Episode Details

Allen and Joel sit down with Dan Fesenmeyer of Windquest Advisors to discuss turbine supply agreement fundamentals, negotiation leverage, and how tariff uncertainty is reshaping contract terms. Dan also explains why operators should maximize warranty claims before service agreements take over.

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Allen Hall: Dan, welcome to the program. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, guys. Well, we’ve been looking forward to this for several weeks now because. We’re trying to learn some of the ins and outs of turbine supply agreements, FSAs, because everybody’s talking about them now. Uh, and there’s a lot of assets being exchanged.

A lot of turbine farms up for sale. A lot of acquisitions on the other side, on the investment side coming in and. As engineers, we don’t deal a lot with TSAs. It’s just not something that we typically see until, unless there’s a huge problem and then we sort of get involved a little bit. I wanna understand, first off, and you have a a ton of experience doing this, that’s why we [00:01:00] love having you.

What are some of the fundamentals of turbine supply agreements? Like what? What is their function? How do they operate? Because I think a lot of engineers and technicians don’t understand the basic fundamentals of these TSAs. 

Dan Fesenmeyer: The TSA is a turbine supply agreement and it’s for the purchase and delivery of the wind turbines for your wind farm.

Um, typically they are negotiated maybe over a 12 ish month period and typically they’re signed at least 12 months before you need, or you want your deliveries for the wind turbines. 

Joel Saxum: We talk with people all over the world. Um, you know, GE Americas is different than GE in Spain and GE in Australia and Nordics here, and everybody’s a little bit different.

Um, but what we, we regularly see, and this is always an odd thing to me, is you talked about like negotiating. It starts 12 months ahead of time stuff, but we see that [00:02:00] the agreements a lot of times are very boilerplate. They’re very much like we’re trying to structure this in a certain way, and at the end of the day, well, as from an operator standpoint, from the the person buying them, we would like this and we would like this and we would like this, but at the end of the day, they don’t really seem to get that much negotiation in ’em.

It’s kind of like, this is what the agreement you’re gonna take and t