Can wind turbine blade anti-icing coatings help prevent downtime and power loss? Brian Huskinson, CEO of Elemental Coatings, says yes. In this episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, Brian explains how Elemental’s anti-ice coatings help increase the speed at which a blade can shed accumulated ice, where it will make sense for wind farm operators to apply it, expected durability, the underlying technology, safety and non-slip applications and more. Watch this episode on YouTube here.
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. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!Â
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Transcript – Brian Huskinson, CEO of Elemental Coatings on Wind Turbine Blade Anti-Icing Coatings
Welcome back i’m Allen Hall; I’m Dan Blewett and this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running all right welcome back to the uptime podcast i’m your co-host dan blewett and i am joined here by my other co-host or did you say other co-host your host Allen how do we do this Allen how are you good good interesting guest this week huh yeah so Brian Huskinson is here with us today he is the CEO of Elemental Coatings, a Houston based company and let me run down a little bit about about Brian’s background he’s uh an impressive guy um Harvard educated also has his Ph.d in Materials Science from Harvard where he did a lot of research on grid scale energy storage so at the very end of this podcast definitely stick around we talk about some of that and some of the research he’s done and talk a little bit about the the grid scale energy storage after college he went to work for McKinsey and company the legendary consulting firm worked for them for five years and today he is the CEO of Elemental Coatings uh which was founded back in 2018 and they’re really getting moving on this anti-icing coating that has applications in wind energy in aerospace i mean in slip and fall like all sorts of safety issues uh you know this coating can help because it helps ice uh shed quickly where it’ll fracture and sort of slide off and you can you know get rid of it and get on your way so alan what were some of your takeaways from our conversation with Brian well Brian’s company has very very interesting technology because of the way that they de-iced uh structures surfaces it’s not the typical uh sort of hydrophobic things you see at home depot it’s a lot more technology into it and it has a lot more applications so it can be used in aerospace it can be used in on wind turbines it can be used on homes uh so the the applications are are nearly endless but Brian’s company has really positioned themselves i i think uh to to be uh going into wind turbines and to apply the coating to a winter blade to help keep ice off the wind turbine blades would be huge particularly in the united states and the midwest of the united states where a lot of wind turbine blades don’t have ice de-icing technology this coating can be added secondarily on an existing blade and help keep the ice off the blades that’s huge yeah and obviously since the the texas power outage disaster back in uh i guess was it january now i’m losing track of time february february earl earlier this year in 2021 you know we we wanted to have some different experts with potentially different solutions to what might be done about this because it’s not clear uh you know we had la say yet to go from WICETEC out of finland and they supply blade heating technology right so that was one you know bona fide solution and then uh Brian with Elemental Coatings this is a solution that maybe makes sense for those where you know the expense of blade heating isn’t isn’t going to add up because it’s not going to be right for every and there might be potential where you have both or one that’s right complements the other so we wanted to have different experts with different solutions because this is a major you know a major event drawing wind energy and all the failings of energy in general in texas uh into the national spotlight so like what can be done about this and we know many in the wind industry are probably thinking or at the drawing board now saying what do we do so we’re not on the hook for something like this in the future right or what can we try this summer to put on to get to the next winter yeah this this 2020 2021 the summer of 2021 is going to be a lot of experiments and rightly so so we need to be trying new things and making the wind turbines operate better and that’s great we should be doing that yeah so without further ado we’re gonna jump to our conversation with Brian Huskinson, CEO of Elemental Coatings
so Brian thanks for coming on the show really appreciate you uh coming here to chat with us about uh about your new your new venture here elemental coding so how are things out there in uh in Houston with you doing well glad to be on the show thanks for having me yeah so obviously we heard about your company um scouring the globe for well the digital globe i should say trying to figure out what’s happened in texas right it was a huge uh huge storm huge thing in the news cycle obviously a tragedy lives lost and i mean just such a huge economic impact on texas as well and in addition to having you know a company on the show uh that supplies blade heating for wind turbines you know we found you guys and your solution elemental coatings you know your coatings help ice shed off of all sorts of services faster so when you start to really think about a place like texas where maybe climate wise this is not a slam dunk to put you know blade heaters when it’s going to be roasting people most of the year right you think of texas you think of how hot it is how humid it is right mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds right um but you know your coating might make a lot of sense for a lot of applications in the win in the wind industry so can you talk to us a little bit about the technology behind your coatings and what your company does sure um so you know put simply our coating it functions like a a normal paint so you can you know you can spray it on you can brush it on you can roll it on it it comes in cans so you wouldn’t be able to tell it apart just sort of looking at it but it has this really interesting fascinating extra property of basically making it hard for ice to stick to surfaces um and so we’ve you know we we took a technology that was actually invented at the at the university of houston by our our cto who’s a faculty member at U of H who’s in mechanical engineering and does all sorts of stuff around around coatings and you know novel materials and what we’re doing is is taking that uh technology and and turning it into a product um we’ve primarily been focused on on aerospace um for a lot of reasons you know icing is a big problem in aerospace there’s actually a lot of parallels between between aerospace and and wind which we can get into but um we’ve done a lot of development there and then we’re focused on a you know a number of other uh problems so think um you know when you when you talk about autonomous vehicles right they rely on sensors and cameras that if they get iced up uh is a real problem um and so there’s lots of issues like that that come up and then as you mentioned yeah here here in in texas and you know across the world there are icing issues specific to wind that that need to be dealt with um you know i think with our coding um you know in many in in many ways it will work to complement existing de-icing or anti-icing technologies and then in other uh situations i think it’ll make sense to just use a coding on a standalone basis and so really there’s a you know we can get into the details there but that’s a quick rundown of the coding and the company more broadly gotcha and and of course in in the texas incident which we’ll cover more as we get uh you know deeper into the show there’s also not just the wind turbines themselves right so we know when there’s ice on the wind turbine especially on the leading edge changes the aerodynamics of the blade then the blade might hit stall speed and stop but there was also a lot of problems with just electrical cabinets being iced pipes valves where they just we couldn’t turn this to get you know that open and there’s a lot of uh you know just like secondary you know not necessarily up on the spinning windmill itself but lots of other applications and is that right that this is maybe something that can be used in lots of different places where then just a quick like hammer and like everything falls off for uh for a technician trying to access whether it’s a you know a storage facility or a wind turbine or you know a power plant yeah that’s that’s exactly right so i mean you can think of putting the coating down on on any type of surface that you could paint um and it’ll it’ll basically reduce the the strength uh with which the ice adheres to a surface um if i i won’t get into the physics behind it but although happy to do so if if you want to go down that path but really what our coding does is it it makes ice crack um with less energy than it otherwise would require um as you know any anything whether it’s concrete or ice once it cracks it loses its mechanical integrity um and then it just sort of you know it’ll slough away off off the surface and basically what our what our coating does is effectively reduce the the energy required to to cause cracks in the ice so Allen i’m gonna throw this up to you so obviously you mentioned aerospace as being one of the big industries alan is it in the aerospace industry is it easy to just get a coating approved i mean can you paint a plane with whatever you want i mean what can you take us through that process process a little bit alan because we’ve talked about certification a lot and airworthiness and where do what what is brian and his company what are they gonna have to go through to try to get something like this implemented on aircraft well aerospace is a highly regulated industry and and there’s essentially a set of rules which are laws in the united states that an aircraft has to show a certain performance so flying into known icing conditions is a certification requirement and be able to demonstrate you can have the handling characteristics that you need to fly the aircraft safely and that ice doesn’t accumulate to the point that you can stall the aircraft and get into a dangerous situation so there’s a there’s a lot of work done on aircraft in terms of uh the safety and the design to make sure that ice doesn’t accumulate to a point that creates an issue coatings have been a part of um some aircraft programs in the last 20 odd years i’ve seen a number of them and the issue with coatings is if you’re going to rely upon it solely as a as a de-icing mechanism it gets hard to to support in a sense of how do i know when to replace it how do i know to inspect it those kind of things come up i’ve seen coatings used as it says the secondary uh effort so there’s a primary de-icing system and then and just to help the the ic system along coatings can be used and that makes a lot of sense actually you see that quite often uh which then and to sort of compare the twos from the aerospace side to the wind turbine side wind turbines aren’t regulated like that right so interims don’t necessarily have an icing anti-icing requirement and as we saw down in texas where the economics may not make sense straight up when you’re buying a wind turbine you may not choose to have anti-icing equipment on and that’s where the the problem comes in on the winter mission is that a lot of wind turbines around the midwest particularly where it’s warmer so even in kansas oklahoma texas anywhere it’s normally warm they don’t tend to have de-icing equipment and if you’re going to modify a wind turbine at this point you’re in trouble because it’s going to take a lot of expense and this is where Brian’s company comes into play is with there’s just a need for de-icing anti-icing technology to be applied to a blade secondarily uh even if it’s done even on some of the wind turbines to keep the wind turbines operational so this is where the technology i think is really applicable because it can be implemented so quickly it makes a lot of sense so Brian you said you guys were starting off you’re a little bit farther along in aerospace and and that’s probably going to be a tougher road for you to either get adopted because you have more like certification hurdles to jump over right um but it seems like at least to me that if you guys can prove hey we’re on airplanes or aerospace is really interested in this that seems like great social proof for it to be like a no-brainer solution for other industries i mean is that is that right i mean how are you guys doing with all that yeah that’s that’s certainly fair um when you look at the the specs required to to get a pain or a coating onto a plane um they’re about as stringent as harsh as severe as testing in any industry right which makes sense because it’s uh you know the the costs of a mistake are so severe um so it’s a you know it’s you know people’s lives are at risk so it’s it’s different than than many many industries where if you know if a wind turbine isn’t producing power it’s unfortunate it’s economically bad but it doesn’t quite have the same you know ramifications from you know to put it lightly yeah yeah exactly so um so yeah so the requirements there are very high um you know obvious it’s one of those industries once you’re in uh you’re in in good shape um but but getting in is is a real challenge and um you know i i so far we’ve taken real um you know good steps in terms of getting in we have some you know really promising active partnerships going um we’ve we’re well on our way to hitting um one of the the kind of primary military specifications for a top coat so basically the the main dod specification for for aircraft top coats so we’re we’re almost through um that process which which is great so we’ve passed like rain erosion tests and things like that which are you know for context an aerospace rain erosion test is basically you you spin a blade really fast that’s coated and then see how how much the the paint gets torn up um every paint will eventually fail um at some point it actually it ruins the metal underlying so they run everything to failure but for for the tests we were running they were at you know 385 miles an hour so actually not that fast by aerospace standards sort of middling um but incredibly fast by wind energy stages so if we if we can pass a test you know there then that’s that’s very promising for uh for for wind applications yeah and that’s a great segue because so alan let me throw this to you because you’ve done tons and tons of rain erosion testing on weatherguard strike tape which is lightning protection for wind turbines because they’ve obviously got to hold up in those crazy conditions right and so brian we’ve talked about a little bit a little bit about this prior how is your coating going to handle leading edge erosion because that’s like one of the biggest things in the wind industry everyone’s talking about leading-edge erosion it’s become a huge problem there’s all these different retrofits that solve it and so if a company is going to go fix leading-edge damage they could easily you know hey bring our coating you do a top coat when you’re done um how well is yours how well are you hoping that yours will perform on the on on the leading edges of wind turbines yeah great great question it’s a uh it’s a huge problem um and and something that uh you know we’re hoping to uh help address i think out of the gate here um our goal is to have our coatings be as durable as the existing coatings so basically one we don’t we don’t want to try and solve necessarily solve two problems at once the durability issue and the ice adhesion issue right we need to at least get one of them done well um and then we can kind of you know build off of that and so our goal is to have a high functioning ice shedding coating that said it has to be durable enough such that you know it’s it’s practical and so so our our kind of driving motivation there is let’s have an ice shedding coating that’s shedding up to standards that are acceptable um while at the same time providing durability that’s at or near the existing coatings um so certainly at this point we’re not trying to claim that we can you know simultaneously solve erosion and ice shedding issues that would be uh that would be amazing i mean i would love if you get a gold medal yeah you’d be the guy you know maybe maybe at some point down the road but yeah really what we’re aiming for right now is to uh to match existing coatings um one one thing we do have in the pipeline we actually have some some government funding around rotor protection tapes for helicopters so helicopter rotors probably experience the most severe conditions of any certainly anything we’ve discussed so far i mean probably only short of like like rocket ships um so they’re very very harsh conditions that that rotor blades are exposed to and they use rotor protection tapes there’s actually similar ones that are in use and um not really widespread but in in wind energy and we’re we’re actually working on some these are still early stage prototypes but um making some tapes that also lend some uh some anti-icing behavior uh to the to the erosion tapes and so that’s a that’s an angle we’re pursuing as well um again that’s that’s really we we’ve just started that in in 2021 so it’s it’s very fresh but uh you know we’re optimistic that there there could be something there gotcha so let’s get to so you just started to use that word shedding so i want to get into some of a little bit of the physics and and explain what that means because i think and this is i mean when wind turbines fail i like i crack a smile because it’s one of those like cool guy things where you’re like like whoa like there’s some crazy like youtube winter like they’re spectacular because they’re way up in the air they’re super powerful right so if anything goes wrong a lot goes wrong and so when you think of like some of these wind turbines collecting ice that could be super dangerous if they’re just start to get going and then like a thousand pounds of ice just gets hooked off right so can you talk about shedding because you know we’ve talked about this that [ __ ] you want these lots of little shedding events rather than that big shocking a tractor trailers a little load full of ice into someone’s backyard in the midwest so tell us about shedding maybe maybe first it’s important to kind of understand like why is ice a problem on the on the blades to begin with right so you you mentioned one of the problems right ice can build up and it can throw a chunk of of the ice which is a big safety issue right and so even if people are working on other turbines next to you know it’s just it’s not safe to be around where where chunks of ice could get thrown off a blade going you know 200 miles an hour so so that’s one thing the other is is they lose power right because the aerodynamics are compromised so so they’re not as efficient um and then uh you know the other is that you get imbalances on the turbine blades because the ice doesn’t build up evenly and so you get all these vibrations and uneven wear and tear and so that increases the you know likelihood of something going wrong wrong and overall maintenance costs so so that’s why ice is a is a problem the ways to deal with it are either to try and prevent the ice entirely or to make the ice come off in small chunks and very predictably to the point where it’s it doesn’t cause any issues um most of and in fact a lot of aerospace especially with small planes not as much with with commercial jets but they are they really what they go for is predictable ice shedding and they know they’re going to have some amount of ice buildup and it’s just it just getting it to the point where it’s not so severe that it’s a problem so either of those you either kind of prevent it in the first place or if it is going to come off you want to make sure it’s happening predictably continuously and in as small of chunks as possible basically and either approach can work where you know for our coatings we’re really in the second we don’t prevent ice buildup altogether um we can talk about how you do that but our coatings don’t do that we try and get regular predictable small pieces of ice coming off of the off of the blades so if say for example like three inches just hypothetically three inches of ice on the leading edge causes the blade to stall air dynamically if you just you know coating that sheds the ice every one inch so you never get to that three inch threshold then you’re essentially in good shape is that right exactly so you can imagine it like uh so a piece of ice will stick to a surface with some amount of force right and then the blade is spinning and at some point that piece of ice gets heavy enough to where that force that like centrifugal force throwing it overcomes the force that is adhering the ice to the surface right and so that’s when you get a shedding event because our coating lowers the energy by which the ice is adhered to the surface it means that smaller chunks are sort of by definition going to come off right because the the balance between those two forces just occurs at a at a smaller mass and so that’s yeah that’s that’s really what’s what’s happening and would it also so obviously as the temperature gets closer to not being in the freezing temperatures anymore so that you know gets 25 degrees 29 30 31 32. like is this is it gonna whatever that temperature point is where a little bit of it starts to melt and now it’s like whoosh it’s all gone would that also sort of like creep up like maybe like completely de-ice itself earlier than a blade that’s not treated does temperature have any factor it does yes so there is um and this is actually true with um in any surface that exhibits hydrophobicity so basically any any surface where water beads up and doesn’t like to spread across the surface any surface that has hydrophobic properties will effectively reduce the freezing point um is a way to think about what you’re saying it’s it’s it’s not quite physically what’s happening but it’s it’s effectively what you’re saying is instead of water freezing at 32 really it actually has to get down to 29 or 20 you know whatever and that’s the effective freezing point on a particular surface um so that’s that’s one way to think about it it tends to be small like you’re not going to take it down into the you know low 20s or you know certainly below that but you can get a few degrees of uh of help there which which matters right because there’s a lot of near freezing conditions which also you know often happen to be the worst icing conditions because there’s tends to be more moisture in the air the warmer it is right so when you get super cold sometimes it’s just so dry that it doesn’t doesn’t matter it’s the same thing on an airplane right you don’t actually get a lot of ice build up at 40 000 feet because the air is super dry you get ice on the when you know when planes are sitting on the ground or when they’re going you know take off and landing and kind of when they’re through the cloud zones and so um yeah they’re you know solving those conditions kind of you know near freezing so call it you know 25 to 32 that’s actually a critical area because a lot of a lot of the problems are caused then
so i want to hear a little bit about your background a little bit more about it so obviously you have a you have a phd from harvard in material science if you google uh our guest here brian you’ll find lots of his research on the web a lot of in grid grid storage which we’ll we’ll talk about a little bit but then you also spent uh five years with mckinsey and company the you know legendary consulting firm afterward um what what helps you transition from the consulting world from the research world um into forming this business with the uh you know your your professor cto out of university of houston yeah you know i so phd and kind of postdoc and all that that’s a you know it’s a pure science uh you know what what you’re doing right you’re kind of you know you’re in the lab and and you’re deep in journal articles and and papers and when i was when i was you know finishing up grad school i i figured um you know i need to get some more experience on on the business side and so you know it ended up going to mckenzie and and kind of on the other end of the spectrum right really not not science at all kind of you know pure business thinking and you know how do you how do you look at you know all the all the various problems that that businesses face um now i feel like i’m in the in the middle and a nice happy uh medium you know running a company because we are you know we’re doing very technical sciency stuff so i still get to you know exercise uh that muscle at the same time obviously there’s there’s the business components of of you know trying to to get a company you know a young company up and running i mean we really you know kicked off in earnest in 2019 right so we’re still a very young company and so um i like you know from a career perspective i i’m you know very happy with with where i am and kind of you know how it’s developed um you know i think from you know with with mckenzie i mean yeah it’s a you know it it has it certainly has a reputation it’s a it’s a great place to work i think um you know from from my perspective the the clear thinking about business problems that that you just get get forced uh into doing there uh the first principles thinking um you know and then the communication style and all that you know i you know i hopefully will will stay with me the the rest of my life so i i think that’s i think that’s helped a lot with the uh transition and you know helping uh trying to get this business off the ground yeah and one of the the problems that al and i have spoken at length about in various episodes of the podcast is just getting through some of these big companies that are often slow moving when it comes to new technology and whether it’s a you know change of a blade shape because they have to change molds or just changing suppliers and in this example like changing what’s on the leading edge what’s protecting it what might be heating it what might be you know the top coat that they’re using i mean how are you approaching getting your small company seen by some of these these giants like ge siemens mesa vestas um it just shoot as many shots as possible that i i if there is a a secret uh formula please uh listeners coming on great podcast yes please uh please reach out to me afterwards no it’s just yeah you just have to put in you know when when you have opportunities to to talk about the product you you do it and and you reach out and and you know use linkedin use you know every every possible resource to uh to try and get in and it is a challenge i think there are ways to um you know make it easier like we have some active work going on with boeing um which is um you know i i think comfortably fits in the category of large company and obviously they have a lot of you know constraints around their suppliers um you know that was made much easier because we were able to bring some some government funding to you know some dod funding to the table um so it was you know we were actually able you know to bring something concrete uh to the table right away which makes a huge difference right so we didn’t have to just kind of hey just trust me we have a good product and you know put you know your resources against helping us to develop this product it was um you know so there are programs like that that are you know helpful and that we’ve tried to take advantage of but outside of that yeah you just kind of have to just put in put in the work yeah we had uh henrik lund nielsen on the show recently he’s the uh the founder and uh general manager of cobot which they’re a disruptive concrete pumping 3d printer which is like it was such a cool conversation talking to him but same thing i mean he talked about how they got uh with ge to build you know wind turbine bases and develop that technology and perry which is a big like concrete mold and form company over so when they had a couple of these really big companies then of course lafarge wholesome which is like the biggest concrete and like one of the materials companies in the world so those three were like we like what you’re doing we’re on board so now they have these big three you know giants coming with them and it seemed like that made all the difference where if those three are sort of validating what you’re doing and you guys are you know talking with boeing and all these other companies and the department of defense and it sounds like you you are sort of starting to rub shoulders with a lot of companies that like i said show some social proof and really legitimize that there’s there’s merit to what you’re doing right and and the thing that you know makes you you know get up every morning is you really only need one um good partnership like that good collaboration that will completely change the trajectory of a company of a business right and so uh that’s the part that kind of keeps you you know motivated and moving because yeah like you know the the prior guest you were describing right if you get a lafarge involved i mean yeah it can you know completely change the fate of the company yeah and they want to see they want to see you work because they’re you know in some ways they’re like putting their hand on your shoulder and saying you know we believe in this let’s put our research resources on it too and of course alan we’ve talked about that with some of these evt oil companies and i mean do you see that happening a lot alan like in aviation and in with smaller you know wind companies where you bring a important partner into the fold and that sort of helps that gets a legitimacy yeah it could really change the face of your company like with our company we we’ve been in this same mode uh for the last couple years as what brian has been where we’ve been introducing our products and and it’s gotten essentially great acceptance so we sort of jumped over that threshold and when you’re when you’re coming through that that gate so to speak of introducing your product to companies it’s it’s it is really hard to to try to find those those uh essentially people who want to be the early adopters right you need to find somebody who believes in is willing to try it because you believe in your in your product you know that the the physics work it’s just funny trying to find those right people who are willing to try it on a small scale and then expand upon it and i think that’s where this coding it can really make a huge difference particularly in the existing wind turbines that are operating today because it doesn’t have to live forever the coding just needs to provide a service and because of the robotics have changed so quickly the repair robotics have changed so quickly you could apply this coding every couple years and it would be fine i think that makes infinite sense because the cost to apply it the cost to maintain it are relatively low and it does a great service in terms of performance to a wind turbine blade and the same thing is going to exist actually on some of these uh electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft on the aircraft side because a lot of those aircraft are not designed to fly through icing conditions but if they ever to get into an icing condition you’d hopefully have some means of minimizing that impact on the aircraft from a safety perspective so it’s not something you wouldn’t necessarily certify an airplane with but it’s something that you would coat the aircraft with just in case because there’s a lot of times a lot of aircraft accidents happen because pilots accidentally fly through an icing condition and then it happens to crash the aircraft same thing in wind turbines if the wind turbine is not designed for it it happens to be in icing conditions like in texas everything just stops so that there is a a huge financial incentives to minimize those amount of downtime and brian have you seen because of the robotics and and the changes in the way we service wind turbines have you seen sort of more acceptance and and willing to try things like that because it doesn’t necessarily involve a human going on the blade and brushing your coating on is that opened up some doors for you because of those recent changes yeah i i think um you know obviously is the you know there there’s significant drivers to reduce the costs of of maintaining wind turbines right and so we can ride those tailwinds right so as as it gets cheaper to even just inspect or to actually you know reapply uh you know new layers of of a coating then we’re absolutely gonna gonna benefit from that right because it just drives down um overall you know fully loaded costs for for a product like ours so so absolutely yeah yeah and the the comparable product we’ve seen in terms of leading edge erosion and sort of icing has been like the polyurethane boots we’re talking about for the helicopters where uh there’s a couple manufacturers are going out and pre-molding polyurethane boots and then physically applying them on that’s that seems like a very laborious process versus applying a coating it those the cost of delta costs have got to be big you know if you’ve got a physical person versus a robot applying a spray-on coating which is what yours is that’s tremendous delta savings right certainly as far as like your proof of concept cycle i know you’ve talked about you know being a factory applied coating uh and also easily be a retrofit i mean it seems like it’d be pretty simple for someone that hey we’re already going up to repair blades you know what do you what do you guys want to code it with when farm operator and it’s like so i mean are you guys trying to get with technicians and say hey you know use us to when you’re sanding and grinding and repairing these leading edges try us out or is it are you more sort of starting at the factory level yeah um so we’re still um just broadly across wind you know very very early right we’re we’re doing kind of you know proof of concept testing with actually we’re we’re talking with a couple of the bigger oems right now um and we we’ve done some some testing on on some of the you know composite materials um i think yeah really what what we need and what we don’t have yet is just uh you know someone who’s willing to just put our coding on on a turbine and and monitor it and see what happens right i mean that’s that’s the the test we need to do and so we just need to find a willing partner to um to try it out because we have um you know we have you know pretty compelling you know evidence and data again in the context of aerospace but you know a lot of that is is is relevant um and it actually exceeds the the um you know specs you need for for wind so really i mean that’s that’s where we need to get is just you know let’s get let’s get some of it out there i mean they’re frankly they’re even some lower tech like um you know even around the wind turbines on you know stairs and ladders going up the turbine anywhere where you have ice buildup that causes safety issues even much simpler much lower tech applications um if someone was you know nervous to to you know be the guinea pig for putting it on the blade there are these other applications where you know we’d be more than willing to to try and you know let people get a get a feel for the product
well well as we kind of transition towards talking about the texas incident you know one thing that sticks out is that i’m sure obviously a lot of these energy companies took a lot of heat and there was huge financial loss and they’re all probably sitting around boardrooms saying hey what do we do so this doesn’t happen again like people there’s a lot of pressure on us what should we install so it looks like we’ve done our work to you know prevent this in the future and a lot of them probably looking at like hey blade heating might make sense even though it might be you know a lot higher cost and others like bleating’s not going to make sense financially so what’s next uh and it seems like you could definitely fit in that sort of like butter zone where it’s like hey we’re not really here but we also don’t want to do anything we don’t want to do nothing so we want to do something what’s what are the other solutions out there and it i mean it seems like that’s a pretty easy easy yes yeah i mean i i agree i think you know ultimately what what you know what wind farm operator is going to have to do is look at you know it’s a risk management question right so so what are what are the probability that our you know that our turbines are affected by icing events and then you know based on that what are we you know what do the economics then dictate that we’re able to spend to mitigate um and it may it may make sense that you know hey for a small percentage of turbines on the farm we we do active heating and coatings and we just make sure that those turbine you know some percentage are are going to operate even in harsh conditions or maybe it’s hey we don’t want to do heat you know heating’s you know an order of magnitude more expensive than a coating we just do a coating across all of them and then you know we you know we’ll end up in kind of a we’re better off than we were and it really you know the the decision there just depends on the i don’t think you can generalize right it’s going to be even micro environment specific farms you know what are the what are the you know climatic differences and and ultimately what makes sense as a solution there so i think we’re going to end up with a host of approaches um and um you know we’ll kind of see what works one of the real challenges in texas specifically the nice thing if you want to try something in finland or norway you’re gonna you’re gonna have you know snow and icing conditions six months out of the year so you find out really quick if what you did worked the issue in texas is you put something on and we may not have another severe icing event for a decade or so so you won’t actually know there’s not a lot of you don’t get those same repetitions and trial and error and understanding what really matters um and so that that’s going to be a challenge for for sure right because there’s gonna be you know ultimately to figure out what to do you’re gonna have to make a lot of assumptions on you know well how likely is this and it’s really hard to to know how how likely you know events like this are and you know how specific areas will will respond but um yeah i think from uh you know again the good news with a product like ours is because the capex requirements are are quite a bit lower the the risk just the from a purely financial perspective is is lower right because you just you’re not spending as much money to do it that’s it yeah that’s it and i think you’re right in terms of locations i’ve watched a number of your videos on your website and they seem to take place up in flint michigan which is particularly cold place in the united states and i i think you’re right is that as you get a little bit further north uh nebraska iowa wisconsin minnesota michigan ohio even there’s just the opportunities it’s just really sweet spot because the the temperatures are in that right range all the time you know plus 10 degrees fahrenheit to about 35 degrees fahrenheit which is where most of the winters are in those areas it’s a sweet prime spot for ice it just is right and that seems like a and because there’s thousands of turbines uh wind turbines in that in those areas it seems like it’s just uh a slam dunk and i think i think you’re right also in that even if blades have heating systems or de-icing systems on them the addition of a coating makes infinite sense for just because it helps reduce the stress on the blades and lifetime in wind turbines is is all the discussion as you well pointed out wind turbine companies and operators are very very knowledgeable about the expenses they incur and the downtimes they incur they know what those costs are and the delta cost of putting your coating on versus the loss of even a day of producing energy it just makes sense with coating on it just does well and even with like you know so let’s say hietsco came on from weistec and their blade heaters which are you know like a carbon fiber mat that’s you know epoxied onto the the surface they don’t go all the way to the very tip so there’s a little bit of the tip exposed because it doesn’t want to get too close to the lightning receptor and then a good portion of the root is also because they say it’s aerodynamically not important so even on an installation like that it might be well let’s let’s take the ice off the root because it does collect their i mean that could still a significant amount of weight even though it’s not aerodynamically important right and then the tip like hey we can’t cover the tip so maybe we throw some coating on the tip and that’s probably going to do the job so even even within that sector it might make just hey now we can have a more complete you know coverage of the blade yeah i think that’s right i think complementing existing systems is where the bulk of the you know the use cases will be there there will be some some kind of you know corner cases where it might make sense to only do one thing or only do another uh but generally you want to combine strategies uh you see similar things in aerospace right like you know commercial jets you get you get on a plane in in chicago and and you sit on on the tarmac they put de-icing fluid they actually do two separate de-icing uh fluids to get the plane ready to take off and then they you typically use bleed air so basically take hot air from from the engine and route that through the through the wings um and so they’re using multiple systems there and so you could you could pair a coating with that to just to complement existing systems obviously the holy grail is to eliminate the use of any of these active systems right if you just had a coating where you didn’t have to use any heat any anything mechanical no moving parts it’s just a a polymer sitting on a surface and it it makes ice you know not build up that is the that is the ultimate end goal and i think you know everybody could agree on that um the challenges in the science and the physics of making that happen are are are really really hard it’s a hard problem that’s why there isn’t uh that’s why it’s not solved yet right and that’s why we’re you know i think we’re you know we have you know the most compelling you know anti-icing coding in the world today but um you know it’s still one of those things where it’s a it’s a real challenge because you’re battling physics ultimately like there there are two things you have to have at a minimum for for ice to build up you need moisture and you need the temperature to be below the freezing point of of water right and if you have those two things at a minimum you have to have those and if you take one of those away you’re not going to get ice build up and so you know the bulk of of what what icing you know anti-icing systems do now is just use heat so you’re above the freezing point or use de-icing fluids which depress the freezing point which will mean you’re now above the freezing point and so there those are the games you play to to deal with ice with a passive coding you can’t really do either of those so you have to find all of these clever ways to get around the physics and you know that’s that’s what we’re doing that’s what you know a lot of kind of super hydrophobic coatings that you know people are developing it’s all kind of the same approach where you’re trying to get around the the fundamentals of what causes ice to form woodpeckers we could train woodpeckers to do what they do and chip it off when they stop so you know we’re getting there too brian what is that sort of fundamental physics of the coding obviously there’s a lot of hydrophobic water repellent coatings from teflon to means gun clothing scotch brite and those kind of things what about your coating is it a hydrophobic coating is it a coating that has just unique features to it on the topology that makes it uh want to shed ice what what is that key ingredient in ingredients that make sure you unique yeah you kind of hit on the two main classes of isophobic coatings that exist so some are hydrophobic or super hydrophobic some are have actually nano textured surfaces which um do a lot of really interesting things with with fluids on the top um ours doesn’t do either so our our coating would be classified as a hydrophobic coating but it’s not a super hydrophobic and in fact most paints are actually hydrophobic just to to varying degrees what what our coating does is so imagine a just a piece of ice is frozen on a surface and you push on it what happens is that the the force gets kind of spread across that piece of ice relatively uniformly it depends on the geometry and all that sort of stuff but it’ll get kind of spread across the ice what our coating does is it has unique mechanical properties and there’s actually at a minimum two two phases or components to our coating and we get these sharp interfaces within the coating this is all microscopic so you can’t see it we get these sharp interfaces within the coating itself where the mechanical properties are very very different and so you get these discontinuities and the mechanical properties of the coating and so what happens is when you push on a piece of ice forces get concentrated where those discontinuities are so instead of having say a pound of force kind of uniformly spread across a piece of ice that force gets concentrated into microscopic areas but way way beyond what you would expect for for a force that size so we call the concept stress localization instead of having a uniform spread of a force it gets concentrated into really small areas and at those areas at those interfaces we get we cross the fracture energy so basically you get micro fractures so you can’t see them um but they they little fractures start forming and then once once a little bit cracks it just sort of you know snowballs no pun no pun intended and and the whole thing just kind of loses mechanical integrity so does it does that make sense it does it mean it’s just like a painted glass essentially once you put that crack in it it’s going to continue to propagate you’re just doing that in a lot of different surfaces wow that’s that’s that’s fascinating because i i do think that lends itself uniquely um to you know things especially things that flex like wind turbines such do flex and wings too right so that just the flexing of a wing or or a turban blade would be enough to basically shed the ice on its own it wouldn’t take much more than that and as we know winter blades are constantly flexing as they go around the the circumference so that it might be like an automatic shedding process that’s that’s amazing that’s amazing and i i do think i do think one of those little key features to the coating because it has some rain erosion capability you know obviously as most wind turbines start to uh take age the the leading edge of the turbine blades aren’t necessarily designed to take the kind of abuse that we would see in some parts of the united states in particular and so the ice accretion is greater because the surfaces are just rougher and now you have especially exposed fiberglass epoxy surfaces where ice tends to want to grab onto and hold on to so the combination then of being basically rain erosion resistant and uh fracturing the ice off at very low levels seems like a great combination so in my head i’m kind of picturing this as like little stalagtites but like which is it stalagmites to lag tights i don’t remember but would that be a good way to describe it brian where like it sounds like at the microscopic level there’s like little spikes where the ice is just that’s what’s going to cause us this fracture localization is that is that a reasonable way for me to help our youtube folks yeah understand that i don’t know that was the way my brain worked so yeah just yeah i i think that analogy works so you can think of it just having you know um um you know we we have a just kind of a general matrix or there’s the paint and within the paint there’s a bunch of little particles and at the interface where the paint and the particles meet right that’s where these forces get concentrated okay and so yeah you can you know the morphology isn’t quite like you know stalactites which by the way have to hold on tight so they come from the roof and slag mites might reach the ceiling so yeah yeah um middle school science guy all right um that that one has stuck with me um but anyways uh yeah if if that if that is helpful i think that’s a you know good way of thinking about it so what are the next what are the next steps in the coding then because it seems like you’ve done a lot of development particularly with boeing and you’ve done rain erosion testing which a lot of companies never get to that point of doing that what’s the next step in the coding because i know how these things go there’s always that sort of next phase in the development of the technology what what are those next steps look like i think in terms of the major milestones we’ve we’ve already already hit hit the big ones we we can demonstrate isophobic properties and we can demonstrate durability with with some of our formulations in terms of you know passing rain erosion or even abrasion tests all that sort of stuff that said there’s a very long tail of requirements on a paint that you still have to get through right so um the the the dry time uh how long does it take the pot life um the just production consistency of of the coating what is the shelf life uh like color matching um how glossy is it um uv and weathering resistance uh chemical resistant so there’s a whole host of how hazardous or toxic is it so do we need to you know are our coatings are solvent based um obviously if you can move to a water-based coating there’s a lot of benefits there especially you know a lot of wind farms tend to be in places where where people are are you know can be environmentally conscious and so you know if you get into scandinavia right there there’s some pretty you know strict issues you know environmentally around you know controlling what you can you know what sort of paints and coatings you can use and so there’s a whole host of of things that we have to address um no deal breakers um or certainly any that we’ve found yet we we hope not to to to find any of course um i think they’re all even if we you know frankly do find you know one of those things we’re not quite there yet with the coding um they can be we can engineer our way around that right i mean these are problems that have been solved in other codings right the problem that that hasn’t or hadn’t been solved was the ice shedding with durability right that’s the that’s the core problem all these other ones are just things that any paint that if you go to home depot you gotta all the paint all the paints have solved those problems so it’s a much easier salt you know those those are much easier but they’re not nothing and they do require you know time and resources and we’re still a young company i mean we’re going to be you know we’ll be fundraising this year right so we’ll need money to to go through all that process and it takes time and effort and so that’s that’s you know where we’re at with with that so wow okay those are really cool next steps because i think you’re right the key technology is built into the materials but if you need to adapt the materials to particular parts of the world or particularly applications you can do that because the fundamentals are still there that that’s that’s really big in terms of a company and fundraising because the technology the the key technology is already done that’s a huge driver in terms of growth for the company that’s amazing nice right and we’re doing we’re using you know different kind of chemical bases right so we have a you know a polyurethane based one which is the standard you know the top coats that are used for wind turbines now you know aerospace paints most automotive paints or polyurethanes we also have rubberized versions though which are actually worked really well on like wood um concrete certain surfaces where um we can even make them grippy so like tacky um so from a slip and fall prevention perspective you get a little extra grip and oh by the way you know the ice will crack when you step on it as opposed to just right you know slipping on it on a you know a sheet of ice so we we have different versions of the coding that we’re we’re making for for these different applications and you know exactly to your point it’s all based on the same fundamental physics you know the same physical principles are underlying at all but we’re you know now sort of translating it across these you know different chemistries so have you tried this on your on your dr we i live in massachusetts so we’re constantly covered in ice alan’s ready to place an order yeah all right i would do my driveway tomorrow with the material because it does play a big you know think about all the safety arrests i mean i’ve fallen on the ice multiple snow do you have a snow blower alan no i know we’ll get there first come on it doesn’t it’s just shoveling snow oh yeah like eight feet a year and you’re still shoveling it come on we are still shoveling the car cart before the horse my man no the problem the problem with here is that uh a lot of things tend to be blacktop it’s it’s the way that the asphalt is the driveway of choice around here and it it constantly refreezes and so you’ve always got this one-inch two-inch thick sheet of ice that is impossible to break off right so having some coating on that driveway walkway whatever would be huge it would be huge because it just reduced the amount of work you got to do it just would it’d be a lot safer yeah that’s brilliant wow that’s cool technology yeah so we we do have it down on a few driveways um doing some kind of early uh early pilots if you will um not my driveway personally we live in houston um outside of last month we don’t uh really you know pretty much ever have any kind of ice or snow build up yeah down here but uh yeah we are that’s in that’s an application that we’re we’re definitely looking at um obviously from a specification and you know all that sort of perspective it’s much easier um you know you you don’t have quite the requirements uh that you do with uh you know a wind turbine or right yeah yeah well as we wrap up here i do want to talk about texas so uh brian you penned a nice article on linkedin and obviously you’re in houston so you have a strong perspective on this and you went through it right so um can you tell us a little bit about what happened in texas and you know there’s a lot of economic uh obviously fallout from it but you know as a texan and as someone owns a business in texas who is affected by this on you know myriad angles um what what did you find most interesting about it and where do you see texas going to prevent this in the future so it was uh i’m sure almost everyone kind of knows the the general story by now but yeah basically uh you know a very um unlikely winter storm uh you know came through basically you know the entire state texas grid is effectively independent from the rest of the country so it couldn’t really be offset by you know increased power by by somewhere else in the country um and then you know it effectively crippled the grid and they had to to you know basically uh cut demand meaning turn off power at people’s homes uh to uh to to keep the grid from from fully blacking out um you know in my house personally we lost power for you know right around two days two and a half days um and it you know it was um you know obviously a pain and not something that um you know we effectively lost a week with the business you know we were closed and most businesses were closed for an entire week right so you think of you know not only the actual costs in terms of you know very unfortunate you know some people actually actually died but then you know the damage to people’s homes from frozen pipes and all that sort of stuff which there’s been you know billions if not tens of billions and you know estimated damages there but then all the you know lost productivity from basically losing a week of of you know people being able to work so it was a it was a really bad situation i i you know i as i’ve been kind of reflecting more about it i think you know there are a few takeaways i mean one is um these systems are are more vulnerable than i think we realize or or want to to appreciate um and and there’s there wasn’t you know and you all have talked about this on your show but you know there there wasn’t one single cause there were systemic failures across almost every part of this right the you know wind power underperformed gas underperformed wells were frozen uh you know even a nuclear plant tripped because they had some you know some of the you know they deal with a lot of water and they had some issues with some sensors freezing um and then the communications were um abhorrent i mean there’s no other way to there were no communications it was pretty clear they had no idea that the scale of this was even possible right you compare it to responses from hurricanes and the the communications are you can’t you you hear about it everywhere the billboards on the highway and the news and the mayor’s out you know before hey get get your supplies or get out of town or whatever there was none of that and so that made it so much worse than it had to be because nobody was prepared everybody was caught flat-footed i’m sure plenty of people would have um you know left or you know took a took a long weekend in new orleans or you know did something to you know basically get out of air cot uh aircut zone um and so i you know that was one thing that uh you know i think a lot of people sort of understand now um that these systems are vulnerable you look at you know generator sales or you know their their back order you know whole home generators or backorder for months it’s sort of a you know kind of heading back to this you know every person for themselves and you know micro grid type uh thing where you know people want to have that ability themselves sure i think the other thing is um assessing the and this comes back to our risk conversation but assessing how likely these risks are is is so so hard um and obviously they you know they they failed here um but you know we the bottom line is this could happen again next year we may not have another storm like this you know in our lifetimes right and so how do you how do you put a dollar amount against something like that um and it you know it’s really hard to say um what i what i do find interesting though and i i’ve generally developed a distrust for a lot of the you know quote unquote you know official stuff is you know this was you know apparently maybe a you know once every few decades storm um hurricane harvey um you know when it it hit houston was a once every 500 year storm uh 2016 there was the tax day floods you may or may not be familiar with those everybody from from southeast texas will be that was a once in 500 year storm and then 2015 there was i believe the memorial day floods another one in 500 year storm so believe it or not houston had three consecutive years with one in 500 year storms now either we are living in a truly truly exceptional era or the uh the probabilities being assigned to these sorts of events are fundamentally flawed um and i i tend to fall in into the to the you know ladder camp now is that a consequence of you know perhaps is global warming driven perhaps you know there’s something else going on i don’t know um but what i do know is that you know assigning probabilities to these sorts of things is so difficult um but there is it’s pretty clear that we’re not doing the cost benefit analysis correctly i think we can say that um is is categorically true given the costs associated with with the last event um and and then just one last thing around you know the other kind of main conclusion is like we we have to do something about it i mean the the status quo you know it can’t remain i think there has to be some level of mitigation um at a minimum just for people to save face and they’ll be just the the appearance aspect of it but i think ultimately what we’re going to have to do is step back look at all of the different causes everything that went wrong against every part of energy production of the grid so not just wind but every part what went wrong how big of a problem was it meaning you know how many and basically how many megawatt hours were lost and then what would it cost to make that not a problem in the future and then basically at make a table of everything everything we could possibly do how big of a problem it was and how much it would cost to fix it and then just figure out what our what our caught up cutoff is and let’s do the highest impact ones the ones that are cheapest and that would keep the most energy production online and and just do some of those things right and i’m sure there are some simple things um some very simple things that that could be done that would make a big difference um whether or not you know putting active heating on wind turbines or even putting coatings on wind turbines is would that qualify as one of them who knows but it does need to be we need to figure that out right we you know we need to methodically think through it and understand um you know what can we do and if you know i i would love if our company can you know obviously play a role in that um but i think there’s a lot of thought that needs to be put into you know what does the future of the grid look like given that these sort of climatic event you know these these weather events appear to be you know more more common and and more extreme than than ever before so yeah i think that forecasting is it’s baffling well i also want to hear your perspective on on grid scale energy storage because you’ve done a lot of your phd research on that i mean is it possible to have big enough batteries to to really offset um you know a whole municipality or a whole state i mean what could grid scale storage do to prevent some of the stuff in the future yeah um so it is possible to to have storage that could power towns or regions for extended periods of time um but there’s there’s two caveat caveats there one the the costs um are prohibitive still at this point and that’s why you haven’t seen um deployment to like you know power a town for days and kind of you know back up power like that um two the the the way there actually is storage that can do that today but it’s not battery based or any kind of fancy technology it’s pumped hydroelectric so they can use dams as a way to uh to store power and they can store absolutely massive amounts of power and so there are there are installations that that use pumped hydroelectric that can supply power to a huge number of of users uh over long periods of time the the bulk of of storage that you’ve seen come into the market um recently so i’ll say in the past decade has been dealing with with different niche problems so a a big one was frequency regulation and basically it’s a power quality so you know you want to keep the the the power coming on the grid at you know 60 hertz and as close to 60 hertz as possible and if it deviates actually even small amounts it could fry you know literally every electronic that’s that’s connected to it so you don’t want that and so they’ll use uh batteries um lithium ions the most common at this point for this this application but they’ll use batteries to uh to help basically you know condition the power improve the power quality um and you’re seeing some of that the the types of things that i i worked on at gra in grad school was was was grid scale batteries so so very big batteries but meant um to provide the something closer to the the storage that like pumped hydro has so much big in terms of kilowatt hour amounts but not necessarily the instant power and high power that like lithium-ion batteries provide because what lithium ion does is it provides a lot of power very quickly you can’t store a ton though or rather if you want to store a ton it’s really really expensive right because lithium-ion batteries are you know you look at you know 100 kilowatt-hour battery pack on a tesla you know and i i don’t know what the battery pack cost but it’s probably 40 000 maybe more it’s a significant fraction of the of the overall cost of the car right so it’s really expensive 100 kilowatt hours is nothing for when you’re talking about a home right or a neighborhood i mean it’s it’s nothing right um and so you you have to get into that megawatt hour scale and there are other battery types that are much much cheaper than lithium-ion they’re not dense so you can’t use them for portable electronics but they’re water-based and they can they’re very cheap on a per kilowatt-hour basis and so those are the sort of batteries that i worked on and that i think you know ultimately will play a role in storage moving forward i mean we’re not going to end up with a one size fits all where there’s just you know one technology that hey this is how we store power on the grid we’re gonna end up with a broad um you know basically different technologies pumped hydro lithium batteries um you know flow batteries which are the kind of batteries i was describing earlier there’s even i mean there’s they’re storing energy and compressed air in caverns i’ve seen those like rail rail car things where they like ship them up the mountain then they come back down the mountain what is that called i’m not going to pull it out of my gravity-based system just like the water there’s ones where people put concrete blocks on cranes there’s um oh yeah there’s flywheel flywheels which are actually used not not just for kind of grid applications but they actually use flywheels when it for like really crazy scientific equipment like particle colliders and stuff where they need insane amounts of energy really quick and so they’ll connect these big flywheels so there’s all there’s a whole plethora of technologies there and i think you know ultimately you know some selection of those is going to end up playing a role but as we move to you know it’s inevitable we’re going to be moving to to more wind more solar more intermittent renewables the the demand for storage is going to go up and up right because you know ultimately we don’t control when the wind blows and so we’re going to need that that storage on on the grid um and so i think it’s a it’s a fascinating market and there’s a you know a ton of really innovative stuff uh going on there and i was uh it was it was great to spend uh kind of the early part of my career working on it well you only need 1.21 gigawatts to get the flux capacitor up to the proper amount of electrons and then you can go to any time period you want so yeah just throwing that out there it’s a back to the fusion reference if you yeah i know but for those who are listening if you didn’t get that that’s where my mind is as you guys talking but Brian i mean this is a fascinating conversation and uh we really appreciate your expertise on lots of different topics here in energy and coatings and in the wind industry and in texas um where can people follow up with you and with elemental coatings and you know what else uh where can you direct our viewers who are interested in learning more yeah um elementalcoatings.com um you know have have plenty of videos on there by the way if you’re just kind of interested to see the see the product in action um so so go check us out there um i’m you know my contact information is on there i’m on you know linkedin twitter all the usual suspects so so feel free to reach out um again we’re uh we’re we’re actively looking for partners um we’ll also be you know we’re going to be fundraising uh here soon so if on any any of those topics uh you know we’d love to love to hear from you and thanks again for for having me uh dan and alan yeah we appreciate you and we will link to all of Brian’s uh contact info like you said his social media web pages all that stuff so it’ll be easy so if you’re listening on youtube or in you know itunes spotify or wherever just check out the description and you’ll find links to all that stuff below Brian thanks again that was a great time chatting with you thank you all right so that’ll do it for this episode of uptime thanks again to our guest Brian Huskinson of elemental coatings as always be sure to check out the description links below for ways to follow up on their company you know find them on their website social media all that stuff connect with Brian on Linkedin and no matter where you’re listening be sure to share the show subscribe and we like i said we always appreciate you listening feel free to share with a friend and shoot us an email if you have input insight or suggestions for a future topic or a future guest thanks again for listening and we’ll see you next time on the uptime podcast
