Published

3 months ago

January 20, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

UK Awards 8.4 GW Offshore, US Allows Offshore Construction

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda cover major offshore wind developments on both sides of the Atlantic. In the US, Ørsted’s Revolution Wind won a court victory allowing construction to resume after the Trump administration’s suspension. Meanwhile, the UK awarded contracts for 8.4 gigawatts of new offshore capacity in the largest auction in European history, with RWE securing nearly 7 gigawatts. Plus Canada’s Nova Scotia announces ambitious 40 gigawatt offshore wind plans, and the crew discusses the ongoing Denmark-Greenland tensions with the US administration.

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!

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, along with Yolanda, Joel and Rosie.

Boy, a lot of action in the US courts. And as you know, for weeks, American offshore wind has been holding its breath and a lot of people’s jobs are at stake right now. The Trump administration suspended, uh, five major projects on December 22nd, and still they’re still citing national security concerns.

Billions of dollars are really in balance here. Construction vessels for most of these. Sites are just doing nothing at the minute, but the courts are stepping in and Sted won a [00:01:00] key victory when the federal judge allowed its revolution wind project off the coast of Rhode Island to resume construction immediately.

So everybody’s excited there and it does sound like Osted is trying to finish that project as fast as they can. And Ecuador and Dominion Energy, which are two of the other bigger projects, are fighting similar battles. Ecuador is supposed to hear in the next couple of days as we’re recording. Uh, but the message is pretty clear from developers.

They have invested too much to walk away, and if they get an opportunity to wrap these projects up quickly. They are going to do it now. Joel, before the show, we were talking about vineyard wind and vineyard. Wind was on hold, and I think it, it may not even be on hold right now, I have to go back and look.

But when they were put on hold, uh, the question was, the turbines that were operating, were they able to continue operating? And the answer initially I thought was no. But it was yes, the, the turbines that were [00:02:00] producing power. We’re allowed to continue to produce powers. What was in the balance were the remaining turbines that were still being installed or, uh, being upgraded.

So there’s, there’s a lot going on right now, but it does seem like, and back to your earlier point, Joel, before we start talking and maybe you can discuss this, we, there is an offshore wind farm called Block Island really closely all these other wind farms, and it’s been there for four or five years at this point.

No one’s said anything about that wind farm.

Speaker: I think it’s been there, to be honest with you, since like 2016 or 17. It’s been there a long time. Is it that old? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So when we were talk, when we’ve been talking through and it gets lost in the shuffle and it shouldn’t, because that’s really the first offshore wind farm in the United States.

We keep talking about all these big, you know, utility scale massive things, but that is a utility scale wind farm as well. There’s fi, correct me if I’m wrong, Yolanda, is it five turbos or six? It’s five. Their decent sized turbines are sitting on jackets. They’re just, uh, they’re, they’re only a couple miles offshore.

They’re not way offshore. But throughout all of these issues that we’ve had, um, with [00:03:00] these injunctions and stopping construction and stopping this and reviewing permits and all these things, block Island has just been spinning, producing power, uh, for the locals there off the coast of Rhode Island. So we.

What were our, the question was is, okay, all these other wind farms that are partially constructed, have they been spinning? Are they producing power? And my mind goes to this, um, as a risk reduction effort. I wonder if, uh, the cable, if the cable lay timelines were what they were. Right. So would you now, I guess as a risk reduction effort, and this seems really silly to have to think about this.

If you have your offshore substation, was the, was the main export cable connected to some of these like revolution wind where they have the injunction right now? Was that export cable connected and were the inter array cables regularly connected to turbines and them coming online? Do, do, do, do, do. Like, it wasn’t like a COD, we turned the switch and we had to wait for all 62 turbines.

Right. So to our [00:04:00] knowledge and, and, uh, please reach out to any of us on LinkedIn or an email or whatever to our knowledge. The turbines that are in production have still have been spinning. It’s the construction activities that have been stopped, but now. Hey, revolution wind is 90% complete and they’re back out and running, uh, on construction activities as of today.

Speaker 2: It was in the last 48 hours. So this, this is a good sign because I think as the other wind farms go through the courts, they’re gonna essentially run through this, this same judge I that. Tends to happen because they have done all the research already. So you, you likely get the same outcome for all the other wind farms, although they have to go through the process.

You can’t do like a class action, at least that’s doesn’t appear to be in play at the minute. Uh, they’re all gonna have to go through this little bit of a process. But what the judge is saying essentially is the concern from the Department of War, and then the Department of Interior is. [00:05:00] Make believe. I, I don’t wanna frame it.

It’s not framed that way, the way it’s written. There’s a lot more legalistic terms about it. But it basically, they’re saying they tried to stop it before they didn’t get the result they wanted. The Trump administration didn’t get the result they wanted. So the Trump administration ramped it up by saying it was something that was classified in, in part of the Department of War.

The judge isn’t buying it. So the, the, the early action. I think what we initially talked about this, everybody, I think the early feeling was they’re trying to stop it, but the fact that they’re trying to stop it just because, and just start pulling permits is not gonna stand outta the court. And when they want to come back and do it again, they’re not likely to win.

If they would. Kept their ammunition dry and just from the beginning said it’s something classified as something defense related that Trump administration probably would’ve had a better shot at this. But now it just seems like everything’s just gonna lead down the pathway where all these projects get finished.

Speaker: Yeah, I think that specific judge probably was listening to the [00:06:00] Uptime podcast last week for his research. Um, listen to, to our opinions that we talked about here, saying that this is kind of all bs. It’s not gonna fly. Uh, but what we’re sitting at here is like Revolution Wind was, had the injunction against it.

Uh, empire Wind had an injunction again, but they were awaiting a similar ruling. So hopefully that’s actually supposed to go down today. That’s Wednesday. Uh, this is, so we’re recording this on Wednesday. Um, and then Dominion is, has, is suing as well, and their, uh, hearing is on Friday. In two, two days from now.

And I would expect, I mean, it’s the same, same judge, same piece of papers, like it’s going to be the same result. Some numbers to throw at this thing. Now, just so the listeners know the impact of this, uh, dominion for the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project, they say that their pause in construction is costing them $5 million a day, and that is.

That’s a pretty round number. It’s a conservative number to be honest with you. For officer operations, how many vessels and how much stuff is out there? That makes sense. Yep. [00:07:00] 5 million. So $5 million a day. And that’s one of the wind farms. Uh, coastal, Virginia Wind Farm is an $11 billion project. With, uh, it’s like 176 turbines.

I think something to that, like it’s, it’s got enough power, it’s gonna have enough production out there to power up, like, uh, like 650,000 homes when it’s done. So there’s five projects suspended right now. I’m continuing with the numbers. Um, well, five, there’s four now. Revolution’s back running, right? So five and there’s four.

Uh, four still stopped. And of those five is 28. Billion dollars in combined capital at risk, right? So you can understand why some of these companies are worried, right? They’re this is, this is not peanuts. Um, so you saw a little bump in like Ted stock in the markets when this, this, uh, revolution wind, uh, injunction was stopped.

Uh, but. You also see that, uh, Moody’s is a credit [00:08:00] rating. They’ve lowered ORs, Ted’s um, rating from stable to negative, given that political risk.

Speaker 2: Well, if you haven’t been paying attention, wind energy O and m Australia 2026 is happening relatively soon. It’s gonna be February 17th and 18th. It’s gonna be at the Pullman Hotel downtown Melbourne.

And we are all looking forward to it. The, the roster and the agenda is, is nearly assembled at this point. Uh, we have a, a couple of last minute speakers, but uh, I’m looking at the agenda and like, wow, if you work in o and m or even are around wind turbines, this is the place to be in February. From my

Speaker: seat.

It’s pretty, it’s, it’s, it’s shaping up for pretty fun. My phone has just been inundated with text message and WhatsApp of when are you traveling? What are your dates looking forward to, and I wanna say this right, Rosie. Looking forward to Melvin. Did I get it? Did I do it okay.

Speaker 3: You know how to say it.

Speaker: So, so we’re, we’re really looking forward to, we’ve got a bunch of people traveling from around the [00:09:00] world, uh, to come and share their collective knowledge, uh, and learn from the Australians about how they’re doing things, what the, what the risks are, what the problems are, uh, really looking forward to the environment down there, like we had last year was very.

Collaborative, the conversations are flowing. Um, so we’re looking forward to it, uh, in a big way from our seats. Over here,

Speaker 2: we are announcing a lightning workshop, and that workshop will be answering all your lightning questions in regards to your turbines Now. Typically when we do this, it’s about $10,000 per seat, and this will be free as part of WMA 2026.

We’re gonna talk about some of the lightning physics, what’s actually happening in the field versus what the OEMs are saying and what the IEC specification indicates. And the big one is force majeure. A lot of operators are paying for damages that are well within the IEC specification, and we’ll explain.[00:10:00]

What that is all about and what you can do to save yourself literally millions of dollars. But that is only possible if you go to Woma 2020 six.com and register today because we’re running outta seats. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. But this is a great opportunity to get your lightning questions answered.

And Rosemary promised me that we’re gonna talk about Vestus turbines. Siemens turbines. GE Renova turbines. Nordex turbines. So if you have Nordex turbines, Sulan turbines, bring the turbine. Type, we’ll talk about it. We’ll get your questions answered, and the goal is that everybody at at Wilma 2026 is gonna go home and save themselves millions of dollars in 26 and millions of dollars in 27 and all the years after, because this Lightning workshop is going to take care of those really frustrating lightning questions that just don’t get answered.

We’re gonna do it right there. Sign up today.

Speaker 3: [00:11:00] You know what, I’m really looking forward to that session and especially ’cause I’ve got a couple of new staff or new-ish staff at, it’s a great way to get them up to speed on lightning. And I think that actually like the majority of people, even if you are struggling with lightning problems every day, I bet that there is a whole bunch that you could learn about the underlying physics of lightning.

And there’s not so many places to find that in the world. I have looked, um, for my staff training, where is the course that I can send them to, to understand all about lightning? I know when I started atm, I had a, an intro session, one-on-one with the, you know, chief Lightning guy there. That’s not so easy to come by, and this is the opportunity where you can get that and better because it’s information about every, every OEM and a bit of a better understanding about how it works so that you can, you know, one of the things that I find working with Lightning is a lot of force MA mature claims.

And then, um, the OEMs, they try and bamboozle you with this like scientific sounding talk. If you understand better, then you’ll be able to do better in those discussions. [00:12:00] So I would highly recommend attending if you can swing the Monday as well.

Speaker: If you wanna attend now and you’re coming to the events.

Reach out to, you can reach out to me directly because what we want to do now is collect, uh, as much information as possible about the specific turbine types of the, that the people in the room are gonna be responsible for. So we can tailor those messages, um, to help you out directly. So feel free to reach out to me, joel.saxo, SAXU m@wglightning.com and uh, we’ll be squared away and ready to roll on Monday.

I think that’s Monday the 16th.

Speaker 2: So while American offshore wind fights for survival in the courts, British offshore wind just had its biggest day ever. The United Kingdom awarded contracts for 8.4 gigawatts. That’s right. 8.4 gigawatts of new offshore wind capacity, the largest auction in European history.

Holy smokes guys. The price came in at about 91 pounds per megawatt hour, and that’s 2024 pounds. [00:13:00] Uh, and that’s roughly 40% cheaper than building a new. Gas plant Energy Secretary Ed Milliband called it a monumental step towards the country’s 2030 clean power goals and that it is, uh, critics say that prices are still higher than previous auctions, and one that the government faces challenges connecting all this new capacity to the grid, and they do, uh, transmission is a limiting factor here, but in terms of where the UK is headed.

Putting in gigawatts of offshore wind is going to disconnect them from a lot of need on the gas supply and other energy sources. It’s a massive auction round. This was way above what I remember being, uh. Talked about when we were in Scotland just a couple of weeks ago, Joel.

Speaker: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say.

You know, when we were, when we were up with the, or E Catapult event, and we talked to a lot of the different organizations of their OWGP and um, you know, the course, the or e Catapult folks and, and, and a [00:14:00] few others, they were really excited about AR seven. They were like, oh, we’re, we’re so excited. It’s gonna come down, it’s gonna be great.

I didn’t expect these kind of numbers to come out of this thing. Right? ’cause we know that, um, they’ve got about, uh, the UK currently has about. 16 and a half or so gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, um, with, you know, they got a bunch under construction, it’s like 11 under construction, but their goal is to have 43 gigawatts by 2030.

So,

Speaker 2: man.

Speaker: Yeah. And, and when 2030, put this into Conte Con context now. This is one of our first podcasts of the new year. That’s only four years away. Right. It’s soon. And, and to, to be able to do that. So you’re saying they got 16, they go some round numbers. They got 16 now. Pro producing 11 in the pipe, 11 being constructed.

So get that to 27. That’s another 16 gigawatts of wind. They want, they that are not under construction today that they want to have completed in the next four years. That is a monumental effort now. We know that there’s some grid grid complications and connection [00:15:00] requirements and things that will slow that down, but just thinking about remove the grid idea, just thinking about the amount of effort to get those kind of large capital projects done in that short of timeline.

Kudos to the UK ’cause they’re unlocking a lot of, um, a lot of private investment, a lot of effort to get these things, but they’re literally doing the inverse of what we’re doing in the United States right now.

Speaker 2: There would be about a total of 550, 615 ish megawatt turbines in the water. That does seem doable though.

The big question is who’s gonna be providing those turbines? That’s a. Massive order. Whoever the salesperson is involved in that transaction is gonna be very happy. Well, the interesting thing here

Speaker: too is the global context of assets to be able to deliver this. We just got done talking about the troubles at these wind farms in the United States.

As soon as these. Wind farms are finished. There’s not more of them coming to construction phase shortly, right? So all of these assets, all these jack up vessels, these installation vessels, these specialized cable lay vessels, they [00:16:00]can, they can fuel up and freaking head right across, back across the Atlantic and start working on these things.

If the pre all of the engineering and, and the turbine deliveries are ready to roll the vessels, uh, ’cause that you, that, you know, two years ago that was a problem. We were all. Forecasting. Oh, we have this forecasted problem of a shortage of vessels and assets to be able to do installs. And now with the US kind of, basically, once we’re done with the wind farms, we’re working on offshore, now we’re shutting it down.

It frees those back up, right? So the vessels will be there, be ready to roll. You’ll have people coming off of construction projects that know what’s going on, right? That, that know how to, to work these things. So the, the people, the vessels that will be ready to roll it is just, can we get the cables, the mono piles, the turbines and the cells, the blades, all done in time, uh, to make this happen And, and.

I know I’m rambling now, but after leaving that or e Catapult event and talking to some of the people, um, that are supporting those [00:17:00] funds over there, uh, being injected from the, uh, the government, I think that they’ve got

Speaker 2: the, the money flowing over there to get it done too. The big winner in the auction round was RWE and they.

Almost seven gigawatts. So that was a larger share of the 8.4 gigawatts. RWE obviously has a relationship with Vestus. Is that where this is gonna go? They’re gonna be, uh, installing vestus turbines. And where were those tur turbines? As I was informed by Scottish gentlemen, I won’t name names. Uh, will those turbines be built in the uk?

Speaker 3: It’s a lot. It’s a, it’s one of the biggest challenges with, um, the supply chain for wind energy is that it just is so lumpy. So, you know, you get, um, uh. You get huge eight gigawatts all at once and then you have years of, you know, just not much. Not much, not much going on. I mean, for sure they’re not gonna be just building [00:18:00] eight gigawatts worth of, um, wind turbines in the UK in the next couple of years because they would also have to build the capacity to manufacture that and, and then would wanna be building cocks every couple of years for, you know, the next 10 or 20 years.

So, yeah, of course they’re gonna be manufacturing. At facilities around the world and, and transporting them. But, um, yeah, I just, I don’t know. It’s one of the things that I just. Constantly shake my head about is like, how come, especially when projects are government supported, when plans are government supported, why, why can’t we do a better job of smoothing things out so that you can have, you know, for example, local manufacturing because everyone knows that they’ve got a secure pipeline.

It’s just when the government’s involved, it should be possible.

Speaker 2: At least the UK has been putting forth some. Pretty big numbers to support a local supply chain. When we were over in Scotland, they announced 300 million pounds, and that was just one of several. That’s gonna happen over the next year. There will be a [00:19:00] near a billion pounds be put into the supply chain, which will make a dramatic difference.

But I think you’re right. Also, it’s, they’re gonna ramp up and then they, it’s gonna ramp down. They have to find a way to feed the global marketplace at some point, be because the technology and the people are there. It’s a question of. How do you sustain it for a 20, 30 year period? That’s a different question.

Speaker 3: I do agree that the UK is doing a better job than probably anybody else. Um, it it’s just that they, the way that they have chosen to organize these auctions and the government support and the planning just means that they have that, that this is the perfect conditions to, you know. Make a smooth rollout and you know, take care of all this.

And so I just a bit frustrated that they’re not doing more. But you are right that they’re doing the best probably

Speaker 4: once all of these are in service though, aren’t there quite a bit of aftermarket products that are available in the UK

Speaker: on the service then? I think there’s more.

Speaker 4: Which, I mean, that’s good. A good part of it, right?

Speaker: If we’re talking Vestas, so, so let’s just round this [00:20:00] up too. If we’re talking vest’s production for blades in Europe, you have two facilities in Denmark that build V 2 36 blades. You have one facility in Italy that builds V 2 36 blades, Taiwan, but they build them for the APAC market. Of course. Um, Poland had a, has one on hold right now, V 2 36 as well.

Well, they just bought that factory from LM up in Poland also. That’s, but I think that’s for onshore term, onshore blades. Oh, yes, sure. And then Scotland has, they have the proposed facility in, in Laith. That there, that’s kind of on hold as well. So if that one’s proposed, I’m sure, hey, if we get a big order, they’ll spin that up quick because they’ll get, I am, I would imagine someone o you know, one of the, one of the funds to spool up a little bit of money, boom, boom, boom.

’cause they’re turning into local jobs. Local supply

Speaker 2: chain does this then create the condition where a lot of wind turbines, like when we were in Scotland, a lot of those wind turbines are. Gonna reach 20 years old, maybe a little bit older here over the next five years where they will [00:21:00] need to be repowered upgraded, whatever’s gonna happen there.

If you had internal manufacturing. In country that would, you’d think lower the price to go do that. That will be a big effort just like it is in Spain right now.

Speaker: The trouble there though too, is if you’re using local content in, in the uk, the labor prices are so much

Speaker 2: higher. I’m gonna go back to Rosie’s point about sort of the way energy is sold worldwide.

UK has high energy prices, mostly because they are buying energy from other countries and it’s expensive to get it in country. So yes, they can have higher labor prices and still be lower cost compared to the alternatives. It, it’s not the same equation in the US versus uk. It’s, it’s totally different economics, but.

If they get enough power generation, which I think the UK will, they’re gonna offload that and they’re already doing it now. So you can send power to France, send power up [00:22:00] north. There’s ways to sell that extra power and help pay for the system you built. That would make a a lot of sense. It’s very similar to what the Saudis have done for.

Dang near 80 years, which is fill tankers full of oil and sell it. This is a little bit different that we’re just sending electrons through the water to adjacent European countries. It does seem like a plan. I hope they’re sending ’em through a cable in the water and not just into the water. Well, here’s the thing that was concerning early on.

They’re gonna turn it into hydrogen and put it on a ship and send it over to France. Like that didn’t make any sense at all. Uh. Cable’s on the way to do it. Right.

Speaker: And actually, Alan, you and I did have a conversation with someone not too long ago about that triage market and how the project where they put that, that that trans, that HVDC cable next to the tunnel it, and it made and it like paid for itself in a year or something.

Was that like, that they didn’t wanna really tell us like, yeah, it paid for itself in a year. Like it was a, the ROI was like on a, like a $500 million [00:23:00]project or something. That’s crazy. Um, but yeah, that’s the same. That’s, that is, I would say part of the big push in the uk there is, uh, then they can triage that power and send it, send it back across.

Um, like I think Nord Link is the, the cable between Peterhead and Norway, right? So you have, you have a triage market going across to the Scandinavian countries. You have the triage market going to mainland eu. Um, and in when they have big time wind, they’re gonna be able to do it. So when you have an RWE.

Looking at seven gigawatts of, uh, possibility that they just, uh, just procured. Game on. I love it. I think it’s gonna be cool. I’m, I’m happy to see it blow

Speaker 2: up. Canada is getting serious about offshore wind and international developers are paying attention. Q Energy, France and its South Korean partner. Hawa Ocean have submitted applications to develop wind projects off Nova Scotia’s Coast.

The province has big ambitions. Premier, Tim Houston wants to license enough. Offshore [00:24:00] wind to produce 40 gigawatts of power far more than Nova Scotia would ever need. Uh, the extra electricity could supply more than a quarter of Canada’s total demand. If all goes according to plan, the first turbines could be spinning by 2035.

Now, Joel. Yeah, some of this power will go to Canada, but there’s a huge market in the United States also for this power and the capacity factor up in Nova Scotia offshore is really good. Yeah. It’s uh, it

Speaker: is simply, it’s stellar, right? Uh, that whole No, Nova Scotia, new Brunswick, Newfoundland, that whole e even Maritimes of Canada.

The wind, the wind never stops blowing, right? Like I, I go up there every once in a while ’cause my wife is from up there and, uh, it’s miserable sometimes even in the middle of summer. Um, so the, the wind resource is fantastic. The, it, it is a boom or will be a boom for the Canadian market, right? There’re always [00:25:00] that maritime community, they’re always looking for, for, uh, new jobs.

New jobs, new jobs. And this is gonna bring them to them. Um, one thing I wanna flag here is when I know this, when this announcement came out. And I reached out to Tim Houston’s office to try to get him on the podcast, and I haven’t gotten a response yet. Nova Scotia. So if someone that’s listening can get ahold of Tim Houston, we’d love to talk to him about the plans for Nova Scotia.

Um, but, but we see that just like we see over overseas, the triage market of we’re making power, we can sell it. You know, we balance out the prices, we can sell it to other places. From our seats here we’ve been talking about. The electricity demand on the east coast of the United States for, for years and how it is just climbing, climbing, climbing, especially AI data centers.

Virginia is a hub of this, right? They need power and we’re shooting ourselves in the foot, foot for offshore wind, plus also canceling pipelines and like there’s no extra generation going on there except for some solar plants where you can squeeze ’em in down in the Carolinas and whatnot. [00:26:00] There is a massive play here for the Canadians to be able to HVD see some power down to us.

Speaker 2: The offshore conditions off the coast of Nova Scotia are pretty rough, and the capacity factor being so high makes me think of some of the Brazilian wind farms where the capacity factor is over 50%. It’s amazing down there, but one of the outcomes of that has been early turbine problems. And I’m wondering if the Nova Scotia market is going to demand a different kind of turbine that is specifically built for those conditions.

It’s cold, really cold. It’s really windy. There’s a lot of moisture in the air, right? So the salt is gonna be bad. Uh, and then the sea life too, right? There’s a lot of, uh, sea life off the coast of the Nova Scotia, which everybody’s gonna be concerned about. Obviously, as this gets rolling. How do we think about this?

And who’s gonna be the manufacturer of turbines for Canada? Is it gonna be Nordics? Well,

Speaker: let’s start from the ground up there. So from the or ground up, it’s, how about sea [00:27:00] floor up? Let’s start from there. There is a lot of really, really, if you’ve ever worked in the offshore world, the o offshore, maritime Canadian universities that focus on the, on offshore construction, they produce some of the best engineers for those markets, right?

So if you go down to Houston, Texas where there’s offshore oil and gas companies and engineering companies everywhere, you run into Canadians from the Maritimes all over the place ’cause they’re really good at what they do. Um, they are developing or they have developed offshore oil and gas platforms.

Off of the coast of Newfoundland and up, up in that area. And there’s some crazy stuff you have to compete with, right? So you have icebergs up there. There’s no icebergs in the North Atlantic that like, you know, horn seats, internet cruising through horn C3 with icebergs. So they’ve, they’ve engineered and created foundations and things that can deal with that, those situations up there.

But you also have to remember that you’re in the Canadian Shield, which is, um, the Canadian Shield is a geotechnical formation, right? So it’s very rocky. Um, and it’s not [00:28:00] like, uh, the other places where we’re putting fixed bottom wind in where you just pound the piles into the sand. That’s not how it’s going to go, uh, up in Canada there.

So there’s some different engineering that’s going to have to take place for the foundations, but like you said, Alan Turbine specific. It blows up there. Right. And we have seen onshore, even in the United States, when you get to areas that have high capacity burning out main bearings, burning out generators prematurely because the capacity factor is so high and those turbines are just churning.

Um, I, I don’t know if any of the offshore wind turbine manufacturers are adjusting any designs specifically for any markets. I, I just don’t know that. Um, but they may run into some. Some tough stuff up there, right? You might run into some, some overspeeding main bearings and some maintenance issues, specifically in the wintertime ’cause it is nasty up there.

Speaker 2: Well, if you have 40 gigawatts of capacity, you have several thousand turbines, you wanna make sure really [00:29:00] sure that the blade design is right, that the gearbox is right if you have a gearbox, and that everything is essentially over-designed, heated. You can have deicing systems on it, I would assume that would be something you would be thinking about.

You do the same thing for the monopoles. The whole assembly’s gotta be, have a, just a different thought process than a turbine. You would stick off the coast of Germany. Still rough conditions at times, but not like Nova Scotia.

Speaker: One, one other thing there to think about too that we haven’t dealt with, um.

In such extreme levels is the, the off the coast of No. Nova Scotia is the Bay of Fundee. If you know anything about the Bay of Fundee, it is the highest tide swings in the world. So the tide swings at certain times of the year, can be upwards of 10 meters in a 12 hour period in this area of, of the ocean.

And that comes with it. Different time, different types of, um, one of the difficult things for tide swings is it creates subsid currents. [00:30:00] Subsid currents are, are really, really, really bad, nasty. Against rocks and for any kind of cable lay activities and longevity of cable lay scour protection around turbines and stuff like that.

So that’s another thing that subsea that we really haven’t spoke about.

Speaker 3: You know, I knew when you say Bay Bay of funding, I’m like, I know that I have heard that place before and it’s when I was researching for. Tidal power videos for Tidal Stream. It’s like the best place to, to generate electricity from.

Yeah, from Tidal Stream. So I guess if you are gonna be whacking wind turbines in there anyway, maybe you can share some infrastructure and Yeah. Eca a little bit, a little bit more from your, your project.

Speaker 2: 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. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show For Rosie, Yolanda and Joel, I’m Alan Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime [00:36:00] Wind Energy Podcast.

UK Awards 8.4 GW Offshore, US Allows Offshore Construction

Renewable Energy

PowerCurve’s Innovative Vortex Generators and Serrations

Published

16 hours ago

April 23, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

PowerCurve’s Innovative Vortex Generators and Serrations

Nicholas Gaudern from PowerCurve joins to discuss SilentEdge serrations with up to 5 dB noise reduction, Dragon Scale VGs for AEP recovery, and their approach to products that actually perform in the field. Contact PowerCurve on LinkedIn for more information.

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

Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the show.

Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Always a pleasure.

Allen Hall: Well, there’s a lot of new products coming outta PowerCurve. And PowerCurve is the aerodynamic leader in add-ons and making your turbines perform at higher efficiency with less loss. Uh, so basically taking that standard OEM blade and making it work the way it was intended to work.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. We

Allen Hall: like to

Nicholas Gaudern: think so. Yeah.

Allen Hall: And there’s a, there’s a lot of new technology that you’ve been working on in the lab that you haven’t been able to explore to the, introduce to the world, so to speak. Yeah. And we’ve seen some of it from the inside of, you know, you’re working behind the scenes or working really hard to get this done, but now that technology has been released to the world, and we’re gonna introduce it today, some new trailing edge.

[00:01:00] Components. Yeah. That really, really reduce the noise. But they, they look a little bit odd. Yes. There’s a lot of ADON dams going on with

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: With these. So what, what do you call these new trailing edge parts?

Nicholas Gaudern: So, so what you have in your hand here? This is the Silence edge, uh, serration. So this is our new trailing Edge Serration products.

Now, most people, when they think of training restorations, they are thinking of triangles.

Allen Hall: Exactly.

Nicholas Gaudern: These Dino tails. Dino Tails, that’s the Siemens, Siemens name for them. Pretty, pretty standard. You see ’em on a lot of turbines now. Sure. And they work, you know, they do do a job. They do a job. They reduce noise.

But like with lots of things in, in aerodynamics, there’s lots of different ways that you can solve a problem and some are better than others. So we’ve worked for a long, long time in the wind tunnel, uh, in the CFD simulations, and we’ve come up with this pretty unique shape. We think,

Allen Hall: well, the, the, the shape is unique and if you, if you look at it, there’s actually different heights to the, the triangle, so to speak.

To mix the air from the pressure and the [00:02:00] suction side to reduce the, the level of noise coming off the blade

Nicholas Gaudern: e Exactly. So we have, uh, we have an asymmetry to the part. We have these different tooth lengths. We have, uh, a lot of changes in thickness going on across the part. So it may be a little bit difficult to see on the camera, but these are quite sculpted 3D components.

They’re not, they’re not flat stock white triangles. No, no. There’s a lot of thickness detail going on here. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the edges. We’ve paid a lot of attention to these gaps between the teeth as well. So all of this is about trying to figure out what is the best way to reduce noise.

And something that not a lot of people will, will admit, but it’s true, is that as an industry we don’t really understand the fundamentals of how serrations work.

Allen Hall: It’s a complicated

Nicholas Gaudern: problem. It’s a really complicated thing. Problem, yeah. Yes. So trying to simulate it in CFD is an absolute nightmare. The, the mesh sizes required, the physics models required are really, really difficult.

So what we found is that you’re probably better off spending [00:03:00] most of your time and money in the wind tunnel. Yes. So, so we go to DTU, they have this wonderful, uh, air acoustic wind tunnel, the pool of core tunnel. It’s one the best tunnels in the industry for doing this kind of work. It

Allen Hall: is

Nicholas Gaudern: because you can measure acoustics and aerodynamics at the same time.

So this allows us to do a lot of very cost effective iteration for this kind of design work. So we know what’s important. You know, we’ve, we’ve studied all the different parameters of serrations lengths, aspect ratios, angles, thicknesses, all this kind of stuff. And it’s about bringing them together into a, into a coherent product.

So this is, this is a result of a lot of design of experiments, a lot of iteration, and combining wind tunnel and CFD to kind of get the best of both of those tools. So,

Allen Hall: so what’s the. Noise reduction compared to those standard triangular trailing aerations. Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: So there’s lots of different ways of, of thinking about noise reduction, but I think probably the most useful is the O-A-S-P-L.

So this is the overall sound pressure level. Right. Is kind of what [00:04:00]typically you’ll be measuring in an IEC test.

Allen Hall: Right.

Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s measured in decibels, but a way to decibels because it’s important that we’re waiting to what the human ear can actually hear. Right. Perceive. Exactly. So that’s the numbers we report.

For the field test we’ve recently completed with Silent Edge, we’re seeing up to five decibels of O-A-S-P-L noise reduction.

Allen Hall: Okay. So what’s that mean in terms of what I hear on the ground?

Nicholas Gaudern: So that is an absolutely huge reduction. It’s multiple times of reduction because you know, decibels on a log scale,

Allen Hall: right?

Nicholas Gaudern: So five DB is is enormous. It’s

Allen Hall: a lot. Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really interesting is that if you have a turbine that’s running in a noise mode, just one decibel reduction. Of power, sound, sound, power level might be three or 4% P loss. I mean, that, that’s, that’s huge. Think about that loss. So if you need to reduce noise by five decibels to get within a regulation, imagine how much a EP you have to throw away by basically turning down the [00:05:00] turbine to do that.

Allen Hall: That’s right.

Nicholas Gaudern: So that’s really what the, the business case for these kind of products is. It means you can escape noise modes because as soon as you use a noise mode. You are throwing away energy.

Allen Hall: You’re throwing well you’re throwing away profits.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.

Allen Hall: So you’re just losing money to reduce the noise.

Now you can operate at peak.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.

Allen Hall: Power output without the creating the noise where you have that risk. Right. So, and particularly in a lot of countries now, there are noise regulations. Yes. And they are very well monitored.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.

Allen Hall: We’re seeing it more and more where, uh, government agencies are coming out and checking.

Yes. ’cause they have a complaint and so you get a complaint. Oh, that’s fine. Or someone can complain. Yeah. You know, you need to be making your numbers.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And, and the industry needs to be good neighbors, you know? It

Allen Hall: certainly does.

Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, we have to make sure that people are, you know, approving and comfortable with having wind turbines in their backyard.

Sure. And noise is a big part of that.

Allen Hall: It is.

Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah. Ap sure. That’s really important. Being a good [00:06:00] neighbor also important.

Allen Hall: Right.

Nicholas Gaudern: Meeting the regulations. Obviously you have to meet the regulations. So this product, um, has been through a really long development cycle, and we’re now putting the final touches to the, to the tooling.

So this is available now.

Allen Hall: Oh, wow.

Nicholas Gaudern: Okay. Great. Um, and we’re hoping that in the next uh, few months we’ll be getting even more turbines equipped out in the field with, with the technology.

Allen Hall: So, oh, sure. There’s a, you think about the number of turbines that are in service, hundreds of thousands total worldwide.

A lot of them have no noise reduction at all.

Nicholas Gaudern: No. No.

Allen Hall: And they have a lot of complaints from the neighbors.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.

Allen Hall: Trying to expand wind into new areas, uh, is hard because the, the experience of the previous Yes. Neighbor

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.

Allen Hall: Grows into future neighbors. So fixing the turbines you have out in sight today helps you get the next site.

I know we don’t always think about that, but that’s exactly how it works. Yeah, of course. Uh, we need to be conscientious of the people of the turbines we have in service right now. So that we can continue to grow wind [00:07:00] globally and more regulations on noise are gonna come unless we start taking care of the problem ourselves.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And another really important thing with Serrations is that you have to design them so that they don’t impact the loads on the rest of the turbine.

Allen Hall: Right. And people forget about that.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: Can you just, can’t just throw up any device up there. And think, well, my blade’s gonna be happy with it. It may not be happy with that device.

Nicholas Gaudern: You have to really carefully understand what the existing blade aerodynamic signature is.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Nicholas Gaudern: How is that blade performing? What is the lift distribution across the span? Yeah.

Allen Hall: Right. Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: So what we do, and we, we’ve talked about it before we go and laser scan blades. We build CAD models, we build CFD models so we can actually understand how much lift a blade can take and what’s the benefit or the penalty of doing so.

So these serrations are designed by default to be load neutral. They won’t increase lift. They won’t reduce lift. That’s what

Allen Hall: it should

Nicholas Gaudern: be. That’s where you should start,

Allen Hall: right?

Nicholas Gaudern: And maybe there’s some scope to do something else [00:08:00] on certain turbines, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t guess. You, you need to calculate, you need to simulate, you need to think very carefully about that.

So that’s what we do with these, uh, with these serrations, we go through this very careful aerodynamic design process to make sure that they reduce noise and that’s it. They don’t increase loads, they don’t reduce AP by killing lift. And that’s, that’s an important aspect.

Allen Hall: Well, that’s the goal.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes,

Allen Hall: exactly.

I don’t necessarily want to increase power. I don’t wanna put more load in my blade, but people do that. I’ve seen that happen and man, they regret it.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, regret it. There’s, there’s some pretty wild claims out there as well about observations can and can’t do. And uh, like with lots of things, it’s important to just do the simulations, speak to some experts and, um.

Yeah, maybe take the, the less exciting path, you know, sometimes,

Allen Hall: well, no. Yeah. Well, less exciting path where I don’t have a broken blade.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s a lot less exciting. It’s, it’s definitely more profitable. Now, the Dragon Scale Vortex generator has been [00:09:00] around about a year or so.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep, yep.

Allen Hall: And the thing about these devices, and they’re so unique, interesting to think about because you typically think of a vortex generator as this being this little bit of a fence.

Where you are tripping the air and making it fall back down onto the blade.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.

Allen Hall: A really, it works.

Nicholas Gaudern: It works.

Allen Hall: But it’s it’s

Nicholas Gaudern: been around a long time.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It, it does, it does do this thing. And they, they were, they came outta the aviation business. We use ’em on airplanes to keep air flow over the control surfaces so we can continue to fly even in close to stall conditions.

All that makes sense. And airplanes are not a wind turbine.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: So there’s different things happening there. So although they work great on on aircraft, they’re not necessarily the most efficient thing for a wind turbine where you’re trying to generate power and revenue from the rotation of the blades.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.

Allen Hall: So this is a completely different way of thinking about getting the airflow back onto the blade where it produces [00:10:00] revenue.

Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really nice is to actually see this together with silent edge, because historically, and maybe not even historically. Serrations VGs, they’re triangles. They work, they do a job.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it in a different way. In a better way.

Allen Hall: Right.

Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s the same principles from applying with Silence Edge and Dragon Scale. We want to work the flow in the most efficient way possible.

Allen Hall: Right. You’re trying to get to an

outcome.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.

Allen Hall: Efficiently.

Nicholas Gaudern: We want to, we want to target very specific things on the blade, and that’s where you can see there’s a few different styles of Dragon Scale that we have on the table here.

We have some that are two fins. We have some that are three fins. We have different sizes, and this is because they’re tailored to different parts of the blade. So these three Fin Dragon scales, their focus is ultimate lift. We are creating a really powerful vortex through this combination of three air foils, if you imagine, um, the inside of a Turbo fan.

You have these cascading air force. [00:11:00] You look at the leading edge slacks on an aircraft. You look at the front wing of a Formula one car. It’s that kind of concept.

Allen Hall: It’s like that,

Nicholas Gaudern: and it’s these air force that are cooperating with each other.

Allen Hall: Right.

Nicholas Gaudern: To end up with a more beneficial result. ‘

Allen Hall: cause an air force by itself does a function, but when you combine airflows together in the right way

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.

Allen Hall: You can really control airflow efficiently, less losses. More of what you want out the backside. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s the backside you’re trying to work on, on a VG or, or dragon scales. You’re trying to create this flow which gets the airflow back onto the blade to create power. We,

Nicholas Gaudern: we want as much attached flow as possible and down exactly down in the roots of a blade.

We have to have really thick aerofoils, you know, blades about round. They’re basically cylinders.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: And that, that’s essential, right? We have to have the blade take a lot of load into the root aerodynamically. They’re horrible.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: So this is where these, uh, these powerful Dragon Scale VGs come into play because what they do is they’re [00:12:00] reenergizing the flow over the aerofoils, and they’re ensuring that that flow remains attached for much, much longer than if those bgs weren’t there.

So down in the root, you’ll get significant boosts to the lift that those sections can generate. And what’s more lift? It goes to more torque, it goes to more power, goes to more a EP. So these dragon scale VGs in the root are there to boost, lift, and boost EP out on the tip of the blade. Things are actually a little bit different because it’s way different.

You shouldn’t really have stall there to begin with if your blade’s been designed well.

Allen Hall: But if you have leading edge erosion exactly. Or some other things that are happening, you can have real aerodynamic problems.

Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah, as soon as you have erosion, uh, maybe your stall margin is not as big as you thought it was.

You’re starting to get some significant losses of lift Yes out towards the tip of the blade. So that’s where these, uh, TwoFin uh, variants come in. So it’s still a dragon scale vg, it’s still the same concept of these cascading error foils. Yeah, but these are [00:13:00] designed for basically ultimate lift to drag ratio.

Mm-hmm. So we don’t really want more maximum lift outta the tip. We kind of have enough, but what we do want is to keep stable attached flow and we want to do it for the less, uh, least drag penalty possible. So basically we want to get rid of as much parasitic drag as we can. These two fin dragon scales, we are seeing 25 plus percent improvements in lift to drag ratio.

Compared to a standard triangle vg. I mean that’s huge.

Allen Hall: That that is really

Nicholas Gaudern: huge.

Allen Hall: That’s huge, right? Because people have seen these, uh, triangular VGs in a lot of places. And one thing I’m noticing more recently is that those VGs, because they’re so draggy, they tend to flutter and they tend to break in just off.

Nicholas Gaudern: Interesting.

Allen Hall: So you’re having this failure mode because this thing is just blocking the air, getting the air to trip.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: It’s not efficient. It does have its downsides ’cause it is. D definitely drag. Just face it, it’s it, is it a draggy [00:14:00] 1940s technology? That’s what it is. Where with the dragon scales, now we’re doing things a lot more efficiently and thinking about how do I get the airflow that the blade designer originally wanted?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes,

Allen Hall: because the blade designer, they’re really intelligent people. They’re, they’re sitting designing blades. But the reality is what you design is on an ideal airflow, and what you have out in service are totally different things. As, as it turns out, the shape of the airflow is not what you think it is because it comes out of the tool and there’s a lot of touching with by humans that are grinding on the leading edges and doing the things that have to be done to manufacture it.

So you don’t really have an ideal blade when it comes out of the

Nicholas Gaudern: No. You

Allen Hall: never do factory. No, you never do.

Nicholas Gaudern: And it’s not polished either.

Allen Hall: It’s not polished. Right. So

Nicholas Gaudern: when you go to the wind tunnel, you have a perfect profile. Yes. And it’s polished. And it works basically. It

Allen Hall: works great. It

Nicholas Gaudern: works great.

Allen Hall: The theoretical and the actual match.

Yeah. In reality they do. I think a lot of operators are not [00:15:00] connected with that reality of, Hey, that Blade should be producing this amount of revenue for me, and it’s not. And you hear that discussion all the time, particularly in the us. It should be producing this amount of power. I’m doing all the calculations.

We are not producing that power. Why? The blade length’s saying, but the power’s not coming out of it. Well take a look at your leading edge, take a look at your yard full of shape and realize you’re going to have to do something like dragon scales to get that E energy. Exactly. Revenue back.

Nicholas Gaudern: You need to do a full aerodynamic health check.

Basically you do. And see what are all the possibilities to improve my blade performance. And some of it is down to the fundamental shape of the blade,

Allen Hall: right?

Nicholas Gaudern: But some of it is down to blade condition. Yes. Blade Blade manufacturing quality.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, what kind of paint did they put on it? What day of the week was it made?

And all these things can be compensated for by VGs and you’ll get more revenue out at the end.

Allen Hall: You say? ’cause what happens? The, the, the scenario which is hard to visualize unless [00:16:00] you’re an A and emesis, is that there comes on the suction side, and it should be, in a ideal sense, rolling all the way to the back edge of the blade and coming off.

What happens is though, is that. When you get leading edge erosion is that the air flow actually separates. Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: It

Allen Hall: doesn’t

Nicholas Gaudern: always make it, yeah.

Allen Hall: Doesn’t make it to the back edge. Yeah. And so you can see that, especially if, if there’s dirt in the air, you can look on dirty blades, you can see where that separation line is, and a lot of operators have sky specs, images or Zeit view images, and then go back and look at the blades.

It takes two minutes to go. I have

Nicholas Gaudern: particularly down in the root, you’ll see it.

Allen Hall: Oh, in the root all the time. You, you

Nicholas Gaudern: see it really clearly that that separation line

Allen Hall: all the time, you really see that separation line. I’m seeing it more and more up towards the tip. Interesting. That’s where the lightning protection, yeah.

Systems sit.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: I see a lot of airflow that is not front to back on the suc. Well, you

Nicholas Gaudern: have a lot of three dimensional flow out there.

Allen Hall: You do towards the tip you do. And you realize how much power you’re losing there. And I think operators are just throwing away money.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.

Allen Hall: So you could [00:17:00] put dragon skills on it very efficiently, very quickly.

Get that revenue back into your system and it’s gonna stay. So even if leading edge erosion happens, the dragon scales are gonna compensate for it. It’s gonna get the airflow back where it should be.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. And the nice thing about this is, you know, we are building on well over a decade of upgrading turbines with aerodynamic components.

Oh yes. So this technology stands on the foundations of all of that work. In terms of the materials, the work instructions. Um, the fatigue calculate, you know, everything

Allen Hall: Yes.

Nicholas Gaudern: Is built on thousands of installations that we’ve done. Yes. So, although it’s a new technology aerodynamically, it’s not really new in lots of sensors.

Allen Hall: Well, I look at it this way. If you turn on Formula One today and look at what the new generation of cars running around as you look at the, that front. Yes. Uh. Fin. Yeah. What do I call it? Air foil shape in the front. It’s super complicated.

Nicholas Gaudern: The sculpting of the [00:18:00] surfaces is really impressive,

Allen Hall: right? There’s a lot of thought going into those surfaces versus you turn on a Formula One race or go on YouTube and look at a Formula One race from the 1980s.

Yeah, it’s basically a piece.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: To provide down downforce. That’s it. The aerodynamics wasn’t really there, so we come a long way and a lot of that technology that happens in Formula One that happens in aviation eventually rolls down into. Yeah. Wind.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly

Allen Hall: right. So we, we, although we are not designing Formula One style blaze today, we’re taking that same knowledge and information and we’re applying that back in.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. We’re

Allen Hall: secondarily we,

Nicholas Gaudern: which is a right thing to do. We’re taking, taking inspiration from all these different aerodynamic fields and, you know, picking the best

Allen Hall: Yes.

Nicholas Gaudern: From what’s available and just allowing ourselves to be a little bit more creative.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Nicholas Gaudern: And thinking outside the box a bit. There’s so many ways to do this as we’ve been saying.

And the import. And the

Allen Hall: data’s there.

Nicholas Gaudern: The data’s there. Exactly.

Allen Hall: The data’s there because you’ve been at the DTU Yep. Uh, wind Tunnel, which also has the acoustic piece to it. Yeah. So you have measured data from a reliable source. [00:19:00] You have field data, and you know, you put all these together, you’re gonna get that improvement back.

You’re gonna get your invest back, you’ll be more profitable.

Nicholas Gaudern: So Dragon Scale, focus on the AP. And that a EP will, uh, vary depending on the turbine.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Nicholas Gaudern: But we’ll assess the turbine and, and decide the best configuration, and then say silent edge. That’s the focus on the noise reduction. And we’re seeing up to five decibels OASP on the field.

It’s, which

Allen Hall: is crazy.

Nicholas Gaudern: It’s even more That’s really good that we were hoping for, you know?

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Nicholas Gaudern: So we, we know this is gonna be a, a great product.

Allen Hall: It looks very interesting.

Nicholas Gaudern: It does.

Allen Hall: It does it. It looks complicated and you think air airflow is complicated. It’s a compressible fluid. It’s not easy to, to just assume it’s gonna do what you think it is.

Yeah. You need to get into the tunnel. You need to replicate, you need to do all that work, which is expensive in time consuming. That’s why you go to someone like Power. Curver knows what they’re doing in the wind tunnel, knows how to measure those things and know when they’re getting nonsense. Out of their computer.

Nicholas Gaudern: mean, you, you’ll pay thousands and thousands of [00:20:00] Euros dollars a day to run a wind tunnel.

Allen Hall: You will.

Nicholas Gaudern: You’ve gotta Absolutely. You’ve gotta turn up with your plan in hand, that’s for sure.

Allen Hall: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there’s a lot of assumptions because it, aerodynamics is hard. You know, you watch these blade spin around, you don’t realize how complicated these devices are.

They are complicated. Those air force shapes we are running today have been through a lot of history, a lot of history to get to where we are now. Now we’re just gonna take him into the next generation. This, we’re bringing ’em into the two thousands. In sort of a

Nicholas Gaudern: sense, what I’m hoping to see is, you know, with the OEMs, some OEMs do it already, but it’s important to think about these components when you’re designing new blades as well, you should because then that will allow you a much bigger design space to work in.

And

Allen Hall: a lot less customer complaints.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: Where’s my power?

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, these products, particularly the VGs, are really important tools for PowerCurve robustness. And some OEMs have known this for a long, long time.

Allen Hall: Yep.

Nicholas Gaudern: And you’ll see VGs on most of their blades. Mm-hmm. Others not so much. And that’s a design choice.

It’s a design philosophy. Um, and I think it may not [00:21:00] be the right one, you know?

Allen Hall: Well, I think the operators are asking to get the most out of their turbines. Yeah. Why shouldn’t they? They should be asking for that.

Nicholas Gaudern: I think for a, for a long time, and it’s not just in wind devices, like these have been considered, you know, band-aids fixes when you’ve, you’ve messed something up.

But I feel that’s a really negative way to think about products like this. They’re doing something that the kind of raw air fall shape on its own cannot achieve. Sure. Oh no. Right. You know, you might be able to mold some interesting stuff. Uh, as part of the blade, it’s very difficult to, to recreate the kind of aerodynamic effects that these products, uh, have.

Allen Hall: Right.

Nicholas Gaudern: So they shouldn’t be considered bandaids or fixes. No. They should be considered opportunities. And ways that you can maximize performance and unlock areas of the design space that previously weren’t accessible to.

Allen Hall: Sure. Every possible component that deals with fluid air is moving this way.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: Jet engines, you look at jet engine, how much more is going into those jet engines today in terms of this kind of [00:22:00] technology?

Yeah. All the race colors, doesn’t matter what class, where it is, is all looking at this anything to do with aircraft, it’s all over this.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah,

Allen Hall: exactly. Or, or doing this today. It’s just wind that’s behind

Nicholas Gaudern: wind. Wind is

Allen Hall: significantly

Nicholas Gaudern: behind. No,

Allen Hall: it’s not magic. It’s proven technology. It’s

Nicholas Gaudern: just good engineering.

Allen Hall: Well, it’s good engineering and if you call PowerCurve, they’re gonna help you under to to, to understand what you have today and what you could have tomorrow.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: And how this, these devices will improve your revenue stream.

Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, we will look at your blades, we’ll give you some good advice and maybe that advice will be that.

You know, a certain product isn’t right for your blade. Right. That’s fine.

Allen Hall: That’s an answer.

Nicholas Gaudern: That’s an answer.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it is.

Nicholas Gaudern: But let’s, let’s look at the blade. Let’s see what’s possible, and let’s just have a, have a proper conversation about it over some real data, some real

Allen Hall: facts. Right. I think that’s the key, and a lot of operators are afraid to talk about aerodynamics is it’s, it’s a difficult area to, to start the conversation on, right?

Yeah. But I think at the end of the day, when I work with PowerCurve, and I’ve worked with you guys for a [00:23:00] number of years, the answers I get back are intelligent and they’re not. Super complicated. This is what you’re gonna see. This is the improvement. And then we can, this is how we’re going to show you can get that improvement.

It’s not magic,

Nicholas Gaudern: no

Allen Hall: power crews backing up with data, which I think is the key, right? Because you’re the, you do hear a lot of noise in this industry about magical products that’ll do all these things. Particularly aerodynamic ones. Yes. PowerCurves, the ones really bringing the data.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And we have, we have the track record now.

We have like we do 17, 1800 turbines. Should be over 2000 very soon with our products on. Yeah. So we have a lot, we have a lot of data to draw on to know that we’re doing a good thing.

Allen Hall: Well, and speaking of that, because one of the questions that always pops up is, well, we have put these new VGs or trailing edges on, are they gonna stay on?

How durable are they?

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And that’s a, that’s a really important question to ask was it doesn’t matter how fancy aerodynamic product is, if it falls off the blade.

Allen Hall: Right.

Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, we’ve spent a lot of, uh, time and effort looking at how we should be fixing these products on. [00:24:00] So we use a, uh, a wet adhesive.

We specify a plexus adhesive to put our products in place. Really good adhesive. It’s a great adhesive and it means that they are not going anywhere. Basically. It’s a very, uh, forgiving adhesive. Uh, and it’s a very high spec. So we, we don’t use, uh, sided tape. We might have some of our products for some initial tack to help, you know, get the clear, the clear outta the line exactly.

But in terms of the bond itself, that is with a, a proper structural adhesive. So one thing that we are really proud of is that we haven’t got any, uh, reported failures of our panels over all the installations we’ve made. And that’s a combination of materials, but also geometry, work, instructions, adhesive.

It’s, it’s the full package. So it’s something that, um, yes, say we’re very proud of. And I think it’s, it’s a big part of what we do at PowerCurve, making sure the product is the right shape. Sure. But also making sure it stays on the blade.

Allen Hall: Well, you see it [00:25:00] from OEMs who have all kinds of aerodynamic treatments on there, and they’ll double set a tape to the blade, and then those parts are on the ground.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And double-sided tape. You can get some really nice spec tape. Sure.

Allen Hall: You,

Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. But it’s not

Allen Hall: 20 year device.

Nicholas Gaudern: No. And the installation tolerance required on surface prep is really, really high. So it’s possible. It’s just harder. I think it’s riskier,

Allen Hall: it’s risky.

Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, I think for us, the adhesive is, is the way to go.

And, and it’s been proven out by the, by the track record.

Allen Hall: And some of the things we’ve seen over in Australia is when trailing ulcerations have come off, it’s been a safety concern. So now you got

Nicholas Gaudern: absolutely

Allen Hall: government officials involved in safety because parts are coming up. Turbine.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.

Allen Hall: You

Nicholas Gaudern: can’t have these components flying, flying through the air.

That’s, that’s not safe.

Allen Hall: That’s because PowerCurve has done the homework.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.

Allen Hall: And has the track record. That’s why you wanna choose PowerCurve. So how do people get a hold of PowerCurve? How do they get a hold of you, Nicholas, to start the process?

Nicholas Gaudern: So, um, you’re welcome to reach out to us in lots of different ways.

We’re on LinkedIn. Uh, we have our website, [00:26:00] PowerCurve, dk, um, so yeah, LinkedIn websites. There’ll probably some links on this podcast as well to get in touch. But, um, yeah, whatever way works best for you.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s gonna be a busy season. So if you’re interested in doing anything with PowerCurve this year, you need to get on the website, get ahold of Nicholas.

And get started, uh, because now’s the time to maximize your revenue.

Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks a lot and great to talk to you,

Allen Hall: Nicholas. Thanks so much for being back on the podcast.

PowerCurve’s Innovative Vortex Generators and Serrations

Renewable Energy

Sharia Law

Published

19 hours ago

April 23, 2026

Alice Rush

Does Sharia Law pose an actual threat to Americans? Are we on a path to chopping off the hands of shoplifters? Passing laws that concern what people can and cannot eat? Polygamy? Forcing women to wear the hijab?

Maybe.

Or maybe this congressman is a loudmouth asshole whose constituents are morons.

Sharia Law

Renewable Energy

Another Thought on Tucker Carlson

Published

19 hours ago

April 23, 2026

Alice Rush

Carlson’s about-face on Trump is huge, as it signals that public intellectuals who wish to be taken seriously at this point cannot support the president, as his mental condition deteriorates and his criminality becomes ever more brazen.