Nordex has closed its Rostock plant in Germany and is moving all blade manufacturing to India. Vestas’ sales are down – way down – and Allen thinks flagging US onshore development is part of the reason. Meanwhile, offshore construction may soon get a new assist: the Bleutec BMIS (Binary Marine Installation Solution) is a Jones Act-compliant concept ship expected to manage both foundation installation and turbine installation. And France’s new PM is looking for a compromise between nuclear, natural gas, and palatable energy prices – is nationalizing EDF the way to go?
Methanol may be the shipping industry’s new green fuel choice, and work to convert old ships to new and dual-fuel systems is underway. The EU is ready to declare that gas and nuclear are green, and Rosemary doesn’t completely disagree. Find out why. And, in case you don’t know what a Dunkelflaute is, you can find out here.
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Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Uptime 121
Allen Hall: All right. Welcome to the uptime winner energy podcast, big week this week, a lot of news on the show.
Joel Saxum: So we’re gonna talk about Vestas wind turbine orders dropping in Q2 as compared to last year. And why some of the reasons that may be also gonna visit France to nationalize EDF completely this
Allen Hall: time and Nordex closes its.
Allen Hall: Blade plant in Germany and moves everything to India.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we talk about the EU controversial decision to declare gas and nuclear investments as
Joel Saxum: green. So in in efforts as well for the us to hit 30 gigawatts of offshore wind, we’re gonna talk about some new concepts in Jones, act compliant vessels that are gonna be.
Joel Saxum: Hopefully built here in the us soon. And then also staying on that same trend of vessels methanol, starting to win the hydrogen shipping race to lower emissions globally for our shipping.
Allen Hall: So hold on it’s a packed show. We’ll be back after the music.
Allen Hall: All right guys, Vestas orders and Nordex orders. Some really interesting developments there, Vestas publishes every quarter, their sales numbers, because they’re publicly traded company. And so does Nordex, but Vestas actually describes every single order that they have. It’s really interesting on the.
Allen Hall: So in, in Q2 of 2022, this, this last quarter, they had roughly 1700 megawats sold and that’s down quite a bit from where Vestas has been in Q1. They had 2,900 megawats sold and looking back one year ago, Vestas had orders of almost 5,300 megawatts. So year on year. Qu like quarter to quarter Q2, 2021 to Q2 2022, their sales are down about 66%.
Allen Hall: That’s a big drop for such a large company. And it, it seems very odd cause I know the, the vest is sales group is extremely aggressive. And if you watch the news enough, you you’ll notice that they’re, they are everywhere. all across the planet. And one of the key pieces, and I wonder if this is what’s driving it is that only 20% of the orders.
Allen Hall: we’re in the us, about 350 megawats was in the us. And we have seen the onshore win purchases and, and agreements in the us are just, are gonna plummet. The predictions in 2023 are totally minuscule compared to where we were. And nor Nordex has a, a sort of a similar situation, even though Nordex sales Rose A.
Allen Hall: Little bit, they, they sold 1800 megawatts in Q2. This year versus 1.5 last year the distribution of sales is, is fascinating. Nordex tends to sell mostly in Europe, about 60% to Europe, about 30% in Latin America. That’s 90% total. And then the remaining 10% is in north America. So again, north America, I would assume Joel, it’s not Canada.
Allen Hall: It’s mostly ITEST states mm-hmm right? Yeah. So they say that Nordex strongest markets are Germany, Poland, and. And again, United States is not in that mix. So it makes you wonder if some of the problems that the wind Turman companies are having is just that the us market on onshore wind is plummeting.
Allen Hall: Does that make sense?
Joel Saxum: I think it does. And I think you can point to PTC. The moonlighting of PTC come December. I mean, you follow the money down. McDonald’s can sell as many cheeseburgers as they want, but if the general public doesn’t have any cash, you’re not gonna buy ’em. Right. So right. If you don’t, if there’s not a movement for the developers to want to put money in and it’s ties to PTC, if they can’t make the money back, if it’s not financially feasible, then it’s not gonna be.
Allen Hall: So PTC ended at the end of 2021. And there’s been a lot of projects that got started in 2021 that are running through now. And it’ll probably finish in 20, 23, some of them, right? Yeah. And there, there is a bill in Congress. I, I was looking this past week. There is a bill in Congress that would extend PTC, but it doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere.
Allen Hall: No, which is really odd. So
Joel Saxum: the, the first iteration. I think it was the first iteration of Biden’s like the, the Biden administration right now, their build back better or whatever. The first iteration had a big chunk of money set aside for PTC. And then there was like some development stuff, kind of like we talked about with the defense production act as well.
Joel Saxum: There was a big chunk of money set aside for, but all that kind of got, they were ear, you know, everything’s earmarked nowadays those earmarks got right. The page got torn off when that got passed through. So yeah, there’s some stuff sitting there, but you’re not hearing much about it. It was really exciting.
Joel Saxum: Last. I don’t remember when it was, I think it was in December, November when all that was sitting in the news and it was, oh, this, all this money’s gonna come into green energy and then it kind of got melted away. So yeah, I think that the right, you know, it’s a big driver of it that it’s dropping here.
Joel Saxum: You know, some of it then talking to some of my friends in Europe as well is the on the developer side, some of the regulatory environment over there is getting kind of. hard to get past, right? There’s some, some D very difficult things over there. So as the regulatory environment changes financially down and, and roadblock up, this is what you see.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I, I kind of wonder for mostly tapped out on new wind development, onshore wind develop in the states, and it’s all gonna move. The vast majority of it’s gonna move offshore, but we’re. At least two to three years away from that, it it’s just an interesting develop to keep our eyes on and I’m gonna watch it as , as you go through Q3.
Allen Hall: And as part of this you know, decline in an onshore wind Nordex is, is closing its last blade plant in Germany and moving it to India. So it announced it was shut down its row stock factory. In June and it has about 600 employees. Now they’re gonna continue to manufacture the cells and hubs and drive trains, but the, the blades factory, or at least the blade portion of it could make a maximum basically retro diameter for 150 meters.
Allen Hall: So that’s, what is that? 70 odd meter blade, 69 meter blade. Something like that was a limit for the size of that factory. And that, I guess they figured it’s not worth making the investment in Germany. We can open or have a plant in India. It’s easier to make bigger blades down in India and a way they went and Rosemary, is this gonna be happening more and more?
Allen Hall: And is it just the size of the blades that are such a constraint that it makes sense to make them somewhere else?
Rosemary Barnes: No, I think it’s a bunch of reasons and it’s been happening for a while. Like, Nordex definitely aren’t the, the first, I mean yeah, and, and Ocon has already moved a lot of their manufacturing away from Germany and well wind power closed down their last real.
Rosemary Barnes: Real factory in Denmark some time ago. I don’t think that there’s much manufacturing of, of blades from other manufacturers in Denmark anymore either. And it’s my understanding is it’s from two, two causes. The first is. You know, obviously the cost of labor is can be cheaper in other regions. But I think probably even the more significant thing is where they’re selling the blades.
Rosemary Barnes: And, you know, originally all those German manufacturers were really focused on the German market. And I know Anacon especially was like nearly all of their sales went to Germany and it seemed to me like there was a big controversy when they were closing down some of their factories. Because you know, it was such a major employer in the, the region where Anacon is based.
Rosemary Barnes: And so there was like a lot of political intervention to try and get them to stay. And it seemed to me at the time that Enercon had been a bit shortsighted in putting so many eggs in the, in the Germany basket. And I think, yeah, in general, German manufacturers, European manufacturers had been really domestic focused and.
Rosemary Barnes: Those that didn’t get in early on, you know, expanding outwards and also expanding their manufacturing, outwards suffered. When you know the sentiment around wind in Germany, weren’t really like jumped off a, of a cliff at one point wind energy was like a dirty word in, in Germany. I don’t, I haven’t been there in a few years, so I don’t know how they are feeling now, but in general, people don’t want more onshore wind in.
Rosemary Barnes: In Germany is my yeah. What I’ve noticed. And so if you wanna continue making and selling wind turbines, you need to look further, further afield. And that likely means building the turbines further afield as well.
Joel Saxum: I got one, one thought here. Do you think that so right now we’re two, two and a half years post start of COVID.
Joel Saxum: So when that happened, of course companies shut down, everybody went home, the, the world stopped. You had to stare at your loved ones and didn’t get to escape them, whichever it was, but that, do you think that some of this down, how, how should I to explain it? The downfall in orders is tied to the development cycle from that six months of when the world kind of shut down.
Joel Saxum: Does that make sense? Does that timeline line up two years ago, all the people that were looking at developing and doing site studies and all this stuff didn’t work for six months or, or nine months or , and, and now we’re seeing two years later, the residual of that, or no.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see that specifically, especially because it’s such a long term trend that started way before COVID.
Rosemary Barnes: But I think what probably does factor into it is the supply chain issues that were definitely you know, kickstarted pretty aggressively by, by COVID and continue now. So I assume that people have to be a bit more picky about which projects they can support now. . Yeah, so I think that that’s, that’s probably part of it.
Rosemary Barnes: One of the
Allen Hall: interesting pieces of the data to pop out in the last week or so is the CO2 emissions over COVID and I there’s a, I think it’s a UN study that I saw this week talking about the different industries in how COVID drove the amount of CO2 emissions. And it’s, if you look at different industries like airline versus industry versus residential you see dramatically different responses.
Allen Hall: And if you look at a country by country, you see dramatically different responses where China was down a relatively short amount of time, and then came back up to more than full capacity. And the rest of the rush of the world sort of didn’t do that. And, and we saw big reductions in CO2, 10%, plus in some cases of CO2 emissions, So there is a, there is a drag effect, I think, on Europe, from COVID versus China, maybe even in India, what the effect of that’s gonna be long term though.
Allen Hall: I don’t know. I, I, I do see crazily enough. Why are we building towers in the cells, in generators, in Germany and the most, probably the most complex piece. What I would consider the most complex piece, the blades are going to India. It just seems all backwards and you gotta ship them all the way back. I there’s a big, huge wind market in India.
Allen Hall: Everybody agrees with that and it’s, they can do it on the shoreline, which you can put on a ship and go anywhere I suppose. But it just seems like somehow the math doesn’t work out. That that’s what it seems to me, but I guess we’re gonna have to just watch it. And so it progresses because when doesn’t go in, it’s just a question of where it’s shifting to.
Allen Hall: And speaking of shifting France is going to nationalize or renationalize. EDF and EDF is the, the big electrical power generator for France, and also is a, a global player in the renewables market. So Frances to renationalize the giant EDF in response to the energy crisis as its prime minister Elizabeth borne quote, we must have full control over our electricity production and performance born told parliament now France already owned.
Allen Hall: 5% of EDF which is one of the world’s largest electricity producers. They’re gonna basically buy the last 15%. And as Rosemary was describing before we started recording today, there’s a lot of problems with an EDF in terms of managing the older equipment, mostly nuclear, I guess, and then building new nuclear and some other projects that are just delayed.
Allen Hall: So they’re in this real crunch where they have older projects that are, that need to get offline or refurbished that are not there. And it’s leading to rising electricity rates in a, in a really stressful time already. With electricity prices across the world going up there’s a big concern. If I was a politician in France, I’d be super concerned about it.
Allen Hall: And I, they clearly are. But Rosemary, it seems like there’s the other side of this is if France is gonna nationalize it, one of the things they, they may not do is stick to their climate goals. In order to lower the price of electricity, especially this upcoming winter, I would expect they’re gonna get a little bit dirtier to do that.
Allen Hall: Do you think that’s going to happen over the next couple of months?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, well, I mean the nationalization is, is maybe a, a second issue. I think the really big issue with EDF is just how terribly their reactors have all been performing over the last year or so. And they’re projected to get worse in the future.
Rosemary Barnes: I think currently like less than 50. They’ve got at less than 50% capacity, just cuz they had some scheduled maintenance that turned out to be a lot harder than they, they thought and staking a lot longer. And then they’ve had some unscheduled maintenance as well. I mean it’s a really aging flight of nuclear reactors and I think everybody wants ’em to take the safety seriously, more se more seriously targets.
Rosemary Barnes: And even, you know, even I would agree with that, that the safety of nuclear power plants is, is the most important thing. So, yeah, I think already we’ve seen the Frances electricity mix probably get less clean because they have to import a lot from yeah. From elsewhere. You think they’re gonna put
Allen Hall: on more natural gas?
Allen Hall: They don’t really have any coal factories. Are they gonna add natural gas to the mix? Just to, to get them through
Rosemary Barnes: the wintertime? I’m not sure they’re pretty ideologically committed to nuclear in France, as far as I can tell, like the politicians, at least, like, I know a lot of French people who are really anti-nuclear.
Rosemary Barnes: I think as like, if you’re to lump everyone together, including the politicians and the people running their energy system over there, I think that they, they they’re really committed to nuclear. And I, I know that they’re gonna build some more reactors and, you know, obviously I. Seems like 10 years ago, would’ve been a better time to start some of those projects because, you know, they’ve ended up with only really old reactors right now.
Rosemary Barnes: And it takes a long time to get a new one up, but definitely we’re starting to see them pulling in you know, they’re connected to the rest of Europe. So they’re pulling in. Energy from other sources to fill the gaps. And it is probably getting more dirty cuz Francis grid is, is quite clean. You know, relatively speaking because we’ve got so much nuclear, there’s not a lot of emissions from nuclear.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, whether we wanna call that clean or green or whatever, that’s a, that’s a topic for, I think a little bit later in the, in the episode,
Joel Saxum: but glow glowing, maybe glowing
Rosemary Barnes: energy. Yeah. Fluorescent, fluorescent green. But I think definitely it’s getting more expensive that like, if you look at the, the.
Rosemary Barnes: The price that people are playing in France, it’s high because you know, they’re relying on yeah. Grabbing it from other markets who are also struggling with, you know, maybe not shortfalls, but definitely they’re feeling, feeling the pinch. So it’s not an ideal situation for them to be in.
Joel Saxum: yeah, let alone bring in those gas plants online, the gas pinch over there and with the crisis going on in Ukraine and whatnot all of Europe is feeling that yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Building new, new gas, power plants doesn’t seem like a ticket to cheap energy prices right now. Does it?
Allen Hall: No, no. There really is no cheap energy right now. Right. The six months ago, a year ago, there was all kinds of cheap energy here around. Everything is skyrocketed up and it doesn’t look like it’s, it’s probably stabilized.
Allen Hall: It is coming down a little bit over the last couple of weeks, but it hasn’t price stabilized yet. There’s more Tomo to come. And when the demand gets high. Yeah, exactly. It’s which is gonna be in the winter time, then we’re really gonna be in some interesting times, except it feels like the world is sort of destabilized in the last six.
Allen Hall: Weirdly enough, it, it has this sort of 1980s feel to it all of a sudden, and you guys may not have been alive or cognizant back then, but I sure was. And it definitely has that feel of Europe is, is in a little bit of turmoil right now. And that usually means America is gonna be in turmoil with it. we’ll see how it plays out, but I, I, I think there’s gonna be a lot of close connections between the United States and Europe.
Allen Hall: And this latest thing from the EU parliament is really gonna kick that off nicely. So we’re gonna take a quick break right here and we get back. We’re gonna have Rosemary, I’m gonna set the soccer ball, the cricket ball, whatever they use in Australia, for Rosemary to kick or throw at, because we’ll talk about E EU parliament.
Allen Hall: And they decided that gas and nuclear are green investments. So we were right back. Get the latest on wind industry news, business and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter at weather guard, wind.com/news. All right, we’re back Rosemary. And here we go. The EU parliament this week.
Allen Hall: Declares gas and nuclear investments as green. So there’s a couple of votes in the EU parliament, and this is a, a preliminary vote. This isn’t, I don’t think this is the final vote yet. They still have a, a little bit to go, but it looks like it’s, it’s, it’s being green lit, so to speak the proposal. So the new rules will add natural gas and nuclear power plants to the EU.
Allen Hall: Taxon. Rule book in 20, from 2023, which enables invest to label and market investments as green. So you can have your L N G power plant have the green label on it. And this is causing a lot of consternation and I think what’s driving. It is it’s clearly what’s happening in the Ukraine. So there’s a huge debate about it in Europe and the rest of the world, by the way.
Allen Hall: I saw Greta th. Tweet about it. Pretty much anybody on the environmental side is really upset with this. What are your thoughts?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, lots of, lots of thoughts. So, I mean, I guess the first thing is, does it matter? You know, if people can call it a green investment, it’s kind of a, you know, such. a vague term anyway, isn’t it green.
Rosemary Barnes: So I, I’m not sure the actual like implications of it, that doesn’t sound to me, like they’re, you know, getting European funding to build gas plants under, you know, instead of that money going to a wind farm or a solar farm or a battery. Project. So maybe it’s, it’s not such a huge deal, but certainly, I mean, on the face of it, it’s just absolutely ridiculous to go to coal gas, a green investment.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, there’s a lot of emissions from gas and it seems like every week there’s a new study that shows that methane leak leakage from the, you know, gas supply chain is much worse than thought. And, you know, methane is such a, a potent greenhouse gas it’s, you know, 20 to a hundred times more Has more warming impact than carbon dioxide.
Rosemary Barnes: And the hit is really early with methane. So, you know, given that we’re trying to, you know, really pull down you know, emissions as fast as possible. It makes sense to be going hard on getting rid of methane, not expanding it. Yeah. So it’s, it’s confusing in that sense. And I just can’t understand why we even need a bunch of European politicians to, or bureaucrats to decide what’s a green investment or not, because shouldn’t, you just have like an emissions intensity and that tells you whether it’s it’s green or not, you know, they should have just set a number that, you know, below this.
Rosemary Barnes: That’s a, yeah, that’s a, a green investment and above it, it, it’s not. So, you know, I. Have a real problem with nuclear being on the list because you, you know, it doesn’t cause a lot of emissions and I also don’t have a problem with gas being seen as a enabling technology for the energy transition.
Rosemary Barnes: And I mean, emphasis on the transition part of that, because it is such a flexible technology. So. It can really nicely support the rollout of more renewables without causing, you know, blackouts and you know, yeah. Just, just making, making things smoother while we figure out how B how bad Dunkle Flos are we gonna get, you know, like when there’s a period with no wind and no sun, you can kind of like, look at the, is that not a term you’ve heard before?
Rosemary Barnes: A you look confused.
Allen Hall: I had no idea what that word was or
Rosemary Barnes: don’t call don’t call flowers. You need syllables. You need to add it to your vocabulary. It’s one of those fantastic German words where, you know, it’s, it’s one, one word, but they it, but it describes a whole concept. So it’s a concept of when there’s no, no wind and no sun and the.
Rosemary Barnes: Literal English translation would be something like the dark Lu or dark doldrums. People sometimes call it. And yeah, that’s at the moment, that’s kind of like a, a thing a lot of people have in their mind, a big, big fear. You can look at the statistics of climate statistics, you know, in the past and have a sense of how often this is gonna happen.
Rosemary Barnes: But I think Yeah, this is gonna be one of the biggest challenges of moving to an all variable renewables grid. And if we have some gas left in the system, then that will help you, you know, ride through any Dunkle flowers that we experience before we’ve totally figured out this you know, variable, renewables grid.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I, I think it, it’s good to keep gas in the, the system and keep that flexibility there. It makes the rest of the energy transition much, much easier. So you know, I’m a bit different to some of the climate activists, like go to Berg and Greenpeace and you know, all these people that have that are, are just a hundred percent opposed to, to gas.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see it that way, but I wish we would just focus on their missions intensity. Yeah. And I mean, I don’t, I don’t have a problem with nuclear if people think that it’s you know, gonna be fast enough and cheap enough to, you know, way to add generation clean generation to their, their mix, then, then go for it.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but,
Allen Hall: Won’t this open up investment money for nuclear, in a sense, if it, if they, it sounds like this is a tax a tax thing, right? So if it reduces the tax burden on investments into nuclear, wouldn’t you think it would at least spur more development in Europe for nuclear? Cause there hasn’t been a lot of huge advancements in nuclear actors in 50 odd years.
Allen Hall: There’s there’s talks of. January about generation four and the new technology recycling, the previously used radioactive material and these new generators, all that discussion happens, but there hasn’t been any action on it. Does this. Crack that open and say, okay, let’s look at nuclear. Like France
Rosemary Barnes: has been here.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I, I think there’s a really big price price difference. Is the reason why we haven’t seen a lot of new nuclear projects, especially not ones that are unsubsidized substantially by governments. I’ve got no problem. If yeah. That we make developing nuclear a little bit more attractive. It is a, you know, is lower emissions technology and I’m happy to see, see more of it where, where people want it around.
Joel Saxum: What is it? Do you know Rosemary? I was gonna say, do you, do you know, just off the top of your head, and this is just a curiosity point, but like per megawatt, how does it compare to how does nuclear compare to wind for new installation? Is it, is it a, an order of magnitude or is it two or three times or.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, it’s pretty, it’s pretty clean, right?
Rosemary Barnes: There’s no, you don’t get carbon dioxide when the nuclear reaction happens. So it’s similar to renewables in the sense that the emissions come from the supply chain BA basically, right. And I guess also there’s, you know, some processing of waste nuclear waste as well. Right. That would have some omissions, but yeah, I mean, to me, it’s, it’s roughly similar.
Rosemary Barnes: I wouldn’t call it renewable cuz it’s not renewable, but I am happy to call it clean. .
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I guess what I’m thinking is is the, the cost of new installations is the cost of new installations. Oh, it’s much is two or three times. Oh, let me look up. Or is it a more order magnitude? I
Rosemary Barnes: did a video on it. You can, you can check out my, my video on levelized cost of energy.
Rosemary Barnes: Alright. So I looked up the latest Lazo levelized cost of energy comparisons. It’s version 14, and they’ve got nuclear is for new build nuclear it’s between 1 29 and one 90. Dollars per megawat hour megawat. Yeah. And then solar, depending on the kind it’s between 29, well, 29 to 42 for utility scale and higher for other kinds.
Rosemary Barnes: And then wind they haven’t actually got it separated off. On and offshore yet in this version. It’s between 26 and 54. So yeah, it’s not an order of magnitude, but it’s so it’s a lot,
a
Joel Saxum: lot different four or five times. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, double.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Way more than offshore. Yeah. LCO E offshore wind
Rosemary Barnes: is pretty high.
Rosemary Barnes: Oh yeah. Actually I think we do have it $86 for offshore. Maybe that’s what that. That point is,
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s fairly high. So that one makes sense. So nuclear is probably the most expensive of all. Yeah. There’s not
Rosemary Barnes: even any overlap between offshore and, and nuclear, but for existing nuclear that’s you already depreciated then that’s they’ve got $29 for that.
Rosemary Barnes: So that is competitive
Allen Hall: key. Then keeping the plants open that you have. Well, I mean, Germany just keeps talking about closing plants. I know France is trying to refurbish plants in the United States. We’re closing plants. Is well to keep the energy prices low, to keep those
Joel Saxum: running. Yeah, but it’s not, they just did that in California.
Joel Saxum: Think Newsome Newsome came back and was like this nuclear plant. We were gonna close. Now we’re gonna keep it back online because they have to,
Rosemary Barnes: mm. I think they have to. Yeah. It’s not easy for Germany though. Cuz that was something that I was going on about early in this you know, gas price crisis was, you know, why is Germany closing there near nuclear power plants?
Rosemary Barnes: They should stop it. But it’s not easy for them to do that because they have known for, you know, like 10 years plus that they’re going to be phasing out, closing them around now. There’s a lot of maintenance that didn’t happen. Safety checks that didn’t happen over the last decade that would need to be done.
Rosemary Barnes: Now, if they were going to keep it open. So mm-hmm, , it’s not like you can’t just say, okay, we’re gonna close it in six months and we won’t now it would be like, okay, in six months, we’ll launch a two year campaign to make sure that this thing is still safe to, to run. To continue. And by then, you know, you could probably actually have a bunch of extra wind and solar and transmissions projects in the ground.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I think in Germany’s case it’s, if it happened, you know, five years ago, they, they may well have made that decision, but. I, I understand that it’s too late now for Germany to just decide to extend the operation. Oh, come on. I mean, no one wants to see someone just, you know, like, ah, we didn’t check the safety of this nuclear power plant, but we assume it’s okay.
Joel Saxum: Let it run. Hey man, that happens in Washington at the console. Yeah. That happens in wind all the time. Right? Like we, as at wind power lab, we’ve looked at some, you know, for, for due diligence for, for M and a saw people buying wind farms and the people who owned them before were like, well, they’re gonna go.
Joel Saxum: Decommission you know, 20, 22. So for the last seven years, we didn’t touch the blades and now a new person’s going to buy ’em and it’s like, whoa, look at these blades looks like nobody’s on any maintenance. They haven’t, they decided not to, it was better for ROI to say, we’re gonna take ’em down in 20, 22, but now you want them, you’re gonna, it’s gonna be a pretty penny to get those things back up and running smoothly.
Allen Hall: But as Rosemary always says, it’s relative to what? Right. And yeah. If refurbing or reinspecting doing the maintenance on an existing nuclear facility has got to be less money than building new has to be. It’s not just the money.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s the, it’s the time sense to do that as well. It’s the time that it takes for that.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So it’s not actually a solution to the current crisis because it’s still gonna be years before you can actually take advantage of, of this, you know, lifetime extension of your nuclear power. .
Allen Hall: But if you declare gases being green, that gives you the time
Rosemary Barnes: to do that. Well, it turns out that solving climate change is really easy.
Rosemary Barnes: If all you gotta do is just say gas is green now. Petrol gasoline cars are good green now. Yeah. problem solve 7, 4, 7 S a a green now it’s yeah, just that’s all you need to do. Just designate that and just fix the problem. Designated all green and we’ve made so much progress. Wow.
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Allen Hall: Visit weather guard, wind.com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call.
Allen Hall: All right. There is a, a group down in Houston, a startup basically called blue tech industries. And I’ll spell it out because it’s not like you would assume it is. And I’ve seen it spelled two different ways, actually. B L E U T E C industries. And there’s no H on the end and their CEO, Robin Batman is discussing.
Allen Hall: Wind turbine, offshore, wind turbine installation vehicles, and how there or there really is no existing Jones act compliant vessels. And if you’re going to start from scratch, how would you design these offshore wind turbine support vessels? What would you do? And so they they’ve, they have announced what they call the binary Marine installation solutions.
Allen Hall: Beas , which is a very odd acronym, but, okay. Which has been developed in cooperation with Nesco, Naval architecture and Marine engineering and Netherlands based heavy lift expert Penas and it’s a self-propelled Jack vessel with a dual crane setup that is supposedly cheaper, faster. You know, does all the good things at, at building and installing monopile.
Allen Hall: So that basically it’s a monopile focus ship. So you drive the monopile on the ground and then you move on to the next one. So it’s, it’s, it’s very reduced in terms of what it does, but it does one job really well. So there’s actually two pieces. This, this is the binary part binary part. There’s a a piling installation vessel and a wind turbine installation vessel.
Allen Hall: Light they’re calling it. So it’s a small version. And then those two pieces are coupled with it sounds like there’s support equipment and SOVs that you know, feed all the people who are, who are working on these, on these vessels. But they’re talking about, Joel are talking about a really short timeline, like the piling installation vessel vessel is.
Allen Hall: Possibly available in the third quarter of 2024. So they got about two years to put that together in the wind turbine installation vehicle. They’re talking about the third quarter of 2025, and you have to start cut and steel like now. Yeah. To get this yeah. To get this in the water. Right?
Joel Saxum: Absolutely. So there’s a couple of schools of thought here, right?
Joel Saxum: When the offshore industry started blowing up in Northern Europe, it was first off repurposing old oil and gas vessels to do the things right. Like, oh, we have this, this nice right here. We can use this. And I mean, I saw tenders flying when I was in oil and gas. We saw a. Tenders flying across for novel sensor technology and camera, vision systems and inertial measurement units to try to drive these piles perfectly straight off the side of these vessels.
Joel Saxum: Cause that’s a huge problem, right? The verticality of that pile is right, is key to the structural stability of the whole the whole asset. So if. So that was an issue. Right. And then building these vessels was an issue. So it looks like this company has taken, you know, 10, 20, 30 years of watching or, or dissecting the issues that happen in offshore, wind in Northern Europe and have kind of developed solutions to, to solve all of those things by having this team of vessels that, that works together.
Joel Saxum: So I like that. There is also you know, another thought of man, we need these vessels now and you’re totally reinventing the wheel. So if you’re reinventing the wheel, but part of it is you’re gonna be able to build them faster to 2024. That’s great. Cause I know some of the, I have seen some of the timelines of these other vessels that they’re like, oh, we’re gonna come over and build this one, the same design.
Joel Saxum: And they’re like, oh yeah, I’ll be there by 2026. So be there by 2027. So seven, eight. Yeah, exactly. So, and if we’re gonna have 30 gigawatts in the, in the water by 2030, we better get these vessels out quicker than that. So, you know, we did see last week a couple of the development companies and, and asset will be asset owners in the offshore world.
Joel Saxum: Write a letter to our government. Help with the Jones act, please, because otherwise we just won’t be able to do anything. So maybe this is a another someone, someone will come along and invest a heavy sum of these things to get ’em built because they’ll be Jones act compliant. They’ll have to be built here in the us.
Joel Saxum: Right. Doesn’t go. As far as seeing you have to get all the steel here. So some of the steel will come from wherever, but yeah. So if, if they can build them quick and the design works. Fantastic. That’ll help out our offshore wind in the us in a, in a massive way. It’s a little bit brand new, right?
Joel Saxum: So I hope they’ve thought through all the issues and they’re not creating new new ones.
Allen Hall: Well, the, the weird thing was on LinkedIn when I saw this article pop up and there’s a, a bunch of of people on LinkedIn discussing. This was a couple of comments like, Hey, There are available vessels for sale right now that could do that same job.
Allen Hall: I thought, well, That’s interesting. And, and sure enough, there are websites that are selling installation vessels, basically big flat bottom ships with cranes work shifts on them. And yeah, they’re just work ships, right? Exactly. And they’re sitting dry dock and if you like to own one, it wouldn’t take all that much money to get ahold of one and, and move it to where you are.
Allen Hall: That’s a really. Thing you wouldn’t think to be an eBay for ships, but there’s an actually an oh yeah. A used ship market, like buy a used car. Oh yeah. And, and so why, why hasn’t anybody done that? Is it because these wind TURs are growing so fast, Rosemary that the wind TURs are FA are growing faster than the ships can possibly be built.
Allen Hall: Is it, is that what’s happened?
Rosemary Barnes: I I’ve. I’ve got no idea how to be honest. I,
Joel Saxum: I think it’s so, so here’s another thought for you. So like, I I’m comfortable. I’m comfortable going and buying a, a two year old Chevy truck that a Chevy mechanic has gone through. Yeah, I am not, I’m not comfortable buying a 15 year old dirt bike that I have no idea who’s owned it.
Joel Saxum: And the top end might be blown up and all these other things, right. BEC because that Chevy truck, I know what it’s gonna do. I know how it’s gonna work. I, I know all these things, right. And the majority of the, of ships and the second hand market. They’ve been cold stacked. They’ve been, you know, the people went out of business and they just let ’em rot.
Joel Saxum: All the hoses are jacked up. They don’t. Yeah, because I’ve, I’ve seen it in the oil and gas world where someone’s like, Hey guys, we picked up this, this vessel for cheap over in Ghana, and we’re gonna go and run this thing out of it. And you get out there and vessel downtime is 80%. It doesn’t work. Right.
Joel Saxum: And, and then you’re, and then you’re again, on the same, the same role. None of those vessels were built for there’s there’s ships that can technically do it. Right. But none of those vessels were built for offshore wind installation. All right. Driving these mono piles of very specialized operation, that would take a lot of changing those vessels over.
Joel Saxum: And, and if the holes aren’t designed for the right stability with all that kind of drainage on ’em and it just doesn’t work
Allen Hall: well, it it’s, it’s gonna. a, a real conflict, right. We’re coming to the point where somebody’s gotta start cutting steel on some ship. Otherwise 2030 is gonna go by the wayside. Am I, am I wrong about that?
Allen Hall: I don’t think so. Yeah. They gotta do something like now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. There’s some, I mean, there’s some players that are making moves, but I think it’s more in the. That what I’ve seen the logistics side of things, cuz logistics are easier, right? It’s easier to get a big old work boat and throw turbines on and move ’em around or, or right.
Joel Saxum: But the, the actual monopile pounding ships and stuff. That’s specialized vessels. So I know there’s some guys in Louisiana starting to, to work on some, but I don’t know what to what scale.
Allen Hall: Hmm. Well, you think the Gulf would be easier? Maybe not, maybe be worse,
Joel Saxum: but the ship building Prowe down in the Gulf for work boats, because of all the offshore oil and gas down there is.
Joel Saxum: Oh, sure. Is, is top
Rosemary Barnes: quality. And how long does it normally take to, to, to build a, a ship?
Joel Saxum: Well, I mean, you can put together like a. So, so, so, okay. So you’ve seen the SVA votes, the SVAC votes in the north sea, and they’re nice, beautiful, big red ships with the curved front ends and all this stuff on ’em and they awesome. I think they’re, I think they’re actually a Norwegian design, even though it’s a Danish company.
Joel Saxum: But those, those are fantastic, but those take forever to build because all the steel is bent and moved. And so that one of those vessels can take two years to build. But if you’re just building a work boat, like say sch west Marine out of Houma, Louisiana, or the borderland group up, down there, they’ve been building these things.
Joel Saxum: They’ll they’ll Palm one of those together in six months. Mm. wow. But, but it won’t be that pretty nice, big, fancy, cool hole design, right. It’ll be big flat bottom boat with a couple of big old diesels on it and, and a CA in a cab up front. And here we go.
Rosemary Barnes: So, so maybe it’s just a little bit,
Allen Hall: yeah, it’ll be built American style.
Joel Saxum: Nothing, nothing wrong with that. Can, can you, can you barbecue on the back? Yeah. Can you barbecue on the back deck set her loose straight? Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: yeah. So maybe it is actually early for, you know, maybe no one’s building these ships now because it’s a little bit early for them to actually be able to, you know, make some money from it.
Rosemary Barnes: I, I think that there’s other, you know, there’s a lot of other pieces that have to come into play for these, you know, before we ready to actually start sticking foundations in the ground or in the sea floor. Yeah. I mean,
Joel Saxum: you’d be, you’d be better off. If I was a developer right now, I would do what they did on block island.
Joel Saxum: And I’d be putting jackets out because jacket installation vessels exist in the Gulf right now that have been there forever. Cuz that’s how they do oil and gas. The monopile pounding ones are the odd ones. Okay.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s really interesting topic. I should make a video. Well, Rosemary, anyone, anyone listening?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Anyone listen, make a video. Who’s got a related company and wants to, yeah. Give me, give me access to get some good video footage of this. I think that would be a cool topic to show how, how offshore wind farm installation happens. That would, that would be cool.
Allen Hall: Well, you should also do a video on what we’re gonna talk about next, which is methanol is winning the hydrogen shipping.
Allen Hall: And so ammonia has been talked about as a, as a, as being derived from green hydrogen and as a fuel to power ships. Right? It’s what’s the chemical it’s NH four, right? Ammonia? Or is it NH three? Do I, did I, I had a hydrogen N
Rosemary Barnes: arm ammonia. okay.
Allen Hall: okay. So in H three, so you can make ammonia, which is a liquid, it’s a liquid fuel, right?
Allen Hall: It’s got hydrogen in it. So it’s a, it’s not a hydrocarbon, but it, it has hydrogen, which you can strip off and then uses a fuel. And it has been talked about for powering ships and also liquid hydrogen has also been talked about for powering ships. The problem with liquid hydrogen, it’s gotta be really, really, really cold.
Allen Hall: The problem with amonia is that it’s toxic. Okay. So there’s a, a big discussion among ship builders and ship operators. Like what’s the fuel, the futures because the global shipping industry is responsible for about 3% of the global greenhouse gas emissions at the moment. So they’re looking for carbon neutral alternatives and ammonia has been one of those discussed for quite a while.
Allen Hall: And, but it looks like because of the issues with ammonia and liquid hydrogen, that we’re gonna be moving to methanol basically green methodol. Now I I’m putting green in quotations. You can’t hear this on a podcast, but I’ve got all quotations up. It’s green methodol. A lot of shipping companies already moving this rush.
Allen Hall: Can I guess MES? Sorry. Is it MES or Meers? They said it
Rosemary Barnes: pretty. Was the Rosemary. Yeah. Your first, your first attempt was wow. Okay. Was fine. I think for a English interpretation of it. Oh, good work. All we can aim, which is all we can aim for. Ah, there we go. All we can aim for
Allen Hall: well, you know, we don’t shoot too high here in America.
Allen Hall: So the me already ex is expressing a preference for a methanol, which is I, I, this, I do know C three oh H take that Rosemary, which, which is produced probably combining hydrogen. Captured carbon dioxide. So you can make this complicated methanol molecule. So methanol is far less toxic. And as we’ve seen on some recent YouTube videos, and it’s probably on TikTok where you’ve seen ammonia leaks.
Allen Hall: And if you, if you Google that, it’s some surprising how many ammonia leaks there are every day in the, in the world. I was looking at one from a chicken factory. So it’s pretty toxic. And so if you have a ammonia leak, it’s a problem. And on ships, I guess leaks are very common. Rosemary, does this make sense to you?
Allen Hall: Is there such a thing as green methanol and we’re are we gonna use electricity to create green hydrogen and turn it into methanol so that we can then power the ships?
Rosemary Barnes: Is that where we’re heading? Yeah, it’s not really Zero carbon to, you know, take CO2 out of the atmosphere. And then well, I guess if you’re taking it outta the atmosphere, then you are kind of, you know, getting an extra, extra loop loop with the, the carbon.
Rosemary Barnes: Cause it is just going, you, you burn methanol, you’re still gonna get that CO2 back in the atmosphere. Sure. Yeah. And especially if you’re capturing. From fossil fuel power plant, for example, then yeah, I, it’s a stretch to call that zero emissions, but yeah, definitely methanol has the advantage over ammonia that it’s not, not toxic and it’s already, you know, used as a, a fuel or something that we, that we know pretty pretty well.
Rosemary Barnes: So that’s fine. And it has the advantage of a hydrogen that, yeah, like you mentioned, that hydrogen is you have to liquefy it or it takes up a lot less space if you liquefy it to transport it, but transport it. But then you have the problem that hydrogen boils it, such a low temperature that you get boil off.
Rosemary Barnes: If you try and, you know, transport, liquid, hydrogen for long amount of time, I guess. Yeah. But both ammonia and methanol have the problem that it, you have to do an extra, you know, if you’re starting with hydrogen and then you have to convert it first to methanol or ammonia, you know, there’s some, some losses in that.
Rosemary Barnes: And yeah, a lot of the times when people talk about, oh yeah, we’ll transport, hydrogen as methanol as ammonia. They’re not just talking about convert. To those those chemicals, they’re also talking about converting it back to hydrogen at the end, and then you get, you know, an extra, extra inefficiency.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, as long as people are using it, as methanol as, as a fuel, that’s a lot better. And as long as it’s for something that couldn’t be done with something else, really. So shipping is definitely one of the tricky. Tricky things to know what’s gonna work out there’s heaps of ways that you can you know, power, right.
Rosemary Barnes: A ship in a, a green way. But the current fuel that we use for shipping is just so, so, so cheap. It’s like literally the bottom of the barrel. Right. It’s you know, it’s, it’s stuff that no, that’s where it comes from too. Yeah, exactly it right. No one wants it for anything else. It’s it’s very cheap. And so.
Rosemary Barnes: Anything green that I have heard of is going to, you know, make shipping a lot more expensive. So my kind of conclusion on, on shipping is that it’s going to, it’s gonna be one of those things where we are gonna be doing a lot, a lot less of it. Once it goes green. And I think that will happen naturally because I think like a huge proportion of the world shipping is to ship fossil fuels.
Rosemary Barnes: And then so obviously we won’t who won’t. That iPhones. And then I think also we’re gonna see more like on onshoring of manufacturing. So, you know, like Australia just ships heaps of, of dirt to rocks to China for processing. So instead of shipping. Iron a, we might ship steel and instead of serious shipping serious, what, what do you mean that, yeah, that’s how Australia works.
Rosemary Barnes: That’s how our economy works. Like you’re shipping
Allen Hall: rocks to China. Why are you shipping rocks to China? That seems like the, we ship
Rosemary Barnes: ship. Ridiculous thing to ship, ship, ship to the is in the form of iron a so that they can process that into steel. And we ship like all our lithium it’s it’s rocks. We, we crush it, we crush it up.
Rosemary Barnes: So maybe it’s not rocks anymore. Maybe it’s gravel. And then we ship ship that, and then they they process it, process it there. And I mean, I’m not so intimately involved with what other countries are doing, but yeah, like if a lot of processing happens in China, that’s because they’re getting the, the raw materials or anything.
Rosemary Barnes: That’s not from China. They’re getting the raw materials and, you know, in mining, You’re not seeing concentrations of like, you know, 50, 60% it’s sometimes for some things you concentrations of 1% or, or lower in the, in the case of some of the really, yeah. Really rare stuff or scare stuff. So it’s huge volumes that get shipped.
Rosemary Barnes: And I think that there’s big savings to be made by more ons, ensuring of processing, especially in Australia where we have plenty of energy to do it. Wait. Time time out. well, that’s what my
Allen Hall: question is. Why isn’t, if, if, if, if China’s gonna do that, why wouldn’t China just build the factories in Australia with all the renewable wind and solar in Australia that makes zero sense to move the rock.
Allen Hall: It might, it might.
Rosemary Barnes: Crazy, but it’s just, you follow the money. It is for the, for the answer. It’s not just the money. It’s also the environmental impact as well. Because some, some of these processes can be done much more cheaply if you’re not as concerned about environmental regulations. So that makes it more expensive, more energy intensive to do it in a country like Australia or the us than in a country like, like China.
Rosemary Barnes: Wow. And I, it’s a huge, it it’s gonna be a huge shift over the. Few years, everyone’s talking about it now. And, but like we can’t just bring the lithium processing, the re earth processing into Australia or the us and do it the same way that China is and the way that they’re getting their really cheap prices, because that would be unacceptable.
Rosemary Barnes: Environmental consequences for yeah, for us. So, yeah, we’ve. We’ve traded off, you know, China has gotten the strategic advantage and so up the, the market on, on many or most of these critical minerals and the trade off has been, we’ve gotten cheap, cheap, critical minerals, but we don’t have the supply chain security.
Rosemary Barnes: And we also have basically just offshored the environmental problems. So if we wanna Reho it, then we have to accept. It’s gonna cost more because you you’ve gotta take care of the environment. You can’t have radioactive waste flowing into rivers. And yeah, there’s a whole suite of other problems.
Rosemary Barnes: If you just do things in the cheapest, cheapest way possible. So anyway, that’s a bit of a tangent from, so then it is pretty critical from
Allen Hall: shipping, but no, but no, it just tells you how critical it is that the, the shipping industry tries to find a renewable source of fuel for the ships. Right? Mm-hmm and that’s the reason why, because you’re moving rocks around of all things.
Allen Hall: One of the interesting pieces is me Jim Germany’s MPCC and Francis CMA CGM have already ordered 26 methanol dual fuel vessels. So they’re, they can burn the existing sort of low quality diesel fuel and methanol, cuz they’re preparing to have it to switch over and I’m guessing in some parts of the world, they use methanol in some other parts of the world.
Allen Hall: They will not use methanol, but they need to have the option to use both now. And that’s, if you’re buying 26, Vessels that are built that way. That’s a lot of cash you’re putting down and you’re betting on methanol being the future. So that essentially wipes out ammonia. It’s gonna essentially wipe out hydrogen because the big shippers have already made the decision in terms of the shipping.
Allen Hall: If me is making that kind of move what’s everybody else gonna do? Yeah. They’re. They’re gonna follow that lead. I would assume
Joel Saxum: the dual fuel nature of methanol and, and fuel oil or diesel has been around for a long time. Right? So if you, if you’re ever at a gas station and this, that you can’t do this in other countries, but in the us, if you’re ever at a gas station and you see someone taking jugs three, four or five jugs of windshield wiper fluid, and putting them in the back yeah.
Joel Saxum: Of a, of a tank and a pickup truck, that’s a methanol injection kit into a diesel engine and it will, and it will make, oh man. It’ll make the diesel engine it’ll run on diesel, but it will go from like 20 miles of the gallon to about 25 miles the gallon and increase the horsepower by about 200 horsepower.
Allen Hall: well, there you go. They taken the. Windshield wiper fluid take at the American ingenuity
Allen Hall: and they’re applying it to huge expensive ships. Where there you go. There you go. Well, Hey, Hey. Some of the best inventions start at the, at the simplest ideas and maybe that’s one of them. That’s good to it’s. Good’s good to see. So there’s just a lot of interesting news this weekend. We didn’t even get to talk about Boris Johnson stepping down.
Allen Hall: So we’ll talk about that next week, but it’s been a, a crazy, crazy. Last 48 hours. Well, that’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast. Thanks for listen. Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to the uptime tech news, our week of the newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube channel engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you next week on the uptime wind energy podcast.
