TotalEnergies VSB Acquisition, Naturgy $2.3B for AUS Market

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Naturgy has secured $2.3 billion in financing to boost its Australian portfolio, MARA Holdings will acquire a wind farm in Texas, and TotalEnergies which will acquire VSB Group for €2 billion. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.comJoin us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference - https://www.windaustralia.com Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news, lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro, discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by Intel Store. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Big news this week, Naturgy has secured 2. 3 billion Australian dollars in financing to boost its Australian renewable portfolio. The financing operation has been formalized with 11 international banks. Global Power Generation, which is a subsidiary of Naturgy. Closes 2024 with a portfolio of one gigawatts of projects in operation. Now, Phil, a lot of things are happening on Australia on their noble energy front, and particularly in wind at the moment. Philip Totaro: This is another one. Well, and this is an important one for GPG because they're trying to build three projects right now two wind farms, the Ryan Corner and the Crookwell Three projects, and then also a, a hybrid project called the Cunderdin. Hybrid plant that's gonna include some solar PV so they're immediately going to be deploying this 2. 3 billion Australian dollars and, and put it to good use, building a significant amount of, of new capacity. So, good on them. Allen Hall: For you Bitcoin lovers, Marathon Digital Holdings will acquire a wind farm in Hansford County, Texas with 240 megawatts of interconnection capacity. Now the site includes 114 megawatts of operational wind currently and Marathon Digital Holdings will develop a behind the meter data center power Buy wind energy. And this allows them to do Bitcoin mining, Phil. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is actually the first of its kind in terms of this type of a deal structure where a, a Bitcoin miner specifically, I mean, there's other companies like Amazon that have bought into wind farms or, or co developed and built wind farms. And agreed to take the power and feed it into their, their data centers but this is the first time, as you just mentioned, that they're going to do a behind the meter data center where they can avoid So yeah. And agreed. Agreed. A lot of the issues you get in, in ERCOT and in Texas in general, where you've got, periods of negative pricing or what have you, where you've got to dump a lot of power. They're at least taking the power that they would otherwise dump and putting it into their, their Bitcoin mining operations, which, is, is increasingly power intensive. I, I remember setting up a small Bitcoin mining operation on my laptop about ten years ago. I ended up getting about 80 bucks. So that's, that's the best I could do. These guys are going to be doing, a lot more with a lot more power. Joel Saxum: But I think you'll see a lot more of this happening in specifically, like Phil said, in the Texas, in the ERCOT market down here, because it's a triage market. When you look at it, you can see negative prices, positive price. You have a bad winter storm or some things come offline. All of a sudden power is 3, hour in a wholesale market. Like you see a lot of changes.