The SG 14-222DD is headed to Scotland for its first deployment, first power in 2024.  A German engineer envisions 250 meter-tall turbine lattice wind towers; is lattice worth revisiting? Some SPRIN-D designers think so. Meanwhile, Japan has installed its first offshore wind turbines. The country plans to deploy 10 GW of offshore wind capacity by 2030 and up to 45 GW by 2040, including floating wind. While critics say it’s not enough, Japan is moving forward – including with a new “clarity” for offshore bidding, and a little friendly competition.
Back in the US, the lower 48 states were recently ranked by wind energy potential. Spoiler alert: Joel does the math and says Texas has some serious export potential.
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Uptime 120
Allen Hall: [00:00:00] Welcome to the uptime wind energy podcast. We got a great show for you this week. Just a couple of highlights. Siemens Gamesa is debuting their SG 14 – 222 DD offshore wind turbine. Mechanical engineer in Germany is talking about building 250 meter tall wind energy towers. Interesting. And we’ll look at some of the, the latest gyrations in the United States in terms of untapped, wind energy and the Biden administration hooking up with 11 east coast states to push offshore wind supply chains and ships.
So there’s a lot on our dock this week. It’s gonna be a great show. Stay tuned.
So guys, Siemens Gamesa SG 14 dash 222 DD wind turbines are getting some orders and that’s good. Right? Siemens Gamesa needed some orders here on those offshore projects. So they had a firm order for 60 turbines off the coast of Scotland, and they are the B 108 blades. So I was thinking the B108 blades is not even the latest generation of blades off from Siemens Gamesa.
The latest generation is the B-115, this so it’s even longer. But the, the first deployment is gonna be in 2024. And I know they were already generating their from their prototype. Back in 2021, they were generating electricity in 2021 with that same tournament. So it is taking like three years, two and a half years between prototype to actual first installs Rosemary. Does that seem right? Is there, is there a two to three year time lag between prototype and first installations? Or is this a sales / COVID issue?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s not normal. Maybe if you know, it was. I don’t know some massive, massive design [00:02:00] change then that might happen. But that would mean like maybe they’ve gone from a, a three blade rotor to a two blade rotor or , you know, an upwind to a downwind or, you know, something major you would take years, but normally it’s six months to one year.
Yeah. So, oh, it’s a, it’s a bit surprising. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Okay. So, so. How long does the prototype sit in development, then how long do they sit it on its on the test site and spin it before they say thumbs up and off, we go to production.
Rosemary Barnes: So hold on. Is it a whole new turbine or it’s a
Allen Hall: it, it is roughly, yeah.
It’s 14 Megawatts so sure.
Rosemary Barnes: Ah, okay. Yeah. Well, in that, in that case then forget what I said. I thought we were just talking about a different blade on a, on an existing platform in that case. Yeah. Then they’re gonna want a season of, of validation data. So. Yeah, but it still seems like two, two years after installing a, a prototype to start production seems lengthy.[00:03:00]
There must be something agreed. Yeah. So like some new design. feature that they need to, you know, properly test out before they really get started with the, you know, locking it into their manufacturing process. There must be some sort of uncertainty that they’re they’re worried about, or it could be supply chain, like you say, but yeah, I’d be, Hmm.
Yeah. Something .
Allen Hall: Well, so as these wind turbines get taller and taller, we’re, we’re seeing more ideas about raising the towers, making the towers taller, and as we go taller, I think as Rosemary, you had explained the higher you go, the more consistent the winds, the, the more velocity in the wind, and there’s less, is there more, less variation from day to night?
There’s more nighttime wind.
Rosemary Barnes: Ooh. I don’t know about the last point. And I mean, we’re talking onshore or offshore cuz the, the problem is onshore shore. Yeah. Offshore. It’s not so pronounced but onshore. There’s this concept called wind. She [00:04:00] where you know, things on the ground slow the wind down. So, you know, trees, buildings, Hills anything like that, it causes friction with the.
You, you know, with the earth surface and it keeps the, the air kind of attached, it’s like a boundary layer. And then as you go up and away from all those obstacles, the wind speed rises for a, a few hundred meters. Yeah. So basically the taller that you can go the faster your, your wind speeds and.
other than that, there’s local variations as well. In some places there probably would be more consistent winds at that wind speed at that height. Sorry. But I don’t think that that’s like a generalized phenomen. And then, because the power in in the wind varies with the speed of the cube of the wind speed.
That means that, you know, if you increase wind speed, if you can double your wind speed, which you definitely can by, you know, raising above that, you know, that boundary layer. So you double the wind speed, you get eight times as much power. So you can see that it’s, it’s really worthwhile to go [00:05:00] after good wind spade sites.
Allen Hall: Oh sure. And Joel, the gentleman who is designing this as a mechanical engineer based in Germany, his name is horse Bendix and he is his concept is a lattice tubular structure, kind of pyramid and shape to create this tower. It looks very similar to things you would see in oil and gas. Isn’t that sort of how they do it in oil and gas.
Yeah. I mean,
Joel Saxum: it’s, it’s a lot easier to manufacture something that way as well. Right. It’s just pieces. You can put piece smaller pieces together, build. And it’s a bit quicker. I think cuz you can build them all, a lot of pieces off site bring ’em in and throw ’em up. But it looks, I mean you’ve seen this structure before, right?
This it’s fairly, fairly common. The Latice one that he’s building, but. 250 meters is a, is hell of a tall tower.
Allen Hall: That’s really tall. Right. But it’s basically the same concept though, is that you build these sort of stackable layers and it does, I would assume it takes less materials and probably your cost for the tower would go down, especially if you’re going to 250 meters.
So [00:06:00] Mr. Bendeck says, Hey, let’s build out a standard steel tubes, lowers the cost and the Rosemary kinda getting back to your discussion says. Wind TURs be able to deliver 10 times the power of today’s best facilities and it require roughly 80% less land to do the same thing. So basically I’m getting 250 meters up in the air.
You’re gonna have some really massive blades. And then the other concept, and Joel, I don’t know if oil and gas does this, but basically he’s talking about taking the generator and putting it at the base and running some sort of chain gear spline. Something drive shaft. from 250 meters from top to bottom.
I does that make any sense?
Joel Saxum: A 250 meter drive shaft would be pretty difficult to balance, I would think so. Maybe, maybe something driven by chain or, or something of that, of the other sort or, you know, a belt. I don’t know that be a long belt too. But you’re gonna have there’s I think that’s the biggest engineering challenge of this whole thing.
Like the lattice can be done. Yeah, [00:07:00] the blades can be done. They’ll be a little bit harder to work on, be a little bit tougher to get people to go and hang off of those on a ropes to, to fix them at, you know, 800 feet up in the air. But I think that that definitely how you’re gonna transfer the power down to the ground without power losses as well.
You know, any kind of transmission or any other rotating weight, you’re also gonna have some power suck there or some, some energy suck. So that’s gonna be the biggest, the biggest trouble. I think
Rosemary Barnes: it’s an interesting. It’s an interesting idea to go back to the, the lattice tower, because that, that was like you said, Joel, that was all that people did for a long time.
And they definitively moved away from it once still processing technology got to the point where you could make these world tubular towers and yes, you do use less steel in a Latice tower, but the cost. Is a lot more. And especially, it really increases the construction time for the, the wind farm.
So you like, it’s really nice to move your labor into a factory where people are doing the same thing every day and get really good at it. When you have a lot of labor on site, [00:08:00] it’s like you have a different crew each time. Usually you’re slightly different conditions and it just takes ages. So, I mean, it was definitely cost that caused us to go from Latice to tubular towers.
So I’d be suspicious of somebody. Coming from outside the industry that thinks that there’s a massive cost reduction to be made made by going the other way. And then the other thing is that those towers weren’t great for, for birds those birds would roost in them and then they would take off like just directly into the blades.
So that was one of the reasons why winter turbines have a, a bad reputation for birds, which is for the most. untrue these days, but back in the day, it was certainly, certainly true that those those structures were. Not bird friendly in all cases,
Allen Hall: I wouldn’t even consider that. it just seems like a very odd design parameter.
Can’t have pigeons taking Roos
Rosemary Barnes: a hundred. I don’t think anybody cares about that. Not many people probably care about the pigeons, [00:09:00] but you know, if you’ve got an endangered bird that’s that’s roosting there, then people then people care. So
Allen Hall: we’ve been looking at. Untapped wind energy potential. And there’s been a couple of websites that are, that have described what the, sort of the maximum amount of wind you could get it in, in each of the 48 cont contiguous states in the United States.
And it’s, it’s a little shocking because you wouldn’t figure some of these states have that much potential for wind energy, Texas being the largest. Obviously it’s a huge state and it’s a lot of wind there. And so they’re, they’re capable of 1300 gigawatts. That’s a lot. And right now they only have 33 gigawatts install.
So they’re like one 20th, one quarter of the way of, of what they could do to max out. And lemme give you the, the first couple in order, in terms of the wind potential, Texas, then Montana. New Mexico, Kansas, which is a big win state Arizona, which is not a big win state, Wyoming, Nevada, Nebraska, another big win state, [00:10:00] South Dakota, big win state, Colorado and Oklahoma.
Those two big win states. So some of the, some of the top. 12 are actually states that really have very little in terms of wind, which is unusual because you think sometimes Joel like someplace like Arizona, which is not that far from California, could be part of that feed in network to keep California lights on.
Right. They need it. Right. Isn’t that need it? It’s it’s just a little backwards. Some of the, the smallest ones are, are places you would expect pretty much anywhere on the east coast, Northeast of the United States, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maryland, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Rhode Island.
Those are just small states, but they, they don’t have any. To speak of in terms of wind and they don’t have it much wind installed even. So if all the energy and all the wind energy is in the middle of the United States, and there’s very little on the edges besides offshore, isn’t the key to wind energy is to get the [00:11:00] wind where it’s strong to the places where it’s weak with via transmission lines.
They get the electricity to the, to the coast, coastal regions. Joel, am I missing something here? It just seems like that’s part of the answer.
Joel Saxum: No, we keep coming back to the same conversation, right? Like there’s you have to get your resources to where they’re they’re needed. Yeah. It’s as simple as that.
Right. So we have, we have power in the, a lot in the middle part of the country. We need to get it to the outsides. The odd thing here is like Arizona. Being at, you know, like the fifth or six month, like possible capacity having basically none that’s that that’s that one blew my mind looking at some of this data.
And the only thing I could think of is like, people not wanna install wind there because of like erosion or I don’t know, in the desert. Yeah. I don’t, I’m not sure. So instead, but there’s yeah, there’s some, there’s some reason and I guess that one’s beyond me. In this chart, but yeah, I mean, it boils down to the same thing and Texas has done a great job of they’ve got 33 capacity or 33 gigas of capacity installed.
That’s because of the transmission lines, right. All that stuff is [00:12:00] in west Texas, but that that’s feeding directly back to Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, you know, down to Houston along the it corridor and whatnot. And now the cool thing in Texas that people are starting to do. There’s a lot of solar going in there as well, but they’re starting to you, you’re starting to see like application for solar permit application for solar permit.
And then if you look at ’em, they’re all within a couple miles of transmission lines, the whole way out to west Texas. So it’s, it’s smart development that you’re starting to see on the Texas side. Of course, I guess the interesting thing for me is you look at the armchair math 1,350 gigawatts of capacity in Texas.
33 gigawatts installed and it’s feeding 20% of the electrical grid. So the armchair math tells me that wind capacity in Texas is 800% of demand. If it was all installed, could
Allen Hall: be yeah. Of Texas as crazy, right.
Joel Saxum: That’s yes. Yeah, yeah. Of Texas’ demand right. Of the, of the state, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe this is how Texas will get connected to the other, other grids, because they’ve got an export [00:13:00] opportunity.
And I mean, it’s not like Australia has a similar, if you do the maps for Australia, we have similarly just way, way, way more wind and solar capacity, then we can use. And so. People are thinking of ways to export it, but it’s hard for us cuz we’re, we’re an island continent, you know, you’ve gotta build 3000 kilometers subsea cables or we’ve gotta, you know, figure out how to ship hydrogen or ammonia.
Whereas Texas has the, the technology right there. They just are resistant resistant to connecting up. But yeah. Yeah, they’re just stubborn. maybe they’re stop being stubborn. The financial opportunity be what, what convinces them.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. I think Arizona, Nebraska, Iowa was, it is not on this list, but because it’s not one of the strongest produced producers, but it is a large producer right now.
So they’re taking, I think they. Create like 50% or a little bit more of their electricity from wind right now that’s crazy could, [00:14:00] right? So they could easily feed a Chicago, a Detroit, an Indianapolis that would be simple for them to do. They could be an energy exporter, which I think is where they’re headed right now, which, which wouldn’t make sense.
Right? You could be the, the Texas of wind power, but Texas, Texas is the wind power king. Iowa will always come in second place. If, if that’s gonna happen. Get the latest on wind industry news business and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter at weatherguardwind.com/news.
This leads to what’s happening offshore in the United States. So on the Northeast corridor, which is like New York, Virginia area the, the white house has been working with 11 east coast states. This happened last week. To develop a partnership. And the, the initiative is to drive the domestic manufacturing sites and get all the supply chains set up to feed this 30 gigawatts [00:15:00] by 2030 and including ships and, and all the offshore pieces.
So there’s a lot to this, right. But they really haven’t had a large initiative between the states and the federal government to get it going well, that seems to be changing and. Already it’s run into a little bit of turmoil because there are no ships to, to do the, the work that are based that are built in the United States.
So they’re talking about, at least Congress is talking about saying, okay, we could use outside ships. You could use ships from Australia, but to either be, it must be. Man by Australians or Americans, you can’t load the Australian ship up full of Englishmen or whatever they’re gonna do. So though, offshore wind companies are like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
That’s not okay. And those kind of restrictions are gonna make. Very difficult for us to complete projects. In fact, they got a letter from a, a large group of two dozen offshore wind companies and trade groups has said there are [00:16:00] 19 projects offshore that won’t happen if you do that. So there, the offshore wind companies, operators want there to be probably crew cruise from Denmark.
It’d be my guess. that’ll come over and with the ships and the people to come do the work, Joel is isn’t that where they’re going. That’s the one that we’re talking about really.
Joel Saxum: Well, I mean, as it sits right now, you could do that legally, but you would have to, you would have to come across from Denmark and never make port.
Never touch before it. Right. All, all the pieces components, everything would have to be shipped out to you, fuel food, whatever you can do it. Right. You can do it ship to ship transfers, and then you gotta go back. So there’s companies that are starting to, you know, I mean, of course this, the Jones act has been a hallmark of maritime in the us for a long time.
Controlling a lot of the oil and gas world around in the Gulf and whatnot. Right. There’s companies that have played in that space for a long time. They’re starting to make moves. I just saw the other day. If, if you’re in the us and you’ve been around maritime at all, you’ve heard of Crowley.
Crowley is the, one of the biggest logistics and [00:17:00] transportation companies that we have. I think they are the biggest actually, if you were to put everything together, chips, trains all the above, but they just signed a joint venture with ES. And the, and the idea is take the vac knowledge of vac has some of the most capable SOVs in the north sea that have been working in SOVs of service operation vessels that have been working in offshore wind for years and years and years and years.
So they have a very good design, a very good operational policies and how they operate those ships and how they’re built. So now they’re gonna bring that same design come over here, build it in the us and have Jones act compliance. SOVs You don’t build a ship in the same speed. You build a doghouse in.
So it’s gonna take a little while right. To build those, but at least they’re starting to make moves.
Allen Hall: Well, the, the question is can that really functionally work, if you did bring crews from some other part of the world, let’s say Denmark, in this case, mm-hmm, , it gets really complicated, right? So you, you all, the little ships would have to feed this Dana ship.
With sandwiches and coffee and fuel and all the winter turbine components. [00:18:00] That’s a big don’t
Joel Saxum: freeze iTry bread. Frye bread, bread staple. Yes.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Be trouble if you didn’t have that. Yeah. Yes. It just seems like it’s adds a layer layer. Of complication on, onto an already complicated thing. And so now the department of energy has been tasked to sort of manage this state federal consortium bit.
And if you start looking at the numbers and I got, I started a deep dive Rosemary on all these. Wind numbers for the United States. I, I, I pulled to Rosemary’s what happened? You know, Rosemary guess she knows so much detail what’s going on. Like, okay, you can really get sucked into this black hole of, of technical information.
But if you look at the, the amount of wind capacity added in the United States over the last couple of years, in 2020, we had 17 gigawatts in 2021 and went down to 13 gigawatts added capacity. In 2022, it’s gonna be 11 in 20, 23. [00:19:00] It’s gonna be five. All right. So it is dropped by 60% over the last couple of years.
The, the pace is slowing down just because the production tax credit, the production tax credit, which is sort of the basis for all wind energy in America, for the most part drives that industry. And that’s going away at the end of this year, 2022. So that has a cascading effect. We, Joe and I were talking earlier about the number of wind blade sites in the United States.
And we think there are. One in North Dakota for LM and Vestus has one in Colorado. Now we’re not sure how busy the one in Colorado is, but Siemens Kamasa has closed two facilities in the last year. Iowa and in Kansas vest has consolidated two factors into one in 2021. LM closed its little rock Arkansas.
Plant in 2020 and has that plant [00:20:00] up in North Dakota. So Elm has a plant in North Dakota and then TPI, which was a fairly large blade manufacturer and had a place in Rhode Island and a place in Iowa. The place in Iowa closed down and the place in Rhode Island is making like automotive pieces or train something or another they’re out of the wind business altogether.
So we’ve gone from having a lot of wind blade capacity to very little. And Siemens CSA is still talking about building that factory in Virginia, but I don’t think that’s even started yet offshore. So the DOE is, yeah, that’s just straight offshore, right? So the, the DOE is, is gonna lead this comprehensive effort for offshore wind.
And they’re expecting to throw 12 billion at it annually. They’re set up up to 10 manufacturing plans and the ships necessary to deploy this stuff. Now, the question is so there’s one more piece of this. And at the end of this year, they’re gonna come up with a plan to do all this work. So we’re at the end of 2022, and now we have the [00:21:00] plan and then we’re gonna try to deploy 30 gigs in by 2030.
We’re gonna run out of time and we don’t have any United States. Doesn’t have a lot of builtin infrastructure. How does this all happen? And even if they throw 12 billion out a year, and I think that’s helpful, does that really get the wind industry started or does the onshore business really collapse?
Cause that’s where it’s headed to right now. And just everything move offshore. Is that the future?
Joel Saxum: does it, did, did they come around and say the 12 billion is loans or
Allen Hall: grants? Investment. They called it investment, which I think are grants. Investment. I, yeah, it could be loans. Okay.
Joel Saxum: So I could see grants really starting to kickstart that.
And what I’d like to see is those be whatever facilities are built for the offshore wind industry, our dual purpose. That’s what I’d like to see. You’d think, right? Yeah. Let let’s, if we’re gonna invest this kind of money, let’s bring it to the the industry as a. And not sequester to one little thing because [00:22:00]we, because we rode stamped 30 gigawatts of offshore wind, which is great, but there’s a lot of other things that could be done as.
Right. So this, this money coming in could, could very well help. I know, like we need key side facilities. We need manufacturing facilities. We need somewhere to, to, I mean, we don’t, the United States is not geared up to, we don’t have a massive maritime economy. Like some like, like. Denmark know, Baltics and stuff like that, so, okay.
Right. Yeah. We don’t have the, the ship building capacity that is needed to build these things even. So the, that needs to be ramped up. And that’s just, Jet’s just ships. That’s one component right now. We were talking towers, jackets, the sells blades. Yeah. It’s generators, right? Yeah.
Allen Hall: There’s a lot to, and rose there.
There’s a lot to be done. And, and Rosemary, if you look at the, if you go to some of the OEMs and look at where their factories are, they have plenty of factories in China. Many factories in China. They have many factories in Europe. They have some factories in south America, not much, but America is like this factory desert wasteland.
There’s just nothing [00:23:00] being built in the United States. There’s, there’s some factories in Mexico. There’s the LM plant up in sort of Northern Canada, but in the United States, there really isn’t all that much. And are we, is, is this just uniquely an American problem? Because it seems like everybody else is building wind turbines, like crazy.
Rosemary Barnes: Australia’s not so , you’re not, you’re not totally alone. But I mean to have. to build a new factory or even to maintain an existing factory, you need a sales pipeline and you need some certainty. And I, I think that, I mean, Australia and the us have in common that we haven’t had consistent federal level policies that support the, the industry.
So people don’t know that if they build a. A new factory that they’re going to, you know, have sales for the next 10 years to support that. So I think that that’s, that’s one of the problems. I think also the onshore aspect of the us, something that occurred to me while you were talking about where the wind resources are, [00:24:00] excuse me, within the United States, they’re all close together.
You know, all these states, I assume they’re seeing the same wind, you know, when there’s wind blowing in Texas, it’s probably also blowing in, in Arkansas or, you know, wherever any of those other in windy places. And there’s a certain point that you can get to with really correlated wind. I mean, it’s like with, you know, solar, if it’s all in the same location turns on and off at the same time, if all your wind turns on and off at the same time.
That’s not nearly as valuable as if you have several different wind systems happening and they all are variable, but you know, their peaks and troughs don’t line up. Exactly. So like in Australia all of the, the south stuff, like south Australia, Victoria Tasmania where we have a lot of wind now it’s pretty correlated.
But we’re adding more in Queensland, which is not correlated and makes this immense difference to the you know, security of the, of the system or, you know, [00:25:00] the, the penetration of wind that you can get before you start having big problems. You know, if you’ve got 70% of your electricity from wind and it all comes on and off together, then you’re gonna see like a, a not very windy week.
Gonna be a huge problem for you, whereas right. If it’s like 20% of your win comes from one place and 20% from another place. It’ll be really infrequent that those will, will line up. So I think that’s why you’re seeing so much attention on the offshore in the us, because it won’t be correlated with all that, you know, middle of America, onshore stuff.
It’ll probably be a better resource. It’s closer to the, you know, where you need to use the electricity. And it’s UN correlated would be my, my guess. I don’t actually know. It’s just my, my expectation. So it makes sense to me that you would be more focused on, on that. And the, you know, the onshore wind turbines are smaller as well.
So you can bring them in on, on ships if you want. I mean, [00:26:00] that’s all we do in Australia is bring, bring everything in practically on ships. So yeah, I think that, yeah, if you want the factories, it’s a little harder for them to be there.
Allen Hall: Well, it’s a little harder and that’s why LM and well, Siemens and Eve had factories or do have factories in the United, in essential the United States, cuz that’s where the action is, but that action is dropping off dramatically.
And I I’m a little shocked by all this now that you see the numbers and the predictions, it’s not the direction. I think the United States wants to go in, but that’s the direction we’re headed in
Joel Saxum: it’s it’s based on moonlighting PTC. Yeah. If, if you look at PTC funds, they’ve been, they’ve been around since what?
19 of long time, 94 long time. And they were, they were, Hey, we’re gonna Moonlight them. Oh, they’re back. Hey, we’re gonna Moonlight. ’em up. They’re back. Hey, we’re gonna Moonlight. ’em up. They’re back. And now it’s, Hey, they’re going away. And the build back better bill stuff. And those things are out right now.
There there was a, there’s a couple of, of references to, Hey, [00:27:00] we’re gonna stick some money back into some, some things to get the supply chain going. And some other stuff, I don’t know where they’re at right now. PTC is done December 31st. And there’s not a bill sitting out there right now to replenish it.
Allen Hall: I, I that’s right. It seems like if. Congress in the way it’s formed right now, wanted to pass up and they could, but it, it seems like we’re getting these either massive bills or nothing. It’s one or the other you ear mark. You’re mark. You’re mark, mark. Right? Exactly. And if it’s not done in the next couple of weeks, I think it’s gonna be trouble because there’s, it seems like all the Congress is off running around trying to get reelected.
And there will be very little action between now in November. Not say it couldn’t get done, but it gets a little scary.
Joel Saxum: Consulting side in the us. You’re you hear a lot of that? Like, yeah, we might, this project might go forward next year. If PTC funds come back. Oh, we might do this PTC funds come back. So we’re just kind of sitting there.
Twidling our thumbs waiting to see what happens.
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So you can stop worrying about lightning damage to your blades. Visit weather guard, wind.com to learn more. Read a case study at schedule a call weather guard is proud to be engineer owned and operated in the USA. So in consideration of what’s happening in the United States, in terms of auctions, let’s take a look at Japan because Japan’s been going through through some offshore auctions and it’s led to a little bit of turmoil.
So they had some auctions at the end of last year for provinces, sort of up in the north and to the west on the coastline, which is a great. Wind resource for Japan. But they had problems in the auction is that only people to really submit bids were Mitsubishi. And I know there’s a lot of outside Japanese [00:29:00] companies that are interested in, in being in Japan because the wind is pretty good there, so they can makes them a pretty good business.
And then they try to have another, it sounds like they try to have another. Auction in March. And the same sort of thing happened to the point where they said stop. okay. We’re gonna, we have to figure this out because they’re getting criticized. It seems like everything was going one direction. Now I, I do not blame Japan for trying to protect its own internal wind OEMs.
That makes complete sense to me. And we don’t do it in the states, but other countries do. And, and Turkey’s doing this too, by the way. Right now Turkey’s developing their own wind Turine company inside a Turkey. From the defense sector that would be unfathomable in the United States at the moment. So Japan.
It’s gonna reconfigure the way they do auctions. And they’re trying to try to open up to more players and they’re not gonna allow one company to dominate all, buy all the sites at one time. So they’re gonna have to break it up a little bit, but one of the interesting pieces is, is they’re considering how fast a wind farm is gonna be developed.
[00:30:00] So you get credit the faster you can put the wind energy online, you get bonus points. For doing that. And that’s not that we haven’t done in the states. And I don’t even know if Australia is doing this, but it seems sort of intuitive. We can’t sell the lease wait five years and then they kind of slowly develop it.
Don’t we need Rosemary more of the action to happen now, rather than later.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, well, I mean, you mentioned Australia, but Australia that development companies are way, way, way ahead of the, the government. They’re like, you know, pulling the government along with them. Oh, you know, we we’ll need to submit environmental approvals.
So you are gonna need to develop a process for us. We’re gonna need to, you know, do this, so you’ll need to develop. This. So it’s kind of yeah, maybe it’s back to front, but that’s how the whole energy transition’s happening in Australia. At least up until now we’ve had a change of government, so it, it might change.
Yeah, so so it’s slightly different, but I think, I mean, with Japan, it’s not just interesting because they’ve got a, a good offshore resource it’s because they have [00:31:00] so few other options, you know, they don’t have a lot. Space right. Solar panels. They don’t want to use a lot of geothermal because they don’t want to, you know, put them in their beautiful national parks.
And true. Yeah. They just, in general, they have a lot of trouble. They’re, they’re really talking about bringing in a lot of green hydrogen from Australia at, you know, huge or in other places, Saudi Arabia and and Europe as well. I think Hugely expensive. So the, the one thing that they’ve really got is offshore.
It’s gotta be floating offshore for Japan. I’m pretty sure exclusively the, the few that they have, right. Are some of the first floating, offshore wind turbines that are, have been installed. So they’ve got this really hard energy transition problem. They, they do seem pretty committed to it and have been over, you know, a period.
So. They’ve gotta squeeze everything they can out of their, their offshore wind resource. So it is important that they get it right. And I do think there’s a difference between awarding a [00:32:00]contract to the person who says they can build it fastest compared to the person that that does and does it well.
So yeah. Rewarding speed is good, but on its own, it could be really bad. You know, if you end up causing delays for the whole industry because they cause problems, or if you clog up these PR these premium sites with dodgy projects that, you know, experience long delays because they have, you know, just insurmountable problems, then that will be bad.
So. Yeah, I’m not sure your first option is the place to try to get it. get it happening really fast, but overall it’s gonna be important.
Allen Hall: But aren’t there injuring ways to deal with some of the speed issues. You hear people say, you can want it fast. You can want it cheap, or you can want it with quality and you can pick two out of the three.
Right then. Haha. Yeah. It’s also, you know, we, we filled a lot of things very quickly and then we’ve done them very well. Like the [00:33:00] space program was done in a couple of years. Yes. We had a fire. Okay, sure. But we, we still, we still got there. Right. And, but unless you put your foot down and say, we, we are going to accelerate this.
You’re going to, it’s gonna get drug out. Yeah. So
Rosemary Barnes: maybe an auction, then isn’t the right way to achieve that. Where cuz that auction is really all about price. Right. Getting the lowest price. So maybe that’s not the right thing to do if you, I think space is a good analogy because you know, building a lot of floating offshore wind, is it?
It is a brand new thing. It’s a new frontier. Sure. So. Can you go after speed and price and quality all at the same time, a hundred percent? Like, I don’t think so. Actually you can, you can say that’s what you wanna do and it sounds great. Can you achieve it? I’m not sure. I think you have to prioritize there’s some,
Joel Saxum: yeah.
There’s some setups that I’ve seen that can, can, can facilitate something like that. I did extensively worked in the state of Illinois when I was a young engineer. and what they would do on their, their state [00:34:00] contracts is they would say, okay, we have a design engineering firm. So the design engineering firm would design the project, this roads, bridges, highways, whatever.
And they would design the project. Then they would say, okay, we’re gonna consult a construction company. Then the construction company would come in and, or they would con do a bid construction company would come in. Then they would hire a third. Engineering company or a second engineering company that would QC back the plans and the construction.
And they were basically the QC for the state to make sure that the state, that the project went well for them so that they were trying to ensure. And a lot of those were competitive bids based on timeline. If you can get, if you can get this highway down before December 31st, then you get a X amount bonus.
Right. So. But to control for QA QC of the product, but then also of course, you know, safety, you’re looking at LTIs and these things, you start pushing people too fast. You have some of those problems. So they’re looking for cost overruns, quality of the product safety of the, of course the workers but it was putting controls in place.
And of course it’s a different story in Illinois that, you know, government wants to have their hands into everything. [00:35:00] So, right. yeah. It’s a little bit different there. It’s, it’s it’s doable, but it’s just an idea. Well,
Allen Hall: yeah, I, I think in the, I, we can try different things in different places, right? There’s different approaches in different countries and there’s different approaches in different states in the United States, in particular, everybody has their own take on things.
I do think it’s a way we can get to some of these projects done sooner. The question is, do we have the will to do it? Are we gonna have to, you know, have some wind turbines and maybe fall over and hit the water and like, you know what, 99 out the a hundred are still up and running and we’re okay. Let’s keep going.
That kind of thing. You know,
Joel Saxum: a few weeks ago we talked about the offshore lease. That’s gonna happen in California. So, this is a far cry from that one. Isn’t it? When that one said, you’re gonna get bonus points. If you engage within the community and build jobs locally and get in on board with the stakeholders.
Whereas in Japan, they’re saying the faster you can install this thing, don’t worry about that stuff. Let’s go forward, right?
Allen Hall: Let’s go, right? Yeah. Well, just like to see some of that [00:36:00] happen in the United States. I think it’s time we’re gonna run outta time, 2030s coming pretty fast and we just don’t have the infrastructure to do this.
So we’ll see what happens. That’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Be sure to describe in the show notes below to the uptime tech news or weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s famous YouTube channel. So we’ll see you here next week on the uptime wind energy podcast.
