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Revolution Wind Cancelled, Section 232 Investigation
The crew discusses the Trump administration’s cancellation of Revolution Wind and US Wind, despite billions already invested. They analyze the Commerce Department’s Section 232 national security investigation into wind energy and new tariffs on steel and aluminum. State governors are responding differently to federal pressure, with Connecticut negotiating while Maryland pushes back against the coordinated assault on offshore wind projects.
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!
You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your hosts. Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Rosemary Barnes is in Australia. Joel Saxo is in the great north of America of land we call Wisconsin. And Phil Totaro is in lovely California, and as we’ve been talking off air before the show started. There’s a lot of news this week. We are not going to get to all of it in this episode. There is no chance of that.
But I wanted to start off first with what’s happening off the coast of Connecticut with Revolution Wind and Ted and the stoppage there, and also the more recent news about US Wind, which is a project off the coast of, of [00:01:00]Maryland and uh, the administration. A couple of days ago decided that, uh, they’re gonna pull the permits from US Wind.
And, and that has created quite a, a firestorm within the states because if you think about revolution wind, that was gonna power like 350,000 homes up in Connecticut and Rhode Island and US Wind, which was nearly as far down the line, was also gonna power a great number of homes off the coast of Maryland.
Now both of those have stopped. Uh, and as I pointed out in a recent Substack article and on and also on LinkedIn, and I think everybody has seen this, that pay attention to what the governors had done. ’cause this is the same thing that happened to Empire Wind and Ecuador a couple of months ago. Where, uh, empire Wind got shut down.
The governor of New York went to the administration and said, Hey, what’s, what gives they negotiated an out, which is that New York was gonna allow more gas capacity and gas lines [00:02:00] into the state. That same thing is, I think is happening in Connecticut and the governor of Connecticut is, uh, has vowed to work with the administration to.
Get revolution back up and running. In fact, there was a interview today, we’re recording on a Wednesday where he was on television basically saying that, that there’s, uh, the art of the deal still exists. You can’t cancel a deal after the art of the deal has been signed. Which that’s a good point. Right.
Uh. Connecticut is trying to negotiate this, and they have been talking to the state of New York, Maryland has taken a different approach and Maryland’s governors, Westmore is saying, quote, canceling a project set to bring in $1 billion in investment, create thousands of good paying jobs in manufacturing and generate more Maryland made electrical supply is utterly shortsighted.
All right, so Maryland’s taking a different approach and is, is sort of punching back hard instead of going to the negotiation table. [00:03:00] Is there more to this than what we can see outwardly? Or is there a lot more, uh, to it in terms of what the administration is trying to do? Or is this all about expanding the role of gas in Democrat LED states?
I
Joel Saxum: think you’re on it there, Alan. I think it’s not even Democrat led states. It’s globally because it’s the same rhetoric that the administration pushed to the eu. Hey, tariffs, tariffs, tariffs, or you’re gonna accept our LNG. Um, and it was a part of the promises made on the campaign trails as well. And, and I, this is tough, difficult for the Uptime podcast here for me at least, because we try to stay away from political stuff on the show.
We want to talk about innovation and technology and what’s moving forward, but this is such a. A paramount issue within the industry right now. We have to talk about it, but I, I, I’m with you. Like, I think it’s, it’s, it’s just furthering the, the hydrocarbon agenda there. Uh, drill, baby drill, these kind of things.
Except for it’s, it, it [00:04:00] ignores some basic economic principles. It’s difficult. Is the US drilling more now than it was six weeks ago, Joel? I doubt it. You know what? As we read this, I don’t know, Phil, let me get your opinion here, but as we read this, I’m gonna look at the rig counts and see what they look like right now in the States.
Phil Totaro: Yeah. I would concur that this is mostly about wanting to, um. Promote gas. They’re, they’re trying very hard to come up with these clever ways of, of hiding or obfuscating why they’re really doing it. Um, in that they’re, they’re doing this under the guise of it being a national security concern, but. That doesn’t actually really exist.
Um, you know, as I’ve pointed out, everybody involved, all the contractors involved are either US European or one, you know, Australian headquartered company. Um, it’s been suggested that maybe this is because of, uh, the Coast Guard has, you know, some, some issues with [00:05:00] being able to, uh, conduct their operations that frankly doesn’t.
Well, pardon the pun, I guess, but that doesn’t hold water. It’s also been suggested that this was potentially, uh, due to cybersecurity issues, which even if that’s true, the reality of that is that’s an operational issue and has nothing to do with the construction of a project. This time, they’re putting more of the onus on, um, you know, BOEM and the Department of the Interior.
Uh, to say, oh, well there’s a national security concern. By the way. We can’t tell you what it is, but it’s very serious. So, you know, it’s just a way for them to avoid transparency and, and avoid accountability. That
Allen Hall: same issue happened, Phil, with EOR and Empire Wind. I think it was Politico or the Hill. Went after the order that shut down Empire Wind to see what the details were.
And basically they got a [00:06:00] page of redacted text or they couldn’t discern anything. 27 pages of redacted text. What is the point of that? Like if, if you’re gonna be so bold to do it, then just write down why you’re doing it. And I don’t know why they would redact it unless Ecuador asked for it. I mean, there’s only, there’s, there’s two ways to.
Have redaction happen. It’s, it’s pri it, it’s private information. It’s commercial information. They don’t want it out. Ecuador could say, I don’t want you to share that information. The other side is the more nefarious of the two is the federal government is unwilling to tell you why they shut the project off, which is not what is supposed to happen.
There’s supposed to be some, a little bit of visibility of why they’re making the decisions or not so much why they made a decision. What went into the decision? Like what were the, the, the pieces of information that let them, uh, make the final de decision to shut off Empire Wind for a couple of weeks?
Phil Totaro: And think about it this way as well, if, if we [00:07:00] don’t have, I mean, regardless of anybody’s personal politics or, you know, a dislike for a particular form of technology or, or power generation, you know, the reality is. Y the government of the day has to be able to provide citizens and, you know, corporations that operate in that, that country with guarantees.
You know, this is why I got so fired up about the whole Empire Wind thing in the first place was because you, you, these guys have spent billions of dollars on leases that they now are being precluded from being able to go build. Nobody’s offered to give them their money back on the lease. They’re just saying, oh, well that permit that you got issued, that we spent either seven years or 10 years, or however many years it was, and however many, you know, compromises had to be made and how many decisions had to be taken.
Uh, you know, at the end of the day, the government has to be able to provide people with certainty. And if you don’t do that, [00:08:00] then we don’t have a functioning government anymore. That’s scary because then the government’s out for its own interests and not the interests of the people and who is gonna end up paying the price for all this us as, as electricity consumers.
We’re gonna now end up in a scenario where you’re gonna get brownouts and rolling blackouts and, you know, within a few years, yeah, maybe they negotiate these deals to, to do gas. You know, off take or whatever. And, and Connecticut’s gotta put up with that, and Maryland’s gotta put up with that. But they need power.
And there’s power, literally right there. The project revolution was 80% complete corn to sted. The power’s right there just take it and they need it
Joel Saxum: now. They, they don’t need it. Five, six years down the line, when we were finally able to get some thermal generation plants built and some transmission built out, they need it now.
And that’s, that’s there. So like even Alan, like you say, is it, or like you asked, what’s the rig count? What does it look like for [00:09:00] production? Okay. Production right now, to be honest with you, doesn’t matter that much. Where are you gonna send it? Like when you’re, when you’re talking about LNG, you talk about Alan, you and I read this report the other day, um, about they, they measure it in billions of cubic feet is how they, like, this is how much we use to empower generation in the United States.
So right now, if we look at the LNG rig count in the states. It’s sitting at 122 as of a couple days ago, 122 rigs drilling gas wells and it was 103 at at inauguration. So we’re up 19 rigs, big drop in oil rigs and a small spike in gas rigs in the field. But at the end of the day, where are you gonna send all this?
Production.
Allen Hall: Well, you’re gonna send it to Europe. Right? That was the agreement between the European Union and the administration was just to send a bunch of gas over there, or for, or forget you to commit to buying what? Uh, $750 [00:10:00] billion worth of, uh, l and g and other energy products over three years, $250 billion a year.
That’s where they hope to send it. But you, you go back to, can they even burn it? They can’t. There’s no way they could burn it tomorrow. So the, the whole. Equation. It doesn’t equate the left hand side and the right hand side. Don’t match. Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. Theologic Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks.
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Phil Totaro: What’s the Australian perspective here? Like how are people around the world perceiving this scenario?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, uh, it’s actually interesting, um, ’cause you know, [00:11:00] obviously I pay a lot of attention to what’s going on in Wind Energy and the US specifically. ’cause, you know, you guys and other podcasts I listen to. But even in conversations that I’m having with people who don’t work in wind or even don’t work in energy.
Uh, they’re aware of, of what’s happened and just a bit shocked, I think. Um, I talked to a couple of business owners and they’re just imagining what would happen if my business, you know, was halfway through a huge project and then it just got canceled for, um, maybe non-transparent reasons or at least something that you could never have predicted, and it would obviously.
Kill any of small or medium sized businesses that had something like this happen to them. So it just feels a bit, um, a bit chilling and makes you just think how you can think that you’ve done everything right, but nothing is certain in business. And Black Swan can always come, come at you,
Allen Hall: you know who’s on your side, Phil, about, uh, getting reimbursed for these projects if they get canceled.[00:12:00]
Is the Secretary of the Interior, Doug Bergham because he was screaming bloody murder when the XL Pipeline was canceled in North Dakota when he was governor. He said that if there’s an executive order or legislation that kills a project where you’ve already invested hundreds of millions of dollars, then they need to reimburse you for that project.
When they do that. And now he’s on the opposite. He actually has the ability to do that, and he is sticking it to wind and solar and everybody else, and it’s like, oh, you know, you put a bunch of money in. Well, tough luck.
Rosemary Barnes: But did that happen for Keystone? What, what? What was the evangel outcome of that? They, they did get reimbursed or not?
Phil Totaro: No. The government never gives money back. When has that ever happened in the history of the universe? But the, here’s the real scary thing, and this is actually why, you know, I, I’m saying like, who’s gonna reimburse them? Nobody’s gonna do that, but I don’t want them to get reimbursed because here’s what happens if they do.
Right now, these guys, even though they’re not being allowed [00:13:00] to construct, they still own leases. If the interior department. Pulls back those leases and gives the money back. They can release that to oil and gas companies, even if they don’t go do anything. And then that those sites that were intended for wind are no longer available.
They can sign a 99 year lease and then we’re screwed. And, and that was actually my big concern with them terminating all the other lease auctions. Um, you know, the ones in Maine, Oregon, Washington, you know, north, South Carolina, et cetera. The Gulf, uh, that’s the real issue here is if, if they decide, oh, well, we’re not gonna allocate those areas for offshore wind, we’re gonna give leases to, you know, for a, a dollar an acre or whatever, to, to oil and gas companies out there.
You know, that’s gonna screw the industry even more because we’re never gonna be able to build anything.
Joel Saxum: Has anybody checked in with any of the companies that are off the coast over by you, Phil? [00:14:00] Oh, you right. Because there’s four or five lease zones off the, off the West coast. Now we knew those were gonna be long-term developments floating and all this stuff, but what’s going on at the boardrooms of those companies?
Do we know anybody that’s a fly the wall there? Because it would be interesting to see what they’re doing. Are they just fi, are they fire sailing employees? ’cause they’re like, oh, what are we gonna do here? Like, are we just gonna sit and burn money?
Phil Totaro: No. Uh, those, all those projects, especially the ones out here in California, they were all long-term prospects anyway.
We were not even gonna start construction during the rest of, of the president’s term. So it, it wasn’t really gonna be that much of an issue to not get issued a, a federal permit. Um, we’ve got. The state level permitting that needs to happen for the transmission infrastructure that hasn’t even started really yet.
Um, they’re still having studies and conversations about it. Uh, so the project development companies, um, there’s really only one that got kind of screwed by this. And it was a, a small company that [00:15:00] was doing a floating demonstration project off the coast of Vandenberg where they are sending up all these, um.
You know, Elon missiles or whatever, uh, that project was supposed to have started construction and in a couple of years, uh, and hook into the electrical infrastructure in Lompoc, where the, um, BEWA project is, uh, a wind farm. Um, uh, Strauss Wind Farm, the, that is unlikely to move forward. Um, but that was being done under kind of a special permit anyway.
It wasn’t actually in federal waters, it was state, uh, but they were also still dependent on, you know, different, um, approvals, uh, given the proximity to the, the, um, space.
Joel Saxum: Space at the same time that we, that these offshore wind projects that are. Uh, it’s like that book how you, uh, Rosemary the guy, you know how big things get done, these mega capital projects, right?
The other one that was not [00:16:00] under construction yet but had gone through 10, 15 years of permitting and is a massive blow to, I’m not even saying renewable energy. It’s a massive blow to the energy grid in the United States Is the grain belt express. That that just got the, all the federal funding pulled from it.
It was, and it was big time that that federal loan was like a four and a half billion dollars guarantee or something like that.
Allen Hall: Right.
Joel Saxum: Why? What is the point of that?
Phil Totaro: They’re gonna move forward with private funding, but they’re also, I believe in energy is still contemplating a legal challenge to that because once.
The, and this is actually was according to the guy who’s heading the, the doe’s loan office, once the DOE issues, that loan guarantee, they can’t pull it back. It’s, they’re, they’re not supposed to be allowed to be able to pull it back. So that’s gonna, that. Probably end up in litigation. But the problem, see, this is the, the real thing, you know, and I was even being interviewed by somebody and, and they were asking, well, what do the states do?
What kinda leverage do they have? [00:17:00] And the reality is they can, you know, make all these legal challenges and then negotiate gas deals and all that other crap. But even if they, they. Proceed with a legal challenge. Nothing’s getting built right now. Nothing’s getting done at a point in time when we need the power.
And even if the state wins, they’re gonna win the legal battle like two or three years from now when it doesn’t matter anymore anyway. And new administration’s gonna come in, presumably whatever administration comes in, Republican or Democrat, they’re gonna be more favorable than this administration regardless.
Um, because by that point in time, they’re gonna see the picture that, you know. Gas and nuclear and whatever else isn’t getting the job done. You need renewables. So we’re gonna have to, you know, soften the, soften the deal
Joel Saxum: a little bit. Well, we’re, we’re legislating ourselves into a energy hole, right? And it doesn’t make sense and go backwards and just cancel off the idea that it’s renewables or traditional power gen.
Energy generation sources and energy [00:18:00] generation, the ability to move electrons across the grid, and we’re just cutting the lines and just like, no, we don’t need that. We don’t need that as, as looking and going, like at the same breath, we’re gonna be an AI data center powerhouse, and we we’re gonna do, this is gonna be the new thing.
And it’s like, you need power for all that.
Allen Hall: Why you, you have two things going on simultaneously, Joel. You have the demand for power from AI data centers, and then on top of it you have. Wider fluctuations in energy usage. So base load is the opposite of what you want there. Uh, you can’t sustain it, right?
So if you put more coal generation, more gas generation on the grid, and Elon or Zuckerberg decides to turn on and off their AI data center, it’s gonna cause massive problems. The way the grid is established today, you have to install battery. And a lot of it to support those kind of loads. And going back to your earlier [00:19:00] point, if no administration is willing to do that, then there will obviously be problems on the grid.
And when the average consumer has a brown out or blackout and multiples of them, they will lose elections. It will be over very quickly because, uh, it doesn’t take long,
Phil Totaro: not for nothing. How do you think Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California? That’s literally what happened under Gray Davis.
We had, we had brownouts and blackouts and people got so upset about it. They literally did a recall election, got the existing governor out, and Arne got in kindergarten. Cop the Terminator. Kindergarten cop out of every movie that he’s ever been in. That’s the one you’re gonna, yeah, I just
Allen Hall: watched it
Phil Totaro: the other day.
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So there’s an old saying in Washington when you want to kill something, you just don’t shoot it once. You gotta shoot it multiple times. And this week. The administration proved that by launching a coordinated two front assault on America’s wind energy industry, uh, by combining national security fears with protectionist trade policies.
So it started about a week or two ago. With the Commerce Department, which initiated Section 2 32 [00:21:00] investigation, Phil, which means that there’s national security risks involved in wind. And, uh, I, I don’t know who was after us, but somehow they’re controlling the wind turbines with their minds. And, uh, that was the first thing.
So section 2 32, that can impose a lot of, um, restraints on particular items that are coming into the United States. And the second one. One is the Commerce department, uh, published a list, uh, making 400 and what about 407 categories of imported products? Uh, 50% more expensive with a tariff. And in that list is a.
Raw steel and raw aluminum, which a lot of wind turbines have those, those two materials. Uh, there was a big push by some of the steel producers and aluminum producers in the United States for those terrorists to be applied and they, they won, right? So now you have a section 2 32 investigation, national security, and you have tariffs [00:22:00] on the raw materials that pretty much make up a good bit of wind turbines.
Where do we go from here? Because to me, we’ve had the department of interior attacking wind, department of Commerce attacking wind, department of transportation attacking wind with the the trains crashing trains bit. Uh, so pretty much every department wants to chime in and show that they are anti win.
So, uh, they can be on, I don’t know, some news channel I suppose, but is this smart? Is this, because in in my head, when one administration does this, the next administration boomerangs it back even harder. And if one thing we’ve learned over the last 20 plus years in politics is that the other side must outdo the previous administration, this is not gonna go well.
Joel Saxum: It’s a pendulum, and the pendulum just is getting more and more power and it’s going a little further and further and further. We need [00:23:00]that pendulum to set to. To settle down, but it shows that it paints the pic picture of the political world in the United States where it used to be, eh, you know, it used to be 15% extreme on either side, 15%, extreme on either side, and 70% where you could have a conversation in the middle.
Now it’s like. 20% that you can have a conversation in the middle and 40% on either side that are so extreme you can’t get anything done or have a conversation.
Allen Hall: But also, Joel, don’t you think because of the population in the United States has grown significantly over the last a hundred years, it gets harder to make the pendulum move.
So even if you’re the federal government, if you want to really try to take out something, you have to work hard at it because there’s so. Many people and so much activity economically in the United States, it’s hard to move the needle, so they have to take extreme measures to try to move the needle. I don’t think it’s, I don’t
Joel Saxum: think it’s as much, this is a very broad topic, but I don’t think it’s as much population growth.
I think it’s the last 20 years in access to communications and access to information. I think we’re in a different, we’re in a such a different place [00:24:00] now with social media and the availability of, not even social media, it’s cancel social media. That’s a huge thing, but like how I can easily get news in my phone, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Just fed into me.
Allen Hall: Yeah. How is TikTok still alive?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, but I mean, fed, I mean, I got a little thing in my corner, my computer that pops up and tells me news. I got thing in my phone that pops up to tell me news. I got the TV pop up. Tell me news. It’s, it’s, there’s so many, so much access to information that it’s starts to easy to start.
Everybody’s starting to develop opinions, and then it’s like, oh, it feeds this algorithm. So if you have an opinion, you start clicking on things, it starts to drive you further down that path and further down that line. So people become a bit more extreme than they were in the past, whereas you didn’t have algorithm based news input before and it was just like what was on the tv?
Uh, it was the A, B, C or whatever the hell, Fox News, whatever it was just on the TV at 6:00 PM or 9:00 PM So. You have the, the, the way our society, the way our, and this is a, this is a dig a little bit, but the way our society is moving towards this capitalistic way of wanting to make money, why are [00:25:00]algorithms there in social media and news?
Well, they’re there to drive people to ads. We’re to make money and do things. So the, like, the, like capitalism is poisoning itself in some of these things. And why the pendulum’s swinging so far? It’s all the same thing in Australia, honestly. Yeah. It’s just, but it’s the same, it’s the same thing
Phil Totaro: globally.
But to go back to the, the whole tariff question, the, the reality of this is that it, it, it drives up cost. And what people don’t seem to understand about tariffs, a lot of people think, oh, we’re applying tariffs on some foreign country or foreign company. We pay the tariffs people, we pay them because even if we’re put applying a tariff on a foreign company or country, they raise their price by the amount of the tariff because they can’t just absorb that cost.
Even when the administration and the White House was trying to tell companies like Walmart, oh, you’re going eat the cost of that tariff. No, they’re not. You know, Apple’s not gonna eat the cost of that tariff. Walmart’s not going to eat the cost of tariffs. The prices are gonna go [00:26:00] up, we’re gonna pay for it, and that means that tariffs end up being a tax.
So my supposedly fiscally conservative government is now suggesting that I pay even more than what I already do to, you know, ensure that they can, you know, continue to demolish the industry that I make money off of. I mean, this is, this is not good times
Allen Hall: if they weren’t $37 trillion in debt. This may not be happening.
This is the rationale behind all of it is that, well, the US is in huge federal debt, so we’re gonna make some money. And if you’ve watched the discussion over the last couple of days about how much money the terrorists are gonna bring in in 2025, the number banty about is like a trillion dollars. Yeah.
Okay. Let’s say it’s a trillion dollars. Uh, what is the effect on the economy? Back to Phil’s point, you take a trillion dollars and put it into the federal government that didn’t have before. Does that make everybody better off? [00:27:00] Good question. Uh. We’re gonna find, you know what, what’s gonna happen? We’re gonna find out.
We have no idea what’s gonna happen. ’cause we haven’t been down this road before, not like this. Uh, here
Phil Totaro: is a positive thing. So while all this is happening, there are people that have been proactive and we’ve spoken a little bit about it on the show in the past few months, that have safe harbored turbines or they’ve already got, you know, projects under development and repowering projects that they’re already working on.
There’s gonna be at least a short term boom here, uh, where, you know, even though it’s, it’s kind of hysterical to me because for the last nine quarters in a row, wind and solar have actually combined in net capacity additions that outpace, you know, natural gas or coal or anything else. And that’s gonna actually continue for the next like year and a half.
And everybody’s gonna sit there and scratch the heads because they don’t understand how the momentum of all these, you know, the project development process [00:28:00] works. And, you know, so a year from now we’re gonna be having the conversation where, you know, wind and solar are still like number one in capacity additions, you know, for, for the second quarter of 2026.
And everybody’s gonna be like, didn’t we kill wind and solar? What happened? And, and they’re not gonna get it. Um. You know, so the reality is we’ve, we’ve got at least a, a something positive to look forward to where repowering is gonna still happen. Some, you know, greenfield project development still happening.
People who are proactive to take advantage of safe harbors under the old IRS rules are gonna still be able to build PPA prices are going up, which actually helps companies offset the, the lost production tax credit revenue, and that, you know, with a high enough. PPA that they could renegotiate. They may be able to repower, afford to repower even without the production tax credit.
Uh, so, you know, there is some, some hope and some optimism and, you know, let’s see how this
Allen Hall: goes. [00:29:00] It’s gonna be a fight. Bring it. It’s better that we fight it out now because it, it’s could be the laster off for LNG for a while. And coal. I mean this, this will be the death blow to coal really will be in the us, not elsewhere, but in the US it will be.
Phil Totaro: And talking about Joel’s pendulum concept, it’s like what? If, if it’s Democrats that go into a majority in Congress in 2029 and or come into the White House in 2029, the pendulum’s gonna swing pretty hard in the opposite direction of where we are right now. And a lot of these, you know, I mean, tariffs are gonna go away.
These mandates to buy LNG are gonna go away, uh, before they’ve even had a chance to really gain enough momentum. And we’re still gonna be at a point where wind and solar are cheaper than anything else to build as they already are today. And they have been for the last eight years. Uh, so. [00:30:00] Let’s, let’s get on with it.
Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for joining us as we explore the latest in wind energy technology and industry insights and nonsense politics. 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 and we’ll catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
https://weatherguardwind.com/revolution-section-232/
Renewable Energy
Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes
Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes
Bret Tollgaard from Sunrez joins to discuss UV-curing prepreg that cuts blade repair time by up to 90% and has recently recieved OEM approval.
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!
Allen Hall: Brett, welcome back to the program.
Bret Tollgaard: Thanks for having me again.
Allen Hall: So a lot’s happening at sunrise at the moment. Uh, there’s, uh, activity with sunrise materials on a lot of blades this year.
Over the last couple of years actually, ISPs, operators, OEMs, are realizing that UV curing is a huge advantage.
Bret Tollgaard: Turns out there’s a lot of value added, uh, to the entire process when utilizing UV cure, uh, pre-req.
Allen Hall: So the, the pre pres are, have been available for a couple of years. The qualification though was always the concern.
Has the OEM qualified this material? Are they gonna give you the blessing? Does this show up in the manual? If I call the OEM, are they gonna say they have talked to you guys? A lot of those hurdles have been cleared at this point.
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, great question. And we are happy to announce that we have finally been approved by a large OEM for use on the epoxy blade for now all general kind of repairs.
We have several more OEMs that have already passed their phase one mechanical testing, and we’re iterating through now [00:01:00] their, uh, secondary and tertiary kind of tests. And so we do expect to be fully qualified by several OEMs before the end of the year, which should make the ISPs integration and utilization of our materials much, much easier.
Allen Hall: So the, the, the problem you’re solving is repairs in the field for the most part, or sometimes in the factory. Mm-hmm. But a lot of times in the field that those repairs. It happened quite a bit. They’re the same repair, the same area, the same kind of thing over and over and over again. And wetting out fabric on site takes time.
Particularly if you’re using standard materials, you have to bag it. You have to apply heat in some cases to get it to kick, and then you have to wait several hours for it to cure. So in the repair cycle time, most of your time is waiting.
Bret Tollgaard: It sure is. Uh, and on top of all that, we all know that there aren’t enough technicians in this industry to even do all the repairs, uh, that would like to be done.
Yeah. And so to really kind of streamline all of that, [00:02:00] uh, we’ve rolled out a couple of new things and we’ve had a lot more interest in some pre consolidated preki patches for customers. Uh, if a particular blade model has an issue that is a standardized kind of repair. We’re actually now building custom prepregs, or we will build the appropriate width length, stack it, consolidate it, uh, wrap it between our films.
So then all the customer has to do when they get on site is, uh, you know, do do the appropriate surface prep. Scarfing, apply a little bit of our UV surface primer to the backside of that patch. But now they can go up tower, single peel, stick, roll out, and then they’re cured.
Allen Hall: And that’s a. How many hours of saving is that?
It’s gotta be like six, 12 hours of saving, of, of
Bret Tollgaard: labor. It’s upwards of 80 to 90% of the labor that’s gonna actually need to be done to apply that. Otherwise, and then same thing too. We’ve had a couple instances where we took a several day repair down to one, to two to three hours. And these are multi-meter long repairs that were fast tracked because we pre consolidated preki [00:03:00] everything.
Some were in flat sheet forms, some were much longer on rolls, where you’re actually then rolling out with a team. Um, and so we’ve been able to demonstrate several times, uh, over the last 12 months, uh, the, the value that a UV cure preprint.
Allen Hall: Well, sure, because that, that would make sense. The issue about wetting out fabric in the field you just done in the back of a trailer or something, somewhere like that.
Usually it is, it’s that you’re never really sure that you got the fabric wetted out. The experienced technicians always feel like, have done it enough that they get very consistent results. But as you mentioned, getting technicians is hard and, and there’s so many repairs to do. So you’re doing those wetting out composite things takes practice and skill.
Just buying it, preki it, where you have control over it. And you guys sell to the military all the time. So that, and you’re, are you ass 91 qualified yet? You’re in the midst of that?
Bret Tollgaard: So we, I mean, a, we just got ISO certified, uh, at the end of last year in December. So our [00:04:00] QMS system and everything like that’s up to date, that’s huge.
Another big qualification for the OEMs that want to see, you know, true quality and output.
Allen Hall: That’s it. I, if I’m gonna buy a preki patch, so, uh, uh, that would make sense to me, knowing that. There’s a lot of rigor as a quality system. So when I get out the the site and I open that package, I know what’s inside of it every single time.
Bret Tollgaard: Well, and that’s just it. And like we got qualified based on the materials that we can provide and the testing that’s being done in real world situations when you’re wetting out by hand and you’re vacuum backing and you’re trying to cure. It is a little bit of an art form when you’re doing that. It is, and you might think you have a great laminate, you got void content, or you haven’t properly went out that glass ’cause humidity or the way the glass was stored or it was exposed.
The sizing and the resin don’t really bite. Well. You might think you have a great repair, but you might be prematurely failing as well after X cycles and fatigue. Uh, simply because it’s not as easy to, to truly do. Right? And so having the [00:05:00] pre-wet, uh, pre impregnated glass really goes a long way for the quality, uh, and the consistency from repair to repair.
Allen Hall: Well, even just the length of the season to do repairs is a huge issue. I, I know I’ve had some discussions this week about opening the season up a little bit, and some of the ISPs have said, Hey, we we’re pretty much working year round at this point. We’re, we’ll go to California. We’ll go to Southern Texas.
We’ll work those situations. ’cause the weather’s decent, but with the sunrise material, the temperature doesn’t matter.
Bret Tollgaard: Correct. And I was actually just speaking to someone maybe half hour ago who came by and was talking about repairs that they had to do in Vermont, uh, in December. They could only do two layers of an epoxy repair at a time because of the amount of the temperature.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Bret Tollgaard: Whereas you could go through, apply a six or an eight layer pre-reg cure it in 20 minutes. Uh, you know, throughout that entire length that he had and you would’ve been done. That’s, and so it took several days to do a single repair that could have been done in sub one hour with our material.
Allen Hall: I know where those wind turbines are.
[00:06:00] They weren’t very far from, we used to live, so I understand that temperature, once you hit about November up in Vermont, it’s over for a lot of, uh, standard epoxy materials and cures, it is just not warm enough.
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, we, we’ve literally had repairs done with our materials at negative 20 Fahrenheit. That were supposed to be temporary repairs.
They were installed four or five years ago. Uh, and they’re still active, perfectly done patches that haven’t needed to be replaced yet. So,
Allen Hall: so, because the magic ingredient is you’re adding UV to a, a chemistry where the UV kicks it off. Correct. Basically, so you’re, it’s not activated until it’s hit with uv.
You hit it with uv that starts a chemical process, but it doesn’t rely on external heat. To cure
Bret Tollgaard: exactly. It, it is a true single component system, whether it’s in the liquid pre preg, the thickened, uh, the thickened putties that we sell, or even the hand lamination and effusion resin. It’s doped with a, a variety of different food initiators and packages based on the type of light that’s [00:07:00] being, uh, used to, to cure it.
But it will truly stay dormant until it’s exposed to UV light. And so we’ve been able to formulate systems over the last 40 years of our company’s history that provide an incredibly long shelf life. Don’t prematurely gel, don’t prematurely, uh, you know, erode in the packaging, all those
Allen Hall: things.
Bret Tollgaard: Exactly.
Like we’ve been at this for a really long time. We’ve been able to do literally decades of r and d to develop out systems. Uh, and that’s why we’ve been able to come to this market with some materials that truly just haven’t been able to be seen, uh, delivered and installed and cured the way that we can do it.
Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s a huge thing, the, the shelf life.
Bret Tollgaard: Mm-hmm.
Allen Hall: You talk to a lot of. Operators, ISPs that buy materials that do have an expiration date or they gotta keep in a freezer and all those little handling things.
Bret Tollgaard: Yep.
Allen Hall: Sunrise gets rid of all of that. And because how many times have you heard of an is SP saying, oh, we had a throwaway material at the end of the season because it expired.
Bret Tollgaard: Oh, tremendously
Allen Hall: amount of, hundred of thousands of dollars of material, [00:08:00]
Bret Tollgaard: and I would probably even argue, say, millions of dollars over the course of the year gets, gets thrown out simply because of the expiration date. Um, we are so confident in our materials. Uh, and the distributors and stuff that we use, we can also recertify material now, most of the time it’s gonna get consumed within 12 months Sure.
Going into this kind of industry.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Bret Tollgaard: Um, but there have been several times where we’ve actually had some of that material sent back to us. We’ll test and analyze it, make sure it’s curing the way it is, give it another six months shelf, uh, service life.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Bret Tollgaard: Um, and so you’re good to go on that front
Allen Hall: too.
Yeah. So if you make the spend to, to move to sun, you have time to use it.
Bret Tollgaard: Yes.
Allen Hall: So if it snows early or whatever’s going on at that site where you can’t get access anymore, you just wait till the spring comes and you’re still good with the same material. You don’t have to re-buy it.
Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And with no special storage requirements, like you mentioned, no frozen oven or frozen freezer, excuse me, uh, or certain temperature windows that has to be stored in, uh, it allows the operators and the technicians, you know, a lot more latitude of how things actually get
Allen Hall: done.
And, and so if. When we [00:09:00] think about UV materials, the, the questions always pop up, like, how thick of a laminate can you do and still illuminate with the UV light? And make sure you curate I I, because you’re showing some samples here. These are,
Bret Tollgaard: yeah.
Allen Hall: Quarter inch or more,
Bret Tollgaard: correct. So
Allen Hall: thick samples. How did you cure these?
Bret Tollgaard: So that was cured with the lamp that we’ve got right here, which are standard issued light, sold a couple hundred into this space already. Um, that’s 10 layers of a thousand GSM unidirectional fiber. Whoa. This other one is, uh, 10 layers of, of a biox. 800 fiber.
Allen Hall: Okay.
Bret Tollgaard: Uh, those were cured in six minutes. So you can Six
Allen Hall: minutes.
Bret Tollgaard: Six minutes.
Allen Hall: What would it take to do this in a standard epoxy form?
Bret Tollgaard: Oh, hours,
Allen Hall: eight hours maybe?
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. About for, for the, for the post cure required to get the TGS that they need in the wind space, right? Absolutely. And so yeah, we can do that in true minutes. And it’s pre impregnated. You simply cut it to shape and you’re ready to rock.
Allen Hall: And it looks great when you’re done, mean the, the surface finish is really good. I know sometimes with the epoxies, particularly if they get ’em wetted out, it doesn’t. It [00:10:00] doesn’t have that kind of like finished look to it.
Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And the way that we provide, uh, for our standard, uh, you know, pre pprs are in between films and so if you cure with that film, you get a nice, clean, glossy surface tack free.
But as more and more people go to the pre consolidation method down tower, so even if they buy our standard prereg sheets or rolls, they’re preki down tower, you can also then just apply a pre, uh, a peel ply to that top film. Oh, sure. So if you wet out a peel ply and then you build your laminate over the top.
Put the primer and the black film over when they actually get that up on tower, they can then just remove that fuel ply and go straight to Sandy or uh, uh, painting and they’re ready to rock.
Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. That’s, that’s impressive. If you think about the thousands and thousands of hours you’ll save in a season.
Where you could be fixing another blade, but you’re just waiting for the res, the cure,
Bret Tollgaard: and that’s just it. When you’re saving the amount of labor and the amount of time, and it’s not just one technician, it’s their entire team that is saving that time. Sure. And can move on to the next [00:11:00] repair and the next process.
Allen Hall: So one of the questions I get asked all the time, like, okay, great, this UV material sounds like space, age stuff. It must cost a fortune. And the answer is no. It doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s very price competitive.
Bret Tollgaard: It, it really is. And it might be slightly more expensive cost per square foot versus you doing it with glass and resin, but you’re paying for that labor to wait for that thing to cure.
And so you’re still saving 20, 30, 40 plus percent per repair. When you can do it as quickly as we can do it.
Allen Hall: So for ISPs that are out doing blade repairs, you’re actually making more money.
Bret Tollgaard: You are making more money, you are saving more money. That same group and band of technicians you have are doing more repairs in a faster amount of time.
So as you are charging per repair, per blade, per turbine, whatever that might be, uh, you’re walking away with more money and you can still pass that on to the owner operators, uh, by getting their turbines up and spinning and making them more money.
Allen Hall: Right. And that’s what happens now. You see in today’s world, companies ISPs that are proposing [00:12:00] using UV materials versus standard resin systems, the standard residence systems are losing because how much extra time they’re, they’re paying for the technicians to be on site.
Bret Tollgaard: Correct.
Allen Hall: So the, the industry has to move if you wanna be. Competitive at all. As an ISP, you’re gonna have to move to UV materials. You better be calling suns
Bret Tollgaard: very quickly. Well, especially as this last winter has come through, the windows that you have before, bad weather comes in on any given day, ebbs and flows and changes.
But when you can get up, finish a repair, get it spinning, you might finish that work 2, 3, 4 later, uh, days later. But that turbine’s now been spinning for several days, generating money. Uh, and then you can come back up and paint and do whatever kind of cosmetic work over the top of that patch is required.
Allen Hall: So what are the extra tools I need to use Sunz in the kits. Do I need a light?
Bret Tollgaard: Not a whole lot. You’re gonna need yourself a light. Okay. You’re gonna need yourself a standard three to six inch, uh, bubble buster roller to actually compact and consolidate. Sure. Uh, that’s really all you need. There’s no vacuum lights.
And you sell the lights. We do, we, [00:13:00] we sell the lights. Um, our distributors also sell the lights, fiberglass and comp one. Uh, so they’re sourced and available, uh, okay. Domestically, but we sell worldwide too. And so, uh, we can handle you wherever you are in the world that you wanna start using uv, uh, materials.
And yeah, we have some standardized, uh, glass, but at the same time, we can pre-reg up to a 50 inch wide roll. Okay, so then it really becomes the limiting factor of how wide, how heavy, uh, of a lamette does a, a technician in the field want to handle?
Allen Hall: Yeah, sure. Okay. In terms of safety, with UV light, you’re gonna be wearing UV glasses,
Bret Tollgaard: some standard safety glasses that are tinted for UV protection.
So they’ll
Allen Hall: look yellow,
Bret Tollgaard: they’ll look a little yellow. They’ve got the shaded gray ones. Sunglasses, honestly do the same.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Bret Tollgaard: But with a traditional PPE, the technicians would be wearing a tower anyways. Safety glasses, a pair of gloves. You’re good to go. If you’re doing confined space, work on the inside of a, a, a blade, uh, the biggest value now to this generation of material that are getting qualified.
No VOC non [00:14:00] flammable, uh, no haps. And so it’s a much safer material to actually use in those confined spaces as well as
Allen Hall: well ship
Bret Tollgaard: as well as ship it ships unregulated and so you can ship it. Next day air, which a lot of these customers always end. They do. I know that.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Bret Tollgaard: Um, so next day air, uh, you know, there’s no extra hazmat or dangerous goods shipping for there.
Uh, and same thing with storage conditions. You don’t need a, a flammable cabinet to actually store the material in.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Bret Tollgaard: Um, so it really opens you up for a lot more opportunities.
Allen Hall: I just solves all kinds of problems.
Bret Tollgaard: It, it really does. And that’s the big value that, you know, the UV materials can provide.
Allen Hall: So. I see the putty material and it comes in these little tubes, squeeze tubes. What are these putties used for?
Bret Tollgaard: So right now, the, the existing putty is really just the same exact thickened, uh, resin that’s in the pre-print.
Allen Hall: Okay.
Bret Tollgaard: And it’s worked well. It’s, it’s nice we’re kind of filling some cracks and some faring, some edges and stuff if things need to be feathered in.
But we’ve [00:15:00] been working on this year that we’ll be rolling out very, very soon is a new structural putty. Okay. So we’ll actually have milled fibers in there and components that will make it a much more robust system. And so we’ve been getting more inquiries of, particularly for leading edge rehabilitation.
Where Cat three, cat four, even cat five kind of damage, you need to start filling and profiling before any kind of over laminates can really be done properly. And so we’re working on, uh, rolling that out here very, very soon. Um, and so that will, I think, solve a couple of needs, um, for the wind market. Uh, and then in addition to some new products that we’re rolling out, uh, is gonna be the LEP system that we’re been working on.
Uh, the rain erosion testing showed some pretty good results. But we’re buying some new equipment to make a truly void free, air free system that we’re gonna it, uh, probably submit end of April, beginning of May for the next round, that we expect to have some very, very good, uh, duration and weather ability with,
Allen Hall: because it’s all about speed,
Bret Tollgaard: it’s durability.
Allen Hall: All about e
Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And ease of use by someone in the [00:16:00] field. Yeah. Or OEMs on, you know, in the manufacturing plant. Um, there has yet, in my opinion, to be a true winner in the LEP space. That is just the right answer. And so by applying our materials with the really high abrasion resistance that we expect this to have and be as simple to do as it really appeal, stick and cure, um, we think it’s gonna be a bit of a game changer in this industry.
Allen Hall: Well, all the sunrise materials, once they’re cured, are sandal
Bret Tollgaard: correct.
Allen Hall: And I think that’s one of the things about some of the other systems, I always worry about them like, alright, they can do the work today, but tomorrow I have to come back and touch it again. Do I have a problem? Well, and the sun rests stuff is at least my playing around with it has been really easy to use.
It’s, it’s. Uh, things that I had seen maybe 20 years ago in the aerospace market that have they thought about using the material not only [00:17:00] in the factory, but outside the factory. How easy is it to adapt to, how easy to, to paint, to all those little nuances that come up? When you’re out working in the field and trying to do some very difficult work, uh, the sunroom material is ready to go, easy to use and checks all the boxes, all those little nuances, like it’s cold outside, it’s wet outside.
Uh, it’s, it’s hot outside, right? It’s all those things that, that stop ISPs or OEMs from being super efficient. All those parameters start to get washed away. That’s the game changer and the price point is right. How do. People get a hold of you and learn about the sun rose material. Maybe they, you can buy through fiberglass or through composite one.
Mm-hmm. That’s an easy way to do, just get to play with some samples. But when they want to get into some quantity work, they got a lot of blade repair. They know what they’re doing this summer or out in the fall or this winter come wintertime. How do they get [00:18:00] started? What do they do?
Bret Tollgaard: Well, one of the first things to do is they can reach us through our website.
Um, we’re developing a larger and larger library now for how to videos and install procedures, um, generating SOPs that are, you know, semi, uh, industry specific. But at the same time too, it’s a relatively blanket peel and stick patch, whether it’s a wind turbine blade, a corroded tank, or a pressure pipe. Um, and so yeah, www.suns.com Okay, is gonna be a great way to do it.
Uh, we’re actively building more videos to put on, uh, our YouTube channel as well. Um, and so that’s kind of gonna be the best way to reach out, uh, for us. One of the big things that we’re also pushing for, for 26 is to truly get people, uh, in this, in industry, specifically trained and comfortable using the products.
At the end of the day, it’s a composite, it’s a pre impregnated sheet. It’s not difficult, but there are some tips and tricks that really make the, the use case. Uh, the install process a lot easier.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Bret Tollgaard: Uh, and so just making sure that people are, are caught up on the latest and greatest on the training techniques will [00:19:00] go a long way too.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s only as good as the technician that applies it
Bret Tollgaard: e Exactly.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s great. Uh, it’s great all the things you guys are doing, you’re really changing the industry. In a positive way, making repairs faster, uh, more efficient, getting those turbines running. It’s always sad when you see turbines down with something that I know you guys could fix with sun.
Uh, but it does happen, so I, I need the ISPs to reach out and start calling Sun and getting in place because the OEMs are blessing your material. ISPs that are using it are winning contracts. It’s time to make the phone call to Sun Rez. Go to the website, check out all the details there. If you wanna play with your material, get ahold of fiberglass or composite one just.
Order it overnight. It’ll come overnight and you can play with it. And, and once you, once you realize what that material is, you’ll want to call Brett and get started.
Bret Tollgaard: A hundred percent appreciate the time.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Thanks Brett, for being on the podcast. I, I love talking to you guys because you have such cool material.
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, no, we’re looking, uh, forward to continuing to innovate, uh, really make this, uh, material [00:20:00] splash in this industry.
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