Published

2 years ago

February 1, 2024

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Maximizing Wind Turbine Power with AeroVista – A Conversation with Nicholas Gaudern

We’re revisiting a great episode with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve, discussing their new AeroVista software. AeroVista uses drone inspection data to evaluate wind turbine blade damage and power production potential. Allen and Nicholas discuss how this technology enables strategic repair planning to maximize power recovery while avoiding unnecessary costs.

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!

PowerCurve – https://powercurve.dk
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Welcome back to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and this week, we’re going to go back in time to September of last year, where I sat down with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve. And Nicholas and I discuss a new piece of software that PowerCurve has developed called AeroVista.

And AeroVista is a unique tool. It takes your existing drone images and then predicts the AEP for the turbine or the particular blade. A lot of operators that Joel and I have run across recently are interested to know what blades to repair based on the amount of damage. And we see damage from all over the world.

And there are blades that have very minor damage that you probably leave alone. There are some with very major damage and those you should obviously fix. It’s the ones in between where you’re not really sure. And this AeroVista piece of software is a predictive tool. It will help you design your campaign to repair blades during the warmer months.

So it’s a very powerful tool and a and a well needed tool for the industry. So I thought it was time to revisit this episode with Nicholas Gaudern of PowerCurve. Enjoy.

Leading edge erosion is a massive power losing problem for most wind farms. Almost every wind turbine blade that has been in service more than two years has some level of leading edge erosion. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with our guest, Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve.

In this episode, we are discussing leading edge erosion, how it reduces average energy production, and when to address it for maximum revenue generation. And just a brief background on PowerCurve. PowerCurve designs, manufactures and installs power upgrades for wind turbine blades that help their clients make their wind projects more profitable.

PowerCurve’s Technology has been thoroughly tested and validated, and they continue to work closely with universities to refine it even further. And the upgrades have been installed on blades worldwide. Nicholas, welcome to the program.

Nicholas Gaudern: Hi Allen. Really nice to be back talking to you.

Allen Hall: So you have some new software tools at your disposal, and anybody that knows PowerCurve knows you guys are really good at aerodynamics to understand how blades produce power.

You wanna, you wanna describe what this little software breakthrough

Nicholas Gaudern: is? Yeah, I’d love to. So, so what I want to talk about today is, is our new tool that we’re calling a. It’s it’s an a p i, you can call it, it does something and you’ll get some really insightful data back. Maybe just take a, a step backwards.

It’s all about taking a, a data driven and an engineering driven approach to understanding the performance losses that you will get from damages and particularly leading edge erosion on a blade. So, We’re about modeling those losses and telling you how you can deal with it. Yeah,

Allen Hall: because there’s a lot of information on the internet today link.

You see a lot of it on LinkedIn talking about leaning edge erosion and, and how you should repair it and it should be repaired and how quickly should be repaired. Those are really interesting data points. Right. But I think the real critical decision is if you should repair it and how. How, how far how many years can you wait?

Right? Because it’s all about spending money and spending money wisely on your turbines to keep your production power up. But there’s really is not a tool out there today that tells you, Hey, we need to repair this turbine, but not that turbine. Yeah, exactly. And I think what

Nicholas Gaudern: we’re addressing here is, is this is not a new problem.

Leading edge erosion blade damages, and they’ve been around for a long time. They also think there’s been a lot of acceptance that they cause a power loss. How you go about quantifying that in, in a reliable manner in the field consistently is something that from what we see hasn’t, hasn’t been achieved.

So we set out with the goal of, of kind of cracking this problem, doing it in a way that users common data and existing data. We didn’t want to go out and put this big new data requirement into the field to be able to do these kind of calculations. It’s happened quite quickly, I think in the last few years, but I would say, you know, a huge percentage of the installed base of wind turbines stay are inspected annually, at least annually, by a drone.

And the primary focus of that drone inspection has been to assess the structural condition of the blades to look at whether there’s any critical cranks or when you should fix them so you don’t have a catastrophic failure, and that’s super important. There’s no link to aerodynamic performance and it’s simply not good enough to say, oh, well I’ve got the Cat five structural damage.

Therefore, that’s bad aerodynamically. It might not be, you know, you might have a crack in a certain place. These kind of almost invisible aerodynamically, but as very bad structurally. So what we do is we take existing damage metadata. So all of the data is captured by the drone companies, the drone inspection companies.

Then we map that onto an aerodynamic model of the Pacific turbine in question. So for example, if we’re out analyzing a a GE 1.5 or a Vestas V80, whatever, we will have built an aerodynamic model of that turbine. So we are taking as many assumptions outta the system as we can. So we look at the real data, so the real damages that were on the turbine at that time.

It’s mapped onto an ergonomic model of that real turbine, not some generic fence.

Allen Hall: So most wind turbine operators have a bunch of drone images and data they’ve accumulated over the last couple of years. So in that dataset, I just wanna understand this clearly here. So in that dataset that the operators already have, there is metadata that describes the damages that they have on the blades, the leading edge, erosion damage, maybe some lightning damage, maybe impact damage or a crack even.

All that damage is metadata already in their existing data that they have purchased.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. So that data exists and that’s an important thing with, with the system that we, we can go back historically, so we’ll, we’ll go forward. There’s new inspections are made, but if you want to see what has happened in the last three years in terms of your AEP loss from leading edge damage, we can do that because that metadata.

Will exist. Obviously there’s differences between drone inspection providers and the level of detail, et cetera, but fundamentally, it, it exists.

Allen Hall: So I have this metadata and I put it through the PowerCurve, API which you’re calling AeroVista. So I take this existing data set already purchased, I sent it to PowerCurve.

You process it and tell me how much power that blade is losing and what, what that means in terms of revenue generally. And you can do that over, over a trend line over the last couple of years. So I can kind of see how that blade is doing. Is it basically being the same or is it really dramatically dropping off?

Can you can tell those sort of things just from the metadata.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. And, and this is the great thing about using a real turbine model. What has been really enlightening when we’ve been adding more and more models to the system is that you could have a hundred meter diameter rotor. Designed by one manufacturing with some erosion on, and you could have another one that’s designed by a different manufacturer that basically looks the same, you know, on the photographs.

But when you actually run the calculation, you may find that one of those rotors loses way more energy than the other. And that’s because it’s not just about how the erosion looks, it’s about what is the aerodynamic shape of the blade. What do the airfoils look like? What’s their performance? What’s the store margin?

What r p m is this turbine spinning at? So again, we’re taking all this into the, into the model that is just cutting out all these assumptions that you’d otherwise have to make if you didn’t build a model. So what you’ll find is that even on the same wind storm, it’s notionally seen the same weather, and it’s been maintained notionally in the same way.

The spread of AEP losses across the site can be quite dramatic. You may have half a percent loss on some turbines over here, but you might have a 2% loss on some turbines over here. So again, by using the real data of each turbine combined with this neurodynamic model, it allows you to get some incredibly valuable insight as to how much money you could be losing due to blade damages.

Then it can guide you to say, well, which turbine should I do something about first? Because if you just looked at the structural categorization, say you needed to pick half your fleet to repair in one year, you may say, oh, well all of them have cat three damages, so I’ll just go and I’ll repair some of them because you know, I can’t tell the difference.

The reality is though, that. That’s not a full picture of the aerodynamic behavior. It matters where that damage is, what type of damage is, and these are all the things that we’re modeling. So you can say, right, I’m gonna go and fix these five turbines first, which they were killing me in terms of performance and spend your money wisely because you can’t fix everything all the time.

We have to prioritize, and it’s a tool for prioritization.

Allen Hall: So when I hook, hook up your a p i and I, I go look for these losses that I’ve. Most operators have right now this is a pretty quick response time, right? You’re not sitting around waiting for months for the, for PowerCurve to come back. It’s like put the data in outcomes, the information, you’ll have it in a day or so

Nicholas Gaudern: under an hour, typically.

Wow. It’s, it’s really fast. So we, we built this in a very flexible and scalable manner. So, you know, we’re running it in, in the cloud on servers that can scale. So if necessary, you know, we can take hundreds of calls into the system simultaneously and deal with them really, really quickly. There’s no, there’s no handholding.

We’re not there checking, clicking buttons. This has been set up as a robust, scalable system, so the results come through incredibly quickly. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s very, very robust. Got a pretty high headroom and hopefully as we grow and people start to use the system, We can scale with it. That’s the beauty of these kind of modern cloud setups.

Allen Hall: So if I’m doing a drone inspection at the end of the summer period, which, where we’re at, right? So a lot of companies like to take them at the end of the summer or at the beginning of the springtime just to get a status on where there are with their, with their, their damage. With, I get that, all that drone information, I get the metadata, I send it to PowerCurve and boom, within an hour I know what I need to do.

Or leading edge repairs. I, I can start scheduling people for next year now and tell them what they’re gonna be

Nicholas Gaudern: working on. So instead of having to, to guess right now, is it worth putting on LEP or is it worth re cleaning the blade or is it worth putting on bgs? You know, there’s all these options available to a customer and we’re hoping to just provide some insight into what is most valuable because.

You know, LEP is not some silver bullet. LEP itself changes the leading edge shape and therefore aerodynamic behavior of as section. And depending on the LEP that may be next to nothing, but it might not be. So if your erosion is, is really mild, you could use our tool. You might see, oh, I’m only losing 0.3% AEP from erosion.

Well, it’s probably not worth putting on LEP from an aerodynamic perspective because the LEP is probably in the same order of magnitude for losses, whereas m losing 3%, well, I should probably do something, but you know, you can then have a conversation with us about vortex generators, about LEP, about blade repair and will help to guide you as to what you should, what you should do.

So I think that’s the thing here. Once you have. A piece of data that is come from an engineering driven approach, you can start to make much more confident decisions about how you go about maintaining your fleet and carrying out more effective asset management. Does it

Allen Hall: also provide some information, like you could get another half a percentage point in AEP by putting on VGs?

Does it provide that sort of additional bonus information besides just the leading edge erosion issue?

Nicholas Gaudern: So as of today, you know, you’ll get the loss, you’ll get the loss broken down by blade as well. You’ll get a heat map that shows you which of the damages are contributing most to that loss. And yeah, as we get more customers, using the system will enhance the functionality, but driven by what the customers want.

I think, you know, we want to get it out into the market and used, we don’t want to. Assume what an operator wants to know. We want to have dialogues, get people using it, get the data flowing, and then we’ll start adding the functionality that that is most useful to the operator.

Allen Hall: So there, Avista a p I has been out for a little while now and you’ve, you’ve had some initial customers use it.

What’s the feedback been?

Nicholas Gaudern: Very positive. I mean, I think this system as, as a whole started life a couple of years ago. When we really started developing the engineering and the process behind how you do this. And then last year at keen Power in the U S A, we launched a, a version of the system.

It wasn’t called Avis at the time, but it was with sky Specs. So Skys specs had been a great partner in this service from a very early stage. So we launched this service with Sky Specs. So that was, yeah, over a year ago now. We’ve run a lot of turbines through the system and what we’ve seen is that it’s given operators the ability to really start looking at that prioritization of prepare and help to drive internal conversation about loss, because without a number, very difficult to talk about budgeting our air VGs or LEP whatever.

So the feedback has been strong in, yes, it is a valuable tool to prioritize. But we’ve also heard some interesting things that we maybe didn’t latch onto straight away, and that was, well, if you have historical data, you’ve got three years of inspection data, you’ll start to see a trend. You can then start to project that forward to plan future O&M campaigns on the expectation of erosion.

But then you could even take it one step further and say, well, I’m planning a brand new windstorm of this turbine type. What did I learn over the last few years in my other wind farms? And then you start to look at, you know, very important financial decisions about, you know, write downs and assets and depreciation, all these kind of things.

So once you’ve got that data set, there’s a whole world of decision making that it can open up. And I feel at the moment we’re scratching the surface. Yeah. And again, the more operators we engage with, I think more we’ll, we’ll learn that. Yeah, so the

Allen Hall: data analytics becomes really interesting there because it’s an unexplored area of leading edge erosion.

The progression on a sort of a national, even global scale with this a Vista a p i tool. Yeah, you can, you could then, theoretically you start projecting when a farm does certain turbines, maybe they don’t do some turbines, right? Because it may not be worth it. But it may give a, be the industry a better sense of.

What is the proper timing and regimen to do leading edge erosion repair?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And we’ll start seeing patterns. We’ll start seeing, you know are there particular turbine models that seem to suffer more than others, for example, you know, and that, and that would be very valuable. So for people making investment decisions.

So I think we’ve, we’ve got a really nice grounding in the tool. As I say, we’ve, we’ve done a lot of work with Skyspace. There’s a lot of calls gone through the system and that’s helped us to really tune it over the last year. Now it is open and open to the world where we can take a p I calls from, from anyone as long as they’ve had the right setup process with us.

So we’re in dialogue with a number of major drone operators around the world. I think to me, in the near term, it’s more likely we’ll be taking calls from the inspection providers because they’re typically the ones in control of the database and the tagging. And all that kind of stuff. Of course, if an operator themselves has a, has all that data to hand and they wanna go direct to us.

Sure. I just feel that, from what I see in the industry, it’s generally the, the inspection providers that are, that are best placed to call us, but it, it’s pretty operator specific I think. As wind

Allen Hall: farms start to hibernate in the Northern Hemisphere, now’s the time to get that drone data, start taking a look at it and figure out what the plan is for next season there.

I know we have seen a number of operators already planning for next year trying to get resources lined up because there’s only so many resources out there. ’cause you need to. Figure out who’s going to do some of these repairs and get them booked. And now’s the time that, that that happens. Using the ar vista a p I would be a quick way to, to help organize that for an operator.

Nicholas Gaudern: For sure. The data’s there. The data’s there. You’ve just got to use it. Where we are adding another stream to the decision making process and. It’s simply not good enough. You know, in these days of challenged energy prices and contracts and, you know, wind farm deployment, you’ve got to squeeze everything you can out of your assets, and that means using the data you have available.

Don’t throw away your two 3% ap. Do something about it, but it’s very hard to do something about it if it’s not visible to you, and that’s what I hope this tool is, is going to bring this. Consistent, reliable methodology to, to give that insight. The Arrow

Allen Hall: Vista, a p i is a result of years of collaborations with local universities.

You that help to basically define how this process works. You wanna describe what happened behind the scenes there? Yeah, so

Nicholas Gaudern: I think, you know, PowerCurve, we’re, we’re a small company, but we, we leverage a lot of things we’ve done over the years and we’re, we’re very proud to have been awarded, you know, EU funding, so, so r and d projects into TEX generators and leading edge erosion and, and other aerodynamic topics over the years.

And our current E U D P funder project is called lca, or Leading Edge Roughness Categorization. So this is a project that’s being led by D T U, the Danish Tank University, and then there’s a number of o e M partners. So you’ve got investors. Siemens, gaa, Len, Sue Long and then PowerCurve, part of the, the consortium as well.

So we are really proud to be part of that project with, with all of these big players in the industry and led by such a, I would say, a world renowned organization of D T U when it comes to wind energy research. So the whole idea of this project is to come up with a universal. Categorization system for leading roughness that is considering aerodynamic and air, air acoustic penalties.

So I think there’s this problem at the moment, like there is with structural tagging of images that individual companies individual operators, they have their own tagging criteria. What makes it to level three or a level four? And I think that can only go on so long before. The industry has to kind of come to a decision about what is the standard for tagging.

’cause then that allows much more effective conversations to happen between OEMs, operators and service providers, third parties such as ourselves. So over the next couple of years, Leah Cat is gonna be working to do a lot of wind tunnel testing and engineering analysis such as C F D, computational fluid dynamics.

To help move us towards this universal acceptance of a classification system for damages. So leading edge erosion. So I think this is a great project. I think it’s a lot overdue and with the partners involved and sort of the financial muscle of the OEMs, I think we can get a long way towards towards the goal and having that classification.

So, Keep watching this space. I’m sure you’re gonna see LinkedIn Post and other media from the OEMs, from D T U, from Power Codes explaining what we’re doing and, and why and how we’re contributing to, to the knowledge base around Leady and

Allen Hall: George. Right. And, and how do the operators connect up with the AeroVista?

A p i like would they just reach out to their local drone company? Do they contact PowerCurve specifically? Do they hook up with you on LinkedIn? What’s, what’s the process here?

Nicholas Gaudern: So I would, I would say if if your drone inspector hasn’t already spoken to you about it, then just contact Power Cove directly and we’ll, we’ll make it happen.

So if you want to go through your drone inspection provider, we’ll then talk to that provider. We’ll have an integration process with them to make sure they know how to talk to the a p i, you know, they send the, the right style format, et cetera, et cetera. The, the boring stuff. And then, yeah, they’ll get the data pipeline plumbed in and where.

We’re good to go. So it’s, it’s a simple process, you know, it’s, it’s designed to be light on, on input effort, but, but heavy on output value and just turn it around really quickly. As we were talking around earlier.

Allen Hall: So Nicholas, I really appreciate you being back on the podcast. We love having, you know, there’s just so many cool things happening in Blade Aerodynamics inefficiency, so it’s, it’s good to get the download.

Maximizing Wind Turbine Power with AeroVista – A Conversation with Nicholas Gaudern

Renewable Energy

NextEra Buys Dominion, China Outpaces Vestas

Published

7 hours ago

May 26, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

NextEra Buys Dominion, China Outpaces Vestas

NextEra’s $67B all-stock Dominion deal targets data center alley. Plus China’s top five each outpace Vestas, and 80% of Swedish wind producers ran at a loss.

[00:00:00] 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

Speaker 6: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with three other people, Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and, uh, Yolanda Padron down in Texas. Uh, we’re all getting ready to go to American Clean Power in Houston, Texas, where it will be practically 150 degrees and 99% humidity, and we’re all looking forward to those warm, wet days that we will spend

It is very similar to New Orleans. New Orleans was also very warm and very humid. So there’s a trend going on here with American Clean Power, although we were up in Minneapolis not too long ago, uh, but I guess we were in Phoenix too, so we gotta find a middle ground, everybody. Can we go someplace like– [00:01:00] Rosemary says we should always go to the Maldives, Tahiti.

I got a lot of requests from Tahiti from people. We never go there. We never go to Hawaii.

Rosemary Barnes: I’ve suggested Hawaii so many times, and I’ve been told that Americans are not gonna be given permission from their manager to go to Hawaii.

Speaker 6: It’s kinda like Las Vegas.

Rosemary Barnes: Maybe one day we’ll make it to San Diego or something and get, um, beach adjacent facility And if your presentation is too boring, then everyone will be at the beach.

So that will be how we ensure quality control of the speakers, which is a big problem at these events now, right? Like you can’t, um, there’s– It’s more like the norm is fairly boring sales pitches rather than informative discussion.

Speaker 6: We used to have OMNS, when I say we, I mean the wind community used to have OMNS out in San Diego in Coronado at the Del Coronado is, I think that’s the hotel name.

And the one time that I went, I think I’ve been [00:02:00] there, I would say one time, uh, everybody was outside on the, at the beach, basically on the patio. So they’re holding all these talks and discussions, and it’s… I’m looking around, it’s like me and five other people. Everybody else is out there next to the water.

So they had a problem with that. So I guess what they figured, either make it really cold or make it really hot, so it forces everybody into the climate-controlled conditions of, uh, the, uh, auditorium to watch the speakers. Maybe that’s the, the plan. All right. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about what happened with NextEra and Dominion because there’s going to be a huge merger.

So if you thought utility business was boring, it’s not anymore. NextEra announced a sixty-seven billion dollar all-stock deal to acquire Dominion Energy, a move that would create the largest regulated electricity utility in the world by market cap. Uh, [00:03:00] the combined company would serve about ten million customers accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, where I’m based, and South Carolina with one hundred and ten gigawatts of generation across renewables, nuclear, and natural gas.

Uh, but the real driver here is data centers, of course. Dominion sits in the heart of Virginia’s data center alley, where it has connected more than four hundred and fifty data centers, and NextEra is building thirty data center hubs through its NextEra Energy Resources subsidiary and has partnered with Google Cloud on paired generation campuses.

So together, they would control about a hundred and thirty gigawatts of large load pipeline. And the question is whether the regulators will let it happen. And I think that’s, having watched some of the news articles over the last several days, uh, the news broke pretty much Sunday morning or late Saturday night that this was happening and [00:04:00] The first thing that came to mind, are the regulators going to let it happen?

And the concern is going to be, and you can well imagine how this plays out, they’re going to drag Dominion and NextEra up to Washington, D.C. and berate them about how electricity rates cannot increase due to data centers. And if they don’t swear to that, then this merger won’t happen. That’s my interpretation of what’s about to happen.

It may not, but how does this play out? How does everybody else on the team at Uptime see this play out?

Matthew Stead: Seems like a good idea to me. So more economies, more geographic diversity, more opportunity for renewables.

Yolanda Padron: I can’t speak to Dominion, um, but being relatively close to the NextEra engineering team, they, they really know their stuff, right?

So I think it’s something that should kind of give us a, a sense of relief here that it, [00:05:00] it’s a big team, but it’s a really smart and competent team taking over a big undertaking.

Speaker 6: You would like to see renewables and data centers work together. This would be the perfect match of the two, right? The, the largest renewable owner management company, along with the biggest data center, uh, region.

Connecting those two would make infinite sense, but in the, our political environment today in the United States, that may be the reason to oppose it.

Matthew Stead: Yeah, why would it be a bad idea?

Speaker 6: Windmills, Matthew. Windmills. Windmills are bad. Can’t even call them wind turbines anymore. They’re windmills.

Rosemary Barnes: I used to mock people for saying windmill instead of wind turbine, but then when I moved to Denmark, um, you know, who, you know, have a firm, firm ownership of modern wind energy, or at least did back 10, 20 years ago They say windmill when they speak English.

Um, the Danish word for it is vindmølle, um, which means windmill. [00:06:00]And so I can’t… I couldn’t maintain that, that energy because like, am I gonna, am I gonna mock these, you know, like everybody at that company knew more about wind energy than I did. Am I gonna mock them for not, not knowing the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine?

No. So yeah, that’s, that’s something that I, I don’t do anymore.

Matthew Stead: That is really valuable to know, um, Rosie. I must admit, I did not know that, and I would mock people saying w- windmill, so thank you for setting me straight.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there are plenty of, um, plenty of people who don’t know the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine and think, “Oh, why you only got three blades with so much air between them?

You know, you’re gonna… Y- if you would just put twice as many blades, you’d get twice as many energy. Everybody who works in wind energy is just an obs- obvious complete and utter idiot.” Um, so there’s that kind of person, but then there’s also the industry. Another fun fact that they call the blades wings.

Uh, um, yeah, in Danish they call them blade wings, which they are. [00:07:00]

Speaker 6: In Spanish, isn’t it shovels? ‘Cause when I always translate those, uh, Spanish questions over to English, it always comes out shovel. At least early on, y- the early versions of Google Translate would translate it to shovel. Like, what are they talking about shovel on a wind turbine?

That doesn’t make any sense.

Yolanda Padron: Yeah, like a shovel or a stick or like a, what you row with.

Speaker 6: Oh, like an oar. Okay, that makes a lot more sense. Okay. Thank you, Yolanda.

Matthew Stead: I think it’s really interesting that, um- We don’t have much material on NextEra, Dominion. Um, yeah, we just don’t think it’s a good– We all think it’s a good idea.

There’s no controversy here.

Speaker 6: Oh, there’ll be controversy. Don’t worry about that. There’s always controversy. Welcome to America.

Matthew Stead: But among the four of us-

Speaker 6: We all think it’s great.

Rosemary Barnes: Well, it’s, um, I mean, some of the interesting facts that I read was that they’ve got 130 gigawatts of load, um, that they’re bringing to the table, and 51 gigawatts of that is contracted data centers.

So that’s, that’s interesting. [00:08:00] And I think large amounts of new data centers on the grid are controversial because in– if you’re not very, very careful about how you integrate them, then you can end up just making electricity more expensive for everybody in the area that doesn’t necessarily get, you know, profit sharing from the data center.

So, um, I think that, uh, like, you know, the wind ind- in the wind industry, we’ve obviously been through and are still in the phase of where social license, um, community acceptance is one of the most important things, maybe the most important thing when you’re developing a new project. And I think that we’re just at the start of that realization for data centers as well.

Companies that are building the, the data centers, they need to do more than what’s required of them because otherwise they have big risks of project delays. It’s millions of dollars delay, um, for the delay for, um, yeah, for every, every day that, um, a data center is held up. And so how can you afford to risk annoying anybody?

[00:09:00] You know, you just wanna be like the just, just perfect, um, addition to the community so that everybody is just happy and, and lets the project proceed. So, yeah, I thought– think that that’s, that’s quite an interesting aspect that I think I’m gonna s- we’re gonna see changing as, you know, all these planned data centers become real data centers.

There’s a real risk that everybody hates data centers soon as much as they, um, hated wind tur- um, wind farms for a while.

Yolanda Padron: For the consumer, aren’t there, like, I don’t know if they’re in Virginia, but aren’t there price caps too for the market? When you’re– When it comes to how expensive the megawatt hour is?

Speaker 6: Not necessarily. Re- remember that AEP in Ohio, uh, was requiring data centers to buy electricity at a certain amount. Because they both basically committed not to raise prices for electricity to the local communities, and that would be really hard to do. And okay, great, if, if they can pull it off, awesome.

But there’s already a lot of [00:10:00] pushback about it, and it hasn’t even gotten to the point of being real yet, so it’s only gonna get worse. I see. And all the data centers are gonna be up in space no matter what. Everybody’s talking about building data centers on the ground. There’s no shot that that’s gonna happen.

I’m just telling you, ’cause they can’t do it. They don’t– They can’t build gas turbines fast enough. There’s just limitations there, and transformers and everything else. It’s gonna be in space. It’s so much easier.

Yolanda Padron: And all the approvals you have to get and everything.

Speaker 6: It will be easier to do it in space In space, you don’t have neighbors.

Matthew Stead: I said it before, it’s just crazy. The key issue around data centers is it’s actually the transmission rather than generation. I mean, you know, at least in Australia, and correct me if I’m wrong, Rosie, but you know, less than half the price in Australia is generation. The other half is sort of retail and transmission and this and that.

And so actually, you know, the generation cost shouldn’t really increase. It’s really the transmission and the, the poles and the wires, which are the problem. And [00:11:00] you know, to your point, Rosie, social, social license for poles and wires.

Rosemary Barnes: I’m actually really surprised at Allen, ’cause normally, Allen and I have this, um, you know, we’ve played out this scenario probably 50 or 100 times over the, over the years with emerging technologies, and it’s always me that’s like, “You know what?

I think, uh, I think there’s something to this one.” Um, and Allen always poo-poos it, and in this case, Allen’s, Allen’s excited. I, I’m on Allen’s– So I also, I also think space data centers is, is a thing that’s more likely to happen than not, at least to some extent. Um, so yeah, but I think, Matt, you’ve got the more mainstream opinion.

Speaker 6: The voice of the common man. I

Yolanda Padron: think for all of our listeners out there, this is the first time Rosie and Allen agree on anything, so round of applause team.

Speaker 6: It won’t last long, Yolande.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s not true because, you know, nine out of 10 new technologies I also think are stupid. Um, so Allen and I agree on the bulk of them, but then of that one in 10, you know, nine out of 10 of those I, I [00:12:00] like and Allen doesn’t, so this is the, you know, the one-tenth of the one-tenth, so.

Speaker 6: I don’t like gas turbines. Can we all agree we don’t like gas turbines? It’s– That would be insane to scale.

Rosemary Barnes: You know what? I, I don’t have a particular problem with gas, gas turbines. I don’t want a lot of new gas turbines. Um, I guess that that’s– We can all agree on, on that. I don’t think the– I think we have most of the gas turbines that we need, or at least, um, will in the next couple of years.

And, um, yeah, I do think that their existence supports faster electrification, um, and faster growth of wind and solar. So I’m definitely not someone that wants to see all gas turbines turned off tomorrow.

Speaker 6: No, I don’t, I don’t want to turn them off. I’m

Matthew Stead: just saying you can’t get to scale.

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Speaker 6: millions.

Well, for the first time, five Chinese turbine manufacturers have all individually outpaced Danish wind giant Vestas in annual installations. Goldwind topped the global list with twenty-nine point seven gigawatts installed in twenty twenty-five. Behind them, Envision put up twenty-one point eight, Windy nineteen point eight, Mingyang at eighteen point six, and Sany at fifteen point one gigawatts.

Vestas came in [00:14:00] sixth at twelve point nine gigawatts. The Chinese dominance was fueled by an enormous domestic market that has accounted for about ninety-four percent of those five manufacturers’ sales. Uh, but exports are obviously growing out of China too. The five captured nearly sixty percent of the hundred and seventy-eight gigawatts installed globally in twenty twenty-five, a year that saw the world market grow forty percent over twenty twenty-four.

So Vestas still holds the crown for cumulative installations at two hundred and one gigawatts, but the gap in annual volume is now almost impossible to ignore. So Vestas has a lot of competition over in China. The, the amount of, uh, gigawatts coming out of the largest manufacturers in China is quite impressive, almost, well, more than double than what, uh, Vestas is doing, and Vestas is doing a pretty brisk business.

What are, what are the outcomes of this, everyone? Is, can this be sustained in China [00:15:00] for very much longer? Can they continue to, to create at, at that rate?

Rosemary Barnes: Yes. Okay, move, move on to the next segment

Speaker 6: Well, that’s a, that’s a huge amount of gigawatts coming out of China. And if 94% of it’s staying in China, eventually you run out of China to put wind turbines in.

Rosemary Barnes: They– I mean, we’re a long way from running out of places in China to put wind turbines in, because China is gigantic. A lot of it is not that populated. They’ve got a lot of offshore area still. But I just think it’s gonna follow the same playbook as, as solar probably, where you see, you know, early on heaps of domestic market, which is totally rock solid because it’s not relying on people to see a positive business case in doing it.

You know, like it’s really… You know, targets are, are really mandated and people make sure that they are met. Um, and then the incentives are also different as well. Like my understanding is that [00:16:00] there’s a lot of incentives about installation of megawatts, um, and then, you know, the, the operation is like, we’ll figure that out as we go.

The volume, the number of manufacturers that are there, they’ve got, you know, like such a great supply chain all there in the same area, so you can move fast and like I, I don’t see anything can get in the way of, you know, continuing to pump out these turbines at that speed. It’ll keep going until, you know, the government basically decides we’ve got, uh, enough wind energy now and then puts the, the brakes on it.

And, you know, that’s what we’ve just been through in solar recently. China is, um… You know, they’ve just– they’ve got a big economy and they’ve just got like rock solid resolve to follow through on, on things that they commit to. Um, whether we can, you know, argue about whether it’s a smart strategy or not, but you know that they will follow it, they will execute on, on it.

I don’t think anyone would, would say that they won’t. So I think, [00:17:00]can it continue forever? No. But do I think it can continue for another 10 years? Yes. And is that long enough to cause massive problems for any other manufacturer? I think also yes.

Matthew Stead: Hey, Rosie, can I ask you a question? You know, obviously there was some cable was proposed, you know, between Australia and Singapore.

Do you see China going in that direction? You know, putting rather than pipes with gas in it, um, pipes with electrons? Uh,

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see China– I’m actually working on a video at the moment about a global sub-sea grid, and I just interviewed, um, uh, Xlinks, you know, that was originally a project from Morocco to the UK, and then the other one, which is super cool, um, we might have an argument about the plausibility of it, is NATO L, which is just in like early development stages.

It’s going to connect the UK to Canada. Um, and yeah, so that’s, um, a few thousand kilometers long. The ocean depth is maximum [00:18:00] three, I think, kilometers, maybe even a tiny bit more than that, um, which is like right on the edge of what is possible. N-none of those projects really actually rely on big technological improvements.

Um, they’re possible with today’s technologies. Um, but I don’t see China doing so much of that. I think that one thing that might actually stop that is that, um, when you have big interconnectors like that, I think the engineering part is not the hard, the hard part. I think that the, it’s the politics. I do see them exporting their, um, you know, they’ve got really good ultra high voltage DC technology, but the transmission lines, they have exported a little bit.

There’s some projects in Brazil that are Chinese made. There’s one in India. I don’t actually know if that is Chinese made, but you know, like I could really imagine them also rolling out projects in Africa, for example. Um, but beyond that sort of thing, I, I wouldn’t tip China as the country to, you know, develop a global [00:19:00] sub-sea grid.

Speaker 6: Do you think the low solar prices have hurt the wind manufacturers in China a little bit? Obviously, there’s a lot of solar panels that are able to be shipped immediately, which is what’s happening right now. But turbines, not so much. It’s a little harder to do. But you, you would think that a lot of these countries and communities would be putting in wind But solar is so cheap right now that, that is what is winning at the moment, and it must be hurting the Chinese wind manufacturers, you would think.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think they’re really in a competition with each other, um, at the moment. In Australia, I think yes. I think that, um, the, like, roaring success of solar and especially batteries is, um, making wind less appealing to develop. But globally, I think that it’s, you know, it’s a race between, um, fossil fuels and renewables.

It’s a race between energy security and continued reliance on, you know, countries that [00:20:00] you don’t really want to rely on for fossil fuels. I think that those are the, the much bigger, um, competition at the moment. It’s a bit short-sighted because, yeah, wind and solar is really easy for the, the part of the, uh, energy transition that we’re doing now, and, uh, if you just don’t build any wind until you reach the limit of solar and batteries, then you’ll find yourself quite far behind.

So that’s what we’re really struggling with in Australia and finding, like, what is the right level of government, um, support because people… You know, like in an electricity market like Australia, you’re not supposed to rely on governments, you know, planning out the system and deciding what thing to build, and I think that that has been a real strength of the Australian market that it has, you know, the government has got out of the way.

It is hard to see, um, us getting to where we need to go in a orderly fashion without some planning for this, like, lumpy middle part of the energy transition. I don’t know. What do you think, Matt? Is that how you see it in Australia as well?

Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think there’s a place [00:21:00] for everything, and, you know, wind, solar, battery is a perfect match and the right places for the right thing.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s really hard because, you know, like, when you look at the system as a whole, you know, like you plan out what, what full energy system is cheaper and better, you know. Is it the, you know, the current fossil fuel system and all of the, you know, annual maintenance and, um, improvements like, um, extensions that need to go along with that to support, you know, things like data centers and population growth, or is it the fully renewable system?

And, you know, if you look at the end state, then I don’t think that many studies or maybe any studies come to the conclusion that anything other than renewables is the, the cheaper, better system. But it’s just, it doesn’t mean that every step along the way is cheaper, and so you end up with this, yeah, like this hump in the middle that you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta get over if you wanna get from one to the other, and it’s, um, it’s complicated.

Speaker 6: I just listened to a podcast about this half an hour ago, uh, and it [00:22:00] was very contentious. And I won’t get into the details of it, but it was just one or the other. We wanna have all petroleum-based, coal-based generation in the UK, or we want zero emissions. They never got into anywhere in the middle, which is where it’s going to have to be.

So why don’t we talk about that? I– It doesn’t… The political atmosphere of the UK is, is a little unstable, as we’ve all read in the newspapers and seen online. Uh, but it, but it’s just causing the both sides to go to extremes. And on the renewable side, some of the arguments that are being made were so outlandish that I could hardly continue to listen to it.

Same thing on the gas and coal side. Like, what are we gonna do? The UK is really in a pinch. They’re gonna have to do something, and it all– as Rosemary’s pointed out, doing nothing is real ex- it’s gonna be tremendously expensive too. So there’s, there’s gonna have to be a, a reckoning somehow, but it, it’s all tied to the [00:23:00] economy at the moment.

Like most things that happen in a country, decisions are made about what’s happening right now, not what’s gonna happen five years from now.

Yolanda Padron: Right. And to your point, like countries need to protect themselves, right? Like what are you gonna do, bank on world peace?

Speaker 6: That’s a bad bet historically.

Matthew Stead: But, um, how many, how many of those charts have you seen in the last one to years where you’ve got the, the fossil fuel, say the coal generation versus renewable generation?

How many of those, um, charts have crossed over in the last few years where, you know, renewables generation is, is higher than coal generation? It’s just, it’s happening all over the world. It’s just happening, and you look at the graphs, it’s just happening.

Speaker 6: It’s less expensive, so that’s why they’re doing it.

The decision’s made with the dollar. You know, the financing and the bankers and insurance are all gonna drive that, and it’s not gonna be the decision you, the homeowner, are gonna have a lot of influence on. It’s all gonna be done at a higher level, and it’s gonna be whatever’s cheaper and whatever’s available.

Back to Rosemary’s point, [00:24:00] solar is cheap and available, people are gonna do it. Wind is cheap and available, they’re gonna choose it no matter who’s in office, right? I… Yeah, that’s the engineer talking, not the politician.

Matthew Stead: Battery, wind, and solar is only gonna get cheaper. Is, um, is, uh, gas turbines and coal gonna get cheaper?

Speaker 6: They can’t. In order to get the efficiency up where they need to, it’s gonna be super expensive, which is what we’re at today. That’s why gas turbines are s- you can’t mass produce them, and that’s why they cost so much money. It’s a great business if you sell a couple a year. You can’t sell thousands of them.

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Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss [00:25:00] out. Visit peswind.com today. Over in Sweden, they built all the wind farms, and here at Weather Guard we’ve talked to a number of operators over in Sweden, so has EOLOGIX-PING, uh, and the– So but the wind farms and the customers haven’t really showed up, and researchers in Sweden have analyzed two hundred and forty-four Swedish wind power producers owning more than about thirty-seven hundred turbines covering eighty-five percent of the country’s total wind generation.

So it’s a pretty large study. They found that eighty percent were effectively operating at a loss in twenty twenty-four. The total sector losses reached six point three billion Swedish kronor, uh, about six hundred and twenty million euros. The sector’s profit margins fell to a negative fifty-one percent.

That’s right, negative fifty-one percent. Uh, and here’s the real paradox. Although wind production actually [00:26:00] rose from thirty-four point two to forty point six terawatt-hours, revenues fell for the first time in at least six years. Uh, the more they produced, the less they earned. And the real culprit is overcapacity.

So they have so many turbines up in northern Sweden, uh, that it’s driving the energy prices down, much like Australia. Uh, and the missing link is obviously transmission because it is big demand to the south. It’s just getting the power there. Vattenfall alone lost eight hundred and seventy million euros in its wind business in twenty twenty-four, and one of its subsidiaries curtailed seventeen percent of the potential production because of, uh, shutting the turbines down was less expensive than selling into negative prices, which would make sense.

So the price has gotten so low in Sweden that it’s better just to turn the turbine off and, and eat the loss than to generate power at a, at a negative price. This is a common theme [00:27:00] as wind has grown, and solar for the same matter, is that when you have so much of it, the price of electricity will drop.

And until you can get that power out to other areas that has high demand It becomes a losing proposition. How does this play out? Will the– Now will countries finally take transmission seriously and start to even out the grid? Is that where we’re going?

Yolanda Padron: I mean, I hope so. The idea of curtailing potential energy isn’t something new, right?

It happens here in Texas all the time. It happens in a lot of places all the time, um, just to, to not overflow the grid. And it makes sense, but it doesn’t make sense too much, at least to me, that in the same country you have parts of it where you have an electricity surplus and negative pricing, and other parts of it where you just, you don’t have enough energy for the whole, uh, region, right?

So, uh, I really hope they take it a bit more seriously than they, than they currently are.

Matthew Stead: Uh, I think the interesting thing about Sweden is [00:28:00]that they’ve got a lot of hydro as well, and so those two things tie together. Um, you know, much like Australia, we’re building the, like the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, um, hydro scheme, and, um, maybe that’s part of the missing puzzle is the actual, the storage element.

So if they had more pumped hydro, you know, they could, um, perhaps store that excess energy and then, then reuse it. But, you know, unless there’s no pipes from the north to the south, you know, that’s not gonna help anyone.

Speaker 6: Hydro is expensive. The more recent news articles I’ve seen about pumped hydro is it’s way less expensive to put in wind or put in solar or put in some batteries than to do pumped hydro projects.

It’s complicated. It’s a lot of construction, obviously, and, uh, the pumps and the equipment are not cheap. So, uh, yeah, so although if you do have hydro and it’s currently running, you would leave that alone, but I think some of the newer pumped hydro projects probably won’t happen. Even if they’re on the– have [00:29:00] been planned and, and even started, I think they’re really reevaluating that it’s probably cheaper to do batteries.

Matthew Stead: In Australia, in Snowy 2.0, I think the original budget was, was it 3 billion? And now it’s up to 12 to 15 billion.

Rosemary Barnes: Anybody that was working on that would’ve known that the price was very likely to blow out because that particular project has a really long tunnel. The two reservoirs that, like the reservoirs were existing, so you think, okay, that’s good, you save money.

But the expensive part of pumped hydro is the tunneling and then, and it’s a very long tunnel. Um, and it’s just so super predictable that when you have a super long tunnel, you one, increase the cost a lot, but two, increase the risk of a massive cost blowout. So I think it’s not a good predictor of, of projects as some other ones that are, that are happening.

I think the biggest problem with hydro is that, um, the project lives are so long, like 100 years e- easily, [00:30:00] but that doesn’t mean anything in today’s dollars, y- you know? So it’s like no one can, no company is gonna assign any value to the electricity they’re gonna generate in 100 years time, you know? So it’s, um, it, it’s really hard for it to stack up to, as a project today unless it’s a government doing it.

Matthew Stead: But I mean, once Snowy 2.0 is done, it will still be reasonably cost-effective as a long-term storage source.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If it had been made on time, then I think it would’ve, it would’ve been a real enabler for the energy transition for getting heaps of wind and solar. But it wasn’t done on time, and we barely we- storage isn’t our problem right now.

We have actually got lots of, of storage. That’s not what’s stopping people from building projects. So, um, I think it is a bit of a shame.

Speaker 6: Back to your point, Rosemary, how old hydro is in terms of electricity generation. I, I went to go look up when Niagara River, Niagara Falls in, in the States first [00:31:00] started producing power, 1895.

That’s how long we’ve been using water power in the States to create electricity. Hoover Dam, which also does something very similar, is in the 1930s, 1935, ’36, around that timeframe. So it’s almost been 100 years there too, 90 years. Yeah. It’s, it’s amazing. So you don’t plan for those, those pieces of, uh, infrastructure to run that long, but they do.

That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. And if today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review.

It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie, Yolanda, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:32:00] podcast.