Rosemary Barnes from Pardalote Consulting and the popular YouTube Channel, Engineering with Rosie, joined us to share her take on wind energy. Ms. Barnes has a Ph.D in composite materials and structural design, and has worked for LM Wind Power, where she oversaw blade heating systems, among other projects. In this episode, she shared her insights on how wind turbine blade design has evolved, what the future of wind power might look like, vertical vs horizontal wind turbines, and how we can make more efficient energy transitions.
Follow up with Rosie on Linkedin, visit Pardalote, her consulting firm, and be sure to subscribe to her YouTube channel.
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. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Transcript: EP64 – Rosemary Barnes of Pardalote Consulting talks Wind Turbine Blade Design & Sharing Her Knowledge on YouTube
Dan Blewett 0:00
This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast.
Allen Hall 0:37
Welcome back. I’m Allen Hall.
Dan Blewett 0:39
I’m Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running.
Dan Blewett 0:58
All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. This is Episode 64. And we have a great guest today, Rosemary Barnes is joining us on the show. She is a consultant with Pardalote. And she also runs the YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie where she educates the public on all sorts of topics in wind, wind energy, on wind turbine design, on blade aerodynamics, lots of really interesting stuff, tons of new videos on green hydrogen. So we wanted to have Rosie on the show to share her expertise. And let me run down a little bit of her background. So she has her PhD in structural design and composite materials from the University of New South Wales Canberra campus in Australia. She was worked for lm wind power as a engineer, and she just has a lot of experience a lot of different areas in the wind industry and as an engineer. So Alan, what were some of your takeaways from our talk with with Rosie,
Allen Hall 1:59
just like the way she thinks she thinks in terms of systems, not in terms of components. And I think that’s a for an engineer is a good way to think about bigger problems. And if you’ve watched some of our YouTube videos, she talks about different parts of the what I’ll call the renewable energy or green energy economy and how that can function and whether we can do the things that are being promoted by in some cases, politicians, and whether that really can come from reality. And if you start looking as a whole system of components, green hydrogen or tidal power or vertical wind, turbans, there’s a lot more to it, then then you would think, and it’s a normal person who’s not an engineer would think about and she’s an engineer and she’s been around for quite a while and so she can connect the dots for you and and it’s extremely helpful to make it make it more realized. Is it realizable? Or is it not aware that wrote are the real costs in doing this and they may not be just in the component themselves, like a vertical winter, maybe all the other things and like, how, how much does it operate? Is it efficient? Can you can you scale it up all those different aspects and and that’s what makes her approach and particularly her YouTube videos. Very interesting.
Dan Blewett 3:12
Yeah. So we covered a bunch of topics in the show today, we talked about vertical versus horizontal axis wind turbines talked about blade design. We talked about blade heating is one of her specialties, one of her projects, with lm one power bureaucracy in some of these wind energy companies, just big, big business in general, again, you’ve been subject to it, you know, she’s been subject to it. We’ve also talked about energy transitions, that’s a big passion of hers is helping companies find the right tech and do their due diligence, to help with making transitions from one energy source to another. So as I mentioned, she is she has her own company called Pardalote. She does consulting helps companies with energy transitions with due diligence, with engineering and winter related projects. And then we’re obviously obviously going to put links to her company, her show her, her YouTube channel, all that stuff. But without further ado, we’re going to jump to our conversation with Rosemary Barnes, engineer and consultant with Pardalote.
Dan Blewett 4:22
All right, well, Rosemary, thank you so much for joining us. And hello from the US is our second guest in a row from Australia. So how are you doing?
Rosemary Barnes 4:33
I’m doing well. Thanks. And yeah, thanks a lot for having me and staying up late to to meet our morning.
Dan Blewett 4:40
Yeah, the timezone thing is crazy. It’s obviously Well, it’s six o’clock here in the US and it’s eight o’clock there in Australia. But yeah, we’re happy to be here with engineering with Rosie. So let’s get started. So your structural engineer and you know following your PhD in composite materials, And structural design, you went to work for lm wind power, which was one of the really interesting things that we want to kind of pick your brain about here today. So let’s talk a little bit about your time element a bit. But first, you know, winter and blades have changed a lot. And one of the things you do really well is educate people on YouTube. And so tell us a little bit about how you got your engineering channel going. You’re now you know, you surpassed 20,000 subscribers in your first year, which is awesome. And you talk a lot about green hydrogen, you know, vertical axis versus horizontal. So tell us a little bit about you know, the educational work you’re doing out there for the masses.
Rosemary Barnes 5:38
Yeah. Okay. So my YouTube story is a bit of a cliche, I think it’s one of those lockdown projects I found myself. Yeah, in but in between jobs at at a weird time. So I had some time on my hands. And it all started with, I was living in Atlanta, you know, the peninsula in the west of Denmark. And they’ve had wind power there for Well, that’s like, where they got their first electricity, actually, from wind turbines back, you know, over 100 years ago. And then from the 70s onwards, they have been developing wind and they never stopped. So when you’re kind of driving around there in Jutland, you can see like a, the evolution of the different crazy designs that people tried out before, they all kind of converged on on this three bladed upwind design. So I just had an idea for that one video to talk about the different designs and why the evolution went the way it did. And then I just Yeah, I just enjoyed it. And I got more and more ideas from videos, the longer I was doing it, and viewers they comment, they tell you all, you know, I’ve always wanted this. So can you make a video on that? So yeah, that tell the vertical axis video has happened because one particular viewer kept on asking for it. And I didn’t know much about it. I mean, most people working in the industry are purely working on horizontal axis turbines and don’t take the vertical axis very seriously. So I looked into it found I couldn’t find a good explanation of how the aerodynamics work like I couldn’t, I couldn’t get it clear in my my brain, you know. So I kind of just sketched out some, some vectors and figured it out and thought that I’d share it. Yeah, I think that’s how a lot of my videos work. It starts with me having a question, why is this done like this? Or, you know, how is this going to change in the future? And then as I learn about it, I, you know, share that same process with the viewers.
Dan Blewett 7:37
What I think that’s one of the things that has made us youtube so endearing, and made it so huge is that there’s a lot of curiosity channels out there, right. And, you know, there’s been, there’s some that been around for 1015 years, and then there’s a lot of new ones who just people are just trying to answer questions that they have in their own lives, just these. Why does this work? You know, how does this work? I’m gonna just do a deep dive when I watched a video about why McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken, which was actually a fascinating video, there’s like a conspiracy behind it. It’s really actually super interesting. So I think that like, and your channel is becoming more and more relevant now that wind power is taking off. So people, you know, this stuff’s in the news everyone’s thinking about, especially here in the US. And, you know, I want to stick with the the vertical axis stuff, because even now, there’s new news about vertical axis wind turbines is like, is this the future? Again, it seems like every five or 10 years, someone’s asking, Are these the future but yet they never seem to be? I mean, what what is your official take on the vertical axis versus horizontal debate?
Rosemary Barnes 8:45
So I think that they won, they can get better, they should be able to get more efficient, but they have this, you know, really common engineering trade off between efficiency and complexity. And at the moment, no one has been able to make a turbine that is efficient without making it so complex that it doesn’t last very long. Yeah. And you do need to note that no one has made a vertical axis wind turbine yet that’s making cheaper electricity, then horizontal, I haven’t even got remotely close. I think that’s what a lot of people miss. But I do think that there are certain advantages to that design that will fit certain specific natures. So those nature’s would be like distributed energy. And especially like micro grids, where you might not have like a lot of solar or not at all times of the year, places where noise is a real problem. So there I think that we’ll see them but I’m like really sure that it’s never going to replace horizontal axis wind turbines. It’s going to feel in something that the horizontal axis turbines can’t do. Yeah, and I think it’s also related to the question of urban wind in general. Which, yeah, it’s an interesting topic because people want to see green energy being made. So that means I want to see, you know, see it near their homes near their workplaces. But the fact is that the quality of the wind really matters so much. With wind energy, you know, the power and the wind it, it’s related to the cube of the wind speed. So you have twice the wind speed, but eight times as much power. So that’s why we see the big utility scale, winds are getting taller and taller, and they’re moving offshore, despite the challenges because the wind is so much better that so you can put a really efficient turbine in an urban area, and it only has such a small potential of what it could catch up if there’s a wind speed slow. So it’s a real natural limit on how much that can do. And I think that’s disappointing to a lot of people. Because people really, you know, they really love these small turbines. And, and I get that as well at their exciting by engineering challenge. But yeah, I don’t think that that’s going to be it’s not gonna replace anything. Yeah, it might, it might be the next thing, but it’s not going to be only the only thing ever
Dan Blewett 11:17
want you and do you feel like it’s one of those things where especially again, people who have an engineering mind, or engineers themselves feel like, Hey, this is an untapped? Like, I could be the person that designs the next vertical axis that hits in big like they feel like, I mean, what are you going to do if you’re sitting in your home with horizontal right, GE has a 13 megawatt behemoth. So to Siemens, Gamesa. So does what Vestas right? No one’s sitting in their home is gonna outdo them. But do you feel like that’s part of the driver that it still gives people this sort of this hope that they could, they could be a part of that revolution and spark it through their own sort of homebrew engineering?
Rosemary Barnes 11:56
Yeah, I think so. And I made I get a lot of flack, every week, at least someone will tell me they’ve got a new, more efficient vertical axis wind turbine design and want to send me the AutoCAD files, which, which is really cool. And I mean, I hope that they’re gonna continue to develop them as well, because that’s, yeah, I mean, you don’t, it, it’s, well, it’s good engineering skills, you learn what the constraints are, when you do it yourself. Like I had this video on my site, I made a gingerbread wind turbine, just, you know, for end of year project. And I mean, I have an education in engineering and in wind energy, but I learned so much, especially about how important the wind resources because by far, the most important factor for that project was how windy it was going to be on the test day. And finding the best side, you know, I’d say where the wind was coming from and find the bit of the beach that was, you know, angled that way, that was by far the most important thing, I could put nearly any shape of gingerbread blade on there. And if the wind was strong enough, it would work, you know, so, yeah, I mean, you really, you learn a lot by by doing so I’m really excited that the vertical axis and even small horizontal axis, you know, they have a scale that people can can get their hands dirty. And that’s, you know, that’s fine.
Dan Blewett 13:16
Well, and this kind of speaks to some of the other, you’ve mentioned in a number of your videos that, you know, there’s the the practical, and then there’s the theoretical, where I feel like a lot of those ideas seem to live only in a theoretical and Alan, I’ve talked about this on our companion podcast on aerospace engineering. Right now, there’s a huge boom of new electric, vertical takeoff and landing vehicle designs. There’s a new one seemingly every week from some companies, they’re like, Hey, we’re gonna take 100,000 people any VTOL now, and then we’re going to do it’s just like a crazy new thing. It’s like, that seems like it’s in one. Well,
Rosemary Barnes 13:52
if one this one one thing when I was 100 people,
Dan Blewett 13:57
I was exaggerating. But the challenge, right now the challenge is, these companies are at the forefront are trying to get like two people or four people to make, you know, the lift ratios work and all that stuff. And just the other day, we saw a company said we’re gonna do 40 it’s like, Okay. I mean, do you feel like there’s a lot of this in engineering where it’s the, the practical sometimes lags behind or maybe not lags behind? But, I mean, how do these theoretical models end up fleshing out? Is it just sort of natural selection over time, and it comes down to numbers?
Rosemary Barnes 14:32
It’s kind of complicated. I think maybe wave energy is a really good example for for this because it kind of, it’s something really complicated but it started I think it started a bit too late to ever really get there because you compare it to like the internal combustion engine, right? That is a super complicated thing, like so complicated. If you had an electric motor first, and then someone was like, hey, look at this internal combustion engine, you’d be like, you kidding me? Look at that. All those parts. You’ve got splosion Are you serious? But it got there it got there because it was the by far the best thing at the at the time and people, people copped, but yeah, wave energy, we have other alternatives. Whereas Yeah, so like wind started out. So, so simple, you know, 1000s of years ago, even people were figuring out how to put sails and you know, rotate something from the wind to, you know, make the energy of, you know, power in a form that you can use it. And it just gradually evolved, took off a lot was around the turn of the previous century, and then again, in the 70s, with the oil crisis, that was a little bit more interest in in making it work for electricity. Yeah, and it had time at they started off very small, really small back then, you know, 100 kilowatts was
Allen Hall 15:59
a lot.
Rosemary Barnes 16:00
Yeah, that’s an industrial Kind of, yeah, that was, that was a big thing. Yeah. And then they gradually got bigger. And, you know, they figured things out, and they bet gradually got more complicated at first, you know, they weren’t, they were a fixed speed, they weren’t changing the speed to change with the wind speed. So they were missing a lot of the energy that they could have captured operating below their maximum efficiency most of the time, then they, you know, got various variable speed, then they could change the pitch of the blades, and others, there’s all sorts of tiny little improvements that have happened since then, I mean, now it’s gotten to the point where you can get an extra quarter of a percent energy over a year, then everyone’s like, Oh, my God, huge, huge innovation. And, yeah, not to mention going to better wind resources. So going into cold climates, even though you have to heat the blades, which is a pain, we’re going tall, even though you know, obviously, it’s really hard to make a very long skinny tower, but it’s worth it for the wind, same with offshore, but it will happen incrementally, and it was very reliable before they kind of move to the next stage. But then something like wave energy or vertical axis turbines Eva, even, I think it can be really tempting to say, okay, so wave energy, out in the middle of the ocean, there’s huge waves, in storms, we’ve got to be able to capture all that and kind of go straight out there. And what happens, you build a really expensive prototype, it gets destroyed, the company’s finished and then the next company comes along and tries it. So it’s a lot, you making the job a lot harder for yourself if you have to make those big increments. Yeah, and I think that that’s the the risk that especially Yeah, like a backyard engineer or a home engineer, you you have the like, Great idea. You say, Oh, you know, there’s this wasted wind race on the side of roads or on roofs or whatever. But until you actually make it, you don’t realize all the tiny complicated details that are going to get in your way, because it doesn’t just have to be efficient and pass last a long time, otherwise, it’s not going to be very expensive.
Dan Blewett 18:14
Well, and that’s a great, I think, point to transition here. I know Alan has a ton of questions about your time with LMS. D Why? Because, you know, working for a company like that, where you’re making these enormous blades out of, you know, high tech materials, which is obviously your expertise, you know, with your PhD in composite materials, you know, I mean, how, how have those blades started to evolve. I mean, you’ve seen them over your career. But like you said, all those little tests and retests, and what’s failed and what’s worked tick, can you kind of take us through just like a little flyby of, of, you know, the design process, and obviously, we know there’s confidentiality, all that stuff, but what is it like working for a big blade manufacturer like like lm,
Rosemary Barnes 19:00
I actually, I moved to a big company like lm on purpose. Before that, I worked. Before I went back to uni and did my PhD, I have been working with a lot of startups, not just wind also, some like alternative solar, and a few other things. And that’s really fun and exciting. But a lot of those companies it’s so few of them make it to the point where they’re actually making green energy and I, I felt like okay, I really want to go to a big company and wind is so mainstream, you know, like it really, it really works as it it makes a good return on investment. You don’t have to be a greeny to want to investing wind energy, you know, to settle that money. So I really wanted to be part of that something that was actually making green energy that you know, would have been fossil fuel otherwise. And I also wanted to learn those. Yeah, like the the things that big money factories do because they’re not just making one one product one time, you know, it has to be consistent every time cheap, consistently high quality. And if it’s not, then it cost them a lot of money. So, yeah, I really wanted to learn how that, you know, huge, huge system works to Yeah, with it with the quality and the manufacturing controls and even you know, starts right at sourcing, making sure that your suppliers delivering consistent quality. So yeah, that was that was something that I definitely experienced. I mean, lm has, I can’t even keep track of how many factories but you know, definitely more than 10, maybe even close to 20. Now all around the world. Yeah, so I learned a lot.
Allen Hall 20:50
So moving from a smaller company to a larger company, what are the differences in the engineering styles that you saw between those two? One, it has limited resources, obviously, and you’re trying to be as efficient as you can. Another one has almost unimaginable resources. What does that mean to you, as an engineer as you move between those two?
Rosemary Barnes 21:11
The quick answer is bureaucracy. And that is definitely a double edged sword. Like, I mean, if you say to someone who works in start up bureaucracy, bureaucracy, then they probably think oh, my God, this is a you know, a nightmare that will lead somewhere like that. But on the other hand, the full manufacturing, especially the bureaucracy is really like a safety safety net for you or like a comforting blanket as well, because you know that you have the instructions that every every worker, every factory around the world is following the same process instruction to make things in the same way they’re doing the same quality checks and in need that I as much as I mean, I have tried with my projects to bring in more and more agile methods, you know, moving fast and reducing documentation, you just simply can’t have major manufacturing without a lot of documentation, you wouldn’t you wouldn’t want to try. I mean, imagine you got you find out that there was a problem with, you know, some of the fiberglass that you’re using in your blades, that means that these blades have to be repaired, and you don’t know which blades they’re in, you know, I mean, that’s, you need to you need to know exactly what’s going on and every player to be able to trace back when you find a problem.
Dan Blewett 22:23
Well, I think that’s a good point. Because when you hear the word, bureaucracy, it almost has an exclusively negative connotation. No one ever talks about bureaucracy in a in a positive light. But really, what you’re alluding to what you’re talking about is is checklists, right? I mean, these are all the things and the procedures that have been passed down the hey, these work, we need to make sure we follow them. And it’s quality control and all that stuff. And yeah, I think that’s interesting, where it’s really rare that you hear the positive side of bureaucracy really All you think about is just like people stamping things and telling you to go back and get your 11 bosses to approve it. Yeah, but in reality, that’s how these big companies, you know, pump out, like you said, high quality products at, you know, a cost effective price.
Rosemary Barnes 23:05
But that said, it never feels like a positive when you’re that system you’re never like, yeah, a bureaucracy, you’re like, Oh, can I seriously not not just buy these bolts that I need? Because it’s not from an approved supplier? Yeah. So there’s, there are definitely all of those those commonly known weaknesses?
Allen Hall 23:25
Well, it’s not the bureaucracy that you think of in terms of just management, I think you hit the nail on the head, where it’s like purchasing, it’s all the little things like I do need to buy some bolts. Why is it take eight weeks to get a couple of bolts I could get at the hardware store? For this little project? I’m working on it all the it’s not just layers of management, it goes sideways. Also, it’s it’s hard to describe if unless you’re in that environment. Do you just see much of that? And like, howdy, how does a wind turbine company that’s making these gigantic projects increase incrementally with all that, that organization around it all the time? And they have to keep up with the competitors? How are they doing that internally to keep moving to larger and larger blades? How’s that possible?
Rosemary Barnes 24:11
Yeah. So that’s, that’s a really interesting point. And I think that one thing you got to note is the wind turbine industry is is out a bit of an inflection now, so I think that that bureaucracy needs to probably adapt to that in a lot of cases. So you know, in the past, wind turbine blades are very similar to the one you made last year or the year before that it’s you know, you have a blade is basically usually to two waves, one, two or three webs, depending on the manufacturer, and the length of the blade, and fiberglass shell, and that was it. And so you know, one year, you’re making a 12 minute blade, and the next year, it’s 13. And then in 15, and, you know, all the way up to 60 meters, that’s pretty much what it was, I mean, approximately 60 meters and then recently, you It’s changed. And now we’re seeing bigger changes. So you say companies bring in carbon fiber, which sounds straightforward, but it’s not at all at all strict for that as a massive, massive change, trying to automate some parts of the process, or, yeah, just have, you know, some pre pre made parts. And then you see the really big technical technology changes, like the two piece blade, or, you know, like the longest blade in the world went from 80 meters to 108 meters in in one go. And, you know, huge, huge changes, and you can’t in the past, you knew that your slightly longer glass blade was going to work basically the same as the previous one. So you could follow the exact same process and be sure of a good result. And that was the right way to make a high quality product. But now when it’s totally different, you can’t, can’t work like that, you can’t just say, Oh, I’m gonna make a two piece blade, and then just make 1000 of them and install them on wind turbines, I think everything’s gonna be fine. You know, you have to, you have to do some testing to find out what you don’t know, you, you guess beforehand, what’s going to be the challenges with so you test for it. But when it’s really new, you don’t know exactly how things are going to fail or where things are going to go wrong. So you do need to have some some increments in there that the industry isn’t used to. And it also is really hard to fit into the normal product development timeframe. So all of these really big technology changes. Super exciting for engineers working on them. And also, it’s causing a big, a big change to the industry,
Allen Hall 26:47
are they handling that in the aerospace world. And to give you the example in the aerospace world, so how we handled on our aircraft was we had this little secret society of engineers that were always hidden away in these exclusive offices that were designing the next generation, almost every Aircraft Company that’s been around for a couple of years will have that setup. So they don’t have to listen to all the Pooh poohing from all the other engineers about how this new thing won’t, won’t work or why it won’t work. So they get set aside in their own little world. Apple did that years ago for like the Macintosh like they completely separated them from the rest of the company. And that’s a normal thing to happen. But how did how did they do that on a such an industrial company that’s making large wind turbine blades? Do they have? do they do that? Or is it the same engineers that are designing the 60 meter? or designing the 108? it? How does that work? internally,
Rosemary Barnes 27:38
I don’t think there’s such a big split. And they’re Pro X men that that product development cycles, Trump’s boss, fo wind turbine blades, then four arrow. Yeah, it’s funny actually, because I wind turbine blade is on the one hand, so much lower tech, then you know, aeroplane or something like that. So you might think, oh, that’s less exciting. But on the other hand, you don’t have to go through that have to be certified, you have to test them to make sure they’re safe. But it’s not nearly the same. As you know, testing a passenger aircraft is going to be safe. So on that side, it’s it can be much more exciting because you can do something new and just try it, you know, and not have to wait 10 years to get it approved. Yeah, but no, I didn’t see a really big split, they do silo off a lot. projects, especially, you know, a company that manufactures bikes for a lot of different other companies. You obviously talk about one company’s secrets to another one. So there’s definitely you know, need to know basis that I don’t know a lot of the technical problems that the products I wasn’t working on. I don’t know about them at all, even though I was in the in the company. Yeah, but I answer your question about it, it sounds really cool that you would be shielded from people telling you that your ideas aren’t going to work. That would be that would be nice. But I felt like in the industry, it was more likely that we had this canteen at work, which is a really European thing to do. And I loved it. And so you talk to everybody at lunchtime, and it was much more than think they were often telling me are that that can’t work. Sometimes people would say well, is that how long you’ve got to do that job. That’s not nearly enough. But much more often, it was kind of like ah, I’ve got this crazy idea for how we’re going to melt ice off blades now so let me tell you all about it. And yeah, I had probably more out their ideas rather than Yeah, people telling me that I was being too ambitious. But sounds like
Allen Hall 29:47
a YouTube channel sort of in in the sense of, yeah, it sounds easy from the outside but when when you delve into the engineering when you get down just below the surface a little bit like this a lot of problems with that way of that are approach or this technique. And that’s I think that’s what makes it interesting is that you’ve been in those situations where you had to explain your way out like, no, that’s crazy won’t work, or, yeah, we can take a piece of that idea. And yeah, it’s useful. But in the big picture, it doesn’t make any difference. That’s the I think that’s a nice thing about the sort of the YouTube approach and your engineering approaches. It all has to work at the end of the day. And there’s more, there’s more to it than just the engineering design. There’s all kinds of aspects and unless you think about it, as a system as a very complex system, even the wind turbine is very complex system, it may or may not be productive. It’s it’s a very interesting way to think about it. And I think it only occurs with engineers have been around a little while and been in, in your case, small companies and large companies where you can see that difference that it does make a big difference, I think in your, the way you think, and the way you approach problems.
Rosemary Barnes 30:55
One thing I really like about YouTube is that I can listen to all these ideas, because when I was working for a company, it was never about what this idea work could work. It was always I have no time to think about that. Like, please go away with your idea, even if it is the most, you know, the most exciting thing is if I can spare a tiny portion of my brain to think about the head, so. And that’s kind of I didn’t like that I found that sad at a time. I’m like, I’m always shooting down people’s cool, innovative ideas. And I didn’t like black that aspect. I mean, it’s part of the company that’s gonna make money. And I definitely agree that that is great that wind energy does that, because otherwise we wouldn’t if it wasn’t cheap, we wouldn’t be at the point where, you know, all of our COVID recovery, economic plans also involve renewable energy that couldn’t have happened without this relentless drive to reduce costs. So I get that, but yeah, now I am getting approached by people with my consulting work, you know, it’s people that have really early stage technologies, and I can help figure out if it’s going to work. So I still need to, you know, make some judgments, I don’t want to work on something that I think can’t work, I won’t work on something that violates the laws of thermodynamics, you know, like, I’ll help someone figure out that it does, but I don’t, I’m not going beyond Well, I’ll spend a day showing why it can never work. That’s, I mean, that’s a good service, because then they don’t spend, you know, years and a lot of money. Oh, yeah. So or applying
Allen Hall 32:35
for patents or things that just doesn’t make any sense. You see that all the time. And it is you feel as it as an engineer has been around a while you just feel sad when you come across like, like, Man, that was 10 grand that you did not need to spend, I could have told you that.
Rosemary Barnes 32:49
Actually, this is a really good time to say this, people do not understand that getting granted a patent does not mean that your technology works, it doesn’t mean that it just means someone else hasn’t done it before. Maybe because it doesn’t work violates the laws of thermodynamics or whatever.
Dan Blewett 33:05
Yeah, like wind turbine made out of banana peels, like probably hasn’t been patented. Probably for a good reason.
Rosemary Barnes 33:12
You know what I bet I bet I bet that would be though, cuz I know, you know, like, the concepts are always trying to use bio bio materials. So I know I’ve seen like sugar, sugar cane waste and stuff. So I reckon that’s a good challenge.
Dan Blewett 33:28
Don’t steal my idea that listeners This is mine. It’s my baby.
Allen Hall 33:40
When you’re working at a smaller company, did you have that feeling like at some point, this isn’t gonna go like this. There’s just no way this is going to continue just because of the nature of the thing. But there’s a lot of enthusiasm.
Rosemary Barnes 33:54
Yeah, no, I worked on a lot of projects. I couldn’t imagine a business case once they stopped getting government grants. And to me, that wasn’t very Yeah, I didn’t feel like I was having a real real impact. So yeah, but I am I’ve kind of for me, I kind of like oscillate between like, I’ve got to go to a really big company have a lot of impact. And then I’ve got to go to a small company and do something exciting and right. Yeah, I mean, I guess the dream would be to find the small company that then grew to have to you know, really, really make it with their product but that’s the thing about innovation is he don’t know he can never know ahead of time otherwise, if he knew it was gonna work then it’s not innovation.
Dan Blewett 34:38
I think to your to your bigger point is that sometimes having other eyes that are sort of outside the industry that are kind of fresh eyes can can really bring like new ideas to it. I’ll give you an example from my two year old nephew. My sister calls me one morning and she goes Daniel, great idea. Ice cream salad. She’s like, why is ice cream salad? Not a thing? Why does that not exist? And I we eventually 10 minutes later came to the idea that this was not a viable commercial product. However, it had maybe some potential at first, like, well, maybe we have a food truck, and people love salad. And there could be like, you know, anyway, but only a two year old can think of ice cream salad, right? If you’re in the ice cream industry, no one would even dream of that. So, but sometimes these outside, you know, consultants, whether they’re two years old, or 50 years old PhD, or, you know, still have someone else dress them can sometimes bring a perspective.
Rosemary Barnes 35:33
That actually reminds me a lot of I did a lot of a lot of baking and cooking that was part of, you know, what I think made me become an engineer, all those kind of experiments in the kitchen. And the first time that I was allowed to cook dinner for my family, I was making sausages. And I had the brain wave that sausages are delicious. Chocolate is delicious. So I’m going to make chocolate chip sausages. And my mom, my mom was like, well, that’s that’s a fantastic idea. Why don’t you try that for your sausages, but then like, we’ll make some normal ones as well. Not everyone is ready for this, you know, a nice innovation. Yeah, no, absolutely disgusting.
Unknown Speaker 36:19
Surprising.
Rosemary Barnes 36:22
But yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s experimentation. And that’s, I mean, that’s how you say, engineer, you try it, you have an idea. You try it. And if laksa doesn’t learn something
Dan Blewett 36:33
well, so I want to shift back to some of the more specific work you’re doing with lm. So you worked in blade heating systems, obviously, we talked about the Texas incident here early in 2021, with a couple episodes here on the show, I mean, what was your take, you know, having a lot of experience in that. What was your take with that whole debacle?
Rosemary Barnes 36:54
It was really funny, because you know, that picture of the helicopter, spraying water on a blade went around was all over Twitter. And everyone’s saying, you know how ridiculous this is? I mean, so first of all, it wasn’t in Texas, obviously, that was from Swedish study. But the thing that I thought was the funniest is that I have used that image so many times in presentations to customers to illustrate exactly what kind of de icing system you would use somewhere like Texas, where you have really infrequent icing, it’s just yeah, you would never install icing, a heating system on a blade that you expect to use every 20 years or even every five years, you know, you need to be losing at least 5% of your annual energy production to make it worthwhile and more like 10% is, yeah, more more comfortable level, because you add yet cost and you add a lot of complexity. So you’re adding maintenance adding something else that can go wrong. And, yeah, that’s it’s also funny that I mean, you could think that making your wind turbines, you know, gold plated for cold weather was going to do anything to protect your whole system security, because obviously it could have the this cold weather could have happened when there was also no wind and the wind turbines would be off, regardless of whether their blades are heated or not by the system security needs to be thought of as a system level not. If you make every individual component able to withstand any kind of operating condition, you’re going to end up with a really expensive system. So I think that that’s like an old versus New Energy kind of thing. And something I’ve noticed coming into because now I’m working a lot more with clean energy transition as a whole, not just the wind part. But I’ve come into it from renewable energy, no background in the energy system. And so I don’t have I’m like the you know, that like the two year old, I don’t have all these ideas about how you you do things because it’s obvious that the new energy system is going to look so different to the old one that I don’t think it’s even worth thinking about how how we did things before for the most part. Yeah, but specifically related to Texas. I mean, it seems obvious to everyone not in the US that you need interconnectors. That’s how you avoid that happening again in the future. I mean, the US is a huge, huge geographical place. And if you’re also connecting up to Canada with all that hydro. Yeah, you can really smooth out a lot of I mean, there’s never going to be some sort of minus 20 degree phrase across the whole of the US at once. So you’ve got some interconnectors, that
Dan Blewett 39:44
that can handle cold temperatures. Yeah, but it’s Texas, but it’s Texas. They do what they want. They want their own grid. They’re just going to push themselves off to sea because they’re Texas.
Rosemary Barnes 39:53
I was talking to someone about electric vehicle to grid project recently, and I thought how perfect that that would be For Texas, because my impression is that they really like their independence. And what’s more independent than having your own own electric vehicle with a battery that I mean, you can run a house for a couple of days off of a battery. And I mean, it’s the the phrase, it was kind of not. I mean, it was predicted, but it wasn’t enough people didn’t think it was enough to worry about, like, several years ahead of time, but everyone knew about a date days ahead of time, they knew it was coming. So you had time to, you know, make sure your vehicle was charged. Yeah, I become a grant. That’s, that’s a good solution for Texas.
Allen Hall 40:40
It is, well, a Tesla building new factory in Austin. I know, it sounds weird to think about this way. But it’s one of the thoughts I’ve had recently is like, well, there is going to be a gigantic Tesla factory there, and probably a battery factory at some point. And yeah, Texas is gonna become even more energy independent from the rest of the 49 other states because of that, because they will have this huge battery works resource in this state, it will make a big difference.
Rosemary Barnes 41:05
Yeah, but under that is the thing about you know, new energy versus the old is that is a lot more distributed. And there’s, you know, huge, huge events that are going to be as widespread, like within Australia, recently, we had an explosion in a big coal power plant, it’s gonna take me a year to come back online. But I mean, that that same sort of thing doesn’t happen when you have wind turbines everywhere. And, you know, like a lot of distributed storage and, and stuff. So you do need to see the benefits, as well as the challenges of, you know, this changeover.
Dan Blewett 41:41
Yeah, that’s, that’s a good point, there’s a lot of anti fragility and having 100 turbines that all generate a little bit of power compared to one big coal mine that could, unfortunately, which, you know, which happened blow up or completely go offline. So that’s a good point. With that I want to shift to offshore. So obviously, with your experience working on the structural components of blades and heating systems, you know, there’s going to be so many offshore wind farms coming up, what are some of the challenges that engineers are going to be facing, you know, getting these blades prepped for some new inhospitable, you know, ocean environments.
Rosemary Barnes 42:20
So I think the initial problem was just the size of them, you know, the blades are so big, and it starts to make things more challenging, like, you know, if you have a root diameter of two meters, and you can stand in it and you know, reached reached the side spot, when it’s five meters, you can’t do that anymore. So there’s some really kind of mundane challenges that happen to be really big and require, you know, in the technical innovations to solve them. Yeah, and then the logistics of getting in there, you know, everyone’s building their factories right on the water’s edge, so that you can just chuck it on a ship and drive it straight to the wind farm. So those ones I think they’re probably, you know, getting their head around that mostly solved. I think the hardest thing is that maintenance is such a pain. It’s such a, I’ve never worked on an offshore wind farm, but one of my colleagues I was working closely with he, he did a lot. And just the days are so long, you know, you get one board or one helicopter that’s going to drop workers off with every turbine and then you wait until someone comes and picks you up again. So you might only have to do a five minute job up there. But it’s going to take your whole day for you know, the person doing the work the person that’s there spotting them and I don’t know how many people are involved in a rescue team offshore but you probably got a team of four or so just even for five minutes of work. So that makes it really hard with new technologies things go wrong. And that’s another reason why you know, it’s really good to develop your technology in the most friendly location possible so that you can get in there and change things. Yeah, I think that’s probably the biggest challenge and then of course, just everything wears out so fast right? So thought out, you know, even stainless steel wraps up you’ve got to have you know, high grades of everything. Every electrical component has to probably be changed or at least have a new set well. Yeah, it’s just very expensive.
Allen Hall 44:24
How would icing be affected there when you get to the bigger blades and being in the water, salt water all the time as you get further and further north? What does that look like on the icing side?
Rosemary Barnes 44:33
So so far, there aren’t a lot of offshore wind farms with icing I don’t actually know of any but definitely like in Finland. They have some proposals for wind farms that are offshore but could definitely benefit from the icing, that de icing. And I think it’s the same problem but magnified You know, every all your materials and everything have to be of a higher grade Steel’s have to be better, but then other blade heating technology, it’s not that mature, it’s not at the point yet, it’s not as mature, as you know, the rest of the wind turbine are a lot of the rest of the wind turbine technology. So it’s not at the point where you just install it, and then you never go there again, for the next 20 or 30 years, there is maintenance involved, and it’s just so much more expensive. So your business case, you need a lot more icing to pay for the you know, an extra trip out to every offshore wind turbine, it costs a lot of money. So you need to be making at least that amount back with your, with your being able to operate through days when it would have been icy So yeah, I mean, it’s always economics.
Allen Hall 45:44
So is a solution then probably is not to just operate in when it’s really icy, just shut them down for that time periods that that from a cost standpoint or an operation standpoint, is that the answer?
Rosemary Barnes 45:53
Yeah. And there’s, you know, plenty of really smart people working with operating systems to figure out what’s the most cost effective, most profitable way to operate them. But so first of all, when this is like icing, you can change the control system a little bit so that it will operate through, you know, some light icing. And then at the point where it’s unsafe for the turbine, you need to shut it down before that, because if it gets unbalanced, or if there’s too much mass on the blades, that it’s not, you know, the blade structure isn’t designed for that, then you need to shut it down. But it’s usually not not a lot. You know, there’s some really heavy icing sites are in like cabac. And in northern Sweden, and in Norway, it kind of gets better as you go from west to east and in Europe, those ones you can say up to like 20% of your, your annual energy production reduced from icing, but most places? Yeah, like if you think about the Alps, for example, you know, that’s full of snow, and you would think all those turbines would need the icing systems, but they generally don’t actually, because it’s a few, a few days per year. It’s really complicated, actually. Because it’s not just the temperature, it needs to be, you know, like around zero degrees Celsius. It’s the worst, because that’s when, yeah, there’s moisture in the air, but it won’t phrase. Yeah, so it’s kind of complex, complicated.
Dan Blewett 47:29
So I want to try and just in a little bit to, I guess, the balance of technology versus, you know, pushing the boundaries of technology, versus optimizing what we already have. So there’s a lot of very well proven, you know, wind technology, turbines, or huge offshore is working right? Do you think we still need to continue to push the envelope on tech? Or do we really sort of need to start trying to just optimize and use better what we already have?
Rosemary Barnes 48:01
I think, with wind, we really need to keep trying to expand it more. So you know, we have offshore, but we only have offshore for shallow, shallow water for now. So developing floating wind turbines, is really going to open up a lot of other areas. So if you think about some countries, I mean, even Australia doesn’t have a lot of really shallow water to put offshore wind turbines in like, Europe does. countries like Japan as well, you know, they don’t have a lot of ways that they can make renewable energy anywhere that’s really densely populated. You know, if they can get offshore, then I mean, it makes so much energy, it’s like huge, huge amounts of, of energy that we can put into the grid. And the best thing is that it’s not correlated with with solar really, you know, so you can say off solar is cheaper, you know, the levelized cost of energy or cost per kilowatt hour is cheaper for solar. So we’re just going to build solar, it’s, it’s one over wind, but I mean, solar, it all in one place all comes on together, and all turns off together. Whereas wind doesn’t, doesn’t do that. So I mean, not Yeah, it’s it. I mean, it’s not like it’s running all the time, but the good offshore sides, practically are, you can get, you know, over 50% capacity factor now. So I think that we do really want to be able to have much more wind, that’s going to make our energy transition much easier. But I do take your point in general, I think people are really focused on new technology to get us out of problems. And if you, you know, like a lot of politicians and some other, you know, like important thinkers saying, you know, we just need nuclear or to have a big, big breakthrough or, we you know, we’ve got hydrogen coming on now and that can do everything. That’s great. But the thing is, we have most of the technologies that we need to get most of the emissions reduction. And it matters how fast we do it, you know, if we everyone’s got these net zero by 2050, targets, it makes a big difference, if we just admit, like normal up to 2050, and then drop as this, you know, whole chunk of carbon dioxide in the air. If we get the electric vehicles happening, we get energy efficiency happening, we get all of those heat pumps instead of natural gas, where it’s easiest to do that, you know, there’s heaps of really huge chunks that we could take off right now, that would cost very little. And then it doesn’t matter as much if we, you know, take longer than 2015 minutes to get that last little, little bit. So yeah, I think that, in general, people are way to focus on coming up with a new solution, rather than using the ones that we’ve we’ve got. But the thing is, because these technologies are mature, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll happen on their own. You can’t just, you know, transition your energy system away from, you know, coal power plants, or nuclear, it’s just, you know, always baseload that you’ve got to use to a really flexible, distributed dynamic system. And it doesn’t, it’s technically possible, but and it will be economically beneficial. But it’s not going to happen on its own with the markets that we’ve got the regulations that we’ve got, we do need to do a lot of a lot of work. But it’s it’s easy and cheap compared to, you know, betting on cold fusion, or even even green hydrogen for everything. You know, I think that, yeah, we do need to start using what we’ve got.
Dan Blewett 51:58
Yeah. Well, you mentioned the levelized, cost of energy. Can you speak a little more to that? Because I know, that’s something you’re really interested in? Only what what do people need to know about that? And how is that changing?
Rosemary Barnes 52:07
Yeah, so levelized cost of energy is basically is the number one metric that I think most of us working in renewable energy over the last decade or so have been focused on. So how much does it cost to make one kilowatt hour of electricity from from this particular source, so it includes everything from, you know, how much of the cost of manufacture and transport to install on to rent the land? To maintain it, all of those things are kind of, you know, like, on the top of the equation, and then you divide all that by how how many kilowatt hours it’s going to make over its lifetime. So you get this one number of how expensive energy is, and everyone’s probably seen those charts of Yeah, lcra, just coming massively down, like dropping really rapidly for solar, not as rapidly for wind, but still, you know, very, very nice cost reduction or nice from the point of view of the consumer and not from the point of view of the manufacturer, I guess. Yeah. So that’s been the real focus of the last decade. And that that’s good when we only have 10 20% variable renewables you can have, the cost is the most important thing. But now we get to the point where you see in the electricity markets, if you watch what the wholesale price is, and California is famous example, they’ve got their duck curve where the cost of electricity and actually, its lowest in the middle of the day when there’s all this solar online, because you know, it all comes together, there’s heaps of it, it brings the price way down. But then as soon as the sun starts to set, you get this massive spike in in price, because, yeah, you you’ve got a lot of cheap energy, but it’s not when and where you need it. And so I think that that for when and where you need it part of the equation is going to become obvious, it’s gonna become more and more important as you get more variables in your system. So that’s why everyone’s so focused on energy storage now. And then other things like well, less exciting things like interconnectors and demand flexibility and energy efficiency. You know, all of those things make our problem much smaller. Yes, I I’m personally most excited by like demand flex. I’m really, really excited by that. But it’s, it’s not so sexy as Yeah, as hydrogen.
Allen Hall 54:33
See, this is this is, and this is the part I like about Rose’s YouTube channel, is because you don’t think about those details in an energy distribution system or especially electric grid, all the fine details that really matter, like solar goes offline at about 630. But there’s a demand everybody comes home at 630 and so it’s not as valuable or how you connect and disconnect different parts of the grid search. times and what? What kind of chaos you create when you do those things? Those are really important those those details get lost, right? Because we see we need Netflix
Dan Blewett 55:11
more than ever. With COVID after 630 solar cannot supply got that right.
Allen Hall 55:19
Exactly right. You may be reading Netflix off your car. Tesla’s got the answer for that. Right? But yeah, that those are that’s the real part of this, which is, in your day to day life, how much do you think about where your energy is coming from? And can you get it? And when if you live in California, you start thinking about that a lot. If you don’t live in California, you don’t. Right. And so having been out in California, a lot recently, my son was out there, you realize like, Oh, you know, they’re having blackouts and brownouts. And that’s a continual thing. And they’re having huge, massive firefight, forest fires at the same time. So you start to think, Wow, the grid, I really rely upon this electric grid. And if part of it goes offline, hey, I don’t have refrigeration, I don’t have air conditioning, I don’t have lights, I don’t have I can’t cook. Those things become more and more important. And that’s why I think when Rosa gets on the YouTube channel starts and explains those details. It makes it real. It makes it real to the average person. I think that’s what’s that’s what’s really cool about it.
Dan Blewett 56:25
One, it’s also I think, hard for people to get access to someone with the like the level of education and experience that you have on YouTube, like YouTube feels very impromptu. But for someone to be an ask or actual engineer who will actually respond to their comments is super rare, and also really cool. So I think you’re doing a great service for people out there who are just they you know, ice cream salad all day, they want someone that is slap it out of their hand, say,
Allen Hall 56:52
Sorry, Daniel, or
Dan Blewett 56:54
maybe give them a gold star you don’t know. So rosy as someone who’s you know, in the industry, and you’ve got your consulting business, Pardalote, tell us about what you’re doing and how companies can connect with you and what your mission is.
Rosemary Barnes 57:13
Yeah, thanks. Um, yes, I started up then independent consulting company, and I’m working on energy technology development, basically focusing on two sides. On the one hand, if there’s a company that has a technology that they wanted to develop, then I can help them figure out, you know, a fast and cheap way to do that. And especially when, especially when it comes to the wind industry, avoid some of the the traps because, you know, wind, it seems like it’s really similar to, you know, Aero industry, but there’s some really different it’s a really weird operating environment. Let’s just say that way. If you put something in a wind turbine, and especially on the blade, there’s some forces there that? Yeah. It’s not, like normal components aren’t aren’t designed for that. So you have to be be aware of that when you’re developing a technology. So yeah, do that help with the technology development? And then on the other hand, with companies that are investing in energy technologies, so whether it’s a wind farm developer, or Yeah, just, you know, venture capital, or any any kind of investment company, helping them do due diligence, you know, is this technology feasible? What kind of milestones should they be hitting with their development to, you know, make sure that we’re, you know, moving in the right direction. Banks want to want to feel sure that a technology is going to last, you know, for lifetime before they will finance? And then what happens when there’s problems with their technology? I have cracks in them. And you know, are they being fixed in a way that, that you think is your that can you feel sure that these blades are being brought back up to, you know, the way that they should be? So that’s, yeah, that’s basically the range of services that I’m that I’m doing.
Dan Blewett 59:03
So it sounds like you can be a good intermediary for companies as they tried to solve and interpret some other problems.
Rosemary Barnes 59:08
Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s it. Yeah, and some of the technology companies that I’m working with definitely, like, I feel some, some ownership for their technology, too. That’s nice. That’s the creative part of it. For me, and probably the most exciting kind of engineering in a way as when you’ve like, you’ve got technology, it’s an idea could work and then you know, like you you work with it and you start to feel like they’re, you know, children by the end once you’ve, you know, guided this this little technology through all of the hazards. Yeah, I like that part of it too.
Dan Blewett 59:43
Well, can you give our listeners ways to follow up with you on the web? I know you have a website and you’re active on LinkedIn, obviously. We’ll link to all the you know, the places you can follow with Rosie. But what are the main channels that you’ve got?
Rosemary Barnes 59:56
Yeah, so YouTube is engineering with Rosie And then on LinkedIn a lot. It’s Rosemary Barnes at my consulting website is pilot consulting.com.
Dan Blewett 1:00:08
Awesome. So yeah, so definitely check out the show notes. Whether you’re on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or on YouTube. We’ll have links where you can click right through and get in touch with Rosie. So, Rosie, thanks again for coming on the show is a great conversation and we might be knocking on your door we have more questions that we can’t answer on the show down the road. Yeah, I would love to. I’d love to be invited back. So thanks a lot for having me. It’s been really fun. All right, well, that’s gonna do it for our episode of The uptime wind energy podcast. Be sure to check out the description, whether you’re on iTunes, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever. And be sure to subscribe to the show share with a friend and we will see you next time on The uptime when energy podcast.
Dan Blewett 1:00:54
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