India Locks Down Turbine Data, Danish Wind Jobs Dip

India now requires turbine data, control centers, and R&D to sit inside its borders. Plus a study on reverse flow loads in parked blades, Envision’s spare parts push across Southeast Asia, and Danish wind employment falling to 32,700. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 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 Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Rosemary Barnes, and I’m filling in for Allen today here with Jolanda Pedron. All right, onto our first story. India is drawing a line around its wind data. The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has ordered every turbine maker on the approved list of models and manufacturers to report where its data actually lives. Data centers inside India, servers inside India, research centers inside India, and no real-time data leaving the country. The order went out last week with status reports due by month-end. And while the government tightens the rules on data, the hardware keeps moving in. Flender has just opened another generator plant in Chennai [00:01:00] Yolanda, I think this is gonna have a large impact on the number of companies who are, you know, there’s a lot of companies around today developing, like, smarts for wind turbines. There’s a lot of scope to operate turbines better, to improve power output, reduce maintenance costs, et cetera, and y- a lot of companies are taking advantage of that. Even Patlow has some projects going on in that sort of area. What do you think about the impact this will be? Is India planning to develop their entire own ecosystem for that aspect of the industry? I  Yolanda Padron: mean, it looks like it, right? Which is really, I mean, kind of groundbreaking. I know that we talked a couple weeks ago about Europe sort of being a little bit scared of bringing in, um, different manufacturers from Asia, um, and just the, the idea of cybersecurity being something really prevalent and really important to all of these people. So just if India starts siloing everything and that works, maybe that’ll translate to Europe.  Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that it, it can work? Has India [00:02:00] got the expertise in place already to, to make this work, or is this gonna be a real, like, handbrake on their, their wind industry continuing to develop as fast as it has been? Yolanda Padron: I mean, I’m really curious to see it because I don’t know if they’ll bring in a lot more experts to be able to, to do that.  Rosemary Barnes: I know the Indian, um, operating environment is quite different to other locations. I mean, it’s, it’s similar in a way to Australia in its dissimilarity, if that makes sense. I, I think there’s a lot of really India-specific problems, so of course Indian companies are gonna be best placed to take advantage of that. But what we’ve seen so far is a lot of, uh, companies from Europe or America coming in to y- you know, like tweak the way that they attack similar problems in other markets. They’re, you know, moving in to understand India better and take advantage of that. Now, of course, like not every smart operating method or aerodynamic improvement, they don’t all need [00:03:00] real-time data, and probably most of them don’t actually. So I think it’s not gonna like s- snip off this entire kind of improvement. But it is really interesting. It’s quite, like it is quite severe, the r