Ørsted’s Financial Situation: Causes and Solutions

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week the Uptime crew looks at Ørsted’s current financial state, reviewing recent difficulties and the pathway forward. What factor have offshore cancellations played? Is the American offshore environment too difficult? Will they source Chinese turbines? Who are their competitors? And our wind farm of the week is Cedar Springs Wind Farm in Wyoming!

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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!

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Allen Hall: I just want to know when I go to Copenhagen next time are they going to be shooting me with squirt guns like they’re doing in Barcelona? You’re not a tourist there. You’re on business. Am I? I like Copenhagen. It’s quite nice. Rosemary tells me it’s a good place to hang out and the restaurants are quite good.

There’s Michelin restaurants all over the place.

Rosemary Barnes: I lived in Denmark for five years and I went to Copenhagen once in that time. It’s It is a cool, it’s a cool city. Europe’s full of cool cities. It’s so expensive to get from Western Denmark across to Copenhagen. You have to, yeah, it’s like there’s a bridge you have to pass each way that’s like a hundred dollars for the just in one, one toll.

Yeah and I was, it was much easier for me to get to Hamburg or Berlin. So I usually went there when I Had a need for big city stuff. Also the I really liked seeing music events, concerts and stuff like that, and Germany is much, much better for that than Denmark.

Allen Hall: Can somebody say something nice about Denmark?

Rosemary Barnes: Denmark doesn’t need anyone to say anything nice about them. Denmark has the best PR out of any country in the world. Like how Facebook whatever? And it’s just, like little reels about some amazing thing in Denmark. It’s just. You get bombarded with it.

Joel Saxum: Have you ever seen the Danish plug?

It’s actually like the power plug. It’s actually a smiley face. That’s how smiley they are.

Rosemary Barnes: Everyone knows the Australian plugs are the best design though.

Joel Saxum: Are they like the English?

Rosemary Barnes: No, they’re different. And they just it’s just so secure, like you got angled pins that you plug it in and it is.

In, none of these, the US ones with the parallel things where it’s always just like sagging out a little bit with live, live wires, just just there, it, ugh, change it. Wait. And that’s why you can only have 110 volts. It’s survival. Have to lower your voltage so our kids can survive it.

Allen Hall: The reason we have 110 volts is because we have the ability to mine copper.

And we had the wealth to put in a little bit extra copper everywhere else in the United States versus Europe. Europe’s at 220 or whatever it is, 221 because they have less access to copper, it’s more expensive.

Rosemary Barnes: So you’re lazy and inefficient is what you’re saying?

Allen Hall: No, we just use the resources that are available.

I’m Allen Hall and I’ll be joined by the rest of the Uptime hosts after these news headlines. Brisbane based power generator Renewable Energy Partners has proposed a 5 gigawatt wind power complex in Queensland, Australia. The Bogunda wind farm is planned to be installed in phases. The initial phase is expected to be 2 gigawatts, with the capacity to generate electricity for 200, 000 homes annually.

The project will be connected to the proposed CopperString 2. 0 transmission link. Renewable Energy Partners aims to bring the initial 2 gigawatt portion online by the end of 2030. Vestas is restructuring its operations. The company will cut approximately 54 positions at its factory in Ringskobing, Denmark, while expanding production in Colorado in the USA.

This move is in response to increased demand for its V 163 onshore turbines in the American market. After adjustments, about 350 employees are expected to remain at the Ringskobing factory. Ørsted reported impairment losses of 3. 9 billion Danish crowns in the second quarter of 2024. The losses were partly due to a delay in the construction of its 704 megawatt revolution wind project off of Rhode Island and Connecticut.

The company has pushed back the start of commercial operations for this project from 2025 to 2026. Despite these challenges, Orr said beat analysts expectations with a 59 percent rise in second quarter profits before interest tax depreciation and amateurization. Orset has also stated that while it currently has no Chinese turbines in its project pipeline, it does not rule out buying turbines or technology from China in the future.

The company is monitoring developments in the European wind turbine market where Chinese manufacturers have Been gaining momentum, Snipper mentioned that the company is already using Chinese components and steel for its projects. Netsco, a U. S. based naval architecture firm, is finalizing an agreement to build and operate a Jones Act compliant feeder vessel for offshore wind turbine installations.

The new feeder barge design incorporates dynamic positioning, Anti roll motion technology and a specialized fendering system to address current operational challenges. The vessel is expected to be ready within 18 to 24 months after contract finalization. And Ibudrola, through its U. S. subsidiary Avangrid, has surpassed 9, 000 megawatts of installed wind and solar renewable capacity In the United States, this milestone enables the company to supply sustainable energy to more than 2.

3 million U. S. families. Iberdrola’s portfolio includes over 75 projects in 22 states with more than 8, 000 megawatts of wind capacity and around 1, 000 megawatts of solar power. That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes.

CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. Mark your calendars for AMI’s Winter in Blades conference happening October 2nd and 3rd in historic Boston, Massachusetts. This two day event, which is similar to the well established edition in Europe, We’ll bring together the whole blade value chain to examine market outlook, innovations in blade materials, design, manufacturing, testing, and lifecycle management with a special focus on the North America market.

Gain insights from experts from Vestas, Along with scientists and engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plan your trip to Boston this fall by visiting the link in the show notes or just Google 2024 Blades Boston.

They always say when Orsted sneezes the rest of the energy world gets a cold. And right now, Orsted is coughing and wheezing pretty good. If you’re looking at the financial numbers from Orsted, they booked a 3. 9 billion Danish crowns, which is about 575 million in an impairment loss in Q2. So that’s a lot of money.

And part of that is the revolution wind project in the States is being delayed due to soil contamination at the onshore site, which man can Orsted not win. And then that sort of had some other cascading effects. Shares of Orsted are down somewhere around 8%. And if you look at the last four years, three, four years, it’s roughly at one third of its peak in like the beginning of 2021.

Now, even with those losses, they beat expectations with a 59 percent rise in profits. Even when things are looking down, Orson has some positive news. And it looks like guys, Orsted is cutting back so they’re not pushing on some of the more perimeter projects that they had, like this flagship one, the e methanol project for green fuels, that one’s been slowed down, and a bunch of other Orsted related items are getting slowed.

I look at Orsted as one of the crown jewels in renewable energy, and if Orsted is having this much trouble today, What are they about to do with it? Are they really going to try to be, work closer to home, step out of America a little bit? Are they. Going to restructure. How does this look?

Particularly in light of the cancellations they had, I think it was earlier this year Joel? On the East Coast.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, earlier this year. I think that you just got to pull it in a little bit, to be honest with you. And we thought they were going to do a little bit more of that when they had the issues with the offshore wind plays in the U.

S. Was just rain it back on the difficult projects. Which you can see right now with that the power to X type stuff or the sorry, the e methanol project that they had just canceled is that’s not normally from their core business. Their core businesses for a long time has been offshore wind in the North Atlantic.

They, you could, I could see them pulling back a little bit more focusing on those things, getting a little bit more healthy and then going out and trying some other projects. Like you said, you’ve seen this, they’re, they pulled back from some of the things in the States but. Now going forward, but then you see a revolution wind come full on commissioning, pushed back to 2026.

So now they’re running into some hurdles and some roadblocks around the world

Allen Hall: is because there’s so much into the offshore piece and that is so expensive compared to

Joel Saxum: onshore. It’s risky, right? There’s just a lot more capital at play. Rosemary rec or has recommended the books how big things get done before.

There’s a book about how these big capital projects, lots of books about how they get done, but it’s because they’re difficult. They’re inherently risky to take on. And that’s one of the reasons why you’ll see in the insurance world, there’s a policy for just the construction. And then there’s a policy once the thing gets running for the next 25 years.

These big projects are capital intensive. Along the same lines as this. Look in the oil and gas world. That’s the other big infrastructure project. In the world that happens offshore, they put up some big capital numbers for these things. I’ve seen in the, of course, in the billions of dollars to develop these oil fields and sometimes they’re a couple hundred million in or even a billion dollars in and they’ll pull the plug on it.

Because the risk is so high operating in that offshore environment that it’s just like you can’t stomach it anymore. So you’re starting to see a little bit of that happen in offshore

Philip Totaro: wind. In order for them to, continue driving profitability, they actually came out and announced this week that they’re not necessarily even opposed to looking at sourcing Chinese turbines if they can get something cheaper than what they’re having to buy right now.

To develop some of these projects. I would imagine they are looking at it from, the perspective of European projects, but certainly also for projects they’re looking at and other markets like South Korea and potentially. Taiwan, I don’t know because that’s gonna get into a tricky area.

I, I doubt they’re gonna allow Chinese turbines in the water there but if that’s the sort of thing that Ørsted’s having to do in order to, it’s frankly why Lux Kara signed the deal with Mingyang in the first place, cause, They can’t build the project that they wanted to build without having a cheaper alternative.

It’s necessitating, the current market environment is just necessitating this this kind of a move.

Joel Saxum: If you’re starting to see moves like that, Phil, which I mean, in, the grand scheme of things in the geopolitical environment we are in globally, it’s like a, ooh what’s going on here?

Orson is saying this. Could you see other moves happening, right? Could you see a headline coming out next quarter that says Orsted lays off 500 people or a thousand people or something like that? Potentially.

Philip Totaro: You’re also seeing that more and more companies are now pushing back on the European Union and European Commission.

And their whole investigation of the Chinese saying, look, we can’t build projects without China as a supply chain option. If that’s the direction that the developers are having to go in, it’s either let’s get something cheaper in the door or what you just mentioned, Joel, layoffs are inevitable if they, if these companies expect to stay afloat.

Allen Hall: Orsted is essentially Denmark, right? And at that point, they’re not going anywhere. Denmark is a very stable country. It’s too big to fail, right? But in terms of their competitors right now, RWE, Equinor, anybody else there that are playing at that level? Total?

Philip Totaro: That and Fall, you could you could argue.

Allen Hall: So is it because the footprint of available projects is diminished over the last six months or so? And all the same players are still there. Is it just less real estate to make projects happen? Plus the OEMs are increasing prices like Vestas has?

Philip Totaro: Yes, and part of that is also, Denmark being a little wishy washy with their open door tender policy where, the Ørsted thought they had a bunch of projects lined up and they were trying to get capital for all those.

And then the Danish government said, Oh, we’re not going to do the open door policy. Oh, yeah, we are. No, we’re not. Yeah, we are. How is a developer supposed to, pursue anything in that kind of an environment as well when a there’s regulatory uncertainty and B there’s a high inflationary and interest rate environment that still plagues the industry globally and precludes anybody from, diversifying the capital investments amongst a multitude of projects.

You’re now having to get a lot more just to fund one.

Allen Hall: That’s all true. If you look at two different landscapes at the minute, you have United States, which over the last year or so has stumbled badly and a lot of projects has been canceled or put on hold, particularly offshore. And then you see this burgeoning market happening down in Australia and you say all right, why is Australia getting such big projects announced and the planning is underway and the financing seems to be rolling and Denmark, the country of Denmark is, are funding some of these things in Australia.

Why is that an easier landscape to conquer than some of these U. S. projects?

Rosemary Barnes: It’s easy to say that Australia is easy while we’re at this very early stage of development. The U. S. market has been harder than most people would have expected. I’ve definitely been surprised how much, The U. S.

has struggled to get offshore wind started given that it’s been going pretty smoothly with some pretty big projects for a long time in Europe. So I thought that, the rollout would be easier in the U. S. and that hasn’t been the case. Australia is the next shiny big thing, lots of potential, lots of big talk, but we haven’t yet got to the point where the U.

S. failed, I don’t think that, I think it’s too early to say that it’s easier to get projects done in Australia. It’s just, I don’t know, we saw it in the US, everybody made a like a, it was a land grab. Everybody wanted to make sure that they were going to have a stake like a big bit of this huge potential new market.

And so everyone rushed in with a lot of enthusiasm to stake their claim. And we’re at that point in Australia at the moment, whereas we haven’t actually started. We don’t even have any projects that are actually committed and, going to start construction, let alone having actually started construction and seeing, what kind of opposition that brings, what kind of supply chain challenges that brings, logistical challenges.

All of those things are yet to be done in Australia and whilst I’m really hopeful that we will have learnt some of the lessons of the US and I think that in general it is an easier environment to get big things done in Australia because we do trust the government a little bit more to make decisions and go with it and the legal structure is also in place a little bit better that, individuals can’t hold things up as easily as they seem to be able to in the US.

We’re going to have tainting problems. We just have, it’s too early to see them yet.

Joel Saxum: If you look back at the history of U S offshore wind, there was companies coming, the Orsted’s and the Econor’s of the world coming over to the United States in Providence and other places along that Eastern seaboard establishing offices in 2017 in lieu of this offshore wind boom.

So when we, when you look at the timeline that way, 6 years from the time we were talking about it a couple of years removed from that. Then we had the auctions and now, so it’s been 7 years since those offices were established. Right now, in Australia, you’re in of if it was the exact same timeline, which it’s, of course, going to be different, but you’re in you’re 2 of that 7 year timeline before steel was actually in the water for us.

You’re, I agree with you, Rosemary. While I think that you guys will probably have an easier time, plus you get the advantage of watching another place. fall over hurdles and stub their own toes that you can hopefully make up for that.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And also, Australia is a bit of a cult, like culturally we’re in between Europe and the US.

So I wouldn’t expect it to roll out as smoothly as it has in Europe. But it shouldn’t be as hard as the U S and like you said, we’ve got the advantage of having seen the problems. Some of the specific problems people, Australia addressing ahead of time, like some of the port stuff and yeah, a few things like that, but that said, there’s a lot of big pieces that have to be in place to get a offshore wind industry happening.

And America does have some advantages that Australia doesn’t have. Like we don’t have this big. industrial heavy manufacturing industry to the extent that the U. S. does. Either a lot more time to, to build it back up in Australia, or it was going to be a lot more importing a lot more reliance on imports, which, supply chain issues have been a problem, basically across the entire economy the last few years, but especially in offshore wind.

There’s some unique challenges that we’ll face as well, but yeah, the potential is big enough that people are pretty excited. And also because like Europe is divided up and the projects are going ahead. And that’s almost business as usual. Now, everyone got very excited about us, put a lot of money in there, saw a lot of losses for some of these projects, they’ve taken hits.

And people are understandably less excited about the future in the U S at the moment. So it does feel like Australia is the next place to get to get excited about and talk to people. And make big talk about.

Allen Hall: But wasn’t that driven by policy, and the push was on the east coast of the U. S. for offshore wind?

That was the place that they were going to focus most of the effort from the administration’s point of view? And the states did too. NYSERDA definitely has made a big push for offshore wind versus onshore wind and solar. It seems like Australia is, even though it’s set up very similarly, where the vast majority of the population is right next to the water, it looks like a lot more projects are going to happen on land in Australia than what are happening in the United States.

That is easier to do, right? It’s just simpler.

Rosemary Barnes: Yes and no. In the U S of course, like in the, yeah, the Northeast part of the country, there’s no, like the onshore wind is so terrible there. If you look at the, the stats for it, it’s just you could never build an, a profitable onshore wind project there.

So it’s. Either offshore wind or it’s huge transmission projects, like probably, HVDC running from the Midwest all the way across to yeah, New York, say, but in the U. S. transmission, it has proven in. Maybe even more difficult than offshore wind, but people are really opposed and it doesn’t seem like the legislative structure is in place to actually make it go smoothly.

So in Australia, we’ve got some differences. So first of all, we’ve got reasonably good, like good to excellent onshore wind across the whole country, including where people are located. So you can build wind farms, onshore wind farms fairly close to Melbourne and Sydney. And there’s still like really good sites as well that aren’t too far away.

In the north of South Australia, there’s some onshore wind sites with capacity factors in the into the 40s. So it’s it’s an offshore wind resource, but it just happens to be onshore. And there, there’s not a lot of, fight to get the transmission done. Not like it’s a walk in the park, but it’s certainly not impossible.

And then the other thing is that whilst Australia has some of the same challenges with building new transmission that the US has, it’s to a much lower extent, like there’s protests about new transmission lines. People the country aren’t that stoked that they got, big new transmission projects running through their properties, and they say that they feel that they’re taking the hit to give city people cheaper electricity and that it’s not fair.

There’s like some discussions there, but at the end of the day, whilst. The ideal scenario is that everybody is happy and on board with it and that affected landowners are compensated. Our, the Australian government does actually have the right to just say, too bad, the transmission is going through there and we’re going to compensate you according to this formula.

They can do that if they want to, whereas I’m pretty sure that’s not the case in the US. You actually do have to get agreement.

Joel Saxum: Eminent domain, you can do it, but it’s tough. But here’s the thing that Alan and I talk about this all the time. HVDC in the United States, why are we not doing more of it?

Like we have 2. 6 million miles of pipelines across the country. 2. 6 million miles. Why can’t we bury HVDC the same way we bury a pipeline?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, or even better yet, dig up the pipeline. I’ve heard that there’s two or three years of US steel requirements buried in natural gas pipelines. Rip up the pipelines and use the channels to put HVDC electricity in.

Job done. But I’m pretty sure that the legislation doesn’t allow that. Like it’s easier, like it’s a lot easier to get gas pipeline approved and If you’ve got an approval for a gas pipeline or if it physically exists and you’ve just dug it up, it doesn’t mean you have the right to do something else with the channel that’s left behind.

Yeah, it’s just it’s really hard and I can see even as hard as offshore wind is proving to be, I still think it’s the easiest solution for for that part of the country. And looking forward into the future, it’ll be floating offshore wind as well. It’s actually worth the effort and the possibility to, get a big new industry with a lot of manufacturing associated with it in place and, I do think that’s going to be easier than trying to get your act together with transmission.

It just, it looks so hard to get the transmission you would need to have, to like fully utilize all your onshore wind resource just looks so challenging in the U. S.

Joel Saxum: Transmission is tough in the U. S. because of federal law, state law, county law, township law in all the stakeholders that are involved.

Plus the fact that the way, our constitution is written with private land rights as opposed to other countries. It’s way easier to pass a power line or a pipeline in Canada than it is in the U. S. by far and a lot more expensive down here, but I don’t know, there’s really no other options for, in my mind, renewable energy off the east coast, unless you’re running HVDC from, say, Canada or something.

Allen Hall: NYSERDA’s pushing now for a lot of solar and onshore wind, and New York’s a big state, right? Niagara Falls. Which has been operational since, what, the early 1900s has been providing power to Buffalo and also New York City, I believe, both, right? And same thing happens in Pennsylvania, by the way, which has Philadelphia doesn’t have, yeah, Pennsylvania doesn’t have a waterfall, but it does have some good wind on the West, on the Western side, right?

So that’s where you see the wind farms. So they do have the ability to put some of this stuff in. And I feel like now that they’ve gone, tripped their, stubbed their toe on offshore that they’re trying to move towards more. onshore solar projects because they can get done. And maybe that Orsted got wrapped up in the big excitement of offshore wind.

And they’re realizing it, that is just a long play. We were, we did not have the infrastructure for it. We didn’t have the ships. We hadn’t scanned the ocean bottoms. There’s a lot of maneuvering that had to happen. And here we are. And Orsted’s the one paying the price. Weirdly, Orsted’s paying the price for this.

Rosemary Barnes: If I were the US government though, and thinking like all the way to net zero, I would be putting in the effort to make sure that offshore wind happens because like as much as if you’re a developer today and you want to make money on clean energy projects, of course, solar panels and batteries, it’s very easy to do that.

But that is not going to be the full solution to power New York City through the winter. It’s not going to be predominantly solar and batteries at that time of year. Offshore wind, it’s not the offshore wind is the only solution. You can have onshore wind and transmission.

You could also, invest in a lot of thermal energy storage and do district heating or, there’s a lot of things that you could do, but they’re all challenging to, for that, winter time in a big city. Yeah, a big city with a harsh winter, like New York.

Allen Hall: That infrastructure already exists.

New York City has power today, right? So New York City is getting power from Canada, Hydro Quebec is coming down that way, right?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But what about when they need to replace their heating with their gas heating with electric, like that’s not in place.

Allen Hall: You’re talking about a millennia in terms of time.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But then what you’re saying is that then they’re not aiming for net zero by 2050 then, which honestly they’re not, then they’re not, they’re not planning for that.

Allen Hall: Did they just not miss it? They missed it about six months ago.

Rosemary Barnes: We’ve still got 26 years to get there they haven’t missed it yet. But

Allen Hall: You think you’re gonna, you’re gonna think you’ll electrify all of New York City in 25 years?

Rosemary Barnes: No, I’m saying that they, if you want to do that, then you need to make a plan and that plan has to involve more than solar panels and batteries so at the moment, I don’t see a plan.

You could do a plan. Of course you could. Yeah, there’s Offshore wind is one. I’ve already, I’ve mentioned the solutions. Heat is the big thing to replace the winter heating load. And you can do thermal energy storage that will, last through the winter. But for a city as big as New York and as compact as New York it’s not easy.

There is not an easy solution to get somewhere to get that region of the world to actually zero emissions is not easy. And it’s going to take a long time. So you can’t just rely on it. Developers doing the projects that make financial sense over the next five years, like that is not going to get you there.

It’s going to have some longer term planning and things need to get started now that aren’t necessarily profitable now, but are going to be needed, 10 years, 20 years time. And I don’t that, that’s take some sort of, political capabilities to think that far ahead and implement it.

I don’t know too much about the politics in that part of the world, but I don’t see, plans like that. I don’t see people on board. With that, I don’t see incentives to get companies participating in that sort of a plan.

Joel Saxum: New York City uses on average five and a half gigawatts of power a day.

Ten gigawatts in the summertime when all the AC gets turned on. It’s the summertime that’s the issue.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and I bet that does that include gas as well? Because somewhere like really cold.

Joel Saxum: That’s just power in general. Power, electricity, right now.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Often the peak heating load is five times the peak electricity load.

If you want to replace if you want to replace all of heating, if you want to electrify all of heating, then you’re going to have to, look at a large multiple of that. You save something if you go with heat pumps and, you get a good coefficient of performance, then it’s not going to be like you’re going to five times that.

In the winter time, you could well be looking at a doubling of it.

Joel Saxum: So a lot of energies, a lot of electricity to, to even get near a net zero to get to a net 40, you’re going to have to put a lot of electricity into that city. So like you’re like what we’re saying, generation wise, offshore wind may be your only bet.

You don’t think so, Alan? I think the

Allen Hall: infrastructure is not there today to do it. And in the mean, in the meantime, you’ve just really hurt the companies that could have helped you. They’re not going to be anxious to do a New York project now. Obviously they have some sites out there they’re going to want to use, but the American companies, except for essentially Dominion, have pulled out of offshore wind.

So all you have left are non U. S. players. Does that tell you something?

Philip Totaro: It’s also experience because, for the European companies that came in and tried to get partnerships going with. Orsted was one of them. They got partnerships with Eversource. They got partnerships with PSEG in New Jersey.

But they ended up backing out because the government made it too kludgy to, to do business there. And, once everybody started, wanting their pound of flesh it, it, it delayed the projects enough where that coincided with rising interest rates and inflation that it’s now made a lot of projects unviable without having to renegotiate the PPA.

And we all saw how that went with a lot of these companies having to. Pull out and rebid their entire projects. So the challenge. Okay, let’s go back, though, to, can we solve the problem with solar and batteries that the reason that a lot of companies and developers are interested in pursuing that in New York is because regardless of how much can talk about the fact that they don’t have good wind resource in the northeast. They also don’t have particularly good solar irradiance in the northeast by the way, but the reason to do it is if you can put solar plus storage in the storage is starting to become more valuable than anything because of the number of companies that want to be able to arbitrage the way that they can in markets like your cot, nice.

Oh, is mostly a merchant market. Anything that’s interconnected there, there’s a few corporate power offtake agreements, bigger ones for renewables asset owners and operators, but when you have. Companies like energy traders, basically that have experience in those type of markets where they’re trading all the time.

They want to be able to take advantage of, the fact that you can get batteries on the grid now and arbitrage on those again, the same way that you can in your cotton Southwest power pool these

Joel Saxum: days. This week’s Wind Farm of the Week is the Cedar Springs complex outside of Casper and Douglas, Wyoming.

It’s partially owned by NextEra and Pacific Corp, depending on what phase you’re looking at. But as it sits right now, there’s about 200 total turbines there. They built 76 miles of new roads, and the three phases are 532 megawatts all together. Now these are all GE turbines, the 2. 8 127s and 2. 3 116s.

Some interesting things. They’re actually going to be looking at building another phase, which would be phase four, which could be up to 390 megawatts, taking the entire complex up to about 900 megawatts, which is pretty wild. One of the cool things they have going on here is what they have done around the warning lights that you see on turbines.

So if you’ve driven anywhere near a wind turbine farm lately, red blinking lights for aircraft warnings and FAA stuff at night. But what they’re doing here is they have the aviation detection lighting system installed. So right now they have installed five radars out there around the project, which detect aircraft within three miles of the boundary.

And once the system sits and understands its radar signatures for a while, it’ll take a couple of months to normalize. It’ll trigger the lights when, once there’s an aircraft within, Three miles so some sites are a little bit faster when these things are all done, but either way What this does is that has the lights off more than they’re on which is of course welcome for all the local landowners So the Cedar Springs complex outside of Casper and Douglas, Wyoming you are our wind farm of the week

Allen Hall: 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 weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.