The U.S. Senate is proposing Tax Credits for manufacturing – will it work? Plus, business news – GE Stock, Orsted earnings, Vestas guidance and will Iberdrola spin off offshore? We also discuss how to develop young engineers, plus thermoplastic wind turbine blades and their lightning and manufacturing issues, something we didn’t cover in episode 73.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!Â
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Transcript EP74 | GE Stock Climbing? Thermoplastic Blades & Lightning, Plus Iberdrola, Orsted & U.S. Tax Credits
This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape 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 strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett
I’m Allen Hall.
And I’m Rosemary Barnes
And this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. So before we get going, let me remind you a thanks for being here be. You can sign up for Uptime Tech News, which is our weekly newsletter, where we’ll shoot you a quick email of the new podcast.
Some other helpful links, you know, stuff that we find valuable all over the Web. So if you want to stay up and be a win insider. Definitely sign up in the show notes, whether you’re listing on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher of today’s podcast.
Let’s talk about this tax credit. So it sounds like Senator Markey, who is from your neck of the woods, Allen and others are introducing a tax credit that’s going to create a 30 percent investment for qualified facilities that manufacture when components for offshore here in the U.S..
And it looks like that will eventually be phased out between December twenty, twenty eight and completely around 20, 30. So, Alan, do you think this is going to work or are we going to be able to put up some of these facilities in the U.S.?
Well, big corporations will take that tax break immediately and hopefully put it to work. The question is who and where and how? It’s easy to make proposals like this. And this is the trouble I think was sort of the Massachusetts delegation, because this comes up quite a bit where they want to make some world altering proposals.
And then you check up on six months later, nothing has happened. And it is super frustrating to watch this go into something I’m more familiar with, which is just offshore wind and wind turbines. Massachusetts itself doesn’t have a lot of wind turbine manufacturing to so to speak.
The university system does some research, and it is one of the national leaders in some wind turbine technology stuff. But in terms of manufacturing, there’s very little. And it’s unlikely that a lot of that will happen locally in Massachusetts.
And there’s a variety of reasons for it. Resources, access to roads, all all those things play into it. So in terms of wind turbine manufacturers or component manufacturers for wind turbines, my little company is probably one of the more probably one of the larger ones at the moment.
And, you know, what are we gonna do with a 30 percent manufacturing break that’ll never come to a company like ours? So it’s it is you know, in one sense, I think they’re trying to promote the industry. And I get all that.
And on the second sense, you have to play with the big boys. And we’re just not a not a big company to start making phone calls to the senators and congresspeople about promoting wind in wind energy. So I just don’t see this going anywhere.
And it’d be lucky right now with everything is happening, the United States, that it would pass that that the president would eventually sign it. There’s so much that Congress has a nine percent approval rate.
So new
proposals like these are aware
of that. Yeah.
Yeah. Proposals like this tend to get put out in the press releases, get put out. But action really doesn’t happen. And that’s part one of the reasons why they have a nine percent approval rate because of these kind of proposals.
So we’ll see. Rosemarie, what’s the climate like for you in Australia? Does the government really push for as much local manufacturing as they can, or is there an increase in that? Or what is what is the climate been as far as like a local manufacturing?
So recently, Australia hasn’t really been too strong on manufacturing, or at least that’s been like the prevailing wisdom. We had an automotive industry that was subsidized by the government, and when they pulled their subsidy a while ago, people kind of thought that was the end of manufacturing in Australia.
It wasn’t really true because we’ve still had quite a lot of advanced manufacturing happening. And in a few kind of key sectors. But certainly it’s been a really long time since we had any kind of major solar panel or wind turbine components made in Australia.
We do have a new government plan, six national manufacturing priorities. And one of those six priorities is clean energy and recycling. But even then, the government isn’t really expecting that we’re going to be making a lot of, you know, wind turbine components or solar panels, mostly just because, you know, we can’t really compete with the low, low
wage, low labor cost countries on those types of components. However, I was talking to a guy who’s involved in some of those really huge. There’s really huge hydrogen projects that are planned for some parts of the Australian desert in Western Australia, and I think also South Australia.
And those plans have huge solar farms and really huge wind farms as as part of them. And he mentioned to me that because there’s going to be so many wind turbines involved that they were looking into getting a wind turbine factory like.
Just for those wind farms, so he was quite optimistic, and I mean, I have to say I’m I’m a little bit skeptical, but I really hope that it’s true, because I would I would love to see wind turbine manufacturing in Australia, especially blades.
That’s kind of like a dream of mine that we would get some of that in Australia.
All right. So next on the docket, let’s talk about Austad. So their profit is up one hundred eighty six percent in the first half of twenty twenty one. Alan, does this surprise you? I mean, we obviously they’re all over every offshore wind project.
Right. But this seems like a really big increase yet. And this article from offshore wind up is that we’ve all sort of read here. They’ve talked about how actually they’ve been hurt by lower wind speeds this year. So it sounds like despite some lower wind speeds, they’ve still had a really big bump in revenue.
And it looks like that was really just about them adding about 10 percent to their total capacity. Is that how you’ve kind of interpreted there? They’re reporting it.
It is it is notable to say that the average wind speed has been low, which is obviously it’s an average rate. So it’s going to move up and down, but it’s on the lower end. And it’s unusual to read a financial report that said we had we didn’t generate as much as cash as we normally would because
the wind has been slow at once. It was hard to take from an investor standpoint, like while you’re in the wind business, Nouwen not blowing hard enough can can really wreak havoc. You would think on average would be average.
So that was curious. But, you know,
I think it’s I think it’s amazing that when farmers are actually farmers in the sense that they they have to pray for wind. I mean, maybe here’s my big idea. The day is maybe they could build some sort of big wind generators, these big winds, these big fans, to then push wind to their turbines.
You know, obviously, it’s nonsense. But, yeah, it’s it’s so funny that, you know, you pray for rain, you know, 200 years ago. I mean, still present day. Right. But here they’re praying for wind to meet their financial for gas reserves.
Zero power over. No one has any control over that. Let’s Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons is going to come back some device to control, you know, the wind.
Well, you think as the earth got warmer that we’d have a little more energy in the in the air and which would turn into more profits for STAD. So if global warming is really driving the temperatures up, you would think there would be more wind.
Right. So that’s
stay tuned. There will be more tornadoes, land. Hurricanes will have. Right. Hurricanes mixing with tornadoes. It’s all coming. Don’t don’t worry. We’ll have it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, it’s I mean, also, it’s had a really good year so far.
Now they are what they want to be cautious because they’re not sure what the second half of the year is going to look like, but. Right. You know, like like I said, you hear their name everywhere when there’s new development, especially in the US right now.
So it sounds like they’re really kind of steamrolling.
Right? I think you got to wonder if the wind turbine OEMs are going to be the big winners in offshore wind or is it going to be the operators that it may be the operators and we’ll see where the investment dollars go.
Yeah, well, and of course, like we just said, it is nice to be the wholesaler essentially in this bike. Doesn’t care whether the wind blows. Right. They’re selling their turbines. They wanted to blow, obviously, but their turbines are sold with or they don’t come they don’t come with wind.
You know, you hopefully get wind with your with your purchase, but it does not come free with a side of wind. So you get what you get. So they’re not going to be insulated from those ups and downs, at least.
Obviously, every business has unpredictable ups and downs. But, you know, the OEMs won’t have that. So along this these business lines, Iberdrola has had also a good year. And, you know, they’re potentially spinning off some of their offshore work.
Alan, why would they do this?
Well, it’s all about markets and financial positions of companies. And in this particular area, a lot of it’s about cash and have available cash to sustain companies. And if you can spin off one of your divisions, which will raise a bunch of cash once it hits the marketplace, you as the original company get a participated in that
. So it actually raises more value for the investors. And that’s why investors demand that really good subsidiaries get spun off, because there’s more potential total net growth as a separate company. And that happens quite a bit in the United States on divisions that have the hot new product and underneath a larger conglomerate of some sort that the
investors will demand, especially during during slow times. They’ll demand that those smaller companies be smaller divisions be broken off and everybody can reap the profitability of them. So it’s a way of squeezing out cash from an existing. Entity.
Well, and speaking of squeezing out cash is now starting to do a much better job. This article by the sort of stock site Seeking Alpha. Just talking about how, you know. Dark Ages might now be over where obviously they were, you know, this giant conglomerate, the Jack Welch days back in.
Alan, what was the 50s, 60s, 70s? What what was GE’s like? Real heyday,
80s, 70s, 80s, 80s in particular, early 90s, mid 90s, even?
Yeah. Yeah. Glamorize the comedy show 30 Rock. Right. But, you know, GE is obviously a huge player in wind and they’ve got some great technology. We talk about the Hal IDEX. Do we’ve been blue in the face and they do.
And they’re obviously doing well on the the aerospace side as well. They do great with engines. So it does seem like they’re picking up their CEO. Jack Halp seems to have done good work. They’ve trimmed a lot of their costs.
Alan, is this I mean, do you see that? So recently, GE has done their 10 to one reverse stock split. So their stock was trading around nine dollars, of course, last summer in twenty twenty, it was down six, seven dollars.
And now they do this reverse ten to one stock split, which has boosted the price. So if you own ten shares of GE at nine dollars, you then got one share at ninety dollars essentially. So the stock price today is in the low hundreds.
Well, why do you think they did this? Obviously, we talked about this a little bit before, but just as part of that sort of, hey, we’re back. This is our golden era again. Is that how you interpret this move or is there something else there?
Yeah, I think so. From a company standpoint, you always feel like GE should be in the 80 to 100 on price range for stock, and they were there for a long time. So when you see GE be in the single digits, it’s really worrisome.
So they have done a couple of different pieces. One is they are trying to accumulate cash rate and cash is what Keates a business operating. If you run out of cash, you have to close the doors. So they’ve been really paying attention to how much cash they have on hand and making sure they have they’re actually increasing
. They’re doing some buybacks and things of that sort. But basically they’re trying to hoard cash, which makes them sustainable. But there are the other divisions, like the health care division has done really well. Engines hasn’t done super well because airplane business is down right now and renewables hasn’t done extraordinarily well.
It’s done OK. They’re sort of paring losses and trying to get it wholesome again. So I think that what everybody’s feeling on the investment side is GM is stabilizing himself instead of being in in this triage situation where you’re just slicing off parts and trying to save trying to save the remaining pieces that you can get stable
, it feels a little more stable that they have cash flow to get through, some to go through some bad times. And there are honing up all those divisions that can generate cash in the future. And, you know, on the renewable side, G is going to be half of the wind turbines, the United States, more than likely just
because it’s our home turf and they can compete very, very well in the United States. So if you’re looking forward looking on the investment side, you’re saying, well, gee, renewables is going to be a big player and the rest of GE is in places that historically have made large amount of profit.
So that’s good for GE. And I think everybody on the outside that was pooh poohing GE two years ago even that’s all quieted down. I think the marketplace is is going to be better. And obviously the new CEO is going to help do that.
There’s a lot of legwork involved, just making sure the investors and the and the stock exchange type, all the all the investment groups that are down in New York City and around the some of the financial centers of the world, there’s a lot of handholding.
It has to happen there to give a pretty comfortable feeling like, yeah, guys, OK, and we’re starting to get that. So that tells you the leadership group is doing a good job of of, you know, stopping the bleeding, creating positive feelings and obviously doing the 10 to one cabonne.
And the stock price has turned positive for them because the stock price has risen well.
And last in this topic today is Vlastos. They’ve lowered their financial guidance chiefly due to Covid and to inflation. They had a good first half, our first quarter of twenty twenty one. But now they’re saying, hey, you know, with Covid and, you know, inflation, that’s kind of running rampant everywhere.
You know, don’t expect as much maybe in the second half. And of course, we heard that from Siemens, Gamesa as well. We’ve heard complaints of complaints. But, you know, look, raw materials have gone up in inflation. There’s been a lot of issues this year with financial guidance, getting those numbers right and just having accurate forecast for shareholders
. So what’s your take here with Festus lowering their expectations?
It feels like the Covid experience hasn’t really ended. In fact, we’re going through sort of round two or in some cases maybe round three. And it’s hard for a business, particularly a large industrial organization like Vestas or any of them, GE, to try to manage the access to its employees.
I think that’s a big drawdown right now. And also the raw materials used to make wind turbines, and that’s going to be restricted also. And as we see, there’s inflationary prices on raw materials, fiberglass, the epoxy is the metal, the steel, all those all those pieces are increasing in price.
And there’s really no way to limit it at the moment. You can’t buy massive quantities to bring the price down as much as you want. Right now, no one’s listening. And so the question really remains, as six months ago, we felt like in large industrials felt like we’re going to be slowly coming out of Covid and we
didn’t necessarily consider a variant. And now we’re on variant two, I think isn’t LAMDA than the new variant that’s going around.
There’s a new one. Yeah, all the time. There was Delta plus, which people said sound like a streaming service, which is very true. It does. And then there was Lambda. So, yeah, there’s a lot that these things do.
They they mutate. You know, it’s natural selection in a sense. So.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
No, not this natural. So I want to clarify that Clamato not natural selection with people, but with the virus the virus is selecting which versions are surviving and thriving longer.
That’s right. So what’s what’s happening? Right. It’s it’s been genetically modified. And then the the the ones that are contagious continue on. Hmm. I guess the question is, what is the. Are these larger companies and countries, for that matter, going to start doing about it?
Because the at least in the United States, I’ll speak for the United States experience six months ago. Thus, the push was, we’re going to vaccinate everybody. We’re going to try to. Well, a year ago, it was we’re going to try to minimize the number of hospital visits and that kind of thing.
And what’s happening now is we’re getting into the in which no one’s really saying yet, but I think it’s going to be the case is that Copas is never going to go away. The question is, can we minimize the the people that are dying from it or having severe reactions to it?
And from an industrial corporation, I think you want to get to that point. We want to say, all right, Covid may come around, but at least my employees are going to be safe or the ones that are at highest risk or maybe need to separate from.
But we got to get going because we can’t be in another year of not generating revenue like we have been in the previous five, 10 years, that that’s that’s just not going to work.
Yeah. And I think that does sound like that probably is the outcome, because you wonder how could we ever get rid of it down to zero on the entire planet and knowing how contagious it is? It does seem like it might just be like the flu where the flu will live with it.
Right. We know people are going to get a flurry of reform. I’m not saying that Covid is the flu. I’m certainly not saying that. I’m just saying we’ve learned that the flu is a thing that just always exists and it never fully goes away.
We expect that every year and some amount of people are affected. We get flu shots, you know, or some don’t. Sometimes get flu shots. They don’t work that one year round. The flu is awful. Yeah, but but yeah, that might be a reality.
So we’ll see. So I want to move on here and Rosemere might throw this one to you first. So a cool article here about a local local to me, actually, a Virginia girl in a rising fifth grader named Piromya Jindal won the twenty twenty one kid win challenge, which was to design a wind turbine, essentially.
So, Rosmarie, what what is your take on your on her winning design? And the other thing I want to hear your input on is do we need more contact contests like this one to help encourage kids to get into science, get into engineering?
Because we’ve talked about how there’s a dearth of engineers around the country, around the around the world, rather. And how especially with all this additional wind power, hot, green, hydrogen, all this stuff, we’re going to need more engineers.
So I assume you’re pretty on board with this this kid wind challenge and probably want to see more of them.
Yeah. So I had a look at her wind turbine and I thought it was really cool. You know, it’s got some design features in there that are pretty interesting. It’s got. Did you notice that it had like a a modular tower and foundation construction out of some PDVSA pipes?
I thought that was pretty pretty nifty way to handle that part of the design. And it had a variable pitch blades. And the thing that I thought it was the most cool about it was that she’s been logging the data and and.
Learning from from that, so I mean, that’s really well, that’s really real world engineering to, you know, come up with a design and then actually follow through to say, how is it working? Is it, you know, working the way that it was expected or not and, you know, tweaking to to try and improve the design.
I do think that these kinds of projects are really important for kids. And I definitely love to especially encourage them in girls, because I know that a lot of girls drop out of STEM subjects, and especially math as they move later in their schooling.
So I think we definitely have to start at that really early age, getting kids to get excited about STEM and engineering and also to see the real world applications. So I think it’s also in this kind of project.
I have obviously many more of them in the future.
So next on the docket, let’s talk about Windbreaks. So interesting article from Science News with some some research backing this one, that windbreaks might be a source of increased or amplified wind power to get some of these turbines producing at a higher output.
So, Alan, I know you read through the research that these windbreaks, which are essentially what is the wind break down and how is it. Let’s start there. What is the wind break? How does it affect the aerodynamics of the airflow before it approaches a wind turbine?
Well, think of it this way. It kind of shoves the air this nearest the ground up towards a wind turbine. So you’re getting more airflow in some minor velocity increase. I would say into the turbine to produce more power.
And the this little research article said up to 10 percent more power, which is has a lot of power. It’s a lot of power right now because we’re scraping away for one to two percent and vortex generators and some other aerodynamic fixes.
But 10 percent would be life altering for a lot of existing wind operations. So it makes you wonder, is this realizable in a sense? Can can we just go out, build mounds of dirt in front of wind turbines and get that same effect?
Maybe it’s possible. You know, our our friend Nick Maddern would be able to tell us for sure. But I think if you look in west Texas, west Texas, a lot of the wind turbines are built at the top of a mesa.
So it’s like a 200 to 300 foot. The land just drops off and it just literally drops off. So you put wind turbines right at the edge of that mesa as a one comes from the valley, comes roaring up the the face of the mesa, flips over the edge and then runs ancho wind turbine.
You can actually get higher wind speeds by doing that. And so Texas has taken advantage of that. In fact, if you look at a lot of the early wind turbines were cited, were sited where there was an elevation change.
So it would make sense that some sort of wind fence or windbreak type of device or a modification of the soil in front of a wind turbine could theory on a smaller scale produce more wind? 10 percent seems like a lot to me, because if it was ever really 10 percent out there, I feel like somebody would
have tried it already.
Go ahead. Concrete barriers beneath each each turbine.
Right. I mean, for if you’re if you’re really talking about a 10 percent increase, it would pay for itself in probably a year or two if you were going to need to build some permanent type structure or at least temporary structure to deflect the wind plus or keep Buffalo away.
You know, you have no need in buffalo barriers. But in my head, I’m picturing a huge concrete, you know, like traffic divider just in front of, you know, onshore wind farms, the base of a turbine just to push the whip.
But yeah, so yeah, keep it’ll keep Buffalo Bay maybe bears that kangaroos rosny but. Oh, no, you’re right. But but but you’re a hundred percent right. If this really does work, then that potentially becomes a legitimate thing right.
Where you might build a some sort of ramp to. Oh, sure. On shore, on shore,
especially like this is just an example of Iowa. Right. So a lot of the wind turbines in Iowa are built in farm fields. And if you could build some sort of barrier and increase the output of the wind turbine, you will probably do it.
So the the kicker I think the kicker is we haven’t seen it tried before. We need to really try it somewhere. And obviously in Europe, they have organizations that are more research oriented than the United States. But the United States also has research facilities in which they could try it and see if it does improve the airflow
. It’s interesting concept, but. We just need to get a little more data to see how real that it is, because you think about the offshore opportunities and that also. Do you put some sort of barrier out in the ocean to to increase the airflow?
Maybe you put an old ship out there and just anchor it and say, OK, winds hit me. Maybe that’s what you do, Rosemary.
What’s your take on this? I’m sure you’re ready to to weigh in. But obviously, I mean, is this something you’ve heard of before? Has anyone ever pitched you this idea on on YouTube or anywhere else as ways to to amplify the wind before it gets to a typical, typical wind farm?
Yeah. So do I think that 10 percent is high? Yes, definitely. But that doesn’t mean to say that, you know, a lower percentage couldn’t be achieved. And to be honest, one percent would be amazing, a game changer. And even, you know, I’ve seen people get very, very upset about losing a quarter of a percent of their pay
from, you know, the stuff that stuff have done to their wind turbine blades when, you know, instrument them up to to see what’s going on. So, yeah, you would need a small fraction of that 10 percent to be real for it to still be a good innovation.
But one. Yeah, but one thing that I did notice with the simulation was they mentioned that they tried a different configuration. And I think it was a bit a bit higher or a bit lower, and that was detrimental to the wind farms.
So they’ve kind of found one really precise height that works. And to me that just really that kind of red flag, that it’s just some sort of quirk in the simulation. And I’ll be pretty surprised if these results pan out in reality.
But like I said, super cheap to try it out. My recommendation is to go find a wind farm owner that once, you know, that wants to buy a lottery ticket for that 10 percent, a pay gain. And, yeah, checks and fences often say how you got.
All right, in their last segment today, Alan will toss us to you first, so we’ve talked about on one of our previous episodes, Thermoplastic Blades, some of the new research that’s come out potentially showing that they’re, you know, might be viable and with some new manufacturing techniques to weld them together, which includes putting essentially metal foils between
the two halves. Joining the two halves, heating up the foils until they melt weld and then the foils would remain so. Alan, let’s let’s talk first about the lightning implications of this. What are the what are some of the bombs blurted out or what are the lighting implications of having a potentially well-made thermoplastic blade?
But then that still has remaining foils inside of it.
Anywhere you put conductivity in a plastic blade, it will attract lightning. So even if they decided to put heaters, some sort of heater in, say, the leading edge of the trailing edge to bond sections of blades, together with those pieces of metal remain.
It is a lower conductive path, at least the path of least resistance for lightning to follow, even if it doesn’t follow it all the way down. It’s going to be one of those places where lightning is more likely to strike.
And the problem is, is that we wind turbine slash aerospace haven’t been really good at predicting where, when, where lightning is going to strike or why it’s striking there. And there’s a lot more we need to understand about aerodynamics and lightning strikes, clearly.
And what what scares me is I don’t think the current regulatory bodies on the aerospace side or even like the IPCC specifications on the wind turbine side would adequately cover the all the conditions in which lightning is striking.
When wind turbine blades adding that metallic or resistive elements into the blade and leaving it there for the lifetime of the blade seems fraught with hazard. And it wouldn’t be my first idea. I would try to find other ways to heat the blade before I would leave something conductive inside of it.
Now, there’s been some research here in the United States where they’ve they’ve done that thermoplastic melting of the blade and bonding it together. And then over top of what they’ve done, over top of it, they basically put a metal foil over top of the blade surface to prevent the lightning from reaching down to where that heater is
. And that, I think, will be somewhat effective. But again, do you want to put that on a thousand turbines and find out the hard way? I think you want to get some turbines in real life situations where lightning strikes much more frequently and check out and make sure that it works before you do make a thousand or
10000 turbines using this technology.
Well, and now and so if if these thermoplastic blades, which are probably, you know, off in the distance, if they start with smaller, say, hypothetically, they start with smaller wind turbines, you know, the distributed wind market. And we’re talking about a 10 or 20 or 30 meter blade.
Is it still the same concern?
No, it’s not what we’re seeing. Well, not as much, because I think there’s there’s been this transition as we’ve gotten sort of above 50 meters on Blade Lankton, and now we’re into the 100 meters on blade length. There are different physics that happen there.
You essentially lift yourself self so far off the earth that you connect the wind turbines, you’re creating lightning strikes. They’re actually triggering a bunch of lightning strikes, more so than when they were smaller. So the size does matter in this.
And if you’re going to do something of an experiment, I think you have to be somewhere in the 60 to 80 range just to make sure you definitely have the lightning effects. And physics are at their maximum effect on the on the on these blades make incepted smaller.
I think it will give us a false positive. That’s and we see that. We see that right now when we have customers call us like you don’t get a lot of 40 amenability problems.
So let me jump in there. Why do the smaller scale blades not scale up? Like why why are they not accurate when they get on to real world situations?
I think it’s a combination of speed, rotational speed speeds and heighth. I think that those are the two and the third the third element here, which we’re doing a lot of work on internally, is what the effect of leading edge erosion does on the lightning production system.
So not only would you have to build a big blade and put it in place where lightning is much more frequent, I think you also need to let it sit out there for several years or to mechanically degrade it and then put it out in service.
I do think there’s an element of leading edge erosion or damage that happens. And so normally to a blade could be even U.B. that degrade the Blades performance and then cause more lightning damage. There’s just too many there’s a lot of variables here we do not have.
Have a good handle on and I just I just don’t feel comfortable because we’re not been super successful right now, I would be very uncomfortable about putting big thermoplastic blades out service without having a little more understanding of what’s going to happen.
Well, and here’s my last laman question. Why does the Therma, if the thermoplastic is encasing this metal, why does it not act just like an insulated wire? Know, like we have wires. I installed a fan in my parents’ house painstakingly, I might add, like 17 feet up at the pitch of their roof and Sivers fan that need
to be replaced for. Thank God my parents, you know, two two boys were there. We were up on ladders. But you know, you’re up there all the wiring and you just put a wire knot and you know, the insulated wire does the job.
It’s going to sit there for the next 10 years and there’s not gonna be any sparking like it’s going to be fine. So why if we have this huge plastic blade encasing this thin sliver of metal, why doesn’t it act the same way and essentially act like a insulated wire where it’s fine?
Well, it has to do with how much voltage lightning has with it, which is in the millions and millions of volts which will break through any sort of plastic barrier. I don’t care what it’s made out. You get enough voltage, you’ll break through anything.
Very few things will handle large, large voltages, ceramics. There’s been a certain ceramics that we use on high voltage transmission lines and that kind of thing. But plastics have not been as reliable. And because the manufacturing variability as you can well imagine, if you’re making a 150 meter blade, it’s not going to be perfectly uniform all the
way down. It are like an insulator that’s used on a high voltage transmission line, which will be controlled all the way through. It’s just a very difficult manufacturing place to to make sure things are electrically perfect. It’s not the right situation for it, I think, as we’ve seen on airplanes time and time again.
And the best laid plans don’t always work out like you think they will. And the laboratory is also the laboratory results always throw you off because you come out with this feeling confidence like I did the IEC test, everything’s going to work out great, or I did the FAA tests and everything’s going to work out great.
And then it goes in service and it doesn’t work out great. And you just realize we just we know a lot about lightning. We don’t know everything about it. And wind turbines are growing so fast and the technology is growing so fast that us engineers are having a hard time keeping up with all the the lightning related
issues that are happening.
So then do you think even when this comes to commercial scale, whatever scale that is, you think it’ll still have to have some sort of external lightning? I mean, beside a receptor, but also probably a lightning diverter strip or a foil or like something else, a cap tip, a different tip to to mitigate these risks.
Yeah. And what was it will it’ll have to have some other form of lightning protection. The question is what and how much is it going to cost? And can you install it repeatably, reliably on thousands of blades? And we haven’t really had a good record of doing that.
The existing lightning receptors, I think because we’ve done it so many times, we’ve been we’ve gotten pretty good at it. But other types of lightning protection toss into a blade do not have that same track record. So there’s just a lot to learn.
If you just looked at the thermoplastic improvements and wanted to fix the lightning side, you could easily spend five years doing that easily full time working on it.
So, Rosea, I want to kick this to you and get your take just on the manufacturing. So we talked a little bit about this last week, which is some of the thermoplastic manufacturing challenges. But when you start leaving things inside the blade, like we’re using these heating elements to, well, the blade together, aside from the lighting stuff
, which which Allen covered, I mean, is that going to pose any problem long term? Like if there’s any sort of rust or if there’s any ingress of water? I mean, one of the things does someone need to think about where leaving metal inside of it might come back to haunt you later?
Yes. OK, so the foil in the wind turbine flight was really interesting to me. I see red flags for manufacturability. I mean, a wind turbine blade. It’s it’s curved and it’s not it’s not just curved in one direction, you know, towards a tip.
It’s double curved. It’s not so easy to just take a, you know, a rigid foil and curve that in two directions. So I think that you’re going to, one, say problems with drivability of a metal foil. And two, if you’re going to infuse the blade, you’re going to have, then the you know, the impermeable metal foil is
going to cause some challenges for the infusion as well, you know, to be able to get the resin both above and below that metal foil layer. And then not to mention the challenge of making sure that you’ve got a good bond between the foil and the.
And, you know, wind turbine blades are flexing, just constantly flexing over their life. Millions of flexes over their lifetime. So you can imagine if it’s not really well bonded together, then you might get some separation there eventually. So those would be my biggest challenges from the manufacturing point of view that I would want to look into.
And probably they you know, they did cover all those points early on in their development. And then the next thing would be repairs, because you definitely don’t want any short circuits in between your metal foil and, you know, somewhere that it’s it’s not supposed to the electricity is not supposed to flow.
So I’d be worried about. Yeah. When you repair how you can rebuild that surface. So it still behaves the way that it was intended to and that you don’t cause any short circuits in the meantime. Not to mention that when you do hot work like grinding, if you’ve got some metal spark.
Yeah. If you’re grinding through metal, then you might get some metal sparks, which could be a fire risk or cause other problems. So, yeah, those are the the main challenges that I say. And, you know, obviously Alan has as well aware about the lightning challenges as well.
And so your specific points about what to ingress? Well, yeah, I’m not sure what exactly the material was. I thought it was aluminum. So I don’t think you would need to worry too much about it rusting. I guess you can get surface oxidation, but you would expect that the whole surface is supposed to be covered with resin
. So it shouldn’t shouldn’t be using any oxygen to to oxidize. What unforeseen consequences might be? I don’t know. That’s that’s what they’re unforseen. Definitely. There’ll be some and there’s caves of merit in trying to, you know, test on a small scale as possible.
But it’s not so easy when we all know that, you know, lightning test doesn’t recreate the exact conditions that you’ll see out in the field. And then you can, you know, install a prototype. But you’d you don’t know it’s going to get struck by lightning, right.
I mean, you’d have to install thousands of them to make sure that you got one or two strikes over the trial period. So, I mean, that’s a pretty that’s a pretty big trial. You certainly wouldn’t want to put out a thousand blades and then find out you lightning system didn’t work and you have to drag them all
down and have to have to redo them. So, yeah, I mean, it’s definitely going to be very challenging. I’m actually surprised that it’s worth it for, you know, they’re trying to to bond to heat up this joint, to bind it together.
That’s what the metal strip in there is for, really. Seems like, you know, the problem they’re trying to solve is opening up a much bigger problem, potentially. I mean, obviously, I’m not involved intimately with the with the technical challenges that they’re they’re facing, but.
Yeah, well, they really opened a big can of worms. When you mess with the lightning protection system and when you’re trying to put something like a metal foil into a blade. So I wish them good luck.
Well, all right. Well, that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks again for listening. Be sure to subscribe to uptime tech news. It’s in the show notes here on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you’re listening.
So again, if you wanna grab our weekly newsletter just with an alert of the new show, some other great news about tech and policy and markets all over wind energy. Definitely subscribe to uptime tech news. And be sure to follow up with Rosemary Barnes on YouTube.
She’s an amazing YouTube channel, so you’ll find links to her channel in the description as well from Rosemary Allen, all of us. We’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades.
It’s incredibly expensive to send a team of rope access technicians up tower to make even simple repairs. We also know how costly lightning damage can be requiring inspection, repairs and downtime for even minor lightning strikes. Maximize the time efficiency of your tax and prevent future lightning damage by installing our strike tape loops upgrade the next time your
crews are going up on ropes. Learn more on today’s show notes or visit us on the Web. Weather Guard wind dot COM.
