How CNC Onsite Cuts Repair Delays for US Operators

Søren Kellenberger, CEO at CNC Onsite, joins to discuss the company's new US office, uptower yaw ring repairs, and blade root insert replacement. Email info@cnconsite.dk to learn more. 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! Episode Transcript Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Søren, welcome back to the program. Søren Kellenberger: Thank you very much, Allen. It's a pleasure. Allen Hall: Well, you have some really exciting news in the United States, because CNC Onsite has been growing tremendously. You're now worldwide, and you've established a presence in the United States. Søren Kellenberger: That's correct. We have been working in the US for quite some time, but we see that the demand is definitely there. The North American market has more than 100,000 turbines above one megawatt. So of course it's an interesting market, and we think that now is a good time for us to make that move and establish ourselves in the US. So we are really looking forward to that. Allen Hall: So you've seen a lot of growth in the company over the last couple of years as operators worldwide realize they have problems that they can't solve, and that will only be solved by precision machining, which is what CNC Onsite does. Where have you been doing work lately? I've seen things on LinkedIn from Asia, but I know you guys are pretty busy right now. Søren Kellenberger: As you started saying, we are basically working globally. So we have had technicians in Australia and Japan, and in other Asian countries as well. Our main market is still Europe, where we also started, and we are widely spread across Europe. But the US, including Canada, is becoming a very interesting and important market for us. Maybe the best way to explain it is that even though we are based in Denmark and working out of Denmark, 90% of what we do is outside of Denmark. And once you travel — whether you travel to Finland or if you travel to somewhere in the US — it doesn't make a huge difference. Our technicians are away from home and family anyway, so it's just the language that is a bit different. Allen Hall: What brings people to your business? What are they calling about today? I know the yaw ring was the number one item. That's what I remember as being, when you were getting started, the yaw ring with the teeth being broken. Is that still your number one request, or has that changed? Søren Kellenberger: It is definitely often a door opener, because everyone can relate to that. So it brings a lot of interest to the company. And then when we start talking to customers about other wear issues in the turbine, it often turns out that we start to talk about worn sliding surfaces on the yaw ring, or it can be worn out rotor lock holes, or wear and tear to generator shafts or main shafts. There's a whole lot of mechanical things that obviously get worn when you have a turbine running for so many years and hours. And then we just try to see if we can come up with smart ways to fix it uptower instead of deploying cranes and doing large disassemblies. Allen Hall: That's the real problem. I think a lot of operators realize that they have worn assemblies, but they don't really know of any way to address it, so they just live with it, or they try to accommodate as best they can. With the yaw ring teeth, the way I had seen that until I talked to you was they would get a guy with a welder up there and they'd try to weld these teeth back on. But that's really a temporary fix and it's not a long-term answer. You're doing something that is actually better than what the OEM installed to begin with, right? Søren Kellenberger: Yeah. Instead of welding —