Greenboats founder and CEO Friedrich Deimann and Co-managing Director Jan Paul Schirmer joined us to talk about their natural fiber composites and how they have been used in the wind industry to increase sustainability and recyclability, while reducing CO2 emissions. We also discuss news about Dogger Bank wind farm, Ming Yang’s plans for a UK factory, and the right to disconnect for employees. Connect with Greenboats here, Friedrich on Linkedin or Jan Paul on Linkedin.
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Transcript EP94- Natural Fiber Composites for Wind – With Greenboats’ Friedrich Deimann and Jan Paul Schirmer
this episode is brought to you by weatherguard lightning tech at weatherguard we make lightning protection easy if your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs install our striketape retrofit lps upgrade at the same time a strike tape installation is the quick easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system forward-thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast welcome back i’m dan Blewett i’m Allen hall and i’m rosemary barnes and this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy tech news and policy
all right welcome back to the uptime wind energy podcast i’m your co-host dan blewett on today’s show number one we’ve got uh two friends of uptime uh we have Friedrich Deimann from Greenboats he’s the CEO and founder and we also have co-managing director from Greenboats and Jan Paul Schirmer they’re going to be joining us to talk about their sustainable natural fiber composites you know they’ve been using them on nacelles and more of their interesting innovative composite work is making its way into the wind industry so we’re going to talk to them about what they’re doing and some of the innovations and how they’ve gotten to this point and where they’re going before that we’ll talk about shell they’re buying power from the dogger bank wind farm we’ll talk about some interesting um research done by ori catapult about mooring and anchoring systems for offshore wind after our interview we’ll talk through the uk’s plans for a giant battery which is going to help to manage your uh to manage offshore wind energy we’ll talk about ming yang’s new factory that looks like it’s been approved for the uk and lastly we’ll talk about a little bit just general employment stuff which is the the idea of the legal right to disconnect and how that can affect employee employer relationships mental health and all that stuff which is pretty applicable to this market and many others so before we get going be sure to subscribe to uptime tech news which you’ll find in the show notes of the today’s podcast as well as rosemary’s youtube channel and again she’s doing live streams every other week and has tons of new content on the regular about wind energy renewables all that great stuff so be sure to subscribe to both you’ll find them in the show notes below so first let’s talk about uh this dogger bank wind farm so dogger bank c is they’ve just entered into a 15-year power purchase agreement with shell and that’s going to be for 240 megawatts in this final phase of the wind farm so obviously we talked a bunch about fossil fuel companies uh getting involved with wind energy alan is this sort of more the same for michelle or is this uh is this like a new pivot for them or what should we expect from this uh power purchase agreement well shell is going to continue to to expand into renewables and they’ve been involved for a long time i remember 20 years ago where it seems like they were involved one of the early ones and the energy sector that was dabbling in renewables and i don’t think that’s going to change i i do think that’s really fascinating because michelle is under a quasi-attack on some level are being aggressively chased by the netherlands and that the the netherlands in a in a court case assigned to shell at fault for carbon emissions and basically telling them that they have to cut their emissions by 40 50 percent i think it’s by 2030 uh so relatively short time frame and shells like i’m sure they’re thinking to themselves like wait a minute like we’re investing in renewables we’re trying to make the transition over this isn’t helping and in fact as after that ruling happened shell said is saying goodbye to the netherlands as as their headquarters because they’re they’re kind of the 50 percent uk 50 netherlands company they’re going to move their headquarters to the united kingdom and and then they’re eventually in dogger bank which is off the shores of the united kingdom i think more of that will happen more more more energy companies are going to be moving around like shell did or is doing to get to a place where they can grow and expand into the renewables it’s going to take time and billions and billions and dollars of investment to make the transition over uh putting false constraints on it i call the netherlands ruling a false constraint based on the paris accords is is not helping them do that it’s gonna it would i think shell felt like it’s gonna be a financial constraint on them so they wanted to to move but that hasn’t stopped their their efforts in renewables in the united states and elsewhere and i think uh if if you want to bludgeon an energy company i wouldn’t pick shell as that company maybe i’m missing some of the finer detail on this but worldwide i think shell has done at least a decent job on on the on the renewable side and i don’t know rosemary do you see the same thing from shell on on at least being invested into renewables it’s not like chevron which refuses to do it yeah i don’t have a big problem with shell relative to other um other fossil fuel companies they’re they’re doing more and i feel that they’re actually investing in projects that they think are going to you know contribute to the the future energy mix um rather than pure green washing like i see other companies doing but on the other hand i also don’t feel sorry for them because you know all these companies uh um have you know they’re they haven’t had the best track record of producing emissions but also you know um trying to get in the way of fast movement on climate change so i’ll say yeah shell is definitely amongst the the better of the the big fossil fuel companies but i find it hard to feel sorry for them no i don’t think you feel sorry for them i think you have to realize that there’s a balance that there’s they’re doing a thing for society that society desperately needs like putting people in in sub-zero weather all winter with no heat is a bad thing and shell provides an alternative to to freezing to death that’s a very positive thing and that people are willing to pay for that but it does have some obviously some opposite consequences but you have if it’s like an energy company it’s like a huge moving train it doesn’t stop or change direct contract directions quickly right or ship a big moving ship you just can’t change it on a dime and i think you have to be able to to allow those energy companies to make the motions that they need to make and if putting artificial barriers in or penalizing them while they’re trying to make that transition isn’t helping anybody and i think it would if if i was going to impose a penalty on you for i don’t know whatever uh it doesn’t make you more energetic to go out and do that do that thing right i don’t know i think companies they they operate within the the laws that are set for them and they have you know responsibility to maximize shareholder value and all that and so i think it is the place for governments to make sure that the market is set up to provide the outcomes that we want if if there is no reason if you’re not giving them a reason why they have to you know stop putting a lot of co2 into the atmosphere if you don’t give them a reason why they’d have to do that then they they wouldn’t they shouldn’t they can’t according to you know rules around um their responsibility to their shareholders so i i i think it’s perfectly reasonable i mean the netherlands can’t go after fossil fuel companies that aren’t headquartered in their country so um their government has said this is this is important and done what they can it’s incredibly important to the next generation um so i think overall i think it’s it’s probably probably good if shell wants to leave the country then you know that’s a risk that the netherlands um faces but it’s also a risk for a shell as well it’s not so easy to just you know relocate your headquarters so moving on let’s chat about ORE catapult they’ve put out a really extensive pdf uh with some of their research on mooring and anchor systems for offshore wind obviously they do great work and you know they’re innovation leader alan what were some of your takeaways obviously they have lots of diagrams and schematics and again tons of their research it’s really well done about just different mooring systems and some of the ideas uh about you know i mean right now it just seems like there’s a lot of different prototypes and different types of floating anchor systems out there and i don’t know are we going to see one sort of pull ahead of the other because it seems like right now there’s just lots of different sort of hats in the ring of which design might be best and which mooring system might be best and i think it seems like everyone’s still trying to figure it out right right you see different opinions uh coming from the different manufacturers and i think that’s going to evolve over time somewhat it’s it’s going to come down to a very basic design with slight variations and worry catapult if every anybody’s not watching or a catapult you should watch or a catapult you should go to their youtube page and you should see what they’re up to because they’re doing really fascinating uh technology pushes in wave and tidal in wind and offshore wind and uh robotic fixes for wind turbines and all these areas that are by essentially about making the united kingdom energy independent and that’s cool and they’re doing some of the really good technology work there’s so much technology sitting in the uk around renewables it’s crazy just to sit on the sidelines and watch that go so the the offshore uh floating wind uh summary that i saw from re catapult lists the the the possible variations and it kind of goes like this drop some very heavy cables or chains make them very long let them drag on the bottom of the ocean and so the the the turbine kind of floats along there and as the turbine bops up it actually lifts that cable off or chain off the bottom of the ocean adds more weight to it basically sinks it back down so it’s like a self-dampening system pretty straightforward the the more intuitive ones are like let’s anchor something to the floor which will actually put an anchor down and it’ll grab the ocean floor so when the turbines pull left and right that anchor will drag and try to keep it in place all the way to driving some pilings into the ground and then physically grabbing hold of those with cables which is kind of what the ge solution was recently they’re going to actually pin it to the floor then have some actuators on on the platform that control the amount of pivot that the turbine does all those are great ideas but nobody really knows when i put a 25 megawatt turbine on that kind of configuration what kind of loads i’m going to impose onto the wind turbine i think that’s where where it’s all going to come down to is which turbine wears out because of the floating platform first and what are you going to do about it if you start to have a problem three five years in are you going to try to change the platform they’re going to try to change the way it’s moored maybe and rosemary i mean australia is a place where there’s going to be a lot of offshore wind and i think your oceans are different than the united kingdom’s but don’t you see those same load issues with floating wind and the in the platforms yeah i mean so australia is is different to europe and a lot of places that are you know becoming early adopters of offshore wind is in places where the sea floor is quite um well the ocean depth is quite shallow um and australia’s uh the ocean not the seafloor drops off quite quite rapidly so there isn’t a lot of space where you can put in a a traditional kind of um yeah fix foundation offshore wind turbine so i think we’ll be we’ll be watching closely for floating developments because yeah once once we figure that all out then that will unlock a lot of a lot more potential for offshore in australia and yeah i mean we’ve got a lot of coastline here relative to the number of people in the country so um yeah i think that we’re quite quite lucky there i’m really excited about you know like as an engineer isn’t this just like the best the best part of a new technology when everyone is it’s like you’ve got a difficult problem to solve there’s a bunch of different ways that you could do it and pros and cons for all of them and then we’re at the stage now like even pretty much just like last year we started to see people actually installing prototypes let’s see which ones work the best and what new problems arise that we didn’t foresee i think it’s really really cool and um yeah one of the most fun fun things that’s happening with energy technology at the moment all right well we’re going to jump now to our interview with Friedrich Deimann and Jan Paul Schirmer from Greenboats all right guys well thanks so much for joining us on the show so first since we have uh the both of you on here let’s kind of get you introduced so you can um so we can get your voices distinguished here with our listeners so uh Friedrich let’s start with you so you’re the founder and CEO um can you kind of give us a quick 30 second overview of your kind of day-to-day with with Greenboats actually i started the company in 2013 and i’m a bubble and profession so i started the company Greenboats in 2013. i’m a boat builder in profession i’m a boat building master on my part in the company is the the building side inviting materials trying out materials and yeah all this sort of stuff so you’re pretty much the the craftsman the main guy hands-on tinkering finding the new solutions and getting everything tested and yeah trying to try and diff different materials and um yeah and then and Paul you’re co-managing director and you’re kind of more the big picture guys that right yeah you can say that and i have a very very humble uh co-worker because he describes himself so modestly but in the end i met Friedrich in 2015 for the first time and i got introduced to what he’s doing so building composite structures out of sustainable materials and i was just blown away by by the potential that this could have and um yeah so after 2017 we started our business together and my job is really from the beginning was to to use the know-how and try to find ways um how to scale it and also especially how to find applications outside of marine outside of sailing boats which critic was focused on in the beginning yeah because obviously as your name entails you guys started with boats but you’re really starting to branch out into a lot of other things that we’ll we’ll get into today so yeah that makes a lot of sense to have that sort of duo where uh Friedrich you’re more the craftsman and Paul you’re you know leading the business side of it and and getting you guys out there you know beyond just boats so obviously we want to hear the why behind this because you know some of these really big companies aren’t really focused on certain aspects of sustainability or maybe they don’t get there until they’re pushed right but you guys have had uh you know a long time of research and you guys have been developing this stuff for about a decade now and i guess the question is there’s still the market is now just sort of starting to blossom so back when you guys started there wasn’t really a strong market for sustainable composites at all so uh Friedrich can you kind of take us through this i mean i mean why did you guys start this vision when you know it just seems like you’re really forward thinking when you guys got got rolling so can you give us kind of the back story on the company after my apprentice um i went in the company where they were just building composite boats so built from carbon fiber in vacuum infusion or pre-preg and dust fiber boats and stuff like that and it was for me very very interesting because the yeah the technique is just like amazing you’re so free in shape it’s so incredible lightweight and you have such a durable material and what i just didn’t like was the material itself because from the from the viewing point of the boat builder it’s all synthetic it’s all itchy on your skin it’s smelly it’s actually quite an ugly material if you don’t put a nice layer of of white or whatever color paint on top that was for me the point where i started to think about what could you change on on composite building because if you do it right it’s just an amazing material and if you really engineer the composites it’s just like awesome and so i thought about okay how can you replace as example the glass fiber or are they natural fibers that you can work with in the same process and replace with them the glass fiber and effort for resin systems and for core materials took for me quite quite a while or i actually started with that while i did my boat building master or at the end of my boat building master i’ve i built my first boat from linen fiber instead of glass fiber cork is a common material and a natural fiber-based epoxy resin system and that was pretty much the start of of of Greenboats or of of the version um to to build uh cleaner boats and as well for not just for the environment as well for the for the boat builder so it sounds like you just had kind of a strong connection with nature and these natural materials and building a wooden boat was you know this this human experience and the composites though they’re you know give you a lot of flexibility and freedom for shape and they’re strong and lightweight but it sounds like the just the synthetic nature of them like you said the color the smells the the texture the even the health impacts of the workers those just didn’t really sit well from you so it sounds like you guys are trying to find that happy balance where you can build free form and have the the same benefits of composite but still have that connection with natural materials and that sort of earthly um you know history that boat building has had do i have that right yeah exactly and if you take the the natural materials it’s just something where we can really be proud of and and paul so can you kind of take us from so you guys started to figure out that this could be done and then as you joined and started to really start to reach out into the you know the public eye how did it go from you know conception to getting your first boat sold and and getting to where you are now really starting to branch out yeah i think what friday just mentioned what’s really important to acknowledge is um what makes Greenboats somewhat different is that the craftsman is really at the center of the company you know the craftsman a lot of innovation is created around the creativity and the intuitive the instinct of the craftsman and that’s also the bit the story of from what he just explained and in that process you realize you shift i mean but in theory it has been known already for a long long time at least since the 70s that natural fibers do have interesting mechanical properties right but for some reason this has never been taken into structural applications at best these fibers have been used whatever in the interior of doors or whatever for for some non-structural applications non-woven fibers are used for these applications and what Friedrich did is he just figured out hey how can i combine these two worlds you know the possibilities of composites but the appeal and the aesthetics of classic wooden boat building and and and it started from this natural aesthetic point of view right for me what really blew me away was when i figured out that you can effectively substitute almost virtually all glass fiber applications because that’s in the end i mean the majority would be 95 98 percent of oil applications are glass fiber-based right they’re a few carbon fiber based applications and they certainly have also their merit but the the the grand mass is glass fiber and then the second part to it meaning uh being that this this incredible end of life problem you know that people are just try starting to get their head around and i mean uh um Allen you made me aware of some of these articles uh by 2025 for example in europe there’s going to be a ban for landfill of wind turbine blades i mean there’s so much coming up for us and natural fibers would be i’m not saying it’s the sole a solution to everything in the world but it certainly offers a whole lot more in terms of options the easiest way to understand our strategy uh is to break it down into horizons and our horizon one was very much about showing what’s possible with natural fibers doing as many crazy projects as possible so really doing like a nacelle i mean you’ve seen this project the the images and i’m sure you you better also make them available for you for your audience so just showing it’s possible to build a 100 square meter whatever 300 foot surface um structure that’s out there offshore out of natural fibers i mean if you see that you have to see it to understand and um the boats why do we build boats boats are subject to wind to weather to i mean there’s they can’t imagine more forces against you arguably it’s even more difficult to to the life of a boat is arguably more difficult than that of a spaceship right because you have even more salt water everything against you and and and yeah twitter with his um talents and with his amazing team was able to build products which are competing on we always say three dimensions so you first compete of course on the performance side can you build a boat that’s sailing nicely right can you build a boat let’s say with the same properties but made out of natural materials well that’s great that’s what we did in 2016 with a green banter that was like the first more commercial project um what i’ve just shown you before the interview downstairs in the workshop the flux 27 we’re building that’s a boat that’s even 15 lighter than a grp boat right so keep that in mind that it’s even a better performance than uh than a conventional grp boat so we’re competitive in terms of cost we’re competitive terms of performance and then at the same time we’re building a product which is 80 made of natural or recycled materials so if you just make like a space defined by these three axes we are certainly in that space um yeah we’re defining new spots you know in that coordinate system of sustainability costs and performance and that let’s say is horizon two because we have we are we can create a viable offer within niche markets and the next step is for us of course to create these viable solutions also in mass markets and in particular and that’s why we’re so happy to be featured in your show in particular this of course counts for the for the for the wind industry for wind energy industry because it’s by far the the biggest user of class fiber reinforced composites yeah and i think that’s interesting because lots of companies have started solving one problem and then have grown and just seen you know their solution apply to other problems alan which was it in the aerospace engineer was it raytheon that made refrigerators and then they became a missile company was it them oh yeah a lot of them did yeah yeah sure ge was kind of like that right there was another there are multiple stories like that they they started in one industry and ended up in another place because they had expertise in a in a very niche uh area and they had the engineers they could then adapt it to other things i think this is why Greenboats is so interesting uh being in the wind turbine industry and in the aerospace industry i’ve seen the use of wood and fabric in the airplane industry it was the start of aviation was all the wright brothers airplanes are made out of wood and fabric and that was that went on for almost 30 years just doing that maybe almost 40 years where we just made them out of wood and fabric even into world war ii there are a lot of wooden airplanes right and fabric airplanes so the application is there i think what’s happened is we sort of got enthralled by other neat uh technologies and we’ve lost all the history with all the natural fibers and with all and we really never really looked at natural resonance systems uh and so we’re learning right we’re learning we’re learning we’re learning and we’re learning in the way that we’re trying to understand how these natural fibers work and how consistent they are that’s always the question wood same way like how consistent of a structural element is this and can i buy it in gross mass quantity and that’s why this Greenboats company is so fascinating really is because you’ve done all the heavy lifting right you’ve done the hard part and i guess from an engineering standpoint how comparable is natural fibers to fiberglass in terms of strength is it is is it close better worse same so it’s close it’s um you can actually compare with the stiffness of the of the product if you compare with like i don’t know pulling strength or something like that it’s a bit less but the density is actually the half of a glass fiber and so you can pretty much match up with uh with a glass fiber and um yeah so so your weight your weight versus strength are comparable yes exactly and that’s the key for wind turbine blades right it’s a it’s a question of mass versus strength that’s why we have used some carbon fibers because it’s it’s stronger but it’s it’s a little bit lighter weight but the vast majority of wind turbine blades are made out of fiberglass because it’s a less expensive product to use when you build it it’s not a less expensive product at the end of life and i think this is where your technology comes into play is what happens at the end of life what do we do with this boat wind turbine nacelle once we’re done with it after 20 years where does it go and i want to hear a little bit about the technologies on on the back side why why a flax fiber why a uh linseed oil based epoxy system what’s what’s the benefit at the end of life so um it’s actually all about um this yeah co2 footprint of the product so the the flex fiber just grows on the acre and binds a co2 and if you compare that with the glass fiber you need five times times as much energy to produce a glass fiber um compare with uh with the flex fiber and pretty much the same with the with the resin system so you really um save a lot of co2 and when you perform an LCA another analysis you end up with an uh reduction of co2 of 80 percent so between 60 and 80 percent compare of the of the input material you you choose and um yeah so um that’s that’s pretty much all about and at the end um uh it is possible to to do a terminal uh recycling that’s pretty much co2 neutral that’s a huge reduction and can you take us through some of the materials so i know there’s like flax there’s cork you guys also use recycled pet um but you know what what is going into some of your composites so uh it’s all the question what are we going to build so um we actually when you when we have area so you need like a really good insulation vibration observation sound insulation and stuff like that cork is some really interesting commentary and if you really want to go more into into lightweight applications um we ex for example our flex 27 we build uh with a recycled pt as a committee core material that is so one option or even buzzer would so what else we have uh foam materials that are like 100 bio based and um for really and your resin systems are bio based systems are bio-based too so we we have a different approach we have um like really high bio-based resin systems they are not a hundred percent bio-based you’ll still need some petrochemicals to to reach yeah i think the the um yeah durability compared to a standard epoxy resin system so we really need systems where we can trust on and where we have like the the same durability to a standard version system so that is something something really important and um we as well have like recyclable resin systems we work with and that makes sense example for if you use like fibers like carbon fibers or fibers where you need like a lot of energy for the production like for a carbon carbon fiber you need 10 times as much energy um if you compare that with the with the flex fiber but some parts um you they some some parts of the composite you really want to have carbon fiber because they’re just so high loaded so if you build something like that it is interesting to use and recyclable resin system because then you can get the cyber back so Friedrich there’s actually two sort of waste cycles in a composite structures life boat wind turbine airplane doesn’t really matter the manufacturing there’s a lot of excess material that’s trimmed off ground off uh the residence made and not really used and then at the end of life so you have these two major uh issues on with the standard composite systems where you have a lot of waste up front and you have a lot of waste at the end so you’re actually not only reducing uh providing a renewable product in the shape of a boat or a wind turbine the cell or other other elements you’re actually reducing the amount of things that are ending up in the landfill that could be somewhat hazardous right that you can reduce um the uh sort of chemical nature and the amount of energy expended to actually create these things that just end up straight in the landfill because they’re they don’t end up on the final product there’s there’s a lot of energy savings and it seems like on the on the renewable green energy green um sourcing of products here so it’s it i think one of the interesting pieces about your company is you’re not just thinking about we’re going to make this product out of green materials make it out of cork balsa flax great but i think most the engineers don’t realize how much you’re losing in the engineering cycle at the beginning in the manufacturing phase and at the end of life phase those are not things that come into the discussion point when we’re designing a structure we just think i need the structure i need to be strong i need to do this task but you don’t think about all the extraneous stuff and most importantly the people that are down like grinding on wind turbine blades that are trying to make it smooth there’s a lot of grinding in and particles in the air you like to make them as safe as you possibly can and is that another advantage of using uh these green and greener resin systems if you look on all the like petrochemical or synthetic materials inside so they’re a lot less toxic as well for um yeah for the worker it’s it’s a great step right the safety data sheets that you you get when you handle resin systems are astoundingly marked with uh all the hazards that the you need to prepare for and all the the face mask and the eye protection and you don’t want to touch your skin sort of thing that’s a real piece that engineers don’t see a lot of so we will design it because it’s cool but from the worker standpoint it may not be the greatest material ever and then the safety data sheets are always enlightening to us that oh if i had to build this part i’m not sure i would like to go uh you know have my hands on that material every day that’s that’s a problem for me and i it does open up that sort of safety aspect that it’s a it’s a true life cycle product right you don’t want to hurt the humans that are building it you don’t want to hurt the humans that are restoring repairing yet so how do we do that we need to use basically greener materials that have uh you know the bpa situation that’s in europe right that’s a it’s a big problem bisphenol a and epoxy systems that there’s there’s toxicity related to that uh taking those things out of service is good right but we need to find real alternatives that we can make when and the cells out of or boats out of and i think you’ve you’ve done that which is amazing you’re right on that really leading edge of the composite technology where we’re going and that’s a great place to be yeah so so paul where are you guys going with uh because you’ve done a lot of research and tinkering you’ve come a long way where are you guys going next well i think it’s a very dynamic process and i think what’s important is to kind of acknowledge one of the overarching trends you know one of the mega trends that we are trying to serve on and where do we see maybe the chance to see an inflection point and time it right you know that’s also an issue um time the demand is applied correctly so the two trends in essence are first lightweight right we had a society that’s decarbonizing so you need a lot more lightweight solutions and lightweight by essence right now you end up with composites right the composites are the dominant solution to to for for that and and people are just starting to realize now okay if you can reduce 60 to 80 percent easily right with our current technology of the co2 footprint of your of your computer side structure today people are like adding up the numbers in the LCA and they’re like okay wait this is interesting however we still have a problem the material the flex fibers are more expensive than glass to buy right and they’re more expensive to process so that’s something you have to keep in mind and that’s when we as Greenboats come in because what we are doing is we we’re trying to create this atmosphere in the company where say let’s do mistakes because we do mistakes we do mistakes of the future you know we figure out the problems other companies are gonna face probably five or ten years from now when they start using these materials so um critic can maybe go more in depth about that but typically we we’re dealing with it with a natural produce right we talked about already the fact how do you ensure that’s homogeneous in quality how do you um how do you deal with moisture how do you deal i mean there’s a list of issues let’s put it like this and there’s a lot of academic literature about it none of that is impossible to manage right so what we are doing is we are creating these processes protocols combination of materials uh the the the the properties you know that we define that you can reach if you act uh and you build in in accordance with our you know with our knowledge and know-how and yeah then you can actually harvest these results would be described and then when we talk about i don’t know you know the numbers better but um there is a very very let’s come to the second mega trend so the first one is lightweight right the second megatrend is sustainability and in germany alone if i trust the numbers we have to build 2000 windmills a year until 2045 if we want to source all that green energy right and want to live up to our ambitious plans year to date we put 300 so we are this year down 1 700 units so next year it’s going to be almost 2000 units we have to build to keep up with that just assume the average whatever assume like 100 square meters per nay cell already if you add that up you know you get quite a big amount of co2 so it is becoming real but again five years ago it would have not been a topic now it is because the price of co2 it is becoming relevant in the end of the day all these companies have to report the co2 they have to perform life cycle assessments for what they’re doing and for us as a company we are there and we can help companies in that transition we can take them by the hand and say look we can sit down even with your accountant i mean that’s the person probably you’re talking to to figure out what would that mean for your production over the next years in terms of co2 savings based on our current technology and as uh you can imagine we we’re just getting started i mean we’re every day working on new resin systems with even higher bio contents we are figuring out ways we’re working directly with the source directly with the people in france at the the harvest the linen and turn it into the flex drawings we’re working together with these guys to come up with products that are exactly tailored to the demand of the processor in the wind industry right and this kind of knowledge five years ago people would have been like why would i use a material that’s more expensive to buy and to process but but so but again that’s that’s that’s what i mean with dynamic right like like it’s really we have to get that wave but if we would have started let’s say three years ago we would be bankrupt now so let’s hope that this time you know we managed to to to to to to keep keep the hustle up and and and then uh team up with more and more and bigger players and for let’s say the last year was was crazy for us i mean literally um we a lot of people that that that i don’t know more viewers like as as crazy people or artists or something they’re starting to realize okay hey maybe what these guys are doing actually does make sense and it’s going to give me a competitive edge in the long run for my company for my business so that’s a nice shooting of course so let’s talk about the the nfc in the cell you did have that project come about and you know what were people saying about it once it uh got out there into the into the press yeah we are now amazing i mean we had a briefing to the audience maybe two weeks ago or something with a small talk you know to prepare for today and in the meantime already we’ve been again in touch with different not like the the ant player if you want so but let’s say uh agents within the the industry you know that i really like okay now that i’ve seen the product i get it like i’ve heard of course about natural fibers before all that stuff and that’s really like a common theme we often have also with our boats you have to see it you have to understand that this is not like whatever a fourth grader whatever kindergarten kid that makes paper machine or something these are really products that can perform and that live up to all the gnv whatever regulation standards required uh and as sweetly said we can reach the standards of a glass cyber fiber product and so people are really like horizon one accomplished like get people excited you know make them aware that it’s possible get them excited now we have to move these people into riser too and of course at as of today i i mean i could go with the camera to the left you see our workshop we can’t build these 2000 windmills in our current capacity for sure not right but to team up with people who have the resources you know and who have the ability with the operations the delta you know to gain uh to to and then we’re talking also about a product we’re not we have to stop talking about the sticker price of a product because of course the nfc nasal could be more expensive than the glass fiber nasal but what you have to look at what is your lifetime cost of the product what does it cost you in 20 years 30 years to recycle it and so that’s what the important thing is right we have to compare the lifetime cost of the glp product with a lifetime cost of nfc product and i think we’re getting there i think within especially if we keep having government incentives and and bottom-up pressure from the consumer we’re really getting to that sweet spot where where people very rapidly will have to want to change and it would be short-sighted to say well this is too expensive so this idea doesn’t make sense because i mean every new idea is more expensive at first right and like you said as bigger players come on say hey we like this this will make sense in the future here’s some investment money here’s more resources now you can pump them out at scale and then the cost goes down i mean is that kind of where you see it going for us the best thing that could happen would be like a steady demand from a client you know who has a growing concern and who’s growing with us and if if we would have that we hope we’re getting there i mean that’s also the good thing by not only delivering to one industry we’re also already supplying uh the the the caravan industry and transport vehicles and boats and we may have a panel unit a panel business unit where we create standardized panel goods and i think that’s the way to go you know to really start make that’s kind of our job as a company is to make it easier to adopt these materials and that can be for example in the form of semi-finished good it can also be of course in the form of some consulting uh of course always depending on who our counterpart is you know what if we are able to to have a long-term vision together well i think a lot of people in wind are just talking about blades right making blades cheaper making them bigger making them stronger but there’s a lot of components like the nacelle that you know if converted to natural fibers more recyclable materials in general are going to make a really big difference when there’s thousands more turbines you know in the landscape on this planet you know even if it’s just a little thing like you talked about door hatches i mean you guys aren’t opposed to starting small where it’s like hey if this is one little piece or five little pieces or here and there that’s still better than nothing and that’s still slowly getting all of us to that goal of a more sustainable future is that right absolutely and and i but also when it comes to blades um not to say too much but we’re in loose talks uh to build a 12 13 meter blade so that’s uh certainly when you look at the just at the rough uh whatever the requirements from engineering perspective that we know looking at our material properties we would be able to reach we’ll be confident about and then again how would you start you first build a prototype show that to the world and i think the work would go crazy right if they see a natural fiber first wind turbine blade that would really be an eye opener for the whole industry and mark our words we are confident that we can do it it would not i think it’s probably harder to build the flex 27 day center that you will see down there than the rotor blade because in the end we talked about a 300 kilo structure roughly for the rotor blade right and and that’s like almost like our hull weight of the boat and also our boat is eight nine meter so it would not be crazy like like uh it’s not that was more crazy what friedrich did 10 years ago when he built his first products you know out of youtube bags that was crazy well and it wouldn’t have to be you know a full blade built completely out of nfc right i mean we were just talking in our previous episode about balsa and how you know there’s some deforestation of the rain forest associated with balsa obviously there’s a lot of balsa farms as well so not all of it is damaging to the rain forest but as they’re looking to maybe replace balsa maybe there’s another natural you know alternative for it or there’s another piece uh in a in a wind turbine blade that’s not structural in them so this is 100 vegetable based foam for example wow this is what we’re using and that could be a core material or something this there is recycled pet was talking about earlier yeah yeah yeah so this is quite standard this is something we started using three four years ago i think we’re quite pioneering also that applications but it’s amazing success story everybody’s literally using it now it’s actually more expensive to buy recycled pt by virtual phd i’ve been told yeah yeah well whales don’t love eating it or whatever so it’s good to get out of the ocean and into something more usable as we wrap up here where are you guys going and what can we kind of expect to see from you uh maybe in the next year or two i really want to be pretty i think you’re with me on that one right like we want definitely want to build a rotor blade around 12 30 meters something within that we want to build amazing partnerships within the industry again like we are smart enough to know that we don’t know everything actually we also aware that we know actually quite little but that little we know could be crucial to some of these really groundbreaking projects and um so we would love to partner up with people in this windpower industry yeah that makes a lot of sense um so Paul where can people follow up with you and your work with Greenboats i think our most active channel is linkedin we really try to also really have an open style of communication really openly talk about challenges and opportunities uh associated with sustainable computer science so that’s and also Friedrich and i we are we are open to chat and everything so that’s i think the best idea if you want to do some self-reading of course visit our homepage and just google Greenboats we actually have good hits on Greenboats so all right well guys we really appreciate your time and great conversation we appreciate what you’re doing for the industry and obviously sustainability is on everyone’s mind so it’s a really interesting topic and we appreciate you so uh thanks so much for coming on the show thanks for having us yeah also from my side ellen dan thanks so much and and uh yeah really yeah amazing uh that you share our message a bit with with your community and and yeah really appreciate it all right well we want to thank again our guests from Greenboats definitely check out the links in the description as always where you can follow up with them definitely follow their linkedin page their youtube page all that they’re putting out a lot of great content you can see exactly what they’re working on and they make some really beautiful boats they have a lot of really interesting prototypes so definitely check out Greenboats again you’ll find the links to them in the description below so moving on uk they are planning a a giant battery to help with their offshore electricity so obviously this project is 360 megawatts it’s going to be installed in rosemary you want to help me with the pronunciation here t-side
i won’t help you with that i i don’t have a suggestion actually sorry you’re not you’re just gonna let me hang out to dry you’re not even gonna try and maybe fail this no because i’ve always i’ve got a hilarious joke planned in my head and i’m just waiting for you to stop talking so that i can say my hilarious joke all right fine just lurk in the background with your pronunciation joke or whatever is coming um but this big battery project is on its way alan i’ll kick this to you first uh are we going to see more of these and is this a significant first step for the uk it is and i think you’re going to see a lot more of it uh the you know t-sides if it’s pronounced t-side rosemary go ahead hit me with the pronunciation of t side are we pronouncing it correctly i assume that we are we are english i need to cue you for your joke what’s what’s happening there seems to be some pent-up anger here come on i don’t know sign uh it’s english right we all speak english why would i have a special insight here i’ve been less sure than i’ve ever been if i speak english since joining the show a lot of words i can’t pronounce i believe that offshore for the amount of power they’re going to produce if they’re smart and they’re trying to maximize profits that if you can get a battery in the mix you’re going to be able to help you maximize profits because you’ll be selling energy when the enterprise energy prices are high and it’s not just the production of power it’s also when you’re producing it and if you’re playing at a moving energy market like we all are selling it high and creating it when it’s low is the best way to go about that it’s so if you have extra power you want to maximize it if you can if you can make the economics work i think there’s going to be a lot more of it and because the united kingdom’s is really moving to a room much faster than i think a lot of other countries to a renewable lower co2 uh world that they’re going to be leading in a lot of different ways and i i think batteries may be the one place where the uk is really going to start pushing hard to to match of the teslas of the world so this is going to be fascinating and and i i hope that they’re successful because what they are able to do on a smaller scale uk is not not a huge place like the united states but what they can do in a small scale can be scaled up and done in other places and the uk will be in a big advantage because they’ll be the leader in that technology and they’ll own probably a lot of patents in that area and us in america or start writing checks to to to england to pay for the patent or scotland to pay for the patent and that’s a huge income for us i think that’s awesome right if if you’re clear thinking and you’re in your mobile like the uk is right now uh they can maximize a lot of things and hopefully they can get the battery offshore battery technology rolling rosemary do you see a similar thing yes and i want to make my joke which is a crocodile dundee joke you keep on talking about this this giant giant battery at 100 megawatts that’s that’s not a giant battery australia’s got giant batteries we’ve already got i think uh more than half a gigawatt of um of big big batteries there’s the famous um tesla big battery that was started by australia’s uh favorite benevolent billionaire mike cannon brooks tweeting elon musk and we got the world’s first big battery um in south australia and they’ve been using that for yeah for years now there’s a new one in victoria 300 megawatts that was just commissioned recently that was interesting because um they had a they had a fire and commissioning actually and uh it seemed like this was terrible news for the renewables industry but i think only two two of the the sales out of a hundred were actually affected and so it was kind of something i’ve experienced a lot in my career where you know you have in in my the worst thing that can happen which is often a fire um and it feels worse when it hasn’t happened then after it’s happened and you’ve seen the worst case scenario and it’s like oh hey you know we had a fire and it contained and we still completed the project on time um it can kind of feel actually better afterwards this bad thing happened and um it’s you know things still functioned yeah so just between those two that’s half a gigawatt and i’m just looking at that there’s so many planned now there’s one in construction in um in the canberra region where i am 100 megawatts underway um and a bigger one even planned what do you think the chemistry is going to be here wasn’t mentioned in this article about this one but are we looking at iron air or like an electrolyte battery i mean what at this scale what do you think it’s going to be if they don’t say it’s lithium-ion that’s right still just just grabbing most of the market and it will stay that way unless and until we start to see a supply squeeze because everyone wants lithium-ion batteries for absolutely everything so yeah unless the price goes up because of that we’ll we’ll continue to see it we keep hearing about you know things like iron air i mean when are these going to start these and these seem like utilities scale right these these bigger electrolyte batteries that are not very portable that are very heavy and obviously have electrolytes it’s literally sloshing around potentially why aren’t we seeing some projects crop up with those they’re still in development and unless i was just looking the other day actually at some future projections for battery technologies um depending on how much duration that you need and how many cycles you need to do per year and looking at which type of battery technology was the best and currently for like pretty uh pumped hydro has a a lot of the you know applications have um pumped hydro as the least cost currently um and then uh lithium-ion kind of has a small of a short duration kind of a small zone of the the chart um and then as you move into the future lithium ion just grows and grows and grows until it fills everything except for the longest duration which is going to be possibly hydrogen possibly a bit of compressed air and then um yeah hydro as well um but this modeling doesn’t it doesn’t take into account the fact that if lithium ion really is used in all these applications then we’re going to run out because we don’t have enough lithium mines that are going to be ready to you know produce 100 times what we’re currently using in a few years so i think that the reason why we don’t have so many other technologies now is because for now lithium ion’s just the best and we need to wait for it to get more expensive before before we see um the other technologies really compete yeah so moving on uh alan i’m gonna kick this to you so obviously you’ve had strong opinions about uh the chinese entry um into global markets but ming yang has signed a memorandum of understanding uh to get a uk blade manufacturing and term by an assembly plant uh stood up in the uk so alan what what’s your take on this i feel like this has uh been right in your alley about concerns you’ve had globally it plays into sort of the greater economic uh battle that’s going on between the united states and china and the uk has oddly enough signed an agreement with with china uh because when you sign on to a large manufacturer in china you’re signing off with the chinese government that that those two go together and the the weird fallout of that is like ge is talking about pulling out of a of a factory in t side so ge is getting a little more hesitant about building a factory in t side because they they see the possibility of really not winning many contracts in the united kingdom so you have to play both sides of this if if you’re going to bring in a super low cost provider then companies like ge can’t compete on that playing field and will go away so you’re left with this connection to china and i’m not sure that’s the smartest move for the united kingdom uh because power is a geo electric electricity is a geopolitical
pawn in this equation you can’t uh you got to be careful i think you really have to be careful especially now uh with covid and there’s a lot of ana things with china that are happening right now that i’m not sure you want to promote uh as you’ve seen australia canada and the united states are not sending ambassadors to the olympics in china that’s just a precipice of more to come and i’m surprised that european countries are actually sending ambassadors to to china for those olympics because of uh the uyghur situation some other things that are happening in china so seeing that entry into the uk is going to be very worrisome for a lot of wind turbine oems because they know they really can’t compete financially and maybe it’s a leverage point for the uk government to drive down prices for all the manufacturers and maybe they will pick a siemens or vestas sort of a ge eventually but it doesn’t feel like that and i i think that’s what makes the united states a little uneasy about what’s what’s happening there so last on the docket today i want to chat a little bit about the legal right to disconnect which is becoming law around the world in various places in 2017 france introduced some regulations that just created boundaries about remote workers at the beginning and the end of their day at some other countries this is starting to become a bigger push and it looks like it might become eventually law in europe and allen all throws to you first do you see this becoming something in the u.s obviously it seems like in the united states we have the craziest work schedule the least work-life balance at times um would you see this like employers backing this uh where they have to you know buy regulations and penalties cut off contact with employees after a certain time of night no and i i think the biggest players that would be against it are the googles and the facebooks and the the silicon valley companies that can push the envelope i think a little bit in terms of if you’re typing on a computer writing code that needs to be available most of the time so i think they would be very against it and that’ll have an influence on whether it happens in the united states or not well it’s a good idea i think there’s there should be reasonable limits on both sides uh from the employee side and from the management side putting limits on it i think is a little more difficult in the united states i just don’t think there’s going to be a um a real meeting of the minds you know the real issue i think is happening in america which is going to open this up is google just announced that if you don’t get vaccinated to the level they think is acceptable you’re going to be fired straight up fired and they have about 150 000 employees okay for most people it may not be a big deal but say for 10 of their workforce it is a big deal
that will come with the pushback right so if you can if you can make me take a uh do a health thing maybe i’m gonna push back and say i’m not gonna pick up my phone after five o’clock that would be a logical outcome of that that there’s a little bit of give and take if i can demand things of you health wise then then i’m not talking to you on saturday and sunday that’s that’s the kind of situation you’re going to get yourself into because there’s such weird animosity at a high level between employees and employers right now this is that time when limitations can be put on on work i’m not sure it’s great for productivity but i i think it’s a possibility here in the states right now rosemary do you see the same thing that worker inks is probably at an all-time high i mean there’s maybe similar debate for working hours and in some countries in europe you know it’s mandated you can’t work more than 35 or 37 hours in a week and i mean denmark is known for its amazing work-life balance but there was certainly no shortage of long long hours worked and i had plenty of 60 80 100 hour weeks especially when i was working in the factories which work on a you know 24 7 sort of shift so i think even when there are regulations around that sort of thing certain jobs you’re always going to go outside that if you’ve got you know an important deadline and a worker feel some sort of you know commitment to a goal they’re going to want to go outside that and if it’s regulated in some ways it can kind of push you into not keeping track of it at all because it’s like okay officially you can’t work more than 35 hours so you didn’t work more than 35 hours whereas before you might have used to keep track of it on a spreadsheet and you know you know or you worked 50 hours the last three weeks so you can have you know half a week off now um so yeah i don’t i don’t think it’s simple and i don’t think that regulation is a simple solution to it but i do definitely encourage everybody to maintain the boundaries that work for them because i think you do better at work when your brain actually you know stops working sometimes it’s not not healthy and not good for your your projects that you’re there all the time so i think the goal is good but it’s hard to hard to know exactly the best way to implement it all right well that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the uptime wind energy podcast thanks again to our guests from Greenboats be sure to check them out in the show notes and description below be sure to subscribe to the show share with a friend and we will see you here next week on uptime
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