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This week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast, the crew covers everything from high-tech wind turbine inspection worms to turbine toilets. Allen, Rosemary, Joel, and Phil dive into the challenges of wind turbine manufacturing and recycling, discussing how Europe and China compete in the global wind market. The team explores how turbines operate far offshore, the need for onboard amenities, and the logistics of servicing turbines miles out to sea. Whether it’s innovative inspection tools, blades recycling advances, offshore turbine operation, or manufacturing competitiveness, this week’s Uptime podcast tackles the nitty-gritty of wind farm operation and equipment. Grab your coffee and get ready for an energetic dialogue on all aspects of wind energy.
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Uptime 187
Allen Hall: Rosemary, a couple of Australians have decided to book continuous cruises. And they have actually done 51 cruises back to back starting about a little over a year ago now, and they spent 450 days living on a princess cruise or a princess ship so far. And they claim that it’s cheaper than living in Australia.
So they’re retired. They don’t have any place to be, but I guess living in Australia is pretty expensive and it’s actually cheaper. To get a cabin on a cruise ship where they just make all the food and you can look at the beautiful ocean and live on a cruise ship. So Rosemary, there’s hope in the home search in Australia, you just get a cruise.
Rosemary Barnes: I can’t think of anything worse than living on a cruise ship. Yeah, I like my personal space. I get seasick. I like to, yeah, be outside and experiencing nature and in charge of my own life. But I think that I, it’s not that they said it’s cheaper than living in Australia.
They said it’s cheaper than living in a retirement home. In Australia. Yeah, but a retirement home has nurses and stuff. They’ve obviously got good health if they are not concerned about only having access to the, little dinky sick room on a cruise ship. It’s catchy, and if they love cruising and, they’ve got the money, then…
Go for it, but yeah, no, I can confirm that it’s not cheaper to go on a cruise than to just, pay rent and buy groceries in Australia.
Allen Hall: I don’t know, the buffets are pretty well stocked on those cruise ships. You’ll be well fed. The dessert bar, the chocolate fountain, come on Rosemary, they have a pool, Shuffleboard.
Rosemary Barnes: Honestly, like I wouldn’t do a cruise for more than a weekend and I would only do that if I had a good reason to suffer through it. A cruise is not my idea of a good time. I’m not a cruising personality.
Allen Hall: Phil you’ve been on a cruise, come on.
Philip Totaro: No, and I never will.
Allen Hall: Joel, you been on a cruise?
Joel Saxum: I have a 17 foot boat that I go fishing on, if you count that as cruising.
Allen Hall: Wow, we got a lot of land lovers here.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s one of the main reasons why I decided not to pursue being an astronaut because I just don’t want to be trapped in, inside for, weeks on end. That sounds horrible to me.
Allen Hall: Wait a minute. Wait. When did this happen? When were you going to be an astronaut?
Rosemary Barnes: When I was a teenager, I wanted to be an astronaut and, I went as far as studying aerospace engineering.
Joel Saxum: Does Australia have a space program?
Rosemary Barnes: No, we don’t have a space program. That’s the other problem.
I would have had to probably, pursue American citizenship.
Joel Saxum: You have a good Arctic research program. You could have done some Arctic research. That would have been a good one for you guys.
Rosemary Barnes: I still hope to go to Antarctica. I applied actually for a for a program for yeah, media to go do a trip to Antarctica. I didn’t get in, but I’m going to apply again.
Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary, we can talk to Elon and get you one of those rides with SpaceX.
Yes,
Rosemary Barnes: I, I’m this is me asking.
Allen Hall: Rosemary wants to leave the planet.
Rosemary Barnes: Yes. Space tourism is more up my alley than actual career astronaut.
Allen Hall: I think Rosemary’s too tall.
Joel Saxum: Were you going to be an astronaut too, Allen?
Well,
Allen Hall: as soon as you cross about six foot tall.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’m under six, six foot. I squeak in just under six foot, so I’m okay. You’re yeah, I’m just under.
Philip Totaro: Joel he wouldn’t survive the worm from Wrath of Khan, so he’s not going to do well in space.
Allen Hall: I’m not doing that, no. That was terrorizing when that movie came out.
That was a long time ago. That was… They give you some sleepless nights. It’s like the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. Phil, we’ve been getting a lot of people who listen to the podcast, trying to reach us via email. And what they do instead is they hit us on Twitter or on LinkedIn, on DMing, they drop into my DMs and send me notes about the podcast.
And I said just contact Rosemary. She’s our point of contact and Rosemary got tired of it. So she said, can you make an email address? And Okay, so we did. So if you want to contact the Uptime podcast, just email us at uptime@wglightning.com. And Joel or Rosemary will get back to you within 24 hours.
That’s what they promised me. It is a good place to reach us and if you have a product or a company you want to be highlighted on the podcast we haven’t heard of and there’s a lot of new technology out there, email us. Yeah, we love to hear about it.
So GE Aerospace Research is demonstrating a soft robot called the sensor worm for jet engine inspections. Now, Rosemary, when I saw this, I thought, no one’s going to use this on a jet engine. They’re going to use this, totally use this on a wind turbine. And this little sensi worm is it looks to be tethered.
It looks like sometimes it has a cable behind it, sometimes not, but it’s like a little inchworm robot that can wiggle itself through small crevices and it can detect defects in the surface corrosion, measuring coating thicknesses. It has a little camera on it, so you can see where it’s going, but it opens up the possibility of.
Looking in tight places you otherwise couldn’t maybe couldn’t get a borescope in or couldn’t look around the corner. You can put this little sensi worm and drop it in there and it’ll squirm its way over to where you need to investigate a product, a gearbox or. Any kind of component, I guess it’s looks like neat technology that she’s been working on.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s not just neat. It’s adorable. As I don’t think that I’ve ever described any technology we’ve covered on this podcast as adorable, but this one is, I need to stick some googly eyes on it and then it would just be perfect. I definitely highly recommend that everyone Google this as a really cute YouTube video showing this little sensor worm out and about on adventures.
It reminds me a lot of the Very Hungry Caterpillar. I don’t know if, everyone remembers that from their childhood or maybe they’ve got kids they read that book to, but yeah, there’s this little worm is, the little worm that could is get into little crevices and I don’t know, does so with a smile on his face, it looks like.
I guess that it’s expensive for wind at first, which is why, marketing it for aero applications first, but I would hope that it’s going to, after a few years, it’s going to get cheap enough that we can be, yeah putting these into inspect blades or maybe, even repair blades in places where people can’t reach.
That’s definitely a big problem in the wind industry. Any, anything that happens inside a blade past. the maximum entry distance which is most of the blade, it’s just bad luck. You’ve got to go out, you’ve got to cut into it from the outside. So yeah this could help.
Allen Hall: Joel, I was going to, Rosemary’s hit on this.
Which is access, right? In certain parts of the Blades, when we go inspect them, you got these little rovers, right? But the rovers cars are, still have height to them, they have all these little sensors on them to, but you think that you drive the rover car up and then the sensor worm would hop out and just wiggle its way to where you really want to look, which is close to the tip, right?
Joel Saxum: The smallest rover that I know of in the marketplace right now is about… 20 centimeters wide and about 20 centimeters tall. I think it’s 17 centimeters tall. So that’s the smallest it can get into. Now, if you’re in, if you’re in the leading edge chamber or in the trailing edge chamber, that really limits you.
If you’re in a dual shear web application, but. Even like Rosemary said, you can’t get very far in these blades. If it’s a 50 meter blade, you’re probably able to get 20 meters into it. If so, with something like this, maybe 25 meters. Being able to go in a little bit, or a lot bit further, with this thing as tiny would be huge.
It’s just, time what kind of sensors can you put on it, cameras or things like that. I’m thinking, in my mind, I’m thinking, is this thing small enough to put inside of a drain hole? Could we do that? Then you wouldn’t have to, ba Otherwise, basically, yeah, you gotta You got to go drop it off with a crawler of some sort, but the other applications I’m thinking about as well as all of rotating equipment, right?
So everything, anything that you can use a bore scope for now, you can get further in hopefully you don’t lose the dang thing, but you could get further in on any kind of bore scope operation into the gear boxes or anything like that as well.
Philip Totaro: You could do bolt inspection. Although there’s plenty of tools that do bolt inspection, but again, I don’t know if you have.
If you wanted to implement like a more complicated bolt structure that was potentially less accessible, or you wanted to do pitch or yaw bearing inspection or something like that, this could come in handy.
Allen Hall: It does seem like there’s applications in wind industry. Seriously, there are places where there’s a lot of tight areas and some turbines and you could definitely throw this into your tool bag if it works out. I’m surprised that GE hasn’t developed it further to put it into practice somewhere. I know they’re pushing it on the aircraft side with the jet engines, but It does seem like there’s a lot of other industries where it’d make some sense to use something like this. It’s neat technology.
And check out the YouTube video. You ever see the Wrath of Khan? Remember you see that movie, Star Trek? They put the little bug in the helmet and put it on the guy and it goes in his ear and then it controls the guy. That’s exactly what I thought of when you said you’re gonna put this thing in the drain hole, Joel.
I’m like, that’s a little eerie?
Joel Saxum: It could, this thing could be used, it could be used offshore to inspect toilets in the new turbines out there.
Allen Hall: Ohhh. Why hadn’t GE thought of that? They got 650 researchers working on the sensor worm thing, or in total, not just on the sensor worm thing. But you’d think somebody would say, toilets, that’s where the money is.
The Pegasus Welfare Solutions Group has delivered a quote unquote welfare solution to the Aberdeen offshore wind farm. And you’re saying what is a welfare solution? It’s a toilet that goes on offshore wind turbines because it is a problem. Obvious problem. It’s what happens when?
They, the agreement with the Aberdeen Wind Farm is a, has a three year service agreement with the operator, which is Vattenfall, right? So the Swedes have connected with Pegasus to provide this solution. And this Pegasus welfare solution is a patented in tower turbine toilet for all 11 turbines at this farm.
So this has got to be a pretty complicated thing if you’re patenting a toilet. The contract covers training, consumable supplies and servicing of the unit, right? So that, as Phil mentioned earlier today, what does training involve with these toilets? I’m not sure. Do they come with a manual? Are they that complicated?
Rosemary Barnes: But what do you do with it? Like you, then you’ve got to take it down again with you or, is it like being cartridges exchanged by drone or what? I assume that’s what the training is about.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, but the reality of the situation is there’s no toilet out there. So when some, when you go to work on a wind turbine, if you’re in a CTV, crew transfer vessel or an SOV, you have a walk to work or you have the vessel come up next to the transition piece. You get off, you get on, the boat goes away.
The boat does not hang out there. Now, the boat has a restroom on it, and that transition now, it’s dangerous for one, making that transition to the transition piece of the wind turbine from the vessel. So that’s dangerous, so you want to limit those kind of transfers as much as you can. But it also burns a lot of fuel to be on DP, if you’re on dynamic positioning, if you’re in an SOV, and it also takes a lot of time.
It takes time to come back in, come back out, if someone’s I have to go to a potty break. Putting these toilets in offshore wind turbines, It’s probably a really good OPEX move for the money spent in service.
Rosemary Barnes: I laughed so hard when I saw this. I said yeah, this eliminates the need to return to a vessel to use restroom facilities.
And I’ve never worked offshore, but I have worked onshore plenty of times. And no one is climbing down the tower to go find a toilet or even find a nice, isolated tree. The men are going up there and the women are holding it. So yeah that’s how it works in reality.
I think it’s actually a really good gender equality thing. If they’re going to have toilets up there, because I can tell you, this is something that you’re thinking about every day that you go out on site. You’re like I shouldn’t get dehydrated. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of benefits to being dehydrated all day.
If you’re yeah. Got to climb up a turbine. You might be there for 12 hours, like it’s something that you’re thinking about. I can assure you.
Allen Hall: So what is happening in Aberdeen, right? Aberdeen’s on the North Sea Joel? The North Sea is like one of the most turbulent places on the planet, right?
So what are they doing? Are they going on top of the turbines? And then, that just sounds, one, it sounds extremely dangerous, and two, messy.
Joel Saxum: Water bottles. Water bottles, man.
Allen Hall: Water bottles?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And then in onshore as well, it’s not to park the car in certain areas underneath the turbine because you might, get a little precipitation on your roof, depending on projectile dynamics.
Philip Totaro: You know what? This is going to be one of the weirdest episodes we have ever done.
Rosemary Barnes: But it’s facts. This is number one question that I get asked by teenage girls when I, talk in high schools about working with in the wind industry, it gets us every single time and always by a woman.
So yeah, I think that maybe, it’s not such a big deal for men and especially in an all male crew, but. If it’s a, mixed gender crew, or, usually just one, one woman up with a bunch of guys, it’s super awkward.
Allen Hall: Yeah, so I do, this is really interesting though, because I don’t, I do not know what’s happening off the coast of the United States right now.
You would have to think what Vineyard Wind’s going in right now. There’s a couple others that are going to happen. I don’t think there’s any provisions for that at all, weirdly enough, in my state of Massachusetts, where that would be a top priority. I don’t think they have anything like that.
Philip Totaro: No. This is because this company also has other, a few other contracts in the UK and I think maybe one in France or Germany, I want to say.
But this is not a common… Accommodation that’s actually made. So Allen, you asked before if this is like in the budget, I’d say most of the time, not necessarily. So kudos to Vattenfall for actually being proactive. And again, whether it was a gender equality thing or just, a personal comfort thing.
It’s certainly helping the people who are out there, like Rosemary said, for potentially 12 hours a day, or even sleeping aboard the, on, on the foundation, potentially if you have to be there for service, for a couple of days or something. Hopefully not, but there are turbines that also have that type of personal accommodation, and again, not all of them have necessarily taken into account this type of personal wellness and hygiene.
Allen Hall: Are there sleeping quarters in some of these offshore turbines? I guess that would make sense to me put a small fridge in there?
Philip Totaro: Yeah, it’s not, no, not like that. It’s basically just a cot. If you’ve seen the movie Tenet there’s a scene at the, towards the beginning of the movie, I actually just watched it I didn’t quite get it, so I’m gonna have to watch it again.
But, there’s a scene at the beginning where you can see the little setup at I think it was one of the wind farms in Sweden or Norway, I wanna say. I don’t remember which.
Allen Hall: I haven’t seen that before. I guess it would be a thing. The further you get offshore, the more you’d think that you’d put a fridge and some snacks and a cot somewhere, just in case.
Philip Totaro: To be blunt, most of the time now, even though Joel mentioned before how these… CTVs don’t necessarily loiter after they’ve done the crew transfer. The, they’re designing vessels now, more of the SOV vessels and things that are maybe a little bit intermediate to larger, that can serve as kind of motherships, and they might have multiple CTVs that are associated with the mothership.
So they might actually transfer crew back to these, they call them flotels I want to say Sea Wind is one company I know that, that does these kind of vessels where, if they have crew that are going to be out, at a project site offshore for, extended duration, let’s say there’s a, fleet repair of cables or there might be something with a series of blades that they have to do.
They might actually have that accommodation. It’s rare to have an actual personal accommodation on the turbine. But again, there must be a specific reason why Vattenfall wanted this solution for this project.
Allen Hall: Joel, I see a coffee table book in our future. Toilets of Wind Turbines.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s just got this one page in it.
Philip Totaro: Allen, the anti wind turbine people are gonna just take that and twist it and that’s not gonna end well for anybody.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, one page is this toilet and then the other next page is just, yeah a yellow bottle of like mineral water or something.
Allen Hall: Hey Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication.
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The EU is considering investigating if China uses subsidies to promote its wind turbine manufacturers. And I think the answer to that is obviously yes. Who doesn’t? This could happen this month as Europe is looking. To protect its wind industry and with the Siemens Gemesa situation that is happening and Vestas, not in great financial shape.
There’s going to be a lot of pressure on the EU to look at China. Now this is in reaction to unfair practices. The EU had a recent probe about China’s electric vehicle market. Same sort of thing. And China was really upset about the EV market. Or there are. Trying to limit EVs from China coming into Europe, obviously there’s a huge market in Europe for EVs and China can definitely deliver there, but Europeans are very protective of their territory.
So it’s causing really a kind of conflict here on the, in the renewable sector by itself for a moment. Obviously, a lot of wind turbine components come from China still to the major manufacturers in Europe. So this isn’t like the wind turbines are completely made in Europe. They’re not. But this does create a weird tension in the renewable space, doesn’t it?
Where European companies are dependent upon Chinese components and China’s manufacturing a lot of the wind turbines, pretty much a hundred percent in country, not being able to enter that marketplace with a delivered product. How do they navigate this without this blowing up into a much bigger problem?
Philip Totaro: Right. This is a great question and it’s something that’s evolved into, the heart and soul of the industry at this point, this is almost like a, a internal battle that we have to decide on, are we going to continue just leveraging cheap Chinese made goods?
As a mechanism that creates price competition and puts pressure on the Western OEMs who are already facing a lot of margin pressure as it is or are we actually going to allow the Chinese to potentially do what they frankly want to, which is come into Western markets and slowly but steadily build enough market share to the point where they can take over.
So that said, the question then becomes okay, if the Chinese aren’t going to be able to. Build their cheap goods in China, export them to Western markets. Is that a good thing for the industry, number one? And then is it a good thing for consumers? The first question, if it’s good for the industry, you have to balance the, lesser cost of, these goods against the tax revenue loss and the jobs that are potentially being lost by having the goods made outside of, if it’s the EU territory.
Versus, more expensive turbine costs in our case, or solar cost translates into higher project CapEx, which translates into the necessity to have higher PPAs, which means that all of us as electricity consumers pay the penalty for that. So the question is there a point at which we can reach a happy balance?
Because, certainly in this latest round of inflation, we’ve all felt the pinch of increasing prices on consumer goods, on, on electricity, on everything. And there’s got to be a breaking point because at the end of the day, I don’t feel like paying 37 for a cheeseburger. Yes, everybody’s entitled to a living wage, but we’ve got to be able to come up with a workable solution that Recognizes the fact that the Chinese are here, whether we want them
or not.
Joel Saxum: To back up what you were saying there, there’s a, there was an article put up by the Enercon CEO, Juergen Chesky, right? And he says without political action, Europe’s onshore wind market will soon be in Chinese hands. But an interesting thing that he says in the article, project developers report aggressive offers from Chinese manufacturers that are already up to 30 percent below the prevailing market price.
So that’s happening in Europe right now. And he also goes on to say, in addition, Chinese competitors, bolstered by government support, operate with unethical financing models, where they give grant full advances, customers pay only years later after the entire wind farm is commissioned, and the European manufacturers just can’t compete with that.
He goes on in the article to state some ideas, right? Which is great, right? He says, here’s the problem, here’s maybe some solutions. One of his ideas is to say, in a European tender, because he’s not only fighting the Chinese here, in this article, he’s talking about fighting against the IRA bill, because the IRA bill basically, subsidizes energy in the U. S. at about 160, 000 per megawatt, right? He’s saying, we have to fight that, now we’ve got to fight the Chinese, so one of the things that we can do as a group if you’re a project developer within Europe is you can add extra points, put them to the top of the list if you’re a European manufactured goods, and that should be, that should get some extra bonus points within the tender process for project developers, so there’s definitely something going on here, and the idea that Europe has severed ties with Russia on gas, or trying to, right?
And going to renewables, but now they’re end up in having to rely on China. That’s scaring a lot of people politically.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Isn’t it a good idea to be proactive? Do we need to wait until this gets to the same point as we’re at with, rare earths and most of the other critical minerals where.
Yeah, all of the battery stuff, yeah solar panels, although solar panels, I think is a bit different because China was, legitimately developed those manufacturing processes that were a large contributor to the cost going down. And it’s not the same with wind energy.
They they haven’t developed the broad technology that has made windows successful as it is today. That was primarily Europe. So then, it’s gone to China and then come back, but, do you get to the point where all, every manufacturer except for China goes bust and then everyone realizes, oh, we actually need a, a supply chain that isn’t a single country and then starts to fix it with.
Yeah, like stuff like the IRA and Europe’s equivalent can’t, yeah, can’t we be preemptive? And I know that working in the industry myself, at least five, maybe a few more years ago than that, it was really clear when we were pricing new products to come onto the market, even if you just add up the, like the actual raw materials that are involved in what you’re trying to make, You still could usually not match the price that these were coming out of China for.
It’s been obvious for quite a number of years that something is a little bit. A little bit funny with the pricing models and it’s not that, I can say with certainty, it’s not just, poor engineering on the part of the European manufacturers or a lack of effort or getting, too comfortable with having it too good in the market and be able to charge too much and getting lazy.
It, it’s not like that. And we see the results in, all of the non Asian manufacturers are really struggling. with profitability. And I think that part of the reason is that, they’ve been having to compete with on price with companies that aren’t playing by the same rules as everybody else.
And so we’ve seen, like great with, for the industry, it seemed really great that we’ve had just really steep price reductions, but I think we’ve, dipped under the natural point of what turbine should be selling for now. And this is probably a big part of the reason. And If we want to install gigawatts and gigawatts over the next couple of decades, then you actually need profitable companies and, continuing innovation and that sort of thing.
And I do think it’s definitely worth getting ahead of these issues and not just waiting for companies to go bankrupt before you start to respond.
Philip Totaro: Just keep one other thing in mind, too. The current price for wind turbines in China, the average price, is, was just quoted the other day at being around 1, 900 yuan per kilowatt.
That basically, when you convert it, is about 330 to 340 thousand dollars per megawatt. That is a preposterously low number. And that includes the tower, by the way. Because sometimes they’ll quote you numbers that don’t include the tower. That includes the tower and, that’s competing up against the global market average, excluding China now, which is closer to about 980, 000 to, most markets are inching back up to about 1 million a megawatt if they’re not already higher, there’s going to have to be a balance achieved with this because the Chinese have been working on this Bye.
And trying to get more credibility in Western markets for the past 20 years, they play a very long game and they’re not looking at next quarter, they’re looking at what this market is going to look like 10 years from now and how they’re going to shape and influence it.
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Joel Saxum: today.
Allen Hall: Moving on to India, because this is the center of all this activity with Chinese wind turbines and where they’re going in the world at the minute is, I think, really going to be focused on India. Envision is the top wind turbine supplier in India, ahead of Suzlon and Siemens Gamesa.
And in 2022 and 23, they booked over two gigawatts of orders in India. And this fiscal year, it looks like it’s going to be bigger. So there is a huge push there if I envision to, to go into places where the wind market is unstable at the minute, so it’s on. You’d think would be the leader in India, but it clearly is not.
And it seems Kamesa has been in that area for a while. And GE made noise this week saying they’re going to be pushing heavily into India also, so that, the growth in India is going to be big, but Envision has wind turbines that are designed for that marketplace. The 3. 3 megawatt turbine.
Is really good for, because India doesn’t have great wind speeds, but pretty consistent winds and they’re on a push for 100 gigawatts of wind power by 2030. That’s which they’re going to need a lot of wind and turbines. And so there are, there’s opportunities for Chinese suppliers to push into different places.
Brazil obviously was probably one of those places, India is another. Does, why worry about Europe? I, and we have seen, I think Joel, you’ve seen it and maybe Rosemary, you’ve seen it too in Australia. You see a lot of Chinese representation of wind turbines at conferences where they’re just testing the waters, trying not to make too many waves at these conferences, they’ll tell you that they don’t intend on selling anything.
They’re just there to get information and see what’s happening in the marketplace. All true, sure, but at the back end of this thing, there has to be some sort of sale. Otherwise it wouldn’t be people out testing the waters. Does this kind of turn into a little more of a global trade issue just because of the nature of the countries that are in play at the moment in terms of who is friendly with whom?
Joel Saxum: I think you’re absolutely correct, Allen with, so Envision here, interesting thing about Envision, Envision actually has an engineering specialty house in Colorado. Which is an oddity for a Chinese OEM of anything. But what they’re doing is taking advantage, like you said, of tumultuous markets.
They’re not gonna go headstrong, envision a Ming Yang or a Goldwind, go headstrong into a market where they can’t really compete yet. But they’re grabbing little bits and information and building their own things in these… Developing markets, there’s a lot of also the same thing in, the APAC regions full of it in Vietnam and Thailand, things like that, but they’re going to build up their knowledge base and their product in prove it in those markets.
And then you will start to see it, try to break into the other ones and politically is going to be the only thing that. So this is an interesting thing here on the political side, and this is where my mind has been going as we’ve been talking about this. I actually have a family member who works for the United States government, and her job is to represent the United States and impartial the UN in trade negotiation and talks.
So basically they’re, they, her agency, organization, that she works for at the federal government level in the U. S. It goes around the world and speaks with other countries about fair trade, regular fair trade. So that means regulations, labor practices financial models, all of these things. So we have a within the U. S. an organization that’s devoted to doing this and keeping a basically a fair table for economic reasons around the world. And it’s it’s a humanitarian effort as well. And, it’s in some respects. But it’s to keep people playing on the same playing field. And this, to me, seems like it should be at the top of their list, simply because we’re not only talking about manufactured goods, but we’re talking about energy security.
And energy security globally is a big issue for anybody. More and more every lab, I’m staring at my desk right now. And I can see five different cables with different things plugged in, right? If you don’t have energy security your economy can’t run and your people can’t thrive.
So I think that this is going to become in the coming years, a hot button topic all the way to the top of the federal government.
Allen Hall: Speaking of technology, TPI composites is partnering with the university of Tennessee, Knoxville on recycling wind turbine blades. And what they’re trying to do is use the glass fiber from the wind turbines at the end of life, and then create a higher value material with that.
And their thought was like we have all this fiberglass in these wind turbines. Maybe we can turn it into some other fabric like product. Or woven product that has a higher value back into the industry. So you can actually make money off of this recycling effort. And there’s phase one, the project involved they realized they needed to mix the fiberglass with a polymer fiber, basically a plastic fiber to then turn it into a textile.
Which is what they’re working on now, phase two. And so they’re making yarn with recycled blade glass that has been also mixed with polymer fibers at a certain ratio. So that has a mechanical properties to it. Now, my first thought, Rosemary is that seems like it’s super complicated. And where would you possibly put this product?
Because when we talked about recycling fabric before recycling blades, your question was, How consistent of a product would this be? Could you use it for anything structural? Isn’t that the same issue here?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I actually it’s interesting that this comes up now because one of the first YouTube videos that I made was on there was a few that I did on winterbone blade recycling really early on and I interviewed a couple of people who are working on projects and One of them was this guy, Ryan Ginder, I think that’s how you say his last name, who was a researcher at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
And he had a pyrolysis process that was somewhat unique amongst other, pyrolysis isn’t, he didn’t invent pyrolysis as a way to recover fibers from. Yeah, wind turbine blades, but his process was a little different. And just last week or the week before I tried to get in touch with him to say, what have you been doing?
Whatever happened to your process? Did you commercialize it? Because there’s a couple of different companies in that area that seemed to be doing something similar to what he was trying to do or his research group was trying to do back then in 2020, I think it was. So I haven’t heard back from him, so I can only speculate, but, it does seem like decent coincidence that, it’s Knoxville that big of a place that there would be multiple different technologies being developed to recycle wind turbine blades there.
It doesn’t, I don’t know, I haven’t been there, but it seems unlikely to me. Yeah, the main, one of the main reasons why I was interested in his technology was because the fibers did retain quite a lot of their structural properties after the process. They’re not exactly the same.
Or they weren’t back then, maybe improvements have been made and some of the disadvantages are the energy use of the process and also the fact that unless when you, pyrolysis is basically burning off the resin and when you do that, you release it, it forms carbon dioxide, anytime that you burn something with carbon in it, in the atmosphere, then you’re gonna form carbon dioxide. And so then unless you capture it, that’s gonna escape out into the atmosphere. So it’s not a carbon neutral process at all. So yeah, those were the main downsides. But I thought it was interesting back then. I still think it’s interesting.
Would love to, to catch up with Ryan again and see how he’s gone and, yeah. If any, or all of the companies that have similar processes now have spun off from his innovation back then.
Allen Hall: So is the pyrolysis process that they were working on just a low temperature burning of the epoxy resin. Cause you can’t go super high on temperature with fiberglass.
It doesn’t like it. It changes the mechanical properties quite a bit. What was the approach there?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, exactly. So their their process was a two temperature step process. Yeah. And the whole point of that two step process was so that they could. maintain as much strength in the glass fibers as possible because like you say in a normal single high temperature pyrolysis step, you usually degrade those fibers a lot.
And so they were saying that the improvement over a normal recovered fiber from yeah, single step pyrolysis. The tensile strength was 19 percent better and strain to failure 43% higher than in that single step process. So yeah that’s the point.
Allen Hall: So does that yield usable, what fiber, but fiber in the winter is a mixture of unidirectional and woven.
What do you do with this thing that’s just like random fiber everywhere? Do you straighten it out and try to make it into a yarn?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah the highest value thing you could do with it would be to coax all of the fibers back into some sort of nice, regular pattern. I think that the years since then have.
So that’s going to, involve steps like taking what was a lab scale process for the pyrolysis itself and yeah, scaling that up to something you could do in a manufacturing facility at volume, and then it’s going to be solving logistical challenges, like how do we, yeah, like you can imagine in a lab scale, if you’ve got like a little handful of random fibers, you can get a comb and tease them out and, get them into a nice uniform pattern.
Yeah. And then when you want to do that commercially, obviously you’re not going to just employ a thousand people to comb out fiberglass. You’ve got to figure out some way to do that automatically. So those would be the sorts of activities I would guess that they’ve been doing in the past few years.
Allen Hall: Does it create a product that has a high enough value? I guess it’s my question without all the, because you’re going to put a good bit of work back into it. One, in trying to remove the epoxy out of it, but two, also weave it into or make it into some sort of fabric like product. That’s pretty difficult to do.
Rosemary Barnes: I’d be surprised if they’re using this lower quality fiberglass in wind turbine blades again, but you would be able to use it in other structural applications that, still needed quite a lot from their fiberglass, but maybe the strength to weight ratio isn’t as critical as it is in a wind turbine blade.
And as I mentioned at the start, The CO2 emissions from it are probably going to be as bad, maybe, probably worse than using virgin fibers. So you have to, consider what your goals are with the recycling as well.
Joel Saxum: So this week’s Wind Farm of the Week, Persimmon Creek Wind Farm. So Persimmon Creek Wind Farm is a 200 megawatt facility in Oklahoma.
It was originally built by Colorado based Scout Clean Energy. That was their first completed wind development project. It has 80 turbines. The whole project was completed in under nine months, and the facility has been online since September 2018. Why they’re the Wind Farmer of the Week, though, is this spring, Scout Clean Energy they announced that, along with their joint venture partner, Elowan Energy, they sold the whole thing to Evergy.
So Evergy paid 250 million dollars for the Persimmon Creek Wind Farm that gave Scout Clean Energy some capital back into to reinvest. So they originally put in 273 to 275 million back in 2018. They sold it five years later for 250. They got five years of production out of it as well. So some good return on investment there.
The wind farm originally employed 250 people during development and construction and then provided the community in 75 million worth of benefits through wages, property taxes, and tax abatement programs. So Persimmon Creek Wind Farm that is now owned by Evergy, Wind Farm of the Week this
week.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a 5 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.
