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Allen, Rosemary, and Phil discuss the state of wind energy development and the potential impact of the upcoming U.S. presidential election. They also cover TPI Composites’ partnership with the University of Maine and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to utilize 3D printing technology for producing wind turbine blade tooling.
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Allen Hall: Alright, did you see this the situation in Colorado where someone who was just released from jail tries to steal a pickup truck? Or, I don’t know what you call it in Australia. What do they call it in Australia? It’s not a pickup truck. A ute. A ute. A utility vehicle. But! This thief.
Rosemary got into the truck and realized it has a clutch. It’s got a third pedal. It didn’t know what to do. They got re arrested that they tried to put the, tried to drive the truck, didn’t know what to do. Got it in neutral and the truck rolled down the road and hit a fire hydrant. But, Rosemary in the United States, Clutch, a manual transmission vehicle is like non existent anymore.
You get to, it is very hard to purchase one. I don’t know about Australia. You still have clutch cars?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know. Even when I lived in America and it was 20 years ago now, and there was nothing but automatics in America and in Australia, it’s mostly manuals. It’s also a point of pride. Like I don’t imagine there would be many hardened.
Hardened criminals in Australian jails that wouldn’t know how to drive a manual. That would just be like really, it would feel really pathetic to them. But it is something that I have thought about because obviously electric cars don’t need gearboxes. Like my son he’s one now by the time he learns to drive, it’ll be all electric cars.
And certainly we’re only going to have electric cars. And. He, yeah, he’ll never learn to drive a manual unless I will most likely really have to go out of my way to find some classic car to, to teach him in and why he won’t need that skill.
Philip Totaro: It’s going to be like the inverse of Mad Max. It’s like you’re going to have to search for petrol.
Rosemary Barnes: There should be actually an energy transition version of Mad Max because now that we know about solar power and and wind energy, like a lot of the premise of Mad Max doesn’t really, it’s, it wasn’t really future proofed, right? If we had, if we did descend into a Mad Max dystopia tomorrow, I think that energy wouldn’t be the big problem.
It would be other stuff.
Philip Totaro: It’s going to happen in November anyway, don’t worry.
Allen Hall: GE Vernova reported a wider than expected loss in its first quarter post spinoff results. The company’s win segment saw a significant 40 percent decline. Phil, this is a problem. 40 percent decline in orders, primarily due to lower demand for onshore equipment as North America customers continue to navigate the permitting process or permit process for their projects.
And this decline obviously was offset by GE Vernova’s power segment, which experienced a 6 percent jump in sales. So the wind side is getting hammered because they can’t get permits. And everybody’s struggling and interconnects is with other Problem I assume, Phil, this is driving sales, not only at GE, but also at Vestas, right?
That they’re having sales problems because the interconnect, the grid, there’s no interconnects. And then the permit process has gotten a lot longer. What are we doing to ourselves here?
Philip Totaro: This is also what’s plaguing Siemens Gamesa to a certain extent, although, again, yes, they’re not selling onshore turbines, but they’re, the rest of their kind of power generation business is bolstering the losses being seen by the wind segment.
So it’s happened, like you said, it’s happening to Siemens, it’s happening to GE, it’s happening to Vestas. And, everybody’s suffering because the government hasn’t sped up the permitting process. And, we’ve talked ad nauseum about the the interconnection queue issues where, there are something like two terawatts worth of wind and solar and battery storage projects in the interconnection queue in the United States right now.
And most of it’s not gonna actually get built especially a lot of the solar I think like 1. 2 terawatts or something of that is, is solar. There’s 81 gigawatts of wind in the U. S. right now that has actually been consented and is either already under construction or has the opportunity to start construction within the next 18 months or so.
But we’re still suffering with lack of transmission availability to be able to get these projects in the ground and the the independent power producers are freaking out about it because they’re losing the opportunity to collect production tax credit revenue. Having an impact on merchant power prices.
It’s having an impact on as you just mentioned, turbine sales and being able to close deals. Because keep in mind the OEMs don’t recognize revenue. They get a little bit of, an upfront payment when they signed a turbine supply contract, but they don’t really collect the bulk of their revenue until they.
Deliver the turbines, and the project is officially commissioned.
Allen Hall: In the GE case, they’re still forecasting revenues, total revenues, this year of 30, so they must be seeing an uptake or an uptick in wind orders over the next couple of months? Is that going to happen if the interconnects all
Philip Totaro: backed up?
Presumably some of the interconnection issues will be resolved. There’s new transmission lines being built in the northeast, the midwest, and there are some upgrades going on in the the Southwest. And then obviously, Pattern is building the Sunzea project which will have a lot of, GE turbines.
But those, those orders were already announced and again, it’s just, they weren’t going to see any revenue off that until probably 2026 or so anyway when the whole thing’s finally done. So yeah, they’re they’re expecting an uptick in orders. And it looks like it’s still gonna be a fair amount of, 2.
8, 127s and probably some new these new 3. 6, 154s as well.
Allen Hall: I asked you on the show floor in Minneapolis who, or which administration, it’s not who, but which administration has installed more wind. in their tenure, the last Trump administration or the current Biden administration? Because the feeling is that the Biden administration will have planted more wind turbines.
But I don’t think that’s the case, right?
Philip Totaro: No it actually was Trump which is fascinating. Installations went up until 2020 when COVID happened. And that obviously had an impact leading into the Biden administration, but they’ve had several years now to work out a lot of these issues that we’re still talking about.
Rosemary Barnes: But isn’t that partly because if you end a subsidy or end a tax credit, that is actually going to vastly bring forward a whole lot of Projects that, if you’ve got a project that you were planning to install in two years time, but the tax credit will end in one, then you’re going to try really hard to bring it forward, is it we all know that Trump wasn’t some like super pro wind energy leftist greenie. He, he’s been pretty vocal about his opposition to, to wind turbines. So by, if he implemented policies that would have seen something to do then that might actually make it look like he was really great for wind energy, but then, the tax credit ended at some point.
Things died off for a while. And then the IRA is, in, I think in some ways we talked about it a few weeks ago, in some ways, the fact that the IRA is so generous to things like hydrogen is, pulling attention away from wind. And yeah, it’s a bit, we ended up with a bit of a
Philip Totaro: surprising result.
Obviously with these interconnection issues we’re talking about, it takes three or four years to get a project, developed, consented, permitted, and then, put in the ground. So it’s not anything that was being built in 2016 or 2017, wasn’t something that happened during, Obama’s second term anyway.
The fact that it happened during Trump’s term is one of those like political realities of being able to take credit for something that your predecessor did. But it’s also a question where, it’s dropped. Again, COVID had an impact, but it, the installations in for wind in the U S have dropped so precipitously in the past three years that one wonders what.
Biden’s administration has really been doing. And to their credit, the fact that we’ve got 81 gigawatts of wind in that consent queue and construction queue is good. The challenge is still now the interconnection queue is bottled up to the point where we should be seeing more solar is going to overtake wind by everyone’s predicting it’s going to be this year, but it’s not because they’re not going to install 60 gigawatts of solar this year.
But by next year, solar will probably overtake wind in the U. S. in terms of capacity installed. And, you’re right, Rosemary, that attention and, more importantly, resources have been diverted away from Easing the, queues for environmental permits and the interconnection queue for wind to be able to get on the grid faster.
Wind, the whole point with this is wind is a proven technology. So why are we giving tons of money? To anything that’s not, I, it’s I get why you want to, try and bolster other technologies as well. Wind got their fair share of this 30 years ago. We’ve proven we’re one of the lowest cost options.
Why are diverting investor attention and resources away from the thing that can actually solve the problem?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s not like a US specific thing either. When I hear American people talk about this, they, lament their politics and everything. But it’s definitely the case in Australia as well.
And I think most of around the world, governments think that their job is to support new emerging technologies, which I agree that they have a significant and useful role that can play there. Everyone says wind is mature, it doesn’t need support anymore, which is true in terms of the actual turbines themselves, the technology works and is mature and is proven, but there are, so many mundane things that governments could and absolutely should be helping to take care of that would massively speed the rollout of wind.
Not just wind, but other mature technologies that are going to play like a really outsized role in the energy transition. We need a whole lot of energy for the energy transition. These days we see a lot of battery projects coming on and, that’s really good. But if we don’t have enough renewable energy to charge those batteries, then what’s the point.
And yeah, in order work, In my opinion, we’re failing at the easy part of the energy transition, which is getting those really cheap technologies, wind and solar as well. In as much as possible. And there are so many, yeah, simple things that could be done in terms of transmission.
And I don’t know, supply chains infrastructure, even in the U S things like, ships and ports and. I don’t know, all those kinds of things that should be taken care of and in a lot of cases, it’s absolutely regulation that needs to change to allow the market to come up with solutions, like even just the way that utilities choose to invest in projects transmission companies choose to invest.
It’s usually most places I think around the world, these are regulated monopolies or they’re centrally planned. And at the moment, there is a really weird incentive structure for how they choose to implement projects that kind of yeah, it’s designed around putting in a new thermal generation every, every 10 years or so.
That’s what they know how to do. That’s what’s safe to them. It’s risky for them to do something new, even if the, the clean, renewable alternative is going to be cheaper. They don’t want to get into the business of, I don’t know, putting batteries in homes or community batteries or doing new technologies on transmission to avoid upgrades, or I don’t know, choosing locations where new wind farms could go that wouldn’t require upgrades.
It’s it’s just says government all over every single one of those solutions. But they’re not doing that. They’re like build more hydrogen. That’s what they think is the part of the transition that they need to get in.
Allen Hall: But isn’t this the point that Vestas is making at the moment with their advertisements about this is not a wind farm on the offshore side.
Saying here’s all the obstacles to offshore wind and they’ve delineated each one of them and that’s being tossed around now. Does Vestas and GE and Siemens Gamesa do a similar thing for onshore wind? This is not a wind farm. Here’s what we need to do
Philip Totaro: to move the barriers. We have supposedly in this industry, an industry trade association and lobby group that’s supposed to be championing what the industry needs.
One wonders why that’s not coming from them, or if it is, why is that not being taken seriously and implemented?
Allen Hall: It’s a good question. And this is where Rosemary’s outside view of it, I think matters because I see it as each administration has four years. You have four years to do something.
They give you 10 year plans, which is ridiculous. If you’re going to do something, it needs to happen in four years. And at the end of four years, you don’t have anything to show for it, or you have missed your mark by a lot. And I think in onshore wind, you could point to the Biden administration as missing the mark onshore and offshore.
Then there’s a penalty for that. And yet, We haven’t seen ACP come up and say, Hey, administration, this is what needs to happen. These are the changes you can make to get some quick action. Rosemary, do you see it that way? I don’t know what the prime minister cycle is for Australia. Is it every three, four or five years?
Something like that.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s about every three years. But it’s a bit different because The prime minister isn’t can change in between that as well. So it’s less of a like it’s less of a abrupt, like in the U S it feels like from about now, everything stops. Especially if it was, like every, if your current president has already done two terms and it’s like everything stops much earlier because everyone’s so obsessed by the primaries and process takes a long time.
It’s weird to me how much time that you spend out of the cycle. worrying about the next person. Yeah. So in Australia, it’s not quite, it’s not quite to that extent. So we’ve got to have an election within the next 12 months. But I get to choose exactly when, as long as it’s not, you can’t just call an election a year after your previous one, I think it’s you’ve got maybe six months window or something or a bit longer.
So, it’s not so dissimilar to your cycle, but Things won’t wind down until the last few months for us.
Allen Hall: Do you have a feeling as the prime minister’s window starts to close, right? And they have to have another election. Do you look back over those previous couple of years and go, Yeah, that was great.
They did a wonderful job or they missed the mark on these areas. Now we need to make a change. It’s still a cycle, right? Do they try to get projects done in three years instead of ten?
Rosemary Barnes: It is also less of a cycle because it’s not, we don’t have this presidential thing, right? So we don’t we don’t just flip flop from one to the other extreme all of a sudden, like overnight you were fully Republican and now overnight you’re fully Democratic.
It’s not like that for us because it’s, The number of seats in the government, or in the, sorry, in the parliament determines who is able to choose the prime minister. It’s a lot less about who the prime minister is. It’s much more about how many seats are in government. And the same is for you, it doesn’t usually change that much from cycle to cycle.
It’s not like one election, one party got twice as many seats, and then the next time it’s the other way around. But usually. It more gradually moves. It’ll be really hard to imagine us having a government completely changed, that the opposition would be in government next election.
It’s nobody thinks that’s going to happen in Australia. But what’s a real likelihood of happening is that the current government would not quite be able to govern on their own and would have to rely on some either the Greens or some of the Independents. That’s the interesting situation.
interesting political story that we’ll have. And in terms of the energy transition, I think most people are pretty excited about that possibility because while the government has been, way better than the previous conservative government on renewables. There’s still, a major party to the labor party.
So they’ve got union links and there’s a lot of jobs and coal coal power production, but especially coal exports in Australia. Yeah. Sorry. And gas as well, similar. So the government has just released this gas plan that nobody’s very happy with in terms of, meeting our net zero targets.
It’s inevitable when you’ve got, a party that big that you’re not going to just fully discard fossil fuel industry that we’re so dependent on. So I’m not really surprised. But yeah, all of the independence In Australian politics, look, the vast majority of independents are are there because of climate.
Primarily there’s a few issues, but mostly they’re Traditionally conservative politicians who also believe that action on climate change is really important.
Allen Hall: Are they working to a time frame? You know what I mean? They know their time in the whatever parliament of the UK, right? They know their time is short, it’s not forever, unlike U.
S. politicians, where they can be in Congress for 50 years. Does that then drive the quicker policy movements or an attempt to get them done?
Rosemary Barnes: I sense, I don’t really understand American politics that deeply, but I sense that the U. S. is much more focused on terms as a finite thing.
Australia is more continuous. And for sure, like individual politicians are worried about their legacy and the government now is scrambling a little bit to actually deliver on some of the big promises that they made two years ago. And, they’ve done some things, but not enough. So I think they are looking for some quick wins.
But also, yeah, it’s an interesting, it’s an interesting fight though, because the opposition has dug in, they lost, they basically lost an election over climate change. And then their response to that was to dig in and say, no, people are wrong. We’re going to convince them that climate change doesn’t actually matter.
And what we really need is nuclear power in 20 years and to continue, coal and gas full steam ahead until that point. So it’s a really weird response from the opposition in my opinion. Yeah, so it’s I think it’s a super different story to what you’ve got going on in the U. S. at the moment.
Allen Hall: Let me throw out to you the latest news from the American election campaign trail, where former President Trump said, I think it was yesterday, that on day one, there will be an executive order, which is something in the United States the president can do to Essentially shut down all offshore wind development.
Rosemary Barnes: But isn’t this like a super, just aside from whether being pro or anti renewables, isn’t it a super anti business stance to have that a new government is going to overturn contracts of previous signed? Because in Australia, they might like strongly disagree with a contract, the previous government side, but that will always honor it because it’s so bad for the country to have people think that you can’t trust, like, how would you choose to invest in a, in the US if you weren’t sure that in a year or two years time that contract would just be torn up.
Allen Hall: That has happened in the Biden administration also. So they’ve stopped things day one that were from the Trump administration. This is weird cycle. That I don’t think other governments get into where The executive
Philip Totaro: order comes in the use of the executive order is a relatively recent thing, but it’s not like Clinton didn’t try and undo stuff from bush 41 back in the early 90s that’s this has been going on as long as there’s certain politics So it’s because that’s what politics ultimately is about.
It’s not you know, i’m right and you’re wrong. It’s about the This is the right direction that we’re going to, take the country in and the direction that the previous administration was trying to take you in is the wrong direction. It’s not, that’s how that goes. The problem with Trump is that he’s chaos.
This is exactly what Rosemary is. And I’m glad that somebody outside the U S understands this as well, intuitively, at least he’s chaos. If you’re an investor, you, you are concerned about what he says, because it’s not so much. That he’s actually gonna, he can’t write an executive order that’s gonna completely derail the entire offshore wind industry on day one of second term.
That, it’s not gonna happen. What it is gonna do, Is it’s going to cause enough chaos that if you’re an investor contemplating parking money in the U S offshore wind market, because we finally got our act together, it’s going to cause enough chaos and enough destabilization that you’re going to think twice about it.
And you’re going to go park your money someplace else. And that’s the real problem is if we’re trying to attract foreign direct investment into the U S offshore wind market, he’s making that a priority. Neon impossible to do, which means that project development does slow down. So it’s not going to be he signs an executive order and it stops the industry.
It’s going to be he causes enough chaos to the point where people don’t want to put money here because it’s just going to be another four years of nonsense. And then they’ll come back to it in, by, 2028, it would be much different than what’s happened over the past three years. This is a situation where the, and I’m not saying the Democrats have done a great job either, because I don’t think they have, clearly in New York.
Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s, I think that’s the issue is that neither side is going to do a great bit of amazing work on offshore wind. One is being more vocal than the other, but the results are going to be basically the same, or very close to it, at the end of the day. Four years, not a lot of turbines in the water, and a lot of developments going to happen.
Unfortunately. And then that, that creates the opening which Trump can come into and say you’ve done such a horrible job already. We’re just going to put an end to it. That what you do previously sets up the next administration, and they’ve really teed this up, in my opinion, for Trump to whack him over the head with it all the time, which is a real problem.
I think that’s the core of the problem, and it’s not that Trump exists or Biden exists, it’s that the fact that one is leading to the other is going to be a dramatic issue for investors on offshore. Here and around the world. It’s going to affect things that are happening in Rosemary’s territory, too
Philip Totaro: Yeah, but I think it if Australia will Demonstrate that they’re ready to get their you know offshore wind projects in the water Then they’re gonna attract that investment that have other would have otherwise gone to the United States So it’s connected in that way.
That’s what I’m trying to
Allen Hall: get at is that what, when the US scripts like screws up like this and they have, I think you can pretty much call it like you see it here. The US has not done a really great job of developing offshore besides making some goals. So what’s gonna happen is others are gonna take advantage of it and we’re gonna watch from our seats in America, we’re gonna watch Australia put tournaments in the water much faster than we have and wonder what the heck happened?
I think that’s what’s where we’re going. It’s not a, it’s not a, it’s not a good situation because you feel like America should be taking the lead in this. And yet somehow we fumbled it,
Philip Totaro: but that’s also a legacy of, oil and gas and coal that goes back for more than 150 years in this country.
So that’s what an energy transition is. It’s not, we’re just going to decide tomorrow to flip a switch. It’s kicking and screaming all the way. And
Rosemary Barnes: it is leadership in, in, in a way. I know that in Australia, I’ve seen come across plenty of reports that are specifically looking at what’s happened in the U S.
In order to not repeat the same things here that’s a service that you’re providing because, Europe has, in a way, Europe obviously has a lot of offshore wind already, China has a lot of offshore wind already, but those political climates are a bit maybe a bit more specific to those places obviously, Australia is not going to copy what China has done, that wouldn’t work here, and the same with Europe, really that’s, That’s quite a different situation.
So the US is probably a lot more relevant to countries that are looking to get into offshore wind now. So it is very handy to have a blueprint of all of the landmines that you might encounter so that we can. Yeah plan a course around them, but that is not necessarily very useful for the U.
S. to, to provide that sort of example. It’s not the kind of like innovation that you can that you can prop it off.
Allen Hall: It’s just interesting to watch the dynamics and you read the news reports are just tend to be very political on one side or the other. But the reality is that. No one has done a great job here, and they have the ability to do good things, or great things.
It’s America, for goodness sakes, right? We can do a lot of things in three or four years, we’ve shown it time and time again, but in this area, we just have really not done what I think we’re capable of doing. Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry.
That’s why we read P. E. S. Wind magazine. P. E. S. Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And P. E. S. Wind is written by the experts. So you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication. So
there’s some exciting news from TPI Composites, which has formed a partnership with the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to utilize one of the world’s largest polymer 3D printers for producing wind turbine tooling. The Ingersoll MasterPrint at the composite center is set to provide modular wind blade tooling at an impressive 500 pounds per hour, which is pretty impressive, with segments up to 18 meters long.
And in that tooling, they’re going to incorporate 3D printed heating elements which are co extruded resistive wires to heat the molds, basically. Now Rosemary, we talked off air about this, like 3D printing molds, I’ve seen this done on the aerospace side a good bit more recently you said it has been done a little bit on the wind side, does this start to change the game a little bit, because the quantity they can print, the quickness of the tooling to a 3D printer mold, or is this just Old technology at this point, because Europe has already done it.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think it was just Europe that was doing this, but definitely 3D printing moulds has been around for a while. I’m guessing that they haven’t been, like printing the heating elements at the same time in the past and that is the innovation here. I’m not actually a hundred percent sure about what’s different here, but seems that’s the likely difference.
It’s, it has been, I don’t know, I want to say game changer, but less strong than that. Like it’s a it’s a definite, it was. It still is a bottleneck. If you do things traditionally, you, when you’re developing a new blade, you have to lock in the blade geometry six months or more before you start manufacturing, because you need to order your mold.
That kind of has really fixed the way that people develop new blades, because you can’t just keep on, iterating. And, you might like to because the structure and the aerodynamics are very very intertwined. If you change the aerodynamics of the blade, then you’re going to change the structural requirements.
And so you might like to, tweak things a bit once you get really far down your structural detailed design and haven’t been able to do that so much because you have to lock in that external shape from day one. Being able to have a shorter lead time on your blade molds is definitely significant.
Also for when things go wrong, a story that I tell often is one time I was working on a project and we had to make some prototype blades and of course the timeframe’s always very tight. And our blade mold got it fell off a ship on the way to the factory and obviously that sets you back Yeah.
And we also, we saw we had a story on this podcast a few weeks ago, right? About in Chabot, one of the blade molds was damaged and they had to stand down a bunch of workers because they had, yeah, no, no mold to work on. So obviously any technology that allows molds to be made really fast is going to help with random occurrences like that to, to speed things up.
Allen Hall: Is there a benefit to having uniform? mold temperatures. Is that really critical compared to what they’re doing right now?
Rosemary Barnes: I think that for, so not all blade molds need to be heated. It depends on the materials that you’re using, but for the most part, our proxies use a heated molds and they are pretty uniform.
But if you take just a simple 3d printed mold surface and then install heating after the fact, then I guess it was challenging to get that heating uniform or it doesn’t necessarily even have to be uniform. It’s more that you have to have. be able to dictate exactly what temperature, what section of the mold gets to yeah.
That, that is important for the quality of your composite material and also for the efficiency how long it takes to cure, how much energy it uses, all that sort of thing. So yeah, it’s important.
Allen Hall: Phil, does this actually save money if they do a 3D printed mold?
Philip Totaro: I think it actually does.
So what’s interesting about this to me is the fact that they could, if you come up with a design, it would certainly help in prototyping. If you come up with a design and. You want to be able to tweak it quickly, like you just, okay, we’re going to change part of the inboard section or part of the outboard section, again, as Rosemary said, you’re going to, if you make an arrow change, you probably also have to make a structural change.
So there’s that, but the fact that you’re using 3D printers to do the mold means that you could achieve that quicker. And anytime you do anything quicker, it’s necessarily going to save on cost particularly if you’re not doing it by hand. So that’s one aspect. The other one that comes to mind for me is if you wanted to be able to do load specific or site specific blades, this might actually facilitate that because you could carve out different segments of the mold where you’re going You knew you were going to have to, tweak the shape of the blade or the arrow profile of the blade because you’re seeing higher turbulence intensity or whatever the thing is, you have noise that you need to to be able to address at a particular project site.
This could, I think, Rosemary can confirm, but I think this would lead to a faster production process that would accommodate more site specific blade designs. Which would be appealing for the OEMs and developers.
Rosemary Barnes: I think the speed and the agility is the real benefit. I would assume they cost less, but they also are less durable.
I would imagine having to replace them more frequently than a. traditionally made blade mold. So I don’t know where the economics ends up, but I’ve definitely worked on projects where the blade geometry turned out to be more noisy in the field than they expected it to be. They learned after they installed the test turbine.
And yeah, so there’s, any, there’s a long list of things that have gone wrong and more that could go wrong. with a blade geometry that you don’t learn until after it’s installed and this is gonna, this is gonna help with that.
Allen Hall: Definitely. How long will this mold last compared to the molds we build right now?
Are you be, will you be constantly building another mold?
Rosemary Barnes: It wouldn’t be a commercial product if the economics ended up far worse overall, right?
Philip Totaro: To put a point on it though, I think with this technology, You’re talking probably maybe between 25 and 50 percent of however many units you can get out of a conventional mold with, is what you could do with this recyclable material mold 3D printed.
Rosemary Barnes: It might also be good for small runs as well, if you you don’t have a long pipeline yet, then you make, one, one mold and then by the time that you’re ready to invest in something longer term, you’ve got everything locked down. You’ve got your sales pipeline more secure and it’s all worth it.
So I just think the extra flexibility that it adds, it’s definitely, we’re going to be seeing more and more things 3d printed as we, we go. And molds is a really good first place to start.
Philip Totaro: And Oak Ridge has been working on this by themselves for. Six years or so along with NREL to a certain extent.
But the fact that they’ve now brought in TPI as a partner and the university of Maine as a partner on this project, this is something that sounds like there is a commercial utility to it and is something that will actually be a a good use of resources if they can actually build and implement this type of technology.
Sounds promising.
Allen Hall: Some other promising technologies are being developed over in Spain. The EU funded Blade2Circ project which is led by Spain’s ATIP Technology Center is set to revolutionize the energy sector by developing a new generation of wind turbine blades using high performance bio based composite materials.
Now, Phil, when you read in, in the press that something is going to revolutionize an industry. What’s your first response?
Philip Totaro: Nope. Okay. Especially not something that’s as mature as, wind turbine manufacturing.
Allen Hall: So they set a budget of 4 million euros and there’s 11 partners from a number of European countries, and they were hoping to improve blade recyclability, which makes total sense.
That’s directly related Absolutely where we should be going. Also to improve the performance of the blades. So there may be some added benefits here. So the key is we’re looking for what they call reversible adhesives. Adhesives that you can break apart pretty easily using some simple chemical or enzyme degradation process.
Also the end all be all is self healing coatings. Which I always think show promise, but they never seem to get anywhere. So Rosemary on the bio side of making bio adhesives, does this make sense? Is this worth spending time on at this point? Because I know there’s a number of recyclable resin systems.
that Siemens Gamesa is going to use, Avestis is going to use, and even GE, I believe, is going to use, LM is going to use. So what is the status of this industry and where should it be going?
Rosemary Barnes: Bio based composites was super trendy when I first started going to composites conferences back when I started my PhD in 2012.
That was like the hot thing. Every conference had a full stream on biocomposites. It’s usually, to do with taking some sort of agricultural waste product and using it as a fiber I don’t know, hemp fiber and from sugar cane. And you’d like anywhere that you’ve got some waste and you want to basically hide it in a wind turbine blade or some other kind of composite component.
And you can get composites that perform. nearly as well, not nearly, but like in the right ballpark, like you could make a blade out of a wind turbine blade out of those materials that would just be a bit heavier. And then at the end of life, people, I think people can found a couple of issues when they talk about recycling blades, there’s a few different ways that you could approach that and they mix up issues.
Carbon fiber is made from fossil fuels, basically, right? Fossil fuels are bad. Therefore, carbon fiber is bad. That’s like the extent of that. And that if you use bio based composites, then, nature is good. I, I don’t think that there’s anything much more to it than that, if it doesn’t end up with a, as good a structure, if it’s not cheaper.
I don’t see the benefit. It’s not necessarily, I think it would in general be less easily recyclable because natural fibers are going to degrade more, like fiberglass and carbon fiber. Really tough and strong have been designed to be that way. And they can take the abuse that a recycling process would throw at them to, there’s plenty of ways to end up with with those fibers at the end of a recycling process.
Whereas, if you imagine Yeah, a bit of, I don’t know, sugar cane fiber or hemp fiber inside a blade. And then do pyrolysis to get rid of the resin or any of these high temperature methods to get rid of the resin. I don’t think that the. That the fiber is going to be left intact at the end of that.
So I’ll be pretty surprised if these bio based composites are actually more recyclable. They do talk about bio based resins, which it maybe is more possible. I’m not sure because, no one ever gives enough details to do anything more than speculate like I am now. But one thing that they could be, if you have bio based wind turbines, then one of the recycling methods for wind turbine blades is to throw them into a cement kiln, right?
To use them as a source of of fuel. And also some of the minerals as well can help improve the cement. So if you’ve got. bio based carbon atoms basically going into that process, then you’re going to end up with a, a net neutral or close to neutral CO2 process overall. Because if you chuck normal wind turbine blades with resin that, comes from fossil fuel originally then when you burn that in a cement kiln or do pyrolysis or whatever to liberate that that carbon, then that goes into the atmosphere and that is basically a fossil fuel.
If you have bio based sources for that, then that’s, a lower carbon option if you’re going to burn it. Yeah. I think that it should be, it makes more sense to me that it would be two different, separate strands. Bio based, if you want to end up burning it and that carbon is going to go into the atmosphere, that makes sense.
If you want the circular thing, where you do use the same thing over and over again, the same materials. whether or not that’s a sensible goal or not, then it would make more sense to be going for really durable materials, which probably isn’t bio based. So yeah, that’s my interpretation again, based on the very little information that’s there and having to read between the lines.
Most of it’s reading between the lines.
Allen Hall: An engineer applying logic to a complicated problem. That’s exactly what we wanted. Yeah, that makes total sense. Some of these projects, while well intentioned, may not have the outcome they desire, and I think that’s the problem, right? You gotta have a problem you’re trying to solve first, and then you work on a solution and they’re, they have a solution looking for a problem at the moment.
And some of these, it’s fascinating to watch. And it’s not just Europe. This happens at a United States all the time.
Philip Totaro: Yeah. And it’s usually one of these scenarios where it’s a technical solution looking for a technical problem to solve, but in the meantime, it’s a solution to another problem, which is, quote unquote, recycling is good and it’s important.
That’s a political or whatever, a social issue.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I have a whole video about that on my channel. At the moment, the way that recycling technologies you get worse climate outcomes for recycling a wind turbine blade than from just burying it in landfill.
Allen Hall: And what is this channel, Rosemary?
You mentioned? I don’t know the name of this thing. What is this called?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s called Engineering with Rosie. You should look it up sometime, Alan. You might like to subscribe. Oh, wow.
Philip Totaro: Episode 844 of Alan winds up Rosemary.
Rosemary Barnes: Actually, and while we’re there, I don’t think we’ve plugged, Phil and I did a live stream together recently on offshore wind and talked a lot about China as well.
I think it was really interesting discussion about China’s role in offshore wind and how they’re. Achieving what they are or what everyone thinks they’re doing with their, incredibly low prices. Cause I think that most of the reporting that I see on that topic is off base. So you gotta listen to what Phil has to say about that.
Allen Hall: Again, you’ll find that on Engineering with Rosie on YouTube. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And as Rosemary’s pointed out on this episode, you must listen to and watch.
The YouTube channel engineering with Rosie. So you go to the YouTube with Rosie and you click the subscribe button there. And so if you do that, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
