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Allen, Joel, Phil and Rosemary discuss the renewable energy landscape in Australia, maintenance challenges at the Hywind floating wind farm, and whether U.S. universities can provide value researching offshore wind designs versus leaving it to industry. Plus–Rosemary will be at Everything Electric Australia! Use code EEROSIE for 20% off your ticket!
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Allen Hall: All right, Rosemary, you got some important news for the world to hear. You’re going to be at…Â
Rosemary Barnes: Everything Electric Australia, which is in Sydney from February 9th to 11th. And I’m presenting four sessions on the Friday, and then I’ll be hanging out there on the Saturday as well to go around.
They’ve got every single electric car that is available or will be soon available in Australia. Plus everything, associated with electrification of the home and everything like that. So yeah, it was a really big, cool event last year, and it’s set to be much bigger and much cooler this year.
And listeners can get a 20 percent discount off tickets if they use my code, which is EEROSIE, so that’s E for elephant. For those of you that have trouble understanding my Australian vowels, but I guess it will be Australians who want to use the code, so not that big a deal. That’s EEROSIE.
Allen Hall: And how many people are going to attend this event, Rosemary, roughly?
Rosemary Barnes: I’m pretty sure it was like 10 last year, and I’m told that it’s much bigger this year.
Allen Hall: Wow. So you better get your tickets now. If you want to attend that event, you better get on it right away. And use Rosemary’s code, EEROSIE we get a 20 percent discount.
That’s fantastic.
Denmark has a new king as queen. Margrethe II has abdicated after 52 years on the throne. King Frederick the 10th, formally took over recently in a ceremony at the palace, which Joel and I were at not long ago. Margrethe is the first Danish monarch to voluntarily give up the throne in nearly 900 years.
And Joel and I were standing next to Frederick recently at the Copenhagen Wind Europe event a couple of months ago. So we were close to royalty.
Joel Saxum: We didn’t even know it either. These guys were pushing us away a little bit. What’s going on with these guys? Looked like a bunch of dudes from a Mission Impossible movie.
And then we looked behind him and there he was. Now King Frederick the 10th. At the time he was the royal, what is it, Crown Prince? Was it Crown Prince Frederick?
Allen Hall: So Frederick is married to, now Queen, Mary, who is from Australia. And Rosemary, I think she’s actually from sort of Tasmania, slash Australia. And I was just wondering if there’s a connection here.
Is she like a second cousin to you, or is there some sort of in, insight we could have into the monarchy in Denmark? Are we gonna have A new wind turbine facility in Australia.
Rosemary Barnes: You’ve really gone for the soft spot for any Tasmanian because that is the joke that in Tasmania, everyone is related to each other in possibly not the nicest way and people don’t mean it as a compliment when they say that.
Yeah, so it is highly possible to be honest. It’s highly possible that we’re you’re related somehow. But not that I know of. And in fact, when I lived in Denmark, I never was introduced to princess, then princess Mary, which I thought was ridiculous. Obviously you would expect as an Australian that when you get your residence permit for Denmark, that it comes along with princess Mary’s phone number and you can, call her up and.
Eat a Tim Tam or a flat white or something together. But that’s not how it works.
Allen Hall: She does look like you, Rosemary. Have you seen a recent picture of her?
Rosemary Barnes: That’s nice. She’s very beautiful. So that’s a big compliment. Thank you.
Allen Hall: You’re welcome. But I just thought there’s just not yeah.
I first thought was I know someone from Australia. There must be, Australia is not that big of a place. Maybe there’s a connection. Because what you need now is to use that angle to get a blade factory in Australia. I think there is a connection now.
Rosemary Barnes: In Tasmania, there’s there’s a lot of renewable energy potential, but they’re unable to expand as much as they would like to, because they can’t use it, they already have a basically a hundred percent renewable electricity grid because they’ve got so much hydro, heaps of wind potential onshore and offshore.
And so expanding industry is one way that they could yeah take use of that. They could use their energy there. The other thing that they’re looking at is expanding the interconnection with more HVDC subsea cables to the mainland. So yeah, that’s, there’s some, a project or two that will happen in the near future there. But yeah Queen Mary, if you’re listening, then, pick up the phone, give me a call and we’ll arrange a new wind turbine factory in Tasmania.
Allen Hall: It looks like australia is trying to find a port for some wind projects, right? So the Australia’s first offshore wind farm, the Star of the South is being developed and they’ve been trying to put a port in a wetland area. And what they call the port of Hastings. And the federal government vetoed it because of some issues with some animals in the wetlands.
Now, Rosemary, I’m not sure how closely you’re following this, but this is a big deal in Australia. From all the press I’m reading about it, it was a last minute stop to the whole project. And the Star of the South group is saying, hey, this is not going to slow us down because of the timeline of the project.
But port access in Australia should be easy. Isn’t, there’s a lot of ports in Australia already, but I guess. None of them are ready to take big wind turbine components. Is that the issue?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah it makes sense that they wouldn’t be ready for an industry that we don’t have that needs such different types of facilities than anything else does.
Of course, it’s not ready yet. That’s duh and the opposition at the moment is having a, trying to make offshore wind a thing. thing. There was a big kerfuffle recently where the opposition got some traction with criticisms of the government. Oh, there’s been absolutely no consultation on this in response to the government’s announcement that they were opening consultation for offshore wind and the, yeah, it’s yeah, of course, they’ve announced the start of consultation.
There wouldn’t be consultation before you started the consultation. That’s like a, not that a duh kind of thing. So I think it’s mostly. Politics the headlines associated with this, of course. Saying that they’re, the first location that they identified as potentially developing into an appropriate port.
It’s not going to work because of environmental considerations related to wetlands. There will be other options, like you say. And it’s not unheard of right in the U S it’s the same, you lacking suitable ports and suitable infrastructure and everything. So I think you could look at this and say the fact that they are looking at the port infrastructure this early in the project, but before they’ve actually.
Got any projects green lit or turbines ordered or, anything of that kind there trying to develop the ports to me that says that they’re learning lessons from what’s what the challenges have been in the U S and moving forward in a more sensible way when there’s still plenty of time to find a new port location and adjust the actual wind farm.
Site layout, perhaps if it, if, if they needed to move it a little bit also it’s great that, the environmental approvals process is going through and the project has changed in response to that. That’s, another thing with offshore wind that can lead to big protests later is environmental issues.
So I think Star of the South have been super careful to. Make sure that they’re not only doing like way more environmental assessments than what they might be required to, but also like really publicizing what they’re doing. Because, public opinion is so important for these kinds of projects.
Joel Saxum: That’s something that we talked about, and I think just in the last few weeks here is. In the US side, we got ahead of all these things and Phil, you actually, you gave very topical arguments of Hey, some of this stuff was lumped in with BOEM leases for oil and gas, and some other earmark things in the government.
That’s why we didn’t get all this analysis done ahead of time. We’re doing some of it now. After the leases have already been sold and whatnot. So there’s reasons for it. However, if you’re, a pioneer versus a settler type thing, you can look at all the lessons learned and the stumblings and the hurdles.
And okay let’s remove those while we go forward to get the blockers out of the way. And it sounds like that’s what Australia is doing right now.
Allen Hall: Is there a lesson in any of that? Because of all the port problems we’ve been having in the United States and now Australia, what is the deal, how come we can’t.
Get through some of these port builds without having major multi year delays. Is it just the wrong site choice? Is that the kicker? Is that every place that you want to build a port is just going to have some environmental impact? And now you’re just trying to find the least impactful one? Is that it?
And why haven’t we figured that out before we’ve done a bunch of work.
Joel Saxum: I think it’s just a factor of where we’re at today as a society, right? Fifty years ago, a hundred years ago, we just built the port. We were like, screw it, throw some concrete in, let’s make it happen, we’ll move forward. And now we’re more litigious.
We’re, a little bit more environmentally conscious trying to make sure these things happen and places like Australia right now that are actually looking at this ahead of time. I think what they’re they’re doing is good, right? They’re going to be the ones that I, that you can see here on the forefront that are going to hopefully not have these hurdles and not have these costs delays because they’re taking a proactive approach of dealing with the problems that they’re now going to pop up.
Whereas, like the Eastern seaboard of the United States, like that’s pretty much sewed up of. Where are you going to be able to put things? So you’re going to have to remodel as a word, remodel a port to be able to use it where it might be, it may not be the same down there.
Allen Hall: Yeah I grasp all that, but it does seem like we can’t, let me give you the example here in Australia.
So Australia is just going to build a port tent kind of towards the South part of Australia. That’s the start of the South project, but they’re going to build. Offshore wind farms in a lot of different places. Is this going to repeat itself over and over again? Because that’s been the track record in the United States, is to repeat this same process over and over again.
There is no criteria when you start. It’s just, it’s all a clean slate and then everybody gets to toss mud at it until it stops. Which is what happened at the start of the South, quite honestly. That’s what it felt like reading all the articles in the States is, hey, they did their homework and yet Out of the blue, red stamp comes, and they have to stop.
It doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially from the federal government, who should be promoting this. Should have said something a year ago, two years ago, three
years ago.
Rosemary Barnes: It doesn’t sound like a showstopper to me, and I think that there’s a lot of noise from the opposition because they have to find something to talk about, something to oppose.
And it doesn’t actually mean that the project is on the rocks just because, like I said, they’re upset that they didn’t consult before consultation opened and now they’re, upset that they didn’t solve this problem before they knew that this was a problem, even though it’s been identified, like way earlier in the process than it, these sorts of issues have been identified elsewhere.
It’s just, if you’re an opposition politician, then of course you need to find things to criticize and things to say that you do differently. It’s definitely going to happen regardless of, even if the project was excluded flawlessly, there would still be headlines exactly like this every few weeks, because that’s what they need to do to stay in there.
In the news. So I don’t really think that you can tell anything about the state of the project from listening to headlines related to political, tussles.
Allen Hall: One of the options for the port was in Tasmania, but that’s not next door. How would you do that, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: You’re crossing the Bass Strait every time that you that you want to drop something off.
But it’s not unheard of for weird logistics related to offshore wind. Isn’t it the case that in the U. S. because of this, Jones Act and the problem that you don’t have any U. S. flagged vehicles that are, ships, sorry, that are capable of installing these wind farms.
Haven’t they got some sort of shuttle system going where they have foreign flagged installation vessels, but they never actually go into port. They, shuttle something out and back. It’s incredibly inefficient, but it’s the quickest, cheapest way to solve the problem given the political situation that you’re in.
It might be the case that this, that is the, the best environmental outcome. And I haven’t dug deep into the environmental issues. They’re not that, that far apart. It’s a, it’s a few hours in a a ferry. Like a faster ship could do it in less than that.
Philip Totaro: Don’t worry because the Chinese are gonna be shuttling components from their ports to, to serve the Australian market.
Allen Hall: That’s what my first thought was. That’ll happen. Unfortunately, yeah. And this ties into what Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest is up to. So he’s pledged. 14 gigawatts of wind, solar and battery capacity over the next decade down in Australia and forest owned squadron in energy.
If you’ve been familiar with the comings and goings down in Australia there’s a 671 million dollar Uungula wind farm being constructed at the moment. It’s New South Wales at 69 GE 6 megawatt turbines. GE is also lined up to supply Squadron’s next two projects, Spicers Creek and Jeremiah Wind. It’s a big pipeline there between GE and Andrew Forrest’s Squadron Company.
And they’re looking to supply like a third of Australia’s renewable target. That’s a lot, Rosemary. I don’t know where Andrew Forrest got his money. Was it from coal or what? Yeah. Is it a mining operation?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But not coal. It’s iron ore. Mostly it’s Fortescue. Yeah. Fortescue metals.
And he has been a very successful businessman and yeah, Fortescue is obviously an incredibly successful company. However, I would say his reputation is not, it’s not like a Warren Buffett type where everyone marvels at how every single call he makes is the right one, right? Andrew Forrest is more of a scattergun approach.
And, he wins it very incredibly successful on some of his calls and some other ones have turned out to be terrible ideas that just, went faded away. So I would say with this, what is it? 14 gigawatts. And if you just look at like yesterday’s peak load for the whole of the Australian East Coast grid was 31 megawatts.
We’re talking a really huge chunk of, of Australian electricity, if it was going to actually supply Australian electricity and not go into exports of hydrogen or new industry or whatever. But that, that all isn’t committed. The way that these announcements work, and not just for Andrew Forrest’s ventures, but for any big hydrogen project you look at or anything, they give a really huge announced figure.
And then they will say, we’ve ordered or construction has started or whatever. And then when you dig deeper and usually actually have to talk to someone involved in the project to find this out, it’s actually split into slices that, so that 14 gigawatts probably has half a gigawatt or one gigawatt of an actual wind farm or whatever that has.
Is in development, active development. And then the rest of it is planned, plan stuff. Maybe they’ve started seeing whether they can get the land for it, or maybe they have on paper, made a spreadsheet model that will say how it’s going to work. And so you you put those two things together, it makes it sound like a 14 gigawatt wind farm is under development, but actually the reality of it is that, every single market outcome would have to go exactly the way that they want it to.
And they’re like most wildly optimistic scenario for that all to come true. If the plan is to. For example, export a whole lot of hydrogen. And I did talk to a developer of a similar giga project somewhere else about yeah, it wasn’t that huge, but a quite, quite a huge multiple gigawatt wind farm that was going to be combined with a multiple gigawatt solar farm and export hydrogen.
And, that would depend on how hydrogen exports around the world go, because obviously it’s not enough for Australia to make the decision. We’re going to export all this hydrogen. Someone would actually have to want to buy that and then you would have to find a way to not only make it cheaply, but to transport it cheaply.
And that’s the big thing in, transporting hydrogen in liquid form. We have tried it in Australia. It’s incredibly inefficient and expensive. And, then there’s other ways to transport hydrogen, like by converting it to ammonia and either then using it as ammonia at the end destination, or even some people suggesting converting the ammonia back to hydrogen.
It’s all very inefficient and estimates that I’ve seen is that, these headline really cheap hydrogen figures a dollar per kilo of hydrogen. That’s at the factory gate and transport could add, five times that onto it, depending on where you’re going to and from, and by what method.
As people realize the reality of hydrogen imports, they’re likely to, scale down the amount that they are going to get. And so then obviously the supply has to scale down too. I yeah, I wouldn’t pay so much attention to the 14 gigawatts. It’s probably largely designed to get a lot of attention.
And you’ll get the, totally the wrong impression about the energy transition. If you start taking all of these announced values at face value.
Joel Saxum: There’s something interesting here too, Rosemary, cause this is talking about financially backing the energy transition, right? So this is comes on the heels of.
Larry Fink CEO of Blackrock, right? They just announced that big GIP deal, growth global infrastructure partners, and what he’s saying in all the press conferences about is the future in private markets will be infrastructure. Okay, so we’ve seen this in other places. We’ve seen the safe place to put money.
All these pensioner accounts all over the world are putting money into Brookfield, into all these other places that are doing these energy infrastructure projects. Bill Gates owns Wind farm companies. Now we see Berkshire Hathaway energy wind farm companies. We see Amazon buying them and Walmart putting money.
And so all these big companies are getting behind the energy transition. Some of that capital is coming from there, right? But I think it’s more often than not because that’s a safe bet for growth, right? Like this Andrew Forrest move is just like BlackRock doing the GIP deal. And sticking 12, 12 and a half billion in cash and the biggest money controlling entity in the world, BlackRock probably besides, I don’t know, some other government or something, but I think they have 10 trillion in assets, Phil, correct me if I’m wrong there.
They’re saying that’s the future. The future is in infrastructure. So that’s where they’re putting their money. So you can see some of these other people with a lot of cash in the pocket are doing the same thing, which is spurring on the energy
Allen Hall: transition. Yeah, but does it grow enough in Australia to then put facilities that are going to build some of this on the continent?
Joel Saxum: I don’t think so, to be honest with you. I don’t think so, because there are, they’re already really there, right? It’s that awesome, the awesome job that they have done in the rooftop solar and the microgrid type things has made it to the point where they don’t, it’s not cost advantage to go and man, we really got to put 10, 000 more turbines up in Australia.
You don’t, you just don’t need to right now.
Allen Hall: Yeah, but it’s such a huge wind resource and solar resource for the world. It does seem like you would tap into that.
Joel Saxum: If like the Bay of, what is it? The Indian ocean. If the Indian ocean wasn’t so deep and you could actually run HDV, VDC to India, there you go.
But if that’s a, that’s one of the deepest chunks of water in the world.
Philip Totaro: Yeah. Right now, the one that they’re planning is to Indonesia and it hasn’t even gotten fully approved. So they’re still talking about it.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s been a new integrated service plan released by the Australian electricity market operator, and they assume that to get to, we’re on track to get to 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030, and that means that there will be 39 gigawatts of new wind and solar built by 2030, so it’s about 6 gigawatts per year between those two, and I think it is actually quite optimistic.
Philip Totaro: There’s actually a fairly robust market and our own projections already indicate that they’re going to be doing at least three gigawatts a year in wind. And they’ll probably do more of that in, in solar as well. So I don’t see any problem for them to achieve that AEMO projection.
Joel Saxum: But that’s only a couple of, so regarding Allen’s comment to why isn’t, is that enough to build a factory in country, I don’t think so, because it’s only a couple hundred turbines a year each.
Allen Hall: That’s what a turbine factory will produce, though, generally, is about that number, roughly.
Philip Totaro: You need about 300 units a year for at least 5 or 10 years to justify the capex costs on a factory, so they don’t, they’re too, it’s too fine of a margin even though they might be getting those numbers, It’s too fine of a margin for them to say yes.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, like a policy change could flip it upside down.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, like one little thing, one little hiccup happens and that their CapEx investment goes down the drain.
Allen Hall: How do you become energy independent if you’re dependent on another country for everything that you do?
Rosemary Barnes: You’re dependent on them to buy the turbines.
Allen Hall: You’re gonna buy a Vestas 20 year full service agreement with that too? The logic of this goes away when that happens.
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I hope that we could figure out how to run a, if we went to war with Denmark, I hope we could figure out how to run the turbines that are on our own land.
Allen Hall: You’re part of the monarchy, you can’t be at war.
Joel Saxum: You better get a discount on your 20 year FSA now.
Allen Hall: That’s what I’m saying.
Joel Saxum: Heavy is the head that wears the crown.
Allen Hall: Dang straight, Rosemary, you gotta start acting like you’re part of the crown. You’re tied to two countries with royalty, right? UK, and now Denmark.
There you go. You can’t go wrong.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe Australia could elect, cause we have a, an ongoing debate about whether we should leave the British monarchy and become a republic, but maybe there’s a third option that we move from the British monarchy to the Danish one. now that we have, at least we’ve got an Australian now, in the bloodline of the Danish monarchy.
So it makes more sense to me.
Allen Hall: Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news, it digs into the tough issues, and PES Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in depth info you need.
Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PES Wind at peswind.com.
Since we’re on the topic of hydrogen, GE Vernova has secured a major order from Australia, CS Energy, for twelve Aeroderivative gas turbines. They will power a new 400 megawatt peaking plant in Queensland. The Brigolo facility will be Australia’s first hydrogen ready power station. Now, what GE is saying is that these new peaking plants can operate on 35 percent green hydrogen and that as the decade goes on they’re going to have the ability to use more hydrogen in those peaking plants.
It’s a new technology that GE has been looking at, and it looks like green hydrogen is going to become a reality in Australia. Rosemary, whether you like it or not because GE is selling turbines down there because they can have the hydrogen capability. I agree with you on the green hydrogen thing.
It’s super expensive to move around. It doesn’t make any sense to move it around, but maybe it makes sense in a peaking plant. Is that a possibility?
Rosemary Barnes: For the very last little bit of decarbonization. But the fact is like a peaking plant like this, I haven’t looked at the figures for this particular one, but there’s another one at Curry in New South Wales, and that is planned to have a capacity factor of 2%.
It’s you use gas for that, it’s not really a big driver of emissions in Australia, considering that, yeah, we’ll be at 82 percent renewable electricity by 2030, you don’t need to have hydrogen instead of gas at that point, it’s like when you’re up to 98, 99 percent then that’s when you would bother to change over from gas to hydrogen, in my opinion.
I, I think that these hydrogen, hydrogen ready turbines, fine, whatever, it’s probably barely costs any different to just a new gas turbine and the gas turbines really can support very high levels of variable renewables and we will need those while we in this stage of the transition when we’re rapidly getting more variable renewables and less rapidly getting more energy storage and long duration energy storage.
I’ve got no, no problem with that. The hydrogen ready aspect of it means that it’s a bit like it’s a little bit of armor against criticisms from green groups that we shouldn’t be having any more fossil fuel power plants built. If this was my project, I would also do that just because I wouldn’t want to spend all my time fighting off meaning environmentalists who maybe don’t understand the reality of running a, gigawatt scale electricity grid.
And the other thing that a green hydrogen turbine, a hydrogen ready turbine provides is domestic use for hydrogen. So if you’re a country that thinks you’re going to export a whole lot of hydrogen and you want to make sure that you’re ready for that when it’s needed, but no one actually needs it now, and we haven’t figured out how to transport it anyway.
Then, politicians are trying desperately to find ways that we can ramp up the industry with domestic load. So that’s why you see this kind of project. That’s why every single project that’s trying to blend hydrogen into gas pipelines. To use for home heating or whatever, it’s totally stupid for every reason, except for that it’s politically very nice to be able to say we’re ramping up, we’re making this much green hydrogen and when this magical hydrogen economy, export economy around the world, when that eventuates to the extent that everybody is claiming that it will, we’ll be ready because we’ve been burning our hydrogen in gas pipelines and we can stop that.
Yeah, it’s I think that’s more what it’s about like I said, I would do it too if I was running this project, so I’m not criticizing, but it’s not it’s not a mission’s, action. It’s not, yeah, it’s not anything to do with reducing Australia’s emissions.
Joel Saxum: Rosemary, maybe this is me being stupid, but if this is a peaker plant, the aero derivative gas turbines that are being used for, can’t, isn’t this a version of that?
The same gas turbines that we would be using in a regular power plant as well?
Rosemary Barnes: I think they’re very similar.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Why can’t a new regular power plant be this? Hydrogen ready over the next future thing. Like why can’t every power plant that’s coming online be like this?
Rosemary Barnes: I’m guessing this is not a huge difference in cost to be hydrogen ready.
It would be a big cost to go through and make existing gas power plants hydrogen ready, that would be different. And it is going to, it’s plants that are trying to be able to blend different ratios that I know that’s quite hard, like it’s easy to get. 10 or 20 percent hydrogen blend.
You don’t have to do too much, but it’s hard to blend beyond that. It’s more like you flick a switch then and go from 20 or this one’s saying 35%. So I’m guessing it’s not your stock standard turbine, but gas turbine. But yeah it, it will have to be modified probably in some way and it might not go 35, 40, 45, 50, it might go 35, 40, 50, a hundred kind of.
I, I don’t know. I haven’t looked at the details, but. That’s my understanding of how it works.
Philip Totaro: So 15 years ago I was working at GE doing projects including the 100 percent hydrogen combustor. This, and that was 15 years ago. And we’re only at 35, the bottom line is, this is, it’s fantastically expensive, actually to implement.
A new build would certainly be cheaper than a retrofit, because the 7H and 9H GE conventional turbines don’t really have the, they’re not high temperature enough to be able to handle the combustor output for for a hydrogen combustor, so they the turbine portion of the gas turbine doesn’t it, you’ll melt it if you put too much hydrogen in it.
These ones that they’re talking about going up to, I don’t think they’re actually going to be at 35 percent for the reasons Rosemary was suggesting, because you start again, you getting into a situation where blending too much is gonna cause both technical and commercial problems. But at the end of the day, again, if you had like a brand new plant to build or you were going to repower a gas turbine site, you might do it with hydrogen if you had a consistent enough hydrogen supply.
But again, that’s predicated on Having infrastructure that’s available where you’ve got a pipeline that’s going to be able to feed this thing. You can’t just switch over from using a natural gas pipeline to a hydrogen pipeline cold turkey, so to speak. It’s, so there’s, yeah it’s actually more expensive than it sounds.
And a lot of these hydrogen things are, They are just green sounding they’re not as cost efficient as they need to be, not to say they don’t work or couldn’t work in the future, but they’re not as cost efficient as they need to be in order to work at scale today.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and considering that it’s not really solving a hard problem at this point, the emissions reduction compared to how hard it is, you’re so much, there’s so many better places that you could put that effort developing proper port infrastructure for an offshore wind industry or something.
That’s, a lot more bang for your buck to be doing that sort of thing at this stage of the energy transition.
Allen Hall: A section of wind turbine blade broke off at the Humber Gateway offshore wind farm in the UK in last December. The roughly 20 meter long blade piece fell into the sea and they’re reported as being likely adrift or underwater.
There’s only really two options. It’s not in orbit. It’s gotta be on the water or underneath of it.
Joel Saxum: It might be in orbit.
Allen Hall: So they have 73 Vestas V112 3 megawatt turbines there and that went from shuttle operation in 2015. There was not a lot of information about this. Obviously, you had to tell Mariners in the area to watch out for this plate that would be floating around.
The RWE which is responsible for the site, has is going to replace it and is once the boats are there to do it, they’re gonna also look at some repairs. Obviously, you’ll be looking, doing an inspection, so this is, you don’t see a lot of offshore blade issues at the moment. This is. A pretty significant one, and the fact that it dropped something into the water.
My assumption is once you drop something into the water, you actually have to find it. Isn’t that one of the rules, Joel, is that if you drop it, you have to bring it back up?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, any kind of, especially oil and gas, offshore infrastructure, offshore wind, anything. If you drop a tool, they want you to go get it, right?
There’s always not only an environmental issue, but it could be aids to navigation. That thing could be resting on an export cable down there. You don’t know, right? So you’ve got to go and find the thing because it could cause problems. Of course, that would be a, it would stuff gets lost all the time.
There’s been pictures and images of 5 million remotely operated vehicles that are size of trucks washing up on the beach in Brazil that were lost in Africa. Like I’ve seen these, this happens. But I want to talk about one interesting thing here. Just looking at the numbers, so this is a V112, 3 megawatt machine.
So if you follow any kind of metrics of wind turbines, V112 usually means 112 meter rotor, it’s a Vestas machine. That’s gonna be a 55, 54 meter blade. And for a 54, 55 meter blade to be on a 3 megawatt machine, that means that those blades have been under some structural loads their whole life. That means that those things have been spinning hard and long for a long time.
Philip Totaro: Those turbines were using the original V112 blade design, which had the carbon prepreg. It’s before they made this changeover to the pultruded rods.
Joel Saxum: There’ll be an RCA down in it, they’ll figure out why it broke. But, this is showing you, okay, this has been, you’re just turning Eight and a half, nine years old of production on this wind farm.
If I was the RWE on this one, I would definitely be taking on some pretty intense internal inspections of all of these blades, just to make sure that there’s nothing starting to loosen up or crack, or maybe even some specific NDT. on these blades, just because if one of them let loose like that and it doesn’t look at this time, we haven’t heard anything like there’s a lightning strike or anything like that.
This could just be fatigue. And if you’ve got one of them that let loose and there’s 73 more of them out there, you’ve got now. 208 more or 218 more blades or 217 more blades out there hanging.
Allen Hall: This is one of those times where you pray it’s lightning.
Philip Totaro: Maybe, yeah, but because you also have a bunch of these in Denmark too.
And I want to also say Germany is using some V 112s in some of their earlier.
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Sticking to the offshore theme, operations at Equinor’s 30 megawatt high wind Scotland. Floating offshore wind farm have been interrupted for up to four months for heavy maintenance on the turbines. Operational data has shown the need for the work on the Siemens Gamesa turbines that have been operating for about seven years off of Aberdeen, their SWT 6. 0154 machines. The turbines will be towed to Werglund port in Norway this summer where maintenance will be done by the Werglund group. This is the first heavy maintenance operation for a floating wind farm. Towing the turbines to shore is the simplest way. This is the, one of the beauties of having a floating wind farm is you can tow the turbines in and out.
What we don’t know right now is what they’re going to repair. And they think it’s going to take a couple of months for the repairs to occur. That screams out to me, bearings, gearbox, drivetrain, probably not blades, right? Or it’s rotating equipment. Gearbox would be the easy one, but it’s gotta be something drivetrain related, right?
To do three or four months. It means bearings?
Philip Totaro: I’m hearing it’s the main bearings, and it’s probably due to a lot of the off axis loading that you’re getting because the tower is flopping around on the floating platform in ways that I mean, they obviously design it with natural frequencies and everything in mind, but it’s, still getting a lot of off axis loads on on the turbine that probably weren’t anticipated at the levels they probably actually been seeing.
Joel Saxum: But we’ve been talking about this with floating wind here on the show for a while. It’s always, it’s been a concern. Any engineer floating, naval architect. Structural engineer is going to see that there’s, if you’re going to use basically the same bearings or anything that’s been used on shore or in a fixed bottom offshore.
That’s not going to take the same loads. It’s because you’re now you’re introducing a few other degrees of freedom on these things. And when you’re in the fricking North sea, we’ve all seen the videos with the North sea does in the wintertime, it’s pitching and rolling that thing is angry and ugly and nasty, right?
So those things have been bouncing around there for six, seven years. I read an article by a friend of mine in New York insurance, but it’s a Norwegian whole club thing. And they were talking about making sure that you have towed a port for all of these issues built into your business model.
And normally six years, you’re not changing out bearings and things like that, but this is the first long term deployment of an offshore floating wind farm in the world. And as we do more of these offshore floaters, and if there’s adjustments and things, we got to understand, we’ve been talking a lot about the fleet for installations.
Yes, that’s there. However, now, if you’re gonna start being dragging turbines all over the place, now you’re talking about anchor handling tugs and the availability of those, there’s a lot of moving parts here.
Allen Hall: So this is where I want to understand this tension leg platform bit, right? So in PES Wind Magazine, on the latest issue, there’s an article by Eco TLP.
And when I saw the high wind issue, I thought, okay, so maybe the tension leg platform can reduce some of the movement, which is what it sounds like, and the article is really good, but, I’m an electrical engineer, I’m not a mechanical engineer, I’m not an offshore engineer. But it does seem like these tension leg platforms are a way to reduce some of the movement so you don’t wear out the rotating pieces of these turbines, right?
Isn’t that the logic?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, but TLPs by, by design are deep water units. And the reason is okay, for every meter of tension leg, you can expect X amount of freedom of movement, right? So if you’re trying to install one of those in 150 meters of water, it’s too rigid. It will BAM, like it won’t work, right?
Or you’d have to have the TL, the actual fiber tensioners would have to be so loose that it would bounce around anyways. So a TLP is better suited for 3, 5, 000 meter water depths, even into 2, 000 meter water depths. Whereas I think high wind is not nearly that deep. I think high wind’s only like 120, 150 meters of water.
Allen Hall: So is there a problem in being in that depth of water that there’s no way to try to control the amount of bobbing and weaving that the turbines are going to do?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, you’re in the, you’re in that middle thing where you can’t quite get a it’s too expensive to put in a jacket because you can build a jacket that’s fricking 500 meters tall easily.
It’s done all the time, but they’re so expensive. Then it’s like, why are we doing this? It makes no sense. So after you get to a certain depth, the jacket doesn’t make sense. But you can’t put a monopile out there in 150 meters of water. Because it’s going to be a 250 meter long monopile, like you’re not going to do that.
Allen Hall: So is there a solution for this, or is it just building the turbines more robust to handle the loads the offset loads that are going to happen?
Joel Saxum: There’s a couple of solutions, right? There’s different technologies you can do for floating concrete. spars and different things on the surface. It’s just, which design do you go with, right?
There’s the X one wind platform and there’s the, this platform and there’s the, that platform and the T omega or whatever, there’s all kinds of different ideas.
Allen Hall: If you’re wearing out the bearings in these turbines, aren’t you then putting a lot of stress on the blades? It seems like that would be.
It’s just like you’re wearing out a bearing in an engine, you wear out the bearing in an engine and all this, all the attached pieces start to wear because things are not working like they should. Is that the real concern is like, you can replace bearings, not fun, but you could do it. You start damaging blades or something bigger, towers even, you’re really in trouble.
Philip Totaro: If this weren’t a floating platform, this would be a monstrously expensive thing to have to fix. Remember what happened with the Vestas V90 3 MW in Denmark. They had to change out the main bearing because it was basically an onshore turbine. Taken and put in an offshore environment, never designed for an offshore environment, as Joel mentioned earlier, and they literally had to change out the main bearings after two years or something, three years and they had to do it on hundreds of turbines.
It cost Vestas millions of dollars.
Allen Hall: That leads into another interesting story I found, which is from Rutgers University. So Rutgers University researchers wanted to develop floating offshore wind turbines, like high wind. And they’re talking about building a facility, a net zero wind energy test center on the shore, the Jersey shore, guys.
And when I first read this, and there’s a big article about it, there’s some news stories. There was some of the state Senator, at least one state Senator there talking about this. They are going to be way out of the league. Any college university in the United States is trying to develop offshore wind.
The industry’s been doing this for 10, 10 plus years at this point. There, it’s really complicated. What is Rutgers going to bring to the table here that an Equinor doesn’t already know?
Philip Totaro: First of all they’re in about 35 meter water depth out there in New Jersey, so I don’t think they’re going to bring much.
Habib Daggar at the University of Maine has already been working on this for 10 years and they had to go get, commercial partnerships involved The question I have is, why is Rutgers the one getting the money for this? I don’t have anything against them. It’s just, if you’re going to do something floating in the U. S., why is it not on the West Coast? Why is it not UCLA, the, even here in my hometown, the University of California, Santa Barbara, or something up in Oregon or Washington? UC Davis. Alaska. Where we’re actually going to have deep water, yeah. Deep water deployments like why is Rutgers getting something where again the whatever they’re going to test it’s going to be at scale and it’s going to be in like 35 to 40 meter water depth that the most because there’s that whole outer continental shelf.
Allen Hall: The thing is in the United States, they like to run. New innovative ideas through some sort of university or college to, to vet them out, which I think is a terrible idea in Offshore Wind. And Phil, you’re probably right, and doing something on the west coast makes a lot more sense because that’s where floating wind is going to occur.
But even then, they’re still way behind industry. Rosemary’s been working in industry for a long time, right? 30, 40 years. She’s not that old. Oh, she, sorry, Rosemary. She’s still there. But Rosemary, come on! Is there, you went to UC Davis you’ve been on the west coast, you’ve been, you’re a west coaster.
Is there anything that UC Davis could add on an offshore wind facility in the next 10 years that would make any substantial difference in the offshore wind industry? Nice people, smart people, just not capable of doing that.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it depends every, some universities make a big a big effort at staying in, linked into industry.
And so I wouldn’t write off every single academic project to not be able to contribute to the real world. But yeah, I probably share, yeah, share your sentiment. I did PhD, so obviously I was in the academic scene while I was doing that. And, I, I. Thought I did a good PhD project, wrote a good thesis, published a few good papers out of it.
I bet that no one ever took that that, that work and turned it into something in industry. And then after I finished that, I went and got a job at a wind turbine manufacturer and, very quickly things that were ideas in my head became products that were in, gigawatts worth of wind turbines.
For me, it’s very clear that I am much more able to have an impact working in industry than in academia. I, academia is needed as well, but it’s more, like it’s a lot earlier on and you have to really carefully design programs that are going to combine academia with industry.
For it to do a good job. I do work on some with the mineral processing stuff that I do that involves a lot of university collaboration. That’s, it’s really good, it’s a really science focused company. Whereas a wind turbine is not at the science stage. It’s at the, project development and operations and manufacturing.
It’s, all that sort of stuff that is mostly practical with only smaller inputs needed from academia, in my opinion.
Joel Saxum: I know that we don’t play as well as we should with other countries and other academic research, but do you think some of it has to do with the idea that, hey, the rest of the floating wind research that’s going on in the world is Scotland, France, some in the Canary Islands a little bit?
Allen Hall: Norway, Japan.
Joel Saxum: Okay, so that shoots my argument in the foot, but my thought was. At least you’re in the same kind of daily time zones where if you’re on the east coast of the U. S. you can talk to Europe, but I don’t think they, they don’t really care.
Rosemary Barnes: That’s Australia’s excuse for not being, not having their finger on the pulse for anything, do you?
It really sucks trying to collaborate internationally when you live in Australia, I tell you.
Philip Totaro: But yeah it’s just I think it’s, it goes back to just a resource thing like we talked about. So again, nothing disparaging against Rutgers. They’re actually doing fantastic work with workforce development, et cetera, et cetera.
The things that they’ve actually been working on. But not necessarily. Yeah. But to, to the point, I think we’re all trying to make here. There’s no point to what they would be doing with setting up some kind of offshore wind research capability, because we’ve already got more than enough designs of, we’ve been talking about floating offshore wind for 20 years in the industry.
There are literally 130 different patent families, which comprises, I don’t know, it could be upwards of a thousand different patents on. Floating offshore wind designs. We’ve got it covered. We don’t need academia’s involvement unless it’s going to be to research a specific aspect of if you want to put in a wave tank or something and research fatigue loading on something, again, whether or not it’s going to be relevant at scale.
Yeah, but, yeah. That’s the sort of thing that the industry would benefit from, not let’s have a university design of floating offshore wind platform. We don’t need that. Thanks.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening and 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.
