US Pushes LNG, Denmark Offshore Permits

This week we discuss the Danish government's permit extensions for
two offshore wind farms, the U.S. Senate's new renewable energy
bill, the Belgian government's halted wind farm tender, and the
complexities of laying seabed cables for wind farms. 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
Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show
on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit
Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes'
YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy
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 2025: Well welcome back
to Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Rosemary Barnes down in
Canberra Australia. Phil's in California, and evidently he lives
next door to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and I, I had no idea,
Phil, like you're that close to royalty.  Phil
Totaro: I'm not. You're  Allen Hall 2025: making
that up. Joel's up in Wisconsin somewhere in the northern wilds of
Wisconsin. Next to a cheese factory, and here I sit in Charlotte,
North Carolina. If we've been paying attention or if you've been
paying attention to the news over the last, uh, 48 hours in America
has been complete chaos as we are recording this and the US Senate
has [00:01:00] passed a bill regarding renewable energy
and it's back to the house. Supposedly this is all gonna get signed
off by the 4th of July. So we're recording it. Today is July 2nd.
Um. So by the time you hear this, something may or may not have
happened, and we're trying to keep abreast of the latest, but I
think there's some other news going on around the world. And, uh,
one of the stories we found interesting was the Danish Offshore,
uh, agency Energy Agency has approved permit extensions for two of
Denmark's oldest offshore wind farms, which marks a major milestone
for. Wind energy longevity. The middle Gruden and Newstead offshore
wind farms have received permission to operate for an additional 25
years and 10 years respectively. That is massive extension. Uh, the
middle Gruden facility, which is built in 2001, has about 20
turbines and about 40 megawatts of capacity, and it's owned by a
community cooperative. [00:02:00] And the Danes being on top
of all these things, uh, allowed the extension after doing an
engineering analysis showing that the infrastructure has more life.
This is unusual. Is this just a artifact of early designs being
overly conservative? And these wind farms can practically live
forever? I think so. I, uh,  Joel Saxum: I like it.
Alright. I wish that all these wind turbines are built this way
because it's then you can get more longevity of, I think now of
course when everybody has a repower now or tries to extend life,
they're trying to really do it. So they're trying to, if we're
gonna put money, we'll try to, you know, up the kilowatt, we'll try
to up the capacity, well then the foundations don't hold and these
kind of things. So it's kind of like if you look at, um. I'm up
here in northern Wisconsin, not too far from my house. There's a
bridge that was built by the CCC, uh, the civilian Conservation
Corps in like the, um, at the Great Depression. So like in the
1930s, late, [00:03:00] late 1920s. And that bridge is
fine. Like it's golden. It's still good, right? But it was
overbuilt, super built to be heavy duty construction. And there's
another bridge just down the road from that same one over the same
river that was done in the seventies that needs a complete
replacement. Because it was done, it was done with like, you know,
di different design functions, not as robust. And, and it's kind of
like, oh, some of this first generation of older stuff is
overbuilt, is toughly built. It's the same thing. We talk about
shorter blades, like a, you know, a V 47 or a GE one X, like those
blades just last and, but you don't see it as much anymore. So I,
I, I'm happy to see this. I think it's cool, uh, to see these
things getting basically refurbished and. Gonna have a life
extension.  Allen Hall 2025: I don't even know what the
refurbishment process or the extension process looks like. Rosemary
on something that is that old that's made out of fiberglass and
resin. How do you even evaluate something like that?  Rosemary
Barnes: Well, what they [00:04:00] do is they, um,
if, if you wanna do it properly, then you go back to the original,
um, blade design files, um, and you basically, you rerun it, you
can, and so you get a different result for two reasons. Or two
possible reasons. One could be that it didn't see as hard of a life
as what they designed for. So, um, you know, you can rerun with the
actual loads that it saw if you have those available. And then the
second thing is that, you know, these wind farms came on around the
turn of the millennium, right? Um, and so we've learned a lot,
especially about, um, um, like how strong materials actually are.
There are still gonna be some, some, you know, defects in some
blades. That will see them fail before others. So you, you know,
the blades are getting older. I would expect they will see more,
more failures, but, um, there's a lot better ways that you can
monitor that sort of thing. Now, you don't just have to wait for a,
a blade to break in half and fly off. Um, anymore. You can, uh, you
know, install monitoring [00:05:00] stuff and, uh.
Inspect them more frequently. You know, drone inspections are so
much faster than, uh, if you would've had to get up on ropes and
have a look at every, you know, square centimeter of blade surface.
So I think that there's just, you know, that so many technologies
have come so far since these, um, blades were designed, that there
is a lot of scope to keep them going, if that makes sense. You
know, a lot of times a turbine that was installed 25 years ago is
gonna be tiny compared to today. So a lot of times people might not
want to, um, they might wanna. You put in new, new, bigger turbines
instead.  Joel Saxum: Do you see, because, okay, so we
talked about blades here for a second, right? But we have all kinds
of rotating mechanical equipment, foundations, bolting all this. Do
you see in my mind, in my mind, for something this old and wanting
to extend that one, I see a massive NDT campaign. I see checking
bond lines on blades, looking at some metallurgical things, looking
at some connection points offshore, looking at the foundations. I
mean, of course you're gonna do some seabed stuff, but that's
usually done in maintenance too. That's a weird one there,
because. [00:06:00] When you talk about maintenance,
inspection, repair, and maintenance campaigns for offshore wind
farms, there's things that you don't do onshore that you do
complete offshore regularly, like scour inspections and some of the
characterization site surveys, that stuff goes on regularly. So
that's not something that you need to, oh, we gotta take this big
campaign on. Should have regular every year bi-yearly data on that.
So that's cool, but I would see a big NNDT campaign in my mind. Um.
I dunno. Maybe that's Jeremy Hanks question.  Allen Hall
2025: Well, is this useful data that would help the industry
just to know how these are performing? Rosemary Barnes: I
think it would be quite specific to the individual components.
'cause you, you know, if the wind farm had an initial life of what,
25 years, um, everything would've been designed to last 25 years.
You don't like, good engineering isn't just making something as
strong as you can because it's gonna be much more expensive than it
needed to be. And what's the point in having a. I don't know, a
tower that lasts for a a thousand years, but the blades only last
for 30 years. There's no, there's no [00:07:00] point.
Right. So, um, it would just be a matter of how, how excessively
conservative the designers were in each case. It won't be exactly
the same for all of them. I'm sure they'll be exchanging many
components probably. Um. Some components will just be preemptively,
like we know that most of these are gonna fail, so we're gonna do a
site-wide, um, campaign to replace, you know, all these bearings or
all these, you know, whatever component and then some other ones.
It would be a matter of yeah, like waiting and seeing when they
fail. And I think that you're right, Joel, that I. There's so many
good NDT technologies around now. Um, and, you know, predictive
maintenance can, there's a lot of sensors you can put in that will
give you an early warning sign that things, you know, bearings
don't have a lot of life left in them or, or something like that.
And so then you can get really smart about your campaigns to, you
know, keep it going.  Allen Hall 2025: Don't let blade
damage catch you off guard. eLog Ping sensors detect issues before
they become expensive. Time consuming [00:08:00] problems
from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in
internal blade cracks. OG Ping has you covered The cutting edge
sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage
before it's too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your
turbine's health today. Belgium's Federal government has
unexpectedly halted the long plan tender for the Princess Elizabeth
Offshore wind zone. Just two months before bids were scheduled and
the two gigawatt auction was set to launch in November, 2025. After
four years of prep work and industry groups are calling the
decision a violation of the coalition agreements and warn. It
undermines investment certainty in Belgian offshore wind
development. Now, the,