Vestas 7.2 MW Turbine, New Aerones Funding Round

The hosts discuss the recent $62 million funding round for Aerones,
Siemens Energy's call for increased offshore wind capacity in the
UK, Canada's push for offshore wind with Bill C-49, and the
installation of Vestas' 7.2 MW turbine in Germany. And the Coyote
Wind Farm in Texas as the Wind Farm of the Week. Sign up now for
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technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
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today. Now here's your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: And welcome back to the
Uptown Wind Energy Podcast. I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Joel
Saxon, and Phil Ro. Uh, crazy week. Again, I don't know how else to
describe it. The, I was just telling our producer this morning that
there's so much news coming out where it seemed like to be a little
bit of a lull after the US House bill, but it's picked right back
up again. And one of the more exciting things that's happened is A
owns closed a $62 million series B. Uh, led by Activate Capital and
S two G with, uh, revenue growing at Aeros by about 300% in 2024,
and they are getting a lot of requests
from [00:01:00] operators in the United States and
elsewhere to fix their wind turbine blades. They have been working
pretty closely with GE Renova and NextEra. Over the last, what Joel
say two years, maybe a little bit longer on a number of
problems.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. A couple years they've been
doing, uh, bespoke solutions for both of them. They've also been
doing their, you know, standard things that they're rolling out to
the rest of the market. But I think this is a good thing. In one
article that I was reading, there is like a tier one operator
starting to adopt it, right? So. Everybody was kind of approaching
that robotic thing, like, yeah, it looks like it's the future and,
you know, but a little trepid, right? Dipping a toe in or dipping a
finger into the water, trying it out. But now it seems like, hey,
we got an LEP campaign, coones, we've got this robotics problem we
wanna solve, collar owns. So they're starting to get more and more
adoption and, and that shows, right, 300%, uh, revenue growth in
2024. So that's, that's huge, right? To, to hit that kind of
number. So now it's up to, uh, scaling up. Uh, the only thing that
can cap that number is the amount of robots that they can put outta
the [00:02:00] factory over there in Riga.  Allen
Hall: And we visited their facility in the United States about
a year ago. It was just outside of Dallas, near Lake Dallas of all
places. And it is a decent sized facility, but at the time we, when
we walked around out back, you just noticed a whole bunch of, uh,
parking lot spaces with trailers and capabilities for robots and
thought, wow, that there's a lot of robot, uh, sitting in the
parking lot. And, uh. But then they had, when I asked they, they
said, oh, they had a ton of crews already out in the field working.
So they do have the ability to get to a number of turbine sites. I,
I guess maybe still not enough from what I hear, there's, the
demand has gone through the roof.  Joel Saxum: Well,
it's, it's a really interesting, or really cool, I guess,
opportunity for technicians. So that's one of the things that
robotics does is it addresses the technician shortage. You got a
technician shortage, great, let's use robots. Then we can start,
uh, having that force multiplier, right? Because you could run
robots on two turbines from one control van. You can do a lot of
stuff there. But as a technician, [00:03:00] what a great
opportunity. If you know blades, if you know in the field, you
don't even have to know that stuff. Not even go work with robotics
and AI and like the future of cool things. And I know that a
Rowan's part of their growth and their plans here, they got the $62
million. Of course, we don't know all the plans they are gonna do
with that, but I do know that they're making a push to hire locally
to get local talent, to get local back office to expand their
presence in the states. 'cause it's a, it's a, it's a huge market
here, right? So they've brought on some, some more, uh, horsepower
locally from the states, whereas before they were having to bring a
lot of technicians over from, from Europe. They've started to crack
into that and use more local stuff to be able to do things faster
and more efficiently, which is, uh, you know, that's better for all
the, all their customers as well. Allen Hall: Well, I think
one key about this announcement is when opportunity presented
itself, I. Rowans went after it. And that opportunity was with GE
Renova on some tip mast additions. And there was a lot
of [00:04:00] blaze that needed some more weight in the
tip, and the robot could do it faster. I think at the time, uh, GE
was planning on doing it with technicians on ropes, and then, uh,
aeros demonstrated they could do it faster, more consistently with
robotics, and that was the opening that they needed. I don't
remember how many, uh, blades they have done that, uh, addition to,
but it's gotta be in the thousands at this point.  Joel
Saxum: I'd say this about that Arons team. I mean, you, you
and I know Dyna crews very well, the CEO, we know the CTO, we know
the sales team. Some of the operations people, they are not shy on
grabbing an opportunity and running with it. And, and I'll also,
this the, one of the, one of, in the, in the wind industry, one of
the best companies I've seen. Run with primary market research,
right? Where someone says, here's a problem, can you help us solve
it? Boom. They're on it, creating a solution tomorrow. Um, and not
a lot of people do that very well. So [00:05:00] I think
that's been part of their, their prowess in, in the scale that
they've done. And what of course, and oversubscribed funding round
means you're doing something right. And I, and I think that that
shows.  Allen Hall: Over in the uk, Siemens Energy's UK
Vice President warns that allocation round seven, which is
upcoming, must award a record six gigawatts of offshore wind
capacity to maintain the trajectory towards the 43 to 50 gigawatt
goal by 2030. Target that the UK has set up for itself and there
are, the UK is at about 15 gigawatts at the minute, and. So the,
the push from Siemens is we have a factory in haul. We make blades
and make turbines. We we're really good in offshore work, but we
really need to go. Uh, and that's driven by governments putting
out, uh, awards and driving the industry forward. And, and Siemens
UK vice president is saying, now's the time. Now is a time that
they really need to show progress. I think
that's [00:06:00] generally true. If you do look at, and
if you, Joel, I don't know if you saw this, or maybe Phil, you saw
this this week. Uh, the UK put out a map of where all the wind
farms are and where all the permanent or the rare earth magnets
were located and when those farms are gonna come offline in an
effort to potentially recycle those rare earth magnets. So you have
this nice little. A year by year map of the decommissioning of one
cype decommission when they could reuse those rare earth magnets.
And you can see all the wind farms in the uk. There are a lot of
wind farms right now in, mostly on the west coast. Well, some of
the west coast, a decent amount on the East coast, but there's
still a lot of onshore wind, which I didn't realize, uh, that. UK
government effort is really paying dividends, I think, but the
rate's not enough. I guess that's the problem. The rate is not
enough to keep up where their goals are. Phil is, are they gonna be
able to do that even if they [00:07:00]do have a, an
allocation round of, you know, upwards of six, seven gigawatts
coming up. Phil Totaro: That's the challenge. They have about,
uh, 11,000 onshore turbines, um, in the UK at this point, according
to, to our data, uh, and offshore, I forget what the turbine count
is, but it, they're, they're up there in the, you know, 28 to 30
gigawatts now, um, that's operational or under construction, um,
which is fantastic. You know what Siemens is saying is that. Based
upon what's happened in previous allocation rounds, um,
specifically they didn't have enough capacity to serve the entire
demand. Um, basically what they were willing to allocate at, at a
particular price point. Uh, and so it left the project developers
and independent power producers is left with, well either, you
know, we've gotta go find a corporate power offtake, which really
for uh, [00:08:00] an offshore wind farm is gonna be
much. More challenging to do, uh, than, than onshore because of
the, the size and scale of these things. Of course. Um, so, you
know, they are still largely dependent on the government, you know,
facilitating this offtake through, you know, national Grid and, and
the other grid operators to be able to have. That allocation of
power and then, you know, more utility contracts get signed, um,
that way. And, and that's how people get fed. How  Joel
Saxum: many years, Phil, did they have that? Uh, like on there
was an onshore moratorium against more new onshore wind. How many
years did that last?  Phil Totaro: I wanna say it was
like eight. Uh, if memory serves to, just to clarify this, so the
head of moratorium in Lower England, which is basically, you know,
not Wales, not Scotland, not Northern Ireland or, uh, you know, any
of the outer banks areas. Um, but just
lower [00:09:00] England,