Nordex Outsells Vestas, GE Vernova Rebuilds Wind Team

Nordex closes in on Vestas in onshore orders, GE Vernova rebuilds its wind team, Nexxis buys BladeBug, and wooden blades draw doubts.

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Episode Transcript The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts

Allen Hall: Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with R- Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron, and it is another crazy week in wind energy. Uh, we should start off with GE Vernova, because if you've been following your LinkedIn pages, you will see a number of new faces and even a couple of press releases.

And if you do follow wind closely, you know that GE Vernova has been in a little bit of a tailspin, and that won't go on very long before they will try to right that ship. Well, here we go. Uh, GE Vernova, uh, is grabbing a bunch of talent. Claire McDonough, the chief financial officer who took [00:01:00] Rivian, the, the truck maker, through its IPO recently and led its cost-cutting push, uh, is leaving the electric vehicle maker to become the CFO of GE Vernova.

So not just wind, the whole kit and caboodle, uh, gas turbines and the, all the transformer businesses. Uh, and she'll start at the beginning of 2027. She replaces, uh, the retiring Ken Parks, and it sounds like Ken is gonna stay on and help Scott Strazik as an advisor, which I'm sure he appreciates. Uh, but, uh, Claire is not the only new face there.

Christie Hopkins, who spent more than 26 years at Siemens Energy and Siemens Gamesa, has joined as executive director for Wind North America New Units, leading sales across US, Canada, and Mexico. And then Gio Scialdone, who has been on the podcast many times with 3S Left, is leaving 3S Left. I'm-- That's a big hit, I'm sure.

Uh, and he's coming back to GE, where he started at many, many years ago as a technician and built the wind [00:02:00] farm outside my front door when I lived in Massachusetts. He'll come back as global head of, of commercial services and a number of other, uh, repowers and a number of other things. So basically between, uh, Christie and Gio, it sounds like they're gonna cover the planet, uh, for wind energy This is a big change, everybody.

Uh, our concern was, was GE gonna shut down the wind division? Yolanda, it looks like they're keeping it and reinforcing it with some really strong candidates.

Yolanda Padron: If they can hopefully get everything together and, and get at least the wind side, um, back to where it once was or close to it, uh, it could be a really good win for their operations sites, right?

Their operational sites who currently don't really know what the forecast is gonna be for their sites in five, 10 years if GE just goes down.

Rosemary Barnes: I was actually watching... There's this new creator, I don't know who they [00:03:00] are, but some creator I've been watching Instagram reels from where they go through just, uh, you know, like, historical things, but mostly related to business or government, and one of the ones that he was talking about that I thought was interesting was about, um, when engineering companies get a non-technical CEO in for the first time, like an MBA type, and what they typically do.

And I think that GE is usually, like, the just shining example of how to run businesses in that way. But the typical pattern is, and he had some examples, which I can't recall, so yeah, sorry, my, um, anecdote will be fact-free, but trust me, there are, is some data behind it. But it, it gave the example of, yeah, so the, um, y- you know, like, a traditional engineering company like Boeing mig