Ørsted Finishes Drone Trial, Iberdrola Exits South Korea

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Welcome to Uptime News Flash, Industry News, Lightning Fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed.

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Good Monday, everyone.

Well, every wind farm is at least a 20-year promise. And this week, the industry learned which risk it can engineer away and which ones it cannot. Let's start in the North Sea. A delivery just went out at Hornsea 2 No crane, no vessel at the base of the tower, no technician hauling a heavy bag up the turbine. Ørsted and Skyports just finished a four-week cargo drone trial there. The drones carried maintenance kits from the service vessel to the top of the turbine. Each kit held the tools and parts for one job. Each one weighed about 55 to 65 kilograms. The kits arrived before the technicians did, and when the work was done, the drone flew them back. Pretty cool. A new automatic hook picked up each load, and nobody had to clip it on by hand, which is a pretty good advancement. And the turbine kept making power during the delivery.

Then came the milestone. The team flew its first delivery beyond visual line of sight inside a working wind farm, about four kilometers from the vessel. Britain's Civil Aviation Authority cleared the airspace, and it says routine flights like this are the next goal. Ørsted's project lead says the trial confirms a plan. Drone maintenance is moving into routine operations.

Now let's stay in Britain, where the next generation of offshore wind is getting a proving ground. The government's research agency just gave three million pounds to the European Marine Energy Center. The money moves a project called DeepWind toward a final investment decision. DeepWind would be a national test site for floating wind and deep water wind. The target is 2030 The center says Europe's test sites don't offer the depths and sees that Britain's future projects will obviously face. Testing a floater in calm water is really one thing. Surviving a deep water winter is another. Moorings, anchors and dynamic cables would all be proven at the full site. The center's operations director says the goal is simple. Make deep water wind insurable and bankable. Three million pounds obviously won't build it. It pays for two years of design, permits and planning. And the center is still asking developers and suppliers what they need the site to do. So the engineers are really taking the risk out of future projects.

The politicians, on the other hand, are putting some risk back in. Germany wants to cap what wind farms pay for land. Under a draft reform of its renewable energy law, rent could not top 3.5% of a wind farm's yearly revenue. That cap would last for 20 years. It would even cover some leases already signed for projects not yet running.

The first draft said 2.5%.

The states and the industry pushed it up. Germany's municipal utilities backed the plan. They say it could save about 13 billion euros in support payments by 2045

A landowner would still get about 32,000 euros per turbine each year. Pretty good. But 18 banks wrote the ministry in an open letter. And they say the cap adds uncertainty. And checking every lease for 20 years costs money.

Enough money, they warned, to wipe out the savings. Germany's Renewable Energy Federation says one cap can't fit every region. And that makes sense. Forest owners and family farms go further. Their legal opinion says the cap may clash with Germany's Constitution. That's a problem. And a landowner who doesn't like the deal can simply say no.

Now down to Spain, where one of the world's biggest wind companies has explained why it walked away from South Korea. Iberdrola signed a deal with GS Energy in 2021 It never built the thing there. Iberdrola's head of international business says the problem was not the wind. It was the government. A wind farm runs for 20 years or more, but in South Korea, the terms of power contracts could change with every new administration.

Iberdrola is not alone in this. Equinor dropped its Korean offshore wind projects this year. It says it won't be back. Corio Generation closed its Korean office in March, and Shell left in 2024 RWE is also scaling back. They point to slow permits, weak grids and rising costs. The Iberdrola executive points to America too. This year, the Trump administration halted several offshore wind projects. Still, she says the door to Korea isn't locked. Demand is high and Iberdrola is watching.

We will see what happens. So what should wind professionals take from this past week? First, technical risk is getting cheaper to solve. A drone trial and a test site cost a few million. And they lower the risk for every project that follows. And if you make moorings, anchors or cables, DeepWind is asking for your input right now. The specs written in the next two years will shape that market for probably a decade. Second, watch the cost of capital, not the headlines. Germany's cap saves money on paper, but when 18 banks object in writing, those savings can come back as higher interest rates. And that's the state of the wind industry for the 12th of October, 2026 Join us tomorrow for The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.