In episode four, we evaluate the effects of COVID-19 on wind turbine site completions, how we detect lightning strikes, and how companies like SkySpecs (https://skyspecs.com/) are changing the way we handle inspection data.
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Transcript: Can Drones Improve Wind Turbine Inspections?
00:00:09 – 00:05:02
Welcome back this is the time podcast. I’m your host. Dan Blewett. And I’m joined here remotely by lightning protection expert Allen Hall. Allen, How’re you doing? Great Dan how are you doing all right doing all right? It’s it’s breezy out here in DC. Today it’s pretty Nice Still a ghost town but in general. I’m I’m getting honestly pretty comfortable being at home every day. What about you? You’re getting used to self-isolation? I hope I don’t get leading. We’re all you know comfortably. Sort of locked into the house My Wife said she. My wife has been delivering Groceries to local families that are people that can’t really get out of house are probably shouldn’t be at the grocery store you said She was delivering groceries to Somebody in the community and a neighbor popped out yelled at her. She should be worrying that my wife had been wearing a mask and I thought well it was the The way it was delivered wasn’t very Maybe that wasn’t the right approach but I think the intent was good. So yeah. Yelling probably isnt the way do it. Yeah okay good idea to wear a mask but it was like. Hey you can Yeah there’s different ways of going about it but We’re we’re seeing people People are being a lot more cautious than they were two weeks ago or even a week ago quite honestly. I thought people were some of them. Were not doing smart things but that seems to have got away so the same people that were like out having fun or go into a restaurant or bar or now wearing a mask and a very cautious of other people so maybe the message has gotten through. Yeah I mean I think that’s the rookie like if we can just cut out all the fun then will be good for this. Specific strain cove in nineteen really thrives. On Fun Yeah. No Ping Pong. No chutes and ladders What else no jacks like. A nineteen forties game the other. We go Yeah it’s been interesting. I like I’m never home so this has really been new for me even though I work completely remotely I’m still just never home. I just choose to be out working either in a co working space around a coffee shop and just I just. That’s my vibe. But I’m finally getting a little more comfortable being just here which is okay like productive. Yeah it’s fine. I can do everything to do. I have a setup that I’ve you know orchestrating. Everyone’s you know Jerry. Rigging, macgyver rigging their their their little home studio areas or whatever and so. It’s you know you start to realize that you’re dug in for the long haul. Years. Just coming to terms that were cave people now like the people you find those little mud little mud caves are like underground layers that humans used to live in two thousand years ago. That’s what we are right now. I liked yeah. We were all back to that. Yup but of course as a kid you always wanted to be Batman or you know have like four a month. Yeah you got exactly what you oughta havoc still obviously on the on the turban industry We’re getting a lot of feedback that Everybody is kind of shutdown right now and You know one of the big things in the states we were talking about earlier. was some of the tax incentives have will sunset unless the projects get done Which is trouble which is really be a hard time to get that those things done a lesser changes to the schedule. Yeah you think probably accommodate that right. I mean everyone seems understand that like I’ve seen some very positive articles about I think there’s one big Brooklyn landlord that gave all of his tenants. Like a free month’s ran. Maybe maybe that’s ongoing. But there’s people are coming around to being a little more altruistic and understanding about like the money’s got to go somewhere so you default like so you’d guess that maybe they’ll put some of these tax credit deadlines back but know why involve anything in evolves Congress. Just never sure until it’s done And those in even at the state level I know that sometimes their state incentives. So you’re kind of playing roulette twice to get both of them the to agree to do the same thing. We’ll we’ll see how it plays out but obviously When citizens called our local congressperson and and or write them It does make a difference.
00:05:02 – 00:10:05
But they’re just GONNA they’re getting flooded all the elected. Representatives are getting flooded with requests to do things. I don’t know how they’re going to weed through all of it and maybe what will happen. There’s just turn a blind eye to it And just let it go. Let it slip by and not in not You know holders to the full letter of the law. We’ll see we’ll see. Yeah it’s kind of interesting. So do you think there’ll be a shift like with all the different types of renewable energy will there be winners and losers? It’s like other industries like would win. Come out better than solar or then we can have nuclear power plants again. I mean well if Bill Gates has his way we’re going to have some nuclear power plants Some newer style Some that actually eat old nuclear waste. And that’s sort of the Bill Gates Approach To some of that. But in the meantime you know they’re going to you know whatever he’s going to happen on a nuclear scale is going to be a couple of years still Wind is still extremely valuable and is is is really proven itself over the last several years solar a little bit You know depending on what the players are there. Obviously Tesla’s getting involved particularly in a battery side and we’re always just thinking this afternoon about the Tesla in the solar thing where we’re at home depot a couple of months ago obviously but we’re up at home depot which is a local hardware store or national hardware store chain and they had the Tesla Battery for your home. While right now it wasn’t gonNA run your home for seven-eight days. It was more like it’s GonNa run for a day or so. I think when I did the calculations but you know to walk into a biscuit a local hardware store and find the ability to power my house. Now it was a couple of grand if I remember right. The price isn’t quite right but Thirty years ago. No shot anything like that So we’re going to see some pretty significant changes. It looks like there’s a lot of pressure for some of the Winter. Some companies that have been struggling lately trying to get now. They’re on top of it. I’m not sure how they’re gonNA SAAG GONNA play out there. There’s going to be consolidated. I think it’d be more consolidation. I think that’s ultimately more. We’re going to go have consolidation on the OEM equipment side. We’re GONNA have consolidation on the maintenance side we’re gonNA consolidation on the inspection side. A lot of the small players are going to get eaten up or just go away. I’m not sure. That’s great for the industry. It depends on who the winners and losers are but we better come out stronger out this And get ready for the next one right and I hopefully. That’s what we’re doing. Yeah so one thing that’s been My mind is obviously. There’s going to be less maintenance workers to go out and look at any single thing like if you tree branch falls on your house. Nowadays like it might sit there for a while right probably does it probably does probably does and Ditto for the winter but industry so you know with all the maintenance that these require like. They require regular maintenance. They’re in very remote areas so we know they’re going to get less attention and less maintenance than than they would normally so with all that they have a lot of systems built in. You know one of which is lightning detection. So can you walk us through a little bit about you. Know what do these modern wins have one of the older styles have. And what are the kind of the way? That’s going with detections. So I would say fifteen years ago. They probably didn’t have much of anything unless you’re a farmer and former yells as he got hit right. Well that was. That was well. Usually each of the wind turbine sites There’s a couple of people who are close by that kind. Keep Track and after storms. Come through what they used to do is just go out and drive the site or walk the site and and just make sure everything looked okay and make sure everything’s producing power. They still had Databases essentially data systems that were monitoring that if powers coming out correctly and Some parameters on the quality of the power that come out of it so there was a very Rough way of determining if terms not producing power may have been struck by lightning. You don’t know until you kind of get out there and look at it More modern ways There was a big effort to fifteen years ago. The basically what they did. They took a credit card and on the credit cards. Not that we have this anymore. It’s just going away to which is the magnetic strip on a credit card What they did it took that credit card and or the magnetic strip on the credit card they take the credit card credit card for cheap and they basically zip tied it to the down conductor in a turbine blade and as lightning energy ran down that that down conductor there was a medic field associated with that and they would change the Manetti Basic Bacon magnetic recording on the on the credit cards.
00:10:05 – 00:15:03
You could pull that credit card out and run it through the card reader until how much lightning energy or if it had been struck as sort of a rough detection method if the blade had been struck without physically scaling it right so he can kinda reach into it. And and do this quickey check. Let’s not a quickie check. But it’s better than nothing. So that was like a very sort of first generation way of going about it. Then that that evolved into instrument either the tower to see if the turban had been struck till they put sensors around the tower or on things in the tower and as lightning current flew. Flew down it it would. It would trigger And then they started instrument Things up in the Nacelle to to tell if the if the turbine have been struck pretty pretty simplistic in today’s world Because he’s trying to keep the cost down. You just need to tell you if the thing that struck the more modern way of doing it is with the the national lightning detection networks that exist in Europe and the United States and all over the place where they have a series of antennas that are scattered about the country and they. When lightning happens they can triangulate it and they have Pretty good accuracy on what the amplitude of that lightening strike is nowadays. Can they triangulate? Were COMES FROM. They can tell if it’s positive. I need striker negative lightening strike. It can give you a rough estimates on amplitude this. They do of want what they definitely do. Is they take the? Gps where they the coordinates of where they think that lightening strike occurred. And run that over like Google map thing to see what what Winterbourne had been struck so it’s Sort of GPS locating via map and they can provide Wind Turbine side. Say Hey turban number four likely got hit or something near there got hit and they’re pretty angry. I seems some those reports come down. They are actually relatively accurate as to We’re lightning has hit. It made its. I don’t remember what the last thing I saw on the accuracy of that system. But if you’re taking a lightning strike within a hundred yards of terminated probably hit the wind turbine and so that’s the most modern way would doesn’t involve electronics in any of the wind turbines. It’s done remotely and it can provide you alive live data. You can watch a screen and watch your site and watch the thunderstorm come over and see what the lightning strikes are in the kick out a report after the thing happened yet to pay for those services. Obviously but it is probably the quickest and the most accurate way of determining if you’re winter but has been hit by lightning is the new Data systems those those global lightning Maps are available. You just Google it. And there’s a couple you can see you can see every lightening strike in the world. Roughly most of them will yeah. Those are really cool because they give. Wow there’s there’s a lot of the earth is an electrical being. There’s like all the time on the Earth if it’s not in your local area it’s somewhere and it’s it’s it’s interesting to kind of watch Storms coming in and out and watch things happen so yeah. They’re using a lot more high. Tech technology to pick out lightning strikes. Yeah it’s it’s funny. There’s the the most lightning strikes in the world. I guess is above the Catatumbo River in Maracaibo Venezuela and. They said there that what is what is the official number. Here is something like a hundred plus per hour everyday forever which which is insane. That’s that’s crazy Disney world was pretty bad. But that’s a lot worse and being in Florida the summertime. It’s like set your watch by it. Yeah I guess it’s just the unique combination of the weather and just like most of them are like within the clouds they said get but it’s just almost like a constant flow of electricity which is I’m sure a quite a spectacle to come visit and watch and you talk about northern lights and all those natural phenomenon. I’d never really thought much about lightning phenomenon or just having a a really high concentration on like that before. Well anytime you get Convective activity in cold temperatures. You’RE GONNA YOU’RE GONNA have some sort of lightning discharges going on even The ones that I’ve seen over more recently I think are cool looking or the volcanic lightning strikes or when a volcano erupts. All the ashes all charged up in it starts to create these discharges in the plumes. Those are really cool looking. I know a volcano erupting is a bad bad thing but one of the cool exit comes out of it is the lightning strikes that are generated by the volcanoes. Yes so when someone gets an alert that all right this turbans men hit. What do they what what happens next? Well they go out.
00:15:03 – 00:20:01
And I take a look. Ob- since monitoring they have a lot of remote monitoring that goes on each the turbans If if some of the sensors have alarms have gone off the a lot of times. They think they’re hooked up to cellphone themselves on a buzz and tell them hey turban number seven. Has these error codes fall codes pop up And then they got us into crew over there take a look and see if they can restart it and clear lows codes or what the deal is because they don’t know sometimes the the faults have don’t have a lot to do with the operation it’s sort of extraneous pieces of equipment but You don’t have coats pop up. And that’s you see a lot of Advertising lately for companies that are Just saw one yesterday. So the the what I’ve been seeing as hey Avoid these Essentially winter been error codes when lightning strikes. Put OUR MAGIC SYSTEM. And and you know prevent this stuff from happening So it’s a computerized digitized world today. there’s a lot of information’s provided to The repair people to know what to go. Look for. It’s not much different than even an airplane today. Where the airplane tell you. What’s wrong with it so you start taking a general looking to go find in a or a car. I mean even in a car cars are tell you what’s wrong with them. Even though the engine the engine light may come on. There’s a way to quickly detect as what component has gone bad. It’s sort of like that Gotcha. And then a bunch about drones being more and more useful for inspections. Yeah do you feel like there’s any kind of Maybe like a hub system in the future where you have a cluster of one hundred turbans up on a mountain and there’s just like a little docking station where protected from the weather and there’s a couple of drones in there and you can remotely open the hatch and out. They fly to inspect. Yeah you know. The guys at Sky specs and in Michigan have system is similar to that. I don’t know if the drones are are located Specifically at each of the sites I think they send the drones around but the training evolve is very minimal and the drones are preprogrammed to skiing the wind turbines so I think that the drones know what kind of Winterbourne we’re looking for and they kind of get the things generally order AIDS oriented in the right direction and then it’s automated just runs in a flex and it takes pictures and provides data in it down and it saves all the data so that someone can go back and look at it That’s huge We’ll talk about a huge improvement. It’s it’s the drone is I you know. There are technologies in the drone. They spent a good bit of time. Developing the drone in developing The methodology to fly an automated flight. But I think the bigger thing for them is the amount of data they’re going to have about the performance of any particular kind of winterbourne. So if you if you had if they’re using their drone require and acquiring all this data they have this huge essentially this huge data sets of types of damage that are particular to a specific type of winter Brazilian sort the data and actually analyze in predict. I think it’d be easy to predict where failures are going occur. Based on other wind turbines simone were turbans based on what you have data on or retaking so you can sort of project out like all right so we were out in Utah and we. We did a scan of a bunch of turbans that were fifteen years old of this particular model and we saw XYZ happened on these wind turbines. Well project back to the winters that only five years old same model that only five years old. Would you make some changes with those now? So you don’t have that problem at fifteen years. That’s the kind of data sets that sky. Specs is going to have and how they’re going to manipulate and generate it and share that data. I think is going to be the interesting part about them. It’s not so much. The the the measurement itself as much as the accumulation of the data and the manipulation of the data to make it useful for engineers go back and make MODs to their design so that they can avoid problems in the future. I think the same thing exists Sky specs in relationship to lightening strike. Damage that if they start taking enough data and start recording enough data you can accumulate. How blades or taking strikes and we’re weak points are in charge then accumulate enough data to get predictive like okay. This is why we’re having trouble with this particularly but not that one or is it is an area located. I know a lot of times if you look at a winter reform on a map that kind of run the US Conrad North to south for the most part So the winters on the end of that farm are the ones that get struck the most and the ones in the mental less were the ones that’s further west struck first and take much of the energy out of the clouds and the ones that are further east.
00:20:01 – 00:25:17
Don’t see as many lightning strikes data like that is really important. Because if you know that going in you can put protection where protection is needed and eliminate where you don’t need it and so the interesting thing about a a a kind of sky. Specs company is not the hardware. The drones are cool but what’s more important in their industry is the data and the data manipulation and I’m curious to see how they organize themselves of a company I think I think they’re doing a lot of fundraising right now. And trying to get to that point of being more like a Google unless you like a a drug company and that’s Brilliant. I think that’s where companies smart of taking the data and getting it into the hands of the OEM’s and the and the operators so that they can prevent things from happening in the future. Now no that makes sense. So as he’s all about maybe the geographic location mattering as far as which ones and a cluster. Get hit Yup. Why why don’t they have almost like lightning rods that are significantly taller than the whole? Cluster OF WIND TURBINES. Well we’re a pretty high bill one higher. Well Yeah you could you could And the thing is they sort of have that already. Because we have a biscuit met station which a meteorological station that’s measuring wind direction and amplitude. They do that as part of the site survey so before they put the winters out there taking a site survey to measure the winds in a very specific location. And kind of see what? The averages are over a period of time so they can get a sense of what type of winter and be effective and those kind of wins in win win environment and those towers are just basie metal towers right so they stick them up but they tend to be in the middle of the Winter Benfield when they’re done to not on the ends You could put something on the end and attracts them a lightning away. I think that’s possible Is it going to be one hundred percent effective no and because lightning sort of random? It isn’t like the the the winters in the middle. Don’t get in the line runs West East. The ones in the middle. Don’t get struck. They do get struck just less less often. So you could mitigate some of the lightning damage by putting up a metal tower. I just watched a video of the day of The new call catenary system. So it’s a bunch of wires at the Cape Canaveral Cape Canaveral when they do in some of these new spacecraft launches the low-earth orbit You know sort of the new spacecraft that have gone on. They have change the system or on a launch area from this. The spatial will type two now. They essentially have four four big towers taller than the rocket. It’s in the middle shows a rocket in the middle and there’s four towers. Abc The cable runs around the whole perimeter of the thing to attract lightning before hits the rocket so that same philosophy you could apply sort of obviously surround the whole winter. Feel what the big wire them long but you could do. The Tower Concept To attract lightning and basic ticks them the charred out of the cloud. I mean that that that’s a possibility. Yeah Yeah but you don’t see a lot year talked about a lot but I don’t see it a lot. Yeah that’s interesting so obviously there’s not just trying to protect them from strikes but also does monitors they can get out there in a timely fashion and I mean they are our most parts that are gonna get hit that are gonna take maybe just they see some damage or they see just signs of it. Are they gonNA pull the thing apart? Or they discriminate. Okay it seems fine. Like how deep do they die back in there? In the cells were the electronics are controlling. Everything usually they haven’t they have the most time they have some spare parts. They’re gonNA take us the they’ll have the codes. Tell them what’s wrong to bring the spare parts over and because it’s probably happened before they have the spare parts available and they’re gonNA stop out those parts not gonNA do I happened I was had a discussion about this the other day about being in West Texas at some of the early wind turbine sites and walk into the repair shack. I’ll call it And seeing just piles of Annemette are sitting there and there must have been fifty fifty. That had gone bad from lightning strikes near lightning strikes So it’s sort of repeat business. What has failed in the past? It’s probably going to fill in the future. Unless THERE’S SOME BIG DESIGN Mon- change so the pair of people pretty much know what they’re going in and go fix on the structural side That’s a little bit different. Because they’ll have to have some means of either trying to photograph the blade and that’s the thing now because cameras are really inexpensive there latronic. He didn’t get some decent lenses. You can do some decent inspections on the ground with Higher power cameras just basically taking the scan and taking some snapshots and looking up and down for any sort of obvious defect Beyond that you’re basically putting somebody out there on a rope to look at it.
00:25:17 – 00:30:03
Yeah yeah and that seems like a like a ton of work and you said it. Yeah it’s all about minimizing those drones and then the and the repair people have enough to do already just to keep the everything operational. Especially if you’ve got fifty hundred wind turbines on one side. You have a lot of work to do. Every plus you’ve got to climb up and climbed down. It’s a time eater so any other additional failure besides us normal wear and tear is starts to overwhelm some of these groups. It’s hard to keep those things up and running. Yeah I’M GONNA throw you for a loop because we didn’t talk about this but do you do see the three d. Printing Industry having any impact on wind turbine parts or blade manufacturing or any of that long. Maybe I know the Three D. printing effect had a this morning about how Aerospace Company was Using Three D. Printing to Speed up the process of some of the things that they’re designing. I don’t think well I’ll take that back. I’m sure there are places. They’re always places that you can make apart Quicker faster and maybe on the repair side where you could actually have a three D. Printer on site to make repair part or temporary repair. Part to kind of get you going like. We’re doing right now for the the covert masks right so having a three d. Printers really handy if you you can make your own protection From the the virus well that saint sort of think. I think when when the price of the printers comes down enough and the standardization of the materials happens which is which is what’s happening now I think you’re GONNA be able to print some parts on site And which instead of having a bunch of loose parts been. You’RE GONNA you know they don’t really need all that often when that rare occasion you this one one part and you just need something temporarily to hold it in place to the real part makes it three. D. Printers probably going to be the thing. Yeah such a cool technology and I heard heard more and more about it but it’s still not something that we see in our life. You don’t see them really a best. Buy like you can give one. But I don’t have anything that exists in my life that’s been three D. printed. I don’t have a three bowl yet or a tupperware or anything like that yet. But I assume that’s coming. It just seems like that’s having got there yet. I don’t have any Lt. Obviously in my aircraft work I’ve been around a lot of three D. printed parts. You’re doing three D. PRINTER. Parts for aircraft Ten years ago in interiors and I think a lot of interiors pieces are are done. That way I in the house in home totally not I mean. It’s just making my toys. That are you’re spending eight bucks to make a little plastic toilets thirty cents to buy in a store right. It makes no sense But on the industrial side definitely I know locally. There’s some local companies around us. That have free printers and had them for a couple of years in actually using them Mostly for prototyping pieces like quick and dirty prototypes to see if something of fit or how feels in the hand or how mates up? That’s really handy very handy to have. Yeah and then. I assume if you have more in depth tools like the CNC machine you can just rough out apart and then quickly machine at to where you need to be or whatever but a CNC. Machines minimum tens of thousands of dollars. They’re not they’re not cheap no and a three D. Printer. I’ve seen some three D. printers now in the thousand dollar in Three D. printers but the In the thousand dollar range. So it’s like a a a cost savings a factor of a hundred so. Yeah Yeah Yeah Long. You see that technology like my sister has a cricket machine. Do you know what those are. Yeah I do yeah I mean that’s like it’s computer numeric controlled. I guess it’s not true. Cnc But it’s not like die die cutting stickers and invitations and and pay paper products which is cool so yeah I mean you wonder if that technology is gonNA eventually make it into our kitchen where I can three D. print a an extra ram again from my house party. Scooter yeah just make out of exactly well. And that’s a really interesting. I don’t know if you saw this was maybe a couple of years ago but the guy was trying to make Low-cost edible Utensils and this was just like a a major like a hunger initiative but also reduce waste initiative that if you could create these more like a sport. I think design. Where they’ll multipurpose utensil. Cheap enough like two cents or something.
00:30:03 – 00:35:01
I don’t know where the costs I can’t remember. The cost breakdown was you can make this cheap enough. Where you can legitimately eat out of it and it was. I think really really really really dry and hard so it will actually last more than it wasn’t just come on or is it eatable. What what’s what’s it was edible ninety one F. Animal why would you wanna eat it because then nothing goes to waste? I mean rather than throw it in the landfill. I mean if it’s just like in my mind it probably tastes a little bit like those sawdust probably not far but composed it. I get the whole composting thing. That’s cool. You’re eating my fork okay. It was kind of like a Like a biscuit you’d have not like split like super hard like Biscardi hard and kind of like lightly lightly sweet but just like a looks like deride. I don’t know but you kind of like almost like a bread product. But you Kinda like church communion. We’re just doesn’t have a whole lot of taste but this’ll obviously much more sturdy and strong but anyway whip utensils in your house and then make breakfast and then eat them and then like crazy. You know well. Hey you know what? I’m sure. Somebody’s thought about it serves. I’m sure somebody has tried it. You know the the market will tell you whether it’s GonNa Liberal liberal or not. Yeah obviously like a little tangent here but you know when you talk about you. Know all the replacement consumable parts not only in the industrial industrial world. But also our own life. There’s so much consumable stuff whether it’s a wind. Turbine getting struck by lightning out. You’re going through fuses. And and all these different parts or just your own home life and going through forks and bowls and yeah well upper wear and all that stuff we we have been over the last couple of weeks working on the recyclability of everything. We’re doing shipping concerned and looking at that from a religious standpoint and eventual recycling. We won’t be able to reuse as much as humanly can on Keep it in the chain as long as we can in the reuse side before it gets recycled to us not one and done and we’ve actually spent a good bit of time and money on that because we think is important That we don’t just make a piece of plastic and dump it. That’s that’s not the way we ought to be thinking about these things. We’d be thinking like we’re gonna use this piece of plastic around us. It use it. Use it and then at the end we it needs to be recyclable. At the end and and taking a different thought process on it and the same thing all packaging similar to what Amazon has done what they’ve tried to minimize the Kinda figured out but just reducing the amount of stuff that’s in the package That needs to be handled. We’re looking at that really seriously now. just basically to tie in with everything else everybody else’s at eight and why aren’t we? We should be looking at it. Yeah absolutely I mean when you when you really start to think about how much trash we create. Whether it’s you know just getting groceries in coming home and unpacking a more you know. They said getting parts for whether it’s a wind turbine aircraft. Or just anything in your home. There’s just much everything’s wrapped in rafting rat for our safety. Yeah but at the same time. It’s just it’s crazy. And it’s untenable. At some point we have to create waste for our planet or it needs to be recycled. All right and Have before enough to to get a new phone over the last week. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting to do it. And they’re interesting thing about. I was showing my daughter. Everything about that. Packaging is completely recyclable. There was no PLA- shrink wrap on that thing Came in a car recycled cardboard box and everything about it could be tossed into general paper. Recycling twenty years ago he would have been. Was it edible but what you can eat anything paper right tastes like but if it’s for cellulose base if it’s paper based you know you’re gonna be able to put that in the recycling stream and you know maybe somebody else. The next person will get a phone with the paper that I had in mind. That’s awesome. That’s the way it that’s what we should be doing. And that’s the goal right if anything in this renewable energy sector. That’s doing it to help the planet and obviously find more affordable energy sources. So yeah before you wrap up. I do want to get your thoughts. One more time real quick about new nuclear power so interesting to me because they pitched it as a a really cheap like very efficient energy source. Obviously we had the two disasters Three Mile Island will and so people will just have a very strong emotional reaction to it.
00:35:01 – 00:40:02
I mean pardon. Pardon upon but Do you see nuclear coming back. I know you mentioned Bill Gates is thing but from everything I read about it. That it’s incredibly powerful again another pun but it gets a really really efficient. We are now too afraid to use it as that the general consensus. I don’t know if we’re afraid to use it as much as we needed to to take the knowledge that we had and fix the areas that we didn’t like obviously the safety aspect one Be No way. We’re building something similar to turn. Noble and Three Mile Island is as serious as an event that was. Nobody died in that So they’re obviously there’s been some safety thought before those things were design. But there’s a lot of new technology that’s happened over that time and I think the new technologies called Gen four and whatever that latest Is it on net flicks. The Bill Gates Bill Gates. Brain is not the name of the of the series. He talks about the the investments. He’s making in some of these newer Nuclear Technologies and I know they were trying to. I thought they had got the green light to make a nuclear Power Plant over in China. That would that happen? I think that happened twenty. Sixteen orden seventeen. And then of course the United States and China got into a little bit of trade tussle so that sorta stop and other talking about trying to build it somewhere in the United States. But the technology is interesting and the amount of of advancements that have been made and were these new Nuclear power size will take the old nuclear energy that we we had scrapped in stockpiles. But can use that as fuel in these new nuclear reactors. That’s a significant step. And if it can minimize amount of nuclear waste or really thoroughly us all that nuclear material. I think the older older style nuclear power plants were not very efficient of using all the energy stored in that in that Fissionable material if we can harness that and we’ve got a lot of money to go do it and obviously Bill Gates a lot of had a lot of resources. I can bring a lot of people to the table there. There’s a chance there’s a really good chance that we can do nuclear much more efficiently and much more safer than we did it. Back in the in the nineteen seventies that would be good now as a bigger overall energy sector. Do we still need to have variety? Energy sources absolutely will need right eating Hershey sources because nuclear is not the answer for everything. It’s it’s probably appropriate in some places in other places. It’s not going to be appropriate right so you need to have a different variety of energy sources available hand and you need to choose the right one for the right situation. Nuclear will be goodness right so nuclear. Be Good but we’RE NOT GONNA get rid of wind and we’re not going to get solar and we’re not going to get rid of oil and gas immediately. It’s going to take a Lotta time to figure out where we can appropriate use each one of those affected house on the planet and figure it out figure out from a from overall strategy standpoint on on the power distribution of into the world what works where and why and what can we tolerate. And what you know. Maybe we have to make a hardest it and say hey you know what nuclear not. GonNa work in. This place was a lot of earthquakes. We’re going to have to go to some part gas. Some part win some solar okay But you know I I do think in our lifetimes We’re going to see some dramatic changes in the way power generated around the world. I would agree. I think we’ve learned too much in the last fifty years. I mean since the seventies that we’ve got to give it another chance and and not just shown that that power source forever. Think about the computers. I think the reason Bill Gates involved in is because a lot of the. The advances had been sort of computational related. We have the ability to to simulate a lot of these highly complicated Reactor things with the computer in back in the sixties. When a lot of the early I nuclear sites developed they were still using mostly slide rules to do them And the simulations did not exist except on huge IBM mainframes possibly didn’t even have been rudimentary so there has been a huge technological shift and on the computing power side. That’s going to come back and feedback into having well. Obviously it’s made better winter. There’s no doubt about that could confrontationally. We’ve done a lot more on winter months. Because he had competing power. We done the same thing in the world and gas industry were burning things more efficiently than we ever have in the four. And we’re GONNA do that in the nuclear industry to just a matter of time. Yeah absolutely well Alan. We’re going to wrap up here but for all of you out there listening Thanks for being here. This again was the apptime podcast where we talk about.
00:40:02 – 00:40:28
Renewable energy wind turbines lightning protection. So if you’re new here definitely subscribe on Itunes spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out our youtube channel. We have a lot of videos and short clips of podcast episodes well as helpful lighting protection tutorials. So if you need that stuff definitely check it out and visit our website at weather guard win Dot Com Allen. Thanks so much. Great Great Talk. Today’s thanks. Dan Appreciate it. Aren’t we’ll see you next time.
