Published

2 years ago

February 19, 2024

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

New Insurance Group, EDPR Enters Australia, IRA Costs Surge

We discuss an offshore renewable insurance consortium launched by SCOR and Acrisure Re and EDPR’s acquisition of Australian renewables firm ITPD to expand in the Asia Pacific. Plus, a look at the rising budget costs for clean energy tax credits in the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act and what it could mean for the growth of wind, solar and electric vehicles.

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.

Reinsurer SCOR has launched a new offshore renewable energy insurance consortium with partner Acrisure Re. The consortium increases SCOR’s total deployable capacity to over 180 million dollars. SCOR says. Its technical expertise and understanding of client needs positions it as a leader in providing insurance. To the growing offshore wind industry.

So Phil, another insurance company hopping into the offshore market, there seems to be a lot of people putting their toes in the water at this point on offshore. 180 million is not a lot of money in that marketplace, but it does seem like people are testing the waters.

Philip Totaro: It’s an interesting thing.

Certainly good to do with a partner. The challenge with offshore is obviously with the scale, like you’re saying, 180 million and deployable. Capital is not going to really make that much of a dent in the overall global market, which is, well over, a trillion dollars in investment even at this point.

The reality is that, insurers have seen a lot of losses onshore and offshore. It’s good that you’re getting, new companies involved. It’s, score is increasing the scope of their. What they’re able to address. The challenge is that, I think these kind of partnerships.

Are going to be necessary moving forward because insurers and in particular reinsurers have had a really rough go of it. With some of the catastrophic losses that they faced, particularly in offshore over the years where, entire projects have had to have, the main shaft bearings replaced on the turbine or.

You’ve had other kind of significant fleet wide issues in, in some cases. Overall, it’s a good thing. It’s a good deal. But it’s a market that’s getting tougher and tougher to get into.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, the important thing to understand about the insurance market in any industrial capacity, specifically, we’re talking about onshore, offshore wind here, is that you don’t have an insurance company and that’s your insurance.

You may have an insurance company, the broker, whatever that runs the thing, but you may have 20, In an offshore win, you could have 20, 30 companies in here. So if SCOR comes in on a project, say there’s, right now we talked earlier today about Dogger Bank A. Dogger Bank A is going to have two, two policies there.

One for construction, one’s when they turn into operations. There’s going to be a turn off, turn on date there. That, say, we’re going to go to the policy when it is in operation, that policy may be written by, who knows, I don’t know, Aeon, that’s the broker, but the Aeon will have 20 different, 30 different companies behind them, each one of them taking 2%, 3%, 5 percent of that risk, there may be one lead on there, and that lead on something like an offshore wind project may only be 7.

5 percent or 10 percent or 15 percent as opposed to onshore where it may sometimes be 25, 30, 40 percent because, that asset, that wind farm may be worth 100 million or 200 million where you go to an offshore wind farm, it’s worth a billion. Nobody has that kind of capital. So a lot of times the lead is someone who really knows offshore stuff Njord, they put that thing out because, the big pro, Case in the North Sea a couple of years ago, where it was almost a billion dollar claim for all of the export cables or interarray cables on an Ørsted wind farm.

A lot of people took a huge hit on that one. So having more players come in and be able to spread that risk out. They’re gonna, they’re good possibility of making some money. That’s what insurance companies do. They, say people say banks run the world. Insurance companies are the ones who run the world.

You can’t get a loan unless you get it insured. So that’s how you can look at that. But yeah 180 million for that segment, not that much, but they’ll get a couple percentage points on a wind farm and be able to learn a little bit more from that consortium that they’re working with outside of even Acrisure.

Good move on their part, and it’s going to be, we’re going to need more capacity as we, as the world changes and we get more offshore wind as well.

Philip Totaro: A lot of the insurance companies have also said that insuring bigger turbines is an even bigger risk than it was with, upwards of the 10 megawatt, offshore turbines that we have in the market today.

So when you start talking about 15, offshore wind turbines that’s gonna necessitate more risk diversification.

Allen Hall: Portuguese energy giant EDPR has acquired Australian renewables firm ITP Development, adding one and a half gigawatts of renewable energy capacity. EDPR secured ITPD to significantly expand its presence across Asia Pacific markets.

The deal provides EDPR with an entire project pipeline, plus an operational team to support rapid growth in Australia. Now, Phil, Australia is becoming a really hot market for renewable energy. It has been for the last 20 years, but I think the world is awakening to the fact that there’s a lot of opportunity there.

What is the IntelStor research point to for Australia?

Philip Totaro: There’s 4. 3 gigawatts under construction right now. With another, close to eight gigawatts of consented projects that are, haven’t started construction yet, but they’re in the pipeline and in, a later stage of development.

But they also have something upwards of 90 gigawatts of proposed projects in Australia. Now, a lot of that’s not actually going to get built. But even if a fraction of it does, let’s say 25 percent of it that’s still a rather substantial amount. Getting in on, a company that’s got a pipeline already is a great thing.

And bringing a brand name like EDPR to the Australian market is a fantastic idea where You know, there’s ample opportunity there. There’s likely to be factories built in the market. Again, if some of those projects, that 90 gigawatt pipeline that I talked about, some of that actually transpires.

There, Vestas will definitely do a factory in Australia. That’s going to make life easier for a company like EDPR if they want to be able to source turbines. The bottom line is there’s a huge opportunity. The challenge for Australia is they don’t quite have the transmission infrastructure that they need to be able to accommodate that much capacity.

Or, Any kind of an export market. They’ve talked about taking the electricity, converting it into hydrogen, maybe doing export that way, or building cables to Indonesia or other New Guinea, et cetera places around even talking about doing an export cable between, a new export cable between Australia, New Zealand the bottom line is there’s, opportunity there for them to be able to be a net electricity exporter.

Or hydrogen exporter, but the reality is, it’s a good thing to, to get into a hot market and Australia is definitely one of the top five markets.

Joel Saxum: I would say that one of the big things about the changing market in Australia, we have heard. Through the grapevine that some of the developers and operators are starting to push back on FSAs.

So that is going to turn into a little bit more of a market where there is going to be some place for some ISPs and some other people in there. So it’s a rapidly evolving, growing, changing

Allen Hall: marketplace.

In the United States, the Congressional Budget Office has significantly raised expected costs for the IRA Bill’s energy and climate policy provisions.

A greater investment and participation is seen in climate friendly technologies like electric vehicles, batteries, wind, and solar power. The CBO now projects 428 billion more in costs related to the law’s clean energy tax credits and other measures. above original estimates. Now, Phil, I think the original estimate was about 370 billion over 10 years when they passed that law.

And now they’re talking about more than doubling the amount of expenditure for the IRA bill wind and solar being big drivers, obviously, and then electric vehicles and some of the EPA regulations and some of the states are forcing electric vehicle uptake faster, so that ends up being more credits going out to, to, to buyers of that.

This is causing some instability, and I know it’s just getting talked about now, but what, what happens here as we go forward and those costs continue to rise?

Philip Totaro: Keep in mind as well, you’ve got, as of 2024, 52. 7 gigawatts of wind that is at least 10 years old or older. And I forget precisely what the number is for solar, but they’re also going to start seeing over the next, 5 to 7 years a ramp up in the amount of capacity that they could potentially repower.

Certainly, wind repowering is going to be a huge driver to this cost increase. And it’s because companies are starting to get wise to what, NextEra, Invenergy, and MidAmerican and Berkshire Hathaway have been doing for the last, five or so years, six years. You know everyone else is starting to jump on that bandwagon and say hey my power purchase agreement is only like 22, but I can also get an extra 26 or whatever the indexed Prices for the PTC this year.

I forget what the CPI number is But let’s call it around 26 a megawatt hour that the PTC is more than what you’re getting from your PPA that definitely makes it lucrative to want to repower your project with that much capacity, again, 52. 7 gigawatts of wind, that’s 10 years old or older and would qualify for a PTC requalification with a refurbishment or a full repowering.

That’s something that’s gonna cause that number to potentially increase even more.

Allen Hall: They’re talking about trillions of this, Joel. They’re talking about this reaching one or two trillion dollars. And a short amount of time.

Joel Saxum: I see it happening. I think that there’s going to be more people to take advantage of it.

The, when you get the mass consumer in there, proposed changeover in just passenger vehicles, that’s 7, 500 a crack. Now that’s a lot of money. So that’s just that’s one thing and that’s, of course, a drop in the bucket compared to what some of these PTC credits are, but you also have 45X and 45C and 45 this and 45Y and there’s the hydrogen and there’s so many parts of this pill.

And some of them are capped, right? There’s sections of that thing. And we talked with David Burton from Norton Rose Fulbright. He said, this one’s capped. There’s only so much and it’s competitive to get, but this one is uncapped and the ones that are uncapped. Are the ones that are just going to they’re just going to run wild.

And if we really plan on getting this energy transition done the way we think we can those costs are going to grow and grow. And you have big ones, right? Some of these 30, instead of taking PTC on some of these offshore wind projects, the developers are taking the 30 percent ITC credit.

And at 30 percent of one of these big offshore wind farms could be 300 million.

New Insurance Group, EDPR Enters Australia, IRA Costs Surge

Renewable Energy

EchoBolt’s BoltWave Makes Bolt Inspections Easy

Published

2 days ago

May 28, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

EchoBolt’s BoltWave Makes Bolt Inspections Easy

Pete Andrews from EchoBolt joins to discuss ultrasonic bolt inspection, the Bolt Wave device, and blade stud defect detection.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here.

Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah.

Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00]

You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world.

Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe.

Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then.

Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.

Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on.

Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems.

So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces.

Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.

Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on.

The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,

Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.

Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people.

If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor.

So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving.

By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology

Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is.

And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago.

You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly.

That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big.

Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement.

People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind.

And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone.

You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened.

They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints.

Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right?

Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well.

Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course.

Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things.

They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen.

Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware.

Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something we could put in the hands of a customer.

Joel Saxum: Yeah.

Pete Andrews: Which meant Ebot scale was limited to what our own team could go and do, and regionally as well.

You know, so we’re UK based. Probably 60% of our customers are uk, but now we have this Northern Europe offshore wind is obviously on our doorstep, but then increasingly we’ve done more and more in North America, so we’ve probably been to five or six sites now in North America and expect that to be a growth market because we can, we can now ship the devices over there, give some virtual training help.

Uh, [00:10:00] people set themselves up and then that opens up that market, you know, so it’s been a real change in strategy for us, but has allowed us to have far more impact than we otherwise would just try to be a pure service.

Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the big problem in the states of a minute, which are the root bushing or inserts that are loose in some blades.

When you lose that pushing, you also lose the tension on the bolt that can be measured. Is that something you’re getting involved with quite a bit now because of just trying to determine how many bolts are affected and, and where we are on the safety scale of can we run this turbine or not? Is that something that EE bolt’s been looking into?

Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I’d say there’s sort of two halves of what we do. There’s the, there’s the bulk wholesale monitoring of. Typically static connections to eliminate this routine retitling where it’s not needed typically, typically. But then we have these edge cases of certain [00:11:00] connections and certain platforms that have known bolt integrity problems, and we are working with clients to really, um, manage those integrity risks.

Blade stud is an absolute classic, you know, sort of, I think almost every turbine OEM on some, if not all of their platforms has got. Embedded risk into their blades, pitch bearing connections. Um, so yeah, exactly as you said, our customers are using the technology for two things really. One is to ensure the bolts have been tightened to the preload that was specified or the target window.

And quite often we find there is an opportunity to increase the preload and therefore increase the resistance to fatigue failure. So. You know, particularly on older sites where the bolts perhaps not in the condition they were on day one. Well, they definitely won’t be. Um, when people have gone and retti them, they haven’t got back to where they, they should be.[00:12:00]

So we can prove that and increase a bit of that resilience, but then also start to look for the segments around the joint where, um, the bolt might start loosening or failures are occurring, and find areas where they can really hone in. And actively manage risk. And that sort of leads to what we’ve decided to do for the next year, particularly with Blade Stud in mind, is evolve this technology.

So whilst it’s also measuring the elongation, we will do a defect scan at the same time. So you’ll monitor your blade stu, um, connection and we’re hoping that we can set the device to flag to you there and then. We believe this bulk has got a defect while you’re here, get it changed out before it fails and, and all the knock on problems, um, from there.

Joel Saxum: So what you’re just pointing to there is a, is a workflow, right? So to me that is typical [00:13:00] of some of the amazing, innovative companies in the UK that I’ve run into throughout my career. And that is, you’re a group of SMEs, you know, bolted connections. That’s what you do, right? But then you’re like, hey. If there’s a tool, we could make a tool that would make our lives a bit easier, then it’s like, well, we could make the entire industry’s lives a little bit easier as well.

So let’s iterate on that. And now you’re able to send these kits around the world to look at these things. Hey, you have a problem with this specific model. We can help you with this because we know the failure mode and we know how to look for it. Let’s do that for you. Also here, you’re doing bolt bulk measurements.

We got that for you. But it all kind of flows back to the fact that Echo Bolt is a team. A bolted connection, SMEs that are making tools and being able to also provide consulting if need be. Yeah. Right. Um, to, to an entire industry. And I think that, um, this is my take on it, right? Wind is stop number one. I think you guys are gonna do a fantastic year, but there’s a lot of, uh, opportunity out there in bolted [00:14:00] connections as well.

Allen Hall: A tremendous amount blade bolts being broken from defects in the crystalline structure. What appears to be a more. Rapidly developing issue across fleets that I’ve seen. I went to a farm this summer and the number of blade bolts that were there on the table that were broken on the conference room table was And the whiteboard office.

Yeah. Yeah. This one,

Joel Saxum: this one.

Allen Hall: Your hard head is not gonna protect you from this one. It’s, it’s, it was this, um, I couldn’t imagine the amount of time they were spending hunting these things down. And of course, the only way they were finding ’em was they were broken. You like to catch ’em before they break because it becomes

Joel Saxum: a safety risk.

Just not too long ago we saw an insurance case where there’s an RCA going on and it is pointing at an entire tower came down. Right. And it is pointing at a mid, mid tower section bolted connection. How often do you guys run into those problems? Or are you contacted by insurance companies or anything like that to, to take a peek at those?

Pete Andrews: We haven’t done anything directly for insurance [00:15:00]companies, but we have been engaged by. Engineering consultancies that are doing RCA type activities. Okay. Um, things like at the end of defect liability periods mm-hmm. A customer has, has seen, they’ve had a lot of, uh, issues from an OEM, maybe an OE EM has offered a modification or an upgrade, assessing whether that upgrade is actually solved the problem or not.

We’ve got involved in, um, but the tower. Issue specifically. It’s actually very rare we find, um, problems with tower connections, but where we do is often where they haven’t achieved good flange flatness, ah, during installation or the bolts have been, let’s say, left out in the elements for a period and lubrication has been, has deteriorated before the bolt’s been installed.

So there are cases out there, but what I would say is. [00:16:00] To think about your whole life cycle, so ensure the bolt’s installed correctly and we can help with that with a QA to say, yes, this torque or tightening method has got you to the load that you want. Do some through life monitoring, but often if you install it correctly, it will it’s operational life.

You will have very little concern. But then in the UK market, we’re increasingly getting involved again at the end of life, right? Life extension where life extension turbines are 20, 25 years old. How does an operator make a decision to carry on running without replacing all bots? Um, and that’s where increasingly we being asked to use the technologist just to say, actually the joint is fine.

The bolts have run in a good, um, operational envelope. Run them on. Don’t replace a hundred percent of them like you might have been recommended to from your, um, yeah. Turbine supplier side. [00:17:00]

Allen Hall: So Pete, if someone’s doing a repower where they’re basically putting a new one in the cell on an existing tower, they’re making a lot of assumptions about all the bolts from the ground up that they’re gonna be okay.

And I know we’re talking about that. We’re in a lot of installations where. If the turbine has gone through a repowered or two. So now those bolts are 20 years old. Yeah. And trying to get ’em to

Joel Saxum: 30 35. 35

Allen Hall: 40. Yeah. I don’t know what they’re doing. By those bolted connections. Are they just like replacing the bolts?

Are they hitting ’em with a hammer again? Is that the, yeah,

Pete Andrews: I mean, they might replace ’em, but you’ve got a problem with the foundation bolts. ’cause they’re obviously often anchor bolts set into concrete, so you have to reuse them and. With the projects, both in wind and in process power industry with the chimney stacks to try and ascertain whether foundation bolts that are set into concrete are still suitable for operations.

So look for corrosion losses, look for [00:18:00] defects. Um, so yeah, they’re all things that need thinking about before you just make the snap decision to repower. But I think

Joel Saxum: a lot of that, uh, going back to a couple minutes ago, you were talking about at the commissioning phase, making sure that you have proper qa, QC of how these things were installed day one, and then making sure that before commissioning of a turbine, they’re checked.

I think that’s really important. We’re starting to see that in the blade world now too, where we’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now when you talk to operators, they’re like, we’re getting inspections done on the blades before they’re hung. Or at the factory before they’re hung. After they’re hung.

Like they want a good foundation baseline. Are you seeing that in the bolted connection world too?

Pete Andrews: Yes. Sort of. It’s just emerging for us. What we’ve found is, so most of our customers are in the operational phase ’cause they are the ones feeling the pain. Yeah. Of the routine retitling work. When they do major components, they sometimes engage us to come and say, can you check [00:19:00] before and after the blade was removed?

What was it? Before we took it off from a a bolt load perspective, what is it afterwards? Can you then recheck after 500 hours When we retalk it? And what we’ve seen there often is the initial install hasn’t got them to where they needed to be and they’ve had to go and do the break in maintenance or the 500 hour REIT to get the bolts to the right load.

So one of the questions that we have is whether. Some of the defects are actually being initiated very early on in that initial running in period and whether if, if actually you’d taken the time at, at the point of assembly to make sure you were correct, whether that avoids some of the knock on integrity concerns.

So yeah, it’s interesting area.

Allen Hall: Well, bolts are what hold wind turbines together and you better know you have the right. Tension and [00:20:00] torque on your bolts to get to the lifetime of the wind turbine and to, and to check it once in a while. And I know there’s a lot of operators I can think of right now in the United States that are sort of doing that job somewhat.

I I think they have missed out on opportunities to save a lot of money and to call it echo bolt. How do people get ahold of you? Because that’s one thing I run into all the time. Like, Hey, hey, you gotta talk to Ebol, call Ebol. How do they get ahold of you?

Pete Andrews: So the easiest ways are via our website. Which is echo bolt.com.

Um, LinkedIn, you’ll find us at Echo Bolt on LinkedIn. Reach out. Our email would be info@cobolt.com. So any of those route and you’ll, uh, reach me and the team and more than happy to speak to you about any of your faulting concerns or problems. We are, uh, yeah, we’re passionate about your problems.

Allen Hall: Pete, thank you so much for being on this podcast.

I, it is great to actually see you in person and see the bolt wave technology. It’s really [00:21:00] impressive. So anybody out there that needs bolt tensioning to checking tools, you need to get ahold of Pete at Echo Bolt and get started today. Thank you Pete. Thanks guys. It’s great to be here.

EchoBolt’s BoltWave Makes Bolt Inspections Easy

Renewable Energy

Carbon Capture and Synthetic Fuels

Published

3 days ago

May 26, 2026

Alice Rush

As we’ve noted in the past, the idea of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is completely unfeasible, since 99.96% of the air around is something other than CO2 (mostly nitrogen). However, there are environments that change this equation radically, cement plants being one of them, where the concentration of CO2 emissions is as high as 30% (versus .04%).

Now, this brings the subject of synthetic fuels into the realm of possibility. Sure, if you want to make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, you’ll need two other things: hydrogen (which can come from electrolyzing water), and a considerable amount of energy, as these processes are heavily endothermic, meaning that energy must be supplied from external sources.

The good news is that we have enormous amounts of off-peak wind and nuclear that are wasted every day. Please see: Doty WindFuels.