Siemens Energy’s scrutiny of Siemens Gamesa unveils fresh worries – costs may surge past $5B! TPI highlights unforeseen expenses tied to blade issues, raising concerns about larger outlays. Tragic incident: Technician trapped in turbine hub in Spain. Legal hurdles emerge for EDF Renewables in Nebraska due to post-installation noise rule change. Phil Totaro addresses escalating restrictions on wind development – could ACP be the solution? After 18 years of permits, TransWest Express Transmission project, spotlighted by Joel Saxum, finally breaks ground. Discover our featured wind farm: Bison Wind Energy Center in North Dakota!
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Uptime 177
Allen Hall: Joel, this bear in China that everybody’s talking about. It does look like a guy in a bear suit. I gotta be honest, it moves like a guy in a bear suit.
Joel Saxum: I’m gonna tell you guys a story. I was gonna tell you this earlier, but this is a short one. So this is a very American thing and a very hillbilly in living in the sticks northern Wisconsin.
When I was a kid and growing up, we convinced one of our classmates that Bigfoot was real, Bigfoot is real well, that he was real and lived in the county that we were from. So one of our friends dressed up in a monkey costume, and we were, we were out looking for deer. And one night during the fall before, before the season, and we had this shining spotlight out, and a dude ran across the back of the field in a monkey costume.
Buddy freaked out, and then he was like, wait, we’ve gotta have proof of this. We gotta have him. And like, tried to grab a hunting rifle and was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We’re kidding, man. We’re kidding. Like, it’s not real. It’s, it’s, you know, it’s so and so in a monkey costume. And they’re like, he was like, I don’t know.
That looked like Bigfoot to me. Like, no, no, man. We’re messing with you. Only in Wisconsin. Yeah. I gotta look for you gotta make your own fun. You gotta make your own fun.
Allen Hall: Well, this week we have some fascinating news. Siemens Gamesa is having huge quality issues, which we all knew. But the, the, the amount which it may impact Siemens energy is growing higher and higher by factors of.
One x two x three x at this point. And we’re not sure where the pain is gonna stop, so we’re, we’re trying to keep track of that and, and figure out where Siemens and Siemens Gamesa are headed. And then TPI has had some recent blade issues and some warranty claims, repairs they have to go do that at this point are in the tens of millions of dollars to their bottom line, but they may be a lot higher based on noise we’re hearing back from the industry.
Rosemary Barnes: And we are gonna talk a bit about health and safety, following the unfortunate death of a wind turbine technician in Spain.
Phil Totaro: This week we’re going to also discuss the Milligan One project in Nebraska owned by EDF, which is facing noise curtailment restrictions after the project was already permitted and has been operational for years.
This reflects a growing issue in the United States where moratoriums and restrictions are being put in place in more than 44 states around the country and counties and townships, and it’s having potentially financially disastrous consequences for project developers.
Joel Saxum: So then after we discuss about some of these issues that are happening to curtail development we’re gonna talk about a victory.
So Wyoming Trans West Express Transmission Project finally permitted and moving forward, that’s gonna bring power from the Wyoming all the way over to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. And then along with that staying on that same thread, talk about some of the FERC interconnection changes, why, how they’re changing some permitting processes and how it might improve interconnection for a lot of renewables along the way.
And then lastly, of course, the wind farm of the week. We’re gonna talk about the Bison Wind Energy Center in North Dakota. And what’s unique about that
Allen Hall: project? I’m Allen Hall and I’m here with my good friends, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro and Rosemary Barnes, and this is your Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, Siemens Gamesa plans to delay delivery of turbines from their five x platform for up to seven months, amid a extensive failure rate investigation. Obviously the delays that attempt to address the turbine problems before delivery and hope to eliminate future issues now a report came out today, we’re recording on a Wednesday.
That this is gonna cost more than the previously estimated 1 billion euros. Now they’re talking about 1.5 to 1.7 billion euros with a top cap of around 2 billion euros. And it, it, Joel, as you have predicted, is affecting like upwards of 30% of the semen energies turbines worldwide at the moment on the onshore platforms.
Combination of problems, rosemary rotor blades, bearings pretty much so. Everything about those turbines is in trouble. You Now, in a worst case scenario, I saw, I think this actually came out today where they were there were some estimates that a cumulative, it could be upwards of 5 billion Euro problem.
Now a 5 billion Euro problem, Phil, does that just break Siemens Gamesa at that point, it’s not
Phil Totaro: helpful especially to Siemens Energy, who is. Obviously been very sensitive to this and has replaced c e o after c e o already at, at Siemens Gamesa and that’s before they were part of, you know, a hundred percent or close to a hundred percent part of the company.
So you can only imagine what’s coming if this continues to spiral out of control. What’s interesting is we actually did some analysis before the merger. That predicted, not necessarily that they were gonna have these blade issues, but like the, the level of complexity of their systems was going to mean that they were something like billions of dollars behind on profitability.
And we, at the time, this was back in like 2016, 2017, we didn’t even believe our own analysis. But we should have we should have trusted ourselves more because this is exactly what has is happening now. They’re, they’re not seeing profitability on every single product platform. They’re trying to maintain too many of these legacy platforms.
And now to have a teething problem with, you know, the five megawatt flagship onshore product on top of all of it, it’s, it’s really the most undesirable outcome. It, it’s echoes of my experience with Clipper windpower. If, if anybody in the industry
Joel Saxum: remembers that, you know, if you look at the market cap of Siemens energy, 12.5 billion euros.
So if you’ve, so if you’ve got a problem that’s worth possibly now we’re, we’re, what, what it looks like right now is it could be around 10% of the market cap value, but it’s possibly worst case scenario. You’re looking at 40% of the market cap value of, of write down. That’s, that’s, I don’t wanna say what it could do to a company, but it could.
It’d be
Allen Hall: really scary if that were to happen. And you know, one of the discussions I’m hearing a lot of rumblings, like it was all first, it began with Blade, blade, blade, blade. But now I’m hearing gearbox, everybody else hearing the same thing, like gearbox problems, gearbox problems on these five x machines and maybe even the four X machines.
That gearbox problems are expensive too. Those are, you know, it’s hard to get a new gearbox in a turbine, so that’s a long-term fix. If it’s
Joel Saxum: gearbox Siemens, right now, their service department, if they don’t have them, they should either acquire or be acquiring a company that owns cranes, because that’s gonna be one of their biggest costs.
All these major component exchanges, if they have to exchange blades, it’s crane after crane, after crane, after crane. And that’s just massive, massive costs. And if you’re giving that all to a subcontractor and you can’t control it, that’s tough.
Allen Hall: It seems like Engie also shut down another farm this week and they didn’t announce where, but that’s just the rumblings that Engie shut down a farm.
I. In Brazil. Okay. That, that was, is that what they had the blade break originally?
Phil Totaro: There, there was an issue. I don’t know if it’s the same project site but the, the issue with the gearboxes is also a Zed F issue. You know, I don’t know that it’s necessarily a manufacturing issue. It could be an operational issue with how the turbines are being run.
We certainly see that happening a lot in the United States where. Companies are basically running turbines into the ground for 10 years, and then Repowering because of the production tax credit. But I don’t even think that’s related to, to this issue for Siemens at all, and the gearbox issues at all.
So they, they’ve got work to do on diagnosing these, these problems and addressing it. Again, this was something that, you know Siemens Legacy, Siemens Wind had different gearbox suppliers, you know, German companies. And then they got, you know, Hanssen was then acquired was was Gomesa gearbox supplier then was acquired by zf.
These issues have kind of continued to kind of percolate, I guess, under the surface as. Supposedly the best of the Siemens Wind technology was brought together with the best of the Gomesa wind technology into this, you know, four x five x platform. And it’s it’s a bit of a, a, you know, so spot for, for everybody that this new flagship product is, is having this many
Allen Hall: issues.
What’s the reason why G Mesa has stuck with gearboxes? Well, it seems like a lot of the Siemens products were going to direct driving a lot of GE products. Were gonna direct drive, Vestas going to direct drive. Why? Why is the Fourex. Five x have gear boxes. Two,
Phil Totaro: two reasons. One is cost. And at the time, permanent magnets were a lot more expensive and harder to come by.
You didn’t have some of these new mines that exist now in Australia and Malaysia for rare earths. And I mean, you’ve see, you’ve even seen Siemens sign deals with. Linus and some of these other companies that, that actually provide, you know, raw material for magnets or finished magnets. So that takes care of their offshore machines.
But the reason why you’re going, even, even Goldwind who was using direct drive almost exclusively in their smaller onshore turbines, has had to go to a gearbox driven or a, what they call a medium speed solution. Basically, so it’s a one or two stage gearbox connected to a permanent magnet generator for their large offshore machines going up to the 16 to 18 megawatts.
The reason for that is basically torque capacity on, on the turbines. So it just you know, you’re, you’re spinning the rotor so slow, you know, you’re talking about like ten nine, ten eleven R p m with a direct drive unit. At like 16 megawatt plus versus, you know, something that could at least operate between, you know, 200 and maybe 500 R p m if you use a medium speed solution.
So it’s just easier on, you know, the it’s easier on the components to, to stick a little. A little two stage gearbox in there.
Allen Hall: That’s a fascinating development at Siemens Energy, and I’m not sure where they’re gonna go. They’re gonna have a, a financial report coming out in the next couple of days and we’ll get more insight there.
I know Joel, you predicted that they may kick that can down the road. It looks like they’re gonna try to hold that when they schedule it, which is, I think is August 7th. So by the time this comes out that have already happened, but we’ll have more info as, as the. Situation progresses and, and as we look sort of to towards the United States and away from Europe for a moment, TPI had a, you know, a QT results guidance published.
Now, TPI has had some blade issues more recently as, particularly with ge, and it seems like GE is rather upset about it, but it’s gonna cost TPI a little bit. So they’re expecting some warranty charges between 30 and $35 million. But net the, the Q two net sales were estimated approximately 380 million with a net loss of 70 to 83 million.
They expect to be back on track in the second half of of 2023. So even though TPI appears to be having some blade issues, it doesn’t seem to be impacting their bottom numbers all that much, which seems odd in comparison to what’s happening at Siemens. If
Joel Saxum: you look at the way that market is set up right, where there a supplier for ge.
Whereas Siemens is, is its own entity. I think there’s just some contractual stuff that looks different in there. There has to be for it only to be a 30 to $35 million you know, warranty charge in there because, you know, from the whisperings around around the industry, there’s quite a few of these blades out here that, that have some issues.
And we’ve seen the changes in the rumblings in the background of quality officers being installed, new c e o, different kinds of things like that. So. The 30 to $35 million warranty charges, but, you know, back charges, money lost. That seems low to me. I, I would expect it to be a lot higher. But we’ll see.
I think when I think that, again, having an s e c reporting crystal ball, I would be willing to bet that that 30 to 35 million number will grow in an, in the
Allen Hall: yearly report. Do you think they don’t know the scope of the problem? At the moment,
Joel Saxum: I think they’re trying to fix it as, as best they can now. Not know, not knowing what’s gonna come out the back end.
Allen Hall: Well, that’s a good way to address it though, if they can have a solution. And it does sound like part of at least some of the blade issues, they have a solution for. It’s just how fast they get out in the service.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And you know, again, there’s some contr contractual stuff floating around here in the wind industry between asset owners that have the, you know, a lot of em are GE turbines that these TPI blades are on, and the responses from either TPI or GE and the sharing of information back and forth, there’s pretty muddy.
So I think that there’ll be, there’ll be more to, more to come from it. And I don’t think this is the, the, the last, these numbers will
Allen Hall: move. More to come there too. Going back towards Spain, there was a death of a technician inside of a turbine. Now, every, there’s a lot of technicians that listen to this podcast and I always worry about those guys out there in the field ’cause it’s a tough job.
Right? And there’s, there’s, you can get killed a lot of different ways in a wind turbine. And it, it makes sense to, to follow all the safety procedures. Listen to the situation in Spain, at least what’s been reported to this point. It sounds like a technician was up in the hub or maybe trapped in the hub.
Not sure how that happens. If there’s a, a couple technicians who are supposed to be working together, how a single guy gets stuck in the hub, but he, he ended up, the guy that was stuck in the hub ended up calling for help the local fire brigade and police and everybody rushed out. The emergency services rushed out.
By the time they got there, he had passed away. Which sounds horrible. So it does sound like a lot of safety protocols were broken for this event to occur, or they had some severe equipment failures, one or the other. I, I wish we could get a little more detail about it because, you know, one of the things in these types situations, no matter how horrible they are, they do remind everybody.
Stick with your safety procedures, tag out, lock out, make sure you have someone with you. Right. That, and Rosemary, you’ve climbed a lot of wind turbines. It’s just Sounds awful.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And as it’s really challenging with this, the safety stuff with wind turbine, suppose you know, your average person, that just sounds like, well, you know, you should, you should do all the safety things, but I.
Planned in a lot of different countries and every country has different regulations. And then every company also has different regulations about, you know, what safety things need to be done, and. Lockout tagout is a pretty standard one, but then there’s, you know, disagreements about should you have your safety harness on at all times, even if you’re in the n cell.
And you know, do you need to have a rescue kit with you if you go into the blade? Sometimes they make you climb in the blade with your harness on and a rope attached in case you know, you would have a heart attack or something while you’re out there. So someone could pull you in. The thing is that it’s not actually safer to say more and more and more safety things because you always get to the point where people, technicians are overloaded.
If they can’t get their job done in their, you know, the amount of working hours that they have in a day, then they’re going to start trying to, you know, just make changes to be able to actually do their, do their job. And one that I have seen done in a few different sites is people don’t always do lockout tagout.
And one of the. Yeah. One of the, the reasons is because you, you don’t always have the exact same crew there all the time. Sometimes people do come and go and, you know, if the guy that went down to get whatever part you didn’t realize you had, if his key is with him and his lock is on the turbine, then you know, that can really hinder things and.
I definitely, on a couple of occasions, I had to speak up and say, look, I’m not comfortable being in there unless my lock is on there because, you know, I don’t do this every day. And so I, I’m really just not aware of what I’m not aware of. And yeah, as an infrequent climb, you’re kind of in the most dangerous situation of all because you have to trust the judgment of other people, but you don’t have that judgment yourself, you know?
’cause it’s your first time working on that side, or, you know, it might be a few months since you last climbed. So it’s really easy to just point the finger and say, you know what an idiot if he didn’t have his lock on the his own lock on the, the lockout tagout. But yeah, it’s just not how, how sites work.
And I, I think, you know, it’s very hard to have an argument with the, the safety team in a company. But I do think that the, the safest thing, safest system is to have the minimum number of safety. Requirements that are absolutely needed. And that way no one thinks about whether they’re going to do a procedure or not.
They just do them all, all the time. And you know, that’s that, I think that’s the safest thing when you don’t have to start thinking about which ones you’re, you’ve got time to do today. So if I Really sad situation.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I think to add to what Rosemary’s saying there is I know in the US there’s a shortage of technicians.
So what’s happening some places is a lot of technicians are being shuffled around. Right. Like we look at ge, e g if GE had a full service agreement on site, they used to have people permanently at all sites where those people know the turbine, they know their, you know, how, what their rescue protocols are, what the E r P is, all of these different things.
They have people’s phone numbers in their phones. They know how to get, get things accomplished. Now that you have more and more of those people just traveling, traveling, I know like blade technicians are always just bouncing from site to site, to site, to site, to site. Take in consideration, like, because I used to, I used to be in the oil field.
Every site you went to new orientation. Here’s how we do safety. Here’s the things you need to know for this site, that that stuff is not to be breezed past, right? It’s there for a reason. So paying absolute attention to that. And then, you know, like Rosemary said, you might have. It might be Rosemary and Phil and Allen today, and it might be Joel and Claire and Rosemary tomorrow, or like Bill and Bob and, and Jessica might swing over.
And you don’t know these people. You don’t normally work with them, so you don’t know how they kind of work through things. Or you, this may be the first time that you climb you know, and SS G r E 1 4 5 system. You may know the sg e two three, but that’s a completely different turbine. So, There’s the, and, and I to, not to rag on the industry, but I think that the, the wind industry for how dangerous it is actually has a pretty good safety record in general in the us Like coming from the oil and gas world where it’s bad things happen all the time.
And the wind industry with the relative exposure to risk of people, you know, hanging on ropes, working at heights, dropped objects, all these things that can happen. We do a pretty good job as a, as a, as a group of controlling those, but yeah, I think that’s, it’s just important to make sure that we’re abiding by all, all of the things that are in place on each site, and making sure that you don’t breeze through your orientation.
Pay attention to it. Lightning is
Phil Totaro: an act of God,
Allen Hall: but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory l p s so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
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Joel Saxum: and schedule a call today.
Allen Hall: Well in Nebraska, the operator of the Milligan One Wind Farm in Saline County is taking legal action against the County Board of Adjustment. Milligan One is a 99 turbine 300 megawatt project that won operational in May of 2021.
It’s a combination of vests, V one tens, semen, esa, two point sevens, and ESA 4.5 machines. It’s operated by EDF renewables and they invested about $350 million into the site and created about 200 construction jobs while they were building it. And they’re about to pay a hundred million dollars in property tax for the lifetime of that project while the, the county Board of Adjustments imposed a retroactive noise limit on the turbines and the limit is really low.
Now the million one project was approved by the county back in 2016 when there, and there was no wind turbine noise requirement back then. And obviously this is creating a huge conflict. And they’re gonna end up in court. Clearly. They have been in court and asking a, the, the operators, asking the judge to, to basically stay the regulation and let them to keep operating because, If they do have to shut down, they’re talking about $120,000 a day and losses from that site.
This is a big deal. Now this, this situation is not necessarily unique. There’s a lot of, of, of counties and jurisdictions around the United States that are putting in restrictions on wind turbine development, wind turbine noise some of the. Flicker requirements have been popping up more recently and it has become, it was sort of localized Phil for a long time, and now it seems to spread, so, like large parts of where I’m from in Nebraska, there’s, there’s several counties that are essentially putting regulations that prohibit large developments of, of wind energy.
Same thing in Ohio. We’ve seen similar things there, and I know you’ve been, you and Tel Store have been following it a lot more closely than I have. Maybe you ought to. Give everybody a little bit of background here on what’s happening out there.
Phil Totaro: Thanks, Allen. Yeah, so this, this has been as you said, a growing challenge for the industry.
What started off a few years ago is just, you know, a few kind of quote unquote anti wind noisemakers were, or troublemakers. We’re, we’re basically now getting, you know, funding together, and I’ll give you three guesses where the funding might be coming from. You’ll only need one. But the, the reality is that this is escalated into a rather serious situation now where there was a report actually put together by Columbia University Law School.
It was originally published in 2021 updated in 2022 and again in March of 2023. Published may of this year, and based on their most recent update, They have identified at least 44 states that have either a county and township level moratorium restriction or something that precludes wind and solar development as inclusive of nine states that have you know, like a statewide, you know, covering a blanket thing, covering all counties within, within the state.
Now the only one state that’s actually seen a repeal of that has been Illinois. But even in that case, I mean you, what you have now is a local populace that used to take great advantage commercially from, you know, having these easement payments and, and. You know, wind turbines on their farms and, and whatnot to communities that are now getting together and saying, I mean, even since this report was published in May that has said there are 228 county level restrictions across the 44 states in the us.
There are 293 wind and solar projects that have been either blocked from being built or delayed significantly and materially to have adjustments made for either noise or shadow flicker, et cetera. This is becoming an issue. For the entire industry. And like I said, I mean, people who used to take great benefit from wind and solar, you know, on their property or in their community, are now opposing any additional development.
Even if it’s not gonna be in their county anymore. You know, there, there may be sites that, that are going in, in adjacent counties and. They don’t even wanna see it happening, happening there.
Allen Hall: What happened? What’s, let’s go, what happened when American Wind Energy Association went, awe used to go out and talk all the, the local people in the county level and, and was, and had a, a big push.
There’s a lot of proponents of wind. Not that long ago. That seems to have dramatically shifted over the last
Phil Totaro: couple of years. And look for, for those who know me and have been following what we’ve been doing for a while, I, I’m gonna get into my I’m gonna make a movie reference now, but it’s the movie Network in 1976, directed by Sine Ette.
You know, some of you will know the reference. I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore. At the end of the day, you know, my, my own, you know you know, impression of Peter Finch, not withstanding the, the, the real issue here is
why has this been allowed to escalate when, you know, it’s fantastic that we can have federal policy for permitting reforms. You know, faster interconnections, et cetera, et cetera. P T C extension, that’s all great, but if you can’t actually build projects and if you’re having problems at a grassroots level, why has this been allowed to escalate?
That’s really the question on leadership and why the shift was made when, you know, the American Wind Energy Association was a standalone association prior to the merger of solar and energy storage. For ACP the American Clean Power Association, why has there been a fundamental shift from grassroots or just effectively ignoring grassroots policy to entirely focused, almost entirely focusing on federal policy?
As I’ve said, I mean, it’s great that you can have a production tax credit, but if you can’t build a project, those 293 projects that I mentioned before, That came up in that Columbia University report. Those independent power producers are just as mad as I am about this.
Allen Hall: And if you can retroactively kill a project that’s been developed, that’s a huge risk for the industry Who’s gonna do that?
If a, if a county, like we talked about in Nebraska, if a county can say the noise limit has just been dramatically reduced, you gotta stop operating your turbines and all that, hundreds of millions of dollars just goes down the drain. That can’t happen, right? That that there’s no way that wind developers are going to proceed in that state or around, around that area.
If that continues, and it seems like ACP should have more of a role in trying to understand what the dynamics are and come and stop this going off the deep end, because when their prohibition’s put in place, once they’re established, particularly in county and state level, they’re really hard to back out, right?
It’s a big ordeal. Not, it’s a bigger deal to unwind them. It’s easier, it seems like, to get them installed, to get them off takes a lot more, a lot more
Rosemary Barnes: work. But don’t you think it, the risk extends way beyond wind energy to just being pretty scary to any kind of business in general and the area that you know, the rules can change after you’ve already laid down your, your capital and, and brought a project to yeah, to this place They.
Pulled the rug out from, from under you. I, I think that, I mean that sort of risk of seeming too risky for any kind of business, that’s the kind of fear that stops governments from doing this sort of thing usually. So I’m just really surprised that you would want your, your region to, you know, you, given that you want to continue to have business in your region and have jobs and that sort of thing.
You know, today it’s wind farms they don’t like, but who knows what it will be
Joel Saxum: tomorrow? Some of these rules so no county or state or municipality wants to come out and say, we’re banning wind turbines or we’re banning solar. Nobody’s gonna do that because that doesn’t politically look good. But some of these, and, and this is important to understand, some of these restrictions effectively do do that, right?
There’s one in, we like Wheeler County. No wind turbine within five miles of a dwelling. When was the last time you were in many places? I mean Australian Outback. Yes. Five miles from a dwelling. I can see that. But in the us even in remote stretches of the US five miles from a dwelling is tough unless you’re in a national forest.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, we had that in a, in Australia it’s it’s like, can remember which part, but some, somewhere it was, you could have a coal power plant closer to someone’s house than you could have a wind turbine. That’s
Joel Saxum: ridiculous. Like this, like there’s another one in here, three miles from property lines. So there’s another level to the argument here, right?
Because if you’re saying three miles from property lines, okay, now you’re stepping into different territory where it’s only the largest of large basically farms in these areas or, or cattle grazing land that can do that. Well that’s owned also those lands are owned by large corporations. So there’s some, there’s some weirdness there.
But I think what one of my biggest issues with this is something that I’ve had in the past. Is it’s less of a technical argument and more of a political argument, whereas it’s, it’s you know, we used to be a country where the, the, a lot of people, even though you may have said, I’m conservative, I’m liberal, I’m centric, I’m whatever, libertarian.
There’s a lot more people that were in the middle in the past. Willing to have the conversations and the extremes were smaller. Now the extremes are growing and the people in the middle are getting small, that that portion of the general US population is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. So you get more of these extreme views and these rules from these counties and these municipalities here are, they’re designed to kill off wind because wind is looked at as this green transition.
This is a, and this is a weird thing to say, but that’s looked at as some liberal ideology thing. I come from a very conservative area and. Wisconsin. And when I tell people that I work in the wind industry as opposed to the oil and gas industry anymore, they call me a trader. I can’t believe you’d be doing that.
Blah, blah, blah, blah. Like and to me it’s that again right there, like, oh, oh, electric vehicles are stupid, blah, blah, blah. Well, that is not a technical argument. That is a political argument. And I think that that’s part of the big problem here in, in the United States and where a lot of these rules are coming from as well.
My comments, aside from the fact that there should be, there is more things that we could be doing as an industry, especially from our industry leadership, to be helping to influence some of those conversations. I completely agree with you on that one, Phil. But it’s, but the problem stems in my mind from political arguments and that’s frustrating.
Phil Totaro: And Joel, at the end of the day, the, the consequence is what Rosemary touched on before. It’s the fact that you are going to dissuade investors from wanting to park money in renewable energy project development. And if that starts happening, then it doesn’t really matter what everybody’s political view is about anything.
A acps not gonna exist. The industry’s not gonna exist in the form that it currently does. We’re gonna get a lot smaller, very fast. So we, you know, if, if you’re gonna be a, an institution that is supposedly doing things for the good of the industry, then you need to make sure that the industry thrives in an environment in which it’s able to do business.
I. If they can’t do that and they can’t facilitate investment coming to this industry and this market, then they need to get outta the way and let somebody else do it.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, when you’re, when you’re one of these communities, the majority of all of these communities where wind is, is prevalent in their rural communities.
Rural America right now needs cash injection. They need capitalism to come in and support those towns. They need. You know, the school districts need money. The, if you drive a lot of places, it’s, it’s a sad state. When I drive a lot of places across the country, I travel by car a lot. And you go through these little towns and you’re like, man, what happened to this town?
Like, it looks like it was this big booming, you know, city at one point in time with all these things going on, and it’s just broken down, building after, broken down building everywhere. That’s frustrating to see. And so if you’re gonna do that, and then on top of it, Basically bite the hand that may feed.
You’re doubling down on going
Allen Hall: backwards. It’s become a state by state problem. I know when we drove across the Midwest last September we in Nebraska, that we drove through Nebraska and into Colorado. And so as you’re driving kind of in southern Nebraska, you can see wind turbines. I think it was in Kansas, and you could see them in Colorado.
Once you cross the state line, it’s like, oh, there’s all these wind turbines, like right close. Right. So if you’re sitting in Nebraska looking over those, that, that, that site next door to you physically that’s got a hundred million dollars in that community and you don’t, you know, at some point, does that neighborly thing become a, a visual concern like, We’re trying to pay for a new school and we don’t have any money.
We need a new firetruck. We don’t have any money, and yet I drive 20 miles down the road and they’ve got all shiny new equipment. I think that leads to the lasting impact that will start twisting some arms eventually. Because you’re right, Joel, a lot of the rural communities right now are really tough shape, right?
Fiscally, they’re in really tough shape, but their towns have dwindled, the families have left. There’s, there’s just a shrunken hu left of what they once were. 50, 70 years ago. It’s a shame
Joel Saxum: drive through West Texas and go through some of the counties that have oil and gas in ’em and see the nice roads and the, the things they’ve got going to the, the a hundred million dollar football stadiums for the kids and stuff.
Right. Cross the border into New Mexico, outside of Hobbes and Carlsbad. There’s nothing, the oil, the oil field stops and those towns are going bankrupt and it’s brutal to watch, but it’s the same thing that’s being created in the wind industry. By
Allen Hall: these rules. Hopefully ACP can step in and bring some sanity to this.
’cause otherwise, Phil’s right. It’s just gonna continue and you’re gonna have large swaths of the United States where wind turbines and solar are not gonna be permitted at all.
Joel Saxum: That one’s a crazy one to me. Who would want stop a solar plant? Insulate. Like what does that do? They’re six feet off the ground.
I mean, that’s, that’s not. That’s, that is a purely political argument,
Allen Hall: sort of. I I think it’s a visual thing that in farmland areas, they don’t want all the farmland covered up with, with solar panels. I, I could see that being a, a, a topic point at the local coffee shop that I would see that being real.
Right.
Joel Saxum: That is, that’s a political argument,
Allen Hall: Allen. It’s sort of, it’s, it sort, it sort of is, and like here in Massachusetts, a lot of farmland has been covered up by, Solar panels. Yeah. Well, yeah, but now not so much in Nebraska and Iowa. That’s, that’s not gonna happen. But it does feel like you, you can watch it happen in parts of the United States.
So those discussions, you, you’re right, Joel, those discussions do become political, but at the end of the day, if there’s passing legislation,
Joel Saxum: you’re in trouble. If you wanna look at net positive for power generation, The amount of acreage that’s used for biofuels in the US with corn and soybeans. If that was covered in so solar panels, you’d be way better off.
Well,
Allen Hall: it had that I’ll give you the news article I saw again today. Remember the solar panel site? I think it’s in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska. It’s also in Nebraska. They got hit by the huge hailstorm. It destroyed that big solar site that’s showing up in a lot of news reports, like this is the future of solar.
That solar’s gonna fail, you’re gonna have a hailstorm. Right? So it does build into the, why are we putting the solar thing out there if it just can’t withstand a hailstorm, it’s, it’s like, why can’t the wind turbine take a tornado argument? Right? It’s nonsensical, but it is leading the discussion. I.
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In Wyoming, there is a groundbreaking happening for the Trans West Express Transmission Project. Now that’s happening out in Carbon County, Wyoming. If you’ve been out that way, it’s, it’s a pretty real community. And that transmission line is gonna be heading about 730 miles to the southwest towards Las Vegas, and it’s gonna power Los Angeles, Vegas, Phoenix.
At some point this is a big deal. The US Secretary of the Interior was out during the groundbreaking and emphasized how helpful this is to have these type, type of projects happening. And it’s all part of, you know, the Biden’s administration’s initiative to, to electrify the United States.
Well, it, it is interesting and it’s great to see that happening, and I’m sure once it’s done it’s gonna be fantastic. Now they’re, they’re, they’re gonna connect this transmission line up to 600 wind turbines. Up in Wyoming. So it’s gonna be one of the larger sites for wind turbines in Wyoming for sure, even in the Midwest.
But this project took 18 years to, to permit. That’s insane. Right. And there’s an initiative going on, and FERC just recently put out a rule trying to speed up the process of getting connected to the grid because every, it seems like there’s a lot of projects in the queue. That are not being connected because of delays.
You name ’em. And, and Phil knows better than me, but it seems like there’s just a ton of delays in the existing process.
Phil Totaro: There are, and basically what this change does is it, it moves us from like a first come, first served or first reviewed process to a You know, if you’re ready to go, then you’re gonna get your, your, you know, review and rubber stamp.
You know, if, if your interconnection analysis is completed and all your other analysis is, is ready to go then you’re going to, you’re gonna jump to the, to the front of the queue, particularly if you’ve got, you know, some type of a PPA in place as well. You’re not just jumping on the, the merchant market.
That’s, that’s one important and good change. And something that Rosemary brought up you know, before we, we started today was that you know, a lot of these things are not necessarily being reviewed in bundles. And that’s another thing that the FERC change is, is doing, is that they’re gonna start bundling projects that are co-located.
And we’ll theoretically interconnect to the same substation or a brand new substation or an upgrade. And that cost is gonna be, the cost allocation’s gonna be looked at, and the cost allocation might even be shared amongst all those project developers as opposed to one company pays for an upgrade and then everyone else benefits off that upgrade for
Allen Hall: free.
So they’ve installed a number of deadlines and penalties for developers and also for the transmission line. Companies. That’s different than what has privileged to been there. There’s been really no penalty to apply. Right. And it seems like there’s a lot of solar sites and some wind, but it seemed like solar was the big one.
Where they would just because they knew the interconnection was gonna be the long lead item, was that they just go apply before they even had financing or have even had the land to go to go make this project happen. Now they’re going through a filter where they have to show that they have all those, their ducks in a row basically to make sure that that project is really going to happen.
Otherwise, you’re just wasting everybody’s time when they’re doing all this analysis work for a project that. It’s got 5% chance of being completed. It wasn’t that part of the bigger change that that FERC
Phil Totaro: made. Yes, it necessarily helps reduce there. There’s a significant amount of, of folks that are in the queue because again, when you have kind of first come, first served queue interconnection queue.
You could have people sitting there holding up the rest of the line while, I mean, it’s, it’s just like, you know, any other super, you know, the queue in the supermarket or something like that. You know what happens when you know you’re sitting there and, and somebody in front of you wants to write a check to pay for their groceries.
It holds up the whole line because they’re not ready like everyone else is, you know? He
Joel Saxum: is waiting. So I want, I want just talk one second about Okay. What this project means. So we’re talking about, a little bit about what, how FERC is gonna is changing the rules about how we’re gonna basically build out the grid, build out what we connect to it.
That’s all fantastic. But this project specifically Wyoming, if you’ve ever spent any time there, has a crazy wind resource, amazing wind, I mean, Everywhere you go, unless you’re on the top of a, or on the side of one of the mountains, many mountains there. The wind isn’t blowing there, but everywhere else it’s blowing.
Like you gotta hold onto your hat while you’re walking around, right? The whole state is like that. However, the whole state only has about 450,000 people. I. So there’s not a lot of demand locally. Your demand centers are a little bit in Rapid City, a little bit in Cheyenne, a little bit down to Denver, maybe up into Montana, Jackson Hole a little bit, but there’s not a whole lot of demand.
What this does is it creates a pipeline, creates a transmission line, but a pipeline to take that demand elsewhere to major demand centers like. Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, those same things. So there’s a lot of, I, I believe that this will bring a massive wind boom to Wyoming. The other side of it, besides the fact that they have a, the wind resources are massive.
There’s, there’s huge private land ownership in Wyoming. There’s a lot of people that they don’t even own. Like, oh, how many acres do you have? The answer isn’t in acres. The answer’s in square miles. There’s, there’s sheep, there’s sheep farmers there that I know just north of Casper that have 150, 170 square miles of land that they own.
Like that’s insane. So the development of wind projects would become much easier. Easy, easy, easy, because you’re not dealing with all kinds of stakeholders trying to figure all these things out. The state of Wyoming is very, very much kind of hands off if the landowners can do what they want to do as long as a.
Like, so in a case of a wind project, if the, the transmission is there, the off take, it’s, it’ll be gangbusters, I think to connect all along this thing through u, I don’t know the, I don’t know the regulatory environment in Utah, but ac across the way from Wyoming, so one of these wind farms that we’re talking about here, this three gig or this 600 windmills, that’s a phase of this wind farm that’s gonna be connected to this thing.
The development’s been going by Pacific Corp. And Pacific Corp has been working on this wind farm. For years, and it’s supposed to be a wind farm complex onshore that’s gonna be up to three gigawatts. So they’ve been putting in roads and pads and doing civil work already for the last four or five years, building roads and everything where they’re gonna build this wind farm.
They’ve just been basically waiting for this transmission line to be put in to, to move forward on it. So I mean that right there in the next, it’s like a five phase project, three gigawatts of wind in one spot. That’s. That’s by far and away the largest wind complex in the United States by about three times, I think.
Allen Hall: So it’s, it’s taking longer to put wind turbines in Wyoming and connect it to Las Vegas than it did to build the Hoover Dam. I. That was, that was an electrification project, right? The, the, the power from that went to Los Angeles, Phil, am I right about that?
Phil Totaro: Yeah. A lot of the power went to Los Angeles.
And actually, I mean, that’s what’s interesting about the choke Cherry and Sierra Madre projects is again the power is gonna, thankfully through this new pipeline, it’s. Going to be distributed in a lot of other places where they have flowed and they have demand. So, you know, transmission is obviously a necessary tool to be able to help facilitate that kind of, you know, market balance.
And, and we need to have more
Joel Saxum: of it in the Western states. If you’ve never been out there as well or don’t know this, there’s a lot of Bureau of Land management. There’s a lot of federal land. And whenever you touch federal land with anything, whether it’s oil and gas development, a road, a campsite, whatever you wanna do, there’s a lot of oversight, right?
So it’s little things like I’ve, I’ve worked all over Utah and oil and gas, so you can be walking around on a whole hundred square mile oil and gas exploration project, and then someone will find this one type of cactus that’s the size of your laptop on the ground, and it will shut the whole project down.
You have a lot of different stakeholders there with a lot of first Nations tribes and stuff out there as well that are wanting to protect their land. So there’s, it’s difficult, and I can understand the, the permitting process, taking a lot of years to get these things done ’cause of the stakeholders that are involved.
But now that this one is going it will be a, a, a difficult project to construct, but it’s gonna bring big things for that part of the country I think.
Allen Hall: So in Australia, Rosemary, do they just run over the turtles and ignore the indigenous people? Is that what it happens there? ’cause it seems like the projects go so much faster in Australia than they, than they do in the United States, so
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think that that’s a reason why it faster sometimes.
Both those things happened. There was an example of a mining company that just blew up an an aboriginal site of significance. You know, tens of thousands of years old. And I just blew it up and were like, oops. So it’s not transmission exactly, but you know, same sort of vibe. And I mean certainly there are, you know, when endangered animals.
Identified they’re supposed to slow things down. Ground parrots is a, a common one that I’ve seen coming up. There’s a yeah, we have some, some rare, rare parrots. You know, like there’s a lot of issues with koala habitat, for example. It’s like, okay, so these specific trees that you’re gonna chop down, the koalas don’t have to live in those specific trees.
They could, you know, move somewhere else. But the issue is that, If every site gets assessed on its own and you see, oh, the animals could move elsewhere, then you end up with, you know, koalas specifically. Yeah. I don’t know if they’re actually vulnerable now, but they’re certainly, like, they’re in a, they’re in a, a bad state now.
It’s pretty point that a country like Australia, it could let it’s most iconic animal you know, get that point. I think the real difference between. Australia and the US is just that the government in Australia doesn’t really have to get the farmers or, you know, landholders on board. They prefer to, because, you know, things are, are hard when the community’s not on board, but in Australia are allowed to just say, we’re doing this and then go ahead and do it.
And so you know, that’s not the first preference and they don’t usually do it, but it, the option, everyone knows the option is there and that, that helps in the negotiation, you know, helps you from going too hardball if you know that they’re. Could just do it anyway and give you
Allen Hall: nothing. The Wind Farm of the week is the Bison Wind Energy Center in Oliver and Morton Counties in of all places North Dakota, and that’s a huge wind farm.
It was built in really four phases with the capacity of, of half a gigawatt. That’s 500 megawatts for everybody in Australia. That’s a
Rosemary Barnes: dick. That should have gone the other way. You probably used some sort of weird like, One pound, I don’t know.
Joel Saxum: Gigawatts. Megawatts in Fahrenheit. Yeah.
Allen Hall: The site uses Siemens 2.3 and Siemens 3.2 machines.
And the unique thing about this site is that it’s. It’s powering Minnesota, so all the energy runs on a high voltage DC transmission line that travels four little over 450 miles between North Dakota and Minnesota. And that’s unique ’cause there’s, I don’t think there’s a lot of long distance DC lines set up like that in the United States.
Now the, the DC line is ancient old too. This Minnesota Power purchased this high voltage transmission line in 2009, but the, the site that, that transmission line is like 45 years old, so they just applied to modernize it, which is terrific. Right? So they’re talking about upgrading everything and it should, that.
Project will be complete in in 2028 to 2030, somewhere in there. So some cool stuff happening up in North Dakota. So Bison Wind Energy Center, you are our wind farm of the week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News or weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
