Published

3 years ago

January 8, 2024

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

London Mega-Merger, Vestas’ Record U.S. Order, WEG’s Global Growth in Renewables

A proposed merger aims to create one of the largest renewable investment trusts in London. Vestas has bounced back from previous issues to receive its largest ever US turbine order. Brazilian turbine manufacturer WEG is emerging as a global wind power player through a new partnership with a European company.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the founder and CEO of Intelstor Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at Intelstor. If you need actionable information about renewable projects or technologies, check out Intelstor at intelstor.com.

Octopus Renewable Infrastructure Trust has proposed merging with Aquila European Renewables. The deal aims to create one of the largest renewable energy investment trusts in London. The combined entity would have a market cap around 750 million pounds. We would also have a portfolio of roughly 1 billion pounds across Europe.

Phil, this is a big deal. I know it’s in the early stages still, but if this were to happen, this is a ground shaking event.

Philip Totaro: It is because both companies have actually been growing their European portfolios. And so to take these two entities and put them together makes a pretty compelling case for one of the biggest certainly would be the biggest financially focused asset owner within Europe and potentially within the rest of the world.

Most of the world. Asset owners are independent power producers, utility companies, et cetera. But this would be one of, if not the biggest asset owner both wind and solar assets and energy storage as well. If they were to actually get this deal to go through. So it’s worth keeping track of it.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Interesting is it’s basically when we talk of Octopus renewables infrastructure, trust. And then looking at Aquila, you’re talking about it’s a more than at the grand scheme of things, it’s a fund, right? It’s a financial asset owner. That is a lot a lot of interest in a lot of different places.

They being this size, they will have a pretty easy way of attracting capital to grow as well, in my opinion, right? If you’re already this big and you’re already making these kinds of moves the larger players within the the trading markets, your Vanguards, your BlackRocks, or these kinds of players are more apt to put money into larger groups like this as they grow as well.

Allen Hall: Vestas has received its largest ever order in the U S market.

A 1. 1 gigawatt deal to supply 242 V one 63, 4. 5 megawatt turbines for Pattern Energy’s SunZia wind project in New Mexico. The order is also Vestas is largest single onshore project globally. This thing is huge. And obviously they held it out to the end of Q4, 2023, but it has ramifications all through 2024.

Philip Totaro: Absolutely. This deal gives them somewhere in the order of about 3. 6 gigawatts worth of V163 platform orders globally. Which is of course, a derivative product off of some of their previous designs, but it’s a brand new blade and it’s something they’re really hoping is going to play well in the U. S. Market. So to have such a strong foothold with not only this deal with the SunZia project. But a few other orders for this product platform as well in the U. S. for undisclosed customers. It’s important for them and it’s a pretty big move for a product that was designed to be a big four, four and a half, five megawatt product platform.

But in a very low wind speed regime with such a large rotor, the 163.

Joel Saxum: Something I’d like to highlight with this one is speaking towards some of the industry issues that we’re seeing right now. We know Siemens has some issues and they’re teething on them as we speak. Vestas knocking down these orders is a testament to the industry, allowing someone to come back from having a bad stretch.

2020, 2021, Vestas had 175 million in write downs on some issues that they had in the marketplace. They’ve regained the trust of the marketplace to the point where they have 3. 6 gigawatts of orders at the end of a quarter ready to go. So I think it bodes good things for the industry going forward that these OEMs have the ability and the market has their back.

At the point where they show that they’ve solved some of the issues and they move forward in a big way.

Allen Hall: WEG has partnered with Statkraft to supply and install a wind turbine at Statkraft’s wind site in Brazil. The deal is announced in December and involves WEG’s 7 megawatt new turbine model.

The turbine is a result of WEG’s partnership with Petrobras to develop large onshore wind turbines in Brazil. The WEG turbine is expected to be operational by mid 2024. Phil, that’s a short time frame for a 7x machine from WEG. I know WEG has a lot of capability, but it’s also interesting that Statkraft is connecting with WEG for a product in Brazil.

Philip Totaro: It is because what WEG’s done, and keep in mind this product’s been under development and in the design phase for a while. They’ve announced it in the earlier part of 2023 and now they’re expecting to be able to go into low rate production with it, with prototype and then low rate production in late 2024.

But this deals with Statkraft is interesting because most of the companies who have purchased WEGs turbines in Brazil been Brazilian focused developers. They haven’t had as much of a track record of success with. European independent power producers or utility companies have come into the Brazilian market.

So it’s important for them for both WEG and for Statkraft. Statkraft also wants to be able to cultivate a third OEM option, if you will. You’ve got Vestas which is dominating the market. You’ve got Siemens, Gamesa, which is floundering a bit and unfortunately not selling their five and six megawatt some of their five and six megawatt platform products in Brazil. Nordex is there to fill in some of that, but a company like Statkraft wants to create price competition. They want to create supply chain diversity. And doing a deal with WEG is actually a fairly sensible option for them.

Joel Saxum: Phil, from your seat, is there an avenue in which WEG leaves Brazil to sell in other markets?

Philip Totaro: They actually already have, Joel, and I’m, you may not be aware of this, but they’ve set up prototypes in India previously under license agreement with their… WEG is a big industrial company that makes generators. Not only in Brazil, but they also have facilities in India.

So they’ve taken their designs for some prototype units for their smaller turbines and done them in India already. The question, the more maybe direct to your question though, is. Are they prepared to go global like the Chinese OEMs and other companies are trying to do? And I think the answer is yes, they definitely have potential.

Keep in mind, they’ve only been doing wind turbines for 10 years. They licensed the technology from Northern Power Systems for the 2. 3 and 3 megawatt product series back in 2013. And then eventually acquired the rights, the IP rights outright. But they’ve been on the hunt for international growth opportunities and a partnership with a company like stat craft is also interesting because if this works, then does that open up opportunities in Chile?

Does that open up opportunities throughout North America and Europe even, or Australia? They’ve got their eye on a number of different markets, but they’re paying close attention. They’re also trying to be very active in South Africa as well. There’s certainly potential for, for them.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Interesting because they have a seven megawatt machine, which is standalone on the market for an onshore turbine. There’s not a, there’s not a whole lot of competition there. And I know as a someone in the U S I’m always looking on the horizon to see, is there a possibility of another OEM coming in?

Because we don’t believe that we’re going to allow Chinese OEMs to be connected to our grid anytime soon. So if there’s something else coming in, it could be interesting.

Philip Totaro: And it could be WEG from Brazil. It could be somebody from India. There’s also other companies that are definitely trying and looking at the U S market, especially in consideration of the recent guidance and rules that the treasury department and the IRS have proposed on the 45 X manufacturing tax credits.

So that’s giving a lot of companies a good feeling for what they can expect if they domesticate production.

London Mega-Merger, Vestas’ Record U.S. Order, WEG’s Global Growth in Renewables

Renewable Energy

Guiding America’s Future

Published

11 hours ago

October 30, 2026

Alice Rush

It’s easy to understand how Trump has great appeal to the hateful idiots and the amoral rich.

It’s much harder to see how it’s possible that a huge number of eligible voters are uninvolved in guiding the future of the United States, with many of them saying that “both sides are the same.”

Guiding America’s Future

Renewable Energy

It’s PEOPLE Who Vote

Published

12 hours ago

October 30, 2026

Alice Rush

We often hear the MAGA folks claim that voting in the U.S. disproportionate favors the people in big cities, mostly along the coasts.

The obvious response: People vote, not acres of land.

And yes, it’s true that Trump has little appeal to the well-educated, highly productive people in Southern California, the Bay Area, the Mid-Atlantic, New England, other large cities like Chicago, Phoenix, Houston, and Seattle.

It’s PEOPLE Who Vote

Renewable Energy

Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap

Published

18 hours ago

October 30, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap

This exclusive article originally appeared in P ES Wind 3 – 2026 with the title, Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap. It was written by Allen Hall and other members of the Weather Guard Lightning Tech team.

As wind fleets expand across increasingly diverse operating environments, the expertise needed to solve their problems is becoming more dispersed. Closing the industry’s knowledge gap means connecting local challenges with specialist experience from across the global wind sector and beyond.

An operator finds something on a blade they have not seen before. Who do they call? The engineer who designed that blade moved on years ago. The service provider has not seen the problem either. Somewhere in the world, there’s probably a person who has spent 15 years working on precisely that failure mode. But there’s no reliable way to find them.

That scenario plays out again and again. It’s rare that a problem is unsolvable. A solution exists somewhere. The bigger problem is finding that solution, or the person close to solving it.

Wind has become a large, geographically dispersed industry with roughly 1.3 TW of installed capacity. The technical knowledge required to keep it running has dispersed with it. The knowledge is real, deep and often highly specialized, but it is scattered across the globe in small teams working in different markets.

This is not the first global industry to discover that no single organization can hold every discipline, and that different parts of the world present different problems.

Two answers, one problem

In January 2023, Andrew Billingsley took a call from Ørsted asking whether his company could recycle wind turbine blades. Billingsley is CEO of Plaswire, a polymer processor in Northern Ireland. It was not a wind company. Plaswire’s business had been built on finding a way to use plastics from aircraft seat manufacturing and other waste nobody else would handle: residue pulled out of biodigesters and municipal waste plants.

He said yes before he was certain the company could do it.

Plaswire had a proprietary process for combining polymers that materials engineers said couldn’t be combined. Ground blade fiber mixed well with the combined polymer. Plaswire says it now has capacity to process up to 11,000 tonnes of blades a year and has increased blade content in its product from ten percent to thirty percent. The company also reports that the resulting structural components can outperform the concrete and timber alternatives they replace.

The same waste stream produced an entirely different answer on the other side of the Atlantic. Everpoint Services in Houston, Texas decommissions wind and solar assets, leaving the company tasked with repurposing fiberglass blades. At a birthday party, Everpoint CEO Tyler Goodell put that problem to James Timmins, a drilling engineer who had spent his career planning and overseeing drilling operations for major oil companies.

Timmins realized that ground blade fiber might work as a fluid loss additive in oil, gas, and geothermal drilling, where fluid escaping into the formation can cost tens of thousands of dollars a day. Everpoint spent the next two years turning that idea into a product. The company says BladeBlok is patented and shipping globally from Houston.

Two regions, two answers, both effective. And in retrospect, it makes perfect sense. Northern Ireland has decades of depth in polymers and injection molding, so its answer was a polymer. Houston is a center of the global oil and gas industry, so its answer was drilling mud. Neither answer came out of the wind industry. Both came from regional industrial expertise meeting a problem that happened to land next to it.

Looking beyond Denmark

Modern wind turbine engineering grew up in Denmark, and in many ways it still lives there. The most prevalent turbine design was refined by Danish engineers. DTU Wind and Energy Systems still anchors much of the research on wind turbines. Ask a hard aerodynamic question today and there is a fair chance the answer comes from within Denmark.

What has changed is that designing turbines and operating them are different problems. They no longer happen in the same places. A machine is designed in a small number of locations. It is then operated wherever the wind blows: West Texas, Queensland, Gujarat, the North Sea, and the Spanish meseta.

The fleet is also getting older and more varied as it grows. Machines commissioned during the last boom are aging in ways nobody modeled, on sites with conditions nobody anticipated. That combination generates operational questions faster than any single organization can answer them. Those questions are local, specific, and urgent. Now, companies all over the world are being asked to solve wind’s problems with legacy knowledge, often from an adjacent industry, that originated a long way from where the turbine was built.

The same blade, four climates

The industry’s leading-edge erosion wisdom is shaped largely by northern European conditions. It is a real problem, well studied and well understood. It is also not the same problem in West Texas, where the air carries dust and insects, and where inspections routinely find turbines one to three years old that look as though they have run for far longer. Will Howell of Armour Edge describes one site near an open-cast mine where airborne marble particulates were destroying blades within two seasons.

India produces a variant that exists nowhere in Europe. During the northern dry season, a sticky, tar-like dirt builds on the blades until the flow separates and the blade effectively stalls. The monsoon washes it away. PowerCurve reports that the use of vortex generators in India has produced some of the largest energy gains it has recorded, exceeding five percent across a full year. India is now the fourth-largest wind market on earth, surpassing 56 GW; last year it added more capacity than Germany did.

Rosemary Barnes worked for a Danish blade manufacturer before returning to Australia in 2021 to work in operations. There, she found blades behaving unlike the ones she had known in Europe. The standard method of predicting erosion severity combines annual rainfall with tip speed. But when Barnes plotted Australian sites with known erosion problems against those two axes, she got a random scatter. The model had no predictive value in Australia.

Her firm, Pardalote Consulting, is now placing scientific-grade sensors in Australian wind farms to establish what actually drives erosion there. [Barnes is also a regular host of The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.]

A library of experts

Today, finding the right specialist can be difficult.

After six years hosting the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, I increasingly think of the podcast as a library. In the past year alone, we’ve highlighted solutions from companies in Latvia, Denmark, Northern Ireland, Spain, Australia, Scotland, and the United States. As an organizer of the Wind O&M Australia event, one of our goals has been to bring international expertise to the local market. And similarly, to allow the global market to learn from knowledge that has been internal to Australia.

The answers are out there

The wind industry does not have time to solve the same problem twice. Fleets are aging, budgets are tight, and a blade defect that sits unresolved for a season costs real production. The pressure is to move faster, and the fastest way to solve a problem is rarely on your own. The fastest way to solve a problem is to find the person who has solved it. That search has to be a global one. The specialist who understands your failure mode may be in Copenhagen, Riga, Edinburgh, or Houston, working for a company you have never heard of. Geography is not a reason to rule them out. Increasingly it is the reason to go looking. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast has become one way of documenting that dispersed expertise, bringing together specialists working on specific problems across different markets.