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Allen, Rosemary and Phil debate whether WindRunner, a huge airplane proposed to transport wind turbine blades offshore, makes sense for the industry. Plus they discuss an article from the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine from CLS Wind about their lifting platform used to assemble wind turbines. Allen and Phil learn that Rosemary is a five-time Wheel of Fortune champion!
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Allen Hall: Do you have game shows in Australia, Rosemary? Is that a thing?
Rosemary Barnes: Hey, I was a five time carryover champion on Wheel of Fortune.
Allen Hall: What?
Rosemary Barnes: What whoa. Rosemary, what was that? I was a five time carryover champion on Wheel of Fortune. I don’t know if they, is it the same in the US when you win an episode, you get to come back the next day?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I did that five times. I was on six, six episodes.
Allen Hall: How much money did you win?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s not as rich as, I didn’t win any cash. There’s no cash in the Australian one. And it’s not as rich as the U S one. I think I won like 20, 30, 000 worth of stuff. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty good as a uni student.
I want to, Bed and like saucepans and a couple of lazy boy recliners, one that had massaging in a fridge, and one a houseboat cruise one how did I electric guitar what else did I want? Oh, and all sorts of stuff. So much.
Allen Hall: Did this really happen, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: This really happened when I was at uni.
Allen Hall: Why we’ve not seen video of this? Why is this not on YouTube? I don’t understand.
Rosemary Barnes: I have a VHF of it. I have been thinking that I should chase down the studio and see if I can get the recordings. So I’m sure that they’re archived, but I don’t know how easy it is to get your hands on it.
Allen Hall: Our producer needs this video badly. We have to get this back on the internet. Come on. Really? I didn’t know that. It’s not in your CV. Why wasn’t that in your CV?
Rosemary Barnes: It used to be, it did literally used to be in my CV. Wheel of Fortune couldn’t have slipped in there somewhere? It’s probably not anymore, but for a very long time, it was on my CV in other.
And it was one it’s a good way to see if people read your CV because there’s no way you’re reading that and not mentioning it at the interview. And two, when people did read it, then it’s a really great icebreaker, you know, cause it’s just Oh, okay. Before we get started, we just have to chat about that.
And then it’s, you know, it’s a fun little thing to talk about and you then, you know, then you’re friends. And then the rest of the interview goes very nicely. Okay. That’s like a hot point. Pro tip for interviews is include something like that on there that will you know, be a way to start the conversation and have everyone be relaxed before the interview.
Allen Hall: Okay. I think Rosemary’s been holding back. We’ve been burying our soul every week and Rosemary’s. Keeping the Wheel of Fortune thing under wraps.
Philip Totaro: Now, I mean, the only thing I could put on my CV is that I used to live next to Rick James. I mean, what the, you know, like
Rosemary Barnes: Allen can put on that he’s married to a real rocket scientist.
So that’s a good one.
Allen Hall: This is true. It’s sort of guilt by association there.
A startup called Radia founded by MIT trained rocket scientist, Mark Lundstrom is developing the world’s largest cargo plane called the WindRunner. Now you’re asking yourself why is it called the windrunner and it’s an airplane because it’s meant to transport wind turbines, of course And rosemary pointed this article out to me a couple of days ago with A whole bunch of calculations about the megawatts per mile traveled or something of the sort So okay, we need to talk about this And get it out, all out, we’ll get out of our systems about this airplane.
Now let me give you the, let me give you the promo on this. If this thing works, it would enable the installation of onshore wind turbines pretty easily by just sticking them in the back of this airplane and flying them to the site because the way this airplane is designed, it will, it could conceivably take blades as long as.
I think 120 meters long.
Rosemary Barnes: But how long a runway does it need to take off and land? Is there a suitable runway in proximity to every onshore wind farm that wants 120 meter long blades?
Allen Hall: Based on the shape of that airplane, it would be about a mile long runway, which is pretty easy to do. There’s all, there’s thousands of them in the United States, maybe tens of thousands of them in the United States.
Rosemary Barnes: Next question. Do people want such large rotors on onshore wind turbines? I mean, offshore you put a rotor on a tower that is barely taller than the, you know, the blade so that you just make sure that it’s never going to hit the water and, you know, add a tiny bit of a safety factor in case there’s a huge storm that’s, you know, unpredicted But onshore, you need to get up away from wind shear.
You can’t, you know, you, because the, so wind shear is the effect that slows down the wind close to the ground. So there’s a big difference between wind speed at the ground and the wind speed, a hundred meters up and, you know, 150 meters up. So you can’t have such a big wind gradient that you’ve got your blades really close to the ground and an onshore wind turbine.
You’ve got 120 meter long blade, I’m going to say you’re going to want 150 meter tall tower. Is that we’re just, I don’t understand why the aeroplane is the first part of this puzzle. If we’re going to move to that, wouldn’t the push come from people who are like, okay, we’ve got this gigantic onshore wind turbine, if only we had a way to install it more places than where we can currently get it to.
And then, you know, windrunners like, ah, solution. Here it is, but I haven’t seen anybody requesting really large onshore wind turbines that can’t be transported.
Allen Hall: So my answer to that is that they’ve already raised a hundred million dollars and they’re valued at a billion dollars. So I don’t have to answer that question.
Just follow the money. I think what’s happening is they realized that building a blade factory is really expensive and you can fly blades into places and building a runway that’s a mile long is not particularly hard to do. And. Subsequently, I do think there’s applications for package delivery or like an Amazon service.
Remember Amazon tried to start, or it has started its own airline essentially or freight service. So they fly their own airplanes or rent airplanes to fly around to carry cargo. When Amazon thinks about the next stage of that, they’re gonna get bigger airplanes. That’s just what’s gonna happen. And this would feed that market also.
So I think there’s sort of two parts to it. You can question the efficiency of it and all that stuff. I totally fine, but somebody thinks it’s worth a hundred million. They’re valued at a billion dollars. So somebody thinks it’s worth a billion dollars today. So there must be some rationale behind it.
Rosemary Barnes: But let’s just be real here. There are a very large number of highly valued companies, especially at startups. And especially there’s a lot of clean techs that have no prospect of ever Making any money that have, you know, like just because they’ve got a high valuation doesn’t, I think that’s a crazy way to think of it.
Oh, because people have invested money in it, then it must be worth that much money.
Allen Hall: I mean, if the world was all right, Microsoft wouldn’t exist, right? That if it came down to whether it was useful or not, there’d be a lot of products that didn’t exist, but it depends on where the money is and if they can.
provide transport in a, in an efficient way. And they may want to develop their own wind farms, probably where they’re going, then maybe they want to have their own airplane to go do this thing. And the upper end of the cargo lifting world in the airplane market is being destroyed one airplane at a time at the moment.
So there’s not a lot of really big airplanes to go do this job. And if you need them, it usually runs the last. The numbers I heard to get a flight of the Russian airplane that does a lot of this is about a million bucks a flight. That’s pretty good money if you can get it.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And how often is that being done?
Almost never. I mean, I’ll read out what I sent you when I questioned about whether this was sensible because I’m doing a a video on shipping at the moment. So I’ve been comparing different modes of transport. I’ll read out a quote from my upcoming video to transport one ton of goods, one kilometer in a cargo ship takes about 1.
4 to 1. 7 to four megajoules of energy rails, a bit higher around 2. 4 to five road is seven to 18. So you know, there’s the range low end for cargo ship 1. 7 high end for road is 18. And then for air travel, it’s 200 to 350 megajoules per ton kilometer. It’s, you know, like it’s a hundred times more energy.
Fuel is a significant cost. It’s just, I mean, you can make it a little bit more efficient, but you’re never gonna bring that to the point where you would choose air over any other method of transport. If you had any kind of a say in it. And yeah, so I just, I don’t see the pull for it. It’s not like people are crying out to install these gigantic wind turbines and there’s no other way but to transport it by aeroplane, you know?
And even if it turns out that we do end up wanting to install gigantic offshore size wind turbines onshore, there are other solutions as well that we’ve covered on this channel. I mean, there’s Split blades, there’s thermoplastic blades will be coming in the future. You’ll weld them together on site.
There’s towers that you can print in situ or, you know, other ways of building towers on site instead of transporting the sections the tower sections in a, you know, one whole cross section at a time. I just think this is a classic case of a solution looking for a problem and sounds cool, which is a really great way to get.
millions of dollars of investment. And yeah, I think that’s going to be the end of it. I mean, for sure they might pivot into transporting packages or something where there’s a bit more of a margin. And it’s important that people really care about the extra speed. You know, that’s something that they were willing to pay more for.
But you know, wind turbines are planned wind farms are planned years in advance. And I know from working in the logistics that the cheapest mode of transport Is a really important part of the planning of the whole project from the start. And they do transport blades by aeroplane every now and then once in a blue moon.
You know, obviously not as large as what this aeroplane can do, but. You know, it has been done before and it’s, you know, it’s either because someone massively stuffed up and you know, there’s something, the whole project is ground to a halt because of some transport issue, or it’s a gimmick to be like, Hey, look at this cool thing we did.
Allen Hall: There is no gimmicks in aerospace because it costs too much money.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no gimmicks in aerospace. I mean, aren’t there like a hundred startups in in personal air taxis that are maybe crying out as being the exact definition of a gimmick? I mean, come on.
Allen Hall: They’re not gimmicks. They either succeed or they fail horribly.
There really is no middle ground. I mean, it has destroyed the careers of many a person that have gotten into aerospace and felt. Phil’s been in aerospace. He’s seen it too. There’s been a lot of airplane designs that were great on paper and had some reasonable amount of funding that never got to the end.
In today’s world, to build that airplane, Billion, maybe a little more, maybe two to get that airplane built because of just the factories and the people and stuff.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Let’s be clear. They haven’t built one.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a design. They haven’t built the first airplane yet, but it wouldn’t take them all that much time to get, at least get a prototype up in the air.
I don’t think it’s really getting it sort of, as Phil has pointed out to me numerous times before we started this conversation, the FAA is going to have A lot to say about it. That’s probably where they’re the slowdown will occur.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, I mean, the FAA is one thing. Let’s talk in addition to what Rosemary just mentioned in terms of energy efficiency per ton kilometer per ton mile.
There’s also cost per ton mile or cost per ton kilometer, which is the metric that they use in the logistics world to figure out how. You know, you move things in a cost efficient manner. We looked at similar technology to this about 13 years ago with a dirigible, actually two different dirigible companies that wanted to do a heavy lift cargo for you know, on site transportation and installation of blades or, and, or towers, or in some cases, the whole turbine where you just literally pick the whole turbine and.
You know, that’s fully assembled in a factory controlled environment, or, you know, reasonably controlled environment. And then you know, you just install the whole turbine like you would in, in offshore, for instance. The problem is, not only does the cost per ton mile not trade at all. Again, it’s, if you’re talking about the you know, order of magnitude difference between truck and rail versus air in energy, That Rosemary just mentioned.
It’s about the same factor in terms of cost per ton mile between truck and rail and, you know, air transport, including either sky crane by conventional helicopter or you know, air freight, you know. For cargo. So the reality of this is it’s never gonna, the industry is so locked into low cost solutions that they’re absolutely never going to adopt something this expensive.
The other problem is also getting the FAA permits to be able to do. You know, if you’re going to, I mean, what’s the point of doing this? If you can ship, you know, hundreds of blades on a rail car and then offload them onto trucks and then do your last mile, quote unquote, last mile transportation through trucks.
Why other than speed, what are you really getting out of transporting, you know, a handful, like maybe up to three blades at a time for one turbine, you’re going to have to make 70 trips to fully outfit your wind farm with, you know, parts delivered by an airplane. So it just I don’t this is one of those it might be technologically feasible, but it’s not commercially viable and it’s just, Doesn’t seem to trade for me.
Allen Hall: Maybe the answer is in the question. Founded by MIT trained rocket scientists. What if this has something to do with moving rocket parts around? Starship.
Philip Totaro: Which again makes a lot more sense than wind turbine blades.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Remember they moved the space shuttle on top of the 747, which was crazy to see by the way, but That happened.
So we’re talking about rocket parts?
Rosemary Barnes: No, if it’s one, one offs, it makes a lot more sense than where you’ve got to set up, you know, like you’ve got a wind farm, you transport many of the same thing and you did the same installation over and over again over a period of months or years. If it’s a big one it can’t like it, I just can’t wrap my head around this ever being a better solution than, you know, the kinds of things that Phil mentioned a minute ago.
Okay. But if it’s one off, really expensive things that are, you know, fragile and you, it’s not worth setting in place all the other things that you have to worry about, then yeah, sure. You know, if it’s transporting things to a remote launch site. Could make more sense. And also who calls himself a rocket scientist?
That’s what I want to know.
Philip Totaro: I’m a rocket scientist. Thank you very much.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m a rocket scientist too. I did a course, you know, I did a year of aerospace engineering. I did a, I did the course on jet propulsion. And I remember thinking as I passed that exam, Hey, I’m officially a rocket scientist now.
Allen Hall: There’s only one person in this group that actually is a rocket scientist, and that’s my wife.
Because she did launch rockets into space, and she is a Princeton trained rocket engineer. Alright fair enough. Yeah, so there is a rocket scientist and so let me, I’ll throw one more thing at you because I think this is another place to go. I mean, Airbus has built special airplanes to haul airplane parts around and so has Boeing.
Both of them have designed special airplanes to haul airplane parts around. Fuselage sections, wings, the whole bit, right? So this would just fill that market. I do think we’re missing the pointer that Fed, FedEx exists for a reason because people want things quickly. And if you go down to Memphis at nighttime and watch all the airplanes coming in and out of Memphis, there’s a lot of cargo that’s moved that you wouldn’t otherwise pay for.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s for that time when you spent. When you spent six years planning a giant wind farm and then you realize at the last second, oh no, we forgot to order blades. We better overnight them. That’s the problem that this airplane is solving, which does not exist. And I think that you’ve really hit the nail on the head where you have mentioned, you know, this is someone coming from an aero background taking Like the kind of thing that’s done in the aero industry and thinking that it’s going to apply to wind turbines.
StrikeTape is literally the only one that I know about. And I don’t know how much you have to change things, but these really expensive solutions that you come up with for aerospace, you know, and I saw it all the time in de icing, you know, the kind of solution that you can have in aerospace, it can be so much more expensive.
It can involve so much more, you know, human intervention as well, you know, wind turbine stuff. It’s. It’s cheap and it’s it’s things that you can roll out and they’re durable and they just last without anybody, you know, poking around and maintaining all the time. So to me, this is just another, like a really expensive and well funded example of someone making the same mistake that, you know, just because they perceive that the wind industry has a similar problem to what has already been solved in aero that The aero solution is going to apply, they just, it, it never works with a single exception of StrikeTape.
Philip Totaro: The final reason why I don’t think this is going to work for wind turbine component transportation, at least unless it’s an extreme one off situation, is let’s, we forget the insurance industry. They have to sign off on whatever the mode of transportation is. And at the end of the day, this is not something that they’re going to get on board with very quickly and easily.
This is a monumentally expensive way. There’s huge risk. You’ve got things that are normally transported by truck and rail now being flown overhead you know, over population centers and things like that. The insurance industry and the FAA are going to have a field day with this. And it’s, I guess, maybe pun intended, but it’s never going to get off the ground.
Allen Hall: If the folks at Radia are looking for a lightning engineer to help them with the design, it’s call Weather Guard, we’ll help you.
Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in depth info you need.
Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PES Wind at PESWind. com.
So I actually. Brought the PES Wind Magazine with me today because I have forgotten it the last couple of weeks. So if you haven’t gotten your latest edition of PES Wind, it’s out and you can get it at PESwind. com and they’re this one is this episode of the magazine and this edition of the magazine has a lot of great articles in it and the one I saw that we want to talk about is the CLS Wind and their lifting platform to assemble a wind turbine.
So they kind of If you think about the way you build a tower, you shove this really big crane and it lifts this tower section up, you stack it, you bolt it on, you go to the next one. So it takes a lot of big cranes to get this job done. What they’ve done instead is made like a cog train. Rosemary, do you know what that is?
If you’ve ever been to up a steep mountain in Switzerland and you take one of those trains and it has a cog on it.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, the rack.
Allen Hall: It’s similar to that On the backside of a wind turbine. Pikes Peak has a similar train. Phil, you’ve been on one of these things. So it’s like a, it’s like a geared system with the platform that raises the next section of the wind turbine up and then you just slide it over and drop it on, bolt it on, keep going.
So it makes like a built in elevator with the turbine. Now, we’ve seen a lot of ideas about how to install turbines faster, right? That seems to be a big pain point with cranes because cranes, you got to call the cranes, got to be there and it’s expensive. This system, and others like it, are really trying to revolutionize the way we build wind turbines, and what I’m guessing is, the backing behind it to do this, is there an industry drive to do something like this, which is unique and probably will save a bunch of money, versus just the rapid need to get Turbines deployed is there a disconnect there and that should we be looking at something more like a CLS wind system?
Which is more integral with the turbine and makes it cheaper to install do the OEMs just not care Once it goes out the door, they’ll figure it out.
Philip Totaro: I mean for offshore I actually think this makes some sense with or you know, this or something kind of akin to this type of a solution It’s not the first time it’s been proposed And Valmont actually is probably the company that investigated this very early.
They had patents dating back to 2001 or 2, I want to say. Kind of a lifting, basically a lifting platform where you could kind of, you know build the turbine. Sequentially, there’s also companies out there like Nabrawind is also, you know, trying to do towers and they’ve, you know, done some demos in Spain and in Africa, and they licensed the technology to China.
I, conceptually, I like the idea of, you know, again, whether it’s a slip form tower or, you know, what CLS Wind is doing conceptually, I like it. The challenge is kind of twofold. One, I think it makes a much more sense for bigger either onshore turbines or definitely for offshore if you’re talking about like an 18 to 20 or you know the Chinese are now trying to design you know 25 offshore wind turbines I think you probably need a solution like this to be able to install it because you were never going to have a boom crane big enough to be able to do you know like a, you know, 280 meter hub height because it’s got a, you know, 400 meter rotor kind of a, you know, on a 30 megawatt wind turbine.
So you’re necessarily going to have a solution like this if you want to go really big offshore. We’ll never have vessels that are going to be capable of doing the installation or the maintenance on components. So I think this is a good idea kind of conceptually aside from some of the commercial challenges, the biggest thing is also, you know, whether or not this thing is actually built to withstand you know, cause these, Alan, you were talking about like these systems in Switzerland or whatever.
They get serviced very frequently. This thing, I don’t know if it’s now an extra thing that you’ve got to service and maintain as part of the turbine to be able to do your component swap outs. You know, it, it does add some cost and complexity, but it does also facilitate you going to, you know, potentially a large onshore or definitely a huge offshore turbine.
Allen Hall: Let me ask Rosemary this because the wind catcher system, right. There’s a store that wall of wind turbines. Does that. Approach to building something that massive requires something like the CLS wind system in order to build it efficiently that you need to sort of hoist it up in place with a little more technology than just being a big crane out.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no, they’ve got their own like assembly and maintenance infrastructure kind of incorporated into the wind catching. Design. So it’s like as lifts that run up the, I don’t know, the you know, there’s that big grid structure with the little rotors in it and there’s all these, you know, verticals along.
So on the verticals, they have these lifts and they can slot blades in and out and other big components in and out that way, because yeah, they’re imagining. you know, obviously if you go from I can’t remember the exact number, but if you go from, you know, one rotor to 49 different rotors, if it’s a seven by seven grid, then you’re probably going to need to do maintenance more often.
Right. So they’re imagining that you’re going to be able to have to be able to get those components in and out. So they’ve integrated the installation and maintenance as part of it. And also for saying. You know, like many others that installation is one of the things that’s getting, you know, the challenge of installation is getting harder, faster than the size of the turbines grow, you know, a little bit bigger turbine is starting to make a lot bigger headache for installation.
Most of the people that are coming up with innovative turbine solutions for offshore, especially really have installation and maintenance. So some of the core reasons why they say that things need to go a different direction than just making things really huge. That, and I mean, there’s a few other things as well, but those are amongst the most important.
So yeah, I think I think it is time to, to stop just thinking about doing things the way that they have been done and just go bigger, because some things are starting to get really ridiculous, like the cranes. And I mean, in Australia, even for onshore wind turbines in Australia, If you’ve got you know, a blade defect problem on a wind farm that was commissioned a while ago.
And you know, all your installation stuff is gone, you know, that, that crane is gone and it’s installing another wind farm. It’s not so easy to get your hands on one in Australia, even for the onshore turbines. You know, even, you know, Even for the, it might be a solution that you create because people with the, that are installing really big wind turbines that, you know, they have a need for it.
They just simply can’t install it without that. But I do see that it will filter downwards as well into the kind of existing existing technology. They also have a bit of a problem. You know, it’s not something that is make or break for. the existing wind farms, but it is certainly, you know, on the blade defect problems that I work on, a lot of the times it’s dragging out what, you know, might have been a couple of month campaign might turn into closer to a year because you’ve got to worry about getting the crane on site and that sort of thing.
Allen Hall: Wow, so maybe the CLS wind type system would make sense then, be able to just basically bolt something on and then elevate it down on a platform. That’d be cool.
Rosemary Barnes: Is it something that needs to be, does it need to be there from the start? Is it, you know, is it, does design change to the turbine you can just come back to an existing turbine and, you know, install a few components and then away you go?
Philip Totaro: If it’s not designed to do that, they should design it to do that because I think that’s a good idea.
Allen Hall: It is good. Like you said, Australia is probably the marketplace for this because the access to cranes, right? It would you design the towers to handle this system? And then when you need to do a major an MCE You just do it and you don’t have to wait for a green to come out.
It makes infinite sense 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.
