Allen, Rosemary, and Phil discuss the state of wind energy development and the potential impact of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. They also cover TPI Composites' partnership with the University of Maine and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to utilize 3D printing technology for producing wind turbine blade tooling.



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Allen Hall: Alright, did you see this the situation in Colorado where someone who was just released from jail tries to steal a pickup truck? Or, I don't know what you call it in Australia. What do they call it in Australia? It's not a pickup truck. A ute. A ute. A utility vehicle. But! This thief.



Rosemary got into the truck and realized it has a clutch. It's got a third pedal. It didn't know what to do. They got re arrested that they tried to put the, tried to drive the truck, didn't know what to do. Got it in neutral and the truck rolled down the road and hit a fire hydrant. But, Rosemary in the United States, Clutch, a manual transmission vehicle is like non existent anymore.



You get to, it is very hard to purchase one. I don't know about Australia. You still have clutch cars?



Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know. Even when I lived in America and it was 20 years ago now, and there was nothing but automatics in America and in Australia, it's mostly manuals. It's also a point of pride. Like I don't imagine there would be many hardened.



Hardened criminals in Australian jails that wouldn't know how to drive a manual. That would just be like really, it would feel really pathetic to them. But it is something that I have thought about because obviously electric cars don't need gearboxes. Like my son he's one now by the time he learns to drive, it'll be all electric cars.



And certainly we're only going to have electric cars. And. He, yeah, he'll never learn to drive a manual unless I will most likely really have to go out of my way to find some classic car to, to teach him in and why he won't need that skill.



Philip Totaro: It's going to be like the inverse of Mad Max. It's like you're going to have to search for petrol.



Rosemary Barnes: There should be actually an energy transition version of Mad Max because now that we know about solar power and and wind energy, like a lot of the premise of Mad Max doesn't really, it's, it wasn't really future proofed, right? If we had, if we did descend into a Mad Max dystopia tomorrow, I think that energy wouldn't be the big problem.



It would be other stuff.



Philip Totaro: It's going to happen in November anyway, don't worry.



Allen Hall: GE Vernova reported a wider than expected loss in its first quarter post spinoff results. The company's win segment saw a significant 40 percent decline. Phil, this is a problem. 40 percent decline in orders, primarily due to lower demand for onshore equipment as North America customers continue to navigate the permitting process or permit process for their projects.



And this decline obviously was offset by GE Vernova's power segment, which experienced a 6 percent jump in sales. So the wind side is getting hammered because they can't get permits. And everybody's struggling and interconnects is with other Problem I assume, Phil, this is driving sales, not only at GE, but also at Vestas, right?



That they're having sales problems because the interconnect, the grid, there's no interconnects. And then the permit process has gotten a lot longer.