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EP63 – Wind Turbines & Hurricanes: Will Off-Shore Wind Farms in the U.S. Actually Hold Up?

wind turbines hurricanes uptime podcast

What happens when a hurricane rips through one of the off-shore wind farms soon to be built in the U.S.? Can wind farms actually obstruct, absorb and decrease the destruction of a hurricane, as some researcher say? The Carolinas to the Gulf of Mexico encompass a third of U.S. coastline, and so in this episode we discuss wind turbines and hurricanes, the engineering, what we’ve learned from oil rigs, and what the research says. Plus – we discuss the Orbital Marine O2 tidal turbine, a very cool and powerful tidal power generator just now being deployed in the North Sea. Watch this great video on the O2 here and watch today’s podcast on YouTube here.

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Can wind turbines withstand hurricanes?

0:00
This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast.

0:37
Welcome back. I’m Allen Hall. I’m Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running.

0:57
All right, welcome back to the uptime wind energy podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. On today’s show, we’re gonna talk a lot about our great oceans. First we’re gonna start with not wind energy, but tidal power, the orbital otoo, which is the super cool title power generator, two megawatts just getting deployed now into the Orkney Islands. So we’ll chat a little bit about that. And then we’re gonna talk about offshore wind and and in respect to hurricane. So this is something that I was thinking about a lot recently did a bunch of research for today’s show. Because as wind power continues to, you know, gain traction the US in the offshore market, you know, the US is a pretty favorable environment for typhoons. So, we’ll talk today about a lot of the engineering challenges and just the unpredictable nature of installing offshore wind farms in the US, a lot of which might be in the way of Hurricane alley. So Alan, first let’s start with the orbital oh two, we were just checking out this YouTube video of the launch of this thing. It’s like the size of a 747. It looks super well built looks very cool. I’m pretty impressed by it. What’s your take here, it is cool looking. It’s enormous in size, it’s hard to get a perspective on it until you because it’s when you see it in the water, it doesn’t have any scale. to balance it off of when you see it mounted to the shipping truck, or whatever you call the moving vehicle what all I know, it must be 100 wheels on this thing. It’s it’s massive. It’s really, it’s really massive. It’s interesting, but isn’t it? I know that there’s been a lot of discussion about wave technology and some title stuff over the last 20 years have I ever can recall. But this scoring in a slightly different direction where it’s purposely designed vehicle for a particular spot in the world, I think to think the tides there are pretty strong. In the in the just the movement of the water, there’s pretty strong. And what do we say it was? How many megawatts? Was it going to be a peak power? Was it? It’s two two megawatt two megawatts? Yeah. So we’re gonna put some some photos up here on the YouTube version. But in case you’re listening at home, this basically looks like if you imagine, you know, 747 or Airbus? Alan, you’re gonna crucify me for this before like a 320. What’s the equivalent of 747? Well, there’s a big one, a very big aeroplane. If you imagine a very big airplane with a yellow fuselage. So the, you know, the whole center passengers section is yellow with two, I guess, like it’s not like a gray, but it’s like a pretty dark bluish gray to set honestly sets of wings. And the reason their wings shade is because they hinge on the body. So they can lift them up and do repairs. You know, even with the water, I wouldn’t say they’re getting above water, it doesn’t appear that they do, but then it will lower them down under the water, or then they can generate their power. So this wing design is really interesting, because then it prevents the need for divers to go down and make repairs, they can just lift them up to the surface, do the work they need to do and then push them back down below. So using hydraulics, so pretty cool. And basically they just tow it out to where it needs to be then they chain it into place. And the rotors can reverse so when the tides are going one way it’ll generate power when the tide is going the other way. The blades will just reverse and continue to generate no matter which direction the tides going. So yeah, one megawatt and to sell on each wing. And for a total of two megawatts each I couldn’t find the the cost of this thing.

4:38
This one article compares it to the cost of the Sheila power plant over in somewhere in Asia. And that’s that’s a completely different system. It’s like a wall of Java of title generators, where they’re using restricted waterflow that then flows down goes through them and produces power. That one was the cost of 298 million. This is vastly vastly cheaper than that. But I can’t find an exact estimate. But I mean, Alan, do you? Do you think you’d see these kind of intermixed with an offshore wind farm coming? Could there be 100? You know, wind turbines and 50 of these kind of thrown in between? I mean, Oh, sure, right.

5:17
I think anything like that is possible, right? Because ties are well known. And we know what the forces are involved there. And we know that coming in and out every day, so it’s pretty easy to calculate when you’re getting powered, how much you’re going to get. I think, though the wildcard is they’re deploying this up in the North Sea, right, Orkney Islands up in the North Sea, are just some really violently turbulent waters. And it’s, I think, until you do it, you’re never really sure. It’s kind of like watching the guys. All the crew at the ocean cleanup when they put their demonstrator out to the ocean, and then it struggle to capturing and is breaking apart and you just can’t Model A lot of what happens in the ocean in the lab, or on a computer. You just have to do it. And I think this is what this is about right now. If it if this first, quote unquote demonstrator works, then they’ll start making one’s right behind it. But you have to put something in the water to see how it’s gonna fare.

6:19
Yeah, well, and you and I were talking about this off off cameras that this isn’t like some really tiny like 200 kilowatt demonstrated this thing is the real deal. I mean, two megawatts is getting small by, you know, onshore, even by onshore standards, but still two megawatts is nothing to scoff at, right? It’s, oh, no, actually, when it’s all or nothing, something that’s completely on harvested, right? It’s only this is, you know, if you have a two megawatt wind turbine in place where you could put an eight megawatt, then you’re like, man, we should maybe tear this thing down and quadruple our power. That might make sense, right. Whereas in this this case, it’s just extra, and so significant amount to megawatts is again, not nothing. Well, it’s still scalable,

6:58
right, I would assume that the design is always just like an wind turbine. So design is going to be somewhat scalable. So it goes from two to four to Halle aid. 12 megawatts, all of a sudden, yeah, because if if the basic fundamentals are there, you’re just increasing in size. I know loading and things get to be a little more difficult. But that’s essentially what you can do just kind of make it bigger.

7:20
Yeah, bigger wings. And the right turbine tips, I think, are 20 meters. So not gigantic, which seems nice, because it’s not going to have to sweep as big of an area and not being quite as deep water to work just fine. So pretty interesting. We’ll link to that YouTube video. That shows there is definitely definitely worth a watch. It’s really interesting, even if you’re not even if you’re just so into wind that you just don’t want to be on waterside. It’s really cool engineering. I’m pretty impressed by it. So let’s move on. New report says that global globally, we might need 500,000 more workers. This is a analysis from the Global Wind organization and renewables Consulting Group and the Global Wind Energy Council. So half a million workarounds that seem right between 2021 and 2025.

8:14
If the offshore when it happens, like we think it’s going to happen, then. Yeah, because there’s multiple countries invested in offshore wind from UK, South Korea, United States, both east and west coasts and Gulf of Mexico. Everybody is talking about this, like massive numbers of wind turbines offshore and Brazil will, right you’re just going to see this. Australia is going to do it. So you’re going to see this massive number of winters pop up because the restrictions are going to be less than on land, I think,

8:48
well, I gotta I gotta clarify. This is half this is half a million globally for all wind not just off right. So offshore and onshore right now.

8:54
But I think that the push is going to be offshore, right? And just the number of people you’re going to need to manage all those wind turbines is going to be huge. 500,000 technicians seems almost undoable, he is a massive number of people. That’s like a decent size American city. Right. It’s like the size of Omaha, Nebraska has got to learn how to to work on winter roads. That seems not doable.

9:26
I mean, that started. But doesn’t Amazon employee now over a million people? Didn’t they add? Yeah, you know, what, a million last summer over the pandemic,

9:34
I think, right? I think it’s actually more than that. I was listened to, of all things a podcast last night, talking about Amazon adding employees on the pandemic and I think it was close, almost over 400,000 that were Adams, right. Yeah, that’s a lot of employees in a short amount of time. But here’s I think here’s a difference. Working on a winter oven is a lot more challenging physically and sort of mentally. That’s it. The technical aspects of FDA all

10:01
that stuff. Yeah,

10:02
the safety, right all this, you got to be in some sort of fit condition to do those things versus not say working in an Amazon warehouse is easy, it’s not easy, but just different things, right, it’s a lot less training involve a lot less physical lifting in that kind of thing. So it’s easy to sort of think about, okay, Amazon, which is a huge employer, picking up 400,000 people to operate the warehouses, because the grocery stores are shut down, which is essentially what happened. And but it takes a while to get trained to be working on wind turbines, that’s not an immediate thing. That’s where I think the problem is going to be is just getting people to go through all that go through all the training, that’s really gonna be the difficulty.

10:46
So moving on, let’s talk about our hurricanes. So obviously, there’s a lot of, you know, coastline, you can build wind turbines off in the US, right. So it’s not to say that all these new projects are going to be a risk, because, you know, the vast majority probably won’t, you know, California, no problem. Upper northeast, very unlikely that you’ll get a major storm. You know, I grew up in Maryland, here in DC, I’m not sure we ever had a should we ever had a major like landfall of a hurricane, you know, we get we get like the Tropical Depression stuff, you know, where it’s already anticipated comes up here, we get a lot of rain, right, etc, etc, maybe a little flooding, but it’s never like a hit, but, you know, down on in the Carolinas, and then obviously, south of that, and then the Gulf of Mexico, pretty significant risk. And those are, I’m sure going to be looked at as possible sites in the future. And we, you know, we report on what was the Virginia, Maryland and one of the Carolinas, were working to sort of build an alliance to bring factories to the area and all that stuff. So I, you know, you think some of these states would want the economic development, the jobs and all that stuff, even if there’s, you know, a mild hurricane risk. So, Alan, I mean, what what’s just your gut reaction first, for we get into some of the the numbers here and some of what some of the researchers have said, I mean, do you feel like there’s gonna be a problem. And for you, as an engineer, as you talked about things not being proven in real life, we haven’t really seen a wind farm get hit by a hurricane halfway,

12:13
I think we have is doing the question of what’s the amplitude of the hurricane, right. And then, especially off the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, where offshore, it over the water has been a lot of category fours and fives. But as it approaches land, they tend to decrease a little bit. So they tend to be category threes and twos, thank goodness. But out in the water, they tend to be where all the energy is stored, and how those storms really get rolling, and then the energy is much higher. So you could have in theory, category five or five plus out in the in the water, where turbans are, you know, they had, they’ve had the issue with oil rigs getting damaged in hurricanes, really damaged in hurricanes. And then we’ve really haven’t done so much in terms of wind turbines getting getting hit and really high ones. And right, and especially in the quantity of wind turbines, we’re talking about providing power for large sections of states. So your risk goes up as your dependency on those wind turbines goes up. And as the size of wind turbines goes up, I also think you have the screwed up sort of scaling problem where shorter wind turbines are going to be see kind of straight line winds. But as you get taller, the winds versus the altitude, the speeds are not the same, she can get some really odd twisting forces going on on the on the turban, which is not designed for that. And we don’t know. The only way to find out is to build them, stick them out there for a little while and see what kind of load you’re getting. And that’s that’s the scary part if we, if we skip the trial stage or seeing what’s out there, before we plant a bunch of turbans and high hurricane risk areas. Well, that just seems like trouble. It’s like, it’s like having a nice storm in Texas. You know, it’s gonna be that sort of scale of Oh, what do we what happened?

14:13
Well, and so some of the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina and Harvey so Harvey had much less of an impact on oil rigs, right then Katrina did, Katrina destroyed 50 almost 50 of them and damaged a lot more than that. And one of the major things they did after Katrina was they they raised the recommended minimum height of the decks from 71 to 90 feet. And basically what they learned was a lot of the the damage was from waves more than wind or rain, as your recommended raising them up. And of course, like so one of the things I was reading was this, this twisted jacket foundation by Keystone wind, one of theirs and they they tout that one of their foundations got hit directly by Katrina. That was totally fine. And those foundations, I guess, are one of many that can be used for wind turbines. But to me, even if the foundation is intact, I mean, you see what happens to trees in these in these hurricanes. They’re just bending. I mean, as far as they can go, they get uprooted. Now, obviously a winter months out of hurt is not a not a, not a tree. It’s very well built. It’s made of structural steel. And they’re going to be, you know, even more well bolstered to be out there in the ocean, especially in like these high risk areas. But sure, you just have to wonder when it’s unproven, like, what what week what weak link Mother Nature might be at a find whether it’s, you know, you look at, there’s a good article on recharge news about Geez, some of their prototypes for new deepwater floating wind designs. And you start talking about these undersea cables, you know, tensioning, these floating bases and all those different base designs, and you wonder, like, Where’s the one weak link in there that could snap, when this is in hurricane winds and hurricane waves, it only takes one islet of a cable to snap and the whole thing’s maybe gone, right? And you’d probably build in a lot of redundancy. But it just seems like a really interesting, and I’m not, it just seems like a really interesting problem to solve. Like, it’s really, it looks like a really, really hard problem to say, we can be confident putting out 100 of these in the in the Gulf of Mexico, that we’re pretty sure they’re going to stand up. Now. I mean, the insurance applications are really important too. Because if these if you know, if the only hair hurricane that could that could destroy these potentially, is a category four or five, and they only come around once every 12 years, that area or the likelihood of hits as well, you know, then it might not matter. Or if it’s every 20 years, it might not matter. Right, right. Right. I mean, do you do you play the edge of the insurance and probability standpoints? Probably a pretty big piece here, right?

16:53
Right. So the insurance companies are going to drive the design, because when they start reviewing it, and you get DMV involved and looking at designs and assessing risk, and what’s there evolves into paying insurance. That’s where the engineers and the insurance people start to fight a little bit. Because you know, you’re adding costs and complexity to your system to lower the cost of the insurance. And it happens in the airplane market, too, is a lot of markets built like that. So the insurance adjusters are looking at the probability this thing going over and having big payouts and the engineers are trying to keep the cost down and make something that’s producible. So they collide in the middle a lot of times and you go well, okay, and I’m not sure any I’m not sure either side is right, every everybody’s protecting their own territory. And the only way to know in this kind of situation where you’re talking about extreme conditions on the planet Earth is usually to put something out there and to try it, but we just haven’t really done it to that level yet. Especially it’s just such tall turbans, there have been turbans out in the water for a while the question is, as they get 12 megawatt 13 megawatt 15 megawatt 20 megawatt and that means that the size is getting bigger, do we have the capability of keeping the mortared? That’s gonna be that’s gonna be the question. Because if you can imagine if they’re floating wind turbines, and they do break loose, that’s bad news. Like, where’s this thing going? Right? Does it run into a? It’s got to run into land at some point, you know, and what kind of destruction does it do to run into another turban? Those things are just like inconceivable right now on. On the risk side, if you’re an insurance company, you’re just you start going through the odds of this and like, oh, man, that’s a huge payout. I’m not sure we want to write insurance for that. So we’re gonna make these engineers design better. That’s, that’s more likely where everybody is at right now,

18:56
when you also have to wonder. So one of the books I’ve been reading recently is noise by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize winning researcher. And he talks about the just the difference between underwriters is vast, like if you get john the, the underwriter or Steve, the underwriter and you give them the exact same thing. One could say it’s this and the other one could be off by 20% 30% people in the same in the same building working for the same company, have vastly different and obviously wouldn’t just be one person, but even then the variability between companies could be enormous. And they’re just as a lot of noise. That’s his point in the book where some of these, you know, what, where can we apply algorithms sensibly? And where can we automate some of these things to eliminate? You know, that’s one of the examples he discusses. Another one is our law system with judges that you get a recommendation of six to 12 years one judge gives you 11 one judge gives you six for the same crime like very, very similar cases and you’re like, that shouldn’t happen. So just trying to eliminate some of that variability, which you imagine that’s going to be a really big fiasco in offshore wind as well. Because you have one underwriter who’s like, Man, this seems really crazy. No one’s like, Oh, this is great. You know, and it has a favorable outlook. And it could be huge financial swing either way, then again, I don’t know how these things play out. So that’s an outsider’s view, obviously

20:22
isn’t like the US housing market back in 2008, seven and eight, right, where a lot of that was driven by essentially adjusters or actuaries that were looking at what the risk was a downside risk from lending people a whole bunch of money for a home with nothing down. It’s it’s sort of that, but I can make a bunch of money right now. And there is a part of that of the economy, which is in that mode, right? We’re gonna put a bunch of wind turbines off, I can sell a bunch of insurance policies for these things. And buy my boat. And I’m going to be, I’m going to be retired and in Boca in 20 years when this goes wrong. Yeah, that’s that’s part of it. Right now. If you watch, if you watch insurance companies sort of ebb and flow or time, you’ll see those sort of things like GE has been taken a huge hit on some healthcare insurance they issued back in the 1980s and 90s. With the Canada load. That’s a big, it’s a big problem, because you’re talking about so much money. And as eternity gets bigger, there’s so much more risk for every single tournament, it’s what’s going to happen.

21:33
Well, and you also wonder, so a book I’ve mentioned numerous times from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who talks about predictions and, and one of his books on fragility and anti fragility, he just talks about a system being anti fragile, when it has lots of variability that can provide sort of a safety net. So example, if you had, right, if you made if you made $10,000 a month, in, you know, working for one employer, that’s great, you might have some financial stability until you get fired, now you have $0 of income, right. Whereas if I have 10 $1,000, self employed income streams, you can’t knock all 10 of them offline, Kenya does not suffer right now. Put me in a game and even then they might still work. So you wonder if that might apply here. So you know, if you it dies, say they’re putting a turbine, you know, wind farm with 100 turbines, I wonder if they’d be interested in putting four different foundation designs, you know, 25, turbines, all with four different foundations. Now, sure something comes through. If they if they’re all well built, maybe none of them have any problems. But if there is a major storm, now, you’re pretty sure that not all of them are going to fail, because at the same defect if there was a defect, or if they just had something you overlooked. Now all 100 are at risk versus only 25 are at risk. And you’re you know, and you might learn something to have a hurricane, that would have just wiped out any design comes through and three quarters of all, you know, all of design a, b and c are wiped out, but but design D is remaining standing. Now, you really learned a lot in practice. You wonder if they would employ anything like that, rather than just roll out the exact same design the exact same, you know, foundations for all of them? I mean, is that something that actually happens in practice, though?

23:13
Oh, sure. You see a lot of wind turbine farms, if you look at details of a particular farm, you may notice that it’s the farmer split in two or three or four in terms of the the types of turbines, even the sizes of turbines, and the manufacturers of the turbines will vary. So you’ll watch as we’ll create a new farm where the vast majority of the turbines are, exist, sort of the existing technology, something that they know, but then there’s always six, eight, right? It’s totally smart, then there’s a couple at the end, which are a different manufacturer, or a different size, or something new or direct drive or something. And they’re watching to learn what they how they operate in the field. And then they if that looks good, don’t purchase more of them. So they use them as like a sampler. system. I know it’s hard to think about buying something so so industrial on that scale as being like a little test platform for them. But that’s what it is. Now, we talk about some of the offshore wind things that are happening off the east coast of the United States, where it’s just one type of turban and a lot of them and they don’t have a lot of service history. That’s, that’s my opinion, is big risk. Now I am a more all work out, right? There’s a lot of engineers working really hard to make it work right now. And then no one’s thinking, I’m gonna make this thing not work. But it’s the unknowns that will only pop up through the lifetime that you hadn’t thought of. At the day you’re designing it. And that’s where your risk comes from. Right. If you got if you’re becoming so dependent on offshore wind, which my part of the world will be, then something cataclysmic like a hurricane coming up the coast, which has happened. We better be prepared for it because otherwise we’re going to be like Texas, and the ice storm. Watch real We’re gonna be really, really cold because most of my area is really cold the wintertime. So it’s gonna be really cold for a number of days until I get something else brought online. And

25:11
it could be cataclysmic, right, you know, you start playing out scenarios, you lose 100, large turbans off the coast of whatever state, you’re that’s a lot of power, you’ve just taken offline, and I’m not sure you can fulfill it easily. And in addition to replacing those turbines, you have to also salvage and drag the other ones back to shore.

25:32
I mean, yeah, that’s a mature salvage operation than onshore one falling over or catching on fire. You know, whatever. Yeah, no, oh, yeah. Not just grab a crane. It’s a bunch of boats. Go find it. Find a Where’s James Can’t wait is Jay James Cameron like? Rain? Yeah,

25:51
well just think about all the underwater cables, right. So you actually have to have a turning point, flop over as much as you sever some cables in the right spots. It’s going to be trouble. And it’s gonna be hard to fix that it’s not a five minute repair, like a telephone repairman, fixing the line up front of your house, talking about the waters off the coast of my case, Massachusetts, and it’s never great sailing out there. Anyway. So I just think, man, that’s the risks are much higher, you’re playing with you’re playing with much higher risk offshore than you do on onshore clearly.

26:27
Yeah. And so obviously, like, you know, every wind turbine has the ability to feather you know, they can lock the blades at 55 miles per hour. And they’re gonna have lots of foundations. I’m, I’m also really curious just about the different some foundations if, because, you know, you hear like, in in, I think Japan, like in California, like they’re building skyscrapers with the ability to sway a little bit, right, like, they want to sway a little bit. So you wonder if some of that is built in here as well, where maybe that could be like, Hey, we were we’re seeing a hurricane approach. Let’s activate the hurricane system where it allows it to have more normal more than normal sway as it sort of just like battens down and more maybe acts like a buoy taking, let’s shut down the blades, it’s just gonna act like a buoy for the next three days till the storm passes, then they do something in a lock sort of locks back in place. That could be really I mean, again, like, I just think there’s like, so it’s a really fascinating engineering problem. There’s just I’m sure all these engineers, I’m sure on it. But there’s like a lot to consider about ways to mitigate this risk. And a lot of times we put them yeah, put them in all these different places. And the other thing that’s really fascinating and bizarre is that if you have enough wind turbines in the water, they can potentially greatly reduced. So Stanford did some research, showing that a large, large amount, I’ll get to that in a second, a large amount of wind, wind turbines off the coast could reduce wind speeds by up to 50%. And storm surges by up to 80%. And some other research also showed the same thing. But Alan, how many wind turbines does it take to actually have those effects? At least 40,000 20,000 Stanford ran simulations up to 50,000 watts other this other research group ran up to 74,000. But and so that’s where it just becomes, like some of these researchers like yeah, let’s put these out there. It’s gonna slow hurricanes down. 20,000. I mean, for reference, I’m sure. Yeah, I’m sure many of you out there listening know, the size of some of these offshore wind farms, but the largest one at the moment, Hornsey one, which is largest five megawatt capacity at 1200 18. is only 174 turbines so that the world’s largest times 20 won’t quite get it. Well, that would get us there. That’d be 34,000. Okay, so Wow, way No, I did that math times. 200. What’s wrong? times? 200? Right. Yeah. 200. So we only need 200 more of the world’s largest wind farm to slow these hurricanes down. That seems Yeah. I mean, how unrealistic is that?

29:07
Well, like we talked about earlier, we need a whole bunch of workers just to operate those things to me. Sure, we would have it and if you think about how much energy is stored in a hurricane, you know, it’s not terawatts. It’s it’s gonna be whatever that whatever it comes after terawatts in terms of the amount of potential energy that’s or kinetic energy. It’s it’s one of those storms because they’re so massively big. That you’re you just tap in a little bit of it, right, trying to suck some energy out of it and make it into electricity. But it’s like, the downside risk is so big that it’s not really worth it, you know?

29:45
Yeah. Yeah. And that that second battle researchers by University of Delaware, so yeah, I just and the other thing is you wonder what happens if you stop a hurricane with so many wind turbines out in the ocean is that have some other Fact maybe it doesn’t maybe this is something where just, you know like, just like a wind rushes through a forest in the forest dampens the wind right maybe it has no effect but maybe you get some like weird effect where the earth is in some I don’t know just like screw like a winter break. Right let’s can we screw with Mother Nature before she gets even angry? It’s that to me seems it doesn’t seem like there’s any issue with it but it seems strange that was stopping the hurricanes.

30:28
There has got to be a downside. There’s got to be a downside to anything you do. Right. So it’s like having the forest fire right? Oh, the forest. Right. Yeah. So I mean, there’s must be some sort of insect creature plant that depends on hurricane category five winds once every 20 years to repopulate itself or whatever happens. So I’m not so sure slowing down hurricanes. As you know. There’s a lot about nature we don’t understand and I don’t know if I want to teach it that way too much.

31:02
Yeah, well, the fire the fire. forest fires are a good example. Because they really do reset like the they reset the landscape and a lot of places like don’t they people burn fields and they’ve been doing it for a long time because in replenishes some nutrients in the field. And yeah, like so Mother Nature knows what’s up on it’s tested those things over years, and I mean, hundreds of millions a year so it’s they figured it out. Good job Mother Nature. So anyway, a couple pieces of housekeeping a number one, if you’re out there and you work in offshore wind and you have deep thoughts on any of this stuff today, we’d love to hear from you. So choose an email. We’re definitely looking for guests in the offshore sector. So if you have any experience with you know, whether your technician or cabling, or you want to talk to us about hurricanes, shoot us an email, links in description. Also, we’re starting a new newsletter. For those of you who enjoy the show, it’s called uptime tech news. It’s not a corporate boring newsletter, it’s just a once a week update on our news show. So you get a link to it in your inbox. You’ll get links to all the the articles and videos that we discussed on the show, and some other stuff that you want to stay ahead of if you’re really you know, on the forefront of technology in the wind industry. So we hope this is a really valuable newsletter to you. So you can sign up for that in the show notes below. And we hope to see that in your inbox this upcoming week. So from Alan all of us here at the uptime when energy podcast we will see you next week.

32:40
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