Siemens Energy has announced plans to hire 10,000 new employees over the next six years as part of a $1.3 billion investment to boost its grid technologies business. GE Vernova has received approximately $30 million in funding from the Norwegian state agency Enova to build a prototype 15.5 MW offshore wind turbine. Invenergy and Patria Investimentos have jointly acquired a 600-megawatt wind power portfolio in Brazil. The U.S. Department of the Interior has announced an offshore wind energy lease sale in the Central Atlantic, scheduled for August 14, 2024.

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Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. And this is your newsflash newsflash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at intelstor.com.

Siemens energy has announced plans to hire 10, 000 new employees over the next six years as part of a 1. 3 billion investment to boost its grid technologies business. The company aims to capitalize on growing demand for electricity and grid equipment. The new hires will be spread across Europe. The US, India, and other parts of Asia and Latin America.

Siemens Energy’s grid technologies unit has seen orders more than double in recent years from 7. 6 billion in 2021 to 16. 3 billion in 2023. Okay, Phil. There’s a lot happening on the electricity grid market besides on the renewable wind turbine solar panel side. Looks like Siemens Energy is taking advantage of that.

Philip Totaro: Their thermal business is still going pretty strong. Obviously the wind business is not so strong. But this is what we call in the industry kind of a classical pivot. Which is to say if you can’t sell your wind turbines, then let’s figure out how to do something else in the meantime. While the wind division gets its act together.

So this is something that’s actually going to help facilitate future sales by ensuring that they’ve got more grid related technology deployed. And since there’s so much grid modernization necessary around the world and just new greenfield build out of. Needed transmission, particularly to help facilitate wind.

I think this eventually is, is gonna, play right into the hands of their power generation business units.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. As Siemens Energy looks to do a little bit of recovery in the wind sector from this past few years, I think. Think there’s a pretty good strategic play here, right? If you’re them and you’re talking to some large grid operator or a utility, and it looks like they’re going to, he’s have some BOP money to spend and build a new wind farm.

Well, why not package it all up? Let’s sell them wind farm, let’s sell them BOP, grid integration and grid technology kit as well. So these two things could play together. This is also on the heels of one of their biggest competitors, Schneider electric being, being named the most sustainable company in their sector in the world.

Allen Hall: GE Vernova has received approximately 30 million in funding from the Norwegian state agency Innova to build a 15. 5 megawatt offshore wind turbine. The turbine will be installed on land at the Bergland based in Norway and tested for up to five years starting in 2025. After testing, it’s expected to produce electricity for another 25 years.

This project aims to advance offshore wind technology and reduce costs for floating offshore wind in the long term. Phil, why is GE testing a turbine in Norway when they have other facilities to test an offshore wind turbine?

Philip Totaro: Yeah, obviously with, with the grant that’s been provided here by Innova, it obviously makes it attractive to want to place this in, in Norway.

GE does have some history in, in Norway vis a vis offshore wind. Probably history they’d prefer to maybe forget a little bit with the acquisition of ScanWind, but It looks like this is going to be an opportunity, Norway is trying to be a test bed for a lot of different technology platforms.

The first floating wind was done in, floating offshore wind was done in Norway. The Tetris bar technology is being developed and tested in, in Norway. And now this gives GE an opportunity to also get a new prototype up and running so that they can demonstrate the Capabilities of this larger machine to the wider European market presumably they’re going to have some, they already have some sales in the U.

S. for this product model and they’re going to get installed over here and, and tested, but they don’t actually for, for G. E. S. offshore business, they have sales for the the Haliot X, 12, 13 megawatt platform in Europe. At this point, they don’t have anything firm yet for the 15. 5 megawatt platform.

So this is kind of a necessary step, I think, in order for them to, demonstrate to the wider market throughout Europe that they’ve, they’ve got a viable product here.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I say that’s something that technology companies run into all the time that to the internally to them seems kind of silly.

If it works in US waters, it’s more than likely going to work over in European waters. But hey, we hear these arguments all the time. An interesting thing here as well is in this article they state the project aims to advance offshore wind technology and reduce costs for floating offshore in the long term.

So it may be that this 15. 5 megawatt machine is going to be a floating focused machine.

Allen Hall: U. S. clean energy developer Invenergy and Patria Investimentos, a Brazilian investment manager, have jointly acquired a 600 megawatt wind power portfolio in Brazil. The portfolio includes four wind farms located in the northeastern Brazilian states.

Invenergy will hold a 10 percent stake and manage operations and maintenance, while Patria Investimentos will own the remaining 90%. That wind farms output is being sold to local distribution companies through a long term contract. Now, Phil, Invenergy is a huge developer in the United States. Is this their first foray down in Brazil?

Philip Totaro: Officially, yes. So they, they’ve actually been looking at different project sites globally including throughout Europe, a little bit in Asia. And they’ve also kind of explored Australia as, as a potential market. What’s interesting, though, is that Contour Global and Electrobras which are selling these projects, were originally just going to sell them to Patria without anybody coming in as, as a partner.

They went out and got Invenergy as a partner in kind of a very symbiotic relationship for them because as we’ve talked about before on the show, you’ve got a lot of companies that are financially and investment focused that don’t have the operational experience, bringing in somebody like Invenergy brings that operational discipline to bear and Patria’s got a lot more capital to deploy.

And there are plenty of projects in Brazil that are. Still looking to get built or potentially looking to get repowered as they’re coming up now on the beginning of a, a repowering market, which is, 20 years plus in, in asset age or with assets that are 20 years plus in, in asset age.

So. It’s, it’s looking pretty promising. If this is going to be the first of, of several new steps for, for both companies.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. It looks like if you look at the breakdown of the percentages, Invenergy will hold a 10 percent stake. So it’s very, very much a minority stake. However, that increases our bottom line, right?

That’s just operations and maintenance revenue. It’s like almost like signing a nice FSA for them and getting a little bit of equity on the tail end is what it looks like to me, at least. This is interesting as well, because I know. Talking with you, Phil, and our different friends in Brazil, there has been quite a bit of market changes down there with some OEMs pulling some resources out and some other things.

So the fact that invent energy is going down there and jumping out into this one is is interesting. And I think it’s a, could be a good move on their part because a lot of those turbines down there are. Fairly new in that market. And as they keep getting their toes wet in the market, they may be able to expand into some of those on an FSA standpoint.

Allen Hall: The U S department of the interior has announced an offshore wind energy lease sale in the central Atlantic scheduled for August 14th. The areas to be auctioned could generate up to 6. 3 gigawatts of clean energy, potentially powering 2. 2 million homes. The sale includes two lease areas, one offshore Delaware and Maryland, and another offshore Virginia.

This initiative is part of the Biden Harris administration’s efforts to expand offshore wind energy opportunities and combat climate change. Now Phil, it does seem to be a lot of leases being auctioned. At the moment, how is this one going to impact the 30 gigawatts by 2030?

Philip Totaro: Oh, we’re still not going to get there unfortunately, but we’re at least, putting the mechanisms in place, we’ve got 13 gigawatts now that it’s approved again, 30 by 30 was what they said originally they wanted to build, then they changed it to say, well, we’re going to permit that.

They can theoretically, they might actually be able to achieve the permitting of, 30 gigawatts by 2030. But the reality is the reason they’re expediting things now is the fact that they are expecting a change in, in the regime. And while the presumption is that projects that are already in the permitting and consent queue aren’t going to get the plug pulled on them. Any, particularly anything that’s under construction, anything that’s already been kind of auctioned off, consented, et cetera can, can continue to move forward. But there’s a fear here amongst people at BOEM that, particularly for their own jobs that, the people who aren’t political appointees.

They’re gonna be sitting there twiddling their thumbs with nothing to do, on offshore wind leases for four years if they don’t, get the, get the ball rolling on these things now. So, they’re, they’re moving at, at quite a, a judicious speed and, it’s going to be good for, for, um, the, the project developers that want to have the opportunity to build more capacity.

And, and I think a generally good thing as, offshore costs can continue to come down, it’s going to start displacing, more of the conventional onshore power generation that tends to be very expensive in the Northeast.

Joel Saxum: This is an odd thing to say, but there’s a, almost a glutton of global auctions and leases up right now.

Like there’s, there’s a ton of them all over the world happening at a pretty regular pace. It’s like every few weeks you see, Hey, auction here. Hey, auction here. Hey, there’s an auction here. I don’t think we’ll see anywhere near the prices for the, the federal revenue for these, what we saw in the past, especially, 7 billion went out for those lease areas.

This, these won’t touch that. And I’m really actually quite curious to see what kind of who’s going to be bidding on these and if there is any kind of interesting like basically joint ventureships or kind of other kind of vehicles of that sort bidding on them, like there was in the offshore more floating areas in California, which was like.

Five different companies that won these things. We had to research who was actually involved, but you got down into them and it was the same operators that you normally see, but they were all joint ventures and all kinds of other things. So be interesting to see what kind of players show up to raise their hand at this one.