Maine announced an indefinite ban on offshore wind in state waters. California, on the other hand, is a step closer to passing laws establishing wind energy goals, setting the stage for a long relationship with wind energy. Why is there such a big difference between states? Can we expect more of this in the future? Plus, the PowerPod by Halcium 1kW wind turbine, off-shore engineering and more.
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Transcript: EP69 – Why are Some US States Different in Offshore Wind Regulations? Plus, PowerPod Wind Turbine
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This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back.
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I’m Allen Hall.
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I’m Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running.
All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. I’m your co host, Dan Blewett. In today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about a lightning storm igniting some natural gas from a leak offshore near Mexico, New Jersey versus Maine some of the different legislation that’s going on over there as far as use of offshore assets, you know, federal versus state waters, mains put in a big ban on using offshore wind in state waters. So we’ll chat through that turbine validation at the galfer wind farm, offshore and then beyond wind to hydrogen project that’s getting a little bit of steam, we’ll talk about this unique powerpod wind turbine, which is a one kilowatt prototype for residential use. And also we’ll talk a little bit about offshore wind, some of the engineering challenges and how ocean cleanup might have a relatable story to some of this unproven technology. Before we get going, let me remind you, you can easily sign up for uptime tech news, which is just our weekly newsletter in the description, or show notes of this podcast. And that’s just getting a weekly update from us as hey, here’s our latest podcast, check it out. Here’s some other news from around the web. So if you’re interested in staying up to date, definitely check out uptime tech news in the show notes below. So Alan, how you doing? Sir, let’s talk about lightning, your favorite thing. This lightning storm out in the waters near Mexico looks like it ignited some natural gas leak from a pipe, you know, well below the surface.
2:31
So there’s a big gas explosion in the Gulf of Mexico next to an oil rig. And one of the byproducts of oil drilling is you get natural gas spots, right? So they had a lightning storm come through it ignite that gas. And it looks like this a big apocalyptic lit the fire in the middle of the ocean like Wow, those water Wow, those fire those two don’t go together, there must be something wrong with the earth or wrong with humans involvement with the earth that caused this big thing to happen. No, none of that was true in the Twitter, bouncing around from environmentalists groups, so to speak. And business groups on the other side are pro drilling groups on the other side, which is ridiculous on both ends a little bit. The fire was put out within a couple of hours. And they had a handle on how to go do that. It sounds like because it got it out. But does it benefit green energy? No, we still need to be drilling in the Gulf of Mexico for now. does it benefit the the sort of the oil drilling drilling community? No, because you had an accident, right? So anytime there was an accident, he just gets blown up. worldwide. I mean, that that that image I saw from Twitter from all across the world. So you know, neither side is right. I think from the lightning protection side, you want to look at what happened. And the post mortem on this is going to be really interesting to see what caused that to happen. What was it? What were the chain of events that caused that to happen? And how do you prevent that in the future, obviously, they had a plan of attack of how to go shut it off. And that was the right thing to do. But you know, you want to prevent that from occurring in the first place. Because fire in any oil drilling situation, oh, uncontrolled fire is a problem. And it creates a huge safety risk for everybody is on that oil rig. So I think the take out from this is that, hey, we need to go look at what the root causes were and to disseminate the solution to everybody in the Gulf of Mexico like this is what we’re going to do to prevent this from happening in the future. And from the engineering side. I think that’s the ultimate benefit out of it. So luckily no one really got seriously hurt in this event. But it does raise some red flags. Okay, we need to really be careful because we’re dealing with explosive materials and, and there’s a lot of lightning storms in the Gulf of Mexico. So
4:57
Alright, so moving on some You’re seeing sort of conflicting state laws. So I think it’s really interesting to see the difference between what California is doing versus what means doing. And obviously, we understand the reason and Maine is not really an opponent of offshore wind, they’re just trying to find a better balance of protecting their their fishermen. So, in California, the State Senate committee has approved a bill to set a goal for, you know, offshore production, and they’re trying to make this into law. So they can just continue to set, you know, these standards that we’re going to keep moving towards creating more jobs and get more offshore wind set up. Whereas over in Maine, they’ve prohibited offshore wind farms in state waters, which that’s the first three miles offshore, after which it becomes federal water. So just a stark difference. And again, like, Governor Janet Mills is not a she’s not an opponent of wind. She’s a outspoken supporter of wind energy. But she’s just trying to find a compromise with fishermen who were like we’ve talked about last week, rightly concerned about their livelihood, and continuing to deliver on you know, Maine is thought of when you think Maine you think lobster, right? Or, you know, Vermont, blueberries, all that stuff. So it seems like she’s found a balance, but obviously, in the headlines, depending on what, you know, media outlet might be reporting this, it could look a lot of different ways. But again, it doesn’t seem like there’s a real, any sort of like mal intent, just that they’re compromised on what’s what’s your take on the situation and some of the differences between these states, and the way they’re gonna start to regulate and push offshore wind forward.
6:34
I think it’s a unique difference between the East Coast, United States and the West Coast, United States in regards to offshore wind. And it has to do with the we term the continental shelf, where does the continent sort of fall off and get into really deep waters, and on the East Coast of the United States, there is this extended shallow, relatively shallow portion of the seabed that extends out quite quite far, versus California, which it pretty much gets a deep water immediately. So the type of Winterburn you’re going to use and is really different. And I think if you look at the percentage of power that can be created on the East Coast, in the West Coast, it’s essentially 5050, in terms of the raw numbers in terms of what you could produce or 6040, I think maybe 60%, California 40% in on the east coast. So if you on the East Coast, if you shove the wind turbine community, three plus miles out, which is what’s going to happen, and pretty much anywhere up and down the coast, I think you’re still not that deep, you’re not, you’re not so deep that you’re going to get necessarily go to a floating turban concept, you may in some places have to do that. But I think they’re still gonna be anchored, I think the some of them will be anchored because they’ll still be close enough to go do that, just like some of the offshore wind that already exists. on California, you’re pretty much talking about floating just because of the nature of the continental shelf. So in Maine, if you say, Hey, we’re not, we want to shove you three miles out, that just means you got three miles more to travel to install these turbans, and he got three miles more cable, but otherwise, probably not too much change in the type of turbine you’re going to install. If you do that, in California, much bigger deal, and California has has really pushed anything. I think they had suspended all oil drilling off the coast of California. I think that happened. So one of the reasons why and when the time was the visual, like, we want to go to the ocean, we were going to go we want to go to the beach, we don’t want to see an oil rig distance. Well, I think that same thing is going to exist when it comes to wind when it comes down to it. So you’re talking about really floating wind off the coast of California and some anchor and maybe some floating off the off the east coast. Some Maine it may be the first one to do that. But they won’t be the last in my opinion. I think Massachusetts will, if it hasn’t done already will do it. New Jersey will do it. Delaware will do it. Because the consequences aren’t that much financially on the installation. And the political politics of it will force them to do that because who owns a house on the on the ocean. It’s not your poorest in your community. It’s the wealthiest community typically in the United States. So there’s some political poll though,
9:36
I find it interesting in general to just to see the almost the different personalities if you call it that of the states, and California is such a is such a mess in just like what’s going on. And this is not a not a political statement, but it’s just when you think of all of the big issues. And yet the things that California sort of has led the way on like California, you know, leads the way on, you know, being unhealthy things which also regulates people’s lives a little more, which some people don’t obviously want, or, you know, renewable energy, like tons of it, you know, California is all for it. Yet again, California has a really huge homeless problem. They also have a huge environmental problem with drought and with fires. So it’s weird that you think that they’re doing all these sort of, quote unquote, right things for the environment, which it seems like they are California is not afraid to, you know, make changes for for Environment sake. But then they’re not. It’s just such a complex climate out there. There’s so much money and just the way things are developed. It just interesting how they’re like seemingly doing the right things. And you have still have a lot of problems that they’re trying to solve that other states states don’t. It’s just interesting that all of them, all of them have just, it’s just complicated trying to make life grand for all but it’s not that
10:50
exam. Let me throw this out. Because I’ve there’s been some chatter about the drought situation in California. You know, there’s been more recent discussions because of the fire that is about to happen and will inevitably happen in California this year, because the it’s just such drought conditions, it’s crazy dry in California right now. Using offshore wind, or nucular for that matter, to desalinate and to create more water for California, so they can maybe address some of the dryness issues and putting out the fire issues. But also, you know, that they have, they’re talking about restricting water by 15%. I think the governor came out this past weekend. So we need to cope. water usage by 15% across the state. Well, that’s a huge problem. And as people exit the state, which is what’s happening now, California is going to want to see they’re going to run into a real economic model problem where their tax revenue into this into them is going to decrease and it is this bad cyclical way down this economic struggle, which will be the as companies leave because of a lack of water and all these other reasons, and fires
12:03
that the states companies love water, hate fire. Yeah, just like just like the lightning. Right? Big, big on the shows me and my company, fewer fires more water.
12:15
And they’re getting the opposite right now again, in less water and less water and more and more fires. And even though there doesn’t seem to be a real plan to attack the fires, I’d say there isn’t one but it’s not well publicized. And the water situation is nuts, because they’re basically importing a lot of the water from the adjacent states via the Choose aqueducts. But it all comes back to energy creation. It just does. And another way to solve those problems with the integration and how fast are they going to bring on offshore wind in the likelihood of nucular to help solve the issues that they have? That’s a real question right now. And I’m, like you said, there are a lot of struggles going on inside of California. With all the other problems that are having, can they navigate and managed Madison simultaneously I’m not sure that the can is which is which is where the struggle will be. And it is California as a huge economic power in the world. It by itself. It may be it’s like the seventh largest economic producer in the world. So that’s a problem not only for the United States as a problem for the world you need need California to be functioning economically and and power is one way that it does that.
13:27
Well, and I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole with desalination. But it’s funny you bring that up, I I was down a YouTube rabbit hole about that many months ago. Just you know, it’s one of those like, why don’t we just disseminate water for places that don’t have like in the Middle East where they you know, have drought conditions all the time. And desalination is really hard, like as a problem. Because there’s various different ways to do it, and many of which are way too expensive. And I believe the cheapest way that could be misquoting myself here still has to pump Brian back into the ocean. So it’s not just like you take it all out. And then the salt gets like dumped in a pile somewhere like they desalinate and then there’s a really salt rich brine. So it’s like, I don’t know, 10 times 20 times something like that way more salty than it came in, goes back into the ocean and that’s really not good for the local ecosystem. And they don’t really know what the long term effects of that might be. So you when you think of California and having all the regulations, you know, they’re pretty cautious about doing stuff like that. I couldn’t imagine California you know, as environmentally friendly as they are pumping all this extra salty water back into their course the Pacific Ocean is not salt water, so well. Yeah. Well, it’s it’s well, is it always ginger salt, mix, mix? Okay. I thought I was exposing my lack of knowledge. But But yeah, that can be problematic.
14:51
If you think about where the intellectual population is, I mean, it’s in terms of like engineering power since today and as such For the last 20 odd years, it’s in California. And there’s engineers and scientific people from around the world have come to the Silicon Valley area and up and down California, for that matter, to create these software companies, these computer companies, these car companies, Tesla, in California, so you’ve got this intellectual powerhouse. And the university system is really good in California. So you know, you have brainpower in that state to solve that problem. But there’s been no incentive to do it. It isn’t like the state’s going to put $10 million into something like that, to my knowledge, they really have it because you don’t see anything happening. You don’t see any, any sort of Silicon Valley investors investing in desalination. So why what what is up with that it’s almost like the Elan musk thing lately, where we’re talking about pulling co2 out of the air, right, that they’re the engineers, and it’s the scientific people are basically saying, we’re never going to get there. So we need to suck it out, suck co2 out of the air, we’re not gonna do by reducing emissions right now. That’s an engineering approach, and they’re putting money behind it, maybe it’s the right answer. Maybe it is the right answer. But you think desalination also be on that list? Because it’s such an immediate problem for California?
16:22
Yeah, it’s complicated. Well, speaking of the ocean, let’s talk quickly about the beyond project, which is a Norwegian offshore wind to hydrogen project. That’s B, eh, YOND? You know, we’ve talked about these hybrid approaches before this one is starting to like get a little further along. I mean, do you see this being a consistent thing in the future? Is, is creating hydrogen offshore? really that important? Really that? Is it? Do you think seats going to be viable? in the future? its energy intensive?
16:54
I think that’s the the question about it is, it’s really energy intensive to make. Green hydrogen essentially, electrolysis breaking water down into hydrogen. So it takes a lot of power. And then it takes power to transport the hydrogen to wherever it needs be using a truck, or my guess is trucks and airplanes are probably the or maybe even industrial uses. furnaces, that kind of thing. If you have a surplus, surplus of energy, then hydrogen is very viable, you know, if you’re if the cost of creating it is so low, like you’re running a nuclear power plant, and it’s going to run it at nighttime regardless, and and there’s just very little demand at nighttime, then it makes a lot of sense. But if you’re, if you’re having to go build something new, that that cost gets tossed into the cost of the hydrogen production. Is it worth it? Probably not. Probably not. I think the economics are not viable today. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be trying to look at it and see how we can make it better. Or at least start to see those little seeds you need for any engineering project to like, get it going. But long term, it has a lot of struggles, because how much money you going to throw at it before you say that’s enough? That’s a great question. You know, how much benefit is it provide versus the costs, which it is to produce? And we really haven’t had that discussion at all. Isn’t that weird? And like, everything else, we have a discussion about how much it cost to manufacture or something or produce oil or whatever, pick it. But in hydrogen, it’s like, yeah, more, we’re gonna go do this hydrogen thing. And costs don’t get into that equation very much. And that that’s a struggle, I think, because eventually the costs are going to get big enough that somebody is going to ask, like, how much does it cost us to do this? There’s only so much money in the country, how do we, how do we manage this? And is it a viable investment? I think right now, based on the level activity you see around the world, the answer is not much viability yet.
19:05
So moving on to more prototypes. So this is an interesting one, the powerpod wind turbine is a small the Salt Lake City Utah based company called calcium is behind it. And this little, it’s about the size of a barrel like a you know, whiskey barrel, beer barrel, whatever you want to call it. And their prototype is a intense lime green, and basically, you know, funnels air into it, and then sort of increases the speed of the air to turn it internal turbine. So they said This increases the wind speed by 40%. And this little one kilogram, or I’m sorry, one kilowatt turbine is actually a pretty high power output comparatively to like the the full scale wind turbines. Alan what, what’s the what’s the engineering behind this? You know, you’re pretty savvy when it comes to jet engines and all this sort of stuff, this sort of thing. A similar look to it, like you imagine, like a vertical jet engine. I’m not saying it’s a jet engine, but what’s what’s the engineering here? Does this seem like a, like a viable prototype for the future that some would want to point want to put in their backyard or bolt to the roof of their house
20:15
doesn’t seem like it produces enough energy to be worthwhile, worthwhile. Yeah. And I think maybe that’s just because it’s on a smaller scale. But essentially, they’re directing air into a rotor that turns a generator, it’s creates power, as essentially yet, so you’re pushing air into this funnel, and then it spins a disk. And that creates power. Not anything super complicated. From the outside, there’s no moving parts, which I think is probably the the engineering thrust behind it in a sense, like with a generating standard, vertical wind turbine, or horizontal wind turbine, you got this rotating thing out in the open and you you, there’s some risk associated with that. Instead of, basically, to have this barrel thing with all all the components internally, you can’t necessarily get hurt with it. But it’s also going to be very limited on how much energy can produce because you’re really not where the wind is great, you’re closer to the ground where the wind is not very good. As we have seen in all the winter, urban exercises, higher is better, offshore is better, and you’re the ground is bad. So you’re really limited on what it’s going to be able to produce. Now. Maybe there’s some parts of the country, the world in which there’s always when near the surface, that would make sense. Or if you’re going to stall it up in the air, like on a roof or something, maybe it may provide some power. But is it really enough to? Is it enough power? For the cost of it? that it makes sense? Is it is it cheaper than solar? I doubt it. I doubt it. Solar is really cheap, right now, it’s hard to compete with that, you know, wins have a hard time competing with solar because of the flood of of solar panels from overseas. But there’s not always one solution to every every power problem. And so you need a variety of solutions based on what’s going on. And different forms of energy like this one may satisfy some need. And then maybe there’s a marketplace for maybe there’s a marketplace. You know, if you’re working off site, you need a generator for some reason for a pump, or whatever, maybe this is the right answer. So you know, it just gets down to the economics of it all. Businesses revolve around economics. And if the economics aren’t there, and that won’t survive, if the economics are good, and there’s a business case for it, it will survive. So it’s sort of the capitalistic way of looking at it. But that’s the reality of it. If we check on it on a year, and they’re still around, then maybe the business model made sense. If they’re gone in a year, then probably didn’t try something else.
22:53
Yeah, the idea that it could be significantly cheaper than solar. That seems like a like, they’re certainly gonna obviously have to back that up. But that seems like it’s hard to do. solars, like you said, it’s always very cheap. And then just going like, Hey, we’re way cheaper than them. That’s definitely like a Show me. Show me kind of statement right now. Because they’re crowdfunding, if you go to their website, calcium calm, they’re actively looking for investors. You know, and this thing is, I would say, not super attractive to put in your backyard, you know, the aesthetics are similar to like an air conditioner, you know, like your your, you know, the back door unit h vac system. But, you know, no one will say, I mean, solar can be tucked out of the way it can be thrown your right, Ingo, I think that’s it, forget about that kind of thing. It’s tough to tough to come back.
23:46
I think that’s the key to all this is, where are you going to put it?
23:49
So let’s talk a little bit about so in the news cycle. If you look at it right now, there’s tons of stories about China deploys their first offshore floating wind turbine, or this country has their first floating wind turbine, this country has their first floating wind turbine prototype. So there’s lots of prototypes getting out there. Floating wind is obviously going to be a big thing going forward. But there’s lots of engineering problems that are still yet to be discovered with many of these models. Some will work better than others. Some might run into big problems that again, we’re just not going to be aware of and Alan, you said you were pretty locked into this company, the ocean cleanup and their work trying to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I mean, amongst all the the waterways, they can clean up and their first system. The 1.0 had a lot of backing a lot of engineers behind it. And it sounds like it really fell flat. And now they’re sort of pivoting. So what was your takeaway from the ocean cleanup? It sounds like that there could be really big learning curves ahead even for things that seem really well engineered and well thought out
25:01
yes, it go back everybody go back and go on YouTube or whatever your video channels are and look for the ocean cleanup about two years ago and their their introduction of MS three years ago now their introduction of their system to collect plastic bits out in the Pacific Ocean, because they had put in numerous numerous hours of research and study at universities and then and water tanks to simulate the ocean environment and had eventually got enough funding and a lot of backing to create the system to to haul out into the ocean and start collecting plastics, they thought they had a pretty much figured out like it felt like they had the 90% tile case it figured out. So it may not be 100% effective, but it’s going to be at least 90. And that’s good enough, because we need to get the get that plastic out of that region as much as we can. Great concept, great ton of engineering work and a lot of really bright people working on this simultaneously felt positive, they take the first unit out into the ocean, they have a lot of problems that breaks apart, pirate breaks off starts floating away. It’s not collecting the plastic they think it’s going to collect, they sort of regroup in Hawaii and and and make some mods to it. Still not what they expected. created some smaller collection systems just on the fly just basically cheap and dirty. Let’s see what the physics are. Let’s get the first principles here. Let’s see what’s going on. And everything they tried some of them work. Some of them didn’t work. But it’s a question of how well they were how much plastic did it attract? versus how much would it cost to operate this this floating system. And that’s that’s where the struggle lies is that they realize that the cost per kilogram of or pound of plastic brought out of the ocean was going to be very high for this self floating system. And it wasn’t very effective. So they got to this new system, which they introduced, I think it was yesterday, or within the last 48 hours as a really interesting hour long presentation on YouTube talking about it. But essentially, they’ve really changed the whole design. So instead of a free floating system, they have a couple of boats and usually shaped piece of tubing that they’re dragging behind it to collect the plastic into this to catch the plastic, completely different model. And it gets you sort of the engineering Dan, if you think you know everything, and then you go to the ocean. And it just doesn’t work because there’s a lot of variables in the ocean, which don’t exist in the lab. And it’s really hard to predict what happens over a year span in the ocean and we just don’t know that much about it. And I think the same case exists for wind in the ocean, we’re gonna learn the hard way, just like ocean cleanup did on what the difficulties are going to be. Don’t you just see that because the ocean is such a treacherous placed or any engineering project?
28:08
Yeah, and I don’t know how you simulate simulate that in the lab because unless you’re putting in an area where the you know, it’s always calm, which obviously the ocean never is right. And so now you have different levels of choppiness each day, different wave height out there. currents are different different currents things are swirling You know, there’s mischievous dolphins stealing you know, your, your equipment. The Loch Ness Monster the crack in the road lurking somewhere beneath the No, he just seems the ocean is really did seem super unpredictable, you know? And that, like you said, it seems like that’s one of the things that we have the least lockdown of of our understanding of how it works just like the
28:51
all about anything that has been engineered to be in the ocean. How long has it lasted? Like, is there 1000 year piece of engineering out in the ocean? No, but there’s 1000 years 1000 years structures on land? Well, you know, the pyramids in Egypt, Stonehenge
29:07
still kick in. Right? Right? Are
29:09
you like oh, on land? Yeah, we kind of got that figured out. We know what the environment is we can we can make something that will last 1000s of 1000s of years. But in the water, the ocean is pretty good about killing engineering projects. And we have yet to really conquer it. The salts a big problem, the winds, the lightning, the animals, the whole thing, the fungus, all the all the growing plants, and there’s going to be something that’s going to try to take down whatever you stick in the ocean. And I just my gut engineering says we’re at that 90% Okay, it’s like kind of like the ocean cleanup is right now. We kind of have a pretty good handle on what we think is going to happen. But we’re going to learn the hard way and the question in my mind is do you massively push out offshore wind within Let’s just say it’s five years, and you’re like, just flood the market and flood the ocean with a bunch of wind turbines? Or do you start getting some out there now? And you stage it. I learned from the previous ones, and then I get better and better. And maybe I can make something that lasts in the ocean 2030 years left by itself, ideally. But maybe I can, you know, and it’s just the the, in the in the record of humans versus the ocean, the ocean has a when it’s most most events. And that’s what scares me about it.
30:37
Yeah. Well, you know, there’s a lot of different prototypes for offshore wind, there’s all the different floating things, and until there’s hurricanes that roll through them, until there’s, I don’t know, a tsunami that rolls through, like, there’s gonna be a lot of learning moments, everyone, I’m sure everyone knows that. Right? And that’ll be really interesting to see how it all plays out. Because there will be some public failures, which weren’t from bad engineering. They’re just like, Black Swan events that, yeah, no one really could have foreseen this, we just didn’t understand. And here we are. But we’re learning. I
31:09
think, from the engineering standpoint, if you’re talking about an engineer sitting at their desk, designing a system, the first thing that happens and then which they need to happen as as a touch point is, where do I box this problem? What what level do I say? It needs to handle x, this when this waves this current, boom, boom, boom, boom. Okay, so I framed the problem, the problem, and then all the engineers get really happy because I got a frame. And once I have a frame, I can build inside of that. That Frank, awesome. The problem is, if the frame is off, if the frame is slightly off, no matter how well you design it within that box, that box isn’t, isn’t the right framework for where you’re going to put the turban. And I think that’s a trouble, I think there’s a lot of confidence you can get, you get a lot of notice a false confidence. But you get that kind of false confidence that Yeah, we’re going to be able to this thing’s going to be perfect. But you’re only working inside this, this box of constraints. If the ocean throws you something outside of that, then you’re in trouble. And that’s where we’re going to learn the hard way. It’s inevitable.
32:20
All right, well, that’s gonna do it for this week’s episode of The uptime podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the show. leave us a review. We greatly appreciate it and share with a friend who maybe hasn’t heard of us yet. Also, be sure to check out the description or show notes below where you can sign up for uptime tech news, our weekly update on the show so you can be alerted when our next podcast episode drops. Thanks again and we will see you here next week on the uptime wind energy podcast.
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