Show Notes
Allen covers the V236 blade failure at He Dreiht, Maine's first full-size floating turbine, and Japan's wind-powered data center.
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Happy Monday Everyone
The V236 just had a bad week last week.
a blade failed on one of the turbines at ENBW's [EN-bay-vay's]
HE DREIHT [hay DRYT] offshore wind farm
in the German North Sea.
Nine hundred and sixty megawatts.
There are 64 of those V236 machines.
The project hit first power just last November.
ENBW says no one was hurt.
VESTAS says it has launched a root cause investigation.
But a blade failure on your flagship turbine ...
at one of Germany's biggest offshore wind farms?
That will be a headline.
And the industry is watching.
Now ... from the North Sea ... to the coast of Maine.
The UNIVERSITY OF MAINE has done something
no one in America has done before.
They put a full-size floating wind turbine in the ocean.
And it is delivering power to the grid.
The platform is called VOLTURNUS [vol-TURN-us].
It was assembled onshore ... in Brewer, Maine ...
then towed thirty miles down the PENOBSCOT [peh-NOB-skot] River
and out to sea.
No specialized heavy-lift vessels.
No deepwater pile driving.
The hull is made of concrete ... sourced locally.
Not imported steel.
Eighty percent of the best offshore wind in America
sits over water too deep for fixed-bottom foundations.
Floating platforms like VOLTURNUS
could change that math entirely.
Meanwhile ... in Japan ...
wind energy just found a brand-new customer.
Data centers.
EURUS [YOO-rus] ENERGY and TOYOTA TSUSHO [TOY-oh-tah TSOO-shoh]
have broken ground on a wind-powered data center
in HOKKAIDO [hoh-KY-doh].
It is the first data center in Japan
directly connected to a wind farm.
The facility sits next to the KOBAOKO [koh-bah-OH-koh] Wind Farm ...
forty-two megawatts ...
with a private power line running straight to the servers.
And here is the bigger picture.
Japan has most of its data centers packed into Tokyo and Osaka.
HOKKAIDO has the wind ... but not the demand.
So instead of sending the power somewhere else ...
they are bringing the demand to the wind.
TOYOTA TSUSHO already operates ten wind farms in the region ...
more than five hundred megawatts.
They are planning a much larger data center cluster by twenty thirty.
Ten to twenty megawatts of capacity.
And speaking of scale ...
China just laid out its five-year plan for renewables.
The target?
A fifty-three percent jump in renewable energy consumption
by twenty thirty.
According to BLOOMBERG ...
renewable power use should rise to about
one-point-eight billion tons of coal equivalent ...
Wind and solar generation alone
should nearly double ...
from two-point-three trillion kilowatt-hours
to four trillion.
And here is the part that matters for reliability.
China wants wind and solar ... backed by storage ...
to provide twenty percent of electricity
during peak summer and winter evening hours.
That is double the current level.
Three hundred gigawatts of peak generation from renewables.
That is not an aspiration.
That is a published national target.
Now ... before we go ...
a story from the other end of the scale.
In KONGIGANAK [KAHN-gig-uh-nak] ... a village in western Alaska ...
they built five wind turbines.
There is no grid connection.
No transmission lines running to the outside world.
For years ... the village ran on diesel generators.
The turbines changed that.
But they created a new problem.
Sometimes ... the wind made more electricity
than the village could use.
No grid to send it to.
No big b
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