“Scaling wind energy …and automating operations” are important, and those are two things Future Positive Capital wants to see happen after its $9M investment in Aerones. There’s more to the explanation worth discussing, so Allen, Rosemary and Joel dive in. They also take a deep dive into the Wind-to-Methanol fray, where there’s a lot of discord, and a lot of (grant and investment) money at stake.

A flammable liquid that has traditionally been used to make other chemicals like formaldehyde and acetic acid, Methanol is becoming the green darling of the maritime industry. But is it a carbon-neutral fuel? The Uptime crew looks at the issue from several angles, does the math, and tries to work it out. Also, GE has three new names (and one unhappy union) – so what changes might we see?

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! 

Uptime 123 Full

Allen Hall: Hey, all welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. We have three items on the docket. Rosemary talked a lot, and so we had to just condense everything and, but it’s very good. in fact, we got very, she was in a very combative mode today. I, I have to say so she was ready to go – all fired up. First topic is Aerones in Latvia getting 9 million in funding and we, we try look at that funding to what the future marketplace is, and we think there’s huge upsides for them.

Rosemary Barnes: And then I get on my high horse a little bit about waste to fuel. And to what extent that can be called green, or maybe, maybe it’s more towards greenwashing.

Joel Saxum: So GE renamed themselves, GE Vernova on the energy side, so renewables in their rest of their energy portfolio.

Joel Saxum: And we’re. Put on our marketing hats. And talk about that for a little while.

Allen Hall: Stay tuned. It’s a good episode, everybody we’ll be back right after the music.

Allen Hall: Well funding news this week, guys, Aerones up in, Latvia received $9 million in investment funding. And I, I bring this up because usually these investment pieces don’t make a lot of news, but the company that one of the companies that invested in, Aerones decided to write up a really detailed loan articles, why they invested in a company in Latvia.

Allen Hall: And it was, it was a little bit different perspective on the wind energy community in terms of potential now, potential growth, why they think there’s gonna be significant changes over the next couple of years. And. Why other companies are not getting invested. I mean, invested into, in terms of wind companies, you don’t see a lot of investment in wind companies.

Allen Hall: The, the earlier one, this year was Skyspecs, which is 80 million, Aerones is nine. But after that it gets pretty quiet. So the, the funding company was future positive capital. They led the round with a couple of companies. You’ll probably recognize Change Ventures, Skype founder, Jaan Talllinn Vinted co-founder Mantas Mikuckas, Printify CEO James Berdigans, and then Pace Ventures and EcoSummit and Capitalia.

Allen Hall: So there’s names that I recognize in that list. So they all invested in our own as a potential growth company. And the reason they did was interesting, it said in late two thousands the north America wind fleet was already average seven years old, and it was expected to be 11 years old by 2025. So they’re seeing this aging wind turbine market.

Allen Hall: And Europe has pretty much the same difficulty where more than a quarter of the wind tubines are gonna be more than 15 years old as of 2020. So they have older wind tubines out in service and they need to keep them running and maintenance costs increas, roughly 15%. In years, 10 through 15. And Joel, I think you’ve seen this too on wind turbines.

Allen Hall: When they get past year 10, they’re just really in trouble. And it takes a lot of energy to just to keep the turbines running. So the, the, the investment was based upon those numbers of, Hey, we see a lot of wind turbines getting older. Hey, we know that a lot of maintenance has to be done on years 10 to 15 and, and all those winds are hitting into that repair suite market.

Allen Hall: And they think that the global maintenance market is expected to. Over the next 10 years from roughly 30 billion today to a 60 billion market. If that’s the case, it seems like that’s a pretty strong growth market. It’s probably not Silicon valley money or SAS startup of some sort. But it’s, it’s getting into that realm of really crazy fast growing companies.

Allen Hall: And with the economic downturn, I kind of wonder if wind and wind repair companies are gonna be some of the faster growing companies in the states, or if not the world. And Joel, you’re probably a lot closer that I know you are. You’re a lot closer to this than I am. Is that what you’re seeing too? Just be a lot more emphasis on repair and maintaining what’s already out in the field.

Joel Saxum: I think in, you know, up until about 2000 13, 14, 15 in the us, they treated blades as a, they, they weren’t a repair item. Right. They weren’t even on the list. It was. Oh. And then all of a sudden you had all these, oh man, we really gotta work on these blades. So now you’ve had eight years of. Of an industry catching up to that.

Joel Saxum: But I think the, one of the things that makes it easy to understand from an investment standpoint for the people investing in their own first off, I think they gotta steal. I think that Aerones is gonna do great. But it it’s an, it’s an easy market to To validate because, you know, I know today I can tell you there’s 71,000 turbines in the United States.

Joel Saxum: It’s pretty, it’s pretty easy to understand your, your target markets, the value, how much cost is going into them. It, it doesn’t get a whole lot better than that, there’s a, there’s a finite market. But the problem being in the us is, is sky specs has showed you the same thing with the, the explosive growth of their drone platforms and the money they got.

Joel Saxum: It’s hard to get technicians to go work on these. Not the, the expertise isn’t there, the bodies aren’t there, the the ability to bring people into that market. I mean, because think about if you’re, this is, these are guys are mostly all working on blades. Now, RO does some LPs system checks. They do some cleaning, they do some, but it’s mostly what would be done by either platform access or rope access technicians.

Joel Saxum: And if you can maybe run two of these robots from the ground with two people, you don’t have to have people that are highly trained to be on ropes. Cause that’s. right. And then you have to combine that with the ability, if these things are doing repairs or leading edge work or whatnot then you have to combine that with the ability to, to have composite skills.

Joel Saxum: So your, your work, your possible workforce keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller. So if these guys can, these, this, you know, there’s some up and cupping robotics companies out there, as well as blade bug is out there, rope robotics is out there, right? There’s people, there’s people getting into the space.

Joel Saxum: If they can nail the quality the commercial portion of it. Basically already established. So if it’s quality and speed, they can get, they will, they will do very well. I think, I think 9 million they’ll if erroneus is they’ll do 9 million of revenue work next year. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, I would say so. Yeah, that makes sense to me too.

Allen Hall: One other aspect is the offshore growth that the. Investors believe that Offshore’s gonna be big. And again, when you talk about finding technicians to do offshore work, you’re talking about even a smaller subset than onshore, just because of the skill sets required. Mm-hmm right. And so that’s gonna lead to more robotic work.

Allen Hall: And I think this makes a lot of sense in terms of an investment. I just don’t see that going to rope robotics, for example, or blade bug, you just don’t see those kind of investments and maybe they are happening. They work. Right. Why not? Yeah. If, if the market is that hot and the potential is that hot, you’d think you’d see a little more activity in terms of that marketplace.

Allen Hall: And at the same time, I had discussion with someone talking about blade erosion, which is the one of the main killers of blades that leading edge erosions, very predictable. That was the argument leading edge erosions. Very predict. And I was thinking about that over the weekend and saying, I don’t think that’s the case actually.

Allen Hall: I think, I think every blade that comes outta the factory is slightly different and leading his erosion is one of those things that finds those weak spots and not every blade has the same weak spots. So you kind of, you get this sort of unevenness that happens out in the field, particularly as the blades get older, which just leads to sort of a little.

Allen Hall: Panic, I think like, oh, this blade’s really having trouble. And that turbine over there is you could wait a year or two. So it just leads to sort of more chaos in the marketplace where a quick fix may be the right solution. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I can, I can say right now I know of two. I know intimately of one university project, or group projects joint industry ones that are trying to address exactly that blade defect forecasting.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Right. So they’re trying to understand if we know all of the ambient weather conditions and we know, you know, we’re in, we’re getting seas spray, we’re getting this say you’re an offshore wind farm, or you’re in west Texas, and we know how much particulates in the air. And, and we can map out a subset of this, this farm.

Joel Saxum: On year one, two and three. Okay. Then by year 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, we should be able to forecast what they’re gonna look like. Now then you mix in the science and art part of, you know, right. Composites and blades. So you’re, I, I totally totally agree with your point there, but from a general standpoint, I think you can get, if you could get, even from 0% accuracy where we are now kind of going like, oh man, these, these look bad, good thing.

Joel Saxum: We got an inspection. If we can get to the point where we’re even. Accurate to plus minus 20, 30% of what that leading edge erosion looks like by forecasting it then we’re in a better spot, right? 

Allen Hall: Yeah. I think in an ideal world that would be possible, but Rosemary keeps telling me that the blades are a handcrafted product, that there are new two blades that are built the same.

Allen Hall: And I think Rosemary, you were the one who was telling me about air pockets in the leading edge and that helping to contribute. Some of the leading edge erosion issues, plus there’s a grinder and a person on every blade trying to smooth them out. So they’re, they’re not the same. So is it no. Does it become the 

Rosemary Barnes: case?

Rosemary Barnes: Not the same. But I think you’re both right. I mean, they’re predictable, it’s predictable to a certain extent. And I think with leading edge erosion, it’s got really a lot to do with the the external conditions, you know, like the droplet size and the amount of dust that’s in the in the droplets and stuff like that does have a really big effect.

Rosemary Barnes: And then of course, like, it’s not like you would be able to look at a blade and say, you’re gonna get leading edge erosion in. Square millimeter here and not over here, that would be a blade by blade sort of thing. But I think that you know, what, you need to be able to prioritize maintenance in, you know, one, one wind farm over another, and maybe even one, like row of wind turbines over another row of wind turbines in a wind farm, I think all that’s gonna be quite predictable.

Rosemary Barnes: And I just wanna go back to the, you know, the, I, you, you raised about one of the reasons why there’s been this investment. In our own is because of, you know, offshore emerging and you, you wondered why we don’t see the same investment in all kinds of, you know, like, right. I dunno, advanced maintenance.

Rosemary Barnes: And I think that it’s not just that when offshore wind is gonna get huge. And so every single maintenance company is gonna do well. I think off showing can only get. If the maintenance technology improves a lot because you know, maintenance is already a big chunk of the cost for an onshore wind farm.

Rosemary Barnes: And you know, in a lot of ways, , that’s great because it creates heaps of high skilled jobs. But, you know, when you take that same amount of maintenance and you scale it up for the increased size of the turbines offshore, and then, you know, like up a whole bunch more, much more significant is the fact that it’s offshore and it’s really hostile environment.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s it takes a long time to get to it and all that salt water, I mean, even building a wind farm that’s remotely near any salt water means you get way, way accelerated aging on pretty much everything. Even things you would have. No, it. You know, your intuition says that salt water shouldn’t make any difference, but you know, it does.

Rosemary Barnes: I think that we need the right maintenance companies to develop the right technologies to actually enable offshore, to, to grow. Otherwise, I see this, you know, like huge ticking time bomb of of maintenance cost being much, much higher than anyone expected in you know, in a few years when.

Rosemary Barnes: First you know, the first surge in offshore wind farms get old enough to start having problems. I think it could be really bad. So I think it’s really important that yeah, investors are looking at which, which companies have the right, you know, the right technology, but probably more importantly, the right team to, you know, respond to what are the challenges that we’re really seeing and develop technologies to.

Rosemary Barnes: To help solve them you know, in a cost effective way. Otherwise, I, I think that it’s gonna hinder the, the offshore industry. So I think it’s like, yeah, it, it, it’s two parts of the, of the puzzle they need to, they need to go together. You can’t have, you know, just this huge surge of offshore wind without having a huge surge in wind turbine maintenance technology.

Rosemary Barnes: You need both together for either of them to. 

Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary, do you think that AONE will have to have a robot on every offshore turbine? Do you think, or do you think that’s the projection as we go forward is that every wind turbine will ha because of the size and the, and the location, you’re not really close to shore.

Allen Hall: Most of these turbine installations, well, you have to have robot or robots on every turbine platform. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, maybe it will work out that way. I don’t know. I, I, I think that that would definitely be a possibility and if they can get the cost of their robot down enough and you know, the cost of getting between turbines and the wind farm stays high, then you might see it move towards that.

Rosemary Barnes: But maybe can you explain how, how does their Aerones system work? Because it’s not, it’s not just drones, right? You don’t just fly a robot out to a blade and it, you know, clings on and, and does its thing. Can you, yeah, I have seen that to explain how it works. Okay. So there, there that’s a thing as well, but it’s not our own’s thing, right?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. No, 

Allen Hall: it, it’s not. There’s a company in the states. That’s looking at something very similar to that. What Aerones has talked about in some recent webinars, Been sitting in on is basically a gantry. Is that the right word? Joel, it grabs hold of the turban tower and it’s got this like gantry thing to it.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm that reaches out to the blade. It looks like. 

Joel Saxum: If you’re, if anybody in the wind industry, if you’re familiar with field operations, it looks like what a 360 degree platform looks like onshore, where the towers, the legs kind of go against the tower and then the platform can go up with it because Theone onshore when you, or Aerones.

Joel Saxum: When, when you see their robots, they have all these G wires and stuff coming out like, well, we don’t have the ability to do that when you’re, you have to either work off the transition piece, work off of. An ample man platform from an SOV or something of the sort, or have something like that. 360 year platform ish looking thing.

Joel Saxum: That basically puts wheels in the tower, slings up to the cell and then pulls up. I think that the, the slam dunk Rosemary and what exactly what you’re saying is the cost. Like if you’re on an SOV, if, if you need an SOV to deploy this robot versus a CTV or something else you’re 25, 30, 40, 50, 70 $5,000 a day just for the vessel.

Joel Saxum: Wow. Now I, I know, I know of one I can’t remember if they’re an OEM, but it was someone that holds an FSA. So either the OEM or whoever the full service contractor is, they recently did this big cost study. It was in German waters that they decided that it was more cost affected to mobilize technicians, to work on turbines offshore with a helicopter than it was within an SOV.

Joel Saxum: Wow. So they’ve started taking, taking them to the top of the Nael with a helicopter versus using an SOV for, for everything, because it’s just cheap. 

Allen Hall: Gosh. So they’re physically dropping them off of off a repelling line onto the Noel mm-hmm . Wow. That’s crazy. I have not heard that. It make sense to me.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm because it would be less money probably. Along as the weather 

Rosemary Barnes: I volunteer for that job, you’d probably do it. I think that sounds really fun. 

Allen Hall: No, no, no you wouldn’t. 

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, from, I never been in a helicopter before. 

Allen Hall: it’s not a lot to write home about teeth that way. , 

Joel Saxum: I’ve never, I’ve never hung underneath one.

Joel Saxum: I can tell you that do either be super fun job 

Rosemary Barnes: to fly around in helicopters and repel off them to grab onto wind Turine plates. I mean, that’s a good. No, they’ll have people lining up for that. And I bet it pays really well to, I, I, 

Allen Hall: I don’t think you understand what the word good means right now. Cause that is the opposite of 

Joel Saxum: good 

Allen Hall: you know how toughs are not.

Joel Saxum: When I climb when you go winter, summer it’s opposite. 

Allen Hall: it’s opposite. Right? It’s south of, so they’re in hemisphere, right? It just everything’s backwards. It must be something the translation with electrons go north. Right. Cause that does not sound fun to anybody, unless, unless you’re like a, you know, an AR army ranger and you’re dropping outta the helicopters or Marine or somebody that 

Rosemary Barnes: no, that’s just because you guys.

Rosemary Barnes: Nice lame office engineers that everyone likes to complain about. Oh, 

Allen Hall: okay. 

Joel Saxum: Get on again, 

Rosemary Barnes: steady. 

Allen Hall: Okay. I got my pants plenty dirty, but I know where my limits are. I don’t like falling into the ocean from 200 meters up. That does not sound like fun. 

Rosemary Barnes: no, I did go what you mean? Because I like, I mean, I, I went to a lot of effort.

Rosemary Barnes: Be trained and be able to climb wind turbines. And the first day of any trip that I do, I’m like, this is the best thing ever. My job’s the best I’ve gotta get out and climb, wind turbines more. But like by the fifth day of the visit, you’re like, oh, my harness is so heavy. It’s so hard to move around. And you know, like, you’re up there all day.

Rosemary Barnes: You can’t like, you can’t go to the toilet and you know, like, it’s just, it does become a bit of a grind. So maybe the first couple of helicopter trips, I mean the training for the helicopter. Repair job would certainly be fun. And then the first, the first little while would be really cool. And then it would probably be very tiring.

Rosemary Barnes: Very tiring job. Yeah. 

What 

Joel Saxum: I’ve wa I’ve watched two people. I’ve watched two people completely lose it during helic LIC bosy at Hewitt training. Like flip, flip the helicopter fuselage over in the pool, sink it in. You gotta find your way out. I’ve watched people who lose their minds in that and have to get rescued.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s I had someone lose their mind in a confined space training that I did, where we were crawling through these smokey tunnels. With oxygen tanks stepped to our back and this one guy, yeah, like freaked out and actually managed to crawl over me in this tunnel. That’s barely bigger than a human on all fours.

Rosemary Barnes: He actually managed to crawl over me and get out. And when I. Talk to him later, he had didn’t remember that he had done that. He was just so, so so panicked that. Yeah. So he he was exempt from the rest of the, of the training. Yeah. No, I love all that stuff. That’s that’s a fail. I love it. When I get to do the training.

Allen Hall: yeah. That’s that, that doesn’t sound. Yeah, it doesn’t sound like it’s something I wanna sign up for, but yeah, this, maybe this is why the investors in owners think that this is gonna be a huge marketplace and give, gimme a rough number, gimme a rough number. You think a wind turbine operator would pay for a robot per turbine, five grand, 10 grand, 50 grand.

Joel Saxum: It depends on what everything you’re getting done. Right. If you’re somewhere where sta statu, like, like I think about the German market, because right. They have I’m saying statutorily either way. They’re the only place I know that has you have to test your lightning protection system every year.

Joel Saxum: France by

Allen Hall: law Francis too. I think France 

Joel Saxum: does every other year. So Francis I, yeah, and France, France’s a little bit more lenient, but the Germany ha Germans have to do it. So I could see robots for certain things per wind farm, like on onshore, because immobilize ’em with a pickup truck. It’s pretty simple.

Joel Saxum: Right. But if you, if you put, put together the O & M cost, I mean, it’s a pretty easy ROI study. If, if the if Aerones says we can redo your leading edge for. 10 grand per turbine. And we’ll also test your lightning protection system in with the same robot and just change out some, I don’t know if that’s exactly how their system works.

Joel Saxum: It’s change out it’s you can. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s a transformer. do, do, do change some tools out. I could see a, an 80, an 80 win, 80 turbine, wind farm owning one of these and taking on training and being able to. And being able to take on some of these on and M activities with their own people, rather than having to bring in subcontractors and pay, travel, and mow D mobile, this other stuff that adds up.

Joel Saxum: So I could, if you can take you know, if you have a big blade campaign, you could be anywhere from 300 to a million dollars over a season, you could probably buy one of these robots were cheaper than that. Yeah. And then have them do it every.

Allen Hall: Yeah, that that would make 

Joel Saxum: sense offshore if that’s a business, if that’s a, yeah.

Joel Saxum: If that’s a business model that’s 

Allen Hall: possible and offshore, if you got 12, 15 megawatt turbines, so you got a hundred of off the coast of New York, mm-hmm you think that you think that business case makes sense or you think it’s a hundred grand for robot and all 

Joel Saxum: in. I see it resident. I see it as resident.

Joel Saxum: If you have an SOV, like if you, so we’ll take, take a, take the like princess Amelia wind farm with Netherlands. There’s, there’s a section of those that are, so there’s five of ’em right. In a row right there, right? Yeah. And so they have, so they have SOVs that are on permanent hire. They have a contract through 20, 34.

Joel Saxum: Well, they should be buying one of these robots and, and putting people on the so. That can run it or training people in the SUV. They can run it and having it out there at all times, because then if they have some slack time, some downtime, you wanna do a little work at night. You, you have the ability to have the asset there, right.

Joel Saxum: Instead of mobilizing people in demo ways, people in kit and all this stuff, just put a 20 foot Conex box on the deck of that SOV that has all the AR Aerones stuff in it. And then whenever you’ve got any time, you can. Check an LPs system. You can go and, you know, clean, clean, do some tower cleaning. You can go and repair, leading edge, whatever you need to do, whatever capabilities they have.

Joel Saxum: But that’s what I would do, but I, I don’t run the world. 

Allen Hall: So knowing all those numbers now, what valuation would you put on our own it’s as five years from now? Will it be a hundred million dollar company? Yep. You think so? I, I think so too. Weirdly enough. 

Joel Saxum: I do. I think, I think it’s quicker than that. It may.

Joel Saxum: Three years, three years, if they can, if they can get, if they can build enough. So they have some capital. Now, if they can build enough robots fast enough, and if they can train the people at fast enough to run, ’em because they’ve proven, they’ve proven their technology. They’re all over the world, trialing it with people and, and, and making things happen.

Joel Saxum: Sure. As long as they can, as long as the quality is there in, in the deliverables of the product, as long as robot works well, and it’s safe, they’ve gone through all those things. How fast can you build them and how fast can you train people to. 

Allen Hall: Of course in any sort of financial discussion do not listen to engineers on podcasts to make investment decisions.

Joel Saxum: do your own research. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Engineers are the worst. The, the little sec, the little star sec thing, like this is not investment 

Allen Hall: advice. Light behind me. Alert, alert. Yeah. So we’re gonna keep following this and ness and the crew in Latvia. I’ve done a really good job to get to this. 

Joel Saxum: I wanna not miss something as well.

Joel Saxum: That Rosemary said five or 10 minutes ago when you invest, you’re investing in a. Right. Right. You have a product, you have technology, you have the commercials, you have all these, these, these metric things. But the intrinsic that you cannot actually measure is that team. And I know Alan you’ve met Dennis many times.

Joel Saxum: I have as well. Everybody that I’ve ever talked to or dealt with over there, they seem like a great team. They’re hustle. 

Allen Hall: They’re, they’re working hard. Yeah, they really are. And they’re, and the webinars. If everybody gets a chance to watch the webinars, they’re free. They’re about a half an hour.

Allen Hall: They’re well, worth your time. Just to see what the state of the art is. It’s mm-hmm , it’s good to see. And, and, you know, these guys had invested 9 million into this company. I’m sure the valuation is probably someone in the 20, 30 million range at the moment. So they’re gonna triple their money maybe in three years.

Allen Hall: That’s not a bad way to, it’s not a bad investment. Get the latest on wind industry news, business and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter at weather guard, wind.com/news. We’re talking about waste fuel, which is a, sort of a Silicon valley startup company.

Allen Hall: That’s gonna take landfill gases from landfills and also take CO2 from the atmosphere and make electrolyzed hydrogen to create what I guess I’ll call EOL or green met. To, to bio methodol, bio methodol, maybe to, to power ships that the shipping industry needs to find a renewable fuel because there’s a lot of constraints can be placed on them in 2023.

Allen Hall: And they’ll have to slow down the speed of the ships, unless they can find some kind of fuel, which is quote unquote green. Now Rosemary’s argument is it’s all greenwash and that may be true. I do not. It sounds like waste fuel has investors in fact or did I think invested in them? Well, let me give you, lemme give you no MES, sorry.

Allen Hall: It wasn’t Ord. It was Mark Benioffs ventures, net jets, which is the big charter jet company, at least in the states. And one of the Gettys in Getty as in Getty oil invested in this. So it’s. Completely off the charts in terms of the technology, these people would tend to do their homework.

Allen Hall: So Rosemary, why is it not green? Why is it greenwash? 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, it depends what, what waste that you are turning into fuel it. So I’ve just been having a quick look at their website and they, they give really no information about what their processes are, which to me is a, a red flag and probably means that it’s, it’s not, you know maybe amongst the best, but they’re taking municipal trash and agricultural waste and turning that into low carbon fuel.

Rosemary Barnes: Renewable natural gas and green methanol. So, I mean, there’s a bunch of ways that you could do that. And I don’t, I haven’t seen how they’re specifically doing it and some of them are more green than others. So if you’re taking municipal waste, that’s not just like one. Homogeneous product it’s full of all sorts of different things.

Rosemary Barnes: If you just burn, burn that, for example you can, yeah, you can get you can get electricity as, as a result from that. Oh, sure. But it’s not green because most of what you’re burning is fossil fossil fuel origin. You know, if you’re burning plastic, then that is yeah. I mean that that’s made from oil in the, in the first place.

Rosemary Barnes: So you burn that, you release the co. I guess it’s possible that they’re taking a regular landfill capturing the methane. That is the result of AER. The digestion. I’m not sure what the process is going deposition. Yeah. The normal thing that happens when , when you have a landfill is stuff decompos and releases methane.

Rosemary Barnes: So if they’re capturing that then and doing something with that methane, then that’s good. But I mean, yeah. Landfill gas capture is, is not like a Silicon valley startup new technology, you know, that’s something that’s been around for ages and is definitely an improvement on you know, just landfilling in the existing way.

Rosemary Barnes: But yeah, anything that they’re doing to take Yeah. The, if there’s it’s plastics or, or anything in there, it’s all fossil origin. And so you, you know, like you take some fossil origin, plastic and then turn it into a fuel you’ve gone from oil to fuel via a few extra steps. It’s still a fossil fuel, you know, at the, at the end of the day.

Rosemary Barnes: So, I mean, you can, I guess you’re relying on the fact that green is this really, really vague term and people don’t like landfill. And so they’ll assume if you have less landfill, that’s a green technology. but I mean, to me, , when you’re talking about green fuels, what you’re talking about is less climate impact.

Rosemary Barnes: That that’s the meaningful part of that to me. And it’s, it’s not gonna be less climate impact. There’s gonna be worse. for the climate, because you are taking something that would’ve stayed underground in, in the landfill, you know, while you got plastic and landfill, it’s not decomposing and putting CO2 into the, the atmosphere, the plastic just stays there.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, that’s one thing people hate about it. . Yeah. So if you burn that or, or release its carbon, into the atmosphere in any way, then that is going to be you, you know, like a, climate’s gonna be a climate impact from that. It’s gonna have greenhouse gas emissions. Sure. And so from that point of view, it’s, , it’s not, it’s not green.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, maybe it’s green compared to, if you assume that you are only displacing full. Fossil. Yeah. When you’re you got this new, new one, but if you compare it to actual renewable resources, it’s it’s worse for the, the climate. So that’s why I say it’s greenwashing. So, 

Allen Hall: so if they took the hydrogen, they were creating from wind turbines that are offshore on the coast of California when that happens and then pulling CO2 from smokestack somehow, and combining those two to make Mehan.

Allen Hall: Biofuel is that, is that not greenwashing? I’m trying to understand where the line is here. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I mean that if the hydrogen comes from a renewable resource and whatever Power that you use to extract the CO2 from wherever you’re extracting it, if that was renewable as well then, right? I think, yeah, that, that, I don’t think that that’s greenwashing.

Rosemary Barnes: I think that that’s a, you know, expensive way of resource intensive way to get an end result. But I don’t think it’s grain washing. No, what’s, 

Allen Hall: what’s less. No, I that’s a good input. What’s, what’s less intensive. What’s less energy intensive than making methanol because it seems like there’s this really concerted effort.

Allen Hall: To do hydrogen, but then there’s a lot of negative about hydrogen of which you’ve informed me about like the hydrogen getting into the upper atmosphere is very bad for the climate. We don’t wanna do that. So if we’re not gonna do hydrogen and because it’s difficult to using, it’s gonna be really cold, all these different problems with it.

Allen Hall: It seems like methanol is something we made for hundreds of years and we know how that process works. And maybe there’s an it’s expensive to create, but if we’re gonna put these. Artificial barriers. I’ll call ’em in, in terms of shipping fuels and aviation fuels and O other you know, petroleum based modes of transportation.

Allen Hall: What else are you gonna do? It seems like you’re all, you’re all of a sudden, you’re, you’re funneled down into some sort of renewable methodol. 

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, if you need the answer. If you need methanol then yeah, the, you know, there’s certain green, green ways to make it and that’s fine. But the issue where I would say it’s more resource intensive than it needs to be is if you’re using methanol for something that you could just directly electrify, it’s the same issues with hydrogen, you know, it takes a lot of energy to make it and then release the energy again.

Rosemary Barnes: So it’s only when you’re comparing. Could be electrified that people you, you know, like it’s like you know, that saying when all you’ve got is when you all the only tool you’ve got you’ve got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And I think that, yeah hydrogen and you know, even green methanol and ammonia are a bit like that.

Rosemary Barnes: People. Are really scrambling. They’re like, oh, I see the potential of this. Now they’re scrambling to find things to, to do with it. Instead of looking the other way around, oh, we’ve got a problem that you need to solve. What’s the best way. And you know, you, that will be electrification. If, if it’s possible to electrify something.

Rosemary Barnes: Then that, that will be the more efficient and ultimately cheaper way to do it, but you can’t electrify everything. And a lot of the things that they’re planning to do with, with methanol are things that are not easily electrified. And so in that case, agree, yes. Go down that path, make it green methanol, and that’s great airplanes.

Rosemary Barnes: As long as you don’t start looking for extra things to do with your , your methanol or your, your green hydrogen now that you should have done. Cause you know, like if. You take example of a fuel cell electric vehicle that runs on hydrogen and you compare that to an electric car. You know, the number of extra steps that you need to, you need to get the fuel cell car working.

Rosemary Barnes: You need to, first of all, generate the green electricity to drive the right. The electrolyzer. Which needs to make the hydrogen and then you need to get it to where you want to use it. So you’re gonna have to compress it, maybe liquefy it transport. And at the end of all of that stuff, and then, you know, back into your fuel cell to convert it back into electricity, to drive the car.

Rosemary Barnes: You end up using needing three times as much green electricity as if you just, you know, connected that wind turbine into the grid and then right into the, you know, power socket that charged your electric car. So, you know, that’s what I mean about yeah, if you can directly electrify it, then no one wants to see three times as many wind turbines as.

Rosemary Barnes: As the minimum number necessary, you, you know even me and I, I love, love wind turbines, but I want the, you know, the number that we need, not three times that, that number, because we chose to go buy a hydrogen. So that’s the point that I’m trying to make. 

Joel Saxum: So quick question for you on that. Rosemary, if you have say two lead or 10 liters of space, 10 liters of compressed hydrogen, or 10 liters of battery.

Joel Saxum: What is the, what’s the smarter way to do it then? Because I believe that the 10 liters of hydrogen power will get you a lot further than the 10 liters of space of battery. Why it comes to my head is I know a company up in Canada, actually off the, the west coast that developed a hydrogen fuel cell for a subsurface a U V.

Joel Saxum: And when they had it on batteries, they could get like a thousand kilometers of range out of it. They put the hydro or the hydrogen battery in there, and now they can get almost 4,000 kilometers of range out of it. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I dunno that exact comparison. I tried to quickly search it, but couldn’t find it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So hydrogen has a really great grabmetric energy density. So per kilogram of, of mass there’s heaps of energy and hydrogen. Definitely compared to batteries, but even compared to other traditional fuels, it, it goes really well by weight, but it has a really bad volumetric energy density. It’s a, you know, it’s a very, very low density gas and it’s the smallest molecule, right?

Rosemary Barnes: So in its natural. State, it takes up a lot of space to get the same amount of energy. And I, I, I don’t know what comes out in front in volumetric D energy density between batteries and hydrogen, but I don’t, I don’t think it’s hydrogen. Yeah, I mean, hydrogen just takes up a lot of space and if you wanna take up less space, Then you have to cool it, I think it’s boiling points like minus 253 degrees or something, something like that, right?

Rosemary Barnes: Like pretty close to absolute zero, actually. And so the amount of energy that you have to keep, you know, keeping something at that temperature, if it raises above that, then it boils off. And I mean, even at that temperature, it’s still, still gonna get some oil off. You, you’re not gonna be transporting it around in liquid form a lot.

Rosemary Barnes: It is like it’s way. When you see these, you know, concept airplanes hydrogen powered airplanes, they’ve all got these gnarly, gnarly shapes because they’ve gotta fit all that hydrogen somewhere. Volumetrically, even though it doesn’t add a lot of, of mass compared to a traditionally fueled airplane it certainly adds, adds space.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it there’s not. So the use some applications, the use don’t care about space at all, like, you know, if you’ve just got a big cavern and you wanna store energy, you probably don’t care how much space the hydrogen takes up. Yeah, but sometimes you do. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I’d have to, I’d have to look, but I think that they were, this, this concept was using or not concept this practice was using liquid hydrogen, but it makes sense because this thing is goes down to 3000 meters of ocean.

Joel Saxum: The temperature’s one degree C so it’s a lot easier to cool. I mean, of course it has to get a lot colder, but it’s lot easier to cool it there than it is at 80 degrees out in the sunshine. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: But it’s only, you know, 20 degrees Kel difference out of 250. Like it’s not probably that big a deal actually.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean it’s easy. Yeah, it’s, it’s tricky when you’re dealing with temperatures and I mean, I guess you’ve got different challenges in the us with using Fahrenheit, but it’s one problem that I. See people making mistake, people making over and over again is, you know, you’ve got something at five degrees Celsius, and then you’ve got something at 10 degrees Celsius.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, it’s twice as hot. And you’re like, well, no, it’s, it’s not you can’t if you, if you wanna talk about temperature in that way, in terms of it, you know, percentage differences or, you know, like what’s a safety margin for a temperature 10%. So, you know, if it’s operating, this is design, temperature is 20 degrees or 10% is from 18 to 22.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, that doesn’t make any sense and you can see that. If you converted that to Fahrenheit, then you would not have your 10% anymore. So yeah, I’m not sure that it’s actually gonna be that, that different, like, I think 20, 20 degrees DNCE might be a, a rounding era. When you look at the, the energy that is required, I mean, you know, all the pressure, the pressure would probably help because you know, yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: Obviously mm-hmm pressure, temperature, high pressure density or related. 

Allen Hall: Equals NRT. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. That’s how rules one formula. I remember from high school. 

Allen Hall: one. Is that the one you wrote down? Yeah, no, it’s 

Rosemary Barnes: there’s, there’s like one like that for every field, you know, same with my like electrical engineer. It’s like, oh, vehicles, IR vehicles IV.

Rosemary Barnes: There you go. You can get a lot. You can get a long way with those key. Key formula that you, that you can, that, you know, sticking that one, one equation that sticks in your mind from every course that you did at high school. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: so the, the thing about all this Rosemary and Joel is that I, I sometimes wanna watch in the new technology, particularly hydrogen.

Allen Hall: I think you realize all that went into the existing architecture and, and systems that you have right now. And we’re just gonna. Put that all in the dumpster, that’s not the way industry grows. And I, I try to relate it to automobile racing. You know, if you watch automobile racing like in the sixties and seventies, if you go back on YouTube and watch these races.

Allen Hall: There’s limitations, right? It’s maybe the cars could have gone faster if the tires were better, but the tires weren’t better or the cars could have gone faster if the aerodynamics were better, but the aerodynamics weren’t better. That’s just where they were at that time. And if they had the knowledge and the, all the, the tire manufacturers, all spooled up to do high much.

Allen Hall: Better tire grip and aerodynamics has spilled up and the oils are all different today than they were back then. There’s just so many different facets that you have to squeeze out that last five, 10% of efficiency from, or just not there. So at some point you just brute force it. I think it’s kind of where we’re at right now, where it’s saying maybe you need three times the amount of energy to create the ethyl.

Allen Hall: Okay. But that’s where you are today. It doesn’t mean you’re gonna be there. Five years from now is isn’t data. There 

Rosemary Barnes: are sort of a same approach, economic limits though. Like you can’t double the efficiency of, of of some of these processes. There’s like, no, no, no. I mean, I’m not a chemist, but , there, there are minimum amounts of energy that you need to take, you know, to do a chemical reaction.

Rosemary Barnes: Sure. Regardless of you get rid of every inefficiency, you still don’t get anything for free. That’s just, yeah. The. Thermodynamics and no. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, but the laws of economics don’t play out that way. Right? I mean, there’s a laws of there’s engineering laws. Totally agree. But the economic laws, which is where everything makes a difference, do change.

Allen Hall: And I’ll give you the example. We never thought about making 15 megawatt turbines 10 years ago. That was not a thing. And now we could make 25 megawatt turbines. So if he did start putting in California instead of 10 megawatt turbines, he put 25 megawatt turbines out there then, and the economics. Scale that way and then costs get reduced, then maybe it makes a sense to electrolyze hydrogen and also to, yeah, but the difference consolidate water.

Allen Hall: So California had some water. 

Rosemary Barnes: The difference is that if you’ve got something else to do with that electricity, it’s all, it’s also got that same improvement in economics. So the relative difference between the hydrogen versus electrification hasn’t changed that much. It will change a bit because, you know, electrolyzers, we haven’t made as many electrolyzers as we have made you know, winter turbines and what, whatever.

Rosemary Barnes: So there’s or methodol plans to be, to be made there. Yeah. Methodol plan. I mean, these aren’t brand, we know how to make methadone plans. Yeah, no, they’re not, they’re not new technologies, so they’re not like right at the start of their cost reduction curve, but they, no, they’re not still have, you know, the cost reductions go with the, the doubling of of volumes produced.

Rosemary Barnes: And so if we suddenly start making a lot more, you’ll still see the cost reduced to, 

Allen Hall: but we’ve also put artificial barriers in there too. Right? The artificial barriers you’re gonna, you have to either reduce the CO2 emissions coming off of your Mars. You have to slow down, which is gonna cost me hundreds of millions of dollars, which is round it out.

Allen Hall: So at that point with these artificial barriers put in place, then it may make sense to own a couple wind turbines. Am, am I too far off in left field here? It just seems like there’s. This is where it’s gonna 

Rosemary Barnes: go. When you’re talking about industries that aren’t easily Del, I’m sorry, when you’re talking about applications that aren’t easily electrified, then, then yes.

Rosemary Barnes: You’re you’re right. Definitely. So I think that we’re not really arguing against each other. We’re arguing different, different ends of the spectrum. So, you know, if you look at things that. Easy to do with electricity. Then it gets gradually harder and harder and harder until it’s like impossible to do it with electricity.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, I think no one would argue that the like easiest electrification app application should be electric and that the impossible ones shouldn’t be. There’s, you know, some point in between and anybody who’s got a methanol company or yeah. A waste of fuel company or a hydrogen company wants to push that point further towards, you know, find more and more and more things.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, sure. It could do with, with hydrogen. And it sounds really appealing to people who aren’t like really involved in the, in the details, because it sounds very simple, you know, hydrogen economy or, you know, meth methodol economy, whatever one, yes. One, one technology to solve everything. But yeah, the further that you go away from, you know, the niche applications that are well suited to it towards things that you could do in a more efficient way, the more, the more energy we waste and the more wind turbines and solar farms that we, we have to put in, and the more cost we have to wear as well.

Rosemary Barnes: So you have to get that right balance. 

Joel Saxum: Mm-hmm. I think, I think that you have to see the support from the outside market as well. So it’s one thing to make the fuel. That’s what we’re basically talking about here. Right. But it’s also another one to say like, okay. So back in may Cummins America debuted a 15 liter internal combustion engine that runs on hydrogen.

Joel Saxum: That’s right. Yeah. I remember that. They won’t hit full production until like 20, 20, 27 or something. It’s it’s it actually went well, I guess, yeah, 200 and or 300 horsepower, 800 foot pounds of torque. And it, it runs, it runs well, but sales, but they’re not gonna hit well, and that’s, I don’t think they’re gonna start a regular sales cycle until they said full production, 20, 27.

Joel Saxum: So they still got some kinks to work out in it, but it’s, you have to have adoption, you know, by the markets and everything, but it’s when you have players like that, starting to develop directly usable components, right? Like the electric cars when they first came out, like I know the first ones in the us They looked kind of weird and it was harder for people to try to take on something different.

Joel Saxum: That was that, that was that different. Yeah. And then the next generations of ’em started looking more like a regular car. You just didn’t have openings in the front for a radiator. So they look a little bit the same. That’s why I think like the Ford F-150 electric vehicle got was soaked up so fast.

Joel Saxum: You can’t get one, like you can’t get one. And if it looked, if it looked odd, like I think the cyber truck thing like looks odd. It’s an electric vehicle, electric truck. It’s gonna be a different. it’s harder to get, right. So, or harder to get acceptance into the general market. So if you have this, like if Cummin starts building a hydrogen motor, that doesn’t make it that much different of a, like, if it goes into like light duty, medium duty trucks or something where it’s not a, just that shock value, it might be easier to start rolling into some of these things.

Allen Hall: As long as you have hydrogen available in the middle of nowhere when they’re using it, that’s the thing in Alaska. What are you gonna do? Or in Australia? In the middle of 

Joel Saxum: Australia? There’s yeah. We’re going on a 2,700 mile road trip tomorrow. if I had an, you know, if I was trying to drive my truck and pull it, pull a trailer with an electric vehicle, I have to stop.

Joel Saxum: But I read an article the other day, every hundred miles with a Rivian, they had to stop and across country trip. Yeah. And I’m all for electric vehicles, but that’s not practical right now in the us. I can’t, I can’t drive cross country with my truck and a trailer.

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Allen Hall: So Rosemary has some very big news this week, and I’m not sure if she wants to announce it to the world, but she reached 2 million viewers on YouTube this week. Which is an astounding, astounding peak. Yay. It’s like Mr. Beast then Rosemary, those, those are the two that’s kind of how the rank goes right now.

Allen Hall: who’s that? Who’s that guy that does all the boxing. Joel, that’s on that annoying guy. It’s on podcast. That guy too. Oh yeah. One of the Paul brothers. 

Joel Saxum: You oh, no. Somewhere, get that guy out of here. 

Allen Hall: Rosemary’s up on that level. That’s stratosphere, which is very good. That’s 

Joel Saxum: exciting. RO yeah, Rosemary and Joe Rogan and Joe Rogan.

Joel Saxum: Right.

Rosemary Barnes: Thanks. Thanks a, I wasn’t sure where you were going with that. I like, what, what secret are you about to out the, the podcast listening universe? but yeah, I know I was looking at what was okay. And that that little notification popped up. It was very exciting. 

Allen Hall: That’s super. Fantastic. Yeah, it sounds like a lot.

Allen Hall: That’s cool. So the big announcement came out today and everybody’s listening to this about a week later, but the big announcement today was GE is splitting to three parts, obviously. And each of those new divisions have to give themselves a name. GE aerospace decided to call themselves GE aerospace.

Allen Hall: Okay. GE healthcare decided to name themselves GE he. Again, pretty logical GE renewable and GE power. I guess maybe there’s two pieces. There are naming themselves. GE Renova, Nova. I, I guess it’s a, a, an amalgamation or a conjunction of the word Spanish word for green and the Latin word for new. So it’s like green, new, new green.

Allen Hall: So it’ll be called GE Verno. And I, I, and we’ve commented so many times about how GE has great names for the wind turbines hall, a X, right? The Sierra C Joel, what’s the other one Cyprus, right? Cyprus Cyprus. Sure. Those are great names for wind turbines, but I’m not sure Renova fits in that top five for me, rose Marie.

Allen Hall: I 

Joel Saxum: gotta think of what, what it’s like to be an employee at GE. Where, if you, if you had some nice polo shirts, because it seems like every six months or so, they’re rebranding, they’re joining two divisions. They’re splitting another division off. They’re putting another, so to keep track of it would be tough.

Joel Saxum: What, what does your email signature look like today? I don’t know. I got a new one on Monday and a new one on Thursday. That’s what I feel like. It would be like.

Allen Hall: It is like that. When we worked, when I used to work for GE, same, same feeling, we were sold to Martin Marietta, which then became Lockheed Martin.

Allen Hall: So we’re constantly throwing out notepads and rulers and all the branded stuff and to get new ones in it’s like, this is such a waste. Why can’t I use this old GE notepads? Well, it’s no longer GE we feel. Like it was not staying in brand. So yeah, I guess all your classic GE power GE renewable stuff is now is a instantly eBay item.

Allen Hall: I mean, would you run down to the pond shop and. And sell it because it’s a, you know, legacy item. 

Rosemary Barnes: Did you have those? I think, no matter how they did you have those online trainings, go ahead when you were there, because that’s what it mean for, for me is like, oh, now I’m gonna have a dozen new online trainings in my queue.

Rosemary Barnes: And I was always late with them. And every time we’d have a team meeting, you’d be like, oh, rose married you a 37 trainings out of date. And you’d be like, oh, this is so boring. oh, oh, Yeah. Yeah. But I don’t know about this new name, I think. Yeah. So did you read that somewhere? Oh yeah. No, they are saying that there is yeah, from, they put it on YouTube green and new, cause I was gonna say maybe they couldn’t call it GE renewables because it incorporates all their, you know, fossil fuel energy as well.

Rosemary Barnes: Right. It’s it’s all energy, not just the renewables. Sure. But yeah, gas turbines. Yeah, whatever other kinds of energy that they’ve got, that aren’t renewable, that you couldn’t really possibly describe them as green or, or new either. So yeah, I think I have to just come down on, on the side of don’t don’t like the new name, but I guess I’ll get used to it.

Rosemary Barnes: Well, or maybe I won’t, maybe they’ll change it again in three months. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s like, this is like, if you tried to rename Nike, you’re into something where like Google, where they have like 40 different companies, they have different names. No matter what it is, it’s gonna be GE, sorry. They’re all almost be GE.

Joel Saxum: Just call yourself. GE. Who do you work for? GE. GE. Okay. That’s what it’s gonna be. 

Rosemary Barnes: So Facebook that’s, it has to be, does anybody call it matter? I mean, I just call it Facebook and Facebook group of companies. That’s what, when I’m, when I’m complaining about 

Allen Hall: it. Yeah. Is that, is that what you really call it Rosemary?

Allen Hall: Or what do you really call? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, there might be some extra adjectives for the 

Joel Saxum: Facebook 

Allen Hall: companies. 

Rosemary Barnes: Definitely Facebook or directly just attribute it to Zuckerberg, anything evil that they did. 

Allen Hall: that’s what I’m saying. Yeah. So I thought that GE had an offer GE Verno. I had to keep looking at that GE Renova.

Allen Hall: You had an opportunity to make something really cool. You know, this is the time. This is the one shot in the next hundred years where you could do something really cool. And get away with it because what would you have called it out? What he gonna do to you? I don’t, I don’t know. I mean, I was think like GE kick ass or GE, you know, , we’re, we’re the best or something, you know, GE supers.

Allen Hall: I don’t, I don’t know. It just seems like you got an opportunity. Like it may, it seems like maybe you should have asked around instead of asking a marketing group, cuz it feels like a marketing group came up with it and started, you know, what they do. They start joining odd words together. To make up these names.

Allen Hall: And I think there’s just a better way. My book, I think you want to make it really stand out and it just seems like for no, just doesn’t really say Edi