Show notes
We discuss a PES Wind Magazine article featuring 4cast's methodology for comprehensive wind resource assessment and site planning. Then cover Vestas CFO Hans Martin Smith's departure after 20+ years. Finally offshore wind security concerns follow a Chinese vessel's severance of Baltic Sea cables, and Tilt Renewables is announced as the title sponsor for Wind Energy O&M Australia.
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Allen Hall: Well, since everybody is getting pardoned recently, uh, I thought it may be a good idea to, to put out there what we should be pardoned for, so we ought to get added to that list.
Joel Saxum: How about this one? I would like to be pardoned for not getting my better half's windshield changed in her Jeep from the crack from it.
Allen Hall: Ooh, you're gonna need a pardon for that. Yeah, that's, that's definitely pardonable material. Yeah. Phil, have you broken any scooter laws there in California? No, I have not. I don't know, Phil, you ought to get them out now because the pardons are coming. Okay. Well, Rosemary, I'm not sure we can pardon anybody in another country, but we might as well just open it up to everybody right now.
Why not? Rosemary, did you commit any offenses when you were in the States, in California, studying composites?
Rosemary Barnes: I've got a pretty big one, actually. I don't know if you guys have this, but in Australia, when you're learning how to, to write, handwrite at school, you know, you start with a pencil and then when you pass a test and you can graduate up to a pen, you need a pen license.
Um, do you have that?
Allen Hall: That is not real.
Rosemary Barnes: I did not get my pen license, but I do write with a pen sometimes. So, yeah, including in the United States.
Philip Totaro: That's as real as a hoop snake.
Rosemary Barnes: That's true. And I, um, I would like to invite Australians to comment on if you're watching this on YouTube or anywhere that you can write comments but look it up on the LinkedIn post about this episode.
Please comment and confirm that we do or at least did in the 90s. I have to get a pen license before if we graduate from pencil to pen. I never got it.
Allen Hall: It's a scandal. It's an outright scandal. Alan, you have to share yours with us. What are you, what do you need to be pardoned for? Yeah, we could use some pardoning on the production side of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast because there are, there have been some times it's pretty rough to edit and I gotta, I gotta plead guilty.
Yes, it is. However. However. Our producer does a very fine job, and what comes out on the airwaves is much better than what we record. Clearly. In
this quarter's PES Win Magazine, a number of great articles, and you can download all of them at PESWin. com, but A really interesting article about weather from a company called Forecast. So if you go to their website, it's fore cast. de, they're based in Germany. And the article really describes how you do forecasting.
Preliminary studies on wind sites to look at what the winds are now, get a really good understanding of that and how that plays into the yield of this farm and what the weather should be, the long term weather implications going forward, so you can at least have an estimate on the revenue you're going to pay.
Possibly be generating from these wind farms. And Joel, it seems like a lot of wind farm operators don't do this. Either they don't
Joel Saxum: do it or they're not doing it at a high enough fidelity, right? So they're not doing it well enough. We run into some wind farms where all of a sudden, you know, the resource is down or the resource isn't good enough or local competition for the wind resource, right?
Someone's building wind farms around them and it changes. And you, you see some people kind of, yeah, generally it looks like this at a hundred meters or at 80 meters. This is what we should have. And then they move on. Um, but what you're seeing now is more sophisticated lenders as well. Wanting really good bankable insights on what is that wind resource going to be?
How much profit are we going to generate out of this project? Um, you know, and there's other things that factor into that, which, uh, forecast is taking into consideration when they do their estimates. Legal framework and regulations, right? Because that's a part of a wind or a site assessment as well, because as those things change or develop depending on where you are, you may be used to doing wind in Texas and you move to Kansas.
It's a completely different regulatory framework, so that's a big part of it. Uh, but, you know, if I'm building a wind farm, this is the kind of thing that I want to make sure that I tackle in a really good way. I don't know if they do this, but I know, Alan, you and I talk about it would be nice if people would do lightning, lightning, uh, density as a part of their sighting assessment, but We'll see.
Allen Hall: Well, there's less lightning strikes in Europe, in most places in Europe, than there is in the United States. But Europe does seem to have a history of doing more research on the sites before they decide to put turbines in, where in the States, there are assessments done, but maybe not the fidelity of what Forecast is doing here.
Rosemary Barnes: In Australia, at least. I know that they do do lightning assessments, but, um, they don't use it for estimating how many lightning repairs that you will need on blades or anything like that. It's for, um, you know, they need to assess the lightning and protect the substation and things like that and make sure people aren't going to die from lightning strikes on the site.
Um, so I know that I, I've seen the, you know, initial assessments and when you had all the information there, it would not have taken very much for you to extrapolate to realize that you were going to have this big lightning problem on site. Like you should, you should have known before you stuck a single turbine in the ground that you're going to have, you You know, a lot more, um, lightning repairs than, you know, other sites that you had that had a lower lightning strike, um, intensity.
So yeah, I, I didn't even think it would add that much more to the development process. If I just need to get the right expert in to, you know, just take a quick look at it and say, Hey guys, might budget in some, um, you know, more lightning repairs than you might be used to.
Allen Hall: Yeah, there's a recent article about wind farms in my area that are on ridgelines.
They're having huge problems with gusts. And they're now realizing that maybe gusts aren't the best thing for wind turbines. Maybe we didn't site these turbines right because Half of them are down at any one time.
Rosemary Barnes: That's, that's one thing to not check the lightning, uh, environment, but to not check the wind resource properly is a bit strange for a wind farm.
Allen Hall: I agree. Uh, there's been a huge shift in whether, uh, wind turbines should be cited on gusty sites or on top of mountains. There's, there's a lot less of the on top of the ridge lines and there were, uh, 10, 15 years ago, which is when our turbines were installed. So, you know, getting those wind resources right is a huge advantage.
And if. If you want to go to a resource, you can go to PESWin. com, read the article from Forkast.
As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial. And let's face it, difficult. That's why the Uptime Podcast recommends PESWin 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 peswind. com today.
Allen Hall: Well, an interesting departure from Vestas. Hans Martin Smith has left the company after 20 plus years at Vestas. Um, he's a CFO who began that role in about two years ago, March 22, and was really instrumental in Vestas, uh, coming back into profitability in 23 and looks like 24.
Uh, they've installed another person temporarily as CFO for the company. But this has rocked the stock market a little bit. Uh, the stock price was down the day of the announcement at about 10%. We'll see what happens over the next couple of days to see if it recovers. But this is a real, uh, unique development, I think.
We've seen wind energy companies really struggle lately, but we haven't seen key players, uh, walk off the court, which is what just happened
Philip Totaro: here, Phil. I mean, there, we don't really know at this point as we record what the were for the departure. Uh, clearly Wall Street doesn't like it because they prefer certainty.
Um, but when you consider, you know, their, the divestitists had a bit of a hard time and, and it's getting a bit clobbered with, uh, you know, a lot of these, uh, warranty claims and, and, uh, Uh, not accurately predicting the extent of, um, you know, their, their liability issues on the services side of the business.
You know, they're, they're still making orders, uh, globally. They're, they're obviously still behind, you know, Gold Wind, um, internationally, uh, as far as, you know,