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Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

Allen covers the V236 blade failure at He Dreiht, Maine’s first full-size floating turbine, and Japan’s wind-powered data center.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Happy Monday Everyone

The V236 just had a bad week last week.

a blade failed on one of the turbines at ENBW’s [EN-bay-vay’s]

HE DREIHT [hay DRYT] offshore wind farm

in the German North Sea.

Nine hundred and sixty megawatts.

There are 64 of those V236 machines.

The project hit first power just last November.

ENBW says no one was hurt.

VESTAS says it has launched a root cause investigation.

But a blade failure on your flagship turbine …

at one of Germany’s biggest offshore wind farms?

That will be a headline.

And the industry is watching.

Now … from the North Sea … to the coast of Maine.

The UNIVERSITY OF MAINE has done something

no one in America has done before.

They put a full-size floating wind turbine in the ocean.

And it is delivering power to the grid.

The platform is called VOLTURNUS [vol-TURN-us].

It was assembled onshore … in Brewer, Maine …

then towed thirty miles down the PENOBSCOT [peh-NOB-skot] River

and out to sea.

No specialized heavy-lift vessels.

No deepwater pile driving.

The hull is made of concrete … sourced locally.

Not imported steel.

Eighty percent of the best offshore wind in America

sits over water too deep for fixed-bottom foundations.

Floating platforms like VOLTURNUS

could change that math entirely.

Meanwhile … in Japan …

wind energy just found a brand-new customer.

Data centers.

EURUS [YOO-rus] ENERGY and TOYOTA TSUSHO [TOY-oh-tah TSOO-shoh]

have broken ground on a wind-powered data center

in HOKKAIDO [hoh-KY-doh].

It is the first data center in Japan

directly connected to a wind farm.

The facility sits next to the KOBAOKO [koh-bah-OH-koh] Wind Farm …

forty-two megawatts …

with a private power line running straight to the servers.

And here is the bigger picture.

Japan has most of its data centers packed into Tokyo and Osaka.

HOKKAIDO has the wind … but not the demand.

So instead of sending the power somewhere else …

they are bringing the demand to the wind.

TOYOTA TSUSHO already operates ten wind farms in the region …

more than five hundred megawatts.

They are planning a much larger data center cluster by twenty thirty.

Ten to twenty megawatts of capacity.

And speaking of scale …

China just laid out its five-year plan for renewables.

The target?

A fifty-three percent jump in renewable energy consumption

by twenty thirty.

According to BLOOMBERG …

renewable power use should rise to about

one-point-eight billion tons of coal equivalent …

Wind and solar generation alone

should nearly double …

from two-point-three trillion kilowatt-hours

to four trillion.

And here is the part that matters for reliability.

China wants wind and solar … backed by storage …

to provide twenty percent of electricity

during peak summer and winter evening hours.

That is double the current level.

Three hundred gigawatts of peak generation from renewables.

That is not an aspiration.

That is a published national target.

Now … before we go …

a story from the other end of the scale.

In KONGIGANAK [KAHN-gig-uh-nak] … a village in western Alaska …

they built five wind turbines.

There is no grid connection.

No transmission lines running to the outside world.

For years … the village ran on diesel generators.

The turbines changed that.

But they created a new problem.

Sometimes … the wind made more electricity

than the village could use.

No grid to send it to.

No big battery bank to store it in.

So the engineers came up with something simple.

They put special ceramic heaters inside every home.

When the wind blows hard …

the extra power flows into those heaters.

Dense ceramic bricks soak up the energy as heat.

And when the wind dies down …

that stored heat slowly releases into the house.

In Alaska … where winter never seems to end …

surplus wind power now keeps homes warm

and cuts diesel bills at the same time.

There is a shift in the wind energy business at the moment.

It used to be utilities buying megawatts.

Now it is tech companies buying uptime.

Remote villages buying independence from diesel.

And entire nations buying credibility on their climate commitments.

Each of those buyers has a different definition of reliability.

And every one of them needs turbines that can run for years and years.

The wind industry has never had more demand.

The question is whether the hardware

can keep up with the ambition.

`That is the state of the wind industry

for the twenty-seventh of July … twenty twenty-six.

Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

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Renewable Energy

As Europe Shuns Chinese Turbines and Components, Who Will Fill the Gap?

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As Europe Shuns Chinese Turbines and Components, Who Will Fill the Gap?

While most of Europe has spent most of this year itemizing reasons it cannot, should not, and will not use Chinese wind turbines or components, accusations and arm-twisting tactics have garnered most of the attention.

But we invite you to consider a future – maybe just five, or ten years from now?- in which those same countries and companies are eagerly awaiting orders from wind turbine manufacturing facilities in… India.
What?!
You know that the country has a lot of installed wind.

You may think – and many in the industry would agree – that India’s blade manufacturers are a few revs behind blade-makers elsewhere in the world. But the country is newly committed to manufacturing and it’s busy installing more – provided that it’s made in India, with Indian technology, by Indian workers.
Of course, similar domestic-focused policy currents are running through European countries – where wind OEMs are almost inarguably a decade ahead of Indian manufacturers. But there’s an important reason why we say, “watch India” in wind turbine manufacturing.

It’s because you might learn something.

If you follow The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, you probably heard this discussion a few weeks ago. It wasn’t the headline story – we try to highlight as many major news items and trends that we can, and follow up as credible information becomes available. India’s quiet moves to strengthen its own renewable energy industries didn’t grab the headlines. But it comprised a good bit of our panelists’ discussion.

With India’s expanding manufacturing capacity, and Suzlon’s strategic offerings for the European market (Blue Sky), there are reasons for European developers to take a closer look at Indian manufacturers.

If Europe continues to squelch deals with Chinese manufacturers due to data security issues, India is a relatively obvious candidate to fill the void, for several reasons:

  • The country has depth and breadth in R&D: India (Suzlon, specifically) has a track record of involvement and relationships across the continent, as it operates research and development centers in Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
  • Indian service providers have reach: Inox and Adoni Wind operate multiple wind turbine manufacturing plants and wind farms throughout several Indian states, and Apraava Energy has been commissioning wind projects, working with multiple OEMs, for more than 16 years.
  • The country’s energy sector has size: Tata Power is estimated to be worth about US$16 billion and employs 22,000 people.

And major manufacturers from other countries have had a strong presence in the country for years:

  • GE Vernova has turbine blade and nacelle manufacturing operations and multiple tech/R&D centers in India;
  • Vestas has a R&D technology center in Chennai; and
  • China’s SANY Wind has had assembly facilities in India since 2017, and in 2024, it signed a licensing agreement with JSW allowing SANY to manufacture blades and generators for JSW – enabling JSW Neo Energy to produce wind turbine generators and major components in-country.

So while there is hard data suggesting that India is already a global hub for wind turbines, sometimes the real strength comes from soft skills. Like sharing information.

We’ve noticed that Indian manufactures aren’t stingy with information. They share what they learn in the field and on the shop floor, so that the whole industry can move faster to solve problems. That bodes well for the industry overall, and particularly well for companies who figure out how to solve problems that some manufacturers aren’t even ready to admit to having.

We’ll be watching India with a great deal of interest in the coming months. Subscribe to The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast and follow along with us.

We’re not financial analysts. We’re engineers who watch the wind industry very closely. This is what we’ve noticed, and we thought it was worth sharing.

Where do you think you’ll be looking for solutions, components, and service providers in the next few years or the next decade? Tell us what you think. We’d love to hear from you.

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As Europe Shuns Chinese Turbines and Components, Who Will Fill the Gap?

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Renewable Energy

When You Write for Idiots, You Can Get Away with Anything

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To the author of the meme here:

“Either” refers to two choices; “any” refers to three or more.

More importantly, it’s amazing how shamelessly the ultra-right wing exaggerates.  The left side of the Democratic party would like to see the United States look like social democracies in places like Scandinavia.  Having government programs that benefit the common person, e.g., Social Security, public schools, emergency relief, libraries, environmental responsibility, etc., does not equate to Stalinism.

When You Write for Idiots, You Can Get Away with Anything

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Renewable Energy

Are Muslims “Dangerous?”

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Some of my old prep school chums from the Class of 1973 convene via Zoom approximately every six weeks for a 90-minute discussion of current events, science, and anything else that sounds interesting.

Our professions range from medicine, law, finance, and business management. All from highly ranked colleges.  Over 50% hold doctorate degrees.

Here’s something I find fascinating about the group: it includes one right-wing conservative.  I don’t mean a Reaganite; I mean a Trump supporter.  This guy is incapable of any thought that doesn’t come directly from Nexsmax.

It’s almost eerie how closely he toes the line of the far-right.  Yesterday he echoed the Newsmax talking point and told the group that all Muslims holding public office are “very dangerous” and should be removed.

Now, the rest of us are sitting there, dumbfounded at this idea, unwilling waste our breath on this racist and utterly preposterous concept.

All this raises the question: How are our political viewpoints formed?  How much of this is genetics?  Epigenetics?  Early childhood experiences? How do take a boy from among the best environments and turn him into someone who struggles to understand the most basic principles on which our country was founded?

https://www.2greenenergy.com/2026/11/09/principles-country-was-founded/

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