Are floating wind turbines–which are capable of producing electricity in deep water where winds are highest–something that we’ll see more of in the near future? Right now there is only one floating wind farm in the world, locating in Scotland. Allen and Dan discuss the implications of deep water floating turbines and what’s keeping them from mainstream use. Allen also breaks down new research on carbon fiber spar and what it means for wind turbine blade construction.
Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast? Email us!Â
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Full Transcript from Uptime Podcast EP14 – Floating Wind Turbines, Carbon Fiber Spar and Wind Turbine Tech
[00:00:00] Dan: This episode is brought to you by weather guard, lightening tech at weather guard, we make wind turbine lightning protection easy. If you’re a wind farm operator, stop settling for damaged turbine blades and constant downtime. Get your uptime back with our strike table lightning protection system. Learn more in today’s show notes or visit dot com slash strike tape.
Allen Hall: Welcome back I’m Allen hall.
Dan: This is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection, and ways to keep your wind turbines running.
Alan, how you doing back for another episode of uptime?
Allen Hall: Yeah, busy week, Dan, a lot, a lot of crazy things going on in the world and to, you know, we’re just one small part of it. How are things down in D C it sounds like you’ve had some excitement down your way.
Dan: Yeah. Um, once of the [00:01:00] protests briefly last weekend, it seems like it’s calming down a lot here, which is, which is good, but it seems like a lot of the, you know, there’s a lot of valid reasons people are pushing for change.
So it’s good that people. Peaceful. He got to get their word out and had their voices heard. And it seems like a lot of things are gonna change for the better, which is really positive. So, so yeah.
Allen Hall: Good. Uh, are, are you getting more into summertime down there now? And it’s it’s it’s
Dan: June, it’s full blown summer.
Yeah. It’s like 80, 80 to 90 degrees every day, this past week. So. Yeah, it’s taken a, a quick turn. There were, there really was no spring. I mean, I guess there was, but it was like sixties and seventies. And then now it’s like quickly 90 in human. So pretty quick. And
Allen Hall: people are starting to go outside a little bit more, even with the crone of ours.
Um, Still kicking around. Are they masking up still or is it kind of just get outside and wander
Dan: around? Uh, so at the protests, almost everyone was in a mask. I mean, [00:02:00] the overwhelming majority were, were wearing masters cause people were, they knew they were going to be in close quarters. But outside of that, most people I’d say it’s 60, 40, don’t wear a mask when they’re outside.
I don’t wear a mask when it’s out, when I’m outside. I think that’s. I think it’s a little silly. Um, it just depends on proximity, but there’s some people that still jog in their masks. There’s some people that still still sees couples walking with both masks on. Um, so it’s just, you know, it seems to be a personal preference, but there’s definitely a lower prevalence of masks
Allen Hall: for sharing store starting open.
Cause we’re starting open stores up here, which is really the big thing for everybody.
Dan: So we’re on phase one. I think phase two is probably coming up soon. Phase one was just. Uh, restaurants reopened for patio seating. So like I could go to I’m yet to go to a restaurant I’ve eaten at like Chipola having taken out, take out here and there, but I have not sat down at a outdoor restaurant, but they’re like getting pretty busy now, which is good.
And people are excited about it. Um, people aren’t wearing [00:03:00] masks at their tables because you’re eating right you’re with your people. I think that’s fine cases in DC still seem to be going down. And it doesn’t seem like there’s been any adverse effects, at least as far as I’ve seen, uh, from the protest, which is good because no one wanted like everyone to get sick from going out and, you know, trying to, again, protest for, for change in this country.
That’s a good thing. So hopefully we’re not all. You know, penalized for it and people get sick. So hopefully that can just continue to trend in the right direction. Yeah. But yeah. Wow. But yeah, the big, the big thing, the big news though, is cicadas. You brought this up, uh, off air and you’ve never seen the cicadas come out in full force.
Allen Hall: We live in Massachusetts and I’d say they don’t exist up here, but it’s pretty cold. And I think part of cicadas are kind of a warmer weather critter, right? Uh,
Dan: it seems like, yeah. Yeah, but I read that article. You mentioned, I read it, I guess probably two weeks, two weekends ago that they’re coming back because for those of you listening [00:04:00] cicadas in, I guess it’s more like the mid Atlantic.
Are, there’s a lot of varieties, but there’s one variety. That’s very cyclical. And they basically stayed dormant in like a nymph stage for either 13 or 17 years sort of plus or minus. And they said that this year they’re dirt do to come back. And the last time this happened, I was a senior in high school, which I’m 34.
So that would have been, you know, 16, 16, 17 years ago. And it’s insane. You’re walking down the sidewalk crunching on cicadas, like their, like their leaves. Like you have it. It’s literally, if you had a huge tree in your house, in the fall or in your front yard, in the fall and your, and your entire driveway and your saw in your sidewalk is covered in leaves.
That’s how it sounds as you’re walking crunching through these bugs that are big. I mean, they’re the size of a silver dollar. These are not smiles. It’s one of the most insane things I’d ever seen at that point. And how just the ground coated in
Allen Hall: it’s the ground like crawling like an episode [00:05:00] of the mummy.
You never seen them movies. The mother.
Dan: Yes. They’re not as dynamic creatures. Like those. Yeah. There’s like scares or whatever you call them. They’re not really crawling around that much. They’re pretty, you know, just like kind of there and then they’ll fly away, take off or whatever, but like dogs real numb.
You’re just stepping on and you’re trying to, it’s disgusting. It’s disgusting stepping on that many of these large books. It’s crazy. So when this comes back, happened to take some time, I’m going to take so much video it’s. I mean, it’s going to be a social media phenomenon because 17 years ago, There wasn’t Instagram, no Twitter.
I don’t know. I don’t know if Twitter existed. Oh, no. It’s going to be everywhere. I mean, they’re just be prepared for so much Cicada madness on social media. It is, it’s a fascinating, bizarre and disgusting phenomenon. And it lasted for like two weeks. Cause they just hang out and then they die. And they’re still there because they don’t just magically go.
They’re big
Allen Hall: shuffle them up like snowflakes in December. Right?
Dan: Big clouds. It’s [00:06:00] crazy. Yeah. It’s crazy. I’m really excited now that you mentioned that, but that’s a comeback. It’s such a weird natural phenomenon. It’s so weird. Having grown up, but
Allen Hall: I haven’t grown up in the Midwest. The, the insect that makes everybody nuts is grasshoppers.
And there are times when grasshoppers can get really thick. Like, um, you know, the one you hear about all the time, it’s like during the dust bowl, they had just huge amounts of grasshoppers come through and just devouring crops. Right.
Dan: Just, just
Allen Hall: hit a corn field and just clean it up. Boom. Uh, so when there’s a lot of grasshoppers around, those are big, right.
They, they, they also like to fly and they also can hop pretty fast. So like, you’re trying not to step on them. They’re everywhere. It’s just like this ooey gooey mess all the time. It just especially driving and run into it, all those things at nighttime.
Dan: Yeah. Car’s
Allen Hall: a
Dan: mess. Sounds very, sounds very similar.
So you’ll be prepared for this a little bit, then our grass, our grasshoppers and locusts, the same [00:07:00] thing. They’re not. No, no, no. But I feel like they know. They’ve been talked about in that same
Allen Hall: way. And it may, it may have been, but you mean grasshoppers or green lawn got the, you know, it’s like Jimminy cricket.
Dan: They’re awesome. Yeah, they’re awesome. I, there are just times in my life where I hear about these plagues of locusts and they seem I’m like, is that just like an interchangeable term or just like a cousin? Of the grasshopper where they’re kind of similar creature, but could be, I don’t exactly know what a locus looks like.
Allen Hall: Well, I
Dan: don’t know. I have low locus exposure in my life, I guess, but grasshoppers are cool. It’s it’s weird that they’re so destructive. Like they’re terrible paths. I mean, they decimated crops. They’re terrible pets, but they’re really, they’re super cool bugs. They’re big legs and yeah, they’re
Allen Hall: fascinating farmers saying them.
Farmers hate them.
Dan: Yeah.
Allen Hall: Just kills everything. Yeah. Yeah. So big news in the winter ministry this week, a lot of things going on, um, Did you saw the thing about, uh, the InVenture? What there’s, what is described as the inventor of the winter been modern winter, I’ve been wanting to [00:08:00] basically have floating wind turbines out in the ocean and then sort of anchor them down with some big cables.
You see that article?
Dan: So Hendrix stays still. Uh, he, I guess is the sort of the father of the modern wind turbine. And he believes that California has is, is a, is a great place where there’s a lot of deep water where they can essentially power the entire state and we could potentially power most of the world.
Um, if we can get the technology there to, you know, anchor these in such deep water, which they’re, which we can’t. Right. So I don’t mean anchor isn’t fastened to the bottom of the sea bed, but they’re going to have to float. So, I mean, you’re an engineer. What do you think about the ability to float a 200 foot tall, 300 foot tall, very top heavy wind turbine.
That’s taking 40 miles per hour sense. I
Allen Hall: don’t know how that works. It seems like the, the amount of load you’re taking and the abuse, these things would take and floating out there and it just be. Astronomically high, [00:09:00] obviously, we’ve we built, uh, or rigs off the coast of California for a number of years being authored.
Gulf. Mexico has a bunch of them too. Uh, and those, those facilities are huge, but they aren’t. Anchored because they’ve got a line going into the earth to poor or a lot of the ground. Um, but an a wind term is case there’s really not, there’s not much to anchor them to. So I, I dunno, I guess conceptually, the thing is, is that conceptually, can you do it, is it possible?
Would it actually generate the amount of energy you think it’s going to generate? Maybe it’s possible, but is it something that can be reliably done? Because the engineering on that’s going to be tremendously complicated. And then once you get the engineering right, to say, let’s just assume that we got the world’s brightest engineers working on this day and night and they figure out a way to do it.
Awesome. Then you’ve got a bunch of regulatory people and trying to make sure that this thing doesn’t blow away and let up on [00:10:00] somebody’s beach or, or hit a, hit a, uh, A boat in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. You know, sometimes, sometimes the, the engineering is easy and though all the other regulatory aspects are the hard part, uh, to get something into service.
So I,
Dan: it seems like a lot of challenges, a lot
Allen Hall: of challenges you’re talking, just thinking about some of the orgs off the coast of California, how long it took to get some of those. Put out there and then now the, now they want to decommission a bunch of them. Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know how you even factor that in because a lot of the coasts waterline is either owned by the state or the feds and.
You have to go run through it, run it through the government. And if I bought a beautiful home with a beach view, overlooking the ocean, and somewhere on the coast of California, you know, you’re going to have 30, 40% of the people on that coastline are gonna be upset about it. [00:11:00] Yeah.
Dan: I wonder if yeah, we were, we were chatting about, I think seeing wind turbines in the distance is cool.
I think they’re just like kind of graceful machines. Yeah. But just, I feel like, I feel like they, they blend in with the, with the, it doesn’t matter where they are, especially with like when it’s dusky out, you know? And it’s like the sun’s fading, just like they look their silhouettes really impressive though.
Kind of, like I said, kind of gray, graceful, but not everyone feels that way.
Allen Hall: No. Uh, uh, there’s a good rule of thumb about people who don’t have any sense of humor. Right? So there’s like 30% of the people on the planet. I have no sense of humor, which is hard to believe, right? Like you don’t laugh at anything
Dan: laughing.
Right. Cool.
Allen Hall: Right. But there’s some section of the population, you know, valid as any other that don’t think things are all that funny. And I. I know where we live at, there was a big controversy and this is going to sound ridiculous. Cause it really is, uh, [00:12:00] about the frequency. Of light on the streetlight. So the light bulbs, right.
Were from moving from a sort of gas bulbs to fluorescent bulbs to these now led, right? So there’s different kinds of led light bulbs. You can get to put on the streetlights, different free daylight, soft white light, just, you know what I’m saying? Yeah. Right. So there’s
Dan: the color, the color
Allen Hall: they call that temperature.
Right. Which is a frequency thing. So it’s a color temperature, right? Uh, and there’s like this big uproar about the color temperature of the streetlights and how they’re going to cause cancer. And if you happen to live near them or how, how it was light pollution,
Dan: there’s no. There is no evidence of,
Allen Hall: I
Dan: I’m telling you, it’s gotta be
Allen Hall: unfair.
I am telling you that they, they stop the process of putting led lights in my town because of it. Now, the next town over it has those same exact lights, same exact lights, right? Uh, that there, they will not put in my, my town. Oh, okay.
[00:13:00] Dan: What color temperature they w what color temperature do they want? I don’t know.
Allen Hall: It doesn’t matter.
Dan: The current, the curmudgeon,
Allen Hall: they don’t want street lights at all because it’s light pollution.
Dan: Right.
Allen Hall: Okay. So anything you don’t like, you throw the word pollution to the end of it, and then you can rally the troops against it that doesn’t make it right or wrong. It just doesn’t make it, it makes it, um, non debatable, which is,
Dan: which
Allen Hall: is a real bugaboo with engineers.
Like, yeah, we need to have the discussion about it because you know, maybe it’s a more efficient light. Maybe it’s actually causing less pollution, which makes the sky cleaner. And you’re telling me we can’t do it. Or we can’t have any light at all. Right. So anytime you get any, any large group of people together to discuss anything like this, you’re going to have some significant portion of the population that’s going to vote.
No, and that’s okay. That’s okay. That’s the society we live in, but some I can get a literal. Off off base at times, and it just seems frustrating that [00:14:00] nothing could ever change ever. Uh, not sure that’s a good idea. So, you know, if we get to the point of having, if it made sense to have large wind turbines floating off shore and we could.
We could do it again. It gets back into the I’ll use the Scott Adams approach from the Dilbert guy of systems versus goals. If your goal is to have less oil and gas being used to create energy, then you’re going to have to figure out a way to go do that. And maybe you try this floating wind turbine and some part of the country, us UK, off the coast of, of, of, of Europe somewhere or.
China Japan doesn’t it doesn’t really matter. Try it, see if it works. If it doesn’t work then fine, you know, we’ll figure out something else, but at least let it have a chance. And my gut tells me that this thing doesn’t even have a chance. Um,
Dan: no, not even a chance,
Allen Hall: not the U S now the U S
Dan: just cause they’re just more because of regulations and [00:15:00] complaint.
Allen Hall: Cause the property in the United States along the coast lines is expensive. Because they went to views, right? It’s just like Elon Musk, putting that, putting the rocket launch facility down on Texas and Brownsville, Texas. And the, uh, the, one of the complaints about that, having that launch facility here is how tall the buildings can be because it ruins the sight line out into the water.
So you can only put things so high because of that. And I was saying it, it makes sense, but just the way that it is.
Dan: Yeah. That’s a shame. Yeah. I mean, you think this is a, at least from the engineering, it’s a solvable problem. Like there’s gotta be some way to make it doesn’t matter how tall it is to float.
But, I mean, then I guess this is the cost cost benefit analysis, right. That could cost a lot of money to get something heavy and wide enough and secure enough. And I don’t know if they, I mean, I guess it’s gotta be completely free floating when it’s really, really deep water and I, yeah, that does seem like a really big challenge
Allen Hall: in the ocean.
Have you followed the ocean [00:16:00] cleanup at all? The guys at the ocean cleanup that are putting the nets out in the ocean in the, in the quote unquote garbage patch or plastic garbage patch? Um, How much difficulty you had going from the laboratory actually to the real ocean, how the water didn’t move. Like they thought it was going to move once they got out there.
Yeah.
Dan: I could definitely see that. I’m sure it’s a night. I’m sure it’s a nightmare to model that stuff and figure out what’s going to actually happen. Yeah,
Allen Hall: it was. Yeah.
Dan: The oceans or oceans are such a rough environment out there. Let’s see. I mean, I can’t. Hats off to the crab fishermen and the, I mean, all these commercial fishermen, terrifying job, nerves of steel, all those guys, no one wants to go out that way.
Getting lost at sea and it happens unfortunately. That’s a rough way to go tossed off that boat. And as soon as you’re overboard, you know, it’s over, they’re very unlikely to find you at the water. It’s over some, some crazy stuff.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So it makes you think about if we put a floating wind turbine out there, what we, how much we don’t know about currents in the ocean.
That we [00:17:00] would find out the hard way. This is again, why you would try it on a smaller scale and see what you, and see if you could get it to work and then expound upon it. Ocean cleanup didn’t do it that way. Well, they kind of did that way. They, they made a larger scale device, took it out to the ocean and realized.
It wasn’t working. And so they actually made a smaller scale device. Tried it tried a lot of variations on it on a small scale, which is probably where they should have started to begin with. And now they know the lesson. Right. But, and then they, then they’re then they’re growing it out again. Um, yeah. So the same thing here, you know, probably start small and figure it out from there.
Dan: Well, Steve tells a story, um, Heinrich diesel. He, uh, so he, in the night, in the late 1970s, there was a, uh, an, a nearby teacher’s college. They’re running an experiment to generally electricity from wind, and he made a little model that fit in his hand. And then he started scaling it up, scaling it up, scaling it up, and then got approached by some executives [00:18:00] to form a, any licensed it to form what eventually became vested.
Pretty cool. Pretty cool story. It is obviously all, a lot. A lot of stuff just happens like that. But how cool is that? The, the, all these wind turbines came from, you know, one smart young man in a, you know, the high school age. I mean, he was 18, 19 years old. It sounds like, yeah. Just win a contest and changing.
I mean, making a huge. I mean huge push in the world.
Allen Hall: Right? That’s a huge purse change in the world, but I think it’s just the, one of the stories of sort of science and engineering is that a lot of the bigger ideas started as small ideas that I was watching. Gosh, you know, with, uh, all the coronavirus and time at home that, uh, I’ve been trying to watch something relatively educational.
So I was watching the discussion about that or the movie about the invention of the jet engine over in the UK. Um, [00:19:00] I want to say the guy’s name is whittle. I don’t know why I’m blanking on it at the minute, but that guy developed the jet engine pretty much on his own. Like he would just, he was, he was working with essentially no government funding for the longest time.
Uh, just finding investors to go ahead and get some prototype up and running. And he did, he get some prototypes up and run and he learned from it and he can just keep modifying and getting better and getting better and getting better. And then obviously they ran into world war II and, uh, the engine got sent over to the United States where it was a little more secure and they could work on it.
GE ended up working on it and, and. And taking it to really in a production sense, making it work in a production sense. But again, it’s like one of the, one of the world changing, uh, inventions in the 19 hundreds right in the 20th century happened because a guy had had a thought about me and he was like in college when he.
Figure this thing out, then he just went off and did it on his own. [00:20:00] And that’s why a lot of these ideas start. So it’s, it’s not surprising. I think we all think that it’s going to be a company like Tesla or Amazon. It’s going to change the world. I’ll actually, for the most part, it’s usually somebody, some person or some small group of people.
That’s got an idea and they, they make it work on a small scale and then eventually grows. Good.
Dan: Yeah, that’s cool. I’ll have to check that out on the jet and the jet engine. That’s interesting. I still have literally zero idea of how jet engines work. They look cool. A lot of little spinning parts, a lot of spinning parts.
Well, I went to the OOD VAR hazy center. Here outside of DC. And they have a bunch of huge jet engines that are sliced in different ways and they they’ll, they’re like slowly spinning. So you can see the inner workings, I mean, fascinating in their complexity, which puts even more, it’s like even more astonishing that that guy.
Basically created that in his garage or whatever. And we said with minimal funding,
Allen Hall: almost no funding yet.
Dan: They’re just, they’re incredible. They’re incredible.
Allen Hall: Yeah. The government thought it was a [00:21:00] horrible idea.
Dan: That’s like all of them, right? I mean, like ride a horse, a horse. What are you talking about then?
Everyone rides, right? Of course. Was there ever a time before they. He must’ve been assigned. They didn’t ride horses, right?
Allen Hall: Yeah, sure. There were,
Dan: there’s a first, there’s a first time for everything, but
Allen Hall: well, in the, in the wind turbine side, it’s the same thing. Right. We’ve gone from boy when they got to one megawatt like, Ooh, then it got to two like, Whoa, two megawatts.
Wow. You know, what are we talking now? 12, 15. Right. So
Dan: ex exponential curves.
Allen Hall: Right, right, right. All of a sudden we’re like, whamo we got these big, got these big turbines and they’re now, you know, Good gravy. They’re just huge. They’re massive. They used to be large. Now they’re just gone for Lords. The massive.
And like we’ve been getting there’s. I saw some email traffic this week about people talking about 50 and 60 megawatt term. I like, I don’t even know if that’s possible. Okay. If we’re tracking like dinosaur size. Or, [00:22:00] you know, it’s just, it just gets to be so unbelievable, but it usually starts with, it starts with a small idea.
So, Hey.
Dan: Yeah. Yeah. Which I’d love to see one of those like double digit megawatt ones in person. Because when I was up at that wind wind farm in West Virginia, when I got close to it, it was a, it was really windy. And then suddenly they just started appearing like right next to the road. Up on this, these small mountain roads, I was on an and, and up close, like you’re intimidated by, and they’re scary almost.
There’s just like out of nowhere. You’re right next to this enormous thing that’s moving. And they’re just like, almost like a sense of vertigo or like, Oh my God, that things, and those are probably, those are probably only three megawatt, maybe two and a half megawatts. That’s that’s pretty much the standard.
That’s what I assume they probably were probably. And then just see these, I’d love to see one of these four, 14 megawatt ones in person, but of course they’re all going to be off shore. Um, but still, I mean, it’s gotta just be a site to site to be hold well. It’s [00:23:00] like Don Quixote ever
Allen Hall: read Don Quixote. Let me rephrase that.
Don’t read Don Quixote, right?
Dan: Well, I read Moby Dick. I read while I listened, I listened to 14 hours of that godforsaken book. Hey, our audio book
Allen Hall: he’s from here in Melville. Wrote that book just down the street. My friend.
Dan: Uh, well it’s well, it’s have you read it? Yeah. Drivel it’s absolute dribble. He talks about sperm whale oil for hours on end.
It’s just ramblings. Yeah. I don’t sound high tech, like I know this is 2020. No, that book was hated. He got terrible reviews when it came out and then slowly it got better reviews over time. And I don’t. I mean, just because it’s classic, doesn’t make it good. I don’t understand. I don’t, I just don’t understand it because as much as we have short attention spans today, which granted like the way people consume media is very different.
I don’t, I don’t see the point in telling a story that could have been told in eight [00:24:00] hours, you know, in 200, 300 pages telling it in 600 pages, because so much of that was just superfluous. Drivel. Just
Allen Hall: terrific. Just about whales
Dan: he’s prattling on about the different types of whale oil for hours.
Allen Hall: Well, no one knew anything about it.
It
Dan: was like, come on. It’s like you could
Allen Hall: Google whale oil
Dan: back. Yeah. But is it, but is it, but is it a novel, is it a story or are you just, or is this a encyclopedia about whale oil? That’s my point. All of those is this is this. Yeah, which that’s a terrible idea. I mean, imagine me writing a book and then just describing my refrigerator for 45 minutes and then describing my kitchen table for 45 minutes.
I mean, you’d be like, this is not pushing, this is not pushing
Allen Hall: the plot. Oh, okay. But most people had never seen a whale and the, and the, the. The number of actual picture. I mean, no, no photographs obviously, but the people drawing whales didn’t even have them proportionally. Right. So, cause you only saw the [00:25:00] tops of them.
Right? When did, when did you see the bottom of a whale? Unless, unless you actually had killed the whale and brought it on taking the oil off and then you wouldn’t know, but uh, it’s uh, you know, the thing about Melville. And sort of new technology. I always saw that into the group of new technology is that when new technology hits, there’s all the gory detail because everybody, nobody knows anything about it.
So they want to know all the gory detail and you’re like, Oh yeah, I could really care less about the batteries and a Tesla car, but there’s a lot of gory detail on the internet today. I don’t think it’s great writing either, but Hey, that’s, that’s the era they, that they lived in. Yeah.
Dan: Well, I don’t know, you know, like I just don’t want to get wrapped up in because it’s a classic.
It’s good. And because other people have said, it’s good that it’s objective. I just don’t believe that one of my favorite reads is dr. Jekyll and mr. Hyde. I think that’s a, it’s a, it’s really short. Right. Which I [00:26:00] don’t like it just because it’s short, but I think it’s just a tremendous thought experiment.
I, you hear about it when you’re a kid. As like, I don’t think we ever read it in school, but I was always aware of it. Maybe they gave us the cliff notes, but I certainly never read the book. I read it, I think four years ago in the clubhouse during the summer. And, uh, I just thought it was, I thought it was wonderful.
I mean, just such an interesting thought experiment of him slowly becoming hide. And this whole time, wondering if he’s really this, the overarching theme is, is he really culpable for what hides doing right. We all have these inner urgings that we don’t let out. You know, when our, our brother pisses off, you’d really like to hit him in the head with a, with a club.
Right. But you don’t, but he, in the, in the story transforms into hide in hide, w does do those things, he goes out and, but, but when he turns back, Jekyll would never do that. No, that’s true. And so the question is, is he called bull because he’s choosing to let hide out and hide. Does those things that Jekyll would never do?
So I just thought it was really interesting. So [00:27:00] I think we just need to
think
Allen Hall: it’s talking about the human condition. Cause I guess it gets back to.
Dan: It is it’s
Allen Hall: right. And that’s why I think those things have such longevity you grew up in Maryland is that’s where ed girl on Poe wrote some of his most famous works.
Right, right. Did you have to read them in school?
Dan: So that’s why they’re called the Raven. So that’s why they don’t even sell the rate.
Allen Hall: Right. So did you have to read those in school because you have to read Moby Dick up here. That’s required reading because it happened.
Dan: Couple months, how the kids get no way kids get through that.
Oh yeah. No way they actually read that. Plus you could just skim it. You could scan part of the goal pages 400 pages, 400 to 700. He’s just prattling on about porpoises. Yeah. Uh, no, we did read some at grandpa, which poem poems they’re trying to,
Allen Hall: obviously, yeah, they’re a little bit easier, but I think the whole emphasis on that.
Is to describe sort of the human condition. And then also that the human condition hasn’t changed all that much [00:28:00] human behavior. Hasn’t changed all that much over all this time. And, um, you know, just like what the jet engine and making a wind turbines, the whole thing where a lot of the time, uh, the, the person with the great ideas, that one is probably trodden down the most.
And it’s just part of the human condition. How many times you’re going to hear that same story. Right. Uh, and. As a society we don’t ever seem to. I think it’s just part of the way people are just the nature of people having brains is that that’s the way, you know, you try to group things and. We think we’re better at detecting patterns than we really are.
And we’re awful at detecting patterns. That’s why Las Vegas makes so much money every year. Um, but it’s, it gets back into that, you know, it’s impossible to do something new sort of thing right now. It takes the, it takes the odd character or the, the savant to shove us down to the next, next level of technology.
Yeah. It’s [00:29:00] it’s somewhat discouraging, but also knowing that it has been done before. So yeah, there’s a lot of these good ideas that are happening in the wind turbine business are, are encouraging, but just know you’re going to take your lumps and it’s just comes with the territory because, you know, you’re telling me about the.
Where are those winter? Ms. Was at Michigan weather time of putting the wind turbines in the great lakes, right. Where they’re going to want them to turn them off during the summer months at nighttime. So a bird wouldn’t fly into it. So I just made the whole,
Dan: yeah. So that project possible. Yeah. So the icebreaker wind farm, which has been in talks it’s development, and they’ve been trying to get it to.
You know, to go for a while now. And it’s, they said that it’s probably the final nail in the coffin that I guess a local Cleveland like mining energy company really like hit them hard with their lawyers and, uh, advocating for birds and bats to the point where. These [00:30:00] wind turbines. If they go, they have to turn off every night from March to November.
Wow. So, and, and they’re just like, you know, we’re gonna, we’re gonna see, but we’re pretty sure this is just not going to be economically feasible. Yeah. We’re going to lose there. They said, they’re gonna essentially gonna lose 40% of their revenue doing that.
Allen Hall: Not worth it,
Dan: not worth it right now. It’s not going to be worth it.
Yeah. And you wonder how much that was a legal tactic and how much of that is really concerned for the birds and bats. Obviously, that is a concern on the nature. Like they do need to solve that problem, but at the same time, there’s a lot of wind turbines operating a lot of places that that’s not a stipulation.
So. I don’t know, but yeah, it looks like that project’s not going to happen, but there’s no final word yet, but it’s reporting from green, green tech
Allen Hall: media. Yeah. The Parenteau term is going to be on the water. Right. They were not on shore. They’re going to be in the water was not part of the thing.
Dan: Yeah, right.
Yeah. They’re gonna be in the grittiest. It
Allen Hall: hasn’t happened. The great lakes completely frozen over. [00:31:00] Uh, at times, especially while near, near
Dan: shore.
Allen Hall: Yeah. They think the gone completely frozen over by man. That’s a rough environment, you know, it’s different than being in the North sea where it’s cold. Uh, but rarely does it freeze over, but that Lake, those lakes are freeze over hard.
Where you can drive across. I’m like, I think you can drive from state to state. I can try from Michigan to Canada, right? Yeah. I’m
Dan: almost certain to Canyon lakes, even Lake superior Lake superior is enormous. Even that one freeze all over. I
Allen Hall: think they’ve had them freeze over in the last several years.
Yeah. Yeah. Cause you see these big ice, ice chunks up on shore.
Dan: They’re fresh. They’re fresh. They’re fresh water and it’s cold. Right. So obviously that’s, what’s a recipe for it’s a
Allen Hall: freeze over, right? Yeah. So. Uh, I can’t, uh, you know, maybe they’re doing themselves a favor by not putting them there, because again, you’re getting to these really awful environmental conditions.
Um, And are the turbines really ready to take all that beating? Cause ice flows can [00:32:00] be well, have you ever, ever watched the, the guys on, uh, uh, uh, what’s the, what’s the one where they go crab fishing. What’s the deadliest catch deadliest catch, right. And they’re definitely afraid of getting the ship stuck on the ice because I’ve just crushed the whole of the ship.
Can you imagine the base of this wind turbine getting frozen in ice, man, look out.
Dan: So last segment here, let’s, let’s cover this research paper. So you were looking at some research, lightening attachment characteristics of new generation wind turbine blades. And this is, I think it’s dealing with carbon fiber spars that, right?
Allen Hall: So as these blades get bigger and we start talking about doing more like floating winter mens, and the sizes are going to get larger and larger and larger, you have to have some really strong fibers in these blades and the. Martin. Well, the modulates, but the relative strength, a carbon fiber compared to like a fiberglass it’s not even close.
Right? So carbon [00:33:00] fibers are very strong material in the epoxy system that they put them in, makes them particularly. Tough, um, and strong. And w so as you get bigger, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, bigger in these blades, you’re going to end up putting more and more and more and more carbon fiber in to keep them stiff enough.
So they don’t collapse on their own, under their own weight. Right. And so when you do that carbon fiber. As much carbon fibers, you have to shove into these blades, into the internal structure. That carbon fiber is conductive, and it’s conductive enough that lightening current will travel down it and people think, well, it’s carbon and it’s pretty resistive.
Yeah, it is. But when you put a lot of carbon, like inches thick of carbon and some of these wind turbines that. And that’s got to be something pretty conductive. So the thing you dread as a lightening engineer on any sort of carbon fiber wind turbine job, is that you allow lightning Kearns to travel in and out of that carbon because.
You heat it up, the current flows in the carbon and you can heat up and [00:34:00] because it’s uneven and it’s, the fibers are usually unidirectional going from the hub to the tip. Usually there’s very little fibers going kind of from the leading edge of the trailing. And it’s mostly going vertically, uh, is that.
If you get any kind of Crossway flow of lightning current, you get jumping of current between carbon fiber inside and it starts to de-laminate and tie the blade deep inside the blade where you really can’t see it. And when you have de lamination or some sort of defect buried inside the blade and the carbon fiber, hooray that eventually those it’ll cause it can cause it.
Blade have a structural significant structural failure. So what so, what this paper talks about is putting expanded metal foil over top of those areas. So you take that spar, uh, in the center of the blade and you basically run, uh, a length of a copper [00:35:00] foil or aluminum foil or whatever they want to use over top of the.
Over the top of the blade to provide a place for lightening current church travel as, so the paper goes on to discuss, and this is done by the North China electric power university. And it’s a recent paper it’s in the last month or so the last couple of months where they’re trying, they’re talking about having different kinds of lightning protection going on, but the real emphasis is like, We need to put some metal back into the blade to provide lightening a place to go and to stay out of the carbon fiber spar.
And they, they did some high voltage and high current testing to demonstrate it, but that, that techniques been used for a long time, um, in the United States or in Europe and particularly Haircraft, we’ve been doing it forever, but it is super important that you do. Totally control where currents flow on winter and blaze because we start degrading the internal structure.
If you’ve got a 20 year lifespan [00:36:00] and for the number of lightning strikes, as he’s, as he’s went, terms, get taller and taller and taller, and the lightning strike frequency goes up and up and up and up and up, you really got to control where current is flowing, because it won’t take much for these plates to start failing.
So it’s interesting to see this paper, um, Not surprising to see it, but it’s, it’s almost sort of, um, a panacea just to just throw some fall on it. Right. Because I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job looking at the variables. And this is where we’re talking with the university of Nottingham. When you start modeling.
Computational modeling, um, winter and blades aircraft, and looking at variables they’re slight variations, make a big difference and you can’t control it all that well in the, in the, in the manufacturing process. So you have these relatively large, uh, variables movement. Um, Uh, controlling exactly where the carbon fiber is controlling exactly where this metal foil is controlling, [00:37:00] where they are relative to one another and any sort of little defect that happens inside of there can really wipe out the design.
And we haven’t really looked at it. So as you start, so your probability of having some sort of significant structural failure really goes up because the quantities of blades goes up the size of the blades go up. Um, The environment they’re put in gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse. And you know, they’re going to reach a sort of a tipping point quote, unquote tipping point where you’re going to start having.
Failures you weren’t anticipating because of the lightning protection design wasn’t as solid as you theorized it was, or in the one test that you ran. That’s that’s really the. Failure point and you see it on, I’ll give you a similar example on airplanes, like on airplanes all the time, especially older airplanes, they started having cracks in the structure of the wing that they didn’t anticipate, uh, on the airplane side, they test and test and test and test [00:38:00] test, and they test them more because of trying to predict where those cracks and things will occur.
But on the structural side, on an airplane or an aluminum structure, they don’t do a lot of lightning testing. And then. Because this isn’t, it doesn’t really matter. But on a carbon fiber spar, composite, winter, and blade, those lightning strikes play into the overall life and the structural integrity of the blade.
I haven’t seen anybody really take a, a blade that’s been structurally tested lightning, test it and did some more structural testing with it. Where, where are they incorporated that kind of electrical lightning related? Uh, damage into the blade and determining the lifespan of that blade really hasn’t happened.
And nor because it’s so expensive to do one, and because you, you need a, you’d need to test sort of multiple samples to actually have any validity to what you’re going about to do. So, um, the paper’s interesting. The work is good. The engineering is good, but I think we need to be thinking about big, bigger picture here.
If we really want to have something. [00:39:00] That makes a big impact and we’re really stress and safety and we should be stressing safety and consistency and keeping these turbines uptime as high as we possibly can. Then we need to be thinking in sort of bigger picture. And I think we’re still a little too shallow right now.
We need to be doing more work on sort of making sure we get to 20 years. Don’t you think so?
Dan: Yeah. I was just thinking, yeah, I mean he’s half the last 20 years and if there’s. Defects or they’re just shortsighted engineering, then that’s going to be right. It’s just going to be a really big challenge, like you said, as they get bigger and environments get, get tougher.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And it’s, it’s not like we don’t know. We’ve had a really solid, really solid 10 years for sure. 20 years. Yeah. So you know, that one mega watt is one and a half megawatt turbine is roughly that’s roughly a 10 year old, 15 year old kind of thing. Uh, now we have all this data now we’re shoving up the.
1215, 14, 15 megawatts or higher. Why are we not taking what we [00:40:00] learned at that lower level and applying it to the higher level? I think in a lot of other cases, we are, are we doing the same thing on the lightening side? I don’t think we are. I think where were assuming that a shorter, smaller blades without carbon fiber are going to be just as successful when we start putting carbon fiber even, and making them twice as tall.
There’s no logic to that at all. Um, so we’ll see, we’ll see, you know, I hate to be the predictor of bad news, but I predict a little bit of bad news as we, as we do this as part of the growing pain, I just, it just hate to lose a turbine out in the middle of the ocean because of it. And that’s such, you really hate.
Dan: All right. Well, we’re going to wrap up today’s episode of uptime. If you’re new to the show. Welcome. If you’re a regular here, thank you for your continued support. Please subscribe to the show and leave a review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Don’t forget to check out the weather guard, lightening tech YouTube channel for video episodes, full [00:41:00] interviews and short clips from each show.
For Allen and all of us at Weather Guard stay safe and we’ll see you next week.
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