Omterra Rebrand, Goldwind Warns on Turbine Size

Siemens Gamesa rebrands as Omterra, Goldwind questions ever-bigger turbines, and MIT revisits the century-old Betz limit.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, who is recovering from a very serious illness, Matthew Stead, who has been healthy pretty much all the Australian winter, and Yolanda Padron in sunny, hot Austin, Texas. Welcome, Rosemary

Rosemary Barnes: Thank you. I am recovering from man flu, and I say man flu because it's just a cold, but I'm complaining a lot about it.

Allen Hall: there's gonna be a new name for Siemens Gamesa. So it was Siemens and then Gamesa's a separate company. They merged. Siemens Energy, uh, broke off from Siemens AG. So [00:01:00] that's a very well-known name, Siemens. It's-- Everybody knows Siemens at this point around the world.

And the, the one family had, as a company, had s- label on everything, right? So it's, uh, Werner von Siemens started it 150 years ago. It's been a long time since Siemens was started, but it's everywhere. It's on turbines, transformers, and power plants around the world, and now they're changing their name, right?

So when Siemens Energy broke off from Siemens AG, they, they had a limited time they could use that name, so they have rebranding themselves or are about to rebrand themselves, and I wanna pronounce this right, Omterra. O-M-T-E-R-R-A. Now, we did a little research on this, and I think it's Latin for all of the world.

It's kind of a conjoined, uh, set of words, Latin words, kind of a, a schmear in a sense. So, uh, so the company that, you [00:02:00] know, that spun off in w- roughly 2020, if I remember this right, Matthew, does that sound right? It was roughly 2020 when Siemens Energy was established on its own. Uh, they're gonna be changing their name to Omterra.

So instead of seeing, seeing Siemens Gamesa publications or Siemens Gamesa wind turbines, I guess they're gonna have this new name, Omterra. What do we all think?

Matthew Stead: I think it's great. I think, and if you go back to, you know, GE Vernova, um, I, I thought Vernova was a bit weird for a while, but now it just rolls off the tongue and easy. It just makes so much sense. Um, so I'm, I'm, I'm for it. I, I like it. I've already... You know, can already say it. It took a lot longer to say Vernova than it's taking to say

Terra.

Rosemary Barnes: I think that it-- But it's not Vernova, it's GE Vernova, right? So everyone knows what it is. Whereas my understanding is it's not Siemens Omtera, it's just Omtera, which makes it sound like a new budget kind of [00:03:00] brandless, history-less, uh, company. So that's... Yeah, I'm no

branding expert, but I think that, uh, like they, they must have not been able to use the word Siemens at all, um, because otherwise you surely would, because it has a very...

Outside of, you know, their blade issues and bearing issues of a couple of years ago, they do have a, like a solid engineering reputation across many fields, so you wouldn't probably intentionally divorce yourself entirely from that. So, um, yeah, I, I think it will take some getting used to for me

Matthew Stead: but everyone remembers. I mean, it's not like-- The people in the wind industry know their heritage, they know their history, so I don't think it matters. I mean, you know, you know, they, they purchase the Sen