Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This week we discuss New York’s delayed/canceled offshore wind contracts and the effects on future electricity demands, new port facilities for wind manufacturing, and a US-based initiative to paint turbine blades black to reduce bird collisions. Joel Saxum, Rosemary Barnes, Phil Totaro and Allen Hall bring you the latest in wind energy news, technology, and science!
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: So I got this really cool swag. So if you’re listening, you really can’t see my new swag. Got this Drive Smart sweatshirt from my favorite race car driver, Kyle Weatherman. And in fact, Rosemary, if you go to the drivesmartwarranty.com website, you will see the Uptime logo on the race car that we were on this past year in Texas.
So this is going to be an exciting year for Kyle Weatherman and for Uptime and Drive Smart Warranty. Because we’re expecting great things this season. Rosemary, want me to, I could, I can get one of these cool sweatshirts and send it your way if you’d like.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’ll never, turn down a freebie like that.
Allen Hall: The only problem with this sweatshirt, it’s not really a problem, is it has a Chevy logo, and I’ve never driven a Chevy. Now I feel obligated that I have to drive a Chevy. Joel, you, are you driving a Chevy right now?
Joel Saxum: GMC, same thing, same pot of money.
Allen Hall: There’s someone on the uptime crew, because Phil is driving a scooter.
a very complicated scooter, nonetheless.
Philip Totaro: I used to, drive a truck, thank you very much, had a nice Dodge for 11 years, so I was part of the family.
Rosemary Barnes: We’ve got a Subaru.
Allen Hall: It’s a very Australian car. There you go. We’re expecting great things this year from, Kyle Weatherman and the DGM crew and from Drive Smart Warranty, so check it out, drivesmartwarranty.com.
European energy companies Equinor and BP have terminated their agreement to sell power from the proposed Empire Wind II offshore wind farm. To New York State, the company cited rising inflation, higher borrowing costs, and supply chain issues as the reasons for canceling the contract. As Phil, New York recently launched a new offshore wind procurement to allow developers to exit these old contracts and to re offer projects at higher prices.
And that’s supposed to conclude sometime in February. However, in this particular case, BP and Equinor also cancelled the substation build. So there seems like they’ve committed a little further down the line than just saying, hey, we’re going to rebid. They’ve actually stopped production on a vital component of that wind farm.
This is in, in light of, obviously, Ørsted pulling out of the two projects. In New Jersey, so there seems to be a trend going on here. Equinor also had the problem, you and I were corresponding via, Slack or whatever it was the other day, and I, commented that Equinor has been pressured by the state quite a couple of times for a variety of different reasons.
One more recently is the New York state canceled the on shoring of one of their cables, and which was a last minute dig at, Equinor, I felt. Does this all seem to align? Equinor is getting the cold shoulder from New York State, and will they go back and try to rebid this?
Philip Totaro: I believe they will.
First of all, this, probably wasn’t surprising that they were going to pull out after, Empire Wind 1, Phase 1, and, some of these other project cancellations, or at least PPA, we shouldn’t say project cancellation, PPA cancellations, or off take contract cancellations. Because, and, actually that’s an important distinction because they still own the development rights, they’re still in the queue, they’re still in the BOEM queue for, environmental permitting, et cetera, et cetera.
And so I, do think that they will end up rebidding. I think the reason that they canceled the substation and the rock bag contracts with, because they also canceled the one with, with Great Lakes dredging. That was, I think, stemmed from the fact that they were, there are potentially obligations in those sub supplier contracts that, once they had certain, permits and reviews and everything in place, even if they hadn’t taken FID on the project, they, they probably had to pull out, of, those. But the bottom line is, yes, I think they’re going to try to rebid if they’re going to be allowed to, it sounds like they are, and we’ll see in February what comes of it. Because again, keep in mind that in, New York, they only have a handful of projects that they could even build, so it’s like, is New York gonna really, bypass BP and Equinor’s Empire Wind, 1 and 2, and say you can’t rebid those, and then go for another project that’s out there in the New York Bight, which is gonna have a later year
commissioning date anyway, like that. So I, think they just need to, I don’t know. Everybody may, maybe needs a bit of a kumbaya moment or something, or I don’t, know what the problem is, but it’s, gotta be an election year thing. I’m, going to put it down to that.
Joel Saxum: Phil, I’m going to agree with you on that one.
And simply look, I’m thinking about the substation, right? The substation is the big one because that’s the most expensive piece for that offshore wind farm. And there’s a lot of steel that goes into that thing. So I know that, I think it was South Forks, substation was built in the Texas, was it built in the Gulf Coast?
And then float it around, right? So, build, building that substation takes a lot of time and a lot of effort and a lot of money, right? So there has to be some kind of contractual thing that it’s going to slow down. And you’re looking at exactly like I say, or like you said, Phil, agreeing with you, the volatility of November election cycle coming up because you can’t build a offshore substation in a month, right?
Like that thing’s going to be under, Under, in the build process for quite a while before it’s able to be floated out and put in place. So there’s just too much volatility surrounding these things. The other thing I want to touch on here is off air we had a little bit of a conversation with Rosemary
about the idea around renewables and the east coast. So we know there’s this massive load center there, right? We have a couple hundred miles of metropolitan power sucking for sure, but there isn’t It’s not that easy to build any kind of renewables around there, right? So there’s not a lot of space.
It’s gets, we get snow in the winter. Solar is not as good of an option. There’s a little bit of onshore wind and, upstate New York and Pennsylvania, a little bit up in Maine, but for the most part, the wind resource doesn’t, isn’t awesome on shore there. So if, NYSERDA or any of these other power grids up there or power, controllers in the Northeast want to have
renewables in the, in their, power mix, offshore wind is really the only option they’ve got right now is a technologically feasible. Someone’s got to figure out how to get these things in the water.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, what’s their trade off here. If they don’t do these offshore projects, what does it look like?
To do solar and battery or onshore wind, what are the trade offs?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’m, assuming based on what I know of the climate up there, that their peak, load is going to be in winter with heating, probably gas, largely gas now. But, assuming in the future as we transition to zero emissions, that’s going to become electrified.
And so they’re going to have their, yeah, their biggest loads. the biggest demand, sorry, in the, in the winter time. So that’s also obviously when solar power is at its smallest contribution, cause days are short and the sun angle is poor in the summertime. So if you want to get rid of wind.
Then you’re going to end up with just immense amounts of, seasonal storage needed. So not just, like usually when you have grids that have a lot of solar power in them, it’s places that are closer to the equator that don’t have such big seasonal differences. You need batteries to, shift the solar power from the middle of the day to the evening and overnight.
That’s a few hours, that’s doable. But if you want to get through weeks and weeks of short, cloudy days, months, Then you need lots of seasonal energy storage, which is not something that’s economic at the moment, unless you’ve got, just like really great hydro resources. yeah, you don’t, there’s a whole list of, different ways that you could decarbonize the energy system in that area of the world.
And if you, they seem to just be going through the list and just being like, nope, don’t want that, don’t want that, don’t want that. yeah, they’re not really taking the steps they would need to actually get offshore, wind, they’re talking a lot about it and, talking tough, but at the end of the day, you have to have an arrangement that’s going to be acceptable to both sides.
You can’t just demand, that projects go ahead that are going to lose company’s money. Obviously that’s not, going to work out. you could have onshore wind, from the windier parts of the U S and less populated parts of the U S, but that’s quite far away. So you would need to build a lot of transmission to bring it across.
And, that’s really similar to what China’s doing. They also have the problem where they’re really windy areas and not at all close to where their populations are. A whole heap of ultra high voltage DC. And, the U S people don’t seem to want that. You’re having huge problems building in transmission.
I even heard of, places where they wanted to bury the transmission so that you wouldn’t see it. It costs a lot more to bury it, it’s technologically feasible and visually lower impact. People didn’t want that either. And it’s fine. You don’t have to have that, but then, like what’s next on your list?
And you end up when you cross off too many options from your list, you just end up with a. You’re going to end up with a expensive and unreliable and probably carbon dioxide emitting energy system. It’s, it’s just the reality that, decisions have consequences. Technologies have undesirable attributes as well as desirable ones.
It’s true for everything. and yeah, I do find it a little bit childish to just say not, and not actually, just. Take a deep breath and say, okay, these are the compromises we’ve got to make to get a reliable energy system. yeah, it’s not the way to make a good energy system.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, you believe that New York has to go through with these projects. Does Equinor and BP think the same? It’s just, a waiting game from here on out?
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, no, I don’t think so. I think that they might be serious. It’s, it’s, it’s political, right? So that means that people are really focused about the next election and the next election is going to come before there’s any consequence for not having built these projects.
The, the consequences are going to be faced in 2030 and beyond. So as if any politician today cares about that. The good, smart thing to do if you’re a politician that wants to get elected in the next cycle is to, yeah, be real tough. Oh, we’re not going to get walked all over by these companies.
They’re trying to screw you. Cause it does sound like that. If you only got 20 or 30 seconds to vote to understand in this situation, you, hear, we had a contract to supply wind energy at this price, and then now they’ve gone and changed the Price that they want, and do they think that we’re stupid and that, we can, we’re just gonna roll over for whatever these big wind companies wanna do.
No way. We’ve got tough politicians that are standing up for us. Obviously that’s the, that’s the story that’s gonna make it to your average voter. So you know, what you need is. Is yeah, what you need is politicians that are grownups and actually trying to end up with a clean energy system in 2030 and beyond.
And that means, yeah, taking their big boy or big girl pants to the negotiation table and saying, yes, okay, I can see that it’s true that things have changed since we wrote these contracts. And, it’s obvious that they can’t deliver these, projects. It is also obvious that you can’t just say, oh, just, like blank checkbook, build a project and then tell us how much you want us to pay you.
That’s not right either. Sorry. Yeah, like it’s a real negotiation where, both sides get involved, but I think I’ve said this before, like the negotiation style matters here. This is not just a, used car type arrangement where you can, twist someone’s arm, sell them a lemon for way more than it’s worth.
And, you’ve won the negotiation because you need this relationship to continue longer term.
All I see is just tough talk and not caring about, how, it turns out. like I, I think my, if I look in my crystal ball, I see New York having energy problems in, five, 10 years time. I, that’s what I see. I don’t see any grownups that want to actually, solve, problems in a realistic way.
Allen Hall: It’s, amazing to watch the contrast between trying to create jobs at the same time making it very difficult to get those jobs in place because you can’t have it both ways. They need to make a decision pretty soon, otherwise, I think some of these developers are going to walk away for years until governments change or politics radically change the United States.
It’s just, I don’t think they can afford to lose money on them. And Rosemary, you’re right, it’s a really tough choice for New York.
Rosemary Barnes: I think that one thing that’s on New York’s side is that New York is not the only place that is having these same kind of fights. I think everyone around the world
that claims to want a big wind industry in the future is being really unrealistic about what it’s going to take to get it. That we’ve been so used to watching, through solar power in particular, you watch prices come down and down and just think, okay, this is a mature industry, but doesn’t need any more support.
But if you want to massively expand an industry, offshore wind is, brand new in the U S there’s all sorts of like building blocks that you have to put in place to make sure that, everything is there for the industry to roll out and for, yeah, for companies to feel confident to have, to open new factories that they would need to.
Trust that people are serious about, the volumes of when they’re going to be installed to get all the ships that you need to get port upgrades that you need. And when I look at New York, and maybe to a lesser extent, the UK, though, I do think that they have maybe taken a bit more responsibility for what happened and changed going forward to something that might work.
But you’d have to look at New York and say, as if you’re going to, as a private company, as if you’re going to put the, millions or billions on the line that you would need to, have a new offshore wind turbine manufacturing facility, you would never have the trust, that those orders were going to eventuate.
I think someone making a call to fund their own manufacturing facilities. Based on offshore wind in the U. S. would be crazy to, think that they were going to make that money back because I don’t see the evidence that people are serious about this industry in the U. S.
Allen Hall: So that rolls into the next discussion, which is the Port of Albany.
So right north of New York City, about a hundred miles or so along the Hudson River. New York State is planning on putting two ports in the port of Albany and the port of Coman. and they’re expecting to create 3,200 jobs in $1 billion in annual industry. That’s a lot. And I, I think Rosemary’s point really sticks here, because if they’re not serious, they’re gonna get, have a hard time getting these sites developed.
Well, a study commissioned by, the economic groups involved in this, took a look at what it meant, mean locally to Albany, New York, and the surrounding areas. Coymanport’s gonna build the cells and blades, and, the Albany site is going to make towers. So they got everything there, 10, 000 construction jobs are projected, the tax revenue, and everybody sit down because these numbers are huge.
The port of Coyman is expected to generate 232 million in tax revenue. Through just its first year of operating its manufacturing facilities, including 12 million each for Albany County and the adjacent school district county. So the 12 million going to the local schools, just from the first year of operation, that’s a lot of money.
The Beacon Island site, which will build the towers, generate 163 million in taxes through construction and first year operations, and pouring in about 9 or 10 million. Dollars into local school districts. That is a ton of money if it does happen. So you’re talking about roughly almost $400 million in tax revenue in the first year of operation.
So it’s all through the construction phase and operation. Those are huge numbers. Someone’s gotta pay for that, right? So if someone’s writing the check for those taxes, who is that going to be? And is it going to be GE, LM, that will, and the tower developer, are they going to be Marmon, right? Is that something they expect to pay?
Because, man, putting that into your planning, that’s a lot, Phil, am I crazy? That’s a lot of money.
Philip Totaro: It is, but there’s, they’ve got a deal because they, basically, they’re going to be able to get some state level support. They’re also, theoretically, going to be able to apply for either the 48C manufacturing tax credit.
Even though there was only about 10 billion that was allocated for that, there’s still some money there, and that, the 48C, IRS rule basically will cover up to about 30 percent of the cost of your factory, again, subject to the, 10 billion limit. There are a bunch of other, cause energy storage factories are all trying to apply for that money too.
Or have done already, I don’t actually know, I, we should look into this, I don’t actually know off the top of my head how much of that 10 billion is left. I think it’s probably at least around half, so they’ve got, some, money there to be able to cover, some of these expenses that would otherwise be incurred as far as the CAPEX goes.
The taxes and the tax revenue that goes to the state, is, something that the, the supply chain companies are necessarily gonna, have to commit to. But they usually only do that in exchange for, number one, tax breaks on job creation, and two, some other kind of incentive for, or some kind of guarantee of a certain amount of, order book, basically, cause as Rosemary was just saying, you can’t actually set up a factory and spend You know, 500 million to do a tower factory when it’s going to end up that, oh, you’re going to make like a hundred towers and then it’s going to sit there for five years.
Like you, you need. Certainty to be able to spend that kind of money.
Joel Saxum: Phil, correct me if I’m wrong here, but 48c is merit based, isn’t it?
Philip Totaro: It is.
Joel Saxum: Like it’s a, like it’s an application process and everything. it’s not just Hey, you get it because you get it. It’s like certain projects get it.
And so I would think that this one, these projects would go to the top of the queue, wouldn’t they?
Philip Totaro: Potentially, but again, I don’t know how they’re doing the queue, because there are other projects for solar manufacturing. there’s a couple of companies that are talking about building like a billion dollar solar production facility in the United States right now, now I don’t know that they’ve gotten the commitment from the government to the federal government anyway to be able to do, that and get the 48 C manufacturing tax credit.
I don’t know if it’s first come first serve. I don’t actually know what the again. We’ll dig into this. The other aspect of this, though, is we now have another mechanism, which is. The 45, the proposed 45X manufacturing tax credits that comes from the IRA bill, that’s gonna pay out, for onshore wind, it pays out something like 120, 000 per megawatt, for fixed, bottom offshore, it’s 140, 000 per megawatt, and for floating offshore, it’s 160, 000 per megawatt.
for whatever factory you’re, setting up, if it’s, building towers, blades, nacelles, et cetera. So all these, the Port of Coyman and the, Port of Albany, they’re both theoretically covered under that as well. so that offers them a certain amount of incentive as well. if they don’t get the, 48 C manufacturing tax credit, they can always, do their, annual application for.
any project related components they built, for the
45X.
Joel Saxum: I think it’s a kind of a crazy concept, this whole thing, because if you zoom out a bit, you go, there’s, a general fund of tax money, and that comes from income taxes, whatever federal sales tax, all these different things that go into that general fund.
And now you have different places in the country fighting for that tax money. So basically, this is. Grabbing federal tax money that comes from all over the country and then concentrating it into one town by giving it back for you, this tax credit. and that’s how the mechanisms work, right?
That’s how this all taxes and subsidies and everything all works. But when you look at it that way, it’s crazy to think that all the money gets collected from the whole nation. And then the people like the port of Albany, you have certain. Congressmen, senators, congresswomen, all trying to get that money for their constituents and there’s, it looks like if this is all to go the way it’s written out, man, 400 million odd dollars to that one little area is a lot of tax money.
Allen Hall: So when they build this tower factory up in Albany, the first thing that comes to mind is how are they going to fill this thing with equipment? that’s specialized equipment. And I don’t know anybody in the United States that makes that equipment. I was reading the PES Wind magazine over the weekend, and there’s an article from HAANE, which is a German company that does a lot of tower, tooling, all the fixtures to weld these tower sections together, these monopiles together, and all the complicated, roller system to move these pieces around.
It sounds like a lot of the equipment that’s going to go inside the factories, like from HAANE, who has, looks like has a tremendous amount of expertise. the, that technology is going to come from outside the United States. Am I, right about that?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, what can’t be missed here is that these are not like, 2×4 factories or pencil factories or anything like that, right?
These are very complicated, very customized, heavy industrial factories. So if we’re making blades, you need all the fixtures and the moving equipment and you have to make molds and all these different stuff and there’s custom robotics that go into that. If you’re making towers, the same thing. like HANNE, like you said, they have the capabilities of 15 meter diameter monopiles and the jigs and tooling that’s made specially for those to be able to weld them together.
Cause you can’t weld a two tower sections and have them off by a half a degree, right? Cause they’ll, you do that a couple of times and you’re going to, you lose all the structural integrity of everything. So there’s, there’s a lot of moving equipment. I know HANNE’s got 4, 000 ton roller bleds, beds to move some of this steel around.
That’s, insane. It’s insane. Yeah, and I think about the, I know some of my offshore friends, they’re, these, they’re like metrology surveyors, right? So really highly accurate. They’re licking their chops at the idea of some of these ports being built because that’s all, dimensional control surveying when they, put those, big overhead gantry cranes and stuff in these factories, if you’ve been in a factory, you’ve seen it, you’re like, Oh, that’s cool.
But those things are aligned to millimeters from end to be able to move. Yeah. Those heavyweights. And every single one of these factories is going to have some of those big gantry cranes in it. So when you say, Oh, we’re going to create possibly 10, 000 jobs, man, you’re creating jobs all over the value chain there from the people pouring concrete and running.
dozers to HVAC and electrical and like the, the dimensional control surveyors and the people in Germany at HAANE over there and with their, customized equipment. it’s, it will, you will have the supply chain and the tree of people involved in these projects is fricking massive.
Allen Hall: This goes back to Rosemary’s point, if they’re not going to have really firm commitments to build the turbines. It’s gonna be hard for companies like HAANE to spool up. ’cause just looking at the technology they have, it’s not gonna be built in a weekend. It’s gonna take time for them to build the proper equipment to, to get that tower factory up and running.
Joel Saxum: But they’re, but it’s all customized equipment, right? So it’s all, it’s, nothing trivial and that’s why it’s, it’s so difficult to mobilize and, to be honest with you, if these things get done and they’re ready to roll in a year from date, that’s impressive.
Philip Totaro: Right now, even for onshore wind in the United States, for any turbine that’s about 4 megawatts or above, we are importing a lot of the castings and the hubs and things like that, can’t actually be built here, because we don’t have the manufacturing tooling.
All that stuff’s being brought in from Germany, from, other, maybe China, in some cases. Malaysia, Indonesia, et cetera, where it’s cheaper because of the labor rates, et cetera, et cetera, the, to actually buy in and implement that equipment. the fact that these offshore factories are gonna have this equipment available to be able to do these bigger castings and these bigger, tower sections and things like that, it could actually help out the onshore sector, especially if offshore has all these fits and starts, and, they’re looking for, oh, what else could we do with this factory that’s gonna be sitting there?
Help out the onshore sector that wants to be able to put up the six megawatt turbines, but we don’t have The ability to source a lot of the components domestically. We’ve got to get everything from Europe. so this, could be very important for us.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, you’ve been to Germany, right?
Joel Saxum: That’s where she goes for raves.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah, that’s right, the Technotrain, I forgot about that.
Rosemary Barnes: I have never been on a Technotrain, but, I have, been to Berlin.
Allen Hall: Have you been to Fraunhofer?
Rosemary Barnes: No, but I am, I’m thinking about trying to wrangle a visit next time I’m there, but mostly I want to see the battery, manufacturing stuff that they’re doing.
Allen Hall: When we go to Hamburg, we’re all going to Hamburg for the big wind trade show, right? It’s in September, October, sometime when it’s, really beautiful in Germany. hopefully get to go to visit Fraunhofer, have you seen this new thing that they developed this, variable glue applicator?
There’s an interesting video online of the day. Which is showing, how the glue go. you put adhesive in bond lines to glues the shells together to make a blade. The, that adhesive is kinda laid down and I assume there’s like templates to put this adhesive down and the thicknesses are generally controlled, but fron, hoffer’s developed this like applicator that changes the shape of the glue application, the bond line application, and controls the thickness.
So this cuts down the, variability there. And I thought that had already been done, but I guess not, but the Fraunhofer has, got this variable glue applicator. And it looks like a little bit of a robot. But they’re saying it’s going to save between 10 and 20 percent. An adhesive per blade. That sounds like a lot.
20 percent of an adhesive is a lot of one, money, two, weight, right?
Rosemary Barnes: I would definitely believe that there is that much excess glue in a blade that could be saved, but I. Would be skeptical that they have gotten there yet. Have you seen, whether they’ve rolled it out in real blade factories or if it’s just in their kind of like small scale
thing?
Allen Hall: It’s yeah, it’s small scale from what we could tell, but it looks like it has application.
Joel Saxum: Like in their internal projects, like they’re working on the ReliaBlade and a few others. That’s where they’ve been basically testing it. That’s their, because it’s controllable and it’s internal, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Okay, it’s, yeah, it’s definitely a big, there’s a lot of glue waste in a blade and it is heavy and it is a critical component, a critical part of the, blade structure, so definitely think that they’re on the money with this being a problem that’s worth tackling, the way that blades, when they’re made in two pieces and then closed like a clamshell, the way that they, that is usually done is that, Yeah, so you’ve got your two blade halves, you’ve got to put a bunch of glue on, the leading and the trailing edge, and then close that, and then you’ve also got one or more shear webs in the middle, and that needs to have glue on the bottom and the top of those webs that will then join them to the shells.
And the tricky part is, the tolerances that are involved and also the, timing of it. So it’s actually really cool. It’s one of the, my funnest parts of the blade manufacturing to go and watch because it’s like this choreographed dance. You’ve got probably, like a dozen or maybe dozens of, manufacturer, manufacturing workers that are there.
All doing the exact right thing at the exact right time because the glue has a certain amount of, time before it’s going to start curing, right? So you have to get everything done, as you’re closing the blade, before the glue starts to set. Otherwise you have to, scrape it off and grind it off and start again the next day.
So yeah, it’s obviously really important to get it all done. But the challenge is that these, webs go in, it’s just it’s just sitting there when the blade is completely closed, it’s all a nice rigid structure, but until then a shear web is it’s pretty, pretty thin, like maybe it’s only, I don’t know, 50 or 100 mils thick and it’s tens of meters long, right?
And so they’re like floppy, like a sheet of lasagna or something, like they, they wobble a bit. And you put glue on the, bottom shell and then you try and balance this sheet of lasagna, on top of it, and then you put glue on the top of that and then close the whole thing up.
But the thing is, because it’s not totally rigid and there aren’t a lot of like braces, anything that you put in the blade to hold it in place is, there once the blade is closed as well, right? It’s there forever. So you have a lot of tolerance. So the reason why I’m explaining all this is that your glue, you can’t ever put in just the precise amount of glue that you need because your shear web might move, side to side like 50 mils or more.
And so you need to have glue over the entire space that it could possibly end up. And so you’re necessarily going to end up with glue waste because of that. So I think, no doubt this Fraunhofer glue shoe is going to help. And, the way that is at the moment you’ve got, yeah, there’s glue shoes and somebody just, there, squeezing like a caulking gun, basically a huge caulking gun with a little
to make the width of the glue, consistent. And they just walk, they literally walk up and down along the blade and put a line of glue in. And there’ll be, half a dozen people doing this at various places on the blade at once. and so one of the problems is yeah, making sure that they put the glue where it’s supposed to go and you can easily, wobble a bit and
go off center. And it sounds like the Fraunhofer, little device is going to definitely help with that issue. But I think to really, capture the full potential of minimizing glue waste, you would need to do, I would need to see something that’s going to firm up those tolerances of how everything ends up when it closes.
And, I didn’t see that in, in their method. They may well be working on that in parallel, but, I just don’t think that you’ll get that, at 10 percent or whatever it is that they’re claiming without taking care of that really big, source of, glue waste.
Joel Saxum: I got a question for you, Rosemary.
It just seems silly to me that they wouldn’t have some really well made braces or jigs that go on the inside of the bottom section of blade to hold the shear web or shear webs in place so they don’t move, like a metal bracket that goes in there as they close it up. it just seems They gotta have something like that, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but then it’s there. How are you going to get that brace out again? There are some braces and stuff like that stay in there. And there are some towards the root that you can take out afterwards because you can climb in and, unscrew it and take it out. So it’s not like there’s nothing.
But yeah, basically, they, don’t want to add mass by putting in supporting structures that are going to stay there. yeah, there, people, that’s one of the biggest things that people are surprised at, we would often, I was working for LM Windpower, which makes only blades. and we would work with, obviously, with engineers from the rest of the wind turbine of our customers, our clients, and, they’re probably used to working with metals.
And somebody who’s used to Working with metals will be used to millimetre tolerances or less in many cases, they come to a wind turbine blade factory and routinely have their minds blown and absolutely shocked. It seems like a real agricultural approach, wow, you guys are back in the dark ages of, your hand making this.
Yeah, what is this like 1800 and you’re, just figuring out how to, make a manufactured product at all. But the, that’s just a part of composites and it’s, it, isn’t like worse engineering or easier engineering. It’s actually really hard to work with a product that has these big tolerances in it because you still need to get, your outcome still needs to be, yeah, product, a manufactured product that is just as reliable and consistent in everything that matters, the strength and durability.
And, presence or not presence of defects all needs to be the same as any other part of a wind turbine. but you have to do it with all these huge tolerances. So it’s just a different layer of, yeah, of, design drivers that, that you face when you’re working with composite materials.
You can get around that a bit, like in the auto manufacturers, they don’t have these massive tolerances, but they’re using prepregs and autoclaves and robots. And, if you wanted to spend 10 times as much to buy a wind turbine blade, then we could probably have that in the industry too, although, it would be something to see a hundred meter long autoclave. But, yeah, it’s just, if you, this has been really the process has been refined to make them cheap. I think automation is gradually happening. And this Fraunhofer glue shoe is an example of, just incremental little bits of automation. I’m sure that one day a wind turbine blade will be fully made by robots. But yeah, for now the cheapest way to make a wind turbine blade is very manual.
Allen Hall: Did you just invent a word? Glue shoe, or is that something that already existed in it?
Rosemary Barnes: I’m pretty sure it’s in that Fraunhofer article as well. It’s yeah, a caulking gun, how, or even those epoxy syringes, they they mix as they go. it’s just you imagine that really scaled up and you’ve probably got someone who’s wearing a backpack or they’re connected by a hose to a big vat of glue that’s getting mixed as they lay it out.
And then it is, the glue shoe goes on the end of the little tube, it’s like a, I don’t know, a little rectangular cross section thing with the glue coming out so that it just squirts out to make a nice, extruded, rectangular kind of, you tube of, imagine a, like laying out a chocolate bar or, I dunno, some, something like that.
Allen Hall: Food analogies today.
Philip Totaro: And this, lasagna and chocolate bars. I’m so hungry now.
Rosemary Barnes: If you just use the caulking gun, then you would get like a really highly variable. Kind of bond line, or yeah, like glue application, and it also, if it’s round, then it’s not going to be touching all, the way along, because obviously glue can only stick things together if it’s touching both surfaces, so you want it to be nice and smooth and flat.
Glue shows just a bit of plastic that, that does that. very simple and. Yeah, no, I didn’t invent the, word.
Allen Hall: I have to see this done. I’ve guess I’ve only envisioned it happening. what does the glue application look like? But because of the amount of glue, you’re, talking about like a massive glue gun and a glue shoe or nozzle.
Like it’s coming down from an industrial vat.
Rosemary Barnes: Check out Fraunhofer’s, YouTube, because they do actually, because wind turbine manufacturers are really secretive about everything, even something as low tech as a glue shoe. they wouldn’t, necessarily let you in there. They definitely wouldn’t let you in there to see that.
I can guarantee you. you’re not getting, you’re not getting in there, Allen, sorry.
Allen Hall: It’s smart on their side, yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Suppliers weren’t even allowed in unless, they absolutely were needed to go in there to solve a critical problem. so you’re not going to be allowed in, but the really cool thing about Fraunhofer is that they’re not a manufacturer.
And they’re a research organization and they, do share quite openly and they have some videos up of the, manufacturing process and including one where you can, see the two clamshells closing.
Allen Hall: All right. PacifiCorp is moving forward with a study on painting wind turbine blades black to reduce wind collisions with birds. The study involves painting a single blade on 36 turbines at PacifiCorp’s Glenrock, Wyoming facility. 28 blades have been painted so far with eight more to be done this year. Partners include DOE, USGS, Oregon State University, and a number of other companies, Invenergy and Nexter on the operator side.
The study will look at the effects on eagles and other birds, including bats. Now this whole emphasis on painting a blade black, I think started in Norway, Rosemary? Does that sound right? Where they did a trial and thought there may be some benefit to it. So they’re trialing it again. I think I’ve seen three or four different trials of this.
Is there just research that it works, or? Is this something that has to be trialed site by site to determine if
it works?
Rosemary Barnes: I actually thought, so there was some research done about 20 years ago that first suggested this as, a simple way that might birds out related to wind turbines. And then later on, they.
actually did a study, but it was, I think it was an island in Norway with a specific type of bird population that had a specific issue with, wind turbines. And they did a small, trial there. Where they just went to some existing wind turbines, got up on ropes, painted, one blade on each turbine black and looked at the results and it was, pretty promising, but also a small trial.
And then at the time that I finished the video that I made on wind turbines and birds, there was another trial that was planned, by RWE in the Netherlands, I’m pretty sure. And they were going to do a slightly larger trial, and I haven’t seen the results of that, but I think it’s underway. Obviously, it takes a few years to get, all the data that you would need, because you need enough time to have had some birds die on your control turbines and hopefully not die on your, your treated wind turbines.
And then, yeah, this is another one, another study now that is, even larger. It’s getting rolled out. People love this idea. People mention it to me all the time about, this, great thing. You can just stop wind turbine deaths, bird deaths from wind turbines by painting one blade black.
So why doesn’t everyone do it? And I mentioned in my video, there’s some, technology reasons, manufacturing reasons why you might not, it’s not actually that easy to just paint one blade black and still end up with all your blades, In a matching set, and also a black blade is probably going to heat up more in the sun, which will affect its, stiffness, and so then, you might have some, issues.
none of those are probably, really, unsolvable challenges, I would say, but I think it’s the reason why it sounds like just such an easy thing, like, why wouldn’t you do it, even if it does nothing, it’s no big deal, and it’s a bit of a deal, it’s, some kind of deal. But the other thing, I actually spoke to the researcher who did the main paper that people refer to, his name is Raul May, and he’s a, I can’t remember his exact, the exact type of scientist he is, but he’s a bird guy, maybe an ecologist or something like that.
He’s not, a wind turbine engineer. and so he gave some really interesting perspectives on, yeah, on the research that he did and his thoughts about the potential for the technology. And the main thing that I learned from him was that. when you’re talking about ecology, you can’t just say this worked on one site, therefore it’s going to be good for birds in every site, everywhere in the world, because there’s different kinds of birds, they have different flight patterns, different nesting patterns, different vision.
or everything like that. and yeah, and there’s differences between the sites as well, there might be difference in, I don’t know, the color of the background or I just, imagining reasons here, every site isn’t the same. And so he said, it’s really not possible to just say.
we have qualified this technology and now you can roll it out everywhere and be confident that you’re helping birds. You might actually have in some cases perverse outcomes where birds are attracted to it or something like that. And so that, yeah, that was from speaking to him, that was the main thing that I learned about the challenge to roll it out.
But it definitely is, enough of a, it is a simple enough technology that if it did have as big an impact as the initial study suggested, then it does make sense to look into it more. But, I don’t think that it’s ever going to just be a matter of, okay, now we paint one blade black and now no bird was ever killed by a wind turbine.
It’s, never going to be that straightforward.
Joel Saxum: This one makes sense to me, though, that it’s in Wyoming and Oregon. And the reason I say that is, is from the, my, my oil and gas past, I did a lot of work up there on BLM land, Bureau of land management, all federal stuff where, and, you, the key ones here, partners include the USGS and us.
Basically for service, right? So you have the, U. S. federal fish and game people and a lot of others involved up in those areas. You have a lot of times like a raptor nest, like when they find a raptor nest, which is any kind of Eagle owl, anything like that. They will put mile. So radius exclusion zones around that, that you can’t go in at certain times of the year, even to the point where it’s sage grouse out there, they have little reflectors that are the size of the tip of your pen on the fence lines.
Every 10 feet for miles across the Wyoming countryside. So otherwise those sage grouse will fly into the fence and kill themselves. But this is, these are the kind of things that happen out there, right? So they’re really looking for, and to be honest with you, central Oregon and central Wyoming, while they’re 800 miles apart, they’re almost identical in the species that live there.
And the, background of the, like you were saying Rosemary, I don’t, we don’t know if that’s metadata that is useful, but What the terrain looks like. So I can see that they have some stakeholders involved here and the DOE from the federal government, trying to help on those, federal lands that are concentrated in Wyoming, Oregon, and out in the Western part of the United States.
Allen Hall: That’s going to 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.
