How big can onshore wind turbines get? If it seems like we ask this question every month, get used to it: Nordex says there’s no limit. That leaves engineers asking, how do you transport a rotor with a 175m diameter? And will the sites themselves become factories? Speaking of manufacturing, Allen and Joel discuss what’s behind Siemens and Airborne’s efforts in composites processing and automation. Hint: it may be safety as much as cost.  

In Oregon, operations are underway on the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility, a utility-scale development combining wind and solar generation with battery storage. While it’s a first in the US, other countries have relied on combined power plants for decades. Worldwide, changes in the energy marketplace – like the UK’s plan to cap power producer revenue – give new meaning to the term power diplomacy.

Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com

Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com

Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com

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 135

Allen Hall: Hello everyone. We have a great show for you this week. Rosemary is still on leave, but we’re going to talk about Oregon’s new battery, solar and wind utility scale site. The first one in America and the UK is talking about capping renewable power revenues to keep energy prices down. 

Joel Saxum: And we’re gonna jump over to the Nordic countries talk about some wooden wind turbine towers.

Joel Saxum: We’ve talked about these in the past, but now we wanna share with you that they’re moving forward. They’ve got a. Letter of intent from res. So that’s, that’s cool for them. Also going into 10 megawatt plus onshore wind turbines, do you think it can happen? Do we think it can happen? The CEO of Nordex believes that that is the future.

Joel Saxum: And lastly on the show we’re gonna talk about Siemens Gamesa partnering with Airborne on some offshore wind turbine blades and looking at automation. So they. Hopefully get the cost of the blades down and the quality up. 

Allen Hall: I’m Alan Hall, I’m president of Weather Guard, Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen Hall: All right, Joel. There’s a new renewable energy plant up in Oregon about 200 miles directly east of Portland. If you know your geography on the northwest coast of America, it’s the Wheatridge Renewable Energy Facility. It’s the first utility scale development in North America that combines winds, solar and battery storage.

Allen Hall: And it’s hard to believe that that’s the first one, but it’s the first one. Yeah. And the, the plant. Combination effort between NextEra Energy Resources. NextEra is a big wind provider across the country and Portland, Portland General Electric, which has had some problems with wind TURs in the recent past.

Allen Hall: So I’m glad they’re hooked up with NextEra. on this project. They have 300 megawatts of wind with generated by 120 GE turbines. They have 50 megawatts of, of solar panels. And 30 megawatts of battery storage and they estimate they can provide power to 100,000 homes. Is this the future for America, 

Joel Saxum: man?

Joel Saxum: I think so. If I step into some developer shoes, I’m thinking less permit costs less headache. Yeah. You know, developing on one side, if you get permission from this hunk of land, and we can put all these things here. It also in my mind, and, and I haven’t seen their, the business model of course, but in my mind, o and m costs become cheaper.

Joel Saxum: Transmission lines become cheaper. You know, connecting to the grid all is in one spot, so you’re not having to build, you know, roads and pads and this and that, and three different locations. It’s boom, it’s all in one. And if you can cross train some of your employees to, to be able to monitor and ensure that these batteries and the, the solar panels and whatever and you know, your inspections become easier, instead of having three sets of, you know, three different teams monitoring this thing, now you’ve got one team monitoring it as a whole.

Joel Saxum: I think there’s, and that’s just from the business model side in my mind, Right. I think there’s a lot of advantages to it.

Joel Saxum: I think there’s a lot of areas as well in the United States specifically, if you look at where this is geographically in the United States, there’s a lot of areas that are really probably well suited for this type of development, right? Like I think West Texas, West Texas, there’s a lot of places where like, man, the wind is blowing.

Joel Saxum: Well, the solar resource is fantastic. Battery storage, maybe not as much. Just because they’re not as close to major. population areas, but I don’t think that really matters as, as much as I think it does. So I, I would like to see more and more of this. So I think that this could be a good use case and something that I hope to hear a lot about, you know, in the industry as we move forward.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Even 

Allen Hall: though we have a lot of, I would call distributed wind across the Midwest, we, we have not connected it with solars too much or with battery even. I think there’s only a couple places that I know of. Battery Storage, Texas being one of those locations. It, but there’s a, it’d be a lot of work to do still.

Allen Hall: I, I was running the numbers because I, I first saw this news posted on of all things Twitter place that I don’t really care for 

Joel Saxum: all that much. You were watching Elon, weren’t you,

Allen Hall: Well, I’m sure he’d be proponent of this actually, but the, the comment was, Oh, we ought do this all the way all over America. And my thought was, well, maybe, you know, maybe there’s, there’s certainly applications for it, but how many times would we have to repeat this? We’d have to do this a lot. It’d be thousands of times we’d have to replicate this sort of configuration.

Allen Hall: I forget how many homes there are in America. I wanna say 140 million, but that sounds like a lot. Maybe it’s 14 million. There’s a, it’s something around those numbers. So we’d have to do this in a lot of different places and America’s just not set up for that. Maybe, maybe Oregon. But New York City and some of those areas are just too population dense to, to even think about it.

Joel Saxum: You know, I’m thinking about the numbers here as well. So, 300 megawatt, that’s 120 GEs at what? They’re the 2.6 s or something? Two something, Yeah. Yeah. So the two X platforms, that’s a, that, those are good. Platforms, you said, to see a lot of those around the country. So 300 megawatts of wind is a, that’s a s sizeable wind project.

Joel Saxum: I think the biggest one in the US is just under a gigawatt. Right. This biggest one’s like 998 or whatever. Yeah. So that’s a decent size. Yeah. That’s a decent size wind installation. 50 megawatts of photo will take of, of, you know, utility scale, solar, decent size, but not that big. Right. I’ve heard of a lot, a lot bigger.

Joel Saxum: 30 megawatt battery. Now I don’t know what they’re using for battery. If this 30 megawatt kind of sounds like it might just be a lithium type site. It does. Mm-hmm. , Yeah, that’s, that’s not massive, but still good. Every little bit we can add to the greatest good, especially at good interconnections and whatnot.

Joel Saxum: So maybe this is just a test. Right. I’m thinking that that one big. and I can’t remember the name of it, but the one they’re looking at putting in southern Wyoming where it’s supposed to be like three gigawatts of wind over the next 15 years. You 

Allen Hall: installed? Oh yeah. It’s going to Vegas with the cable.

Allen Hall: Yeah, the transmission 

Joel Saxum: goes to Vegas. Yes. Yeah, I’m thinking that site now, that whole site is so, the site is massive. Right. But may, but maybe there’s a couple of locations on that site where you can filter in some solar and stuff like that. You know, And I, I don’t know if the snow and Wyoming, if it’s feasible or not, but I think that it’s a really good idea to lower the levelized cost of energy.

Joel Saxum: Mm-hmm. also, you know, my mind always shifts into the financial markets and these kind of things, so insurance wise, Could be better or could be worse. Because if everything is stuck to get, you know, if the battery storage is right next to the solar panels, something happens next to them in 

Allen Hall: Turbin, right?

Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There might 

Joel Saxum: be more risk there. I don’t know. If a turbine throws a blade and it lands in the middle of a solar panels, that could be bad. But, you know, you’re also, you’re also centralizing risk for, So I’m thinking now hail. Hailstorm comes through, now you’ve, now you’ve got solar fat panel problems, you got wind turbine blades, no cells spinners, all these problems.

Joel Saxum: But I mean, you’re gonna have that no matter what. So there’s gonna be risk associated. Yeah. I guess my, Go ahead. I like it. I like the idea. I think it’s cost efficient of spend from, from NEXT ERA and Portland General Electric. Some people re refer to it as pge, not to be confused with Pacific Gas and Electric out of California.

Joel Saxum: Because not a whole lot of people are happy with those guys these days. Nope. But , but. Yeah, I like the concept and I, I wanna hear more on, I wanna see how the development process goes and if I, you know, if possible, I’d love to see more of the commercial model behind it. 

Allen Hall: You know, what Rosemary would say is why did it take America so long?

Allen Hall: We’ve been doing it in Australia for 10 years or 20 years or something. Right. , something that the United States has not been a leader in this sort of combo, and I, I know Australia has for a while, and it, so I, I thought this had already happened. When I saw this utility scale combo featured, I thought, Oh, come on.

Allen Hall: Is that really the first one? But I, I guess it is. So we have a, we have a long way to go. It’s still a long way to go. So Joel, the. Problem with natural gas prices coming out of Eastern Europe and other places is causing a problem in the United Kingdom, and so the electricity prices are expected to quote unquote skyrocket over the next couple of months.

Allen Hall: They’ve already gone up considerably in the last, last several months since the spring, but the UK is proposing a cap on revenues of renewable power producer. And attempt to keep prices stable for consumers. So the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy, now that’s one heck of 

Joel Saxum: goes in the cup.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Discussed this proposal with some of the largest renewable energy companies all behind closed doors. And I hate that when I read they were negotiating behind closed doors cuz it the. It just shouldn’t be behind closed doors. It’s okay. It’s not fair. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the energy producers are just getting throttled, I’m sure.

Allen Hall: So the proposed capital limit revenues and take the additional revenue and redistribute them back, in theory to the consumers. So the, the threat of these record energy prices this winter is of massive concern to the UK government and to the citizens. But it seems like the politicians are really focused on it because the government is a little unstable at the minute.

Allen Hall: So the UK government is essentially pushing for long term fixed price contracts, PPAs, but I guess they don’t have them at the moment, so they’re gonna try to force it that way. And, and they’re trying in, in a weird way, they’re, they’re trying to decouple renewable energy prices from natural gas prices.

Allen Hall: And I don’t know if that has been done. On the planet yet. I think this may be their first attempt to decouple them, but it seems like something very hard to decouple just because of the way the marketplace works. So British lawmakers have approved a, you know, a 25% windfall tax on oil and gas producers earlier this year so that there’s sort of a foundation for this process to happen.

Allen Hall: But now that. The European Union is talking about doing something very similar. It seems like the United Kingdom’s gonna be in a similar vein. So the, the, in the European Union, the European Commission has proposed setting a price limit of 180 euros per megawatt hours. That’s about $180 for megawatt hour, roughly.

Allen Hall: I still, it’s still a pretty good price. Yeah. I still, it’s about, Two, about three times what it is in the States at the moment. So does this, Joel, I mean, are we think you’re gonna see more of this and I’ll, I’ll put on another little wrinkle to this. I, The French government has essentially nationalized the French power producers.

Allen Hall: And Germany is in the process of doing something very similar. The UK hasn’t made that move yet, but this essentially would do that. When you’re capping profits, you’re essentially taking over the market. Is this a, a short term thing that’s gonna happen or do you see this because of the issues in Eastern Europe?

Allen Hall: Do you think this is gonna be more of a long term play? 

Joel Saxum: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is ppa, right? So when we’re in the US and we’re looking at PPAs, they are a lot of times from development assigned to PPA will get you your financing and that p so that PPA will be sometimes 20. Right.

Joel Saxum: So if you’re, You’re talking 20 years, so if they say, This is what we want you to cap that. Okay. Then everybody has to adjust their operating model to operate their assets effectively at 180 euros per megawatt or megawatt hour. So if everybody has to get to that point and then they want to look towards a long term fixed price ppa, you’re, yeah, you’re essentially taking the capital.

Joel Saxum: Like the capitalism portion and the, the profit we getting the revenue out of the industry, I think that it makes it not, like, not a nonstarter for some people or they don’t want to go to it. Right? So if you’re right, if you’re a, a, like a Scottish power who has all kinds of different assets, like you’re gonna start swinging your, you’re gonna start swinging your capital somewhere else.

Allen Hall: You know what I mean? I think you have to. Right? You almost have to. 

Joel Saxum: With the North Stream, like the Nord Stream pipeline thing that kept blowing up that we’re still trying to investigate who did it last last week or two weeks ago. You know, energy security and supply security is a big portion of what this department, business energy strategy and industrial, yada, yada group is probably trying to take part in.

Joel Saxum: All of Europe is looking at it that way. The rest of the world should take notice. Thinking about energy security. I 100% agree with that, but I don’t know if capping the profitability of renewables is the way to do that. 

Allen Hall: Right. And I, we had a similar situation happen in Texas. Right. And in fact, Texas, I think put a cap on the maximum price that could happen in a, in a, like a ice situation a year ago.

Allen Hall: Well, I think they said at $2,000 a megawatt hour. Cause it wasn’t like $9,000 or some crazy 

Joel Saxum: number. Yeah, there was. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I remember I was living there during that and there was people that got, there was people that were delivered like $10,000 that month. Electricity bills. Like, wow. That’s, that’s, that’s crazy.

Joel Saxum: There’s an, there’s a limit that you should hit an extreme on. Right? Like the general public shouldn’t have to be at that, you know? So I know. I, I’m here. I’m, 

Allen Hall: How does that work though? I mean, how does it work? Let me ask, how, how would this functionally work if, if you’re gonna set a, a limit or like a European case, European commission talking about setting a limit on the UK case or mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: basically limiting revenues to some number. What do you do with the excess? Like how do, how does the, what does the government do with that? What 

Joel Saxum: offers. They’d use it as a subsidy, I think they would have to subsidize, But if you’re ca, if you’re capping at a certain height, then the, the, the, the extreme cost doesn’t get passed onto the consumer.

Joel Saxum: They get capped at that 180. So they know that their power bill can only get to be so much. So if there’s extra money to be had and it goes into a fund, then I would say that that fund would get redistributed across the power generating companies. But 

Allen Hall: isn’t that just where the, the process goes sideways, Right?

Allen Hall: I think that’s in the United States, the process would go sideways there because they. You just, 

Joel Saxum: So in the United, In the United States, I’ll give you an ex Yeah. I’ll give you an example here. And this isn’t exactly the same, but this is on the other side. So we’re talking here in this example, power company government, and they’re negotiating between the two of them.

Joel Saxum: Right. And the consumers just have to take as they get. Right. I’m in, I’m in northern Wisconsin, backed into my home, my hometown here in Hayward. And it’s beautiful. It’s fall colors and everything. We were talking about this off. Line, but today it got down to this morning was 27 degrees, so it’s already, I mean, it’s October and it’s 27 degrees already, so it’s getting cold.

Joel Saxum: One of the things that they do up here, now, this isn’t a negotiation between the government and the power companies, but it’s the, the power energy companies and the consumer. So you can be a part of a co-op, you can be a part of just a right, you know, a regular, So like a thing they do is, Hey, Prebuy, prebuy your propane for the winter prepay.

Joel Saxum: So you prepay, so you, at, you as the consumer can hunt for when the levels are good and then you say, Boom, I want 3000 gallons of propane at that price Yeah. For the next year. And they go, Okay, you’re, you’re locked in at that price. Now that’s a a gamble that the power companies or gas companies have to take to get cash flow all year round, right.

Joel Saxum: You know, it, they get, sometimes they get burned, Sometimes the consumer gets burned. Sure, 

Allen Hall: sure, sure they do. But that, that’s a hedge. Right. And I think the, the marketplace exactly. That’s in energy marketplace is full of hedges and that’s the market controlling it. Exactly. Right. And I, my guess is that the, the renewable energy companies are, are going back to the UK government saying, Well, there’s a ton of hedges on the marketplace.

Allen Hall: Right. Buy one. Mm-hmm. , . Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because we’re selling hedges at the moment. Just buy some so you know what that, that power price is going to be. Cause you think typically in any fuel market, energy market, there are, there are, there is a marketplace to figure out, you know, you can, you can do at least 12 months ahead, sometimes several years ahead, and it happens in aviation all the time.

Allen Hall: I, I would say that the energy marketplace over in the UK already has some sort of system, somewhat like that. So the energy c. Have understanding of what their income levels are, and you’re just gonna really rock the boat on them because now they don’t know what the revenues are. Right. So the investments just go away.

Allen Hall: They just have to 

Joel Saxum: stop. Yeah, exactly. It’s too risky. So this is a, this is a, you know, an article and a thing we’re talking about in the uk, but I just spent a week with my compadres in Denmark. This is a very real conversation amongst them as well. They’re, they’re people are scared for this winter in.

Joel Saxum: Because the, the energy prices are just, they just, And there’s no sure there’s no cap to it. When’s it gonna stop? When’s the bleeding gonna stop? So at some level, as much as I hate to say this out loud, please nobody record this. I guess we’re recording now. But the government has to step in and do something to protect the consumers from things that are happening outside of their 

Allen Hall: border.

Allen Hall: I, I, I agree with you. I think this is a short term situation mm-hmm. that the US really stepped into. I, I feel somehow culpable in this mess just because I’m a US citizen. But holy moly, the US sort of created the situation that exists right now in Eastern Europe. And we are not in, I, the, the discussions that I’ve seen in the newspapers of Wall Street Journal, New York Times, some other places are saying, We’re not gonna help Europe this winter.

Allen Hall: We’re gonna keep all that energy in America. And it, it is astonishing to me that the United States, which was in part responsible for what’s happening in Eastern Europe, is not going to then try to help. Yeah. that’s find, I don’t understand it. It makes no sense 

Joel Saxum: to. It we should be sending and then in my opinion, US and Canada, Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Should be sending natural gas LNG tankers straight across the Atlantic. 

Allen Hall: That’s what we should, I think on the open market we are. Right. I, I, I think on the open market, we are, If you look at, I did do some research and looking to where the LNG shipments are going. The US is on the open marketplace, sending l and g over to.

Allen Hall: Not at maybe levels that are, have any significant impact on the, on the pricing, which is odd because it doesn’t sound like the supplies are short. In Germany, it sounds like, has plenty of supplies to get through, quote unquote April, whatever that means. I dunno if that just means the housing stock, the, the, the, the homes are gonna be heated or does that mean all of industry and Germany’s up and running through April?

Allen Hall: I don’t know yet. There’s a bunch of discussion about that, but it seems like the United States has a ease. The most likely case of being able to support Europe at least for a couple of months. Cause it also sounds like the Middle East is gonna raise oil prices or cut production to raise oil prices, which is not helping that.

Allen Hall: And I feel also like the United States contributed to that situation with opec. Or OPEC plus what they call it, OPEC plus Russia. That, that somehow we’re in the middle of this and we can’t stop causing pain. , 

Joel Saxum: the Saudis have got a new, a whole new golf league to pay for, for private jets and whatnot, so they gotta raise oil prices a little bit.

Joel Saxum: Right? I know. I was in, so I was, when I was, when I was up in Canada up in Newfoundland, not, you know, two months ago there was this big the German chancellor came over and met with Trudeau and they had this big signing that’s right about hydrogen. And I’m sitting there thinking to myself like, Man, they’re exporting so much hydro so many, you know, barrels of hydrocarbon every day to the, out the west side of the country.

Joel Saxum: Why don’t instead of them talking about hydrogen right now, bring it this way because what, you know, your conversation, you’re saying it sounds like they have enough to get through. So are the sky high prices just worry in the market? Is it, is it the financial market? I wonder just. We don’t know. So sh, because it sounds like right now it’s there, but the risk has to be hedged and that by that it’s raised prices when you can.

Joel Saxum: Because eventually if it gets too bad, the government will step in and like they’re doing here, proposing to do here, cap at 180 euros. Now I wanna shift, shift gears one second. 180 euros. If that’s the cab, that is an easy price to run. operational. Yeah. A renewable, absolutely. Like you, you’re, you’re profitable.

Joel Saxum: Big time at 180 megawatts an hour. Yes, you are. So this’s not gonna like it, it’s gonna take away maybe a couple of fancy dinners in private jet flights, but 180 euros an hour, a megawatt hours. It’s nothing to sneeze at. So if you are, if, if your operating budget is at that or above that, you’ve already got a problem.

Joel Saxum: I don’t know if there is any kind of, I don’t know what the government subsidies or help is in the UK for getting renewable generation installed. I don’t know what that is. I’m not an expert on that, but I wanna hope this doesn’t curb any of it because they’ve got big goals over there just like we 

Allen Hall: do.

Allen Hall: Yeah. The longer term play, it should still be in focus. We seem to be all of a sudden focused on the next couple of months, and maybe rightly we should be until the situation calms down a little bit. Mm-hmm. . But we can’t also lose the longer term picture. And it feels like if we start putting these systems in place, that government starts taking revenue away.

Allen Hall: They don’t like to undo. S revenue sources to the, to the government. And so they’ll tend to stay, and that’s gonna hurt long term. I think it’s just more to watch and, and as, as, as you said, as as it starts to get cold in the United States, it’s starting to get cold in Europe. There, there’s a lot more of this to come.

Joel Saxum: Get the latest on wind industry, news, business and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news. 

Allen Hall: So Swedish wood, wind turbine maker Modan announced a deal with global wind developer res. Now Joel, you’re like, what? what? What is this all about?

Allen Hall: When I saw this news article that, okay, this, this is interesting. So they have a letter of intent between Res and Marion, and we’ll have res promoting wood towers to projects in Nordic countries. When they say Nordic, I assume that means Netherlands. , Denmark, Sweden, Norway, pretty much, right? That’s where the, I 

Joel Saxum: would say, is, I’d say Norway, Sweden.

Joel Saxum: Finland. That would be the three. 

Allen Hall: Oh, Finland. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Oh, that, that would make sense. All right. Mm-hmm. It is, so the agreement will is looking to yield about 20 towers per year. For 10 years, beginning in 2026, it goes from 2026 to 2036, and the contract’s worth about 350 million US dollars. Now.

Allen Hall: Now this, this is the part that doesn’t make any sense. So if you start doing the math on that, that’s about one, a little over one and a half million dollars per turban tower. That doesn’t make any sense. So somewhere the, the math is off and maybe $175,000 per tower make a little more sense, except that they’re talking about making really tall tower.

Allen Hall: Like 250 plus meter towers, which then may cost a pretty penny. Yeah. But, but MoVI has been backed by Vestus. They have a couple of investors into that company. It’s not a, it’s not a very large company at the moment, but it will have to be, if it’s starting to produce towers at quantity. But it is, are what towers a way to get to these 200, 300.

Allen Hall: Hub Heights, for, for better wind is, is that where all this is going? Does it make

Joel Saxum: sense if, if there’s a structural thing there that, that, you know, having, having that fibrous moving kind of thing that can absorb some wind, absorb some impact or something of the sort. Then there’s something I don’t know about here, but, you know, classical knowledge has got you at a, you know, a hundred thousand.

Joel Saxum: for a tower for the steel of a tower. You know, not that’s, of course not the ladders and cables and all that good jazz, but Yeah. Yeah. Per megawatt. So this pricing puts it like, man, 15, 20 times the cost. So Maybe this, maybe it was in, in like Danish krona, so that that would put those three in that seven.

Joel Saxum: That’s what I, I made back down. I dunno. Right. So, so divide it by seven. Yeah. . Yeah. I, I like, you know, we’ve talked about this in the past and I like the concept of it, but if it’s that that’s, that’s cost prohibitive, that’s going the other way. That the wind industry needs to go raise and levelize cost of injury.

Joel Saxum: And that is, unless there’s some kind of structural thing here that makes these. Or more resilient to damage or 

Allen Hall: something. Is it the shipment part of the tower delivery that is causing a problem? Because obviously you can make these, these wood towers and segments. You can do that with steel too. Yeah, 

Joel Saxum: you do it with steel too.

Joel Saxum: I mean, even if you’re charging 10, 10,000 bucks a truckload, there’s five sections for each tower. I mean, it’s 50 grand to move ’em. That’s, that’s peanuts from the Port of Houston to West Texas or Oklahoma or whatever. 50 grand is cent, and that is, unless you get stuck on. On a train track, so the train takes it out, then you got big problems.

Joel Saxum: But we’ve seen that happen. Yeah. I just hope for the sake of the industry and maybe someone from Mavi would love to chat with us, but I hope for the sake of the industry that this isn’t a big greenwashing thing, cuz I don’t, I don’t. I don’t see the financial feasibility of it from, at least from the, the, the five bullet points we’re looking at here in a quick article.

Joel Saxum: Right? Maybe there’s more to it than we don’t know, 

Allen Hall: or is it just to kickstart the, the company and start to build a little bit of scale that the prices will come down when they start to scale up a little bit. Quantity changes everything. 

Joel Saxum: That could absolutely be. And but when I look at it, say the agreement, you know, we’re looking at 20 towers per year for 10 years, that’s 200 towers and could be worth 350 million if that 350 million number says.

Joel Saxum: 20 minimum per year for 10 years up to a hundred or something like that. And that’s where the 350 million is. And we’re just kind of not seeing it right here in the, in the press release. Then there’s something there because I believe it’s just like everything else. We talk about what is or with, especially with Rosemary.

Joel Saxum: Okay, so what is the amount of time that this is, this technology is going to be more affordable, be, you know, health levelized, cost of energy out Right now, I’m. If it’s a startup and it’s, the first 10 towers are gonna be one and a half million but the next ones are gonna be one, and then year three they’re 500 and year four they’re a hundred.

Joel Saxum: Then they’ve got something cooking maybe because it’s, it’s sustainable then, and it’s, and you’re not in the with thing. I keep going with the talking the last section, energy security. Now this Nordic countries won’t have to rely on South Korea and India and Brazil for. , 

Allen Hall: That’s what I was wondering. Is it a steel play?

Allen Hall: Obviously the shipping is part of that, but is it a steel play? They can reduce the amount of steel usage and that there’s a, a cost savings and a carbon dioxide elimination by using wood instead of steel. Mm-hmm. making steel use creates a lot. CO2 obviously. Is, is it the combo that they’re, they’re getting, I, I won’t use the word greenwashing, but is, is it a credit system because they’re, they’re cutting amount of carbon from being produced cuz they’re not making the steel towers That, that, that’s a 

Joel Saxum: benefit to them because res is ESG rating in a skyrocket after this 

Allen Hall: maybe.

Allen Hall: It’s possible. So I think there’s just more to watch Your ex. I I, it, it is interesting technology. We haven’t seen it really implemented yet, and 2026 is a long way away from today. What happens in the meantime? How does Modan get from 2022 to 2026? Those, those couple years can get pretty lean. You’d think they’d be trying to hook up some, Some contracts right now.

Allen Hall: All right, so 

Joel Saxum: next we’re gonna talk Nordex guys. So Europe’s chief executives executive says on short turbines will reach tan megawatts in higher. So the first thought that comes to my mind, Alan, is that right now a lot of the offshore turbines aren’t even that. . Right. What kind of, what kind of hub heights we’re gonna have to need to have these to be safe on shore?

Joel Saxum: Oh 

Allen Hall: gosh, that’s a, that’s a good question. I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it, but yeah, they’re gonna have to be pretty high. 

Joel Saxum: I mean, a 10 megawatt turbine, I’m thinking I gotta have at least 90 meter blades on ’em. And if you wanna have some re some relief, you’re talking 150 meter tower. 

Allen Hall: Oh gosh, yeah.

Allen Hall: Probably 200 meter towers 

Joel Saxum: I think. Yeah, that’s massive. That’s big time. So you’re starting to, you’re starting to fight with some more air airspace laws. There’s, there’s, there’s, there’s quite a, 

Allen Hall: some hurdles there. I think your neighbor would notice , the wind, tur butt in your backyard at those ice. Yeah, a little bit.

Allen Hall: Yeah, so,

Joel Saxum: so earlier this year they revealed this, the new six megawatt turbine, the N 1 65 or 1 75. And that turbine can be upgraded to seven megawatts. Which there’s some space they’re competing in there. I think Ener Enercon actually just re released 175. 

Allen Hall: Yes. At the show in Homburg, they did that.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Yep. 

Joel Saxum: So this is, this is to compete with the Siemens Ga Mesa SG 7.0, and then that’s the one 70. So they’re, they’re getting that class right. And I believe, and I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna say this wrong, but I believe a lot of those are for low wind areas, so they can actually pick, they can actually pick up in those lower wind areas that are kind of steady.

Joel Saxum: And once you get up that high, of course the wind resource is much. . But the, the whole thing is to push on a lower, lower levelized cost of energy. You know, which is of course highly dependent on rotor size and. Tower heights. So if you have an area that you wanna get wind energy from the higher you get in the sky, the less pads you have to build.

Joel Saxum: The less ground you’re taking up, the less permits you have. That’s why, I mean, it’s the same thing of the offshore play, right? The offshore play. Why they go so big? Because the levelized cost of energy goes down because you’re only driving one pile and now you’re getting what’s the newest, you know, 15 megawatts out of, of the 

Allen Hall: big.

Allen Hall: And, and I think with the advancement in transmission lines and the cabling, the, the, the voltages that those cables can withstand is getting so high. And we, I, I’ve been noticing that in Hamburg too, that everybody’s just pushing for bigger and bigger, which means fewer and fewer parts, essentially.

Allen Hall: That’s what it means. Just bigger parts. Yeah. Less of them. Yeah, I think they’re pushing to levelize cost of energy it needs is a big driver and they need to shove that down. I just don’t see it playing so well in certain parts of the United States, you’re talking about five times in what we have right now in America, most of the terms of America are two megawatts for the most part.

Allen Hall: So if you five Xing that, wow, those turbines are gonna get really. 

Joel Saxum: We’re talking about logistics issues. I think we talked about it a couple months ago and there was a company, well actually it was NRE who was pioneering a way to transport some of these components and blades on trains where the, the actual blade took up like four or five train cars, of course, Right?

Joel Saxum: So, so I, I guess you might be limited to wherever there’s rail, you can build these things. Because I don’t see a hundred, so I’m just going stupid math of folks. 90 meter. , I’m going 270 feet, 300 feet, 300 foot blade plus the truck, which looks to be really small in front of a 300 foot blade. That’s not going down a highway, you know, like, so, I mean, you might be able to transport ’em on the beach to a port facility and build one there, but inland us I don’t, I just don’t see it.

Allen Hall: You’re looking at multi piece blades, I think. I think GEs Yeah. And lms, Multi, multi piece blade, which they, they seem to use and not use. Or use and not use. You’re, I think you’re into must use it at Thoses. Yeah. I would assume 

Joel Saxum: they use and then they don’t use when they have issues with it, right?

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So I mean, multi, multi police bays have been around for a long time, but I don’t think anybody’s got ’em a hundred percent correct. They’re. And it could be this too. Alan, what do you think about Let’s, let’s make a two gigawatt facility, something we got massive amount of spaces for. Yeah. Build a temporary factory on site and build the blades right there.

Joel Saxum: Oh, 

Allen Hall: you’ll have to, I, I don’t really, I think so know any way you can get, avoid it. Really. You’ll have to build a temporary factory. And we’ve looked at those, That company, gosh, I wanna say they’re in Colorado. It’s either Colorado or Texas that’s making the spiral towers, right? Yeah, yeah. Colorado. Yeah, it’s Colorado.

Allen Hall: Okay. So that technology, it looks really interesting to me and it’s surprised they’re not getting a bunch of funding into that company because mm-hmm. , if we do get. Even five megawatts on, on, on shore, seven 10. You have to build the towers, I think, on site and probably the blades and who knows about the generator.

Allen Hall: Some of the assault components, like some of that may be built or assembled on site for sure. Does that change the way you just do everything? Because right now we’re just essentially shipping the big components however far they gotta go and assembling ’em at the site. Now the site becomes a factory. Is that where we end up at?

Allen Hall: I I think we end, Yeah. So there’s a 

Joel Saxum: business case model there too, right? Where it’s, okay, what’s the ROI on this? Do we build it, we shut it down? Do we build something temporary? Can we really get, can we really have proper q a QC in a , a temporary factory? Yeah, exactly. But I mean, if you’re building a something, I mean, it would almost have to be, if we talked with Rosemary about like this.

Joel Saxum: Snowy power, snowy. What was the one in Australia? 

Allen Hall: Oh yes, the hydro facility where 

Joel Saxum: Snowy, snowy hydro. So what that project was so dang big that the government had to put up the capital for it. Yeah. If we have the, if the government decides they want to build a five gigawatt power facility, but that’s got these massive turbines and stuff and it, maybe there’s enough capital behind it to do that.

Joel Saxum: And then if that, if that factory could do double duty of putting. 50 and 60 meter blades, and they can actually be used around the country as well. Yeah. Well then, then there might be a play for it, maybe the, the shut down factories in Iowa, they start building seven and 10 megawatt turbines right around that thing.

Joel Saxum: and then Right. And then move on. So, so we’re discussing some of the headwinds to this technology, but it’s already in place kind of worldwide as well. So Sweden only approved roughly a quarter of the onshore wind projects last year. because of the techno, the two taller turbines too close to home.

Joel Saxum: Visible yeah, visible, all this stuff. So potential wind insights across the US are, they’re already pushing back on wind turbines in general, but taller wind turbines as well. So while technologically this may be something that can happen or could be in the future, I mean, what do you think about the, the public’s response to it?

Joel Saxum: Alan, is it possible? 

Allen Hall: I don’t think it’s possible until you, until you start writing check. , It’s possible, Yeah. If the, the, the neighborhoods around these areas receive a part of the proceeds that seems to make everybody want to work together for the quote unquote, greater good. Mm-hmm. , but they’re all getting paid a little bit.

Allen Hall: And I think that’s why you see so much acceptance of wind in certain areas in the United States, is because they’ve been economically depressed, they’ve had bad crops for a number of years, whatever the case is, having a thousand dollars hit your mailbox. Or $10,000 hit your mailbox once a month is not, it’s not a bad way to go.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And you would think that, particularly in the United States, because the US government does control masses amount of territory. I, I, the number sticks in my head for like Utah, I think the government, federal government is, has claimed like a third of Utah that Yeah, I mean it’s federal property, 

Joel Saxum: hundreds of millions of, of acres all over the.

Allen Hall: Right? And, and I’ll give you the, an the, it’s up in Alaska, so the Anwar discussion about drilling in Anwar all the time. All right. Maybe we don’t drill for a petroleum there, fine, but maybe we put 50 10 megawatt tournaments up there and create this massive wind facility. Wind always blows what you do, right?

Allen Hall: Yeah. You create these sites. , right? You create these wind sites on federal lands such that pretty much no one lives in those federal lands. At least it’s severely reduced. There’s no big cities on federal land. Yeah, for the most part in the states. Then it may me a little bit easier to do and, and to permit.

Allen Hall: Maybe that’s where these things end up because I, I don’t see, you know, three megawatts. I mean, I’m thinking out in the future, four megawatt, five megawatts seems like probably the limit you’re gonna see anywhere near a populated area. After that, I think you’re right. You’re gonna run the problem.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean, you’re the, I just Googled it real quick.

Joel Saxum: The Bureau of Land Management, which is the big federal agency. There’s other ones that manage land as well. But in the US 245 million acres that’s a, that’s a, that’s a 10% of American land and most of it’s in the west. There isn’t much BLM land until you hit Colorado and Wyoming, New Mexico. Right.

Joel Saxum: Like it’s all, it’s all over there. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s, it’s doable. It’s, it’s a doable plan. If you wanna get to. Condensed areas of high energy production. That’s how you would do it. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And then it’s a, then it’s a matter of transmission, like we’ve talked about many times getting this powered market. So if some of those big lines get stabbed in acro from Wyoming to to Las Vegas, well then there’s a whole court order that can be connected to it all across this BLM land.

Joel Saxum: I’ve worked on BLM land quite a bit. There’s some interesting stakeholders when you get on it. Of course, a lot of BLM land runs through First Nations reservation territory, and you wanna make sure that everything is done well by those stakeholders, but it might bring some economic boom there as well.

Joel Saxum: Sure. I do know that the, the archeological and environmental studies through there would take. I mean, you’d be, you’re worse than offshore because you can actually walk there and see it. . Yeah. I’ve had jobs shut down for a kind of cactus, eh. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. But well do, here’s a good question. If, if, because you can do these, if, if we say we go to 10, 15, maybe 20 megawatts on shore, do the do and because and because it’ll have to be.

Allen Hall: Remotely located, but those feeder lines also become like the route 66 of, you know mm-hmm. 2030. Right. Wherever there’s energy is where towns and industry is going to develop. Mm-hmm. because you can’t get it, or that’s the cheapest place. Right. We’re already seeing it. in Amazon with the Amazon web serve services and some of those YouTube and others where they’re locating their businesses, where the energy prices are the lowest cost.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. . Right. So you’re seeing a shift. You’re seeing a shift outta California where energy prices are super high in these east coast. Mm-hmm. moving to the middle of the United States like Iowa because the prices are less and you, it’s weirdly creating these bigger centers for wind and, and solar, which will happen too, may change the demographics of the United States just because that’s where power is.

Joel Saxum: You know, I, I read something a while back that said of the, in, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the commodity that was the most important was steel. Sure. That that built. Pittsburgh, what we see today. Yes. So people don’t really That’s right. A lot of people don’t really realize that steel was the commodity.

Joel Saxum: Then steel gave way to hydrocarbons and hydrocarbons as the, as the commodity carried us all the way until now, basically. And then there was the, the article went on to say the, the commodity of the future is going to be data, and so you’re starting to see this massive amount of data collection. You just talk Amazon web servers and things like that, right?

Joel Saxum: Mm. And then at the end of the article, before they went to their conclusion and kind of walked through this thing, But it might not be data. It might just basically be. It’s gotta be. And we’re starting, we’re starting to see that, I mean, at a global scale, everywhere we’re talking, talking about one, one event in Eastern Europe has caused this massive crisis worldwide in energy prices, energy production, energy usage.

Joel Saxum: And as we grow as a society, we’re only gonna absorb more. I mean, you go in, I walked into. Friend’s house the other day and I was like, This kid had an iPad. This kid was on an iPhone, but laptop here, TV on there. Like, and while electronics are more efficient than they were, the Yes, just the amount of consumption of electricity, electric car charging in the garage.

Joel Saxum: Like there, it’s, it’s going to change the way we see the future. Right in for the generations to come. I 

Allen Hall: think. So the Silicon Valley. Situation may not happen in Silicon Valley and May because that’s where aerospace was at the time. And so Silicon Valley is an outgrowth of aerospace companies. Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: it. It could be where the transmission lines are, which is a fascinating way to think about 

Joel Saxum: it. Yeah. And you’re gonna start to see possibly you know, Little societies, little com communities and stuff pop up where they weren’t before or where they were before, and then they grow back up. You know, we talked last week about in Nebraska with the county where they had the, the US military had some installations in and they wouldn’t put, that county had 645 people in it.

Joel Saxum: In New York City. That’s a block one building. Yeah. It’s one building of people . So, so now if you start to get these, these, the, the, you know, new arteries, the lifeblood of what rural America is for power generation, crisscrossed by transmission lines, that might spur on. I mean, of course there’s jobs there, but that might spur on economic activity in all these locations.

Allen Hall: Well, it, it already has in a sense. I think we’re just not paying attention to it. So Panasonic’s gonna put about 4 billion. Eastern Kansas, in rural Kansas to build a battery factory. And they’re talking about doing that same thing in Oklahoma, not 200 miles south of there in sort of south of Tulsa. There’s area in there where they’re talking about doing the same thing.

Allen Hall: They’re gonna make a second plant, but it has to do with. You think in part of lower cost of energy for the lithium battery factory, that which is gonna feed, I think Tesla down in Texas. So you’re already seeing this shift towards lower cost energy sites, where in industries moving out of the bigger cities and more expensive cities and moving outta Chicago, the moving outta New York, the moving out of you know, Detroit and moving to places where it’s, it’s just less expensive.

Allen Hall: And where the energy corridor is moving to. Texas to Iowa right now, and, and it, it’s in its infancy. We’re not talking about it like we should, but it is definitely happening and the energy companies know it. 

Joel Saxum: You wanna talk about Onshoring manufacturing as we do? We would like to see, Oh, do it again? Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Again, as a business case, you bring it to where the, the, the, the hired help is cheap. Don’t go stick ’em in Detroit where the, where the unions will gouge. You go, go to Oklahoma where people are happy to have a job that that pays a good wage.

Allen Hall: Yeah. No offense, Oklahoma, it’s changing the demographics. Love Oklahoma.

Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Family great to see jobs so , they’re gonna love those jobs you’re gonna get the next couple of years and, and it’s, and it’s all in, in part, by just being part of this sort of renewable energy future, it, it’s really changing the demographics, Fascinat. 

Joel Saxum: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually, It’s very predictable and very preventable.

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Allen Hall: Joel, as we’ve just discussed, blades are getting bigger and usually what that means to manufacture them, the cost goes up exponentially because you need more people to build these blades and everything just gets cosier as you go along.

Allen Hall: And we can’t continue to do that right there. There’s downward pressure on pricing for all the OEMs and Siemens com. MEA is no exception. So Siemens Coma is partnering with a company out of the Netherlands called Airborne for Automated Systems to manufacture offshore wind blades. And although Siemens Kaba says it is not getting into the specifics, it seems.

Allen Hall: Airborne’s gonna be involved in Probably kidding of the composite supplies for the blade and maybe laying the supplies down into the mold. Cause that seems like a very intensive mm-hmm. process. So they’re just trying to reduce, I think, variations in the blades. Like they’ve had some issues on the five megawatt blade.

Allen Hall: My guess that has to do with just the complexity of putting those blades together and people laying those flies down with rollers and brooms, whatever else they do to put blinds down. And maybe there’s, maybe they’re, they’re, you know, Siemens is learning a lesson like, Hey, because we’re gonna make so many of these blades, we need to take the variability out of it and we need to automate some of this.

Allen Hall: And they’re the first company that I know that’s actually mentioned automat. The blade manufacturing do you see this, you know, expanding it to the vests of the world, the GEs of the world of, of really taking some of the automated technology out of the aerospace companies and putting it into the wind Turine companies?

Joel Saxum: Well, I think most manufacturers have some small scale. Hm. Automation of sorts. Right, Sure. Yeah. But, but at a, but this seems like Siemens ESA is going in a big way towards automation, towards like car factory automation. Right? Which, which is so, of course it has cost implications. We hope to get the cost of these blades down.

Joel Saxum: Sure. Hope to get the quality up. These kinds things less people. more robotics consistency. Yeah. But that’s, that’s the big thing I want to touch on here. Right. We’ve talked about this many times. We had a good friend, Martin, the Blade Whisperer on not too long ago talking about quality issues in the factories.

Joel Saxum: So being from Wind Power Lab and we look at RCAs and stuff all the time, man, I, the majority of RCAs, you can point to some kind of manufacturing detect because, or defect, because it’s when it’s, That science meets art mix type thing, right? That’s when you run into trouble. I mean, that, and that’s why our, our, But there’s a problem there as well.

Joel Saxum: So like, if I’m, if I’m making desks and they’re mostly custom made and I’m selling that amount of premium and I’m only selling a hundred of them, I’m not gonna design a robot to build these desks for me. I’m just gonna be like, Well, they’re gonna be, they’re gonna be expensive and there might be some flaws in it, but I’m gonna make every one of ’em by hand.

Joel Saxum: Right. So now if, if Siemens, Ga Mesa can look at their, their portfolio of orders today, tomorrow, in the future, and, and kind of project out what they see for the renewable energy uptake of these five, say it’s the five megawatt machines mm-hmm. and say, Okay guys, now we’re looking at not selling or making a thousand these blades.

Joel Saxum: We might be making 10,000 of these blade. Now it makes sense to put some money into developing a system and hopefully that system Yeah. Can be kitted for other blades. Right, right. But it makes sense to be putting some of this stuff in and I would be willing to bet it’s because partially, I think it’s more driven this way than the economics of the sale price.

Joel Saxum: Yes. But not so much. I think it’s the hit that they take when they make mistakes and not see Minsky MEA specifically, but all of the manufacturers. So they’re seeing. They’re seeing this happen and they’re like, Man, we keep getting hit. Like people keep getting hit coming back going, Oh, we need three new blades because these all had this, blah, blah, blah.

Joel Saxum: Defected it. And sometimes it’s the guy running down the middle of the, the, the blade putting glue down to stick the, the sheer web on if he goes like this or the machine doesn’t squeeze out enough glue in one spot, now you’ve got a weak spot. Yeah. In the blade. Right. And now, An insurance company that’s worth their salt or an operator or asset owner is gonna dig into that.

Joel Saxum: If the thing fails and go, guys, that’s on you. And this happens a lot to these OEMs. So if they can alleviate some of that stuff, it de-risks their, the back end of their business model. So I think that in my mind, that’s where this is being pushed. But that’s just because I deal in that. I deal in those cases a.

Joel Saxum: I, I wonder 

Allen Hall: what Rosemary would say about this. I know in the aerospace world, when we do hand lay up the parts, particularly critical parts, the, the play count in making sure the pie’s in the right places can get a little wonky unless you have those like people on top of people verifying. And that you put extra supplies and extra weight and extra cost into a part just to accommodate those times you were

Allen Hall: A hand layup may not be right and automation. When we switched automation back in the nineties, late nineties, we started doing automated apply lays. We got rid of a lot of the extra dead weight that was there to accommodate human inter. That you also wonder, is it a combination of, yeah, you have less labor, but also do you end up having less material on the blaze to cover up some of the variability that you had when you’re doing it by hand?

Allen Hall: That may be another reason to go that way. You’re gonna say it’s somewhat on materials and materials are not cheap. But also, you know, there’s just too much. There’s just, when you start talking about making structures, A hundred meters long. Absolutely. So we’re in there as a mistake, right? There has to, almost has to be.

Allen Hall: When you throw a human on top of that, there has to be a mistake somewhere in most of those blades, whether it, you know, progresses to the point of being a problem. Who knows? Do you see that same thing like maybe there’s savings in kinds of areas by automating. A 

Joel Saxum: hundred percent agree with you and it.

Joel Saxum: Fact of exactly what you’re explaining has already started happening, right? If you look at the old, old one megawatt machines of any manufacturer, they’re, those blades are like old dozers, man. Like they’re, they’re thick and heavy and they compo, they’re composite every, anybody that knows composites, I mean, you’re always looking at fatigue cycles and all these different things, and, and you can, you can really, if you want to, I mean, look at a carbon fiber road race bike, that carbon fiber is so thin on those things, but there’s no margin for.

Joel Saxum: There’s no margin for error. Right? But that’s why that bike frame costs $10,000. But, so we’ve seen this already happening in them industry across all manufacturers. As as these blades have gotten longer, they have dropped supplies. The safety factor just isn’t there. Whereas they may have been designed comp and composites.

Joel Saxum: That’s a very tough thing to quantify sometimes. Sure. Because of, because of you just testing and testing and testing, you can only test so much electronically, you know, in a CAD software before you have to test it in real life. Right. And now it’s getting harder and harder to test duty cycles in meantime before a failure of these hundred and some odd meter blades because testing that is hard.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So, and, but at the same. If you look at it, and I don’t have a chart for this anymore, but I, I, I just, I know it here. If you look at a simple measurement of like meter per blade to kilogram per blade or meter, meter per kilogram of each blade measured, as they get longer, they get way lighter. And it’s not necessarily because they get longer, it’s because it’s because they’re the, the next generation of blades that they’re being designed with less safety factor, all these different things.

Joel Saxum: Because if you had. . If you had a hundred meter blade that was built like a, Like a ideal wood want. Yeah, like an, Yeah, exactly. Like a GE one, five. Even that blade would be Right. That’s true. I mean, it would be as heavy as, as, I don’t even, I don’t even know. Blue whale. Like it would be so much, It would be so big and heavy, and then you get to the point where, and this is why this is