Tornadoes Damage Turbines in Texas; Plus, Will LinkedIn Changes Hurt Wind Community?

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Uptime 107

[00:00:00] Rosemary: I have really strict LinkedIn feed hygiene. So if something has like thousands of, of likes or shares, I immediately like you don’t, don’t spend time looking at it. Immediately click on the three dots and say, don’t show me content like this, the topic isn’t isn’t

[00:00:15] Allen: Whoa.

[00:00:15] Rosemary: Relevant. Yeah, and if I have, I have somebody who…

[00:00:21] Rosemary: yeah. So, so do do it religiously. You can’t even look at it, like don’t even let your eyeballs leave. Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your co-host Allen hall with Dr. Rosemary Barnes from Australia. From the land down under Rosemary.

[00:00:43] Rosemary: You don’t have to call me doctor.

[00:00:44] Allen: No. Okay. It’s better than mr. I suppose.

[00:00:49] Rosemary: yeah, that’s true. That’s true.

[00:00:50] Allen: We ha we have a really interesting show today. There’s a lot going on in wind. It seems like the world is awakening and there’s just activity all over the place. Let’s, let’s, let’s get started on a, on a, a couple things that happened in Texas. So there was some it’s it’s that springtime season in Texas, which means there’s gonna be tornado.

[00:01:09] Allen: And there was a tornado and, and, or a couple of TA tornadoes, 18 tornadoes to be exacted up in north, Texas, just kind of north and a little bit west of, of Dallas, if you know, your Texas geography, and they had multiple wind turbines that were damaged, the blades that were damaged in those, in those tornadoes and Rosemary, it looked like the blades had melted.

[00:01:32] Allen: a couple of winter, but it just, everything drooped.

[00:01:36] Rosemary: Which, yeah, to me, it looks like you like, if you grow flowers in your garden, and then at the end of the, the season, you know, some of the pedals have fallen off and the other ones are kind of limp. It’s got a really, really sad look like that about it.

[00:01:49] Rosemary: It’s not nice to see

[00:01:50] Allen: It’s not good. And what, what does that, because there were wind turbines,

[00:01:54] Allen: maybe a quarter mile away that weren’t affected at all. But there were, in this particular case, there were like three that were closely grouped together and they were. Blades blades down the towers were there, then the cells looked fine, but what causes the blades to come apart like that?

[00:02:10] Allen: Is, is it the twisting motion? Is it over speed? What, what, what does that to wind turbine blade?

[00:02:18] Rosemary: Yeah, I guess it’s, I mean, primarily over, over speed. And it could be that there was some, you know, turbulence and sudden changes in direction. From the pictures that I can see, it looks like the upwind and downward sides are two, you know, halves of the blade shells seem to have been separated from each other.

[00:02:36] Rosemary: And, you know, once that happens, even in a small, small part of the blade, then yeah, that is definitely game over. Cuz you just got no stiffness anymore once, once the two sides detached from each other. So yeah. I mean, I have to assume that there was some, I mean there was so many blades affected, right?

[00:02:52] Rosemary: That it must have exceeded the design. Yeah, the design load.

[00:02:57] Allen: So the, the blades, if, if you haven’t looked at a blade before everybody, but the blades are actually built, typically built in as two pieces and they’re, they’re glued together. How STR in the, in the airplane world, when we do things like that, we, we put a couple, we call chicken fasteners in.

[00:03:11] Allen: So that once that, that bond joints told them what chicken fasteners chicken is a kind of a bird it’s in America.

[00:03:17] Rosemary: Why’s called them chicken?

[00:03:19] Allen: Because it’s the design I, the chicken, because the engineers are chicken. I mean, they have, that’ll have the

[00:03:25] Allen: intestinal fortitude to rely on the glue joint by itself.

[00:03:29] Allen: Oh, though, it’s, it’s a kind of a quasi put down. For stress engineers, I guess.

[00:03:35] Allen: Okay. So we call ’em chicken fasters because expensive chickens. Yes or, or call ’em

[00:03:41] Allen: peel. I think the proper term is peel stop. Fasteners peel stop is the proper term, but in the industry, lingo is chicken fasteners. So at least in the United States, it is.

[00:03:52] Allen: So if that bond joint starts to let loose, if you have a couple of fasters, it would stop that bond joint from continu to break. But in the case of blades, once the, they start to let go. If the, I guess if the forces are enough, there really is nothing to stop that joint from unzipping. Right. Is, is that how it, how it would go.

[00:04:11] Rosemary: Yeah. If it’s in a loaded area, which it will be if it , if it happened because they were under a, a lot of load. Yeah. And then even if it’s not that larger section that, you know, unzips, you’re probably gonna buckle the blade then at that, at that point where it’s missing, you know, cause it’s all of a sudden, just way less stiff at that spam wise location.

[00:04:30] Rosemary: And it’s just gonna, yeah, like buckle, like a, I dunno like a Coke can that you , that you you know, you can easily bend a Coke. Can. That’s kind of the effect. Ah, okay. Yeah. All right. Usually once, once something goes wrong on a wind turbine blade, if it’s in a highly loaded area, then it, it goes from the very first bit of damage to catastrophic failure.

[00:04:51] Rosemary: It can happen quite quickly if it’s still loaded, if it’s under load the whole time. Mm.

[00:04:55] Allen: Okay. So that, that’s what looks like what happened here down in Texas. And luckily I don’t think anybody was killed. There were some people injured in those tornadoes, but it’s tornado season and everybody has to be aware of that.

[00:05:06] Allen: I’m not sure what you do if you’re on a wind, Turine when that happens. But I assume everybody gets warned ahead of time with cell phones that people tend to get away. Oh yeah. You

[00:05:14] Rosemary: can’t, you can’t climb. You can’t climb. Wind speeds way below that. Like, I mean, I’ve done a lot of onsite work and it’s one of the really, annoying things about it is that you, you have to have to, you know, if it’s a windy period, I mean, first of all, they don’t wanna, don’t want you climbing when wind speeds are strong because that’s when they’re making a lot of money from generating a lot of electricity.

[00:05:34] Rosemary: Yeah. True. And secondly, it’s like 10 or 12 meters per second. Usually you. When it’s above that. So that’s way below, even the cutout wind speed of a, a wind turbine, let alone, you know, winds beyond the extreme wind speeds. So yeah, I mean, it would be a major, major stuff up if, if people were climbing at anything like those wind speeds.

[00:05:55] Allen: So are tornado is tornado damage force Masure does it fit into the lightning bucket of acts of God? Insurance wise is not covered. I, I wonder if that’s the case? What, what do you do? Cuz most of the United States and the Midwest, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska Illinois, Kentucky, most of the Midwest is tornado.

[00:06:19] Allen: Some sort of tornado alley, Missouri, Arkansas. Is if tornado hits your wind turbines, I, I, I guess the OEM doesn’t cover that, right? That, I mean that’s outside the purview with the warranty. I would.

[00:06:34] Rosemary: Yeah. I mean, if the blade was damaged in an event where the wind speeds were higher, then the, the Turine is certified or then of, of course that’s not the fault of the, the company that made it.

[00:06:44] Rosemary: You know, you can have a fight between the, the developer and the insurance company as to who, who is at fault because, you know, should they have known that it. See these wind speeds. I mean, if, if you should have known then, I mean, that’s your, your fault for buying a wind turbine that was unsuitable for your conditions?

[00:07:03] Rosemary: I, I would suggest , but we’re seeing similar, a similar issue here in Australia at the moment, not with tornadoes, but a lot of really, you know natural disasters or things that used to be infrequent. Natural disasters are just happening constantly now. And I don’t know if tornadoes are getting more frequent due to climate change.

[00:07:24] Rosemary: Stuff like floods and fires in Australia are, we’ve just had a series like within the space of a month, we’ve had the same, the same town flooded in what should be, you know, like a one in 500 year flood happening, you know, just one after the other and people whose homes were, were flooded four years ago and they’ve rebuilt now they’re flooded again.

[00:07:45] Rosemary: And yeah, according to the insurance companies, these are yeah, like events outside of what you would normally design for. It’s clearly not appropriate anymore. And so we’re having this big political debate about, should we be living in these places? Should you be required to, you know, do we need to update what we, what we used to call a one in 500 year flood based on, you know, the historical data.

[00:08:08] Rosemary: Do we need to update that now? Based on when we don’t have enough years of data of, you know, climate change affected climate to, to know sure. What the new statistics are. Obviously there’s a mismatch and how we’re just gonna keep on re, rebuilding and being surprised every year or every couple of years.

[00:08:26] Rosemary: So I, I think these are interesting topics that are coming up all around the world. Yeah, that’s a really good point. It’s political discussion. We’ve gotta have.

[00:08:38] Allen: Sure. And as the wind energy wind industry grows and we start putting more and more wind turbines and creating larger and larger farms, which we’re gonna talk about today down in Oklahoma.

[00:08:49] Allen: These wind farms get larger and larger. The probability that they get hit by a tornado, I think goes up almost exponentially almost. Right. So then at that point, do you say maybe we need to have some level of protection against level three tornado, maybe that maybe something to think about just because we’re gonna become more and more reliant upon when energy and like you said if there’s changes in the climate that are driving more tornadoes, then yeah.

[00:09:16] Allen: Maybe we need to go address it. That’s an interesting. Because you know, the other thing that happened down to Texas, which is very interesting, cause I’ve come across some of this before is moving heavy things around like wind turbine parts, if there’s because they’re so massive and it tends to be on these especially design trucks for the blades and Noel and whatnot when they have an accident or there’s a problem with the road, it turns into a big deal.

[00:09:44] Allen: So as they’re moving wind turbines through Texas they had a, a quote unquote component fall off a truck on an overpass and put big holes in the overpass. So it is actually shut down this major overpass in Wichita falls, Texas, which if you’re been to Wichita falls is kind of a busy place. So you know, Rosemary, we’ve seen more and more pictures of wind turbines being damaged as they’re in transport.

[00:10:10] Allen: We’ve seen. Things fall off and these, these accidents happen over time. One of the things I don’t think we’ve really thought about too much is like the road conditions. Cause you’re moving bigger and bigger wind turbines around now. What’s the chances that you’re gonna come across a small patch of road.

[00:10:26] Allen: That’s not designed for it or has a defect in it or that are we out to that point? Are we at to the point that we gotta be really careful on the route we take to move wind turbines

[00:10:36] Rosemary: around? Yeah, I. We reached that point many years ago, actually especially for transporting blades. And I mean, every part of the wind turbine is affected by your ability to transport it there.

[00:10:51] Rosemary: Like one of the constraints on how tall towers can go is based on the size of the, the diameter that you can actually put on a road and, and transport somewhere. True. You know, so if, if you wanna go taller than the best way to make. A taller tower that’s stiff enough is to increase the diameter.

[00:11:10] Rosemary: Otherwise, if you’ve got a, you know, diameter constraint, you’ve gotta increase the thickness of the, the steel a lot. You can have a more expensive tower heavier. So yeah, it’s a, it’s a constraint. Yeah, exactly. It’s a constraint to to going higher, which would make, you know, a, about our winter turbine, cuz wind speeds are higher up there and you can get, get more power if you, you know, can have a longer blade.

[00:11:31] Rosemary: Yeah. And I know that, you know, with the long, long blades for onshore wind, it’s one of the constraints on how long the blades can get is, you know, can you, can you get them onto site? It’s all fine for a straight road to you know, drive a really long blade along, but most roads have corners. some, some the jump bridges, I mean, yeah.

[00:11:52] Rosemary: Yeah. already, you are, you know, when you’re planning a a wind farm, then you are looking in the early stages as is, is there a route we can get there without bridges that we have to go. And you know, that will dictate what turbine you can sell to that developer because oh, wow, sure. Might be able to deal with a, you know, blade root diameter that you know, can’t fit under the, the bridges on the way there.

[00:12:17] Rosemary: So yeah, the transport, it, it, it infiltrates more than you would probably expect. Not just the design of, of turbines, but yeah. What you can sell where. I mean, it’s led to, like, that’s a reason why GE made that slip blade, the Cyprus blade, because yeah, they, you know, for saw that this was, was gonna allow them to get into some some locations that the competitors wouldn’t be able to get into are, do, are they the only that’s turned out well, not be such a big deal.

[00:12:46] Rosemary: Yeah.

[00:12:46] Allen: Yeah. That’s what I was wondering. Any, I don’t think any of the competitors followed suit with that two piece

[00:12:51] Rosemary: design, did they? No. No, not that I, not that I know of. And Yeah. I was talking to somebody from GE recently. And like, you seem to be making a lot of the Cypress blades, like one piece version of the Cypress blades.

[00:13:04] Rosemary: Now what’s what’s going on. And he said that it’s because the competitors have kind of sorted out some of those constraints with you. Ah, I don’t know, ports and roads and whatever. To be honest, it sounded like a bit of a corporate thing to say you know, like a way to be like, yeah, well, our design was awesome, but cuz our competitors couldn’t couldn’t match our awesome design.

[00:13:26] Rosemary: They had to, you know, the solution, but. Yeah. So, so that’s, that’s one interpretation. The other interpretation was that, you know, there’s a lot of compromises that you make when you split a blade in half. And you know, I still think that the jury is out on whether that’s gonna prove to be as valuable.

[00:13:43] Rosemary: You know, the benefits are gonna prove to be as valuable as the, the cost to adding that complexity. And yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s a.

[00:13:52] Allen: Well, it, it it’s, it brings up the discussion. I think we talked about this a little while ago of, of moving blades around. One of the things you see tossed around in, in the aerospace world all the time is airships or blimps and moving heavy cargo, like wind Turine blades.

[00:14:05] Allen: Maybe it does make sense. Maybe we’re at that point that we need to have some sort of Airship lifting and, and moving blades around just to get over the road issue. That that is very possible still. Don’t you see that? I, I see that.

[00:14:21] Rosemary: When you go into a factory, like the number one rule that you learn is that you don’t walk under a suspended load, right?

[00:14:28] Rosemary: They , they really, really take care to make sure that you are, you are not, that’s the number one rule that they’re making sure that everybody, everybody follows. And I remember one time I was in the factory after like, 24 hours straight of working. I was really tired and I somehow didn’t hear the alarms that were going off about you know, cause they’ve got this gantry system in place and they, they sure, sure.

[00:14:50] Rosemary: Blades and half blades around all the time. And I walked, I walked underneath something I got, I got really yelled at by the by, by the, the, the lead for that the foreman that yeah, I can’t remember what, what they’re actually called. This was in Spain and, and fair enough. And I was, you know, like horrified at myself because I don’t like to put myself in danger when I’m at work.

[00:15:12] Rosemary: But yeah, it it’s really important that you don’t walk under suspended loads because things usually don’t go wrong. But if they did then yeah, you’d be crushed to death. So that’s why I’m uncomfortable. about the idea of glimpse. Delivering really heavy things is that everybody’s gonna be walking or living or driving, or, you know, kids playing under these huge suspended loads.

[00:15:36] Rosemary: And the one time that goes wrong, you know, that’s, that’s not, not cool. So it sounds good. But at the same time, I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with it. .

[00:15:49] Allen: I think we can do it. We’re already walking under those loads already. There’s 7 47 S and Airbus, a three 80 S flying around. They’re much bigger than a wind turbine blade.

[00:15:55] Allen: Well, at least today they are maybe, maybe not much longer. These wind turbine blades on some of these newer turbines are massive, massive things. So bigger than we do on

[00:16:03] Rosemary: occasion deliver. Wind turbine blades and wind turbine components by, by airplane that has on occasion. I’ve seen that I’ve actually seen that the cheapest way to do it.

[00:16:14] Rosemary: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:14] Allen: I, I was down in North Carolina one in time when that happened with the one of those large Russian transport planes came in. Yeah. With wind turbine components was shocking. Airplane was massive. Yeah. There you go. Right? Yeah. I don’t think maybe blade. No, no,

[00:16:31] Rosemary: no. Also I don’t not yet. It’s not so.

[00:16:34] Rosemary: It doesn’t sound at least environmentally friendly. Does it you know, drive really? just huge masses around in, in airplanes for, yeah. If there’s, if there’s an alternative, I’d rather see it used

[00:16:48] Allen: well, we’re still working on it. That’s for sure. Down in

[00:16:51] Allen: Oklahoma this week, they American electric power is opening a, the largest single wind farm in north America.

[00:17:02] Allen: It’s called the traverse wind energy center. It has a 998 megawatt. Well, they just round it up to a gigawatt. You know what I mean?

[00:17:09] Rosemary: 9 98, 1 more turbine. I mean, come on, just

[00:17:12] Allen: spin it up a little faster, right? Can we upgrade some of the

[00:17:15] Allen: generators here? Just like a little tiny bit cuz that one gigawatt is pretty impressive.

[00:17:20] Allen: 9 98 is like, you know,

[00:17:22] Allen: just not quite there, but

[00:17:23] Allen: it’s, it’s it’s a big place in sort of Northern Oklahoma. 356 GE turbines 2.3 is a 2.8 megawatt turbines. That is that’s a lot of turbines to do in one project. And actually it’s only one third of two. There’s two other projects gonna on simultaneous, which are generating again, 1.48, four megawatts.

[00:17:46] Allen: Why couldn’t they just round it up to 1.5 gigawatts? I think that would’ve been a nice to get a nice number, but, okay.

[00:17:52] Allen: So the, the, the thing about this

[00:17:54] Allen: project is. I think it’s the beginning of many projects like this that we’re gonna see instead of putting up 50 turbines, 75 turbines in America, I think you’re gonna see certain seeing projects and where they’re gonna be several hundred turbines at a time.

[00:18:10] Allen: So it’s gonna be interesting to see how that, that project actually turns out because if it does work. You could see sort of the Elon Musk effect of we can power America by, by putting solar cells, solar raise in the one part of Utah and we can power of all America. I think that St Thorn’s gonna thing is gonna be tried in wind energy because someone’s gonna try the Elon Musk thing.

[00:18:35] Allen: Maybe Elon Musk actually tries the solar farm thing and tries to power all of America with the corner

[00:18:40] Allen: of Utah. Okay. Maybe,

[00:18:43] Allen: maybe, but as we get more independent on renewable energy, we’re gonna need that sort of buffer. We’re gonna need to have more than what we could possibly use sort of thing. And so these wind farms are gonna get, I think,

[00:18:55] Rosemary: bigger, don’t you?

[00:18:57] Rosemary: Yeah, I think so. And I did work on, I did a lot of work in Northern Sweden and the yeah, the wind farm up there. I mean, there’s a few in the area, but the biggest one is the the den one. That’s the last one I worked on up there and they’ve. Over over a gigawatt for that area. And it’s the largest ons show, wind farm in Europe.

[00:19:17] Rosemary: And it’s, it’s interesting how, how it all works. So when you put in a wind farm of that size, The developer actually built like a village for all the construction workers on wow. A barge in the river. Yeah. I didn’t stay there when I, I went on site. I couldn’t get, couldn’t get a spot, which I was a bit disappointed about cuz it would’ve been really cool.

[00:19:41] Rosemary: Yeah. Yeah. But you know, like they need so many construction workers for the construction period that yeah. They just actually built a village for a few years while all that happened. Then obviously you’re left with a lot of maintenance jobs, operations, or maintenance jobs afterwards. So it really changes the, the area and in Sweden.

[00:20:02] Rosemary: I mean, everyone was really happy about it because, you know, it’s it’s an area where people had traditionally been leaving the area to get work in the, you know, in Stockholm or in, you know, a big city somewhere else. And so, you know, it kept a lot of really good jobs up there professional jobs and what they call blue collar jobs in, in.

[00:20:21] Rosemary: Yeah. So that aspect of it is really interesting. And I think it, it does make sense. And especially for wind where, you know, people don’t wanna win turbine in their backyard. It’s not like, like people are happy to have solar problems on their, on their roof, but true. You know, you do, you do face problems putting in like a lot of small wind farms is gonna be near a lot of communities who will raise a fast.

[00:20:43] Rosemary: So if you can get one big area where the community wants. Then that can be a good way to get a lot of yeah, a lot of power all, all at once. And we’ve seen something similar in Australia. All the states have announced these renewable energy zones where they take sure a site that has good. Good wind and solar potential and is near transmission lines because that’s the, the problem with putting that’s the key, right?

[00:21:10] Rosemary: Putting all your renewables at once is you’ve gotta get that, that huge amount of power. And it’s, it’s a problem in Sweden too, cuz there’s not a lot of people living up there. So how to get this cheap Swedish power down to where people live. And in fact, you see other industries energy intensive manufacturing move, move up there because they’ve got cheap green energy.

[00:21:27] Rosemary: So that’s the thing as. Yeah, the renewable energy zones are kind of good because you can also, yeah, you put them in the places where communities want them. They want the jobs they want, you know, they want the, the industry in their, their town or in their region. And so then you don’t need to be fighting with communities against these projects all the time.

[00:21:47] Rosemary: You, you put them where they’re, where they’re wanted and where things make sense. And It’s a really

[00:21:52] Allen: interesting approach. Yeah, because I think one of the issues is the support crews tend to be very small in most places in America. There’s five, 10 people maybe supporting a, a 50 German farm. When you start to get to the numbers, we’re talking about 300, 400.

[00:22:06] Allen: Now it seems like there’s a little more mass and it, the jobs become a little more relevant. I think because the numbers are higher and that’s a really interesting take. And I, I do think we’re gonna see more of this in the future.

[00:22:23] Rosemary: Yeah. So Alan, you and I spent a fair bit of time on LinkedIn, I’d say. And I mean, I really like the, I I’ve made actual friends by now. I would call them friends on LinkedIn and I, I find it a really good way to, you know, keep in touch with what’s going on in. In the industry and get a variety of viewpoints.

[00:22:40] Rosemary: But have you noticed this getting a little bit more annoying recently? A lot more like spammy kinds of stuff happening. It’s kind of hard to, yeah, this, I don’t know. There’s less, the, the value to spam ratio seems to be getting skewed recently. Have you noticed that?

[00:22:55] Allen: Yes, it’s, it’s almost like Twitter at some point where there’s anonymous names behind these accounts and people start to to spam you and it for the longest time, at least through COVID.

[00:23:07] Allen: I rarely had that happen, but now it happens multiple times a day. And, and the wind en energy community is really on LinkedIn. That’s where it exists. Right. So everybody we like to talk to and, and hear from is on LinkedIn, but now we’re getting this sort of. Peripheral thing. And maybe it’s just us, maybe because of this crazy podcast, we’re, we’re getting hammered a lot more than others, but it, it just seems like we’re getting of just sort of random accounts that, that don’t look like.

[00:23:37] Allen: They’re real people reaching out to connect and Rosemary, maybe you’ve seen some of this already, but. You probably get those inquiries about Hey, let’s have a, let’s have a meeting and you can give me all the knowledge you have in your head. And then I can use that to create this white paper or to sell the information to somebody else and their clients.

[00:23:56] Allen: Don’t you, don’t you, you get that stuff too, don’t you?

[00:23:59] Rosemary: Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple of different things. There’s the, there’s the weird accounts that don’t have any followers or any you know, they haven’t got work history. And those ones, if, if, if I can, then I. You know, look at my connection requests quickly.

[00:24:14] Rosemary: And I, you know, I just reject those profiles and if they get several rejections you tell LinkedIn, you don’t know them, then they have some sort of you know, penalty for that. So I think that that’s worth, worth doing. The other thing I did was putting my profile onto create a profile so that people are encouraged to follow rather than connect.

[00:24:32] Rosemary: And I, I find that helpful. I get less connection requests now. Because, yeah. What is the point in being connected if you’re not actually gonna, you know, have some sort of one-on-one relationship? So that helps, but then the final point that you mentioned about people getting in touch to yeah, like get free access to, to my technical,

[00:24:55] Allen: to your head expertise, right?

[00:24:57] Rosemary: That really annoys me. I’ve had every, every week or two now I’m getting people who are, they’ll say that they have a client, you know, that they’re getting paid to, you know, do this financial analysis of a, of a company. And, you know, then they, they do this like semi. Kind of flattering, kind of language like, oh, you know, you’re a thought leader and oh, it would be really great to have a meeting of the minds and, you know, spar on this.

[00:25:22] Rosemary: There’s all these like like jargon, these like buzzwords that they throw in there that basically they want me to do some technical, some engineering analysis for them so that they can get paid at a financial analyst rate by their client for yeah. Yeah. For my. My 20 years of experience in the, in engineering of renewable energy technologies.

[00:25:47] Rosemary: And that is starting to, to really annoy me. Yeah. I don’t know why there’s investment companies. Aren’t going directly to engineers rather than getting, you know, they, they seem to only get financial analysis most of the time. And you see that in the kinds of investments that they choose to. Choose to make.

[00:26:06] Rosemary: It’s the same kind of, you know, like these occasional companies that have really figured out the media, how to get media attention. And they, you know, they just keep on announcing investments and projects and, and the engineering never seems to go anywhere. And I guess that’s never goes spend 99% of their effort on the, on the fundraising and marketing.

[00:26:26] Rosemary: Yeah. So I don’t know to those companies that, you know, have money to spend on, on clean tax, like actual hard, hard tech, you know, hard. I would suggest that, you know, you need your financial analysis, but before you need that, you need engineering analysis. And I, I would recommend getting, getting one involved, opening paying for it.

[00:26:45] Rosemary: I can recommend that would be a good idea. Yeah. I can recommend a good one if you want. right. I can think of a couple. Yes, exactly. The, the, the, the

[00:26:54] Allen: thing about LinkedIn, I think the, the beautiful thing about LinkedIn and wind energy, it at least for the last couple of years, Is that there has been a community there and people had some really good ideas and, and people would post things that are happening around them locally.

[00:27:07] Allen: So, and being in America, we only see kind of American things, right. And we see things that are happening in Denmark and Germany and India and Australia. And that was the really fun part of LinkedIn. As you felt like you’re in this sort of professional community and maybe LinkedIn is realizing that it’s more beneficial to be more like a TikTok than it does to have a professional community.

[00:27:31] Allen: It does seem exchanging some, which is unfortunate because I do like seeing professional people, post professional things. And another thing, you know, I think we’re seeing more of is, is more political stuff than we we have in the past before it was like, revoting that you couldn’t do it. If you did, you just kind of got kind of swarmed and told to stop by

[00:27:50] Rosemary: public.

[00:27:51] Rosemary: Do you think that’s because of the, because of the current situation? I mean, nothing political.

[00:27:56] Allen: I don’t think so.

[00:27:57] Allen: No, no. You know, we went through four years of of a certain president and there really wasn’t that much noise on LinkedIn. There was on Twitter and TikTok and all the other social media platforms, Facebook, but there wasn’t much on LinkedIn and then.

[00:28:13] Allen: Just seems like there’s a lot more things going on

[00:28:15] Rosemary: that certain president was bad for you in America, but he didn’t start any wars, you know, any actual wars, true. Not, not in the way that Russia has. So yeah, I don’t know, but I do have a tip for that and I, I, I think LinkedIn has always had that huge cringe factor.

[00:28:34] Rosemary: And if you like, I’ve always felt like such. Such doc. So uncool for liking LinkedIn, because everyone thinks that it’s so cringy, but you’ve got to make the algorithm that, you know, determines your feed. You you’ve got to teach it or train it away from like every social media platform has this tendency to like, just funnel you into this extreme kind of like appeal to every single person, catchy, superficial thing.

[00:29:03] Rosemary: So I I’m, I have really strict LinkedIn feed hygiene. So if something has like thousands of, of likes or shares, I immediately like you don’t, don’t spend time looking at it. Immediately click on the three dots and say, don’t show me content like this, the topic isn’t isn’t whoa. Relevant. Yeah, and if I have some, I have a buddy who.

[00:29:26] Rosemary: Yeah. So, so do do it religiously. You can’t even look at it, like don’t even let your eyeballs linger. It’s not watching your, I know how expressions I don’t. Yeah.

[00:29:38] Allen: Algorithm,

[00:29:39] Rosemary: but I’m assuming. I’m assuming that it’s like, you know, every other algorithm where it wants to keep your attention on the platform as long as possible. Sure. And probably the amount of time that you spend on a post, or if you click the, you know, like read more thing, I’m assuming that that is just information for LinkedIn that you love this sort of thing.

[00:29:59] Rosemary: So even if it’s like, oh, I wonder what, what this says. Like, if it’s got thousands of like you just immediately, like don’t show me anymore of. And then you know, sometimes it shows you things that just some random contact of yours has liked. And you notice the same person coming up, you just, just mute them.

[00:30:18] Rosemary: You know, I don’t wanna see this person’s updates. And then you’ll only see if they like post or something. Which I think is, is a bit better. Yeah. So just doing those two things can really make the feed a lot better. Cause I mean, I don’t wanna lose the, I don’t wanna just, you know, go off LinkedIn cuz that’s gotten annoying because one thing I really like about it is, you know, if I’m researching a new technology, I will often go to LinkedIn first to search for it because you look at the comments, you’ll see people like people with expertise in that area, arguing different points of view about it.

[00:30:51] Rosemary: Like, oh yeah. But you’ve failed to see this. Like you. This engineering consideration or this economic consideration. And so you get a lot, a lot more, I, I guess you could call it balance. And if you just read, you know, a news article written by a journalist that doesn’t understand the context and the broader context and the, the

[00:31:10] Rosemary: nuance.

[00:31:11] Allen: I assume you’re talking about Glen Ryan, when he comments on a bunch of engineering technology, I love his responses to all kinds of renewable things.

[00:31:19] Allen: Glen is right on top of like a.

[00:31:22] Allen: Baloney or no, that’s great. But you haven’t thought about that. His comments are actually additive to the conversation where some others are like, oh, that’s a great idea. That’s that’s cool. Those kind of comments don’t add anything. Glen adds something to the discussion.

[00:31:37] Allen: And I think that’s what LinkedIn was all about was trying to add something to the discussion in a professional manner. He does a very professionally of course, that I always think, oh, Glen’s talking about this. I need to read what Glen is saying because he’s a really smart person. So I need. To need to absorb this and see what his opinion is.

[00:31:53] Allen: And I think that’s what LinkedIn’s all about. And that’s why I, I really like it is, is that occasionally you get really smart people. So there’s my 2 cent.

[00:32:01] Rosemary: Yeah. And there’s a few, a few like that. I actually, you know, I I met, I met Glen in person on the weekend. That was very exciting. He’s, he’s one of my link, my LinkedIn friends.

[00:32:10] Rosemary: And yeah. Now I’ve met him in person. I, I visited his his house where they’ve got a prototype of this UNOV eight system on the roof. I’m gonna make a video about it coming up soon. Yeah, but it was, it’s really funny cuz we’ve, you know hung out a lot virtually and to virtually meeting in person was yeah, it

[00:32:28] Rosemary: was interesting.

[00:32:28] Allen: It’s nice. Right?

[00:32:29] Allen: I mean, that’s the, that’s the beauty of LinkedIn where a TikTok or a Facebook, you doesn’t do that. And then that’s, that’s what I hope we get back to on LinkedIn and we can have those good really, you know, get into a little bit engineering discussions. Cause then that’s what it’s about.

[00:32:48] Allen: Talk about engineering discussions. One of the things that’s happening off the coast of the us again is offshore leases and they’re, they just announced an offshore lease off the coast of the Carolinas north and South Carolina. And that’s gonna happen in may. So we’re not very far away from that’s 110,000 acres, and they’re gonna put 1.3 gigawatt, at least that’s the plan off the coast to power about 500,000 homes.

[00:33:14] Allen: Now. We recently had the offshore bidding off the coast of New York and that raised about $4 billion for about 500,000 acres. So this is about a fifth of that. I I’m, excuse me. I’m guessing this is gonna be close to a billion dollars. Another bid for offshore wind. That’s a, that’s a crazy number, right?

[00:33:36] Allen: For 1.3 gigawatts. Yeah. It’s not, it’s not a lot of money for 1.3 gigawatts, just to have access to reasons that just seems. Yeah, MIS

[00:33:44] Rosemary: proportion somehow I didn’t quite understand the economics of this and it’s something cuz I was at a wind. Oh actually it wasn’t a winded energy conference. It was a clean tech conference or just an energy conference in Melbourne a couple weeks ago.

[00:33:55] Rosemary: And it’s something I was talking about with a friend of mine who. He has been working in offshore oil and gas. And now the, the company is, you know, trying to move into offshore wind. And we were thinking about, you know, what’s been going on in America with these just immense prices that are being, being paid at auction for the, the leases.

[00:34:12] Rosemary: Right. And how that fits into the Australian context. Cuz here, you know, we’ve got, there is one project in particular the star of the south in Victoria, they. Done all the groundwork for the offshore wind industry in Australia, you know, they’ve identified a site then they’ve gone through and it’s like, okay, we there’s, no, you know, there’s no rules or regulations or planning process for offshore wind in Australia.

[00:34:37] Rosemary: It’s not even technically allowed. So, you know, they’ve had to kind of hold the hand of, of governments and, and, and everyone, you know, at all, all levels to, to get those frameworks in place, they still don’t. A lease or anything for the, the site that they plan to build it. But can you imagine if at the end of, you know, they’ve been working on it for at least, I don’t know, five years or so, I would say, and it’ll be another five probably before they’re like really well and truly underway with constructions.

[00:35:04] Rosemary: Construction. Can you imagine if, you know, after five or 10 years of, of planning and development work, if the government had a, an auction and then you, you lost, you know, you didn’t get the right to use that you lost to use that land. You can lose that’s somebody else get the. Somebody else could just come in and you know, basically get all of that work that they did for free and, and you would be able to, because they don’t have to make back that money that Sarah, the south has, has spent so far on, on all that development.

[00:35:31] Rosemary: And they’ve done, you know, so much work with yeah. Community engagement and, you know, every, every part of it. So I. Feel like that was hugely unfair if that happened to, to them. So I hope that we don’t immediately see this auction process in Australia, but as a government, it must be so tempting.

[00:35:51] Rosemary: Cause that’s a huge amount of money that they, they can get. I don’t, what do they do with that money when they get it? Do you know, spend it

[00:36:01] Rosemary: Yeah, I guess that’s what you usually do with money. Yeah, but is any our government energy transition stuff or anything or just

[00:36:09] Allen: Revenue? No, I doubt it probably general revenue it’s probably spent before they get it too. Yeah, I would imagine that’s the case. Well, I it’s like Australian. Government’s gonna be any different than the United States government.

[00:36:20] Allen: If they saw a billion dollars laying in the street, you know, the politicians are gonna scoop that up pretty quickly. And I think that’s what’s happening in the states is that they realize like, holy moly, there’s a lot of money out. We we take advantage of, and then all the states get very active about it and start thinking, well, if they just paid a billion dollars for a site, maybe we can, you know, pull a couple million off of the, off of the developer too.

[00:36:43] Allen: So it kind of a cyclical thing. And I think you’re right. Maybe it’s beneficial, but maybe long term is not that great of an idea. So

[00:36:50] Rosemary: what do you, what’s it make their cost of that energy higher? Because you’ve got this. Yes, it has to project cost to, yeah. I don’t know. Interesting. It’s not overhead to carry with a project.

[00:37:02] Allen: Yeah. Right. And so one of the things about this, this particular auction’s gonna happen is the the us government and just make it simply the, the us government is gonna offer a 20% credit to bids. If they commit to invest. In programs that will advance the us offshore wind industry, workforce training and supply chain development.

[00:37:23] Allen: So if you got a 20% discount, so this is just say you put the billion dollars down and you won the auction. You’d only be paying 800,000 for that lease space, but you I’d assume that the other $200 million would be poured into the local community. Maybe that’s maybe that’s the deal right there is that the, that, that, that, that cash, that 20% discount does kind of get you, does.

[00:37:46] Allen: Funneled into the local community. Well, for, for workforce training, that would, that I think that makes total sense for the wind industry to, to be involved in that and the supply chain development, because we just don’t have a supply chain in the United States at the moment and most countries don’t. So maybe this is a, a different take on it.

[00:38:02] Allen: Maybe it’ll work. It’s it’s one of those things, it kind of gets fleshed out. And like you were saying, we did talk to just on this side, we did talk to maybe a potential future guesses. That’s working on some offshore wind in the United States. And one of the, one of the issue was getting workforce training together and how big of an issue that is.

[00:38:22] Allen: So it kind of ties in right there and hopefully that guest will come on shortly because we’re really interested to hear that

[00:38:29] Rosemary: story. I like the idea of this this discount, if you have, you know, benefits for the local community, I, I think a lot of countries require local content to, you know, get a project at.

[00:38:43] Rosemary: But in a way, this, this new plan, maybe that makes more sense because the developer can then decide which parts are best to, you know, feed into the, the local community. Like where are there existing capabilities that can be built upon? Because I think if you just kind of impose that everything has to be built there, you can end up with, you know, causing big delays or big cost increases.

[00:39:07] Rosemary: If, if you are, you know, imposing that something needs to be built there, that there is just like zero capability currently. You need to wait for that to, to build up and it can really put a, put a hand break on the whole, whole, whole project. I mean, people are pretty keen to get renewable energy projects developed fast now, especially, you know, with the volatility or not even volatility, just price rises of fossil fuels.

[00:39:29] Rosemary: So I think that it is smart to allow some flexibility that you definitely need to have local benefits. And I think going forward, everyone’s aware that we’ve probably offshore too, too much too much. It was good at the start. And now now it’s bad. Yeah. I mean, even just for, for costs aside from security or anything else.

[00:39:49] Rosemary: So I, I think it is really important that we, we develop those capabilities in, you know, in the countries where the energy is yeah. Needs to be. And I think this is a good way to do it, to make sure that it doesn’t slow everything down.

[00:40:03] Allen: Yeah. I, I think that’s, I think you’re right about that. And the national renewable energy laboratory, N R L just put out this really big report talking about.

[00:40:13] Allen: Onshoring in the United States and particularly on this 30 gigawatts and by 2030 on the east coast of the United States, they, they, they went through sort of the supply chain piece of it and the, the workforce training piece of it to see what you would need. And how if could, could you get to 2030 with those 30 gigawatts?

[00:40:30] Allen: And the numbers are really staggering. Actually, you’re gonna need about 2100 wind turbines, about 7,000 miles of cable. You’re gonna need four vessels just to lay the cable. You’re gonna need 11 op service operation vehicles vessels. You’re gonna need five to six wind turbine installation vessels. And those are things we don’t have at the moment, by the way.

[00:40:55] Allen: And in terms of, of employees, you’re gonna need between, depending on how much you on shore and how fast you on Shorem you need between 12 and 50,000 full-time employees. That’s a lot of people. By 2030 to, to pull that off. And it, it, the, the question really is do we have that capability? And some of the, some of the technology pieces, Rosemary are really fascinating because there tend to be more heavy industry that you would assume would be in the United States already, because we built cars.

[00:41:26] Allen: We built chips, we build airplanes who do all these things, but in very specific wind turbine focused areas, we do not have that capability and here. And let me, let me list some of them. I think they’re interesting and I don’t even know how us or Australia or a lot of countries could even respond in a short amount of time because these things take time to develop because the industry takes time to develop.

[00:41:46] Allen: So big one here, ya and pitch bearings, I guess you don’t make Yon pitch bearings in America. It must be coming from overseas somewhere interesting permanent magnets, especially with generators, right? You need permanent magnets to do that. And when a lot of that comes from overseas cast at large castings and forged components.

[00:42:05] Allen: I, I guess they’re talking about hubs and generator casings, and that kind of thing. Steel plates for the model piles and towers. That one seems odd too, but okay. Maybe we just don’t make the steel plate here. Like you used to electrical systems and the one that doesn’t make any sense is boring chains.

[00:42:25] Allen: Like we can’t make boring chains in the United States. We don’t have anybody making any chain in the United States. And maybe we Don. Maybe we don’t have anybody making the chains, but when you start breaking down that list, you can’t build a wind tur, but without having heavy, heavy steel capability or you need that.

[00:42:40] Allen: Yeah. So you can’t just, you can’t just work around that. So do you see that there’s, there’s gonna be this kind of big problem coming.

[00:42:51] Rosemary: A lot of the sensory related to steel steel manufacturing, actually, I would guess that that’s your problem. Yes. I mean, China does nearly all of the, the world still you know, processing it from making it from INR and turning it into, into steel and into plates and, you know, whatever else that you need.

[00:43:08] Rosemary: Of course the us used to have those capabilities and I’m sure that the reason why I sure moved was because of cost. Yeah, so I guess. That’s just a, a strategic decision that can be made to, you know, to, to bring it, bring it back onshore and pay a little bit extra cost. I think it’s gonna happen around, around the world, partly because of, you know, security, but also I think partly because as advanced manufacturing becomes more of a thing the cost of labor isn’t quite so important as it probably used to be.

[00:43:43] Rosemary: And I know cost of labor in China is, is going up in any way. It’s not the really like super local sure. Labor that it, that it was at the start of the, you know, process of globalization. So I think that we’re gonna see a lot more manufacturing done in the, in the place where the, either the, the raw materials of mind or the final products that are used.

[00:44:04] Rosemary: And I think there’ll be a nice side side effect, beneficial to climate change and that a lot less stuff, heavy stuff is gonna get shipped around. In my opinion, that’s gonna be one of the, the biggest changes to, you know, to decarbonizing shipping is a really big, big problem as a hard to abate sector.

[00:44:21] Rosemary: And I think a lot of it’s gonna come from just shipping less stuff from yeah, like not reversing, but you know, the next phase of globalization it’s gonna, I think we’ve seen a peak of making things, just all around the world, wherever it happened to be the cheapest. And we’re gonna, yeah, the event’s gonna change where then like the overall cheapest system cost is.

[00:44:41] Rosemary: It’s gonna change. And I think we’ll see less, less shipping. Do,

[00:44:46] Allen: do you think that in the United States, I’m guessing the steel factories that do remain are the ones that have been shuttered, at least in the recent past are, were probably Coalfire. That you think that if we do start up those, those bills, big steel factories and, and the processing that we’ll be doing it new, like with hydrogen or, or some electricity based.

[00:45:06] Allen: I mean, we’ve, I think you mentioned that there’s a new way of making steel. That that is much more environmentally friendly. So are, are we gonna go down that pathway? Was some of the, it’s funny actually, you know,

[00:45:18] Rosemary: new money. It’s funny, you mentioned that. Cuz if Dan was here, then he would have a go at me for plugging my YouTube channel again.

[00:45:23] Rosemary: But that’s actually, I have a video coming out soon on, on steel on how to you can’t say decarbonize steel because obviously decarbonized steel is just a iron. He needed, you need to some carbon in there, otherwise it’s not steel. But yeah, so it is, it is a topic that I’ve been researching recently.

[00:45:44] Rosemary: I think in the us, you have a lot of what you call mini mills, there’s electric arc furnace. So you take scrap. We do. And you mostly scrap and you use electricity to make it into new steel products. And so, I mean, that’s already environmentally friendly and and cost effective, but it only works, you know, to maintain the, you can only take steel products that are at the end of their life and turn them into new ones.

[00:46:08] Rosemary: You can’t, you know, like expand the amount of steel you use each year. And I, I. Even if you just look at the energy transition let alone all the, you know, bridges and whatever else you wanna make with steel. You know, wind turbine towers made from steel. A lot of frames of solar panels are made from steel, hydrogen, everything uses steel, so you’re gonna need more.

[00:46:27] Rosemary: And then, yeah, the options for that hydrogen is a really good technology for retrofitting existing that you can replace you replace coal with with hydrogen basically. So you still use your, your blast burn. And instead of reacting carbon with the oxygen and iron, or you react hydrogen or there’s some other things you can use as well, or you can replace it with biomass.

[00:46:49] Rosemary: And those are really fast things you can do and you see companies are, are doing that. Now there are projects happening. But then the next wave is probably gonna be some, some other processes use electric. Can go directly to steel. So there’s like the Boston metals method where they do this high temperature electrolysis.

[00:47:11] Rosemary: I think they called it, I can’t remember what they call it, Moten, Moten, something electrolysis. And then there’s also a low temperature version of that as well, where you dissolve the, the, the in R and yeah. Reduce that, that solution and, and end up with, with yeah, with iron at the end. So tho those couple of technologies, new equipment and yeah, it’s a new process.

[00:47:35] Rosemary: So, so those are probably a new ideas, but

[00:47:38] Allen: yeah. New, you think new ideas? Well, maybe, maybe not right. Maybe not a decade away.

[00:47:44] Rosemary: It’s it’s a commercialization thing. It’s not the, the science is, is fine. And, you know, everyone’s, excuse me, everyone’s had demonstration projects, but it’s yeah, it’s a, you know, taking it from, we did this once to now we can make, you know, thousands of tons of steel using this process.

[00:48:01] Allen: Well, that’s what, then you don’t get into those accelerated development cycles until there’s a real demand, right? And maybe this is the, the new demand is the, is the offshore wind, maybe driving a lot of different industries to, to become greener and try new technologies, which is good. I mean, it’s sort of like an offshoot of something that we need renewable energy, and then we develop these other technologies and now we’re making cleaner steel.

[00:48:24] Allen: Hey, that’s

[00:48:24] Rosemary: great. I agree. And if, if a lot of your, you know, supply chain pain points are related to steel and you in the us, I say you, I mean, the, the us, you, you represent the whole of the United States to me. If you are gonna expand your steel manufacturing industry, I, I do hope that it’s not gonna be by buying a lot of blast furnaces and and Coke and Cole.

[00:48:46] Rosemary: I hope that it’s, , it’s gonna be with some, some cleaner stuff. And if you’re starting from scratch, then it, it makes more sense to go through. Yeah, the direct reduction or electrolysis roots rather than going for a blast. VE I would

[00:48:58] Allen: suggest we’ll see. Right. I, I think that’s, but I, these discussions are really, are really good to let people know.

[00:49:03] Allen: There are other alternatives to sort of 1950s or 1890 technology.

[00:49:10] Allen: Yeah. I, in terms of steel,

[00:49:11] Rosemary: I think it’s pretty old in industries.

[00:49:14] Allen: Well, it is we, we made steel for a long time in the states, right. We’ve started dirty and it’s gotten cleaner over time and Hey, let’s, let’s, it’s a new generation. Let’s make it better.

[00:49:23] Allen: I think that’ll do for this week on the uptime win energy podcast. Thanks for joining us today. If you have some time, go check out. Rosemary’s engineering with Rosie YouTube channel with its hundred thousands of, of subscribers. It’s a really good time. There’s actually a lot of, a lot of good, a lot of good episodes on there.

[00:49:43] Allen: So if you wanna learn something about renewable energy or, or wind energy, it’s probably on Rosie’s channel. And you can check us out on apple and Spotify and Stitcher and all that normal podcast platform. So thanks for joining us this week. We’ll see.