LM Wind Power Cuts 60% of Denmark Staff

The crew discusses LM Wind Power's dramatic layoff of 60% of
remaining Danish staff, dropping from 90 to just 31 workers. What
does this mean for thousands of wind farms with LM blades? Is
government intervention possible? Who might acquire the struggling
blade manufacturer? Plus, a preview of the Wind Energy O&M
Australia 2026 conference in Melbourne this February. Learn more
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turbines.com today. Now here's your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon,
Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Welcome to the Uptime Wind
Energy [00:01:00]Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall in the
Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. I've got Yolanda Padron in
Texas. Joel Saxon up in Wisconsin and Rosemary Barnes down under in
Australia, and it has been a, a really odd Newsweek. There is a
slow down happening in wind. Latest news from Ella Wind Power is
they're gonna lay off about 60% of their staff in Denmark. They've
only have about 90 employees there at the moment. Which is a
dramatic reduction of what that company once was. Uh, so they're
planning to lay off about 59 of the 90 workers that are still
there. Uh, the Danish media is reporting. There's a lot of Danish
media reporting on this at the moment. Uh, there's a letter that
was put out by Ellen Windpower and it discusses that customers have
canceled orders and are moving, uh, their blade production to
internal factories. And I, I assume. That's
a [00:02:00] GE slash Siemens effort that is happening,
uh, that's affecting lm and customers are willing to pay prices
that make it possible to run the LM business profitably. Uh, the
company has also abandoned all efforts on large blades because I, I
assume just because they don't see a future in it for the time
being now, everybody is wondering. How GE Renova is involved in
this because they still do own LM wind power. It does seem like
there's two pieces to LM at the minute. One that serves GE Renova
and then the another portion of the company that's just serving
outside customers. Uh, so far, if, if you look at what GE Renova
paid for the company and what revenue has been brought in, GE
Renova has lost about 8.3 billion croner, which is a little over a
billion dollars since buying the company in 2017. So it's never
really been. Hugely profitable over that time. And remember a few
months ago, maybe a month ago now, or two months ago, the CEO of
LM [00:03:00] Windpower left the company. Uh, and I now
everyone, I'm not sure what the future is for LM Windpower, uh,
because it's, it has really dramatically shrunk. It's down to what,
like 3000 total employees? I think they were up at one point to a
little over when Rosie was there, about 14,000 employees. What has
happened? Maybe Rosemary, you should start since you were working
there at one point.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I dunno. It
always makes me really sad and there's still a few people that I
used to work with that were there when I went to Denmark in May and
caught up with a bunch of, um, my old colleagues and most of them
had moved on because a lot of firing had already happened by that
point. But there were still a few there, but the mood was pretty
despondent and I think that they guessed that this was coming. But
I just find it really hard to see how with the number, just the
pure number of people that are left there. I, I find it really hard
to see how they can even support what they've
still [00:04:00] got in the field. Um. Let alone like
obviously they cut way back on manufacturing. Okay. Cut Way back on
developing new products. Okay. But you still do need some
capabilities to work through warranty claims and um, you know, and
any kind of serial issues. Yeah, I would be worried about things
like, um, you know, from time to time you need a new, a new blade
or a new set of blades produced. Maybe a lot of them, you know, if
you discover an issue, there's a serial defect that doesn't, um,
become obvious until 10 years into the turbine's lifetime. You
might need to replace a whole bunch of blades and are you gonna be
able to, like, what's, what is gonna happen to this huge number of
assets that are out there with LM blades on there? Uh, I, yeah, I,
I would really like to see some announcements about what they're
keeping, you know, what functionality they're planning to keep and
what they're planning to excise.  Joel Saxum: But I mean,
at the end of the day, if it's, if [00:05:00] the
business is not profitable to run that they have no. Legal standing
to have to stay open? Rosemary Barnes: No, no, of course not.
We all know that there, there's, you know, especially like you go
through California, there's all sorts of coast turbines there that
nobody knows how to maintain them anymore. Right. And, um, yeah,
and, and around there was one in, um, in Texas as well with some
weird kind of gearbox. I can't remember what exactly, but yeah,
like the company went bankrupt, no one knew what to do with them,
so they just, you know, like fell into disrepair and couldn't be
used anymore. 'cause if you can't. Operate them safely, then you
can't let no one, the government is not gonna let you just, you
know, just. Try your luck, operate them until rotors start flying
off. You know, like that's not really how it works. So yeah, I do
think that like you, you can't just stay silent about, um, what you
expect to happen because you know, like maybe I have just done
some, a bit of catastrophizing and, you know, finding worst case
scenarios, but that is where your mind naturally goes. And the
absence of information about what you can
expect, [00:06:00] then that's what. People are naturally
gonna do what I've just done and just think through, oh, you know,
what, what could this mean for me? It might be really bad. So, um,
yeah, it is a little bit, a little bit interesting.  Allen
Hall: Delamination and bottom line, failures and blades are
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inspections, completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical
defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your
blades. Back in service, so visit cic ndt.com because catching
blade problems early will save you millions. Yolanda, what are
asset managers [00:07:00] thinking about the LM changes
as they proceed with orders and think about managing their LM Blade
fleet over the next couple of years, knowing that LM is getting
much smaller Quicker? Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and this all comes
at a time when. A lot of projects are reaching the end of the full
service agreements that they had with some of these OEMs, right? So
you already know that your risk profile is increasing. You already
know. I mean, like Rosie, you said worst case scenario, you have a
few years left before you don't know what to do with some of the
issues that are being presented. Uh, because you don't count with
that first line of support that you typically would in this
industry. It's really important to be able to get a good mix of the
technical and the commercial. Right? We've all seen it, and of
course, we're all a little bit biased because we're all engineers,
right? So we, to us it makes a lot of sense to go over the
engineering route. But the pendulum swung, swung
so [00:08:00] far towards the commercial for Ella, the
ge, that it just, it. They were always thinking about, or it seemed
from an outsider's point of view, right, that they were always
thinking about, how can I get the easiest dollar today without
really thinking about, okay, five 10 steps in the future, what's
going to happen to my business model? Like, will this be
sustainable? It did Just, I don't know, it seems to me like just
letting go of so many engineers and just going, I know Rosie, you
mentioned a couple of podcasts ago about how they just kept on
going from like Gen A to Gen B, to Gen C, D, and then it just,
without really solving any problems initially. Like, it, it, it was
just. It's difficult for me to think that nobody in those
leadership positions thought about what was gonna happen in
the [00:09:00]future.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I
think it was about day-to-day survival. 'cause I was definitely
there like saying, you know, there's too many, um, technical
problems that Yeah. When I was saying that a hundred, a hundred of
versions of me were all saying that, a lot of us were saying it.
Just in the cafeteria amongst ourselves. And a lot of us, uh, you
know,