Meet Joel and Allen at ACP in New Orleans! Visit the Weather Guard Lightning Tech and Ping display at Booth 810.
Rosemary kicks off this episode with an analysis of a 14,700 ft high wind farm southwestern China. Do the blades need to be designed to handle the less dense air at high altitude?
AES is getting out of coal fired plants and plans to triple its renewable capacity – Yay!
Q1 for Nordex wasn’t great but Joel think the future is much brighter.
GE and NREL explore Low-Level Jetstreams (LLJ) off the US Atlantic coast using super computers. Will these air disturbances create massive power losses?
In the land down under, RWE wins an eight-hour energy storage bid with a battery, beating out several pumped hydro projects. Rosemary provides insights in to the shift to lithium battery storage for the grid.
Aaron Barr of Wood Mackenzie gave his thoughts on the state of the wind energy in a recent article. Is the future for wind brighter in 2024?
Our wind farm of the week is the SeaMade Offshore Wind Project in Belgium!
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power LAB – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
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Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Uptime 166
Allen Hall: Well, everybody’s preparing to go to New Orleans. That’s where the big American Clean Power Conference is going to be. And it is going to be huge.
Joel Saxum: Everybody I talk to in the wind industry is going, so it’s going to be, I think the attendance is gonna be fantastic. I’m excited for it.
Rosemary Barnes: You guys won’t have any fun though, cuz you’ll miss me.
That’s right.
Allen Hall: We’ll, think of you while we’re at the great New Orleans restaurant,
Joel Saxum: hanging on to B Bourbon streets and music.
Rosemary Barnes: The music I play, grace and why I wanna. We go there,
Allen Hall: We can FaceTime it to you. How about that? Please do. So when this episode release next week, which is be Tuesday, ACP will just be starting.
And fyi, there’s gonna be some exciting stuff happening on the show floor from what I can hear already. So stay tuned. Next week this week we talk about a, a number of, of. Topics from all around the world. In China, they’re building a wind farm at about 14,000 feet 4,500 meters. And Rosemary talks us through like, what does that mean to build a wind turbine farm that high?
Do you get to change the blades, air density is less? It’s pretty complicated actually. So there’s some good input there from Rosemary. And then we move over to AES in the United States and they are really investing in renewables. They’re offloading their coal assets and really trying to, to move into the renewable energy economy, which is good to hear.
We talked about nordex. Their first quarter report came out, didn’t look so hot, but the future is going to be brighter. And then GE and NREL in the states are looking at something new, low level jet streams and what that means off the Atlantic Coast.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we’re gonna talk about long duration energy storage or at least eight hours.
Yeah. Duration, energy storage. There was a battery that won an auction in Australia, and we talk about how. Energy storage technology is going in general.
Joel Saxum: And then we’re gonna touch in with Aaron Barr here from Wood Mackenzie, and he’s gonna give us a little bit of a, or he’s not gonna be on the show.
I’ll, I’ll be clear on that. But we’re gonna re read a little bit about some of his comments on the, the macroeconomic situation within the wind industry involving the OEMs and all of the vendors and what it, the out output will look like hopefully through the end of this decade. And then of course everybody’s favorite wind farm of the week.
We’ll be talking about the seam made wind farm in Belgium. So, so stay tuned.
Allen Hall: I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power LAB, Joel Saxum and the Bill Nye of Australia, Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, we’ve all seen wind turbines up on ridge lines and in high altitude places, at least in the States. When we consider high altitude in Massachusetts, we’re talking about a thousand meters. That’s what’s considered a mountain in Massachusetts. But in other places of the world we’re they’re talking about putting wind turbines much higher up in, in China China Energy Investment Corporation has begun a construction on the world’s largest wind power project in Nacu, which is lo.
In a high altitude area, when I say high altitude, 4,500 meters, which in America talk is 14,700 feet. In this places in southwest China the one Power project is expected to have a capacity of 100 megawatts and provide around 200 million kilowatt hours of clean electricity to the region. And it’s, it’s supposed to be operational.
At the end of this year. So Rosemary, when you put a wind turbine up where the air is thin, it seems like to me that would be a problem.
Rosemary Barnes: Is it? Yeah. So obviously when you go up in altitude, then the air gets thinner and I just looked it up and at four and a half thousand meters, it’s something like 60% of the air density that it is at sea level.
And yeah, so the power in the wind, it is, you can calculate that using the formula. P equals half row, V cubed and row in that equation is air density, and V is the wind speed. So the power in the wind varies linearly with the air density. So if you have. You know, twice air density, twice the power, or 60% air density, 60% the power.
And then because the velocity part of the equation varies with the cube of the, of the, yeah, wind speed, wind velocity, that has a much more powerful effect. So even though it’s not good to go up you know, up to thinner air, it’s not nearly as significant as the wind speed. So, The cubic relationship between power and wind.
Speed means that if you double wind speed, you get eight times as much power. And if you wanted to compensate for the fact that you’ve only got 60% of the air density, then you would need to have wind speeds that are about 1.2. Times what they are at sea level wind turbine. That’s actually, yeah, 18, 18.6% more to be precise.
So you can see it’s not that much of a difference. And I’m assuming that this site. Has, you know, wind speeds that are, you know, are, are good for the area. So they’re gonna get, you know, value from that. And then there might be some other reasons to put the wind farm there as well. For example, you might find in that site that the wind speeds or the, yeah, the times that winds are high in that area might not correlate with the other wind resources in the the area that that electricity grid serves.
So that means that adds a whole lot of value to the system if you can get an uncorrelated wind site and add it because it means that you are making your electricity less variable and so you’ll end up needing less long duration energy storage, which is very expensive. Compared to just adding more generation in, in good sites.
Joel Saxum: So Rosemary, when we first started talking about this, and I’m looking at these numbers, 4,500 meters, thinking the air density is way less. This is just armchair thinking. I’m, my mind goes, man, this turbine has to be designed completely different than something at sea level. Would it have to have a different kind of gear box, different kind of blades or something to be able to handle that there?
But I, but when you say it only really is about a, you know, the 18.6%, about a 20% increase in wind speed. Delta from what would be at, at the sea level is do this turbine need any kind of changes or is it something that may, might already be off the shelf?
Rosemary Barnes: It might or it might not. What did you say? It was Allen, like a hundred megawatt wind farm.
So it’s you know, it’s not small, but it’s not huge. They may design some you know, some components separately for this wind farm. But you try, definitely try not to. Yeah. When I was working at LM Wind Power, one of the things that happens quite often is, Because, you know, you design a blade for a wind turbine for a, a customer, and that’s designed to withstand a certain set of loads.
But they, the turbine manufacturer doesn’t know every single site that they are gonna wanna sell it to. So from time to time, they’ll have a new big wind farm that they want to be able to sell turbine to, but they have to submit new design loads and we would run them and check if the blade could, you know operate as, As is within the, you know, blade certificate would still be valid at this new site.
And if not, then if it was you know Attempting enough prospect, this new wind farm, then you could actually make a new version of the, the blade. So you add in a couple of extra layers of of glass or carbon fiber, yet some critical places. And now this blade is strong enough for the new loads. So yeah, with this design, let’s assume that they’ve got higher wind speeds than normal, but they’ve got the lower air density, so the forces on the blade would kind of like even out probably.
The one thing that. My. Not quite work. Is that wind turbine blade design? It’s really specific to a certain tip speed ratio. So the tip speed ratio is the ratio between the wind speed and the tips of the blades. So you know, a wind turbine blade, it’s twisted along the length so that the, the aerodynamic profile, the angle of attack that it sees is the same all the way along.
And that the air that it sees it. It varies in its direction because it’s got a component that comes from the wind and a component that comes from the rotation. So if you are changing the wind speed, then you also need to change the rotation speed to make sure that those aerodynamic angles all stay correct.
But I doubt that the wind speed would be so different that you would be operating on, you know, such a different tip speed ratio that you would actually warrant you know, change in. In the design of the gearbox or anything like that. I’d be highly surprised if that was, that was worthwhile.
Joel Saxum: So what we’ve been talking about here, of course, engineering theory, which is, has to be the basis of a wind farm before it starts, right?
And then once you get past that, we go into the development decisions and how those go forward. The next step of decision making is operations and maintenance. How are we gonna run this thing? So when I look at this wind farm at almost 15,000 feet of elevation, who’s gonna go up there and maintain this thing?
Right? I think the highest I’ve ever been in like Colorado, it was about 13,000, maybe 13,400 feet or so. And I remember walking around kind of like on the top of this mountain in the summertime, being like, man, it’s, it’s tough. It’s top up here. Now you’re gonna go another 2000 feet plus higher than that, and you’re gonna have to do all the regular maintenance activities.
You might have rope access people up there, you’re gonna have the whole construction crew pouring concrete, all kinds of different things. And then for the life of the wind farm, the, the, all the people that have to maintain this same day-to-day to day. So I, who do we get to do that? Is it, is it The, so of course maybe some locals, maybe some, some guys from Mount Everest, from Nepal or something that can, that are good at, good at altitude.
What, what, how do we do this?
Rosemary Barnes: I just looked it up. And the highest ski resort in Europe is the zma ski resort and the highest ski slope. That resort is 3,899 meters, so not so far off. I don’t think it’s the, you know, kind of height that four, four and a half thousand meters for this wind farm.
And then, you know, add a hundred and a little bit for the, for the wind turbine tower. I. I don’t think that that’s so extreme that you know you’re gonna be supplying your workers with oxygen, but you would certainly not, you know, fly from your sea level city directly to this wind farm. Climb up there, y you know, on the.
Ladder and think that that was all gonna be straightforward and and easy. You’re gonna wanna have a little bit of time to acclimatize and you’re definitely going to feel the effects of altitude when you’re doing physical work at that, at that height, that’s for sure.
Joel Saxum: I think the technicians are gonna want climb assists for sure.
Or like a three, the 3S elevator lift or something in that turbine. They’re not gonna wanna be just climbing that one.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, to be fair, isn’t that what we always want when you’ve gotta climb up in turbine?
Joel Saxum: True. True story. True story.
Rosemary Barnes: I climbed a few towers. Under a hundred meters that only had ladders early in my career, but e, everything over a hundred meters is, has gotta lift in it these days, I think.
Not that you can avoid, you know, some clambering around on ladders and, you know, physical work, dragging rescue kits and stuff into the, the hub or the, the blade if you’re up there. So it’s it’s not easy, but I at least hope that, yeah, the poor workers at this went far. Not gonna be. Climbing up and down ladders.
Allen Hall: Well over in America, we’ve had some actually good positive news for a change with AES corporation. So AES has unveiled a new long-term growth strategy aimed at tripling its renewable capacity by 2027. That’s exciting. The strategy includes adding. 25 to 30 gigawatts of solar, wind, and energy storage, as well as exiting coal operations by the end of 2025.
So shut, shutting down coal, bringing in the renewables. A ees also invests, will also invest to deliver 10% annual rate based growth in its US utilities. Renewable energy is expected to be a key driver of growth for the company over the next four years, and they give some projections on. What they think their growth rate’s gonna be.
Looks pretty positive. So A E S C E O, Andre Ky said that the company is uniquely positioned to create value for our shareholders in the once in a lifetime energy transition. We are currently living through so positive outlook from a AEs. It’s very, seems very similar to things like r what r w is doing in some others, that as an operator, Now it’s time to
go.
Joel Saxum: Is this one of those things where we have to give our disclaimer that says, the, the Uptime Win Energy podcast is not investment advice can’t, you can’t sue us with the s e c or anything like that.
Allen Hall: It should be obvious when you have three engineers on a podcast that they are not giving you any good advice.
Finances.
Joel Saxum: No, but it, it, joking aside, it’s great to see us companies jumping on the transition here and, and shooting for growth, right? So if they’re, if they’re planning it or if they’re, if they have Guidance of increases of six to 8% every year. That means they’ve got a plan behind it. And that means they’ve more than likely got some, some capital moving in the background.
So it’s good to see that. Yeah. AEs another great company hitting the growth hard. We
Allen Hall: need some positive news because I’m telling you, Joel, when you go online and, and look for wind energy news and just see what’s happening on a day-to-day basis, which is what I do. It seems like 70, 80% of it is pretty negative, and only in that, you know, 20%, there’s some, some highlights and which is good.
Well our next story is about nordex. And of course, OEMs have been having trouble for a while. Nordex releases first quarter numbers not so hot. For nordex, the first quarter of results indicate a long way to go for Nordex as operating margin was a negative 9.4%. And sales for the first quarter rose by over 30% to 1.2 billion euros, but nordex quartered a loss of nearly 215 million euros, a 40% increase compared to the same period last year.
They’re having obviously supply chain issues, it sounds like. Some of the jobs that they’ve bid on are unprofitable, but they have to wrap ’em up and finish them. Because they’re contractually obligated to do that. But they, I think Nordex is thinking like Vestus and Siemens and GE that at the end of this year, things are gonna turn around a little bit.
And, and that’s what they’re, their c e O, the CEO E o Jose Louise Blanco expects stronger performance later this year. And my guess is that’s in part because of the IRA bill and I, I think the market is starting to show that. Yeah. Maybe
Joel Saxum: it’s a question for Phil next time we talk to him. About what Nordex market share is in the US cause I’m curious of that.
Right. I you know, basically, basically all the turbines installed last year were either Nordex, Vestus, Siemens Grain, right? You had the four. And I’d like to understand where Nordex is in that, in the, in the market as far as their market share. As pushed by the ira cuz I think that could change some of these
Rosemary Barnes: numbers since you’re talking about Phil.
Can I take the opportunity to plug that he is gonna be coming on an engineering with Rosie Livestream. It’ll probably be shortly after this. This one, this podcast is released, so I can’t remember the day of the week, but I think it’s the Tuesday after this podcast will be released. So can check that out.
And we’re gonna be talking about where we’re at with the. Energy transition which is actually a topic that came up after talking to you guys Alan and Joel. I think I mentioned at a podcast that, you know, we need to get 90% of the emissions out of the electricity sector by 2030, and you guys are like, no, no way.
We could never do that. That’s not happening. So I. I mentioned at the time I didn’t wanna have that discussion without the facts to hand. And so, yeah, that this is me gathering, gathering facts cuz Phil at Intel store, you know, they have gathered data on the amount of wind. Solar batteries, even transmission a whole bunch of different categories of infrastructure projects.
And so yeah, he, he knows how fast they’ve been rolling out and they’ve got forecasts for the future. So we’re gonna talk about that and some of the obstacles that might prevent us from getting to that target in 2030.
Joel Saxum: The numbers will tell the story. That’s what we’re looking forward to. Phil knows.
Allen Hall: Hey uptime listeners.
We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read p e s Wind Magazine. P e s Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And p e s 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.
PS Wind, PS wind.com. GE and Enrail are, are working on rosemary, something called low level jet streams. And you say to yourself, what’s a low level jet stream? I had the same question. So low level jet streams occur on the Atlantic Coast in the United States where we’re gonna be putting a lot of wind turbines out in the water.
Well evidently based on the topology and the types of weather systems that happen along the East coast, you’re getting these. Close to the ground blast of air. It’s like similar to like when you cross, if you ever cross a jet stream when you’re flying, you’re like, you’re at 30,000 feet and the airplane gets rocked and you like, whoa, what was that?
Well, you probably crossed a jet stream. Right? Well, those exist at low levels also, and which is where GE and NRO have been focused on. So they’re trying to understand what these low level Jets streams mean. And if you can imagine, they’re gonna create a bunch of wakes. Which means more losses and more loads on the wind turbine.
So GE and Enrail have been using basically simulations in supercomputers to look at the vulnerabilities there on these low level jet streams. And from, and this is still early from what I can tell. We don’t know a lot about what the winds are gonna be like offshore in, in the United States yet, and yet we’re building turbines to handle these environments.
It does seem a little odd and. My guess is on some of these, because there’s so much development, Joel, Joel knows on the East coast, there’s a lot of development along the shoreline. My guess is that that development is changing the way the airflow comes off the shoreline onto the water.
Joel Saxum: Absolutely. So just one little concept there before we get, keep running on it, but Chicago’s called the windy city, right?
The reason Chicago’s called the windy city is because it’s surrounded by corn fields behind it, which hold a certain amount of heat and moisture. And then it has Lake Michigan in front of it. So you end up with this hot moisture here and Lake Michigan here. And then you have Chicago sitting in the middle.
And Chicago holds way more heat because it’s a big concrete jungle. So you have a heat mass, and then you have the cold mass of the lake, and that creates, It’s almost like unnatural independent weather patterns around the city of Chicago. The same thing happens on the east coast, right? You have that massive water right there, and then you have the mountains of like, say the Appalachian kind of chain there, and then all the cities that are along the the coast.
So immediately off the coast you have different land masses of concrete and steel and asphalt and roofs of houses and stuff that create that trap heat during the day and, and keep the heat longer. And then you have moisture packed up against those mountains and then the different temperature from the ocean.
So it’s going to the, the, the manmade objects along that coast also do mess with the
Allen Hall: weather patterns. Well, I think it was Arc ferra that had a discussion, a webinar even about. It’s wake Vortices and some of the unique things off the East coast where there’s these thermal layers that exist, right?
And so wakes tend to get trapped in these thermal layers, so they tend to travel much further than first envisioned. And the numbers, the numbers stick. In my head, it was like a hundred miles. That seems crazy. But now when you start talking about these low level jets coming off the shoreline, I wonder if they’re also getting caught in some of these thermals.
So now they’re able to travel pretty far out. And Joel, I think you’re right. So, man, it, it’s, it’s very similar to what we see on some of the wind sites and onshore wind sites where the predicted winds are X and when they get the site developed, they’re X minus two. No one knows why. Right. It’s a, that’s a big mystery.
It’s a very expensive mystery that we really need to get figured out. Because of the amount of money that’s going offshore in the United States. Right. Why, why don’t we have the same problem on in Europe? It’s because it, all the winds are coming off the water and then hitting land mass. We’re just the opposite of that in the United States where it’s coming off the land mass into the
Joel Saxum: turbines.
Yeah. I mean if you look at the, if you look at the weather and the North Sea, just because of the nature of the beast up there, right? With the way the weather patterns work plus the the historic climatology of the area, it’s, it’s nasty up there, especially in the wintertime, right? Like, if you’ve ever seen videos of it, like it’s, it’s brutal and it’s just a, it’s a, you can’t, you can’t, it’s not apples to apples, apples and oranges, right?
It’s completely different. It’s a take the Pacific Coast, right? The Pacific Coast in California has much more steady winds that come across and around the Pacific Rim because it’s coming off the water onto land versus, like you said, The weather patterns moving west to east, and then know you also have that shear coming up from the south, from the warmer waters in the Caribbean along the east coast.
And then vice versa, you have sometimes a shear coming down around, around Newfoundland through Greenland and, and meeting. So the, the, the environmental conditions are just completely different on the east coast of the US I think could sort of
Allen Hall: have about all this. Are we gonna start having turbines fail because of the unknowns in the wind?
You know, when they put wind turbines up on ridge lines, one of the concerns there is you kinda get these gusty winds and the winds are not really hitting the blades just right and, and you can do some damage to the gear boxes in the blades. We’re gonna, and that’s one level. I mean, if you do that to a one two megawatt machine, not such a big deal.
Not fun. But if you do it to a 15 or a 20 megawatt machine that’s 50 miles offshore, that’s a whole different animal.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think that because the, the offshore wind play has been, Talked about and researched and, and moved along for a long time. Right. We didn’t just start this thing a year ago. It’s been 5, 6, 7, 8 years that we’ve been talking about putting offshore wind in the us There’s companies like, like T G s TGS was a oil and gas data company and has made the switch into, or they still do that of course, but they have switched into doing some renewables.
One of the things that they’re doing is deploying a lot of medoc ocean equipment. Medoc ocean equipment can measure. Measure currents in the water temperature, salinity pressure, all those good things. But there’s also floating lidar units, right? So they’re collecting a lot of data on spec out at these sites where they would be you get a permit to put a little buoy out there, or big buoy.
Sometimes they’re about the size of a vehicle, like a car or so. And they have lidar measurements of the wind resource. So they’ve been tracking this wind resource for, for quite a few years now, to ensure that when they spend four point, when someone spends 4.7 billion in the New York bite auction, they’re not buying a lemon, basically, you know, Hey, Joel, does LIDAR affect
Allen Hall: whales?
No. No. Okay. I, I thought we oughta just say that now, because I swear to you if I read another whale article about some wind development that is not even happening at the moment, I’m gonna just lose it for our
Joel Saxum: listeners. Lidar is light detection and ranging. So it’s a, it’s a basically a, a way of sending light photons out and measuring the returns on them for getting distances.
So if you point, and there’s a way to point, there’s a way to triangulate beams and point them into the clear blue sky and measure wind resource.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s like magic. But boy, if you have been following New Jersey news, political news, there is just so much about whales and dolphins and anytime a dolphin or any sort of mammal washes up on the beach in New Jersey, it is a.
Political firestorm at the moment, and nobody knows anything. Both sides are just talking out of the backside. It’s just, somebody’s gotta walk into that conversation and tell ’em to stop and figure it out. Like if a whale is, if a whale has died there and has got propeller marks on his back, can we just assume that it wasn’t a wind turban?
Can we do that? I mean, that this, we don’t have to do an autopsy on a whale that’s been hit by a boat, I wouldn’t think. But man, it, it’s insane right now. Speaking of insane, let’s move on to Australia.
Joel Saxum: She’s right here, man. She’s right here.
Rosemary Barnes: Nice segue and
Allen Hall: a surprising turn of events. Proposed big battery with eight hours of storage has emerged as a winner in the New South Wales State Government First long duration storage tender.
The 50 megawatt battery will be built by Lyndale I’m sorry, at Lyndale by German energy, giant, r w e, next to an existing solar farm, also owned by R W E. So this is really important because in Australia there’s a lot of pumped hydro projects for energy storage. And there were several that bid on this project but didn’t make it that the batteries was less expensive.
It had to be less expensive. It’s just so little to do there, just the cost of the batteries and putting it on the site. That now all these pump Hydro program programs are wondering like, what does the future look like if. We can just put batteries everywhere. Maybe the pump hydro isn’t as necessary and maybe the shift the everything’s swinging over to batteries is, is that what you’re hearing down in Australia?
Rosemary Barnes: Rosemary? It’s definitely big news for Australia and I think. It’s globally significant as well. In Australia, nearly all of our grid scale batteries are between one and two hours duration, and they’re mostly not used to like time shift, renewable energy or energy arbitrage, you know, where you charge using the really cheap electricities applied by all of a solar power in the middle of the day and then supply it in the evening when there’s no so solar in the grid, but when people are using a lot of electricity.
So we, we are using it very little for that now. And that’s true most, mostly around the world. I know in the US there is, there are longer battery durations than elsewhere and I think I should have looked it up before this, but I’m, I’m pretty sure there has been an eight hour battery or two that’s one auction, similar kinds of auctions in California.
So. I don’t think this is a world first, but it’s, you know, amongst the world first. I doubt that there’s any eight hour batteries actually installed yet. Probably just announced. So it’s a big deal. For from that perspective, and it is interesting, it is compared to pumped hydro. And in Australia we’ve got a lot of talk about pumped hydro projects more so than we’ve got actual ones.
The only one that’s actually under construction well there’s a couple small ones, but the only major one that’s actually under construction is Snowy Hydro 2.0, and that is plagued by delays. At the moment, one of their tunnel boring machines is, Stuck and has been for some, some time. I, I think I heard that it only made it 50 or 80 meters or something before it, it stuck itself and has been proving hard to get out again.
Apparently it’s not actually that uncommon that these machines get stuck, but yeah, it’s it, things aren’t progressing and the time keeps blowing out and the cost keeps blowing out. And I think that that’s one of the, the key points about. Hydro projects in general, have you guys read? There’s this Danish guy I think it’s Ben Uhub who’s done a lot of research on mega projects and it’s been in the in the media a lot recently.
I think he must have. Released a new article or something recently, but I’ve just got his his book on Megaprojects on Kindle, and he has this nice table in there about where he sorts all of a different kind of infrastructure megaprojects by category and then looks at the cost overrun. Yeah. And so.
The number one like worst category of make mega projects that have the worst cost overrun is nuclear storage, which kind of makes sense, mean cost, overrun of 238%. Second. Second is Olympic games at 150% mean overrun and 76% of projects have more than 50% overrun. And I think that one’s kind of obvious too, cuz I think people purposely underbid the cost for Olympics.
Cuz otherwise you’d never get it. But yeah, so hydroelectric dams are number four. Three is nuclear power, 120% overrun, hydroelectric dams, 75% mean cost overrun. And then you get all the way down to the end and yeah. Wind power 13% energy transmission, 8% solar power 1%. Battery projects isn’t on there, but you can imagine that it’s got a lot more in common with, you know, a solar farm than it does have in common with a hydroelectric dam.
You know, it’s a sort of project where you’ve done it once. You solved most of the problems that you’re gonna encounter in the next project. Whereas a dam or a, you know, a, a tunnel or anything like that, you’re gonna have new. Problems arise that you can’t foresee ahead of time. So I think that that’s probably one thing in favor of battery projects.
It
Joel Saxum: probably has to do with capital costs too, right? Like if you’re, if it’s capital intensive, it’s probably more accurate rather than like a pumped hydro dam. You have a lot of fuel costs, a lot of trucking, mining, a lot of dozer work, and a lot of that kind of stuff that. Can be, can overrun quickly.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah.
I mean they’re both pretty capital intensive I think. But hydro more so and you need a lot longer project duration to make those projects stack up. And one other researcher that I find his work interesting, it’s Oliver Schmidt and his. Team, they do a lot of work comparing different energy storage technologies and they’ve got forecasts for the future.
And so this paper I’m looking at, I was using it a few years ago. And so it was published in 2019. It’s called Projecting the Future, levelized Cost of Electricity Storage Technologies. But he’s got all these really cool charts for projections for different timeframes about how, which. Energy technology is going to be the cheapest for certain use cases.
So on one axis he’s got the duration of energy storage and then so that’s on the y axis and on the accessor has frequency discharges per year. It’s you know, it’s different different economics if you’re using your battery, if you’re cycling at once per day compared to, you know, once every week for.
For example, and if you look at the different charts over time, we see that pumped hydro is the cheapest for you know, for longer energy storage durations and lithium ion batteries for shorter energy storage durations. But the, the crossover point where it changes rich technology is cheapest. Between those two, it.
It gets longer and longer. The further you go, so the first graph starts at 2015 and it’s basically always pumped hydro. Then by 2020, you see at one hour it’s cheaper for a lithium ion battery. And beyond that it’s pumped hydro. And then, In this chart that was, yeah. Published 2019. So they did the research bit before that 2025 had the threshold at about four hours.
And it wasn’t until 2030 or a bit after that eight hours was cheaper for lithium myam batteries than for yeah, to do it with pumped hydro. So, Based on this one single data point, you can see that we’re moving faster than expected. Lithium is taking his, you know, eating, eating pump tiger’s cake faster than we expected.
And I guess it’s all it to do with. How do you expect the, you know, the cost of the technology to come down and also the cost of materials and our lithium prices spiked a year or two ago, but now they’re down again. And, and yeah, still dropping, so that would have a lot to do with it as well. But yeah, I think it’s really interesting to, you know, go back to these previous projections and see how are we, how are we tracking?
And seems like lithium, Mayan is yeah, set to take over longer and longer storage durations a bit faster than we thought, which also. Makes my mind immediately go to all of these. Crazy new energy storage technologies that we see emerging, like thermal energy storage and gravity and, I dunno, compressed air, everything, it’s all geared around that 10 hour-ish energy storage duration and you know, maybe a bit more, but seems to me that, you know, they’re at risk of lithium-ion batteries.
Just, you know, totally sealing that. Off before they, you know, ever get a chance to commercialize those technologies. So my advice to energy storage startups would be try and, you know, aim, aim longer, try and futureproof a bit, you know, maybe you’re gonna want to be more in the 20 hour duration.
But I mean, that’s tough cuz the economics of that long energy storage are, are pretty. Pretty hard to see how that happens without government, you know, intervention to pay for that security and who knows what that’s gonna look like until it get there. But anyway, super interesting to, yeah, it’s kind of like watching a, I don’t know, a football game or something.
Who’s gonna win?
Joel Saxum: Do you think 10 hours makes sense, like from a cultural standpoint, right? Like 10 hours gets us through a section of the day. Right. 10 hours gets us through the workday, or it gets us through a night, or it gets us, or is it purely
Rosemary Barnes: economics driven? The reality is it should be purely economics driven.
I, I think that the, the comparisons that you made, that’s the sort of thing that. You know, people, people like to think of it in terms like that. Is it correlation
Joel Saxum: or is it actually real? I don’t know. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, I did it myself at the start saying, oh, you know, you know, a four hour battery can shift solar power from the middle of the day to the evening, but in reality it doesn’t work like that.
And you’ve got batteries doing you know, all sorts of, they, they do all sorts of crazy, crazy things with their operations. Actually, I saw a presentation last. Week or the week before at the Smart Energy Conference I was at by someone from Energy Synapse and they had done some really good analysis on exactly how all of the big batteries, the grid scale batteries in Australia, how they’re using their, their batteries.
And that, that’s how I got that figure of, you know, most Australian batteries are between one and two hours. It was there. Their research and analysis and yeah, so I, I’m sure you can find that presentation if you search for it on their website. That’s really, yeah. Really interesting stuff. It’s not like a two hour battery.
It’s not like every day you charge it and then discharge it two hour over the next two hours. It, you know, you charge hold and you know, sell, sell a little bit. Now and then charge again a little bit later and you’re trying to forecast the future. So yeah, the battery operating system is probably like the, the most important.
Technology in, in all of this to be able to use them. Smart. Given that we don’t know exactly what the, you know, the future is gonna look like, so you’re never a hundred percent sure if now’s the right time to charge or discharge or
Allen Hall: hold. Who has the best battery charge technology at the moment? Yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: I dunno.
I’m sure every, everyone would tell you that, that they did. I know Neil and who did the first grid scale battery in Australia w would. Say that that’s their, you know, their core IP is their the way that they know how to manage it. But yeah, like I’m sure all the other, the major players think they do too.
I saw What’s an en energy vault? You know that crazy gravity energy storage system there? That’s their IP that they’re selling to outside of, in, in China, they announce that they’re doing a actual gravity installation. But all the rest of the energy storage projects that I’ve seen them announced in the last year have all been just straight batteries.
And they’re like, yeah, we know how to operate batteries because of our history and this space. Which is, I don’t know, a bit of a stretch to me because they haven’t actually installed any of that. Have any systems and use them for a long time. So where did they get that expertise? But the
Allen Hall: company’s doing the most that’s actually producing batteries in a sense, and monitoring batteries all the time and producing chargers so they know how people are reacting and what how they’re using for is Tesla.
That company has gathered so much information about battery usage and how to charge and discharge a battery to maximize its lifetime. You’ve seen changes. More recently in the way they’re dealing with battery charging and discharging. Man, it, it’s hard to think that Tesla doesn’t lead that parade at the moment,
Rosemary Barnes: but you don’t see them winning ev everything.
So
Joel Saxum: give them time. They won a big one in California couple years ago. They did that one
Rosemary Barnes: in Australia. The Australian won the first one. The horns style big battery. It’s a Tesla battery, but it was now in that that did the project and it’s their battery management system or their trading, trading.
Platform on that. I’m, I’m like 99% sure that’s true, but I don’t think that’s the case moving forward. Yeah. Anytime you
Allen Hall: give engineers time to study how it a piece of equipment is operating and to make adjustments on the fly, that’s the best way to get to the, you know, the peak of of operation is let engineers just work with it for a while and you, you know, that.
Tesla engineer’s been working on these batteries for 5, 6, 7 years. Pretty hard. It just feels like they would have a lead in that space. I’m surprised other companies are trying to enter that space because with all the AI and all the other crazy things that Tesla is doing, it. You’re competing against a, a behemoth.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but I mean, it’s not that other companies are trying to enter, other companies have have entered and there’s what’s the Siemens one called? Fluence. I mean they have got, you know, a Siemens and no strangers to, you know, data, data collection and analysis and doing smart things with it. So Yeah, that kind of, you know, makes sense as well.
And then, yeah, like I mentioned Neo and again, but that’s kind of their, their core thing as well, specifically with renewable energy that, you know, they manage they operate their assets, I’m pretty sure all their wind and, and solar and batteries, so they, they know a lot as well. And then there’d be, you know, at least half a dozen other players beyond that that are, you know, bigger, bigger or smaller, but, Doing smart things.
It was still early days for this, and I think that the, the market is totally evolving as well because, you know, it’s one thing to have the first battery in the system, the first huge battery you know, in Australia in springtime You see wild fluctuations in electricity prices. They’re, you know, consistently negative in the middle of the day for, you know, quite, quite a lot of days in spring they can go down to negative a thousand dollars per megawatt hour and they can go up to over $15,000 positive and you can get swings, you know, nearly that whole range within a day.
So, you know, the first people to put batteries in see this, it’s like immense arbitrage opportunity to, you know get. Paid to charge and then get paid even more to discharge. But every person that installs a battery is making that, you know, that that shortfall just a little bit less. And so eventually, you know, in an efficient market, you’ll get to a, a very, you know, smooth kind of system.
So it’s really hard, even when you see, you know, dollar signs when you look at these duct curves. And you are, you know, thinking about. Buying a battery, it’s, it’s super hard to predict the future. You know, you can say, okay, if we had a battery now we’d be killing it. And I know it’s also true for, for Europe battery projects that got installed before, you know, the big Russian gas crisis and everything else, they really did crush their business cases over the last year.
But you install one now and then, you know, in six months or a year, you have actually got it. Up and running and you’re making money. How many other people did that? What does the duck curve look like now? You know? So it’s, it’s really hard in the absence of some sort of government support or utility scale support, it, it’s pretty hard to actually have the confidence to.
Invest like that. And that’s why you, you see these big batteries that don’t come from people that are just like, oh, I’m gonna make a ton of money. No one told me to do this. I just decided to, it. It’s always in response to you know, a, a government saying, we want, you know, this amount of energy storage.
And yeah. In the case of Australia, it’s. In response to some of the big coal power plants closing down, and we know that we’re gonna have to replace that. And that you can’t just, you know, wait until the plant goes offline and everyone’s lights go out. That’s not the right time to start thinking about long duration energy storage.
You need to think about it a, a year or two ahead at a minimum. It sounds like it’s really
Joel Saxum: not that, not that bankable of a solution, right. Like if, if it’s, if the business case is dependent on outside factors, basically no matter what. There’s not a whole lot of people that are gonna take that risk on.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, there’s a whole categories of finance that you, you know that, that deal with these kinds of uncertainties. It’s certainly not the only kind of you know, large capital intensive project where you can’t predict a hundred percent what’s gonna happen in the future, but it’s. Definitely not as easy as, I don’t know, building a wind farm where all of your output is tied up in power purchase agreements you know, that’s like rock solid.
The wind is not going to change over a, you know, the life of the wind farm. It’s the average wind speed will be very close to what you thought it should be if you, you know, did your site assessment properly. But you can’t say the same for. Battery unless you’ve got, you know you can have a power purchase agreement from battery as well.
And then you can, yeah, I guess mitigate most of that.
Joel Saxum: Get the
Rosemary Barnes: latest on wind industry, news, business,
Allen Hall: and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news. Well, there was a recent news article in which Wood Mackenzie contributed to an, it had to do mostly with the state of the OEM industry wind industry and, and, Where it is today, where it’s likely to go in the future, and we all know that supply chain and inflation and interest rates and all the.
Problems that have existed there for the last year or two or three. But there’re, I think, and people who are, are industry analysts are saying there may maybe be turning the corner. And Aaron Barr, who is an industry analyst at Wood Mackenzie, had a couple of good quotes and let me, let me read them so we just can discuss ’em, quote, the, the wind energy market is stuck in this very strange paradox right now.
We have the best long-term climate policy, certainly ever across the largest markets, but we are struggling through a period where the whole w whole industry, particularly the supply chain, has been hit by issues that have culminated in destroying profit margins and running many of the top OEMs and their component vendors into negative, negative profitability territory.
That means everybody’s stuck. Here’s a second quote. It. It just has to get over the speed bump, most of which is driven by supply chain issues. Quote, if all the players involved can make it through the end of this year, 2023. We think the future is bright for the industry. So Wood Mackenzie, who is on top of all the moving parts of the, of the wind industry is saying.
This year, it’s not gonna be so great. And I think that’s what all the OEMs are saying also. But they’re, they’re what? McKenzie’s looking at 20 24, 20 25 and saying that this should be a pretty dramatic turnaround. Because all the factors are in place to make it positive in 20 24, 25. Joel, are you seeing some of the same things as Aaron Barr is?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. You know, when the IRA bill came out last year, everybody was super excited. Of course, it’s, it’s a, it’s a fantastic thing for the renewable energy transition here in the states. And then like this December and stuff, I remember we were talking with some people like, you know, that just the IRA bill was signed.
Why, why are they still reporting negative? You know, profitability and, and, and a lot of red on their balance sheets. It’s, well, these things take time to move, right? The, the macro economy doesn’t move like a bullet. The macro economy takes a little bit longer to, to respond to market conditions and the market conditions that people want it, right?
But now we’ve got the IRA bill in place. There’s the ITC credits where you can get 30% on manufacturing and some other things. So it’ll take a little bit of time to get it going. Like Aaron Barr saying here over at Wood Mackenzie, who does, does a great job with research as always. They’re saying the wheels are starting to turn right.
It, we’re still kind of in the mud a little bit, and we’ll be in the mud a little bit, but we’ll come out of it hopefully Q1 24 and then through the end of this decade, it looks like it’s going to be a a profitable. Turnaround for all of these OEMs and, and when the OEMs are profiting from the past, it looks good for aftermarket suppliers, their vendors, the whole industry.
So, so as we are, you know, we’re constantly reporting on the news that’s coming out. We don’t make it, we just report on it. And like this week, Nordex is report wasn’t too good. We hope that end of this year we’ll, we’ll start to look a little bit sunnier and then next year and through the end of the decade will be.
And the
Allen Hall: positive. My only comment about all this is that the Wild Card, at least the United States, is the Fed, and if they continue to keep pumping up interest rates, that’s a problem for the wind industry and they need to pause for a little bit, maybe bring it back down. Quarter of percentage point would be nice but they’re really trying to tamp down inflation, and it just makes everything more expensive.
Our wind Farm of the week is Sea Made Wind Farm, which is about 45 kilometers off the coast of Austin, Belgium. Nice place to visit. Sea Made is really two projects the Mermaid Project and the Seastar Project and the obviously conjoined the names. The Mermaid project was 235 megawatts and the Seastar project was 252 megawatts.
They that whole farm, the seam made farm is, has 58 Siemens Ka Mesa 8.0 1 67 turbines producing 487 megawatts total. The, the site became operational in about 2020. It’s cutting. 500,000 tons of CO2 emissions and it has several stakeholders in it. Enco Wind, Belgium, ENGIE, and Odry. But Enco purchases the power for the Belgian customer.
So it’s a really nice site. If you go online it’s pretty there. It’s hard to describe like these wind are in a nice place. It’s belgium’s a nice place, so it’s a pretty wind farm and it is our wind farm of the week. Sea made wind farm in Belgium. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Win Energy podcast.
Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Win Energy Podcast.
