Joel Saxum and Allen Hall review the latest info from the tower tip-over at the Pioneer Trail Wind Farm in Illinois. Keystone Tower Systems completes its first spiral welded tower for GE, and signs a big agreement for many more. The first monopile for Vineyard Wind is shipped from Germany to kick-off the build. SENSEWind developed a new method of assembling a wind turbine – could it be a game changer? The Netherlands is tracking submarines in their offshore wind farms, and our Wind Farm of the Week is Black Rock Wind Farm in West Virginia.
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Uptime 154
Allen Hall: Joel, I’m working on six different time zones today, , and that’s the way it’s been for the last two or three weeks. All around the world. We’re getting phone calls and Zoom calls Northern Hemisphere, Southern hemisphere. It, it, it does add up for a small business when you’re dealing with so many time zones.
Joel Saxum: Oh, man. I was, I was thinking before when, before you hopped on here today and I was, we were talking, I was, I have talked through four. and I thought I was busy. And you’re over here with six different times. Those under your belt. And then it’s, it’s not even dark yet. Yeah,
Allen Hall: it’s not dark. I, I still have time.
Australia will be calling here in a minute. . There you go. You’re up to
Joel Saxum: seven. Lucky number seven.
Allen Hall: Number seven. There it is. I think I’ve set the record at least for this week. There you go. Well, we have a lot of wind energy news this week. The big win in America is that a wind tur been tipped over in Illinois.
While that’s the, a big talking point, I’m not. But it is all the rage on LinkedIn, so we’ll, we’ll talk about it. More importantly Keystone and GE connect on the spiral steel towers, and that’s something I have been waiting for, for uhno a year or two. And I’m just on Looker, but I think that’s a really cool
Joel Saxum: project.
We’ll jump over since wind and we’re gonna talk about this company coming outta the UK that is doing something. Okay. Basically a cli, a self erecting tower, or Alan during the episode has his own New term for this tower technology. And then we’ll speak about the Netherlands accusing Russia of spying on some of their offshore wind farms.
Not sure why or how Google Earth is your friend to find this stuff out, but the Russians are in that corner of the world peeking around also. Touching again on some tower technology. We speak a little bit about the first monopile that’s on its way to vineyard wood one off the CO east coast of the us.
So that’s happening now. And then to close out the episode our new. Feature is the Wind Farm of the week. We’re gonna talk about the BlackRock Wind Farm in West Virginia and what they’re doing over there with the new five megawatt Siemens Kamasa machines. I’m
Allen Hall: Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard, lightning Tick.
And I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum. And the soon to be guest host, fully charged Live. Rosemary isn’t here today, but should be back next week, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Joel officials for R W E Renewables are investigating what caused one of their wind turbines to fall over at its Pioneer Trail Wind Farm up in Illinois. The turbine was taken offline earlier because it was leaning and if you looked on LinkedIn on social media, you would’ve seen this turban pretty much everywhere.
And this is the first time according to R R W E that this has ever happened. And they have 30 plus wind farms across the US and several thousand turbines at this point. That wind farm began operation in 20 11 94 turbines ge, 1.6 megawatt machines, and. Joel, the pictures you and I saw on LinkedIn, there was a drone that had a gun over top of the site and it looked like the concrete pad had failed.
Joel Saxum: When I first saw this thing leaning, I was thinking, man, being deep into the kinda the wind turbine world here just in the States, but globally as well. You see blade failures and you see generator failures or gearbox failures, but you don’t see very many foundation failure. and, and then I started kind of thinking about it.
I’m like, well, I wonder why that is. And kind of like my engineering mind started running and I was thinking, you know, it’s really actually kind of surprising you don’t see more of these issues because, because you know, concrete con, you know, mixing concrete and steel and all these different mechanisms together and engineering it and different soil conditions and all this stuff like this.
It’s, it’s a science, right? But it’s the same thing as the blades or anything else when it comes to the engineering world. There’s some, there’s some art to it too. You know, like if you’re, if you’re, you know, if you’re pouring these foundations in West Texas, it’s completely different than if you’re pouring ’em in Illinois with all the, all the , you know, organic soils and the different mechanisms of soil movement and all that kind of stuff.
And, you know, you get in some areas Oklahoma regularly has a lot of little, you know, 4.0, 3.0 earthquakes. So it’s kind of surprising that you don’t see more of these, these issues with some foundations.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it is. And the last time I think we talked about, one was up in Canada, probably a year ago. They had a couple of, of, they had a tur.
Chip over and then they started checking all of the pads and they had an issue on, on multiple pads and they were gonna have to repore them, I assume, or try to address them in some way, which would’ve been an exciting time up there. This, this situation is, it seems to be a one-off right now. And the key to this little news story is that it comes at a time when Illinois is in a lot of.
Back and forth between the state officials and the county officials and local officials. The state of Illinois passed a law recently, which basically all the siding and regulation standards for wind, turbis, and solar. Facilities are controlled at the state level. So if your or local ordinances do not match the state, then the state rules apply.
So basically it took all the power away from the local counties and took it to the state. And that exists everywhere, Illinois, except for Chicago in the surrounding area. So that did not go over well with a, a lot of the officials in, in.
Joel Saxum: It’s frustrating, right? Like so I’m, you know, if you’ve listened to the podcast, you know, I’m from Wisconsin originally, so in Wisconsin we have kind of the same political, I, I’m not gonna say the same cuz I don’t wanna say the same as Illinois, but the same kind of like concentrated power as Illinois does, right?
So you have the city of Chicago, which Chicago’s not even the capital, right? But a lot of the power resides in Chicago. Much like in Wisconsin, a lot of the power resides in Madison or Milwaukee. So you have these couple of strongholds that tend to control or have, you know, their word. everything in the state.
Now, if you look at Illinois as a state, the the, where a lot of the rules and regulations and legislation comes from is a very minority position in the state. The rest of it is, is it’s agricultural land. It’s it’s conservative people out there that are the kind of angry anyways about their lives being run by someone that, that doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Now, twofold here, so I believe that, you know, when we’re talking foundations for wind, There is some o you know, overarching engineering principles that should be applied and, you know, A S C E or a S C M E laws or, or regulations or, or guidelines at the state level or, or even national level for some of these things are, are, are okay, right?
So You know, there’s things that don’t change within this. We know that the reason we put steel in concrete is because the coefficient of thermal, expansion of steel is the same as con or close to the same as concrete, right? We, we have these rules around these things and the way they’re done, but taking that power away from the l local government, I mean, I, I’m a fan of small government, so I don’t really like to see that.
Allen Hall: Yeah, and it, it, if you’re a wind turbine operator, it’s a really difficult mix at the moment because there’s been a lot of more recent interactions between wind turine operators and developers and the, and the local officials. And a lot of confusion between the two. It’s, it’s hard if you’re the developer to navigate all these things because you got local people who probably don’t know that much about wind turbine installations, what’s all going on.
And then you have the state that’s involved and all their authority and you’re just trying to get a wind turbine project off the ground. , it seems like it takes a couple years to get it done. So I’m assuming that the Illinois legislature decided to make this move because the movement at the local level wasn’t where they wanted it.
And the, the way I kind of look at it, It’s the United States of America. It’s not the United Counties of America. So the state government has a lot of authority over their own state. The problem in some of these areas, like you pointed out, Joel, is kinda like New York, really? New York City and Buffalo control the whole New York state and, and it’s hard if you’re in the middle, which is where the wind turbines are.
The wind turbines are not gonna be in New York City. They’re not gonna be necessarily in Buffalo. They’re gonna be in the middle. You know
Joel Saxum: what, and, and at some level, because I, I also agree, and if the, I like free market. Capitalism, right? So r w e, massive International Operator Offshore Wind Farms in Europe, onshore wind farms.
They’re a German company, right? They’ve been around forever. They’ve been around, I think they’ve been around since, you know, the, the return of the 19th or nine 20th century. But it’s. You have to almost be able to rely on some of their expertise, right? This is, as they have stated here, and as we’ve stated in watching the market, this isn’t a regular thing that happens.
This is a, a kind of a freak event, right? So I believe that they’ll do a root cause analysis on this case. I don’t think it’ll be. From, from my, from my mind and looking at the pictures, it looks like there’s something off there with the concrete, like there might have been a, a cold joint or a bad mix or some, the bad slump in the, in the poor or something at that stage, or some cracks, you know, the, a freeze thaw level and some water ingress got in there.
There’s something goofy there. They’ll do a root cause analysis study. They’ll figure out what it is. They may do some, some, some penetrating, you know Penetrating radar, N D t tests or something on some other foundations in within that wind farm. They’ll figure out what the problem is and they’ll, and they’ll rectify it.
I’ve got utmost confidence in that. So the people that are saying, well, maybe we need to have more oversight on these things, I think that just slows down our energy transition if you try
Allen Hall: to do that. Yeah, I kinda look at it this way, you know, there was the. Train accident, east Palestine, Ohio.
That led to the chemical spill. Then the, then the chemical burned. Which is one train accident. And when that happened, the response outta the federal, federal government was, well, there’s a thousand train derailments a year. Why is this one any different? Like, okay, that’s not a really good answer. In this particular case, it’s like the opposite.
We have one turbine fall over. because of something wrong with the pad, but it was designed such that if something were to happen, it wasn’t a safety issue. Right. It didn’t just immediately fall over one and two. It is like there’s nothing around it. Right. So it, it’s not like that train explosion. I, I just see the, just widely different responses.
The train was like, oh, hum, . But the wind term was like, oh my gosh, the world is ending. Those, those don’t equate, they don’t have to equate. , but just hit calm down a little bit. Right. It’s one wind turbine. R d b is gonna figure it out. They’re gonna have this thing identified within the next two weeks probably if they haven’t done it already and you know they’re gonna move on.
Good. That’s the way a good engineering company should
Joel Saxum: do. Yeah. It shows that the, you know, the, the wind, that wind energy and the, and the clean energy transition is a bipartisan. Hot button issue. That’s what it shows, right? They, if you look, I mean you got a, a cloud of vinyl chloride in the air that you got people that can’t return their house cause their lungs are burning and they, oh no, trains are okay.
We will go back. Like, that’s fine, don’t worry about that. And then you have this and there’s a big blowup about it. Like it, it’s a fell into a cornfield or something, right? Like it didn’t harm. Anybody, and it’s designed that way or it’s, it’s not gonna fall in a house or fall near anybody. Like you can’t cite wind turbines that close to dwell or, you know, buildings anyways right
Allen Hall: there.
Right, which is the point right now. The engineers, r d b wouldn’t have let that happen in the first place. They wouldn’t. It’s put a huge wind tur to an apartment complex , that’s just not,
Joel Saxum: this is just not gonna happen. Yeah. I don’t want any of the listeners to think that. It’s not like we’re saying this isn’t a big deal or anything like Yeah, of course it’s an issue.
Right. And we’re gonna, you know, and as an industry and as a collective, and RW as a company, they’re gonna, they’re gonna figure it out. You know, they’re, I’m sure they’re, there’s gonna be a bunch of subject matter experts involved in this thing and, and when issues like this happened, then. Dive in as engineers, we learn from them and we apply the fixes in the future generations.
So it’s not that it’s not a big idea or, or a big issue, it’s just what we’re trying to, I, I guess, communicate around here or talk about is the. the response to it from the governments.
Allen Hall: Yeah, which is gonna be a success at the end of the day. They’re gonna figure it out and it’s gonna be resolved. All right, so one of my favorite projects over the last year or two has been the people at Keystone Tower Systems and their spiral welded tower.
Because it, it is sort of an industry changer while they’ve been working behind the scenes and we’ve asked ’em to come into the podcast but evidently they’ve been too busy. But Keystone Tower Systems and GE Renewable Energy had a milestone with their spiral welded tower. As it was used on a 2.8 megawatt GE machine, a 2.8 1 27 turbine, and it’s a combination of a multi-year effort between GE and Keystone to design it and produce spiral weld towers for GE turbines.
The roughly 90 meter towers manufactured at Keystone’s Factory in Tampa, Texas and Joel Tampa, Texas is up in the panhandle of Texas. Pretty much it’s far north as they can get in Texas. And that they, they hope to create a, a 200 new manufacturing jobs at that factory when they get to full capacity, full capacity.
They’re talking about one gigawatt of towers per year. So if they’re, you know, it’s 200, well, it’s 400 towers a year, roughly. That’s a. Towers to make. And, and you and I were talking beforehand, Joel, and we thought that the, the, one of the keys to the Keystone effort was that it was gonna be mobile, a mobile platform, that they could build these towers wherever they were needed.
But in this particular case, it’s a fixed site, sort of in the central United States. So you think of Texas being pretty far south, but the pan held actually, It’s kind of north, it’s right next to Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. It’s right there in the middle of everything. It’s probably a smart place for a factory, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. To be honest with you, Pampa, I mean that area of the, of the country near Amarillo and some of those other small you know, lot cotton farmers and stuff up there, like those 200 jobs are gonna be amazing for that area. What an ec an economic boom, right? It’s huge. And it’s not, I mean, there’s a lot of you know, technical capabilities that go into producing these, but they’re not.
so deep that it’s like, it, it’s not the aerospace industry, right, where you’ve gotta have all these technic, like highly technical skills. A lot of these jobs will be soaked up like that. So it’s great. Another thing about that corner of the world is there’s a lot of rail over there too, right? And your, your Oklahoma’s right there.
Kansas is right there. What? Eastern Colorado, New Mexico. And. . Yeah. And you’ve got rail all the way straight shots up to Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, South Dakota Minnesota. So Wyoming, I mean you’ve got it’s a great spot. Plus like, like we were talking about, taking advantage of those Texas tax laws.
And then right now, great time to build a factory cuz you can take take advantage of ittc. And you know, as p as PTC goes, ITTC goes as well. So now you’ve, now you’re getting some credits back from your, our tax credits back from our federal government for starting manufacturing jobs in a manufacturing facility in the United States.
So it’s, you know, we thought it was gonna be on site. Maybe it’s still will, maybe this’ll be a staging area. We don’t know. But cool to see it happening cuz we talked about it you know, some months back this is what they’re, you know, kind of putting out there as an idea, but now it’s reality.
They’ve installed one, it’s fantastic.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s good. And the Keystone is still working on the, the mobile factory concept, but Keystone and GE are also collaborating on the GE three megawatt turbine platform. And they have signed a multi-year agreement to make Sparrow Towers out of that pampa. There you go.
There’s a great quote here, and I, I wanna read this quote quickly. Quote, this Collaboration with Keystone is an example of GEs commitment to working with partners to bring new and innovative technology to the wind industry and advanced domestic manufacturing. Said Vic Abate, GEs renewable energy, c e o, onshore wind.
We’re delighted to be part of this exciting opportunity for our workforce products, or sorry, our workhorse products and the, with the goal of providing affordable, sustainable, renewable energy to our customers and helping to deliver on the energy transition. So I, I, I think that tax implications are, Pretty clear here, Joel.
I mean, GEs gonna try to use as many American manufacturers as they can because those credits are in place. So
Joel Saxum: why not? Thanks to GE for bringing some of those jobs back, right? Like, so we’re constantly talking on the podcast here about wanting to see more American companies involved in wind, whether it be from the man manufacturing side, the aftermarket side, whatever it may be.
Keystone being one of those new companies, starting up a factory, adding jobs, and bringing some American efforts to the energy transition here is
Allen Hall: great. Yeah, and we, as we were talking earlier also, the spiral tower must be a pretty big game changer in either terms of Cost of the final tower or speed of manufacturing towers, it’s one or the other.
GE doesn’t tend to mess around with things at only minor improvements in the way they do business. So this keystone effort must have some underlying good economics and GEs gonna push it forward. That’s great.
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Allen Hall: As we stay on the steel tower business, German company, e e w, special Pipe Construction, U S P C, that’s how you’d pronounce it in America. ? Yes. Sorry. It’s totally an American thing. Manufacturers offshore wind monopiles and has completed the heaviest monopile for the first commercial offshore wind farm in the us, which is vineyard, wind.
The monopile. Thousand 895 tons of steel for Vineyard One. And if everybody is not familiar with Vineyard one that’s located about 15 miles from Martha’s Vineyard in Nantucket and about 30 or 40 miles from the mainland of Massachusetts, not very far from us. The comparison that is given in this particular article is a fully loaded 7 47 is only 447 tons, so basically four fully loaded, fully fueled 7 47 s is going to equal the weight of this one model pile.
Holy moly the model pile has a diameter of 9.6 meters. And a length of 85 meters. This is a massive piece of steel, Joel. And remember that vineyard wind is gonna have 62 of these tur, 13 megawatt hall, eight x turbines, and it looks like the, in December. Wait a minute. In, in December, the first transition pieces were manufactured for vineyard wind.
So you, you have the monopole, you have the transition piece, and then you’ve got the turbine goes on top of it. But the, the transition pieces are being made in Spain, being shipped to the United States, and also the cables for this vineyard wind project are. Being made and man manufactured and tested in Finland and in Italy.
So you got a German mono pile, you have a Spanish transition piece, and you have cables from Finland and Italy going into the vineyard, wind,
Joel Saxum: and a yeah. As it sits right now, the blades are being made in Canada. And where are the ne where are the neels coming
Allen Hall: from? I don’t know. That’s a great question. I don’t know.
Joel Saxum: I’ve, I mean, there’s, there’s, there’s an idea for, there’s idea for, of course GE has, has put the idea for you know, up the river there putting Neel factory in a blade factory in New York, which would be fantastic. But that’s not ready yet, right? These are happening now. So, so there’s not one major component here that we know of.
And maybe we’re wrong within the cells, but there’s not one major component we know of right now that’s being manufactured in the us and that’s frustra.
Allen Hall: That’s gonna be par for the course for at least the next two years
Joel Saxum: at least. So I was looking, I was looking at the size of this thing, and I was talking with my better half here yesterday, and I was looking at the 1,895 ton steel monopole.
She’s like, can you put that into some other context for me? And I was like, my truck that sits out in the yard, Six, 630 of those trucks. That’s how much it weighs. She was like, no. Yeah, yeah. It’s dead. Series 630 of those pickups. And now this isn’t even the part like this, the, the, the thing here is this isn’t even the part that you’ll see.
like, you won’t even see this. This is the stuff that’s in the water and pounded into the ground. So that doesn’t hap, that’s not the trans. The transition piece when we talk about it is if you’re not not familiar with offshore wind, that’s basically like the cage that is set on top of the monopile, so it goes monopiles pounded into the ground.
Maybe if you’re in 50 meters of water, that monopile might be pounded into the ground another 20, and then. The transition piece will sit on top of it, and then the tower sections are put on top of the transition piece, then the cell spinner blades. So this is a, it’s, it’s, it’s a, it’s a lot of work to do this.
Allen Hall: So the soil testing around these, Joel, it is gonna be interesting, right? When I started running the numbers, like, man, that’s a lot of weight for basically a 10 meter diameter area of, of ground, right? So you stack all these things on top of one another and then it has to not. Further into the, into the earth.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. The geotech, the geo geotechnical engineers that work in these offshore wind farms are some of the best in the world, man. You know, a lot of times their design will go because there’s bedrock down there lots, right? So depending on where you are, you might go, say at, at turb. Four, there might be 18 meters of, there might be three meters of silt and then 10 meters of, you know, compacted dirt and then you four meters of something else.
And then you hit bedrock. So they’ll actually measure this thing. They go right to bedrock and they’ll set it right on the bedrock so that thing can’t sink anymore. And they do a com. A combination. Sometimes it’s a combination, sometimes it’s individual. Pounding the monopiles, and sometimes they do it with the suction can, or at the same time.
So if you cap, if you put the, the thing into the mud for the monopile, just like a tube, think of like a paper towel tube. Stick that into the mud and then cap it. Then you can put a p a water pump on it and basically pump the air and water out of it. And as you do that, it’ll suck itself down into the. So that’s one method of putting in a monopile.
The other method is to get on top of it and just boom, boom, boom. Jackhammer it down
Allen Hall: into the mud. Yeah. I think that’s what’s happening. The jackhammer is gonna be the way that they’re gonna do it for vineyard wind, the question is, and how do they know how? Where they’re gonna bottom out at? How do they figure that out?
Do they do core samples? Are they drilling down that far to actually figure out what that depth is?
Joel Saxum: Oh yeah. Combination of a combination of core sampling. and near surface and near surface seismic. So near surface seismic. Think about basically, If you were to get an M r I of your knee after having an a c L surgery or something, and then the doctor pulls up the image and you go like, and they kind of slice through it and they go like, see here is skin, skin, muscle, bone, ligament, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Near surface seismic of the C floor. We’ll give you that same profile. and then you compare it with the soil borings or the, you know, the, the weight drop borings or whatever in that area to say, okay, this is, this is what we believe is sand, silt, mud, you know, rocks, whatever. Here’s the bedrock. So you’ll have that, that process data of basically acoustic sub subsurface imaging.
Which is the near surface seismic to compare to the geotechnical drilling data. And then that’s when they, they can develop that profile and then the geotechnical engineers hand it off to the structural engineers and then they go about their
Allen Hall: merry way. So every wind farm in America is gonna need to have that survey
Joel Saxum: done.
Absolutely. And a lot of, a lot of times it will be, you’ll, you’ll do, you know, a geotechnical drilling or borings or soil samplings, you know, at. Along the cable routes, you have to do it as well. But you’ll do one big deep sampling at every pi monopile. And sometimes they also want to do, and this is a, this is something not to be missed.
They’ll also do sometimes an array of geotechnical sampling around each of the Monopile locations if they’re going to do the installation with a jack vessel. Because when you’re gonna install the jack vessel, you have to put the legs of the jack vessel into the sea floor as well. And, and we’ve seen that.
If you don’t do that geotechnical explor. Properly, you can hit air pockets, gas pockets, soft pockets in the mud as happened in the South China Sea, and the whole jack vessel can tip over. Did
Allen Hall: they have not only a jack vessel, but also a monopile tip over? Oh, remember that, that was not very long ago. Maybe a year ago they
Joel Saxum: lost the monopile.
I don’t think that was a, that wasn’t a soil problem, I don’t think. I think they mishandled it. But the, the jack, when when the jack went over, it hit a soft spot. In the soil. Sometimes you can hit gas pockets or other things like that, or just like where, where you thought it was sand and, but it’s actually like, I mean, if you’ve ever walked out into a muddy pond, so you know, you know what I mean?
You’ll know when you walk in that stuff. You can be up to your knees. Now imagine you’re offshore and that layer that’s up to your knees in the pond is 40 feet
Allen Hall: thick. So the oil gas industry, when they do this work and put these rigs out there, what percentage of ’em do they have problems? 1%. Less than one.
Less than one because they’ve been there so long in the same basic
Joel Saxum: area. These oil and gas industry has been doing this offshore work for since the, you know, 1960s.
Allen Hall: Now. How much do we know off the east coast
Joel Saxum: of America? Not much. , that’s the thing, right? So in the, if you go and do this, that’s why when we were talking, like right now, we just, there was just another notification coming out today.
I saw a bur bureau of Ocean Energy Management pushing forward on that auction area, lease area down in the Gulf of Mexico. We know what the Geotechs look like in the Gulf of Mexico, off of coast of Galveston and Louisiana. We’ve been out there. Years. I mean, there’s, there’s more oil rigs decommissioned on the shoreline than there is in the, in the water.
Right? They’ve been there forever. So we know what that sand shelf looks like out to the, the Gulf, in the Gulf of Mexico and where there’s salt domes and where there’s gas pockets and stuff. Cuz we’ve been all over there, the east coast of the US. We know generally, you know, you can look at geo physically, sometimes it’s surface and there’s a lot of, you know, there’s a lot of side scans on our data and stuff up there, but we don’t know the in depth look at it.
Right. We haven’t been doing that near surface seismic and the geotechnical drilling and all that stuff off of the East coast because we just never have developed anything out there. So the, no, it’s expensive. , right? It’s very expensive. So there’s no, there hasn’t been a reason to do it besides as long as we know what the bathymetry is.
So we know what kind of charting is good and, and you know, our US Navy can patrol the, the ridge with our submarines without hitting anything. We’re, we’re good there, right? So we have a good view of what’s there. And by the, by what you see on the, the suber, like the, the sea floor, you can kind of generally.
what the subsurface found, you know, is going to look like geotechnically, like it, like a, a smart geophysicist will know when you look at the mountain ranges in Denver, well, the front range of Denver, which is or, or Colorado, the front range, which is that, all that area behind Denver, behind Colorado Springs.
As you go off into the plains, they know that there’s gonna be oil and gas there because the organic material has been rolled over as those mountains formed and all this. , these are things we know, right? So looking in at the, at the sea floor, we kind of know what might be out there, but we don’t have that granular detail.
So now we have to go do all these studies. And it’s, like I said, it’s, it, it’s time consuming. It’s expensive so they, you’re not just gonna go do it for fun. Are we
Allen Hall: gonna hit oil with one of these mo piles? Kind of the
Joel Saxum: clamps? No. Now off of the West coast. that’s possible. But off the East coast, I don’t think so.
Well, that,
Allen Hall: that explains the Beverly here. Billies, right. There you go. It’s, it’s the next generation of the Beverly Hillbillies.
Joel Saxum: I hope that nobody, nobody pops into an oil pocket when they’re out there doing geotech for offshore wind. That would be a disaster.
Allen Hall: That’d be a bad day. Well, Dutch authorities had a press conference recently and they accused.
Spying on their assets , quote unquote assets including the Netherlands offshore wind farms as part of a broader effort to potentially sabotage European infrastructure. So the, the Dutch ministry defense and other intelligence agencies well since 2022, are, have been monitoring Russian ships and in particular, they wanna be really careful around those gas pipelines and any other sort of national resource that could be a target.
This comes on a recent report from the Dutch. That they’re gonna expel 10 Russian diplomats, . So, so yeah, they’re, so, yeah, which happens more often than you would think. But they expel these dip diplomats and then it sounds like there’s some Russian ships around. They’re kind of snooping around, whatever that means.
But for several months, You know, the Dutch have been watching Russian vessels, what looks like collecting data on the offshore wind farms off of Netherlands and other countries have been aware of this too. Norway has, has seen unauthorized drones near Sumits oil platforms, Denmark. And the UK having increased security around some of their more sensitive assets.
And Joel, when I, you and I talked about this a day or so ago, cuz I thought it was a little amusing in the sense that Russia knows where your wind turbines are. They’re not moving. Any kind of Google search will
Joel Saxum: tell you. Yeah, I mean, I’m, I’m looking at a map of like basically every wind farm in Northern Europe right now that’s free four C offshores that are owned by TGS is a couple.
I’m, I’m looking at it right now, going like, cause I was thinking to myself, I know a couple of wind farms offshore in the Netherlands. I’m like, how wonder many really are. They pull it up, boom. I can see every single one of ’em in a free database. Like it’s, I don’t need to be the KGB to figure this. No,
Allen Hall: it’s, it’s not good if Russian ships are trolling the area and, and you know, trying to raise the angst of the, whoever defense department, that’s, that’s just not good.
But to think that they don’t know where the wind turbines are, or if they wanted to knock the wind turbines out, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t take much to do that. There’s just sitting objects. But is, is this gonna be the. That we’re gonna have to put berries around and maybe put perimeters around the wind turbines to say there is no ship entry within these regions.
You just can’t sail on these waters. What’s to
Joel Saxum: stop it? Right. So you, you can, you can denote this as a government, you know. Do you put a chain link fence in the water? I mine in? Yeah, you could mine it, I suppose, but, You, but you’re in, you’re introducing so much more risk to the general public if, if Russians or anybody wants to sabotage anything, one of these wind farms, it’s not hard, right?
It’s not very difficult to find where the interconnector cables are. And it’s like, okay, so the Nord Stream two pipeline that happened six months ago, they blew up a pipeline. Now, I’m not saying it was Russians, but basically that was in the news and everybody’s like, who did it? Who did it? And then it kind of went.
well, someone launched a missile into a, the pipeline and blew a 50 meter crater in the sea floor and destroyed a pipeline going into Northern Europe. If someone, if, if someone, I’m saying someone with air quotes, wants to take wind farms offline or anything of the sort the technology and the capability exists within every Navy in the world to go do this.
There’s nothing you can do to stop it besides having your own navy protect your assets at sea. I mean, I hope we never get to that stage. You know, of, we’ve seen, we’ve seen articles and, and talked about you know, privately Alan, about some of the different. Issues we’ve had in the US around some of our, you know, critical energy infrastructure and what has happened, cyber attacks, physical attacks on land like this.
Is it, it may be something that’s a specific attack, but it also might be a couple of. , you know, drunk, hillbilly, redneck buddies out shooting guns. We don’t know. But that stuff can happen no matter where you are. So, so what’s to stop it? I don’t know. Mobilizing navies and armies and militaries around the world to protect your own assets.
Like I said, I hope we don’t get to that, but this article says that they escorted the Russian ship or Russian vessel out of the area the Dutch Navy did. I don’t know, it seems. It seems like it should be almost more inflammatory than it has been made up to be. Like, I don’t believe that I should just be reading an article on this.
This should be something that we hear about at the UN level, like this is a, this is a, a bigger problem to me than it’s made out to be. I think. Oh
Allen Hall: yeah. Everybody’s trying to keep a tamp this tamp down as much as they can. See where it goes. But I don’t know what you do besides an instrument. I mean not, you know, I threw out mine
This a stupid possib. But you would, you would think that you may be monitoring around them for sure. Why not? You have nothing to lose.
Joel Saxum: To monitor. Okay. So if you’re looking at a map, if you’re familiar with the North Sea, if it’s coming from Russia and it’s coming through the Baltic Sea, all of our good friends in Denmark know if a submarine or a ship of any type is coming through there, because they have to basically go through the straits between Copenhagen and Malmo.
And I can, I can. Like, it’s shorter than a golf course across. I was gonna say, I could hit a couple drivers across it, but I can’t, let’s be honest. So , so, you know, they could be coming now if they’re coming over the top, the, you know, any kind of Russian submarine or something’s coming over the top, along the, the west coast of Norway and then down, that’s a di a little bit different of a story, but there’s so much activity in that North Sea that, I mean, you’re gonna know what’s out there.
I’m not a Naval Mastermind. I don’t know. I don’t like, I don’t like the situation. Do you
Allen Hall: think it changes the way we do offshore wind TURs in America in the way we def defend them? No, I don’t. You
Joel Saxum: don’t think so? No, I don’t. Because I think that contrary to maybe popular belief there, if you look at a sub-sea map of the East Coast of the United States, because of what has happened in our past, the Cold War World War I.
all these different things. There has been German U-boats in World War ii, there has been Russian submarines and during the Cold War up all up and down that r that that Atlantic Ridge, I, I’m not gonna say Mid-Atlantic Ridge, that’s a different thing, but that Atlantic cliff, basically that falls off into the, the deeper ocean.
I know for a fact that, that those, the canyons coming up, that ridge and that whole ridge are instrumented so well that we as a country, as a military will. If there’s any kind of threat coming up the coast. I’ll,
Allen Hall: I wanna tie this into the whale discussion we just had. So we just, we put out a podcast last week talking about the whales on the east coast.
Yeah. We can monitor for submarines. Can we monitor
Joel Saxum: for whales? We can. I think so. You just gotta put the effort into it. Are we gonna do it? I don’t know, because I think that if you monitor for whales. Okay, so now we’re going to an roi. Right? So you’re, you are monitoring for whale. or slowing down the US economy?
Allen Hall: Oh, oh, no. Okay. I I, I, I get you. I, I get, I, I totally get you. I get you there. Sure, sure, sure, sure. And someone’s
Joel Saxum: making these decisions somewhere. And that’s the two things that you’re weighing. You’re either shutting down the ports on the East coast when Wales are coming through, or you’re saving 430 North Atlantic Wright Whale eventually.
Someone’s gonna make a business decision,
Allen Hall: you’re saying to follow the money. What I am saying is if I knew where they were, then I could maybe slow down if I were around them, if we had the technology to do it. Now the question is, is a submarine make more noise than a whale or is a whale noisier? I bet the whale is actually the more noisier.
It makes more noise of the. Probably right.
Joel Saxum: I fully agree with, if we can know where, if we can map and know and understand where the whales are, we can put some measures in place. But if the measure is stop all traffic until they clear, it’s never gonna happen. Oh
Allen Hall: yeah. No, no. Again, I go back to follow the money, which is a shame because we should be able to, To do both, right?
We should be able to have a shipping and have Wales coexist. There’s gotta be a way to do that. Where we’re right now is not gonna last much longer in my opinion.
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Allen Hall: Since wind gots spelled capital S E N S E Wind, I selected SM Industries to produce a new type of floating wind turbine tower for its flagship to megawatt onshore demonstration project. So since wind, if you haven’t seen it, has, its this sort of rail system to assemble towers and then to put the Noel on top.
So it’s what they call the first of its kind triple rail. It’s inter, it’s interesting if you, you can go to sense wind think it’s since wind.com and you can see the video there. So they’re gonna create this entree project, demonstrate that. That this self erecting tower system and the rotor, na cell assembly system will work and practice.
So, Joel, they assemble the tower in pieces and they have basically an elevator that’s hooked onto these three rails that’s actually built into the tower itself. So they lift it up, drop a section on, go back down, put other one on, lift it up, get, so when they get to the top, that’s where things get really interesting.
So, cuz now you gotta put them, the cell and the blades. All at one time. Cause there’s really no cranes, no big cranes involved in this tower N cell assembly. It’s, it’s like a regular medium size crane. So the, the last bit is they take the, the cell and they kind of hoist it up on the side of the tower and they horizontally pin in the blades.
1, 2, 3. Okay. At that point, the whole assembly starts crawling up the side of the tower within the cell and the blade’s attached. As it gets to the top, it sort of lifts up. It’s kinda like the Viagra of wind tower assembly processes. And it sets this tower right on top. The UG is right on top. That’s it.
So I’m, I’m coining that term, by the way.
Joel Saxum: The blue, the blue pill
Allen Hall: of the blue pill of wind turbot
Joel Saxum: assemblies. I like it. So there’s a couple of questions thoughts here now, now you’ve thrown me off. But that’s a first
Allen Hall: cuz usually joli is crushing me somehow with some weird reference.
Joel Saxum: The, the one thing I th the first thing I think about when I watch the video.
Is this cap, are we able to do this? Okay. The tower could be agnostic. The tower tower’s built by, you know, has a sense when has the triple tower thing or the triple rail system, but does the nelle. Hub spinner blades is, does that need to be of a specific design as well? Because what I’m, what I’m worried about is, is it’s tipped, are we, are we pinching bearings in there?
Are we doing anything goofy as it gets moved and swung like that? That’s a good question. Maybe I’m not so concerned about the blades. Right? The blades or the hub or the actual, the cell, the ne actual neel itself. I mean, everything is bolted down in there. If it’s tipped 90 degrees and then has, that’s not a big deal, but I’m worried about.
you know, we know that there’s certain platforms that if you let them sit idle for more than 24 hours, they can end up with divots in the pitch bear or in the, in the hub bearings, right? So that’s, that’s how sensitive some of these systems are. So now if you’re tipping them 90 degrees and then rotating them through that, that angular range as you put the N cell on top of the tower, , could that affect the, the bearings?
Does it need to be a special design? Is it a certain kind of tur, can we do this with every turbine, right? Can this be a vest’s, whatever, or, you know, a V one 50 or a, a GE 2.8 or can it be, you know, does it have to be a Nordex N 1 49? Like what does it have to be? I don’t know. That, I don’t see, I don’t see any materials that tell me that either.
They’re looking to
Allen Hall: finish this first demonstrator project. They’re gonna start construction at the end of this year and do testing. For the following year. So they’ll finish up testing at the end of 24, and the whole goal is to get to a 15 megawatt floating offshore wind assembly project. That’s where it’s going, in a sense to make the ships cranes smaller, non-existent.
And maybe it’s a good idea. Yeah, I, I, I’m sure. I don’t think this makes a lot of difference. Right. You have cranes that are available, you can be, everybody knows how to do that offshore, a little bit different. This may be a really interesting development for offshore cause it would, in theory, maybe drastically lower the cost of an
Joel Saxum: installation.
Yeah. The fun thing to track here, Alan, is we talked about offline as well, is. You know, we were talking the other week about blade robots and how there is, you know, at what level will one of them become, you know, the class of the industry. Kind of like what happened with autonomous drone inspections. Now in the last six months, we’ve seen a bunch of these different kind of solutions come out from, you know, we have like the lift lift works.
There’s the this, this company, that company, there’s sense wind. So there’s all these kind of different designs and everybody’s playing around with these. Will one of them become the class of the market, or will it be It’s not as transportable, right? Like when, when drone inspections came out, it’s easy to throw a drone in a pelican case, get a car net for it, and jump across borders and inspect turbines all over the world.
A piece of equipment like this or something specialized as far as a lift may be more geographically limited based on where you are, where you’re developed. Like, if you develop in the uk, you’re probably gonna be working in the UK for a while before you’ve got it. Really nailed, nailed down before you exported the other countries and whatnot.
So interesting to see who’s, who starts soaking up some market share here from the classical crane, crane companies with these different solutions.
Allen Hall: Well, it feels like you need SpaceX kind of money to do a project like this. You’re, you’re talking about re-engineering a good part of the way the wind turbines are built, which is what SpaceX did, right?
SpaceX tossed out the conventional rocket concept and built. And launched it the way they wanted to launch it and landed it the way they wanted to land it. Now we’re talking about assembling wind turbines in a particular way to saving the overall cost. That’s a great idea. It’s just do you have the funding to get the project to the end in a 15 megawatt turbine is a very expensive item to be playing with.
Is it worth the risk? I think it’s the risk calculation if you’re not spending your own money to evaluate that. You may not get a lot of, of OEMs that wanna play
Joel Saxum: along in that. Yeah. So if you look at who sense Wind has kind of on board I know quite a few of these companies have either worked, have either worked with them or know people decision makers at them.
So Ho Holder Marine is outta the Aberdeen cre I know out of Denmark. Exodus is a great renewables consulting company. The or e Catapult is involved sub-sea micro piles. I know a whole bunch of their senior leadership team, but I don’t see where they fit into this as much. But they’re, some of the funding is coming from innovate uk.
Carbon Trust department for business energy and industrial strategy. Like so a lot of, there’s some federal money behind this thing too. So good job on raising cash.
Allen Hall: It’s a great idea and I think if implemented it could work it. It’s just in this weird economic environment that we’re in at the moment when we’re in the US the Federal Reserve is, keeps ratcheting up interest rates.
It’s gonna be hard to fundraise for a project like this worldwide when the US does it, it. It
Joel Saxum: hurts. The difference here is a lot of their funding is coming from the f from the federal government of the uk rather than private industry.
Allen Hall: It’s, it’s one to watch, and I think they have the right team. I was on their website, I’ve been on the website a couple of times.
Now they have the right people. It, it, that appears to be in place. It’s just the question of the economics, right? And part of any business is timing. Everybody will tell you, you can have the greatest idea at the wrong time, and it just doesn’t work out. They have a really good idea. It’s just that the economy isn’t gonna be on their side at the moment.
Maybe it will another year, and by 2024, they get this thing figured out. They gotta demonstrate working and boom, it just explodes because they have
the
Joel Saxum: right concept. Yeah, the tough thing there is, as well as I’ve been involved in innovation for a lot of my career, is getting that person. that one decision maker to take a leap of faith and use you, right?
So like you said, if, if, if they’re looking at a, if someone in some developer’s looking at an offshore wind farm and, and the cost is gonna be a, a billion dollars, but that billion dollars turns into 800 million by using this is 200 million worth the risk of. That’s the problem, right? Because you still have, you still have to have a jack.
Like if you’re gonna put this out there, you still almost need to have a jack vessel and cranes and stuff at the ready in case it doesn’t work. That’s the, you know, the way when a lot of these programs work. So but it, it, but it still has that possibility, right? It has that possibility of really reducing the cost of installation.
So hope. Hope it works. I hope I like
Allen Hall: it. I hope so too. I hope it does work. Our wind farm of the week is Black Rock Wind Farm in West Virginia. Now that’s a farm operator by ClearWay Energy Group, and it began operation in 2022. One of the unique things about this wind farm, it has 23 Siemens ka mea wind turbines, the SG 5.0 1 45 s.
Those are big winter turmans for onshore project. BlackRock created oh 200 union jobs and 12 permanent operations jobs. And they’re doing a lot of things in the community. ClearWay is here they’ve been hiring graduates in the local community college and technical college and recruiting locally, of course, and they set up a BlackRock community benefit fund, which donates $50,000 to local nonprofits each year.
And as part of this project, obviously they’re gonna pay taxes. So ClearWay will pay about 15 million in taxes to the state of West Virginia. For the life of the project. The power is delivered to a e P Energy and Toyota Motor Sales usa. So they got some PPAs in place. Nice job everybody. Interesting project for West Virginia.
There’s more to come by. Congratulations to ClearWay Energy Group. Our land, black rock, wind Farm, our wind. Of the week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
