BOEM Offshore Lease Cancelled, Gulf Offshore Technology Methods

BOEM has cancelled its Gulf of Mexico offshore wind lease auction due to lack of interest. We explore why companies are hesitant to put turbines in the gulf, examining challenges and opportunities for wind projects in Texas and Louisiana from both financial and technical perspectives. Phil and Rosemary discuss downwind turbine designs for hurricane-prone areas and the complex economics of wind energy projects in the region. Our Wind Farm of the Week is the farm built for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea, showcasing the potential of wind energy on a global stage.

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Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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Allen Hall: Have you seen the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile up close, Joel? Have you been around that thing?

Joel Saxum: I have, I’ve actually sat in it and I think I know where this story is going.

Allen Hall: I been up close to it and I don’t remember where it must have been an automobile museum and to the peanut mobile Which is another engineering marvel not seen that I saw them both driving down a highway one day I thought man either I’m really tired Strange vehicles on the road today But the wiener mobile flipped over outside of Chicago, did you see that It looked like a, did it look like somebody fell asleep and hit one of those concrete barriers that you can always find in Chicago?

Joel Saxum: My thought was, I was actually joking with a friend about it, is cause I’m from Wisconsin, so there’s this rivalry between Chicago and the people in Wisconsin. And it was brats versus the all, the all beef hot dogs in Chicago that they make the Chicago dogs. And they’re saying that they wanted to keep the Wienermobile in Chicago so much that they, someone actually sabotaged it. I don’t know, that’s probably not what happened, of course, but that was the joke.

Allen Hall: Is there a Bratmobile?

Joel Saxum: There’s not. I will tell you this, if you’d like to see some great American entertainment, tune into a Milwaukee Brewers game and watch the Sausage Race. And you will see hot dogs and brats, polishes.

Italian sausage. That’s the fourth one. Are these the four

food groups up in Wisconsin? Yes,

yes. Yes they are. Number five is cheese curds and number six is beer.

That rounds it out nicely. So the Wienermobile needs a little TLC based on the photos I’ve seen and they’re gonna have to put that thing back together.

That’s a hallmark of America, right? There’s things to be proud of. That’s one of them, man on the moon, Wienermobile.

I’m Allen Hall, and I’ll be joined by the rest of the Uptime host after these news headlines. In our first story, German wind turbine manufacturer Nordex is reporting a significant turnaround in its financial performance. For the first half of 2024, the company saw a dramatically reduced net loss of 12.6 million euros, a substantial improvement from the 298 million Euro loss reported in the same period last year.

This positive trend is further underscored by a 24.7% increase in sales reaching 3.43 billion euros. In light of these encouraging results, Nordics has revived its 2024 guidance upward now projecting an EBITDA margin between three and 4%. Amid these industry dynamics, the United Kingdom is making bold moves to accelerate its wind energy sector.

 The British government has unveiled ambitious plans to support an additional 20 to 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. Central to this initiative is the creation of a new government owned energy company, aptly named Great British Energy.

Joel Saxum: This new entity will spearhead a public private partnership aimed at attracting up to 60 billion pounds in private investment. Completing these policy initiatives, the UK is also investing in critical infrastructure. Construction is underway for what will become the world’s largest monopile factory in Teesworths.

The 90 acre wind monopile factory represents a significant boost to the local economy with plans to create over 2, 000 jobs. This includes 1, 500 positions during the construction phase and 750 operational roles once the facility is fully functional in 2026.

Across the Irish Sea, Ireland is also recognizing the immense potential of offshore wind energy. A recent report has projected that if properly developed, Offshore wind could contribute a staggering 69 billion euros to Ireland’s economy by 2050. To fully capitalize on this opportunity, experts stress the need for strategic investments in port infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities.

In North America, an intriguing development is unfolding in St. John, New Brunswick, up in Canada. The virtual wind farm is making headlines by selling electricity to St. John Energy at less than half the price charged by the provincial utility. New Brunswick Power. This remarkable price difference has enabled St.

John Energy to achieve record profits and implement more modest rate increases for its customers. The success of this project could serve as a model for other municipalities looking to reduce energy costs and increase renewable energy adoption. And despite these positive developments, the wind industry continues to grapple with the challenge of intermittency.

Recent data from the United States highlights this issue showing that wind generation plummeted by 78 percent in July during a high demand. In response, power producers significantly increased their reliance on natural gas generation.

And in a groundbreaking development, energy giants Total Energies and RWE have joined forces to implement the innovative Oranje wind project in the Netherlands. The 795 megawatt offshore wind farm located 53 kilometers From the Dutch coast is set to become the country’s first system integration project in the wind sector.

What sets Oranje Wind apart is its comprehensive approach to energy system integration. The project aims to implement a range of flexible demand solutions including electrolyzers for green hydrogen production, smart chargers for electric vehicles, e boilers for heating, and even battery storage systems.

Additionally, Aranjawin will serve as a testbed for cutting edge offshore technologies, including floating solar farms and advanced energy storage solutions like seabed battery systems. Construction 2026, with full commissioning expected in early 2028. Once operational, Orange Wind will generate enough green electricity to power over 1 million Dutch households annually.

And that’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, Renewable Energy Expert and Founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barn. CEO and Founder of IntelStor Phil Totaro. And the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum. Mark your calendars for AMI’s Winter in Blades Conference happening October 2nd and 3rd in historic Boston, Massachusetts.

This two day event, which is similar to the well established edition in Europe, will bring together the whole blade value chain to examine market outlook, innovations in blade materials, design, manufacturing, testing, and lifecycle management. With a special focus on the North America market. Gain insights from experts from Vestas, Nordex, TPI, and DNV.

Along with scientists and engineers from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Plan your trip to Boston this fall by visiting the link in the show notes or just Google 2024 Blades Boston.

Allen Hall: Down in the Gulf of Mexico, Boehm has canceled a planned offshore wind lease for about 400, 000 acres of land. of Louisiana and Texas due to, of all things, lack of commercial interest. Only one company, RWE Offshore showed interest in the latest lease sale notice. And this contrasts with other auctions that have happened, particularly along the East Coast.

But despite the cancellation, BOEM received an unsolicited lease request from Hecate Energy Gulf Wind LLC for areas off the southeastern part of Texas. Okay. I bring this up because Joel and I were, our producer were just down in New Orleans right where this activity is planned to take place. And it does seem like if all the places in the United States you could put some decent wind in relatively inexpensively.

It is Texas and Louisiana because the infrastructure is there.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. We went and visited Gulf wind technologies this week and their facility is on, is in another facility, right? It’s an active port. The port is for the facility, the one we were on mile and a half long, it used to have over 26, 000 employees working at it every day.

They used to build ships here. It’s a deep water access, deep water port. We drove around in a truck key side up against the coffer dams. The size and scope of this thing is crazy, but they’re there and they have to this specific port we were at, or not, I wouldn’t call it a port, but Pacific facility we were at, they have brought in the cells.

They brought in over a hundred blades last year. When say the port of Houston didn’t have the capacity to bring these boats in and they have all the cranes, they have all the working stuff. Along that Gulf coast. All of the infrastructure that is needed for offshore wind is there. The people are there, the vessels are there, the support is there, and the people, and the local communities want the jobs.

So they’re all about it as well, right? So when we were sitting there talking with a lot of the Gulf wind people, it was like, they’ve been working on a holistic view under contract for a while about how to make the wind. Our wind energy in the Gulf of Mexico basically go forward, right?

In the most efficient way, in the most, in the safest way and the most cost effective way. The thirst is there, the capabilities are there, and you knock some hurdles down, right? When we’re, I think last fall, we talked about on the show, a deep water port being put in, or a deep water quayside being put in up in your neck of the woods, Alan, up in Massachusetts.

And it was like, seven different entities, everybody fighting over it, and you had to have this permission, and that permission, and this permission, it was delaying things and all they had to do was add a couple hundred meters of Causeway or something on the leg or to one end of a facility these facilities exist It’s literally just roll in and sign a contract to be able to pull your boats up.

So it’s there It’s ready to go. You know right now we have a lot of other wind Focus going on in the united states. There’s a ton of things going on the east coast There’s the west coast a lot of people paid a lot of money for auction. Lease You areas out there so money’s tied up all over the place and To be honest with you people are probably a little bit concerned about you know Just our political climate right now instead of spending money on more leases.

Allen Hall: So is it the financial risk that is limiting projects off of Texas and Louisiana or is more of a technical weather related risk?

Philip Totaro: It’s really Competition with, especially in the ear cot market where you have cheap onshore wind and solar PV that really negates the need for substantial capacity. Of offshore wind but as you mentioned, at the top of this with canceling this auction for additional lease areas. And this unsolicited bid by energy.

They are specifically trying to do a project that would be powered by offshore wind, but for hydrogen production. So this is not the only project that’s been proposed down in the Gulf for that purpose. But what’s interesting about it is Ahektae already has a 40 percent interest from Repsol, the Spanish oil and gas company Repsol, and Repsol’s now made an offer to take 100 percent control.

So there’s obviously some, investment looking to come in but there, a lot of the other Developers, the reason that frankly canceled this tender for the Gulf of Mexico, the 2nd round of the Gulf of Mexico was they received, I think, something like 25 different comments from some of the potential participants in the auction.

Who all indicated to Boehm that the market climate just isn’t right now and there have even been some, um, European utility companies or, sovereign wealth funds Ecuador, for example, in Norway. And one of their executives came out and said that they’re a little concerned about, you know, they frankly think if Trump wins, it’s going to be, the end of offshore wind in the U.

S. for a little while. The reality of that is if fear is going to hold people back from making that kind of an investment, Then I guess Boehm had to pull the plug, but there are still companies that are interested in those lease sites, it’s just that the use case is not necessarily supplying electricity the way most offshore wind is doing in the world right now, it would be for this kind of hydrogen application.

Where, you know, that hydrogen production facility would take the bulk of the power offtake and then a little bit might go into a merchant market.

Joel Saxum: It makes sense though, Phil, right? Have that kind of hybrid production usage ready, right? Because you’re in now, this is a completely different market, right?

When you talk about all the projects that are going on the Northeast part of the United States, they’re looking to secure a We secured a PPA for X amount of megawatt. And we know we’re gonna make that throughout the life of the project. If you’re shoot for shoving energy into the Ercot market, there’s times when the prices are peanuts, like you’re not making anything.

However, there’s also times when you’re , a couple years ago you’re making $9,000 a megawatt hour. So there’s if you’re gonna have a yeah. Backup production of hydrogen or a focus on hydrogen production makes sense. And then if you have the ability to flip the switch. When prices in that merchant market or cut go up, that could be attractive to someone.

However, right now it’s just it’s

Allen Hall: really risky, like you said. So it’s more of a longer term play then, right? Phil, is that what I’m hearing is that you need to have different, create different things with electricity. Rather than just feed the grid straight off, and green hydrogen would be one of them, of probably several.

Philip Totaro: If you’re gonna do a project in the Gulf of Mexico, given where demand is right now, and what Joel just mentioned, that in, in some cases you get negative pricing in ERCOT even if the offtake was going into, Louisiana and, Southwest Power Pool, et cetera, You’re still, it’s not that Southwest Power Pool is that much better at the moment, you’re still getting, somewhere around 30 a megawatt hour.

If you’re also getting the PTC, that obviously helps but the point being that I, I think a lot of project developers, yeah, like weather related risks, like you mentioned that’s kind of part of it, but it’s really the offtake situation. That’s what. Everybody’s really concerned about, having to build, a billion dollar offshore wind farm and a, at least, half a billion dollar transmission capability, substation and, export cables et cetera to be able to plug that into a market that’s already saturated with renewables.

That’s going to be, a hard sell in, in the near term.

Allen Hall: But Phil, wouldn’t you design it to be lower cost if you knew that was a constraint? You wouldn’t put a brand new 15 megawatt turbine out there and you wouldn’t put it out so far. You put it closer to shore so the cabling’s shorter. You may use a four or five megawatt turbine just for simplicity’s sake.

There’s a lot that goes into that though. It the model on the model on the East Coast right now is to put turbines further and further away from shore, which makes the cost go higher and higher because Construction costs go up, cabling goes up. Everything just gets more expensive for every kilometer you’re offshore.

Louisiana is talking about putting turbines within the three miles of their shoreline, so it’ll be state, what is considered state waters. Louisiana is the only one doing that. Does that then make the projects less expensive? Within the ppa price doesn’t matter so much

Philip Totaro: it does but also again keep in mind that this the power coming off anything in Louisiana would probably not go into your car to would be spp so it’s like I said it’s a little easier to justify but you’re still also talking about something where with.

interest rates still so high, it doesn’t matter necessarily how far away. Something closer to shore, shorter cables, etc. Yes, it makes it easier. It makes the foundations easier because the amount of pile doesn’t have to be so deep or the jacket, whatever it is. So that’s a consideration, but I don’t think it’s the governing factor of why Okay The developers don’t want to get into the Gulf of Mexico at this point.

I think they just look at the overall kind of economic picture and say to themselves, I don’t think this really makes sense when I could just go build a solar plant on shore or a wind farm. Onshore.

Allen Hall: So I, I think there’s two pieces to this, right? Obviously, as Phil’s pointed out, you get the financial piece, selling the power, where’s it gonna go?

All those financial constraints and the weather, right? But after the break, I wanna get Rosemary in here and talk about the technical issues about putting blades in these hurricane conditions because we had talked to Gulf Wind Technology. And learn a couple of things about how it could be done.

So after the break, let’s talk to Rosemary.

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Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary, after visiting Gulf Wind Technology down in New Orleans, we were really impressed, Joel and I, of all the things that were happening there. And one of the discussion points was, what do we do about hurricanes and the design of wind turbines?

We had some feedback about that, which we cannot disclose. We’re sworn to secrecy there. However, you’ve been looking into these hurricane turbines and what we call downwind turbines, which the blades are on the wrong side. And is there some update on that? Is it useful in hurricane conditions?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, maybe.

It’s one of the questions that I get asked a lot about. And I think one of my very first YouTube videos is about that. How do you design a wind turbine so the blades don’t hit the tower? So the way that a regular wind turbine is designed, the Blades are on the upward side of the tower. So as the wind blows the blade and it bends towards the tower.

So that’s one of the major design constraints when you’re designing the blades is they have to be stiff enough to not hit the tower, obviously. And yeah, smash into it while they’re rotating or in a strong gust of wind. But there’s a lot of interest in designing blades that are more flexible.

And one of the reasons for that is so that in strong storms, they wouldn’t need to be as, have as much material. If you don’t need to design it as stiff, you can use less material. Yeah, and so that, that is helpful in a strong storm. Because it’s challenging to put a normal wind turbine in an environment like that because the blades aren’t stiff enough to be sure that they’re never going to hit the tower.

And then there’s other reasons as well, why you might want a more flexible blade, like if you can make the blade more slender, which will skinnier blade, that will naturally make it less flexible, but there’s a lot of interest in doing that and having a higher tip spread ratio, you can get more efficiency and again, better performance in these extreme wind loads.

People did try, there are downwind designs out there and still today like small wind turbines are often made in a downwind design and you can make them so that they behave like a weather vane. They just naturally follow the wind. So that’s one benefit, but it really only works for small ones.

Back in the day, utility scale wind turbines were sometimes downwind, but it’s been a few decades since anyone did that seriously, because there were a few big design flaws associated or design challenges associated with the downwind design. And the major one is that Every time that the blade passes behind the tower, it goes from having the wind pushing it to all of a sudden having no wind pushing it.

And when the wind pushes a blade, it bends away from the wind. And then when it goes behind the tower, it suddenly springs back. And so that does two things. One, it makes a thump. Every time that the blade passes the tower, you go thump. And then the other thing that it does is it it, is challenging for the, those kinds of loads that are happening on the blade frequently.

Yeah, cause fatigue loading, fatigue damage of the blades. And that was hard to get around. But yeah, some researchers at NREL have been looking into ways to make more flexible blades. And this was the, downwind orientation is one of the really obvious ways that you can do that. So they thought.

We’re not going to go off data from the 80s and 90s that we had when people used to make big wind turbines that way. Let’s just take they’ve got a 1. 5 megawatt wind turbine, a test wind turbine at their disposal and they’re like, we’ll just flip it. So they just literally took the rotor off, turned it around, whacked it back on I guess change the polarity of the generator and maybe a couple of other little things.

But yeah, that, that’s what they did. So now it’s a downwind rotor. Yeah. And then they instrumented it up and tested how it went. And yeah, the TLDR is that downwind orientation is still a bad idea for the same reasons that it always has been, but now they have a lot more confidence in that it’s it’s ruled out a whole path of investigation that they were maybe going to go down.

And it is, I’m in two minds about this experiment. Cause it’s like on the one hand, like you probably could have predicted that was going to be the outcome. How many millions did they spend on it? But on the other hand, it’s it’s stopped them from, spending years engineering a perfect downwind turbine to, build a whole turbine and see what happens.

So I love these quick and dirty things of just, yeah just take what you’ve got. make it work. Now you don’t need to talk about that anymore. All of your, instead of, splitting your research team in two with half of them working on downwind rotors, now they’re all working on upwind and solving the next biggest uncertainty.

So yeah, it’s pretty cool. They also got a lot of information from the measurements that they took in terms of yeah, loads and strain, and they can use that to validate some of their models. Cause it’s really challenging to model. The aerodynamics and the blade structure, how they interact together, especially in these kinds of challenging environments where you’ve got, disturbed blow.

Yeah, so they’ll get a lot of learning from that as well. So yeah, I think it’s not so much it’s easy to just look at it and go, what a waste of millions of dollars. But I think that there was a lot of learning that happened And, worthwhile thing to do.

Allen Hall: Why don’t we have paddle turbines?

They’re not efficient. No, I know they’re not efficient, but we’re talking about Like a water wheel. Yeah,

Philip Totaro: You have a steamship. Barrel, like a horizontal orientation barrel.

Rosemary Barnes: You can half your efficiency that way. I

Philip Totaro: like to do

Allen Hall: that. You put a blade on either side, right?

Bounce it out.

Rosemary Barnes: No, just the drag type device is inherently half as efficient, roughly, as A lift type device that’s just, yeah, they’re aerodynamics. You can only go as fast as the wind when you’ve got drag pushing your turbine around. What compared to, yeah, a lot faster from having lift on your side.

Allen Hall: Yeah. But we’ve seen all kinds of other types of turbines, not only downwind recently, but if it’s going to keep the turbine operational where it’s not going to break or tear itself apart, why would you not look at. Other things, or why wouldn’t NREL be investigating things that could possibly work, especially since if I was going to go with a downwind turbine, I would call Rosemary or somebody that knows what they’re talking about and say, is this even possible?

And the answer would be no. Don’t do it, which I think is what Rosemary would tell me. It is possible.

Rosemary Barnes: They did it.

Allen Hall: They did it. I know they did it, but they got the output that you would have told them about two years ago.

Rosemary Barnes: No, I’m all for that, like periodically reassessing if the, assumptions that you’ve been making for the last few decades, if they’re still valid, because things have changed a lot since the 80s and 90s.

I think it’s fair to revisit. I think that they learnt a lot, and I don’t know the exact we’ve got to wait for the full paper to be written up, but so I don’t know the exact deal breakers that led them to their conclusion, but I would expect that none of them are insurmountable, that, you could, with enough money thrown at it, you could make a perfectly reliable and efficient downwind wind turbine these days, and that it would cost more than the the standard arrangement, And that’s the other thing.

We can already make hurricane proof wind turbines if you just want to throw materials at it, basically, put twice as much carbon fiber and make it make it twice as stiff, then there you go. You got a hurricane proof wind turbine. But the problem is that then it costs so much more that you would, no one would ever actually want to build a project with those turbines.

That’s where we’re at. It’s always the, like we talk about it, like engineering Oh, can we solve this technical problem or that technical problem? But the true answer is 99 percent of the time. It’s like engineers could do it, but it wouldn’t be cost effective. So you wouldn’t. And I think that’s where we’re at with this as well.

Joel Saxum: That’s the same conversation, Alan, we had with all the SMEs at Gulf Wind Technology this week is building that problem statement at the beginning and understanding the economics of it before you get into the engineering of it. Because if it doesn’t make sense economically let’s not waste the time to build or design something like this.

And Rosemary, I got to tell you something, and this is from someone who doesn’t have that many gray hairs. I’m embarrassed to say I actually had to look up what TLDR meant because I didn’t know what it meant. Oh my god.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh my

Philip Totaro: god, Joel! Joel’s like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers, he’s I’m with it, I’m hip, and then starts dancing the Macarena.

Exactly, sharks with freaking laser beams on their heads.

Joel Saxum: One million dollars. If you’ve been watching any kind of news, and or if you’re on social media, or however you get your news, you’ll see that the Olympics are going on in Paris right now. So in honor of the ongoing Olympics in Paris, I’m going to throw it back a couple years to 2018.

When the Olympics were in Pyeongchang, South Korea, so that was Winter Olympics, so not the Summer Olympics. But at those Summer or Winter Olympics in South Korea, a wind farm was built to power the Olympics. There, the wind farm that was built to power the Olympics was 203 megawatts during the games and this was a hundred and four percent of the energy required to power them So it the South Koreans when they put this plan together they were creating the most green Olympics and wanted to make that a Kind of a flagship for the rest of the games as they move forward only one bad thing happened with the wind there and it didn’t have anything to do with the wind farm but the wind was so extreme on some of the outdoor events that there was actually, they got canceled or they got delayed.

And there was actually some issues with the wind blowing so hard up on the mountains in South Korea. But the the Olympic wind turbines outside of Pyeongchang, South Korea, in the province of Gangwon, you are our wind farm of the week.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News. Our weekly newsletter, which is now on Substack. And you can check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

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