Nordex Outsells Vestas, GE Vernova Rebuilds Wind Team

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

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And now your hosts.

Allen Hall (0:17)

Welcome to The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall. I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead and Yolanda Padron. And it is another crazy week in wind energy. We should start off with GE Vernova, because if you've been following your LinkedIn pages, you will see a number of new faces and even a couple of press releases. And if you do follow WindClose, you know that GE Vernova has been a little bit of a tailspin and that won't go on very long before they will try to right that ship. Well, here we go.

GE Vernova is grabbing a bunch of talent. Claire McDonough, the Chief Financial Officer who took Rivian, the truck maker, through its IPO recently and led its cost-cutting push, is leading an electric vehicle maker to become the CFO of GE Vernova. So not just wind, the whole kit and caboodle, gas turbines and all the transformer businesses. And she'll start at the beginning of 2027 She replaces the retiring Ken Parks. It sounds like Ken is going to stay on and help Scott Strazic as an advisor, which I'm sure he appreciates. But Claire is not the only new face there. Kristi Hopkins, who spent more than 26 years at Siemens Energy, and Siemens Gamesa has joined as Executive Director for Wind North America New Units, leading sales across US, Canada and Mexico. And then Geo Chardon, who has been on the podcast many times with 3SLift, is leaving 3SLift. That's a big hit, I'm sure. And he's coming back to GE, where he started at many, many years ago as a technician and built the wind farm outside my front door when I lived in Massachusetts. He'll come back as Global Head of Commercial Services and a number of other repowers and a number of other things. So basically between Christy and Geo, it sounds like they're going to cover the planet for wind energy.

This is a big change, everybody.

Our concern was, was GE going to shut down the wind division? Yolanda, it looks like they're keeping it and reinforcing it with some really strong candidates.

Yolanda Padron (2:33)

If they can hopefully get everything together and get at the wind side back to where it once was or close to it. It could be a really good win for their operation sites, right? Their operational sites who currently don't really know what the forecast is going to be for their sites in five, ten years if GE just goes down.

Rosemary Barnes (2:56)

I was actually watching, there's this new creator, I don't know who they are, but some creator I've been watching Instagram reels from where they go through historical things but mostly related to business or government. One of the ones that he was talking about that I thought was interesting was about when engineering companies get a non-technical CEO in for the first time, like an MBA type and what they typically do. I think the GE is usually the just shining example of how to run businesses in that way. But the typical pattern is, and he had some examples which I can't recall, although, yeah, sorry, my anecdote will be fact-free, but trust me, there is some data behind it.

Yolanda Padron (3:38)

Most of them.

Rosemary Barnes (3:40)

But he got the example of, yeah, so a traditional engineering company, like Boeing might be an example, and GE Vernova would be another one. They build up their strength and dominance by investing a lot in R&D and all of the technical staff really care about the company and are all contributing to making sure that they continue to dominate technologically. And then if you get an MBA type manager in, the typical pattern goes that they fire a bunch of people that were working in R&D, like reduce the R&D spend massively, reduce the wages of all the technical people. Technical people start to have less assay in how the company is managed. And in the short term, they get spectacular results from that, right? You know, profits go massively up if you stop investing in R&D for a few years. Because, you know, R&D takes quite a while to pay off. So you're not going to notice the pain. You're going to see the financial benefit immediately and not notice the pain for ages. And, you know, without going into too in-depth analysis about the wind energy companies that are around today, I think if you look at the companies that are going well, you see that they are companies that continue to prioritize research and development and continue to prioritize the opinions of the technical people working for them. And I personally think that GE is maybe gone just a little bit too long with the MBA type way of running a company.