Siemens Gamesa, Vestas, Ørsted Updates: Finances, Fallen Rotors, and Offshore Wind Outlook

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week we analyze recent news from Siemens Gamesa, Vestas, and Ørsted, including financial struggles, layoffs, and plans to regain profitability. The episode also covers offshore wind manufacturing expansion in the U.S., a fallen wind turbine rotor in Norway, and the need for better data sharing among wind farm owners and operators. Plus, if you're attending ACP O&M in San Diego, sign up for the IntelStor event! 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Joel Saxum: So Allen is in Denmark at the Leading Edge Symposium DTU in Roskilde there with a lot of really smart people talking about leading edge erosion issues. What are the newest protections out there? What kind of projects going on in the world? From our side of view, how does aerodynamics leading edge roughness affect lightning? A lot of really cool things going on there. Of course, DTU is always doing great work. But that's where Allen is today. So this week I'm going to try to be my best Allen. I'm Joel Saxum, the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. And I'm here with international renewables expert, Rosemary Barnes. Plus, wind energy economics and data guru Phil Totaro from IntelStor. This is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. So speaking about offshore wind in the United States and how the IRA bill is interacting and if it's kicking off manufacturing facilities or what's actually happening on the ground, today there was an announcement by US Forged Rings Inc. It'd be the USA's only integrated one stop shop manufacturer for offshore wind towers and steel forging. What they released today in an article was, or in a press release was, the fact that they're going to have two factories up and running on the east coast. One by 2026, one by 2027. And they're going to work together. To build these large scale steel infrastructure that we need for offshore wind in the U. S. So one of one of the factories is going to output towers. They're saying a hundred towers per year with a 35 foot diameter on them and the other factory that's going to be completing 2027. It's for forging and ring rolling, and they can do up to 40 feet in diameter. So what this will do is be able to help the U. S. market create its own transition pieces, its own, bearing races, its own caps for the towers and whatnot. But Phil, what are the larger reaching implications of this press release? Philip Totaro: It's extremely good for the offshore wind market where, a company is looking to obviously take advantage of the 45x manufacturing tax credits. What's interesting about this, though, is that in addition to this serving the offshore wind market, assuming that this factory exists, we don't actually have a lot of particularly forging capabilities in the United States for anything above, let's say, like a megawatt onshore turbine. We usually have to import a lot of that stuff from Europe. Even Asia doesn't have the, a full capability to do, enormous 6, onshore turbines. A lot of that they're actually getting from Europe as well. Surprisingly, to, to most. The fact that this, these factories will exist, and, the tower factory with, it's going to start off at 100 units a year and they said that it's going to potentially expand to 200 units a year. We'll see. Maybe some of those units will actually be dedicated to to some onshore wind turbines as well. If we can get the offshore market really going,