If Vestas’ HUGE 4th Quarter portends good news for OEMs – wind is a seller’s market right now – what does it mean for smaller manufacturers, third-parties and consumers? Allen, Joel and Rosemary look a few months into the future. GE Healthcare is trading now; what can we expect this year, before the energy holdings, GE Vernova, spin off in 2024? The Uptime crew also discusses hydrogen – green, blue, gray and otherwise – and some cool new technology.
Could gearboxes and generators work on the ground? It sounds unlikely, but engineers at Purdue University have some interesting designs. And in France, Eolink will demo a full-scale, 5MW floating pyramid turbine by 2024. How have they moved so quickly when others are still in the concept phase? Tune in for market insight, engineering and technology news and stay up-to-date in the wind business.
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147 Audio
[00:00:00] Allen: Rosemary, I saw that TikTok is now the number one advertising source in the world. It’s surpassing Google and Facebook, which is very odd. So I guess we’re going to have to transition ourselves from the YouTube world over to TikTok, and I was hoping not to do that because, you know, It’s TikTok.
[00:00:20] Allen: Yeah,
[00:00:20] Rosemary: I’m not, I’m not going to TikTok. Well, it’s hard enough to get my video for like 15 minutes. Am I supposed to communicate any kind of meaningful amount of engineerings in 60 seconds? Well, yeah.
[00:00:32] Allen: I, I’m just getting familiar with bereal and I think that has something to do with just engineers have a proclivity to talk about things longer than they probably should.
[00:00:44] Allen: And this episode’s gonna be one of those cases actually, because we, we, we, we, we talked about vestus sales and they had a huge quarter in the fourth quarter. Last year, 2022 5 billion, over 5 billion euros. That’s a, that’s an amazing number. And meanwhile, GE Ver Nova’s market cap looks to be about 13 billion in total when they break off in GE and beginning of 2024.
[00:01:10] Allen: So there’s a, a big difference between those two. And, and then we take a quick look this week at Equinor RWE working on some hydrogen projects and of course rosemary has a lot of insight on that. Blue hydrogen, green hydrogen, gray, hydrogen. , no hydrogen, all electric And then we there’s a really interesting concept coming out of Purdue and I, I kind of poo poo it, but I don’t mean to poo poo it in this episode because it, it is, I like new ideas.
[00:01:38] Allen: And Purdue has a new idea about using, essentially a hydro drive using water to drive turbine. Drive generators using the turbines as a power source. Makes sense. And then we, at, at the end here, we talk about EO link. And they’re, they have that pyramidal shaped wind turbine, very similar tot Omega here in the States.
[00:01:58] Allen: But EEO link is massively ahead and they’re gonna make a demonstrator five megawatt demonstrator. That’s gonna be a big winter bin. They’re hoping to have that in the water by 2024 for an offshore demonst. Genius and glad. I’m glad that they’re doing it. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Ticket, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon and the Pride of Australia, Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind energy Podcast.
[00:02:42] Allen: Well, the last quarter of 2022 for Vestas was apparently outstanding. They had , they announced a couple of different things. 22 entree wind order, wind orders for capacity, a 3.37 gigawatts. And there’s a consensus in the marketplace that they have another 1.1 gigawatts that was unannounced orders.
[00:03:07] Allen: So they think they have about 4.5 gigawatts sold in a quarter. And Joel, that, that’s a lot of gigawatts in the quarter. That’s right. Yeah. That’s big time. Yeah. Yeah, that’s really good. So they think that fourth quarter, just in the fourth quarter, that the cash flow in was about a little over 5 billion Euros, which is a record for vestus.
[00:03:27] Allen: Now I, I haven’t done the math here, but it seems like Vestus is raising prices. Is that what it seems like to you two? .
[00:03:35] Joel: I think they’ve gotta be, I mean all, all, everything you’ve heard in the marketplace about the OEMs not being able to make it, not being able to make it, they’ve gotta be raising their prices as a strategy y You know, it kind of reminds me of the Hendrix interview with Neighbor Energy from the other week about Yes.
[00:03:49] Joel: Him saying that, that the, the actual OEMs are picking who they’re talking. They’re getting, there’s, they’re getting so choosy with people that they’re talking to, the ones that they. are going to be installing things. And if you’re not or your, your, your pipeline isn’t that big for development, they’re not even really spending that much time with you.
[00:04:06] Joel: So it shows that it’s a, you know, it’s a, it’s a kind of a seller’s market there, and you can see what, that’s what Henrik said. It’s a seller’s market. And you can see with the increase in orders here that it looks like Vestas is fully taking advantage of that.
[00:04:18] Allen: Well, it’s more than a million dollars per megawatt just running the numbers.
[00:04:21] Allen: It’s like 1.1, somewhere in there, just ballpark. Which is higher than it has been in quite a while. So the, it appears the OEMs have stopped taking orders temporarily and then pushed pricing up, restarted the sales network, and at least Vestus has done really well, which is fantastic because the big concern in the marketplace as if Festus isn’t making money, the industry’s in big trouble.
[00:04:48] Allen: That’s a really good sign.
[00:04:50] Joel: in the report, did they say anything about geographic regions? About where this, these four and a half.
[00:04:55] Rosemary: All they, they said that the reason why the price per megawatt has pushed higher was cause of a giga order in Australia. So it’s nice to know that we’re, we’re obviously playing more than the global average.
[00:05:08] Rosemary: But that’s said, I mean there’s, so there. Such a big pipeline in Australia and people are struggling to actually get Turbin. So I guess it makes sense that, you know, the consequence of that is that you have to pay a bit more. And if we are paying more in Australia, if you know higher turbine price can still make a profitable project, then means we should be, you know, moving towards a front of the queue.
[00:05:27] Rosemary: So I guess that is good for renewable energy in Australia. . So as part of
[00:05:32] Allen: this, since there’s so many different countries pushing 20, 30 end dates and 2040 end dates, that really does put the manufacturers in the driver’s seats in a sense, right. And the US we’re talking about 120,000 wind turbines in that timeframe.
[00:05:49] Allen: Mm-hmm. I, I don’t know if Australia can even get into that list of deliverable on wind turbines in that span, just because there’s so much demand in the United. Plus in Europe, you probably aren’t gonna pay a premium and the OEMs know that for sure. Right. It’s like buying a car that they don’t have any on the lot.
[00:06:08] Allen: You’re gonna pay more for it no matter what because of scarcity.
[00:06:12] Rosemary: Yeah. But I think it’s good. I mean, the prices have been too low for the last few years and you know, all of the major manufacturers have been in real trouble. And it’s something, you know, like I’m not an an economist in any sense, but I have struggled to.
[00:06:25] Rosemary: To make sense of the fact that, you know, there’s so much demand and people can’t get their hands on turbines as fast as they want, and yet profits are so constrained. It seemed to me, you know, like the obvious, obvious solution to all those problems is to raise prices a little bit. And then you, you know it, it won’t be such a problem for the manufacturers and the, you know, the more profitable projects can still get their turbines.
[00:06:48] Rosemary: So yeah, it is kind of working out in, in the way that it needs to.
[00:06:54] Joel: and, and this is just onshore as, as well to talk about, right? Right. So this has nothing, this doesn’t count offshore sales. And I think the offshore sales market is a little bit, of course, is a little bit different. It’s still gonna be a seller’s market there, but you’ve seen so many of these lease auctions going boom, boom, boom, all the way over the place.
[00:07:10] Joel: So I, I, listen, I re-listened to the Hendrick Staver thing today, so that, that’s in, in my mind, but. I think that that’s also, I mean, the four and a half gigawatts of onshore is crazy because those numbers are, are a lot lower too. Right. So these are 3.6 s and four point ohs and 2.8 s. Yeah. So they’re smaller.
[00:07:30] Joel: Yeah, exactly. So that’s a, that’s a lot of turbines. That’s a lot of, a lot of, a lot of work around the world
[00:07:34] Allen: for that too. . So while Vestus has a pretty good market value based on that quarter, I didn’t GE Renova, which will be the GE wind turbine and gas turbine business that when GE finally splits into three blocks Renova will be on, on its own, and that’s supposed to happen in 2024.
[00:07:53] Allen: So GE Healthcare broke off in January 1st of this year. So their own standalone company. That leaves two divisions left, essentially. Aerospace division and the energy division. There is some real concern about GE Renova valuation when that happens. So they have a year to kind of straighten things out and their CEO and GE Renova has been trying to get the cash flow going in the proper direction, and it sounds like they have positive cash flow.
[00:08:22] Allen: Now, when Joel, when you and I talk about positive cash flow, it means that we can go to the bank and pull a hundred dollars out. That doesn’t, doesn’t necessarily mean that in corporate terms, positive cash flow means at a start, at a certain start date. There’s more money coming in than flowing out. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have orders on the books that you’re losing money for because GE does.
[00:08:42] Allen: So they’re expecting to lose about 2 billion this year, which is not. and the market is indicating that once Chief Renova breaks off, it’s gonna be worth about 13 billion, which seems extraordinarily low for such a bus, such a business that is gonna be in high demand. Mm-hmm. , what is happening here?
[00:09:08] Joel: We just talked right about Vestas having $5 billion worth of orders in one.
[00:09:15] Joel: And then we’re talking about one of their biggest competitors only being valued at 13 billion Bosley next year. It’s crazy to think I mean, maybe this is the time that some, some big operators scoops ’em up. I mean, that’s a, that’s a possibility, right? There’s there’s a couple operators out there that are worth a lot
[00:09:31] Allen: more than that.
[00:09:32] Allen: Sure. I did a little bit of research when I saw that number pop up in, in a couple of news articles I thought, 13 billion. You know, it’s still 13 billion. It’s nothing to shake a stick at it. It’s, yeah, significant amount of money. But there’s a lot of companies in that range. And I’ll give you a couple that are in the 12 to kind of 14 billion range in the US Snap on tools, ugh, , Domino’s Pizza and MGM Resorts.
[00:10:01] Allen: So it may make more sense for GE Renova to open a. Yeah. Or order
[00:10:06] Joel: wind TURs, get tool trucks and drive ’em around everywhere. As I know, those Staffon guys are brutal on prices. They, they’re not afraid to raise theirs. Yes, they are. But I mean, so in that same breath, right? We looked the other, the other couple weeks ago at some prices of some of these large operators, right?
[00:10:21] Joel: Like Osted was valued at 77 billion. I think Inve energy was 33 and next era. somewhere in between them. Right. And those are of course, three massive operators that are all over the world doing a lot of cool things. Building a lot of great wind farms and, and driving value across, across the energy chain.
[00:10:41] Joel: Right. Supply chain. Right. Fantastic for them. But to have the, have the OEMs, which is the people creating the things for these companies to survive, not be val, be valued at, you know, sixth of the value of, or a fifth of the value of what Orstad is. That’s crazy to me.
[00:11:01] Allen: Yeah, I think it’s a little low. I think it’s, it’s low and it, it should be driven back up, you know.
[00:11:06] Allen: I did another quick look looking at the auto manufacturers in the United States to see what their market cap was. Both GM and Ford are roughly worth 50 billion. So they seem awful though too for a size, comparative size of business, right? When you’re making a, mm-hmm , you have several production lines, you’re making cars, you’re making ’em around the world.
[00:11:27] Allen: You think that GM would be, have a higher street value. Tesla is like 350 billion. It’s like seven times what GM or Ford is at the moment. So there, there is this weird dynamic that is happening and maybe GEs just caught up in that. Industrial companies are not valued as highly as they once were, but as we drag more manufacturing back into America, they may have more value.
[00:11:54] Allen: And maybe that’s what GE is hoping for. Just giving Renova a little bit of breathing space. Say, here’s another year. Get it together. We’re gonna fund you, make, get you squared up on the books. But let’s get into some real valuation.
[00:12:10] Joel: So, so some of those things that you talk about though, as well, with like Tesla being valued so high.
[00:12:14] Joel: Some of that is, is is market driven, right? It’s not, not sure. Not physical market, but the, the, the street market, wall street markets. Right? Right. So it, it’s for, but, but that goes back into play here. That means that GE Renova as a future company in the world is not being valued that high, which seems odd to us.
[00:12:36] Joel: Odd to me, and for sure. This is what we’re like, clean energy, transition, renewable energies. How is one of the biggest players in it being valued so low? You know, we’ve heard for a long time that some of these OEMs are relying on their service models to make profits. Is, does GE renova, is that gonna, is all of the service stuff go underneath that as well?
[00:12:56] Joel: Or is that just the manufacturer? Yes.
[00:12:58] Allen: No, that’s all that, yeah. Yeah. It’s just surprising.
[00:13:01] Joel: It’s, it’s,
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[00:13:17] Allen: EOR and R B E are agreeing to work together, develop large scale value chains with they’re calling in value chains to work on low carbon hydrogen.
[00:13:27] Allen: Right? So that sets up alarm bells with everybody, right? As soon as we say low carbon hydrogen. , what that means is blue hydrogen and rosemary. You wanna explain what blue hydrogen
[00:13:36] Rosemary: is? Yeah. So blue hydrogen is you make hydrogen in the same way that most hydrogen is made these days with steam methane reforming.
[00:13:44] Rosemary: And so the, yeah, when you, when you crack it, the. Methane, then you end up with CO2 and hydrogen. And currently the CO2 just goes into the atmosphere and that’s gray. Hydrogen is what it’s called when it’s produced in that way. And blue hydrogen is just the same, but they take the CO2 emissions, capture it and store it somewhere.
[00:14:05] Rosemary: So it’s nice in theory definitely the engineering is, is all there to make it work, but when you look at the history of carbon capture projects, there are very, very, very few that have actually captured and stored the amount of carbon dioxide that they said that they would. Yeah. So I think most people are skeptical.
[00:14:27] Rosemary: about why would that be any different with hydrogen? And for me personally, if you’re gonna do a carbon capture project, why do you need to make a new source of, of carbon dioxide emissions? To put it the carbon capture project on, take your carbon capture project and put it on some existing source of CO2 emissions and then, you know, no one would have a problem.
[00:14:46] Rosemary: A problem with that .
[00:14:49] Allen: So this is part of the energy transition, Rosemary. So you have to, you have to play along for a little bit. So what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to shut down those coal fire plants. They just started up again in Germany and convert them into hydrogen ready plants. So they want to run these power plants with hydrogen, and as part of that, they gotta, they gotta have a source of hydrogen to start that, and it won’t be immediately done by offshore wind, but that’s what they’re.
[00:15:18] Allen: So it seems like there’s just a temporary step, like, okay, we’re gonna make some blue hydrogen because we need to keep the heat on in Germany. It gets cold. Yeah. But as soon as we can do it, we’re gonna go to green hydrogen Now, does that make more sense? It would, because
[00:15:32] Rosemary: you’re gonna get carbon, get to a green hydrogen.
[00:15:33] Rosemary: It would, if carbon capture was some sort of existing mature plug and play technology, but it, it almost never works. It, it could. Okay. , but you know, you are not taking some sure thing and doing that until you’ve got the better thing working. You have to make this, you know, dodgy temporary bandaid, fix work first.
[00:15:55] Rosemary: You spent all that effort making it work knowing that it’s never gonna be a long-term solution. And yeah, I mean, if you actually just follow the carbon capture projects that are announced, and there was a big one in Australia. Either every month or two, there’s a new reason why they can’t actually capture the amount of CO2 that they said they were going to.
[00:16:13] Rosemary: Oh, this sand has clogged up our, you know, whatever. And like, yeah, well, you always knew it was gonna be operating in these conditions and it’s just excuse after excuse after excuse. And that’s, that’s how they work. And they don’t actually catch a carbon. Why will this one be different? .
[00:16:28] Joel: So, so the but the, what you’re saying, Rosemary, is that the effort, well, you’re taking all this effort to develop basically duct tape to fix a problem.
[00:16:36] Joel: Why don’t you just take that effort and develop green hydrogen? Wh why, why do this step change, intermediate thing and just go full force and get it done? Yeah. I mean, but that’s, that’s what you have Our, our w is a handful. Offshore wind farms in German waters, right? So they’re the perfect vehicle for this thing.
[00:16:52] Joel: Andor, of course, the, the Norwegian powerhouse. So the, the, a great team to put this thing together. I think but yeah, if they would put a little bit more effort in to just go straight to green rather than the, the blue intermediate step, it’d probably be a better. better way
[00:17:05] Rosemary: to move forward. Yeah.
[00:17:06] Rosemary: And then even better than that, maybe consider whether hydrogen is the right solution to your problem in the first place, because it’s basically an energy storage problem. And Germany is one of those countries that’s really latched on to hydrogen as a solution, and then they start looking for problems that can be solved.
[00:17:21] Rosemary: By it. Whereas, you know, I, as an engineer preferred to do it the other way around and look at, you know, what’s the problem and then what’s the best solution. And hydrogen isn’t the only option. There’s also all kinds of long duration energy storage and more interconnection and, you know demand flexibility and all those sorts of things.
[00:17:38] Rosemary: And I do just worry that, you know, hydrogen is such a. Purpose tool that people start applying it everywhere without thinking, is this actually the best, the best way to solve this particular problem? Mm-hmm. .
[00:17:52] Allen: Well, we need to get out our roastary comparison tool and so what would you rather have a coal fire plant or a blue hydrogen plant to make electricity?
[00:18:02] Allen: Well, a blue high.
[00:18:03] Rosemary: Those your options today. Those is. . Yeah. I would rather have the existing coal power plant with a phase out plan and the research dollars spent on a long technology with long-term potential. Actually, I’m, I’m, I’m not really, yeah. I’m not arguing for all coal power plants to be shut down overnight, and I would certainly spend my development budget if I was a country, I would spend my development budget on solutions that can scale all the way to zero emissions, not just, you know, something that’s gonna.
[00:18:33] Rosemary: Stick around the edges because I mean, carbon capture in, in theory, you can capture a hundred percent of emissions, but it’s just, it gets harder and harder and harder and harder the closer to a hundred percent that you get to. And so one of the contentious things with blue hydrogen is what’s the definition of, you know, of clean hydrogen?
[00:18:50] Rosemary: Is it. , 99% CO2 capture, is it 90? And I think that’s a pretty, that’s a pretty normal level that people will choose. Mm-hmm. or is it, you know, 50% in, you know, plenty of people are arguing for that. And so there’s, there’s emissions from that, that you’re probably gonna, yeah. Say you can get rid of 90% could go 99%, but it would cost you, you know, a whole lot more.
[00:19:13] Rosemary: But then there’s also all the problems with the supply chain because you’re still then taking, you know, trying to extract natural gas and transport it. Natural gas is methane, which has a, a global warming potential that’s 20 to a hundred times more than co2. So all of the leakage, right? Which, you know, now we’ve got satellites monitoring these sorts of things.
[00:19:34] Rosemary: It’s like every year we find out that actually there’s more and more and more leakage than we ever imagined in the supply chain for for gas and for for coal, as well as a lot of methane leakage in coal mining. So you, you are never gonna get to zero. It’s not ever gonna be a zero emissions technology blue hydrogen, so, right.
[00:19:53] Rosemary: Yeah, I, I think you need to be honest about, about what you. how clean it can ever be, and then think hard about whether that has that technology has any possible role in, you know, 2050 or, or beyond. And is it actually worth spending so much effort developing it when there are true zero emissions technologies that could use that development effort now instead?
[00:20:19] Rosemary: Well,
[00:20:19] Allen: so Rosemary, I think what you’re eventually getting down to I is having an all electric society versus some combination. Hydrogen, probably natural gas and electricity. Right? You have a mix. Yeah.
[00:20:34] Rosemary: There will be a place for, for clean hydrogen. For green hydrogen in, in the future. I mean, not least because we already use hydrogen for a bunch of things that you, you know, you actually need the hydrogen atom, so it’s not gonna be easy to, to change to something else.
[00:20:51] Rosemary: Like, you know, making fertilizer would be a big example of that. And yeah. And then. I don’t see much of a place for natural gas far in the future, but I am one of those people that think that natural gas is going to play a big complimentary role as renewables rollout because it’s so flexible and you can gradually use less and less and less of it in a way that you can’t, with, with coal, you know, your coal, you can’t just turn on for half an hour when you’ve got a , a spike in demand and Right.
[00:21:23] Rosemary: You know, there’s not much wind around. But the difference between using gas like that and hydrogen, which you could also have a hydrogen turbine that did the same thing. But the difference is that true, we already have the gas turbines, we already have all the gas infrastructure. Those things aren’t just gonna turn off overnight.
[00:21:39] Rosemary: So we use them smarter and the less and less and less we use, the less emissions there are. And it doesn’t take up, you know, billions of dollars of development money trying to get this technology to work. Cause it already. And that’s the difference between hydrogen, especially blue hydrogen with carbon capture is it is not, it’s not ready now.
[00:21:56] Rosemary: And so you know, you’re, it’s turning our attention away from the real problem, which is electrifying everything as fast as we can quickly. And then, you know, there are legitimately hard problems to solve. You know, there’s a lot of sectors that can’t just be easily electrified, like cement and steel aviation shipping to name a few.
[00:22:19] Rosemary: that’s where we should be sending our smart engineers that wanna work on something that doesn’t exist yet. That’s what they should be doing. Not getting carbon captured to work, which isn’t really an engineering problem, it’s an economic problem. You know, there’s carbon capture in all sorts of other industries that works fine in L n G, they get rid of all of the, they get all the carbon dioxide out of, out of that.
[00:22:41] Rosemary: Because if you don’t, then when you try and liquefy it, then you get, you know, you get freezing. They suffer a big financial penalty. So it’s, it’s not that we can’t do it, it’s that we can’t do it economically, and that’s not gonna change just because, you know, someone wants to make a , a small blue hydrogen plant.
[00:23:03] Rosemary: You know, it’ll be a a, a tiny amount of new carbon capture. Equipment compared to what’s going on in other industries all around the world. So there’s no conceivable way that this is gonna be the start of, you know, like a really steep cost reduction curve like you’ve seen with, you know, solar panels or lithium batteries because these already, these already exist.
[00:23:22] Rosemary: and the major cost involved is all balance of plant stuff. You know, it’s like tanks and pipes and heat exchanges are all people. Yeah. It, it’s not stuff that is going to, that the, yeah, the energy transition is going to materially affect the, the cost of those things cuz they’re just so, you know, normal and used in such large volumes.
[00:23:42] Allen: Well if, if we end up with some mix of hydrogen, which I think we will. and some places the world, you’ll be using hydrogen. I I know a lot of auto manufacturers in Europe and even in Japan. I think Toyota is still on a hydrogen pathway at least. Mm-hmm. for now. BMW’s still in it. I think Audi is still toying around with, with hydrogen powered cars.
[00:24:04] Allen: Some
[00:24:05] Joel: of the big guys are too, like Com, Cummins, Cummins, diesel, like that, the big motors. Yeah. Cummins,
[00:24:09] Allen: they’re doing hydrogen as well. Yeah. . Yeah. I there are some uses for hydrogen. I don’t think it’s gonna go away. The market will take care of it eventually. Right? The As cost. Mm. , find their way down, you know, what’s the cheapest option?
[00:24:22] Allen: And that, that’s where everybody will eventually head it. It might, there’s still, there’s, there’s still a significant part of the world that thinks hydrogen is a possible
[00:24:29] Rosemary: solution. Oh yeah. It’s huge. A huge part of the world. But you do see use uses dropping out. Like you are starting to see consensus. Oh, that the home heating hydrogen is not smart.
[00:24:40] Rosemary: It. Definitely, it’s not been totally ruled out, but more and more you ask the government, say, oh, actually it doesn’t seem to make sense that we use hydrogen for home heating, you know, heat pumps and that sort of thing is a, a more sensible way to go. But just because it’s, it, it, whether or not it’s the right engineering answer is not the only question.
[00:25:02] Rosemary: It’s also governments have the, the possibilities to possibility to make sure that the economics work out. Cause like if you take a look at the, the us the, this ira the ira program, It’s incredibly generous to hydrogen. Much, much more so than for any other technology. And so I think it’s something like a $3 a kilo subsidy for, for hydrogen.
[00:25:23] Rosemary: And, you know, people’s eventual cost targets are like a dollar, a dollar 50, something like that. So, you know, that’s a huge subsidy. It it, when you’ve got that kind of a head start, then you know people are gonna put attention there and start using it for things that maybe it didn’t make. Overall. So I do worry that y you know, it’s such a, like a shiny, shiny, attractive thing for politicians to have this, you know, one tool that can do everything.
[00:25:54] Rosemary: And it is getting in the way of, you know, some rational engineering trade offs and, you know, are there better things that you could. Not just with the development budgets and people, but also, you know, if you’re looking at green hydrogen, because hydrogen is so much less efficient than direct electrification.
[00:26:13] Rosemary: You know, if you want to use hydrogen for home heating, to use a particularly bad example, you wanna use hydrogen for home heating instead of a a heat pump, then you’re gonna need like, Four or five times as many wind turbines and solar panels to produce electricity than you would about the net otherwise needed.
[00:26:30] Rosemary: And so it’s not just a matter of wasting a bit of money, it is also like really hindering everything else that you could do with that clean electricity if you didn’t have to make hydrogen with it. So that’s why I think a lot of engineers get quite passionate about, you know, about hydrogen including me.
[00:26:47] Rosemary: I guess I get worked up . Okay. If you haven’t noticed. Yeah, just a little
[00:26:52] Joel: bit. But I had a conversation with someone the other day about internal combustion engines, right? So internal combustion engines. If you look at the history of them just over the last 30 years, I’m not saying go all the way back to a hundred years ago, but just, just 30 years now.
[00:27:06] Joel: And you see that the, like the leader of displacement. Horsepower or torque, whether you’re Newton meters or whatever, output has gone so much lower right now. You have like, I mean, and this is performance. I’m talking, I’m not just talking performance engines, but this is an example from the performance engine category.
[00:27:23] Joel: So 5.5 liter, the new Corvette engine puts out 670 horsepower. A 5.5 liter engine when I was in high school 15, 20 years ago, would put out 280. And that was like, man, you’re really killing it. You’re almost at 300 horsepower. So the technology has been borrowed from racing and all these different things and, but put into these cars, so now you’re getting them, engines are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, but so much more efficient on gasoline.
[00:27:50] Joel: That’s the problem with hydrogen and natural gas motors is they’re so much less in, less efficient because they don’t have the BTUs per unit of energy. Right? Like you’ve, you’ve seen dabbling of compressed natural gas vehicle and this and that, but they have no. They, you can use it for city buses and stuff like that and, and some heavy haul trucking and trains and, and whatnot.
[00:28:10] Joel: But when it really boils down to it, it doesn’t have the, the energy per BTU u so, or the BTU is per unit. So, but the, the conversation was, okay, you’ve seen in the last 20 years how you used to get a hundred horsepower out of this and now you’re getting 300 on gasoline. Is the same thing gonna start happening for hydrogen motors where they’re like all of a sudden, at some point in time if they keep engineering ’em down.
[00:28:33] Joel: Cummins put that 14 liter, I mean, which is just a beast of a, I mean, it’s a huge motor hydrogen power plant, but it’s based on a Cummins diesel power plant, but it’s just swapped over to you able to use hydrogen. So, but it had to be 14 liters to make the same kind of power that like a six liter diesel engine makes.
[00:28:49] Joel: So at some point in time will they get. , the engineering effort become, get efficient enough where hydrogen motors now can just be dropped into a Toyota car. And they have the same kind of power that, you know last generation’s internal combustion gas engines had. Because if that happens, then, then there might be more of a place for it in the market.
[00:29:10] Joel: And I, and I guess that’s, that’s an outside comment to everything that you just said, Rosemary, about the, the, the creation of it. But it, it was just a, a conversation that I had. Street the other day.
[00:29:25] Joel: Lightning is an
[00:29:25] Rosemary: act of God, but lightning damage is not actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
[00:29:43] Rosemary: Visit weather guard wind.com to learn more. Read a case study
[00:29:47] Joel: and schedule a call.
[00:29:51] Allen: There’s a couple of engineers at Purdue, not engineers, but more professor types that are working to improve the efficiency of wind turbines. She’s like, well, that seems smart, right? And the, and the issue it’s about that generators like to have constant spinning rotation and wind turbines. The blades don’t spin that fast, so there’s a gear box or something in between electronics to to, to work out the difference.
[00:30:15] Allen: Well, the produce solution, which they’re going to patent or in the middle of patenting and are I trying to license the technology uses the wind turbine to create hydraulic pressure. And in a sense, the, the goal is you can use this hydraulic pressure and transmit power via hydraulic tubes that are filled not with hydraulic fluid, but with water to someplace where then you.
[00:30:40] Allen: Turner generator. So you can use the hydraulic power to spin a generator and bob’s your uncle. There you go. So the, the whole, the whole system is such that you could have, and Rosemary, this is where I need your expertise on connecting wind turbines together. You could take four or five wind turbines, connect ’em all together, hydraulically and drive one generator like on the surface of the water and an offshore.
[00:31:06] Allen: Does that make, does that seem like a plausible thing to do? It just seems like to me there’s like losses here that are substantial and, and the Purdue engineers are saying that the powertrain is up to 90% more efficient than current systems. That doesn’t. makes sense to what I know about hydraulics versus electrics.
[00:31:24] Allen: Yeah, it and gear
[00:31:25] Rosemary: boxes. It’s a weird way to, does that make sense? Phrase it 90% more efficient because I mean, that drivetrain is already more than 90% efficient. So it’s, what are they saying that, you know, if there’s, you know, 5% say efficiency loss, then this is going to save four and a half percent of that.
[00:31:43] Rosemary: It’s, it’s kind of yeah, it’s a weird way to phrase it. And I think. . I think it’s one of those things where it is probably true on paper that they can you know, end up with less losses, but they’re. Probably doing a really, really common kind of early stage startup kind of mistake. Mm-hmm. , which is that they compare their ideal on paper design against the real world of the alternative.
[00:32:12] Rosemary: So, you know, a standard transmission, we already know every single loss that that comes because they’ve been put in place, we’ve tried to solve the problems and this is what you have to wear. Whereas when a design is only on paper, you. Realized all of the losses that you’re gonna have yet. So, you know, they’ll have, when they go to implement this system in reality you know, starting with a.
[00:32:35] Rosemary: A lab scale, small, small system, and then moving up bigger and bigger until it is a whole wind farm. You’re gonna encounter problems at every scale up stage. And the solution to that is going to chip away at that, you know, efficiency improvement that they’re expecting. And so, I mean, every, that’s true for any alternative technology that you know.
[00:32:57] Rosemary: You start with that, you’re always gonna start off thinking it’s gonna be better, and then the real world is gonna, you know, chip away and a good technology, you’ll still be left with something that’s better than the status quo. And so then that will, you know, go ahead and be the new mainstream. But in most cases, the real world, actually, you know, it, it takes the whole, the whole benefit that you’re expecting is lost to things that you weren’t expecting.
[00:33:20] Rosemary: So in most cases you will see, oh, there’s this problem that we have to solve, and now instead of a 90% efficiency gain, it’s 80% and okay, so then now there’s another one that we have to solve and there goes another 20%. And you know, by the time you get to the end, you end up with something very similar that costs a lot more, or you end up with something that’s actually performs a little.
[00:33:40] Rosemary: a little bit worse. And or at least there’s not enough benefit that there’s any point in someone making such a major, major change because of course, you know, the existing system they’re, they’re fairly reliable by now. And, you know, supply chains and maintenance procedures are all in place if you are just gonna scrap that for, you know, like a 1% efficiency gain to something totally new.
[00:34:01] Rosemary: You are gonna have, you know, a few decades of pain while you try and figure out how to make this new system work reliably and, you know, cost effectively and it’s not gonna be worth it for anybody. So yeah, the Debbie, Debbie Downer in me is sees that as the most likely outcome for this . But if no one ever started a project because it will probably fail, then you wouldn’t see any new technology.
[00:34:25] Rosemary: I think.
[00:34:27] Allen: Oh, okay. So let, let, and, and Joel, I want to loop you into this being an oil gas person, and Joel and I were discussing earlier about some of the subsea oil and gas things that are happening, infrastructure. It looks like there’s a lot of piping and plumbing connecting things together. I think the concept makes sense.
[00:34:44] Allen: Like it would be great if you could connect winters together and drive one big turbine. And so you, you, you, you basically can maybe simplify the system from a theoretical standpoint. But is it an ev? Every technician wind term, a technician around the world is gonna chime into this. Is it because engineers have.
[00:35:01] Allen: Clue how difficult the real world is. And when we get to a university, we get another step removed from sort of real world application. How are you gonna make this thing work? And that every technician sitting in a wind turman right now listening to the podcast is going, yeah, there’s no freaking way that’s gonna happen.
[00:35:19] Allen: Like, just, it’s obvious. Yeah. Is is that the, is that the disconnect or, because it, it, there’s just so many unknown unknowns you just don’t think about and it’s Rosemary’s right. The people that are actually on the, on the ground doing the difficult work and actually making power, just, just see it every day.
[00:35:38] Allen: They see, they see how real things work.
[00:35:41] Joel: Yeah, I’m, I’m thinking about the, the concept of the thing, right? So in my mind trying to connect, like you say, Alan, to the, the technicians in the field right now, I see the exact same turbine everything. But instead of having a generator up tower, right behind the gearbox is like a centrifugal super.
[00:35:58] Joel: That pulls in a clo that pulls in a closed loop water system and pressurizes it. Right? And once you get that pressurized water system moving, it’ll, and if you could connect 2, 3, 4, 5 of these things together, I’m thinking on the surface on onshore. But you’d have to have, you’d have to have an odd system mix of, like a hybrid mix of rigid and flexible piping.
[00:36:18] Joel: Because if you. flexible piping the whole way you’d end up with losses. No matter how good of piping you make, if you’re putting that much pressure through, you have loss. So if you put, if you put a, a rigid piping system in and then connected it all, now, that’s something that you need to maintain 24 7
[00:36:33] Joel: You know, of course it’d be easy to see pressure losses and stuff and go find them, but but either way that, that’s what I’m seeing is like a big supercharger driven off there, that, that’s that centrifugal push. And then a closed loop system that has X amount. RV antifreeze type water in it so it doesn’t freeze in wintertime driving one big generates.
[00:36:52] Joel: That’s yes, .
[00:36:53] Allen: I think you’re right about the freezing part. Yeah, that’s what I thought. Like, well, it’s cold out there, you know, even in Texas it gets cold and, but, but the freeze.
[00:37:01] Joel: Right. The simple engineering question is, and this is a maybe more of a rosemary question, but is if you’re generating X amount of power at five different stations and then putting it into one, are you actually.
[00:37:15] Joel: physically possible to actually multiply that energy or not? Or does it just make sense to make it at each one of ’em and put it into the grid? Or is it, or would you be doing that to put for less or for easier o and m strategy where instead of having five generators, you’ve got one big one and it’s easier to maintain?
[00:37:29] Joel: Just, just thoughts. Yeah.
[00:37:31] Rosemary: I think it’s, it’s possible in theory to say a benefit. But I think that what Alan said is, is right that, you know, you ask people that are in the field maintaining. Systems, whether they think this is a better, better one, and, and they’ll tell you no. And I think that they would be right 99% of the time.
[00:37:50] Rosemary: And so I guess that’s, you know, the whole point of you know, new tech, new technology is that someone has to be that one to take, you know, be, you need to have a lot of people making these one and a hundred bets to get the occasional one that works out and, you know, have you know, technology evolution.
[00:38:08] Rosemary: So, You need both. You need the technicians in the field that know how things really work in practice. And then you need people in the lab who have no clue about the real world and are just, you know, dreaming big. And they’re naive and they’re probably gonna fail each, each one of them is probably gonna fail, but yeah, one in a hundred is going to not fail.
[00:38:27] Rosemary: When gonna surprise the, you know, the technicians and the, the engineers in between them. So, yeah. I
[00:38:35] Allen: don’t know if you could ever surprise a technician. They have a pretty good sense . What will work or not. Yeah, we had, we had a pretty
[00:38:43] Joel: astute, we had an awesome poster in one of my old offices that was a picture of a technician in the field and then a picture of an engineer from the office standing next to him with perfectly clean clothes, brand new safety vest, brand new white hard hat.
[00:38:56] Joel: And it said, I don’t know how to do your job, but my book says you’re doing it wrong. And the technicians love, love the picture because it’s, you know how many times you run into this? Someone comes on, you’re like, ah dang, engineers are here again.
[00:39:06] Allen: You know? Yeah. Well, so all true. Continuing on this flow about technicians having a pretty good sense of what will work and what won’t work there’s a French company called EO Link that is building this sort of trapezoid, is that the right word?
[00:39:18] Allen: No, it’s not. It’s like a pyramid. Sorry. Pure Pyramid . I’ve lost track of my geometry. It’s a quad schedule quad.
[00:39:29] Allen: So it’s got a, it’s got a wind turbine. That design that has the blades are in between sort of the two triangular towers and it makes us pyramid shape and then it’s, it would, the reason this all makes sense for offshore wind is there’s a lot less steel involved, particularly underneath the water. So they basically float this pyramid with this wind turbine.
[00:39:51] Allen: On two bearings front and the rear bearing and the blade are in between it. The comps that’s been tossed around quite a bit, but EEO Link is actually doing it, which is the unique piece of this. Now, Rosemary talked about another program we’ll talk about here shortly, but EEO Link is working on a demonstrator.
[00:40:10] Allen: That they think will be about 30% less materials by weight than comparable designs today. So that, that’s a huge cost savings, right? That you can simplify lower your costs. That makes a lot of sense. They have funding to go off and do this, so they’re gonna make a five megawatt megawatt demonst.
[00:40:30] Allen: that weigh about 1100 tons and with a, a base that’s about 50 meters per size, that’s, that’s a big turbine. Obviously five Megawatts is a big turbine, and the rotor’s gonna have about 140 meter diameter, but they have about 25 million US dollars already in the system to go make this full scale test.
[00:40:54] Allen: Now this gets to one of my pet peeves in America is that we don’t, we talk about a lot of stuff. We don’t actually. , go out and do it. Right. This is not, the eLink is like the overall and Wilbur Wright of this pyramid design. They’re actually putting their money where their mouth is, and they’re gonna go out and they’re gonna go do this thing in a big, in a big scale.
[00:41:15] Allen: The five megawatt turbines. Nothing to to shake a stick at. That’s, you know, Bob’s your uncle. There you go. Five megawatts would prove that this is a conceivable, recognizable, workable concept that could be expanded into a larger area. They, they think they can pump out like 60, 70 turbines per port doing this.
[00:41:32] Allen: They just, simplicity wise. Now there are other companies, I know T Omega is talking about doing a similar thing but they don’t have the funding yet. They’re still looking for funding. They’re in like a series A around at the moment. Meanwhile, Elin’s gonna be doing this in like 2024. This thing’s gonna be in the water in 2024.
[00:41:53] Allen: What is, what, what is driving? The difference between an America versus a France and the offshore wind industry, how did eLink manage to do this in America? We’re just sort of generally talking about it now. , what can,
[00:42:10] Rosemary: can I add in? I’ll give you, I’ll give you a couple. Can I add in that there’s also the Danish sts dale.
[00:42:16] Rosemary: They have a a instead of a square pyramid. Yes. They’ve got a tetrahedron. So that’s a pyramid with a triangular base. And the design is, is different because it’s, you know, this tetrahedron with the normal wind turbine. Lollipop on, on top of it. Whereas the others are yeah, putting the, the rotor in between the two sets of, of legs.
[00:42:36] Rosemary: But the STS down one, they already did a 3.6 megawatt prototype. 2021. Yes. So, and I know the STS Dale approach, I actually toured one of their their thermal energy storage projects, but they’ve got kind of the similar design philosophy or development philosophy for all of the technologies in that suite.
[00:42:55] Rosemary: It’s a, a company started by I think it’s Hendrick STS Dale, who was like the grandfather of Danish wind energy. Had some, you know, pretty, pretty impressive contributions towards, you know, the regular, regular wind tur. But the, the philosophy is, you know, take the important problems that need to be solved in the energy transition, and then do it with, you know, proven solutions from other industries so that you can get something fast and reliable and, and cheap just, you know, out there soon.
[00:43:22] Rosemary: And so, yeah, the idea was to take, not, not do something really out there. Do something that you know is gonna work so that you can get moving on it fast. And, and so that’s what they did with their with their, what do they call it? . Yeah. The, is it Te Tetra Spa? Tetra Tetra
[00:43:41] Allen: Spa.
[00:43:42]Â Joel:Â TetraSpar. Yeah. Cause the TetraSpar Base is an oil and gas old school design.
[00:43:47] Joel: That design has been used for spars offshore since the seventies. So let’s just, Hey, take this down. Take the same thing, shrink it down. We know how it works. And then let’s take a turbine that works, that we know works, made ’em up and now we’ve got a product.
[00:44:01] Rosemary: Yeah. So it’s nearly like the opposite of what we were talking about with this new, new drive train you, you know, you Yeah. You’re not going for the one in a hundred, you’re going for the 99 and a hundred in, in this case. And, you know, and they’re a few years ahead of the, the alternatives. So yeah, I think it’s a good, good strategy to have in the mix. But don’t you need both? Yeah, but you need both Definit. ,
[00:44:23] Allen: Rosemary don’t, don’t, you need both.
[00:44:24] Allen: I mean, you need, need the one on a hundred, but you need the 99 and a hundred in the tran in the transition. Yes. There you go. But it doesn’t seem like in a, this I, I’m trying to find cool things that are happening in America and wind turman. It’s really hard.
[00:44:37] Joel: So, so the piece that I, the thing that I was thinking about was looking at innovation not, not necessarily cultures, but markets for the French versus the us, right?
[00:44:47] Joel: So the US is just coming into floating wind. We’ve been eyeing up fixed bottom wind for a while offshore. But now just going, hey, now we’ve got floating. The French have been eyeing up floating wind because they know that’s the majority of anything they have offshore for a long time. So like technique FMC is, I was talking about well now it’s technique, energies.
[00:45:07] Joel: They’re a French company. They have a huge office in Houston. They’re 40,000 employees globally or whatever. They’re huge, but they invested in the X one Wind platform, which is the one that has like the platform and then the front with the. 90 degree angle on the back with the hub on the front of the yep.
[00:45:22] Joel: So there’s a lot of energy being put forth out of France, just like it is in Norway right now. Why they, you know, high wind Tampa and EOR are getting into the flood because that’s all they have for a resource for offshore. The great wind resource onshore in, in France has been, for the most part, kind of developed.
[00:45:40] Joel: So now they have to move offshore, or they don’t have to, but they can, they can infill, but to move offshore, they have deep water. So, They’ve gotta figure out floaters. And that’s why more, more investment has been putting into like EO link and stuff. Whereas in the US it’s like, man, we’ve got so much space and some other, so many other things going on.
[00:45:58] Joel: We’re more kind of flock shooting at some of these energy projects, not really getting anything done. Where over there they’re more focused on, we know we need this, let’s work on this. That’s, that’s just a couple of, that’s a couple thoughts. I don’t know if it’s a hundred percent
[00:46:09] Allen: right or not. I don’t know.
[00:46:11] Allen: It it, it is very odd that basically very similar projects exist in multiple. Same concept, but there’s some Yeah. Countries are so far ahead, so I mean, if,
[00:46:22] Joel: if you’re, if you’re French as well, you’ve been staring at out the northern part of your country, your northern door, you’ve been staring at offshore wind for the last 30 years.
[00:46:31] Joel: So it’s been there, it’s been in your face. They’ve been looking at it. Right. Where we just, just haven’t, you know, like we’ve had five turbines in block Island for the last few years. That’s it. And the majority of the country doesn’t even know they exist. Yeah.
[00:46:45] Allen: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
[00:46:48] Allen: Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and be sure to to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube Channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
