“Every bearing is failing the same way, even in the gearbox, main bearings, and everything else. All of these conditions are happening across all the OEMs, but they're not allowed to talk.” Howard Penrose · The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast
September 2026
Penrose diagnoses wind turbine drivetrains for a living. He had just described how the industry first assumed a failure pattern belonged to one manufacturer and then found it everywhere. The claim in the second sentence is the sharper one: not that the failures are widespread, but that the manufacturers seeing them are unable to compare notes.
Transcript
And everybody, well, first people thought it was a particular manufacturer, which it wasn't. Turned out every defig's failing the same way.
Sure. You're fatiguing it.
Yeah. Every bearing is failing the same way, even in the gearbox, main bearings, and everything else. All of these conditions are happening across all the OEMs, but they're not allowed to talk. Well,
this is the thing that I like watching your podcast.
Yeah. The
Chaos NK, it comes out Saturday mornings, it's on YouTube. If you haven't clicked into it, you should click into it because a lot of these issues are discussed there.