Published

9 months ago

September 17, 2025

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

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?

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

Court Saves Wind Safe Harbor, Norway Pauses Utsira Nord

Published

7 hours ago

June 16, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Court Saves Wind Safe Harbor, Norway Pauses Utsira Nord

A federal court restores the 5% safe harbor for wind tax credits, Norway’s parliament pauses the 35 billion krone Utsira Nord floating wind program, and the crew digs into Australia’s battery boom and the looming blade technician shortage.

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!

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Matthew Stead: [00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts

Allen Hall: Welcome to this edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m Allen Hall here with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and Yolanda Padron. And our week starts off in the courtroom. And if you’ve been watching the news lately, there’s a pretty substantial IRS case involving large-scale wind and solar having to do with the, uh, production tax credit and, uh, investment tax credit at the same time on the safe harbor, 5% safe harbor rule.

Uh, a federal judge handed the wind industry and solar industry a pretty substantial legal win that could reshape how the [00:01:00] projects qualify for tax credits. So a judge up in, uh, the District of Columbia vacated IRS Notice 2025-42. So if you remember that, uh, from a- about a year or so ago, uh, f- it found that the, that notice was arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.

The notice, which was issued following a July 2025 executive order, had eliminated the 5% safe harbor for wind projects, uh, a provision developers have relied on since about 2013 to establish construction start dates without breaking ground. The court found the IRS failed to justify removing it, ignored industry comments, which I had read, and I agree with that, and gave no reason for treating wind differently f- than other clean energy technologies.

So That his executive order came down and said, “Hey, we don’t like wind. [00:02:00] IRS, write a rule and make it hard for wind to get installed in the United States.” And so they dutifully did it, but a court is throwing it out. This has some pretty significant implications because if you hadn’t broken ground before this ruling, I think the– what was happening was be- if you hadn’t broken ground by July 4th, your project wouldn’t qualify for some tax credits.

But now, if you have 5% safe harbor, you still are in the game, at least for now. Now, Wanda, that’s gonna make a big difference to asset managers and developers, won’t it?

Yolanda Padron: Yeah, it’s really exciting. I think it opens up the, the playing field for, for some of these projects that might be a little bit behind schedule.

Um, of course, a lot of teams had to change their plans and their pipeline when, um, you know, the big, beautiful bill passed and, I mean, it’s– of course, it adds a little bit of additional volatility, right, to, to wind and, and solar in the US, but it’s exciting to see at least things for, [00:03:00] for those of us that are in the wind and solar side, the, it’s a little, little bit of, of hope there.

Allen Hall: And Matthew, uh, even in terms of opening up o-o-operations and, uh, getting contracts signed, this should make a big difference in sort of opening the floodgates a little bit. Although there is a short timeframe. We’re, we’re recording on, what, what is today? June 10th. So you have, in theory, less than 30 days before the July 4th deadline, but hopefully this stays.

You think there’s a chance this just gets completely, uh, wiped out, the executive order and the IRS notice and- It’s back to what we remember for the, for the last, ooh, 12, 13 years?

Matthew Stead: Uh, yeah. I’m, I’m, I’m hopeful, and I, I agree with Yolanda. I think you, you said it really well. Um, I think this is a, a glimmer of hope in, um, a sometimes gloomy, um, environment.

So I think that’s great. In terms of going back to where it was, um, I mean, I guess my observation has been that, [00:04:00] you know, things in the US were a bit, um, distorted. You know, distorted through the, the PTC, um, and the whole repowering thing after 10 years is quite a distortion. So I think, um, you’re not necessarily going back to the good old days, um, might be the way, what will happen.

Allen Hall: I think there is a lot of people actively trying to dig holes at the moment, and I, I’m sure they’re gonna continue to do that. Yolanda, do you th- you think anybody’s gonna stop and kinda say, “Oh, we have the 5% rule. We’re, we’re good”? Do you think, or you think they’re gonna still go ahead and really start construction and then just keep things continually moving on site?

Yolanda Padron: I don’t think they, they can really stop, right? Because you, you don’t know if, if anything strange happens. A lot of people didn’t think the, a lot of the provisions in the big beautiful bill were gonna, were gonna see the light of day, and they did. Um, but it does, I really hope it brings at least a little bit of breathing room for some people.

I know it’s, it must be… I mean, I have some friends in development, and they’re, they’re q- a little [00:05:00] bit stressed right now just with everything going on. Um, so, so I really hope for them at least they, you know, if, if they’re a little bit behind schedule, then it, it’ll be, it’ll still be fine.

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Norway’s Storting has voted to pause the 35 billion Norwegian krone support program for floating offshore wind at Utsira Nord. The Conservative Party secured a parliamentary majority for the external quality assurance review, a socioeconomic analysis, and a technology development assessment, all before the Storting will authorize any commitments.

Equinor and Vårgrønn, along with EDF and Deepwind Offshore, each hold allocated 500-megawatt areas and were preparing to compete for that subsidy. Equinor says the project will continue for now. I think everybody is saying that at the moment. But, uh, Equinor cannot rule out consequences as framework uncertainty compounds in the already challenging nature of floating offshore wind development.

So Utsira Nord is a massive project. So it’s, it’s about three and a half billion US dollars [00:07:00] to go do this. We had Mads Furuseth and Anders Naslund about a year or so ago, maybe a little bit longer, talking about the project and how big it was and how important it was that Norway did this for floating offshore wind.

But with this, uh, recent change in the parliament of Norway, it does seem like they’re slowly going to try to kill it by putting in a number of, uh, reviews, which is how bureaucracies tend to kill things. Is put it under six, seven, eight reviews, different committees. They all take time to get together.

They have to put out a report. It could be two, three years from now. At that point, the world has completely changed, and everybody’s moved on. Does that seem like the outcome here at the moment?

Matthew Stead: Yes.

Allen Hall: In my mind, there’s really two big areas for floating offshore, which UK, right? That there, there’s some massive projects there, Green Volt being one of them, and then there was Sue & Nord.

So between the two, I feel like the, the UK one was going to [00:08:00] happen. The question whether the world was gonna move towards floating offshore wind was gonna happen up in Norway. If Norway decided to do it and could get it developed, and it has the capability to do it because, because they have that skill set, uh, right there in Norway.

If they could do it in Norway, everybody in the world would learn from it and figure out how to do it. Does this really set back floating offshore wind globally?

Matthew Stead: Yeah. I mean, going back to what I said before, and I, I’ll defer to Rosie on this as well, but, um, when I was at, at Blades Europe, um, one of the, one of my long-term contacts, um, y- was in floating wind, um, and had, um, left the industry.

He basically said i- in his view that the offshore wind industry was slowly, um, in decline or slowly dying. Um, so I’m just wondering if this is just evolution of viability of offshore wind.

Rosemary Barnes: Is offshore wind in decline? I think if you look globally, it’s, it’s not in decline. I, I haven’t looked in, in depth at the figures just based on what, you know, [00:09:00] headlines I’ve seen and podcasts I’ve heard, but I think that globally it’s still on the rise.

It’s just that- It’s only in Europe that things are really moving with speed, right? Like, people were expecting heaps of growth in the US and now no- nobody expects that. Floating offshore wind, it’s… I th- I still think it’s too early to say. There are plenty of countries that don’t have any good energy options besides, um, floating offshore wind, like Japan.

What their energy transition looks like is gonna depend a lot on their culture and what people think, ’cause, like, if you go through, like, the engineering solutions that Japan could have, the ones that make the most sense from an engineering point of view are not popular at all, are not politically viable.

Like, Japan could easily have a subsea cable connecting it with, um, with China, for example, or Korea, but I don’t think anybody, anybody thinks that that will ever happen because, you know, politically it’s, it’s very far from being possible. What else could they have? Geothermal. They’ve got heaps of [00:10:00]geothermal resources, like really good traditional geothermal resources, but my understanding is that it’s super unpopular because their onsen, um, community doesn’t want it.

Uh, my understanding is that they’re worried that if you put geothermal, um, if you exploit geothermal resources, then the onsens will not be hot anymore, and again, my limited research understanding is that it’s not true. It’s different resources. The two aren’t connected in any way. Um, and yeah, there’s actually a community geothermal, um, facility near Fukushima.

I’m trying really hard to get over there, but I’m, I’ve got a roadblock at the moment because, uh, n- no one there speaks English, so I need to find somebody to, to come with me and, you know, I’ll have one, one day to try and get there on the fast train and back to Tokyo in, in a single day. So it’s, it’s a bit of a stretch, but I’m gonna try.

But anyway, so yeah, what have we… We’ve ruled out, like, subsea cables, ruled out geothermal. Floating wind is good.

Allen Hall: Well, speaking of Fukushima, [00:11:00] there’s been a more recent push in Japan to start up some of the nuclear facilities. So after the tsunami, was that 2012, 2014 when that happened? It was a while ago.

Uh, when the tsunami happened and h- had that, uh, nuclear accident, they, they s- shut down all the nuclear facilities in Japan, but it does seem like they’re trying to restart some of them And, and maybe it’s just the demand for energy and, and they’re trying to weigh that off with offshore wind or floating offshore wind.

At what point, you know, which one do you choose? It has to be driven by cost and availability.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And so Fukushima, I just looked it up, it was 2011. Um, and yeah, so I mean, I think it is very fair that they had a reaction to that and they wanted to put the handbrake on nuclear at that time, or they did more than put the handbrake on, they did like a handbrake turn.

Allen Hall: They shut it down.

Rosemary Barnes: So, and it, you know, it’s gradually ramping up. I think that their target for nuclear now is to, to regain, um, 20% of their electricity from [00:12:00] nuclear by 2040, something like that. It was 30% prior to that incident. Um, so that will be part of it, but it’s not, um, it’s not all of it. And then even if you think of, uh, okay, so forget climate change, just, you know, we want, Japan just wants energy and they don’t care about climate change, you know, ’cause that, that, that could be true.

What are their ch- choices for that? They import a whole bunch of… They, they import nearly all their energy. Everything that’s not nuclear basically is, is imported. Um, coal, but a lot of LNG, and, you know, that is not exactly an appealing prospect at the moment either. It’s not secure. Prices are very volatile.

We’ve had, like, two fossil fuel shocks in the last, what, like four years or something like that, and how many more, how many more are we g- are we going to have? You know, like energy security is important, totally separate from climate change issues. So I don’t think we need to rely on Japan, like, you know, [00:13:00] steadfastly staying the course because their, their existing o- opportunities are not, are not great for fossil fuels either.

Allen Hall: I don’t know what country’s gonna stay the course right now, really. Maybe the UK?

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I think it’s- Countries that have other reasons for going to renewables are the ones that are gonna stay the, stay the course. Um, and there are plenty of examples of countries where it just, it is by far the easiest, cheapest, fastest option to get more electricity.

Um, you know, like all of Africa, for example, is, is facing that as a, uh, a better development path than trying to build big, um, fossil fuel power plants. But even that, you know, like in India, they’re making a huge transition, Pakistan, not to mention Australia, where now batteries are having more of an impact on electricity prices than gas is.

So our electricity prices now finally are dropping, um, this year for the first time because of how many batteries have come on and are now, you [00:14:00]know… Like they’ve just flattened. The evening price peak used to be on average about, like, I think $400 or something dollars a megawatt hour, and now it’s like 100.

In one year we had that, we had that change, yeah, just from the amount of batteries that have come on in the last year or two.

Allen Hall: Why does that make such a big difference in the price of electricity, the battery aspect?

Rosemary Barnes: Because, so the way that Australia… Australia’s electricity market is pretty similar to Texas, so if you understand that, then you can probably understand Australia’s.

But, you know, at any five-minute interval, people, like, they know how much demand there’s going to be, and then people are bidding in how much they would supply electricity for in that five minutes, in real time as well. It’s not like day ahead or anything like that in Australia. The, like, last one they need is what everybody gets paid.

So, like, solar power is gonna bid in at, like, you know, practically zero, um, or maybe negative prices actually if they’ve got power purchase agreements in place. And then, you know, wind a little bit more, and then coal, uh, you know, a, a bit [00:15:00] more than that, and then gas, the open cycle gas turbines, the peakers, they’re very expensive.

They’re bidding in at 400, $400 a megawatt hour. If there’s enough batteries that that gas doesn’t need to bid in, then all of a sudden we don’t have the gas price that everybody has to pay. We have the battery price that everyone has to pay, and that is very, very cheap and will become cheaper as there’s more of them in the, in the system.

So it’s like a threshold event. You, you know, um, even if you’re using only a tiny bit of gas, if you need any gas at all, even like, you know, one megawatt of gas, everybody gets paid the gas price. If you just get a little bit more battery in and you don’t need it anymore, bam, the price just falls. So that’s what we…

We’ve passed that threshold now.

Allen Hall: Isn’t that where the UK is trying to get, is to get past that threshold where renewables are that last addition to the grid and kick off peaker plants and some expensive other- fuel sources. That’s I, I [00:16:00] think where everybody’s gone because they have the same system where the, the last one in is what sets the price for everybody.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. The UK’s a little bit different because one, they’re connected to Europe, and two, they’ve got nuclear, so they do have that kind of base load.

Allen Hall: Let’s go down the rabbit hole just for a second. So if the peaker plants don’t come on, that means that the battery electricity supplying the grid is pretty low in price.

It seems like they are losing money on their investment in the battery That they were hoping the price would be higher. Because if the peaker plants are still going on, that would be a $400 price and they’re gonna come in at, like, 350, so that would make sense. It, it helps pay off the battery investment.

But if they’re dropping the price down from 400 to 100, it would seem like the battery investment may not be a, a wise decision.

Rosemary Barnes: For sure they’re making less money, but it was– they were making crazy profits for the first little, the first few, few years of, you know, grid-scale batteries. And even [00:17:00] home batteries, people were making a l- a lot of money off that, and it was crazy.

Like, I’m on some, um, some Reddit subreddits about, uh, you know, people with home batteries and-

Allen Hall: Slash battery?

Rosemary Barnes: Matt probably is too. Matt’s a Beta G enthusiast, so I’m sure that he is just as excited as me. But anyway, so on one of these subreddits, you know, people used to talk about, “Oh, I made 100 bucks last night,” um, or, or whatever, you know, just a household.

And now all the posts are complaining about there’s been no price spikes all year. You know, I thought that I was gonna make heaps of money off my battery, but people are really change- changing how they think of it. And now it’s like… And l- like I want– used to want to do this. I don’t have solar panels yet ’cause we need a new roof, and I’ve been waiting a few years to, one, live in a house that I own, and then two, get a freaking new roof.

Um, and I thought I’m gonna just, like, cover it in solar panels, get a huge battery, and I’m gonna be an energy trader in my free time and make heaps of money, and now that is [00:18:00] not the strategy anymore. The strategy is to just reduce your bills to the m- the minimum that you can. Um, that’s basically, that’s basically it.

So you are right that some of this arbitrage is, um, the opportunity’s over, and that it will be less, um, exciting for, uh, opportunity for people to put more, more batteries in.

Matthew Stead: Just to add to that, through the middle of the day quite often there’s, uh, negative pricing. So if you’ve got a battery, you’re being paid to charge through the middle of the day.

So that actually takes away some of the pain from having a lower, a lower price, um, during the peak.

Rosemary Barnes: But the thing about negative prices is that you need coal power plants for them to be… Like, the only reason we have such pervasive negative prices is not because solar plants have PPAs that are, you know, make it worthwhile for them to generate even when the price is slightly negative.

The real thing is that coal power plants don’t want to turn down below, I don’t know, yeah, like 20, 30% during the middle of the day. They have to be on if they want to make money in the evening, and that means that they bid in at, like, [00:19:00] negative 50, um, so that people– so that they can stay running. And that’s where the bulk of our negative prices come from.

As coal power plants close, those negative prices will go away. Um, and when they close, we should get some better evening price spikes again. So, you know, like nothing ever stays the same for long, which is why it is such a fascinating hobby to have, being interested in the electricity market, because it’s never the same from one year to another.

You’ll never understand it, ’cause it’s never, it never stays the same long enough to really get your head around it.

Allen Hall: You need other hobbies. You really do.

Matthew Stead: A friend of mine works in trading, and, uh, he said, “As long as there’s volatility, there will be progress.” So much like what Rosie was saying is the more volatile it is, the more opportunity there is for people to come in, um, and change it.

Allen Hall: I just don’t know how the battery thing plays out once that threshold is reached. When you have more batteries on the system and you knock down the price that [00:20:00] much, I think battery sales, industrial batteries really slow down because they’re all looking for that quick ROI And they’re not gonna get it.

Rosemary Barnes: You have to wait for all of the coal to close before you would find out what’s the right amount of batteries to have in the, in the grid.

Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, I totally agree there, yeah.

Yolanda Padron: You’d still get, like in extreme weather events and stuff, you’d still get a big price spike, right, for all these batteries.

Allen Hall: Back to Matt’s point, more volatility.

Rosemary Barnes: If you want the market to respond, you need to give enough incentive to invest in assets so you’ll have enough when it’s needed. And because it’s really infrequent, then it has to be a super high price to, um, bring on enough investment. And will this system… The system has worked absolutely, you know, pretty well in Aus- Australia at least.

Will it continue into the future with more variable prices and renewables? I, I don’t know, and the government is starting to do some things like, uh, you know, like a lot of [00:21:00] electricity markets have, um, not just energy markets but also capacity markets where you will pay a battery or a gas plant something to be on standby basically, um, so that if there is, um, if there’s a shortfall then they, then they have to respond.

So in Western Australia they have that, but across the east of Australia th- they currently do not, do not have that. It’s energy only.

Allen Hall: Really? How do you not have capacity payments?

Rosemary Barnes: The majority of their profits are made in just a few hours a year when there are those price spikes, so that’s, that’s h- part of their business case.

Allen Hall: I mean, there, there is arbitrage happening on the electricity grid. That’s not the best place to be arbitraging things because you will have players that won’t provide electricity just to drive up the price.

Rosemary Barnes: Uh, and it happens in Australia too, but, um, you know, because batteries are such a distributed resource, it, it will become harder and harder to do that when, you know, the, um, the ownership of these batteries is, you know, households as well as, um, yeah, as well as [00:22:00] big companies.

Matthew Stead: So offshore wind, I was talking to an OEM a, a little while ago and, uh, talking about blade repairs for offshore wind, you know, floating, floating wind. Um, so specifically floating wind. The OEM was extremely concerned about floating wind, um, because it makes it very, very, very hard to change blades. So the story was that if you’ve got an offshore floating platform, you’re basically gonna have to tow the wind turbine back to port to change a, a blade.

Rosemary Barnes: They see that as a, as a pro, not a con though. Yeah. That, that’s because it’s very hard to… Like, it’s not only floating offshore wind where it’s very hard to remove a, a blade out at sea, like fixed bottom offshore wind, that’s incredibly expensive to remove a blade. So floating is like, well, you can just tow it back to shore and then you can do it all in the port.

I, I, you’re looking skeptical, Matt, and I’m also skeptical about how it actually plays out. I know that, um, what was it? The, [00:23:00] the one- An EOL project off the coast of Scotland. I can’t remember what it’s called now. Like what, the first big one, the big wind farm, a floating offshore wind farm

Allen Hall: HiWind Scotland

Rosemary Barnes: They had a, a problem.

I don’t know if it was a serial issue or also, like it’s the first big wind farm, and there might have been like some operating condition they weren’t aware of that caused some problems. They had to tow back everything to port, and they stayed there for months and months. So like maybe, maybe close to a year or over a year, I’m not sure.

It was a really long time. And so, um, yeah. But then, you know, like what’s the alternative? If that had happened out at sea, it would’ve been more expensive. If, it still would’ve been shut down, not doing anything, and you would’ve had like helicopters out there every single day bringing teams and, um, you know, huge vessels with cranes and yeah.

So like it’s, maintenance at sea is never good.

Allen Hall: But the whole point of the HiWind project was to get some of these problems figured out, and one of them was just towing it back to port and [00:24:00] doing major repairs or component exchanges make sense. I think it’s a, it’s a lesson well learned, and we’ve moved on.

I guess the question is, does offshore, floating offshore in particular, have much of a future if Norway’s not willing to do it?

Matthew Stead: I think it’s a good comparison with, um, data centers in space.

Rosemary Barnes: You know where else they’re planning to put data centers? Not just space and offshore, also like, um, underwater ones, like on the deep ocean floor, um, on the moon somewhat.

Like there’s an actual company that is apparently developing a, a data center on the moon

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Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t [00:25:00] miss out. Visit peswind.com today. Well, in this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, there are a number of great articles, and if you haven’t downloaded your copy, you should do that at peswind.com. There’s a good article from Global Blade Services USA, and it’s talking about the technician problem and how it’s not gonna, it solve itself, obviously.

But Global Blade Service is putting some numbers to it. And Rosemary, this is really directed at you. Blades represent roughly 20% of the total, total turbine capital cost and are the leading driver of unplanned downtime.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, 40% of O&M.

Allen Hall: Right, and 75% of all blade repairs are already handled outside OEM warranty.

That number seems really high, but maybe after the warranty expires?

Rosemary Barnes: Do you say 30% of, of repairs are repaired under warranty? That’s, uh, unexpectedly high from my point of view. [00:26:00] But, you know, how would I know? No one’s getting in touch with me if, you know, they’ve got a problem with their blades and it just got fixed under warranty.

Then they’re not paying a consultant to come sort it out. I only, I’m, I’m only there when the warranty is nearly up or it’s already over.

Allen Hall: So they, they’re saying that the, the ratio’s even gonna grow more towards out of warranty repairs. But the problem is having technicians. And the deeper problem is developing all those technicians in time as that need grows.

Uh, reaching full structural repair competency takes a rope access technician eight to 10 years. A basket technician is five to seven, and a factory technician is four to five years, meaning the workforce, uh, the industry needs for the next decade has to start training now. I, I think we’re seeing this in full force.

I- the issue is keeping good people in the industry as it fluctuates up and [00:27:00] down all the time and is very seasonal. Because there are really good rope technicians out there who know what they are doing, and it does take a, a minimum of three years to be competent. And then to be that lead person, it takes four or five solid.

And to be, uh, the, the relied-upon person, especially for some of the more complicated repairs, it’s gonna be six, seven, eight years before you’re there. It’s just an exposure thing. Are we in a technician crisis?

Rosemary Barnes: Crisis is maybe a little bit inflammatory, but, uh, we’re in a technician challenge

Matthew Stead: But it’s a pretty, it’s a pretty basic topic, Allen, isn’t it?

Like, um, you know, there’s more and more wind turbines, there have to be more and more technicians. It takes time to train. So, you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s pretty much basic maths and, um, you know, it’s like te- you know, tradies to build houses. Um, you know, unless you’ve got the tradies, you can’t build houses in a cheap way.

Yolanda Padron: Part of the issue is that, you know, say there’s [00:28:00] 10 technicians that are available in the area, right? Then you … maybe they work under two different companies, and then one company goes bankrupt, so then they all work with the same company. Another company pops up, or someone gets kicked off site from the OEM side, and then a month later they’re back with the third party.

And then it’s just really difficult to keep track of kind of who’s still there and who’s not, because some people have the certifications and maybe they’re not really, really great at what they do, or other people have a lot of training and a lot of experience, and it’s just difficult to track exactly, you know, where they are now.

I know that the, the strategy here oftentimes is you’ll find one person that you like and you kind of follow him around, or follow them around whatever company they’re, they’re with at the moment, and then just use that company.

Matthew Stead: The other point I was going to make is that there’s also the seasonality, isn’t there?

So you know, if you’ve got a great, a great technician, when it’s cold, they can’t earn cash from [00:29:00] repairing blades.

Rosemary Barnes: Aren’t they hired as, like, seasonal workers in America and they just don’t get paid for part of the year? That’s not how it’s done here. I mean, I guess we don’t have the climate where you have to, like, totally shut down, so they’re not, like, sitting around getting paid for nothing.

But, like, that’s a really unim- unappealing feature of the of the, um, field, isn’t it? If you’re deciding what you wanna, what kinda job you wanna do, you want one where you can get paid for 12 months out of the year, not just, I don’t know, like eight or whatever it is.

Matthew Stead: I know there’s been a lot of discussion between, like, Australian US repair companies of, like, shipping technicians down here during the Northern Hemisphere winter and vice versa, and it gives, you know, chance of exploring the world.

But, you know, if you’ve got kids and family, you’re not gonna necessarily wanna do that either.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s such a tiring job, though. I don’t… Like, there’s, um, I think it’s fine if people do it for, like, a hard 10 years and then, um, yeah, move on to… Because you obviously learn a lot as a technician, so y- you know, like, there’s a lot of office jobs that you would be really good at [00:30:00] because you had that physical experience.

But yeah, like, I, I do think that there’s heaps of young people that are traveling the world being wind turbine technicians.

Yolanda Padron: At least in Texas, I know a lot of rural areas where they don’t necessarily have a lot of opportunities to get higher education, and so going to be a technician is a good route for them to then go into a larger part of the industry, um, to, to kinda get a head start there.

Um, and they get a lot of really valuable skills, and oftentimes, like you said, Rosie, they’ll, they’ll get picked up by, um, by the owners or the OEMs or someone, um, because of their experience there. But it, but it is quite a bit of, of hard work and, and physical, physical labor. I climbed one tower and I was sore for two weeks, so really, really not my cup of tea.

Rosemary Barnes: I’m always, like, so excited to, to be climbing towers ’cause I only do it, like, you know, sometimes no times in a year, sometimes twice a year. Um, yeah, so, like, I’m really excited to go climb, and it’s really cool the first day, and then the second day it’s like, “Oh, this harness is [00:31:00] so heavy. Am I really putting this on again?

Oh my God.” Yeah, so it’s, uh, it’s ob- obviously you get used to it if you, um, if you do climb a lot. The last, uh, last site that I was at, a lot of the technicians were just climbing the ladders so that they wouldn’t have to, you know, go to the gym afterwards. So there’s a lift there, but they use the ladder because then they get their cardio for the day.

So, you know, they’ve obviously got some surplus energy.

Allen Hall: I think it is kind of a myth outside the US, uh, uh, seasonal workers, uh, at least in Europe, I haven’t seen a lot of seasonal workers. It doesn’t mean they don’t exist, of course. But in the United States, there’s a lot of seasonal workers from construction and all kinds of other industries.

People figure it out And it, it’s a lot more common than I think y- being an engineer you think it is, but there are a lot of seasonal workers. So being a, a wind technician is not a bad job.

Rosemary Barnes: I guess they’re just getting [00:32:00] paid extra for the time that they’re working and they just know they’re used to budgeting to cover the few months off.

Allen Hall: They have a winter job. They’ll, they have employment. They already have it lined up where when it gets cold outside, they have someplace else to go. Back into construction for a few months. They’re maybe driving a truck or doing other things that, that bring in income. They have it pretty well figured out.

When– At least the technicians I’ve talked to seem to have a, a plan about it, and they’re not sitting by the television for six months. That’s not what’s happening. It, that there’s a lot of employment opportunities here in the States, and so they, they’re pretty nimble. So if you haven’t read this article or a number of our other great articles in PES Wind, you should go to peswind.com right now and download a copy today.

That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. 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. [00:33:00] For Yolanda, Rosemary, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Court Saves Wind Safe Harbor, Norway Pauses Utsira Nord

Renewable Energy

Why Is Trump Still Here?

Published

17 hours ago

June 15, 2026

Alice Rush

I challenge anyone to watch this short video and explain how Trump still has enough standing with the American people to remain president.

This is just so embarrassing.

Rich Americans aren’t happy that their country is a laughingstock around the world, but their fortunes are multiplying, so what’s the big deal? How does personal integrity come into play when there is so much money at stake?

The MAGA crowd, i.e., uneducated white people, believe Trump when he says that he has brought back respect for the United States.