Published

8 months ago

July 7, 2025

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

GE 18 MW Turbine, Nordex Revives Iowa Facility

Nordex USA has reopened its wind turbine plant in Iowa, while Alliant Energy plans to add up to one gigawatt of wind generation in the state. GE Vernova’s 18 megawatt turbine has been approved for testing and the UK has greenlit the 1.5 gigawatt Mona Offshore Wind Farm.

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!

Good news for Iowa’s clean energy sector.

Nordex USA celebrated the reopening of its wind turbine plant in West Branch, Iowa on Tuesday. The plant now employs more than one hundred workers. They’re producing the company’s first U.S.-made turbines.

Manav Sharma is Nordex’s North American C.E.O. He says the company is committed to Iowa for the long term.

The plant had been closed since twenty thirteen. Nordex bought the facility in twenty sixteen and spent months retrofitting it. The plant will produce parts for five-megawatt turbines. Production capacity is planned to exceed two point five gigawatts annually.

The reopening comes despite federal debates about renewable energy tax credits.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds noted that sixty six percent of Iowa’s power comes from renewable energy. That’s the highest percentage in the US.

Alliant Energy also has big plans for wind power in Iowa.

The company filed a plan with the Iowa Utilities Commission to add up to one gigwatt of wind generation.

Mayuri Farlinger is president of Alliant’s Iowa energy company. She says expanding wind energy will help them deliver reliable and cost-effective power to customers.

Alliant plans to own and operate the new wind projects. The company expects the projects to create construction jobs and provide payments to landowners. They’ll also generate new tax revenue for counties where the turbines are built.

The Iowa Utilities Commission is expected to make a decision in the first quarter of twenty twenty six.

Norway is testing the one of world’s biggest wind turbine.

Norwegian regulator N.V.E. approved GE Vernova subsidiary Georgine Wind plans for an eighteen-megawatt turbine in the municipality of Gulen.

NVE says this is the largest wind turbine ever approved in Norway. It’s also the first to be licensed inside an existing industrial area.

The turbine will have a rotor diameter of up to two hundred fifty meters. The maximum tip height will be two hundred seventy five meters.

The turbine will undergo testing for five years before switching to standard commercial operation for another twenty five years.

The United Kingdom has approved its largest Irish Sea wind farm.

Energy Secretary Ed Miliband granted planning consent for the Mona offshore wind farm. The project is owned by B.P. and EnBW. It will feature ninety six turbines off northwest England.

The one point five gigawatt project could power more than one million homes with clean energy. It’s expected to begin production between twenty twenty eight and twenty twenty nine.

Miliband says this shows the government is backing builders, not blockers.

B.P. and EnBW are also waiting for approval of a neighboring wind farm called Morgan. That decision is due by September tenth.

The developers have been paying option fees of one hundred fifty four thousand pounds per megawatt per year since January twenty twenty three.

Richard Sandford is B.P.’s Vice President of Offshore Wind. He says this approval brings them closer to delivering large-scale, low-carbon energy critical to the U.K.’s net zero goals.

That’s this week’s top news story.

Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

https://weatherguardwind.com/ge-nordex-iowa/

Renewable Energy

The Positive Effects We’ve Had on Others Are Profound, Whether We Know It or Not

Published

10 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

There’s a theory that most people underestimate the positive effects they’ve had on other people.

Yes, that’s the theme of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” but it’s also the core of the 1995 film “Mr. Holland’s Opus,” in which a music teacher who deemed that his life had been a failure because he never completed writing a great symphony, is gently and beautifully corrected. Please see below.

The Positive Effects We’ve Had on Others Are Profound, Whether We Know It or Not

Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy Concepts Can’t Violate the Laws of Physics

Published

23 hours ago

February 28, 2026

Alice Rush

In the early days of 2GreenEnergy, my people and I were vigorously engaged in finding solid ideas in cleantech that needed funding in order to move forward.

I vividly remember a conversation with a guy in Maryland who was trying to explain the (ostensible) breakthrough that he and his team had made in hydrokinetics. When I was having trouble visualizing what we was talking about, he asked me to “think of it as a river in a box.”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “You mean you take a box full of standing water, add energy to it get it moving, then extract that energy, leaving you with more energy that you added to it.”

“Exactly.”

I politely explained that the laws of physics, specifically the first and second laws of thermodynamics, make this impossible.

He wasn’t through, however, and insisted that, in his office, his people had constructed a “working model.”

Here’s where my tone descended into something less than 100% polite. I told him that he may think he has a working model, but he’s wrong; if he believes this, he’s ignorant; if he doesn’t, but is conducting this conversation anyway, he’s a fraud.

“But don’t you want to come see it?” he implored.

“No. Not only would not fly across the country to see whatever it is you claim to have built, I wouldn’t walk across the street to a “working model” of something that is theoretically impossible.”

—

I tell this story because the claim made at the upper left is essentially identical. You’re pumping water up out of a stream, and then claiming to extract more energy when the water flows back into the stream.

Of course, social media today is rife with complete crap like this. We’ve devolved to a point where defrauding money out of idiots is rapidly replacing baseball as our national pastime.