Weather Guard Lightning Tech

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

EchoBolt’s BoltWave Makes Bolt Inspections Easy
Pete Andrews from EchoBolt joins to discuss ultrasonic bolt inspection, the Bolt Wave device, and blade stud defect detection.
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!
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Pete Andrews: Pete, welcome to the program. Good to be back. Yeah. See you face to face. Yeah. Yes. This is wonderful. It’s a really great event to catch it with loads of the. UK innovation that are happening in the supply chain. So it’s, yeah, really nice to be here.
Allen Hall: This is really good to meet in person because we have seen a lot of bolt issues in the us, Canada, Australia, yeah.
Uh, all around the world and every time bolt problems come up, I say, have you called Pete Andrews and Echo Bolt and gotten the kit to detect bolt issues? And then who’s Pete? Give me Pete’s phone number. Okay, sure. Uh, but now that we’re here in person, a lot has changed since we first talked to you probably two years ago.[00:01:00]
You’re a bootstrap company based in the UK that has global presence, and I, I think it’s a good start to explain what the technology is and why Echo Bolt matters so much in today’s world.
Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, as you said, we’re a uk, um, SME, there’s a team of 13 of us based here in the uk. Yeah. But we do deliver our services internationally, but really focused on Northern Europe.
Yeah. But increasingly we’ve done more in the US and North America, a little bit in Canada. Um, but our big offering really is to help wind turbine operators and owners reduce the need to routinely retire in bulks. So we have a quick and simple inspection technology that people can deploy, find out the status of their bolt connections, and then.
Reti them if necessary, but the vast majority of the time we find that they’re static and absolutely fine and can be left [00:02:00] alone. So it’s a real big efficiency boost for wind operators.
Joel Saxum: Well, you’re doing things by prescription now, right? Instead of just blanket cover, we’re gonna do all of this. It’s like, let’s work on the ones that actually need to be worked on.
Let’s do the, the work that we actually need to, and instead of lugging, like we’re looking at the kit right here, and I can, you can hold the case in one hand, let alone the tools in a couple of fingers. As opposed to torque tensioning tools that are this big, they weigh a hundred kilos, and those come with all of their own problems.
So I know that you guys said you’re, you’re focused here. You do a lot of work, um, in the offshore wind world as well. Yeah. I mean, offshore wind is where you add a zero right? To zeros. Yeah. Everything else is that much more complicated. It costs that much more. It’s you’re transitioning people offshore to the transition pieces.
Like there’s so much more HSE risk, dollar risk, all of these different spend things. So. The Echo Bolt systems, these different tools that you have being developed and utilized here first make absolute sense, but now you guys are starting to go to onshore as well.
Pete Andrews: Yeah, that’s right. So I mean, as as you said, that there’s really [00:03:00] three main benefit areas we focus on.
The first one is the health and safety of technicians, right? As you said, some of the fasteners used offshore now are up to MA hundred. So a hundred millimeter diameter bolts,
Joel Saxum: four inches for our American friends. Yeah, absolutely.
Pete Andrews: And they probably weigh. 30 kilos plus per bolt. Yeah. Um, so just the physical manual handling of that sort of equipment and the tightening equipment for those bolts is a huge risk for people.
If you think 150 bolts lifting or maneuvering, the tooling around on on its own can cause all the problems. So as well as the inherent risk of the hydraulic kit failing. So occasionally we see catastrophic tool failure. Is, which have really high potential severity, you know, sort of tensioner heads ejecting or crush injuries from Tor.
So that is really a key focus for our customers, just to [00:04:00] keep their teams safe, but also you have to be the cost effective and the the major cost benefit we allow is that we don’t have to revisit every bolt and every turbine like you’d have to do if you were retyping. So we believe there’s something of the order of a million pounds per installed gigawatt saving.
By moving from a routine REIT uh, maintenance strategy to a focused condition based inspection, you significantly reduce the amount of intervention you make and keep your turbines running more and reduce the boots on the ground on the turbine. So three real kind of, um, key. Benefits for people adopting our technology
Allen Hall: because we routinely see tower bolts being reworked or retention depending on who the manufacturer is.
And I’m watching this go on. I’m like, why are [00:05:00] we doing this? It seems, or the 10% rule, we’re tighten 10% this year, and they’ll come back and see how it’s going. That’s a little insane, right, because you’re just kind of. Tensioning bolts up to see if one of them has a problem and then you just do more of them and we’re wasting so much time because echo bolts figured this out years ago.
You don’t need to do that. You can tell what the tension is in a bolt ultrasonically, which was the original technology, the first gen I’ll call it, uh, that you could tell the length of the bolt. If the length of the bolt is correct within certain parameters, you know that it is tension properly. If it’s shrunk, that probably means it’s not tensioned properly.
That’s a huge advantage because you can’t physically see it. And I know I’ve seen technicians go, oh, I could take a hammer and I can tell you which ones are not tensioned properly wrong. Wrong. And I think that’s where equitable comes in because you’re actually applying a a lot of science simply [00:06:00] to a complex problem because the numbers are so big.
Pete Andrews: Yeah, I mean that, that, that’s been the real. Driving force between our offering is to simplify it. So ultimately we’re based on a non-destructive testing technique. It’s an ultrasonic thickness checking technique, but when from the non-destructive testing background, it’s crack detection, people have time, they can be, it’s a very precision measurement.
People have to be trained in the wind industry. We’re trying to inspect. A thousand, 2000 bolts a day at scale. It’s a completely different, um, ask of the technology and the way the technology has been developed historically has required too much technician expertise, too much configuration and set up time, and hasn’t delivered on the, on the speed that’s needed to be efficient in wind.
And that’s where our bolt wave [00:07:00] unit we’ve, that we’ve developed over the last. 18 months, let’s say, where all of our focus has gone to make it as slick and as easy for a client technician to pick up with minimal training. It’s through an iOS interface. Everyone understands it intuitively. Um, it’s a bit like using the camera app on your phone.
You know, you’re just hitting measure, measure, measure, measure, measure 10 seconds a bolt as you move the, um, ultrasonic transducer across, and then the data gets moved. Automatically to the cloud, to our bolt platform. And customers can view it in near real time. The engineer in the office can see the inspections happened.
They can see if there are any anomalous bolts, and then there can be communication there and then whether an intervention is necessary. So it’s sort of really changed the way our customers think about managing their, um. They’re bolted joints.
Joel Saxum: Well, I think these are, these are the kind of innovations that we love to see, right?
Because [00:08:00] we regularly talk about a shortage of technicians, and this isn’t, I was just learning this this week too, like this is not a wind problem. This is a everywhere problem. No matter what industry you’re in. Use are short of technicians. But we’re seeing like a tool like this is developed to be able to scale that workforce as well.
Right. You don’t need to be an NDT level three expert to go and do these things. ’cause there’s a very few of those people out there. Right? Right. We know the NDT people, a lot of NDT people, and that’s a hard skillset to come by. Yeah. This can be put in the hands of any technician. Yeah, a quick training course.
Just, Hey, this is how you use your iPhone. You can check Instagram, right? Yeah. Okay. You can off figure. Yeah, have fun. See you at lunch. Um, but they can, they can make this happen, right? They can go do these inspections and you’re getting that, that, uh, data collected in the field. Centralized back to an SME that’s looking at it and you don’t have to put that SME in the field and try to scale their ability to go and travel and do all these things.
They can be in the office making sure that the, the QA, QC is done correctly. I love it. I think that that’s the way we need to go with a lot of things. [00:09:00]Uh, and you’re making it happen.
Pete Andrews: Yeah. And it’s a real kind of. F change in mindset for us. So originally when we started Ebot, we were using third party hardware.
Yeah. Which required a bit of that specialism. Yeah. A bit of care about the setup of the project, getting multiple parameters configured before you got going. And it wasn’t really something we could put in the hands of a customer.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Pete Andrews: Which meant Ebot scale was limited to what our own team could go and do, and regionally as well.
You know, so we’re UK based. Probably 60% of our customers are uk, but now we have this Northern Europe offshore wind is obviously on our doorstep, but then increasingly we’ve done more and more in North America, so we’ve probably been to five or six sites now in North America and expect that to be a growth market because we can, we can now ship the devices over there, give some virtual training help.
Uh, [00:10:00] people set themselves up and then that opens up that market, you know, so it’s been a real change in strategy for us, but has allowed us to have far more impact than we otherwise would just try to be a pure service.
Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the big problem in the states of a minute, which are the root bushing or inserts that are loose in some blades.
When you lose that pushing, you also lose the tension on the bolt that can be measured. Is that something you’re getting involved with quite a bit now because of just trying to determine how many bolts are affected and, and where we are on the safety scale of can we run this turbine or not? Is that something that EE bolt’s been looking into?
Pete Andrews: Yeah, absolutely. So I, I’d say there’s sort of two halves of what we do. There’s the, there’s the bulk wholesale monitoring of. Typically static connections to eliminate this routine retitling where it’s not needed typically, typically. But then we have these edge cases of certain [00:11:00] connections and certain platforms that have known bolt integrity problems, and we are working with clients to really, um, manage those integrity risks.
Blade stud is an absolute classic, you know, sort of, I think almost every turbine OEM on some, if not all of their platforms has got. Embedded risk into their blades, pitch bearing connections. Um, so yeah, exactly as you said, our customers are using the technology for two things really. One is to ensure the bolts have been tightened to the preload that was specified or the target window.
And quite often we find there is an opportunity to increase the preload and therefore increase the resistance to fatigue failure. So. You know, particularly on older sites where the bolts perhaps not in the condition they were on day one. Well, they definitely won’t be. Um, when people have gone and retti them, they haven’t got back to where they, they should be.[00:12:00]
So we can prove that and increase a bit of that resilience, but then also start to look for the segments around the joint where, um, the bolt might start loosening or failures are occurring, and find areas where they can really hone in. And actively manage risk. And that sort of leads to what we’ve decided to do for the next year, particularly with Blade Stud in mind, is evolve this technology.
So whilst it’s also measuring the elongation, we will do a defect scan at the same time. So you’ll monitor your blade stu, um, connection and we’re hoping that we can set the device to flag to you there and then. We believe this bulk has got a defect while you’re here, get it changed out before it fails and, and all the knock on problems, um, from there.
Joel Saxum: So what you’re just pointing to there is a, is a workflow, right? So to me that is typical [00:13:00] of some of the amazing, innovative companies in the UK that I’ve run into throughout my career. And that is, you’re a group of SMEs, you know, bolted connections. That’s what you do, right? But then you’re like, hey. If there’s a tool, we could make a tool that would make our lives a bit easier, then it’s like, well, we could make the entire industry’s lives a little bit easier as well.
So let’s iterate on that. And now you’re able to send these kits around the world to look at these things. Hey, you have a problem with this specific model. We can help you with this because we know the failure mode and we know how to look for it. Let’s do that for you. Also here, you’re doing bolt bulk measurements.
We got that for you. But it all kind of flows back to the fact that Echo Bolt is a team. A bolted connection, SMEs that are making tools and being able to also provide consulting if need be. Yeah. Right. Um, to, to an entire industry. And I think that, um, this is my take on it, right? Wind is stop number one. I think you guys are gonna do a fantastic year, but there’s a lot of, uh, opportunity out there in bolted [00:14:00] connections as well.
Allen Hall: A tremendous amount blade bolts being broken from defects in the crystalline structure. What appears to be a more. Rapidly developing issue across fleets that I’ve seen. I went to a farm this summer and the number of blade bolts that were there on the table that were broken on the conference room table was And the whiteboard office.
Yeah. Yeah. This one,
Joel Saxum: this one.
Allen Hall: Your hard head is not gonna protect you from this one. It’s, it’s, it was this, um, I couldn’t imagine the amount of time they were spending hunting these things down. And of course, the only way they were finding ’em was they were broken. You like to catch ’em before they break because it becomes
Joel Saxum: a safety risk.
Just not too long ago we saw an insurance case where there’s an RCA going on and it is pointing at an entire tower came down. Right. And it is pointing at a mid, mid tower section bolted connection. How often do you guys run into those problems? Or are you contacted by insurance companies or anything like that to, to take a peek at those?
Pete Andrews: We haven’t done anything directly for insurance [00:15:00]companies, but we have been engaged by. Engineering consultancies that are doing RCA type activities. Okay. Um, things like at the end of defect liability periods mm-hmm. A customer has, has seen, they’ve had a lot of, uh, issues from an OEM, maybe an OE EM has offered a modification or an upgrade, assessing whether that upgrade is actually solved the problem or not.
We’ve got involved in, um, but the tower. Issue specifically. It’s actually very rare we find, um, problems with tower connections, but where we do is often where they haven’t achieved good flange flatness, ah, during installation or the bolts have been, let’s say, left out in the elements for a period and lubrication has been, has deteriorated before the bolt’s been installed.
So there are cases out there, but what I would say is. [00:16:00] To think about your whole life cycle, so ensure the bolt’s installed correctly and we can help with that with a QA to say, yes, this torque or tightening method has got you to the load that you want. Do some through life monitoring, but often if you install it correctly, it will it’s operational life.
You will have very little concern. But then in the UK market, we’re increasingly getting involved again at the end of life, right? Life extension where life extension turbines are 20, 25 years old. How does an operator make a decision to carry on running without replacing all bots? Um, and that’s where increasingly we being asked to use the technologist just to say, actually the joint is fine.
The bolts have run in a good, um, operational envelope. Run them on. Don’t replace a hundred percent of them like you might have been recommended to from your, um, yeah. Turbine supplier side. [00:17:00]
Allen Hall: So Pete, if someone’s doing a repower where they’re basically putting a new one in the cell on an existing tower, they’re making a lot of assumptions about all the bolts from the ground up that they’re gonna be okay.
And I know we’re talking about that. We’re in a lot of installations where. If the turbine has gone through a repowered or two. So now those bolts are 20 years old. Yeah. And trying to get ’em to
Joel Saxum: 30 35. 35
Allen Hall: 40. Yeah. I don’t know what they’re doing. By those bolted connections. Are they just like replacing the bolts?
Are they hitting ’em with a hammer again? Is that the, yeah,
Pete Andrews: I mean, they might replace ’em, but you’ve got a problem with the foundation bolts. ’cause they’re obviously often anchor bolts set into concrete, so you have to reuse them and. With the projects, both in wind and in process power industry with the chimney stacks to try and ascertain whether foundation bolts that are set into concrete are still suitable for operations.
So look for corrosion losses, look for [00:18:00] defects. Um, so yeah, they’re all things that need thinking about before you just make the snap decision to repower. But I think
Joel Saxum: a lot of that, uh, going back to a couple minutes ago, you were talking about at the commissioning phase, making sure that you have proper qa, QC of how these things were installed day one, and then making sure that before commissioning of a turbine, they’re checked.
I think that’s really important. We’re starting to see that in the blade world now too, where we’ve been talking about it for a long time, and now when you talk to operators, they’re like, we’re getting inspections done on the blades before they’re hung. Or at the factory before they’re hung. After they’re hung.
Like they want a good foundation baseline. Are you seeing that in the bolted connection world too?
Pete Andrews: Yes. Sort of. It’s just emerging for us. What we’ve found is, so most of our customers are in the operational phase ’cause they are the ones feeling the pain. Yeah. Of the routine retitling work. When they do major components, they sometimes engage us to come and say, can you check [00:19:00] before and after the blade was removed?
What was it? Before we took it off from a a bolt load perspective, what is it afterwards? Can you then recheck after 500 hours When we retalk it? And what we’ve seen there often is the initial install hasn’t got them to where they needed to be and they’ve had to go and do the break in maintenance or the 500 hour REIT to get the bolts to the right load.
So one of the questions that we have is whether. Some of the defects are actually being initiated very early on in that initial running in period and whether if, if actually you’d taken the time at, at the point of assembly to make sure you were correct, whether that avoids some of the knock on integrity concerns.
So yeah, it’s interesting area.
Allen Hall: Well, bolts are what hold wind turbines together and you better know you have the right. Tension and [00:20:00] torque on your bolts to get to the lifetime of the wind turbine and to, and to check it once in a while. And I know there’s a lot of operators I can think of right now in the United States that are sort of doing that job somewhat.
I I think they have missed out on opportunities to save a lot of money and to call it echo bolt. How do people get ahold of you? Because that’s one thing I run into all the time. Like, Hey, hey, you gotta talk to Ebol, call Ebol. How do they get ahold of you?
Pete Andrews: So the easiest ways are via our website. Which is echo bolt.com.
Um, LinkedIn, you’ll find us at Echo Bolt on LinkedIn. Reach out. Our email would be info@cobolt.com. So any of those route and you’ll, uh, reach me and the team and more than happy to speak to you about any of your faulting concerns or problems. We are, uh, yeah, we’re passionate about your problems.
Allen Hall: Pete, thank you so much for being on this podcast.
I, it is great to actually see you in person and see the bolt wave technology. It’s really [00:21:00] impressive. So anybody out there that needs bolt tensioning to checking tools, you need to get ahold of Pete at Echo Bolt and get started today. Thank you Pete. Thanks guys. It’s great to be here.
Renewable Energy
Carbon Capture and Synthetic Fuels
As we’ve noted in the past, the idea of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is completely unfeasible, since 99.96% of the air around is something other than CO2 (mostly nitrogen). However, there are environments that change this equation radically, cement plants being one of them, where the concentration of CO2 emissions is as high as 30% (versus .04%).
Now, this brings the subject of synthetic fuels into the realm of possibility. Sure, if you want to make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel, you’ll need two other things: hydrogen (which can come from electrolyzing water), and a considerable amount of energy, as these processes are heavily endothermic, meaning that energy must be supplied from external sources.
The good news is that we have enormous amounts of off-peak wind and nuclear that are wasted every day. Please see: Doty WindFuels.
Renewable Energy
What Trump Is Actually Doing
With each passing day, there are fewer and fewer American voters who believe the bullshit at left.
Is Trump working hard to stay out of prison? Enrich himself and his family? Of course.
Could be possibly care less about anything else? Obviously not.
-
Climate Change10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases10 months ago
Guest post: Why China is still building new coal – and when it might stop
-
Greenhouse Gases2 years ago嘉宾来稿:满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago嘉宾来稿:满足中国增长的用电需求 光伏加储能“比新建煤电更实惠”
-
Climate Change2 years ago
Bill Discounting Climate Change in Florida’s Energy Policy Awaits DeSantis’ Approval
-
Renewable Energy7 months agoSending Progressive Philanthropist George Soros to Prison?
-
Carbon Footprint2 years agoUS SEC’s Climate Disclosure Rules Spur Renewed Interest in Carbon Credits
-
Greenhouse Gases11 months ago
嘉宾来稿:探究火山喷发如何影响气候预测
