Between volcanos, unexploded ordnance, and a flash of cash, we can say that the new year has really started with a bang. But seriously, folks – extreme weather may be getting more extreme. When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted last week, half of all the lightning in the world was concentrated there. That ash is now headed your way, wherever you are. The Uptime crew also considers why GE has extended its partnership with TPI. How strategic is it, and what else might GE have planned as the Vernova spinoff looms? Meanwhile, as the Dogger Bank Wind Farm development continues, about 100,000 tons of UXO from WWI and WWII is expected to need to be cleared. Joel explains how they’ll diffuse the situation.
Denmark’s PolyTech just got a $135M Euro investment and the Uptime crew has some very specific suggestions for how other small companies could find big investments. If you’re interested in growing your company in the wind space this year, don’t miss this episode!
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Uptime 148
Allen Hall: Well in wind energy this week there’s been a lot of great news. TPI is hooked up with GE and it’s maybe developing some of the next generation blades for, for GE that’s an interesting topic. And, and we also look into LM Windpower in India where they’ve finished their 50000th blade.
Allen Hall: Congratulations to everybody there. And, and then the, the volcano in Tonga created a massive number of lightning strikes, but it also puts debris in the air. And I, I asked a couple questions like, do we have to worry about that debris in the air when it comes to wind turbines that are nearby.
Joel Saxum: And then we’ll, we’ll jump up to the North Sea. Talk about Dogger Bank and the unexploded ordinance, like, so it’s been a couple of world wars up there. We’ve had a lot of things going on and what they’re doing to make sure that it is safe for. Not only the infrastructure to go on the ground, but for the workers that are out there putting it in.
Joel Saxum: And then the last thing we’re gonna talk about here is Polytech just, just raised or got a cash infusion for 135 million Euros. So big amount of money flowing there. We kind of dive into if you are a company, What can you do to race cash? Where can you go? What are some of the resources?
Joel Saxum: So it’s gonna be an exciting episode. I’m
Allen Hall: Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum. And the soon-to-be guest host of fully charged live event in Australia, Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Allen Hall: There’s been some more news between TPI and GE and it’s good news for TPI. So TPI announced that they have extended the supply agreement with GE renewables through 2025. That’s, that’s not actually a long-term extension, but it’s a good extension nonetheless. And they plan on working together on next generation blade.
Allen Hall: which was a little shocking to me cause I thought that’s what LM Wind Power was all about, is that’s where all the, the new designs were developed at lm. So GE already has nine production lines with TPI and now they don’t, don’t make different blade types. At least we don’t think that. I think there’s multiple lines making the same blade.
Allen Hall: But nine lines is a, is a lot of production. And as we talked about previously in an earlier podcast they’re gonna reopen their plant plant in Iowa in beginning, in 2024 that’ll start ramping up actually this year. 2023. Mm-hmm. and TPI’ s been a long-term supplier to GE and I didn’t realize how long that was, but it, they started in 2008.
Allen Hall: So that’s a pretty long relationship. It looks like that’s going to continue. I guess the question mark is, where’s LM Windpower in all this, because that’s where the blade expertise has been for so long.
Joel Saxum: You know, the first thing that triggers my mind here is when you said through 2025, and I was thinking, oh, that’s a good ex, that’s a long extension.
Joel Saxum: And then I looked in the corner of my screen, I was like, oh my, it’s already 2023. That’s not really that long of an extension. It’s only a couple years. And in the, in the manufacturing world, that’s not really that long of an agreement, you know? But yeah. So we, we were talking off air a little bit about LM is of course owned by ge, so GEs gonna go through their split up here, but healthcare, aerospace and then the renewables being GE renova.
Joel Saxum: So we were all kind of curious here talking about what’s the, what’s the play here? Is it LM has, you know, been, been the engineering house for GE blades for a long time and since, since they’ve taken them over and now TPI is going to be. also helping them with some design. Didn’t you say Alan?
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah. I, I know that TPI has some design people, cause they’re building blades for other companies. Mm-hmm. , it’s not just GE. So they have some design capabilities in house.
Joel Saxum: So, Rosemary, from your time at lm, what’s your thoughts on it?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, well I’m a little bit out of date now cause I think, oh, it was, yeah, right around the time of the pandemic starting that I left.
Rosemary Barnes: So that’s already two three. Three years. It was 2020, right. So, yeah. Yes. She,
Joel Saxum: that was three. It’s like we’re going too far in the future. . Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: So I’m a bit outta date, but my, my thought was, oh gosh. Like I think that Elm is going to feel a little bit Offended, insulted, slighted by this because I mean, the whole point of LM is their, you know, blade design and manufacturing capabilities.
Rosemary Barnes: And when lm I was working at LM when they got bought by ge and the idea was that all of the blade design would, would be taken by lm. So this is kind of a step backwards and yeah, of course I don’t, I don’t know how, how it’s been taken amongst the staff, but I would assume that it, it was a bit of a, a bit of a shock and a bit of an insult to.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So one thing that we talked about was that it, it might be a, a protect. Kind of scheme on GEs side. So it, it, as it sits right now, if they have t p make blades for them and, and there’s a error on the blades or a serial defect or a manufacturing issue that’s found, then all of that on doesn’t fall right on GE as an OEM and hit their bottom line across their business because then it wouldn’t be an LM issue.
Joel Saxum: It would be a TPI issue, which would be separate than, than ge. So maybe, maybe it’s a strategic thing going.
Rosemary Barnes: Is t p i big enough though, to, to wear a, a big problem like that because that was one of the points of the takeover was that LM on its own was not really big enough to aggressively move into offshore because the, you know, dollar amounts are so big and if you have a, a problem with a new, you know, offshore turbine after you’ve already sold Yeah, a thousand of them, then.
Rosemary Barnes: LM could not, could not survive that. Whereas GE, as a huge company could. So I’m just wondering. Yeah, it sounds great that, you know, our t p will be responsible if they’ve designed and manufactured it, but it doesn’t help you if they go bankrupt in the process because you’re still, you know, they’re not going to actually you know, recoup your losses.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I, I’m a bit bit hesitant to say that that’s, you know, clear cut benefit.
Joel Saxum: I’m, I’m sure the reinsurance market is kind of licks their chops on those kind of things too, right? Because the premiums would be high if the capital isn’t there within the the subcontractor to be able to float
Allen Hall: it.
Allen Hall: Well, does TPI become just the onshore blade manufacturer and LM transition only to offshore? Maybe some local things sh on short wise. , there’s gonna be big money being spent in offshore wind blade design. Do they separate LM as a standup standalone company as they transition in 2024? and get LM set up as an offshore blade expert, which is where it would naturally go anyway.
Allen Hall: It’s longer blades, bigger projects, more difficult things to do, and t b I can handle the onshore stuff like they’ve shown. They have. The capability to do that is, is that where the separation line happens? And then LM wouldn’t be so worried about it because realistically, The big marketplace will be in
Rosemary Barnes: offshore.
Rosemary Barnes: It does sound like a very GE thing to do, to buy a company and then, you know, like five years later, sell it again. But, but you know, it wasn’t, isn’t that GE of the past though? They haven’t been doing so much of that recently.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it means selling a lot of ge. That’s just how we got down to three divisions.
Allen Hall: a lot of it has been sold over the last 10 years.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. You know, we could tell, we could look at the fundamental differences as well between T P I and LM to maybe uncover something here. So one thing that LM does that tpi, I. Does not, to my knowledge, his LM has an aftermarket services development department too.
Joel Saxum: Yes. Like they have the, the power shells and some of their own Vortex generators and some of that stuff, right. That they create as products that can be sold onto multiple platforms. But tpi, I don’t think, does any of that TPIs specifically Blades manufacturing? I could be wrong though, Joe. I’m,
Allen Hall: you know, I, I’ve been weirdly enough reading through some of the year end reports from tpi.
Allen Hall: and things that they have offered. I do think they have some offer aftermarket offerings and some upgrade offerings. I, I’m not sure they’re doing a lot of it, but it, it would make sense. You, you, you almost have to, your customers are going to to demand it at some point that you’d be able to upgrade the blades you make.
Allen Hall: Why not? Yeah. Right. And it seems like a little bit of easy money. So it’s, this is, this is just fascinating cuz there’s gonna be a lot more shakeout like this. And we were talking about Vestus earlier and how Vestas has. Blade issues. Everybody has blade issues, but mm-hmm. , ver vestas. It may, may be, you know, a financial burden.
Allen Hall: What do you do? Do you continue to make blades or do you, do you break that off into a separate entity? Just because of the risk involved. And like Rosemary said, if you, if you don’t find out until Blade 1000, you have an issue. Yeah. In trouble. It’s like sort
Joel Saxum: of too late. Yeah. Something to follow.
Joel Saxum: Definitely. I mean, from on the surface level, we’re all applauding. Great. Moving forward this is a big thing for the energy transition. Some agreements being signed, but trying to understand, none of us are sitting in those rooms where these decisions are being made, so trying to understand them. I guess that’s what we’re
Allen Hall: here for.
Allen Hall: Well, you, you know, just on, on a similar note, you know, Vic is now running the onshore division of ge. And he used to run the renewables business for a number of years, and then when he ended up, I think he ended up in corporate r and d and helping him on sort of larger projects. And now he’s back onshore.
Allen Hall: And when I saw him come back, he’s a local kid. Kid, he’s not, he’s not a kid, but he went to, he’s from the town I’m in. When he came back on onshore, I thought, Ooh, that’s interesting. He was good on onshore when they were mostly, when they were all onshore several years ago. So he knows that business, he knows the people.
Allen Hall: It wouldn’t sh, it wouldn’t shock me that GEs going to really break into onshore offshore, and LMS gonna go to the offshore and G’S gonna be the onshore. Some of those moves that GE makes. At the, sort of the sea level in, in their corporate structure can be indicative of where the future lies. And I, I have seen a couple of articles mentioning that, and that one makes sense to me because there’s a sort of a steady hand that knows onshore and it has worked with TPI and some others in the past to get that all ready to go for 2024, that that makes a ton of.
Allen Hall: So staying with LM Wind Power LMS division in India has completed their 50000th winter in blade. That’s a, that’s a remarkable fee. That’s a lot of, that’s a lot of product. So it was made at their blade manufacturing site in Veted. I, I’m going to murder that name and I apologize up upfront. But that operation began in 1994, making 13.4 meter blades.
Allen Hall: It’s a little tiny baby blades , and today they big blade back then. Well, yeah, it’s true. Right, right. It seems a little small now, but now they’re making what 80 meter blades. Yeah. So that, that makes complete sense. And they currently, about 70% of the blades that are manufactured there are, are exported.
Allen Hall: So they’re, they’re making blades that get sent all around the world. That’s a, that’s a pretty remarkable feat. 50,000 blades is nothing, is it? Just, it gets a lot of time, a lot of effort. That’s amazing.
So
Joel Saxum: tying, tying those years again together, I’m thinking, so I’m. . I was born in 1987, so, and I’m thinking about 1994.
Joel Saxum: I’m like, oh, that wasn’t too long ago. But then now we’re looking, it’s almost 30 years, right? They’ve been making blades for almost 30 years at this place. 30 years. Yeah. That’s a lot. 50 50,000 blades. So you’re looking at 12 what? No, not 12, 1400 blades a year. Something like that. That’s a lot. 12 blades.
Joel Saxum: Keep breaking it down. Yeah, that’s a four day.
Allen Hall: It’s pretty good production, right? Isn’t it? It it, it, it’s remarkable. Then you think about how many blades that they have built and how many more they’re gonna build in the future. . Mm-hmm. , right? Joel, you were saying, I think you were telling me there was 120,000 wind turbines gonna be installed in the United States.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , right? So that’s 360,000 blades. That’s just in the us so this bi, this factory’s gotta be busy. So congratulations to everybody in India. Ellen’s factory there. Yeah. That’s, They’re gonna have a good, that’s the good
Joel Saxum: couple of years. The next seven years, next seven years is gonna be cruising .
Allen Hall: It’s gotta be good.
Joel Saxum: Get the latest on wind industry, news, business, and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news.
Allen Hall: So there’s a big volcano that erupted a couple of weeks ago. The
Allen Hall: Volcano, , and it, it’s, it was massive, Joel. It was, it was a huge explosion. When you think about volcanoes going up, you think, oh, it’s throwing rocks at lava and all this stuff, which it totally is right. But all that ash, ash junket, it throws up, throws up in the air. Creates lightning. It’s lightning is static electricity that’s created by friction in the air.
Allen Hall: And when you have all these little particles run up against each other as being ejected miles high into the atmosphere, yeah, they create lightning. So they had almost. In a six hour period, 400,000 lightning events around this volcano. That is crazy. Mm-hmm. and they, and roughly half of the lightning in the world on, I think on that particular day was at that spot that that’s Wow, , that’s, that’s a, that’s remarkable.
Allen Hall: Right? The guys over at Havis Chris Fki and if. If you don’t follow him on Twitter, you probably should. If you have, you’re interested in lightning to wind turbines and sort of the Lightning National Lightning Detection network. He, he put some really interesting Twitter posts up. He’s, they’ve been detecting at, at visa.
Allen Hall: They’ve been detecting lightning for about 40 years. Said this is by far the most extreme event that they’ve seen in comparison when they had the snowstorm in Buffalo in November that I was nearly, there was about 1100 lightning strikes off the, off the edge of lake Ontario. So, you know, 1100 lightning strikes compared to 400,000
Allen Hall: That tells you the size of event it, yeah, yeah. Right. So, you know, the lightning piece is interesting, but when it throws all that ash, that ash goes every. , it travels all around the world eventually. Do we have problems or will we have a problem with a volcano letting up that much ash and running into wind turbin blades?
Allen Hall: Because I, I remember when Mount St. Helen blew up and all the problems he had with jet engines. , then all that ashes in the air and it would really eat up engines. In fact, they almost had an airplane crash when that happened. And the from the ash and how everybody was diverting around it. And the
Rosemary Barnes: Iceland, but Iceland eruption as well.
Rosemary Barnes: Wasn’t there one in Iceland just a few years ago? Oh yeah, that’s right. Yeah. And old planes were ground over. It caused cause chaos with the people’s travel plans in Europe. . Yeah. It, it was very, very disruptive. Yes. Forgot about that. But I don’t recall any, so do, do these suit any wind turbine failures from it.
Rosemary Barnes: And I don’t know if, I don’t know
Joel Saxum: if we’ll see failures. Yeah, I think we’d see it. It would be like a lot of people on the phone with Erroneus being like, Hey, we need to get, get these things cleaned, , . You know? Cause if you got. Yeah, if you’ve got any kind of moisture and then that ash hits the blade even without moisture, I mean, it’s just gonna load up and create this mess.
Joel Saxum: I think about when, when you see those ads in the paper sometimes about cleaning your, the, the, you know, he heating and ventilation, air conditioning ducts at your house, right? And they show the picture of the inside of the duct where it’s just this nasty conglomeration of dust and little stag tight stag mites inside of there.
Joel Saxum: Right? I think. The blade would look like if it was in a heavy, you know, area of, of this down or of, of if that ash was coming down. So it’d just be, we’ve gotta, maybe we stop these things and we have to clean ’em all up or something. But I don’t think we would see failures per se from it. Some, some plaguing issues.
Joel Saxum: Something don’t in something annoying,
Allen Hall: right? I mean there’s different active kids in from Hawaii and they’re talking about aren’t they shutting you on a coal plant there? They’re gonna do some wind power projects there. That would be, I think it’d be a serious problem. I mean, there was a, there mbmi,
Joel Saxum: there was an eruption of a volcano in New Zealand in like 2019 as well.
Joel Saxum: That was only. 20 kilometers offshore from the main island or something. And, and they have some wind over there, some wind generation in New Zealand. And I, I don’t know if it af how, I don’t know if the, the ash plume affected or went in that direction. I guess we could look into that. But you know, in the, in the u in the US your, from a volcano standpoint, Hawaii, yes.
Joel Saxum: possibly. You keep hearing, if you read, if you follow this kind of stuff, you’re interested in geology and science, you hear Yellowstone could erupt right. But if Yellowstone erupted, I’m gonna be a hundred percent honest with you. The wind energy’s not gonna be our problem. , we’re gonna have enough other problems or that’s gonna be kind of a tertiary thing.
Joel Saxum: As in growing food and whatnot, that might be a , that that’s probably what would be the issue. But I think, yeah, as a to, to my thought from a pragmatic standpoint, now I’m not a blade expert like Rosemary is, but I would think it wouldn’t be that much of an issue cause it’d be an isolated event, right?
Joel Saxum: It would only come, it, it might be a really bad thing for 48 or 72 hours, and then after a week or two, all that stuff comes outta the air and you. need to clean everything up. Oh, no. Travel, move forward. That’s
Allen Hall: what I hang out to. Yeah. I can’t tell you where I learned this, but I learned this from someone who actually knows this stuff.
Allen Hall: This is in the aviation side. So when sand gets picked up, like in the Sahara desert mm-hmm. , it goes around the. It goes everywhere. You’d be surprised to how much dirt and dust gets picked up and shuttle around. So if there’s a volcano somewhere, that debris is in the air a long time. Remember even, well, I’ll give you another example.
Allen Hall: Remember when they had the wildfires out in California? . Mm-hmm. last, was it last summer? The summer before we, we saw that in
Joel Saxum: Massachusetts last summer was really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I remember a couple, couple years ago, couple years ago, 4th of July, I actually have a picture of it. I was in northern Wisconsin and they were having wildfires up in and towards Rocky, like BC and Alberta up that way.
Joel Saxum: And a lot of that smoke was coming down. And there’s a, I have a picture of a, some of my friends and I sitting on the back of a boat and the whole picture is this yellow haz. and like, you can’t actually even see this make out the sun. And it was, and I mean, and we were thousands of miles away from these wildfires.
Joel Saxum: But you’re saying exactly that the, in that wildfire, what that is, we’re just thinking like, oh, it’s this yellow haze. No, it’s particulate matter in the air that’s, that’s so actually dense in the atmosphere that is blocking out the sun. . So yeah, I mean, if that’s a prolonged state now, so, okay. So those fires happen like that, that lasted in northern Wisconsin, a thousand miles away from where the fires were.
Joel Saxum: Four, four weeks, three, four weeks. Right. That’s a long time. Yeah. I don’t know if it’s enough time to, to damage a wind turbine to, to, to more than just kinda cleaning it
Allen Hall: up. I think blades have trouble with that. If you look at rain erosion studies leading edges. , the water droplet size and the hardness, all that matters.
Allen Hall: So if you start putting little slugs of volcanic rock in the middle of that, I, that can’t go. Well, I, I think it’s one of the problems that we’re having actually, is that on leading edges, we don’t know what we don’t know, and all the atmosphere in different parts of the world is just, , generically different.
Allen Hall: So what happens in Denmark is not the same thing. It happens in Wyoming, right? Mm-hmm. . And we don’t have a good handle on it. And when we start, look, start thinking about expanding wind turbines and putting more and more places, some of these events that we wouldn’t have otherwise considered, why would any designer in Denmark think about a volcano on the other side of the world?
Allen Hall: That wouldn’t even be in the realm of like discussion. Maybe you kick it around at lunchtime. There’s wild, crazy things you have to deal with. . I think they become more and more a reality. I think we see it on the lightning side all the time, that these different parts of the world behave differently.
Allen Hall: Volcanoes and tsunamis and these sort of things are gonna become more prevalent. We’re gonna have to do some design around them. I think. So over in the UK there’s been a lot of war activities, since pretty much the do since the Romans I’ve been there. It, so there’s a lot of warfare items in the water.
Allen Hall: In World War I and World War ii, there was a whole bunch of ordinances dropped in the water on the sort of the shallow sea lion a around in the nor on the coast of the UK in the North Sea. Well, if you’re gonna develop wind turbines in that area, you better find out through in ordinance down there. And if, and is it in the way or could you set it off?
Allen Hall: Well the smart thing to do is to, to scan the bottom of the ocean floor. Well, and dog or bank, they’re doing. They’ve been working on it for quite a while and they found some unexploded ordinance, they call it. And Joel, correct me on this because you know more about this Seafair stuff than I do uxo.
Allen Hall: That’s the, that’s the abbreviation uxo. Yep. And they, they put out a chart that said, Hey, everybody they’re there. . Let me see how many there are here. I think there were two in one area. and yeah, there’s two Unexplode ordinances in Dogger Bank A and six in Dogger bank B. So there it’s, there’s like, I think there’s four different sections, a, B, C, and D.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. . So they, they’re finding total of eight unexploded pieces on the bottom of the seed out there. That’s a problem. And they think that there’s over a hundred thousand tons of unexplored ordinances. in, in that area in general, just from World War I or World War ii I, and they’re gonna go out and have to, I, I don’t know what they do with it.
Allen Hall: Do they have to detonate it? Is that what they’ll have to do? Just Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
Joel Saxum: They get, they get a debt team out there.
Allen Hall: So how do they do that now? What is it, what’s involved in doing
Joel Saxum: that? So the fir the first part of it is, is so you need to do it like your site characterization survey. You’re out there and you’re doing a sonar mapping of the whole area, right?
Joel Saxum: So you have, now you’ve got a map of the area on that map. because of the shifting sands and scour and all the subsea currents and whatnot. A lot of those things are buried. They’re just subsea, or they might be exposed, or you don’t know, but think about, mm-hmm. , we’re gonna go out there and drive monopiles, so you better know what’s down there at least 20, 30 meters.
Joel Saxum: You know what I mean? Otherwise, you might be pounding right into one of them that’s been covered up over the years. So you go out and do a geophysical survey so you can see everything. Now you’ve got a visual representation of what’s on the. . But if you ever looked at any kind of you know, bathymetry or, or you know, side scan sonar data, it’s not really clear.
Joel Saxum: It’s acoustic bouncebacks, right? Skip back scatter. Right. So it’s not really clear what’s down there. Some, sometimes you can see stuff beautifully, but it’s not really that clear. So another portion of the site characterization survey is what people in that industry called well, we’re gonna go do a mag survey.
Joel Saxum: So they drag these magnetometers which are a lot of times have like a, a, a, it’s. , it’s a half-life sensored. Somewhat. So there’s like CCM in them in some of ’em. Mm-hmm. . But CCM reacts with water, right? Explodes, right. Let, you gotta put the thing in the water. So, so, anyway, but the, the sensors are all sealed up and they drag them behind a vessel.
Joel Saxum: Usually it’s like a, like they call it like a flyer almost. And it’s kind of pulled behind because you don’t wanna be too close to the vessel because the vessel will mess up your meg magnetic reading. Oh, sure, sure, sure. You know what I mean? So, so they’ll drag these things sometimes way back. And there’s a couple of really cool companies out there now that are trying to get them on, like flying wings to get them closer to the sea floor.
Joel Saxum: And, and so you wanna keep the, the, the instrument, the same height from the sea floor all the time because you’re reading. You’re reading a, a signal strength. So if you keep getting further and closer and further and closer, then it’s tough to equate that to what’s on the bottom. Because if something is a a, a metal pop can, at 10 meters, it’s gonna have a signature of X.
Joel Saxum: And if it’s here at 20 meters, it’s gonna have a signature of Y. But you wanna know, you wanna have an even thing, right? So you do this mag magnetics, magnetometer survey of the whole area as well, and then you’ll have a map basically of signal strength. Whatever would be a magnetic, like a Ferris reading on the sea floor.
Joel Saxum: Some of that could be, it could be a, a shipwreck you know what I mean? It could be, it could be treasure. Yeah, treasure. It could be, it could be an anchor from a boat. You don’t know what it, it is. Right. So, so they, they will find these hotspots. Then they’ll equate it to the, the scan, the side scans on our data so they can look at it kind of visually, and then they’ll go out there with a, an actual r o v a sub-sea robot with a camera.
Joel Saxum: and go down and actually see what it is. If they can see anything there. Once they have an, it’s, it’s, it’s pretty inde in depth, right? So, but once you have an idea of what’s there then it goes into, okay, this is uxo, now we need to get rid of it. Well, if you’re looking at a 70 year old unexploded bomb, like you don’t wanna bring that up onto a vessel.
Joel Saxum: you know what I mean? Like, like, like, all right, someone throw a rope around it, let’s get it up here and get rid of it. Like, no, it’s not how it works, right? So you’ll, they’ll, they will go down there with ro with R specialized ROVs and equipment and monitor. Sometimes they’ll have two ROVs. So one R o V can watch the other ro o v as it works to make sure that it doesn’t touch anything.
Joel Saxum: And they’ll actually do like if you’ve ever watched any military stuff or whatever, when they have a piece of ordinance, they need to explode, they explode it with more ordinance. and then they’ll, they’ll put triggers on it that are triggered by sonar or whatever, and then they’ll back the, back, the whole caboodle off a kilometer or two and then send an acoustic signal to the detonator on whatever’s down there and boof blow it
Allen Hall: up.
Allen Hall: Do you think that some of them were really actively live after Oh yeah. 70 years?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, there was, there was, there was one just not a few months ago in German waters, and it was in a. that was like near a port. And there’s a cool video on YouTube of it somewhere where they’re like, yeah, they detonated and boom, you see the big water column?
Joel Saxum: Poof. Shoot up in the air. You know, like 50 feet or something. But yeah, I mean, you’d be amazed at where that, that UXO is. There’s a, they’ll, they’ll find some on the east coast while we are from World War II while we’re developing these wind farms. So how long
Allen Hall: would it take to do all the scans and analysis?
Allen Hall: Is, is this a like a year long process? The weather in the NORCs not great either. It seems like there’s a small window of opportunity for this.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean site characterization for a wind farm, it, a lot of it has been going on off the East Coast for four and five years. People just don’t know about it.
Joel Saxum: Right. It’s cuz it’s not something that’s been really Publicized. So you’re, you’re not only doing those things, but then you’re gonna be drilling for geotechnical surveys and using near surface seismic refract to find boulders and stuff like that under the subsurface. And how deep is the, how deep is the silt until you hit, you know, hard rock until you hit bedrock and all these different things.
Joel Saxum: So not only do you need to characterize what you can see on the surface, As far as what you’re gonna work with, but also all of the subsurface below the seabed, you need to characterize as well to understand foundation design. So it’s it’s a very, very in depth process. Like I, I know people that were a great company called Tarson.
Joel Saxum: They were doing geophysical surveys off of the east coast for offshore wind back in 2019 and 2018. Hmm. They made a killing doing it too . Wow.
Allen Hall: It just seems like a really complicated process that there’s really no way to get around it. You have to be careful, you know, that it’s there.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So, so we were talking.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, it it’s there. It’s gonna happen. You’ve gotta make sure you do it. It’s not something you’re like, well, I don’t think there’s anything in this area. Nope. You gotta do every square inch of the damn thing. And so we were talking earlier about the shortage of, of people. To, to go offshore and work. This is an industry that is highly specialized, right?
Joel Saxum: There’s not very many educational institutions that can teach you how to go offshore and do geophysical, sonar surveys, but then tie them into all the surveying thing. Like there’s, there’s one school in the United States that teaches that, or in the Northern America that teaches that specifically, and it is Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, they’re their geomatics program as they’re, is there there’s, that’s a maritime community buddy, Newfoundland Canada.
Allen Hall: Oh, no. Yeah, I mean, it’s right on the water, but why that?
Joel Saxum: It’s the, if you look at high order, like high order charting and subsea surveying and those kind of things, it’s very, very, very specialized.
Joel Saxum: Sure. Okay. So that’s one of the schools in the, in the world that offers that, that degree program. If you go, if you, if you meet or if you’re down in Houston and you’re in an oil and gas thing, you’ll run into a bunch of Newfoundlanders and it’s because of the, the schooling that they all got up there.
Joel Saxum: They, they graduated into Houston. Yeah. .
Allen Hall: Well, there’s, there’s gonna be a lot of this activity. And then I know we talked about all the offshore wind is gonna be placed in California in sort of the really deep waters. I don’t mm-hmm. do you do the same thing and when it’s a thousand feet, 2000 feet down, can you do the same sort of thing versus a hundred feet down?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, it’s a lot easier and cheaper in shallow water. But you can def you do it in the deep water as well. One of a, a really cool company, if anybody wants to look into an ocean infinity they have the, what they call now, the armada fleet that they designed, which is a, it’s a fleet of uncured ships.
Joel Saxum: They’re not uncured like little boats. They’re like, man, I think the armada fleet is like 50 or 60 meter long vessels with not a person on ’em. They’re ghost. Well, what they, yeah, and what Ocean Infiniti does is they run that ship on the surface and then that ship will Dr. Drop off what they’ve been using.
Joel Saxum: Hogans Hogan is a made by Kongsberg. It’s a, it’s an a u v, so an autonomous, like underwater vehicle, but basically a little submarine that has all the sensor packages on it. And then those go into the water and they spread out like a swarm in a line. And the vessel on the top tracks every one of them.
Joel Saxum: And then they do the surveys in the deep water. So those, those AUVs may be down 1500 meters in depth in the water only, only 50 or a hundred meters off the sea floor. And the ship on the surface is tracking all of them. And then when they run outta juice, they come up, oh, download data, and then charge ’em up and go back down.
Joel Saxum: So that’s so that they used Ocean Infinity, went out for a couple months and mapped a massive portion of the Indian Ocean during that MH three 70 when nobody could find that plane. Yes, yes. So, so they’ve, they took that on. That was one of their big first. Deployments of this swarm technology, and then they’ve been subsequently doing a lot of like surveys on spec because they can do ’em fairly cheap with this.
Joel Saxum: Nah, it’s not cheap , but a lot cheaper than just going out there with one boat and, and trying to survey everything. They’ve done a lot of stuff for governments, looking for planes, looking for shipwrecks and of course mapping for oil and gas, mapping for ports, mapping for other things as well. But yeah, it’s same thing when you go to floaters.
Joel Saxum: You gotta get the same data and you gotta get the same kind of resolution on it. So yeah, you take, you, there’s, there’s ways to do it. Technology’s
Allen Hall: there and have this podcast and we can get ’em on. That would be really a cool interview. Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a lot there I haven’t learned, and I just dunno a lot about it, but it seems like a super complicated task to perform efficiently.
Allen Hall: The area of, oh man, ground we’re talking about is massive. Yeah.
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Allen Hall: I woke up this morning and I noticed that Polytech we’re re recording this on a Thursday, so when you hear this played it, you’ll, it comes out next Wednesday. So this news will be a little behind, but not much. But Polytech had 135 million Euro infusion of cash from Fs and Capital in Ver and Verdine had had already invested into Polytech several years ago, 20 16, 20 18, something like that.
Allen Hall: So both Verdine and Fs and capital are, are eventual capital funds that are in the renewable energy space in, in other areas. At, at the time, when I first heard this morning, it kind of made sense because there’s just been a lot of, of noise about this behind the scenes. I think really since probably last November is.
Allen Hall: Just rumors, you hear things when you’re shaking People’re talking about it. Yeah, so there still has to go through regulatory approval and from just some news articles today, it looks like FSN Capital is gonna own about 40%, which is the minority stake for deans. Must be, I’m assuming it has the 60% share and it’s something close to that, more than 50%.
Allen Hall: So they split the company between these two venture capital funds. and I, I think everybody’s in the same boat right now. It’s smart for Polytech to do this. I think Joel is, is, yeah. The next year or so is gonna be a little bit rough and you need that buffer. Mm-hmm. on a growing business and polytechs are growing business.
Allen Hall: Does, does this make sense to you?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, in the industry, a lot of people know polytech is the people who make the, the shells, right? They make the leading edge protection shells, but that’s. Not just what they do, they do a lot of other things specifically in the lightning protection space. And, and I do a lot of other stuff with, with different r and d and plastics and some innovative items.
Joel Saxum: I, I was surprised to see the 135 million because that’s just a lot of cash. And, and maybe it’s my ignorance of not knowing how big Polytech is and, and every, everything that they do, but. , I would hope that that would help them survive over the next few years if there’s a couple of couple of lean moments.
Joel Saxum: But also for f SN capital and verda, the renewable energy space is a hot space to get into, right? So there’s not, right. It’s not a, there’s not a ton of you know, and there’s not a massive amount of companies that provide aftermarket products for wind turbines. And Polytech is definitely one of those at the, you know, as the market sees them kind of at the top of the heap.
Joel Saxum: So, so kudos to those guys. I think that the, the long haul here for Polytech will, will be a, a lot of growth. I don’t see, I don’t see the, a massive amount of risk in them right now, to be honest with you.
Allen Hall: So do you think they expand operations? They have a place in China, if I remember correctly, and I think one in India if, if I remember all this correctly.
Allen Hall: do, do they start expanding into the US a little bit more than they have? Do they go to South America, hit Brazil a little bit?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, Brazil, of course, Northeast Brazil. Really rough market for l a p. So, or a really good, good market for l lap protection. But I, I, you know, from a personal standpoint, I would love to see more companies having a presence in the, in the wind industry, in the us.
Joel Saxum: I can completely understand that manufacturing may not be in, in the cards, but it would be great to see a, a Polytech office, a poly, some polytech, people of bigger presence over here. I’d love to see some r and d go on over here from them. As you know, as the world knows, the, the US market is large for wind turbines and is growing.
Joel Saxum: Polytech does a lot of stuff for offshore wind. So. , you don’t poised to, to shoot to the moon and offshore wind over here as well. So there’s definitely a huge market for them. And I, I was hoping I, you know, cuz I hearing the whispers behind the, the scenes of what’s going on with Polytech, what’s going on with Polytech.
Joel Saxum: I would’ve loved to have seen some capital groups from over here invest in, in bring up chunk
Allen Hall: of hills. I thought the same thing. Yeah. Joel, I was thinking the same thing this morning. Where are the US investors in this? If there’s a big push for getting into the clean energy, It seems like an
Joel Saxum: choice.
Joel Saxum: You know, I was, so along the same lines, I was speaking with some friends and colleagues in the space as well that have a a really innovative company and they’re based out of Denmark and they’re in the middle of raising some capital. And you know, I kind of asked them like, you know, you guys are a really cool company and you’re doing some great things, but you are a, at the end of the day, you’re a small company in an office In jut.
Joel Saxum: in the middle of Denmark. Like it’s, you don’t have very good visibility. It would be, it would be smart to come over here, send, send the, the investment team over here for a month and do some rounds. Spend a week or two in Boston, come down to Houston, go out to Silicon Valley or, or San Francisco or something of the sort and see what you can find in this side.
Joel Saxum: Because if you can get the big time capital from some players over. that will help you with your exposure over there as well, right? So sure. We, we’ve seen that once, once. And, and this isn’t me trying to be, that, that ignorant, arrogant American, but once some of these companies from that side of the pond come over here and set up a presence, they, they blow up, right?
Joel Saxum: They, they do very well. Right? So, so I, I would love to see more, more investment and, and those kind of things coming from our side. And get a couple of these companies here, or someone, someone start a company in the US that does aftermarket products for Wind. We will put you on the podcast. We’ll support you all the way, make a good product
Joel Saxum: But well,
Allen Hall: yeah, if, let’s, let’s walk through that, Joel, because I, I think you raised a couple of good points here. Mm-hmm. , if you are a, a renewable energy startup, particularly in the wind. Where would you go in America to, to find funding? I, is it just Boston and Houston and Silicon Valley? Is that, is that where you go right now?
Allen Hall: And and are those, are those VC firms that are in those places investing in non-American entities? .
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I mean, so in Boston you have a really good innovation hub, right? You’ve got m i t there, you’ve got some great universities there, but there’s also groups that have started out, like some of ’em have boiled outta those universities, right?
Joel Saxum: But you have like Greentown Labs and, and those other ones there. And I know that Greentown Labs and those entities want to invest, or those groups want to invest into American innovation. I completely understand that. Come over and set up , set up an L l C. Now you’re an American company. Yeah. Is this that easy?
Joel Saxum: You know, the money, the money doesn’t, the money isn’t coming directly from Boston, right? That’s where the groups are. A lot of that money’s coming from New York. A lot of that money’s coming from other places in the world or, but, but the, the people. Doling it out and writing the checks are in those spaces.
Joel Saxum: So there’s a ton of opportunity, you know, now I’m just talking Boston there. Now, if mild stomping grounds in Houston, you have the ION is a great space. There’s Greentown Labs, there’s tx yes, there’s, there’s, there’s TX rx, there’s, there’s a handful. Houston is right now being touted as. They’re like Jane Stricker and their group over there.
Joel Saxum: They’re, they’re being touted as the, the energy transition of the world. It used to be the energy capital of the world still are, but now the energy transition capital of the world. So there’s a lot of money being put into everything and anything renewables there. You have all the big energy companies, all the big oil companies.
Joel Saxum: Rice University has a great booster kind of program going down, the incubator going there. And it’s down there. When you sit in these groups and you give a pi, you go to a pitch competition, the people sitting in the crowd. Aren’t random VCs that you’ve never heard of. It’s Chevron technology ventures and BP ventures and shelve.
Joel Saxum: It’s people with real capital sitting there going, licking their chops, you know what I mean? Because they want the next big thing. So if I was a European company or a startup, the European VC setup just isn’t there right now. Like the, the cash isn’t there. I would be over here looking for money and the first conversation we may be even to have is, Hey, we’re from, , Denmark or Germany, Spain, right?
Joel Saxum: Wherever. What can we do to, cuz a lot of these places they’re gonna wanna invest in the US companies, but some of them won, won’t care either. If you’re a good investment, you’re a good investment, they don’t care. So I, I, I would be over here looking for cash. And, and I guess some of that comes from pragmatic view, but also from a emotional view.
Joel Saxum: I want to see, I wanna see more renewable energy companies and, and energy or companies supporting the energy transit. In the us. I want, I, I’d like to see that.
Allen Hall: Well, when we saw the Erroneus investment recently mm-hmm. , they’re based, they’re, they’re an llc or incorporated, maybe They’re just incorporated in Delaware and I think smart when we Yeah, that was really smart.
Allen Hall: Right. And they had a, I think their mailing address was in Palo Alto or somewhere in California. So
Joel Saxum: the game play some law office. Yeah. You’re smart, right? Yeah. And they got 39 million bucks. They got 39 million. They got so they, they’ve got
Allen Hall: runway. That’s, and that makes a lot of sense. Right? So there are a couple of hurdles you, you would need to do to get access to that money, but I, I think the entry barriers are relatively low.
Allen Hall: And if I was gonna Yeah. Do something like that, who would you call first? I would, I would call Dana’s Cruise and say,
Joel Saxum: yeah, what, what those, what’s the play? What’s the playbook buddy? Right. Yeah. I mean, Alan, you and I can get off this phone call and by before we go to bed tonight, we can have an LLC set up in an office wherever we want in this country.
Joel Saxum: Absolutely. It’s not a problem. And That’ss not just because we’re Americans, it’s because it’s that easy. It’s
Allen Hall: easy. Yeah. Right. It’s a lot easier in the States than I, I’d say most European places. Oh yeah, definitely. And that’s, that’s the beauty of it, right? And yeah, like we’ve said many times on the podcast, there’s 70,000 gonna be close to 200,000 wind tur.
Allen Hall: In America, this is in, this is the place. Brazil obviously gonna be another hotspot. Europe generally, overall, Canada’s, Canada’s
Joel Saxum: blowing gone Canada, I mean, Australia, there’s, there is so many turbines being installed in Alberta and Saskatchewan right now. It’s crazy. And if you’re supporting the market here, you know how easy it’s to do that.
Joel Saxum: It’s just like driving around in Europe, just rip across the border. It’s, we have, we have an agreement that says you can do it. So, Yeah.
Allen Hall: Well, and I think this’s is what, it’s hard for some of these companies that are based in Europe to, to conceive of mm-hmm. , how to make this transition. It’s, it’s a lot, right?
Allen Hall: You, you’re moving 2000 miles away. You could start somewhere
Joel Saxum: easy too. Get, get, get someone you trust and it’s like, get someone you trust in the states and hire them as a BD person or a salesperson, right? And once and one, and once you’ve got that kind of down, then, then it’s like, all right, now we’ve got some trust.
Joel Saxum: We’ve been in the market, we know some things. Then you have that person help you out. We could look at our friends, our friends from Ping. . That’s, that’s what math, that’s what Matthew and, and the crew have done. They’ve, and they’ve done a great job. They’ve gotta, they’ve put a person in Europe, they put a person in, in the state, or two people in the States now and, and some, and some other strategic places.
Joel Saxum: And once you kind of got that set up, then boom, boom, boom, the, the, the, the dominoes start to fall.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And, and I think in the one place where there seems to be activity in this, Way is in Rhode Island, right in Providence, Rhode Island. There is, yeah, a renewable wind, mostly wind energy actually. Mm-hmm. space that’s dedicated.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. to international companies setting up. And getting into the United States that way. So it isn’t, it wouldn’t be like you’re by yourself if you’re from Denmark, you wouldn’t be pretty much, everybody in that space I think is from Denmark . So you get a little bit like
Joel Saxum: home. You can get a rye bread sandwich, open face sandwich at lunch at the at cic Providence
Allen Hall: But those places, if you, if you’re not familiar with them, they would seem completely foreign to. Yeah, why? Why would I think that Ro Rhode Island wouldn’t have anything for me in terms of getting into America, but that tends to be the runway in right now. You
Joel Saxum: know what, you know, and one other thing to mention here too, and this is just from a per, from personal experience.
Joel Saxum: Americans are fairly open with who they do business with. But if you give them an option, they want to do business with Americans. And I know that’s a kind of an odd thing to say, but if you, if you come over here from, you’re a German technology company and you come over here, well, actually let me shift gears.
Joel Saxum: If you come over here and you’re a British company and. You, you walk right in and you, and you do business, how you would do it in, in Britain or in Germany or in Sweden or Denmark or wherever else. Americans at some level will have their hair up a little bit. So my, my, my suggestion is, is if you are one of those companies coming over, finding American that you trust and, and, and use them to, to bring you over because it’s, it, it, it’s easier to open doors.
Allen Hall: I, Joel, that’s really good advice. And I, I know because of some of the feedback we’ve been getting over the last several our months, there’s so many startups in the win space that are listening to this podcast and, and what can we do to help them? This is really good advice. They said, play this back and take our advice and reach out to us especially Joel.
Allen Hall: Yeah. We help has been doing this thing, right? Mm-hmm. , Joel’s been the BD director for Wind Power Lab. A while now. And it, it just knows the ropes and obviously Matthew at Ping. So reach out. We’re here, we’re here to help. Yeah, absolutely. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
Allen Hall: Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, which has exploded. Joel, it has gone big time. Great ,
Joel Saxum: and also I’m part, I read it, sorry, , I do too
Allen Hall: religiously every week.
Allen Hall: I read it every week. So also join Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
