MingYang just released info on its new model, the 16MW MySE 16.0-242, sweeping a 242m area, with 118m blades. It’s huge and another surge forward in turbine size. We also discuss gearbox failures and wear issues, as well as solutions that may help, including offerings from Poseidon Systems that monitor wear debris. Plus, how green is blue hydrogen? Why is grey hydrogen, well, grey? Rosemary shares insights on hydrogen, including an explanation of Liebrich’s ladder. Cover Photo is a copyright of MingYang Smart Energy Group Co., LTD used under fair use.
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Transcript – MingYang’s 16MW Turbine; Gearbox Failures & Monitoring; Plus, What’s a Hydrogen Ladder?
This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning
protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan BlueT.
I’m Allen Hall.
And I’m Rosemary Barnes
And this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Dan Blewett on today’s show. First, we can shout a little bit about some big news from MingYang
They’ve released a 16 megawatt offshore turbine that they’re going to hope is going to be in service in a couple of years. So we’ll talk about some of the I mean, the thing is gigantic and obviously now displaces the Halifax and the Siemens Gamesa.
Their top turbines as far as size. We’ll talk at length about gearboxes today, some about gearbox failures. Also an interesting where debris monitoring system from Poseidon. We’ll talk a little bit about what we can do to make those gearbox maintenance periods, you know, extend a little bit longer.
And then in our third segment today, we’re gonna talk about hydrogen. Rosemarie’s got a ton of stuff she wants to share and we’re going to chat through how green is blue hydrogen. We’ll talk through lyrics, hydrogen ladder and some interesting hot brick technology that could be used to store energy, not really hydrogen related, but also just energy
storage related. Before we get going. Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to uptime tech news. That’s our weekly newsletter and podcast update. So if you want to stay abreast of everything, wind energy definitely sign up for that.
You’ll find the show notes and YouTube, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen. And obviously, our co-host Rosemary has a great YouTube channel, so you’ll find links to that there as well. So let’s get going. Rosemary, kick this to you.
So MingYang has a 16 megawatt offshore turbine. The MYSE 16.0-242. So they’re going to it will sweep a 242 meter area. That’s the rotor diameter, 118 meter long blades. And that’s going to be a forty six thousand square meter swept area.
So, Rosemary, what are some of the challenges as these continue to get bigger and bigger and bigger, as are ever going to be a cap on on turbine size?
It’s so funny because that’s like the question that everyone’s been talking about in our favor as far as far as I can tell. I know when I was working at ILM, every if someone had a 10 year or a 25 year working anniversary, we still have cake in the canteen.
And it was like, follow the same pattern every time they’d give a speech and they’d say, when I started, wind turbine blades were, you know, 12 meters long or whatever or something like that. And we all wondered how long they could get.
And we were pretty sure 20 meters was the limit. You know, everyone had this story like that from when they started. And I mean, I started a lot more recently. And I guess for me, I think it was in the eighties, the longest blade in the world.
And people were like, could it get above 100 meters? I mean, I guess in theory it could, but would you ever. And it’s kind of funny because, of course, there’s no no hard limit. I mean, I don’t think that you could realistically make a kilometer long blade, but I bet if there was like a real incentive to
, you probably could. But the thing is that, you know, as you scale something up, the actual structural considerations are not in favor of getting bigger and bigger because you double the well, you know, the power increases with the square of the length, but then the mass of the materials increases with like the cube because it’s three dimensional
. So the blades of a longer of a bigger wind turbine are more expensive for the amount of energy you get. But it’s all the other savings in other parts of the turbine. So you’ll say, you know, obviously for offshore, it’s really expensive to run those cables out to the turbine.
And it doesn’t matter so much if it’s a cable for a 10 megawatt turbine or for a 16 megawatt cable. And so, yeah, basically it’s just economics. And at some point at some point, I mean, the optimization is constantly changing.
That’s why turbines are getting bigger at the moment. The size of turbines, that’s the optimal size. And then when that changes, then you get a bigger turbine. So. Yeah, I don’t. I’ve got no answer to when it will stop, I think that any gas you make is just definitely going to be proven wrong.
So, yeah, another another bigger one. That’s all I can say.
That’s fair. Well, I remember hearing back in the day, and I don’t know if this is true or not, that Godzilla or knows King Kong, the King Kong, couldn’t have existed. Because if if an ape was that big that his bones, I couldn’t support his weight, essentially.
And all of that was correct. But I think I feel like I read that. I mean, could that be kind of what you’re talking about to an extent? Like at some point, might the nozzle on the blades up top just be too much for a reasonable sized tower?
Yeah, just costs it. Just Kozmo.
Right. It is like the dinosaur experiment where dinosaurs got to a certain stage and they couldn’t get any bigger because their structure couldn’t handle it. So. So I was right. That’s right. It’s good. Yeah. And that the same thing’s going to happen.
And what it’s already happened in airplanes, so to speak, and it’s going to happen in wind turbines. The question is, at what point does become painful? And until you push engineers and materials to the point, it becomes painful.
They’re going to continue to make them bigger and bigger and bigger. Now, are we getting close to that number now? I think we are. I think my gut tells me 200 meters is about, you know, when you say my ship sizes and things like that, 200 meters seems like pretty on the edge.
Yeah.
Yeah. That was my other question. Is the support the support stuff. Right. If you have a crane big enough that can, you know, has a ship big enough to support the crane when you’re way off shore, then that might be your bottleneck.
Right. And it’s going to be cheaper to to make many more smaller ones in one large one. That economics across here pretty soon.
So moving on to gearboxes, and this is obviously the same same topic here. So the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and ANDRLE has done some interesting research on gearbox failures. And they’re saying basically that a lot of hard working components, just like these, don’t quite make it to their entire 10 year lifespan.
And Gearbox specifically often suffer from what they call white Åh, which is some cracking in the roller bearings inside the inside the gearbox. Alan, what stuck out to you as far as this this article about gearboxes and some of the failure modes?
Well, the failure modes were interesting because it didn’t really have a handle on what was causing it. And one of the first engineering tests you need to do is be able to recreate and figure out what the source of the the issue is.
So what they ended up doing was making a little test set, essentially, that could, in theory, recreate these these kinds of fractures in the bearings. And one of the interesting things that came out of it was the different kinds of lubricants that are used sometimes allow the two interfacing surfaces that are should be rolling against one another
to slip and a slide. And in that sliding effort, you can create these stress cracks. But now, if you can imagine, it’s like in an automobile, if if I’m going to go down and put new oil in my engine, I have a variety of choices and not all the same.
There are close to the same, but the additives will change. And with a synthetic or it’s real oil pumped out of the ground will change also. So you don’t think about that as having an effect on the performance of the mechanical system.
But as they’re finding in the in the research that they’re doing, those particular lubricants have a big influence on where the cracks develop. And I wouldn’t have picked that as the place of the source of the issue. So it’s really fascinating that as they delve deeper and deeper and deeper into this thing, it’s not really the bearings
themselves. It’s it’s all the things through use of fluids. We used to keep them operating, though it may maybe inducing failures. That that’s interesting feature. And Rose Rosemary is more of the mechanical person. I’m an electrical person. But Rosemary, did you did you pick that that same sort of thing out of out of the discussion?
When you think about a gearbox and bearings and you think, I mean, these are things that we’ve been using for at least hundreds of years. Right, in in other applications. So you might wonder why why is this such a big deal for wind turbines?
And I think it’s it’s like anything that you you put in a wind turbine has this extreme operating environment that’s really different to to what it had in its previous life and know where you get your the lifetime data for a bearing or whatever.
It’s based on different operating environment. And it’s not going to apply to you all thing that you’re putting in a wind turbine. And I saw that with everything that I put in in the blade for the heating systems.
I was always taking things off the shelf as much as possible. And people think, well, why do we need to test this? You know, it’s got a it’s got a warranty. It’s got a design lifetime. But, you know, you’re you put it in a wind turbine with all these vibrations, constant fatigue, just all sorts of fatigue and
different frequencies. So things things break and it has taken some time to kind of figure that out for. And then the second thing that’s different is just how hard it is to replace, you know, you’ve got your gearbox in your car and if you stuff up and choose the wrong the wrong lube, I mean, the consequence is
that you take it to a shop and get it replaced. And that feels painful. You don’t want to pay for that. But compare that to getting a crane out. You know, lift the top of you in a cell and drag the whole the whole gearbox out of a wind turbine.
I mean, you can say that it’s going to be really appealing for a wind turbine operator to get some heads up, that something might be wrong and give them a chance to do some preventative maintenance because the consequences are so high.
So, yeah, I think that’s the that’s the main difference with the wind turbine gearboxes.
Well, is this another one of those items that’s falling into an arbitrary 20 year life span, like 20 years are really round number like it, just like when we say, oh, it should be 100 or 100 years or 10 years or 20 years, they’re all just around arbitrary numbers.
Like is this is it arbitrary? Is that why we’re not meeting any of these 20 year lifespans? I mean, could you really design a blade or this or that to make it 20 years, or is it just was it just wishful thinking?
Some components you can design to whatever life you like and some components you can’t say bearings. One of the things where they are legitimately struggling to get the lifetime as long as they’d like. But in general, you want the life as long as possible that you know, when you’re calculating the levelized cost of energy, you’re dividing by
the, you know, the number of years of lifetime. So the bigger that number, then the cheaper your energy is and the easier to get financing, the more profit you’re going to make. So definitely we see a trend towards increasing lifetimes.
And for a blade or a tower, you can get there by just adding more material to get the extra life, the extra photogs strength. But for some components and I understand that gearbox and gearboxes and bearings are still at the stage where like actually that they’re trying their hardest to make them last as long as they can
. It’s not a matter of, oh, we could design a 50 a gearbox if we wanted to. I don’t think anyone can do that.
Alan, is it going to take like new higher tech materials, like harder alloys, or is it just is there something else that maybe we’re missing?
Well, I think the issue right now is that the the loads and the forces are growing faster than the engineers can keep up with the failure mode. So as we push into 12, 13, 15, 16, 20 megawatt machines, that means you’re talking about more mass, more loads, more forces that you’re getting to the point of you’re going
to get different kind of failure modes in the pairing. So you may have had on the one megawatt machine. And so in the in the sort of the maintenance side, maintenance is always playing catch up to the design.
Engineers and design engineers put out this product and off it goes and kind of look to the next machine. That’s what that’s what their job is involves. But it’s a technicians that have to live with the results of that.
And the technicians find out five, six, seven, eight years later that that initial concept, that initial analysis may not prove out just just because and and the engineers as you push higher and higher. The same thing goes on with blades as you keep pushing higher and higher hurry.
You’re getting some places you’ve never been. And so you’re automatically going to have failure mode. You never thought of guaranteed and airplanes. We see it on wind turbines. We’re going to see it. I guess the question is, you know, at what point do the economics get so bad that you start taking steps back like you could make
a 20 megawatt machine, but you really can’t design bearings for it. So there are maybe limitations like the bearings where we just don’t do it. We just say, all right, 12 is a really good number for us and 12 megawatts is the sweet spot.
We’re going to stay there for a while because wind turbines haven’t stayed anywhere long enough to really prove out a life span where we’d be just continually getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
Well, and that’s a good segue way into one of the companies that I found doing research for this, which is Poseidon’s systems. They have a number of different sensors for Gearbox is one of them is their Trident, where do monitor.
And they are basically looking for metallic debris. So whether it’s they can classify it, whether it’s Ferrer’s or Nonferrous, and I guess that can give operators an idea of where that there’s little flecks of metal are coming from.
I mean, is that sort of how something like that would work?
I do understand it’s you know, it’s trying to be an early warning system for them. So they know, you know what, we’ve detected something strange and you better you better get in there and do some maintenance before you know one of your bearings or shadows or whatever.
That’s my my interpretation of it. So I think there’s also other other ways of doing predictive maintenance where they’re watching for the the vibrational frequency and they can, you know, pick out one of your bearings is is cracked or is rounded or whatever.
And, yeah, if you’re looking at the vibrations, then you can get in there and replace that before. To the point where the whole thing is just stuffed and you’ve got to totally remove it, so I’m assuming it’s the same kind of principle of, you know, looking for some some early towel that something bad is about to happen
. Yeah. I mean,
Alan, they do all this stuff on aircraft. Yeah. Or you have an idea of, hey, we need to replace this well before guys a chance to fail. And I’m sure a lot of that’s already going along with wind turbines.
But I mean, is that maybe the best that we can hope for in the future? Like if something like you said can’t be designed to withstand 20 years over here is like, hey, let’s just do the even then maybe design components to be a little more easily replaced or more often replace, like, hey, let’s not spend X
amount of dollars trying to make this bulletproof. And we know it can’t be. Maybe let’s go a little cheaper and just replace that gear every five years instead of trying to make it so expensive that it can make it eight.
Would that would that be a reasonable solution?
It’s reasonable. And aircraft, because aircraft tend to be in places where you can repair them or on the ground or usually in a hangar and it’s dry. And so making those swap outs does happen. And it’s pretty regular on a wind turbine.
You really can’t do that very easily. And that’s the big difference on a jet engine. I’ll give you an example on jet engines and helicopter engines, for that matter, is that they are monitoring system five vibration monitoring system.
So they’re constantly looking at the acoustic signature of the motor to make sure everything is working the way it should. And if you see something odd happen, the actual the engine has a data system and it’ll transmit data out after a flight to the manufacturer says, hey, this particular engine is unusual.
Somebody needs to be looking at this thing. And they also create fleet data from that. So the Pratt Whitney will be able to see the whole fleet of airplane, a substantial part of them, to see how the whole things are performing and where you may have unique situations because of the operating environment that’s that’s been going on
in aerospace for 20 years at least. And the wind say you don’t see that as much as we’re leader say. I don’t think the OEMs are necessarily always getting data back. And it’s getting to the point where the size of the wind turbines are getting so massive and you’re pushing the limits of materials that as an OEM
part of the agreement on which I’m going to show you this wind turbine as I get to have the data back, I get to see how my winter is performing because I need to know what is coming up.
The factory is actually going to do it with. We say it’s going to do, and that’s the only way you’re going to know, which is to accumulate data.
Yeah. So I think that we see a trend now towards could you actually spot on when you say how hot it is to get the data once you’ve sold a turbine? And so a lot of manufacturers are now purposely getting into service so that they can get that data.
Like maybe the service part of the business isn’t super profitable on its own, but the data that they get is so valuable that they want it anyway. So I think it’s going to be a big, big thing in the future.
And we do see the industry changing as it learns the operating environment, because, you know, if you think about it, you’re trying to test for 20, 30 year lifetime, but you’ve got to accelerate that. Right, and do it in six months or less than a year anyway.
And some things are easier to test a lifetime than others. So, you know, they have a pretty good method for blade structures. It’s not perfect, but, you know, they can they can excite at Warbelow and get the right number of of movements that they would say in a lifetime and test it that way.
But something like a bearing, you know, if you’re actually getting enough revolutions, then either you’ve got to make them so fast that it’s not they’re going to heat up in a way that they wouldn’t in operation say anything that’s got gravity lighting.
It’s incredibly hard to accelerate that in a realistic way. So some of it does. You need actual calendar years to test an actual calendar year for some things. And, you know, we say wind turbines don’t park anymore the way that they used to.
They’re mostly idle. And that I believe that that’s mainly because that’s a lot easier on the bearings to not sit there in the one location, because that gives them flat spot. So I think we’ll see some improvements just the longer the industry has been been around with a lot of turbines around.
All right, so moving on into hydrogen. So Acciona is planning to build a floating wind and solar hydrogen complex. So the Spanish developers got some government funding and it’s going to be called the Ocean H2. So, Rosemary, you’re our green or blue or whatever colored of the day sort of hydrogen expert.
How excited are you about this floating hybrid farm? Is this I mean, this is your dream.
Close to a zero, I would say. OK, OK. I’m sorry. I mean, yeah, it’s always cool to say that, you know, ambitious things, but I don’t I don’t understand offshore hydrogen and I don’t understand offshore solar. I understand offshore wind, because you go offshore, the wind resource gets much better.
So there’s a reason to be there and you pay the price for it in terms of really expensive installation and expensive maintenance. And for any new technology that you’re developing in the early days, you’re going to be out there a lot figuring out why it’s not working the way that you thought it was going to.
Right. So I just I mean, the solar that’s that’s quite mature. So maybe they’re ready to go offshore. But why? I mean, they say I was reading a bit into this because I actually didn’t even know that offshore solar was a thing until I until I saw this article.
And, you know, OK, so some countries are filling up their onshore opportunities for solar. They want to go offshore. I just can’t imagine that it’s worth the headache. But OK, that’s the thing. But then hydrogen, I mean, it’s really I like Julys.
The technology isn’t brand new, but it is brand new that we’re going to be using them in this in this way with a wind turbine. Why aren’t we doing it onshore? First, to figure out if this is a good idea and even to say if the markets are there to, you know, make their business case make sense
. I just think that we’re so far jumping the gun by so far to put. Yeah. Offshore hydrogen, wind turbine hybrids. And then secondly, to add solar into it, I just think that this is going to be so much more complicated than it needs to be.
So, yeah, that’s that’s my opinion on that one.
Rosemary, do you think it’s a of being an international waters and taxation that essentially there is no governmental control over it? And in a sense, I mean, you are really, really creating energy from the sea, so to speak.
And if you turn it into hydrogen, you have an open market to walk into any place that the highest selling market and just basically drive a ship to wherever they’re going to pay the most for it. Is that it sounds like that’s what this is driving towards, that it’s more economic than engineering related sailing towards.
That’s what this is sailing towards.
You know.
I mean, that might be true, and there is also so I shouldn’t be so dismissive of that wind hydrogen combo because there are some kind of synergies for putting it both offshore, because you don’t need then to put a big subsea cable and you can just get ships to go, you know, or or a pipeline.
So there’s something there. It’s not just a matter of complicating it for no reason. And maybe you’re you know, you’re right that, you know, that sounds plausible, but I just don’t see why you need to do that now.
Get your technology working. I just in the offshore wind industry, anything that you can do onshore, you do it onshore. It always it’s just the cost just goes through the through the roof. When you every everything you add to it adds maintenance cost and times it by ten.
Because it’s offshore. It’s just I don’t understand it. And then I did wonder with this with this project, if it’s more for the headlines being a generating concept. You know, I get all of the cool podcasters to to talk about it because because it’s so crazy.
But that’s probably the most out of the the most sensible interpretation that I can think of this project.
Well, it says that the the the total cost of the project is seven point twenty five million so or six million euros, which doesn’t seem very big either. It’s a really tiny experimental thing or it’s I don’t know.
So getting it manufactured by IKEA or something, I don’t know. But maybe it’s not very big.
Maybe if the wind turbine was going to be installed anyway, maybe that incremental cost to put an electric either on a solar panel next to it is about seven million. That that sounds about right to me. That’s what I would be asking for if you wanted me to take an existing wind turbine and put a solar panel
onto an electric offshore. I think I think I could get something done with that much money. But, yeah,
well, I think there’s going to be fewer problems of Elon Musk getting to Mars than this thing going to go, just as fewer problems to solve, because it could be a number of problems you have to solve to get to Mars is just like mass, right.
Is just build something bigger. And this thing, you got so many moving parts. You got wind, you got solar, we go localizers, you got a ship involved. There’s just so many moving pieces from an engineering standpoint, you have each one of those problems is very difficult to solve and you stack them all together at the same time
and try to make trying to make a nickel on the project. That’s that’s really hard.
And it’s floating wind. Right. So that also is not mature yet. I mean, I think it’s got potential, but. Yeah, yeah. To solve all those problems at once. I feel sorry for the project manager and it’s trying to, you know, bring that together on a schedule that’s that’s going to be tough to
parts of moving on. There’s a interesting graphic called the Clean Hydrogen Latar by Michael Libbrecht. And as he describes it, it’s his attempt, quote, to put use cases for clean hydrogen to some sort of merit order. So at the top.
Well, there’s unavoidable. These are things like fertilizer, hydrogenation, methanol, hydro cracking. And at the bottom of the ladder are things that are uncompetitive, like metro trains and busses, urban delivery, two and three wheelers, power system balancing. And then somewhere in the middle, there are things like long haul, medium haul, short haul aviation ferries, trucks and coaches, stuff
like that. So, Rosemary, what is the story of this ladder? What does it mostly trying to convey?
Yeah, so I mean, I really love this ladder because I think that’s just such a really clever way to communicate hydrogen, because, I mean, if you read the article, you can see a bit further down and it’s got this graphic of a Swiss army knife with about a thousand different attachments.
So, yeah, in theory, you could carry this knife around with you and do everything that you wanted to do with it. But in reality, it’s never it’s not the best tool for many, many jobs. So you wouldn’t. And people talk about hydrogen a bit like that, like, oh, it could do.
It could do anything. And they’re right that they could do anything. But it won’t, because, you know, there’s alternatives that make more sense. So in this Latha, it’s been done in a really rigorous way where, you know, you take every single thing that people talk about hydrogen being able to do and then look at what else could
we do it with instead, and does that make a lot more sense? So, yeah, like you said on the top, you’ve got things that hydrogen is already doing. You know, we already have a lot of hydrogen getting made.
It’s all very, very dirty. And yes, that includes especially fertilizer. Where we’re the main largest one. And then at the bottom, you say of the least likely technologies got fuel cell passenger cars and power system balancing, which I think.
Is the things that people, maybe not engineers think are the main things that hydrogen is going to do, so to say them right at the bottom is really interesting.
Well, I think this is an economic ladder. That’s the way I looked at it, like it’s determining whether it’s a cost related issue. It’s not an engineering challenge issues so much as can you economically make this work versus all the other alternatives.
And I think as a bigger picture on the engineering side is that the economics kind of get tossed by the wayside because engineers don’t tend to think about the money part of it too much. If it’s cool, I’m going to buy the Tesla.
And whether it is the most economical way to get me around town or not seems to be secondary to the discussion. But ultimately, those the economy is going to be the bigger driver in the financing of these things.
And things that are economical are going to pick up hydrogen engineering pieces that won’t like making a lawnmower out. A run on hydrogen doesn’t make any sense at all. Then it’s just not going to happen. And I think that’s the way these get filtered out over time, is that if you can make money on it, they’re going
to stay. If you can’t, it’s going to go away. And hydrogen is going to find its sweet spot at some point, particularly these large industrial things. I think that is the sweet spot for hydrogen right now is large industrial places which need hydrogen fertilizer.
Being one of those is where if you had a wind turbine, solar plant and electro lizer and you’re creating that hydrogen right next door and it makes your operations more economical, slamdunk, all the bean counters are going to say, go ahead and do it.
But if you’re talking about generating hydrogen from natural gas and shipping it across the country, makes no economic sense won’t happen.
Rosemary, I want to use that as sort of a transition into some of these different methods of creating hydrogen. So a couple of articles have come out a little bit critical of blue hydrogen. Can you tell us, as I made a little joke earlier.
What are the different colors, quote unquote, of hydrogen for those who aren’t as as savvy as you are?
Yeah, I mean, there’s no definitive word. Actually, I keep on saying people come up with different different colors for different things. But the way that I mean, some of them are definitely agreed upon is a green hydrogen is made from electricity, from renewable sources, although there’s no color for hydrogen made from nonrenewable electricity.
So, you know, feel free to make up your own color.
Brown, I say. Brown, dirtiest calling
brown suggestions from brown coal. All right. Brown calls that one. Steichen. Yeah. And then blue hydrogen is from steam steam, methane, reforming to make hydrogen. And then you put carbon capture on it. But it’s usually used for just any kind of fossil fuel hydrogen that has carbon capture added to it.
And that’s been proposed as a second pathway to decarbonization. And so I think I’ll say a little bit about why so many engineers are so passionate about hydrogen on this hydrogen ladder, including me and about the economics, because it’s not it’s not just like the cost of it.
That’s the issue. It’s it’s how fast we can get to decarbonization in general. Right. And hydrogen, it can that if you use electricity to make hydrogen and then back to electricity again, which is what you’re doing, if you’re using it to balance a power grid or in a passenger car, because a hydrogen fuel cell car is an
electric car. It’s really inefficient. You know, you get one third of the electricity back that you put into it. So you can imagine if you scale that up and you have like lots of power system balancing, lots of hydrogen fuel cell passenger cars, you need three times as many wind turbines or solar panels as you would need
if you were able to just use that electricity directly or from a battery. So, you know, we can expand our solar and wind industry a lot, but not infinitely, three times as many as is a big deal. And there’s other things that we could be doing decarbonizing with that green electricity.
So that’s why a lot of engineers get really passionate about the economics of it, because, you know, it has it’s a handbrake on our energy transition. If we start using hydrogen willy nilly, then, you know, we’re we’re missing out on opportunities to do something else with that.
So then enter blue hydrogen, which is a separate pathway and legitimately is a separate pathway to, you know, rolling out hydrogen without cannibalizing green, renewable electricity in general. So it sounds really nice. You’ve got your fossil fuel hydrogen manufacturing, which is the way that it’s it’s done 98 percent of the hydrogen that’s made today is from fossil
fuel source with no carbon cap. Add carbon capture now you can call it clean hydrogen, and it’s not taking renewable electricity, that would have done something else. And we can use it to expand all of these amazing things in the Swiss Army knife of hydrogen.
It’s perfect. And so then comes along this study, which is the first peer reviewed one that’s rigorously looked at the whole the whole emissions chain of blue hydrogen and found high. It’s not not so appealing as it sounds.
And, you know, I think calling it clean hydrogen is is a real misnomer.
So what was misleading about that idea that blue hydrogen is just like super duper clean, like where’s it go wrong?
Yeah. So it sounds really simple. You just shove carbon capture onto the steam methane reformer and suck out all the carbon. But in reality, I mean, you can capture as much carbon as you want, basically. But the economics kind of set a limit.
It’s hard to go much above 90 percent capture for just the same methane part of it. And then for there’s a you also need heat and pressure, which is usually comes from gas as well, and that the emissions are much lower concentration, the flu gases.
So that’s harder to capture. So this report included not just that part of it, but also the upstream emissions. So, you know, in the natural gas extraction and transporting, there’s a lot of losses. There’s leakage. And this this report in a main baseline scenario assumes three point five percent leakage of that methane, which is on the high
side. But they did also do a sensitivity analysis right down to kind of like the lowest estimates of about one and a half percent. And they still get roughly the same same conclusion. Yeah. So they included all of that.
And then the fact that you need a lot more gas to make hydrogen than to get energy from hydrogen, then if you just burn that gas directly, you know, if you want to, you know, a certain amount of energy, you then get a you can burn gas to make the heat, to make the electricity, or you can
use, you know, like three times as much and get it from hydrogen via hydrogen. So then you’re multiplying all of the upstream emissions and you get to the point where actually blue hydrogen for the same amount of electricity out blue hydrogen has more CO2 emissions than just burning the gas directly.
So as a transition, Filion, you know, actually making any improvement on your your emissions outcomes. So, you know, can we can we call it clean when it’s dirtier than what we’re replacing? And can you call it a transition when it’s a step away from our carbon emission targets?
It’s you know, that’s the that’s the real interesting thing about this. This study is this blue hydrogen as opposed to any other things that we’ve been told that it’s going to do.
Hmm. That actually reminds me a little bit of the ethanol discussion here in the U.S. for 20 years ago, like the government subsidized ethanol from corn quite a bit. It was add to gasoline and like 85 percent gasoline, 15 percent ethanol mix.
But when you started to really break down the economics of it, it didn’t seem like it made a lot of sense, both from the cost cost benefit and also just the amount of trucking and all that other stuff.
It seemed like it was contributing more. And I don’t have those numbers, but I remember remember that conversation. Alan, I mean, is that a decent analogy or my way off?
Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good analogy. And I think I look at a little bit differently than Rosmarie in this particular case. There’s a lot of technologies that may not be ideal. I think from a if you’re talking about the world in an industrial economy and trying to get to a cleaner environment, one of those transitions
you’re going to have to make in all these countries as you need to get economic development up, you need to get the economy is growing faster. You need to bring everybody, essentially everybody out of poverty into somewhat of a term, sort of quasi middle class sort of status.
At least that’s your fastest way to bring down emissions, is that once we get society and some moderate basis, then we can attack these other problems. But if we don’t attack the sort of the poverty problem first, whenever we’re going to have a much more difficult time to getting to a really a carbon neutral carbon reduced society
. So in the transition, I think we have to kind of suck it up a little bit. And I think one of the one of the keys that has happened recently is like in the United States, in the Paris Accords, one of the things that happened with the Paris Accord is everybody went off and there’s all this clapping
and cheering and stuff that’s happened. But the United States is the one actually reduced emissions, and we did it in an unnatural way. Or in a way that wouldn’t have been approved by the Paris Accords, so to speak, or wouldn’t have been looked upon kindly and.
But when we made that sort of natural gas transition, we did reduce the amount of emissions that’s not going to last forever. But did it help stabilize the economy in some parts? And it did. And I think the United States can do those sort of next generation things in terms of energy development.
So I’m willing to to suffer a little while to to bring up the world economy, to then really push down the carbon emissions, because we’ll be at a better place to go do it. So it’s sort of let’s get to the economy is working first, then let’s attack carbon.
They both need to be solved. It’s a question of which to you first and how to get to the end result for both of them sooner.
I’m on I’m on board with that. And I’m also on board with the idea that green hydrogen is going to be really it’s gonna take some time to to scale up to the point that it needs to. And so we can this is you know, it is a legitimate second pathway.
Doesn’t look like it’s super it’s not a large step or any maybe any step towards decarbonization, but it is a step towards getting these, you know, industries swapped over to hydrogen. So I don’t have so much of a problem if it sticks to applications that are going to make sense to hydrogen in the long term.
And I would really love to see it done, you know, within a framework that made sense as well, because at the moment, it is really similar to that ethanol thing, where it’s the government saying, you know, put ethanol in and fuel or the government saying blue hydrogen is that is the go.
I would much rather see it on the carbon tax. You know, like it’s a wish that people in countries like ours are never going to see fulfilled. That would be the way to do it. You know, then you can sensibly choose the decarbonization pathway that has the least economic pain.
So I think that that that’s the best way to, you know, get sensible economic outcomes. But I also don’t believe it will ever happen in Australia.
So, yeah, I don’t know if the economics of that really work out. I think that’s the reason why the United States has a big problem with carbon taxes, is that economically we’re not sure that’s the best answer to get to the final solution, and that’s the debate.
Do you artificially skew the marketplace so much that you force decisions, you force engineering to go in a particular way? And we saw that during the last economic collapse in 2008 with with the government taking over General Motors, essentially, and telling them they’re going to be an all electric vehicle.
That vehicle went absolutely nowhere, unfortunately, went absolutely nowhere. And it was it was not the right thing at the right time. And those sort of edict and government mandated engineering bits never seemed to to get to to the better part.
Tesla was off there making cars and they didn’t get wrapped up in that. They’re going to be the winner. GM is not going to necessarily be the winner in that. And the government didn’t really help it. So in some cases, you know, I think society in general, people like us say, hey, cleaner is better, are going to
be making the decisions. And that’s probably a better way and a faster way to get to the ideal than letting the governments force it on us.
So last story for us today. This one’s in Rosemary’s neck of the woods. And this is just sort of that’s that conversation that’s going to be happening in an increasing amount is of people who have done, you know, work in fossil fuel industries their whole life as they see those industries start to hit their sunset.
So this interesting story out of Australia about the Hunter Valley, which is supported by coal. They’re starting to see their end and starting to talk about what’s next for our children and grandchildren in this in this area. And one of the interesting technologies that’s popping up in that area is MJ Thermal.
They have these sort of alloy bricks that are made of various metals that essentially they can heat up if they have extra energy from the grid, whether it’s heat or extra electricity, they can heat these bricks up stores.
That energy is heat, and then they can use it to either release that later as steam or to power some sort of industrial process using the heat. Rosemary, I mean, is this is the conversation that we’re going to continue to have where older generations are seeing their line of work, like like I said, fade into the sunset
in favor of new technologies? And how are these people going to get sort of moved on and their next of kin on board with some of these these new these new facilities that will be built?
Yes, I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it on this podcast before, but I have been noticing as I climbed turbines every now and then with technicians, and I meet some interesting people there, and I’m always asking them about how do they get into that line of work.
And one time when I was climbing in New Brunswick, I believe that that was traditionally a really strong mining area. And I. Climbed with this guy, he’s like, I was a coal miner, my dad was a coal miner, my granddad was a coal miner.
Jay, it’s really nice to be, you know, above the ground as a wind turbine technician. I love this job. And so, you know, that’s an area where they’ve they’ve been able to at least start to make that transition away from coal mining jobs and into clean energy.
And also highlighted for me that, I mean, it’s not like magical skills that are needed in the in clean energy. It’s really similar, similar things to what I needed in mining and coal power plant. So my most recent J-W are training.
There was a guy who was an apprentice electrician who wanted to work on wind turbines to get away from ridiculous inner city housing prices. There was a guy who used to repair aircraft who was now wanting to replace wind turbine blades because Covid shut down has grounded a lot of airplanes.
All sorts of trades, people from all sorts of backgrounds are getting jobs in in wind. And then this company is another example of, you know, the that the taking really normal kind of skill sets. They’ve got this cool technology and it’s called materials technology.
So there’s pretty high tech. But they’ve got these hot, hot bricks that they want to heat up. It’s not the only kind of thermal energy storage that we say. But what I really liked about the system is, you know, you can do it anywhere and you can even retrofit a coal power plant that’s been decommissioned.
You can put these hot bricks in there and use the turbine from the coal power plant to get you to make electricity from it. So it’s you know, it’s from a university in this traditional coal area where they are thinking about the future and what else we could do, because, you know, the writing’s on the wall for
Australian coal mining, at least, you know. Ninety five percent of that is exported to countries that have zero emissions targets. So, you know, like it doesn’t matter what our domestic policies are, things are going to change. And so I was just really excited to say I didn’t this time was it’s not just this one project.
There’s so many things happening in this region of people who are, you know, really thinking ahead. What what are the jobs going to be? What are the opportunities going to be? And for me, I think there’s traditional coal areas, a really good place to put in.
You know, some go back to manufacturing those areas. They used to used to have really cheap electricity, used to manufacture a lot of steel, a lot of aluminum. And then that dropped away as electricity prices rose in Australia.
But, you know, there’s there’s a huge opportunity in the future for renewables to bring, you know, clean and cheap electricity and get those industries back. I think we’re starting to see people realize the energy transition is an opportunity, even for the communities that you might think are going to suffer from it.
All right. Well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks again for listening. Be sure to subscribe to the show, whether you listen on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher or YouTube and check out the show notes or you’ll find Rosemarie’s awesome YouTube channel, as well as uptime tech news.
Our weekly update for all things wind energy, technology, stocks, business, what have you. So we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades.
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