Show notes
The crew discusses Equinor's significant investment in Ørsted, while Ørsted denies plans to merge. They also cover Jupiter Bach's new plant in Colorado and the upcoming Wind Operation and Maintenance Australia 2026 event.
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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 Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
I'm your host, Allen Hall in the queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. I have Rosemary Barnes in Australia who has, uh, been doing a little bit of travel. Joel is back in Austin, Texas. Man, I feel like everybody's been traveling a lot and so is Yolanda. The Yolanda has been on the road quite a bit and we have a really interesting week in wind energy.
Particularly over in Denmark and Norway, and if you've been following the news there, uh, as we all know, Ecuador had a pretty big investment into Sted several months ago where they put in about two and a half [00:01:00] billion dollars to buy 10% of Sted to help write the ship a little bit, and then. A c basically last month, right Joel?
It was about last month where they, they spent about a billion dollars for the right rights issue, uh, to keep that stock moving, right, and or, and need more cash. And that's how they raised it. That's a total investment, about three and a half billion dollars. That's a lot of money for anybody to be spending at this moment, and Ecuador is thinking this is a pretty good bet.
That's great and they wanna work closer with Ted. And the talk is that Ecuador wants a boar seat with Ted Joel. Is there any chance that is going to happen?
Joel Saxum: Well, it was, it's interesting that they brought that up as well, right? Because the initial buy-in, you know, back I think six, nine months ago or whatever it was, they specifically said in their press release, we are not trying to get a board seat.
We don't want to have [00:02:00] control over this, yada, yada, yada. But then when the rights issue came out, and I think it was the, the TED stock dropped like 30% or something that day. Um, they threw more cash in, they got a little bit more power. But it's like anything, right? Once, once you've got, uh, quite a bit of money invested and you have a, have pretty heavy percentage of us of whatever that investment may be, it can be.
Half ownership in a car, I don't care. You want to have a little bit more say about what happens with your money and what the results can be based on strategic decisions. And if you've, you know, been watching Ted's decisions. Now they've been at the, the whim of government policies and stuff for the last few years, but they've also mistepped a little bit on a couple of them.
Uh, so you can see EOR wanting to get in there to protect their investment a little bit. The, in the funny thing to me here, and, um, Rosie, you spent a ton of time up in Denmark, is the, the, the back and forth between the Norwegians and the Danes about, oh, you're, you're just our [00:03:00] little brother. You're our, oh, you're our distant cousin, da da da da.
How they were kind of all at one point in time, a lot, you know, a lot closer. There was what was called the, um, the calmer Union, I think it was. And that was the Danes, Norwegians, Swedes, all under one king. This was a long time ago, but, so there's that area of the world's kind of all been playing together and, and if you know a little bit of the history too, all of that money that Norway has, so all the money that Einor has is Danish ex Danish land money.
So the Danes gave away their rights to the North Sea, to the Norwegians for whatever reason, and that's where all the oil was that made the Norwegians rich. That is the EOR pile of cash.
Rosemary Barnes: People talk about that frequently, like really frequently. In Denmark. I probably would've had a conversation like, I don't know, at least once a month, maybe once a week about that topic.
I remember one that sticks out in my mind. Um, I always said that Norwegian, like, I love the Norwegian [00:04:00] accent. It sounds like Danish, but they're, they're laughing. And I remember saying that to my boss one time, my Danish boss, and he says, yeah, they are laughing, they're laughing all the way to the bank because they've got our oil.
And, and every Danish person has a huge chip on their shoulder about it. Um, it, it was like the oil, the oil reservoirs weren't well known when they did the divide up of who would get, you know, which bits of the ocean. It was mostly about fish. Um, and yeah, so they divided it where they divided it, everyone was happy with it at the time, and then not so long afterwards found out there was just heaps and heaps of, uh, oil under there.
And yeah, Norway got quite rich off it. But you know what? I think that, um, Denmark hasn't done so bad out of it because it kind of forced them to go all in on wind energy in a way that other, like other countries kind of, it's like during the oil shock of, was it the 1970s? You know, everyone. Looked into wind energy a lot, but as soon as the price went down again, then they were just like, oh, don't worry about wind energy.
But [00:05:00] Denmark just, you know, kept on keeping on and they did have, you know, a few decades of just total world dominance in wind energy. Um, and it also kind of, you know, filtered through to other bits of the economy. It's, it's really nice kind of. Smart industry manufacturing. They, they really did train up a whole generation or so of, um, engineers that are, you know, really industrious and innovative and you see them in all sorts of other industries now.
So I, I don't think that Denmark should have a ship on their shoulder about it. I think that, you know, they should consider that they got some, some good out of it as well.
Joel Saxum: I, I completely agree. The, the last funny I'll throw in there is, if you don't know this, Ted used to be known as Dong Energy, which is Danish oil and natural gas.
So they used to be an and not, that's not too long ago. That's only like 10, 12 years ago.
Rosemary Barnes: No, and I think it's the only example of, um, any fossil fuel company that has flipped, like fully flipped to [00:06:00] renewables. I don't think there's another example. Um, maybe, you know, someone can email us and, and tell me I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're the only ones.
And so that's why, like, I, I really like, I'm always going for them, you know, like I'm always cheering them, cheering them on. I want them to succeed because I want that to be something that can happen, you know, so much better if, um, oil and gas companies spend their energy transitioning to renewables and succeeding compared to if they spent their energy trying to, you know, um, stymie the renewable energy transition.
So yeah, I, I think good for them.
Allen Hall: Ted is saying no chance of any sort of merger with Ecuador. In fact, there's CFOs, total analysts, there are no merger plans, and the CEO of Ted is also basically saying we're focused on our own plan. We, we we're going to go ahead and get the company righted and we don't really need a lot of Ecuador involvement.
That's gonna come to a head pretty soon though, if Orec [00:07:00] can't get their stock back up. Like Joel has pointed out, the, the pressure from Ecuador will slightly diminish over time. And if Oreg can get really rolling, which analysts are saying now is somewhere in the 2030 region before they become, uh, self-sufficient in a, in a sense that, uh, until such time, EOR probably is gonna keep knocking on that door.
It does lead to the question, and I think Rosemary, you brought it up, oh, probably six months ago or more, that Ecuador is starting to pull back from its renewables business and starting to focus a little more on the oil and gas side, but they have renewable sort of requirements that they're going after are goals.
And that stead could fulfill those goals, is that still likely to be the situation where EOR is gonna be in oil and gas and Orsa is gonna be in renewables and between the two of them, they satisfy, uh, both sides, Denmark [00:08:00] and Norway's economic interest?
Rosemary Barnes: I, I think it's very, very hard actually for, um, a company that's used still oil and gas projects to move on to renewables.
I mean, they're not. That similar, you might like, you might think it's one kind of energy, um, moving to another kind of energy. But I think that that totally misunderstands how the, the business, the actual business works, what kinds of, um, projects they do, how risky they are, how much return they require, and the only reason.
Companies would do that as if they were kind of forced to.
Joel Saxum: That's the ESG thing. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Well, it's not only ESG though, because I mean, eor they are kind of running out like, you know, started off with, um, stuff in Norway or in Norway's waters. Right. And they've, to a certain extent, run out of good projects. I mean, that always happens with, um, with fossil fuels that, you know, the good sites get, um, uh, depleted and you have to find new sites that, that always happens.
Um,