We had a great time at WindEnergy Hamburg 2022 last week; more on that later. In this episode we discuss compelling, but conflicting, new research showing how wind turbines heat OR cool the earth. Scottish company Edge Solutions and US-based Rope Partner created a leading edge protection shield that’s gotten high marks in European installations and in testing at ORE Catapult. Joel explains why solutions like this shield make sense. We look at potential impacts of the Biden administration’s recent $50M investment in floating offshore wind development. $31M is for ATLANTIS.
Did you know ATLANTIS Did you know ATLANTIS is an acronym? Rosemary did. And an already-approved wind project in Nebraska could increase the state’s wind production by 25%. BUT, it’s too close to missile silos, operated by the US Air Force for 50+ years. Is a compromise possible?
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Uptime 133
Allen Hall: Hello. Hello, Hello everyone. We have a great show for you this week.
Rosemary Barnes: We’re gonna talk about some research from a couple of different research groups that shows that wind turbines may either heat or cool the surface of the earth, depending on which study we’re looking at. And then we’re gonna talk about 50 million that’s been set aside by the US government to support floating offshore wind.
Rosemary Barnes: And then
Allen Hall: we have a standoff in Western Nebraska between nuclear missiles and wind turbin. Row Partners is now installing custom form Turine Blade Shields from Ed Solutions, a really interesting partnership. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Regard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend and blade expert Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: And my good friend put Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If you’re a frequent listener to the podcast, please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe to our weekly newsletter Uptime Tech News, which can be found by Googling Uptime Tech news.
Allen Hall: Do wind turbines heat the earth? My response is based on simple engineering, and when turbines take energy from the wind, which reduces the speed of the wind, and the cooling effect from wind blowing across to prairie should reduce it should be reduced so necessarily temperatures will increased.
Allen Hall: So less wind means slightly warmer temperatures. That’s my engineering take on it. However, wind farms may warm the earth or they may cool the earth. It depends on the specifics. So there’s some really interesting research has just popped out from Harvard University. Harvard researchers Lee Miller and David Keith estimated the effects of wind turbines on local temperatures in the United States.
Allen Hall: To do this, they created a computer model, which put roughly 460 gigawatts of wind turbines in the us. The US currently generates about 120 gigawatts, so they basically multiply the wind tur times four and derive the temperature two meters from the ground. So that’s like human temperature things we would feel surprisingly millers and key simulated predictions calculated air temperatures will increase by 0.24 degrees Celsius across the us.
Allen Hall: And a half a degree Celsius in the Midwest where most of the wind turbines are found. That’s an interesting result because I’ve seen varying numbers and you always think that the temperature would rise a little bit, but a half a degree Celsius is something to you. You could feel that. I think is is, is that your opinion too?
Allen Hall: A half a degree? Rosemary is
Rosemary Barnes: something you could actually. ? Yeah, I think so. It, it’s interesting this one, cause it’s a question that I get asked a lot and generally by people who are looking for, you know, there’s a big crowd of people who always wanna find a reason why renewable energy is actually worse for the , for the climate than than fossil fuels.
Rosemary Barnes: And so it’s you. Pretty long voter to draw . The, the research is, is interesting to get contradictory results, and it’s also interesting the way that the research is then reported in the media or. On, you know, targeted Facebook ads, and stuff like that because they make it sound like it’s contributing to global warming.
Rosemary Barnes: But I don’t think that either research group is suggesting that this is actually changing the global temperatures. It’s a surface temperature and it’s just, you know, a mixing effect, right? There’s gonna be less mixing between the layers, so it will feel. Warmer or cooler on the surface that than it would have without the wind farms.
Rosemary Barnes: So I mean, I don’t think it, I’m no climate climate scientist, but I mean, no energy is being created or destroyed from putting wind turbines on the ground. You know, you’re still, you’re converting energy from one form to another. My intuition would be that your total temperature balance is not gonna be affected if you look at the entire globe, the entire atmosphere.
Rosemary Barnes: But you know, like I said, I’m not an non atmospheric scientist. So, so, Yeah, let’s, let’s see. You know, in contrast to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which trap heat inside that would’ve otherwise left, I can’t see how, how this can cause anything like that to happen. It’s merely that yeah, cooler air at a higher.
Rosemary Barnes: Altitude would have mixed more with the lower air, so it feels warmer on the, on the surface. That’s, that’s my interpretation of the research all it’s saying. The one that says that the that the warming that is gonna be half a degree of warming, it’s a computer simulation, you know, using some. You establish establish science.
Rosemary Barnes: But I don’t know if this was me. If I had the question in my mind, if I was a researcher with a budget and I had a question in my mind, Oh, you know, do wind turbines affect the local temperatures? I would go out to a, a real. Wind farm with some, you know, historical temperature data. And c it measure has, has it changed?
Rosemary Barnes: You know, you can use a reference point outside of the wind farm and then measure inside the wind farm and see if something has changed. And then I would choose that wind farm for my model so that then you get a validation at least of you know how it works cuz it’s just such a complex phenomenon.
Rosemary Barnes: All this. Yeah, mixing and climate models on a small scale are, are very difficult. It’s a very difficult problem. I just think that the first step that like measuring and statistical analysis of, you know, historical temperature data and, and, and recent since the wind farm. Seems like a much faster, cheaper way to answer the question.
Rosemary Barnes: And I haven’t seen anybody that’s done that study, and I, I don’t know why there might be a really good reason why they think that that’s not a good method to pursue. But as someone outside of the field, that’s, that’s my big question. Why not? Why not measure and see what happens? Yeah.
Allen Hall: But so you, you’re applying engineering.
Allen Hall: To a scientific problem, , that’s, that’s what just happened there. Well, why don’t you just go out and measure it? It’s not particularly hard. If you just put a thermometer out there for a summer, you’d be able to tell you what the temperature is, two meters from the ground, and you have before and after measurement.
Allen Hall: You can measure in the middle of a wind farm and then a couple of miles away. You could probably get roughly in the ballpark you could, probably a half a degree Celsius is something you could probably measure. And that, that gets to my, sort of, my, my point of these two articles. Cause there’s a second article here, the University of Delaware just finished another study on the, about the East coast ocean temperatures because they’re planning to put a bunch of wind turbines offshore Of course.
Allen Hall: And what Delaware is saying is that the, there is essentially no change in surface temperatures that they’re talking about. Maybe a 0.05 degree Celsius difference, maybe a slightly. Because offshore wind turmans are much taller, so they’re not that close to the ground, so they won’t affect or not close to the ocean, so they won’t affect temperatures at the surface.
Allen Hall: So the fish and the dolphins and the whales that are floating through the ocean won’t feel anything different because the wind turmans are standing. Several hundred feet in the air versus, cuz there’re 10 megawatt machines and up, but in, in, on the ground and onshore, we’re at sort of two, three megawatts, which tend be a lot closer.
Allen Hall: So I, it sounds like the only difference between these two studies is the size of the wind turbine. Like the taller you go, the less impact you have on the surface. But in any sort of scientific research, like this isn’t your first response. Rosemary is, eh, it’s probably not.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Like you just keep, can’t put any weight in it.
Rosemary Barnes: That’s every, that’s, I mean, that’s a definition of, of, of science practically. I think that that would be the researchers you know, initial instinct as well. Oh, you know is, is this true? What can I do to, well, how can I improve this model and try and dis disprove it? That’s like the scientific method.
Rosemary Barnes: I think
Allen Hall: the, the point here is every time we see one of these articles float about, about temperatures at the surface and something that’s really exact we all have the ticket with a little bit of a grain of salt and say it’s probably not true and there’s a lot more information we need to go get before we can confirm it.
Allen Hall: So it’s just a piece of information. And more to your point, since we’ve seen these numbers like a half a degree, Celsius is a lot for like crops that can make a big difference in crops. If a half degree Celsius was real, we’d probably be seeing that impact already engineer. Versus we’re gonna have some sort of cataclysmic problem in the farmlands scientist.
Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. . Those are, those are kind of the two. And I always take, I always, when I read these and we get all kinds of them sent to us, it’s, I always say they’re not true. They may be directionally true, partially true, but it’s too early to tell We’re in the fog of war of all this, and it’s hard to say. So.
Allen Hall: Whether a wind turbine heats up the planet or cools the planet, don’t really know yet. And, and more to Rosemary’s point, we haven’t really measured it actually. So maybe we should do some measurements first before we get all wound up about it. .
Rosemary Barnes: But I do think that it’s not, it’s not fair to say that there’s a scientist that are saying, you know, there’s gonna be this cataclysmic consequence of this.
Rosemary Barnes: If you, when you read the actual papers, they’re, they’re always nuanced and have all the caveats in there. It’s the journalist. Sure. Or maybe it’s the press office from the university. Or the journalist or both that are making these outrageous extrapolations. I just, I got set one today, another one about vertical access, wind turbine wake mixing.
Rosemary Barnes: And, you know, all these articles and press releases, I cannot, for the life of me find the actual research that they are referencing. How can you release a press release on an effect and then not link to the paper that that said that because you’ve got no idea what their assumptions are. No idea if it’s just total junk science or if there’s they’ve actually done something new and worthwhile.
Rosemary Barnes: Drives me nuts. It gets reported, you know, everyone reports it cuz it’s a sensational headline. I mean, this particular one I read, it was like, you know, you can get five or more times the energy density from a vertical access wind farm than a horizontal access one. That’s a sensational headline. Everyone reports it.
Rosemary Barnes: I bet that they haven’t read the paper either, because it’s so damn hard to find. I’ve emailed to try and get it, but yeah, I don’t think that the problem lies with the research. I I, I’ve never actually looked at a published paper and thought, Oh, you know, that’s ridiculous. The claims that they’re making, they, they always, I mean, that’s, you know how academia works.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s so, so careful and nuanced, and you put every single assumption in there and, you know, it’s, it’s all there. Sure. But yeah, it gets reported like it’s something that it’s not and I, yeah, I would be very surprised if that very often had anything to do with the scientist that did the research.
Allen Hall: Well, that’s why you went through eight years of education is so you could sort of.
Allen Hall: Figure out what’s the wheat and what’s the chf . I, that’s one of the things that happens at engineering school. Oh, sorry. Nine. So you double, you’re double mine.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. Some of that was arts degree, philosophy degree. So although, I mean, that’s probably the main thing that you learn in a philosophy degree is testing logic and that that’s the sort of thing.
Rosemary Barnes: So it’s not, definitely not irrelevant. Yeah. Yeah.
Allen Hall: But that, that’s where engineers are always cynical because we learned to be cynical and, and learned to get the facts. And like you said, the vertical axis wind turbine news. I saw the same news, I thought the same thing. I tried to find the same information, couldn’t find it.
Allen Hall: I thought, well, it’s just another reported quote unquote fact that is not based in anything. And maybe you’ll get the report, Rosemary, and, and when you do, I would love to talk about that to see, Yeah, what is reality and what is interpretive.
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Allen Hall: The Biden administration has announced a series of goals for offshore wind. Now they’re calling it the floating offshore wind shot, and that’s a trademark term to lower offshore wind costs by 70% by 2035 to $45 of megawatt hour. Now as part of this effort in the end goal, I guess. So the end goal is to get 15 gigawatts of floating wind out in the ocean by 2035.
Allen Hall: Seems like a pretty good. Now that’s coupled with some money that they’re distributing to a variety of different places. The total sum of money is $50 million, and that $50 million in spending is gonna be spread across seven different programs. There’s about 6.8 million going to optimizing floating platform technologies.
Allen Hall: 3 million to develop modeling tools for floating window rays. A million dollars for a West Coast ports analysis. Some undefined funds that are going to a West coast transmission analysis. $30 million is going to a program called Atlantis two, which is devoted to floating wind, and then a million and a half ish is going to environmental research.
Allen Hall: Environmental research for bats off the west coast of California. And then three and a half million dollars is funding is headed to the national offshore wind r and d consortium to look at marine life and fish. And how they’re gonna interact with wind turbines. So Rosemary, that’s a lot of different programs for $50 million.
Allen Hall: It seems like a spread pretty thin. They’re really trying to drive offshore wind prices down, because currently the PPA prices are about 80 to a hundred dollars per megawatt hour. I, I think the spot market price is gonna be about $150 a megawatt hour. So they’re trying to take $150 a megawatt hour and drive it down to 45.
Allen Hall: 70% reduction in anything is massive is $50 million. Even a realistic amount to, to drop it, 10%, 15%, it seems like so little to, to make an impact.
Rosemary Barnes: I think we’ll have trouble teasing out what the impact of this was, but I won’t be at all surprised to see drops of 70% because floating offshore wind is, is very new now.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s only, you know, a couple of operational wind farms floating offshore wind farms today and a couple more in development. So I. It’s definitely gonna drop that much over the next, what is it, 13 years? I mean, it’ll drop more than that. True. I’m pretty sure. If you look at any, any of the curves for any other renewable technology or Yeah, energy storage, the drops are much bigger than that.
Rosemary Barnes: So I don’t think the problem is there. Their goal, it’s one of those, it’s a great political goal because something’s gonna happen anyway, and you can be like, Yeah, we did that . So, you know, it’s, it’s good. Good in that sense. But yeah. How is the, the money being spent? It’s, it, it’s interesting cuz floating offshore, there’s, there’s a ton of startup companies floating offshore companies, and the very vast majority that I know of, I, I can’t think of any.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s one or two, but I can’t think of any established companies you know, like startups that have been in the space for years already. From the us they’re all Europe or there’s a Middle Eastern one that I know as well at. Yeah, so it’s an interesting kind of turning of the tables where you’ve got the US government that’s funding this technology and Europe is the one that’s like capitalism, you know, take care of it.
Rosemary Barnes: So that’s a bit, a bit different to how you might, you know, normally expect things to go. That’s
Allen Hall: a different viewpoint
Rosemary Barnes: for sure. Yes. Yeah. But I think, I mean, any new technology floating offshore, I think it’s definitely something with, with potential. And I think that we are gonna need it to get you know, the expansion in wind generation capacity that we need.
Rosemary Barnes: And definitely there’s a lot of potential, especially in the US where your onshore wind is really kind of concentrated in one spot with one weather system. You know, it’s not a very diverse resource. And so, Offshore wind is gonna be a lot more valuable in terms of you, you know, it’s generating at times when there aren’t a lot of other renewables in the system.
Rosemary Barnes: And then floating offshore can, can help even more with that. So I think it will be okay that the price may never, probably, will never get cheaper than offshore wind, but I think that that will be okay because you know, it’ll be so much more valuable to be, you know, providing energy at a time when solar and onshore wind isn’t available.
Rosemary Barnes: So I think that, you know, the government coming in in the early days and supporting projects can really help to bring cost down fast. Cuz I mean, the cost of a technology, it’s usually. Related to, you know, the volume of it. Every time you double the, the volume of a product made you get, you know, a fixed decrease in the cost.
Rosemary Barnes: And in the early days, it’s not that many more units that you need to double. You know, you’ve only got, you know, three three floating offshore wind farms in the world. You only need another three to double it, you know? But in 10 years time you’re gonna, you know, need hundreds or, you know, maybe thousands.
Rosemary Barnes: So, Makes sense to get in at this early stage. That’s the time when government could, could affect things and you know, get the price point down to the, to a level where it is commercially interesting or at least nearly commercially. Interesting. And then once you get to that point, that’s when it really rapidly starts to take off.
Rosemary Barnes: And you know, the government can’t and shouldn’t do anything at that point when you’ve got a commercially viable product. So, Yeah, I think it makes sense. Most of the money, 31 million is for Atlantis two and . This is the most American thing ever. When I lived in, in the US for a year, I did a year of my degree at uc, Davis
Rosemary Barnes: I had to, I had to learn to speak in acronyms, you know, to figure out. What, what you guys are talking about. Americans love acronyms. That’s what I learned. And Atlantis too is, is an acronym. It’s Aerodynamic Turbines Lighter and Afloat with Nautical Technologies and Integrated Server Control. . It’s like really natural name for, For a program, isn’t it?
Rosemary Barnes: That’s so funny. So American. So just, just wanted to point that out. Well, it.
Allen Hall: No, I think you’re hit on part of it, right? The name is a little outrageous and, and they, they’re trademarking terms like Wind Shot and Earth Shot. That’s the other one. I’m like, Okay,
Rosemary Barnes: it’s, they like Tesla Wannabees or Yeah, El Musk wannabees.
Rosemary Barnes: This is that, that what it is. It’s a bit sad how
Allen Hall: much, how much of this is, is gonna be just people sitting down and Google searching what’s happening in Denmark or Germany or Spain, , you know, really, Because I think that’s where the technology is. Are you gonna just reinvent the wheel in America on some of these things?
Allen Hall: Maybe. But it’s gonna take a lot more than 50 million to, to make a sizeable dent. And at Rosemary, you’re also, I think you’re right about the, the price of energy coming down over time because it will naturally, But I’m not sure offshore wind, fixed bottom wind, it’s really dropped that much. I, I think it’s still it’s more than onshore.
Allen Hall: Wind is per megawatt hour by 30% is numbers that stick in my. That number hasn’t dropped nearly as fast as I thought I would. Yeah. Yeah. It hasn’t dropped as much as I thought that it had, and we’re getting to scale there, which makes me wonder if we’re gonna be able to do the same thing an offshore wind.
Allen Hall: Can we, well, can we, are we gonna kind of flatten out because the difficulty and it’s in the ocean and just things are harder. It just, there’s a limit to how much you’re gonna be able to bring down the cost of installing a turbine, maintaining the turban. Connecting ’em up with the cables, all of that.
Allen Hall: Yeah. There may be a bottom limit there.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, definitely. And I’ll be very surprised if we end up with. Any kind of offshore that’s consistently cheaper than onshore. And I mean, the latest Zad levelized cost of energy has off offshore wind at around double the cost of energy for onshore. So that was their, you know, their average probably using, you know, 2020 data or 2019.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m not sure. And things are moving pretty quick, so I think that that will probably be changing. But the most interesting result that I saw for the cost of offshore was the auction that the UK had recently. , it was, you know, not constrained to any one type of generation, but offshore wind actually came in cheaper than offshore wind.
Rosemary Barnes: It, it was the cheapest of anything, I think, in, in this auction that they had. So certainly maybe it’s not. Moving consistently across the board, and it really matters where as well because I mean, you’ll start to reduce costs when you’re putting in the second, third, fourth, fifth wind farm in an area because, you know, you’ve learnt all of the, the challenges of the sub-sea cables and you know, a lot of other stuff like that, right?
Rosemary Barnes: But, If we’ve still got, you know, the US is putting in first offshore wind farms and, you know, Australia is still thinking about putting in our first, like, you’re not gonna see those big reductions for the first project that a country is doing or a region is doing even so I, I think it’s hard to say what’s happening definitively, say what’s happening to the cost of offshore.
Rosemary Barnes: I get the sense that it is coming down quite fast, but just not quite at the point where you can have the, you know, the, there’s so much sho wind that you get really good solid numbers about how much it costs. And we don’t have that much yet for offshore. Well,
Allen Hall: if you’re gonna be putting wind turbines off the coast of California, which are, have to be floating, you’re gonna buy a vestus, wind turbin, you’re gonna buy a Siemens ga, mesa wind turbin, and I’ll, at that point, it’s probably gonna.
Allen Hall: French based GE renova is gonna be where you’re gonna be, be buying a wind turbine. There, there won’t be any low cost options in the United States, so to speak. So you’re, you’re still relying upon the manufacturing and the engineering skill in, Well, if you, most of Europe to come up with the savings.
Rosemary Barnes: You look at most of the pro, the, the parts of this 50 million a lot of it is on locally specific things.
Rosemary Barnes: So they’re well, they’re looking at the floating platforms. I don’t, I think that that is, most of the wind farms you see out there are using existing offshore winter turbine and putting it on a floating platform that’s been probably minimally adapted from what they, what they’re using in offshore. Oil and gas.
Rosemary Barnes: But then they’re also sure looking at, you know, there’s ports analysis, transmission analysis. Research for bats. I mean, those are all small on mammals and fish. They’re, they’re all small things. I guess the biggest chunk is this Atlanta’s program, which I haven’t seen too many details about, but there’s so many words in the title.
Rosemary Barnes: I guess , it hopefully describes it. Aerodynamic turbines. I mean, is there aine that’s not aerodynamic, That’s clearly there for the sake of the acronym. Lighter and afloat. Lighter is the only, I guess, new. New bit of information there. Yeah, I dunno. We actually, we should, we should dig into that program and do a segment on that another time.
Rosemary Barnes: Cause we’ll be interested to see Oh sure. What exactly they’re, they’re planning to do there. But I think that, yeah, for sure. I mean, California is a huge, huge market wanting renewable energy right there. So I think it makes sense to, to try and see how can we get California floating offshore wind working.
Rosemary Barnes: You don’t necessarily have to, you know, design your own wind turbine. But yeah, you know, just get the conditions right to roll it out as fast as possible. Even using someone else’s technology, you, that in itself will, you know, help drive down prices because you know, once you’ve, once you’ve figured out the first projects, then that’s a lot of logistical and technical challenges that you don’t have to solve again, and you can roll out gigawatts you know, just in that one small space.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think it makes sense.
Allen Hall: Very true. Let me ask you, I’ll ask you a question about bats and see if you know the answer because I, I, I went down this little research hole about bats because it’s been studies off the east coast of the United States of how far bats will travel off land. Mm-hmm. , can you take a rough guess?
Allen Hall: I’ll, I’ll put it in kilometer, so I’ll put it in Australian for you. Take, Just take a wild stab at how far bats have been detected from land
Rosemary Barnes: mass. Well, it’s obviously gonna be more than I’m expecting. If, if, if I wasn’t primed to, you know, exaggerate my, my instinct, then I would’ve said a few hundred meters, because as far as I know, like Australian bats eat fruit and they eat insects.
Rosemary Barnes: Yes. . I didn’t know any bats that I. Eight fish or anything. So I can’t see why they would wanna go kilometers offshore. But that’s, that’s what you’re gonna tell me. It’s kilometers right? 126
Allen Hall: kilometers is what I
read.
Rosemary Barnes: What’s, what are they doing out there? What are they, What kind of bats? I don’t know. I think that’s the eight fish.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t,
Allen Hall: I I, now, I, I can find out. I can find out because there was a study done by the Department of Department of Energy a couple years ago, like 20 14, 20 15, looking towards offshore wind off the coast in New York and Massachusetts and whatnot. So they had done a study and they, they put sensor on boats as they travel along and they had the little radar ultrasound detecting unit, so they knew when a bat was around they detect a bat’s 126 kilometers offshore.
Allen Hall: And I thought, that cannot be, That’s a long way, Isn’t that roughly like 80 miles from civilization? I, the bats are the most inefficient flying creatures. Have to inhabit the earth. Besides, like ostrich is, they’re like, they’re close to that level of flight to, to go that far. It sounds crazy. Unless they’re, unless they’re hanging around boats and on, on the, on the shipping lanes.
Allen Hall: They’re hopping ship to ship and is eating whatever’s around, but other mosquitoes, a hundred kilometers off shore. Got it. Kilometers offshore. God, I hope not. , .
Rosemary Barnes: No, that’s weird. It, it seems weird. I’m glad that you brought that up because it did, when I read that out, that there’s like 1.6 million for environmental research for bats off the west coast.
Rosemary Barnes: I thought, I don’t know if you need 1.6 million to answer that question because surely there’s not gonna be bats flying around these offshore wind farms. But yeah, so apparently there are there.
Allen Hall: I guess once, once you plant something physical in the ocean that some brave bat will make their way out there and must tell all his bat friends that there’s a nice place in the ocean to hang out because it seems to be a problem.
Allen Hall: Weird. It’s the bizarres thing. So we’ll have to bring it up into subsequent episode. I’ll find that research and bring it back out because I had no clue. I said, There’s no chance. What are we even doing this research for? Because there’s no chance it bats out that far. Absolutely. They’re flying all over the place.
Allen Hall: So, More interesting bat news, Dateline Banner County, Nebraska. Banner County is in the western pan home handle of Nebraska. The grassy plains of Wyoming and the the mountains of Colorado are just immediately to the west. And Banner County is a wheat and cattle country with a total population of 645 proud residents.
Allen Hall: Banner County is also one of the prime spots for winded America Shock. Wind companies have been courting farmers in the county for more than 15 years. In fact, energy companies have already leased 150,000 acres of prime wind real estate, and in Enge has already poured several concrete pads for turbines there except no wind turbines are in Banor County.
Allen Hall: Because Boer County is also the home to another large industry, the US Air Force. So back in the 1960s during the Cold War, nuclear missile silos were placed in Western Nebraska and Wyoming, Colorado. These silos are still active and are controlled 24 7 by Air force crews. So winter turbines can pose a significant flight safety hazard according to the Air Force.
Allen Hall: So when the wind turbines were, when. When silos were installed back in the sixties, wind turbines weren’t a thing in Nebraska, and now that there’s gonna be a lot of wind activity in the area, the Air Force is requiring 2.3 miles or two, two nautical miles, a separation between a missile silo and a wind turbin.
Allen Hall: So pretty much every planned winter and site is that when within 2.3 miles of a, of a missile silo. So therefore there are no wind turbines. So why 2.3 miles? So the military helicopters don’t crash during a winter storm and they run some simulations. And in western Nebraska, when it snows, it snows. So if the ground’s covered the snow and you’re flying through snow, it’s pretty much a white out.
Allen Hall: And for some reason we paint all the wind tur, it’s white. So it makes them invisibly just go invisible during a snowstorm. And because those missile silos are operated 24 7 and they need, if they had an emergency and they needed to get. People into the silos or something, and they’re flying helicopters to these areas, they’re afraid they would have an accident.
Allen Hall: So Nebraska continues to lag behind all of its neighbors, Colorado, Kansas, and Iowa on wind turbines and Iowa, you know, more than 50% of the energy in Iowa is generated by, by wind. The wind turbines that could be installed in Banner County, they’ll tell you how much of an impact this is. If they could install those wind turbines in Banner County, it would increase Nebraska’s wind output by 25%.
Allen Hall: That’s a lot. So there is essentially no wind turbines in Nebraska. Very few places, and Rosemary and Joel, One of the interesting things about this news article just was really focused on nuclear missile silos in the Air Force and why there’s no wind turbines. They also mentioned that production tax credits didn’t apply to public entities In Nebraska, the energy companies are co-ops.
Allen Hall: They’re publicly owned, and the point of a co-op in Nebraska, as they have the lowest energy prices as you can. So the energy prices in Nebraska are much lower than the art in Saint Massachusetts. But also they weren’t available. They weren’t able to go out and get production tax credit. So they don’t, they didn’t put wind TURs out there because it didn’t make financial sense.
Allen Hall: All the energy companies were cooperative. Cooperative, basically a quasi public entity. They couldn’t apply for production tax credit. So when you drive across Nebraska, you can look to your left. If you’re going east to west, look to your south, and you can see wind tournaments on the other side. You can’t see ’em in Nebraska.
Allen Hall: So this Great Winds resource is essentially free of wind turbines. Go to Iowa, wind turbines all over the place, go into Kansas. Wind turbines literally all over the place. You, you cross into Wyoming and Colorado, there’s, there’s wind turbines right on the border. So this is one of the frustrating things about wind energy in America.
Allen Hall: that when a, a national body like the Air Force puts limitations in, it really constrains what the states can do dramatically. Now, I understand the need for missile silos. I understand the need to get Air Force people in and out of there and helicopters when they need to be all that school with me.
Allen Hall: But there’s gotta be a middle ground some. It seems like in today’s world, Rosemary, don’t we know where wind turbines are located? They’re not moving objects. Right? And it’s in today’s flight world, you know where obstacles are. All the wind turbines are put into a database. We know where they are. , Do we need two miles of separation?
Allen Hall: Is that really a thing?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s not probably anything to do with the wind turbines because wind turbines if is a really bad storm with really strong winds, then they would probably be shut down anyway. And you certainly could set a, you know, yes, a threshold or some sort of, you know alert that that shut all the turbines down.
Rosemary Barnes: So I guess their issue is that. These helicopters can’t pinpoint where they’re gonna land within 2.3 miles, it seems. It seems a lot, but I’m not a helicopter pilot, so yeah, I guess the only solution would be around the military agreeing to reduce that, that limit. Yeah. I’ve got, Could you paint when
Allen Hall: TURs red, orange something, could you put.
Allen Hall: They’re flashing red lights on top. So we knew they were there. It seems like those obvious things that could be done to alleviate this, I mean,
Rosemary Barnes: I’m guessing, I mean, it’s a really extreme, They’re thinking of worst case scenario that they’re trying to learn a helicopter, and then Augusta wind just blows them, you know, somewhere they didn’t intend to go.
Rosemary Barnes: And then, I mean, it isn’t gonna matter if you’ve got a light or a yellow wind turbine because you, you, you’re not in control of where the helicopter’s going anyway. But Right. Yeah, it’s, it seems. Unnecessarily cautious to me. But what do I know? I’m not a , not a military helicopter pilot. So yeah I don’t wanna, don’t wanna dis discredit their, their skills or anything.
Rosemary Barnes: It you know, I can’t fly a helicopter at all, let alone landed in as Tom like that. So, you know, I’ve never been in a helicopter. Actually. I’m never in my life. I’m waiting for electric, electric helicopters, so I can go he skiing in Alaska.
Allen Hall: No and no , as is the airplane representative, airplane engineer, representative on.
Allen Hall: Podcast. No .
Rosemary Barnes: No, it’s never gonna happen. Well, I just can’t justify you know, my boyfriend’s been a season he skiing in Alaska and I’m super jealous, but , but I, it is just, I, I’m not one to shame people about their, you know, carbon emissions. And I do plenty of things that are, you know, climate hypocritical.
Rosemary Barnes: But just, you know, going up in a helicopter every day just to ski down a mountain seems particularly frivolous way to release emissions into the atmosphere. So I yeah, I, I’m holding out for that electric helicopter. I just can’t believe that you’re, you’re telling me. Telling me I’m wasting my time. I mean, they, they exist, right?
Rosemary Barnes: There’s plenty of test flights of almost, Yeah. So I mean, if I get rich enough, then maybe it won’t be cost effective, but I could still do it. Right? I just need, just need a need to
Allen Hall: become a billionaire. You need Bezos level of money. Yeah. Bezos or Oprah level of, of money to, to really get around those things.
Allen Hall: Maybe one of the in fact, we.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe one of these these electric helicopter companies wants to sponsor engineering with Rosie Video where they let me go. He skiing in one of their, in one of their electric helicopters. Get get in touch, .
Allen Hall: Yeah, I, I’m all for it, but I, I’m just, Yeah. This is not my top 10 things to go do.
Allen Hall: Haven’t been on a lot of airplanes in my lifetime. Joel, hey I wanna talk to you about sort of the, the, the lack of wind in certain places, the wind energy in certain places, and it seems to be state by state. And, and it does seem like Nebraska has been left out of the wind energy growth spurt that happened over the last 10 ish years.
Allen Hall: Why is the federal government, if they’re pushing so hard for offshore wind, looking for the easy wins, , like there’s a lot of wind and it’s just not being accessed or, or there’s just not taking the barriers down. Something that if the president told the Air Force, Hey, it’s not gonna be two kilometers or, or two nautical miles, it’s gonna be one nautical.
Allen Hall: Okay. Can you make it work guys? The answer’s probably yes, or sure we can make that work and then both sides win.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that if you look at the way some of some maps read, so I, I, I’m mapper by trade a long time ago, so I’m really interested them, and the other day I was looking at one of cell phone coverage in the United States, and I believe it was actually Nebraska that has like a, a big 5G hole in like the whole.
Joel Saxum: So it’s just these political games. We talk about this regularly. Political games play such a role in, in how things get developed, that sometimes it doesn’t seem to make sense. I saw another one today that the federal government was having oversight on some BLM land, and the local people on the BLM land were like, No, stop.
Joel Saxum: Please. We would like this development to go forward, or it was close to BLM land. We would like this development to go forward. Can you listen to the locals? This is what we want. We want this income, we want this tax revenue, we want these things. And the federal government said like, Yeah, well, this is the way it’s gonna go.
Joel Saxum: So too bad. . You know, and, and to me that’s just, you know, governmental overreach when you know the way that US is set up, the states are supposed to have a little bit more say in what goes on within the states than in the federal feds kind of step in. Yeah. So you would think that there’s, with all these things we’re looking at the IRA bill and some of these other ideas of offshore wind and all these other things to, to push things forward.
Joel Saxum: There’s some boundaries and some barriers to entry for these markets that could be taken down a lot easier. I know earlier in the conversation about Nebraska, we were talking. PTC funds don’t apply to a. Well, my, and I’m, of course there’s people that are smarter than me, tax wise, legal wise and whatever, but my suggestion to those co-ops would be start a private entity and then sign a public private entity partnership with that private entity, and then have them take the, have them do the wind development.
Joel Saxum: Now, I, I would think that someone’s thought of that already and there’s some loophole or something, some barrier to stopping that, otherwise they would have done it. But yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s a shame to see that huge resource right in the middle of the country. That’s, you know, if you’re in western Nebraska, you’re not far from Cheyenne, you’re not far from Fort Collins, Denver, Colorado Springs.
Joel Saxum: I mean, and that’s all in the same inter power interconnect as well. So it would be on the same crib. It is so, All, and there’s massive, I mean, drive down I 80, the whole thing’s a transmission line, and that’s just on I 80. Right. So there’s a lot of areas in that corner of the country that would benefit from a big boom in, in wind resource there.
Joel Saxum: So
Allen Hall: the farmers would love it. Yeah. Oh yeah. Of course there’s thousands of dollars in checks per. To
Joel Saxum: show. Yeah. And the only thing, like if you’ve driven through that part of the country, that’s, it’s, it’s wheat farms and cattle grazing, but a lot of the cattle grazing has been moved into, or cattle have been moved into Western or eastern Colorado there, but that’s true.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. There’s, there’s nothing really there. The oil and gas stops before it gets there from the Rocky Mountains, so you don’t have that income. Yeah, this would be a huge, huge economic boost for that corner of the world. And hopefully we can find a way around it, you know. There’s a lot of other areas in the, in the country that are controlled by the US military and the federal government that have some yes.
Joel Saxum: Some odd restrictions on them. You know, and I’m, I’ve nothing against our, our armed forces but it would be nice to see some of that relax a little bit, maybe in this
Allen Hall: case, some sort of compromise. Yeah. I’m of opinion they can probably compromising and both sides will win on this. Mm-hmm. , there’s a lots happening in aviation in the last 20 years that makes me.
Allen Hall: Two nautical miles is a lot.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, yeah,
Allen Hall: it’s a long, Even a limit
Joel Saxum: limit’s AEs.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Two miles. Well, yeah, that’s another thing too. Yeah. You could Or shut ’em down. Shut ’em down and make ’em all flicker lights like crazy so you can see ’em out there. I, I think there’s are very doable things and yeah.
Allen Hall: Hopefully someone for the administration and is listing and takes this on because there’s, there’s things that the, the administration can do that are easy wins. Why not pick up the, the low hanging fruit? And I think this is one of ’em and be a smart thing to do.
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Joel Saxum: and schedule a call.
Allen Hall: There’s a lot of news about companies working together, partnerships. You see it almost every day now in the wind industry. Company A is partnering with company B to create synergy and they can work together to, to create more wind energy output by some new technology that they’re working together on.
Allen Hall: Almost every day. And I think as the wind energy grows, the companies grow, there’s gonna naturally be a merger scenario partnership scenario, which leads to merger scenarios on technology because it has to, Everything goes that way, right? That companies get bigger, the small ones go away, they get gobbled up, and there you go.
Allen Hall: Well, a bigger player, which is rope partner. Is now working with Edge Solutions. So Edge Solutions is a Scottish company, if you haven’t heard of it before, and I had somebody ask me on a chat the other day about leading edge protection and these guys came up. So Edge Solutions is based in, is a Scottish company.
Allen Hall: And they create these thermoplastic shells. They’re called armor Edge, and they have shown a really high resistance to rain erosion and a recent study from the UK’s, or a Catapult estimated that the shells could have an operational lifetime of 50 years. So Rosemary, do you, have you ever designed a wind tur in last 50 years?
Allen Hall: It seems like a really long time for a wind turbine that maybe 15, 20 is probably your, your, your prime spot for lifetimes.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s always more than 20, it’s 20, 20 to 30, maybe a little bit more is kind of where we’ve we’ve ended up. But that’s one of the tricks that every, every startup that you see that’s promising, you know, dramatically decreased levelized cost of energy, it’s because they’re claiming a 50 year lifetime for something that they’ve never even built a prototype for.
Rosemary Barnes: So that’s a, that’s a good, good trick to make your, your project sound very, very economically attractive. Yeah. But I mean you, you could design at least most components in a wind turbine. You could easily design to last that long if you wanted to. I mean, in the case of a blade, which is what I know the best, you just need to, you know Add, add more material, make it a bit stronger so that the fatigue fatigue lifetime is gonna be long enough, You know, you reduced deflections enough, then it will it will last that long, but it, it costs more.
Rosemary Barnes: And if you think back 50 years, I mean the, I visited the longest operating winter turbine in the world. It’s in Finn, Denmark. It’s something, it was built in the seventies. I. I think it’s a mega, that’s a huge for, for , for its time. And you know, you look at that as this big concrete thing. I mean, it’s still operating, so that’s great.
Rosemary Barnes: But , if you were really just interested in making a lot of renewable energy, then you know, who knows what the world’s gonna look like in 50 years time? By today’s winter turbine’s gonna be the, you know, the best use of that land. It’s you know, probably not. Probably have cold fusion by then, won’t we?
Rosemary Barnes: Solar, solar panels in space, beaming, beaming energy down to us, you know, like 50 years. I mean, come on. It’s, it’s pretty, I don’t know, it’s a bit arrogant as an engineer to think that the solution that you’ve come up with now is gonna still be state of the art in 50 years time. So I think that’s the main argument against against making it that way.
Rosemary Barnes: Even if on paper to accountants, it looks like a great project, if you have a 50 year lifetime. ,
Allen Hall: right? It does. Mm-hmm. . So this is a thermoplastic shell, right? So, so Joel, these are thermoplastic shells. So they’re custom molded and they’re using a a customized mix from enosis, ty revolutions plastic. It, it’s, it’s actually called l loran, L u R A N s C.
Allen Hall: So the plastic’s, Loran. S. They’re just hard molding these, these shells that then get stuck into the winter. So you wanna describe sort of the process in which they get applied to a, a leading. Absolutely.
Joel Saxum: And that’s the big thing in leading edge protection right now is the application, because there’s quite a few players out there, right?
Joel Saxum: Like if you’re, if you’re into operations and maintenance, or you deal with blades regularly, you know, the, the leading Edge protection tapes, you know, the leading Edge protection codings you have more than likely heard of Polytech or politics, L Shells or GEs. What is GE call? Pro Edge or something, or LMS with Pro Edge.
Joel Saxum: But they’re hard shells that go over the, the blade. So one of the, I think is, if I, my memory serves me correctly, is Edge Solutions was building theirs. It was, they’re Scottish, right? So it’s all about offshore wind, right? And offshore wind of course. And that sea spray and the salt spray, like they, the leading edges get, they get beat up just simply.
Joel Saxum: They don’t last as long as they do on shore. Say you. Oklahoma or something. So the part of them was if that 50 year time is to make them thicker. Now our, our good friends at Power Curve can tell us if they’re too thick, you’re gonna end up changing the aerodynamics of the blade. And that’s not a good thing.
Joel Saxum: So what they, I believe they’ve done here with Edge solutions is you have to do a little bit of actual grinding to fit the blade. So, as the other solutions that are hard shells have been, you know, you, you have to tell them, I have. Texas 37 C 30, you know, 37 meter blade. This is the design, da da. And they custom make the shells for, So if they custom make the shells for these as well, they custom make them so that they don’t actually have that like step lip if you were just to put a shell over the top of the leading edge.
Joel Saxum: Mm-hmm. sure, sure. Because that would create that bit of capitation there. And then you, you know, you mess up your CFD model so they grind, you, grind, you actually kind of grind and cut them in and install them. So again, like any leading edge protection system, you’ve heard war stories. It’s not necessarily leading edge protection that the problem is, or the product, it’s the install.
Joel Saxum: Right. If you’re putting tape, if you’re putting tape on and you have a little bit of pitting or chipping or something in the leading edge, and it’s not just 100% perfect, you can get that bit of drum skin in there when the wind hits it and all of a sudden it rips open tears off. Same thing with coatings.
Joel Saxum: Same thing with the polytech shells. I’ve heard some stor like not, it’s nothing against polytech. Polytech means a great product, but if they’re not installed correctly, the correct adhesive, the corrected humidity, the correct blade prep. You can come back six months later and you can see Polytech shells laying around in the field.
Joel Saxum: Again, nothing against Polytech. They make a great product. But installation is the, is the tough thing. And you’re starting to see some more of these people. You need to be trained by Polytech now to put these on by their actual company. And that’s a great way to move forward. So I like the idea of these two getting together edge solutions and role partner because.
Joel Saxum: Edge solutions can bring the rope partner people or, or however they wanna do it, but train them specifically because if you’re gonna go to an offshore wind farm and install these things now rope partners, classically to my knowledge, I, I might be off on the business case of it, but classically more in the us the North American market.
Joel Saxum: Yes. So they’ll, they’ll have a kind of an edge on installing them over here. Thinking about the way this thing was started in Scotland, if you’re gonna go offshore, that campaign may. A ton. You, you go out there and do 50, 50 turbines of this stuff. I mean, it’s gonna cost you millions because of vessel time and people, and all this good stuff.
Joel Saxum: Now, the, the idea of a 50 year operational lifetime, that means to me that. Should never have to touch the leading edges of my turbines ever again. So the, the return on investment is there. It may not be for 5, 6, 8, 10 years, but it’s there for the lifetime of the wind farm. So I think you’re gonna see more and more of these solutions come, these hard shell solutions for L eep come, come to fruition in high erosion areas.
Joel Saxum: I know, you know, if you look down in, along the coast of Texas the, there’s turbines within. Couple hundred meters of the water. It’s basically the same thing as an offshore site, except for they sit there and turn in the fog all, all winter, in half the summer and just get burned up. You know? So the, I like what they’re doing here.
Joel Saxum: I think it’s a great strategy of having a, a trusted, There’s a lot of people that trust row partners. You know, they’re one of the biggest blade ISPs out there in the US and the North American market. Yeah, they are. Yeah, so getting these guys trained up properly from the factory and rolling a new product out could be good.
Joel Saxum: Could be good for the.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I think this partnership makes a ton of sense and I’ve actually looked into edge solutions. Engineering a little bit, just doing research on my own just to figure out what this product is, how it be applied, so those technical details. The plastic is pretty amazing if the numbers are even remotely close to things that I’ve seen.
Allen Hall: It’s a really durable material. It’s a question of, like you said, Joel, how easy is it to apply? Does it really need to be applied on the ground at the Blade Factory or before the blades are lifted up and put onto the turbine? Is that your sweet spot? Just for consistency of the installation? Cause it seems like quitting it on.
Allen Hall: With ropes, which rope partner I’m sure will do requires a lot of extra training. And if you have Wind Tur Missouri out in the ocean, you really don’t have a choice. You’re gonna gonna need that expertise that rope partner is going to bring to that case. But where’s your sweet spot here in terms of installation for these, these edge protection devices?
Joel Saxum: The sweet spot is as a developer, putting them on in the. That’s, that’s what I would say. Right. It’s, it’s, if you’re gonna put the, you know, okay, so this is the Armor Edge, I think the GE LM Solutions Pro Edge. If I was ordering a GE wind turbine today, I’d say put the pro edge on before it gets on the truck, because then it’s quality controlled in the factory.
Joel Saxum: There’s no, the blades have never been flown, They’ve never been, they’ve never caught a bit of wind. The edges should be perfect. You should be able to glue them in a controlled, or, you know, Epoxy resin glue, however, fasten them installing properly. That’s what I would do. Now, of course that comes hand in hand with an ROI study and some extra CapEx at the beginning stages
Joel Saxum: But, but if you can take a look at that in the long run and reduce your on m costs installations when we’re going to, you know, as the US is throwing money after you know, dollars after dollars to hit our targets. I would, I thought if it was me, I would love to see, know my blades are going up with an erosion, a hardcore erosion protection system on ’em.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, as we talked about earlier in this episode, a lot of the interesting technology are, is developed in Europe, in America, is just way behind. Even in, in something like this, which is leading edge protection America, America’s made airplanes for a hundred years, but in this particular, which have leading edges.
Allen Hall: Right? And we know a lot about leading edges, but it, it does seem like. In the United States is throwing money at different projects, r and d projects, but all of the cool tech is happening across the ocean. Is this another
Rosemary Barnes: example of that? Well, I think that this is just a consequence of the fact that most of the, well traditional big winter turbine manufacturers are.
Rosemary Barnes: European and I mean, even ge the, the blade part of it is you know, is LM wind Power, which is a Danish company. And so airplane wing and a wind turbine blade aren’t exactly the same. And I think that the wind turbine has the more challenging leading edge erosion conditions. And it also, it varies from location to location.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, Scotland, even on shore, I know that they just have . Something about the rain in, in Scotland just erodes sling edges, winter turbine, leading edges like butter. So, you know, there’s probably more incentive to, to come up with solutions there. Yeah. So I, I think that that’s, that’s the reason I, I think, I don’t know, the US innovation kind of, I don’t know, ecosystem is set up to solve problems like this, but if you don’t have the companies that have the problem, then how would you have come up with the solution?
Rosemary Barnes: I, I think it’s as simple
Joel Saxum: as that. I think it rolls back to what we talked about last week with the you know, when we looked at the curve of once PTC funds run, The, the effort isn’t there to keep these things running as, as smoothly as they should.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, we need to talk about that in depth later on.
Rosemary Barnes: Cuz I, I found that yeah, one of the annual reports recently just showed the availability of wind farms in the US and after 10 years, it really drives us a cliff. It’s it, it, it’s too abrupt to be a technical. You know, Yeah, like a, a engineering maintenance kind of thing. It’s, it’s gotta have some sort of human cause a, a drop like that.
Rosemary Barnes: So we’ve gotta. We’ve gotta talk about that sometime in depth. So Rosemary’s
Allen Hall: Rosemary’s talking about a, a wind turbine field of dreams. If you build it, they will come and all the, all the support companies will come once we start building wind turmes in America. I think all the support industries will start to develop relatively quickly like they have in Europe.
Allen Hall: I, that’s a really good example of rosemary and I, I agree
Rosemary Barnes: with that analysis. Hard, hard to be a follower though, you know, once there’s already so many companies with. The expertise somewhere else. And the, the cheap, cheap solutions they’ve, you know, they’ve already. Paid back their their research budget.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, definitely something to be said for, for getting in on the next industry so that floating offshore money is maybe that’s the right, the right industry to be trying to, you know, develop those sort of supporting industries cuz that’s not established yet anywhere. Right.
Allen Hall: You, you do raise a good point.
Allen Hall: I, I agree with you. That’s open landscape right now. And if, if the United States wanted to get after that market, much like China has, China went after that. About two years ago, and they are really far ahead of everybody in terms of deployments, technology growth in that industry. But they did the same thing.
Allen Hall: If you build it, they will come. Basically, they put cash out there and said, Hey we’re gonna pay you a, a tremendous amount of money to, to create power with floating and offshore wind fix, fixed bottom wind, and just let the industries go. Now there’s a more of a governmental. Intervention then there is in America.
Allen Hall: But if the incentives are there, like much like with ptc the American companies will and international companies will step up and, and fill on that void. That’s what we’ve seen. That’s gonna do for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcasts platform.
Allen Hall: Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube Channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
