EP80 – Voxeljet Partners with GE; Is The Hiring Process Broken? And, Will Carbon Capture Work?

Employers are struggling to find qualified, motivated workers despite a surplus of them out there, looking for jobs. A recent Harvard study shows that poor job descriptions, coupled with ineffective filtering and AI may be to blame for screening out qualified applicants. GE partners with Voxeljet AG on 3D printing – the binder jetting technique could be a game-changer. Plus, the Ridley undersea drone system being nurtured by ORE Catapult, Vestas factories closing and more.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 

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Transcript: EP80 – Voxeljet Partners with GE; Is The Hiring Process Broken? And, Will Carbon Capture Work?

This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning

protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett.

I’m Allen Hall,

and I’m Rosemary Barnes,

and this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your co-host Dan Blewett on today’s episode. We’ve got a full full docket today.

We’re going to talk about Vestas closing three plants in Europe. Some interesting submersible technology coming out of OarI Catapult. Ridley is hoping to contribute a lot of robotics to submersible and undersea development. So we’ll see what’s going up there.

We’ll talk about GE renewable energy, partnering with Voxel Jet, some really interesting sand casting and 3-D printing stuff going on there. We’ll talk about Chevron and some other shareholder meetings. Their CEO has been talking kind of about their future and it looks like to be in in contrast with what Shell is doing.

So we know a lot of the oil companies are moving into renewables and Chevron has a good view of renewables, which doesn’t sound like they’ll be investing in them. We’ll talk about electric electricity prices climbing rapidly in Europe.

The world’s biggest carbon capture machine now flipped on to Rosemarie’s. Got big things to say about that. We’ll also talk about at the end some big recruiting and job stuff. A really big topic about interviews, the job description process, algorithms filtering, and whether or not employees and wind and other sectors are suffering, because some of it is

maybe the digital hiccups that are going on in hiring right now. So before we get going, I want to remind you, sign up for uptime tech news. You’ll find that in the show notes of this podcast today, whether you’re on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, wherever.

And definitely check out Rosemarie’s Engineering with Rosie YouTube channel, which you’ll also find in this description here today. So, Rosie, let’s get started with you. Vestas is closing three plants in Europe. Is this something that people should be really alarmed about?

Obviously, some jobs are going to be cut, but what does this look like for investors in their future?

Well, yeah, I mean, it’s hard to say what the the business looks like, but I think when companies are deciding where to have their factories and keep their factories, it’s mostly to do with one where their sales pipeline looks like it’s going to be.

And two government incentives for for them to be there. I know usually when you say a new factory announced, it’s not just purely off the strength of the business case. There’s there’s usually some sort of incentive from the local government, either forcing them to be there through having local content requirements or they’re, you know, giving them the

land for free or some tax break or something. So I guess it’s a combination of those things. But if the closing factories seems like we’re probably they’re expecting to sell less less turbines in those areas at least. So that from that point of view, I guess that’s a shame.

Yeah. So it looks like some of the a lot of the blades manufactured in these facilities, there’s one in Germany, one in Spain, one in Denmark that they’re closing. It looks like they’re manufacturing just a limited number of blades for V 117 and V 136 turbines, which are on the smaller end of their platforms.

So it’s not like that. The demand for those platforms are just decreasing. Allan, is that the way you kind of see this?

Yeah, and the demand in the United States has been decreasing for those particular types of turbines for a while. So, you know, we’re all pushing five, six, seven, 12 megawatts as we talk about the eight. And with the offshore effort going on, there’s going to be massive amounts of money needed to to build factories and next to

the shore and to get involved in offshore, because that’s where the next 10, 20 years of revenue is going to come from. So if you have all the facilities on on land somewhere, it just makes them really unusable because of the size of the blades are going to get so big that doesn’t knock be able to move

them around. So you got to get to the coastline. You got to close those factories, hopefully move some of the people, because I’m sure they’re very competent people. Move them to the new factories you’re going to create. I’ll just on the on the shoreline next to those new offshore facilities.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like they’re going to relocate a lot of them. This article from Renu Dabis. Yes. Those are going to try to place people wherever they can. And it seems like it might be a little more of a reorganization than just purely, you know, like it, like like the way you might shutter a factory

and, you know, like the auto industry or something where it just seems like, hey, we’re not doing this anymore. It seems like they’re just doing things a little bit differently. And of these employees will, you know, unfortunately have to be relocated.

But it sounds like a lot of them might keep their jobs or just start to find a new niche within within the company. So moving on, O’Ree Catapult is they’re always doing cool stuff. Right. And one of the companies that they’re helping is Redly Submersible Platform that’s going to help transport larger robots and remote operated vehicles to

offshore sites. And then it sounds like there’s a I don’t know, a pretty interesting platform here where these submersibles are going to sort of. I don’t know, it sounds like there’s a lot still here in development. Alan, what did you take from this technology that they’re announcing what it is?

It’s like a small submarine. That’s essentially what it is with its autonomous or remotely piloted. And then inside of the submarine, they have the sort of the smaller drones, submersibles that you would see when you watch an adventure show or watch somebody out, a Jacques Cousteau kind of thing, where they throw this drone over the side of

the boat and it goes down to the bottom of the sea and it finds an old shipwreck or something like that. So what they’ve done is they’ve made a submarine with a door on it and then inside it, I don’t think it’s a little submersible drones and the drones are connected to the the little submarine.

So the the benefit of this is that you just don’t have any people involved. And so the most expensive part of any sort of offshore offshore adventure is the people, because you got to feed him. You got a housum, you got to provide medical care, the whole thing.

Right. So it gets really expensive. So if you can cut all the people out and make it autonomous, then it drives down the costs and then that explodes the possibilities and possibilities. But did you notice that they’re also talking about seafloor mining at the same time as one of the opportunities they have is that so much of

the seafloor has been unsearched that well, now you could search it, you know, you could find all treasure down there. Right, or pirate treasure at the bottom of the ocean. So it’s a pretty cool technology.

Yeah. And that’s and so the parent company, so really is the platform Honu works with H.O. and w o r x at the end. Yeah, it sounds like they’ve they’ve got their eye on a lot of different potential solutions and things they can do with the bomb, the ocean, the under the subsea mining seems really complicated.

There’s another I’m not going to recall the name at this moment, but there’s another company that was involved in a Spaak going IPO or, you know, going to the initial public offering through ESPEC and trying to do subsea mining.

And once the SPAC merger completed, a lot of the shareholders pulled out and didn’t, you know, eventually give their money to the company. So they ended up having a tiny fraction of what they were hoping to to raise.

And basically they’re saying they needed billions and billions of dollars to do the subs, the sea mining the way they intended and was going to be quite a long road to profitability. So I’ll be curious if they have a different sort of vision, because I think this vision was something like 13 billion over five years before they’re

going to start being profitable. And again, don’t quote me on that, because it’s that article kind of unrelated to here. And and, you know, our conversation always goes different ways where here it is relevant. Again, I didn’t have all the details ready, but yeah.

Subsea mining, I mean, rosea, where are your thoughts? I know you’ve talked a lot about lithium mining and some of the other mining related topics in in energy. Is subsea mining something that we can really expect in the near future?

I actually I did not even think about subsea mining as a thing until you mentioned just then. My initial reaction was really hard hit, really hard also. Like, isn’t there like, you know, one place on the planet that we can just leave the way it is?

And I guess. Yeah, I guess. Of course, of course not. Human nature is what it is. I mean, it’s cool if they’re going around to bring up pirate booty that’s been lost, you know, that’s cool. Yeah, I think I did do a video recently on on lithium mining.

And one of the points in, you know, because people wonder, are we going to run out of lithium? And my guest, Alex Grant, he mentioned that, you know, even if you just look at the amount of lithium in the oceans as still, you know, millions of times what we’re expected to ever need annually.

But I know a lot of people interpret that as like, you know, as soon we’re going to be getting out lithium from the ocean. And I don’t I don’t think that it’s going to be certain. I think, you know, maybe in a thousand years, if we’re still here on the planet, then, you know, we might be at

the point where we need to do that. So, yeah, maybe maybe that’s the same for ocean mining in general. But I guess it just depends what’s what’s there and how valuable it is. I mean, I know when I talk to people working in the space industry, they say asteroid mining is is definitely going to be a thing

in the you know, in the next few Deckert next few decades. So I guess the reality is, if there’s something valuable and we can access it in an economic way, then then someone’s going to say, yeah, now that I’m aware of the possibility of ocean floor mining, I’m sure it will happen in the next ten years.

Well, it just sounds really complicated. And this is not the biggest we’re not going to get off topic too much. But that just seems like a really I mean, Alan, you talk about hard engineering challenges to solve No.

One, you can’t breathe underwater. So everything’s got to be in a bubble or in a sea lab or in a submarine or it’s all got to be autonomous. I mean, that seems like I mean, obviously, we’ve been drilling for oil in offshore platforms for a long time.

But anyway, not a mining expert, but some pretty cool technology coming out of Iraq or or you caterwaul, not surprisingly. So moving on to G.E. and Voxel Jet, Alan, we’re going to need you to go ahead and explain some of those 3-D printing stuff as it pertains to sand, because this technology is not as cut and dry

like they’re talking about 3-D printing and their binder jetting technology and what is voxel jets’ binder jetting technology and how would this help GE?

So they’re making a casting mold and or sand sand mold to pour meddle into to make a casting of a particular shape they need for a wind turbine part. And a lot of times, some of your some of the cheapest ways to do that is to make a sand mold because the sands reusable and you just pour

the hot molten steel into the shape and the steel fills it up. And when it cools, you break it apart and reuse the sand and do it again. And you have a, you know, usable part. The problem was, Sam cast sand casting is it’s kind of crude on the final shape at times.

So depending on how that sand set up and and yes, just some of the details about it, you’re you’re casting can have really clean features or can be kind of muddled. And the problem with a casting this kind of model is you end up doing a bunch of machining on it and it just takes more time.

So if you can get a really clean part out of a cast of a casting, that’s just a huge cost saver overall. So 3D printing a mold makes a lot of sense. You know, we’ve talked about different ways of making tooling and that sort of thing with 3D printing.

The idea of using sand has never popped up, but now that now that they brought it up, it makes total sense. Why else we wouldn’t do it any other way? It’s just the most efficient way to do it.

So, you know, GE has been really fishing around. If you’ve noticed the last couple of years, they’ve been picking technology like the recycling of the blades and someone like the two piece blades and the concrete towers of Kobad.

So they’re picking technology up as they see it and making it part of their more of their integral business, basically taking players, technology players out of the marketplace, which is a really interesting play because it’s going to change the way that the competition has to respond to that.

Right. So the technology is cool. But I think on the broader perspective, this is more of a sort of a business play for GE.

Well, it says some of these parts, these metal parts that can be used for Hally attacks, nozzles, can weigh up to over 60 metric tons and take 10 weeks to mold and produce. And this could cut them down to maybe just two weeks time.

In addition, they make a claim that it can reduce the carbon footprint. Rosemary, what do you think about 3-D printing and with regards to that claim, with reducing carbon footprint?

Oh, well, yeah. I don’t know if that’s the first benefit that jumps out at me. To me, it sounds like the exciting thing is the reduction in the lead time and ability to make changes, because, you know, if you’re making molds in the old traditional way, that was a really expensive piece of kit.

And you don’t make it until you have, you know, frozen your design and then you don’t make a change unless you absolutely have to, you know, like it just just simply doesn’t work. So I think that’s the coolest part, is that it adds some flexibility.

And we say the same thing with, you know, that changing the way they make Blythe’s molds for the wind turbine blades as well, and the 3D printing a lot of the actual metal components as well. All of that.

I mean, there’s benefits in terms of the simple, the simplicity and the cost of the parts. And usually if you know you’re saving and materials and you’re saving emissions and energy and energy use as well. So it’s all related.

But to me, as a development engineer, the most exciting thing is the flexibility and the design process to be able to order later and change change of design if you have a good reason to do so.

I think that’s cool. Yeah, and it seems like the the push to 3D printing is also going to make it a lot more a lot modulars the word, but just easily transportable relocatable. They can do this closer to the offshore ports or at the port or out even on a boat, potentially.

Now, they would mold and cast, you know, metal parts on a boat. I’m sure they wouldn’t. But you never know if we get to that point where he was travel offshore, a little community, you know, in the center of a wind farm where it’s like, hey, this was going to do a lot of stuff out here and

Castparts and do all that and then just, you know, dismantle it when the wind farm is done. You never know where things could go. I know if you’re you can set up shop, you know, at the port on the shore, why couldn’t you maybe set up a temporary shop for a year, you know, offshore, closer to all

the turbines? You never know. Right. So Allergist’s looks like that’s kind of like the way things are going. And this might just be one piece to keep exploring and making things just easier to get offshore farms that done.

Yeah.

You know, one of the things that I’ve been watching is the number of offshore rigs that are. They’re in development to construct wind turbines with and those offshore ships are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger because they’re trying to do so much out on the ocean, which is, again, it’s cheaper to do it that way.

I mean, you’re as an employee, you’re out on this Morde ship out in the middle of the ocean. But those ships are enormous. They’re just enormous. So you could start thinking about maybe we can pour metal, maybe we can lay up composites, maybe we can do some of the machining and whatnot.

Right, right there on site, because it changes the whole way you do. And think about creating a wind turbine today, even onshore, we don’t have that capability. Really what we’re playing around with it now, just now. But we’re going to make 10 megawatt plus generators out, you know, offshore a couple of kilometers.

It may make sense to to actually put a factory in the ocean. That kind of makes sense.

Rosemary, this is this is in our future. Give us a prediction. What do you

think? Like what a while to remember that that movie. I remember the time it was the most expensive one ever made, and it was a huge flop. I was a teenager and I saw it as a terrible, terrible movie.

But, yeah, you know, I think the way that sea level rises is going, then maybe that is our future. But I certainly if it was up to me, I wouldn’t choose that I read. Casting something on a moving platform seems very difficult.

And in general, you know, anything that happens offshore is much more expensive and the same thing happening onshore. So, I mean, you’re probably right that it will eventually happen. But I, I don’t I don’t know how I think it be a last resort rather than I can’t imagine saving anyone money in the near in the near term

. I mean, small like maintenance. Yeah, definitely. And also fact that when wind farms go offshore, at the moment, they’re all pretty close to shore. But if that changes a lot, then. Yeah, I can imagine you set up a platform and have, you know, like an offshore oil and gas.

You have some people kind of living out there in shifts. So anyway. And I bet that they’ll have some 3D printers and be doing their their maintenance from from that. That’s that’s probably the next thing to happen. And then.

Yeah, what a world in 50 years or whatever.

Well, yeah. And at the very least, like you said, having the smaller maintenance things, maybe like they have they’re a couple of drones that always live there saying something new to inspect stuff. Hey, does power up the drones or their submersibles?

You know, they have this whole crew of like things they can definitely save money and save time doing that. They just live out there. So, yeah, we’ll have our whole robotic fleet living offshore that way. If they ever turn, you know, Sencion, they’re too far offshore to come and take over the rest of the planet.

Don’t teach them to really be smart enough to find some way. Yeah, don’t seasonless swim. Make sure they broski, they run too much so they can’t swim ashore. So it’s a perfect fail safe. So moving on, Chevron’s CEO has been in the news talking about, you know, their company’s plans for the future.

And one, I don’t know how he said this, maybe, maybe a little tongue in cheek, maybe not. But he basically said, sorry, we’re not going to invest in wind or solar. You know, you can plant trees if you want to contribute to the sort of green energy boom.

Alan, why do you think Chevron is less interested in renewables compared to a company like Shell, which is actively partnering with, you know, on wind and some other projects?

Well, I think it really has to be a business decision whether they can make a return on their investment and they have stockholders to report to. And if they can’t generate enough revenue for the amount of time and energy and cash they would pour into a renewables project, then it doesn’t make any sense for them to do

that. But, you know, that’s that’s where the market’s going to differentiate. You’re going to there’s a lot of risk being played by a lot of companies every single day. Tesla is a good example, and they’re just going massively in one direction.

And pretty much every other automaker is still playing the gasoline game. So it’s a huge risk. Right. And Tesla may fail. You know, the cars start bursting in flames. That company’s gone. Right. And so you’re going to find the marketplace trying to find a wiggle its way down this pathway at some point, if renewables become more profitable

, let’s just say by some miracle, we come up with fusion. I could see a Chevron playing and Fusion totally could. There’s just a lot of a lot of variables here. And it’s it’s OK with me. Right? If Chevron decides to do it and not get involved in renewables and happens to fade away, someone will step in his

place. That’s that’s the way the marketplace is set up. So they made their bed. They’re going to have to live in it. Right.

Well, I’ll read a quote from his interview on CNBC said These are technologies that are relatively mature, referring to when in solar there’s plenty of capital is available, the returns and win in. Solar are actually being bid down, and we’ve concluded that management in our company can’t create value for shareholders by going into wind and solar.

So, Rosemary, obviously, you know, different companies are going to have different perspectives and no one can predict the future. And some of this is definitely true, that it’s getting harder for, you know, OEMs, for example, to make a profit on their wind turbines.

And like like you said, there’s in this race to plant as many of these, you know, wind turbine trees in the ocean forest. Right. It’s becoming everyone trying to beat them down, like you said. So do you think there’s just going to is there ever going to be a consensus among oil companies that they’re all going to

rush in, or is it still going to be kind of, hey, we’re just not sure yet? Well, I

don’t see a lot of parallels between oil and gas company and wind farm, our solar farm developers. So I, I don’t necessarily disagree. I probably am more surprised by the phrasing that’s like, you know, go plant trees if you want a clean energy future, because to me, it just seems like this that isn’t the right part of

the clean energy transition for them to participate in. But I think most fossil fuel companies have recognized that if they want to be sure of having a profitable business in 10, 20, 30 years time, then they are going to have to participate in the clean energy transition, because, I mean, the world is basically committed to going all

the way to to zero. Right. So I think something like eight percent of fossil fuels used are for non combusting purposes. So, you know, I think it’s going to where 92 percent reduction in the business or are they going to find something to move into?

And I think that’s a big reason why so many fossil fuel companies are excited about hydrogen. Leaving aside, you know, the conspiracy kind of perspective, which I don’t think is that farfetched, that, you know, they’re just trying to use it as a distraction.

But assuming that we can get to a truly green hydrogen product, how it is so much more similar to the kinds of business that these companies are used to dealing with. I can see that they would be the right people to make that happen.

Whereas with solar and wind, it’s I mean, it’s energy, but it’s it’s not at all the same to build a wind farm and operate it as it is to, you know, extract a bunch of fossil fuels out of the ground and move it around and sell it.

They’re just two totally different things. So, yeah, to me, that that’s that’s what makes sense. And then the other phrasing of it is probably just to, you know, to generate headlines and keep a certain portion of their shareholders happy.

Yeah. And of course, Chevron has some rocky times ahead. The a coalition of green groups has filed an FTC complaint against them. And the House Oversight Committee is calling Chevron and some other oil companies to to testify before Congress about how the oil industry has spread misinformation about climate change.

So, yeah, we’ll see how this tune they’ve been singing, how that continues to work out for them, because there’s going to probably be some very contentious questioning at that that oversight committee meeting. So moving on. Speaking of pricing, electricity has really shot up over in Europe.

Looks like, you know, the cost per megawatt hour for natural the natural gas benchmark has cleared 70 euros per megawatt hour or just a really sharp spike in the last, I don’t know, six months or so. Alan, what do you what do you how do you explain this rise in electricity prices?

Well, it sounds like it’s a coupling of sort of two things. One, renewable production is down. The average wind speed in Europe has been lower this year. And for whatever reason, I think they’re still trying to figure out why that is.

Then the carbon tax issue where Europe is tried in the European governments are placing taxes on carbon creation. And so it creates a sort of negative marketplace where to fill that in, you’re going to use natural gas. That’s something you can’t do.

So if your renewable renewables production is down, coal plants are offline, you’re not typically burning oil in Europe. So what’s left is natural gas. And if you’re Chevron, you’re not an idiot and you realize that the marketplace is ripe for the picking.

So you start raising natural gas prices because you can and it ends up being sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy created by the idea that there are certain countries in Europe that are particularly driving this. I think Germany being one of them that are creating this situation.

Well, it’s settle out. I think Rosemarie’s is the big question is, is this a temporary thing or is this a more long term issue they’re going to have?

Rosemary, where do you fall on this issue?

Yeah, so I think I mean, all of those issues are a factor. And I read a. So that they had a particularly cold winter last winter, which led to, you know, reduced reserves of of gas. And I mean, if you look at the ice and LinkedIn, several people posting graphs of the natural gas price in it.

You know, it’s not a small small rise in prices. It’s going,

you know, very

low. Yeah. So I think to me, it kind of highlights the fact that there’s no energy system that just kind of chug that, just chug away, you know, without any kind of shocks. You’ve got to plan for unexpected things to happen, whether it’s, you know, the the Texas phrase, whether it’s a winter with or a whole year

with low wind speeds, whether it’s some political disturbance. I, I wonder if, you know, with as we move to more variable renewables, no one ever thought that we could, you know, just settle and forget that that’s the biggest thing that everyone’s thinking about.

Well, what happens in these extreme situations? And I think that this this issue just highlights the fact that no matter what your energy mix is, you still have to plan for extreme situations and have, you know, security needs to be planned for it.

It doesn’t just happen by accident.

And Dan, does this sort of tie into the closing of a lot of the nuclear plants in Europe that that has been a big driver? You’re taking a lot of essentially steady energy production offline. They have a rationale of why they’re doing it.

But if you’re taking a very knowing 24 hour a day, 365 energy source off the grid, you got to replace it with something. And renewables hasn’t been able to replace that yet. And the same same thing that’s happening in Europe, that’s happening in the United States.

Also, by the way, the state of New York is closing down a nuclear facility five or six years early because the now ousted governor decided they was going to close it. No other rationale besides political same things happen in in California where they’re trying to close a nuclear facility.

I can kind of understand the earthquake situation in California a little bit better than the one in New York, but the one in New York Power’s New York City. So is it is it making is it a political thing or is it Brout, you know, providing energy for your citizens?

It seems like there’s there’s got to be some sort of middle ground here. And Europe’s some parts of Europe are paying the price right now for the political decisions that are made a couple of years ago.

Yeah, well, you wonder because I think part of your point is that if you remove one source now, you’re more relying on to. Right. And then you can write have a you have a very skewed picture of supply and demand when you go from three sources or five sources down to just one or two.

Right. And then one of those could be subject to, like you said, a loss of reserves and then prices could spike. So I guess I’ll throw back a question to either of you, which is, is there like an ideal like percentage?

I mean, in a perfect world, is it 20 percent solar or a 20 percent wind? 20 percent. You know, A, B and C. I mean, do you always need to have your bets hedged in that sense so that if the wind goes off, the solar still cooking?

Or can can you ever be like safely 50/50 solar and wind? I mean, Rosemary, I’m sure you’ve thought a lot about these different sources. I mean,

how how

sort of how variable do the sources of energy need to be for us to be sort of like stable on price and and source?

One of the really exciting things to me, anyway, about the energy transition is that so local like it really depends. I mean, in Australia, we will have a much easier time relying. You know, we’ll get a much bigger proportion of just purely wind and solar, because it’s it’s really rare that you see a long period without sun

grass, you know, all of Australia. And the same with with wind, you know, like we might we might get a week where you don’t have a lot of renewables, but in northern Europe, where they have the winter with no barely any sun.

And then you can get a low wind, period. You know, they’ve got a much bigger challenge. So I think in some countries, you know, like Iceland and New Zealand, Norway, countries that have naturally a lot of hydro or geothermal, they’re the ones who, you know, had very clean electricity grids way before it was trendy or anything to

do with the environment just because they had this, you know, reliable, cheap source of energy on tap. So where you’ve got a lot of that sort of resource, then, yeah, you can definitely get 100 percent renewables without too much trouble.

But yeah, and then I think a country like Australia will be, you know, the next kind of category where we can get most of the way there with wind and solar. Probably California would be similar, I would guess.

And then, you know, you kind of just move harder and harder. And that’s where you start to see people panicking about seasonal storage that, you know, especially in northern Europe. Like what are we going to do in in the winter times?

So, yeah, there’s a. A really wide range of answers to your question.

Well, do do kangaroos like running on hamster wheels? Because I feel like there’s a big untapped resource there. Can you make

burn all strategy to base it in some energy?

Well, maybe like it’s a sort of trampoline system that harnesses, you know, the return energy. They’re they’re quite good jumpers.

But I do think kangaroos have a big, big part to play, though, because, you know, people are worried about emissions from agriculture and kangaroos are very low emissions type of animal. So, you know, a lot of people stopped from Bombay for pork to kangaroos.

And that would yeah, that would be a good chunk of the kangaroos. There are so many kangaroos. You didn’t you do not you do not need to worry about about the kangaroos and so many more because we, you know, cleared forests and put farmland in.

They get killed anyway because there’s just populations, boom, because of what we’ve done to the natural landscape. So. Yeah. Don’t don’t stress about the kangaroos. They’re doing fine.

OK. All right. Well, the kangaroos. OK, you are a kangaroo expert, so I’ll take your word for it.

But yeah, they’re like everywhere else.

They’re like this magical, just cool creature that they grew up close.

They are amazing. Awesome.

Appreciate what you have here. Jumping friends.

All right. All right.

So moving on, the world’s biggest carbon capture machine is now chugging along. Rosie, tell us about when we can expect to be at zero atmospheric carbon.

Well, I don’t think we would like to go to zero. Atmospheric carbon does stop. You’ll get you’ll get people putting putting comments on a YouTube video. If you say that. I already get quite a lot about people wondering what the ideal level of CO2 is.

But I do think that negative emissions through something like direct air capture also, you know, the bio energy equivalent Becs Bioenergy with carbon capture, I think that’s definitely going to play a big part. But there’s a difference between playing a big part and being a silver bullet.

You know, I had a friend of mine did crunched some numbers on on LinkedIn. And if we were to just keep on generating electricity in the way that we do and then sucking it out of air, we would need very similar amount of energy to power the direct air capture to capture the emissions from the electricity.

So, you know, it’s kind of like it makes the joke, you know, is this what we meant by the circular economy? So it’s so energy intensive, it doesn’t scale that well. You need to move 6500 tons of air to remove one tonne of carbon dioxide.

So this is not going to enable us to keep doing things as we have been doing them. So you need to kind of keep it in perspective. I think when you’re thinking about this as a cool technology, it’s going to remove, you know, carbon from the atmosphere and it can and will.

But it’s like the hardest way. While we’ve still got emissions reduction to do, then that is just by far the cheapest, most effective fast as just best way to do it. So, yeah, I guess that’s my my contribution to the you know, Catal, your enthusiasm.

It’s not it’s not going to do what the headlines say it’s going to do.

OK, well, for a little more info for all of you, they’re listening. Clim Works is the startup that owns this plant. And the plant itself is known as Awka. And they’re saying that it can draw out emissions equivalent to about almost 900 cars.

So not a lot of cars. But again, this is a starting point here. And a lot of these technologies, like we talk about wind turbines from 20 years ago, they had a paltry amount of power production compared to today.

So, Alan, is this one that’s going to just continue to scale and scale and this is just the one the first headline making versions that is going to be, you know, in 10 years. We look back and laugh at how small this is and how far we’ve come.

Well, I

think you’ve got to start somewhere, right? And there’s there’s needs to get the technology in service so we can understand what its drawbacks are and how much energy it’s using and how effective it is. And where are the maintenance tasks and what’s the overall cost of the system is so within we can figure out what the next

generation looks like. And, you know, Elon Musk and a group of investors out in California have decided that this is a priority for them. So like an X Prize event where the carbon capture is going to be a big push in terms of future investment.

So if you put cash out there and they’re not talking about, well, billions of dollars for any particular company, that it’ll spur technology, that’s the way that you grow it. Right. If if if you have a great idea and you can put it to work and someone’s going to pay you to do that, it’s going to come

to market faster, which is what this investment group is talking about. Like let’s. Figure out what the technologies are and figure out which ones work. I think it’s a good way to go about it, right? I think the way that we’ve been kind of going about is having meetings in Paris, France or wherever else these these U.N.

bodies meet and deciding that this is not good or this is good and this is direction to go. That’s not the way humans have evolved at all in anything technology, big, large committees and don’t make good decisions. So I’m willing to let this ride a little bit longer on carbon capture to see where it goes, because there

is there are places where there’s too much energy being generated. Right. And there’s too much energy being generated. If we dump it into carbon capture where we have too much energy. That’s not a bad thing. Maybe that’s part of the solution.

One thing about direct air capture is that it can’t work without value for its product, which is either CO2. So at the moment, we say, what’s the other one called, as I should have written it down. But, you know, there’s two different direct that capture carbon engineering.

I think it’s called the other one. And the whole business case relies on them selling that CO2, which is mostly going to enhanced oil recovery. So, you know, it releases more emissions into the air. So if there was, you know, a real international trading in carbon removal, then they would have a value for the product from that

. But we don’t have that yet. So I think, like, why would you even if you had excess energy, why would you spend the extra money to suck, to buy the equipment, to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere?

At the moment, there is no reason for a company to do that. So I think that that is, you know, something that a committee needs to get together and, you know, set up the the marketplace for this solution to have a place.

Otherwise, I just can’t see how how it’s going to like why anyone would do it.

So you’re saying someone needs to buy the the thing they removed from the air they need to buy the CO2? Or is it is there some other form that can process it into to make it a you a salable or sellable commodity?

Yeah. That enhanced oil recovery for beverages, for, you know, meat industry uses it. But all of these things mean that the carbon dioxide just goes back into the atmosphere. So if we want to be able to, you know, remove it from the atmosphere and store it forever, I mean, unless it’s all just people that are altruistically doing

this or they want the good PR or something, I do think we’re just we’re missing a step for this to work as a as a political and a market thing that needs to happen before we could say people, you know, use innovation to to solve this problem.

So, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a.. Alan is no. Normally not so excited about carbon taxes or carbon prices. But don’t you think that that’s needed for this, too? Like why what how would it ever roll out if it’s not via that kind of mechanism?

Well, creating market distortion doesn’t ever create economies that make sense. Right. The economies are based on a false bottom, and those historically have failed eventually. And there’s many cases of this over time. And I think the question right now is how much carbon capture do you do you need to sort of stabilize temperatures?

What does that mean and what is the economic consequence of doing it versus not doing it? Those those are tougher questions to answer, because you have to look at everything in a broader perspective, if I’ll give you a good example, because we’re were talking about money here.

Right. I think the US government spent about two trillion in Afghanistan, roughly. I think you spent somewhere around that in Iraq, in the Middle East. Now, you can agree or disagree whether we need it to be there or not.

But there’s a lot of cash in some of these countries like the United States and China, for that matter. There’s a lot of governmental cash, evidentally that can be expended in particular efforts. If if America thought this was a serious enough adventure, they’d find a way to do it.

I don’t think you have to create a false marketplace for it as much as create a create a system in which money can be made and it’ll happen.

So you think that a country would say, you know, to meet our net zero target, we need to remove this much. So we’re going to pay pay the company to remove that. Is that that how the the money got to change hands, right?

Yeah. Right. So OK. OK, so let’s just say Europe has this created this tax carbon tax environment. Let’s just say something. The United States gets smart and says, hey, France, you’re not meeting your goals. America is meeting its goals.

Right. They are. America has exceeded its goals. So we’re going to make this carbon capture system you pay us. There you go. Right. France would pay America to take carbon now. They are so they could keep with the existing system because it may be cheaper for them to do that.

There’s a marketplace, but I think you’re talking about larger. You’re not talking about even companies the size of Tesla. You’re talking about countries now going after this. There is I think if you let investors alone long enough, they’re going to figure out what that marketplace is and exploit it.

We just have made it very uneven and treacherous to get into that marketplace, and that’s slowing down the progress. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of similarities and a lot of different marketplaces. But I think in this one, it gets really distorted because you never sure where it’s going at any particular time.

And if I’m if I have this great new technology and any renewable, I don’t know what to do with it, because if I’m a company like Vestas and Vestas is pushing heavily into renewables. Right. America tomorrow could stop offshore wind tomorrow.

Right. And those kind of marketplace fluctuations make it unstable for investors, which is why renewable companies have hard times with investment. It’s too volatile still.

All right. So I’m sure we’ll we’ll come back. And I mean, this issue of carbon capture and, you know, our our climate is going to be a recurring one on the show. So more to come on this. But I want to move us to our final topic today, which is, you know, what’s been called the great resignation

all over the world with employers struggling to find employees. And so specifically here today, there’s been some interesting research from Harvard University and others showing bias in algorithms for hiring candidates. Also terrible job descriptions that are inaccurately describing job.

So essentially, many potential employees who would be, you know, desirable candidates for a job are getting screened out, filtered out by algorithms or just discouraged from applying altogether by poor job descriptions. And of course, one of the growing things today is in trying to find, you know, more equality here in the U.S., a lot of people are

challenging. Why does this job need a college degree? What does a college degree? How does it enhance this person’s qualification for doing this job or that job? Or is it just this old tape measure, this old, you know, yardstick with which to just generically measure employee without really getting down to the specifics of the job?

So, Rosemary, I know you have some quite a bit to say on this issue. What what do you find so problematic right now about the hiring system and some of these job description issues, an algorithm and filtering issues?

Yeah, so there’s a few aspects to it. And I think the first thing to talk about is the reason why we have all this automation and hiring. And I think it’s got a lot to do with the fact, you know, now that you apply for jobs online, it’s very easy to just apply for a hundred jobs where

you would have in the past only applied for one or two. And so I know that when you list a job, you do get way more applications than you used to. And so you’re trying to find some way to screen them.

And then I think that the challenge for candidates is is twofold. First, that people generally write pretty lazy job descriptions that often, you know, describing just kind of what the last person was like or just adding more and more criteria to hope to get better people.

So you end up with this, you know, long, long list of things that may or may not be that relevant to the job. And then secondly, when they’re automatically screened, you don’t have the possibility to say, oh, OK, they don’t have, you know, floor boffing experience.

But now that I think about it, I don’t really care about that. So it’s kind of a combination of of all those things together, I think.

Yeah. And Alan, you’ve talked about this. I mean, as an engineer, you said numerous times and across both of our podcast that you learn the vast majority of your job on the job, like you learn a lot of the basics and the foundation, of course, both of your engineers.

So you both know this, but I mean, it’s still the case that employers need to be prepared to train people. Right. And to get them to fit into this exact box. Seems kind of ridiculous.

Yeah, I think there was a place and time in America with that that was happening where there was a an apprenticeship type program. And I know a lot of people over in Europe went through that program. If they’re older, quote unquote.

Engineers went through something very similar to that. I know Australia the same thing. And as you know, the universities have gotten paid for by by by governments has been more of a push on on having college degrees. But there is a lot to be learned on the job.

And I think that’s really key to really future growth is what you learned in that previous position and what you can bring to the next job. I think the the the the problem has been in the job market is trying to and because of job markets, more mobile people used to stay at a.

Job, 20 years, 25 years, my father totally did that, people his age did that. People my age maybe stay at a job six, seven years. I think younger people probably are there three years. Yeah. Right. So there’s this constant churn now for looking for new employees and left up to anybody.

It’s not going to be as efficient as it probably should be for the growth of the corporation or for the benefit of the corporation or the benefit of the employee. It’s just this can be very hard to make that an inefficient system, I think.

I think that we need to step in and help because, you know, there’s way too many applications for jobs now for humans to deal with. But I think that the behind the eye tools aren’t really doing what we need them to do yet.

So. I mean, I don’t even know if it really is. I if you just got a checklist of keywords and you you’re looking looking for them in a. I mean, that’s that’s that’s not really I. But, you know, it’s very easy to say, oh, I need somebody that can use answers.

I need somebody that has experience with I don’t know whatever software when that’s not what you need. You need somebody that has the mental capacity to learn that quickly, because, you know, it takes a few days to to change from one software over to another one to, you know, maybe a few months to get fully up to

speed. And it’s the same with, you know, changing industry. What I found in my own personal job search history, I really wanted to move into, you know, a different part of the energy transition by everybody’s asking, you know, if you want to work in automotive industry, everyone wants you to have 15 years of automotive experience.

And I think that that’s one of the biggest problems with this, you know, push for the AI is that it really kind of funnels people into very, you know, specific kinds of people that they’re going to get for the jobs.

That’s it’s really reducing diversity, not just in the obvious ways where you have, you know, biased AI algorithms that are, you know, learning to roll out women for technical jobs. But you also say this lack of diversity from people from different industries coming together, and you just you need that so much in innovation.

You need people that have a really broad, diverse background that, you know, come from different countries. They’ve been involved in different industries, different types of engineering, different types of university systems. All that helps to get really creative solutions.

And I, I worry that, you know, that’s a big problem with this system, that you just kind of you know, exactly what you’re looking for before you get started. And you can’t bring any exciting new ways of thinking to the mix.

Yeah, and that’s one of the problems with A.I., is that if you train because like you said, A.I. is not just using a keyword search and just checking our boxes. What you use AI for is to say try to teach the A.I. to learn what is a great candidate to work at software company Y.

Right. But the problem that they run into is that in an already male, specifically white male dominated industry in AI algorithm is going to pick up on that and are going to say, oh, it seems like being a white male is is necessary to be, you know, a software engineer or, you know, a technician or an engineer

or whatever. Right. And so then they start to select for that same trait because. Hey, guys, aren’t doing this with any knowledge of, you know, equity or anything like that, so they’re just trying to say what are the salient traits that I can find from a data set?

And then if this seems like what a good candidate is, then they try to look for ones that seem similar to it. And that can be a problematic thing as well.

I don’t think it’s so much an A.I. issue as is a legal issue for a lot of large corporations. You don’t really want to have individual people making decisions on who you’re hiring and who you’re not, because I think in general, it exposes you to crazy lawsuits that if there are, you hire three females in a day

and no males in a day. Just generically speaking, there’s the male think he’s been excluded for some particular reason, that there are some selective bias going on. So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to remove the selective bias out of the system.

The question is, do you have something to replace it with? And I think the answer is no, you don’t, because, one, I think it’s a very complicated problem to start with. You’re trying to identify key human issues or characteristics, but you’re not actually measuring them.

Right. Conscientiousness would be a key indicator for a good employee, I think. Well, how do you measure that on a resume? Well, you don’t write IQ. Oh, come

on. The 46, the 46 to ninety two conscientiousness skill. Well known, well known. A lot of your homework. Do your homework.

Well, let’s let’s look at it in the sports arena for a minute. Right. In sports and in the sports arena, they used to and I think they still do give apto sort of aptitude tests. Like do you work with other people very well at the San Francisco 49ers used to do that back in the 80s.

I think they were the first ones to do that gives psychology tests to their future. Employees, players and businesses have been excluded from doing that for a long time. They can’t give an IQ test. They can’t. There’s a lot of things you can’t do and try to to to find an employee.

And I think that is sort of makes it very hard for an employer to go out and find quality employees, because I think at a Fortune 500 company, they are looking for certain demographics. There’s no doubt about it.

And there are certain demographics that they are trying to promote to get into their company. And if you happen to fit that key characteristic, they want you there. I think the question is, is what does everybody else do right now?

Everybody else is still stuck in trying to do the best they can with their sort of their hands tied and trying to find a good employee. And and Roseberry, I don’t know what it’s like in Australia, but I’m curious to hear, do you have those sort of same limitations on finding employees over there?

I mean, it’s been a while since I was applying for jobs in Australia, actually working for another company in Australia. So I’m not 100 percent sure that I’m up to date. But no, that didn’t ring a bell to me, actually.

And also, I’ve always wondered, it’s technically illegal to ask certain questions. You know, like, for example, one time early in my career, I was asked if I was planning to have babies soon, because all the female engineers that they hired just went off on maternity leave immediately.

And, you know, that’s illegal. But what am I what am I going to do about it? You know, I but there’s no way that they that I could prove that they didn’t hire me because of all of that.

And also just didn’t really seem like I thought I needed to have something that I needed to be covered in the media and have, you know, follow me around and every other job that I applied for. So I never really I don’t feel like there’s the the laws, but I think it’s so rare that people are actually

, you know, using using those laws. But I know that America is a much more litigious society than Australia. So maybe people are legitimately scared about over there. Whereas in Australia, I think we probably have many of the same laws, but no one really pays them much notice.

I could be totally wrong about that.

And I think one of the things that Rosemary, I think one of the issues about finding a new position or a new job, that sort, is that I don’t think we teach those skills very well. I think in the United States, we don’t teach them hardly at all.

And so your young college graduate, a young high school graduate, is sort of left to their own devices to figure out how to make that happen. And a lot of it is just human interaction, like being presentable, showing up on time, being conscientious.

Right. Doing and saying hello, those kind of simple things. A lot of times we’ll get you a job versus someone who dresses sloppily or who shows up late. And those kind of things drive hiring decisions and in the wind turbine world, as well as any other sort of professional endeavor.

And I think, you know, if if if the United States or and I talk about the United States, if they were if we did a better job of. Resenting people, making people much more grabbable candidate, it’d be easier just to hire random people.

It would. But now we’ve got to try to find this this needle in the haystack thing, because a relatively few people have those skills to be productive in the workplace. And I think companies know that. Amazon knows that.

Right. And Wal-Mart knows that. And so for them, it is like all hire a bunch of people. I’ll see who Whittle’s up to the top and then I’ll grab them for a management position. And that’s the way we’re going to settle it.

A small business can’t do that as well. And it just leads to really weird things like this, which is we’ve created this as quote unquote A.I. system to try to find employees. It doesn’t work very well. Right. Because the other system does not working either.

It’s, you know, which which is the real root of the problem is that the quality of the candidate and the 13 years of schooling that we missed out on, or is it this computer program that’s trying to sort these people out?

Don’t know. Yeah. And this article, which we’ll link to in the description, it’s from Inc.com. And it was it was really interesting, well-written. One of the big, big things we’ve talked about is over prescriptive job descriptions. And so then as you’re scanning through this as a potential employee, like, well, what does it mean to be proficient at

Microsoft Excel? Like I’m pretty good. I can make make a spreadsheet, but I’m not like, you know, you know, top the wizard down the hall who can like, you know, calculate the the diameter of the sun, be an expert as Excel spreadsheet.

Right. So like they you know, but if you are making that job description and you want them to have Excel skills, you’d probably use the word proficient, like you’d want to be proficient. But it’s so vague that it doesn’t have any meaning.

But it has enough meaning to deter people who are like, oh, I’d actually don’t really know much about Excel, whereas they could probably learn it in a four hour online course and be good to go. And they’d otherwise be a really good employee.

So, you know, it’s not like that’s really complicated. I’ve even seen that in the sports world, like baseball has changed so much where there’s a heavy focus on analytics and data. You’ll see baseball coaching positions and like minor league baseball that say you have to have a python experience.

And Python is a coding language. I’ve seen these. And I’m like, yeah, it would be a good fit for your like I’m an extremely smart baseball guy. I mean, that’s I think I am. Yeah, but I don’t know one droplet of Python, but I feel like you’d want me in your organization.

Then you could just teach me that stuff rather than like like how many people in the world know Python and no baseball? Not many. But no, you could teach them that. And that seems like what more of these employers need to do is make these job descriptions a little more simple and less scary and less of a

deterrent. And, of course, you know, not get fed into algorithms or then they screen everybody out and then just be like willing to talk to people and see what skills they do have and see how they can think on their feet and then teach them some of the stuff that, you know, there’s there should still be a

burden on employers to teach your people how to do things. I mean, Rose-Marie working in a blade factory, who could possibly come in with like such that someone so many of those experiences, like laying carbon fiber, really there’s a lot of technical jobs that people who are really smart, competent people wouldn’t come in with those skills yet

if they hadn’t already been doing that. Jobs all you said, it seems like there’s a lot of things. And when and other places that could just be that catch 22, where if you don’t really have the skills, you never get them because no one wants to train you.

Yeah, I think the wind turbine factory is a good example where in general that the not requiring, you know, for the technicians or the manual labor, they’re not actually requiring that experience. Before most of the job ads that I’ve seen, they prefer that you have done a manual job before.

And that’s, you know, kind of the extent of it, because, you know, you open a new factory. People aren’t relocating to get a job as a manual labor in a factory. And if there wasn’t a wind turbine factory that before then, no one has that experience.

So I think they do a pretty good job of, you know, realizing what kind of person. So it’s that kind of work and. Yeah, and just training on the job, I guess. Old school.

Yeah. So we’ll keep following that as well. I mean, I think everyone’s still kind of reeling and figuring out how to keep their companies staffed and growing and changing in this digital world. I mean, the pandemic has shook everything up so much that I guess it’s not surprising that there’s a lot of issues now in various parts

of hiring and, you know, retaining employees. So well, that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of the uptime podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe to uptime check news, which you’ll find in the show notes below, as well as Rosemarie’s channel or Engineering with Rosea, which you’ll find again in the show notes

. She does a great job there on YouTube, so follow up there for more info from her. Thanks again for watching. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, wherever you are. And leave us a review if you’ve been a long time listener of the show.

We greatly appreciate a review on iTunes or even just a comment on. YouTube, you know, it helps the show grow, and we appreciate it. Thanks again for watching or listening, and we will see you here next week. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades.

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