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The team discusses the job cuts at Siemens Gamesa and the challenges of finding skilled wind energy workers in the U.S. They also touch on Mitsui O.S.K. Lines and MOL Drybulk’s move to outfit ships with wind propulsion technology from Anemoi Marine Technologies to reduce fuel consumption and emissions.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Allen Hall: Residents in Evan an English Town are complaining about the noisy chickens. There was a flock about 100 feral chickens. Now, Joel, down in Texas, you have feral hogs. They are everywhere. But I have not seen feral chickens. Feral chickens are easier to get a hold of.
Joel Saxum: Then the feral hogs, I think, but the chickens you got to watch out for because they can’t survive in the heat by themselves They got to
Allen Hall: have some shade.
Dude, do chickens travel in packs like wolves? You know what I’m saying? What is it? What does a feral chicken flock look like?
Joel Saxum: I don’t know if it’s the same they have the same goals as a flock of wolves or a pack of wolves But they do travel in groups like
Allen Hall: turkeys it’s this, it’s something that happens down in Australia too, Rosemaridia, feral chickens.
It seems like a UK event.
Rosemary Barnes: No, we have native chickens. There’s a lot of native, they’re just a native bird. That is a kind of chicken, and yeah, they run around being chickens in the wild.
Allen Hall: It seems like the chickens are the most defenseless creatures on the planet, right? And because one, they’re so tasty, and two, they have no defenses.
Rosemary Barnes: They play chicken.
Allen Hall: Ah, the sage grouse is worse.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, the pheasant is the stupidest animal, the stupidest bird, I think that’s why I always think it’s yeah, like particularly lame when people go hunting for pheasants, which I found out in Denmark that they’re not even native. They bring, they found a stupid pheasant.
Stupid easy to kill bird and then they restock it for all these people to hunt. It’s so sad.
Joel Saxum: I once referred to pheasant hunting in the United States as the bowling of hunting.
Rosemary Barnes: Like you could run up and grab one with your hands. They’re so dumb.
Philip Totaro: No skill required.
Allen Hall: Siemens Gamesa is making some moves. They plan to cut 4, 100 jobs, according to CEO Jochen Eichholz. In an internal letter to staff, so you can find this news article pretty much anywhere at the moment because it’s really important the company aims to adapt to lower business volumes, particularly in the 4X and 5X machines, which they evidently are not selling and some reduced activity in non core markets India being one of those evidently also, and they’re trying to streamline their portfolio, right?
So despite the job cuts, I cold stated that the goal is to maintain a stable workforce by shifting jobs and hiring in other parts of the division. Now, Phil, I assume this is wrapped around India, that the, they’re going to sell that factory in India. And then I still think they’re going to have some layoffs in Denmark and in Spain, but they’re not, I’m not being specific yet, but isn’t this like the precursor to those layoffs in the union factories that they need to give them advance warning that this is coming and this letter is starting that process?
So I, I assume Spain and Denmark are going to be impacted and India obviously is going to be sold. So what does this all mean and where is Seamus Gamesa headed?
Philip Totaro: Yeah first of all, it’s unfortunate that they’re having to downsize this much, but it’s the net result of it taking so long for them to get back to selling the four to five megawatt platform that had these played quality issues.
As far as where the company’s going at this point, they’ve already publicly stated they’re going to focus more on core markets, which is really what, frankly, a lot of companies have been doing lately, the, but for them, that means Western Europe and the U. S. And, but they’ve got to have products to sell.
And, while they’re not generating revenue, workforce reductions are almost a necessity. They’re probably going to have, and already have, plants that are close to, if not already idled. This is just the unfortunate consequence of of all these product quality issues.
Joel Saxum: Question for you, Phil. The On your Intel store, basically database, or you could, you guys watch the news. You see basically everything that’s going on. When was the last time you saw a major Siemens Gamesa onshore sale of equipment? Of turbines. Someone said, Hey, we’ve contracted since Mesa for
Philip Totaro: They’ve been selling their direct drive, their legacy direct drive turbines in Japan.
There’s been a number of projects there. They’ve sold some of the 3 megawatt, 132 meter rotor turbines in different markets, including Africa. But they haven’t really been selling anything. They were intending to sell the four to five megawatt platform in the U. S. They’ve been selling some of the six megawatt one seventies in Scandinavia and Brazil and offering it for sale in Australia.
But that’s about it. You’re, Joel, I guess to your point, it’s, it, but it’s been kind of dribs and drabs of those kind of sales. The, so for instance, the Direct Drive 4 megawatt 130 meter rotor that they sell in Japan, again, that’s based on the legacy Siemens design but that’s also, selling like, Maybe a maximum of about 20 units at a time for either new projects or repowerings that are going on in Japan all the other markets where they’re selling turbines other than the six megawatt 170, where, you know, again, throughout Scandinavia and Brazil, where they’re getting somewhat larger orders, most of the orders they’re getting for anything else is, in the hand, the handfuls, few, two, three dozen of units.
It’s not big orders.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, that’s my kind of the direction of the question. I guess it’s a little bit loaded, but you watch here in the U. S., right? And it’s, you’re just not seeing it. The last time I saw, say Vesta secures order for, X amount of V 150s or GE, Sol, like the big Sunzea project and, and Alan, you and I talk regularly about seeing turbine blades move around on the highways down here in Texas.
I’m like, yeah, I saw a bunch going this way. I saw a bunch going that way. None of those blades are Siemens Kamesa blades. They’re, they, like you said earlier in the, this little section here, 4, 100 staff cuts, that’s got to happen at some point in time, just based on the lack of sales performance.
So coming, bringing, bringing in the troops and have to cut some fat out. And then streamlining the portfolio is a big one for me. We’ve heard GE say this as well. We’re going to cut down on so many, having, so many options and so many of these and so many of that and get back to a.
A core offering that’s easier to scale up, easier for the supply chains to manage, easier to, for logistics. And should, in all reality, reduce some quality issues and speed up the
Allen Hall: So while they’re losing jobs at Siemens Gamesa, the latest report from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory said that we need about 120, 000 workers in the United States by 2030 if the current hiring and training trends continue.
The study by NREL found that wind energy firms are experiencing increasing hiring difficulty for both entry level and experienced positions compared to 2020. Which seems odd, Joel. The top reasons cited include a lack of applicants, insufficient experience among candidates and inadequate education and training.
Meanwhile, students and recent graduates interested in wind energy careers report barriers, such as a lack of exposure to the industry in coursework, uncertainty about available jobs and difficulty finding opportunities in desired locations. So something is amiss. If there are so many jobs. Available, but the students don’t know that they’re there.
Isn’t that the point of NREL, maybe Department of Energy and some others to try to connect them together? ACP? ACP is, yeah, another one, and that’s what happened?
Joel Saxum: There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of oddities around this too. So we were at ACP back a month ago or so, something like that, three weeks ago.
And they had the collegiate win competition there. And there was a massive turnout for that. There was A lot of college teams I would say over 10 easily and that’s, to get the funds together and to put these projects on and do this, that’s a big undertaking for a university. So there’s a lot of money involved there.
There was also a really cool section they had where You know at most of these conferences you have e posters or you have the poster kind of setup where people present projects and this And that the other thing and there was a Section of that they had that was just for students and there was a ton of them that were doing a ton of students that I saw were doing capstone projects for the end of their engineering degree or end of their environmental sciences degree or whatnot about wind that weren’t necessarily from wind industry like focused You schools.
And that was great to see. So from that side, and I’m talking in two different, two different lanes here, basically, but from that side on the engineering and technical at the university level side, I saw a lot more, I think basically players at the, at ACP than I have in the past. So I wasn’t happy about that.
Now to switch on to what we’re talking about here, NREL and the employment part for the, on the technician side. There’s something odd about this because I’m always on LinkedIn, and I constantly read about people on LinkedIn complaining that Hey, I have this certification, and this certification, and I have this many years of work, but nobody will call me back.
Why? I can’t get and then you see other people chime in Hey! Call these people they’re hiring now, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then you’ll, they’ll tag the company and then you’ll see someone from that company come in and talk, right? So I think that there’s a what might be missing here at the technician level for just experienced people is a place where they can go, that’s easy to get connected to all of these places.
Because once you get siloed, like if you work in Abilene, Texas, like a lot of times you’re applying to companies in Abilene, you don’t realize that in Dallas and in Houston and in Oklahoma City and in Denver, there’s companies hiring all over the place. So you do see that. And then on the recruiter side, you also see, Hey, we need we’re hiring blade techs, but we’ve got enough entry level blade techs now we need.
Siemens blade D’s or whatever they may be. So I think that it’s that industry really is, or that side of the industry is really frustrating because there’s Demand needed. There’s people there, but then the people, then the demand that’s needed says that people aren’t good enough. And then, and I think that to be honest with you, some of it is some of these employees get into the field and if you’ve done some, if you’ve made a bad mistake on one site or something, a lot of people know each other and then they have a hard time finding a job as well.
Yeah. So I think what we need to do is have some more of a grassroots effort to communicate with new net new capacity here is at That high school level, that vocational technical school level. To just let people know where these opportunities are and how to get to them.
Allen Hall: Oil and gas at the minute is pumping more product than ever before in the United States.
There’s a huge draw towards oil and gas and oil and gas tends to pay a little bit better a
Joel Saxum: lot bit better
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a lot better. Let’s just say it. It’s a lot better at the minute just because they’re just pumping so much petroleum product. So it’s hard for wind to keep up with that, but it does seem like there’s a lack of connectivity in wind.
And many moons ago, Rosemary, you were a student and wanted to become a wind engineer. I don’t think I’ve heard this story before, so I’m interested in finding out, like, how did you want to become a wind blade specialist? Like, how did that happen? And was that something you just saw in school or is that something you learned at on your own?
Rosemary Barnes: I wanted to work with renewables and my background was with aerodynamics and composite materials. And in particular, I always really loved composite materials. And. Knew that I’d have to study more because, yeah, composite materials are really complicated. You can’t really cover everything in an undergraduate degree.
And my undergraduate degree was systems engineering, so quite broad. Yeah, obviously the combination of renewables, aerodynamics, composite materials means wind turbine blades. That’s the obvious place. I knew I wouldn’t probably get a job for, I wanted to work in manufacturing. So I went back to uni to do a PhD.
And so I did a project on. When turbine blade design methods. And then I handed in my PhD thesis one day and the next day, the literal next day I was on an airplane to Denmark to meet the team where I had a job offer. So yeah, it was quite intentional.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Very purposeful.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And and there’s a lot of courses for engineering that will be, like renewable energy engineering or something quite specific like that, and there has been for a while, at least in Europe and I know that there’s a few like master’s courses in Australia like that.
But when I was working for the manufacturer, it, people are just as happy to, or maybe even more happy to employ just the really standard engineering stuff. I’m a chemical engineer and electrical engineer, like you don’t, it doesn’t need to be so specific as a wind energy engineer.
Joel Saxum: Alan, to your point, to sister onto that, as far as Rosemary’s.
Purposeful and like kind of a plan. This is what I want to do. This is where I want to be. I think if we were able to get some more of the education of what the wind industry is, what it can offer you as a career into, like I say, into these early level, into the high schools, into these things to get to communicate with these, what could be that next era of workforce, then there could be plans put forth.
Like I know myself when I was a junior in college or junior in college, junior in high school, I didn’t know what I was going to do. And I was talking to a high school teacher of mine and he was like yeah, this may be odd to you guys, but my undergrads actually is a land surveyor. So that’s my background, my educational background.
But he said, I’d be a land surveyor. I get to work, you get to work outside, work with cool technology and you can make decent money. And I was like, all right, I’ll be a land surveyor. So that’s what I went for. But it’s the same thing with the wind industry. Like you don’t think about it. It’s a tertiary thing.
And like oil and gas, if you’re in, Wyoming or Colorado, the front range of Colorado, or you’re in the Marcellus shale or you’re in. The Permian Basin, you think about oil and gas as a career path because it’s in front of you, it’s there, it’s accessible. The wind industry is in front of you and there and accessible in a lot of other places that like oil and gas isn’t.
It’s just that people aren’t exposed to it. They just see the big turbines go by and they don’t know how would you get into that? How would you do it? What can a career offer you in it? And those kind of things.
Allen Hall: That raises a good point, which is in relationship to To advertising for positions.
When we’ve been in Texas and Oklahoma, I’ve seen postings about oil and gas jobs. I’ve never seen a posting about wind weirdly enough.
Joel Saxum: Those hiring fairs where they just like the, some, somebody will go rent out like a conference room in a hotel and just say just come here, we will find you a job.
Oil and gas
Allen Hall: is super aggressive right now. And wind, I don’t think is so much in that mode of hiring like oil and gases right now. And maybe it’s just a. Turn of events where oil and gas just slows down maybe 10%, right? The amount of oil America is pumping out right now is amazing. But once that slows down, there’s gonna be a lot of employees.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, is it setting it up well though? Because the skills that you get from an oil and gas career translate pretty well to the wind industry, don’t they? I know a lot of people that have gone from one to the
Joel Saxum: other. I would say the difference there, Rosemary, is if you’re an employee that has skills that could translate into the wind industry from the oil and gas world, When there’s a downturn, you don’t leave.
They keep you. It’s the guys who are like roustabouts and stuff. They’re just like, Hey, you’re going to pick up truck, go out to these 20 wells today and check these valves. That guy that’s still, that guy still makes a hundred grand a year, but that person doesn’t have that many skills that translate because you don’t, there’s, that doesn’t exist in the wind industry.
You gotta have something. You gotta be worse. You gotta be able to go and do something. There’s a lot of people in the oil field that are just like, Come to this hiring fair, you go there and they’re like, do you have a CDL? Because we can just use people to drive a truck around and they’ll pay him a hundred thousand dollars a year.
Yeah. It’s a real competition. If you’ve got compressor skills or mechanical skills of some that are somewhat decent, like when there’s a downturn and they get rid of 40 percent of the staff, they’re keeping you because you’re worth
Allen Hall: keeping. But the thing about wind is it’s localized, right?
Once you find a position, you’re going to stay there for, you got a 20 year job if you want it.
Yeah,
Philip Totaro: theoretically, yeah. But the, there’s two two things. One, Joel, don’t worry about it because George Washington was also a land surveyor before, he ended up being our nation’s first president and getting a state named after him.
Joel Saxum: Hey, all four presidents on the, on Mount Rushmore. They got room for a fifth face
Philip Totaro: up there, Joel, or? No, so the real issue here is this, it seems like companies aren’t willing to train people up. They want somebody that’s already credentialed and certified, they’ve got an errata four or whatever, three, four level something.
And it’s not everybody’s going to have that. And you’re going to have to find some of these people who are younger and enthusiastic that need to be trained up and need to be upskilled to be able to have a contribution. here. I met a guy in Minneapolis at the Clean Power event, works for Deutsche Windtechnik, name’s John.
And he went through a a university program for wind energy specifically. And he told me all about and I was amazed, like they, they’re teaching them about, project development and a little bit of finance, a little bit of, what a site tech does and just everything, all the aspects of it, but that’s only, those kinds of programs are a little bit few and far between.
So that’s one aspect of it. So people aren’t getting the proper education that they need to be getting in, a university environment, but they’re also then trying to come into the workforce and not getting the appropriate level of training. And that’s where it’s not just okay, let’s find, and get GWO matched up with some kind of trade school.
It’s more than that. It’s something that frankly, probably used to happen a little bit more back in the good old days when we would do a lot more grassroots things and was more involved at the state level. And had more boots on the ground. Nowadays, they’re, predominantly focused on federal policy.
They’ve left kind of state level things and grassroots things to these different regional organizations that probably aren’t doing as much outreach on things like job opportunities and educational programs. that you’re, you’ve been talking about, so that’s where we seem to have a gap at the moment in terms of what the industry wants and what’s available.
Rosemary Barnes: I was listening to a podcast with Jagger Shaw recently, and he was talking about everything that they’re doing with the government is doing to try to get. Yeah, the jobs to match up with this, big push on manufacturing because, for decades, the U. S. has basically been encouraging either, inadvertently or advertently, that’s the word, to offshore everything, all the manufacturing and now all of a sudden we want to onshore and it’s not, they realize that’s not something that’s just going to happen.
And he was saying that one of the, a big part of his job, I think he’s at the loans office. And a big part of his job is getting people companies to understand what is available to support them. And so he was saying that, a lot of people don’t realize the program’s available.
And I’m definitely no expert. I’m not even an American living there. Looking into a bit more, but he was saying companies can actually, go to their local community college and have a course made that will suit the needs of the company. It’s not even, cause it’s, it’s one of my.
Topic that I frequently roll my eyes over is companies complaining that there’s not enough skilled workers But they want people coming out of university that are trained to work at their company which is not how university really works or high school or vocational colleges But in this case, it seemed like it is how it can work You can actually you know have the the University of the Community College, whatever You can have them design a course specifically related to the skills that you need.
So I wonder if, all of the wind companies that are lacking workers, if they’re aware of these programs. I think it sounds like they really are trying to bridge this gap and help people out. But I also think that companies need to remember that back when you did, manufacture a lot in the U.
S. And back when, more things were done locally, that companies invested in their staff and, they trained them and they kept them on board for a long time. And that’s why. They used to have all those skills available because they made sure they had them available.
So I do think we need a little bit more of that as well.
Allen Hall: Sort of chicken and the egg though, Rosemary. The number of technical training programs exist in the U. S. high schools has dropped dramatically over the last 20 years.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah it’s obviously got to rise if you want manufacturing local again, then you know, that just can’t continue.
But I think it, It’s also one of the problems is probably the same as problem across the wind industry, the whole world over that, that, the pipeline of projects is just so lumpy, companies aren’t confident to invest in stuff like training up hiring a lot of people and training up the workforce.
They want, people that they can hire seasonally to, to fill a need because they don’t know if they’ll need them again next year.
Allen Hall: As much as Jigar Shah can push out loans. It really is not going to have any effect on the low level workforce that is now entering into the wind industry.
What’s happening in the United States is what Pierce is doing, TSL STL, all the places that Joel and I visited when we were in Texas a few weeks ago, they’re creating their own facilities to train people. The community colleges in the United States are not going to be the leader in that. It’s going to be the companies that are working in wind right now.
And they’re all creating their own training facility. It wasn’t who must Rangel’s doing the same thing, right? Aren’t, GEV.
Joel Saxum: So that’s their solution to fixing the pain that they have, right? Because they’re like, we, At the end of the day, they’re tired of trying to rely on outside sources for these people.
They’re just like, screw it we’ll recruit and train them on our own. And and I think part, part of that’s driven economically, right? Because if you have to go outsource someone to get GWOs, you’re like, oh, we got to do 10 guys. That’s 25 grand. For 25, 000, we can build our own training center in our office.
And, why would we outsource that? But then that leads to being able to train more people. I think one of the issues here that, Alan, you touched on it with the vocational and technical programs in our high schools. You’re going to have to gamify and make an app of how to maintain these turbines to get any of these young kids to even want to look at them because they’re not going to pick up a wrench.
Just don’t do it.
Philip Totaro: Keep in mind to the IRA bill, which has provisions in it for, additional production tax credit benefits for pay or requirements for paying prevailing wages. To site technicians that hasn’t really had any kind of dramatic impact on increasing wages overall for site techs, because most of them were already getting at or above the prevailing wage within that the county where, the wind turbines or wind farm was installed in the first place.
Policy wise, we’re not going to get there. It’s going to be incumbent on the industry to have to invest in this if you want to see, anything happen.
Allen Hall: I’ve never seen a company regulate themselves into prosperity. Definitely not. And I think it’s an easy answer for Jigar Shah to say the community colleges can start their own program.
You know how hard that is? That’s why no one’s doing it. And the reality is that all these companies, Pierce being one of them of many that they’re having to build these massive training facilities and train people on their own. I think that the trainability is there in a lot of the students that show up and Joel and I met numbers of them while we were at the Pierce facility.
So it’s a little odd that NREL is saying they can’t find people in the meantime, Pierce and TSL, STL, all these companies are out there doing it. Live we just saw it. So there’s a there’s this like the government doesn’t understand what’s happening And which is a sad part right NREL should be able to say hey all these great facilities that these companies are developing GEV be another one that are producing students producing workers.
We should support that
Joel Saxum: I don’t know if they are I can’t tell When was the last time that we knew our government to do something that was intelligent and or know what’s going on the ground?
Allen Hall: It really is trouble. It’s, that’s why I brought this NREL report up was because it just seems so disconnected from the realities of the situation on the ground.
It didn’t make any sense to me. Yeah, it’s and the one thing that the federal government does have an input into is the education requirements for students across the United States They were leading the effort to drop all the technical training classes that happened in the United States not long ago So here we are like Rosemary pointed out.
Yeah, you’re gonna have to train some people Hey, Uptime listeners, we know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts. So you can get the in depth info you need.
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SSE has announced that the commercial operation state for the massive 1. 2 gigawatt Dogger Bank A offshore wind farm in the UK has been pushed back to 2025. Ouch. Despite progress on monopile and transition piece installation, challenging weather conditions, vessel availability, and quote unquote supply chain issues have impacted the timeline for turbine installation.
SSC, which owns a 40 percent stake in the project expects turbine commissioning and export to occur in tandem with installation over the summer months, targeting a full commercial operations in the first half of 2025. Phil, what happened here on Dogger Bank A?
Philip Totaro: It’s, this isn’t the first time we’ve had a chance to touch on this on the show because at the end of the day, it looks like vessel availability is playing the biggest role.
But the fact that they specifically, SSE specifically mentioned supply chain issues, I think harkens back to this issue that they had at the Schauberg blade facility in France that LM Windpower had an issue with one of the molds. And there, it seemed to be some kind of industrial accident, and, there’s conflicting, it seems, reports, because if you talk to people from LM, they’ve said, Oh all the blades for Dogger Bank A were already, produced and were sitting in port waiting to be transported.
But then, if those blades, if this mold was supposed to be for blades for Dogger Bank B, then why is SSE saying that there are supply chain issues? What other supply chain issue is there? Besides something like that, I, I think all the other components for the turbines are available or didn’t have any other kind of known production issues.
This, the blades seem to have this sort of issue.
Rosemary Barnes: I think when I’ve worked on projects that have gone a bit wrong, my part of the project has delayed, that there’s a high chance, like when you’re working on, something new, which I mean, these turbines are new then there’s a high chance of many aspects of it, going wrong.
And so when it’s your part, that’s causing a delay, or, there’s going to be a delay, You start really hoping that there’s going to be another one somewhere as well so that it’s not all pinned on you. And there usually is, right? Because, when you do something for the first time, it always takes longer than you think.
I think it’s going to be really hard to actually tease apart, what was the one thing that caused the biggest delay? Because, if the I don’t know, if a ship has a delay of one day longer than what they’re able to get the blade situation under control, then the blades can say it wasn’t us, it was a ship, which is true, but only so I, I would guess that there would be quite, quite a lot of things going on there and you’re never gonna get the reality of it from reading press releases as, it’s like that analogy of, The, duck swimming looks very calm above the water, but below ground, it’s all scrambling.
Every single one of these, first of a kind wind farms that goes out has got a lot of scrambling duck feet underneath the water. And, you only get to, you only get to look underwater when you know, there’s something big happens and it gets announced. So yeah, I didn’t know how to tease it apart.
Allen Hall: That was a great explanation of corporate planning. There’s, it’s all chaos anyway, so no one can be sure what’s exactly happening. And from the book that you always tell us about Rosemary, how,
Joel Saxum: how was it, how big things get done? Every, everybody’s scrambling.
Rosemary Barnes: No, it’s not. It’s not, but you only need to have your D’laby one day less than somebody else’s for it to not get pinned on you.
Joel Saxum: That’s if you run into a grizzly bear in the woods, you don’t have to be the fastest. You just gotta be faster than the guy next to you.
Allen Hall: What’s the analogy in Australia for that, Rosemary? Is that a crocodile or a emu? What is it?
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. An Australian one, actually. I have to think, but yeah maybe A drop bearer or a hoop snake.
Allen Hall: Hoop snake?
Rosemary Barnes: Have you got hoop snakes in America?
Allen Hall: I hope not.
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, yeah, no, it’s a snake that it puts its tail in its mouth and then it can roll along so it can go very fast and yeah, chase people down.
Allen Hall: That is not real, is it? Deadly. Deadly. Deadly? Deadly how?
Rosemary Barnes: They roll, they, they put their tail in their mouth so it’s like a hoop.
That’s why they’re called a hoop snake. And then they can roll along like much faster than a slithering snake can travel. And so they can. Yeah, they can hunt down, small children and dogs and yeah, anyone. Small
Allen Hall: children and dogs. I do not understand Australia. I just don’t.
Joel Saxum: It has a venomous tail. It’s not, it doesn’t bite you at its tail, stings you. Wow. Oh, so here’s how, here’s where we go. The snake grasps his tail in his mouth and rolls after its prey, thereby achieving great speed, especially when going downhill. At the end of the tip of its tail is a highly venomous stinger.
The snake straightens out at the last second, skewering its victim with its venomous tail. The only escape is to hide behind a tree, which receives the deadly blow instead and promptly dies from the poison. Okay, that part might not be real.
Allen Hall: All the rest of it’s real. Have you experienced a hoop snake?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, for sure. I haven’t been stung by one, obviously.
Allen Hall: Thank God. Wow. Okay. Alright. Alright, Rosemary, in a move to reduce fuel consumption and emissions, Mitsui OSK Lines and it’s subsidiary, MOL Drybulk are outfitting seven new bulk carriers and multi purpose vessels with wind propulsion technology.
Here we go! Now we’re talking about putting fiberglass blades on ships. So six ships will feature MOL’s wind challenge or telescoping hard sails, while some may also incorporate Animoid Marine Technologies rotor sails system, and I think I’ve talked to them actually so Rosemary, they’re basically putting these big blades or sails, they’re generally made out of fiberglass, on ships to reduce the fuel burn, and they say they can cut fuel use and greenhouse gas emissions by somewhere between 15 and almost 30 percent annually and I haven’t seen one of these ships in Real life, all I see at this point is just images of what these ships are going to look like.
But this is turning into a real thing. It does seem like there’s a lot of technology and ships and sort of winter blades on the front of them. Sometimes multiple blades set up on these ships to reduce fuel burn.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I have a list actually of of this examples of this technology. I’m working on one day.
I will work on a video about it. It’s definitely a real thing and there’s heaps of them coming out. I’ve got five versions of this on my list so far. And maybe I need to add another one. We’ve got wind wings, rotor sails, sea wing, ventafoil, and sky sails, which they gave up on that. It’s a airborne wind system that they initially were doing on ships, but now they’ve just transferred over to purely focusing on land based one, but maybe they’ll move back.
But yeah, no there’s quite a few around and these emissions savings, they’re not or fuel savings, it’s not just calculations. It’s actual, measured values by now from from some of them at least. So yeah, it’s definitely interesting. The whole shipping industry is interesting.
I think emissions from shipping, if you add it all up, it’s like the eighth largest country, the same size of emissions. And so Definitely significant. And it’s a bit of a hard challenge, not necessarily because the technology is hard, but because the fuel that they use currently is so bloody cheap, but, they use a literal bottom of the barrel with the heavy fuel oil.
Yes, you can use biofuel as a drop in fuel, but a lot of other industries want biofuel like aviation, for example, is really short on sustainable aviation fuel, which is largely. Made from biofeed stocks and you can imagine that, like the airline industry can pay a lot more for their fuel if there’s, if it’s in short supply, which it is then yeah, it’s you can imagine shipping is going to have a hard time finding it.
And I know I, I have spoken with some people in the shipping industry while I’ve been working on a video on that. They are having trouble finding enough biofuel, so they’re adding, nobody is attempting to, go back to sailing ships that are purely wind powered, but, if you do you put these wings on your ship and you can save 15 30 percent of your fuel, then that’s a big emissions reduction chunk right up front.
And secondly, if you combine it with some fuel that’s a bit more expensive or hard to get, then you need less of it. So I think that there’s heaps of small or not small. 15, 30 percent isn’t small, but there’s quite a lot of examples of, I guess this would be like an efficiency gain.
They’ve got some other, redesigning the hulls. You can save a lot from redesigning the hull to be more hydrodynamic. Also just going slower as well. So they’re doing a bit of work with AI to optimize the logistics so that you don’t, go full steam ahead. Just, travel really fast and then wait in the line in the port.
So they’re trying to, have, be just in time so that you go slower and save the fuel that way you can get big savings. Yeah, and then the other technologies to move beyond just efficiency and to zero emissions, they’re a little way away. We’re starting to see some some methanol ships being purchased, but methanol is quite expensive.
Green methanol is expensive and also in short supply. And then in the long term. Probably ammonia is the one that people are most commonly investing in, but those engines don’t exist, they don’t exist yet. There’s huge safety concerns related to ammonia and they haven’t quite been solved.
But there are companies working on it and they expect to, you’ll be selling engines in a couple of years. And a lot of ships are being made that are ammonia ready. But. That sounds more advanced than it is because yeah, when I heard ammonia ready, I thought, okay, so they’ve got an engine there and they’re just waiting for the ammonia fuel to put into it.
But what it really is they’re like we know we don’t know how to make an ammonia engine, but we know it’s going to be bigger. So make your engine room bigger. And then now your ship is ammonia ready. That’s the extent of it. Yeah, but that said, it’s only the really long distance stuff that needs these complicated solutions for the shorter stuff, which makes up quite a lot of the proportion of global shipping.
There’s already a lot of electric and hydrogen fuel cells as well. So there’s, there’s a really wide range of options. And it’s an interesting one. It’s one where I’m not really. Convinced that I understand what the future is going to look like here.
Allen Hall: The limitation on these sails is the bridge heights that as you come into port, usually you have to go underneath a bridge, right?
So that limits how high these things can go. So
Rosemary Barnes: they fall down.
Allen Hall: Some don’t.
Rosemary Barnes: Some don’t. Okay.
Allen Hall: Some collapse, some fold. Some collapse down, you’re right, yeah. But even then, you still have to, you have this sort of complicated telescoping bit, or the mechanism to fold it. It makes it harder, right?
But, it does, weirdly, change how you design the ships. Cause you think you’d just build the biggest sail you could possibly build, right? And we know how to make 100 meter long fiberglass, carbon fiber fiberglass blades for wind turbines. It wouldn’t seem like a straight line. Two out of the round to put some really big sails on these ships, but you can’t get into port.
Rosemary Barnes: The ones that I’ve seen, and I haven’t, like fully researched this, but the prototype ones that I have seen have mostly taken an existing ship and put on a sail onto it. So they haven’t redesigned a whole ship around. So that obviously is going to limit the, the loads, the extra loads that you’re going to be able to put through it.
I would expect that, once this is proven out in a few years, if it becomes popular, then we’re going to see them get bigger and, have more of an impact. Yeah, so it, it’s the kind of thing that a couple of years ago, if you said, yeah, we’ll go back to, to wind power for shipping.
People would think that was such a today, like a hippie kind of idea that, we’ll just transport everything by sailing ship again. But here we are with so many shipping companies taking this very seriously. So I think it’s super cool.
Joel Saxum: I actually think at Rosemary, I’ve been, I was looking into some of this is the efficiency mechanisms for some of these large shipping things.
Cause I dealt with some people in Houston that were making Really cool biofouling coatings.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah that’s one of them.
Joel Saxum: Yeah the, two, one was biofouling coatings. I also have a connection to some people that made a an ROV called the Bat. Cause it kinda looks like a bat, but like it goes in the water, and then it sucks onto the bottom of the ship, magnetically, and then it cleans it and inspects it.
Cleans all the stuff off, like while they’re in port. So they pull them in port to offload, they just have these things, That can be rigged up on the side of the, on quay side and they just Oh, ship’s here, throw them in and they autonomously clean the whole bottom of the boat and then pull them out when they leave.
It’s pretty slick.
Rosemary Barnes: I was just going to say, that’s why I’ve just pulled up my draft script on shipping in general and the efficiency gains. Yeah, it’s hull design, operational strategies defouling technologies. And wind assistance is a kind of, like efficiency, but it’s really interesting because, if you look at the regulations that they’re introducing for shipping in the EU, and I think that the international maritime organization, IMO is also bringing them in they it’s a really interesting example of how it matters, what kinds of regulations that you bring in, because.
From what I’ve seen, a lot of the plan revolves around replacing a certain amount of fuel, like a certain percentage of fuel has to be low carbon. And so then it’s you don’t then get the option to be more efficient because that doesn’t count, you, you can’t save 10 percent of your fuel needs by efficiency gains because you still won’t have any zero emissions fuel.
So you would need to. Still go down the fuel route. So yeah, I think it really it really, the regulations that countries choose to make or organizations choose to make to move towards net zero, you can inadvertently dictate the technology that has to be chosen by by the way that you do it.
So if if you say that you got to do fuel blending and gradually increase the percentage of of sustainable fuel that you use. you locked into a fuel route because otherwise a company that just goes for, a total, like a totally electric or totally wind based solution is going to, make zero progress every year until they finally get rid of it all, all at once, more or less.
They get around that a bit by having it averaged out across a whole fleet, but yeah, no, it is really interesting to think how. Like regulators don’t usually want to choose winners in, in technologies, but you can end up doing it by mistake if you design your scheme without that in mind.
Allen Hall: You don’t design a scheme without corporate interests putting their fingers in it ever, right? So you, we always shocked at the way it’s written is because somebody’s written it for them.
Rosemary Barnes: And it depends who had the loudest voice or who they trusted more, like Europe’s policies are, a lot of people think that they’re, so skewed towards hydrogen because there was this one particular hydrogen obsessed guy that, run around convincing all the relevant people that, That was super important.
And yeah, if you’ve got companies that want to sell ammonia, then you’re going to end up with, that in your regulations.
Allen Hall: That’s going to 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, our 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.
