Wind Power

Welcome to the ‘Wind Power’ news review – hosted by Windpower Monthly’s editor, Ian Griggs, and Windpower Monthly reporter, Orlando Jenkinson – along with our regular panellists, Shashi Barla and Will Sheard. This time on the news review: has US offshore wind turned the corner after a series of setbacks? Our regular panelists give their verdict. The advance of Chinese turbine technology continues...

How vulnerable is wind industry infrastructure to physical and cyber-attacks – and is the risk growing? The owners and operators of today’s wind industry infrastructure must now navigate a new and murky world of unattributed physical attacks, cyber warfare and GPS jamming – as well as hybrid attacks comprising one or more of these elements. And as geopolitical tensions rise between Russia and Euro...

This time on the news review: Our panellists discuss a change of leadership, rumoured job cuts and a new offshore turbine in development at Siemens Gamesa.   A change of leadership, rumoured big job cuts and a new offshore turbine in development – we ask our panelists to analyse the big developments at Siemens Gamesa.  Meanwhile, as the first shots are fired in a potential EU/China...

Vic Abate, chief executive of GE Vernova’s wind segment, discusses the company’s Haliade-X workhorse turbine and how long-term relationships with its customers will determine which markets it is deployed in. Interviewed at WindEurope’s annual conference in Bilbao earlier this year, Abate talked about how GE Vernova can reconcile deep cuts to its onshore workforce with the urgent need to ramp up gl...

Senior wind industry voices discuss what they want to see from member states to enable EU policies to be implemented quickly - and the potential roadblocks. Recorded at the recent WindEurope conference in Bilbao, the Wind Power podcast spoke to delegates on the conference floor about what member states should do to enable far-reaching EU policies, such as the Net Zero Industry Act and the Critical...

This time on the news review: Our panellists discuss the continuing issues with Siemens Gamesa’s 4X platform, after a wind project supplied with the turbines in Norway was shut down when a turbine blade broke. A Russian drone attack on a Ukrainian energy substation left 200,000 people without power but are wind turbines are more resilient than other energy infrastructure and is wind power becoming...

Experts from across the industry discuss how to optimise blade performance and reduce the cost of operations and maintenance. Recorded at our Blades USA conference, held in Austin, Texas, earlier this year, this episode of the Wind Power podcast features speakers from Vestas, RWE, the Electric Power Research Institute in the US, Envision and Aerones. What emerged loud and clear from the discussion...

This time in the news review: Major Western wind companies have released quarterly and full-year results but what do they tell us about the overall health of the wind industry? Meanwhile, several wind giants have announced – in the wake of their financial results – that they will narrow their focus on markets, but what is the strategy and what does it mean for the markets not chosen? Following the...

WindEurope chair and Nordex CEO José Luis Blanco discusses EU policy, a looming trade war with China and whether the consensus on the energy transition is holding two years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine . Speaking ahead of trade body WindEurope’s annual three-day conference - to be held in Bilbao from March 20 - Blanco examines some of the key policy developments to emerge since the start of...

What do the winning entries in this year’s Turbines of the Year awards tell us about the trends at work in wind power technology and why did the gold medallists win? In episode 21 of the Wind Power podcast, Windpower Monthly’s editor and deputy editor are joined by technology and market trends correspondent – and Turbines of the Year judge – Eize de Vries to discuss the awards   Last mon...

Welcome to the ‘Wind Power’ news review – hosted by Windpower Monthly’s editor, Claire Warren, and deputy editor, Ian Griggs, with a panel of expert guests. This time in the news review: An  academic has reopened the debate on turbine sizes , claiming that bigger is better after all, while it also emerged that Siemens Gamesa is due to test the prototype of a new offshore turbine which could b...

As wind power’s contribution to the global energy transition grows, insiders are looking to improve sustainable practices within the wind industry itself.  In the latest edition of the Wind Power podcast, Lisa Ekstrand, head of sustainability at Vestas, joins Carbon Rivers’ chief technical officer David Morgan to discuss how both companies are boosting circular economics in the wind industry...

Welcome to the ‘Wind Power’ news review – hosted by Windpower Monthly’s editor, Claire Warren, and deputy editor, Ian Griggs, with a panel of expert guests. This time in the news review: Major Western turbine manufacturers have released quarterly or full-year results, but what do they say about the OEMs relative financial health and which of them is likely to move into profitability first? Me...

Senior wind industry figures from GWEC, Vestas and Arup come together to discuss what they want policymakers to agree on at the forthcoming COP28 conference later this month. Starting on 30 November and running for nearly two weeks the 2023 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP28, will bring together world leaders, business and NGOs to discuss the urgent need to reduce carbon...

Welcome to the first ‘Wind Power’ news review – hosted by Windpower Monthly’s editor, Claire Warren, and deputy editor, Ian Griggs, with a panel of expert guests. This time in the news review: Did we dream too big on offshore wind and will inflation force the industry – and policymakers - to recalibrate pricing or deployment targets? The Contract for Difference mechanism was once seen as the...

Indigenous and first nations communities are being confronted by wind energy developments on their traditional lands, causing legal battles and protests to flare. Is this an inevitable conflict? Or is there space for a mutually beneficial coexistence?  Orlando Jenkinson, reporter for Windpower Monthly, discusses these issues across three interviews that make up Episode 18 of the Windpower Pod...

British wind power pioneer Andrew Garrad has worked in the industry for more than four decades, from the early ‘Wild West’ days of trial and error in the late 1970s. Now semi-retired, Garrad – who received a pioneer award at the Global Wind Energy Council’s ‘One Terawatt’ party earlier this year - is nonetheless still active in helping communities to harness wind power for themselves.  In the...

Global offshore wind deployment is happening in greater volumes, at an increasingly frenetic pace but is the industry becoming a safer place to work in as it matures? In the sixteenth episode of the Wind Power podcast, Ian Griggs, deputy editor of Windpower Monthly, spoke to Rakesh Maharaj founder of safety & training organization ARMSA Academy, and Anna Hilden, global industry manager for of...

President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act is expected to double the size of the US market over the next ten years, but is the industry fully equipped to meet all of the benefits on offer? With clarity of the details in the IRA beginning to emerge, it is clear that it will have a transformative effect on the US market. But in order to fully realise the benefits, turbine firms will need to make mass...

Vic Abate, chief executive of GE Vernova’s onshore wind division as well as GE's chief technology officer, is one of the most senior people working in the wind industry today A former CEO of GE’s renewable energy division from 2005 to 2013, Abate has been with the company for more than twenty years and he can trace a line in his career from when wind power was in its infancy through to today’s glo...

The threat of cyber attacks on the wind industry’s remote control systems for turbines and other equipment is all too real and it is growing by the day, with potentially disastrous consequences for companies which do not understand the dangers they face. As the industry becomes increasingly reliant on remote systems to control the operations of offshore wind farms, the so-called ‘attack surface’ g...

Last year Europe as a whole commissioned 19.1GW of new wind power capacity (16.7GW for EU-27 member states), according to WindEurope, up 4% (40% for the EU-27 states) from the previous year. That takes Europe’s operational wind power capacity past the 250GW mark but still falls well short of what’s needed to hit climate and energy goals. From the perennial problem of long waits for permits and gri...

Speaking ahead of the start of the WindEurope conference in Copenhagen next Tuesday (25 April) Sven Utermöhlen - chair of the trade group and chief executive of offshore wind for RWE - discusses the EU’s package of measures to stimulate the wind industry. Last month, the European Commission proposed a package of measures which, if enacted, could help boost the fortunes of the wind industry in memb...

Elizabeth Klein, the new chief at the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), discusses the route ahead for offshore wind in the US. Klein was appointed as the new director of BOEM in January and has been a member of Biden’s administration since it took office, initially serving as senior counsellor to US secretary of the interior Deb Haaland. She has also served two previous presidents and was...

Turbine blades represent up to a third of the cost of a wind turbine but they do not yet benefit from the sophistication of sensor technology which exists in its other components, so are they the poor relation? The evidence is that, as blades get larger, issues such as leading edge erosion – and its cumulative effect on annual energy production – will get worse and other types of repairs more freq...