22 – Vestas Wastes 175MM in Lightning-Related Warranty Claims, Plus – Are OEMs Out as Service Providers?

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast - A podcast by Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro

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Vestas had a rough quarter, reporting 175MM in losses from warranty claims due to high-intensity lightning strikes. It's not clear what this means, but Allen and Dan dig in. Plus, more wind turbine customers are choosing to bring operations and maintenance in-house. Does this spell the beginning of the end for the profitable service contracts long enjoyed by turbine manufacturers? Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast? Email us!  Full Transcript: Uptime Podcast EP22 - Vestas Wastes 175MM in Lightning-Related Warranty Claims, Plus - Are OEMs Out as Service Providers? Dan: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make wind turbine lightning protection easy. If you're a wind farm operator, stop settling for damaged turbine blades and constant downtime. Get your uptime back with our Strike Tape lightning protection system. Learn more in today's show notes or visit weatherguard wind.com/strike tape. Allen: Welcome back. I'm Allen hall.  Dan: I'm Dan Blewett and this is the Uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection, and ways to keep your wind turbines running.  In today's episode, we're gonna talk a bunch about lightning strikes. Uh, some articles, obviously it's summertime. So there is electrical energy all over. Our marvelous planets. We're going to talk a little bit about that. Uh, Vestas has been having some lightening warranty issues. Obviously again, it is the summertime, so that's not surprising, but they've reported $175 million loss because of additional warranty issues. So we're going to chat through that. And then our second segment, as we talked about engineering, we're going to talk a little bit more about, uh, O and M contracts and the idea that a lot of these wind turbine manufacturers are maybe going to lose. Service contracts to their own customers who are potentially going to bring operates operations and maintenance in house to save money. So Allen hall is here with us, Alan, how are you doing  Allen: great, Dan boy, uh, this Vestus lightening issue was really surprising when it was announced. I haven't seen any numbers, nearly the high in terms of lightning strikes for any particular OEM. It wasn't that just, it just seemed like off the charts, a massive amount of money.  Dan: That's a lot of dough, 175 million.  Allen: Yeah. I can't. They didn't the one thing that was asked, but I don't think answered was how many blades are we talking about and where, and that didn't get answers. So that will trickle out over time. I think if somebody is really on it, uh, but. In terms of financial numbers. Did you watch a Vesta stock with an after the announcement? It went up?