New ONYX CEO, Smarter Farmland Contracts

The hosts cover some recent turbine failures, Onyx Insight's new
CEO and strategic acquisitions, research about wind turbine
farmland contracts, and an article about hybrid brakes by Dellner.
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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 to the Uptime
Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall in the Queen city of
Charlotte, North Carolina. Rosemary Barnes in Australia and Joel
Saxon in the great state of Texas. Just before we hopped online to
record this podcast, Rosemary was telling us about a number of
turbine problems on LinkedIn and. Rosemary wanted to comment on
them. These are some of the larger turbines. Rosemary are newer
turbines. Uh, some of them onshore, some of 'em offshore 
Rosemary Barnes: for the, yeah, for the most part. Um, yeah,
both onshore and offshore. Some a little bit older, but the common
thread is, um, [00:01:00] just like spectacular fail
failures of multiple blades of one across multiple turbines of one,
the one I saw most recently. Had blades smashed to pieces. It had
towers that had just like fallen apart. Like it was, um, like they
weren't bolted together. Like it was just blocks stacked on top of
each other and they had, you know, just an angry baby had just
topped them over. That's what it looked like. And um, I think
what's really interesting is reading the comments in those and it
just, without fail every single time, the first few comments are
gonna be. Um, justifying how that is just cool and normal, like
either by the company itself or the turbine manufacturer itself
saying, oh, you know, oh, this was just a prototype. So, you know,
it doesn't matter that it fell apart, like. Forgetting about the
fact that, okay, it's just a prototype, but it's still an
operational turbine that people would've been inside it to install
it. They're inside it to maintain it. You know, people are inside
those things. They're not supposed to be able to just fall apart by
the time that it gets to that point.  Joel Saxum: I, I, I
think I've seen some of these same posts, Rosemary, and one of the
ones that I saw recently [00:02:00] was not even, it
wasn't new, it wasn't prototypes. It was, it was like, there's a
picture, there's three turbines with, or four turbines and there of
the, of the dozen blades in the picture, nine of them are gone.
It's just a nelle hub with like little stubs on three turbines, and
those are only like 850 kilowatt, one megawatt, 1.5 megawatt
machines. They're, they're old. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah.
And so I think a typhoon went through in that particular case and I
made a comment, you know, like it's either poor turbine design or
it's really poor site assessment. In either case, it's a failure,
right? Like you don't put wind turbines that can't withstand a
typhoon in a place that gets typhoons. Um, but you always, you
always say people saying how this is actually great engineering.
And I just thought this is just the classic example of that, um,
that was written under this latest post, and I'll just read it out.
The pictures point to the designers of these turbines. Having done
that, designing to a certain wind speed, having done that to a high
degree of consistency, I note three failure
types [00:03:00] in the pictures, blade snap, tower,
buckling and bolt failure, pointing to all parts, having been
designed to the same survival. Wind speed looks like they did their
job well. And it's just like, oh, what, you look at this, at this
path of like it's Godzilla has run through this wind farm, and
you're like, oh yeah, that looks like a job done. Well, well done
guys. It's just like, if we can't learn anything as an industry
from these kinds of things, then, you know, how can we expect to
have a, a bright future for the industry? Like it? It's one thing
to fail, but if you look at a failure and say, that's actually a
success that is. Just the worst possible outcome we have. We have
to be able to say what went wrong, what do we do to make sure this
doesn't happen again? You have to. You have to learn, otherwise
you're going backwards. Allen Hall: Are you worried about
unexpected blade root failures and the high cost of repairs? Meet
eco Pitch by Onyx Insight. The standard in blade root monitoring.
Onyx state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in
real [00:04:00] time, delivering continuous data to keep
your wind farm running smoothly and efficiently. With Eco Pitch,
you can catch problems early, saving hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Field tested on over 3000 blades. It's proven reliability
at your fingertips. Choose eco Pitch for peace of mind. Contact
Onyx Insight today. To schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and
Experience the future of Blade Monitoring, there's been a series of
leadership transitions that is really changing the face of the wind
industry. Onyx Insight. The Macquarie Capital Back Condition
monitoring specialist who've had in the podcast, um, has appointed
Alexis Grennan as this new chief executive officer Alexis Bringss
dearly 20 years of experience from Joel. Schneider Electric where
he most recently served as CEO of the digital grid division, and
his expertise in smart grid software solutions and energy
management systems positioned him to lead [00:05:00] Onyx
Insights expansion beyond its current 28,000 wind turbines under
monitoring across 35 countries. So obviously Onyx is a big provider
of CMS systems. They are the sole provider of CMS systems on GE
turbines at the minute. Onyx is making a lot of moves. They just
acquired 11 I recently also. So they're, uh, what it looks like
right now. They wanna be the, the leader in CMS.  Joel
Saxum: Yeah, I think it's, if you go deeper into their history
a bit. You know, the couple of CMS solutions around gearbox was
really where they started then. Then they got to the eco pitch
thing, and then now the blevin. And I think if you're sitting in
that boardroom, you're thinking they want to be the center hub for
IO ot, IOT being sensors out in the field. Anything that comes in,
they want to be able to amalgamate it and help people out in that
direction. Um, you know, a new, a new CEO that has, uh, 20 years at
Schneider [00:06:00]with digital grid. That's awesome. Right?
Good hire there. I would think. Um, I, I do see this as a trend in
wind. You're seeing some more CEOs and senior leadership coming
into organizations from outside of wind directly. Some of the
bigger capital holders, you know, the Goldmans of the world and the
Macquarie's and that kind of things, if they have portfolio
companies, you're seeing people be placed in leadership roles that
are coming from outside of wind and bringing expertise from, of
course, usually energy, software, supply chain, these kind of
things that we need, but some fresh blood at the leadership level.
I like to see that.  Allen Hall: Well, the addition of
the grid coming into Onyx, is that an expansion plan? Because there
is a lot of work going on expanding the grid and monitoring the
grid and making the grid carry more energy than what it was
originally designed for. And I've listened to a number of podcasts
over the last month that talks specifically to it. It, it is a
definite growth area. [00:07:00] You think this could
indicate a move into other areas besides just the basic wind? CMS.
Solutions.  Joel Saxum: Well, let's think about it this
way. So in wind, when you have wind specific companies, you're
starting to see intenders or you have been seen intenders for the
last few years, even just the most basics inspections. Okay? We're
inspecting blades. Use your RFP. Now those blades say, and blades
plus BOP. So we want you to do the transmission lines. And then
you're seeing some of 'em that are BOP plus substations. So all the
sub, all the way back to the edge of the wind farm where connects
to the grid. Um, so companies are adjusting, like you've seen Skys
specs adjust to that. You, you know, whether it's partnerships or
expanding things internally and other companies as well, even down
to the ISPs starting to do more and more and more because they're
being asked to. This makes sense because, uh, at the end of the
day, if you're working for a subset of customers, there's only so
much budget in. Of turbine work and if you wanna expand your
company and grow, you need to expand in
other [00:08:00] areas. So why not just keep it going
down the line of connection to the grid, inter, inter wind farm
issues, those kind of things out of the wind farm. So I, I don't
know if that's ON'S plan, but I can see that. I think that from a
strategic standpoint, it makes sense. Allen Hall: Well, as
Schneider is involved in all kinds of aspects of the grid
worldwide, so I would assume bringing in a new CEO would open up
maybe some horizons to Onyx and maybe there's adjacent businesses
that they should be in because they have a lot of technology and
they're pretty smart group. They may want to expand outwin just a
tiny bit just to, to test the waters, see what they could do there.
Well, going to solar seems like an obvious choice, but there could
be other areas that they may want to look at, at least in the short
term to see if they can add value.  Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Grid infrastructure. Right. I think that that's a,