Ørsted Settles in NJ, Vestas Restructures, Belgium Objects to French Offshore Wind Farm

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Ørsted and New Jersey settle their dispute over cancelled offshore wind farms, Belgium objects to a French offshore wind farm near Dunkirk, Vestas merges its technology and manufacturing divisions, a new blade root bushing repair method is patented by We4Ce, and details on NextEra’s Hubbard Wind Project in Texas.

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Allen Hall: Over in the UK, and this is the only place where I think this would Obviously occur for multiple reasons. Adam Spencer, a serial thief from Sutton in Ashfield, Nottinghamshire, was recently caught and sentenced after a string of burglaries and shoplifting incidents. Most notable theft, 17 tubes of Pringles potato chips, all stolen in one go.

When arrested by police, Spencer reportedly quipped, Once you pop, you can’t stop. A reference to Pringle’s famous advertising slogan. But Prince’s crime spree went beyond just chips. He broke into the same Iceland shop twice in one morning, stealing meat and then returning a couple hours later to steal over 300 pounds worth of additional stock.

Okay this is gonna become the Pringle’s defense. It has to be, right? Once you pop, you can’t stop. I like it. Rosemary are we would call them potato chips in the United States, but they’re called other things in other places. Are they popular in Australia?

Rosemary Barnes: No, they’re they’re chips in Australia.

They’re crisps in the UK.

Joel Saxum: Are they popular and or would you be willing to steal 17 tubes of them?

Rosemary Barnes: I certainly wouldn’t. Wouldn’t steal them. It’s hard to imagine how you could sneak out 17 tubes of Pringles in one go. So that’s, obviously I guess they, they didn’t because they were caught, but yeah, no, I think, I don’t know with chips, I I don’t like them particularly, but if they’re there, I’ll eat them and then regret it.

So I would not. I would not keep 17 tubes in my house because there’s, it’s hard to, It’s hard to eat healthy foods while you’ve got Pringles available. Even if I don’t like them. I don’t, yeah, I guess ones you probably can’t stop.

Allen Hall: A Belgian minister has joined several coastal municipalities in filing an objection against a large wind farm off the coast of Dunkirk, France. And if you remember Dunkirk, France is the place where the British removed all their coal. Troops at the beginning of world war two very famous place The plans would build 46 wind turbines barely 10 kilometers from the coast which Belgian authorities say would cause visual nuisance impact shipping routes and harm protected seabirds Belgium has been opposing this Project since 2016 has proposed an alternate location further out to sea if necessary Belgium is prepared to go to the European court to safeguard the rights of coastal residents and other stakeholders Okay, guys, so when you decide to build an offshore wind farm along your border You have to anticipate if the country or the other side is going to have some concerns about it, right?

Particularly in Dunkirk France, which is a very next to Belgium, which is quite beautiful You it’s just like the coastline of New Jersey that and Virginia and everywhere else in the United States where the sight lines can’t be interrupted. Six, 10 kilometers, which is six miles, right? Six miles isn’t that far offshore.

Joel Saxum: How do they navigate this? I’d be the like to be the first one to say that if we’re gonna take a uptime podcast field trip to visit a coastline I would much rather go to the northern coast of France than New Jersey.

Philip Totaro: You beat me to it. I was gonna say something about New Jersey.

They’re not the same.

Rosemary Barnes: Have you seen the movie Dunkirk? That place is bleak. You watch the movie Dunkirk and you’re like, yeah, holiday destination.

Joel Saxum: Even Rosemary knows. So Allen, I know you and I, when we were talking, I think it was when it was the Virginia wind farms, Commonwealth or something of that sort, where we were actually doing the math with the curvature of the earth and how far off the the beach, the turbines need to be if you’re six feet tall before you can’t see them anymore.

And they’re just going to be specks out there and all this stuff. We did that. So this one, 10 kilometers off the coast, that’s six miles. You’ll still be able to see them fairly clear. If they’ve, I guess the way I see it is if they’ve proposed another spot, that’s a little bit further out. And if it doesn’t change the economics of the project too much, then I would just move it out.

And that, if that was my development decision, just make it easier because otherwise you’re running into so many stakeholders that you got to have a piece and they’re just going to fight and fight, they’ve been fighting it for eight years already.

Philip Totaro: Look at the end of the day this sort of thing happens all the time with onshore wind as well.

Somebody’s got an easement in place to put a wind turbine, but it’s gonna cast a shadow on the neighbor’s, backyard and diminish their enjoyment of their property or some nonsense like that. So it’s just buy them off and move on. At the end of the day, you’re seeing

Allen Hall: France should buy Belgium.

I don’t know if that’s possible.

Philip Totaro: No, FRA What France is gonna do is they’re gonna give a contract to Deme and you know that’s gonna take care of it. And then everybody’s happy. Deme is Belgian anyways, aren’t they? Yeah, that’s what I mean. France is gonna give a contract to DE and then they get some tax revenue off and then everybody goes home happy.

This is a, it doesn’t have to be an issue. But the Belgians keep making it an issue.

Joel Saxum: If they keep delaying it, the turbines are going to get taller and taller anyways. If they would have just built it back in 2016, I think those were only six megawatt direct drives back then or something, weren’t they?

Should have built it then.

Allen Hall: Over in New Jersey, speaking of New Jersey, Danish wind farm developer Orsted will pay New Jersey 125 million. To settle claims over the company’s cancellation of two onshore wind farms last year. This settlement amount is just over a third of the 300 million ORSID was once required to pay in guarantees and development obligations.

The state will use the settlement funds to support investments in wind energy facilities, component manufacturing facilities, and other clean energy programs. All right, everybody. Do you think New Jersey’s really going to use 125 million for clean energy investments?

Joel Saxum: It would be nice if you, if it would go into some fund that could, fund some loans or something of that sort, but I, but the trouble with this and most all other federal funds in general, regard that it’s green, transparency is usually an issue.

So if they would put this up on a simple to use website that would be nice and transparent where you could take a peek at where the funds are being used. That would be fantastic. But I doubt that’s going to happen.

Allen Hall: The Orsted lawyers earned their money for sure. They knocked it down by 175 million.

That’s a nice job well done. Hopefully they take a percentage of that home. Still, these situations. Are going to arise again and again, and I wonder at what point will the developers stop getting involved in this like this down payment thing that the states require when the states hold all the cards and in New Jersey’s case, pretty much made it untenable for Orsted to move forward on these projects.

It’s feels like you’re bludgeoning them and then encourage him to come over for some more bludgeoning. And there’s nothing that the developer can do. They’re trying to play nice. And at some point they, they’re. And true New Jersey nature and some point of watching enough mobster movies It feels like they’re just gotten whacked, right?

It’s it is a really not a good look for New Jersey and Orsted You know from I have to give Orsted some credit here, right? That Orsted PR wise It’s done a pretty good job of this.

Joel Saxum: In the article here that we’re referring to they say some environmentalists have criticized the settlement as a sellout, saying the state basically gave up or gave in to Orsett.

The end of the day here, those states on the East Coast, while they’re fighting and fighting, they all still say within their policies that they want to have a settlement. offshore wind as a clean energy, renewable energy source. So if they’re going to, if they were going to force Orsted to pay that 300 million and keep pushing, if I was Orsted, I’d move my capital down to the next state.

I wouldn’t deal with them anymore. So there’s a reason.

Rosemary Barnes: But I don’t understand the environmentalist angle here. Shouldn’t that be. Pro wind, if they’re environmentalists why are they pro New Jersey, and

Joel Saxum: It’s the pro whale, or the pro bird, or, yeah. It’s a really, it’s a really, it’s really quite a fight in the U.

S. right now.

Rosemary Barnes: The environmentalists who are opposing wind farms on the basis of whale deaths I don’t, I wouldn’t call them environmentalists, because there isn’t any basis in fact to that. I think it’s, at best, I Maybe there’s some naive environmentalists in there who, love whales and don’t have very good reading comprehension or something to be able to look into it a bit further, but I think much more likely it’s an astro turfing kind of thing where, you know interests that are anti wind for other reasons are riling people up about these Yeah, there’s fake things about whales and we’ve been through the birds thing for ages, there’s, some tiny element of truth to it, but I have yet to see any evidence that there’s any tiny element of truth about the whale thing.

And I don’t recall. Everyone getting outraged about whales dying from, offshore oil and gas platforms. Like, what’s the difference? These are hydrocarbon environmentalists, Rosemary. It’s a new subset.

Allen Hall: Speaking of New Jersey, New York, while we’re at it, Ecuador has announced the finalization of an agreement with NYSERDA.

On the offtake removal power generated at the 810 megawatt Empire Wind 1 offshore wind project, the deal comes after Equinor was selected as the conditional winner in New York’s fourth offshore wind solicitation back in February. The strike price for the project fill will be 155 per megawatt hour which is roughly double What Massachusetts was asking for about six months ago for one of their projects.

So 155 per megawatt hour doesn’t even feel like they negotiated on the NYSERDA side. They needed to get a project up and running and Ecuador has been waiting. Quite honestly, Ecuador has done all the right things here. It’s been the state that has been dragging their feet to make it a difficult. I’m glad this is settled finally.

But 155 then becomes a floor for every other project going forward.

Philip Totaro: Potentially. But look let’s also back up for a second because originally when some of these New York projects that got pulled and then had to be retendered were, asking for strike prices around like between, 80, 90, 110, 120 bucks, they wanted to renegotiate.

They asked for 190, which obviously, in a negotiation, you’re going to ask for a lot more than what you’re actually willing to settle on. They were probably willing to settle on 155 about 9 months ago, so the question is, why did it take this long to get to this point? That’s where I have a frustration with this whole thing and NYSERDA in particular.

Now the actual challenge to, the there’s two things. So one, I’ll address the question of, Is 155 a new floor? I don’t necessarily think so. I think this is the reality of that particular project, the turbines they want to use, the availability of vessels, etc. Everything that, inflation, everything that’s gone into what’s gotten us all these delays and all that.

I think probably there’s a few projects that are going to be done in New York, Massachusetts Connecticut and Rhode Island that are going to be cheaper. Probably around 130 to 135. And then again, if we ever see a future reduction in interest rates, then we’ll have a basis to lower that price tag even more.

So that’s one aspect of it. All of the things I just mentioned about inflation and vessel availability and having to pay for project delays and all that, is the fact that just today there was a news article indicating that some of the other proposed projects including Attentive Energy One, Community Offshore Wind, and Excelsior are now also struggling to find wind.

Available turbines because they were originally going to use the GE 18 megawatt, and now they’re either not going to be able to get the GE 15. 5, or they’re trying to spool up Vestas or Siemens Gamesa, and there’s not enough availability of supply in the timeframe they’re going to be obligated to actually build these projects.

So this is one additional thing that’s complicating. Getting some of these projects built and what may end up influencing the price that they end up negotiating on some of these future projects.

Joel Saxum: But Phil, wasn’t Empire Wind 1, that was originally supposed to be Avesta’s? Machines, right?

There was there. I don’t remember the V 264s or something like that. They were two big ones

Philip Totaro: 236

Joel Saxum: Yeah, so that so they but they should I mean there isn’t an Slow down on Vestas turbines offshore is there right now,

Philip Totaro: but it’s also Joel It’s also impacted by the fact that a lot of these companies like GE and Vestas both said they were gonna do factories Nacelle factories blades etc in the US And now they’re not those that didn’t happen because New York in particular delayed some of these projects and forced the companies to retender.

The retendering meant that they, the supply chain companies didn’t have enough order book to commit to the capital that was going to be required to do the factories for domestic content and all that sort of thing. So now it’s a question of where do we get blades from? Can we get them from, LM up in gas Bay?

Can we, do we have to get them in, in. Do we get them in Denmark? Do we get them from someplace else and get them all the way over here? And there’s only so much, there’s only a finite amount of production capacity at any one of these factories. And if they’ve already got an order book that’s full, it

Joel Saxum: just puts you to the back of the queue.

But that, what you’re saying basically is this, hey, you’re at 155 per megawatt hour for a PPA. You probably would have been at this nine months ago if you would have just negotiated at that time and you would have had all of the factories and all those things still happening but because you did this now you don’t have those and you did it to yourself.

Philip Totaro: Thanks NYSERDA because you’re costing me as a rate payer more money.

Joel Saxum: Is that the most expensive PPA in North, in the country? 155? It has to be. There’s nothing close to that.

Philip Totaro: Hawaii, there’s one onshore that’s more expensive, but that’s Hawaii.

Allen Hall: Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry.

That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And PES Wind is written by the experts. So you can get the in depth info. You need check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication PES [e-mail].

Vestas has announced plans to merge its technology and manufacturing and global procurement divisions into a single technology and operations organization. To accelerate ramp up in industrialization, the restructuring expected to be implemented by Q3 of this year will be led by current CTO Anders Nielsen and is anticipated to only impact senior management role.

So essentially, they’re reorganizing at the top to. bring technology and manufacturing and procurement together under one head. And this is a cyclical thing within engineering, at least where engineering and manufacturing get merged, Phil, and then they get broken apart when they need to develop something again, and they come back together when they’re in production mode.

Is this just part of the natural ebb and flow of a manufacturing business?

Philip Totaro: I’d have to say yes. This, we talked off air about this. This happens in aerospace quite a bit where. It’s just sometimes you need to reorganize the profit and loss centers inside a company to, Make it look a little healthier than what it probably is if they were separate So that’s really probably what’s going on with this.

I don’t really have any additional knowledge about it Unfortunately,

Joel Saxum: I am when I see it. I see that I see a company that wants to optimize their production, right? So Vesta CEO and the last year just like Siemens and GE have to have talked about Hey, let’s slow down on this arms race. Let’s, we’re going to build less models and not have 300 different options.

We’re going to hone in on and do it right and get things better, get the quality up, get costs down. All these things are going to be working on. To me, that’s what this screams, but that’s just me. I’ve never worked in a, in an engineering to manufacturing role, but we do have someone who is an expert.

From Australia who has, so Rosemary, what are your thoughts on this?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think a lot of the Western wind turbine manufacturers at the moment trying to get away from so much, that they’re really short technology development cycles, new and, more new and new stuff and get more into having, a good range of turbines and then getting as much value out of the engineering that went into them as possible.

So that means probably putting more effort into. Engineering effort as well as all kinds of roles, putting effort into the manufacturing yeah, to drive down costs of the technologies that already exist. We see a few companies having layoffs that are with those sorts of goals.

And this is maybe in that end as well. If the only thing that’s happening is changes in, very senior management, then, I don’t know, it doesn’t, it might be no kind of change at all, or it might be the start of bigger changes. It’s hard to say at this really early stage.

Joel Saxum: I think that’s what it is.

I think at this early stage, you’re saying it’s only going to affect top, top senior management until they get their heads wrapped around and then they’ll start. Optimizing the whole value chain the hierarchy, I, you would have to, otherwise what would be the point of doing this, besides just making it easier to communicate or something?

Rosemary Barnes: Maybe it’s a way to hedge their bets to keep to commit to this new order of yeah, getting out of the rotor race, like constantly having bigger and bigger rotors and new technologies all the time. Yeah. But they also don’t want to dismantle their ability to compete in that race.

If it turns out that, everybody else does go back to it, you can’t be the only ones not competing in, in that kind of a race because then you just won’t make sales. It is starting to look like Western manufacturers, definitely not Chinese, but Western manufacturers do seem to be taking a pause.

I think that’s sensible, but unless most people do it, maybe even all, then it’s not going to work. Like you can’t just be the only ones to opt out. Yeah, maybe it’s a bit of a cautious strategy.

Allen Hall: Hasn’t GE Vernova opted out at this point? Doing the same thing.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I think that some of the other companies have made more definitive moves in this way.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So Vestas is doing it now. Geez. Doing it as well. And Seaman’s Grace is doing it by proxy

Philip Totaro: if they’re not already. Yeah. They’re going to be forced to write.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but it’s funny because Vestas are the ones that have been saying this for the longest. They’ve been saying for years and years, we don’t need bigger wind turbines, we need to, make more of the ones we’ve got now.

We need to get more realistic about what they cost. They’ve been saying. All the right things for at least five years. I can’t remember exactly, before it was obvious to me, at least that’s what needed to happen. It took the kind of the crisis of the last year or two before people realized, you know what we have.

There’s no future in continuing the way that we have been. So we’ve got no choice but to change tactic. But now, yeah, I do see investors with a more cautious approach than. The other players that you mentioned. So that’s a little bit interesting. What’s the cost of

Allen Hall: doing this Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think they have a lot of cost at this point. They’ve what are they’ve fired one, one guy on a high salary, that’s that’s good. And probably they’ve, had a few town hall meetings and. That might be the extent of it so far. I, yeah, I’ve got no way of knowing without being a worker in the company.

Philip Totaro: Plus this is supposed to, this is supposed to save money not be something that even if they have to spend a little bit to do this merger of these two business units, it’s supposed to save them in the long run. So that’s how they’re justifying it.

Rosemary Barnes: But if you compare to what, GA has done where there are, I think they’ve lost at least a thousand personnel with years of knowledge of the industry and the company.

That’s a cost, right? They are saving money financially, but they have lost very valuable know how that is, these kinds of companies, that’s their most valuable asset that they have. And they go to great lengths usually to try hard to yeah, to protect that. So that’s a cost.

And So far, Vestas don’t have that cost yet. So that’s why I say, it’s it’s cautious for now because they could always undo it. Whereas GA would struggle very hard to, just overnight say oops, nope, changed our mind. We want to actually go back to the way that we were. Doing all our blade development and manufacturing.

Yeah. Oops. They couldn’t do that now. They’re committed. And if they did try and rebuild, it would be incredibly costly and surely unsuccessful. Think that’s a big difference.

Allen Hall: When I’ve seen this done in multiple other large organizations, when they become manufacturing focused they lose about a third of the engineering staff.

from attrition who do not want to be doing manufacturing work. They want to be doing advanced engineering work. Yeah, I could see that.

Rosemary Barnes: So I haven’t looked at Vestas, but I, in these wind turbine Manufacturers. It really is designed to manufacture. It’s always there’s no engineer that’s working on something that is not like really tied into manufacturing.

At LM, every single engineer has to go spend a week in a manufacturing facility, learning every single process, like you’re literally there on a grinder. And then you I don’t know you, you do all the jobs, right? And yeah. Yeah, you’re in the factory, you’re working on a you work on a design and there’s some people that work only in early stage development.

So they would only be working in in like pilot plants and that sort of thing. But even then they’re still usually going into the factory for projects from time to time. I think it’s different to, some other industries that might be a bit more separated. But I really feel like, yeah, I constantly hear people commenting, oh, they need to work on, Design for manufacture.

And these are just, they’re manufacturing companies through and through. And I don’t, I would be surprised if there are a lot of engineers that aren’t involved in their day to day isn’t, intimately involved with manufacturing as it is, who that would be such a big change to. There’ll be some people perhaps who get annoyed that the priorities change just purely based on the fact that they’ve got a new boss or boss’s boss or boss’s boss.

That, that happens. And, that happens every time, even if there’s no organizational change, but just they replace the VP or whatever. That often causes people’s favorite projects to get scrapped or a direction that they didn’t like. So yeah, for sure that, but I’d be pretty surprised if there’s a lot of engineers working for Vestas who weren’t on board with the fact that they’re ultimately there to make a product that has to be manufactured, manufacturable all those sorts of things.

But just one

Philip Totaro: another anecdote maybe from my experience with aerospace, when I started off working at Sikorsky We were just at that point. This was back in you know between 2003 and 2005 we were just at that point reviving what is now still not even really a product that they offer.

It’s called the S 97. It’s a twin axis rotor helicopter that they wanted to have as a mission replacement for the Apache. They wanted to be able to leverage. Yeah, Allen, you keep gesturing counter rotating at me. It is, it’s a counter rotating rotor.

Allen Hall: I saw that program.

Philip Totaro: I read the magazines.

But it took, it took 22 years for them to get something from, technically it took from 1972 when they first, piloted the technology and tried it out. But the point is like even. There are some people who work at the company that are still there doing their job on that platform for the last literally 20 plus years.

And, personally for me, I can see where, the attrition comes from because I wouldn’t have wanted to work on one thing for that long. Being an engineer myself, it’s like I, you don’t want me designing your helicopters or your wind turbines for that matter, but I I do still enjoy, Doing other things, at all times.

It’s that’s why I do what I do now because it’s there’s, constant dynamism to everything. So it’s, I can see where. People may get frustrated with, just having to do one thing for a very long time.

Allen Hall: Yeah, Rosemary, engineers are people too.

Philip Totaro: This is what happens in, in a maturing industry.

Rosemary Barnes: I personally wanted to get out of working solely in wind energy because I didn’t find it as satisfying to work on, cost out as I like developing new technologies. And yeah, like the wind industry of 10 years ago was more interesting to me than the wind industry of now.

And, there’s a lot of other energy transition technologies that are in that really exciting part where you care more about technology than you do about the cost. Yeah, of course, I don’t necessarily see that that, that is that it’s a big change, obvious to me, that kind of change investors from this restructure.

They’re not getting rid of any of the engineers that are working on, blue sky projects and investors does. Does do probably more than the average of, like bold ideas that they know are probably not going to be economic or be a product anytime soon, but they’re just testing the limits.

And yeah, exactly. Cable stay rotors and a multi rotor. And there’s like quite, quite a few that they do to, advance their learnings and to just, see if the assumptions that they’re working under still hold, is this still the right turbine design? Okay. They do a lot of that, and so probably they are attracting more of that kind of engineer, my kind of engineer than the average manufacturer, but are they announcing that they’re going to close that?

Are they necessarily going to focus less on it because they have integrated the manufacturing with the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, with the technology I don’t know, maybe, I guess it’s, I guess it’s a possibility.

Allen Hall: In order to ramp up production, they’re going to have engineering focused on the manufacturing floor to get product out and to get rid of problems and make it, manufacturing more efficient.

The downside risk to this is when the development cycle kicks back in again, a lot of the development people you relied on for the last go around, they’re Or not at the company. And when you try to flip that switch, it’s hard. And what in aerospace is that you can’t recreate that feeling. All the people that learned all those great things have moved on.

So you’re stuck.

Rosemary Barnes: But I also think to a certain extent, it is a one way street because, the wind industry is maturing. A wind industry is it’s needs a different now than they were 20 years ago. And if we want to, yeah get prices down, we need to. Pause and do the same thing a lot of times.

That’s you know, that’s how it works. So I didn’t start looking around for other jobs purely in the wind industry because I could see that you know my perfect time to work in wind has passed now because it’s a mature technology that is mostly focused on the cost and not so much about making it work.

I mean there’s still pockets of within wind that are doing what I do and I mean I could certainly find a job that. Would be interesting to me. But as a whole, the number of jobs like that are naturally going to decrease as a technology matures. So I would say that, those kinds of engineers will gradually start or have already been gradually making the same decision I made to move into other technologies that are in that earlier part of the yeah, the technology maturation cycle.

Allen Hall: Phil, if we were going to put the wind industry in some sort of alignment with the aerospace industry, airplane industry, 1903 Wright Brothers first flight, right? We can pick one. The first electricity producing wind turbine was it? It’s a lot of variations there, right? But let’s say that’s in the 1970s.

Airplanes got really popular and there’s a lot of airplanes produced during World War one. And that tended to be in, in wind industry about 10 timeframe is when the big push happened. And then we hit this lull and we’re back in we’re in this sort of lull period, which is like 1930s aerospace. And then boom, eventually the money hits, everything hits, which you feel like you’re on in the wind industry.

It’s like you’re on this precipice. You still don’t know when the ramp up’s really going to start. When that happened in the aerospace world, like all of California turned into aerospace companies. That’s why the Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because the aerospace companies were there. There was a time when everybody was focused on aerospace.

There will be some time, I think in the near future, where it’s going to be a lot more engineers involved in wind. We just don’t see it yet. And what I’m afraid of is we’re going to Divert the good talent to other fun projects because Rosemary is a very creative thinking engineer, right? She likes to play with cool stuff.

If she’s not working on cool stuff, she goes find something else to do. It’s hard to get Rosemary back.

Rosemary Barnes: I think the wind boom is going to, it’s going to be in manufacturing though. We, maybe airborne wind is going to take off. Maybe there’s going to be, floating offshore wind is going to be by far the bigger the bigger market, but ultimately we need to be build wind turbines.

And there’s plenty of interesting, satisfying engineering and new manufacturing processes. It’s still, a very manual manufacturing process. It will eventually be automated. I’m sure, there’s lots of cool, fun engineering to do in manufacturing, which I really think it’s highly likely that’s going to be The main thing into the future.

But also like you can go back again. If the future development needs, if when does, yeah, does, cycle back and go through a big, technology boom with something new that we haven’t thought of yet. Then, it will need new skills from other industries and can pull them back in.

I, yeah, I think it’s okay.

Allen Hall: Maybe Aerospace is a hard time getting engineers back at this point.

Philip Totaro: But here’s where we’re at in technology development and innovation in wind right now is. We’ve really We started off where, we had to develop concepts and there were different technology architectures and there was, direct drive and with permanent magnet generator and doubly fed and, there are companies that even tried hydraulic gearboxes and all this sort of thing

Allen Hall: by planes, triplanes, pushers,

Philip Totaro: right?

And that’s the thing is we got through that point where, you, we downselected on some of the technologies that look like they were the best fit. We had reliability issues, particularly with gearboxes. We still have some with blades and et cetera, quality problems, all that. But the point is that you engage the engineers that you need at the time.

So we engaged a lot of people who are mechanical focused to help improve the reliability gearboxes. We did that. So those people, now that they don’t necessarily have a gearbox to improve the reliability of. They go on and do other things where we’re at right now in the industries. We need people that are experts in material science and data science, because those are still the two areas where there’s a possibility for engineers to have the most impact on innovation and product development, as well as manufacturing, because we’re still not taking advantage of, all the different types of manufacturing process.

We could. There’s a lot of, you talk about aerospace technology. There’s a lot of aerospace technology that we haven’t adopted because they haven’t made it cheap enough to be able to do it. And that’s the other thing is if you can engineer something that’s going to be more cost effective, it’ll start getting more widely utilized and then everyone else will want to come in and start copying it.

Allen Hall: Are we at the spruce goose phase of wind?

Philip Totaro: Yeah, you could say that. Yeah.

Allen Hall: I think there’s a huge jump going to happen in the next 10 years. We’re there, almost there.

Joel Saxum: I think Phil’s right. In blade manufacturings, I could see something in blade manufacturing needs to happen.

I don’t know what it is, but something’s got to happen.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and even in things like bearings, right? Come on, there’s a lot of technology that needs to be developed because the reliability is not as good as it should be.

Philip Totaro: Let me make a prediction and I’ll tell our producer to bookmark this.

Allen Hall: Are we going to be doing this program in 10 years? Because I’m not going to make

Philip Totaro: it. I’ll still do it. But in 10 years, We’re gonna be, we’re gonna be at a point where there’s probably not gonna be a whole lot of hand layup on blades anymore. I’m saying it now. Like I don’t Yeah, I don’t think we’re gonna have hand layup anymore in about 10 more years.

We’re

Allen Hall: making them in space too,

Joel Saxum: in a vacuum. That’s how you get rid of bubbles in the resin infusion.

Allen Hall: If we’re gonna pay $155 a megawatt hour. Rosemary wants us to do, which is like 230 Australian, which is insane,

Joel Saxum: right? That turbine better be running.

Allen Hall: If the turbine better be running.

And at what point are GE, Vernova and Vestas and Siemens eventually going to get their pound of flesh out of the operators, right? They see that money what the operator is going to make and what they’re getting for the turbines. At some point, that’s going to transition. That 155. Dollars a megawatt hour is not going to sit with the operator for very long

Philip Totaro: It’s like joel talks about all the time It’s like a pendulum like right now the operators have the negotiating leverage and the pendulum swung their way and The margins are on their side And eventually the margins are going to swing back to the OEMs, because they’re going to start commanding a higher price, and

Allen Hall: That’s right now.

That’s why I’m surprised Rosemary’s phone’s not ringing off the hook.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, although, it’s a higher price, but it’s not a higher margin. And that’s the problem, is it’s You know, everybody’s still struggling to, to deal with logistics issues.

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Allen Hall: We4C, a Dutch company with over 25 years of experience in rotor blade design, has patented a new method of repairing leaf root bushings, which is essentially blade bolts, everybody, which is the part that holds a rotor blade onto the hub.

The refit method offers up to a 60 percent cost savings compared to the cost of a new sheet and saves wind farm operators months of downtime. The way when you have a blade bolt go bad you We have a hard time trying to repair that in the field and a lot of times they bring the blade down I have to send it off site to get the blade bolts repaired What we foresee has done is figured out a way to do it on site So it’s just a lot less down time And it has some sort of novel ways of gluing essentially an insert into a machined Recess so it doesn’t come out now part of the description rosemary was You one of the problems with polyester resin is it micro cracks and loosens up on these blade bolts.

At least that’s what the claim is and they’re trying to fix that problem with some sort of repair. And as Joel and I have traveled around Oklahoma and Texas a lot recently blade bolts Loosening in the blades are a huge problem at the minute. So is there some value to these new blade inserts?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. This is a type of failure that is not. It’s not uncommon, all failures are uncommon within the subset of blades that have failed, this is, reasonably common kind and it can be very significant because it’s the kind of thing where you can end up with a fleet wide problem that you don’t realize until all the blades are out in the field.

That can obviously be very serious because in the worst case scenario, if that connection point where the blade connects to the hub, if that fails, then you can have, blades just flying off and like javelining themselves. A long way away. So that’s obviously pretty close to a worst case scenario.

For a wind turbine failure? Yeah, it’s just, it’s really challenging structural part of a wind turbine because the, the entire load from the entire rotor. Goes through this connection point. So you’ve got huge aerodynamic forces acting on a big, long lever, a big moment arm that, that root connection needs to withstand.

And then from a materials point of view, it’s really hard because the the hub is really stiff compared to the blade. And anytime that you have a change in stiffness, you have a stress concentration and a stress concentration is what you’ll get. Failures. And then to add to that. You also have to, that you’re going to bolt it in with some kind of metal connection, metal fastener.

And then you’re trying to put it into a fiberglass blade and actually getting that to stick is is challenging. So there’s a bunch of different ways that it can be done and yeah, correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that this particular repair method, if it’s talking about polyester, then that means LM blades, I’m pretty sure most or everybody else is using epoxy, this is a, an LM specific solution for their older blades. Obviously if it’s newer blades, then that’s on LM still to, to repair them if you’re getting serial failures across the fleet, then even if it’s out of warranty, that’s something that the original manufacturer has to take care of.

So definitely good to see. Solution emerging, but yet such a challenging component.

Joel Saxum: Allen, I do know that we were, when we were at ACP, we were talking with our buddy Lars Benson from AC 883, and he was talking somewhat about this We4C solution, and the fact that We4C also works with a company out of Denmark called CNC Onsite.

And they’re doing some other really cool things yeah, facing the blades and some other stuff right at the wind turbine, so to cutting down all those logistics costs, one of the things they basically have mobile milling machines that are, can fix these things and refurb these blades and get them back up tower if you’ve got some blade bushing issues or some facing issues or something of that sort.

CNC on site and we foresee the people to call.

Philip Totaro: And keep in mind that what we just recently uncovered with the analysis that we did for the new O& M tool we built was that this issue is actually, as Rosemary was suggesting, it’s actually the number three issue in terms of cost of repair in the United States.

So transportation damage was number one, lightning damage number two, and these root issues is number three. So we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars on an annual basis to, to have these blades get, get fixed. And there’s, I don’t know quite the number off the top of my head, but let’s say that LM’s got probably 40 percent of the blades deployed in the U S market.

So that’s what, 72, 000 turbines by 40%.

Joel Saxum: That’s pretty big chunk. So what you’re saying, Phil, is yell at your trucking company, call Weatherguard Lightning Tech, and then deal with your bushing issues. That’s one, two, three. Your three steps. That’s what I heard. When you think of Waco, Texas, you may be thinking of Chip and Joanna Gaines and their Magnolia Media conglomerate.

However, Waco is also home to the Hubbard Wind Project from NextEra. With phase one producing energy and another phase being planned. So phase one is 108 GE wind turbines generating approximately 300 megawatts of clean renewable energy that began commercial opera operation in 2021. Phase two is in the planning stages.

Still. Originally it was supposed to start operations by 2023, but it looks like now 2026 is the target. That phase two is gonna cost about 400 million to build. Interesting thing about this wind farm as well as it also included a 15 mile, 345 kilovolt single circuit transmission line to connect the ERCOT grid.

And also, as you may not know, this NextEra has a lot of subsidiaries and other companies. They also own a company called Lone Star Transmission that will actually, or was actually the company that built the transmission line to connect these. Wind farms to the grid. So this will be a total of 600 megawatts.

Once totally complete producing a hundreds of construction jobs up to 15 full time local jobs over 78 million in payments to the limestone and Hill County landowners there in central Texas and millions of dollars in tax revenue for the local schools. The other interesting thing about it is you think Texas wind, actually most all of Texas wind is either in the south.

southwest corner or the western northwest. So there’s not a whole lot in the east side of Texas at all because you run into the big pine forests. So this is actually the only utility scale wind farm that is within the Dallas Houston, San Antonio kind of triangle that I 45, I 10 and I 35 makes. But it will when complete be over 600 megawatts.

So next era’s. Hubbard Wind, you are the wind farm of the week.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and check out Rosemary YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.