TUV Nord is employing drones and AI image recognition to inspect hybrid steel/concrete towers during the warranty period. Who will use them, what will they find, and how much will they save? Vineyard Wind will use Charles River Analytics’ Awarion system to protect whales and other marine life. The system’s algorithms were developed in part using videos taken on whale-watching tours. And in a move to de-risk its business, AEP sold $1.2B of renewables assets; IRG Acquisition Holdings will pick up a capacity of about 1,365MW. Joel explains why he sees more asset flipping in the future.
New standards in the US require turbines to be able to operate for at least one hour in extreme weather; the ruling is effective in four years. Everyone agrees it’s too little too late, so what’s the real solution? Wisconsin’s Quilt Block Wind is our Wind Farm of the Week – listen to find out why.
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Allen Hall: We’ve reached 100,000 downloads of this podcast. That’s a crazy number. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And thanks to everybody out there who downloads and listens every week. Our, our faithful listeners have gotten us to that threshold. It’s a, it’s a huge number and we more and more people listening to uptime every week, and we appreciate everybody doing that.
This week’s episode lot going on.
Joel Saxum: T u v Nord does some drone inspections of concrete towers. We talked a little bit about what are they looking for, how can they look forward to more efficiently, you know, kind of following bit of our experience in the Blade World. And then also Charles Rivers Analytics.
So they’ve teamed up with Vineyard wind to work w. With some AI machine learning and some sensor packages, sonar on the, in the, in the water. And basically thermal cameras and color cameras on the top side to look for whales and fishing gear and some other things that keep the impact down during offshore wind farm activities in the east coast.
Allen Hall: Then we’ll talk about AEP selling their renewables business to invent. And FE matches up with NERC to define extreme cold reliability standards to keep the lights on in places like Texas. And our wind Farm of the week is Quilt Block Wind Farm up in Wisconsin. I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum, and the soon to be guest host, a fully charged live event in Australia, Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Rosemary Barnes: Joel
Allen Hall: T UV Nord is using piloted drones to inspect concrete towers of wind turbines. And when I first saw this story, it’s probably been a month or so ago, I thought, uhoh new concrete wind turbine towers have problems, and evidently they do, and they’re working. With an undisclosed partner, and I assumed at the time that it was Nordex cuz Nordex uses a lot of concrete towers.
A, a quick search on Google. Said Nordex has got a couple thousand concrete towers out in service, so they’re concerned about having cracks in these towers as the age and get to the end of the warranty period. Right now they’re just taking pictures and looking for cracks, but obviously someone’s gotta fish through those and determine if there are cracks and if there are, if there are cracks, what they’re gonna do about ’em.
But it sounds like they’re gonna be moving to a more automated system to find these cracks and get ’em repaired before the warranty expires. So someone’s doing the into warranty campaign, a big one, and Lou of Any have way of doing this? I, I don’t think there is another way to inspect a concrete tower besides putting some eyeballs on it.
I
Joel Saxum: mean, visually. Yeah. N D T of course. Right. So doing, doing some N D T work to, but it’s Where do you start? Yeah. You’re looking at, you know, classically I’ve used, I’ve used ground penetrating radar. To look at rebar inside of concrete for, you know, different projects before. But that’s, again, that’s a, you know, those are big antennas.
It’s not that easy. It, and then you’re covering what you’re looking at with ground penetrating radar. Yes, it is a RA or image, right? It’s like a picture. But those pictures aren’t very big, right? So they’re dang near when you’re talking concrete tower, you’re talking, it’s a vector. It’s almost like a point image.
If you were to do a whole scan of that whole thing, it would take you forever. , but visually there’s a lot of things you can detect fairly easily, right? So we, you know, in the Blade world we talk about AI algorithms and all these things, and it’s very specialized, to be honest with you, AI algorithms, machine learning algorithms to pick out defects in blades.
with concrete towers. There’s so many other things made out of concrete, right? There’s bridge, pulpits and, and all, all kinds of stuff within the civil engineering world. All of every bridge and highway and the, you know, there’s, there’s concrete structures everywhere. So I would be willing to bet, and I’m not saying this cuz I know I’m not inspecting concrete at this stage of my life.
So I’m, I’m not in the knowing that in that sector, but I would be willing to bet that there is some off the shelf. That can pick some of this stuff up. So I would be almost willing to bet somewhere you can find, or you, you can get ahold of a company that has developed some kind of software to take visual input, whether it’s video or images, and do an AI recognition algorithm on it to, to help speed this process up, right?
Because You know, cracking and spalling. Big issues cuz once you spa off a piece of concrete that exposes the steel underneath. And I’m, I’m not an expert on concrete towers for wind turbines, but I imagine they have rebar in them. And I don’t know if that rebars epoxy coated or not. Cuz if it’s not epoxy coated and you get some cracking in spalling and there’s, and the, and whatever coating was put on the outside of these things, now you’re gonna get water ingress and you’re gonna start to ru rust that steel.
And once you do that, you’re in for some. .
Allen Hall: Well, that was my first question was isn’t it just easy to look for the rust marks? Because if you have some significant cracking in the concrete, you will see rust that’ll tell you everything, won’t it?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And those are the easy ones to pick out. Right? But I think that there’s not, there, there may be some stuff, some cracks that are developing it at an early stage that you won’t see.
You know? Here’s another way to do this as well. We’ve done this before in the past in Windpower lab, is. Before we all switched over to drones, the hot ticket on the market was a system by Corny a French company called Panel Blade. Have you heard of that one, Alan? No. So Panel Blade was a system developed by this French company that basically was a.
One inch c m o s d s l r camera with like a 600 millimeter lens on it, and it was on a tripod and it had a little robotic stand, and then you hooked it up to a laptop, right? So you’d stop the blades, you’d get like two meters off of the tower, and you’d stop the blades in a horizontal position, and then you’d point the camera up and you’d go like, okay, this is the route.
And then you’d manually kind of scroll over with the camera and say, this is the tip. , and then you would go, go and it would take the pictures in sequence by itself all the way along the blade with the correct overlap for you, and then you would say to the technician, okay, pitch the blade, you know?
Hundred 80 degrees. So you’d do that on all four blades. You’d do the suction side, pressure side, trailing edge, leading edge with that robotic camera from the ground, and then you’d roll to the next, and then you’d do the blade opposite, and then you’d roll for the third one. Right? So that was how inspections were done in an, in a quote unquote, automated fashion before drones became the hot ticket.
But you can also take that same exact camera back up, depending on the tower height, right? 40 meters from the tower and then do the same thing, point it at the base and then point it at the decel and then say, I’m doing the tower. Take pictures. So that was, and then you’d do it. do it on all four sides, like a compass, rose, northeast, Southwest.
You’d move around if you’re, you know, nice if you’re out in the field or something. But that was a way in the past of inspecting towers. But that, of course, that was steel towers. You could do it with concrete ones as well. But that’s a, just a good way of collecting imagery. It,
Allen Hall: it does make you wonder a little bit because gee’s been looking into the 3D printed concrete bases and like the lower portion of a tower, which is then you can stick a steel tube on top of it to make the turbine sit higher.
If we don’t have a lot of experience with concrete towers, besides, I think mostly Nordex, you wonder if it’s some of that feedback loop is going to start because now we have several years, five, six years of experience with it. Do we now understand? What the upside and downsides are of concrete towers.
Joel Saxum: You know, we’ve been using concrete as a, as a society in general for a lot of high-stress components for a long, long time. Every, you know, the majority of, I’m not gonna say the majority, a lot of bridges that you drive over and see heavy trucks going over just made outta concrete a lot of that pre-stressed concrete.
Right. And I don’t know if they do prestress on these towers or how they’re engineered to, to make them strong, but I think that there’s gotta be a way to make that to, to have towers. Strong enough to support the nelle and all these good things. And then of course, the out the outside of the. The coating.
You, you, you’re as good as your coating is on the outside, right? Because if you can keep it weathered from the storm, you’re great. Talk about these, these wind farms that are going offshore in the us. I’ve seen contracts floated around already for, I mean, the efforts are crazy and this is just, it’s for corrosion control, but it’s like, Hey, I need, I need 30 to 40 guys for six months.
What are they gonna be doing? They’re gonna be doing touch up paint on these towers offshore. Like what are you, cra Like, the amount of the, the money that goes into just corrosion control of touch up for these offshore things. So same kind of thing. If you have a concrete tower on on shore and we’re talking about cracks or spalling or you know, water getting into the concrete.
Concrete’s a sponge. So if you could stop it by having a good coating on the outside. You’re ahead of the game. I think,
Allen Hall: I think that’s what matters here. I I, and that’s what I’m wondering. If it didn’t have a good coating or if it got exposed a lot to salt, which can be pretty aggressive against concrete.
They’re having some issues there. So it’s just
Joel Saxum: an interesting news story. Anybody that lives in the north, that’s, you don’t put salt on your concrete sidewalks because. After one or two summers, or one or two winters, they will be full of pits and holes and all kinds of stuff. You can, you can ask my dad about
Allen Hall: that one.
And that’s why the bridges, the bridge pillars and abuts here in the northeast look the way that they do, where you can see the rebar underneath of ’em. And a lot of them, because the salt, it’s so aggressive, so aggressive.
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Allen Hall: Well, as we keep searching for whale and ways to avoid running into them with ships there’s a company outside of Boston, Massachusetts that’s looking into having an automated system to. Identify whales using, its sort of an electro optical system, an infrared video to detect them.
And vineyard wind has partnered with them. So Vineyard winds that new wind farmer off the coast of Massachusetts where there’s a lot of whales. So Vineyard, wind and Charles River Analytics are working together to protect the. Wales and other marine mammals joined the construction of the Vineyard One project.
And the Charles River Analytics has, has a system called Ion . Just a little bit of an odd name. The, yeah, it, it, it works in conjunction with other detection technologies that are on this, on the. And it uses some artificial intelligence and it’s a computer vision system to support the human lookouts.
And Joel, before the podcast, you were telling me about these human lookouts, but I, I guess the people on ships with binoculars looking for the whales, so they.
Joel Saxum: Don’t run into them. Yeah. So past life this is where that this knowledge kind of comes from for me was in oil and gas exploration, onshore and offshore.
So when you’re offshore, of course you wanna make sure that you’re not harming any wildlife as, as least you can. Right? So, The energy that you use is in air cannons. So you’re shooting off these air cannons you know, that could be crazy amounts of power in them. So it might be 3000 psi and you’re shooting off 32 of these air cannons that are the size of a basketball all at once every eight seconds.
Just boom, boom, boom. Right? So, but what you do before you start doing that in an area to make sure that you’re clear of any marine mammal species or anything like that, is you ramp them up. So you might shoot one gun at 10%, like barely enter any energy, and you ramp that one gun up to a hundred percent energy, and then you add in two, and then you add in four, and then you add in eight, and then you add in six.
So, so you’re slowly. You’re putting out a little bit of a signal and then you’re slowly getting that signal to be louder and louder and louder. Cuz what? When you shoot off an air cannon in the water, it creates a shockwave. And that shockwave is acoustic energy that travels through the water call. So if you do it small enough at the beginning, any whales.
Sea life seals, sea otters, these kind of things that are fish in the area will go like, oh, I want to get away from that, right at that little tiny thing. So they start swimming away and by the time you have ramped up, the area’s clear and you haven’t harmed anything. So the people that are on the vessels are called marine mammal observers.
And in an oil and gas in, in US waters is one what the majority of my experience was. They are the, they’re the most powerful person on the boat. You always think that, oh, the captain of the ship, you know, and these might be 150 foot long, 200 foot long ships. The captain of the ship is the, the one in charge.
The marine mammal observers got more power than anybody because they’ll shut that ship down. They’ll shut your shift down, they’ll shut any activity you’re doing down if they see any kind of marine mammal in the water. Sometimes on a vessel you have. Two, three or four of ’em, de depending on what kind of activities you’re undertaking.
You know, like it might be, if you’re gonna be operating 24 hours, you may have two on shift at a time. And that one, one during the day might be out on the bridge with binoculars, literally just scanning the horizon, looking for, you know, a whale surfacing or, or any other sign or signal of, of some kind of marine mammal in the area.
And then you may have another one looking at a you know, a sonar. Screen, you know, in the bridge of the boat to see what they can see in the subsurface. So there’s two, two areas, right? You have the above the water and basically below the water. And you need two people to cover that. So, and those people will switch back and forth and whatnot.
So the same thing that goes for any kind of regular operations. They’re, they’re having this these marine mammal observers, I’m going to imagine on these vessels that are doing installations and whatnot of these offshore wind farms. They’re there as basically agents of public agencies to protect the, the fisheries, so US, U S D A, US Forest Service the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management who, whatever, whatever agency says in the contract, you have to have these people on there.
They’re usually work for a separate company or something, and they have biology degrees and whatnot, and then they’re on that boat as a part of the contract.
Allen Hall: It seems like automated technology or AI technology would. Better way of detecting those sea creatures. The human eye, looking out on the ocean can get blinded pretty quickly.
Joel Saxum: You get tired, you get blinded, you get, you get, you know, as, as much as you don’t wanna say it, if you’re out there on shift, right? So you might be that, that marine mamm observer might have those binoculars in their hand for 42 days straight. Standing out there, getting sunburnt and, you know what I mean?
So that person gets tired. And you, you, you, you know the hu you have an e element of human error there. So you have the element of human error, but you also don’t have any traceability. Right. I’ve done, I’ve done things before where you have pipeline inspections and there’s someone like, how do you do your pipeline inspections on land?
And I’m like, oh, we have a guy that flies down him with a notebook in his lap, , and if he sees it leak, he writes it down on the notebook. Would you rather have that or would you rather have someone out there like with a drone, with thermal imagery that has timestamps and date stamps and X, Y, z and all this stuff on those things?
Right? So you’re gonna go from a, an analog type, marine mammal observer on the vessel deck or behind the sonar looking at things, noting things in an Excel spreadsheet or writing things in a notebook to all of a sudden now you have, if as they’re doing ANA analytics, we’re running AI models or machine learning models on the imagery that they’re picking.
which they’re talking about using electro, optical and infrared. So electrical, optical infrared, basically you’re saying it’s gonna, it, they have a color camera and a thermal camera. That’s the, the, the easy way of saying it. So they’ll pick up heat signatures on the top of the water. You can’t pick those up.
Subsea, of course, you pick up heat signatures on the top of the water, or you’ll pick up visual things. So you might pick up a fishing buoy. Boat or a, a fishing boat, or is it a pleasure craft? Is it someone else sailing? Now, you don’t have to take notes. The AI will pick it up and say like, Hey if, if they, if they can pick it up from two cameras on the vessel, they can triangulate where it is too, right?
So if you have a, a direction in the, or you know, in some kind of compass calibration in the, in the camera. Now, you know. The vessel was pointed. You know, the, the work vessel that we’re on was pointed at, you know, a hundred degrees. This thing was off at 50 degrees and it was four kilometers away.
Now you have a position on that boat and you know where their fishing gear is. So now you know where their fishing gear is that they’ve been deploying. Well, that’s great. Now you have record of it, and you can, you can feed that into a database. So that’s one thing. Now, you can also put in. Things that might be stuff that you won’t pick up as a person, like fishing buoys or something like that, or like a, a whale surfacing.
You might miss it. AI doesn’t miss that. AI picks it up, notes it, and it gives you, and it will take a snapshot and put a log together, and then all of a sudden, like at the end of the day, your job becomes reviewing the logs of the things that you, the AI found or the, the algorithms found, rather than having to be the eyes to do it.
The same thing works. Sub C. So experience from Wind Power Lab with us. We did a project with the University of Ahu a few years ago called the Beca Project. B Beca, b i C A, and it was a bird collision and avoidance. So there’s a, there’s a protected species of goose in Germany and whenever these geese are near wind farms, they have to curtail the wind farms cuz they don’t want.
You know, mess with their mating patterns or anything of, of these sorts or, you know, have one, but god forbid get hit by a blade, that’d be not good. So the project was recreational grade, not even professional grade. Radar put put, we put one flat to pick up a basically in the XY plane, and then we turned one 90 degrees on the side to pick up the Z plane.
So now you had mult, multiple radar signatures that were in basically a domed. Feeding into a system and the smart software guys in the background at Wind Power. Wrote an AI algorithm to be able to pick these birds up outta the radar signatures so that you would get an automatic detection notification, Hey this, cuz you can see different kinds of birds.
Some, some birds sit and fly in a circle, you know, like a vulture or something. Some of ’em fly this way, some fly in a V. So if they’re flying in a V pattern, well that might be some geese if they’re, if they’re doing this where they’re looking for somewhere to land, they might be this type of thing. If they’re this size, they might be this kind of bird.
If it flies in a swarm at night, they’re probably bats, right? So you can kind of pick. Things up from a radar signature, and if you write an algorithm that will take that data and sort it out, I think the ion system here from Charles Rivers Analytics is applying that same kind of idea, but to Subi Sonar.
So now you have the thermal and rgb, you know, color imagery on the surface to pick boats and buoys and all these different things up. But you also have an algorithm that is running on the sonar data subsurface to pick up whales or fish or nets or whatever else on the. or in the in
Allen Hall: the water column. If you wanted to know where the whales were traveling though, why don’t we put this same technology in a bunch of buoys that already exist out there and just say, keep looking.
Put some solar cells out there that are transmit back and forth.
Joel Saxum: I think we do have some of that, you know, that and that, that, and on those, on some of those buoys in the, in, you know, in the meoc ocean phase of the, the studies for these wind farms, it also has acoustic listening devices so they can pick up when the whales are doing their, their acoustic communication.
So I think it’s okay, so the, the. Article here states that Vineyard Wind One England, Charles River Analytics, I, I think that’s fantastic, but it’s also a great PR move by Vineyard wind one to put this out there. Right. So, and, and the other side of it is, is, you know, while it would be nice to have this like a Charles Rivers analytics type system on every buoy up and down the coast and on every boat out in the water, I mean, it’s.
I’m not gonna say it’s not open source, that’s not the word I’m looking for, but it’s not standardized across the, you know, the entire fleet that everything has the same kind of system on it, right? So, like, individually in the capitalist, capitalist market, we have to come up with solutions for different people to use.
And this is where we’re at right now, seems
Allen Hall: like a very solvable problem. And it, I, from the sounds of it, vineyard wind’s gonna run into difficulty this summer. Things progress and the whales come up and the sharks come up for the summer. There’s just gonna be a lot of activity of the water and having more eyeballs and ears in the water
Joel Saxum: makes sense to me.
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be tough to be on one of those construction crews vessels. I think they’re gonna get messed with pretty hard. I, the, I, it’ll get, it’ll get to the point, I believe, and this is just a, the prediction from my side where they will have to end up having escort vessel. To keep perimeters while they’re working cuz I’ve seen it before.
I,
Allen Hall: I think that’ll happen too. I agree. I agree with you
Joel Saxum: there.
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Allen Hall: American Electric Power has entered into an agreement to sell. Its basically four 1.4 gigawatts of unregulated contractor renewable portfolio to I rrg acquisition holdings. Which is a partnership owned by Invent Energy, C D P Q, and funds managed by Blackstone Infrastructure, and they’re selling it for a value of about 1.5 billion, including project debt.
A e p expects to net about 1.2 billion in cash after paying its taxes, transaction fees, and other adjustments. All the payouts to the lawyers there. And what a e p plans to do with that money? Is it, it’s part of a of a larger effort where they’re planning to spend about 40 billion over the next couple of years.
In its regulated business adding about 6, 16, 17 gigawatts of new generation and transmission line infrastructures. So this is in line with a lot of other things that are happening in the renewable business. There’s sales of large of wind turbines and solar fields. In this particular case there was 14 projects.
Of wind and, and which is about one point, let’s see, 1.2 gigawatts of wind and about 170 megawatts of solar spread over 11 states. So this is a wide geo geo, yeah. Geography wise, it’s, it’s a wide area. Now, Joel, this is not. New, but it seems to be all the trend. So Phil Terro joined in today on LinkedIn and said, this is a great deal.
Buy Banerjee to acquire this wind and solar asset from a e p. You said the assets are acquired are operating in at or above P 75 and the price point offsets aeps capital commitments. So, AEP makes money on the deal and Venter Energy gets some pretty good working assets to add to their portfolio.
So both sides come out as winners in this negotiation deal. Completion of a deal. The deals keep, keep getting bigger. , right? Duke Energy was one like, oh, it’s Duke Energy. You know, they’re not a huge player, but they’re a decent sized player. And then a e p, which is a big player started selling assets.
Does it continue on for the next year or two?
Joel Saxum: Oh, I think it’s just smart strategy, right? Like, so if you’re, there’s, there’s two ways I would look at it. if I was, if this was my strategy. So the strategy we’re looking at here is build unregulated assets. And when we say unregulated versus regulated, unregulated means not a part of a public utility, right?
So like if you’re, if you live in Minnesota, you may have Excel energy as your power provider, and they’re a public utility in Minnesota. If they. Wind assets or solar assets that are on their grid, then that is technically regulated versus unregulated. Which would be like if, if they had an Excel energy thing that was in Ercot on someone else’s grid, and it’s not something that they, they may manage the asset, but they don’t manage the, the whole public utility part of it, then it’s, then it’s unregulated.
So the idea of, okay, so if I am a E P American Electric Power and I was sitting. Four or five years ago going, I got an idea for a strategy guys. Let’s build a bunch of assets. And when we build them, let’s make sure they’re operating at a stellar rate. As Phil said, they’re above P 75. They’re, they’re kicking butt, right?
So that they look really attractive to. A potential buyer. So to do that, of course, you need to do great due diligence on, you know, what kind of technology you’re installing, how you’re building it, where you’re building it, these kind of things. But you also have to have good o and m strategies behind it, or some kind of strategy there where you know, if it’s an FSA or someone else is taking care of it or something.
Either way. . You want to get the first few years of these things really, really killing it as far as uptime guarantees and whatnot, or uptime percentage and whatnot. And then you say, we’re gonna dump this thing, we’re gonna pay it off, but we’re also gonna make some money on it and we’re gonna take that money and we’re gonna roll it back into something else.
So that’s the strategy that we’re starting to see take place. And it’s not just in the us that’s a global strategy. We’re starting to see it with some, some companies in Europe as well. One of the things I was thinking of as we were reading through this, We’ve had a lot of conversations with Phil on PPAs.
If I was American Electric Power, I may be apt to sign a low PPA to get a project green lit and on the, on the grid, but I think when I sign that ppa, I would sign a, a note in there that says, if this thing changes hands, the new owner gets the right. renegotiate the p p a, Ooh. Right? So that when this thing gets dumped, maybe inve energy and, and I’m saying, I don’t know if that could happen or not.
I don’t know if it does happen, but if I was, if, if I was, you know, my silly self sitting in a. Writing and contracts, I would write that and see if I could get it passed because then when in Invent Energy Cdpq, cuz Cdpq owns 50 some odd percent of energy and Blackstone is, is capital. So we’ll just say this is invent energy buying this from these guys.
Basically, when invent energy gets it, invent energy might be like, Ooh, this is attractive to buy. Because now we can renegotiate the PPA possibly once it’s started in the grid. Otherwise, that PPA might be locked in for 10 to 20 years or something like that. .
Allen Hall: Well, does it give them access to the grid though?
Right. It may give you access points into the grid because they’re already feeding it where you would have to wait in line to to feed that transmission line. You’re just, you’re, you’re just buying it right away. You might
Joel Saxum: have an asset where it’s a hundred megawatt wind farm, but it’s been permitted for 200 and now you can put a hundred mags of solar behind it, or more wind farm.
I’m not sure. Like I said, I haven’t dug into it, but that’s, that would be a, definitely a strategy as well.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It just seems like the, the, the ability to get connected to the grid is much more difficult than actually creating the, the wind farm or the solar field. It’s a weird situation we’re in.
Joel Saxum: It’s backwards. You’re starting to see things take place here where some, some companies are becoming more. Owner operators and some are becoming more developers. Right. In this, in this like the big Duke, I think the Duke deal was like, or the, when it was for sale. I don’t know if, I don’t know what happened with those assets yet right now, but it was like 4 billion.
Right. But Duke also operates in both of those spaces. Duke operates as a, a regulated utility out east and in an unregulated in some of their Texas assets and stuff like that. So they were selling a bunch of their unregulated stuff, I believe as. Yeah. So you’re starting to see, yeah, I think you’ll start to see some more and more.
This invent energy has a, has a, a niche where they, I mean, they also develop things too, right? Invent energy one, some, some of the auctions for the West coast, offshore wind and whatnot. So they do a little bit of the above. They’re a big, they’re a big conglomerate. They’ve got the power to do that. But you, you may see the formation of more of these secondhand, I’m gonna buy and operate these rather than a strategy of developing.
we’ll see how it kind of develops because the market is becoming large enough where those things can kind of start to separate themselves out as
Allen Hall: well. Yeah, and if you’re not in it for the long term in, in Invent Energy’s, it’s definitely aggressive, right? They’re aggressive at getting assets, getting into the grid, making big gains if you’re Yeah, it’s, it’s gonna be a battle, isn’t it?
It’s
Joel Saxum: starting to look a lot more and more, to be honest with you, like the oil and gas. , and I’m always making references to it because I was in it for, you know, 10, 15 years, whatever. But oil and gas fields that people may not know this, they’re bought and sold like houses, right? Like, they’re like, like someone, like it’s, it’s literally like flipping homes.
Someone will buy something that like, hey, this, this used to produce an average, you know, all these wells used to produce an average of a hundred barrels per day and now you know per well on this lease site and now they’re down to. , well, I’m gonna pay pennies on the dollar for what it costs you to develop.
I’m gonna come in there, but I’m gonna over, I’m gonna work over every one of these, and I may do a CO2 injection in the field or a, you know, a steam injection in the field and pressurize the thing back up. Now I went from a hundred barrels, I’m kicking ’em out at one 20 now, and then all of a sudden, someone else might come in and buy it at that one 20.
So there’s people literally like flipping them. Like you’d put new, new cabinets and flooring in your house. So you may start to see that in the, in the renewable energy asset world, as well as there’s so many players. maybe buying, flipping, adjusting, you know, kind of It’s gonna be cool to see
Allen Hall: develop.
Yeah. It’s, it is happening as, as we speak. Yeah. And I think the, the inflationary pressure put on by the Fed are gonna feed this. So you, you’re going either gonna be in or you’re gonna be out. It’s decision time, you know, looks like a lot of boards are deciding to be out of things that are outside their normal operating business.
Joel Saxum: If there’s one thing I can see from it is it, Underlying for me, from my standpoint is the, the importance of o and m for these assets. If you, if you, if you run ’em into the ground, they’re not gonna be worth anything. Right. And you have, you have companies out there like, man, if, if, if, if nobody’s followed drone based now Zeit view and what they’re doing for solar assets, because this is wind and solar assets and how they’re doing their You know, countrywide, solar scans and grading of solar assets.
It’s such a cool, they’re literally flying inspections, so on solar assets, thermal and RGB on spec. And then selling the, you can either sell the data back to the operators themselves, you know, with a manned aircraft take flying all over the states. You can either sell it back to the operator themselves, or you can start to sell it to financial agencies and insurance companies and all this stuff.
So everybody is gonna. How your assets are doing and what shape they’re in. So staying up on o and m on all, all fronts is gonna be very important for this kind of business model to take
Allen Hall: shape. Well, an anybody is interested in Phil Toro’s research into this deal, just, just go visit intel store.com and if you’re looking to sell some assets, you probably want to talk to Phil because he has a pretty good bead on what your assets are Probably.
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Allen Hall: The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has approved new extreme cold reliability standards for power plants, and the standards come with acknowledgement. By the commission that the new rules do not go far enough. The commission sent the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which is the nonprofit regulator that sets standards for the industry Fe St.
Nerc, back to the drawing board in several areas. What FERC is essentially saying is, yes, this is, this is good stuff from nerc, but. The generator weatherization requirements are pretty loose, and there’s really no hard and fast changes that are going to happen. And because we’ve had a couple of really cold storms, particularly in Texas and there’s one in kind of North Carolina, Tennessee area where blackouts happen because things froze up.
They were looking to basically increase the standards and saying, here, here’s how we’re going to make the grid more reliable when it gets. If the, at the end of the day when you, when I read through a lot of this guidance material or regulatory material, Rosemary, a lot of it was about reporting. Go through your system, determine what things may be susceptible to cold.
Show us you’ve given training to everybody so that they know what to look for when it gets cold outside and. , but it didn’t really change the the weather. It didn’t change the ability of the equipment to handle the weather. Better way to describe it. And a, a kicker to all this is that the standards require.
That the industry weatherize its equipment to operate for one hour at extreme cold temperatures starting in April of 20 27, 4 years from now. So the , the wind turbine operators, solar farm operators, gas plant operators need to make sure they have the ability to withstand one hour of cold temperatures in four years.
It doesn’t seem like they’ve really gone far enough here.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s an interesting, an interesting issue and kind of, I, I guess it’s a good example of y you know the, the downsides of kind of just leaving it all up to the, the free market, because none of these generators it, it’s not that any of them couldn’t winterize their equipment.
You know, technologies exist. Have been, you know, operating for a, a long time, that will keep any of these technologies operating through cold weather, very cold weather. I mean, obviously. Canada doesn’t have constant blackouts or you know, Northern Europe, but like there’s all sorts of wake holder places that manage to have reliable electricity grids through much, much harsher winters.
But it just, it’s simply, it costs more. So it’s not. It’s not really that it’s a challenge in terms of the technology. It’s that you have to pay a little bit more for these technologies. So you need, you know, heaters on pumps and I dunno, all, all sorts of random things need to change when you know that you’re gonna be operating in cold temperatures.
And so, I guess if you’ve got like a totally free, free market, then you are deciding, well, how many hours of the year on average would I expect to be operating in these cold temperatures? How much money would I make in, in those hours? If my system worked and how much will it cost to winterize so that they can be operating there.
And my assumption is that in the, it, the past companies have generators have made these kind of, you know, calculus and decided that it’s not financially worth it to them to be able to operate through these pretty rare events. . It’s not, they’re, they’re not like freakishly rare. I know that Texas freeze was something like a one in 10 year type cold snap.
So it’s not like, oh wow, we could never have predicted this. It’s more just that, yeah, it’s gonna happen every now and then, but it’s not worth us maintaining all our cold weather equipment for yeah, one in 10 year storm. And obviously that’s not good enough for people that rely on electricity.
Cause people, I mean, people died in that in that event and. It’s not good enough to have a system failure every 10 years on average. So yeah, the regulator needs to, to do something about it, but unless the financial incentives line up some way, then there’s always gonna be a reason for companies to try and find loopholes or to, you know just try and avoid doing what they.
Because just because you’ve told someone they have to go through and you know, identify what needs to be winterized doesn’t mean that they’re then going to do it One. You know accurately or really in depth and really make sure they’ve got a very robust system. In winter. It’s kind of, you know, if there’s no money to be made, then it incentivizes them to do a half halfhearted job and just kind of, you know, reporting a few line items.
Oh yeah, we put this heater in here and it cost us a hundred dollars and now we’re winterized. And then, you know, the storm comes, oh no. It turns out that our system wasn’t right. It, you know, there needs to be a penalty for, for actually failing and. Yeah, I guess that’s the two option is one, a penalty for failing under the conditions that they are, you know, required to be able to ride through or so much upside potential that they want, you know, the profits from those cold hours.
So obviously like somewhere like Texas where they have a pretty free electricity market and the price of electricity varies so much during that Texas freeze, the price went up so high. , anyone that was able to generate and sell electricity through that period just, you know, made heaps and heaps of money.
So that would be another option. But you need really high maximum prices for that to work, for events that are as infrequent as one in 10 years. And yeah, my understanding is that around that sort of frequency, you’re going to need more stick approach than a carrot approach.
Allen Hall: Well, Joel, didn’t Texas lower that bar?
They, they limited the maximum pricing during these events, I thought to $2,000 per megawatt hour. In, in, in the li last icing event. It was upwards of 9,000 I, if I recall correctly. So they, they put the limit on the top. So you can’t, there’s no. Commercial incentive to make $4,000 a megawatt hour. Right now,
Rosemary Barnes: they’ve done the opposite of what they would’ve needed to do if they wanted the market to be able to take care of it.
So they’ve taken away the, the upside. So now they have to use the, the stick or some other kind of carrot. You know, they could pay people a certain number of generators to be winterized. Because I mean, it’s not, I don’t think it’s necessarily the right thing to require every single generator to be able to withstand a very cold weather event.
And in the example of wind turbines, it’s, it’s hard and expensive to maintain a de-icing system to use once a decade. You, you know, that would really just be a huge Cost on the system that you wouldn’t see a return for, for why not just say, you know, all of the, the gas generators have to do this and we pay them for that.
To me you’d probably end up with a lower cost overall for doing that. But yeah, that’s not the path that they seem to go down. Well,
Allen Hall: what’s the problem in Texas in, in North Carolina slash Tennessee, the fact that. Not the fact that the, a lot of systems froze and failed is that they didn’t have any advanced warning about.
They didn’t know that they were gonna go down at the times that they did. So is, is this one hour buffer? Just to, to give the people that manage the grid kind of a heads up, like we need to bring on other energy sources to keep the grid alive or to tell people to start powering off things so we don’t take down the whole grid.
Is, is it, are they just buying an an hour? Is that what the intent of this is in
Joel Saxum: the Texas case or that Texas, we’re talking about winter storm Uri there. That was two years ago. There’s still lawsuits going on around the negligence for that because like Rosemary, like you said, there was some deaths, there was some extreme circumstances around it, but it wasn’t necessarily the, in that, in that storm, it wasn’t necessarily the renewable assets that.
Down. It was more the natural gas fired thermal plants. That actually, cuz then once they started cascading, they just started casing. So even if you had, say you have 10, 10 plants and the draw on the system is high, cuz this draw on the system well is super high as well because a lot of places in Texas are heated with electric baseboards.
So once one of ’em fails, it doesn’t. matter as much in my mind if the next two or three or four in line are winterized, because once they get that spike load on ’em, that’s what takes ’em down. It’s that cascading issue. Right. So there’s the like the one, and it’s very, I’m sure, I’m hoping that in this legislation and in this written thing, there’s.
Specifics because when they say operate at extreme cold temperatures for one hour, starting in April, 2027, to me, that’s just ridiculous because also what’s extreme cold to you, because extreme cold to someone from Northern Minnesota is 40 below. And extreme colds of someone from Texas is like 20 degrees.
So there’s a, there’s a big difference there, right? But it’s a tough one because you wanna let the, the free market take care of some of these things. But when you start to put into, because that’s the American way, right? But when you start to put into fact that if the free market fails, people lose their lives, something needs to change, right?
Like it’s not, it’s not cool to leave it up to the free. and people die from it because they failed. Like, oh, that’s a fine on you, naughty naty. Like, that’s, that’s not, that’s not right.
Rosemary Barnes: But the interesting thing about this event was that, so maybe generators didn’t forecast that they were gonna go offline, but the storm was certainly forecast.
And I know that you know, people were warned that cold weather was coming. People with electric cars were plugging them in ahead of time to make sure that they had a full charge before the storm. You know, this. Doesn’t just come out of nowhere. People confuse that a bit with, you know, variability of renewables.
It’s tied to the weather but it doesn’t just, you know, it. All of a sudden go cold in one hour period. You can see it. Even if it, even if it does go cold in a one hour period, you know that it’s coming for days ahead of time usually. And so they could prepare. And especially with you know, the spike in demand that’s expected.
There’s things that you could do to reduce that if people were, were willing. But I think that it’s a. It’s a tough sell in, in the United States, which is, you know, so much concerned with individual liberty. And I you know, as a total outsider, my impression is that Texas is kind of, you know, like the, the most, the most like that out of anywhere.
So, you know, if you say, oh, okay, you’ve got an indoor pool that you are heating or you an outdoor pool or you know, jacuzzi or something, you can’t use that because we’re about to have a huge spike in electricity. You, you could actually take a bunch of loads that are really, really. Don’t need to be on.
And you could curtail those so that everyone could keep their heating on. And you didn’t have a problem. I know that I’ve seen articles about y you know, there’s sections of downtown. Businesses had their lights on overnight, you, you know, while people were freezing to death. And there’s heaps of examples of just really unfair allocation of electricity because once you have a mismatch between supply and demand, once you’ve got a short.
Wall, it’s not so easy to control where it goes, but if you’re able to ahead of time, you know, if you’ve got enough smart appliances or even you can do it the old fashioned way and you don’t have someone send you a text message or ring you on the phone and say, you know, what, can you turn off in your house?
Can you avoid Dr, you know, doing a lot of laundry drying using your dryer for this couple of days? Or, you know, anything like that. You could get enough of a difference to not have, have blackouts. And that’s a, a way cheaper way of doing it than winterizing every single generator in the, the country.
But it does rely on people being willing to, you know, forego their jacuzzi at a time when people are, are freezing to death somewhere else in the. Alan, you’re shaking your head. You don’t, you don’t believe that people are, are prepared to make that trade off between their jacuzzi and somebody else’s life.
Allen Hall: I don’t think those two equate. I think you’re drawing a connection that doesn’t actually exist. There’s nobody have the lights on in the office that then the sucking power out of some you know, old lady’s heating system. That’s not the way it works. However they, they have ways to address it, right?
They have ways to, to, to shut off power to different parts of a community or in two cities such that it’s a rolling blackout. That’s what they do in California. But I don’t think you design a system to have rolling blackouts. That’s not where you want to go here,
Rosemary Barnes: right? No. And it’s not, it that’s not targeted enough either.
So I’m not saying that someone’s jacuzzi was sucking heat out of some old grandma’s house. I’m saying that because the, the demand spiked. A certain proportion, like maybe 10%, 20%, I don’t know. Some amount of demand is, is not critical. Things that need to be on right now. It’s not even things that you need for your, your, your comfort really.
And you know, when you, you have a certain load that. Pushes you over the amount that you can supply, then you get uncontrolled blackouts. You don’t just get to say, okay, we’re turning off all the jacuzzis. You are just like, okay, we’re turning off all the power in this area. And if you don’t have a, you know, a backup uninterruptable power supply, then you know, your e everything is, is, is switched off at your place for a certain period.
And they weren’t beyond that. You know, it wasn’t rolling blackouts, it was extended blackouts. The
Joel Saxum: difference in Texas, though there as well, is that. The people. Don’t understand cold. And I’m, and I’m being a hundred percent honest with this, because like that, that statement, Rosemary, like you’re saying, you’re a hundred percent correct.
Like if we could get everybody to shut your laptop down, turn some lights off, like, and lower the, the demand on the whole grid by at the micro level. Fixes at the macro level. They do that in Texas, but they do it in the summertime when they’re like, Hey, don’t run your AC or Don’t turn your AC below 76 degrees, or whatever it is.
Right? So that stuff happens in the summertime here and under Everybody understands it cuz they’re like, oh, it’s hot as hell in Texas. We’re gonna get blackouts if we don’t turn our ACS down. So people will actually do that and they won’t do their. Their laundry at 5:00 PM When everybody comes home from school and work and is doing all these activities that sup, that suck a lot of energy, they’ll do it.
They’ll do laundry at midnight or do laundry at 9:00 AM after people have gone to work or whatever that answer may be. But when it came to the cold, , they didn’t know how to cope. They didn’t know how to do anything. Right. It was, it was, it was wild to see being from the north and living through that storm in Texas and listening to the people talk about it.
Like, man, how do you not know this kind of stuff? Like, how, how do you like, just, just it, it was, it was mind blowing, to be honest with you, but it’s, it’s just a, a, they’re not used to it. Right. But I, I believe that these events are gonna become more and more common and. Fe and Nerc and the people who are regulating the the power grids are going to do something, actually do something to help the public.
Because what they did here is, is word service. It’s just lip service. There’s nothing, there’s nothing here that’s gonna do anything. Well,
Allen Hall: in the I R A bill we had 370 billion assigned to renewable energy products projects. Where was weatherizing? Solar and wind farms. Part of that, I don’t think that it was, but it, it seems like a pretty good use for money, right?
Joel Saxum: Right. Solar farms will work better. They’re more efficient when it’s cold out anyways.
Rosemary Barnes: But I mean, are we really talking about going through and retrofitting deicing systems onto every winter turbine in Texas? I mean, it’s just a, a stunning waste of money, in my opinion, to, to, to do that. Texas is
Allen Hall: a huge area.
It, it didn’t. Galveston, it hit sort of northwest Texas. Correct. Joel?
Joel Saxum: Well hit Galveston. I hit Galveston too, for sure. Hard
Allen Hall: like it did in Northwest Texas. I know. That’s, it’s a huge state. It’s the size of many countries.
Joel Saxum: Oh yeah. Are you, we’re talking about the same storm, right? We’re talking about the one back in 20.
Yeah. Oh yeah. I was living in Houston. I was living in Houston at the time, and Houston was frozen over like it was dec December in Minnesota. 15 degrees, 10, 15 degrees, 18 degrees cold enough to, I mean, like I said, the other day we were talking that storm did more monetary damage to Texas than Hurricane Harvey did.
And Hur and, and Hurricane Harvey rained 48 inches of rain on Houston. Right. It was just, yeah, I mean, it just like, cuz it broke pipes everywhere and it, it just did so much damage. Well, I, I go back to then,
Allen Hall: What we’re gonna do for four years, we’re not gonna do anything in for four years, essentially.
Rosemary Barnes: Well, if it’s a one in 10 year storm, then we’re not due for another , another six or seven, right?
That’s how it works. put it in your calendar for 2031.
Joel Saxum: statistics is easy.
Rosemary Barnes: No, but Alan, you’re right, that so yeah, it was widespread across Texas, but it wasn’t widespread across the whole United States. And in this specific example, what really, really made it worse was the fact that Texas is not well interconnected to the surrounding areas.
That’s by far the cheapest way to to, to winterize, to, you know, protect yourself in against winter conditions or any kind of extreme weather. They’re never gonna cover such a huge geography as the whole us. So if you have lots of interconnectors, then you can you know, draw on the other, other states’ resources at your time of need.
But Texas has chosen not to do that. So they have to go for more expensive solutions as a, as a result. And that’s, that’s their right to, to choose, you know, whatever way they want to get reliability. But they’re finding out that it’s, it’s very, very difficult. This new solution is not gonna work.
Right. Would that , would that have prevented if they had the new thing in place at the time of the previous storm? Would that have prevented anything much? I, I don’t think so. That should be the first test,
Joel Saxum: surely actual physical retrofits that this, this bill or this, this, this new reliability standards recommends, or, or, or pushes into place, doesn’t do anything.
It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it does nothing. It, it, it trains people on what to look for. Like, that doesn’t stop the grid from going down or stop a pump from freezing up that it doesn’t do anything specific, right? So having to weatherize generators so they can withstand a one hour extreme cold is ridiculous.
When extreme cold comes in, it’s 48 hours, 72 hours, 96. One hour doesn’t save you anything. I bet
Rosemary Barnes: they do better if they started subsidizing home batteries or requiring, you know, electric cars to have vehicle to grid or two, two-way, or at least vehicle to home capabilities. I, I bet you get way more bang for your buck.
I mean, certainly when it comes to the wind turbines, which is just, you know, it’s crazy to, you can’t really even retrofit to a, a, you know, reasonable. Had a reasonable cost and capability. But
Joel Saxum: in Texas you also run into political issues, right? So there’s a lot of very, very conservative people here. So like the, you don’t see.
Electric vehicles in this state whatsoever anyway, so a V two X problem wouldn’t solve it because I, I can go and drive around in between, around San Antonio for three hours and I might see one, maybe if I go to Austin, I’ll see some. But if you go to Houston, you’re not gonna see any, and you go to Dallas, you’re not gonna see any either.
So they, there’s a, there’s an issue there. Two battery banks, solar panels and houses. You know, a distributed grid type thing. It’s just not here. But
Rosemary Barnes: aren’t Texans pretty into self, self, self-reliance, independence? Shouldn’t they love to have like an electric pickup truck that can run their house for three days and then, you know, connect it to solar panels on the roof and you never have to deal with the u utility or the, the government or anything?
Well, it, it seems to me like it’s a perfect match.
Joel Saxum: You would think so, but what the difference is, is, is because classical Texans that have a lot of money here, Are have usually made it from oil and gas or some kind of egg background. You can go to any ranch around here. You may not see solar panels or you may see solar panels on the water pumps for the cattle, but you won’t see a solar panel on the ranch house.
But what you will see is a propane 10 kilowatt generator out back. So y yes, you are correct about the. don’t be in my business. I’m, I, I’m self, self-sustaining. I can do these things, but renewable energy wise stuff, you don’t see as much. You won’t see a, a ranch with its own wind turbines or a big solar field out front.
Like I’ve been around the state quite a bit, and you just don’t, it’s just not there yet. Even when people like the, oh, the neighbor, the neighbors sold a hundred acres to someone who’s putting a one of them damn solar fields. Like, yeah, that’s great. Why would they do that? They can. Yeah. Why would they do that?
That’s good. Cattle grazing land. ,
Rosemary Barnes: you can graze amongst solar panels. There’s plenty of sheep, sheep farms co-located with solar farms in Australia and obviously wind turbines as well. But I mean, there is heaps of wind and solar in Texas. So, you know, if you look at the actual stats for the amount of wind and solar in the us.
And the growth rates. And, you know, Texas is right up there. So people must like money more than they hate renewables. Like, I guess, like it’s not so strong, their hatred of renewables that they’re, that they will turn down an opportunity to make a lot of money. ,
Joel Saxum: the majority of renewable generation in Texas is out in western Texas, so Abilene, Midland, Lubbock, all out there.
That land for the most part. If you can drive around and see all these things, all these wind turbines and stuff, that land is arid dry garbage. Like they’re not even running cattle out there. The person who owns that land a lot of time doesn’t live there. They live in Dallas or something else, or San Antonio or whatever.
They, and their family had owned 10,000 acres since 1885, and they’ve got some, they’ve got, there’s also oil and gas wells out there that they’re making money off of too. So that’s just a, it’s just a revenue generator. The, the people where they actually live on the ranch and run the ranches and stuff like that?
Not as much renewable generation on those as there is on just the, I’ll call it family money land. Our
Allen Hall: wind farm of the week is E D P renewables North America Quilt Block Wind Farm, which opened in 2017. They have 49 Vestus, V one ten two megawatt machines for a total of 98 megawatts. Quote block is really near the corner of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa.
It’s in the Quad State area during its construction in, they had about a hundred full-time construction jobs and now they have 12 permanent operations people. And the point of raising the as Wind Farm of the week is what they do to the local community. So when quote block was being constructed and continuing on, Fed into that local economy, about 10 million from people spending money, restaurants shopping, whatever else that really feeds the local economy a great deal.
They also have provided about $600,000 to local governments, which then goes to the schools and the fire departments to keep things running. And they paid. 0.3 million to local landowners for leases. So it’s a, it’s a really good financial system. In, in, up here, quote block for a lot of people, 6.3 million to landowners is a, a really good deal.
So quote, block wind farm up in Wisconsin, run by E DP renewables is our wind farm of the week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime. Wind Energy podcasts.
