The world’s first compressed air energy storage, in China, is now in operation. It’s expected to power up to 60K homes. The technology is solid but it’s less efficient than other energy storage systems. We consider the pros and cons. What did European Commission President von der Leyen and US President Biden agree to in their meeting last month regarding incentives in green tech? Joel and Rosemary speculate, and offer some suggestions for a stronger renewables market. (Hint: they’re not fans of hydrogen subsidies.) A unique partnership between Onyx Insights and Nearthlab could pay off for both companies and for operators, too.
GE is investing in carbon capture – is it worthwhile? Ask 3 engineers, get 3 perspectives. In Germany, Nordex is knocking down four 4.5MW turbines. What do we know about why? In the Gulf of Mexico, Shell and Gulf Wind Technology are working to develop, test and deploy a Cat 5 Hurricane-proof turbine by 2024. What’s at stake, and what will we learn? Our Wind Farm of the Week, the Strauss Wind Energy Project in Lompoc, CA, has been more than 20 years in development. Find out why its time is now!
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
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EP 159
Allen Hall: Well, I am in Åre, Sweden at the moment for winter Wind, which is the icing winter blade conference held in, in Sweden every year. And Joel, it’s just like I imagine Sweden. It is beautiful, but it is ultra cold and very
Joel Saxum: snowy. The people are nice, though. The people are nice. Oh
Allen Hall: yeah. It’s a lovely people actually enjoying the food.
And the company here, and it’s a pretty well attended conference. It, it starts off tomorrow. They had some, a little bit of adventures this afternoon, but the, the conference itself starts tomorrow. Really looking forward to learning a lot about wind turbine anti icing, some of the issues they’re having with a e p and icing, and trying to keep these wind turbines running in these really harsh winter conditions.
And, I’m used to cold. It’s cold here. This is beyond cold. So this, this week we have a number of great topics. China has a compressed air energy storage system, 100 megawatt system that is pretty unique, and Rosemary goes through some of the details there. Then we look at the, the the EU and the United States are doing battle on, on how much money they can pour into renewable energy and, and how that’s gonna end up as, as both United States.
And the European Union try to keep their technologies in their countries. And then GE is demonstrating a scalable director capture system for CO2 removal. And we, we look into that and where that technology may be used, and we’re
Joel Saxum: jumping back from in directly into the wind world with Onyx Insights, a company that we know for some CMS monitoring, but also starting to partner up with Nearthlab.
South Korea with their drone technology to help some of their clients with blades. Alan and I’ve been talking in the background about some Nordex towers made outta concrete that are gonna get actually blown and have a demolition due to some defects in the towers themselves. So.
Little, little bit of trouble there with the concrete towers. And then jumping down in the Gulf of Mexico, talking about a cat five hurricane proof wind turbines that that Gulf wind and shell are teaming up on to be able to deploy in the Gulf. And then we jump into our wind farm of the week.
So we’re over in California this week talking about lo. Or in Lopac at the Strauss Wind Energy Project.
Allen Hall: I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Ticket. I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab. Joel Saxum, an Australian renewable expert, Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Right over in China, commercial operations have started on the world’s first 100 megawatt compressed air energy storage plant, and this is pretty unique. That plant can generate 102, 132 million kilowatt hours of electric. Annually, and that’s enough to power about 40 to 60,000 homes during peak electricity consumption.
And the way that compressed air energy storage works is that when they, they use electricity when it’s off hours and they have e excess electricity to run a compressor, which then compresses the air into these tanks. These tanks are stored underground, and then when they need the energy, the electricity, they call in these compressed tanks to, to spin a little generator.
And you, you’re powering the grid again. Something on this scale, 100 megawatts is a pretty good size system. We haven’t seen anything like this in. Europe or in the United States. I don’t think, I know there’s talk about it, but Rosemary, is this the largest system that you know of in a compressed air energy storage
Rosemary Barnes: network?
Yeah. It I’m pretty sure that it’s the, the largest by a fairway, a compressed air energy storage. It’s one of those ones that people have been talking about a lot for. At least a couple of years. It’s not a new technology. You know, we’ve been able to com compress air and decompress it for a long time.
There’s no, you know, special, high tech, new devices needed to make this work. It’s more a matter of Jaman just saying. Yeah, we, we, you know, we can recognize the potential on paper and now we want to take it from being a on paper, you know, possibility to actually make one and, and use one. And it’s not really surprising that China would be the first ones to make this happen because one, you know, they haven’t got to worry so much about the.
The business case making a hundred percent sense now cuz of the way that they run their economy. And two, they’re, they’re kind of the first on nearly everything. You know, I’ve, I cover heaps of different energy storage and energy generation technologies on my channel. And very often it’s, it’s China that’s moving the fastest.
I’ve got one coming out next week on concentrated solar power. And even though China doesn’t have close to the best resources for that in the world, they’re. They’re currently, they’re moving probably the fastest out of, out of everyone. So yeah, they’re kind of looking a bit ahead into what technologies they’re going to need and they’re building them now.
Whereas you know, in economies like Australias or the US or even in Europe, it’s more about, well, we know that we will need that, but we don’t actually need it until more coal plants start closing down. So it means that, you know, if you. Built one now you know, as a private company and tried to make money.
You, you, you wouldn’t, because we don’t actually need the, the storage that much.
Allen Hall: And this is different than lithium batteries. In what way is this lithium’s much more energy efficient than compressed air? Is that the difference?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s more suitable for long duration storage. And I, I’ve been reading and.
3, 4, 5 articles on this project. Trying to find out how much energy storage there actually is, cuz you know, it’s a hundred megawatts. That’s the power, the instantaneous, you know, amount that it provides. But that’s what you would use a, a lithium ion battery if it was for just a short duration. The only reason you would go to compressed air Yeah.
Is if you want a long, long duration. And then you need to know how much energy’s in it, how many megawatt hours. And I, I can’t find that anywhere. You know, this annual figure. It doesn’t really help you because it totally depends how much you use it. You know, if you’re doing one cycle per day then that would be one, a mountain.
If you did two cycles per day, then you would double it, but it would be the exact same battery. It would just be, you know, using it differently. So it’s my pet peeve and everyone’s pet peeve. I think when they announce an energy storage project and don’t tell you how much energy it stores, it’s like, what are you?
Yeah, it’s yeah. So any journalist. Or people writing press releases, please take note and correct that in the future cuz it’s a pain.
Joel Saxum: I think one of the advantages here over like a lithium storage is of course you’re not using rare earth minerals, right? I mean, it’s, it’s steel and some technology that we already know.
Right. So it’s some compressor stations and a lot, a bunch of steel and some iron here and some electronics here. It’s, it’s nothing too crazy. And and it’s not really resource depleting to build storage facilities at this size for compressed air.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, that’s true. And it, it’s a lot less efficient than a lot of other energy storage technologies.
So you know, you don’t get all of the energy back that you, you put into it, but because it’s, In theory so cheap, then you still see a big benefit from having it in the system. And so it is cool to see I mean there’s a whole list of energy storage technologies that could, could work that work well on paper, you know, should be cheaper than lithium ion batteries for longer storage durations.
It’s good. To see them coming off the paper and into a real design. And, you know, we won’t probably find out the economics of this project since it’s in China. But yeah, obviously the more projects that get made, it’s gonna, you know, if, if it works well, it’s gonna spread throughout the world. And so yeah, it’s kind of the next phase of the energy transition, the long duration storage.
So cool to see the start of that.
Allen Hall: Well, as China progresses down its renewable energy future, the EU and the United States are going. Ha. In hand-to-hand combat because the I r A bill and the European Commission wants to try to balance that a little bit because all the energy literally speaking is happening in the United States.
So the EU is, is trying to set some requirements out and say, Hey, we, we want EU industry to stay in the eu. And they’re aiming to produce like 40% of the Cleantech products within the country. By 2030, they’re trying to shorten the cycle time down for permitting decisions to try to get down to one year.
Right now it’s 3, 4, 5 years or longer in a lot of cases. So they’re, they’re trying to match your r a bill sort of dollar to. And wind Europe, which is Wind Energy’s industry group said the commission’s proposals don’t do enough to get the EU to its energy future, basically because they don’t have enough factories.
I, if you wanna create this infrastructure, you need to start building factories. Those factories haven’t started. You can throw as much money as you want to in research and technology, but at some point you’re gonna have to start building some factories. I, I think it’s a pretty fair. And they’re also allowing, obviously, subsidies to happen at the, at the country level.
So a, a particular country can subsidize its, its renewable energy interest like France has done recently on offshore wind. So this, this is then drawn the EU in president Biden into a a meeting. So EU President Ursula Von der Leyen, and Joe Biden met to diffuse the tensions that have come up over the last several months about the I R A bill.
And a couple of outcomes on that. Basically president Biden says, Hey, yeah, Americans’ gonna back down. It’s gonna be cool. Don’t, don’t e everybody get upset with me right now. It’s gonna be fine. We’re gonna try to balance the EU and the United States manufacturing so we’re not monopolizing those industries.
I don’t know if that’s even possible, but that’s, that’s what they’re talking. And they’re trying to keep like Vestas in the EU and not move it to America. I mean, that, that’s literally what they’re talking about. The one area which I think is still under dispute is the $3 tax credit per kilogram of clean hydrogen.
That hasn’t gone away, and I don’t know if the EU can even try to match that, but at the end of the day, if the EU. Is putting a bunch of money into renewables and the IRA bill, which is putting about 700 billion into renewables. Now you got, instead of one money pump, you’ve got two on, on either side of the, of the ocean.
That’s gonna make count. The company’s very wise. Joel, like GE and Vestas Siemens are gonna realize I got money on both sides of the ocean. I’m gonna tap into both those simultaneously. That’s, that’s the right answer. If I’m a business and I, and they’re in trouble right now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, it’s gonna be all driven.
The, the rest of it’s driven by demand. Right? So right now it’s, there’s only so many factories that can only produce so many, say, wind turbines. There’s, or so many heat pumps, so many of these things, right? So that’s why the. EU is saying, Hey, wait a second, we need to have some fair playing ground here.
Cause otherwise everything that gets produced is just gonna go away and we’re not gonna get any of it. So, but in, so in, I, I see that what they’re trying to do here, but unless they address the complete supply chain, this money doesn’t really help or doesn’t even the playing field, because everybody’s gonna be playing for just the limited amount of finished resources that are being created.
Allen Hall: And then in a joint statement, EU and United States put out. It says we are working against zero sum competition so that our incentives maximize clean energy deployment and jobs and do not lead to windfalls for private interest. Now, I don’t know of any government agency this building wind turbines at the moment.
So pretty much anybody that’s involved in, in renewable energy is a private interest. And now you just created two pools of money for private interest to to go after. What happens here? In the EU, I guess they do have windfall profit taxes and they go after. But in the United States you do not. So there is no way Congress is gonna pass windfall profit taxes.
So it still makes sense. If I’m Geus and see Mesa to put the plant in the United States, because you’re not gonna claw back those profits in the states. They won’t. Yeah. You’re
Joel Saxum: turning it into the old, the old statement of like, the rich get richer and, and the rich being the people that want clean energy.
Cuz what it, what it will create is now. Our friends in South America, say Argentina, Chile, Brazil Mexico, everybody else that’s trying to have an energy transition, even the Canadian companies, everybody else is trying to get on board with a clean energy transition to help the entire world is gonna be.
S so l because all of the money is gonna be going states and into the eu because there’s just not enough resources to build everything. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Canada’s already complained about it, and rightly so. They’re, they’re trying to figure out how to match the I r A bill also. So then you have a third in to teach trying to, to match this pot of money.
So now there’s even more incentives to try to grab hold of that cash. I don’t, there’s gonna be profits. There has to be. And the, the weird thing about all this is that who’s making money right now? Windfall profits is not even in, in the discussion point of Vestas, Siemens Gamesa, or GE.
Rosemary Barnes: That’s a problem they wish they were having.
Allen Hall: They wish they had that problem. Right. Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: Right. Yeah. It’s something I get asked about a lot. I’ve been doing a few interviews and stuff recently about the wind industry and fi by finance people. You know, there’s heaps of finance, renewable energy communication out there. And. They always ask me, you know, I was so surprised that we’re in this huge renewables boom.
People can’t, you know, get the wind turbines. They need to put them in the ground fast enough. But when I looked into it, there aren’t any profitable wind turbine companies. Like why is that? How does that make sense? And it’s, it’s a shame that I’m getting asked this because, you know, by finance experts, because I’m.
Please. Can you tell me why, why this is happening?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. To be you guys telling us. Yeah. It’s
Rosemary Barnes: definitely a strange situation. I, I don’t know, I haven’t looked closely enough into the, the ERA and other related ira, whatever we’re calling it, other related. Bills to see, you know, exactly where all the money’s going.
I’ve kind of focused a lot on the $3 kilo, or even I saw three 50 a kilo somewhere subsidy for hydrogen. And my big problem is not like you know, I’m, I’m not like a pure capitalist, you know, make the, you know, competition. The let the week die off or anything like that. You know, like I’m happy to see subsidies for tech.
That we, we need and that need, you know, a little bit of a help, especially in that first phase of their development where they’re trying to, you know, get enough units out there that they can start to, you know get them cheap and and sustainable, but, The problem with this, the hydrogen subsidy is just too, too big and it’s, it’s gonna distort things.
And you know, like I’ve winged about hydrogen a lot on this podcast and other places over the last couple of years, but it’s not the most efficient. Technology, it should be the technology that you use when none of the more efficient ones can do it. But when you throw this much money at it, then you’re gonna start using it for everything.
You know, it’s like, it’s like if you, you know, your, I don’t know, car mechanic showed up with just a Swiss Army knife and wanting to use that to, to fix your, your car. It’s like, yeah, you could do it, but it’s not the right tool for the job. And you, you know, lose out when you try and. Try and use the wrong tool too much.
And if, you know, depending on the application, using hydrogen is gonna be like two to six times as much renewable energy that’s needed than if you just directly electrified those same applications. So it, it actually risks slowing the energy transition globally by throwing too much incentive to start producing hydrogen re, you know, without any thought.
What it’s for.
Joel Saxum: No, that’s been part of the problem with the wind industry, right, is like even, so take the United States, the, you know, we, we talk about the IRA bill now, but PTC credits have been in play for 30 plus years. I think it was like what, 1994 or something? 93 that the first PTC credits came into play.
So when you have an industry that’s been around for 30 years that’s been propped up its entire life by subsidies. There’s a false floor there like and a false ceiling. Like nobody really knows where the, I. You should be able to figure out where the economics fall. But when you’re playing apples over here and oranges over here with different kind of subsidies, everywhere you get so far down the line that it’s been propped, propped up and held up by a government policy, and then when it’s expected to try to stand on its own, it kind of, because it.
You know, a year and a half ago, or nobody knew that the PTC was gonna be extended. Nobody knew this IRA bill was coming. They knew it was being worked on, but it was a very real possibility that it wasn’t gonna get passed. So there was a lot of wind energy producers in the US were staring at the end of PTC for the first time in 30 years.
And, you know, things changed in their, in their mindsets and how they were starting to operate o and m and. Boom, it happened again. So now we’ve got this new windfall of PTC credits we can take advantage of. Let’s repower, let’s do this, let’s do that. So like, you know, we talk about things with Phil on the show quite a bit about Repowering.
At 10 years they’re taking down equipment that works just fine, but it’s been driven by government subsidies and government policy that we have basically altered what a free market would look like versus what it is being operated as now. And that’s the issue because. No. And if we have to come crashing down to reality, the economic models need to.
And that’s why we’re in the state we’re in. And that’s a very vague, I guess, explanation of my, my thoughts on the economics of it.
Allen Hall: Hey, uptime listeners, we know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read p e s Wind Magazine. P e s Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues.
And p e s Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in-depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication PS Wind, p e s wind.com.
All right, Rosemary, your old stomping grounds. GE has announced that it’s planning large scale demonstrations in 2024 following successful testing of its first direct air capture prototype. It’s been a combination of GE research and GE renova that have been working with the Department of Energy and the ARPA E project to develop better CO2 removal.
Methods. David Moore, GEs carbon capture breakout technology leader said quote, if we do this right, we could have a commercially deployable director capture solution around the end of the decade. What’s 2030? With the new GE director capture system, the thermal management design. Has been optimized so that the CO2 AB absorbent material removes the maximum amount from the air.
And GE is investing in, in this technology trying to breakthroughs, creates more breakthroughs in the technology. Rosemary, I know you said this is like the last half, a percent or 1% of the carbon future or carbon list future is, does this new technology. Increase that percentage? Like is it the last last 3% we can go after it through direct air capture, or is it still like a half a percent?
I don’t
Rosemary Barnes: know if it, I, I don’t know if I would get stuck too much on how much of a percent. It is. But I think the thing that you, you should never talk about direct air capture without also talking about the energy requirements that it has. Because you need a lot of energy to power, direct air capture.
And if you were to power it with, you know, with, I don’t know, coal power plant or a gas power plant, then you will end up emitting more than you are, you know, soaking up. Yeah. Or maybe not more, but you, you, you’re not really coming out ahead in that way. So it can only happen in parallel with like really fast and a aggressive emissions reductions.
It makes zero sense to think of it as something you do instead of emissions reductions. And certainly it’s. You know? Yeah. A world that’s still making electricity with coal power plants is not one that, you know, can just be mopped up with direct deck capture. It’s definitely not on that scale. So yeah, it is the last.
The last little piece of the puzzle. And I, I think direct air capture really divides people because it kind of, it sounds like giving up right. That and it also, it sounds like it’s a bit of a moral hazard. It sounds like. We don’t need to do any of the hard work of the energy transition if we can just get direct air capture to work.
And I can kind. You see that point. But on the other hand, we are going to, no matter how aggressively reduce emissions, we are going to end up in a world that has more CO2 in the atmosphere than it has done historically. And the only way that we’re going to get closer to historic levels is by bringing it down either with something like direct air capture or maybe it’s going to be you know, with bioenergy carbon capture.
You know, some, something like that is probably gonna be needed. So I kind of like to, I, I like that people are working on it and I hate that they’re talking about it, like, just, you know, quietly go make this technology work. I understand that it’s a difficult thing. You need to make it more energy efficient.
You need to scale it. You definitely need a lot of attention on that. Now, if we wanna be using it in 20 years, at any scale, at any, you know meaningful scale. But yeah, just don’t, don’t talk about it to, to you with your, you know, every everyday regular people just like I’m doing right now. Don’t give anyone the impression that you, you know, there’s an easy solution coming.
That’s the problem, is you, you know, like everybody wants attention on their, on their project. They wanna make it sound like it’s gonna change the world. And so you end up with these hyperbolic, hyperbolic headlines that really exaggerate things, make it sound like a free lunch when it’s not a free lunch.
It’s, you know, a really, really expensive cleaner to come in after, you know, you’ve you’ve done everything that you possibly can. So yeah, cool. But let’s just.
Allen Hall: So th this, this article and this, this news from GE sort of ties into something that’s happening in Japan. And I saw a news article that today talking about a, a coal fire plant in Japan where they’re using oxygen to feed that coal plant, which then makes it burn a little more efficiently.
Then they’re using carbon capture to get the carbon, a significant amount of the carbon out of the emissions there, and then they’re getting, as a byproduct, hydrogen. Out of this plant. As, as a sort of a stepping stone, and I’m wondering if this is where this carbon capture technology is kind of going is, hey, in some parts of the world, You’re just not gonna wait.
Get away from coal plants straight away. So, but at least we could start pulling some of the emissions down a
Rosemary Barnes: little bit. No, you’d never use this near point source of emissions. This is for like, super low concentration that’s in the atmosphere that you can do anywhere if you’ve got a concentrated source, like on a a coal power plant or cement manufacturing facility or, you know, something else like that or a, yeah.
Steam Han Reformer, you know, gray hydrogen facility. Then you’ve got really concentrated CO2 at maybe like 15% thereabouts. And then you can use other way, way, way cheaper methods to to capture it. So it’s it’s way. Better in that case to use? Yeah, like a normal carbon capture method. However, it still adds a chunk, like even that, you know, better, much more energy efficient traditional carbon capture, and probably shouldn’t call it traditional because there’s definitely not a tradition of these things working.
But even in that, you know, mainstream. Technology, it still adds 30% approximately power consumption. So if you put it on a coal power plant, then 30% of your power output you’re gonna be using to power the carbon capture. So you, you can see it’s the same sort of problem where you’re just adding to the energy requirements and that’s.
Much, much, much less energy than what you need for direct air capture, where you need to move vast, vast, vast volumes of air through because, you know, you’ve got these you know, fractions of a percent that you’re trying to concentrate and remove. So, I couldn’t say it too many times that this doesn’t coexist with coal, coal power plants, or any coal is just, you know, The easiest slam dunk of a thing to just remove it, you know, there’s plenty of better, cheaper, yeah, just better in every way.
Technology is to replace it. So it is so much cheaper and simpler to, to get rid of those. And I think that that’s one of the big problems with carbon capture as a technology. As the early on it was sold as a way to continue. With, you know, traditional thermal generation from coal and gas. But it makes it like it, it’s a logical inconsistency to, to do that.
It, it’s just makes. No, no sense. You’re just ending up with a more expensive tech, yeah. Product at the end compared to you. Something that’s green to start with and doesn’t have any emissions. I think
Joel Saxum: something to concentrate on here from this article is that David Moore from GE, as you were saying, Alan, he says, if we do this right, We could have a commercially deployable DAC solution around the end of this decade.
That does not mean commercially viable or commercially solvent. It just means deployable. Yeah, that’s a lot of
Allen Hall: work to do still.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, how could you have a commercially viable system when there’s no value for co2? You know, There’s very few places in the world where you’re charged to put it into the air.
And if you, and this isn’t even what that is, this is pulling it out of the air. And then to spend money bearing it, you know, like we haven’t yet got a mechanism to attribute value to that so that it could be commercially viable. You couldn’t even start to make a business case for it now, except for like involuntary carbon.
Reduction markets.
Allen Hall: I watched a ge video today of on LinkedIn of all things, and they were talking about what they’re gonna do with this carbon, and one of the answers was aviation fuel. So they take the CO2 and then make it into aviation fuel, which seems like the most. Seems like the most expensive way to make aviation fuel is to do that, is use carbon taking
from
Rosemary Barnes: the air it, yeah, it sounds, it sounds like you don’t need to worry about aviation.
It sounds like you’re pulling carbon out of the air. So already in just that like immediate, like one second interpretation, the average person’s gonna have their double counting what’s happening to that carbon because you know, you pull it out of the air. So you feel warm and fuzzy about that, then you put it into an airplane, so you won’t feel warm and fuzzy about that, but where’s it going?
Out of the airplane, back into the air. So, you know, you end up back where you started in terms of co2, but with a lot, a lot, lot, lot, lot, lot of energy used that wouldn’t have been used otherwise. So yeah, it’s, it’s, that’s, that’s the, the problem is that, you know, you talk about it, it makes you feel like, oh, these things are under control.
They’re not under control and that’s not going to be the you, you can’t have that as you solution to aviation without then pulling out a bunch more CO2 from there and storing it, you know, never putting it it back out there. So you should, if you wanna feel both of those warm, fuzzy feelings, you’re gonna need to be pulling out twice as much from the air as what.
Yeah. Using, using an airplane, otherwise you just end up back at zero. Yeah. I, I
Allen Hall: don’t, I don’t think it’s realizable. I. It’s interesting on the PR approach
Rosemary Barnes: more than anything, but I do think it’s impor important. I mean, the timeline doesn’t sur surprise me that that’s, you know, when it will be ready to, you know, like physically ready to go out there and do, its, its thing from an engineering point of view.
And like I said, I don’t think you can even guess what the commercial impact will be like at that point because how will you know, how will we value carbon removal in 10 years time? I’ve got no idea, but I do know that if we want. Pulling significant volumes outta the air in 2040 and 2050, then we need to be doing those small things that sound meaningless now in order to get there.
So I am, I think it is really good that people are working on this. I, I don’t wanna be too dismissive, but at the same time I do, because I don’t want anyone to think that this is gonna make a big difference and stop doing all the other
Allen Hall: things. So, at blades usa last week in Austin, Texas, there was an announcement.
From Onyx Insight and North Labs. And North Labs is based in South Korea. They’re a drone company, and we’re Onyx Insight and North Lab. We’re gonna be working together in the United States and Onyx is gonna have access or licensing North Labs, zoomable. It’s called Zoomable software to, to look at the health of, of wind turbine.
So it’s pretty much the North Labs has much drones. They have a, a kind of a cloud interface where they put all that data and it helps an engineering company like Onyx go through and predict when maintenance needs to occur. And that, and that’s a unique partnership because Onyx hasn’t really done a lot with anything drone related and, and North Lab hasn’t done anything in terms.
Helping to fix Blaze necessarily. So right now it looks like what Onyx is working to do is they’re mostly in the vibration business. They’re looking at vibration of gear boxes and turbines and helping do predictive maintenance on the turbines. So now they can add blades to that mixture because of the, the drone technology.
And that expands our capabilities. So it says yeah, Onyx Insight is now able to monitor about 85% of the major component failures with this partnership. So this, this is kind of a unique thing that’s happening. I think more of this is going to happen. Joel, you’ve, you’ve seen this a little bit. Skys specs has done something.
Kind of similar where they’re trying to bring it in-house. There’s been a couple other players that have been trying to do similar things with you guys at Win Power Lab,
Joel Saxum: right? Yeah, I mean at Win Power Lab we do some of the same kind of concept of this as far as using, you know, cause we’re not a drone company of course, but we’re a blade expertise company, so it’s kind of the same thing.
Onyx Insight great at monitoring a lot of different components within the turbine, but they also do have some blade experts on staff and so they do a little bit of blade stuff, but this is, but. They’re not a drone company, right? They’re not all flying and inspecting things, so they rely on third party people to do that.
And, and you know, at Wind Power Lab as well, once we’ve, once you hook into a third party that you really like to use and you trust them and the data deliveries are good, their professional in the field, all those good things, then you, then you sync up with them and then it makes the workflows easier.
It’s better for, it’s easier for both of the companies. It’s a value add for both of the companies, but it’s also the at. The heart of it, it’s a value add for the client and that’s where it’s at. So Onyx Insight has a whole suite of clients that they help out regularly with. You know, they have their own CMS systems for vibration and drivetrain monitoring things.
And then they have, you know, our friend Megan Rotunda over there that has been helping people with blades. Now she has a whole other tool as a value add to. To bring it in. So and I know Nearthlabs created a software, much like UHS Schmidt kind of has where they can go and now have ’em have inspections, field deployable, which it thread does the same thing that you know and I think a lot of people will start to move that way is it cuts down on the need to deploy drone technicians and pay travel and pay mobilization and pay all this stuff.
You just buy the, buy the drone. As a wind farm or as a company. And when the wind is in a, in the, what, what’s the word you use? Rosemary. What’s the German word for the, the wind is dead. Dunkle fl dunkle fl dunkle fl. There it is. So when the, how about when the wind isn’t blowing For our English listeners?
When the wind isn’t blowing and you can go out and do inspections right at any time, so you’re not paying downtime. And it may might, you might get two or three done this day and you might get two or three done this day, but you can be regularly out there instead of paying someone every year. You could be out there every quarter.
You could be out there whenever a storm comes through and there could be some lightning, you know? So. They can get the the interfaces worked out between the two of ’em, Onyx insight and, and Nearthlab. It could be a very good pairing for a lot of Onyx companies. And then south Korean company, Nearthlab.
Being able to export their technology around the world will be great for them. I know as they grew, they, they received a lot of awards. South Korea. They also reli received a lot of government funding to grow and grow and grow and they’ve got a lot of really smart software people over there building some solutions.
So I’m not sure. Do you think they will white label. What Nearthlab has in the background for the Zoomable software for assessing the, the health of the turbines, or would they use semis inside input with that?
Allen Hall: What do you think? That’s a good question. I, I did run into Megan at the conference. I didn’t ask her about that.
That’s a really good question. We should try to get her back on to, so she can describe what the relationship is and, and whether how they’re gonna use this data.
Joel Saxum: I think you’ll start to see a lot of people or a lot of companies move this way. I mean, you already have, like, you see this going. We’ve seen Skys specs partner with, you know, our friends at Power Curve.
A lot of really smart guys over there. And, and so you have subject matter experts joining up with some of the drone companies and inspection companies to give a better value add to their customers. And I think that’s what will start to differentiate in the market. You know, who’s gonna continue to grow?
Rosemary Barnes: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage
Allen Hall: is not actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
Visit weather guard wind.com to learn more. Read a case study and schedule a call. You know, and Joel, you and I talked a couple of weeks ago about drone inspections happening on concrete Towers, and we guessed that it was Nordics turbines that were having some troubles maybe end of, into warranty campaigns that were, that were happening at the time.
Well, we were probably right. So Nordex is knocking down four wind turbines in Germany due to concrete terrors that have defects. All four turbines on the wind farm are gonna be completely dismantled, and they’re going to put up brand new turbines in their place. And they’re four and a half megawatt machines, so this is not cheap.
Four and a half megawatt machines, about four and a half million dollars, plus all the new infrastructure in the pad and everything else. It’s gonna be an expensive concrete tower replacement
Joel Saxum: job. But, but they’re just doing the towers, right? So they’re gonna take the, they’re gonna take the blades, rotors, spinners the cells off, set ’em to the side, and then blow the towers.
And then put new towers and put the same to sell
Allen Hall: back on. I think they’re gonna knock them down the whole thing. Yeah. It sounds like they got a structural concern and they don’t want to be putting a crane near that. Trying to disassemble it. That’s what it reads like. Now, I could be completely wrong, but I was just trying to read between the lines of what the effort was.
But this says they’re gonna be completely dismantled and they’re gonna put the Germans up in the same, again, the same place, but, and
Joel Saxum: they’re lucky for the labor laws in the eu. Cuz if that was someone in the US they’d be looking for a new job.
Allen Hall: Some. Well, you know, I think there is a big growing concern about concrete pads and concrete towers.
And do we have. History on them to know what the lifespan is and are we designing them correctly. I, when we were at the A C P O M S show in Orlando, there was a discussion in one of the, one of the sessions about. Have we put enough basically steel in the concrete? And is it, is it set up correctly and tied together correctly so it doesn’t pull apart?
I think the answer was no. Based on what we know, that one in Illinois
Joel Saxum: just went over. Right,
Allen Hall: right. And I, this, there was some comment online about that saying, well, this should have been some more horizontal steel in that. Rebar in that, in that mix. And there wasn’t, but that was the way we did it at the time.
If we had to do it again, we would do it differently. So obviously you know, it’s Monday morning quarterbacking there, but if you have several thousand turbines and Nordex does on concrete towers, you, you, I think you should start to worry a little bit. About it. You know,
Joel Saxum: there is a company in Germany, and I can’t remember the name of it, but at one of the, at Windy Europe, I believe maybe last two years ago, they were across from Wind Power Lab.
We had a booth there, and they were in the innovation hub, and it was a, I can’t remember the name of them, I can picture their logo. It was Orange and Black, but they were doing pre-stressed, concrete wind turbine foundations, but they’re doing ’em in pieces like Legos. So instead of. Instead of pouring in place, they brought ’em in, brought the pieces in on trucks, and then you just kind of set ’em like Legos and then, so you’d think they were a Danish company, but they’re an extra German.
And then that was the foundation and, and they won some awards with this. And I, but I don’t know how it’s taken off commercially. We should circle back around. I, I wanna say it was Anchor was the name of them. Yeah, it’s I, I don’t know where they’ve gotten commercially with it. I know when I, I looked at the, the, there’s a couple of friends here in the US and the, Hey, when you go to Wind Europe, check these guys out.
And I looked into it with them and they they did a great job on the. On the show floor with having some engineers and stuff there. So I’d be curious to see what kind of traction they’ve got in the, in the marketplace.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, some of your former colleagues have started a company called Gulf Wind Technology and they have partnered with Shell New Energies in the US to develop hurricane proof wind turbines for the Gulf of Mexico.
And Shell has committed 10 million towards this effort, which is gonna be based in Louisiana. The Accelerate Accelerator program looks to develop, test, and deploy a Gulf of Mexico specific demonstrator, turbine as early as 2024. Now, I cross paths with one of the. People at Gulf Wind Technologies at Blades U s A, it’s like, and I was asking him 2024 is pretty soon to, to put a demonstrator together that’s gonna handle hurricane winds.
And it sounds like they’re gonna try to take it in stages. Very logical approach. Not try to build a 50 meter blade that’s hurricane proof, but maybe build something shorter, try to do proof of concepts, and then develop this into a, a full skill. Wind turbine system with the, with the leases going on, on the Gulf of Mexico over the next six months, a year or so.
Joel, I don’t remember. It’s pretty soon. They don’t have wind turbines are put out there yet. Right. So they’re, they’re still trying to figure out, like if I put a wind turbine out there and the winds are lower, right, so the wind speeds are like seven, like seven meters or second or some kind of number like that.
It’s relatively low compared to some other places like in Kansas or Oklahoma. You have low winds, speeds, and then you have these high, massive speed swirling winds that winter term blade has to withstand. Rosemary is what’s this blade gonna look like as be made out of a, a aluminum
Joel Saxum: You been if you’re up too long.
Aluminum? Yeah.
Allen Hall: No kidding. Aluminum.
Rosemary Barnes: Aluminum. Are you trying to say aluminum correctly? Is that your problem? You’re you’re trying Yeah. Aluminum. That’s better. Yeah. I assume it’s gonna look really. From the outside, it’s gonna look more or less exactly the same as any other wind turbine that is gonna have thicker.
Skins on the, on the blades, maybe they’ll shorten the blades. I’m, I’m not sure. I don’t think that their biggest challenge is designing a, a wind turbine that can withstand these loads. I think they’re gonna have two, two problems. The first one that any manufacturer would have if they chose to make a wind turbine for that application, which is that, you know, when you’ve.
Low average wind speeds, but very high extreme loads. You have to design for the extreme load. So you put a lot more material in there to make it strong enough to withstand it costs a lot more, but you can only recoup you. You don’t generate power during those extreme extreme times. You have to generate your power during the low average wind speeds.
And so you’ve got an expensive turbine that doesn’t make a lot of electricity. So, Main problem is the economic one. It’s, you’re not gonna need any new unheard of technology to make these turbines strong enough. Anyone could do it just by, yeah, like I said, making the, the fiberglass a bit thicker than it would otherwise be.
And yeah, like I said, also maybe make the blades a bit shorter so that there wasn’t as much. Force on it. But of course then you get less, less energy generated if you’ve got shorter blades. But the biggest problem would be starting a wind turbine manufacturing facility from scratch. So I, I assume that they’re not doing that.
If they’re going to put out their first turbine in 2024, it’s not going to be them making the tower, the generator, the, the blades all that. Maybe they’re putting stronger blades onto an existing turbine that’s rated for those loads. Maybe that’s how they’re. Doing it. And their point of difference is only that they’re willing to make this product.
When others don’t see the, you know, economic, the business case for it. They don’t see that they would sell enough to warrant the effort. So yeah, I, you guys would have a better idea than me about how much opportunity there is. Like, is there a big enough market there that it’s, it’s worth specializing on that
Allen Hall: right now?
There’s two. They’re getting smaller by a minute. Yeah, they
Joel Saxum: are. They’re shrinking ’em. But but that’s one place that you can go with them right away, right off the coast, Louisiana. Boom. But there’s also places, other places in the world that could use these, right in the APAC region. Some of those typhoon like the, like Ming Yang has the typhoon class turbine now.
They, there’s other places that could use ’em as well. That would just be a Kickstarter here. So a qu a question I have. F for the, the team here is, we’re talking about blades, blades, blades. But is there other things that you need to, to do? Like would you, would you like to have a, a more responsive, faster yaw motors to be able to, to spin the tower faster if the winds are changing instead of just letting it free float?
Or is there anything else that you would change? Do you need bigger main bearings because of the forces
Rosemary Barnes: that you might endure? Ev Everything will be, need to be changed for the bigger, more heavier, strong. Blades. I mean, even aside from. Yeah. Aside from anything else, if you, if you make a wind turbine blade heavier, then you’ve gotta add mass all through the rest of the, the tower.
It’s one of the reasons why you see carbon fiber being added to blades to make them lighter. The wind turbine blade itself is more expensive actually to do that in, in many, maybe all cases. But where you save money is by being able to take white out of every, everything else that’s attached to the wind turbine blade, which is, you know, everything cuz the, the blade is the first, the.
Thing in the, you know, in the train. So my, I, I don’t know what they’re doing, but my assumption will be that they’ll take a turbine, you know, everything minus the blades. They’ll take that from a, a, a bigger, higher rated. You know, turbine and then put smaller, shorter blades on it. So you’ll end up, you know, some parts of the turbine will be over overbuilt in order to make sure that none of it is underbuilt.
They’ll make the changes necessary to the blades and then, You know, maybe this is their proof of concept and as time goes on, they will gradually, you know, take out some of the material from other things that are overbuilt. But yeah, that would be my, my guess of how you’d do it. Because to start optimizing everything as a whole is gonna just.
They’ll, they’ll never get enough money to make one their first turine like that. They would have to do it in an agile way. And I know the company that I’m assuming that these, these guys came from, I know they came from GE and before that they were probably part of another company that was bought that was in, you know, in that.
Location in Louisiana and they were a really agile company, you know, really doing you know, like cutting edge stuff with wind turbine blades. And they’re really used to thinking what’s the quickest way that we can test the, you know, crucial assumption of this. How can we get to a minimum valve viable product as soon as possible?
And so that’s why I’m pretty, pretty sure that they’ll be taking that kind of agile approach to to this new. And
Joel Saxum: shell, I mean, partnering with Shell or Shell being a part of this is fantastic because Shell has a ton of knowledge of the offshore working conditions in the Gulf. They’ve been out there for 40
Allen Hall: years.
Yeah. I think there’s this init, this initiative is gonna carry over. You’ve seen a couple other companies, I won’t name them now, that are doing very similar things, that they’re, they’re kicked off these initiative programs, willing to put some money behind. A startup company to help them in certain ways.
This is the first one I’ve seen that’s been direct to wind turban tech. Like there’s a company that’s in this that does this for a living and we’re gonna speed ’em up to make a product that we need in the Gulf and probably down in North Carolina, South Carolina region. Also, because hurricanes come up the East Coast too.
It would make sense if you have that technology in the Gulf of Mexico, why would you not put it in North Carolina? Same. Same Condit. Our wind Farm of the week is a Strauss Wind energy project in Lopac, California, and there’s gonna be 27 GE 3.8 megawatt turbines spinning out there relatively shortly, with just enough to power about 44,000 residential homes.
This project has, has been going on a little over 20 years. It began in 2000 and. And then it changed hands in the middle here. There’s been some issues with the soil and, and that site. And if you’re familiar with Lopac California, that’s where Vandenberg Air Force base is. So they do rocket launches.
Polar rocket launches. When I worked for ge when they had an aerospace division as we were doing launches out of there really cool site. So they have had some soil issues and some setbacks. Mostly due with the Santa Barbara County planning commission. It looks like as of right, right now, there’s about 25 turbines done.
And ready to go. But the county has laid on about a 103 conditions, including environmental mitigation. They have to be checked off before they can go live. 103 conditions seems like a lot, Joel, but they’re almost done, which is congratulations to them. That’s crazy. Yeah. But it is, it is good. So, you know, it’s for a wind farm’s been through 20 years of struggle.
It’s, it’s nice to see that being completed. So our wind farm of the week is Strauss Wind Energy in loock ca. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube Channel Engineering with Rosie.
And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
