The Uptime News Flash is a short form podcast to discuss wind energy mergers, acquisitions, and partnerships. This week in the news Joel Saxum and Allen Hall discuss Scotland-based Edge Solutions seeking another funding round for their Armour Edge leading edge shell solution. Renantis and Ventient Energy are merging in 2024 to build a more powerful energy company, and PelaStar and FibreMax are working together for their innovation tension leg offshore floating platform design.

Edge Solutions / Armour Edge – https://armouredge.com
Renantis – https://renantis.com
Ventient Energy – https://www.ventientenergy.com
PelaStar – https://glosten.com/project/pelastar/
FibreMax – https://fibremax.nl
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

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News Flash 12 July 2023

Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Ticket, and I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power Lab. Joel Saxum, we’re the host of the Uptime podcast, and this is your Newsflash. Edge Solutions, a Scottish company is looking for additional funding for their Armour Edge leading edge erosion solution and the company is, is seeking to raise 2 million pounds in new funding to expand its team meet, demand and finance research and development. And Joel, they had noted earlier that it had closed a 1 million pound enterprise investment scheme funding round which was participated in by private investors. But now it’s, it’s trying to expand itself.

The company has hired  Stuart MacLean former senior partner in mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance at law firm, CMS who becomes the head of corporate development and Richard Scullion, a former global marketing director for Palla Pharma, has been appointed as head of business development. So Joel, we know that the Armour Edge product from Edge Solutions works really well.

It sounds like they need a little bit of funding to, to really kick off this product.

Joel Saxum:  Yeah. They’re on that scale mode, right? They’ve got, they’ve, they’ve been in, out in the world. They’re installing it. It’s on turbines. They’ve got the, it’s proved right. We know it works. They claim a 50 year lifetime now.

It hasn’t been around that long, so we don’t know if the 50 year lifetime is correct yet. However they’re out there in the market, they’ve have acceptance by the market, and now they’re ready to hit the ground running. They’ve, they’ve done the walk and now it’s time to sprint. So it’s get some cash in, grow the team grow the ability to scale up by building product.

And. They’re on it right now. They’re ready to go.

Allen Hall: Why is it so hard for a physical product to raise money? This has gotta be the number one or number two issue for every wind turbine operator on the planet. Well, I think 

Joel Saxum: part of the problem is, is that you have to attack the asset owners, right? That’s who you have to go after with the hard, with the hard product.

And when you’re going with the asset owners, their budgets are a little bit smaller. So if it’s not a solution that gives tangible feedback. Now to me, this is tangible, it’s easy, it’s gonna reduce my o and m budget by X amount. The ROI is pretty easy to calculate. You know, I won’t have to do a million dollar campaign in year one, and then year five, and then year 10.

It’s easy to see. But those are, that’s money down the road. If it’s tangible money right now, well, it’s maybe easier to introduce a software solution to see what we can’t squeeze AEP out or something like that. To, and to get people to trial hardware on wind turbines is tough because you’ve got to shut that turbine down.

You’ve gotta get it installed, you’re gonna take some production loss there. It’s just a difficult thing to get hardware moving. They, they have said in this press release here that they’re working with a quote unquote major manufacturer to explore the potential to factory fit shields, the new blades.

That’s the home run. If they can do that and that’s what they can, if they can scale up and get the amount of people to be able to support that in the background, that will be what will catapult this company. So news from across the pond, Renantis and Ventient Energy to combine to form a leading renewables firm.

The new company tends to become one of the largest renewable power producers in Europe with a combined installed capacity of 4.2 gigawatts with an 18 gigawatt pipeline. So what we’re seeing here is more consolidation in the market companies that are grabbing this, you know, if you see another company that aligns with your corporate goals and they’ve got some good people and some installed capacity, join them up.

And you have more horsepower in the background, right? That’s the the idea here. They’re looking at over 750 Renantis employees. And 250 from Ventient Energy, they’ll form one organization, which brings scale, opportunity, and diversified expertise to their, to employees, stakeholders, and shareholders. This is outta the press release, so what what do you think that can do for them, right?

Joining these two up? What does it do? Yeah, I mean, it’s, 

Allen Hall: it, it sounds like scale, right? That, that. In order to get OEMs to sign contracts and deliver product today, you have to have a a, a product pipeline, right? You have have to have a lot of projects scheduled, and they do, when they combine the two companies together, it starts to look a little more impressive when you start knocking on an OEM’s door, Hey, I’ve got at gigawatts on, on our pipeline.

We’re gonna be good for the next five to 10 years. I need you to sign some contracts with me to get turbines and solar panels delivered on time so we can all make money. That is a big play, so, You, you see companies doing this merger, but you also see companies breaking up right now, right? Like Duke Energy?

Yeah, 

Joel Saxum: duke Energy. But I mean, it’s this, duke Energy’s a different type of play, right? They’re selling things so that they can build capital base back up to reinvest in others, right? So they’re like, ah, we’ll get rid of this, we’ll sell that. But then someone else is scooping those assets up and making bigger and bigger and bigger.

It, to me, it looks like the, the playbook from RWE. You know, a month ago or two months ago, they signed that big agreement to say, Hey, we’re, you know, a gigawatt of pipeline, we’ll, we’ll, we will buy a gigawatt of turbines. Here’s the agreement. Well, they have the ability to do that cuz they’re big and powerful.

Right. And that’s what you’ll, you’re start to see other people making that same move. Yeah. And r w e just 

Allen Hall: committed to put like $50 billion into renewables again. You gotta carry a big stick and you gotta show that you have it to, to get product 

Joel Saxum: delivered. Yeah, you’re the big dog on the block. All right, Allen, we have regularly talked about who is gonna win the offshore floating wind race.

And what we mean by that for our listeners is there’s a lot of players out there. There’s a lot of ideas, there’s a lot of different platforms. There’s tension like platforms, there’s floaters, there’s. Semi submersibles. There’s all kinds of ideas about how floating offshore wind could be, but nobody has risen to the top.

There isn’t a cream yet, per se, right, in the, in either technolo, technologically or commercially. So there’s a lot of, lot of space there left for growth. What we do see in the market this week is PelaStar, who has developed a tension leg platform and FibreMax. FibreMax is a company that’s developing the actual tension legs.

They’ve signed a collaboration agreement. So what this does for the offshore wind, Floating industry is, it solidifies one of the players. Right? So PelaStar is a Glosten company, gloss in a big, big marine engineering company, been around for a long time. But they’ve been working PelaStar and FibreMax has been working back and forth for on the r and d behind their PelaStar concept for a while.

And now they’re getting to the point where it’s, they’re, they’ve got you know, Chris Volepenhein, PelaStar’s commercialization lead. They’re getting ready to go, right? They’re they’re trying to put their stake in the ground, or, or maybe we should say they’re buoy in the water as the leader out there, an offshore floating wind.

So good to see that. There’s some, some when you see a tie up, when you see a collaboration agreement, that’s, that’s validation. 

Allen Hall: Oh, absolutely. And you know, FibreMax is based in the Netherlands and it’s the key to that tension leg platform system, right? Those tendon cables are the magic that makes the, those floating platforms work.

So the, the, the technology has been developed over several years. They needed to lock in with another, I think, because to get to the next stage to look viable. For a, a Vestus or a GE who’s gonna be making a 15 megawatt turbine, the need to have a partner there. Right. And you, you have seen some of the vestus in the Siemens ca mesis looking at different offshore floating platforms.

This one makes a lot of sense, especially if the technology’s right. If FibreMax has what we think they have, then the PelaStar FibreMax combination is really powerful in that 

Joel Saxum: space. And, and to note as well, this is a collaboration agreement, right? So this is not a merger, this is not an acquisition. This is simply saying, we trust you, you trust us.

We are gonna work together to make this happen. 

Allen Hall: It’s gonna be magic if it works.