Show notes
In this episode, Allen, Joel, and Philip discuss Siemens Gamesa's leadership changes and quality issues, the strong financial performance of Nordex and RWE, and upgrades to UK wind turbine testing facilities. They also cover the christening of the first American-built offshore wind service operation vessel, the EcoEdison, and the DOE's selection of five floating wind technologies for the Flow Wind Prize readiness competition.
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Allen Hall: All right, Lego lovers a Canadian man has combined his love of Lego and Star Wars, shocker, to build the 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon in a record breaking time of, Joel, take a guess.
Joel Saxum: How much coffee did he have first?
Allen Hall: Red Bull.
Joel Saxum: I'm gonna say
Allen Hall: That's not too far off. Phil, what's your guess?
Philip Totaro: Six? I don't know.
Allen Hall: Seven hours, 36 minutes and 37 seconds. Ivan Wu of Markham, Ontario earned the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to build a Lego Star Wars 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon. It's 10, 000 pieces an hour. That's insane. How did that, Phil, can your fingers move that fast?
Philip Totaro: 10, 000 pieces an hour?
Only when I'm typing Intel store research.
Allen Hall: You get the bags, right? And the bags are all just mixed parts, right? And they say, you open up the manual and it says, open up manual one out of six. And then you open bag one and six, and then you have to, that's three pieces a second. How do you tell your spouse Hey, I'm I really need to buy the 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon to set a Guinness
Philip Totaro: World Record.
Sorry to stereotype, but this guy does not have a spouse.
Joel Saxum: But it only took seven hours of his life, so Seven hours of peace and quiet. Yeah, but how much training did it get to that point?
Allen Hall: See that, Joel, that's the ultimate question. I was thinking the same thing. That guy worked on that for weeks.
Joel Saxum: How many times has he built that thing? He's trained like an Olympic athlete. Seven hours was the record winning attempt, right? He's probably done it a hundred times or more. Canadian winters are long. They are, and now they're the world champions. There you go.
Allen Hall: Vinod's Philip, who will take over as CEO of Ascension. Seaman's Kamesa on August 1st, which happens to be my birthday, by the way, plans to conduct a thorough review of the company's onshore and wind turbine development process. I hope so, because that's desperately needed at this point. Philip believes that the current two year development cycle may be insufficient for onshore turbines leading to inadequate testing and quality control issues that have played.
Siggins Gamesa's newest onshore turbines, and in that he means the 4x and 5x machines. By comparison, offshore wind turbine platforms have usually a five to seven year development cycle. Philip is suggesting that the onshore industry needs to slow down a little bit and work on a supply chain. to get rid of some quality concerns.
Now that all sounds great, right? But everybody's waiting for Siemens Gamesa to get back into action again. And they're thinking, or at least they're still saying by 2026, they're going to break even. And they're going to get rid of these quality concerns. And now, Phil, something has to happen within Siemens Gamesa, right?
We haven't seen many changes internally. There haven't. Announced any changes besides having the review team look at the design. What are the next steps? What's likely to happen here over the next six
Philip Totaro: months? Let's also maybe deconstruct a couple things that he's talked about too, which is development cycles need to speed up, not slow down.
So I'm not sure where he's getting his information from. We're trying to make things go faster. And if the supply chain is not capable of maintaining quality whilst also being able to deliver at the same rate, An increased scale, then we're going to have a problem. And then it brings the Chinese into the conversation.
Cause where else are you going to get turbans from? So if they want to maintain their, customer relationships and they want to have any semblance of an order book, once they can start selling turbans again, presumably by, August, September, when they said it was going to be, after the end of this fiscal year was there their previous announcement they've got a, they've got a Get on the horse here.
So that's the first thought that comes to mind with this. The next thing is you're right that they haven't really, I'm obviously they've done a lot internally. And there were, unfortunately some people let go, engineers obviously they got this new CEO.
So the CEO was also like, Oh, but there It's a little odd with how vocal they were last year about we've got a problem, and then nothing about what the problem actually is, what we're doing to fix it, how long it's going to take, and then, it's just, that stuff has come out in dribs and drabs, and that's why in the past, nine months that this has been going on at least publicly it's been going on for probably about a year with what they were doing internally, um, they're just now getting to the point where they're providing a modicum of transparency to everybody and their stock price is starting to, climb back up because they're not necessarily going to go close to that 5 billion euro target that they said they're going to have to set aside.
So that's good, but not selling turbines is still a problem. They've been selling. Some three megawatt turbines in Eastern Europe, they're also continuing to offer, the three megawatt platform for sale where they can, and they're still selling, the six megawatt, with 170 meter rotor, that wasn't the platform that had the problem.
But there, the bulk of what they need to be selling, the bigger you go with turbines, we've talked about this on the show before the bigger you go with the turbine. The more finite amount of addressable market you're going to have. So they're not going to get anywhere with just being able to sell the six megawatt turbine.
They have to have something in the, four to five megawatt range that is going to compete with the Vestas V150 and, the likes of Nordics and other companies that are out there, including some of the Chinese companies that are out there selling those sized turbines.
So they've, I hope that this new CEO best wishes to Vinod and I hope that what he's going to do is going to really turn this around. He's very experienced coming from the oil and gas side of the Siemens energy business. And seems pretty adamant that they're going to stick to these targets, as you mentioned, Alan where they're going to turn a profit by 2026.
I think he, he understands how you need to toe the line, just like anybody, with GE, for instance, bringing Vic Abate back in, he knows how to tell the line and he knows what the parent company wants to see. So I think this is a good move in general from Siemens Energy.
Joel Saxum: I think there's something here underlying that we should address as well.
So back it was last fall when they were like, Hey, we let all the engineers go. Or not all, of course, but we let a large part of the engineering staff go. All of us are going, Wait, you got all these problems to fix, you got this stuff to do, why are you letting these people go? But what, when you start digging deeper into things, and if much about corporate culture, especially at large companies, It's really hard to take that ship down.
And write it in a different direction if you have all the same people on. Now, I know I'm, this may be a hard thing to talk about, right? If you're trying to change company culture, if it's around whatever it is, if it's around quality or your development processes or something, there's certain things that are controlled by processes, yes, and you follow those processes and you can adjust things.
However, there's a company culture there within your engineering teams, within your product management teams, and everybody else that it's easier, a lot easier to change culture a lot quicker. If you just get rid of some people and bring new people in, then they don't have those old tendencies.
Allen Hall: Can I play Rosemary here? Are you blaming this on the individual contributor to these companies? It's not their fault. They were just doing their job.
Joel Saxum: Part of the reason they've identified as culture, and that's not an individual person.
Philip Totaro: That's the mob. By the way, since Rosemary's not here, that's usually her argument as well, is there should, you should never have the means or a corporate process that allows you to get down to this point where you've got, everybody, look and to what the Siemens, Gamesa's CEO is now saying, everybody in the industry has blade quality and manufacturing and reliability issues, et cetera.
But it's the process that you have in place to be able to address something, particularly that is a fleet wide issue and be a systemic thing that you should have been able to catch before it escalated to this point. And frankly, again if we can fill in for Rosemary, who's.
Off doing exciting things. That's the point I think she usually likes to make with this. Is, you should never have a corporate culture that allows you to get to this point.