Show notes
We discuss Statkraft's withdrawal from floating wind projects in Norway, Valero's $23 million Series A funding, and the varying quality of blade repairs in the field. The Babbitt Ranch wind farm is this week's Wind Farm of the Week.
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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here's your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
I have Phil Totaro from California and Joel Saxum down in Austin, Texas. And Rosemary Barnes will join us shortly from the Southern Hemisphere. Uh, a number of news articles this week that we want to talk about Stack Craft. Let's lead off there, up in Norway. So Norwegian energy giant Stack Craft has announced it will withdraw from the upcoming floating wind tenor for the U Sierra North area as part of a broader cost cutting strategy.
Uh, the company, which is Europe's largest renewable energy operator, we're also halt new offshore wind project [00:01:00] development to focus on what CEO, uh, Bergit Ringsted AL calls near term profitable. Strategies unquote. Like solar? No. Come on, solar, wind. There we go. And batteries In fewer markets the decision follows.
Stack craft's early announcement and may stop New green Hydrogen developments signaling a strategic shift toward more immediately profitable renewable energy investments fill. Does this slow down some of the offshore wind work, particularly up in Norway, and it does seem like. Floating will be the future here, but if Stack craft's not gonna be involved and it's right in their backyard, uh, what does this say to the industry?
Phil Totaro: It doesn't send the best signal, but it's also coming in a time when, you know, as we record this, the, the Norwegians just released, uh, four new, uh, wind lease areas with potentially up to 20 different, uh, project [00:02:00] sites. So. It seems like there's a lot of enthusiasm and obviously they've got the wind resource up there to be able to do a lot of floating offshore wind.
If they can work out with their military, you know, the radar interference and all that, uh, there's no reason they shouldn't want this capacity because it's, you know, power that they can use to balance their hydro and power that they can offload to, you know, other Scandinavian countries because there's plenty of transmission already and they're, they're already.
Planning on building more. So, um, it's just whether or not they have the appetite to put the market mechanisms in place to, to actually support these, uh, you know, these, these tenders.
Joel Saxum: I think appetite's the right term here, Phil, when you say that because, uh, you know, and as the CEO is saying in this, in this article we're getting, we're gonna focus more on near term profitable technologies.
So doing things that they know make money, that are proven to make money. You know, we all love the idea of floating [00:03:00] wind, which is, you know, what they're, they're pulling out of this project, your floating wind project. However, nothing's really so sussed out yet. Nothing's really sorted. There's not a specific foundation that works best.
There's not, uh, a, you know, an interconnect that works best. There's not a turbine model that's out there that this is the one, this is what we run with. You don't have support from major OEMs like, you know, oh, do we pick a Siemens one or a Vestas one, a GE one for offshore? Like we have for fixed bottom offshore.
So I get it like in, in, you know, we're in a stress capital market where we're still sitting on high interest rates and, and everybody wants to do something that's more profitable for them. That's proven right now, um, in my mind is a good strategy. You know, it would be, you don't want 'em to pull out of it.
You would love to see some of the, the big guys put some of their r and d budgets and keep this floating thing moving. 'cause that's a good move for the future. But. I mean, it's all about making money and, and, and de-risking yourself. So like it's understandable.
Allen Hall: Well, is [00:04:00] still involved in that URA North effort and they're working on one of the larger float taste floated wind turbine projects off the coast of Scotland.
Green Volt, right? Yeah. Green Volt. Right. And I'm wondering if CRA feels. Like the technology isn't developed as far as they would like it to be, and companies like Farrun, which are really heavily involved in floating, are going to do the dirty work and then everybody else is gonna follow behind their lead.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, that could be right. Because that's what, that's what's needed. Someone needs to go and put the money in this and, but it's going to be risky. Right? So it's what's your, what's your risk appetite? Um, and if we're talking about risk and offshore wind, I mean, we've seen what's happened in the last six months, a year, so someone has to really.
Uh, I, I guess the, the joke term in Wisconsin, we says, pull, pull up your big boy pants and, and go and go make this happen. So maybe that is, that is of, of our gro We've, you know, we've spoke with them on the podcast and that's what they're focusing on. So maybe it takes someone like them to [00:05:00] really make this thing happen.
Allen Hall: Well, Gros at the minute is it's discussing what type of term they wanna put offshore. This is where the Ing Yang discussion comes into play, because rag is. I don't know if they've selected them or down selected Bing Yang as one of the potential providers of turbines, but that's created a lot of chaos, at least temporarily in the UK because the United States is super concerned about a Chinese wind turbine off the
Phil Totaro: coastline of the uk.
Joel was talking about de-risking, uh, and originally for this project, stat Craft was partnered with uh, ocean Winds, which is, um. Uh, EDPR and Eng g and Acre, uh, which was originally mainstream offshore when they originally, um, started making the, the bids and those two, uh, other groups or three technically, if you know, um, Eng G and, and EDPR.
As well as Acre. They had [00:06:00] already previously pulled out of this partnership, so you didn't have, you don't have this, this de-risking capability anymore. Stat Craft was basically having to take this whole thing on by themselves, and they probably weren't finding any other partners that were particularly interested in diving in.
With them at that point. So I think, you know, them pulling the plug, it's, it's almost like what happened. Um, you know, when, uh, with the Atlantic Shores project in the United States, you know, when, when one partner pulls out, the other partner can't really make it a go, so the other partner is gonna pull the plug and then the whole project is basically dead.
So. That's just what happens. Unfortunately, when you're not able to de-risk the project
Allen Hall: Over in the uk, they're de-risking a couple of larger projects. The Crown of State has selected Ecuador and Gwent Glass, which is a joint venture between EDF and ESB. Uh, they've been selected as the preferred bidders for floating wind projects in the Celtic Sea.[00:07:00]
Now, each developer was awarded 1.5 gigawatts of capacity. Which is quite a bit in their respective development areas for an annual option fee of 350 pounds per megawatt. And the Crown Estate launched this fifth offshore wind leasing round in February of last year. Originally offering three areas with up to 4.5 gigawatts total capacity.
This is a big deal because you're bringing in Ecuador and E-D-F-E-S-B. And it's going to really expand the amount of energy produced from Floating Winds. So, although, um, stack Craft is not gonna be involved up north off the coast of Norway, a bunch of developers are gonna be really involved off the coast of the uk.
This has implications. I think the, the floating wind difficulty, at least the engineering difficulty is gonna be solved by the United Kingdom and maybe France, [00:08:00] don't you think, Phil?
Phil Totaro: Yeah, I mean, France has had, you know, a couple of demonstration projects now, um, for a little while, and they just got their first kind of, people still refer to it as kind of pre-commercial.
It's like 30 megawatts worth of, uh, floating offshore capacity now with, uh. A small, small project. Um, and the second one's on the way, uh, Japan's been investigating floating foundation technology. We've even had some, some stuff here in the States with the University of Maine looking at this. I mean, everybody's been looking at floating for 15 years.
Um, but the reality of it is, it's. There's plenty of technical solutions out there. None of them have achieved commercial viability yet because nobody's been willing to invest in scaling it up. Um, and the fact that we haven't really directly involved the oil and gas companies who have, you know, abundant experience with tension like platforms, uh.
Bill confounds [00:09:00] me because, you know, if you, if you leverage the capabilities that they already have, you're gonna get them more interested because it's gonna give them an opportunity to leverage the technology that they already have heavily invested in, um, that we can use for, for, you know, a floating offshore wind platform.
So it,