Vestas and TPI agree to blade manufacturing contracts. Will OEM’s subcontract manufacturing of blades to lower risk and costs? Australia is planning for 100% renewable grids. What hurdles remain and what lessons can be learned? Tesla installs grid battery onshore near Dogger Bank offshore wind farm – Rosemary has questions…and an employee was terminated in France for not being “fun”. Joel, Rosemary and Allen discuss the details.

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Uptime 142

Allen Hall: It’s almost holiday season. Well, I guess it is a holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving, Joel. I guess we both had Thanksgiving. I, I saw some pictures on, on slack of, of a Turkey slash cranberry. Oh yeah. Delicious Rosemary, you you did see the, you did see that big plate. Joel, Joel was not cutting back at than time.

Joel Saxum: You can’t see, you can’t see my belly underneath the camera here, but it’s still big

Allen Hall: Yeah, so US Americans are pretty full from the, the Thanksgiving holiday. It, it was actually a really nice holiday. We, we had decent weather in America and there was really no travel hiccups. Thank goodness everybody got home safe. This week for the podcast, we have a lot going on, and again, it’s one of these crazy news weeks.

Where there’s just so much renewable news happening. Vestus is, is working with TPI on manufacturing blades and maybe making some off offshore blades, it sounds like, which would be great for TPI and for Vestus. And then Siemens is gonna be closing a plant in Morocco, a blade plant in Morocco. And it looks like OEMs are starting to get outta the blade business and transfer some of the load onto independent operators and 

Rosemary Barnes: more good news for investors with a big order in Australia.

And then a couple of other Australian stories. There’s one gigawatt wind farm plant in Queensland that’s now been announced over double in size to two gigawatts. And also looking forward, Australia’s energy market operator has mapped out a route to a hundred percent instantaneous renewables, which they expect to happen in 2025.

So we’ll talk about some of the engineering things they have to take care of before that can happen. 

Joel Saxum: So then we’re jumping back over to the UK and we’ll talk about Tesla building a, a, what, what would be Europe’s largest battery into the grid. And it’s right near where the dog or bank Wind Farm is off or coming ashore.

So really cool to see the, those additions to the grid in the UK and see what it can happen in the future. And last but not least, a French man wins the right not to be fun at work. So, we’ll, we’ll dive into that and have a little bit of a prelude to our holiday season around the world, and have a little 

Allen Hall: fun with it.

I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Garden Lightning Tech. And I’m here with Australian Renewables guru Rosemary Barnes. and my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

All right. Rosemary Vestus has signed a multi-year agreement with one of your former competitors, TPI Composites. And this gets into the future of who’s gonna make blades, particularly in the United States, but I, I think this is gonna move worldwide. TPI is already making blades for Vestus, has made them for a little while, and the two in the four megawatt marketplace.

But they’re talking about making some investments and expanding production capabilities to handle the V 163, 4 and a half megawatt machine and the V236 15 megawatt machine. And I believe the V 236 15 megawatt is an Equinor machine, I think for offshore, if I remember that correctly. So the TPI has a facility that was making blades in Rhode Island, and they had stopped.

That May opening again now cuz it’s really close to the shoreline and there’s a bunch of, a bunch of agreements like this. There seems to be a lot of of movement around in terms of who’s gonna be building blades, is it gonna be the OEMs or are they gonna sub out the work? And it looks like, at least in the States, we’re gonna be subbing out a large part of that.

Does this, does that make sense, Rosemary, to start kinda like GE with lm, right? I mean that was sort of a supplier agreement early on. Is is that the. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think it’s, it’s the past as well and maybe it’s gonna be a bit different in the future. So with GE it was a bit different cause when GE started, they didn’t have any blade manufacturing capabilities.

So they had LM and TPI making blades fallen. They had blade design in house, but Right. I know at LM at least, they don’t every blade that LM manufactures is a blade that LM designed. They don’t do any build to print, but TPI do build to print. I dunno if it’s exclusively, they probably have a blade design team as well.

And lm, I mean, LM before it got bought by ge, it didn’t have any, you know, it didn’t make any, any of the rest of the parts of wind turbines. So it was only making blades to supply to other manufacturers. And all of those manufacturers would use LM blades in addition to their own blades, usually as a, a kind of a supply chain diversification.

Idea, you know, a little bit of a backup plan in case something went wrong. You don’t wanna have a, a single supplier for any critical component. And yeah, even if that’s, you know, something that you’re making yourself that’s just something can still go wrong. But I wonder if the future more of the same, but maybe with increasing emphasis on the, you know, third party supplied parts.

And I can see that it kind of makes sense for, like, if you take somewhere like Australia for example, we’re very far away from any existing wind farms. I think most of the blades that go to Australia are, are made in, in India or China usually. So it’s you know, quite a distance to get them there. It’s a big, gonna be a big, it has been a big market and it’s gonna be a very big market moving forward.

There’s a lot of plans and I think we’ll talk about some of those later in the, the episode today. But. You know, for a company to start a factory there, that company needs to have lots of sales in the area. Whereas if you have someone like TPI who are making blades for all sorts of manufacturers and they could supply, you know, investors wind farms, they could supply Siemens you know, all, all of them GE , right?

So I can see how it makes sense for new locations like that. And yeah, maybe, maybe we will see a lot more of that in the future. It’s, it’s lower risk for the the wind turbine manufacturers at least. You know, it’s a lot of work to start up a new factory and they need to be really sure that their pipeline is, you know, really secure that they’re gonna gonna have orders to fill it for the next few years.

Allen Hall: Well, Joel, does it make sense that a TPI builds blades for several different OEMs? And if they’re gonna do that, why? If, especially say they’re making a three megawatt blade for GE and they’re making a. Three megawatt blade for Siemens mea, which eventually will happen. Would they just not use the same blade design?

Doesn’t that make sense? If you’re gonna be in that, in the manufacturing space, why would you have two molds, two different setups where you can just cause yourself mistakes if won’t them be, makes sense for someone like a TPI to say, Hey everybody, let’s just settle on one design here and, and make it easier.

I think, I mean, so we can make the, the products less expensive that used to happen 

Joel Saxum: in the past. Some designs were you just like, Hey, we, we need some of those LM 40.3 s and you could just bolt ’em on to whatever turbine you want. But I think as we see wind turbine. Technology innovation cycles going so fast, everybody’s trying to get that little bit of edge, right?

So you start to see more, you know, of course aggressive blade designs. And I don’t think that, and, you know, and it’s for low wind speed versus high wind speed, and the little specifics here and there. And as you see more of those things change, I don’t think you’re gonna see that much. You might, you might have, okay, so yeah, say you have a TPI factory and you have a bunch of really skilled technicians, you might, instead of having, you know, a three way megawatt blade that fits a bunch of different platforms, you might have two or three lines production lines of different kinds.

Cause I know like TPIs also makes Intercon blades, you know what I mean? So, right. And so they, they, they’ll make different ones for different manufacturers, and I just don’t see the, while it probably is more economically feasible to have, you know, for the, the industry as a whole everybody, all the different OEMs want to have their, their edge in the marketplace.

So I, I don’t think you’ll see that. They, they, everybody wants a little bit of a custom thing. . 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I lm did did attempt to do that years ago because I mean, they had the same thoughts that you are having, Alan, I, I assume it’s so obvious that, you know, you get the economies of scale and you can get better reliability if you have more blades out there to, to learn from.

You get, you know, better and better at it every time. But yeah, LM gave it a pretty red hot go of 10 years ago or maybe even more. And yeah, probably more, and they just didn’t really sell. I think that the issue is that it, yeah, there’s no, there’s no way to. Make different turbines like to, to get the techno, the edge in technology to have the best turbine.

You can’t do that if you can’t change the blade. I mean, the blade’s where it all starts, that’s a part that’s gonna capture the energy and all the, you know, the loads in the blade, it transferred to the rest of the, the turbine. So I mean, if you all had the exact same blade everywhere across the world, then everything else would look, start to look very much the same as well.

So you kind of stagnate. So I’m not sure if overall it would lead to a better yeah, a better system. So I’m not, I’m not sure. On the one hand it makes sense, but on the other hand, I can’t actually see it ever, ever happening. . 

Allen Hall: Well, Joel, am am I wrong about this? But the American auto manufacturers, I, I don’t think Ford makes their own engines anymore.

Right? I think there’s, they make a couple talk about a critical component. They make a couple of them. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So they can outsource the, probably the most critical component of, of the car is the engine. And, but they set up, they’re outsourcing that they set 

Joel Saxum: up agreements too. Like, okay, so now if we’re talking cars, like trying to equate it to Yes.

If you go tires, now tires are not, I mean, they’re, they’re a critical component. You can’t get down the road without tires, but the tire isn’t gonna make or break a. Right. Like you can have a little bit, like if you’re, you’re in a Corvette. Yeah. Your tires are a little bit different than they are in a passenger car, but, but they don’t make or break it.

Now, the engine and transmission combination, that might be something that make or break that model of car. So even if Ford is outsourcing what engine they’re building, they’re gonna have an agreement that this is the only engine that this thing can go in besides specific models. Right. So, okay. So they may have someone outsource, outsource build it, but they’re gonna say, Hey, that is just for us.

That doesn’t go in, you know, they’re not giving away the, the, the what’s the new motor? They got the Coyote 5.0 lit. They’re not letting anybody else have the Coyote 5.0 lit, even though they’re not probably manufacturing it themselves. . You know what I mean? So, yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: So in that way it’s similar to tpi making blades for somebody.

Yeah, 

Joel Saxum: they’re blades are outsourced, but the, that custom model of like when we were at Hamburg Intercon was debuting that 75 meter blade. That, that, the, the right I think its, yeah. Or the 1 75 platform, whatever it was. They’re not gonna, because that’s their new hot rod in the, in the marketplace that they’re counting on for sales.

They’re not gonna let everybody have that same blade design. So, 

Allen Hall: and Rosemary, are these blades really that different really? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yes and no. I mean, they all do the same thing and you know, if you gave any designer the airfoils that, you know, Siemens was making and the wind speed that it should, should operate in, then they would come up with.

Very, very, very similar geometry for the the Blade. So in that sense, no, there’s some innovations with manufacturing. And I, I mean, throughout the years, if you look back at like big changes, they have made a difference for a few years. Like I know at LM they, you know, you focus a lot on IP and Peytons and that sort of thing.

And every Peyton’s lecture I’d go to, they would bring out the, by far the most successful Peyton that LM ever had was for pre-B bending the blades. So, you know, they were the first ones to bend the blades away from the tower when they were unloaded so that when the wind hit them when they were operating, they would just kind of get to straight, which is better aerodynamically and also gives further to go before it hits the tower.

So that was only LM Blades had that for, you know, the life of that patent, which I believe has expired now. And so that, that was huge for them. And then there’s been some other ones as well with materials, you know, figuring out how you can use carbon fiber and preforms and maybe carbon fiber, fiberglass blends.

All these sorts of things don’t sound like to somebody at the bottom of a wind turbine. That’s not something that you’re gonna notice looking up at it and be like, oh, wow, that’s a, that’s an LM blade. But they certainly made a difference for annual energy production and for, you know, the, the cost of the blades.

So yeah, it’s I guess it’s, to answer that question, it’s like what’s a significant difference? And what’s a significant, significant difference to a engineer is maybe different to everybody else , 

Allen Hall: right. Well, there seems to be some more consolidation in the blade manufacturing group. Siemens GAA is gonna close a factory in Morocco.

Blade Blade Factory, which again, goes back to how much work are the OEMs really gonna do if they’re, if they’re close in the Blade Factory in Morocco. And, and Siemens, CESA has a big footprint in Africa in general. It would, it seems like they’re definitely consolidating and were, and thinking about off offsetting some of those expenses onto, to another company to take the responsibility of that.

Now Siemens Maya cited a whole bunch of different factors for why they were closing the factory, but they are Ukraine of all things. Aluminum prices chain supply, chain problems, competition, you know, the usual stuff. But that would apply worldwide. Why, why Morocco? It just, especially since you’re close to the shoreline, it, it makes sense to keep that Blade factory open if you’re trying to deliver blades up to the Mediterranean or somewhere.

That would make sense. But I think the consolidation continues. Cuz we also see a sift south towards Australia of all places. Vestus has got a big project down in Australia, the Golden Plains Wind Farm, where they, they’ve secured a big order for 756 megawatts of turbines. It’ll be 122 v, 1 62, 6 0.2 megawatt machines.

That’s big. And Joel, are you ready for this? They have a 30 year service, service and maintenance agreement to go with that . 

Joel Saxum: Wow. I mean, but that’s standard in Australia, right? I mean, Rosemary cre if I’m wrong, but most it is. Mostly the industry down there runs on FSAs. But 30 years, man, 

Allen Hall: that’s a gr 

Rosemary Barnes: man, the guy who signed that contract.

Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: Vests must really, really trust in that. V 1 62. . 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I’d really be interested to see what’s in these, in these agreements in terms of, you know, cuz you just trust them then to maximize your asset to make sure that they’re you know, operating. Operating efficiently and got the best maintenance strategy and you know, of an availability guarantee or performance guarantee, that can really only set like minimum acceptable levels.

And I just, I, I’m constantly surprised that developers in Australia don’t seem to be concerned about, you know, like two, five, 10% maybe, you know, improvements that they could be making years into the future by adopting a different operational maintenance strategy. You just kind of, I dunno, you are obviously leaving something on the table if you trust somebody else to operate and do the, the service because you know, say that you’ve got a problem and you’re gonna have to repair a bunch of blades.

They’re really only. Worried about making sure they meet that minimum level. They’re not gonna be, you know, I assume that they won’t be proactive to get them up as soon as possible and to be you know, like maximizing yield, but maybe they’ve got some sort of bonus payment in there. I don’t know. But yeah, like I said, I’d really love to see these contracts cause I developers are so trusting of these OEMs to yeah, give them 30, 30 years.

So, so, well 

Allen Hall: they only had somebody consulting in Australia that knew those details. They could help them. I, I just don’t know of anybody though, do you? 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, that’s why I’m so interested because yeah, I’m the, I’m the one who’s in the, in the conversations trying to translate between Danish engineer and, you know, Australian developer and make sure that, that all the problems are, are under control.

So, yeah, I wonder if we we will be hearing from that developer at Consulting. Maybe, maybe we’ll be working together in the future. 

Joel Saxum: So here’s a question for you, rose. Mary, what’s, what is, if we, if we go energy sale to the grid, now, let’s, let’s calculate this. I gotta spreadsheet open here. Any energy sale to the grid at a kilowatt hour.

What is a, what’s a wholesale price in Australia right now? 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, it, it varies obviously from day to day. I can look it up right now. And tell you what it is, 30 cents, 40 cents. Just opening open, open them.org.au. And. Yeah. Well if I go onto one day over the, the last 24 hours we’ve seen 2 57 62 per megawatt hour.

Okay. So 2 57. So do I that by a thousand? 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. 

Allen Hall: So I add 2250 $7. 

Rosemary Barnes: Is that what you just said? Yeah, it, I mean, it’s an expensive, that’s an Australian though, right? Expensive day . 

Allen Hall: That’s almost an American dollar. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: So like 160 or something? Us. Yep. So, 

Joel Saxum: so I’ll go what I’m saying. That’s crazy. So 160, that’s one point.

Rosemary Barnes: No, but that’s not the average. No. 

Allen Hall: That, that’s the immediate price, right? So spot price. Yeah. But that, that at a, 

Rosemary Barnes: so in Yeah. Oh, actually it’s, it’s 1, 1 62 on I misread that. 

Allen Hall: So, so we gotta install some wind as an Australian. 

Joel Saxum: So, but, but, so with that spot price right now in, this is in US dollars. If you’re at 16 cents a kilowatt hour, that’s 24, about 24,000 US dollars per turbine per day.

With the size of that wind farm, you’re looking at three, almost 3 million US dollars in revenue per day. And now that’s at a hundred percent capacity. So if you drop 1% of that, I mean, you’re talking, that’s 30 grand if you drop 1%. So they must really trust in that, that now if you’re talking, if they’re trying to hit a minimum and they’re just kind of bouncing through there, if they drop 1, 2, 3, 4, 5%, 150,000 a day, if you’re at 5%, that’s crazy.

So, I mean, yeah, 

Rosemary Barnes: I, I agree. It’s something that I can’t get my head around why there’s so much of it here, because before I came back to Australia, the the operators that I was working with were really proactive about, you know, trying new maintenance strategies and operational strategies. I was working, that was mostly Canadian ones.

I was in a few wind farms in Quebec where they’re pretty innovative. And then, yeah, in Northern Sweden, but those were just farms under construction. And I, I talk about it when I, when I’m at conferences, industry conferences in Australia, trying to find out, and the impression that I get is that we’re just at this different phase of the whole cycle in Australia, where developers are really focused on the next project and you know, getting projects underway get, you know, just, just more and more and more.

That’s the kind of easy money at the moment. And I. I expect that in five, 10 years, when that all slows down that then people will be more worried about, you know, getting that squeeze one or 2% from existing assets. And I mean, it can be more as well, if you’ve got an actual problem in, in this strategy then you could definitely see 5%.

And some of the, you know, I often get brought in to look at serial defect problems where, you know, they’ve gotta eventually take down, you know, every blade on a wind farm or at least, you know, stop them for a week or something to do repairs on. Yeah, maybe not every blade on a wind farm, but, you know, on the affected population, which, you know, could be 10, 20% of blades The speed that you do that and the way that you do it as well.

You know, making sure that you’re doing you know, non-urgent maintenance on, on days when the wind isn’t good or the price of the wholesale spot price is low. You know, there’s huge differences that you can make by you know, strategizing on that. And I just really surprises me that the OEMs are so hands off, but I have also noticed that they seem to be kind of hands off in.

The contract stage when, you know, contracts are being developed and agreements are being signed, but later on when there’s a defect, and the OEMs that I have worked with, which is most of them by now are exclusively terrible at communication. They, you know, it’s like, oh, we’ve got a serial defect, don’t worry about it.

We’ve got it under control. And that’s kind of the end of, of what they will communicate at first. And so then the developer’s like, well, actually we don’t have anybody on staff who knows anything about blades. We’ve got no way to tell if what they’re saying is reasonable or normal or under control, or if this is gonna be a huge problem becomes especially a big problem.

If you wanna sell an asset or refinance or, or anything, then you know, you need to actually know where you stand. And yeah, at that point, I think maybe developers, operators are wishing that they had spent, you know, thought about it more at the, the stage of the contract, but, Yeah. Like I said, I don’t quite understand, but I think it’s maybe to do with maturity and just the fact that it’s just all systems go for getting more turbines in the ground now.

That’s, that’s what everyone’s spending their effort on and there’s only so many engineers in Australia and they’re all working on development as far as I can sell. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. With those energy prices, Joel, I mean that, those would be dream prices in America, right. Yeah, but like Rosemary 

Joel Saxum: said that we’d have to look at what the levelized cost is over the year to kind of do an apples to apples.

Otherwise, 

Rosemary Barnes: and that was one, one day. And PPAs aren’t, aren’t maybe all, all that much. Yeah, you have to gimme some warning and I can, I can put together some stats for next week’s episode if you like to get a Yeah. A more broad representation. Yeah. I’m actually not following the spot price every day cuz I, but I think you’re, I think you’re, you’re a mechanical engineer, not a analyst.

I think your, 

Joel Saxum: your supposition is about perfect though, Rosemary. Everybody’s focused on getting these things in the ground. So all the engineering effort is, is on, on development and, and then it’s just once they’re in, hand it off and we’ll move forward. But that may come back to, to vitamin and about a little bit.

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Allen Hall: Rosemary’s talking about all the developments happening in Australia, up in Queensland, which I guess is like the Silicon Valley of Australia, from what I can tell, is set to become one of the, have one of the largest wind farms in the Southern hemisphere, not just in Australia.

With the Queensland government announcing plans to double the size of the MacIntyre wind Project. So the project already is about a, a megawatt, sorry, a gigawatt, and they’re gonna bump it up to, to two gigawatts. So it’s 180 turbines moving up to threet 60 turbines. Yeah. Gigawatts sorry. From one gigawatt to two gigawatts.

Right. So that they figured it was good enough to power about 1.4 million Queensland homes. That’s a, that’s a lot of homes. The labor government in Queensland as part of this deal is talking about establishing a Blade factory in the next couple of years up in Queensland. The, the blades that are coming from this new project or the expansion project are, will be coming from.

Which makes sense. But this seems like with all the activity in Australia, they’re, they’re wanting to work with somebody, maybe one of the OEMs, maybe one of the operators, to create a, a wind turbine manufacturing facility in country. That makes sense. But Rosemary, as you were just saying, engineers, they’re all kind of tied up working on projects.

Is the infrastructure there for Australia to open a 

Rosemary Barnes: Blade Factory? Not. It’s not ready to start tomorrow, but you know, when new wind, turine blade factories are opened, it’s usually somewhere where they haven’t made wind turine blades before. It’s not a, it’s not a problem. It’s not like highly, highly, highly skilled labor.

I know I was looking at some of the job ads for an LM factory that was opening somewhere one time and it was like, if you’ve ever manufactured anything before then that gives you a big head start, but you don’t have to have, so, you know, all the trainings provided. So I don’t think it will be such a huge problem.

To me, it makes sense to you know, if you’re gonna make an industrial hub, it would make sense to put it somewhere that already has a lot of industry that’s maybe declining. So, you know, there’s a lot of coal mining in Queensland, so perhaps. We can, you know, take some of those workers and, and get them started making wind turbine components.

There’s a lot of areas like that. I was just visiting one at the Hunter Valley where Newcastle was a bit north of Sydney and that’s, you know, coal country and, you know back when we used to have climate change wars every election. The conservative conservatives would always be campaigning in these areas.

Like, oh, look at all these people who will never work again if we do anything about climate change. And I was up there because I was having a look at a bunch of clean energy projects that, that are there as, you know, a bunch of startups and and yeah, yeah, just innovative projects by established companies.

And yeah, all of them are saying, you know, we need, we need workers and the skills that we need are really, you know, really similar to mining industry or, you know, other you know, thermal power generation workers. So I would assume that there would be skill transfer or that would be the way to, you know, maximize the effect.

And since, as you mentioned, it’s a labor government that wants to do it, then it would make sense that they would be concerned about the, you know, the workers that will be affected when they do this big ambitious transition that they’re. 

Allen Hall: Would there be a company that could operate that business?

Who would, who Are there companies in Australia that could just add onto their existing business and add on a blade business as part of it? Is that something in play? Or do you need to bring in someone like a TPI where has plants all around the world? Yeah, to come in and to start it 

Rosemary Barnes: for blades, I would be just highly, highly, highly surprised if it was just an Australian company.

And I know I did read an article by a commentator who I, I really, really like, but he was saying that Australian makes surfboards, so why not wind turbine blades? And I don’t think that that is a relevant skill transfer. They, they both use foam and fiberglass, so, you know, there’s that. But, and winter airplanes are largely hand handmade.

But I think it’s that whole Structure of quality control and, you know, or it’s not so easy to make a profitable winter turine blade factory. You know, you’ve gotta get a highly choreographed dance practically to, you know, get these blades, hundreds of people making these blades and getting them out the door one, one every day you know, operating 24 7 to, to get value out of it.

So I think for Blades it would definitely be an existing manufacturer. Otherwise I would expect it to fail. Sorry. But I think there’s heaps of components in a wind turbine that, that Australia could, Australian manufacturers could step up to make. And I know there’s already some, you know, parts of towers being made and, you know, all, all sorts of other stuff.

And a lot of it obviously has to be made on site. Like you’re not gonna, you know your foundation has to be kind of, you know, put together in place that doesn’t work otherwise, and a bunch of other stuff like that. So yeah, I, I think that that will be the easiest. And if we are gonna have blades made here, then.

I guess that it will be tpi. I mean, I saw an article this week, maybe another one that you shared, Alan, that TPI is talking about expansion into other regions and you know, immediately tweaked in my brain. Always, you know, is one of those Australia. I would love to see it, love to love to help. Gimme a call if you if you need some help setting up, because I would love to see a Winter Glide factory in Australia.

That would make me very happy. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Well, and, and blades aren’t the only thing that Australia is gonna need to develop and it sounds like Australia’s already pushing forward to a 100% renewable grids. So there’s a little bit of technical work to do there. Still. The Australia’s electricity market operator has laid out an engineering roadmap, from what I can tell.

It looks like they’re trying to get the grid to 100% renewable. It’s easy to do at times in sort of a statistical way. Like yeah, we make enough energy to get to a hundred percent, but we’re also sending energy outside of our neighborhood the power of other places. So it, those things tend to be really temporary happened in the United States in a couple of places, but in Australia they’re talking to make about making 100% renewable grid and sta and having a stabilized grid where they don’t have a lot of natural gas slash coal backing it up.

And there’s a couple of hurdles there still. The first one is you have a lot of output, right? And you have a lot of variability. You have a lot of rooftop solar and you have wind and, and some hydro, I assume. How you gonna manage all that and. It’s all electronic, right? So the inverters and everything is feeding the grid.

You have to have some control over those inverters and, and are they doing what we think they’re supposed to do? So it sounds, Rosemary, it sounds like Australia is gonna be leading that effort to really have a standalone grid. Is there, are there resources to do that? It’s a, that’s a complicated thing to accomplish.

It seems like you would need a lot of engineers working on just that problem alone to to, to get a 100% stabilized grid. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it, it is gonna be really interesting and will be significant for the, the world when this happens. And I, I think it’s important to point out like we, we’ve got a pretty progressive government now, but only for less than a year.

They’ve been in before that the government for the previous decade was very against renewables. And so this getting to a hundred percent renewables, it’s, it’s not the result of a government saying we need to get to a hundred percent renewables and forcing it, it’s been the market that’s done this.

It’s just you know, now it’s just the cheapest way to. To generate energy most of the time, and it’s the best way that you can make money. If you wanna, you know, start a new energy project, then you’d be crazy if it was anything except for window solar in Australia, plus heaps of rooftop solar as well.

Which, you know, is a decision made by each household. And so we’re kind of, we’re gonna get to that point. How are we gonna manage to do that without just, you know, wasting a bunch of energy And like you said, this report, it lists the kind of nuts and bolts of what we’re gonna need to, to make sure is done by then.

So. The grid doesn’t just collapse the first time, right? Yeah. You know, cause you have the market settings in place and the, all of the thermal generators, the, you know, the big spinning mass, if they all get the signal that you need to turn off because you’re losing money for staying on you know, then the grid becomes really unstable if you haven’t thought about how you’re gonna do it before.

So there’s a bunch of of challenges. You mentioned some of them. And yes, there’s a lot of electronic control of, of the grid with batteries. For example and. And yeah, synthetic inertia they call it. Right. But there is also the possibility for synchronous condensers, which they’re trialing in South Australia now which is basically, it mimics, it physically mimics a big thermal generator, so it’s a big mass that use, use electricity to spin it up, and then it, you know, it’s got that actual mechanical inertia, keeping it spinning no matter what happens in the grid.

So that’s one, one way to do it. And then the, you know, the, the batteries that do the synthetic inertia, that’s that’s probably the next step after that. And yeah, there is some, some experimentation being done in South Australia. One of the states in Australia who’s kind of like led this transition, they’ve already had plenty of times where they have instantaneous a hundred percent renewables, but the key difference is that they’ve got interconnection points to the rest of the, a main Australian grid so they can import and export there.

So it doesn’t matter so much what you know, what goes on there, but they have been doing a lot of experiments with how to maintain stability and they’re down now to, you have to always have at least two thermal generators running now to you know, make sure there’s that iner in the system. But they’re gonna try soon to go to zero and just use the synchronous condensers and synthetic inert.

But there was a little bit of a natural experiment recently when there was a storm that knocked out the main interconnector and just left two, I think two tiny ones. So they were basically islanded for a a while. And there was a period of really strong you know, renewable availability during the days at least.

And, and so they did have more renewables than they could use and had to curtail a lot. And that’s why you’re gonna, one of the things you’re gonna need to see happen when you get up to the whole Australian grid being a hundred percent renewables, is we’re gonna need a way to control all of the, the different things.

You can’t just have rooftop solar pumping electrons into the grid, you know, no matter what happens, because that could be really destabilizing at those times. And, you know, bearing in mind that that’s actually rooftop, so it sounds tiny, but it’s actually, when you add it up, it’s a, a major source bigger than any single generator.

Yeah, so there’s, there’s a lot of. A lot of things to be taken care of, but I was really excited that it’s 2025. This is predicted to happen. It’s not a target that, that happens in 2025. It’s a prediction. It’s like, this is coming and we need to be ready for it. And so, you know, we can, we can hold our breath and wait and see, see what happens, and hopefully amo next year that we’re ready for it.

Allen Hall: as the electrical engineer here, those things scare me. Right. So the, the power quality is a huge issue. Maintaining the frequency on the grid is a big deal and keeping the, the voltage level stable is, is a amazing feat that we’ve seen to do fairly well at this point. We’re adding a lot of variability back in.

And Joel, you know, What’s happened at Icot that they’ve had a lot of trouble with the a relatively small grid compared to what Australia’s about ready to do. Is there ways that we can sort of leverage what we’re doing in the states and learning in the states and what Australia’s about to do, or, or doing to provide some stability to the grid?

And I’ll, I’ll add another element to it. Did you, Joel, did you see that? Tesla was announcing the, the semi tractor trailer is operational. Oh. That, that they did along 80,000 pound load run for five, I think it went 500 miles recently in the last couple of days. So they think that, that those tractor trailers gonna be on the road and that we’re gonna be putting a pretty large demand onto the grid that we hadn’t planned for.

Yeah. Like we were talking about the, do we have 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Talking about the other week, that those, if we have power charging stations for those trucks that each of the power charging to it, well, they’ll, they’ll take as much power as a small city. To charge all those vehicles. What I’d like to see, so, right, so we were talking about the software a little bit is with our listeners being all over the globe, it’s nice to get a little bit of a, some information and news from all over the place.

And it’s really cool what Australia is doing to, to me as a, they’re a larger society, right? Like the Danish society runs a lot on, on wind power, but it’s a smaller, it’s a little bit easier to manage, right? There’s. Like five, 5 million people and you can drive across the country in three hours. And it’s connected and it’s all connected to, to the Yeah, it is.

Right? Australia is an island and it is, it can’t, you can’t just export everything off offshore or to a different country easily enough. So I think that there’s a lot of really big lessons to be learned from what Australia is doing down there right now. And I would like to see some of these US operators, you know, t we always talk about Ercot because of, of who they are and what they’ve done.

But a lot of these other operators and these other interconnects is to look at what’s happening there and to learn from it as, as we move forward. Cuz they’re, they’re years in front of where we are. As, as far as I’m concerned, like, yes, I don’t, we talked a couple months ago about miso putting 10, $10 billion into the, the right infrastructure just in the Midwest.

I mean, and, and these big transmission lines are talking about planning going from Wyoming all the way to California. And so we’re still, I mean, everybody’s, you know, as, as the grid changes in every country and every market, we’re still adjusting what the infrastructure looks like. But we should, we shouldn’t be putting this infrastructure in just like, yeah, just run some cables and throw up some towers and we’ll make it work.

We should be thinking about it as we go and adjusting for these things. So what, what Australia’s doing is, is something that the operators and the engineers in the US and globally need to be watching because they’re, they’re ahead of the game. 

Allen Hall: We just visited the Hoover Dam recently, and if you look back and see how massive that project was and what it was intended to do, how it has evolved over time.

It’s about a hundred year old project at this point. So it’s paid for itself a couple times over, I assume. But yeah, you’re talking about doing Hoover Dam type projects right now, but in renewables, that’s what’s happening at the moment. And how big of an, or how big of a, a cultural change that was for that part of America.

Yeah, that’s, that’s coming, that’s really coming. That’s gonna be fascinating to watch really, is Daer Bank and Tesla has, Tesla has put a big battery at the output of Dogger Bank, which is an offshore wind farm off the coast of the United Kingdom. So they’ve added about a hundred megawatt battery, that’s about 200 megawatt hours.

That’s right at basically just on shore. So all, all the energy rolls in off offshore. Plugs into this battery, which is there to, to provide a little more stability. So again, as we’re, Joel, you were talking about you, you’re seeing the world take on these different projects to stabilize the grid with renewables.

There’s, there’s another one, case in point and Yeah, , I think Rosemarys were talking about before the show started. You didn’t think that was a very large project, but it’s just the first, right? It’s the first of probably several. Well, space is a little 

Joel Saxum: bit more limited in the UK than it is in Australia.

That could be a reason. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, battery doesn’t take up very much space. No, I was just I was surprised to see it described as a, you know, the, the, the biggest battery cuz I, I checked and I think there’s five, five bigger than that in Australia. And Australia is a much smaller country. So the population at least population wise.

Yeah. So it. Yeah, I was a bit surprised, but it is really interesting to see that yeah, they’re adding a battery to you know, existing plans. The big battery in combo with a solar farm or a wind farm or, or both that I’ve seen have usually, you know, been all developed together or it’s been a standalone battery somewhere else.

So it’s interesting to see it being added on. And I was also interested that, yeah, it’s offshore windfall. One of the topics that there’s a lot of interest in for energy startups recently is offshore energy storage. And to me, battery onshore where the good connection is, that’s the, that’s the place to do your, your offshore energy storage.

So yeah, now we’re seeing, seeing that actually happen that will set the benchmark for what any of the, you know, exciting new kinds of ocean energy storage have to be. So, yeah, look forward to watching how it plays out. Yeah, 

Allen Hall: so you think it’s gonna be how many gigawatts of or terawatts A battery?

How many Terawatts would the UK need? I think they said four. Terawatts in America is a rough number, if I remember correctly. If it’s a hundred megawatts. Yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: They’re always kind of thing. The projections are always so much like, this is how we run our grid now. We’re gonna make it look exactly the same in the future.

And it’s just not gonna be like that. We, we are gonna get better at flexibly changing our, you know, the time that we use electricity as well as flexibly supplying electricity. It, there’s just no way. We won’t because the. Bit of storage, you know, to make the system look like it does now. It’s just so ridiculously expensive.

I mean, I’ve seen when petrol prices, you know, when there’s one petrol station in town who has 10 cents a liter cheaper than everyone else, you get, people drive 30 Ks to get there. They wait an hour in their car to fill up and save a couple of dollars. Are you telling me that there’s not enough people who will care that much about their their electricity bill that they’re not prepared to, you know, do everything in the middle of the day when, you know, solars at peak levels or, you know, and other ways be flexible?

I just, I think I find it so crazy that we think that we we’re just definitely gonna do things exactly the way we do now, because that’s what everyone’s used to. I think that 

Joel Saxum: will come, that’s my opinion. That will come Rosemary. So like the, one of the reasons why you have that with the fuel prices is it’s so dang visible.

You drive around and there’s a big sign that says, you know, here’s how much the price is. To, to, to date. You don’t get that, like the energy prices as far as electricity going in your home. That doesn’t happen. Now when you talk about last week or two weeks ago, we talked about a you know, an app based system that you look at your phone and you can see how much energy being used, how much money you’re making, all that kind of stuff, as that becomes mm-hmm.

more commonplace. I think you will have, I mean, one of the biggest things in, in energy and, and my humble non-electrical engineering opinion is people just waste energy. I mean, its back to when you were a kid, I closed, close the refrigerator, what are you doing? Like, you know, during the lights off, like that kind of stuff.

But that, that is something that we don’t, as I know as an American society for sure, we don’t take into consideration that much. But if you had on your phone, like your phone was like, ding, hey, you’ve used $10 of energy already today. Oh man, I’m gonna turn these lights off. So, you know, if as that becomes more and more common, I think, You might have people actually conserving energy, you know, at the, you know, and instead of using it in, in, in waste is, is my 

Rosemary Barnes: thought.

Yeah, I think you’re definitely right that the first step is awareness. And you know, I mentioned that I worked with some you know, really innovative wind farm operators in Quebec. And I remember this one. I walked into their, their office and I had this huge screen up with the current price of electricity.

And it was like, I don’t know, it looked like a, a gambling screen or something. It showed how much money they were, they were making every, every minute, you know, ticked over and they and that really, Dr Oh, do I really need to go up and, you know, check the, you know, whatever, talk of the de-icing system bolts in today.

Do I need to do that today? When, you know, we’re making so much money? Maybe I’ll save a look at the forecast. Okay. It’s gonna be less windy later in the week, or it’s gonna be more sunny so the price of electricity will be lower. And the same with some of the innovative companies in Australia. I went into Neo’s um, operating room and had a look, and they’ve got like a thousand, a thousand screens in there with, with numbers.

And yeah, very prominently you can see exactly what the price of electricity is and what they’re earning. Maybe it’ll be the same in people’s homes. You know, you’ve got your thermostat and maybe the, you know, there’s a big number on the top of it that says how much electricity costs right now. I don’t think that we’ll be getting alerts on your phone that tells you to turn off your lights.

I think that you will have programmed that, you know, this is the minimum lighting level that you are happy with if you’re home. And, you know, some some other automated stuff like that. Yeah, I did, I was listening to some other, other podcast, a competitor, I can’t remember the name, so I can’t, I can’t mention them and, and draws away from this one.

I can’t remember the name. But they were interviewing somebody who has, you know, like a, a, a similar kind of thing to. The app that I was talking about in Australia that helps people manage their, you know, time of electricity use. And it was saying one of the most useful things that their app does is it.

It’s watching the state of charge of the battery and your electric car. And so if you are, if it knows you are at home and your car battery is low and that you haven’t plugged in, then it will send you a reminder that says, Hey, did you mean to not charge a car? Because, you know, like it’s, it’s about to be, it won’t have enough for you in the morning.

So there will be ways that they can add value to the customers. You know, draw them in with something that improves their lives. And then I think from there it’ll be a reminder of it says, you know, if you had agreed to be on our flexible plan, then you could have saved $20 last night because, you know, there was this event that you couldn’t participate in cuz you were asleep or stuff like that.

I don’t think it will be as intrusive as your thermostat being, you know, or your air conditioner being turned off or your, yeah, you go like, I’d like to turn it up to 72 on your phone every, every five minutes. Yeah. Yeah. Telling you, telling you what to, what you need to get up and do, or it wakes you up at two in the morning, put your laundry on now.

Like it’s not, it’s not gonna be like that. I’m thinking, well, it’ll be, it’ll be a bit more user friendly. I think when 

Joel Saxum: I woke up this morning, and I, this is what I’m thinking about. We have like the Nest thermostat where it’s, it’s really user friendly actually, the, the user interfaces. But I’m thinking like, you push the, you push the thing and then you turn it and it’s like, it’ll be 72 degrees in your house in 25 minutes.

And do, do, and I’m thinking like, if it said like, this will cost you $7 and 46 cents. Are you sure you wanna do that? Like, oh, seven bucks that might pay for lunch. Ah, seventies fine. like, yeah, 

Rosemary Barnes: it could do that. It could already do that. It can already forecast the electricity price or it could know your tariff or, you know.

Yeah. 

Allen Hall: But economies are based on energy. They just to, they just are. But 

Rosemary Barnes: they’re not based on wasting energy and we waste so much this, have you met America yet? Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be. Oh, I have, okay. I have met America. I have opinions about the way you use energy over there. No, 

Allen Hall: I, you can have opinions about it.

I’m just saying every, every, every country, every nation, every development that has happened has happened because of the availability of energy. And that could be in human form or it can be in nuclear oil, whatever. Pick your poison. But that’s how societies grow and that’s how we get there. You’re not gonna see a country willingly cut energy production or cut the amount of energy that’s delivered because that without something significantly happening.

Rosemary Barnes: What about energy efficiency? What about if you have a, you know, a huge cold store, cold store in your company and you get onto a wholesale pricing plan and now you know, you turn the freezer on in the middle of the day when you get paid to do it, cuz prices are negative and then it will, you know, maintain its temperature right through to the next time that happens.

Like, that company is making more money now by using energy in a way that helps, helps the grid. I, I just think it’s gonna be things like that. It’s not gonna be about not using any energy to do productive things. It’s about using it smarter. Much smarter. Yeah. Oh, 

Allen Hall: okay. I’m, I’m with you. I’m obviously, if there’s a financial advantage to, to use US energy, people are going to do that, or companies in particular are going to do that.

It just begets to the point of it becomes too much to manage. And you’re, you’re a new mom, right? And you know how time management is become super critical. Do you think you have time to check the status of your electric vehicle to make sure it’s charging all the time? Or what your thermostats set at?

There’s some things that that could done. Yeah. You sort of run outta, you run outta time of the day. Right? And I think when, when these projects always pop up and you see a lot of SaaS companies in the United States that are talking about these projects, and I think when is the time, if someone’s gonna do this, when the average citizen’s going to do that?

I, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think it’s gonna be more of engineering people, like everybody here of, we’re gonna design more efficient homes, we’re gonna design more efficient cars, we’re gonna design more efficient airplanes, which we’ve all done, by the way. We’ve done all those things. . So it.

Rosemary Barnes: But we find time to go to the, the petrol station and fill, fill your car up. So I think you can find time for, for some new things. And I think also the successful companies are gonna be the ones that don’t require their customers to make more time. Some people will be happy to trade off time for, for money.

Like, you know, the person that’s happy to sit in their car for an hour, to save a couple of dollars while filling up their, their tank. And some people are gonna be happy to hand over, you know, tell, tell an app what parameters they’re happy with in their home. You know, never go below this temperature.

Never go above it. Sure. I always need my dishwasher finished when I wake up in the morning. You know, stuff like that. And they’ll be happy for a smart, a smart app to take care of the rest. All right. All 

Allen Hall: right. So I’ll give you the Rosemary theory of relativity, right. Every time we bring up a topic like this, it’s like relative to what?

Right. Replacing lights in America and incandescent lights with LEDs. It’s probably one of the largest power changes that’s happened in America in the last 20 years, but it’s taken 20 years. Yeah. Oh no. It’s taken 20 years. It’s still think how much energy. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. But think about how much energy we are using less.

We’re using less energy now in lighting. All the street lines in America are going to l e D at the moment. Mm-hmm. . Those are huge numbers that we don’t talk about. Right. We talk about changing the thermostat all the time, but the real, the real numbers are in sort of these wider scale projects that we pay short shrift to all the time.

And it just makes me crazy to think, you know, people have worked their whole lives making those l e d lights. And what a huge power saving that is and how much power is in the United States in particular, it goes into lighting, how much energy reduction that is where we haven’t built power plants. We haven’t built that coal plant because we’ve just switched light bulbs.

That’s what I’m getting to. There are things that we can still do at that level, which are easier to do and probably have more impact than turning down our thermostat. We shouldn’t think about that. We should, but you know. Plenty of engineers working really hard to make life a little bit easier, and I think that’s one of the things we just miss.

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Allen Hall: France’s highest court has ruled that a man fired by his parish based consulting firm for allegedly. Failing to be fun or quote unquote fun. And if at work was wrongfully dismissed, so they actually fired an employee in France because he wasn’t fun . So in the holiday, in the holiday spirit, you know, it, it gets to where we’re all going to holiday parties, at least in America.

And I guess it sounds like Denmark has a really good blowout season in, in Christmas parties. I thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about. So the, the man referred to in court documents as Mr. T was fired from Cubic Partners in 2015 after refusing to take part in seminars and we can social events that his lawyers argued according to court documents included excessive alcoholism and promiscuity

So, so I, I don’t know what’s happening in France, but it just seems like the, that’s not really quote unquote fun is it? But is, isn’t it, isn’t it odd? I just, I just think it’s just a weird thing to have happen in France and in America. I could totally see it. There’s, there’s 330 million Americans. Stuff happens like this all the time.

Unfortunately, , but to not be fun, it doesn’t seem like a reason to get fired. Isn’t it 

Joel Saxum: Really hard. It’s weird, right? It’s really hard to fire someone in France anyways by their labor laws. That’s so true. This guy must have been really not fun for them to make that move. . I mean, he must have been like, I always call him a Debbie Downer.

He must have been like this, the Debbie Downer of Debbie Downers. Or something. Right. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well sympathize with Mr. T. I don’t, I don’t want anybody telling me when or how I have to have fun, you know, I’ll leave that. That’s a decision for me. And I, I will say though, that I really missed the Christmas parties in Denmark.

Yes. Which definitely there was a lot of alcohol, and they definitely have a reputation for promiscuity, but I never actually saw any evidence of that myself. So it might might be one of those urban myths. Yeah, I definitely miss that and I did find that fun, but I wouldn’t think, you know, you can’t pressure somebody to get drunk if they don’t drink alcohol or just don’t feel like it on that particular day.

I don’t think that that, that’s right. Definitely have been in situations through my career where I felt like, you know, to fit in culturally you had to do some non-work stuff that wasn’t really your preference. I, yeah, I, it is important to, you know, have a team building and have fun together to, you know, get to know your teammates and develop that relationship.

But I, like I said, I feel for this Mr. T for being not fun 

Joel Saxum: enough. I keep reading this, I’m reading this article and I keep thinking about the Wolf of Wall Street, if you guys have ever seen that movie. Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. Like, man, that’s too much fun. Yeah, exactly. That’s what I’m thinking here.

Like Mr. T maybe has a point here. Yes. 

Allen Hall: No, I, I think some moderation is probably good. I, I, the, they, the courts actually ruled that he was entitled to his freedom of expression. So not participating is his expression of where he, where he wants to be at that moment. And that was part of his fundamental freedom under labor, labor and human rights laws in France.

So I, so they, they, I guess, are they, I don’t know if he’s reemployed at this company he doesn’t like working at. Probably not. Is that what happens? 

Joel Saxum: He get paid out, I would say here, here 

Rosemary Barnes: at the, I hope he got paid out. I think that, I think they also mentioned one of the reasons for getting fired was the tone and facial expression he used in meetings or something.

Yes. And that just kind of triggered me from when I lived in America. People used to tell me to smile all the time, just random strangers. And I would be like, this is my face. Like I get to, is what I do with my own face. . Come on, come 

Allen Hall: on. What You must have been in California. That’s the only place that that would occur.

Stop. 

Rosemary Barnes: I was in California. I was in California. It happened constantly. It happens very occasionally in Australia, but almost never. And in Denmark, I just actively just enjoyed. Looking at everybody’s scowling in front of their computers every, every day. You know, this is, it’s work. It’s work. You know, I’m here, I’m working hard, you know, my resting face is not a smile , it looks like a frown, even if I’m not actually upset.

And I, I would feel pretty put out if my company told me, oh, your facial expr