How well are wind farms protected from cyber attacks? Will ransomware and other attacks potential strike more and more wind energy companies, following the attempted extortion of Invenergy? And, we discuss transmission lines – the electrical engineering needed, AC vs DC power, interstate line projects, Texas and ERCOT’s problems, and more.
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Wind Farms At Cybersecurity Risk? Plus, a Deep Dive into Transmission Lines
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This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape 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 StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast.
Welcome back.
0:38
I’m Allen Hall.
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I’m Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running.
All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. This is Episode 66. And in today’s episode, we’re gonna talk a lot about transmission lines. Obviously, our co host, Allen Hall is an electrical expert, electrical engineer, lightning protection, all that stuff. So be prepared to get real nerdy with us today on electricity. And we’re also going to talk a little bit about something that’s going to be a big growing concern. It’s becoming a growing concern in all industries, which is hacking ransomware struck invenergy does a big developer of wind sites and other renewable energy, they are subject to attack recently. So we’ll chat a little bit about that. And then obviously, as we get more and more wind farms online, a growing problem is going to be how do we transmit that power to the grid? And where does it need to go? And do we have enough capacity in the transmission lines to get it there. So that’s going to be a big topic for today. But before we get going, I want to remind you again, in the show notes of today’s episode, whether you’re on YouTube, iTunes, Spotify, you’ll find a link to subscribe to uptime tech news, which is just our new weekly email sent every Thursday morning, that’s going to let you know, hey, we got a new podcast. Here’s what it’s about. Here’s our guest. Here’s our topic. Here’s a clip from another show. Here’s some other great wind energy news, always on the tech side of things just right in your inbox. So if you’re already a regular guest on the show, or a listener of the show, thank you. And we think you’ll really like our to the point concise, not time waster very upfront email. So sign up for that in the show notes. So Alan, let’s start today with invenergy. They were hacked, they discovered the the breach. And this wasn’t a typical ransomware where they encrypted all their data, really, it seemed like it was just an extortion attempt on their billionaire founder. And of course, the guy was kind of just like, Hey, here’s the middle finger, we’re not paying you. And you’re not going to extort me. But this is a scary thing. And I’m sure, you know, as our previous guest, Byron Martin from Teknologize, who’s a cybersecurity expert and an IT expert, as they mentioned in our podcast, so definitely check out that episode with Byron Martin and Dan Morgan, if you haven’t, this is going to become a bigger bigger thing like the colonial pipeline was hit. You know, government agencies are getting hit. They could I mean, Alan, could they take all out a whole, you know, wind farm off the grid by some of this stuff?
3:17
In theory? Yeah, sure. All you need to do is just connect certain switches. And yeah, you can disconnect the whole, the whole farm, it wouldn’t take all that much. I mean, you can physically go down, go down to the pole and disconnect it. But yeah, it’s, it’s possible. And it raises a really good point, which is, and I hope more engineers are becoming aware of this, because they’re becoming more and more publicized these events, and then involving Bitcoin and transfers of millions of dollars and CEOs and presidents are getting involved is that we’re at war right now, essentially, we’re in a economic war. And instead of sending missiles across the water to do damage, what’s happening now is you can just destroy infrastructure. Put the whole East Coast without some significant portion of the East Coast without gasoline for several days. that’s a that’s a big deal. And if we don’t think about it, as being in some sort of ongoing war, then we don’t pay attention. And at some point, the level of urgency has to get stepped up on it, because large portions of the grid can go out and win, you know, obviously, right. You had the the blackout, or blackouts in New York City, and what kind of havoc that has raised over time that we’re not related to any sort of cybersecurity. But in theory, there’s a lot of weak pieces in a power grid. If you think it’s just a very vulnerable system. There are some parts that are very hard and then there’s other parts that aren’t as hard and so how does cyber threats get to massive scales, they find those ways Witnesses that go through this little backdoors. And they weave their way in to a place where they can do a lot of damage. That’s just the way it is. And as engineers, as sometimes we’re satisfied if the system just works, right? It’s just a little behind the scenes in engineering world, if the system does what it does, and it’s actually producing what it says it’s supposed to produce, and it meets all the specs, like cybersecurity is so far down the list that it rarely gets in a lot of specs, just doesn’t. Because we can reset it, we can reboot it, whatever, right? Well, we’re becoming so dependent on computer technology and software and being interconnected and things happen in the cloud, that you become vulnerable, you become vulnerable. And so your system may not work as it was intended, or someone else may be controlling it, which is a worst case situation. And you can’t bypass it because you’re so dependent on others services, software services to make your system go and work at peak efficiency. So it is a big, big deal.
6:01
Well, and the thing that comes to mind is I mean, you hear these ransoms, like it wasn’t the colonial pipeline, I think it was like $4.4 million, right? And you’re like, oh, man, and as a small business owner, or consultant, or just any regular person, you’re like, for four, no, that could put us out of business. However, you start to put it in, in relative terms with some of these finds, like you remember, a couple years ago, Facebook paid a $1 billion fine by the FTC. Was it for I came around exactly which practice but like, in discussing that on a bunch of different podcasts, they said, yeah, this was essentially a slap on the wrist for Facebook, because they make a billion dollars in like 17 days or something like something crazy like that. So you start to think of these attacks being, you know, for some of these really big companies $10 million dollars from, you know, a company the size of GE or Siemens, Gamesa, and these with a 50 100 million 100 billion dollar market cap. It’s just like, just get out of here. It’s just like, you see lawsuits, like I saw Apple had a lawsuit, they settle recently for like, $5 million. That’s literally nothing. They have multiple billions in cash. It’s like, Alright, just here’s, here’s it, here’s your $5 go get ice cream, you know, go about your business. But this is a real threat just as far as disruption. And that might start I think, for more money and just
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that’s the bigger threat is a disruption is not so much the cash, obviously, the cash is a big deal. And the way we can transfer essentially transfer money electronically and encrypted. In theory, encrypted. Reality is probably not encrypted, like we think that it is. But if someone wanted to do real damage, they could. Regardless, you’re gonna pay him or not, the damage is already done. Right? They got to inflict the damage to get you to write the transfer Bitcoin over. That’s where the damage is. And that’s that’s that’s the intent, at least my opinion of some of these things is like the intent is to inflict damage. And having if you pay attention, and you watch what happens in sort of rivals with the United States, appears to me that the United States is inflicting damage via software breakthroughs, all kinds of security breaches that America is doing, and then it gets returned to us. And in the same way, so we are in an active cyber war, there’s just no way getting around that right now we are, and you don’t want to get wrapped up in it, right? You want to make sure your stuff is as hard as it can possibly be, particularly if you’re producing power, and keeping the lights on for millions of homes. It’s a big deal.
8:35
Well, and I’m a broken record talking about prediction errors and Black Swans, that’s like, I don’t know, I’m like a character that’s broken. But, you know, you talk about 911. No one could have ever would ever have imagined something like that would have happened, and it happened and it changed everything. This pandemic changed everything. Hurricane Katrina, I mean, it just changed everything in that town. And so you start to wonder, could a ransomware attack shut down a million homes from power for multiple, multiple weeks on the East Coast? Like could they shut down New York City? It’s conceivable, like, no one’s like these things. I would be shocked if you go 20 years from now as electrified and connect to the web that we are that this doesn’t happen it’s to some country at some point or some chunk of America like with all this hacking technology, you don’t think some bad actor in some other country wouldn’t love to shut down a whole city in the US that I mean, imagine I mean, you’d be a national hero of of a bad actor state right? So you got to think that stuff is like is in the works and why I think it’s it’s scary to think that no one ever imagined that their home could not have power for two weeks because someone just broke it. But that could happen. It absolutely could happen. could shut down airport airport easy.
9:52
I don’t think that’s even a question airports no problem at all. The the more the grids become I’m interconnected. And in my case, like in Massachusetts, a lot of my our power, my power, a lot of our power comes from Canada, right? So it doesn’t have to happen in, in country, they could be an attack on a Canadian Quebec power plant that wipes out power to my home. And yeah, we could be without power for quite a while. And the one of the keys to minimizing that impact is be able to reroute power and deliver it via other means, right. And this is sort of the thing that happened to Texas with the freeze a couple of months ago was they don’t get it, no one could help them. No, because you don’t let power lines cross the state boundaries, because then the federal, the feds can come in and dictate the way they’re going to run their grid. And they know what the feds in there, so they don’t do it. And since its way Southwest Airlines just be forever, like Southwest Airlines only flew in Texas for ever, because they have working under not FAA rules. They’re working under the Texas air regulation rules, whatever those were. But yeah, I mean, the way we get around some of these things is make it so we can regroup, right? And get power where we needed to go. But it also in some ways can make you more vulnerable, because it makes a lot of backdoors. So you know, there’s there’s benefits and real downsides to all these things. And that’s where, when you watch people testify in front of Congress, it’ll scare the living heck out of you, because you’ll have an engineer walk up there and go, yeah. Oh, yeah. Los Angeles could be without power for a month. Yeah, sure.
11:33
What chaos like Well, yeah, exactly what I mean. No,
11:39
no, we can’t let something like that happened. And why we’re not working? Well, because we got 800 other things that we need to be working on. And that isn’t whether it’s a low risk, versus some in the wildfires, for example, right? So that’s, that’s the issue is your, the vulnerability still stay around, because you got other problems that you’ve ranked higher. And when the big one hits, the big ones gonna hit, and it’s gonna be painful?
12:07
Well, there’s also no reward. So say, you know, say hypothetically, Gotham City. Well, I didn’t have to say hi, but the city, my brain was gonna say New York City. But say Gotham City invests a billion dollars a year into protecting Gotham City from this exact thing from a cyber attack, shutting them off. And they never have a cyber attack. People think they wasted that billion dollars, where’s the reality? Maybe it actually worked. But you don’t get any, you don’t get any prizes. And this is the big thing about these is like, you don’t get any prizes for preventing 911 iF 911 never happened. There’s no heroes like, Oh, this guy prevented the thing that never happened. Like, it doesn’t compute in your brain. Yeah, you know, you can react to things and there’s so people get rewarded for reacting to things. And of course, true. I’m not saying that as far as 911. Like, there were so many heroes who did amazing things and 911. I’m just saying, you know, when you can get paid to clean up a mess, you know, if you have a home restoration, like my parents had some water in their basement, you get paid to clean up the messes, but you don’t get paid nearly as much to prevent that damage in general. Right. Right.
13:09
That’s right. And that’s, that’s devising. Right. And in the engineering circles, it is one of these super frustrating things because you see it right, you maybe we’re not oblivious to the fact that there’s huge downside risk on on systems that provide all kinds of functions to regular people, and how they can be really vulnerable. And and you look at sort of the government officials in any sort of natural disaster. Like, why is the governor of California still the governor of California after the wildfires? Like what is that about? And after the COVID things, but obviously gonna try to recall them. But it looks like a pretty good chance it’s gonna be an office. And so you’re like, well, how much responsibility Could he have had? Could he have taken steps to prevent some of the like, the wildfires from happening? Yeah, I mean, we’re in like, year, six or seven of these things are we not going to step in and like, do smart things to prevent these from happening? Nobody knows. But if it comes in, and they put all the forest fires out, and homes are saved, it’s you kind of get this hero status where you still sort of culpable in that. That’s, that’s where the you don’t ever look backwards, you know, that. It’s very hard to look backwards and go, Hey, you knew that was a problem, and you’ve decided to ignore it. And now bicha, so you’re going to lose, but the losing part doesn’t seem to happen. On the political level. It’s weird. I think it happens on an engineering level quite a bit. When on the on the policy side, not nearly as much.
14:45
Yeah, well, and I know obviously, with all these older wind farms, you know, they’re 10 1520 years old. They are running on older software, obviously, they get upgrades right, you know, right, sure. But there’s still going to be if you took an inventory of all the wind farms in the US or all over the world, you’re gonna be many that have, you know, five year old software x, you know, this software that just has known known security issues, or just because it was it’s five years old, it’s just not as secure as something today. And there’s going to be a sliding scale of risk, depending on how current everything is and how patched up it is and how moderate is right. I mean, right? You see this happen in like, CRM systems, like, I know, just recently, one of the big CRM companies switch from like, some authorization token thing that I don’t understand to like, some new way that’s like, way more secure, like you’re sending all these emails about it. It’s like, are they doing that on all these like, you know, utility scale software’s and systems? And I don’t know the answer to that. But I doubt those could all be vulnerable, where, like you said, with your California example, on the on their wildfires? Or what if these need to be upgraded? slowly, but surely now, and then they’re not. And now, cyber criminals realizes in five years, they’re just attacking all of them left and right, you’re like, well, we should have, we should have started looking ahead five years ago, and upgrading these systems and really making them robust, because now they’re just left and right getting attacked. And and that could be a thing.
16:11
Well, in the engineering world, one of the things, one of the sort of cardinal rules is if it works, don’t mess with it, right. And so what happens, like, I’ll give you the good example, in engineering, there’s a lot of things working on Windows seven in this world, which is crazy to think about. All kinds of applications, all kinds of useful tools, all kinds of things are running systems, and they are working on really outdated operating systems, which Microsoft doesn’t support anymore. It doesn’t provide security patches for anymore. But as the engineer, still works, don’t mess with it. And who’s going to hack into that thing, and we’ve been sitting there operating for the last 15 years, no one’s gonna bother it. Yeah. But that’s, that’s the back door to get into the rest of the system, right? That’s the door to get into the rest of the network. And that’s what happens. So it’s like, it’s everybody’s, it’s every engineers responsibility. I think, in today’s world, start looking back and go, Hey, where are we really vulnerable. And that’s where, again, cybersecurity companies are really providing valuable, valuable data to regular engineers like me to say, guys, we need to take a look at what’s going on and make sure we don’t have vulnerabilities because we’re just being promoted a little bit and don’t want to change the software.
17:33
Which is what the people who probably end up being more vulnerable or like you said, in over in Europe, there’s more single wind turbine in a town or right five or 10 clusters, those ones where they’re run by smaller companies or own you know, in part by a town or Co Op or something. Sure, those are probably the ones who like they’re not going to be at a spring for all those regular upgrades may drive maybe their turbans 20 years old, but it’s still kickin, so they’re they’re just getting, you know, free money, essentially, it’s paid off, or they are there, you know, we talked about blades being no longer like you can’t get a new, you know, 1.7 megawatt blade from x manufacturer has been discontinued, because it’s 15 years old, right? They’re not making a blade anymore button. It’s still working. But just like the blades, the software is old, like ads, fine. Let’s just let it keep going. Yeah, and now that gets hacked, and now they get ransomed. And it’s $2 million, and the things not worth $2 million. And you’re like, but now we are losing all that power to our little town and our towns really suffering. I could see a lot more of those small just like again, just like targeting a small business where they don’t have the $4.4 million at the colonial pipeline would have right and now they’ve become really crippled by it. Yeah, so you just hope that I don’t know it’s just gonna be a problem for every industry, but it could be a really complicated one for wind as well.
Looks like grids are going to become more and more interconnected in the future. So one project that’s just been given like the go ahead as far as they’re gonna start construction soon is the trans West Express transmission project, which is going to take wind power from Wyoming and it’s going to feed it through Utah, all the way down to Las Vegas work at power homes in Nevada, California and Arizona. So pretty interesting that I mean, I don’t think that’s something that people think about all that much like oh, this when wind farm in our town or in our state is sending power to somewhere completely for you know, not our not our home state. But that’s probably pretty common number one, and it’s like you said leadings that Erica interconnectivity, as far as grids, but on what what challenges does this pose as far as transmission like, are they losing power sending it so far? I mean, what’s the electrical side of this? Well, there’s
19:48
a couple of real keys to power transmission. One is you need the right away to put down transmission line. So when you’re going across state lines, the feds get involved and There’s a lot of oversight about where you can put transmission lines, you’re going through local communities. So there’s a lot of planning involved, that’s that’s over they say, sir, do you have electricity in your trunk, and he just stepped out of the car, I can smell you’ve got too many amps in your truck. But that that’s that’s the reality of it. It’s conceptually, from the engineering side moving power from point A to point B, we’ve known that for 100 plus years, the real difficulty is getting the transmission lines in in places that may have endangered species. Or you may have to clear cut some areas because the trees are in the way or may go too close to the powerlines. Or you got to go over mountain tops, or do you got to get me in places where there’s a lot of snow, all those things, all those little, small pieces to putting a powerline in the middle of a state or some of the biggest costs, maintaining them, making sure someone’s over there, making sure they’re clear every summer and that they’re chopping down trees that grow near them and inspecting them with helicopters and all all the things that happen there. It’s not cheap to put in transmission lines, that’s why we don’t do it that often. So they to hear about a fairly large transmission line project go on is unusual. I know for a lot of wind turbine farms, they are located near Trent, big transmission lines, close to them. That’s one of the if you have good wind, but you’re 100 miles from the nearest big transmission line, it’s all that infrastructure get to pay for the 100 miles of transmission line to get from A to B just so you can plug into the grid, you don’t want to do that it adds a lot of extra cost and a lot of burden there. And that’s and that’s why you don’t see him that often. It’s so we do look at where wind turbines are sign and that’s one of the what’s one of the issues, can we plug in readily to the grid. So we don’t want to put in transmission lines. It’s it’s a problem. It is a real problem in the States because you think as we become more electrified was particularly with vehicles and batteries, you’re gonna need more transmission lines, you just kinda need it. We’re gonna go, yeah,
22:08
so what what is the the equation here? I mean, you know, in this image, there’s an interesting article by Bloomberg just talking about the kind of the future the grid and some of these new high tech lines, the ultra high voltage direct current lines, can you kind of take us through AC versus DC? I mean, what is the what are the considerations with voltage and amperage? I mean, what are some of the constraints that engineers have to work between to get this power? I mean, are these, you know, these gonna have to be tree trunk size lines? I mean, like, what modernization Do we have to take to get power needs to go?
22:43
Well, Tesla, and Edison fought this battle, in the early 1900s, late 1800s. lost track now, how long ago that was, but the AC power is a lot easier to transmit over long distances. That’s why one out, DC is very lossy, when you try to try to push it long distances more than a couple of miles, it’s becomes lossy, so lossy that you can’t afford to do it. And it takes a lot, it can’t take a lot more copper in the lines to cut the losses down versus AC, which you can use a lot less copper. So there’s there’s a huge advantage from just a material standpoint, simplicity standpoint to using AC power. And that that’s why, you know, all countries today are all AC, there may be some small island, someone that’s working on DC, whether whether it’s just a local community, you could have a DC grid, and that and that’s what Edison did, right? So Edison early on up in New Jersey, in New York, and some other places where they had basically a power generation station locally, and then they’d run things DC, so they just push power locally, but you got to create a lot more power generation stations to do that, because you can’t transmit it very far. Whereas with Tesla’s idea, and Westinghouse, it was working to create this massive power generation station, like Niagara Falls, and we can transmit the power 1000s of miles, and we can generate power for millions of homes, which is the solution. So if AC is definitely the answer the question what’s going to happen now and offshore wind is if you’re not going that far, it may be cheaper, overall cheaper to do things DC until you get on shore and then converted to AC and transmitted outward needs to go. So there’s a lot of work going on. And a lot of discussions about do we create our own DC grid underwater and then put naked AC once it hits? Sure, because it’s just a lot less equipment on the on the turbans? Maybe, maybe it will remember when we talked to fire trace one of the issues was Transformers catching on fire and determines right You don’t really have a transformer if you have a DC system. So you may not have as many fires, those, those are the trade offs that you make between AC and DC today.
25:12
I don’t know the answer this, what happens if a sub c line is severed? Whatever? What happens to electricity under water? This seems like it is like a question I should I should look on YouTube. But does it? Does it jump the gap? Does it just stop transmitting it? I mean, what happens there?
25:32
The voltage voltage is high enough? Well, depends if the voltage is high enough, right? If the voltage is high enough AC or DC, it’s just going to arc over to the to the earth, create a lot of hot water. That’s what it will do. And maybe make hydrogen out of it. I mean, it’s gonna be so much energy in such a localized spot. And you may start breaking away more water molecules. But the the, the safety aspects underwater aren’t so bad as much as the cost of trying to repair it and fix it up. That’s a nightmarish Yeah, that’s a nightmarish, right? Well, if you’re if you’re way back, Oh, my gosh, way back when when they’re putting those some of the first transatlantic cables trying to get from the United States to Europe, what a big deal that was being just being able to conceive of the ability to do that. And then to do it with such a monumental task. Because there’s so many variables, there’s just so many variables. And I think we’re under the same thing on offshore, especially floating wind, I think we’re gonna run into a lot of those obstacles in the first three, four or five years, where surface roughness on the bottom of the ocean, whales something, I mean, it’s gonna, there’s gonna be something as close to the lobsters, they’re always
26:49
trying to get back at us,
26:50
right? Try to take us down, snip, snip,
26:55
right, this is a new challenge. Well, you know, a year and a half,
26:58
for the longest time when I’ve when I worked at, well, lightning technologies way back when one of the things for fiber optic cable was you needed a fiber optic cable had this armor on on it to prevent animals from eating the cable underground. Right? So it has this slight animal barrier built into the optic cable to keep critters out you think oh my gosh, I mean, that’s, that’s only learned to the school of hard knocks. That’s it. That’s how you find that stuff out is like it happens. And with like, ping, when we talk to Matthew Stead, a ping, you know, they had problems with insects early on, which they didn’t envision. That’s what’s gonna happen when we start doing cables on offshore floating wind is that we’re going to find something that we didn’t know before. It’s going to be attacking our cables. And we’re going to have to go in and spend a bunch of money to go fix them. And that’s part of engineering. The way it goes,
27:58
Yeah, it just seems like one of the big complicated pieces with all this new windows again, just to keep it on and more when and I’m sure a lot of people like Well, well, we got to put a lot of lines up and you know, there’s some reporting that Houston are on on in Houston, but reporting from the Houston Chronicle that are caught, maybe doesn’t have the transmission capacity to send all of the power produced by some other wind farms over in West Texas, Texas Well, with, with with no, these aging transmission lines, like they need an upgrade quick.
28:26
Well, yeah, yeah, it’s a grid. I mean, if you think of it as I’m going to use Houston, as example, because Houston is what the fourth largest city in America, Houston’s a massive area and requires a lot of power, right. And the way you feed that is you feed it with different sources coming from different directions. But coming from so far away, and driving all that power and trying to direct all that power to one location like Houston would be very difficult, I think on the on the grid, and the grid may or may not handle it. And you know, that’s one thing about electrical grids is that they’re designed to protect themselves from failure. So you really can’t overload them without them coming offline and giving you a bunch of warnings before it happens. Yeah, the grid is designed to protect the grid. Think of it that way. It does not. It’s not designed to make sure your air conditioning works. It’s it’s designed to make sure that it doesn’t catch fire. That’s what it’s designed to do. So it’s a it’s interesting, we talk to people about the grid like Oh, why don’t we get a Cheb billion more amps down the lines and satisfy you know, what’s not there? No, there’s limits the stuff. At some point, you ran out of capacity, it’s just a capacity issue, you need more capacity, which means you’re gonna need more transmission lines, and I definitely think as you become more Tesla ized that we’re gonna need more transmission lines. And how has that kind of work? how’s it gonna work?
29:50
Yeah, well, I’m sure we continue to talk to talk about transmission lines and some of the monitoring solutions. We’ve reached out to a few companies to come on the show and talk about monitoring of subsea cables, all these different things because all this stuff needs to be kept close to the vest, like we need to know if you’ve, you know, severed line somewhere under the Atlantic Ocean. Again, I can’t think of like, you know, someone calls you to me like, hey, Dan, we need you to go to the Middle Atlantic Ocean, there’s a line down, can you fix it? It’s like, Oh, God, click hang up. But I mean, those are big, big problems that are complicated to solve. And so they need really robust solutions and hopefully, you know, mitigate the risk of them breaking in general, but then also, knowing the moment it happens to get that thing patched up because it could be a huge just a huge disruption to the grid. So yeah, more on this to come. But thank you for watching. That’s it for today’s episode of The uptime podcast Be sure to check out uptime tech news again. That’s our quick newsletter. Every week you’ll get a quick blast with the new episode, clips from the show other great news from Tech around the wind industry. So definitely check that out in the show notes subscribe today. And you’ll get us in your inbox anytime there’s a new uptime podcast ready to listen to. So thank you from Allen all of us and we will see you here next week on uptime.
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