LiftOff Uptower Crane Success and TPI Composites Growth Plans

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

We hope you had a good Thanksgiving break! Allen and Phil dive into offshore news with Netherlands-based LiftOff and their uptower crane system. Recent successful MCE projects bode well for Liftoff in 2025. Plus, TPI Composites announced their Q3 results. Turkey's inflation pressure and a shift to more American-based manufacturing is tamping the near-term growth. Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.comLiftOff - https://liftoff-mce.com Allen Hall: Phil, I hope you had a good Thanksgiving and a lot of turkey. I did. Thank you. I hope you did too. I did. And one thing that goes with all the tryptophan and that turkey is caffeine, so you can fight off the tryptophan and watch your favorite football team lose. And during this time, Duncan's been working, which is a big coffee producer in the United States is trying to break world records. And so they hooked up with Nick DiGiovanni to break the Guinness World Record for the largest ice latte. And that ice latte was in an 11 foot high Dunkin Cup with ice milk and espresso. That's what a latte is, right? And it turns out that the Guinness World Records confirmed that it was 276 gallons in that cup. And the question is, what did they do with all that latte? That's a lot of latte. Hopefully everybody drank Phil Totaro: that. You'd hate to think they would waste it. Allen Hall: According to Duncan, they served it To 300 employees at the corporate office in Massachusetts. Now, if you do the math on that's roughly a gallon of latte per employee. Phil Totaro: That's a lot. I know some people that do drink a lot of coffee. I don't I guess I'm naturally a brilliant, but like some people need that much, I don't know. Holy cow, that's Allen Hall: a lot of coffee. This could be a lot of sleepless nights in Massachusetts from all the Dunkin employees. And productivity's gotta go way up. The latest P. E. S. Win Magazine has a number of great articles in it, and if you haven't PESWin. com and you can download it for free and read all the articles in it. And one of the more interesting articles that I thought was in this one is an article from Liftoff. And we've had Elko May from Liftoff on the podcast previously. And Liftoff is an offshoot of a podcast. arm of Liftworks, which is, Liftworks does onshore wind, heavy lift, and crane work, using a unique process to do that. And Liftoff is doing all the offshore work for Liftworks, and Liftoff is based in the Netherlands with Elco, and it has done a number of, a couple of amazing things this over the last couple of months, really. They've done some crane technology work on fixed bottom offshore winds, where instead of using jackup vessels to do maintenance, they've got the system now to work, where they can handle up to 9. 5 megawatt capacity turbines without using jackup vessels. So they're using standard containers. on flat barges that are moved around via tugs. Now, Phil, this makes a ton of sense to me because the expensive part, as we always say on Offshore Wind, is not really the turbine, it's the jackup vessels and all the specialized ships you need to go do this work, and liftoff is eliminating a lot of that and simplifying MCE for some of these tournaments. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And what strikes me about this is actually something slightly unrelated, which is Cattler just came out with their quarterly report saying that the demand for their services is huge right now. So maybe Liftoff helps alleviate some of that burden much to the chagrin maybe of Cattler. But it's great. They can take, a technology that was developed for onshore and deploy it offshore. In, in that, you don't always have the same obviously weather and site conditions. But the way in which the, this liftoff system works is using this kind of ...