In Massachusetts, Vineyard Wind crews discovered an unexploded WWII-era ordinance on the ocean floor. (History buffs rejoice: more finds are sure to follow.) MISO (Mid-continent Independent System Operator) plans to establish $10B worth of much-needed new transmission lines in the middle of North America. And with the Nord Stream 1 pipeline currently shut down for maintenance, Germany is on edge about its reopening. At the same time, the country is cutting Enercon a check for $500M EU. And why is GE walking away from Teesworks, where it planned to manufacture 107m blades?
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Uptime 122
[00:00:00] Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Podcast. We have a packed show this week, top of the list. Vineyard Wind finds a bomb on the ocean floor.
[00:00:08] Rosemary Barnes: And GE have shelved plans that they had to make a new factory to supply the Dogger Bank wind farm in the UK while Enercon in Germany have received 500 million euros in state liquidity assistance.
[00:00:22] Joel Saxum: After that, we’ll speak about some wind energy shutdowns here in the Midwest, over in Minnesota, and then how they tie together with the mid continent independent system operator, otherwise known as meso to expand the power lines and to try to alleviate that bottleneck.
[00:00:37] Allen Hall: It’s gonna be a busy week. So stay tuned back after the music.
[00:01:01] Allen Hall: All right. So the first story for the week Vineyard Wind, which is off the coast of Martha’s vineyard. In Massachusetts they’re evidently exploring the bottom of the sea floor, looking for places to put wind turbines. And they happened to stumble across an unexplode ordinance. It says here that the horn Hornbeck offshore services support vessel mystique, and covered a potential unexposed ordinance at about 130 feet of water.
[00:01:31] Allen Hall: Why this is important is evidently back in world war II, that whole area was uses training ground. So there’s all kinds of ordinances down, down off the coast of Martha’s vineyard. In fact, I started digging around a little bit and I guess some of that ordinance just washes up on shore once in a while.
[00:01:48] Allen Hall: So you could just be walking your dog on the beach and there there’s a, an unexplode piece of organ on the beach, right? Yeah. So it sounds like it’s a pretty significant issue. So this is the first warning I’ve seen. And Vineyard Wind actually puts out these alerts, like, Hey everybody, there’s a you know, black hole or an exploit ordinance or some sort of great white shark or something out, you know, in the water.
[00:02:12] Allen Hall: I don’t know why the coast of Massachusetts is so treacherous, but it is right now. It’s crazy. The some, we have some of the biggest great white sharks. I mean, we would, we. Hold our own up to Australia, for sure. These things are massive and they they’ve been attacking people lately. It, it is like a real life jaws out here right now.
[00:02:30] Allen Hall: You can honestly say that but now you got jaws and you have this unex exploited ordinance. It’s like this Godzilla movie thing that’s happening. I dunno if you saw the last Godzilla, but that’s how they woke up Godzilla was that they set off a nuclear weapon. Shark. Yeah. So sharks, shark, NATO, shark, NATO.
[00:02:46] Allen Hall: Exactly. We can have a shark NATO. In, in her own backyard. So I, I guys, I’m, I’m expecting to see more of this. And especially if we start going up and down the coastline around long island, New York city, New Jersey, even all the way down to North Carolina, I think there’s gonna be all kinds of ordinances out there that we haven’t really thought of before that we’re gonna have to pay attention to Joel mean.
[00:03:10] Allen Hall: You’ve probably seen some of this stuff. What do you think.
[00:03:13] Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, depending on who you talk to and what organization you talk to, it’s something between the level of 70% to 90% of the sea floor in the world has never been mapped. Right? So there’s so much stuff down there that we don’t know about.
[00:03:27] Joel Saxum: Now, the, all the operators that have been putting an offshore wind over in the, in Northern Europe, they’ve been doing the same thing. So you gotta do, there’s a bunch of stages to it, right. So you’re gonna do a geophysical campaign. So you just. You’re gonna ping with sonars, build a, build a 3d 3d elevation model of the sea floor.
[00:03:42] Joel Saxum: And then sometimes you’re gonna go down with magnetometers to find any kind of you know, unexplode ordinance metal steel, anything like that. That might be just on the surface or on the subsurface. And then you’re also gonna come with like a near a near surface geophysical campaign to look for olders how deep the muck is.
[00:04:00] Joel Saxum: And then the sand is, and then the bedrock is and all this stuff. So there’s a huge campaign that happens before any of these things get. Installed out offshore and, and this UXO here on the coast of the us, I think people would be surprised at how many we will find as we move forward here. I mean, it’s a daily occurrence in a mapping of a wind farm over.
[00:04:20] Joel Saxum: Over in the, nor in Northern Europe, but world war II. Right, right. bombing back and forth across the English channel. We get that, but there will be, there’ll be, there’s also gonna be some pretty cool. I would imagine shipwrecks and other things that we’ll find that we haven’t seen before, cuz it’s the, the massive scientific campaign to map.
[00:04:38] Joel Saxum: The, you know, the sea floor and the sub, the sea sub floor down to a couple hundred meters is gonna be unprecedented off the east coast and wherever they do offshore
[00:04:46] Allen Hall: wind. Well, you’d think all the treasure hunters would be really following this very closely because I think that’s how they found some of these treasure ships.
[00:04:53] Allen Hall: Right. All the, yeah. Off the coast, particularly South Carolina, North Carolina.
[00:04:57] Joel Saxum: Mm-hmm, , there’s a couple out there and I know, you know, some of the, some of the cool they found I just read this not too long ago. , it was a, a frit. They called it, but it was a, basically a steel armored ship from the, from the civil war that they found off the coast of North Carolina.
[00:05:13] Joel Saxum: Oh, wow. Doing one of these surveys. Right. So it was like it because it was covered partially by the sea floor. You never saw it when, you know, a fisherman’s sonar goes by, but when you’re on a magnetometer, all of a sudden you got this big, glowing hotspot on your map, what is this? Let’s go investigate it.
[00:05:28] Joel Saxum: And that’s what it. This
[00:05:30] Allen Hall: does this sort of scans also happen when we get to floating wind? Like how far, how deep can they scan? Oh, really?
[00:05:37] Joel Saxum: Oh man. Yeah. Oh yeah. Because the big thing with floating wind of course, is when we go to either drive piles or set anchors for Mo chains, right? So not only is there the, the, the remote sensing part of it, but there’s a physical geotechnical campaign that has to do drilling and bore samples to understand what kind of soil is there.
[00:05:54] Joel Saxum: So can the anchors hook, are, are you gonna need a 20 ton anchor here or are you gonna need. 1500 ton anchor, what are you gonna need? Are you gonna be able to do subsea micro piles? How are you gonna do this thing? So all of that geotechnical and geophysical investigation has to happen no matter where you’re gonna install anything offshore.
[00:06:11] Allen Hall: Wow. So there’s a lot of work to do. Mm-hmm . Before we get to, yeah. Big time floating wind and California, I would assume the next stage is California, then the Gulf, but California from world war II, there’s all kinds of ordinances dumped off the coast of California. Cause they’re trying to protect the coastline, right.
[00:06:28] Allen Hall: Just like the war on the east coast. So, but there’s, it drops off the continental shelf drops off. So, so fast that it’s gonna be almost all floating, wind out there. So they get a lot of work ahead. Yeah. I mean they could probably have years of chance to go.
[00:06:41] Joel Saxum: Oh, yeah. And so when you go geophysical campaign in deep water, there’s a, if you follow that technology sector, there’s a lot of really, really cool companies coming out with what they call an AUV, which is basically a drone for the subsurface.
[00:06:53] Joel Saxum: Right? So these things can be rated one, one to 3000, 4,005,000 meters of depth rating. So to get the resolution you need on the sea floor, they’ll take ’em and, and then they’ll have a, like a mothership. This is a lot of what’s going on now. Drop one. And then that mothership will communicate with it acoustically and then guide it subsurface.
[00:07:13] Joel Saxum: So if you’re in California in 1500, 2000 meters of water, that AUV is actually a hundred or a hundred meters off of the sea floor, mapping it at high resolution while the ship above is controlling it wirelessly.
[00:07:25] Allen Hall: Wow. Yeah. And that’ll be the first time where we’ve really done a, a really deep, thorough scan of some of these areas.
[00:07:30] Allen Hall: I’m sure. Particularly off California.
[00:07:34] Joel Saxum: wow. Yeah. Off. Exactly. And so that’s like, there’s not that much mapped right. In oil and gas areas. Of course this stuff has all been done. Sure. But we’re not installing a lot of offshore wind on top of subsea oil and gas infrastructure. right.
[00:07:46] Allen Hall: I hope not at least.
[00:07:47] Allen Hall: Yeah. Well, it’s, it’s an interesting development and I’m just keep thinking. We’re gonna find all kinds of, of unique items at the bottom of the ocean floor. And speaking of oceans GE. Rosemary’s all stomping grounds is, was in plans to build a blade factory. Again, something Rosemary was heavily involved in on, on T side, which is on the Eastern side of the, of England.
[00:08:13] Allen Hall: And it, it was a it’s a port area. And the, the goal there was to create blades and then ship ’em off to sort of Scotland area in the north sea for these big wind farms, Dogger Bank being one of ’em. GE had committed it about the middle of last year to do this project. And then it came about Christmas time and you could see things had slowed down quite a bit, and they just announced that they’re not going to take over that factory.
[00:08:38] Allen Hall: So there’s existing buildings on this site, an old steel factory that GE was gonna take over and use a bill blades. and it really tells you how fast this market is changing because GE only has one confirmed order in the UK for their Dogger Bank complex. Well, Siemens, GA Mesa keeps winning job after job, after job over there.
[00:08:59] Allen Hall: And, and so, and then that kind of fluctuating environment, Rosemary, how does GE deal with this? I mean, how do, how do you. Project out in the future. Do you, I guess you don’t build factories, I guess you take over existing factories. Maybe that’s the approach now, like GE deadly. If there’s a factory there, I’ll take it.
[00:09:17] Allen Hall: If I don’t need it, I’ll just walk out of it. Instead of putting in, you know, 40, 50 million into it.
[00:09:24] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, I’m sure that there would still be a huge amount of investment to, you know, make it suitable for making wind turbine blades rather than steel. And I dunno how many buildings there are that are big enough to make offshore wind wind turbine blades, cuz you know, they’re, they’re massive.
[00:09:40] Rosemary Barnes: I know it’s not just the, the length, which you know, can be over a hundred meters. Now it’s also the width cuz you have to be able to rotate it. And if you’ve got your, you know, your, the. Widest point of the blade is, you know, well over five, five meters it’s you need to have a ceiling higher than that.
[00:09:58] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and I, I don’t even know what the, the very longest blades are probably getting close to. Yeah. Closer to 10 meters, even in their widest point. And that’s, that’s challenging to find BU buildings that are big. But I guess that they were trying to hedge, you know, the, they, they want to be able to supply this huge market, but they don’t wanna have to pay to, you know, commit to that before they know if they’ve won the orders or not.
[00:10:24] Rosemary Barnes: And so it sounds like that’s what they’ve done, which is no doubt, incredibly frustrating for the, you know, the local government and the people that lived there and wanted those jobs. They probably. Probably thought it was quite certain. I know it’s not, when there’s the only time that you see this, it happens every time in Australia that they wanna open a new coal mine or something.
[00:10:44] Rosemary Barnes: You know, they make this immense number of jobs that they estimate are gonna be associated with it. And even when the projects do go ahead, the number of jobs is always reduced down to like 10% or less. By the time it actually happens because wow, everybody knows that local communities want want jobs.
[00:11:02] Rosemary Barnes: And that’s how you get them on board is by. In inflating the numbers. So yeah, I definitely got sympathy for people that thought that this was, you know, coming to their local area to help, help with problems they might have. But hopefully, I mean, Dogger Bank is still going ahead. Right. It’s just not GE that’s gonna be making as many turbines for it as I thought.
[00:11:24] Rosemary Barnes: So. Hope, hopefully if Simmons, G MEA is winning most of the contracts, hopefully they’re gonna, you know, maybe they’ll need to ramp up their manufacturing in the area or they’ll see this opportunity. And yeah, I mean, there’s still gonna be work there associated with the
[00:11:39] Joel Saxum: wind farm. I think Siemens just they just built, opened a new factory.
[00:11:43] Joel Saxum: I don’t know if it’s new or repurposed in outside of hut. Right. For, for these offshore wind farms. So they’re, they’re capitalizing
[00:11:51] Allen Hall: on it, but. The queen has visited there. Second place queen blessed it or whatever the queen does got have
[00:11:57] Rosemary Barnes: any places anymore. That’s a big.
[00:12:02] Allen Hall: Yeah. She’s yeah, I’ve seen pictures. It, yeah, it actually is pretty cool. Yeah. She’s just walking around in there. It it’s pretty awesome. And Rosemary you’re right. They were talking about making 750 jobs in another 1500 in supply chain. So that that’s T site’s not a very big community. So we’re talking about 2000 jobs, ISS, a that’s a really big deal.
[00:12:20] Allen Hall: And, but there’s, there’s actually two parts to this facility that exist in T side. The. Part of the facility is gonna be taken over by south Korean mono pile fabricator, basically a steel company. That’s gonna be building mono piles there. So at least, at least they’ll have something in that factory, which is good.
[00:12:36] Allen Hall: And with this latest Boris Johnson leaving office, you gotta imagine that a lot of these UK tenders are gonna. Put set aside for a little while maybe. And I’m sure what’s gonna happen because Johnson’s not supposed to leave until what the end of this year, when the next elections are September. So we have several months.
[00:12:56] Rosemary Barnes: Oh September that that’s what I saw that early. Okay. That early is that early? I don’t know. Maybe it is in the us. We have a similar thing in this it’s pretty soon in Australia. Our government is maybe a little bit more similar to the UK than it is to the new guys are. Because we also have our, our head of state.
[00:13:13] Rosemary Barnes: Our well prime minister is chosen by the party, the gov party and go. So obviously when you’re directly elected president, then you know exactly when that’s gonna happen and when that’s gonna change. But in Australia, we went through our last prime minister was the, the first one in over a decade to have served a one full term, actually from election to election.
[00:13:35] Rosemary Barnes: That was, yeah, we had a decade of them just changing constantly and it can happen like, like that, you know, like. One one day, you’ve got a prime minister and you’ve heard that people are a bit annoyed with the way that they’re managing things. And then the next day there’s a new prime minister who you might not even like.
[00:13:51] Rosemary Barnes: I there’s been plenty of times where I didn’t even couldn’t even pick out our deputy prime minister out of a lineup. For example, I know it was, it was this new person what’s going on. So to me it feels very slow that, you know, I mean, especially cuz the pressure has been on him to leave for so long months and months And now it’s like, ah, so we’ve all agreed that this guy’s a dad and has to leave.
[00:14:13] Rosemary Barnes: And even he’s accepted that now, but we’ve still got a few more months. a few more months of hanging around. That seems so weird to me. Like what can you get done in that period when you already know people don’t trust your judgment? That’s the point. So, oh, now just gonna, yeah, hang around and make a bunch more decisions that, and everyone’s gonna, you know, work real hard to implement those.
[00:14:35] Rosemary Barnes: It’s just so. Really strange.
[00:14:37] Joel Saxum: I can’t speak the same for the UK, but I know in the us, when we have a lame duck president or senators and whatnot, a lot of the things that happen in that period are more social than economic mm-hmm . Yeah. So they’re just trying to pass some like, eh, cement, some legacy stuff and yada, yada, yada.
[00:14:53] Joel Saxum: But, but the curious thing about offshore wind is it’s it’s in that intersection between social and economic. So, so maybe something will go, maybe it won’t. Yeah. Mm. Just timing isn’t on his side. I suppose.
[00:15:07] Allen Hall: the timing is bad. And as there seems used to be a lot of turmoil, have you guys been watching the Netherlands, the farmers in the Netherlands with their.
[00:15:18] Allen Hall: Tractors protesting the changes there. It’s just a lot of weird things happening simultaneously in Europe and in the United States, all throw us into that mix that doesn’t bode well for renewable energy projects, because if there’s, if there’s turmoil and other facets of life, that doesn’t. Make governments very stable.
[00:15:42] Allen Hall: Yeah. And they’re not thinking long term. Typically they start thinking very short term, but thinking about that next election and all the, all the long term projects, just kind of get put on the sidelines until the elections are over.
[00:15:53] Rosemary Barnes: But I do see lot, it seems like it’s happening a lot happening. I’m certainly getting more inquiries than, than ever from Europe about Clean energy projects that are going ahead.
[00:16:03] Rosemary Barnes: And a lot of them have EU funding. So maybe that’s a more stable kind of way of, of funding things. And yeah, definitely a lot of things are, are moving forward. And everybody that gets in touch with me has a really ambitious timeframe of, you know, when they want to yeah. Achieve their plans. Yeah.
[00:16:22] Rosemary Barnes: There, there is a lot, a lot happening there and I’ve seen, I mean, in my tiny, tiny business I’ve, I. Got way more of a, as a proportion of people getting in touch with me, it’s way more from Europe than normal. Usually it would be, you know, largely us startups, tech, startups, and investors. And now there’s a lot of like actual physical projects to install, to use these technologies, you know, all the new emerging energy technologies to build, you know, say a, a microgrid here or a, you know, like a, some making.
[00:16:54] Rosemary Barnes: Traditionally polluting industrial process green somewhere else, or, you know, all, all sorts of different things there, you know, like actually starting to organize construction projects to get these things in the ground. Fast. So I, I am noticing a bit of a, a change to the speed that things are happening in, in Europe.
[00:17:13] Rosemary Barnes: Over the last few months compared to, you know, the last few years I see a. Have you
[00:17:17] Allen Hall: been following on the Nord stream gas pipeline where they it’s down for maintenance at the moment? I think it’s maintenance. It’s some concern that it may not come back
[00:17:25] Rosemary Barnes: up again. You need the inverted coms, the scared square quotes.
[00:17:28] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I, I think that. Necessary in this case. Yeah. I have seen that. And I know that also I’ve seen that Germany is preparing to just, you know, cut the cord anyway because they don’t want, are they that because other than they have to, right. I mean, when you know that it could get cut off at any point, better to feel the pain on your timeframe rather than you know it to happen.
[00:17:55] Rosemary Barnes: And as soon as there’s a cold, a cold snap, and then all of a sudden you get no notice and you’ve got no, no gas. I mean, they can build up their stores, but to a certain extent, no, one’s got that much storage though. That’s not enough storage to be like, oh, we’re cool for the rest of winter now. And we can sort something else out before we run out.
[00:18:14] Rosemary Barnes: Like it’s, it’s not like that. You know, people have days of storage if. If they’re lucky. Yeah,
[00:18:20] Allen Hall: it, it did seem like Germany was trying to store natural gas in whatever storage facilities that they had. To prepare for winter that says what it seemed like, that they were trying to stockpile. But Austria, I read, I think it was today where Austria’s gonna bring back some cold fire power plants that had been mothballed because they’re concerned about this winter and they need a little bit of time.
[00:18:43] Allen Hall: Like we discussed previously a little bit of time to bring those back up to speed. It, it is a really changing energy front and maybe son of eight, maybe Clint Glen Ryan’s company will get some action over in Europe because it’s a big improvement in, in, in solar efficiency with, with his idea, we’re gonna get a short break right here.
[00:19:00] Allen Hall: When we come back, we’re gonna talk about 500 million euros that are, is a liquidity assistance to Enercon after the break. Get the latest on wind industry news, business and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter at weather guard, wind.com/news. All right, we’re back.
[00:19:26] Allen Hall: And Rosemary’s gonna give us her 2 cents on a 500 million Euro, which is, I think the dollar in the Euro are finally at unity once again. So as, I guess it’s $500 million of liquidity assistance. So Enercon which is one of the German wind manufacturers. The only one left maybe is that the only one. In Germany, Rosemary, is it just Enercon Nordex isn’t Nordex German.
[00:19:54] Allen Hall: I have to look it up because Nordex may be German.
[00:19:56] Allen Hall: I’m losing, I’m losing track here.
[00:19:58] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s headquarters in rose stock. Management situated. Oh, there you go. Yeah, I knew that. Okay. That was a great city. Oh, Hamburg. Yeah. Where we’re gonna be.
[00:20:08] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I love Hamburg
[00:20:10] Allen Hall: so Enercon so Enercon fight to receive 500 million euros from the federal German federal government, essentially. And as part of their COVID support structure. And it sounds late to us in the United States, all that sort of COVID support’s already over, it’s just what’s causing in part causing really high inflation in the United States, combined with a, I think a recession is all the money’s been dumped into the economy, but I guess in, in Germany, there’s, there’s still at it.
[00:20:43] Allen Hall: So it’s a half a billion dollars to Intercom. Now Enercon says it’s going through a transformation and it’s trying to basically break even for 2022. It’s with the 500 million. So that indicates maybe Enercon is really struggling if it needs a half, a billion euros to just to break even. But you would think that it makes sense for the German economy to support Enercon and if it’s Enercon and Nordex.
[00:21:10] Allen Hall: Combined with this requirement now that all the municipalities in Germany have to dedicate 2% of their land mass to wind energy. It seems like there’s a built in marketplace right. In Germany at the moment. And does that make sense, Rosemary? That it, because they’ve just created a marketplace mm-hmm , but that they need to keep to wind tur manufacturers around.
[00:21:30] Allen Hall: Yeah.
[00:21:30] Rosemary Barnes: Otherwise they’re gonna end up stimulating you know, foreign, foreign countries companies with that, that policy China, for sure. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. I, I, I don’t know if this is really related to the, the pandemic Anacon has been in struggle town for, for a lot of years. And I mean, my personal take on it is that Anacon were, were way too German focused for way too long.
[00:21:53] Rosemary Barnes: I mean, early on, that was, that was just the absolute. Amazing best strategy to, you know, focus on the Gemma market because, you know, from the early two thousands, yeah. For a while onwards, that’s where not just wind, but you know, all renewable projects seem to be happening in Germany. But for a long time after it started tailing off in Germany and definitely like, I spent quite a lot of time in, in Germany while I was living in Europe.
[00:22:19] Rosemary Barnes: Cuz you know, it’s a nice country with. With great food and did a lot of skiing there and stuff as well. You know, you talk to people and the sentiment around wind had changed a long time ago, at least a decade ago. People were not overall positive about wind, especially I was spending a lot of time in Bavaria and down in the south there.
[00:22:38] Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think they ever really liked it. And Encon was really, really stubbornly in my, this is my word, my opinion, that there was just stubbornly focused on Germany, on selling only to the German market and making everything in Germany. And they certainly have a reputation for being you know, like a really, really.
[00:22:57] Rosemary Barnes: Nice. Wind turbine, high quality. I know wind turbine technicians have told me it’s like a Mercedes Benz of wind turbines. When you know that you’re gonna be working on an Anacon turbine that day, you’re like, oh, you know, it’s like luxury inside. I’ve never been up one. But you know, I, I know talking with the engineers that I have worked with at Anacon, they’re definitely not like good enough is good enough type engineers.
[00:23:19] Rosemary Barnes: It’s like, let’s optimize this and optimize that. And you end up with a premium, premium product. that maybe really suits a German engineering mindset, but wasn’t as suitable for the, the rest of the world who are much more focused on, on price. And as long as the quality is good enough that it doesn’t, you know, break down and cost you more money than, than that’s kind of more where yeah.
[00:23:44] Rosemary Barnes: External markets are. So for years, they’ve been having problems, keeping the German factories open because you know, it’s more expensive than O other manufacturers were moving offshore closer to the emerging markets. I mean, they were emerging back then. Now they, you know, mainstream you know, India, for example so yeah, I’m a bit skeptical.
[00:24:07] Rosemary Barnes: This is so much to do with COVID. I think it’s just a, a continuation of, of problems they’ve been having, but maybe with this new policy that is gonna bring a lot of German demand. Again, maybe we can go back to con’s original strategy of really serving that market. And, you know, if there’s local content laws, then that will really suit them, keeping their factories running, even if they are high costs.
[00:24:30] Rosemary Barnes: So maybe it’ll work out for a bit, bit longer for them, but. I would think that in the long term, they’re still gonna have to think further ahead than, than Germany and make it work. Cuz eventually Germany will fill up. You know, there’s only a finite number of places that you can put wind turbines in, in such a densely populated place as Germany.
[00:24:50] Joel Saxum: You think that that the local geopolitical climate might have been another poke in the side to the German government to say, Hey, you’ve got. Wind turbine manufacturer here. We’re gonna be focused on renewable energy. Make sure they make it. Yeah.
[00:25:01] Rosemary Barnes: Cause we need them. Yeah, I, I think so. I hope so. And I hope that all countries are doing that.
[00:25:05] Rosemary Barnes: Because yeah, it’s, we, we can’t just think about what’s the lowest cost way to make this, this year. You, you know, now we’re all like, okay, well, you know, what are we, what are we doing to our supply chain security? If we have these single countries who, I mean, even if they. Friendly countries now, how can you say that’s gonna be the case in five or 10 years, you know, so yeah, I, I think there is gonna be a, a shake up and a more on onshoring and countries making sure that they look after their own industry.
[00:25:36] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, at least I hope that they, they do that. I think that’s good for world peace. .
[00:25:41] Allen Hall: Rosemary. I was thinking of you the other day, I was watching Elon Musk and don’t kill me for this. Cause I don’t think you’re a big Musk fan, but he, he was walking through his, his factory showing off the rocket engines and talking to this.
[00:25:57] Allen Hall: Amateur scientists, rocket enthusiast as he’s doing it. So he is like taking this guy around his, his rocket engines and showing him how the new rocket engines have fewer components and the old rocket engines like, oh yeah. Okay. That makes sense. And you kind of chimed in saying the first problem with engineering is you try to optimize things that shouldn’t be there in the first place.
[00:26:15] Allen Hall: Yeah. Like, do you really, really, really need this thing? And maybe the best situation is to remove it. And I think about Enercon sometimes because. Turbines are so beautiful. I mean, when you see a wind Turine it looks really awesome. It’s an Aon every single time. And I, I think, well, it does look cool, but maybe it has that sort of mentality of we’re trying to optimize something that doesn’t really need to be optimized.
[00:26:40] Allen Hall: Yeah. And that’s maybe one of the reasons it hurts some it’s kinda like buying a expensive car, same sort of thing of buying a Ferrari like that.
[00:26:48] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no, I agree. That’s my, yeah, I’d
[00:26:49] Joel Saxum: have to go check my three, three Ferrari.
[00:26:52] Rosemary Barnes: right. That was definitely my impression working with the, the engineers there. And you can see, I actually think that they got an architect into design the, that egg shape, Elle that they that they had.
[00:27:05] Rosemary Barnes: Right. They’ve moved, moved. They did too, but they’ve moved away from that. Now, I dunno if they moved back, but it was too expensive and it didn’t really do anything. I mean the whole shape, you know, they’ve got the blades got the optimal aerodynamic design, usually, you know, non Anacon wind turbine.
[00:27:21] Rosemary Barnes: The blades are just like a cylinder at the root because you know, the blades making talk and talk is a force times a, a distance. So the closer you are to the hub, the closer that distance part gets to zero. And so you’re closer. Your talk gets to zero. There’s very little to be gained by optimizing the aerodynamics there.
[00:27:40] Rosemary Barnes: And if you want the optimal design, because the, you know, the blade’s not turning as fast, close to the, the hardware that’s, you know, wind speed. So you need a huge cord to get the same, like the optimal amount of of, of lift produced there and thereby to right. So you have to add a lot of material, a lot of weight to get this, you know, optimized aerodynamics and everybody else is like, okay, this isn’t the, you know, when you trade off all these different parameters, we find that yeah.
[00:28:10] Rosemary Barnes: The best thing to do is just a simple cylinder at that point, but not Ancon, you know, Ancon has the Much more optimized, aerodynamic shape than a cell. At least it used to be this, you know, beautiful egg shape to disturb to reduce the disturbance of airflow in the early parts of the blade. And it, it doesn’t really give you a better overall turbine, but every individual part is optimized, you know?
[00:28:35] Rosemary Barnes: So I, I do think that that’s. A bit like that. I don’t, and I’m not, I’m not anti Elm Musk at all. Like, I don’t think he seems like a guy I would like to be friends with, but I, I think he’s doing really good, good things for engineering and, you know, for the energy transition. And I ignore what he says on, on Twitter.
[00:28:54] Rosemary Barnes: I think that’s a I don’t know why anybody does anything different to that. But I disagree that you could say, oh, you know, engineers wanna optimize things that don’t need to be. I mean, I think it has a lot to do with your your business structure. If you’ve got someone that’s in charge of some component, that’s, you know, their whole team is, is organized around this one component.
[00:29:15] Rosemary Barnes: Of course, that’s what they’re thinking of. And they’re gonna try and optimize that, you know, it’s up to the person in charge of the business to make sure that you’ve got your structure in a way that makes. Possible to innovate across boundary lines. I mean, you can always tell like a company’s business structure.
[00:29:32] Rosemary Barnes: If you just look at their bill of materials and how, you know, how, how the systems and subsystems and components are all broken down. That’s a, that’s a, you know, a company flow chart basically, or an engineering department flow chart. So right. Yeah. I, I would disagree that you should put the responsibility for that on, on the shoulders of the engineer, whose job title is probably linked to the component that they’re working on.
[00:29:55] Rosemary Barnes: They’re not gonna be thinking about, does this component need to exist? That needs to happen at a, a higher, higher level. So, yeah, maybe you can take some responsibility. Let me ask you, he’s a chief engineer. .
[00:30:09] Allen Hall: Well, that’s just, it, that, that the chief engineer is just what I was thinking, because that’s the person, usually in an engineering organization who is like responsible only to the head of the company and their job is to go around and kick the tires and say, what are we doing?
[00:30:24] Allen Hall: This doesn’t make any sense. You’re spending all this money on a, on a piece of this hardware that doesn’t add any value here. Do wind turbine companies have chief engineers anymore. And it seems they had gone away in like their early nineties. No, no, that’s do they have people like
[00:30:37] Rosemary Barnes: that? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:30:39] Rosemary Barnes: and I, I believe that Elon Musk is the chief engineer for all of his engineering companies as, as well, or at least a podcast I listen to and like that, but yeah. I mean the company that I’ve worked for and with all had chief engineers, definitely. I mean, there’s, they’re signing off on oh really?
[00:30:55] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, GE has a lot of different chief engineers. Some of them were, yeah, quite. Quite quirky. And you would, you would, you know, know who you were gonna run into at the at your design reviews, but yeah, definitely. I mean, you mostly people are using a stage gate developed product development models.
[00:31:16] Rosemary Barnes: So, you know, you’ve got maybe like five gate, gate points. Where the chief engineer has to get involved and sign off on the decisions that are being made. And, you know, they’ll, they’ll be looking at what’s the biggest technical risks and what have you done to address those? And there’s, you know, certain criteria that they have to, to meet before you can move to the next one.
[00:31:36] Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I mean, I was doing product product development the whole time that I was working at LM Winka, which is was eventually GE. And so yeah, every, every month, at least I would be in some design review with, with chief engineers and yeah, it’s an important, important role. And I, I really enjoyed working with, with the chief engineers.
[00:31:58] Rosemary Barnes: It makes,
[00:31:59] Allen Hall: it makes you wonder if that yeah. And that maybe it’s a European thing where they, that has continued on. I know in a lot of I’m working in a lot of different programs and chief engineers are really hard to stumble across. It used to be. In any sort of serious design discussions, the chief engineer would be sitting at the end of the table, just absorbing everything that was going on and making recommendations at the end.
[00:32:21] Allen Hall: But I haven’t seen that in a long time and it’s a very odd person to be in that role. Right. It’s a, it’s not an easy thing to do. Think about all the skillset you have to have to be able to do that. It would make you sort of a. Odd person in a sense why do you know all this stuff? Yeah, because it just it’s someone who just absorb it over the 20 years.
[00:32:39] Allen Hall: If
[00:32:39] Rosemary Barnes: someone who’s got a long history in the company, so they have, you know, a lot of knowledge about what’s been tried what’s failed in the past. So part of the job is to make sure that you don’t just try and reinvent the wheel constantly. And you know, they can predict how things are going to. Gonna break.
[00:32:56] Rosemary Barnes: I mean, to me, that’s what I think, you know, engineering intuition, or there’s a difference between an engineer 20 years experience compared to one with two years experience is that the 20 years engineer has seen so many things break that they , they know how things are gonna gonna break that’s, you know, basically.
[00:33:13] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Basically what you get when you get a senior engineer is the ability to predict things, breaking. Yeah. So, you know, they’re making sure that you haven’t missed anything obvious. And you know, they’re making usually making suggestions about, oh, we tried this, you know, sometime couldn’t that solution work here.
[00:33:31] Rosemary Barnes: And they’re just somebody that’s not knee deep in the project day to day, so they can bring some sort of fresh eyes to it as well. Usually. So I was gonna say, like, aside from the chief engineer being in charge of, you know, like chain big shakeups of the way things are done. I also think that brand new employees, especially ones from outside the industry really should be tapped for that.
[00:33:55] Rosemary Barnes: And I know every time I would get a new teammate before, or like from outside, like a brand new hire. Before they do all the reading and go to meetings and start to absorb the culture. You want their fresh beginner eyes on a problem to point out, you know, like why do you do that? You know, say all the dumb, they, they think that they’re dumb questions.
[00:34:17] Rosemary Barnes: Say all of those, because you are never gonna get that again, once you are absorbed in the company culture and you know, how things have been done and you kind of start to respect your colleagues and think that they’ve obviously made smart decisions before all of that. Do you want to be able to say, why did they do that?
[00:34:35] Rosemary Barnes: It seems like it would be easier to do it in this other way or something like that. And I, I think that’s a really crucial part of innovation and that’s something that. Think that Europe doesn’t do as well as the, the us, because I think the, the us people are moving industry a lot more. Really? Yeah. I think in Europe, in Europe, oh, that’s probably true in Europe.
[00:34:54] Rosemary Barnes: People have much more linear career paths. So they get expert really expert at one thing. And in America it’s much more common to get poached from another industry where they can see that you’ve got some things that will help and. people have seen a lot of different ways of doing things. And so you can get more innovation that way.
[00:35:12] Rosemary Barnes: That’s that’s my, that’s why I opinion in about it. The yeah. Engineering difference. Yeah. I.
[00:35:20] Allen Hall: Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between the two. And I think it’s sort of cultural too. And that’s what seems, in my opinion, what drives Japanese engineering systems are totally different than American engineering systems versus south American or European.
[00:35:34] Allen Hall: They’re just, there’s a lot of cultural differences between those two and that sort of. Sets the bar of like where the , where, where the weight swings. Does it swing to the top of the organization or to the bottom of the organization? Or is it kind of spread out mm-hmm and there is no right answer. I don’t think it depends on the industry.
[00:35:49] Allen Hall: It’s just something that You know, as, as times get a little bit tougher here, you tend to lose people like chief engineers, cuz they’re expensive to be the ones that kind of, you lose that top and you lose the bottom right in the middle. That’s kind of doing the thing will, will be the ones that stick around typically.
[00:36:06] Allen Hall: So it’s gonna be an interesting couple of months here. We’re gonna take a quick break. When we come back, I wanna talk about power line congestion, and it’s a big topic in Minnesota, cuz some of these counties are losing thousands and thousands of dollars on tax revenue. And what part of the United States is gonna do to try to re this situation.
[00:36:25] Allen Hall: So we’re gonna be right back after this short break.
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[00:36:48] Allen Hall: Visit weather guard, win.com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call. All right. Power line congestion in Minnesota. You would think yourself. Oh, Minnesota. That’s not the biggest estate in the world, right? It’s it’s a decent size state, but it’s about the size. Well, it’s about the size of England.
[00:37:07] Allen Hall: Let me be a little bit bigger. But it’s not the it’s. Yeah,
[00:37:11] Rosemary Barnes: it is roughly, that might really big.
[00:37:12] Allen Hall: Is it Minnesota? Like half the size of England. It lived the whole country. English is not that big of a place either. Yeah. But you could drive across it in a couple of hours. This isn’t like Texas, where it takes you a whole day to get across.
[00:37:23] Allen Hall: Come on
[00:37:23] Joel Saxum: guys. Yeah. I think you could, you could drive from the Southwest corner to the Northeast corner in about seven hours,
[00:37:28] Allen Hall: eight hours. Yeah, there you go. There you go. Yeah, but they have a lot of wind power up in Minnesota and they’re having trouble because you can generate as much power as you want to, but unless you have a, a means of getting it to market, doesn’t matter.
[00:37:42] Allen Hall: And they have a transmission line bottleneck in Southern Minnesota because. Rosemary gonna talk about us geography for a minute. There’s a sort of like a lake in the way. So Minnesota has to go down through Iowa to kind of get around to well sort of you want to get to Wisconsin and to Chicago with that power, Indianapolis, those areas.
[00:38:03] Allen Hall: And they really can’t. So everything kind of going Southern Minnesota, can’t get to where it needs to go. And what’s happening is they’re turning off wind. Turbin. The older wind turbines because, and keeping the newer ones on, cause the newer ones have production tax credit. So those wind turbines generate more revenue than the older ones and the production tax credit rolls over in about 10 years.
[00:38:24] Allen Hall: Joel’s that right? In 10 years it expires.
[00:38:28] Joel Saxum: Yeah. Depending on which version of it, you were on, it’s a little bit different, but yeah, as a
[00:38:31] Allen Hall: rule, Okay. So the older wind turbine sites are being shut off. So the new ones can make more money. And there it’s causing counties, which are participating in the revenue of these wind turbines to lose a lot of money.
[00:38:43] Allen Hall: In fact, 18 counties of Minnesota in their wind belt, quote unquote reported a 14% drop in wind tax revenue last year, compared to the previous year, that’s a big deal. Right. And they’re trying to figure out ways to deal with this because. If, if you can imagine local municipalities become dependent upon that revenue, it’s wind, right.
[00:39:06] Allen Hall: It’s pretty consistent. Why aren’t we making money? And I, and I’m sure they got that money already allocated to a new fire engine, a new schoolhouse to whatever, and then to see a more than 10% drop in a year is a big deal. So, Joel, have you seen some of this, have you seen been around some of this where they’re shutting off wind Turbin cuz of transmission line issue?
[00:39:28] Joel Saxum: yeah. When you go, when you drive across Southwestern, Minnesota, if you drive at night, Southwestern, Minnesota, Southeastern South Dakota that corner of Iowa, all you see is red lights blinking in the sky. Yeah. There is turbines everywhere around there. Right? So with that much power generation in one area, of course the bottleneck is gonna be the utility lines.
[00:39:48] Joel Saxum: Now the other side of that over there is you would think it wouldn’t be as hard to build them because if you’ve ever driven through there again, it’s all. Agricultural land. Sure. There, I mean, there there’s a stand of trees for 10 acres and then it’s another 2000 of corn. Right. And, and that’s, that’s basically what’s there and the major cities, right.
[00:40:07] Joel Saxum: You have Sioux falls there. The next major city is Minneapolis. And then Des Moines to the south. So there isn’t a whole lot of it’s mostly rural. So I believe that when they start, you know, if they start to try to push some more power lines through the area, it shouldn’t be as hard. The only difficult thing is too.
[00:40:24] Joel Saxum: I think some of the farmers, cuz I, I do some, some pheasant hunting and stuff out there, but some of the farmers are, they’re a little bit tired of it. They’re getting to that, not in my backyard and they weren’t originally. And some be because some of it is there’s so many, they’re literally taking.
[00:40:40] Joel Saxum: Taking over every chunk of farm that you see. So there’s some people that are starting to get their hair on the back of their neck. Up a little bit about the, the wind development in the area. Mm-hmm so it might be a little bit harder to push, push through some of these utility lines, but they need it big time.
[00:40:53] Allen Hall: Yeah. And for the first time, in a long time, I’ve actually seen some action and some, a little bit of forethought here, that whole area, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and then going all the way down south into, I think Louisiana and all the way north up into Manitoba and Canada. So there’s like a, a north south string of states that are all connected together.
[00:41:14] Allen Hall: It’s called the mid continent independent system operator is the, is. Meso is the grid that ties ’em all together. They understand that there’s, there’s a bottleneck there and they’re trying to do something about it because all the solar projects, all the wind projects, all the renewable projects wanna be close to the transmission lines.
[00:41:29] Allen Hall: So everybody’s stuck around these transmission lines and they don’t have enough to feed out. So they’re planning a 10. Billion dollar project to expand the power lines. And so they have a couple, if, if you go online and look at it, there’s a couple of of lines extensions into sort of Southern Minnesota into Iowa, I think through Illinois.
[00:41:48] Allen Hall: And they’re talking about. Spending 10 billion to support up to 53 gigawatts of additional resources. 53 gigawatts is a lot of power generation. It’s about twice of wood, the wind in this in Texas that they’re gonna add capacity for. And with that 10 billion, they think they’re gonna get about 37 billion in benefits.
[00:42:08] Allen Hall: So they’re, they’re making the, the dis trying to do the economics of it’s like, okay, if I put 10 billion in, what do I get out? Well, I, I almost quadruple my money in this project. So. The concern is how fast can you do this? They’ve been working on this for the last two, at least two solid years, and they’re getting close to the, to the process starting where, okay, we’re gonna get the green light and, and go ahead with it.
[00:42:31] Allen Hall: So for that 10 billion to create these power lines, I was shocked, shocked at how many jobs it would create, at least what they’re talking about. And Rosemary I’ll even throw your 10% on this. So their saying is gonna create 213,000 jobs to build the renewable energy and energy storage facilit. Makes sense, plus another 120,000 jobs just to create, create the transmission facilities that that’s transmission lines, towers, substation, switching, all, all the stuff.
[00:42:58] Allen Hall: So in total it’s like 330,000 jobs. That’s crazy. What Joel, what’s the population of Minnesota.
[00:43:09] Joel Saxum: Well, Minnesota’s about seven to 8 million. And if you just kinda look, I’m looking at a map here of the, where they’re gonna put these lines. So seven, 8 million there. I’m talking seven in Wisconsin, six in Iowa.
[00:43:20] Joel Saxum: Illinois’s get a lot, but , I mean, you’re 50, 50 million people, 40 million people in this corner of the world. Hmm. And 300,000 jobs. I mean, that’s, that’s a big chunk of jobs that could alleviate. Some unemployment rate. Oh
[00:43:36] Allen Hall: gosh. Yes, it would. And they’re same with the 53 gigawatts of added capacity in the lines, it would be able to power 12 million homes.
[00:43:44] Allen Hall: That’s a significant impact for that area. Now miso thinks it’s gonna take between seven and 10 years for the permitting in construction to, to get this all done, but they’re working on it and it isn’t like they just came to the decision last week, like, oh, we got a problem. They’ve seen overheating situations happen more recently, they’ve been watching the, obviously watching the grid.
[00:44:05] Allen Hall: That’s what they do for a living. They’re watching the grid and they’re realizing, Hey, we need to get this project started. So that’s good. You know, it’s good to see something proactive happen in the states where we don’t feel like we’re always behind the heat ball. Cuz lately that’s what I, that’s what it feels like.
[00:44:18] Allen Hall: It feels like no one’s driving this bus.
[00:44:23] Joel Saxum: I like the idea of this. Like, so I’m looking at the, again, looking at this map and reminds me of what I saw with my own eyes happen in Texas is those big transmission lines that we’re heading out to west Texas bringing out this wind energy and yeah, all of a sudden little solar, solar, you know, utility scale, solar PV plants just started popping up within five miles of ’em all over the place.
[00:44:40] Joel Saxum: So when I look at these maps, I think, well, there. There’s two or three difficult areas to, to build a power line on here. That there’s a chunk going up towards the Northeast part of Minnesota. You get into some timber up there going across Western Wisconsin, you get into the Bluffs. That’s a little bit difficult, but for the most part, all of these, all of this proposed lines go through agricultural land and they do that’s right.
[00:45:03] Joel Saxum: It’s yeah. And it’s, it’s prime for popping up solar PV around it. And of course, wind, as we’d like to see with some. Storage facilities. This, this could be great for the Midwest.
[00:45:13] Allen Hall: Yeah. Let’s and let’s just see how they’re doing here and see if this project gets green, green lit, because it does mean someone’s gotta get raised a 10 billion.
[00:45:21] Allen Hall: I assuming with rates electricity rates a little bit to do it, but if the payback is three or four to one, it really makes sense to do it. Good to see it. So I’ll, I’ll follow this and, and I’ll check out some other parts of the us on the electricity grid and see what they’re doing too, because they can’t be the only one that’s actually working on projects.
[00:45:39] Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast. Thanks for listen. Be sure to subscribe in the show notes to the uptime tech news or weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube channel engineering with Rosie. Rosemary, do you have a highlight of what’s coming up on your channel
[00:45:54] Rosemary Barnes: while we’re here?
[00:45:55] Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think next up is gonna be actually a video that I recorded when I was in the us. I did a tour of Boston metal who are making a, a green steel manufacturing process and they let me see it was really cool actually, cause they’ve got like four different stages of development in their facility.
[00:46:13] Rosemary Barnes: It’s essentially in a business park, they’re making steel in, in a business park and they. Yeah, they showed me all the development that they’ve done to take it from, you know, what started out as an interesting result of an experiment at MIT. And now, you know, it’s moved up to this semi-commercial scale.
[00:46:29] Rosemary Barnes: Process that it yeah. Is there’s a way to make steel without any CO2 emissions. So it’s, it’s pretty cool. So get
[00:46:35] Allen Hall: on YouTube, go to engineering with Rosie and ring the bell. So, you know, when the next YouTube video pops up from Rosemary and do the same thing for uptime while you’re there. All right, that’s gonna do for this week on Uptime.
[00:46:47] Allen Hall: We’ll see you next week.
