Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Inside Wind Turbine Insurance with Nathan Davies
Allen and Joel are joined by Nathan Davies from Lloyd Warwick to discuss the world of wind energy insurance. Topics include market cycles, the risks of insuring larger turbines, how critical spares can reduce downtime and costs, why lightning claims often end up with insurers rather than OEMs, and how AI may transform claims data analysis.
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Allen Hall: Nathan, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So you are, you’re our link to the insurance world, Nathan, and there’s been so many changes over the past 12, 24 months, uh, not just in the United States but worldwide. Before we get too deep into any one subject, can you just give us a top level like, Hey, this is what’s happening in the insurance world that we need to know.
So there’s
Nathan Davies: obviously a lot of scope, a lot of development, um, in the wind world. Um, you know, there’s the race to scale. Um, and from an insurance perspective, I think everybody’s pretty tentative about where that’s going. Um. You know, the, the theory that are we trying to [00:01:00] run before we can walk? Um, what’s gonna happen when these things inevitably go wrong?
Uh, and what are the costs gonna be that are associated with that? ’cause, you know, at the moment we are used to, to claims on turbines that are circa five megawatts. But when we start seeing 15 megawatt turbines falling over. Yeah, it’s, it’s not gonna be a good day at the office. So, um, in the insurance world, that’s the big concern.
Certainly from a win perspective at least.
Joel Saxum: Well, I think it’s, it’s a valid, uh, I don’t know, valid bad, dream. Valid, valid risk to be worried about. Well, just simply because of like the, the way, uh, so I’ve been following or been a part of the, that side of the industry for a little while here the last five, six years.
Um. You’ve seen The insurance world is young in renewables, to be honest with you. Right. Compared to a lot of other places that like say the Lord Lloyd’s market, they’ve been writing insurance for hundreds of years on certain [00:02:00] things that have, like, we kind of know, we know what the risks are. We, and if it develops something new, it’s not crazily new, but renewables and in wind in specific haven’t been around that long.
And the early stuff was like, like you said, right? If a one megawatt turbine goes down, like. That sucks. Yeah. For everybody, right? But it’s not the end of the world. We can, we can make this thing happen. You’re talking, you know, you may have a, you know, your million, million and a half dollars here, $2 million here for a complete failure.
And then the business interruption costs as a, you know, with a one megawatt producing machine isn’t, again, it’s not awesome, but it’s not like it, uh, it doesn’t break the books. Right. But then when we’re talking 3, 4, 5, 6. Seven megawatts. We just saw Siemens cesa sell the first of their seven megawatt onshore platforms the other day.
Um, that is kind of changing the game and heightening the risk and makes things a little bit more worrisome, especially in light of, I mean, as we scaled just the last five, [00:03:00] 10 years, the amount of. Failures that have been happening. So if you look at that and you start expanding it, that, that, that hockey stick starts to grow.
Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, of course. And you know, we, we all know that these things sort of happen in cycles, right? It’s, you go, I mean, in, in the insurance world, we go through soft markets. We go through hard markets, um, you know, deductibles come up, the, the clauses, the restrictions, all those things get tighter. Claims reduce.
Um, and then you get sort of disruptors come into the market and they start bringing in, you know, challenging rates and they start challenging the big players on deductibles and preferential rates and stuff like that. And, and then you get a softening of the market, um, and then you start seeing the claims around up again.
But when you twin that with the rate of development that we see in the renewables worlds, it’s, it’s fraught for all sorts of. Weird and wonderful things happening, and most of them are quite expensive.
Joel Saxum: Where in that cycle are we, in [00:04:00] your opinion right now? So we, like when I first came into the market and I started dealing with insurance, it was very, we kept hearing hardening, market hardening, market hardening market.
But not too long ago, I heard from someone else that was like, Hey, the market’s actually getting kind of soft right now. What are your thoughts on that? And, and or may, and maybe we let, let’s precursor that there’s a lot of people that are listening right now that don’t know the difference. What is a hard market?
What is a soft market? Can you give us that first?
Nathan Davies: When you’re going through a soft market, it’s, it’s a period where they’ve either been, um, a limited volume of claims or the claim values have been quite small. Um, so, you know, everybody gets. It’s almost like becoming complacent with it, right? It’s like, oh, you know, things are going pretty well.
We’re having it. It looks like the operators, it looks like the maintainers are, are doing a pretty good job and they know all of the issues that are gonna be working through in the lifetime of these products. So for the next however many years, we can anticipate that things are gonna gonna go pretty well.
But as you see those [00:05:00] deductibles come down, you start getting more of the attritional claims, like the smaller values, um, the smaller downtime periods, all that sort of thing, start coming in as claims. And all of a sudden insurers are like, well, hang on a second. All of a sudden we’ve got loads and loads of claims coming in.
Um. All of the premium that we were taking as being bled dry by, by these, these attritional claim. Um, and then you get like a big claim coming. You get a major issue come through, whether it’s, you know, a, a serial issue with a gearbox or a generator or a specific blade manufacturer, and all of a sudden the market starts to change.
Um, and insurers are like, well, hang on a second. We’ve got a major problem on our hands here. We’re starting to see more of this, this specific piece of technology being rolled out, um, worldwide. Um, we are in for a lot of potential claims on this specific matter in the future, and therefore we need to protect ourselves.
And the way that insurers do that is by [00:06:00] increasing or deductibles, um, increasing their premiums, all that sort of thing. So it’s basically that. Uh, raises the threshold at which a claim can be presented and therefore minimizes the, the outlay for insurers. So that’s sort of this, this cycle that we see. Um, I mean, I can’t, I’ve, I’ve only been in loss adjusting for six years, so I can’t say that I’ve seen, you know, um, multiple cycles.
I’ve, I’m probably at the end of my first cycle from a hardening to a softening market. Um. But also, again, I’m not in the underwriting side of things. I’m on the claims side of things, so I own, I’m only seeing it when it’s gone wrong. I don’t know about everything else that the insurance market sees.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, the, the softening part, I think as well from a macro perspective, when there’s a softening market, it tends to bring in more capital.
Right. You start to see more, more and more companies coming in saying, Hey, I’ve got, [00:07:00] and when I say companies, I mean other capital holders to beat for insurance, right? Like these, the big ones you see, the big Swiss and German guys come in and going, like, I got, I got $500 million I’ll throw into renewables.
It seems like to be a good, pretty good bet right now. And then the market starts to change and then they go, uh, oops. Yeah.
Nathan Davies: And that’s it. You know, you’ve got the, the StoreWatch of the renewable insurance market like your G cubes and, and companies like that who’ve been in the game for a very long time.
They’ve got a lot of experience. They’ve been burned. Um, they know what they want to touch and what they don’t want to touch. And then you get. Renewables, everybody wants to be involved. It covers their ESG targets. It’s, it’s a good look to move away from, you know, your, your oil and your coal and all the rest of it.
So, of course, companies are gonna come into it. Um, and if they’re not experienced.
Allen Hall: They will get banned. How much reliance do operators have at the moment on insurance? Because it does seem like, uh, Joel and I talk [00:08:00]to a lot of operators that insurance is part of their annual revenue. They depend upon getting paid a certain amount, which then opens up the door to how sort of nitpicky I’ll describe it as the claim.
They’ll file. Are you seeing more and more of that as, uh, some of the operators are struggling for cash flow, that there are going after more kind of questionable claims? Um, I think it depends on
Nathan Davies: the size of the operator. So you’ve, you’ve obviously got your, your big players, you’ve got your alls and your rws and all of those sort of guys who, the way that they manage their insurance, they’ve probably got, you know, special purpose vehicles.
They’ve got, um, sites or clusters of sites that they manage finances independently. They don’t just have the one big or pot. It’s, it’s, it’s managed sort of subdivisions. Um. Those, those guys, we don’t typically tend to see like a big push for a [00:09:00] payment on account partway through a claim. It’s, it’s typically sort of the smaller end of the scale where you might have, um, an operator that manages a handful of smaller, um, assets.
The way that we look at it is if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so when we talk to an insured, it’s like. Present your costs, you know, we’ll review them and it’s, it’s better that you present all of your costs and insurers turn around and say, you’re not eligible for this. You know, that that element of it will be adjusted, um, rather than not present something.
And it’s like, well, you know, your, your broker then comes further down the line when they say you could have claimed that element of, of the cost. So, um. Typically that’s the approach that we take is, is present everything and we’ll work through and let you know which elements aren’t claimable.
Joel Saxum: When we’re talking insurance policies, there can be, you know, like an operator, an owner of a turbine asset can have them.
Then there is construction policies and [00:10:00] there’s the EPC company might have a policy and ISP may have a policy. So, so many policies because at the end of the day, everybody’s trying to protect themselves. Like, we’re trying to protect the bottom line. Tr that’s what insurance us for, that’s why we’re here.
Um, but so, so, so, so gimme a couple things. Like in your opinion as, let’s look, well, I wanna stay in the operator camp right now, say, during a non non-commission policy, a actual operating policy, wind farm is in the ground, we’re moving along. What are some of the things that, from an, from a loss adjuster’s perspective, that a operator should be doing to protect themselves?
I mean, besides. Signing an insurance contract. Yes. But is it, is it good record keeping? Is it having spares on site? Is it, what does that look like from your perspective when you walk into something,
Nathan Davies: if you were to take the insurer’s dream operator, that would be somebody who, and you, you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head with a lot of those points, Joel, the, the.
The golden [00:11:00] operator would have like a stash of critical spares because the last thing they want to be relying on is, um, an OEM who, you know, they, they’ve, they’ve stopped manufacturing that bit of kit three years ago. They now want to sell you the latest and greatest. It’s 18 months lead time or something like that.
Oh yeah, absolutely. And so you are now having to look at potentially refurbishment through. Whether that’s through sort of approved, um, processes or not. Um, you might be looking at, um, sort of, um, aftermarket providers. You know, there, there’s, as soon as you are looking at an aged asset, you are, you are in a really complicated position in terms of your repairability.
Um, because, you know, a as we know, you get to sort of that three, five year period after you’ve purchased the product, you’re in real jeopardy of whether or not it’s gonna be. Gonna have that continued support from the original equipment manufacturer. So [00:12:00] critical spares is a really good thing to, it’s, it’s just obviously a really good thing to have.
Um, and how you can manage that as well is if you have, um, a customer of sites that are all using the, the same equipment, you could sort of share that between you. There, there could be. Um, so we, we’ve sinned that where, um. An umbrella company has multiple sites, multiple SPVs. Um, they were all constructed at the same sort of time.
They’ve got the same transformers, you know, the same switchgear, same infrastructure, and they hold a set of spares that cover these, all these sites. ’cause the last thing you want to do is buy a load of individual components for one site. You are then paying to maintain them, to store them to, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of costs that come with.
Along with that, that you, you don’t wanna be covering. If that’s just for the one site and it’s the [00:13:00] eventualities, that may never happen. So if you’ve got multiple sites and you can spread those costs, all of a sudden it’s a lot more, um. Could
Joel Saxum: you see a reality where insurers did that? Right? Where like a, like a, like a consortium of insurance companies gets together and buys, uh, half a dozen sets of blades and generators and stuff that they know are failures that come up, or they have a pool to pull from themselves to, to avoid these massive bi claims.
Nathan Davies: Yeah. I mean maybe there’s, maybe there’s the potential for a renewables pool. I mean, it’s always. Complicated. As soon as you start trying to bring sort of multiple companies together with an agreement of that sort of scale, it’s gonna be challenging. But, um, I mean, yeah, in an ideal world, that would be be a great place to be.
Um, so critical spares is, that’s, that’s a key thing we, we have seen. So we, we’ve got, um, one account that we work with that they’ve actually got a warehouse full of critical spares. [00:14:00] So they, they have a lot of, um, older turbine models, um, sort of typically, um, 2015 through to, well, yeah, from about 2012 to 2015.
Um, these sites were commissioned so they knew there was a, a finite lifetime, uh, replacement blades, generators, gear, boxes, what have you, and it’s like we’ve. A huge number of assets. So what we should do is retain certainly a number of gearboxes and generators that you, we can utilize across, um, the fleet.
And obviously they then keep a rolling stock of refurbishment and repairs on those. But they, they basically included in their, their premium spreadsheet, they’ve got all of their individual sites. Then they’ve got a warehouse that is full of all their spares, and that is an inuring asset, is their warehouse full of critical spares.
Joel Saxum: So what
Nathan Davies: happens to
Joel Saxum: that
Nathan Davies: person then? Does
Joel Saxum: their premiums go [00:15:00] down? Because they have those spares, they’ve got really low deductibles on their bi. So there’s a business case for it probably, right? Like if you’re sitting there, if you’re, if you’re, you’re an accountant, you can figure that out and say like, if we hold these spares for this fleet, like if you’re, if you’re a fleet, if you have a homogenous fleet, say you’ve got a thousand turbines that are basically all the same model.
W you should have centrally located amongst those wind farms, a couple of blade sets, a couple of generators, couple of pitch bearings, couple of this, couple of that. And you can use them operationally if you need to, but it’s there as spares, uh, for insurance cases. ’cause you’ll be able to re reduce your insurance premiums or your insurance deductibles.
Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. I don’t know a lot of operators in, at least in the United States that have done that, I’m thinking more of like Australia where it’s hard to get. Parts, uh, you, you probably do have a little bit of a warehouse situation. That’s really interesting because I, I know a lot of operators are thinking about trying to reduce their premiums and simple things like that would, I would imagine it make a huge difference [00:16:00] in what they’re paying each year and that that’s a smart move.
I, I wanna ask about the IEC and the role of certification in premiums. What does it mean and how do you look at it as an industry? Uh, one of the things that’s happening right now is there’s a number of, I think some of the major IEC documents in, in our world, in the lightning world are going through revision.
Does that, how do, how do you assess that risk that the IEC specs or the sort of the gold standard and you have the certification bodies that are using them to show that the turbines are fit for purpose. Is there a reliance upon them? Does, does it help reduce premiums if there’s an I-E-C-I-I, I’m not even sure how the industry, the insurance industry looks at it.
Or is it more of how the turbines perform in the first year or two, is how, what’s gonna really gonna drive the premium numbers? I mean, insofar as
Nathan Davies: I eecs, it’s, that’s a really tough question. It’s, it’s [00:17:00]interesting that you ask that. ’cause um, I mean certainly from the lightning perspective, the, the IEC. We look at on that the blades need to withstand a lightning strike of a known value, but even within that, they, within the IEC, there’s an allowance of like 2%, I think, um, for blade strikes that can still cause damage even if they’re within the rate of capacity of the LPS.
Um, so in the insurance world, this is a big gray area because each, um, operator has a, a turbine, uh, has a blade failure because of a lightning strike. They’ll then immediately go to the OEM and say, um, you know, we’ve had had a lightning strike, we’ve had a blade failure. Can you come and repair or replace the blade?
Sure, no bother. Um, down the line, we have an insurance claim for this repair or replacement. And insurers are like, well, what’s the lightning data? And if that’s within the [00:18:00] LPS standard, it’s like, well, why have. Why is this not covered under warranty? And, you know, you, your OEMs will always turn around and say, force majeure.
Um, it’s, it’s that 2%. So the IEC, even though that’s, you know, it’s, it’s best standards, it still has a degree of allowance that, um, the OEMs can slip through and be like, well this, this falls with insurance. And again, I can only speak for what I’ve seen, but that is. We see, I’d say, um, Lloyd Warwick, we probably see 50 plus notifications a year for blade damage from lightning and, um, almost every time if it’s within the capabilities of the LPX, the OEM or say towards majeure and Atlanta with insurers.
Allen Hall: Well, is there a force majeure for gearboxes or generators or transformers? [00:19:00] Is, is there a 2% rule for transformers? I don’t, I don’t think so. Maybe there is, but it is, it, it is a little odd, right, that, that there’s so many things that are happening in the insurance world that rely upon the certification of the turbine and the sort of the expected rates of failure.
I have not seen an operator go back and say, we have a 3% rate of, of damage of my transformers, so therefore I wanna file a claim. But that, that doesn’t seem to occur nearly as often as on the lightning side where it’s force majeure is used probably daily, worldwide. How do we think about that? How do we, how do we think about the transformer that fails versus the lightning damage?
Are they just considered just two separate things and uncontrollable? Is that how the insurance industry looks at it? If we, if we would
Nathan Davies: talk about transformers. So the fact is that we see on those can vary from, you know, it’s, it’s a minor electrical component that that goes, um, [00:20:00] which is relatively easy to pin down.
But then at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a fire where it’s. You know, with all, all the will in the world, you could go in and investigate, but you’re not gonna find the cause of that fire. Um, you know, the damage is so great that you, you could probably say, well, the ignition point is there because that’s where the most damages occurred and it’s spread out.
But, but how is that occurred? The know, and we, we do have that, that happens not frequently, but um. You know, as an engineer, I, I want to get to the bottom of what’s caused things, but, but all too often we come away from a claim where it’s like we don’t know exactly what’s caused it, but we can’t confirm that it’s excluded in the policy and therefore it, it must be covered and, you know, the claim is valid.
Um, so in, in terms of causation and the standards and all the rest of it.
Joel Saxum: It goes to an extent. So this is a, this is another [00:21:00] one. So Alan was talking about lightning and blades. Then we talked about transformers a little bit. I wanna talk about gear boxes for just a second, because gearbox usually, um, in, in my, my experience in, in the wind world, claims wise, it’s pretty black and white.
Was it, did it, did it fail? This is how it failed. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Did was maintenance done at blah? So I heard the other day from someone who was talking about, uh, using CMS. On their, on their gener, on their, uh, gearbox, sorry. So it was an operator said, Hey, we should be, and, and a company coming to them saying, well, you should be monitoring CMS.
This is all the good things it can do for you operationally. And the operator, the owner of the turbine said, I don’t want it, because if I know there’s something wrong, then I can’t claim it on insurance if it fails. Does that ring
Nathan Davies: true to you? Part of our process would be to look at the data. Um, so we know nine times out of 10 there is condition [00:22:00] monitoring, there is start out there, there, all this stuff.
The operator, um, assistance tools, and if we can look at a gearbox vibration trend. Um, along with, you know, bearing temperature, uh, monitoring and all that sort of thing. And if you can see a trend where the vibrations are increasing, the temperatures are increasing, um, and there’s no operator maintain maintenance intervention, then, you know, if, if you, if you’ve received an alarm to say, Hey, there’s something wrong with me, you should probably come and have a look and you’ve done nothing about it, then.
It’s,
Joel Saxum: it’s not great. Okay. So, so that, so that it rings, it kind of in a sense, rings true, right? That what that operator was saying, like the way their mind was working at that stage. ’cause this is, this is during, again, like, so we, Alan and I from the uptime network and just who we are, like we know a ton of people, we know [00:23:00] solutions that are being sold and, and this her about this.
And I was like, man, that seems like really shortsighted, but there’s a reality to it that kind of makes sense, right? If they don’t have. I, it, it just seems unethical, right? It seems like if I don’t have the budget to fix this and I don’t wanna look at it, so I’m just waiting for it to fail. I don’t want the notifications so then I can claim it on insurance.
’cause I don’t wanna spend the money to go fix it. Like, seems, seems not cool.
Nathan Davies: Yeah. So the, I mean the, the process, the process of the insurance claim, if, if you want to look at it in almost an over simplistic way, um, a claim is notified. Um, to trigger an operational policy, there needs to be proof of damage, right?
So in this instance, your gearbox has failed, whether that’s gear, teeth have have been pulled off, you’ve had a major bearing failure, whatever it is. So there’s your damage. So insurers are now [00:24:00] engaged. Um, the rules of the game. It’s now on insurers to prove that whatever has caused that damage is an exclusion.
So in this instance, um, you know, that might be wear and tear, gradual deterioration, uh, could be rust. Um, and, and part of that is poor workmanship. Um, so if they have knowingly like. Cover their shut, their eyes covered, their ears just ignored this gearbox slowly crunching its way to, its, its inevitable death.
You know, it, it’s not reasonably unforeseen. It’s not an unpredictable event. This was going to happen if you can see that, that trend, um, towards the failure, um, and in that light, it would, in theory be an uninsured event. Um, but [00:25:00] we know that. 90 plus percent of owner operators have, at least on their drive train, they have some sort of condition monitoring, whether that’s, you know, temperature sensors, vibration sensors, uh, noise sensors, you know, all that sort of stuff.
We know that it’s there, but what’s really interesting in the claims process is. The first thing that we’ll ask is, where’s your proof of damage? Let’s see your alarm data, your scarda data, all this sort of thing.
Joel Saxum: Does the RFI get responded to?
Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and it’s like, oh no, we, you know, we don’t have the SCARDA data.
And we’ve had instances where a company, a company had turned around and said, oh, we don’t have any SCARDA data for the time of this event. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. And worked our way through the process. And eventually insurers were like, you know what? We’re, we’re gonna deny this one. We’re not.
Things aren’t adding up, we are not happy with it. Um, and all of a sudden out the woodwork, we get scar data, we get the, the insured’s, um, failure report, [00:26:00] which I mean, there was computational flow dynamics. There were, there were like all sorts of weird and wonderful data that had been thrown into the, this failure analysis.
And it’s like, well, you’ve done our jobs for us. Why did you not just hand this over at the beginning? We know that this stuff exists, so. Just, just playing, playing dumb itch. It’s just a frustration really.
Allen Hall: It does seem like the operators think of loss adjustment in insurance companies as having a warehouse full of actuaries with mechanical calculators and they’re back there punching numbers in and doing these calculations on.
I lost this gearbox from this manufacturer at, at this timeframe, and, and I understand all this data. That’s not how it works, but I do think there’s this, uh, assumption that that. Uh, there’s a in wind energy that because of the scale of it, there’s a lot of, of backend research that’s happening. I, I don’t think that’s true, or, I mean, you can tell me if it’s true or not, [00:27:00] but I don’t think so.
But now, in the world of AI where I can start to accumulate large sets of data and I have the ability to process it with just a single person sitting in front of a laptop, is it gonna get a little harder for some of these claims that have Mercury, just really shady histories to get? Approved.
Nathan Davies: I, I think that’s inevitable.
You know, whenever we go and speak to an insurer, you know, insurers are always interested, are interested in what’s the latest claims data, what are the trends that we’re seeing, all this sort of thing. So we’ll sit down with them for an hour and a half and we’ll say, oh, this was interesting. This is what went well, this is what didn’t go so well.
And then they always sort of grab us just as we’re about to leave and we’ve, we’ve said our goodbyes, and they’re like, so you guys have a. Claims database. Right? Every time. Yep. And it’s like, how’d you feel about, about sharing your data? And it’s, it’s every insurer without failure. They’re like, let’s see your claims [00:28:00] database.
Okay. Right. So we can share, we can share some information. Obviously it needs to be sanitized. We don’t want to provide identifying information, all that sort of stuff. You’re looking at thousands and thousands of lines of data. And the big problem that we have with any database like this is, it’s only as good as the data that’s been entered, right?
So if, if every claims handler, if every loss adjuster is entering their own data into this database, my interpretation of, of a root cause failure, maybe different to somebody else’s. So what we are gonna start seeing in the next year to three years. Is the application of AI to these databases, to to sort of finesse the poor quality data that’s been entered by multiple, you know, it’s, it’s too many cooks.
Spoiled broth. All of these people have entered their own interpretation of data, will start to see AI finesse [00:29:00] that, and all of a sudden the output of it will be. Really, really powerful, much better risk models. Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s inevitable in the next two to five years. Um, and I think insurers will, but again, the, we go back to the cyclic thing.
So the, the data that we have is the claims that we’ve had over the past however many years, but all the while that the OEMs are manufacturing. New gearboxes, new generators, new blades. We don’t know about the problems that are gonna come out the woodwork. We can tell you about failures that might happen on aged assets, but we can’t tell you about what’s gonna fail in the future.
Allen Hall: Well, is there an appetite to do what the automobile world is doing on the automobile insurance? Have basically a plugin to monitor how the driver is doing the State Farm drive safe and [00:30:00] save. Yeah. Your little black box is, is that where eventually this all goes? Is that every turbine’s gonna have a little black box for the insurance company to monitor the asset on some large scale, but then that allows you then to basically to assess properly what the rates should be based on the actual.
Data coming from the actual turbines so that you, you can get a better view of what’s happening.
Nathan Davies: I mean, it’s challenging because obviously you can only get so much from, from that monitoring data. So arguably that’s, that’s like the scarda data. But then there’s, there’s the multiple other inputs that we’re looking at.
I’d say the vast majority of claims come from some form of human intervention. And how do you record that? Human intervention.
Allen Hall: Right? You, it’s like getting an oil change in your car. If the guy forgets to put the oil plug in. Pretty much you’re, you’re gonna get a mount down the road and engine’s gone. [00:31:00] And that’s, that may be the, that may be ultimately where this all goes.
Is that a lot of it’s just human error.
Nathan Davies: Yeah. It’s, you know, we, we can take the, the operating data, you can start to finesse maintenance reports and, and try to plug that into this data stream. But you can guarantee, like you can absolutely bet your bottom dollar, but when there’s an insurance claim and it’s like.
That one key document that you need that will answer that question, nobody knows
Allen Hall: where it is. This has been a great discussion and Nathan, we need to have you back on because you provide such great insights as to what’s happening in the insurance world and and the broader wind energy world and. That’s where I like talking to you so much.
Nathan, how do people get a hold of you? Can they reach you via LinkedIn?
Nathan Davies: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. Um, you can also find me, um, on the Lloyd Warwick website. Sounds great.
Allen Hall: Nathan, thank you so much for being on
Nathan Davies: the podcast. Right. Appreciate it. Thank you so much [00:32:00] guys.
Well, never is a long time, as they say.
Yet imagine this scenario, which is quite possible:
Trump is impeached and removed. Almost immediately, there is an incredible outpouring of information on an additional set of crimes committed by Trump and his administration. Simultaneously, the U.S. morphs into a social democracy, and its people enjoy quality education, access to healthcare, and prosperity, not unlike those in Northern Europe and elsewhere around the globe.
Yes, there will always be Republicans promising mass deportations and whatever else appeals to a dwindling MAGA base, but I would think they will have one hell of a hard time winning a national election.
The GOP can say the American economy is skyrocketing. But then there’s that nasty little piece of reality that people can’t afford groceries and are suffering financially more generally.
Or they can day that people are suffering financially, but it’s Biden’s fault. Oops. Biden left office 588 days ago.
Or they can say that the war in Iran has driven up gas prices, but that will turn immediately because we’ve won the war. Yikes. What can we say about all these bombs?
Or they can say that all the racial hatred and divisiveness is Obama’s fault. No, that’s problematic, since he’s been gone for almost 10 years.
Trump supporters may not be too sharp, but even they are having trouble accepting all this crap.
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
India Locks Down Turbine Data, Danish Wind Jobs Dip
India now requires turbine data, control centers, and R&D to sit inside its borders. Plus a study on reverse flow loads in parked blades, Envision’s spare parts push across Southeast Asia, and Danish wind employment falling to 32,700.
The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now, your hosts
Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Rosemary Barnes, and I’m filling in for Allen today here with Jolanda Pedron. All right, onto our first story. India is drawing a line around its wind data. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has ordered every turbine maker on the approved list of models and manufacturers to report where its data actually lives.
Data centers inside India, servers inside India, research centers inside India, and no real-time data leaving the country. The order went out last week with status reports due by month-end. And while the government tightens the rules on data, the hardware keeps moving in. Flender has just opened another generator plant in Chennai [00:01:00] Yolanda, I think this is gonna have a large impact on the number of companies who are, you know, there’s a lot of companies around today developing, like, smarts for wind turbines.
There’s a lot of scope to operate turbines better, to improve power output, reduce maintenance costs, et cetera, and y- a lot of companies are taking advantage of that. Even Patlow has some projects going on in that sort of area. What do you think about the impact this will be? Is India planning to develop their entire own ecosystem for that aspect of the industry?
I
Yolanda Padron: mean, it looks like it, right? Which is really, I mean, kind of groundbreaking. I know that we talked a couple weeks ago about Europe sort of being a little bit scared of bringing in, um, different manufacturers from Asia, um, and just the, the idea of cybersecurity being something really prevalent and really important to all of these people.
So just if India starts siloing everything and that works, maybe that’ll translate to Europe.
Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that it, it can work? Has India [00:02:00] got the expertise in place already to, to make this work, or is this gonna be a real, like, handbrake on their, their wind industry continuing to develop as fast as it has been?
Yolanda Padron: I mean, I’m really curious to see it because I don’t know if they’ll bring in a lot more experts to be able to, to do that.
Rosemary Barnes: I know the Indian, um, operating environment is quite different to other locations. I mean, it’s, it’s similar in a way to Australia in its dissimilarity, if that makes sense. I, I think there’s a lot of really India-specific problems, so of course Indian companies are gonna be best placed to take advantage of that.
But what we’ve seen so far is a lot of, uh, companies from Europe or America coming in to y- you know, like tweak the way that they attack similar problems in other markets. They’re, you know, moving in to understand India better and take advantage of that. Now, of course, like not every smart operating method or aerodynamic improvement, they don’t all need [00:03:00] real-time data, and probably most of them don’t actually.
So I think it’s not gonna like s- snip off this entire kind of improvement. But it is really interesting. It’s quite, like it is quite severe, the restrictions, and I haven’t heard of any other market, um, that is doing that. I, I don’t know, do you think it’s warranted or is it maybe like overly paranoid? I know when I heard that in, um, in Europe they’re not allowing Chinese manufacturers of inverters, for example, and I just felt like, “Ugh, is that a bit over the top?”
I’m not sure. Um, yeah, what’s your opinion, Yolanda?
Yolanda Padron: I think it, it might be a little bit over the top. We live in such a globalized world that the idea of one country just siloing completely is, is a little bit strange to me. But- I guess if, if that’s, they have a, a reason for concern, then I guess it might make sense.
But to your earlier point, like, I don’t know if the cost of doing this [00:04:00]would also come into play
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that there’s always a, a, a trade-off. It’s like when you have any kind of l- local content rule, which is similar in a way because it forces, um, yeah, it, it forces your own ecosystem to develop, and that’s, that’s great.
Like, it is a missed opportunity if you just have, you know, like a huge new industry and you just import it all, then that i- is a lost opportunity for your own economy. But I mean, in the past, India has had pretty strong local content rules, and they do have a bunch of wind energy manufacturing, um, within the country.
They are a country known for really great engineering, so it’s for sure not beyond them to, you know, step up. So yeah, I guess time will tell if this is a smart move from that point of view. I don’t think it’s actually the motivation behind this rule. I think it’s more of a, like, a cybersecurity, um, kind of perspective where you don’t want, you know, overseas companies having the ability to shut down your energy system, for example.
Um, [00:05:00] so yeah, but it, it has the potential to have that other effect of, you know, like boosting the local industry or alternatively just slowing down the whole industry because they can’t get anything done. I guess that’s always that balance that you need to, need to look at when you’re looking at local content.
So India is deciding who gets to control the data inside a turbine. Our next story is about something inside that same turbine nobody controls yet, the air moving across a blade that isn’t turning. A parked turbine might look like the safest thing on the site. Blades are locked, the rotor’s still, nothing turning, nothing generating.
But a new study says that stillness is not safety. When the rotor is locked and the wind shifts, air can strike the trailing edge first and travel backwards across the blade. That is reverse flow, and in reverse flow, the models this industry uses to predict blade loads start to fall apart. Field data cited in the study suggests blades on turbines above 15 megawatts can go aerodynamically [00:06:00]unstable at winds as low as eight meters per second.
That is nowhere near a storm. So this is actually already definitely a known issue, and I know that modern wind turbines don’t usually park with locked rotors, right, Yolanda?
Yolanda Padron: Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: We, we saw that a locked rotor during installation was one of the causes of the Vineyard Wind fiasco, right? Where broken blade pieces washed up on the beach.
So definitely something that’s known about.
Yolanda Padron: And it’s something that even onshore you have a, you have your system so that it tracks sort of where the wind is coming from. So even if it’s stopped, it won’t just be stopped at a specific angle, particularly in case the, the winds shift.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and I’ve seen examples of blades failing when, um, there was a storm and there was power lost, so they weren’t able to yaw or pitch a turbine, and that also can cause…
Like, any time that- Wind is going in a different direction than what the turbine desi- was designed for, you’ll get unpredictable stuff happening and often, [00:07:00] like, really bad loads. Like the harshest, um, conditions, loading conditions that a wind turbine blade has to withstand is not in operation. It’s if you’ve got just wind hitting like a bluff body, they call it, where a gust of wind just hits flat on the blade and tries to bend it.
Like that is way, way stronger loading than, um, than anything it would see operationally. If you’re looking at, you know, like a really severe storm, like a one in 50 year kind of, um, wind speeds, and then if you have flow going on weird angles where it’s creating lift, then you can ratchet up those loads even more.
So for sure a known issue. This study, it, it singled out turbines above 15 megawatts, which are huge. That’s a, you know, like a big offshore wind turbine. But I don’t think it’s limited to that. Like what would you think, Yolanda? Is this, is this like purely a big blades thing, or is this something that actually all wind turbines need to take into account?
Yolanda Padron: Oh, this is definitely something that all wind turbines need to take into account. It’s something that we’ve seen a lot in the [00:08:00] US as well, um, onshore and s- wind f- uh, smaller wind farms and wind farms that have, you know, 200 plus, um, wind turbines on them, uh, the, the 1X or 2X turbines. Uh, this is also ver- a, a reason that it’s really important, right, to check your systems constantly, and I know that a lot of the, the owner/operators do that, um, in their regular maintenance checks.
Um, but it’s, it’s, it’s an issue that, uh, if you don’t have the correct systems in place or if you just remotely reset things, uh, because you see an error that maybe you thought, “Oh, that, that must be just a glitch,” uh, then you start having issues like this that can cause catastrophic failures, not just on the blade but on the turbine itself if, if the blade ends up hitting the turbine, um, it, it ends up hitting the, the tower itself.
Uh, and then [00:09:00] a similar issue, um, that can happen too is when you don’t have the correct systems in place for, for an emergency, and so the turbine can just overspin, and that also causes a lot of blade failures, uh, both onshore and, and offshore as well. But I think onshore it’s, it’s just the, the wind farms are so big that it’s It’s easy or, or easier to miss, like, one or two turbines, um, when you’re doing those checks.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I think another issue with keeping the rotors locked out, and one of the big reasons why they moved to pinwheeling as the, you know, um, turbine off kind of configuration, was with the, the bearings, right? Like, it’s not good for the bearings to be totally stationary. Um, so I think that it’s better to, yeah, pinwheel.
It’s lower loads on the bearings.
Yolanda Padron: Something, um, similar to this as well, right, and, and I think Wind Power posted about it the [00:10:00] other day, um, about just, oh, it’s really common for, for sites to, to think of, of a financial solution to, to negative pricing being just fully stopping turbines that might not be producing at positive pricing.
Um, and then, uh, that can also cause a lot of loading issues because you’re, you’re having a, a turbine at, at full capacity, and then it just stops.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that’s true. The braking loads are, are one of the more extreme loads that turbines have to withstand also. I mean, hopefully if they’re curtailing, um, voluntarily, uh, they’re not doing an emergency brake kind of level.
I hope that they’re being a bit more gentle on their turbines, but yeah, for sure, like, the easiest thing for a turbine to do is just operate normally its whole lifetime. That’s exactly what it was designed to do, and anything that deviates from that can reduce the t- life of the turbine, complicate things.
So machines keep getting bigger, and the physics keep [00:11:00] getting harder. Meanwhile, the map keeps getting wider. Next, a Chinese manufacturer planting both turbines and spare parts across Southeast Asia. Stay with us
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Rosemary Barnes: China’s turbine makers are no longer just shipping machines. They are building the network that keeps those machines running. Envision Energy has secured its largest wind project in Vietnam, 200 megawatts with REE Energy, 25 [00:12:00] turbines, grid connection targeted for October 2027. It is also the company’s largest overseas nearshore project to date.
And Batangas, Philippines, Envision has opened a distribution center holding major components and spare parts close to the projects that need them. Turbines first, then the parts network. Yelena, I’m just wondering if spare parts was a big headache for you when you worked in asset management, and do you think that this plan of, that Envision has is gonna be a successful one for Vietnam?
Yolanda Padron: I think spare parts, having spare parts on site or near a site is always a good strategy. I know that sometimes it can get the, the accounting itself can get a little bit difficult because for at least, you know, in the US for tax purposes, you can’t really sell something from one project to another, so you, you have to be a little bit careful, um, as far as when you hold a part or you’re sending one part that might fit in multiple sites and where you’re technically buying that [00:13:00] from.
Uh, but I think the spare parts that they’re having here I, I think it’s a, it’s a really good idea, right? Because oftentimes you might have a, a big, um, there might be a big queue for a particular component that fails years after, uh, it was produced, and then you– I mean, if you need it now and there’s a big queue now, then you need to wait until it can get to site, until it can be produced, until it’s your turn in line.
Uh, and so just having those components on site or really close to the site I think is a really good idea.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s really challenging. Like it’s, it, it’s easy to imagine how you could organize a spare parts network or, you know, just l- literally a bunch of warehouses holding spare parts for the kind of, you know, like one-off failures that happen routinely throughout a wind turbine’s life.
But when you start to see a serial issue or if there’s just, you know, like statistically every now and then [00:14:00] you’ll get clusters of failures even if it’s not a serial issue, that’s when it starts to get really hard. So I know in Australia, and I’m sure it’s the case elsewhere, you kind of got to pair your spare parts inventory with the capability to repair and refurbish as well.
Because sometimes it’s like, you know, you might do, like speaking of blades, which is my specialty, you might have a bill of, you know, maybe even a million dollars to do a really big repair on a blade, but that’s better than spending probably, honestly, the similar amount of money on a brand-new blade, but then that comes with a six-month or a 12-month, um, wait time.
You know, like obviously you’re gonna save overall if you can get that turbine up faster. And we also see a lot of, um, in-country capabilities to refurbish, you know, all of the drivetrain components and, and everything like that, and I think that that is such an important complement. Like your spare parts strategy should never just be about having them physically sitting there, ’cause if you were [00:15:00] to have enough to cover any situation, then, you know, most of your components would go unused over the, the lifetime of the wind farm.
And it’s not like they’re just swap in, swap out for any different wind turbine, right? Like they are usually quite turbine specific.
Yolanda Padron: I completely agree with the idea, especially with blades and how trif- tricky some of the new blades and their, their repair processes can be. It’s really important to have a plan and not necessarily just, “Okay, now I’m gonna throw this one out and bring in a new one, and always hold a new one,” because that’s really expensive.
Um, and it’s also really, really important to, uh, that doesn’t matter what particular part it is, that whatever storage facility you’re using, that you’re, you make sure that the environmental factors impacting the spare parts are taken care of, right? So, um, I know I’ve seen spare parts for a battery site or spare parts for a solar site, uh, that just kind of end up degrading even more than the parts that were in [00:16:00] operations because no one was really looking at them.
They were just outside in the elements, and then you just wasted millions and millions of dollars for really nothing. Um, something that you need to take to the landfill eventually or report.
Rosemary Barnes: Hopefully recycle it if it’s electronic waste.
Yolanda Padron: I completely agree that to, to be able to, to have any sort of replacement strategy, you, or any sort of spare parts strategy, you need to make sure that, that the replacement strategy is there and that the refurbishment strategy is there.
If there’s anything that you can recycle in-house and use in-house, that’s a lot better than just landfilling anything or sending anything to be recycled elsewhere where it just piles and piles and piles up.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think also it’s reassuring if you’re buying wind turbines from maybe a, a less well-known manufacturer or less well-known in your country, I think it is reassuring to have a, like just a stack of spare parts on site, because that will give you the confidence that if [00:17:00] and when things start to go wrong, you know, a few years into the wind farm’s operation, you are gonna have that capability.
‘Cause I think it is, like it’s a big leap to move away from the really, really well-known, uh, manufacturers into some of the less well-known ones and have the confidence that y- you know, you wouldn’t have any- anyone to ask what they’re like for service, uh, for example, and you might also not have confidence that they’re even gonna exist in, you know, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years’ time.
So having the parts on site can give you that confidence. Although, as you say, if those parts aren’t actually functional when you go to use them, that can be worse than not having them in the first place because you thought that you were okay and then you find yourself scrambling. That’s not ideal at all.
Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I completely agree. I did hear about someone who, um, had a, a blade that they They thought they, they didn’t really have the capabilities in-house to, to restore it, and so they sent it to be recycled, [00:18:00] and then later it was sold to them by their OEM, um, on site. And so I think that also speaks to the…
And, and it was just because someone noticed the serial number was exactly the same and kind of noticed. It was, it was really honestly kind of a funny, funny thing in retrospect. But, uh, and it, it just speaks to the idea of you really need to understand if you’re holding spare parts and, and just in general, even if you don’t wanna hold spare parts.
Um, the idea of being able to refurbish or have a plan to be able to refurbish the, the materials that you have on site is really, really, really important because it can save you so much money. I mean, the, I mean, the, for that case, just the, the transportation costs of hauling the blade off, of paying someone to recycle it, of paying for a new blade, um, and everything just to kind of be bamboozled in that way where you could’ve just repaired it on site is, is It’s almost a no-brainer, yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: I gotta say, that’s like a real recycling win, right? Like, you can’t get [00:19:00] better than, than that. Uh, you know, you had a blade, you recycle it into a blade. It’s, you know, performing exactly the same function, better than shredding it and hiding it in a, you know, a footpath, a sidewalk, or something like that.
Stay with China a moment longer, because the product strategy tells you as much as the project map. Mingyang Smart Energy has unveiled the Tianchi MCD 5 MW turbine at its factory in Guizhou. It’s the first machine in the company’s new medium-speed compact drive platform, a semi-direct drive that Mingyang says cuts component count by 60%.
And it is built for sites nobody used to bother with: mountains, plateaus, places where the wind averages four and a half meters per second. Now, Yolanda, 5 MW is pretty big for an onshore turbine in locations. It sounds like, you know, these locations, aside from the, like, less than ideal wind resource, also sounds like places where it’s actually, you know, transport might be a bit of a constraint.
I wonder what their strategy [00:20:00] is gonna be to get those large components and installation equipment in.
Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s not gonna be the first site, I think, that we’ve seen that where they have to develop some sort of game-changing vessel or crane or something to be able to, to get things, uh, to the site.
Uh, my, my first thought honestly was just kind of like, “Oh goodness, that might be a lightning nightmare depending on, on where they’re located.”
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that’s true. Like we’ve seen in Japan, they have all their turbines on the ridges where the wind speeds are great, at least. Um, but they have been just absolutely destroyed by lightning, like really, really dealing with extreme situations.
I think also, like these are low wind speed sites. Like what, what did they say? Four and a half meters per second average wind speeds? I mean, that’s like half what you would consider a good, a good site, right? And we know that the power in wind, it goes, like it increases with the cube of wind [00:21:00] speed. So, um, you know, like if you double the wind speed, you get eight times as much power.
So it’s like all of the challenges associated with a high wind speed site in the mountains or, you know, somewhere tricky to get to you know, at least you’ve got eight times the power to make up for the effort of maintaining it. Uh, just it seems like, like a lot of effort to get to a low wind speed site, right?
I think these turbines, the cut-in wind speed is gonna be two and a half meters per second, so you know, again, like you can reduce your, yeah, like the, the wind speed a- again by another factor of eight. It’s almost nothing at that wind speed. It really, yeah, I don’t know that you can make up for a low wind speed site by having a really low cut-in wind speed, right?
Like, you’re still gonna end up with low power across the board.
Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and it’s, it’s strange too, I mean, we said it’s, it’s a mountainous region, right? And so, and the transportation [00:22:00] in itself, I mean, we talked about the idea of bringing them in is gonna be difficult. But I know that a lot of times we see a lot of blades that have issues down the line because of the transportation issues and because of the way that maybe they, they didn’t use the lifting points right, and there might be a lot more transportation issues or damages from transportation on the site if they come in and it’s a completely different terrain that they’re used to.
Uh, and teams have to build in a completely different terrain to- that- than they’re used to, then that might also cause problems down the line. Not to mention the idea that I know sometimes in sites where there’s already roads, uh, it, it, because of the position of the turbines, because of the, the way that things are, are mapped out in development and construction, sometimes it’s a, a hassle for operations to, to get the correct cranes or trucks or everything in there to do any sort of maintenance.
Uh, so [00:23:00] I can’t imagine in a place where it’s just really, really difficult to get to in general.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and especially over the lifetime, you know, maintenance i- is gonna be such a challenge. So I think that it sounds like they’re aware of that because their emphasis with this new platform, dropping the component count by 60%, that’s a claim from Ming Yang that I haven’t seen the details of.
It seems highly implausible but, um, yeah, I would wanna look into that a bit more to believe it. But they also say that their new bearings and gearbox features lift reliability by 10%, so yeah, I think that that is going to make their job a little bit easier, but yeah, I don’t know if it’s enough that would make me wanna invest in a wind farm with a, what was the number?
Four and a half meters per second average wind speed. Seems marginal at best. So new machines for marginal sites built in China and priced to compete. Now let’s move [00:24:00] to Denmark, where the employment numbers show what that competition feels like from the other side. Back in a moment.
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Rosemary Barnes: Numbers out of Denmark tell two stories at once. Green Power Denmark counted [00:25:00] just under 110,000 full-time jobs across the Danish energy sector in 2025. That is up 1,526 positions or 1.4%, slightly ahead of Danish employment overall. That is the good news. Inside the wind sector, employment fell to 32,700, a drop of roughly 500.
Green Power Denmark blames international competition and unfavorable market conditions. Its chief economist calls the dip normal You know what, Yolanda? I think that if Denmark’s labor market is weak in the wind industry, there are many countries outside of Denmark that would wanna snap up that talent.
I know that my own company, Pardalote, is included in those numbers of people that would really like to have Danish talent. I’m trying to s- hire someone currently that’s got wind turbine blade expertise, and I tell you what, that is not easy to do in Australia. So I would say if there are any Danes listening or watching who fancy a move to Australia, then please do get in touch [00:26:00]if you have some excellent wind turbine blade experience.
Yolanda Padron: You guys would have a lovely, lovely boss. I’ve- I just gotta say that. The learnings that you have in Denmark and just the, the, the school- not just from the schooling, the, the onsite, I mean, it- it’s just historically Denmark’s been really, really great in, in wind. And there’s just so many bright minds, um, that d- I mean, if, if they can’t find a j- a job in Denmark, then I, I agree that there’s a lot of places in wind that if they’re, they’re okay with moving, they’ll, they’ll find a, a good spot that’ll receive them really happily.
Rosemary Barnes: I know it is a bit of a, like, a cultural blocker. Danes more than other nationalities that I know are, are really, um, I don’t wanna say attached, it makes it sound like not quite the word I’m looking for, but they, they do really appreciate the region that they’re from and, you know, family is so important to Danes, so not the easiest thing [00:27:00] to just say, “Just move to the other side of the world.”
But you know, I did it. It, it can be done and, uh, yeah, Australia is, has got very nice weather, especially at the moment. It’s, um, it’s gonna be… It’s been, like, in the high teens Celsius all this week, and this is, I’m in Canberra in still winter and, uh, yeah, like, on the weekend it’s gonna be 20 degrees. It’s, you know, normally 15 degrees is a really great one-off day in winter.
It was my birthday this week and in Denmark there is a, a saying or a, you know, a belief that if you have good weather on your birthday, then that means that you must have been really good all year. And the weather was just, like, unprecedentedly good for my birthday, um, yeah, for a winter day. So obviously I was very, very good this year.
Yolanda Padron: You’re a great person, and happy belated birthday.
Rosemary Barnes: Thank you. But it is something that I say every time we get another story about another Danish wind energy company that’s, you know, doing layoffs and, you know, I’m honestly surprised that it’s [00:28:00] only 500 fallen in wind energy. If you look at, like, even just the job losses at LM Wind Power alone, um, I think that it would be about that many, right?
And so there are obviously some other companies um, growing to absorb some of the job losses, ’cause for sure we’ve covered more than 500 job losses just on the show. But I know I always feel really sad, um, not just for the people involved who y- you know, probably love wind energy and wanted to work in that field, but I feel sad that, you know, this was such a strength for Denmark, their, their wind industry, that they had been, you know, developing this expertise since the ’70s, honestly.
Uh, really, really world leading and, uh, of course, like, globalization means that you can’t, like, stay siloed forever, and Denmark obviously also took advantage of that globalization to, you know, export. Wind industry was a huge export market for Denmark, and still is. Um, but I do, I, I just feel really bad at the companies that are losing, um, all of that, you know, institutional [00:29:00]knowledge and the really, really deep specialist knowledge.
It’s, um, yeah. Uh, and they’ll go on to, you know, bring new skills to other industries, but it just makes me sad. As a wind energy lover and, um, you know, somebody who has a lot of friends that work in wind industry in Denmark, I do feel, feel sad. And there are some of my old colleagues who are amazing, like, literally the best engineer that I ever worked with, an electrical engineer, it, it was not easy for him to find a new job in wind.
I’m actually not sure if he’s working in that industry now. And plenty of other, like, really, really talented engineers that have gone on to other, um, yeah, other different kinds of industries, and it just makes me a little bit sad.
Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I mean, there are a lot of people too that are com- And I agree, it’s sad.
It’s really sad. But I, there are a lot of people too, some friends that, uh, just, you know, started doing consulting on their own, and it’s, it’s good to see that they’re still in wind, you know? Because they’re, they, they’re so smart and they have so much knowledge of so many years in the industry that they bring to the table, um, [00:30:00] that, I mean, it, it might even work out better for them, right?
Because maybe now they’re not just wor- focusing on Denmark itself, and now they get to, to expand and do what they evidently love to do, uh, the, for clients around the world, which is really exciting.
Rosemary Barnes: Well, that wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast, and my first as the primary host of the show, so let me know if you think I did a terrible job in the comments.
Comments boost engagement, make me look better. So if today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, 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 don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
For Yolanda, and Matthew and Allen Hall in their absence, I’m Rosemary Barnes, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:31:00] podcast.
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