Rosemary, Joel and Allen discuss the Duke Energy sale of its renewables business to Brookfield Renewable for a massive $2.8B. The RWE merger with Con Edison makes it the #4 renewable energy company in the US. RWE also locked-in ship provider Jan De Nul in a multi-year deal – will other operators make similar moves? Balmoral has a new product to prevent scour at fixed bottom offshore turbines. Kansas State goes back-to-back in the Collegiate Wind Competition and our Wind Farm of the Week is Vattenfall’s Hollandse Kust Zuid 1.5GW offshore farm!
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Uptime 170
Allen Hall: So Rosemary, I know you’re a big, uh, soccer fan or football fan. Uh, I dunno if you saw that man said he won the trouble. I’m sure you were watching diligently, like every good football fan does. I watched that game. I made myself watch it. Why? It was important to the people of Manchester.
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, the people of Manchester. Important to you, Allen.
Allen Hall: It is because that’s the home of Oasis. That’s valid. They had a really good time in Manchester over the weekend. Let me tell you. It was. Party Central. So,
Joel Saxum: so this week on the podcast we’re gonna talk about Duke Energy selling some assets to, uh, unregulated assets to Brookfield, uh, renewables, and for 2.8 billion, which is a couple more dollars than the city of Manchester spent on their celebration.
Um, Oh, after that, we’re gonna get into R W E, becoming the number four renewable company in the US after their, uh, merger or acquisition with ConEd. Uh, and then also staying with r w e, the, the, the big German player there. Uh, tying up with Jan Renewal and some installation vessels for offshore wind in the future.
And
Allen Hall: then we head over to the UK in particular, Scotland with our Mor and their Hex defense Scour protection, which is, uh, a new design and a, and a patented. Designed to get rid of, scour around, uh, fixed bottom foundations.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we’re gonna talk about the 2023 Collegiate Wind Competition, which was won for the second year in a row by Kansas State University’s Wildcat Wind Power, and then Wind Farm of the Week.
This week is in the Netherlands. It’s of the South, throughout the Netherlands, LAN se. I’m
Allen Hall: Allen Hall, president of Weather Garden, lightly taken. I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power Lab. Joel Saxon and renewables expert Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Duke Energy has announced an agreement to sell its unregulated utility scale commercial renewables business to Brookfield Renewable for approximately 2.8 billion. Joel, that’s a nice tidy amount. Brook Brookfield Renewable, uh, is one of the world’s largest owners in operators of renewable power, and we’ll acquire the business including about 3.4 gigawatts of a utility scale, solar, wind, and battery storage across the United States.
Duke Energy, obviously Will, will book a profit of about 1.1 billion before this whole thing is settled. So I think it works out for both sides. Joel. Uh, the approval’s gonna end up finishing up the end of this year, so there’s, there’s a lot of legal going around and contracts and right, and oversight that has to happen before you can close in this kind of business.
But the industry is really looking favorably upon upon this, uh, it seems like Duke’s trying to get into some new renewable projects and needed some cash to do it. Meanwhile, Brookfield, which is, is a huge player. Just add to their portfolio. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: You know, at the end of the, uh, article here, we’re looking at Duke’s also progressing with the sale of its distributed energy business.
So it sounds like basically everything at Duke is for sale right now. Like if you need a pickup truck or something, give ’em a call. They’re, they’re just dumping things. But I, but it’s great to see this, cuz I think, um, in general it will be a boon for the industry. Right. So you’re seeing someone else.
Purchases the assets. Brookfield Renewable wants to build their portfolio. Great. Now, Duke’s got a bunch of more capital to be able to deploy for new pro projects. Whether the projects are wind, solar, battery, storage, whatever they’re going to be, um, they can now develop more and I can see this cycle turning over.
Right. So Duke has another, another side of them that’s not just the, this renewable asset generation. Right. They have a hole. They’re a. They’re a power generation company. They maintain power lines, they do all kinds of things, so they have a whole other side of their business. And if this capital can keep rolling over for them, and I think you’re gonna start to see some other companies do the same thing.
Um, it’s, it’s good for the, the whole of the energy transition in the states by injecting more capital back into the, the mix to build more new facilities. R
Allen Hall: W E AG has successfully completed the acquisition of Con Edison, clean Energy businesses. And if you’ve just been paying attention there, that’s a, that’s a huge deal in the United States.
It makes r w e the number four renewable energy company in the United States. Uh, the new entity is gonna be called R W E, clean Energy llc, and they have a portfolio of about eight gigawatts of renewable energy projects and a development platform of over 24 gigawatts. Holy smokes. There’s. If you look at rws portfolio right at the moment, it’s about 60% onshore and 40% on onshore wind at about 40% in solar, uh, to make that eight gigawatts of current capacity.
So if, if you paid attention and listened to some of the rumblings around this, this is really having a lot of effects across the industry because it seems like a really good match between the two. It makes ’em a much stronger company. R w E basically is standing up its own American division. And there’s more, there’s more tri powder here for r w to go after and acquire, uh, other businesses and other renewables.
It, it seems like r w will not be the number four. Player in renewables in the United States for very long, it’s gonna try to climb that ladder quickly. Yeah, no,
Joel Saxum: look, looking behind the curtain in r w e, they do a good job of managing their assets. Um, they’ve got a, a large engineering team and their engineering teams, uh, I do know, as opposed to some of the other big operators, they, they talk across the pond, uh, to some of their other compadres over that do a lot of offshore development, you know, in the, off the coast of Germany and some other projects as well as a lot of onshore, uh, in Northern Europe.
So, Not only a US powerhouse, but r to be big around the world and being able to leverage that knowledge, uh, can only help them grow quicker. Right. So that we do know that they’re a part of, uh, some actively developing some offshore wind projects in the US So they have expertise in-house, just like everybody thinks.
When I think offshore wind, I think Sted, that’s what I, that’s what I immediately come to mind. Right? But there’s a lot of other players in that market and RWE is one of ’em. They’ll be able to use that. Uh, That knowledge gained in the European theater to help in the US offshore wise as well.
Allen Hall: Well, on the offshore side, Rosemary, r w e is doing, what basically Phil Totaro has been pointing out is that you have to create a pipeline of wind projects and you need to lock in suppliers for those projects.
And R D B is doing that with Denal, which is a offshore construction company based in Luxembourg. And I think that’s actually originally from Belgium. I think the family that runs, it’s from Belgium. But they’ve, they’ve signed an agreement with r w E for two of their largest and most innovative installation vessels, uh, which plays into the industry in general.
Like you’ve taken two of the, probably the best assets off, off the docket, so the companies can’t use them. And so there’s really two ships here that there’s a Le Elise. I’m gonna murder this name of course, uh, which is a, a vessel designed for installing wind turbine foundations and they’ve RW chartered it for more than five years.
Man, that’s a big deal. Uh, that ship has a capacity up to 5,000 tons and at at a deck loading capacity of 61. Thousand tons. That’s a huge ship, Joel, how, how big of a ship be is, is
Joel Saxum: that, oh, I think if they’re jack ups, right. With a, if it’s 130 meter long jack up legs, I would say that that thing’s probably 300 meters long to, to 280 to 300 meters long.
Somewhere in there. Well, because
Allen Hall: the other ship is called the Voltaire, which is they’re saying is the world’s largest jack-up installation vest vessel. Fully moly. And R R W B has booked it for four years, starting in 2027. It has a crane capacity of 3,200 tons and especially designed 130 meter, uh, long legs.
And it’s particularly suited for putting wind farms out and deep waters, which R W B has some of those set up already. Uh, So essentially if you’re a big player and you and you need to go to do big projects, you better hook up with another big player that can actually finish those projects and lock them in, because if you don’t, one of your competitors is gonna grab those assets.
Isn’t, isn’t that what’s happening right now? Yeah,
Joel Saxum: absolutely. Rosemary, a question for you now, we’ve talked a little bit about the offshore wind development going. Uh, on, in Australia, what stage are they at and when will they be ready off, ready for vessels down there?
Rosemary Barnes: Uh, it, I mean, nothing is physically happening yet.
I kind of, um, I got so excited when they started talking about offshore wind in Australia and started trying to, you know, network to, um, hopefully be able to be part of that myself. But everybody that I talked to was like, we are so far away from needing any engineers that know about, you know, specific technologies.
That was a couple of years ago. I probably ought to start. Um, yeah. Getting, getting back involved, but it’s more like progress has definitely been made, but it’s more on the like, um, regulatory side. You know, we are developing a framework for how you will, um, be able to get environmental approvals and how you will be able to get, you know, a lease over, uh, an area of the ocean to install your turbines.
So the front running project is Star of the South, and um, they have a major project status I think for their, their. Project. Um, and yeah, it’s time for me to dip back in and see where they’re at, but as far as I know, they haven’t selected turbines yet. They’re just kind of looking out to the future and saying, okay, around the time that we’re gonna wanna install turbines, they’ll probably be, you know, 16 megawatts.
So let’s get approvals for something about that size and, you know, work towards it. And then close to the date, they’ll check in and see where is technology at. And then I, I hope that these, um, yeah, offshore developers will get in touch with me through part Luke Consulting to help them pick the right, the right turbine for them.
So I say as,
Joel Saxum: as those developers get closer to making these decisions, this is something they definitely need to think about is making a move like r w E did here because, uh, these vessels that, that Jen or Jan Nnu has, there’s multiple of them from different companies floating around the North Sea. There can’t be a whole lot of this stuff in the APAC region.
I mean, there’s some in Taiwan right now working, but there’s not a whole lot like down in to Australia to pick from. So someone’s gonna need to make these moves quicker than quicker than they think.
Allen Hall: Probably. Yeah. You, you’re gonna be out in like 20, 35 if you decide to try to lock
Rosemary Barnes: something in. I think we started doing some, some drilling, and it’ll be, it, it’ll be before 2030 that they start installing.
Um, but I, I don’t know how, how long before. But it is really interesting that all the supply chain stuff and the logistics as well, like when I think about renewable energy technologies, I have traditionally thought of, yeah, like wind turbine, solar panels, batteries, um, all those sorts of things. But the, I, I mean, development is still going on there, but I’m seeing more and more that the, like the.
Crucial, the, the bottlenecks for actually getting, you know, um, renewables and energy transition projects on the ground or in the ocean. The bottlenecks aren’t Those technologies themselves, they’re all of the supporting stuff. It’s no surprise that companies like X Links the one that’s trying to make a, a subsidy interconnector between Morocco and the uk.
They have seen, okay, we’re gonna, we’re gonna struggle. And they’re yeah, building their own ships, they’re building their own cable manufacturing facility. And I think that we’re gonna see a lot, a lot more of that sort of thing. If people want to be able to bid for really big projects, then they need to be a hundred percent sure that they can deliver.
And the main way that you can be a hundred percent sure you can deliver is if you own the, the means of, of that. So, That’s gonna mean, yeah. Vertical integration of manufacturing components and also, uh, yeah, in installation.
Allen Hall: Hey uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry.
That’s why we read p e s Wind Magazine. P e s Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and p s Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in-depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PEs wind, PEs wind.com.
Rosemary, at what point do you say to yourself as an, as an owner of a wind farm and a developer of a wind farm, if I put it at 15 megawatt turbines and I have to do all the cabling for 15 megawatt and the ships, Joel for 15 megawatts, that it just starts to stack up. Like he get fewer and fewer assets to actually do this, and the risk gets so big that you’re just better off putting in four megawatt turbines, just more of them.
For the fact of the matter, I can find a ship to put ’em in. I know how to do that, and the cabling gets a lot easier. It just lowers the overall cost of the project. It may end up having more time in the water to put all these turbines in, but. The financial risk is way less to do it.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that’s, uh, those are, there’s some really cool ROI models that someone, or, or I would say, I’m not gonna say cool.
I would say, how about some really in depth ROI models that someone needs to create. So a lot of spreadsheet time for someone to make those decisions, because you gotta factor in so many things, right? Uh, the p ppa costs, or you know, what your offtake is gonna look like in the end. So the life of the wind farm, how much money can you actually make?
What it takes to install what the o, what the o and m budgets will be on those smaller machines. You know, cuz a lot, for a long time, a lot of the Northern European offshore wind farms are eight megawatt machines. Right. They’re not, there’s not a whole lot of, I mean, there is a whole lot of those smaller ones out there, so, You know, the, the, when you start, start talking, even like now, you get into like the whole supply chain insurance wise, because now if the insurance company needs to have that one vessel that can install those blades or that thing across the world, all of a sudden that premium goes
Allen Hall: through the roof.
Right. It seems like, again, we’re gonna be driven by the insurance companies, but even in the, in the, the loan factor of the cable that goes onshore, right. That if you’re talking, I’ve seen some discussions most around H V D C and just raising the voltage and raising the voltage, which makes the cabling much more complex and risky.
In my opinion. It’s new. Uh, do you do two lower voltage systems and come on shore in two different places just because you want to break up the risk. It seems like at some point the spreadsheet should be telling you there’s too much risk in this basket and we need to simplify this whole equation, right?
Well, I think so, but I don’t make those decisions. Well, that’s what Rosemary’s for. She’s the one that should be doing all the calculations. Right. That seems like a good engineering with Rosie episode. Right? Like there, if I put in, like Joel was saying, eight megawatt machines. I have double of them and, and versus 15 megawatt, is it more.
Cost efficient to do that. It, it, it’s gotta be close.
Rosemary Barnes: I guarantee that those spreadsheets exist in mul multiple, uh, people’s desks around the world. Um, and I mean, yeah, it’s, you see this’s all through engineering. It’s, you know, multi variable optimization. You got, you know, a bunch of different things, some things, um, Yeah, a bunch of different factors when you’re deciding am I gonna go bigger or, or smaller.
And I, I did make a video on, you know, one small part of that. Um, yeah, I think it’s called something like, how Big can Wind Turbines get? And looking at, you know, what’s the, for just for the turbine itself and not for all that other stuff that you mentioned. You know, what’s the, the best size to go for?
What will give you the cheapest, um, Electricity at the end of the day. And there’s a bunch of factors that say bigger is better and, and cable connections is one of those, from what I understand. I mean, I’m no, not really an expert in that. I’ve been looking into a lot recently, but, um, still got a lot to learn, but fewer connections is, is good.
Fewer cables is good. I mean, it is gonna cost you the same amount nearly to fix a fault in Yeah, like a, I don’t know. A one one megawatt cable compared to a a five megawatt cable. So, uh, I think that you’re still in favor of having fewer, bigger ones for those sorts of things, but then structurally, usually smaller is better.
Um, y. Because as you increase the size of something, then, so with a wind turbine you in, you say you double the length of the blade, then you’re gonna sweep out four times the, the area. So you get four times the power, the power increases with the square of the length of the blade, but the, the volume and.
Therefore the mass of the system increases with the cube cuz you’re in, you know, um, scaling in three dimensions. So you usually end up favoring smaller things. Structurally. I mean, it’s why, you know, gymnasts are small. They, uh, can jump, jump higher because they’ve got a smaller mass for, um, you know, a not that much smaller strength.
It’s the same. It is, it’s the same, same effect that says that structurally things are prefer to be smaller. And so you’ve always got this balance of, um, what’s the right size to make something. Um, and it changes all the time as technology changes because you, you know, like we would like to have. Taller towers for onshore wind turbines, for example.
Bigger turbines would be nice there, but there’s a constraint that the, you can only fit a certain diameter of tower on a road if you wanna drive it, you know, in a normal truck, on a normal road without too many road closures, then you’re limited in the diameter. The way towers are built now, they, you know, you, you ship a whole, a whole section of tower in, in place.
Um, so that’s a constraint that’s keeping. Onshore wind turbines small. It’s like at any time we’re optimized for. The size that something should be. But it changes all the time. And I think with offshore what the challenge is, is that you’re trying to imagine what the constraints will be. So now it’s hard to get your hands on ships, but your project, you need the ship in, you know, five years, eight years or something.
Um, Will that constraint exist then? If you assume that this is gonna be your driving constraint and you go for small turbines, but because everybody just kept on talking in the media and on podcasts about how big a problem there is with ship supply, you know, maybe. Thousands of new ship builders, um, sprung up and now ships are super, super cheap.
In, um, 2030, everyone’s got, you know, ships, this market’s been flooded. People are discounting their prices to just, you know, get someone to use their ship. Um, you’re gonna look pretty silly if you’re putting in one megawatt wind turbines and everybody else is putting in 20 megawatt wind turbines, um, because you assumed that the ships would be the constraint.
So that’s why I think you try and. You try and kind of like loosely plan your project and only lock in details as you move closer towards it once you get a better idea about what the constraints are gonna be.
Allen Hall: But is is it silly? I don’t, I don’t think it’s silly. Okay. And, and the reason I say that is, you know what, you have to have a defined, roughly defined cost of what it’s gonna take to put these turbines in an offshore project.
Same thing for onshore, it’s the same equations pretty much. But once you know that cost of that project, It’s sort of, uh, Joel, what’s the term I’m looking for? It’s, uh, it’s a sunk cost. It’s like a sunk cost, right? The equation works out on producing the power. If you can produce the power and make money at the end, then everything sort of works out in the end, right?
I mean, you know how much power that farm is gonna produce. It may. And with the IRA bill and all the production tax credits and all that going into it, it gets a little murky. I’m not sure bigger is better in this situation. And I, I wanna tie this into something that Vic Bates said from, uh, GE ver Nova, and I’m, I’m not gonna quote him, but I generally, where he was going.
He’s running the onshore division, I think he’s the c e o of the, of GE, ver Nova’s onshore. Which is they’re gonna slash a number of towers being built, they’re gonna slash a number of wind turbine blade types of being built. They’re gonna slash a number of nasals being built. They’re gonna basically simplify the process.
Again, I think that may come down to all, all the other pieces. Not only just what GE has to build, but everything else. You got different trucks to haul ’em around. You got different kinds of insulation techniques. You got all the stuff, you gotta go do it. Maybe not just be the oem. Piece, but also the customer piece that you just makes it too damn complicated.
We need to standardize the trucks we use to haul blades around
Joel Saxum: in Vestas had the same, an article just like that the other day too. Um, and it’s basically says it’s time to slow down on turbines if we really wanna scale up the offshore wind industry. So basic, basically they’re saying, yeah, continuous rapid introduction of larger, new models is hindering efforts to establish sustainable and robust supply chains.
And that’s from investors. Brass
Rosemary Barnes: investors are always whinging and whinging about what everybody else is doing. Uh, they investors always seem to just want to stand, stand still and not, um, develop any further. It, it’s weird because, you know, like if you look back at their history, investors has a good history of trying out innovative stuff and, um, you know, progressing their technology.
Um, they’ve got some, you know, more of those like really. And this guy kind of crazy out there, ideas that they’ve pursued to see what they could learn from that. But recently, like the last couple of years, all you hear is Vester wishing that, you know, like what do they wanna go back to? Those old like drag type wind turbines that, you know, the old farm ones with about 50 different, um, sail on them is we could really perfect that if we all just, you know, all just agreed to, to make those, um, I don’t know.
Yeah, they’re, they’re right that. If you would make just tons and tons of the exact same product, it would go better. But you have to, um, have the right product as well. I mean, looking back over the last decade, would would they say, oh yeah, we should have stopped in, um, you know, in 2013, what were we at?
Like, I don’t know, like a, a three megawatt turbine would’ve been a big, a big one back then, right? Like, oh, we should have stopped there and just perfected that. I mean, no wind, wind energy has gotten so much cheaper in the, um, the time it’s happened since then. It’s super challenging time for businesses to make money, but you’ve gotta keep on developing.
Surely.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think it’s like a, the pendulum swing though, right? Like, and that happens with everything. Everything is cyclical, right? So we went through, you know, we went through this crazy fast period of. Innovation and technical change, and now it’s, it almost seems like the OEMs are calling for the pendulum to swing back.
Like, let’s slow down a little bit, mayor and kind of perfect these, and, and in 20 years maybe the pendulum will swing back the other way and we’ll go on this another crazy streak again. But I think they’re kind of, they’re getting caught by all these warranty claims and things, so they’re like, man, we need to, and saying like that, that thing from Vestas to me sounds like in the background, was sitting in a conference room going like, how do we.
How do we get away from some of these warranty claims, but like, put some stuff out there so it doesn’t feel like we’re saying we can’t survive these warranty claims. Well, you say, Hey, we need to slow down this thing to, you know, optimize our supply chains. Well, in all, in reality, you need to stop innovating so fast because you’re getting burned by warranty claims.
And, and that’s, to me it’s, it’s back and forth.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But I think, I mean, the warranty claims. They kind of lag. Right. So I mean, definitely there was a burst in, um, innovation in probably all of the manufacturers. I don’t know from. I dunno, around 2015 plus or minus a few years, um, for, for a few years.
There’s so many different changes, um, in terms of materials and design features, um, and size of turbines. And it’s now that those warranty issues, uh, becoming apparent and we talked about the, um, yeah, there was that d n b report last week that. You know, went through the, the, the fact that there are more claims now.
Um, and I think every manufacturer goes through cycles, cycles of that and has over their lifetime. Um, you go through a cycle of rapid innovation, um, and then a few years after that, then you go through a, a cycle of, oh my God, we’ve got so many warranty claims, we’re nearly gonna get bankrupt over it. And everyone gets scared and, and slows down a bit.
Um, I think maybe it was kind of coordinated between all the manufacturers this time. So you know, everybody is, is suffering like that. But I think we’re probably naturally at that next phase I, I think, Best as is maybe, I don’t know. Obviously they’re, they’re in the industry, um, as much as I am or more so, and so they, they know what’s going on, but it seems like they’re kind of, you know, reacting to something that’s actually quite a few years in the past now.
And I mean, there is naturally a, a, you know, changing, it’s a, it’s a cyclical thing that innovation warranty claims, um, you know, settle, take stock and then, you know, in another 10 years time there’ll be another burst of innovation and, and warranty claims. But the. Technology changes have have happened and now we need to get, make them more reliable.
My
Allen Hall: question is, is GE ver Nova competing against Ssus or on a bigger scale, are they competing against solar and battery? I think that’s where the real battle is. They know what Vestus is, they know what Nordex is, right? They, they know what that product line is, but you’re competing against an ever lower cost.
Solar easy to install. Not a lot of constraints to get it to where it needs to go. Kind of industry isn’t that where the, the ve Novas of the world have to compete against? And that’s why they’re doing all these things. They’re not just saying, which it’s a wind world. If you look at R W E, their portfolio is split like 50 50 roughly between solar and onshore wind.
That will change dramatically if wind continues not to rapidly, you know, improve and be more stable That. Rdb of the world just installed more solar and more batteries. So isn’t that the real constraint is solar and batteries, not that are competitors
Rosemary Barnes: in wind? In a way, I think you’re right that, um, There.
If solar never got cheap, then we would’ve seen wind filling. A lot of the, the role that solar does now and batteries are getting cheap, which makes solar plus batteries even more similar to wind. But if you look at any of the, the scenarios and any of the countries continents that I’ve seen them plan out, uh, you know, a net zero scenario, or at least a highly variable renewable scenario.
You usually see more wind than solar, even though everyone expects solar to be a lot cheaper. Everyone expects batteries to get cheaper. A again, but the fact is that adding more solar means that you need more storage and, um, storage is still, you know, ex expensive, even as cheap as it can get. So the more wind you have, the less storage you need.
And especially, it’s especially crucial for the stuff that, um, batteries can’t do. So batteries are never going to help you meet your winter load if you know, if you’ve got a ton of solar in your system. And that’s mostly generating in the summer. Lithium ion batteries are not going to help you be able to ride through the winter in a, in a system like that, just Christmas day.
Joel Saxum: That’s it though. After that you gotta get some more juice going, flowing back through.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So, so there’s, there’s that. So I think that, um, yes, solar, if solar never got cheaper than wind, we would see more of the easy kind of wind. But I think you also have to look, um, Further, and when I see people focusing on offshore and especially floating offshore, you know, everyone thinks this is so crazy, why would you be, you know, fixed bottom offshore is double the levelized cost of energy, of onshore wind, right?
So you’re like, why would you do that? And then flow, uh, more again, I mean, it’s not so many. Uh, of them to be able to really get a good figure for it. But, you know, like a lot more expensive. But people make the mistake of thinking that it’s floating offshore wind competing with onshore wind, and it’s not.
It’s competing with stuff like liquid hydrogen exports or, you know, the floating offshore is to massively expand the kinds of areas that can generate large volumes of renewable energy. So, you know, it’s gonna mean that. Japan can put floating offshore in instead of having to get liquid hydrogen from Australia, for example.
Or instead of having to have, you know, um, a subsea cable. You know, Japan doesn’t wanna get a large chunk of their electricity from China by a subsea cable. They just don’t trust it. And, um, so it’s those kind of trade offs that. Floating offshore and, um, probably fixed bottom offshore to a lesser extent, are involved in.
Um, I think it’s really misleading or, yeah. It’s just, it’s wrong to think of these technologies competing with onshore wind or, or solar because these, the whole reason why people are willing to spend so much on these technologies is that it, it’s feeling those really hard, hard use cases.
Allen Hall: Oh, sure. I think you’re totally right about that.
But I think you pointed out the same thing I’m pointing out. If wind onshore wind is competing with onshore solar, offshore wind is competing against something else. Right? And if it makes better sense from an engineering and a financial standpoint, if I’m running these companies like a Renova, that I want to just get lean and focus on things that are profitable and not try to make 50 variants.
I think that’s where everybody’s getting to vestus is, is saying it in a different way than ver Nova’s saying it, but basically saying the same thing. Like, yeah, we’re getting pushed from these outside forces, which are not even in wind. We need to make wind as profitable as we can. Here’s
Rosemary Barnes: how we do it. I mean, I, I agree.
I think though that, um, wind and solar are helping each other ultimately because without really cheap solar, um, or without really cheap wind, then you would never be able to conceive of a hundred percent renewable electricity grids. I mean, with only one or the other, then you truly would need something like nuclear or, you know, I don’t know.
Something, something else that doesn’t exist to, to fill it in, but between the two of them, wind and solar, you can get, um, pretty, pretty damn close to a hundred percent renewable pretty much everywhere in the world. And so I, I think that all ultimately the, you know, they might. Squabbling over, you know, who gets the bigger piece of the pie, but the fact is that the pie is way bigger because there’s both involved.
And so I, I think that ultimately it’s still good for, for both wind and solar, that the other one exists and is cheap and reliable.
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Connect with the Global Blade experts at Wind Power Lab by visiting wind power lab.com. Scotland based BOR has now introduced a new patented product aimed at significantly reducing scour phenomena around fixed wind turbines. Uh, you know, scour is when the, the ocean gets turbulent around a tower and starts to erode the seabed and expose cables and do all kinds of, of, of bad things, which are very expensive.
And typically, uh, around, and Joel, correct me if I’m wrong here, but around the base of a mono pile, they’ll put a bunch of rocks, essentially in a bag to prevent
Joel Saxum: erosion. Or even without a bag, they just dump rocks there too. I mean, Yeah. Cause the thing, the thing you gotta think about here is, um, so a lot of the, most of the fixed bottom offshore wind in the world is in the North Sea.
It’s, you know, offshore in, in between mainland Europe and the uk. And that water body has a. Almost constant, but they sh they shift and move just like the winds do in the sky. But they have a two to three knot subsea current, almost constantly, right, to the point where you almost sometimes have to have special, like you can’t put a small inspection class r o v down some days because they don’t have the staying power to hold themselves against the current.
So, so you think about, think about like, everybody’s been to a river, right? You look in the river and you see that rock sitting there and the the cavitation behind it, where there’s the eddy, right? Where sometimes, like if you’re a fisherman, you know, you can fish around the edges there because the fish will hang there because the, all the little worms and bits and grubs get caught in that eddy and they sit there.
That same eddy scours behind that rock and creates a divot in what would be the, the bed of the river. The exact same thing happens to an offshore wind turbine. The water hits it, and then it creates that cavitation behind It creates an eddy behind the tower where it’s on the sea floor and it scours it out.
It it. Scoops that sand and stuff outta there.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And it’s a big problem and you have to address it. So right now, if they’re, they’re dumping rocks there and what Biomal is saying, and because Scotland is a birth place of golf, right? I mean it, I’m right about that. I think, uh, uh, they’ve developed this little scour protection system, which basically is like a sleeve with a bunch of, uh, Dimples on, not necessarily dimple, but raised area.
So it kinda looks like the inverted golf ball in the sense. So they’re trying to create, uh, a little bit of turbulence around the foundation such that the water flow doesn’t get, get those eddies built up in it and start to scour behind it. Uh, and so it’s sort of an interesting technique, right? It, it, it does make life a little bit simpler.
They’re talking about, uh, because of the rock dumping and all the things that have to happen. There’s chances for problems with that. But Joel, did they have to go and inspect after the rock dump or even look to see every, every year or so to make sure that the scour protection in terms of rocks is still working?
I assume there’s some sort of check that
Joel Saxum: has to happen. Yeah, I mean, it’s like any, any major infrastructure project you’re gonna do an A, you’re gonna do, you have, you’ve designed everything in the office. You’re gonna go and execute that design, and then you’re gonna do an as-built survey. So you’re gonna go sub C, you’re gonna inspect, and they are, a lot of times you’re doing rock dumps that are, that are, uh, specifically.
Intricate, you’re inspecting them as you lay the rocks. Sometimes they’ll place those rocks with an r o v and then watch with another one to make sure that everything’s in the right spot and everything’s good, so that, that, that process can get quite expensive. But at a minimum, yes, once you dump, you’ll go back and do a scan to make sure that everything looks good.
And if not, you gotta fix it at that time, cuz otherwise it’s useless. Right. But, um, yeah, I mean the, if you’re, if you know anything about. And I don’t wanna get too deep here, but vortex induced vibration. It’s basically the same thing we’re talking about when water hits or air can be the same thing, hits that monopile.
If you, if you’re, again, if you’re. Driving a boat and you try to stick a pole down in the water, it will sit there, it’ll start doing vibrating back and forth, left and right, left and right, left and right. But you, if you put, because when the water goes around it, it creates that cavitation, it’ll pull it left, pull it right, pull it, left, pull it right, pull it, left, pull it right.
So that’s, that’s kind of the same thing. So the, what, the tool that you use or the engineering design that you use, uh, to, to eliminate vortex induced vibration, it’s called a strike. And a strike basically will go around the, the object. If you ever see a turbine tower, sometimes you see them in very windy areas that have streaks on them.
Even in the air, that’s to break up the air flow around the tower so it doesn’t
Allen Hall: vibrate. It’s just like the antenna on my car. It’s got that little wire it wraps around it to keep it from vibrating, some of that. Otherwise
Joel Saxum: it’ll sit there and vibrate cause it sort of breaks up the airflow around it. And if you know that the air is always gonna come from one direction, you can actually just put like a V on the back of it.
And the water will flow. It’s, it’s just, it’s like hydrodynamic modeling, right? But if you don’t know which way it’s gonna come all the time, then you put these strikes on there, then it protects it in general. So this idea of these rock bags with the dimples on ’em is like having a more of a three-dimensional strike.
To, to induce turbulence, to break up the, uh, specific
Allen Hall: water flow around them. Uh, I, I think this is a cool idea. So what they’re talking about is you, you put in the, the mono pile foundation, you slide the sleeve of this hex fence over top, and then you build the rest of the turban on top of it. And the theory goes is that you don’t have to do a lot of inspection.
You kind of set it, forget it, and I guess that would make sense. You know, you’re not gonna know until you put it out in service for a long time and check it, but, It’s a cool idea and you don’t see a lot of new ideas around foundations and scour. Uh, but this is, this is interesting. So I, I would like to just follow them to see if they get some, some sales and where they’re, where they’re headed.
I think just some places in the United States where this may make a lot of sense. Well, Kansas State has done it again. The Kansas State University’s Wildcat Wind Power Group has emerged victorious. In the prestigious collegiate win competition for the second consecutive year. Now, Rosemary, you and I saw this competition down in San Antonio at a c P 2022, and we wandered around the, all the engineers and watch them compete.
It, it’s a really serious competition. Yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: it’s cool. They bring like portable, um, wind tunnels into the, into the hole so that they can, uh, test out their. Their designs in, there’s a few different categories. I I, this one, I guess they’re older. The one I was mostly looking at when I was there was the, the kid wind, which is I think elementary school age kids.
And, you know, they’ve gotta make a. I think they were making floating offshore, the one that we saw. And they even had wave tanks, like a wave tank there inside the wind tunnel. They brought that into the hole and that was pretty cool, seeing the designs that kids had come up with to, you know, that they’re trying to solve the same problems that, um, When energy engineers are, make sure that the turbine doesn’t fall over and that it can generate a lot of energy.
Um, and I guess that that’s the same for the university age, age one as well, but maybe with, you know, a little bit, a little bit more sophisticated designs in manufacturing methods. Well, yeah. K
Allen Hall: states, uh, Walcot, we wind power competed against 11 other schools, and this competition takes basically an academic year.
And they’re tasked with designing, building and testing model wind turbines, uh, and presenting their creations at the competition, which was in Boulder, Colorado. Uh, really nice place to have a competition. Uh, yeah, it’s great. I’m not sure where next year’s is going to be. I haven’t seen anything from the Department of Energy where, uh, the 2024 competition’s gonna be, but you’d like to see more colleges participate in this because, It’s a really good engineering exercise.
This is kinda like some of the F S A E off-road s a e aircraft competitions with Rosemary. I think you competed in some of those, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, yeah, I did. I did. Um, the, uh, error designs, SAE error design West, uh, I did that five times, including one time when I was at uc, Davis in the us The rest of the time was at my, my real university, an Australian one.
Um, and that was really cool. And then while I was in America, I also was on the team for a human powered vehicle, which was a, a similar one. Um, and I did dabble a tiny bit with the formula, s a e, um, back at the Australian National University, but it was era design was the main one I did. Um, and I have often said that I learned as much.
Or more real engineering in that project than I did in the whole rest of my degree combined. Cause it’s so, so different to, you know, you have an open-ended design problem. Um, instead of, you know, like when you’re doing your, your homework and or studying for exams, doing exam questions, it’s like, you know, here’s a problem.
There’s one, one solution to it. Try and get the right answer. But then when you go out and you work as an engineer, it’s not about that anymore. Um, and it’s not about, You know, just working longer and longer and longer to try and get, um, more closer to the exact right answer. It’s about how far can you get in the time that you’ve got available.
Um, all sorts of other real world constraints. Like, uh, I don’t know, being able to access the, the workshop, um, being able to fundraise the fundraising was one of the, the aspect, the things that I learned. During my time on that team that I never would’ve thought was a real engineering skill. But you need that.
Even when you, you know, you go into a company and you’re like, we should do this project, then you have to fundraise within your company to, um, to find, find the funds for that. You have to convince people that this is the right project to do. Um, not to mention all the manufacturing, you know, you learn so much more about, um, manufacturability when you’re, you’re making something, you test it, it breaks, you fix it.
It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s fantastic.
Allen Hall: There were sponsors last year, right? The, those teams had corporate sponsors. Some of them did. I thought that they did. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: I I bet they, they would have. We, um, I, yeah, I did all the, the fundraising. I think while I was at, um, a N U and I approached places like the, um, civil Aviation Authority, um, they, they sponsored one year.
Um, just, you know, companies, uh, engineering companies in the area that were trying to re recruit that they, you know, they wanted to get their name out there so that, um, students might consider working for them. Um, trying to think what other kinds of companies, uh, yeah, just. Lots of, lots of companies that just want, you know, just think it’s, it’s cool, it’s not, you know, like a few thousand dollars was a big deal for our team, but doesn’t matter that much to a big company.
So some, you know, often they would do it just because, you know, they see kids having a go and wanna, wanna help out.
Joel Saxum: I’d like to see them do the finale for it like they did last year in San Antonio. Do it at the ACP event. We’re in Minneapolis next year. Like host the thing back there where you can get everybody.
And then those students not only. Could they possibly get some sponsorship from some of these asset owners or other people in the industry, but they get direct exposure to ’em. You’ve got all of them, the same people walking around the same hall and have them come in, give them free, free access to the event and expose them to the wind industry.
I think that’s, that’s a win-win for me. You could pass their resumes around.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Ex exactly. I was just gonna say, I was hiring for, um, my consulting business and my YouTube channel and a guy that I, I hired to, yeah, do engineering and research. His. He was straight outta school, but he had been the technical director for the formula s a e team.
And I, I know what that means. You know, that is, that is fantastic management experience and project management experience. Um, much, I would much rather, uh, someone with experience like that than someone that had spent a couple of years in a, a graduate program where you’re still kind of getting, you know, spoon spoonfed tasks to do and very.
Clear expectations and yeah, it’s worked out really well cuz he is so proactive. He easily sees what, you know, what’s the deliverable that needs to be done and then problem solves to, to get there. And only, um, yeah, comes to me when, when there’s a roadblock, but doesn’t in general need his handheld the whole way through.
And I think that that’s the kind of skills that you learn from these kinds of projects. And I hope that other employers see. How, how valuable that is cuz it is like getting someone with a few years work experience rather than, you know, comparing to someone that is, has only been at university, only studying to get good grades and not learning any of that stuff that you, you need to be able to actually function in a workplace.
Allen Hall: Yeah, well, well, congratulations to Kansas State and all the competitors. We hope to see you, like Joel said, in Minneapolis next year. Well, off the shore of the Netherlands, uh, the last wind turbine has been installed at the Polly Ous Wind Farm, making it the largest offshore wind farm in operation, uh, Polly.
Zeus basically means Netherlands, south Coast. I think that’s what that means in America. Talk. It has a capacity of one and a half gigawatts. It’s a huge farm, and it’s being developed by Vattenfall. It’s a first, uh, subsidy free offshore wind farm. Uh, they say in the world, but I don’t know if that’s true.
I mean, maybe it is. Maybe, maybe it is because America has done very little. Yeah, we definitely subsidize
Joel Saxum: everything.
Allen Hall: That’s true. Okay. Uh, they’re installing 139 wind turbines, and Joel and Rosemary, if you remember, they were supposed to install 140 wind turbines, but they had that ship go astray. And running to one of the monopiles.
And so they knocked it down one, that one Monopile is still damaged sitting in the water, but the, it sounds like they’re talking about removing it, maybe putting a turbine back in its place, but this is a big milestone. A one and a half gigawatt, uh, wind farm is a huge step for renewable energy. So the Ho Wind Farm.
Is our wind farm of the week. Okay. Congratulations to Vattenfall. 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 or 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.
