Start your engines for an electrifying episode exploring the fast-paced world of wind power! From cheering on an Uptime-sponsored race car to tracing troubles with turbine technology, we’ll navigate hairpin turns and straightaways in the wind industry. Pit stop with us as we check the pulse of offshore wind farms being built in the Baltic Sea and get an under-the-hood look at new blade monitoring systems. We’ll also rev up debate around maritime rules for transporting US wind parts and plunge into the deep to see how underwater drones are scouting future floating turbine sites. So grip the wheel and press play to go full throttle into this action-packed episode!

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Uptime 184

Allen Hall: So Joel, we’re headed to the big NASCAR race this weekend. So when this comes out, the race would have already occurred down at the Texas Motor Speedway. But we are sponsoring part sponsor of one of the NASCAR cars with Kyle Weatherman. He will be number 91. So if you go back and watch on YouTube, I think you can watch the race afterwards.

You’ll see our little Uptime podcast. 

Rosemary Barnes: I’ve never, never watched a NASCAR race before, but this, this might be just the push that I need. So Allen, you’ll have to tell me how I can, how I can tune in and watch this guy. 

Allen Hall: We can Skype it to you somehow, but the NASCAR is actually taking really good action on reducing CO2 emissions through the whole operations.

They have a sustainability person that is working in there. They’re making a lot of changes at the NASCAR and I like watching NASCAR. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also sort of rewarding to know that something you watch like that is trying to make a difference and they’re doing a lot, making a lot of changes internally.

So yes they do drive internal combustion engine cars for now, but the vast majority of the operations is going to be carbon neutral, I believe by 2035. So that is a pretty short timeframe to change as many operations as they have going. And that’s commendable. So we thought we’d help him out and we helped Kyle out a little bit, and we’re going to be down at the Texas Motor Speedway.

So we’ll take some pictures and send them to you, Rosemary. 

Rosemary Barnes: What’s your guess, Allen, about when they’ll go electric in NASCAR? 

Allen Hall: Actually, probably sooner rather than later. 

Joel Saxum: Spinoff series first, it’ll be like Formula E. 

Rosemary Barnes: How long do they drive for? 

Allen Hall: At Kyle’s level, they drive about two hours. That’s doable now, yeah.

You know, the thing about electric vehicles is they accelerate so darn fast that it would make the races a little more exciting, right? That, that race tightness would really pick up.

Well, more news from Siemens Gamesa as they’re expecting a 5 billion loss for Some turbine problems and those turbine problems are still tied to from what we’ve here the 4x and 5x platform Blades have wrinkles in them and there are some pieces of debris and some bearings which are a huge problem there are approximately 2100 4x and about 800 5x models Affected with about somewhere between 15 and 30 percent of them having issues.

So that’s that’s a huge number, right? It’s about 900 Turbines and at a worst case so there are some changes happening within Siemens Gamesa where they are limiting onshore turbine sales. In fact, they’ve restricted it. It sounds like they’ve restricted it to a subset of their customer base to, to manage the problem until they figure out the quality problems.

In fact Siemens has said their CEO has said that. That they sold wind turbines that were not sufficiently tested. Now, Phil, I don’t think that’s a good idea to say that, and I, I, I’m having a hard time with the certification bodies that are around that hearing that, you know, Siemens Kamesa thinks that they’ve had, That they undertested something for cert.

And then secondarily, it seems like they’re trying to mitigate the amount of lawyers that are going to be involved. And in fact, it was you who sent me a note saying it looks like they’re hiring people to be on site to manage warranty claims on new wind farms. You want to just give us a little background there?

Philip Totaro: Sure. So they, they, since coming out and making these announcements, which has dated back now about five or six months tied into, you know, their financial disclosures and other disclosures they’ve made regarding the, the status on the manufacturing quality issues. They have since put out job postings on different boards for people who would be in charge of warranty claim processing on behalf of the OEM.

That’s interesting because it’s not the insurance company hiring additional… You know, underwriters or claim suggesters this is the OEM having to step up because these are all relatively new blades and new products. Everything’s under warranty and it’s under the warranty period and, and everything’s going to have to be covered.

By the OEM, which is why they’ve been, you know, making all these statements when they, when they release quarterly results regarding the, the financial health and, and status. With everything, so it’s, it’s a challenge because the company, I, it sounds like Steel doesn’t quite have their arms fully around the, the entire issue.

I think they’ve understood some of the, the product quality issues that they’ve had. I think they’ve identified some of the manufacturing quality issues they’ve had. They, I, it sounds like they still don’t have a clean quote unquote supply chain that they can pull from, which is why they would put a moratorium on selling turbines to specific customers in, in regards to, you know, if they don’t have the availability of.

High quality materials to be able to manufacture the blades, then they can’t fulfill orders that they were otherwise contractually obligated to do or would be with, with new product sales. So it’s, it’s a setback but it’s a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of what they have going on and the steps that they’ve needed to take to kind of bolster investor confidence.

I think they’ve, they’ve done. And they’ve made some questionable choices, I think, in their PR but they’ve they’ve seemed to have done an adequate job in terms of diagnosing what the issues are and, and at least attempting to resolve them. 

Allen Hall: Rosemary, what does this mean when they say that they didn’t test the, the, for example, the blades sufficiently, does that mean they need to go back and…

Do all the structural testing and evaluation again. Do you say that because you have a quality issue that you’re trying to deal with and It sort of put the blame on the, the tests that were run. I don’t, I don’t know where Siemens goes when they say this, cause it sounds like they would have to restart the certification process.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’m assuming that it must be the process that wasn’t tested properly because they would have had to have done full certification. Yeah, full size blade tests to pass their certification to get the blade certificate. They would need to do a static test where they just pull on a blade and check that it deflects the amount that it’s supposed to and it doesn’t break.

And then they do a fatigue test both in flatwise, which is like with the, yeah, the, the flat part of the blade going up and down and then edgewise where they rotate at 90 degrees. And those take months to do, they just kind of set it off wobbling and, watch it monitor it with strain gauges and yeah, check that there isn’t any damage over that period and that everything is performing the way that it’s supposed to.

And they can’t avoid that. I mean, you definitely have to do that for every new blade that gets certified. You have to do those tests. And I, I mean, it’s just one, one blade that gets tested in that way. So it’s possible that they had a problem with their process, which meant that every blade didn’t turn out exactly the same.

And I would say that that’s the, the problem that they tested a blade that didn’t have these wrinkles in it. But then they found out after they’ve already rolled out you know, a bunch of these blades into the field. They found out that actually like a, quite a significant chunk of them are getting some sort of problem in the manufacturing process that results in wrinkles.

Allen Hall: Joel, as a chief commercial officer dealing with the business aspects of this, how do they navigate the quality issues, the customer issues, that not being able to sell product as fast as they want to issue, how do you package that into a, a nice framework? 

Joel Saxum: I think the trouble here is what Phil said earlier, is they made some questionable PR moves, right?

Like in this article we’re talking about, they have the company planning to present the results of a strategic review in November. You would want to think that they would keep that, keep some of these, these details that they’re just slowly letting out at 2100, four X models, 805 X models, 1. 6 billion. We’re going to work with certain people, not with other people before they actually put this strategic review out.

Because that has a lot of economic and commercial implications, right? When that thing comes out, then the whole truth. And I think that’s another day to watch the stock price, right. To see what’s going to happen here. So you know, them saying that they’re only going to work with certain customers right now, restricting the new onshore wind turbine sales.

I would imagine these are the big guys that they have really good relationships with like, you know, and I don’t know exactly who they are, but I would be willing to bet it’s a next era and RWE. You know, an Invenergy, a Iberdrola, someone like some, some players like that, where they know that they have, if they can keep them happy, there’s a large order book coming down the road.

So they want to make sure they stay close to those people while reducing their risk. Because this is, this is what the whole thing is, and you’re sitting in the C suite boardroom right now at Siemens. It’s how do we hedge risk? How do we continue to be, you know, viable in the marketplace while fixing our engineering problems and fixing our economic and commercial woes that we’re staring at right now?

Right. So if it is these customers that you want to make sure that you keep them close by, there’s probably sitting at the table, to be honest with you, the larger players of some of these larger companies trying to figure out what’s going to happen with, with Siemens. I mean, it’s going to be a hard pillow to swallow.

There’s just going to be as this thing came out back in August. And they’re going to release this new report in November. It’s three months of kind of thinking and figuring out. And I hope they’ve got a plan by then. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, I think we all do because we need Siemens be in the game. For a long time. And right now it seems like the short game is really killing them.

Joel Saxum: At least in the U S there was Joken Eichholt and some others from Siemens visiting clients on basically a PR tour in the last few months. Right. So. They’re doing a lot of things to try to reduce the impact here, but, I mean, there’s just some, some numbers that they have to stare at and figure out.

Allen Hall: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today. Well, back in July, the Customs and Border Patrol issued a ruling allowing foreign vessels to transport monopile foundations from U. S. ports to offshore sites not previously attached to the seabed and then install them.

The Customs and Border Patrol does not consider offshore sites beyond three nautical miles from the U. S. coast to be U. S. points. So transport to them by foreign vessels is allowed. Okay. All right. So let me get that straight. So a foreign vessel can take things off U. S. shore and put them out into the ocean, particularly foundations.

All right. So that was, that was the ground rules. Now, back, back in July CBP also said that the jackup installation vessels could jack up Before the, the ships arrived with the, with the parts, essentially. Okay. So they could plant themselves in the, in the ocean bottom. Well, they changed their ruling.

And this is how crazy the U. S. is at the moment. Well, they had, they had some protests from the American Maritime Partnership, right? So they’re an active group at the moment and they filed a grievance with Customs and Border Patrol and says, Hey, time out. That’s not right. So, the Customs and Border Patrol came back and said they modified the ruling and they confirmed that if an offshore site without prior attachments things in the ground are still considered pristine and foreign vessels can deliver and install monopiles there.

However, the anchoring of the installation vessel necessarily doesn’t change that. However, the jackup vessel can’t be attached to the seabed before installing monopiles. 

Philip Totaro: And it, and it has to be colored green on a Tuesday? 

Allen Hall: Right. So it’s a timing thing. It’s a weird thing, like, well, once they plant the jackup vessel into the seabed, well, then that becomes U. S. territory. Then it’s, then it’s a foreign vessel between two U. S. points. It’s something like that. It is the world’s craziest thing. 

Philip Totaro: Allen, this is the most preposterous nonsense I’ve, I’ve heard. 

Allen Hall: It’s a, it’s a technicality, right? It’s a technicality and they got around it by just saying, well, the, the vessels, the, the Danish or Norwegian vessels or whatever they’re using Taiwanese vessels that are hauling parts from U. S. shore out to the, in the water, the jackup vessels can’t be attached to the sea bottom when they arrive. I think that’s what’s happened here. 

Joel Saxum: So that, so does the barge have to dock up next to them and then they can plant the legs? And then they can pick off the barge because they’re not gonna plant un plant, plant un plant plant.

They’re not gonna do that. But I guess if you’re, I dunno, that’s, it’s so stupid. That just makes the cost, that just makes the L C O E go up. That’s all it does. You’re gonna delay delay, that’s gonna make the installation process longer. That’s just silly. 

Allen Hall: It’s just silly nonsense. Right. It’s just a, it’s, it’s a way of getting around a, a crazy old law.

So that it is quote unquote legal. But the problem is, is that this, you know, this is not the last of this. This is going to continue on for a few more months, right? There has to be a pushback on this new thing. It really gets down to what you define as U S territory, right? And so as soon as. Something hits the ocean bottom, then it becomes U. S. territory. I think that’s what the logic is. If they had a floating, floating ship out there, could it install wind turbines? And I think all this would go away. 

Joel Saxum: The answer is do not use a jackup, use a DP 3 vessel. That’s what I’m saying. So a DP 3 vessel for the listeners would be like, if you’ve ever seen the movie Deepwater Horizon, now this is a, this is a gross movie, Hollywood part of it.

But when they’re, when the, when the ship starts to move off point. And the lady’s in there and she’s going like, we’re going to stay on point. And she’s trying to pilot the boat or the, the whole drill rig to stay still. It doesn’t work like that. That’s not, there’s no haptic feedback and the controls for the, the drill vessel.

However, that is drilling vessels are DP three vessels. So, so what a DP three means is it’s dynamically positioned in three and with three redundancies. So you have. Like multiple GPS systems on the boat. So you may have a GPS that only runs on GPS satellites. And you may have a system that only runs on, like, Galileo and Glonass satellites with different corrections coming in.

So if one of the satellite systems goes down, the other one still holds it in place. That would be DP2, so you’d have two systems. DP3 would be the other one where you can actually plant acoustics on the seafloor and range off of those to stay in place as well. So if you have satellite system, satellite system, plus a anchor to the, to the seafloor, a virtual anchor, Then the vessel can hold itself really tightly on its technically what would be called like an autopilot, and you can plant jackets with a vessel like that.

Like that, that happens regularly. 

Allen Hall: Does it also help the floating offshore wind effort? Like all this nonsense go away as soon as you start Just towing out turbines that are floating. 

Joel Saxum: But you still gotta anchor them. You still gotta moor them. 

Philip Totaro: That’s gonna, that’s gonna get into a different set of, you know, or subset of the regulations under the Jones Act.

And the, I mean, we don’t actually need foreign vessels to be able to do that kind of mooring. That’s, that’s the good news. You know, we do have service operation vessels in the U. S. that would be capable of being repurposed for that type of mooring activity which is good but, you know, this goes back to this whole argument of, if we don’t have the people that have the specific knowledge, and we don’t have the vessels that have specific capabilities.

Then why do we have a Jones Act in place that is, as Joel just said, driving up the cost of LCOE at a point in time when, you know, these companies are already pulling out of projects because it’s already too friggin expensive to, to build it in the first place. I, I, this whole thing does make, does not make any sense to me.

And I, you, you know, you all know my position on the Jones Act to begin with and I’ve, I’ve taken a lot of heat about you know, wanting to either ban it or put a moratorium on it or something for, for the next 10 years or something that allows and facilitates the industry to get off the ground, so to speak, so that we can actually build an industry and then you can reinstitute it if you’re, you’re, trying to protect American jobs.

You know, there are ways of, of accommodating this that doesn’t damage the industry. And that’s the biggest issue is it’s slowing down the pace at which we can, we can achieve the energy transition. It’s slowing down project deployment. It’s driving up costs. It’s making everyone reluctant to want to do anything in this market.

Joel Saxum: But one piece of simple math for, for, for people listening as well, if this jackup, jackup and barge juggling act takes an extra, say two hours on site, these installation vessels cost 40, 000 an hour. So think about the math there. 

Allen Hall: All right. I was thumbing through PES wind magazine and I came across this article by Fibersail and it was talking about monitoring blade and blade deflection and blade shapes.

And I was trying to discern as an electrical engineer, like, how does this work and why do I care? And I thought, well, Rosemary ought to know and Rosemary, from what I can tell from the article, which is full of cool pictures and tons of information, but it sounds like there’s fiber optics that’s being added to the blade that they’re using that to, to, to measure.

How the blade moves as, as the blade, as all three blades rotate, and then hooking that to a CMS system so they can interpret the blade movement as it equates to structural issues. Does that make any sense to you? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah it does. And it’s something, the technology has been around for a while, let’s say at least 10 years that, yeah, we’ve kind of recognized the possibility and that this would be nice information to have and manufacturers have released products with this technology or something similar.

So that’s all, that’s all good. I’m not a hundred percent sure of what the difference is with Fibersail compared to some of the other attempts before. 

Allen Hall: Well, it sounds like they are able to monitor all the aspects of the blade. Like they’re measuring the full length of the blade, the deflection and twisting.

And I thought the twisting part was interesting because it seems like that’s one of the. Failure modes we don’t understand very well, and that monitoring how the blade, especially these longer blades, how they twist and get in these weird sort of secondary vibration modes that have been a problem. For some of the blades, like when the blades, some of the blades stop, they have this issue where they’re bending or twisting in a unique way.

That’s not, not happy for them. Does that, does that make sense then to sort of load it full of instrumentation? So you can detect issues, particularly on new blades. I mean, I’ll give you the good example here. 5X blade seems Kamesa it’s having issues. I don’t even know what the issue is right now, but wouldn’t you want to put the instrumentation system in like this to help.

Identify that and track it. 

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, if you put some fiber optic sensors in the blade so you know exactly where the blade tip is, then you’ll be able to potentially pitch the blade as it’s going past the tower, if it’s bending a lot. So then you could make sure that it, it doesn’t bend as much when it’s going around the tower and you can.

Kind of control that way. So you could have a more flexible blade, which is nice for a bit, a bunch of different structural reasons and cost reasons, and still not have to worry about the blade hitting the tower. And so that was tried at least I know that at LN Wind Power, they had a project like that quite a while ago.

And you know, there is at least one wind farm with this technology in it. And it works, but it, it is complicated. And so it did require a lot of extra expense. And these were installed in, in the factory, which is going to be obviously the cheapest way to do it because the blades, you know, already on the ground and open and everything.

So you put the, the sensors in, but then obviously the more sensors that you’ve got, the more data that you’ve got going into your control system. And if sensors start failing. Then that can cause a problem. In the past, I have kept it pretty simple. I think just mostly trying to look at where the tip of the blade is, but then it sounds like Fibersail is taking it a step further to solve some other problems, which are legitimate problems that the industry has, which is that you don’t really know how a blade deflects in reality.

You can’t test a wind turbine blade full scale in a wind tunnel because. You know, like an aeroplane wing you can test in a, in a wind tunnel because it’s a simpler aerodynamic problem. Your wind turbine blade is rotating at the same time as the wind is coming in on it. So you can’t really just scale things down and get your aerodynamics and your blade structure to kind of all scale at the same rate.

So. That makes it hard to really know exactly what does your blade look like when it’s under actual operational loading. I think it would be really good to see you know, a research program where you rolled out. A few turbines with heavily instrumented blades to be able to check the structural deformation.

Allen Hall: Let me go back to something you said earlier, which is if you know how your blade is moving, you can actually pull fiberglass structure out of it, make it lighter, make it, make it more flexible, which would then in turn make a lighter, cheaper blade, less material, right? That seems like a huge cost savings for putting a couple pieces of fiber optic in if you’re able to do it in the factory.

Why wouldn’t you do that? The control systems we have today for turbines are so much more advanced than 20 years ago. They’re crazily advanced and with all the AI things that are happening, we have autonomous driving cars at the moment. It seems like we can manage handling a wind turbine blade pretty easily.

Rosemary Barnes: Yes, that’s what everybody thought. And so it was a, a big, big project, a lot of people working on it for a lot of years because it seemed like such a slam dunk. But it’s one of those projects where every step of the way it’s more complicated than you thought it was going to be. And costs a little bit more than you thought it was gonna be a little bit less reliable.

And it wasn’t as popular in sales as people thought it was going to be either. And so, you know, all of that just added up to it, just not making sense. Then number of. And engineers that need to be dedicated to keep you know, a program like that running that it was in this instance, it was judged not worth it, but definitely the potential is there.

And if something changed, I would suggest that, yeah, it’s the operating system that needs to change. And the main thing is the reliability of the sensors. 

Allen Hall: Well, you can learn more about Fibersail and a lot of other great new innovations in the latest PES Wind and this, this latest issue is full of great stuff.

So check it out. You can actually just go get a free copy yourself at PESwind. com. Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and p e s Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in-depth info you need.

Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication PES Wind at peswind.com.

Autonomous underwater robots have been contracted for a site investigation survey at the US’ first floating offshore wind farm in Marrow Bay, California, Ecuador. The Norwegian Energy Company secured a two gigawatt lease for the project marking the first offshore. Wind lease sale in the U. S. west coast and supporting commercial scale offshore floating wind development.

The Morrow Bay Wind Farm has a potential to power approximately 750, 000 U. S. households. Now, in order to check out the ocean bottom and, and, so the ocean on the west coast of the United States is pretty deep. Equinor signed a contract with Ocean Infinity, a marine robotics company, to deploy multiple autonomous underwater vehicles for the survey of the floor.

The AUVs are modular robots that can operate independently, reaching depths beyond human divers capabilities, and is equipped with sonar, depth sensors, and cameras. Now, Joel, this sounds super sci fi to me that we have a bunch of drones running around the bottom of the ocean floor. Looking for I guess rocks or deposits or unevenness.

What are, what are they exactly looking for here with these scans? 

Joel Saxum: Ocean Infinity saw, this is Ocean Infinity started as a company only six, seven years ago. They, they saw a gap. And actually the oil and gas space, there’s a group called the NIP on Foundation, and they want to, they have a seabed, what is it called?

Seabed 2050 or something. But they want a map. 30 percent of the seabed of the entire world by 2050, I think is the goal. And I have to don’t, don’t quote me on that one. Cause I can’t remember what it is because this, we know less about the seabed than we know about the surface of the moon. Right? So ocean infinity caught, cause classically you’re just saying like, Hey, we’re going to put a multi beam echo sounder on a big ship and we’re going to drive that ship around.

Well, they saw a kind of a gap and there was a company called Kongsberg. If you’ve been in the maritime world at all, Kongsberg. Big Norwegian technical company, they build all kinds of stuff, navigate, a lot of navigation stuff, some robotics and whatnot. A lot of things for the defense sector and, and what, and what as well.

They created a vehicle call it an AUV, Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, called the Hugin, H U G I N. And the Hugins are these big, bright orange little sub, they look like torpedoes, right? 

Allen Hall: What does Hugin mean in Norwegian? 

Joel Saxum: So they’re these big orange torpedo looking things that can dive. They have them rated now all the way up to 6, 000 meters of water depth.

But I think the majority of the units, yeah, the majority of the units that Ocean Infinis has are like 4, 500 meter rated, and they cost like 6 to 10 million dollars a piece. So what those vehicles can do is they can take all that multi beam echo sounder and all the The magnetic sensors and all these other tools that they used to put on ships and put them on that submarine and now sink it to the bottom.

So when you get closer to the bottom, you can get more higher resolution. The other thing that Ocean Infinity figured out is, well, if we just deploy positioning systems from the vessel up top, we can launch 6 or 8 or 10 of these at a time and use it as a force multiplier. So now when you used to have this big boat out there cruising around with 50 60 people on it collecting one stream of data, Now you got that same 50 or 60 people collecting 6, 8, 10 streams of data in much higher resolution and covering a much, much, much larger footprint on the ocean floor.

So now you can map larger areas of the ocean in deeper depths way faster by having all of these submarines out there. And that’s what they’re doing here. So they’ll take one big vessel, the Ocean Infinity, they have two big vessels. They’ll take one of them, and they’ll bring it over there, and they’ve got six or eight of these Hugins on them, and they, BLOOF, they start launching them out the back, tracking them, and then surveying with them.

And it’s, it’s really kind of really cool and impressive. Ocean Infinity, great company. They’ve also started making what’s called the Ocean Infinity Armada fleet, which is a fleet of vessels. They’ve built three or four of them now, that are 75 meter long vessels that are designed to be completely uncrewed.

There’s not a person on them. Wow, they can put these Hugins on those as well. So they send that ghost ship out with the ghost AUVs They dump those in the water and they can and they’re like they were involved in all kinds They’ve been finding all kinds of cool stuff with these things like submarine ships a lot of shipwrecks and stuff They’ve been finding them.

So what they’ll do for Equinor here another Norwegian company Is it will be a much cheaper and much more accurate and high resolution data set for site characterization of this Morrow Bay area. And it’s going to be by far the best data set that’s ever been collected there. And I would, I would be, I would imagine since Ocean Infinity mobilizes a ship to that corner of the world to do that.

They’ll be calling everybody else that has a leased on the, a lease on the West Coast for offshore wind and they’ll be trying to hit all of them at the same time. 

Allen Hall: I’m still trying to look up what Hugin is. Located northeast of Rügen Island, Germany, the Baltic Eagle Offshore Wind Farm will feature 50 Vestas B174s, 9

5 megawatt turbines, over a 43 square kilometer area, in water depths up to 45 meters. The installation of all 50 monopiles was just completed. At the 476 megawatt site, according to Iberdrola, construction of the 570 million Baltic Eagle project is on schedule to be complete by an operation by the end of 2024.

So Baltic Eagle wind farm, because that’s a cool name, is our wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News. Our lovely weekly newsletter and check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next time on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.