Joel and Allen discuss Japan’s first commercial scale offshore operation. The 33 bottom-fixed Vestas V117-4.2 MW wind turbines, designed to power 150,000 homes, are locatedin an area of heavy lightning activity. (More on that later!) Some savvy new designs like an automated bolt tightener from IntoMachines and GustoMSC’s new “Seahorse” trolley systemshould save a lot of tech time and make offshore blade installation easier and less expensive. Also, Allen and Joel explain how German technology helps submarines avoid wind turbines. Now the question is, who’s using it? 

Last month, robotics startup Aerones secured almost $39M in funding from undisclosed investors. Isn’t it about time? For some timely insight into offshore development and the risks US offshore developers face, don’t miss the interview with Henrik Stamer of Naver Energy. 

Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com

Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com

Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com

Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Naver Energy – https://www.naverenergy.com

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! 

Uptime 146

[00:00:00] Allen Hall: Well, Joel, it’s just you and me on, on New Year’s. So we’re recording this just before New Year’s Eve. Rosemary is off on holiday en enjoying the Australian summertime. Meanwhile, Joel Saxum and I are, are back in front of the hot cameras and microphones recording you a a new Uptime episode and we have a lot on the docket this week.

[00:00:20] Allen Hall: Japan is, is starting some commercial offshore operations in the Akita prefecture. It’s sort of northwest Japan, where there’s a ton of major big lightning strikes in the wintertime. So I’ll be, keep my eye on that one. And then IntoMachines has introduced a automated bolt tightener that just runs around and tightens bolts on towers so that you kind of keep, keep technicians time better spent somewhere else.

[00:00:49] Joel Saxum: We’ll talk about GustoMSC plus NOV plus Lyftra and their new offshore blade installation tech is kind of like a, well, we’ll talk about some throwbacks to my younger years of shingle ladders, moving blades up the tower to install them offshore. So we think it could be huge for the Jones Act here in the us.

[00:01:08] Joel Saxum: And then we’re gonna talk about in German waters some acoustic pingers that they have installed on the foundations of all their offshore wind turbines to make sure that submarines aren’t running. . So maybe the Germans are operating a little bit differently than the , than the rest of the world.

[00:01:25] Joel Saxum: And then we’ll, we’ll touch real quickly on Aerones and as well their big 39 million haul that they’ve made to expand the company and scale it up and grow. So congrats to those guys. 

[00:01:38] Allen Hall: And then I have an interview with Henrik Stamer Stamer from Naver Energy on the offshore wind supply chain chAllen Hallges and the effects on operators.

[00:01:46] Allen Hall: And that’s a really good interview, so stick around for that. I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab. Joel Saxum Saxum. Rosemary is on holiday. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

[00:02:19] Allen Hall: Well, Joel Saxum Marubeni has started Commercial Operations at its Noshiro port offshore wind farm in Japan. And actually there’s Marubeni has two projects going, one and Noshiro and another one in the Akita port. And so this is really the first sort of commercial scale offshore wind project that’s happening in Japan.

[00:02:42] Allen Hall: And it’s on the northwest corner of Japan on the, sort of the main island there, which is where there’s a lot of wind turbines, just onshore of that. So just onshore there. Miles of wind turbines, and it happens to be probably the, one of the most, the strongest lightning strike . So in the world, good? No good?

[00:03:02] Allen Hall: Yeah. 200,000 a lightning strikes are pretty common. 300,000 amps has happened there, and there has been a 400,000 a strike. I don’t know if it’s in that neighborhood, but it was around.

[00:03:13] Joel Saxum: What does that do to a turbine blade? I mean, does it just literally blow it apart, like , sweat it, cheese? No, none left it.

[00:03:21] Allen Hall: Well, it caused a fire too, so it’s not just that there’s a lot of energy. It’s also really hot. So, so this is, this is an interesting development and I’m, I’m, I’m glad to see Japan is taking this on. They’ve learned a lot about lightning in Japan, and if you read some literature about lightning in Japan, there’s.

[00:03:37] Allen Hall: Ton, ton of really good long-term wind turbine research with video and monitoring just to see what’s going on there. So the, the Japanese have a pretty good handle on it I bet. But they’re putting vestus turbines in Vestus V117 4.2 megawatt machines, which are fixed bottom. And then they have 33 of these turbines between the two, two ports.

[00:04:01] Allen Hall: And it’s gonna create about 10, well, no, it’s gonna power about 150,000 homes, but Japan’s trying to get on that kind of scale. The US is, they plan to install 10 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, and then they’re hoping for 45 gigawatts by 2040, which is a pretty rapid increase. Yeah. So they have to get this first farm in and get it running to.

[00:04:22] Allen Hall: How they make the remaining farms. I’m guessing, 

[00:04:25] Joel Saxum: so correct me if I’m wrong here, but for something in the back of my head tells me that in Japan, they had a rule that at a lightning strike you had to shut the turbine down to inspect it, to make sure it was good to go every time before you put it back into commission.

[00:04:39] Allen Hall: Is that right or wrong? Maybe. Okay. Maybe I, I know they have monitored a lot of wind terms and instrumented a whole bunch of them, particularly in a. province. Sure. Which is where these wind TURs will be. I don’t know what they have rules about offshore like that. If they do, Hmm. That’s, that’s gonna be a little bit of trouble.

[00:04:56] Allen Hall: Yeah. 

[00:04:56] Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. That’s tough. So, a couple couple things that about it that I, looking at the, the kind of the press release here and a couple bullet points, I really like how they’re doing 10 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 and 45 by 2040. Because they’re, it, it’s more realistic, right? They’re like, let’s get the, let’s get everything kind of moving.

[00:05:15] Joel Saxum: Let’s get some, cuz they’re gonna have the same struggle. , everybody else is right now in the world trying to offshore wind. Yep. There’s no va, there’s no vessels. And the expertise is limited. Right. The, the expertise is not, not everybody knows how to do it. And I know a lot of the players that are involved in some of these, I don’t know about this in this wind farm specifically, but I know in some of the the bids and the leasing rounds in Japan, it has been some, some companies that have quite a bit of experience, right?

[00:05:38] Joel Saxum: So there’s some of that north Sea experience floating over there as well. Great to see that they’re, they’ve got some goals. 10 gigawatts. I know that Japan has some great wind resource all around the whole island. I mean, it’s, it’s kind of what happens when you’re an island as well in some tradewinds.

[00:05:57] Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. So that, that’s great to see. So happy that they’re getting this thing going. 150,000 homes. Another, that’s another thing that peaks my mind there when I see 33 turbines powering 150,000 homes. As a lot of the business that I do is onshore us. We don’t see as many of these 4.2 and, and higher megawatt machines.

[00:06:19] Joel Saxum: No. So when you start talking offshore, it’s always really cool to see like, oh, 10 turbines are gonna power 50,000 homes. It’s like, wow, that’s a, that’s amazing. So to see 30, only 33 turbines can, can power 150,000 homes. And it’s it, it’s looking good. I, I like what they’re making moves on here and.

[00:06:38] Joel Saxum: The weather is definitely something to keep an eye on. Like, like you were saying, Alan. Yes. Strong lightning over there. So, and it, and 

[00:06:46] Allen Hall: it snows there a good bit, right? So the, the lightning strikes in that part of the world happen during the wintertime. So this just coming up in January, early February will be peak lightning season through about May, late April, may, we’re gonna be peak lightning season for that region.

[00:07:03] Allen Hall: So we have to just watch the news. There will be news about it if, if one of those turbines gets struck, I’m sure, because they’re mm-hmm. brand new and the, the, these, the Japanese companies I’ve worked with. Have done a tremendous job of maintaining the war turbines. It’s crazy how well those, those wind turbines are operated.

[00:07:21] Allen Hall: Unlike some of the American ones, which seems like at times the blades are barely hanging on in, in Japan, it’s like, wow. It’s like a. Pristine new machine all the time. I wanted to learn something from that to watch . Yeah, yeah. I know. I, right. That’s that’s my thought too is like, what, what’s, what’s is the, you know, department of energy doing, when we have countries that are, that have really structured ways of going through new technology?

[00:07:48] Allen Hall: Are we, are we sending people over there to watch, to, to check out how this is going down and are we trying to bring some of that knowledge home? I, I hope. I hope so. Yeah. I know 

[00:07:58] Joel Saxum: that there’s not, it’s not a, it’s not real easy to get data. out of Japan. I’m thinking in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, man, I wonder what kind of uptime percentages they have com as compared to what our mm o and m activities look like here.

[00:08:14] Joel Saxum: I’m, I’m thinking, I wonder if Phil’s got some information on this from Intel store there about, yeah, maybe about what’s going on in Japan, but I also from some business dealings in the past, it’s not easy to get information out of Japan either. So. there. We’ll see. 

[00:08:28] Allen Hall: Well, let’s, let’s ask Phil, let’s ask Phil to follow up with it and just to watch how this offshore Wind Farm develops.

[00:08:34] Allen Hall: Give it 12 months and then we’ll have a pretty good read on it. But I, I, my gut tells me this is gonna be amazingly smooth because they have been in that area with wind turbines for quite a number of years. So this, the only new part of this is the offshore bit. The rest of it, I think they got figured.

[00:08:52] Allen Hall: you know, 

[00:08:53] Joel Saxum: looking at the, looking at the image here too of this wind farm. It’s actually more, I would call it nearshore. I mean, these things are, 

[00:09:00] Allen Hall: yes, you could, you could throw rock out there. 

[00:09:04] Joel Saxum: Yeah. You could do a drone inspections on these turbines from shore. You don’t need a vessel 

[00:09:09] Allen Hall: genius. Yeah, you could, you 

[00:09:11] Joel Saxum: know, you could, you could just, they’re there.

[00:09:13] Joel Saxum: The furthest one out might be a, might be a kilometer. I, but it doesn’t even look like that. You could easily get out there on one battery, do an inspection, and come back with one of these autonomous. 

[00:09:25] Allen Hall: So smart plan. Maybe that’s part of, yeah, part of their om maybe that’s part of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the, the latest I’ve seen on LinkedIn, Joel Saxum, about bolt tightening, which is a big area because think about the millions of bolts we’re going install on wind turbines over the next year or two.

[00:09:41] Allen Hall: It’s, it’s gotta be a couple of million. If you think about all the, the wrenching and tightening and verification that happens, you can eat up a lot of technician. By doing that, and when I stumbled across this LinkedIn post from, it was from into machines, they were showing an automated bolt, tightener, and it’s like two bolt tightening tools, guns, I’ll call ’em, that are on a, on a trolley.

[00:10:09] Allen Hall: So as you tighten the bolts around the, the tower, it follows that rail. And so it. Dries down, two nuts, lifts itself up. Scoots over drops two more tightens, two more, and it, it showed a a technician with a wristband with like a gigantic eye watch, . That’s what kinda would look like. . And he’s pushing buttons now.

[00:10:32] Allen Hall: I have no idea if it made, you know, played music. I, I don’t know what that little wristwatch was doing, but the implication was, is the technician was sitting there. pushing this watch device to make this robot tighten bolts. Now, I haven’t seen anything like that. Everything is seen from bolt tightening, has been these guns that are, you know, takes a human to squeeze a trigger and mm-hmm move it over sort of thing.

[00:10:56] Allen Hall: This looks like something that makes sense from. From a sort of mass production way of doing it. And my first thought is don’t they do something very similar to this in the automotive world? 

[00:11:06] Joel Saxum: It’s not that hard to, it doesn’t take that, I guess in my mind, it doesn’t take that much ingenuity. To create something that goes stop at a hundred foot pounds of torque and then , I don’t know, print me out a receipt that says this bolt is at a hundred foot pounds of torque so that I can show my supervisor.

[00:11:23] Joel Saxum: Or when someone comes back on me and says hey, were these bolts all tensioned correctly? Yes, they were. They were on this date, and here’s the receipt. Yeah. Or, or a digital signature or some sort. And I know there’s a couple of other companies out here doing stuff like this. And I, up the top of my head, the names don’t come, come to me.

[00:11:40] Joel Saxum: One of ’em is torque com, I think. I, but it’s, it’s a, it’s, it’s a tool. Same kind of same concept. So, so everybody can see that we have within the wind industry space, whether it is technical field advisors, commissioners, construction, personnel, O and m personnel up to anything up tower. We have a shortage of skilled and trained technicians and there’s a ton of new people coming into the industry, so we applaud that.

[00:12:07] Joel Saxum: There’s a lot of people rolling over into it. You’re like, you’re gonna see some automotive people, you’re gonna see some other, you know, mechanical types. Coming into this thing, but, so we need as many people as we can and it’s scaling so fast. As we’ve talked about a few times, you know, another a hundred thousand, 120,000 turbines in the next 10 years in the us We’re at 70 right now, , and we’re having problems staffing these ISPs and, and these other companies that are making this energy transition happen for our country.

[00:12:34] Joel Saxum: It helps us to be able to scale our workforce without having to put in. Hours and hours of training and this and that and, and so now you can, you’ve got, everything is reportable. I mean, I think I’ve seen, and I can’t remember if it’s torque com system or not, but like every bolthead there’s a system out there, has every bolthead has a QR code and the, and the actual torque gone, reads the QR code and then, and then it goes into a database that’s like here at, on this date that was tightened to this much based on that q.

[00:13:07] Allen Hall: Oh, wow. Is that echo bolt you’re thinking about? Is it echo, echo bolt In the uk I know they do something similar where they’re checking the bolt tension via ultrasound 

[00:13:17] Joel Saxum: means, I don’t think it’s them. I think this is a, this was actually a gun, like a torque gun. So like, like the, you know, everybody talks like, oh, did you 10% these, did you 10% These?

[00:13:25] Joel Saxum: Like, so that, those are like all maintenance things that need to be done. So I, I could give you some like, firsthand experience now. I think for the most part here we’re talking. Tensioning for tower sections is what we’re mostly talking about, right? Right. But there is also anybody that knows wind turbines knows that there’s a whole slew of blades or of, of bolts around the blade, a root section that bolt into the, the spinner, the hub.

[00:13:48] Joel Saxum: That’s another area that we need to make sure that we get just right. So mm-hmm. , if you, if you over tension, if you over tension metal to metal bolts and stu. , that’s a problem you shouldn’t do that. They, that can lead to fatigue issues down the road and blah, blah, blah, blah. Right? But you have a little bit more of a safety factor there when you’re tensioning bolts from a composite to steel.

[00:14:09] Joel Saxum: If you over, if you over tension those, you can create problems immediately structurally for that root section and those root bolts and how everything ties are there. So having a little bit more process driven control I don’t wanna say robotic control cause that’s not really what I’m, I’m more looking for.

[00:14:26] Joel Saxum: a process driven solution, right? That that has checks and balances within itself and gives you a balance report and, and I think it’s it’s an open market space that’s not flooded yet, but I think that there’s. There’s, I, I believe that you could have insurance companies start saying, you must have one of these, or I think so.

[00:14:48] Joel Saxum: Municipal, municipalities, states, federal government saying, you must be towards, because if you, if I, if you go to, I’m sure your aeronautics knowledge, Alan, that the FAA has got some, if you don’t have this torque correctly Yeah. , you know what I mean? So yeah, let’s learn from other organizations. And and industries to make sure that we’re doing the kind of the same thing.

[00:15:13] Joel Saxum: I think it could be safe safety for all. 

[00:15:18] Allen Hall: This makes complete sense to me and into machines is based in the Netherlands. According to their website, I couldn’t, the website is, looks to be somewhat new, weirdly enough, so there’s not a ton of information on it, but if you want to go check ’em out, you can go into machines.com, I N T O M A c H I N e s.com.

[00:15:37] Allen Hall: Take a look at at these. Tensioning devices, they have a couple and they act, it looked like on the website you could purchase a bolt tensioning system. But that page wasn’t working when I was on it. So this, this whole concept must be new, but they’re gonna get flooded because based on the feedback on LinkedIn, there’s a lot of interested parties.

[00:15:56] Allen Hall: So they better get ready to start making some of these tensioning machines. They don’t have a busy. 

[00:16:01] Joel Saxum: Don’t forget the, the uptime podcast bump that we just gave them, increase in traffic on their website. You’re welcome, . 

[00:16:10] Henrik Stamer: You’re quite 

[00:16:10] Allen Hall: welcome. Yeah. Joel Saxum, there’s a new type of blade lifting system for offshore wind turbines.

[00:16:17] Allen Hall: Gusto MSC is creating a, basically a trolley system. So I, I’ve, I’ve watched a couple videos trying to figure out what they were talking about specifically, and they have a, a video that shows it. So think about your standard ship. vessel with a bunch of blades on deck, right? And all, and the blades are stored obviously horizontally.

[00:16:40] Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , so these blades are all stacked up on deck. Jack the vessel up, and then there’s like this trolley gantry that reaches from the ship up to basically the, the bottom of the, the cell. So the tower and the cell are already installed. That, that all, all that work is done with a big, heavy jack up vehicle vessel with a big crane on it to put all that together.

[00:17:02] Allen Hall: Those, those components are heavy, but the wind blades aren’t nearly as heavy as in the cell, obviously. Mm. So you can use a, basically a simpler system. So they have this trolley gantry that the attach between the ship and the tower, and then it has a little a trolley that sits on it. So it goes up and down these rails.

[00:17:19] Allen Hall: You hook the blade, set the blade on this trolley, the trolley spins the blade so it’s vertical and slides it up these rails, railroad track kind of thing. And then they bolt it into the, So the, the benefit of the system is that instead of having limitations on wind speeds from Correct, usually it’s in the 12 to 13, 14 meters per second.

[00:17:39] Allen Hall: Limitations on when you can hang blades. They think they can jump that up to about 18 meters per second. That’s a pretty big shift. And it just uses, it doesn’t have a big crane, so you don’t have a big, huge, expensive, heavy lift crane involved. Right. So it’s huge. A lot simpler. Yeah. To. Right. I mean, right.

[00:17:59] Allen Hall: So now that we’re, 

[00:18:00] Joel Saxum: go ahead. Well, you’re, you’re eliminating the, you can go to a smaller jack, you’re eliminating the massive specialized vessel. That’s the big savings here. Right, right. And so, yeah. So smaller crane, of course, you’re not lifting the blade as far once it’s grabbed basically by the, lira is also helping these guys with their, with the, all of the lift, all the lifting tools.

[00:18:23] Joel Saxum: Right. Okay. So that makes sense. Yeah. . What it, what I’m looking at it is, is, okay, so I, when I was a young kid, what to, to make money in rural Wisconsin and roofed houses and stuff, right? So it looks like a sh what we would call a shingle ladder. and a shingle ladder is, it is. That’s what I thought too. Yeah, like, like it’s got the motor at the bottom and then it’s just like, and you throw bundles of shingles on it.

[00:18:46] Joel Saxum: It carries ’em up ladder. That’s when we were really killing it, . And we didn’t have to back the truck up to the edge of the roof and throw ’em on . But that’s basically what it is, is a shingle ladder. So the questions that it raises for me is, okay, so these blades, of course, they’re not the heaviest component up there.

[00:19:01] Joel Saxum: We know that, but you are still gonna be. For one of these offshore wind turbine blades. It’s a 75 to 90 a hundred meter blade. You’re still gonna be 15 tons. I mean, they’re not light. Oh yeah. So you put some engineering, there’s gotta be some engineering done on the strain or the level of force that you’re putting onto that tower as this thing is kind of leaning on it when it goes up.

[00:19:29] Joel Saxum: Right, right. So there’s, there’s some, there’s something there. But I, I do believe that that can, that’s, I mean, of course these guys have covered the N O V is involved in it as well. Right. So they’ve, they’ve done the engineering, they know what they’re, they know what they’re doing. Yes, but my mind keeps floating to the.

[00:19:46] Joel Saxum: The speed and tenacity at which the US wants to install wind and a solution like this. Bingo. Yes. Big time. Like you don’t have to have that crane speed. You don’t have to have that big crane jack up vessel sitting at that one turbine. They work in conjunction with each other and just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, down deep frogg down the line.

[00:20:07] Joel Saxum: So there’s there’s definitely some advantages to it. How fast can they get it mobilized and out in the, out in the world working? I think it’s quick. To me it does. The, the engineering behind it doesn’t look that difficult, to be honest with you. 

[00:20:21] Allen Hall: I mean, it’s, no, it doesn’t, steel wise is pretty simple.

[00:20:26] Allen Hall: It’s just a lattice structure that you’re building. Yeah. That’s really the complexity part of it. And the trolley, I suppose. Yeah. Having some way of pulling it up and down, but that’s standard crane work. Yeah. From 

[00:20:36] Joel Saxum: what I can see. I mean, it’s a scalable solution. It looks like they could. Build them pretty dang quickly.

[00:20:43] Allen Hall: Well, don’t you wonder if that’s part of the solution? And we’re seeing so many new ideas and because of the offshore complexity and the cost and everybody’s trying to hone in on, you know, how many people does it take to do this? How long does it take to do it? What are the how, what conditions can you install when turine blades, in this particular case, all those factors come.

[00:21:04] Allen Hall: Start to drive down the cost of offshore wind. And the only way you do this is because you have farms in Europe that have been operating for a couple of years. Mm-hmm. I think I saw a five year anniversary for one of them recently that, oh, if we had to do it all over again, what would we do? Well, yeah, here’s a, here’s a new concept.

[00:21:24] Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, and this one, I’m looking at the pictures of this vessel. This is something that could. Like I said, it’s, it’s not complex. This is something that could be easily Jones Act compliant. Very quick. 

[00:21:34] Allen Hall: That’s, that’s what I was thinking too. Yeah, it has. They didn’t say that when I was watching the presentation for Gusto msc.

[00:21:40] Allen Hall: It was from this previous fall. They didn’t talk about Jones Act, but the whole time I’m watching it, I’m thinking Jones Act. 

[00:21:47] Joel Saxum: Jones Act Jones, because the Jack, the Jack is not anything special that Jack exists in Louisiana. There’s a hundred of ’em out of Port Fusan right now. You, but the little bit of a crane, crane set up that lifting mechanism from lift drop, that’s standard.

[00:22:05] Joel Saxum: Those, that’s a single point hookup. Like that’s not a, that’s nothing custom and new about that, those exist. And then that lattice tower work kind of sh shingle, shingle ladder thing that we’re talking about, that’s, that’s not a big feat of engineering. That’s a, that’s a couple weeks in a lay down yard with some good welders and some coating special.

[00:22:23] Joel Saxum: Right. So that I, I think that this is, this is something that could be readily adaptable to be Jones Act compliant to help these, to help our offshore wind in the US scale up and get moving. 

[00:22:39] Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a really interesting idea, and I think we may see this one coming to ashore near us in the next couple of months.

[00:22:47] Allen Hall: We’ll keep an eye on it. Ping Monitor is a continuous blade monitoring system, which allows Windfarm operators to stay ahead of maintenance. Windex can often hear damaged bleeds from the. But they can’t continuously monitor all the turbines. They also can’t calculate how bad the damage is or how fast it’s propagating based on sound, but ping can ping’s acoustic system is being used on over 600 turbines worldwide.

[00:23:12] Allen Hall: It allows operators to discover damage before it gets expensive and prioritize maintenance needs cross their fleet, and it pays for itself the first time it identifies serious damage or saves you from doing. Visual inspection. Stop flying blind out there. Get ping’s ears on your turbines. Learn more@pingmonitor.co.

[00:23:34] Allen Hall: Joel Saxum, you know we’ve all seen the hunt for red October in that great movie with Sean Connery. And Alec Baldwin. And we know that submarines really operate at these, in these quiet zones under the water and try to be invisible. And according to the hunt for red October, try to make themselves sound like whales in the wilderness.

[00:23:56] Allen Hall: But in reality, that’s not what’s happening. And when submarines are operating sort of near shore, there’s all kinds of noise sources out there. Well, obviously we’re gonna put several thousand wind turbines off the shorelines and create noise in the water. So now there’s a question’s popped up and you see articles once in a while discussing, well, what, what are the submarines gonna do?

[00:24:19] Allen Hall: You know, the turbines aren’t that far apart. If they’re in a place around ports, kind of general vicinity of ports where, where submarines operate at are, is there gonna be a lot of noise coming from the wind turbines such that the submarines may have a difficult time navigating inside of there. And it’s gotten to the point where,

[00:24:39] Allen Hall: The Germans have been very proactive about it, and they have a system in Germany where the submarine pings the via sonar, pings the pings, the turbines, and turns on transponders. So all the wind turbines start talking back and saying, here I am. Here I am. Here I am via transponder. Mm-hmm. . So that the submarine crews can pick out where these wind turbines are in the water.

[00:25:04] Allen Hall: It seems like in the United States we really haven’t discussed this much at all, but a lot of these wind turbines are around ship ports and particularly where like Newport News and places where submarines will operate out of, are they gonna have a similar systems in the United States or in other places of the world so that, you know, in theory, a submarine doesn’t run into a wind it to 

[00:25:25] Joel Saxum: me.

[00:25:25] Joel Saxum: So, so knowing what advanced technology is available to the general public, usually we know that the mil, the military. 10 steps ahead of that. Right? Like the military had g had centimeter accurate GPS for 20 years before the civilians did. Right? Yeah. So, and again, knowing what’s out there, I can, when we were talking offline, I said, I can find a submarine in 60 meters of water with my fishing sonar.

[00:25:51] Joel Saxum: And, and, and you could see like, you could, like, I, I have this like here, like. Modern sonar for survey operations can find this bottle of topo Chico on the bottom of the, of the sea floor. If the sonar in a, in a whatever class submarine that you wanna say is operated by any military in the world, can’t pick out a, I don’t know how exactly how big the foundation would be, put a five to 10 meter wide base foundation of a, of a wind turbine offshore.

[00:26:22] Joel Saxum: I think we’ve got some bigger problems. Now, so diving into the problem a little bit, we know you’re gonna create wave noise, you’re gonna create scour noise, you’re gonna have some, yes, you’re gonna have some sub, yes, some sub-sea vortex induced vibration, which will create some bad acoustics, right? Those things are all true blades.

[00:26:41] Joel Saxum: Worrying around up top, that vibration going through the tower that will emit sub-sea as well, while a subsidy that acts as an insulator. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of noise in the water, which we can completely understand by. basic physics. Also, you have some, you know, the high voltage lines in the water.

[00:27:00] Joel Saxum: You’re introducing some things like if you go North Sea and you look at the North Sea, traditionally it’s a fairly. Sandy kind of silty bottom, but now you have rock dumps everywhere. And rock dumps create, scour, creates subsea currents, these kind of things we’ll mess with, right? True, right? So, so there is a lot more noise.

[00:27:19] Joel Saxum: And if you’re trying to be in, you know, non-war time safe, the really easy way would be put these, put some kind of transponders on these things that are, ping them. Now another, another thing in shallow. Now GPS doesn’t penetrate water. Right. That, that doesn’t work. Right. But these submarines have ways of locating themselves subsea.

[00:27:43] Joel Saxum: Yes. Very well. And all it takes is a screen with the GP s coordinates of the turbines on them to avoid them. So , it almost seems like, hey, it’s a government saying we’re gonna do something here. To alleviate everybody’s concern that we might hit one of these with a submarine, but I don’t really think it’s needed.

[00:28:05] Joel Saxum: I mean, the other side 

[00:28:06] Allen Hall: do, do you think it’s, well, well, do you think it’s for the, for the Russians to avoid Russian submarines from running into German wind turbines? Do you, do you wonder that Well, could you know that the Russians are running around and the Americans are too, by the way. Yeah. 

[00:28:20] Joel Saxum: Everybody is.

[00:28:21] Joel Saxum: It’s not just one side. Yeah. The Baltic Sea. The Baltic Sea is busy. 

[00:28:25] Allen Hall: Yes. Right now. Yeah. Very busy place. But so like 

[00:28:28] Joel Saxum: in what we’re leading bullet points from the press release, it says that they’re, the transponders are designed to be activated by a sonar transmission from a German submarine. So if they’re only activated by German submarines, what’s the point?

[00:28:39] Joel Saxum: Anyways, they should know where their infrastructure. You 

[00:28:45] Allen Hall: would think so. Yeah. I mean, the 

[00:28:45] Joel Saxum: other side of it is, is that well see that I, like a wind farm isn’t that big. They’re, they might be a couple kilometers wide. Sure. Just to avoid them. Like there’s, you don’t need to go in there. Right. It’s like when they’re talking about fish fishing, commercial fishing and stuff, like, they don’t take up that much space.

[00:28:59] Joel Saxum: Just 

[00:28:59] Allen Hall: don’t fish, buy ’em. Well, is it a place for a submarine to hide? 

[00:29:03] Joel Saxum: Ah, maybe that, that’s, you definitely 

[00:29:05] Allen Hall: got a point there. . I mean, if it be you wanna be in a place where there’s enough noise, whether it’d be hard for, to detect you, that be a break spot. Good place to go hang around. Yeah. Right, right. Well, and if the, the complexities add up quickly because.

[00:29:23] Allen Hall: As soon as we start drawing, dropping mooring chains on the floating wind turbines. Mm-hmm. , that’s a different thing than a fixed bottom turbin. So do you clip a chain, a mooring chain? Oh my gosh. How many bad news? Think about that. How much. Damage that would do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, did we, did we have, we had submarines run into one another recently, or have a submarine accident in the us I think recently we did, and I think we recently, we had a ships run near one another, so the chances of it’s possible nearly enough.

[00:29:54] Allen Hall: I, I think it’s possible just because of the odds. Right. Well, and if you look at, it’s a busy operating environment, a lot going on. If 

[00:30:00] Joel Saxum: you look at. The, the areas were offshore, floating wind. Now we’re talking about mooring chains. Right? So if you’re looking at where they’re installed, a lot of those are heavy submarine traffic corridors, right?

[00:30:14] Joel Saxum: Like the, like I would think that they’re Yes. Off offshore Norway, there’s that shelf right there. I would imagine if I was a submarine operator, I’d be cruising right along the bottom of that shelf. Right on sneaking by, you know, so I don’t, again, . I’m not a submarine. I’ve never been in a submarine. I don’t, I dunno anything about how that works or, or submarine warfare.

[00:30:32] Joel Saxum: I’m not an expert, but yeah, I mean, so in, in the oil and gas grill, You have a lot of more drilling rigs, more drilling or floating production storage, offloading facilities all over the world in every, in the Gulf of Mexico, Africa North Sea. Yeah. Everywhere. They’re everywhere. And not only are there mooring chains going down, but there’s production lines going down.

[00:30:52] Joel Saxum: There’s production lines that are going down through kilometers of water that are carrying hydrocarbons from the sea. to the surface. You, you clip one of those, now we’ve got a problem. Right? So, so there’s you know, sonar targets that are hung from these things or, or attached to these things on the flexible risers and on the mooring chains quite regularly and on even on subsea infrastructure.

[00:31:16] Joel Saxum: Cuz if you, if you’ve never. Something cool to Google is just like sub-sea oil field just to see what the infrastructure looks like. Is this it like literally build, they build looks like a, it looks just like if you drive through Midland, Texas and you see what the top side looks like, that’s what it looks like.

[00:31:32] Joel Saxum: But at 2000 meters depth water, it’s pretty wild. But they have sonar targets. All over those fields so that when an R o V goes down there, because visibility, of course is, is limited, boom, they pick it up and it just glows on the sonar, you know, like the certain angles and stuff. There we go. So I would imagine we have some of those same things going on, all of the, the mooring chains and, and whatnot.

[00:31:55] Joel Saxum: I don’t know if they’ve, 

[00:31:56] Allen Hall: so do you think your risk is, well do, do you think the risk is coming from the US Navy, which seems to be a very competent organization? From all my dealings with them, they really have their act together. Or is it coming from the submarines, from like the Pablo Escobars of the world where they’re trying to bring in cocaine into Florida, that we have to worry about them running into some more chains.

[00:32:16] Allen Hall: So that’s probably the more likely situation because they have had submarines made to bring Coke into America. Oh yeah. That’s the one that’s gonna get you. Yeah, yeah. That’s the one that’s going to clearly smack a mooring line at some point. Then we’ll really know what’s going on in the waters when that happens.

[00:32:33] Allen Hall: It’s scary. Is that who it’s really 

[00:32:35] Joel Saxum: for? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It’s gotta be, that’s, I it’s hard to like, so there was a, there was a picture or a video clip maybe six months ago or something of a vessel that had a DP runoff and if you know what a deep. DP systems are the dynamic positioning where you have multiple GPSs or ways of positioning a vessel, and it stays in one spot by itself, basically robotically through algorithms.

[00:33:04] Joel Saxum: and you can have a DP runoff where the GPS will get jammed or get lost, or it used to happen, doesn’t really happen anymore. Where the vessel will start to just move where it thinks it’s actually staying still. Mm-hmm. . So, but it can also be where just like a part of the system fails, right? Like the bowel thrust fails and the thing that starts going, like it thinks it’s putting input in, but it’s not.

[00:33:23] Joel Saxum: And one of ’em smashed into a transition piece. It was like six months ago or so, I saw a video of it Oh. Where a vessel was just like, bam, into the transition piece. Of and it, and it messed the vessel up bad. And the transition piece had like a bent ladder on it. It was, it was, it was impressive. I was like, cause I was thinking to myself like, man, do they have to do a whole, like from an impact from a vessel?

[00:33:45] Joel Saxum: Do they have to do a whole engineering study or thinking they have to look it down to the sea floor, see anything move, or, and after watching the video, it’s like, huh, it didn’t look like anything really happened to it. So maybe a submarine will just bounce off. I don’t know. . 

[00:34:00] Allen Hall: Just a couple of rattle cans of yellow paints.

[00:34:03] Allen Hall: good as 

[00:34:03] Joel Saxum: new? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Maybe, maybe there’ll be a submarine out there with one fin left or something. can’t turn left. 

[00:34:10] Allen Hall: Yeah. Hm. Man. Well this again, we see some of these issues rise up as we get closer and closer to more wind tumors being in the water where there’s a just a lot more discussions about what if, what if, what if, what if, and I’m not sure.

[00:34:27] Allen Hall: I’ve seen many of these answered yet I have a feeling that the Navy’s figured it out. They just haven’t told everybody yet. But I’m not, so, like I said, I’m not worried about the US Navy too much. As much I am about everybody else that’s operating in those waters. And who knows? We may learn lunch, man.

[00:34:43] Allen Hall: Interesting. Things about what’s floating underneath , underneath the, the shoreline. So cool. Well, Joel Saxum, if you follow the s e c filings, you’ll have noticed that Erroneus has been in a series a fundraising round, and they’ve locked in about 39 million of funding. It still looks like they, that, that Series A has about 2 million of space.

[00:35:07] Allen Hall: So if you have. Have, you know, a briefcase full, full of cash. You can send it to Lafia , and they would be glad to see it, you know, in a piece of Verona. But they’re fundraising because they’re expanding very quickly. And I, I think this is a good sign for them. It, it’s hard being in that business. It’s just a cash intensive business.

[00:35:25] Allen Hall: It’s not a software company, it’s, it’s a hardware company. They need to keep fundraising to stabilize it and get it to the point where it’s just a, a global powerhouse, 

[00:35:34] Joel Saxum: don’t you think? Yeah. I mean, they, they do a really good job over at err ronis of, of getting out and getting some reach out into the world, right?

[00:35:41] Joel Saxum: You see them in a lot of South American countries. Every trade show in this side of the pond in, in the us we see them at every trade show on that side of the pond in the, in eu we see them at. So they’re spend spending a lot of money getting the word out and stuff, but the capital intensive part of it, when you talk about software company versus hardware, Hardware company is also a software company, especially when you’re talking robotics.

[00:36:02] Joel Saxum: It is. Right? So the, the, those guys are the amount of of capital that goes into building something like that. It’s, it’s intensive. And then it also think about the, what the business model is. The business model is getting robots mobilized around the world and out onto wind farms, paying a couple of three, four people to be out there doing these things.

[00:36:22] Joel Saxum: All the training that goes along with it like it is, , it is a very capital intensive business model to get off the ground and get running, but right, they off right. The, the, the, as we talked about earlier in the episode with the, the shortage of of trained technicians in the, in the wind industry that were comp compete com, com, completely up against the wall keep just pounding and pounding and pounding.

[00:36:46] Joel Saxum: We need more, we need more. We need more. They may have a scalable solution here that can fix that problem, and if they can do. 39 million in funding could become 39 million in 

[00:36:57] Allen Hall: revenue real quick. Oh, I hope so. I really do. All these robot companies that are, the people working at these companies are working their tails off.

[00:37:08] Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , every, every trade show I see, every report I get back about where they are in the world indicates they are really. Trying to make a difference out there, and it’s, they’re only a small percentage of the total repair market as it sits today. , but hopefully they can become a, a much bigger dominant player because we’re gonna need it.

[00:37:30] Allen Hall: Yeah. If we, without ’em, we’re never gonna achieve some of these goals in terms of gigawatts installed, it just won’t happen. 

[00:37:36] Joel Saxum: Yeah. I know that Arron Erroneus is working, cuz we were kind of talking about this off offline. They’ve got. Some l e P stuff they can do, they can do lightning protection system testing drain hole, clean out tower cleaning.

[00:37:47] Joel Saxum: And I believe they’re working on a system that can do some, some at least light repairs. I know Rope Robotics is doing the same thing. They’re a part of a consortium group group that has some funding that’s want, is gonna come out to do some, some hopefully do. Actual repairs. And when we get to that level, well that’s a game changer there as well, right?

[00:38:07] Joel Saxum: Because then you become more than just a leading edge protection tool and you become a, a technician a whip up with the 

[00:38:14] Allen Hall: robot instead. Right? Right. Well, and this, because this is a a series A round. , that’s like the start line. Mm-hmm. , right? All weirdly enough, in, in investment world, you get to series A, that’s the gun goes off , you start running from there, you’re trying to get to B, C.

[00:38:35] Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. and, and, and d if you need it to have a self-sustaining company. Now the real race begins. I, I, I think all it’s gonna be, it’s hard to process all that, how hard they have worked to get to this point. and now it must in some way feel like, okay, I have this new lease on life. Yeah. I, I have all the, the robot thing kind of figured out.

[00:38:59] Allen Hall: I have technicians trained, I have robots in different countries already stationed to go Now it’s, now it’s really go time. Yeah. Like the last three years haven’t been go time compared to the next three years. Yeah. Wow. 

[00:39:12] Joel Saxum: Yeah. Wow. It’s gonna be crazy. It’s gonna, it’ll be a fun, it would be a fun a fun ride to be a part of.

[00:39:17] Joel Saxum: I know. Next time I see Dan Dana Screws, I’m gonna ask him how he got away with call. And this is round a.

[00:39:25] Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I, I understand what they’re trying to do. Everybody’s playing that same game. But there hasn’t been a, the only other company I can think of that has that kind of series A, that’s really in the business of Skys specs, right? Yeah. That Skys specs has been fundraising, and it’s good to see Erroneus in that.

[00:39:45] Allen Hall: in that same space. Yeah. I look to see 

[00:39:47] Joel Saxum: big things from them. I mean, of course, if you’ve been at any kind of industry events in the last few years, you’ve seen Erroneus, you’ve seen the team, you’ve seen the BD people, you’ve seen the ceo, you’ve seen the, everybody there. Yeah. I would say pretty soon you might see a bigger booth on a fancier booth.

[00:40:03] Joel Saxum: From the Erroneus 

[00:40:04] Allen Hall: team. You will. Well, with 39 million. I, I hope so. . That’s good. That’s the way it should be. Yep.

[00:40:15] 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 weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

[00:40:33] Allen Hall: Visit weather guard wind.com to learn more. Read a case study and schedule a call.

[00:40:41] Allen Hall: Welcome to the program, Henrik Stamer. Glad to have you on the, on the podcast. Thank you for having 

[00:40:47] Henrik Stamer: me here, Ellen. I’m happy to be here. 

[00:40:49] Allen Hall: Henrik Stamer Stamer is the founding partner and managing director of Navor Energy, which is based in Denmark and Navor Energy is a relatively new company and focuses on management and advisory services for offshore.

[00:41:01] Allen Hall: Project. So we thought it’d be great to have Henrik Stamer on the podcast because we just had the California offshore auction. We just got through the New York auction and there’s auctions going on around the world actually. And we, we, we at uptime don’t know a lot about offshore wind here in America, so we thought we’d bring it an expert.

[00:41:19] Allen Hall: So Henrik Stamer, welcome to the welcome to the program. 

[00:41:21] Henrik Stamer: Thanks again. Thanks again. Yeah. You guys are really hitting off with some very interesting. Visions for offshore wind, both on the East Coast, of course, for many years, but now also on the West coast. It’s very exciting. 

[00:41:36] Allen Hall: It is, it is exciting. And just having finished the California offshore auction, there’s a lot of questions about that.

[00:41:42] Allen Hall: And, and if you look at the press and read the news articles obviously there are five different companies and some of them were conglomerates, so there’s more companies involved, but they, they tended to be companies that have some expertise mostly. An onshore wind, a little bit of offshore EOR is in there, but in America there’s so many unknowns and I, I’m really glad to have you on the pro on the program just because I, I wanted to talk through something we have been talking about on uptime for a while, which is supply chain.

[00:42:12] Allen Hall: and how difficult it seems at the moment to ac acquire turbines to make contracts to figure out what turbine you’re going to use. And it, it, it seems like to us at uptime that that the OEMs are, are being very choosy as to who they will work with. Is that what’s happening behind the scenes? Very 

[00:42:33] Henrik Stamer: much so.

[00:42:33] Henrik Stamer: Ellen what we see as well is that, The OEMs they have sort of a a bandwidth and they would like to. U use their sales time with the most the, the, the developers that are progressing the most and seems as if they have the right pipeline in in in, in place. So that means that whereas in the.

[00:43:05] Henrik Stamer: Just a few years ago the developers, they were very certain that they could get in contact with the, the turbine manufacturers and participate in in a good conversation around their specific project. But nowadays, things has really changed. 

[00:43:22] Allen Hall: Well, I’ll, I’ll use the California auction as an another good example.

[00:43:26] Allen Hall: There were 43 companies that had been authorized to bid in that auction. I think at the beginning there were seven or eight that started and there were five at the end. So the vast majority of companies that had applied and, and were registered to bid on those leases didn’t. My guess at the time was that they didn’t have a contract with an o e Em though, or an OEM wouldn’t talk to them.

[00:43:50] Allen Hall: In terms of securing wind turbines and e same thing for cables and foundations. I is, is that what’s happening? Is it early on the, the, the larger players are able to make those contracts because they have a supply chain? 

[00:44:02] Henrik Stamer: Absolutely. I mean, the it’s not only the turbines, as you say, it’s also the foundation suppliers and the cable suppliers.

[00:44:09] Henrik Stamer: They are, they have, I mean, , over the past several years, they have been taking new products to the market, so that takes a lot of investments. At the same time, they have not been so profitable, so that means that they have certain amount of capacity and again they want to deploy that capacity in the.

[00:44:33] Henrik Stamer: With the developers that they that, that they really believe in can have, you know be successful in winning auctions and have the right team and management and of course, cash to make these projects happen, happen, happening otherwise. , you know, you spent your time as a wind turbine manufacturer or a foundation manufacturer in, in, in in a wrong way.

[00:45:04] Henrik Stamer: So it’s really, it’s really seller market at the moment. And they are, already now what we see is that they are demanding some fees to, from, from the potential buyers to involve them in in a sales process. So, so again, it’s, it’s it could be come back to your question. It could be one of the things that some of the already listed and Listed the bidders at the California auction that they realize, well, it is difficult and this is going to be a very competitive bid.

[00:45:52] Henrik Stamer: So if we cannot even engage the supply chain, then we might as well go back and revise our strategy and maybe go for something that is more. Long term or in a more emerging market where you are not bidding and, and actually paying for, for the auctions 

[00:46:14] Allen Hall: that you win, right? Once you win an auction, the United States, you have to pay those fees up upfront and the, the United States Federal Government and the state government would love to have you put wind turbines out there, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to do that.

[00:46:30] Allen Hall: The money is exchanged and so you have to try to develop that. And it seems like you, it would be a big risk if you can’t lock in at least one of the OEMs into a supply chain deal as to how many turbines when you’re gonna put ’em out, out and sea. Those seems like a very big risk as a developer to get those contracts in place.

[00:46:52] Allen Hall: And if you mentioned that there’s, they’re asking for fees, I think that makes a lot of sense to me because they’re cash hungry at the moment. Does that change? If I’m a developer, how big of an impact is that on me? Where there, there’s a limit number of manufacturers there have a tight supply chain at the moment.

[00:47:11] Allen Hall: Does that really change the structure of the economics, the, the, the financing of a project because of that constraint at the moment? I 

[00:47:20] Henrik Stamer: think it may change that a bit. But I think what is really the risk for developer is that that they end up having one, let’s say 3, 5, 600 megawatts somewhere, pay for that.

[00:47:38] Henrik Stamer: But because they lack a bigger pipeline of offshore wind projects that is. , then they really cannot get the, the turbines and the foundations for that specific project. We’ve seen already now that if you, if you have less than one gigawatt of pipeline secured, you are really not A company that sought for, or sought after by, by the salespeople of the, of the turbine, manufac and, and foundation manufacturers.

[00:48:11] Henrik Stamer: So, so what you want to achieve is to establish 

[00:48:16] Allen Hall: a, 

[00:48:17] Henrik Stamer: a pipeline of a certain size. So at. More than one gigawatt. That could be in different locations, of course, but that’s what we are looking at at the moment. Less than one gigawatt. You are sometimes. If, if you’re taking seriously, you are sometimes put aside to, you know, a special project, a kind of sales organization where there’s a limited.

[00:48:44] Henrik Stamer: Amount of support and we all know that Binding turbines is a complicated matter because you need to factor in all the local content, both in terms of technical specification and, and also local content in terms of compliance with all sorts of regulations. So it’s not something that you just buy off the shelf.

[00:49:09] Henrik Stamer: It really needs to have you need to have some traction with the. With the OEMs in, in order to establish the, the right setup for that specific turbine that you were 

[00:49:21] Allen Hall: acquiring? Well, that, that makes sense because some of the California auction winners were actually a combination of two larger energy players, two or three.

[00:49:30] Allen Hall: And is is that the reason why is because between the two of them, they, they can show a pipeline of one gigawatt plus projects. Is, is. The logic behind it. It is the logic 

[00:49:41] Henrik Stamer: behind it. And also because there’s a very big push towards many of the players. At the developer side or the investor side to, to be able to deploy their funds into renewable energy.

[00:49:58] Henrik Stamer: And I think the philosophy is if you cannot beat them, then join them. So better form these partnerships so that eventually you will win just a little bit and deploy just a little bit of your. Of your funds re instead of losing out of opportunities elsewhere. And, and it’s also better to be part of something that is a success with 25% instead of standing outside.

[00:50:26] Henrik Stamer: Because when you are involved, you also get some experience out of each and every, every project that you can then utilize in, in In the, the, the month and years to come and revise your strategy and become even more competitive in, in the future. 

[00:50:48] Allen Hall: I noticed that in the auction, that the people that, or the companies that were bidding were.

[00:50:53] Allen Hall: Companies that had expertise, or if they didn’t have direct expertise, they were trying to grab hold of expertise and, and that’s where Neighbor Energy comes in, right? Because it is such a complicated projects to develop, you need to have steady hands on the controls to help minimize those extra costs and those complexities that you haven’t thought of before.

[00:51:13] Allen Hall: Especially if you’re new to the offshore wind. And, and Neighbor is, is a relatively new company in the space. How do people get ahold of you and, and to your expertise? How, how do they, how do they reach Neighbor Energy? Yeah. So obviously we make ourself available everywhere, you know, on, on the internet.

[00:51:33] Henrik Stamer: But we are also we are part, part of a wider group of companies that are focused a hundred percent of on offshore wind. We are part of Ventera group that are currently more than 450 employees uh, deployed over. Eight different con companies. And one of them is actually a US based company inspire Environmental down in Rhode Island.

[00:51:59] Henrik Stamer: And we have recently opened up a Ventera group office in Rhode Island in Providence. So for us clients, we, we have a presence and we, we. We are operating out of that legal entity and we can, we can service in, in us. We are born out of Denmark, and as everyone knows, that’s where everything started.

[00:52:28] Henrik Stamer: Of course. There’s a lot of competences in, in many of the other European comp countries like just south of us in, in Germany, where we also have group presence in in UK and Ireland where we also have presence. And then we are also expanding to. Asia, we have already entities in Taiwan and in Australia as we speak.

[00:53:00] Henrik Stamer: But the, the idea is actually to bring a lot of the European knowledge that are that are, you know, Common for every single offshore project, and which can then be reused in a US context. And then of course we will like to form strong partnerships with local companies in in us in order to also.

[00:53:30] Henrik Stamer: Compliment our knowledge and know-how from Europe with what is local requirements and and local compliance with local legi