This week, Glen Ryan, Co-Founder of Sunovate, an innovative solar startup with technology to convert solar energy from photovoltaic panels into not only electricity, but heating and air conditioning for commercial buildings and homes. Glen, also the inventor of Bombora Wave Energy shares his entrepreneurial journey and where Sunovate is headed. We also discuss a recent mishap aboard the jack-up vessel the MPI Adventure, in which a full rotor was dropped into the sea. No one was injured, thankfully, but what happened? Plus, Siemens Gamesa’s new Virginia, United States factory, Google 24/7 and more.
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Transcript – Episode 85 with Glen Ryan of Sunovate
00:00:00:13 – 00:00:21:08
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This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning
00:00:21:08 – 00:00:48:22
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protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett. I’m Allen Hall and I’m Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy.
00:00:59:21 – 00:01:19:03
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Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast, I’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s show. Number one, we’ve got a great friend of up time, Glen Ryan, who’s the co-founder of Sunovate is going to be joining us to talk about his new startup, which is a fascinating new idea and use for PV, you know, solar panels
00:01:19:03 – 00:01:37:02
Unknown
, which not just turning solar energy into electricity, but also to potentially heat commercial and home spaces, among other things. So really interesting things all over his conversation in about 20 minutes. first, we’re going to talk today about Tesla, some interesting new battery technology that they’re waiting for Chinese patents to run out and then they’re going to be
00:01:37:02 – 00:01:56:10
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. It looks like going after that technology hard to bring to their their cars, and we’ll see what Alan and Rosemary think about the trickle down effect of that technology here in the U.S. and other places. We’ll talk about a really crazy video of a and you’ve probably seen it if you’re president of the wind industry of a
00:01:56:10 – 00:02:17:15
Unknown
hub with blades attached falling into the ocean off of the jack of the MPI adventure, a jack of vessel. So talk about the implications there. And then after our interview with Glen Ryan, we’ll talk about the Virginia’s new offshore wind facility that Siemens Gamesa is building here in the U.S. and some of the implications there.
00:02:17:15 – 00:02:33:00
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And then lastly, we’ll chat about Google’s 24-7 initiative, which Rosemary is quite excited about, as this puts us further on the path towards a carbon free future. So before we get going, is one remind you. Sign up for Ultime Tech news, so our weekly newsletter?
00:02:33:00 – 00:02:44:07
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Get updates on this podcast and other news around the web. You can sign up for that in the show notes or description below, and definitely sign up for Rose Mary’s YouTube channel, which you also find in the description below.
00:02:44:14 – 00:03:01:12
Unknown
She’s pumping out great new content each week, so definitely follow up. If you want to stay up to date on all of her endeavors. So first, let’s talk about Tesla. So, you know, obviously they’re really pushing hard. They’ve had a great quarter recently, and their goal now is to push into lithium ion phosphate batteries.
00:03:01:22 – 00:03:16:19
Unknown
So Alan Watt has told us right up to you since you’re, you know, you’re a big follower of Tesla in all Musk’s endeavors. What is this push towards LLP batteries mean for Tesla? And then, you know, as as they sort of lead industries, you know, the rest of the renewables?
00:03:17:01 – 00:03:36:01
Unknown
Yeah. Switching to Ion basically will help lower the cost of batteries clearly. And then also iron is readily available and essentially all countries. So it opens up opportunities in terms of battery construction and will help lower the cost of the batteries.
00:03:36:01 – 00:03:50:12
Unknown
The issue is just sort of the how fast you can discharge them. So what Tesla is saying is they’re going to apply them to the sort of base model cars that are not like the plaid, which is zero to 60 in under two seconds kind of thing where they need a lot of energy very quickly.
00:03:51:03 – 00:04:08:07
Unknown
The ion technology batteries are more sort of long duration controlled amplitude on how much current L will draw at any one time. So it’s a less performance battery, less expensive battery, which is where Tesla needs to get because of Tesla.
00:04:08:18 – 00:04:27:23
Unknown
So all the Teslas are relatively expensive compared to the internal combustion engine cars and in the United States. I think why this is really important now is if you noticed Hertz, which is one of the larger car rental country companies in the United States, if not the world as picked up, it’s going to pick up a 100,000
00:04:28:10 – 00:04:43:12
Unknown
model threes. That’s a large, I’m sure, a lot of cars, I’m sure it’s the largest fleet order, and until the last year or two you couldn’t even rent an electric vehicle. He could rent hybrids, but that was rare.
00:04:43:18 – 00:04:55:17
Unknown
But to rent a Tesla was off the charts. Not going to happen. And they just turn the page on it. So they have to drive the cars, the cars down batteries as a big expense. This is what this is directionally going to go.
00:04:55:23 – 00:05:17:13
Unknown
I also wonder to Dan if if in Rosemary, if the China factory plays into this, that Tesla’s factory in China, that they’re going to go to that technology anyway because it’s more of a standard in China that they want to just uniformly make that the base car because that technology is already in play in different countries and
00:05:17:13 – 00:05:31:04
Unknown
it’s recyclable, a little more recyclable. So it makes sense. Yeah, it does. And when we talked last week about, you know, rare rare earth minerals and the scarcity there and of course, you know, nickel manganese, cobalt, they’re not.
00:05:31:09 – 00:05:42:20
Unknown
I don’t know if those don’t qualify as rare earth minerals, I don’t think, but they’re definitely scarce and hard to find and, like you said, more regional and not as readily available. I don’t know, rosemary. I mean, does this seem like a big?
00:05:42:20 – 00:05:55:20
Unknown
Is this going to trickle down into maybe like home batteries or, you know, your Tesla as a leader, obviously innovation in the battery and electricity sector, if that’s a sector. But do you see the spilling over into other avenues, not just cars?
00:05:55:21 – 00:06:14:03
Unknown
Yeah, I think that it might already be in a lot of stationary batteries because the left pay chemistry has not got the problem with fire that some of the other lithium ion chemistry chemistries have. I mean, I’m no expert, but my understanding is the Powerwall is already already use it.
00:06:14:12 – 00:06:24:16
Unknown
I could be wrong about that, but I think that it’s at least common in home batteries, if not the only one that’s being used. Because the main drawback with the chemistry is it just doesn’t have the power density.
00:06:25:09 – 00:06:44:00
Unknown
And also, yeah, like the discharge rate, maybe it’s harder to get the hottest charge, right? So I’m not sure that we’re ever going to see it fall really high performance cars because you know you need that light, lightweight you need you need a lot of power at once, and fast recharging is also good.
00:06:44:00 – 00:07:04:20
Unknown
So maybe it will never go there. But I think that getting cheaper models of electric cars that aren’t as high performance is going to be really important. And I mean, for me personally, I’m I’m so desperate to buy an electric car, but I have just been through the exercise and made a spreadsheet and got on, you know
00:07:04:20 – 00:07:21:02
Unknown
, like all the comparison websites. My first obstacle is that, you know, I go on these comparison websites and just find a list of awesome EVs that aren’t available in Australia because we have very few available here for a bunch of reasons that I won’t go into because they’re largely political.
00:07:22:11 – 00:07:33:08
Unknown
And then the second thing is that they are still the upfront price is still more expensive. And for me personally, I mean, I’ve never bought a new car or I think the newest kind of bought is about seven years old.
00:07:33:08 – 00:07:50:21
Unknown
So I I think consumers like me, like I really want one, but it’s just the car that’s right for me doesn’t exist in electric in Australia yet. So I think that, yeah, more effort spent on getting that just cheaper entry point.
00:07:50:21 – 00:08:08:15
Unknown
I’m not that worried about acceleration. To be honest, I like going fast, but when I’m driving, I just want to get there safely and with minimal environmental impact. So I think that you know where we can get the price point down on, you know, just like boring, boring electric vehicles, that will be good.
00:08:08:15 – 00:08:24:11
Unknown
And I think this is a step towards that. I mean, Alan, so do you think you know, Rosemary mentioned like Powerwall is at home, but that’s not a huge market in the US. I mean, do you see any other applications for this battery chemistry or the whole ion battery technology is what form energy is talking about?
00:08:24:17 – 00:08:41:17
Unknown
They’re based in Massachusetts, right? That’s a slightly different sort of chemical reaction to create a battery, but everybody wants to get to the cheapest element. That’s your dream, right? That’s why I lead acid. Batteries are so common in automobiles, because lead is everywhere and it’s inexpensive.
00:08:41:17 – 00:08:53:03
Unknown
And it yeah, it’s heavy, but in a car, it doesn’t need a standard car. It doesn’t really make that much difference. And that’s a driver for all batteries, right? Materials are what drive the cost and also the performance.
00:08:53:14 – 00:09:12:22
Unknown
So it’s a real tradeoff. If you’re not moving, then the weight doesn’t matter so much, which is why Form Energy’s looking at ion technology, it just really has to do a lot with the application. And as the second piece of this, which I think is fascinating, is as we play around with the technology, all battery technology, the
00:09:12:23 – 00:09:27:11
Unknown
ion technology hasn’t been flushed out all the way yet. Like we have done what LED acids or with nickel cadmium batteries that’s pretty much flat, flat out pulled all the energy you’re going to pull out of it technology ion batteries.
00:09:27:11 – 00:09:42:04
Unknown
Not so much yet. I think. Are still a little bit of technology, you had to go there. So I think they’re going to make them better over the next four or five years. We should see improvement still. OK, so keep holding out people, keep holding out, do what you need to do.
00:09:42:04 – 00:10:05:15
Unknown
But you know, wait for that perfect Model X or Y or whatever. It’s got the best chemistry in five years. So moving on, you know, the like you said, this a vessel, the spy adventure drops one of the hubs you know, with, you know, the hub, the three to the three blades, pitched motors, batteries, electoral cabinets, grease
00:10:05:15 – 00:10:21:03
Unknown
pumps and other components. All are now resting happily at the bottom of the ocean rosemary. Having watched this video, what do you think happened? I heard like a like a pop and a ping, so it looks like some piece of rigging maybe gave way.
00:10:21:06 – 00:10:37:18
Unknown
Yeah, it looks. It looked like something like that. I mean, the video I saw you can hear, I guess it’s one of the guys involved in driving the the crane. Hey, it didn’t seem like human error or someone you know, just like whack whacked it into the ship.
00:10:37:18 – 00:10:53:18
Unknown
It did sound like something broke and it just fell. And I I don’t know. I don’t work on a lot of construction projects, whether it’s wind or any other aspect of construction. I guess this sort of thing happens every now and then a, you know, something fails and gets dropped.
00:10:53:18 – 00:11:12:03
Unknown
But yeah, it it was cool that they were filming that. That’s not my style, right? Exciting aspect. My dream. My dream. Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, no one was hurt, and luckily it wasn’t over the ship because Alan and I were discussing like, how much weight could a ship deck hold right there?
00:11:12:03 – 00:11:23:18
Unknown
Could you drop a 2000 pound weight just onto the ship deck and not go all the way through and sink the ship like we don’t know how former? Obviously, these are formidable vessels, but I mean, only about half that blade.
00:11:24:05 – 00:11:40:21
Unknown
Yeah, only about half that blade to the edge of the boat and the rest of it just went right into the ocean. Yeah. Even if they could carry, you know, the hundreds of tons of white, you know, to have it dropped on there, that’s probably not a design load that anybody is designing a ship to handle.
00:11:40:23 – 00:11:53:22
Unknown
I would guess, Alan, I mean, is that this looks like a rigging error? I don’t. We’re just a failure. I mean, all these things are made like a super high strength webbing, right? Like that crazy nylon webbing that can hold ungodly amounts of weight.
00:11:54:07 – 00:12:08:07
Unknown
And then but there’s still support about like, you know, steel rings and hooks and carabiners and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, but one of them just had a manufacturing flaw, a little something wrong with the metal. And finally, what gave way?
00:12:08:09 – 00:12:22:08
Unknown
Well, you know, my first reaction was maybe the winds were high, and that obviously increases the load that the crane is lifting. And that’s usually what will cause a crane to collapse or something a break because it’s it’s over, it’s rated value.
00:12:22:18 – 00:12:38:03
Unknown
In this particular case, it can’t be because they were making a lift with this system, so it must have been qualified, usually two or three times the rate of load. Um, that’s that doesn’t make any sense, either. It’s just weird that you hear something.
00:12:38:03 – 00:12:54:17
Unknown
It sounds like something snapped, right? Like Ping and then down it comes. The follow on for this is going to be really interesting just because they’re going to have to have a safety stand down. People could have been really hurt or killed in that situation.
00:12:55:00 – 00:13:10:17
Unknown
And you could have really critically damage a ship at the same time. So it’s not only are people loss, it’s like millions and millions and millions of dollars in damage. So usually when those safety kind of events happen, it’s a complete stand down.
00:13:10:18 – 00:13:28:11
Unknown
Everybody stops what they’re doing. They try to regroup and figure out what happened, and that could take months at times. So I’m really thinking this is going to be a real big setback. And I know we’re getting close to the end of the wind turbine installing season up in the northern hemisphere.
00:13:28:11 – 00:13:47:03
Unknown
It’s pretty close right now, so I’m not expecting them to be there much longer and maybe that was part of the deal. They’re trying to rush to get some things done. It’s it can’t, especially when we’re talking about the United States, when those kind of areas show up, it just automatically hits all the safety regulators in the
00:13:47:03 – 00:13:59:07
Unknown
United States, and they’ll start putting rules in place about how that can’t happen here and how you’re going to avoid it. And it’s just the consequences are so massive that you just don’t want people to get hurt, and rightly so.
00:13:59:07 – 00:14:19:13
Unknown
So there’s that. There’s a lot. It’s just like the truck. We saw the train ride through the that went terribly down in Texas. I haven’t heard anything more about that, and I haven’t seen anything in the press by assume that there has been some safety stand out there, too, that we’re trying to make things better.
00:14:19:13 – 00:14:42:04
Unknown
So it’s just not not a good situation right now. Yeah. And so this wind farm is owned by Vattenfall and they had contracted. Van Ford, which owns MPI Offshore, who was, you know, that’s their jack of vessels, so yeah, you know, these things, it’s hard to know how many of these things happen, just daily life, because like
00:14:42:05 – 00:14:55:02
Unknown
so much construction is going on all over the world, right? I mean, cranes tip over. It happens like these things happen all over. Obviously, once in a while, they catch it on video and it gets more scrutiny than it otherwise would.
00:14:55:09 – 00:15:07:10
Unknown
And fortunately, there were no deaths, like you said. And unfortunately, this is going to fall right into the hands of, you know, like all the right wing in America that wants to point out how evil when Bauer is right.
00:15:07:20 – 00:15:23:19
Unknown
So expect lots of that in the future as well. But obviously, like you said, rightly so. The regulators. So yeah, but I imagine this won’t be a long investigation because there weren’t that many things involved. You know, it was rigged up either properly or improperly.
00:15:23:20 – 00:15:38:05
Unknown
Right? And if it was if was rigged properly, then which which failed, right? You’re going to see a broken piece of webbing or, you know, a bolt or some piece of connection or, you know, some some piece of rigging gave way.
00:15:38:09 – 00:15:50:08
Unknown
So I’m sure they won’t they won’t take too long to figure out what the root cause was. Yeah, but the root cause isn’t so, so simple as just saying what part broke it. So you’ve got to figure out how it’s possible that that part broke.
00:15:50:08 – 00:16:09:05
Unknown
So, you know, it was it wasn’t inspected correctly. And I don’t know. You can’t guess at what the root cause was, but it it’s never simple to find a root cause, even if you know exactly what broke the root cause analysis is going to be, yeah, lengthy on something that’s so regulated as that as well.
00:16:09:05 – 00:16:25:15
Unknown
It’s not. It’s not like the root cause is going to be our highway. We bought the wrong webbing and yeah, and it just wasn’t rated high enough. That’s that’s not going to be it on an organization that experienced and you know, where the stakes are as high as it was for this installation.
00:16:25:16 – 00:16:38:19
Unknown
That’s yeah, it probably will be quite complex, even if even if at the end of the day, it’s like, Oh yeah, the webbing broke, it won’t be a simple matter to figure out exactly why it broke and how to make sure that it can never, ever happen again.
00:16:39:14 – 00:16:50:03
Unknown
Well, and of course, right now, obviously they’re trying to salvage as well. So a lot of the big components are at the bottom of the ocean. But then there’s a lot of debris fragments that are going to end up, you know, making it to the shore.
00:16:50:04 – 00:17:01:00
Unknown
They said a lot of glass fiber and just chunks of wood and other debris. And what was interesting was that they’re urging people like, don’t touch anything like that. If you see debris, don’t pick it up. Don’t put in the trash.
00:17:01:00 – 00:17:15:09
Unknown
Like, don’t touch it, which seems just like an obvious. Like, they’re just trying to stay out of litigation at this point because someone I’m sure someone would love to like, Oh, there’s a thing in the beach. I’m going to grab it and claim that it cut my hand open and file a lawsuit and get a nice settlement
00:17:15:09 – 00:17:25:17
Unknown
out of it. So I’m sure they’re just trying to be as close as they can while cleaning it up as quickly as they can. To be honest, I would. I would pick that up if I saw it on the beach and take it on as a souvenir.
00:17:26:00 – 00:17:43:15
Unknown
I mean, definitely. Sorry. Sorry to call the table table, put on a table and put some epoxy on top of it, like on the school bar top. Yeah, I’d be careful not to get splinters in the fiberglass, but yeah, I think I would like that souvenir.
00:17:43:15 – 00:17:58:11
Unknown
So, yeah, good. Good luck to them to try and stop people from touching it. All right. So we’re going to transition now to our interview with Glen Ryan, who is the co-founder of Sunovate. He is also the inventor and co-founder of Bombora Wave power.
00:17:58:20 – 00:18:16:21
Unknown
So really all encompassing conversation about just his entrepreneurial endeavors and a lot of stuff that he’s learned over the years. And this, you know, this dovetails really well with a lot of our conversation with Rosemary and Allen. As far as you know, good engineering ideas and good technology don’t always make it to market.
00:18:17:06 – 00:18:35:10
Unknown
And that was one of the things you want to pick Glen’s brain about today, just because he’s been in the industry so long, been a founder of multiple startups. And just how difficult is it, how difficult it is, even with good technology, with a good premise and even a budding market, it can still be really difficult to
00:18:35:10 – 00:18:58:14
Unknown
get people to buy in and get regulators and policy in place where you can make things happen. So without further ado, we’re going to shift to our conversation with Glen Ryan, co-founder of Sunovate Yes, so let’s let’s get right into it, so son of a obviously is your your solar startup, but it’s it’s bigger than that.
00:18:58:14 – 00:19:10:00
Unknown
So one of the big things that seems like the common way we think about solar panels are they just provide electricity, right? They capture the sunlight, convert electricity, goes through power. Is your home or back to the grid, whatever.
00:19:10:00 – 00:19:28:06
Unknown
But you’re using your startup, Sunovate, is going beyond that and saying, Hey, we could not just collect electrical energy from the solar panels, but also use some of the extra thermal heat that’s created to actually thermally heat and cool the home.
00:19:28:07 – 00:19:40:23
Unknown
I mean, that seems like like a crazy. Like, why don’t we think of this kind of idea? But why haven’t? Why hasn’t that come to market yet? And and how can you pull that off where you’re sending both electricity and heat and cooling into a home?
00:19:41:03 – 00:19:56:20
Unknown
It’s a great question, Dan. We originally installed our three kilowatt PV system nearly ten years ago, and I guess initially confronted by the fact that in the middle of summer, when we’re expecting it to produce the full three kilowatts, it was only producing 1.9 kilowatts.
00:19:57:09 – 00:20:18:11
Unknown
So we set about a way of, I guess, trying to recover some of that electricity electricity during the heat during the summer. Because heat is the panel’s enemy, the hotter the panel gets the listing electricity it produces. So we developed a system that sat underneath the panel and we called the panel with air that was blowing through
00:20:18:11 – 00:20:42:04
Unknown
it. We regained that electrical production, but we also realized that we had a great deal of awesome heat coming off the top of it. So we actually pivoted the business to actually focus on more the thermal side. So, so we set up the system and we demonstrated that on a number of different panels, and then we went
00:20:42:04 – 00:20:57:11
Unknown
and produced a domestic system. So, so now we channel the air from inside the house up through the panels and we collect the heat. And then we draw that air back through the traditional air conditioning ducting system and we deposit that back through the house.
00:20:58:04 – 00:21:11:15
Unknown
So it’s very simple and very effective. Yeah. And I I’m not an expert on like the Model T or, you know, when cars are first and developing. But I assume there was a same aha sort of moment with the first car, right, like their water cooling it.
00:21:11:21 – 00:21:22:23
Unknown
And at some point they realized, Hey, it’s really cold and he drives in the winter. Maybe we can use, you know, the water cooling and this type, the car, those probably that literally that same idea. So it sounds like that’s kind of what you’re doing.
00:21:23:15 – 00:21:34:07
Unknown
And I’ve heard you can lift the internal temperature of a house 15 to 20 degrees above ambient. Is that right? Yeah, so definitely. So that was kind of. Yeah, that was our aha moment. Well, why don’t we do something with this thing?
00:21:34:08 – 00:21:52:12
Unknown
So yeah, we basically have the system goes in open loop or closed loop. So in wintertime, when we want to retain the heat inside the house, we draw the air from inside. We push it through the panels. And, you know, typically we’re getting a 20, you know, 15 to 20 degree uplift of the panels, which, you know
00:21:52:18 – 00:22:06:17
Unknown
, turns it into a nice balmy summer day as it comes back inside the house. So, Glenn, the obvious choice to cool solar panels typically is to put some sort of liquid in a freeze water, you name it, underneath the panel to cool it.
00:22:07:04 – 00:22:25:04
Unknown
Why air instead of a liquid? So a really good question. And look, there are, I guess this technology classification is called PBT. So Photoshop folks like them. Or so there are a range of other technologies out there that do use both liquid like holes and refrigerants cooling mechanisms.
00:22:25:17 – 00:22:47:23
Unknown
And I guess our original proposition was to boost the electrical output. So we were focused on cooling the cells equally because we wanted to to basically get that maximum electrical gain out of it. And maybe if I explain, like if you have a hot cell within a string of your PV panel, that’s essentially, you know, the foot
00:22:47:23 – 00:23:02:07
Unknown
on the part of the current. So if you don’t call them all to that, you know that equal temperature the hot cell dictates what basically drives the current so. So ours is unique in that we call every cell basically evenly.
00:23:02:20 – 00:23:22:10
Unknown
So the difference between a water system is, or a refrigerant system is they typically have one inlet at one corner of the panel and an outlet at the top end of the panel. So you have a thermal, you have a thermal gradient from one end of the panel to the other, and that is challenging in terms of
00:23:22:10 – 00:23:38:22
Unknown
cell manufacturers. So they don’t like, you know, thermal stresses or other, I guess stress has been imposed on their panels. So that’s one of the reasons we went around it. So that was, yeah, I guess that was quite an interesting diversion from existing technology.
00:23:39:03 – 00:23:51:04
Unknown
But, you know, liquid will cool a lot faster. You know, what is it, four times about four times faster than heat. It’ll transfer transfer heat there to four times faster than air. But it just sounds like that at a lot of complexity, right?
00:23:51:04 – 00:24:04:23
Unknown
And A. We’re you’re trying to bring this to market a big scale. Did that just pose further problems because it is quite unique in the marketplace or within the PBT classification, we are sort of forging one of those earlier marketplaces.
00:24:06:05 – 00:24:24:12
Unknown
You’re correct that the I guess the energy carrying potential of water is four times higher than airport permits. But I guess water presents and liquids present a challenge to the thermal stresses that we spoke of. But also, you know, extra white extra fittings to be connected.
00:24:24:20 – 00:24:36:06
Unknown
So, you know, we over time lose a little bit of air. It’s not critical, but if you lose a little bit of refrigerant or liquid or, you know, especially when you’re dealing with water, it becomes a little bit more critical.
00:24:36:09 – 00:24:50:00
Unknown
So, you know, that solar panel may look nice in, you know, Solar Thermal System might look nice in the first ten years, but I can tell you from personal experience, they look pretty cruddy after the first, after the second ten leaks in the light.
00:24:50:00 – 00:25:03:23
Unknown
So just not a good place for electricity as well. Yes. So you mentioned at the start that you saw a decrease in the efficiency of your just normal solar panels. What was it from three to less than two kilowatts, a huge, huge decrease.
00:25:04:07 – 00:25:19:08
Unknown
What can you bring it back up to by getting getting rid of some of that excess heat? So it’s essentially how much air we push through the system. So we’ve got a, I guess, a comparative test by next to a domestic demonstrator.
00:25:19:08 – 00:25:34:09
Unknown
So we have five panel PV system and then we have four other panels that are adjacent to it in the same plane. And in that we test what’s essentially a PV is a built in PV with no airflow right through just to a standard tin roof mounted system.
00:25:34:17 – 00:25:53:02
Unknown
And we compare that. So temperatures across those. So what we’ve been able to show over summer is that, you know, the the built in PV can get nearly as high as 100 degrees Celsius. So, you know, close to boiling and even the basic ones that are sitting on a tin roof their way up into the high eighties
00:25:53:13 – 00:26:10:08
Unknown
. So what we’ve been able to demonstrate through our system is that we’ve actually brought those cell temperatures in our PBT system down to low fifties in one of our experiments. So we essentially just flood the system with air and we can pull that pull that performance right back.
00:26:11:03 – 00:26:29:14
Unknown
Yeah, we do. We do have a need to drive fans. So there is a, I guess, an additional parasitic loss, but that’s less than the gain that we get from the electricity. And part of part of it innovation is actually how do we get that relationship between extra power required for the fan versus the extra power we
00:26:29:14 – 00:26:42:23
Unknown
get for electricity? So that’s part of the innovation that we’ve developed as well. And then in addition, I like the heat. Obviously, you know, it’s producing heat. You’re, you know, sweeping that heat away with air makes sense. So you can then use that waste air to heat a home.
00:26:42:23 – 00:26:57:08
Unknown
But can you explain that it sounds like you can cool a house as well, which just sounds incredibly counterintuitive. I mean, how does that end up happening when you’ve got solar rays heating up a panel and yet you can take cool air and cool home with it?
00:26:57:14 – 00:27:10:16
Unknown
So it was, I guess, one of our Model T moments that day and is, you know, we used to have the our little experiment sitting out there, you know, and we’d go and do our test each day. And then one morning I went out there a little bit earlier than it normally would.
00:27:10:16 – 00:27:28:16
Unknown
And there’s all this condensation was streaming off our PB panel, but it wasn’t streaming off the third panel. That was kind of like an open back panel. So I went, Oh, that’s interesting. And I guess, you know, we started through observation realizing that overnight, you know, we read a bit more about night radiative cooling and you know
00:27:28:16 – 00:27:42:22
Unknown
, you just kind of wonder why your car has all this dew on it in the morning or windows freeze over. It’s not freezing. Well, you know, there’s a whole ancient art around ice making and and all this sort of stuff that the ancient cultures used to use.
00:27:42:22 – 00:28:00:08
Unknown
So they use this phenomenon called night radiative cooling and PB panels are actually well-suited to that because they’re black, they radiate heat to space. So we’ve measured our cell temperatures to be up to -8 degrees Celsius below ambient.
00:28:00:18 – 00:28:12:04
Unknown
So you’ve got a really clear, you know, the most crystal clear skies, you know, when you walk out at night at times and you feel you kind of, you know, the heat just sinking out of your head, that’s that’s kind of not right in effect.
00:28:12:04 – 00:28:25:20
Unknown
So, yeah, really interesting phenomena. So we just took that to our advantage. So the cooling aspect of our panel happens at nighttime. So, you know, during the daytime, we can capture the heat for, you know, glow the summer.
00:28:26:07 – 00:28:43:05
Unknown
It depends. You probably don’t have a huge heating load, so you might want to heat your hot water and your pool, but you don’t want a heat your house. So any excess energy, we will dump its atmosphere. But at nighttime, we just leave the system running at a slightly lower rate and we bring the cold ambient air
00:28:43:05 – 00:28:55:02
Unknown
in and we push it through the panels, get some cool and then we distribute that cold air back through the house. So you get fresh air and you get it cooled. So essentially, look, we have done over the last.
00:28:57:06 – 00:29:09:17
Unknown
The last year or so is we certainly don’t need any external heating and cooling because we run with the passive nature of the of the system. And then you mentioned heating water. You can also heat water with this.
00:29:09:17 – 00:29:28:20
Unknown
Is that right? Yeah. So basically, it’s like a drafting gate of what you want to do with heat. So, you know, we can we can go straight to space heating without any extra heat exchanges, just a fan. But then we can also push that hot air over a coil so that coil might have water in it.
00:29:29:18 – 00:29:47:17
Unknown
Which we can heat up. So just just like a radiator in your car coming back to Mr. Model, Mr. Ford’s Model T. And also we can also use the evaporator of a heat pump. So we just pass that heater there over the top of the coils and we extract the energy that way.
00:29:47:23 – 00:30:00:18
Unknown
So, so, Glen, I want to shift gears a little bit. So you are the founder of Bombora Wave Energy. So this is not, you know, your first venture, you’ve been a serial entrepreneur and Bombora has been successful and you’re still a founding shareholder there.
00:30:01:11 – 00:30:11:16
Unknown
Can you tell us one of the things we’re going to get into today, as you know, with all these great ideas? Not all of them make it to market like it’s not that simple or you just have a good idea.
00:30:12:04 – 00:30:22:11
Unknown
Rosemary gets this all the time on our YouTube channel. People send her, you know, engineering drawings of, Hey, I’ve got a new wind turbine and it, like, might work on paper. But is this actually viable in the market?
00:30:22:11 – 00:30:34:10
Unknown
Is it going to be a take off? Is going to be mass produced? Like, who’s it going to fit in in the market? Are people going to adopt it? So I know you had a lot of growing pains with with Bombonera, and it’s really done well now.
00:30:35:06 – 00:30:52:22
Unknown
But what have you learned from that? And can you tell us a little bit about your experience with Bombora and what what that’s meant to you in this? The second big venture? Okay. Look, it’s been a fantastic learning experience, and I had a little wind turbine design even before Bombora, which will don’t show it Rosie she’ll man
00:30:53:19 – 00:31:14:09
Unknown
tear you to shreds. Yeah, it’s vertical axis as well. No, they don’t actually do it. Oh no. Well, and and rosy, I guess. Will you understand? So I guess even with Bombora and this little wind turbine idea, I guess the first thing we learned about was convergent technology.
00:31:14:14 – 00:31:35:17
Unknown
So what I was developing that little wind turbine, the biggest wind turbine available, was 330 kilowatts. By the time I’d finished my R&D project one year later, the biggest wind turbine was 1.6 megawatts. Wow, that’s crazy. I guess I suddenly realized then that, you know, even if you’ve got a better widget, you know, sometimes it’s timing to
00:31:35:18 – 00:31:55:03
Unknown
market. So I would say that my widget wasn’t better than the horizontal axis is still good, but they had the best scaling potential. So I kind of took that into Bombora So what was interesting there is, I guess, yeah, I’ve created solutions for the market that hasn’t actually asked for it yet.
00:31:55:16 – 00:32:06:22
Unknown
So what I saw the potential with Bombora or white power in general. So I actually started with the idea of white power. I didn’t have a design and I went, Wow, this would be good to support wind and solar.
00:32:07:08 – 00:32:28:14
Unknown
So when the solar’s week during summer and we know the waves are really strong in winter, you know, wave and wind kind of was quite complimentary. Wind wind is seasonal, but probably to a lesser degree. So I used to say that’s like the third leg of the renewable energy sort of supply matrix.
00:32:30:04 – 00:32:44:18
Unknown
So that was that was kind of where we started off there. And I guess once we realized that wave had this potential to solve future energy mixes, then we said about the technology. So but look, it has been really challenging.
00:32:45:03 – 00:33:08:09
Unknown
Like I said, we we I guess as an engineer, my learning through Bombonera was that you don’t engineer the the hell out of it. Okay, so we learned that customers king listened to the customer in this experience. Now with Sunnyvale, and we’ve been really cautious about not spending too much more on the technology, but actually focusing on
00:33:08:09 – 00:33:27:21
Unknown
the market and and the customer to, you know, you only get really one chance to cross that valley of death. You know, very few companies get the second chance to go. So, you know, that’s that was kind of our learning out of the Bombora experience is that, you know, and that’s a big deep tech, you know, that’s
00:33:28:07 – 00:33:42:05
Unknown
you know, they’ve spent 20 plus million dollars on that technology so far. Well, and that reminds me of kind of like, you know, the Apple Story, you know, like Steve Jobs was there’s obviously a legendary, you know, businessman.
00:33:42:17 – 00:33:56:12
Unknown
And, you know, when he brought the iPod and the iPad like these were product markets that didn’t exist. Like there was no market for a tablet, there was no MP3 player. That or maybe there were, but his was fundamentally different, right?
00:33:56:12 – 00:34:08:15
Unknown
He was saying, Hey, customers, I don’t want to give you what you want. And of course, I know that that old quote attributed to Henry Henry Ford, I don’t know if it’s actually attributed to him, but he said, you know, if I’d given what the customers wanted, they I would to give them a faster horse.
00:34:08:21 – 00:34:19:04
Unknown
I don’t know if that’s. I’ve heard mixed reviews of that quotes actually attributed to Henry Ford, but the same thing. Keep going back to the Model T, you know, trying to engineer something that people don’t know they need yet.
00:34:19:04 – 00:34:38:20
Unknown
It is that kind of what you meant with with Bombora Wave that the market didn’t know that it wanted it or needed it, or that it could be a viable technology. Slightly, because like it’s I guess, the epiphany epiphany this is going to come through this year with Microsoft and and Google coming out just recently going well
00:34:39:14 – 00:34:53:23
Unknown
, look, we’ve achieved net zero, but we’re not net zero every hour. So, you know, some classic Google graphs come up with a they’re just trying to remember that 40 40% of the time they’re still using black energy when they basically look at it temporally.
00:34:54:08 – 00:35:09:14
Unknown
So, you know, what we’re saying is that’s where the sort of the fit starts to come with the Bombora technology. Yeah. Working in the ocean is, you know, it’s an apprentice environment, so you have to be survival and it’s not going to come as cheap as sticking a paddle on a roof.
00:35:10:02 – 00:35:24:06
Unknown
But, you know, when you start to time value that energy, it becomes, you know, that’s when it starts to drop in the slot. So as we as we have experienced here in Western Australia, you know, we’ve got, you know, as much as some of our federal policies, quite backward.
00:35:24:18 – 00:35:39:06
Unknown
We’ve got a policy that was developed in 2001, which is called the Renewable Energy Target, and we’re still working on that policy framework today. And that’s actually allowed us in Western Australia to have the, you know, during the middle of the day.
00:35:39:06 – 00:35:55:03
Unknown
The biggest power station is rooftop solar. So we have over a gigawatt in a system that is at times getting down to a grid facing, you know, less than if there’s less than a gigawatt itself. So, you know, rooftop is the predominant generator now.
00:35:55:23 – 00:36:11:16
Unknown
So we’re now faced with turning turning wind farms off during the middle of the day and even some big solar farms because we’re getting negative prices. So the coal, the coal’s just getting wedged and it can’t. Yeah, you know, it’s got no more demand to soak it up into.
00:36:11:16 – 00:36:30:09
Unknown
So they’re using pricing instruments to basically keep the lights on due to coal and and it’s shutting down wind and solar. So that’s kind of where we’re at. So when you look at that next evolution, if we’re trying to get rid of that, that coal system out of the yeah, we need this diversity and renewables.
00:36:30:09 – 00:36:43:16
Unknown
So energy storage will come in and play, but you’ve got to think of the system as a whole. So I guess that’s yeah. Now we see where Bombora will fit in, as you know, in the future energy mix and people will start to pay a price for that.
00:36:44:03 – 00:37:01:03
Unknown
You know, 15 years ago was just a little bit too early for that conversation. Yeah. Glen, I think you raised some really good points just in the sort of the venture entrepreneurial spirit of trying to create technology where there is a lot of government oversight.
00:37:01:11 – 00:37:18:13
Unknown
It’s a mix being an engineer and an entrepreneur, it just adds levels of difficulty to it because you’re trying not to convince maybe a customer you’re trying to convince a government and governments move slowly and make a lot of wrong decisions.
00:37:19:03 – 00:37:37:19
Unknown
So if you’re in that marketplace, I think some of it’s taking a different approach, which is here we have this sort of existing technology, which has been blessed by the the government was make let’s make it better is is is that clear some of those pathways for you as a business?
00:37:37:19 – 00:37:50:05
Unknown
Oh, it does. Yeah, yeah, I mean it more the commercial pathways. So we. So you’ve raised very good points, though with Bombonera, we had you had OEMs, you know, the scale of the business. We needed both policy support.
00:37:50:05 – 00:38:06:11
Unknown
We needed, you know, grants, you get the early products going through, but ultimately you need a long term revenue stream, so you need certainty of if you deploy and get to scale, where are you going to still make money or where your investors or your project developers still going to make money?
00:38:06:12 – 00:38:19:19
Unknown
So yeah, here in Australia, we got wind and solar, but we’ve got a very, you know, it’s a fairly linear certificate. They get the same certificate, so there’s no discrimination. So why even it’s early days, it’s never going to compete with wind and solar.
00:38:20:02 – 00:38:31:21
Unknown
So. So you were only, you know, you’re pricing yourself against their electricity in their certificate price. It’s never going to happen. But in the UK, they have what’s called a, I guess, a mechanism which is contract for difference.
00:38:32:06 – 00:38:51:01
Unknown
And then they break that up into portfolios. So, you know, they have an offshore wind market, they have an onshore wind market. So they’ve got different classifications that you can compete again against your peers. And that means so you may get one or two certificates in there for your wave technology.
00:38:51:09 – 00:39:09:16
Unknown
So suddenly you’ve got a guaranteed revenue stream and you’re not competing. Yeah, you rip your revenues not at risk from other technologies or policy, you know, changes. So so that right? Yeah. So that’s what so we you know, it actually, you know, we need all those things happening at the same time.
00:39:09:22 – 00:39:25:22
Unknown
Yeah, I’ve your comment about Sunovate Well, you know, with all those learnings there, I’ve tried to try and prune as many of those other externalities that I can that I can sort of control. So, you know, we’re looking, you know, we still have got challenges.
00:39:26:15 – 00:39:47:00
Unknown
So in Australia, we don’t have a renewable heat target. The British have just come out and announce that, you know, they’ve got a they’ve basically their roadmap for, you know, for the domestic housing stock. So I had a lovely reader that yesterday and I did a couple of word comments and solar featured solar thermal featured three times
00:39:47:09 – 00:40:02:17
Unknown
and hydrogen featured 341 times. So, you know, it’s kind of like so we still have, you know, those challenges of actually, yeah, we have the technology here and today we don’t have to go invent, you know, sophisticated hydrogen gas boilers and things like that.
00:40:02:18 – 00:40:16:23
Unknown
Yeah, yeah. We just got to work out how we integrate those into the system. That’s actually something that I was thinking about the whole time that you’re talking. It’s it’s interesting that you’ve developed in Australia. That makes sense because there’s so much rooftop solar in Australia.
00:40:16:23 – 00:40:34:12
Unknown
I know more than, I think a like a quarter of houses have rooftop solar. But on the other hand, heat is not something that we talk about too much in Australia. And when we do talk about it, it’s mainly because, you know, like a gas distribution company has invested in hydrogen, that’s the only the only thing I
00:40:34:12 – 00:40:53:18
Unknown
ever hear about in Australia, even though we’ve probably got the least challenging renewable heat problem out of anywhere in the world. So I was just wondering how how you say son of eight competing with, yeah, with hydrogen, with heat pumps, how how will it fit in?
00:40:53:18 – 00:41:10:12
Unknown
What what, what places is some of its technology going to suit and compared to some of those others? So I spend a good part of my time. I guess people say I bash hydrogen. I think hydrogen has a very good place in our future energy mix, but it’s not heating our homes and cooking our food.
00:41:10:20 – 00:41:27:06
Unknown
You know, it’s displacing existing hydrogen requirements, fertilizers, minerals processing. So yeah, I try and say, Well, look, if I had a dollar, why would I, you know, kind of burn it? You know, taking all this high, high entropy, high entropy product and really just devaluing it.
00:41:27:06 – 00:41:40:12
Unknown
So we say the same with electricity. So you know, why take a premium product which can give you mobility and give you a job, your appliances and computers like we are today, we out and destroy that into heat.
00:41:40:20 – 00:42:00:14
Unknown
So I guess we started trying to move that conversation. We also are big proponents of heat pumps, but what we say is with our technology, you can have a much smaller heat pump. So, you know, we just use the heat pump for the topping cycle, not doing all the cycles when you get to when you get to
00:42:00:14 – 00:42:16:12
Unknown
like a European or a very cold climate where they’re all pushing to go heat pumps. Yeah, we know the first thing that’s going to happen. Well, we talk about emerging problems that people don’t see is that electrical network is going to get stressed big time because, you know, they’ve got to put big heat pumps.
00:42:16:12 – 00:42:34:22
Unknown
They’re going to have car chargers. You’re moving. I guess what? The global energy carrier, the electricity carries about a quarter of the world’s final energy demand. So you’re asking it to basically go to, you know, force three or four times its existing capacity to service all these new customers.
00:42:35:11 – 00:42:55:11
Unknown
So yes, we’ll get smarter about how we dispatch those loads. So in terms of timing, you know, we will, you know, will have, you know, timers and, you know, demand responses. But we’re still, you know, we’re still challenged with getting that volume into those services, you know, those domestic heating and commercial services.
00:42:55:16 – 00:43:16:02
Unknown
So so I guess coming back to Rosie’s question, you know, in Australia, surprisingly, when we did our research, the the heating demand especially for, you know, Melbourne and Canberra and all that, you know, it’s it’s actually higher than, you know, some of the high altitude European countries because essentially our houses weaken their poor performance.
00:43:16:10 – 00:43:37:15
Unknown
So, you know, we have massive heating loads. Yeah, I know that very problem very intimately. I just moved from Denmark to Canberra, and I have frozen the whole point. Yeah. So it’s such a contrast to me. Yeah. And then in some in some of your bike and you know, that’s that’s just part of the challenge.
00:43:37:15 – 00:43:53:23
Unknown
So we have huge opportunities here in Australia, but without targets or these incentive programs, we’re happy to make their systems more efficient, but we’re not actually happy to transition across to renewable heat. Do you think that part of it is big?
00:43:54:12 – 00:44:07:00
Unknown
Yeah. Do you think that part of it is because it doesn’t need a huge like it’s not some really out there space technology kind of level innovation. It’s, you know, the way that you describe it, it’s quite simple.
00:44:07:12 – 00:44:25:16
Unknown
It’s, you know, I can imagine how it works after you describe it in a couple of minutes. Do you think that that’s part of the problem? I noticed this a lot with all kinds of renewable energy technology reporting that it’s it’s the really out there ideas that capture people’s imagination and get them excited.
00:44:25:16 – 00:44:43:07
Unknown
And I wonder if that’s part of it with hydrogen. That’s like, Wow, you know, it’s this huge challenge. We need to design all these new things. How exciting do you think that that is more appealing for an investor to see some huge technology gap that you know this new company is going to provide?
00:44:43:15 – 00:45:01:18
Unknown
Do you think that actually handicaps the, you know, more mature, more robust technologies? Absolutely. So I guess we’ll have a little analogy around this. You know, it’s the George Jetson versus Fred Flintstone. You know, George Jetson has the technology and the buzz in the future and all that excitement.
00:45:01:18 – 00:45:17:23
Unknown
You know, Fred Flintstone is still, you know, it’s it’s, you know, basic technology gets him from A to B, but it’s not sexy. And yet I find, you know, I guess there’s two elements. I think part of it is the policy and the, you know, I guess, the camera moment.
00:45:17:23 – 00:45:37:16
Unknown
So you know, you have our policy makers wanting to get in front of, you know, highlighting these great, you know, Hajin. And, you know, it sounds interesting, sounds complicated. You know, lots of technical stuff. And there is a big push from the, I guess, the natural gas manufacturers to to, I guess, continue their product stream, which is
00:45:37:16 – 00:45:58:16
Unknown
through the blue hydrogen or clean hydrogen as our government likes to call it. But yeah, I think there is that really like, it’s that simple. You know, okay, it’s kind of it gets moved over quite quickly. So yeah, it’s and it’s I guess what we’ve found is as people walk inside our house over winter time of year
00:45:58:17 – 00:46:12:02
Unknown
. Oh, that’s nice and warm. You know, they connect with the service, so they connect with, oh, a nice warm house, thermal comfort. They don’t really care what’s up on their roof. So I guess that’s why we’ve taken a bit of more of a change in tact.
00:46:12:02 – 00:46:30:01
Unknown
And you know, we talk about the customer and what they experience as opposed to kind of the technology. So, you know, as an engineer that’s been trained in solving problems and you know, all this stuff, it’s it’s it takes a little while for you to reconstruct your thought processes.
00:46:30:01 – 00:46:54:09
Unknown
But yeah, that’s fascinating. Glen, I really like that to hear that because rarely do you hear engineers talk about basically building confidence and selling a product. And I think you have a really great product to deliver, right? And it comes down to building that sort of relationship, that confidence that this works.
00:46:54:18 – 00:47:13:11
Unknown
It doesn’t have to be complicated to work. And there’s engineering involved, clearly. But does the user really care? Users don’t care how their iPad works. They just don’t care. Right? So it comes back to is it reliable? Does it do what you say it’s going to do and is a value proposition for me?
00:47:13:18 – 00:47:31:07
Unknown
If you can check those boxes, then? I think the product will succeed regardless of how, quote unquote technological the product does. It doesn’t matter anymore. And I think that’s where you really find a sweet spot is because everybody can relate to losing power at a PV panel.
00:47:31:20 – 00:47:46:19
Unknown
That’s just, you know, that’s one of those depressing things. You know, what’s going to happen? Just nothing you do about it. But you’re saying, Wait a minute, let’s to rethink that. Yeah, you don’t have to lose that power one, but two, we can be much more efficient and make your home much more comfortable without a lot of
00:47:46:19 – 00:48:02:04
Unknown
complexity. That’s a great that’s a great product, I think that that makes it just makes salivate such a basically a leader in that market space. And I think that’s just really going to push the market. Yeah. one of the things we work on is this spatial constraints.
00:48:02:04 – 00:48:18:05
Unknown
So energy independence. So you know, I’ve talked a lot about the macro in the in the grid scale stuff. But you know, what’s really interesting for us is that, you know, just around very basic system that we’ve got here, we don’t have a domestic battery, but we’ve got a a now little Evie.
00:48:18:16 – 00:48:37:12
Unknown
So now we’re managing our portfolio, just a simple three kilowatt grid system, plus our pivot. And you know, we’re freeing up that electricity that may have been used for heating for our car. So, so suddenly within this constrained portfolio, we’re managing our energy budgets.
00:48:37:17 – 00:48:52:12
Unknown
So the issues about time of use and stuff like that, like I know in the middle of the day, I just set the car timer from about ten to two and I set the rate at the timer and it’s done, you know, and I suck up all that cheap energy that’s going off to the to the grid
00:48:52:12 – 00:49:05:08
Unknown
that they’re challenged with. And then I got a free, you know, free energy from my car. And so Glenn, one of the last major questions I have is, you know, what’s your mark as you’ve been talking about heating the home.
00:49:05:08 – 00:49:19:06
Unknown
But but it sounds like you’re going to go after more of a commercial market kind of from like a simplistic from a standpoint of keeping your products simple and easy to install and easy to scale. So can you talk about like commercial or home?
00:49:19:06 – 00:49:30:09
Unknown
And what are you guys focused on in the future as you really start to launch and get out? There is probably all of you know that every technology goes through a learning rate phase. So, you know, we are bespoke spitefully manufacturer.
00:49:30:10 – 00:49:44:11
Unknown
We’re expensive, but we’ve got to scale to market quickly. And I guess we realize that we probably won’t have the same. I guess just, you know, focus on our technology as wind and solar have in the past in terms of, you know, massive R&D.
00:49:44:12 – 00:50:02:06
Unknown
So we’ve got to work on how we get there fast. So we’ve actually we enjoy the domestic market, but it’s having to say, you know, the cost of customer acquisition and the complexity of smaller projects to scale is problematic for us to start with, although is an attractive market there for early adopters.
00:50:02:14 – 00:50:22:20
Unknown
But we want to get into the hundreds and thousands of panels really quickly. So so we’re really looking at what we call the district heating market or larger platform. So we can basically, you know, scale the technology really quickly, get lots of panels, lots of frames and and get that market traction at scale.
00:50:23:04 – 00:50:35:19
Unknown
And once we’ve got that adoption, we can then, you know, gain scale of manufacturing, dual those learnings and bringing our cost down so that we can actually make the product really competitive with gas long term in the domestic sense.
00:50:36:03 – 00:50:53:15
Unknown
So that’s a scaling opportunity. I will start in the hundreds to megawatts sort of projects. And then once we scale, we’ll come back to those domestic opportunities. So. And is that because, you know, if you’re going to put this on one house or two houses, you know, different roof shape, different sized cans, you know, they don’t need
00:50:53:15 – 00:51:08:01
Unknown
it nearly as much wattage that probably just becomes more of a complex. You know, it takes more time, takes more architecture to get that one system bill versus I’m hearing correct you correctly. It’s if you throw this on, you know, huge commercial building.
00:51:08:08 – 00:51:18:23
Unknown
It’s 1000 of the same panels, you know, in a like a modular just line them all up. Very simple. Ship them all out and just, you know, run down there and install them as that kind of the difference.
00:51:19:06 – 00:51:36:17
Unknown
That’s exactly it. So we only have to deal with, you know, smaller amount of customers, smaller man and injured so an engineer can deploy. Yeah, that makes sense. It’s basically the point of the effort. So, you know, it doesn’t take much more effort to do a commercial system than it does, you know, two or three domestic ones
00:51:36:17 – 00:51:53:23
Unknown
. So you know, that’s that’s that’s kind of the tactic we’ve taken there. Okay. So you mentioned that one of the early markets that you want to chase is district heating. And where I was living in Denmark, we had district heating from a combined heat and power from actually it was mostly burned garbage that they send there the
00:51:53:23 – 00:52:08:21
Unknown
heat out. But obviously you need the heating in the wintertime and you know you’re making you making the heat all year round. So do you know how they deal with that and how that will relate to, you know, what you’re planning with district heating?
00:52:09:00 – 00:52:27:11
Unknown
It was certainly and that’s why we’re focusing on both probably Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands because they actually had lots of district heating systems, but they’ve also got large seasonal storage solutions. So, you know, one of the I guess the things we need for a technology is to make sure if you’re producing the energy that you actually
00:52:27:11 – 00:52:39:12
Unknown
get to sell it. So what happens in Denmark is I’ve got these solar fields that they charge these big pit storage systems. So many, many, many swimming pools in size with an insulated cap on the top of it.
00:52:39:21 – 00:53:00:13
Unknown
So over some of those who charge that that big thermal battery to think that we’re the time to market. So as they get cloud cover over sustained periods of of, you know, basically no solar isolation, they can draw upon that big thermal storage system and basically still deliver the service of heat and thermal comfort.
00:53:00:21 – 00:53:18:06
Unknown
So for us, that’s a great pocket because we can Typekit technology there and we can. So pretty much every kilowatt hour of heat that we produce can go into that into that pocket where, you know, so for example, here in our domestic system over summer, we’re long on heat, so we just dissipate that atmosphere.
00:53:18:06 – 00:53:28:00
Unknown
So, you know, it’s kind of, you know, that’s that, you know, if we had a pool, we could heat that with that. But you know, we’re trying to maximize the thermal production. Well, Glenn, this was an awesome conversation.
00:53:28:00 – 00:53:42:00
Unknown
We really, really appreciate it. This was, you know, like I said, it’s one of those. Why haven’t we done this sooner? Kind of technologies already exists, already a great framework for it, people already to really trust solar. So I think it’s really, really impressive what you what you’re doing.
00:53:42:14 – 00:54:00:15
Unknown
How can people follow up with you and son of that? Excellent. Well, thank you both Dan, Rosemary and Allen for the invitation. Look, you can follow me on LinkedIn. That’s my social profile. So you’ll you’ll be able to find me at Glen Ryan at Sunovate and also our web page.
00:54:01:07 – 00:54:17:10
Unknown
WWW.SUNOVATE.com.au today. And as always, we’ll link in our description below, no matter what platform you’re listening or watching on, so you can connect easily. So just open up the show notes and you can click through to follow with Glenn and learn more about some of it.
00:54:17:16 – 00:54:31:14
Unknown
Glen, thanks again for coming on the show now. Thank you very much. My pleasure. So again, we want to thank Glen Ryan for coming on the show. Be sure to follow up with him. You’ll find links to Sunovate and to connect with him in the show notes or description of this podcast.
00:54:31:16 – 00:54:48:01
Unknown
Every listening. We appreciate his time and again great conversation. You know a lot of the intricacies of being an entrepreneur in this space, so we’re going to shift to. Siemens Gamesa is making a new offshore wind farm in Virginia here in the United States.
00:54:48:12 – 00:55:08:17
Unknown
And this is a 200 million dollar facility and they say, will create approximately 260 jobs. So Allen you’ve been following the U.S. policy pretty closely. What do you think this means to get a facility here right in the island of Virginia is still the Northeast or not?
00:55:08:17 – 00:55:19:23
Unknown
But you know, the the East Coast right in the center seems like a good place to put one. It is because it’s right in the middle of daily activity. You can go north and go south and there will be a wind turbines in the ocean there shortly.
00:55:20:14 – 00:55:40:10
Unknown
The $200 million is a sizable investment for Siemens and the I think the state and local governments are going to be supportive of that. Also in terms of financing and putting the roads in and putting the power stations in and all the things that are needed to actually create that facility because there’s just there’s just a lot of
00:55:40:10 – 00:56:01:06
Unknown
infrastructure that has to happen. But this is going to be the first of many from what it seems. L’m obviously going to have to be building a facility somewhere. And TPI, which is a big blade manufacturer out of Rhode Island already, they’re pretty close to the shoreline right now, so they kind of have their foot in the
00:56:01:06 – 00:56:24:12
Unknown
door in terms of being a to make offshore wind turbine blades you, you’ll see a lot of activity out of them. Obviously, it’s the Vestas is yet to be known. Nordex is still unknown a little bit. And if there’s going to be any Chinese players, which they’re most likely will have to be at some point, you think
00:56:24:12 – 00:56:35:01
Unknown
that they’re going to want to try to negotiate something there. We’ll see how it plays out because it’s a lot of politics with that. So there’s gonna be a lot more activity up and down the coastline for the states.
00:56:35:07 – 00:56:53:15
Unknown
It’s I don’t know if it’s like this in Australia, but obviously the United States has 50 independent states, so they can all sort of vie for that business opportunity. That’s what’s happening is that they’re trying to drive the jobs into their state and localities because it’s such a huge influx of cash that you’re going to make a
00:56:53:15 – 00:57:07:02
Unknown
lot of really beneficial deals for the companies to bring those jobs in. So what’s going to change in the next year or two up and down the shorelines? Yeah, this strikes me as a small amount of jobs over a 200 million dollar facility.
00:57:07:09 – 00:57:22:07
Unknown
Maybe I’m just way off, but that’s like just a gut reaction. I mean, Rosemarie, how many jobs does a facility typically support? I believe a city. Yeah, I thought the same thing when I read the numbers at 260 or something to.
00:57:22:10 – 00:57:41:19
Unknown
Yeah. And I thought, that sounds small. And then I thought, how many people normally in a factory I read, I never I never counted. I never actually asked that question. But I feel like, you know, at any time there’s, you know, at least 100 or more working in the factory.
00:57:41:19 – 00:57:55:14
Unknown
And if that covering three shifts a day, then you would think it would be like quite a few hundred in, you know, like a. Medium sized wind turbine blade factory, so it sounded small to me, but I don’t actually have the the figures on hand that could either conclusively say yes.
00:57:55:16 – 00:58:12:04
Unknown
Yes, that’s small. Maybe they’re starting off with just a single, a single malt single production line. I’m not sure, but maybe it’ll grow if if the market grows. Yeah, it has to grow just because the number of blades they’re needed offshore off the United States, that they’re going for a 30 gigawatts.
00:58:12:17 – 00:58:30:04
Unknown
That’s a lot of blades that need to be built. And I think from Virginia and Massachusetts are going through the same thing right now where I’m from. It’s all this surrounding jobs that happen. So all the machines that are making all the tooling, all the carpenters that are, you know, setting up the building, the facility, all the
00:58:30:04 – 00:58:45:06
Unknown
all the all the other electricians and all those sort of people who come in to make those things happen, provide a lot of jobs. And then obviously the surrounding restaurants and hotels and all those pieces of the rental cars, we’ll see all that business, too.
00:58:45:07 – 00:59:04:08
Unknown
So it’s not just the facility itself, it’s just this is surrounding area that look in terms in terms of jobs. But Rosemary, if if we’re growing, the question for me is we really haven’t stopped on the size of wind turbines like we’re really ramping up in twelve, 13, 14, 15, 16 megawatt machines.
00:59:04:08 – 00:59:17:07
Unknown
If I’m going to build a facility today, is it going to be out of use or because the Blades are going to get even longer or just keep adding on to the building as a place longer? Yeah, it’s a big it’s a big issue.
00:59:17:07 – 00:59:37:09
Unknown
And when I was at Elm, the main reason for the new factories that were opened was because they simply couldn’t fit it in the old old factories. They would often it was pretty common over the last few decades to do extensions to the length of the factory to fit, you know, the new blade lengths.
00:59:37:09 – 00:59:47:20
Unknown
And if every time you announce the longest blade, you know longer than any that you’ve got before, you have to figure out which factor you’re going to make it in because most of the factories won’t be long enough.
00:59:48:06 – 01:00:03:16
Unknown
But then when they get to a certain size, it’s not just the length of the factory that’s important. It’s the height as well. Because, you know, these really long blades, if they’re, you know, 80 meters plus length, the cord maximum cord is going to be five plus meters.
01:00:03:16 – 01:00:21:12
Unknown
So you need to be able to rotate the blade to work on all parts of it. So you need an area that’s high enough to do that. So, yeah, they do just get really huge. I don’t see people planning very far ahead now in terms of longer and wider blades.
01:00:21:12 – 01:00:39:17
Unknown
Like I don’t see factories being built that are just way huger than they need to be for the blades that they’re planning. And I think that’s partly because it’s not it’s not so obvious to say where the size of blades is going to stop because, you know, like we have seen, obviously the trend is blades get longer
01:00:39:17 – 01:00:51:14
Unknown
and longer and longer and longer. And we’ve all been saying since, you know, the year 2000 before, however long anyone’s even working in the industry. Everyone’s been like, Whoa, why is it getting so long? It can’t go on.
01:00:51:14 – 01:01:02:14
Unknown
And I know that, you know, some of the people I’ve worked with that have been working in the industry for decades are like, Yeah, when I started, blades were twelve meters long and we all wondered where it would stop, and we’re pretty sure you’d never have applied.
01:01:02:14 – 01:01:19:05
Unknown
That was 20 meters long. And now here we are, well over 100. But the fact is that, you know, as you, you scale them there, you don’t get as much extra power as you spend extra in materials to make a blade longer.
01:01:19:05 – 01:01:36:08
Unknown
That’s just, you know, the laws of physics, the power scales with the, you know, the square of the blade length because the swept area increases with the square and the materials increase with the cube approximately unless you unless you make technology advances, which which we have.
01:01:36:21 – 01:01:50:15
Unknown
So it’s other factors that are causing blades to get longer. It’s not not about the blade, it’s about, you know, having less USB-C cables and about having less connections and less less of all of those things and installation.
01:01:51:10 – 01:02:08:23
Unknown
It’s all those things. And yeah, it’s worth noting that at any point in time, we’re at the optimal blade size. You know, that’s that’s the point. When you put out a new turbine, you figure out what is the absolute cheapest, cheapest, you know, dollar per megawatt hour that we can get out of this thing.
01:02:08:23 – 01:02:24:13
Unknown
And then that’s that’s why they’ve made it the size that they have. So it’s not that big. A bigger turbine would be more optimal, but it may be in the future. So, yeah, I think it’s really hard to predict, but I do like everybody in the last 20 years.
01:02:24:13 – 01:02:40:21
Unknown
I don’t think we’re close to the longest blade that we’re going to get to. Yeah. What are we going to be making kilometer long blades at some point? It’s just no, we’re not. But, you know, now I feel like that guy in 2000 saying you’d never have a 20 meter long blade, so you know.
01:02:43:05 – 01:02:56:12
Unknown
Yeah, that would be an interesting conversation just to hear what they’re planning for the facility. As I’m sure there is some amount of overrun, just like anything else, like if there’s hey, even if you’re making like a health club, for example, like I used to own a baseball and softball academy and we had a plan for the
01:02:56:12 – 01:03:10:23
Unknown
future. We’re like, you know, this is our absolute minimum. But we could grow to this. What’s the balance of like extra usable space we might we might want without bankrupting us and being wasteful? Now, you know, I’m sure they’re extrapolating above and beyond what they’re currently doing.
01:03:10:23 – 01:03:23:09
Unknown
You know, maybe like, Hey, let’s build in 60 extra feet, 20 extra meters, just like flex space so we can use for X, Y and Z now. But if we need to cannibalize it later, we can do that.
01:03:23:10 – 01:03:33:09
Unknown
You know, as Blade. But then obviously that’s only going to be to a point, right? They’re not going to build a 180 meter long facility, one that just might never be useful. So I’d be really curious what the what the plans are.
01:03:33:10 – 01:03:44:07
Unknown
That’s actually a really good points. Both of you raised just trying to prepare for the future and not build something that you outgrow like a hermit crab shell. You know, in just a couple of years, because that’ll be really unfortunate.
01:03:44:17 – 01:04:03:13
Unknown
So, Rosemary, let’s shift our final topic today, Google’s sustainability efforts. Their goal is to be operating on 24-7 carbon free energy by 2030. And you’re excited about this. Yeah, I am excited. It’s an exciting topic, right? Doesn’t everyone get excited about, you know, the accounting of clean energy?
01:04:03:13 – 01:04:19:14
Unknown
Yeah, my Google searches are just irreparably harming the planet. So this is going to be good that this can reverse this anyone, any any more. When I need to look up more carrot cake recipes or what the largest flightless bird is, I will no longer be contributing greenhouse gases.
01:04:19:14 – 01:04:38:12
Unknown
That’s wonderful. Yeah. Yes. I mean, Google, it’s it is a big energy user, but I was actually looking at a chart just recently about about bitcoin and how much energy it uses. I had read that it uses bitcoin, uses as much as Finland in total.
01:04:38:19 – 01:04:57:19
Unknown
And I said, Yeah, Bitcoin’s cool and all, but I’m not sure how much we actually need to, you know, add a Finland sized amount of emissions to the world. And Google is like significantly less than that. So, you know, like it registers on the same kind of scale as you would use to measure Finland or bitcoin’s emissions
01:04:57:19 – 01:05:11:04
Unknown
, but it’s a lot smaller. But and I also think that they are providing, you know, like I can’t I can’t do without, you know, knowing immediately what’s the world’s largest flightless bird. So, you know, I think that is important service that they’re providing.
01:05:11:16 – 01:05:30:09
Unknown
And they started back in 2007. I’m just looking a little infographic on that website. In 2007, they started with their net zero things. They, you know, they calculate their emissions, try and reduce as much as possible. Whatever they can’t, they just, you know, pay somebody to not cut down a tree that they would have otherwise so that
01:05:30:09 – 01:05:43:21
Unknown
they would otherwise cut down. And I think that that sort of net zero kind of thing. It was very good at the time, and it does provide a reason to bring extra renewables on board and pay for some important projects.
01:05:43:21 – 01:06:00:10
Unknown
But people are really rightly skeptical of some of these things, like we see carbon neutral LNG projects, for example, where you know, they say, Oh, this is a carbon neutral fuel, but it’s still the same fossil fuel. It’s just that they pay to a farmer who said it was going to cut down some trees.
01:06:00:10 – 01:06:18:07
Unknown
And it’s like, you know, like, it doesn’t doesn’t seem enough anymore. So then in 2017, Google moved to 100% renewable electricity. So then every kilowatt hour that they used was produced by a wind or solar farm somewhere at some time.
01:06:18:08 – 01:06:38:19
Unknown
So it’s they’re still relying on the grid mix. So at times when you know, at night, if there’s no wind, then they’re still using the grid grid power. And then this is the next step beyond that, where every electron that goes through a Google data center came from a wind, the wind turbine or a solar farm.
01:06:38:19 – 01:06:51:21
Unknown
So I mean, they’re still connected to the grid, but they know that there is green energy being produced at the moment that they’re using it, and that’s their plan for by 2030. They’re calling it 24-7 carbon free energy.
01:06:52:07 – 01:07:09:07
Unknown
And I also saw a term that I like in contrast to net zero. They’re calling an absolute zero, and I think that’s obviously where the world has to get to. You can’t kind of just. Net net away all of our emissions, I thinking of the planet as a whole, you know, at some point there’s not going to
01:07:09:07 – 01:07:27:19
Unknown
be any, any any more ways to, you know, provide offsets. So they’re doing it through some of the normal ways where, you know, you just try and, you know, use, use less and make more green energy. And then one of the other interesting things that I saw as part of that plan is load shifting.
01:07:27:19 – 01:07:39:22
Unknown
So like a lot of what Google does, needs to be done immediately. Like you don’t want to put in your search for world’s largest flightless bird and then they’re like, Okay, well, once you know the sun comes up, we’ll get back to you with an answer.
01:07:40:07 – 01:07:51:19
Unknown
You’re not mostly going to be happy with that. OK, Google Maps is like, Yeah, we’ll tell you tomorrow how you can get to your destination. But there’s a lot of stuff that they can choose when they want to do it.
01:07:52:06 – 01:08:10:11
Unknown
And so they’re planning to shift shift a lot of that. Yeah, so was it say they say they’re shifting the timing of non-urgent compute tasks like creating new filter features on Google Photos, YouTube video processing or adding new words to Google Translate.
01:08:10:19 – 01:08:26:13
Unknown
So they’re going to shift those kind of tasks instead of just doing them whenever you whenever they feel like it, they’re going to do it when there’s a lot of solar, a lot of wind. And so in that way, you kind of end up needing a lot less storage because, you know, otherwise they’re going to need to
01:08:26:22 – 01:08:43:16
Unknown
put in, you know, say, a whole ton of batteries so that they can keep providing green energy at any time of day. But if you do most of your energy using at times when there’s already a lot of wind and solar, then then they can reduce the size of the challenge.
01:08:43:16 – 01:08:57:05
Unknown
And the reason why I’m so excited about this, other than it just being an inherently fascinating subject, is because I just really think this is the biggest, biggest piece of the energy transition for society as a whole that we haven’t taken advantage of yet.
01:08:57:05 – 01:09:13:14
Unknown
There’s, you know, there’s so many loads that we could do at a different time if we just had the financial incentive or some other incentive to shift that load. So, you know, for homes that will be like EV charging, you’re not just going to let it charge when you plug it in, you’re going to have a smart
01:09:13:14 – 01:09:35:16
Unknown
charger that says, OK, now there’s a lot of extra wind and solar, so charge a car up. And same with, you know, like heat pumps and Paul pumps, hot water heating, all that sort of thing. And then, yeah, and an industrial scale was a lot more stuff like, you know, aluminum smelters or food processing companies that have
01:09:35:16 – 01:09:52:08
Unknown
deep freezers. They can all really vary their loads a lot, actually. And I think that it’s going to make the energy transition much easier when we start to really take advantage of this flexibility that at the moment we don’t we don’t barely even take advantage of at all.
01:09:52:15 – 01:10:03:06
Unknown
Hmm. Well, here’s my one question I have, which is, you know, this is all well and good for a company like Google or Apple or, you know, the evil empire of Facebook, who they like Sony’s hundred million dollar bills, right?
01:10:04:01 – 01:10:22:10
Unknown
So it’s like, Oh yeah, let’s go throw a quarter billion dollars at this thing. That doesn’t make them any money, but it’s philanthropic and good for the planet, etc. But like, what do smaller businesses do because they’re not going to be able to say, Oh yeah, let’s allocate $5 million of our 30 million dollar annual revenue to going
01:10:22:10 – 01:10:36:06
Unknown
, you know, absolute zero. That’s not going to make sense for like the, you know, 99.99% of businesses that aren’t behemoth size. I disagree. So what’s the path out for them? I think, OK, well, what’s what’s the path out for them?
01:10:36:08 – 01:10:55:22
Unknown
Well, I think that it will be a smaller company, Google Money to be the first to do it on a large scale. But then I mean, the point is you shifting load to when there’s excess electricity in the system, which is also I mean, we’ve got this happy lucky coincidence that these days, cheap electricity also means green
01:10:55:22 – 01:11:17:21
Unknown
electricity. So it it does already can save individuals and businesses money. And you know, you see through flexible tariffs like octopus energy in the U.K., we’ve got Amber Electric in Australia. I don’t know which ones you’ve got left in the U.S. after, you know, all the companies in Texas went bankrupt over it.
01:11:17:21 – 01:11:37:08
Unknown
But you know, these sorts of flexible tariffs are starting to figure out how to make their business model work. And there’s definitely at least the potential for this to save save money rather than costs money. So is it then, just like if I have a small business, I’m just opting in to just a different utility provider.
01:11:37:08 – 01:11:50:08
Unknown
I’m just saying I want to buy my electricity from you. And, you know, like, is it that simple? Because this thing with Google seems kind of complicated? Yeah. So I mean, in essence, it is that simple, but you need to have learned that you can shift as well.
01:11:50:08 – 01:12:08:22
Unknown
So if you don’t want to be there standing by your thermostat and adjusting it based on, you know, watching the wholesale power price and adjusting your thermostat, then you’re probably going to want some smart appliances or you’re going to want a utility or an energy retailer that is doing that for you, controlling your appliances for you.
01:12:08:23 – 01:12:24:02
Unknown
So it’s kind of OK, it not not that simple in in implementation, and that’s why it’s not rolled out yet. OK, but that that makes sense. I mean, the way you use the analogy of like a high tech thermostat that helps me wrap my brain around a little bit more.
01:12:25:02 – 01:12:35:14
Unknown
I mean, Alan, it seems like Google is going to be kind of the linchpin here. So kind of the way you see this and others will will follow is following suit. I think Google’s being an outlier in the United States.
01:12:35:22 – 01:12:59:05
Unknown
I think having quote unquote smart appliances in the United States is a no go for most people. I think they’re going have a really hard time. An Obama administration tried it back in. 2008 or 2009 and ten, and it went absolutely nowhere because there’s a huge push back in Congress and in the next election cycle against that
01:12:59:05 – 01:13:11:20
Unknown
and many other things for that matter. So it’s a really hard sell in the United States that to have the government turn your stuff on and off, it just will be. And the same thing exists on the industrial scale.
01:13:11:20 – 01:13:33:10
Unknown
On the industrial scale, here in the states, the the price of electricity fluctuates versus demand. So there is a shift to take some of those higher loads, like in the aircraft business, used to do a lot of heat, high heat autoclave stuff at nighttime because electricity rates are cheaper and we had occasional brownouts.
01:13:33:11 – 01:13:44:04
Unknown
Some of the factories, because the the general consumer and when it’s hot outsiders are using a lot of air conditioning, so they would actually slow down the factories. So we have that sort of balancing thing at the moment.
01:13:44:04 – 01:13:58:15
Unknown
We just don’t have it down to the individual household level. And I think that in the United States, it’s going to be a really hard sell to wean people off being able to turn on their dishwasher at 2:00 in the afternoon if they need it on at 2:00 in the afternoon.
01:13:59:12 – 01:14:12:05
Unknown
I think a better approach is really providing more stability to the grid, more capability to the grid, which that produces more power, be able to take things on and off the grid. It’s going to be a better solution overall.
01:14:12:07 – 01:14:32:00
Unknown
And I don’t necessarily see that we’re in a somewhat of a crisis condition. I see a lot of LinkedIn posts lately, maybe because of the upcoming Conference on World Energy. And the UN has been putting out some tweets about it, but it polarizes everything and it doesn’t move.
01:14:32:00 – 01:14:50:08
Unknown
The doesn’t move the technology forward. It doesn’t move the arguments forward. It’s just more of the same. And that’s the frustrating part for me because I think we could do a better job both sides of this argument, instead of calling each other a hypocrite, which is what happens.
01:14:50:18 – 01:15:02:10
Unknown
We need to be able to figure out a way to make an argument that makes sense to both sides because I do think we’re all going in the same direction. Generally, we’re just arguing at one another all the time.
01:15:02:11 – 01:15:15:08
Unknown
And that doesn’t that doesn’t help. Does that make sense? You see what I’m trying to get out. It’s like there’s so much politics to it that nothing’s happening. Is everybody calm down a little bit? We’re going to figure this thing out.
01:15:15:21 – 01:15:35:03
Unknown
We will. Yeah. I mean, so I don’t think that you have to. one way to manage load flexibility is to have a government or a utility controlling when your thermostat. Well, yeah, like what what it’s set to. But then there’s the other approach where it’s up to the individual and you know, you can choose, do I want
01:15:35:03 – 01:15:51:16
Unknown
to pay this higher price now and have my air conditioner on? Or do I prefer to save the money? And I do think at the moment are the only people that are really, really getting into that are huge energy geeks like me.
01:15:51:16 – 01:16:09:10
Unknown
And maybe, maybe like you guys do, I do that. I find it really exciting. There’s plenty of people tweeting about, you know, exactly what they’re doing with their flexible tariff. And I say, follow a couple of people on LinkedIn who are showing exactly how they’re managing their home home energy to make the most of these flexible tariffs
01:16:09:10 – 01:16:24:21
Unknown
. And they’ve got full control. You know, nobody has the capability to turn anything in their home on or off except for them. They just bear some risk of higher prices if they use it in those expensive periods. But I do think that for the most part, people do not want to get so involved with their energy that
01:16:24:21 – 01:16:42:08
Unknown
that’s going to be the the only the only model for it will probably have a model, whether you trust your utility to manage your bills. But I also think not everyone needs to do it. I think that if we just get enough people doing that and if the financial incentive is enough, you know, people will be more
01:16:42:08 – 01:17:02:13
Unknown
inclined to do it, then you are going to necessarily end up with cheaper and more stable energy for anybody. Everybody else left on the, you know, the flat tariffs because you won’t have so many, you know, rolling brownouts because you can’t match up supply and demand if you’ve got enough people that are turning the air conditioner off
01:17:02:13 – 01:17:18:21
Unknown
. So I think we’ll get some sort of mix a mix of different ways to use electricity in the future, depending on what your personal preference is. But I’m certainly not in favor of just handing over control of your air conditioner and fridge and dishwasher to the government.
01:17:18:21 – 01:17:32:06
Unknown
That’s that’s not something I feel like I would say. I definitely feel sympathy with. You know, you’re probably an average American, probably also doesn’t want that. Yeah, that’ll be the I don’t know how many amendments are we out on the constitution?
01:17:32:13 – 01:17:46:12
Unknown
That’ll be like the second Amendment and all new thing like Thou shall not commandeer my toaster. Classic American will be up in arms about it. Well, that’s going to do it for today. Well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode of The Upside.
01:17:46:14 – 01:18:02:06
Unknown
Podcast, thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe wherever you are on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube and be sure to subscribe to Uptime Tech News, which you’ll find in the show notes of this podcast and Rosemary’s YouTube channel, which you will also find in the description or show notes.
01:18:02:14 – 01:18:26:10
Unknown
Thanks again for watching or listening, and we’ll see you here next week on uptime. All right, folks. Good job. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance repairs and upgrades.
01:18:26:23 – 01:18:39:16
Unknown
It’s incredibly expensive to send a team of rope access technicians up tower to make even simple repairs. We also know how costly lightning damage can be, requiring inspection, repairs and downtime for even minor lightning strikes.
