As offshore wind technology continues its global expansion, a noteworthy collaboration has emerged between industry giants GE and Toshiba, who are now partnering to deploy cutting-edge Haliade-X nacelles for Japanese offshore farms. Meanwhile, in Louisiana, discussions are underway for the establishment of up to 5 near-shore wind farms in the Gulf of Mexico, a strategic move that would keep these projects out of federal waters. However, the wind industry and WindEurope have expressed their disapproval of the recent negative bidding process that unfolded for German offshore sites, which has sparked debates. On a brighter note, Swiss-based RigiTech is revolutionizing drone deliveries to offshore turbines, promising improved efficiency and effectiveness. In US waters, tensions arise between worker groups and developers due to the Jones Act, posing challenges to offshore endeavors. In the realm of corporate innovation, Shopify is taking a novel approach to reduce meeting times with an innovative calendar update. Lastly, let’s shine a spotlight on our Wind Farm of the Week, the impressive Fowler Ridge 1 project.
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Uptime 175
Allen Hall: Joel, I had a meeting with nascar Xfinity Driver, Kyle. Weatherman. He is a really interesting character. I have never talked to a NASCAR driver before. Super talented and we went to watch the race this weekend up in New, well, when you hear this, it’s been a week past, but it was up in New Hampshire, which was fascinating.
I haven’t been that close to a NASCAR race before. I’ve watched it on television for years, but it never really been to one. It, it was really cool. It’s loud and powerful and there were a couple of really. Significant accidents right, right in front of us near know the start, finish line. It was quite the scare there at the end.
But a really, really good time. So we’re just gonna keep track of him the next couple of months. It’s just interesting to talk to somebody who actually races cars for a living. It’s. It’s pretty cool. It’s kinda like being a lightning engineer. They’re cool. But, so this week we talk about a woman being hit by a meteorite in France and then GE and Toshiba are partnering together in Japan to make NA cells, which is
Joel Saxum: really cool.
And the state of Louisiana taking advantage of its three mile economic zone to install some offshore wind down there. And then we’re gonna stay in the offshore wind world and take a peek at the. Auction that just happened over in Germany, and we do call it an auction instead of negative bidding via Rosemary.
And then also staying again in the offshore world of RigiTech or RigiTech. We’re not really sure which one it is, but drone deliveries right from the vessel all the way up to the nael dropping parts, and most importantly lunches off to technicians
Rosemary Barnes: up there. And we’re gonna talk about the Jones Act with suspicions that foreign flagged vessels might be being used instead of us made ones in off the US coast, we’re gonna talk about Shopify’s plans to reduce waste of meetings with unnecessary people involved.
Our Wind Farm of the week this week is the Fowler Wind One upgrade. I’m Allen Hall
Allen Hall: president of Weather Guard Lightning Ticket. I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon and International Renewables expert Rose Murray Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, Rosemary, a French woman, was hit by a meteorite while having coffee on a terrace with a friend in, in France, obviously at first they thought it may have been a piece of cement that fallen off the roof or maybe an animal of some sort, but they took the, the rocket for analysis and realized that it was a meteorite.
Now, the chance of getting hit by a meteorite have got to be infinitesimally small. However, it has already happened once before. In of all places. Joel, can you guess the state in which this occurred?
Joel Saxum: I would say somewhere out like Utah or something like that.
Allen Hall: You’re close Alabama. The first, one of the first recorded incidents of a meteorite directly impacting a human was in 1954 when it ate pound meteorite, crashed the roof in Alabama, leaving a woman with a severe bruise.
My God, you know. You know. Fact is stranger than fiction at times. And I, I, I do wonder, have you seen some of the meteorite pictures that have been on LinkedIn and, and Twitter lately? Like, man, there’s a lot of meteorites and I, I wonder once in a while, Any of this stuff ever hit a turbine like Joel?
Have you ever seen a meteorite like wonder, like that’s a really big bird or that’s a rock from space?
Joel Saxum: No, I did listen to a good, a good Joe Rogan podcast this weekend about a meteorite that possibly has struck Greenland in the year, like 12,000 bc And it, and, and if it’s true, it will have changed history of mankind as we know it.
And it would’ve actually been a longer history of people in the or of, of. Inhabitants on North America, whereas we think that the cranial civilization was in Mesopotamia now. Now it’s possible that it was actually in the Americas.
Allen Hall: A meteorite took us all out. Is that what you’re saying? Stick out the North Americans.
It’s possible. Oh wow. Okay. Well you, you learn stuff on podcasts just like on this podcast, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Occasionally I think it’s wild that this woman got hit by a rock and thought to take the rock and send it off for analysis. So, you know, like you think that it’s super rare, but given that it’s not just that you need to be hit by a meter, right?
You need to realize that that’s what it was and send it for confirmation. Maybe it’s actually super common cuz it wouldn’t occur to me to send off it. A, a rock for, you know, unless you saw it coming from, from the sky, from a long way away you wouldn’t, you wouldn’t think to send that off to a lab. I mean, if you get hit by rocks, do you, do you collect them and send them to a lab for analysis?
Allen Hall: It does feel sort of men in Blackish, you know what I mean? Well, in Japan, Toshiba and GE are striking another partnership. And to Toshiba and GE have been working together for quite a number of years off and on. They plan to bring a supply chain together for Nael, which they don’t have in Japan right now.
You know, remember Mitsubishi was building wind turbines and stopped, and Hitachi was building wind turbines and stops. So there really isn’t any wind turbine large components that are manufactured in Japan at the moment. But with the Toshiba plan, they plan to bring on 100 smaller suppliers with the goal of increasing domestic procurement to 60%.
By value by 2040. So they’re gonna stand up a number of local companies to help make NA sells. For GE it looks like they’re for GE designs and. This article is really fascinating because I think it may be indicative of a, a really unique way of trying to stand up industry very quickly to get more offshore capacity.
And we, at the same time that that’s happening in Japan, they’re supposed to be ready by like 2026, right? And they’re talking about delivering some turbines in the Ike to prefecture in 2028 that’ll be manufactured there. It’s quick. Yeah, it’s pretty quick. Right, Joel? Like, can, are we, we’re not doing the, the same level of infrastructure building in the United States, even though we’re probably pouring a lot more money into it.
It seems like the initiatives are more sort of company driven and or maybe company and government driven way that are working together a little bit closer. I
Joel Saxum: think if you look at it in a general incentive laden way in the US the I R A bill is like a carrot in front of the horse, right. And in and in my, now I don’t do a lot of business in Japan, so I don’t know the culture or the business culture that well, but this to me sounds like more like, it’s kind of a, a foot in the ass to the horse.
Like, we’re gonna, we’re gonna be with you, we’re gonna get you going. You’re gonna, you’re gonna do it, right? Like it’s, it’s a little bit more. A little bit more hands-on from the government side than it is where in the US’ just like, Hey, free market, we’re gonna give you a carrot. See what you do with it.
It’s there. See what happens. And it kind of hasn’t really come. I mean, it has, we’ve, it’s come to fruition a bit, but I think that if you want to mobilize quicker, you gotta get deep into it. Now, that kind of model private to public doesn’t really work in the United States. That’s not how things go. But in other economic.
Situations that does Right. Japan being a good one. And now the other thought of mine goes, you know, a few years ago there was M hhi. M HHI was making some mouth shore turbines. They got with Vestas M hhi Vestas. Right. That didn’t work out too well, but they, so they separated. However, those people that from Mitsubishi MHI is M Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, those people from Mitsubishi still.
May have some of that expertise. Right? So they may be easier for them to, to blow up here by involving or blow a grow up this, this, this idea by involving some of those people that were involved in M HHI vests before.
Allen Hall: Yeah, and it makes sense. The Japanese government has set a goal of having 30 to 45 gigawatts of offshore wind power installed by 2040 with a domestic operators accounting for 16% of the related investment.
So they’re looking for a Japan based solution to Japan energy. That’s amazing. That’s proper thing to me. It’s energy security, right? It sure is. Right. I I, I, this is just
Joel Saxum: unique. So Rosemary, here’s a question for you and now, like we know that offshore wind has been proposed is in these, these early planning stages in Australia, as the Australian government came forward and said, Hey, for offshore wind, these are the kind of the things that we’re gonna do to try to.
Do get some more local content in or are they still down there kind of relying on more of the free market capital idea?
Rosemary Barnes: The Queensland government, so you know, the northeast state of Australia has announced some plan for manufacturing wind turbines in that state. Although that’s for onshore. I don’t think Queensland has too much offshore plans because the, the southern bit of the state is yeah, covered by the, the Great Barrier Reef and I don’t think there’s a lot of offshore wind farms planned in and amongst that but I, I tried to find out what they meant by that because y y you know, you can be quite tricky.
Politicians love to be tricky about saying, you know, we manufacture this or that. But you know, there’s a lot of things that count as manufacturing. Like in Australia, we love to say how we used to have a car manufacturing industry. But really by the end, the last couple of decades, it was assembling components that came from overseas.
Primarily. It was a, you know, the, the last little bit of assembly, I, I would struggle to call that manufacturing. So, Really. So yeah, doesn’t mean we’re gonna get a wind turbine blade factory. I, I doubt it. On the other hand, you know, we are already manufacturing some parts of of a wind turbine. You know, some of the steel components are made here.
And yeah, obviously, you know, when you actually put the turbine together, that’s gotta happen on site. So that’s gotta happen locally, you know, so you could easily, like, as a politician saying, yeah, we’re supporting Australian manufacturing, you could say that without actually doing anything. And so I guess I’m a huge cynic and when I, I, you know, I have quite some contacts in Australian manufacturing and I.
Asked a few people and no one, no one had heard any detail at all beyond the little one sentence announcement. And so, yeah, I would suggest that the answer is no. There aren’t, aren’t big plans for doing that.
Allen Hall: Well, in Louisiana, we may have a, a sort of a Japan based approach. A Danish for Vestus is planning to build wind farms off Cameron and St.
Mary’s. Parishes in Louisiana. Now remember, federal waters start at about three miles shore. So anything within three miles of shore belongs to the states. Well, Louisiana is gonna act on that and they wanna become a national leader for near shore when energy development and with at least five. Wind farm proposal in its waters.
So Larry already talking to five different operators OEMs about putting wind farms in Vestus, which is operating as Cajun wind in Louisiana. I think that’s so funny, is in the, is in negotiations with the state for potential offshore wind farms with. Vestus knows what they’re doing. Right. But the key is if you’re not in federal waters, Louisiana gets you to control everything.
So there’s a lot less bureaucracy. Louisiana’s gonna set the rules. You’re only a couple miles from shores, so it’s a lot less cabling. It’s a lot easier to put things in the water. It’s, it’s in the Gulf of Mexico, Jules, isn’t it? It’s not that deep. Three miles out, right? It’s
Joel Saxum: the, where the Louisiana Delta comes out, the, basically the whole state.
It’s very shallow for a long ways. And the, the thing that they’ve got going on there as well is the, the, the Cajun Navy, they, they really know how to operate in those waters. There’s a lot of really good mariners
Allen Hall: there. So the only other wind farm that’s like that in the States, I think is Block Island.
Is Block Island pretty close to Rhode Island, right. So I think it’s in their state waters. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: I think it also is gonna take into consideration like, okay, so yes, if you are within three miles, that’s great, then you’re in state controlled waters. However, if you try to put a wind farm in the middle of a shipping channel that affects, you know, the, the national economics, then you’re not gonna be able to.
Right. So I think that there may be a little bit more federal oversight on Block Island. First off, it’s the first wind farm in, in the water. However, it’s also in an area that’s heavily traveled. There’s a lot of, a lot of this area here off the coast of Louisiana, and I don’t know exactly where they’re putting these, but a lot of that area is very remote.
Like it’s, it’s not used for much. There’s a lot of commercial fishing down there, commercial fishing and commercial shrimping. If anybody ever has ever seen, you know, of course bubblegum and Tom Hanks out there, that was in Louisiana, lot of, lot of shrimp boats. But yeah, other than that, I think, to be honest with you, it’d be pretty easy to put ’em in it’s shallow water too.
Allen Hall: So why wouldn’t other states take this Louisiana approach, especially down
Joel Saxum: south? I think pushback from the locals, right? If you do, if you try to do this in Louisiana, a lot of the coast of Louisiana is just marshland, swamps, islands. There’s like little fishing camp camps and stuff out in the middle.
It’s not a whole lot there. You try to do it on the coast of Texas and you’re within three miles. There’s beaches the whole way. The whole, almost the whole coast of Texas.
Allen Hall: Right. Well, does that drive the size of the wind turbines that they would in theory install? Would they keep it closer to a two megawatt machine instead of a 15 megawatt machine?
Because it’s so close to shore?
Joel Saxum: I don’t know if it maybe, maybe eight or an eight or 10, but I don’t, I don’t know if they wanna go through the trouble of laying cable and all that stuff. If that big, better technology or the larger technology exists, they just wanna go for it.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, are there, are there issues with that being near shore?
It seems like everything’s really onshore up high or way out in the waters. What’s, why are not other places looking at nearshore?
Rosemary Barnes: I think it is around, I remember actually applying for a job that was specifically gonna be about nearshore. And that was back in 2020. So you know, it’s an either idea that’s been around for a while.
I guess it, it, maybe the term is a bit fuzzy, but what I understood it to mean back then was it’s a, it’s. Offshore, you know, it’s a, a water, water location, but the water’s shallow enough that you can use onshore turbines there. So it was really about, you know, take an existing onshore platform and make minimal changes so that you can install it offshore.
And yeah, you’re trying to keep it as, as close as possible to the, you know, proven design and existing You know, supply chain, but of course it’s a, it is still a marine environment, so you have to deal with corrosion and yeah, a few, a few other things. Obviously the foundation’s gonna be different, but it’s more similar to onshore than it is to offshore.
Anyway, that’s, that’s the one that I was working on, but I could imagine that somebody else could call it nearshore and it just, you know, is an offshore turbine, that turbine that happens to be installed. Relatively close to land. And, you know, that would be fair enough to call that nearshore too. So, yeah, I, I don’t know the area, you, you guys probably can tell me how, what the, you know, the water depth is out there as to which of those two options they’re talking about.
You
Joel Saxum: can run 50 kilometers off the shore of of Louisiana and still only be in 10 meters of water, 20 meters of water. So it’s pretty, it’s pretty shallow. Most of the layout out, cause it’s one big delta.
Rosemary Barnes: I would suspect it’s the same, the same definition then that that I was talking about is
Allen Hall: scour a problem when you do that?
It just seems because the tide’s rolling in and out and it’s so shallow, do you start
Joel Saxum: worrying about tides aren’t really a problem there though. I mean there, there’s tides of course, but the tide swing is a couple feet. Your pro, your problem is hurricanes. To be honest with you, right, that’s the problem.
Small problem. Yeah, just a small problem. But the, as far as tides go, no, not really that bad of an issue. You’re gonna, the, the geotechnic are, are complex. Because it is a delta. Right. So it’s, it’s just a lot of silt that’s been dumped there over millions of years. It’s all in the Mississippi River dumping everything in there.
Right.
Allen Hall: Is there a bottom
Joel Saxum: to it? There’s a bottom, but it’s a ways
Allen Hall: down. Well, that’s what I was wondering. Do you have to power drive basically do a huge mono power to get down to something that’s secure?
Joel Saxum: A lot of times they use a jacket with deep suction piles on it.
Allen Hall: Okay. All right. That makes a lot
Joel Saxum: more sense.
Yeah. It’s like a jacket, but instead of having a suction pile that’s only a couple meters long, you’ll have like a 10 meter long one, and you’ll put big zip pumps on it to suck the water and mud out and get that thing to really anchor itself down. Does that work for hurricanes too? The foundations will stay, I can guarantee you that because they’ve been, they’ve been out there for, on oil and gas platforms for years.
Right. It’s the, it’s the blades that I worry about.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Rosemary, it’s the blades. It’s always the blades. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard.
It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory l p s so you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weather guard wind.com to learn more. Read a case study and schedule a call today. Well over in wind Europe they are really concerned about the German offshore bid system that just happened where they got into negative bidding.
A negative bidding means that the bidders are. Paying the government money for the rice to secure that, that that plot of ocean.
Rosemary Barnes: Can I just interject and say, isn’t it weird to call that negative bidding? Like if I go to a a, an auction for a house, expect they’re gonna pay me to live there, you know, like that.
A regular auction is where you, you. You know, you figure out who’s prepared to pay the most for something, and that’s exactly what we have here. So I think what the term they’re looking for is an auction. Let’s, we don’t have to, we don’t have to use their weird, weird terminology that makes it sound like this is a crazy concept that you would pay for the right to use a bit of land.
I,
Joel Saxum: I a hundred percent agree, Alan, and I said that the other day. I said, this doesn’t make any sense. It should not be called negative bidding. I don’t get it.
Allen Hall: Well, it’s all in the spin, right? You can control the language, you can control the outcome. And if they can define it as negative,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, but they don’t need to control our language.
Let’s just step in and just accept that this is, this is an auction.
Allen Hall: Rosemary coming in with editorial control. We’re now calling it an auction. So the German auction. Caused a lot of consternation with wind Europe because they spent about 12 billion euros for the rights to develop four sites to create seven gigawatts of power.
Now the European Union is trying to create a competitive environment and trying to grow their own renewables. And what when Europe is saying is like, look, if you, if you’re paying. 12 billion euros. That money comes from somewhere and it’s not going to the manufacturers of the equipment. It’s going to the governments, and it’s, it’s not helping the industry grow.
$12 billion, 12 billion euros to the industry would help it grow. So you’re not gonna meet your targets unless you put all that money into your manufacturing capacity. I think that makes
Joel Saxum: sense. They’re screaming and going, give us the subsidies. Give us the subsidies. Give us the subsidies. That’s what they’re saying.
Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: And I mean that makes, that, that makes sense that they would be asking for that. And in that sense, it’s not very new newsworthy that, yeah. Industry body wants subsidies, but I do think that they could better use instead of you know, having people compete how much money they’re prepared to pay for it.
Maybe you could have them compete on. Other aspects that are maybe more beneficial to the future growth of the industry. You know, you could compete on how much local manufacturing it’s going to involve. Compete on, I don’t know how many environmental protections that you have, or, you know, there’s all sorts of other things that you could compete on.
I’m not trying to say what they should be, but. You know, you could choose something else that, because we, we do see that manufacturers are, are really hurting and yeah, I’ve been having calls with some Australian wind energy developers recently and you know, people and investors as well and they’re asking me, you know, is wind, is wind energy is it about to fail?
Are we gonna, you know, just see the industry explode and we won’t have wind energy in 10 years time. It’ll be only solar. People are actually starting to worry about the future viability of the. Industry and I, I, you know, I’m always saying, of course we’re gonna still have wind energy. It’s super hard to, to, you know, just rep do everything with solar.
So I don’t think that’s a problem. But I also say, I would bet money that all of the OEMs we have now will not exist in 10 years time, maybe even five years time. I think that, you know, like the squeeze that’s on now is not gonna be survivable by everyone. And it might take some, you know, big failures before.
Governments start to realize, oh, actually, you know, cheaper prices is good. Getting more getting paid money by developers to, you know, install offshore wind farm. That sounds good, but not if we, yeah, squeeze suppliers to the point where they’re gonna fail and they can’t actually deliver those wind farms because we need them.
So, you know, it’d be crazy if today. Twin farm developers and you know, in effect manufacturers as well are giving money to the government. And then in a couple of years time, the governments are spending more money to bail out companies that are gone bankrupt. I mean, that’s not like an efficient way to, to use that money, right?
You’d be better off to. Look in your crystal ball and see the obvious future. It’s the
Joel Saxum: movie. Too big to fail, right? Yeah. But we can stop it. We
Rosemary Barnes: can see it now. Exactly. You can see. Okay. We, we can’t have all of these companies failing. I don’t think any one manufacturer is too big to fail, but they’re all under the same pressures and maybe, you know, in the, the US you’ve only got one major manufacturer, so probably is, you know, significant at least if that that fails.
So maybe remove some of the pressures now rather than foresee that in the future you would have to be paying out bailout money to rescue a company that’s already foundering, you know, that’s not gonna be without consequences to the supply of, of wind
Joel Saxum: turbines. So there’s an interesting thing here as well, Rosemary, and it speaks to exactly what you’re saying.
Now. I’m gonna put a little of, a bit of a turn on it or, or a piece of information there throughout this. Process. Sted who is specifically, they used to be an oil and gas company now specifically only wind. They backed outta the process. We don’t know at what stage they backed out, but they were gonna bid or did bid.
And at one stage they said, you know what? As a wind pure, pure play wind and renewable energy company, were getting out of this. The people that did go all the way through with it, however, and won the, won the bids are two oil companies, BP and TO and tote and total. Two of the biggest super majors in the world, right?
So now I don’t know the inner accounting works of BP in total. However, I gotta think that some of that money comes from the general coffers that was made in the oil and gas world. So that’s why they were almost able to push some of the wind people away from this auction or out of this auction by R running the thing higher cuz they just have more cash.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, well, you need super deep pockets to install to get into offshore. I know when, yeah. I was working for LM Wind Power, a small, relatively small company. I mean, it’s still got 14,000 employees. It had at the time that it got bought by ge, but I know that part of the, the benefit to LM was they had a desire to get into offshore but didn’t have the capability to, to do so because, you know, you can do.
The most careful product development that is possible, but you’re never gonna remove the risk that you’re gonna end up with a, a fleet-wide quality problem. And, you know, if you, because of the increased costs for offshore, if LM had developed offshore yeah, some, some big, spent a lot of money developing an offshore project and installed it, and then it turned out that they had to, you know, go in and replace all the blades, for example, that the company would be over, you know, but with The whole of GE behind them.
Then they say, okay, well, you know, we’re gonna do every, we, everything we can to make sure that our projects are successful. But the chance that that it’s not, is there that GE would survive. And so I guess it’s the same with, you know, oil and gas companies are Generally pretty, pretty cashed up and it would be fairly small compared to, you know, someone.
And they’re also used to risky projects, right? Like oil and gas is all about you. You know, you, you go out, do a bunch of prospective things. Most of them aren’t gonna pay off, but the ones that pay off are gonna pay off really, really big. So they’re kind of used to sinking a lot of money and it turns out to not, not pay off as their whole.
Business model is based around that. So in that sense, it sounds like a natural kind of company to be developing projects like
Joel Saxum: this. Absolutely. I mean, I per, I’ve personally been on projects for super majors that have cost $250 million and when you walk away they go, eh, guess that was a miss. We will, we’ll go to the next one.
Like, it’s crazy the amount of money they could spent
Allen Hall: there. How does the crowd estate play in this, in the uk? The crowd estate? Owns all the sea around or the ocean around the uk. Right. And same thing in Australia, isn’t it? Like, so any offshore project has to get approval of the crown and they actually have to pay the crown.
Rosemary Barnes: Does King Charles own our, our own our water? Is that what you’re saying? I,
Allen Hall: no, I’m serious. Right? That happens. I, I
Rosemary Barnes: mean, for, for sure the. The king is not getting involved in the offshore development process in Australia. That’s not happening. It’s possible that technically, That’s who owns it. But in the day-to-day sense, our Prime Minister is not going to the king to ask his permission if he can put up a wind turbine.
Yeah. So I mean, they, they’re, I just listened to a podcast actually the other day, energy Insiders podcast, and they interviewed the energy and climate minister, Chris Bowen, and he was talking about, that’s one of the major things that he’s doing at the moment is Getting the framework in place to, you know, start moving fast on offshore wind, and he did not mention.
Having to go to Buckingham Palace to to ask for for permissions.
Allen Hall: Ridge Tech, a Swiss aerial logistics company, has developed the Iger drone delivery system to deliver accessories directly to technicians inside offshore wind turbines. So if you forgot your flashlight or. Or your socket rich, you can have it.
Or your lunch. More importantly, your lunch, you can have it droned to you. The I drone uses advanced technologies like AI based flight planning algorithms, precise navigation in windy conditions, which is important, computer vision and sensor fusion algorithms to drop off payloads with centimeter level precision without needing to land.
So Joel, the key here in this drone is that it doesn’t land. It basically drops your. Coffee on the turbine and it goes back to where it came from. Now I do think this is gonna be part of the offshore wind industry, and I think you do too, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, definitely there. A lot of, a lot of the large players in the offshore wind industry has been looking at this problem for a long time, and this isn’t the first drone to do this.
There’s been quite a few that have done it. It’s just waiting for someone to like take that next step and to make it a part of their, their operational process. Because if you think about it, if, if you’re up, if you’re up tower and you’re offshore, so, so s o V is on dynamic, they’re on DP two hanging off, you know, a couple hundred meters away.
You and your team have two other compadres are up tower, and then someone goes, oh man, we need this. We need this. Right. We need this screwdriver, we need this chip set or something. And now you gotta go all the way down the turbine, go use the walk to work ample and platform, get back on it, da da, da. So a, a problem that if you had the tool in your hand, could have, will, would have taken two hours or three even can be solved in 20 minutes.
It’s
Rosemary Barnes: gonna make such a difference, even onshore, you know, when you’re going around. Yeah, maintaining wind turbines because it’s such a hassle to get up and down and, you know, you can’t do anything just on your own either. You always have to be in cruises of at least three and sometimes more depending where you’ve gotta go, because you know you’ve gotta have if you’ve got someone going in the blade, then you need someone, somebody that’s nearby to, you know, make sure they’re not having a medical emergency and don’t need to be rescued, pulled out.
And then you probably need to have someone in the hub too. And some sites you also need someone at the bottom of the turbine. And so because it’s such an effort to get everyone up there, you take everything that you might possibly need with you up there. Like when you’re doing maintenance work in a wind turbine, you haul just kilos and kilos and kilos of these just heavy equipment sack you, you hold them up and yeah, so you’re either, you know, putting that in the little tiny lift or you’re using a, a winch to drag them up.
And then at the very top, you don’t have anything to get it between, you know, the, the, where the elevator ends and the Noelle starts. It’s usually a ladder. So you’ve gotta, you know, you shoving sacks of heavy equipment through there and it’s, you know, the vast majority of it is stuff that you are taking just in case.
So you’ve gotta take all your safety equipment and that’s, you know, that’s good. You should do that just in case you need it. But you also need to take every, every tool and then also a variety of common spare parts as well that you might need or might not. So, I’m just thinking, you know, it would be so much simpler to be able to take what you know you’ll need and then if something comes up unexpected that your drone can fly it out to you.
And yeah, like Joel said, all of that is magnified when it’s offshore because it’s not just a drive back to the side office, then it’s, you know, it’s a boat or a helicopter. So yeah, I, I. Definitely think that this is gonna simplify
Joel Saxum: things. I, I’ve actually written a couple of charters for some of the large offshore wind guys to investigate this and to put money into it.
And I know some of them have gone forward, but like I said, someone with it in their processes, I don’t know of yet. However, the technology’s been around for a long time. Right. This bullet point here, which is very interesting to read, if you, if you’ve never been in the drone world or you’re not in the robotics world, AI based flight planning algorithms, precise navigation, windy conditions, computer vision sensor fusion algorithms to drop off payload centimeter level position like.
All of those things are commonplace, right? All of those things that D G I M 300 has, right? They’re, they’re, there’s nothing crazy special there, like using computer vision. Like if ever, if you’ve seen a QR code before, right? You can go to GitHub right now for free and download the software to plug into a, a cube that you can buy off of Amazon and build your own drone.
And you could buy the soft, you can go and download the software for free that will use a camera to see a QR code. And then once the drone sees the QR code, it’ll orient itself the way it needs to and land right on it. And it will land within centimeters like that. That’s plank. Like Plank. Aero Systems was a company outta San Diego.
They were bought a couple years ago by Aero Aero environment. They had a whole bunch of military funding to develop this technology five, 10 years ago. And they have crazy videos online of like. Humvees ripping across the desert in a drone, chasing the Humvee down and autonomously landing in the box of it, and then taking back off again.
And on boats, on water and moving water and stuff, right? Like this. These, it’s not, this isn’t crazy new things. It’s just it’s cool that you’re seeing someone. Go, go forward with it, right? Like try to get, get one of these big vessel companies to bite on it and use it as one of their offerings to the, to the wind industry.
This could be a game changer, right? If you’re, say you’re Sted and you’re looking for your next fleet of boats or sos, and they say, Hey, also on our O V, you have the capability of saving a lot of time and hours. By having this drone that we’ve designed, I can take off of our helipad on a QR code and land on top of the coordinates of the.
Of this turbine, drop some tools off and come back. So it’s, it’s cool. It’s gonna be something that’s, drones are gonna be here, right? They’re, they’re like a train, get on board or get run over. This is just one, one more example.
Allen Hall: Well, I, I just haven’t seen it used a lot and it does make sense to me like, why are we not doing this right now onshore?
Cuz you know how it goes. Like Rosemary was saying, you always forget the thing that you need and it’s at the Granger store about 30 miles towards
Joel Saxum: town. Yeah. But there’s a lot of little, like, there’s little troubles, there’s little stupid troubles that people don’t think about that much. Like, okay, now you now part of your three man crew, one of them have to, has to have an FAA part 1 0 7 drone license.
Like that’s, that’s, but you have to ha it, it still has to be regulated. Right? You can’t just let drones go flying. Well, you’re the aerospace guy. Come on.
Allen Hall: Well, you’re not gonna run into a 7 37, but that’s
Joel Saxum: the thing. Like if the drone gets outta control, it could just, just keep going until it runs outta battery.
Well, that’s gonna put it in, in airspace in with manned aircraft.
Allen Hall: Set it to explode at a hundred meters. Right. That’s the,
Joel Saxum: that’s the answer. Oh, once you get a hundred meters away, you gotta blow up. But that’s the trouble, that’s the trouble, right, is you gotta have, like, it doesn’t come without, its, its, its problems.
You also have to the tech. You could be up, build all the cool technology you want, but can’t fly it without a license. Well, that’s a pain in the ass. Now you got an issue where, like if you’re on shore, if you have a guy on the, on the base of the tower and go, Hey, call the radio and say, I need a number two screwdriver.
Well, he can run into the base of the turbine, put it in the bag, and. And zip it up to the top of the tower for you. So I think it’s cool. It’s a cool idea for on shore, but I don’t think it’ll take off on shore cuz it’s too much of a logistical pain in the ass. You gotta maintain drone, you gotta swap motors and charge batteries and all that shit.
It’s too much work on shore but offshore I think it’s gotta a big place. It’s
Allen Hall: gotta happen. So at some 0.1 of these countries is gonna come to its census and realize it’s gonna save time and implement it. There’s gotta be a way to do it. Come on. We, we have self-driving cars for goodness sakes. We, we can get a drone from A to B without running a muck,
Joel Saxum: hopefully.
Soon as that car takes off, it’s an f FAA problem, Alan, then we got issues.
Allen Hall: Yeah. If it ever sprout swings, ellan is sunk. Yeah. For all you lovers of corporate meetings, Shopify is trying to put a, a stake in those meetings. So Shopify is introduced a calculator embedded in the employees calendar apps to estimate the cost of a meeting with three or more people.
The tool uses average compensation data, meeting length attendee count to calculate the cost of a meeting, which in a 30 minute meeting it’s with three employees, ranges for somewhere between 700 and $1,600 for that 30 minutes. So it’s not free. The company is seeking to reduce unnecessary meetings and has already eliminated recurring meetings with more than two people and discourages meetings on Wednesday.
So Wednesday is meeting free. Engineers must cheer to get to work on Wednesday. So Shopify expects to cut out about 300,000 hours and 450,000 discrete events in 2023 alone with these initiatives. Now research suggests that non-critical meetings waste about a hundred million annually in big organizations.
And this little calculator may not be enough to, to dramatically change that. But I think as we, as these operators and OEMs get bigger, Rosemary was in a fairly large company for a number of years. Meetings seem to be all the time, and middle managers seem to be in them from the second they walk into the office to the moment they leave.
It’s crazy.
Rosemary Barnes: It used to really drain, drain my energy a lot. I, I would be okay if I had a a day plan with back-to-back meetings that I just sat in, didn’t have to run then, you know, that can be quite a relaxing day. You can search up your brain and, you know, if everything’s online, you just do other stuff at the same time, but, One problem that I used to have was when I would call a meeting that had, you know, a purpose, I would invite the people that I needed there, and then they would forward it to, you know, a thousand other people.
And then the meetings would, you know, d drag out and also get confrontational sometimes because, you know, people would use it like warfare. Like if I fought it to more people on my side, then I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna win. If you’re having, you know, a discussion about, about what tests you should do or what design choice you should make and so I discovered the feature that you can turn off the ability for people to forward your meeting to other people.
And that was probably, you know, the single biggest hack that I found for my, you know, workplace sanity in my whole career. Learning that you don’t have to let people forge your meetings onto other people. You can decide who shows up to your meeting.
Allen Hall: That is such a rosemary move.
Joel Saxum: I like it. Shut ’em down. I,
Allen Hall: I do think once, as these companies get larger and we all deal with the operators and OEMs regularly, you, you see that when you, when you try to reach out to an engineer at some of these larger operators, it seems like they’re constantly in meetings or they’re on the road.
Or, or they’re in the air traveling to a meeting. It is nonstop. And at some point you’d hope that they try to focus their resources a little bit better and realize that this can’t go on. And maybe Shopify is gonna start leading that, leading the, the charge from outside the wind industry and maybe the wind industry will catch onto it.
But I do think it is a generic problem across the wind industry at the moment.
Joel Saxum: Part of it, to be honest with you, Alan, is just the nature of the wind industry being d distributed geographically, right? So everybody’s remote work isn’t a new thing in the wind industry. It’s been there forever. If you’re on an operations and maintenance team, you’ve been doing remote work in the wind industry since the inception of the wind industry.
So try, try. There’s a, there’s a crafty balance there of a good leader, good managers between. Getting everybody involved and making sure everybody’s knows what’s going on, but then also taking up their time and their, you wanna maintain some comradery between, between people and, but you don’t wanna soak up their whole day.
Allen Hall: It’s, it’s tough. I think in our company, we, we try to avoid meetings as much as possible. We have some mandatory ones that we do on the dinner table. Around. The dinner table is a good one actually. We don’t really talk about work at, at the dinner table. We maybe talk about it at breakfast, but once, once six or seven o’clock hits we’re kind of out of business mode.
At least we hope we are.
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American Boat Patrols are monitoring waters around new offshore wind farms off the coast of Rhode Island and New York. The Offshore Marine Service Association is concerned that foreign flag vessels are being used instead of. US made ships with American crews, potentially leaving American Marine companies and Mariners behind the Jones Acts enforcer.
A ship named after the century old law is documenting operations to show potential violations of two federal enforcement officials and members of Congress. Now obviously Ted’s out in the water and they’re developing South Fork with Eversource. And so the ship has been out there just sort of monitoring what’s happening.
OSTED has responded and said that 75% of, of the vessels supporting South Fork wind are US flagged, but the larger US flagged offshore wind vessels needed for the industry. Aren’t built yet. That’s totally true. They’re not built yet. So I, I know we’re at this impasse and these Offshore Marine Service Association is, has been putting out some posts and, and writing about this.
And they have been talking to Congress people pretty consistently it sounds like, cuz they’re concerned ab that everybody’s gonna go around the Jones Act and the, the, the Mariners that are on the eastern seaboard here are not gonna get employed. I think that’s a reasonable request or looking at, I just hope it doesn’t get too heated.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I, I agree with you there. I mean, this is something we’ve talked about quite regularly. Jones act like it’s the, the, the cart before the horse or the is, is is the, does the horse even exist? You know, we don’t, we don’t wanna leave these Mariners behind. No, we do not. But is there Mariners that know much about installing offshore wind turbines on the East Coast?
So do, do these people exist? I think it’s, it’s, I mean the, my, my younger self deep down inside starts going like, man, what a, what an annoying boat to be just driving around basically ratting people out, you know? But to be honest with you, I I, I don’t think it’s that bad of an idea to keep people honest.
You would think that they would be almost, it wouldn’t have to be a private entity. You would almost think this would be a public thing, like the US Coast Guard would be out there doing. Make, making sure that this is done correctly. And, and I know maybe, maybe within the Coast Guard mission statement, they don’t deal with the economic stuff.
I’m not a hundred percent sure I could ask my brother. I guess he just retired from the Coast Guard going to the, going to congressman and stuff like that. Do you think that’s the right move? Or do, do you, do they, should they write it up, you know, write something public to the company themselves and say, Hey, I, we need, we want a response here.
Do you, do they take it as a, a journalism thing to, to, to be a whistleblower? What do you do? Are, are they doing
Allen Hall: the right thing? Yeah, it’s showing up in newspapers now because they’re making enough noise and putting up press releases, and the Biden administration has put itself into a corner because they, they keep speaking to good paying union jobs for Americans.
That would be great, I guess, if, if they were gonna follow through with it. And this is one place where they maybe haven’t fallen through so much, and it again, especially in Massachusetts, this comes up in my state quite a bit because. There’s a lot of potential jobs for people in my state, and the pot politicians in my state try to poo poo it and try to not quiet it down because they’re concerned that if it became a big visual issue, that it would hurt them politically.
I think, Joel, you’re right, we just don’t have the people to support it at the moment, but, Something has to be done. There’s gotta be a middle ground here. I think you can placate both sides. The, or heads of the world that need to get a, a job done, need to be able to find people that can do it properly in the United States.
Joel Saxum: So, I’m, I’m just, just for, for kind of shits and giggles here. I, I looked up the Euro US Bureau of Labor Statistics, occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. This is from year 2022. This is 53. 5 0 11 sailors and Mar Marine Oilers. Basically, these are the people that run the big vessels, and it says in the, it says in the United States, if you were to go to support activities for water transportation, deep sea, coastal, great Lakes, water transportation, you combine the two of them.
There’s under 12,000 of those people in the United States in the whole country. And I would be willing to bet that probably 3000 of ’em are employed in Alaska. Probably. Yes. So if you start looking through some of the employment statistics, like where are these people all at? Well, there’s a lot, and I’m looking at a map right now.
There’s a lot in Washington, Oregon, Texas, Louisiana, Florida and then Virginia and New York. There’s, there’s there’s a blurb of them as well. Louisiana being the largest 6,800, California, Texas, New York. I just don’t see that there’s that many of these people available. I’m all for getting the jobs, but when I look, when you just even look at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, they don’t exist.
These people aren’t there.
Well,
Allen Hall: I, I do think we should touch upon it once in a while and highlight that that’s going on because it has been getting a little more heated and you see much more press about it now than you did six months ago, and there was discussions about it six months ago. But as more wind turbine parts hit the water, It’s gonna be become a political issue.
It has to, states like New Jersey are gonna get involved. New York’s gonna get involved, and then it’s gonna become a hot potato come election season. GE is looking for you if you know something about lightning protection and wind turbine blades. So GE is seeking a simulations engineer to join their dynamic team, specializing in computational and numerical simulation of lightning protection systems, LPs for wind turbine blades.
GE says you could play a crucial role in optimizing the lightning protection systems. Through cutting edge simulations, driving innovation and efficiency in the industry. If you have a background in engineering or physics, knowledge of simulation techniques and a passion, rosemary, a passion for the wind industry.
This role is for you. So you can go on GE and, and look up that job. We’re just talking about this position a little bit earlier. This, I’ve seen this posting a couple of times now. I think just to note to ge, I don’t think your answer lies behind a computer screen. Lightning is a really complicated subject and you need to have people that have some experience out in the field and been in, in some lightning tests, I mean, for years, and understand what’s happening in the physics of it.
It’s really hard to bring somebody new into that role and get to an answer. We at Weather Guard have been doing about 25 years and we’ve watched other people who’ve been in the industry about that long. It takes about 20 years to get to the point where you can understand what’s happening. This is gonna be a really fascinating post to see who fills it because it’s, it’s a tremendously difficult job to take.
It’s not a simple task. They’re asking you to, to do the near impossible at a short amount of time. So there are people who are interested in doing that. And if so, you better, you know, apply on LinkedIn to GE and for this position and see what you can make of it. You
Joel Saxum: know what I’d like to see Alan in the, in the job search industry world.
Right? This, when you were reading that part of that job posting off, it screams, HR wrote it, right? The HR person went down and talked to the, don’t you think that they would be better off if they were like, here’s the post from hr, but also. Here’s the po. Here’s the section of the hiring post from the team you’re gonna be working with.
So whatever, whoever those engineers that you’re gonna be working with every day, they should have to write part of that directly that says like, Hey, if you’re gonna be on our team, these are the things we do. This is how we operate. Instead of having all this fluff, like if you’re passionate about lightning protection systems, like come on.
I’m, I’m passionate about some things, but I, I don’t think Lightning Protection Systems is one of them. It’s
Allen Hall: like that newspaper, it’s like that newspaper article you see once in a while. I think it’s on Facebook about the expedition to the North Pole. I. And how desperate you, like, there’s very little chance of succeeding yet to be a great adventure.
Come along, we’d love to have you. That’s, that that position is gonna be pretty much like that. That’s a very difficult thing to do. And Rosemary sort of lived next door to that when she worked in the blade industry and I’m sure she’s saw some of the hair pulling that happened. It’s not easy.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it’s possible that that.
Role is for a position in my old team, actually, maybe, yeah. In my, my old old desk. I don’t, I don’t know because there’s a couple of different places that it could be, but it’s not an easy role to hire for. And certainly in the last few years that I was working for, for ge, we always wanted more lightning expertise.
It was hard to come by and hard to keep people in the role as well. It’s just, It’s a position that’s just gotten way, way harder. Lightning protection systems have gotten more complicated to deal with the more complicated blade technologies that they have to protect now. And so, yeah, it’s, it’s just simply gotten harder and you can’t just, you know wish engineers with 20 years lightning experience out of thin air.
You know, that takes 20 years to grow a, a lightning engineer with 20 years experience. So I guess this is the first step, but Yeah, I, I hope that in addition to doing simulations, that they’re also gonna be involved in physical testing and, and I think crucially be involved with the claims process for Lightning protection systems that have failed in the field, because that’s the real test.
You know, passing simulation, passing. The lab testing is a lot easier than having turbines out there that are reliably protected from the variety of lightning that they see in the field. I think
Allen Hall: that’s a very interesting point. Rosemary, probably the first step is to go through all the warranty claims and all the lightning damage that has a, that has happened over the, let’s say, the last five years, and try to understand why that’s occurring and then come up with a plan of attack.
You just can’t start on the computer screen and hope you’re gonna make something great. That’s not how it’s gonna work. You’re gonna have to go back and dig.
Rosemary Barnes: You might actually benefit from having some, some fresh eyes without 20 years experience, because I guess people with 20 years experience, you know, they spent the first decade of their career working on lightning protection systems that were relatively easy to understand and worked really well, and maybe are, you know, I can imagine the, the things that you have done for.
A long period of time that have worked successfully for you. It’s hard to let go of those when, you know, new evidence shows that that is not not a successful strategy anymore. I know whenever I would get new team members from outside of the wind industry, I would always have them. Before, you know, I, I gave them all the information and all the training and, you know, indoctrinated them basically in the, you know, the new com company culture.
And about the wind industry in general. I would always have them put their fresh eyes on the problem because, you know, they might have some. Out there solution that no one else had thought of because you know, it’s not the way that it’s done and that, that could be the key. You need a bit of that yeah.
Like fresh influx of ideas every now
Joel Saxum: and then. Absolutely. I think it is. It’s like once you’re an engineer or or anybody working on a problem for a long time, it’s like trench warfare, right? You end up down in the trench and that’s all you see is the trench. And when that person comes in and can fly in from 10,000 feet, they may see more of the battlefield and have a fresh idea about where to go next or what, what to accomplish.
I think one of the things that this highlights though in the industry and wind industry in general is if GE is having this much trouble or not, you know, problems or like outreach for hiring for their lightning specialist role, there is hundreds of asset owners out there with engineering teams that have even less knowledge of lightning.
If the o, if one of the big five OEMs in the world is having trouble finding a lightning specialist, then there’s what’s the chances that some of these asset owners are gonna have one on, on
Rosemary Barnes: staff? Lucky for those owners and operators that they exist, experts that they can call on a consulting basis.
Joel Saxum: Turns out there’s experts right here. Little, little weather guard, art out, or
Allen Hall: lab. I will say GE has been great for my business. Cause we fix a lot of GE blades.
Rosemary Barnes: Ouch.
Allen Hall: Ben BP is investing $100 million to upgrade dozens of wind turbines at the Fowler Ridge Wind Farm in Benton County, Indiana. Now, Joel Benton County is near my old stomping grounds where I went to school at Rose Holman.
So it’s just north of Terre Haute, Indiana. The wind farm is VP’s largest onshore wind farm in the in the world and consists of four sections and the capital investment will significantly boost the wind turbines. Electricity production, obviously without expanding the farm’s footprint, which is nice, right?
Should be getting more out of the wind. New, larger blades will be made by Vesta and will replace the 40 turbines at Ballor Ridge. One. The upgrade will extend the life of the wind farm and increase the production by over 40%. Man, that’s good. Helping BP reach its goal of having around 10 gigawatts of installed renewable capacity by 2030.
The, the project has created, it’s going to create about 150 construction jobs and it is expected to be completed by the fourth quarter of this year. And all that money goes into the local tech basin and surrounding community and county government and educational services. So, quite nice. So Fowler, when one you are.
Our Wind farm 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.
