Allen and Rosemary discuss the California offshore auction that finished below expectations, and discuss the latest news from researchers on whale habitats. MIT engineers pursue microwave drilling to the earth’s core for thermal energy sources, and a freak snow storm in NY creates a snow apocalypse with multiple upward lightning strikes to wind turbines. Then Allen discusses PPA’s and onshore wind economics with Intelstor’s Founder and CEO Philip Totaro.

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Uptime 143

Allen Hall: Hey, Rosemary. We, we left Joel out in the cold somewhere. He was supposed to be traveling from northern Wisconsin to Texas, but we can’t see enough to find him anywhere. I, I, my guess he may be back in the snow. So it’s just US two this week, which is super awesome because we really get to do a show, just the two of us anymore.

So what do you, what do you have on the list this week?

Rosemary Barnes:  Well, we’ve got the recent auctions for offshore wind in California. So it’s gonna be floating offshore wind, and then we have microwave drilling technique to make deeper holes for geothermal power.  

Allen Hall: Then we have some discussion about whales off the coast of Massachusetts and how wind turbines can affect the zooplankton.

And then we had a thunder, snow, thunder, snow apocalypse off of Lake Ontario recently, and researchers up there have instrumented that whole area and have recorded lightning strikes that happen to wind turbines. So there’s gonna be a lot of good information coming out of there. And then I have an interview interview with Phil Totaro of IntelStor.

When we talk about. PPAs of onshore wind and the operational risks evolved on some really low PPA prices that some of these operators are, are have in place. So it’s a really interesting episode. Stay tuned. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with Australian Renewables guru Rosemary Barnes.

Joel Saxon is out in the field doing some good work and will be back next week. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Rosemary. We just finished the California auction for all those offshore plots. There were actually five plots that were up for bid. They had about little over 40 different companies that were. We were able to bid. They went through a little process to get vetted. So there’s like 43 of them that were vetted to go, and they were off auctioning off about 370,000 acres sort of in central and Northern California.

The, the plot up north is really close to Oregon, actually, so it’s pretty far north and they think they’re gonna generate 4.6 gigawatts off these sites. So that’s a lot of power. It’s like a million and and a half homes. They’re gonna. Well based on predictions, I think they were thinking it was gonna go well over a billion dollars in bids, but it didn’t get there.

It went to 757 million, which is roughly $2,000 an acre. And the bite auction on the east coast was about 4 billion, and that turned out to be about $8,000 an acre. So the water’s. Coast of California over about a quarter of the price of the ones off the East coast, which I guess sort of makes sense just because it’s floating California versus fixed bottom New York.

So that was an interesting bidding process. Rosemary, it went on for a day and a half, almost two days before they final settled out. There were only about seven to eight initial bidders out of the 43, and then it whittled down to five at the end. So it, it didn’t, there weren’t a lot of bidder. And the, and the bidding rounds.

Joel and I were going back and forth on Slack about it. The bidding went like, you know, 16 million this round, 32 million next round. So it was making these sort of massive jumps and, and millions of dollars. Until they got to, they were roughly a hundred million, a little over a hundred million a plot.

So that’s, that’s a good bit of money. Does I, I, I don’t know what happens down in Australia. Do you, do you do as a similar thing down there, because I know Europe hates that bid for, for plots like this. 

Rosemary Barnes: We we’re not ready for that yet in Australia. And I don’t know how it’s gonna happen. Probably it, it hasn’t been decided how it’s gonna happen.

We’re in this weird kind of process where, you know, the offshore wind at Australia’s been pushed by companies you know, that have started, you know, trying to develop a, a project there. And so, you know, there’s individual companies and one in particular Star of the South, they. Done a ton of work to try and bring the government, you know, to the place they need to be, to be able to, you know, get permits to, you know, start a, a wind farm, but they don’t have permission to use that, that area.

So it would be pretty strange if after all this work that they have done assessing the resource and, you know Teaching the government what they need to do or set in place to be able to, you know, get their environmental and everything else assessments underway. It would be pretty funny if at the end of that they just went to an open auction and they lost.

That would be quite strange. So I would be a bit surprised if that’s how it happens here, but I guess there needs to be some sort of process.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s. I’m not sure the American process is the best process. It did did seem to take quite a while and it didn’t have a lot of activity. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I think when we all watched the one on the, the East Coast auction, it seemed like they paid too much.

And I think with everything that has been coming out about you know, we’ve been following advances in the wake persistence, you know, how far the, the wake of an upstream wind farm will affect the downstream one. I don’t know. I, I do tend to think that some of the winners of, of that, of those auctions might regret the amount that they paid.

So I think, yeah, so California was a quarter of the price. Like you say, it takes into account the fact that you’ve, you gotta put floating offshore wind there, which is a very new technology. And. No, and add to that, the fact that, you know, probably the East Coast one was overpaid, and I think that that explains the, the difference.

I bet if they did another one over in a similar area to. The ones around New York that you would see lower prices this time too. I mean, also the economic outlook is just a, a lot different now than it was a year or two ago. So that would also have an effect. 

Allen Hall: Oh yeah. A year ago. Well, the, the, the you know, some of the winners here the offshore California auction, it was R W e EOR in Venter Energy, and then there’s two kind of conglomerates here California North floating, which is.

I think Eedp, renewables and nji, I think were the two there. I’ll have to look that one back up again and everybody can just Google it. And the other one was California or so, sorry, central California Offshore Wind llc. So there are two LLCs involved, which just was interesting be Joel and I were going back and forth just to figure out who everybody was and where they were from.

There was not an American company in the bidding, weirdly enough. Banerjee was, is based in Chicago, but it’s owned by a Canadian company and I, but mostly owned by a Canadian company up in Quebec it sounded like. So there wasn’t a, a huge American investor there, which I, I guess makes sense because all the knowledge about offshore , it’s not an America, that’s for sure.

So it makes sense for companies that know what they’re doing to, to bid on these projects. And maybe that’s, it ended up the way that it did because the expert companies were the ones that were able to maybe secure contracts with OEMs on terms of making turbines. It there seems like your supply chain would be a really big driver here, whether you’re gonna bid or not.

If you could somehow talk to a ge, talk to avesta, talk to a Siemens ESSA and say, Hey, we’re gonna bid on this project. Are you in? I have a hard time thinking Siemens ESSA or GE is. sign up for 20 different companies to say, yeah, we’re in. I think they’re gonna have a subset. Same thing for cables, same thing for the floating pylons, whatever they’re gonna do.

don’t you think that’s probably part of the issue is how it limited the number of, of bidders just supply chain? Yeah, I 

Rosemary Barnes: think supply chain, but also just the, the risk. There’s only three, maybe four now floating offshore wind farms that exist in the world. And I think three quarters of those are Emos. So well, yeah, Kuala has a, a partial spike at least.

So, no surprise to see them on there and then everybody else yeah, they’re, they’ve got to learn through this project, so it’s hard to hard to pay a, a lot for the right to, you know, just try something out and see if it’s gonna work. Yeah. So o on the one hand, you know, there’s nothing like, Brand new being used in these.

You’ve got existing wind turbines, you’ve got a lot of knowledge of floating platforms from oil and gas and you know, the engineering involved is sure fairly straightforward. So whilst it’s never been done before, you would be pretty confident that you could, you know, foresee most of the problems that you’d have and you know, design around them.

But on the other hand, you know, you always attempt. You know, think through every problem that might happen and and make a good design first time, but it doesn’t work out that way. It is different enough that you know there’s gonna be surprises in. Yeah, maybe it’s not such a big issue to make a wind turbine that will, you know, stay upright.

But will it generate the power that’s expected? You know, just small differences and angle. If it’s, if it’s bobbing around, that could have a, a bigger than expected. Effect on the power production, but also on the life of the components, if the, the loads are very different to the way that they have been designed and operated in the past, these turbines.

So I think there is a fair amount of uncertainty there and, I, I guess people are trying to limit the , the size of their, their losses. It’s a huge, huge potential industry in the future. But how much advantage is there for being the. The early leader, I’m not sure, because mostly you should just be able to see what works for other people and copy it, because you’re not gonna be able to patent the use of a platform or a structure that was used for decades in offshore oil and gas.

You’re not gonna, just because you’re using it for a wind turbine, you won’t be able to patent that and nobody else can do it. So you can just take a look at at , all of Ecuadors offloading offshore wind farms and see, see what direction they’re going. And just be like, okay, well we don’t need to make the first three things that didn’t really work for ’em.

We’ll just go with the, the fourth one that that’s providing, you know, reliable base for, for the turbines. So, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see, see how it goes. It will be surely at least another decade before this kind of Technology is competing on its own except for in very specific places. And California is one of those places that has specific circumstances, you know, like they really, really want, they’re renewables.

And this resource the winds are higher in the afternoon in, that’s when people are using electricity. So, you know, it’s in contrast to solar, which peaks in the middle of the day. And it’s not very well aligned with when people are using it. So yes, solar is much, much, much, much, much cheaper than floating offshore wind.

But on the other hand, electricity prices are usually close to zero or even negative in places where there’s a lot of solar in the grid on a sunny day. So I think that you’ll get much higher value from the floating offshore wind farms. So, Remains to be seen, how profitable that will be overall.

Lots of pros, lots of cons. Very interesting. Yeah, 

Allen Hall: I think, yeah, it’s true. I, I think California hasn’t made it easy for the developers. There’s some filter, taro had hosted a couple of items on LinkedIn and I was watching, and he was discussing some unknowns about where the transmission cables are gonna hit shore.

That hasn’t been really well defined. and how it’s gonna integrate, integrate with the California grid, which it hasn’t been defined yet, and the utility operator in California is not making any motions to buy the energy yet. There’s a lot of unknowns there. Those can be very expensive. And we were just talking also before the show about the names of some of these companies that we’re bidding California North, floating in Central California, offshore wind.

They defined that what they were gonna bid on. in the name of the company. So when you saw that company bid, you know where they were gonna bid on the north part or the central part, of those, of those auctions. So it just seems weird, right? I mean, do you show your, show your hand like that at an auction?

Is that, is that the best way to do that? Cause it seems like a really bad. James Bond episode where, you know, James Bond always goes to an auction. He’s gonna buy a fache egg or something, and he’s gonna take it away from the villain. And that always goes sideways because he declares what he is gonna do while he walks into the room.

And it’s, so, it’s always been my tendency, like if I go into an auction, not, not to tell anybody what I’m bidding on. They seem to take the big, bold move to name their companies like James Bond does. When he walks into a room, he just says, I’m gonna bid on that and I’m gonna walk outta here with that. I guess it’s a move.

It works. Yeah. It’s excited 

Rosemary Barnes: off anybody else 

Allen Hall: the name wasn’t gonna bid for. Yeah. Yeah.

It’s just sort of a funny thing like, oh, the name is what they purchased. Well, I, I, I guess so. Yeah. . Sure, 

Rosemary Barnes: why not? I did think it was interesting that they haven’t Got the transmission in place that they need to connect to these wind farms, because that’s the difference with the, the projects that I’m hearing about in Australia.

Basically, the very first thing that they do is find a coal power plant, a huge coal power plant that’s going to retire soon. I mean, they’re all gonna retire soon. That’s near the coast Sure. Where the, is a good offshore wind resource nearby. And so that means that they don’t have to, don’t have to do much other than get, you know, like from the, to, from the, the beach to the, the power plant where there’s already really, really huge good big transmission in place.

So yeah. What a huge uncertainty for the people that have. put up millions of hundreds of millions of dollars. For a resource that they don’t know how Yes. If they don’t know whether they’re gonna have to pay for that transmission themselves or not. So I mean, that would massively affect the value.

Right. And yeah, and they don’t know who’s going to, if, if they’re gonna have to, you know, find customers or if that’s gonna be, you know, assisted by the government. So yeah, really unusual to not have those big details sorted before the auction, in my opinion. I guess everyone’s just really keen to get in 

Allen Hall: there.

Well, I, I guess it does change the price, right? That’s what happened. It changed the value of the, of the asset. Looks like it Significantly. 

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Allen Hall: Rosemary in. Hour of free time this week, and I literally had an hour of free time this week. It’s just, I don’t know why everything’s so crazy in December, but this December is nuts. Well, I didn’t have a baby. You had a baby. . I, I can’t really complain. My time is probably a little more free than yours at the moment.

But I was watching the, there’s a, a National Offshore Winds r and d conference that was, Northeastern University, which is in Boston. Hmm. And they had a bunch of researchers come in and, and explain some of the projects they’re working on. And one of them was talking about whales. And there’s a certain kind of whale that runs along the East coast, it’s called the right whale.

And the right whale was fished heavily in the 18 hundreds because it. or yields a lot of oil. So a lot of the oil burning light candle candles or, or or oil lamps that they had on the east coast were burning whale oil. Well, the right whale was named a right whale because when you killed it, it floated.

So you could get to the , you could get to the oil before it sunk. So they were heavily hunted. Heavily hunted, and there’s about 350 of these whales left and. Maybe I’m wrong here, but I think my animal knowledge goes into this. The bigger the animal, the longer the sort of, the gestation time to have new, have calves is.

So it takes a long time to rebuild that population base. Kinda like elephants, right? Versus rabbits. There’s, there’s your difference. So it takes a long time to build that population back up and they’ve been having like three to. Calves born a year, so it’s not really growing that fast. So they’re super concerned about these right whales and the right whales run up along the coastline and eat all the, the, the shrimp and things that are floating around in there.

Okay, so there’s concern now with offshore wind turbines because as we’ve been talking about more recently, the wakes off the wind. Turbines not only disturb the air, but they disturb the water. and there’s concern, and there’s been some research that when the water gets churned by these wakes, that it may change the animal life or the zoology in the water.

So the the people that are assigned to, to watch the fish and the mammals in the waters are starting to be concerned about this. And they’re, and they’re putting buffer zones in, in fact they’re talking about a 20 kilometer buffer. Off the coast of Massachusetts to the edge of the wind turbines and trying to keep that a, a, a whale zone almost.

And this is the first that I’ve heard of it. And, and I, I know there’s been concerns about whales and other sea life around that area, but this is the first time I had someone explain what the issue was. And I don’t do, we don’t know that much about what wind due to the water behind. , the wind turman yet, 

Rosemary Barnes: do we?

No, I, I, well, I haven’t, I don’t know . I’m not a marine biologist though, so . It is interesting and definitely, you know, it sounds plausible that that would be a, a problem and should be studied. I’m just always surprised why it’s always in the US where these issues get raised. When Europe has had, you know, offshore wind for so long and I know that their waters are more shallow.

They likely don’t have this specific whale there. They do have other, other whales and other marine life obviously, but Europe. Tend to have very strict environmental regulations. And I know that if, you know you wanna put in a, a wind farm in Europe, then you’re gonna need like a, you know, like a large dining table size of of documentation to go along with it.

So it just surprises me that no European ever thought to look at this problem, and I never, the articles, I don’t know, I, maybe it’s an American thing, but they never addressed that. Really obvious issue in my mind, like, has this been studied in Europe? They never say if it has or, or hasn’t. So I, I guess I could find that out for myself with a , a few minutes of research.

But I didn’t, I didn’t do it. I didn’t do that few minutes, so I, I don’t. . I don’t know if that’s been studied before, but I would assume that it could be studied pretty, pretty promptly. You know, within a few years. It’s gonna take a decade or two for offshore wind to really get up to full speed. So there’s time to do some good studies and, and find out to what extent this is a problem before moving ahead and then, I’m sure that we’ll be able to find solutions if it does turn out to be a big problem.

Y yeah, you, you make sure you, you map where the whales go and make some exclusion zones so that they’re undisturbed in some of their favorite places. I, I would assume again, I’m not, not a marine biologist, but Yeah. It just seems like the answer is to, to study it and see if it’s an issue and if it is, come up with a.

Yeah. Control so that we, we don’t end up making a, any species go extinct or struggle unnecessarily. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. And I, I was a little shocked by you too. It, it seems like the, the research is being done in Europe, in the North Sea mostly, and the researchers were over, I think in Germany, what that really kicked this thing off.

And the Americans are just taking that research and expanding upon it. It sounds. But it also evolved. The discussion evolved into installations of wind turbines in the water that they didn’t, they were concerned about the acoustics. Obviously, you driving these pilings into the ocean floor, that there’s whales in that general area, and they have track whales in that area.

They’re actually sensing the clicking or the noises that the whales make so they can get a general sense as to where the whales travel. that they were concerned that there are certain parts of the year where you probably didn’t wanna put in wind turbines in the water just because of the density of whales in that region.

You didn’t wanna upset them or change their habit. Very much. And it looked like the whales were active in the wintertime, that they, they go south in the summertime and that’s when the great white sharks head up our way. So or the whales are replaced by gigantic sharks that they’re just trying to keep that sort of flow of these large sea creatures going.

And not to, to alter that at all. I, I don’t know how you’re going to manage that, because I don’t think we know. About it, and may, maybe I’m wrong. It just seems like there’s just, it’s a question that’s been posed. They’re trying to create these buffer zones. They don’t know if the buffer zones are real or not.

Yet it, it’s a huge question. Mark and I, we go back to the California auction and there’s a lot of unknowns there. This is a huge unknown. There’s 350 of these whales around you. You don’t wanna be responsible for ending that population because you put some wind, wind turmans in the. Right. No, I I’m not Does this get answered before there’s, before you start putting wind TURs in?

I don’t, I don’t know if it 

does. 

Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s okay to put some wind turbines in before you’ve got a definitive answer and that will be part of the way that you study if it has an effect. It’ll be really hard to, to know for sure before you put anything in there. But I think you know, what you’ve gotta do is set up some research.

Asap. And you know, so California’s got an extra 757 million in their pocket compared to a couple of days ago. So you know, I bet that that could buy quite, quite a lot of whale research. Yeah. And then start small and make sure that you’re, you’re, you know, make it a condition of the project development that they, they have to include some monitoring activities and, you know, Of course they’re gonna, they’re gonna start out small.

It’s tough anyway. No one’s gonna put in a whole gigawatt wind farm when they have never made it a floating offshore wind farm before. Or, you know, even for a fixed bottom, ev every developer’s gonna start out small. There’s also some wind farms. Yeah. Offshore wind farms already in the world, lots in Europe.

You could monitor answer a lot of questions from monitoring there. You could at least, you know find out the extent of that. Of, you know, how, how deep water gets turned up and how much, and you know, what the effect is on yeah, if there’s more or less life in the, in the water than in an area without a wind farm.

I think that there’s a lot that they can do, and I bet that the money to answer that would take, to answer these questions is small compared to the, the size of the industry. I just think, yes, it’s good that this question has been raised and we should answer it. , I’m really surprised if the answer turns out to be something that is incompatible with you know, developing offshore wind.

I, I think it will probably help us to figure out how it should be done and where they should be located and yeah, how many exclusions zones should be set up. And yeah, I think that they should, should definitely do that. Definitely wouldn’t wanna see , any any whale or go extinct because of, because of offshore wind.

Allen Hall: Right. And, and I didn’t realize at the time that how much research had actually gone into the whales and to the the zoo planking that’s running around off the, off the coast of Massachusetts and New York. So I started digging around a little bit deeper to see if other animal studies have been done onshore.

Mm-hmm. . And it turns out there’s one real close to us here in Massachusetts, actually just a couple of miles away. Up in Vermont so right on the border and there’s, there was a, a series of wind turbines installed up there five-ish years ago, six-ish years ago. And they have been doing a study on black bears up there of does the wind turbines change the behavior of black bears as the kind of TRAs to the woods over there.

And, and they’ve been doing that study for almost 10 years, a little over 10 years. And they’re just gonna be able to publish some results in 2020. So I started noodling that a minute. Like, wait a minute. Okay. So we have onshore creatures that we see in the neighborhoods all the time, and we can see them wandering through the woods all the time.

Those are pretty easy to track. Bears aren’t moving very far. Typically, they tag them in the wintertime when they’re sleeping. They’re poor bears. They wake ’em up and tag them, put a little collar on him, look like a bow tie sort of thing. And then they wander around and they, and they, they beep and they, they find out where they.

But whales are a lot harder to track. , 

Rosemary Barnes: you need a big, a really big cutoff collar 

Allen Hall: on a whale, I don’t think . Right. And, and it just is a lot more expensive, right? Because whales travel thousands of miles where a bears probably in the hundreds of miles. So it’s just to, seemed like a much bigger task to go.

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Allen Hall: Rosemary, you know, if you’ve watched enough James Bond movies, you know that drilling a hole to the sin of the earth is typically left up to the villains that are trying to hold humanity hostage for a billion dollars. But evidently in m I t they’ve thought this is a good idea because there’s a company called Qua Energy that’s looking to do the same thing.

So they back at m i t this is a couple years ago, they were playing around with millimeter wave radar to determine if they could drill with a, with a radar. It turns out you can. Now, they, they drilled, initially drilled a two inch deep hole, two inches wide in a piece of bustle. They’re, they’re, they’re

They’re using millimeter wave energy to bore into the earth, and they’ve done it, the laboratory. So they. Do it. They haven’t done anything massive scale yet, but they’re proposing to do this. So the goal is that if they could drill deep into the earth’s core , God, it’s like an Austin Powers episode into the liquid magma of the Earth’s core.

They could get the heat out and there’s a lot of heat in the center of the earth. So they could basically use, make crate a thermal generator. This is essentially what they’re talking about. Oh, look, the question comes in like, One, they have barely even started to, they haven’t dug any serious hole, and they don’t really have an ability to create a huge millimeter wave energy system to do it.

And the furthest that anybody has ever mechanically drilled down into the earth is about seven miles. And of course that happened in Russia. Why wouldn’t it happen there? So does this, Rosemary, does it make sense to go after this? It seems like there, this Quas energy, which is based outside Boston, is raising money.

They seem to be active in a lot of fronts. Does is this technology hold a future or is it just too damn dangerous? Cause I’m, I’m kind of in the two damn dangerous camp at the minute. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, maybe. And I mean, what have they managed 10 centimeters so far? So I don’t think that like next year or the year after, we’re gonna be seeing 50 kilometer deep , yeah, drilling.

With this technology, I, I assume that it will be much longer than that and I, I hope that it will be so that you can figure out what’s going on. Cause I know that some other forms of drilling for geothermal have been definitely linked to earthquakes that have caused a lot of damage. So, you know, it is high stakes.

But on the other hand, I mean, geothermal is, it’s really tempting prospect because it is you. It is very similar to nuclear in the way, you know, the kind of electricity that you get out of it. It’s just, it’s like really, really, really constant. and no emissions. And in the case of geothermal, you don’t have any toxic waste or any, you know, problem with people not wanting to live nearby unless, right, of course they’re worried about earthquakes, in which case you probably get the same thing

And I know that a lot of, a lot of countries that really struggle to find enough renewable resources, To, you know, have a zero emissions economy in the future. They do have good geothermal resources like Japan Springs to mind. I’ve been in the onsens there. They’ve, you know, there’s plenty of Right, sure.

Plenty of natural geothermal activity there. So you wouldn’t even need this drilling technique in Japan because it’s you know, there’s, there’s heat quite close to the surface there. Active volcanoes, . Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I think Indonesia is another one that you know, it’s difficult for them to just get enough wind and solar and a lot of Asia has that problem is just too densely populated to be able to get all the, the wind and solar enough wind and solar to power the whole country.

Yeah, so it makes, it makes sense. I mean, I, I have been interested for a while in why Japan has been, you know, so pro pro hydrogen why not al alternatives and to media is the obvious one for Japan because, you know, they’ve got, They’ve got the resource there. And I’ve heard that the reason why Japan isn’t keen on geothermal is because the good resources are in the national in their national parks and they’re just not interested in messing it up.

And if you have a look at Iceland for example, that. That has developed a lot of geothermal. I think they get 25% of their electricity is from geothermal energy and probably even more of their total energy use because they can use it for heating as well. It, it’s changed the landscape, you know, it’s not, it’s not impact free.

It, it sounds like it should be because it’s all underground. Right. But yeah, you, you have to, right. Yeah. It’s a bit like. Well, a gas exploration, you know, you have to drill and find where’s a good place and you know, so you do some, some test drills and then it won’t come up exactly where you want to put your power plant.

And so, you know, there’s pipes and stuff and just Yeah, it is, it is disruptive. Right. And you wouldn’t do it in the, in the middle of a, you know, treasured national park. So. . Yeah. It’s one of those things where it, it makes so much sense on the face of it, but when you actually consider, like geothermal in general makes a lot of sense, but if you start talking about any specific geothermal project, then it makes less sense.

So I do think we, we should be investigating options and new technologies, and especially ones that can, you know, reduce the risk of causing earthquakes or eliminate it. and yeah, let’s see how these guys go. I hope that they move slowly and with a lot of oversight because it does seem risky and in a James Bond kind of way,

Yeah. Well if 

Allen Hall: you go to the website and you look at the . Yeah, exactly. If you go, if you go to the website and look at the companies that are associated with it and you go, Hmm, yeah. Those are some big names. And yes, it gets, sort of gets Jane’s bondy really quickly. Yeah. Like what? Like what are they all up to?

It, it does, it just seems like one of those things that can go wrong. You know, it, it, it, it has that feeling of if they were able to do it and somebody wanted to use that technology for harm, they really could. Not to say you couldn’t do other things, but that one seems like a super powerful piece of technology.

and yeah, you would, you would think you’d be careful about it. Even if say they could do it. Would we ever hear about it if they actually did it a couple of weeks ago, Rosemary, just before Thanksgiving, so this is like middle of November I was out in sort of western New York state looking at a wind turbine that had been damaged by lightning.

And I stop by and I knew that In State University of New York, Oswego, so they call it SUNY Oswego, had done some research about lightning strikes in that area. And the area I’m talking about, it’s right on the edge of Lake Ontario, so anybody in Canada and sort of eastern part of the United States knows where that is.

It’s sort of north and a little bit east of Buffalo. So they have lightning strikes that come off in the, in the snowstorms off of Lake Ontario. On the shore, and they had been tracking them. And the Suno Swego researcher Scott Steiger, who had an opportunity to sit down with for an hour or so when I was out there, had been researching snow coming off Lake Ontario and the lightning strikes that were happening from that, those snowstorms.

So the, the snow gets up in there, starts spinning around, creates this friction, creates that electricity, static electricity turns into lightning. and they had tracked it long enough that there, there that a wind farm had been installed during their research period. So they knew where lightning strikes occurred, pre wind turbines and post wind turbines.

And it turns out, once the wind turbines were installed, there were a lot of lightning strikes on the wind turbines, . And they, at the time, they didn’t really think much about it, but it turns out that these storms are triggering lightning strikes off the wind turbines and. , when I was out a couple weeks ago, they had a huge snowstorm.

In fact, I just missed it. Thank goodness I just missed it. Got outta there just in time. They had about five feet of snow and a over a, a basically a two day period, and they had a whole bunch of lightning strikes to wind turbines right off the coast of Lake Ontario. Again. Now this time though SUNO Swego and Scott Steiger already because they had a a, a Doppler.

and a lightning mapping array, which is a sort of a way of actually watching discharges in, in the sky and then making these little computer images of them. It’s pretty cool. So they had all the technology and they had applied for a grant to go do that from the National Science Foundation. So they had all the technology set up just before that storm came in.

So they captured probably one of the best snowstorm slash lightning event. Up in that region and they had it fully instrumented. So they have a ton of data coming. Now what we’re seeing is the, what we call upper lightning strikes happen. What we think is upper lightning strikes, which seem to be the, the big thing.

So when rosemary’s up. designing deicing system in blades. Lightning strikes are a big deal, and upper lightning strikes as the blades have got longer, become more of a big deal because some of the physics, the way lightning is working when you have lightning strikes in random places, they tend to trigger.

Lightning in the clouds if and I in Australia. Do you have that kind of thing happen in the summertime, Rosemary, where you have these, the, you see these, these lightning events that that happen in the clouds only. So you see this kind of discharge roll through miles or miles of clouds. Is that something you have down there too?

Rosemary Barnes: Not that I know of, but I don’t pay as close attention to lightning as you do probably. I, I mean, I pay, I pay some attention. And I’m definitely , definitely well interested that yeah. I, I couldn’t say for sure that we don’t have that . So, 

Allen Hall: researchers, we had Tom Warner on the podcast not too long ago, and Tom had been doing a lot of research into this area.

And what seems to be the little trigger for all these wind turbines creating lightning strikes is there’s a random lightning strike from the cloud to the ground. Now there’s a discharge in the cloud. So you see this, this charge connect up via this lightning discharge. Leader in the cloud. When that leader happens and that discharge happens in the clouds, all the wind turbines sitting underneath of it see that charge all of a sudden and they reach out.

So you get these, what they call upward lightning strikes. You see these leaders, lightning leaders, which are just basically, they’re just charge and there’s a a length of charge that reach up into the sky. and they have lightning strikes on wind turbines. In fact, most of the lightning strikes you’re seeing on these taller wind turbines are upper lightning strikes.

Somewhere 80, 90% in some cases are these upper lightning strikes. So the question comes about, we don’t know a lot about them, and, and we, Tom Warner’s research group, and Marcel Zaba down in Brazil was involved in a lot. . They did a lot of research roughly 10 years ago, and it was just before everything kind of got kicked off.

And, and wind TURs weren’t that popular in the United States. There were some, but not like they’re now and they aren’t the size they are now. Rosemary, you were involved in a lot of lightning testing while working at LM because of the icing. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yes. You triggering painful memories. , see? Did you

Allen Hall: Yeah. Flashbacks. Yeah. Yeah. . So you spent a, did you, you spent a good bit of time

Rosemary Barnes: in the lightning. No, I didn’t. I didn’t get to, I was I was occupied in the, in the factory putting out other fires. So to speak, . So I didn’t, I didn’t get to, I, I, I tried, when I was in Boston, I was trying to go to your old your old Lightning lab there in Massachusetts, but I didn’t manage that either, so I, oh, lightning Technologies.

Yeah. I still haven’t managed to get into a Lightning lab. But I will keep trying until, until I get in there and yeah, I wanna see it and I wanna make a, a video on it as,

Allen Hall: Yeah. Well, we have to get you to a, a lightning lab and, and one of the things that we’re trying to understand right now, and this is why I think between the two of us, you can probably figure out a lot of this you being a blade designer and me being a crazy lightning person, the, there’s a lot of lightning physics that we’re just learning about or be becoming more knowledgeable about because we’ve never had a rotating tall object like a wind turbine on the earth like this at these.

Yeah, and we haven’t been able to document what’s happening lightning wise until recently. . 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So that was so frustrating trying to, you know, manage the design of a new system that had a strong implications for the lightning protection system. Just the fact that people don’t really know, so you can design something that you.

Think will be good, but if it’s really new and hasn’t been done before, you don’t actually know. And yeah, so the lightning test labs are, are great, but they can’t a hundred percent replicate what’s going out there in the field. I mean, you haven’t got a full size blade rotating. Yeah, and of course you, you know, you do it once or or twice.

You don’t get the e every kind of lightning and every possible attachment point that you might get in reality. But I wanted to ask you something about these this recent event where the turbines were instrumented. Does that mean that they, they definitively showed that it’s definitely an upward strike from the turbine?

So the turbine is definitely causing the lightning strikes, not just, it’s not just that, oh, coincidentally there was lightning in the area, even if it seemed statistically unlikely that it would so happen so often happen on the wind turbines. They, they’re actually. Further than statistics and just actually showing cause and effect.

Yes. Right. So that’s, that’s very interesting because yeah. Well, Scott Scott’s yeah. Be before I got involved with wind turbines and yeah, and lightning for that, I, I had no idea that structure can cause lightning. I, and I always wondered, you know, cause they always say, you know, the, the tallest. The tallest structure in the area is the one that’s gonna get struck by lightning.

And I just always wondered, how does a lightning know that , that there is a tall structure down there cuz the lightning starts in a cloud. That’s what, you know, that’s what you understand when you’re, you know, learning about it in school. But actually it’s the upward lightning that’s causing the problems.

And yeah, I guess awakening the, you know, it’s causing. Less resistance in the, the air upwards. So, and that’s why you get the, the strike hitting the, the tall things. Yeah. You’re 

Allen Hall: getting right. , the downward lightning strikes at which you mostly see. If you’re wandering around and there’s a storm out and you mostly see downward lightning strikes, that’s what you see.

And those are random events because I think you think about this, you’re thinking about this correctly. If the lightning originates from the cloud, it kind of wanders around the sky to, it finds a place to attach. If it sees a tall building, it may jump over there, but it’s, there’s still a probability that you, the person.

Some distance away from the tall building are getting struck. It’s, it’s sort of a random event. It, it’s gonna find a tall object, but not necessarily. You see it all the time. If you look at, down at, in Cape Canaveral where they’ve launched rockets, you see lighting strikes that are near the rocket, that’s sitting on the, on the pad out there.

It just doesn’t hit it well, sometimes it does though, you know, and, and so it’s the probability with upper lightning strike, that probability kind of goes away because the lightning event starts from the wind turbine or the rocket or the tall. , and it’s just the way the physics are with those particular kind of storms.

What we saw with this recent snowstorm off of Lake Ontario, and can I say thank God for Twitter, because , the, the, the researchers at Vasala who do all the lightning detection network in, in the states put up a little image of the lightning strikes that happened on the coastline. There was a series. a dozen wind turbines right along the coastline.

And they were showing that those lightning strikes happen where those turbines were. Mm. During that snowstorm. Mm-hmm. Yes. So they were able to detect upper lightning and track it. So it’s, it, there is gonna be a ton of research. I’m sure Scott and his crew, right, Suning Oswego are probably sort, thumbing through all that data.

They’re gonna have a ton of data. So I can’t wait for the research to come out. He told me it’s gonna take about six months before they can start releasing things. So maybe the. Maybe there’s some warehouse, some data. Cool. That would be cool because we need to know more about how lightning is attaching to wind turbines.

Yes. Particularly in the States. Cause we’re gonna put a lot of

Rosemary Barnes: wind TURs up here. Yeah. And it’s such a big problem. I mean, everywhere I see it a lot in Australia. Just, you know, a lot of failures from lightning because blade designs have changed a lot and. The science of, of lightning strikes is not, not kept pace with the, the rate of change of technology development.

And people are flying a little bit, a little bit blind, right. You know, designing these systems that seem like they should be doing the job, but you just see a lot of failures and. You’ll always end up in fights between, you know, insurance companies and and asset owners and also manufacturers. You, you, you know, you, there’s always a big fight to see who the liability rests with, so it would be good to just get, get that better under control and just, you know, have it be a reliable thing that that works every time, like most other parts of a winter.

Well, the 

Allen Hall: most difficult job in a, in a war turbine factory in the design side is deicing systems . I think just because the lightning thing isn’t well known, and especially when you were there. 20 years ago. I don’t know how you’re there. You went there 

Rosemary Barnes: that long. That was a university still 20 years ago at 

Allen Hall: this point, Rosemary, you’re like an old hand at, at Blade design, but you know how difficult that can be because anytime you wanna put something conducting the blade, everybody screams foul and says, oh, the lightning’s gonna take it out.

And it probably will. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. They, they say you, you may not put anything conductive in the blade. That’s the normal, the normal way that that’s done. Yes. Because you don’t know what’s gonna happen and. You won’t know until you’ve got, you know, hundreds of them out there. And , you’ve got enough, enough you know, events that you can do some statistics on it.

It’s it’s very challenging and it’s not like other systems, you know, you could, the rest of the, it, it’s one of the most important parts of the, the product that I was designing. But, you know, the, the. Main part, the de-icing part, the part that heats the blade up. You put that out there and then you test it.

And, you know, a few times I was unlucky where the, the test year might have been like really warm, so there weren’t many good icing events, but at least you can, you know, turn it on and see if it gets warm and you’re gonna get something. But that turbo is highly unlikely to get struck by lightning. In that year, and certainly even if it did get struck by lightning once, that wouldn’t be enough to you, you know, tell you if this was was a problem or not.

Cause it, you know, you dunno where it’s gonna attach and so you put you, yep. You have to put them out there before you really know if you’ve got a good protection system in place. And that’s just a real challenge that you might have hundreds, thousands of blades out there before you start to get enough data to, you know, realize, oh, this doesn’t behave the way that we expected.

And it doesn’t matter how many, you know, times you test in a lab or you know, how carefully you follow the the standards or design standards when you’re making it. It’s just lightning is, yeah. The technology has. moved, moved far away from the, the science of, of lightning and so yeah, it’s just right.

Allen Hall: Challenging. Yeah, it has. You’re absolutely right. You’re, you. It’s one of the most challenging aspects in blade design today and the physics that we didn’t know 20 years ago, and we’re starting to apply them to wind turbines don’t really apply as well as we thought that. and there’s a lot about aerodynamics, there’s a lot about the way lightning is occurring.

There’s a lot about the lightning protection systems that don’t play well together. Yeah. And we’re working really hard to fix that because Rosemary, you’re right. If we had to put. A thousand blades out in service to figure out it doesn’t work. It’s really too late. 

Rosemary Barnes: But that’s where we’re at now. I mean, there’s heaps of , everyone in the industry knows that there are certain blades or certain manufacturers that are seeing way more failures than you should expect with their lightning protection system.

And you know from manufacturers that in the past they had very reliable systems in place. So it’s not just that they, you know, dunno what they’re doing or they don’t care. That, you know, things are, things are different now with these new types of blade structures, with carbon fiber and with really long blades and yeah, it’s it keeps, keeps people like us busy though, doesn’t it?

Allen Hall: are, they’re moving at 200 miles an hour. Oh yeah. It keeps us super busy . 

Rosemary Barnes: It really does. Yeah. Cereal defects are my, my, my favorite. . Send all your cereal 

Allen Hall: lightning defects to Kara of Rosemary. Yeah. . Exactly. Carlo, Australia. You just, that’s all you need. You put on an envelope, it, it’ll get to her, so don’t worry.

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Allen Hall: We have Phil Totaro back from Intel store. Check him out@intelstore.com and we’re gonna be talking about PPAs and how products are designed to fit those PPAs.

Phil, would you like to just describe some of the data you’ve onur? . Sure, 

Philip Totaro: thanks Alan. What’s interesting is we’ve been going through a cataloging process based on recently published data from FERC and Berkeley National Labs in the United States. And they, they published a list of power purchase contracts, about 525 of ’em for utility scale wind project.

There’s about 1300 wind farms in the US so this doesn’t cover all of ’em. And obviously we know that there’s some corporate power off take mixed in there these days. But the one thing that we noticed just by kind of visual inspection of the trend is that PPAs have been getting cheaper and in some cases they’ve been getting so cheap that they’re below not just $20 a megawatt hour.

Some of ’em have been below $10 a megawatt hour. If you can. Wow. So that kind of begs a question. You know, considering the fact that, you know, based on previous research we’ve done and published about kind of asset lifespan and the fact that in the United States you’ve got like about a 10 year life cycle for a wind turbine before it, it, you know, falls off in performance.

Some of these projects that have a PPA below. $20 a megawatt hour are not gonna see a net positive return on capital on the project during the 20 year, the typical 20 year lifespan of a conventional project. Some projects are even seeing a 25 year PPA get executed, a 30 year p p a get executed. And for some of these projects that are, you know, like 10, 11, $12 a megawatt hour.

we did the math and you, you literally have to have a 50 year asset life and you literally would have to repower your project three or four times during that asset life to requalify for the ptc in order to have that project turn a profit. During, now you, that’s also making the assumption that you’re gonna stay at a, at a 10 or $11 ppa, which is probably not gonna be the case.

But it, it, that, that brings up a whole lot of questions about the way assets are designed, implemented, and operated. 

Allen Hall: Sure if, if you’re operating at that low of ppa, and then hopefully you’re getting production tax credits on top of that because it seems like your margins are really slim. I’ll give you the numbers from Massachusetts recently.

Offshore wind w with Commonwealth Wind had a PPA at about $75 a megawatt hour, so anything. 10 seems incredibly low. Is that driven at all by the co-op nature of some of these energy systems? Like in, I know Nebraska’s that way. I think Oklahoma can be that way. Is it, is it a co-op situation or is it just independent power producers that are trying to feed the grid and just have a different model for generating revenue?

Yeah, 

Philip Totaro: there’s, there’s a couple of things. So you, you brought up a great point. The co-ops have been signing some of the, you know, on, on the cheaper side, not necessarily down at the like 10, 10 or $11 level. However the other, the other situation that the industry’s facing right now is you see a huge.

Queue of interconnection requests at all the regional ISOs or pretty much all the regional ISOs in the United States? Yeah, so what some independent power producers for Wind Energy are doing is they’re getting a power purchase contract executed with what’s called a community choice aggregator or some kind of power marketing company that’s basically gonna agree to buy the power and then resell it to consumers.

Set a modest markup off of whatever the p. So there’s a couple of projects and I’ll just give you some numbers. Skeleton Creek in Oklahoma, which I believe is a next era project. It’s a 250 megawatt project, $9 94 cent, p p a crossing trails in Colorado, E D P R project for 104 megawatts, $9 62 cents, p p a, and then the Mojave County Wind Farm in Arizona.

Just under 300 megawatts. I forget who owns that one, but it’s $8 64, excuse me, $8 64 cents. $8 and 64 cents is absolutely dirt cheap. You’re talking about getting into a price range now of hydropower where they’ve got, you know, a a, they might sign a 30 year PPA at $5 or $6 a megawatt hour, but they’ve got a 70 year asset life and they know that they’re gonna have to refurbish some of the components during that time.

But if you’ve got, you know, imagine that you did have an $8 64 cent a megawatt hour PPA for wind energy. You are necessarily, again, even with the ptc, you’re only getting that benefit for the first 10 years. Of course, what the In Inflation Reduction Act does now is it gives you the opportunity to.

You know, replenish or repower or at least re blade re a sell in your project after 10 years and requalify for brand new ptc. But in this case, with PPAs being so cheap, you’re not just doing a a 40 year design life or a 50 year design life out of. Necessity because of the, the improvements in the, the reliability of the product, you’re doing it because you’re never gonna see a net positive return on capital if you don’t have an asset life that long.

And if you don’t repower your project. three, you know, 2, 3, 4 times during its 

Allen Hall: asset life. Right. Phil, this has been great to, to touch base on this. I, and I know we’re gonna have you back because there’s just so many moving pieces to the financial market and win energy. So, Phil, thanks for, thanks for coming back.

Everybody. Check out Phil Totaro and entel store I N T E L S T O r.com and where you’ll learn about wind energy and where it’s. Thanks Ellen. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. We missed you, Joel, come back. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube Channel Engineering with Rosie.

And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Miss you, Joel.