Nordex Outsells Vestas, GE Vernova Rebuilds Wind Team

Nordex closes in on Vestas in onshore orders, GE Vernova rebuilds its wind team, Nexxis buys BladeBug, and wooden blades draw doubts. 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: Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with R- Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron, and it is another crazy week in wind energy. Uh, we should start off with GE Vernova, because if you've been following your LinkedIn pages, you will see a number of new faces and even a couple of press releases. And if you do follow wind closely, you know that GE Vernova has been in a little bit of a tailspin, and that won't go on very long before they will try to right that ship. Well, here we go. Uh, GE Vernova, uh, is grabbing a bunch of talent. Claire McDonough, the chief financial officer who took [00:01:00] Rivian, the, the truck maker, through its IPO recently and led its cost-cutting push, uh, is leaving the electric vehicle maker to become the CFO of GE Vernova. So not just wind, the whole kit and caboodle, uh, gas turbines and the, all the transformer businesses. Uh, and she'll start at the beginning of 2027. She replaces, uh, the retiring Ken Parks, and it sounds like Ken is gonna stay on and help Scott Strazik as an advisor, which I'm sure he appreciates. Uh, but, uh, Claire is not the only new face there. Christie Hopkins, who spent more than 26 years at Siemens Energy and Siemens Gamesa, has joined as executive director for Wind North America New Units, leading sales across US, Canada, and Mexico. And then Gio Scialdone, who has been on the podcast many times with 3S Left, is leaving 3S Left. I'm-- That's a big hit, I'm sure. Uh, and he's coming back to GE, where he started at many, many years ago as a technician and built the wind [00:02:00] farm outside my front door when I lived in Massachusetts. He'll come back as global head of, of commercial services and a number of other, uh, repowers and a number of other things. So basically between, uh, Christie and Gio, it sounds like they're gonna cover the planet, uh, for wind energy This is a big change, everybody. Uh, our concern was, was GE gonna shut down the wind division? Yolanda, it looks like they're keeping it and reinforcing it with some really strong candidates.  Yolanda Padron: If they can hopefully get everything together and, and get at least the wind side, um, back to where it once was or close to it, uh, it could be a really good win for their operations sites, right? Their operational sites who currently don't really know what the forecast is gonna be for their sites in five, 10 years if GE just goes down.  Rosemary Barnes: I was actually watching... There's this new creator, I don't know who they [00:03:00] are, but some creator I've been watching Instagram reels from where they go through just, uh, you know, like, historical things, but mostly related to business or government, and one of the ones that he was talking about that I thought was interesting was about, um, when engineering companies get a non-technical CEO in for the first time, like an MBA type, and what they typically do. And I think that GE is usually, like, the just shining example of how to run businesses in that way. But the typical pattern is, and he had some examples, which I can't recall, so yeah, sorry, my, um, anecdote will be fact-free, but trust me, there are, is some data behind it. But it, it gave the example of, yeah, so the, um, y- you know, like, a traditional engineering company like Boeing might be an example, and GE Vernova would be another one. They build up their strength and dominance by investing a lot in R&D, and all of the technical staff really care about the company and are [00:04:00] all contributing to, um, you know, making sure that they continue to dominate technologically. And then if you get an MBA-type manager in, the sh- the typical pattern goes that they fire a bunch of people that were working in R&D, like reduce the R&D spend massively, reduce the wages of all the technical people. Technical people start to have less say in how the company, um, is managed. And in the short term, they get spectacular results from that, right? You know, profits go massively up if you stop investing in R&D for a few years, um, because, you know, R&D takes quite a while to, to pay off, so you're not gonna notice the pain. You're gonna see the financial benefit immediately. You're not p- notice the pain for ages. And, you know, without going into too d- in-depth analysis about the wind energy companies that are around today, I think if you look at the companies that are going well You see that there are companies that continue to prioritize, um, research and [00:05:00] development and continue to prioritize the opinions of the technical people working for them. And I personally think that GE is maybe gone just a little bit too long with the MBA-type way of running a company. Um, and that, yeah, like that's really great for a little while, but it's not a long-term strategy, and I don't know how you pull back from it. Um, I haven't seen any turnaround stories like that. But yeah, just some, some food for thought that that might be part of the reason why they're struggling. But I would say that 'cause I'm an engineer, and yeah, engineers hate to be managed by non-technical people, so. Allen Hall: I wanna get Gio's title right because he is responsible for a lot at GE Vernova on the wind side. It would be Global Head of Commercial Services and Repower at GE Vernova. So global repower, that's a huge area, and in services, as we know, is one of the profitable areas within GE Vernova Wind. Very important position, and he's an engineer [00:06:00] That's good Maybe  Rosemary Barnes: that's the start of the comeback, comeback king. Allen Hall: It, it def- definitely could be. Yeah. Well, the numbers are in for the first half of 2026, and Europe is having the best wind year ever. Wind Europe reported, uh, 8.8 gigawatts of new capacity installed in the first six months, uh, up 30% from the same period last year. Germany alone put up more than 500 turbines. That's quite a few. Uh, but behind those numbers, there's another story that is unfolding, which is Nordex, the German turbine maker, is closing in on Vestas, the Danish wind tu- turbine maker, in the onshore market. Uh, in August, Nordex booked more than twice the megawatts that Vestas did. Uh, a Danske Bank analyst says Nordex has been quicker on its feet, picking up market share that left behind b- by Siemens Gamesa and GE Vernova. Uh, although [00:07:00] Vestas is still way out in front in, in terms of total gigawatts that they're gonna produce. This is an interesting shift, right? I mean, we've been li- seeing this the last, ooh, year or so, where Nordex is picking up clients that were formerly GE Vernova or are even, like, massively dedicated to GE Vernova or Siemens Gamesa. Uh, it does seem like there's an opening there, and so far, at, at least people we've talked to, uh, from the Weather Guard side, l- literally like Nordex. They like the response to problems and questions and things that maybe they hadn't seen out of other suppliers. Was this unexpected, or is this a, a sort of a natural outgrowth of where Nordex is headed? Rosemary Barnes: Is this one year of this trend, or is it, has it been growing for a few? I,  Allen Hall: I think it's been growing for a couple. It's been growing  Rosemary Barnes: for a few years  Matthew Stead: now. Isn't it one month? Yeah. One month?  Allen Hall: It's one month, but if you- ... if you beat Ves- if you beat Vestas at all and you're Nordex, think, if you look, think [00:08:00] about four or five years ago, and I've, if I said Nordex had outsold Vestas, and maybe it had happened, uh, but it would just seem implausible  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah Allen Hall: that that would  Rosemary Barnes: even occur No, I mean, if it's, if it's several years then, then fair enough, that's a turn. I just say that because y- you know, most of this capacity is offshore, right? And offshore projects are so lumpy. You, you know, like, when you make a sale, you make, like, a gigawatt sale. Um, and so I think it's pretty hard to take, like, a single year, or even, like, within a couple of years it could still be the same project. So, um, that's one point. And then the other point is, like, when you look at the breakdown of, uh, what did we say? Europe put in 8.8 gigawatts, and 3.4 of that was in Germany. I think European countries do tend to be a little bit, like, protective of their own companies. Or, I mean, ev- it's natural for, for everyone, you know, has some sort of preference- Mm whether it's explicit encouragement or support, or whether it's just, like, a warm, fuzzy feeling that you have for a company that's from your [00:09:00] country. I think that that possibly has something to do with it. So yeah, if I would no- if I was Nordex, I would see this as encouraging and probably not just consider it a slam dunk from here. But, you know, something to, to grow on. 'Cause I, I know traditionally German companies have had some trouble succeeding as much outside of Germany as within it.  Matthew Stead: Mm. I think this is a good example of the, the last discussion we had about GE. I mean, you know, Nordex, Vestas, Siemens, Gamesa are investing in their development, investing in their technology, improving the quality. ...