Split wind turbine blade design is something that isn’t going away due to transportation logistics – but will it really work? Can split blades hold up? We also discuss carbon nanotube technology and how its RF-absorbing properties can reduce interference with air traffic control, potentially opening up new land tracts to wind farm development. Also in the show is chatter on new solar panel technology that claims to boost power output significantly, a new blade mishap and more.
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Transcript: EP31 – Split Blade Wind Turbine Design; RF-Absorbing Coatings & New Solar Panel Tech
All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. This is episode 31. And in today’s episode, we’re gonna talk about. Pretty wide range of stuff. First thing, New Jersey, there’s some trouble afoot as legislators are potentially going to suspend some offshore wind work. Um, it seems like the fishermen, uh, association is involved there also a blade is broken on a Vestas in Australia.
So we’ll chat a little bit about the. You know, and go down the investigative trail just a bit. And we’re gonna talk a little bit about solar, actually a in today’s episode. So panel efficiency is potential improving with a new startup. So we’ll talk about the implications of that in our engineering segment today.
RF absorbing material might be an interesting new development for wind turbines to prevent some of the interference with aircraft traffic control. Next, we’re gonna talk about split blades, which look seems are you gonna be more and more important as you know, these wind turbines get bigger and bigger.
Transportation is always a challenge there without further ado, Allen. What’s going on here in New Jersey. Well, democratic processes at work right now. There’s a big push by fishermen that use the sea where the wind turbines are going to be installed off the coast. You know, the New Jersey governor has been pushing to do a big offshore effort on wind turbines.
But inevitably there’s going to be an opposing group to that. Like always, and the fishermen were complaining about it and probably rightly so. They see it as an, uh, another thing to work around and don’t particularly want it and they have a lot of clout. So it’s going to be a, it’s gonna be a, uh, a battle in the legislature, for sure.
And now in this political environment, we’re in right now. We have to, you know, just sort of bear through it. I think once they get past November and into December where, uh, the political atmosphere settles down a little bit and people keep kind of get back to work. We’ll see, we’ll see this, uh, even out, I don’t know if this is a knee jerk response to the governor’s proposal.
Kind of feels like it, but in any sort of a dispute like this, the, the better approach is to attack it early. If you do think there’s going to be some concessions that the, the administration is gonna be willing to make you better start now and start those negotiations too. To get to a final agreements that are waiting until the project is approved, then fighting authentic, because in most cases it’s way too late.
So the, I think the fishermen are just acting proactively and rightly so, because that’s the way state governments work in the United States for the most part. Yeah. So the wind project in question here is the or stead ocean wind project. And basically what they’re alleging is the company has failed to deliver on some of its promises of economic development.
They’re supposed to hire a union labor, provide grants and, you know, in general boost the local economy. But, you know, the, the, the head of the state Senate or the state Senate printed president basically said that the, this isn’t happening right now, and they’re looking into whether or stead is, you know, not made good on some of their promises, uh, on previous projects.
So it seems strange to me as I read this article that I, it doesn’t seem like this has been going on that long. I mean, yeah. And I know this stuff takes time, especially really big projects with lots of regulation and construction, and I’m in logistics. There’s tons of stuff at play. So to say like, Hey, you guys, haven’t, you know, you haven’t created new jobs yet.
It’s like, well, maybe this just takes a little more time. Yeah. Uh, and that’s true. And I don’t know if you’ve driven through New Jersey at any particular point, just, uh, Get a feeling for the strength of the labor unions, especially in construction and things that are heavy industrial enterprises. The unions are very strong in New Jersey.
So it’s not surprising that there. I have a sense of where the governor may be going and want to redirect it a little bit and, or to gets concessions out of the administration, which would make sense. New Jersey is struggling a little bit in the economy, and there’s a lot of talk about taxation and millionaire taxes and all these things are in turmoil because of the presidential election.
Hmm, state elections, all the elections are in November. So it, this just plays into politics right now. I like to see what happens in another 30 days, 60 days to see for back to these sort of discussions or, or have we moved on. Um, it’s so crazy right now, just watching you, Tony. And when are you really watching any social media or television or anything?
Right. And I was listening to the radio yesterday. Couldn’t take it. Uh, it’s just too much craziness. And I think this falls into that category. Let’s, let’s let it burn over for a while and see where we get back to. Yeah. And of course, one of the specific complaints are that. Uh, you know, they have a facility need to be built and they hired a German based steel fabricator to do that.
So they’re like, Hey. Why isn’t this using, you know, local Jersey labor. Yeah. So, I mean, I understand that it gets the higher of the, you know, the logistic. Well, it should, it should, I suppose, because if the roles were reversed, if this was happening somewhere else, well, it’s true. I think if there’s a big push and I’ll give you an example.
So Scotland has, has a lot of offshore wind turbines, and there’s a big push by, uh, the UK government to do, to get companies, to establish themselves in Scotland to promote that industry. It makes sense. And that’s one reason if a government is going to support that sort of industry, one of the natural outcomes is that they’re going to try to grow employment for that industry in their own country.
And, and that, that will makes sense. But again, I get back to, is this just part of the political atmosphere that we’re in right now? It feels like it. So moving on a blade fell and fell, fell from a wind turbine. Uh, in Australia, there are no injuries, but again, they’re, you know, starting a root cause analysis to try to figure out why.
And, you know, I know we’ve been reporting these each week. Course. There’s so many wind turbines in operation around the world. It’s not like there’s really that many of these incidences, but. You know, they do happen. So what, what was the stories? Anything stick out, especially that seems especially interesting here to you.
I think this is a relatively new blade and a new site, and that leads to projections of something happening in the manufacturing process that didn’t get caught and. Quality escapes are serious concern, manufacturing, escape store series concerned, or the secondarily. Was it something in shipping where it got damaged in shipping and other possibility?
Most likely it’s not a designer. Most likely not to design air it’s something in the manufacturing process. And those things take so much. Bloody time to figure out as to what happened in the postmortems. Take up so many man hours to do, uh, that it’s, it’s really advantageous to catch those co those kind of defects, those, those larger defects.
This is what we’re talking about. In the factory before they leave. And so the point of some case marginal, if you have them design a one blade, that’s marginal, it’s better to set it aside and make another one, a lot of cases than to suffer the consequences. There’s this natural push and you see it in a lot of industries and not to say this is a particular case, but in general, that if you have a significant defect, In a part coming down the factory line that you want to try to re quote unquote, rework it or repair it to make it a usable out because you don’t throw it away because you put so much time and money and materials into that part.
You want to deliver it in and get the check for that part. So you want to do whatever you can to keep the process moving. In some instances, it’s the, the PR problem with a broken blade out weighs the cost of the blade. To manufacture it. And you got to wonder if this is what’s happening occasionally because we know we have such good technology, Danny, you know, you know how great technology we have to detect things in the human body today with some of the derivatives of those things or how we check the.
The structure of composite structures. So ultrasound x-ray, we have all these technologies to go in and look on the inside where we can’t visually see it. We can actually look inside the blade to look for defects. Why are we having defective blade draw the factory? Doesn’t make much sense to me. I can see it 20 years ago.
Not really today. Yeah. And I’m curious, this one, the verbiage they use in the article is just that it fell. Yep. So I’m curious what that actually means. Like, did it snap in the S in the middle, did it come loose from the root? It’s not really clear. It’s ambiguous language, right? Either way. It’s a lot of, I just want to see one fall to the ground.
I want to see the aftermath of just like, I want to watch it in slow motion. They need to do some testing on every possible thing and just get all in slow motion, Def video, just so the world can see. It’s just fascinating to see those one of these huge blades just fall down and, uh, just the way they it’s always interesting.
I think to everyone, how big structures at high speeds just become like soft. Right? You see one of these, these turbine towers that are made of inch thick steel, when they get stuck in a monsoon or typhoon or something, they’d just fold over. Like they’re made out of aluminum foil. But anyway, I’m rambling.
I just think it’s fascinating. The power of these things is just crazy. And I just don’t know what that looks like. See a whole whole blade fall down, fall out of its root. So anyway, moving on, uh, sun density, a solar startup. Is a touting, a 20% power output gain too, especially coated glass that can, you know, boost the efficiency and potentially viability of solar and lots of different places.
So this caught your eye and I mean, where are you on solar? We haven’t really talked much about it on the show yet, but where are you with solar and how do you feel about this? Uh, That seems like a pretty big boost. Is that it? Is there a catch? Well, I don’t know if there’s a chip because we really haven’t seen the technology being implemented yet, but essentially what it’s doing is it’s, it’s changing a light from, or the energy it’s basically changing light.
Want it. Describe this very simplistically from the ultraviolet side of the spectrum to the infrared side of the spectrum. So there’s a conversion happens. It’s taken a light and one frequency spectrum and shoving it into another that the solar cells can absorb thereby opening a wider spectrum of energy into the solar cell, which it can, can convert to electricity.
That’s that makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense. So there’s been ways of trying to expand that, uh, usable spectrum that solar cells. Can turn into electricity. This is another way to do that. Really. It really comes down to a lot of different factors. Can you manufacturer it? Can you manufacture in mass production?
What does the cost of that look like? How does it last over time? Uh, is there any sort of environmental factors that we gotta be aware of? Is that, is it. Humidity sensitive temperature sensitive. Um, is it, uh, is it chemically stable over time is ultra violet light degrade the thing. So there’s a lot of little variables that we’ll have to get checked to make sure that it’s something of use, but the thought process is probably right that you just trying to use more energy.
I think on the solar cell implementation aspect here in Massachusetts. There’s a lot of solar cells. In fact, the state government has, has, um, really made a push a couple of years ago to get solar cells installed on people’s homes. And then there’s wide swaths of the countryside that have been converted from what was farmland into a solar panel sites, uh, fairly large sites, several acres, at least in and to supplement the electrical grid.
I’m not sure. Of course, when you see a 20% improvement you went in and you think, wow, that’s could be reality, reality, right. That the 20% improvement can actually happen. You think to yourself? Well, gee whiz, I’ve got all these acres and acres and acres of solar panels sites. Now that I could confer to be 20% more efficient.
Ooh. Uh, Maybe we should have waited a year or two it’s that sort of feeling too, because you know, the solar cells have been around a long, long time and there’s always been a discussion about improvements, but we never seem to get to that sort of critical stage. And there was for a while. Cause, and this is when there was allegations of, uh, China dumping.
Solar cells in the United States and back and forth and into Solyndra episode with the Obama administration was about solar cells. And so there’s a big push on, on the, at least the national and the state government, Massachusetts to, to push solar cells. And that did happen. The question is right now, Is, is it paying off or not?
And I haven’t seen a lot of studies that say, yeah, this has been great for the countryside or this has been great for the state of Massachusetts. I haven’t seen that. And I should start seeing that cause it’s been a couple of years. So I don’t know. I think it’s like a lot of technology industries you really don’t know to a four or five years down the, down the road before you see, is it worth it or not?
You’ll know. I think, I always know when I see them on taking them down, that it’s when you know that the technology didn’t really prove itself out and it’s, it’s costing too much money to operate. Yeah. Start taking them away. You’re like, huh? That’s odd. Where’d they go? They go, right. I didn’t see that in the newspaper about them taking these solar panels down.
Yeah. That’s that’s when you know whether it’s paid off or not, because then when the economics come into it and the power company has to maintain them and, and the local governments to get involved. If, if the costs are outweighing, the benefits they’re just quietly disappear into the night.
all right. So moving on into our engineering segment, first thing we’re going to chat about here is a graphing nanotube technology that can potentially reduce radar interference and wind farms. So obviously this is an important. Topic, because there’s a lot of land that’s essentially off limits for wind farm development.
And because of the, uh, you know, the, the RF, um, interference that those big wind farms would pose to neighboring airports or landing spots, or just like low outs, cruise spots for aircraft. So if the, if we can find a way to reduce the radio-frequency. Um, I don’t know. You have to tell me if it’s reflections or just what they produce in general, then, you know, they can potentially build wind farms on these previously restricted lands.
So how does this, does this, this technology sound like it could work? Does, uh, there’s been a lot of technology and money spent on graphing and sort of derivatives of that on sort of a nano. To type, uh, applications from you can name it. There’s you just Google it. You’ll see all the, all the companies that have popped up and the idea is to go use them and how it’s going to make the world better and how it’s going to make it more efficient.
Just probably using this carbon stuff. That’s. True. But again, we haven’t seen that really implemented in a lot of applications where you thought it would have been, and it seems like a material that’s looking for an application still, and it really hasn’t taken hold the marketplace. It’s cool technology, but it just doesn’t seem to ever get into common usage.
Maybe it, maybe it is. I just don’t see it, but I’m, I’m in. Pretty aware of things that are happened on, on the, on the high tech end of the world. And I haven’t seen it used in large skills yet, but the concept is right now. So what they’re trying to do is absorb or redirect RF energy from like a radar site at an airport or a weather station, so that the energy doesn’t come bouncing back to the, to the radar to think it’s a real, um, Storm or aircraft or whatever, even though it’s fixed.
Right. So what does it happen is that the radar, see those turbines out there and it can’t see behind them. That’s that’s where the trouble lies. So if you put an, an, an RF absorbent material on the turbines to absorb the energy, then you’re not going to see anything behind it. I think it’s the orphanages.
You’ve got to pass through it. Right? I think that’s the kicker. The blades rotating were a problem for a while. And you saw a lot of our articles back in the two thousands about rotating blades and it’s showing up on, on radars. Here’s the thing. Software fixes a lot of problems. And my guess is a lot of those earlier issues were resolved by some sort of software patch so that, Hey, that rotating thing out in the, in, um, 20 miles down the road.
Uh, we’re just going to ignore that. Okay. And we’re going to cycle it and know that it’s a rotating blade and we’re going to ignore it. We take that out as noise. That’s a software patch. And I think that makes a lot more sense than coding them with some sort of RF absorbent material, because it sort of defeats the purpose.
Uh, but. If you see Dan, you see a lot of applications. If you just Google, are you going to watch on the, on the, on science shows still, but carbon nanotubes, how they’re super conductive, how they got all these features and you just don’t see them. It’s it’s like a, uh, a lot of high tech things just never see.
Hopefully, hopefully there’s application, but the cost of it is really driving it. It’s not cheap material to make. And so it’s. Yeah. Well, one, I think what you’re saying about one, I think what you’re saying about software makes sense where it’s essentially just, you know, have your radar equipment separate the noise from the signal, right?
Yeah. Like if we know there’s constant interference coming from this neighboring. Wind farm. Just ignore all the algorithms that, yeah. That this is not real. So this is noise, not signal. Right. And just move past it. I mean, I’m sure that’s easier said than done, but that seems like part of the move. Some of the, some of the, uh, more recent software.
Um, capabilities are amazing. And so identifying what things are out there on the field, like the Tesla software, if you’ve been watching Tesla on, on the driving software, that software is unbelievable. And the things we do with software today are just amazing. Amazing.
So speaking of technology and blades. Uh, split blades are starting to become, it looks like a little more prevalently, send the news and it looks like more and more companies are working on this technology. And it seems really fascinating. It also seems really difficult because you’ve got 150 foot or 350 foot wind turbine blade.
In three sections that then is going to be tension, you know, have all those sections tension together and screwed together and then never come apart in 20 years. So, you know, like, I don’t know, the more I listened to you talk about engineering and. Think about the durability required over these really harsh environments.
This seems just like a really tough thing to pull off. I mean, am I right or wrong? Totally. Right. It will be different. Want to pull off because the longterm effects of rotating around and in hot cold environments and saltwater a lot of water and moisture. Yeah. Right. And you just don’t know until you put it out there and that’s the trouble is I think a lot of these designs.
Conceptually structurally the analysis are right now. Yeah, we can do this. We can, we can make this part. We can put it, we can assemble it at the site, say in a bunch of trucking, which is what it is. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. Absolutely. Makes a lot of sense. So it is, it simplifies all the factories get smaller.
The trucking gets easier. It puts more restrictions on the assembly at the site. So you got to. Put pieces thing together, and you’ve got to have the right tools and technicians to do all this stuff. Right. But I think there is, uh, a place for it. The tendency though of the marketplace is to say, unless someone has actually installed that.
Technology out in a real environment for a couple years. I don’t believe it. That’s, that’s very typical. The wind turbine industry, we run into that all the time, uh, as a company, uh, that unless somebody else has done it first and it’s been out there for five years, then we don’t want to go there. And which is a bizarre way of looking at it because we do have.
More technology than we ever had before. So some of these, some of these variables of which we don’t have a good feeling for, we need to get a good feeling for. And what do you need to be able to test it in the laboratory and say, yeah, it’s okay. Or not instead of building it and sticking it out for a couple years and then.
That’s our test on one, on a sample of one that doesn’t make any sense from an engineering standpoint, I’ll give you the rationale. This, if I have one super duper sample, which is what you will get when I make the one sample, you know, on that one sample, every engineer involved with that thing is going to be on top of it and making sure everything is perfect.
So as that one sample, most likely will pass. Whatever test is going to happen to it. That’s what happens versus a manufacturing effort where there’s variability involved in things change over time that, and we’re shipping these, making these parts and we’re assembling on different parts of the world and language barriers, you name it.
There’s all kinds of reasons. Temperature, humidity, salt, pick it that, uh, there’s a lot more variables and more likely to fail in that sort of that random environment. But we don’t test for the random environment necessarily. It’s weird. It’s weird. And the interviewers are sometimes the, the most vocal about it.
Like, Oh, if company B didn’t do it yet, then we’re not going to do it. So the technology just dies just. Guys, and I think there’s a place for these split blades and maybe you didn’t need to do it on a smaller scale first. I, I think that may be smart, do it on a smaller scale and make some of these things and then increase the size.
Grow it grow it over time. That’s probably the better bet. Instead of just going into like a 12 megawatt turbine with the S with the split blades. That’s probably not the right answer. Yeah. Well, it seems like, so this company that I’m looking at is Regene blade. It’s unclear where they’ve installed them.
Like they talk about their technology, they share some drawings, but the fact that they haven’t mentioned on their website where they’re installed makes me question whether they are installed anywhere. So I don’t know, maybe they could be, but. You know, this kind of makes me think of like the aircraft companies, do you know, like Boeing and Airbus, they have so much, you know, they just have such a vast resources.
We’re like, yeah, let’s throw $2 billion of this, you know, prototype program. Right. And I feel like that’s what, this is where they need a company that big, like someone like GE or Siemens can Mesa. That’s huge. I can say we can send a bunch of engineers to work on split blades. We’ll make our own farm, put 10 of them in service, run them ragged.
And if they blow up, they blow up. Like it’s not going to break our company. Like that seems, but if this is your company, It’s it has to work or you’re, you’re done before. Right. And someone’s got to choose you. They’ve got to place big orders and these are more engineering than companies that are already out there.
And you’re going to bring me more expensive than a LM wind power blade. Right. Because there’s more engineering involved, right. Smaller it’s. So just, it seems like there’s a lot of hurdles for us. For this is my company to do this, rather than just putting this in the hands of a big company. So maybe GE might buy this company and say, Hey, let’s give it a shot and go with a G.
But that seems like, no, I think you’re you’re, you’re nailed it. Dan. You you’re right on. Right on it GE a couple of years ago was talking about essentially fabric cover blase so they could make them in segments and come with a fabric. I don’t know where that went. I, that it has all gone quiet. I haven’t seen that actually installed anywhere.
I thought they probably figured out yeah. Either doesn’t work or yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe it just didn’t have enough drive to see it through it. That happens a lot of these projects where if the marketplace doesn’t demand it, then I have to stop the production or the engineering spend on it and they go to die.
Yeah. Well, it is an interesting contrast, you know, with our other podcasts struck that. You know, there’s like 20 companies chasing the electric vertical take off Atlantic vehicles. Right. There’s so many companies doing that and all the big players have thrown some money out of it as well. Right. But yet here and wind the split blade thing with just logistics of trucking, being a nightmare, you’d think this would be one of that same kind of thing.
Like, yeah, we all should want to be in this race. So yeah. Find a way to make transport easier as these things get bigger, because at some point the blade length is going to be untenable for roads, right? Like you can’t have a 200 meter long blade and try and truck it anywhere. Can you, it’s going to have to be rail rail and then, well, yeah, that’d be it.
They’re going to go off, off shore. Right. That’s why that’s where the big drive is to go off shore because it takes away a lot of those impediments, they can build a ship to, to carry that out to the. To the site where I landed. You’re totally right. The roads are going to be a big impediment, but I think you’ve raised a really good point, which has to do with just the technology improvements that tend to happen at the smaller scale.
And they’re not a lot of small scale wind turbines right now. Right. We’ve talked about a couple on the show, but in terms of like going on Amazon and looking for, Hey, I want my own personal winter, urban, there are some, a lot of the novel activity there. There’s not a lot of technology going on there and it makes you really wonder why.
And I, and. I think the reason, because a lot of technology comes out of those smaller companies, just like here with a split blade, that the technology is probably gonna come from a smaller company that got to think outside the box, or just takes the box and shakes the hell out of the box. And it says, okay, let’s look at just from some fresh eyes.
The, I think the driver though is. The battery, the wall battery, like the Tesla, the Tesla wall battery, that if we have sufficient energy storage, I think a lot of smaller wind turbines are going to start popping up because then it becomes, I can store that energy that I may not need right now for later this evening, when the, when the wind dies down and I can be independent of the grid.
And if there’s one thing about the United States being independent is on the top five. Right. And. A lot of places in the United States would go off the grid if they could. But the, the energy storage is not quite there yet. All right, we’re going to wrap up today’s episode of uptime. If you’re new to the show.
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