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This week we discuss the recent GE Vernova investor call, discussing the company’s current situation, future plans, and how the US market will react. We also cover an article by TRESIOS from PES Wind Magazine about their offshore construction business. Join us at The Wind Energy O&M Australia Conference – https://www.windaustralia.com
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Allen Hall: In an extraordinary display of memory and pattern recognition, a man who doesn’t speak Spanish has dominated the Spanish World Scrabble Championships. Nigel Richards, a New Zealander living in Malaysia, defeated 145 competitors and won 22 consecutive matches to claim the title in Grenada, Spain. Known as the quote, Tiger Woods of Scrabble, Richards has mastered the game across multiple languages despite not speaking them.
He has a unique ability to memorize dictionaries without understanding anything what the words mean, and has led him to winning nearly 200 tournaments, including French in 2015 and 2018. Now, that is crazy, guys. Did you ever meet somebody with that kind of photographic memory, and you’re like, that is a very odd person?
If you have done it, if you’ve won championships in Spanish and French, and I assume English, wow, that is a unique person.
Joel Saxum: Is there money to be won playing Scrabble?
Allen Hall: Evidently there is because he’s won so many championships. It’s the, from all the information I could find online he, this guy is super human in how he does this.
According to some of his friends, he can look at a page of words and remember all those words. It’s like a photographic memory, even though he couldn’t carry a conversation in French or Spanish at all, he can’t carry one. It’s just understanding how words go together.
Phil Totaro: It’s technically a I forget specifically what it’s called, but it’s actually technically a form of autism that allows you to do that.
allows a person to do that. It’s still an astonishing talent. So
Joel Saxum: what I would say to as a segue into the show today is some people have an optimized electrical grid in their brain and it works better.
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Allen Hall: In the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine, which you can download at PESWind. com, a good article from Tresios, and I did not know that business very well until I read the article. It’s a big subsea construction and marine services company. And they’ve actually reorganized themselves because there’s so much offshore wind work that they’re, they have divided into basically two sections to do that, subseas construction and marine services.
And they have a third division because there’s so much work in offshore wind. They have a sort of a human resources division. It’s a company, workforce company called Mr. James. You can go to the Mr. James website. It’s actually quite good. It’s one of the better human resource workforce websites that I’ve ever seen, honestly.
It’s pretty cool. So when you’re looking for people to work at sea, Mr. James is not a bad place to go look for those people. But Joel the interesting thing about this is that there’s so much activity around wind. And you just don’t see all this work that’s happening, but it’s major construction work.
You got to know what you’re doing out there and Trecios is one of those companies. The
Joel Saxum: tough thing with
Allen Hall: offshore
Joel Saxum: construction is like the general public doesn’t see it, right? As for understanding, like you drive down the highway, high rises going up, cranes, big machines building the highway.
So it’s so visible and you can understand it a little bit. But when you go offshore, it’s just, it’s it’s imaginary to most people to see Oh, you see these turbines in the water. Great. The one I always compare it to Allen, you and I talk about this often is like the subsea oil and gas infrastructures.
Same thing with wind. Like you see these towers and the big blades up there, but you don’t see all the stuff that happens below the surface. The pile driving, the rock dumps, the cable lays, the trenching, all of the geo geophysical work that has to be done beforehand. There’s so much to do there and it’s inherently complex, right?
Because almost everything you do outside of basically an offshore wind driving monopiles is remote work. So you’re working with ROVs. You don’t actually have people on it. You have, robotics and you’re dealing in sea states and keeping the vessel steady and customizing that vessel to be able to work with the kit that you need for that specific job.
So having people like Tresios that have a lot of experience, it says, we’re reading the article here, doing a little research, the founders both previously worked for Allseas, huge offshore construction company. So these kinds of people that you grab for a construction project like this, they have these skill sets.
They’re very specialized, right? I’ve been on projects before. We’re like, Hey, we need this one person to come in because they have the knowledge of how to do this. And that person costs 2, 500 a day. That’s the kind of crazy stuff that happens in offshore construction. Having a partner like Trecios, it has a lot of experience.
They have the body shop part figured out. They know how to upfit vessels. They know how to go from feed study all the way through construction as a full on EPC. They’re the partner, the kind of partner you want to have.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s quite remarkable. So if you want to learn all the things that TRESIOS is doing, just go to peswind.com
,download your issue and give it a good read. There’s a lot of great articles in this issue. This. This quarter.
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Allen Hall: right, GE just held an investor update as we’re recording this. It happened last night. Very interesting.
GE Vernova is broken into the three main parts. They have a gas turbine division. They have an a switch transformer division. And they have the wind energy division. So they call different titles, but it’s essentially it. So she, understand what products are they’re serving there. So it’s really three different businesses that are all wrapped together, but it’s all about electrification.
That’s where their emphasis is. That business is seeing tremendous growth in gas turbines, and it’s seeing really good growth in electrification, the switchgear and transformers that it’s delivering and the the, Outlook for that is fantastic. They’re sold out through 2028 for a lot of equipment already.
They’re selling slots into 2029 right now, but the wind division, not so much. All right. So the wind divisions is reporting about a negative 10 and a half a percent EBITDA margin in 2023, but they’re expecting that to be have about a 50 percent improvement in 2024. Still negative, but half what it was, which is good.
And they’re projecting EBITDA losses between 200 and 400 million into 2025. And that is all, or vastly all, from offshore. The offshore wind business is really dragging them down in terms of numbers, right? So they had the blade break at Dogger Bank and they had blades break at Vineyard. That and the slowdown of those projects really are pushing them to the right, which they wanted to have done sometime next year.
Whatever now you’re talking about. 26 ish timeframe when they’re going to be wrapped up. And that is killing them because you can imagine, Joel, as you pointed out numerous times, ships are expensive and if you’re not producing, putting turbines up, you’re just spending money. And that’s what’s happening.
Onshore, which is the real focus here, GE has not taken an order for offshore in 35, 37 months. And they don’t plan to take any more, so their focus is onshore. The vast majority of the onshore sales are in the United States, like 80 percent of the business is going to be in the United States, which kind of makes sense.
But the projection of revenue is flat. So 2024 is expected to be flat. It’s roughly what it was last year, about almost 10 billion, 9 billion, 10 billion. And they’re projecting it’s going to be down a little bit in 2025. As I think Phil pointed out a while ago. They’re planning to make about 2, 000 wind turbines, and Joel and I had talked to a couple other people and involved with that, and he said, GE’s planning to make about 2, 000 wind turbines.
They have the capability to make 4, 000. Their break even’s at 1, 000 for onshore. So they’re gonna get to 1, 000, be break even, make another 1, 000 more, and that’s essentially it. They have a capability to do twice that, but they have no plans to do it right now. Because they’re really focused on improving the quality.
And that is the big driver. I mentioned in the Slack chat Also that GE said the word lean probably a thousand times during that hour and a half. One for each turbine. Pretty much. Everything was lean this, lean that. And what, when GE people say lean, they mean cut. That’s what that means. They are trying to reduce costs, because there’s not much they’re going to be able to do in wind in terms of raising prices.
The concern here is we’re not going to see a lot of growth in wind. In fact, they’re projecting pretty flat growth. So that leads me to the question of what is going to happen to wind if GE is not driving it in the United States? Is it really going to be stagnant? Is it just repowering projects just to hit the PTC or what is driving that sort of slowdown in wind?
Joel Saxum: I think one thing to, to add to your anecdotal comments to Alan is the statements that they made. 2024 revenue expected to be flat, right? And 2024 expecting improvements with nearly 50 percent EBITDA improvement. Only means cuts, right? If your revenue’s flat and you’re gonna get up your EBITDA, you gotta cut some fat somewhere.
You gotta be doing something. And so they say it right in their statements, this is what we’re gonna do. What I see for the, the next few years, this is the we know that there’s players that are basically side by side developers with GE, right? We know NextEra’s gonna be putting in some GE turbines.
And their big clients, I’m sure are going to soak up a lot of that market store, that share of the volume. Because basically it’s like, Alan, you and I were having the conversation about doing this thing like aerospace does. Hey, this is the capacity. We’ll sell you a slot in that capacity. And if you don’t like it or someone wants more then the prices just go up.
Those are the slots. Sorry. That’s what’s available. I think that for GE as a company, that’s probably, or it’s a GE playbook thing, right? That’s a good way to get back to EBITDA and control getting back to profitable in a few years, writing that ship. What that does for the overall wind industry. I think it continues to leave a gap.
So so the last few years we’ve been talking about a gap from Siemens Gamesa, right? When they stopped selling their turbines. They didn’t install many. Like, when you look at the install capacity in the United States, there’s a lot of Siemens 2. 3s and some, of that type size, these B53, B59 blade machines.
But there’s not a whole lot of those when they started putting in the SG145s and stuff. There’s not a whole lot of them. Then you have that gap. B or GE will continue to put turbines in, but it might not be enough to satisfy the consumption of that development market. People will look to Vesta’s more.
People may look to, you may see some Nordics turbines getting installed because I think that if you’re saying 2000 turbines a year, we’re going to install, and that’s not just the U S we know that 80 percent of that 75, 80 percent of that’s probably us, but we know that some of those are going elsewhere in the world.
So that you say 1500 turbines a year from GE. That’s four, five, six big wind farms. And we know that Sun Z is already going to soak up, how many hundred of these things. So that leaves a lot of space for other players to come in and get some installed capacity numbers.
That’s my opinion. I think we’re going to install a lot more than 1, 500 turbines in the United States in a per year, the next few years. Phil, what do you think?
Phil Totaro: Yeah, I agreed, but. Keep in mind that the reason why everybody’s, revised their forecasts is because of the outcome of the election and everybody’s expecting, as we’ve talked about, there’s going to be, a spillover into 25 and 26 of everything that’s in the interconnection queue that can get money to get built, but that’s a finite amount of projects and that’s why GE’s saying it’s a finite amount of capacity that they’re going to serve.
In that market I don’t necessarily expect that obviously Nordex wants to expand their footprint Siemens wants to come back into the US market, but they haven’t really done so with any brand new orders yet and Vestas is here and, is slugging it out with GE, but at the end of the day, I think everybody’s looking at a market where I don’t know how many times we’ve said it, probably just as many times I’ve said the word inflation and interest rates on the show as, as much as, GE said lean in their investor update last night.
The reality is as long as interest rates are high, fewer projects are getting built. It’s just, that’s the reality, which means fewer turbines, it trickles down through the supply chain. Why
Allen Hall: such a huge growth in gas turbines then?
Phil Totaro: Because there’s still demand for electricity actually, electricity demand is still increasing, but because Oil and gas prices are still relatively stable to high and that kind of segment of the business is looking more profitable than wind or solar that frankly requires a lot more transmission build out.
Rosemary Barnes: But also aren’t gas peakers quick and cheap to build, right? So if you. aren’t sure about the future. It doesn’t cost as much to, to build a gas plant as a gas peaker plant, as it does to build, a wind farm and batteries. Yeah. And also if you’re not sure when delaying making a decision, you eventually delay and delay long enough that you’ve got no choice but to, put in something like that.
I think that’s part of it.
Joel Saxum: I think transmission as well, Rosemary, on the same side, it’s easier to connect A peaker plant like that to a transmission than it is to put a wind farm where it might be intermittent and it might not be, you need, Alan, we’ve said before Hitachi, GE, all these switch gear and converter.
Companies are way out with backlog. So it’s easier to put on more traditional power than to put on these more complex stuff.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But I think it must be like a partly US specific scenarios, right? Because the globe, wind isn’t stagnating anymore. We, we’re seeing growth again globally with wind, maybe, not as much as it could be or as much as we would hope, but I don’t think that interest rates are high everywhere.
So I don’t think that that fully explains it. I think transmission is more of a problem than in the U S than elsewhere, but again, it’s not the only place that’s struggling with transmission. So yeah, I want to know, you guys are there on the ground. What is it about the U S? Last time, even Trump, last time.
Trump was in, there was actually, a little surge in wind installations, probably by people, like you say Phil trying to try to get in before the, yeah, the door slammed shut. Yes it’s a hard one for me as an outsider to figure out.
Phil Totaro: The reason, yes, transmission’s a big issue, but the reason we keep saying interest rates are probably the dominant thing is because there’s a finite amount of money that can be invested right now, and the sentiment amongst investors is, I’d rather put my money into oil and gas that’s giving me a certain degree of certainty and, you I can project my return a lot more clearly and cleanly than I can with, and this is the big problem and the big issue that, that a lot of people have is when you’ve got an administration coming in and you don’t know what they’re going to do, investors are just going to sit on the sidelines and not spend the money they could be spending, or they’re going to go spend it someplace else rather than in renewables.
Cheers. And that’s the issue is, it, if you’re expecting chaos or uncertainty, you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna want to get in the middle of it. It’s, it is, that’s why it’s also, I think, a uniquely, U. S. kind of a challenge it’s much more of a scenario like in Australia, for example, where If you get sufficient transmission buildout, then it facilitates the buildout of renewable projects, even in a high interest rate environment, because you have the opportunity for offtake.
We have a finite opportunity for offtake, and that’s right now being gobbled up by investors that want to put money into, gas projects gas turbine power generation projects rather than grid, batteries, and renewable power
Allen Hall: generation. So the big push appears to be AI in data centers.
From the gas turbine business it sounded like a number of these gas turbines are going to end up in either Texas or Louisiana because they could get permitted
Rosemary Barnes: quicker.
Allen Hall: And the data centers were going to be down there for a variety of reasons, so it sounds like there’s a lot of capacity being purchased trying to pick up those slots of, I’m going to put a data center down in Texas, I’m going to need something to power it, I’m going to gas because I can plug into the gas infrastructure that exists in Texas and Louisiana and it’s a quick and dirty way to, to do it.
The troubling thing about it is it’s the quick and the dirty way to do it. Why the companies that are involved in those data centers, which are the Googles, the Metas, the, the SpaceX’s, the Tesla’s, the all those companies that are in that space, you would think that they want to have something that’s a little more technical.
Cleaner, natural gas is not, obviously it’s way better than coal, but if you had the opportunity to do something wind or solar, you’d think that they’d be doing it maybe it’s a time frame?
Rosemary Barnes: But they are they’re doing everything, like when they’re directly purchasing electricity it usually is through something clean.
You’ve seen announcements with Nuclear, wind, solar, batteries, geothermal is a big one. So it’s like everything. They need electricity no matter what. I think a lot of it is also perspective. Like they’re a lot more worried about. Not being able to take an opportunity than they are in making sure that they don’t, procure too much data center capacity.
So I’m not sure that the amount of activity is really representative of what will actually happen. But then a lot of it as well is utilities saying, we know that data centers are interested in connecting here, so we need more electricity and we need it fast, and the only way we can do that is with gas.
And partly I think that’s because, utilities mostly everywhere around the world are highly incentivized to say, we’ve got capacities about to increase massively, we need to invest because it’s that investment is the only way that they can increase their rates and get a, guaranteed return on any investment they make.
If you look back through history, we’ve had really flat electricity yeah, like growth in electricity demand over the last couple of decades. And still, if you look back at utilities predictions for what they would see in the future, it’s been a lot, it, they’ve on average been predicting quite a lot of growth.
Actually, I was listening to a podcast. I think it was that one with Jesse Jenkins. Whatever it’s called, shift key or something like that. Anyway, and they were saying that some, one of them had done some research recently and looked at. The projections that utility companies make, and on average, they’re predicting two and a half percent more than the reality of what growth has been.
And it sounds like not a big gap, but when you think that the real growth has been basically zero and they’re consistently estimating two and a half percent more than that, you can see that it was a real bias towards yeah, overestimating. And. In a lot of ways, that makes sense because you don’t want to find yourself short, right?
If you’re an elected official or, in charge of running an electricity utility, then Yeah, people really don’t want any shortfalls. They’d be, they don’t want to pay too much, but they’d probably rather pay a bit more than have a lot of blackouts. So yeah, I think that like the story that gets told is not as predictive of the future as it maybe sounds on first blush.
And I think that, yeah, when you look at. I don’t know, when we look back in a few years, I think that we will likely think, Oh, wow, everyone like freaked out over data centers, but it wasn’t that big a deal. I know currently data centers use less electricity in the US than televisions do. Like even if you double that, it’s still it’s not the electricity grid’s going to crash yeah, kind of scenario.
So it’s. Significant. And for sure, electricity demand is increasing and is going to increase because, we’re trying to electrify everything. So I don’t want to disagree that it’s a challenge, but I think it does matter what proportion we think is going to be for data centers and also, like what kinds of data centers, because people think, Oh, this means like always on 24, seven electricity, there’s that’s, all that data center needs and all that we’re going to need in the future is going to be dominating electricity grids.
But I think actually we’re not going to see as dramatic a change in the demand profile from what we see today by adding another, like 5 percent of like pretty constant around the clock. Demand, it’s not going to change curves too much. So yeah I tend to think that the future is going to look more like the past than what people are currently making it out to be.
Joel Saxum: But I think you made an argument there for some of these, some of the constant powered baseload things, because. If I’m talking about my house, right? There’s a certain time of the day when wind and solar is usually pretty decent that the peak load is here. Whereas if these things run in all the time, 24 7, that you have to even that load out with something that can run like if you’re talking renewables like hydro or geothermal, it’s a better option for data center type driven things than would be wind or solar.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. If it’s not going on to the electricity grid, then I would agree with you. If and there is also a lot of data center stuff that is you can shift the demand around, a lot of training and yeah, especially from people who are cost conscious, you don’t have to do it. Not everything is a Google search that has to happen exactly when you want it to.
Not everything is a, recording a podcast remotely where, this data needs to go through right now. Yeah. Otherwise, Alan’s going to, freeze in the middle of his one of his, one of his classic rants. Some of it is flexible, but the fact is like like Australia is an extreme example, Texas must be as well, where, like plenty of times rooftop solar is meeting, or solar at least, is meeting all of demand on the grid.
And as solar increases, that’s going to get more and more. There’s no such thing as baseload in Australia anymore because there’s so many times when we have, even in Australia, literally behind the meter, there is more than enough electricity for everything in large parts of Australia now from time to time.
And like we’re not at the end of our solar installation journey yet. So that’s going to continue to get more and more. It’s not that there’s no industry happening around the clock in Australia. It’s that there’s so much solar that it’s more than that amount of baseload. If you look at, if you see data center, like assume data centers are 24 seven, if you assume that’s going to increase by, it’s going to double, we end up with another, 5 percent of the electricity demand that comes from 24 seven data centers, that’s still not going to undo the fact of the vast amount of solar that’s in the grid.
You’re still going to see that issue with. No baseload in the grid as a whole. It’s, I think people tend to think about things in isolation, like imagining that a data center is coming online and building its own nuclear power plant just for that data center, but really it’s not, it’s, once a piece of that, it’s gone.
They definitely want thermoelectricity and would prefer it to be clean, but they’re not for the most part actually building their own generation and not planning to be part of the electricity market.
Joel Saxum: Could there be an issue in the future? So this is a really a, me being daft, but when I think about power generation and companies that do it.
You have people that, this company is known for building wind farms. This company is known for building solar and they connect to the grid and they do this, but there’s like a, there’s an old school group of companies that do, would buy a gas power plant. Could there be a future where you have random people buying, like not random people, but random companies that are new to the space.
It’s Hey, we’re going to throw up a gas plant just for data centers. And then instead of wind or something.
Allen Hall: No, that’s exactly what’s happening.
Joel Saxum: Okay.
Allen Hall: Right now, as GE just explained it, they said a lot of the slots that were taken by people or companies that didn’t have a lot of experience on energy projects.
And so they were not sure they were actually going to be able to take that order, but they held that position in the manufacturing so they had the ability to get a turbine. But Joel, I think the question is, when GE says that there’s a lot of users that don’t have any experience or little experience in energy projects.
That screams AI to me. That’s, that says Google, Meta, right? For sure. Amazon, whoever.
Phil Totaro: So for Google’s benefit, by the way, they have actually just recently said this week that they’re going to start putting any new data centers co located, basically as to the extent that they can next to wind, solar, or conventional power generation.
So that, it shortens the amount of transmission needed to get the power to the data center and gives them a faster reaction time to stabilize the grid when it comes to the actual power offtake. With a scenario like that it could actually it’s almost like you could have a data center serving the way that like hydro does to balance out, variable renewables where you could throttle, a data center’s consumption based upon, whether you have access or need, it needs additional so it can, it’s almost like it would act like a flywheel of sorts.
Allen Hall: Yeah I think that’s true, Phil. Being, when you listen to GE Talk, who is into the HVDC, which is into the transformers, into the switchgear, that equipment is, there are orders for that for like separate grids. Again, going back to Joel’s point, AI, right? There’s separate things going on out in the desert somewhere and they need to have switchgear for it.
There’s not a lot of switchgear HVDC projects going on for existing grid. Which is the worry. Going back to Rosemary’s point, the existing grid needs to get upgraded. There’s not much of that going on. There is some, but not at the level in which Rosemary’s talking about to upgrade the ability to transmit energy across the country.
That doesn’t seem to be happening at a pace which is needed. Upgrading the grid doesn’t have an ROI. Immediately. No, it doesn’t. And, that’s just it. If I have an existing transmission system that’s been running for 50 years and a lot of the equipment that GE is going to be selling is replacement for the old transformers and the old switcher because they’re just aging out and they’re going to go back in and put new equipment in.
Why are we not upgrading that, like doubling the capacity, tripling the capacity of those substations with new technology? HVDC, for example. It’s just a 50 year wrong move. You’re playing a transformer, you don’t want to touch it for 50 years. Once you do it, you’re like, oh, it’s oh, that sunk cost.
I don’t want to do it again and upgrade it later. Isn’t it just like a self fulfilling argument, like
Rosemary Barnes: sustaining and expanding? There’s a lot of people because it’s so hard to build new transmission in, especially in the U. S. There are a lot of people talking about ways that you can get more out of existing transmission.
And, there’s a lot of cool tech actually people using carbon fiber instead of aluminum because it it sags less when it gets hot. And so you can, put a lot more power down the same lines with the same towers. And so like you can go through and change all that and get a lot more smart ways about.
figuring out what’s the capacity, have a dynamic line rating so that, on a really windy day when there’s a lot of, convective heat transfer, then you should be able to put more power through before they get too hot and sag, which works perfectly for, if you’re connecting wind farms, because obviously when they want to put a lot of power down is when it’s really windy.
So there’s heaps of smart smart things people are talking about. I haven’t actually heard anybody except for you mention the substations, but yeah, like upgrading them, it would be, obviously it makes no sense to do one part of it and not the rest of it. Otherwise there’s, yeah, it just doesn’t make any difference.
So definitely people are talking about it. Are they doing it? I don’t know.
Allen Hall: Going back to the money part, which is what Joel was on. I’ll throw out a little news snippet I saw earlier today. The F 35 fighter program in the United States. Lockheed Martin has roughly a 1 trillion contract for that. That may be canceled.
1 trillion. Now, 1 trillion in the grid could go a heck of a long way of electrifying more of the United States at higher energy levels than we could possibly imagine. So I think the funding may be there. The question is, do we have the knowledge, willpower, momentum, to do those upgrades? To take the capacity up 2x, 3x?
I think as a country we used to.
Joel Saxum: Think about the interstate highway system. The interstate highway system was built, is, that’s the Eisenhower stuff, right? So post World War II. That was built, that, what, people may not realize this, but that was built as a defense project. The Interstate Highway System of the United States is a defense project.
There’s rules where every five miles you have to have a one mile straight stretch that can be utilized as a landing strip. Think about that next time you’re driving. Every five miles or, I can’t remember exactly the number it is, there’s a straight stretch. So the, our country used to have the gusto to get massive projects done like that.
We just don’t have it anymore. You look at certain things like we’ve got to do we’ve got to fix this one bridge. It’s going to be a billion dollars to fix this bridge. And it’s going to take us four years or whatever, whoever, those numbers are crazy, but to do a massive overhaul like that, we need something that modernize our grid.
Absolutely. But that won’t happen until in the, where we sit right now, until we have blackouts, brownouts, or some, something happens to push that along because we’re just not there.
Allen Hall: Do you feel like we’re in a hold my beer moment? Yeah, I feel like there is like a hold my beer. Let’s see if we can pull this thing off moment or watch this because you see it, it’s palpable.
It wasn’t palpable six months ago, I didn’t think, but today I’m like, man, anything that I thought was going to be firm, fixed, never change is completely up for debate. And an F 35 program, something that is so instrumental to the defense budget, to the Air Force, to the Marines. is willing to be cut, stop, cut, close the doors on the factory thing, and then anything’s possible.
Literally anything’s possible. We could send a man to Mars or a woman to Mars, whoever to Mars, and we could sure as heck increase the grid. Back to Rosemary’s point, like just increase the cable, increase the transformer
Phil Totaro: size, do it. Yeah Alan, this assumes that They’re going to cancel an F 35 project and then reallocate a trillion dollars into the grid, which is never going to happen.
This is fun to speculate about, but
Allen Hall: No. What I’m getting at though, Phil, is that the people at the top at the moment that are talking about these high level things, one of them is Musk, who is a huge solar proponent, who is a huge electrification proponent. There has to be a lot of discussions at the highest level at the moment about, we need more electricity, everybody.
And we don’t have it. I can’t sell Teslas, and I don’t think that discussion’s happened, but maybe it has. I can’t sell Teslas if I can’t plug them in. I can’t, if there’s no plugs, there’s no power, there’s no electrification, there’s no electric vehicles. Now maybe Trump doesn’t care. I don’t know. Don’t, he probably owns a Tesla.
Somebody in that organization probably owns a Tesla. One of his kids probably owns a Tesla. Cybertruck? Okay, there you go. He got gifted a Cybertruck. He’s got a Cybertruck. So he needs a place to plug that thing in. And at Mar a Lago, he probably has it. Let me tell you, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, getting a plug in for my Cybertruck, which I will never own, by the way, is almost impossible.
I can’t get it. I can’t even keep the power on in my house at the minute.
Joel Saxum: I think that you’re 100 percent correct, Alan, that we’re, that the possibilities of a wild ride, they’re coming.
Allen Hall: I will say, one of the things that can happen right now, and America can change its direction relatively quickly.
There is when this momentum at these election changes if you can get a clear message out let’s I’ll use the branding right making America great again. What’s gonna make quote unquote make America great again forget about all the other garbage is that America was electrified, like in the early 1900s.
And that system still pretty much exists like it was in the 1900s. And obviously in the 1930s and 40s, there was a huge improvement, right? 1950s, obviously huge improvement. However, that was 70 years ago. And if someone at the highest level, like a musk, says, we need to get on this thing, and that means We need to create more energy, which is what Trump is talking about.
We need more energy. Great. We need more energy. What the heck are you going to do with it? It is, you can’t deliver it anywhere. Where is it going to go? So you can drill all you want, or, and you can get all the natural gas, you can frack all you want, but you, the end use, which is electricity for the vast majority of that, has nowhere to go.
You need to fix that problem first, which is the hardest problem. Transmission is the hardest problem. Where’s the DOE on this? Where’s the DOE on transmission? Joel, you asked that, that’s a really great question, because I think I’ve seen the nominee for the DOE, who was an oil and gas person, fine, not super.
But those people, generally speaking, the DOE, whoever’s sitting on the DOE, doesn’t get to make the big picture outlook. Whoever that person is, and I think it’s someone, isn’t it someone from North Dakota? Maybe the former governor of North Dakota, one of those people. Chris Wright. He’s an oil gas person, right?
That’s his background. He’s CEO of Denver based Liberty Energy. Okay, that’s it, Liberty Energy. Yeah. An oil gas company. Fine. But if he’s really wants to make America great again, having lower gas prices, yes, but electricity is going to be the thing. You can’t grow factories without electricity. You can’t do it.
You can’t grow jobs without electricity. Can’t do it. And we’re capacity locked right now.
Phil Totaro: Yeah, I think about FDR in the 30s trying to get everybody out of Let’s go CCC style,
Allen Hall: man. I don’t think we need CCC. We don’t need that. Joel has pointed out to me numerous times when we drive across Texas and Oklahoma, he’ll say, we’re like driving over 50 pipelines between here and wherever we’re going.
And he’s right. He’s totally right. Like we’re driving over a lot of oil and gas infrastructure all the time. He’s right. And you just don’t see the electrical infrastructure anywhere near that. If we spent some time, if we spent four years trying to get the infrastructure on the grid side upgraded, a lot of problems in America would go away and the GDP would definitely skyrocket.
That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. And subscribe in the channels below to Uptime Tech News or Weekly Newsletter. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
