Show notes
The crew discusses TPI Composites' chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and Ørsted's $9 billion fundraising amid financial challenges. Joel gives an update about the 2026 Melbourne Wind O&M Conference.
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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, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, Joel Saxon.
Is in Australia. You want to tell everybody where you're at at the moment?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, we're down in Melbourne. I'm here with Matthew Stead from Ping as well. Uh, Rosemary was supposed to join us, but uh, of course she's under the weather. Uh, but we are down here doing basically a, a tour to Melbourne, uh, I guess you could say, of the wind industry.
So if you don't know in Australia, a lot of the wind operators, uh, and ISPs, uh, and OEMs, to be honest with you. Are located here in Melbourne, uh, and we are talking to them all about the conference that we're gonna put on this February. Uh, it is a, the, the new and improved version of the, [00:01:00] uh, successful one we did last year.
So we're taking the feedback that we got right after the event last year, uh, connecting with these, uh, all the stakeholders down here and seeing what do they, what do they want to hear for the next one? What did we do well? What could be better? Uh, we're looking at venues, we're doing kind of all the above to get this, uh.
Conference up and running, and I know, uh, Matthew and I, I think we've had four to five meetings a day, every day. Um, thank you to the people that we've met with, if you're listening, because it's been really good for us, uh, very engaging, lots of feedback. So I think we've got a, we've got a good list of speakers lined up and then also, um, content for next year.
That's great. So what we're looking at right now as well, uh, if you're inking this on your calendar. For the, uh, wind energy o and m 2026 conference here in Melbourne is February 17th and 18th. This year we're gonna do two full days of, uh, panel discussions, round tables, and all kinds of information sharing.
[00:02:00] Uh, the goal, of course, just like last year, gather up some of the smartest people in wind and share strategies that you can take back, uh, for operations and maintenance and, and action within your company.
Allen Hall: And Phil Tarro of Intel stores out in California. And Phil, this has to be one of the. Busiest weeks in wind on the investor side.
So much happening. Osted, uh, is going to issue a $9 billion emergency fundraising round. And I want you to frame this a little bit. I, I, I've heard so much on the news and been reading a lot about this, but there's several undertones, several things happening at the same time and there really hasn't been a clear path as to why.
Osted has decided to go forward on this fundraising round?
Phil Totaro: Well, effectively it stems from two big things. One is obviously they had shown some financial losses, uh, recently, and this is going back a couple of [00:03:00] years now that had necessitated. You know, companies like EOR coming in and taking a 10% stake, um, just to bolster them again, we, we talked on the show before about the fact that they're not necessarily wanting to take over, although now there's some people in, you know, Denmark, that are kind of pushing the Danish government to sell off their chunk.
And the presumption is that it would be sold to, to somebody like eor. So we'll still see if that's possible or even. You know, uh, likely to happen, but there's a project here in the United States called Sunrise Wind, which Ted was hoping to sell off a chunk of to a co-investor and. Because of some of the rule changes around, um, tax credit qualification, they're probably not going to be able to move forward in the way that they had hoped to, um, with that stake sale.
And as a result, [00:04:00] it's leading them to absorb a lot of the, um. You know, financial losses from, you know, some of the delays and, and other issues that they've had with getting a lot of these offshore projects, you know, uh, up and running. Uh, it's, it's kind of forcing them to do this capital raise to be able to provide themselves with enough cash to be able to continue operating.
The
Allen Hall: Sunrise Wind Project was a partnership between Orit and Eversource, and Eversource pulled out of that roughly a year ago. And the other one, which had a partner that, uh, Ted had who pulled out was for Ocean Wind one and two, which was PSEG, which is a New Jersey power company. Eversource being a northeastern power company, essentially those two pulled out like in 2023 and 2024 when the price of steel went up, inflation was high, the cost of the projects went up.
So they've been out for a little while still. [00:05:00] It was in that interim that Osted just wasn't able to find anybody to join in on those projects. And it does seem strange, and again, I want to get to this point. All the US investment and offshore, all the US companies are all out. Basically you have EOR and you have Osted Dominion.
Dominion. Okay, that's true. But Di Dominion is sort of a different animal.
Phil Totaro: The the reality is, yes, is the short answer to your question, Ellen, that they, they had tried to find another co-investor after, um, Eversource pulled out. The challenge with that was that there. Has has also been, um, an effort by the project developers to try and renegotiate the PPA prices.
Eversource was gonna be one of the main off takers for this. They don't wanna have to absorb a significantly higher price. And then have to find ways of passing [00:06:00] that on to to customers. And it's also what led to this challenge of sted not being able to find a new co-investor after Eversource pulled out.
Um, you know, with interest rates being so high. And not being able to renegotiate the PPA anymore. Y you know, the developers that are still, you know, have their lease areas and, and are pursuing their projects. They're locked in to whatever they've got at this point. If nobody else wants to come on board, then it's up to Ted to basically eat the entire cost of this thing and thus, you know, a major contributor to the capital raise.
Allen Hall: So the discussion online is that the Trump. Administration sort of forced this to happen. That isn't necessarily correct. I think a lot of this has started a year or two ago. You remember also. Phil with Ocean Wind one and two, the exit fees with the state of New Jersey. I think that Osted was [00:07:00]going to have to pay somewhere around $300 million to the state of New Jersey, and I think they ended up paying less than half of that at the end.
But it's still a lot of money. There's a lot of money in exit fees that Osted has paid over the last two years roughly, or, or buybacks. They, they paid Eversource to get
Phil Totaro: out. Essentially just to also clarify, you know, what, what the administration's done has not helped. I think we can all agree on that. The, but the reality of it is that yes, they, they were already in a bad situation that got made even worse by.
Increasing the risk of, you know, particularly a foreign investor coming in and, and being a co-investor in, in this project. Obviously there are any number of utility companies in the United States that could have, you know, uh. Co-invested in, in this project along with Sted. They chose not to because they don't like the economics of offshore wind.[00:08:00]
Uh, and that's just the, the reality at this point in time. Uh, I mean, duke Energy this week, or I guess last week as, as this episode airs also just announced that they're gonna cancel their two North Carolina projects because of the same thing. It's, it's basically down to the economics of the project.
And at the end of the day. If you've got somebody in the administration that's making, you know the, the investment environment look even worse than what it already was before he even came into office, then it's going to necessarily, you know, take more options off the table for. Potential investors that could have come in and at least helped, uh, kind of share the, the risk and, and, you know, reduce the amount of, of capital outlay that OSTED would've had to make just by themselves.
In my
Joel Saxum: mind, with this new kind of like P-T-C-I-T-C cliff coming, there's no [00:09:00] reality where, uh, capital gets cheap enough, interest rates get low enough in time for any of that to change like that, that's just not gonna happen. We've got 18 months and we need to, it would have to come down by percentage points, not basis points.
And I don't think that's going to, there's no reality of that happening. I think
Allen Hall: that's true, generally speaking. Right? But I think the problem is, is where are the New York's and the Massachusetts of the world gonna be able to get power from? They need this, they really do need offshore wind. The prices of electricity there, uh, if you're a consumer, is about $300 a megawatt hour.
That's what I was paying in Massachusetts to buy power on the grid. So $150 a megawatt hour coming off of the, uh, you know, offshore wind farm. Yeah, wholesale still is, is high compared to other parts of the United [00:10:00]States, but as it's half of what I was paying as the consumer.