Weather Guard Lightning Tech

NextEra Buys Dominion, China Outpaces Vestas

NextEra’s $67B all-stock Dominion deal targets data center alley. Plus China’s top five each outpace Vestas, and 80% of Swedish wind producers ran at a loss.

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[00:00:00] 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

Speaker 6: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with three other people, Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes, and, uh, Yolanda Padron down in Texas. Uh, we’re all getting ready to go to American Clean Power in Houston, Texas, where it will be practically 150 degrees and 99% humidity, and we’re all looking forward to those warm, wet days that we will spend

It is very similar to New Orleans. New Orleans was also very warm and very humid. So there’s a trend going on here with American Clean Power, although we were up in Minneapolis not too long ago, uh, but I guess we were in Phoenix too, so we gotta find a middle ground, everybody. Can we go someplace like– [00:01:00] Rosemary says we should always go to the Maldives, Tahiti.

I got a lot of requests from Tahiti from people. We never go there. We never go to Hawaii.

Rosemary Barnes: I’ve suggested Hawaii so many times, and I’ve been told that Americans are not gonna be given permission from their manager to go to Hawaii.

Speaker 6: It’s kinda like Las Vegas.

Rosemary Barnes: Maybe one day we’ll make it to San Diego or something and get, um, beach adjacent facility And if your presentation is too boring, then everyone will be at the beach.

So that will be how we ensure quality control of the speakers, which is a big problem at these events now, right? Like you can’t, um, there’s– It’s more like the norm is fairly boring sales pitches rather than informative discussion.

Speaker 6: We used to have OMNS, when I say we, I mean the wind community used to have OMNS out in San Diego in Coronado at the Del Coronado is, I think that’s the hotel name.

And the one time that I went, I think I’ve been [00:02:00] there, I would say one time, uh, everybody was outside on the, at the beach, basically on the patio. So they’re holding all these talks and discussions, and it’s… I’m looking around, it’s like me and five other people. Everybody else is out there next to the water.

So they had a problem with that. So I guess what they figured, either make it really cold or make it really hot, so it forces everybody into the climate-controlled conditions of, uh, the, uh, auditorium to watch the speakers. Maybe that’s the, the plan. All right. Let’s, let’s, let’s talk about what happened with NextEra and Dominion because there’s going to be a huge merger.

So if you thought utility business was boring, it’s not anymore. NextEra announced a sixty-seven billion dollar all-stock deal to acquire Dominion Energy, a move that would create the largest regulated electricity utility in the world by market cap. Uh, [00:03:00] the combined company would serve about ten million customers accounts across Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, where I’m based, and South Carolina with one hundred and ten gigawatts of generation across renewables, nuclear, and natural gas.

Uh, but the real driver here is data centers, of course. Dominion sits in the heart of Virginia’s data center alley, where it has connected more than four hundred and fifty data centers, and NextEra is building thirty data center hubs through its NextEra Energy Resources subsidiary and has partnered with Google Cloud on paired generation campuses.

So together, they would control about a hundred and thirty gigawatts of large load pipeline. And the question is whether the regulators will let it happen. And I think that’s, having watched some of the news articles over the last several days, uh, the news broke pretty much Sunday morning or late Saturday night that this was happening and [00:04:00] The first thing that came to mind, are the regulators going to let it happen?

And the concern is going to be, and you can well imagine how this plays out, they’re going to drag Dominion and NextEra up to Washington, D.C. and berate them about how electricity rates cannot increase due to data centers. And if they don’t swear to that, then this merger won’t happen. That’s my interpretation of what’s about to happen.

It may not, but how does this play out? How does everybody else on the team at Uptime see this play out?

Matthew Stead: Seems like a good idea to me. So more economies, more geographic diversity, more opportunity for renewables.

Yolanda Padron: I can’t speak to Dominion, um, but being relatively close to the NextEra engineering team, they, they really know their stuff, right?

So I think it’s something that should kind of give us a, a sense of relief here that it, [00:05:00] it’s a big team, but it’s a really smart and competent team taking over a big undertaking.

Speaker 6: You would like to see renewables and data centers work together. This would be the perfect match of the two, right? The, the largest renewable owner management company, along with the biggest data center, uh, region.

Connecting those two would make infinite sense, but in the, our political environment today in the United States, that may be the reason to oppose it.

Matthew Stead: Yeah, why would it be a bad idea?

Speaker 6: Windmills, Matthew. Windmills. Windmills are bad. Can’t even call them wind turbines anymore. They’re windmills.

Rosemary Barnes: I used to mock people for saying windmill instead of wind turbine, but then when I moved to Denmark, um, you know, who, you know, have a firm, firm ownership of modern wind energy, or at least did back 10, 20 years ago They say windmill when they speak English.

Um, the Danish word for it is vindmølle, um, which means windmill. [00:06:00]And so I can’t… I couldn’t maintain that, that energy because like, am I gonna, am I gonna mock these, you know, like everybody at that company knew more about wind energy than I did. Am I gonna mock them for not, not knowing the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine?

No. So yeah, that’s, that’s something that I, I don’t do anymore.

Matthew Stead: That is really valuable to know, um, Rosie. I must admit, I did not know that, and I would mock people saying w- windmill, so thank you for setting me straight.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there are plenty of, um, plenty of people who don’t know the difference between a windmill and a wind turbine and think, “Oh, why you only got three blades with so much air between them?