Ørsted Restructuring, Nordex Cold-Climate Turbine

Allen and Rosemary discuss the upcoming Wind O&M Australia 2026
conference, Ørsted's major restructuring announcement, and the
BirdVision bird collision avoidance system. They also explore
Nordex's new cold-climate turbine for Canada and the ongoing
challenges of blade icing protection systems. 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
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Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be
a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com
today. Now, here's your hosts. Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime
Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall from the Queen City,
Charlotte, North Carolina. And Rosemary Barnes is here from
Australia. And Rosemary, Joel and I just got back from the Sky
Specs customer Form 2025 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we had a
really good time, man. Most of the install base in America. For
Wind was up at Sky Specs and interesting discussions. Just a lot
going on. Obviously, we're all talking about the changes in
legislation we're talking about. Uh, all the
moving [00:01:00] targets everybody's trying to
reorganize. There's been a number of, uh, shifts from wind into
solar that's happening right now in the United States. And lowering
operational costs, that's the big one. Getting blades under
control, uh, getting gear boxes under control, understanding where
some of the risks are. It was a very good. Conference, uh, they do
it once a year. It was a full room, uh, and really good people,
people we, we don't see all year. You maybe see once a year, maybe
see at another trade show. It was nice to spend a couple of days,
uh, talking wind turbine o and m. Very similar, much to what we're
gonna do in Australia in February. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I
wish I could have been there, uh, maybe next year.  Allen
Hall: Well, we, we met with Matthew Stead. He was there. He
had traveled all the way from Australia. And one of the things we
did tell everybody were at the SKYSPACE conference was come to
Australia February 16th and 17th in Melbourne, and you need to
start [00:02:00] registering now. You can go to Woma.
2020 six.com. WMA 2020 six.com and register for that event. Or if
you want to, uh, present, you need to put your information into the
website and get that rolling. Uh, it, it's gonna, it's getting
close to being sold out, so you need to do that now before you lose
your spot. We've increased the size of the conference from, it was
about 170 odd people last year, and it's gonna be up to 250, but
even. By increasing the, the amount of seats we're still gonna be
full.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It's a hard, it's a hard
cutoff this time as well. Last time we kind of expanded as, uh, we
got more registrations in, but we don't have that option this year,
and yet that, uh, agenda is definitely starting to get worked out.
So now is the time to get in touch. If you, one, want to speak or
two, have a, a topic that you think that we should talk about, like
one of the big things that we wanna achieve with this event. Is
matching people with [00:03:00] problems to people who
have solutions and especially, you know, people who are developing
solutions. So, you know, it might be that there is no solution
available yet, but we still wanna hear about the problems 'cause
there's a lot of smart people that know all about developing wind,
wind turbine technologies. So that's the place to. Get those sorts
of, um, yeah. That kind of information sharing, flowing and get
people thinking creatively.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And I
don't wanna make all the announcements here, but a number of world
experts are going to travel to Melbourne to talk about wind energy.
So if you, if you haven't heard of a solution before and, and
there's a lot of problems with wind turbines, right? There's little
nuance. Difficult problems that we're all trying to solve. And you,
you may not have an expert in Australia, you may not have an expert
in United States. They may be over in Denmark or Germany, or
France. Uh, pretty much everybody around the world is gonna be in
Australia in February to talk about how to make our wind turbines
operate better. That's why it's gonna be good. It's just the
world's gonna be there. [00:04:00] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah.
It's one of the other other reasons why we wanted to make this
event is it's exhausting. Going to all of the technical events
around the world is really hard, especially for Australians. You
know, you can't go anywhere basically without getting on a 15 to 30
hour flight to, to get there. So, um, we're bringing some, some key
people over. Um, yeah. And we can talk about. There's more in depth
later on, but there's some, some good topics that I think
Australian wind farm owners and operators really can learn from
some of the solutions that are happening elsewhere. And we have
also got some unique Australian only problems that, um, I think
that, you know, these, uh, companies will be interested to help
solve. Allen Hall: And there's a lot of unique Australian
solutions to wind turbine operations that the world needs to hear
too. So it's a both way conversation because Australians have a
really intuitively, uh, solving problems kind of get down to first
principles and, and suss [00:05:00] out how to get their
turbines up and running again. And, and sometimes if, if you spend
time in Samoan m buildings, sometimes they overthink these problems
and Australians are really good at solving them. So. It's good to
hear both sides and that's how we do it.  Rosemary
Barnes: I'm really enjoying this, technical subset of the
Australian wind community. I do find people are very much kind of
solution oriented and less, I've always been a bit bamboozled by
how secretive and isolated wind turbine companies want to be. And I
don't feel like that's the vibe. Like we don't have obviously any
Australian OEMs and so all of the operators are. fairly, or most of
them are fairly free in the way that they're talking about problems
and solutions that they've found and also willing to try things
out. So it is a really good place to run trials for new
technologies. 'cause you'll usually find a really huge wind farm
that, is able to, try it out. And Get some data on how it's
working, [00:06:00] Allen Hall: and it's definitely some
of the world's harshest environment for wind turbines. So if you
have a great new leading edge product, you probably ought to take
it to Australia and actually check it out because, as Rosemary
pointed out a number of times, the UV in Australia is really
strong, the dust and debris is really strong and the winds are
strong. So you have all the ingredients to, really aggressive
leading edge erosion. Plus the lightning from our area of
expertise. The lightning is amazing in Australia and not amazing in
a good way. There's a lot of lightning. To wind turbines And it can
be destructive in Australia, where you may not see that up in
Denmark. So you can really learn a lot from watching what the
Australians have done.  Rosemary Barnes: I, I am involved
in, in a couple of trials ongoing at the moment for a few Australia
specific problems. Um, par loads, also starting to do some r and d
into, uh, figuring out more about what the problems are and
solutions to them. So yeah, I think that it's a really exciting
time [00:07:00] to be part of the Australian wind
industry.  Allen Hall: So you need to register now. Go to
WOMA 2020 six.com. And get involved. Are you worried about
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monitoring. Well, the announcement today was when Giant or is
having a major organizational restructuring that will
eliminate [00:08:00] approximately 2000 positions by the
end of 2027. Now. CEO Rasmus Abo uh, described the move as
necessary to create a more efficient and competitive organization
as the company prepares to bid on some new offshore wind projects
across Europe. Note that they didn't mention America in that, that.
Ted is gonna be mostly focused on Europe. That makes a lot of
sense. Honestly. Uh, the restructuring reflects Ted's strategic
focus on offshore wind and European markets with plans to finalize
large construction projects in coming years while. Building a more
fiscally robust company than the current workforce of about 8,000
employees globally will be downsized through natural attrition,
redundancies, and outsourcing with the organization, ultimately
ending up at about 6,000 people and rosemary in the United States,
there's been a number of announced layoffs, or we're seeing that on
LinkedIn. This is a [00:09:00] big deal for the
organization because Ted needs to get, its. Financials settled. Uh,
if you listen to some other discussions about this, there's a lot
of talk. I mean, it's, in my opinion, a little bit of crazy talk
about, uh, Ecuador and Orton into some sort of merger, which I just
don't think is ever going to happen.