The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Howard Penrose from MotorDoc discusses their electrical signature monitoring for wind turbines that offers precise diagnostics, enabling cost-effective preventative maintenance and lifetime extension. 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! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Howard, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Well, we’ve been traveling a, a good deal and talking to a lot of operators in the United States and in Europe, and even in Australia. And, uh, your name comes up quite a bit because we talk to all the technical people in the world and we see a lot of things. And I get asked quite a bit, what is the coolest technology that I don’t know about? And I say, Howard Penrose MotorDoc. And they say, who? And I say, well, wait a minute. If you want something super powerful to learn about your turbine, that is easy to implement and has been vetted and has years of in-service testing and verification. It is MotorDock, it is [00:01:00] empower for motors, it is empath for systems and vibration and all the other things. And now empath, CMS, which is a continuous monitoring system that you’re offering that those systems are revolutionary and I don’t use that word a lot in wind. It’s revolutionary in wind and. Let, let me just back up a little bit because I, I want to explain what some of these problems are that we’re seeing in the field and, and what your systems do. But there’s a, the, the core to what your technology is, is that you’re using the air gap between the rotor and the stator and the generator to monitor what’s happening inside the turbine. Very precisely. Can you just provide a little insight like how that magic happens?  Howard Penrose: Okay. It’s, it’s basically, we use it as an, as a basic accelerometer. So, um, the side to side movement of the, of the rotor inside the air gap. Um. I could get very technical and use the word [00:02:00] inverse square law, but basically in the magnetic field I’ve got side to side movement. Plus every defect in the powertrain, um, causes either blips or hesitations in the rotation. Basically, the torque of the machine, which is also picked up in the air gap, and from a physics standpoint. The air gap, the magnetic field, can’t tell the difference. And, um, both voltage and current see that as small ripples in the wave form, and then we just pull that data out. So, um, uh, I, I liken it exactly as vibration. Just a different approach,  Allen Hall: right? And that that vibration turns into little ripples. And then I’m gonna talk electrical engineering, just for a brief moment, everybody. We’re taking it from the time domain to the frequency domain. We’re doing a four a transform. And in that four a transform, you can see these spikes that occur at, uh, known locations that correlate back to what the machine is doing  Howard Penrose: exactly. [00:03:00] They’re they’re exact calculations, uh, down to the hundred or even thousandths of a hertz. Uh, so, uh, when we, when we do the measurements, they come up as side bands around, uh, whatever. The, the, uh, signature is, so the amplitude modulation, it’s an amplitude modulated signal. So I have, uh, basically the ripple show up on the positive side of the waveform and on the negative side of the waveform. So around everything, I just have plus and minus line frequency. That’s, that’s basically the primary difference. Then we just convert it over to decibels, which makes it, um, relational to the load, which means load doesn’t matter. Uh, so I can compare an unloaded machine to a fully loaded machine and get the same results,  Allen Hall: which is also amazing. So the load, what the turbine is doing doesn’t really matter at all, as long as it’s rotating and producing power. You can [00:04:00] monitor what’s happening, sort of anything up, and then the cell. Mostly,  Howard Penrose: well, it’s even, it’s even more fun than that because the air gap in a wind turbine is at a fixed speed for a dfi. So, uh, it’s constantly turning at the exact same speed, which is basically all I need regardless of the physical speed. So, vibration, I need to know that physical speed and electrical signature. I need to know the air gap. Speed.  Allen Hall: So with this data and the way you’re monitoring what’s happening on the turbine is through current sensors on the feeds and voltage probes. You could do one or the other and, and you’ve done both, and we can discuss that for a moment. But just using the what’s happening on the wires, on the generator wires, now he can determine everything that’s generally happening mechanically. So from gearbox to the blades. The, [00:05:00] the hub, uh, you can even determine things that are happening up tower a little bit like ya motors and that sort of thing. If they’re acting weird, you can see changes there. And it’s sort of like the pulse of the turbine  Howard Penrose: and the main bearings. And the main bearings, right? So all the bearings never leave out the main bearings. That’s, that’s a study we’re involved in right now. So, um. Yeah. Uh, oh. Yeah. The, the study right now is, uh, we’re using the technology to map out circulating current sub tower. Um, so we’re, we’re looking at, uh, why main bearings are failing, um, which was missed before. I’ve got an, I’ve got a paper coming out on it. We’re kicking off an NRE L study, uh, on it. And we are also working along with, um, groups in the field and an independent study all to. Well, a main bearing is a really expensive issue. Um, and, and we’re fine. People are just [00:06:00] finally figured out that they were failing because of electrical discharge. And, um, the high frequencies associated with that basically caused the brushes to become resistors and the bearings to become conductors. So, uh, we now have a technology that allows us to look at these very high frequency sound or. High frequency  Allen Hall: noise. Okay. Let’s just use that as a test case for your system for iPath CMS, because. That is one issue that pretty much everybody in the United States that uses a particular OEM has  Howard Penrose: actually, uh, you, you got, you hit it on the head. It’s just like the old W Ring thing. Everybody thought it was a specific, uh, generator manufacturer turned out to be every DFI failing the same way we discovered that. Uh, we’ve also heard, uh, you know, a specific OEM and a specific. Type of platform. They were seeing the problems in the main bearings. And again, it just came about because people were talking about it. Except [00:07:00] guess what? We’re not just seeing it in the us, we’re seeing it globally. That’s one of the benefits we have with so many users worldwide is we’re finding out that all of these problems are not unique to us. They’re global in nature and they’re cross platform.  Joel Saxum: So when we talk cross platforms and, and you, the listeners here will notice that I’ve been markedly absent from the conversation so far. ’cause it’s a bit over my head. Sorry. No, it’s, it’s just, this is, this is great stuff. But what I, that was one of the things I was wondering while we were going through this is we were talking about, um. Solutions that you guys have that can solve specific problems. Now, does this say I have a direct drive turbine? Or like, is, is there any models or any types of technology that you can’t work on out in the field or does it Basically we have a solutions that can cover all turbines regardless  Howard Penrose: if it’s got a magnetic field, whether it’s a generator, motor, or transformer, we can see it. I can follow that. So we even, we even, we even use [00:08:00] the technology in the industrial side for power monitoring for plants. Because we get, uh, we get good insights on what’s coming into the facility and what the facility’s putting back into the system, in particular with high frequency noise and stuff like that, that utilities are just now starting to pay attention to. Joel Saxum: It’s just, this is an important thing for the CMS system that you guys have, because I’m, I’m thinking right now, okay, now, now again, I’m gonna dumb this way down, um, in my. Built Jeeps that I’ve done in the past, I’ve gotten death wobble in the steering wheel because of oscillations in the front axle. Right? But that only happens at a certain speed, right? If I, if I could, if I could get through second gear at about 4,000 RPMs and grab third, I’m fine. But if I have to shift to 2,500 RPMs, about 32 miles an hour, I’m in a world of hurt, right? I’m, I’m shaking this thing down the road. So turbines I know will do that sometimes at certain RPM. They will have vibration issues that will either go away or expand a resonance or natural [00:09:00] frequency.  Howard Penrose: Yeah,  Joel Saxum: right. Like at, at at, um, you know, four RPM is one thing at seven and a half rpm it goes away. So having cm, your CMS system, that’s their continuously monitoring when the wind speeds are low, when they’re high, when. Does that help you pick up different anomalies within the turbine to be able to kind of pinpoint what’s, what could be happening?  Howard Penrose: No, because those frequencies are always present. They just amplify at certain points in speed, right? They, they hit a natural frequency, so they just oscillate like mad. Uh, I’m rereading all of my Tesla books right now. So where, where he talks about that, you know, you could split the world like an apple if, if you hit the right frequency. Um. With a small device. Uh, so, uh, yeah, we see it across that entire speed range, even though you feel that oscillation. One of the nice things about, um, uh, electrical and current signature is it isn’t a structural vibration analysis. Like if, if I [00:10:00] have the, um, structure or the machine vibrating outside, I see very little of that. I see all the drivers behind it instead. Right. So it, it’s, it’s less likely, uh, I’ll pick up a false positive because I hit a resonance. That amplitude remains the same.  Joel Saxum: That’s the difference between what you guys are doing and what and what everybody else is doing with a accelerometer, gy, gyro, whatever that sensor may be. You name it,  Howard Penrose: accelerometer, ultrasound, all that other stuff. It’s all variations of,  Joel Saxum: of physical.  Howard Penrose: Yeah, and I refer to those as basically fault detectors. They’re dummy lights. Nobody’s actually using condition-based maintenance as condition-based maintenance. We can use the information to actually make modifications and changes. Joel Saxum: You can actually diagnose with yours. That’s what we always say right now. CMS basically at, at this, at a general level is go and look at this turbine, bing. Go and [00:11:00] look at this turbine. You have a problem. Go and look. One of these blades has a problem. Go and look at it. But you are actually going deeper down saying diagnosis, Hey, this may be the actual problem that’s causing. This issue in your turbine, and that is invaluable.  Howard Penrose: Yeah. One of our case studies is of a bearing a man, a a a a re, a reinstalled bearing on a, or an installed bearing on a drive end of a a wind turbine. The, um, it had some problems with, uh, the cage, which caused one of the roll balls not to rotate. Um, and it had some false brunel on in the inner outer race, and we saw that, but we also saw, uh, a much higher level in the thrust bearing in the gear box. And so when we, we went back to them and said, yeah, you’ve got a problem here. Uh, they took the bearing back off, and then I said, make sure that you’ve got all the shims in the. And the, uh, coupling and they had left out a shem, so it had [00:12:00] caused a problem in the, so if we hadn’t detected the other thing, we would’ve detected the gearbox, um, bearing. But they were ignoring that data and were looking at the bearing. They just replaced in the generator. So when, when they put everything back together, we were able to confirm that. All we saw after that was the friction losses in the, in the bearings.  My  Joel Saxum: question is, is okay, we’re looking at. Basically deltas outside of a, a sine wave and these peaks and valleys to in your, in the sign you’re detecting, how are you able to know, oh, I saw this delta here, or I saw this here. That’s a thrust bearing. That’s a main bearing. That’s something here. Is that just years of knowledge built up from, okay, we saw this fault and we, we figured it was this because of it, or. How are you guys arriving at that?  Howard Penrose: Uh, it’s from my years as a, uh, vibration analyst, um, Navy trained vibration analyst. Uh, [00:13:00] so, um, what, what was discovered by Oak Ridge National Labs in the 1980s? So this isn’t that new. As a matter of fact, this technology is direct descendant from Howard Haynes’s work another Howard. What we discovered was the frequencies are. For the most part, exactly the same as what we look for in vibration, just side bands, right? Because we, we, you know, I tell people, how do you interpret the data versus vibration? Stand on your head and cross your eyes. Um, being former Navy, I sometimes use some other, you know, things such as go out and drink heavily. Uh, but in any case, um. Instead of looking from bottom up, we’re actually setting whatever the peak line frequency, current or voltage is, that’s zero. And then we, uh, relate every other peak, um, based upon 20 times the log 10 of the difference in the current, from the current in [00:14:00] question back to that peak. Which is kind of cool because that also means that it’s. As my load changes, everything follows. So it’s not load dependent. The only thing that happens is frequency. So you have to take enough of a, a data across a long enough time so that you can determine the differences between the, the components, right? So, so in a wind turbine for instance, I’ll have all those bearings in the gearbox, including the planetary gears. I have the main bearing, and they all kind of crowd around line frequency. I need a resolution that’ll show me a hundredth of a hertz difference between any two peaks. It’s it’s vibration. It’s actually vibration. So the, each of the components, even each component of the bearing, ’cause I can call out which part of a bearing, and that’s actually how we analyze what conditions we’re looking at. If it’s, uh, cage and ball only, and no signature off of the inner and outer [00:15:00] race, chances are it’s lubrication. Um, you know, that kind of thing on a main bearing. If I see the outer race cha and nothing else, chances are, uh, they didn’t clean out all the old grease and there’s dried grease across the bottom. Uh, we discovered that actually with a couple of the, a couple of sites. So we, we say check, check greasing and condition of the inner and outer rays, you know, that kind of thing. And, uh, we’ve been right more than wrong. Uh, the, the quoted, the quoted number back from one of the OEMs is about 95% accuracy. And when you consider, when you consider borescope has been identified at less than 50%, um, it, it, it gives you a really high accuracy.  Joel Saxum: We just had a conversation with someone the other day, Alan, you and I, about borescopes and how can you borescope so think that’s full of grease And they were like, oh, yeah.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s difficult. At best. Well, and that’s the power of [00:16:00] what Modoc is doing, and what Howard’s doing is that it can detect a range of problems early. And as we get into this area of where o and m budgets are becoming restricted, and you need to spend your money wisely. Do preventative maintenance, which is what MotorDoc is all about, is catching these things early before they become really expensive. Electrical signal analysis is a very simple way to get that data, which is what the Empower Empath and then Empath CMS system are doing is they’re, they’re reading those electrical signatures and correlating back to where the problem is and the success rate is. Howard, as you pointed out, is. Really high, uh, a lot of systems that I see and I was just went to Europe and looked at some data on some other systems, it’s about 50 50. Well, if 50 50, I could flip a coin at that point. It’s not of any use to me. It has to be somewhere north of 90 where I become interested. And your system, when I talked to operators that use it, [00:17:00] said, well, geez, um, you know, it’s well in the high, in the nine high nineties all the time and it’s amazing what they can pull out. It’s this bearing or that bearing or this problem with this motor or this problem with the system and the amount of money they’re saving to pick up those problems early and to get them repaired when it’s lower cost or to keep an eye on ’em even, which is an option, lowers our operational budgets down and it makes sense. So the, the cost of a CMS system is only relative to the money it saves. And I think this is where a lot of operators are getting a little hung up. There’s a lot of CMS systems, which are you pay per year for, and it’s a constant expanse. It adds up to the om OMS budget and no one wants to do that. What you’re seeing now with MotorDock is that system is a capital expenditure. You buy it, it comes with the hardware, it comes with the [00:18:00] software, it comes with all the knowledge and all the updates I think are free. So. It makes a lot more sense to use a MotorDoc type of system and empath CMS than necessarily to, to put individual CMS systems on that maybe do less than what Howard can do. Joel Saxum: I think an important thing here too, Alan, is as we get to, uh, an era of lifetime extension, I. People looking for that solution. How do I guarantee the safety of my turbine, the operation of my turbine as we continue to roll this thing forward? I know here, even in the states, we always say PTC, 10 year repower. That’s not the case for all these turbines. We have 80 20 repowers. We have a lot of ’em. Like, Hey, we have a good PPA. So these things have been, these are 14 years old, we’re still gonna run ’em. We’re not repowering these, or in Europe or in other places in the world where we don’t have the same kind of tax setup we do, where they’re trying to squeeze as much life outta these in, you know, originally 20 to 25 year lifetimes. Man, if you can put something on there that can tell you you’re good to go, or Hey, you need to watch this, or This is the next big spend you have coming up, they can help those operators to make decisions [00:19:00] to for lifetime extension in a really, really good way.  Allen Hall: Going into the data acquisition system and how it connects to the turbine, I know it’s one of the problems that we run into occasionally, is using anything that the the Tower has in terms of data streams. They want of a lot of it information. Does your system plug into the data system of the turbine or is it independent, or how does that work and what is the security features?  Howard Penrose: Yeah, whatever they want. So, uh, that, that, and, and you bring up a good point, like wireless is not allowed. Um, but everybody’s using it, right? Um, there’s a lot of things that aren’t allowed that we were, we were. Privy to during NIST’s work and, and others’ work on cybersecurity on the hill, because I was advising that stuff back in the, you know, back, uh, prior to 2020 and a little bit afterwards. Um, so, uh, uh, [00:20:00] yeah, we, our system was originally designed for nuclear power plants. So, uh, it’s meant to either. It’s a wired system basically, that you can take back to an independent server. You can have it go locally and send it through your own, uh, own network. Um, it doesn’t need to connect to cloud or somewhere else. Uh, if you want to keep it itself contained. Uh, in some turbines we have gone the route of, uh, cellular modems. For, for each of the towers. Um, you know, when, when they’re permanently installed, a lot of people just do data collection. I mean, when you consider, like in a GE turbine, um, if I go, if I personally go to a site and I’ve done over 6,000 turbines in the, in the US and Canada myself, um. And if you could see me, you know, I don’t climb. [00:21:00] Um, yeah, that’s my running joke. It’s like, yeah, I don’t think the ladders will support me. Uh, but any case, um, the, uh, normally it’s walking the base of the tower gathering data as long as the transformer’s down tower and moving on to the next one, I, I think my record is seven minutes a tower, including traveling in between. So it’s not unusual to knock out a single data collection on a site within, uh, if it’s 120 turbines, normally three days. Three and a half. If there’s a, if it’s summer and they’ve got that wind break in Texas where, you know, it’s changing direction, so it takes a lunch break.  Joel Saxum: You’re a small company, right? Just like we are here at Weather Guard where we’re flexible to what the client wants. So if the client wants a certain thing, we can deliver a certain thing. If the client needs this, they can, we can do this. So you get, you guys can do the, the CMS UPT Tower where it’s like you have an installation and it’s gonna be there. Or hey, we can just come to your site, boom, boom, boom, do some testing, and be outta there and give you some reports like you can, you [00:22:00] have a lot of solutions that you can help people out with.  Howard Penrose: We even have, uh, most of the, um, uh, wind service companies, you know, motor repair shops and generator repair shops and everything else have our technology. They also provide the service. Uh, that’s our model is the more the end users or service companies can do it, the better. Uh, we, we made the choice not to, you know, I don’t want a room full of people that are sitting there doing nothing but analysis, right? They’re gonna burn out. Uh, I’d rather be doing the research and identifying the problems, finding industry related issues to solve. And our technology was built simple enough that we don’t have to handle a lot of tech support calls. Um, and, uh, and monitoring is an option. Meaning we’ll do the monitoring. I’ve got, I’ve got a number of industrial sites, some wind sites, some other energy sites. Uh, [00:23:00] all, all using the technology and getting us data, but yeah, exactly. Smaller company. It’s broad, but the technology is not backed by just us. It’s backed by a small $12 billion company called ome. So, uh, yeah, so, and that’s not, it’s not an investor anything. It’s, they, um, they got the license from Oak Ridge back in 1991 or two and, uh, and they maintain it. And during some 97 on, uh, I, in different roles. Uh, have been supporting the development of the technology. So we have a mutual agreement. They focus on, um, nuclear power, and I focus on everything else.  Allen Hall: Howard, we love having you on the program because your technology is just amazing and people need to get a hold of MotorDoc. So if you’re an operator, a developer, an OEM, and Wind, if you’re making some of the components for wind [00:24:00] turbines, you need to be talking to Howard and MotorDoc to get this diagnostic tool into your toolbox and save the the world a lot of money on downtime and repairs. Howard, how do people get a hold of MotorDoc? Where do they find you on the web?  Howard Penrose: Well, we could be reached online, uh, through, uh, LinkedIn at, uh, LinkedIn slash in slash MotorDoc, or, uh, at our websites MotorDoc.com or MotorDoc ai.io. Uh, or you can also reach us via email at info@motordoc.com.  Allen Hall: Howard, thanks for coming on. We’re gonna have you back on soon and everybody keep watching Howard on LinkedIn if you wanna find out what’s happening as MotorDoc develops more technology, watch Howard on LinkedIn. Howard, thank you so much for being on the program. Love having you.  Howard Penrose: It has been a pleasure as always. And we’ll see you the next time [00:25:00] around.

The hosts discuss the recent $62 million funding round for Aerones, Siemens Energy’s call for increased offshore wind capacity in the UK, Canada’s push for offshore wind with Bill C-49, and the installation of Vestas’ 7.2 MW turbine in Germany. And the Coyote Wind Farm in Texas as the Wind Farm of the Week. 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! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: And welcome back to the Uptown Wind Energy Podcast. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon, and Phil Ro. Uh, crazy week. Again, I don’t know how else to describe it. The, I was just telling our producer this morning that there’s so much news coming out where it seemed like to be a little bit of a lull after the US House bill, but it’s picked right back up again. And one of the more exciting things that’s happened is A owns closed a $62 million series B. Uh, led by Activate Capital and S two G with, uh, revenue growing at Aeros by about 300% in 2024, and they are getting a lot of requests from [00:01:00] operators in the United States and elsewhere to fix their wind turbine blades. They have been working pretty closely with GE Renova and NextEra. Over the last, what Joel say two years, maybe a little bit longer on a number of problems.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. A couple years they’ve been doing, uh, bespoke solutions for both of them. They’ve also been doing their, you know, standard things that they’re rolling out to the rest of the market. But I think this is a good thing. In one article that I was reading, there is like a tier one operator starting to adopt it, right? So. Everybody was kind of approaching that robotic thing, like, yeah, it looks like it’s the future and, you know, but a little trepid, right? Dipping a toe in or dipping a finger into the water, trying it out. But now it seems like, hey, we got an LEP campaign, coones, we’ve got this robotics problem we wanna solve, collar owns. So they’re starting to get more and more adoption and, and that shows, right, 300%, uh, revenue growth in 2024. So that’s, that’s huge, right? To, to hit that kind of number. So now it’s up to, uh, scaling up. Uh, the only thing that can cap that number is the amount of robots that they can put outta the [00:02:00] factory over there in Riga.  Allen Hall: And we visited their facility in the United States about a year ago. It was just outside of Dallas, near Lake Dallas of all places. And it is a decent sized facility, but at the time we, when we walked around out back, you just noticed a whole bunch of, uh, parking lot spaces with trailers and capabilities for robots and thought, wow, that there’s a lot of robot, uh, sitting in the parking lot. And, uh. But then they had, when I asked they, they said, oh, they had a ton of crews already out in the field working. So they do have the ability to get to a number of turbine sites. I, I guess maybe still not enough from what I hear, there’s, the demand has gone through the roof.  Joel Saxum: Well, it’s, it’s a really interesting, or really cool, I guess, opportunity for technicians. So that’s one of the things that robotics does is it addresses the technician shortage. You got a technician shortage, great, let’s use robots. Then we can start, uh, having that force multiplier, right? Because you could run robots on two turbines from one control van. You can do a lot of stuff there. But as a technician, [00:03:00] what a great opportunity. If you know blades, if you know in the field, you don’t even have to know that stuff. Not even go work with robotics and AI and like the future of cool things. And I know that a Rowan’s part of their growth and their plans here, they got the $62 million. Of course, we don’t know all the plans they are gonna do with that, but I do know that they’re making a push to hire locally to get local talent, to get local back office to expand their presence in the states. ’cause it’s a, it’s a, it’s a huge market here, right? So they’ve brought on some, some more, uh, horsepower locally from the states, whereas before they were having to bring a lot of technicians over from, from Europe. They’ve started to crack into that and use more local stuff to be able to do things faster and more efficiently, which is, uh, you know, that’s better for all the, all their customers as well. Allen Hall: Well, I think one key about this announcement is when opportunity presented itself, I. Rowans went after it. And that opportunity was with GE Renova on some tip mast additions. And there was a lot of [00:04:00] blaze that needed some more weight in the tip, and the robot could do it faster. I think at the time, uh, GE was planning on doing it with technicians on ropes, and then, uh, aeros demonstrated they could do it faster, more consistently with robotics, and that was the opening that they needed. I don’t remember how many, uh, blades they have done that, uh, addition to, but it’s gotta be in the thousands at this point.  Joel Saxum: I’d say this about that Arons team. I mean, you, you and I know Dyna crews very well, the CEO, we know the CTO, we know the sales team. Some of the operations people, they are not shy on grabbing an opportunity and running with it. And, and I’ll also, this the, one of the, one of, in the, in the wind industry, one of the best companies I’ve seen. Run with primary market research, right? Where someone says, here’s a problem, can you help us solve it? Boom. They’re on it, creating a solution tomorrow. Um, and not a lot of people do that very well. So [00:05:00] I think that’s been part of their, their prowess in, in the scale that they’ve done. And what of course, and oversubscribed funding round means you’re doing something right. And I, and I think that that shows.  Allen Hall: Over in the uk, Siemens Energy’s UK Vice President warns that allocation round seven, which is upcoming, must award a record six gigawatts of offshore wind capacity to maintain the trajectory towards the 43 to 50 gigawatt goal by 2030. Target that the UK has set up for itself and there are, the UK is at about 15 gigawatts at the minute, and. So the, the push from Siemens is we have a factory in haul. We make blades and make turbines. We we’re really good in offshore work, but we really need to go. Uh, and that’s driven by governments putting out, uh, awards and driving the industry forward. And, and Siemens UK vice president is saying, now’s the time. Now is a time that they really need to show progress. I think that’s [00:06:00] generally true. If you do look at, and if you, Joel, I don’t know if you saw this, or maybe Phil, you saw this this week. Uh, the UK put out a map of where all the wind farms are and where all the permanent or the rare earth magnets were located and when those farms are gonna come offline in an effort to potentially recycle those rare earth magnets. So you have this nice little. A year by year map of the decommissioning of one cype decommission when they could reuse those rare earth magnets. And you can see all the wind farms in the uk. There are a lot of wind farms right now in, mostly on the west coast. Well, some of the west coast, a decent amount on the East coast, but there’s still a lot of onshore wind, which I didn’t realize, uh, that. UK government effort is really paying dividends, I think, but the rate’s not enough. I guess that’s the problem. The rate is not enough to keep up where their goals are. Phil is, are they gonna be able to do that even if they [00:07:00]do have a, an allocation round of, you know, upwards of six, seven gigawatts coming up. Phil Totaro: That’s the challenge. They have about, uh, 11,000 onshore turbines, um, in the UK at this point, according to, to our data, uh, and offshore, I forget what the turbine count is, but it, they’re, they’re up there in the, you know, 28 to 30 gigawatts now, um, that’s operational or under construction, um, which is fantastic. You know what Siemens is saying is that. Based upon what’s happened in previous allocation rounds, um, specifically they didn’t have enough capacity to serve the entire demand. Um, basically what they were willing to allocate at, at a particular price point. Uh, and so it left the project developers and independent power producers is left with, well either, you know, we’ve gotta go find a corporate power offtake, which really for uh, [00:08:00] an offshore wind farm is gonna be much. More challenging to do, uh, than, than onshore because of the, the size and scale of these things. Of course. Um, so, you know, they are still largely dependent on the government, you know, facilitating this offtake through, you know, national Grid and, and the other grid operators to be able to have. That allocation of power and then, you know, more utility contracts get signed, um, that way. And, and that’s how people get fed. How  Joel Saxum: many years, Phil, did they have that? Uh, like on there was an onshore moratorium against more new onshore wind. How many years did that last?  Phil Totaro: I wanna say it was like eight. Uh, if memory serves to, just to clarify this, so the head of moratorium in Lower England, which is basically, you know, not Wales, not Scotland, not Northern Ireland or, uh, you know, any of the outer banks areas. Um, but just lower [00:09:00] England, they’ve removed that. At least in principle. And so far there’s only been one proposed project from Kubico, uh, that was actually had been proposed from like, whatever, 15, 20 years ago. And now they’re like, Hey, great, we can actually do our project now. Uh, you know, like everybody’s just kind of waiting for whatever the mechanism is gonna be. Um, and where the demand is is gonna come from the, you know, everybody keeps talking about things like AI and data centers and. Et cetera. And, and yet their, their pipeline for project proposals in, uh, you know, the lower England, again, so to speak, is, is, uh, a little bit thin by comparison. They’re really trying to focus more on offshore wind for. You know, power that’s gonna be fed into London and the surrounding areas. And Scotland is still going strong with, uh, you know, with onshore wind and of course whatever, whatever offshore they’ve got up there. Um, [00:10:00] but they’re building a lot of interconnectors as well with Ireland, with France, um, and I think one with Norway, if memory serves or is it Denmark? One of those. Um, but they’re, they’ve got, you know, power links going all over the place now to be able to, to, you know, feed and balance power with Europe.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think the, I think the interesting thing here is, um, I mean, from Siemens energy point of view and from, I mean, you name it, if it’s Vestas or GE or whoever of their offshore wind needs some wins. Uh, no pun, no pun intended. Like, we, we need some good news. We need one of these auctions to go well as a, as a group. Um, just to reinstall confidence that offshore wind is the, the way of the future, right? So we have some movements, right? You’ve seen Japan open up their EEZ, that’s fantastic. Um, we saw some of the projects in the states get moving again, great news. Um, but you see still this kind of lukewarm temperature towards offshore wind. So it would be great to [00:11:00] see this thing go fantastically so that, uh, we get. Kind of the, the winds back in our sails pushing  Allen Hall: offshore wind forward. We’re gonna take a quick break here, but when we come back, we’re gonna talk about Canada getting into offshore wind and what that means as wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial. And let’s face it difficult. I. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit p ps win.com today. Well, up in Canada, Canada’s uh, bill. 49 C 49, uh, establishes a joint federal provincial management of offshore renewable energy development with Newfoundland and Labrador, uh, targeting up to $1 trillion in renewable energy investment by [00:12:00] 2041. Trillion’s a big number, Joel. Uh, the, the regulatory framework addresses jurisdictional complexities that have historically complicated offshore development and is creating some streamlined programing. Permitting that, uh, mirror successful offshore, uh, petroleum models. Now, I, this is really Canada taking advantage of what has happened off the east coast of the United States in that, uh, if progress is gonna slow off the Atlantic, then Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Maine, all those East coast states can be fed and are currently fed. Um, by Hydro Quebec and others, uh, to provide power. So if they, if Canada does decide to build offshore wind up in Newfoundland, it’s pretty easy to get the power to Canada and to the United States. That could be a huge win. And the cost of doing business in Canada is lower than it is in the United States at the moment. Joel Saxum: There’s a fundamental trouble there. So, Newfoundland Labrador, [00:13:00] amazing wind resources, like I’ve spent some time up there, right. Um. The other side of it is, uh, about 90, I think it’s like, it’s really high. It’s like 98% of their power is renewable already. It’s, they have a lot of hydro, they have a ton of hydro resources and a lack of, uh, heavy industry or load. Right. So it’s not, if you look at the population of Newfoundland, like most of it’s in St. John’s Labrador. Labrador City Lab City’s got some population, but the population of those two areas, and I I, the island of Newfoundland and Labrador mainland is so small that there’s not that much demand. Right. I think they’re total, I can’t even say what their total numbers are, but I know they’re low. Right. And there’s not a lot of heavy industry there. There’s not a lot of things there that are going to take advantage of this wind resource they have. So you’re either gonna be looking at green hydrogen of some sort. Or you’re gonna be exporting. So whether you’re exporting back to the [00:14:00] mainland or you’re HVDC exporting down to the states, and that’s the route I would go simply because even when you start passing back to the mainland, so you’re gonna New Brunswick and that, like, there’s no load there either. Like there’s no load until you hit Halifax. Right? So there’s, there’s just a lack of, there’s there, they have the abundance of wind resource and a lack of off take. So. Put it in a cable and ship it down to the states where we need it anyways. And, uh, triage it that way, that’s the way I would look at it. I’m, I’m super happy up for, for them.  Rosemary Barnes: But Quebec’s already connected to the US right? They’re, yeah. So if they are, their grids already very renewable, but it’s hydro, which is dispatchable. And so if they can replace more of their own, um, you know, local generation, even if they can’t connect all of that, um, you know, new, the new projects, if they can’t get capacity to connect it all to the us you know, directly, they could at least reduce the amount of their hydro that they have to use [00:15:00] themselves and then allow them to sell it to the US when, um, yeah, when prices are high. So it seems like it would still be, still be a win. And it also seems like it would be a whole lot easier to develop those wind farms than to go slightly south and you know, the troubles that the US is having developing. Developing those regions for offshore wind seems like this would be an easier solution. I don’t see a whole lot of like the, you know, the northeast of the us. So many people live there and they just seem like really set on categorically eliminating every single, um, sensible idea that they could have for. Generating electricity into the future and not just assuming that they want to decarbonize, even forgetting about that, they’re still, like, they, they won’t, they, they won’t build anything basically. Every, you know, you can’t, um, take advantage of the inland wind. They don’t want more nuclear. They don’t want more gas. They don’t want, uh, yeah, the, the, they don’t want offshore wind. [00:16:00] I, I don’t know. There’s, there’s a finite number of options that you can. That you can choose from to, um, figure out your new, you know, what your future electricity mix is gonna be. Um, it seems like it might be easier to, uh, you know, build a project in Canada, but they don’t seem so, so, uh, you know, bothered by every single option that you could come up with to generate electricity. They seem quite happy to, you know, generate cheap green energy and, um, sell it at a premium to the us so. Maybe that’s a, a win-win for everybody. I mean, it’s a, it’s a win-win except for in probably the, the cost of electricity that, um, you’ll pay in, in New York, obviously it would be cheaper to just directly build the offshore wind and connect it right into the grid there, rather than having to go across the border via HVDC, but  Allen Hall: I don’t know. I, I, yeah, I’m really wondering about the economics of that Rosemary. Just because things are cheaper in Canada. Well, yeah, it was about 30% less than what it costs in America to do things. [00:17:00] So just during that 30% number, if you could install wind at a 30% lower cost, you could then spend some money on building a cable or two. To me, that’s, that would, it would start to pencil out. You have to start thinking. America’s not gonna move. They’re  Joel Saxum: attached to Canada permanently. One, one of the things that we’ve said that there’s an issue with the United States, okay, we talked Jones Act and Vessels and these kind of things, but one of the, you know, the crux of the Jones Act is people and the fact that along that, like East Coast of the United States, while it is a maritime or a marine environment, it is not a maritime society, right? You don’t hit. A lot of big ocean going like, like when you’re in Denmark, a lot of people have worked on boats. They’ve worked offshore, they’ve done these things. You don’t run into that along the East Coast of the United States. However, when you go to PEI and Cape Breton and Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, PE, like those people, they’ve. They’ve lived with the [00:18:00] ocean, right? That’s, that’s their bread and butter. They’ve been on fishing boats. They know there’s a lot of mariners up there. So I think that if you’re looking for the ability to ramp up and scale up a, uh, a workforce, it might be easier to do it there as well. So there’s some advantages to doing things in Canada. Allen Hall: Do you think that, uh, they’ll find. Operators willing to take that risk or who have put down deposits on turbines that they can’t put into the United States that’ll just say, Hey, we can move up to Canada and do it there.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think there’s, there’s a couple of trouble troubling things there. If you wanna operate in Newfoundland Labrador, offshore wind, you better have your wits about you when it comes to o and m, ’cause that is an unforgiving environment. I mean, you’re literally, you’re combating, uh, icebergs, right? The Titanic sunk off the coast of Newfoundland. So just so we’re all clear that their icebergs are a real thing up there. Really nasty. You’re in the North Atlantic now. You’re, you’re not in Kansas anymore, right? It’s, it’s [00:19:00] nasty up there. It ain’t Australia, I’ll tell you that. So making sure that you, you’ve got your o and m budget squared away and everything is great. The other, the other economic thing. I don’t know what kind of, now they’ve said they’ve streamlined some permitting and some other things here in this bill that Canada put up. Great. To export renewable energy from Canada to Mexico or to Mexico, from Canada to the United States. You got, you got to have your, the, the, uh, economics. Correct. Because one of the things we always talk about in the o and m world is how much better the PPAs are in Canada. Right where you’re gonna see, you’re gonna see in Michigan a 60, $70 PPA, you go across the border in Canada and that is a a hundred dollars PPA or $110 PPA. Right. So if you have a hundred, if you can, if you can build a, yeah, if you can build a wind farm, and, and I’m, I’m just looking at the map right now, I’m going clo a little bit closer. If you can build a wind, wind farm off shore in Nova Scotia, which is a couple hundred miles from Maine. Right. Not a big deal.[00:20:00] You better hope that you can get more for that power coming into the United States than Nova Scotia would allow you in an offtake PPA agreement, because you’re gonna have to beat that to send it elsewhere.  Rosemary Barnes: But did you know that there’s a plan to connect the um, yeah, connect Canada? I, I think connect Labrador. It might be from somewhere in that region anyway, to the, to the UK to. Island, maybe  Joel Saxum: that, I mean, that makes sense.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean it’s long, I think it’s four or 5,000 kilometers, um, cable, something like that. Um, may maybe it goes ahead. Maybe it doesn’t. It, yeah. It, it’s long, it’s unprecedented. There’s a whole lot of technical challenges to solve, and I. But you know, like as far as some of these, uh, really big interconnections, I mean, there’s always a political challenge that, you know, I just mentioned between, um, Canada and the US Probably wasn’t the slam dunk that you would’ve thought it was a couple of months ago. But some of the other big ones that are planned, like from Australia, they plan to connect the north of Australia to Singapore via Indonesia. I mean, we’re not countries that are, you know, extremely, uh, close [00:21:00]on our, um, you know, international relations. Then the other big one is X links between Morocco and the uk. And again, like these aren’t countries that we’re not like at war or anything, or worried about imminent war. I mean, we’re, we’re friendly but not extremely like-minded. You know, between, um, Ireland and, uh, and Canada. I mean, that’s, as you know, that, that’s more closely aligned in terms of, you know, culture and, uh, history than any of those other pairings. So I do think it has that benefit.  Phil Totaro: The challenge with this is that we actually ended up canceling a lot of the grant money for some of those HVDC lines we were gonna put. To expand the capacity between the US and Quebec. Uh, so they’re gonna build, you know, additional pipeline there to be able to, to offtake some of that power. But we’re not gonna be able to accept it if we don’t have the matching HBDC [00:22:00] capacity to be able to offtake the power down here. So that’s still a technical challenge to be overcome potentially in another three and a half years. Allen Hall: When we come back from the break, we’ll talk about vest’s newest. Onshore turbine, a masses 7.2 megawatt machine. Don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs. Ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered. Their cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health today. Well, Vestas has achieved its first commercial installation of its V 1 72, 7 0.2 megawatt turbine in Germany. Joel, this is awesome. Which marks the latest evolution of, uh, the Inventus platform. They’re looking towards medium and low wind sites, [00:23:00]which I think makes a ton of sense. But they’re also, uh, I think the hub height’s like 175 meters because they’re having issues in Europe. Right, right. It’s 175 meters. Uh, but the rotor, Joel is 172. Right. So. The rotor diameter and the hub height, you know, it’s, it’s, they’re approaching one another. Uh, 7.2 would be a big term in the United States. GE is only offering what a 6.1 at the moment is kind of where they stopped. This one makes sense  Joel Saxum: that they’re putting it in Germany though, because Germany classically, right, they’re a little bit more land constrained for turbine locations, right. It’s not like the United States where you drive across Iowa and you’re just like, boom, boom. There’s a hundred turbines there and a hundred turbines there. Um, they’ve gotta pay a little bit more attention to, they’ve got a lot of little smaller towns in places and different local laws. Uh, so you’d see smaller, I imp smaller wind farms. And I think what you’ll start to see here is, is [00:24:00] as those wind farms have that interconnect and they’re good to go, but they’re getting aged out, you’ll see one of these turbines replace, you know, 2, 3, 4 of the old ones. Uh, is, is what I could see in some of those European. Places as well.  Allen Hall: Is there a broader market for a seven megawatt machine? I think so. Um, I guess I’m asking is there’s a lot of low wind areas that tends to be what’s left. All the prime locations with medium high wind are already taking. So if you want to hit somewhere and put a lot of turbines up, you have to be low to medium. Speed is, it’s a question of the hub height. The 175 meter hub height is. Big.  Phil Totaro: Yeah. And the, the challenge with that is that, uh, I think Rosie mentioned it last week or two weeks ago, about when people build wind farms, they interconnect them to the closest, uh, available transmission. Certainly, you know, that’s what they’ve done in Australia. That’s what we did in the United States as well. Um, and. [00:25:00] You’re necessarily going to build out everything you can in what we used to call kind of IEC class one winds. That’s the highest, you know, average wind speed about 10 meters a second. Once you’ve kind of fully penetrated those sites that are in close proximity to transmission, you start stepping down, you know, your average wind speed, and then that’s why you need to increase the, the power density. And basically for a given, you know, nameplate capacity of the turbine, you’re, you’re making a bigger and bigger rotor all the time and a higher and higher hub height. Um, so where is the market for this besides, you know, Scandinavia and Germany and a few places in eastern Europe? Australia is the big market. Chile, Argentina. If Brazil decides to come back as a market, that will be a market for these as well. Um, it’s basically places where they still have wide open country and they’re not gonna be land constrained. Now, theoretically, in the United States, we’re not land constrained, but. We, uh, you know, you’re only gonna [00:26:00] be able to put these in specific places where you don’t have FAA interference or, you know, you, a lot of counties and townships now have, you know, tip clearances from, you know, adjacent dwellings that are gonna preclude you from using anything this big in this market. It’s one of the challenges that a company like Weg, who also has a seven megawatt turbine, they’re trying to sell it in the United States and, you know, it hasn’t been, unfortunately for them going. Uh, very fast because there’s only a handful of sites where they can kind of put that thing and, and repower those, um, you know, these type of smaller projects with something this, you know, this massive. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I think that equation is changing a bit recently. Like, um, like you said, you know, you start out in high wind speed sites that are near transmission and then kind of go down. I think what counts as near transmission is sort of. Changing because it’s harder. I think everybody around the world is finding it hard to build out even small bits of new transmission that they [00:27:00] need now compared to what we thought that it would be like a few years ago. So I know in Australia our grid operator is explicitly, um, trying to move away from having to rely on that. So that means, yeah, building out more renewables in or close to urban areas. And, um, yeah, part of that, especially for wind, is gonna mean accepting a, a lower quality resource, which is, you know, the cost of energy from the, a lower, a lower speed wind site is gonna be higher than an equivalent, you know, higher speed one. Um, Australia is definitely, like, when I talk to developers, onshore developers, they definitely are largely thinking bigger, bigger, bigger turbines for onshore still. So there’s an appetite for it. Um, I do question, you know, to what extent it makes sense.  Allen Hall: And the question I always have is, how many turbines do you have to sell early on to make the project profitable?  Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I don’t think the early sales are [00:28:00] gonna make it profitable or not, but, um, definitely most of the. OEMs like to have a large initial customer or a few before they start developing something. Something that’s quite new. Unless they’re, you know, like really certain that it’s gonna be their new workhorse platform. Um, you know, if it’s a bit niche, they definitely want some, um, advanced sales to cover the cost of development. At the very least.  Joel Saxum: I think, I think Phil, one time, a long time ago you said it would be roughly cost like a billion dollars when you go from a brand new turbine model. Now this is Inventus platform, so this platform has been done before.  Phil Totaro: That was for offshore. We, we have run numbers in the past on, um, exactly this kind of profitability question, like how many units do you have to produce of each make and model for the OEMs, which is actually why when, when Siemens Gmaa merged, their numbers looked so. Weird that we were like, this can’t be true. But it’s exactly predicted [00:29:00]why they ran into the profitability problems that they did even prior to trying to sell the, the four megawatt platform. Um, we kind of held back from publicly announcing that because we thought we were wrong and I should have, you know, insisted that we do it because it, it would’ve really shed a lot of light on, on what was really going on over there. But anyway, in the meantime, it’s, it’s roughly for like a. Two to 2.53 megawatt turbine. It was about 350 units as you go scale up nameplate capacity, it starts coming down. Um. You know, in, in the number of units you need to sell, but it’s still roughly around, um, let’s say, you know, six to 800 megawatts worth of capacity needs to be sold just to break even. Um, and that’s assuming, ’cause again, back in the day when we did the calculation, they were still having like a 12% margin. They’re not getting that anymore. It’s maybe like two to 5% now. So let’s say conservatively, it’s probably [00:30:00] about 1.2 gigawatts worth of capacity needs to be sold for them to just. Break even. And, uh, you need, you know, really to turn a, a serious profit to get, you know, executives interested. Probably about two gigawatts worth of sales. So this week’s Wind Farm of the Week is  Joel Saxum: the Coyote Wind Farm. This is an EDF Wind Farm in Scurry County, Texas. So it’s 243 megawatts. And we’re, we’re switching gears and gonna talk about the SGRE. 4.5 megawatt, 1 45 turbine. On this one there’s 59 turbines. So they’re big turbines, right? Big turbines in the United States. More power with less footprint. An interesting thing here is, uh, at the time this thing was put in, that was some of the first, uh, installations of the SGRE 1 45. Uh, in the states and Masar, uh, owns 50% of this thing with, uh, EDF. So you have 50% EDF, 50% masar. EDF runs the wind farm of course, for them. Uh, but Masar money coming from overseas, coming from the Middle East. Um, so, and that was [00:31:00] one of their first to four raise into the United States as well. Um, this wind farm can generate, uh, enough power to sufficiently supply about 65,000 households, which is really interesting. Uh, and again, we always wanna focus on community engagement. Here we’re talking Wind Farm of the Week. Uh, what they did when they built this wind farm, uh, was to make sure that they engage with the local stakeholders they had meeting after meeting, after meeting edfs and the team out there, uh, talking with the locals, and they got, uh, everybody to buy into this one locally. And there’s a really cool, and what I wanna focus on here is there’s a really cool, uh, YouTube video. So if you’re on YouTube, uh, spending some time at work or, or at home. Uh, just look at the Coyote Wind Project, uh, from EDF and they have a video there about how they showcase this thing locally, uh, and how they work with the local government. So the Wind Farm of the week this week is the Coyote Wind Farm from EDF.  Allen Hall: Thanks for that Joel and Rosemary, Phil and Joel and I, we’ll be back next week from the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. [00:32:00] Everybody keep their heads up. There’s a lot happening in wind at the moment. Uh, it’s gonna change, it’s gonna get better. We just need to focus on profitability. That’s what we really need to do right now. And I, I, I get everybody is frustrated and they should be, uh, but not everything’s locked in, in the United States. Things are headed. At least it smells like things gonna be headed in a little bit of a better space over the next couple of weeks. So let’s see what happens and we’ll see you here. Next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Allen Hall covers the appointment of Catrin Jung as Vattenfall’s new head of wind division, the Netherlands reaching 20% renewable energy in 2024, Quebec’s $1.1 billion funding for a major wind project, and France commissioning its first floating wind farm. 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! Good news from the offshore wind industry today. Vattenfall has named a new leader for its wind business division. Catrin Jung will take over as Head of Business Area Wind starting July first. Jung currently leads the company’s offshore wind operations. She replaces Helene Bistrom, who is leaving the company. Jung joined Vattenfall in two thousand two. She has managed some of the company’s largest investments in recent years. The wind division handles both offshore and onshore wind projects. It also manages large solar and battery projects. Jung says staying focused on fossil freedom is more important than ever in these uncertain times. The Netherlands reached a major renewable energy milestone last year. Renewable energy made up nearly twenty percent of the country’s total energy use in twenty twenty four. That’s up from seventeen point four percent in twenty twenty three. Statistics Netherlands released the preliminary data. The increase comes mainly from new offshore wind turbines and more biodiesel use in transportation. The overall renewable energy consumption reached three hundred fifty eight petajoules. That’s a fifteen percent increase from twenty twenty three. Biomass remained the largest renewable source. Wind came second, followed by solar power. Renewables were mostly used for electricity at sixty percent. Heat and cooling accounted for twenty eight percent. Transport fuels made up twelve percent. The share of renewables has more than doubled compared to five years ago. A major wind energy project in Quebec has secured its funding. Invenergy and a consortium of 209 municipalities and territories in Eastern Quebec announced the closing of one point one billion dollars Canadian in financing. The money will fund the PPAW 1 Wind Energy Centre. The work will create three hundred fifty jobs during construction. Construction will happen throughout twenty twenty five and twenty twentysix. Commercial operation is expected in late twenty twenty six. Once operational, the project will add three hundred fifty megawatts to the local grid. France has achieved a renewable energy first. EDF Renewables has fully commissioned the country’s first floating wind farm. The Provence Grand Large wind farm has a power capacity of twenty five megawatts. The farm features three floating wind turbines installed seventeen kilometers off the France’s Mediterranean coast This is the first floating wind farm in France and across the entire Mediterranean basin. The project uses unique anchoring technology. Siemens Gamesa built the turbines. They’re installed on floats with tight anchor lines. The technology was inspired by systems used to stabilize oil platforms. SBM Offshore and IFP Energies Nouvelles developed this technology. It’s suitable for deep sea areas and provides excellent float stability. Bernard Fontana, Chairman and CEO of EDF, says the project helps diversify renewable energy sources. He calls it an important project for France’s energy sovereignty. The experience will help with construction of EDF’s second floating wind farm, Mediterranee Grand Large. EDF was awarded that contract in December twenty twenty four.

Carlos Oliveira, CEO of Fibersail, discusses their advanced fiber optic technology for early detection of wind turbine blade damage, reducing downtime and optimizing maintenance for wind farm operators. 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! Allen Hall: Wind turbine blade failures cost the industry billions annually. Today we’re talking with Fibersail, CEO, Carlos Oliveira About their innovative fiber optic technology that detects early blade damage before catastrophic failures occur. Learn how their shape sensing system is helping wind farm operators reduce downtime and optimize maintenance. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Carlos, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me here.  Allen Hall: This is gonna be a fascinating discussion. when I was over at Wind Europe, the activity around your booth was really good. a lot of interested people wanting to learn more about the technology and how to protect their blades and be able to determine early if they have blade problems. And I think everybody on the [00:01:00] podcast knows that blades are a huge issue financially. And we just don’t have enough information about how they are moving structurally or what kind of structural issues they’re having. How big do you think this problem is, Carlos?  Speaker 3: I agree with you. So we have quite a busy Wind Europe event. we were really full all the, time. and I think that, the problem is really, getting out, right? It’s every year, more than. Five, $6 billion are being spent in non-planned repairs activities. and this is impacting a lot to the bottom line of the industry. what we knew at fiber cell 3, 4, 5 years ago, that the problem was really big Honda blades. Now it’s mainstream knowledge. big companies are putting billions of euros, in, recognizing losses because of this issue. And more and more customers are coming to us. it’s [00:02:00] really a big issue and we believe that, it can really put in danger the wind industry as a whole.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And even if you buy a new turbine today, there is very little information that comes from the blades themselves. A lot of it is coming from the SCADA system, and that’s, those SCADA systems are not designed to detect this sort of. Issues that Fibersail can detect. Correct?  Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think it’s we are building bigger and bigger blades, using old technology, right? It does not work. you have a mixture for a big explosion happening, and that’s exactly what we are seeing. If in the past, the turbines, they were showing problems after 5, 6, 7, 8 years of operation. Today we have customers that come to us. with big problems in blades after one, two years of operation, some of them still during the warranty period. So it’s really becoming a big issue and that’s where our shape sensing technology kicks in because we have advanced sensing technology. For the most [00:03:00] advanced, turbines out there and the new ones, it’s really good interior, but the reality is a different story.  Allen Hall: how soon should you install a system onto a blade, particularly a new blade? Should it go in at the factory or, immediately after in the warranty period, or a lot of operators that we have seen, like to install them at year five or six of operation, which seems. Late to us.  Speaker 3: I tend to agree, we would prefer to have it installed, at the manufacturing. we know it’s not, straightforward. and what we’re doing, and this is let’s say our go-to market strategy, we are working with end customers, the owner operators of the turbines. the ones that have the hurdle, they have the problem to solve. And we are working with, many of them. We are deploying, we are doing a retrofit installation. And that data then can be used to convince CEMS to integrate this technology. Of course, that’s our end goal. we understand it’ll take, a bit of time, [00:04:00] transparency, the level of transparency we bring with our, chef sensing technology. sometimes, people try to avoid it, at the beginning, but we want really to use the data from the field and the value that we deliver to our customers. To push this into the product. So hopefully the next place that, the customers are buying from the OEMs will have, fiber cell technology, inside it. Joel Saxum: Let me ask you a little bit of a question about that, how it fits into the marketplace. ’cause we’re gonna get into the amazing technology that you guys have. But I just wanna understand, because when we talk to operators a lot of times we’re like, Hey, I’d love to implement this solution, but hey, I can’t do this until end of warranty. Or it’s, I’m under full service agreement for the next five or 10 years, or whatever that may be. And the OE EMM doesn’t wanna allow me to put this CMS on or this aftermarket product or these things. and contractually those things can be, those contracts can be pretty tight where you can’t even put stuff on that’s even air gapped. How have you [00:05:00] guys dealt with, that, or have you ran into those, hurdles yet?  Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. We, have, so we, there are different kinds of customers. Of course. If there is no contract, trying to block anything like this, we can, we have an easy entry. And we have some customers like that. others, they really fall into what you said, some of them even during the warranty, period. we, at Five Cell, we are our position here, we are a solutions provider and we position ourselves as a solutions provider for the industry, not necessarily for one or the other side of the industry. So we don’t want to be used. As a source of information for one side of the industry to try to attack the other side. We really see that the industry has an issue and, we want to provide transparency to avoid costs and to make wind, competitive, source of energy. and so in those, [00:06:00] situations, usually we try to do a cooperation with three parties. So fiber cell gen customer, and the OEM, if possible. So we always try to invite them. To the table if possible. because, we, have cases where actually, the contract is blocking the entry of, sensing technology like ours, but the customer is losing above the cap of compensation from the O end. So they are losing lost production. So the problem is really big. So there needs to be a, found a solution. At the same time, the OEM is losing money because they are paying the compensation okay, till the cap. But they are paying a lot of money and they’ll need to pay this for 20 plus years. So we position ourselves as a solution provider on both hands. Of course, it’s not easy, but as I usually said here with the team, if it was easy, it was already done. So we are in the. let’s  Allen Hall: talk about the technology just for a [00:07:00] moment. It’s obviously Fibersail. The technology is in the name, it’s fiber, but I, wanna understand a little bit about how are you using the fiber, how it’s installed, where does it go? What is the, electronics or the electrical boxes that are connected to it? What does the system look like?  Speaker 3: as I said, fiber, it’s easy. The sail part I can do here a connection, right? Fi fiber cells started measuring the shape of the sail of the sailboat. and now what we’re doing is applying the technology to a different cell, right? A blade is a rooted cell and what we are doing is really to get the added level of information of how that sale is behaving, in real time. And so what, we build actually is our shean technology. That’s the unique approach. We built a fiber optics beam that we glue inside the plate. We go from the root till where we can install in the retrofit. Of course, when we do the integration in the product, in the end, we can go all the way to the [00:08:00]tip. But that’s a possibility for a later stage. and basically we encapsulate all the fiber optics, all the. technology that does require, more, detailed level of expertise from the people in the field. We encapsulate everything into a system and then we hand over the system, to a normal field technician that can simply glue our sensor to the blade, plug the power, and then we are on,  Allen Hall: we are working. Wow. Okay. And how many pieces of fiber would typically go in a blade? Is it a, bundle of fibers in one specific area, or is it. Spread out across the blade structure.  Speaker 3: We have, two products today. We are working onto the next two. they are still, not at commercial level, but basically we have, our shade sensor. That’s our, core technology. But we also have, for example, in our product line, the standard load sensors. It’ll be incredible to know that more and more customers also need this kind of data. [00:09:00] even basic load sensing data is not available for the end customer and we can provide it. and so the setup really depends on what the customer wants. So if the customer just wants, very limited information, for example, we can provide a system with the load sensors in it. If the customer wants, for example, early damage detection, we put our shape sensor in it and we actually had on top. Hotspot sensor to do really the early damage detection. So it really depends on what the customer needs, what we do, we call it internally, tailored made, but at scale it’s that we adjust and we make a system using all the resources we have in our product line, to offer the customer solution that works and then it works for that turbine type for that customer. to, give you an example, we are working in a package that will be really working on early damage detection for a [00:10:00] specific turbine type in the field that has huge damage is huge. And then we have a system that works for the entire fleet of that, turbine five.  Joel Saxum: So I, one of the things I want to just, just touch on there and you, briefly mentioned it in its implementation, right? we wanna, I’ll raise a hand. I’ll put my operator hat on. I wanna retrofit the system in the field. Okay. Because that’s gonna be a lot of what it is. It’s gonna be less right now, of course, factory installs and more after the fact. So if they’re gonna put it in, you guys have packaged this thing so it’s easy for technicians to install. So you said like basically it comes in, they’ll be in different, like a beam of sorts, and then it’s clean and go inside the blade, clean, epoxy, stick it down and plug it in. More or less it’s,  Speaker 3: not as easy what we did. And we can do the, installation ourselves. And usually we are doing the installation of ourselves for, the initial qualification projects we do with customers.[00:11:00] let’s say you want to test our technology. Let’s install in five or 10 turbines. We can do it ourselves. And then we go to the hundreds after mine that you have with that model. And then we usually go to a, a service company, actually the ones that do the, service of those turbines in the field. And for that, we do, a training session. And so we train those teams to do these election for us. but we can do this because we put all the complexity farts on our side. All the fiber optics connected far with our side. And then it’s a robust system. It’s out there. You can put your feet on top of it, you can try to destroy it, it’ll not get destroyed so easily. and then you send it to blade, blade technicians and they can do the installation themselves, following, of course, our protocol. And we do the quality assurance on our science.  Allen Hall: Carlos, once the system is installed, what are we looking at as a data stream? Is there a data stream that goes to the cloud? Does Fibersail [00:12:00] analyze that data or is it data that the operator can analyze? What does that interface look like?  Speaker 3: We have all the, data flow prepared from the sensor itself, sending the data through 4G, 5G, starlink, you name it to the cloud. And then we have even a, dashboard solution for the customer. Anywhere in this process, we can say that we don’t go all the way. For example, we have customers that they don’t want our dashboards because they do have dashboards. And actually what they want is that we feed our results into their dashboard so we can adjust those parts to what are the needs of the customer. but we can do the full sweep in terms of the, data flow.  Joel Saxum: Okay? So this is an important thing too, ’cause we’re talking about implementation here. we’ve heard this from many operators. We hear from other CMS companies. cybersecurity’s a big issue, right? Because people wanna make sure that. no nefarious activity could happen within the wind turbine or anything like that. So how are you guys handling cybersecurity? Yeah,  Speaker 3: we take it very [00:13:00] seriously. Of course, all these communication protocols, they are to the highest standards using the industry, so we take them very seriously. And, in some cases, also mostly with the manufacturers, we actually do a edge solution, meaning we collect everything on the turbine and we don’t use any cloud access any. Any connection outside of it. So we use it, we store it there, and then we communicate directly even to, the data, the data lakes. Of the customer if need be. So we have this, these two levels of, of, options, let’s say  Allen Hall: o Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And then the interface is working with a large operator. Obviously they have their own dashboard set up and they’re watching the turbines in the structure. So there’s an API then that takes your data and pumps it into there. Specific system? Is that how that works?  Speaker 3: I’m not, the technology officer here, but, [00:14:00] to, give you an overview of that, it’s like we don’t offer the cu the customers, the raw data from our sensors. We offer them already the outputs, the value, and then we can, stream them to their own dashboard for, we have customers that, for example, they tell us I don’t have time to go through a dashboard and look into beautiful graphs and data. What I want is to receive an email. If you spot a problem or a potential damage, that’s propagating. I want to receive an email to go and look into that. And then our dashboard is actually an email or two emails that it receives when our system detect something is off.  Joel Saxum: I think that, to be honest with you, that’s more and more of the direction that the industry is going and it’s driven by the feedback from the market. So, kudos to that. Doing your, primary market research there, because these, engineers and site supervisors and asset managers, they have so much going on that at the end of the day, they just basically wanna be told what to do. They don’t wanna analyze the data, they just wanna see that [00:15:00] you’ve installed the solution. It’s doing, its smarts. You guys are analyzing the data yourselves and or, admit, of course, probably using some algorithms and whatnot. and they just get that email. They just get that notification, go look at this turbine, or Hey, you’ve got this propagating, check this out. That’s the way things need to be done. E Exactly. And, if  Speaker 3: you think about what we see is that you, have a handful of people taking care of, gigawatts of turbines out there. Then all of them have issues, but some of them, they need to be referred this week. Some of them they can wait a couple of months to do it. Today, you don’t know how to do it. So what you do, you send teams all the way every month to check every single turbine. And what you believe at cyber sale is that to start, you don’t have the manpower to do it. And then it’s not smart to do it like that. So the more complex turbines, they will get a warning from fiber cell, and that’s the ones you need to pay attention to. Because the other ones, they do have problems, but it’s not a damage that [00:16:00] will, hit you. next week. It’ll continue to propagate and you can optimize the way you manage your fleet.  Allen Hall: that’s a real interesting point. So Fibersail data stream, which is really accurate, can then predict the damage curve in a sense or how damage will progress based upon your intimate knowledge of that structure and when it is actually happening. That’s really valuable.  Speaker 3: Yeah. And, do we do it in a, different way from the industry? if you have other technologies like, vibration, sensors, meters and other stuff, what do we have that’s unique? Is that we, get the shape of the blade in real time. and so we look into the variations of the chain, but also we look into the model analysis of that structure, The frequency of that structure. And so we do a kind of a double validation. If the cha the shape changes and the frequency also changes. We have two variables to check that the problem is [00:17:00] really there. and I don’t see any other technology out there doing this type of validation to avoid false positives. So it’s, like we have much more confidence in the result head to our providing to the customer.  Allen Hall: So the different vibration modes that’ll happen on a blade, they do slightly alter over time as the blades age. Is there a significant variation there, even between blade to blade, meaning the same factory? Are you seeing variations in the sort of the overall performance, the way that the blade operates or, moves, based upon just the variations in manufacturing?  Speaker 3: definitely, yes. let’s say the blades are all the same when they leave the factory. That’s only theory. That’s why you only have a numerical bottle to try and simulate that. The reality is that they are all different from the factory, from the manufacturing tolerances. And then just think about one, two, or three years of operation, a repair, a new patch of fiber, and then you have a Frankenstein [00:18:00] turbine in your hands that you don’t know what’s doing. And, that’s the reality we have today. So all the numerical models, everything you have, they are really far off to give you the, precise, knowledge about that.  Joel Saxum: I think the industry would really love to see a white paper or report of some sort of, here’s what Fibersail was able to sensate basically a virgin blade and then this is what it looks like after this repair and that repair. ’cause like scarf, big scarf repairs, they’re designed to not create structural load hotspots. But I, mean there’s no way to get that perfect. So I would love to see, because I know there’s been a couple of DTU masters projects about this, but it’s all been. FEA stuff. It’s all modeled. It’s not actually sensed, and it would be really interesting to see if you guys could do that.  Speaker 3: what, I can tell you is that we have, a bunch of, projects out there. We are collecting data as we speak. some of them, I’ll say actually a very promising one, in the next couple of weeks, really targeting, damage [00:19:00]detection, early damage detection, and damage propagation. but, it’s, I said nothing, is valued as the data from the field. we are collecting the data. We are working on that. Actually, we did some publications that we wrote. So what I can tell is that stay tuned because we’ll be launching some called stuff in the next month.  Allen Hall: So where’s the EIS at the moment? Is it onshore wind? Is it offshore wind? I could see the value on offshore wind in particular because the, loss of. Like a 15 megawatt turbine is a, big driver. It’s a huge money issue. Where are you seeing the most activity for your  Speaker 3: systems? we are starting onshore. It’s always an easy, an easier entry, let’s say. And also the volume. The volume is there. much higher volume and a lot of problems. we are doing this, this summer, the first offshore installation in the Netherlands. and all the indications we have is that we have no issue going [00:20:00] offshore. it’s just a matter of planning the installation, doing that, and then the return on investment will be even greater. But again, we are working to have that, business case proven with real data, in the next couple of months. let’s see if you can, get it right to put the data. On the table. So what is the feedback from your customers today? What are they saying? we have different kinds of customers that said, some customers just want basic data. Others, they want really the eye end system that you can offer also. So we serve all of them, because our, systems are building a modular approach, so you can add layers of complexity as you need, basically. but I think the most interesting feedback we got, Because he’s using everything we have in our port product line is that he tried every other technology in the fields and none of them can help them.[00:21:00] And then he said, but what you have is something different. I really want to see if you can help me because I, don’t dunno what to do. And that’s, a great feedback for us. I said we like the, tough stuff. Easy stuff. Everyone can do it. we are focusing on the really hard stuff because. After we, we solve the hard stuff, we can also do the easy stuff. it’s like after we detect the damage, we can do a increase, we can do whatever you want. It’s not, it’s a no brainer for us after we can, do the early damage detection.  Allen Hall: So the system is, sounds fascinating and I do think there’s a place for this today, and we don’t know much about these larger blades and we’re trying to learn as quickly as we can, but. One of the things that Joel and I talk about all the time is just a lack of data. If you don’t have any data, you, it’s hard to do ENG engineering and it makes it hard for the next generation to blaze to be better. So Fibersail is gonna change that [00:22:00] dynamic quite a bit. I. And if you want to talk to Fibersail or reach out to Fibersail, Carlos, how do they get ahold of you? Where do they go?  Speaker 3: we are quite active in the industry, events. that’s, a good start. But, our webpage is always there with, you can contact us directly, and we’ll follow up on that via shared, or follow us on LinkedIn. We are also sharing there some insights of what we do. come and talk with us. We will love to, to try and, help you on that.  Allen Hall: And the website is Fibersail.com, F-I-B-E-R-S-A-I l.com. Great information on the website, Carlos. it’s, full of good information. So if you’re trying to quickly learn what Fibersail does, just check out the website and yes, the LinkedIn page that you have is really good also. So a ton of information for everybody to go check out and learn from. Carlos, thank you so much for being on the program. Really enjoyed the discussion. Thank [00:23:00] you for having me.

This week we discuss Australia’s recent cancellation of wind projects due to political changes and community opposition, the complexities of grid interconnects, and the need for strategic renewable energy planning. 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! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Well, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am Allen Hall and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who’s fresh from. Sweden, she just traveled all around the world to record this episode. Uh, Phil Totaro is out in California and Joel Saxum is up in the cold north of Wisconsin. And we, we’ve been just discussing off air. All the craziness has been happening in the wind industry. And I, I have to admit, you know, I thought last week was. Insane. Well, we just, uh, put it on steroids. So not only are we canceling a lot of projects in the United States currently, we’re all, we’re starting to be cancel [00:01:00] them on Australia and over in Queensland. The Queensland Deputy Premier, uh, has used his ministerial powers to refuse planning approval for the moonlight range when Farm Near Rock Hampton. Now I, and I’m sure I murdered that name Rosemary, so please forgive me, but it was gonna have 88 turbines in about 450 megawatts of capacity, enough to power about a quarter million homes in Australia and tied with, it’s about 300 construction jobs and 10 permanent positions to make that wind farm go. But there’s was like a two month public consultation period that happened. And during that consultation period, about 80 per 90% of the local residents, and when I say local residents are about 150 local residents, uh, replied back and were concerned about some of the, the known people that are gonna be there because it’s gonna like double the population, right. And 300 construction workers in a, an area of 140 people, 150 people. Uh, and based on [00:02:00] that boom, perhaps the, the project was canceled. What is happening in Queensland that we need to understand that projects just kinda get wiped away like that with 140 people, 150 people chiding in.  Rosemary Barnes: So what’s happened is that the Queensland government, the Queensland State Government, it was labor for quite a while and they had, uh, renewables targets and net zero targets and stuff like that. And then, um, the government changed last year, so now there’s a, a liberal government, which means conservative in Australia. They’re in power and they wanted to change their planning regulations. But what is a bit weird is that they wanna do it retroactively. So they’ve changed the rules in April, and now they’re going through projects that have already been approved to see if they meet the new rules rather than the rules at the time that they were approved. But the weirdest thing is that I’m pretty sure that this specific wind farm that they revoked, they were the ones to approve it shortly after [00:03:00] they came into government. They approved this wind farm and then they changed the rules a few months later, and then they did a new round of community consultation. Um. And they say that 85% of local residents were, um, you know, in favor of reassessing. The issue is that now we’re at this stage of the energy transition where, you know, we’re up over 40% renewables across Australia. Um, that’s primarily wind and solar. We’re getting to the point now where we kind of, you can’t just add things as they’re convenient and easy. You have to get a bit more strategic. Think about the whole energy system. I was looking forward to that coming online because it will make the whole system more robust and less, um, yeah, less fluctuations. You know, it would really even things out quite a lot to have, um, a lot of that Queensland wind in the mix. So it will be a, a real shame and a, a problem for, uh, the whole of the Australian East Coast Grid. If Queensland opts out of any more wind energy.  Speaker 4: But once [00:04:00] they approve these plans, it sort of, you have to think about the grid as an entity and unplugging some capacity. There does have consequences further down the transmission line in this case. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but each, each state has responsibility if they’re interconnected, but each space, each state has responsibility that they are gonna be okay regardless of what, they can’t control what the other states do. So. Every, um, every state has to make sure that they are okay on their own, and they are, they are planning for that, you know. Um, so yeah, like Victoria’s got, got a lot of plans for, for batteries and interconnectors and stuff, and, uh. I mean, new South Wales is building renewable energy zones. Everyone’s got their own plans moving ahead. It would’ve, it would’ve made the whole job easier. But you know, like any interconnector, um, or yeah, interconnection between two, two grids, you can’t, like, you kind of, you plan for it, but you can’t, you have to also plan for the scenario where that interconnection goes down or you, you know, [00:05:00]um, whatever reason you might not get the energy that you plan on from the other states. So. It is a tricky, tricky aspect I think of planning.  Joel Saxum: Mir. Lemme ask you a question, and this is popping into my head right now because it’s basically political games between parties and these kind of things. And normally we don’t talk politics on the show and we try to stay away from that. And I’m going to, I’m gonna skirt it. But a couple months ago I, when I was uh, down, I was invited to testify the Texas Senate and I was uh, always amazed. The lack of technical knowledge in the room, right? There’s these people setting their chain. They’re, they’re putting bills forward, they’re putting things, doing things that really affect the general populace, but their knowledge base is coming from like their chief of staff and their chief of staff is a political science major, and that person is just googling whatever. They want to see in the bill, so they’re putting things out that just didn’t make sense. Right. When it comes to Australian [00:06:00] politics, is it the same kind of stuff? Is it more of just like these political arguments versus the technical ones, or how do they get information into these decisions? Because this decision to me just seems like. It seems like it’s not based in, in scientific fact or scientific method around anything. It’s just like, oh, we don’t like these things. Let’s get rid of ’em.  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I don’t think it’s trying to be based. They’re not, they’re not even the, yeah, the government is not trying to say that it’s based on any kind of science or anything they’re saying that it, you know, they’re mostly citing things that community consultation. Um, so you know, it’s more about people’s feelings, which is, you know, a valid, a valid thing. I was listening to a podcast about Texas, actually, I’m halfway through it still, um, about what’s going on there with, um, some of their proposals to, you know, require everybody to have a hundred percent firming for each individual project. And I do think that Texas is trying really hard to, uh, you know, like, um, to, to, you know, they’ve got, you’ve got a pretty flexible system and allow, you know, [00:07:00] um, uh. And allow companies to make their own decisions about how, you know, what kind of energy sources they’re gonna have and how they’re gonna make money and let the market take care of it to a certain extent. And it’s really similar to the Australian electricity market as well. They’re, um, they are, they do share a common basis and some of the same people worked on the, um, market design of both of them. But I feel like Texas is trying as hard as possible to intervene to make sure that none of the, you can get none of the benefits and all of the disadvantages of a system like that. So. That is a bit interesting,  Speaker 4: but at some point, Rosemary, and maybe we’ll talk about this after the break, maybe that’s the thing to do, is to talk about this after the break. It takes so long to get projects approved because of the interconnect that this engineers have to go back and look, make sure if this is going to work, how do they connect this energy source into the grid? How do they make it work in the United States? And I want, I want want to get over the break here. I want to talk to Phil about this. We spent all this time doing the engineering work and then all of a sudden, poof, it’s gone. What [00:08:00] is the point of doing all the engineering work? Engineering? If at a moment’s notice you can yank this project,  Speaker 9: don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. eLog ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive to consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to vibrations and internal cracks. EOGs Ping has you covered. Their cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to easily stop damage before it’s too late. Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine’s health. Today, Speaker 4: Phil, explain what is happening on the interconnect and why it takes so long to get projects approved and all the in supposedly because of engineering, it takes a long time to understand what effect of adding a 500 megawatts will do to a grid. Then instantaneously you just delete a project. Doesn’t that really affect all the work that the engineering [00:09:00] just completed and spent all that time doing? It’s not, you just can’t plug 500 megawatts into a grid willy-nilly. You have to. You have to plan for it, but to delete a project does,  Phil Totaro: has like cascading problems. Right. I think you also just kind of answered your own question regarding what’s the challenge here. It’s, you know, if you wanna add five megawatts to a grid, that’s a lot easier to integrate because the, the grid can probably handle it. It was a little bit over designed. But when you start talking about adding or subtracting 500 megawatts plus at a time, and you know, there are terawatts worth of solar projects that have been proposed. Obviously they’re all not, not gonna get built. Um, but, uh, when you, when you’ve got that volume in. The interconnection queue. Every single one of those has to be independently studied. And then every single one of those, you know, the, how each one goes together and, and the impact of one on the other and the whole [00:10:00] system that all needs to, to go together. Originally, the way that things were being, um, permitted for interconnection was that, um, if you had like utility PPA in place, they would kind of put you to the front of the queue. Um. And nowadays what they’re doing is it’s kind of first come, first serve. So when they’re trying to figure out all the, you know, impacts on, on the grid from adding whatever the capacity is that you’re proposing, they have to take that into consideration in relation to everything else that’s been proposed and everything else that’s already on the grid and, and operating  Speaker 4: well. I’m just wondering what the effect of an IRA. Bill change is going to be right. So the, you have an IRA bill, it’s been around for a couple of years. You had a lot of applications to put, uh, uh, power sources onto the grid. Some of them have gotten approved. Or close to approval. So you have this expected pipeline of capacity being added to the grid. [00:11:00] And then if the IRA bill changes in the way it’s currently proposed, where you have six months or 5% or no, 60 days after the passage, you have to have 5% of the total investment re in the ground, so to speak. Bent. Yeah. Spent, uh, otherwise it doesn’t count. Right? So then you, you’re pulling the plug on some projects, I think. Doesn’t that just completely just wipe out all the planning that has happened in terms of the interconnect over the last couple of years that it, it really throws a kink in the works, right? I, I, I’m thinking about this correctly. It’s playing around. I’m the electrical engineer on the panel, I think, am I the only one that’s an electrical engineer? Okay. So when you add capacity, it’s not easy. Because you’re adding reactive power. You got real power and reactive power, right? So you got transmission line. When you start adding transmission line, you have this sort of, you have this inductive thing that’s [00:12:00] happening and you gotta balance it. Although it doesn’t work, you have. Big problems ’cause you’re not really moving electrons, you’re moving tic and electric fields around, right? So you kinda got these waves going. It’s electromagnetics, it’s the electrons are not, are just rattling back and forth in the wire to create these waves. That’s what’s providing power to the world at the minute. If we can’t do that efficiently, if we don’t plant it out, then you have problems. You have unevenness and the grid doesn’t like unevenness. One of the reasons maybe Spain disconnected from the grid was because of the unevenness. The frequency changes, the loads disconnecting bad stuff happens, and then they don’t have power for 10 hours or whatever the amount of time was. That’s a huge freaking problem. I don’t think anybody has really thought this through. I, I’m okay if you want to pull the plug and all the $26 a megawatt hour. Okay, sure. But doing it at 60 days is too [00:13:00] freaking soon you’re gonna create problems. Well, going back to the Australia problem and the now the American problem, you have to increase the amount of electricity on the grid period. There is a certain growth rate, I think 3%, two to 3% is generally acknowledged as that growth rate. I don’t know what it’s exactly in Australia, but it’s gonna be somewhere close to that. If that’s the case, you cannot be altering. You can’t go from 3% to 1%. You’re gonna have problems three or four years from now. Rosemary Barnes: Even if it’s 0%, you’re still gonna have problems because the thing is, in Australia, at least, you, our coal power plants are really old and they, uh, borderline economic to run even an old power plant that’s already paid, you know, it’s paid back all of the um, you know, capital expenditure. They’re borderline to run, right? So they’re all announced closures. They’re, as they get closer to their end of life, they’re getting less and [00:14:00] less reliable. And, you know, it’s one thing if, uh, you know, it’s not windy for a little while and wind power turns down. That’s something that everyone’s planned for. With coal power plant when that, you know, that’s a, a gigawatt all in one go when that goes off the grid, that is, um, challenging, um, planned for, but you know, it, it’s a bigger deal. You start to see a few of those happen at the same time and your electricity system suddenly falls apart. So yeah, even if you want to just have, maintain zero growth if you still want electricity into the future. You have to plan. And the planning today does involve replacing the existing coal plants with renewables. If you wanna place it with, replace it with something in something else, something instead, then you need to do that along a long way ahead of time. It takes longer to build a coal power plant than it does to build a wind farm. Um, and. Who’s gonna pay for it, you know, then there’s nobody interested, no, no private company is interested in building new thermal, uh, power plants in Australia because they’re not economics. So it’s not, you can’t just simply say, we want [00:15:00] things to stay exactly the same. They can’t. Your coal, coal power plants are dying. You know, you have to replace them. You can’t just pretend that you don’t need to replace them with anything, because that’s just not based on reality.  Speaker 4: Yes. And so the argument that’s being made at the moment, and going back to Rosemary’s point about the coal plants, ’cause that discussion is happening in the United States, now all of a sudden we’re talking about coal again, is that there’s just a certain amount of load. Always on the grid. The coal plant just provides all that power that the grid, uh, demand doesn’t vary up and down all day, which it totally does, right? So coal plants and gas, fire plants in general don’t nuclear. I’ll throw into that, into the mix. Don’t like going up and down, right? They like to be constant, but the usage is not constant. Is anybody talking about this? I don’t get it. I mean, the duck curve is real.  Rosemary Barnes: I’m, I’m talking about it. We’re talking about it. You know, people talk about it, but I’m not sure. I’m not sure everybody gets it. Like, last time I was at Queensland, I, I was [00:16:00] up there, you know, um, going, uh, to one of the big, big wind farms that, that are there. It’s already there, already running. And I was there at seven o’clock in the morning. Uh, I was just driving on to site and the turbines had been running. Then all of a sudden it’s like the whole wind farm slows down to a stop at seven in the morning. The sun is barely up, you know, so there’s a small amount of, of solo’s, heaps of rooftops, solar in Queensland because there’s just so much sun. It just really makes money and it takes like three years to pay back for your system. Um, so what’s caused that? It’s because no one’s using much electricity at that time of day. Coal can’t turn down beyond a certain level. The rooftop solar also, you can’t stop households from using their own electricity that they’re generating. So there’s just coal power. Plants are supplying more electricity than the grid needs, and so everything else shuts down. But the prices then, then they’re negative. That means the coal power plants are paying to generate electricity. It’s not, you know, they, they don’t get it for free. Sometimes they’re paying, you know, negative hundreds [00:17:00] of dollars an hour, um, a megawatt hour just to generate through the middle of the day so that for a couple of hours in the evening, they can make, you know, a few hundred dollars a megawatt hour, two. Generate, but now there’s heaps of batteries coming into the grid and they’re going to reduce that evening price spike. So it’s, it’s just like things are gonna change even faster over the next couple of years.  Phil Totaro: And that was actually the one big pillar of Labor’s proposal for renewable energy was, yeah, we’re gonna do transmission. Yeah, we’re gonna do more generation, but we need to have, especially consumer based battery storage systems. With some type of maybe subsidy or some other type of regime that facilitates the adoption of that technology because we, you know, the, in Australia, we need that to be able to take some of that power to, to basically eliminate that duck curve. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the Queensland government has just canceled all of the bomb hydro projects in the state as well. So, you know, they just like, they’re just nothing. You know  Joel Saxum: why?  Rosemary Barnes: Because they just don’t want [00:18:00] anything, anything, uh, any of these green projects, they don’t want any. Negative, uh, you know, negative effects from a new infrastructure project, unless it’s from, um, fossil fuels. That’s okay. You can have a new coal mine or a new, new, uh, you know, expand gas infrastructure, but just don’t, don’t do it for clean energy reasons.  Speaker 4: But those devices are not meant to handle flexible loads. Coal is not meant to handle a flexible load. So what are you doing if you, if you know you have a certain amount of fix? Sure. Inflexible, we’ll call it. And you have a lot of flexibility because that’s the way. The grid is developing at the moment. You have this flexible demand that you need to meet with something that you can turn on and off. So when they see wind farms being turned off, that’s a good thing. The reason they’re doing that is because the grid needs that. You have to turn those things off. Otherwise you have grid collapse. You will damage the grid for crazy [00:19:00] reasons by leaving too much. Too much power on it, feeding it and not enough pulling it off.  Rosemary Barnes: And the coal power plants, they, they have to pay a lot of money for the fact that they’re not flexible in that way. But you know, what I think is, is really gonna help, um, is so, I mean the Queensland government, I, I don’t know if they had any incentives for household batteries. Not, not that I’ve heard of, but the federal government has announced a 30% rebate. But I think that what’s really going to change things is because, so rooftop solar has changed the way that the average person thinks about energy in Australia. Because once you’ve got rooftop on, yeah, solar panels on your roof, and one in three Australian households do already. Then, you know, you’ve got a real economic incentive to use electricity when the sun is shining, right? It’s, um, the, you feed in tariff that you get for giving it to the electricity grid is not anything close to what you pay to bring electricity in. So, e everybody is naturally kind of incentivized when you get household batteries. Then it’s going to just really boost the extent to which households can shift their demand around. ’cause at the moment, like [00:20:00] if you’re at work all day. You can’t choose to do your, you know, um, I don’t know, dry your clothes in the middle of the day. Um, and if you would hang ’em out probably on the line anyway, if you did. But you know, there’s only so much that you can shift your loads around if you are out of the house during the day when it’s sunny. But if you’ve got a battery, then all of a sudden households are gonna be trying really hard to make sure that they are only. You know, relying on, they’re as energy self-sufficient as they can be. I’m not talking about going off grid, but I’m talking about, you know, using mostly self-consumption. Um, and I think that that is really gonna change how much, uh, you know, a non-friendly to renewables government can really bamboozle people because they will get this understanding you, you know, of, of what it means and um, and to what extent you can shift things around To what extent solar plus batteries. Can, uh, you know, supply the bulk of, um, bulk of power, which in a state like Queensland is, you know, especially true. So I think the discourse should change over the next few years [00:21:00] Speaker 4: as wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit ps win.com today. The grid stability is economic stability. That’s exactly what it is. And I, I’m not an analogy person as an engineer. I don’t like using analogies, but I’ll use this analogy ’cause I think it applies to the United States and it kind of clears this up. When the US started putting train tracks down, where are all the cities at? They’re on the train tracks. That’s where they are. When the US started to put highways in, where did all the cities develop? Along the highways when the, I, I, when, when the [00:22:00]Eisenhower administration went to this kinda the super highway thing, right? So Interstate 95 and 10 and all those, where did all the industry and people move right to the super highways is exactly where they are. If you are not on the electricity grid, if you wanna isolate yourself from the grid, you are isolating yourself and your future generations from economic success. Growth, you just are. So you wanna be on that grid. You need to be near that grid. If you want your children and your children’s children to have a life, they gotta be near that damn grid. And if you do, if you make a grid that’s unstable, like this happened in Spain and other places, it’s not just Spain. I mean, Spain’s the most recent case. When the grid becomes unstable, you become economically unstable. America cannot have an unstable grid. Australia cannot have an unstable grid. Canada cannot have an unstable grid. Brazil cannot have an [00:23:00] unstable grid, and for for some freaking reason, we don’t seem to understand that when politicians get involved in this, and Joel pointed this out, when you start unplugging unplugging projects and saying, we’re gonna fill this with some other sort of power sub source, that you are screwing with the economic viability of your community. That is what you are doing.  Rosemary Barnes: The average person, uh, that doesn’t understand the electricity system well to it sounds more reasonable. That a really constant out, out load, you know, base load generator is more reliable. We all know it’s not, it’s not true. Um, however, it’s just, it’s a simpler message and that’s why I say that as batteries come into households with rooftop solar. Then they’re gonna understand how reliable, um, variables plus, uh, batteries can, can be  Speaker 4: rosemary. I think the average person will never understand that, which is why the politicians are not talking to that. What, and Joel, correct me if I’m wrong here, but the latest I’ve, I’ve heard of the United [00:24:00] States and it’s a little bit of a different argument. I think Rosemary’s right on the technical side. Don’t get me wrong. She’s totally right on the technical side. On the politics side, here’s what, here’s what I hear in the United States at the minute. Well, those wind turbines are ugly. What the hell does that have to do with the grid? Security? Nothing. Coal plants are freaking ugly. They are ugly. No one wants to live next to a coal plant. That’s why we’re closing them down because they are awful to live next to.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s, it’s a mo it’s a, it’s a, it’s a politically driven, but it’s emotional versus technical, emotional, political, whatever you want to call it. You hear a lot of influence from all these things, you know? Here’s the opposite side of that. I think wind turbines are fricking beautiful. I think they look like works of art on the horizon. They’re cool as hell. Some of the, Alan, think about this. How many times you and I have literally pulled over on the side of the highway to take pictures at sunset together? Like we’re on a date.  Speaker 4: We’re not on a date  Joel Saxum: officially, by the way. We’re not, yeah. Yeah. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. To me, they’re beautiful. I think they’re amazing. They’re awesome, right? So then it’s [00:25:00] just this emotional thought. You like them or you don’t this, it’s the nimbyism thing. It’s the Nantucket don’t wanna see it off the coast. But they don’t realize that their energy future, their economic future is hanging in the balance of what they don’t like to look at.  Phil Totaro: If you go to any. Midwestern county meeting where they have, you know, a community session talking about a new renewable project they wanna build. That is precisely what ends up happening anyway, because the, all the arguments that people come in with are whatever they’ve Googled on the internet, and we used to have experts there, either from the project developer. And, and they still send their own people. But see, the problem is the, the community’s like, oh, well of course you’re gonna say nice things about the project you wanna build. But what we also used to have were people from awe that had a network of grassroots folks that could go out and provide independent support during those kinds of meetings. We lost that grassroots when they pulled [00:26:00] out and sent everybody into Washington because that’s where they think policy gets made. And it, but it’s not. Making the right kind of policy because you need to be able to change people’s minds in the local communities. And the lack of grassroots is what’s killing the industry at this point, and nobody’s investing in that anymore. Rosemary Barnes: Pol, let’s be honest, have politicians ever understood how the electricity grid works like in the, you know, the electronics kind of way? No, your average person under doesn’t understand that. So we’ve, you know, engineers, electrical engineers, power system engineers have got on with the job of keeping the grid reliable despite a lot of challenges for, you know, over a hundred years now. And if we would let them get on with it, then they would continue to do that. But now electricity is political because of, um, you know, climate change. And so that’s why we, you have all these problems where people want to, you know, mess with the way that engineers have always have always done things. So. Speaker 4: Sun Zia, the largest wind energy and solar project in America at the moment is being built [00:27:00] right as we speak. It’s about three gigawatts. Alright? So plugging in three gigawatts anywhere is a big deal. No matter how big your grid is. Three gigawatts is a lot of power. It’s run into legal problems again, and maybe they’re all justified. But if you take three gigawatts that are planned, co plan capacity. That all of a sudden disappears, could disappear, or could be delayed by a couple of years. That’s a big deal. And I, I think all the electrical engineers in the world would say, uhoh, we got a problem here that we need to get fixed. And I think that is gonna be more common now than it has been previously because of the size of the projects. The projects are getting massive. Instead of putting in 50 megawatts or putting in 500, instead of 500, they’re putting in five gigawatts.  Rosemary Barnes: But is that so different to, you know, like you’ve had, you know, gigawatts or multiple gigawatts of nuclear power that turns out to take 20 years to build instead of 10? You know, and that’s the same sort of thought of challenge. You, you, you, you [00:28:00] gotta, you gotta, in your planning people are ob Yeah. People are obviously aware that things can get delayed, uh, or whatever. So I don’t know if it’s a, a brand new, unique challenge. It’s a, a challenge for sure, but I’m not sure that it’s unprecedented. Joel Saxum: I think the trouble, the trouble that what you say unprecedented. I’m, I’m, I, I, I disagree with you because when I hear, like, I’m sitting in the Ercot market, right? And I watch what the Ercot like. 2, 5, 10, 20 year plans are great. Looks like we’re gonna be fine. They, they were the ones who put in the crest lines, which are the, the big transmission lines that go west in the state to grab all the renewables and bring ’em to Dallas and bring ’em to San Antonio and bring ’em all great. But they’re being undermined right now by the politic politics. And the politics are literally quoting the, the DC politics and saying like, we’re, and they’re standing up against renewables and it’s like. Okay. Whatever your political ideal ideology is, is [00:29:00] do you, but when you’re looking at stopping growth, stopping energy generation of the only sources that are deployable fast enough, you can only build solar and wind and batteries fast enough to keep up with the de growth and demand. Right Now, you can’t get, we’ve said this before in the podcast. You can’t, I can’t go to GE and order a thermal generation. I can order a natural gas plank and, and get it next year. I’m not gonna get it until like 20 30, 20 32 thought if I’m lucky. And by 2032, the demand in the erco market is gonna be over two and a half times what it is right now. So you better start building wind and solar. So if you’re passing legislation that’s undermining the ability to do that, we’re screwed. Like, I’m gonna go, I’ll come, go get solar panels and batteries for the house because you’re gonna have to have,  Speaker 4: do states start to take over. Where the federal government is stepping away. You can’t, if you cross state lines, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. In terms of, in terms of development, Joel, I’m not, I’m not saying in, in, you know, providing, [00:30:00] basically what I’m thinking is if it’s a $31, a megawatt hour production tax credit, and the federal government pulls it, which is the problem, they pull it, they, they bring it back, they pull it again. Okay. If, if I wanna have some stability, and if I’m in Kansas and the electricity is being generated in Kansas by wind and solar and a bunch of other things, same thing about Iowa. I don’t want that nonsense going on. I want them to know that the power is gonna be there when I need it, because my economic viability is relying upon that. It depends on that to happen. So do I take the production tax credits and build it into my. State somehow, either in terms of. Rate increases or subsidies from the state  Phil Totaro: government. The only way that they can pay for that kind of a subsidy at a state level is to raise prices or taxes or, yeah. Or taxes. But probably raising rates, uh, is the easier way to make that [00:31:00] happen. ’cause changing the tax code means more state level, you know, provisions need to be put in place. It’s just easier to jack up the, the, the utility price. So that’s, that’s likely the outcome if they go that direction. The reason why the industry’s pushed for federal, um, you know, tax subsidies in the first place is that it. It provides a bigger, more economically viable pool to pull from for, for those subsidies as opposed to leaving it up to the states where states are then gonna get into competition with one another. Where one’s, you know, Kansas is gonna make their subsidy, you know, 32 bucks and then you know, somebody, Oklahoma’s gonna make theirs like 35 and then, you know, which, which sounds good. I mean, it sounds like, okay, capitalism, yay, capitalism. But that’s gonna end up, but that’s also gonna end up having the, the same effect that you were talking about before, Alan, because [00:32:00] somebody that was proposing a project, even if it’s like, let’s say it’s somewhere in the Southwest Power Pool. Even if you were proposing a project to be built to connect to one node y, you know, based on. The, the inconsistency of the state subsidies, you may pull your project from one node and now wanna stick it into another node because you’re getting a higher subsidy over here. That’s why a federal subsidy is actually better, um, because it provides more consistency to the entire industry, regardless of where you’re building the project. Speaker 4: But it’s a brave new world right now. Phil. There has not been consistency at the federal government level. It has been very, if anything, inconsistent, consistently inconsistent. So it’s gonna be consistently inconsistent. Then the states are gonna take over or the utilities are gonna take over and make it consistent. Joel Saxum: So let, lemme give you a rundown of states and, and I’m just saying for money to be able to possibly do their own PTC. These are the states in 2024 that ran at a budget surplus, Texas, [00:33:00] Florida. And now it gets weird. Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, South Dakota, Wyoming, Nevada, Wyoming, big wind state, of course, Texas, big wind state. There’s a couple of big wind states in here. The rest of ’em, solar, of course, you can put anywhere. Uh, Oregon’s a big, Oregon’s, a pretty decent sized wind state as well. Uh, but I, I think you could see that. I, but I think you would, to what you’re saying, Phil, I, I under completely understand federal’s better. However, if they’re not gonna do it and the states start doing it, great, but I think you would see some lawsuits instantly because people would be like, and it’s because the power pools don’t follow state lines. Ercot is the only one that is within one state. No lawsuits there. But if you’re in S Southwest, you’re in Meso, you’re in the PJM, you’re anywhere else where that stuff can cross the the electrons. Technically you can cross state lines. Then you’re gonna run up a lawsuit. It’ll get stopped up instantly.  Speaker 4: I could see ways of structure would, would [00:34:00] work where everybody would be happy.  Joel Saxum: It’s about time. It would make com, it would man, it would make, it would make investment in states competitive. Think about that. If you’re sitting here in South Dakota and Minnesota and Minnesota’s offering you $30 megawatt hour, all of those jobs are gonna Minnesota. You know, all those jobs are gonna Minnesota, all that construction’s going over there, all that spend is going over, all that economic growth is going over there. That’s  Speaker 4: as easy as it is. That’s exactly right. That is the railroad of the 2020s. It’s exactly what it is. And if you’re not willing to hop on that train, man, you’re gonna pay a price. And it’s not gonna be a five year penalty, it’s gonna be a hundred year penalty. That’s what we’re talking about right now. So. Get on this electricity train, but thank you for listening to this podcast. Hey, there’s everybody’s frustrated at the minute we’re all trying to figure out ways to make the electricity grid more reliable, more consistent, and, uh, better than it is today. So thanks for listening. This is EP Time Win Energy podcast for Phil [00:35:00] Ro Joel Saxon, and now The Missing Rosemary Barnes. We’ll see you next week.

In this episode of Uptime News, Allen covers leadership changes at Eneco, historic renewable energy deals in Poland, strong support for wind energy in Ireland, and a surge in American clean energy investment. 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! Welcome to Uptime News. Flash Industry News Lightning fast. Your host, Allen Hall, shares the renewable industry news you may have missed. Allen Hall: Leading off the week, there’s a leadership change at a major European energy company. As Templeman is stepping down as CEO of Dutch Energy firm, Eneco on August 1st. Templeman is leaving to become the new chief executive of lighting company, signify in September. Eneco says Kees Jan Rameau will serve as interim CEO starting July 4th. The company’s board has already started searching for a permanent replacement. Templeman joined an Eneco as CEO in July of 2020. The supervisory board chair Mel Kroon says Templeman led the successful launch of the company’s one planet plan before Eneco. Templeman held senior positions at Shell across [00:01:00] Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Over in Poland, energy companies have closed one of the largest renewable energy deals in European history. Norwegian firm, Equinor, and Polish company, Polenergia, have secured 6 billion euros in financing for two offshore wind projects. That’s about $6.8 billion. The companies say it’s the largest project finance deal in Poland’s energy history. The Baltic two and Baltic three Wind Farms will feature 100 turbines with a combined capacity of 1.4 gigawatts. Polenergia, CEO Adam Purwin says they have secured financing from around 30 institutions. He says The company’s obtained exceptionally favorable terms despite challenging market conditions, construction has already begun. Onshore marine operations will start next year. The wind farms should begin full commercial operation in 2028, and they’ll provide power to more than 2 million [00:02:00] Polish households. And Irish citizens are showing strong support for wind energy development. A new national survey by Wind Energy Ireland found 80% of the public supports wind energy development, 62% back having a wind farm in the local area. The survey found people support wind energy because it offers more affordable electricity and reduces carbon emissions. Energy independence was also a key motivator. CEO. Noel Cunniffe says, Irish people know wind power is the leading solution to rising energy costs and climate change. He says, wind power is already helping reduce electricity prices and create jobs. 75% of those surveys support offshore wind energy. 82% recognize its role in securing Ireland’s energy supply. Research shows Ireland’s offshore wind farms could generate 38 billion euros for the Irish economy by 2050. And American clean energy investment continues to surge. The American [00:03:00] Clean Power Association says developers installed 7.4 gigawatts of new solar, wind and storage capacity in the first quarter. That represents $10 billion in domestic investment. The trade group says it was the second strongest start to a year on record. Battery storage achieved record first quarter installations surpassing 30 gigawatts of total capacity nationwide. The development pipeline grew 12% to reach 184 gigawatts. That represents $328 billion in potential project investment. CEO. Jason Grumet says, clean power is shovel-ready at scale. He says the industry has a technology. Investment capital and workforce needed. Grumet warns that the greatest threat to reliable energy is an unreliable political system. That’s this week’s top. News stories. Stay tuned for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.

Joseph Chacon, CEO of Padge LLC, discusses the impact of electrical harmonics on wind turbines and solar systems, providing insights into causes, consequences, and effective solutions for improving power quality. 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! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Joe, welcome to the show.  Joseph Chacon: Thank you. I appreciate it.  Allen Hall: Well, I’m glad we connected, uh, through Jon Zalar, I believe, and we don’t talk electrical power creation or what that. Kind of power we’re creating and what the effect of that power is on systems downstream very often, uh, the Uptime podcast, because there’s so many wind turbine issues, is mostly focused on mechanical problems. But we’re finding that more and more problems may have an electrical origin. We wanted to get an expert in here that would be you to come help us on harmonics because there are requirements about harmonics.  Joseph Chacon: There are, uh, IEEE five 19 governs [00:01:00] the requirements for harmonics. At the point of common coupling. Allen Hall: That’s correct. And your prior experiences with ge, which is now GE Renova down in South Carolina, that’s correct. But you were involved, maybe give a brief description of the things you’re working on because when electrical people talk, um, kind of gets lost in translation. You were knee deep, maybe waist deep, maybe eyeballs deep and electrical  Joseph Chacon: power at GE Renova? No, not, not knee deep, not weight deep, waist deep. I was baptized, completely immersed all the way in. I came shortly after the Enron acquisition. Um, I was one of the electrical engineering managers at the time. We had, uh, I think two or three at the time. Um, this was pretty early on. Uh, I got out of that because, uh, I’m, I like management, but I, I like electrical engineering, so I wanted to go back to being an individual contributor. Um, so I’ve touched just about [00:02:00] every electrical thing you can think of in a wind turbine. And also in solar  Joel Saxum: as well. You know, a little bit of a sidebar here ’cause I want, we want to definitely get into this deep technical conversation, but Joe, you touched on something that happens to people, right? You’re a really good engineer, you’ve run a team, you’ve solved some problems. So now you get promoted to management, but you don’t get to engineer as much anymore. So you get, like, you get, you start being leadership and like doing all these things, how to manage people, how to run a team, this, that, and that’s great. We need that. The industry, every industry globally, we need to be able to do those things. But for engineers that have engineer at heart, and I’m, I’m also looking at you, Alan Hall. Uh, they, they wanna be able to engineer, right? They wanna be able to do stuff to make a difference to, to, to get hands on with a problem. So, so you, so you’ve done that though, right? That that’s you, you are now, uh, Josh Shahan is, uh, pad LLC and  Joseph Chacon: pod is short for Padre, which is what my kids and grandchildren call me. They just shortened it from Padre to podge. ’cause saying two [00:03:00]syllables was too much and I liked it.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, I like that. Okay, so, so, so like we said, uh, you, you, you guys, you’re getting deep into harmonics and other issues. You get called in by Solar Farms to solve problems and, and this is the thing Alan and I were kind of talking about off air a little bit is. W we have a bit of a culture like in wind right now of electrical problem, swap, swap apart, swap apart in, swap apart out. But nobody’s looking at the, the root cause of why or why did this thing fail, and how can we, you know. Make this more robust for the future. And that doesn’t just stop at components in the turbine. It’s, it’s BOP, you know, and this is, like you said, also solar and, and other industrial facilities as well. But that’s what you tackle, right?  Joseph Chacon: Yeah. And you know, you mentioned John Zellar, uh, great, great root cause analysis guy. Uh, does fishbone, uh, ad modeling, things like that, um, what’s your observation that you’re seeing? I think is correct. People ignore. [00:04:00] One of the fundamental root causes for a lot of issues, um, not just in renewable energy, but anywhere you have, uh, large amounts of nonlinear loading, uh, these days. That’s primarily coming from data centers. Um, with the advent of the diode six pulse front end, uh, variable frequency drive, uh, IGBTs, any type of switching device. It’s only getting worse. It will never get better because we are putting more and more non-linear loads on the utility and fewer and fewer linear loads. Even our lighting today, we don’t use incandescent anymore. It’s all either LED, well, we used to do fluorescent, but LED is a horrific offender for harmonics. So, and I hate to pick on that technology because. They all really are. Um, so a solar inverter, a wind turbine converter, uh, a UPS, any type of [00:05:00]device is going to introduce more harmonic content into the grid. So you got the issue where the device itself has harmonic content, couple to a grid that’s getting more and more harmonic content already on it. So the situation is definitely getting more and more exacerbated.  Allen Hall: So some of those harmonics have really significant consequences. Uh, if you go to podge LLC on YouTube, you can watch some of the discussion there and walk through the equations about what harmonics can do to equipment on generators. Up in the the wind turbines, you can actually damage some of the Y connections on those, uh, defi generators. It can causes all kinds of problems. And I know one of the issues that’s, and it’s being sussed out right now, so we’re talking about it live as it’s happening, is, uh, they’re seeing transients come from the line back up to, to the turbine and are causing problems to the electronics. Straight harmonics. And the same thing coming [00:06:00] out of some of the turbines is the harmonics can be strong. And in one of your videos you talked about what kind of damage you can do with a transformer if you have harmonics that are significant enough. It’s, it’s surprising. How you can shorten the life of a transformer  Joseph Chacon: correct, or any magnetic circuit, uh, generators, motors, transformers, anything that’s going to take, uh, electrical conversions to magnetic conversions and back or vice versa, any type of thing like that. Uh, they cause extreme dielectric stress and extreme temperature changes. Um, and both of ’em are damaging. To devices like transformers, motors, generators, et cetera.  Allen Hall: Yeah, because transformers and all that sort of magnetic equipment is designed to work around a core frequency. Typically 50 hertz or 60 hertz, depending on where in the world you are. When you put other frequency components on that equipment, it’s not designed to do that. So that turns into a lot of heat a lot of times, [00:07:00] and then you over temp or shorten a lifetime of. Transformers on the pads and up tower in some cases that don’t. If you have a failure like that, uh, at a wind farm, I saw it most recently, uh, a couple of weeks ago, where they’re replacing transformers, like, wow, it’s only been there a year or two. That shouldn’t happen. There are other, so those kind of failures, unless you’re paying attention, are just gonna repeat, right? Because replacing a. Pad transformer with another pad, transformer doesn’t remove the source of the problem. It just puts in another fuse in the circuit.  Joseph Chacon: Correct. And you know, let’s say you put it in, in pick a year, January of 2015, and your harmonic content from utility can change over time. So many times it’s worth just taking a look at it. Um, in one of the videos you talked about. I promoted a [00:08:00] Fluke 1777 power quality analyzer tool that I use, and I rent that tool out to people that are wanting to do a study. Uh, and that’s an economical way to do a study. Um, the technician or engineer or whoever puts that in does not necessarily need to know a lot about harmonics to set that up. Uh, you’re going to be putting in either three or four cts, depending upon whether you’re a four wire or a three wire system. Then connections to your bus for voltage, and then you turn the fluke on and you verify that your currents are going in the right direction. So in Phase A current, it’s phase A voltage, and you start a session and then you mail it back to me and I’ll give you the report. Um, and it does a lot more than just harmonics. Uh, and I basically, I run an IEEE five 19 report. It does sags swells, it does super harmonics. It does intra harmonics. Super harmonics [00:09:00] are harmonics that are higher than 50, um, 50 times the fundamental. So that’s 50 times 60, uh, for 60 hertz people, or 50 times 50 for 50 hertz people. And you, you mentioned Alan, that Transformers motors are designed for a certain frequency. Um, if you take a motor or a transformer and look at it, it’s gonna tell you the frequency. Sometimes it’s dual rate at 50 or 60. Um, but the engineer that designed that transformer motor is gonna take certain things into account related to the magnetic side to make sure that it’s able to operate for that broad frequency range. Low frequencies are quite bad. In fact, as you get towards dc DC you can’t use magnetic circuits as a rule. I mean, there’s ways to make DC motors and things like that. And then as you get to tire frequencies, um. Then like 400 hertz is a common in aviation, you know, it’s specifically designed for that frequency. So when you introduce [00:10:00] even small amounts, it could wreak havoc  Joel Saxum: over time. So a question for you, just I we talking, IEE here. I. Do you get into, this is like a, as a, as a podge LLC thing. Do you get into more of these studies at the development stage, or is it once they are deployed and having problems, when do they call? Joe,  Joseph Chacon: you know that, that’s a very, very good question, Joel. Um, I do both. Uh, so if you, there’s a fixed installation. I could come in and put up the Fluke 1777 and conduct that study for that person or the company, or they could do it themselves and just, uh, FedEx or UPS me back the equipment and I could interpret the data. If you’re doing a new installation, I use a software called Easy Power. There’s others, uh, SKM, etap. Um, you know, if you ask me what type of phone I use, I’ll tell you I got an Android. Why do I have an Android? Because that’s what I’m comfortable with. That’s what I use. I’m not [00:11:00] opposed to Apple or anything like that. Why do I use Easy Power? Because that’s what I use. I mean, it’s, you get comfortable with what you use. Um, 20 years ago I used SKM. But easy power. And there’s a video on that YouTube series I mentioned about how to use easy power to do IEEE five 19 harmonic studies before you even put it in. Um, so that can be done as wealth. I. And I can model it with easy power after the fact too. Uh, but Fluke makes it so easy. It’s just hook up 6, 7, 8, 9 leads, whatever, click record, come back a few hours later and populates the report. Then when you want to talk about the fix, then I might have to use Easy Power to help with. Do you want a, so there’s lots of fixes and, and I hope we get to talking about some of the fixes here in a minute. Joel Saxum: That, that’s what I wanted to dive into next. ’cause I’m thinking, okay, earlier we talked, uh, RCA, how these, you know, what’s happening here And my mind immediately [00:12:00] goes to, and, and everybody that’s listening here knows I’m not an electrical engineer. Uh, like, not nothing nuts whatsoever. You know, like I, I, I put uh, KC lights on a truck once and almost burnt it down. So that’s not my, that’s not my thing, but in my mind, I, this goes through this, this unstable grid with a lot of frequency. So I go like, okay, is it a grid macro problem? Like, do we need to have more flywheel type technology on the grid to even these things out? And I’m thinking about like, I’m in Texas here, right? So there’s all kinds of renewables, all kinds of, you know, up, down, up, down, up, down. We talk about duck curves and we can look at a graph. Yeah, that’s the entire grid. But when you talk about at the wind farm or solar farm level, there’s so much differing load. And now we’re adding batteries and we’re adding data centers and all that stuff. So there’s, there’s multiple. Entry points, I think, to solve this. And one of ’em is, is like, is is Joe Shahan standing in front of Ercot and telling them how to fix their problems at a macro level. But what we, but I think what we wanna dive into here is there’s also filters and other [00:13:00] fixes from, you know, the abbs and the Siemens and the Schneiders of the world that can fix things at a local level. So what are some of these problems that you see and then fixes that you prescribe to solve those problems?  Joseph Chacon: I must clarify, it’s not a utility problem unless the utility is using massive amounts of renewable energy. Um, with that said, though, uh, whoever makes the wind turbine or whatever the asset is, you’re gonna be required for the point of interconnect to do that IEEE five 19 study. Um, what causes the problem is on the load side. Because you have the most classic case of this is a six pulse, uh, rectifier on the front end of a variable frequency drive. Um, before the advent of that, people would just put across the line starters or across the line contactors to turn on [00:14:00] a motor. And a motor is a very linear device. The only issue you might have with that are dips and swells. Uh, or mostly dips for that matter. But when you put a variable frequency drive on there, which is a wonderful, wonderful device, it gives you absolute control over that motor, and you wanna put it in all day, every day. But when you put it in, you’re gonna wanna put a line reactor in front of it. And if your VFD is here and your motor is so many feet away from your VFD, you’re gonna wanna put in different types of things as well. And those could be DVDT filters. Our sway filters ultimately. And I mean, sometimes you can just do a basic choke, but you’re gonna usually look at A-D-V-D-T filter or a sway filter between those two devices. So those are what you’re gonna do at the source for where you are creating your harmonic content that gets reflected back up onto the utility. So those are very simple things to do that [00:15:00] in my opinion, are no-brainers. And also use shielded cabling. Um. I, I preach this a lot between your VFD and your motor use shielded cabling. Um, now let’s talk about if you’ve got all this in place and you still have massive amounts of harmonic content, what do you do? I’m in love with the active harmonic filter. This is the best thing since sliced bread. And I don’t wanna oversell it because, uh, uh, my wife says, you talk about it so much that you make me think you’re overselling it and I don’t want it. That’s not what I’m trying to do here. But there’s tons of people, uh, companies that make an active harmonic filter and that has the capability at the point of common coupling of completely neutralizing your harmonic content. And this is the part that I like the most. Power factor correction. So power factor is, uh, just basically a ratio of, uh, [00:16:00] real power and reactive power. Um, you want it to be as close to unity as possible, and that’s what the utility likes. So another side effect of excessive harmonic content is also lower power factor, um, when you accurately measure it. So an active harmonic filter. Um, it’s kinda like, I forget which law. I think it’s Newton’s third law for every force, there’s an equal and opposite force to go with it. So if I just push that there, I’m not pushing back on it. Right? So if you have a, let’s say you have, I don’t know, 500 hertz of harmonic content that’s constantly being injected. An active harmonic filter will come in and basically do that. It’ll also do it for other frequencies all at the same time, completely counseling them out. It really is a, a wonderful, wonderful device. And you don’t have to put it in series with anything. You put it in shunt and that means you could get close to [00:17:00] your point of common coupling. So on. So a point of common coupling. It, you could be def you could define it anywhere, but if you were gonna put this in, uh, let’s say at a a, a solar plant. You could put this in at the output of the central inverter, or if you got a string of series, um, a series of string inverters, you could put it at the switchboard there as well. Um, and it’ll neutralize the harmonic content that’s there and even downstream as you get further and further away from ect Harmonic filter. Your THDV, that’s total harmonic distortion, voltage, and a little bit of THDI, total harmonic distortion. Current goes down as well, but at the point of common coupling, you are putting the cadis on that and squashing it. It’s a pretty cool device and I. I don’t sell them, but I help specify them.  Joel Saxum: So it’s like, it’s the, it’s the ultimate [00:18:00] noise canceling headphone for BOP. Joseph Chacon: Yes. Perfect. That’s exactly the best analogy. I love that.  Joel Saxum: So you go on Amazon, you buy a set of BS seven fifties, and you put ’em over the cable. Right. Then it’s good.  Joseph Chacon: Very,  Joel Saxum: very  Joseph Chacon: similar technology. Yes. I, I love the analogy. I love the analogy.  Allen Hall: Yeah. But it’s magic because 20 years ago you really couldn’t do that. Or if you wanted to, it was super expensive and. If the prices come down, they’re still expensive, but you’re trying to eliminate a more complex problem that you didn’t necessarily create, right? So a lot of these harmonics. Or coming out of equipment that probably did not really meet the spec to begin with, and you’re just trying to find an ultimate solution that gets the plant running again. And that’s the key here. It’s gonna save you a tremendous amount of time and effort if you can use active suppression instead of trying to fix the a hundred inverters that are creating this problem. And,  Joel Saxum: and that’s  Allen Hall: the one  Joel Saxum: thing I want to touch on there, like, if, if, if this isn’t solved or if this is an issue and [00:19:00] you don’t use a certain fix. Failures, the what are the components that will  Joseph Chacon: fail any and everything. I, I was, uh, gosh, I did a presentation of harmonics a couple of days ago, and I used the Bugs Bunny analogy of the gremlin in the airplane. Uh, so in the 1940s during World War ii, many of the pilots would say, we have gremlins in our system. Um. Gremlins are kind of like harmonics. They just show up in all types of different places, even even on mechanical devices, uh, related to bearings and other things. Um, they, it just shows power supplies can start going, motor bearings can start falling. All types of things can start failing. So  Allen Hall: let’s talk about that. There are a number of main bearings that are failing in wind turbines today that look like they have electrical discharge damage. And the, everybody who’s designing these systems, these wind turbines is pretty smart, right? There’s, there’s a lot of engineering that goes into a [00:20:00] wind turbine, but when you have undesirable harmonics, regardless of where they come from, can be from a SU piece of supplied equipment that those harmonics can show up on. Mechanical devices like bearings, you can actually pick up harmonics physically from discharge, you’ll see discharges to bearings and. Uh, drive shafts all the things you wouldn’t expect. But here’s the one thing I wanted to talk to you about, Joe. Can you, can you kinda physically see like, oh, that’s an electrical discharge, or, oh, that’s a mechanical failure. Are there differences between those two when it comes to mechanical failures from harmonics?  Joseph Chacon: In cases like that, that’s where you wanna pull, pull in a holistic RCA approach. Uh, kinda like the gentleman John we’ve been talking about before. Um, John is a great systems engineer and he would help isolate electrical, mechanical, environmental, things like that, uh, and look at the contributing factors [00:21:00] that come in to producing all of those things. The answer is yes, it could. Um, but not every time. And it takes, uh, a certain amount of surgical precision to diagnose the root causes or combination of root causes.  Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s one of those Sherlock Holmes, uh, quotes, right? Once you’ve eliminated the impossible, everything else is. Possible. What is that? What is that saying guys? It’s probable, there you go. Right It where you’ve, on the mechanical side, it seems like we’ve eliminated a lot of mechanical probabilities of, it could be something in manufacturing, it should be something in tempering, it should be something in coatings. And now we’re going down that rabbit hole of, I wonder if this is electrical discharge. I wonder if the brushes are working. Do we need to install brushes? Do we need to add more grounding? In the towers to get rid of some of these or provide another path for the harmonics to go through. It’s a complex problem. But Joe, if they’re not bringing someone like you into help look at this problem, they’re not gonna solve it just by [00:22:00] Joseph Chacon: eyeballing it. Right? Right. And then finally, the most important consideration of all of this is, is economics. Um, and fin finance. Um, sometimes living with the devil, you know, is better. Then the angel, you don’t know. And uh, you notice I switched that up. Yeah. Everything has to have an ROI in a business case, and you can come in and solve this and probabilistically reduce all failures to six seven Sigma. Um, but at what cost? Um, so what I try to do is help customers really dig into it electrically. And if, and if you got mechanical devices that are failing, then you’re gonna wanna look at it holistically. Um. In, in the case of solar and things like that, you know, you don’t have a lot of moving parts. Wind turbine’s a little bit more complicated. Um, but at a facility, um, where you have motors and drives and things like that, um, it, it doesn’t always have [00:23:00] to be electrical or mechanical. Um, I, I became a thermal engineer over the, over the last few years, not because I liked thermodynamics. Because I had to keep my electronics cool and it was a discipline that I had to, to really get familiar with. Um, the things related to bearings and other stuff like that. I’ve known some phenomenal bearing people, loads people through the years. That stuff I don’t understand. When you bring in a good system engineer and you’re able to holistically parse it out, uh, that, that would be the way to go on those things. Joel Saxum: Absolutely. I like part of this conversation here, Joe, is that, um, okay, so this is, this resonates with Alan and I because we are talking with lightning protection people every day, right? Like, Hey, I have this issue, have this issue. There’s a specific fix or, or a, a prescribed fix for a lot of different things that can happen. But it all needs to be based in a business case. If the business case doesn’t make sense. Or you can’t present a decent business [00:24:00] case to someone, you might as well just get off the phone. I, and, and I think that the wind industry really needs that, uh, renewables industry in general, but the wind industry really needs that if we’re trying to ’cause the goal, one of the goals of the, the uptime podcast here is to lower the, the LCOE if we can help make wind turbine or wind energy more competitive across the globe. Beautiful. So the, the fact that you’re approaching business as business case forward, I really like to hear that.  Joseph Chacon: That’s good feedback. I like that.  Allen Hall: So Joe, I know we could go on all day and if you let me, I will. Uh, so we’re, we’re gonna have to invite you back because I think as Joel and I learn more about some of these harmonic problems that exist in turbines and, and also. On the line, uh, we want to talk to you about possible solutions, what you can do about it, how to address it, even how to suss it out, diagnose it  Joseph Chacon: related to, to lightning. Uh, I’m sure all the time you’re constantly looking at, did the utility cause this, did the device cause this, or did lightning cause [00:25:00] this? So bringing that harmonic aspect in and utility power, quality in general. Harmonics is just a subset of the overall power quality. Um. It, it definitely does help differentiate things from something happened electrically. What was it? You know, that, that, that level of knowledge I think goes a long way. Allen Hall: Yeah, it sure does. So Joe, how do people get a hold of you if they need to do a harmonic analysis or just take a, a kind of a holistic look at what’s happening electrically in their turbines or in their solar facilities? My  Joseph Chacon: email is pretty easy. It’s josephchacon@padge.org. Um, my website is padge.org as well. Um, I encourage people to check out the YouTube videos because that’s to demystify harmonics a lot and, uh, educate people. Uh, my goal is if people and technicians and engineers are educated. It helps them become better for [00:26:00] their companies. And, uh, you know, I do like making a buck, but more than that, I like seeing people succeed. And, um, I have a lot of people in various industries, uh, not just renewables. Um, I wanna give them the tools to be able to do what’s best for their companies. And that’s what. Helps me sleep good at night is is doing that in education.  Allen Hall: So check out Joe’s website, it’s spelled padge.org and you can also check out Joe’s YouTube channel. Same thing, Padge LLC. Just put into YouTube and it’ll come up. You can watch some of those videos on harmonics. Very interesting stuff, Joe. Appreciate you actually putting that up on the internet. Uh, it’s gonna help a lot of people. So Joe, thank you so much for being with us today. And yeah, we’ll talk soon. Thank you, Allen. Thank you, Joel.

Lene Hellstern, Director of Engineering at PEAK Wind, discusses the complexities of onshore wind siting, the advantages of using LIDAR technology, and strategic considerations for turbine selection. 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! Allen Hall: We’re back with Lene Hellstern, the Director of Engineering at PEAK Wind, and we’re talking about onshore wind siting, which is a really critical issue that a lot of operators have difficulties with. And I’ve seen it in the United States and it’s not good. And I’m wondering from your perspective, what are some of the problems, Lene? Well first, welcome back to the podcast.  Lene Hellstern: Thank you. And thanks for having me repeat experience last time, so I hope so. I thought I’ll pop in again.  Allen Hall: Well, it’s good to have you back and thanks  Lene Hellstern: for coming to Copenhagen.  Allen Hall: Yeah, well we love Copenhagen. It’s great. Uh, I just wish it was a little bit warmer. Yeah, the sun is terrific. Yeah. When you’re in it, well, at  Lene Hellstern: least I fixed that. Right. Yes. It’s not raining. It’s not raining. Yes.  Allen Hall: We, we quite enjoyed it. Uh, but I’m trying to get an understanding of what the underlying issues are with onshore wind siding and why some of the operators have difficulty later on. Let’s just start with the sighting [00:01:00] itself. Yeah. Is usually, we’ll see a wind mast out on site for several months, maybe a year, maybe two years. To try to get some wind data. We would  Lene Hellstern: really like that. Yeah. Okay. But, uh, the preferable measurements are lidars.  Allen Hall: Oh, lidars. Yeah. I have not seen a lot of lidars in use. Lene Hellstern: No. You, you need to get some more.  Allen Hall: Why?  Lene Hellstern: Um, because they reach higher.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Lene Hellstern: Um, and you can, uh, you can, you can move them around. Right. And the hassle of installing a Met Mass that’s a hundred meters tall, is, uh, is it a problem? Quite, uh. Quite it, it cost a lot more. Yes. Um, and, and the lidars, they, they just, they’re better and they measure higher. And you can, you can have one sort of mother lidar and then you can move the other around and you can cover your wind resources and site suitability much better on the site. So I would definitely recommend  Allen Hall: lidars. Okay. How the lidars use a [00:02:00] good bit of power to make them run, correct? Yes. So you need a decent power source? Yes.  Lene Hellstern: You do? Yes.  Allen Hall: Okay. Yeah. I, is that one of the difficulties why they don’t use a lidar? Is it just in a lot of remote areas, they don’t have the power source to run it?  Lene Hellstern: It could be, or it could be the, the lack of knowledge. Right. Traditionally we have used med masks, yes.  Allen Hall: Forever.  Lene Hellstern: Uh, so, so it could be, and then there are also some, um, uh, some issues with uncertainties because the lidar is the, the standards are not up to date. I would say that’s the political way correct way of saying it. So. Eh, the standard actually introduces more uncertainty on the lidar that’s really not necessary to, due to a calibration with a me mast. Um, so that there’s some, there’s some things that needs to improve in that area  Allen Hall: because a lidar should be a lot more accurate than a met mast. Lene Hellstern: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But, but the, the downside of the lidar, so that, that is not often we see that, is if you don’t have enough particles in the air, you have [00:03:00] an issue because then you are, you’re simply not gonna be able to measure. The, the, uh, velocity of the particles because they’re not there. And then you have a low availability on your measurements. But, you know, most places there’s, there’s a quite a lot of dust. There’s pollution. Um, so there, there are things in the air that we don’t see, but the lighter sea and then you can make the measurements.  Allen Hall: And as the hub heights have gotten taller, it gets a lot more difficult to get a met mass up that high. So the lidars go can measure winds. How high up in the air? How many meters? I  Lene Hellstern: think at least 250 meters. Wow. And, and you want, you want to, you know, traditionally you would only measure at hop height, but you wanna measure at the, the, the rotor surface, right? So you wanna measure at tip height, and you wanna measure at lower top tip and lower tip to, to see what, for instance, what’s the wind share across your, uh, rotor disc. Um, which  Allen Hall: you cannot really do with a met mast at all. You can’t do that. You have no [00:04:00] wind share knowledge. From that instrument? Sort of, yeah,  Lene Hellstern: you can, because you can make, you always, you, you have a met mass that’s at least at hop height, and then you have, uh, anemometers and wind veins and I don’t know what on all the way down. Um, and you can with, without that equipment, you can, you can measure on the lower part of the rotor, but not the upper part. So, so you, you do get some possibilities to measure wind share, but not as good as, um, for instance, a lidar. Yeah.  Allen Hall: So how many lidars would you typically need on a 100 turbine site? Lene Hellstern: Well, that depends.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Lene Hellstern: Because you have a, if you have complex terrain,  Allen Hall: right?  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. You may want a lot. Right. That’s what I  Allen Hall: was wondering if the more hills and valleys, the, the more lidars you will need, or more samples you’ll need, or maybe the longer duration you’ll need. Yes.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. And you, you would wanna, you know, it’s always the best to measure it. I think it’s [00:05:00] ideally five years. Nobody does that five years. Nobody. No, no. But you should at least have two, right?  Allen Hall: Yes.  Lene Hellstern: Uh, and then you should do a proper long term correlation. Um, so, so that’s, and how does  Allen Hall: that, how does that accomplish Right now, let’s just say we have a met mass. What I typically see is, has been a met mast out in the middle of the United States where the winds are pretty good. Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: And they have data. They have some data. Yeah. So typically I’ve seen them out there a year, maybe two years, and then. The, but the sites are massive. Yeah. They’re, they’re square miles. Yeah. Dozens of square miles. So it’s big.  Speaker 3: Yeah. I  Allen Hall: dunno whether it’s in kilometers, but a lot of square kilometers. So then they are trying to interpret interpretate that data that they have from the Met Mass on top of that. I think they’re looking a little bit forward in terms of who, what other wind farms may be surrounding us in the next several years. Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: And that’s, that’s one of the challenges we have because there’s a lot that. Uh, you, there’s a lot of guessing.  Allen Hall: Yes.  Lene Hellstern: Um, and so if [00:06:00] you are planning a wind farm, you wanna know what goes on in the area. You wanna map out the already existing turbines, uh, and what, what hop height, what rotor size, because you wanna be able to model them in your calculations.  Allen Hall: That was really good. Get to my question about how difficult this process is and how you try to address it. In the United States, we turn over wind turbines every 10 years, so there’s a repowering happening and. Almost always, the rotor size gets substantially bigger. 20 to 30 to 50% bigger. Right. So there’s fewer turbines, same location. Yeah. And the turbines are roughly in the same spots, but they’re just bigger rotor diameters. How do you then prepare for that? Do you use the old data or is the old data even applicable? If I’m really dramatically increasing the rotor size, do I need to be doing more? LIDAR measurements before I make that repower, or how do I even cite that? Right.  Lene Hellstern: Uh, you can, if you have some good SCADA data from your turbines, you can do some [00:07:00] modeling. And many of the sites actually have a met mast. They do a lot Yeah. As a reference, right? Yes. Right. But that will be on it, it will have sectors where there’s a lot of weight from the existing.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Lene Hellstern: So, and so I would, I would, I would try, I would filter your SCADA data from your site and see if, can I, can I use this? I’ll take a look at the mid mass state and see, can I use this? If not, I’ll start a me mass campaign. Now the problem is if you’re reusing the spots now, well first of all, that’s a little bit difficult reusing because your foundation is dimension to an old generation turbine. Uh, let’s say take someone a hundred, a hundred, uh, meter rotor, right? Right. But now you’re going up in size. Um, so that means everything gets heavier and bigger, right? So your foundation may not be suitable. The old foundation, normally they’re over dimension. So you can, you can extend life or you could repower on them, but you would want a bigger turbine. [00:08:00] So you don’t necessarily want to use the opposition, right? And then you would wanna know what is in the pipe. You know, when can I get my, when can I start digging? Right? When can I start installing? Uh, what is in the pipeline at that point from the OEMs? Because sometimes it actually takes five years from, you start planning until you, you, you start digging. And in that time, if you, you, if you space with today’s models, you are gonna have two shorter distance between the turbines because the new turbines on the market that you would wanna buy has increased significantly. Um,  Allen Hall: and that’s a real problem. Yeah. Like that, this, this. Between the, the siting time, the met mass, the LIDAR data, getting enough data and having to make the decision about a turbine relatively early because the production lines are not operating at full capacity right now. Yeah. It’s hard to get a turbine. So you are 3, 4, 5 years out. Yeah. How do you plan for that on an onshore site?  Lene Hellstern: Well, [00:09:00] you, you gotta guess a rotor and guess a, a turbine site. Okay. Right, right. So, but  Allen Hall: do, do the engineering staffs that a lot of operators have that inside knowledge because it seems like smaller operators, I’m, I’m not the urals of the world, have power and they can see inside the factories and they have a really good connection and they develop that connection over a long, many, many years. Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Where newer operators usually do not have that sort of insight. So where do they go to get help?  Lene Hellstern: Well, well, they could go to, right? We could help them a little bit, but. You can also look, if you look at the evolution of the turbines, you can, and I, I’m, I’m hoping we are at a little bit of a pause here in the, in, in the growing size. So we, we can refine the turbine, we can refine our manufacturing facilities. We, we get better at service and installation. But you can pretty much, you know, guess the rotor. Uh, I’ve, I’ve done that a lot in, in this job and my previous job, because you [00:10:00] look at, if you look at when the. When did what? Come on the market and from what, OEM. Right. And then you, you know, there’s, there’s other topics you need to look into for, for instance, site suitability. Right? Right. What are, what are the conditions on the site? Um, are you a, we, we categorize in different classes. I, e, c, 1, 2, 3, um, or turbulence classes. A, B, C. And then there’s the, the class I like the least that is the Class S. Which is special. And then you never know what it is before you start digging in all the paper. Um, but, but you, that’s sort of the first things you need to find out. What class are you? And then there’s a small in that because, um, you may think you are a, a class two or have a class two side, but then it turns out that your air density is unbelievably low. So sometimes you can actually squeeze in a class three. Turbine on a class two [00:11:00] side and get that much more production.  Allen Hall: Do a lot of operators know that?  Lene Hellstern: No.  Allen Hall: I wondered. Okay. Yeah. Well  Lene Hellstern: maybe the, it’s not so much the operators. It’s the developers. Developers. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That has to, to, to dig a little bit more into the lovely engineering science around turbines and. And, and then do more site suitability because you can actually improve your, the value of your project quite significantly.  Allen Hall: That’s what I wonder if, if you spend a good extra amount of time maybe spending a little more money to get LIDAR measurements Yeah. And to do them for a slightly longer period of time, does that have a return on investment? Lene Hellstern: You get, you get less uncertainty. Right. And then I think some of the issues or some of the mistakes that the developers do, they. They do a wind, they do a, a production estimate, but that is not the same as a site suitability or uh, [00:12:00] you know, also, some people also think if I do a wind resource assessment, then I’m covered. No, because that is the input to the site suitability. Now you also need to do the site suitability. So you know, I would start out doing a wind resource assessment, right? Then I would do a site suitability and then you do your production calculator.  Allen Hall: And how long does that process take, generally?  Lene Hellstern: Oh, that’s always a cue. So it could take, uh, it depends on who you use for this, right? But it could take four to to eight weeks.  Allen Hall: Okay. That’s not horrible. No,  Lene Hellstern: no, no.  Allen Hall: Alright, so it, it is relatively efficient compared to other things that happen in wind.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. If you are have a complex site, it can take longer because you need to run a lot more calculations due to, uh, the comp complexity of the terrain, right? Mm-hmm. You can have issues with inflow, angles, uh, ware, wind share, uh, [00:13:00] all the lovely technical things. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Well, and because we’ve developed so many sites to date, all the best wind sites have turbines in them mostly right now, and. We’re, we’re starting to get along the fringes of that good wind area. Yeah. And in some cases, does that change the way you do the analysis and do the approach?  Lene Hellstern: Yes, but, um, some of us have done that for a long time because it’s not good enough to have good wind if you don’t have good grid. Um, so, so for me, a good wind side, you know, we, I, I spoke with someone yesterday about. The best, uh, uh, wind resource in Sweden. Um, but, but if that area doesn’t have a good grid, then you know it, I can’t harvest the wind. Right. Right. Um, and it’s the same in, in the US right? You, you have some grid issues. Um, so we have a lot of  Allen Hall: grid issues. Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: And if you don’t, everything is [00:14:00] combined. Everything works closely together, right. Uh, the technical, the commercial and the finance. So if, if, if that is not. Well, um, covered in a, in a, or, uh, investigated in a project, you don’t have a good project. Um, is  Allen Hall: the grid the limiting factor in a lot of onsite onshore sites?  Lene Hellstern: I think the world is becoming more and more electrical, which it is, which I think it’s good. Mm-hmm. And I don’t think that they, we can point at any government that was super duper on, um, expanding the grid. Um, no. I know there are issues in Texas. There are also issues in Denmark where I’m from. There are, yes, there’s issues in Europe. So, um, we, we need, we need massive in investments from the government to build out this grid. It’s, it’s not, um, enough to say we want clean energy and then do nothing. Right. Well  Allen Hall: this is where, where, where the ons onsite versus the onshore versus the offshore comes in. Yeah. [00:15:00] Is the grid.  Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So in the US and other places, uh, there’s been. A, a lot of concern about offshore wind, but offshore wind, you can get to a grid relatively easily. Yes, usually. Yeah. Yeah. And it’s less bureaucracy to lay cable in the ocean than it is to run transmission lines over land.  Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So is this starting to flip a little bit because of the onshore limitations in the grid that we’re seeing more offshore, just because it’s easier.  Lene Hellstern: Well in Europe, but I would not say that in the us Right. But, uh, but, um, um, it, it, it is easier, but it’s also much more complex to put up these, uh, offshore projects. They are in development for many, many years compared to onshore.  Allen Hall: Right.  Lene Hellstern: So, so onshore is a little bit of a, depending on country you are in, if it’s overpopulated right? It’s, it’s difficult, but it’s, it’s a much more of a quick fix, uh, [00:16:00] onshore. For, uh, lack of energy. Right, right. But, but it just requires it, yes, it requires the grid and yes, it requires that you don’t do it in a popula populated area. We don’t want to do that. Right, right. We want, we want the open fields, um, where we’re not disturbing anyone. True. Yeah.  Allen Hall: True. But we also want infinite electricity. Absolutely. So you have to weigh those two off.  Lene Hellstern: I, but I think the turbines are beautiful. So I would, I would love to be able to see one from my house, but I can’t. Yeah.  Allen Hall: We have actually quite a few we can see from our, from our house. Yeah. Yeah. And no one complains. No. They complained for the first few weeks after they were installed and after that it’s been completely quiet. Yeah. But,  Lene Hellstern: but I do understand if you place turbines too close to a house Right. Sure. That, how that can be disturbing. Sure. Um, I, I totally understand that. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Can we talk about AI data centers and independent grids and how that’s factoring [00:17:00] into some of the decisions about where to place wind sites? Because it does seem like in a lot of places in the world, these AI data centers are going to go in. Yeah. And they’re making decisions about using natural gas to power the turbines or using wind and solar and a little bit of battery to, to run these centers. Yeah, but that doesn’t necessarily. Wire a connection to the grid. Does that make it easier in a sense that you don’t necessarily have to have a grid connection, you could put something out in a remote area that it still had good wind and still has good solar with a little bit of battery? And are you starting to hear more action that way, or interest in that?  Lene Hellstern: I’ve, I’ve seen that there’s been, uh, quite some centers that has, uh, made, uh, PPA agreements with, with wind turbine owners. But they are normally not super close, uh, uh, located to the wind farm. Okay? And I would also say that I would find it a little bit difficult, [00:18:00] uh, if they were remote, because you need a, you need a constant power source and, and the wind doesn’t blow all the time, right? No. So you need, you need a lot of, uh, combination mechanisms, right? You do to make sure everything runs stable.  Allen Hall: But you may not have neighbors in that case because you could select a site that’s a little bit further away from. Society in a sense. Yeah. Where the, the wind siding may be a little more complicated though because we, we probably haven’t looked in those areas because it’s not connected to the grid. So you may not have historical wind data doesn’t make the problem just bigger. So I do think in the United States you see like Amazon and Meta and Google talking about using wind and solar to power some of these data centers. Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: And, and they are, and I know that there are, uh, agreements that has been signed. But I, I am, I don’t think they are close, uh, you know, in close proximity necessarily.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Lene Hellstern: But of course the, the, the electricity needs to be to be transported in the grid. Right. [00:19:00] And it’s not like it’s a microgrid around the data center.  Allen Hall: I think you may see more microgrids.  Lene Hellstern: Okay. Well that could be interesting. Well, that’s what  Allen Hall: I’m wondering because there may be more microgrids that won’t even be microgrids because the amount of power that they’re gonna use, they’re gonna be decent sized grids.  Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: That. Th that becomes even a more difficult engineering challenge.  Lene Hellstern: Well, I think it’s gonna be too expensive.  Allen Hall: You think so? Yeah. Compared to natural gas or just because No, just,  Lene Hellstern: uh, buying, doing a PPA with a wind farm that may be a hundred kilometers away. Yeah. Right.  Allen Hall: Okay. Um, well that’s interesting. Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: I think the whole, um, uh, burying the cables in the, you know, the whole installation, uh, is, is simply, it’s simply to, uh, it’s complicated cap. Is too high.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Lene Hellstern: It’s, it’s much more affordable just to buy a PPA.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It may be. Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Okay. Well this is, this is fascinating. Can I pick your brain or bother you just a little bit longer?  Lene Hellstern: Yeah, [00:20:00] yeah, sure. Okay.  Allen Hall: So  Lene Hellstern: it depends on the time. Yeah.  Allen Hall: We got 20 minutes. Good. Can I steal 10?  Lene Hellstern: Yes, sure.  Allen Hall: Okay.  Lene Hellstern: This is not my core area, just so you know. Allen Hall: No, no, no. I wanna, I wanna get, I wanna get back into Yeah. The, the meat here, which is turbine selection.  Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: I have my LIDAR data. Mm-hmm. I have my MET Tower data. I have say I have two years. I am really the best wind resource knowledge operator developer that you’re gonna meet.  Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Great. Super. What do I do next in terms of picking a turbine? How do I even do that? And how does that process look like if I’m talking to OEMs about something that’s still three years from being developed?  Lene Hellstern: Well, you need to start, you, you need to have your planning, uh, your permits in order.  Allen Hall: Sure.  Lene Hellstern: So depending on what country you are in some operate, what you need to apply for the [00:21:00] specific location of the turbines more, it’s more a box. Uh, so it’s, you say, I am, I wanna apply for 300 megawatt, 500. Uh, please. In, in this area. Um, so then you start looking at your site, suitability, uh, what, what boundaries am I working within? What is my average wind speed in different, these different heights? Uh, what’s more, how do I get levelized cost of energy as low as possible? Because some people still sit and look at the net capacity factor, but those days are over, right? They are,  Allen Hall: yes.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. So when, when all alarms should go up, if they say. Good lift capacity factor. Yeah. Super. What’s your live life cost of energy there? Um, so, so then you, now you start, you have a good idea on what kind of a turbine class should I look at? Then you start looking at who is, do you wanna do self service? Do you wanna have a full service agreement?  Allen Hall: Exactly. That’s what Im really wondering how that works then, because if I [00:22:00] know the basics of the wind site, do I just. Put a proposal together and slide it to Vestus and slide it to ge, or is there still more I need to do before I start talking to them? Lene Hellstern: You need, you need to ask you yourself and your organization. Okay. Or PEAK. Yeah, but, but we would ask you as well, what is your o and m strategy, right? Do you wanna do self perform? Do you want a full service agreement? What, what’s, how risky do you wanna make it? Is that  Allen Hall: a deciding factor in determining what turbine you want to purchase? Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: Because then you may not need D-O-E-D-O-E-M to have a service organization close to your site. Right? Let’s say, okay, so  Allen Hall: let’s say you choose vestus because they have a, they want to sell you a full service agreement, generally sPEAKing. Yeah. Where a, a GE typically doesn’t care or not so involved in that. Lene Hellstern: Okay. But then, but you wanna know, do they have a service organization close to right. Right, right. Or are they gonna re uh, are they, do they need to build it? Right? Is this a new [00:23:00] platform? Do they not have any experience with this platform, the people in this area? Because then you, you know, that’s always, so it’s teething issues, right? Allen Hall: Sure.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. So,  Allen Hall: so how does that play into your decision making then?  Lene Hellstern: Well, you know, if you have a, if you have, let’s say, four volumes in this area,  Speaker 3: right?  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. And then you had, you, you look at what, what do they, what turbines do they offer? What service agreements can you get? What availability, you know, how does the contracts, you wanna benchmark the TSAs and the SMAs? Yes. Um, and to see what kind of, who’s the best player here? There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle. Well,  Allen Hall: that, that’s exactly what I wanted to get to was, I’m trying to understand how deep you’re going in this. So you’re actually looking to see if they have a service site nearby? Yes. And what the service people have been exposed to in terms of turbine type. Yeah. And also you’re going a little bit deeper to see how successful they have been. Maybe you, you’ve called the sites  Lene Hellstern: around if I have that information. Yes. Yeah. [00:24:00] Okay.  Allen Hall: Yeah. So you’re making a lot of decisions not based upon necessarily what the OEM is offering as a product, but you’re also looking at what does the next 10, 20, maybe even 30 years looks like. Lene Hellstern: Yeah. And then you wanna know what, you know, what, what turbines, what pipeline is there, and then you wanna do the tender. Right,  Allen Hall: right.  Lene Hellstern: Let’s say now you’re down to three because the fourth one, that, that was a no-go. Right? So now you have, that’s why I always, I say four turbines per site. You need to pick, pick four different OEMs. Now you’re down to three. Right? And then you, you, you, you, you issue a tender and you, you get the proposals in. Okay? And then you, you start negotiating and you do your tech, your technical due diligence, right? To sort of dig a little bit deeper and understand the OEMs right. Also give them a chance to say. Hey, this was an issue before, but we fixed this problem and you can see it documented. Oh, you go, yeah, but you’re still, you’re not there. So I need to account for that. So then you have a dialogue with them, and then, [00:25:00]then you have, you, you then the third one is too high and now you have or can’t deliver, or you know,  Allen Hall: doesn’t have a production schedule that meets your deeds. Lene Hellstern: Yeah. Yes, exactly. And now you’re down to two, and then may the best one win. Right.  Allen Hall: Okay. So you’re talking about. Several months of gyration. Yes. Meeting with the OEMs or OEMs coming to you even to give their pitch. Meanwhile, you’re evaluating their technical expertise about their turbine, and you’re questioning how the previous generation of those turbines have performed looking forward to say, have you fixed the the existing problems? And what does the next generation look like? Yeah.  Lene Hellstern: Oh, well, what did they look into? Developing a new  Allen Hall: platform.  Lene Hellstern: Okay. Right.  Allen Hall: So are you thinking about risk in terms of new technology? I’ll, I’ll throw the easy one at you two piece blades.  Lene Hellstern: No, thank you.  Allen Hall: Okay. That’s a, that’s a good response. Yeah. Because I think a lot of, there was just a lot of unknowns about that. Speaker 3: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And then now that we have some service history, yeah. We may wanna rethink that. Yeah. Are there other types of [00:26:00] technologies that would lend themselves to requiring further review?  Lene Hellstern: Yeah, but there’s, I, what I’m hoping is that, that maybe we can pause a little bit on the sizing thing in the. Right. And then refine the components a little bit more and then, and be more innovative, um, instead in the components. In the components, yeah. And, and improve the manufacturing quality installation service. Right? Because, um, sometimes what I see in the industry is not, it’s an old component, but actually it’s the people that’s the issue, right? Mm-hmm. We don’t, we are not, we are not trained, you know, we don’t have the technicians trained really in a. We don’t have the people in the manufacturing trained well enough, and so, so we make mistakes. So, and  Allen Hall: are you looking for OEMs that are doing more reflective activity at the moment that they’re basically causing new designs? And then we always do that, that when we  Lene Hellstern: always look at, when we do technical diligence, how is the training [00:27:00] in the, in the manufacturing, you know, what kind of programs do the different people need to go through? How do you get to a seniority? How do they train them? How do they test them? How many years does it take, right? Because you can’t do things in five minutes.  Allen Hall: Right?  Lene Hellstern: What’s the turnover at a manufacturing plant?  Allen Hall: See? But this is why you would choose PEAK wind to help you do that process. Because I don’t think a lot of developers, and especially in the United States where we see a lot of it, I see a lot of it developers are about putting turbines in the ground. Yeah. And then selling that farm to the next owner, right? Yeah. So those long-term agreements don’t really play into a lot of this, and from what I’ve seen, but I think in Europe it’s a lot different.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah. No, but we also have, you know, there are different concepts. There is a built to sell.  Allen Hall: Yes. Right? Yeah. Lene Hellstern: That’s, then you, you, they, they tend not to, uh, be so focused on the technology. Right, right, right. And then there’s the people that built to keep, right, right. And you could, if you can see, they, that was their intention. And then they [00:28:00] ended up having to divest anyway. Then, you know, that they, they, they probably did, did a little bit more work on the technology side. Which  Allen Hall: one’s more successful? Build to sell or build to keep  Lene Hellstern: build, to keep  Allen Hall: built, to keep has better power production, more revenue,  Lene Hellstern: less uh, downtime.  Allen Hall: Less downtime. Yeah. Because they’ve done their work upfront and many  Lene Hellstern: of them Yes. Have have done it. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Mm-hmm.  Lene Hellstern: So, but, but developers can still do, uh, build to sell. Sure. But then they need someone with the technol technological glasses to come in and help.  Allen Hall: Sure, sure. But that’s where PEAK wind comes in, because. You carry those people on your staff, you, your PEAK wind’s full of experts.  Lene Hellstern: We would love to, yes.  Allen Hall: So that you can immediately tap the group of experts about the different aspects of this new development. Yeah. From training to warranties to technology to just generally how an OEM performs and Yeah, but it’s  Lene Hellstern: also, it’s the technology [00:29:00] commercial finance, right? Bingo, finance. Yeah. They go, they go together. Right, right. It’s not a. Enough to have a brilliant gearbox that can last a hundred years if you only need it for 35. Right. That’s true. And you paid a fortune. Right. That true. That’s just not a good business case.  Allen Hall: Right. And there are turbine manufacturers that have that model that do do that still. Yeah. Yeah. This is fascinating and I, I appreciate your time. Every time we talk, I just get more in depth of what is happening and, and where we can get better as an industry. Yeah. And that’s what PEAK wind is all about. Yes,  Lene Hellstern: but we are really good already. We just need to get, we are good. Better. Yeah. Yeah.  Allen Hall: We do need to get better. And we do, I think we do need to take a pause.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: So how do people get a hold of PEAK wind and to tap your expertise and attack, to bring in the expertise of your team? Lene Hellstern: Well, we have a, a webpage, uh, where you can contact us through, or, uh, LinkedIn. I am on LinkedIn, so feel free to send me a, a message. Um. [00:30:00] So, and reach out to us and we would love to help. We also have a, we have offices in Boston and uh, uh, Texas. Uh, we also have Oh, around the world. Yeah. Canada. So Taipei, yes. Yes. Re and  Allen Hall: congratulations. I think you just won a, was it in Taiwan? Uh, an offshore site Yes. That you’re gonna be operating or managing Meow.  Lene Hellstern: Yeah.  Allen Hall: Yes. Congratulations on that. Thank you. That’s very exciting. That’s  Lene Hellstern: my lovely C in asset management. Yeah.  Allen Hall: Very nice. Yes. So Lene, thank you so much for being back on the podcast and we have to have you back on again ’cause there’s so much to talk about and win. And it’s great to talk to someone who has been around and has seen it and has done it. Uh, it’s, thank you for having, it’s such a tremendous learning experience.  Lene Hellstern: It was a pleasure. Thanks.

Allen, Phil, and Joel cover the low turnout at American Clean Power in Phoenix, the US House’s budget bill affecting renewable energy incentives, security concerns over Chinese equipment, and a patent infringement lawsuit filed by 3S Lift. 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! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your host. Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, and I’m joined today by Phil Totaro and Joel Saxum. Rosemary Barnes is over in Sweden, and Rosemary’s gonna miss out on a very active week in renewable energy, at least in the United States. we should probably start with American clean power, which as we are recording, just finished the day. It was in Phoenix, Arizona. Things I’ve seen online, Joel, were that they were expecting around 10,000 people to attend that event, but watching LinkedIn, and I did not attend it this year, unfortunately, or fortunately, is my daughter’s graduation. So [00:01:00] I wanted to be there. I. But it looked like the hallways were pretty empty, which was a little shocking.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. So Allen, I wanna preface what you said there by, changing, a CP was in Phoenix too. A CP was in 106 degrees Phoenix today. it was a little bit toasty walking around in the suit jacket, but, of course, everybody, had theirs on. but no, you’re, a hundred percent correct. I was there all week, of course, weather guard brand there, talking lightning with everybody and, strike tape. And we had the uptime wind energy banner. We talked to a ton of podcast fans, which was really cool. so the hallways were, Tuesday morning was great. Tuesday afternoon, Wednesday, Thursday. It just got slimmer and slimmer. and, there was some kind of logistical things there too. This trade show was oddly on two different floors that were separated by four escalator sets. I think like it was a, maze to get up to the other thing. Yeah, it was, pretty wild, in that respect. [00:02:00] And you saw some of the same players that you always see at these trade shows, right? But there was quite a few new ones walking around, doing a little, tour day, exhibit, exhibition floor. A lot of different new companies, that I wasn’t used to seeing, in the solar space. some software, some, a lot of little AI software things that you’ve been hearing about as well. battery storage, quite a few battery storage companies and that battery storage supply chain starting to spread out. You had some battery safety companies and stuff like that, which was great to see. I know I talked to some of our insurance friends and they were bouncing around talking with all the battery storage people and the solar people and that kind of stuff. but yeah, it wasn’t very heavy, heavily wind as it has been in the past we’re, which we’re, usually used to. another factor. to walk the show floor was $1,600. [00:03:00] So that’s, that, deters quite a people. And when, we had talked before we go to the show, of course we wanna connect with our clients, connect with colleagues, connect with old friends, and you start sending out these emails and there wasn’t a whole lot of asset owners and operators coming as they, as we usually see, and it showed on the show floor. I didn’t talk to that many asset owners and asset operators as we usually do. I’m talking probably. A quarter of the traffic that we’re used to from those people.  Allen Hall: I Is that just because the, operators are trying to pull back on the travel budgets or was it more about just the state of the industry at the minute or were, because of the time of year and where it was the people that wanna travel to Phoenix, what. What was the feeling there?  Joel Saxum: I think it was a bit of all the above. OOMS, the ac, other a CP event, the operations and maintenance, which is, where a lot of our, focus is on the commercial side. That was a good event. That was a well attended event, Nashville this year. A [00:04:00] lot, quite a few asset owners and operators there. So I think that, they used their budget on that one a little bit more this year than this. of course you’re in Phoenix, which is an odd place. it’s. Button up against Memorial Weekend, which is graduations, right Allen? so, it’s a, it’s not an awesome time of the year to be putting something like this on, in my opinion at least. Phil Totaro: At least we’re going to do it in Houston next year, when it’s gonna be in June and even hotter.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s first week of June next year for a CP in Yeah, in Houston. But in Houston, if you think about it this way too, there’s quite a few wind companies there. There’s ISPs there. There is operators there. Dallas isn’t far down the road that’s got a bunch of ISPs and operators. Same thing with Austin, R-W-E-E-D-P-R-E-D-F, or stead. There’s a bunch of players over in that area, so I, would expect that one next year to be more well attended because travel budgets, you can hop into car and drive [00:05:00] over there. Allen Hall: you were in Phoenix. The US house passed a budget bill. that was, Approved this morning as we’re recording, that would effectively end the clean energy production, tax credits, and the quote unquote boom in the United States that were spurred on by the IRA bill. And the, for the most part, there’s, still a lot of discussion about this, so none of this is hard fact yet, and it has to go to the Senate. So there’s gonna be changes made and some bartering back and forth. but some key things here, the production tax credit gets shortened if you don’t have projects started, roughly 60 days after the enactment of this bill. You’re not gonna account for anything. So you gotta hurry up and start digging. it, it eliminates a, big piece, which is the tax transfer. So when you get these. Production tax credits, you could sell them and [00:06:00] all the tax credits could be transferred and you could re get that cash upfront. the bill changes all that. So you would have to get a tax equity partner upfront, which generally is a bank, and that can be hard to go do in today’s world. So it’s making it much harder for renewable projects to be developed if this bill were to be signed by the president, which. Who knows where it’s gonna be a couple of weeks from now. Now, Phil, how big is the tax transferability piece of that? Because the discussion in the renewable crowd is that’s probably the most important piece. Phil Totaro: It, it is, setting aside the fact that this is gonna obviously have a big impact on. Greenfield project development, the, complete removal of any tax transferability, for PTC credits is a bit problematic in that not [00:07:00]everybody was taking advantage of it because it was a relatively new thing and enacted through the, inflation reduction Act in the first place. So it’s only been in place for three years at this point. Now, on the flip side of it. For anybody involved in operations and maintenance. This is probably a good thing. but again, setting aside the repowering question for now, and I’m again, as we record, there’s no final language to this bill and this law. it hasn’t been signed in into law yet, so there’s, all we can do is speculate on it. And assuming that they’re gonna change the, immediate, as Allen said this, 60 day, window to start digging for your project, assuming they’re going to kill that bit of it, which is likely, because that’s just too fast of a ramp down. what it’s good for, what this bill is potentially good for, despite the fact that we [00:08:00] might be losing a production tax credit and investment tax credits. It will spur more companies to try and accelerate their plans for repowering and or life extension.  Allen Hall: I wanna pause here. Take a quick break ’cause I want to come back. I wanna talk about how much power production the US needs to add every year and what the breakdown is and what it’s likely to be and why changing these. Production tax credits and all the existing IRA bill matters in the growth of the power network in the United States. Don’t let blade damage catch you off. Guard the logics ping sensors to take issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems. From ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment in internal blade cracks. OGs Ping has you covered The cutting edge sensors are easy to install, giving you the power to stop damage before it’s too late. Visit OGs ping.com [00:09:00] and take control of your turbine’s health today. All right, we’re back and I have been doing a, good bit of research prior to this. IRA bill change that’s likely to happen to see what. The power requirements are for the United States and what generally has been the growth because remember during a recent conversation with Rosemary, we were talking about the growth of AI and how is that gonna affect the amount of power usage and Rosemary’s opinion was, is that gonna affect it that much? I’m still not sure about that based on the research I’m doing, but just to give you some numbers here, the US needs to add about 33 gigawatts of production every single year over the next 10 years. just to stay even with the growth of technology and electricity usage plus, as older facilities get turned off, you gotta bring new ones on, right? that creates a, little bit of a complex [00:10:00] situation. So for the next 10 years, if you look at 20, forget about 20, 25 for a minute, let’s look at 2026 to 2035, right? The expected. Percentages of what the, what will be added will be about 40 to 45% will be solar. So you’re thinking about 120 to 150 gigawatts of solar. That’s a tremendous amount of solar power being that would have to be added to the grid just to stay even. So you’re talking about 12 to 15 gigawatts per year. Wind will be about six, roughly gigawatts a year natural gas. Combined cycle will be about six gigawatts a year. Nuclear will be about one and a half to maybe two, and then battery storage, which is gonna even out the duck curve, is gonna be around maybe five or six gigawatts. Changing the IRA bill and changing the incentives here is really gonna affect the ability of the United States to keep up with the electricity demand and the [00:11:00] ramp down of old generation sites. You’re starting to see a little bit of noise from, Silicon Valley and other places in the United States, is this smart? I understand what the, house is trying to do and trying to lower the deficit. I got it. I’m not sure this is gonna help with that.  Joel Saxum: I’ll give you some. this is direct feedback here from the last week talking to the majority of the, and I’m gonna say with renewables industry from ACP talking to ISPs. Major big ISPs, some of the, like the big, 3, 4, 5 in the country. They multiple people telling me every meeting they walked into. Hey, do you guys do also do solar? Do you also do solar maintenance? You also do solar operations? ’cause people are shifting that way. And if you look at what the installed capacity has been, the growth in the last few years, you’ve seen solar start to take off at a steeper hockey stick than wind because it’s quick. And that’s the thing about this, right? So if we, if, the demand is growing as fast as we see it growing, the [00:12:00] only things you can put in the ground fast are solar, wind, and batteries. You can’t put. Gas and fast. You can’t put new, if we try to put a nuclear plant in right now, anywhere in the country, it’s gonna be 2035 before we get first power out of it anyways. Or 2034, whatever it may be. But it’s, down the line like this. That’s not gonna happen. So if you’re going to introduce legislation to curtail or to just really stomp on the ability for greenfield renewables. It’s the only thing we can build fast enough to keep up with demand. So we’re gonna end up with rolling brownouts, get your generators.  Phil Totaro: And keep in mind that the small modular reactor that GE Renova is developing, that has been proposed for the TVA site in Tennessee that’s only just getting started and is, not likely to come online very soon. You’ve got a four year backlog of gas turbines at GE Renova. and I, they actually, I didn’t read [00:13:00] it this morning by the way. so I don’t know if they actually extended that backlog, when they reported their numbers, but, you’ve got a similar situation with, with Siemens as well, with their gas turbines. at least a three year backlog. And so where are you getting the power from? presumably those, the, all these gas turbines are gonna be, put in place for, projects that have already been approved and consented. But again, you’re not addressing that immediate concern of demand growth with the. the immediacy of, being able to deploy something like solar, wind, or batteries that’s going to address that demand growth quicker than what you’re gonna get out of any other form of power generation. Joel Saxum: So here’s an interesting, thought process, right? We have these interconnection queues with renewables stacked up in ’em 10 miles [00:14:00]long, right? And all of a sudden if they’re gonna lose the capability of putting PTCs, if they haven’t, if they don’t have shovel ready, like in the oil and gas world, some of these contracts used to be written like, you go park a bulldozer on this land and it extends your lease and extends your, like that was the way that some of these were written. I don’t know if wind is that way or if you’ve gotta have components on site or you gotta be digging dirt or something. I don’t know how the contracts work to, to secure those PTCs. However, if we get to the point where we have a few years of desert for PTCs, what I would expect then is the next step is when we get these. These, greenfield developments pushed into the interconnect, and they’re gonna connect them anyways, then the power prices to the consumer are gonna double, or they’re gonna at least have to go up enough to cover what PTC was, which is basically in most of the United States, you’re gonna, your power price is gonna double. correct me if I’m wrong, I mean, Allen, what do you think about that? Does that make sense?  Allen Hall: I don’t know if it’s gonna double, but it’s gonna go up 15, 20% I think easily, because they’re going to have to add the generation [00:15:00]capacity regardless if there’s tax credit or not. In order to keep from the brownouts from happening, they will have to add generation. In order to do that, you have to pay for it, in order to do incentivize, and basically incentivize companies to start putting generation up there that they’re gonna have to pay them. Extra more than they are right now to go out there and develop or they won’t, or they just won’t do it. So that’s gonna be in a real bind. And then the demand’s gonna get greater than the supply. And then the prices are obviously gonna go  Joel Saxum: up. Like we’re up against, we’re, against physics here. Like you can’t, you just can’t change some of these things. You can say drill, baby drill. We want to be the, biggest gas and oil producer or whatever. That’s great, but we don’t have the, turbines to burn the stuff to make power out of it. So Cool. And gas is gonna be cheap for your car, great. But it’s not gonna go into the power grid because we don’t have the stations to, to transform it into electric electrons.  Allen Hall: No, we don’t and we won’t. [00:16:00] Which I think the, when the Senate gets this bill, that’s gonna be a lot of discussion about that because senators think are like. Cats, they’re all just going each in their own independent direction. The house, you can, gather them together and get them all to vote as a block, which obviously has happened over the last, I don’t know, 20 years or so. But the Senate kind of moves around a good bit. So one senator can change everything or a couple of, a handful of senators, two or three actually can change everything here. It’s not good for the growth of, the power industry in the United States. And I wonder if, the desire to reduce deficits is, not going to have a good effect on the growth of the economy of the United States. It’s a very weird development. It seems like things were done at the last second, To me, just reading the news, like nothing, Oh my gosh. We [00:17:00] gotta get rid of the production tax credit. Oh my gosh. The deficit is overwhelming. We gotta kill all the solar and wind. How do those things go together? I don’t know. but hey, you want higher electricity prices? You’re gonna get it. And it’s inevitable. It’s inevitable. We just moved from Massachusetts and North Carolina, Massachusetts. Electricity rates are practically double hole almost of what they are in North Carolina. There you go. And we live next to a nuclear power generation station just down the street. yeah,  Joel Saxum: I  Allen Hall: get it.  Joel Saxum: So Allen, so just so we’re clear, watch for extra fingers and stuff. ’cause when they start to sprout, you might wanna move again.  Allen Hall: I have to say the nuclear facility is near us. Has had, has been run really well. It is one, it is a pride and joy of the area actually.  Joel Saxum: As busy wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial and let’s face it. Difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES WIN Magazine. PES Wind offers a [00:18:00] diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PS wind.com today.  Allen Hall: Joe, do you remember about, oh, maybe two, three weeks ago, maybe a month ago now, where, there was concern about. Chinese manufactured equipment, having the capability of being shut off remotely or controlled remotely from China. And one of the executives, one of the Chinese manufacturers said, Hey, check our equipment. There’s nothing there. somebody did, the US Department of Energy did. Yeah. And so still have some European countries actually. So there’s been a lot of investigation about this and it turns out, and this is early days because there’s not a lot of detail, that there has been found to be undisclosed communication devices and some of these inverters [00:19:00] that are used in solar panels and wind turbines, and it has caused a. Bunch of problems because obviously there’s, China and Europe and the United States are not necessarily friend with one another and there’s a surveillance aspect. And the concern has always been that if, China can flip a switch and shut off the European grid or shut off the United States grid, that’s a huge national security problem. And if they did find communication devices in inverters, there have to be some circuitry there, there some components there that shouldn’t be there. Wow. Just, wow. And I don’t even know where they go next, Phil,  Phil Totaro: where are, what do you do next? So let’s, take a step back and make sure we all understand what we’re talking about here. in. Some of the energy storage devices and in the converters themselves, what they’ve done in the battery management systems for energy storage and the [00:20:00] inverters for solar and batteries and a little bit of wind. They found basically cellular modems. So you’ve got this situation where they can. Make a demand of their domestic companies to say, hey, let’s, use this remote capability to, turn something off. As you said, the, national security implication of that alone is enough to get people thinking, alright, maybe we shouldn’t be, so dependent on a Chinese supply chain. And what it means now from a practical standpoint is that if we. The Europeans start mandating that every single one of these things gets inspected during customs inspections to ensure that there’s no, listening device or spying device, or cellular modem or whatever else that’s not supposed to be there if anything’s in there that shouldn’t, okay? Even if we make the Chinese. Pay [00:21:00] the cost of doing those inspections, we’ll do the inspections, but we, basically, it’s in addition to tariffs that we’re already surcharging them with, there’s gonna be another surcharge for inspections. Now it’s just eroded the entire cost benefit of sourcing anything from China. Joel Saxum: To me, this is surprising that it’s taken this long to figure some of this out, to find this out to, to discover this because. At the end of the day, if anything’s being transmitted, it’s rf, right? That’s pretty easy to scan for. Like you can buy an RF scanner on Amazon. that’s not a big deal. And, to the level of security that we deal with. So when, Allen and I are talking to any operator in the States anymore about when we’re putting strike tape on, right? We’re, if we’re fixing their lightning problems, we’re also monitoring with it. And it’s I simple IOT devices to monitor for lightning strikes. Great, right? That everybody’s happy, but then the engineers always go, oh, we gotta go through the cybersecurity stuff. Fine. we’re armed to the teeth with all the information to [00:22:00] make sure that this, passes muster IOT wise. So we don’t have an issue with it, but some of the questionnaires that we see come out of these operators pages upon pages of cybersecurity questions. So how is it that some of these major components have snuck by. at this time, and we haven’t heard of this yet, like why is it something that’s just popping up now? That to me is surprising specifically with the level of, gigawatts or level of components installed in the United States. we’re talking, what are we up to now? 75 in change thousand turbines. Yeah. And I don’t know, I can’t count how many solar panels and inverters are out there in the tens of  Phil Totaro: thousands.  Allen Hall: Yeah, Joel, it’s a really good point. What is the United States and Europe gonna do? Are they gonna go back through and figure out what. Inverters have these  Joel Saxum: man, I don’t. So, if the, but that’s the other thing too, right? If the RF isn’t actively, if the RF isn’t actively transmitting, how are you gonna do this? This isn’t impossible. This is a damn near impossible needle in a ha needle, in a needle stack  Allen Hall: [00:23:00] like thing, right? There’s ways, there are ways to do it, to make it think. It needs to come alive and start talking. And my guess is that’s how they’re going to figure out where these devices are, is to try to turn ’em on and see if they’ll talk. But wow. Can you imagine the. Pain in the rear that’s gonna be involved in ripping out all these inverters and replacing them with some European, or God forbid, American made product because there’s not a lot of American made inverters. It’s mostly like A BB, right? It’s gonna be over in Europe.  Phil Totaro: And to be clear, it’s not that they’re bad, Allen, it’s that they’re expensive,  Allen Hall: they make high quality inverters. It’s just that if, you think about if you’re an A bbb, let’s use A, B, B as an example. If you’re A, B, and you know that there’s gonna be. Man, 25,000 inverters are gonna think, be polled in the next six months. You can’t ramp up production fast enough to fill that order, even though you would love to. And every salesperson who works for A, B would love to have that commission check, but you just can’t do it. So what do [00:24:00] you do? Do you have to shut down the field one by one? I guess you gotta go  Joel Saxum: just start going through things.  Allen Hall: if you’re an inverter technician.  Joel Saxum: Great job. Here’s a business model for an ISP start advertising that you can scan for these things. Figure out how, oh  Allen Hall: man, what a mess. And speaking of messes, when, you guys, when Joel was in Phoenix, Phil, you were in Phoenix too for a little bit,  Phil Totaro: Yes, I was, and I, was able to get into the show floor, but I did not see what you’re about to talk about.  Allen Hall: Wow, you missed a good one because wind turbine equipment manufacturer three s. Americas filed a patent infringement suit against, Cooper New Energy in Arizona Federal court. and the lawsuit alleges that Cooper’s free climber lifter product infringes on three S’s patent for, traction machine and lifting equipment technology, and [00:25:00] it really centers around that. Cooper was at clean power showing the device. That looks very similar to the Climb Auto System. From what I can tell in the, lawsuit, paperwork that was filed. it looks really similar. And three s Lift said, Hey, there’s a patent infringement going on here. We are going to shut you down while you are at clean power. Wow. That’s major. They must have known, had an indication that, Cooper was gonna be at clean Power, but. Phil Totaro: Wow. So let me, help dissect this a little because what happens with situations like this is you may have a Chinese company that’s copied something from another company, and even though there may be patents in China as well, I. When they go into a more litigious market like the United States or the uk, or even elsewhere in, in Europe, or Brazil for that [00:26:00]matter, you’re, likely to face a lot more scrutiny. The way this worked out is on, on or before, the show opened on Monday, Cooper imports this supposedly infringing technology. They, as they’re doing their booth setup and all that, somebody from three s Lyft is also doing their booth setup, and they just walk over and take some pictures. And by Tuesday morning, so the show started on Monday. By Tuesday morning, they had this complaint filed in the federal district court in Arizona. So three s Lyft is not screwing around. And the, point I’m trying to make with that is twofold. One, they’re trying to get ahead of. Cooper coming into the US market and undercutting them on the sales of, auto climb and, climb assist systems. And second, it underscores why you need to, not to put it [00:27:00] sounding too much like a commercial, but it’s why you need to work with a company like ours that does IP risk certification. This is exactly what we can prevent.  Joel Saxum: When you look at the, it’s a full on lawsuit filed in one day. This wasn’t done in one day. Three s knew this was coming and they waited until clean power and went Gotcha. That, that, that, was, that’s what happened. And it was a, to be honest with you, whether they get an injunction or not, this wave, this big red flag that’s gonna stop people from buying from that company. Whether, the, whether legally they, they get forced to or not. if you’re operator X, Y, Z, you’re gonna buy a three S lift instead. Sorry. That’s what’s gonna happen.  Allen Hall: you should buy a three s lift because those things are awesome. It’s a good product. Yeah. Technicians love those things. Yeah. Phil Totaro: why, do you think somebody wants to copy it? Exactly.  Allen Hall: That one’s hard to copy. ’cause they have so much technology built into those, climb auto systems. I. [00:28:00] Yeah, this, was, obviously Cooper’s gonna say they didn’t infringe and it needs to get adjudicated, and I’m sure that it will because it’s N three S’s. It’s three S’s right? To go do it. So they’re going to go do it and they’re gonna try to get an injunction. And I’m surprised I haven’t seen more of it. And as, as we are discussing here, the, role of, Chinese manufacturers, it’s a touchy subject, right? There’s a lot going on in that space at the moment. And this week has been in, my opinion, one of the busiest wind energy weeks of all time. At least the United States. Hopefully things are calmer in Europe than they are in the United States right now. It has been. I, can’t keep up with it anymore. it’s really every in the morning, in the afternoon, I’m checking the news. There’s always something else that’s happened. my gosh, how do you even manage this if you’re, running an operator right now, [00:29:00] or an ISP or even some of the investment companies that are involved in solar and wind. Whoa. This week has just reset everything.  Joel Saxum: I gotta tell you some more. I’ll touch on a CP again, to me, to be honest with you, it sounded like a lot of people. Tried to almost put their heads in the sand about what was going on, IRA. It’s like they didn’t want to hear it, they didn’t want to hear that bad news. They didn’t want to like, people were like, oh man, to this morning. did you hear about that? Yeah. And then people didn’t wanna talk about it. and on the other side, I was looking at some people when, when the, the stop work order got lifted for Empire Wind? I was. Osted stock jumped 20%. Vesta stock jumped like 14%. And then you get this bill this morning and all of a sudden boom. And it’s oh, if you’re, an investor looking at renewable energy companies, holy volatility, So the whole industry is just reeling.  Phil Totaro: Yeah.  Joel Saxum: That’s not  Allen Hall: specific to wind. True. But there American clean power aspect [00:30:00] to this. And it doesn’t feel good right now. I think a lot of operators are upset about what happened with the IRA bill and then what’s happening now and has there been leadership in Washington DC to provide guidance because the, words I have seen in the last 48 hours, don’t move the needle. You need to be moving the needle. And I’m not sure what the lobbying is at the moment, but it doesn’t feel like it’s having any impact at all, which makes. Everybody involved with American clean power, take pause, and I’m sure there’s a lot of loud phone calls at the minute. that’s enough for this week because I pretty much can’t take anymore. I don’t wanna, it’s just depressing enough at the moment. It’s gonna get better. It’s gonna get better. We’re gonna figure this thing out. Maybe. Maybe it’s a paradigm shift. Maybe it’s a temporary blip. It’s hard to tell right now. I think [00:31:00] we’re it’s too early to get a sense of where this is headed, but. Keep listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. We’re going to bring you the latest news and we’re going to suss through it so you don’t have to. So we’ll be here next week, hopefully with some better news. I’m Allen Hall. I’m here with Joel Saxon and Phil Dero. We’ll see you next week.

South Korea’s Jeonnam 1 Wind Farm enters commercial operation, Norway launches its first floating wind tender, Denmark announces 3 GW of offshore wind possibility, and The Netherlands delays tendering for two wind sites. 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! Allen Hall: Leading off the week, Norway has launched the first part of its long awaited, inaugural floating wind tender, offering subsidies to the winners. Bidders will be awarded rights to develop commercial projects of up to 500 megawatts in capacity at the Utsira Nord site off the country’s southwest coast. The winners will have two years to mature the projects before competing in an auction for subsidies in 2028 to 2029 to be provided as a direct grant. Norway’s Energy Minister said Utsira Nord is an important first step in the development of commercial floating offshore wind development on the Norwegian continental shelf. Norway has agreed to cap subsidies for Utsira Nord at 35 billion Norwegian crowns equal to about [00:01:00] $3.7 billion. Over in Denmark, Denmark has announced the launch of offshore wind tenders with a capacity of three gigawatts, enough to power approximately 3 million homes. According to the Danish Energy Ministry, the tenders set to open in autumn of this year, we’ll cover two areas in the North Sea. One in the water separating Denmark and Sweden. The initiative comes with the potential subsidy of up to 55.2 billion Danish crowns equal to about $8.32 billion over a span of 20 years. Last year, Denmark halted its ongoing offshore wind tenders to reevaluate its subsidy model after failing to attract any bids and what was supposed to be its largest offshore wind auction. The Danish Energy Ministry clarified that bid prices and electricity price developments will dictate whether further subsidies are necessary or if the state might even generate revenue from the projects. And in the Netherlands, the Dutch government has [00:02:00] delayed tendering for two offshore wind sites. Uh, companies were scheduled to compete for three permits in October this year for construction and operation of new wind farms in the North Sea. However, two of the sites will now be tendered later, just one site. Nederwiek 1-A has been designated for the next offshore wind tunnel with the capacity of about one gigawatt. For the Nederwiek 1 Wind Farm, the tender criteria have been adjusted to improve the business case for offshore wind. The Ministry of Climate and Green Growth said it is taking these measures to make the upcoming tender round more attractive and to allow the construction of offshore wind farms to proceed at a realistic pace. The Nederwiek 1-A wind farm will supply about three and a 5% of Dutch electricity consumption once completed. And in South Korea, south Korea’s, Jeonnam 1 Wind Farm has officially entered commercial operation. The 96 megawatt project is owned by a joint venture between Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and SK Innovations [00:03:00] ENS, the installation of 10 Siemens ga MEA 10 megawatt Direct Drive turbines was completed in December of last year. Commissioning followed earlier this year. Copenhagen Offshore Partners, the exclusive offshore wind development partner to CIP Co-LED project development activities for Jeonnam 1 on behalf of the project owners. This project Mercks the first large scale offshore wind project in Korea led by the private sector. That’s this week’s top. News stories. Stay tuned for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast tomorrow.