Show notes
Allen and Rosemary discuss the upcoming Wind O&M Australia 2026 conference, Ørsted's major restructuring announcement, and the BirdVision bird collision avoidance system. They also explore Nordex's new cold-climate turbine for Canada and the ongoing challenges of blade icing protection systems.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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 to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall from the Queen City, Charlotte, North Carolina.
And Rosemary Barnes is here from Australia. And Rosemary, Joel and I just got back from the Sky Specs customer Form 2025 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we had a really good time, man. Most of the install base in America. For Wind was up at Sky Specs and interesting discussions. Just a lot going on. Obviously, we're all talking about the changes in legislation we're talking about.
Uh, all the moving [00:01:00] targets everybody's trying to reorganize. There's been a number of, uh, shifts from wind into solar that's happening right now in the United States. And lowering operational costs, that's the big one. Getting blades under control, uh, getting gear boxes under control, understanding where some of the risks are.
It was a very good. Conference, uh, they do it once a year. It was a full room, uh, and really good people, people we, we don't see all year. You maybe see once a year, maybe see at another trade show. It was nice to spend a couple of days, uh, talking wind turbine o and m. Very similar, much to what we're gonna do in Australia in February.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I wish I could have been there, uh, maybe next year.
Allen Hall: Well, we, we met with Matthew Stead. He was there. He had traveled all the way from Australia. And one of the things we did tell everybody were at the SKYSPACE conference was come to Australia February 16th and 17th in Melbourne, and you need to start [00:02:00] registering now.
You can go to Woma. 2020 six.com. WMA 2020 six.com and register for that event. Or if you want to, uh, present, you need to put your information into the website and get that rolling. Uh, it, it's gonna, it's getting close to being sold out, so you need to do that now before you lose your spot. We've increased the size of the conference from, it was about 170 odd people last year, and it's gonna be up to 250, but even.
By increasing the, the amount of seats we're still gonna be full.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It's a hard, it's a hard cutoff this time as well. Last time we kind of expanded as, uh, we got more registrations in, but we don't have that option this year, and yet that, uh, agenda is definitely starting to get worked out. So now is the time to get in touch.
If you, one, want to speak or two, have a, a topic that you think that we should talk about, like one of the big things that we wanna achieve with this event. Is matching people with [00:03:00] problems to people who have solutions and especially, you know, people who are developing solutions. So, you know, it might be that there is no solution available yet, but we still wanna hear about the problems 'cause there's a lot of smart people that know all about developing wind, wind turbine technologies.
So that's the place to. Get those sorts of, um, yeah. That kind of information sharing, flowing and get people thinking creatively.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And I don't wanna make all the announcements here, but a number of world experts are going to travel to Melbourne to talk about wind energy. So if you, if you haven't heard of a solution before and, and there's a lot of problems with wind turbines, right?
There's little nuance. Difficult problems that we're all trying to solve. And you, you may not have an expert in Australia, you may not have an expert in United States. They may be over in Denmark or Germany, or France. Uh, pretty much everybody around the world is gonna be in Australia in February to talk about how to make our wind turbines operate better.
That's why it's gonna be good. It's just the world's gonna be there. [00:04:00]
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It's one of the other other reasons why we wanted to make this event is it's exhausting. Going to all of the technical events around the world is really hard, especially for Australians. You know, you can't go anywhere basically without getting on a 15 to 30 hour flight to, to get there.
So, um, we're bringing some, some key people over. Um, yeah. And we can talk about. There's more in depth later on, but there's some, some good topics that I think Australian wind farm owners and operators really can learn from some of the solutions that are happening elsewhere. And we have also got some unique Australian only problems that, um, I think that, you know, these, uh, companies will be interested to help solve.
Allen Hall: And there's a lot of unique Australian solutions to wind turbine operations that the world needs to hear too. So it's a both way conversation because Australians have a really intuitively, uh, solving problems kind of get down to first principles and, and suss [00:05:00] out how to get their turbines up and running again.
And, and sometimes if, if you spend time in Samoan m buildings, sometimes they overthink these problems and Australians are really good at solving them. So. It's good to hear both sides and that's how we do it.
Rosemary Barnes: I'm really enjoying this, technical subset of the Australian wind community. I do find people are very much kind of solution oriented and less, I've always been a bit bamboozled by how secretive and isolated wind turbine companies want to be.
And I don't feel like that's the vibe. Like we don't have obviously any Australian OEMs and so all of the operators are. fairly, or most of them are fairly free in the way that they're talking about problems and solutions that they've found and also willing to try things out. So it is a really good place to run trials for new technologies.
'cause you'll usually find a really huge wind farm that, is able to, try it out. And Get some data on how it's working, [00:06:00]
Allen Hall: and it's definitely some of the world's harshest environment for wind turbines. So if you have a great new leading edge product, you probably ought to take it to Australia and actually check it out because, as Rosemary pointed out a number of times, the UV in Australia is really strong, the dust and debris is really strong and the winds are strong.
So you have all the ingredients to, really aggressive leading edge erosion. Plus the lightning from our area of expertise. The lightning is amazing in Australia and not amazing in a good way. There's a lot of lightning. To wind turbines And it can be destructive in Australia, where you may not see that up in Denmark.
So you can really learn a lot from watching what the Australians have done.
Rosemary Barnes: I, I am involved in, in a couple of trials ongoing at the moment for a few Australia specific problems. Um, par loads, also starting to do some r and d into, uh, figuring out more about what the problems are and solutions to them.
So yeah, I think that it's a really exciting time [00:07:00] to be part of the Australian wind industry.
Allen Hall: So you need to register now. Go to WOMA 2020 six.com. And get involved. Are you worried about unexpected blade root failures and the high cost of repairs? Meet eco Pitch by Onyx Insight. The standard in blade root monitoring.
Onyx iss state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in real time, delivering continuous data to keep your wind farm running smoothly and efficiently. With eco pitch, you can catch problems early. Saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Field tested on over 3000 blades. It's proven reliability at your fingertips.
Choose Eco Pitch for peace of mind. Contact Onyx Insight today to schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and experience the future of blade monitoring. Well, the announcement today was when Giant or is having a major organizational restructuring that will eliminate [00:08:00] approximately 2000 positions by the end of 2027.
Now. CEO Rasmus Abo uh, described the move as necessary to create a more efficient and competitive organization as the company prepares to bid on some new offshore wind projects across Europe. Note that they didn't mention America in that, that. Ted is gonna be mostly focused on Europe. That makes a lot of sense.
Honestly. Uh, the restructuring reflects Ted's strategic focus on offshore wind and European markets with plans to finalize large construction projects in coming years while. Building a more fiscally robust company than the current workforce of about 8,000 employees globally will be downsized through natural attrition, redundancies, and outsourcing with the organization, ultimately ending up at about 6,000 people and rosemary in the United States, there's been a number of announced layoffs, or we're seeing that on LinkedIn.
This is a [00:09:00] big deal for the organization because Ted needs to get, its. Financials settled. Uh, if you listen to some other discussions about this, there's a lot of talk. I mean, it's, in my opinion, a little bit of crazy talk about, uh, Ecuador and Orton into some sort of merger, which I just don't think is ever going to happen.