In this episode, we discuss the installation of offshore wind turbines at Hornsea 2, which are being embedded in the seafloor via suction caisson jackets. But, how do they work? We also discuss Australia’s future in renewables, the Sami people’s legal battle over a wind farm that disrupts reindeer herding. Plus, can Puerto Rico’s electricity grid be rebuilt with renewables, or only with fossil fuel sources, as is currently proposed?
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: Uptime 83 – Off-Shore Wind Turbine Suction Caisson Installations – How do They 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 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 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 show. We’ve got a bunch of Australian news we’ll start off with.
So Rosemary is going to have some a strong presence in this episode, as if she didn’t already. We’ll talk about some of Australian entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes, and he’s the founder of Atlassian, which is an amazing suite of software products.
Some of his ideas for Australia’s renewable future. We’ll talk a little about battery manufacturer Red Earth and some of the things they’re doing. Kind of like Tesla’s Powerwall. They have a bunch different storage solutions over in Australia. We’ll talk about some of the seas and wind in Australia.
And then moving on, we’ll chat a little bit about this reindeer situation with the Sami people in Norway is a really interesting ruling that could get a wind farm dismantled if their lawyers. Right. We’ll talk about crabs and their electromagnetic fields.
We’ll talk about suction, caissons and some of the new offshore wind turbine foundation jackets that have just been installed. An update on the horn seeta wind farm, a 107 meter, a wind turbine blade mold. And lastly, will shed a little bit about Puerto Rico and their electric grid to rebuild.
Before we get going on our mind, you subscribe to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. It’s growing fast and you can get a weekly update from us with new wind energy news all from around the Web, as well as alerts for about the new podcasts and videos.
And definitely subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’s YouTube channel, which you’ll also find in the description of this podcast. So, Rosemary, come up on stage. Let’s talk about Australia here. So might Mike Cannon-Brookes again. He’s a co-founder, co CEO of Atlassian.
They make Trello Jera, which is their project development software. They had tons of teams work with that, getting projects from start to finish and a lot of other stuff. He’s a big entrepreneur in Australia, and he says they should be aiming for 500 percent renewables.
Rosmarie, 500 percent seems ambitious.
Yeah, but I mean, if you think about it at the moment, the amount of calls with that Australia exports, I don’t know what percentage we’re at in terms of fossil fuel generation, but definitely more than 100 percent. So I guess it’s just an extension of that.
So, yeah, it doesn’t sound out there to me. And I mean, big time, big time fan of Mike Cannon-Brookes. I describe him as Australia’s Bill Gates because, you know, he’s sort of got his money through software and then has used his profile and and money to really get into some Aronow world improving projects, or at least that’s
what he’s trying to do. He was he first came on my radar when he was the one who tweeted Elon Musk about our battery of need for a battery in South Australia. And that was what set off that famous Honesdale battery project where, you know, it was if it was wasn’t done in I think it was three
months, then it was free. And, yeah, Elon Musk managed to make that happen. And all of a sudden, yeah, batteries were a thing in Australia. And since then, Mike Cannon-Brookes has gotten involved in several other high profile, high profile projects.
Most kind of exciting of which is the Sun Cable Project, which is a massive solar farm in I think it’s Western Australia, northern Western Australia. And then they’re going to build like a three or four thousand kilometer long cable to supply Singapore and maybe Indonesia along the way with a bunch of renewable electricity.
Well, speaking of batteries. So this company, Red Earth, is down your way there, an Australia company, and they just got a really well subscribed round of funding. And it seems like they’re doing similar things. I mean, one of their photos is a to earth energy storage battery outside of a house.
So, I mean, Rosemary, why is battery storage so integral to Australia’s future?
Well, I think there’s two things. One, we have the highest penetration of rooftop solar in the world. I think 20 or 25 percent of Australian houses have have solar panels on their roofs, which probably sounds like a lot to someone anywhere else.
And it’s not it’s certainly not ideology. I mean, if you look at the places where there’s a lot of solar panels, it’s not, you know, like a Lefty Graney kind of enclaves. It’s places with a lot of sun.
They just simply are good economics. In fact, I think I can recall a political scandal a few years ago where it turned out that a really anti renewables politician had solar panels on his roof. And that was like this big amusing scandal, kind of in the opposite direction to what you might expect.
So, yeah, there’s that there’s a lot of people with solar. And then there’s this other thing, which is that Australians are pretty pissed off at the utilities for perceived price gouging. We have really high electricity prices. And I mean, I’m not an expert on why exactly.
But the kind of common interpretation is that the electricity companies have they’ve kind of rorted the system. There’s there’s. Pacific specific, then they’re not public owned, but they are, you know, strongly regulated, and they can only increase their prices if the government allows them to, basically, which they do by investing in something and then, you know, saying
they need to increase their prices to recoup their investment. And the general impression is that they invested purely to raise their prices, not in a way that would make, you know, the electricity grid more reliable or more suitable for the future, more suitable for more renewables.
And everyone’s really annoyed about their really high electricity prices. Rooftop solar owners are annoyed that the you know, the price they get for that solar is has has decreased a lot. So I think these two things together mean that people won’t have the will to, you know, use less of the utilities, electricity and to the capability to
do it because we get so much sunshine. Well, Alan,
you know, you’ve seen how Elon Musk I think he’s a great example, and Bill Gates and some other, you know, billionaire entrepreneurs, philanthropists in the U.S. sort of use their political power to get things moving. I mean, is this a situation where you could see someone like Mike Cannon-Brookes stepping in to just make these lasting change as
not just advocate for a battery project, but just the way things are done? I mean, is that something that you would see that something happened here and also in the U.S. right hand moving factories to this state or that state?
I mean, do you think that some of that might happen in Australia?
I think it’s possible. I think in the United States we get a little bit of a different government dole economic system than than other parts of the world in the United States, like Bill Gates doesn’t seem to have a lot of influence on Capitol Hill, on projects.
And so what they tend to be doing is investing in the projects on their own and then going to tell congressmen, senators how well it’s doing or where the United States should invest, quote, quote, unquote, invest in, I don’t know, call an investment, but essentially, you know, where should the US government throw the weight around in?
I think the same things happened to Elon Musk. I think he’s realized that getting Congress and the administration to do anything consistently is going to be very difficult. So what they do instead is they developed the projects on their own and they have the wherewithal to do that.
Now, I think Bill Gates has been pushing basically Gine, what he called generation four nuclear power, and also looking at fusion a little bit, things that are not necessarily on the radar. And Australia can do the same thing.
I think if there’s enough economic wealth and enough willpower that those those that are companies and people that are well-off enough can actually create the thing they want to see. You just can’t rely upon the government to deliver necessarily reliable energy sources.
And we’re seeing that now in Europe really play out. Big time prices of electricity has skyrocketed. The availability of electricity has gone down in some places. And they’re talking about blackouts. That’s a bad situation. And you wish that Europe doesn’t have those.
Bill Gates, the Bill Gates in Europe. I can’t. All right. And I think that’s not a great model. I think the US model is a little bit better in the sense that we’ve been able to push through some of those technology challenges, because we’ve had essentially billionaires have gotten it done.
And Australia can be in a in a similar boat to the United States, which I think could be a great advantage to Australia because it’s so full of natural resources and a well-educated workforce.
I mean, what’s your take, Rosemary, as Australia starts to, you know, get pushed to the center stage a little bit because of its natural resources? What’s a way for some of these problems, like the electric, quote, unquote, price gouging to get better?
Well, I think that we need to recognize that the clean energy transition is a huge opportunity for Australia and not just, you know, some problem that’s going to happen to our current economy, which is to a large extent based around coal, not it’s not as based around coal as certain people would have you think, but certainly recognize
opportunity. And I do think that that’s starting to happen a lot, that even many of the federal politicians who have been kind of standing in the way of change are now starting to say, OK, there’s there’s opportunities not just for, you know, green electricity that we generate and getting it offshore, whether it’s via a subsea cable or
by a green hydrogen. But we’ve also got all these minerals. And, you know, that’s for me, that’s one of the most exciting opportunities for the future of Australia and and for the world. Uncertainty kind of overdo it too much.
But, yeah, I mean, waste your time. It’s your time to decide. I mean, they call Australia the lucky country, which is supposed to be like a. An insult, a sarcastic kind of insult that we just rely on, on dumb luck rather than, you know, making things happen.
And I think this is a really clear example that, you know, Australia has been one of the real laggards in climate action. We’re still don’t have a federal target for net zero at at any time. As soon as possible is the official line.
Yet I do think that with, you know, really great wind and solar resources that we have, plus all of the minerals that we have and that, you know, already got a big mining industry that will know how to how to get them out.
I think I think we’re going to be lucky again.
Don’t forget, spiders got a really good crop of big spiders. So phallic. Look, I get somewhere to add there.
Well, from us, from the Australian point of view, I think there’s an interesting scenario that’s going to play out. And I think Australia needs to really think about this. Obviously, Australia is full of natural resources and coal being one of the big ones.
The question is, do you want to be an exporter of energy or do you want to be an exporter of things that are much more valuable? Do you want to set up a manufacturing facility and make iPhones at a thousand dollars a pop?
Or do you want to make a small two, three per cent margin on selling electricity to Singapore? That’s a real trade off that has to be made. And I think with the abundance of energy, any country with an abundance of energy can have an abundance of manufacturing and creation, a creative economy that could drive it into the
future. And I think it’s really interesting that Australia is pointing its future in ways that are small on margins and not high on growth, because I think it’s totally poised to do some really significant things because it has all the pieces, kind of like United States does, has all the pieces to really have an economic boom.
Yeah. No, I massively agree with you. I think that that’s definitely true. And we do see some baby steps towards that and some bigger things. I think that will start with, you know, we already take a lot of minerals out of the ground, but they’re usually just shipped for processing somewhere else.
I think and hope that we’ll do a lot more of that processing in Australia soon. And there are some projects already started to get into that. But then there’s also a lot of the manufacturing we used to have like maybe 50 years ago that we lost because energy prices went up and also cost of labor went up
. I think, you know, all of this clean, clean, eventually will be cheap energy that we have will take care of the first problem and then the second problem. Labor, I think that’s like advanced manufacturing is is going to solve that problem, too.
So I think we’re going to see like a big full circle for Australia’s economy to maybe look a lot more like it did 50 years ago, in a way, but also in a, you know, in an advanced way, as I think advanced manufacturing is the key part of the puzzle, that that doesn’t happen by lokke.
That’s something that you actually have to get in there and do do some projects. And yeah, I see a few things now, but I would I would love to see a lot more focus on on that in the future in Australia.
Well, moving on. Interesting story coming out of Norway. So there’s an indigenous people called the Samey and they heard reindeer. This is important to them culturally, something I’m doing for forever. And a wind farm was given licenses to build.
And there’s 151 turbines standing on the Fossen Peninsula. And a recent ruling by the Supreme Court in Norway said that these are, you know, essentially the license to build these earths void, that they violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, basically Article 27 of the U.N. treaty saying that ethnic people qpid, you know, should not
be denied the right to enjoy their own culture, practice their own religion, profess their own language, and this cultural practice of reindeer herding extends within that. So this is really interesting because obviously 151 turbine’s is a very large project, a lot of money, and it’s fully built.
And now they’re saying that this can’t operate. So, Alan Watts, what’s your take here? This this doesn’t sound like something that could be stopped this easily. It’s so much money involved, so much construction, not to mention why now, why the ruling at the end when it’s already built?
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And there’s a lot of pieces to this that are unanswered at the moment.
And yet the stories are very vague or have been very vague.
Right. I think the lawyers are still positioning themselves. The really critical pieces. Why is the Supreme Court ruling on it now, I guess? Time it takes time to process through any judicial system. But like usually that happens before you start digging that after it’s already in service.
And to do it afterwards seems like it’s like double jeopardy in a sense. Like we heard this out, we got licenses, we got all this stuff done, and then we go back around a second time. We can get somebody to rule against it, and what I think what eventually is going to happen here is they’re going to
negotiate some sort of settlement between the two opposing sides, because I don’t think the wind turbines can really come down. It isn’t like all people in Norway are not using power. They probably all are. And so it’s a benefit to everybody, not just a select group of people that are have electricity in Norway.
But I think the other piece, which we’re going to talk about some animal things today is, is it really real that the animals are scared of the wind turbines? Because I’ve seen a lot of pictures of animals next to wind turbines.
I saw there’s one from South Africa recently where you see giraffes wandering around wind farms and thinking, well, they’re probably the most at risk because they’re so damn tall. You know, they can look closer to the wind turbine, any other species that I can think of.
They’re not sensitive to it clearly. So, you know, I think there’s a lot of a lot of politics going on. And unfortunately, it’s a it’s now in court, which is not good.
Yeah. This is an interesting one, because there’s a lot on environmental justice here in the U.S. And you know, we’ve found that, you know, a lot of minorities were put in less desirable places to live and then pipelines run through their through their land where they’re living or a factory is built very close to them.
There’s a runoff, there’s cancers, you know, toxic chemicals in the water that they’re drinking, but not in the more affluent parts of the country. So I think that’s part of what’s at issue here now, is that really what’s going on with wind turbines and this particular, you know, group of people, the samey, I’m not sure.
But I think that’s probably at least a little bit of it right there. Just the fact that why why do we have to live among these when everyone else doesn’t? I mean, Rose-Marie, what’s your take on this? Because, again, it is vague.
It’s there’s still a lot that needs to be fleshed out, it seems like. But what what struck you about this, the story?
Well, to me, I notice in Norway, they don’t have as established a wind industry as they do in neighboring Sweden, which has the same indigenous populations. And the reindeer herding is also important. In northern Sweden, where I worked a lot for that, was working on one of the big wind farms up in northern Sweden near LULIA.
And in Sweden, they’ve worked it out anyway. So they have. I know that the Sámi aren’t 100 percent happy with it, but they do seem to have reached some sort of agreement. I don’t know if it was just imposed on them by the government in Sweden or if there was a legitimate agreement made.
But I would expect that something similar is going to work out in Norway. And this is probably, you know, the first first time that we’ve seen seen this conflict in Norway. And so it’s taking a long time to work out.
But I know that it hasn’t been all the way through the courts yet. They’ve made this ruling that there’s some inconsistency with this UN role, but the implication of that hasn’t been ruled on yet. It’s just kind of speculation that all they might have to tear the turbines down.
I expect that they will they’ll reach an agreement. Like Alan said, I think that they’re going to find a way for the turbines to stay and to keep everyone at least somewhat happy.
Well, and with so much money at stake, I mean, when you start talking about he said she said claims like we talked about a couple of weeks ago, a man living on a piece of land that a wind farm was then built on, he said, I can’t sleep, you know, with the sound.
That’s kind of unknowable, whether that’s true or not. I guess you could observe him somehow. But in this case, you would definitely see, you know, companies that have a lot of money to lose, sending private investigators out to observe the animals.
Right. Just someone’s camped out in the woods looking and watching at the animal’s habits. Have one video. Do they are they actually frightened by this? Is this actually a thing? You’d see that on probably both sides, the lawyers willing to prove their case.
Yeah, this is a real issue. Or someone else on the other side saying it maybe isn’t as big an issue as as they’re making it out to be. I’m not saying either that’s the right or wrong. That’s probably something that’s going to happen to sort of put some evidence in play for the effect of these animals.
Because, again, we’ve been talking about underwater observation. Right, for what’s going on in these eco labs underneath wind turbine, what’s what’s happening with the vegetation and the plant life. And, you know, those little ecosystems, I’m sure, are going to do the same thing here.
Well, let’s actually observe these animals and see what’s happening, because if you can use this as an example, then you can do better in the future. Like, OK, maybe we do need to put these offshore. Maybe we do need to put them in in some other place to keep these people able to have, you know, for self-determination
and not have their cultural practices stripped from them, which is, you know, something that they should better, you know, retain their cultural heritage. Alan, it sounds like you have something else here to add, maybe.
I just think in these situations, what tends to happen is that this is called an injunction. For the time being, this injunction tends to spread. All right. So. Hours other groups to do the same thing. And, you know, I don’t I think if the Supreme Court was was a little wiser in this, I think they would have
brought the two sides together and said, you don’t really want us ruling on this. You want to settle this outside of this courtroom. And that’s how most things get settled. Lisa, they do in America. Very few of these things actually go to trial.
A lot of them. And when they do go to a final judgment like this, it just causes more grief on both sides. And it’s probably worth I think they could have reached some other agreement.
We’ll see. Yeah, well, hopefully they can, you know, like you said, come to an agreement and this is a point of contention and that these people can continue to live their lives and renewable energy can find its way into Norway, as Rosemary said.
But we’ll see. So moving on. Speaking of more wildlife, brown crabs have been found to be attracted to undersea cables. And that it seems like this is from research in Scotland that they are attracted to the electromagnetic field, which then causes them to sort of just like stop what they’re doing, not really forage for food, just hang
out and then maybe starve to death. I’m not sure exactly that’s what they’re implying. But it says they’re not. They’re not. Here’s a here’s a quote by one of the researchers. If they’re not moving, they’re not foraging for food or seeking a mate.
And that’s obviously a major cause of concern. So, Rosemary, this seems like just yet another check in the list of things. We didn’t have any idea we’re going to happen to, you know, construction out in the wild.
Yeah, I think so. And I think that it definitely needs more study. So far, they’ve just mentioned it’s its impact on on one crab. And I think even even that isn’t that well known. So let’s study it some more.
And I also wonder if there’s not some simple things that you could do in the cases where the, you know, local wildlife excuse me, whether it’s crabs or, you know, some other creature, if if it turns out to be a thing that some animals are bothered by the electromagnetic field, then I mean, I think electromagnetic field, doesn’t
it decay like with the inverse cube of the distance. So maybe it maybe a symbol is putting a cage over the cables in those areas, which is, you know, an extra cost. But my instinct is that it probably won’t won’t be super widespread because I mean, this is not the first time that someone has studied animals, you
know, with relation to offshore wind or subsea cable. So. Yeah, I think we’re starting to see that, see the impact and then see what kind of solutions we can find where where there are impacted animals.
Alan, you’re an electrical engineer. What do you have to add here? I mean, can they make thicker, thicker shielding, thicker insulation? I mean, what is there any anything to be done here or is there just going to be some that electromagnetic field that leaks out?
There will always be somebody they feel that leaks out. The question is, do we have enough field strength or at the right frequency? So to call it and I did research on this this a little bit before the show.
And PaulWell, the scientific articles, and I was skimming through it like, oh, this is kind of fascinating. This there is has been a lot of work on undersea, crab’s, a magnetic field. It’s pretty interesting. But there’s a lot of, you know, people who are involved with animals don’t know a lot about electrical activity or or electrical engineering
in particular. So there’s a lot of things you can do to actually shield cables from magnetic field. You can put things like nickel and things that are magnetic absorbing materials can go into the cable. You can also do things like raise the voltage, which means there’s less current, which means there can be less magnetic fields.
So you actually operate at a higher voltage or you could do things like change the frequency that it looks like the researchers are using, basically steady currents, not alternating current. Like maybe you could alternate the current a high enough frequency that the crab just ignore it.
So there’s a lot of variables you could play with here. And right now, it just so there’s a little news article talks about the crab and reacting to magnetic fields that can be generated by a refrigerator magnet.
Well, yeah, it’s a little
that’s a pretty low bar. Right. And so what are you going to do? You know, I don’t know. There’s a lot of options there, but it. Okay. So here’s here’s where I think this goes. I think you have a lot more study on these undersea creatures, because if they found a crab that reacts to these monadic fields
, whatever you deem them to be, then what about all the other species that are floating around in the in the North Sea? What are you going to do? I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s a good answer there.
Besides put a wind turbine in. Turn it on and see what happens. I think you’re going to have to do that on. It’s some sort of temporary basis just to see. What the heck’s going on, because you can’t check every species of fish, crab, whatever whale that’s running through that area, because it’s this is going to take
forever. So I’m just curious what they think of the end goal of this. If you’ve got to have renewable energy, which I think is a great idea, then you’re going to have to give a little take a little to figure out how to make it work.
And it me. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s there be a huge push to just ignore the ecology, is there?
Oh, I don’t think so. I usually I mean, always the wind farms have to you know, by the environmental laws we’ve seen in Australia, we’ve seen plenty of problems that people are having, you know, clearing those. So I think that they’re being taken seriously.
But there’s always something that you can do to minimize the danger. So, yeah, I don’t think anybody is saying who cares about the crabs or any other creature. But it’s a matter of, you know, understanding what the danger is so that you can take appropriate mitigation rather than just saying, you know, no more offshore wind until we
figure out what’s going on with this crab. Yeah, but I certainly feel for the for the crab. I don’t I don’t want this species to to suffer any more than any other species.
Well, you know, this is an effect also seen in humans video games keep many a young man stuck indoors for 12, 15 hours a day. They don’t go outside to see the sun, to play sports, go on dates.
That’s exactly exactly
what I thought when I when I read that article. It sounds like there’s crabs of becoming couch potatoes.
Mm hmm. Yeah. So but I do think this is interesting because this is that, you know, humans, we’re really smart. We’re great animals, but we don’t put ourselves into this like we don’t we forget that so many other creatures have so many different senses that we don’t have.
Right. We can’t detect electromagnetic fields. Sharks swim around through what is it, radar like? Infrared. Obviously, whales communicate via sonar. It’s it’s a crazy world. I think it’s hard for us as a species to to even like think of those things when we’re engineering or when we’re solving engineering problems.
Right. You just like can’t solve for every other sense that every animal has. We just have like these five dumb ones. Like we can see stuff and we can touch stuff. We just stumble around like Frankensteins. But, you know, bees are landing on flowers that have the most like biggest electromagnetic field.
So anyway, interesting stuff. Yeah, we’ll see what comes of it. But these brown crabs would be great for night players as well. So moving on the sea green wind farm is getting built as we speak. And they’re going to be one of the first very large wind farms to be built almost entirely with suction Kason jackets.
So this is an interesting technology. That’s it’s it’s old. So it’s not actually it’s not actually that interesting. It’s really simple. But it’s good for the wildlife, especially because we talked about how just damaging pile driving could potentially be to some of these marine animals, especially whales, which I love to listen to the all those sweet sonar
sounds. But a suction case on acts like a basically like an inverted bucket. So if you took a bucket, you drill a hole on it and you just sort of shoved it down, you know, into the soft sand of the beach.
That’s essentially how a suction caisson works. And then you can actually draw the water out that it traps inside, help create it like an even stronger seal into the seabed. So they’re doing this, obviously, with these gigantic, you know, turbine Jackett foundations, but they’re so heavy and they’re just letting them sink in and essentially embed themselves with
their own weight and the suction action into the bottom of seabed. So, again, this is great because there’s no pile driving and they’ve been proven out pretty well in the oil and gas industry to work. So I think that’s really interesting.
Alan, as all as you will, engineer number one, why don’t they use this everywhere? I assume it’s a partly related to the seabed like composition. Right. So rockier areas, this is not going to work. But why is why is this the first time this is being done on such a large scale at the sea green wind farm
? I think it has to do with cost. I think it’s all driven by cost. Yeah, I think you would have to have a much different sort of on set up to do that. And it makes me think it’s it’s wider just to get the pressure differential, because what you’re doing is you’re using suction to pull this thing
down into the earth. And so the bigger the diameter of the case on, the more force you can have to pull it down, which bigger diameter equals more steel, more steel equals more money. And that’s my guess. It has to do with cost materials, probably.
But I know that the technology has been around for a while. And I kind of wonder in the United States, particularly every individual state, and God knows what our. Local governments doing what they’ll do is they’ll put it in my code.
Right. They’ll make it a requirement that you use certain kinds of of power driving techniques or means of getting steel in the ground, essentially an edict. That’s what’s likely to happen along the East Coast up here. That’s just likely to happen for a lot of reasons.
And one of the technology challenges is we don’t know what we don’t know. Right. And I think on that, in my part of the world, I don’t think we’ve tried it. So we get out there with a, you know, a five million dollar vacuum seal case on and it goes awry.
Then I don’t know what you do. You’re stuck. And that’s the trouble, right, is that there’s got to be a lot of engineers and geologists that are saying this is the kind of system you can use in this kind of area, because the terrain is like this.
It’s rocky, it’s Sandy, it’s muddy, it’s whatever. So it isn’t like we’re just going to do it blind. But, you know, getting things legislated is like doing a blind rosemary. Because because you have I think this is interesting in Australia, because you have these huge coral reefs.
You’ve got this sort of natural barrier from the outside world. I don’t know what you do. Trying to put wind anything out there in the ocean, because you got to come across that in certain parts of Australia, right?
Yeah. Don’t you have a just a difficulty there?
They’re not putting wind turbines anywhere near our roofs. I hope and I’m 100 percent sure that no one’s putting a wind turbine. No, no. Why? I mean, you should go to the Great Barrier Reef, lie while you still can.
But and there’s some other ones, too, that Ningaloo Reef. And I mean, they’re amazing, amazing areas is nothing like that any anywhere else. There’s plenty of coastline in Australia that doesn’t have something, you know, totally unique like that to put wind turbines.
So solution to that problem is very easy. You just simply don’t. But I actually don’t know a lot about offshore in Australia. We don’t have any yet, but we will soon. And I’m definitely keen to look into it more for for my YouTube channel and just for general interest.
I’d also really love to be part of some of these projects professionally. But I mean, one of the things in Australia is that allc, I know that the sea level at it increases rapidly. You know, there’s a big drop off site and we don’t have a lot of shallow water around Australia like they do in Europe.
So that’s why Australia hasn’t been an early adopter of offshore wind. Also, because we have so much space onshore. But now, yeah, I know this is I don’t want to segway into one of the other topics, Dan, because that’s your job.
But I know that we are going to get some some more projects in Australia now. And it’s not as much because it’s like a really easy place to put offshore wind compared to onshore. There’s lots of onshore wind sites left in Australia, still undeveloped, but it’s because the resource there is so good, the capacity factors are high
. And I think the most important thing is that it actually really closely matches the the load as well. So, you know, the time when wind speeds are at their highest is the same as when people are using the most electricity.
And there’s good sites located close to existing big electricity users and grids and stuff. So I’ll be really interested to learn more about the. Yeah. The technologies that they’re using, because I know we’ve got these deep waters. I haven’t heard people proposing any floating wind farms.
So, yeah, I have to have to find out.
With with onshore being so attractive in Australia, I mean, do you feel like your country will be just kind of wait it out? Because, you know, floating wind is still pretty unproven, right? It’s new like the engineering, I’m sure is good.
And I don’t think any of these wind farms with floating wind are going to, you know, go under, no pun intended. But, you know, if things are really good onshore in Australia, why be an early adopter of a of a still new technology,
just the dollars? It makes economic sense. That’s what the project developers are saying anyway. There’s just so much more value in the you know, if you can sell electricity at the peak peak power price time, then it can be a lot more expensive to install it and you still make more money overall.
So I think that that’s there’s a bunch of other smaller reasons. But to me, that’s the number one main big reason why anyone is bothering.
Well, you’re going have
less spiders in your in your in the cells if you’re offshore,
you know. You know, I, I just you’ve
got a bond.
And that’s why a column is a spider on my wall watching watching me record the podcast. It’s yeah.
If you’re in danger, blink twice.
Yeah, we can. Well, I can handle that sort of thing in Australia
because they’re more robust than else here in the US. Oh, so moving on, haunch Hornsey two, which is the largest wind farm in the world, are offshore wind farm in the world at the moment. They just started installing turbines at the end of May and their first one, so their first of all, on down May, and they’re
already a hundred turbines down, which strikes me as just remarkable. And they’ve still got about, you know, 65 to go. Rosemary, does that surprise you that only five and a half months that these huge jakab vessels are able to install a hundred of these massive turbines out in the ocean?
Yeah, it did surprise me a lot. But on the other hand, I have never been closely involved with an offshore installation, so I don’t even know if it’s unusual. And maybe just in general, the industry looks very, very fast.
I guess it makes sense if everything’s, you know, that day rate that they’d be paying for all the equipment they need would be extremely high. So you would want to go fast. But I mean, in general, people try and get people try and get construction projects done as fast as I can.
I think it’s a pretty normal thing to do onshore or offshore. So, yeah, I mean, it’s just made me even more I have just got I’ve got to get involved in some offshore projects. I’ve got to go out and say, because, you know, there’s going to be so much more.
It’s super important, you know, part of additional. Renewable capacity, that’s going to come on, so just totally different environment to what I’m used to.
Yeah, I guess maybe the more I’m speculating here, but the cabling seems like one of the really complicated challenges of an offshore wind farm. Right? I mean, maybe just mashing these things into the ground. I mean, the suction case.
And Jack, it doesn’t seem complicated. Right? Plus, if we if anyone’s going to doubt my King Kong method of, you know, creating a giant creature to just pile drive them in with their fist, it’s going to be really simple.
But, Allan, I mean, where do you feel like the big piece of complexity comes in to these offshore wind farms if it’s not really that hard to plant 20 of these out at sea in a month?
I think it’s the infrastructure. I think it’s all the equipment in the ships and the people with connections.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s all the little detail things. You never think of plunking a wind turbine into the water. OK. You know, it’s complicated, but with the right equipment and the right people, you’d be surprised what the human human race can do if given the right incentive to go get it done.
And I think in this particular case, I do think investors in offshore wind see a huge opportunity and they are going to go after it in the United States. We’re talking about building ships right now, which is something we just don’t do.
We haven’t done since probably World War two or shortly thereafter. So, you know it all it’s all economic driven system. If there’s an economic incentive to get them in faster and to get a bonus at the end, guess what?
We’re going to go after it and we’re going to try to get it done. And that’s why you see these crazy record numbers. I think the same thing exists in the United States is the comparison. The United States is going to go like this.
They’re talking about putting, what, three gigawatts out in the ocean and by 2030, that’s a lot just like three or four times the the rate at which are putting wind turbines up at the moment. Well, you hang enough cash out there.
Guess what? Someone will do it. And I think that’s what it’ll take. If you’re really serious about doing it. Companies like GE would respond to the cash flow and will get it done. And I think that exists around the world that, you know, the United States is not unique in that.
But this is this is I think this is a dichotomy. And, Rosemary, I think you probably see the same thing in Australia where things that the industry or the government really wants to turn on and make happen, they’re going to pour buckets of cash into it.
And guess what? Usually gets done crazily enough.
Well, I guess this is partly like, you know, if you’re going to build a house and just, you know, your own neighborhood, you could truck over the lumber and, you know, truck over the like. You could do it in lots of different pieces and it would kind of be more complex.
But if you’re going to build a house on the top of a mountain in a very inhospitable place, you’d prefab a lot more stuff, take it up in chunks, and that house would be together a lot faster. The sets probably a a decent analogy for what’s happening here, because you think of this being really hard to install
these offshore and obviously it’s really costly, but they’re doing so much of the work, I assume, onshore, getting every duck in a row where they get out there and just like connect A to B, B to C, C to D, E to F, and let’s move on to the next one.
I mean, Rosemary, you’ve been part of all these processes. Is that obviously not offshore, but, you know, is that sort of how they try to do this, just make it as simple and as safe as possible just to do as much onshore and get all the complexity other way before they go out there?
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, that’s the golden rule is when you’re working on offshore projects, anything that can happen onshore should happen onshore. So I’m sure you’re right that that’s the reason why they’ve been able to go so fast.
I think I remember from the article as well that it was that was it was six months for a certain part of the project to happen. I think that they had already done some some, you know, groundwork satisfactory, not the right word when it’s offshore.
But, yeah, I think that there was some preparation done. And then, you know, this one, one phase of it goes faster than you would expect and likely due to a lot of good preparation.
Well, speaking of complex things, l’Homme Wind Power has announced that they’re Cherbourg Factory, their second one hundred seven meter wind turbine blade mold is now operating. It’s not the right word, but available to have things poured inside it, late inside it, curat inside it.
How big of a feat is this, Rosemary, to get one of these new 107 meter long molds out?
I think it’s a big deal. I mean, I was looking at LM when that project started, and I know how huge of a big deal it was. They had to build a whole new factory because the mold is so big.
They’re just simply, you know, wouldn’t have the space in a normal factory. Also, it has to be, you know, right on the right next to the so that you can you don’t have to do any land transport because the blades are so big.
So the fact that they’ve got a second mold now basically means that they’ve got the demand for that. That’s probably the most exciting thing is means people are really buying these blades. They wouldn’t definitely wouldn’t wouldn’t take. The space and the cost of the new Marled just for the fun of it, so.
Yeah, they’ll obviously be able to make twice as many now as they they could before, make them twice as fast anyway. So I think that’s a huge deal. Yeah.
And what is the typical rate? I mean, if they say are the molds ready to go? We’re starting on Monday morning. How long until that blade leaves the mold and is either ready for the next stage in the blade and the molds ready to be used again or it’s just already completely done.
But there is a lot depending on how big the blade is. So back in the day, I’m sure that they could, you know, make a whole blade in a day. But for the more medium sized blades now, you probably see one blade per day running off the end of a mold.
But it will have been in the factory for maybe five, seven, 10 days, depending how big it it is. But these 107 made a bias. I don’t know how long they take. And if I did, I don’t think I’d be able to say.
But I’m sure that they’re not getting one blade per day out of this factory. I’m sure it’s much longer than that, because, I mean, they’re so huge. And it’s not like things scale in a funny way with with composites.
You know, it’s you make a blade that’s, you know, maybe well, like twenty five percent longer than the previous longer one, but previous longest one. But it’s not just 25 percent harder, because, you know, when you’ve got really thick laminates now, you can’t necessarily cure everything at once.
The root diameters are really big. So, you know, it doesn’t the old methods of laying the fabric in might not work anymore. So, you know, it gets kind of exponentially harder the longer that they go. So this is a really impressive blade.
And I’m really happy to say that they’re you know, it’s becoming more mature. And, you know, it’s a serial serial production product now, not just like a nesh nesha handcrafted kind of thing. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, these will go off to the 12 megawatt latex X, which is cool. It’s cool to be a part of that. The new turbine. And we haven’t really seen many of these new ones out there in the in the world.
Of course, they’re about to be. And there’s some big turbines from all the minor major manufacturers, you know, getting placed in these offshore farms. But yeah, the big gear up, we will see hundreds of Halifax’s and 14 to two to Dede’s and the Vestas 15 megawatt.
All these outlets are cranking out power. That’s that’s going to be pretty pretty soon. So last year, up on our docket today, you know, Puerto Rico was decimated by hurricane a couple of years. Hurricane Maria in 2017. And now FEMA here in the U.S. is tasked with rebuilding their electric grid.
And people are upset that they’ve basically tasked fossil fuels to be the official choice of the Puerto Rican Puerto Rico rebuild. And a lot of people saying, hey, this was a chance to start brand new. Why aren’t we starting brand new with renewables, Allen?
And what’s your first thought here?
I think the island can’t support it at the moment, one and two. I think there are bigger issues to tackle that will have more consequence. And I think you have to know where to put the money and for the biggest bang for the dollar.
And when Puerto Rico has been hit with some of these hurricanes, it’s done a tremendous amount of damage. Essentially, all the exposed transmission lines get toppled over. They lose power in large sections of the island, which then causes either further problems and it takes longer to get back up and running again because you don’t have power.
I wonder if it makes a lot more sense to sort of sexualize the grid, bury some of the wires if they can. I know what’s the terrain may not be may be easy to do that there. But I think you got a hurricane proof some of this and I use the example of of New Orleans.
New Orleans has had a lot of problems, but one of the things they haven’t had problems with is that they and a lot of Gulf communities that they started burying power lines. So you have much more reliable power.
I think if they have to use petroleum for a while longer, sobeit, I’d rather have people have power, have access to hospital care or have access to medicine and have access to refrigeration, to store food and do those things after a hurricane than worrying about trying to reassemble a wind turbine, that the wind speeds are unbelievable and
the hurricanes are unbelievable there. Same thing for solar. I think you would solar be pretty vulnerable to the environment that they’re in. And Rosemary, I don’t know if you have that kind of environment in the Southern Hemisphere, but, boy, we just there’s some islands off the coast of America that just get hammered.
Yeah, it’s interesting. I, I definitely agree that I’m sure that the reason why they’re replacing it with fossil fuels is because they don’t want. To make Puerto Ricans, you know, guinea pigs, it all be seen to be doing that, I think definitely the most important thing is they get electricity back as reliable as possible, as fast as
possible. But I do think that there is some potential for a distributed energy system to increase their reliability in the long run. I would have thought I mean, I’m no expert, but I would have thought that if you can design a roof to to stay on a building during the wind speeds, that they say that you could
also design a solar panel to to stay on a roof. And then combined with, you know, some community batteries or household batteries, even if, you know, certain parts, islands or, you know, parts of the grid were taken out.
If you’ve got, you know, distributed battery storage and solar, then it shouldn’t be as devastating for the community as a whole. But I would probably if it was up to me, I would be doing that in parallel with, you know, first of all, going to nothing that, you know, works working as soon as possible.
And then secondly, going as far as you can with. Yeah, with with solar and and community or or household battery. It seems like it would be a good good thing to try.
Well, and I have a question for both of you with solar. So my my dad grew up in Oklahoma and they never got hit by a tornado. But he said once he saw just the debris from one that was close and you.
And so for me, when I think about a solar panel, I don’t think as much the issue is only at staying on on the on the house itself or on the building, but also can absorb sticks and rocks and debris being thrown at 120 miles per hour.
And that’s I don’t know the answer to that question, but it seems pretty complicated to keep solar panels on line and a hurricane.
My question was the distributed battery network. I think it makes engineering sense. I think it always will make engineering sense because it just spreads out the risk. Right. But the costs are still really high. I think the Red Earth batteries I was looking online on Red Earth there to see how much a smaller battery system cost.
And it’s like 12 grand for seven kilowatts. And they had systems up to 30 kilowatts, like, wow, okay, that’s 50, 60 thousand dollars Australian dollars, but still dollars. It’s a lot of money at this discount card.
So you come on.
I don’t know the exchange rate. I was talking about Canada. You know,
you’d get your own money, all
your own things. We go three days.
There you go. But I can’t see a lot of people in Puerto Rico having the wherewithal to buy this. Yeah. Right. How many people in Puerto? How many people in America could buy that? I. Not me. I couldn’t afford it.
But.
But they’re not buying the new gas power plants either. I mean, I would imagine that it only be a government supported rebuilding initiative and and also would be community batteries. Household batteries even are still emerging technology. I would say so.
You know, there is something that other people can learn by rolling it out. It would be a large scale. I don’t know what the border of between a microgrid and just a grid is that I mean, it would be a large microgrid if if it became one.
But yeah, I, I, I think it would make a really good program to learn more about what you can do with more distributed energy and batteries. But, you know, I do love that distributed energy stuff. So maybe that’s just my own personal bias.
Well, this
is one of one of the solutions that I think this is somewhere we got to get because this effect is happening in Europe. Forget about Puerto Rico for a minute. It’s happening all over Europe. If you’re going to move to renewables, you’re going to have to have battery storage.
I don’t think there’s any way to get around that. And if we can drop the cost of some of these batteries, I mean, large scale battery storage would definitely change the the future of a country like Puerto Rico.
You could if you need a gas burning power plant, great. On the off hours, you’re storing that energy and it’s not burning it off. You’re actually creating something you could use a little bit later. So it’s be a much more efficient system.
And it just boggles my mind that we keep seeing a lot of discussion about renewable energy and almost zero about large scale batteries, which they have to go together. They have to go together. And if they don’t go together, they’re going to have the situation we have in parts of Germany and other places.
They’re not alone or they’re going to have blackouts because the winds winds are lower crazily enough and they can’t generate enough electricity at this moment that just something’s wrong and the balance isn’t there. The engineering’s off. We rely too much on people in the press to decide engineering things.
That’s my take on it.
But do you I mean, I probably I’m watching a different part of the media than most people, but I see everyone obsessed with with batteries and energy storage in general. I mean, we’ve got so many new technologies, gravities, storage, everyone’s.
Carrying on about about that compressed air flow batteries, pumped hydro, I maybe it’s my personal obsession, so maybe that’s why I’m like seeking out these stories and getting recommended them. But I see people talking a lot about you.
Don’t you don’t think that that’s true for the wider non nongay comedia?
Well, let’s just less Dan Dan, Switzerland in this day in America. When’s the last time you heard anybody talking about a large scale battery project on in the news in the news?
Yeah, well, I don’t watch TV, but it’s definitely not a mainstream thing that people care about. It’s not really newsworthy for someone like power works. Like we don’t care. Right. Like.
No, that’s what happens. Exactly what happens.
Yeah. And if you’re Puerto Rico, you care because I mean, these people and businesses without power, without without lights. But that’s not an issue. Mainstream us, you know, you to pay your electric bill and you’re fine like whatever.
So until that is disrupted. I don’t know that anyone’s really going to think too hard about I don’t think it’s going to be very successful in the news cycle. So, yeah, now, you know, with with things like Texas, though, like that major power outage that caused that freeze, that call, you know, people lost their lives.
That’s the sort of the kind of thing that gets people thinking about keeping their lights on. Right every time. You know, my parents would have, you know, a huge storm in a power line would go down. They’d start talking again about getting a generator.
Right. And they and they did buy one, but it was never a huge part of their life. And one less electricity was reliable again, when I think they maybe bury lines near my house, my parents house. But, you know, it became a non-issue.
So I think it comes down to grid stability in general for people to start to to really give a hoot.
Yeah. And let’s let’s talk about California for a brief second. I think this plays exactly into this discussion, which is California this week decided that you cannot or you will no longer be able to buy a gas generator.
So when the power goes out, your power is out. You can’t buy a gas powered lawnmower pretty soon. You can’t buy a gas powered weed whacker, whatever that translates to in other countries, I don’t know. But snipper. Oh, there you go.
Called whippersnappers whippersnapper. That’s actually a better name. That’s a
better name. I’m sorry to hear that. That’s not what you call them, because it’s always fun to to say the word whippersnapper.
It is. It is indeed. Now, Alan, is that to cut emit carbon emissions or is that to keep California from catching on fire? Like are they banning watches, too, and candles? Because they probably should go ahead and do that now?
Well, yeah, but California is full of blackouts. And what’s that happened? What happens is people buy generators. Right. People have generators because they don’t want to lose all their food in the refrigerator. And they have some means of hanging, holding tight for a couple of days of the power comes back on.
And now they’re cutting off that ability. And this is the kind of policy that I think that really hurts renewables. For God’s sakes, if you if you’re going to have renewables that are not always reliable for a variety of reasons, forget about what the causes you need to have some other backup system setup in place to handle
that. And when you cut citizens off from it, what what you create and what California is going to create, I think is a lot of wrath. And when the lights go out and you can’t run your generator or your your mother in law, who’s 90 at home by herself, doesn’t have power.
People get really upset with that. And I think California can be the first one to do that in the United States where it’s going to turn. Meanwhile, in Texas, they may have had a blackout, but I Garren phreaking to you there.
There are some process in place that’s going to try to prevent that from happening. And my guess is that since Elon Musk is moving from California to Texas, that Texas will all of a sudden have this great battery capacity sitting in west Texas next to all the wind turbines.
That makes infinite sense to me. So, you know, you see just two distinctive states doing going to polar opposite directions right now, which went to when I got my money on Texas. But California thinks it’s going in the right direction.
So be it.
Yeah, well, I don’t know the economics of battery of home battery power, but they are expensive. I mean, we know for sure. Like, yeah, you know of Tesla, Powerwall, you can get a bunch of different, but it’s one wall or one segment of it.
You can get, you know, different mounts depending on your energy needs. But they’re expensive. And if were talking about five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars, like, why are you going to spend that money? Do you either have chronic blackouts or does this reduce your energy costs enough or is going to pay for yourself?
And it’s not? The answer is not yes to one of those two questions. There’s no need to ever buy it or you just wait and let the cost come down. And as the cost come down, the energy storage capacity goes up just like anything else.
I mean, I’m in love with my new MacBook here because the battery life is now insane. That’s more to the processor than the battery. But battery life has as improved on everything. I mean. And charging technology has improved.
So, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see what precipitates the move to more home battery storage. But I think, like Rosemary said, in Australia, it makes more sense where they feel like they’re being price gouged. And if you can control control more of your own destiny, that makes a lot of sense.
If you’re Puerto Rico, you don’t want to go offline. That makes a ton of sense where it’s more stable than it probably doesn’t. But yeah, the community batteries, I can’t imagine why anyone would want to get involved with that when they don’t really have power problems here in the U.S..
Well, that’s going to do it for this week’s episode of The Upside when R.G podcast. Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe. Leave us a review and sign up for the uptime tech news, which you’ll find in the show notes of this podcast.
Also, be sure to subscribe and tune in to Rosemarie’s YouTube channel. She’s doing some awesome live streams sponsored by Weather Gaarde Lightning Tech. And her videos are just terrific in general. They’ve got some great guests, including some of our old friends, such as Paul Guiseppe.
So definitely check out his episode. I watched it the other day. Really funny. And as and Rosemary dispelled a lot of wind turbine design, Miss. So good stuff coming from her on her YouTube channel as well. So thanks again for listening or watching.
And we’ll see her next week on uptime. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades. It’s incredibly expensive to send a team of rope access technicians up tower to make even simple repairs.
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