Let’s dive into some of the exciting stories that have been happening in the wind industry this week. From the use of prefabricated foundations for repowering projects in Germany, to the milestone of a US-built offshore wind service ship reaching 50% completion, there’s plenty of innovation to explore. And that’s just the start – we’ll also be discussing the use of non-US flagged vessels for site exploration work, liquid air energy storage technology, and a breakthrough in hydrogen boron plasma fusion. And of course, we’ll be highlighting the wind farm of the week, the Red Barn Wind Park Project in Grant County, Wisconsin. So, buckle up and get ready for an exciting episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
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Uptime 161
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Just a couple of show notes here. Joel and I are headed to Copenhagen for Wind Europe and we’re gonna be enjoying all the sight and sounds of Copenhagen and it’s gonna be a big event, Joel?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, exciting. We’ve got a bunch of meetings scheduled. I know the, the insurance world is gonna be to the wind world innovation.
OEMs a lot of ISPs, asset owners, all kinds of new technology. So always excited to see what that one, that show looks like. And it’s gonna be just a precursor, just a couple weeks, right before our big ACP show in the United States. So we’ll be able to see what are the Europeans doing? What is the rest world doing on that side of the pond?
And then, Three weeks later, come back and we will both as be in for ACP in New Orleans as well for that week. And it’s always interesting to see. We’ll see if we can’t bring some bring some technology back with us, maybe.
Allen Hall: Yeah, well, Wind Power Lab, Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and Ping share booze at these events.
So there’s always some activity around us. They’ll stop by if, if you’re in Copenhagen or we’re gonna be in in New Orleans, we. We would love to see you. Well, and this week we have a, a bunch of really interesting stories The wind industry’s picking up because it’s springtime in America and, and springtime in Europe, and all the projects are starting.
So Joel, why don’t you give us the highlights of what’s happening this week?
Joel Saxum: So we’re gonna talk about RWE, so a German company, RWE, using another German company for an innovation project. They’re looking at prefabricated foundations for a repowering. It’s a pilot project. I don’t know if it’s technically Repowering because.
They’re tearing the old turbines down, putting new foundations and everything in, but they’re gonna use pre-fabricated foundations, which is really cool. And then we’ll jump back onto this side of the pond as well. We’ll talk about the first US built offshore wind service ship reaching a milestone, 50% complete Edison West down in Louisiana, doing their part for the transition.
And on the. Coattails of that conversation. We’re gonna talk a little bit about Dominion Energy’s use of non-US flagged vessels and some of the site exploration work that they’re doing for their projects
Rosemary Barnes: South Virginia. And then we’re gonna talk about tel getting into liquid air energy storage and talk about how that kind of technology fits into the energy storage ecosystem as a whole.
And then we’ve got a US Japan team that has a breakthrough in hydrogen boron plasma fusion. Let’s talk about how that fits into the energy transition. And then finally, the wind farm of the week is Red Barn Wind Park Project in Grant County, Wisconsin.
Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Ticket, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon and Australian Renewables Guru Rosemary Barnes.
And this is the up. When did you podcast?
Well, in an effort to reduce the amount of pollution that is generated when putting in wind turbines, r w e is testing prefabricated foundations for an upcoming repowering project in Germany. They’re replacing a 1.8 megawatt turbine with a 5.7 megawatt machine. Wow, that’s a big difference. The foundations is gonna be made at precast concrete and weighs 270 metric tons, which is 80% lighter than traditional foundations.
Wow. The foundation was developed by smart and green anchor foundations and only a third. It uses only a third of the amount of steel and concrete normally used for poured standard foundations. Now Rosemary, this seems like a pretty good idea because one of the issues about pouring foundations is how many concrete.
Trucks it takes to bring the concrete to the site. So instead of using 120 concrete mixers, they’re gonna use 30 truck trips to bring the, the foundations in. Then they’re just gonna get bolted together on site, and then when they’re done, Joel, they can just take the foundations apart and move ’em on to another location.
Possibly or bury them, I guess. It’s just concrete. So this is a really interesting project. And, and you know, Joel, you and I have been to a couple of places recently, and Rosemary has probably seen this too. R W B E is investing in a number of innovative ideas, and this is one of them. And they’ve been doing some really good technical presentations over the last couple of weeks.
So it, this pre Fab Concrete Foundation is another one of those R R W. Funded innovations. This is good. So Green
Joel Saxum: anchor green anchor foundations is, they’re, they’re German as well. So r w the, the home, the home base is Germany. The, they got this right outside their door. I think it’s fantastic. Cuz it’s, and I was talking with a friend of mine that’s a civil engineer and we were walking through this solution, this was a couple weeks ago, and, and I said, You know the difference between pouring in place with big mesh bars and all the steel and everything, and, and, and he and I asked him, I said, okay, so when you build things for civil engineering purposes, whether it’s bridge beams, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I said, Poured in place with, with grid or post tensions or pretension. So post tension and pretension and this, this is how these things are built. So for our user or listeners, so you pour the concrete in a cast and you run a cable through it. And that cable, you put tension on it either beforehand, before the concrete cures or after the concrete cures.
And what that does is it holds the whole concrete together. Yeah, with a higher psi. So it’s almost like putting bar in it, but you’re putting
Allen Hall: pressure on it as well. In Rosemary, it goes to, to your case all the time. It’s not just about the building of the item itself. It has a lot to do CO2 wise with all the transportation back and forth.
So they’re really trying to address transportation, it sounds
Rosemary Barnes: like. Yeah, and it definitely sounds good for that point of view. And also I’m working on a video on cement at the moment for my YouTube channel. Is like 7% of the world’s emissions. So it’s it, it’s definitely something where we’re gonna have to start paying attention.
And I think that making, yeah, prefab cement probably makes it easier to get some of the new technologies in there. You can, you know, use different kinds of materials in the cement that will actually capture carbon during the curing. And yeah, there’s a few, few other technologies underway, so I hope that they would be able to, you know, start implementing some of.
And then the other thing, just as you know, someone that’s been involved in when turbine construction projects, you know, I’ve, I’ve seen, and we’ve talked about it a few times on the channel where there’s been defects in the foundations that either, you know, cause turbines to collapse or they at least, you know, once they realize that there’s a problem, then you’ll have to shut down potentially a whole, whole wind farm while they, you know, fix those foundations.
So I guess that it would be a way to avoid so many of. Also when you are trying to install turbines in really cold climates, you know, you get a really sh short window of a construction window because you’ve gotta allow for the cement to cure the yeah. Concrete to cure and. Yeah, if you’re prefabbing, then I would expect that that would open up a much longer window for yeah, for getting your foundations in the ground, which would definitely, you know, that’s a big, a big deal if you’ve got a big wind farm in a, a cold climate and you’re trying to work within weather windows, it you know, it makes things hard cuz obviously Yeah.
The weather is not. Totally predictable. Say even sometimes when you’re like, okay, yeah, we’re gonna be manufacturing right up to the middle of, of autumn. Sometimes it gets cold sooner than that, and you are left with a few, a few foundations short of your wind farm for another year. Well, it, it
Allen Hall: really goes into what the d o e here in the states Department of Energy has been pushing for offshore wind to, to lower the cost of offshore wind.
This is a really good way to lower the cost of onshore wind. And it, it seems like these initiatives are coming from the operators taking it the initiative themselves to, to, to drive costs out of onshore wind. And I think you’re right, right? If you can prefab a bunch of concrete. Tower bases in a row, that’s the most efficient way to do it.
Instead of making a couple in April, then waiting till September to make a couple of more. If you’re constantly producing these, these foundations outta the factory, that’s the most efficient use of the factory and it’s gonna produce the lowest cost product. Right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think you’re, you’re spot on there.
And one of the things that I like about the solution that rws taking it on is, You’re, when you have an innovation that’s driven by market capital, like capitalism, right, and not driven by grant funding and all this stuff, usually it has more staying power, right? Because the market has demanded it. It’s actually more cost effective.
You’re saving money, all the, all the advantages of it, but it’s not being subsidized. It’s actually just like, Hey, this is just a good solution that’s gonna save us some money and it works. Those are the kind of solutions that stay around. And and scale faster.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I think this idea is really interesting and I, I hope that they get some early results from it and start using it in other places like the United States, because it would be a big cost saver at the end of the day, and that’s where we need to go.
As we get closer to having some offshore wind turbines in the United States, we need some SOVs, some surface service operation vessels. And we’re building one in Louisiana. So the first first of those ships is 50% complete. So Louisiana base ship building company. Edison’s West Offshore as manufacturing the S so V and it’s gonna be a 260 foot long vessel called Eco Edison and the, the making of the ship for Orstad and Forever Eversource.
And it’s supposed to be done in 2024. That’s, that’s a good sign. Things are, Rolling along quite nicely. You
Joel Saxum: know, Edison SCH West has got a huge and storied history in the Gulf. So a lot of, a lot of vessels, a lot of operations, and a lot of some support for the energy sector has come out of Louisiana from Edison SCH West for many, many, many, many, many years.
When we talk about Louisiana boat captains going up into the, the North Sea a few months back and how that helped with the oil. These were, this is where the boat captains came from Edison SCH West is I’ve, I’ve been on their vessels. They do a good job at maintaining them. Really cool that they’re the ones that are building it.
I think some of this design comes from a lot of iterations of North Sea SOVs, right. So they’re, Orstad was a part of it. I mean, Orstad is one of the, one of the people that have been playing in that, that realm for so long. So they know, Hey, we like this in an sov. We like, we don’t like this. We want, you know, This layout for our walk to work platforms and this and that.
So this vessel is brand new state of the art. The, it’s going to be super comfortable. I think it’s, I think it houses basically 60 people as a, it’s a floating hotel and work boat, right? So they’re out there in wind farm and they can do, they can run back in if they need to or they can do shift changes at c I would imagine with it.
But yes, 60 wind techni turbine technicians, I think can be on this vessel at any time. And I’m not sure if that includes the. The ship crew, you know, you got cooks and all, all the, all the, the pilots and everybody, everybody like that. But yeah, excited to see this one coming outta Louisiana, built in the US Jones Jones Act compliant.
We’ll see some more of these and I think Edison SCH West will they’ll be, they’ll be a lot of vessels that come outta that port facility. So this,
Allen Hall: Ship’s gonna be used for three wind sites, soft fork winds, which is taking place right about now. It. Getting much closer to be in reality. Sunrise, sunrise, wind, and revolution winds are all those off the east coast of the United States, around New York.
And Which they’re all come pretty soon, right? So they gotta get this ship done. And it, as Joel, you were saying, it has that walk to work motion compensated gangway. And if you have, have you watched pictures of those gangways, like they’re really complicated little devices to, to keep the. Oh, have you, because it looks treacherous.
I don’t know how those things work, but boy, that’s
Joel Saxum: impressive. It’s really, I’ll tell, I’ll tell you kind of the, some of the gist behind them is, is that they have a really, really, really expensive inertial measurement unit built into them. So in the world, you’d call it an I M U, it’s the same thing your your iPhone has in it.
When you, when you turn your iPhone, when you have Google maps up, it kind of knows where you’re going, but not really. There’s an IMU in. In your phone that costs $2. There’s an IMU on that walk to work platform that costs a hundred thousand dollars and it’s sometimes they’re, they’re of the quality of the same kind of guidance system that would compensate for gyros, for like guidance, for cruise missiles and stuff like that.
So they have update rates of motion sensing and angular sensing in. You know, hundred to a thousand hertz. So a thousand times a second, it’ll update where, what angle it’s at. And then it hits a feedback control mechanism into those the pressure rams and pumps that kind of just like, so when you watch them, you can watch the vessel move like this and, and pitch and heve all over the place.
And that walk to work just stays. It’s, it’s ama it’s really amazing. I, they make cranes like that too. It’s super cool.
Allen Hall: Well, it seems like this is gonna be put to good use in the near future, and that’s a good sign. So it’s the first of a couple of Jones X vessels that are being in, in the process of being built in this one being the first, obviously.
So more, more to come and yeah. This, this is interesting tech. Hey, uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read p e s Wind. P e s Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And p e s Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in-depth info you need.
Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication p e s Wind at p e s wind.com.
So there’s a dispute with Dominion Energy O off the coast of Virginia at the moment, and there’s a dispute with the Offshore Marine Service Association s a, which released a video a couple of weeks ago accusing Dominion Energy of using non-US flag vessels for unexploded ordinance surveys off the coast of Virginia.
And one can well imagine there’s probably a bit of unexploded ordinance because that’s where the Navy ships to a lot of Navy ships operate out of there. So in 2020, dominion Energy stated they would use US flag vessels for this unexploded ordinance surveys. And the dominion submitted solicited bids from for US vessel operators, but none of them were accepted instead.
Dominion chose two foreign flag vessels and which were also foreign and crude. And this has set off a little bit of a firestorm in the United States because there’s such a push from the administration to use union workers and union ships and all, all that good stuff. And it seems like that’s not really taking place in some of these early efforts.
And I, I, you know, obviously there’s two sides to this dispute, dominion. Disputes the UMass claims and say quote, we follow a competitive and thorough review process to contract with vessels performing survey work for coastal Virginia offshore wind. We require the firm’s performing work on our behalf to comply with all laws, codes, and regulations, including the Jones Act.
Now Joel, that’s a really. Pointedly worded statement, which dance around the fact that they’re using non-US vessels because you don’t have to come on shore. Right. That’s the, that’s where the Jones Act falls into place is that if it, if they hit shore in the United States, it would have to be a US flagged in US man vessel.
But if they don’t, they can be from anywhere. And that’s what, how Dominion is getting through this, right? Yeah, I
Joel Saxum: think so. And and the other thing I believe. Probably aren’t doing is if someone was to say, okay, are you auditing these and can you give us an audit report on it? I, I don’t know that for sure, but that, that would be the next logical step I would take.
Right? So yeah, if these are, if these flags are, or if these vessels are coming in from the Marshall Islands and, and they’re loaded with fuel there, they’re loaded with people there, loaded with food there, and they come out and do the survey and then leave and go back to them. That is a way around some of the Jones Act stuff.
Now, there is. Mileage from shore things and stuff, and I’m not a hundred percent sure I know what they are, but there is ways around some of these things, and this is a very. Worded statement, you’re a hundred percent correct from Dominion. So I would like to see, like, if they wanted to, if they wanted to quell this, then they would put out some audit reports and make ’em public and say, Hey, this is, this is what happened, or, and this is what’s going on in our sites.
Cuz offshore Marine Service Association, if you’re, if you’re, if you’re watching LinkedIn and you’re watching these guys, they’re, they’re making this very well known and trying to push it up to the top levels of our federal government as well to raise awareness of what’s going on. I’ve seen
Allen Hall: a lot of stories about this in the last couple of weeks and I thought I should highlight it because this is not gonna go away.
And when other opportunities for US vessels to be used come up, I’m wondering if that’s gonna be the choice. And I’ve seen some discussion about Block Island. That was several years ago, right? Block Island was off the coast, Rhode Island, and there are still ship owners over there really upset by. They used some foreign vessels to do some of that work, and they felt like Rhode Island ship owners should have got some of that business.
So there’s more to come here, but I just really think, can we just use some US operators once in a while? Can we try
Joel Saxum: that? Yeah. I mean, a UXO survey is not, it’s not like you’re contracting a specialized, big, heavy dollar vessel. Right. These vessels exist in the us. I, I’ve been on a few of them. I know who, who owns
Allen Hall: them?
They were formerly flagged US vessels. They were made in the united. Joel, these vessels are made in the United States and they, they re flagged ’em in Marshall’s Islands. Yeah. So it’s just awake working around the system. Whoever
Joel Saxum: the operator is, is, is just hiding from some taxes.
Allen Hall: Unfortunate. But here’s, we are, here we are, some interesting news from Orsted.
They are looking at storing energy via liquid air systems. And you say to yourself, what, why? Well Ted and British Energy Storage Company, high view power think that the, that wind power and liquid air storage may help deliver some of the flexibility needed in the grid in the United Kingdom.
And high, high view power is the, is the developing technology here. But essentially what they’re doing is they’re just compressing air and storing it. And it can be used anywhere between four hours and several days down the road. So it’s kind of a nice middle ground in terms of energy storage. What the technology does is it, it uses electricity to cool air until it electrifies, and then it’s, it’s stored in a cryogenic energy storage tank at minus 190 degrees Celsius.
Joel, that’s pretty cold. That’s worse than Wisconsin January. Yikes. So the, so they’re already pre preparing to deploy the technology in a number of locations and including a 50 megawatt. 300 megawatt hour project near Manchester home of man, United in man city football teams. So Rosemary, this is a really interesting piece because it’s basically using available technology.
Nothing really complicated here and errors free. And to use it as a storage means is, Efficient way to do it. Is it just because it’s so flexible, it can be done anywhere sort of technology? Or is it just, we have so much energy we don’t know what to do with it, so let’s just store it in liquid air and then we get some return on our, our storage investment.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So liquid air energy storage is, it is a lot like, I mean, there’s not least a dozen. Ways of storing energy that, you know, don’t use very complicated stuff. So liquid air, compressed air energy storage, just a similar, you just take, take air, you use energy to compress it, and then you get that energy back when you allow it to expand.
And yeah, the expanding air drives a turbine, which makes electricity so very simple. It’s all things that y you know, we, we know how to do using. You know, like really normal components. So we could have been doing it, you know, 50 years ago if we’d wanted to, but we never needed to until now.
And so that’s kind of basically the description for why we’ve all of a sudden got all of these new energy storage technologies that aren’t really new at all. They’re. You know, like you see gravity energy storage, which is basically like a grandfather clock, and I guess compressed air is like, you know, a bike, a bike pump.
You, you pump up your tires and then you let the valve out and make it, you know, turn a turbine. You can, you know, you can imagine how easy that is to the principle is so simple. But yeah. Why now? Because now we have a, a need to store energy and. I don’t know. The article that I read about this was saying, you know, this is a solution to curtailment of energy.
Because when it’s a super windy day, or you know, in Australia we more often have like a super sunny midday period, then you’ve got a lot of renewables on the grid, and so you might have so much that you can’t use it all, and so you waste. Some. And I think that that’s a really silly way to think about the need for this because I think people need to get away from being worried about you know, wasting a little bit of renewable energy.
I mean, the wind and the sun come for, for free. And what we should be aiming for is the cheaper, cheapest overall system. It’s a lot cheaper to overbuild your wind and solar a little bit than to start building liquid air energy storage to, you know, capture all of. That waste. So yeah, I guess it depends.
Would you rather waste money or would you rather waste a little bit of wind? So I’ll get that little tiny rant out of the way. But then, yeah, in terms of liquid air or compressed air, they’re pretty similar, but liquid air just, it allows it to be done on a smaller scale is probably the. The bigger benefit because you compress it so much that it doesn’t take up very much space.
If you want to do compressed air energy storage, you need somewhere huge to store all that air, compress it a little bit further, and then You can store it in tanks and stuff. So you could put it anywhere, but it is at the cost of a little bit of wasted, more wasted energy. So there aren’t actually any really big versions of either of ’em that exist yet.
It’s like mature technology. We know it would work, but no one has actually done it yet to, you know, Be really sure about efficiencies, but it’s gonna be something like 60, 70% depending on, you know, how much of the, the heat that you can you can reuse for, you know, you gotta move heat from one part of the process to the other, to crank the efficiency up a little bit.
So yeah, 60, 70% efficient, which if you compare that to. Like lithium ion batteries are at least in the high eighties, maybe pushing 90%. So you know, it’s a little bit worse than that. It’s a little bit worse than pumped hydro, for example. But in general, because you’re talking about energy that would otherwise have been curtailed, then their efficiency doesn’t matter nearly as much as the cost.
So you’re just trying to come up with the lowest cost energy storage system, compressed air, liquid air also have the advantage of being They’re suitable for a longer duration of energy storage. So you usually see when these projects are, there’s been a lot planned and then scrapped over the last five or 10 years.
And hopefully now we’re gonna see some that actually get, get built and used, but they’re usually aiming for at least six hours and maybe up to even 15 hours of, of storage. You know, longer than what batteries can economically provide currently. Well, so
Allen Hall: here’s the, here’s the financial piece, which I think plays into it, and I wanna ask you about the structural piece.
So, Orstad saying, over the last winter the UK could have stored as much as 1.35 terre watt hours. Of wind energy and instead they spent UK spent 60 billion on gas power or 60 billion pounds, sorry, 60 billion pounds on gas power. So there’s now, because gas prices are so high, maybe this starts to make sense from the turbines perspective.
Is it better to have their turbine spinning and producing power rather than Id. I think the answer is yes. Right? As we get to these bigger blades and some of the structural issues we’re seeing with them, it appears like it’s better to keep the turbine spinning. It’s, it’s actually less stressful and will extend the life of the turbine if it’s creating power.
So it’s kind of a win-win, right? Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: I think that you know, however many terawatt hours, 1.35 terawatt hours figure that would’ve been wasted and how many homes it could power. I think that that’s a real. I don’t know if it’s a red herring or if it’s. It’s bordering, I’m dishonest, I think because you know, that’s, this isn’t seasonal energy storage.
This is, you know, it’s gonna be something like 10, 10, 15 hours of energy storage. So it’s not going to give you the difference between generating too much energy in winter compared to not enough or. Yeah, it’s, it’s not gonna be making seasonal differences. And if you were going to build an energy system that never needed to curtail any energy, then it would be so expensive.
You would need so much, you know, compressed air energy storage that you know, it’d be be ridiculous. Way cheaper to overbuild your wind and solar. And then, yeah, and, and weigh some than it is to try and store every single electron that could have been generated. And so I’ve done a, a few like o off-grid or mini-grid or microgrid design system designs where, you know, you’ve, you’ve got You’ve got some energy user that doesn’t have the ability to connect to the grid and then try and design them.
What’s the, you know, a robust system that also, you know, doesn’t cost too much, and what mix of wind, solar, battery, storage, you know, other kinds of energy storage would you need for that? And you usually see at least like 20% over-building of wind and solar up to about 30 or even more depending on the specifics of the location.
But it’s always around. That is the cheapest thing, you know, wasting, wasting that much. And if you look at any scenarios for that, that have you, you know, designed a hundred percent renewable electricity grid, they’ve always got over-building because when you put the economic. Into your model, it’s gonna tell you don’t try and store every electron.
You gotta minimize the amount of storage that you need. That’s the way to make the cheapest system. So you only want storage for the times when you’ve got way more or way less power available than what people are. If that makes sense.
Allen Hall: It, it does. In absence of the regulatory system that exists in the United Kingdom at the moment.
So as we’ve seen a number of stories come out of the UK that developing a new wind site is taking up much longer than they had planned, and Osted obviously knows that because they’re right in the front lines of those discussions. So as, as Ted’s approach then saying, Hey uk, if we’re gonna take 10 years to get a new wind farm online and to add that extra.
Energy, solar energy that we’re eventually going to need in the interim. It’s probably faster to get permitted for an air storage system, wouldn’t you think? I, I
Rosemary Barnes: think that it would, but it’s not, it’s not nearly big enough. You wouldn’t need a, an air storage system. You would need like an absolute fleet of them.
So, you know, like a really big compressed air energy storage system or liquid air. Mm, well, liquid air would be smaller, but compressed air, one might be 500 megawatts. That’d be, you know, I don’t think that one that large exists, but there are plans to make some that large. And so, you know, you have that for like 10 hours.
You think that adding one of those to the UK is going to meaningfully affect the security of their supply from wind farms or, you know, Their usage of their existing wind farms so much more efficient that they don’t need to build another one. It’s, it’s gonna be absolutely, absolutely at the margins.
So you, you need it definitely. But it’s not, even though, you know, in the name it says long duration energy storage, that kind of makes people think, oh, okay, yeah, this is going to make everything nice and secure. So now, you know, we take the energy. Storms and then we use it, you know, like three weeks later when there isn’t much wind, that that’s not what it’s for.
It’s for, you know, it’s much more fulfilling in the gap between, okay, yeah, we had lots of solar power during the day, but then it’s in the evening that people want to use a lot of electricity, so we’re shifting it for that. Or, yeah, there was a lot of wind power overnight when no one was using much, so we are gonna shift it so we can use it the next day.
That’s, that’s the kinds of shifts that we’re talking about with these kinds of energy storage. So I do find like a lot of reporting on this and, you know, it’s it’s pushed also in the press releases from the companies working on these projects. They’re, they’re really, they’re pretty much lying about what it’s for, you know, like they will evoke all this imagery of, you know, like a, a, a storm.
And this power was wasted in this year, and so we will be able to, you know use that for, you know, the following year or something. Like, they don’t explicitly say that’s what our system’s gonna do, but that’s how they set the stage for why we need this technology. And it’s not at all what the use case is for.
The use case is not that different from what a lithium-ion battery can do. Just, you know, instead of economically shifting power, you know, by two or four hours like lithium ion batteries do, now we’re talking 10 hours. So it’s, it’s very valuable to the system, but it’s not the silver bullet solution that the press releases always make it sound like.
Okay.
Allen Hall: I’m gonna take your word for it. So we wanna make Elon even richer.
Joel Saxum: So I, I’m gonna shift gears a little bit and ask you a question then. So, when it comes to, we’re talking about liquid air storage, right? What is an advantage of liquid air storage? Over lithium ion batteries, over pumped hydro over is like, so where does it fit within these things and what are the advantages of it?
Because one of ’em that comes to my mind is, doesn’t depend on rare earth minerals. Right? So what other advantages
Rosemary Barnes: are there? Yeah, so I, I mean, lithium ion batteries aren’t. They don’t really have the problem with, they have critical minerals in them. But not rare earth so much. The rare earth is mostly for if you’ve got like motors or generators.
So I mean, maybe compressed air would, would depend on rare earths. If you are, you know, gonna put a super magnet in your, your generator, you probably not, cause you probably don’t care about the size. So I think the rare, the rare earths people use rare earths and critical minerals interchangeably now.
So maybe I should get on board with that, but for now, I’m still fighting that fight every time I hear it. But yeah, so advantages compared to lithium ion batteries, it should be cheaper for the energy stored. So power batteries, lithium ion batteries are really good at providing cheap power, but they can’t provide cheap energy.
So, you know, the longer that you wanna store your power for the more hours that you want. So then therefore the more energy that. Want that costs a lot for lithium ion batteries. And so basically all of the other energy storage systems are, are all trying to make a point of difference with lithium ion batteries in terms of the energy storage being cheaper.
So it should be cheaper for long durations and the longer the duration, the bigger the difference to lithium ion batteries. And then yeah, you compare. All the other kinds of energy storage. So I guess the two big ones would be pumped hydro and thermal energy storage systems. Pumped hydro. You need some elevation difference.
So usually a hundred meters at, at least for a, a small system to be economical. So if you don’t have a a hundred meter hill where you can put a reservoir at the top and a reservoir at the bottom, then you can’t really have pump hydro. So that would be. An advantage compared to pumped hydro. And then, yeah, for thermal energy storage, I mean it’s, I I don’t think that we really know which, which of these kinds of technologies is going to win out because the big ones haven’t been made yet.
So they all use really simple components and you can definitely make a paper design that’s gonna get you pretty close with any of these technologies. But then it’s gonna be in, you know, the. The operation of it and you know, just small details that you find out from building it. So I would say, you know, there’s all these horses in the race and it’s pretty hard to say which one’s going to win or not win.
Yeah, so we’ll see. Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually, it’s very predictable and very prevent. Strike tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
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Allen Hall: So in California, t e Technologies has been working with Japan’s National Institute for Fusion Science. They’ve completed a couple of tests with hydrogen boron in a phonetically confined plasma, which could generate.
Fusion power at lower costs than the existing approach, which is using hydrogen variants, deuterium and tridium in the fusion process. So the, this little hydrogen boron process does not create any radioactive materials and it’s, it’s supposedly is capable of powering the planet essentially.
Now they’re, they’re thinking that they can get a design together by and up on the grid by 2030. And as discussed in some of the press releases it’s using very standardized stuff basically. Let me, let me read it. It says, most fusion efforts around the world are focused on combining deuterium tridium hydrogen isotopes for uses fuel, and the donut shaped toma tomac machines commonly used are limited to the deuterium deuterium tridium fuels.
Unlike those efforts, the new design uses in advanced accelerator, Being driven field reverse configuration that is versatile and can accommodate all fusion fuel cycles. So if I read a couple more articles about those, Rosemary just trying to get a sense of what the hell is going on and what it sounds like is that they were trying to clean out one of their fusion containment devices and they had b.
In there to do that, and they realized that they were getting alpha particles out of this process, which should not have been there to begin with, and realized, hey. The only way we’re creating alpha particles is there’s a fusion process going on, and that fusion process isn’t like the fusion process of old, where there’s sort of banging two hydrogens together to make a helium and, and a massive amount of energy comes off.
It’s a lot less energy. Than a, a typical hydrogen fusion reaction. So they think this has some, there’s more energy coming out than it’s going in not huge amounts, but they think they can dial this process in. Which is interesting because I think one of the issues with the hydrogen process is that we just.
Can’t get it to, we can’t sustain it. We don’t have money to sustain it. So maybe there’s a, a basically a lower energy fusion process that is more controllable and less expensive. And this is, this, I think may have applications, but when I read about it in the press, it’s like they’re talking about you know, imaginary things.
It’s like, oh, in Harry Potter World, they can create fusion. That’s just, this is how it’s addressed in some the scientific literature, right? Where. Either they’re making energy or they’re not. It’s not that hard to, to validate this. So we’re in this weird spot of, there’s competing technologies and we’re not sure which one is right yet.
Have you seen a little bit about this process and does this, does this make any sense?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think that one of the issues is, I mean, when you get a group that you know, has been research researchers that spend their whole career careers on fusion, then they’re talking in one language amongst themselves and they kind of already know all the caveats and, and stuff like that.
And don’t need to say it again every time. So then when an outsider comes into it, like you or me or a journalist, then. Don’t know all that stuff. And so it sounds a lot more exciting than it probably is fair to attribute to it at this point. So you know, and, and I’m no expert on any kind of nuclear technology and, and including not fusion, but my understanding of, one of the key key points is, is it generating energy, you know, net energy on a whole?
So is putting out more energy than is coming in or that they’re putting into it to, you know, Get the ball rolling. They, it depends what system you’re considering. So you know when they’re considering this one small part of it, you know the actual fusion reaction. Yes, we’ve shown, okay, that makes more energy than what you’re putting into that.
But then you’ve got. Another layer of, you know, getting, getting it started that is, is one, you know, you might put a lot of energy in to get it started and then it’s self-sustaining and, and produces energy over time. And if you could continue to have it, do that for, you know seconds, minutes, hours.
Years, then yeah, that would make a lot of energy, but for now they can’t keep it going. And so the amount that they put in to get it started is not recouped. And then there’s everything else on top of that. You know, there’s layers and layers and layers. So, you know how much cooling do you need for the, the system as, as a whole to stop all your materials melting?
And I don’t know what, whatever other auxiliary power needs that you have, which I. Boring engineering details to the scientists. But in terms of actually having this be something that you can, you know, can provide energy to the world rather than consume energy from the world those are key details.
So when you see estimates like, okay, we’re gonna have this on the grid in the 2030s, but we have not yet. What do they say? They haven’t yet demonstrated? Net energy. Delivering power to the grid. I mean, that is not seven years, seven years away, seven years away is when you have something working at a pretty small scale you know, reliably working, and now you wanna scale it up to a grid scale.
That’s a, like a 10 year process. And they’re so far from that. So I think that that’s just something that, you know, you optimistically estimate to estimate to, you know, get your next grant approval. But yeah, I think that that, because when you read these articles, you’re like, well, why are we doing anything else?
You know, why would we bother with compressed energy storage? Why are we bothering with, you know new. Making new vessels to install more wind farms because they’ll only be ready in the late, you know, 2020s. And then by then, we’re only a couple of years away from nuclear fusion providing all of our power.
And so I, I do, I, yeah, let’s make this episode where I just rip into energy journalists, but I. It’s a little bit irresponsible to make out, like this is coming in 2030. Because it gives the impression we don’t need to do any of the, the stuff, the hard stuff with our current imperfect technologies.
It’s really easy to see, you know, technology of the future that doesn’t exist yet and not. Know any of its downsides for now, it’s just a perfect a, a perfect idea to then make that compete against, you know, today’s imperfect technologies is just a way to avoid, you know, doing anything about, about the energy transition and, and, you know, ruin our climate in the process when it turns out, oh, it’s not 2030, it’s 2040.
No, it’s 2050. No, it’s 2060. You know, that’s how all the rest of fusion has played out. It’s always getting pushed back and back and back. Yeah. Odds are that’s what will happen here. Yeah. Eventually something will push through, but it’s not, not in the next seven years, that’s for sure.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I maybe I, I, I don’t know, but the, the, I think they’re interesting piece of using heavier weight particles, right?
They’re using oron, which I think is number five on the periodic table versus hydrogen, which is number one. So obviously there’s a higher, it’s a higher weight material, and it may, it may have something to do. With something unique about boron and, and how, how many materials have we shot into a, a fusion generator setup to see if they actually generate, you know, you know, it’s sometimes the weirdest ideas are the ones that actually take action because so many pieces of technology we have today are just complete flukes.
We didn’t think it was gonna happen. Some weird experiment. Poof, there’s Teflon, poof, there’s, you know, the transistor that just, it’s, that’s what, that’s what happens. And I. I’m not saying that these guys have the right answer, I’m just saying I don’t doubt anybody at the moment because no one has done it.
So if someone can provide data that says, yes, we have net energy, that’s a big deal. And these haven’t done it yet, but I’m not sure they’re that far away from trying to demonstrate something like that. By 2030, they probably could, if it, this is real. 2030. They should be, have something that’s workable, you’d think
Rosemary Barnes: I’ll just, no, I’ll just say the same thing again.
I mean, so it’s, it’s, it’s good. And I’m sure that by 2030 we will know whether this specific technology is worth pursuing or not. And no doubt there’ll be plenty of other variations of fusion by then that look a little bit better, and eventually one of them will push through, but none of them are gonna be solutions to the.
The current energy transition, they’re not gonna be ready in time. We need to get you know, our electricity grids around the world need to have 90% of their emissions removed by 2030. So a technology that starts, you know, starts commercialization in 2030 is too late. So this is really cool. This is really cool technology.
It might be the next energy transition. I’m sure eventually fusion is, is gonna be a thing. And then, you know, as we start decommissioning wind farms, we won’t need to put new ones up because we’ll be able to just build more fusion and no doubt 2100 is gonna look like that, but it’s not y you know, it’s not part of the solution to climate change.
I’m sorry. It would be cool if it was.
Allen Hall: Our wind farm of the week is Red Barn Wind Park in Grant County, Wisconsin. Joel, that’s up by you in God’s country. Cheese Land, maybe? Yeah. Wisconsin Public Service is powering more homes in Wisconsin. Thanks to the completion of the Red Barn. Wind park in Grant County, which is near the Iowa and Minnesota border.
The site has been developed by elite clean energy, 28 turbines. 24 of them are GE 3.4 megawatt machines. Nice. And the other four are two and a half megawatt machines. The site. Interestingly uses slag cement for the foundations. So there’s about 14,000 cubic cards of concrete with 55% slag cement replacement.
So 45% is the standard Portland limestone cement, and, and that’s another way of reducing co2. There you go. The foundations are 450 cubic yards of concrete, and there’s 40 tons of reinforcing steel. Yikes. And Banerjee services appears to be doing the maintaining for the site from Morica tell online.
So congratulations to the Red Barn Wind Park in Wisconsin. You are our wind farm of the. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Win Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Win Energy Podcast.
