Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Goldwind’s 20 MW Turbine, Recyclable Blade Breakthrough
Allen covers the world’s first 20 MW offshore wind turbine now grid-connected in China, a European breakthrough in recyclable blade composites, Nova Scotia’s push to become Canada’s offshore wind leader, Great British Energy’s new headquarters in Aberdeen, and South Dakota’s largest wind farm approval.
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Allen Hall: Happy Monday, everyone. You know what they say about records? They’re made to be broken. Well, off the coast of the Virginian Province in China, a new machine is spinning China three. Gorges and Goldwin have connected the world’s first 20 megawatt offshore wind turbine to the electrical grid.
20 megawatts from a single turbine. It’s blade stretched 147 meters long. That’s nearly 500 feet. The rotor sweeps an area equal to about 10 football fields. The hub sits 174 meters above the waves, a 58 story building floating its sea. This one wind [00:01:00] turbine will power 44,000 homes. And here’s what makes it interesting.
This is the same wind farm where the world’s first 16 megawatt turbine went in. That record lasted barely two years. Meanwhile, Chinese turbine exports hit a record, 8 million kilowatts in 2025, a 50% from the year before. Chinese companies now operate in more than 60 countries. Uh. Across the Atlantic, a different kind of milestone.
Nova Scotia has quietly become Canada’s leader in corporate clean energy deals while Alberta fumbled through policy moratoriums, the maritime province signed agreements that drew renewable investment northward The $60 billion Wind West project aims to unlock 62 gigawatts of offshore capacity.
That’s a quarter of Canada’s total energy needs. Premier, Tim Houston traveled to New York this past month for the [00:02:00] International Partnering Forum. He signed a deal with Massachusetts to collaborate on offshore wind development . Lisa Engler from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center put it simply worked together lower costs, build the Atlantic Wind Industry.
Nova Scotia’s first offshore lease auction comes later this year. And in Scotland, great British energy, announced its permanent headquarters. Location. Marshall Square. In Aberdeen, CEO, Dan McGrail called Aberdeen the perfect home for Britain’s publicly owned energy company.
Thousands of engineers and technicians already call the city home Energy Minister Michael Shanks noted that Aberdeen has powered Britain for decades. First with oil and gas. Now with clean energy and on the American Prairie, South Dakota, regulators approved the state’s largest wind farm.
Philip Wind Partners, a subsidiary of Chicago based Invenergy will build [00:03:00] 87 turbines across 110 square miles of private land north of Phillip. The price tag $750 million. The capacity. 333 megawatts enough to power hundreds of thousands of homes and in laboratories across Europe.
Researchers announced a breakthrough that could solve when energy’s most stubborn problem. What happens when turbine blades were out The Oleum project has produced the first bal salt fiber reinforced vier composite laminate through a new infusion technique in plain English. Its recyclable blades made from volcanic rock fiber.
The goal blades that last 20% longer repair 40% faster and costs 15% less over the lifetime. So there you have it from China’s colossal machines to Nova Scotia’s Bold Ambitions from [00:04:00] Aberdeen’s new energy company to South Dakota’s Prairie Wind Farm from European laboratories working on the recycling puzzle.
The wind industry just keeps moving forward, and that’s a state of the wind industry on the 16th of February. 2026. Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Renewable Energy
Bashing Socialism
Margaret Thatcher made this comment in the 1980s, before the Internet made it possible for most people to figure out that:
- The countries that make universal healthcare and free education available to their citizens are the happiest nations and Earth, and
- The United States offers its people a great number of free services: roads, bridges, tunnels, firefighting, national defense, embassies, air traffic control, food safety, libraries, public schools, FEMA, criminal justice and corrections, law enforcement, OSHA, auto safety, disease control, the upkeep of our local, state, and national parks and beaches, animal control, space exploration, and dozens of other items.
Renewable Energy
It Seems Trump Is on His Way Out
I know not everyone agrees with me (e.g., my wife) but I will be surprised if Trump completes his term in office.
Congresspeople want to be re-elected, and for most of them, this is the only thing motivating their actions. How many of them want to be thought of as someone who supported a criminal president who brought this country to its knees?
Renewable Energy
Recognizing the Worst Among Us
There are two types of people. OK, there may be many different types of people, but there are at least two.
First are those of us who stand for the idea: live and let live. We don’t deliberately step on ants, and we support the rights of the poorest people in the Western Hemisphere to enter the United States to escape starvation and the threat of death by the Mexican drug cartels to pick our crops and live here, for months at a time, to live in the U.S.
Until Donald Trump rose to the U.S. presidency and gave us all permission to be our worst selves, virtually all of us felt this way. Were migrants a problem before about 10 years ago?
The other type is those like Christian Castro, who takes (took, past tense) great delight in tormenting the most world’s poorest and most desperate.
The story here from the New York Times:
Law enforcement officials on Friday arrested an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent accused of shooting a Venezuelan immigrant this year and lying about it.
The agent, Christian J. Castro, 52, was caught in Texas after investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension tracked him down, according to the Hennepin County attorney’s office, which had charged him this month with four counts of second-degree assault. He faces an additional charge of filing a false police report.
The shooting, on Jan. 14, set off violent protests at the height of the Trump administration’s immigration operation in Minnesota this past winter.
“Today’s arrest is a critical step forward in our prosecution of Mr. Castro,” Mary Moriarty, the attorney in Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, said in a statement.
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