Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Funding vs Engineering, Edinburgh and WOMA Plans

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss Modvion’s €39M grant for wooden wind turbine towers, leading to a discussion about funding vs. engineering readiness in the wind industry. Plus they highlight Veolia’s blade recycling advances in PES Wind Magazine. And the Weather Guard team announces they’ll be in Edinburgh for the ORE Catapult Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight!

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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!

Allen Hall: A portion of the Weather Guard team. We’re headed to Scotland for the ORE Catapult Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight, which is gonna happen on December 11th in Edinburgh. We’re gonna attend that and it’s gonna be a, a number of great offshore companies there. We’re hoping to interview a couple of them while we’re there.

But Joel, this is a real opportunity, uh, for offshore companies in the UK to showcase what they can do and they can get on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Joel Saxum: Of course. So we’re flying over the sixth and seventh there over the weekend. And we will be, uh, in Edinburgh, uh, on the eighth. So Monday morning through Thursday.

Thursday and Thursday is the or E Catapult event. And yeah, we’re excited to see some of the companies that are gonna be there, interview some of them, get the, the picture, uh, of the uk um, supply chain, right? Because I think it’s a really cool event that they’re doing. I’d love to see other countries do that.

I’d love to see the US do that. Um. Just say like, Hey, this is, these are the companies, the up and [00:01:00] comers and the, the people that are changing the game and, and kinda give them a platform to speak on. So we’re excited to do that. It’s gonna be a one day event. Um, love to see some people join us, but the other side of that thing is we’re gonna be over in Scotland.

So we’re, well, we’ve got a couple meetings in Glasgow, a couple meetings in Borough. So if you are around the area, um, of course we’re linking up people on the uptime network, but, uh. If you’re around the area and you want to, you wanna chat anything wind, or maybe you got lightning protection problems, get ahold of us.

’cause we’ll be over there and, uh, happy to drop in and uh, share coffee with you.

Allen Hall: It’s just part of Weather Guards and the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast outreach to the world. So we’re gonna be in Scotland for an entire week. We’re heading down to Melbourne, Australia for probably a couple of weeks while we’re down that way.

And we will be somewhere near you over the next year probably. It’s a really good, uh, free service that we provide, is we want to highlight those businesses and those new technology ideas that need a little bit of exposure to grow. And that’s what the Uptime podcast is here to do. So join us [00:02:00] and if you want to reach out to us, you can reach us via LinkedIn, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon.

We’ll respond to you and hopefully we can meet you in

Speaker 3: Edinburgh. You’re 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 in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Soon, the home of Maersk North America, I think we’re going to find out. And also the new Home of Scout, if you haven’t seen the little, what was formerly a MC little vehicle that’s gonna be made, well engineered in Charlotte and then built in South Carolina.

So we’re looking forward to that. And with me as Yolanda Pone in Texas. Joel Saxons up in the great state of Wisconsin and Rosemary [00:03:00] Barnes is back in Australia. And there’s plenty of things to talk about this week, and I, I think our pre-recording discussion has centered on wooden wind turbines. And if everybody’s been following, um, mod Vion, they have received a 39.1 million Euro grant and they are making of all things.

Wooden wind towers. So, uh, up in Sweden, there’s plenty of wood to make towers out of, out of it. And it’s a laminated process. And if, if you’ve looked online, I encourage everybody to go look online. It’s kind of an interesting technology they have where they’re layering wood together to build these towers sections.

And so instead of using steel or other materials, concrete, you can make them outta wood. Uh, so the European Union is backing this, and as Joel has pointed out. This is not the only money they have received to develop this technology.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Back in 2020, they received a six [00:04:00] and a half million euro. Grant as well.

And then they had some investment money come in, um, and it was in Swedish Knox. Okay. Or of course they’re in Sweden, so Makes sense. But that was a, a convertible note around 11, 12 million, uh, euros as well. So when you add this 39 million Euro grant on, you’re looking at about 55, 50 7 million euros in funding over the last five or six years for this company.

Allen Hall: How does the European Union decide where to invest? These innovation funds at,

Rosemary Barnes: you know, it’s interesting ’cause I visited MO when I was in Sweden a few months ago. I actually have a video, uh, about to come out hopefully next week. Um, about, yeah, I got a tour of their factory and, uh, interviewed one of their engineers who’s been with them like the whole time.

Um, and I visited them just a few days after I visited C 12. I made a video about that as well. That’s a floating vertical axis wind turbine. C 12, just like four days after I visited them, they, um, received the [00:05:00] news that they had been awarded a similarly sized European grant. So, yeah, in the tens of millions, I can’t remember the exact number.

And I was thinking, what would I do if I got, you know, 40 million euros, which is like nearly 80 million, I think Australian dollars. Like I could really come up with something major and develop it in that time. It’s not, they haven’t been given the money to come up with the right solution, right? They’ve been given the money for the solution that they already have.

And I think that it’s really interesting that these European grants, it’s set up like that where they’re supporting, uh, assume that they’ve got a certain technology readiness level that you have to be at before that they will support you. And that kind of means that you’re locked in to a solution by the time that you’re at that point, right?

Rewards only that kind of model where you have a charismatic person with a vision that they just pursue to the end. It does not reward getting the smart people who could find solutions to the real problems. It [00:06:00] doesn’t reward that because you, no one’s getting heaps of money, like $10 million early on to be like, here’s a problem, now find a solution and we’re going to.

Fund that through the 10 things that you try that don’t end up working, no one is funding that, right? So all of that has to be done on the basis of your own pockets or the ability of your charisma to convince other people to support it. And I just think that it’s probably like. Not the right way to spend your, you know, if you’ve got like $500 million to spend to get the next big thing in wind energy, you shouldn’t be picking a bunch of companies that are tier L five.

You should be getting the smartest people and giving them money to found a company and um, yeah, come up with solutions that way.

Joel Saxum: Is it wooden? Wind turbine tower worth it.

Rosemary Barnes: And ev everyone will have to have to watch my video. ’cause I asked, I asked quite in depth questions ’cause I went into it very, very skeptical thinking that this was a su sustainability play.

And I’ve got two issues with that. Like, first of all, wind turbine tower is [00:07:00] not that unsustainable. I mean, wind turbines on average are paying back the energy that it took to make them in, you know, six months or so. But what was interesting is, you know, wood is a, a composite material, right? It’s got the, um.

Fibers, cellulose fibers in a malignant matrix. It’s, it’s, it’s a composite material, just like fiberglass is. Why don’t we make fiberglass towers? I mean, it’s partly ’cause of the cost and it’s partly ’cause joining them is quite tricky as well. Um, and yeah, those are probably the, the main two things, but I’ve actually done a bit of work into it.

If you could make a fiberglass tower, you could go. Way, way taller than you can with, with a steel tower, with, you know, transport constraints and whatever. So the wooden tower actually has a lot of the advantages that you would find if you had, were able to make a fiberglass tower. So they are expecting to be able to go taller, um, with, you know, they’re as constrained by transport because, you know, the fibers are all running this way.

It’s fine to cut it, um, like longitudinally, um, slice it into pieces and join the all site. Doesn’t, um, [00:08:00] reduce the, the. The strength really. So there from that point of view, there’s something to it. If you can go taller, make it easier to go taller with towers, then that’s a real problem that needs a solution.

There are other solutions. There’s like NARA Lift, you know the one just got bought by Ford Spanish company where they build a turbine on like a tiny tower and then slot pieces in underneath it to come up. That’s another great solution. Um, people are also looking at 3D printing concrete towers and thing, things like that.

So it’s not like this wooden tower is the only way that we’re gonna be able to do that, but it’s a real problem with a plausible solution to it. So. I think that they’re ahead of many, many, many, many of this kind of company. Just just from that, that at least they’re solving a real problem.

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Is it the fact that founders in that sense can speak about problems and tell a story, which it feels like if you watch Shark Tank, this is sort of the Shark Tank wind energy connection. I always think it when you watch Shark Tank. Is someone who gets money there or what’s the equivalent? In the UK it’s called Dragon’s Den.

There’s [00:10:00] a a certain personality type.

Rosemary Barnes: How often am, am I saying? Are we all saying what we’ve got here is a solution looking for a problem? Like there’s a real disconnect between. Engineering a good solution and, um, that, that will work in the field versus fake it till you make it to attract investor money.

I think it’s like this, this Silicon Valley like model where with software you kind of can fake it till you make it and it, you know, like update quickly, learn quickly. But with a hardware product as big as a wind turbine. You can’t, like if the engineering isn’t right, the product will never succeed. You can’t bluff your way through that.

Um, the projects that are done, like with the right engineering can’t attract enough. Funds. So they, they fail before they ever prove it. But the ones that attract enough funds are doing it because they’re like, uh, designing for investors rather than to build a successful project. And so it’s like you’ve got these two alternatives, both of which are guaranteed to fail.[00:11:00]

Um, I think that that’s the, like the biggest problem for how hard it is to get like legitimate innovation in energy

Yolanda Padron: up. I feel like it’s almost like a, it should be a training. For engineers in school to be able to at least pretend like you can not care about the details as much, you know, for 20 minutes in the day or something.

’cause imagine how successful some of these projects could potentially be if you were at least for a meeting like par with. Those people who just have that personality type.

Allen Hall: Not all engineers are gonna be founders of company and not all founders of company are gonna be engineers. And that has an influence on what the little tiny pool of people that can be able to do this where you’ve taken a very complicated problem, come up with a solution and being able to sell it or market it, which is even harder.

You gotta market before you can sell it. [00:12:00] The engineering. Type person tends to wanna focus on the details, the of the product, not on the problem that someone is struggling with and what that means to that person. Here’s, I think where that line gets crossed, and you can do both, is that, that the engineers that are just.

Focused, super focused on learn, learn, learn, learn, knowing what you do not have and going to get those skill sets because you don’t have to be the world’s best engineer, nor do you have to be the world’s best marketer, but you have to know enough to be dangerous and you as an engineer. Training I had in school was keep.

Pounding, keep trying to learn more. And I, I feel like Rosemary’s in the same vein, right? So she’s always trying to learn more and that’s why she has her engineering with Rosie, uh, YouTube channel is because she’s constantly trying to pick up new things. But you also look at Rosemary. Oh, Rosemary, I don’t mind if I use you [00:13:00] as an example here, but you didn’t come out of, uh, Australian Elementary School, whatever that is, being a a, a really good speaker, like that’s something you’ve learned over time.

You’ve been able to. Work in a very large company, you now, you’re in a very small company, the one that you own, and you’ve had to bridge that. And that means you have to know what the budgets are, what the money, where this money’s coming from. You have to sell to large corporations. You have to learn all those skills.

That takes time, and each one of those skills you learn is extremely painful. So you have to have the resilience to say, you’re shooting arrows at me all the time. I’m not dead yet. I’m gonna keep moving forward because I could, I can see a way that I can make a business that produces a revenue that I can pay the mortgage with.

Joel Saxum: That’s what it takes. Another, another side of this is, is if you’re trying to, to get, you’re getting to the point where you’re building a team out, right? I think it’s very [00:14:00] important for a founder to under, to understand their limitations at certain points in time. Because if you build a company and you’re just like, I like engineers, so I’m gonna build a company with five engineers and us six are gonna make something happen that may not be the best, you know, the best strategy if you’re gonna want like.

I did, we used to do this thing, um, in a, in a company that I was a partner in where we had those, it’s a, basically like a spider graph, right? And you take, you answer all these questions and it ranks you on points of like, where you are for problem solving and where you are for the, you know, the big picture where you are for details.

And then it overlays them all. So you look at your management team, you overlay ’em, what you wanna see is a perfect circle that you’ve filled every one of these. Areas, these silos with skills on your management team or on your execution team, or on your project team or whatever it may be. You can’t really

Allen Hall: have an ego in a sense.

The thing about starting a company is everybody is shooting Arrow, is that you, when you first go to a customer [00:15:00] that first time, they are gonna blow holes in you because you haven’t thought of all these different things that they consider to be very important. And you come out of it like, boy, yeah, yeah, I was not ready for that.

Yes,

Rosemary Barnes: but you’ve gotta want that. See that not as an insult to your ego, but as information that you need to, to grow. I think. ’cause I work a lot with startups as well as having one of my own. Um, and one thing that I do is I really, really early on screen them to figure out what kind of founder there are.

’cause there’s, there’s two kinds. There’s the one that wants to develop a significant product that will be successful in the world. And then there’s other ones who just love their idea and want to keep on working on it forever. And that second type, they don’t, they don’t want to learn anything wrong with their product.

They don’t want to know about, um. You know, showstoppers because that’s gonna prevent them from doing what they love, which is working on this idea. So I only wanna work with the, the first kind, who would see a, being informed about a [00:16:00] showstopper for their project. They would see that as a real win. So that’s my always, my philosophy is just, uh, just gonna break it.

What, whatever your idea is, I’m gonna do whatever I can to break it. Whether that’s physically or whether that’s commercially break the business case. You just throw everything you can at it intentionally. And with my own products too. You. Do everything you can to make it a failure. ’cause that’s how you learn how to make something that cannot fail, you know?

And that’s what you need to succeed. It’s not enough to have an idea that, you know, like, like a lot of times with wind energy, you come up with something that might make be better, right? Than the status quo. So let’s think about, you know, um. Wind turbine. They’ve all got three blades. They all have a, um, the upwind facing rotor.

You know, they’re, they’re very, very similar. There are all sorts of ideas that could be better. Right? That could be a better way to do it. You know, there’s different ways to make the, the blade maybe out of sailcloth instead of fiberglass. You can have two blades. Um, you can have a [00:17:00] downwind rotor. You can, like any, all of these ideas have been tried before, but being a little bit better is, is not.

It’s not close, it’s not close to being enough like it is so far from, from being enough. It has to be so good that it can’t fail. That is the only way for you to overcome the, um, the gap that you have to what the status quo is. And so many people like, but my, you know, but my design is 1% more efficient.

People could, you know, get all this amount extra. They, they’re not, that is not enough to get you over that massive hump between where you are now with an idea. What it would take to get people buying enough of it that it will ever reach its potential. That’s what people don’t see.

Allen Hall: That’s exactly circling back what we’re talking about.

The idea has to be a big improvement. Whatever it does. The wheel was a big improvement. The pencil was a big improvement. Paper was a big improvement. [00:18:00] Sliced bread, huge improvement. It just made your life easier. It has to be something that makes. Life easier, not just a little bit. And Rosemary is 100% right about this.

It has to be a lot. So when, when I hear people in wind that are working in technology talk about a quarter percent, a half a percent, say 2%, that’s usually not enough to get somebody to react to it. It has to be a bigger number. Now, the two percents of the world. Incrementally, we will make the world better.

Rosemary Barnes: It, it’s fine if it’s a, if it’s a small technology that will just fit in with a status quo without making anyone’s life harder than 2% is amazing. If it requires anyone to do anything different, then it is not close to enough.

Allen Hall: Don’t miss the UK Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight 2025 in Edinburg on December 11th.

Over 550 delegates and 100 exhibitors will be at this game changing event. Connect with decision makers. Share your market ready innovations and secure the partnerships to accelerate your [00:19:00] growth. Register now and take your place at the center of the UK’s offshore Wind future. Just visit supply chain spotlight.co.uk and register today.

So we have somebody on the other side of the table, which is Yolanda, who sees all the crazy people come up to ’em. If you’re sitting across the table from someone who wants to sell you a product, I, I can’t even think of what. To be selling you, honestly. ’cause there’s not a lot of, um, maybe, maybe they’re selling aerodynamic improvements.

Maybe they’re selling some blade whizzbang thing or CMS system. Maybe CMS system. Can you suss that out? Can you just tell that this person is not locked in on reality? It’s, does that show up in a meeting?

Yolanda Padron: Well, initially, a lot of times some people just won’t. They don’t care exactly what your problem is or what the, you know, a problem might be big, but it might [00:20:00] not have as big an impact on generation as the spend to fix it would be.

Or a lot of times the, the problem that you may be seeing is just. You know, it, it’s a risk that you’ll, you’ll take because of the, the cost of the solution. I mean, if, if you have, if I have $2,000 budgeted to fix or deal with an issue and you’re offering me a solution for $45,000, I just can’t take it.

You know? I mean, as great as you might sound and as much as you believe in your project, uh, on your product, you just can’t take it. And I think there’s some people who. Come to the table really caring about what the issue is and finding a solution together for the sake of the industry, as was weather guard and is.

Uh, but there is also [00:21:00] just some, some teams who just really, really just want their product, who will come to an engineer and won’t even bring an engineer to the table, who will just not even care about testing. Their, their product in a, their an accredited facility. And we’ll say, I mean, I had people come to me in a sales pitch and then when I asked them for testing results, they would say, well, will you fund this testing?

It’s like, no, I. I, I won’t, you’re, you’re selling me the product. Like I don’t,

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think you understand. I saw so many companies that that was their biggest failure. They couldn’t get real world testing and that, that’s why I know that weather guard and paddle load are like poised for at least once you have a good idea, you’re gonna be able to develop it.

Because the testing is, the testing capability is built in and I definitely could get people to pay to test. [00:22:00] A product that I developed because I know exactly what their problem is. I know exactly how much it’s worth to them, and they know that I understand it better than than them even. So I think people don’t, um, like it’s a very wind specific thing, but it is so hard if you just come up with an idea and you don’t know anybody that, um, managers wind farms.

It’s so hard to convince someone to put something like even to just allow you to put it on for free. That’s a really, really hard sell.

Allen Hall: So what is the advice for. Small businesses that want to be large businesses that are, have wind products that they’re offering today, what are the steps they need to take to make it a reality?

Rosemary Barnes: They need to understand the, the problem really well, or the problem that they’re. Potential customers had and they also needed to understand the other pain points in that person’s life. Because a lot of times I’ve seen people get so, um, kind of worked up that, yeah, they’ve got a business case on [00:23:00] paper that, you know, the company should, in theory, make way more money from having this product.

They’re not having it, but people don’t have enough time. Um, it has to be. Solving, either solving a problem that is taking up their time already, and you will immediately take up less of their time with when your solution is, when they even start to implement your solution. It’s not enough that they do a year project and then they start to have their problem solved.

Um, so either, yeah, it has to be so much better or it needs to be totally painless to implement it. That’s the, that’s the two, two options that you have. There isn’t a third option.

Yolanda Padron: I think it’s really important to balance your humility. Uh, and just your ego a little bit. Of course, you need to be proud of your product and you want to believe in it and everything.

Uh, but you need to be humble enough to listen to the person and listen to their issues and listen to maybe your product isn’t perfect and it needs some tweaks [00:24:00] and mower likely than not, it will need some tweaks. So just don’t. Continue going forward to something that just won’t work.

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Allen Hall: So everybody’s preparing to go to Melbourne in February of 2026 for Woma [00:25:00] Wind Energy, o and m Australia and the promos have just hit LinkedIn.

Everybody’s talking about it. We’re getting a, a quite a number of sponsors. Joel. We have a, a couple of sponsorship levels still available, but not many.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, we are fresh out of round table sponsors. Um, we’ve still got a couple hanging out there for some. Receptions and lunches and things like that. But, uh, yeah, we’ve got, uh, a lot of our friends joining up, a lot of emails coming in to ask of can I get involved somehow?

Um, which is great because to be honest with you, even if we don’t have a spot for an ex ex exhibitor spot or a sponsorship spot, getting to talk with people at an early engagement level is fantastic. But we’re, ’cause we’re finding more and more subject matter experts through these conversations as well.

So we’re able to bring, if, if we can’t. Engage on a sponsorship level, fine. Still reach out because the, there might be a spot for you up on a panel as one of these people that can educate, uh, and share, uh, with the Australian wind industry

Allen Hall: and as the promos are saying, Rosemary. We [00:26:00] want solutions, not speeches.

So this whole event is about solution, solution solutions, right?

Rosemary Barnes: And problems.

Allen Hall: What kind of problems are we gonna talk about?

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, I think that’s the, the interesting part is that it brings those two, two parts together. That’s what we’ve been talking about with technology development. That the, you know, the critical thing is to know, understand very well what your customers.

Facing in terms of problems. And so this is the event where everybody is there to talk about exactly what problems they’re actually spending time on day to day. And those are the ones where, you know, it’s a much easier pathway to succeed. So if you’re a, a. Technology developer, you know, a company that has some new technologies, then this is the event to come to to make sure that you get that fit right.

Allen Hall: And Woma 2026 will be held the 17th and 18th at the Pullman Hotel, which is in beautiful downtown Melbourne. And you need to be going online. Go to Woma 2026 WOMA, 2020 six.com. Get registered. There’s only 250 seats [00:27:00] available and a number of them have already been reserved. So it’s shrinking day by day.

If you want to attend and you should attend, go ahead, register for the event. If you’re interested in sponsorship, you need to get a hold of Joel. And how do they do that?

Joel Saxum: Uh, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn, um, pretty easy to find there. Uh, or send me a direct email. JOEL Do a xm. I have to say that out loud because.

I gets confused a lot@wglightning.com, so Joel dot saxon@wglightning.com.

Allen Hall: So go to Wilma. 2020 six.com and register today.

This quarter is PES WIN Magazine, which has arrived via the Royal Mail. There are a number of great articles and uh, I was thumbing through it the other day and the article from Veolia, and we had Veolia on the podcast, uh, a couple of years ago on blade recycling. And there’s a number of, of cool things happening there.

You know, Veolia was grinding down the blades and then using them, [00:28:00] uh, mixing them with, with cement. Reducing some of the coal and other energy forms that are used to, to make cement. And they were also using, uh, some of the fiber as fill. So that process, when they first started, we were talking to ’em. Then there’s been a lot of iterations to it.

It’s like anything in recycling, the first go around is never easy. But Veolia has the.

That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us as we explore the latest in wind energy technology and industry insights. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you.

Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you. Found value in today’s conversation. Please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show and we’ll catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:29:00] Podcast.

https://weatherguardwind.com/funding-edinburgh-woma/