Siemens Energy is in turmoil as warranty claims spiral out of control. Insiders say an internal investigation has been launched into potential wrongdoing, and rumors are swirling about a possible fire sale of the struggling onshore division.
Meanwhile, Equinor is popping champagne bottles to celebrate the grand opening of its futuristic Hywind Tampen floating wind farm. EDP Renewables is bringing the wind power revolution to the American heartland. The company just opened a state-of-the-art training center in Bloomington, Illinois that aims to create an army of 100 wind turbine techs over the next year. But the winds of change are blowing in another direction in Alberta, where Premier Danielle Smith has slammed the brakes on new wind and solar projects. The controversial move has the industry on edge and sets up a showdown with the federal government. At the same time, researchers at NREL and GE are cooking up radical new offshore wind turbine designs using superconducting direct drive generators that could dramatically cut costs. It’s a sneak peek at the floating wind farms of tomorrow! The DOE is betting big on carbon capture, doling out a whopping $1.2 billion in funding. The lion’s share is going to high-profile projects by Occidental and Battelle. But some are questioning whether carbon capture is a smart investment or just an expensive distraction. In wacky wind power news, a Dallas doctor wants to harvest electricity from the gusts generated by jets and propeller planes at the city’s Love Field airport. Is this genius or crazy?
Our Wind Farm of the Week is the just-completed Viking wind project in the gusty Shetland Islands. SSE Renewables finished this 103-turbine wind farm a full 6 months early. Raise your mugs – the winds of Shetland are blowing strong!
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Allen Hall: So college has started in the States, which means I am building IKEA furniture. It seems like IKEA should give you a Swedish citizenship certificate when you complete one of those things. It they are What is with Swedish engineers, are they some sort of state of mask or something? Because there are some installations which.
That can only be done in the most painful positions. It is insanity.
Rosemary Barnes: I actually knew quite a few engineers when I was living in Europe. I, I, I, you would run into engineers at, at parties that were working for IKEA or doing their master’s projects on, you know, simulation. The, you know, they’ve got finite element analysis engineers working for them and, and, and stuff.
Allen Hall: What
Rosemary Barnes: They really are engineered, they spend a lot of effort on those products. Phil, would you agree with that? Now I sound like an ad for ikea, but I, I had never set foot in IKEA before I moved to Denmark. That was the first time that I ever entered in ikea.
Allen Hall: Let’s all try to pronounce Ikea in the way they would pronounce it in Sweden.
And the rosemary has to go last. Phil, give it a shot
Phil Totaro: isn’t it? Ikea, Ikea.
Rosemary Barnes: Rosemary. I just said Ikea. As long as you just don’t say I, you say E. That’s, that’s the only change that I made and that was understood. But I was in Denmark, not Sweden, and it’s not exactly the same. You, they definitely laugh at you if you say, I Ikea, see am part,
Allen Hall: I am part Swede.
You wouldn’t know it. But I am part Swede and I, I was paying attention. I knew that IKEA could not be a Swedish word. So there you go. Ikea is not a Swedish word. It’s an American word. Ikea. I think that’s how it’s pronounced.
Well, Phil Siemens Energy has done another investigation into the Siemens cesa acquisition, and they’re really trying to hone down on what the actual cost is gonna be in the charges. Right? So a few weeks ago, Siemens Energy announced a $2.2 billion in. Charges are 2.2 billion euros in charges including 1.6 billion to address onshore wind problems.
Well, that looks like the 1.6 is actually closer to 4.5 billion euros, so there is a lot of concerning reports coming outta Siemens Energy at the moment. The stock. Has dropped when that announcement came out. I think it’s going to recover, obviously. But there’s just so many variables here and it, if you’re hearing the same reports that I’m hearing, Phil, it sounds like they got an internal audit or an internal committee reviewing the financial status of Siemens cesa and trying to figure out what is going on and to put a number.
What the expenses are gonna be to to, to fix a lot of these Siemens Gamesa issues. Are you hearing the same thing?
Phil Totaro: Yes. So the, the, obviously the bad news is the financial impact keeps Siemens seems to keep getting worse. The good news, I guess, is that they have indicated publicly now that they have a fix.
They’ve identified what the problems are on the manufacturing side of things, and they have a fix for any of the serial defect issues that they have. The problem with that is that I don’t think they fully accounted for any liquidated damages or other associated charges for repairs or replacements that may need to be made.
As a result of having to fix blades in the field that may have been impacted by this serial defect issue with the, the manufacturing. So the, the question is, are we at the end of this, you know, increasing number, you know, is 4.5 billion euros the end, or how much further do we have to go? And frankly, how much more.
Is Siemens energy going to take in, in terms of, you know, a willingness to continue propping up the company? Rumors also abound as to whether or not onshore wind in Siemens, Gamesa, and Siemens energy is, is going to stick around, or if they’re going to just divest it. The question there is who’s buying?
With all that kind of an asset liability on the books. You’ve got a situation where in the past when companies have. Been on the brink of disaster. Somebody comes in and just asset strips. It’s usually not somebody that comes and buys out the entire organization. They’ll just buy the healthy assets that they want to have access to, which opens up the door to some interesting questions because you’ve had recent reports about Chinese OEMs looking at Eastern Europe with a lot more vim and vigor.
You’ve even got some Indian, you know, OEMs that are now making inroads in, you know, in India ramping up and they have ambitions globally. Companies like Suzlon that’s now out of debt. And companies like Adani group that has set up a, both a solar subsidiary and a wind subsidiary. They’re also interested in, in expanding a global footprint.
So, You know, does it make sense for, for any of those companies to step in and you know, dive in on, on an acquisition in part or in whole.
Allen Hall: Well, does it make sense for a sulan to, to move that way, to just, to acquire those assets, those useful assets? Or maybe, maybe it’s a, maybe it’s a play on the aftermarket things on sustaining onshore wind turbines for Siemens cesa that maybe where a lot of good asset lies and.
On full service agreements and those kind of things.
Phil Totaro: And if you recall back to the, the Senvion implosion about five or six years ago, that’s actually what happened with Siemens Gamesa. They came in and they gobbled up all the long-term service contracts for all the se Vion turbines throughout Europe and North and South America, Asia Australia, et cetera.
The reason for that was twofold. A, they wanted the service contracts and the service revenue and also help them expand the multi-brand service capability. But the other thing it did is it gave them the first option to be able to repower those projects with cion turbines utilizing Siemens Gamesa turbines since they had that, that commercial relationship now with the asset owner.
So, This is interesting. I, there’s, I don’t actually know what’s gonna happen as yet. I mean, there’s a lot of discussions that are ongoing at this point. It is too soon to predict what’s the, the real outcome of this is gonna be.
Allen Hall: And I, I’ve heard on the engineering side, particularly in regards to blades, that the preference going forward is to make the one piece blades, rosemary, not the two clamps shells glued together.
Maybe that’s where some of the problems lie, at least, is what it sounds like from what I’m hearing for the field.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, it’s a nice elegant design and the, you know, in theory, the component that you end up with should be more reliable because you cut out a lot of the glue joints, which are, you know, very problematic for most manufacturers to get, you know, consistent.
Gluing, be sure that you’ve got consistent bond in all of the components that are glued together. So it’s definitely a good goal, but you yeah, change over that one risk for another one, which is that yeah, your manufacturing process becomes a lot harder to control. And so I just becomes more, more complicated anyway.
So. Or designing the, designing the component so that it can be manufactured becomes more complicated. And I guess that that’s the, the trade off. That’s why we don’t see exclusively one piece blades because I, well, I, I, I assume that Siemens had a patent on it, but I’d be surprised if they still did because they’ve been making blades like that for a long time.
Yeah. So I mean, if it was just clear that one way was just definitely better than the other, then you’d see everyone doing the same thing by now.
Allen Hall: Well, moving on to happier News Norwegian Energy Company, Equinor and his partners inaugurated, the world’s largest floating offshore, wind farm, high wind tampon.
The 88 megawatt wind farm started operating in 2021. It reached its full output a couple of weeks ago. It’s will supply nearby oil and gas platforms covering about 30% of the annual power needs, and cutting about 200,000 tons of c o two emissions annually. Now, this is really interesting, Phil, because Norway’s involved in this floating offshore project.
And it, it has opened up a, a couple discussions more recently about who’s gonna be the winner in offshore wind and even in onshore wind in the long term. With Norway being one of those potential players, those leaders, and it seems to be based upon the ability of their oil and gas industry to fund large projects much in a similar way, the way China is doing it with their funding.
Really complicated projects. And when they release the, the leash off the, the, the design guys they’re gonna be able to attack the world with these designs. And Equinor obviously is a world leader in offshore wind. It just seems like they’re becoming more and more powerful leveraging the oil and gas cash flow to learn.
Phil Totaro: Exactly. And so there’s, there’s a few different aspects of this, which is very interesting. So, They also released a statement where they indicated that between this high wind tampon project and the original high wind Scotland project that they did a number of years ago, they’ve actually seen a 35% reduction in the cost of energy associated with the new project.
So that underscores how. Much technology is advanced in between, you know, your, your kind of pilot project. Now, a, a small scale you know, low, you can call it low rate production project. However, the challenge here is that floating offshore is still extremely expensive. The good news with that is that e especially compared to any kind of fixed bottom, you know, offshore wind or especially in, in other markets where you, you all might be competing offshore wind against onshore wind as, as a you know, power generation source onshore is always gonna be cheaper.
But this gives them the experience necessary to be able to go take. Their technological expertise that’s been cultivated with Equinor and the Sovereign Wealth Fund in Norway, which as you described, has been, you know, funding a lot of projects. Yes, they still spend a lot of money on oil and gas exploration and whatnot, but the fact that they’re actually using this offshore wind power for those offshore oil drilling and extraction platforms is actually pretty interesting.
There’s been more of those projects proposed in the uk. And this is also something that could influence the outcome of the Gulf of Mexico tender later this month in the United States. So this is a very kind of interesting trend that that’s been kind of emerging here. And, and I think absolutely Equinor is gonna be at the forefront of it.
Allen Hall: Over in the United States. EDP is opening a training facility in Illinois, in Bloomington, Illinois. The home of State Farm Insurance, I think. So e d P has invested about two and a half billion dollars into seven wind farms in Illinois already. They provide power to over 400,000 homes. They chose central Illinois for the training facility due to their longstanding presence in the state.
The facility will train 100 workers per year in small classes of roughly 10 students. The training will be on hand and include activities like scaling ladders and mock rescues. Now, Rosemary, I, when they said mock rescues, I thought of you, you, and some of the mock rescue things you had to do. It’s not easy being a technician and, and it’s, it’s nice to have an another training facility here in the United States or anywhere at this point.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I’m just, I was just laughing at scaling ladders, being on the curriculum. ’cause I, I would hope that most people would, would bring that in as a, you know, preexisting knowledge. Especially if you have the idea that you’re gonna be a wind turbine technician, then you better be able to climb a ladder.
I would suggest. Yeah, I have done, I have done a lot of training in, in rescue. That’s the, the most fun kind of training that I had to do. And depending on where you’re climbing in the world and what company you are going to be on their site of then you have to do more or less training. But there was a few times where I had to do some really advanced stuff, you know, multiple days of cons, confined space training, which includes.
You know, exercises where you’ve gotta crawl through basically a rat, a rat maze that’s just about big enough for you and your oxygen tank on your back, and not much bigger. I. You gotta crawl through that in a, you know, in the dark and in the smoke and that sort of thing. And then another fun one that I did was a couple of days of advanced hub rescue, where you’ve got to rig up all these kind of rope and pulley systems to get your colleague I.
Yeah, re rescue them no matter where they are relative to you. And what kind of equipment around. ’cause you can imagine that, you know, if your colleague has a medical incident and are just, you know, totally unconscious and they weigh, say, you know, a hundred kilos or, or so, it’s not that easy to actually, you know, even if you’ve got you’re working in pairs, so you’ve got somebody there, but it’s not so easy for.
You know, to drag around a body of that size, especially if you have to, you know, get it up yeah. Haul it up into a, a hatch or something like that. So yeah, there’s all sorts of training that you do, and I definitely always saw that as a little bit of a paid holiday from work when I got to go spend a, a week or even two weeks sometimes doing those sorts of trainings.
Allen Hall: Well there, there seems to be an emphasis on training new technicians here in the United States and that, that’s good. That’s a good trend. You know, Ted’s doing it for offshore. Wind applications at the moment, I’ve seen a lot more even from the independent service providers. They’re starting to open some training facilities, so now’s a really good time to be a wind technician.
Nordic has announced that it is won a contract up in Canada to deliver 49 n 1 55 5 x wind turbines for a total of 280 megawatts up in Alberta. Renewable Energy Systems Canada is developing the farm and which will be completed in the first quarter of 2025. The wind farm known as 40 Mile will be a will be Axiona Energia’s largest wind farm in North America, Nordex said so the Spanish or have invaded Canada and are building wind farms and it’s, it comes at a weird time, Phil, where Alberta itself is not super happy about renewable energy.
And Canada is unique in the way it’s constructed, where there’s several provinces that are really independent of the federal. Government and they have internal autonomy. Well, up in Alberta, the premier Danielle Smith has, is saying that the province will never comply with the federal plan to c to phase out carbon emissions from power generation by 2035.
Smith says achieving net zero electricity by 2050 is possible for Alberta, but 2035 is too costly and risky. She’s threatens Alberta will do its own thing if necessary. Now Alberta relies on fossil fuels for about 90% of its electricity. Smith defends the province’s recent pause on new wind and solar projects to review land use issues.
So there’s a big fight going on in Canada, particularly Western Canada, the oil producing region against you know, the, the Prime Minister in Canada on renewable projects where the Alberta has stopped them, which is. Wow, because Nordex is gonna put a farm out there.
Phil Totaro: The good news is that anything that’s already been consented, I think is not gonna be part of this restriction.
The bad news is there’s a significant amount of projects in the pipeline that’s been proposed to Alberta’s independent system operator. That are probably, we’ll see how long the pause button is, is hit for here. It could be six months, it could be longer than that If they decide that you know, this is almost going the way of, of the United States and some of the states and counties and townships these days with saying, Hey, we, you know, we’re making a lot of money off of renewable energy, but we don’t wanna do that anymore.
I, I don’t know what’s, other than oil and gas interests potentially, you know fiddling around in the background. I don’t know what else is really behind this, but it’s, it’s strange timing.
Allen Hall: Well, Canrea, which is the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, is going to hold their big conference in Calgary in October, so that’s gonna be fascinating.
They’re gonna be holding their renewable energy conference in a place that. Doesn’t want renewable energy. So something is just amis here. I’m, I’m not sure if this is just a, a, a federal squabble, a provincial s squabble, or is this really a bigger overall issue? ’cause it, it seems to me like we talked about with Norway and Equinor, if, if you’re a huge oil and gas producer like Alberta is.
Then renewable energy is something you can easily get into because you have the cash flow to do it. Maybe Alberta feels like Ottawa is having too much say and they wanna put it into it. Hey uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine.
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NREL and GE research have been looking at offshore wind turbine drive trains and trying to find drive trains that make sense for floating offshore in terms of keeping the cost down and making it lighter weight and weight’s a big issue there. So as, as the turbine sizes increase, the drive trains are needing to change.
So a couple years ago, it seems like we’re doing a lot of direct drive, drive trains and moving away from the, the gear boxes while we may be going back according to the study. So for 15 to 25 megawatt turbines. Particularly floating ones. NREL is saying, oh, we need a median speed gearbox and a permanent magnet generator because it has a lower cost of energy up to 7% lower than direct drive.
But the, and the bonus there is that you don’t need a lot of fancy magnets that come mainly from China. And it felt, I think that’s where that’s really going here is NREL’s looking at where are they gonna source. Rare earth magnets and realizing China’s not gonna be an option in a couple years. How am I gonna build these floating offshore wind turbines without them being super heavy and, and just making the design intolerable?
Phil Totaro: Yeah. So there’s a couple of things to pay attention to with this. First is, The neo dium is plentiful not only in China, but also in the mines that Australia’s been cultivating with companies like Linus and others. But it’s also the desprosium and turbium. So desprosium and turbium are the other two elements that go into making high grade permanent magnets, particularly for direct drive turbines.
The more you, the bigger you make the turbine, the more you need to potentially narrow the air gap between the rotor and the stator and the you. Basically, the bigger you’re making the turbine, the more you’re gonna have to incorporate sperum and tur in there to maintain your magnetic fluxx on such a high torque machine.
So in order to reduce those critical materials, It makes more sense to introduce the, the gearbox to be able to minimize a lot of the, the critical material usage, particularly that which comes from China. But there’s also a lot of different, you know, architectures that have been investigated.
They’ve also looked at high temperature superconducting which has been kind of on the menu for about 15 years, and nobody’s ever been able to really crack the nut with that one. You know, there were, there were a lot of fascinating outcomes from, from the study. But it, it definitely looks like even, even the, you know, 16 and 18 megawatt offshore turbines that have been proposed in China.
They’re gonna be using a medium speed gearbox as well. So it looks like that’s the direction for, for bigger machines.
Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary, it seems to put Australia in the driver’s seat because that’s where all a lot of the rare earth minerals are gonna come from, including the magnets are gonna come from for a lot of these wind turbines.
Rosemary Barnes: I think the interesting thing about rare Earths is despite the name, they, they’re not actually that rare. The mining isn’t the hard part. You could put a mine in a lot of places and especially like in a lot of mine tailings, there’s you know, rare earth that could be taken out. But the processing is pretty difficult and environmentally problematic.
So I think at the moment, China, I think process is about 80%, or maybe it’s even higher of the world’s rare earths. And that’s not because, not only because they were, you know, incredibly savvy and foresaw that this was going to be, you know, really critical mineral that people would want in a couple of decades.
You know, everybody used to process them in the small amounts that we needed back then. But the environmental destruction, if you wanna do it in a really cheap way, you end up with like radioactive rivers and ponds and stuff, and just ridiculously high cancer rates in the. The villagers that live a around them.
So the challenge is that, you know, assuming that, so we wanna start processing them in places that aren’t China, but we also don’t want to have those sorts of environmental outcomes, then it’s going to cost more, basically. But I mean, I would say that that had to happen eventually. It wasn’t, you know, well the way that we’re doing Rare Earth at the moment, it wasn’t a great deal for the rest of the world that got no security in their supply chains and it wasn’t a great deal for China, especially people that lived around these Processing facilities.
So I think it was gonna have to change eventually anyway. And yeah, I think it rare Earths is just one of many kinds of minerals that are gonna have to be started to be processed in different places. It’s an industry that I’m involved with a little bit in Australia. In the past we’ve mostly just dug stuff off and shifted off and now we want to start, you know, value adding and there’s a lot of benefits to doing it that way.
Allen Hall: Superconductors, you probably have more recent information about it than I do just because you’re making all your YouTube videos, but. Are superconductors within five years, 10 years of being really, you know, high temperature, maybe even room temperatures. Superconductors is, is, is that even a possibility yet?
Rosemary Barnes: People think it is. And most of the major wind turbine by manufacturers do have projects research projects to try and develop superconducting generators. I, I’m not a hundred percent sure how close anybody is getting to major advances, but definitely when I was looking around to move within the industry, Was it like three years ago?
There were, you know, major projects with Serious In Intent that had been going on for some time already. But, you know, I haven’t seen the announcements of turbines being sold with these technologies yet. So I guess it is going slower than they than they expected. And there’s some roadblocks, but yeah, all I can do is kind of, you know, just put the pieces together from what I see as an, an outsider.
I. It’ll get there eventually, I’m sure. But it’s not an easy problem. It’s interesting. You know, I think it’s the whole thing with gear. Yeah. Gearbox or direct drive in wind turbines. It’s such a good case study for the way that different constraints shape design, because the constraints are, are kind of changing.
You, you know, at first it’s like, oh, gearboxes are super unreliable. You know, a couple of decades ago they were unreliable and people wanted to get away from gear boxes just because they were a pain, that component maintaining and getting them them cheap enough. And obviously once, you know, once it’s up in the a wind turbine, you don’t wanna be taking it down for maintenance very often.
And yeah, so that led to some companies trying to get away from direct drive. And then there was also, you know, like you mentioned with the floating offshore, it’s super important how much the everything that’s, you know, kind of up, up the top and up. And then the cell of a wind turbine, it’s weight really matters a lot for offshore.
So so direct drive helps that, but the, you know, the smaller that you want your generator to be, then the. Stronger the magnet that you need, basically. And you want a really, really, really strong magnet to make a, a small generator, but really, really, really strong magnets need rare earths. And so, you know, there’s that trade off.
Now people are like, well actually it would be good if we didn’t need to use so many rare earths. And so, You’re thinking, okay, so it’s not so simple as, we’ve gotta move away from gearboxes. Maybe we should look back into that. Or, you know, or is there some other alternative. And so, you know, that the direction of the design has changed quite a few times as the constraints have changed.
And I just find that quite interesting.
Allen Hall: Well, what’s gonna come first? Fusion. Superconductors
Rosemary Barnes: Superconductors. That’s my, you heard it here first. That’s my hot tip.
Allen Hall: It’s totally fusion. Guys hate to tell you that.
Phil Totaro: Allen, they are already doing a supernode in Ireland and the uk They’re already doing a high temperature superconducting wire project, so I, they are definitely gonna beat fusion and the generators not that far behind.
Allen Hall: Well, we need to take a, a trip to Ireland if that’s the case. I wanna see this. I.
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Allen Hall: Speaking of spending a lot of money, because superconductors are gonna cost a tremendous amount of money. Let’s talk about what the Department of Energy is putting out. The US DOE announced 1.2. Are you ready?
Rosemary? $1.2 billion in funding to develop regional hubs for capturing and storing carbon dioxide from the air that represents a major step in establishing a market for carbon removal to combat climate change Now. I have listened to Rosemary for the last 2, 3, 4, it feels like five years now, where she’s been talking about the, the last 1% may be worth carbon capture.
That that’s where you go after the carbon capture, out of the air. The vast majority of how you’re gonna remove c o two is through other means that are a lot less expensive. So, Let’s figure out where they have delivered this $1.2 billion in the back of pickup trucks. The first recipients are Occidental Petroleum, located in Texas, and, and a partnership between Batel and Clime Works and Heirloom for a project in Louisiana.
So there’s two projects, one in Texas, one in Louisiana. Together they’re gonna receive about 1.1 billion. They, they, they hope to recover about 1 million metric tons from the Occidental Petroleum site per year. In total, the projects funded could increase global carbon removal capacity about 400 fold.
’cause nobody’s doing it at the moment. So what the hell is going on? I don’t get this at all.
Rosemary Barnes: Should it count as carbon removal? If it’s part of a project that puts more carbon into the atmosphere than what you’ve removed? That’s, that’s what I struggle with. I I have, I ha I have, since I started talking about carbon capture and direct air capture.
Maybe more specifically, I have actually changed my mind a fair bit and I used to be pretty much just against it. That it was, you know, such a, a waste, a diversion of attention and resources and, you know, a bit of a moral hazard that people think that we can just shove a carbon underground. So we don’t need to change anything.
I have since changed my mind because you know, when you to, to an extent maybe from the outside, it’s not gonna look any different. But let me, let me just, let me just ex explain a little bit. But what changed my mind was thinking about carbon offsets. You know, the idea that instead of reducing your emissions, you can pay for emissions reduction somewhere else.
And you know, kind of using an accounting trick claim that for yourself. And if you kind of think that through logically it is a really good way for, you know, to buy some time to figure out how to get rid of your hardest emissions, hardest to abate emissions while you pay for something easier to be done.
But that made sense when it was only some countries that are trying to reduce their emissions. Because, you know, rich countries could put money into less rich countries to develop projects they might have not otherwise been able to afford. But when you. Go to the end game. The idea that we, you know, we actually have to get to zero emissions.
There isn’t gonna be any kind of swap like that because these developing countries still have to reduce all their emissions, but they can’t get the, you know, the credit for, for that because they already sold the credit for the easy part to the countries. So at the end of the day, the only way to get to zero is to reduce emissions everywhere.
Or to have negative emissions. So at the, you know, at the end of the day, pulling emissions out of the atmosphere through some sort of negative emissions technology, which would either be direct capture or be something like bioenergy with carbon capture or there’s some, you know, cement or concrete examples where you can end up with negative emissions, mineral carbonation, that sort of thing.
Those are gonna be the only kinds of offsets that there are. So if you can’t get you know, long distance jet that is zero emissions, then that’s gonna be your only recourse to have that industry remain. And the same with, you know, cement. If you didn’t end up being able to. You know, get these new technologies that are in development.
If you could never actually scale those and get rid of emissions entirely, then your choices would be to either not produce any cement or to, you know, pull all emissions out of the atmosphere. So I do want these technologies to exist, and I don’t know if it, maybe it’s the last 1% or or, or, so maybe I’m still right about that.
But what I can’t agree with is that, Carbon capture is gonna have any place for anything other than negative emissions. I don’t it’s crazy that they would yeah, that they, the, a government would be funding, you know, spending your taxpayer dollars. Phil and Alan would be taking that and giving it to oil companies to you know, the, the credit is only tied to the fact that you are storing carbon dioxide underground, and it’s practically irrelevant where that carbon dioxide came from.
And I know that there’s an example of one of the, the big oil and gas companies, I can’t remember which one, and I probably shouldn’t say anyway, but, you know, they have a, a resource it’s a natural gas resource that they’re, you know, they’re tapping. It’s actually about two thirds carbon dioxide and one third methane.
And so they’re capturing that carbon dioxide when the market suits it for that to happen. And the rest of the time they’re, you know, just allowing that to go into the atmosphere. But you know, there’s a lot of subsidies that are going to that project that would not exist if it wasn’t for the fact that they sometimes capture some of the CO2.
It is really hard to see how that is, you know, good for the environment at all. And you can say, oh, you know, well they’re developing projects like that, like in enhanced oil recovery. Those projects are helping to develop the technology that you’ll need for the end of the, you know, for 2050 ish when we get to net zero.
And I, I guess that’s a point, except that they’re actually making things worse in the meantime, meaning that we have to get there sooner. I, if it was me and I was in charge of handing out government money, I would be funding carbon capture, but only for negative carbon negative projects. That would be, I, I think that that is a sensible criteria to put on it.
Allen Hall: It seems like just as an outside engineer watching this go on that when you create a complex, Financial structure, like carbon credits, the winners in that are going to be large companies that have the ability to have tax lawyers and people that can leverage it to their best advantage. And little guys get left out of that.
This is exactly what that is right now. It’s a complex, confusing thing.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s way too complicated.
Allen Hall: Right. And well, you know, Occidental, they have. Tax people and lawyers and engineers that can figure out a way to make money off this.
Rosemary Barnes: The way that it seems to me is that you know, all of the really direct efficient ways to get the outcomes that you wanted, you got ruled out politically.
And so you end up with these really indirect things. So instead of, you know, like at the end of the day, we want less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or less greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, right? But you can’t do anything about that directly. So then you start thinking, okay well, you know, c c s, that’s great, so we’ll pay people to store carbon dioxide underground, but that’s only indirectly.
Like it might be related to having less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but it also might not, if you just. You know, burn more fossil fuels than you would’ve previously installed some of that carbon dioxide. Then you get paid for it. You know, it’s actually subsidizing projects that make the atmosphere worse overall.
Because it’s too indirect. Because, you know, it’s really hard to either you, you know, Pay people to not do something. And that’s, you know, another thing that most of the carbon offsets industry is, is all about paying people to not do things. And you will never know what they would’ve done if you had have, you know, if you had have paid, hadn’t have paid them.
So then you see stories of like you know, environmental groups that are getting credits because they started saying, oh, we we’re actually gonna chop down this reserve that, that we have unless you pay us not to. It’s like, come on, you were never gonna do that. Or, you know, like, it, it, the whole industry is fraught with examples like that.
And then it’s the, the same with where you pay people to do a specific action that isn’t actually the, the outcome that you need. It, it just seems incredibly wasteful and prone to people. Yeah, people gain the system. The more lawyers that you have, the more creative you can get about, you know crazy ways to you know, layer subsidies on top of each other and all sorts of things that may or may not have anything to do with yeah, saving, saving the atmosphere.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, you’re down at Dallas Love Field and if you’ve been to Love Field that’s the home of Southwest Airlines. A local company called Jet Wind Power Corporation is on a sustainability initiative. Jet Wind has developed technology to capture wind energy from aircraft, propellers, and jet engines as a taxi, and then convert it into electricity.
Basically, it sounds like a wind turbine that sits next to the runway and, and spin some turbines and charge us some batteries. The JetWind founder Dr. T.O. Souryal, a Dallas surgeon, came up with the idea after seeing planes push back from the gates love field is allowing jet wind to test the technology at the airport.
So, Rosemary, how many you know megawatts can you generate from the backside of a jet engine with the wind turbine? It seems like the world’s most inefficient way to generate electricity.
Rosemary Barnes: I. Probably it reminds me of, you know, this idea that I get told a lot, which is that, you know, everybody at the gym is just running on treadmills or riding bikes and they should hook that up to generators and, and power the gym.
Allen Hall: And that’s a patentable idea. Rosemary don’t let that out to the world.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think it is. I’ve literally been told that idea about 50 times. So I would be highly surprised if no one ever, no one ever wrote that. No one ever wrote that down somewhere. And I’m sure it’s been done. I know I’ve seen like little, little demonstrations.
We’ve got a like a center called Questacon, a Science discovery center, basically, and there is, I’m pretty sure that I have at some point been on an exercise bike there that was hooked up to a, a meter that you, you know, oh, actually, no. It was hooked up to a bunch of different appliances and if you pedal slowly, then you know, like a, a, a little light bulb will turn on you, pedal a little bit harder, and then a TV will turn on and, you know, et cetera.
So yeah, cool. But if you’ve got a, a grid connection, then that is the better way to get your, your renewable energy, I would suggest like, It’s possible that, you know, this is some really cheap source of, of renewables, but it’s like a good rule of thumb that any small scale, new technology like that, that you need is going to be more hassle than it’s worth and end up costing a lot more than just putting a little bit more, you know, put a solar panel on a, on a roof somewhere.
Put an extra wind turbine up in a, in a wind farm and you know, you probably get a thousand or a million times the energy that you are gonna get from this whole system and however many people are employed doing that. And you know, getting in the way at, at the airport. And of course, I mean, is it renewable?
If it’s You know, those jet engines aren’t renewable yet, so Not yet. Yeah, it, it’s interesting. I mean, you see kind of variations of this all the time. There’s vertical access, wind turbines that are being put on lampposts in the, the UK and in some sports stadiums to capture just, you know, whatever energy is just flying around.
From traffic or whatever. And I’ve seen ideas in the subway as well to capture energy from the trains and yeah, like it’s, it’s a cool gimmick. If your idea is to kind of raise awareness about, you know, the scale of energy production and show, okay. Yeah. So this, this here produces this amount of energy and.
I don’t know, maybe it can achieve something like that. But usually I think that people just massively underestimate how much energy that we use and overestimate the idea that any little gimmick like this can do, you know, any more than a drop in the ocean. And, you know, people say, oh, well every little bit counts.
And I don’t know, not, not really, not if it, you know, if it makes you think, okay, well this is taken care of. Is, is it gonna make people think that, you know, I’m sure the airport’s gonna oversell it, right? Put it on their sustainability page and be like, we’re generating our own renewable energy. And you are like, well, yeah.
You know, like maybe 0.01%. I don’t know. I hate these kinds of things as you can, you can tell from my total killjoy attitude, but like in a primary school science fair kind of sense. I think they’re really good. And you know, I have enjoyed talking to school groups that had ideas like this and helping them develop it.
For that purpose. Excellent. For anything else that I think people should grow up a little bit.
Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the state of the wind industry at the moment. I think this is a good reflection point as we kind of roll into the fall here. I. It, it, the summer was pretty busy. There’s been a lot of installations worldwide in the Northern Hemisphere and in the southern hemisphere too.
And I’m talking to people in Earth, wind in Brazil, and there, there’s been a lot of activity down there too. But as we roll into the fall, it just feels like things are gonna become a little more unsettled. Inflation in the United States hasn’t really come down to the level they thought it would a couple of months ago.
There’s a lot of concern about products going forward. There’s, we’re seeing consolidation in the wind industry overall. I think that will continue. And Phil, you can fill us in on that, but what are your thoughts looking into 2024? Because we’re, we’re getting close to that.
Phil Totaro: It’s interesting because if you look at markets like the United States, for instance, The Inflation Reduction Act actually has sparked a lot of interest in the market and investment in manufacturing facilities for wind, solar battery storage, et cetera even electric vehicle batteries as well.
So it’s starting to unlock investment, but that always takes time to kind of trickle down through the system, so to speak. But it’s interesting though, I mean, in, in the global sense, we’re, it, it just feels like we’re not going fast enough. You know? I mean, we keep talking about this, you know, and, and Rosie and I have even talked about this a number of times, you know, even, even on her her podcast as well, like, we’re, we’re governments are setting these targets, but we’re not moving.
In the direction of hitting those targets because the money’s not being spent. And we’ve just talked today about, you know $1.2 billion is going to carbon capture instead of being invested in something else. That might make like the, the, yeah, right. Like unlike unlock the interconnection queue in different countries where, you know, they, they’ve got a huge backlog so, There are any number of things that need to keep happening, and that, that’s why I, I kind of share this frustration about you know, companies who are well-intentioned with, you know, novelty technologies or anything like that.
But it’s really just kind of creating a distraction. I mean, we already have technology. It’s cheap, it’s proven. We’ve been building it for 40 years. It’s financeable. People like it. It needs to be more profitable and then it will get more investors. And that needs to be the focus of the industry moving forward is, you know, better quality equals better profitability.
Keep focusing on improving efficiency and improving quality and we’ll get to where we wanna be. But it, I don’t know, it just seems like that’s not clicking with everybody just quite yet.
Allen Hall: It seems like we’re stuck. And Rosemary, on the engineering side, it also seems like a little stuck. Not a lot of great new ideas have popped out in 2023.
So far. It’s basically everybody has stopped on new designs and we’re gonna build some of the things we’ve designed a year or two ago, or three years ago, and that’s the state of engineering right now, it seems like.
Rosemary Barnes: I think, I mean, things are being worked on still, but I, I think it’s a rational response to the way things have been going in the last couple of years.
You know, with more, more defects and more claims problems. I think that it is a rational response that, you know, things slow down. And also I think that the few years before that were a real, real. Buzz time for heaps and heaps of new technologies to be coming on all at once. So I think we’re always gonna feel a bit, you know, once things got back to more like normal things, were gonna feel a bit slow, but a period of consolidation and, you know, making existing technologies better quality is probably a good thing.
I mean, if I looked at what’s, what’s the reason why we’re not rolling out wind turbines as fast as we need to, to you know, be on track for our, our goals. I don’t think it’s be because we don’t have enough new technologies that are in the pipeline. I think, you know, supply chain issues and being able to connect projects to the grid are probably far, far, far more important than all the other stuff.
So, you know, if I was in charge of a major manufacturer, I would probably have my engineering team working, you know, a lot more on, on ways to. Deliver projects cheaper and reliably. So that does mean sometimes, you know, if you wanna substitute a material like we were talking about, you know, if you want to get rid of rare earths from your supply chain, then that takes a lot of engineering work to do that, you know, it sounds like you know, not an engineering problem.
The supply chain specialist isn’t always an engineer. You know, even if you just want to change your fabric supplier for a wind turbine blade, that’s engineering that has to come. Before that you can do that because you need to make sure that the quality’s there. You need to make sure that your manufacturing processes are all gonna gonna work the same way.
You’re do a lot of, a lot of testing. So it wouldn’t surprise me if those kinds of projects are where people are spending their effort now their engineering effort. And I think that that is, What the industry needs. That’s what a mature industry is. It’s not one where there’s, you know, crazy new technologies being developed all the time.
It’s where you are, you know, reliably and just relentlessly cheap, more and more cheaply delivering yeah, delivering your product year after year. So yeah, I guess we’ll see a bit of both.
Allen Hall: Rosemary. I think that’s two different workforces, right? When you’re in design mode, you need a particular kind of engineer that’s, it’s just can piece things together really quickly and look at the new technology and create something that hasn’t never been created before.
But when we get into these phases, like I think we’re going into now where it’s more of a sustaining engineering. That’s a usually a different person. They, they’re just two different skill sets. Usually not the same person doesn’t do both of those. And the, the design people like, like to play around and do cool stuff.
And once you hit sustaining, they tend to leave the building because they get bored. And the sustaining people love that detail work, love it. And they’ll, they’ll be, they’ll be coming in finding new, new roles. It looks like that’s what the transition is happening.
Rosemary Barnes: To a certain extent, but I think you’d be surprised how many things that look really boring from the outside can actually be really interesting and innovative to, you know, one once you’re in there.
So I don’t think it’s a matter of like scrapping one workforce and replacing them with another. I think you’re right that certain people leave and I, I would probably say that I am one of those. I, I did get a bit bored of just cost out being the, you know, the main bulk of my projects. It’s not the most interesting thing.
Yeah, so I, I think you’re right, but also maybe not a hundred percent.
Allen Hall: Our wind farm of the week is Viking Wind Farm, up in Shetland uk. So SSE renewables installed the final turbine at the 443 Megawatt Viking onshore Wind Farm in Shetland uk. The project broke round about three years ago, and it will be the UK’s most productive onshore wind farm once it is complete.
The 103 Vestas V117 4 0.3 megawatt turbines were installed. Six months ahead of schedule. Yahoo. Nice job everybody. Installation began in February of this year when operational in 2024, Viking will produce 1.8 terawatt hours of renewable electricity annually, enough for about 500,000 British homes.
So that is a tremendous amount of work being done and it’s ahead of schedule. So nice job everybody at Viking Wind Farm, you are our Wind Farm of the week. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
