Nordex Q3 Orders Jump 30%, Vestas Bets on Australia

Nordex Q3 orders jump 30% and Vestas lands about a gigawatt in Australia. Plus why turbine factories skip Australia, high project costs, and whether batteries can replace coal. 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 Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'm here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes, who is in Sydney, Australia, attending some business conferences. Rosemary?Rosemary Barnes: Right now I'm in Sydney. I was at an ARENA innovation event last night, and it was matching up startups with investors. It was a great event, actually. I got invited because I was moderating a panel. Not all startups, though some of them were. I had the head of sustainability at Qantas there, Fiona, and then Katherine from Brighte. They do a bunch of financing, mostly for distributed energy and household consumer energy products like rooftop solar and batteries. And then Jack from Neara, and they do grid simulation. It's pretty cool. If you run a network and you want to know how to best improve resilience while spending the least money, they'll model things like, okay, if this particular pole falls over, then this will happen. And you can improve resilience by just adding a guy wire to this one asset, and you're not going to take down any additional poles.Anyway, we talked about the Australian energy landscape and investing in technologies in those areas. Some of the strengths we have in Australia have a lot to do with distributed energy. We're really leading the world there, and there's heaps of opportunity for innovation and for companies to solve problems in these spaces. I also talked about some of the categories that aren't so easily decarbonized.We had Qantas there, and they're investing a lot in sustainable aviation fuel. I really enjoyed talking with Fiona before the event, because one of my problems is that I travel so much for work. I do make sure the travel I do is for the climate benefit, so I don't ultimately feel guilty about it, because it has more impact than the emissions of the flight by a long way. However, I do want to decarbonize aviation. I love to travel, and I would like to be able to continue to do that in the future.So I talked with her about that. I really want to be able to buy sustainable aviation fuel, because one, it actually does something, and two, it's an industry that needs to grow and scale, and I would like to support some of that scale-up in an appropriate way. She let me know they've got a small business scheme now where you can get in touch with them and buy it. We also discussed maybe a collaboration with Engineering with Rosie, a video about some of the projects they're investing in. So that was really cool.Later in the evening, five startups pitched to investors, and it was a really great investor-to-founder ratio in the room. For every startup there trying to get money, there were probably five investors trying to find people to give money to. It's definitely a good event to go to, and they do it annually, so it's one to keep on your calendar.Allen Hall: Did you break out your checkbook and invest in one of these companies?Rosemary Barnes: I would really love to. My investment strategy is that I invest $1,000 to $5,000 in companies. I don't do heaps of financial due diligence. I just do the technical due diligence: is this a real problem that's going to need to be solved, do I trust the engineering, does the team seem like they get it? That's as far as I go. And I invest enough money that if it goes wrong, it's not the end of the world. I have lost all of my money on a few investments, and I've made 20 or 30 times on some others, so it works. I would love to give $1,000 to $5,000 to probably three of these five companies, but that's not the kind of money they need. You'd have to add several zeros onto the end of that. I'm just waiting for my first big success so I get my $100 million in the bank, and then I'll go around funding. Or if someone's like, "I've got $100 million and I don't have any technical judgment," feel free to give that to me.Nordex Q3 OrdersAllen Hall: Well, there's a company over in Germany you probably should invest in right now, which is Nordex. Do you have any money in Nordex right now?Rosemary Barnes: I don't have any money in any wind turbine companies. I did early on, in 2010 or whatever. I was like, well, we know wind is going to grow huge, I'll invest in this. And it did grow huge. I was right about that. But no one made any money. If I was going to invest in wind, and I do, because I have a wind energy company, so I guess all of my investment is in wind, it would definitely be in small individual solutions that I thought were needed.Allen Hall: I think you're missing out, because Nordex is expanding way beyond Germany. Third quarter orders jumped 30%. Thirty percent is a magic number. That's amazing. They have about 2,800 megawatts in orders just in the third quarter. Turkey brought in more than 900 megawatts, and U.S. orders have topped about 1.3 gigawatts this year. So Nordex is really growing quickly. CEO José Luis Blanco expects the international share will keep growing, and I assume one place it will be pretty soon is Australia. And they have this new turbine they're selling down in South Africa for moderate wind speed areas. It does seem like Nordex is taking the place of maybe a Siemens Gamesa onshore, maybe a GE in certain places, and that they're actually competing against Vestas, which is hard to believe, because five years ago, if you mentioned Nordex, it would have been like, they're a small player. They have some cool technology. But boy, have they ramped up.Rosemary Barnes: Sounds like you've got an investment to make, Allen.Yolanda Padron: From conversations we have with a lot of the owner-operators in the U.S., a lot more people are looking into Nordex or purchasing from Nordex, which is really good to hear, to have a bit more diversification in wind turbines and wind turbine owners.Allen Hall: Matthew, are you putting sensors on Nordex turbines yet?Matthew Stead: Yeah, definitely, probably more from an icing point of view. So definitely in the Nordics, optimizing power production. I would agree with what you're saying, Allen. Within our team, the discussion around Nordex is, yeah, we're always talking about Nordex.Allen Hall: It's crazy how much the industry has changed. If you see a Nordex representative, they have a lot of products to offer. Obviously, when Yolanda and I are talking to operators in the U.S., Nordex comes up most times. Right now it's Vestas and Nordex as the two. GE is sort of a distant third, and I haven't heard anybody say Siemens Gamesa's name in months. Big shift.Well, that's the Nordex update. Next, Vestas CEO Henrik Andersen on why Australia now matters to Vestas.Vestas in Australia and Local ManufacturingAllen Hall: Are you overspending on lightning repairs? Most operators are, because solving lightning damage is complicated. Weather Guard Lightning Tech helps operators reduce lightning damage. Our StrikeTape lightning diverter protects over 20,000 blades worldwide. Now StrikeTape Ultra installs faster than ever. StrikeTape Ultra cures up tower in just 15 minutes, even in cold weather. Visit weatherguardwind.com to schedule a call.Europe's fleet is getting older, and someone has to keep it running. In this edition of PES Wind magazine, there's an interview with Matthieu Dessailly of MDWind. He's talking about how MDWind has changed its focus from doing a lot of installation work to major component exchanges and life extension, the things that keep turbines running for the longest time possible. He says owners must treat their turbines as industrial assets, not just financial ones. And that's true. This is a really good article, because it touches on a number of points having to do with wind turbine maintenance and how to keep your turbines running efficiently, and not treating them as something that gets tossed away, as has happened in some places. So don't do that. If you want to read this article or many of the other articles in this edition, you can go to PESwind.com and download a free copy.Australia is turning into a big market for Vestas. CEO Henrik Andersen says so himself in a LinkedIn post. He points to three Australian orders this year, adding just about a gigawatt. Andersen links the orders to Australia's push for energy independence and more stable power prices. And Vestas crews are busy in Australia right now installing turbines on two projects. So it does seem like there's been a Vestas invasion into Australia. And most of the turbines in Australia right now are Vestas, right, Matthew? That's the numbers today.Matthew Stead: Yeah, I was going to say, what's the difference? They've always been here. They've always been strong. Most of the turbines behind me are Vestas models. So as far as I'm concerned, they invaded Australia a long time ago.Allen Hall: Are they offering bigger turbines in Australia than some other places? But more importantly, are they going to build any sort of factory in Australia to build blades, nacelles, or tower sections, for that matter? Anything in regards to turbines?Matthew Stead: My guess is no. I don't think anyone has seriously considered building factories in Australia. Rosie probably knows more than I do.Rosemary Barnes: I don't disagree with that. We would love for them to do it, and it could happen. It would just need to be a conscious choice, probably involving the Australian government. Not necessarily, but that would be the easiest way. I don't see it happening. However, one of the sites I'm working on at the moment has quite old