This week we discuss new technology, jobs, and some interesting business developments. Aerones’ latest modular robot is 5x faster than humans,repairing up to Level 3 LEE damage and halting progression of up to Level 5 erosion. Then we leap from Latvia to Kentucky, where Nucor’s new factory is making Elcyon, “creating the first domestic supply chain of sustainable steel” in the US – and it’s specifically for designed for the demands of offshore energy. Rosemary posits that the economics of recycled steel may outweigh the environmental benefits, but it’s a win for the state and the industry. Â
New York could be the big winner in jobs, with BP and GE including new factories in their bid packages, while Invenergy signed a MOU with North America’s Building Trades Union to sweeten its bid. Joel thinks he understands why Iberdrola is selling wind sites in the US, but says there may be more to it. The wind industry is not slowing down. Keep up with Uptime!Â
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Uptime 151
Allen Hall: So we came on the podcast today, Joel, Rosemary checked in and her first comment was about the sweater I’m wearing. It took like maybe five seconds before she’s on top of me about my sweater.
Joel Saxum: It’s beautiful, Allen. It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful cardigan. It’s not a sweater, it’s a cardigan. It’s fantastic.
Allen Hall: It’s a cardigan, right? There you go. And I’m here to the whaling territory of America. Right? This is sort of like’s what the whalers used to wear. It’s cold in Massachusetts. It’s awful. And it’s wets
Allen Hall: too. It’s awful.
Joel Saxum: If you’re new to the podcast, what you’ll understand from that comment is that Rosemary usually doesn’t have a filter. She’s gonna tell you how it is and what she feels, and that’s why we love her.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So this, this is a really fun episode, because Rosemary is completely filterless this week. And we’re gonna talk about Aerones over in Latvia. Talking about really going after a big marketplace.
Joel Saxum: They’re, they’re going to be doing leading edge repairs with AkzoNobel has the sealant fixed to keep those leading edges clean and making power. And then we, then we shift gears over to New York State and there’s a lot happening offshore in New York State with the New York State bid process. All the companies that are just offshore trying to make bids into the state, the state’s only looking for two gigawatts, and there’s a lot more power offshore than two gigawatts at the moment.
Joel Saxum: So, A bunch of shuffling, including GE proposing to, to build two new facilities in New York State, a new blade facility with LM Wind Power, and then an a cell facility right next door. Lot of action
Joel Saxum: there. We’re also gonna talk about ebra Jola. So for the technicians in the field that may be working on one and wind farm, and they come to work the next day and it’s owned by someone else what we see is that with the availability of capital for, for their developments, that’s going to become more commonplace and Iberdrola is making some big moves to shift around their capital base to, to put some more renewable energy in the ground.
Joel Saxum: That’s actually, that’s what we’re thinking, right? We don’t work for iro, so we don’t know. And then we’re gonna get back to Rosemary talking losing her filter a little bit, talking about Nucor and some sustainable steel and some, some efforts they’re doing in Kentucky, here in the United States to.
Joel Saxum: Our offshore wind developments, which we all like to see US manufacturing jobs, US materials, going into what we put forth for the energy transition. We’re gonna talk about ACP a little bit and what they’re talking about in some of their opinions on manning the offshore wind wind farms that are being built.
Joel Saxum: So stay tuned for that one. And then we’re also going to debut a, a. Piece of the show that we like to do the Wind Farm of the Week. So we’re gonna talk about some of the fantastic wind turbine technicians and o and m personnel doing a repower out in Iowa on a great wind farm. So stay
Allen Hall: tuned.
Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum and the soon-to-be guest host of the fully charged live event at Australia, Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Allen Hall: Well, big excitement up in Latvia this week because Erroneus has announced a new modular robot for leading edge repair. And Joel, if you had watched the YouTube video, there was a big pronouncement. Danis was there and Janis were there. Showing this sort of modular robot that does a number of different tasks to repair leading edges.
Allen Hall: And they say they can repair leading edges up to level three damage. decently severe, and they were also talking about lower fours and fives that could at least temporarily cover it and maybe delay the inevitable technician repair. But it, the robot does a couple of things. So it, it cleans the surface, it preps the surface, right?
Allen Hall: It has to grind off any sort of tape or existing tape that’s on there. Primers, it fills. And smooze it. Wow. But it, the, the, the little piece they were talking about that I thought was interesting, they, they said this is a modular approach. So I, I don’t know if they’ve just taken existing pieces and, and plugged them in to, to make this.
Allen Hall: leading edge fixing robot work. The, the, the big announcement when, and there was a big announcement because he had partnered with Axl Noble for the material to coat the leading edge. And Axl Noble has been working in that space for a little while trying to come up with solutions. So it’s a, it’s an interesting concept and I, I think leading edge repair is the big repair.
Allen Hall: Industry at the moment, right. That that’s where all the, all the emphasis is. Yeah. There’s a couple
Joel Saxum: of companies in the robotic space that are working on projects to do some different kinds of repairs. That’s tough, right? You’re getting into things that are, and that’s why there’s technicians that do them because ev, not one of ’em is cookie cutter.
Joel Saxum: None of ’em are the same. Every single one of ’em is different. When you get to leading. , it’s a process that you can replicate, right? You may overdo it a little bit because when you’re doing a leading edge, it’s not always, you don’t need to do a hundred percent of that stretch, right? If you’re working on the, the, the, you know, four meters, six meters, eight meters, 10 meters, whatever, in that, that heavy erosion zone, or if you get some chipping, some peeling, you don’t always need to fix.
Joel Saxum: Every single meter of it, or every single, you know, like little inch of it, but they, you know, with the robot you will, but that eventually will give you a better coding as well. So I guess like when you say modular, I like the approach because you know, some of the other robotic companies in the space are doing the same thing.
Joel Saxum: Blade Bug, they’re saying the same thing, modular. And the idea is today we can do leading edge. , who knows? We may be able to apply in anti icing coating. We may be able to actually do a scarfed repair. We, you know, we can put maybe that it’s modular, we can put on a coating that is liquid coating.
Joel Saxum: Maybe next year we’re doing 3M tape coating or whatever it is. So the modular approach is smart and robotics, no matter. Where you’re working, you know, think about sub seats, just tools and different things. It’s all modular. Very, very smart. So I guess the, the thing I would, I’m curious about is if it is a modular approach and they’re gonna, you know, you’re gonna sand, you’re gonna prep, you’re going to put filler in, and then you’re gonna put, finally put your coating and maybe a top coat or something.
Joel Saxum: There’s 3, 4, 5 steps. Are they doing anything to do some of those at once? Right? Because now you’re, you’re starting to fight. The idea is can you beat a team of technicians in quality and speed? And if you have five different processes to do, you might not be able to do that. , you know what I mean? So if you have to sand it, and that’s one thing.
Joel Saxum: And then you gotta do a tool change and then you have to do this. And so every time you have to do a tool change and do another run up and down the blade or, or however that works for their process, there’s some time there. So as long as they can beat that time and, and do it well, that’s, that’s fantastic.
Joel Saxum: I mean, cat three, you’re down into, you’re almost a substrate, right? So once you get past cat three, then you start to get structural and you start to have, actually have to build up some repair in there. You know, I’ve seen, we’ve all seen those leading edge stories where someone could stick their fist through a hole.
Joel Saxum: I , I hope they’re not planning on just putting filler over the top of something like that and just that wouldn’t be good. Talk guys over there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There you go. The guys do a great job over there at Erroneus, so I’m sure they’ve thought of
Allen Hall: all these things. Yeah. So Eros has been working on anti ice coating application with Nine Ice for probably six months or more.
Allen Hall: We saw them over in Hamburg. , Joel, they had nine ice. Yep. Yep. There. And we’re, and we’re talking that up before the, the winter season. But one of the key points that Erroneus is pointing out is that technicians can typically be on a blade when it’s like eight, nine meters or second of wind. Mm-hmm. . But the robot can be up there in 15 meters per second wind, which means you have a larger operating window to do repair.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I think that makes a little more sense. The only thing I worry about is fixing lineage erosion is a difficult task and once you get out in the field, it’s not like being in the laboratory. And if anybody knows that, erroneus knows that because they’ve been doing a lot of different tasks.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. like LPs measurements, they’ve been cleaning the towers and all of other things the robot does. I think that’s gonna be the stumbling block, is how to do this in difficult situ.
Joel Saxum: I mean, you don’t want to be up there in 15 meters per second in my mind, because then you start to get some warble and some different things going on.
Joel Saxum: If the, if that coating, depending on the pot time of whatever coating they’re using, you might get some. Some leaks, some drips, some, some waves in it.
Rosemary Barnes: Plus it’s a good time to be generating electricity when it’s 15 meters per second winds, right? So you wouldn’t want to assume that leading edge protection isn’t ever an an urgent repair, or it shouldn’t be unless they’ve really let it go too far.
Allen Hall: We’re gonna see a lot more robots that do similar things over the next year or two.
Rosemary Barnes: Mm. . I think it’s really interesting cuz like five years ago, everybody all the manufacturers were, well, they probably still are, but working really hard on better leading edge protection that wouldn’t need to be repaired or replaced.
Rosemary Barnes: And so I just think it’s interesting in terms of technology development, how, you know, the. The path that seems, it seemed obvious back then that we needed better coatings for leading edge protection. But it turned out to be easier to get robots to be periodically replacing the yeah, improving it.
Rosemary Barnes: And it’s interesting too with the the is phobic coatings because their weakness has always been that they just don’t last on the on the blades very long. So if you can, you know, reapply that every year without having to send a team up there, then that seems like a much more likely. technology improvement to happen then, you know, like I, as I was, I spent a, a decade waiting for better , better is phobic cobi coatings to occur that, you know, could actually do what they said that they would do.
Rosemary Barnes: Right. This seems like a much, much faster path to seeing is phobic coatings that actually perform some sort of function.
Joel Saxum: Absolutely, and I think that the l e p conversation as well, Rosemary. What some of the manufacturers and aftermarket companies have found is no matter how good of a coding you make, it’s only as good as the technician applying it.
Joel Saxum: So when these people are making, you know, it’s, it’s tough to get it right every time. And I think part of the leaning is, is now that they, we can get robots to do it if the robots can do it. Effectively, efficiently in a robotic manner as, as should be. But you know, you’re thinking car factory weld type thing versus a, a hand weld that the coatings will just last longer.
Joel Saxum: Innately. Right. But I don’t, that’s, that’s the
Allen Hall: idea. Our wind turbine farm of the week is elk, wind in Elk Township, Iowa, which is, if you know you’re Iowa, it’s, it’s in the corner of Iowa, Wisconsin. And, So it’s right in Joel’s neck of the woods. That’s right, that’s right. Elkwood was commissioned in 2011 and at 42 and a half Megawatts, it’s a good size farm.
Allen Hall: It’s now owned by Green Backer Renewable Energy 17 turbines. And they’re looking to repower good for them. They have two and a half megawatt nordex machines, but they’re gonna repower with ge there you. And they’re gonna put bigger blades on, and I haven’t seen what the power rating increase is gonna be, or maybe they’re just gonna put, keep it at two and a half megawatts, just put bigger blades on.
Allen Hall: But they’re gonna have 127 meter diameter blades when they currently have a hundred meter diameter blades. So, Nice job, everybody out there. It’s good to see you. Wind farm Repowering. Right? It’s about that 12 year time span. Mm-hmm. all right. At the right time. Being smart, taking, taking care of the tax credits.
Allen Hall: I’m sure great. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Congratulations everybody out there. And. Elk, wind Farm, elk Township, Iowa In July of 22 New York, governor Kathy Hoel announced the third offshore wind solicitation for two gigawatts of offshore wind. Well, those bids are, are rolling in and we got a, got a brief snapshot of, of what everybody’s proposing, Orti and Eversource on their South fork wind, and, Sunrise wind are combining for a little over gigawatts what they’re proposing soft work winds and process at the moment, they’ll have about 130 megawatts and then sunrise wind is have about 900 megawatts, which be all finished in late 2025.
Allen Hall: So that’s, those are two with the wind farms that are proposing to, to move into New York. Eor. With our Beacon Win two project which is gonna complement the already existing Empire one and two and Beacon win one projects. So Beacon Win two is a 1.3 gigawatt proposal. The Ecuador and BP are also proposing as part of this package to create manufacturing plants for cable components and wind turbine components.
Allen Hall: Like blades and missile cells in the state of New York. So they’re saying if we get chosen to provide power, we’re gonna build some manufacturing plants in New York State, R w e and National Grid with their community Offshore wind project, which is a 1.3 gigawatt gigawatt offshore project is combined with ge.
Allen Hall: And we’ll talk about this in a moment, but they’re saying that GE will build a blade plant and in a cell plant outside Albany, New York, which is upstate New York, and could also bring in some steel fabrication into Orange County. Joel, you know that from Orange County Chopper, the motorcycle? Oh, yeah.
Allen Hall: Television show is right there. Right? So it’s a big steel. And then inve in energy and energy re with their leading light wind project. It’s a 2.1 gigawatt proposed project. There’s, they signed an M o U memorandum of understanding with the local trade unions as part of their bid package. So everybody’s going down a different avenue.
Allen Hall: Yeah. In terms of what the, the, the highlights are, it sounds like manufacturing is part of it. That makes a lot of sense. GEs up the street. Mm. but also hooking up with the trade units. So there is going to be a lot of negotiations in the back rooms of the Capitol up in Albany, New York, deciding who out of these projects are gonna get to deliver power.
Allen Hall: The, the weird thing is, Joel you know, you and I were talking before the show here. Mm-hmm. , a lot of these companies paid a lot of money for these leases off the coast of New York. Oh yeah. If they can’t deliver power, where are they gonna go? What’s the next step? .
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, you’re looking at here with all of these projects combined that you just mentioned, a little over nine gigawatts of possible power.
Joel Saxum: Right. And the state of the state of New York saying, we’ll take a, a minimum of two. That’s, that’s so much less is 20%, you know, ish of the, of, of the power that could be created. Now, did they put a cap on it? So does New York say We’re not taking any more than X? Cause I don’t, I don’t think they put a cap on it.
Allen Hall: No. So they could actually, I think they could go higher. I think the question is were they gonna onshore it? Right. That’s, that’s usually the big dilemma. Yeah. Where they put the cable in. So what
Joel Saxum: we were talking about was how can you, you know, this is all part of the New York bite auction. So saying these companies all put out over four, 4.7 billion in leasing and permit bids to get the option or the opportunity to go and develop these farms.
Joel Saxum: And it blew my mind reading this going, they did that. Without even knowing where their offtake was gonna be and where it’s gonna go to. Right. It just, the, the risk of this thing is, is wild to me. I can’t, I can’t, I wouldn’t be able to stomach it. If I was one of the people on that bid team, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night going, man, you know, we just put out X billion dollars or how many hundreds of millions of dollars to get the opportunity to do this.
Joel Saxum: We don’t even know who’s gonna take the power. That’s, crazy. I mean, right in on that East Coast, you do have, of course, New York is there. You could ship some to Rhode Island, you could ship some to Massachusetts New Jersey you know, quite a ways down the coast of Delaware if you wanted to. So there’s places that can take it, but that it, those things have massive implications on cost and where you’re gonna come ashore, right?
Joel Saxum: So if you’re, if you’re having to run an ex export cable to Staten Island versus having to run it to Providence , that’s. that’s millions and millions and millions of dollars in difference. So how, how can you have a cost model built around these things that, and not know where the power’s going to go or even have an idea of a PPA lined up.
Joel Saxum: So I, you know, that’s one part to unpackage here. The other part is lots of different flavors of carrots being hung in the state of New York right now. Yes, depending, depending on who’s gonna bite and how it’s going to. A lot of different, like you said in here, there’s a lot of different tactics. Getting in with the trade unions is a great one.
Joel Saxum: I believe, in my opinion, building a factory is an even better one. Because then you’re, you are putting a permanent or a semi-permanent, we hope, permanent facility there to bolster some long-term jobs. And you’re gonna end up using union labor anyways for something offshore there, whether it’s painting or electrical union.
Joel Saxum: So you’re gonna do that. So, Yeah, quite a, quite a bit moving here. Lot of, lot of moving parts.
Allen Hall: Well, this comes in at the same time when Avan grid is fighting with the state of Massachusetts and has gone to court now state court to argue that the purchase power agreement is null and void. That that process wasn’t valid and and wants to stop that process.
Allen Hall: And so AV. And the Commonwealth Wind are gonna be looking for another place to deliver that power if they’re gonna actually go forward with the project. This is a huge risk. When we talk about 30 gigawatts by 2030, we have to have a place to deliver it. and it seems like at the moment that we don’t have the roadways or pathways into the states or the states are going to hold them somewhat hostage and extract out hundreds of millions of dollars in essentially payments, which is what it is.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. to either secure jobs or create factories or whatever they wanna do. So is it just the highest bid or wins? Is that where we’re at right now?
Joel Saxum: I think so. Oof. But that, yeah, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a dangerous path to walk. And with the p with the, and with the, the, the PPA agreement argument, we’re, we’re also looking at down the coast in Virginia, the dominion issue down there as well, with PPA prices and, and the guarantees.
Joel Saxum: So 30 by 30 gigawatts of offshore wind is, we’re looking at nine here, and the state is only saying they’re gonna take two at a. . Okay. That’s, that’s low numbers. Now we have, we have, you know, the Virginia stuff coming in, so you’re up to that. We could, we could say in the vicinity of 15 and gigawatts sitting on the east coast ready off at the southern, you know, in the, in the Gulf of Mexico.
Joel Saxum: We don’t know exactly what that auction is gonna bring. It’s not going to. 15, it’s gonna be in the, more, in the two range, two gigawatts maybe. And then off the west coast you’re four five. So you’re looking at even right now without any more auctions, we’re only at 20 gigawatts, 22, something of that sort.
Joel Saxum: But still not understanding what the PPA agreements look like and or what states are even gonna take the power into their grid is, is very troublesome being February of 20. With only six turbines in the water as we speak.
Allen Hall: I’ve been chewing on this all week, actually because the last couple of weeks on the podcast, it seems like everything has been really negative.
Allen Hall: We’re just not moving at the speed, which was intended, which is being publicized. And when you start to get into the, the depths of these projects, you realize, man, we are really, really far behind. I, I want to keep this light and positive on the podcast because there are some opportunities. Clearly to speed this whole effort.
Allen Hall: I just haven’t heard them. Yeah, you, Joel. That, you know, here’s, here’s a way we can speed it up. We’re gonna get some regulations cleared out. We’re gonna find the pathways. We’re gonna work the communities to get the power on shore. These are the processes we’re gonna use. We’re gonna move this forward.
Allen Hall: It’s not like that when you dig through the news articles every week, you realize. They’re, they’re just getting bogged down in the courts.
Joel Saxum: I’ve, I’ve got a new process, I think I got a process on, and I’ve got it figured out. So if anybody listening to the podcast has ever heard of Mattress Mac from Houston?
Joel Saxum: Yes. So, so what Mattress Mac does is he says if you buy a a, a, a mattress, a Sealy, Posturepedic, whatever, and it costs over $3,000 and the Astros win the World Series, you’ll get it for free. So he hedges that bet by placing a 10 million bet on the Astros. So what we need to do is go to Vegas and get one of the casinos to open up a line on 30 by 30 of our gigawatts of offshore wind, and then we get all of these other man, all these developers, to hedge their bet by placing that we’re not gonna hit 30 by 30 in Vegas
Joel Saxum: And we’ll, we’ll protect, we’ll protect the finances. That’s right. We’ll protect the finances that way. I’ve gotta figured out.
Allen Hall: It’s, it’s one way to do it. I, I, I am looking for the positive light in every news story, and I’m not seeing it right now. So I’m gonna start talking about onshore wind, cause I, at least I know onshore wind in the Midwest is happening for the most part.
Allen Hall: Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska. Go,
Joel Saxum: go, go. Yes, sir.
Joel Saxum: Lightning
Allen Hall: is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
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Allen Hall: As part of the R W E and National Grid Bid for the New York Offshore Power they’re working with ge. And GE has somewhat committed based upon how many wind Turmans would be involved to create two factories in New York. , these factories would be just south of Albany, New York, on the Hudson River. So the, the, the thing the goal is, is that they take these blades in the cells and put ’em on a barge and moving down the Hudson River to the offshore wind area.
Allen Hall: And the, the two areas they’re also proposing are not that far from where the GE facility is in Schenectady, New York. And then there’s a corporate r and. Facility, inis units. So all, all these places are within probably an hour of one another. So the, the blade facility, and this is the interesting piece, the blade facility they’re considering building would be for Halle a 12 megawatt plus turbines, but it’d be an LM Windpower facility.
Allen Hall: So we had talked about LM being the offshore wind power blade designer and maybe moving the onshore blade designs to tpi. This would kind of fall in line with. and this and GE would then keep hold of the Nael business and have a GE Nael factory right next door to the LM Wind Power Blade facility. Now they’re talking about several hundred jobs, roughly a thousand jobs, 800 to a thousand jobs between the two facilities.
Allen Hall: Plus it would create a whole bunch of construction jobs, obviously. Probably like a thousand. Yeah, yeah. Construction jobs to get these, these few factories built in. But Joel, let me ask you this and Rosemary, cuz Rosemary’s been in an LM factory before. Yeah, yeah. How quickly can you build, how quickly can you build an LM Wind Power Blade facility that’s making 12 megawatt plus blades?
Joel Saxum: that’s you. Rosemary, what do you. Well, I
Rosemary Barnes: didn’t know. The only one that I saw happen was the first. And so, I mean, building the factory itself wasn’t the, the difficult thing. It was yeah, figuring out how to make a, a blade of, of that size. There’s so many different like, it, it sounds really similar.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, we used to have 70 meter all glass blades. Now we’ve got 108 meter old glass blade. You know what’s, what’s the difference? You just stretch it out. But there’s just like a bunch of. Things that you might, might not be immediately obvious that make it quite difficult. So, I mean, one that any, anybody problem that anyone’s gonna have is that you are gonna have to increase the thickness, a lot of the, the fiberglass.
Rosemary Barnes: And normally you don’t make really, really thick laminates because the curing is. Difficult. You end up, you might get, you know, some internal stresses or, or something happening. If it’s really thick, you can try to do it in two goes, but then you end up, you know, obviously with a lot longer time and an extra process where something can go wrong know, when you’re trying to have a, a second.
Rosemary Barnes: A second layup on top of our first one. And then there’s just other stuff like, okay, it’s really big, the root diameter is way bigger than you know, a human arm span. So whereas we used to, you know, lay glass in by hand, now, you know, it’s it’s falling down and we can’t reach it or, you know, just details like, like that that happen from a really big.
Rosemary Barnes: Big blade. But in terms of the factory itself, I mean, it’s still just a huge big building, but now, instead of being 80 meters long, it’s gotta be, you know, 120 meters long. And another big thing is the height of it, cuz you need to be able to rotate the blade onto its side. So you can work on all aspects of it, so it needs to be really high.
Rosemary Barnes: But the basilion needs to be really high. But I, I don’t think that those take particularly, Time. So I, yeah, I think they could put it out there pretty quick. But then they’re gonna have to get personnel in that you know, these blades are harder to make do it than your average . Yeah. 70 meter blades.
Rosemary Barnes: So they’re gonna have to get a really good team there, and that will probably be the, the harder thing to do quickly. So here’s a question
Joel Saxum: for you, Rosemary, from your time with the, with the LM team, the, would the factory in gas. be the other option. If this factory isn’t created, will do. They have the capacity to make them up there in Quebec?
Joel Saxum: They’d
Rosemary Barnes: have to make a bigger building. And so the, in the past, I mean, they, they’ve been doing that all the time because, you know, these factories started when blades were, I don’t know, so maybe gas based started when blades were 30 meters long or, or something. I can’t remember the exact. So they just keep, yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: And they would always, you know, just extend it. But then the problem is when they get so big that they’re so wide, then you can’t just extend the length anymore. You’re gonna have to also the height, extend the height, which is not so easy to do. So yeah, and it also depends on, on the land available, because you don’t necessarily just have a spare 50 meters to whack a whack an extra bit onto the end of your factory.
Rosemary Barnes: So, I, it wouldn’t be simple to just go and, and do it in gas buy, that’s for sure. Yeah. Cause
Joel Saxum: some, my, that’s my mind is thinking, okay, if these aren’t built, because there’s some risk there for GE as well, right? They’ve got some, the patent issues hanging out there right now where they might not, there might be a time here shortly where the, the hay ad model in the US might not be something that can get right.
Joel Saxum: So they’ve, why would they build a factory if they’re only two wind farms that they can supply with, with blades as it sits? The other, the other side of that is, is if they do build that factory there, I know that corner of Albany within an hour, hour and a half radius of there would love those jobs.
Joel Saxum: There’s a lot of small communities there that could benefit greatly from, from having ge put another facility in there. So that would be fantastic. Where would
Allen Hall: they get the molds from and all the tooling? Would they come from Europe? , how would they get ’em to America?
Rosemary Barnes: The molds are easier now than they used to be.
Rosemary Barnes: When I started working at lm, the mold was really big. Like it was definitely the critical path for any new New Blade because it would take six months to get the mold. So within six months of starting to make a blade, you’re not making any changes to the the external geometry. , but now they’re 3D printing parts of molds and they can get it done a lot faster if they want to.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I, I think that they would be making them some somewhere nearby. It’s a guess, but yeah, that would be my guess.
Allen Hall: Joel, the only, the biggest 3D printing facility I know of. was part of NASA for a while. I don’t know if we have any of the facilities to make something. There’s one, you
Rosemary Barnes: don’t need to make it in one piece though.
Rosemary Barnes: You and you don’t Just pieces, you don’t, no. Right. Print the mold. You print, you’re probably gonna print a mold to make the mold, if that, that makes sense. Right, right. No, that’s right. Right. Yeah. There’s a company out there right
Joel Saxum: now and I don’t remember where they’re based out of, that has a, an active 3D printer with heat set thermoplastic that can make like a 30 foot boat.
Joel Saxum: So if, and that’s just, it’s, it’s a, it’s a tear it down, put it in a Conex box and you could rebuild it. Like, I don’t think that’s a,
Allen Hall: that’s a huge issue. Let me give you the project timeline based on what I’m seeing so far from other projects in that area. Yep. Two years to get the environmental review done.
Allen Hall: Minimum, probably with a lawsuit in the middle of it. Right. Another year or so to get the, to get the building up ish and another year to get, get it. with the tooling and the cranes and the office furniture and all this stuff. 27. And then I think you’re looking at year five before it goes live. Don’t. So 27
Rosemary Barnes: don’t.
Rosemary Barnes: I think you’re talking, we don’t know where we are in that though. You’re pronouncing it. They’re not just starting to think about it and now they’re going to figure out what they need to do and what permission they need. They, they might already be two or three years into that by the time that they’ve announced it.
Rosemary Barnes: You don’t think so? No. And,
Allen Hall: and, and at least I took a round of the records to see if they had been working on the environmental part of it. It doesn’t look like it. I haven’t seen, it doesn’t mean they haven’t been doing it behind the scenes, but I haven’t seen anything locally that’s been talking to it.
Allen Hall: But that’s, that’s just the way the projects go out here. So why announce it now? It, it’s gonna be 20, 27, 28. I. Because they’re, they’re trying to get New York to buy into the power. Right. That
Joel Saxum: and keeping up the Joneses. Right. They’ve, they’ve, unless they, unless they’re making moves announcing it’s a, it’s a marketing ploy, right?
Joel Saxum: It’s corporate communications. Sure. Oh yeah. PR stuff. Hey, hey, hey, offshore wind is good. We’re gonna give all this jobs here. And, and if they’re doing it because everybody else is doing it, and Venter Energy’s doing it. R W’s doing Itor is doing it. Everybody’s throwing all this stuff out there right now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. . It depends on what, what Carrot gets bit. I
Allen Hall: agree. And do you think that the, that New York is going to accept any project that’s using a non GE turbine?
Joel Saxum: If they’re building them? Depends on
Allen Hall: where they’re building them at. You think? You think it’s gonna make a difference?
Rosemary Barnes: We’ve already seen some other comp, other companies announcing facilities in New York, in Virginia.
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, not in New York.
Allen Hall: Virginia. Siemens, KA Meso is talking about building a blade plant in Virginia for common. But I think in New York, I, I’d be hard pressed to think another manufacturer’s gonna plant themselves in GE territory, which is what it would be. But do
Rosemary Barnes: you think that that New Yorkers are so emotional that , they would only only consider a GE Turine?
Rosemary Barnes: Really?
Joel Saxum: I think ge. I think ge, GE has the political clout to keep people
Allen Hall: out as well. And if GE renewables plants or GE re. plants their new headquarters, not in Paris, but in Albany, New York. You can pretty much be sure GEs gonna get a lot of wind turbine orders from that. Mm-hmm. , because the state can, can make that happen.
Allen Hall: It’s just my personal opinion. We’ll see what happens. I, I, I. But if they have the opportunity to make, make GE wind turbines pop up in the water, they. IRLA is selling off large portions of their company, or at least discussing it. They’ve been doing it the last several months. But IRLA has a number of sites in the US which are supposedly up for sale.
Allen Hall: Andros been trying to raise cash and offload older assets so they can get involved in some newer businesses which we had seen from Duke Energy doing something very similar. So Joel, I think this is, A new way forward that the company’s been around for a while, that have a lot of renewable assets, that they may have maxed their value right now because of all the chaos in Europe.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. It all depends on ca available capital. Right. So I think that why we’re seeing part of this, you know, Philip Tatara would be a good, I gotta ask about this as well from the economic standpoint, but I think part of the reason we’re seeing this happen with these bigger players is capital’s hard to get right.
Joel Saxum: because interest rates are so high and all this stuff. True. So, so if you can, if you can dump some of your interest payments. So say Iola has a wind farm that they’ve, they built two years ago and it, they’re still paying interest on it and, and making that loss. If they can pay that off get rid of the note on it and then take the free capital that’s left and then go put it into something else to develop.
Joel Saxum: That’s, that’s smart move. Right. And I know one of the bullet points I’m staring at here from our notes today. They sold 49% of some Spanish renewable business to Norway’s Sovereign Wealth Fund. If I was selling. to any sovereign wealth fund, it would be the Norwegian one. And I would feel great about it because I know they’re gonna pay
Joel Saxum: They’ve got money. So I think it’s a, strategically, it’s a great move By Ila, I mean, when we did a a rundown of the most valuable global wind businesses a month or two ago, IRLA was worth 33 billion. At the time, it was number two behind Orstad at 77. So their ebaa has their, they, they do business under a lot of different names.
Joel Saxum: You may, you know, if you’re in Brazil and you see neo energia, that’s ebaa. They’ve got a lot of Right. A lot of entities around and a ton of projects. So if they can kind of look at their portfolio, manage it in a, in a smart way, by looking at the economics of each wind farm and what the, what the interest is costing them, and how much capital’s avail, free capital’s available after they can dump it.
Joel Saxum: Smart move. , and then they’ll, they’ll turn right around and invest that into more renewables. So they’re doing their part for the global energy transition in my
Allen Hall: opinion. Right. Isn’t that built into the business model though? You have to turn over, turn burn assets Yeah. To keep going. Yeah. Turn and burn, right?
Allen Hall: Yeah. Well that looks like they’re also putting on the block six onshore wind farms in Romania and. It’s about 250 megawatts worth of assets and they want 300 million euros for it. So it’s a little over a million euros per megawatt. Does that sound. That’s what the price of wind turbines is, right?
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Because it’s a, what are we trading Euro right now? 1.1, 1.09 to a dollar ish? Yeah. So 300 is 330 million 230 at megawatts. It’s less than a 1.5. It’s like 1.3 million per megawatt. And, but, but when we talk about the price per megawatt, we’re only talking about the price for the turbines. We’re not talking about interconnects, transmission civil work, anything like that.
Joel Saxum: So I. To be honest, if these are good, well, or if these are good producing assets with a lot of life left, left in them, it’s a good price for ’em. I’m, I’m not an m and a guy in, you know, corporate finance in, in renewables, but my dumb armchair math tells me that it’s not a bad price. I also don’t know what the, the, the dollar per kilowatt hour euro per kilowatt hour goes for a ridden Romania and Hungary.
Joel Saxum: So I can’t tell you that
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Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary NewCo. Which is the largest steel producer in the United States, has announced that it is going to manufacture a sustainable steel plate, especially for the US offshore wind industry. I know you’re excited about that. So Nucor’s new, sustainable heavy gauge steel plate product for the offshore wind sector is called elson.
Allen Hall: Now I, I assume that’s some Greek God or something of the sort. But it’s the only steel plate in offshore wind that’s actually melted and manufactured the United States. And the little trick is, and this is where I want to get your thoughts on, it’s they, they’re making this s cion steel from 90% recycled.
Allen Hall: And they’re using electric arc furnace to melt it and recast it, which takes about 80% less energy than a typical global glass furnace. So I think they’re using their , the recycling effort to show that they’re. Using less energy to create this steel. But they’re not doing, they’re not actually making steel, right?
Allen Hall: They’re just re essentially recycling it. Is that, is that what they’re doing? Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Well then it’s it’s not primary steel anyway. It doesn’t come from iron ore. So that’s, that’s great. And of course you should do that where you can, and I mean, already. Before anybody cared about climate change, the economics were there that you would recycle.
Rosemary Barnes: All the steel that you could get your, all the steel scrap you could get your hands on. So that’s kind of already being done. You don’t need to You, you don’t need to have any incentive to recycle more steel because it’s, it’s already, it’s already being recycled. So I guess that I, I would think that the comparison between electric arc furnace, steel and blast furnace steel as kind of an apples and oranges comparison because yeah, of course it uses a lot less energy to make steel.
Rosemary Barnes: Steel scrap than it does to make it from iron ore. And I did look up there’s a report from the Steel Manufacturer’s Association that find, found that across the US E A F made steel users 70% less emissions than a blast blast furnace steel. So so they’re doing slightly better than that. I’m actually surprised you couldn’t do even better than they have by using mainly renewable electricity.
Rosemary Barnes: I would’ve thought you could do better and get, get more emissions reduction. So I think the big story here is that they’re, you know, it’ll be us made for us projects, because until now they haven’t had that Right. Kind of steel, so you’ve had to bring it in. So I think, I think it’s a good story, but the, yeah, comparison with blast Furnace is a bit.
Rosemary Barnes: Red herring. It’s not really that
Joel Saxum: relevant. The, the, the big one there that you said, Rosemary is us, made steel for us wind projects that qualifies the wind project for ittc, which is another part of the IRA bill. Bingo, 30%. Thank you Joel. 30% tax right off on the project. Yeah, there’s, there’s story us
Rosemary Barnes: made product and if they wanna reduce the emissions further than, you know, get some, get some wind power in, in their factories as well as supplying wind, wind power.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, you can get, make it nice and circular.
Joel Saxum: So wind is there. Wind much, there’s not much wind in. . So I don’t know if solar, no solar’s. You could do solar down there. But as far as powering by renewables,
Allen Hall: so yeah, I, I was gonna raise this issue which they announced this facility is in Kentucky, not New York.
Allen Hall: Not Pennsylvania, not Illinois. It’s in Kentucky. Right. And I, I think we’re seeing the major heavy industries move. and Alcoa’s in that area. I worked at OAA in the, in Indiana for a summer and there’s a lot of aluminum smelters up and down sort of that area. Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio and putting a steel plant down there I think makes sense because it’s probably the energy prices are probably less.
Allen Hall: There, especially if you use any electric arc furnace, you want to go someplace where electricity prices cheap are low. Cheap. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. You also got some transportation there too, right? Cuz there’s a, that’s, that’s three rivers areas like there’s Ohio River and some other things that I’ll join up right
Allen Hall: there.
Allen Hall: So, . Yeah, it’s smart move. I think it’s a really smart move. It’s just disap. I, I would say somewhat disappointing that we we’re talking about offshore wind. Again, you would think that the steel factory would be somewhat near where the offshore wind turbines are gonna be built, which are gonna be New York in Virginia, Kentucky is not that close.
Allen Hall: Last time I checked a map, it’s not particularly close.
Joel Saxum: Not a whole lot of wind energy there. So here’s another thing to think about too. Kentucky parts, parts of Kentucky are coal country. As the coal plant shut down. , that area of the country’s gonna need jobs. So if they’re building a new 1.7 billion steel mill in Brandenburg, Kentucky, those are jobs driven by renewable energy.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Oh yeah. That aren’t directly renewable energy that can put some of those coworkers back to work.
Allen Hall: That’s fantastic. And NewCo, if went to school, I was in college in the nineties, God, I hate to say that, but I was in college in the nineties and one of the, one of the, you know, key pieces, it was at the time it was us and.
Allen Hall: Fighting with one another in regards to steel. And NewCo was the American savior at the time that they had a new processes and different ways of thinking about manufacturing steel in an old industry. So NewCo ha lived it survived in a very difficult time. So now it seems like we’re still out there doing some good work.
Allen Hall: It’s good, good to. All right. American Clean powers is saying that US offshore wind was gonna be built by a non-US company, is in an article by Claire Richer director of Offshore Wind American Clean Power in an article in work boat.com, and I believe Claire Richard used to work for Senator Edward Markey from my greats.
Allen Hall: State of Massachusetts. I’m just gonna quote a couple of lines out of this to get a sense of where this article is going. Since quoted in the 1960s, the family owned Louisiana based NL thorough tugboat company was racing across the Atlantic Ocean. The company’s boat captains had had extensive experience laying cables and anchors for offshore oil and gas platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.
Allen Hall: And now their specialized skills were needed, do the same for a new oil and gas industry. They work alongside Norwegian boat captains who learned the skills and needed to help stand up an industry that would eventually turn Norway into an energy production powerhouse, increasing energy security for the west.
Allen Hall: Fast forward to 2022. European maritime companies are coming over to this side of the Atlantic to aid in the development of the United States’ nascent offshore wind. reaching America’s goal of deploying 30,000 megawatts or third gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 will create up to 83,000 jobs and new opportunities for American Mariners today.
Allen Hall: However, the US only has seven turbines of offshore wind compared to Europe’s over 5,800 turbines. So to catch up and quickly build a domestic manufacturing sector, we need to learn from the European experience just as those Norwegian boat captains learn anchor handling skills from n Thos Cajun Captains.
Allen Hall: Alright, so this is basically an editorial from American Clean Power saying we’re gonna have non-US companies heavily involved in offshore wind and. , we’re not going to make much of an effort to get American companies involved in the 30 by 30 effort. There’s nothing in this article that says they’re gonna try to be training workers.
Allen Hall: Nothing gonna be bringing us ships in into the sector. Nothing about training technicians. Nothing zippo I’m in. So cost, really disappointing in American clean power for this. What is, what is, how is this helpful? It’s essentially
Rosemary Barnes: bizarre as well, because you know the bulk of the jobs that are, you know, yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Technicians and skilled labor and that sort of thing. Why would you think that you would. You know, tracking thousands of Europeans to, to do that. I mean, are there thousands of Europeans that wanna move for a job of that, that level? I mean, I know if I’m gonna consider a cross continental move, then it’s gonna be for, you know, like a, a pretty high level role with a nice big pay pack.
Rosemary Barnes: And I’m not gonna move for a job that I can just as easily get, you know, near my friends and family. And with. Yeah, with every, everything that I like back home. So it just seems bizarre. Aside from like, it, it’ll just, it’s obvious that it’ll never happen to that extent. And then some of the stuff that she’s saying is also obvious that it will happen that way.
Rosemary Barnes: That, you know, there will be need to be some knowledge transfer from people who have done it in Europe. It would be crazy to, to start again. Sure. Reinvent the wheel. Have all of the, you know, failures that Europe experienced in the nineties. Have them in the US now. That would, that would be incredibly stupid.
Rosemary Barnes: So. Of course there’ll be some knowledge transfer, but it will be, you know, key personnel come over and share their, their lessons with their American colleagues and probably help train some, some workers and then go home again. That’s what , that’s what I would expect would be the, the bulk of the knowledge transfer.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean
Joel Saxum: it, this is a backup to their kind of, their opinion or their statement along the, what was, what was the name of it again? Alan, the American. Offshore Worker Fairness Act or something of that sort thing within Fairness Act. Yeah. That the, that backed up. That’s you know, trying to close the loopholes in the Jones Act.
Joel Saxum: Right. So we know that we need a little bit of help. I don’t believe we wanna ship them over in bulk. Right. So in here, in my mind, if you’re acp, how about we put a plan together to train more of these workers? We, we do not wanna hold up the 30 by 30. Yes, I completely agree with that. But let’s do something that will help.
Joel Saxum: So, so if you are, say you’re an American company that’s trying to get into wind and you’re gonna do some insulation and some s o v work and some maintenance, how about I know, oh, here’s one for you. I know. And Vact Vact Danish at Big S Sov Ship Company. They’re building some SOVs and stuff over here to do this.
Joel Saxum: How about Crowley and Vact get together right now and ship some Americans over? And, and man some of the SOVs that are working in the European waters right now, just to get them trained up. Yep. So that when we’re o we come back, we’re ready. We have some people that have some knowledge from those operating, you know, extremes over there.
Joel Saxum: We don’t, we don’t foresee to have North Sea extremes in our waters, but then they can see how those operations work. Like I said, we know we’re gonna need some knowledge transport, but it, I don’t believe that we wanna start sign posting that it’s going to be all people coming over to, to, to man these vessels and these installation jack up rigs or however we’re gonna do it.
Joel Saxum: But there is plenty of people over here that, that have some of this knowledge as well. I mean, land cables, land cable Americans have been doing that for a long time too. The, the right, yeah. The, the Avax, the Crowleys, the demos, the Bo SCEs, these, the, the Edison sch West out of Louisiana. Those guys that have been building ships and moving them around.
Joel Saxum: Who else is over? There’s a, a bunch of great. , great vessel companies along the Gulf Coast that have experience running jackets and platforms and all this stuff that golf, that Gulf Coast oil and gas infrastructure. Let’s get some of those people trained up and then have ’em at the ready because they’re, they’re gonna be in high demand.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: I, I don’t understand what we’re not connecting with Louisiana, Texas Mississippi area. Mm-hmm. , for some of this knowledge, it seems like we have 80% of what’s needed right now. to do offshore wind in America with mostly American workers and companies. , it wouldn’t take too much to get them trained up in the remaining 20% of just the techniques and the specifics of particular boats.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , I’m with you, Joel. Why are we not sending some these American companies to work with some of the Danish Norwegian companies, French companies, wherever. Yeah. That are doing this right now, so we’re ready to go Because if you think you’re gonna, if offshore wind is gonna be in such great demand like they’re talking about worldwide, what’s the chance you’re gonna be able to.
Allen Hall: A significant number to America to do a 30 by 30 project when they’re scattered. Is denmark’s not that big of a
Joel Saxum: place? If you are, if you are a company right now that is bidding on the o and m contracts for these new wind farms that are gonna be installed and you can bring to your bid, oh, by the way, 20% of our workforce has been trained in the North Sea already.
Joel Saxum: You’re gonna win that bid as long as, as long as you’ve got the vessels to back it up, you’re gonna win. . That’s the way
Allen Hall: I’d look at it. Shouldn’t American clean power be pushing that? I
would
Joel Saxum: think so, but, but it highlights the disconnect in American clean power. Right? There’s a disconnect in American clean power between the people that are doing work in the renewable energy sector on the ground, and even in the, in the, in the, the, the white collar engineering offices and those that have worked for American clean power that are sitting in dc.
Allen Hall: Definitely, it feel, it definitely feels like that. I’m sure someone from American, American Clean Power is gonna call me this week. Get me earful. I’m happy to, willing to listen to him. Let’s have a conversation. No, we’d love to have ’em on the podcast. Yeah, let’s put him on the podcast and explain what’s going on because it was just watching from the outside.
Allen Hall: It’s a little confusing. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News are our weekly new. Check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
