PGE’s Biglow Canyon wind farm isn’t aging well. Is it due to poor maintenance or faulty equipment? PGE isn’t convinced that every bolt failure meets the state’s reporting threshold, but a “blade liberation” in January got widespread attention. Some complain that the Inflation Reduction Act does little for climate change – but is it enough to be a catalyst? We discuss how it may affect wind, and the planet. And interesting new designs from Norway show floating turbines with contra-rotating blades that could be more powerful and less dangerous to wildlife. Are they really viable?

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Uptime 131

Allen Hall: Hello, everyone. We have an amazing show for you this week. First off is the inflation reduction act. How big of an impact will it have on global temperatures? 

Joel Saxum: And the team jumps up to Oregon to talk about some bolts coming out of a blade route and the blade coming off to the ground on one of PGES 

Rosemary Barnes: sites up there.

Rosemary Barnes: And finally, we had to Norway where there is a new startup making a vertical access wind turbine for offshore. There has some interesting design features that we’ll talk about. I’m Alan 

Allen Hall: Hall and I’m here with my good friends, Rosemary Barnes, and Joel Saxon. And this is the uptime wind energy podcast.

Allen Hall: Hi guys. The, the Biden administration has made a lot of claims about the inflation reduction act and Michael Shellenberger, who is a, is the environmentalist. But he also is an engineer and he writes a lot about the environmental changes that are happening and, and what we can do about it and sort of the costs, reward side of the equation.

Allen Hall: So he had an article he put out and, and it was talking about the effect of the inflation reduction act on temperatures and isn’t really gonna make that much difference. And the article is, is interesting. You know, I, I, I can’t validate everything that Michael says in his article, but let me give you the pieces of it.

Allen Hall: So the us saying is gonna reduce carbon emissions in by 2030, around 40% below 2005 levels. That’s I think that’s true. It’s just less in the 50% that the Biden administration’s been talking about. So they kind of gave themselves a haircut on reaching the 50% point. and the us has substantially reduced emissions by using natural gas.

Allen Hall: And so we were already on a pathway to get to lower emissions just by converting, over stopping coal, using more natural gas. Would’ve been the pathway. So if we didn’t need, if we didn’t pass a law, we would’ve already been at sort of 30% of those levels. Would’ve, we’ve been knocked down by 30%, which is most away to 40%.

Allen Hall: And with this due law, they’re figuring that it Michael’s saying that it’s gonna add another 7%. So instead of 30%, we’re going to 37% and we’re gonna lower the temperature down in Fahrenheit by like one, 1000th of a degree Fahrenheit. by the end of the century. So for 300 plus $400 billion, we’re gonna make one, 1000th of a degree change.

Allen Hall: And also on C levels, aren’t gonna change that much based on the predictions. You put it into the model, the UN model and spit out the numbers, and it doesn’t really make that much difference. So it’s interesting how the administration is talking about this inflation reduction act, having a big impact on CO2 reductions, which it will in terms of relative to the United States, this is sort of the Rosemary effect, right?

Allen Hall: You can always decrease, but what’s the effect and the effect is almost nothing it’s tiny. That was shockingly low and Rosemary. I know when we were, we’ve talked about this about a week ago, actually, of what some of the biggest impacts are. It doesn’t seem like for 300 and well it’s actually the, the actual cost is 369 billion.

Allen Hall: It doesn’t seem like there’s gonna be a lot of big changes in. CO2 and we’re gonna, are not gonna change the environment all that much. Does that make sense

Rosemary Barnes: to. Well, to me, I don’t, I think it’s kind of beside the point, if you try and calculate the actual temperature reduction of, I mean first any one country’s effort, but second.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Any one specific program. What I think is cool about a lot of the, the aspects of this this program is that it’s going to, you know, provide support for these early industries, I guess. So, you know, when you look at technology adoption curves, it always starts out really gradual at first and then ramps up and there’s so much learning that needs to be done in this kind of gradual adoption.

Rosemary Barnes: Bays and in that early part as well, the business case isn’t usually that compelling for, you know, a lot of mainstream or large companies to get interested in it. So I think that this is going to help accelerate the, the way through that gradual part and get us closer to the really, you know, steep part of the adoption curve.

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I mean, an example would be with EV charging where. At first, it’s really hard to you know, for a company to make money off EV charges because there’s not that many electric vehicles on the road yet. And so they’re not used that much, but you need a certain number of charges before it becomes, you know, convenient enough experience that people in the mainstream are gonna wanna swap over.

Rosemary Barnes: So I think that, you know, you provide early support and then you can get over that threshold to where it becomes a really attractive technology choice between the clean one and the, you know, incumbent dirty one. And that you can really, you know, fast forward. And I think when you see the big you know, emissions reductions, the big percentages, and you know, that, I guess for our country, as big as a us, that will translate to some real you know, noticeable degrees difference or percentages of a degree difference to the climate that’s gonna happen when the commercial aspect of it is, is there and it doesn’t need the government support anymore.

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, I would never really expect that a government is just gonna pay for, for emissions reduction. I think that that’s kind of like, I don’t know, early two thousands kind of thinking, and it , it didn’t really get us anywhere because it’s just, you know, as, as you’ve noted, it’s so expensive for every, you know, 0.0.

Rosemary Barnes: One of a degree reduction comes with this immense immense bill for a government. That’s just trying to brute force their way into an emissions reduction. I think it has to work like this. And yeah, I think it’s, I, I think that it has the potential to do something meaningful. Even if you add up the degrees that will be reduced from the program.

Rosemary Barnes: Doesn’t sound very impressive, but you know, think about the effect in 10 years time when there’s, you know, a lot more companies that are you know, making money off clean products. So because they’re just better than the, the dirty ones. I think that, yeah, that’s the real impact. And Joel, 

Allen Hall: you’ve been across the United States quite a bit.

Allen Hall: And we, me personally, we just drove across the United States from Massachusetts to California and the United States is immense. So unless you’ve made that journey, you don’t really realize how much energy the United States uses. And in particular, we were paying attention kind of like on some of Rosemary trips of the number of wind turbines, where they’re located, where are the substations?

Allen Hall: Where are the big transmission lines across the United States? Where are the, the energy producing sites, natural gas, where burning sites in lot of cases. There’s just so much infrastructure. If you wanna change that over and, and back to Rosemary’s point, if you, if everybody, if you haven’t gone to Rosemary’s engineering with Rosie and listened to the discussion about charging sites for electric vehicles and how big of a, a problem that is in, in Europe and even in Australia.

Allen Hall: And I’ll give you the United States too, Joel, it doesn’t seem like there’s 370 billion is getting done. Make a drop in the bucket. Yeah. Cause just so massive, right?

Joel Saxum: Because there’s so much to do. I think if, if we look at the inflect inflation reduction act is like this, this end all be all Fixit tool.

Joel Saxum: That’s not what it is. I, if we look at it more like a catalyst, right? If this thing is a catalyst to jumpstart, some innovation to jumpstart, some people throwing money at different things to, to get up and running now, like Rosemary is saying you know, it. With the PTC extensions and things like that, like it will get more development in place and we’ll be able to get further down the line towards, you know, reducing, you know, these 40% goals and, and, you know, 37% in reality of as this article states, right?

Joel Saxum: This, this catalyst will get us towards those things. But I think I, I like the idea as well of thinking maybe the, the United States on the world stage can, can be looked at as you know, we’re not normally looked at as the people starting the green energy revolution. But maybe this can do some of that.

Joel Saxum: Maybe we can set some examples of, Hey, we’re this is what’s going on, right? The point, you know, the one, 1000th of a degree change, it’s better than looking at some of the other stats that say three degrees of increase. So, right. You know, we’re, that’s true. We’re one country in the world throwing you know, a large sum of money, 400 billion at a problem as a catalyst and maybe.

Joel Saxum: Some other countries will follow suit. Some other things will happen. Some innovation here we’ll spur some innovation somewhere else. So it’s, it’s a group effort. It’s not just the us trying to fix the world problem too, you know, and 

Allen Hall: I think you actually touched on Michael shell and Berger’s ultimate point in that article, which was if he actually took some of that money and put it into R and D.

Allen Hall: It’d be of better use than trying to implement at this stage. And I think Rosemary is saying the same thing of we’re still early. No, don’t think so. We still need to propagate out things snow. Think so because, oh, I’ll give, 

Rosemary Barnes: I’ll give you the example. I think we have the technologies, it’s the implementation and getting the business cases workable that then leads to the scale that you need to, to go up, you know, R and D is always, you know, 20 years in the future that you see something that might be able to be commercialized.

Rosemary Barnes: But the bulk of emissions reductions can happen using technologies that are well well known to us. And it is just, you know, like needing to get over that little, little hump. I mean, you would’ve seen it with wind energy, right? Like in two, th from 2000 to 2010. Things moved slowly because it was more expensive.

Rosemary Barnes: It was you know, it was more of a pain. And then as soon as it got to the point where actually wind energy is a great way to make money, then you have all sorts of developers rushing in bringing in experience from other fields. And you know, you can’t get projects in the ground fast enough because it just, every, everybody wants a piece of that pie.

Rosemary Barnes: And so we just need to see the same thing replicated with all of the other clean energy technologies. Now, you know, we’ve done it with wind with, with solar. 

Joel Saxum: So what if we shoved some R and D funds into some projects that were like TRL seven, TRL eight instead of TRL three. Right. You know, like we’ve been, you know, Alan, you, you share some stuff today.

Joel Saxum: We were talking about in the group about some different Al algae projects and things like that. Like there’s some of those technologies that are like, ah, they’ve been kind of being played with for 10, 15, 20 years. And now they’re almost commercialized. It’d be nice to get some of those over, over, over that last hurdle and, and in the field.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: I think that’s appropriate, especially where you know, some technologies are just never gonna be cheaper than the polluting emitting you know, version of it. And so I think that those, yeah, I mean, support the the development, because there’s no nothing in it for a private company to do that.

Rosemary Barnes: And yeah, so a mix of that, and then plus stuff that’s at, you know, eight or nine and just needs that last little bit to get to scale and commercial rollout. I, I think that that would be a good mix. So yeah, I think, I think that’s what, 

Joel Saxum: like the ARPA E projects are a lot, a lot of them are like that.

Joel Saxum: They wanna see some stuff that’s in the seven, seven and eight for those who don’t know TRL technology readiness level, it’s the us government’s scale of where an innovation is at to, to hit the field. One through nine. One is an idea. Nine is commercially 

Allen Hall: scaled making money, ideally, and, and back to Rosemary’s point, the production tax credit probably had more to do with.

Allen Hall: Deployment of wind than anything else. I think we’re gonna see that again, versus some of these other projects they’re trying to take on. If you really, if you want to push wind, I think that’s great. I, it seems like you do it cheaper. And I think the arguments that a lot of the states are using right now is saying, well, we’ve been putting money into wind for 20 on years.

Allen Hall: Why do we keep doing it? And the answer is obvious, right? Because we want to try to, you know, wean ourself off foreign substance foreign oil, all the stuff, all the above. Right. Is it worth it? Dunno. I don’t, if there’s a good answer. 

Rosemary Barnes: Mm, I don’t think that wind needs a lot more subsidies in most places. I mean, Australia didn’t have any kind of production tax credit.

Rosemary Barnes: There’s some renewable energy certificates. And I, I guess they still exist, but the real incentive is just that you can, you can make a lot of money from a good win project in Australia and it’s, it really does stand on its own two feet. Definitely am in solar as well. I keep on talking about win cuz that’s, you know, obviously all of us yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: Are more involved in that part, but yeah, well, sure, 

Allen Hall: sure. I think I know I, you see a lot of, we drove across the United States, we’re listening into a lot of different things. We had a lot of seat time. One of the, I, I think there’s just a big concern of, we don’t have any wind manufacturers in the states necessarily.

Allen Hall: I would count GE as sort of in the states and solar pretty much none. Right? So if we really wanna stand those things up, we gotta get on it. And in that part, I think makes sense. If we wanna stand up wind energy companies that could manufacture turbines in the states, that would be something that, that needs urgency.

Allen Hall: We don’t need to have that 10 years from now. We need that in the next 24 months. I would say, if we’re really serious, now it’s gonna be hard. I think it’s gonna be hard to tell if if the inflation reduction act is gonna be making a dent in 24 months, 

Joel Saxum: if you were to sign post Alan, one thing, one, one thought of why the us doesn’t have a winter tur by manufacturer.

Joel Saxum: What would you say? It is?

Allen Hall: China and the availability of competitiveness. Yeah. Yeah. It’s cost it’s it’s cost. Yeah. And the, the Danish have the same problem. The Germans have the same problem. It’s cost, right? Everything gets outsource. Even a lot of the vest is wind turbine components and Siemens, Mesa, wind Turbin components are not in country they’re they’re made outside.

Allen Hall: And I think that supply chain of China is a, is a big draw, lower the cost down because the operators want lower cost turbines. Yeah, sure. Why not?

Joel Saxum: Yeah. I’ve seen, I’ve seen an article today that just said something about ons, ensuring a lot more manufacturing. Like there’s more new manufacturing facilities being built in the us today than there has been in the last many years. So maybe that maybe that’ll come from a POL you know, policy changes and things, and maybe we see someone something start up or someone onshore at least bring the factories back over here.

Joel Saxum: And start, start those back up. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. I think the Biden administration’s gonna have trouble if they don’t have physical factories production. On the ground, invisible spots. Mm-hmm, , it’s going to bounce back on ’em in a hard way. And, and they they’re promoting that. And I think that’s what they’re trying to get to, but they have to make it reality.

Allen Hall: And which is the hardest part as engineers. We all know we can all make computer simulations of whatever we want to, but building a factory and delivering wind turbines out of it is extremely 

Joel Saxum: difficult. Yeah. The one thing, the one feather in the cap they’ve got is the Jones act is sitting out there. So at least some of this money’s going into vessels that are being built here at the coastal port communities, you know, but other than that, 

Allen Hall: well, that’s a, that’s a really good question.

Allen Hall: Joel, do we need a Jones act for wind turbines? 

Joel Saxum: Competitiveness again? I think it just, it would be nice. It would be really nice. It’d be nice to have a Jones act for car parts. But, but now you’re solar, solar, solar panels. Yeah. Yeah. But now you’re $50,000 car will turn into a hundred thousand dollars car if every component has to be made in the us.

Joel Saxum: So it’s a global economy, global supply chain thing. Yeah, it would be, it would be fantastic if they have, I would look if the government, if there’s $370 billion, if some, if they said, if you started a renewable energy manufacturing facility, design manufacture build facility and you got a massive tax break, I think that would be fantastic to bring it onshore just for energy security purposes.

Allen Hall: Mm. And ultimately, I think that’s what matters. Right? We, we don’t need a, a wind turbine spurt that doesn’t have lasting legs to it. Yeah. Yeah. If we’re gonna do this and put this effort into it and, and spend mm-hmm, hundreds of billions of dollars and the effort we ought to have something that goes on more than a couple years, ideally.

Joel Saxum: The investment might be better there into distributed power generation, photo Volta, right? Yeah, all solar power, because they’re, it’s just easier to deploy. Maybe we need to bring that more on shore. Get the latest on wind industry 

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Allen Hall: All right. Rosemary GE wind turbine dropped a blade out in Oregon. Now you would, you would say if that happened to Texas, I don’t know if anybody would really care all that much, but in Oregon, for whatever reason, it’s a huge deal. so as the story goes a blade fell off or was thrust into the air and it landed in a field without injuring anybody.

Allen Hall: Well, it could have injured somebody if someone was standing right there, At 2:00 AM in the morning, watching the wind turbine, they could have been hit by flying blade. The news articles you see are very inflammatory. The language is so suspect. It makes you wonder what the agenda is, but cuz it clearly the agenda is we don’t like wind.

Allen Hall: We don’t like PGE, which is a power provider and which has operating a little over 200 winter ins out in Oregon. And we want all this stuff to stop because for whatever reason, I I’m guessing Oregon, which is one of the most liberal places on the planet. Doesn’t think wind energy is cool and depends where 

Joel Saxum: it was in Oregon.

Joel Saxum: yeah. Right. It was the Western, the coast. It’s one. If it’s in a middle, it’s a different story. 

Allen Hall: That’s true. If it’s on the Eastern side, not cool. Right. Wind. Wind is not cool on the Western side. Wind is cool. You think it would be mm-hmm but the, the issue with this particular winter turbine is the bolt started falling out of the blade.

Allen Hall: And some of them were on the ground, a sales or not salesperson, but a delivery person was up that way and was maybe taking a lunch break, what it sounded like and saw some bolt sling on the ground. And he took a picture of one. He, he picked one of ’em up and kept as a souvenir as a paperweight. And that was it.

Allen Hall: And then two days later, boom, the, the Blake flies off shocker and the local community and regulators are super concerned about it. Like, I guess that makes sense. And PGE pretty much stopped everything, shutting down, all those wind turbines, little over 200 wind turbines and then checking the, the blade T torque.

Allen Hall: And they sh they kept four shut down for a little while longer. I assuming they, they found some issues with those. And I had talked Tobolt a couple of months ago off behind the scenes there. And when I, I asked those guys. Talked to Pete there. And what they said about bolts was I said, what are the critical bolts joints in a wind turbine?

Allen Hall: Because their company measures bolt torque or bolt tightness. And he said, cause I thought it was foundation bolts. No, no, no, no. It’s blade bolts. It’s definitely blade bolts because of this, the coefficient thermal expansion fiberglass hasn’t move with the bolt moves things, tend to loosen up over time.

Allen Hall: And I thought, oh yeah, that makes obvious sense. Come on. Right. So Rosemary on those, because you’re our blade expert, does, does that whole joint make sense where you put these big metal bolts and, and you tap it into fiberglass and that’s, what’s holding the blade onto the hub. Does, does that design makes sense?

Rosemary Barnes: It’s a tricky, it’s a really tricky design aspect. I don’t think they usually tapped in at least I haven’t seen it done that way. You would usually mold them in there. So you know, you, you put some, okay. Some material around it and then as you’re as you’re curing the. The blade shell, you, you cure it with, with bolts in there or with, you know, some, some component in there that the bolts are gonna thread into.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Okay. Because I mean, if you’re trying to tap into the into the fiberglass, that’s, that’s tricky because you, then you’re gonna be cutting as you, you know, as you cut out the, the path for the right, the thread, you’re gonna be slicing through the fibers and you’re gonna be just transferring purely through the the resin, which is.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, not ideal, but I mean, it’s not ideal anyway, they’re two totally different, different materials with different properties, not just the, the thermal coefficient of thermal expansion is different. So yeah, the, the bolts probably you know, their volume changes more than the blades with temperature changes.

Rosemary Barnes: Then also the, you know, the stiffness is different between the two materials, so you’re gonna get stress concentrations around it. Yeah, it’s just, it’s a really challenging feature and every manufacturer has come up with a slightly different way to do it. And when there are, there are issues from time to time, probably with every manufacturer.

Rosemary Barnes: And when there’s issues with the, yeah, with, with something, you know, related to the way that the blade is bolted into the, the hub, those are big, big problems that the, you know, companies need to take seriously. , but in this particular case, it doesn’t sound to me so much like a design problem as like a maintenance problem.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, if you read through the article, there’s been, you know, a history of poor maintenance and things being covered up and turbines continuing to operate, even though there’s been, you know, more than one blade, bolt failure. I mean, I know they’ll be designed with safety margins. So, you know, in theory you can have you know, one or several bolts could break and the, the design is still safe, but you do have to start thinking, why did this one blade bolt break and other ones going to also break and it doesn’t look like they really, you know, displayed the necessary level of curiosity and didn’t, you know, make sure that the maintenance was done adequately to ensure that this sort of thing couldn’t happen.

Rosemary Barnes: Joel, 

Allen Hall: is that something that is regularly inspected? The, the bolt. Tightness on the blades. Well, 

Joel Saxum: I’ll give you, there’s just a couple ways to look at it as well. So think about you, you, we were talking earlier about you building some Ikea furniture. When you put together the corner, the corners of some of your Ikea furniture, there’s a hole that you drop a barrel nut into, and then you screw in this way.

Joel Saxum: And that barrel nut goes like this and pinches it together. That’s the design that’s replicated in a lot of root bolts. There’s a, like a void in the, in, around where they, the, where you would put a threaded bolt in mm-hmm and then you, you cast the blade, you do everything, and then you drop that in there.

Joel Saxum: And then come in the other way with the threaded rod thread, the rod into the, the, the barrel nut, and then you EPOXI in. So now you have it’s setting against all the basically all the huge supplies and materials at the end of the root bowl. So sometimes when they start to loosen up. That they start to kind of vibrate shimmy a little bit.

Joel Saxum: And that th that bolt can, can like wiggle inside of that cavity. And then you get a crack in the gel coat. So you can see that a lot of times on external inspections, right? Like the GE the, the GE one five S that’s how they were built. And if you look at them, you can see that sometimes if the turbine’s 10, 15 years old, if that gel code is cracked, and a little bit of water’s gotten into where that bolt is, Sometimes they rust and it looks like little rust pockets or, I mean, not let me take that back.

Joel Saxum: GE I said, GE I meant SU salons, SU salons are built like that. So they’ll have like a little bit of like rust crack that is around right at the root. And you can see it from an external drone image from the outside. That’s even without going up and tensioning bolts and all this stuff, like you can catch it on normal inspection if that’s the way it happens.

Joel Saxum: But then once those get loose in there, they start shimming and moving around and shaking. And then you start loosen in the whole blade up, you 

Allen Hall: know, the bolt image that was shown with this article looked like the bolts were rusty. I thought that’s, you know, up in Oregon, it’s wet all the time is probably a little bit salty.

Allen Hall: What, what are the chances that the bolts are rusting? Probably pretty high. Well, same more 

Joel Saxum: of it’s the exact same thing. You’re talking about coefficient of thermal expansion. Right? So if, if the steel is moving at one rate and the fiberglas isn’t and it’s galvanized well, it’s great that it was galvanized went, it went in, but it’s gonna.

Joel Saxum: Eventually rub that galvanization right off that bolt. Yeah. It’s not like the reason that you put metal in concrete is because the coefficient of thermal expansion is the same or basically the same in concrete and steel. It’s not the same in a composite blade, root end, and steel. So the, they don’t, they don’t play well together.

Joel Saxum: So it’s something to gotta keep an eye on. Definitely we catch it. I I’ve seen the guys on, on my team, catch it in reprocessing inspections where they say, Hey, this was missed. Look at the root bolts. You have to go do an investigation there. And sometimes a rope crew will need to go up there, grind the gel coat off so they can look, actually look at the problem and see cuz in that pocket, the actual root sometimes can crack of the, of the composite rather than the bold bolt itself.

Joel Saxum: And then you gotta do a deep repair to fix that. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Is that even fixable? 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, at some level it’s not right, but if you catch it early enough, you can and you can yeah. Yeah. You can catch those things in, in vibration alarms as well. because if they start getting goofy and because what ends up happening sometimes is the pit.

Joel Saxum: Then if one side starts to loosen up of the root bolts and then they start the, the, the tip angle gets a little bit weird on one blade, and then the whole thing starts to vibrate and you can catch it beforehand. Sometimes. That’s what we are the other week talking about the guys at ACA 83, doing the pitch alignments and, and whatnot.

Joel Saxum: You can catch it with that, 

Allen Hall: right? Yeah. Yeah, Rosemary, has there been more recent design changes that get rid of some of these failure modes at the bolted 

Rosemary Barnes: connection? I mean, there’s several ways to do it and I actually haven’t worked so much with that Ikea bolt like design mm-hmm, that there’s a few other other ways and any of them, all of them can have problems, but I really think that this is a cautionary tale for why you need to spend the money on maintenance after you’ve bought your wind farm.

Rosemary Barnes: Cuz if you read through you know, the, the list of issues with this particular wind farm it’s got way more maintenance issues than comparable wind farms. I think that mentions like three times or something. The, the level. And also the power production has declined a lot over the last few years as well.

Rosemary Barnes: So it just suggests to me that, I mean, I have worked with with owners, with operators that didn’t think that they should have to spend any money on maintenance and win wind turbines do need maintenance. I mean, it’s just a, you know, it’s just a, a feature of the, the technology. They, they need maintenance and if you don’t do it, then, you know, that’s a great way to save money for five years.

Rosemary Barnes: Maybe it’s a great way to save money for 10 years, but these ones are at 15 years now and they’re talking about replacing them. And it really sounds to me like it’s because they just haven’t, haven’t invested in preventative maintenance and yeah, you just, you need to, if you’ve gotta win, if you are to win farm, you need to maintain it.

Rosemary Barnes: That’s that’s the lesson that we can draw from this. I think 

Joel Saxum: cautionary tales sticking with Rosemary there. And because we run into this, when we do root cause analysis cases, a lot is the, the asset owner has entrusted the, a lot of times OEM under a full service agreement. and they’re like, we pay them to do the full service agreement.

Joel Saxum: We shouldn’t have these issues. You can see in this case that yes, they did that. But if it’s still vested with the full service agreement, which is what it sounds like they should have, you know, once in a while had someone else stick their nose in their, maybe do an inspection campaign on their own, just to make sure that they’re QCing their full service.

Rosemary Barnes: What do you think about these OEM service agreements? Joel, cause that’s something that is a real feature of Australia or pretty much every developer here is is using OEM service agreements. And I know I only get brought into these cases when there’s a problem. So maybe I have a pessimistic view of it, but I say nothing, but, but difficulties when agreed, you know, the, the owners of these assets are kept totally separate from what’s going on with their very, very expensive asset.

Rosemary Barnes: They don’t have information about what’s going on. They don’t have the right to monitor it. They don’t, ah, it’s, it’s a weird system and I that’s, I would feel very uncomfortable if I own to win farm and, and didn’t have the right to know what was going on with my assets. 

Joel Saxum: I think it’s rife with like a, I believe the term is nepotism.

Joel Saxum: like if you have, if you it’s the same thing when we were, when we were in the oil field, if you had an inspector working for you. That worked for you, inspecting their stuff. Like what’s the, what is the, what is the advantage of them? You know, blowing a whistle or anything? There isn’t one, right? A good, a good thought here.

Joel Saxum: I, I worked in the civil engineering world in Illinois for a while. Illinois has a very tough hierarchy on how public works projects are done. So in each public’s works project, if the state of Illinois was doing it, they would have a construction company that construction company could not also do the drainage works.

Joel Saxum: It had to be a different one so that they couldn’t cover up each other’s mistakes. And then the third party had to be an independent consulting engineering firm because that independent consulting engineering firm would act as the bird dog for the state and make sure that everybody was doing the things they were supposed to be doing.

Joel Saxum: So it’s the same thing that you say here, you have someone selling you the product, and then they’re also gonna maintain it. And in the language, they have stuff in there that says you don’t get rights to our inspections. You, you can’t put people up tower, like to some weird, there’s some weird stuff in there.

Joel Saxum: Right. But some of it gets, gives this like feeling of this warm and fuzzy feeling to the owner like, whoa, this is great. All we have to do is get permits to build this thing. They’ll build it. They’ll manufacture it. They’ll maintain it. And we collect the money. Well, 

Rosemary Barnes: yeah, I would urge you to, I think that, I think that it’s to, to read deeper.

Rosemary Barnes: I think they think it’s a way that they can avoid needing any technical expertise on their, on their team. Yeah. Cause I know in Australia, you know, we don’t have a lot of engineers that are experienced in, you know, designing manufacturing, servicing, wind turbines. It’s it’s new. All of that. I mean, service actually is probably probably wrong.

Rosemary Barnes: We’ve got good, good service industry now. But so the, the developers and the operators, well with operators, they choose the OEMs to do that because they don’t have that expertise and they don’t, they don’t wanna have to get it. It’s hard to come by. And so you end up with these agreements and they only protection really is, you know, an availability guarantee you know, an uptime guarantee.

Rosemary Barnes: And so the. The person, the company with a service agreement, all they’ve got to do is make sure that, you know, you don’t drop down below that minimum level of, of uptime. And if there’s a problem that is, you know, going to have less downtime, then that they’ve got no incentive to fix it. But it’s the, the owner that is gonna see, you know, reduced, reduced checks coming in because there’s, you know, there’s problems that could have been fixed faster if if someone had an incentive to.

Rosemary Barnes: But yeah, just I don’t know. It seems all a big mess to me. 

Joel Saxum: I’d like to see the industry or the market respond heavier with independent, full service agreement contract, like do Deutsche wind technique. Right? They do it. Mm-hmm , I’d like to see more opters, you know, cause I reside in the blade space.

Joel Saxum: So you start, you there’s a lot of blade repair companies out there there’s every corner of the globe has ’em, but there’s not a whole lot of companies capable of taking on a full service. Arrangement. I know like, like I said, Deutch win technique comes to mind because they’re the biggest one I can think of right now.

Joel Saxum: But I’d like to see more of those that when, when the warranty end runs out on a turbine, that’s when their full service agreement ends with the OEM and they can switch to someone else because there might be better language, better contract, better legalities. 

Allen Hall: What, so when does the government step in, when does the state step in and start checking up on these sites?

Allen Hall: Oh, for 

Rosemary Barnes: sure. If there’s safety issue. Isn’t that inevitable. Yeah. I mean, in this, this one, 

Joel Saxum: you think OSHA. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. But OSHA only is only involved. If there’s been a person injured, typical. Or, or something that could have seriously injured people in 

Joel Saxum: particular case, maybe you’ve got, you’ve got times I know some, some roofers in Minneapolis that OSHA literally came through and fined every roofer in an area as inspectors came and looked and saw they weren’t using the proper tie offs.

Joel Saxum: Right. And they were just like do right. Shocked, right up fines, you know? Yeah, exactly. But, but for things like this, such as something like this, that’s such high, so highly visible and it’s a hot button topic. You would think that, I mean, that’s the only agency I could think that I would have any power there anyways.

Joel Saxum: You know, occupational safety and health administration. 

Allen Hall: Well, it, it, we’re in California at the minute and California’s going through a little bit, what they call the heat wave, where it’s mid nineties, maybe it reaches a hundred, it’s not Texas hot, it’s California hot. And they’re telling people to turn off air conditioners and to not charge your EV.

Allen Hall: That all makes sense to me. But if you have a variable, like wind turbines going down because of poor maintenance, I, the state has to step in politically. They have to step in and at least throw some, some bodies at it. We use because you can’t, you can’t lose ’em right. Now we 

Joel Saxum: walk back to the thing we’ve been talking about for the last three weeks is the 42% guarantee from the government for dominion.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. That’s such a mess. Well, you, you get to rose 

Allen Hall: so against it, but I think she’s right. No, you know, Rosemary’s totally right about that, right. She’s totally right. But I, I see the other half of it, which is while it forces everybody to keep the, the wind turbines at peak performance all the time, which adds costs, which is why they’re pushing back.

Allen Hall: It’s. Continual it being and yang of Carson, 

Rosemary Barnes: it saves money over the, the long run. I don’t think it’s it’s the financial incentives are, are there to keep your asset running as long as possible. So I think these guys have just made poor decisions because they’re looking now at replacing their wind turbines halfway through their lifetime.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, that’s, that’s not a prudent financial decision to save money on, on maintenance. So that’s why I called it a cautionary tale. And I hope that people will will take that precaution and say, oh, okay, we’ve gotta invest in maintenance. Otherwise we’ll be stung in a couple of years, 

Allen Hall: but isn’t the production tax credit driving a bunch of that.

Allen Hall: Like after 10 years, the production tax credits go away. So the value of your assets go away. So therefore. You would logically, if I’m an accountant sitting on a spreadsheet, say, I won’t want to put as much money into these maintenance projects with these wind Turman that are not PTC ready. That isn’t, that what happens?

Allen Hall: I think that, I think the data backs that up, right? So isn’t the government, isn’t the

Joel Saxum: go over to the next column on the sheet and have their insurance company hit ’em with a massive penalty then, then it makes more sense to maintain ’em better. Right? So let the market correct it, right? Yeah. The market has to correct it. So if the insurance, if the insurance company, now that they’ve thrown a blade for doing something dumb, can penalize them or can make their premiums go up the next year because they’ve failed to be a prudent operator and maintain their, their assets properly make, make a burn on insurance.

Allen Hall: isn’t, isn’t it a weird E a weird economic dynamic that we’re in at the moment. If the PTC drops at 10 years, which is, I think that’s right. You 10 or 13 10 sticks in my head at 10 years, your, your asset value goes way down, more incentive to put new internments up. That’s good. The OEMs love that. So from a PTC standpoint, they’re there for 10 years.

Allen Hall: I’m gonna refresh ’em every 10 years. Cool. Right. But in the meantime, there are all these consequences. It’s, it’s, it’s the Rosemary where the consequence bit, the consequence of doing that, that PTC, the way that it’s structured today is the maintenance goes away. And then you have problems. So is there, is there a good middle ground, either one of you, is there a good middle ground that would get rid of this maintenance issue and keep these turbines turning, but also make the OEMs happy?

Allen Hall: Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: It’s all gonna come down. Like you said, Alan, to what does it look like on the balance? So the middle, middle ground has to be. Yeah, that’s what I get back to guys. It has to be a struck balance between on and M costs, insurance costs, finance costs and production costs. 

Allen Hall: I, I love Rosemary’s answers because it’s the engineering answer.

Allen Hall: Like, look, you idiots, you need to be keeping your winders up and running. That’s the obvious answer. Hello. Right. And us engineers who drive cars for 25 years because we take care of ’em. Yeah. That’s exactly what we do. And sure. That’s, that’s just how sort we operate. Right. But that not how the accountants operate.

Allen Hall: The accountants, try to maximize profits every quarter, every year. And they have a different input. And I think sometimes us engineers get on our high horse me include, it’s not just Rosemary. I’m a say I horse is there, but we, we create these weird problems. Is 

Joel Saxum: there an advantage to okay. Say think ICUT meso, all these, all the different, the, the grid operators.

Joel Saxum: Is there an incentive that the grid operators could put out to if they had uptime. Right. Like its own its own private PTC type thing that says like, if you are, if you say you can put a hundred megawatts into the grid if you can get me 50% uptime, we’ll give you this. If you can get me 45, you get this and have it.

Joel Saxum: I don’t know. Right. See that’s then everybody gonna wanna 

Allen Hall: yeah, well, yeah, to Rosemary’s point though, I think the capacity factor with dominion is a big problem, but at the same point, if the PTC were tied to capacity factor, some of this may go away. By itself. It’s just say, Hey, we’re gonna have a capacity factor.

Allen Hall: If you want PTC, I have to meet the capacity factor and we will extend your PTC if your capacity 

Rosemary Barnes: factor is. But how does, I don’t know about the, that get you where you wanna go. I don’t know about these tax credits, but how do they work? Is it that they supply, they, they pay you based on every megawatt hour that you produce or.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So, I mean, there, there is, is an incentive to you know, have good availability cuz you get more megawatt hours produced. And I know in Australia and Europe at the moment, I don’t know what’s going on with power prices in the us, but there is already an immensely strong, strong incentive for everyone to keep their assets generating because prices are so high that you know, wind farms and solar farms that are able to generate, they don’t have increased fuel costs, like all the fossil fuel producers or fossil fuel generators do.

Rosemary Barnes: And so they’re just making massive profits at the moment, if they can keep their availability up. So. It’s certainly not true that there’s no incentives in the system. I know every electricity market is different, but is this even a widespread problem? I don’t feel like we hear about that many. Yes.

Rosemary Barnes: Blades falling off turbines. Is, is it, is that really an issue? Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: It’s, it’s not just this issue. It’s all issues with blades, all issues with maintaining these things. They just, it’s a, it’s like a, a cultural issue, like a cultural in the wind industry that like a lot of times Rosemary, and this is a I’ve I’ve seen this many times and I can understand why it happens.

Joel Saxum: It’s just very frustrating to see like wind farm X will have 50 turbines. And they’ll say we’ve got 200 grand to put towards the blades this year. Okay. So you start working, you start working out there, you’re fixing blades. And then all of a sudden it runs into 190,000 on the PO. And they’re like, Hey, you got 10 grand left demo.

Joel Saxum: And you’re like, we’ve got some cat four and cat five damages over here that like, if you don’t stop these things, they’re gonna, those blades are gonna rip apart. And they’re like, Sorry, only 200 grand in the budget. See you later. And they just leave. ’em run. That’s a regular occurrence all across the us.

Joel Saxum: Like they just don’t put any kind of love. There’s no, I don’t know any operator that has a whole lot of TLC for their blades specifically, because of course that’s what

Allen Hall: I work. Yeah. Everybody love your blades a little bit better and this, this problem would go away. 

Joel Saxum: Tuck em in at night, give ’em a pillow and a nice blanket.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: It takes a lot to make wind. That makes me sad if people aren’t loving them after they leave the factory. 

Joel Saxum: yeah. 

Allen Hall: They’re made with love. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. They’re made with, they made with love and a lot of people’s, you know, personal hand touch on them. So yeah. Very true. Look after your winter 

Allen Hall: turbines. Oh, more to come, lets I, I think we’re gonna have to keep track of this as it goes through.

Allen Hall: We’re gonna see some big changes in the next couple of months, so we will keep following this new story.

Joel Saxum: Lightning is an 

Rosemary Barnes: act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is 

Allen Hall: a lightning protection system. Upgrade for wind turbines made by 

Rosemary Barnes: weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Rosemary Barnes: Visit weather guard, 

Allen Hall: wind.com to learn more, 

Joel Saxum: read a case study and schedule a call today. 

Deep Voice Guy: Well,

Allen Hall: there’s a Norway based firm called worldwide wind that is developing a, a new type of floating vertical access, wind turbine that is uniquely different than other ones. I’ve seen Rosemary it’s. It’s actually actually two sets of vertical access wind turbines stacked on top of another.

Allen Hall: And they, they counter rotate probably to keep the moment of inertia down. And it’s obviously it’s still on paper. We haven’t seen anything yet. And the whole thing, the whole wind turbine, if you can envision, this is at an angle. So you got a 45 degree angle, so it’s not truly vertical. It’s like I would call it a slanted axis, wind turbine, maybe not out of patent that or trademark that it’s a slanted axis, wind turbine.

Allen Hall: And it seems interesting because one part, one of the TRUS is the rotor and the other part’s the Stater. So they’re counter rotating. So the whole assembly itself makes a generator makes sense on paper. Now there’s been a ton of criticism about this on LinkedIn. And so this popped up a couple of weeks ago.

Allen Hall: I sat on it because I thought this is crazy. No, one’s gonna. Bad, an eye at this and all of a sudden on come, the LinkedIn experts to say that’s crazy. That’s the worst wind turbo I’ve ever seen. What are you talking about? And I, I don’t think it’s horribly bad. I think it’s just another idea when we were talking earlier about having some new ideas in wind Rosemary, why is this a good idea or, or a so-so idea?

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I think the idea of Vertical access, wind turbines for floating offshore definitely has some merit. And so I’ll put this in the category of interesting idea to investigate further. It, it’s kind of obvious why, if you look at a normal, horizontal access wind turbine, you’ve got a really tall tower and all of the weight is at the top of that tower.

Rosemary Barnes: And you know, it just doesn’t look like something that wants to float, right. Whereas if you take a vertical access, wind turbine, the generator can be on the bottom and you have most of the weight at, at the bottom. So, you know, it keeps the center of gravity low, makes it easier to make a floating structure for it.

Rosemary Barnes: So that’s you know, that’s, that’s true for any kind of vertical access, wind turbine design. This particular one, it’s got the counter rotating thing. So perhaps that’s gonna make their mooring system easier because you know, you’ll end up canceling out some talks. I haven’t done any, you know, free body diagram of it to, to kind of think that through properly, but that’s at least what they’re stating.

Rosemary Barnes: They haven’t made one yet. I think they’ve got, like, if you look at their website way down the bottom, they’ve. a photo of a small scale one, which is two of those they’re called Sivan type, like a drag type wind turbine, which is just basically like a cup that gets pushed around by the, the wind that, you know, you see them on weather stations and all sorts of places that need like a really durable, low efficiency generator.

Rosemary Barnes: So I think they’ve made one of those, at least I did see in another article that the founder has once made vertical access when turbine looks very different to the one that they’re promoting for their floating offshore design, but seems that he has made something and then they’ve got some nice, you know, computer generated images of, of whole wind farms of these things.

Rosemary Barnes: But it doesn’t look like they’ve even made a prototype, an onshore prototype of, of one. So you know, it gives you an idea of where they’re at. , but if you go through their list of benefits, it just reads like any other kind of revolutionary new winter turbine design. They all, I’ve made a whole video about this actually with Paul GE who has a, a whole website wind works that tracks think it’s wind hyphen works.org and it tracks all of the new wind and he’s been doing it for decades.

Rosemary Barnes: So you can see like the rise and fall of, you know, dozens of examples like this. And I had him come on my my YouTube channel to talk about his list of red flags that he sees, you know, over and over again in these, you know, new design. So yeah, I, so some of the, some of the benefits that they’re saying are, are, are real benefits associated with vertical access, wind turbines.

Rosemary Barnes: And some of them are just these myths that keep on coming back and back. And because we don’t actually see any industrial sized, vertical access, winter turbine farms, or even individual turbines since, you know, the nineties, these, these myths never get disproven because no one ever actually gets to the point of you know, build building a wind farm with these turbines.

Rosemary Barnes: So maybe I just go through I’m just on their website. So it’s a worldwide wind dot N O. And yeah, I’ll look at some of their, their claims and talk through those. So simple design, no, to sell gear calling, calling, or your, and that think all the, the first ones are, you know, that’s, that’s very easy to have a simple design when it’s just on paper.

Rosemary Barnes: No, to sell. Yeah, sure. And the, your that’s when people talk about a lot with vertical access, wind turbines that, you know, they don’t need to turn to face the wind direction that the, you know, the omnidirectional and that’s true. But if you look up cost, cost breakdown of a normal wind turbine, the, your system is somewhere between like one and maybe maximum 5% at like the very upper upper.

Rosemary Barnes: And it’s not, I mean, it’s not something that I see fail a lot. I don’t know if Joel, you see a lot of your system failures, motors. Yeah. Motors every once in a while. So I think this idea that the omnidirectional it’s like great, like your system is not a, not a big problem. It’s not a big cost. Like who cares move on.

Rosemary Barnes: And then reduced wake effect and increased turbine density. This is the one people keep on going on and on about for vertical axis, wind turbines that you can pack them closer together. And it’s similar to what we talked about last week with the you know, the turbulence turbulent wake that persists behind a normal wind turbine.

Rosemary Barnes: And I mean that wake is there because you’ve taken energy out of the wind. So if a vertical access, wind turbine is taking energy out of the wind, then it’s also gonna have a, you know, reduced wind speeds behind it. That’s just definitely, definitely gonna happen. And yeah, this particular idea that you can pack verticales wind turbines closer together.

Rosemary Barnes: It comes from one study that was done. It’s a desktop study. They did some, two dimensional CFD of a wind farm of three, three different vertical access, wind turbines, and from a specific angle, then that gave a better performance than wind farm of horizontal access, wind turbines that are, you know, basically arranged in the least least efficient way.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s an interesting result that should have led to somebody doing some wind tunnel tunnel tests, maybe some 3d analysis, maybe a few more wind turbines in their simulation, maybe a few different angles wind angles. It gets repeated over and over and over again, like gospel truth, but there’s, it’s, it’s nothing.

Rosemary Barnes: It was actually as an undergraduate student that led this study and, you know, found an interesting result, but it’s it’s the starting point for research to find out if it’s an effect, not the paces for, you know, it’s spawn about 50 startups as startup companies, as far as I can see just this, this one, undergrad students.

Rosemary Barnes: So, you know, final year project it’s that’s kind of interesting to me that that just keeps on coming up and up and up. Yeah, it’s true. Yeah. What else about this? Sorry, this, this, this, yeah. 

Allen Hall: Well, let me, let me, let me throw the, the ultimate question, which is the Rosemary age of wind maturity. How long would this take to become reality at?

Allen Hall: And they’re projecting a 40 megawatt machine as early as 2029. So let’s just use that as the baseline. When did you think they would have a 40 megawatt machine 

Rosemary Barnes: out of, I mean, honestly never. I’ve I know a lot of designs, vertical access, wind turbine designs that are, are looking a lot more promising for offshore.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, for, for, for floating offshore application, there’s some weird features about this particular one. They’ve got their generator underwater I mean, that’s such a. Yeah, such a self handicap that they’ve given themselves, you know, you’re trying to develop this radical new design and you’re gonna put it in the water.

Rosemary Barnes: And then one of your main maintenance components is underwater. So then what you’re gonna dive under under the underwater to, you’re gonna get scuba divers that are also wind turbine technicians to go under and maintain that. Are you gonna have to hold these things out of the water, tip it over? Like, I don’t understand the, the maintenance.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And then just the normal thing that I isn’t that the case though. 

Allen Hall: Rosemary, I, I, yeah, I think you raise a lot of good questions, right? Like some of the obvious ones, like how do you maintain it and what happens if which is what vertical axis when turbines have had trouble with for a long time.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Horizontal axis. When turbines have gone through that, that Pain and, and reached at least teenage years in a sense of being able to being able to like consistently produce power. That’s a really difficult thing to do. It’s a lot harder than people would assume. Yeah. And when I, when you see anything that’s happening within a decade at a 40 megawatt level, you’re like, whoa, I, if I put the, you know, if I gave Vestus a couple billion dollars, could, could they do that?

Allen Hall: Maybe 40 megawatts is 

Rosemary Barnes: a big machine. Yeah. You could, you can make a regular winter or 40 megawatts if you wanted to. There’s no like engineering you know, law or physics, law physics that you’re gonna gonna, no, you could, you could do it. Oh, Yeah, you could, it, it just would be very expensive. And it’s actually, I’m been trying, been trying to write a, a video script about that the last, last week about how, how big wind turbines are gonna get, and you know, all the scaling laws and yeah, you have this problem, especially with the, the blames that, well then yeah, it, it wouldn’t be, it wouldn’t be how big, well, there isn’t, I, I don’t think that there is necessarily gonna be a hard limit.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s an economic limit. It’s about, at what point do you know things get. Well stop. Getting’s, A’s cheaper. It’s we’re already at the limit, you know, we’re always, we’re always at the limit. That’s wind turbine. Manufacturer will design the turbine that they, that can give the cheapest energy out because that’s how you win projects.

Rosemary Barnes: And so, you know, it’s been getting bigger because some of the considerations that there’s you have to have to wait don’t cop outta me. See the, the video, how big, how, but basically, you know, things like the, the generator, the power con