Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This episode Allen and Phil examine China’s move to end its domestic wind turbine price war and its global market implications. They discuss Germany’s countermeasures and the complexities of international manufacturing in the U.S. wind industry. Additionally, they highlight an innovative bolt tensioning system featured in PES Wind Magazine, showcasing advancements in wind turbine maintenance technology.
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.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Well, Phil, a Minnesota man has won the Safeway World Championship Pumpkin Weigh off with a 2, 400 pound squashy dub. Travis Ginger of Nalvin traveled his gargantuan gourd to the competition in Half Moon Day, California, of course, Phil, not for where you are where it was placed on a massive scale and dubbed the heaviest in the contest.
The win marked Giger’s fourth top spot win in the Safeway World Championship pumpkin weigh off. And if you’re not from the United States, Safeway is a grocery store. It’s Really big in California and a couple other places. So a 2, 400 pound squash. Now that’s not the most he’s ever. grown. And back in 2023, he raised a 2, 700 pound pumpkin named Michael Jordan.
Now I don’t understand why they have to name these things. That is the mystery to me is why would you have to name a pumpkin or a gourd? It is what it is. And it’s just heavy, right?
Philip Totaro: I mean, I’m, I’m impressed not only by the, the growing of something that large, but the logistics of getting it from the Midwest out to California.
I mean, we talk in the wind energy industry about the logistics around, shipping components and, and things like that all the time. I mean, how the hell do you even truck a 2, 400 pound? And that’s, that’s gotta be a pretty, that’s got, that’s a big rig right there, isn’t it? It’d be
Allen Hall: Travis to start.
Moving some blades around. There’s been some blades that look like they’ve been moved like pumpkins, I’ve seen lately. Yikes.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, well, Aion, we did catalog the fact that blade damage was the number one cost impact on, on repairs, so. Maybe this guy can teach the industry a thing or two.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’ll be joined by my Uptime co host, After these news headlines, France is making waves in offshore wind development, announcing plans to tender for 9. 2 gigawatts of projects in the coming months. This includes two fixed and three floating wind farms to be built off the coast of the Ficon, Brittany, the Gasconia Gulf, and the southern Mediterranean.
These installations are part of France’s ambitious goal to have 45 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2050. Francis, Energy Minister, emphasized the importance of these projects for the industrial value chain, urging companies to maintain their local presence for turbine manufacturing and installation.
Crossing the Atlantic, Hydro Québec and Lyons, de l’Energie de l’Est. has unveiled a plan for a new wind farm in eastern Quebec. The project, which could generate up to one gigawatt, represents a three billion dollar investment in the region and spans over 700 square kilometers. This development also includes First Nations marking a step towards economic reconciliation.
The project aligns with Hydro Quebec’s strategic shift towards collaborating with communities from the outset. In the United States, the Vineyard Wind Project faces new scrutiny following a turbine blade failure in July. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement has ordered the company to conduct a site specific study evaluating the environmental harm caused by the incident.
The study will characterize the subsea debris field and assess potential impacts on onshore, offshore, Coastal and offshore resources. The order requires Vineyard Wind to submit a detailed sampling plan, including methods, media, and biota to sample. The development comes as the project remains under a suspension order, though modified to allow continued installation of turbine towers and nacelles.
while prohibiting power production and blade installation. On a more positive note, Greece’s Hellenic Cables has secured a partnership with the Leading Light Wind Project, one of the largest offshore wind farms planned for the U. S. The company will supply 65 kilometers of 132 kilovolt interarray cables for the 2.
4 gigawatt project, which is set to power over 1 million homes in New Jersey. Located about 40 miles off the coast of New Jersey, leading light wind is expected to spur 3. 7 billion in economic development. Benefits and create thousands of local union jobs. Across the pond, GB Energy’s chairman, Juergen Meyer, has unveiled ambitious plans to transform the publicly owned company into a UK version of Denmark’s Ørsted.
Meyer envisions GB Energy evolving from an investment vehicle into a major power generator. operating its own wind farms, tidal power projects, and carbon capture schemes. The company is set to receive 8. 3 billion pounds over the next five years to drive its investment program with an initial focus on floating wind, offshore wind, hydrogen, and nuclear energy.
Lastly, Abu Dhabi’s Mastar and Spain’s Iberdrola have completed turbine installations at the 476 megawatt Baltic Eagle offshore wind farm in Germany. The project featuring 50 Vessus turbines, each with a capacity of 9. 5 megawatts, is expected to produce 1. 9 terawatt hours annually, enough to power 475, 000 homes with clean energy.
This milestone is part of a broader partnership between Masdar and Iberdrola which includes a 15 billion euro joint venture announced at COP28 to explore offshore wind and green hydrogen projects in Germany, the UK and the US. Masdar, which aims to reach a 100 gigawatt capacity target by 2030, sees Europe as a key contributor to its growth strategy.
That’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro.
Well, Phil, a lot of news coming out of China, where pretty much all the major Chinese wind turbine manufacturers have pledged to end their price war against one another, which is sort of following what the solar industry has done in China. Now, news reports are saying there have been 12 turbine companies involved, which include Gold Wind, Envision, Mingyang, Shanghai, and Dongfeng.
And, as everybody knows, there’s been an internal price war there for a little while, and it’s hurting the sector and hurting profit margins. Now, this is a little bit unusual because they agreed, these 12 companies agreed to put a price floor. In which they wouldn’t cross for both solar and wind to help restore the industry.
That is usually frowned upon pretty much everywhere else in the world, where you get multiple companies to agree to what the, the bottom end of the price market will, will, will be. At that point, it’s, it’s considered collusion. In the United States, you can’t even do that internationally without getting punished in the United States.
I, I understand why they’re doing it because they feel like there’s a lot of difference between what Vestas charges and what they are charging. Maybe they ought to push themselves up a little bit and get more into the profitable regions of the economy and start forcing, stop forcing themselves to compete with one another.
But doesn’t that trigger a lot of EU oversight and U. S. oversight into that marketplace?
Philip Totaro: Well, it’s okay. So this is a fascinating kind of occurrence because, as you mentioned, this has been going on for a while where You know, they’ve been in a race to the bottom with each other in the domestic Chinese market.
Now, what the Chinese also want to be able to do is leverage those cheap labor rates, raw material costs, et cetera, to produce turbines in China for export to other markets, particularly where they’re going to be able to go in and and deliver projects, either, deliver turbines or deliver turnkey projects in conjunction with EPC contractors from China and potentially finance from Chinese banks where, they can leverage this, this low production cost to basically undercut Western OEMs.
So this. Move. This, and we can call it a collusion kind of a move. You’re, I don’t think you’re, you’re wrong to suggest that, because in, in a Western economic system, this absolutely would be considered anti competitive, but it’s actually probably a good thing for them and seems like it might end up trickling down to be a good thing for the rest of the industry, in that If they’re going to not continue to gouge each other’s eyes out in the domestic Chinese market, keep in mind that this, this price fixing thing is only for China.
So they’re, they’re basically agreeing that they will create this floor, this price floor and not gouge each other’s eyes out on, on margins anymore in an environment where they’re actually all Suffering. They all have a lot of cash because their, their top line is good and they’re, they’re getting a lot of revenue but their margins are, are thinner and thinner every year and that’s what they want to be able to address with this is, okay, let’s stop hurting each other because at the end of the day, companies, particularly publicly traded companies in the U.
S. or the U. S. Western Europe, they’re all focused on next quarter and next quarter’s results, next quarter is whatever. But at the end of the day, the Chinese are trying to figure out ways in which they can be globally competitive in the next like 20 to 50 years. On the back of this news it was also reported that Vestas stock went up by, I think it was like three to 5 percent the other day.
Which kind of makes me chuckle because, again, at the end of the day, this isn’t actually going to impact a company like Vestas that much. Vestas already doesn’t sell a ton of turbines in China, so the fact that they wouldn’t really be subject to this agreement, and they weren’t a signatory to this agreement either, it was only for Chinese companies and only a It makes me scratch my head a little bit as to what the, the equity analysts and trading houses of the world are thinking about about this kind of deal and the impact it’s going to have on a company like Vestas.
Allen Hall: They’re triggering all those reactions because if you just read through the noise here a little bit. The Chinese government is allowing them to raise prices. So in that sense, it’s a subsidy straight from the Chinese government to the wind companies to keep them all alive and profitable. Which then makes the, their initiative to push out Chinese made products into the power industry more powerful.
That’s essentially what it does. Because now, if, if the EU is. looking at this properly, I think, in the U. S. also, they’re going to see it as a straight subsidy, which is what it is. Because there’s no way that they can allow 12 companies to sign an agreement to raise prices without the Chinese government agreeing to that.
That’s why they had the meeting in Beijing to talk about it, I’m sure. But if it’s a subsidy, and it’s collusion at the same time. There is no way that the EU is going to sit on the sidelines here and let China do what they want to do, and that may even include parts of Africa, parts of South America, that there will be a reaction to even that.
Because now they’ve essentially are playing by a different set of rules and the EU hasn’t been willing to go that far.
Philip Totaro: Right. And, and, well, you just brought up two good points. One is the only mechanism that the U. S. administration or the EU and their competition commission really has is for anything that’s outside their jurisdiction, they can go to the World Trade Organization and file a complaint there.
But the, the reality of it is That that’s kind of the only mechanism and, and look, it’s going to take so long to get through a, a WTO dispute resolution that the, the commercial impact of these actions is already going to be felt for years before, I mean, it’s going to be five or seven years before the WTO makes a ruling on any of this, going back to your other kind of bullet point on this is, this is a decision that the Chinese government has made.
And, and look, at the end of the day, maybe you don’t like communism and certainly we can probably all agree that you don’t like China’s human rights record. Their government has made a decision to subsidize their domestic industry, and many different domestic industries, but renewables in, in particular, because they want, and they’ve seen the success of solar and they want to see a similar success in global market domination for their wind companies.
So they’re making a choice. Their government is making a choice to subsidize their, their companies so that they can not only thrive domestically, but they can also try to take over the world. And the reality of it is, all right, if you’re gonna compete with that, then, Hey, EU and Hey, U S government, you’re going to have to find ways.
You can’t just apply countervailing duties and expect that that’s going to solve a hundred percent of the problem. Because frankly, it’s not. But the reality of it is, you’re, you’re gonna have to find ways of getting your wallet out. And figuring out how to also support your domestic companies that we don’t benefit from the same cheap labor rates because we have such high pensions because of unions and other things that, we, we’ve got higher costs.
Overhead and labor costs, we’ve got higher raw material costs, because again, we don’t get the benefit of having access to cheap materials from China. This is why, I think, part of the solution is, alright, look, China’s restricting exports of things like rare earths. Elements that we use to make things like permanent magnets, both for wind turbines and EVs and other things.
Why not apply not just a countervailing duty on Chinese imported goods, but why not say, All right, we’ll let you, import this much, two gigawatts worth of your equipment into our market in exchange for, Hundreds of tons or hundreds of millions of tons of, rare earth element being increased in your, your export quota.
But
Allen Hall: there’s, there’s a huge difference, I think, between what the EU could possibly conceive of and what China is doing. They are directly subsidizing every manufacturer. And I’ll give the US case, I’ll pull the EU out of this for a minute. With the IRA bill and you’re getting to PTC tax credits, right, so you’re looking at production tax credits, you’re looking at some manufacturing tax credits, primarily it’s production tax credits at the moment, that, those funds go to operators.
It doesn’t necessarily raise the prices of wind turbines as we have well seen. The, the operators, the investment groups tend to, to take those subsidies and run with them and there’s their beneficiaries of them. The GEs and the Vestas and the Siemens of the world are not participating in that. The Chinese scheme is totally different.
They’re going directly to the manufacturer. They are subsidizing their manufacturers, which produces a different outcome. So I’m not even sure the EU or the US could create the same sort of situation in the legal framework that China has done. That in, in a sense, gives China a huge advantage. If, if, if I was the Chinese GE, I would then know how much revenue I’m in theory bringing in because my government’s exporting me.
I can only have a minimum price floor. I know roughly the profits I’d make over the next year, roughly. Here, they don’t have any clue. It is, it is really difficult, and they’re losing, and let’s face it, they’re losing money. So, now, now, now you take two, two significantly different economic models, and it’s now Godzilla versus King Kong.
That’s gonna get ugly.
Philip Totaro: Well, for anybody who’s seen the movies recently, it does get, it does get ugly.
Allen Hall: It gets messy. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of fallout all around them if you watch the movies.
Philip Totaro: But here’s the thing though, even the IRA bill we have in the U S that has manufacturing tax credits baked in, that’s not for existing factories.
That’s for new factories and new products that are actually, for the most part, being investigated right now by foreign companies. And not even just from China, but in India, South Korea Brazil, that are looking into how can they take advantage of domesticating production to be able to capture this IRA money that’s being made available.
It’s, it’s a subsidy that’s supposed to be benefiting domestic production, but it’s benefiting foreign Owned companies that are looking to domesticate the production who haven’t done so already, so it’s not even really leveling the playing field because it doesn’t really even go far enough to, to subsidize the, the domestic corporations that have already made a substantial capital investment and want to be able to continue their order book and their manufacturing.
Capacity, it, it, it kind of comes back to, all right, well, if you don’t like what China’s doing, it really only is because you don’t like their economic system. You don’t like communism and you don’t like, their, their human rights record. I mean, what they’re doing, you could call it unfair from a financial and competitive standpoint, but they’ve made a choice and we’re unable to match the choice that they’ve made.
And that’s what this really boils down to. We could, we could choose what our priorities are but when have we ever really prioritized industry? I mean I’ll tell you when, Phil. We prior we prioritize industry in times of war. Yeah. And, and that’s got that was kind of my point with all this is We’ve only ever made choices to, to, support industry when we, we can’t do anything else.
Otherwise, the government in particularly in the U. S. is very kind of laissez faire, hands off and let the market sort itself out. And that’s supposed to be capitalism. But, there’s a lot of people that complain, oh, the government supports our industries. Not to the same level that the Chinese government supports theirs.
And that’s the reality of the world we’re in, and the industry we’re in.
Allen Hall: Sure, but you’re seeing a shifting model in the United States, and I don’t want to dwell on this too long, but from 1945 until, let’s just say, 1975, maybe 1980, There was a post World War II where the rest of the world had destroyed itself and America was left pretty much unaltered in its manufacturing capacity and let America explode, right?
So then all of a sudden the U. S. became a huge exporter. The world is now stabilized from that horrific World War II event and some of the subsequent wars. Now, now it’s competing on economic, economic fronts that are just different than they were 60, 70 years ago even. So every, every economy has to adapt to the, to the new playing rules.
I’m wondering how far the US and Europe are going to go. on this new frontier. That, and that’s where I, that’s where I think we ought to look at because I want to come back after the break here and I want to talk about what Germany is doing. Being the largest state in Europe, they have a lot of weight and some of the things they have just done to push back on China, I think are going to be implemented elsewhere.
As busy wind energy professionals, staying informed is crucial and let’s face it, difficult. That’s why the Uptime Podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need.
Don’t miss out. Visit PESWind. com today.
Allen Hall: Well, Phil, Germany is introducing a set of state guarantees for wind energy production as part of a package to boost its wind industry. Now this move comes amid concerns about Chinese firms gaining momentum in this sector. A couple of key measures here are in expanding upon a bank program to include guarantees for a sustainable transformation, approximately 16 billion euros in guarantees are needed to ramp up production for 2030, and then expanding cybersecurity regulations to include all companies with access to power generation facilities, and obviously that’s directed at China.
The government aims to reduce dependency on China for critical components like permanent magnets and Germany plans to use existing EU tools and trade protection measures to ensure fair competition, right? So you’re now seeing Germany be a lot more proactive and, and obviously watching what China has just recently done, they’re going to go into high gear and they will not be the last one.
You, I’d imagine France is going to be right behind them and a number of other EU countries are going to want to do this. There’s where your shift is going to happen. And I, I think in some measure, the EU being a block of nations can throw significant amount of weight at China about turbines coming into their
Philip Totaro: countries.
Right? They can. And again, it’s, as we were talking about even before the break, it’s, it’s a choice that, that can be made. The choice that Germany’s making is interesting because they’re obviously going very heavy on the, the anti dumping. Duties and countervailing duties on a, kind of anti subsidy, what they’re calling it.
Regulations, but the, the reality of it is that only precludes the Chinese companies from manufacturing in China than importing into the EU. So that’s not necessarily going to have an impact on, companies like Mingyang who want to set up a factory in Germany, for example or in, in Italy with the recent agreement that they also struck.
Saini is also looking at setting up something in either Spain or Germany, so, that’s not going to stop the Chinese companies from necessarily coming into the market, it’s just the way in which they come in is going to be affected.
Allen Hall: But the cybersecurity touches all those areas, Phil. As soon as a Chinese company plants themselves in a neighborhood somewhere, the cyber security groups are going to be highly focused on that Chinese facility and the number of Chinese nationals coming in and out of it, so it wouldn’t be very difficult just from a cyber security, national security, defense aspect to go, to say no, just to honestly say no, And that is the move.
I mean, ultimately, it’s going to come down to something like that, which is defense related more than it is industry related.
Philip Totaro: In all likelihood, I’ll agree with that. But here’s the, here’s the flip side of it. These countries in Europe all have, priorities about job creation and, and, tax base creation.
And so whether it’s a Chinese owned company or a U. S. owned company or a German owned company, if they’re coming into a market trying to create jobs, the question is how long will that debate go on about cyber security versus or national security versus job creation and tax base creation, because while your economy is growing and your domestic companies are, are all ramping up production and, and things like that, that’s an easy conversation to say, well, we can keep the Chinese money and we can keep the Chinese industry out, but if your economy is stagnating or going down then you have to potentially invite foreign direct investment in.
And let them, as foreign owned entities, create the factories, create the jobs, and create the tax base that you’re not getting from your domestic industry anymore.
Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection WeatherGuard.
It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today.
Allen Hall: Blue Wind company specializing in high performance composites has secured a contract with GE Vernova to manufacture the WT 20.
wind turbine nacelle cover. Since the partnership began in late 2019, BlueWind has delivered over 2, 000 units of the 2X nacelle cover. This new generation of the WT20 model is more robust and has a higher power generation potential ranging from megawatts, so BlueWind is expanding into the 3x platform.
The key differences here and the newer models is it has thicker panels and some more metal mounts for easier maintenance. And it’s about a meter longer and they’re making it a little bit tougher, it looks like. So Blue Wind estimates they’re going to produce about a thousand of self covers for the 2X GE platforms over the next year, so a thousand more 2X platforms are going to happen.
And Blue Wind has invested about three million dollars in its industrial structure, including new equipment, CNC lines, fiberglass cutting machines molding machines, all those kind of things. Cool things and plans to double the number of employees to about 300 by the first half of 2025. Now going back to our discussion about outside U.
S. companies manufacturing components in the United States. This is one of them. Blue Wind is based in Brazil and very similar to the aerospace business where Embraer has a factory in Florida also and Airbus has a factory I think in Alabama. You have international companies coming to the United States taking some, I would assume this is going to fall into the, some of the manufacturing tax credits, Bill.
And, obviously, GE wants it to be domestically produced, and there are, I’d assume, U. S. employees making some of these nacelles. So, this is good in a sense, right? You’re employing U. S. U. S. Well, I don’t want to say U. S. citizens. I’m not even sure that’s going to be the case. But, we’ll just say, we’ll just assume that they’re all U.
S. citizens are making these nacelles. Is that really beneficial at the end of the day if they’re outside the U. S. based companies? If it’s something as critical as power infrastructure, at what point do we say, well, we’d like to have a couple of U. S. based companies involved in this? When does that, when does that
Philip Totaro: happen?
When, the price of gas and oil is probably less than half of what it is today, to be perfectly blunt. Because, the, look, the reality of this is we, and we’re not, going against Blue Wind here or anything. They, they have done a fantastic job at, at kind of growing their, their global footprint.
And, and look, they’re, they’re also playing under the rules. And the scheme that the, the DOE has kind of created and, and the, the federal government to the US has, has created with the IRA bill. So the, the reality of it is okay, they’re, they’re creating. U. S. jobs, quote unquote U. S. jobs, because, again, there, there might be some foreign workers in these factories but at the, at the end of the day, they are also foreign owned companies, which means that any profits that they generate, they have the option to repatriate that back to, in, in the case of Blue End, it’s Brazil, in the case of, Siemens or, or Vestas, it’s Denmark, and, and in the case of Nordex, it’s, Germany and, and Spain.
Blue so it, at the end of the day, I, I go back to my statement before, how is that necessarily that much different than what the Chinese are, are proposing to do with, coming into a market like the U. S.?
Allen Hall: Because I can’t build a factory in China
Philip Totaro: without their approval. I get that. But that’s kind of the thing is, if they come over here and spend the money to build the factory here.
And they’re hiring for the, 90%, U. S. workforce. Mean, is that not still creating value for, let’s say they put up a factory in Florida? Is that not still creating value in Florida?
Allen Hall: It’s creating jobs in Florida. It’s creating a tax base in Florida, right? Obviously, Florida is a beneficiary because of the taxation bit that whatever the company makes in Florida Employees pay taxes.
So therefore, yes, it’s a net benefit to the state of Florida.
Philip Totaro: However, it’s a foreign owned company. And in the case of China, it’s, it’s, potentially not only government, but military investing in, these, these corporations. And, and look, I, again, I, I antagonize on, on this point a lot because I’m trying to draw the distinction of, it’s, it’s, they’re not actually doing anything that would be substantially different than what we’d be doing if we were prepared to open our wallet and spend in the same way to, to subsidize our companies, but for the fact that the U.
S. Army is not directly invested in, like, renewable energy corporations and, and, ex generals or, or current generals are not directly on the board of directors of, of, G. E. Vrdova and, and, what have you. So, but going back to your original question, which is when are U.
S. companies going to be able to, to take advantage of this? The, the reality of it is, US companies don’t have, I mean, we already missed the boat from a certain perspective, because we, we might have technical competence to manufacture things like nacelles over here and, and do fiberglass. But even the other company that, that does a lot of GE nacelles is, is Danish.
So, at, at the end of the day, like, we don’t create enough Opportunity for the domestic companies to even get a foothold into the market because the barrier to entry at this point in the, in the maturity of the market is so high that they can’t even really do it if they wanted to. And the government certainly doesn’t create the mechanisms that they would need to in order to, to, to do it.
Cause these manufacturing tax credits are great, but the bulk of the benefit of the tax credits, the way it’s structured goes to companies like GE because GE negotiates. with Blue Wind, for example, to take advantage of most of the benefit of that tax credit. Because, Blue Wind manufactures and sells domestically, but then GE’s the one doing all the final assembly with domestic made components.
They get the, GE gets the benefit of the tax credit. But the manufacturing
Allen Hall: tax credit is not a significant part of that ARA bill. The production tax credit is where the majority of that lies. Now, the logic goes, well, you have to have foreign companies come in and manage these American workers to build these components.
Com No. Really? If you’re using American employees in an American factory, and you’re using American products to build the thing, then, at what point do you not select an American company to do the work? It’s basically the same dang thing. The only thing that’s happening is, is that if it’s a foreign based company outside the US based, they take the profits, onshore them into their country, and it doesn’t stay in the States.
It’s essentially the difference there, but it is relegating your domestic energy production system to other countries in some critical areas. Maybe not Nacelle housings may not be one of them because I’m sure you could spool up somebody in the states in about 30 days to go do this. However, there are some other components in there where you couldn’t.
And I, I think that those are the ones that you have to be really careful about. And, and what from my perspective, just watching at it at I’m at 10, 000 feet, but also my 10 feet there, I’m, I’m watching both these simultaneously. What I see is the lack of understanding of what those critical pieces are and to put emphasis on them from a government standpoint.
It’s the energy grid, for goodness sakes. Thanks. We have never let it sort of wander around and be built willy nilly. And we’re, we’ve always looked at that as a infrastructure as being part of the nation’s defense system in a sense, because it is. Are we going to then put up the political will to say, Hey, look, we’re going to start doing some of these things in the States and there are plenty of companies to choose from.
Pick one
Philip Totaro: and go. Well, and, and Matt, that was kind of my point is, part of what we just talked about in the previous segment was how Germany is trying to create incentives even to, to get off, Chinese produced goods. The whole point is we, we are still as a, as a planet. Globally dependent on China’s rare earth element supply chain to be able to either produce magnets for us or provide the rare earth element raw materials and then we refine and produce magnets over here.
So until and unless we can either create substitutes and alternatives to that supply chain, we are going to be dependent on that supply chain. That is elsewhere, as opposed to, we, I mean, this is also part of the problem is, okay, again, it’s not going to be applicable for things like fiberglass in the cells.
But for some of the internal guts of wind turbines and even solar, we don’t have the raw materials and the depth of capability to, to refine and produce the raw materials at the same cost level. That they would in, in China.
Allen Hall: Oh, I’m not saying it’s going to be the same cost level, Phil. What I’m saying is there are other places where those minerals lie and why are we not going after them in,
Philip Totaro: in some form?
The expense, but that’s exactly, it all comes down to money, Ellen.
Allen Hall: Right. But if we just spent 700 billion on an IRA bill, what do we have to show for it at times? And then that’s, that’s the, that’s the reality, right? The reality is when you start looking about what the long term effect of the IRA bill has been over the next five years, what is going to be the legacy here?
Will we have more US based manufacturing? Will we have more even in Europe? I mean, cause Europe’s going to do something similar. Will Europe have more EU based products built by EU companies and EU citizens? I
Philip Totaro: don’t know. I really don’t know. This even goes back to the conversation of priorities, because you’re saying, how can we create opportunities for the U.
S. in the U. S.? This is also choices that the DOE makes to go and spend a billion dollars subsidizing carbon capture, whatever. Nonsense, where A, they’ve got, they’ve got the, these oil and gas companies have the money, if they wanted to invest in that, they could invest without billions of dollars from the DOE doing that.
Why is the DOE spending money on things that are not to the benefit of creating this national and domestic security by creating the domestic supply chain for things like renewables, which are seeing increased penetration in, in the market? In
Allen Hall: the latest edition of PES Win Magazine, a number of great articles.
You can always find them at PESWin. com. There is a tensioning system by Tension Pro and it’s called the Quantum System. And I’m always a proponent of bolt tension versus bolt torquing. I know there’s still a lot of dispute about that, but the tooling that is coming from Tension Pro is great. Is really good and it’s a lot easier than it used to be.
So if you, if you take a look at the article, just go to pswin. com. You can actually see this tensioning tool. So it grabs, grabs the bolt, pulls it to tension. It’s all hydraulic. It’s really slick. And the amount of data that they are recording when they do these measurements and do these tensioning exercises.
It’s pretty much you plug it in and it just goes and stores all the data, which is a huge, huge time saver. I’m always shocked when I don’t see these, like these quantum systems out in service, because it’s going to save a tremendous amount of time, that data recordings. Yeah,
Philip Totaro: and if you think about it, what this technology is, is they’re, they’re able to, tension a bolt, but monitor the amount of pressure that’s being applied and record that so that, normally when, when you’re, hand torquing or tensioning anything, you’ll, you’ll do that and then you’ll mark it off.
Based on, a gauge. And if you see that this mark that, that was put on, the, the, the double nut system that’s usually utilized, if we’re, especially if we’re talking about like tower flanges or base flange on, on the turbine that system is, is potentially, it’s, it’s the, the most kind of simplistic system we could invent, I guess, for what we were willing to spend.
And in the past, because turbines were so small, it didn’t necessarily make sense to invest in all this, data acquisition system along with your, your torquing or tensioning system. To be able to capture the, this relevant information. But if you’re doing the commissioning work on, on a project and you need to ensure that everything’s being done, A, in the most time efficient way possible, and B, with the same kind of reliability and consistency, this is absolutely the way to go.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s truly amazing. And to check out Tension Pro’s quantum system, just go to PESWIN. com. That’s gonna 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 Substack weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosie’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
