Show notes
We hope you had a good Thanksgiving break! Allen and Phil dive into offshore news with Netherlands-based LiftOff and their uptower crane system. Recent successful MCE projects bode well for Liftoff in 2025. Plus, TPI Composites announced their Q3 results. Turkey's inflation pressure and a shift to more American-based manufacturing is tamping the near-term growth.
Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.comLiftOff - https://liftoff-mce.com
Allen Hall: Phil, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and a lot of turkey. I did. Thank you. I hope you did too. I did. And one thing that goes with all the tryptophan and that turkey is caffeine, so you can fight off the tryptophan and watch your favorite football team lose. And during this time, Duncan's been working, which is a big coffee producer in the United States is trying to break world records.
And so they hooked up with Nick DiGiovanni to break the Guinness World Record for the largest ice latte. And that ice latte was in an 11 foot high Dunkin Cup with ice milk and espresso. That's what a latte is, right? And it turns out that the Guinness World Records confirmed that it was 276 gallons in that cup.
And the question is, what did they do with all that latte? That's a lot of latte. Hopefully everybody drank
Phil Totaro: that. You'd hate to think they would waste it.
Allen Hall: According to Duncan, they served it To 300 employees at the corporate office in Massachusetts. Now, if you do the math on that's roughly a gallon of latte per employee.
Phil Totaro: That's a lot. I know some people that do drink a lot of coffee. I don't I guess I'm naturally a brilliant, but like some people need that much, I don't know. Holy cow, that's
Allen Hall: a lot of coffee. This could be a lot of sleepless nights in Massachusetts from all the Dunkin employees.
And productivity's gotta go way up.
The latest P. E. S. Win Magazine has a number of great articles in it, and if you haven't PESWin. com and you can download it for free and read all the articles in it. And one of the more interesting articles that I thought was in this one is an article from Liftoff. And we've had Elko May from Liftoff on the podcast previously.
And Liftoff is an offshoot of a podcast. arm of Liftworks, which is, Liftworks does onshore wind, heavy lift, and crane work, using a unique process to do that. And Liftoff is doing all the offshore work for Liftworks, and Liftoff is based in the Netherlands with Elco, and it has done a number of, a couple of amazing things this over the last couple of months, really.
They've done some crane technology work on fixed bottom offshore winds, where instead of using jackup vessels to do maintenance, they've got the system now to work, where they can handle up to 9. 5 megawatt capacity turbines without using jackup vessels. So they're using standard containers.
on flat barges that are moved around via tugs. Now, Phil, this makes a ton of sense to me because the expensive part, as we always say on Offshore Wind, is not really the turbine, it's the jackup vessels and all the specialized ships you need to go do this work, and liftoff is eliminating a lot of that and simplifying MCE for some of these tournaments.
Phil Totaro: Yeah. And what strikes me about this is actually something slightly unrelated, which is Cattler just came out with their quarterly report saying that the demand for their services is huge right now. So maybe Liftoff helps alleviate some of that burden much to the chagrin maybe of Cattler.
But it's great. They can take, a technology that was developed for onshore and deploy it offshore. In, in that, you don't always have the same obviously weather and site conditions. But the way in which the, this liftoff system works is using this kind of gen hook, what they call a gen hook.
Which is a multi winch system that allows you to, better balance a load. And I think that's probably one of the keys to how they've been able to more rapidly deploy this offshore is the fact that they have a winch system that allows for, whether it's a gearbox swap out or even a, blade swap or some other uptower component this is a system that, will allow you to avoid, not only avoid using the vessels, but avoid using any kind of crane, other than the onboard crane avoid using any other type of crane because it, I don't even think this needs transition piece based support cranes or anything like that, so this is fantastic and the fact that they can just lift or lower things, off of or onto a barge. Makes things a heck of a lot cheaper when you're talking about doing, any kind of maintenance work, whether it's a fixed bottom or a floating. I recall, didn't they Alan, didn't they test this at the Kinkerton floating offshore wind farm in the UK?
Allen Hall: Yeah they did a floating platform Kinkerton. Generator exchange on a Vestas turbine, a nine and a half megawatt Vestas turbine, which is quite remarkable. Now, obviously floating turbines, everybody from the engineering side says, if you have a problem, what are you going to do? You're just going to tow it back to port and fix it.
Except that is also really expensive and it's a lot less expensive to Do something on site from Liftoff and Liftoff was able to pull that off to replace that nine and a half megawatt generator on that floating platform. So it took them a while because they were trying to navigate the weather, obviously, with this floating platform, the up and down and all the crane motions and trying to keep everything steady, but they did it.
So even if it took a little bit longer time to do it. It's shorter than hauling that whole platform back to shore and trying to do the work there. This is remarkable. This kind of technology, this kind of engineering is going to change floating wind for sure because built into the cost model of floating wind is dragging it back to port.
Or using an expensive jacket vessel on this floating platform, which is really complicated. That's all built into the model. And if Liftoff can change that financial model, maybe that'll help lower. The cost of electricity from some of these floating platforms, which make it much more enticing for operators and governments to go after.
So this is really good from Liftoff and Preston. Maybe we'll have Elko May back on the podcast again, because he's a good person to talk to. Yeah, but if you want to learn more about PES Wind and this Liftoff process and Just go to PESWin. com and download the article. It's a really good one.
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Allen Hall: Phil, we haven't talked about TPI in a little while but their Q3 results were announced. And just to give you some background here, sales for Q3 was about 380 million, which is about 2. 5 million. To 2.5% increase a little more than two and a half percent year on year.
And adjusted EBITDA was roughly 8 million versus 200,000 a year ago. And the net loss this in Q3 was about $38 million versus 43 million last year. Now, a couple of positive things about GPI. 89 percent plant utilization, so their assets are being worked pretty hard. And they have 10 production line transitions complete, and the asking price for a blade increased to about 200, 000 from 175, 000.
So prices are going up a lot. On wood turbine blades. Now, it's a little hard to gauge because also the length of the blades are increasing, so Sizes are going up, yeah. Exactly, so the weight of the blade is going up, so prices have to go up with it. Now, a couple of strategic moves here. They are reopening the plant that they had in Iowa for GE.
And GE plans to have TPI produced 2 megawatt blades there, which are very popular in the repowering scenario. So a lot of older 1. 5 sites, Siemens, Gamesis sites, are getting repowered with GE 2 megawatt turbines. Great. And there's Also considering or in the process of acquiring another plant in the United States, what they call a brownfield plant to build more blades in the States.
Now, not a lot of discussion about who is asking for that. My guess is GE, but it could be Nordex or it could be Bestos, honestly to see where that goes. But all right, so they're moving some of their plants back into the United States. And as you pointed out earlier, Phil, it's probably a 45x tax implication.
This is
Phil Totaro: presumably to in addition to taking advantage of the 45x manufacturing tax credits, this is presumably intended to ward off the incoming administrations implementation or proposed implementation of tariffs on goods, particularly, renewable energy related goods manufactured in Mexico, China, and Canada of which I suppose we do import technology from all three markets, although Canada it's just, Blades for GE for offshore turbines from their plant in Gaspé.
We don't get a lot of other components anymore. We used to import some towers until, Arcosa and Broadwind complained about that. So You know we're at a point now where, okay, companies, including TPI, want to be able to take advantage and on behalf of GE want to be able to take advantage of the 45X manufacturing tax credits.
Keep in mind that the reason why GE's on this is usually in the supply contract, the bulk of that 45X tax credit benefit goes to whoever's buying the blades. And even I've had word from,