Podcast: Play in new window | Download
A 107-meter mold at the LM factory in Sherbrooke, France has been damaged and LM in Denmark faces significant layoffs. Researchers at TU Delft develop noise-reducing “Muteskin” technology. The U.S wind industry suffers from shortage of skilled welders.
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!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Alright, Joel, so we seem to have eaten our weight in barbecue in the last three days.
Joel Saxum: Yes.
Allen Hall: That is a literal fact.
Joel Saxum: Now should I tell you the perfect barbecue plate order? If you’re in Texas and you’re getting barbecued, this is what you want. You want a two meat plate, you want brisket, you want a jalapeno cheese sausage, you want fried okra, and some mac and cheese.
That’s it.
Allen Hall: We were sitting with some Danish folks last night and trying to explain what okra was or is. And then I thought, I betcha Rosemary doesn’t know what okra is either. Have you had okra before, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, we have it. Yeah, I haven’t eaten it a lot, but you can, yeah, it’s in the supermarkets, usually.
Yeah.
Allen Hall: Does it have a taste? Can you describe what the taste of okra is for those who have been uninitiated?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s not something that I eat often. I’ve tasted it, but I I don’t even really remember. I know that it gets if you don’t do it well, it gets slimy. That’s its biggest crime. It has to be well cooked, otherwise it’s a slimy mess.
Allen Hall: Now. So we went to our restaurant and Joel and I didn’t say anything to our waitress. It was a nice restaurant. It was a barbecue restaurant, of course. We’re in Texas. But the waitress came up and immediately associated Joel with Texas, even though he’s from Wisconsin and then associated me with being an outsider.
Now, I was born in Nebraska. I’m a lot closer to Texas than Joel, but I was seen as being an East Coast person. Immediately, I thought, oh my gosh, I think the Massachusetts is starting to show on me.
Joel Saxum: It’s the glasses. I think.
Allen Hall: Is it the glasses? You think that makes me look Danish?
Rosemary Barnes: Don’t you have glasses too, Joel?
I’m looking at you both.
Joel Saxum: Allen’s looks way too smart. That’s what it is. Or they can smell the east coast on you. I don’t know what it was, but she knew right away. She’s like, where are you from? Northerner. Yankee.
Allen Hall: Rosemary has been jet setting all over the world, and, which is awesome, but When she’s gone, then we have all these questions. We just hold, hold until she comes back. And meanwhile everything had happened at LM at the same time, and Rosemary wasn’t even around to, to ask what’s going on.
But let’s talk about the most important one first right now, which is that in Sherbrooke, France, the LM factory 107 meter mold was broken somehow. And it’s really thrown a kink into the works over at Sherbrooke, because There’s not that many mulches like you can pull out a spare mold and start making blades Do you have you heard what actually happened in Sherberg?
Did they? How do they damage this mold? And how would you damage a mold? Maybe importantly is like, how could you damage a mold like this?
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, there’s all sorts of ways that you can damage a mold. Obviously you can drop something heavy on it or drive something into it or that they do eventually wear out though.
It doesn’t sound like that. That’s what’s happened here. So yeah, obviously, I would say, yeah, it’s obvious that there was an accident of some sort that involved some sort of blunt force trauma to the mold. And maybe not blunt, maybe it was sharp. I don’t know. But anyway, the mold is damaged enough that it’s It’s going to take some time to repair and when you only have, one or a small number of lines of manufacturing, then that has a significant impact.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And it’s interesting too, because it doesn’t just impact the LM factory. People think, Oh, the LM factory. I’ve actually seen on LinkedIn a ton of the technicians from Dogger Bank where they were supplying a lot of these blades looking for jobs because yes, they were furloughed. So a lot of them will come back, but some of these guys are subcontractors and technicians out there that.
They don’t know if they’ll come back and it’s getting to be busy season for anybody offshore that’s a contract worker. So they’re looking for projects.
Rosemary Barnes: Is it plausible that this is the only thing that has caused that? It’s just it’s wild that, like they were just. a blade was coming off the line and then being driven straight out to the wind farm to be installed.
It’s not normally that tight, so maybe this was the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it would be surprising to me if the blame rested solely on the shoulders of whoever, whoever damaged this mold.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, no, you’re a hundred percent correct. They had vessel issues and some other things out there, but as those things started to spool up and snowball.
On that project. There’s a lot of people out there that are looking for work.
Allen Hall: How do you build a mold quickly? Rosemary, is there a way, or do you just say, you know what, it’s going to be 90 days.
Rosemary Barnes: There have actually been a lot of improvements in the mold manufacturer because, for a long time, the design, the building of the mold, the procuring of the mold was basically the critical path for a new blade designer.
It used to take. say roughly six months, maybe longer for such a big mold to get the mold made. And so it was always, yeah, like I said, the critical part, you had to lock in the blade geometry quite early on so that you could get the mold made. But now they are starting to use 3d printing and composites.
So instead of, machining the entire mold, they can 3d print a framework and then. Lay composites in it, and then I think that they use 3D yeah, manufacturing to to, make the surface perfect and that’s a lot faster, but it’s a huge mold. So I don’t think that, it’s going to happen instantly.
And usually the molds are not manufactured in the same place that they’re needed. I, for example, worked on a project where we were. Desperately waiting on our mold to arrive so that we could get started making our blades and then it just fell off a ship in the ocean. And and then, like it was a big, it was a big deal that caused some problems.
So yeah, stuff can happen and it takes a long time.
Allen Hall: Wait a minute. Timeout, timeout. Did that really happen?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I was only peripherally involved with that one. So there was definitely, project managers who were more, more bothered by that occurrence than I was.
But there was, the number of times that my blades on the way to site would get, the truck would roll over and the blade would end up in a ditch and you’re like, okay so it’s one thing. We’ve got to get the blade out of the ditch, which is not that easy. Always in the middle of winter, of course, because I worked in de icing.
And then you gotta figure out is it broken as well. And, like when you’re working with prototypes, you only have three blades.
Allen Hall: So what happens to the mold that falls off the ship, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s bobbing around somewhere in the Atlantic, that’s my assumption.
Joel Saxum: That’s what happens. That happens all the time.
Container ships lose containers all the time. They just bloop.
Philip Totaro: If they can salvage it, they do, but most of the time they can’t salvage it, it’s too deep.
Allen Hall: So they just let it go?
Rosemary Barnes: It wouldn’t have been in a container, obviously, but.
Allen Hall: How much is it going to cost to make another 107 meter Mold?
Philip Totaro: Several millions.
Allen Hall: Yeah, one million, five million.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, quite a few, but bear in mind, they are like a wear, wear part, right? You do expect to replace them. So they would have brought forward the replacement of this one. I don’t know by how much, I’ve got no idea where they’re, where they’re at in their cycle, but it’s not like you just buy one set of molds and use that for the entire lifetime of the blade when it’s something that they’re, making so many others as this one.
So yeah, it’s impossible to say if it was. small deal or a big deal. Obviously it’s not a small deal. Otherwise if they were just about ready to replace it, then they would have the next one ready to go. So obviously they weren’t expecting it’s life to be up just yet, but.
Allen Hall: It’s life is over now.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It is interesting to think like what’s happened to it, that they couldn’t repair it. Cause if you just dropped a hammer on it and bash the hole, you’d obviously be able to repair it pretty well. It’s not like totally straightforward cause you do need to make sure that the surface is perfect.
But yeah. Yeah I’m wondering if maybe Gantry just, smashed down, dropped on it, and bent the whole thing in half, or, it’s got total speculation, obviously, but it is amusing to wonder what happened, and what happened. The vibe in the factory was like, as that was happening and afterwards, it yeah.
Joel Saxum: The person who did it.
Can you come to the office, please?
Allen Hall: Just walk out.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. You might as well. No, not in France and France. You’re good. That person still has a job.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Now we’re going to have the same fight that we always. We always have it like if it’s possible for one of your, like just a random manufacturing worker to cause this much strife, then there are problems higher up that there weren’t the appropriate safety systems in place.
If one, one human error can cause an issue like this, then you have some I would say safety problems and Yeah, just general organizational problems, yeah, process issues, like little, yeah, safety controls.
Philip Totaro: There’s 650 people that got furloughed for three months, so it’s more than a handful now.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I still, I can’t quite get my head around the fact that is the the direct that it’s one to one, it must have been some pressure built up and this was the last thing that meant that it was impossible to avoid that surely. I don’t know. I’m speculating, but. I just can’t imagine that this on its own is enough to cause that because there is usually some sort of slack in the system and other things that people can be doing for a little while.
But if the mold truly is just absolutely destroyed and they have to just start again and there’s absolutely nothing else for them to do in the factory because they’ve only got one line, then yeah, I guess that, that is yeah, that, that is going to have a big impact. But yeah. Yeah, we’ll probably never know.
Allen Hall: Can we talk about something more positive than broken molds at GE or LM?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, let’s talk about laying off of two thirds of the, or 70 percent of the workforce global
Allen Hall: at LM.
Oh, okay. Since Rosemary’s raised that issue we haven’t talked about the we have talked about briefly the closing of the plant in Turkey, the LM plant in Turkey.
But, and then associated with that was some significant layoffs up in Denmark and it looked like a lot of engineering staff and professional staff in Denmark were let go. I’m not sure of the number right now. I’ve seen anywhere from, 150 to 275, and Rosemary, you may have more of a feeling for that.
What do you hear?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think 275 is the number of engineers that were left in Denmark after the round of redundancies where, which was when I left LM. So it wasn’t 275. I’m pretty sure it was more than 150. I don’t want to say the exact number of being told because I’m not sure if I’ve been told something that people weren’t supposed to share.
I don’t want to get anybody. There’s not very many people left there. I wouldn’t want to get one of them in trouble. Yeah, so definitely huge. And it’s not just Denmark though. Denmark’s the most affected because it had the most engineers there, but it’s everyone in global functions.
So it’s spread across all of the, LM locations including yeah, other other factory locations where they also have, bits of engineering doing global things.
Joel Saxum: Is this the last chunk of these or is there going to be more to come in the next few weeks? What do you think?
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think there’ll be more to come in the next few weeks.
That would surprise me. They’ve really mishandled this if they’re going to just follow this up with more cuts in a few weeks. But yeah. I do think that it seems likely that there’ll be another round in a year or two or whenever, because some of the roles that were left are people that are working on key customer accounts and I guess that’s to maintain.
Continuity, but I could imagine that those eventually, that they would not replace those same, project managers and customer managers. They might not replace them with more people in Denmark. They might replace them with people somewhere else. And so those might eventually disappear as well.
It’s hard to say exactly what roles have gone. I definitely, I’ve been watching my LinkedIn. And I’ve seen so many posts that start off with, after 25, after 26, after whatever many years, fantastic years at LM, unfortunately we’re tying those over and it’s just, some of these people were just some of the most talented engineers that I’ve ever worked with.
And one in particular, my, my literal favorite colleague that I’ve ever worked with, he he’s been laid off and it’s insane to me because he has such a, body of knowledge inside his brain that nobody else at the company had. And, there’s not, it’s pretty rare in the industry as well to the, specific projects that you’ve worked on throughout a career.
They, there’s lessons inside each engineer that’s been, yeah, 20, 30 years in the industry. There’s lessons in their brains that don’t exist on paper and will just be lost. There’s no way that this, a hundred, 200 engineers. that are being cut from Denmark. There’s no way that they’re all going to go get jobs at Siemens up the road or Vestas or yeah, it’s just like totally implausible that they’re going to find more work.
I think, It’s really, a bit of a death knell for for the Danish wind industry or, it’s one more nail in the coffin of, Denmark being the center of that and for Europe as a whole as well. It’s, it’s sad to me and maybe hard to see that it’s good for the world as a whole.
When you think about, the wind’s place and the energy transition and to just lose this huge. Amount of knowledge that you have in Denmark, it’s it’s sad. Yeah, business can be cutthroat, but. I don’t know what’s going to happen to all this expertise. And I hope that it’s not just, lost as people go out to different industries.
Allen Hall: Yeah. What’s left of LM in Denmark right now that you’ve seen the people have left, what would you say is remains?
Rosemary Barnes: I had an idea based on which announcements that I had seen. They’ve cut, Everything is this good starting point, right? Everyone’s gone. And then which few key roles do you need to put back?
But I realized after I started messaging people, I realized that some of the roles that I thought had stayed, it’s just that they hadn’t updated their LinkedIn yet. And like the cuts were more extensive than I, the impression I originally got from people who’d updated their profiles. But yeah, from what I can sense and what’s been said in the media is that they’re keeping these, yeah, key customer facing roles in there.
They haven’t said too much else, but I don’t, I still see a lot of people that still say in their profile they’re working for LM and don’t have an open to work banner on them. I still see a lot of like materials expertise, which. That would be, you would have to be fully insane to, to fire, like your chief engineer that knows exactly how, every material has developed at LM and every problem that they had introducing something.
That would be like absolute insanity to fire that whole team. There’s still quite a lot in conceptual design in the front end engineering. And so some of the design and analysis people seem to still be there. There is also a little bit still of new technology introduction, but yeah, it seems like most of that is gone as well.
And then all the support roles that, like the VP of marketing is gone and like lots of people in the commercial side of things, even really high up are just gone. So it doesn’t look like they’re wanting to keep the team of people that would enable LM to, to grow new business and thrive in new markets and develop new technologies.
That it seems like it’s, more of a legacy thing and more kind of just simplified. And maybe that makes sense to a certain extent. We’ve all been talking about how we’ve got all these quality problems at the moment. And my thing that I’ve been banging on about for the last year or two is that we did go through a period of really rapid technological innovation and yeah, a lot of new technologies.
developed over a really short time frame and fast and with maybe not enough people and money to do the project properly. And this isn’t talking about LM specifically, this is talking about the whole industry. So I guess, yeah, the response to that is, okay, we’ll just do what we do better. Like the core stuff, we’ll focus on that.
But if you focus on the core stuff, but fire three quarters of your workforce, then I don’t really feel like you have more engineering attention going on to your core products. It feels like even just, maintaining is going to be a stretch based on the number of people that have been fired.
Allen Hall: So does GE Vernova limit, then the LM production of blades for anybody outside of GE? Is that where this is headed?
Rosemary Barnes: My understanding, and I think it’s just a rumor, I haven’t seen it confirmed anywhere, but my understanding is that LM moving forward will be solely about external customers.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I saw that.
They’re basically saying they’re going to focus on them. So who’s going to make all the blades for GE? Yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: it’s so weird, because when GE bought LM, that was the first thing that happened, was all of the GE blade design became part of LM. And it could easily have gone the other way, that their blade design, that GE’s blade design department absorbed LM, even though, like a small fish eating a big one in that case.
But, they could have done that organizationally, it wouldn’t have been surprising at the time, but that was What, like at least six years ago, that was the time to do it. Seems odd that you would spend six years doing the opposite and then yeah, try and go back and like how much of the GE blade design is still left there and feels culturally GE.
I, it felt reasonably integrated, like not fully integrated, but it felt reasonably integrated when I was yeah, after a few years. When I left. So it’s just it’s hard for me to understand.
Allen Hall: Yeah I don’t understand it now because I thought I understood it about a day ago and now listen to Rosemary and thank God she’s here.
It has enlightened me quite a bit. So now I don’t even know where Vernova is going in terms of blade design. Are they going to a TPI? Are they going to Aris? Are they looking internally to GE?
Rosemary Barnes: TPI don’t design blades. TPI only make blades.
Philip Totaro: They don’t, but maybe they will. It’s it’s contract manufacturing of the blades that have been already designed.
That’s part of the workhorse turbine philosophy.
Joel Saxum: Is there a team within GE that can do it themselves?
Philip Totaro: Design? Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there was. They used to design their own blades. Before they bought LM, they GE designed their own blades and had either LM or TPI make them for them. And then they bought LM and officially the blade design parts of GE, those people then worked for LM.
And I wouldn’t say that like cultural change was ever a hundred percent, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t dysfunctional, it worked roughly. And GE still had some blades by made by TPI after that. I don’t know. I don’t know how many, if it was many at all, but they wanted to maintain that, that second, that alternative manufacturing source, which is always smart to have two different manufacturing options.
Maybe their plan is that they never designed another blade. Honestly, that’s sounding like the most the most, rational interpretation of what they’ve done, because if you, yeah, so if you want to focus for now your attention on the blades that you’re making, they’ve got the Haliade and they’ve got their existing onshore platforms and just make more of the same for the next five years, say.
That’s fine. That sounds like a good approach to me, but you can’t fire every single person that knows how to develop a new blade, a new technology, or you really, in five years time, what’s your plan? You can’t just go back and get those people again. I could have understand like a 30 percent trimming if that’s what they were going to do, but not yeah, 60, 70% massacre.
Joel Saxum: It sounds to me like it could be one of those cases where in a few months you see you get a lot of people getting callbacks to be a consultant or a contractor at an elevated rate. No, that’s not a GE thing. No, but if something comes across, like, how are you going to, how are you going to address it if you have no, no talent lab.
Allen Hall: Having worked for GE in the past and been around a lot of GE people, pretty much all of my adult life, there is a plan B. Rosemary. You sat through these GE briefings. There’s always a plan B. There is a plan in place. You don’t, may not know it, but there’s a plan in place that’s being enacted right now.
It’s just a question of where’s the designs going to be made from? Where are they going? Are they going internally?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it wouldn’t have surprised me if some of these roles got moved to GE. Yeah, I mean it’s funny because like for the whole time the last few years that I was working there It was like really drilled into us.
There’s no GE and LM anymore. We’re all one company, but now it’s really back in the other direction. But yeah, if they want to split G even over into G onshore, G offshore and LM blades, then perhaps some of the engineers that have left LM will get roles in G onshore and offshore. But the funny thing is that I haven’t heard that.
I heard that even from the people who have just been informally off the record telling me what’s going on. No one has mentioned, oh we’ve been told that, a bunch of us will end up in these two companies. Yeah, I, I struggled to believe that’s their plan A, yeah. So I don’t know. I can’t understand. I guess that there is a plan, but it doesn’t make sense to me and it doesn’t make sense to a lot of the workers that have been laid off. Obviously it, you never feel good about it, but at least, like when I, when the, I had the redundancy they were taking that round of layoffs and I can’t remember the proportion, but The basic things that they were trying to achieve was they wanted to close down the pilot factory that was still at LM.
And they wanted to get jobs like mine out of Denmark and into the factories. And I had been saying for the whole past year of my job, maybe two years, that my job was so stressful because I really needed to be in the factory all the time. And instead I would do these trips there and. I would go for a week and then something would go wrong and I’d end up there for two months.
That happened over and over again. I’m like, this job should be done by someone that lives at the fact, not lives at the factory, lives at the location of the factory. So to me, that made sense. It’s not nice that they closed down the pilot plant in Denmark, but it is not cheap to run a factory in Denmark compared to all their other locations.
It made sense, but this, I can’t understand the rationale. And I get the impression that that’s the general vibe from people who have been laid off, at least, obviously people who are still there speaking more cautiously and positively about the company. But yeah it’s harder to see the rationale for this one.
Philip Totaro: It feels like that’s exactly what they’re doing though, is they’re trying to cut back on an expensive legacy pension and other costs and shift some of their responsibility and labor pool into. Other markets, although it’s a bit curious that they would do that and then close down Turkey but they’re going to be left with, Spain, a little footprint in Brazil, some in the U. S. and certainly China and India. And, but with that, if they’re solely going to be focused on customers, those are also markets where they’ve got a lot more competition these days for making, customer blades. So this is very curious how this ends up playing out.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, if you were starting a wind turbine factory, a wind turbine manufacturer today, you wouldn’t, and you could pick anywhere in the world to start it.
You wouldn’t choose a high labor country like Denmark. However, when you’ve got this huge amount of, industrial know how and just, yeah the history of the engineering people. Because, when you’re developing new technologies, most of the the way that you do that well is by having people involved that have just seen similar projects go wrong.
A lot of them, the more, the better. We’ve talked about how, all sorts of things went wrong on the projects that I did and be like, Oh, don’t advertise that. But I will advertise that because that’s my most valuable thing is that I have seen just, project after project.
after project go wrong in the most ridiculous ways. So then that helps you for the next one to anticipate what could go wrong. And test for the, common sorts of things early. That’s how you get your engineering intuition. And it’s not something that you say, though, you wouldn’t start.
Out in Denmark, if you were starting from scratch, once you’ve got two, 300 engineers with decades of that experience, that’s really specifically related to the kinds of products that you’re going to continue to develop in the future. It’s just that you can never replace that. I’m sorry, that’s just, no you can’t.
It’s not that engineers in another cheaper labor location are worse. There’s good engineers all around the world. And it’s not a hundred percent related to the salaries that they’re paid, but they just haven’t been developing wind turbine technologies for decades. And, cumulatively for hundreds, probably thousands of years, when you add up all of the experience of people that were.
That were laid off, you just will never replace that. That’s lost now.
Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually, is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
Visit weather guard wind.com to learn more. Read a case study and schedule a call today.
Allen Hall: Moving on to a less controversial topic over in the Netherlands, the researchers at TU Delft have been working on a quote unquote slipper arrangement called Muteskin. Which can reduce the noise from a wind turbine blade by up to 6 dB is a lot.
And it, now it’s made from a permeable foam material. And it attaches to the trailing edge of the blade to dampen the noise. So it’s basically a sound absorber kind of material. Device field tests on full scale turbines are underway and partnership with the utility in echo to validate the noise reduction.
So what they’ve done so far is they’ve been in the one tunnel and looking at the noise level. And there’s some really complicated, intricate ways of measuring noise in the one tunnel. But then you want to validate it out in real life, that’s where they are right now. And as Rosemary is going to point out, we have not seen a picture of this product, just a lot of words.
Rosemary, you want to describe what you think that this thing is?
Rosemary Barnes: I really want to see a picture because it’s impossible to say if it’s genius or rubbish, it could be Either of those two extremes probably, it’s probably not in the middle, it’s probably one of those, one of those two things.
I want to start by saying that, noise is a real problem. They’ve got a real problem that they’re trying to solve. It’s a design constraint when you’re designing a wind turbine. Usually you’ve got a certain noise limit that you have to make sure that your turbine is quieter than that.
And the main way that they control that is by having the tip speed limited. So the faster that the tip of the blade is going, the noisier it is in general. So if no one cared about noise, probably wind turbines would spin a bit faster. And then you could have a more slender blade, which helps with, keeping blades narrower and lighter and less extreme forces when they, get hit by a gust of wind.
So everyone would like to make blades rotate faster. And yeah, noise is one of the main reasons why they don’t. So yeah, they’re definitely pursuing a problem that everyone would like to see improved. But it’s already got a lot of focus on it, this area. It’s certainly not true that nobody has done any work on trying to make wind turbines quieter.
There’s already I actually, I used to work with a guy who was doing his PhD on the acoustics of wind turbine blades. So you know, like that’s it’s a field and people are pursuing it.
Joel Saxum: Serrations of other sorts?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah they add these, like they try and mimic how an owl.
Owls fly very quietly and they’ve got these, long feathers on their wings, and my understanding is it’s not fully understood, actually, the phenomenon of why they’re so quiet, but they do add these yeah, feathers or whatever you want to call them, I’m sure people call them different things, just like plastic feathery things that go on the trailing edge at the tip so that they make the blade quieter.
And then also, the aerodynamic profile of the blade as well. That’s something else that that is designed with noise in mind. I remember one time working on a blade where we’ve got a profile from the customer and it looked a bit funny and you’re like, and I remember the LM engineer saying, that’s going to be noisy.
Have they tested that? And in fact, when the, the blades got made and the turbines got installed, it was noise was a problem and they had to scramble to fix that. Noise is something that people are thinking about a lot. Welcome a technology that will improve that.
But Yeah, without having seen it, it’s hard to say for sure, but when I hear soft, foam, that sort of thing, I think not durable.
Allen Hall: Ice.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I don’t know how much they’ve tested it. They’re obviously intentionally not showing a photo, right? They must not be able to patent it, otherwise there would be nothing wrong with sharing it.
So they’re worried about being copied. But. Yeah. Once they install one of these to a third party customer, they, someone’s going to take a photo of that and share it. And then everyone, if it’s so good and so easy to copy, then every manufacturer is just going to make their own version. I would be worried about that if I were them.
Yeah, it feels like a premature press release. Like you were saying, Joel, like if they’re really so scared to show it should they really be talking about it? I I don’t know. What do you guys think?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s the same thing when I read it, when I read it and I see permeable foam, I think that’s not going to last on a blade.
I don’t know what it is, right? And I immediately, and this is why I said this earlier, Phil, my mind goes to the injection molded crock. And then they’re like, Oh, it’s a blade slipper. And I’m like, it is a crock that goes on the blade somehow. I don’t know. That’s not true, but it’s just what comes into my mind.
So I’m thinking about some of that permeable foam material. Okay, so Weatherguard, right? From our Strike Tape product. We’ve been on this tour all week talking to Every O& M building and asset manager we can, and we’re talking consistently about how we’re installed and how it’s for longevity and durability of the product of the blade.
Because any blade add on is only as good as its installation. And so if you can’t install it well or the materials aren’t designed well, if it doesn’t last, what’s the point? And I’m not saying this doesn’t last whatsoever. I’m just saying, when I hear permeable foam, I think I don’t know about that.
Philip Totaro: And keep in mind too, serrated trailing edges were first thought up back in the 70s for not only aerospace applications, but there was also a patent for serrated trailing edge on a wind turbine back in, I want to say 72 or something like that? This is not necessarily a new idea. There was a point in time, and I want to say it was around 2008, 2009, when there were a ton of patents filed on noise mitigation technologies by GE and, Joel, you mentioned, some by Siemens and etc.
The thing is, all of these designs were investigated, including this kind of permeable foam type of structure. So one wonders if they’ve gotten improvement on something that was previously developed and they can actually make it commercially viable, then that’s interesting and compelling. But a lot of these, and this happens a lot more so in the U. S. Than with these European research facilities, but people invent or think they’ve invented something that’s actually already been done. Or already been investigated by, these for profit corporations that have a vested interest in having the latest and greatest technology available. So again I hope that this can come to fruition as a product.
But we’ll see. Show us a picture. Yeah, if it’s truly meant to be something, you got to explain what it is, hopefully they’ve got their patent in place that they, because if you’ve got it filed, then you’ve got protection. If they don’t have the patent filed yet, then you’re right.
Then it’s a premature press release.
Joel Saxum: It could be like, I think it was Rosemary. You were telling us about a book of just different wind turbine models that have been. Explored and experimented and investigated for the last 50 years or whatever people like we’ve got this new idea and it’s going to change the way wind like that was done in the 60s.
I don’t or the 80s or whatever.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’ve never, people suggest new, new ideas for wind to me all the time. And there’s new companies spring up all the time with new wind turbine ideas. And I have never since I bought this book, like two or three years ago. And it’s from the eighties.
I think I have never come across a technology that I could not find in that book. It’s every, everything is in there that, that clothesline wind turbine that Bill Gates invested in. That’s in there. Yeah, airborne wind, which we’re probably, or maybe we won’t get to it today, but there was some, there’s been some news with airborne wind recently.
That’s in there. Vertical access, obviously in there. Just, any kind of way that you could think of to harvest energy from the wind. It has been thought of. It doesn’t mean that there’s no reason to develop those as, like our needs change, materials change controls technologies have changed.
So you can revisit, but it does make it hard. You can’t patent an idea that’s that old and that public, right? So it, it makes it harder for business.
Allen Hall: Does it matter if it’s paintable? I think this is the misconception.
Rosemary Barnes: It does. If it’s easy to copy, if it’s easy to copy, if you would just show a picture of this muteskin slipper.
If you would show a picture of that and that would be enough to, give away your clever idea to to, manufacturers and you’re worried about them reproducing it themselves. Yeah, if you can look at a picture of it and then just make it or, Even, someone’s going to get their hands on it.
They’re going to be able to feel it and test it. The, that will happen once it’s selling to external customers, they can do what they want with it once they’ve bought it. Including give it to GE or Vestas or whoever to reverse engineer it. If it’s not patentable, then that is totally legal.
Allen Hall: I’m going to give you the Elon response to that Rosemary, which is Tesla just releases all of its patents. Or patents for the cars and just turns ’em loose. And guess what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make any difference.
Rosemary Barnes: Because it’s not easy to copy. It’s not easy to copy what they’ve ended up with.
Philip Totaro: Yeah. But they’ve also developed certain, it’s Apple with some of the proprietary connectors, and now in Europe, they’re being forced to switch over, like the Thunderbolt connector to a USB-C connector. It’s, the, there, there are still reasons, even if you open up the ip. It’s the level of investment that’s required to replicate it.
That is going to end up determining whether or not you’re going to get copied. But the key to this is like we’ve been talking about it, anybody that has invented anything over the years, there’s always going to be somebody that’s invented something similar already, especially if you’re this far into the maturity of an industry like wind energy, the reality of it though, like you just said, if we’re maturing a concept that was not.
commercially viable before with new material science that makes that possible. We see this all the time in aerospace, like the supercritical wing airfoil shape that nobody can ever build because, even though it’s the most aerodynamically efficient thing, it’s too you’re never going to be able to house the fuel inside the wing anymore.
You can’t actually build the supercritical wing. It’s the same kind of thing in, in wind that we’ve got a lot of technologies that have been proposed that we don’t have a commercially viable way of bringing it to fruition. So it’s, you’re going to get up to a TRL five and then stop. You’re not going to get it to a TRL nine and then it’s available for everybody.
Allen Hall: I think the key for any sort of new innovation is you have to get it out in the marketplace very quickly and dominate the marketplace. You may have somebody copy you, but if you’re the idea leader in that space, it’s very hard for someone to take that over. And I think Tess is a good example of that. So I’m with Rosemary on this.
It could, and this is shocking to say, actually I’m shocked to hear it myself, but it’s. It’s either going to be completely wonderful, or going to have a really hard time, there’s not going to be a lot of in between here.
Rosemary Barnes: We’ve just got to see it though. I would really love to have those guys on the show, we’ll do a special episode and hear their side of it, because obviously they think that they’ve got something that’s worth pursuing that isn’t, in danger of immediately being copied by everybody as soon as they sell one.
I’d love to hear more about it because if it does work, then that’s, that has implications for wind turbine design. We can make them the whole turbine a little bit more efficient, a little bit cheaper.
Allen Hall: So everybody involved in MuteSkin, because it is a separate company, you can just reach Rosemary.
Just go to pardaloteconsulting.com and send them a note that’ll get right to Rosemary and she’ll set up an interview. Hey, uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES wind magazine. PES wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES wind is written by the experts.
So you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication. PESWIND at PESWIND. com.
As Joel and I have wandered around most of Texas over the last week, what we’ve noticed, there’s a lack of technicians. And we’ve talked to a number of technical training schools in the last several days. And, That has been eyeopening. Here comes the news about the lack of skilled welders. The U S is really in trouble in terms of manufacturing and infrastructure and clean energy projects, because there’s just not enough welders around to do those projects.
The supply of welders. If you’ve been following that, it’s been shrinking for several years. In fact, there’s a lot of job postings. If you look online, there’s a lot of job postings right now for welders, and they’re willing to pay them a lot of money if you’re a good welder. But the shortage now is estimated to be Over 300, 000.
That’s a lot of, that’s a lot of people that need to learn how to weld and that’s going to accumulate over the next four years. So what has historically been seen as a. Maybe a dead end job in some people’s minds, that thing you’re going to earn a hundred thousand dollars being a welder and Joel, as you and I have done a lot of work on this in the last week or so, where are young people or old people like me, going to learn how to weld so that we can do these jobs where does that happen at now?
It used to happen in high schools.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, for sure. It’s really interesting being in West Texas, right? Allen and I. Of course, stopping at training facilities, stopping at O& M shops, but we’re driving around West Texas in the truck, talking to each other. We have had lengthy conversations about the state of our nation and education for the youth and all kinds of good things.
But we’re in a special place, right? The West Texas is where the Permian Basin is and a bunch of other shale formations. So it’s heavy oil field. We’ve been driving through the oil field for the last few days. The oil field out here is also the wind field, right? It’s the same thing. They coexist. For So you see all these welding trucks running around here from my oil and gas past also pipelines being put in.
I know that those pickups that have the welding machines in the back of them out here, the truck itself, you’re getting 100 and 150 a day for, plus per diem. And those guys are making crazy hourly wages. Some of them have an apprentice with them, some of them don’t. Some of those welders that are working on pipelines because, and now because, specifically they’re in higher and higher demand, those guys are making 150, 000, 200, 000 a year traveling around welding up pipelines.
It’s in very high demand. There is schools, right? I learned how to weld in high school. Now I’m not going to say I’m a good welder. We also had this conversation. My, my first TIG weld that I thought was professional. The guy who inspected it for me said, you’re getting a grinder for Christmas.
So yeah, same thing about me tying knots. I’m not a good knot tire, so you can’t tie a good knot. You tie a lot of knots. It’s my same, it’s my same theory of welding. So I’m not the one you want to call when you need something welded. It’s not going to be pretty. But there is we talked about earlier on the show, we talked about UTI, that’s actually a huge welding school.
So there is these technical schools out there that are teaching just welding programs to get youth involved in them. But it’s the same thing we’re seeing in the wind industry in all these training academies and community colleges and stuff. There’s a reaction to the lack of technicians.
So the reaction is, Hey, we have this thing. So it’s been visible. Now we have this shortage. So now you’re starting to see more and more of these schools and training facilities and stuff popping up. But also at the same time, when you talk to those schools, getting new net capacity into those schools is tough.
They’re having a hard time finding young adults, young people out of high school, career transitioning men and women coming out of the military or, you might be 40 years old and need a new career. But they’re having a hard, those are easier to find, to bring people in, but they’re having a hard time getting new net capacity into some of these more vocational schools here in the States.
Which I don’t understand because if you look at the writing on the wall, Plumbers are retiring, HVAC technicians are retiring, electricians are retiring, welders are retiring, that there’s nobody to replace these people. We need all of these skilled labor individuals, welders being a very skilled labor, right?
There’s a lot more to it than sparking an arc and running a bead. There’s so much more to welding and I can tell you that because I’m not very good at it. It’s Like I said, Allen and I doing this trip through Texas the last week, you see a lot of projects going on all over the place.
Everywhere you turn your head, there’s something happening out here in West Texas, whether it’s building a wind farm. Or welding up a pipeline. So these jobs are out there. We just have to find the people to fill them and get the training to go out and do them.
Allen Hall: And you notice most recently with the online advertising, it’s plastered everywhere.
I see it on television. I’ve seen it on race cars, build submarines. com, right? That they’re having a hard time. 24 And I did go to that website. And if you’re interested, you can go to build submarines. com and take a look. I think the last time I checked, they had almost 200 pages of job postings for skilled workers.
That’s how bad it’s gotten is that they’ve they’re trying to advertise their way into finding workers for critical things like submarines too that we will send to Australia, it, it, Because it does show you, Joel, that there is a lot of demand for skilled workers and those jobs pay more than desk jobs in a lot of cases, and there is a skilled workforce need and This is just highlighting it.
And as we go around Texas a little bit more and travel to other training facilities, we’re going to highlight this. This is important for the wind industry and for the, everybody’s economy around the world you need skilled workers.
Philip Totaro: Tiktok and chat GPT are not going to solve the skilled trades issues that we’ve got across the world.
So while everybody’s enthusiastic about. Tech, the reality is skilled trades are a necessary part of actually attracting foreign direct investment as well, because, we talked before on the show about companies wanting to set up factories in Australia, for example for wind energy component production, but they can’t do it because they have a lack of skilled engineers and skilled trades people there that would be capable of, providing the necessary jobs and support that, that companies are going to need to be able to produce anything at scale.
They’re having to depend on, Malaysia, Indonesia, China, Vietnam, for a lot of the component imports. As opposed to having a significant base of domestic production there. Any time you want to talk about An IRA bill or in Europe now we’ve got this whole malaise of countervailing duties against China and all that.
The reality is if you’re not creating an environment where scared, skilled trades, people are going to thrive, you’re going to end up losing because you can’t just shift your entire economy to a tech economy and think you’re going to be fine. The stuff breaks and needs to be fixed. And if we don’t have people that know how to do that, We are going to lose.
We’re going to fail.
Joel Saxum: It’s, Allen, it’s a conversation you and I had in the truck today. There’s a foundational issue there within the culture in a lot of advanced countries where people don’t want to work with their hands anymore. And it’s going to be a downfall.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
Thanks for listening and please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News. Please subscribe to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. It’s free. And so is Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie.
It’s free! And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
