Wind energy strives to work alongside nature as Greece-based nvisionist leverages Artificial Intelligence with their bird detection and avoidance equipment. Joel explains the latest in vision tech and how rapid development is lowering costs. Australia seems poised to benefit as multiple countries try to find alternate sources for critical minerals. Rosemary brings great insight into this shift. Danish researchers invented a new method of recycling wind turbine blade epoxies – what does Rosemary think of the effort? Ørsted takes the initiative in New Jersey to train future employees for the renewable future.
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Uptime 165
Allen Hall: So, Joel, have you seen this news article about this lady that got lost in Australia and lived on lollipops and wine?
Joel Saxum: No, but it sounds like a, an ex-girlfriend of mine.
Allen Hall: Is she in Australia?
No, I don’t, I don’t know where she is.
Allen Hall: It’s a national, well, international story cause I saw it here in America. But this poor lady was was gonna go visit her mother and it threw a bottle of wine outta the car and then got sidetracked and got stuck in the mud and, It was outside cell phone coverage, so she couldn’t reach anybody.
She was, she was hanging out there for a couple of days and she lived on lollipops and wine until they tracked her down via helicopter. That’s amazing. People in Australia are tough.
Joel Saxum: It wouldn’t be a bad way to go out, you know, as long as it’s a good bottle of wine, I guess.
Allen Hall: But the crime scene will look kind of weird, like, what’s all these lollipop wrappers and this wine bottle here?
Is there one bottle of wine? Yeah. You know, you never know, but all the people I know from Australia are. Pretty darn tough. So this is another example of Australians that survive some of the worst conditions. And speaking of worst conditions, we have a, a packed show for you this week. We’re not sure how it’s gonna turn out.
Actually. It’s been kind of a struggle to get this episode out. But if we do. Talk about this week bird detection system that was highlighted in PES Wind and in Copenhagen. So I’ve seen it in two different places recently. So we talk about a camera system that detects birds from pretty far out, and I actually identifies the, the species of the bird.
So really interesting technology there. And then we look at really the separation of China on the rare earth minerals from the rest of the world. And how that’s affecting all the other countries involved. Australia being one of them in the middle of this because they do have some of those minerals and processing and who’s gonna do all that processing?
There’s a new place in the United States. It looks like it’s gonna do some railroad processing and. Now everybody’s scrambling at the same time to look for minerals that are just the byproduct of mine waste. So not only we pulling outta China, we’re like scraping the bottom of the barrel in some cases to find where these minerals are gonna come from.
So, really interesting discussion about that with Rosemary this week. So
Joel Saxum: then we’re gonna talk about the University of Ahu. Pioneering another way to break down epoxies. Now, in the last few months, if you follow this as we do, you’ve heard from Vestas that they’ve got a solution. This is another one coming, coming around in the same corner of the world.
But we’ll see how it works. And then as well, Orsted here in the US down in New Jersey has, you know, like everybody else realizes that there’s a shortage of technicians. So they are putting together a technician training school, and they’re gonna use a lot of those technicians, I believe 40% of them.
And some of their offshore wind farms off the coast of the US
Allen Hall: And then our wind farm of the week is from Germany. So you can stop writing me and sending me emails, asking to have a wind farm of the week outside the United States. We’re in Germany this, this week and a lot of interesting things happening in wind in Germany.
So listen to the episode in. We’ll find out who it is. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum and the Bill Nye of Australia, Rosemary Barnes and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Joel, when we were over in Copenhagen, I came across this company that was showing and had a booth called nvisionist. So I just took a quick look at it and it’s one of those bird detection systems and I thought, wow. Wow. That’s kind of cool. And it’s a camera based system. And from what I could tell, it looks like when you see the Tesla car in, in full self, self in full self-driving mode, and it shows you like there’s a dog, there’s a bicycle, there’s a bus, there’s a crosswalk it’s, it’s detecting verge.
And that’s similar fashion. And I hadn’t seen these systems that close. I thought there were a lot. You know, just sort of old technology, but they’re not, they’re like, they’re like AI-based systems now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, there’s, there’s a couple of them out in the marketplace as it sits. I know there’s one that’s been around for probably three years now, can called identify flight, but they’re all working on the same premise, right?
So you can, you can use an AI model or train an AI model to, to. Recognize most anything, right? The earliest AI models of what we know of AI right now is like ocr. If you guys, if you’ve ever used Adobe products, you know what OCR is? Optical character recognition. So it just scans through it and it recognizes what it’s looking at by looking at the, being trained on enough letters, it knows what it is.
So same kind of thing. This is, but it’s, it’s with the advent of all these like NVIDIA jets and TX I chips and stuff, now I can do these computing on video frames at the edge. So now you’re imagining like, This camera looking out there, and it might be at 24 frames per second. Might be at eight frames. 16 frames.
I don’t know exactly what they’re at for processing speed, but sometimes it’ll take a video frame or a video feed that’s at 24 frames per second. Dumb it down to say four frames, frames per second, so you’re every second you’re processing four pictures with an AI model to see if there’s a bird in it.
And then it’s not only is there a bird, it’s what kind of bird it is. Right. And that’s the big thing here because you know, sometimes there’s a certain species that can’t, you know, you, you have to make sure you curtail for, I know like in Germany there’s a certain kind on the coastlines, there’s a certain kind of goose that won.
That goose is in the area, you gotta shut the turbines down. Or at least that was a rule a year or two ago. So in the, like in the US you may have you know, the states don’t normally have individually individual laws on. Taking birds. But if it’s a migratory bird, then you run into federal law. Same reason, like if you’re out duck hunting, you gotta have a federal bird stamp because it’s across the state line.
So that’s controlled by the feds. So the species identification is important. Right. You know, it’s not only, it’s not only the birds though as well. It’s, it’s what direction are they flying in? What habits do they have? Right. So I I also when Wind Power Lab, a few years ago was involved in a project called the Beca Project.
It was in, with university of Ahu, someone’s PhD project. But we used radar and we had like basically like recreational boat, like civilian grade radar, one in a horizontal plane, one in a vertical plane. And with those spinning, it created a dome of radar coverage. And once you had that dome of radar coverage, then you could get the signals in as a raster signal to what birds were flying through the area and by what birds were flying through the area.
You could track patterns and even kind of see what species they were, which is an odd thing to think about, but. Eagles fly a certain way. Ducks fly a certain way. Right. You know, like the way they circle, the way their wings move. So, so you can start to identify species by, by radar that way, but identifying them with a camera is, is, is much more high resolution.
Right. There’s, it’s, it’s a lot better. But yeah, I mean, It’s needed. It’s needed in the marketplace.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And the, the en envision system that I saw, they had a little YouTube video and it sounds like there may be a couple of different variations here because I read about one that was mounted on top end the cell, which makes sense because you can see 360 around you.
But they also showed one that was mounted to the tower. And so it’s actually has two cameras real close together to give you. Binocular vision essentially, right? So you can tell how far something is away. And they use that to one, detect and figure out what, what these birds are, and then to slow the turbine down if the bird is coming in too close so they can really gauge a distance on whatever those bird is.
But on offshore systems. Where they have, I, I assume this is because they’re using bigger turbines, they, they actually add a radar to it so they can see like 10 kilometers out from the turbines. And then there’s a kind of a graduated system. They can track it for further out. And as bird moves in, Start to slow the turbine down, maybe even stop it in some cases.
And I, I couldn’t figure out what the, what was driving to have a radar system offshore versus onshore. Does it have to do with like the, the amount of time it takes to slow the turbine down, those big offshore turbines can’t stop on a dime? Right.
Joel Saxum: I would say two things. Two things would be, of course that, right?
It’s a lot easier to stop a turbine with 35 meter blades than it is to stop with hundred meter blades, right? Just that rotational mass. It’s not, and you’re not hitting the e-stop button boom, cuz you’re gonna blow the. Blow the gearbox up, so we’re not gonna do that. But another one is of course offshore visibility, right?
So when you have any kind of cloud cover or fog cover in on, and it’s very mu, a lot more common, you can see through that with radar and you can’t see through it with a, with an RRG B camera or a FLIR camera. So I think so I think it’s a combination of the two of those and you know, cuz you get that, that further range so you know when things are coming and you can start to, you know, curtail or slow the slow the turbine down because you’re just not gonna get it stopped in time if you try to stop it too quickly.
And then
Allen Hall: it’s weather in that case where we’re getting to the point where this technology is readily available. Do we start putting these systems on, on a lot more children’s? I don’t think they’re on that many right at the moment, except where it’s acquired. Yeah. It’s
Joel Saxum: gonna be driven by legislation.
Again, it’s, it’s, it’s just like last week we talked about the red lights in Nebraska, nobody’s gonna pay the $2 million to put it out unless, unless, unless that from a, you know, a CapEx standpoint at the beginning of the jobs, there’s a, you know, a A stakeholder within the area that wants and demands this to happen.
That could be, or if it’s just driven by regulation. Right. The, the, the example that I said earlier about the geese in Germany, that’s a regulation. That was part of, that’s what part of that beca project was, was this certain species we needed to curtail for. So we devoided it in, in the US I think you, you could possibly see it for Raptor populations.
Raptors being. Eagles, owls, those kind of
Allen Hall: predatory birds. 10 years ago, I would never thought that this system would have been available. Right. Be able to detect birds from that far out and to identify them as a bird and what species of bird that it is, is pretty remarkable. Right. And what’s coming over the next couple of years will be even more interesting because my guess is the price goes down, right?
The system performance goes way, way up. And the price comes down where you may see widespread usages of these systems. It’s
Joel Saxum: good if you follow the like I know a lot of people in the drone world will follow this stuff, but like it’s a combination of edge computing devices and cameras. So as cameras get better and better and better, when the first like Zenmuse X 30 camera came out for a drone, it was like $15,000 for this camera that could zoom optically 15 or 10 times in digitally 20 times or something.
I can’t remember exactly what the details were, and people were, oh my God, this is amazing. If we can get this for inspections Now that camera’s like, 2200 bucks. And, and now, and now the next one is the P 100 where it’s like a hundred megapixel drone images, right? So, and, and then the edge computing, where edge computing was super fast two years ago.
That edge computing device that is the size, you know, a chip set that’s the size of your cell phone, now you can do that same thing with someone the size of your fingernail and the one that’s the size of your cell phone can compute 10,000 times the data. So the changes are so fast,
Allen Hall: just leveraging the same technology, right?
Are we able to detect whales on the east coast of the United States? Just say if they’re mounted on top right? So I know these systems are kinda looking up to the sky, looking for birds, but. Can they also not look down and say, Hey, there is a family of whales scooting through the area.
Joel Saxum: Put a polarized lens on the RGB camera and you’ll be able to see through the water.
That’s what I’m saying. Yes. The other thing is too, is use the same technology that like the Wind Power Lab did the beca project. It’s just, it’s just running AI algorithms on radar feedback. Radar feedback is the exact same thing. Ba radar Backscatter is the exact same feedback you get from a sonar that works subsea.
Oh yeah, sure. So you can run, you can run an AI model and detect a whale off of sonar by running an AI model against it. It’s,
Allen Hall: it’s all doable. On the Envision website, they had a discussion about older technology having to basically block off. Parts of the camera’s vision system to say, oh, there’s a, there’s a road over here and there’s a bunch of trucks coming down, and we don’t want that to trigger this system, so let’s block it out and just coordinate it out.
But n now with these, this new technology, they can. They can detect the trucks and say, Hey, that’s a truck. It’s not a bird. And no deal.
Joel Saxum: No, no, no, no big deal, because the processing speeds are higher, right? So if you, if you ever, if you know anything about video compression, video compression works this way, frame to frame, you may have 30 frames per second, so 30 images per second.
If that value doesn’t change from frame one to frame two, to frame three, to frame four as a color value, they just store that as one unit. Right. That’s why when you’re on, when you’re on FaceTime on your phone and you’re moving all over the place, if you have a bad internet connection, you’ll start to get choppy.
But if you slow down and just stare at it, you’ll get clear again. Right, because it’s video compression. It’s the same thing that the com, the edge computing devices in these old technology ones did not have the power to process moving cars and all this stuff at the same time. It was just like, it just wasn’t enough.
You’d go from being able to process 10 frames a second to being only only able to process one or two, and then you can’t really process video that way. So now that the edge computing devices, these chips are getting so powerful, you’re able to. Do AI recognition on all these things at simultaneously, because you just have, you’ve got the computing power
Allen Hall: to do it.
That’s amazing. Technology. Well, there, there’s more to come in this space. You know, I, there’s some articles out today and I didn’t have time to, to gather enough of them up for this podcast, but some more recent research saying more bats were killed than birds and maybe ought to focus on the bats a little bit.
That’s probably true, right. But you gotta give technology time to catch up. Cause we’re, we’re definitely in a catch up game. So more to come and this envisioning system is, is pretty cool.
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PS Wind, PS wind.com. There’s multiple news articles, not in like the New York Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal here in the States, but there are a lot of sort of low level news articles about rare earth minerals in the soon-to-be departure from China in that space in, in terms of providing or selling those rare earth minerals to the United States and.
Australia and a number of other places. So China is reportedly considering a ban on the export of rare earth magnets used in electric vehicles. So Elon Musk look out also in wind, turbines, motors, and other products. This comes amid growing tensions between, between, between the US and China. And a global shift towards decarbonization and the use of electric motors.
Chi China currently controls about 90% of the market for samari cobalt magnets, and roughly 84% of the market for odium magnets worldwide. If China. Bans the export of these technologies. It would become difficult for the US and Europe both to enter in, into the market and to make them, which makes us basically totally dependent on China at the moment.
So this, as China goes through this process of slowly banning the United States and the rest of the world they’re talking about national security. Why would we send these magnets out to someplace else that doesn’t like us and America do the same thing, quite honestly. So this is the start of a, of a mineral war, basically, right?
We’re not shooting at one another, thank God, but we’re restricting natural resources from one another. And so that puts Australia, rosemary in a u unique position because if China’s decides to stop on some of these rare earths, I think the next place to go. Here’s Australia.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that that’s that’s likely true for rare earths and other critical minerals.
Probably more so other critical minerals where Australia’s got the kind of unique advantage cuz rare earths, despite the name aren’t really rare. They’re kind of distributed all over the, the planet. The problem is that they’re not very concentrated. There aren’t many sources, but they’re very concentrated.
But there’s a lot of interesting work in Australia and elsewhere to try and find new sources of rare earths cuz we have been just relying on, on China. Like the whole world has just been relying on China for rare earths. So yeah, I mean there’s a bunch of different, different. Ways that can, they can a different ways that that can take.
The most simple one is just substitution. At the moment, you know, we use rare earths when you wanna make a really, really strong magnet, basically. And you’ll use that in electric motors and generators. And I don’t think that there’s many rare earths used in onshore wind turbine generators, but offshore when they’re trying to keep the size of the direct drive.
Yeah. Turbines smaller than use rare earth, a stronger magnet can give you a much smaller size. But yeah, for sure. We already know how to make generators without them. There’s just, you know, benefits to using them. And I did see in the news recently that Tesla is planning a new kind of motor that doesn’t use rare earths in an attempt to get away.
And I’ve noticed that that’s something that they. They’ve been pretty good at, at doing, you know, for foreseeing potential. Bottlenecks from, you know, certain problematic materials or components as well. You know, that they didn’t suffer as badly in the computer chip shortage because they were in control of their supply chain and they just found a different, a different way around it.
We’ve seen, you know, cobalt is another critical mineral that has supply chain problems. It’s problematic that most of it comes from Congo and has yeah, child force, child labor and other, you know human rights problems associated with it and environmental. So Tesla amongst. Other manufacturers have moved away from using cobot at all in some of their batteries.
So you can move to the lithium iron phosphate battery chemistry, and that’s what all of, all of their batteries may be. Paradoxically, all of their batteries that are made in China of that chemistry. And that’s what we get for the most part in Australia. It’s just got a little bit less. Energy density.
So batteries are a bit bigger, a bit heavier for the same storage capacity. And then, yeah, now this third example that I’ve noted that they’re moving away from rare earths in their motors or they’re trying to, so that’s the most simple thing. There’s other ways to get your hands on railroads as well.
I think in the past they’ve all come out of China. It’s been kind of a bad deal for. The rest of the world, bad deal for China as well. Like both people got bad parts of the deal. So for the rest of the world, we’ve lost the ability to you know, control that part of the supply chain critical part. But from China’s point of view, they were able to, you know, lock down that that mineral by, or those minerals by.
Providing them very cheaply. But the thing is that when you process rare earths very cheaply, you usually get a lot of radioactive byproducts. And so I know that there’s been reports of, you know, some of the villagers that are downstream from the processing of rare earths in China have very, very, very high rates of cancer.
And you know, like a lot of environmental destruction. So, you know, there’s been a heavy price paid there too. So I think that when we are moving away from China processing these materials, I mean it’s either we’ve gotta accept that kind of environmental and health impact everywhere that we process them, or we have to accept a much higher cost for them as we process them without those issues.
And you for sure, you don’t have to accept that, but you. Then you have to pay more. So that’s the, you know, that’s the bargain that we’ve made in the past. We got cheap minerals that we couldn’t control the supply chain for. And China got the you know, they locked down that part of the supply chain and got the, you know, economic benefits.
But on the other hand, they’ve had health and environmental problems, so, Let’s see, you know engineering’s full of hard trade-offs like that, and you kind of have to accept that moving forward. It’s,
Allen Hall: it’s odd that you don’t read a lot more about this, and Australia is really stepping into the breach between the United States.
And China on minerals and some news articles here. So Australia supplies nearly half the world’s lithium in, is the third largest cobalt exporter, and also is a sign significant producer of things like copper, graphite, manganese. Now, the minerals that really need in this screen transition. Well, the Australian government has signed some new agreements with Japan and Germany and the UK and India since.
Late last year and is encouraging funding for project development and it Will Australia is, is gonna release its own national critical minerals strategy. Now this is really telling, I think because when Australian politicians Call out specific countries. I think that’s unique, particularly if it’s China.
And there’s an interesting quote here from the Minister of Resources, Madeline King, quote. China enjoys an unchallenged position across many aspects of the global critical minerals market having invested in its sector for decades. Like-minded partners can work together to build sustainable supply chains and hedge against such concentration.
So Australia’s saying, Hey, we’re here and, and, and we can provide some of these minerals that everybody needs for this clean transition. If China’s not gonna do it. We can do it. And I, I think that’s going to happen. It has to happen. Like you said, Tesla’s moving away from some of these critical minerals.
I’ve noticed other motor manufacturers, I think GM’s talking about this too. Some of the car manufacturers are trying to get out of the China business. In terms of relying on them because it, it hurt ’em so much during the, the Covid pandemic that it’s a natural transition. Don’t you think? It’s, it’s, it, it was gonna happen after Covid anyway, but now that there’s any sort of impasse between China and the rest of the world, it’s gonna accelerate that.
Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, I think it was obviously stupid to rely on one country for so many critical things, and I, I know it was an intentional strategy from China to, you know, get into the technologies of the, of the future. And they, you know, they accurately foresaw that batteries were beco gonna become very important to a lot of people.
And so they, you know, doubled down on making sure that they were the supplier for most of the critical materials from there. That are used in batteries, sorry. But they’re not blessed with the the raw materials. You know, they don’t actually have them, the minerals in the ground in China, for the most part, they do have some of, most of those those minerals.
But you know, for example, the lithium isn’t high grade enough that they could produce it economically from, from China. So so they’ve looked elsewhere and I think virtually. All of Australia’s lithium goes to China for processing. I don’t think there’s much going other places. And so yeah, it is a, it is a two, it’s a two way relationship.
And for all of these things, I, I, I’m just kind of getting into the mining industry myself. It’s actually good timing for this episode cuz I’m in Brisbane at the moment for a yeah, a company that I, I work for doing minerals processing. It’s a startup and we’re trying out some new processes and building a, a pilot manufacturing facility here.
It’s kind of like halfway between a, a lab and and a yeah, full on mineral processing plant. That’s designed to be, you know, very flexible so that you can lock down new processes. And so it, it’s something that I think I. For a long time in Australia, a lot of us have been really frustrated by the fact that, you know, we’ve, we’ve got so many mineral resources here and in fact Australia I think is the only country that has all of the 10 minerals that go into making a battery.
And. And, and a lot of other things as well, especially iron ore. You know, we a lot of our economy depends on iron ore aside from the fossil fuels that everyone’s well aware of how much money we make from those. But at the moment, you know, we dig up the rocks, lithium rocks dirt for, you know, iron ore.
We just ship all that to China and they process it and it’s just and all our mining companies are foreign owned and so, you know, the profits just go offshore. It’s, it’s crazy. We benefit so little actually from our resources. So well before battery minerals were, you know, the, the. Trendy thing. I shouldn’t say trendy because it’s a legitimately critical thing.
But everyone, you know, long before everyone realized that it was clearly a waste that we’re doing just the, the dumb low value add part of the process and then sending it offshore for them to do the, you know, the high value add parts of the of the. Yeah, Manu whole manufacturing, manufacturing process.
And so it’s really exciting Now there’s this opportunity and the IRA is a large part of that. You know, we’re fortunate that we’re you know, a country that America is best friends with that that has all this stuff because that political tie is, is a key part of it. Yeah. But now between that and the Australian government’s own plans for critical minerals, we’re at the point where, We, I, I think we might actually have the opportunity to really change the mining industry and start to, yeah.
Process here. There’s so many benefits from it. Not only economic benefits, because yeah, it is, like I said, it’s like a, the high value add part of the process to go from the, you know, what you dig up out of the ground and then process, process it into the actual minerals that people need. A aside from that, you also have some environmental benefits.
One from it happening in a country that, you know, has pretty strong environmental protections. But also because you can imagine to ship a whole bunch of rocks and dirt for somebody else to process. That’s a lot more ships that you have to send than if you would actually. Make chemicals and, you know steel for example, and ship that instead.
And not ship all of it because presumably some of it we’re gonna use in Australia. So benefits all around. The other key piece of the puzzle that I haven’t mentioned yet is that, you know, Australia has the potential for so much more renewable energy than we could ever use here. And so a lot of this processing and manufacturing, it’s really, really energy intensive.
And so we got that last piece of the puzzle to be able to fit it all, fit it all together. We’ve got everything that we need here to take it a bit, a bit further get more money, better for the environment. It’s just yeah, I, you can probably, See that I, this is one of my like, pet topics that I’ve been complaining for probably literally decades, about why we don’t do this.
And I’m kind of really excited that I finally seem to be in the right place, the right time to help out with the, you know, the transition away from just dumb digging up stuff through to, you know, actual, actual, I don’t know, advanced critical minerals industry.
Allen Hall: Well, it does seem like there’s becoming more of an engineering consensus on the things that are in mind, even in Australia, that maybe some of the money is not actually.
In the, the mine itself as much as the byproducts from the mine. And there’s some really interesting news stories about this. Recently Sweden, South Africa and Australia are, are leading the charge to turn mining weight into rare earths, reducing the dependence on China again, right? Trying to remove reliance upon China.
So six advanced projects are being developed to extract rare earths from mining debris. Or byproducts targeting output over 10,000 tons of key elements, odium and pres, sodium oxide. By 2027, the projects could cut the expected deficit in the materials by upwards of 50%. So just go on by and just looking through the.
Excess of the mining operations, you can gather 50% of the minerals you need, which is shocking, that’s really high. Recovering rare earth from waste is much quicker than setting up new projects and trying to dig a new hole and try to find this stuff. So obviously if you’re sitting on, sitting on the sidelines, you can just process it.
Companies can extract phosphorus for fertilizer, flooring, gypsum, and other rare earths from mining the byproducts. And this is really gonna be key to keeping rare Earth available in the near future. So there are some new processes that are being developed to extract these minerals, including ion chromatography and there’s, which is used in the pharmaceutical industry.
And there’s, there’s some technology around some scientists from M I t. But as things progress here, you’re gonna see more people going back to the tailings, right? I mean, that, that’s, that may be where the money is. It’s in the tailings rather than the, the, the, the thing you’re actually mining, didn’t we,
Joel Saxum: the, correct me if I’m wrong with these last few things we’ve been talking about here with rare Earths, didn’t we a couple months back talk about a company from Michigan that was developing a turbine that didn’t use any rare earths.
Allen Hall: Minerals. Yes. As a generator that had a, had a different design, different layout to make it more compact without using a lot of rare errors. That is still in play. I have followed them occasionally. It’s been a couple of weeks since I looked. But there is efforts because obviously if we’re gonna put up another a hundred and.
20,000 wind turbines over the next couple years in the United States. You’re probably gonna have to change the way we build those mo those generators, right? And even some motors. And it’s more of a pancake generator or a pancake motor. Everything is flatter. It’s a different way of moving the magnetic fields a around a generator.
That’s what their thought process process is. And yeah, I think you’ll see both, Joel, I think you’ll see. Less reliance on the, on the more powerful magnets and maybe a switch over to some new technology, which is where we should go as part of this withdrawal from China and finding all these minerals.
You need some place to process them. And we do not have a, a place to, to extract these earth minerals in the United States, weirdly enough but we’re working on it. And whereas we’re gonna build a plant in Louisiana, The first rare earth extraction and purification plant in North America. We built in Alexandria, Louisiana.
Following a 75 million investment at England Air Park. Theor North America plant will create 100 direct jobs in almost 300 indirect ones. The plant will operate in an existing 80,000 square foot building at the air park and began operations in early 2025. So they got a short timeframe here with the capacity to process over 75.
Hundred metric tons per year of rare earth oxides by 2027. So what they’re hoping to do is Alexandria in Louisiana is. Kind of along a river where they can bring materials in and out and process ’em. And so they’re essentially gonna take the tailings and all the runoff of some of these mines and process ’em to get the rare earth out of them in Louisiana of all places,
Joel Saxum: unless they’re getting these, this, the raw materials from somewhere in the gulf.
I, I got a hard time believing this is a financially sound.
Allen Hall: Move? I don’t think so. I think it’s part of just having security. Don’t you think? Don’t you think that’s what’s going on? Yeah. But if that’s the case,
Joel Saxum: then it’s gotta be subsidized, right?
Allen Hall: Yeah. It didn’t say what the prices were for the, for the products they’re gonna be selling, but I’m assuming that you’re gonna pay a little bit more money to have it.
Resource in the
Rosemary Barnes: United States. It’s an interesting way to do it. To, if their idea is that they’ll bring in you know, mine tailings from around the country and process them to get the rare earths out and then, you know, send, send them off the model that the, the company I’m working with, It’s more geared around, you’re probably going to be setting up small plants at a, you know, a specific mine because part of the benefit for, you know, using tailings you know, mining waste as a source of new new minerals is that you have to pay to dispose of that anyway.
So if you process it first, then you you know, you have to. Dispose of less mining waste or you, you, you know, you’re kind of, you, you’re saving at least one, one lot of waste disposal. But if you have to take all your waste, transported it a long way, then process it, and then, I mean, they’ll have to deal with their waste, then you’re still doing that twice, which yeah, gets rid of a lot of the, the benefit of Yeah.
Of using mining tailings.
Allen Hall: So here, here’s a quote from the, the plant director. It says More than 90% of the rare earth processing happens in China, like we’ve just discussed. And E CORs plant will handle rare earth element oxides from quote US friendly sources all over the world. And I met, I assumed that was Australia
Joel Saxum: when I read that, everybody but China and Russia, right?
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. But isn’t it where we do not have any rare earth? Processing plants in the states we’re a big country. You think you’d have one? That’s weird
Joel Saxum: to me because in, in, in the Nevada desert, there’s lead silver, lithium, gold, like they’re mining all kinds of stuff out there that you can’t be telling me that there’s nothing out there that they’re mining.
There
Rosemary Barnes: is a rare earth mine in Nevada that I think it was operating in. I don’t have the. Figures here, but I think it was operating in the, the seventies or or something, at least a decade or, or two ago. And they’re starting it back up again, but maybe they’re not planning to process their it just seems strange cuz they’re in such, such, such low concentrations.
They’re rarer. It’s very basically anywhere they’re found. So it would seem really weird. If you were just going to, you have to do some sort of processing, surely on site. Otherwise it’s just crazy volumes that you’re gonna be shipping. But yeah, it, it might just be some, some processing, some last bit of processing happens.
So this new, new plant that doesn’t involve such large volumes, I’m not, you’d have to say the details. Rosemary, I got a question
Joel Saxum: for you. So when, when, when we talk about rare earth minerals, cause we’ve, this subject has come up a few times. I think that the term from, from listening to your knowledge on it and your technical expertise, the term rare earth seems to be a bit misleading.
W what would you actually call these minerals, because it seems like they’re kind of everywhere, but they’re in low concentrations, right? What would you call ’em? Right? Like lithium? Yeah. Would you call it like, maybe not rare earth, but like low concentration?
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t, I don’t know what the right. Name for them is the most annoying thing with the terminology around rare Earth is that now everyone uses the term rare earth to mean.
Nearly anything. So I heard somebody say recently rare earth’s like copper. Like copper is not, not a rare earth. You know, there’s a specific set of elements that that the term rare earth refers to. Yeah. I think criti critical minerals is a nice term that’s I think we should use that. It’s already, you know, like a pretty, it’s.
It can refer to whatever you want. It’s stuff that you, you need and you find hard to get, you know, that’s all, all you need to, to fulfill, to be called a critical mineral. So I guess I would yeah, just like to get people using the term critical mineral more than rare Earth, but I guess. Rare Earth is more catchy or something.
I’m not sure why, but I see a lot of people calling things rare earths that really are yeah, just critical
Allen Hall: minerals In America, we like to make words as short as possible, right? Rare earth is a lot easier to say than critical minerals. Well, you
Rosemary Barnes: like acronyms in America, so maybe you can just call ’em cms.
Or something,
Allen Hall: but they have to be three letters. R e m, rms. There you go.
Rosemary Barnes: We’re earth minerals, but we don’t wanna call them we earth minerals. We wanna call them critical minerals so that you know, it’s broad enough that people could use it correctly. Literally. I think that is the problem, that it just doesn’t sound.
Sound as cool.
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Allen Hall: Researchers at Rhut University in Denmark have developed a new method of breaking down wind turbine blades so that their component parts can be recycled.
The challenge of recycling the blades, of course lies and the fact that they’re built to last forever, which means that the materials used to create them, such as the epoxy resin systems cannot currently be recycled. Well, researchers have developed a process that targets the chemical bonds. In the epoxy and breaks them down while leaving the glass fibers intact.
So you don’t have to grind everything up and try to break it apart. You just sort of leave it like it is. The, the, the team used solvents and a catalyst to break down the epoxy materials, heating them to about 160 degrees Celsius and Joel. That’s about 350 degrees Fahrenheit, something like that. And they had to leave it between 16 hours and several days.
After six days, a one-inch square chunk of winter and blade was left nearly spotless in terms of its glass fibers. And the epoxy was broken down into its constituent parts. So they thought, okay, we got a, we got a system here. It may be a little. It takes a lot of heat. It may take a little bit of time, but it will work.
So although the, the meth was able to break down the materials in the lab, it be, could be difficult to scale it up and to make a real dent in the amount of wind turbines that are gonna be decommissioned over the next 15, 20 years. And one of the possible roadblocks to this commercial operation is the catalyst used and then they were using ruthenium.
Now the ruthenium wasn’t used in the process. They can pull it back out, but doing that makes it obviously more expensive. So it, it, it seems like they found a chemical way of breaking down epoxy systems, but it may not be the way that the industry wants to do. It’s it’s gonna be, yeah, it’s gonna be expensive.
Right. So there’s another team working on this, which is from Vestus. I think Vestus has been working on this problem for a while. Vestus has a different process, but they haven’t really defined it. And from what I could see online it’s not gonna be defined for a while. Like they’re either they’re out rushing around trying to patent it, or they’re trying to put some fine details on it.
So n now, essentially we have two different ways of recycling blades to get the parts back out. You got fiberglass and from the pictures I saw from this, from this researchers up in Denmark, It, it is fiberglass. It doesn’t seem to ef the, this chemical process doesn’t seem to affect the fiberglass at all.
This is like, it’s burnt or charged or anything. And the epoxy system is, is broken down into its parts, right? And the then the most expensive part of epoxy is the bisphenol a part. So if you can get that out, you, you have something of value. And obviously fiberglass can be a little expensive. So you, you do have some valuable parts to this question is, does the process lend itself?
To re to actually recycling blades with standard epoxies. I think,
Joel Saxum: and, and, and Rosemary’s probably much more of an expert on this than I am, but when I look at, we had, I don’t know how big of a piece
Allen Hall: they put, it’s like a one inch square chunk of winter blade. They put in a beaker and heated it up. And I don’t
Joel Saxum: see that as a sustainable option.
Right. It’s too, it’s, it’s too, it’s too resource intensive to, to do, to, to make happen. I mean, you can cut up. Wind turbine blades into pieces, put ’em in there, try to extract some of the, you know, the raw materials out of them, but, Too, too much energy’s gonna go into heating the material too much. That, that ruthenium as we talked about earlier, possibly a rare
Allen Hall: earth mineral.
Well, that’s, this is the thing, right? Rosemary always points out, it’s not just the process, it’s all the stuff you have to do to get to the process, right? So you have to transport, I guess, a full size blade to a recycling center. Cuz if as soon as you start cutting it up, you’re cutting up all the, the, the fiber that you’re gonna need, right?
Cause the fibers run length, way, length wise on the plate. So you’re gonna cut ’em up and make them. It’s kind of worthless at that point, but. Yeah, you gotta truck these heavy things around, that’s gotta be expensive. Chopping ’em up is probably easier. I think Rosemary’s point a good number of times is just bury the thing.
Why are we not burying them? And that’s a valid point. Cause it’s probably less CO2 emission over the lifetime or the blade if you just bury them. Yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: I think the now burying, burying them makes sense in a lot of places. But I do see that this, this process does legitimately look. Interesting in a way that most of the, you know, recycling methods that I’ve seen so far don’t.
So if it’s just been published in nature, let’s say that it’s going to be 10 years at least, until we’re gonna be putting, you know, processing whole blades with, this is a long way from Yeah. One inch to a hundred meters or even, you know, 40 meters. But there’s a, yeah, there’s a lot of. Potential in it.
So they’re actually separating all the components. It’s not, they’re not just finding a way to hide bits of wind turbine blades in other materials, which is what most of the recycling that we’ve seen so far is, or I guess, The first way that people are, you know, recycling wind turbine blades is just to burn them, which releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
So it’s not, not amazing. And then you can already, you know, shred wind turbine blades and get some sort of structural properties from using that shredded material in other stuff. So, you know, you can make like decking material out of that. Or dashboards or plastic molded plastic dashboards for cars or.
Or trays for trucks can be made out of that sort of material. So, you know, there’s some, it’s got some value, but not much compared to how much it costs to actually, you know, reprocess that. And it’s usually more expensive to use a recycled wind turbine blade than to just use virgin materials, so that’s not ideal.
But this one, yeah, they’re actually, they’re not only pulling out the glass fibers with their structural integrity intact, which I have seen before. But they’re also separating the components in the epoxy resin so you could use them again, because a wind turbine blade, you know, it’s mostly made from fiberglass.
And yes, the glass part is important. You know, that’s in the, the name. That’s what people think of. But the epoxy is half of it roughly and just as important. And so if you’re only reusing the glass, you can’t really say that you’re recycling fiberglass. You’re just, you know, using some of the glass.
So for now yeah, then they mentioned, and I just wanted to say as an aside that I like this article cause it actually gave enough details to comment on. It’s nearly always when we have these stories come up on the show, it’s like, well, I don’t know what, what’s going on there. Who knows if it’s if it’s good or not.
But in this one, you know, they mentioned a lot of inputs that it needs and the materials input is one thing that you mentioned. Though they are trying to separate everything out so they wouldn’t be, you know, buying more and more and more catalyst, or at least not a lot of it. Energy input is a big one, and I know that with a lot of existing plastic recycling processes for the, the difficult to recycle plastics, sometimes you end up using more energy and having more carbon dioxide emissions from the recycling process than if you had just gone from Virgin and then, Put it in landfill later.
So that will be a key point. But by the time the process is ready, no doubt, you know, all of all of our energy or industrial heat will come from renewable resources anyway, so it won’t be such an environmental burden. But I think definitely this is one to watch. Let’s see how it gets commercialized.
It may be that you don’t need to Chop blades up and chuck them around. Maybe they’ll refine this process so well that you can just take a mini plant out to a wind farm that’s about to be decommissioned, feed a blade along a conveyor belt, and it’s, you know, it’s spraying these these chemicals down and by the time it gets to the end, you’ve just got, you know, all your your fibers in, in the same length that they started and, you know, Who, who knows where we’re gonna be in 10, 20, 30 years.
But in the meantime, I do think that it’s not a bad thing to store all of the wind turbine blades underground in what we call landfill. But you might call Yeah. Storage for, you know, wait while you wait for the recycling processes to be developed. Yeah, we
Allen Hall: get shipped them to Wisconsin and call it cold storage.
I think we could make
Joel Saxum: some offshore reefs with them. We
Allen Hall: could, no, that’s actually not a bad idea. Really. Or like a weather,
Joel Saxum: like like a, like breakwater, right? Like so you protect some
ports
Allen Hall: and things, right? Yeah. Well, you know, this week Vestus released its financial report for quarter one, and they made about, 17 million.
They had positive cash flow in the first quarter, Joel, versus I think last year, same quarter. They lost, I don’t know, a half a million, some or half a half a billion. Sorry, half a million. It’d be nothing. Half a billion. It’s, it is the right number. Yeah. So they had a. Slight positive growth, which is a change.
But it just reinforced in my head like, there are so many things that the OEMs have to deal with simultaneously where they’re getting their minerals from. Right. And so, like Siemens, KA Mesa, ive, and all these companies are running around trying to find where they’re get their railroads from. They’re trying to deal through recycling bit.
They’re not making a lot of money, so they’re trying to turn the companies positive. And another thing that is, Coming about in, in sort of the large operator side is in the, in the states is they don’t have any trained technicians or having to run training programs. All these large operators are creating these programs.
Well, OSTED announced another one. So Renewable Energy Company, OSTED just has launched its Wind Power ready training program for Windfarm technicians at Carnegie Library in Atlantic City. So if you haven’t been to Atlantic City, it’s was at one point maybe. 20, 30 years ago, a big kind of casino place like Las Vegas is now, but Boardwalk Empire, right?
Yeah. And that, that’s fallen off quite a good quite a bit from its heyday. So the TED program aims to partner with local, local organizations near or Ted’s developing offshore wind facilities throughout the years to to provide individuals from underserved communities with a pathway to a well-paid and permanent career in clean energy.
So the whole thing is at least funded through grants from Osted and the New Jersey Wind Institute for Innovation and Training and the New Jersey’s Governor’s Office for Climate Action and the Green Economy and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. So it’s like Osted and a lot of New Jersey government arms ORCID plans to hire about 40% of his technicians for ocean wind.
One. Project from the training program. So you think about all the sort of balls you have to have in the air if you’re an oem and if you’re a large operator, you have to basically create everything. You, you have to train the technicians. You gotta do all the licensing. You gotta explain to how this works to the US government on how you’re gonna build offshore wind because they don’t have any idea.
For the most part, it’s coming over from Denmark and the UK and France and other places. It is just, there’s so much on their plate. In fact, Siemens Ga Mesa, the head of Siemens gaa, talked about recently about building new factories because he was questioned about building factories in like Australia.
Rosemary or Brazil, and he said, we’re probably not likely to do that because a new factory costs upwards of 500 million euros. Like wow. Wow. So not, not only are you trying to expand your business, in order to do it, you have to spend 500 million Euros to open a factory, and then if things kind of go sideways, you may have to close that factory.
Yeah. What do you do? Yeah. Right. What do, what do you do in that situation? I, I think weirdly enough, and this. I was outback mowing with my battery power mower over the weekend thinking about this, like they got one of the worst jobs in the world. There are so many things they have to do simultaneously and everything has like, you know, a a billion dollar sign behind it, right?
Almost everything does. It’s insane. The whole world
Joel Saxum: is looking at basically what four com five, if you count the Chinese manufacturers five, five or six companies to. To make this happen, right? Three of them in the three or four, three and a half, four in the western world, five
Allen Hall: in the western world. It’s almost impossible.
And, and Joel, today, I was just thumbing through some because we had been to Norway recently. I was just seeing what’s going on in Norway. Well, Norway’s talking about taxing onshore wind with a tax of about 40%. Like what, what are we doing? I don’t understand what we are doing right now because the OEMs aren’t making money.
They’re, they’re trying to make decisions about what’s happening in the future. There’s, they’re being asked to do more and more things simultaneously, like, can we just. Take the boot off their neck just for a brief moment. Can we do that? And, and Rosemary, you were inside of these companies. I know there were, you didn’t work at a you know, you worked at Lam Windpower.
It isn’t like they were flushes cash and you guys were having caviar for lunch every day. That wasn’t what it was like, right? It’s, it’s a tough work
Rosemary Barnes: environment. There was caviar on occasion, I will have to admit. But I mean, There’s caviar and caviar, right? Like it’s not, it’s not such a weird, a weird food in, in Denmark actually.
So yeah, no, there, there were, there was on occasion fi fish eggs. Let’s call it fish eggs so that, it doesn’t sound so fancy, but I can, I can’t lie and say that there was never caviar and the canteen at Ellen Windpower, but no, I can confirm it wasn’t, wasn’t flush with cash. I just wanna
Allen Hall: get that out there like everybody’s, take a deep breath a minute.
GEs trying to make money. Vests actually did. Turn it around. He’s trying to turn it around. Siemens Gama is trying to, in this turnaround project, can we just, Help them just for a brief moment because otherwise this, this is not gonna happen. It’s just not gonna happen. Our wind farm of the week is Rhine Charts Vault Wind Farm, which is located in central Germany.
Now, Joel, from what I could tell online, this is where some of the grims. Fairy tales. Our base is around this area in sort of central Germany. So this wind farm is sort of like in the dark forest area. I guess it’s, it’s fascinating. We were just over there in Hamburg if not that long ago. Yeah, we had a great, fantastic time there.
Yeah. Well, in this Rhines Fards vault wind farm, which I know I have murdered, so please do not write in. It’s a hundred megawatt project using 18 ssv, 1 55 0.6 megawatt turbines. And the project is underway at the moment, and it’s supposed to complete this year. It’s expected to power 105,000 households and the cost of the project is about 160 million.
So this kind of relates to Phil’s 1.6 million dollars per megawatt installed. That’s so, Filter towers right on the numbers part. So this, this is, we we’re trying to expand our wind farm of the week outside the United States and, and I have to make a request to Europe. You need to write something about your wind farms.
Because in America we got PR departments that write about their wind farms every week and put out some really cool videos. But in other parts of the world, this isn’t happening. So I’m having a hard time finding some of these wind farms, and this one at least has written something up about it lately.
You know what
Joel Saxum: GDPR is? Yes. That’s why nobody want, nobody can, it’s too hard to talk about you if you had to talk to, if you have a technician in your video, you have to get ’em to sign off on GDPR laws and all these different things. It’s a, it’s a pain. It’s a pain to collect content over there.
Allen Hall: Well, it makes it hard to promote wind energy in Germany if you can’t talk about it.
That’s true. We’re talking about it. That’s, that makes one, I guess we can do whatever we want in America. We’re not under GDPR law. We’re barely under Andy laws at the moment. That’s true. So Ryan. Bald wind. Is our wind farm of the week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening.
Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind. Energy podcast.
