Rosemary Barnes, wind turbine blade and renewables expert, is back on the show as a permanent host, bring a fresh new perspective to the mix. Form Energy, a startup backed by Jeff Bezos, is betting that their iron-air battery technology can transform the power grid. Can it? Plus, we discuss GE’s plans for automated blade finishing, a distressed jackup vessel at sea, and more.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Transcript – EP72 – Rosemary Barnes Joins to Talk Iron-Air Battery Tech, Automated Blade Finishing & More
This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape 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 strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett.
I’m Allen Hall.
And I’m Rosemary Barnes
And this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Podcast. I’m your co-host, Dan Blewett On today’s episode, we’ve got some exciting news. Number one, Rosemary Barnes will be joining us here today, as are our new co-host.
So, Allen, Allen is it, what do we have to do? Tri-hosts now? What happens here? I don’t know. I don’t know
how that works. All right. Three new territory.
Yeah, it’s going to be great. So we’ll hear from her in a second. Today’s episode is going to be pretty exciting grants. I was battery tech. We’re going to talk about this, really this terrible Chinese offshore installer vessel that has capsized.
We’ll talk about the implications of that. I mean, so much offshore wind is is getting going now where, you know, there’s going to be accidents like this or talk about the implications there. Some projections and some ideas about engineering as we add offshore wind turbines.
A really interesting case study of an Oklahoma wind farm that’s had a lot of problems with safety and damage. And we’ll talk about an SCHUTZE investing in a Wyoming wind farm, which is pretty interesting that more and more of these fossil fuel companies are getting into renewable energy.
And lastly, we’ll talk about ion air batteries, which is a really exciting development and potentially has major implications for the grid. Before we get going, I want to remind you that we need to get you signed up for uptime tech news.
So if you’re interested in the podcast, if you’ve been a long time listener, it’s time to sign up in the show notes. You’ll find a link. You just get a weekly email from us as, hey, we got a new podcast.
Here’s what it’s about. Here’s some other great news from around the Web. So definitely sign up for that today in the show notes wherever you listen. So here are my co-hosts. First, let’s introduce Rosemary Barnes. Is your first episode back since you were a guest?
Way back when. So, Rosemary, a welcome back to the show. We’re excited to have you. Can you give our guests who maybe haven’t called your episode or obviously it’s been a couple of months, could just kind of give us a quick rundown of your background.
And, you know, part of the reason we wanted to have you on the show is your expertize in wind energy and renewable energy. So what do our guests need to know about you and the expertize you bring to the show?
Yeah, thanks. Thanks so much for having me. Yes. So my career, I’ve been looking at developing renewable energy technologies for the last 15 plus years and most recently in the wind industry. So I got a pair HD and composite materials, structural design of wind turbine blades.
And then the last five years, until about a year ago, I was working at L.N. Wind Power. So there are wind turbine manufacturers. I spent a lot of time in their factories and climbing turbines and developing technologies for the wind industry.
And then after I left L.N. Wind Power, I started my own consulting company, Paddleboat. I develop renewable energy technologies and other sustainability technologies. And I have my YouTube channel engineering with Raisi, where I talk about the whole energy transition and help my viewers to understand the engineering involved there.
Awesome. Well, like I said, we’re excited to have you back here. And we’ve got a good show today. And I’m sure your your expertize, especially as we cover, you know, some of the grid challenges towards the end, the battery technology and the composite stuff that’s going to be right up your alley.
So excited to have you back. And then, Alan, how are you, sir?
Doing great. We’re just living through the rainy season in Massachusetts, recorded history. So so we’re pretty much in the offshore business right now because we’re just completely flooded out here. It’s crazy.
Well, here in DC, all we have is just mosquitoes, all the mosquitoes you could want. So, you know, pick your poison, I guess. But first on the docket, Alan, you know, we heard about this jackup vessel tilting while in Storrie, stalling an offshore wind farm and shine others for missing.
It looks like they haven’t been found as of it looks like a week later. I mean, are we going to see more incidences like these?
Oh, I’d hope not. But I think until we develop the procedures and the safety situations in which when terms are going to be installed offshore, the answer’s going to be yes. In this particular case, we were just watching the video of it again, and it’s just amazing that that accident happened.
But in the rush to finish the job, you know how it gets when you’re in a construction and you’re trying to get things done and and get it all put together. Sometimes safety is not the number one priority, and then that’s when accidents happen.
So it’s really disappointing to see it. But hopefully, unlike some other wind turbine things we’ve seen in the past where there’s been an accident and the industry hasn’t really glommed onto it and learn from it. And when you start losing people, we need to take a good safety look at make sure that the safety implications get transferred
to other offshore installations.
Rosemary, you’ve worked with, you know, on big projects like this with, you know, big corporations and wind power. What falls through the cracks, obviously, like anything can happen in the open seas. Right. But I mean, would you say that things like this seem like.
Maybe a slip in in procedures or is it just this stuff is just going to happen every once in a while in in a business like this?
I don’t think it can happen once in a while. I think that that would be the end of the industry as it started to happen regularly. So I’m sure I hope and I’m sure that there will be an appropriate response to this, but it doesn’t necessarily surprise me so much.
I mean, I’ve never worked offshore about any of my colleagues that I have that have worked offshore and I’ve spoken with. They all have stories of near misses where, you know, they’re watching the wave. Hi. They’re watching the boys, the boys, you know, Americans, they’re watching them, the hot wave height and seeing that it’s coming up and
up and up. But, you know, there’s so much pressure on shore as well. You’ve got to find that weather window to be able to climb. And if you’ve got something urgent to do and you know that this is the half day where the winds are going to be low enough that you can get in there.
Then there’s an immense amount of pressure to to get that up. And you think that’s just going to be dialed up for offshore because you’ve got more places that need to align to make conditions right. For a safe climb.
And each turbine is just, you know, so much more costly that have have downtime. So I can say that the pressure must be so much more immense to to climb and to push the limits. And, you know, obviously, they pushed it too far with tragic consequences.
But I think that the response will be, you know, the offshore oil and gas is known for its just intense safety culture because there’s no tolerance for anything to go wrong out there. And it’ll the same thing will have to happen with offshore wind, which will no doubt add a bit of cost and especially pain for new
new projects. If you can’t, you know, try to do something new, if you can’t get out there to maintain, then it really makes timeline’s blowout. So, yeah, it’s going to be a hard balance. But it can’t you can’t compromise on safety to the extent that people get killed every now and then.
There’s just no way that that’s going to be acceptable, acceptable to anybody in the industry or outside of it.
Yeah, that’s a good point, because we’ve talked a bunch in recent episodes that, yeah, we’ve got to we’ve got to throw six million more turbines into the ocean as fast as we can. Right. Like everyone seems like they’re scrambling to do things as quick as they can, but they can only go as fast as this as the
safety, you know, allows them to.
Yeah. And Dan, is there a regulatory body that was going to monitor all of that? I know every country is going to have its own regulatory system, but I don’t know if there is one in the United States, especially once you get a little bit offshore like we’re talking about in in international waters or federal waters.
I guess who’s going to oversee all that? Because, you know, somebody in the United States, we would never let that go. It’s going to be somebody overseeing it. Just sounds like they need to spool up.
Yeah, I don’t know the answer to that. Rosey, do you know is there a is there a bigger regulatory body that the global.
Every country obviously has WorkCover or work safety systems in place. And in every country where I’ve climbed those definitely a body that would come in and shut down a site if that was, you know, if that happened. The question about being in international waters, I don’t know.
But again, like oil and offshore oil and gas, I mean, they’re just it’s got to be the site, this industry that exists on the planet or, you know, they spend the most the most effort on safety there. So I don’t know whoever you have monitors that maybe.
Well, speaking of more installation, the UK is planning to install 40 gigawatts of offshore wind power by 2030. An interesting article by the conversation dot com, which I’m not familiar that that website, but they had some some good stuff as I was puttering around there.
They said basically this will require 5000 wind turbines, double the number installed worldwide, offshore by the end of 2020. And, you know, to get to this number of maybe 30000 turbines by 2030, there’s just going to be a lot of engineering breakthroughs that are going to have to happen to make this make this feasible.
Rosemere, I’ll throw this to you first, but do you feel like that’s that’s fair, that there’s going to be a lot of or do we have sort of enough of the floating platforms and the rigging and enough know-How from fossil fuel industry to where maybe it doesn’t take that much more to get over that hurdle?
Well, I think definitely they’ve learned a lot from that offshore oil and gas. So that’s going to give a head start. But probably more importantly is everything they’ve learned from decades of onshore turbines. So it’s not like, you know, when they put wave energy devices out at, say, in the experience, all these problems, because it’s brand new
. You don’t have that with wind energy because the vast majority of the problems have been sorted out through decades of gradual evolution. So I think we’ve got that head start. But that said, I mean, yeah, it’s going to it’s going to be teething problems for sure.
And especially. Yes, I mean, we. Really same fighting offshore. Yeah, that’s, you know, a couple of pilot projects, but yeah, I think we can we can expect to see turbines occasionally tipping over and especially installation times blowing out on projects from time to time as we figure out what, you know, one of the new challenges that need
to be taken care of with each project.
Rosemary, do you think there’s enough engineers in those areas to even support that kind of output? It seems like it’s almost an impossible task.
There’s never enough engineers. And, you know, the company that I was working for before, there was a huge shortage. And now I’m consulting. And every company that I work with, they’ve got a huge shortage in engineers. And I don’t know if that is just like in every industry that’s the same.
Yeah, but I think definitely for kids thinking about what to study at University College, then I think the engineering, a renewable engineering was probably a safe bet for a continued employment.
Yeah. And that’s that’s what’s really interesting, you know, as the world continues to evolve, because here in the U.S., at least, college is looking like more and more of do I need to go? Can I just get a certificate?
Can I do this digital thing? I mean, I advise some of the younger kids, you know, I used to work with, you know, baseball and softball players a lot in my my previous lines of work. And we had that conversation and we’re like, look, you don’t have to go to college to be successful.
There’s a lot of other things you can do that’s always been true, like with trades. But it’s probably more so now than ever. You could there’s just lots of different ways to to make together or to cobble together a living living or just do lots of different things that are very skill intensive on the Web where, hey
, if I’m not going to engineering school now, I’m never, never going to be on that track. So it might be harder to get kids just, you know, because to get on the engineering track, you at least have to be at a four year college, you know, to start.
Right. But if you’re staying home doing a certificate or doing something else, you know, in this digital economy, I mean, Alan, do you do you feel like obviously your son Adam just graduated with his degree in engineering? I mean, do you feel like even his generation is starting to slow down as far as enrollment?
It’s interesting because I followed the group of kids. We live in a small town, so I follow the group of kids since they were essentially in kindergarten, first grade till graduation and are out of college. And it’s interesting because I thought I live in a town which is very university centric.
It’s a university town or college town. There’s a lot of professors that live in town and their children are professors you figure are going to go to university. And that has changed dramatically over their life span over the last 20 years, because a lot of them have decided not to go to university or college.
They are doing things or traveling the world or doing things that I did not expect when they were 10 years old. So you’re seeing or I think you’re seeing a real shift, and I think the cost of college is part of that.
And but if you’re doing something technical like Rosemary and me, you have to go to college. There’s no nobody’s going to let you loose in an engineering place, a facility without having the degree to go with it just because there’s so many implications on safety.
And it sounds like you’re saying that I can’t get a Google certificate and be an aerospace engineer in six weeks. Is that right?
Well, I don’t want you working on my airplane.
Fine, fine.
But you can be a wind turbine technician. There’s also breaks through wind turbine. That’s true. Right. So and that is also a path I know it’s not so common in Australia, maybe the US, but in Denmark, so many of my colleagues had a trade.
First of all, you know, they were an electrician or a carpenter or even a farmer. And then later in life, they went back to university and got their degree. And now that, you know, some of them, the best engineers, because they you know, they’ve got they’ve got but both sides, they know the hands on stuff as well
as the, you know, like the mental stuff. So that’s another option.
Well, we get requests all the time through the website that ask about being a wind turbine technician. And some of the articles we have posted on our site also talk about being wind turbine technician. And that’s one of the things about it is and people ask us this question is how much is the cost be qualified to
work on wind turbines? It’s actually not that much compared to
a lower barrier to entry than a four year degree in the U.S., which is. Oh, yeah, in many cases, like I have a degree in philosophy, kids, it’ll be
good for your brain.
High five, but may not get you employed right away. I don’t know. That’s also a changing, changing conversation, because there’s a lot I feel like in the US, there’s a much more there’s been much more emphasis like do accounting so you can be an accountant.
Right? Do this. You can be that. Where is it? Seems like almost it’s it’s becoming a little bit cyclical where now it’s like people do like. The philosophy majors, because they have a kind of wide skillset mentally where they can like think on their feet, they can problem solve.
You can kind of leave them alone. They can write a technical paper. They can. They don’t need babysitting. Right, because you learn those skills in that major. It’s it’s interesting how you see this stuff come back over time.
So moving on, I mean, speaking of safety. Interesting article from The Oklahoman. So for those of you or global listeners, Oklahoma is in the American Southwest. And you know, Allan, is that is this still in the Midwest? What do I say?
Right.
I would qualify it. Midwest is just north of Texas. Texas, Oklahoma. Kansas, Nebraska.
So it’s in them. It’s in the Midwest. It’s in a very flat place of our country. But there’s this crazy old wind farm that if you’ve seen any of these images floating around the web of a wind turbine, that looks like it’s wilted, like it’s literally melted in the sun or that the nozzle has caught on fire
and just burned to a crisp. There’s a good chance that those photos came from this wind farm. So it’s been sitting around for quite a while now and just like sort of look a looking very haphazard, be looking like a risk because like, hey, are these blades is going to fall off any given day?
Like is this tower going to topple over? But they had a lot of problems with with lightning. So this was the it was in the Oklahoma Panhandle. This was the nervous one and to one facility. So it sounds like they’re working on getting these fixed and getting this either back into service, not maybe all the turbines, but
many of them. How often do you see stuff like this happen? I mean, is this common where you see a wind farm that’s been just sort of decimated by by lightning and just by this much damage?
No, I never saw something like that before. I was shocked when I when I had a look at that article. It made me really sad, actually. You say one of those wind turbines that looks like like the blades of bananas and, you know, just the peels left.
And that’s kind of like that was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Wind turbine wires. And you’d say it’s all but when I read the article said that it was commissioned in 2012. So, I mean, it’s it’s not that all of them, when they first started to have problems, it was probably quite new.
So the manufacturer is not in that. They’re not operating anymore. And perhaps that’s a good thing. But yeah, there’s obviously massive problems with their design on multiple levels because it wasn’t like, oh, yeah, it was just lightning for all of these turbines.
It’s clearly a few different things that have happened. So I don’t know, getting it back into operation, how do you even go through with the manufacturer doesn’t exist? How do you get access to all the information that you would need to be able to even know where to start to to fix these up?
And I mean, obviously, they passed certification at some point. But, you know, I would want to say most of that were done because I don’t want to be anywhere near this. This is wind farm when it starts off, unless, you know, it’s really been gone over with a fine tooth comb.
Well, Rosemary, does it have implications for offshore wind? Also, just thinking about the timeframe in which that happened and the sort of the resulting problems that they had since then. If you’re going to install a lot of offshore wind like we’re talking about in the UK, do you start selecting vendors and OEMs based on that track record
? Because it’s going to be a cost thing. Right. Is that the OEMs that produce quality Winterson’s know that and they know that the downside risk is massive for a country that is going to go wind energy wise versus someone who’s new on the block.
What do you think that? How do how does that even get played out in terms of buying a wind turbine?
Yes, I’ve worked through that process on a few projects with brand new technologies. The banks are really nervous. And maybe because they’ve learned through experiences like this, obviously someone lost a whole bunch of money on this wind farm.
Right. So the banks really care about the technology. And if it hasn’t been, it hasn’t got a track that it hasn’t got a track record, then they will the banks will send teams of people to come and grill the engineers working on it to say, you know, this could go wrong.
What have you done to make sure that that’s not going to happen? And once you test program, like what’s previous versions of the technology and what have you learned from them? So they’re trying really hard to minimize that risk.
And I doubt they won’t be just putting out a hundred turbine wind farm for, you know, a new manufacturer would not stop their offshore journey with 100 wind turbines out there. They would start with one, ideally. And that’s what you do say with, you know, like when you hear about that floating wind projects, for example, it’s not
like, oh, yeah, here’s here’s one hundred turbine wind farm. Like we’ve we’ve taken one out there. And then hopefully the next time you’ll have a few, because obviously you learn different things in different sites. The you know, the ocean and the wind aren’t the same everywhere.
But yeah, it’s. You got to do it a little bit gradually, and they have learned so much. Most of the problems they are well aware of from the onshore. So it’s the new offshore specific problems that are the main ones that they’re going to have to deal with.
Well, how valuable is certification in terms of the one? I mean, obviously, those wind turbines had to be certified, quote unquote, certified, and pretty much all wind turbines are today. But do we have that feedback loop that the certification we did on an on a new wind turbine is actually working because you’re not going to.
The worst is going to happen is what happens in Oklahoma, that you just wind turbines to catch fire or they stop operating in terms of a grid or safety or a community. It doesn’t make that much difference. So is what I’m wondering is how does that certification then get readjusted or is it is it constantly evolving over
time? And so we’re learning things and putting it back into certification for the next one doesn’t have that problem because it doesn’t feel like that quite yet.
It’s definitely evolving, but it’s behind the manufacturers because obviously they can’t respond to something that hasn’t happened yet. And I know that most design engineers will tell you that certain parts of the certification unnecessarily strict. You know, they’re requiring standards that don’t really correlate to the field.
But the converse is true as well, that there’s some standards that as kind of widely assumed that just meeting the standard is not enough. And the manufacturers are really driven by, you know, the performance of the system. And I think that the biggest example of that is lightning, which obviously familiar with that barrel certified.
But most lightning engineers would not say just because you’ve got a lightning cert means everything’s going to be fine. You also have to, you know, design based on your field experience. And, yeah, it’s usually quite, quite a bit about it’s easy to design something that can get certified, but not as easy to design something that’s going to
be very reliable in the field.
In our next segment here, let’s talk about GE. So they have just released a press release that Alan Windpower, which they own, is essentially completed a automative blade finishing program. So Rosy, obviously, you’ve worked for L.M., you’ve been there.
You know what this process looks like. You know how much manual labor is in and how much robotics and automation. They’re working into it. But it says that their vision is to leverage, you know, a lot of the things they learned over the years, but to just start to decrease costs by doing some of the trimming and
some of these other finishing parts. So obviously, how much labor goes into, you know, these final parts, and is this really as big a deal as as they make it seem?
Oh, I was really excited when I saw this. I think that we need to get more automation in general and wind turbine manufacturing. And I do sort of feel like the industry was a bit against it. They sort of, you know, had a big push then maybe a bit more years ago and sort of put it in
the too hard basket. So it’s really nice to see GE coming along and, you know, like giving it the the resources that it needed to succeed. And I think that finishing is probably a really smart candidate for, you know, one of the first processes to automate because it’s a hard job.
You know, it’s a team of people with with Grinder’s. You say, you know, they’re they’re they’re they’re all day in the same position with this big vibrating thing. It’s very it’s very hard job. So I would love to say that the grinding replaced and then with a trimming, you know, that’s something where you can make mistakes and
not necessarily it is harder to detect maybe than some of the other potential faults that you can get in a in a wind turbine blade. So I think that that’s another really good process to automate, to improve quality.
And then the final reason why I like it is because, you know, the leading edge there finished by hand, but it’s also just the absolutely most critical part of the blade aerodynamically. And you kind of just eyeballing it when you when you grind away, you know, all the excess that you get in the manufacturing process.
So automating that so that you can guarantee that the design intent is is actually there, I think that that’s going to be going to give some aerodynamic improvements as well.
And are there any any spots? Because obviously, when you talk about automation, there are some problems still that are just too hard for a robot to figure out when they require some nuance, they require, you know, may they change from one molding to the next.
Are there any parts of the finishing process or just the process in general that you feel like that they might never be automated out?
I don’t think it’s anything that will never be automated, but I think that. Yes. That’s going to be, you know, obviously start with the easiest. No, once I give you the best return on investment now and then move to the harder ones later.
I think a lot of the repairs, you know, they don’t just do the same repair on every play. It depends what what defect you found. And so I don’t think you’ll ever totally get rid of human involvement there.
And I think that that will stay manuell probably longer than a lot of the other processes.
And Alan, obviously, you know, with airplane design and your significant background in the aerospace industry, is this something that they’ve been doing for a while, or is this something that they’ve been coming around to just the same? Is the wind industry behind or ahead, or is this just sort of in a different category by itself?
They’re bad at the same place right now. There’s not a lot of robotic painting going on besides Honda Jet and the military. Those are the two places where you see it in Honda Jets, a relatively small aircraft. But the consistency of it is why they’re doing it.
And obviously, Honda as a corporation puts a lot of of emphasis on quality and looks and finish. So that makes sense from an airplane standpoint. But like at least to my knowledge, like Boeing or Airbus, doesn’t they still have people crawling around on airplanes painting airplanes.
So the wind turbine industry doing it, it’s a little bit odd. I kind of wonder if it has a lot to do with durability, too, on the coatings, that unless you get a very consistent coating thickness and also cure time and making sure that everything is just right.
I wonder if the coating durability is going down and if we automated it and get very consistent with the way the coatings go on. Can you extend the life of the coatings, particularly around the leading edges and some of the places that historically wind turbines have had problems and on airplanes?
That has been the case a lot of times on airplanes. When you go to an airport, you see an airplane that the paint just looks awful. Most of that has to do with the prep of the surface and the application of the paint that extends to houses, cars, boats, all the same thing.
So consistency in the in the paint is really critical. You’d be surprised how much technique there is involved in that. And doing it robotically sort of takes the the the variability out of the system so you can get better results and it makes sense for you to do it.
I don’t know how much money there would save in terms of labor. It maybe as a cost savings in terms of materials, because you you only use less of it. That’s one of the points. It’s an interesting thing for GE and L.M. to take on, honestly.
So moving on, and this was a talking point from our last couple podcast episodes about how, you know, whether or not fossil fuel companies are going to start to diversify or maybe just that, you know, slowly convert into more of a either just an energy corporation or a renewable energy corporation.
So and Schutze is a they’re sort of the parent company behind Tranz West. Tranz West is creating a seven hundred thirty two mile high voltage power line that’s going to carry power from, you know, Wyoming all the way down to Las Vegas.
And so this is interesting because Anschutz has been you know, they’ve made their fortune essentially on shale deposits in Wyoming, and they’re traditionally a big, big on fossil fuels. So now, as we look to them, as they’re starting to really heavily invest in Wyoming wind, you know, is this another company?
You know, I’ll throw this to you. Rosies, this another example of, you know, fossil fuel companies seeing the writing on the wall, or is it just them trying to diversify and maybe just hedge their bets and kind of wait and see what happens?
Well, I think that they do say the writing on the wall and I was actually talking about this with somebody the other day about the difference between fossil fuel companies and the governments that have traditionally been influenced by fossil fuel companies.
And I I’m actually pretty excited that we’ve gotten to the point now where even fossil fuel companies can say that the only way to ensure they’re still making money in a decade’s time is to get on board with renewables, because the economics is just there.
The world is clearly going in that direction. And I think because, you know, they’re a company. I know they’ll be here. You know, they really want to be here in 10 years time. That gives them different incentives than governments who are much more capable of just ignoring anything that’s, you know, more than three years in the future
. So I actually think that this politically is going to be really great because presumably they continue to put pressure on governments, you know, which has been terrible in the past for action on climate change. But at least now we’ve got, you know, more and more of the people trying to influence government are pushing in the same direction
for renewables. And, yeah, so, you know, I like it. Nobody really likes to see fossil fuel companies like rewarded for. For what they’ve. The damage that they’ve done in the past, but I think practically I think that their involvement is a real just sign that the momentum is there and the clean energy transition is happening now.
No matter what.
Alan, do you see it that way?
I think there’s there’s real long term investment. Look at what the large companies are going to do. Right. So in this particular case, you’re trying to diversify out just because politically in the United States, you’re never sure what’s going to happen.
Right. I recall we had Trump and now we have Biden. So there’s a complete opposite of the spectrum in terms of policy. So you need to play both sides. And I kind of wonder if it makes sense to to really be in both, because you just never know what’s going to happen next.
Every four years are going to have the same sort of flip flop. I see that coming again, honestly. The the the thing about this project I think is interesting is where they are developing it and where they’re driving the energy, too.
So they’re taking it from Wyoming. And if anybody’s been to Wyoming, it’s pretty open space. There’s not a lot of people. Wyoming, obviously, they’re going to Las Vegas where there’s a lot of lights and things, but there’s not that much need for that much more additional power.
And obviously know Las Vegas is like a break point where they can transmit it to Southern California or somewhere else. But yeah, also kind of wonder, too, if Nevada is super happy about this because Nevada is making the play to be the next California.
So everybody in California that does want to pay five dollars for gas or and have the state on fire like it is right now are moving to Nevada and Nevada needs. The mayor has a lot of the water that California uses.
Nevada is sitting pretty. They just need some electricity and they’re the new California. So I kind of wonder if it’s more of a state play of Nevada positioning itself with Tesla going to be moving out somewhere and Tesla is already in Nevada, that the more electricity generation you can pump into the state, particularly renewables, makes it much
more it makes it easier for a company like Tesla to leave California and to show up in Vegas or Reno or wherever they want to go. So this is a this is like a multiple level play, I think.
And that’s what makes it interesting, is that there’s so many facets to this deal and all it takes is one of these little dominoes to flip over and the whole thing collapses. But it is there is a big shift in the United States and where energy is being created and where it’s going, which sort of shows you
where the future population centers will be.
All right, so in our last segment today, we’re going to talk about ion air batteries, which have been in the news cycle. You know, there’s a form Entergy is a startup that’s backed by Jeff Bezos, and they’ve just released some of the information about how their technology works, which I’m going to let one of you on a
viewer engineers explain to the world. But the real breakthrough here is that this is a they’re hoping it can get to one tenth of the cost of these storage costs of lithium ion. And it’s going to be a longer duration in comparison to lithium ions, not necessarily going be a true long duration, but fall somewhere sort of
in the middle. So, Alan, how does ion air battery storage work? Let’s start there.
Well, it simply takes iron powder and air are the two anode cathode to the battery, and then it has an electrolyte in the middle, very similar to an alkaline battery you buy at Wal-Mart or somewhere, and that makes the battery cell.
So the way if you think about it very simplistically, the ion turns to rust from the oxygen from the other side. That’s generically how it works. And then if you apply electricity the other way around, you turn the iron rust back into iron and oxygen again.
So it’s a reversible process and it’ll hold store energy for a relatively long time, unlike the lithium ion batteries that are in your iPhone, which lasts a couple of hours, relatively speaking. So form energy, which is doing a lot of this work, is saying, hey, this is not a permanent storage solution, but it is long enough that
you could write out some peaks and troughs in the in the grid. And in case you had a freezing event in Texas, you may be able to get through it because they’re saying roughly 100 to 150 hours is a sweet spot for this battery technology, which would make a huge difference.
And as Rosemary is going to tell us, that’s a huge difference, because you can essentially store energy that you generate from solar, solar and wind during the daytime and use it at nighttime or use it to do other fancy things.
And I think that is where this is going. The real trick to it is all the financial business stuff on the back side. And so the technology is cool, but the business side is really fascinating, too. So. Roseby, can you explain a little bit more?
Yeah, well, I mean, I’m really excited about the the potential of it. I think it is early days. Maybe, you know, when you dig into it, it’s maybe a little bit earlier than you might get the impression based on some of the reaction, which is, you know, the case for any new energy technology you ever see reported
yours. It always turns out to be further away than you think. So I think that their first their first prototype plant is going to come. They planned to come online. Twenty twenty three. So it’s not imminent. But on the other hand, obviously, they’ve worked through the vast majority of their issues before.
They would be at the point where they could be planning I think it’s a 300 megawatt battery to start off with, which is, you know, large for what I would call a prototype. So I guess, oh, I think they’re calling a pilot plant.
So that’s really exciting. And the the length of the storage, I think, is really good, because in high quality renewables areas like the Australian, you know, East Coast grid and like in California is I mean, 100, 150 hours, that’s going to get you through nearly every single kind of downtime that you might have.
It wouldn’t be necessarily enough for somewhere like northern northern Europe, where they have much bigger seasonal variations. But, you know, for those of us lucky enough to live in places where the sun shines nearly every day and the wind, you know, doesn’t stop for more than a few days across the whole grid.
I mean, it’s really yeah, it’s really perfect. Still waiting to say a few details, like I haven’t seen the round-trip efficiency of the cycle life. Yeah. And even the charge and discharge. Right. I haven’t seen a lot of detail on that yet.
So I’m looking forward to, you know, getting some of that filled in. But yeah, within a couple of years, we should and should know whether the hype is going to live up to expectations. But the potential is there for it to be really, really big breakthrough in Rose-Marie.
One of the things that you read in the publications and what they’re actually pushing out is information right now as a saying that ion er batteries have a higher energy density than lithium ions. Like it’s not even close that lithium ions can only store so much density wise, weight wise than an iron er battery.
But it does seem odd that that the battery that they’re creating is not doesn’t have that energy potential, so to speak, like there’s there’s it’s not as efficient as the quote unquote theoretical. Is there more room for growth in this?
Is it still or is it still really early? And we and this is just the first baby steps, you think?
Yeah. I mean, I guess it is. It is really early. I mean, we never even heard the chemistry until, you know, like a week ago. And I mean, to me, it’s also really interesting to get an alternative to lithium ion because, you know, we need those batteries for a portable application still, even though the energy density is
better. And this ion battery, I don’t think anyone’s proposing to use it for transportable applications. So I have always wondered why we’re using all our you know, there’s a lot of minerals in a lithium ion battery that aren’t going to scale very easily.
You know, the supply chains are going to struggle to keep up with an extra demand for all the ideas that are going to come online and then using the same materials for stationary batteries. I think it’s it’s so great if we’ve got an alternative for them.
Even if it wasn’t, you know, better than lithium ion batteries, that will still be important addition because you. Yeah. It’s going to help to, you know, funnel the lithium, the cobalt, even nickel and everything else you need. And a lithium ion battery can can go for where it needs to be portable.
So I find that part of it really exciting.
Yeah. And can of us up to either of you. But I think it’s you know, you start to hear this duration thing. I think most of us, myself included, I’m not an engineer. You think of. All right, I have a battery in my phone.
I have a battery in my laptop. I turn my computer on and the battery just discharges to power it. I don’t think I’ve never thought of duration. So can you can you kind of explain for the layman out there, including myself, what do we really mean by duration?
Like, why would I want a battery to be longer or shorter end? Like, how does that can you kind of give an analogy or something where we’re like, OK, so the consumer electronics, we can maybe relate that to what we mean here with the grid.
Yeah. So I think it’s mostly not a matter of can a battery last that long? I mean, you could charge a lithium ion battery, leave it sitting there, and then a week later use the electricity. But the economics wouldn’t be there to do that.
So that’s why you see like a hydro power dam is great long term storage, because you can add a lot of capacity to that dam without adding a lot of cost. So you can make the dam wall twice as high.
I get twice as much water in there. Doesn’t cost that much more. But, you know, you’ve doubled your duration, whereas for a lithium ion battery, you just need, you know, double your duration and you double the cost. So because you just need twice as many batteries, basically.
So usually it’s some sort of economic thing. There are in some cases, like if you are thinking about a Thamel battery or something, then are you going to get losses over time? So it’s not purely as simple as that, but generally it’s an economic consideration, which is why it’s kind of hard to to grasp why we can’t
just use lithium ion batteries for everything. OK, so
it’s it’s the duration of storage without being used. Is that right? So I don’t I don’t really care that my laptop maybe loses some charge over five days if I don’t use it, because you know what? It costs me and my electric bill to charge my laptop.
Right. But if you’re charging 300 megawatts of electricity and that’s your business and you lose 30 percent of it because it hadn’t wasn’t needed. And that’s where it becomes really costly. Is that right? That I it correctly.
Yeah. And if you’ve paid a whole lot of money for a battery, you only make money when you discharge it. Right. So if you are only discharging once a week, then you’re making a lot less money than if you’re discharging twice a day.
So that that’s basically the equation that people financing battery projects are looking at.
Well, and just the reuse that that number of cycles that you can charge and just charge a battery is really super critical here, because I know you an iPhone, when it dies, it dies. Right. You can replace it if you’re talking about gigawatt hours of energy storage.
You don’t want to be constantly replacing the cells. You wanted to be able to charge and discharge. And what tends to happen on other forms of batteries is solely the chemistry decays. There’s there’s other types of chemical reactions that are happening simultaneously to the one that you want.
And like in a lithium ion, eventually it won’t charge anymore, as we well know. Eventually, the lithium ion after four or five years is essentially a dead battery. You can’t do it. So from a utility scale problem, you want that battery to the last 20 years without touching.
I mean, this is your dream, right? You can just put a real battery and energy storage device out in the desert and it can just sit there. And I don’t have to do anything to it because the chemistry is so simple that I have this money making machine.
I mean, that would be better than Vegas, right? If you have that sort of technology, you are like a casino. Every time you discharge it, you just cash in the bank. Which is why the Bill Gates and the Jeff Bezos and the Tesla people are all congregating around this new business, because if it wasn’t going to generate
that kind of money, they wouldn’t be anywhere near it now. Now, Bill Gates has got a little bit different story, but you know, the others not so, not so much. So you got to wonder that in terms of a long term play, once you make that initial cost investment, it is then just playing the markets in terms
of energy when you discharge it. Can you hit California up and, you know, make them pay three times the amount that you write, which is what Enron did back in the 90s. Right. This is that you’re kind of building this sort of Enron situation because you will be playing the power markets and the battle becomes inconsequential to
your ability to manipulate and control power markets, which is where I think this is going.
Yeah, I love mixing Enron.
And what did Enron make Enron mean? Nothing. Enron was a trader, was a power trader. That’s all that they were. Now, this is a little bit different because you have to go out and create and form energy has to go create batteries and sell them someone else to buy them.
But once you do that. Where’s your where’s your cost, where’s your infrastructure costs? It may not there may not be any. Right. And because of demand for intermittent energy is going to be higher as we get into the electric vehicle explosion.
That’s, in theory, going to happen. We’re going to be charging cars at night. We’re going to be generating solar energy and wind energy during the day. Somebody’s got to store that. So there you go. There’s your marketplace. And I think that’s eventually going to go.
What was
that? Was Enron ever a legitimate business, though, like? I want to clarify. And maybe they were, but yeah, obviously they’re a huge. What? Sure. Ponzi scheme, essentially.
No, but they
actually do legitimate work for some for some time before defrauding everyone.
They’re a power trader, but they’re playing both sides of it. And I think that’s what got him in trouble, is they’re limiting the controlling how much power or they want to deliver, particularly to California. And California had open rates.
And so they would just hold it until California was desperate and then they release it that fifteen thousand dollars a kilowatt hour.
That sounds like the plot of a James Bond movie. Maybe in 2027, ion air batteries will be controlled by a villain named I’la.
Well, let’s have we not said for the last 50 years whoever can if we could create the battery, you’re going to control the world. I mean, on the engineering front, I’m an electrical engineer by training. That’s that’s what has said the money was.
Right. It’s not in making it’s not on making iPhones. The money is in making a battery. It has long term storage, because then you can control the success of nations. And that’s what Adobe. And you will become. And, you know, Jeff Bezos, money will look like nothing compared to this if they can pull it off.
And I think that’s you know, it’s like nuclear power. It’s one of those magical things that we never thought we could ever get to. And yet here we are. But the battery technology is going to be super cool.
So. So, Rose-Marie, globally, do you see this kind of technology catching off? Obviously, this this pilot project is going to be in, it looks like is going to be a Minnesota great river. Energy is a Minnesota based company.
That’s I’m not sure if the project will be in actually in Minnesota, but do you see this being first a U.S. thing? Do you feel like some countries will jump on this sooner than others? What do you what do you see as far as like the global reach?
I think in general, the US has already got longer duration batteries. Are they using them for longer durations than other countries? And I’m not a hundred percent sure for the reason about the reason for that. So I guess based if that trend continues, then, yeah, you would say it in the US first.
I don’t see us companies. Of course, it’s easier for them to maintain new projects that are that are located there. So I’d say yes. But yeah, I think it could potentially be really beneficial in a lot of places.
So we just got to wait and see how many unexpected problems they have in between now and the twenty twenty three commissioning date and. Yeah. But if everything goes the way the press release says, then it’s incredibly exciting.
And is this going to change the complexion of the way wind farms are built? You know, we we talked about this big hydrogen wind plant that’s going to be built in Australia. I’m sure you’ve heard. And I mean, is this going to continue or may this trend of like when we build a new thing on the say
is going to be like this theme park? Like there’s going to be a huge battery in a couple of acres of battery. There’s going to be a couple of acres awin. There’s going to be ammonia. There’s going to be hydrogen.
I mean, do you see it continue to flush out that way or will it maybe kind of remain segmented? Yeah, I
mean, I think a really good battery like a you know, something that’s a lot a lot cheaper and longer duration than what we’ve got available now. It’s kind of, in a way, a competitor to hydrogen, green, hydrogen, because a lot of people think of that as, you know, a way to smooth variable renewables, which I’ve personally always
been a little bit skeptical that that will end up being how it’s used. But on the other hand, it will also support hydrogen in that, you know, if you’ve got more battery storage, then you can run your electrolytes 24/7, which is probably the only way to make good money from it.
So it’ll be interesting to see exactly how that pans out. But in general, you know, both this, you know, large interconnector that we just talked about, big batteries, all of that is just going to really turbocharge how fast we can go from, you know, like 20 percent renewables to 90 percent or even, you know, like really with
this battery that it will make it easy to go even further beyond 90 percent. So that’s the exciting part.
Well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode of Uptime. Thanks so much for listening. Remember, in the today’s or in today’s show notes, you can sign up for uptime tech news. So if you enjoyed today’s conversation and you want to be notified of the next podcast episode, drop sign up in the show notes below, whether you’re
on YouTube or iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher. Be sure to subscribe to our channel on YouTube. Be also sure to subscribe to Rosemarie’s channel on YouTube. You’ll find engineering with Rosie on YouTube. She does a great job explaining so much in the renewable energy industry.
Engineering problems, all the whys behind wind, energy, hydrogen, all that good stuff so far. You’ll find her links as well in the show notes. Thanks again for listening. And we’ll catch you next time on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
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