Statkraft Withdraws from Floating, Repair Quality Concerns

We discuss Statkraft's withdrawal from floating wind projects in
Norway, Valero's $23 million Series A funding, and the varying
quality of blade repairs in the field. The Babbitt Ranch wind farm
is this week's Wind Farm of the Week. Sign up now for Uptime Tech
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today. Now, here's your hosts. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome back to the
Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Phil Totaro from California and
Joel Saxum down in Austin, Texas. And Rosemary Barnes will join us
shortly from the Southern Hemisphere. Uh, a number of news articles
this week that we want to talk about Stack Craft. Let's lead off
there, up in Norway. So Norwegian energy giant Stack Craft has
announced it will withdraw from the upcoming floating wind tenor
for the U Sierra North area as part of a broader cost cutting
strategy. Uh, the company, which is Europe's largest renewable
energy operator, we're also halt new offshore wind
project [00:01:00] development to focus on what CEO, uh,
Bergit Ringsted AL calls near term profitable. Strategies unquote.
Like solar? No. Come on, solar, wind. There we go. And batteries In
fewer markets the decision follows. Stack craft's early
announcement and may stop New green Hydrogen developments signaling
a strategic shift toward more immediately profitable renewable
energy investments fill. Does this slow down some of the offshore
wind work, particularly up in Norway, and it does seem like.
Floating will be the future here, but if Stack craft's not gonna be
involved and it's right in their backyard, uh, what does this say
to the industry? Phil Totaro: It doesn't send the best signal,
but it's also coming in a time when, you know, as we record this,
the, the Norwegians just released, uh, four new, uh, wind lease
areas with potentially up to 20 different, uh,
project [00:02:00] sites. So. It seems like there's a lot
of enthusiasm and obviously they've got the wind resource up there
to be able to do a lot of floating offshore wind. If they can work
out with their military, you know, the radar interference and all
that, uh, there's no reason they shouldn't want this capacity
because it's, you know, power that they can use to balance their
hydro and power that they can offload to, you know, other
Scandinavian countries because there's plenty of transmission
already and they're, they're already. Planning on building more.
So, um, it's just whether or not they have the appetite to put the
market mechanisms in place to, to actually support these, uh, you
know, these, these tenders.  Joel Saxum: I think
appetite's the right term here, Phil, when you say that because,
uh, you know, and as the CEO is saying in this, in this article
we're getting, we're gonna focus more on near term profitable
technologies. So doing things that they know make money, that are
proven to make money. You know, we all love the idea of
floating [00:03:00] wind, which is, you know, what
they're, they're pulling out of this project, your floating wind
project. However, nothing's really so sussed out yet. Nothing's
really sorted. There's not a specific foundation that works best.
There's not, uh, a, you know, an interconnect that works best.
There's not a turbine model that's out there that this is the one,
this is what we run with. You don't have support from major OEMs
like, you know, oh, do we pick a Siemens one or a Vestas one, a GE
one for offshore? Like we have for fixed bottom offshore. So I get
it like in, in, you know, we're in a stress capital market where
we're still sitting on high interest rates and, and everybody wants
to do something that's more profitable for them. That's proven
right now, um, in my mind is a good strategy. You know, it would
be, you don't want 'em to pull out of it. You would love to see
some of the, the big guys put some of their r and d budgets and
keep this floating thing moving. 'cause that's a good move for the
future. But. I mean, it's all about making money and, and, and
de-risking yourself. So like it's understandable.  Allen
Hall: Well, is [00:04:00] still involved in that URA
North effort and they're working on one of the larger float taste
floated wind turbine projects off the coast of Scotland. Green
Volt, right? Yeah. Green Volt. Right. And I'm wondering if CRA
feels. Like the technology isn't developed as far as they would
like it to be, and companies like Farrun, which are really heavily
involved in floating, are going to do the dirty work and then
everybody else is gonna follow behind their lead. Joel
Saxum: Yeah, that could be right. Because that's what, that's
what's needed. Someone needs to go and put the money in this and,
but it's going to be risky. Right? So it's what's your, what's your
risk appetite? Um, and if we're talking about risk and offshore
wind, I mean, we've seen what's happened in the last six months, a
year, so someone has to really. Uh, I, I guess the, the joke term
in Wisconsin, we says, pull, pull up your big boy pants and, and go
and go make this happen. So maybe that is, that is of, of our gro
We've, you know, we've spoke with them on the podcast and that's
what they're focusing on. So maybe it takes someone like them
to [00:05:00] really make this thing happen. Allen
Hall: Well, Gros at the minute is it's discussing what type of
term they wanna put offshore. This is where the Ing Yang discussion
comes into play, because rag is. I don't know if they've selected
them or down selected Bing Yang as one of the potential providers
of turbines, but that's created a lot of chaos, at least
temporarily in the UK because the United States is super concerned
about a Chinese wind turbine off the  Phil
Totaro: coastline of the uk. Joel was talking about
de-risking, uh, and originally for this project, stat Craft was
partnered with uh, ocean Winds, which is, um. Uh, EDPR and Eng g
and Acre, uh, which was originally mainstream offshore when they
originally, um, started making the, the bids and those two, uh,
other groups or three technically, if you know, um, Eng G and, and
EDPR. As well as Acre. They had [00:06:00] already
previously pulled out of this partnership, so you didn't have, you
don't have this, this de-risking capability anymore. Stat Craft was
basically having to take this whole thing on by themselves, and
they probably weren't finding any other partners that were
particularly interested in diving in. With them at that point. So I
think, you know, them pulling the plug, it's, it's almost like what
happened. Um, you know, when, uh, with the Atlantic Shores project
in the United States, you know, when, when one partner pulls out,
the other partner can't really make it a go, so the other partner
is gonna pull the plug and then the whole project is basically
dead. So. That's just what happens. Unfortunately, when you're not
able to de-risk the project  Allen Hall: Over in the uk,
they're de-risking a couple of larger projects. The Crown of State
has selected Ecuador and Gwent Glass, which is a joint venture
between EDF and ESB. Uh, they've been selected as the preferred
bidders for floating wind projects in the Celtic Sea.[00:07:00]
Now, each developer was awarded 1.5 gigawatts of capacity. Which is
quite a bit in their respective development areas for an annual
option fee of 350 pounds per megawatt. And the Crown Estate
launched this fifth offshore wind leasing round in February of last
year. Originally offering three areas with up to 4.5 gigawatts
total capacity. This is a big deal because you're bringing in
Ecuador and E-D-F-E-S-B. And it's going to really expand the amount
of energy produced from Floating Winds. So, although, um, stack
Craft is not gonna be involved up north off the coast of Norway, a
bunch of developers are gonna be really involved off the coast of
the uk. This has implications. I think the, the floating wind
difficulty, at least the engineering difficulty is gonna be solved
by the United Kingdom and maybe France, [00:08:00] don't
you think, Phil?  Phil Totaro: Yeah, I mean, France has
had, you know, a couple of demonstration projects now, um, for a
little while, and they just got their first kind of, people still
refer to it as kind of pre-commercial. It's like 30 megawatts worth
of, uh, floating offshore capacity now with, uh. A small, small
project. Um, and the second one's on the way, uh, Japan's been
investigating floating foundation technology. We've even had some,
some stuff here in the States with the University of Maine looking
at this. I mean, everybody's been looking at floating for 15 years.
Um, but the reality of it is, it's. There's plenty of technical
solutions out there. None of them have achieved commercial
viability yet because nobody's been willing to invest in scaling it
up. Um, and the fact that we haven't really directly involved the
oil and gas companies who have, you know, abundant experience with
tension like platforms, uh. Bill confounds [00:09:00] me
because, you know, if you, if you leverage the capabilities that
they already have, you're gonna get them more interested because
it's gonna give them an opportunity to leverage the technology that
they already have heavily invested in, um, that we can use for,
for, you know, a floating offshore wind platform. So it,