A busy week in wind energy! IdentiFlight’s bird detection system was approved for use in France – Rosemary has great insights into the effectiveness of the system. BP and Equinor test the ocean floor off the coast of NY, and the US Government Accountability Office promises to look into the effects of offshore wind. GustoMSC is moving towards Modular SOV’s to fill the growing need for multi-tasking ship. Massachusetts and New York are dealing with offshore projects in limbo – will the states move to save the projects? Wood Mackenzie has studied the offshore wind supply chain in detail with some eye-catching results. And, our wind farm of the week is the Twin Ridges Wind Farm in Pennsylvania.
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Uptime 171
Allen Hall: Up in Canada last week, there was a wind turbine, then it was on fire. Everybody saw it on LinkedIn or TikTok or wherever you get the news from. And then they got struck by lightning and then they got struck by lightning again, from what I could tell. So that wind turbine had a really horrible day because it just completely burned down, unfortunately.
And in the aftermath, a lot of people were calling me like, well why are these wind turbines burning? I think, and this is word to the wise. If you have a lot of oil or grease or debris in your wind turbine just kinda laying around, if you walk into the top of a wind turbine and you see, you know, your ankle deep in, in oil, you probably ought to clean that up because the first lightning strike that happens, that turbine is a torch.
There’s your safety tip for the week. Clean your turbine. Well, this week we have a, a, a very short list of topics for a really good episode. We are talking about birds, whales, ships. An offshore wind and maybe some politics, but very little. Thank goodness. So it, it’s a, a packed episode. Rosemary has some really good insight into a bird detection system that got approved over in France.
And then we, we get into some Joel things about how we take samples from the ocean bottom and some really cool o v stuff that GustoMSC is working on. So stay tuned. I’m Allen 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 an international renewables expert Rose, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast,
IdentiFlight Has received acceptance from the Grand East region authorities in France and IdentiFlight is a US based company, I think it’s based in Colorado, that provides bird detection systems for wind farms. And their system has, and Joel, I don’t know if you’ve seen this thing, but it’s basically a series of cameras wrapped around a, a pole that’s looking at all directions.
Then it has a camera that swivels around. The, the, the cameras that are sort of fixed are looking for the bird, and then the, the swivel camera, which has stereo vision, locates it, zooms in on, identifies it. The acceptance of identify is the first time that French authorities have validated an automated system for reducing bird collisions in wind farms.
The system can identify multiple species of protected birds, including the red kite, which is a big deal in France. So the success of the system in reducing sys mortality rates supports obviously French and EU regulations for protecting bird species. And, and Rosemary, you’ve done a little of bit of research on this system.
It does seem to be really complicated and, and in the fact that it predicts where the birds are flying. And then only slows down turbines in the bird’s path.
Rosemary Barnes: So I talked to somebody who was managing the environmental stuff at a wind farm that uses this system, and he told me about how it had, how it works, and how it had worked for ’em in, in.
Yeah, in actuality, I think they’ve been, they’ve had it for a few years now, so they’ve got the chance to see how it works. They have one of these systems on a little mask. They’re not that tall. I think they’re like maybe 10, 10 meter tall kind of mask. You put a camera system on, it’s scanning the sky.
When it sees something bird-like, then it will it’ll figure out what kind of bird it is, because usually you don’t care about every single bird death. There’s, you know, specific species that you’re targeting. And he said that when they’re out at site, The system will recognize a, a bird before any, you know, human that’s there has, has noticed it.
So they can see it pretty far away for this wind farm anyway, there’s about one mass per three turbines ish. They have to be able to see, see the turbines. There’s two cylinders around each turbine. And when the bird reaches the outer cylinder that’s when the system goes, okay, we need to you know, watch this bird now.
And then when it reaches the inner cylinder, then they’re like, okay, slow down. And then they pitch the blades, and then it, you know, it, it slows down and, and pinwheels. And it, it’s really active On this particular site, they had a lot of eagles that they were worried about and. They saw that they’re getting 400 turbine shutdowns per day on average over the, we over the year.
It was more in summer than winter. Takes about 30 to 60 seconds to pitch the blades to slow depending on what the wind conditions are, like 1.4 minutes per shutdown. And so, That’s a lot of activity. But he said overall, the AEP loss, the annual energy production loss is less than 1%. And obviously, like a lot less than some of the other strategies that we’ve heard are, you know, like shut down every night or shut down for the month of May, or you, you know, something, something like that, which is obviously gonna give way higher a AEP losses.
So they’ve been pretty happy. They’ve actually got more eagles on the site now than they had before the winter. Wind Farm was built so you know, it’s working, working pretty well and they’ve got really low bird deaths from the turbines with good coverage and they’re just in the middle of doing an, an upgrade to add in another, another system to cover this one turbine.
That’s a bit. A bit shaded and you know, a bit shaded from view. And so they have seen some deaths from that particular turbine, and they’re pretty confident when they add this extra system that they’re going to have close to no deaths from the, the birds that they’re targeting. So what they’re seeing, he told me the number of deaths they’re seeing about one bird and one bat death per per turbine.
But nearly all of those are non-targeted birds. Yeah. So overall it’s been really successful.
Joel Saxum: You know, I, I saw this, this company actually put back in 2019 or so. I think it was one of the first ones that I saw in the market, right? There’s an Envision and there’s an Visist. I think it was in, there’s a couple other ones out there.
Robin Radar
Rosemary Barnes: is another one. Yeah. That they’re
Joel Saxum: so advanced now. I starting to see in my mind I’m thinking about different, Capabilities for this too, right? I’m thinking if I was a, if I was a major airport, I would wanna put this out at an airport and I, and I would, and I would want the AI to be able to recognize drones so I could see when that threat is coming in.
I. Right. Or a military base and drones and certain things like that. Because if you can do this for birds already, you can definitely catch Dr. Pick, pick drones outta the sky.
Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s really true. I, I, you know, that’s one of the questions about wind turbines is the stopping the use of drones, and at least in the states, right, they don’t want you flying drones around wind turbines because of the damage and maybe the wind turbines need to protect themselves a little bit.
But the, the, just being a, a regulation based system, right? It, it’s there to satisfy regulation. We do not have that same requirement in the United States because of the success of the system. Is that going to. And encourage us regulators to, to go down this route.
Rosemary Barnes: I talked to a, a guy also I’ve been talking a lot about people to people about birds and wind farms cause I’ve got a video coming out on that.
Probably around the same time that this episode will be released. But do you guys remember that there was a study it’s mentioned a lot in the media about how you can just paint one of the wind turbine blades black and then, you know, birds won’t. Won’t die anymore. And you know, it’s always mentioned in the media, this study, but never really in practice.
So I got in touch with the lead researcher from, from that paper to, to talk about that. One interesting thing that he told me was that in, there was one US state who saw that study and we’re trying to mandate that it that it had to be a one blade had to be painted black on every wind farm in that.
State where was it? Oregon, he said. And so the legislation passed, but then they realized that it was kind of infeasible and also silly cuz this guy you know, this researcher, he’s an ecologist, right? He’s not, not an engineer, but he said, you know, we painted Blades on three turbines in one wind farm on one Norwegian island.
You can’t just extrapolate that over the whole world. You know, they’re highly likely that it’s not gonna work like this for every bird species in every ecosystem. And in fact, sometimes it might actually do more harm than good. So you really need to recreate the study before you start mandating than everyone does it.
But I think that’s Interesting that, you know, his idea, the idea that they were testing is so simple that it kind of just caught on. Everyone’s like, oh, well why wouldn’t you do it? And don’t really think actually, there are even really simple ideas can cause negative outcomes. And you know, I’ll talk a bit about some of the.
Negative engineering outcomes that you might have if you, you know, wanted to try and have every third blade be black. Yeah. So that was interesting. So there has been people attempt to legislate, but I always think it’s a bit wrong when they try and. You know, legislate a technology that has to be used rather than legislate an an outcome and then let people choose the, the technology that suits them best.
And that’s
Joel Saxum: specifically tough in the United States because people don’t like being told exactly what they have to do. You know, the, the, here’s the difference too in the states that I don’t think a lot of people realize in the wind in industry as far as regulating birds in the states. The individual, individual states don’t have a whole lot of laws around these things, right?
For the most part, there’s none. Except for. When the federal oversight happens, right? So the federal oversight, when it’s the US Forest Service and it’s a protected species, like, and most of those are raptors, right? It’s a certain kind of eagle or you know, like the sage grouse. I know that people that are operating wind farms up in Wyoming and Montana, they can’t bring cranes on site during the month of like, you know, June and July.
Because the sage grouse are mating. And those kind of things. But the big one will be when, as soon as we start having wind farms that take down flocks of ducks and geese, because when you get into the Federal Migratory Bird Act, and that’s what regulates all the hunting of ducks and geese and why you have to have a federal stamp, because the federal laws start to start to dictate what can happen with these birds because they cross state lines regularly.
And that’s when you’re gonna start. We’re gonna start running into trouble. So if some, some senator from some state brings up the fact that flock of ducks was taken down by a wind turbine, well then we’ll have issues. So and that’s where you’ll start to see legislation, I think.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, it was really interesting in the research I did for this video on birds that I’m doing.
I mean, I have to, I I, I would be remiss to not mention in a segment about birds and wind turbines to say, you know, it’s like hundreds of thousands, maybe a million birds are dying in the US for wind farms each year. And it’s. Billions with a b that are, are dying from cats each year. And then, you know, in between there’s power lines and buildings and cars.
So, you know, it’s, it’s a small problem in terms of, you know, total numbers of ways that humans are causing birds to die. Not to mention climate change but. You know, so that aside, it is still a problem, albeit a small one. The biggest changes have come just simply from wind turbine design. So in probably the most famous example of wind turbines killing birds as the ultimate wind farm in California, it was one of the first, I think the first wind farms in the, the US and it was in an area where there was just heaps of heaps of birds.
Heaps of. You know, important birds as well, or I guess every bird’s important, but, you know important species. And they, because it’s really old wind farm, I think it started getting installed in the 1980s. You can imagine wind turbine design has changed a lot since then. And a lot of those original wind turbines have been replaced with modern ones.
So they did a study looking at in the same area how many. Birds were dying from the old wind turbines compared to the modern ones. And per energy, per unit of energy produced, it was 66% lower deaths just simply from modern turbine technologies. So the old turbines were small, their blades came closer to the ground and they, they spin faster.
The small wind turbines, cuz you know, it’s the tip speed that’s important. So a small turbine can have more RPM to keep the same tip speed. But I think the most crucial thing was the tower design. Old turbines had either had a lattice tower structure, you know, like a like a power line pylon. Or they had an external ladder and those were really, really great places for birds to rest or even roost on them.
Same for bats. And so they would have this, Location that they really wanted to hang out. And then every time that they took off from there, they were taking off right directly into the path of a, a turbine rotor. So you can imagine that’s quite hazardous compared to today’s towers. Which one? They, they’re taller and the blades are further away.
And there’s nowhere to perch on a modern wind turbine tower. It’s just a sleek tube of metal with not, you know, there’s no external ladders and stuff anymore either. So just inherently in the design, it’s two thirds reduction with, and that’s before you add any, you know, radar system or AI vision or sonic deterrence or, you know, any of the other methods.
And then the other big thing is just citing, you know, you’re like, now you wouldn’t put a wind farm probably Well, before you put Installer Wind Farm, you have a check to see if there’s any vulnerable species that are relying on that area. And where you do see that there are, then you require additional measures to even further reduce bird deaths.
So it’s, it’s come a long way. Well, Joel,
Allen Hall: Equinor and BP are doing a sediment survey, and I thought this was an, a unique story cause I haven’t seen a lot about sediment surveys. I’ve seen a lot about scanning the ocean bottom for all kinds of whatnot. Old ships ordinance, that kind of thing. But I haven’t seen a sediment survey.
But they put out a, a, a little notification that they’re gonna be in the water doing sediment surveys beginning in June for Empire One and Empire two. So this is part of the Bight auction, right? Is it Empire 1 and 2. A Bight auction? Yep. That’s New York. Yep. They’re gonna be sampling the seabed without excavation, dredging, or the use of sonar or subsurface sound outside of normal mechanical operations, which means that they’re trying to make sure everybody realizes they’re not gonna do anything that affects whales.
That’s what that’s all about, right? But they’re taking 35 sediment core samples. And I was wondering how are they gonna do that quietly? Like what is, what’s involved there to take core samples without excavation or dredging?
Joel Saxum: Well, I would say one of the, one of the reasons that they’re able to do this now is that the pre.
By auction, basically site characterization surveys, they had to be done. You can’t go out there and, and, and develop this site without having some kind of visualization of the surface and subsurface, right? So if they did them, they’d be doing, they’d be doing them twice. So they probably already have sonar, the sonar data and this, the, you know the subsurface, but basically seismic data for looking below the surface to make sure there’s no rocks and things like that.
So that’s stuff they probably already have in a library. However, when you lay cables, you really gotta understand the geotechnical makeup of that first you know, couple meters down, all, sometimes down to 10, down to 15 meters of depth of the sea floor, depending on what the, but the makeup is. And that’s what they’re doing here.
So along that route where they have, this is a planned export cable route, or it’s a planned inter cable array route, they’ve gotta make sure that when they lay that cable down, it’s not just gonna sink. Right, because then you’ve got problems when you’re laying it for construction. The, the whole lifeline of the cable if it starts to sink or move on this surface or in that soil.
So what they’ll do now is, and what they’re saying is they, they’ll sediment core sample. So to do a core sample what they use, if you’re not gonna use a viro core, which is a thing you can do as well, or a C P T, which is a constant I don’t wanna say what CPT is wrong. Cone penetration test is what a CPT is.
And CP T is where you’d basically like put a, you put a rod and you push and push and push, and then you can develop ISU in situ measurements of what the soil basically make and densities are by how much pressure push back on it is. That’s a little bit more advanced, right? That’s, that’s like version two.
Version three is the VIO core, but a sediment core sample right now at the simple level is a lot of times done by what they call a gravity core and a gravity core basically looks like a lawn dart. If you’ve ever played lawn darts, they’re, I think they’re illegal now. They were cool in like, in the seventies and eighties and like, they hurt too many people at, you know, drunk in the backyard throwing ’em around.
So you can’t use ’em anymore. I guess think of it as an arrow. That’s what we’ll think of it as. So it’s like an arrow that you shoot out of a bone arrow with like fletching in the back and they will hold it or, or basically deploy it over the edge of the boat and then drop it. And when it drops, the gravity of this big steel arrow will go into the subsurface and then penetrate down as far as it can basically to refusal by gravity.
And by gravity, I mean there’s a lot of force coming down behind this thing. They’re heavy, right? There are a couple tons and then they a, depending on what kind of soil you’re in, in the world, sometimes they’ll add weight to ’em. So I’ve seen ’em before where they have on like a, on the back by the fletching of what the arrow would be.
There’s like a, you can basically slide 50 kilo, a hundred kilo weights onto it, and all of a sudden you can add two, three tons to this thing as well to make it have more downforce when it goes down. But it goes down and it goes in and think of it like basically a straw going into the soil. And then when you go to pull back up on it from the winch, from the vessel, it closes off the end.
That’s you know, penetrated in. And then you pull that, that core sample up, lay it on the deck, get the core sample out every meter. You’ll basically catalog it as it comes. You’ll have some geotechnical engineers on the deck of the vessel. And then it’ll all be put in samples, put in crates, brought back to shore for an analysis, and then you go another.
You know, 500 yards down the line on this cable route, and then you toomp, you dump another one, and then you’ll do that. That’s, that’s the process.
Allen Hall: So then that gets a geologist. To realize what, like when they go to trench, what they’re up against, when
Joel Saxum: they’re gonna trench what they’re up against, if they need to trench Sometimes because of what you find in these things, you won’t need to trench, but then they can correlate it, right?
So it’s also ground truthing. So at some, like we said in the beginning of this kind of conversation, at the beginning of this whole bite auction, they had to do basically site characterization. Characterization service, so they did sonar and so you have, this is the depth of the water. This is what the surface subsurface looks like.
Okay, that’s great. Then they did some near surface seismic type stuff where they can see basically probably the first 50 to a hundred meters of the. In, into the dirt in a, but in a, like an MRI scan, basically of the subsurface. But, but now you will actually have hard data that you’ve pulled outta the ground to correlate that all to, so you’ll do the sonar scans and everything for the whole corridor of that pipeline, right?
But then, or that power line, and then you’ll go and take the core samples every 500 meters or every half a kilometer or whatever it is to be able to basically ground truth all the data so that you can tie it all together. So if the da, if the data looks like it has, you know, three meters of silt and then five meters of sand, and then a hard, you know, hard, rocky bottom, that’s what it looks like on the data.
That’s great. But now you’ve got ground truthing, actual cone or, or actual Gravity, core sediment, core samples to correlate that to, and if you can correlate it, then, then you’ve got a real good picture of what’s down there. That’s classically how you would do it. Now, the one I, when I was talking about CPT tests or like vio cores, that’s more of a mechanically intense version of taking a, a
Allen Hall: gravity core.
So there’s been some also news related to trenching. Have you seen the latest discussion about the Jones Act and. Trenching and laying of cable. Mm-hmm. There was a recent article discussing it and I, I don’t wanna get too deep into this cause I’m not that well versed in it, but it kind of went like this.
You can drop a cable on the ocean floor without having a Jones Act vessel. You can make, create a trench in the ocean floor without having a Jones Act vessel. When you rock dump, you have to have a Jones Act vessel. Because rocks are merchandise but isn’t a cable. I don’t,
Joel Saxum: I don’t know. I don’t get it. That doesn’t
Allen Hall: make any sense.
No, I know, right. And the trenching part, if they dredged, it would be Jones Act because they are trenching. It’s not Jones Act because
Joel Saxum: they’re leaving the tailings there. It’s fine, but if they were taking the tailings with them, then it’s, then it’s not good because the tailings would have to go somewhere.
What if you did, what if you Dre? What if you dredged and took the tailings and then went and dropped ’em in
Allen Hall: Canada and came back? Well, yeah, that’s a good point. I don’t, I don’t know. That’s a, that’s a really good point. The, the issue about the rock bags or the rock drops is because once you lay the cable, it becomes part of the US waters.
I, I think, essentially makes it part of the US waters when that happens. And so you’re going from sort of us soil to us soil with the rocks. And the rocks are merchandise.
Joel Saxum: But while the cable’s being laid, there’s a thing called like touchdown monitoring, right? Where you gotta, you have to ensure where that cable, where the actually containery is coming off of the O off the back of the cable lay vessel, right?
And that’s called, that’s like that, that big thing coming off the cable lay vessel is called a stinger. And where the cable comes out and off the stinger, there’s a, there’s a monitor point there, and there’s a monitor point at the B at the bottom. So at one point in time, while this thing is being laid or at the whole point in time, once it’s being laid, it’s touching the ground.
And it’s touching a what could be a non Jones Act vessel. So I don’t understand. Cable layout I would think would immediately be the, would be a trigger,
Allen Hall: unless it maybe, cuz
Joel Saxum: it doesn’t reach shore, maybe it’s right when it, as soon as it’s connected to something, then, then it, then it becomes, I don’t know, because yeah, tech technically, you, you might be having, if it’s prosimian or something like that, like you may be having Italian made cable coming in.
And being, or being, so it’s comes, comes from the EU in a on Ave EU vessel. And I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer. We need a Jones Act lawyer. I think everybody
Allen Hall: needs a Jones Act lawyer at this point because these are getting really complicated about who has to use what kind of ship. I just thought the rock dump would not be the one that would be a Jones Act, but I guess
Joel Saxum: then it is.
Unless the rocks are coming from the US mainland, then I
Allen Hall: get it. Yeah, I, I doubt that’s the case too. They’re probably Canadian rocks.
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Joel Saxum: a call today.
Allen Hall: The US Government Accountability Office has agreed to investigate the potential impacts of offshore wind energy development on the US East Coast. The review will focus on the Northern Atlantic area between Maine and New Jersey, and will include impacts on the environment, fishing industry, infrastructure, vessel traffic, and more.
The investigation was requested by a US representative, Chris Smith of New Jersey, and supported by other Republican officials who have concerns about offshore wind projects. Opponents of offshore wind energy cite well death. Off the uscs coast and particularly New Jersey, although federal scientific agencies have found no evidence at linking them to offshore wind preparations the exact scope and timeframes of the inquiry are yet to be determined by the g A o.
Republican officials have called for temporary or permanent halts on offshore wind development. While us senators, democratic senators have requested the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to investigate the well death, so, There has been a big push and pull in New Jersey about the well deaths and mammal deaths, sea mammal deaths dolphins, that, that have been happening.
And there’s clamor that this is caused by wind turbines and some of the sonar scans, I guess this is seminar scans they’re talking about off, off offshore that may be affecting the, the whale’s ability to navigate. I, so far they have zero data and, you know, one of the, the. Most difficult pieces is the researchers that are looking at each of the whales that come on shore, and they don’t, I don’t think they have to, but I think that they are, it, it’s taking forever to get reports back.
Like the death report of this whale sitting on a beach shouldn’t take a week to, to generate Joel. Am I wrong? Especially if it seems like it’s been hit by a boat. How long can that take to. Push out the report.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think, I mean, we, we talked about this and I think we even did a special episode on it a couple months ago, but we, we talked about it at length.
I mean, if there’s a bunch of cuts in this, In this whale then it probably got hit by a propeller. If there, if you did, if you did a quick scan of the whale’s bone system and it has a broken back, it probably got hit by a, a vessel. Like it’s pretty simple. However, I can see what they, what someone would want to dig in and say, well, why did it get hit by this vessel?
Was it confused because of sonars? Something like that. But then you, then you go backwards into, you know, what sonars been used in these ports and in these shipping channels. Since the, since the fifties like this, this isn’t anything new. What, what This the GAO thing here screams just political posturing to me because the Government Accountability Office, like what are, what does the government accountability Office have doing in a scientific study?
They, they don’t, right? So they’re saying, oh, well, we’ll make sure that the scientific people. Are doing their job well, the scientific people have done their job right. It’s already been there’s already been a couple of studies that have been done. So now, so that’s why I’m saying political posturing, Rick, oh, well, since they’re under the control of the Biden administration, us as Republican senators are gonna send the government accountability office, Adam and blah, blah, blah, blah.
So it, it turns into the same thing that we kind of, we’ve talked about many times here where this is not a technical argument anymore. Now this is a political argument.
Allen Hall: It’s exactly where it’s going. And it, it’s, it’s, it’s creating chaos because I think both sides think they’re going to win and I’m not sure anybody’s gonna win out of this.
And that all, all this just revolves upon the Wales at the moment. And so, like the Democratic senators were asking for Noah to do something. Well, Noah is doing something that they’re connected with the University of Rhode Island and have formed a. Five-year partnership to research the impact of wind energy development on marine ecosystems and industries.
The partnership aims to examine the effects of wind en energy development on coastal communities and people living or working near the ocean. So here we go. Here’s the research effort to look at what’s happening in the water around the wind turbine for several years. Of course, it’s gonna take a little bit of time to do this study.
The key, I think the key thing about all of this is faster turnaround. Right. If you looked at the previous reports, it seemed like they had a bunch of data, then it took a year or two to publish it. Why, what is taking so long to do this? We, we designed wind turbines in shorter amount of time and deploy them than it does to prepare a report outta Washington, DC at some point.
Joel Saxum: Private versus public, right? Private industry versus public?
Allen Hall: I guess so. Somebody stick a deadline here and get it done. Because it’s becoming a bigger, bigger problem. I mean,
Joel Saxum: the, the, the whole industry is gonna suffer from all of these things, right? So the whole supply chain and what we were talking about a little bit off air what happens with the financing for these things?
So are these companies that have secure secured financing if they haven’t taken, you know, what would be equate to draws yet? I mean, I know they have because they’re there. There’s tur, there’s turbines. Getting installed now, right? Just New Bedford last week, two weeks ago. They’re like, the towers are here.
Like, those, those have, those, those aren’t done on good. Those, those materials are not built on good faith. Those materials are built on payments, right? So now if you, if you, if you’ve got all this money floating around and all of a sudden everything’s up in the air who’s on the hook for some of this stuff, right?
Is there, do people have insurance policies that deal with business interruption from permitting and, and or if the government puts a stop on ’em? Is that, is that is, could that be qualified as a, you know, force majeure event? I, I don’t know if, if the government steps in and tries to and shuts your wind farm down after you’ve already spent how many hundreds of millions of dollars on
Allen Hall: hardware, that would be totally catastrophic to our project.
To have that
Joel Saxum: happen. And we, and we may talk about here in a bit, but like some of these the majority of offshore wind developers in the US that have won auctions have their their rights to build and construct on places. Some of ’em already already have the construction permits in hand. And now you have, again, the government flaring back up about environmental.
Looking at environmental things in, in the areas. And then also you have the PPA prices skyrocketing and the banks gotta be kind of screaming and everybody’s in the middle. That sounds like a high, high stress place to be right now. I don’t, I don’t envy any of them.
Allen Hall: Not at all. And as we get more wind turbines in the water, you know, one of the big constraints is gonna be ships and SOVs.
And I think there’s been a lot of discussion in the industry about what kind of SOVs do we need in the future. And thinking about how few ships there may be for quite a while, until we can build up a stock of them, the ships are gonna have to be more versatile. Well, Gusto MSC is already looking at it.
So Gusto MSC is designing a modular service and operation vessel, and it’s a new class vessel, I guess I would call it. It’s called Enhydra, M S O V that. It’s modular, which makes total sense. I dunno why, why we haven’t done this before, but it, it, it’s able to do a whole variety of tasks, including probably the most expensive thing that’s gonna happen in the water cable repair and floating wind installations.
Right. So towing in and out and, and doing in inspections, maintenance and repairs, which makes total sense. Right. It the, Joel, you and I had talked previously about what happens if a cable breaks and how expensive that is and what kind of insurance claim that is. Well, Gusto m ffc has seen that, right? And so they’re designing this s o v to handle repairs of cables, cuz it may take a long while to get a, another ship over to where you need it to be.
That can accomplish that task where an s o V could probably do it too. A couple of things about this new class of ships is they’re able to, you know, to, to do not only a variety of things, but they’re fairly big. And they’re run on methanol, or it can be powered by methanol, which produces less of sulfur.
Diox sulfur. Sulfur basically, and and nitrogen related emissions. Right? So that is a unique vessel. This should be, have a lot of draw you think in Europe and the United States, right? I think
Joel Saxum: globally it should be, it’ll be a concept that’s grasped simply because of the need for these vessels. Right now, a lot of the SOVs in.
Northern Europe right now are basically floating hotels, right? Right. I mean, they’re, they are, they do have, they do have some specialized capabilities, right? Where the, you may pull up long keyside and they can drop on different, you know, 20 foot containers, 40 foot containers, and that 40 foot container may be a, a workshop for.
Whatever, pitch bearing, replacement, whatever it is, and they can boom, boom, boom, drop ’em on and that’s great. And, and that’s the way vessels should be made. But they’re not to the point where they’re actually like a really modular and a, and a, a Swiss Army knife per se, of vessels. Right. To be able to be able to do cable repair.
And, and you know, light cable a maybe even. If you could do, if you could do that, plus you had a work class, r o v or an even inspection class, r o v on board that, that is, that’s, that’s huge, right? And that’s what a lot of these things lack is that, that ability, I mean, you know, a work class R O V also costs two to $5 million just for the R O V itself.
So but if you have that, you might be able to do light cable repair. You might be able to do some more intervention work. Some Im imr. IMR inspection, maintenance, repair, things that wouldn’t normally be done off of that vessel, but if you’re gonna build these nice, big, beautiful vessels, I know like the, like the vac fleet, a lot of those are on, they’re on.
Did contract for sometimes 6, 8, 10, 12 years at a crack. Wow. Osted has some of these, like to, to the point where they paint osted on the side of the vessel right next to SVAC because they’re out there for so long. So, so, and, and, and, and, and know that may be a beautiful, big, brand new vessel with an, you know, an ample and walk to work platform and all this stuff on it, but to.
To be honest with you, it’s a, it’s a floating hotel for the most part, with a small, some small workshops and capabilities on it, out and out servicing that wind farm. And if they need specialty stuff, they sometimes have to bring in specialty vessels. And if you have one vessel that can do all of that and be your floating hotel that’s fantastic.
Allen Hall: It’s the future. No doubt about that. Should have been done years ago, but glad we’re doing it now. Well, Joel, there’s a bunch of discussion in Massachusetts and New York about the offshore wind projects, about the viability of them. Mostly that as inflation has risen and the cost or everything has gone up, and there’s a also a big demand for offshore wind turbines that the, the companies and the projects that are already sort of developed are.
Gonna have huge cost increases while they’ve been locked into PPAs that they signed a year or two or three ago. And the operators and owners of these sites are getting really nervous about it. And Massachusetts is, it has been volleyed back and forth between the state and the project owners. Is what they’re gonna do.
The state, Massachusetts has been reluctant to do anything. So once they assign a ppa, they’re not gonna change it. No matter how many times an operator or developer has come to the state, they just bounce them out the door every time. Well, that’s now coming to a head. I think we all discussed probably several months ago that they’re all just gonna default.
They’re just gonna take the penalty and default because you can’t force them to build a farm that they’re gonna lose money on. Well, it’s all come to a head. So the wind farms in, in Massachusetts are seeking to terminate their purchase power agreements and that includes commonwealth wind, who may be forfeiting 48 million and South coast wind which may be forfeiting 60 million.
And the theory is, is that money will go back to the, to the electricity buyers, people like me. The wind farm developers cite inflation rising interest rates, of course, supply chain disruptions. War in Ukraine as the reasons why their projects can no longer be financed. And so that they’re essentially saying, Hey look, we’re gonna terminate just fine us.
We’re fine with it, and we’re gonna reapply for the next round of bidding, of which there is. Okay, so Massachusetts is opening another round of bidding and what they have done is kind lifted up the PPA prices. They haven’t got a cap on them necessarily. What? What they’ve also done is they made the amount of gigawatts they’re gonna purchase and velop these previous two projects that would’ve been tied into the previous P P A.
So I think they’re allowing like 3.6 gigawatts in the purchase of which like 2.4 or is Commonwealth and South Coast. So they’re allowing Commonwealth and South Coast to rebid into this new bidding process, and I think they’ll probably win because how many people, how many companies are gonna be able to bid?
There’s like three or four companies that could possibly bid into that P P A. Auction. Aren’t
Rosemary Barnes: these the same sites that saw such, such ridiculous prices when we, you know, we followed the auctions on this podcast and now they’ve cited a bunch of unforeseen reasons why the projects aren’t profitable. But did anybody say, Hey, we overpaid was there, you know, or we wouldn’t, we wouldn’t pay that much again, and we won’t pay that much now that we know you, you know, the true Finances of a, of one of these projects.
Allen Hall: Yeah. But you, you remember the time in which the, they bid into those projects is that inflation was
Joel Saxum: essentially zero and the interest rates in the states are at like, what, 3.19 was standard and it’s up at seven. Seven now.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but I mean, okay, so I’m, I’m looking to buy a, a house at the moment and I have been for a few years.
So I was looking when interest rates were at. Historic lows. I didn’t plan for, you know, the project of buying a house. And in Australia our interest rates, our mortgages have variable interest rates. So you can’t just say, oh interest rates are at historic lows now. And I’m sure that they will remain that way for the duration of my loan, like you say.
Okay. They’re at historic. Rates now I have to at least be able to afford this this mortgage, if they go back up to average. Why wouldn’t a project developer on a larger scale, not for a home interest rate, but they’re being stung by the exact thing that. You know, me and my partner were able to foresee that and not overstretch ourselves on a, you know, a mortgage we couldn’t afford.
Why weren’t these project developers able to look in their crystal ball and say things don’t stay at historic lows forever? It’s, it’s
Joel Saxum: very frustrating to, to watch because you’re a hundred percent correct, Rosemary. These, the people that are employed by these companies are, you know, they have some very smart economists on the staff that should be planning these things.
But they at this stage are now just throwing up their hands and saying like, Nothing we could, nothing we could have foreseen. Nothing we can do about it. Now we’re pulling out, we’re gonna redo and, and to be honest with you, the Commonwealth win. I’m looking back at the bullet points. Your 48 million penalty.
What? That’s peanuts. I. To be honest with you, right? When the, when this wind farm stands to make billions over its lifetime, 48 million right now is nothing. Pay the fine, redo your PPA and you’ll make it back in the first couple years.
Rosemary Barnes: I guess that’s the reality of it. They, they saw it as, you know, we don’t want to miss out on this.
We don’t have enough information yet, no. Now to know if it’s a good project, but we at least want the chance to go ahead with it, and the fines aren’t that bad. We’re willing to pay that for, you know, just to be. To be in it if it turns out to be good. And they probably knew, you know, if it doesn’t work out for us, it won’t work out for anyone.
And so things will have to be renegotiated. That’s, I, I guess that that’s what
Joel Saxum: they saw. I agree with you, Rosemary. I gotta say that this isn’t, this isn’t one of those things that’s like, the CEO woke up this morning and we had a panicked email. Oh my God, what are we gonna do about this PPA price and do this?
Like this is, there’s been a playbook. There’s been a playbook around this and a flow chart decision tree. That’s three years old that they’re just following. Now in,
Allen Hall: in the state of Massachusetts, there’s been a lot of discussion about cutting off someone who has quote unquote defaulted on a project from bidding on future projects that came and went and, and the legislature and the representatives there.
Have really changed their tune. I listened to a podcast today where they had a couple representatives talking about this in particular. They said, well, we, we can’t close the door because only really four or five companies that can offer power offshore power to Massachusetts. If you cut off one or two, well you’re just gonna raise the price cuz everybody’s gonna see that and just bid higher.
So we, we can’t do that. Which is like, duh. Yeah, sure. And then the question from the interviewer was, well, won’t this raise the prices of electricity in Massachusetts? The obvious answer is yes, right? It has to the representative’s response is, well, global warming, we’re all gonna be, you know, the oceans are gonna rise in Nantucket.
It’s gonna be indoor, six feet of water. And we’re gonna create all these jobs in Massachusetts and New England from all the offshore wind jobs. I think both of those are not great answers because I don’t think Massachusetts in general has seen a lot of job creation from any wind at all. And being in Massachusetts and being involved in the wind industry, I can tell you we’ve had zero sales in Massachusetts, absolute zero and zero contact with the government involved in promoting wind zippo.
So it’s sad. It’s really sad. Do I think that there is an opportunity there? It sh there should be, you’d think
Joel Saxum: that’s a hard ROI pill to swallow for the, the people in Massachusetts. Yeah. Our prices, yeah. Our power prices are more than likely gonna go up. What do we get out of it? A warm
Allen Hall: feeling. We may have some jobs maybe.
Yeah. It’s not, it’s not, the whole thing doesn’t make any sense. At the same time they’re, they’re promoting a hydro. Power. There’s a, a cable that’s coming from Canada with hydropower is gonna run into Massachusetts. So they’re, they’re big proponents of that. And yeah, more power the better. I It’s renewable energy.
Let’s do that too. It just seems like Massachusetts is stuck in a never ending saga of can’t get outta their own way. Wind turbine blade damage occurs every day all around the world. And finding knowledgeable engineers to get your blades back in service is a serious problem. And as we know, operating with damaged blades is really, really risky.
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Connect with the global Blade experts at Wind Power Lab by visiting Wind power lab.com. But in New York, they’re having similar issues, by the way. So pretty much the, all the major offshore wind developers in New York are requesting amendments to their power purchase agreements CI citing financial viability concerns due to inflation and interconnection costs, and the internet connection costs are getting higher and higher by the minute.
So we’re talking about Beacon Wind, empire Wind, sunrise Wind, which is Ecuador, bp, and an or dead, essentially. Eversource was involved, but Eversource is getting out of that. But unlike Massachusetts, where they’re gonna go ahead and bid into a new PPA auction, what’s happening in New York? They’re just asking for basically price adjustments.
So they’re petitioning the state for price adjustments. And those price adjustment requests are public. So you can, you can go ahead and look at those and I decided to sort of dig into a little bit, but the price increases they’re looking for are not like a percent or two. Joel, they’re like 20% increase, which is pretty substantial.
Now you, you think, well, if you ask for a 20% price increase, you better have some data to back it up. Well, they do. Because the, the developers went to Wood McKenzie and asked for an industry analysis, looking at the offshore wind industry in general, and then the specific of the East coast to see what that looks like and what the best options were for putting turbines in the water.
And that report is fascinating. Now, part of it has been redacted, but there’s a ton of information in it about. Building a blades, rosemary and building ’em to cells and, and building a towers and where you’re gonna get the steel and all that’s in this, in this report. And it’s, it doesn’t look good. And the summary, sort of the executive summary kind of goes like this, if, if you delay putting wind turbines in the water now and say you delay it two, three years, cuz that’s sort of the general feeling like, well, things aren’t going so great right now, let’s just delay it a couple years and inflation will come down.
This will be easier. The fact of the matter is, as according to Wood McKenzie is, it won’t be easier because the demand for offshore wind is gonna be so high and there’s so few players in it that your ability to purchase components is gonna get higher and the prices are automatically gonna go up, only gonna get worse, is what they’re saying.
Oh, they’re gonna get worse. Yeah. So you better do it now. You better eat the additional PPA prices because when 2030 comes around good luck. The one piece I thought was probably the most interesting is just looking at where we’re at now and what we could possibly do in the next couple of years to get offshore turbines in the water.
How close are we gonna get to this? 30 gigawatts by 2030? It looked like from the McKinsey report. The McKinsey report, that they’re gonna be about 40% short. That was my interpretation of the data. Now we weren’t the only, the US citizen, the only ones gonna fall short for sure. Everybody suffers somewhat in this, but 40% short is not good.
It’s just not good. And there’s really not much to do about it. I think when McKenzie’s saying that US needs about 25 billion in investment in vessels, foundations, blades, towers, the whole thing. And the problem is, as everybody wants bigger and bigger turbines, It gets harder and harder to make those, like making the tooling for blades gets harder, making, you know, moving the blades around gets harder.
It’s just fewer and fewer companies able to do this. I know we had this discussion a week ago maybe that maybe buying a smaller turbine be easier. That seems to be part of the conclusion. As we keep pushing bigger and bigger, it’s gonna get harder and harder, cuz fewer and fewer companies should be able to do it and you just can’t produce them as fast.
Does that make, does that make sense to everybody? Yeah, I think so. I don’t know what to do about it. You, I don’t see anybody. What’s, what’s the alternative right now? Is there one as Wood McKenzie just nailed it and say it’s just gonna be ugly? I. So 2035 and just grant and bear it and move on. Is, is that
Rosemary Barnes: what we need to do?
No, I think that with these like quite long out projections, they’re not really predicting the future. They’re predicting the future based on a certain set of assumptions. But you know, given that there is such a huge demand and will be such a problem to supply it and prices are gonna go up, there’s gonna be a lot more people that want in on want in on that.
And so supply chains aren’t gonna behave. The way that they are now into the future, there’s gonna be a lot more people trying to, you know, take, take a piece of that lucrative pie and so things, things will get better.
Allen Hall: So is it just a matter of time? But I think that’s, that’s the question, right? We’re moving too slow and I think everybody agrees to that.
But there’s not been a big effort to change that. There
Rosemary Barnes: isn’t enough incentive yet to get in there and take, take the risk. And, you know, so it’s one thing to have a goal and say, oh, okay, we’ll need to open this many more factories, but are we sure that we’re gonna do what it takes to meet those goals? In which case, you know, it would make sense to, to open those factories.
Or do we think that it’s, you know, just like a, a nice, easy, clever political thing to say, but actually there isn’t gonna be any support. To, you know, make sure that that things go the way they need to, to get to those goals, in which case, you know, it’s a huge risk to put in a factory. So I think that you just need more certainty for people that would, would come in and provide solutions.
Do
Joel Saxum: we have enough capital? Resources, human resources, engineering resources, and all of these things to go around to make this happen. Because my thought is, is like there, it may be there, but it would take a massive industrial shift for some companies that have these resources to get into this play. To maybe be good and profitable for the next seven to 12 years.
And then what are they gonna do after that? Once the i, the build out will never be complete. Right? Once we get to, it’s like, it’s like what my dad used to say, it’s like weed eating in a graveyard. Once you’re done cleaning everything up, you gotta start right back over again. Right. So once we’re done, once we’re basically done with what we believe will be probably be our build out in the next 25 to 30 years, we gotta start back over re repowering and refurbishing and all this.
So there will always be an ongoing work there. But for companies to really, to, to, to say, I, I’m just thinking out loud. Like take, you know, like there was a press conference the other day from Shell, shell has a new c e o, Shell’s new c e o came on and said, you know what guys? Wind isn’t working out that well for us.
We are going to, he didn’t say we’re gonna say screw renewables and we’re only gonna do oil and gas. But what he did say is we’re gonna focus on the things that we’re good at and that have made us profitable until up to this point. And we’re gonna, and we’re gonna, and we’re gonna focus there. So that’s one big major oil and gas company saying, not necessarily that they don’t believe in renewable energy or the energy transition or anything like that.
They’re just saying like our, our. Return for our investors is better for them and better for us if we stay in our lane right now. And, and that’s a, and that’s a big player in the market. So is there, is there a lot of that, is there some of that going on that, you know, what, like you said, Rosemary, that some people are staying by the sidelines.
Is it worth the risk to jump into it? Is, is it, is it worse the risk to, to either amend change. Transition or cross pollinate their technical and industrial expertise from where they are and all their capital resources to something else. Or do they just stay
Allen Hall: in their lane in terms of capacity and ability to create supply chain?
We need to double what we could possibly do to get to some of these goals. So even if we’re like ripping and doing and building and just head down, let’s do this. We’re still gonna be about, need to double that again. To get to where we want to go. That’s in, do we have it? I, I don’t know
Joel Saxum: if we have it.
There’s crazy numbers thrown around, right? The, the, the trillions of dollars that need to be spent for a complete energy transition. Like, is that capital available?
Rosemary Barnes: It is possible. It’s a matter of whether we care enough, whether we feel the urgency, whether we, you, you know, want to take. The, I guess it’s inefficiencies that you get from suddenly moving much, much faster than you used to on those kind of projects where there’s a will, there’s a way, right?
Is there a will that we, so far there hasn’t been, and or not enough of one I’m still hopeful that we’re gonna get there, but it’s gonna be messy for a little while. You can’t just suddenly change gears and you know, have everything happening smoothly and efficiently and, you know, great cost effectiveness.
It it. Things will be shaken up
Joel Saxum: for a while. I think the problem, I know one of the problems on that respect in the US is more people are concerned about the bottom dollar than they are saving the climate or saving the environment or the energy transition, right? The majority of things, the majority of major decisions in the US are made on Wall Street, and that just depends on where, where money’s going and what’s happening with it.
And if, and if that, if the best idea is inefficiency, it just won’t happen or that, or it’s been slow to
Rosemary Barnes: happen. I think beyond even that, like if you look in the long run, any, any of the studies that I’ve seen about, you know, a, a net zero future or at least a hundred percent renewable electricity grid you go out a couple of decades, that’s always the cheapest solution is renewable energy compared to fossil fuels.
But It doesn’t mean that every step along the way is, is cheaper. And so that’s where, you know, it’s hard as an engineer because you’re like, okay, like keep your eyes on the prize guys. We’re, we’re moving towards something that’s just better from every perspective. We just need to get through this, this little bump, and then it will be, you know, downhill from here.
But it’s where, you know, politics comes into it and psychology comes into it. And so I think that’s what makes it so frustrating for engineering types where you can see this is, this is better in the long run, but people don’t always think of and implement the best solutions for the long run. So
Allen Hall: there’s only so much cash in the world to do a project and.
Money is being used for other things at the same time, you gotta figure out a way to distribute it where it does make sense. And right now we’re saying we don’t have enough money to do these projects at the speed where we want to do them. I think that’s what’s happening. If there’s money sitting on the sideline, I do not know about it.
Because you think that money. Would be come to the forefront in a situation like this and it just hasn’t. Well, Danish wind turbine maker Vestus has security contractor repower, the Twin Ridges wind farm in Pennsylvania that’s owned by Vitol. They currently have a whole bunch of Senvion, M 92, 2 0.05 megawatt wind turbines, and they’re going to put in 68 beautiful V one ten two 0.0 megawatt models.
But they’re gonna crank them up a little bit to get to the 2.05 megawatt output, just like the sym Vion machines. It’s, it’s a big project and Joel Vestus has got them to sign a 20 year a o m Active Output Management 5,000 service agreement for optimized performance of the turbines. So in this REPOWERING project justice has signed a long-term management agreement.
That’s amazing. And we love these Repowering projects because it just shows the continuing growth of wind, right? You, you gotta keep the, those, those active wind farms active, don’t let ’em go away. And, and Repowering is the way to do that. And Ira Bill is really helping with that. So congratulations to the Twin Ridges Wind Farm in Pennsylvania.
You are, or at Wind Farm of the Week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News. Our weekly newsletter and check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
