How much of a threat are the four Federal lawsuits against Vineyard Wind? All of the cases charge that the BOEM’s environmental review was inadequate. We discuss what’s at stake and how we see the cases progressing. Legal cases may be harder to predict than wind: GE and Siemens Gamesa just settled their patent dispute. Meanwhile, the US DOE has released its Offshore Wind Energy Strategy to reach 110GW by 2050 and lower PPE by a third. Allen and Joel wonder how the DOE plans to do it. Will there be R&D grants? Does DOE have a wondrous new technology up its sleeve? Or will we buy Chinese turbines?Â
Speaking of innovation, RWE and BP are both looking for projects to fund. RWE is looking for innovations that improve circularity and reduce waste and also for systems integrations that improve system flexibility. The winners get to test their concepts with RWE team and other experts. Similarly,BP’s Offshore Wind Innovation Challenge wants to see concepts that reduce waste and other potential negatives of wind while balancing energy supply and demand. See show notes for application details and deadlines. Scottish Power Renewables has ordered 95 SG 14-236 DD wind turbines for the East Anglia 3 wind power project in the North Sea. There’s a great repowering project (actually, eight!) going on in Texas, thanks to the IRA and a new partnership between ACEN and PivotGen, to be completed in less than a year. And our Wind Farm of the Week is Rattlesnake Creek Wind Farm, in Nebraska, which will power both Adobe and Facebook facilities. But are there any rattlesnakes? Grab your earbuds…there’s a lot more in this episode!Â
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
BP Innovation Application Site – https://innovation.bp.com/offshorewindcircularity
RWE Innovation Application Site – https://www.rwe.com/en/research-and-development/project-plans/innovation-competition/#competition-2023
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Uptime 160
Allen Hall: Joel, we just celebrated our third. Of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast,
Joel Saxum: Man, time flies when you’re having fun.
Allen Hall: Yeah, we’re entering year four. I can’t even believe it, that we’ve been doing the podcast that long every week pretty religiously. And bringing our faithful listeners the information they want to hear in regards to win energy.
It, it, it’s a lot of work. Joel, you, you’ve seen me deep dive into the, the news effort that goes on every week. We’re trying to bring everybody the, the latest and greatest. And the news you probably haven’t seen in regards to wind energy, not only in the United States, but a across the world. And this week is no e exception.
To start off this week, we have a, a couple of legal items. Vineyard, wind is involved in. Four different lawsuits at the moment that are dealing with fisheries and landowners. And those are coming to a close here shortly, we hope. And then GEs and Siemens cesa have finally settled their patent dispute.
And then that’s good news for. Both sides. And then Joel and I take a, a, a deep dive into the Department of Energy and their new US offshore wind strategy and what that means for the wind industry over the next couple of years.
Joel Saxum: And sticking with the talk on the US trying to sh ha put forth the strategy with offshore wind.
We also chat about R W E and bp both launching offshore wind innovation challenges. So trying to figure out what’s out there in the market to reduce the levelized cost of energy and then be a little bit easier on the environment. At the same time, some circularity and E s G things. After we chat about that, we’re gonna talk about Siemens Kamasa landing, a 95 wind turbine order from Scottish Power for the East Lia three project of their big flagship offshore turbine.
And then as, as that is going on in other parts of the world, we’re gonna jump to Sweden. Sweden talking about the percentages of wind projects that they’ve actually turned down at the governmental level. And you. I think quite surprised to hear how high those numbers are. And then of course, the Rattlesnake Creek Wind Farm is our Wind Farm of the week over there in Nebraska.
We’re gonna do a little bit of chatting
Allen Hall: through that one. I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon. And this. Is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, Joel, where would the week be if we didn’t have a couple of nice lawsuits to talk about and wind energy? And they seem to be focused around Massachusetts at the, at the moment there are four cases that are in federal environmental court related to vineyard wind, and that project is expected to really get rolling this summer and be up and running, I think by the, 2023 or early 24.
Well, a federal judge heard arguments brought by two landowners in two separate cases. And then there’s two other suits brought by fishing groups. But those cases have been consolidated, so they’re running all these cases through one judge in Boston to handle him and to, to get some clarity on what the ground rules are and that the, the, the.
Thrust of these lawsuits have to do with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management saying that the bomb didn’t conduct a thorough environmental review when it approved the project. And if once they didn’t, if that did not occur, then subsequently everything from that point is. Relatively null and void.
That’s, that’s where the efforts are pushing the right whale is become a center point of these cases because of the recent deaths of the right whale and a number of other whales along the east coast. This is a big deal. And I, I think the thought was early on, Joel, that that vineyard wind would have these cases dismissed that they weren’t worth hearing.
A lot of them had to do with standing, but now they, they percolated up to, I think final judgment will happen here shortly if vineyard winter gets put on hold. That’s a, that. Big, big stopping point for offshore wind in the United States.
Joel Saxum: The, one of the things that’s kind of odd here is that all these cases are centered around vineyard wind.
Now I know they, the, where vineyard wind is geographically, it’s very much in the public eye, so it makes sense. But there’s a, there’s. There’s a dozen other wind farms up and down the east coast that are in the same pro permitting process or you know, in that planning stage as vineyard wind. So that, that’s kind of odd to me.
The other one that’s rings a little odd to me here is in, within the United States judicial system that there’s one judge trying all of these. Now I can understand. That you wanna have one person that may be, you know, maybe they have all the, in more information, the more information they’re fed about offshore wind, the more they have.
But then you put all of the decision making into one person’s. Pocket right off, off of one person’s desk is the signature that makes all this stuff happen. And that’s usually not the case when you start trying separate things. Right. So I would imagine most of these suits are being brought in the, if they’re out of Boston, the state of Massachusetts, in that whatever district court it is.
To me this seems to be such an important precipice of offshore wind in the us. This should almost be a Supreme Court thing, but I know it has to. Through stages to get there. I,
Allen Hall: I don’t, I don’t know if they’re gonna appeal it. I wonder if these groups will appeal. Somebody’s gonna lose in either it’s gonna be vineyard, wind, or the the fisheries.
Does it go to the Supreme Court? It may, if you appeal it, does it put a hard stop? It could. I mean, they could get
Joel Saxum: a stay. Yeah. Get a stay of injunction or whatever. I’m, I’m not a lawyer. I mean, it’s already been delayed and pushed hard enough. It’s isn’t Vineyard wind one is the same exact wind farm that GE and Siemens have the fight ongoing about the, the patent issues as well.
Right. Man, I’d hate to be, I would hate to be an executive on that, on that thing that just bad news. Every day the project has stopped again. Project has stopped again. But I mean, so you and I have personally investigated some of the, all the material that we can find online or, or out there in general about the, the right whale thing.
And there’s been a few releases by some of the federal government agencies that have said, You know, the wind is not the, the cause of the right wheel deaths. So we’re, you know, pointing them at more of like overs, speeding vessels and contact with vessels and stuff like that, but not wind vessels in particular.
So you’d think that these things should go through pretty, pretty quickly. The fishing group thing is a bit tougher as far as a lawsuit to pick apart because you. I can see where the fishermen are a little bit up in arms about it. Where you need a longer term study to see the impact on the fishery itself, whether it’s lobster fishing or cod fishing or, or, or whatever.
But if you can point to other studies the best fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, nearshore, Texas is right next to the, all the platforms. So, It might be, it might be better off for the populations.
Allen Hall: Yeah. The, the whale issue is interesting because last October, November, they had a, a big offshore wind meeting at Northeastern University and one of the, the, the presentations was about the right whales and how they were gonna pass through that area.
And there may need to be a more of a buffer than was originally laid out by b to make sure there’s no interference between the ships working offshore to install the wind turbines, and the whales gonna be running along that coastline. And my first thought was like, uhoh, we’re gonna be putting some of these turbines in, and now the experts are saying they need a larger buffer.
If that gets to a courtroom, that’s a pretty good argument to say we need to put everything on hold until the experts agree on what and where this wind farm should be and how they should handle the ship traffic through that whale corridor. I, I, I saw that as a problem. That was, well, that was six months ago now.
And here we are in front of a judge. I, that could go either way. I think the, the right well issue could go either way long
Joel Saxum: time because it’s an endangered species. Yeah. And the endangered species thing kind of, that, that’s a, that’s a big difference than the, the fisheries case. So as the, I guess the end goal, and I haven’t read these cases, are, is the end.
We wanna stop offshore wind, or is the end goal for the fisheries? We want, we want some money in our pockets based on what you might remove from them. Or you know, is it with the right, well where it’s, that would be basically we wanna stop to the extra vessel traffic and the installation of these winter rights.
Yes. There’s, there’s a fight looming. And like we say, usually we’re, we’re gonna keep an eye on it, but there’s a little bit more reading to do here to see exactly where these things are going.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I’m gonna dig into a little more of this coming week and we’ll talk about it again next week and to see if there’s been any motions from the judge or to, to see how the, the trial is playing out.
And Siemens, KA Mesa and GE are also trying to settle their patent and dispute. And remember, not that long ago, Siemens Gabaa won their patent quarrel with ge and it became, Pain point for offshore wind because it had to do with the haea X wind turbines and the way a bearing was installed in this wind turbine that Siemens Geesa said that they had designed it and had patent rights to it.
Evidently, a, a US judge agreed with that. So. GE and Siemens Kamasa, which I think is now Siemens Energy now that they’ve been reacquired by se, the parent Siemens agreed to a settlement to end their European and US patent disputes. So remember they were suing each other in United Kingdom Court, I think also in France, and then obviously the United States.
So they’re just trying to stop all the lawsuits from one another, which. To the benefit of both companies. I think there were no, no details of the settlement. Everything is confidential, so we are not sure exactly what’s going to happen. But remember, about a month ago, a US judge doubled the royalty payments.
GE was supposed to pay Siemens Ga Mesa as part of that patent infringement for the hex turbines, and that meant that GE was gonna pay about $60,000 per megawatt for each of the turbines at. 1.1 gigawatt ocean wind project off the coast of New Jersey, which is a lot of cash, but
Joel Saxum: for this, just for this ocean wind, one at one point, one gigawatts at that rate, that’s 66 million.
I mean, What a, what a wicked shot in the arm for Siemens on their balance sheet. 66 million bucks for having a court case.
Allen Hall: Well, you know, if, if Siemens, now that Siemens owns the majority stake in hall of a Siemens cesa maybe the higher ups at Siemens say, Hey, talk to the higher ups at ge. Obviously his G’s gonna split here in the.
A couple of months and said, Hey look, we cannot help each other by suing one another in all these courts. We’re just making lawyers rich and we just need to come to a peaceful agreement and move on. And that’s what appeared to have happened. Cooler heads prevailed and we’re going to move on and everything’s gonna be okay with the world.
We can compete as much as we want to, but we, they’re spending too much time in courts and courtrooms and paying lawyers. I think. Somebody decided to call an into it and good. Yeah, exactly.
Joel Saxum: But so there, will there be a remodel to the Hax platform?
Allen Hall: There are already. Well, this is the, this is the thing. I think that there was one last time I looked.
They were already trying to redesign that whole fitting, but now that GEs say we’re gonna go, they’re gonna go to an 18 megawatt machine, I think that all goes away. If, if GEs moving to an 18 megawatt. And the Haad is just a platform. It’s gonna be, instead of being a 12 megawatt, 50 megawatt machine, it’s just gonna move to 18.
You’re gonna just redesign all that anyway, so it kind of becomes a moot point.
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So the US Department of Energy Release, its offshore wind energy strategy document a couple of days ago now, and that strategy aims to set the nation on a pathway to 110 gigawatts or more by 2050. Yikes. That’s a lot of
Joel Saxum: power. Another 80 between 2030 and
Allen Hall: 2050. Yeah. Let’s get to 31st, then we can figure out the rest.
The strategy categorizes Dees offshore wind efforts into four pillars. Joel, there’s four. They’re near offshore wind initiative. The Ford program, the Connect Initiative, and the Transformed Initiative. So let me kind of step through them as I was trying to do the other day, the near offshore wind initiative, which is the now part of this, it will lower cost from $73 from megawatt hour to $51 per mega megawatt hour by 2030.
Develop a domestic supply chain and inform sustainable. Just deployment of fixed bottom offshore wind. That’s the NOW Initiative. The Ford Initiative is to achieve the floating offshore wind shot goal of reducing cost by over 70% to 45 megawatt. $45 per megawatt hour by 2035 established US leadership in floating offshore wind design and manufacturing and inform sustainable just deployment of floating offshore wind.
The connect. Program is to enable, enable reliable and resilient transmission solutions for large scale offshore wind deployment. And the transform effort is expand offshore wind co-generation technologies for widespread electrification and decarbonization. So I, when I read that, like that’s a mouthful of, of different initiatives.
Joel Saxum: That’s a lot of fluffy words. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Right. And to say you’re gonna reduce floating wind by cost by 70% is, is a, is a goal. It isn’t a system to get there, and I wanted to, to take one of them and break them apart. So I’m gonna, I, I looked at the near offshore wind initiative that’s a little closer to reality.
In the states and to see how they’re going to go from $73 to megawatt hour to $51 by 2030. Well there are three main pieces to this, Joel, so hang onto your seat. First, optimizing the design of wind turbines and wind plant layouts through enhanced understanding of the short and long-term US offshore wind resource and meteorological ocean and geophysical characteristics.
This optimization will reduce cost to higher energy production, longer wind, turbine system, lifetimes, and lower development expenses and material use. That’s step one. Two, upskilling the wind turbines through systems engineering and testing. Validating, validating, and demonstrating the many innovations that will enable larger, more powerful tur.
For example, superconducting generators, active turbine controls while exploring the need for costs and benefits of and pathways to standardizing turbine sizes. And bullet 0.3, developing installation operations and maintenance strategies that reduce complexity and labor at. Mitigating adverse impacts on the ocean environment.
For example, remote maintenance, noise mitigation measures during installations, et cetera. Okay, so those three bullet points are gonna lower fixed bottom nearshore, wind turbine costs from $73 a megawatt to $51 a megawatt. I am at a loss. I don’t
Joel Saxum: get it. Yeah, so, so yeah, number one, the, basically everything you said there, optimizing design of wind, plant layouts, enhance understanding of short and long, yada yada, that’s all standard stuff that you have to do.
To install an offshore fixed bottom wind farm anyway. Exactly like understanding geophysical characteristics, the wind resource, me, mead, ocean data, like that’s just standard stuff. If you gonna develop a wind farm whatsoever, you have to do all those things so that that one can be kind of, I don’t know how you’re gonna reduce costs.
That’s gonna be standard cut. Now if you say we’re. I don’t know. If instead of having a manned vessel out there, you’re gonna use an a u V to do geophysical exploration and you can do it cheaper. That’s something, right? But I don’t, that’s, that’s already kind of happening in the industry right now is remote vehicles.
So that’s, that’s not something new that an innovation project needs to be done. There’s, I can name off the cuff, half a dozen companies already doing it. Upscaling of wind turbines through systems engineering and testing valid. Demonstrating innovations, yada, yada, yada. That’s again, ongoing within the industry.
We just heard GE go from 15 to 18 megawatts. Right. So while that’s, while that’s great, a great thing to talk about on the congress floor or wherever this is being talked about. These things are realities within the industry already. Superconducting generators and things. Now that’s, we have read something about a company in Michigan working with some non rare earth conductors and some things like that.
So maybe this will enable some innovation funding for, for groups like that. That’d be great. But again, I don’t understand some of the pathways to standardizing turbine sizes. Like what’s the point of that? How does that reduce cost? Besides if you, now, if you reduce the, or if you slow down in innovation cycles and you stick with one turbine model for a while, then you can, your supply chain can catch up and things and that’s great.
But that goes against everything that the US economy is known for, i e capitalism and market adjustment. So you’re not gonna tell Siemens gmas unless you like say, oh, Siemens, you stay at that 15 megawatt machine for a while, we’ll pay you 500 million a year. Or, I don’t know. I don’t know how you expect to do that.
One. Seems like hot words to me too. This is, this is a
Allen Hall: series of goals. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: So the third point, developing installation operations, maintenance strategies that reduce complexity and labor at Sea F. Words again. There’s a couple groups out there creating different kinds of vessels and new vessels for installation as Jones Act requires.
Other than, and, and they’re, you know, of course you ought to put the most innovative new ideas onto those vessels. So that’s happening right now. Remote maintenance drones from shore. Drones from an A U V, so a drone launching from an autonomous, robotic, robotic boat. Again, those things are happening right now.
So engaging with those companies, maybe the federal government engaging with those companies and giving them some money to further their research and their development programs. Great. But this doesn’t really point out a process to, to get that done or how much money’s there or what they’re just saying this, basically they’re saying all of these things would be nice and we’re gonna cut the cost of near offshore wind by 30% by doing all.
I don’t know who’s doing the accounting
Allen Hall: here. Right. There’s, there is no system in place to to, to accomplish any of these things. Everything they’ve have talked about at the DOE level are goals and then they try to, if you read this document and it’s huge, so if you start reading down into, they start listening to different federal organizations that can participate in different aspects of this all, that’s fine, but who’s gonna do it?
Who’s gonna do the heavy lifting you’re talking about? Significant changes in wind turbine design the substation design to drop prices down by a third, that’s not realizable as an engineer, I’m telling you that’s not gonna happen. Now, the, the PPAs that the, for example, Commonwealth Wind had negotiated with the state of Massachusetts were about $74 a megawatt hour, and Commonwealth Wind is stepping away from those because they said that PPAs are too.
To say then you’re gonna go from 74 to 51 there, no one’s gonna sign up to that. There is, there’s not gonna be a single operator owner that’s gonna say, sign up to $51 a megawatt hour for offshore wind. Not in today’s world, not even in 2030. They’re, they’re not likely to do that. So I, I don’t see where the breakthrough technology is cause that’s what we’re talking about, breakthrough technology.
Where is the breakthrough technology? And you think that’s gonna be developed by the federal government? That that is not a realizable. Thing. Yeah, it’s not, they have not demonstrated themselves the ability to do that. If they want to cut loose federal funding to say, Hey, we’re gonna create this.
Hey ge. I wanna hear your ideas for some great new ways to reduce the, the cost of running these wind turbines. And GE comes forward and says, we have some, but we just need a hundred million dollars of money to get it done. All right, let’s talk. But unless that is happening, GEs not gonna participate in this Siemens Kamasa.
Why would Siemens Kamasa participate in this? Why would Vestus participate in this effort? They have no incentive to do such. Now that they may, they may talk about it and say, well, we’re, we’re supportive of these goals, which I’m sure that they are. But when the rubber hits the road here, it is not in their best financial interest for these things to happen.
And they’re the ones that, that we need to make it happen.
Joel Saxum: They’re already screaming about non profitability, like you’re gonna take 30%. Revenue away from them and you think they’re gonna be happy about it? Like I don’t. Like I said, like there’s some operations and maintenance stuff here. That’s, that’s great.
They’re great ideas and, and they can help. You know, my mind isn’t going to all the robotic technologies and remote vessels and the ability to fly a drone from shore and all these different things for inspections. And so there’s some ways to optimize some, some o and m costs, but to, to optimize actual development and installation.
I don’t think you’re, Cut down on the CapEx to install these things that easily. There’s just, it’s just too much.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And the same, the same sort of process existed for their, their push for floating offshore with, they tuck even greater reductions in cost. I don’t see that one happening either. And we didn’t even really have a baseline.
If we had a couple hundred or a couple thousand wind turbines out in the water right now, and then we could really get a baseline to understand where those costs could be reduced. But because we have seven wind turbines in the water, there’s just no way to even get a baseline on that. So floating
Joel Saxum: to me is the one spot that there’s an opportunity.
And now why I say that is because the. The supply chain, the engineering, the design isn’t quite completed. So, and what I’m trying to, to get at is, is like right now with floating, we are in the 1930s on large tractors. Right. TRA tractors have been around for 10, 20 years, but we have the ability to kind of, kind of have like we, we know a little bit about how the design could work and may work, and some borrowed parts from some other things like some wagon wheels and a little bit of this.
And cars have been around for a little while. Car, the cars are whatever being fixed, floating offshore in my mind, but, or fixed offshore. I’m sorry in my mind, but I’m thinking now. Okay. Floating. There isn’t a country right now or an area of the world that is powerhouse for floating. Yet. Right. So the capability is still there for us to be able to inject some cash and develop that as our own, to have, you know, bald eagle, floating wind and, and the, and the US take the lead on it.
Like, that’s, that’s the one that’s possible because, you know, there’s some offshore wind being there. There’s of course, like high wind tampon and some other things in. You know, off the coast of Scotland and there’s some Norwegian initiatives and there’s initiatives in France, like there’s things going on, but they’re not installed at scale yet.
So all of the, all of the offshore wind farms are made by three, you know, besides some Ming Yangs, some Chinese stuff, right? Some, some, some of the things in the APAC region, they’re, they’re made by specific. Manufacturers and we know like, okay, when Orci was really cruising, installing a lot like they have, ORCID has a pile of three point megawatt, eight megawatt se or Siemens machines installed.
Like we know the certain things that are there. Now when you go to floating, it’s not quite there yet and we know that we’ll probably adopt some. Technology from these OEMs, but like the, the specific supply chain insulation engineering is not completed yet. There is not a front leader in it. So that’s the one spot I see a possible opportunity for the US to, to run with.
But we, it, it, it’s a quit first to market thing here. Right? We’ve gotta make it happen. Now. That can’t be the thing that we wait till 2035 for, because it won’t happen. I mean, and, and to put it in perspective. Time goes quick, right? I keep thinking 2030. Yeah. 10 years away. No, it’s six and a half years away.
Like six and a half years is not much time in the, in the industrial world to develop something. Right. We’ve been, we’ve been working on the F 35 joint strike fighter since 2004 or something like that.
Allen Hall: Longer than that, I think. Yeah, in the nineties.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So like in the industrial world, six and a half years is not much time.
Allen Hall: Okay. So if there, let’s just say that floating may be the place where you could lower material cost down, let’s just say that. I think that’s probably doable. The only place to really grab some cost reduction is to use a non-US non-European wind turbine. At that point, you’re talking about using wind turbines that are developed in China, and I know there’s been some discussion in Europe about that.
Like if you’re really serious about putting them amount of wind energy in the ground and, and offshore, the only way to do that at the moment is to bring in manufacturers from China to go do that. You think that you think the United States administration’s gonna do open the door to that to get to these, these goal
Joel Saxum: numbers?
Nope. And I’ll tell you why. I mean, I think it’s pretty clear, right? But I mean, earlier in the conversation, you and I were ha, we were just kind of talking through some articles and looking at some stuff and I said, what is, you know, it was like regulatory approval by ferc. FERC
Allen Hall: is Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Yeah.
Joel Saxum: And so there’s already been things that have stopped. Clean energy development within the us, specifically in Texas that was owned by Chinese companies because we want to have our energy security by a energy system that we maintain. We have control of the United States government and FE and specifically will not allow Chinese turbines on the grid.
I just don’t think so. Because if they can be remotely controlled at any time, if there was an issue politically or as anything, it’s just, boom, shut the power off. It’s a click of a button. That’s as simple as it gets. So I just don’t think that, I don’t think that you’ll get Chinese wind turbines onto the.
Public grid. Now, if it’s a private grid or some distributed power or something, maybe within
Allen Hall: the last two weeks, the Department of Energy was put in front of a Senate committee and they were crushed. The representative from the d e was crushed in regards to knowing how much of the existing United States Grid has Chinese components in it.
And where those components would be. And the DOE didn’t have any answer for that. And it got combative and it, it wasn’t a good look on either side in my opinion, but it got combative, and I think you may be right Joel, that the legislature is not happy with having large-scale Chinese components in the US grid.
Obviously offshore would be a real, real problem, pain point, potentially. So it probably won’t happen, but if they’re talking about trying to meet these one third reduction in megawatt hour costs, that is the only way it’s going to happen today.
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Well, Joel, there’s actually two separate efforts by large operators, r w E and bp where they’re. Calling for innovations and offshore wind, and both the BP and R w e requests are, are basically the same. So I’ll use the r w E one as the example here, knowing that BP has essentially the same program.
So r w is is sticking new concepts that would contribute to a net positive effect on biodiversity at the company’s new offshore windfarm sites. In the, for circularity, circl calling it, I always find that word odd. R to b welcomes innovative solutions to contribute to the increasing circularity of the, of the wind turbine life cycle, which is what they’re talking about, and minimizing waste during the entire lifetime of the offshore wind farms.
And if they’re looking in terms of system integration, which is a subject point for the D oe and where R D B is, is looking. Some new ideas that enhance the flexibility or of the wind farm or, and minimize curtailment off times. Obviously every wind farm operator’s looking for that. The winners get a chance to explore their innovation on an offshore wind farm with r W’s development team, which would be kind of cool.
So if you have a, a good idea there, you be working with the experts at R w e and they get involved with a technical innovations program at r w if they were chosen, which grants access to. Experts to help them further develop and test and scale their proposed solution, which is great. The submittals have to be, be made by the middle of April, so we got about two weeks away from the day we’re recording, and the winners will be revealed sometime late this fall.
So you’re looking at. Operators, not wind turbine designers, but operators, BP and r w e that are wanting to reduce the amount of waste that’s, that’s contributed during the, during the build, during the operations. Also try to help the fish and the, the wildlife that are around those turbines, but they’re also trying to keep the uptime.
And expand it and produce more power. And I think that’s probably where they’re gonna get the most feedback on is these are things that, here’s some ideas to keep the wind turbines turning with less
Joel Saxum: cost. It’s basically anything that would, anything that help helps with an E S G goal or keeps the turbines running.
Right. So I think there’s, there’s prob, there’s probably a lot of players out there, a lot of people out there with smaller companies or development companies smaller engineering firms that have a little tool or some, you know, a CMS system or something to help with lightning such as yourselves that may, this may be an open and an opportunity to get in with R to B to talk to them, to, to, to.
Get to be able to be a part of, or, or get involved with their technical innovation team, which would be is great exposure for anybody. So I think you look to these, RW is one of those companies when you go to any conference, you see them sitting up on panels, right? There’s always someone from r w up on a panel.
There’s someone a lot of times from BP on a panel from, or sit on a panel next air on a panel. So these are the thought leaders you want to see in the market and that they’re putting this out. Great, because what happens to them and what they learn from this, I hope they share it with the rest of the world.
Hopefully they share it with the smaller developers to show how we can cuz everything here is about being better with the environment. But that’s why we’re do, that’s why we’re all in clean energy. And then also lowering the cost of energy, the levelized cost of energy, right? So whatever these big, big players that have some of the budgets to be able to do these things, car.
Fantastic. So get some people in there, learn some things and share the information with the rest of the world. Hopefully at the next one of the next conferences or in a year or two we hear about what came out of this program and it can help the rest of the operators out there. Two companies
Allen Hall: came to mind immediately arc vera in terms of wakes and predicting what the wake turbulence was going to be and wind.
Because they have that big campaign down at the Millford sites down of Utah, which is very successful. And it, and it’s now a large scale effort to maximize the output of the farm, not just individual turbines. I think those two companies are really set up right now to take advantage of these initiatives because obviously wakes are gonna be a problem.
Trying to maximize the output of a farm is, is already a problem. As we, as we’ve predicted, and those two companies have solutions on deck and I, if BP or r w e opened up a, a site like to WinCo for example, let’s say, alright, here’s an existing site. We wanna try your technology on this wind farm out in Scotland or wherever it may be.
Let’s, let’s give. Go run this out and see if we can get three, four, 5% improvement in a e p. That would make tremendous sense that that would pay for itself. Multiple times over, hands down. Right. And that, I think that’s the way these projects will hopefully go is you’ll see companies like those take another step forward and really help reduce the cost of, of offshore wind because they can add three, four, 5%.
Joel Saxum: Something that, that to, to be sure to touch on here as well is if you’re, you know, one of our normal listeners in the US and whatnot, you’re not used to offshore wind usually. Right? If you’re, if you’re over here, you haven’t really dealt with offshore wind yet. Off offshore wind is so difficult to get a company to allow you to test out an idea on their turbines simply because it’s so expensive for.
Right. It’s, it’s, it costs dollars and do thousands of dollars a day. For the S O v it costs, most of those turbines are eight 10. If it’s new turb, new wind farms, that rws talking about 1214 megawatt machines shutting that thing down for an hour. Costs 10 times what it costs to shut down at onshore turbine, right?
So the shutdown time, the logistics time, the planning, the effort that goes into trialing stuff on these offshore wind farms is very, very, very difficult. There’s been a ton of drone companies that have tried to go offshore and it’s so hard to get the vessel time to test your solution and a lot of ’em then go out and test it and the imus fail cuz the magnetometers and the big metal boats and all this different stuff that, that kinda stuff happens offshore.
But so to not to be missed here for people that are looking for testing things offshore. If you’re looking to test things offshore, you probably already know this, but if you don’t, Offshore wind to test things and to get access to a wind farm is very, very difficult simply because of the cost to the operator.
Well, some
Allen Hall: big news outta Siemens Ka Mesa because they announced the signing of a firm order with Scottish Power renewables to supply 95 units of the flagship SG 14 dash 2 36 DD wind turbine to the East Anglia three Windpower Project in the North Sea. With a, which has a total capacity at 1.4 gigawatts.
That’s a huge project. Roughly, Joel, that’s about one and a half billion dollars of an order. Nice. That’s a nice order for Siemens, GA Mesa. And it also includes a service contract initially for an eight year period. And I think then after that, you’re gonna figure it out. But it’s a, a really nice step for Siemens Ka Mesa and a, a really big water east.
Analia three is a second of four projects planned with the Scottish power renewables and their 2.9 gigawatt total East Lia Hub, a development in the North Sea. The anticipated lifetime of the project will be 25 years in which is gonna kick off in 2026 and is be part of the UK’s 2050 net zero target.
And in addition to that that same 14,236 DD model. They’ve sold a number of those up in Denmark and in Poland about another 2.8 gigawatts of those machines. So there’s having some really nice orders with that 14 megawatt machine. That’s a good sign for Siemens Ga Mesa right now to get an order of that size that that’s helps sustain them, right, that those, you need those orders once in a while, those sort of big gigawatt orders to keep the production line going.
Well, our,
Joel Saxum: our old friend Dan blew it, would say You can win games playing small. But when you hit the home runs, man, does it feel good? You know, I, I had a couple of colleagues that act actually went to the test center there in Denmark, and this thing, the report back is, it’s a monster. It’s, it is the first time you stand under a wind turbine when you stand under like a 1.5 or something.
If you’ve never, if you’ve never done it, if you’re new to listening to the wind or you’re a back office person has never been to the. You stand under a 1.5 megawatt machine and it’s just like, wow, that thing is huge. And then you stand under like a four megawatt machine and you’re like, that 1.5 was tiny and now you’re gonna go stand under a 14.
I mean, it, it’s, it’s scary how big these things are. Well,
Allen Hall: and it’s, it’s gonna be their baseline for at least a little while. While GEs going to move to 18 megawatts. Investors is gonna hold at 15 megawatts. It sounds like. Siemens, me. Has traction of 14 megawatts will probably stay there quite a while.
Obviously, if they can get it to 15 or 16, they will, but you need to sell some units. And they have, and you’re right, Joel, y you, your, your whole company picks up when these orders come in. If you sell five turbines, yeah, it’s a good day, right? But when you sell 95 of these things, everybody in that factory should be cheering and rightly so.
So congratulations to Siemens KA Mesa. That’s a really nice order. Over in Sweden, Joel, there’s been recent research saying that the vast majority of Windfarm projects are rejected and they’ve looked, this research has looked from 2020 through 2022, where, I hate to even say these numbers because they’re so high.
A total of 80 wind proj, a total of 80 wind farm projects were submitted between 2020 and 2022 and 54 reject. While 1,021 of the 1400 applications to install turbines were declined. Wow. In some of the southern regions, 78% of the applications were rejected and compared to up north, 50% of the applications were rejected.
So Southern Sweden is rejecting wind turbines at a higher rate than Northern Sweden. Municipalities in Sweden can stop wind farms at three different stages after the application is submitted in the formal consultation period, and then in early talks before consultations. So there’s multiple stopping points.
Now it looks like the municipalities are hitting those stopping points and telling the, telling potential operators or bidders to, to stop which is unique because Sweden has a capability of being really electrified and that is one of the. Things we noticed when we were, we were just in Sweden the train we were on, which took us from Norway all the way to.
To the wind, winter wind Conference that was electrified, that whole train in the middle of the rural Sweden rough territory. The frozen tundra, yeah, it was electrified. Whereas on the Norway side it was a diesel locomotive. So Sweden clearly has made an effort to electrify itself, at least in part and Balance that off though Norway, weirdly enough, has one of the highest use of electric vehicles that when we got to Sweden, we were saying, wow, everything’s electrified.
Yeah. But in Norway there’s a lot more electric cars than there is in Sweden, so a lot more gas. Powered vehicles, internal combustion engines in Sweden and there is a Norway. So there, there’s a little bit of a dichotomy going on. But it’s still remarkable that the, these projects in Sweden are being rejected at such a high rate.
I don’t think the rate in the United States is nearly that high. I don’t think it’s anywhere near 50% in the United States. It may be we can actually dig into that, but is there a big pushback about wind in Sweden? And if so, Why is, is it just because of the rural nature and they love the pristine mountain views that they have?
Is, is that what it is? I think
Joel Saxum: that’s part of it. The other side of it being you know, the southern part of the country is of course where there’s more population. We have Stockholm there and some other larger cities, Malmo and whatnot, gothenberg. So you have more larger cities there and of course you wanna.
As power generation facilities as close to the city as you can, so you don’t have to have transmission lines going everywhere. But then it. They know if you know this, this is the same with Norwegians though too. Norwegian, Swedes, fins, all the above. They, they love the outdoors. They like to go camping.
They like to go skiing, like to go do some fishing, do do these. So they don’t want their pristine. And it’s part of what you say is like the, the populace and they don’t want their pristine kind of views ruined. And a lot of the. In the southern part of the country. If you ever ever looked at a map of Sweden, there’s a lot of nice little lakes.
And so, you know, some glacial lakes and some larger ones some beautiful little towns. So I think part of it is just maintaining what Sweden has naturally been and that little bit of pushback to changing over to a more electrified society or a green, green society, I would say. It goes against my, what my brain would naturally think of, of the, of the country, which is odd.
Allen Hall: And before anybody sends me any hate mail, cause I, I know that’s coming. I, I am part Sweden here, right? So my great-grandfather came over from Sweden back in the early 19 hundreds, so I get it. Ditto.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So I understand. Generically what’s happening there, but does that just mean there’s gonna be a push for more offshore wind?
Is is that the drive of saying, hey, not onshore, at least not in some specific locations, is offshore. Then the window of opportunity for wind to be used in Sweden and Norway for that matter.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think, I mean, Norway, of course, they have the deep continental shelf off the West coast, so they’re looking at floating wind more over there.
I do believe that Sweden has some plans for the, for some, some wind in the Baltic Sea. But if you look you know, off the southern tip of Sweden or Southwestern side around Denmark and Germany, There is tons of offshore winds stacked all over in there. Right? So they have the resource, they have the resource there.
They can use it if they, if they decide to. I’d like to ask some of my, my Danish colleagues what they’re. Thoughts are on why Sweden pushes back on this. But I don’t know, we might get some, some calmer reunion battles going back in there between cousins, cousins and friends, and Swedes, Norways, Norwegians, and Danes.
So maybe,
Allen Hall: maybe that’s the answer. Maybe ultimately that’s the answer if, if Sweden is gonna push, and I think they are. And that’s where Greta Thunberg is from too, right? She’s from Sweden. It, it’s just weird to see these two things play together. Maybe offshore wind is the answer. And we did fly from Gosh, where, where were we?
We were in Oslo, Norway. We’re flying to Copenhagen, and when you’re flying into Copenhagen, there’s a number of wind turmans offshore there. They’re
Joel Saxum: everywhere you go right over the top of ’em. Yeah. That’s a cool sight to
Allen Hall: see. It. It is. It’s, it’s remarkable. Everybody’s taking pictures. At least the Americans were, because we’ve never seen anything like that.
We have seven wind turmans in the water. They’re literally hundreds around there. It, it is a, a sight to see. Our wind farm of the week is Rattlesnake Creek Wind. In Nebraska, and it’s located in, if you know your geography, Joel, it’s up in northeastern Nebraska, right across the state line from Sioux City, Iowa.
The site is owned by an L, green Power, and it’s one of the largest farms in Nebraska with 318 megawatts being produced from it’s 101 acciona, 3.15 mega watt turbines began operation at the end of 2018 and, I wouldn’t have guessed this, but it is providing power to Facebook and Adobe as part of their green energy investments and the amount of money that went into that site locally to get that whole site developed.
The, the was a little over $400 million and 400 million in that part of Nebraska is a lot of. Good for them. I’m sure it was a big driver to the local community. At least I hope that it was. I’m from Nebraska, but this place is pretty far north from where I am. Interest. That’s an interesting amount of money to go into a sort of a rural part of Nebraska.
The other part about this I’ll say is I haven’t seen a rattlesnake in Nebraska because it tends to get really cold. So to, to call it Rattlesnake Creek wind Farm. It’s a little odd, but maybe there’s an existing Rattle Creek. Rattlesnake Creek there. I, I’ve, I’ve been a lot of places in Nebraska. I’ve never heard of a rattlesnake, never been around a rattlesnake.
Not say that they don’t exist there, but they. To live a little further south where it’s warmer.
Joel Saxum: It sounds like one time one person saw one rattlesnake in that creek and that’s how it got its name,
Allen Hall: or, or is a way to keep out other settlers. Yeah. There you go. Hey, there it is. Yeah, it’s to keep out Other settlers.
Oh, there’s rattlesnakes near that creek over there. Man. Well, might as well head to South Dakota. We’re we’re okay over here? Yeah. So Rattlesnake Creek Wind Farm is our wind farm of the week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
