Published

2 years ago

April 24, 2024

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Solving Wind Turbine Pitch Bearing Problems with Malloy Wind

We interview with Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind, a company specializing in providing bearing solutions for wind turbine applications. Cory shares insights into common pitch bearing failure modes, how Malloy Wind analyzes failed bearings to develop improved designs, and the importance of factors like grease and manufacturing processes in bearing longevity. Visit https://www.malloywind.com/ for more info!

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with my co host, Joel Saxum. If you were an owner, operator, or technician in wind, you have come across pitch bearing problems. And those pitch bearing problems can get really hard to detect early. But once you see them, they’re expensive to repair.

So Joel and I thought it was time to bring on an expert. In bearings to the podcast. So our guest today is Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind. And Cory has an extensive background in wind bearings. Now, Malloy, if you’re not familiar, is based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which is in the middle of the United States.

And Malloy Wind specializes in providing solutions for wind turbine. applications. So they’re a total wind focus organization. They offer a variety of services, including upgrading gearbox bearings, blade bearings, main shaft bearings, pitch motor renewals, and generator bearings. Cory, welcome to the program.

Cory Mittleider: Hey guys, thanks for having me.

Allen Hall: So there’s so many questions about pitch bearings and just having been down in San Diego at the ACP OMNS one of the complaints is, Oh, I got a huge bearing replacement program going on this summer. And my first thought was of you were thinking, wow, you guys must be really busy because Bearings are probably after lightning, it’s lightning and then bearings were one and two of the problems for wind turbines at the moment.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah, it’s been it’s been a busy couple of years. There’s certainly standout platforms that are having their own platform specific failure modes that we’re discovering as we work with operators.

Joel Saxum: Yeah we talked a little bit off air about some of that thing. Okay, so we’re in lightning space.

We know if someone calls and says, I have this turbine with these blades, you go, Ooh, you got problems. So I know that it’s the same thing in the Bering world, generators, like you know the ones that are going to happen. So when you guys initially talk with someone, What are some of the points that you asked them right away?

Okay. They’ve called, what are we looking at?

Cory Mittleider: Sure. Sure. So to your point, it’s a lot of platform specific. We know platform X has this history of problems. Platform Y has a different set of history and platform Z is a pretty stable, pretty robust platform, for example. So we start to, to investigate, is it one of those platforms that we already know has some issues that we either maybe have something developed for, or are currently working on.

We talk about how soon are they experiencing their first failures or how are they detecting them? And most importantly, I think is how long do they plan to run the site? Are they two thirds of the way through the life of the site? Then, we probably propose a different solution to them than we do to some of the worst case scenarios where they’re having failures in the three year ballpark and they’re trying to get to 25.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, no. One of the things that we talked about was, hey, you’re on platform A. With bearings, but you have bearings B and C, same design. But different manufacturers, and sometimes you run into issues there as well.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah. It’s really interesting when it comes down to it. There’s only four parts in a blade bearing.

There’s the rings, the rollers, the seals, and the cage or the spacers, depending on the configuration. It sounds easy, right? But there are a lot of process controls quality checks, things like that. That can be done to ensure. The best long life operation. We actually got a call about three years ago from an operator in our neighborhood that said we have platform a and we have two bearing manufacturers installed across our fleet, all from original build.

The site was about 10 years old. They said, why are all of brand X failing and none of Brand Y. So we worked with them. We investigated that a little bit and we found exactly that, that the bearings are the same dimensions, from a raceway load capacity point of view they should have been the same, but what we found is it was some subtle manufacturing differences from the way the the races were hardened. control point of view. And corrosion protection of the bolt holes, for example, that were leading to that. So very small details, right? That lead to larger implications a decade later.

Allen Hall: And just seeing some of the pictures. That Malloy Wind has on its website and there’s some great technical information about bearings. So if you want to know anything about bearings, go to the Malloy Wind’s website and start looking at the technical explanation, because it’s written in English for in simple terms that even I can understand for me.

Yeah. For people like me that don’t know a lot about bearings, that was really helpful because I’m a picture person, right? I want to see how, what the, how these things break down. The pictures of these pitch bearings coming apart was fascinating because essentially, from what I could tell, it starts to degrade internally and it starts to blow out the seal.

So it starts spitting out metal parts that. Once that begins, it’s bad stuff. You really can’t fix it from there. That’s my understanding of it.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah, then maybe I’ll dive into that, right? Yeah, to your point and you mentioned right at the top that blade bearings are almost impossible to get a health assessment on.

It’s not like a high speed gearbox bearing where you’ve got vibration and temperature because it’s running fast and at full revolutions. But Blade bearings are they don’t ever go full revolution and they go so incredibly slow. So you really can’t apply any of the traditional bearing monitoring tools.

That we’re used to, right? So health assessment is incredibly difficult. Even when you look at the construction of the traditional two row four point bearing type that’s used as a blade bearing it actually stops you for the most part, for most part from even trying to bore scope them.

Joel Saxum: But you can’t access them by design.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah. Yeah, you really can’t access it. To your point Allen a lot of the times what what leaves people to look at them or operators to look at them is pitch faults. For example, especially electric pitch turbines, you’ll start to see an increase in pitch faults, asymmetry type stuff or overload over current on electric pitch.

Or I think you mentioned the seals come out, and grease leaks all over, you’ll get dirty blade ruts, and that’s a signal you can see from further away. But you may have some blade bearing health issues. What we do we and we support in the field. We don’t climb. We don’t do the installation removal, but as the bearing distributors, the bearing experts supporting these operators we’ll get pictures from the field.

We’ll get a call. What am I looking at? If they’re not used to navigating that kind of external inspection, we help that way. But when we get I say a new platform with a new failure mode. We haven’t heard of, we’ll have them replace it. We bring it back to our shop in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and we’ll dismantle it.

And I think there’s a couple of those pictures, those dismantling pictures on the website that you talked about. It’s it’s a terrible job. It’s dirty. That grease is really sticky, especially electric pitch turbines. That tooth the open gear grease is really sticky stuff. But you work through it, you dismantle it.

Sometimes they’ve been locked up such that we had to cut the bearing in half. To get inside to see it. Other times we’re able to remove the filling plugs, pull the balls out and rotate the inner ring around. And that still takes half a day to do. So it’s a really dirty process. Then you got to clean everything after you get it dismantled.

But then we put all that diligent diligence and effort into we’re inspecting the rolling elements that came out, inspecting the raceway, looking for signs of wear. Or electrification or, what they’re called micro pitting or spalling of the raceways, things like that, that help inform the updated designs that we are offering to operators that have had these premature failure problems.

Joel Saxum: One thing you talked about offshore, and this is just a funny note when you were talking about an extreme cases. We’re like, how do they know when it fails? When does the seal go bad? When does it get enough holes in it? And you’re like, yeah, sometimes you have water that runs into the hub from the outside, or you got to put, you got to make sure you got your hard hat on when you get out of the truck, because you might have pieces of bearing falling down from the top.

Cory Mittleider: So to that point, one of the common problems in the last five or eight years has been cage failures. And I’ll emphasize this by saying none of the failures I’m talking about are, I’ll say design failures in terms of, usually when you talk about bearings, the design life is based on rolling contact fatigue, right?

The raceway fatigue. All these premature failures are other failure modes. It’s the real world. It’s the environment. It’s things like that. So in the last several years, it’s been cage failures has been a big topic, which is internal that cage will start to rub and tear up. It’ll get overrolled by the rolling elements.

It’ll get sharpened. And start to tear up that seal and evacuate and cut up that seal and that’s where the grease comes out. Eventually that cage can degrade so much that the balls begin to bunch together because there’s so much gap opened by the cage that’s missing, that was, that’s no longer there.

So I I’ve seen some where All the cage was gone from the blade side row, for example, and only about half left in the hub side row because there are two rows. And I, if I remember right, it was about 40 to 50 degrees because the balls were all bunched together. 40 to 50 degrees didn’t have any balls.

Joel, to your point then you can see straight through it. And on my shop floor, that’s easy, right? You can see the blue rag underneath. But I have heard techs tell me that they’ll be out in a hub and they’ll see all kinds of water is ingressed, or they’ll one just last week at OMS told me that he was in a hub and it was dark.

I don’t know if it was night or what was going on, but he looked and he saw starlight through the gap where balls, cage, and seal all should be blocking your view of that. Just gone.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So As we’re recording this, I have on my other screen here, some of their technical resources go malloywind. com. And it has a bunch of tabs on there, but one of them is resources. And I’m looking at technical things. I’m looking at the ones that says blade carry blade bearing cage failures. And there’s pictures here that literally, it looks like a pineapple grenade. Like it’s just fragments Sharp fragments, right?

They look like they would if you touch them like they would just cut your hand up and there’s tons of them.

Allen Hall: I want to talk about grease for a minute because from my experience working on car engines and all kinds of rolling products, airplanes what you grease these bearings with is really critical to lifetime.

Is that part of the magic here? Not only just the way that the bearings are built and some of the hardening and the coatings, but is the grease and proper maintenance there part of keeping the bearing to have a longer life?

Cory Mittleider: Absolutely. So grease, I like to view it as grease already is.

A compromise. It’s just a carrier for oil. Oil is what you need, the lubricant that separates from the soap and gets between the balls and raceways. So definitely lubricant health is important. In all bearing applications in blade bearing specifically, because the whole bearing is turning end over end during operation, that ball can move up and down the raceway or move micro movements right around the raceway.

So the additives in the blade bearing grease does support avoiding things like false Brinelli. So that, that can be important there. But yes, the frequent relubrication cycle, some turbines it’s put a bunch in at a six month interval, walk away and come back. Other turbine models have auto lubricators, which maintain a more consistent level of grease in that bearing.

So both options do exist. And to your point Allen On the electric pitch turbines that use a, an electric motor and a pitch driver, a gear box with a spur gear on it they have teeth cut into the bearing. Most of them it’s on the inner ring, but there are a couple turbines electric pitch that use a geared outer ring.

That needs grease too, right? That needs a lubricant in place to to support that so you don’t end up with metal to metal contact and rubbing and wear on gear teeth. We actually have seen that in some turbines that Didn’t have as diligent grease applied to the gear teeth during operation as well.

Joel Saxum: Is there a certain kind of grease that you recommend or is it seasonality, right? Do you put a different grease in when it’s going to be cold if you’re in those kind of climates versus when it’s hot? Or is it Specific to a manufacturer.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah,

no, cause you can’t really purge the grease, right? It’s just, so you couldn’t say you couldn’t switch it in that scenario.

But largely we typically as the bearing supplier, we don’t really change the grease. We use what the OEM specified. But to your point we do know that some turbines have an Arctic package, which may have a different grease than the either tropical or standard. package that’s applied to the turbine so that can influence what grease is put in the blade bearings.

Allen Hall: So then the failure mode for, if it’s not grease and lubrication, the other failure mode, which I picked up from your website, was the sort of the stresses on the bearing where you take this big strong metal bearing and you shape it like a potato chip. So you’re putting this incredible stresses on those rings and on the rollers.

Is that I assume that’s built into the design though, right? Are they made to handle those stresses or is that something about the way it’s installed or the blade or how it’s operated that creates those stresses?

Cory Mittleider: With wind we often talk about say design modes is a topic of conversation.

I view it as air is invisible. They probably had a pretty good idea, but there’s, who knows what we don’t know. Whether it’s, whether she or turbulence there’s probably some unknowns going on in these applications is how I like to view it. What we do know is we do know there’s deformation to your point, right?

We do know from the failures we’ve done from the X ray analytics that our manufacturing partners have done with their FEA tools. We do know that there’s deformation going on. Everybody we’ve talked to pretty well acknowledges that yes it’s deforming. And what you’ll see when you look at that tech article sitting on our website is that one of the other failure modes to your point, Allen, is is ring cracking.

That one’s a little, it’s not a new problem. We’ve seen ring cracking and wind probably a decade ago already, but the prevalence is increasing. So it’s been a much more active topic. It’s happening on younger turbines. So it’s been a lot more active conversation for us.

Joel Saxum: Would you tie that younger turbines to larger turbines, right?

We’re talking, if you’re talking older turbines, you’re, You’re six, eight ton blades, and now you’re getting 10, 12, 15 ton blades. Is that why you’re seeing more?

Cory Mittleider: Sure. That’s how I view it too. When we look at the blade bearings support a moment, right? So that’s forced at a distance.

And when you look at the center of pressure for, from an aerodynamic load the center of pressure is further out on a longer blade. And when you look at just strictly the weight of the blade, the center of mass is further out. So at the same time as the aerodynamic load is getting higher, the weight and the bending moment from the gravity load is getting higher.

One of the diagrams that I know I have in those tech articles is we simplify it into two different load sets, the aerodynamic load and and the gravity bending moment load, just from the way we presented on the website. Obviously the FEA tools can consider everything in a very much the more complex application that it is.

But Both of those have gone up at the same time. So really and then at the same time, the blade bearing diameter has gone from maybe 1. 9 meters to 2. 5 meters. So it’s only grown by two feet, 600 meters. Approximately because that’s how you support a moment load, right? A larger diameter would reduce that applied load to the raceway.

Definitely attributed to that. We’ve seen when we talk about ring cracking in the younger turbines, it really seems like once we broke about a hundred meter rotor diameter is where that conversation has picked up for us. In in the last.

Joel Saxum: For five years, like I say, the immediate thought that came to my mind was we talk with quite a few people in Brazil and their average megawatt size down.

There’s three

Cory Mittleider: for new installations.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, for new for just the average fleets because their fleet is so young. So they’ve only installed a lot of brand new, bigger turbines. They had, they don’t have a lot of 20 year old, 15 year old turbines on. So I’m thinking to myself Man, they must, the bearing issues they must have down there.

It’s going to be fleet wide.

Cory Mittleider: To, to the point from earlier manufacturer A or B does have a reputation for certain failure modes, right? We know, we know those. And to that point we’ve, we, because of our tech articles both on our website and what we shared on LinkedIn, we have talked with operators in.

South America, South Africa, actually a couple different places in Europe. We’ve been able to set up some teams meetings and share, some of the investigation that we’ve done to help inform them where to look, how to start addressing it, both on turbine models that we know that are global turbine models, but also on some that we don’t know that aren’t installed in the U. S., but they just happen to be, similar failure modes.

Joel Saxum: So this is the important thing I wanted to get to here with Malloy wind and the awesome place you guys fill in the market. So we know that when you buy a turbine, you get whatever the OEM built for blade bearings, pitch bearings, yaw bearings, whatever that may be you.

That’s what you get. Malloy fills the space where if that fails, or if you need new ones, if you’re doing a repower, if you have some kind of issue, you guys are the experts and you have feedback mechanisms built in. So like earlier in the call or earlier in the chat here, we were talking about you guys going and Diving into the problem, getting that problem bearing or representative problem bearing of a fleet or whatever it may be back at your shop, tearing it down.

But then you guys go the next step further to provide value to the industry. Can you walk us through that?

Cory Mittleider: Yes, so that process so we work really closely with one particular manufacturing partner IMO based out of Germany. They know a lot from the analytics side, from the manufacturing side, and then also some feedback they’ve had from education globally.

But our role in the U S here is to work with those operators and collect that empirical data, right? The tear downs the, even the real world stuff. And the nice thing about working with them has been that we can use the baseline knowledge that they had from 30 years of history, little 30 years of history and wind.

In blade bearings for them and inform that and we take their, this basic part number we’ve known from from a serial production point of view and add on to that, right? We’ve added, for example, two years ago, we took a blade bearing that was designed about 20 years ago for an older turbine model, and we’ve taken all the best practices of a 2021, 2022 wind turbine blade bearing.

And applied it to that. It’s improved sealing, it’s corrosion protection, it’s different raceway hardening practices, orders of operations in in manufacturing processes that, that weren’t known back then, but we’re applying all this field education to the new product. So that’s what that looks like.

Allen Hall: I love that. That’s how the rest of the industry should work. That’s why Malloy exists, right? Because it’s hard to find somebody who knows enough about bearings to then incorporate design changes into the next generation so you don’t have those problems. There’s not a lot of Corys around. That’s why we want to have you on the podcast.

And from a Malloy Wind standpoint, you’re then Really changing the industry, right? And in a sense that you have an OEM product, it’s pretty good, starts to fail, and operators want to upgrade or put something on them that’s going to last. That’s why they’re coming to you. That’s a big change for the industry, right?

It just makes the wind industry more resilient in the long run. And that’s where we need to go. And as Joel’s pointed out many times, there’s a lot of companies that are in the wind industry that don’t do that service. Don’t provide that actionable information. And when you weren’t across one, it’s so remarkable because you just want to hold them up and say look here, this is the way it should happen.

Look at Malloy Wind. Here we go.

Cory Mittleider: That’s interesting. I so I started at Malloy almost 15 years ago now, and I started supporting other industries. And that’s that’s how we support all of the industries across our company is we look at and we’re not just say, hey, there’s a part number we can offer you that part number.

We like to ask why. I guess is what I like to say. Why are you replacing it? So that’s I guess I cut my teeth doing that learning with from our shop and to our other our other industries. And I’ve just applied the same approach as we discover problems with our wind customers too.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. At the end of the day A bearing is a wear part. Now it’s a long, a very long life wear part, right? It’s not like the brakes on your car where you’re like, yeah, it’s going to go now. They should last a long time, but they do wear down, right? Especially in industrial applications.

But you guys so let’s talk about this then when customers come to you, are they usually Hey, we’re repowering or is it like, man, we’ve got a fleet wide issue. We need to solve it. What do you think that split is?

Cory Mittleider: Yes. So repower projects aren’t as active in the aftermarket, I think. So a lot of the repowers are done with OEMs, right?

So you’re using those turnkey OEM designs that we talked about already. There are some repowers, I like to call them overhauls. Where you’re starting, I like to describe you start on the low speed side because that’s the big stuff. That’s the heavy stuff. It’s stuff takes a big crane, right?

You start at the blades, the hub and work backwards. So on those overhaul projects we are able to help offer something that I’ll say we learn of the history on that platform and apply this 2024 current generation wind. Blade bearing technology to make sure that they meet their goals. On the other hand, there are some turbines that are to your point, Jill, younger three, four, five years.

They maybe had their first failure in blade bearings two and a half, three years. They’re really striving to hit the 20. And some of these newer sites that we’re talking 25, maybe 30 year. Is the desirable time horizon to operate those sites. And if, if an application doesn’t matter what the application is if a blade bearing failed in three years that’s a big problem and you need an impactful solution.

To try and get another 22 years out of that, for example.

Joel Saxum: Otherwise it’d be replacing them every three years.

Cory Mittleider: Yeah. Yeah. We have some bigger solutions for that big of a problem and then other ones like the one I mentioned a minute ago they made it to 10 years maybe they’ll try and hit 20 and maybe they’ll try and coast a little past 20, get a little gravy on the end.

But let’s do. So we have a little bit of different tools we can apply. We have we can do a little bit better. We can update the design by that 10, 15 years, the corrosion protection, the bolt holes, larger balls, maybe things like this, we can still use the same basic bearing type. We don’t need to bake this big overhaul change like we do.

So that’s why we ask the questions we ask early on. What’s your failure rate? How old is the site? And what is your time horizon? So we can try and apply the right tool to help them meet their goals.

Allen Hall: Malloy Wind is a big resource. People should get on to your website and check out all the information you have there.

How do people get a hold of Malloy Wind and how do they get a hold of you if they have bearing issues?

Cory Mittleider: I’ve always got my email on just about any of us, right? So I definitely have my email address which is cmitleider at malloyelectric.com. Cause we are, our wind division is a part of our bigger company Malloy electric wind at Malloy electric, much easier to spell his is a good one.

We have a shared inbox shared amongst the inside team here. Or message me on LinkedIn, like Allen, you did recently. So yeah, LinkedIn website, email phone is my direct line is 605-357-1076.

Allen Hall: There you go. So if you have bearing issues, better give Cory a call. All right, Cory, thank you so much for being on the program.

Joel and I have learned a tremendous amount.

Cory Mittleider: Thanks, guys.

https://weatherguardwind.com/wind-turbine-pitch-bearing-malloy-wind/

Renewable Energy

Boycott Amazon

Published

6 hours ago

May 5, 2026

Alice Rush

At left are a few good reasons not to shop from Amazon.

I use eBay, so as not to make this world an even worse place than it is now.

Boycott Amazon

Renewable Energy

Vineyard Wind’s $69.50 PPA, Two Offshore Lease Exits

Published

14 hours ago

May 5, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Vineyard Wind’s $69.50 PPA, Two Offshore Lease Exits

Rosemary reports back on her visit to multiple Chinese renewable energy companies, Vineyard Wind activates a $69.50/MWh PPA with Massachusetts utilities, and Bronze Age jewelry halts a German wind project.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

[00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts.

Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron in Austin, Texas, who is back from the massive wedding event. Everybody’s super happy about that, and Rosemary Barnes had her own adventures. She just got back from China and Rosemary. You visited a a lot of different places inside of China.

Saw some cool factories. What all happened?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it was really cool. I went over for an influencer event. So if you are maybe, you know, in the middle of your career, not, not particularly attractive or anything you might have thought influencer was ruled out for you as a career. No one, no one needs engineering influencers in their [00:01:00] forties.

It’s incorrect. It turns out that’s, that’s where, that’s where I, I found myself. It was pretty cool. I, I did get the red carpet rolled out for me. Many gifts. I had to buy a second bag to bring home the gifts, and when I say I had to buy a second bag, I had to mention. Oh, I have so many gifts, I’m gonna need another bag.

And then there was a new bag presented to me about half an hour later. But, so yeah, what did I do? I got to, um, as I was over there for a Sun Grow event. Huge, huge event. They, um, it’s for, it’s for their staff a lot, but it’s also, they also bring over partners. They also bring over international experts to talk about topics that are relevant to them.

Yeah. They gave everybody factory tours in, um, yeah, in, in shifts. Um, I got to see a module assembly factory, so where they take cells, which are like, I don’t know, the size of a small cereal box, um, and assemble them into a whole module. Then the warehouse, warehouse was [00:02:00] gigantic. It, um, was, yeah, 1.8 gigawatt hours worth of cells that couldn’t hold in that one building.

They’re totally obsessed with fire safety there in everything related to batterie, like in the design of the product, but also in, in the warehouse. And they do, yeah, fire drills all the, all the time. Some of them quite big and impressive. Um, I saw inverter manufacturing facility that was really cool.

Heaps of robots. Sw incredibly fast. Saw a test facility.

Allen Hall 2025: So was most of the manufacturing, robotics, or humans?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So at the factory it was like anything that needed to be done really fast or with really good quality was done by robots. So they had, um, you know, pick and place machines putting in. Um, you know, components in the circuit board, like just insane, insane rate.

I’m sure it’s quite, quite normal, but, um, just very fast. Everything lined up in a row. Most of their quality control is done by robots. Um, so it does well it’s done by ai, I should say. [00:03:00] Taking photos of, of things and then, um, AI’s interpreting that. Repairs, I think were done by humans. There were humans doing, um, like custom components as well.

Like not every product is exactly the same. So the custom stuff was done by humans.

Allen H: So that’s the Sun Grove facility, right? You, but you went to a couple of different places within China?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I went to another, a factory, a solar panel, a factory, um, from Longie. That was really cool too. I got to see a bit more probably of the, um, interesting, interesting stuff there, like, uh, a bit more.

Um, yeah, I don’t, I dunno, processes that aren’t, aren’t so obvious. Not just assembly, but um, you know, like printing on, um, bus bars and, you know, all of the different connections and yeah, it was a bit, a bit more to it in what I saw. Um, so that was, but it, it’s the same, you know, as humans are only involved when it’s a little bit out of the.

Norm or, um, where they’re doing repairs, actual actually re [00:04:00]repairing. You know, the robots or the AI is identifying which components don’t meet the standard and then they’ll go somewhere where a human will come and, um, fix them.

Allen H: Being the engineer there. Did you notice where the robots are made? Was everything made in China that was inside the factory or were they bringing in outside?

Technology.

Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t think to look for that, but I would assume that it was Chinese made, also

Allen H: all built in country

Rosemary Barnes: 20 years ago that wouldn’t have been the case, but I think that China has had a long, a long time to, to learn that. Again, it’s not like, it’s not, it’s not rocket science. These are, these are pick and place machines, you know, like I remember working on a project very early in my career, so.

Literally 20 years ago, um, I was working with pick and place machines. It’s the same, it’s the same thing. Um, some of them are bigger ’cause they’re, you know, hauling whole, um, battery packs around. It’s just the, um, the way that it’s set up, but then also the scale that they can achieve. You just, you can’t make things that cheap if you don’t have the [00:05:00] scale to utilize everything.

A hundred percent. Like I said, wind turbine towers is a really good example. ’cause anyone, any steel fabricating

Allen H: shop

Rosemary Barnes: could make a wind turbine tower. Right? They, they could, they could do that. You know, the Chinese, um, wind turbine tower factories have the exact right machine. They don’t have a welder that they also use for welding bits of bridges or whatever.

Uh, they have the one that does the exact kind of world that they need, um, for the tower. They, you know, they do that precisely. Robotically, uh, exactly the same. And, you know, a, a tower section comes on, they weld it, it moves off to the next thing, and then a new one comes on. They’re not trying to move things around to then do another weld in the same machine.

You know, like they’re, um, but the exact right. Super expensive machine for the job costs a whole bunch to set up a factory. And then you need to be making multiple towers every single day out of that factory to be able to recoup on your cost. And so that is [00:06:00] the. The, um, bar that is just incredibly hard slash impossible for, um, other countries to clear.

Allen H: Can I ask you about that? Because I was watching a YouTube video about Tesla early on Tesla, where they wanted to bring in a lot of robotics to make vehicles and that they felt like that was the wrong thing to do. In fact, they, they, they kinda locked robots in and realized that this is not the right way to do it.

We need to change the whole process. It was a big deal to kind of pull those. Specialized piece of equipment, robots out and to put something else in its place in that they learned, you know, the first time, instead of deciding on a process, putting it in place and then trying to turn it on, see if it works, was to sort of gradually do it.

But don’t bolt anything down. Don’t lock it in place such that it doesn’t feel like it’s permanent. So you engineer can think about removing it if it’s not working. But it sounds like this is sort of the opposite approach of. A highly specialized [00:07:00] machine set in place permanently to produce. Infinite amounts of this particular product, does that then restrict future changes and what they can make or, I, I, how do they see that?

Did, did you talk about that? Because I think that’s one of an interesting approaches.

Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t actually get as much chances I would’ve liked to speak to engineers. Um, I was talking mostly to salespeople and installers. Um, so they know a lot, but I couldn’t, um, like in the factory tours, I was asking questions.

Um. That kind of question and, and they could answer all, all that. Um, but outside of that, and I couldn’t record in the factory obviously. Um, but I did, I did take notes, but what I would say is that they would have a separate facility where they would be working out the details of new products and new manufacturing processes and testing them out thoroughly before they went and, you know, um, installed everything correctly.

But what I do hear is that, you know, especially with solar power. Maybe to [00:08:00] batteries to a lesser extent. You, you know, you like, you have these kind of waves of technology. Um, so you know, like everyone’s making whatever certain type of solar cell and then five years later, um, there’s a new more efficient configuration and everybody’s making that.

And I know that there are a lot of factories that kind of get scrapped. Um, and the way that China’s set up their, like, you know, their economy around all this sort of thing is set up is that it’s not that, like every company doesn’t succeed. Right. They SGO was a big exception because they’ve been going since 1997, I think it was.

It was started by a professor quid his job and hired a room across the, across the road from his old university and, you know, built his first inverter and, um, you know, ’cause he, he could see that. Uh, the grid was gonna have to change to incorporate all of the solar power that was coming, which to be honest, in 1997, that was like pretty, pretty farsighted.

That was not obvious to me when I started working in solar in mid two thousands. And it was not obvious to me that this was a winner.

Allen H: Well, has sun grow evolved then quite a bit? ’cause if you’re [00:09:00] saying that they’ve minimized the cost to produce any of their products by the use of robotics, they have been through an evolutionary process.

You didn’t see any of the previous generations of. Factories. You, you were just seeing the most modern factory that that’s actually producing parts today. So is that a, is that a, is that just a cost mindset that’s going on in China? Like, we’re just gonna produce the lowest cost thing as fast as we can, or is it a market penetration approach?

What are, what were, were the engineers in management saying about that?

Rosemary Barnes: I think there’s a few different aspects to that, like within China. So Sun Grow is the big company with a long track record and they’re not making the cheapest product out of China. So I think that they are still trying to make the cheapest product, but they’re not thinking about it just in the purchase price.

Right. They’re thinking more in terms of the long, long term. You know, they’ve been around for 30 years and probably expect to be around for another 30 years. They don’t wanna be having [00:10:00] recalls of their products and you know, like having to, um. Installers in particular are probably working with them because they know that they won’t have to go back and do rework and the support is good and all that sort of thing.

So they’re spending so much money on testing and you know, just getting everything exactly right. But I don’t think that that’s the only way that China is doing it. There’s, you know, dozens, probably hundreds of companies. Um. Doing similar stuff between Yeah, like solar panels and associated stuff like inverters and, and batteries.

So many companies and all of them won’t succeed. You know, sun Girls Facility in, I was in her and it’s huge, you know, it’s like a, a medium sized country town. Just their, um, their campus there, they’re not, they’re not scrapping that and moving to a new site, you know, they’re gonna be. Rejiggering and I would expect that, you know, like everything’s set up exactly the way it needs to be, but it’s not like gigantic machines.[00:11:00]

It’s not like setting up a wind turbine blade factory where it’s hard if you designed it for 40 meter blades, you can’t suddenly start making 120 meter blades. Like it’s, they will be able to be sliding machines in and out as they need to. Um, so I, I, yeah, I guess that it’s some, some flexibility. But not at the cost of making the product correctly.

Allen H: Did you see wind turbines while you were in China?

Rosemary Barnes: I, the only winter I saw, I actually, I saw, because I caught the train from Shanghai, I actually caught the fast train from Shanghai to, which is about, it depends which one you get between like an hour 40 or three hours if it stops everywhere. Um, and I did see a couple of wind turbines on the way there, out the window, just randomly like a wind turbine in the middle of a, a town.

Um, so that was a bit, a bit interesting. But then in the plane, on the way back, the plane from Shanghai to Hong Kong, I, at the window I saw a cooling tower of some sort. So either like a, yeah, some kind of thermal [00:12:00] power plant. And then. Around all around, well, wind turbines, so onshore wind turbines. So I don’t know.

Um, yeah, I, I don’t know the story behind that, but it’s also not a particularly windy area, right? Like most of the wind in China is, um, to the west where, uh, I wasn’t

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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. So there are two stories out of the US at the minute that really paint a picture of the industry. It was just being pulled in opposite directions. The Department of Interior announced agreements to terminate two more.

Offshore wind leases, uh, [00:13:00] Bluepoint wind and Golden State wind have agreed to walk away from their projects. Global Infrastructure Partners, which is part of BlackRock, will invest up to $765 million in a liquified natural gas facility instead of developing blue point wind. Ah. And Golden State Wind will recover approximately $120 million in lease fees after redirecting investment to oil and gas projects along the Gulf Coast, and both companies say they will not pursue further offshore wind development in the United States.

Well, we’ll see how that plays out. Right? Meanwhile. In Massachusetts Vineyard Wind, which has been fighting with GE Renova recently has activated its long awaited power purchase agreement with three utilities. The contract set a fixed electricity price of drum roll please. [00:14:00] $69 and 50 cents per megawatt hour for the first year and a two and a half percent annual increase.

Uh, state officials say the agreements will save rate payers $1.4 billion over 20 years. So $69 and 50 cents per megawatt hour is a really low PPA price for offshore wind. A lot of the New York projects that. Renegotiated we’re somewhere in the realm of 120 to $130 a megawatt hour, and there’s been a lot of discussion in Congress about the, the usefulness of offshore wind.

It’s intermittent blahdi, blahdi, blah. Uh, but the, the big driver is what costs too much. In fact, it doesn’t cost too much. And because it’s consistent, particularly in the wintertime, uh, electricity prices in Massachusetts in the surrounding area are really high. ’cause of the demand and ’cause how cold it is that this offshore wind project, vineyard wind would be a huge rate saving.

And [00:15:00] actually the math works out the math. Math everybody. Do you think this is, when we go back five years from now, look back at this. This vineyard wind project really makes sense for Massachusetts.

Yolanda Padron: I think it really makes sense for Massachusetts. I’m really interested to know what the asset managers are thinking on the vineyard wind side, um, and if they’re scared at all to take this on.

I mean, it’s great and I’m sure they can absolutely deliver. Like generation I don’t think should be an issue. Um. I just don’t know. It’s, it sounds like they’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Allen H: I would say so, yeah. But remember, the vineyard win was one of the early, uh, agreements made when things were, this is pre Ukraine war, pre Iran conflict on a lot of other, a lot of other things.

It was pre, so I remember at the time when this was going on that. P. PA prices were higher than obviously a lot of other [00:16:00] things. Onshore solar, onshore wind, it would, offshore is always more expensive, but I don’t remember $69 popping up anywhere in any filing that I remember seeing. So even if they had said $69 five years ago, I think that would’ve still been like, wow, that’s pretty good for an offshore wind project.

And now it looks fantastic for the state of Massachusetts

Yolanda Padron: because I know that there’s sometimes, and we’ve talked about this in the past, right? There are sometimes projects where, you know, you think you, you’ve got a really good price and you’re really excited about it, and then it goes into operation and then like a couple years down the road, prices increase quite a bit and it’s not the worst thing in the world.

But you do just kind of think a little bit like, I wish I could. Renegotiate this or you know, just to get, to get our team a bit of a better deal or to get a bit more money in operations and everything.

Allen H: Does this play into Vineyard wind claiming $850 [00:17:00] million in dispute with GE Renova that at $69 PPA, there’s not a lot of profit at the end of this and need to get the money out of GE Renova right now, and maybe why GE Renova wants to get out of this because they realize.

The conflict that is coming that they need to separate the, the themselves from this project. It’s, it’s very, as an asset manager, Yoland, as you have done this in the past, would you be concerned about the viability of the project going forward, or is all the upfront costs. Pretty much done in that operationally year to year.

It’s, it’s not that big of a deal.

Yolanda Padron: As an asset manager taking this on, I’d probably have started preparation on this project a lot earlier than other of my projects like I do. I know that usually there’s, you know, we’ve talked about the different teams, right, throughout the stages of the project until it goes into operations, [00:18:00] but.

And usually you don’t have a lot of time to prepare to, to make sure all of your i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed, um, by the time you take the project and operations from a commercial standpoint. But this project, I think would absolutely, like you, you would need to make sure that a lot of the, of the things that you’re, that might be issues for some of your projects like aren’t issues for this project.

Just to make sure at least the first few years you can. You can avoid a lot of, a lot of turmoil that the pricing and the disputes and the technical issues are gonna cause you, because I feel like it’s just, there’s, there’s just so many things that just keep this side, just keeps on getting hit, you know?

Allen H: Well, I, I guess the question is from my side, Yolanda, is obviously inflation, when this project started was pretty consistent, like one point half, 2%. It was very flat for a long time. And interest rates, if you remember when this project started, were very, very low. Almost [00:19:00] nonexistent, some interest rates.

Now that’s hugely different. How does a contract get set up where a vineyard can’t raise prices? It would just seem to me like you would have to tie some of the price increase to whatever the inflation rate is for the country, maybe even locally, so that if there were a, a war in Ukraine or some conflict in the Middle East.

That you, you would at least be able to, to generate some revenue out of this project because at some point it becomes untenable, right? You just can’t afford to operate it anymore. And,

Yolanda Padron: and I think, um, I, I haven’t, I obviously haven’t read the, the contracts themselves, but I know that there’s sometimes there, it’s pretty common for a PPA to have some sort of step up year by year.

And it’s usually, it can be tied to, um, the CPI for. Like the, the change in CPI for the year to year. So you’re [00:20:00] absolutely like, right, like maybe, I mean, hopefully they’re, they’re not just tied to the fixed 69 bucks per megawatt hour. Um, but, but yeah, to, to your point like that, that price increase could, could really save them.

Now that we’re, we’re talking the, the increase in, in inflation right now and foreseeable future,

Allen H: if you think about what electricity rates are up in the northeast. I think I was paying 30 cents a kilowatt hour, which is 300. Does that sound right? $300 a megawatt hour. Delivered at the house, something like that.

Right? So

Yolanda Padron: prices in the northeast are crazy to me,

Allen H: right? They’re like double what they are in North Carolina. Yeah.

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Allen H: Well, sometimes building a wind farm turns out more than expected construction workers at a 19 turbine wind project in lower Saxony Germany under Earth. What experts call the largest Bronze age Amber Horde ever found? The region, the very first scoop of an excavator brought up bronze and amber artifacts that stopped construction and brought archeologists back to the site.

Uh, the hoard has been dated between [00:22:00] 1500 and 1300 DCE and is believed to have belonged to at least three. Status women possibly buried as a religious offering. Now as we push further and further across Germany with wind turbines and solar panels for, for that matter, uh, we’re coming across older sites, uh, older pieces of ground that haven’t been touched in a long time and we’re, we’re gonna find more and more, uh, historically significant things buried in the soil.

What is the obligation? Of the constructor of this project and maybe across Europe. I, I would assume in the United States too, if we came across something that old and America’s just not that old to, to have anything of, of that kind of, um, maybe value or historically significant. What is the process here?

Rosemary Barnes: I assume that they’ve gotta stop, stop work. Um, yeah, that’s my, my understanding and I don’t think, do you have [00:23:00] grand designs in America?

Allen H: I don’t know what that is. Yes.

Rosemary Barnes: So missing out by not having that chat. It’s a TV show about people who are building houses or doing, um, ambitious renovations, and it just, it follows, it follows them.

You can learn a lot about project management or. The consequences if you decide that you don’t need to, project management isn’t a thing that you need to do. Um, anyway. I’m sure that in some of those ones I’ve seen they have had work stop because in their excavation they found a, um, yeah, some, some kind of relic, um, from the, from the past.

So based on that very well-credentialed experience that I have, I can confidently say that they would be stopping stopping work on that site. I mean, it’s so bad, bad for the developer, I guess, but it’s cool, right? That they’re, you know, uncovering, uh, new archeology and we can learn more about, you know, people that lived thousands of years ago.

Allen H: It, it does seem [00:24:00] like, obviously. Do push into places where humans have lived for thousands of years. We’re going to stumble across these things. Does that mean from a project standpoint, there’s, there’s some sort of financial consequence, like does the lower Saxony government contribute to the wind turbine fund to to pay the workers for a while?

’cause it seems like if they’re gonna do an archeological dig. That that’s gonna take months at a minimum, may, maybe not, but it usually, having watched these things go on it, it’s. It’s long.

Rosemary Barnes: But wouldn’t that be something that you’d have insurance for?

Allen H: Oh, maybe that’s it.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, it seems to me like an insurable, an insurable thing, like not so hard to, it would’ve affected plenty of other, like any project that involves excavation in Europe would come with a risk of, um, finding Yeah.

An archeological find. And having work stopped, I would assume.

Allen H: Yolanda, how does that work in the United States do, is there some insurance policy towards finding [00:25:00] a. Ancient burial ground and what happens to your project?

Yolanda Padron: I don’t know. I, um, the most I’ve heard has been, it’s just talking to like the government and like the local government and making sure that you have all your permits in place and making sure, you know, you might need to, to have certain studies so you know, you might not have to get rid of the whole wind farm or remove the hole wind farm, but at least a section.

Of it has to be displaced from what you originally had thought. I don’t know. I know it happens a lot in Mexico where you get a lot of changes to construction plans because you find historical artifacts or obviously not everybody does this, but like. Tales of construction workers who will like, find, they’re so jaded from finding historical artifacts that they just kind of like take and then dump them to the next plot over to not deal with it right now.

Not that it’s anything ethical, uh, or done by everybody, [00:26:00] uh, but it’s, but, but it’s a common occurrence, a relatively common occurrence.

Allen H: You would think it where a lot of wind turbines are in the United States, which is mostly Texas and kind of that. Midwest, uh, wind corridor that they would’ve stumbled across something somewhere.

But I did just a quick search. I really hadn’t found anything that there wasn’t like a Native American burial ground or something of that sort, which they previously knew. For the most part. It’s, so, it’s rare that, that you find something significant besides, well, maybe used some woolly mammoths tusks or something of that sort.

Uh, in the Midwest, it’s, it’s, so, it’s an odd thing, but is there a. A finder’s fee? Like do does the wind company get to take some of the proceeds of, of this? Trove of jewelry.

Rosemary Barnes: I, I would be highly surprised.

Allen H: Well, how does that work then? Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: I’d be highly surprised if that’s the case in Europe. I bet it would happen like that in America.

Allen H: Sounds like pirate bounty in a sense.

Rosemary Barnes: In, in Australia it wouldn’t be like that because [00:27:00]you, when you own land, you don’t actually. You, you own the right to do things from surface level and above, basically. I don’t know how excavation works. So you don’t generally have a a right to anything you find like that?

I mean, you shouldn’t either. It’s not, it’s not yours. It’s a, it belongs to the, I don’t know, the people that, that were buried. When you then to the, the land, like, I guess. The government in some way. I mean, in Australia it’s, um, like we don’t have so many archeological fines that you would find from digging.

I mean, it’s not that there’s none, but there’s not so many like that. But it is pretty common that, you know, there are special trees, um, you know, some old trees that predate, uh, white people arriving in Australia. And, um, you know, that have been used for, you know, like it might have a, a shield that’s been, um.

Carved out of it. Or, uh, hunting. Hunting things, ceremonial things, baskets, canoes, canoe like things, stuff like that. They call ’em a scar [00:28:00] tree ’cause they would cut it out of a living, living tree. And you know, so when you see a tree with those scars and that’s got, um, cultural significance. There’s also, you know, just trees that were, um.

That that was significant for cultural reasons and so you wouldn’t be able to cut down those trees if you were building any, doing any kind of development in Australia and a wind farm would be no different. I know that they are, there are guidelines for, if you do come across any kind of thing like that or you find any anything of cultural significance, then you have to report it and hopefully you don’t just move it onto the neighboring property.

Allen H: I know one of the things about watching, um. Some crazy Canadian shows is that. Uh, you have to have a Treasure Hunter’s license in Canada. So if you’re involved in that process, like you can’t dig, you can’t shovel things, only certain people can shovel. ’cause if they were to find something of value, you.

You’ll get taxed on it. So there’s just a lot of rules [00:29:00] about it. Even in Canada,

Rosemary Barnes: if I was an indigenous Australian and you know, some Europe person of European descent came and found some artifacts, uh, aboriginal. Artifacts. I would be pissed if they just took it and sold it. Like that’s just clearly inappropriate right.

To, to do that. So you, I don’t think it should be a free for all. If you find artifacts of cultural significance and you just, it’s, you find its keepers that, that doesn’t sound right to me at all.

Allen H: Can we talk about King Charles II’s visit to the United States for a brief moment?

Uh, he is a really good ambassador, just like, uh, the queen was forever. He’s, he does take it very seriously and the way that he interacted with the US delegation was remarkable at times in, in terms of knowing how to deal with somebody that there’s a war going on right now. So there’s a lot [00:30:00] happening in the United States that, uh, not only could it be.

Uh, respecting both sides of the UK and the United States’ position in a, in a number of different areas, but at the same time being humorous, trying to build bridges. Uh, king Charles, uh, had the scotch whiskey tariffs removed just by negotiating with President Trump, and sometimes that’s what it takes.

It’s a little bit of, uh. Being a good ambassador.

Allen H: Yeah. The very polished you would expect that. Right? But this is the first visit of. The king to the United States, I believe. ’cause he, he’s been obviously as a prince many, many, many times to the United States. [00:31:00]But this time as, as a, the representative of the country, the former representative or head of the country, which was unique.

I think he did a really good job. And I wish he, they would’ve talked about offshore wind. Maybe he could’ve calmed down the administration on offshore wind.

Rosemary Barnes: I bet that’s one of the, the goals. I mean, that’s an industry that’s important to. So

Allen H: I wonder if that happened actually. ’cause that’s not gonna be reported in, in the news, but how the UK is going on its own way in terms of electrification and I guarantee offshore wind had to come up it.

Although I have been not seen any article about it, I, I find it hard to believe that King Charles being the environmentalist that he is, and a proponent of offshore wind for a long time. Didn’t bring it up and try to mend some fences.

Rosemary Barnes: Maybe he’s playing the long game though. I mean, Trump is pretty, he’s transactional, but he also, you know, he has people that he really likes and you know, will act in their interests.

So maybe it’s enough to just be [00:32:00] really liked by Trump, and then that’s the smartest way you can go about it.

Allen H: Did you see the gift that King Charles presented to, uh, the US this past week?

It was a be from, uh, world War II submarine, which was the British, I dunno what the British called their submarines, but it was, the name of it was Trump. So they had the bell from. The submarine when it had been commissioned and they, they gave that to the United States, or give to the president. It goes to the United States.

The president doesn’t get to keep those things, but it was such a smart, it’s a great president. It’s such a smart gift, and somebody had to think about it and the king had to deliver it in a way that got rid of all the noise between the United States and the uk. Brought it back to, Hey, we have a lot in common [00:33:00] here.

We shouldn’t be bickering as much as we are. And I thought that was a really smart, tactful, sensible way to try to men some fences. That was really good. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn.

Don’t forget to subscribe, so you never miss this episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. For Rosie and Yolanda, I’m Allen Hall and we with. See you’re here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.