Published

8 months ago

November 24, 2025

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Nordex Crypto Theft, Goldwind Turbine Asbestos

Allen covers positive developments like EDF’s 261 MW Serra das Almas wind farm in Brazil, Ørsted’s offshore progress in the US, and Shell’s hydrogen deal in Germany. Then the troubling stories: a Nordex technical manager caught mining cryptocurrency inside turbines, and the discovery of asbestos in Goldwind turbine brake pads across multiple Australian wind farms.

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!

The wind industry is having quite a week. Some stories are blowing in the right direction. Others… well… you’ll see.

Let’s start with the good news.

In Brazil… EDF power solutions just powered up the Serra das Almas wind farm. Two hundred sixty-one megawatts. Fifty-eight Danish Vestas turbines spinning in Bahia state. Six hundred thousand homes… now running on wind.

Up in the United States… Ørsted is making waves with two offshore wind projects. Revolution Wind and Sunrise Wind. Cable installation is underway. Offshore substations are being commissioned. By next year… more than sixteen hundred megawatts will be flowing into Connecticut… Rhode Island… and New York.

Over in Germany… Shell is turning wind into hydrogen. They’ve signed a five-year power deal with Nordsee One. Starting in two thousand twenty-seven… offshore wind will feed a one hundred megawatt electrolyzer. Clean electricity making clean fuel. To power everything from trucks to chemical plants.

But now… the other stories.

In the Netherlands… a technical manager at Nordex wind farms thought he’d found the perfect side hustle. He had the keys. He had the access. He had giant wind turbines spinning out free electricity twenty-four hours a day.

And he had a plan.

Between August and November of two thousand twenty-two… the man installed three cryptocurrency mining rigs at the Gieterveen wind farm. He plugged them straight into a Nordex router. Inside a substation.

Then he drove to Waardpolder. Another wind farm. He climbed inside the turbines. And he hid two Helium network nodes. Connected them to Nordex’s internal network.

Month after month… while the turbines spun… his crypto wallet grew.

Nobody noticed. Why would they? He was the technical manager. He belonged there.

But then… Nordex got hit with something much worse. A ransomware attack. The Conti cybercrime crew. The company was scrambling. Investigating their networks. Looking for breaches.

That’s when they found his mining rigs.

The courts heard the case earlier this month. The prosecutor was not amused. This wasn’t just theft. This was a man who’d been trusted with critical infrastructure. Giant turbines. Automated systems. Industrial networks.

The prosecutor wanted two hundred forty hours of community service.

But the judges saw something else. A first-time offender. A man suffering from depression and burnout. Someone who admitted everything.

They cut the sentence in half. One hundred twenty hours.

Plus four thousand one hundred fifty-five euros in damages. About forty-four hundred dollars.

And if he doesn’t pay? Fifty-one days in custody.

If he doesn’t complete his community service? Sixty days in jail.

The court made one thing crystal clear. He’d shown no concern for the potential disruption to the turbines. No concern for the company’s trust. No concern… that he was running a side business… inside critical infrastructure.

But here’s the story that’s really stopped the industry cold.

In Tasmania… at the Cattle Hill wind farm… inspectors made a disturbing discovery. Asbestos. In the brake pads. Inside the turbine tower lifts.

Now… Tasmania is just the beginning.

The turbines were built by Goldwind… And Goldwind supplies turbines to wind farms all across Australia. New South Wales. Victoria. Queensland.

WorkSafe Victoria and SafeWork NSW confirmed Friday… asbestos has been found at multiple wind farm sites. White Rock. Gullen Range. Biala. Clarke Creek. Moorabool. Stockyard Hill.

The brake pads were imported into Australia. Importing asbestos has been illegal there… since two thousand three.

Beijing Energy International says the risk is extremely low. Access to affected turbines is restricted. They’re working with regulators. Testing is underway.

But here’s what everyone’s thinking…

Last week… asbestos was found in colored sand products from China. Schools shut down. Childcare centers closed. In the Australian Capital Territory. Queensland. South Australia.

Now it’s wind turbines.

So the wind industry had quite a week.

Clean power spinning up in Brazil.

Offshore cables going down in America.

Hydrogen flowing in Germany.

Cryptocurrency crimes in the Netherlands.

And asbestos… hiding inside turbines… from China.

And that’s the wind industry news for the 24^th of November 2025.

Join us tomorrow for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

https://weatherguardwind.com/nordex-goldwind-asbestos/

Renewable Energy

Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

Published

5 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

Allen covers the V236 blade failure at He Dreiht, Maine’s first full-size floating turbine, and Japan’s wind-powered data center.

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!

Happy Monday Everyone

The V236 just had a bad week last week.

a blade failed on one of the turbines at ENBW’s [EN-bay-vay’s]

HE DREIHT [hay DRYT] offshore wind farm

in the German North Sea.

Nine hundred and sixty megawatts.

There are 64 of those V236 machines.

The project hit first power just last November.

ENBW says no one was hurt.

VESTAS says it has launched a root cause investigation.

But a blade failure on your flagship turbine …

at one of Germany’s biggest offshore wind farms?

That will be a headline.

And the industry is watching.

Now … from the North Sea … to the coast of Maine.

The UNIVERSITY OF MAINE has done something

no one in America has done before.

They put a full-size floating wind turbine in the ocean.

And it is delivering power to the grid.

The platform is called VOLTURNUS [vol-TURN-us].

It was assembled onshore … in Brewer, Maine …

then towed thirty miles down the PENOBSCOT [peh-NOB-skot] River

and out to sea.

No specialized heavy-lift vessels.

No deepwater pile driving.

The hull is made of concrete … sourced locally.

Not imported steel.

Eighty percent of the best offshore wind in America

sits over water too deep for fixed-bottom foundations.

Floating platforms like VOLTURNUS

could change that math entirely.

Meanwhile … in Japan …

wind energy just found a brand-new customer.

Data centers.

EURUS [YOO-rus] ENERGY and TOYOTA TSUSHO [TOY-oh-tah TSOO-shoh]

have broken ground on a wind-powered data center

in HOKKAIDO [hoh-KY-doh].

It is the first data center in Japan

directly connected to a wind farm.

The facility sits next to the KOBAOKO [koh-bah-OH-koh] Wind Farm …

forty-two megawatts …

with a private power line running straight to the servers.

And here is the bigger picture.

Japan has most of its data centers packed into Tokyo and Osaka.

HOKKAIDO has the wind … but not the demand.

So instead of sending the power somewhere else …

they are bringing the demand to the wind.

TOYOTA TSUSHO already operates ten wind farms in the region …

more than five hundred megawatts.

They are planning a much larger data center cluster by twenty thirty.

Ten to twenty megawatts of capacity.

And speaking of scale …

China just laid out its five-year plan for renewables.

The target?

A fifty-three percent jump in renewable energy consumption

by twenty thirty.

According to BLOOMBERG …

renewable power use should rise to about

one-point-eight billion tons of coal equivalent …

Wind and solar generation alone

should nearly double …

from two-point-three trillion kilowatt-hours

to four trillion.

And here is the part that matters for reliability.

China wants wind and solar … backed by storage …

to provide twenty percent of electricity

during peak summer and winter evening hours.

That is double the current level.

Three hundred gigawatts of peak generation from renewables.

That is not an aspiration.

That is a published national target.

Now … before we go …

a story from the other end of the scale.

In KONGIGANAK [KAHN-gig-uh-nak] … a village in western Alaska …

they built five wind turbines.

There is no grid connection.

No transmission lines running to the outside world.

For years … the village ran on diesel generators.

The turbines changed that.

But they created a new problem.

Sometimes … the wind made more electricity

than the village could use.

No grid to send it to.

No big battery bank to store it in.

So the engineers came up with something simple.

They put special ceramic heaters inside every home.

When the wind blows hard …

the extra power flows into those heaters.

Dense ceramic bricks soak up the energy as heat.

And when the wind dies down …

that stored heat slowly releases into the house.

In Alaska … where winter never seems to end …

surplus wind power now keeps homes warm

and cuts diesel bills at the same time.

There is a shift in the wind energy business at the moment.

It used to be utilities buying megawatts.

Now it is tech companies buying uptime.

Remote villages buying independence from diesel.

And entire nations buying credibility on their climate commitments.

Each of those buyers has a different definition of reliability.

And every one of them needs turbines that can run for years and years.

The wind industry has never had more demand.

The question is whether the hardware

can keep up with the ambition.

`That is the state of the wind industry

for the twenty-seventh of July … twenty twenty-six.

Join us for the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tomorrow.

Vestas V236 Blade Fails, Japan Wires Wind to a Data Center

Renewable Energy

Examining the Huge Correlation Between Religion and Violence, Ignorance, and Misery

Published

18 hours ago

July 26, 2026

Alice Rush

Bertrand Russell reminded us that the primary driver of religion is fear and encouraged us to look at life fairly and honestly. He urged us to try to resolve our mysteries with science, rather than superstition.