Show notes
This week we discuss the Danish government's permit extensions for two offshore wind farms, the U.S. Senate's new renewable energy bill, the Belgian government's halted wind farm tender, and the complexities of laying seabed cables for wind farms.
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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 2025: Well welcome back to Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
I have Rosemary Barnes down in Canberra Australia. Phil's in California, and evidently he lives next door to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and I, I had no idea, Phil, like you're that close to royalty.
Phil Totaro: I'm not. You're
Allen Hall 2025: making that up. Joel's up in Wisconsin somewhere in the northern wilds of Wisconsin. Next to a cheese factory, and here I sit in Charlotte, North Carolina.
If we've been paying attention or if you've been paying attention to the news over the last, uh, 48 hours in America has been complete chaos as we are recording this and the US Senate has [00:01:00] passed a bill regarding renewable energy and it's back to the house. Supposedly this is all gonna get signed off by the 4th of July.
So we're recording it. Today is July 2nd. Um. So by the time you hear this, something may or may not have happened, and we're trying to keep abreast of the latest, but I think there's some other news going on around the world. And, uh, one of the stories we found interesting was the Danish Offshore, uh, agency Energy Agency has approved permit extensions for two of Denmark's oldest offshore wind farms, which marks a major milestone for.
Wind energy longevity. The middle Gruden and Newstead offshore wind farms have received permission to operate for an additional 25 years and 10 years respectively. That is massive extension. Uh, the middle Gruden facility, which is built in 2001, has about 20 turbines and about 40 megawatts of capacity, and it's owned by a community cooperative.
[00:02:00] And the Danes being on top of all these things, uh, allowed the extension after doing an engineering analysis showing that the infrastructure has more life. This is unusual. Is this just a artifact of early designs being overly conservative? And these wind farms can practically live forever? I think so. I, uh,
Joel Saxum: I like it.
Alright. I wish that all these wind turbines are built this way because it's then you can get more longevity of, I think now of course when everybody has a repower now or tries to extend life, they're trying to really do it. So they're trying to, if we're gonna put money, we'll try to, you know, up the kilowatt, we'll try to up the capacity, well then the foundations don't hold and these kind of things.
So it's kind of like if you look at, um. I'm up here in northern Wisconsin, not too far from my house. There's a bridge that was built by the CCC, uh, the civilian Conservation Corps in like the, um, at the Great Depression. So like in the 1930s, late, [00:03:00] late 1920s. And that bridge is fine. Like it's golden. It's still good, right?
But it was overbuilt, super built to be heavy duty construction. And there's another bridge just down the road from that same one over the same river that was done in the seventies that needs a complete replacement. Because it was done, it was done with like, you know, di different design functions, not as robust.
And, and it's kind of like, oh, some of this first generation of older stuff is overbuilt, is toughly built. It's the same thing. We talk about shorter blades, like a, you know, a V 47 or a GE one X, like those blades just last and, but you don't see it as much anymore. So I, I, I'm happy to see this. I think it's cool, uh, to see these things getting basically refurbished and.
Gonna have a life extension.
Allen Hall 2025: I don't even know what the refurbishment process or the extension process looks like. Rosemary on something that is that old that's made out of fiberglass and resin. How do you even evaluate something like that?
Rosemary Barnes: Well, what they [00:04:00] do is they, um, if, if you wanna do it properly, then you go back to the original, um, blade design files, um, and you basically, you rerun it, you can, and so you get a different result for two reasons.
Or two possible reasons. One could be that it didn't see as hard of a life as what they designed for. So, um, you know, you can rerun with the actual loads that it saw if you have those available. And then the second thing is that, you know, these wind farms came on around the turn of the millennium, right?
Um, and so we've learned a lot, especially about, um, um, like how strong materials actually are. There are still gonna be some, some, you know, defects in some blades. That will see them fail before others. So you, you know, the blades are getting older. I would expect they will see more, more failures, but, um, there's a lot better ways that you can monitor that sort of thing.
Now, you don't just have to wait for a, a blade to break in half and fly off. Um, anymore. You can, uh, you know, install monitoring [00:05:00] stuff and, uh. Inspect them more frequently. You know, drone inspections are so much faster than, uh, if you would've had to get up on ropes and have a look at every, you know, square centimeter of blade surface.
So I think that there's just, you know, that so many technologies have come so far since these, um, blades were designed, that there is a lot of scope to keep them going, if that makes sense. You know, a lot of times a turbine that was installed 25 years ago is gonna be tiny compared to today. So a lot of times people might not want to, um, they might wanna.
You put in new, new, bigger turbines instead.
Joel Saxum: Do you see, because, okay, so we talked about blades here for a second, right? But we have all kinds of rotating mechanical equipment, foundations, bolting all this. Do you see in my mind, in my mind, for something this old and wanting to extend that one, I see a massive NDT campaign.
I see checking bond lines on blades, looking at some metallurgical things, looking at some connection points offshore, looking at the foundations. I mean, of course you're gonna do some seabed stuff, but that's usually done in maintenance too. That's a weird one there, because. [00:06:00] When you talk about maintenance, inspection, repair, and maintenance campaigns for offshore wind farms, there's things that you don't do onshore that you do complete offshore regularly, like scour inspections and some of the characterization site surveys, that stuff goes on regularly.
So that's not something that you need to, oh, we gotta take this big campaign on. Should have regular every year bi-yearly data on that. So that's cool, but I would see a big NNDT campaign in my mind. Um. I dunno. Maybe that's Jeremy Hanks question.
Allen Hall 2025: Well, is this useful data that would help the industry just to know how these are performing?
Rosemary Barnes: I think it would be quite specific to the individual components. 'cause you, you know, if the wind farm had an initial life of what, 25 years, um, everything would've been designed to last 25 years. You don't like, good engineering isn't just making something as strong as you can because it's gonna be much more expensive than it needed to be.
And what's the point in having a. I don't know, a tower that lasts for a a thousand years, but the blades only last for 30 years. There's no, there's no [00:07:00] point. Right. So, um, it would just be a matter of how, how excessively conservative the designers were in each case. It won't be exactly the same for all of them.
I'm sure they'll be exchanging many components probably. Um. Some components will just be preemptively, like we know that most of these are gonna fail, so we're gonna do a site-wide, um, campaign to replace, you know, all these bearings or all these, you know, whatever component and then some other ones. It would be a matter of yeah, like waiting and seeing when they fail.
And I think that you're right, Joel, that I. There's so many good NDT technologies around now. Um, and, you know, predictive maintenance can, there's a lot of sensors you can put in that will give you an early warning sign that things, you know, bearings don't have a lot of life left in them or, or something like that.
And so then you can get really smart about your campaigns to, you know, keep it going.
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OG Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it's too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine's health today. Belgium's Federal government has unexpectedly halted the long plan tender for the Princess Elizabeth Offshore wind zone.
Just two months before bids were scheduled and the two gigawatt auction was set to launch in November, 2025. After four years of prep work and industry groups are calling the decision a violation of the coalition agreements and warn. It undermines investment certainty in Belgian offshore wind development.
Now, the,