Offshore Energy Attacks, Solar Train, Coffee Badging

There were 500 attacks on undersea energy in Europe in 2024–what does that mean for offshore wind? SunTrain may be powering Denver in the near future. And the latest workplace trend, “Coffee Badging”, may not be the best plan for new employees.

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Allen Hall: Coffee badging hits the workplace, NATO addresses offshore wind security, and a wild proposal to move solar power by train. Plus, NextEra’s massive Montana wind project powers up.

You’re listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines.

com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.

Allen Hall: Hey, Uptime Community. We want to help to shape the future of your favorite wind energy podcast. I need you to take our quick five minute survey at uptimewindenergy.

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Phil Totaro: com? Allen, you’re right. We have a total of 32, uh, or participants and speakers from a total of 32 different companies at this point, registrations today, uh, that I haven’t even checked in yet.

So, it’s, uh, you know, tickets are going like hotcakes at this point, and we are actually capacity limited at this facility, so get yours today, uh, if you want to be part of this event.

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Allen Hall: There’s a new workplace trend called coffee badging and companies are pushing for return to office and employees are doing what this new thing is called coffee badging, and what that means is that you walk into the office, check in, get yourself a cup of coffee. You hang out, chit chat. And then you go back home.

And employers obviously know about this, but they’re not really doing too much about it at the minute. It does meet minimum office requirements. So a lot of large companies say that counts as being in the office. But the demographics for this are really interesting, Joel. Uh, if you look at who is actually doing the coffee badging, mostly men, like 60, 40 men to women are doing this practice and it also is related to age.

Uh, it looks like Gen X and Gen Z are the ones who are most active in this coffee badging scenario. And to me, this is a little weird because it’s got to be the most expensive cup of coffee you can get, right?

Joel Saxum: So a big thing here that’s not being taken into consideration in any of these conversations. We talked a little bit about this return to work last week.

Is the cost of it, right? So in this article, we’re talking about, you know, a hybrid worker, they’re spending an average of 50, 50 or so a day to commute into the office. So, I mean, that, that adds up, right? 400, 500 a month for a hybrid worker, or even a thousand dollars for someone full time. And, and it’s something that I, it was taken into, taken into consideration, you know, or not taken into consideration before when we never, not that many people were working remotely.

But now when people are starting to go back and then see that cost, that’s a lot of money. I mean, for a lot of people, that’s a big percentage of salary. So I think I align right with you, Allen, saying this is a really, really expensive cup of coffee. Cause if it’s going to be 50 to go in and out, that’s.

Plus your coffee. That’s 50 bucks for your coffee.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, you say Australian coffee is really good. So it’s probably worth going into the office for, is this a trend in Australia too?

Rosemary Barnes: Um, I don’t know. I work for myself primarily. I do have an office, um, for the startup that I work for and I go in there.

Once a week or so. They’ve got terrible coffee in, in there. Um, yeah, but I mean, I actually, I think maybe I’m, although you said, right, that this is a gen X and Z thing, missing out millennials in the middle, gen Y.

Allen Hall: Millennials are also highly involved in this.

Rosemary Barnes: Okay. Cause I’m a millennial and, um, I actually miss the office quite a lot because, uh, I don’t know.

I, um, I think when you’re trying to work. Creatively, like, you know, to me, engineering is a creative, creative discipline, which, you know, a lot of people might be surprised to learn. But, um, I really gained a lot from, um, coffee, chit chat, and talking in the canteen when I used to work in Denmark, there was a canteen and everyone had lunch together every day away from the computer.

And, um, yeah, like you learn about what else is going on in the company. You learn about, you know, Oh, Hey, this guy worked on something similar 15 years ago, and you would never have known except for that you ran into him and, Um, he overheard you talking about something that he knew about and Yeah. So I, I kind of actually think that all that is incredibly valuable.

Allen Hall: Was this similar to the mouse moving devices that have become popular? I’ve got hit with a lot of ads over the Christmas holidays for mouse movers. And I thought, really, is this something? But evidently a large number of people that work from home have. Little mouse movers just look like they’re active at the desk.

Rosemary Barnes: Aren’t managers tracking the output? Like a mouse mover, like are there really managers who are like, it’s super important that you’re moving your mouse eight hours every day and they don’t actually care if you get any work done or not. I just find this so. Crazy that anybody manages like

Phil Totaro: that. On my end, I mean, I said this last week already, like, but we’re, you know, my company is, you know, half consultancy, half, you know, software as a service, uh, kind of development platform.

And we have the ability for, for myself and all the contract employees to work wherever everybody wants to. Um, so at the end of the day, people are, you Engaged in a job, especially like a back office, you know, white collar, typically, uh, type of job, like, you don’t have to actually be in the office. I agree with Rosie that you do lose a lot when you’re not there, and it’s maybe important for a younger generation to do it, but I’m not surprised that people, I am Gen X, I’m not surprised people in my generation and, and above are You know, doing this because it just, there’s a point at which being in the office is more consuming than the ability that you have when working remotely to increase your productivity.

Um, because you’re not always being bothered by somebody that wants, you know, an answer for, for two minutes of your time or this, that, whatever. Um, so it’s, it’s, there needs to be a balance though. And at the end of the day, like I said last week, you know, people. need to get their job done or they get fired one way or the other.

So mouse movers and all this other coffee badging, I mean, whatever. Like, as long as you get your job done and you’re helping the company achieve the goals and objectives that are important here, then whatever it takes.

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Allen Hall: A new clean energy transportation concept called Trains Mission is being proposed in Colorado with SunTrain launching a demonstration project between Pueblo and Denver. The project aims to use rail cars equipped with iron phosphate batteries to transport renewable energy from solar farms to urban areas.

SunTrain, along with the Colorado Governor, Xcel Energy, and Clean Energy Advocates, are seeking 10 million in a federal grant to begin operations by 2026. Now, the SunTrain plans to demonstrate this transportation system using train cars with these big batteries, essentially. They’re going to have 20 of these train cars, and it’s going to move about 100 miles between Pueblo and Denver.

So it’s going to charge them in Pueblo, Move them up using a diesel train to Colorado and discharge them and keep going back and forth. And evidently there is some economics to do this.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s not even an electric train.

Allen Hall: No, it’s not an electric train. I

Rosemary Barnes: guess if they had electrified railway, they could just use that to transmit the electricity instead.

Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re talking about making an electric train as they move along through this process, but it is odd, Rosemary, that you can’t get power from Pueblo to Denver efficiently. And, and the, one of the ways you would do it is basically charge up a bunch of batteries and drag them up to the destination.

That makes no sense. And maybe you’re right. Maybe we do electrify the train rails. Maybe that’s an easier way to do this. It’s, it’s a little crazy, but where have we gotten to in transmission if this project makes sense?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you’ve worked on the front range of Colorado before doing any kind of development project, you know that there’s a lot of political problems there.

Whether, because there’s a division, there’s, when you’re down in Pueblo, you get to the edge of where you’re in ranching territory and then you get across that and you get towards Colorado Springs and it becomes a lot more Denver City. There’s a big blue red divide there, so you’re fighting political problems the whole way.

While you try to push this, you know, what would be essentially a transmission line there. And so if it’s gotten to that point, that means that the permitting is either, or the permitting is too tough. It’s too expensive to build, which that actually would be kind of an expense. The real estate, once you start getting close to Denver is expensive.

And then you’re also punching through some foothills and through some mountains and some other difficult terrain, some federal land, some forest reserves and some other things that are difficult. I think going back to where are we at, we’re in a bad spot. I mean, because of whatever hurdle it was or whatever, the economic sense, it makes sense.

And if you’re looking for 10 million dollars to do this project, it must be costing a lot more than 10 million to build that uh, transmission line.

Rosemary Barnes: You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of there’s, um, you know, gravity energy storage, like energy vault, where they lift blocks uphill and then drag it down.

Um, there’s actually a version of that concept that involves rail. It’s called advanced rail energy storage. And they do use railways to drag blocks up a hill and then, um, drag them down again. And, you know, it’s I’ve got to say that makes a whole lot more sense than charging an electric, um, yeah, battery, uh, and then physically transporting it to discharge and then take it back again.

It’s, yeah, it’s, it’s very strange.

Phil Totaro: I mean, that’s, Rosie, what you’re describing is a mechanical equivalent to pumped storage, and we have a ton of that around the world, especially in Scandinavian countries, where, you know, they’ve got a lot of fjords and whatnot, so, you know, it’s, uh, this, however, like, putting, like, solar power into batteries on a train and then dragging the train up with diesel to, it just doesn’t compute.

And at the end of the day, I mean, no matter how expensive the transmission is, the electrons are used by everybody. Uh, you know, so the, the various forms of power generation that we can have, you know, everybody’s going to be able to benefit from that. So this is one of those, maybe eminent domain has to come into play here and they just need to get the job done.

This, I mean, look, this is one of these things we talk about on the show quite a bit, like sounds viable technologically doesn’t really sound viable commercially. I’m sure that they can get 10 million in grant money or whatever seed money from the government or somebody else to go build one of these pilot projects, but I don’t really see this happening.

I think this is a specific solution for a problem. Different problem than what we really have. Yeah, they have a transmission problem, but that’s the problem we need to solve, not doing it this way.

Rosemary Barnes: Do you think that maybe it’s, um, a higher level play that really the point of this project is to say, come on guys, like, can we really not get transmission done?

This is what we’re looking at. If we can’t just build the damn transmission line, let’s just get our act together and then maybe it will focus people’s attention to say, uh, yeah, okay, you know what? This is getting ridiculous. Let’s put some new transmission in.

Joel Saxum: I don’t understand that like the there’s a technical part of this too, though, that we’re not, it’s not laid out here and I’m sure this has been thought of, but how long does it take to charge and discharge?

They’re looking at the first thing is 20, 20 cars that can power 20 or a thousand homes for a full day. So, and now they’re going to want to expand it to a hundred train cars at the end of the How fast can you charge and discharge those?

Phil Totaro: I mean, they can, Joel, they can charge fairly fast. You can, uh, uh, 20 megawatt hour battery or so can charge in, like, Two hours, I think, if it’s, you know, if you’re doing it the right way, and you don’t blow it up.

But the, the reality is, I don’t know why they would do this with solar power, because if you’re trying to, like, it would make more sense to do it with wind, because wind blows at night, especially in the wintertime. You know, you charge up the batteries at night, you drag them up in the morning, and then you’ve got power during the peak time of the day.

Like, what are you doing Hmm Charging. I mean, I guess if you’re doing it with solar, you’re charging between basically 10 AM when the sun’s actually up and then, you know, maybe 2 PM.

Rosemary Barnes: I guess it’s a bit more predictable. Like you could get on a regular schedule with solar power, whereas you couldn’t with wind, but how, what’s the distance, Allen, that you said that they want to do this a hundred miles or something?

Allen Hall: It’s about a hundred miles. Yeah. It’s about a hundred miles.

Rosemary Barnes: So, I mean, is a solar resource. It’s actually different between those two locations. Why not just put the solar panels where you want to use the solar energy and have stationary batteries? I, um.

Joel Saxum: The price of land. The price of land around Denver is extreme.

Rosemary Barnes: Well, put them on roofs. Well, you know, you guys can learn how to do it when you come to Australia. You can get some tips on, on how to put solar panels on roofs. It’s um, it’s cheaper for us to put them on roofs than land. Not for you, I know, but.

Joel Saxum: This is I 25. Like, this is a I’ve driven this many times. This is a main highway.

I can’t understand why they why this is even a thought process. Why I can’t just hook into the existing grid. Clearly there must be an issue with it, but it doesn’t seem like there should be. These are two, like, Pueblo’s a big city and Denver’s a hundred miles away. They should be connected with sufficient capacity, throughput capacity.

Allen Hall: I would think, but apparently not. Just as an aside, I did look up what one train car of coal would generate in terms of gigawatt hours. It’s about 0. 8. So it’s about 800 megawatt hours per train. Car of coal. So if they’re in theory, if you get the energy density way up, then it may make sense to push batteries around.

Phil Totaro: Well, I don’t know that pushing batteries around, if we got the energy density of storage way up, then that would actually unlock a lot more. You know, ancillary services and other commercially viable things that we could do with longer duration storage that would probably resolve a lot of these issues in the first place, and then you wouldn’t need to be dragging batteries around by train, you know, especially a diesel train.

Like, this just, this is one of these, like, I don’t think it makes sense. We should, we should introduce a thing on the show, like, you know, uh, I don’t know, like, yay, yay or nay, and it’s just, I, I vote nay on this one.

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Allen Hall: A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about underwater cables and some sabotage that happened, uh, up around Finland and Germany.

And that led to a kind of a larger discussion between us of what is happening out there and how much cable damage is there. Actually, there’s a lot more than I thought there was. Now, NATO has held a meeting and is trying to understand some of the risks here and put some frameworks in, and it’s reinforced its commitment to protecting Europe’s critical undersea energy infrastructure at its annual roundtable in Brussels.

Now, this recent meeting addressed growing concerns about the physical and cyber threats to offshore wind farms and undersea cables. particularly in the Baltic and the Arctic Seas, uh, Wind Europe CEO, Giles Dixon, joined the discussion to highlight the importance of protecting both, uh, physical assets and data security around wind energy infrastructure.

Now, some of the numbers here are quite disturbing. NATO has documented 500 suspicious incidents in Europe. in 2024 with approximately 100 tribute attributed to Russian hybrid attacks, espionage and influence operations. And with modern wind turbine, modern wind turbines utilizing several hundred sensors at times.

Uh, there’s a lot of ways to sneak into a wind turbine and to get past some of the security systems. So this is a pretty large threat, everybody. If you’re having 500 Documented threats a year. I’m not sure the infrastructure is hardened enough to handle all that. Joel, being our underwater expert, what is the likely outcome of this?

Are we going to see more hardening of underwater cables in particularly around wind turbines?

Joel Saxum: I think you definitely will in the upcoming future. As we build out more and more things and we’ve started to see this as a higher risk, of course. Insurance companies are going to demand it. Financial companies are going to demand it.

And it’s not that hard to do, right? It’s just expensive. So you lay a cable on the bottom of the ocean. What people don’t realize is, and you can Google this just like, Hey, map of cables in the ocean. You will be wildly surprised of what the world’s oceans look like up a spaghetti bowl of cables and pipelines, because they’re everywhere.

Uh, you just think about how, you know, how. How quickly we can communicate. We’re talking with Rosemary right now down in Australia. Australia’s an island, right? There’s cables, redundancy and redundancy and bandwidth all over the place to connect everybody. So you’re not going to see, maybe on some high value things, uh, a, you know, retrofit campaigns to, to, like you say, Allen Harden, these assets to put some, you know, some concrete mattresses or something, or some rock dumps on them to protect them.

I don’t think you’ll see that, but I believe going forward. I think the recent, you know, global actions will demand it. You’re going to have to say, put, you know, put a rock dump on top of this thing, or, or put some, um, you know, preformed concrete blocks or bollards on top of these cables to protect them.

Allen Hall: So does this then change the way we start designing wind turbines? Siemens, Kamesa and Vestas are going to be the two offshore wind turbines providers. And all the companies that are involved with this, are they changing designs as we speak? Is NATO talking to them and saying, look, we need to harden these turbines way beyond what they are right now, if they plan to stay out in the water for 20, 30 years?

Because I guarantee you the opposition is trying to develop ways to Take down these turbines, plus other data lines, everything else. And they have to be working this and they’re using very crude methods at the moment, basically dragging anchors. But that ain’t, that’s going to end pretty quickly. They’re going to come to more advanced techniques, you’d think over the next year or two.

I think they’re, they’re from,

Joel Saxum: from a cyber security standpoint, the turbines are designed fairly robustly. There is cybersecurity insurance out there. That’s becoming a new product as well. I’ve, I’ve seen on the market. But from that standpoint, we do pretty well. Idaho National Labs and our friends over at Everpoint, Everpoint Resources in a little Pringle wind farm.

They’ve been doing a lot of testing there. Um, and if you have something that you want to test, you can get ahold of them and they’ll help you out. But I think it’s more what we’re worried about now is the more agricultural kind of physical things, right? Running into a turbine or dragging a cable. Um, those are the design, uh, and construction things that are going to change less than the The actual electronics part of it, I think.

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Joel Saxum: So the Wind Farm of the Week this week is the Clear Water Energy Project, uh, by NextEra and Portland General Electric, uh, which is up in Montana, northwest of Miles City. Uh, it’s three phases. began commercial operation in December of 23. So it’s just a year old.

Uh, the interesting thing about this is, uh, and Rosemary, we talk about it regularly on the podcast about the differences between, um, wind resources in certain areas of the country. They’re taking wind energy, which is across the Rockies, From Eastern Montana, from this wind farm. And they’re bringing it, PGE is bringing it to their customers in Oregon.

So they’re pushing, putting, uh, enough power in through, from this wind farm to power 830, 000 homes over in Oregon. Uh, that’s a hundred million LED light bulbs or 83 percent of a time traveling DeLorean. Yes. So the Clearwater Energy Project, which is, um, up, up over 200 turbines, Uh, 243 to be exact, GE2X machines, uh, you are our wind farm

Allen Hall: of the week.

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 Substack weekly newsletter. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.