Weather Guard Lightning Tech

GE’s 15.5MW Offshore Cap, New York’s Canceled Projects, and Colorado’s Manufacturing Wins

Allen, Joel and Phil discuss GE’s decision to stop at 15.5MW for offshore turbines, the impact of cancelled New York offshore wind projects, challenges for Siemens Gamesa’s rumored 21MW turbine, and Colorado attracting wind manufacturing jobs.

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Allen Hall: Joel, we’re getting close to American Clean Power up in Minneapolis. What are the warmer destinations in the states in May?

Joel Saxum: Actually, the weather doesn’t look like it’s going to be too bad. It’s going to be, it’s going to be what sounds like I’ve been talking to some of my friends that they’re, what you would expect is a traditional spring in Minnesota.

Not snow, not 80 degrees. It looks like 65. So it’ll be nice where you can wear a blazer and do your things and not sweat too much.

Allen Hall: Is that a promise, Joel, or a wish?

Joel Saxum: Weather in the Midwest, it’s a wish. Bring flip flops and winter boots.

Allen Hall: And Weather Guard will be with AC 883 at ACP. And so if you want to come talk to us, stop by, you’ll see us wandering around the halls and making all kinds of noise and reporting, recording podcasts.

If you have a company that’s involved in wind energy and you want to be on the podcast, that’s a good time to talk to us. Our podcast numbers have exploded. So there’s a lot of listeners at the moment. And if you want to get your company out in the industry, heard of all around the world. We’re a good way to do it.

We’re absolutely free. And we’d love to talk to you. The other thing that’s happening which is I think going to create an earthquake up in Minnesota is that Phil is actually going to go to ACP. You can’t believe the amount of leverage it took to get him out of sunny California and go to Minnesota in May.

We worked on it for weeks.

Joel Saxum: He’ll be there though. Smiling.

Philip Totaro: This is actually something I’m pretty excited and interested about this time though, because I’ve never had so much so many potential, partners and customers show up to an event before and so many existing ones as well, there’s a lot of people that I’m going to have.

It almost feels like we’re back to before the pandemic, which is when I was, a lot more enthusiastic about going to these these events and trade shows. There was a lot more payback, frankly when you participated and that diminished a lot. For obvious reasons with the pandemic and whatnot, we weren’t getting together in person.

But it feels like they’re starting hopefully to create an environment that is conducive to the industry flourishing and actually transacting some business. And so that’s what’s attracting me to, to participate in this thing. I hope that continues and, I’m happy at this point to dip my toe back in the water of participation.

Joel Saxum: So if you’re in Minnesota, be prepared for a hundred percent increase of people that grew up next to Rick James.

Allen Hall: All right, over in New York State the offshore industry has been really hit, and this is due to the state’s third solicitation, what they call a third round for offshore wind, and they aim to add four gigawatts offshore. Everybody goes back in time and remembers they had all the sort of the cancellations happened and they re bid everything at the end of last year.

That got approved, there were three projects approved, Attentive Wind, Community Offshore Wind, and Excelsior Wind. All those projects had just been essentially cancelled as of a couple of days ago. I went to NYSERDA, which is a group that manages offshore wind for the state of New York, didn’t even put it on the website.

There was no press release about it. It was, they updated the website to eliminate these projects, and somebody noted that, hey, three projects are gone off the website. Huh, that’s weird. And they’re starting to follow up on it. Yeah, it wasn’t widely announced. Attentive Wind, which is Total Energies, and Community Offshore Wind, which is RWE, and then Excelsior Wind, which is Kof and Hagen Infrastructure Partners those projects were canceled.

And the reason they’re giving, Phil, is because GE decided not to make an 18 megawatt turbine to stick to their existing 15. 5 megawatt platform, and that would change the number of turbines that would go into the water, basically the number of holes in the ground and the ocean floor. And that was enough to reset everything.

We have to cancel it and start over again. Now, first off, let’s get to the method in which New York State went through this. They canceled these projects because of this Turbine change. Is that the right approach? We’ll start there. Is that the right approach to cancel projects because they use a slightly smaller turbine?

Philip Totaro: You’re asking somebody, competent and who actually has an industry domain experience. I’m going to say, no, that’s not really a good basis for doing that. And by the way, if you think my Jones Act rants are epic, just wait. So the thing with this is, GE pulled the plug on an 18 megawatt turbine, which necessarily triggered a change in what the project developers had submitted, but.

Normally when a project gets bid, certainly in Europe, for example, when a project gets bid, they bid, a maximum capacity and then like a maximum turban size or maximum turban envelope I’m not quite sure if New York was trying to be more specific or deliberate with saying that, okay, if you’re going to submit these bids with, this 18 megawatt turban, then it has to be an 18 megawatt turban and you can’t downscale You know that’s a question that I don’t think we’re ever going to get an answer to.

But the, the reality of this is that I can understand where New York’s coming from a little bit. And I’ve said this, that I’m putting this 80 percent on, New York, and 20 percent on the developers as far as, culpability for why, the projects themselves didn’t get canceled.

They, the companies that still own the rights still, have the lease rights and all that the companies have the option to rebid. It’s just the OREC process that they were engaged in. That’s what got the plug pulled on it. So just to clarify but the reality of it is that the reason that this, the developers are partly to blame because they knew what the rules were and they, so when they submitted the bids and it was with.

Specific number of turbines or what have you size specific project, CapEx, PPA, et cetera, that they were asking for. If there’s a change to any of that, New York said, Hey we’re not going to allow any changes to be made. Okay. Which is one thing. And if that’s going to be a rule then that’s fine, but there’s also common sense, and this is why I put 80 percent of the blame on New York for this, which Okay, if a company who’s going to manufacture a product says we’re not going to manufacture that product, we’re going to substitute something else, why is that really a problem?

Why does New York, why does it matter to New York if that’s something that happens? And this is just emblematic of you saw their lack of willingness to negotiate with Orsted in the past and the reality that, this is just more of the same, like New York is, thinks that they’re being clever or playing hardball or I don’t know what they think they’re doing.

But at the end of the day they’re wasting time. They’re costing everybody more money, including rate payers, including the project developers, because the longer they drag this out, now a rebid of these three projects is necessarily going to result in higher costs, probably necessarily higher project CapEx and probably higher PPAs because.

Two reasons. One, pulling the plug on a project development timeline and pushing it out, which New York has just done, means that there are necessarily going to be more costs, overhead and capex costs, that the developers have to incur. And secondly, everyone was bidding predicated on the fact that the Federal Reserve was going to start lowering interest rates later this year, which now, everybody’s up in the air about whether or not that’s even going to happen.

You’re necessarily going to see a higher PPA price, if these guys re bid in the newly announced round 5 that New York has just come

Joel Saxum: out with. Okay, so the math works out here basically to this. If you are using a 15. which is The Haley Idex, right? It’s scalable 14 to 16 or 12 to 16, I think, actually.

So either way I’ll just go with, I’m gonna go with 15 and we’ll go with 15 megawatt machines. Either way, for every six, 18 megawatts you’d put in, you’d have to put an extra turbine in, right? To make sure that if you were going to have the same project, create the same amount of power, that’s what the math works out to.

In the grand scheme of things cost per turbine, I know the installation costs are a little bit more, of course, right? Some more inter array cables and some other things, more steel. Is that cost, does it upend the whole project? By the, by the time you’re done building it?

Philip Totaro: The difference between 15 and 18 megawatt really isn’t that much.

If we look at total cost of ownership, Joel, you’re absolutely right that, there’s more foundations, more cables more time with installation vessels. Et cetera. So that does necessarily drive up the cost of a project by a little bit. But the reality is there’s a huge difference between, let’s say a project that’s going to use a bunch of five megawatt turbines.

And then, three times less 15 megawatt turbines. That’s the real, yes, again, the difference between 15 and 18 is not zero. There’s an LCOE benefit to bigger turbines, which is why, a lot of Companies, including a lot of the Chinese OEMs, want the bigger turbines and all that.

Developers also want as big of a turbine as they can get, although they just don’t know how total cost of ownership works, apparently, because they don’t understand that vessels don’t always exist to install these things. But we’ll come back to that. The reality is the, your LCOE does get impacted by this, but not that huge of an amount between 15 and 18 that it would have necessarily, like if the developers didn’t already PPA, then this change would necessarily probably need to trigger a rebid, but I don’t.

After everything that everybody’s gone through, including Orsted, including, the rules that were laid out for these developers that, submitted these bids for round three in New York they knew what the deal was, and they probably included a bit of margin in their OREC request Specifically because they would have anticipated, all these other factors now, interest rates and, the potential for some type of delays or whatnot to a project.

There’s such a thing to be said for putting a little margin in there. Um, a change from 15, from 18 to 15 is not going shouldn’t necessarily have triggered throwing the whole process out and delaying projects, which were already supposed to be under construction, by the way delaying them to the point where New York is no longer going to meet their, 2030 requirement, nor their 2035 or 20, this is throwing everything into jeopardy.

And not for nothing, but if I’m an investor, I’m looking at New York and saying, why am I even trying to put money into this market to support offshore wind right now?

Allen Hall: Phil. What is Total Energy’s RWE and CIP thinking right now? Are they all just refocused on going to scratch out 18 megawatts and put in 15.

5 and resubmit? With a slightly different layout is that what they’re going to do or are they going to take a little bit of a breather and maybe skip this next proposal application date?

Philip Totaro: No, because they all want to resubmit because they’ve all got, millions of dollars invested in the development projects already.

And the longer it takes to get something done. Steal in the water, get something turned on where they’re generating revenue from it, the worse it is financially for the developers and then the subsequent asset owners if they end up, selling off a chunk to somebody else. So the reality is they want to get these projects bid, rebid as soon as humanly possible.

Allen Hall: Sure, but is there an advantage because interest rates are so high right now? And that you’re so close to an election that if you waited a couple of months, you might get better terms.

Philip Totaro: You might also not get the project built because, look at.

Allen Hall: But that’s where they’re at right now.

Philip Totaro: Sure. But, it’s better than having somebody pull the plug on the entire process and entirely, undoing the current administration’s agenda is probably going to be the order of the day.

Allen Hall: I don’t think they’re gonna be able to do that, Phil. I understand what you’re saying, but realistically.

There’s so many things going on. There’s so many things happening in the world right now. What’s happening on wind turbines off the coast of New York is not in the top 100. So I don’t see that changing. What I do think, though, is if interest rates decline, say they come down to, More historical norms over the last 20 odd years, which is, 2 percent kind of number instead of the five or seven we’re at.

It’s a huge saving. So a lot of these projects are stalled because interest rates are so high and because steel has been so high, even just waiting a couple of months for the price of steel to come down even further would be a huge advantage to an RWE, for example.

Joel Saxum: So this is a problem that the general public has seen globally since Even like the pandemic, right?

Everybody’s been waiting for prices to come back, for commodities to change, and their interest rates to correct, and it’s just not happening. It’s just continuing to like, we were supposed to have lower interest rates now. They were supposed to start coming in down in January. Our interest rates now are the highest they’ve been since September of 23 in the States.

So there’s no, we’ve had a rough, Wall Street’s in the middle of a sell off right now, not recession type sell off, but it’s in a, it’s in a sell off. It has been for the last week. So there’s this financial trepidation all over the place. What I see here from these This New York deal that just happened is that New York state or the New York officials that are fighting here.

And basically like Phil said, not willing to negotiate. They’re using GE as a scapegoat for not getting stuff done. They’re just pointing at you, which is stupid because GE is a New York state institution. GE has been there forever. GE was supposed to build all these factories up in Schenectady and all this stuff for this offshore wind programs.

And because. New York State is taking such a stick in the mud, firm stance on not willing to work with anybody in the offshore wind space. None of those factories are getting built. That’s a direct tie back to them not willing to negotiate with the people putting the wind turbines in the water. Because if the wind turbines farms were going forward and being installed in the water, you would have a factory being built.

And you may have 18 megawatt turbines being built. Like you may have all kinds of other things going on as an economic boon to what’s going to, to the state of New York, but because of the way they’re negotiating with the wind operators and developers, none of it’s happening. And they’re, so they’re pointing fingers at, and they pointed their fingers at the developers enough.

Now they’re switching gears and pointing at GE.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And I, and onto that, Joel obviously GE is not going to develop an 18 megawatt machine. So that means it looks like in the port of Coyman, which is not far from me in Albany, New York, they were supposed to create about 900 jobs. Those have been.

Canceled for now, right? And they’re about the only one doing that though, right? In the port of Albany, there was supposed to be a tower factory to support Equinor on empire wind and that is not happening either Now there has been a Bunch of money put into the Port of Coromandel and the Port of Albany to get those ports ready for development.

But as of right now, none of it’s going to happen. So it’s not necessarily a GE thing. It’s just an offshore wind off the coast of New York problem that’s driving the loss of those jobs, right? That’s what I’m saying,

Joel Saxum: right?

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s exactly what you’re saying, right? You described them as being pretty much shovel ready and in theory they were, but if you’re not going to proceed with those projects, it’s a huge problem.

Now the press at the moment is pointing all the fingers at GE, but realistically, how could you not see this coming? Phil? GE was going to, it was going to split into three, right? They’re going to split into three and they were losing one plus billion dollars, closer to 2 billion. So the last couple of years.

What are the chances they were going to develop an 18 megawatt machine when they split apart? Was that even real?

Philip Totaro: Yeah, they definitely had it on the drawing board, because, with the Heliodex, the original 12 platform, They, because of partly because of this whole patent malaise with Siemens Gamesa and also partly because, you develop a new product, you want to improve on it.

They were going to do a different upgraded design for the 14 to 16 or 15 and a half megawatt product anyway. And then they were going to scale that technology platform up to 18 megawatts. So the fact that they’re not scaling it up to 18 megawatts doesn’t mean that they aren’t still spending a bunch of money on R and D.

And it, but it’s also, see it coming or not. The reality is we don’t have the vessels to be able to install 18 megawatt turbines unless we’re going to borrow them from the Chinese. So we’re, there’s not enough vessels that are being outfitted right now with the crane capacity and, other technology that they need to be able to install.

Anything beyond the 16 megawatt product platforms that Gamesa are developing anyway. So it doesn’t really make sense to pour tons of money into something that can’t actually be installed in the time frame that people want to install it. Both the state of New York, the developers, and the OEMs want to be able to install stuff tomorrow.

The only thing that you’re going to be able to do is whatever has the Crane capacity to do those installations.

Allen Hall: So GE did the calculation months ago. They were supposed to receive about 300 million in support of building these factories, but that wouldn’t have covered the entire cost of these things.

And somebody sat down and did the analysis. There’s no ships to install 18 megawatts. If we build it, then what are we going to do with it? We can do 15 megawatts pretty easily. So we don’t want to spend any more money. Pretty much slashed the most of the staff of the development staff at LM. We’ve cut the internals of GE Vernova by about 40%.

We just don’t have the ability to do this, nor do we have the funding to do it. It doesn’t make any sense on any level. Any level to go ahead and build an 18 megawatt, but I guess New York state didn’t realize that. Meanwhile, GE realized it probably back in November of last year that this was not going to happen.

That’s the weird part. Like everybody at the table here, Realize that was going to be really hard. 18 megawatts is gonna be a really hard thing to do because not GE related specifics. It was everything else that was going to drive that decision. GE was just going to make, be the one who was going to make the call, right?

Ultimately they get to decide, no. It’s, the buck stops with GE it’s not, it’s, it was a decision that was given to them, literally given to them that it was obvious they couldn’t do it.

Philip Totaro: But the reality too is that GE is the one that’s ultimately responsible for creating the jobs. If jobs are going to be created based on a new factory, et cetera, GE is the one that does it.

Does that now the politicians are the ones that potentially facilitate that, but the politicians are also the ones who pulling the plug on, getting projects in the ground or in the water is precisely what, causes this. It snowball effect and leads GE to say we can’t build an unprofitable product because we don’t have enough order book.

We’re not getting quite enough support from the state or the federal government, et cetera. So they’re doing it to themselves and then they’re trying to blame industry for it. And that’s where I have a problem, because the, NYSERDA will go out and let everybody pat them on the back for doing the responsible thing, but how is GE not supposed to also do the prudent thing financially and not build an unprofitable product?

Allen Hall: Joel, what’s NYSERDA’s best move here over the next six months?

Joel Saxum: Sit down at a big round table with these developers. At the end of the day, and I’m going to go, we don’t really talk politics here very often, but at the end of the day, what this boils down to me is. where they’re trying to make something happen right before a presidential election.

It doesn’t have to do with the blue States. Okay. The blue States up in the Northeast are going to vote blue, no matter what in this presidential election that this ain’t, this isn’t going to change that. However, it’s just a, it’s just a boost to the presidential election. If you’re looking at the overall look of 30 gigawatts By 2030, right?

So now they’ve changed that rhetoric to 30 gigawatts planned by 2030. And this is just shooting themselves in the foot, after the foot of not getting these things in. So what it has done again, like we just said, it’s cost job creation. It’s cost clean energy resources being developed.

It’s cost a lot of things. They need to sit down and stop being Combative back towards the developers if you want clean energy off the coast there to power these big Demand centers like you’ve got to sit down at the table with them And figure out a way to get the stuff in the water.

You can figure out something fair and equitable for everybody, but it’s gotta happen.

Philip Totaro: And here’s the last point that I think is extremely important. At the end of the day, if these companies are forced to re bid, do you think those bids are gonna come in higher or lower than what they were today?

They’re necessarily gonna be higher, the PPA’s gonna be higher, the CapEx is gonna be higher, everything’s higher. And guess what? In five years, when ratepayers in the state of New York are looking at their electric bill and it’s 30 a month higher than what it is today, who are they going to blame? Are they going to blame industry and the utility companies and not the politicians for, delaying a project and costing everyone money when they do that?

They’re going to blame us, the industry, the utility companies, everyone but the people who were actually responsible for costing rate payers money. Delays to projects costs you and I, as electricity consumers, money.

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Allen Hall: As we talk about GE stopping at 15 and a half megawatts for their offshore machines, it’s still rumored that Siemens Gemmesa is developing a 21 megawatt offshore machine with a rotor diameter between 280 270 to 280 meters. And obviously that would make it one of the most powerful wind turbines in the world if they decided to build this thing.

Financially, you have to wonder if Siemens Gamesa has the ammunition that Bankrolled to pull this off. It seems and I’ve heard this a couple different places, that Siemens Gamesa is still going to look at 21 megawatts because it’ll pull this off. Push them ahead of GE investors who are essentially stopping at 15 right now.

And as we just discussed on New York offshore, going to a smaller turbine is a problem and is a little more, a little bit more efficiency to moving up in scale. Is, does this make sense, Joel, for Siemens Gamesa to push for 21 megawatt based on all the other issues they’re having right now on the. 4x and 5x

Joel Saxum: platforms?

We know Siemens Gamesa as a unit has got problems, right? We’ve been talking about it for a year now. They’re struggling some financially. What I see this project as there’s a couple things to think about here. And before I get into what I see it as. You don’t just roll over a 21 megawatt machine and think it’s gonna go out in the water, right?

You have to retool factories. You have to teach people how to build the thing. You have to make new tooling, new blade molds. You have to get different vessels to install something of this size. There’s so many problems that it’s not just we’re gonna design it and put it out in the field.

You’re not designing a new pencil. That you can go sell at Office Depot, right? There’s a whole supply chain around something that is that big of a jump. Now, Ming Yang is making a big, massive one. I think they put an 18, a 18 megawatt machine out. It was like a 113 meter blades, 117 meter blades or something.

This is gonna be a hundred and 34 meter blade, 140 meter blade. That’s crazy. So what I see this as is, this is Siemens, this is right now Siemens they’re hurting, right? And this could be, maybe they’re looking at it like this could be our home run, right? Other, Vestas has been really good at playing what we call in the baseball world, small ball.

They’ve been hitting singles and doubles. for a while. And they’ve been doing a pretty good job at it. And then they, their new like 162 platform, 150, was a little bit of a blop over the second baseman’s head and they’re scoring some runs. Siemens is not. Siemens is hurting. They’re sitting on the sidelines.

And they need to hit a home run or a grand slam to get them back in the game. And that’s what this feels like to me. Is they’re Keeping it under wraps not talking about and this is on top of in the last year the heads of GE Vestas and Siemens talking about the fact that we shouldn’t be making all these new turbines We should stop where we’re at and you know, perfect the ones that we’re working on now So we get good machines out in the fleet And now the possibility of this big thing coming out.

I think that’s a it’s a halo project.

Philip Totaro: Here’s the reality of this, I think. So companies, particularly their R and D departments, they’re going to investigate new products, new technologies all the time. I was convinced a while ago that if we were going to go out to a 270 or 80 meter rotor, you weren’t going to be able to do it using conventional manufacturing techniques anyway, and you were going to have to do a cable stayed rotor.

And that was actually one of the patents that the Siemens Gamesa had. And Vestas too. There’s been companies that have investigated all these kinds of technologies, so the fact that they’ve got a paper turbine that might be 21 megawatts and 280 meter rotor is lovely, but it’s, the reality is Siemens still, outside of China, still controls the majority of the installed base in the offshore wind market.

With the, 8 megawatt 154, their 10 megawatt and 11 megawatt offerings and now the fact that they’re scaling up to 14 to 16 megawatt as well. Considering the fact that’s where everybody is around 16 15 and a half that’s the, that’s where everybody’s going to stay.

I think for the moment until and unless two things happen. One vessels become that are capable of, installing 18 to 20 or plus megawatt wind turbines become more readily available. And number two. If someone invents technology that can utilize a vessel that was designed for a 15 megawatt turbine to install an 18 megawatt turbine, I don’t know how you do that with the vessel mounted crane unless it’s got a, a boom height that’s high enough.

To be able to handle the turbine, unless we start talking about some of these other technologies that we’ve mentioned on the show recently, where, you’ve got the sled or something that might, and the railing system that might like self install the nacelle or whatever. I don’t see how we, we make the leap forward without the vessels to be able to install the thing.

It’s lovely to have a design. And the reality is, look, I’ve worked for a company, Clipper Wind Power, who back in 2008 announced that we were going to do a 10 megawatt offshore wind turbine. And you think about it today and it’s 10 megawatt, that’s easy. But at the time everybody was doing two, two and a half, three, maybe four megawatts, and everybody looked at us like we were absolutely crazy.

And probably rightly because, again, at the time, there weren’t even vessels capable of installing a 10 megawatt turbine. So were we actually going to be able to get that thing in the water? Because the economics of a bigger turbine, like we talked about earlier in the show, make a lot of sense. Fewer foundations fewer, less cabling.

There’s all kinds of cost of ownership related incentives to go bigger. on your power rating. However, it’s, you only get that up to a point because if you have to spend tons of capital on building new vessels to be able to install all that, then the people who built the vessel need to be able to recoup that CapEx investment as well, which means Project CapEx goes up, PPAs would necessarily need to go up to be able to pay for all of this stuff to

Joel Saxum: happen.

So let’s dive backwards once. Last week we talked about Orsted and was it Cattler? No. Who was it, who was the company that Orsted, that they went into a vessel agreement with? Cattler. That vessel that they’d went into a long term agreement with for them to build so they would have capacity for installations for the next, through 2031, which is seven years from now, cannot install something this big.

So like even the long term, it’s the same thing when people say to me, like I’ve heard this is it, are the, what did someone say to me the other day? Do you think that the large banks would invest in waterfront property if in the next 30 years, those were going to be underwater?

Allen Hall: No.

Joel Saxum: No, exactly.

That’s why the large wind farm Developer sees the future of saying, this isn’t going to be a thing for the next seven years. So we’re just going to go on with what we’re going on now.

Allen Hall: They need to make money, everybody. They need to make a little bit of money. And you can’t do it if you’re pouring into new projects all the time, especially ones that have as high risk as a 21 gigawatt machine, super high risk right now.

Philip Totaro: The reason that the Chinese are doing it. And again, so this, there, there’s a bit of a weird thing going on in the industry right now, where the developers. The biggest thing they can get their hands on. The developers are using the fact that the Chinese are willing to come out with these designs and prototypes and, heavily government subsidized products.

They’re using them as negotiating leverage to try and get the Western companies to follow suit. And the reality is that, I don’t know that’s a really good thing because first of all, we’ve seen the fact that the developers are threatening to, sign turbine supply agreements with the Chinese.

They’re not actually doing it. The financiers are also not wild about financing a project with Chinese made technology for all kinds of reasons that I’ve talked about in the past. The Perception of bankability and et cetera, et cetera. So the reality of it is that I don’t know why the developers have so much control and so much power at the moment with deciding the products that the OEMs are going to build, because at the end of the day, you got to build something that’s commercially viable, not just technologically feasible.

We talk about this all the time when we get these crazy, ideas that we end up talking about on the show where somebody’s got like something they think is a really clever idea, but at the end of the day, it just, it’s a dog that won’t hunt like it’s never going to be commercially viable just because it might be, an engineer thinks it might be technologically feasible.

Joel Saxum: Okay. So Alan. So this last few weeks, we’ve been talking personally about ESIG because it is a place where operators can go and speak to other operators about O& M practices in a basically confined space where they’re able to learn and communicate and talk amongst themselves, right?

Maybe something like this needs to happen with the developers, where someone with a, maybe clear minds prevail hey, just for the sake of our whole dang industry, can we stop pushing these people, these OEMs to develop these big things and have them focus on what we need to get in the water? And be operating efficiently without breakdowns.

Can we do that guys? Maybe that’s a bar room conversation. I don’t know.

Allen Hall: I don’t know why they wouldn’t be able to do that right now. The phone works. You could call them up and find out. I agree with you. I think the same thing. I know what I’m. Yeah, the internet. Yeah, it does seem like they should be able to talk to one another and work together to predict or to outline where the industry should go.

And yeah we don’t see that all the time, but now with this New York experience and New Jersey experience, it makes me wonder if there’s more incentive to get together now than there was a year ago. Because the risks are so high and the costs are so high and it really hurt Orsted that none of the other developers want to go through that.

And if I were a developer, I’d be calling Orsted and reading getting some advice from them for sure.

Joel Saxum: Right now in New Orleans, 2024 Oceanic Network IPF Conference. IPF, what is the namesake, but it stands for International Partnering Forum. So if any, anytime there was a conversation to be happening and some bad news to come out of offshore wind, it’s right now.

So down, and I’m sure this, what we’re recording right now is going to be the buzz of those conversations. Down in New Orleans this week and we’ll probably hear the we’ll hear the residual of it in two weeks up in Minneapolis at ACP

Allen Hall: It can’t be a rosy discussion though, right? I’ve been trying to follow a little bit of IPF this week on LinkedIn It cannot be a happy not rosemary.

No, I’m rosemary Yeah No, but what I’m what I try to get to Joel is that I’m not getting a lot of positive feelings from the LinkedIn posts from there, I do see some rosy outlooks and, but if I scratch a surface of them, I go, I don’t think so. That’s, that is too far of a of a guess of the future, and I hate that.

The thing I don’t like most about all this is that the predictions are so widely disconnected from reality. That it is impossible to the outside observer. It’s impossible. You have to put some realism back into this. This all costs money and it all takes time and there’s people involved.

And once you have those three elements, things don’t go as fast as you want them to go. They just. Don’t, and especially when you’re talking about putting anything in the ocean, it goes slowly, but why the industry is making it, it’s not so much the industry, why the offtakers of the energy are making it so hard to get this done is mind boggling because they were the ones who were pushing forward to begin with.

New York wanted this, New Jersey wanted this, Massachusetts wanted this, Connecticut, you can name them, right? They are the biggest hindrance to the success of these projects right now.

Joel Saxum: But you can look looking back and look back in the economic history of some countries and how things work as well You can see these this is a repeating process like people wanting to protect themselves, protect their home. Like I point at, I like, I love the country of Brazil. I love the people from there. My good friend Armando from Arthwin is from there, right? Brazil is a pain in the butt to do business with. Why? Because they wanted to try to protect themselves.

So it is, and they over, overreach their import and export tax facilities are so extreme that it stunts their own economy. So when they put policies in place, because you’ve seen other people around the world if you look back in history There’s a lot of countries that have been taken advantage of by others and are worse off for it, right?

So when the pendulum swings one side to one side, right now that pendulum has swung an offshore wind in the States to far to one side where it’s hurting the economic capabilities or economic, outcomes that could be happening from these wind projects. Because we’re basically policing

Allen Hall: ourselves too hard.

The states that wanted to create jobs, and a lot of jobs, in offshore wind have done a terrible they have done a terrible job at that. They just have as of now. Not that they couldn’t right this ship and get it going, but this year? Pretty much over. Right now. There’s not going to be a lot more offshore wind jobs in the U.

S., and that’s a shame, because there should be thousands of them. Hey, Uptime listeners! We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And PES Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in depth info.

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Now there’s a secretive project in Colorado. They even gave it a name. It’s an unnamed project. They gave it a name called Project Saffron. And the Colorado Economic Development Commission has approved 3. 3 million in tax incentives over eight years to attract this mysterious company. Now when you read between the lines and you start asking yourself who could this possibly be from Denmark that’s going to move to Colorado?

Some of the more recent stories indicate it is a supplier to Vestas because Vestas has factories there in Colorado, obviously. It, so if it’s a Vestas supplier and they’re in Denmark, that makes the pool really small. And Phil, what’s your guess at what this company or who this company is?

Philip Totaro: It can probably only be one of two.

I’m going to go with FiberLine. Which, is the one that, again, according to the news reports coming out of the interviews that some of the Colorado journalists have done with the academic development corporation there they specifically said that the company manufactures components of like spar caps and things like that for the blades.

Fiber line is probably. Now owned by Gurrit is probably the biggest one in, in Denmark to supply to Vestas. So that’s going to be my educated guess. They’re at least getting the economic development corporation to their credit.

I guess this is at least getting a little bit more clever with the project names because last time when they were trying to attract LM, it was project Danish and it was pretty obvious that it was LM, although now obviously LM is not going to build a factory in Colorado, so they’ve moved on to the next one.

At least Project Saffron is a little more secretive.

Joel Saxum: They tried to point us over to Greece, Morocco, and India with the saffron thing, and then a little rope a dope. It could have been Project Mink. If it was another Danish company,

Allen Hall: but I think this is in a clear contrast to what’s happening in New York state where Colorado is has a clearer pathway to get factories and jobs up and running because they’ve had a tower factory.

Be bumped up in Colorado and Pueblo, right? So Colorado is taking all the wind jobs the manufacturing wind jobs at the moment. They seem to be checking every box and winning every possible company moving to the States. It’s insane. And New York and Massachusetts, for that matter, are missing out on most of it.

Crazy.

Joel Saxum: Colorado. I’ve always said if I had an ISP or a company in wind, onshore wind in the United States, it would be in Colorado. I love Denver. I love the mountains. I love getting out of there. Also everything from Denver wind wise in the United States, not everything, but the majority of things is a day and a half drive.

80 percent of the turbines probably. The other side of this, and I know this is I’m going back to what we said about the New York side of things. Colorado is actually heavily divided state, politically blue and red. The front, the basically the front range is all red. The hills are all red and the Little tiny city spots are all blue, but it’s very like closely divided at what a couple years ago They try to divide Colorado east and west to the 51st state this was a vote that actually happened there so when they’re looking for Wins to support political campaigns or they’re actually making them happen because they need the wins, right?

It’s good for the constituents. New jobs are great for the constituents. So not only is it, do they have a good geographical fit and a good economic fit, but there’s a political fit that works for Colorado as well.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s brilliant. The thing about having 50 States United States is 50 separate little small governments and they compete with one another.

So you see models that work Colorado and models that are not working so right now, New York. Learn from it, adapt, get better. That’s what we’re supposed to do. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. And please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.

And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

https://weatherguardwind.com/ge-offshore-canceled-colorado-manufacturing/