Nordex Q3 Orders Jump 30%, Vestas Bets on Australia

Allen Hall (0:00)

Did you break out your checkbook?

Rosemary Barnes (0:02)

Just waiting for my first big success so that I get my $100 million in the bank and then I'll go around funding cool tech startups. But if somebody does want to, someone's like, I've got $100 million and I don't have a technical judgment, they can feel free to give that to me and I will distribute it.

SPEAKER_3 (0:26)

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.

Allen Hall (0:40)

Welcome to The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall and I'm here with Matthew Stead. How about that? Yolanda Padron, of course, and Rosemary Barnes, who is right now in Sydney, Australia, attending some business conferences. Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes (0:57)

Right now I'm in Sydney and I was at an arena slash innovation bay event last night, and it was matching up startups with investors. It was a great event, actually, and I got invited because I was moderating a panel on, yeah, with a few, not startups, like it was, actually, some of them were startups. I had the head of sustainability at Quantus there, Fiona, and then Catherine from Bright.

They do a bunch of financing related to mostly distributed energy household, consumer kind of energy products, like rooftop solar batteries, that sort of thing.

And then Jack from Neera, and they do grid simulation kind of stuff. It's pretty cool where you can, like if you have a network and you want to know, like how can I improve, best improve resilience with spending the least money? We'll model things like, okay, if this particular poll falls over, then this will happen and you can improve resilience by just add a guy wire to this one asset and everything is very strengthened. You're not going to take down any additional polls and yeah, that sort of thing. Anyway, so we just talked about the Australian energy landscape and investing in technologies in those areas, some of the strengths that we have in Australia, which is a lot to do with distributed energy. We're really, really, really leading the world there and there's heaps of opportunity for innovation and companies to solve problems in these spaces that can then move out to the rest of the world. We talked about AI, we also talked about some of the products that, or some of the categories that aren't so easily decarbonized. So we had Qantas there and they're investing a lot in sustainable aviation fuel. Actually, I really enjoyed talking with Fiona before the event because one of my problems is that I travel so much for work. And I do make sure that the travel I do, it is for the climate benefit. So I don't ultimately feel guilty about the travel because I go because it's got more impact than the emissions of the flight by a long way. However, I do want to decarbonize aviation. I love to travel and would like to be able to continue to do that in the future. So anyway, I talked with her about that I really want to be able to buy sustainable aviation fuel because to me, it's like one, that actually does something and two, it's an industry that needs to grow and scale and I would like to support some of that scale up in an appropriate way. Anyway, she did let me know that they have got a small business scheme now where you can get in touch with them and buy your SAF, support some projects, also discussed. Maybe we will do some collaboration, get Engineering with Rosie video about some of the SAF projects that they're investing in. So that was really cool.

But later on in the evening, they had five startups that pitched to investors. And there was like a really, really great investor to founder ratio in the room. It was like for every startup that was there trying to get money, there were probably five investors trying to find people to give money to. So I think, yeah, like, it's definitely a good event to, can I do it annually? So it's one to keep on your calendar if you need to raise money.

Allen Hall (4:40)

Did you break out your checkbook and invest in one of these companies?

Rosemary Barnes (4:46)

I would actually really, really love. My investment strategy is I invest like one to $5,000 on companies so that, I don't do heaps of financial due diligence. I just do the technical due diligence in terms of, is this a real problem that's going to be need to be solved? Do I trust in the engineering? Does the team seem like they get it? And then that's as far as I go and I invest enough money that if it goes wrong, like it's not the end of the world. And I have lost all of my money on a few investments and I've made 20, 30 times on some other ones. So it works for me.