GE Vernova Closes Brazil Factory, Decommissioning Bonds for Wind Farms

GE Vernova closes a Brazilian blade factory as installations drop 30%, while Australia faces issues with trailing edge serrations falling from turbines. Also, cultural differences between European and American work environments, blade recycling challenges, and the need for decommissioning bonds as the industry matures. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Manufacturing capacity in the wind energy sector continues to contract as GE Vernova's LM wind power continues to grow. Plant down in Brazil is being closed and that affects about a thousand workers, Joel. And it's coming because the demand in Latin America for GE, Vernova wind turbines and all them products is diminishing quite a bit. Now it's also part of a broader trend down in Brazil where installations have fallen by about 30 percent in 2024 compared to previous years. So there's a big slowdown in Brazil. And. GE, Vernova, slash LM are ceasing operations there. I don't see how this is going to last very long. There's a number of operators that are coming into Brazil, especially Chinese manufacturers. You think this factory will get gobbled up like some of the other ones that LM has closed recently? Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think this one, we heard about this whisperings of this. We before it happened, we've got some pretty good connections down in Brazil. With some people that are in the factories and it is, it's just following that trend. I think one of the interesting things about the Brazilian market as well is that, A lot of big turbines down there. People may not know that, but the majority of turbines, I think, are over like three megawatt machines. They're big down there. They don't have a whole lot of legacy old stuff like we do here. So there was this big ramp up to create all these bigger blades down there. Of course, making those big blades locally saves a lot of logistical costs. But you're going to see this changeover, right? Like in the States, we don't really, we don't allow the Chinese manufacturers to come in. And in Europe, they're not really allowing the Chinese manufacturers to come in, but in Brazil, they've been all over the place. And to be honest with you,