Show notes
Allen, Phil, and Joel dissect Siemens Gamesa's latest financial woes, including their shocking 54 MW onshore wind order intake. The trio debates the company's bold claim of competing with Chinese manufacturers on quality, not price. Plus, they explore the ripple effects of Chinese wind turbines potentially entering European markets, from Italy to Germany.
Register for the AMI Wind Turbine Blades Event!
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Joel, I will be at the AMI Wind Turbine Blades conference in Boston in the beginning of October, holding a panel or hosting a panel, I'll moderate a panel. On blade operation and maintenance upstream quality problems and operators challenges, which sounds like what we just saw on our drive through Kansas and Oklahoma a lot of operators with a lot of challenges on the quality of products that they're purchasing.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that panel couldn't come at a more timely. I guess that's not a very good way to say that. However, yeah, when we hear from people is the, we're getting blades, the blades are a year old, two years old, three years old. We've got a leading edge erosion. We've got cracks. We got this going on.
We're fighting warranty claims. We've got blade repair contractors out here. We got this, we got that. So we're going to get up on state, or you're going to get up on stage and we're going to have some people from a couple of IPPs. So there's going to be some some of the engineers that are dealing with this firsthand.
And you're also going to have someone from Nordics on stage with you. So someone from an OEM. Going to have some varied opinions and some good information. But you're going to get different viewpoints and different details from all sides of the supply chain there to be able to hopefully solve some of these problems.
Allen Hall: Yeah, Matt Sagala from Moraes from Nordex and Pragna Martin from Engie, if you don't know Pragna. That would be a really good panel. I'm gonna learn a ton there, I'm sure. And I am, just want to make sure everybody knows, if you're interested in attending that event, and there's several other sessions about supply chain and blades and, all kinds of materials involved in blades.
This is your conference. So you need to Google the AMI plastics wind turbine blades conference in Boston and Boston in October will be beautiful. The weather would be perfect. So it's a good time to get out of the office and get a short flight over to Boston and have a good time learning about.
Supply chain and blades and all that's involved on making and supporting the wind industry.
I'm Allen Hall and I'll be joined by the rest of the Uptime hosts after these news headlines. In the UK, Siemens Gamesa wind turbine workers in Hull have secured a significant pay deal. Around 300 employees who construct the 108 meter long wind turbine blades by hand have accepted a two year agreement worth 8.4%
the deal includes a 4.5% increase for 2024 and 3.9% for 2025 with 93% of workers voting in favor. The settlement demonstrates strong support for the agreement among the workforce. U. S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has called for a substantial increase in climate financing, stating that the global transition to a low carbon economy requires three trillion U. S. dollars in new capital annually through 2050. This figure far exceeds current financing levels but represent what Yellen describes as, quote, the single greatest economic opportunity of the 21st century, unquote. She emphasized the need for increased private sector investment and highlighted the role of multilateral development banks in catalyzing climate focused projects.
Ørsted is pioneering the use of heavy lift cargo drones for maintenance work at the Borsele 1 and 2 offshore wind farm in the Netherlands. This world first operational campaign involves 70 kilogram drones capable of transporting up to 100 kilograms of cargo from vessels to wind turbines. The drones can complete tasks in minutes that typically take hours, significantly reducing operational time.
This innovative approach is expected to cut costs, enhance safety for personnel, and lower carbon emissions by reducing the need for multiple ship journeys. In the United States, construction of the first U. S. offshore wind turbine installation vessel Charybdis is nearing completion. Now 89 percent complete the vessel owned by Dominion Energy is expected to be delivered in late 2024 or early 2025.
However, the project has faced cost increases. The latest estimate reaching 715 million. As a Jones Act compliant vessel, it will offer great operational flexibility compared to foreign built alternatives for offshore wind development in American waters. Fugro has completed a comprehensive four year survey operation for Atlantic Shores Offshore Wind in New Jersey and New York.
The company's innovative approach boosted efficiency by 30 percent, playing a crucial role in the recent federal approval of Atlantic Shores Southbound. which will provide 2, 800 megawatts of clean energy to New Jersey. We will also introduce Virgeo, a cloud based platform for data management, marking the industry's first digital deliverables to federal regulators.
And finally, the UK government has significantly increased the budget for this year's Renewable Energy Auction to 1. 5 billion. Up 500 million pounds from last year, Energy Secretary Ed Miliband announced that most of the funding will support offshore wind power development, aligning with Labor's goal of quadrupling offshore wind capacity by 2030.
While the renewables industry has welcomed the move, experts caution that additional measures may be needed to ensure timely project delivery. That's this week's top news stories. After the break, I'll be joined by my co host, CEO and founder of Intel Store. Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxon.
As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let's face it, difficult. That's why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you're an industry veteran or new to Wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need.
Don't miss out. Visit PS wind.com today. Phil, the Q3 report from Siemens g Mesa came out this week and their, obviously that's combined with the Siemens Energy reports for all their divisions, but the Siemens Cab Meso is the one that we're concerned about on this podcast. Really fascinating data because it's broken up into offshore, onshore, and the service business.
In Q3, now remember that everything's shifted a little bit for their quarterly year. So they start October 1st is the beginning of their fiscal year, so we're in Q3 with Siemens Energy. The order intake for onshore wind turbines in Q3, Q3 was 54 megawatts. On the offshore side, they had 0 megawatts of order intake.
On offshore, the service business looks to be fairly consistent. It hasn't changed too much. They have about 80 gigawatts of a fleet managed by them. And that seems to be pretty consistent, but with the 4X and 5X platforms having design issues and they essentially stopped selling. 4x and 5x until probably just now they're going to start is what it sounds like it has, they have had a dramatic downtick in order intake a year ago in Q3 of 2023.
I'll give you the example here. They had 717 megawatts of orders for onshore compared to now 54. So it's less than 10 percent of what they had eight. A year ago, when Siemens made this move to stop the 4X and 5X and that dried up all sales, is this something that it's recoverable? From a Siemens Gamesa standpoint, or is it just that Siemens Energy, the larger corporation, has the financial resources to carry them over until they become productive again?
What's the move here?
Philip Totaro: Allen, this is a real tough question because, at the end of the day, with a product that's been taken off the shelf for a year, And then put back on, this isn't consumer products where, maybe they can sell it again, just maybe even rebranded, repackage it and sell it again.
This is a piece of industrial equipment that people need to be able to trust. And that's really the challenge for them is how do they really go about gaining the trust of project developers who I mean they're going to start what I think is going to happen if they're going to make sales on this 4x, 5x platform without redesigning it.
Although with the new fixed blade and all that, we're assuming, although again, they haven't been very transparent about what actually happened and what they've done to fix it. But hopefully that comes out when they start selling it again. But in the meantime the reality of it is if they're going to sell.
I think they, instead of being up with GE and Vestas in kind of a tier one, they're now down in terms of kind of finance ability of their product at the same level of maybe Nordex and some other companies out there. I don't think they're a tier one with their sales anymore. And I think they're going to get financially discounted in Western, particularly in Western markets.
Joel Saxum: For sure. Phil, and I think a difference here in the market and I take the market in general,