EP73 – Will Battery Fires Set Renewables Back? Thermoplastic Blade Tech + Vestas Invests in Cranes

New research and work on thermoplastic blade construction has yielded some excitement in the community, and Allen and Rosemary discuss the commercial viability of these turbine blades. Vestas has invested in S&L Access crane technology, and their Salamander Quick Lift looks like a step in the right direction. The small Block Island wind farm now has four of its five turbines stopped for “routine maintenance”…but is something bigger at play?

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 

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Transcript: EP73 – Will Battery Fires Set Renewables Back? Thermoplastic Blade Tech + Vestas Invests in Cranes

This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning

protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett

I’m Allen Hall.

And I’m Rosemary Barnes

And this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am your co-host Dan Blewett – on today’s episode. We’re going to talk about a recent battery fire from one of the Tesla mega packs burn for about three straight days until

it burn itself out in Victoria, Australia. So we’ll talk about some of the implications and whether we should be concerned about battery technology as it takes off, whether that’s going to be a problem for renewables. We’ll also chat a little bit about the Block Island Wind Farm, which has five turbines up in New England.

Four of them are currently offline, and they’ve got some subsea cable issues that might need to be reburied. So we’ll talk through some of the problems are having there. We’re also going to talk a little bit about the fishing sector sector.

Get Rosemarie’s take here on some new reporting from The Guardian about, you know, whether the UK is sacrificing their fishing sector for offshore wind and whether this is really a Zero-Sum game or if everyone can get along. We’ll talk about some new technology in cranes, the salamander lift system and what that means as Vestas investors invests in

that technology. And lastly, kind of our big topic today, we’ll talk about thermoplastic blades, some interesting technology about how to ban them using metal foils. And, well, this is going to be a sustainable practice, whether it will work with lightning issues and all that.

So we’ve got two great minds on blades here. So before we get going, I want to remind you, you can sign up for uptime tech news in the show notes of today’s podcast, no matter where you’re listening on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher.

Just click below and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter where we’ll send you an update on the podcasts and all of the latest news around the market. So let’s get going. Alan, I know you want to talk batteries.

So this big mega pack fire out in Australia sounds pretty scary. What what was the story here with Tesla on this fire?

Well, they don’t have any details yet. And Rosemary may have a little more because she’s a little closer to it than we are. But it’s a big lithium ion pack battery packs out. And they were in construction mode, it sounded like.

And they had an accident in a fire. They’re not sure what caused it, but there’s really nothing to do. Once the pack starts to let go, they’re going to burn until there’s no more energy inside of them. So you just have to let it burn out, which is the the the part that scares everybody is because we’re

going to be having more and more battery packs and larger battery packs, regardless of what the chemistry is inside of them. They’re just still a lot of stored energy in there. And if they if they decided let go.

How are you going to stop it? How are you going to mitigate it? How you know those population centers near there? How are you going to deal with that? So there’s a lot of details that haven’t been thought through on the at least in the United States.

I can guarantee you they haven’t been thought through the United States yet because we tend to have an accident and then write regulation after it, which is retro. Something you can do. Yeah, it’s the worst way to do it, because then the engineers are out of it.

It’s just politicians and lawyers discussing how they going to save the planet. And there’s no engineers at the table. So hopefully it’s more of an impetus and on the engineering side to think through those problems and try to to mitigate them upfront where we don’t get into that rapid response congressional hearing situation.

And and and Rosemary, have you heard anything more about the outcome of that fire? Have they announced any details?

I just saw that if I was out. So I guess that’s an outcome. But no, I haven’t heard any details. I am assuming that it’s similar to any of the other lithium ion battery fires that we’ve heard about in cars, but on a larger scale.

So, yeah, I think it’s definitely the the worst aspect from my point of view is kind of the the payoff for the clean energy transition as a whole. What’s a really good weapon for opponents, political opponents to to raise now?

But I mean, fires in the batteries, it’s definitely a risk that engineers have been aware of and have been taking care to mitigate. You know, right throughout the history of lithium ion batteries. But I guess there’s still some some way to go.

I mean, can we ever get to the point of zero fires that definitely other technologies have never gotten to that point. We did say in Victoria back in 2014, there was a fire fire in a coal mine that burned for 45 days and probably killed about 11 people.

So it’s and of course, you say, you know, thousands of fires in petrol, gasoline cars every year as well. So I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to get to the point where we have no fires, but definitely.

A different nature of the lithium ion fire, where it’s very hard to put it out once it got started. That is going to require some different regulation. And I would hope that engineers could could work together with regulators to, you know, get get sensible proposals.

Well, and you wonder, you know, with the way the world is today. So, you know, if you’re a celebrity today, you are subject to incredible scrutiny that someone like, you know, Elvis, Johnny Cash, like name a celebrity from the 50s and 60s and 70s, never grew up with.

Right. Like they have to go through any of that. I’m not saying any of those people did anything worth noting. I’m not going to I’m not going to go there. They’re just names. But, you know, today with this new technology sprouting up in the world of instant news all over the Web, you know, oil and coal and

natural gas didn’t grow up in that same you know, they’re essentially like the Elvises. They didn’t grow up where if something happened at a coal plant or a petrol factory, that it was going to suddenly be on Twitter and 80 million people were going to be retweeting it the same day.

I mean, do you feel like that is just a just an unfortunate challenge of renewable energy?

I think that such a such a great analogy. And, yeah, I guess lithium ion batteries. Are this the celebrity of the energy, the clean energy transition? I had never thought about that, but definitely going to be using that one in the future.

Yeah, it just seems hard because again, it’s like you almost can’t have a slip up when and when these new technologies are coming out. They’re they’re going to be and it doesn’t seem like there’s that many, but any time it happens, it seems like it’s everywhere because this burned it burned for three days.

But we’ve had cell phones that catch fire once in a while. And like you hear about it once in a while, like we know you can’t have a laptop computer stowed underneath in the belly of the airplane. That’s right.

Right, Alan. Like you have to have it with you in case something happens. But, you know, rarely ever happens that. Right.

It happens a lot less now because the industry made changes in the way they designed those batteries. So it didn’t happen as often. But yeah, I mean, that’s the circular loop, right? You have on the airplane side, you had fires in the cabin and then you had congressional hearings and then you had the engineer who’s trying to

fix all the batteries. So that wasn’t an issue. But there’s occasionally it still does happen on cargo planes and cargo ships. You hear about lithium battery fires, and there’s really nothing to do about, like Rosemary said, there’s just going to burn itself out.

Well, do we know that for for certain I mean, if this is such a new thing still on, of course, like you said, lithium is not that new. But do we know for sure that burning out is the only solution?

I mean, in a year, I mean, as a company like Fire pTrace, not on this. Or maybe they can figure something out to extinguish Adobe. You know, I don’t know the oxygen or do something like this. Is there really?

It strikes me as odd that there’s really no solution except for letting it burn itself out.

The lithium ion fires are bad in a sense, because they provide their own fuel and they provide so much massive heat that really all I can do is, one, try to cool them down. And that’s what is typically done, like going to a car test, a car fire or electric car fires, or they throw water on to

try to keep the parks cool or keep more parks from igniting. And then they add the suppression foam to it to try to knock it down. But the recent fires I’ve seen in automobiles, it’s pretty much let it burn until it stops.

And I think until we either figure out a way to to limit of some different kind of chemicals, which I’m afraid are going to be probably more caustic and letting the other fire on my own burn or change the chemistry so they don’t do that.

There’s really not much you’re going to do about it on airplanes. One of the things on airplanes when they use lithium ion batteries is they actually put it in a hardened case. So if there is a fire, they have to demonstrate that there is a fire in that in that lithium ion case, that it doesn’t escape that

case. And that’s the way we deal with it on airplanes. It’s not the most elegant way to deal with it, but it does work. And when you’re talking about sort of general population things, you’re not going to do that out in an open space because it’s going to cost you so much money to do it.

There’s no reason to do it. And I think that’s where, you know, we’re going to see more effort on how to disconnect, maybe even physically separate the batteries if one bank does go up. How do you pull the other ones away so they don’t get so hot or how do you dump so much water on it that

they don’t don’t go up? That’s going to be part of the trick, but the cost is going to get extremely high fast when you do systems like that.

Well, it reminded me of fireworks companies, manufacturers. So if you are well and know. But if you go to a fireworks manufacturer, they have it’s almost like a campus where one thing is built in one little hut and then another cabin has another ingredient.

So if any given building goes up, it’s not going to destroy everything, which obviously it’s so flammable. I assume they probably do that with other munitions, too. But I know that’s how they how they operate, how they used to operate as.

Back in the day when fireworks or, you know, originated in Japan and it was, you know, done in in rural areas, they just kept everything as separate as they could so that if one thing went, not everything went.

So moving on, let’s talk about this struggle, the struggles that the black Eilon wind farm is having. So this is up in New England. They have five wind turbines. Apparently four of them are knocked offline at the moment.

And there’s also a high voltage power line that was buried that is apparently coming back up and is going to need to be reburied at an expanse of about 30 million dollars. And it looks like they’re going to expect the taxpayers or the ratepayers to help foot some of that bill, at least.

But this has been another to your point, Rosemary, like any issue with any of these wind farms, the naysayers just want to jump on it. The you know, the opponents of wind just want to jump on it. And to me, you know, they’ve said or said has said that, hey, this is just kind of routine maintenance.

We’re going to rebury the thing. And in the fall, it got pushed back. They want to allow tourism. But Rosemary, does this sound like it’s getting maybe a little bit blown? Obviously, this is not a good situation for the wind farm, but can wind farms go offline temporarily and not be, you know, suffering?

It sounds like people are pushing a little bit of conspiracy here. Like why or why are these really offline? Are feel like they shouldn’t be down ever. But there is downtime and there is maintenance that needs to be done, right?

Yeah. I mean, I don’t know a lot about the details of this of this wind farm, but it’s definitely true that there is downtime. The article that I’ve read said that four out of five of the wind turbines have been down for weeks, and that is not just normal downtime.

So there’s there is some issue at this wind farm and who haven’t got a final financial stake in the wind farm will be having a fit over this. You know, they will not not be at all impressed about this amount of downtime.

So in that sense, it’s not normal. However, there are so many wind farms in the world now that some of them have unusual problems. You know, if it’s like a one in a hundred kind of thing, then, you know, one percent of thousands of wind farms is still, you know, some some this great number of wind farms

. And I think that that’s basically it. So it’s yeah, it’s like a combination of no, it’s not normal, but it’s also not uncommon, not so uncommon that we wouldn’t see cases like this from time to time.

Gotcha. And it sounds like there was maybe a little bit of an issue with just the way the approval process was done. So it says the the Coastal Resources Management Council typically recommends a burial depth of eight to 10 feet for these or for these cables.

And this one was only buried at four feet. And then within months, it says portions of the cable were exposed to the shore. So, I mean, Al, does it seem like maybe there was some oversight issues here that have maybe played into these problems?

Yeah, well, if you’re building a sandcastle over there, you’re going to dig down at least three or four feet. So I kind of wonder if that made a lot of sense. Block Island, if you’ve never been to Block Island and I haven’t physically been to Block Island, but a lot of people around us go visit Block Island

because it’s off the coast of Rhode Island and it’s this nice little place out in the water and all the you hab not out there. And it’s it’s a nice place to go visit. So visually, it’s a lot of people see it.

Right? I think that’s the bigger problem. If that had happened off the coast of who cares, spik, Nebraska, you know, it’s place where where no one’s out there vacationing, then it wouldn’t have been as much of a big deal.

But the issue on Block Island is there’s just so many tourists there. And this is why they didn’t want to upset anybody. They had to leave it because the tourism drives the economy on Block Island and there’s only a limited window where where the weather is good enough to be out there.

So you’re going to get bludgeoned regardless what happens here. And maybe there’s an oversight on how far down the cable was or maybe the erosion is higher than they thought it was. Or maybe there there’s a great white shark tugging on the cable or something.

You know, who the hell knows? But the the kicker is, is that as we talk about it in wind all the time, the marketing departments of the PR departments sometimes don’t do a really good job of getting out in front of these things.

They just let the press go on and never really provide any feedback and or at least say, hey, it’s a known issue. We know we’re going to take care of it, but we’re also trying to help the economy at the same time.

And we’re going to have to wait because we need the hotels and the restaurants and the servers to make some money in the middle of Covid. But that’s a bitter argument then. I don’t want to pay for it now.

I’m going to wait till the fall. And that doesn’t seem to play very well. So I for whatever reason, the power industry does not have great PR because they got me. They feel they don’t need it. But as we were talking about earlier, if you’re if your battery bank goes up, then it’s going to be on Twitter

in the next 30 seconds, and that’s bad. So maybe, maybe, maybe a little more PR and a little. Less obstinance about it would be better, because you’re right, Darnah and Rosemary. It’s like instantaneous. The feedback on these problems is like instantaneous.

And you get these explosive headlines like wind turbines hazardous to humanity. We must pull them all down, kind of emails and websites going and it gets us. And on Facebook, it’s it’s the prevalent place to do that stuff.

So it feeds itself. And there’s no limitation or pushback from the American Clean Clean Power Association or anybody to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. So put a little perspective on this. And I think we do ourselves a great disservice when we let these problems escalate like they do.

And speaking of PR, we wanted to get Rosemarie’s take on the fishing industry. So there’s more and more articles coming out. You know, there are some here in the U.S., obviously recently that we discussed. And now there’s more on talking about fishing in the UK.

So obviously, you know, someone’s going to get pushed out a little bit, whether it’s just not unfettered access to any fishery they want. But anyway, this article from The Guardian, just the headline is UK is sacrificing fishing sector for offshore wind.

Wind farms says the fishing industry. So, Rosemary, I mean, how do you what’s your take on on the PR here and this sort of conflict between fishermen and their livelihoods and the rapidly encroaching wind offshore?

Yeah, well, I think that’s a situation that still remains to be seen how much of a problem this is. You know, at the moment, people are really worried that there might be a problem. There aren’t so many offshore wind farms currently that it’s already causing a problem to anyone’s livelihood.

And I know that in the UK, they are trying at least to have fishing able to happen quite close to, you know, within wind farms and quite close to some of the individual turbines. More more so compared to other countries, like maybe Germany is a bit more risk averse and doesn’t want anyone going anywhere near these turbines

. So I think we do need to wait and see how much of a problem it’s going to be. But I mean, I’m definitely sympathetic to anybody who’s industry is potentially going to go away. It’s similar issues, I guess, with coal mining or any of those fossil fossil fuel jobs.

I do think that fishing is an industry that’s going to be changing anyway. You know, it’s been it’s been done quite unsustainably over the last hundred or maybe more years. So on the one hand, I kind of think you say fish are actually protected in some ways by the structures being put there and preventing, you know, large

predators and and fishing boats from going, you know, right up to them. So I think that, you know, there could be some benefits for fish. There’ll be some changes to fishing. But I don’t know yet how extreme that will be.

And I think, yeah, we’re just going to have to see how it plays out to say how we need to regulate this. And I definitely wouldn’t want to say the whole fishing industry collapse. But I also think that that’s extremely unlikely.

It will. It will be to that extent.

Well, and it almost seems like, you know, the wind turbines are part of that ecosystem. Like, you know, a little fish swims for cover, you know, under a rock or under some coral where a big predator can’t get them.

It almost seems like the wind turbines themselves do that same thing, like the big predatory boat now can’t swoop in and and get the helpless little fish. Like you said, maybe this is off off air that, you know, it’s not clear whether or not these fish will stay in that same spot where they can’t be accessed or

if they’ll just move and they’ll still be you’ll still be able to fish to an extent and they won’t lose their livelihood. Like you said, there’s still just a not a not a lot of clarity, I think, on the issue and what the habits of Mother Nature are going to be, because it always seems to surprise us

. I mean, there’s so much out there with invasive species where scientists are like, oh, this new species has invaded this river, it’s game over. And then five, 10 years, something happens that we could have never predicted. I mean, Alan, do you do you feel like we really know where this is going to end or is this just

sort of a sort of just a panic switch kind of thing at the moment? Well, it’s

too early to tell. And I think, Dan, I heard some really interesting things in the wind turbine sector this week on another podcast talking about wind turbines in 2050. And I thought that is the most ridiculous damn thing I’ve heard this week.

And I’ve heard a lot of ridiculous things this week. But any prediction that’s going to happen 30 years out is nuts in a wind turbine. You just can’t you can’t tell.

I will be a cyborg. This is not my prediction. Yeah, I’ll be in a car accident in 20 years or 21. I’ll be in a car accident in 2042 and. I will return as a cyborg. So look forward to that.

That’s just it, like how do how do we know what’s going to happen with fishing and when we haven’t really started with it. And obviously, we’re not going to be putting wind turbines out in the ocean so fast that we can’t monitor it.

Come on. There’s going to be feedback loops here and all this stuff, and we’re going to be able to adapt. And, you know, just like with the bird losses and particularly United States of birds running near wind turbines and getting hurt, that there’s going to be a lot of environmental oversight in this in the United States are

just not going to let this get out of hand and end. The fishing groups have large sway, particularly in Massachusetts and the other coastal communities. So it’s not going to get out of hand before there’s a feedback loop.

And and as we said before, this is really not a slippery slope here. Let’s just take one day at a time and and just be careful.

All right. So moving on, Vestas has a, you know, investment arm of their company, just like all these other big companies do, to help push, you know, innovation along, especially if you could help them. So Vestas Ventures was created in November of twenty twenty.

And one of the new companies they’re investing in is Snel Access Systems, which is a I guess subsidiary is the right word of Stena. And this is an interesting new Krein technology. It’s basically a climbing crane. So have you seen these self-loading cranes all over cities, all over the world, where they have this sort of lattice work

and they actually build themselves up? They call it climbing by inserting one segment that the crane jacks itself up and starts another segment until it gets to the height that it needs to be. So it looks like this system is called the salamander.

Quick lift essentially sort of attaches itself to the base of a wind turbine tower, and then it will climb build itself higher and higher and then sort of shimmy itself up for stability. And this is something Vestas is pretty excited about in they’re in their press release.

So, Rosemary, obviously with your work on Winter and Blades with Elm, it seems like maybe crane technology, something that’s lagged behind. I mean, how do you feel like is this something that the industry’s needed?

Yeah, I think that they do need new solutions. And actually, it’s been interesting coming back to Australia. People are talking about cranes all the time here in a way that they weren’t in Europe. There’s maybe not as many cranes of the right size as you would need to install a wind farm or to, you know, pull a

gearbox out of a NSSL. So I think that it yeah, technology development within cranes is really good. I’ve seen a few interesting things over the years, interesting ideas either to do with cranes or ways that you don’t need to have such a large crane, you know, like building towers from the bottom up, which I don’t.

It feels a little bit like this in that. Yeah, it’s kind of holding itself up as it as it goes. So it looks interesting to me. I haven’t seen enough detail on the design. And yeah, it would be so cool to see a video of it actually operating.

So I can’t really comment on how likely this particular technology is to, you know, really shake things up. But it would be really good to have a crane or more cranes for a start and ones that are easier to get to remote sites that I mean, that would be really fantastic to see a big development there.

So I think it’s definitely got potential.

Rosemary, do you see the uniqueness of the Vestas Ventures group in that they’re actually creating a pocket of money set aside to pocket of money to invest in newer companies, newer technologies? That seems different than what I have seen from the wind turbine industry generally.

Like GE hasn’t really done that sort of thing. They’ve let the U.S. government sort of take that role. And in Europe, it seems a little odd that that’s the way it’s set up. Boeing just recently divested of a group just like that.

There was an investment in new technology and they offloaded that because it couldn’t manage it. But is that the future? Is investors just realizing that there’s so much technology out there that they can’t really develop at all in house and that God is going to have to buy it at some point or pour money into it so

they don’t, as a company, have to to develop all the infrastructure for it.

Yeah, I’m not sure it seems it’s really not my area, the you know, the structure of companies, but it does seem like a little bit cyclical, you know, that people buy up a lot of technology companies and then they sell a bunch of technology companies and it kind of goes in and out of favor, whether that’s the

right way to do it. A company like GE is a good contrast or probably Siemens as well, where they you have these huge conglomerates. They’ve got they’ve got their fingers in many pies throughout the group. So maybe they’re less into.

Instead, in bringing on more yeah, more technologies, more companies in totally different areas, because they’ve already got so much Covid within, you know, within. It’s so broad that there’s a lot of expertize on, you know, I don’t know if I’ve got any Cryan expertize, but within their power industry or, you know, anything else, they might already have

a technology that they can bring in and use, and that would be their preference. Yeah. So I don’t know if if that’s the smartest investment thing or if they would rather do partnerships. That’s what I’ve been more involved in is, you know, you you stay separate, but you work together closely on something you intend intend to maintain

that, you know, customer supplier relationship, but just work closely on the development so that it works out in the way that, you know. So it’s so it’s a customer.

Well, so let’s let’s walk down this pathway just for a quick moment, because I want to hear your thoughts about this. So let’s just in theory say there’s a company named Ping and there was a CEO named Matt that ran Ping.

And they’ve got this really great sensor device. They’re putting on a lot of wind turbines right now. And they have developed all the technology, which seems like every wind turbine should have something like that. If you’re Vestas or if you’re GE, doesn’t it doesn’t that make sense to like say, hey, Matt, have a nice time in Tahiti

? Here’s here’s a pile of cash and we love your love your product. And and we want to make it into we want to just explode it, which is something that Matt may not be able to do in the middle of Covid on top of it.

Doesn’t that make a lot more sense than just ignoring that technology? Because that seems like where the industry’s headed. A lot of times, like there’s some really great robotic technology out there. There’s a really great sensor technology. All these smaller companies are starting to congregate around the wind industry.

But the wind OEMs seem to, for the most part, just to ignore it and miss the opportunities when they could buy a ping like company. Let’s just throw it out for 50 million bucks that five years now they’re going to buy for 250 million bucks.

So it doesn’t. When does wind realize that it’s a technology? When is it when does it get to that point? Is it soon?

Well, I think I think I agree with you that ping is is a cool technology. And I’m surprised that more of the OEMs aren’t really interested in it, because I know that if you are developing a technology outside of the industry, it’s really hard to get the access that you need to test it and develop quickly.

So I, I would love to see more partnerships there, but I can also talk from the other point of view of working at a major OEM with people constantly. You know, every week, several people telling me, hey, I’ve got this idea that’s going to revolutionize everything.

That technology might be. And it’s very hard to tell how developed technology is from somebody’s little PowerPoint presentation that they send you through. You know, it could just be a sketch and it could be something that’s ready. But when I was in a role like that, I had way too many of these things, like just bombarding me

, you know, every week if I didn’t screen for them. Yeah. And the vast majority of them will never go anywhere. So you do start to see patterns of the same type of thing. Like when I was working with deicing systems, you know, there’s no shortage of people that have what they say is an ice phobic coating.

So you just paint a applied in this stuff. The ice will never stick to to it. And they’re like, why isn’t anybody watching everyone jumping all over themselves to to buy this technology from me? It will solve all your problems.

And from my point of view is I have no belief that, you know, technology is going to work, not because I know anything about you or how good your technology is, but simply because I’ve seen 20 other people who have made similar claims.

Of course, we all want, you know, a patent that you can put on a blade. That means you don’t need to install an expensive heating system. That’s not that’s not in doubt. But I just didn’t have the time to go through every single innovation when very quickly I became totally cynical about any of them ever working.

So because, you know, I just seen so many that that did did not live up to what they they said. So I suspect that that’s the main thing.

Yeah. Is there a is there a difference here? Let me let me step to the different, because I want it. This is a fascinating place for me because we’re in that mode. Right. Make my little companies in that mode.

So the issue is there’s a different spin. The idea is that I get and so people submit ideas to me like, hey, I know how to maximize the the amount of wind and an acre, you know, like great culture.

I can help you, but there’s a lot more companies coming in that five year 10 mark, which is that sweet spot and wind where you’ve been around long enough that people know who you are and they can go back and look at the data and see, yeah, OK, this is real.

This is not real from a. Did you ever get that type of feedback? If you’re sitting at Lim working away on dissin blades, did you ever have somebody come to you like we’ve been doing this for five years and it works.

Here’s the data.

Boom. Yeah. And those are the ones that I would pay serious attention to if, you know, like I would never really give much attention to an idea unless it was an idea that I had never had before. Clearly, you know, it had potential, which never happened, actually.

So really, it would. Yeah. It’s why things have been thought of this. There’s at least tens of thousands of of engineers working for decades in the wind industry. You know, a lot of people think that, you know, like if you ask something, what is wind turbine have three blades.

I think like three comments on that on YouTube. And most people think it’s because engineers are so close minded and never think to do anything other than what everybody else has been doing. But that’s that’s not the kind of person that becomes an engineer.

The kind of person that becomes an engineer is because they’re always trying to make things better and think, oh, what about if we did it like this, like this? And a lot of times the reason why we haven’t adopted a technology that sounds like a good idea is simply because of the like the inertia in the whole

manufacturing system. You wouldn’t even I think you could easily make a two bladed wind turbine that was just as good as a three bladed one. But it requires changing so much, making so many problems that you need to fix.

And it would end up being about as good as a three bladed one. Why would you bother? I think that is that’s probably the main reason why any individual great idea hasn’t been implemented, because I don’t see a big enough benefit to warrant all the pain.

But yeah, when it comes to technologies like Ping or like this crane, you know, that’s different because it’s solving a real problem that people acknowledge is a problem and don’t have a solution for yet. And they’ve demonstrated that it works beyond an idea.

So I guess that would be my advice for anyone with a great idea for wind industry or probably any other industry, is you need to show why, why you’re solving a real problem and demonstrate that your solution is actually going to, you know, going to work, going to be manufacturable, going to be scalable, going to be cost

effective. That’s the thing that most people fail on, especially if you’re bringing solutions from the arrow industry over to the wind industry. That’s all that’s always the the number one hurdle. Yeah. So I, I think it’s really tricky because there will be real good ideas out there that get lost in this kind of cynical screening of.

I’m not interested because you haven’t proven it, because how can you prove it if you can’t get in a wind turbine? So. Right. Yeah, I think, you know, you get really creative and do as much as you can on your own.

And then I do I would like to see more partnerships with with the manufacturers. And I’ve been surprised sometimes when I work with technologies that I think are great and demonstrated. I’ve been surprised how hard it is to get it in an actual wind turbine.

There’s a lot of people involved, you know, from the manufacturing then, you know, so if it’s applied technology, you have to deal with a blade manufacturer, the turbine manufacturer, then with a customer as well, and the operator. And everyone has to be on board for the extra effort versus the benefit for them.

You know, it’s not enough that you’re going to set up the manufacturer some pain or some money if it’s the operator that has to do all the extra work, you know, so. Right. Right.

Well, that that is a good segway into the thermoplastic blades. So I think this is a really interesting technology that’s been going on the last couple of years, where there’s been some releases in the last week or so from us government agencies talking about making thermoplastic blades and incorporating that him into wind turbine designs.

And my first question about that is, like you were saying, why is it a 10x multiplier? Is it ten times cost savings or manufacturing timesaving? Is is it that much of a doubt on thermoplastic in terms of new technology that it would be worth implementing?

What is the rationale for making some of these changes and. What impediments like you got to put something in the blade to heat it so you can thermoplastic build a blade? Are those impediments so large that doesn’t even make sense to go down the pathway?

Yeah, actually, when you mentioned you wanted to talk about this, like this topic this week, I remembered a thermoplastic blade design that I cited in my pitch to hit ISS. I actually went back and have a look at look at that, which is pretty funny.

I found the papers from 2011, and that was a really interesting design just through the structural design method that they used. And in that paper, they also saw it, thermoplastic blade design efforts going back as far as 1996.

So it’s not new that we wanted to make a thermoplastic blade. And the benefits and the number one benefit in my mind is the recyclability. And it should also make repairs and stuff easier. The manufacturing stuff, they always every article about it says how easy it will be to manufacture.

But I think that there’s as many problems as benefits in the manufacturing. The real thing that’s kept us from doing it is the structural properties. Most of them of plastics are not nearly as stiff as a thermostat, Thammasat resin.

So that’s why we haven’t seen them up until now. And I guess this new they they’ve got a specific GUGINO Not every thermostat is as strong and stiff as another, and every thermoplastic is the same. It’s not like there’s two separate separate groups.

There is overlap. And presumably they have finally, after, you know, lots of tweaking, found a thermoplastic that is stiffer than than the older older ones, because I can’t see how they could make a decent blit design until that’s the case.

Yeah, right.

So the technology is from Arkema and it the the the product is called Ileum, and it’s a two part mix. And it it would be basically using the same processes we use for thermal sets today, where we’re we lay up all the fiber for the blade and we inject the resin polyester or epoxy resin into the tool

and let it kick off and cure. In this particular case, instead of making a thermal set, which is a chemical crosslinking, that happens in like an epoxy where it just becomes toughened because of the links that are there.

This are kema project. And the pathway they’re going down is it makes a plastic Sheenjek these two pieces and makes a basically an may methyl metallic acrylic plastic blade and the May adhesives are relatively tough or use them a lot of aerospace applications because they’re tough.

They are. So the technology is interesting, but like you were saying, is it allows you to then heat weld or fusion. Well, pit bits together instead of epoxy two parts together. You could actually fuze and. Well, that’ll make into one continuous piece.

But is that the follow on parts in the factory? It’s pretty easy because it controlled. But what happens out in the field where I got to replace part of a blade is that there’s everything change, all the training change for all the technicians.

Does all the tooling change because they’ve got to get this part hot to bond new materials onto it. What what’s stopping this technology? Because what we’re seeing on, at least in the United States, is a big push for the recyclability, which is, in our case, 20 odd years down the line.

And America is not good at looking 20 years down the line. Does that 20 year. End of life benefit, overcome all the things that happened for the 20 years of service life. How does that how do you weigh those things?

Yeah, I think it will be it will be a huge challenge before we see a whole blade made out of stem plastic, because you’re going to have to. Well, the whole structure will need to be redesigned. And then, you know, you have all the problems of it is the brand new product that hasn’t had that evolution that

, you know, the epoxy or whatever other material manufacturers are using. You know, they’ve got a long history. They know exactly how they lost over time. And we don’t we don’t know that he’s only so far you can get with coupon tests and subcomponent tests to really figure out the fine details of how the structure is going to

behave over 20 or 30 years. But I think there’s a lot of potential and it should eventually make all these things easier, because you can know because you can well, you can you can melt a thermoplastic and you can’t melt a Thammasat.

That’s that’s the big difference. And the way that I usually describe it is that Therma Thammasat is it sets like when you fry an egg, you know, you can’t you can’t melt an egg after you’ve tried it because you.

The problem is the long chains, they cross lengths and they’re just like that. They join together now. And that’s that’s you can only burnat you can’t you can’t melt it. But I think the plastic is more like, you know, when you cook spaghetti and then you let it set, you know, it’ll it’ll be one solid thing.

But all the individual strands of spaghetti are still individual strands. And if you were to, you know, put that in BORTAC and you could separate the the strands out so that that should be really, really good for repairs because you’d be able to, you know, melt the bond line, take whatever faulty component, just slop it back in

with a brand new one and have it be exactly the same as it was. So it should be better, but it’s totally new. It’s brand new. It’s not we’re not saying full thermoplastic blades. Even if the material properties are exactly the same, it’s going to be a decade at least before that’s maybe I shouldn’t make such bold

predictions, but I don’t think we’ll see a full thermoplastic blade within a decade. But I do think we’ll say is small parts of the blades, that inmate and thermoplastic. So maybe we’ll say just the tip of the blade made with anaplastic, just the leading edge, just the web being some something, because you can still glue them.

You don’t have to weld them. Right. True. So this article was mostly about that welding process and leaving the conductive strip in there and the lightning implications, which is a whole other huge topic. And you want to talk about.

Yeah, well, I think we’re going to say that for next week, but I do, because I really want to delve into that because of the Liten laboratory that’s near our facility ran those tests. And it was interesting to hear their thoughts on it.

But in terms of just the technology in general and is one of the one of the pieces that was promoted when I was doing research on this was how fast that thermoplastic actually sets up. So it sets up in a matter of, say, an hour versus a thermal set, which can take up to 24 hours to fully

cure. Now, I learned recently that when Henry Ford was making the model Ts or model is wherever the car was, is that they painted them all black and used, could get in any color you wanted. It just has to be black.

And the reason they chose black, because the paint dried faster in black than other colors did. So it actually increased the production. And like, if you can bang out a couple more cars an hour, that means more revenue for the company.

But as winters, are we up to that kind of speed where we need to put a part in a mold and bang it out in an hour? Or are we ever does that even make any sense as as a multiplier effect for a thermoplastic?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, I am I was a bit surprised when I saw that that was one of the main benefits that they saw in this. And the article I read, it also didn’t fully understand the existing technology because it said that, you know, you’ll get away from needing to heat them all to cure the resins and

you don’t that not everything needs to be hated to cure. I mean, everybody’s use a two part epoxy from the hardware store, right. Like you don’t. That’s not complicated. But three or four is hugely important in a wind turbine factory because, you know, you’ve got the molds, they’re taking up space.

And yeah, while a blight is sitting in the mold, you can’t start the next one. Right. So anything that you can do to to speed up the time between, you know, starting to use the mold and when the bike can be taken out of it, that makes a big difference if you can.

And curing time is a big, big, big, big consideration as well. So, yeah, definitely that’s that’s an issue people want to solve.

So maybe maybe that just that that part alone is being able to maybe build less tooling. Maybe use less force base and produce the same number or even greater quantities of blades, maybe the the impetus to really take it on rather than the recycling bit, which is 20 years down the line.

That’s that’s a really interesting thought.

They also say that he could, you know, build them up from Modula pieces so you wouldn’t maybe not even need to use a full length mold in a factory. Maybe you would ship a care kit out to a wind farm and they would, you know, assemble it onsite.

So IKEA, you know, the gold standard of durability, if you want your

things to last 20 years. Yeah. IKEA call.

But point to that point taken. Yeah.

Yeah. It’s more about the idea. But, you know, I think that with plastics, it is what I think people have been thinking about it for what I say, 96 was the first one that I could find so a long time.

And it is one of those things that gets entities excited because it’s like, oh, it would remove this constraint or it would remove this constraint. And so it is kind of. Yeah, like really a really fun technology for engineering nerds to to think about.

Well, when you see an idea has such persistence, is that sort of lends some credence that like, hey, this is probably going to work at some point because, like I said, stuck around for 25 years and now it’s starting to become a little more feasible.

I mean, is that is that a sign that it has some viability or not? Maybe not so much.

I tend to think the opposite when I hear the same idea over and over and over again, I’m like, oh, God, that they think again. And I know it’s there’s always some reason I don’t think that about them, the plastics.

I think that it is inevitable that we eventually get to them. It’s been quite hard, probably harder than than people writing that 1996 paper imagined. But yeah, I think. Yeah.

Well, I think the trouble here. Here’s my two cents on that, because I think we aim too high with technology. And the Arkema website was really fascinating because it said that the probable uses for this great new material and it is I have to admit, it’s fantastic.

It’s really cool. Technology is wind turbine blades and airplane fuselages. And my first response is like there is no freakin way you would choose those as your initial products because the downside risk is so damn enormous. Why would you do that if an airplane falls out of the sky?

Your company is gone. Gone. And if a wind turbine blades start breaking, your company is going to be severely impacted financially. How about making something that is less critical out of the thermoplastic that that just gets the acceptance in the engineering community?

Right. If you meit’s little light airplanes out of the stuff and let the industry grow for five, 10 years, then there is a payday. And the same thing in wind if you’ve made smaller wind turbines with it. And so you’re making 500 kilowatt machines or something so that you’re downplaying the risk, but also demonstrating the technology, then

it gets a little easier to swallow when you’re ready to go prime time. But it seems like the marketing departments grab hold of these things and go, we’re going to launch a man into space, uses this new technology and all this engineers just go, there is no freaking way I’m ever listening to anything that’s coming out of

you, because that’s that’s not rational. Not that I don’t want to put a man on the moon. I do. But that’s not rational. We need to take a couple of slower steps at it. And this is where I think Rosemarie’s right.

Like you start seeing the technology over and over again because they’re shooting so high. Aim a little lower. Start making money so that it is going to stick around a little while and then start knocking on the doors of Airbus and Boeing and Siemens and Elm and then really go for it.

I think that that’s the better pathway that I have seen. And, you know, everybody has their own opinion about it. But that’s that’s what I’ve seen has worked well.

And the fellows from Orbital Composites, who we had on the show a couple of months ago, you know, their dream is to 3D print blades out of thermoplastic. And this is something we’ve discussed on the show, which is that everyone’s only thinking, you know, GE, Halyard, XYZ and Siemens, S.G., 14, seven, seven, dash nine.

You know, you know the these serial numbers. Yeah. But as we kind of chat through with them, the small one market might be a really good market for them to start. Where now you’re talking about a 15 meter blade or whatever size.

And then like you both said, that that could be a place where you prove that technology out and someone says, hey, these have done really well. You know, in this sector on people’s farms producing, you know, 40 kilowatts or whatever.

Maybe it’s as this is Vance to me, it’s time to give it a shot, a little bigger one, you know, and and the other thing they discussed was the the forgotten blade market. I mean, how many older models are not going to have an OEM manufacturing new blades for anymore?

I mean, Rosmarie, that’s going to be a big problem, isn’t it, that these some of these old two megawatt machines, no one really cares about them anymore because just replace them anyway, but. As far as some small townships and little little towns all over the world, that they want a new blade for their old turbines that, right

? Yeah, I think so. And maybe even especially for the even smaller ones. I have seen some. Yeah, some companies that that’s their that’s their little nations that they’re making blades for. I even I saw one an old elm when it wasn’t even Ellan when I was on Elm Glass, fiber optic fiber, whatever it was before that when

they were making furniture. I saw all these old drawings attached to a totally different manufacturer who have yet found this market of recreating these very old blades. Yeah. Like five meters long or less even. Yeah. So, I mean, it’s I think it says really small size, because when you get up into megawatts, then it’s much more just

like a cost benefit thing overall for a whole slate. And we’ll see some repowering. But in general, I think the whole wind turbine is going to be retired and replaced with something larger once the once that reaches the end of its life.

Well, hopefully it gets its foothold somewhere. And like Alan said, we’ll probably chat next week about some of the lightning applications and other things there, because that enters a whole new slew of potential issues, which is what we know about.

You know, these glass fiber blades might not apply to thermoplastic and the whole game might change as far as, like you said, a heating or lightning protection or any of these other peripheral systems. We might have to sort of start from the ground level as how to protect these blades or what protection they might need.

Hopefully it’s less, but we’re only going to figure that out from real world, real world testing. Right. So. Well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode of the uptime podcast. Thanks so much for listening again. Be sure to subscribe to uptime tech news.

You’ll find the links in the show notes no matter where you’re listening. Also, be sure to follow other guard Lightning Tech. You’ll find links there. Be sure to follow Rose-Marie Barnes’s awesome YouTube channel where she’s explaining tons of renewable energy topics.

Definitely check her out. You’ll find links to subscribe to her channel as well in the show notes. Thanks again for listening. And we’ll see you here next week on the uptime podcast. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades.

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