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An article about the benefits of being a wind technician is bringing attention to the industry! After some advice for getting into the industry, we discuss Vestas getting the green light on their GIANT new offshore turbine – the V236-15MW. Phil gives us the scoop on plans for the Port of Long Beach to drop nearly $5 billion on offshore wind real estate in California. Joel highlights an article in PES Wind about engineering firm Bardex bringing offshore oil and gas expertise to wind. And the team agrees that putting data centers inside wind turbine towers is an amazing idea.
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Allen Hall: It looks like McDonald’s is going to connect up with Google to use AI in their restaurants to make the French fries hotter, and to make the ordering a lot easier. I don’t know if you’ve been into McDonald’s in the United States in the last couple of years, but you walk in. And there’s almost no humans there, and they got these big touchscreen boards, and they are the most counterintuitive machines in the world.
I would like to have a soda. I gotta press press. They make it really difficult. So evidently they’re gonna put AI to use with Google to make that better. Pretty soon it’ll be in Australia.
Joel Saxum: It’s not Mac It’s not McDonald’s there though, Allen. It’s Macca’s.
Allen Hall: Is that what it is? Really?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s roughly right. Maccas.
Allen Hall: Of all the things we’ve seen AI being used for, I swear every day there’s a new whiz bang thing that’s going to save the world. But none of them seem really action oriented and touchable, right? You can, you’re gonna see something from AI.
Philip Totaro: Allen, I’m surprised it’s not hydrogen powered.
Joel Saxum: Hydrogen powered French fryers.
Allen Hall: Maybe Google will put their servers in the bases of wind turbines to make everybody happy. How about that?
There’s a new article by Bloomberg News talking about wind turbine technicians, and that has generated a lot of noise on LinkedIn, on the web also. And the data in that article goes like this wind turbine technicians are projected to grow about 45%, not the technicians themselves, but the employment opportunities and it’s faster than a lot of other occupations, obviously, because there’s so much energy going into creating wind turbines across the United States onshore and offshore.
There’s a lot of demand for it and some of the highlights from that article are wind turbine technicians can make about 80, 000 without a college degree but you have to be willing to travel. And there are wind turbines in 44 states at the moment and entry level roles are about 50, 000 plus overtime and travel pay.
And within about a year, it can get trained up enough to be working in the field. Now this has subsequently sent a lot of people to our Weather Guard website, because we have some information about being a wind turbine technician. So in the last 24 to 48 hours, I think I’ve seen 20 requests to be a wind turbine technician and where can they find some information?
And I want to highlight here while we’re on the podcast Hey. Go to the job boards. Go to monster. com. Check out your local community college. Joel, you know this. That there are a lot of training programs and opportunities out there. You just need to look a little bit.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, we did look not too long ago, Allen and I, we were just having a conversation looking at a DOE.
I think it was DOE or Department of Energy or another resource from the federal government where they actually had a map of kind of how. A wind energy career could look like, depending on how you came into, if you came in through university, or if you came in through a technical college or community college or a training center, and it gave you all the different career paths.
And it’s not just technicians that we need. Of course, we need technicians. Yes, but the entire industry is hurting for people to the point where, you know as on the uptime podcast here, we talk to a lot of companies. A lot of the companies that are making products for the wind industry, whether they’re in the U. S. or in the U. K. or in India or wherever else they are, the new innovative products, solutions, software, hardware, whatever it may be, are almost all getting to be geared towards alleviating the technician shortage, right? They’re trying to make things easier in the field. We talked to someone that does, is doing a, has a new SCADA platform that has a, an idea of how to make it easier for a technician to learn to troubleshoot things.
So that’s fantastic. We talked with, was it Echo Bolt? And all these different little tools that make things easier because of the technician scaling problem. This, to me, looks like, ah, ten years ago, five, ten years ago. And this is still a shortage we have in the United States of nurses, right?
It was always like, we need nurses. Same thing. And it took a little bit of time for that to catch. I know a lot of people that I grew up with went into nursing school. And even now, there’s still a shortage of nurses. But at least there’s a lot of people that are chasing that avenue.
And hopefully we can do our little bit of a part to get a little bit of a word out here. What we’d really like to see is people going to some of these training centers and getting getting some skills and getting out into the field.
Allen Hall: Yeah, because pretty much any ISP, independent service provider has a training system.
Rangel Renewables does, and we’ve talked to a number of other companies like Rangel that, that do train technicians. So you don’t have to have the skillset to work on a wind turbine. As long as you have some basic electrical mechanical skills. They will train you up for the rest of it. So it’s a, you just gotta reach out.
And I think that’s the key, is reach out to them, go on LinkedIn, go on the job sites, and you’ll find plenty of opportunities right now. Every service provider, even some of the OEMs, are hiring right now, and it’s pretty hard to miss those opportunities, now
Joel Saxum: is the time great time of the year as well, because people are starting to build their rosters for spring to kick off.
Allen Hall: Let’s talk about 1 of the big OEMs. Vestas has received the type certification from DNV on the V 236, 15 megawatt offshore turbine. They, that turbine is using 115 and a half meter long blades. Holy cow, and it’s designed for a place like the North Sea off the coast of the U. S. and maybe over even in China.
It has a low cut in speed, Rosemary, three meters per second. And a cutout speed of 31 meters a second. So those are, that’s a pretty wide range.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s very broad.
Rosemary Barnes: Is it that of really high cutout speed?
Allen Hall: I think so too!
Rosemary Barnes: Yes! I saw an article recently, someone tagged me on LinkedIn, this article that was about some record being broken from a wind turbine, it was, I think it was a 16 megawatt wind turbine operating at rated capacity for a whole 24 hour period, basically.
And I said yeah, okay. It’s the world’s largest wind turbine and it operated at rated capacity for one day. Therefore, obviously it was going to break the one day record. It’s just a logical conclusion of the fact that the article was like, and the turbine does this, and this. And those are all the same thing.
That’s one exciting thing that you’ve just, just written a whole article restating that basically and yeah, it was a bit of a LinkedIn argument because someone’s Oh yeah, you’re such a party pooper. Like I bet that you would go watch the, a hundred meters final at the Olympics and say, Oh, what’s the big deal?
They’re just moving their legs really fast. Yeah, okay. But like it’s one cool thing that can run a hundred meters fast. You don’t then say, Oh my God, they also broke the world record for 90 meters. And 91 meters at 92 meters, it would be the same kind of thing, like it all follows.
But anyway I digress because one of the other claims of the article was that, oh, and this, revolutionary new wind turbine can survive hurricane or, whatever kind of storm it was. And I looked up the wind speed, the rated wind speed, and that is just a very normal cutout, yeah, rated wind speed and cutout wind speed, all very normal, but that’s in the twenties.
So this one. Couldn’t you legitimately say this is like a storm proof wind turbine? I just think that’s yeah, higher cutout speed than normal. Not every storm. I’m not saying that there’s not a storm on earth that could destroy it, but it’s it’s clearly rated to, certified to withstand stronger winds than your average wind turbine.
Let’s say that I don’t want to be the one that, is getting all hyperbolic now and about. I’ve had a wind turbine, but, this is a robust, sturdy wind turbine by the looks of it, as well as being huge.
Allen Hall: So how do they get to the 31 meters a second? Is it because they have more pitch?
Rosemary Barnes: No, every wind turbine can pitch all the way around that It’s normal that you would pitch to make the minimum aerodynamic load, it’ll be just a stronger, it’ll be a stronger blade and stronger bearings and stronger, like every, everything that it’s attached to, it has to be stronger all the way down, stronger, yeah. Foundation as well. Yeah. There is the certification standards require that it can withstand a maximum gust wind speed and that the turbine doesn’t get to decide, the turbine manufacturer doesn’t get to decide what that is, but that’s not the operational cutout.
That is up to the the turbine manufacturer to decide at what point. Do we say you can’t generate power anymore, you have to just, yeah, feather your blades and pinwheel probably and, ride out the storm without falling over, but not generating power anymore. And this turbine is generating, yeah up higher.
And there’s good power to be to be got from those high wind speeds, if you’re in an area with a lot of storms, then I think that would make a, you’d see more annual energy production from having the higher cutout wind speed.
Philip Totaro: And they are too, because keep in mind what markets this was also designed for, not just the North Sea but also Taiwan, where they also have, some pretty strong typhoon winds and stuff like that during different parts of the year.
They’re also intending to use this quite a bit in Brazil if Brazil is ever going to be a market, potentially Columbia as well. There are and both Brazil and Columbia if you’re familiar with the region, the reason why people are actually excited about Brazil’s offshore wind market is because even if you just look at their onshore.
Wind in Rio Grande Norte and that kind of area of the country, if you go offshore, you have very low turbulence and you have very high sustained winds. And it’s a, it’s a turbine designer’s dream. It’s an operator’s dream out there. The turbine is perfectly designed for that type of application.
Joel Saxum: So I found the numbers now and Rosemary completely agree with you. This thing is this Vesta’s V2 36 is going to be super robust to be able to regularly run in those high wind speeds in the IEC standard. The highest wind class is one a, which is. 10 meters per second annual average wind speed at hub height, or the extreme 50 year gust is 160 miles per hour.
That’s the highest, that’s the highest rated one. Now if I’m switching to my other screen and I’m going to go to the Saffir Simpson, and I’m going to say that wrong, Saffir Sympson hurricane wind scale. This is from the the government of the U. S., National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA.
Their class 5 is a, major sustained winds is 157 miles per hour or higher. So a class 5 hurricane is sustained at the same speed that is a class 1a wind turbine at a 50 year gust is the max. So that’s why I worry about if we just put these same types of turbines in the Gulf of Mexico, that some morning we’re going to wake up with a beach full of fiberglass.
Allen Hall: Yeah, the Gulf of Mexico is not the right place for this, but along the Atlantic coastline, it would be, in the U. S., the hurricanes don’t tend to be fours and fives South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia up. They’re two threes, generally, right? So it’d be a good place there.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, cold water.
Allen Hall: It loses energy there. Cold. But is it, alright and what’s the 115 meter blade mean Rosemary? Is that Super difficult blade to build because of its length or is it a two piece? Is it a two piece or one piece? I assume it’s one piece.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I assume it’s one piece. I don’t know if any of the really long blades that are two pieces, the two piece blades are all in the yeah, 60s, 70s meters length.
Yeah, for offshore wind, you don’t have that same issue with transport, right? You make your blade factory right next to a port and then you put it on a ship and away it goes. It never needs to go under a bridge or around a corner or anything. So it’s not such a big deal. And the, the blade structure is so important.
So you would really struggle to put a split in there somewhere and make it strong enough to withstand 31 meters per second storm. But the blade length, it’s super duper ridiculously long. So let’s not downgrade it. These long, really long wind turbine blades, they’re the largest single piece man made structure anywhere, there’s no part of a bridge that is bigger than a wind turbine blade or, part of a building a skyscraper even, yes, they’re gigantic. However, they’re not, these aren’t the longest blades in the world. There are people up, in the one twenties or at least they’ve got, paper designs and blade molds for that length haven’t, I’m not sure that they’ve actually installed turbines with 120 something meter blades.
Although maybe they have, and I missed it. Yeah, so super long, but not world record breaking.
Allen Hall: How many turbines do they have to sell before they break even on that particular design? Is there a rough number?
Philip Totaro: It’s usually about 300, Allen. For something that big when you consider all the non recurring engineering plus all their like supply chain startup costs and stuff like that.
I normally when we’ve done that type of analysis for companies in the past, it comes out to be about 300 units. Now, that said, that was also at commodity prices that were a lot cheaper relative to turbine size a few years back, so we could be talking about 350 to 400 units. That said, I’m actually looking at our IntelStor data platform, and Based on both un unconfirmed orders and stuff that’s probably in negotiation and again hasn’t actually been formally publicly announced yet, there’s actually a total of about 95 gigawatts.
Or about 6, 300 units where these turbines could be used. But again, a lot of these also include overwhelming majority of that is actually in Brazil where they just use the Vestas V. 236 as a placeholder for their permitting application.
Joel Saxum: So you’re saying 6, 300 that are, that could go into actual permitted areas that exist right now?
Philip Totaro: If these become firm orders. So again, keep in mind that all of this is just, again, in our project database where we track everything into the future, as far out as governments have publicly reported. Data that’s for projects that are in the consenting queue.
Anybody who’s Utilized the Vestas v236 as their kind of quote unquote kind of placeholder turbine and this includes so I’m looking at the countries We’ve got You know Denmark Germany Italy Poland the US Taiwan South Korea, etc. There’s markets all over the world where you know, these turbines could be used in project sites but again We’re, 95 gigawatts is a big number, and that’s also out towards 20, 35, 2040 a time frame.
None of that, I don’t think, has been firmed up yet. I think they only have one firm order so far for the, or maybe two firm orders in Europe so far for the 236. So just keep that in mind as we talk about it. But, this could, to be blunt we’re actually projecting that Vestas will overtake Siemens Gamesa in offshore market share at some point in the future because of this turbine and any derivatives of this turbine platform.
This is a, the fact that they got it certified. I think you’re going to see more deals become formally announced in the near term, especially again in the US, some of the projects where they were lined up as the preferred turbine vendor, some of those projects are going through some of the re resubmittals at this point of their their power offtake contract requests and, They’re going to have to retender some are going to be for newer projects keep in mind also Vestas has a pretty big desire to have a big footprint in a market like Australia where they’re really starting to get their act together now.
I think they’ve got something like 36 gigawatts according to the latest estimate we’ve got of projects in the, the permitting and consent queue down there at this point. That’s the, there’s pretty big global opportunity for this turbine.
Allen Hall: Yeah, but Phil, and Rosemary, the turbines are so big, how many can they possibly produce in a single year?
A hundred? A hundred seems like a lot.
Philip Totaro: Maybe, but how much money you got? Because, yes, there are diminishing returns in terms of maximum, factory capacity, but at the end of the day, if they are gonna get firm orders, I could see them putting up a dedicated factory in Australia.
I could see them putting in a factory in South Korea. Definitely see them putting a factory in Brazil. And they’ll continue to supply throughout Europe from Denmark. So, yeah and I think they’re even looking at Taiwan at this point, but, they’re not going to sell any of them in China unless something dramatically changes at this point, but.
Yeah, they could establish a decent amount of annual manufacturing capacity. A single factory could actually churn out about 200 units a year if they designed and built it, right?
Allen Hall: Yeah, and, and on the Blade side, you’d have to make about a, say it’s 300 units to break even, right?
So you’re gonna make about a thousand Blades before the companies start to see any sort of Revenue, return, a thousand blades, do you really, at that point, you’re, you have to commit, right? A thousand blades, and then you can figure out how well the blades are performing. Is that a real risk, right?
Because of the time frame it’s a couple years out, you have this big demand. You don’t have a lot of history on those, some think it’s 115 meters.
Rosemary Barnes: Just because that’s your breakeven point doesn’t mean that you’re definitely going to get to that point. I know that definitely in the past, like it’s really, it’s a matter of prestige as well.
These really big turbines, especially in the past. People have really wanted to have the world’s biggest turbine, the world’s longest blade and so there have been in the past designs that have been made to mostly just fulfill that PR need to be able to say we have the longest blade in the world and then use that to sell other turbines, other blades and so I know that there were projects of really long blades at the time that did not break even, they wouldn’t have made the volume.
But either way, even if you’re only making a single test blade, even you still need a fair amount of commitment because you need to get that blade mold made, you need the same mold, whether you’re making one blade or a hundred blades or more. And then if you, then beyond that number, it’s a matter of how quickly do you want to pump blades out?
Because like for a shorter blade, you’ll usually have. In a factory, a single line, like a single mold spot is going to put out one blade per 24 hour period, like clockwork. And, some of the bigger factories have multiple lines. So they’re putting out multiple blades each day.
But for these really long blades I know when they were, when around a hundred meters was new it was certainly the case that it was, not a day per blade. It was, maybe that by the time they got everything dialed in, it was more like a week or two for a blade, presumably in the decades since we got to that point, it’s come down.
But I’d be really surprised if you can make 115 meter long blade, if you can close one of them every single day from any kind of factory, just cause they’re so big. Laminates are so thick. Just the timeframe for everything pushes out and you can’t necessarily just throw more people onto it to make the problem smaller.
So yeah, I haven’t actually worked in a factory that was making blades of this length I’m. I’m speculating, but I’m going to assume that it takes multiple days for one of these blades to come off. And of course the factories need to be really big. It needs to be obviously more than 115.
5 meters long. And then also you’ve got to think about the blades need to be able to rotate and the if you’ve got the normal blade manufacturing process where you make it in two halves, like clamshell halves, two blade molds and then you close one. And also after the blade is finished when you’re repairing it, you need to be able to rotate it so that it’s, you can get at all parts of it reach all parts of the blade.
If you’ve got a maximum chord, that’s five meters, eight meters, whatever it is your roof needs to be a lot higher than that. The buildings are really big. And so if you’re having multiple lines, then you can end up with. Huge factories, and like I said before, that you want to place them conveniently to access the port, so it’s not like there’s just infinite land available.
So I think that companies would be a bit more cautious about their scale up plans for a blade of that size compared to, a 50 meter blade. You can just chuck lines in as you feel like it, basically without risking as much.
Allen Hall: That’s my opinion too, Rosemary, that I know a couple of months ago, there was a discussion with Vestas had, it was some sort of webinar, I think I heard it or a podcast where they’re talking about building new factories and each factory is about 500 million. Wow, that’s a huge investment. If you’ve already put all the money into certifying a new wind turbine to start then putting literally billions of dollars down around the world to make this new machine, that’s a huge risk. And Phil, I don’t, is there a projected
rOI on this? There must be a number somewhere. I haven’t seen anything published by Vestas, but you would think you would like to get your money back as soon as you can, but Rosemary points out, the scale of this makes it hard.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, and what also complicates it, Allen, is what we’ve just been talking about.
As Rosemary’s indicated you aren’t, you’re going to get a point of diminishing returns where you can’t just throw more money and more people at the factories, as I was indicating before yeah, you can build multiple factories, you can build multiple lines, but at the end of the day, your ROI is ultimately determined by whether or not you have a firm enough order book to make the capital commitment to do the factory, and then you can actually deliver on that order book with the level of quality that you need to, because if you end up doing a ton of blades and then there’s a lot of rework because maybe the factory you have in Taiwan or Australia isn’t the, performing at the same level of quality as the Danish factory or whatever.
There, therein lies the problem of, you’re gonna, that’s a pretty, that’s a pretty big thing to blow if you don’t get that right. Y’know, and you have to start the blade over from scratch or something, potentially? Y’know, you could, you’re talking about scrapping, y’know, blades that are a million and a half plus, two million each?
Allen Hall: Maybe Vestas will get smart and acquire Pardalote and just send Rosemary to the different factories to make sure they’re built right!
Joel Saxum: Somebody’s got to do it.
Rosemary Barnes: I’ll wait for that call.
Joel Saxum: Oh, no. The Vestas will put a Vestas factory in Australia.
Allen Hall: Oh, that’s true. Right down the road, right in Canberra. There you go.
Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And PES Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication.
Joel Saxum: So there’s an article this quarter here in PES wind magazine about the company Bardex. So Bardex provides engineering solutions for offshore wind, including heavy lifting, installation and operations. Now Bardex has passed. Is much like a lot of the existing large companies coming into the offshore wind space is they’ve done a lot of stuff in oil and gas.
So they know their way around ports. They know their way around shipyards. They know their, they know quayside operations. And when you read, this is an interesting one for everybody getting into offshore that’s not been in there before. Quayside is spelt Q U A Y S I D E. So if you hear someone say quayside, that’s what they’re actually, that’s what they’re referring to.
It took me like three years to figure that out when I got an oil and gas.
Philip Totaro: Joel, it’s not quake. It’s not quayside. I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.
Joel Saxum: So Bardex is in the magazine this month. And they’re saying a lot of things that we’ve been talking about in the podcast for the last few years.
So there’s a knowledge that exists out in the world and in the industrial world that can be transferred. So when you’re talking offshore wind, a lot of the companies that are, very good at it, the DMAs and Seaway seven, and some of these other ones doing large installs, they. Got their start.
They know their how their operations. I know how to do heavy lifts offshore. They know how to do construction offshore because of oil and gas and the other project that they’ve been involved in. So Bardex is taking that same, those same knowledge that they’ve built in how to make. Keep port facilities, port and shipyard facilities and manufacturing facilities optimized, right?
Because there’s a lot of people that earlier off air, we were talking about building new port facilities over in California for some of this floating offshore wind. The port facilities in California and on the East Coast of the United States, they’re not ready for these things, right?
They’re not prepared. They’re not those. Those port facilities are not built to have. Big jackets manufactured there, welded up there, coated there, or loaded onto barges or if it’s a, floating offshore wind, so build it, you’re welding up facility, or the actual structures on land, then you have to launch them, and then you have to Basically tugboat them out through, what may be a shipping channel or something of this sort and those facilities and the people that are around them just aren’t, they’re not used to it.
So Bardex has got some cool lifting technology and some other knowledge around consulting for making these facilities lean manufacturing processes, standardizing how you do things. And having simulation tools to put these things in place to make it easier to develop offshore wind farms, because that development doesn’t have a lot of that development that does not happen out at sea.
That development happens on land, and then there’s that transition to the ships or to being towed out and then moored or if we’re talking, if we’re talking floating wind, then they have to be moored, anchored, all these other good things. And those are ancillary activities that you don’t think about when you think about offshore wind.
People think, okay, offshore wind, yeah, someone’s building it. It’s like when we talked about Ridgway rock bags what are rock bags? Why do we need these? There’s so many ancillary parts of this offshore wind play that people don’t realize. And Bardex is, they’re they’re a really good resource within that industry because Or as this industry kicks off because they’ve done it before.
They know how to build quayside facilities and make sure they’re optimized to work. So if you want to learn a little bit more about that, check them out. PES Wind Magazine for this quarter and is the company Bardex, B A R D E X.
Allen Hall: Staying on the offshore theme, the Port of Long Beach has unveiled a new massive 4. 7 billion dollars, billion with a B, offshore wind turbine assembly complex. That will be known as pier wind. It’ll, it’s going to be a 400 acre terminal built on newly dredged land and where they can put these massive wind turbines that now this all has to be developed and built and permitted, which is going to take obviously several years.
It, there, it’s so big that they’re going to build like a 30 acre transportation corridor. With four lanes so they can get the trucks in and out to leave parts there. It’s a huge endeavor and they’re expecting to get some federal money to help with the cost of it. But we’re talking about somewhere in 2027 when they’re gonna kick it off and hopefully it’ll be done about four years later, 2031.
This is a long term project and very complicated, and this is out in Phil’s territory. In California. Phil, obviously there’s a lot of players along that west coast of the U. S. that want to be involved in offshore wind. Long Beach, obviously, is a major port in the United States, period. It looks like they’re trying to flex their muscles a little bit and just push everybody out of the port world for offshore wind.
Philip Totaro: Potentially, yes. If this thing actually goes through and gets built the way they’re designing it. It will be, even though Humboldt is going to happen with a different consortium, of course for the Northern California lease areas that have already been auctioned. Long Beach could end up serving certainly the Morro Bay sites and anything throughout the West Coast.
Of the U. S. And theoretically even Mexico, if they ended up ever doing anything down there. Now, as you said, they’re going to have to dredge. And as anybody who lives in the Northeast knows about dredging it’s not easy to get it environmentally permitted. This is a monstrous thing that has to be dredged.
And I’m concerned that the, the kind of environmental powers that be out here in California may end up having to scale this back a bit. So right now it’s a 4. 7 billion dollar, massive port. We’ll see what we end up with by 2027, if that’s even when they’re going to be able to start.
I’M imagining people coming out of the woodwork to try and oppose it. Certainly the shipping companies aren’t going to be too happy. Because something that’s this big taking up a chunk of space in the shipping lanes it’s not gonna excite the vessel operators and everything But the good news for Offshore wind is again if they can get this to happen, this certainly serves the needs of the offshore wind community is we were talking about earlier, with the Vestas V 236.
If you’re going to build factories, you need substantial acreage to be able to do this. This type of port facility will have the acreage to be able to accommodate that on site manufacturing and key side assembly. Notice I didn’t say quayside. The the reality with this is it’s got a lot of potential.
There have been some other proposals. There’s a private company that’s trying to say we should just install a temporary floating dock up near Morro Bay to be able to service that. Only, the problem with that is, it’s, conceptually it’s a good idea. The problem is that the people don’t want it up there.
They’re, like, largely objecting to anything, even like the service port that’s gonna have to be, installed and upgraded in, in Morro Bay. Where it’s, at this point, just a small kind of fishing town. There’s already a lot of locals that are interested in getting revenue associated with wind energy, but they don’t want the infrastructure anywhere in their backyard.
Port of Long Beach kind of solves that, that issue. So all in all I think if they can make this happen, it’ll be great Again, I think the challenge with this is are they gonna be able to get everything that they want? Or is this gonna end up having to be redesigned and scaled back a little bit based on The environment, the environmental concerns that are likely to end up driving this conversation about this port extension and precisely where it goes, how big it is, et cetera.
Joel Saxum: So one interesting thing there is like we’re talking about just a little bit ago with Bardex and their knowledge of how to build ports and things. If these are, these floaters will come off of the, out of this port of Long Beach, floaters are, they’re going to be large. They’re going to be a massive structures that are going to be floated out.
And when you pull those in a controlled area, such as a port of Long Beach. Normally, you’ll have three tugs on them. You’ll have, you will either have one lead and two tails or two leads and one tail. So that’s a operation. And then an operation also includes sometimes there’s patrol boats, basically to keep everybody at bay and stuff.
The port of Long Beach as well, and I’m just thinking about this out loud, is one of the most, or probably the busiest port in North America. Because of all the goods that are coming into the United States from the APAC region through there. Through that port. So you’re now, if you have that there now, I’m not saying this is not a stop or anything.
This is not even really probably a hurdle, but you’re going to complicate a lot of the marine traffic around the port of Long Beach by having this heat there, because I’m looking at the marine traffic. com, which tracks all the AIS system of all the large vessels in the world. And there’s got to be a hundred vessels already between Newport and Long Beach sitting there as I, as we’re talking, or more.
So it’s just another wrinkle in the development of this.
Allen Hall: I think traffic on the ground is going to be even worse, right? The amount of truck traffic and especially moving big blades and big tower sections into that port, beyond what they typically do now, right? Which is mostly containers, which is pretty quick in and out.
Moving big things in and out of there is going to be a problem.
Philip Totaro: But again, most of that stuff would be either built on site or built in China, let’s say, and then shipped over. So the land based infrastructure that they’re talking about is really just trucking in raw materials, which you can usually do on flatbeds or, cargo containers sized.
So I, we’ll see.
Allen Hall: This is going to be a really good economic experiment, right? To figure out how to keep the cost down and yet get these things made.
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The Nordex Group is currently in the process of installing its first N 163 five X turbines. In northern Finland and that particular wind farm is going to have a new tower design. It’s the, it’s Nordex’s first in house developed hybrid concrete and steel tower with a hub height of 168 meters.
Joel, that’s Pretty tall. Man the tower design draws on Nordex Group’s expertise gained from designing and producing concrete towers in various locations. It’s made in segments and then each up to about 20 meters long, and then they stack these segments up and bolt them all together. And put the turbine on top of it.
It sounds like Nordic’s going to keep going down this concrete tower approach, because they’ve been doing it for a long time. GE’s been playing around with it a little bit. They’ve, Or working with a 3D concrete printing company that we’re doing some work out in New York state on it.
But Nordex is really involved in the concrete tower and the segment of tower I guess just get higher hub heights, right? That’s the whole point of the concrete tower is to get you higher up in the air to get to better winds. They’ve had some issues, was it earlier this year, Joel, where they’ve had some, uh, Concrete towers that had issues and had to be inspected.
There was a lot of drone inspection going on and a lot of hubbub over in Europe about what the outcome of that was. It seems like they’re really invested in concrete towers. And I don’t, is it going to be the future? I know Rosemary doesn’t like it from the CO2 perspective, but. Is it the approach?
Joel Saxum: I think that the one thing that they’re, of course, you’re getting up, up into the higher winds of the hybrid tower approach, being 168 meter hub height is a game changer for wind resource, right?
But the other advantage here too, is now you’re taking control of your supply chain because otherwise your supply chain is steel from a lot of times India or South Korea or somewhere else overseas. Depending on where you are in the world and you’re building turbines, but when you take you’re taking a little bit more control of it Of course, there’s steel in these turbines, but it’s steel rebar instead of steel towers So it’s a lot less steel and it’s a lot lower quality steel to be honest with you so you’re taking control of your supply chain by shifting gears to do this, and that will, might make construction cheaper in remote areas as well, such as, being in northern Finland, or if you’re going to a place that doesn’t have good port facilities where it’s easy to bring in large tower sections, might be easier to build concrete on on site.
Allen Hall: Evidently there’s a second effect to making concrete towers is that you can put data centers in them. WindCORES over in Germany is taking this approach. I guess in Germany, and Phil, you can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but in Germany, they intend to put a lot of wind turbines up, but the grid can’t handle it.
That’s the same problem we have in the United States, by the way. But so they have these wind parks where they can’t drive all the energy onto the grid. And some of that energy doesn’t get used and now in comes a company called WindCORES to put data centers in the bases of these turbines. So they got the racks and the computer stuff all jammed inside these bases.
And I guess it makes sense, right? It’s it, they’re averaging almost 90 percent of the data center power comes directly from. The host turban. That seems like a slam dunk, right?
Philip Totaro: Yeah it’s a really great idea, actually. And like you mentioned, the reason for this is that if you’re in a market environment where you’re constrained on upgrading your substation facilities a lot of the repowering that’s happening in Germany, you’re taking out, kilowatt sized turbines and you’re replacing it with multi megawatt sized turbines that frankly do indeed have, physical space in the base of the tower to be able to actually put these rack mount servers in there.
And the fact that you’ve got your load literally as, as close as in physical proximity as it could possibly be to the power generation. It’s, you’re cutting down on transmission losses. Which is reducing, copper that needs to be mined and or otherwise utilized.
So you’re in effect, you’re reducing CO2, you’re increasing efficiency. And, you’re addressing that grid constraint issue as well by, instead of just throwing power into a resistor bank and burning it off when you need to curtail. You’re actually putting it to good use by having it power this data center.
I, I frankly love this idea. It’s a great one.
Allen Hall: Isn’t one of the issues with data centers is the temperature and that they have to temperature control that space because the servers get so hot. Are they managing that the same way? Or is it turbine just they’d have to have some sort of environmental control system in the base of the turbine, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, but you got power for it now.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, there are humidifiers. Yeah, you’ve got that but there are humidifiers and other Fans and things that definitely need to go And be installed, but if you’re familiar with some of the OEMs that have done You know wind turbines in like desert areas I’m thinking in places like Chile or I think even in Australia, maybe Rosemary knows but they’ve actually put like heat sinks on the outside of the turbines.
Certainly turbines, some of the turbines in like Jordan and other places in the Middle East, and again, as I mentioned, Chile I know for a fact that they’ve put some of these external mounted heat exchangers on the turbine to be able to just cool the turbine. I’m gonna imagine you could do something similar with this type of application if you had to.
But the fact that you’ve got a self made chimney, as long as you have enough ventilation coming out near the near the yaw bearing I don’t see a problem necessarily with it. Yes, you’re going to have extra fans and humidifiers in there, but sounds good.
Rosemary Barnes: I would have appreciated a data center in the wind turbines that I climbed in Sweden. If the turbine had been off overnight, then it was so freezing cold. You always hope that, if they’ve been on and the gearbox is warm. And I will admit that I would hang out literally sitting on top of it so that I didn’t freeze so badly, but yeah, a little bit of data center.
Hey, it would have been much appreciated.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, there’s a, there was an interesting one that I think it happened and it’s in a port in the UK somewhere. And I can’t remember which one it was, but it was Google. who took a data center and they sunk it offshore. So they put it in basically a little submarine type capsule, and this was an experiment they did, and they sunk it offshore because the biggest cost at these data centers is not the computing, it’s cooling them down.
And of course, water, best heat sink you can get, so you take all the servers inside of this capsule, connect them with heat sinks to the wall Of the submersible sink it in the water and let it sit and the, I think the experiment went really well. I think they’ll probably try to do more of in the future.
Philip Totaro: Yeah. Microsoft also did that. And I want to say New Zealand and there are actually companies that are investigating, literally developing that type of technology where if you’ve got like a floating Solar farm, you could literally have some type of storage tanks underneath that are not only providing the buoyancy to keep the racks afloat.
But then those buoyancy tanks can also house your data center. Look forward to that, yeah, look forward to that, and look forward to potentially co locating with fixed or floating offshore wind as well. Like this I could see this it’s gonna necessitate more fiber optic cable connection.
I don’t see necessarily any problem and with performance again, the fact that they’re doing this in places like Germany where they have grid constraints is a really good idea because, again it’s accomplishing multiple things and doing it in a CO2 neutral way. Or potentially even a CO2 beneficial way but it’s, yeah, you’re not going to put every, you’re not going to put a server in every wind turbine moving forward, but, we’ll see what happens with data usage and data consumption in the future, but for our own industry purposes, but yeah, I, again I love the idea conceptually, but this is still an evolving thing at this point.
Joel Saxum: So our wind farm of the week is the Brazos Wind Farm located in Lavana, Texas, which is up in the north. We northwest corner of Texas. It, and I’m gonna say it, it is owned, but it will have been owned by Shell Wind Energy because they’re actually in the midst of. Selling it and another couple of other projects to Infrared Capital Partners now.
Shell has recently gave some advice in one of their capital markets days, not too long ago that they’re going to get back to their core industries, which is, of course, hydrocarbons, but they are going to keep the offtake of the Brazos wind farm for shell. So they’re going to keep Their green initiatives up by taking the power from them, but they’re just not going to own and operate it.
So this wind farm, the Brazos wind farm is also in the midst of a repower. They’re going to go from 160 of the Mitsubishi 1000 A’s. And if you’re in the wind industry, you know exactly what turbine we’re talking about. At this 160 megawatt wind farm, and once they repower, they’re going to take those down and put some new technology up.
It’s going to be 182 megawatts, and the cost of capital there is about 200 million dollars. So the project is currently active it was originally commissioned in 2003, but now getting a full remake. The Brazos Wind Farm in Flavana, Texas, you are the Wind Farm of the Week.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
