Ex-Ørsted Employees in Demand, CIP Orders Goldwind Turbines

CIP taps Goldwind for an Australian wind project even as Europe fights Chinese turbines. Plus, Alfanar's $100 million bet on Senvion, and where laid-off Ørsted staff are landing. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape — protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts.Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes and Yolanda Padron. And top of the week is Rosemary’s been out and about looking at wind turbines in Australia, and I would like to hear some of the details about that, Rosemary. What did you see out in the wilderness?Rosemary Barnes: You might have to settle for generalities rather than details.Allen Hall: Okay.Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know what’s going on with Australian wind turbines at the moment, but there have been a lot of problems — a lot of lightning damage and a lot of serial defects. That’s the category I’ve been looking at recently. It’s a wide variety, looking at a lot of Australia-specific, or not even Australia-specific, but just local problems. Certain wind farms are getting the same kind of problem over and over again — some of them I’ve never seen anywhere else before. I check in with people like you and other international friends who do similar kinds of work, and some of these damages are just like — everyone’s like, “Well, what is that? I wouldn’t have even believed that was possible.” So that always keeps it really interesting. The last couple of days I’ve spent crawling around inside some blades, getting covered in fiberglass — very reminiscent of my time in the factory, when I used to just be itchy for weeks or months in a row. My hot tip for that: you’ve got to feel the sensation, but it doesn’t bother you. It’s not itching, it’s just zen — zen out, and you can handle being itchy for days in a row.Allen Hall: It’s sort of the hot sauce analogy. Hot sauce is really not burning you, but it just feels like it is, so if you can think it away, it’s just fine. Similar thing. And you’re headed to Denmark and then to Germany pretty soon, right?Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’m so sad that you’re not going to be able to come, because I’ve got some really cool tours lined up and cool meetings.Allen Hall: Me too.Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I’ll have more to report back. But definitely anybody who’s going to be at Hamburg — if you’re in Denmark and have something you want to show, feel free to get in touch. I don’t know what that might be. I’ve got some plans currently — it’s pretty jam-packed, itinerary so far, but looking forward. I always love going over.Allen Hall: Well, when you’re in Denmark, you should go by Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Rosie, because they have an Australian project, and the turbines are coming from China. The Gawarra Bayya site is a 408 megawatt project, and CIP has confirmed to Finnos that Goldwind will supply the machines. That lands smack in the middle of the fight between a lot of countries that would like to use Chinese suppliers and the EU Commission, which is really prohibiting it at the moment.So in a sense, we have CIP — a Danish company that’s been pretty much avoiding any sort of Chinese wind turbines in the EU — but once they come out of the EU, they’re perfectly comfortable using Chinese wind turbines in Australia. It does seem like a real contradiction there. And my first thought was, well, Scotland has raised their hand and said, “What the heck — why is it okay for this Danish company to buy Chinese wind turbines and put them in Australia if they’re so afraid of all the technology that’s inside them, and maybe the spying or whatever else the concern is?” Is this going to play out okay, do you think, Rosemary? And especially Yolanda — you’ve worked for a Danish operator. This doesn’t feel right.Rosemary Barnes: I do personally see the contradiction, because Europe is worried about China taking over Europe’s electricity grid. They don’t care what happens to Australia’s electricity grid. Australia doesn’t manufacture any of our own wind turbines, so we don’t care that much. We have so many Chinese solar panels and Chinese cars, and China is our biggest trading partner, so I think we have a lot more comfort with China and Chinese technology in Australia than Europe does. If I’m honest, I think the main reason for Europe’s discomfort is probably primarily to protect their own manufacturing industry, and I don’t disagree with that. So, controversial — is that a hot take?Allen Hall: Well, it sort of is, yeah. I mean, obviously there is a Danish wind turbine manufacturer in CIP’s backyard, so to speak, that they could have easily chosen — Vestas — and put Vestas turbines in. And Vestas is the number one turbine maker in Australia in terms of quantities of turbines. It’s the vast majority Vestas. So it would have made a lot of sense to choose Vestas here. Don’t you think that’s going to create a little bit of tension between the Vestas group and the CIP group?Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. I don’t think so — I mean, they’re not the same company, right? They’re not sister companies or anything like that. There’s no official relationship other than that they come from the same country.Allen Hall: They’re probably next to one another.Rosemary Barnes: I think you either have a local content requirement, or you allow free competition. It’s a bit weird when you’re somewhere in the middle — officially there’s no local content, but in practice nothing else can be bought. I would rather it all just be on the table, and everyone knows where they stand from the very first days of project planning. You don’t want to get halfway through a project and realize that, even though it’s technically allowed, you’ll never get approval for this, or that the laws might change partway through. I think that’s worse than just knowing from the start that you’ve got to choose European. But in terms of the wind industry going better, I think it’s not a bad thing to see a bunch of different solutions to some of these challenges, and it would be nice if we could all learn from each other and improve.Allen Hall: Well, let me ask you a question here, Yolanda — as you used to work for a Danish operator that is considering using Chinese turbines, at least they haven’t eliminated the possibility of it — is this really just a ploy to push down prices from Vestas and Siemens Gamesa?Yolanda Padron: If it is, it wouldn’t be anything new, right? It’s something that a lot of owner-operators, whether they’re Danish or not, have seen if they can maybe get a lower price. But if they have a fairly homogenous fleet in a country, they might get a site from a different OEM just to prove to themselves, and to their OEM of choice, that they’re not the only ones out there. So this could be something that’s happening. I’m really curious — Rosie, I don’t know if you know, but a lot of times the IT department is all the same in a big company that owns a lot of assets in different countries, and sometimes they’ll try to silo it by continent or by country, or they’ll just keep the same thing everywhere. My understanding was that part of the reason some of these operators didn’t want Chinese wind turbines was because of that whole SCADA system, and everything would have to be integrated into their internal IT. Do you know if they’re siloing their Australian part of their IT department, or their Australian back end, for CIP?Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know about that, but from the sites that I’ve worked with, for the most part, the SCADA system is whoever’s operating the wind farm — that’s their thing. And who is operating this wind farm? I would have assumed it would be Goldwind, because that’s always how it works —Allen Hall: Yeah.Rosemary Barnes: — in Australia, at least. So usually it’s a matter of, if the owner wants to get into the SCADA, they get in and grab it and remove it from the system. It’s not like it’s all integrated. Yeah — it is a good point that maybe this is opening a backdoor into Europe somehow. I can see that as a European regulator, I’d be worried about that, and maybe be requiring something of CIP to ensure that that can’t happen.Allen Hall: Our next story takes us to India, where a Saudi group is writing a $100 million check. Back in a moment.As wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high-quality content you need. Don’t miss out — visit peswind.com today.Well, Senvion is getting fresh capital, and a lot of it, coming from Saudi Arabia’s Alfanar Group. They’re investing $100 million into Senvion, and obviously Senvion is a huge wind turbine maker in India — Senvion originally started in Germany, and ends up in India. So the first $34 million already went out to Senvion, and the rest follows in the next couple of weeks, so there’ll be a lot of cash floating around at Senvion. Senvion builds about 1.5 gigawatts of turbine capacity a year and has roughly 16 to 17 gigawatts already deployed. The whole effort does seem like a play to expand Senvion internationally, now that India has essentially created a closed marketplace — if you’re going to put turbines into India, the technology must be developed in India, the manufacturing must be in India, the construction companies, everything else, must be India-based....