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This week we cover GE Vernova’s offshore wind backlog and plans for growth, the challenges Australia faces in streamlining wind farm approvals, a new fiber optic sensing technology for monitoring gearboxes from Sensing360, and NextEra’s plans to build a renewable hydrogen-based fertilizer plant in North Dakota.
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Allen Hall: Rosemary, have you been to Dubai? And all your world travels.
Rosemary Barnes: I stop off there every time that I go to Europe or half the time I go to Europe.
Allen Hall: You’re an adventure seeker, right? You’re one of those ride the skateboard, be on the bike, go down the mountain, surfboard kind of people? Have you seen this new jet suit racing league that they’ve developed in Dubai?
I don’t know if you saw this on Instagram but they’ve got those, these jet packs. You see where you put one on each hand and there’s one on your back? And, but they make it and fly around like Iron Man does, but they’ve created a racing league with this thing and it was just fascinating to watch.
I thought, oh, Rosemary would be interested in that. She wouldn’t be afraid of that at all. But Joel, I didn’t realize there’s, those things are 1500 horsepower. So I did a quick look on the Corvette website today to see what the latest Corvette engine is.
Joel Saxum: 670.
Allen Hall: Is it 670? It’s a roughly 500.
Joel Saxum: The 670 is the LT5.
Come on, I got this. 670 horse, 495 foot pounds of torque.
Allen Hall: So you essentially have three Corvette engines attached to your body. And that is propelling you. Ah, now we’re talking. So if you watch the race, you got to watch this race because it is really interesting because everybody’s really good.
It’s tentative, and they had two participants collide and not fall out of the sky, surprisingly. And one of the participants lost direction a little bit, and they do it over water. So when you if you’re going to fall out of the sky, you’re not going to get hurt. So this one racer fell into the water, and I thought, oh, there you go.
It’s like the perfect Rosemary sport, right? It’s speed, it’s danger, it’s above water. It’s got all the elements. This is insane.
Rosemary Barnes: You’re missing one element. My, my sports are all human powered and it’s not.
Joel Saxum: Zero fossil fuels in Rosemary sports.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I am. I am waiting for the day. I actually, I’m going to be going to Switzerland soon for a ski trip.
And I usually I like to do that people powered as well. Like I hike up the hill and and ski down in the back country and cross country ski. That’s my favorite things. But I would love to go heli skiing just for the, amount of extra terrain that you can cover in a day. And I did look and see, is there an electric helicopter that you can do heli skiing with in Switzerland yet?
And the closest that there is a helicopter that’s 50% SAF, so 50 percent sustainable aviation fuel, and then the other 50 percent they offset. But there aren’t really any offsets around today that truly do. Eliminate the point of your the damage of your emissions.
So I won’t do it on this trip. I don’t think also probably it sounds pretty expensive, but I am desperately waiting for the day when I can do electric heli skiing.
Philip Totaro: Rosemary and I are going to get into electric scooter racing then, because you can recharge your electric scooter from renewable sources.
Joel Saxum: I saw that at Blades USA at two in the morning. They’re called Lime scooters and you can rent them with a credit card
Allen Hall: If you missed GE Vernova’s Investor Day, it was a couple of days ago, and they announced that it’s backlog and offshore wind equipment, which is about $4 billion worth. They’re gonna try to work that down over the next couple of years. That sounds like a lot of money sitting on the table that they could.
Desperately use and they’re also signaling that, Hey, offshore wind is having some trouble and interest rates, the whole thing, but they’re going to work their way through it. Now, as Vic Abate has been set up as the head or CEO of wind and Vernova, and he’s saying, Hey, the industry is going to be moving to a positive territory, even though Vernova had lost about a billion dollars last year in 2023 they.
See the renewable energy market essentially doubling over the next couple of years and They’re they made some expectations on revenue For this year they 34 to 35 billion and free cash flow of about 700 million to 1. 1 billion Which is some good numbers. It’s better than last year for sure So I think what GE Vernova, and it will be a separate company come April 2nd, is saying is there’s gonna be a little bit of short term pain, but they have a decent order book.
In fact, their on shore order book looks really good at this moment, and I know those sales guys are working hard at it, but over into 25 and 26, Phil, it looks like GE Vernova on the wind side is gonna be Profitable again and really pushing the onshore wind business.
Philip Totaro: Yeah their onshore business, it looks pretty healthy and they are already showing positive returns and margins there.
The offshore business, the challenge has been that they’ve had all these project delays, not only in the U. S. On projects that they were supposed to be a part of but also this Dogger Bank delay. That’s certainly having an impact because remember that when you sign an agreement to supply somebody with wind turbines, you get paid a very modest deposit.
It’s usually like 5 percent or something of the full price up front, and you don’t collect the rest until the project is commissioned. Or close to it and you hand it over so that’s gonna these delays are necessarily going to impact their revenue recognition and it is going to push their profitability back towards the end of this year, probably into the first and second quarter of next year.
I’d guess. And I’ve. I’ve actually been speaking recently to, some equity analysts that are tracking GE Vernova’s spinoff and they they concur with that kind of timeframe. But the good news is things are looking in a positive direction. They’ve come up off whatever bottom they saw in a few years ago.
Joel Saxum: With their focus on onshore wind, I’m curious of how they’re going to basically Scrape back. So this is an operational thing. So last year, rough year, right? But talking in the industry, we know that they fired a lot of engineers. They went to that hub and spoke design for their, all of their FSA agreements, right?
40 percent reduction in staff. So if you’re looking at a two X growth in the market, And then you’re going to exploit that, which of course, their company that’s going to do that, right? They’re going to make their money. How are you going to support all these things in the, in your FSA agreements and in your back office engineering?
Whether there’s, and they’re putting out new models in the world too, right? Sunzea, that’s a brand new model. So we don’t know what could happen with that thing. Now, of course, We’re wind energy aficionados. We want it to work well, but we have seen other stumbling blocks in the past.
But now they have this very limited amount of engineering support in the back office and a little bit more limited service help in the field. So I would be willing to bet that any of those engineers that got cut from there aren’t going to go back. If the, even if they were asked, they’ve all secured.
We talked to people all over insurance. We talked to someone in the insurance world. We talked to someone. They’re hiring these people and grabbing them and some of the national laboratories are grabbing these ex GE engineers because they have a lot of knowledge. So to me, that seems great to hear that GE’s expecting to do well, but there’s some things from like the operational part of the business that have me scratching my head a little bit.
And maybe they’ll just be able to rebuild and bolster that back up. I’m not a part of, I’m not a fly on the wall, so we’ll see.
Allen Hall: Just cutting the number of models down is going to help them tremendously. For sure. I think there is an incentive in the United States to use GE. At least there’s a feeling of it when you talk to operators.
They would at least talk to GE. They’re not going to shun them for sure. And because Siemens Gamesa is not selling onshore turbines at the moment, You have either Vestas or GE, essentially, some intercon a little bit. But GE is always at the table. At least they should be.
Joel Saxum: There’s a feeling that some of your money is going to stay in the States.
Philip Totaro: By the way, Siemens is selling onshore turbines, just not the 4. x, 5. x platform, which was their, new thing, but the challenge With GE is that they want to be able to get to this, back to this kind of workhorse quote unquote philosophy that got them so much business growth in, the early to mid 2000s with the 1.
5 megawatt platform. Splitting it between, the 1. 16 platform, the 1. 27, and now this, 1. 54 that’s, dividing your resources again, a little bit. There, there is some, if they’re gonna sunset the the 1. 3 to 2. 7 1. 16, And then you’ve got the 127, which they are just going absolute gangbusters with.
And this new 154, which actually fills a pretty important gap in the market. It’s funny because we actually did analysis at Intel Store in 2017 that said, something in the three to three and a half megawatt range with a rotor diameter of one 40 to one 50 would probably be a really great fit in the U S market because there was a big gaping hole in terms of wind resource and available product.
And, the, eventually they got the message. Even Vestas was supposed to have come out with this three megawatt, one 38. And they never actually, they announced it, that they were going to do it, but they never sold any. So I think this is GE really capitalizing on What the market particularly in the U. S. wants and they’re regrouping after pulling back from a lot of international markets on shore, Brazil, etc. And they’re gonna get back to doing what they do best in terms of, high rate production on, a higher margin basis. And then they’re gonna, reevaluate their global expansion again.
Allen Hall: I think GE is going to be expanding into Australia from the sounds of it. They’ve had a couple of setbacks and last year, Australia only built three wind farms, which doesn’t seem like all that much. And but the growth needs to be there. They need to plant about 40 turbines every month until 2030.
That’s a lot. And a decent market, when Australia gets rolling, it’s going to be doing more than that, obviously, but the delay time is related to the approval process that some analysis has been looking, analysts has been looking at the approval process in Australia, and it’s averaging about two years to get approved.
And the environmental laws are causing some delays also up to three years. So that’s a big delay in infrastructure that Australia is trying to overcome at the moment. And there’s been a discussion, Rosemary, about declaring wind Infrastructure as part of the critical infrastructure for Australia, which means it gets a streamlined assessment and I’m thinking yeah, why wouldn’t it?
It has a proven track record. Why are we taking all this time on these approvals when we know what the end product is?
Rosemary Barnes: Changing it to critical infrastructure, it only puts it in the same category as, I don’t know really everyday stuff like roads and airports and what else? I think even, thermal generation, like gas turbines and coal power plants also often get designated you know, critical because obviously you can’t just decide that, every single option for energy, somebody locally opposes it.
So you end up with no energy for the country. Obviously it is critical. I think the reason why it hasn’t been done so far is because there’s still a lot of like tension and people going very gently when it comes to renewables, until a couple of years ago, we had a decade of a really conservative government who were very anti renewables.
We still got a lot put in during that time, but purely based on the economics of it, not because anybody was, trying to work towards a plan of net zero or. But that said, I think that we do really need to work on getting these renewable projects seen as more just, yeah, like everyday kinds of things, whereas it seems like, but, because renewables are quite distributed compared to some of the other examples that I mentioned, if you have a new, if you need a new coal power plant for your state, it’s like obvious that you need that big chunk of electricity and needs to go somewhere And people will generally, people will oppose it, of course, but people will generally get on board with the need for it.
Whereas with something like wind and solar, it’s it can go anywhere. Why does it have to go next to me? Like we could put this somewhere else. And so you end up with a lot of small projects with a lot of small opposition, that can drag things out. And then the other thing is that, the environmental impacts do matter.
And we were talking before we started recording this episode that it, particularly in Queensland, it’s a real challenge to get really big wind farms rolled out because, but anywhere there’s a tree in Queensland, there’s basically a koala in it. And koalas have, had their their habitat chipped away.
Like suburb by suburb. Everyone’s okay, yeah, there’s koalas in this block of land that I want to clear, but there’s plenty of other trees left in Australia that they can go to. And that kind of. individual decision has been made so many times that we ended up now in a point where there isn’t a lot of koala habitat left and they are endangered.
It was really iconic species of Australia. It’s hard to think of something more iconic than the koala. And so it means that now we’re at the point where even a wind farm, it’s not like you clear fell a forest to put a wind farm in, right? You’ve just got to clear some trees to make some roads and some pads and stuff.
But even that impact is, it’s starting to matter for koalas, so that can slow things down there. And then obviously in other states of Australia, New South Wales, they’ve already, got rid of most of their koala habitat. So they’re worried about other things which do make sense. It’s not like an airport or a gas power plant where it’s all in one location, you do one environmental assessment, you’re done, you move on.
and you progress, if you need a dozen wind farms, that’s a dozen different local environments that you have to consider. And there will be species impacted in each of those locations. And so every time you’ve got to make this decision about the, local environment versus the global climate.
Australia’s energy targets, emission targets. So I think that’s why things are dragging out, the system that we have that made sense in the past doesn’t make sense for now. We do need to come up with some sort of more streamlined framework for assessing these things that come up and.
Yeah, I it hurts me a little bit to say it because the main reason why I’m interested in renewable energy is because of biodiversity. I don’t want to destroy any animals environment and cause species lost and species loss and extinctions and things like that. But I think it is a case where you have to, if you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs and that, that sucks, but we need to move fast.
It’s not. Moving cautiously on renewable targets is going to mean that we damage the climate in an irreparable way. So yeah, I think we all need to grow up a little bit.
Allen Hall: What’s the incentive for the government to go faster? I think that seems to be the trouble, right? The government is doing all the environmental reviews.
So it’s criticizing itself in a sense saying, Hey, we’re slow, but how do they speed it up? Because it, can it really take three years on a plot of land, which They’ve known about forever and have probably done an environmental assessment on it some earlier point.
Rosemary Barnes: Australia has a huge, a really large number of species.
So that’s one. America is also rich in biodiversity, but not to the extent that Australia is. And in the Daintree rainforest, which is the rainforest that’s just adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef up around Cairns. One square metre column of that you go from the ground and one square metre and then all the way up to the canopy, that there’s more different species in that square metre than there is in all of the European continent.
That’s, yeah there’s a little fact that I stuck in my brain for a while. And yeah, no one’s proposing clearing any of the Daintree Rainforests, it’s a World Heritage Site, so I’m not saying we should be cutting that down to put turbines up.
Allen Hall: Isn’t the answer then to put your turbines up in Europe and just run an HVDC all the way to Australia?
Because that’s what you’re saying.
Philip Totaro: Super cost effective.
Rosemary Barnes: We also do have plenty of land that that appears empty. We’ve got a lot of agricultural land, which in Australia, there’s a lot of grazing on really, marginal soil that kind of grows a little bit of scrubby grass and stuff.
And you’d think, okay, that’s empty, just put a term on it there. But then when you go do the environmental impact assessment, you find, okay, there’s actually, a bunch of really specialized species here in this land that don’t exist anywhere else on the planet. And we never noticed them until now.
So I think I can’t speak for every single process that’s gone through. But usually when you hear about these cases, it’s Oh, we’ve discovered that this ground parrot that we previously thought was extinct, there’s nests of that in this area, this little kind of yellow, gray, green sort of nothing looking parrot is actually, like super important.
And no one knew it was there because no one went looking in this area before. So you see a lot of examples like that. It’s not it would be hard to just say, we’re not doing environmental impact assessments anymore. Screw the parrots. You can’t really do that.
Allen Hall: Wait. Are the ground parrots related to the penguins? Are they in some sort of connection there on the Darwinian chart?
Rosemary Barnes: Not that I’m aware of. I’ll have to get out. I have got a taxonomy chart of birds. Cause you know that I’m a bird nerd. I like to go birding and.
Allen Hall: Yes. Pardalote. Yes.
Rosemary Barnes: So I would have to look up how far away they are, but no, there’s, Ground parrots, they live on the ground, they don’t fly much, but they’re related to, cockatoos and yeah, budgerigars and stuff like that more so than penguins.
Allen Hall: I just watched this opal mining show, it’s based in the middle of Australia and those people in Australia are digging holes wherever they dang please, looking for these little pieces of opal and there is nothing there, literally nothing there. They can dig holes for a week. They may run across flies, that may be the only kind of critter they’re going to.
I don’t think I’ve ever come across that I’ve ever seen on the show and I think, man, there’s a lot of Australia when there is no life, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. So yes, you say that it’s probably like somewhere like Lightning Ridge or something. It seems like nothing. I guarantee you go do an environmental impact assessment there.
You’ll find some little frog that has adapted to life in the desert with no moisture, and it hibernates for 15 years until it rains, and there’ll be something, there’ll be something like that. There’s always something like that.
Allen Hall: Sure, I didn’t think of that.
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I had the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine in my hands earlier today. And now that I don’t, but I was going to talk about this Sensing360 article that appeared in the latest edition because it was really cool. And I, I don’t know all the technologies behind this, but.
But at Sensing360, they have this system called GearUp, which uses optical sensors to monitor gearbox performance. The way that it works is they wrap this piece of fiber optic around the gearbox, the ring gear, and they can measure loads, torque and what’s happening with the planetary gears inside in real time.
At which, if you look at The charts in the magazine. You’re like, Oh, that’s cool. So they’re leveraging the ability of this fiber optic system to pick up really subtle details that are happening in this gearbox. And they’re, they made a statement in there that obviously you could do predictive modeling.
You can detect when things are off. You can see if there’s a misalignment or an op. And if there was something seriously wrong in the gearbox, you would pretty much instantly pick it up, but they may be able to increase energy output around 7 percent by knowing what’s happening in the gearbox. And I assume building better gearboxes or optimizing what’s happening in the drivetrain.
That is pretty fascinating because, and we had talked to John Bosch from Arcvera about the powertrain and the power curve and where the opportunities lie. And the gearbox historically has not been one of those places, right? But maybe with some of this new technology from Sensing360, it could be a possibility to improve performance there.
Joel Saxum: It’s interesting here because this morning, Allen you and I were on a conversation with Dave Beattie from Dash Engineering over in Australia. Last week we were on a conversation with Corey Mitleider from Malloy over in South Dakota. Normally we’re always talking about blades, because Rosemary’s a blade expert.
I’ve dealt with blades, lighting protection system and blades, so that’s something that lives, we live our lives in, but we’re diving a little bit more into that other side of things, just in our personal lives and professional lives, just to try to understand it a little bit better. See where the nuances are.
rotating equipment, bearings, gearboxes, all this stuff. So one of the things that, of course, when you’re in the wind industry, you talk CMS. CMS came from that gearbox world, right? The gearbox, the rotating equipment, because you looked at it as, oh, if we can sense vibration, we can sense when something’s wrong.
So you have these vibration sensors that you can put on different parts of the gearboxes or different parts of that rotating drivetrain. And you can see when things happen. So then blades started going we’ll do CMS too. And you’re getting some different sensors and stuff in there. And that’s great.
And that industry started to build and gain some trust in how they can sense things. So there’s different things in that blade world where you see like the kind of the rough Hey, you got an issue here. Or, there’s things like like Bill Slatter’s 11i system, where you can install in blades, and it’s like super sensitive, physics based engines, it’s like CMS the next level, right?
You’re getting 24 7 data, and you can really pinpoint where there’s an issue. Why I say this is because that’s what this Sensing360 system is for gearboxes and rotating equipment. I know it’s super sensitive and it can see things because I’ve done it myself, right? I was at Wind Europe, I think last year or the year before in Copenhagen, and they had this stainless steel ring on the table that is about, about as big around as my, the grip of my hand.
And they had the fiber optic sensor wrapped around it, the same one that they put in the gearboxes and in the turbines. And I was able to squeeze this fiber or the stainless steel ring Now, I say squeeze, I exerted force on it with my hand. It didn’t squeeze to my eye, right? To my eye. This thing is a three eighths inch wall, stainless steel chunk of tube, like I’m not moving it.
There’s no way you could drive a truck on top of this thing. It’s not going to move to your eye or to form, but that fiber optic sensor was picking up the most minuscule amounts of movement in it by the pressure of my fingers squeezing on this thing. And it showed in real time, live on a. TV screen behind it.
So what I say, why I say that is, is I think Sensing360 is the next level of the next frontier. of what we can do for sensing. Now you’re going to develop a ton of data from this system, an astronomic amount where you’re going to need some help by some algorithms or some AI system, some machine learning system to do this.
And that’s what Sensing360 does. But if you’ve got Any kind of crazy issues going on in your gearboxes, or you’re trying to figure something out, this is the system to use.
Philip Totaro: We’ve talked before on the show about putting, fiber optics into blades, but the, what was holding it back were a lightning strikes and B cost.
So the fact that they figured out a way to gearbox, as turbines get bigger. The cost of a CMS as a percentage of the overall turbine cost goes way down. And if you can do things that are further reducing cost while giving you substantially more data and higher quality data that’s going to tell you A lot more about how the your assets are operating.
That’s extremely important. And this may have cracked a nut on no pun intended, on how to, um, how to actually get meaningful gearbox efficiency improvements and reliability enhancements, the problems that we’ve had with gearboxes historically has been more of a reliability issue, not necessarily a performance one.
Now we’re reasonably efficient with gearboxes. We still have some, bearing related issues, but this could help take things to, another level, like Joel was saying.
Allen Hall: It’s not intrusive. And even though Rosemary hates fiber optics inside of blades, I do think there is a place for it in the nacelle and on the drivetrain.
And if it can do what they say it does, that’s really intriguing. And I’m surprised they haven’t, I think they’ve been working with Siemens Gamesas a little bit. I’m surprised. A Vestas or a GE or some of the other, even the operators are not actively looking at this to to see if it can help reduce O& M costs and increase production.
It’s, it looks really cool. Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PES Wind at PESwind.
com.
So in the frozen tundra of North Dakota, NextEra is going to build a hydrogen based fertilizer production plant. And you say to yourself, what? What? Who? Why? What is going on in North Dakota? And it is an initiative that started back in end of last year, where North Dakota is trying to make itself independent of the world, in a sense, in terms of fertilizer production, because North Dakota is a big farming state.
And what they decided to do is to fund 125 million in a forgivable loan to NextEra to build a electrolysis plant to basically split water into hydrogen and oxygen, take the hydrogen and make ammonia. So I didn’t know NextEra was in that business, but I guess they are now. And obviously, as Joel has pointed out a couple of times in North Dakota, NextEra has several facilities up there.
So they have the energy, but in total, they think the fertilizer plant is going to be about a 1. 3 billion project in the state. So this is just to make nitrogen fertilizers. They plan to start cracking the ground in 2025. You have to wait for it to thaw first, of course. And then they’re going to finish in 2028 and be operational by 2029.
So by 2030, North Dakota could be making a decent amount of their own fertilizer in the state by renewable energy. That’s. Pretty impressive because I have not heard of any other projects in the United States like this at the moment and NextEra being obviously a huge renewable player in the United States is stepping up to the plate here and it’s a big project to take up.
Rosemary, have you heard of similar projects anywhere else like this?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there are a few. And it’s one thing that me and people like me who are a bit critical of this idea of a hydrogen economy. It’s an idea where you’re like, why don’t we just yeah, make green ammonia. We already shipped that around the world.
We know how to transport ammonia more easily than hydrogen and we can just displace yeah, the fossil ammonia from fertilizer production. And that’s a really a win situation. It’s a lot easier. And yeah. We’ll make a real impact because, people talk about hydrogen, like it’s a climate solution, but currently hydrogen is a climate problem.
I think it’s about 2 percent of the world’s emissions come from producing hydrogen. And a lot of that goes to making fertilizer. So yeah, it, on the face of it, it makes a lot of sense, but I did just recently speak to a guy who works with fertilizer markets, international markets, and he informed me that there are a lot of nuances that make it not quite the slam dunk that you would think.
So maybe I can go through a few of them. So only about 10 percent of the world’s ammonia is actually traded internationally. The rest of it is produced and used either in the exact same facility or within the same country. And so the 10 percent that’s traded, you can definitely just replace that fossil ammonia with green ammonia except for the fact that it’s such a cost sensitive item.
And if you look at the countries that are buying in this traded ammonia, It’s not necessarily countries who you would associate with wanting to add a hefty green premium to decarbonize the fertilizer industry in their country. So that’s the first challenge is that is the economics of it. Yeah.
Fertilizer is just in agriculture in general, it’s so cost sensitive. Then the next issue is that where where ammonia is made. on site and then turned into fertilizer. You need both hydrogen and CO2 to make the fertilizer. So if you split natural gas into hydrogen, then you get CO2 as a by product from that.
And if you then say, okay, we’re going to get rid of natural gas, we’re going to make green hydrogen. Then all of a sudden you need a CO2 source. And the factories that have been making these fertilizers, they are not used to paying for CO2. They’re not used to, it’s not transported. CO2 is transported around a bit.
It’s used in, greenhouses and stuff like that. But it adds in a whole other level of logistics and especially cost that makes it it’s not easy to take a factory that is. Currently using methane and replace that with yeah, hydrogen from electrolysis because then you need to find a CO2 source.
Maybe it’ll come from direct capture in the future, but then you’re just adding, a whole other big layer of of issues. So those are two big things. The third big thing is that it’s only one kind of fertilizer. There’s lots of kinds of fertilizer around the world and it’s pretty hard to actually get in and get farmers to change the kind of fertilizer that they want.
And some of the biggest users of fertilizer are in markets like India where it’s really heavily subsidized certain types of fertilizer. And you don’t necessarily get farmers using fertilizers in the most efficient way in terms of putting the minimum amount on the fields that would make sense for.
their yield, what you get is them maximizing the subsidies that they will get. And so they yeah and so that’s a bit contrary to, to, the kinds of smart solutions that you hear about precision agriculture, where you put in precisely the amount of fertilizer where you need it, that might be suited for somewhere like Europe, but probably not many other locations.
And then that leads on to another issue with fertilizer, which is that emissions associated with the fertilizer industry, it’s not just from making the fertilizer from, splitting the methane into hydrogen and CO2 and some of the CO2 gets used, but some of it just goes into the atmosphere.
Actually, a lot of it happens in the field. So any of the nitrogen that doesn’t get taken up by the plants, if that gets flooded, And yeah, that then that will react and form a nitrous oxide and that is a very potent greenhouse gas so that actually the bulk of emissions come from that.
And again, you can reduce that problem with precision agriculture, putting it the exact amount that you need and no more. Making sure that you don’t fertilize right before it’s going to rain. Those sorts of things, you can reduce that a lot, but again, it’s not the bulk of emissions from agriculture now, and especially in the future.
It’s not coming from places like the U. S. and Europe who are going to be, like concerned about using science on their large industrial farms. It’s going to come from developing countries where there’s a whole lot of really small farms and people that, are not necessarily looking to apply scientific techniques.
So I think that’s, yeah, all of those things together just make it a really challenging solution. But that said, the where you can, where you are making ammonia and transporting it, there is technologically, there’s no reason why you can’t make that green. It’s just an economics problem. I still think that’s a really good place to start without, hydrogen economy.
You start by decarbonizing something that already, causes emissions rather than, trying to always think of new applications for hydrogen.
Allen Hall: Joel, does the advantage in North Dakota is, I would assume, is because electric rates are lower and so the economics lean in their favor.
Plus, there’s congestion as most, at least some of the energy in North Dakota is trying to get to Minnesota and they’re locked up transmission line wise. Is some of this is just a use? power from the grid, the renewable energy grid in North Dakota, when it’s cheap and to turn into something useful for the farmers?
Is that the thought process here?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, that and the Dakotas are, okay, so if you’re in North Dakota, you have access to, there’s some carbon sequestration projects going on up there and there’s some carbon available from the fracking industry. There’s a big pipeline that’s supposed to be built up there.
It’s a weird situation because the pipeline itself is a carbon sequestration pipeline and people developing it told the different stakeholders, different things. They told the people on the more renewable side, energy side, renewable energy side, that they’re not going to give any of the oil and gas people.
And they told the people in the oil and gas world, if you write us checks, you can have some. So there’s a little bit of a weird thing on there. How, however. The Dakotas are also one to, there’s some of those states you’re a hundred percent correct. A lot of that energy is trying to get to the Minneapolis.
It’s trying to get to Rochester that Fargo’s takes it as well. It’s a lot of me. So stuff, but those states are some of the states that are open for business, right? They welcome new industries. They want new things in there and they have the people to staff them as well. So it’s a, it might just be, someone like a, NextEra saying okay, we’ve got all these wind farms.
where makes sense to put some investment. South Dakota or North Dakota is a very friendly place for investment as well.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, that was a really good description of the problems of making green fertilizer. There’s a lot to it, a lot more than I thought there was. Is there a video on that? Do you have a video making green fertilizer on the Engineering with Rosie channel?
Rosemary Barnes: No, I’m trying to figure out. Do I do one on fertilizer or do I do one on ammonia? So I don’t know what’s the more catchy angle, probably fertilizer.
Allen Hall: Probably fertilizer. Yeah. So if you keep your eyes open for an Engineering with Rosie episode on fertilizer in North Dakota.
Joel Saxum: The last thing you got to know about North Dakota up there, if you’ve ever driven through it, North Dakota, Western Minnesota, Eastern Montana, South Dakota, all the way down.
It’s full of farms. It’s all farms. So they need fertilizer, right? So they might as well produce it themselves because otherwise they’re just shipping it in.
Allen Hall: Yeah. They make a little fertilizer island of sorts, right?
Joel Saxum: All right. Our wind farm of the week this week is Hilltopper Wind Farm in Pulaski, Illinois.
This is an NL site. So there’s, it’s 185 megawatt site, 74 GE 2. 5s. So these can power 46, 300 households per year on average. It was NL’s first project in Illinois, it was a 325 million investment back in 2018 they started construction. They’ve got PPA signed with Bloomberg GM, Starbucks, an interesting one, and Dan 1.
So they did a lot of things for the local community when they built this project. Like I said, 325 million investment. Also about 325 construction jobs when they did it. They improved over 26 miles of roads here. Why it’s our Windfarm of the Week this week is this windfarm was actually at the heart of a social media smear campaign a few summers ago.
So there was this thing that went across Facebook and went across Instagram, went all this stuff, basically people saying windfarms are garbage, they don’t work, they’re replacing all of the generators in these things, only three and a half years old, blah, blah, blah, blah. So USA Today actually did some investigative journalism into this thing and debunked all of this stuff, right?
So they had, they did have some manufacturing issues from a problem with a third party supplier where they were not changing out generators, they were swapping out a couple of gearboxes. So they swapped out 17 gearboxes on these turbines to make sure that they would run for the next 25 years. So it was an unforeseen, due to unforeseen and rare defects related to equipment procured from a third party manufacturer.
So there was some, there was they’re saying, yes, there was some issues, but we got them fixed after we, we figured them out. And this is in the GE25 fleet. You don’t hear about a lot of gearbox issues in that fleet. So this is a kind of an isolated problem. Let’s look at based on the research, only 14 percent of generators.
Would be expected to fail over the life of a turbine so the failure rate is actually very low in this post they also said it takes, they’re going through massive amounts of diesel fuel to maintain these and there is all kinds of claims. What we want to focus on here is the fact that These are claims that are unfounded it’s people from outside the industry trying to draw us a black eye on it when in reality they’re regular operating issues and they’re good to go.
So the Wind Farm of the Week, Hilltopper is an NL site in Illinois you’re the Wind Farm of the Week.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening and please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
