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Blade Failure Alert: How ONYX Prevents Million-Dollar Disasters

ONYX Insight‘s ecoPITCH system prevents catastrophic wind turbine blade failures caused by pitch bearing issues. Forrest French and Martin McLarnon reveal how continuous monitoring and early detection can save wind farms millions.

Contact Martin McLarnon: martin.mclarnon@onyxinsight.com

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Allen Hall: ONYX Insight’s ecoPITCH monitoring system has become crucial for wind farm operators facing blade root insert failures. These failures start invisibly but can end catastrophically with blades detaching completely. This week we speak with Forrest French Senior Project Engineer, and Martin McLarnon, sales Director for North America at ONYX Insight.

Their ecoPITCH system detects dangerous movements before visible signs appear as Forest notes in the interview. By the time you can get a feeler gauge measurement, it’s probably too late. So join us to discover how data-driven monitoring is helping operators make smarter maintenance decisions preventing million dollar disasters and keeping turbines spinning safely.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Martin and Forest. Welcome to the [00:01:00] show. Hello. How’s it going? Thanks for letting us. Yeah, we’re really interested to, to talk to you today just because there’s so many blade root issues from pitch bearings and blade bushings or inserts as they’re called sometimes, and a number of other issues. And when we talk to operators, what they tell us is, oh, we, you use ecoPITCH.

And they love that system. But I want to, I wanna back up first and talk about what are some of the operators experiencing out there in the field And ecoPITCH system was originally developed to look at pitch bearing problems and forests. What are some of those pitch bearing problems you’re seeing out in the field today?

Forrest French: Yeah, so it, it, it’s a funny story. It was originally developed for pitch bearing, uh, applications. Um, the industry as a whole started experiencing this root insert issue, so we were able to, we were kind of in a perfect position, right? It was, it was a, it was a [00:02:00] really serendipitous thing that we, we had just developed this product and we could easily pivot.

To measure both the pitch bearing and this root insert issue. Uh, the, the pitch bearing issues are admittedly the, the more difficult, uh, issue, right? To measure. Um, there’s, there’s some, some great opportunities for value and there’s also some really good challenges to come along with that. Um, pitch bearings, uh, they, they don’t rotate quickly.

Right. Uh, when, when we talk about typical CMS typical vibration monitoring, you’re looking at a very, very fast rotating, uh, shaft or bearing, et cetera, and you’re able to pick up on those frequencies as they revolve. You don’t get that with a pitch bearing. It’s a very slow moving, uh, slewing bearing. Um, so picking up.

Noise through vibration can be very difficult, uh, because again, you don’t get that frequency of that [00:03:00] rotation, so you’re left with nothing but uh, a bunch of noise. Right. And you’re hoping that that noise floor is low enough that you might capture a bit of crunching of cage material or anything like that?

Right. The alternative in what, in what we use ecoPITCH for is it’s very simple. We, we point a an inductive displacement sensor right at the pitch bearing itself. Typically the inner ring, depending on the type of turbine. And what we’re looking for is any kind of slop or displacement between the inner and outer ring.

And there’s always gonna be some, right. Uh, but, but what we’re looking for is. Is a change in the amount of, of movement between those two rings, which may indicate falling or, or other failure modes within the raceways. The challenges come along when you have failure modes that maybe, maybe don’t show themselves right through that displacement because it’s absolutely possible to, to completely lock [00:04:00] up a bearing while, while showing almost no displacement.

So there’s, there’s, there are challenges to come along with this, so, so. ecoPITCH is great for pitch bearings, but it really needs to be coupled with good visual inspections by the sites to make sure that that bearing’s not spitting out cage material right. And something that, that maybe isn’t being seen in the data.

Allen Hall: So those measurements are important.

Right? And it’s very difficult to go up there every month or two and try to take those measurements. Are there signs on the outside that everybody should be watching for? I know when we were on site a number of times. If there’s a pitch bearing problem, you typically see grease on the outside of the blade, near the root area.

Is that the, the main source of detection at the moment?

Forrest French: Yeah. And, and you know, I think, I think every operator’s gonna have a different way of looking for this stuff. It’s, it’s not there, there’s not a, uh, a very uniform strategy, I would say. Um, but really what they’re gonna be [00:05:00] looking for yeah. Is, is exactly that.

It’s gonna be grease purging out of the seals. Um, it’s gonna be the seals themselves blowing out. Right. Um, that’s, uh, cage material. Coming out of the seals is a, is obviously gonna tell you that you’ve got some, some, uh, some balls inside your bearing that are getting locked up and pulling the cage to bits, right?

And that’s what’s gonna happen when that displacement I was talking about gets severe. So you get severe displacement. It jams up a ball, but you continue to pitch. So other balls continue to move and you kind of shred that cage and it starts spitting that material out, damaging the seal. Um, so it’s, it’s a whole process.

Yeah.

Allen Hall: So if you see grease on the outside, the seal is blown. And more than likely, if you look on the ground, you’re gonna see metal shards.

Forrest French: Potentially, yeah. Depending on what kind of collars and stuff you have. Uh, but, but yeah, usually a lot of those, a lot of those shards and, and that, that metal material is gonna get captured in a lot of that grease.

Um, so really it’s just gonna turn your [00:06:00] hub into a greasy metal mess. Right. It’s, it’s still fun to be in those, those hubs. For sure. Well,

Allen Hall: let’s talk blade uh, inserts or bushings. What do you typically see if you’re walking around a farm? When a blade bushing is starting to fail, what’s the indicator from the ground?

Forrest French: From the ground? It’s difficult. Um, what, what we’ve seen typically is you’re gonna see a, uh, and, and again, this, this depends on the turbine, uh, whether it’s an electrically driven turbine or a hydraulically driven, uh, pitch bearing, sorry. Um, with the electrically driven pitch bearings, it’s a little bit easier to spot these issues.

You’ve, you’ve got. Uh, when, when the bushing starts to fail, it will basically spit out some of this, they call it dust, like a metal dust basically. And that dust will kind of make its way out onto the outside of the blade usually. So. From the Nelle, for example, you might pop your head out the hatch, do a visual inspection of the outside of the root, [00:07:00] and you might see some of that dusting heading down, down the blade.

That’s a good indicator that, that you’ve potentially got an issue. It’s, it’s not a, a, a, a sure thing at that point. Right. Um, because there’s a lot of places where metal can can make its way into the system with the hydraulically driven turbines that. Indicator gets a lot more difficult. Um, if anybody, you know, and I’m sure a lot of the folks on the call have some of these turbines, they’re a mess usually, right?

Um, if, if, if any bit of debris gets loose, it’s gonna knock off a bunch of hydraulic lines and it’s gonna make an absolute mess. And any material that’s being spit out by those bushings, it’s just gonna get. Caught up in all that hydraulic oil, and again, it’s just gonna turn into a mess and you’re not really gonna know one from the other at that point.

You’re really just left with, with uh, uh, kind of your more rudimentary ways of looking for this and some of your [00:08:00] more labor intensive ways of looking for this

Allen Hall: force. There’s a lot of ways to inspect the blade root insert. Bushing issue as the blade moves around and I, I’ve seen some of these, uh, sites where they got a technician who climbs up in there and he is got a feeler gauge of some sort.

Is that really an effective way to, to even measure that problem?

Forrest French: Yeah. The, the feeler gauge method is. Is better than nothing. Right? You’re, you’re doing something at that point. What, what we’ve found historically is that by the time you can really get a feeler gauge measurement, uh, it’s probably too late.

At that point, you, you’re seeing a significant enough gap that you can get material in there. It’s, it’s a, you’ve got a big problem on your hands. We also see paired with that, um. We see folks doing a dial indicator measurement, right? Where you’re taking sta uh, dial indicators, you’re placing them around the circumference of the blade, and that usually involves pitching the blade out, cantilever, and then you, you just rotate the blade, and that’s in that [00:09:00]static position.

You’re not actually rotating the hub. That is, is definitely better than something like a feeler gauge methodology. The, the, the, the good thing about that is you get higher resolution and you can track that over time as you use that, that methodology. The problem with both of those though, is they’re, they’re offline measurements.

I. You’re not seeing any of the loading due to the rotation of the hub, none of the arrow loads on the blades. So what you’re gonna see is if you place a continuous monitoring system, or, or even a, a, a, a portable monitoring system on this, and you rotate that turbine, you’re gonna see a significant increase in displacement value.

So you’re getting the real picture of what’s actually happening when this turbine is operating. Right? That’s gonna give you. A lot more insight into when you need to make a decision to shut this thing down.

Allen Hall: So how far off are the feeler gauge measurements compared to the ecoPITCH system?

Forrest French: It varies. Uh, it, that’s, that’s the issue with the feeler gauge is that depending on [00:10:00] which technician, on which day.

In which position, you know, how they’re feeling that day. They’ll get a different measurement every time. Um, and that’s nothing against the technicians themselves. They’re, it doesn’t matter how perfect, how perfect you do it, you’re gonna get a different measurement every time because that, that blade is shifting and moving around and it might just sit somewhere new one day when you go up to check it.

Um, but on average, I could say easily that you could see up to. A, a difference of, I mean, two, three millimeter I’ve seen before, a difference between a feeler gauge and an actual live measurement when operating the turbine. So very significant.

Allen Hall: Well, yeah. Well, what I want to talk to then is what happens if we don’t catch these, uh, these indicators early enough?

What is the downstream effect and sort of how expensive does that get

Forrest French: The final failure is, is catastrophic. Right. The final failure is that the [00:11:00] blade falls off. It, it liberates, right? That’s the, the correct term is a liberation. Um, but nobody wants to end up with a blade in on the ground. Um, and so you, you generally have a lot of signs leading up to that.

Um, that again, you, you need some type of system to measure those. Whether that’s a manual measurement, um, using feeler gauges or dial indicators, and I have my opinions on those and we will get into that. But, or, or, or a continuous monitoring system, whether that’s permanent or a portable system, uh, such as a, a sweep.

Um, but you need to be looking out for these items in some way, shape, or form. There’s, there’s a particular subset of turbines, of blade types that are, that are known to be seeing this failure more. And it’s highly likely that if you’re listening to this, you probably know whether you have those, those blades.

You’ve probably been notified one way or another. [00:12:00] Um, but if not, we can help, we can help make that call.

Martin McLarnon: Yeah. And just, just add to that, you know, there’s other, um, owners, you know, the blade liberation potentially if it strikes the tower. Could you get tower collapse as well? So that’s like obviously, uh, huge increases.

Um, and then when that happens, you know, what are the options? You know, um, you know, what damage does that do? How long does it take to get a new blade in an expedited fashion can be even more expensive. And then the whole time you’ve got, um, the turbine is offline. And depending on what time of year that happens, you may not be able to kinda get it all, all lined up, um, for several months.

Um, so, so yeah, definitely. It’s, it’s extremely, we’d say high risk. So the, the cost impacts are, are, are really big.

Joel Saxum: I’ve, I’ve heard of, uh, touching the insurance world, right? Like farms where, and this is where the ecoPITCH system comes into play.

Wind farms that have been shut down and they haven’t been turned back on for months, entire wind farms because they don’t know how to monitor for this, or they don’t know if it’s safe to go back on. Once [00:13:00] they’ve discovered a problem, they don’t know what that, um, you know, what is our safety margin here?

What. Can we play with, how can we get this thing back running? So you guys as eco with the ecoPITCH system, have walked into that, right? You’ve been able to get these things up and running. How does that work? How does that process work with you guys?

Forrest French: So, so a situation like that, and we’ve seen this, right?

Uh, customer has a blade liberate they shut down their entire fleet because to your point, they don’t know. They don’t know, right? They don’t know what’s out there. Now, what, what other insidious failures are just waiting for them. So. What we can provide in that case is, is our, our ecoPITCH system. We have a portable.

Portion or a portable version of this where we go up tower, it’s a real quick and dirty type thing, right? We’re using magnets and Velcro, whatever we can right to crudely get this stuff into the turbine safely. Obviously it’s not going anywhere, um, but whatever it takes to quickly [00:14:00] get this system installed, what we’ll do is we’ll run the turbine for about 10 minutes, right?

We’re gonna. Take our measurements, we’re gonna get outta there, we’re gonna yank our equipment out, and we’re gonna move on to the next turbine. Generally speaking, with that system, and this depends on the turbine, you’re looking at about two turbines per day. Certain certain blade types, we have to get in the blade itself.

That can push us back to, you know, one turbine per day for confined space reasons and things like that. Um, but what that does is it provides you with. Your full population. Now you know what every blade looks like compared to the rest of the population. And what we’re doing with that data is we’re, again, we’re taking all these 10 minute data samples and we’re just saying, Hey, these, this subset of turbines needs further analysis, right?

You need to be watching these. The rest of these though are baseline. They’re all right where we expect them to be. They’re all [00:15:00] the same. The operator can quickly just go and fire those turbines back up and get back to business.

Allen Hall: And what does that data look like for us? Is it just a, a measurement or? Do you see the movement of the root and the, the pitch bearing as the turbine spins?

What, what is that data?

Forrest French: The data is, is really rudimentary. It’s very, it’s very cool and, and there’s a lot of information that you can take away from it, but at the end of the day, it’s just a sine wave. And I’m sure we’ll, we’ll provide some, some examples of that that you guys can toss up on the screen.

Um, but really what you’re seeing, and generally in a simple system, we’re gonna put a sensor up near the leading edge. Near the trailing edge, right? And if you put those two, uh, sign waves on a graph, what you’ll typically see is they’re, they’re out of phase by about 90 degrees. That’s expected as the turbine is rotating.

One side, you know, one side of the blade’s gonna go into compression, one’s gonna go into detention, and then as it swings around, it’s gonna reverse, right? So you get that 90 degree phase [00:16:00] where it starts to get fun is, uh, or fun, fun for me as the engineer looking at the data. Maybe not fun for the, the person who owns a turbine, but, uh, where it starts to get interesting is when these failures get.

Very severe. We’ve seen that that phasing actually start to line up. And what that means to me is that the blade is no longer wobbling. It’s literally pulling away all at one time and dropping back down all at once, right? So you have the entire blade system plunking up and then falling back on the bearing.

So at that point, that means that likely you’ve, you’ve lost. Enough bushings around the circumference of that blade that the entire blade is moving at the same time rather than flexing in and out. That’s a little more rare, but it’s just an example of some of the cool, uh, bits of information that we can take away from this

Allen Hall: for us, when you see these kinds of large measurements, uh, displacement happening [00:17:00] as the hub spins, putting a permanent system in, I think makes sense because you want to be able to project.

Ideally where this growth is or if it starts to vary wildly uh, or grow rapidly, you wanna be able to understand how soon to shut the turbine off. Explain to me what the logic is that goes into that, because there’s a lot of engineering that looks at that data.

Forrest French: Yeah, and this is, this is the key difference between something like a portable system that we talked about where you go up, you take 10 minutes of data and you yank it out.

The key difference between that and a continuous monitoring and a permanent system. The portable system is gonna tell you on this day at this time, what was your displacement? And that’s great information. You can absolutely action that information, but what you’re lacking is the full story, right? What, okay, it was here today, what is it tomorrow?

What is it? The next day? I’ve seen examples where, uh, I’ve put a permanent system in place and the [00:18:00] displacement value is, we’ll call it elevated. It’s maybe not in like emergency status, but it’s elevated. It stayed there. For as long as we’ve monitored this turbine, it stayed. What that means is that had you just gone and done dial indicator measurements or even a portable suite, you might end up thinking, we need to, we need to action this.

We need to replace this blade. However, with a permanent system, you’re now armed with that knowledge to say, no, let’s monitor. Let’s keep watching it and wait until it does actually grow. And that’s the full picture, right? If I go and put a system in place, and I’m seeing that gross pattern, and, and Martin used the term peak to peak earlier, and what that’s referring to is that sine wave that we’re talking about.

The distance that the target is moving away from the sensor, the top minus the bottom of that waveform, gives you your full displacement, your peak to peak, as that peak to peak grows. What we generally see is a, an an [00:19:00]exponential growth. Once it starts to go, once you get a, a significant number of these bushings that start to fail, the rest of the bushings that are already prone to failure continue to fail, and then you have a cascading effect where you just start to release.

Um, so being able to watch for that and being able to make a risk-based decision with that data. Is crucial.

Joel Saxum: So for, with that being said, when an, when you guys are dealing with an operator, do you have a set metric or is it case by case? When you know like, hey, this thing is starting to unzip itself. What does that look like?

What’s the time look like? Do they have an hour? Do they have a month? What does, what are they thinking?

Forrest French: The timing can change depending on the, the type of blade, the environment right. That it’s in, how it was installed. Um. How many, how many blade bolts have broken over time, right? That, that time can change significantly.

On average, I would say that we go [00:20:00] from making a call to notify a customer that you have an issue that is starting to reveal itself to, we probably need to consider shutting this thing down is usually on the order of two months, on average, probably. Um, so. Not, we’re not talking days. Right. It, it, it can be though.

Allen Hall: Maybe give us a picture of what the system looks like when it’s installed in, at the base of Blade or in the hub.

Well,

Forrest French: I’ll, I’ll, I’ll, I’ll start with the root insert. Um, it’s the one that’s a little more interesting as far as the installation goes, but. Typically what we’re gonna have is we’re gonna have our CMS boxes, right? There’s two of them. Um, they’re about, yeah, I mean about a foot, foot by foot, maybe. Um, you’ve got two of those guys depending on the turbine.

And this is the fun of my job as, as the ecoPITCH application lead. Every turbine I get to go up and make a custom installation design, right? We have to find somewhere to put these boxes, and, and we’ve talked about it. These, these turbines, these hubs [00:21:00] are not designed to be, uh, retrofit friendly, right?

There’s nowhere to put this stuff. They don’t, they don’t leave bolt holes for you to put things. So we have to get really creative in order to design a robust system that’s gonna survive in this environment. But I digress. Generally you’re gonna have your two CMS boxes mounted somewhere in the hub, um, on a, a mounting plate of some kind.

Uh, and then from there, at most you’re gonna have about nine displacement sensors. So three sensors in each blade. Those sensors are wired. Uh, so what, we’ll, what we’ll typically do is I’ll have, uh, for example, a, an anchor of some kind. Dead center or in the center of rotation inside the blade itself. And I’ll typically have a, a.

Some kind of, uh, I’ve used very fancy, uh, uh, industry grade bungee cable, basically. Uh, or, or [00:22:00] similar, uh, metal, cable, whatever it may be. Um, it’s something with some stretch and some give because we have a rotating component, but the cables will then drop down onto that anchor. They’ll come up that, that fancy bungee cord right from there.

They’ll be routed along existing cable lines to the boxes themselves. Um, the sensors are mounted. It’s a pretty simple thing. The sensors are mounted using a combination typically of a, of a, of a double-sided tape and a liquid epoxy. The double-sided tape is there for installation efficiency, uh, because it’s very difficult to install a liquid epoxy overhead.

But we’ve never had any, any, any, any issues with that design so far.

Joel Saxum: And I’m gonna throw one more at you here because this is something that Alan and I run into almost everywhere. We, we end up when we’re talking I, iot or anything else. Cybersecurity. Right? Because at the end of the day, this is the conversation we have.

Oh, you can solve a problem. Great. I’m gonna pass it. Oh wait, cybersecurity. We gotta make sure this is, [00:23:00] that we can get these things actually installed in our turbine. So how does, uh, ONYX Insight handle that with this system?

Forrest French: Sure. So I, I think a couple key things, right. First and foremost, I think a lot of people jump for joy when we tell them that our system is run off of a 4G router.

It does not connect to the turbine operating, so it does not connect to the turbine at all. Right. It runs fully on its own. Um, there are, you know, there are still, those questions absolutely come up still. Right. Even though it’s, it’s just taking data from our system. It’s not getting any kind of operating data from the turbine itself.

We still get that question right, and I think it’s perfectly fair. However, um, we’ve had multiple success stories up to this point, right? We’ve, we’ve, we’ve, uh, we’ve been able to work through those. We have a dedicated IT team. We’re up to date on cybersecurity, uh, certifications and those items. I’m not an IT guy, but we have a whole IT group that takes care of this, right?

So when those [00:24:00] concerns do come up. We’re locked and loaded. We’re ready to get them chatting with the people who they need to chat to, to make sure that whatever cybersecurity questionnaires or, uh, you know, confirmations need to be done, it can be done and it, and it does get done. So that, that’s, that’s, I think, I think the best news is just, it’s, it’s fully standalone, right?

There’s no ethernet connection to the tower itself.

Allen Hall: All right, so that sounds really simple and easy to do, and you can do it in a temporary fashion and get yourself some data across the whole fleet. Or if in some cases when you triage these, you’ll want to keep the system in there longer term to help you understand when repairs need to take place.

And this is where the money comes in because it’s all at the end of the day, is about using your resources wisely as an operations. And your o and m budget is limited and is. Tends to get limited more and more every year. So you want to be spending the money wisely, which is what ecoPITCH System does.

How does, how do you project then, when you have that data [00:25:00] and you’re starting to get that streaming coming in, you’re seeing the, the blade movement play out. How are you spending your budgets there? How do you appropriate the right amount of funds for the right size of problem?

Martin McLarnon: Yeah, so we’ve got, um, um, a good case study with a customer who had installed ecoPitch permanent, uh, for insert issue. And they had quite a lot of historical issues with this, um, and, and really trying to manage this, this problem. Um, and like how do they keep operating the turbine, uh, wind farm safely while, while these, uh, issues are ongoing? So really legal pitch was really unique and enable enabling them to do that.

They get this peak to peak measurement that, that we’re measuring, you know, all the time. And seeing how that, um, changes over time. So gives ’em the benefit of an early stage indicator. And as far said, it’s a, it’s a direct measurement and it’s, um, you know, through the actual operation of the, the turbine rotation.

Like some of these other, you know, [00:26:00] one off measurements are very, you know, it’s whenever the, the, the blades are static, it doesn’t show that true, um, garbing throughout the whole rotation. So. Um, that we were able to see that whole progress from really early stage. So things that we talked about, getting a new blade or looking at some engineering, uh, solutions, gives them time to plan that out, but also in the right way so they can wait until it gets to a point, um, where they’re, um, you know, saying that this needs to be switched off.

We’re not comfortable anymore with the level of the gabbing. Um, and even to that point when even the, the blade itself is, is switched off, turbine, switched off, there could be still a chance of slippage and the blade continuing to, to fall off. They need to know that as well, for safety reasons. So until that blade gets replaced or repaired, they need to have really good visibility on, on what that condition is.

But effectively, you know, across a large wind farm, it really helps them manage things rather than, uh, you know, switching everything off when just, you know, [00:27:00] until they replace all the blades, which isn’t really. Realistically an option anyway. So they have to really help some manage that. Loose budgets, excuse me.

And uh, yeah, supply chain, um, lead times, things like that. You have, that all has to be managed. Um. So it’s been a really good success story.

Allen Hall: And all this is backed by all the engineers and scientists that are at ONYX Insight.

And Martin, maybe you can provide a little summary of that because if you haven’t worked with ONYX Insight, you may not realize the power and the capability that exists within in that building.

Martin McLarnon: Yeah, yeah. And it’s great, you know, here in Forest talk through the, uh. The application for, for ecoPITCH. So, you know, obviously, you know, we’ve got a really talented bunch of engineers that can, you know, really explain, uh, the issues and under, you know, we really are understanding, um, the problems customers have, which is unique, uh, depending on the turbine type, um, or, or the specific issue.

And, and that’s really how, you know, ONYX is, um, business has really grown over the [00:28:00] years. Is that continuous, um, collaboration with customers. What sorts of issues are coming up like for said. This root insert issue has just kind of emerged in the last couple of years. It wasn’t something people were, uh, necessarily expecting.

And, um, we were always trying to drive to have those, those discussions. So for us, we, um, you know, background is in, uh, a lot of me, mechanical engineering and gearbox design was our original, uh, how we started out. But then getting into drive, train, uh, monitoring, vibration monitoring, CMS hardware, um, um, with, you know.

Principal engineers with decades of experience, like, you know, global team, uh, different data analysts as well. So we, um, yeah, really have expanded that from drive chain, uh, skid analytics, um, foundation monitoring, uh, pitch bearing, um, and, uh, and this route insert blade monitoring as well. So, um, yeah, we really, whenever customers have have those issues, we like to [00:29:00]discuss it, figure out what, what the potential solutions are, and.

Uh, it could be a new, a new product for us. Um. E eventually, if that’s, if that’s something we can, uh, kinda get a good solution for or release. Provide advice to the customer.

Allen Hall: Yeah. If you have blade root insert issues or pitch bearing issues, you do not wanna mess with them. Or even blade bolts because blade liberation is so expensive.

And when you have those issues, you want to go to accompany. Like ONYX Insight because they have the expertise. They’ve been around a long time. They’re a part of some OEMs equipment and they understand the variations between all those different blade models and turbine types. That’s where you wanna start because you’re gonna save your company.

I. Millions of dollars in losses in downtime. And Martin, how do people who are not familiar with On Insight get ahold of you and talk about ecoPITCH to see how they can get it installed in their turbines?

Martin McLarnon: Yeah, I, um, we confirm my, uh, email address in the chat. Um, I’m a [00:30:00] cover the North American region, so hobby to, um, you know, get, get involved in that discussion.

And we’ve got global, uh, commercial folks, so I will get. Get the, you connected to them and I’d love to have a conversation.

Allen Hall: And you can always visit ONYX Insight ONYXinsight.com. Great website, and you can learn more about ecoPITCH on that site. There’s a good PDF download there if you wanna learn more.

And yes, reach out to ONYX Insight. Reach out to to Martin, reach out to, for. Get your questions answered now, because as the season progresses, it’s only gonna be more expensive and at the right time to do this kind of inspection and data acquisition is now so. Martin and Forrest, thank you so much for appearing on the show.

I really appreciate all of the information. Absolutely.

Forrest French: Thanks

Allen Hall: for having us.

Martin McLarnon: Thanks Al Joel. Appreciate [00:31:00] it.

https://weatherguardwind.com/onyx-insight-ecopitch-blade-root/

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Does Evil “Destroy Itself?”

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What Aristotle said here is interesting, especially since there has been so must of both evil and good through the millennia. The days since Aristotle have been marked by the Golden Age of Rome (Pax Romana), the Dark Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the Rennaissance, the Enlightenment, the end of slavery, the slaughter of the Native Americans, the post-Emancipation oppression of Black Americans, the Holocaust, and so many more major historical events.

It seems we’re just about to see what happens to the evil represented by Trump’s second term in office.  It seems that the United States has re-elected a man to the highest position on Earth whose only interests are punishing his enemies, enriching himself from public office, further consolidating his power, and keeping himself out of prison.

Will this evil destroy itself?

Again, we’ll have to wait and see.

Does Evil “Destroy Itself?”

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RPA on New Jersey’s Electricity Rate Emergency

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Weather Guard Lightning Tech

RPA on New Jersey’s Electricity Rate Emergency

Kyle Mason (Associate Planner) and Robert Freudenberg (VP, Energy & Environment Program) from the Regional Plan Association break down why New Jersey electricity rates spiked 17-20% in June 2024. They explore how outdated grid infrastructure, AI-driven energy demand, and stalled renewable projects are creating a perfect storm for ratepayers.

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 FacebookYouTubeTwitterLinkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Kyle and Rob, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having us.

Robert Freudenberg: Yeah, thanks. Great to be here.

Allen Hall: Uh, so I was doing a lot of homework online a couple of days ago and looking into, uh, some statements with an administration about the electricity rates in New Jersey, and I thought, well, I need, I need to do my homework because some of this is new to me and throughout all my research and spent several hours on it.

Your organization is the only one that had any real data. So I’m glad you’re joining us today. So, Kyle, I would like to start with you first, and, and. There’s a fundamental challenge that’s happening, uh, in New Jersey. Can you just paint a picture of what around New Jersey rate payers are facing with their electricity bills?

Kyle Mason: Yeah, absolutely. So starting [00:01:00] June of this year, uh, electricity rates in New Jersey went up between 17 to 20%, depending on your utility company. Uh, that is a cause of a larger problem with the regional grid operator. PJM. Uh, PJM is the grid operator for New Jersey and 12 other states. It covers over 60 million people in a wide geographic area.

Uh, they run a annual capacity auction, which secures power for when the grid is at peak load or when most power is being used on the grid. And that capacity market saw record high prices, which trickled down to. Increased electricity rates for New Jersey rate payers.

Allen Hall: Rob, from a policy perspective, how did we get here?

Robert Freudenberg: Yeah, I mean, there are, there are so many ways we got here and that’s part of the issue. Um, you know, I think what we’ve seen in, in the aftermath [00:02:00] of these rate hikes is everybody trying to point to one thing. Uh, and there is no one thing here. This is, this is a series of changes over time. Um, you know, we’re.

We’re, we’re looking at, um, the way we bring energy onto a system on an old grid. We have a very old grid. And we’re trying to update it in real time. And the process to put things on the grid is, uh, taking a lot longer than it used to. And we’re putting new and more, uh, various types of, of energy sources onto the grid.

So, um, as we’re, it’s like trying to, to build the plane while you’re flying it, and we’re trying to update our grid. As we need the energy and as demand is increasing. So, um, you know, as we add these new and various sources, uh, to the grid, they’re going through a process that used to take a few years, and now it takes many years.

And we’re also in a, in a phase where we’re adding a lot of renewables, which are, you know, not big behemoth like power plants. Um, you know, they’re [00:03:00] smaller, more distributed. So the process that’s set up to bring new energy, new infrastructure online is outdated. And, um, you know, I think what we’re, what we’re finding is as we go and more energy is demanded that the system is not keeping up, uh, with the demand.

And so we’re falling behind and projects are getting stuck in the queue. And the, the federal government, which is overseeing this, is trying to update it, um, and trying to make changes, but the grid operators are trying to react to that and, and find the realistic balance. So at the end of the day, you have, uh, new systems that want to come online with an old system that’s not letting them come online as, as quickly as they need to.

Joel Saxum: And, and there’s a compounding factor here too, right? Rob and Kyle, correct me if I’m wrong, but we have new types of generation on an old grid. But then we also have new types of demand on that grid, right? So with, you know, the buzzword around energy, of course, AI, [00:04:00] data centers, all these things. But we’re really looking at a change.

And Kyle, when we talked a bit kind of offline and planning this, and you, you noted to, to us that. This, this 1% of like annual load growth now is looking at like 5% in the future, and we haven’t had that kind of growth since. Was the air conditioning was invented? Is that what you said?

Kyle Mason: Yeah, absolutely. We are seeing in our lifetimes unprecedented load growth.

I mean, we have not seen the amount of year over year percentage low growth since. Air conditionings were invented and they started going up in places like New York City and Detroit and Chicago and other big cities throughout the us. And what we’re seeing right now is a massive, massive expansion of data centers.

Not just small data centers that we saw expand during the, uh, years leading up to the.com bubble, but rather these massive, uh, hundred plus megawatt data [00:05:00] centers that are. Very, uh, tightly geographically located. So there’s clusters of these in Northern Virginia, in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and Ohio, and they’re using massive amounts of electricity and they largely were not, uh, predicting 10 years ago they were not predicting AI to, uh, develop as it has and for data centers to expand as they have.

So it’s really been a. Tricky, tricky planning situation with grid operators, the federal government and state governments.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that’s something that the general public doesn’t really see or understand right now is like when you’re playing around on CH GPT making a, a funny picture of your friend picking up a house or whatever the thing is, you know, the amount of energy that, that those resources are taking up.

Is massive and the growth is there. The things are happening behind the scenes. You don’t see the issue now as a rate payer, as a normal citizen because the lights are still on in your house. Everything’s cruising lock you. You see [00:06:00] this little blurb, like you said last June, like in June, like, oh, my electricity price just went up.

Well, that’s gonna continue to keep happening here. And then you have this, this, this perfect storm of. Now we’re, we have an interconnection queue issue within PJM, and then you have like the 1100 megawatt ocean winds project offshore wind that would’ve been connected in New Jersey there that is, has been abandoned for now.

At least. There’s, there’s a lot of things happening. Chess pieces moving on the board. They’re going the wrong way. We don’t wanna see.

Robert Freudenberg: Yeah. And here’s the real challenge, and this is where policy comes back, is, you know, up until, uh, the last year or couple years, um, we were all rowing towards the same direction that we’re gonna electrify things, we’re gonna electrify our cars, we’re gonna electrify our buildings, we’re gonna be more plugged in, uh, use more data.

And we’re gonna create new renewable energy to feed that hunger, uh, for power. And, and what has just been completely upended is, is [00:07:00] this idea that, okay, we can have more, we can do more, and we’ll have clean energy, uh, to kind of feed that. We’ll get these projects in the queue, we’ll get ’em lined up, and we’ve been spending the better part of the last decade or so.

Planning for new big renewable energy projects to feed that demand, um, and, and feed our electric cars and feed our more electrified buildings. And now all of a sudden the plug has been pulled on that, and we’re still moving towards the direction of having electric cars and having electric buildings and having data centers.

But now without the renewable energy, that was really just on the verge of coming online. And, and that’s the, the kind of conundrum we’re in right now is that we are, we are hungry for more. We have set things on track to kind of move towards a more electrified, more plugged in world. And now we’re unplugging the, the renewable energy sources.

I could have said that.

Allen Hall: And New Jersey’s really at risk because it’s its own energy island, so to speak. It uses more energy [00:08:00] than they produce. But they’re also tied to all this data center. So the larger PJM, uh, grid, I’ll call it, is what? Pennsylvania, Virginia, New Jersey, and a number other big power hungry states.

They’re all interconnected. New Jersey was trying to help forge a path to bring more energy online, but obviously that has stopped from what we have seen. There was supposed to be about around five gigawatts of offshore wind. To be able to supply New Jersey and that has all stopped. But at the same time, uh, Kyle, I think you mentioned there’s over 200 gigawatts of interconnect queue.

That is vast majority is renewable, just waiting to be connected.

Kyle Mason: Yeah. Yeah. As of about. April of last year, there were over 200 gigawatts of projects in the internet connection queue waiting to be studied. And around 98% of them were solar, wind, both onshore and offshore, and [00:09:00] storage. Now a project being in the queue and completing the study doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to come online, but even if 50% of those projects came online, uh, it would’ve.

Uh, markedly improved the rate situation, and those are clean energy, uh, systems that can be deployed in small, already geographically constrained areas like New Jersey, for example, is a, the most densely populated state in the country and is fairly geographically constrained. A lot of the open land will.

Uh, municipalities would rather use it for housing or open space than large energy projects. And solar, uh, and storage can fill those gaps. And then offshore wind for New Jersey is the ideal solution for a large scale generator. And having those projects stuck in the queue only, uh, decreases supply [00:10:00] or limits the supply supply that will go onto the grid.

And at the same time, we’re seeing generator deactivations either from policy or reliability concerns, uh, particularly with coal and oil and gas plants. Uh, there’s a lot of reliability concerns during extreme weather events, extreme cold events. And, uh, PJM recently changed their market rules to, uh, make the reliability rules stricter, which, uh.

Which made a lot of those fossil fuel plants ineligible to even enter their capacity market.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That buffer dropped from about 16 gigawatts of, of supposedly reliable, uh, energy sources to about 500 megawatts when the reliability requirements were issued. That’s. Amazing because I think the normal assumption is that, well, your, your base load is always gonna be covered by gas fired generation [00:11:00] or coal fired generation.

What could possibly go wrong with that? But when they had to do the reliability review, they realized. They’re not really set up for extreme cold weather events or some of these other situations, and so they’ve removed them from the, the reliability factor that even tightens the news, so to speak. On New Jersey and PJM, what are they about to do here?

What is, is, is there a current. Plan or market dynamics in, in place to put some structure back in to get us out of this hole?

Kyle Mason: Yeah, to an extent. Uh, PJM has worked with, uh, ferc, which is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to improve their interconnection Q process. So starting back in 2021 and 2022, uh, PJM worked with the federal government to create a new cluster study prop.

Process. So their previous interconnection study process was first come, first [00:12:00] serve, and that was a serial basis. And it didn’t matter if the project would take one year to build or 10 years, if it went into the queue earlier than another project, it would be studied earlier. They have since changed it to reviewing, uh, projects in clusters and on a, uh, first.

Ready for serve basis. So a project that will only take one year to build will get a precedent over a project that will take 10 years to build. And they’ve started to implement it on a staggered basis, starting in 2023. And they have made significant progress. They’ve, uh, looked at, they studied over 40 gigawatts of energy already, and that’s starting to get built.

Um, but it is a very slow process and. Uh, there, there is the question of whether that can, uh, outpace the rising demand.

Allen Hall: What is the consistency or, or what is that [00:13:00] new generation comprised of? Is it gas fired? Is it solar, is it wind or a combination of all of those?

Kyle Mason: Yeah, from my understanding it’s mostly solar and storage, um, when there is some wind, but with, uh, federal policy around offshore wind that has been stagnated.

Um, and there’s also a significant amount of up rates to gas plants. Up rates are increasing the, uh, nameplate capacity of a plant. So basically, uh. Categorical improvements to improve efficiency and the amount of generation these plants can have.

Robert Freudenberg: This process has been, um, good. Right. This is, this kind of sets us on a better path, um, especially because we were going to bring, you know, a lot more renewables on.

I think what’s interesting to think now is as, as there’s a federal shift away from, from offshore wind and there’s, there’s actually a push, uh, for fossil [00:14:00]fuels. Um, I think it’ll be interesting to see how this process plays out now for those projects, right? Because we’re gonna need energy and, and there’s a lot working against renewable energy.

And now this speedier better process might favor, uh, and work for, uh, kind of the, the, the fossil generated things. I think we’re, we’re gonna hit a problem with is, is we’re back to supply chain issues, uh, where we’re years away from getting new, um, fossil, you know, fired, uh, turbines, right? We’re. We’re years away from, uh, the nuclear dream, uh, that, that so many people seem to have.

Um, and, and we had these renewable projects coming along and we’re gonna hit right when we needed it. So. It will be interesting to see how, what’s in the queue now, um, you know, keeps moving forward. And then what comes next in the queue. What, what shifts, uh, is, is it, you know, policy is driving us, uh, away from renewables right now.

Uh, it will be interesting to see how, how that actually plays out in [00:15:00]reality.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Because speed is part of the answer in trying to get more generation online. That’s why I think solar is a big part of that, right. Is just because you can deploy very quickly. With gas and other petroleum based systems, they’re slow.

It’s gonna take, you may not even be able to get a gas turbine for 20 30, 20 31 if you, if you put your order in today and at, at that point when we get to 2030, I think you’re projecting what, 10%, 12% of the electricity demand on PJM is just from data centers, which is crazy. That’s a huge amount of energy.

With the, uh, uh, the federal administration at the moment, uh, pushing wind off the table, so to speak. How do you fill that demand quickly? Or, or do we just not do it and get to 2030 and hope that we have some gas generation? Is is that where policy is headed? Because

Robert Freudenberg: PJM. [00:16:00] The territory is so large, uh, and it includes so many states.

You know, I think, you know New Jersey. As a state, uh, we might be looking at importing even more energy, uh, from places and it’ll be importing it from states that didn’t necessarily have, uh, renewable energy goals or, or climate goals. Right there. There are states that make up, uh, the PJM territory. That kind of never left that track or didn’t leave that track as much, and that might start to fill, uh, the demand, um, or that, that we have, uh, again, Kyle, correct me if I’m wrong on that.

Kyle Mason: No, you’re, you’re absolutely right. And then if it gets even, and if it gets to a certain point, PJM as a whole may have to start purchasing power from outside authorities, whether it’s states on its border like Miso or Southern states, um, or even Canada. Uh, we’re seeing that in New York with, uh, the Chippy line.

Uh, New York is purchasing power directly from [00:17:00] Canada, uh, di uh, plugging in directly to New York City, which is great. It’s clean, hydroelectric energy, but they are relying on, uh. Energy from outside of our borders.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So what do you start comp? You’re compounding the issue, or not you, sorry, not you, but we are compounding this or issue more here.

Right? So if you start relying on energy from Canada, now you’re running into energy security, which is national security issues, right? And then the other side of this thing, at the same time, we would love to see more renewable energies come from. Uh, environments regeneration is easy, right? So we’re talking about like the mid, the middle of the country, the all the wind states.

It would be fantastic to be plumbing that, uh, that power back to the east coast, to the PGM, to different, uh, operators through like high voltage transmission lines. However. Now those are under attack. We saw this with the, the grain belt express coming across from the middle of the [00:18:00] country heading east.

That’s been, you know, the d the DOE loan guarantee was pulled from that, so now they’re looking at private funding and whatnot. But so like, there’s just so many things happening here that, like I said earlier, we’re kind of in this perfect storm where what you’re gonna end up having is extreme rates possible blackouts, brownouts, and, and.

Also, and this is the thing that nobody wants to see, is, in my opinion, job loss. Because energy intensive industries are gonna have to leave the East Coast because they’re not gonna be able to afford energy. You’re gonna see more of them, what you’re seeing now actually from around the country, like heading to Ercot, heading to Texas, where power’s cheaper.

Because at the end of the day, if that’s, that’s a consumable for a manufacturing operation. And if you’re looking at rates that are, I think like in Austin, outside of Austin, I’m paying like 9 cents a kilowatt hour. Uh, your, that, that can’t compete with something that is in, you know, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 times that in the future, as these rates start to keep increasing, jobs are [00:19:00] gonna leave as well.

Leave that pla that area as well. And so there’s this, this issue that’s compounding, compounding, compounding. And it’s great to hear that the permitting, uh, issues have been. Addressed that there’s, if there’s a plan working for there in the PJM. But the big thing here is to me, generation, you got to stop taking generation off the off the table.

And that is in the form of offshore wind because. N there’s no other resource over there, right? Nuclear dream nuclear could be great for the energy grid. However, when are you gonna get a new pet built? 10, 12 years? Same thing with gas right now. You’re not gonna get ’em online till 20 30, 20 32. So the generation, and we wanna be this AI Super house AI powerhouse.

We need power Now. Why are we shooting ourselves in the foot at the generation that we need? Is there? It’s ready to go. Shovel ready. We’re ready to collect, connect the electrons to the grid. Um, but we’re, uh. We seem to be going backwards on that.

Kyle Mason: Yeah, absolutely. And I do wanna just touch on one thing you said.

Uh, so PJM still hasn’t [00:20:00] figured out the permitting issue. They figured out they’re working on the studying issue. The permitting issue is a, a federal, state, and local process, and PJM doesn’t really have much say over that. Um, and there is still a lot of reform that could be done. And it’s been, there’s been a lot of talk, especially in the last two, three years around permitting reform, and a lot of states are working on solutions.

There’s. Legislation within state governments to try and figure out permitting for energy systems, um, and transmission wires in particular. Transmission wires is a, a big, uh, issue right now. ’cause the average amount of time to build a high voltage transmission wire is 10 years. So you have the issue of it taking years and years just to get the materials to build.

Power plants and then 10 years with permitting costs and supply chain issues and, uh, permitting timelines to build the transmission wires that will bring that power to the load centers.

Allen Hall: Isn’t that where offshore wind was gonna solve that problem? Because instead of [00:21:00] drawing power a thousand miles away, you’re gonna draw from about 20 miles offshore.

And is there a scenario where offshore wind. Plays a factor in New Jersey electricity rates to help bring them down, or is it completely off the table? We are not even planning to see any offshore wind because of what’s happening with the current administration.

Robert Freudenberg: That’s the question, um, is what’s going on with federal policy, federal aggression, honestly, towards offshore wind?

Is this a pause or is it. A death blow. Right. And, and I think, you know, probably the answer to somewhere in between there, but we’re certainly losing time. Um, we’re losing kind of the opportunities. We have an offshore wind farm working right now off of the South Fork on Long Island. And if you look at the data from that, that is performing very well, it’s reliable.

Uh, the folks who pay, uh, the rates on that, you know, they get a a dollar [00:22:00] and a half more on their bill. Um, but it’s not gonna go up because they negotiated that rate, um, you know, years ago. And that’s set. It’s not gonna fluctuate. Like, uh, other rates do, uh, put a thousand people to work. Uh, we have the proof that these projects work and they deliver on what they said they were going to do.

Um, and we’re, we’re actively citing against us. We’re not, but the federal government is. Um, so I think what. You know, offshore wind developers, uh, around the, the world are asking themselves right now is, you know, are we just leading, uh, to see what the US ends up doing with offshore wind? Or is this damaging enough that we just go away?

I, I think the way we think of it is the ingredients here are so good for offshore wind. Everything you just said. Uh, the proximity, the, the wind speeds. Um, all we have to do is build those things and connect them into our grid and we’ve got a lot of power. Um, and I think that [00:23:00] opportunity doesn’t go away.

It’s just what are the, what is the damage we’re doing to the industry now? How, how many years are we setting ourselves back? Um, if you look in New Jersey. You know, there was a plan to build this pre-built infrastructure, PPI, um, where they were going to connect, you know, build the infrastructure in ducts so that when offshore wind farms come online, they have nice, one nice duct to put a few projects in, uh, minimizes disruption on communities.

And, um, it really just allows a place for multiple farms to plug in. And, you know, the state is in a, in a, a limb in limbo right now because, um, they don’t see offshore wind coming anytime soon. So why should they go ahead and build this and put the resources and time into it? New York did something similar.

They had a, you know, plan for building transmission infrastructure for the future offshore wind farms. And, and now those projects are on ice. Um, in [00:24:00] some cases not even, not even moving forward. So how far are we setting ourselves back? Our hope is that offshore wind comes back quickly. We would like to see states continue to make these investments in transmission, uh, but we also understand that it’s, it’s tricky, um, to get the timing right, but, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a real challenge.

Allen Hall: Well, what is the message then for New Jersey policy makers, uh, about offshore wind renewables going forward? I

Robert Freudenberg: think it’s, um, you know, as much as a state can, uh, because there are limits to what a state can do without federal approval, I think states need to keep the charge on for offshore wind. They need to keep the fire burning for it.

Um, I think they need to, you know, recognize that this, this likely is a pause. Uh, work closely with developers, work closely with communities to prepare them, uh, but know that we have, uh, some, some time and space here where, where it’s not gonna move forward, but have all the plans ready to go. [00:25:00] Um, want the minute?

Kind of this federal policy changes. Um, I have to think that with everything going for offshore wind, with the demand that’s gonna come with the prices that are gonna come, there’s gonna be an outcry, uh, for more energy. And we have the lease areas, we even have projects on paper, right? We can, we can get these things going again.

And I think, uh, states, uh, should be doing everything they can to prepare for that. And I do think that includes, you know, getting the transmission and infrastructure ready so that. As soon as we can build them, we can plug ’em in versus having to start from scratch and leap for them to be built and leap to go through the process.

We can get some of this done that’s in the state’s, uh, power right now to, to move on the transmission infrastructure, uh, to the degree it doesn’t need federal approvals.

Kyle Mason: Yeah. And uh, and along that line, uh, the state recently has announced some major steps forward to building transmission infrastructure, not necessarily for offshore wind, but general.

Grid modification. They [00:26:00] recently announced their Garden State Energy Storage program, which, uh, aims to get, uh, over two gigawatts of energy storage onto New Jersey’s grid in the next few years. And they, uh, release their first set of grid modification rules, which really are more statutory, but they require.

All of the utility companies to conform to a, um, modern standard in New Jersey. But they’re hoping to release another set of rules later about actual technical grant modification standards that they would like utilities to follow, and that that workup can really improve efficiency, bring down costs for rate payers, and prepare the grid for, uh, renewable energy like offshore

Allen Hall: wind.

There’s so much that’s gonna happen over the next. Six months to a year, to two years in New Jersey and PJM, uh, it’s gonna be amazing to watch. And if you want to learn more about what’s about to happen, you need to visit Regional [00:27:00] Plant Association. And guys, your report has. Was fantastic. And if you haven’t visited their website, you should, it’s rpa.org.

And I assume, are you gonna have any new information coming out or any new reports coming out? Uh, talking about more electricity prices in the region?

Kyle Mason: Yeah, we will be having three more lab posts. Uh. Featuring a, a state of the grid for each of our three states in the region. So that’s New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut.

Oh, wow. Okay. That’s terrific. I’ll, I’ll look forward to

Allen Hall: that. Well, Kyle and Rob, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We’d love to have you back. As those reports get issued, we’d learn to learn more about what’s about to happen on electricity rate. So thank you so much for joining us.

Kyle Mason: Yeah, thank you both.

It was great to speak with you. Yeah, great conversation.

Robert Freudenberg: Appreciate what you’re. Talking [00:28:00] about.

https://weatherguardwind.com/rpa-new-jersey-electricity/

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Re: Late-Night TV Comedy, Let’s Give Americans What They Want

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Bill Mahrer has a point here, but it needs to be kept in perspective.

Most of us Boomers can remember when late-night comedy shows rarely had any political content.  Johnny Carson’s viewers had no interest in the subject, and even if they did, how much entertainment value could the escapades of Gerald Ford or Jimmy Carter possibly provide?

The circumstances are completely different today. It’s true that Trump and his support base believe that Trump is an honest and effective servant of our country and is doing his best to make America great again.  As such, they take offense at being the butt of jokes.

But the rest of the country understands that Trump is a criminal conman who is doing everything in his power to turn the Unites States into an autocratic nation. The entire purpose of his second term in office is to punish his enemies, make money, and stay out of prison.  Now, we have many millions of people who think of this as the only news in America of any real importance at all.  They look forward to a nightly blend of news and comedy along those lines before they head off to dreamland.

To simplify this, until Trump, there was neither demand for nor supply of sharp-tongued R-rated political humor.  Now there is plenty of both. We need to let Americans have what they’re demanding. If it annoys the MAGA group, they’re free to tune into Fox News, NewsMax, and the rest of the ultra-right-wing propaganda machine.

Re: Late-Night TV Comedy, Let’s Give Americans What They Want

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