Siemens Gamesa Struggles, RWE & Nordex Thrive, DOE Invests in Floating Wind

In this episode, Allen, Joel, and Philip discuss Siemens Gamesa's
leadership changes and quality issues, the strong financial
performance of Nordex and RWE, and upgrades to UK wind turbine
testing facilities. They also cover the christening of the first
American-built offshore wind service operation vessel, the
EcoEdison, and the DOE's selection of five floating wind
technologies for the Flow Wind Prize readiness competition. Sign up
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: All right, Lego lovers a Canadian man has combined his love
of Lego and Star Wars, shocker, to build the 75, 000 piece
Millennium Falcon in a record breaking time of, Joel, take a guess.
Joel Saxum: How much coffee did he have first? Allen Hall: Red
Bull. Joel Saxum: I'm gonna say Allen Hall: That's not too far off.
Phil, what's your guess? Philip Totaro: Six? I don't know. Allen
Hall: Seven hours, 36 minutes and 37 seconds. Ivan Wu of Markham,
Ontario earned the Guinness World Record for the fastest time to
build a Lego Star Wars 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon. It's 10,
000 pieces an hour. That's insane. How did that, Phil, can your
fingers move that fast? Philip Totaro: 10, 000 pieces an hour? Only
when I'm typing Intel store research. Allen Hall: You get the bags,
right? And the bags are all just mixed parts, right? And they say,
you open up the manual and it says, open up manual one out of six.
And then you open bag one and six, and then you have to, that's
three pieces a second. How do you tell your spouse Hey, I'm I
really need to buy the 75, 000 piece Millennium Falcon to set a
Guinness Philip Totaro: World Record. Sorry to stereotype, but this
guy does not have a spouse. Joel Saxum: But it only took seven
hours of his life, so Seven hours of peace and quiet. Yeah, but how
much training did it get to that point? Allen Hall: See that, Joel,
that's the ultimate question. I was thinking the same thing. That
guy worked on that for weeks. Joel Saxum: How many times has he
built that thing? He's trained like an Olympic athlete. Seven hours
was the record winning attempt, right? He's probably done it a
hundred times or more. Canadian winters are long. They are, and now
they're the world champions. There you go. Allen Hall: Vinod's
Philip, who will take over as CEO of Ascension. Seaman's Kamesa on
August 1st, which happens to be my birthday, by the way, plans to
conduct a thorough review of the company's onshore and wind turbine
development process. I hope so, because that's desperately needed
at this point. Philip believes that the current two year
development cycle may be insufficient for onshore turbines leading
to inadequate testing and quality control issues that have played.
Siggins Gamesa's newest onshore turbines, and in that he means the
4x and 5x machines. By comparison, offshore wind turbine platforms
have usually a five to seven year development cycle. Philip is
suggesting that the onshore industry needs to slow down a little
bit and work on a supply chain. to get rid of some quality
concerns. Now that all sounds great, right? But everybody's waiting
for Siemens Gamesa to get back into action again. And they're
thinking, or at least they're still saying by 2026, they're going
to break even. And they're going to get rid of these quality
concerns. And now, Phil, something has to happen within Siemens
Gamesa, right? We haven't seen many changes internally. There
haven't. Announced any changes besides having the review team look
at the design. What are the next steps? What's likely to happen
here over the next six Philip Totaro: months? Let's also maybe
deconstruct a couple things that he's talked about too, which is
development cycles need to speed up, not slow down. So I'm not sure
where he's getting his information from. We're trying to make
things go faster. And if the supply chain is not capable of
maintaining quality whilst also being able to deliver at the same
rate, An increased scale, then we're going to have a problem. And
then it brings the Chinese into the conversation. Cause where else
are you going to get turbans from? So if they want to maintain
their, customer relationships and they want to have any semblance
of an order book, once they can start selling turbans again,
presumably by, August, September, when they said it was going to
be, after the end of this fiscal year was there their previous
announcement they've got a, they've got a Get on the horse here. So
that's the first thought that comes to mind with this. The next
thing is you're right that they haven't really, I'm obviously
they've done a lot internally. And there were, unfortunately some
people let go, engineers obviously they got this new CEO. So the
CEO was also like, Oh, but there It's a little odd with how vocal
they were last year about we've got a problem, and then nothing
about what the problem actually is, what we're doing to fix it, how
long it's going to take, and then, it's just, that stuff has come
out in dribs and drabs, and that's why in the past, nine months
that this has been going on at least publicly it's been going on
for probably about a year with what they were doing internally, um,
they're just now getting to the point where they're providing a
modicum of transparency to everybody and their stock price is
starting to, climb back up because they're not necessarily going to
go close to that 5 billion euro target that they said they're going
to have to set aside. So that's good, but not selling turbines is
still a problem. They've been selling. Some three megawatt turbines
in Eastern Europe, they're also continuing to offer, the three
megawatt platform for sale where they can, and they're still
selling, the six megawatt, with 170 meter rotor, that wasn't the
platform that had the problem. But there, the bulk of what they
need to be selling, the bigger you go with turbines, we've talked
about this on the show before the bigger you go with the turbine.
The more finite amount of addressable market you're going to have.
So they're not going to get anywhere with just being able to sell
the six megawatt turbine. They have to have something in the, four
to five megawatt range that is going to compete with the Vestas
V150 and, the likes of Nordics and other companies that are out
there, including some of the Chinese companies that are out there
selling those sized turbines. So they've, I hope that this new CEO
best wishes to Vinod and I hope that what he's going to do is going
to really turn this around. He's very experienced coming from the
oil and gas side of the Siemens energy business. And seems pretty
adamant that they're going to stick to these targets, as you
mentioned, Alan where they're going to turn a profit by 2026. I
think he, he understands how you need to toe the line, just like
anybody, with GE, for instance, bringing Vic Abate back in, he
knows how to tell the line and he knows what the parent company
wants to see. So I think this is a good move in general from
Siemens Energy. Joel Saxum: I think there's something here
underlying that we should address as well. So back it was last fall
when they were like, Hey, we let all the engineers go. Or not all,
of course, but we let a large part of the engineering staff go. All
of us are going, Wait, you got all these problems to fix, you got
this stuff to do, why are you letting these people go? But what,
when you start digging deeper into things, and if much about
corporate culture, especially at large companies, It's really hard
to take that ship down. And write it in a different direction if
you have all the same people on. Now, I know I'm, this may be a
hard thing to talk about, right? If you're trying to change company
culture, if it's around whatever it is, if it's around quality or
your development processes or something, there's certain things
that are controlled by processes, yes, and you follow those
processes and you can adjust things. However, there's a company
culture there within your engineering teams, within your product
management teams, and everybody else that it's easier, a lot easier
to change culture a lot quicker. If you just get rid of some people
and bring new people in, then they don't have those old tendencies.
Allen Hall: Can I play Rosemary here? Are you blaming this on the
individual contributor to these companies? It's not their fault.
They were just doing their job. Joel Saxum: Part of the reason
they've identified as culture, and that's not an individual person.
Philip Totaro: That's the mob. By the way, since Rosemary's not
here, that's usually her argument as well, is there should, you
should never have the means or a corporate process that allows you
to get down to this point where you've got, everybody, look and to
what the Siemens, Gamesa's CEO is now saying, everybody in the
industry has blade quality and manufacturing and reliability
issues, et cetera. But it's the process that you have in place to
be able to address something, particularly that is a fleet wide
issue and be a systemic thing that you should have been able to
catch before it escalated to this point. And frankly, again if we
can fill in for Rosemary, who's. Off doing exciting things. That's
the point I think she usually likes to make with this. Is, you
should never have a corporate culture that allows you to get to
this point.