While GE just lost the latest round in the patent lawsuit saga with Siemens Gamesa, an appeal is already in the works. We discuss how the process (and politics) will affect wind energy innovation, development, and production. Speaking of innovation, T-Omega’s floating wind turbines have a very unusual design, more like a ferris wheel than an iceberg. In small scale testing, models look promising. T-Omega says it’s looking for manufacturers who “aren’t locked into legacy technology.” The company might need more than that, though.Â
Several US states are collaborating, partly in an effort to replace gas tax revenues, to enable electric vehicles to charge while they drive. And in possibly the coolest product placement ever, Coldplay is taking a wind turbine on tour. It’s made by Texas startup Flower Turbines. Rosemary says small wind may inspire change, but questions its actual impact. Allen will try to get Coldplay on a future podcast.
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
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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!
Uptime 132
Allen Hall: Hello everyone. We have an amazing show for you this week. T Omega creates a wind turbine that looks like a Ferris wheel, and then GE gets an injunction against them by Siemens Gamesa. We talk
Joel Saxum: about electrifying highways to charge electric vehicles and with a specific focus on heavy haul trucks.
Rosemary Barnes: And then finally, we’re gonna talk about my favorite topic small vertical access wind turbine that looks pretty and doesn’t generate only and doesn’t generate any electricity.
Allen Hall: Hey, everybody. If you’re a frequent listener to this podcast, please take a moment and give us a five star rating on this podcast platform.
It makes a. Difference to us, and it allows our podcast to be played in in new places. And to subscribe to our weekly newsletter, Uptime Tech News, which can be found by just Googling uptime tech news, and you’ll go right to it. I’m Alan Hall, President of Weather Regard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend and blade expert Rosemary Barnes, and my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon.
And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Okay, first up Boston Startup to Omega win says it’s model tested of a unique floating wind turbine design. So Rosemary, it looks like two triangles, side by side, and in between those triangles is a a three bladed wind turbine. So it resembles a sort of a Ferris wheel design. Two Omega is, is interest in this design because they think it takes a lot less materials to build it.
It’s a lot simpler to build, and you don’t have complicated bearing structures to support the spinning winter blades. The group is out of Northeastern, which is a college in Boston, but they’re, they’re saying like their sweet spots can be like seven to eight megawatts in. The amount of in sort of energy and cost to build the thing is gonna be like a fraction of what it takes to build a seven eight megawatt turbine right now, just because of the difference in design, they’re using simpler design techniques, things that are general walls, steel tubes, everything’s lighter.
It basically just floats on top of the, of the waves. It doesn’t have a, a counterweight at the bottom, like the standard horizontal access wind tur is due. They are getting money. They got funded and free show. We were just talking about our renewable energy companies in Boston getting funded. And this is another one of those they’ve received.
Yeah. $256,000 from the US National Science Foundation. Small Business Technology Transfer. So S GTR is what we call it in the United States for their r and d work and their groundbreaking floating wind turbine. Now first off, does this, Sense this sort of basic Ferris wheel type design. Oh, I
Rosemary Barnes: like it structurally.
I think they’re gonna struggle. Aerodynamically and then the aerodynamic struggles are gonna cause structural struggles, . So, because, you know, normally the reason why normal wind turbine has its rotor upwind of the tower is because every time, if you put it on the other side, the down wind side, then every time that the blade passes the tower, it, you know, its wind is interrupted.
And so, you know, the, the blade bends away from the wind. And then when the wind. All of a sudden removed, then it bends back suddenly. And then, you know, so you’ve got this, every single time that a blade passes the tower, it’s all of a sudden flicking back and forth. And that’s really, really challenging to, to deal with.
And so yeah, like back in the nineties, plenty of people had downwind rotors because there’s some advantages to that too. You know, the blades can never hit the tower. If, if that’s the way you operate it. But pretty much everyone realized that on balance it’s a lot easier to get these things to survive, especially the blades and the I guess the bearings as well to survive if you have the upwind design.
So this, this doesn’t have that. And I, I note that they, they’ve just done a lab test or like a wave pool test of you know, something that looks, looks fairly similar to the, the drawings that they have. Shown of, of it out in operation in the open ocean. So they know something, but they definitely don’t yet know anything about the, you know, how that dynamic behavior is going to go.
So I would definitely not. Put any weight in their cost projections at this point, because it’s very easy to say your design’s gonna be cheap when you only know about the advantages and you haven’t had a chance to learn about the disadvantages yet. And all of the expensive solutions that you have to come up with to get around all of the, the problems that come up.
Cause you’re doing something differently. So, early, early days, is it
Allen Hall: a design that’s already been looked at already? The basic concept hasn’t been looked at before?
Rosemary Barnes: I haven’t, I haven’t seen it, but I would struggle to, It’s, you know, it’s not, it’s not a brainwave, it’s you know, we, we make other things, like you mentioned Ferris wheel.
You know, there’s plenty of, of things that we make with that structure. So yeah, I would expect that it has been thought of before, but I, Yeah, no, I’ve never seen anyone develop it as far as they have. Joel,
Allen Hall: is, is there a real need for a wind turbine that is, That less expensive. Cause they’re talking about 30% of the price of a conventional design and maybe about 20% of the weight.
30% would mean that right now when turbines are about a million dollars per megawatt, so they’d be at $300,000 per megawatt. That seems artificially low somehow. Is that, does that seem even plausible?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think when you start talking, who will take the risk on putting these offshore in a grand scale?
Right? And the the megawatt numbers you’re talking about is, those are onshore numbers as well, right? Offshore, they’re, I think they’re offshore numbers. The million of megawatts usually what we look at for onshore.
Allen Hall: Well, that, that’s, Yeah, you’re totally right about that. Right. There’s not really good published numbers for offshore
Joel Saxum: wind.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So, so third, now thinking about a new radical way to design something and do something, 30%. Of the cost of the, a conventional design, that’s enough to get someone to turn ahead, right? To like, oh, 30%. Well, that’s a big change, right? I don’t know if it’s, if they’ve done enough due diligence in the design to get someone to put enough money them to go forward.
$256,000 grant, or isn’t gonna do it, right? 256 grand for. R and d level engineering. If this is just, that’s just gonna get a couple more engineers, six more months to do some more CAD designs, that’s not gonna do anything for,
Rosemary Barnes: for, Yeah. I’d be surprised if the, the test that they did in the, the lab test they did, they could, you know, do that, that part of the project for less than that much money.
Ballpark me a
Allen Hall: number. What you think it take to, to build a seven to eight megawatt machine. Started from nothing. All in and install it off
Rosemary Barnes: the
Allen Hall: Yeah. To get it offshore. Yeah. Two fixed, fixed, fixed or floating.
Joel Saxum: Floating, Floating. Floating for you talking like complete ground up design to offshore at a 70
Allen Hall: megawatt Canada to the ceo, getting a company established, getting a building, getting a factory, getting it certified, I guess certified
Joel Saxum: five to five to 700 million probably.
Allen Hall: Oh, I, I think there are billions. Today’s dollars. Yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah. I’d be okay to work on a, on a project like that if they had a, had a billion, but for much less, I would expect them not to succeed. But you don’t need all that up upfront as well. You know, you, you can get a little, especially if they’re smart and they, you know de-risk key parts of the technology onshore before they move offshore.
Because, I mean, this dynamic loading thing, for example, that’s just the, the most obvious technical risk when I look. There’s no, there’s no reason to build something and drag it offshore and pay for, you know, ships and stuff every time something goes wrong, probably every half hour at, at first. So I think, you know, if, if you would build a smaller version onshore, then you can make your development a lot cheaper and maybe entice investors to give you more of the, the big numbers that you need to get it offshore.
Do a, do an
Joel Saxum: onshore test, like you’re saying, Rosemary, and then have a goal of selling to someone. That already exists in the marketplace. I think that’s what a lot, in my opinion, that’s what a lot of these startups that are coming up with, all these new designs should be shooting for. They shouldn’t be shooting for, We’re gonna go and install 10,000, these, you know, and by 2030 they should say like, by 2025, we’d like to sell this company and this idea to.
Vestas or Siemens or whoever’s.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s challenging for them though. It’s hard to see how much of it can really be just slotted into an existing design like you would need to redesign, obviously. I don’t know. Now you’ve got a, everything have two attachment points. So yeah, your whole Noel hub. All the bearings and then the blade structure, like the aerodynamic design for the blade might be able to be similar, but the structure of the, the blade will have to be, is got very different requirements.
So it, that won’t be the same either. I can’t see a lot of reason for an existing OEM to. To buy this? I think you would, What do you think need to kind of start from
Joel Saxum: scratch? Yeah. I’m, I’m looking, I’m just watching some of the videos and stuff on my other screen here of them and I’m thinking about some of the like CFD analysis things that I’ve worked on in offshore subsea things.
So now I’m looking at, instead of having one tower, of course, when we have one tower, normally it’s always a cylindrical tower and that’s it. Or close to it, right? And there’s not a whole lot that you can do to cur. Like vis, like vortex induced vibration or anything. Like, you can’t really add things to it to make it aerodynamically so the wind will flow around it.
Right. But with what, with four, with four pillars on this design they have, it almost seems like you might have more flexibility to make those pillars more aerodynamically neutral. No. So that it wouldn’t affect the. The wake of, or not the wake, but the, the pressure of the, when the blades come. Am I, I’m not saying this correctly.
Make ’em into an air foil, basically. Yeah. Make the, make the stru into an air foil so that they’re aerodynamically neutral so it doesn’t affect the loads and the blades as they come around.
Rosemary Barnes: Is that currently, that’s square with this design, if you look at that, Yeah. That’s
Joel Saxum: square That’s what I’m, That’s that’s
Rosemary Barnes: kind of what, Yeah.
They haven’t, they haven’t had that, They haven’t got as far in their thinking as you have on, on that problem, but That’s, that’s okay. Oh, it’s yeah, it’s early days and they’re, they’re trying it. It, it’s called it’s fine. The cost projections though, I mean, just because you can reduce mass to 30% does not mean you’re reduced costs.
It’s, I mean, you’re reducing mass from the, the tower and the, you know, the floating structure. So I don’t think that you can , you can really extrapolate that to be a whole of system cost reduction. I mean, you’re still going to need the, the generator is not gonna be any cheaper. The blades will be more expensive.
The control system will still cost the same power connection will still cost the same, like you, you know, it’s, it’s nice to use mass as a kind of a substitute for cost in really fixed, specific, isolated sections. You definitely can’t do it in a whole of whole of turbine. Level. So I think that’s pretty misleading that even in their, their best case, you know, I mean that there are cost models out there from NRE and, and Sander and stuff that you can use if you wanted to get an idea for how much of the cost goes to the tower and the floating structure, but it’s.
Definitely not gonna be a 70% cost reduction, just because they’ve made those components cheaper. Lighter. I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got another
Joel Saxum: one for you, Rosemary’s, As I’m watching again, I’m, I’m watching the, the, the g image of their pool testing. So now I’m thinking they’ve said we can withstand a hundred, a hundred foot wave in, in some of these things.
And I think a lot of that’s due to the fact that they’ve lightened up the structure, right? So it can actually. Float easier. But now when I look at it and I, and I’m thinking seven, eight megawatt system, your 80, 90 meter blades. Now you, now you’ve in introduced a whole bunch of other dynamic loads to this thing because it’s the structures lighter and it can move like this.
Now the blades are gonna be, Whoa, we’re up and down, left and right. And that’s those dynamic loads on composite structures, as we all know are Yeah, could be. Could
Rosemary Barnes: be brutal. They’ve got a good idea and they’ve got a lot to learn because they’re doing something so different. They can’t assume that, you know, they’re not gonna have new problems.
They will have brand new problems that goes along with a brand new technology. So, you know, the, the more that you deviate from the norm, the more special new problems that you get to experience for the first time. So yeah definitely wish them good luck. And yeah, they’re just at the start of their, well, I guess they’re not right at the start, but they’re, you know, closer to the start, closer to the start than the end of their journey.
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Allen Hall: call today. See, Miss Kasa got an injunction. From a judge that prohibits ge from selling wind turbines with their special bearing support structure that has been patented by Siemens GA Mesa, that’s a big, big problem for ge.
So essentially it shuts ’em down from sales of offshore wind in the United States until they either remove that design. Figure out some something contractually with Siemens Kamasa and it doesn’t look like Siemens Kamasa is going to allow them to do that. So the injunction came after a number of months.
I think that the, the, the initial court case was sort of settled in. The judge came down in June and now they’re going back and forth. But the, the, the US district judge prohibited GE from selling any more of these wind turbines except for two cases. And I think this is the interesting piece. They’re gonna.
GE to make wind turbines for vineyard wind and ocean wind. So off the coast of Massachusetts, off the coast of New Jersey and they’re gonna charge GE $30,000 per megawatt per turban. So for the Vineyard Wind project, that’s about $24 million of a hit financially to ge. So the judge looked at the state’s arguments that it’s, we need these wind turbines because climate change is such a public problem that overrides Siemens ownership of this patent.
So the, the public interest came above the private interest, which is weird. It doesn’t happen very often. So I think it set a new standard, weirdly enough. One patent case in which, by the way, Siemens is not even using this design. , which is whipping, they patent this thing. They’re not even using it. GEs using it evidently.
And Siemens isn’t even usually, that’s one of the arguments GE is using. Like, why are you sticking us? And Siemens isn’t even using the thing. But it creates a new standard that the public’s the public impact of a design not being used may override the, the patent holder’s owner. Ooh, that doesn’t feel right.
And, and maybe, maybe it’s a little more nuanced than that. I know Sea Winds was had said earlier that they were willing to let ge build these two site wind turbines because really, what are you gonna do? You look like the bad, bad guy if you do that. But GEs gonna appeal GEs, GEs saying they’re gonna appeal that decision and see if they can get it back to basically try to get it back to, to zero again, to say they didn’t infr.
I’m not sure they’re gonna be able to do that. It’s gonna be really hard to do, and you may have to take that all the way up to the Supreme Court if you really wanna fight this thing out. So two big things, right? You got this legal framework now in which the public interest can override a patent holder’s interest.
and GE will, is gonna be essentially off of the playing field and us offshore wind until they can redesign this, this bearing support, which would at least knock them back three, four years, I’m guessing, to, to get that all undone and designed and put back. So that’s when all the actions happen in the United States.
This is a huge impact for ge unless something has been going on behind the scenes where GEs been redesigning this thing while they’re in court. I doubt that’s the case. Rosemary, you work for GE for a number of years. How big of a injunction, how big of this is this injunction in, in terms. Ge you know,
Rosemary Barnes: renewable business I mean, definitely if they can’t, can’t sell this product moving forward, that’s a huge, huge big deal because, you know, so far the Hallide project has, you know, primarily cost them money and they haven’t yet got to the, the.
Part where, you know, they’re selling a lot of them and they recoup that. So that would be devastating for them, I would imagine. And it would take, I, I don’t, if they knew about this at the start, they would never have designed it like that. It would’ve been fine. The turbine would’ve ended up roughly the same cost, probably exactly the same cost, no problem.
But to start again is gonna be quite hard. Or it is gonna be expensive and possibly time consuming. So that’s bad. But I think that the impact, it sounds like, extends far beyond. GE because if yeah, it, it all of these big winter tur by manufacturers and any other company that, you know, has a lot of you know, knowhow, intellectual property, that’s part of the value of their company.
They, they all have a, you know, a strategy for developing ip. And it, I definitely, I had things of, you know, ideas of mine patented or, you know, applied. Patent applications that we never intended to use, that I thought were a, you know, stupid idea. And I would never do it that way cuz we’d found a better one.
But they go through to the effort and the expense of patenting them anyway precisely for this kind of outcome that, you know, well you’ve had the idea, you’ve developed the, the ip, you know about it. We might as well get a patent on it and if somebody else does it, then we can earn some money that way.
And they do, They get royalty, royalty payments for sure. You know, a few good ideas. So if they’re really gonna just say, Well, it doesn’t matter that Siemens Gaza rightfully owns the IP because the public really wants it that would render everybody’s strategy incorrect. And I, I mean, you’ve gotta change the.
Law. You can’t just, you can’t just decide not to enforce it can, can you just seems really out there to me, even though I can see that it’s better for the, the planet and the public and everything. Yeah. But you’re also, I think that should change the law. You tru a first and Yeah. Rosemary, and then start implementing the new law.
Yeah. Is it really a
Allen Hall: valid argument is, is, is who’s it protecting? Is it, it’s not really protecting GE as much as it’s protecting vineyard, wind, and public or Ted. Ocean wind, that’s who it’s protecting because they’re the ones who are really at risk. If GE doesn’t sell a turban, theoretically how to booking for, Okay.
Okay. Right. Those, those wind turbines are kind of in process, so they haven’t expanded all the money. Who it’s really protecting are the operators. In this scenario, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. But the operators should have a clause in their contract that says, Force Azure, we’re putting in, you know, Siemens , like a 11 megawatts, 200 DDS or something.
You know? Right. Like they’ll have that in there.
Allen Hall: Joel. Joel, you’re right about that. I think the issue with that is that you have to go back and redo your applications again with the federal government. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah. Go through the evaluation again, which is one of the initial. Constraints when you make an application and you’re actually applying for, to bid on the lease, is that you have to define all that stuff up front and you get initial blessing on it.
Yeah, we’re gonna use GE turbines. Okay, fine. I’m not sure why that matters. Is there really, Rosemary, Is any real difference or Joels any real difference between the Turbin? Why should
Rosemary Barnes: it matter? Well, there’ll be a dramatically different size. So I think it, it does matter, but I mean, they’re gonna go smaller and, yeah.
It matters. I don’t think it matters that much. I’m just surprised that they can’t I would’ve thought a compromise on the royalty payments to something manageable would be the right course of action. And yeah. I mean, there’s plenty of OEMs paying other OEMs royalties for design aspects Yes. That they, they want to use.
Would like to see , Siemens, KAA, and GE Reach, reach something like that here. And I, I’m surprised that they can’t, because it’s not, it’s not something critical that’s going to, you know, it’s not an insurmountable obstacle to find a new way to, you know, design around this patent. Sure. So Siemens Goza should be, I would’ve thought, interested in, you know, trying to make the royalty payment that they’ll accept low enough that GE are willing to pay it for the, you know, the amount of time that they it takes them to, to redevelop, you know, the next version.
But maybe their plan is to just. Bankrupt ge, make sure that they never sell another offshore wind turbine. And could be in that case, that’ll be very sad because there aren’t that many of them, of these big ones out there. There are so many ts of offshore wind turbines in the pipeline all around the world.
You know, there’s a few, there’s a few other. Manufacturers with similar designs, but they’re, you know, they’re far, far behind. You know, the 14, 15, 16 megawatt turbines from other manufacturers are behind the GE one. So yeah. It’ll be bad for the planet if, if they can’t reach an agreement. Well, I’m
Joel Saxum: thinking where, where it comes to is really, it’s, There would be a political nightmare if it, if they didn’t let these two wind farms go forward with these.
So the odd thing to me Yes. Is that they’re gonna let two, they’re gonna let two of ’em, but then stop it after that. That to me, shout politics because as we have just laid out this 30 gigawatt goal by 2030 offshore wind. And then the first wind farms are at scale that you’re gonna put in. You there’s a huge problem with, And they get delayed years.
That would be a political travesty, right? It would be, it would be a nightmare. So like in the US the, the U, we regularly use the term eminent domain, right? For what’s better for the public can take from the private, But usually that’s reserved. That’s not reserved for IP or anything like that. That’s usually reserved for like, you know, cutting a corner on a highway and we gotta take a little bit of land from a farmer or something of, of that sort.
So the government use. Right. But it kind it, Right. But it, it can, but it can be eminent domain can be used privately as well. It has been. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I was, I was on a project once a while back where we took, we took a whole neighborhood to expand a runway at O’Hare Airport. That’s not government.
Mm-hmm. . Right. So this is the same thing as what, what’s in what’s in better Yeah.
Allen Hall: Security thing. It sort is, Yeah. It’s nebulous is kind of, Yeah. Well
Joel Saxum: defined, but, but, but what’s in the better, better interest of the public. I think if you really weigh it, it’s the political play of, man, the first wind farm we have a huge problem on and we can’t move forward with it.
Well, that’s, that’s, that’s tough. Right. But I mean, I just gotta, you see where
Allen Hall: Siemens game is coming from and I’ll, I’ll. Play the Siemens ga Mesa. Part of this is, is hey, it’s a really tough marketplace right now. We’re not making a lot of money. Offshore is a potential huge growth market. If I can eliminate one of the players in one of the wealthiest markets in the world, I will probably do that.
And if it’s only a two to three year delta in which slow down is gonna be. I’ll make all of my money then, and well be happy with it. So yes, I, I will stick it to GE and I will look like the bad guy. I’ll give him a little bit of a break so I don’t cause a political problem with the administration at the moment, which is what they did.
And then just sit back and take the orders. And you
Joel Saxum: think about that, that exactly what happened. Now, put down, step into the developer shoes. Right on Tuesday. On Tuesday at Sunrise Wind Farm, they just sold 84. 11 gigot offshore turbines. Right? So they, the orders will roll in because anybody that’s like, Oh, we’re thinking between GE investors or we’re thinking between GE and Siemens.
Well, sorry, GEs off the table now, Right, because that’s too, too
Allen Hall: risky. Right. And one of the constraints of the injunction is when GE talks to a potential customer, they must provide the potential customer a copy of the injunction. So they’re, there’s, they’re per blocking GE in front of.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. That’s brutal.
That’s brutal. That’s brutal.
Allen Hall: Like, come on, who can’t Google that? Do I, Do you need GE to do that? Really? Come on. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: I wouldn’t wanna be a sales guy for ge.
Allen Hall: No, no. Right. Cuz you know, they have to do this thing. Right. And the, the other, the customers know they have to do it too. It just, that to me seems more of a shaming event than anything legal wise.
Come.
Joel Saxum: Do think that, Do you think that they took it this far or that it’s come to what it is? Because I think originally it wasn’t this like GE had sued Siemens Gu Mesa. Yeah, yeah. They, Siemens Kasa was like, were like, You know what, no. Like we’re gonna come back and sue you for this. Yeah. There was some, there was something beforehand that played in there, so that’s kind of like a ti for tat kind of thing.
Allen Hall: But this, as Rosemary has pointed out, the public’s interest in this is weirdly at the forefront and it will. Change the way courts think about these things. If it, if I had made a knickknack I patented a, a, a new W bank pencil. If someone stole from me, the best thing I’m gonna do is to get them to stop.
Right. And they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna work on some agreement for the public interest. This is not a thing they will ne the courts will never do. But this is, you touched the third rail of politics right now, which is renewable energy and an inflationary economy and, and, and a constraint where the president has made, made promises.
That’s a tough one for anybody to be in the middle of. And GE is, knows full well what the ramifications of those things are. I just don’t know if it’s gonna come to a conclusion, and maybe this is the Siemens play is, there’s only a certain amount of time here you got till 2030. So a couple of years at a head.
A head start will make a huge difference. So you can be a bad guy for 12 months, maybe two years, and then Oh, okay. No, no, no, no. Ge. You can use it. Mm-hmm. , sure. You know, we’ll charge you a hun. A hundred grand for the licensing off you. They could do that too. And so there’s a lot of give and take and nuance.
And I, that’s where it, it’s gonna get really combative because I think GE is willing to go to the map because it’s such a huge profit center for them. And it’s in their backyard that they have to, that they have to fight it. And they should, in my opinion, and they should fight it to see if you can get.
Rosemary’s position, which is some sort of mutual agreement and a payment so they can move on. Cuz I think GE has been playing the send, send me some money and we we’re, we’re cool game for a long time, but Siemens is not playing that, Not yet. Yeah. We should
Joel Saxum: track and kind of watch as these all the, all the lease sales that have happened, what kind of orders start flowing in and just kind of start putting that information together so we can watch down the coast.
What it looks. , Right. I,
Allen Hall: I’m interested. Vesto
Joel Saxum: has to be lick their chops too. Oh, sure. V2 v v2. 60 fours as, as far as, Yeah. I can see.
Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Absolutely. Well, and I think the, the, then the political landscape again because it’s energy is politics. The constraint that the administration put on itself, where they’re trying to have more American components in the wind, tur.
For sure and manufacturing in the United States, that one’s gonna be hard when there’s, they’re all non-US companies that are involved on, on the offshore wind. Mm-hmm. , That one’s gonna be hard to swallow. Right. So you would think that the. You would think, This is my opinion. I think that the administration would be involved somewhere in the negotiation here.
Much like they’re negotiating with the, the train unions and the longshoreman right now. Mm-hmm. , you think that they’d be at the table saying, All right, hey Siemens, why don’t you come to the White House? Hey ge, why don’t you come to the White House and we’re gonna negotiate this thing out? Everybody. Yeah.
Wasn’t not smiling. Was
Joel Saxum: it Obama who did like the, The beer summit or whatever it was? Yes. Beer Summit. I think that was be, Yeah, like, come on, let’s talk about this. Let’s
Allen Hall: talk this over. Yeah, that would probably be the best outcome. So Roseberry, Joel and I vote for Beer Summit. What do you think?
Rosemary Barnes: Sounds good to me.
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Allen Hall: Well, if you’ve watched YouTube recently, you’ve have noticed that Rose Manage been doing a number of videos on electric vehicles and she actually took a, a cross country tour of Australia it with varying levels of success. Mostly had to do with recharging of the. That’s a big problem in the States and in Australia, charging a vehicle can be rather a long drawn out process.
But there is a couple of developments in the United States where they’re talking about putting what I think to be coils in the ground to provide charging to vehicles as they drive over them. And down in, in Utah there’s a firm that’s, that’s looking at. Electric, buying a part of the Pennsylvania, Ohio border, and then up near Detroit.
And there’s another project that’s going on around Walt Disney World in Florida where they’re talking, where providing a way for electric vehicles to be charged as they’re driving. Such that, if you think about it, and I think Rosemary had raised a good point about this in one of her videos, that how do you pay for the roads?
How do you pay for everything else? And in the United States, you pay with the gas tax. Well, once you turn electric, what do you. Maybe the, the state, quote unquote, the power company starts selling you electricity as you drive. So as you’re driving along, you just got a rolling tab, , you just see the, the dollars on your Tesla screen keep increasing as you’re charging, as you go along.
And initially I thought, Oh, okay, this is crazy, right? So you’d have to electrify a substantial amount of the roads, but I don’t think they’re necessarily aiming for. Vehicles, passenger vehicles, they’re looking to do tractor trailers, long haul trucks. The batteries are impressive. The batteries are impressive, and you can imagine how long it takes to charge up Rosemary’s electric vehicle versus a tractor trailer.
It could take a long time to get to full charge. So do you need to have something in the road to charge these vehicles up? Because if they’re making a, you know, eight or 10 hour run, it’s kind of hard to do. Does this
Joel Saxum: make sense? You know, I, I think when I looked at the trucks, when they, this was like a year or two ago, because it’s been an ongoing process.
Just like the cyber truck, right? The, the, the passing. They’ve been playing around with it for a long time. They had a five or 600 mile range, which is a little bit short of what a semi is right now. Semis right now in the us, at least in the US at least lowers elsewhere, whatever you wanna call ’em. You know, loaded, loaded and going across the planes.
You might be getting three. If you’re really lucky or you got a tailwind five, five and a half miles of the gallon. So if you kind of equate that back, I mean, that’s a lot of fuel you’re burning. So, and if those batteries, now we think about those batteries going five and 600 miles, pulling, you know, up to 80,000 pounds or whatever behind them.
Right. Yeah. I, the battery packs themselves weigh 10,000 pounds. Like they’re, you know, they’re, they’re, they’re ridiculous. So the, the idea that you could charge, you’d have to have charging hubs. And we now, like with Rosemary’s trip across, you know, Australia and I’ve, I’ve, I’ve read and watched recent things of people doing the same thing in the States.
If they can get to the level three chargers where they’re like, Oh, this is great. It’s really quick, but that battery. , you know, the size of my table, a level three charger will still take overnight or more to charge one of those trucks. So you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to have three phase power coming in or something, I don’t know.
But that’s definitely a, Oh, gonna be a challenge.
Allen Hall: Yeah. How much of big, how big of a charger would a tractor trailer required compared to a, a little Tesla four door?
Rosemary Barnes: My wife. Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve seen people talk about megawatt charges you know, to get, to get fast charging of, of trucks and yeah, who knows if that’s that’s gonna happen, but it is really interesting kind of part of the, Transport decarbonization in a lot of ways.
I think it makes the, the challenges with passenger cars look very quaint almost, you know, like it’s like, oh, it’s so cute. You’re worried about, you know, Yeah. 200 kilowatts versus 500 kilowatts or something. Like, that’s, that’s adorable. And yeah, but for, for, for trucks, it’s, it’s gonna be a lot more, but it’s also, you know, like a, it’s a big, big chunk of the, the problem.
The transport of, you know, moving around of, of stuff that that we currently are, are moving around in trucks. That’s there’s a lot of emissions to be saved by electrifying that. So it’s an important problem and it is one that I talked about. I got a, an expert on the shows that Australian guy works at at Cambridge University.
David Seban, Professor David Seban, and he came on engineering with Rosie for a live stream a couple of months ago. And he’s actually, I mean, his, most of his career has been about you know, heavy transportation starting with, I think trains by, you know, back a long time ago. And he’s just recently released a white paper on decarbonizing trucking.
In the, in, yeah, in the uk I think primarily, Although he has looked at how it would work around the world and they looked at all different kinds of options for decarbonizing the industry and What they came up with is the best way was charging, or I think pantograph is another way to call it. It’s like you know, electric trams, they have the overhead power line and, and connect to it with an arm.
And yeah, they found that if you electrify certain corridors of the highway that a lot of chucks go on that it can have a payback period as short as 18 months apparently. Oh wow. Yeah, so the economics work out what that came away with. The impression that the hardest part of it is just . It’s like the, it’s a really huge upfront cost, and then you’ve got some standardization issues.
Who, who pays for it and how do they recoup their investment? And so I can see it. Much more likely to work in Europe than in the US or Australia, just cuz culturally it seems like they’re more prepared for governments to, you know you spend a lot of money upfront to make something that’s gonna work over, pay itself back over the years.
And then you combine that, these big hubs. With then the, the local deliveries are just with just regular electric trucks that only, you know, need to go a hundred, 200, 300 Ks between charges and it can kind of all work like that. But yeah, one of the hardest things is gonna be to get standardization because you know, sure if you’ve got.
Some company that’s working on wireless, charging over, you know, electrified roads that’s not gonna be compatible with overhead charging that you know someone else is working on. And so, Yeah, again, I think easier, easier to do in Europe where they’re much more willing to force companies to, you know, adopt standards.
You know, I think Europe is, is about to be forcing iPhones to change over to the USBC because they’re, you know, the compatibility is, is mandatory there. So yeah, I can see it happening there. That’s cool. I like
Joel Saxum: that one. I like that one.
Allen Hall: That one makes me happy. Electrical plugs should be the same.
Why wouldn’t they have the iPhone plugs? This thing? You know what I’m saying? Yeah. Like UK’s on two 40. Most of the world’s on two 40. We’re on one 20.
Rosemary Barnes: No, the problem is that you can’t just use an iPhone with any random charger. You need a special iPhone charger, and that’s not okay in Europe. Right. Yeah, they, they’re not saying, I mean, of course already iPhone is charging off two, two twenty volts in in Europe, Australia, and you know,
Allen Hall: Right.
You go to, you go to America and you got this nice, thin, sleek. Plug and then you go to the UK and you got
Rosemary Barnes: this big, do not get me started on how terrible the design of the American plugs that were there two parallel teeth that just want to fall out of the wall at any opportunity. , it’s like the Australian ones are angle who tells who stand out.
You put the plug in and it stays there. Yours a parallel and it’s not Way
Allen Hall: tells Rosemary. We’re getting now it’s. It can’t fall out. Gravity won’t let it . It’s
Rosemary Barnes: they do. They’re constantly just, they just out.
Allen Hall: So
Rosemary Barnes: you’ve got, you’ve got these like the little edges of the of the wall just sitting there for someone to stick a four and ate themselves.
It’s why you can only have tens. Because you can’t, you’re constantly touching them, so you have to make it safe to touch .
Joel Saxum: That’s how you can push your couch against it and bend it down. That’s what those are designs.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. 2, 2 20 volts is better. I would, Come on. You can’t, you can’t, You’re telling me that America has the best, the best system plays there.
Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah, sure we do. Well, , you know what’s with deal with 50 and 60 hertz, right? Can we stick to something that’s normal? Late 60 hertz? No, we have to have 50. Again, just there’s no, no reason for it. Nice. So the whole thing about plugs, you are absolutely right. So this is the discussion they should have about electric vehicles.
Cause they’re having it right now on Tesla versus everybody else, right? Tesla has a different plug and they’re, their Tesla chargers are different than everybody else’s. And so you have to have this adapter. So are they gonna standardize this stuff or do we, do we just go to etic coils in the ground and manically couple the energy in so that nobody has a connector?
So it’s connector. It’s all wireless charging.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but you still have a standardization issue cuz it’s not like every wireless charging system works with every other one. You, you know, you still have to
Joel Saxum: true if everybody cause So here’s, here’s one for you that most people don’t understand, and I’m sure you guys do, but wifi, right?
Wifi is not a thing. It’s a protocol. Yeah. Right. So it’s a protocol so that everything can communicate with each other. It’s not an actual like hook up to the wifi. It’s actually. Calling something Kleenex when it’s actually a facial tissue . Right. So if we could get some, if we could get a standard wifi is the ultimate standardization story o of of the world.
Yeah. Because no matter where you are, it probably is Yeah. The same.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. Joe, I think you’re are, you probably might, I haven’t thought about enough terms. I mean, even pencils are different in the UK than America, right? Some of the simplest things are not the same. They drive on the wrong side of the road.
We drive on the right side of the road. There’s just multiples of, of unevenness where America has clearly led the way, and yet others have decided. Did you say wrong
Joel Saxum: side and right side
Allen Hall: Yeah, I, I, I actually love the UK and Australia is pretty cool too. It is just that, it’s just that unless there is some standard that’s gonna be settled upon, we’re gonna have this continual problem. Yeah. That it, it’s not interchangeable. So if I wanna bring over my, my British Sports Car, ev, Sports Car to America, I may not be able to charge it.
That’s a huge problem, right? Mm-hmm. , my new Jaguar, I can’t plug it in somewhere, or it won’t work on the roads in America That. Big issue and they’re gonna have to find a way to solve it. And some of these early programs about charging electric vehicles are, are awesome. But I think Rosemary is probably right here that ultimately it comes down to compatibility.
We can figure out all the other details. It’s whether they’re gonna be compatible worldwide or not. That’s yet to be different. I think. Well,
Rosemary Barnes: we’re a long way away from What about worldwide compatibility? It’s compatibility within countries is, is already a big problem. And I, the Tesla charging network is already opening up to everybody in, in a lot of parts of Europe.
And it could do that because the plug was the same. Whereas to do the same thing in the US you’ll have to physically change. All of the, the plugs over or provide adapters for a long time and then start making Tess with a different you know, shape, shape hole to shove the plug into. So true. Yeah, I, I think that it’s like it.
It’s better to have standardization. I do think that the, the European system is, is better, but it does interfere with the, you know American competitive environment that allows companies a lot of freedom and allows them to get the advantage, which gives the incentive to actually bother to develop these things.
So it’s yeah, it’s kind of, it’s. Swings in roundabouts as advantages, disadvantages, both ways, but it’s certainly, yeah, definitely gonna be a challenge. I mean, how did you get there with, You don’t have, it doesn’t matter what kind of petrol kind of gas powered car you have. The, you can use the same petal.
Pump for every single one, right? Like there must be something that stops, you know, one company from eases from saying, you know, Oh, you need a, you know, different, different size or a different shape or, or something. Everybody got on board and made every, every car compatible with every service station.
So I feel like it’s, it’s within our power to solve this problem. Yeah.
Allen Hall: I feel like that was a monopoly at the time, right? Sun Oil Company, Joel stopped me if I’m wrong here cause I, I probably fell asleep during the history class, but Sun Oil pretty much owned all the oil in America at one point. So they probably decided what that was and then when they got broken up, all the divisions probably used, still use the same thing.
So maybe what we should do is have test left. Just make all the vehicles and we’d just be done with it. Maybe that’s, There you go. That’s the answer. There you go. Elon would appreciate that. So would a stock price,
Rosemary Barnes: Yes. My stock share portfolio would appreciate that.
Joel Saxum: And not, Not, And not se not stock advice.
Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah. We do not give it, You do not give investment advice on this show. Absolutely not.
Joel Saxum: You know, here’s a, here’s a good one for you. There’s standardizing those things. The only one that’s different is in some passenger vehicles that are diesel in the us. You can’t go to the truck ones because the truck ones are like this big, like the big truck ones, Right.
And they don’t, and they just don’t fit. But I believe that you should have like a square or a triangle hole for the diesel ones because I’ve, I, I have quite a few technician friends that have come over from like the UK or from Europe, that are driving rental trucks in the wind industry and they don’t know.
Difference between like, Okay. I know that the green pump means diesel usually, or in some states the yellow pump means diesel, but they just grab one and there’s a whole lot of ’em putting diesel fuel and gas trucks and gas are
Rosemary Barnes: diesel trucks the same size in the US so we should fix that. Were there different sizes in Australia?
So you can put petrol in a diesel car, but you Same can put diesel in a petrol car in Australia? I, I think that’s right. You can do, you can
Joel Saxum: do, You can do both
Allen Hall: here. You can kind of do both. Yeah. It’s not easy, but you can do both. You’re
Rosemary Barnes: right. Okay. That’s interesting. My mom did it once. . Yeah, my dad did it once, but I’m pretty sure he put in a diesel truck that he had borrowed.
And yeah, then you have to get it pumped out if you realize soon enough. .
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Oh yeah. Hopefully you realize soon enough. Yeah. All right,
Allen Hall: Rosemary, this is right up your rally, vertical access wind turbine, but not the normal vertical access wind turbine that you complain to me. This is a cool looking vertical access wind turbine.
It’s a flower, it’s shaped like a tulip, so it’s it’s flower turbines, which is now based in Texas. So they chose Lubbock as their home base to make these turbines, and I saw them down in San Antonio and I saw them. I thought they were cool looking. Now Rosemary informed me like, well, the super inefficient.
Okay, that’s probably true. That doesn’t mean they’re not cool looking, that they actually fit the decor of the buildings and things that are around. But they’ve made, I think it made us really smart decision. They didn’t put their factory in a place that was gonna be difficult to establish a company.
And they, they chose Texas, which is probably one of the easiest place to get a company up and rolling. And they chose LUT because that’s where Texas Tech is. so they can take the resources, the people coming outta Texas Tech who are engineers and bring ’em on over. So they have a, a ready made engineering system, a technical system to work at then, and it’s going ahead.
In fact, they’ve, they sold a one of their wind turbines to the band cold. and I know we all love Coldplay, right? So that, that, that is pretty cool. That had to be a pretty hard thing to do. So the Coldplay is taking the wind Turbin on tour to help reduce the emissions. So I dunno if it’s on top of a tour bus or is it set on a pole?
I don’t, Not sure what they’re doing, but that, that’s a pretty goal. Good way of actually introducing your technology to the world is to hook it up with one of the, probably one of the most world famous. Bands that is out there promoting clean energy. But the, the capacity of these things is not very big, right?
So the largest wind turbin they make is about a three to five kilowatt machine. So it’s, it’s not, we’re not talking megawatts here, everybody we’re talking kilowatts. So it’s, it’s more of a place a wind turbin for a home or a small business. But Rosemary Rose, Why is, why is this you know, not top of the heap in terms of wind turbines for buildings?
It seems like it’s a really kind of cool looking design.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, they, they look, they look, I guess some people would say that they look nicer than a normal wind turbine. But. The question I would ask is, do they look nice? They’re not having anything there at all, because that’s roughly how much electricity that they generate.
I mean, Coldplay taking one of these around with ’em. How? How big is it? I’m just on the website now. You can get five of their small size wind turbines, which have one meter high blades. And they make it six meters per second wind, which is, which is pretty windy. Definitely, definitely above the average of pr, pretty much anywhere people live.
In the, the US at a 10 meter height above the ground, you can expect 25 to 50 watts from the set of five. So, you know, let’s say co player bringing that around and. Generating 25 watts. I mean the, it’s not emissions free to drag something like this around with them on tour. I, I bet if someone did a life cycle on analysis, they would find that they’re emitting more for having this wind turbine and then for not having it.
And I. I dunno that that’s helpful for, I mean, it might be nice, it makes them feel nice that they’re, that they’re green. But it also kind of makes it seem like this is the kind of scale of solution that we need for the energy transition. And it’s absolutely ridiculous. I mean, 25 watts is nothing at all.
. So, yeah, I mean, I, I don’t see a lot of place for turbines like this at a lot of point in them beyond feeling smug that you have a wind turbine on your house for like, literally no reason. I did make a whole video about why I think I called it rooftop renewables. So, you know why solar power makes a lot of sense on roofs and why wind energy doesn’t, and it’s basically to, to do with the, the wind resource that you’re accessing.
Compared to the solar resource accessing. So, you know, solar power is roughly the same intensity, whether you’re on a roof or in a nearby solar farm. Whereas wind energy really depends that the amount of energy in the wind depends on the cube of the wind speed, and the wind is a lot slower, close to the ground, and it’s a lot slower in urban areas than it is in you know, in open, open, undeveloped areas.
So you end up, you know, with, if you’ve got half the, the wind speed, then you end up with one eighth of the power. And so it’s just not cost effective to put wind turbines in, in places where there’s not a good wind resource. And yeah, people. Don’t live in places with good wind resources and they don’t wanna put their turbine up on a 5,000 meter tower in their backyard and their , you know, neighbors probably don’t want that either.
So yeah, I, I do wish that,
Allen Hall: Is there a place for
Rosemary Barnes: a small wind though? There isn’t, Yeah, there’s a place for small wind. You talk about this before about, it’s for people who, who, and where is it? Who are off grid? They. Can’t or desperately don’t want to connect to the electricity grid, so then you can get a lot more reliability from having a combination of wind and solar.
It’s for people who do live in good wind areas. So, you know, like on the west coast of Jet Land and Denmark there’s a lot of farms there that have. Wind speeds and they, they have, it’s so common to see small wind turbines there. And I talked with a few farmers and they absolutely love them because they just are economic and they’re you know, they’re, they’re providing pretty reliable power of, you know, decent amount, a lot bigger than these ones you’re seeing.
And they’re of the traditional horizontal Lexus type, you know, variations on that theme. So, you know, they’re making twice as much energy for the same swept area as one of these flower wines would. And yeah, those are basically the two, the two places I think I, I cuz I’ve made this video and I always try my hardest not to be too negative about what I’m talking about.
And so I did come up with a bunch of places where I think that small wind or rooftop wind makes sense. And it was those two yeah, for, for off grid or where you have a good source. And then also for where you. Want to look cool and inspire people. That was the other one I came up with. I mean, there’s some, you know, nice skys cold.
The cold play skyscrapers that have been designed to, you know, funnel wind up to some turbines and I mean, they look, they look cool, they’re cool out there buildings. They’re supposed to, you know, like promote a vision of the future and inspire people. That primary goal is not to make a lot of electricity.
And if Coldplay. Honest that their primary goal is not to offset any meaningful amount of their emissions, then maybe that’s the same, same thing. They’re letting people know, Hey, wind energy exists. Maybe because maybe people are showing up to his concerts that didn’t know that there’s energy available in the wind.
Ma, maybe there’s something there, but , if they, Yeah, maybe if they were serious.
Joel Saxum: If they’re serious about it, they would play acoustically, .
Allen Hall: Well, you could count out the cold play tour of, of Australia that just got scratched off the calendar for sure. That whole week is, I
Rosemary Barnes: mean, if they would get an electric, they’re gonna come to America Electric tour bus would, would be a much better contribution I would suggest.
And yeah, I mean there, there would be a lot.
Allen Hall: You think they’re flying it? Do you think they’re riding in a tour bus? Rosemary? Really? Do you think they’re riding around in a bus, wouldn’t
you?
Rosemary Barnes: You’re talking about cold plate here. Isn’t that a lot nicer than packing everything up and getting on planes every day?
If you, Your stops are close enough. I think that’s more pleasant. No. No, If I had to,
Allen Hall: if James Brown set the bar back in the 1970s and he took a lit jet, right, James Brown, if, if the godfather of soul is taking a lit jet, then you better be sure that Coldplay is flying from place to place. Well cold play
Joel Saxum: an electric bus.
All the gear, their gear is on trucks, so
Rosemary Barnes: at least the wind turbine is traveling by truck. I, I hope that that’s true. Cause if they’re packing that up to put it on a Learjet, then I would say that’s a pretty. Pretty clear cut case of greenwashing. Yeah, I will admit Coldplay is not my favorite, my favorite band anyway.
But , I will admit
Allen Hall: that Coldplay is awesome and they should come to America. If they happen to come to Boston, I’m gonna go see them. So if you can just cancel the whole Australia tour date and come to the Northeast where you can sell some tickets. And we think wind turbines are.
Joel Saxum: And if they’ve got something to say, they can come on the podcast.
They can come on the
Rosemary Barnes: podcast. We would love to have. Yeah. And if they want someone that can help them go through their tour emissions and find meaningful ways to reduce that that then I can also help them, help them with that or help them find someone to do that for them. Be They may have done that.
In addition, let’s give them benefit of the doubt they did. That they went through, they reduced emissions as as much as possible and then added this turine so that it was, you know, they had something that people would write an article about and talk about you know, sustainability. It may, maybe it’s okay.
I, I don’t know. I, I don’t follow Coldplay in the news, so I, I didn’t know about it until you told me I wanted, They’re
Allen Hall: writing and they’re, Plus they need to get on YouTube and watch engineering with Rosie to kill the time and learn about renewable energy. Maybe that’s what they need to do. Yeah. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: So I, I would say to, to, to share something with the listeners as well, the biggest model that they have the, the blades are 16 ish feet high, and that’s three to five kilowatts.
So three to five kilowatts is the size of basically a small gas generat. That you may you see on a construction site or something like that. Or like if we’re talking to Blade techs around here, the same generator that runs your 360 degree platforms up and down is how much power the sink can create.
Yeah. Except that and, and you know, if you run two saws at the same times, it’ll pop the breaker ,
Rosemary Barnes: except that that’s their, they’re rated wind, but it also says check crew. Yeah. It’s a five kilowatt turbine. You can expect one kilowatt hour per hour, which makes it sound like they’ve potentially oversized their generator.
Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform, and be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to the Uptime Tech news, our weekly newsletter, and subscribe to Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rose, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
