Ørsted Denies Equinor Merger, WOMA 2026 Tickets Live

The crew discusses Equinor's significant investment in Ørsted,
while Ørsted denies plans to merge. They also cover Jupiter Bach's
new plant in Colorado and the upcoming Wind Operation and
Maintenance Australia 2026 event. Register for ORE Catapult's UK
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a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com
today. Now, here's your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome back to the
Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall in the queen
city of Charlotte, North Carolina. I have Rosemary Barnes in
Australia who has, uh, been doing a little bit of travel. Joel is
back in Austin, Texas. Man, I feel like everybody's been traveling
a lot and so is Yolanda. The Yolanda has been on the road quite a
bit and we have a really interesting week in wind energy.
Particularly over in Denmark and Norway, and if you've been
following the news there, uh, as we all know, Ecuador had a pretty
big investment into Sted several months ago where they put in about
two and a half [00:01:00] billion dollars to buy 10% of
Sted to help write the ship a little bit, and then. A c basically
last month, right Joel? It was about last month where they, they
spent about a billion dollars for the right rights issue, uh, to
keep that stock moving, right, and or, and need more cash. And
that's how they raised it. That's a total investment, about three
and a half billion dollars. That's a lot of money for anybody to be
spending at this moment, and Ecuador is thinking this is a pretty
good bet. That's great and they wanna work closer with Ted. And the
talk is that Ecuador wants a boar seat with Ted Joel. Is there any
chance that is going to happen?  Joel Saxum: Well, it
was, it's interesting that they brought that up as well, right?
Because the initial buy-in, you know, back I think six, nine months
ago or whatever it was, they specifically said in their press
release, we are not trying to get a board seat. We don't want to
have [00:02:00] control over this, yada, yada, yada. But
then when the rights issue came out, and I think it was the, the
TED stock dropped like 30% or something that day. Um, they threw
more cash in, they got a little bit more power. But it's like
anything, right? Once, once you've got, uh, quite a bit of money
invested and you have a, have pretty heavy percentage of us of
whatever that investment may be, it can be. Half ownership in a
car, I don't care. You want to have a little bit more say about
what happens with your money and what the results can be based on
strategic decisions. And if you've, you know, been watching Ted's
decisions. Now they've been at the, the whim of government policies
and stuff for the last few years, but they've also mistepped a
little bit on a couple of them. Uh, so you can see EOR wanting to
get in there to protect their investment a little bit. The, in the
funny thing to me here, and, um, Rosie, you spent a ton of time up
in Denmark, is the, the, the back and forth between the Norwegians
and the Danes about, oh, you're, you're just
our [00:03:00] little brother. You're our, oh, you're our
distant cousin, da da da da. How they were kind of all at one point
in time, a lot, you know, a lot closer. There was what was called
the, um, the calmer Union, I think it was. And that was the Danes,
Norwegians, Swedes, all under one king. This was a long time ago,
but, so there's that area of the world's kind of all been playing
together and, and if you know a little bit of the history too, all
of that money that Norway has, so all the money that Einor has is
Danish ex Danish land money. So the Danes gave away their rights to
the North Sea, to the Norwegians for whatever reason, and that's
where all the oil was that made the Norwegians rich. That is the
EOR pile of cash.  Rosemary Barnes: People talk about
that frequently, like really frequently. In Denmark. I probably
would've had a conversation like, I don't know, at least once a
month, maybe once a week about that topic. I remember one that
sticks out in my mind. Um, I always said that Norwegian, like, I
love the Norwegian [00:04:00] accent. It sounds like
Danish, but they're, they're laughing. And I remember saying that
to my boss one time, my Danish boss, and he says, yeah, they are
laughing, they're laughing all the way to the bank because they've
got our oil. And, and every Danish person has a huge chip on their
shoulder about it. Um, it, it was like the oil, the oil reservoirs
weren't well known when they did the divide up of who would get,
you know, which bits of the ocean. It was mostly about fish. Um,
and yeah, so they divided it where they divided it, everyone was
happy with it at the time, and then not so long afterwards found
out there was just heaps and heaps of, uh, oil under there. And
yeah, Norway got quite rich off it. But you know what? I think
that, um, Denmark hasn't done so bad out of it because it kind of
forced them to go all in on wind energy in a way that other, like
other countries kind of, it's like during the oil shock of, was it
the 1970s? You know, everyone. Looked into wind energy a lot, but
as soon as the price went down again, then they were just like, oh,
don't worry about wind energy. But [00:05:00] Denmark
just, you know, kept on keeping on and they did have, you know, a
few decades of just total world dominance in wind energy. Um, and
it also kind of, you know, filtered through to other bits of the
economy. It's, it's really nice kind of. Smart industry
manufacturing. They, they really did train up a whole generation or
so of, um, engineers that are, you know, really industrious and
innovative and you see them in all sorts of other industries now.
So I, I don't think that Denmark should have a ship on their
shoulder about it. I think that, you know, they should consider
that they got some, some good out of it as well.  Joel
Saxum: I, I completely agree. The, the last funny I'll throw
in there is, if you don't know this, Ted used to be known as Dong
Energy, which is Danish oil and natural gas. So they used to be an
and not, that's not too long ago. That's only like 10, 12 years
ago.  Rosemary Barnes: No, and I think it's the only
example of, um, any fossil fuel company that has flipped, like
fully flipped to [00:06:00] renewables. I don't think
there's another example. Um, maybe, you know, someone can email us
and, and tell me I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're the only
ones. And so that's why, like, I, I really like, I'm always going
for them, you know, like I'm always cheering them, cheering them
on. I want them to succeed because I want that to be something that
can happen, you know, so much better if, um, oil and gas companies
spend their energy transitioning to renewables and succeeding
compared to if they spent their energy trying to, you know, um,
stymie the renewable energy transition. So yeah, I, I think good
for them.  Allen Hall: Ted is saying no chance of any
sort of merger with Ecuador. In fact, there's CFOs, total analysts,
there are no merger plans, and the CEO of Ted is also basically
saying we're focused on our own plan. We, we we're going to go
ahead and get the company righted and we don't really need a lot of
Ecuador involvement. That's gonna come to a head pretty soon
though, if Orec [00:07:00] can't get their stock back up.
Like Joel has pointed out, the, the pressure from Ecuador will
slightly diminish over time. And if Oreg can get really rolling,
which analysts are saying now is somewhere in the 2030 region
before they become, uh, self-sufficient in a, in a sense that, uh,
until such time, EOR probably is gonna keep knocking on that door.
It does lead to the question, and I think Rosemary, you brought it
up, oh, probably six months ago or more, that Ecuador is starting
to pull back from its renewables business and starting to focus a
little more on the oil and gas side, but they have renewable sort
of requirements that they're going after are goals. And that stead
could fulfill those goals, is that still likely to be the situation
where EOR is gonna be in oil and gas and Orsa is gonna be in
renewables and between the two of them, they satisfy, uh, both
sides, Denmark [00:08:00] and Norway's economic
interest?  Rosemary Barnes: I, I think it's very, very
hard actually for, um, a company that's used still oil and gas
projects to move on to renewables. I mean, they're not. That
similar, you might like, you might think it's one kind of energy,
um, moving to another kind of energy. But I think that that totally
misunderstands how the, the business, the actual business works,
what kinds of, um, projects they do, how risky they are, how much
return they require, and the only reason. Companies would do that
as if they were kind of forced to.  Joel Saxum: That's
the ESG thing. Yeah.  Rosemary Barnes: Well, it's not
only ESG though, because I mean, eor they are kind of running out
like, you know, started off with, um, stuff in Norway or in
Norway's waters. Right. And they've, to a certain extent, run out
of good projects. I mean, that always happens with, um, with fossil
fuels that, you know, the good sites get, um, uh, depleted and you
have to find new sites that, that always happens. Um,