Vestas Stops Turkey Production, Avangrid Sells Kitty Hawk North, LS Greenlink Virginia Facility

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Vestas in Turkey has suspended their generator factory project and blade production in the country after loosened locality requirements for wind. Avangrid has sold its Kitty Hawk North offshore lease to Dominion Energy for $160 million. LS Greenlink invests $681 million in a Virginia factory, creating 330 full time jobs. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. And I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum, and this is your NewsFlash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at intelstor.Com. Avangrid, a subsidiary of Iberdrola, has announced the sale of its Kitty Hawk North offshore wind lease area to Dominion Energy for approximately 160 million. The deal includes a nearly 40, 000 acre lease and associated assets with Dominion Energy paying 117 million for the lease acquisition and reimbursing Avangrid for development costs. Avangrid is retaining ownership of Kitty Hawk South Lease, which it plans to continue developing. All right, Phil. There seems to be a lot of swapping of of repurchased ocean land. Off the coast of the United States here, what is going on? Why is Avangrid selling one site and keeping another? What's happening? Philip Totaro: Well, I simply put, this sounds like they, have a bigger slice of cake than they can maybe eat by themselves so to speak. So they just want to be able to, this is one way that they can kind of divide up the site. a chunk of it without having to bring in an equity partner on the full project site, which is actually pretty clever, right? So I have to give them credit for that. Keep in mind as well that, of the projects in the US that have now been officially consented, Avangrid's got something like 20 something percent of them. So, this is, uh, it's getting expensive. And Iberdrola wants to be able to, control their costs. This is also one way of doing that, too. Joel Saxum: Another thing to think about here with Dominion Energy, if you've been following the offshore wind plays along the east coast here for the last year, two, three, four years, as we have here on the podcast, Dominion Energy is one of the groups that has actually been able to go through with their leases. Development costs, getting vessels ready, getting some turbines getting ready for development, getting ready for offshore without really too many hiccups. So the money's there, the PPAs are right, everything is moving forward for Dominion. So they're doing things without too many issues and that may point to this as well. Allen Hall: South Korea based LS Greenlink is investing 681 million to build a state of the art facility in Chesapeake, Virginia. This facility will manufacture high voltage subsea cables for offshore wind farms and is set to create more than 330 full time jobs. It's a significant step for the U. S. offshore wind industry as it'll be the first offshore wind cable manufacturer in the country. Now, Phil, this obviously has tax implications. What is driving LS Greenlink to really build a facility in Virginia? Philip Totaro: Well, besides market demand of which, this factory and fabrication facilities has a total price tag of something like 681 million which is an awful lot of money....