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Does the Massive WindRunner Plane Make Sense? Plus CLS Wind’s Innovative Assembly System

Allen, Rosemary and Phil debate whether WindRunner, a huge airplane proposed to transport wind turbine blades offshore, makes sense for the industry. Plus they discuss an article from the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine from CLS Wind about their lifting platform used to assemble wind turbines. Allen and Phil learn that Rosemary is a five-time Wheel of Fortune champion!

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: Do you have game shows in Australia, Rosemary? Is that a thing?

Rosemary Barnes: Hey, I was a five time carryover champion on Wheel of Fortune.

Allen Hall: What?

Rosemary Barnes: What whoa. Rosemary, what was that? I was a five time carryover champion on Wheel of Fortune. I don’t know if they, is it the same in the US when you win an episode, you get to come back the next day?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I did that five times. I was on six, six episodes.

Allen Hall: How much money did you win?

Rosemary Barnes: It’s not as rich as, I didn’t win any cash. There’s no cash in the Australian one. And it’s not as rich as the U S one. I think I won like 20, 30, 000 worth of stuff. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty good as a uni student.

I want to, Bed and like saucepans and a couple of lazy boy recliners, one that had massaging in a fridge, and one a houseboat cruise one how did I electric guitar what else did I want? Oh, and all sorts of stuff. So much.

Allen Hall: Did this really happen, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: This really happened when I was at uni.

Allen Hall: Why we’ve not seen video of this? Why is this not on YouTube? I don’t understand.

Rosemary Barnes: I have a VHF of it. I have been thinking that I should chase down the studio and see if I can get the recordings. So I’m sure that they’re archived, but I don’t know how easy it is to get your hands on it.

Allen Hall: Our producer needs this video badly. We have to get this back on the internet. Come on. Really? I didn’t know that. It’s not in your CV. Why wasn’t that in your CV?

Rosemary Barnes: It used to be, it did literally used to be in my CV. Wheel of Fortune couldn’t have slipped in there somewhere? It’s probably not anymore, but for a very long time, it was on my CV in other.

And it was one it’s a good way to see if people read your CV because there’s no way you’re reading that and not mentioning it at the interview. And two, when people did read it, then it’s a really great icebreaker, you know, cause it’s just Oh, okay. Before we get started, we just have to chat about that.

And then it’s, you know, it’s a fun little thing to talk about and you then, you know, then you’re friends. And then the rest of the interview goes very nicely. Okay. That’s like a hot point. Pro tip for interviews is include something like that on there that will you know, be a way to start the conversation and have everyone be relaxed before the interview.

Allen Hall: Okay. I think Rosemary’s been holding back. We’ve been burying our soul every week and Rosemary’s. Keeping the Wheel of Fortune thing under wraps.

Philip Totaro: Now, I mean, the only thing I could put on my CV is that I used to live next to Rick James. I mean, what the, you know, like

Rosemary Barnes: Allen can put on that he’s married to a real rocket scientist.

So that’s a good one.

Allen Hall: This is true. It’s sort of guilt by association there.

A startup called Radia founded by MIT trained rocket scientist, Mark Lundstrom is developing the world’s largest cargo plane called the WindRunner. Now you’re asking yourself why is it called the windrunner and it’s an airplane because it’s meant to transport wind turbines, of course And rosemary pointed this article out to me a couple of days ago with A whole bunch of calculations about the megawatts per mile traveled or something of the sort So okay, we need to talk about this And get it out, all out, we’ll get out of our systems about this airplane.

Now let me give you the, let me give you the promo on this. If this thing works, it would enable the installation of onshore wind turbines pretty easily by just sticking them in the back of this airplane and flying them to the site because the way this airplane is designed, it will, it could conceivably take blades as long as.

I think 120 meters long.

Rosemary Barnes: But how long a runway does it need to take off and land? Is there a suitable runway in proximity to every onshore wind farm that wants 120 meter long blades?

Allen Hall: Based on the shape of that airplane, it would be about a mile long runway, which is pretty easy to do. There’s all, there’s thousands of them in the United States, maybe tens of thousands of them in the United States.

Rosemary Barnes: Next question. Do people want such large rotors on onshore wind turbines? I mean, offshore you put a rotor on a tower that is barely taller than the, you know, the blade so that you just make sure that it’s never going to hit the water and, you know, add a tiny bit of a safety factor in case there’s a huge storm that’s, you know, unpredicted But onshore, you need to get up away from wind shear.

You can’t, you know, you, because the, so wind shear is the effect that slows down the wind close to the ground. So there’s a big difference between wind speed at the ground and the wind speed, a hundred meters up and, you know, 150 meters up. So you can’t have such a big wind gradient that you’ve got your blades really close to the ground and an onshore wind turbine.

You’ve got 120 meter long blade, I’m going to say you’re going to want 150 meter tall tower. Is that we’re just, I don’t understand why the aeroplane is the first part of this puzzle. If we’re going to move to that, wouldn’t the push come from people who are like, okay, we’ve got this gigantic onshore wind turbine, if only we had a way to install it more places than where we can currently get it to.

And then, you know, windrunners like, ah, solution. Here it is, but I haven’t seen anybody requesting really large onshore wind turbines that can’t be transported.

Allen Hall: So my answer to that is that they’ve already raised a hundred million dollars and they’re valued at a billion dollars. So I don’t have to answer that question.

Just follow the money. I think what’s happening is they realized that building a blade factory is really expensive and you can fly blades into places and building a runway that’s a mile long is not particularly hard to do. And. Subsequently, I do think there’s applications for package delivery or like an Amazon service.

Remember Amazon tried to start, or it has started its own airline essentially or freight service. So they fly their own airplanes or rent airplanes to fly around to carry cargo. When Amazon thinks about the next stage of that, they’re gonna get bigger airplanes. That’s just what’s gonna happen. And this would feed that market also.

So I think there’s sort of two parts to it. You can question the efficiency of it and all that stuff. I totally fine, but somebody thinks it’s worth a hundred million. They’re valued at a billion dollars. So somebody thinks it’s worth a billion dollars today. So there must be some rationale behind it.

Rosemary Barnes: But let’s just be real here. There are a very large number of highly valued companies, especially at startups. And especially there’s a lot of clean techs that have no prospect of ever Making any money that have, you know, like just because they’ve got a high valuation doesn’t, I think that’s a crazy way to think of it.

Oh, because people have invested money in it, then it must be worth that much money.

Allen Hall: I mean, if the world was all right, Microsoft wouldn’t exist, right? That if it came down to whether it was useful or not, there’d be a lot of products that didn’t exist, but it depends on where the money is and if they can.

provide transport in a, in an efficient way. And they may want to develop their own wind farms, probably where they’re going, then maybe they want to have their own airplane to go do this thing. And the upper end of the cargo lifting world in the airplane market is being destroyed one airplane at a time at the moment.

So there’s not a lot of really big airplanes to go do this job. And if you need them, it usually runs the last. The numbers I heard to get a flight of the Russian airplane that does a lot of this is about a million bucks a flight. That’s pretty good money if you can get it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And how often is that being done?

Almost never. I mean, I’ll read out what I sent you when I questioned about whether this was sensible because I’m doing a a video on shipping at the moment. So I’ve been comparing different modes of transport. I’ll read out a quote from my upcoming video to transport one ton of goods, one kilometer in a cargo ship takes about 1.

4 to 1. 7 to four megajoules of energy rails, a bit higher around 2. 4 to five road is seven to 18. So you know, there’s the range low end for cargo ship 1. 7 high end for road is 18. And then for air travel, it’s 200 to 350 megajoules per ton kilometer. It’s, you know, like it’s a hundred times more energy.

Fuel is a significant cost. It’s just, I mean, you can make it a little bit more efficient, but you’re never gonna bring that to the point where you would choose air over any other method of transport. If you had any kind of a say in it. And yeah, so I just, I don’t see the pull for it. It’s not like people are crying out to install these gigantic wind turbines and there’s no other way but to transport it by aeroplane, you know?

And even if it turns out that we do end up wanting to install gigantic offshore size wind turbines onshore, there are other solutions as well that we’ve covered on this channel. I mean, there’s Split blades, there’s thermoplastic blades will be coming in the future. You’ll weld them together on site.

There’s towers that you can print in situ or, you know, other ways of building towers on site instead of transporting the sections the tower sections in a, you know, one whole cross section at a time. I just think this is a classic case of a solution looking for a problem and sounds cool, which is a really great way to get.

millions of dollars of investment. And yeah, I think that’s going to be the end of it. I mean, for sure they might pivot into transporting packages or something where there’s a bit more of a margin. And it’s important that people really care about the extra speed. You know, that’s something that they were willing to pay more for.

But you know, wind turbines are planned wind farms are planned years in advance. And I know from working in the logistics that the cheapest mode of transport Is a really important part of the planning of the whole project from the start. And they do transport blades by aeroplane every now and then once in a blue moon.

You know, obviously not as large as what this aeroplane can do, but. You know, it has been done before and it’s, you know, it’s either because someone massively stuffed up and you know, there’s something, the whole project is ground to a halt because of some transport issue, or it’s a gimmick to be like, Hey, look at this cool thing we did.

Allen Hall: There is no gimmicks in aerospace because it costs too much money.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no gimmicks in aerospace. I mean, aren’t there like a hundred startups in in personal air taxis that are maybe crying out as being the exact definition of a gimmick? I mean, come on.

Allen Hall: They’re not gimmicks. They either succeed or they fail horribly.

There really is no middle ground. I mean, it has destroyed the careers of many a person that have gotten into aerospace and felt. Phil’s been in aerospace. He’s seen it too. There’s been a lot of airplane designs that were great on paper and had some reasonable amount of funding that never got to the end.

In today’s world, to build that airplane, Billion, maybe a little more, maybe two to get that airplane built because of just the factories and the people and stuff.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Let’s be clear. They haven’t built one.

Allen Hall: Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a design. They haven’t built the first airplane yet, but it wouldn’t take them all that much time to get, at least get a prototype up in the air.

I don’t think it’s really getting it sort of, as Phil has pointed out to me numerous times before we started this conversation, the FAA is going to have A lot to say about it. That’s probably where they’re the slowdown will occur.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, I mean, the FAA is one thing. Let’s talk in addition to what Rosemary just mentioned in terms of energy efficiency per ton kilometer per ton mile.

There’s also cost per ton mile or cost per ton kilometer, which is the metric that they use in the logistics world to figure out how. You know, you move things in a cost efficient manner. We looked at similar technology to this about 13 years ago with a dirigible, actually two different dirigible companies that wanted to do a heavy lift cargo for you know, on site transportation and installation of blades or, and, or towers, or in some cases, the whole turbine where you just literally pick the whole turbine and.

You know, that’s fully assembled in a factory controlled environment, or, you know, reasonably controlled environment. And then you know, you just install the whole turbine like you would in, in offshore, for instance. The problem is, not only does the cost per ton mile not trade at all. Again, it’s, if you’re talking about the you know, order of magnitude difference between truck and rail versus air in energy, That Rosemary just mentioned.

It’s about the same factor in terms of cost per ton mile between truck and rail and, you know, air transport, including either sky crane by conventional helicopter or you know, air freight, you know. For cargo. So the reality of this is it’s never gonna, the industry is so locked into low cost solutions that they’re absolutely never going to adopt something this expensive.

The other problem is also getting the FAA permits to be able to do. You know, if you’re going to, I mean, what’s the point of doing this? If you can ship, you know, hundreds of blades on a rail car and then offload them onto trucks and then do your last mile, quote unquote, last mile transportation through trucks.

Why other than speed, what are you really getting out of transporting, you know, a handful, like maybe up to three blades at a time for one turbine, you’re going to have to make 70 trips to fully outfit your wind farm with, you know, parts delivered by an airplane. So it just I don’t this is one of those it might be technologically feasible, but it’s not commercially viable and it’s just, Doesn’t seem to trade for me.

Allen Hall: Maybe the answer is in the question. Founded by MIT trained rocket scientists. What if this has something to do with moving rocket parts around? Starship.

Philip Totaro: Which again makes a lot more sense than wind turbine blades.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Remember they moved the space shuttle on top of the 747, which was crazy to see by the way, but That happened.

So we’re talking about rocket parts?

Rosemary Barnes: No, if it’s one, one offs, it makes a lot more sense than where you’ve got to set up, you know, like you’ve got a wind farm, you transport many of the same thing and you did the same installation over and over again over a period of months or years. If it’s a big one it can’t like it, I just can’t wrap my head around this ever being a better solution than, you know, the kinds of things that Phil mentioned a minute ago.

Okay. But if it’s one off, really expensive things that are, you know, fragile and you, it’s not worth setting in place all the other things that you have to worry about, then yeah, sure. You know, if it’s transporting things to a remote launch site. Could make more sense. And also who calls himself a rocket scientist?

That’s what I want to know.

Philip Totaro: I’m a rocket scientist. Thank you very much.

Rosemary Barnes: I’m a rocket scientist too. I did a course, you know, I did a year of aerospace engineering. I did a, I did the course on jet propulsion. And I remember thinking as I passed that exam, Hey, I’m officially a rocket scientist now.

Allen Hall: There’s only one person in this group that actually is a rocket scientist, and that’s my wife.

Because she did launch rockets into space, and she is a Princeton trained rocket engineer. Alright fair enough. Yeah, so there is a rocket scientist and so let me, I’ll throw one more thing at you because I think this is another place to go. I mean, Airbus has built special airplanes to haul airplane parts around and so has Boeing.

Both of them have designed special airplanes to haul airplane parts around. Fuselage sections, wings, the whole bit, right? So this would just fill that market. I do think we’re missing the pointer that Fed, FedEx exists for a reason because people want things quickly. And if you go down to Memphis at nighttime and watch all the airplanes coming in and out of Memphis, there’s a lot of cargo that’s moved that you wouldn’t otherwise pay for.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s for that time when you spent. When you spent six years planning a giant wind farm and then you realize at the last second, oh no, we forgot to order blades. We better overnight them. That’s the problem that this airplane is solving, which does not exist. And I think that you’ve really hit the nail on the head where you have mentioned, you know, this is someone coming from an aero background taking Like the kind of thing that’s done in the aero industry and thinking that it’s going to apply to wind turbines.

StrikeTape is literally the only one that I know about. And I don’t know how much you have to change things, but these really expensive solutions that you come up with for aerospace, you know, and I saw it all the time in de icing, you know, the kind of solution that you can have in aerospace, it can be so much more expensive.

It can involve so much more, you know, human intervention as well, you know, wind turbine stuff. It’s. It’s cheap and it’s it’s things that you can roll out and they’re durable and they just last without anybody, you know, poking around and maintaining all the time. So to me, this is just another, like a really expensive and well funded example of someone making the same mistake that, you know, just because they perceive that the wind industry has a similar problem to what has already been solved in aero that The aero solution is going to apply, they just, it, it never works with a single exception of StrikeTape.

Philip Totaro: The final reason why I don’t think this is going to work for wind turbine component transportation, at least unless it’s an extreme one off situation, is let’s, we forget the insurance industry. They have to sign off on whatever the mode of transportation is. And at the end of the day, this is not something that they’re going to get on board with very quickly and easily.

This is a monumentally expensive way. There’s huge risk. You’ve got things that are normally transported by truck and rail now being flown overhead you know, over population centers and things like that. The insurance industry and the FAA are going to have a field day with this. And it’s, I guess, maybe pun intended, but it’s never going to get off the ground.

Allen Hall: If the folks at Radia are looking for a lightning engineer to help them with the design, it’s call Weather Guard, we’ll help you.

Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in depth info you need.

Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PES Wind at PESWind. com.

So I actually. Brought the PES Wind Magazine with me today because I have forgotten it the last couple of weeks. So if you haven’t gotten your latest edition of PES Wind, it’s out and you can get it at PESwind. com and they’re this one is this episode of the magazine and this edition of the magazine has a lot of great articles in it and the one I saw that we want to talk about is the CLS Wind and their lifting platform to assemble a wind turbine.

So they kind of If you think about the way you build a tower, you shove this really big crane and it lifts this tower section up, you stack it, you bolt it on, you go to the next one. So it takes a lot of big cranes to get this job done. What they’ve done instead is made like a cog train. Rosemary, do you know what that is?

If you’ve ever been to up a steep mountain in Switzerland and you take one of those trains and it has a cog on it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, the rack.

Allen Hall: It’s similar to that On the backside of a wind turbine. Pikes Peak has a similar train. Phil, you’ve been on one of these things. So it’s like a, it’s like a geared system with the platform that raises the next section of the wind turbine up and then you just slide it over and drop it on, bolt it on, keep going.

So it makes like a built in elevator with the turbine. Now, we’ve seen a lot of ideas about how to install turbines faster, right? That seems to be a big pain point with cranes because cranes, you got to call the cranes, got to be there and it’s expensive. This system, and others like it, are really trying to revolutionize the way we build wind turbines, and what I’m guessing is, the backing behind it to do this, is there an industry drive to do something like this, which is unique and probably will save a bunch of money, versus just the rapid need to get Turbines deployed is there a disconnect there and that should we be looking at something more like a CLS wind system?

Which is more integral with the turbine and makes it cheaper to install do the OEMs just not care Once it goes out the door, they’ll figure it out.

Philip Totaro: I mean for offshore I actually think this makes some sense with or you know, this or something kind of akin to this type of a solution It’s not the first time it’s been proposed And Valmont actually is probably the company that investigated this very early.

They had patents dating back to 2001 or 2, I want to say. Kind of a lifting, basically a lifting platform where you could kind of, you know build the turbine. Sequentially, there’s also companies out there like Nabrawind is also, you know, trying to do towers and they’ve, you know, done some demos in Spain and in Africa, and they licensed the technology to China.

I, conceptually, I like the idea of, you know, again, whether it’s a slip form tower or, you know, what CLS Wind is doing conceptually, I like it. The challenge is kind of twofold. One, I think it makes a much more sense for bigger either onshore turbines or definitely for offshore if you’re talking about like an 18 to 20 or you know the Chinese are now trying to design you know 25 offshore wind turbines I think you probably need a solution like this to be able to install it because you were never going to have a boom crane big enough to be able to do you know like a, you know, 280 meter hub height because it’s got a, you know, 400 meter rotor kind of a, you know, on a 30 megawatt wind turbine.

So you’re necessarily going to have a solution like this if you want to go really big offshore. We’ll never have vessels that are going to be capable of doing the installation or the maintenance on components. So I think this is a good idea kind of conceptually aside from some of the commercial challenges, the biggest thing is also, you know, whether or not this thing is actually built to withstand you know, cause these, Alan, you were talking about like these systems in Switzerland or whatever.

They get serviced very frequently. This thing, I don’t know if it’s now an extra thing that you’ve got to service and maintain as part of the turbine to be able to do your component swap outs. You know, it, it does add some cost and complexity, but it does also facilitate you going to, you know, potentially a large onshore or definitely a huge offshore turbine.

Allen Hall: Let me ask Rosemary this because the wind catcher system, right. There’s a store that wall of wind turbines. Does that. Approach to building something that massive requires something like the CLS wind system in order to build it efficiently that you need to sort of hoist it up in place with a little more technology than just being a big crane out.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no, they’ve got their own like assembly and maintenance infrastructure kind of incorporated into the wind catching. Design. So it’s like as lifts that run up the, I don’t know, the you know, there’s that big grid structure with the little rotors in it and there’s all these, you know, verticals along.

So on the verticals, they have these lifts and they can slot blades in and out and other big components in and out that way, because yeah, they’re imagining. you know, obviously if you go from I can’t remember the exact number, but if you go from, you know, one rotor to 49 different rotors, if it’s a seven by seven grid, then you’re probably going to need to do maintenance more often.

Right. So they’re imagining that you’re going to be able to have to be able to get those components in and out. So they’ve integrated the installation and maintenance as part of it. And also for saying. You know, like many others that installation is one of the things that’s getting, you know, the challenge of installation is getting harder, faster than the size of the turbines grow, you know, a little bit bigger turbine is starting to make a lot bigger headache for installation.

Most of the people that are coming up with innovative turbine solutions for offshore, especially really have installation and maintenance. So some of the core reasons why they say that things need to go a different direction than just making things really huge. That, and I mean, there’s a few other things as well, but those are amongst the most important.

So yeah, I think I think it is time to, to stop just thinking about doing things the way that they have been done and just go bigger, because some things are starting to get really ridiculous, like the cranes. And I mean, in Australia, even for onshore wind turbines in Australia, If you’ve got you know, a blade defect problem on a wind farm that was commissioned a while ago.

And you know, all your installation stuff is gone, you know, that, that crane is gone and it’s installing another wind farm. It’s not so easy to get your hands on one in Australia, even for the onshore turbines. You know, even, you know, Even for the, it might be a solution that you create because people with the, that are installing really big wind turbines that, you know, they have a need for it.

They just simply can’t install it without that. But I do see that it will filter downwards as well into the kind of existing existing technology. They also have a bit of a problem. You know, it’s not something that is make or break for. the existing wind farms, but it is certainly, you know, on the blade defect problems that I work on, a lot of the times it’s dragging out what, you know, might have been a couple of month campaign might turn into closer to a year because you’ve got to worry about getting the crane on site and that sort of thing.

Allen Hall: Wow, so maybe the CLS wind type system would make sense then, be able to just basically bolt something on and then elevate it down on a platform. That’d be cool.

Rosemary Barnes: Is it something that needs to be, does it need to be there from the start? Is it, you know, is it, does design change to the turbine you can just come back to an existing turbine and, you know, install a few components and then away you go?

Philip Totaro: If it’s not designed to do that, they should design it to do that because I think that’s a good idea.

Allen Hall: It is good. Like you said, Australia is probably the marketplace for this because the access to cranes, right? It would you design the towers to handle this system? And then when you need to do a major an MCE You just do it and you don’t have to wait for a green to come out.

It makes infinite sense That’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Does the Massive WindRunner Plane Make Sense? Plus CLS Wind’s Innovative Assembly System

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Renewable Energy

Trump’s “Dumbest” Lie

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The fellow in this video asserts that Donald Trump’s dumbest lie is that the cost of things like gas and groceries have fallen since he took office, since it is so provably false, and is directed the MAGA base.

I’ll grant that the typical Trump supporter doesn’t care if the president is all over the Epstein files, or that the war with Iran was stupid and illegal.  But there is no evidence that there is any more than a trickle of disaffection over consumer prices.

Trump’s “Dumbest” Lie

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Renewable Energy

MotorDoc Finds Bearing and Gearbox Faults in Minutes

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Weather Guard Lightning Tech

MotorDoc Finds Bearing and Gearbox Faults in Minutes

Howard Penrose of MotorDoc joins to discuss current signature analysis, uptower circulating currents wrecking main bearings, and full drivetrain scans in minutes. Reach out at info@motordoc.com or on LinkedIn.

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!

Howard Penrose: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Howard, welcome back to the program.

Howard Penrose: Hey, thanks for having me.

Allen Hall: It’s about time everybody realizes what motorDoc can do. There’s so much technology, and I’ve been watching- Yeah … your Chaos and Caffeine podcast on Saturday morning, which are full of really, really good information about the motorDoc as a company, all the things you’re doing out in the field, and how you’re solving real-world problems, not imaginary ones- Yeah

real-world problems. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and

Howard Penrose: whatever annoys me that week. Exactly. And, and whatever great coffee I’m trying out. Yes. Except for a few. We’ve had the ReliaSquatch down our- Yes … um, a couple of times. Uh, yeah, no, I, I enjoy it, and we gotta get you on there sometime. I don’t do- I, it- … a lot of interviews other than an AI character we put in.

Allen Hall: It’s a very interesting show because you’re [00:01:00] getting a little bit of comedy and humor and s- Yeah … and a, and a coffee review, which is very helpful because I’ve tried some of the coffees that you have reviewed, that you’ve given the thumbs up to. But if you’re operating wind turbines and you’re trying to understand what’s happening on the drivetrain side, on the generator, everything out to the blades even, main bearings, gearboxes- Yeah

all those rotating heavy, expensive parts, there’s a lot of ways to diagnose them-

Howard Penrose: Yes …

Allen Hall: that are sort of like we can look at a gear, we can look at a joint, we can look at roller bearings, whatever, but motorDoc has a way to quickly diagnose all of that chain in about- Yeah … 15 seconds.

Howard Penrose: Well, a little longer than 15 sec- more like a minute.

A minute, okay. It feels like paint drying. But- Uh, in any case, yeah. Uh, uh, and, and what’s kind of funny is, um, back in the ’90s, uh, EPRI actually accidentally steered the technology away from its [00:02:00] core purpose, which was in 1985, um, NAVSEA, the US Navy, had done research on using current signature analysis for looking at pumps, fans, and compressors, the bearings, the belts, the components, all the rotating components using the motor as the sensor.

Not too much different than we are now. I mean, mind you, we got better resolution now, we’ve got, uh, more powerful– I mean, I look at my data from the ’90s, and now it’s completely different. Um, and then Oak Ridge National Lab, same thing, bearings and gears in motor-operated valves. So in 2003, we were the first ones to apply electrical and current signature analysis to some wind turbines in the Mojave Desert.

Wow. Yeah. So, um, nobody had tried it before. Everybody said it couldn’t be done. And, uh, that was a bad thing to say to me because- … it meant I was gonna get it [00:03:00] done. Right. At that time, um, we were looking at bearing issues and some blatant conditions with the, um, with the, uh, generator using a technology called Altest, ’cause I was with Altest at the time.

And, uh, I had taken an EMPath software and blended it with a, a power analyzer, and they still have that tool to this day. I was using that technology all the way through 2015. 2016, I should say. And then- And then switched over to the pure EMPath, which was more of an engineering tool. And then more recently, in 2022, uh, made the decision to ha- to take all the work we’d done on over 6,000 turbines, uh, looking at how we were looking at the data and what we were doing on the industrial side, and took a, uh, created a current signature analyzer that would do one phase of current to analyze the entire powertrain.

Allen Hall: So when you tell [00:04:00] operators you can do this magic, I think a lotta times they gotta go, “

Howard Penrose: What?” Oh, yeah, yeah. They don’t understand it because they’re used to vibration- Right … which is a point analysis system. Right.

Allen Hall: Vibration at this- Yeah … particular location. Yeah. One spot- Even if it’s- … or a couple

Howard Penrose: spots

triax, they’re reading through material, up through a transducer. Hopefully, they put it above the bearing and not in the middle of the machine like everybody is now, because everybody’s trying to sell a sensor. Right. True. They’re not selling a- they’re not selling accuracy. They’re just selling sensors.

Right. So, um- Yeah … you know, uh, I, I’ll, I’ll even talk about one of the companies here. We’ve got Onyx here, and they do it right. I mean, they’ve been doing it right pretty well because we’ve been doing some of the same towers they’re on, and we can match the data they’re getting. Oh, good. Right? Yeah. Uh, so but they get it in multiple spots, and there’s areas they can’t quite reach, so we’ll detect those areas as well.

So it’s a good melding of two technologies.

Allen Hall: Oh, sure. Sure,

Howard Penrose: sure. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when you have electrical signature and you have vibration, but in [00:05:00] cases if you don’t have vibration, we’re a direct replacement.

Allen Hall: Because the generator- I

Howard Penrose: dare say that.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Whichever–

Howard Penrose: I dare say that, um, with- Well, the

Allen Hall: generator is acting as the sensor.

Howard Penrose: The air gap. The air gap in the generator s- specifically, yes. Yeah. Generator, motor, transformer. Right.

Allen Hall: Yeah. So any of those- Mm-hmm … you can clamp onto, look at the current that’s on there. Everything that’s happening on the drivetrain, in the gearbox, out on the rotor- Yep … main bearings, all of that creates vibration.

Creates a torque. T- a, a torque. Yeah. Yes, more exactly a torque. Yeah. And that’s seen in the generator, in the current coming out of the generator. Yes. So those signals, although minute, are still there. Yes. So if you clamp onto that current coming out of the generator, you’ll see the typical AC sine wave sitting there.

But on top of that- Is all the information about how that drivetrain is doing

Howard Penrose: Absolutely, and everything else. Anything electrical comes through [00:06:00] that. So what you do is just like vibration, you do a spectral analysis. So every component has a frequency associated with it, just like vibration. It’s, as a matter of fact, I, I keep having to try to explain to people electrical and current signature analysis is no different than vibration analysis.

It’s the same concept. We use the same tools. The signature looks just a little different. It’s a little noisier, um, but you need that noise in order to see everything. But we have a time waveform, and instead of, um, inches per second or millimeters per second, whatever, you know, uh, velocity, acceleration, and displacement, uh, what we end up with is decibels is the optimal method.

You can look at straight voltage signatures at those points or, or current signatures, but the values are so small that you have to look at it from a logarithmic standpoint. Right. There are some benefits to it versus vibration, and there’s some things that aren’t as good as vibration. [00:07:00] So, you know, we, we do…

You have to… Any technology is gonna have their strengths and weaknesses. Sure. So we will see everything all at once. Load doesn’t matter. Right. Speed doesn’t matter. It’s… Only reason speed matters is the location of the frequencies. Uh, so the higher the resolution, meaning the longer you take data, the less chance you have on a lightly lo- loaded machine of blending the peaks together.

Right. Um, on the flip side, if I have two bearings turning at the exact same speed, I couldn’t tell you which one it is. Because they’re the same. Right.

Allen Hall: And the mechanical features of that bearing is w- what creates the signal that you’re measuring. Exactly. So if a bearing has five rollers versus 10, just imaginary thing.

Yeah, yeah. Five rollers versus 10 has a different electrical signature, so you can determine, like, that bearing, that 10 roller bearing- Yes … has the problem, the five is fine. Yes. Yeah. That’s the magic, and I think people don’t translate the mechanical world into the electrical world. That that’s what’s [00:08:00]happening.

They,

Howard Penrose: they don’t because, because what’s happening is they named it wrong.

Allen Hall: Yes.

Howard Penrose: A majority of our users are mechanical folks. Sure. Our vibration analysts and stuff like, ’cause they know how to look at the signatures. Right. Everybody tries to force it on their electrical people, and electrical people go, “We don’t know what this is.”

Yeah. And it’s, it’s, it’s a matter of that training and, and, you know, in the electrical world, you’re not taught to look at that. Right. Yeah. It doesn’t matter. Mechanical world, you’re taught to look at that. So our intern, we were trying to bring in electrical engineering interns and found out that just wasn’t working.

So last year, I brought in my first, uh, intern that’s, you know, he’s been with us now since I brought him in. Okay. Uh, and, uh, Amar, and, uh, you know, he’s helped us develop our vi- uh, vibration software to go along with it. Guess what? It’s the same thing. It’s the exact same sy- system Um, but we just take in a vibration signal instead.

But he picked up on it immediately as a [00:09:00] third-year college student. I can take somebody with a decade as an electrical engineer with a PhD and they can’t figure it out.

Allen Hall: Well, because you’re, you’re taking real- Because it’s different. Yeah. It’s r- well, it’s real-world components-

Howard Penrose: Yeah …

Allen Hall: creating electrical signals.

That’s hard- Well, you have- … to process for a lot of people. Yeah,

Howard Penrose: yeah. It’s

Allen Hall: just not

Howard Penrose: something that we do every day. But that’s… If they, i- if we sa- i- i- if you’re looking at vibration and you start looking at the sensor, it gets complicated too, ’cause guess what? It’s an electrical signal. Right. It’s, it is technically electrical signature now.

It’s converting a

Allen Hall: mechanical signal- Right … into an electrical signal, which is what’s happening in the generator anyway. Yeah.

Howard Penrose: Whether it’s a piezoelectric cell that’s generating a small signal- Yeah … on top of a small waveform that you then take out, you demodulate, uh, or it’s, uh… So you take that carrier frequency out, or it’s a MEMS sensor, which is the same thing.

You know, the, it just sees some slower s- It, it does more of a digital output. So you, you, you know, you have those, or you [00:10:00] have this, which just basically uses a component of the machine to, to, as its own sensor. There is one other difference between them, too, and, uh, I find this very useful when I’m going out troubleshooting something that other people can’t figure out, uh, ’cause we use all the technologies.

So in this case, it would be, uh, the structural movement. Okay? So, so say I have a generator and there’s something wrong with the structure, and the whole machine is vibrating. So y- well, if I put a transducer on it, they might think that’s vibration or something else. We don’t see it. Right. We only see directly exactly what’s happening with the machine.

Sure. So a lot of times when we go in to troubleshoot something that people have done vibration on and everything else, it’s been pro- a, a problem for them for years. We walk in, and all of a sudden we’re identifying whether it’s the machine or it’s something else right off the bat. Then we can take a look at the vibration data and [00:11:00] say, “Okay, it wasn’t the bearing or the bearing, um, structure.

It was, you know, the mounting.” Right. It wasn’t

Allen Hall: fastened

Howard Penrose: down properly. Yeah,

Allen Hall: yeah. Right.

Howard Penrose: Go tighten that bolt. Right, exactly.

Allen Hall: Well, I mean, that’s the cheap answer. Yeah. I’d rather tighten a bolt than rip apart a motor or a generator- And, and- … every day …

Howard Penrose: and that’s the whole point. Now, there are other strengths that go with it.

So for instance, on the powertrain of a wind turbine, I can tell you if you’ve lubricated the bearings correctly. Wow. Because part of what we do is we do take those electrical signatures, and we convert those over to watts. Watts is an energy conversion. Sure. So you see that as heat or some type of loss.

So whatever, whatever’s being lost there is not being sent to the customer. To the outside. Right. Making money. So, um, if I’m taking a look at, say, a main bearing, I might see watts or kilowatts of losses. So you’re gonna have some ’cause you have friction, right? But when we see it increase on, say, a roller, [00:12:00] or the rollers, or, or the cage, that’s usually an indicator that I have a lubrication issue.

Or if we only see it on the outer race, that means that they didn’t clear out all the old grease when they were lubricating it, ’cause the rollers then have to ride across it- Right … ’cause it dries up.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Howard Penrose: Uh, and will carry contaminants. So if you see that, you go up, clean it up, you’ll extend the life of the bearing.

Absolutely you will. Without having to do a lot of work. So, uh, we, we look at our technology as more so early in the, in the stage of a condition. I don’t wanna call it failure, ’cause it’s not a failure. It’s something that’s mitigable. And I made that word up. You can mitigate it. Meaning you can go up and correct it and extend the life of that component.

Sure. Uh, in gearboxes we’ll see problems with, um… Well, the, the one we’re talking about here a fair amount is all the circulating currents going on uptower. We did that research. The current signature analyzer we have is a direct result of doing wind turbine [00:13:00] research just on circulating currents uptower, ’cause we conferred everything over to, to sound at 48 kilohertz.

And so that gives me a 24-kilohertz signal. That high-frequency stuff, which we’re researching in CGRE, and IEEE, and IEC, is called supra harmonics, which I– we talked about that before. Yes, we have. Yeah. And, uh, so when you start seeing that in the, in, in the current that’s circulating uptower because the ground that goes from the top of the tower down is for- DC

lightning protection. And lightning protection, yeah. It’s not meant for, um- Not for

Allen Hall: high frequency- Yeah …

Howard Penrose: currents. Yeah. Uh, we, when we measured it, when we mapped out dozens of towers of all different manufacturers, we found that the impedance about halfway down the tower is where it ends. Sure. The, the resistance.

And then the increased, uh, the high-frequency noise turns any of your shaft brushes into resistors. And at about 15 kilohertz, no current is [00:14:00]passing through them. It’s all passing the bearing, which becomes more conductive the higher the frequency. So with 60% of main bearings failing due to electrical currents, it’s actually currents that are circulating uptower.

It’s not static. There is some static up there, but it’s not static. It’s coming from the controls, the, the generator, and everything else. Inverters,

Allen Hall: converters.

Howard Penrose: And we’ve seen up to 150 amps passing through a, through a bearing.

Allen Hall: So I– We run across a lot of operators who have been replacing main bearings, and they don’t know the reason why.

Yeah. And I always say, “Well, call Howard at MotorDoc because I would almost bet you you have the f- high frequency running around uptower in the nacelle- And the next main bearing you put in there is gonna go the same way as the- Yeah … first one you put in there. Until you cut off that circulating current and then the cell, you’re just gonna continue with the problem.

Then you haven’t eliminated the problem, you’re just fixing the result of that problem. Yes. But it takes- Yeah, you’re, you’re- How, [00:15:00] how, well, how long- You’re replacing

Howard Penrose: a fuse.

Allen Hall: Right, you’re replacing a fuse. Yeah. How long does it take you to s- to determine- An expensive fuse. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, ’cause you’re taking the rotor down.

Yeah. Well, how, how fast can you determine if you have harmonics uptower that are gonna be causing you problems? 120 seconds.

Howard Penrose: Okay.

Allen Hall: So that’s the thing. I think a lot of- I mean,

Howard Penrose: that’s of the actual data collection time. So you clamp on uptower, uh, and then you can… Well, the way we have it set up now, you just tell it you wanna collect data every five s- uh, five minutes, and then you go downtower, let it collect its data, go back up, grab it.

Um, it’s like…

It’s huge. It’s this size. So, um, and then you connect- It plugs into a laptop. Yeah. Plug it into a laptop or any type of tablet. Um, it, it’s Windows now. I’m trying to get away from Windows. We’re gonna have Linux systems, uh, as well. Uh, and then you use that to, um, just collect that data, and then you press another button.

Now it pops up, and it tells you if you’re in danger or not, [00:16:00] the amount of current passing through the bearing, and the frequencies all the way out.

Allen Hall: So the ideal is you’re gonna have this kit with you in the truck. Yeah. And as you see these problems pop up, you’re gonna clamp on uptower. Yep. You’re gonna measure these circulating currents, and you’re gonna know immediately if you have another mechanical issue, a, a lubrication issue- Oh, yeah.

It’ll look at- … some kind of alignment issue, or- You’ll get all

Howard Penrose: of this information at once. So you- Right … if you go on the power side. So certain turbines, like anything that has the transformer downtower, you don’t have to climb. Right. GE. I mean, I don’t climb. So, uh, uh, you know, th- and that was part of the, the concept behind when we started down this path because I’ve been in the wind industry since 1997.

So one of the things I always saw was, and, and we talked about even, you know, here when it was called AWEA, and we were talking always on the health and safety side about wearing out the technicians. Um, so we discovered that, you know, what was it? Almost 60% of the [00:17:00] turbines you didn’t have to climb. Right.

Oh, yeah. And even the ones you do, you go up, you set it up, and it’ll tell you where you need to focus. The other thing in the powertrain, let alone the generator, when we do a sweep of a site– Now, if we do a straight electrical signature analysis, I’d term that one as a technician’s tool. Sure. That’s more of an engineer’s tool.

Uh, a lot more data, a lot harder to set up. But even though I’m saying harder to set up, it’s still pretty easy. It’s still minutes. Right. Yeah. Most technicians will collect data with, like, a couple hours worth of training. Yeah. You g- You basically gather that data, and if you’re getting a site, so we’ll go out– I love going out in the field.

So we’ll go out in the field, especially if it’s a tower we don’t have to climb I’ll knock out, uh, well, let’s just say I’ll, I’ll, I’ll name one. Say a GE 1.6. I’ll knock out one of those every eight to 11 minutes, depending on how you get to the tower.

Allen Hall: So that’s a full diagnosis of drivetrain- Yeah … plus anything odd happening- Yep

with circulating currents and all that [00:18:00] can- Oh, no, no. Circulating- Or just- … current, that’s a- That’s a separate thing at tower … separate study that- Okay … you have to do that uptower. But anything, anything drivetrain-wise, you can be in and out- Yeah … in a couple of minutes. Yep. Okay. So there’s a lot of operators that have end-of-warranties coming up, right?

Yes. There’s been a lot of developments, so they’re kind of running into the end-of-warranty, and they don’t know the health status of their drivetrain. Same thing for a lot of operators that are in- Yep … full service agreements, and they’re questioning whether they’re getting their money’s worth or not.

Yes. I always say, “Call Howard at Motordoc. You guys can have a whole site survey done maybe in a couple of days, and you will know all the problems that are on site for the lowest price ever”. Yeah. It’s crazy how fast you can do it and how accurate it is. I talk to operators that use your system, so I hear you.

Yeah. Your podcast, listen to your podcast, I’m calling your customers to find out what they say, and they love it. Oh, yeah. They can’t believe how accurate it is. Yeah. Well, the thing about that is we as an industry need to make sure that our turbines are operating at [00:19:00] maximum efficiency. Yep. And if a simple tool like the Motordoc EMPath system exists, we need to get customers, operators in line to start doing it worldwide.

Australia- Oh … Europe-

Howard Penrose: Yeah. We- … Canada. Australia, we’re trying to get into, but right now we even have OEMs using it through North- That’s good … and South America, Asia. Good. Uh, Middle East, um, and, uh, and some of Europe. Good. So it’s, it’s, it’s really taking off. Uh, I’d say probably our biggest market right now is Brazil.

Sure. They’re going crazy. Well, the, the turbines are- They’re having a lot of problems. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Right. And the, well, those turbines have a h- high usage, right? So because- Oh, yeah … the winds are so good, they’re operating at, like, capacity factor is above 50%. Yes. It’s insane. Yeah. So there’s a lot of wear and tear.

There’s no downtime for those turbines.

Howard Penrose: Yeah. Well, and, and people think it’s all the starting and stopping. It’s not. No. It’s a grid-related issue. So we have- Sure … we have a low frequency. And you know some of the stuff I volun- I, I’m, I’ve been volunteered for- [00:20:00] Yeah … uh, including the CIGRE thing. Um, so I get to sit in the grid code committees for IEEE and put my, and our input into that, uh, and kind of watch the back of the IBR industry, right?

Mm-hmm. ‘Cause there’s a definitely bias against our industry. Um, and I also, uh, get to hear what’s going on in the grid side of things from CIGRE worldwide, and it’s all very similar, and it has to do with low-frequency oscillating currents- Yes … called subsynchronous currents- Yes … which are low enough not to damage large synchronous machines.

And they thought, and there’s books written on this, by the way, multiple books written on wind turbine impact- Uh, and they’re seeing now, um… Well, we detected it first, along with Timken. Hank, uh, and, and I went out to a site, and we detected for the first time, because of how they wanna do the testing and where the site was located, we saw the oscillating torque [00:21:00] in the air gap, ’cause that’s one of the things the technology does.

It actually measures the torque, air gap torque. Sure. So we were watching the oscillating torque as a tower started up. And so we did, we went through the rest of that site looking at the same stuff in the same way. It increased our time and data collection, and time on site. But then we started looking for it at other sites, and going to pass data because I don’t have to go back and retake data.

Right. And we’re like, “Oh my God. It’s everywhere.” 16 hertz, 21 hertz, and 50 hertz. And we found a paper that specifically identified that as the sub synchronous frequencies for 60 hertz. So we know what they are also for 50 hertz. Once we identified that and we saw how much the torsi- torque was oscillating, we worked with Shermco, who got us some information on Y-rings that were failing.

Yeah. And they were all failing… When the metallurgy was done, they were all failing from fatigue. And you’re like, fatigue how? What’s fatiguing these connections? [00:22:00] Well, the fatigue is that air gap torque- Exactly … because you’re basically causing the, the, everything to oscillate a little bit, and that causes the windings to move slightly.

It’s a living,

Allen Hall: breathing machine-

Howard Penrose: Exactly … this generator

Allen Hall: is.

Howard Penrose: Yeah.

Allen Hall: It’s not

Howard Penrose: static. It’s definitely not sta- no electric machine is static. No. Even a transformer’s not static. Right.

Allen Hall: So- There’s a little

Howard Penrose: bit of wiggle going on there all the time All the time. And it’s minute, so it takes a long time. Right. And what, uh, uh, everybody…

Well, first people thought it was a particular manufacturer, which it wasn’t. Turned out every defig’s failing the same way. Sure. You’re fatiguing it. Yeah. Every bearing is failing the same way, even in the gearbox, main bearings, and everything else. Right. All of these conditions are happening across all the OEMs, but they’re not allowed to talk.

Well, this is, this is the thing that

Allen Hall: I like watching your podcast.

Howard Penrose: Yeah.

Allen Hall: The Chaos and Caffeine. It comes out Saturday mornings. It’s on YouTube. If you haven’t- Yeah … clicked into it, you should click into it

Howard Penrose: because a lot of these issues are discussed there. It’s definitely, um… [00:23:00] Let’s just say I’ll speak Navy quite a bit.

Allen Hall: It’s a great podcast, and I think what you’re doing with the EMPath system- Yes … at motor dock is really a game changer. Yeah. I’m talking to everybody, all the operators I know. I keep telling them to call you and to try the system out because it’s so inexpensive and it does the work quickly and efficiently, and it’s been proven.

There’s no messing- Oh, yeah … around when you’re talking to MotorDoc. I…

Howard Penrose: Somebody dared tell me that there’s no standard for it. There’s ISO standards for it. Yes. There’s IEEE 1415- Yes … which I chair. Uh, and there’s other standards coming out- This is- … associated with it. And there’s a document that I also chair for Sea Gray- Called A178, which is the practical application of the technology.

So it’s well-documented. There are traceable standards for it. I need more

Allen Hall: operators to call you- Yeah … and to talk to you and get systems in the back of the trucks that they can use to check out the health of their gear boxes and their drive trains and their generators. How [00:24:00] do they do that? Where do they go?

Where, where’s, what’s- Well- … the first place they should look for?

Howard Penrose: Uh, info@motordoc.com. Okay. I get all, I get all of those as well, so do my people. Um, or, uh, LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s really good.

Allen Hall: Look up anything. Yeah.

Howard Penrose: Yeah, yeah. So, so either the company at Motordoc, or, uh, I’m, I sh- I’ll show up either searching for my name or, uh, linkedin.com/in/motordoc.

Come straight to me ’cause I’ve been in, on LinkedIn forever, so- Right, just- … I got to do that … look up

Allen Hall: Howard Penrose, P-E-N-R-O-S-E. Yep. Or go to motordoc.com is- Yep, motordoc.com … the website address.

Howard Penrose: Yep. There’s a lot of great information there. And we have partners, and we have people. We’re growing the company.

You know, talk to me. I, I’ll- Yes … I like answering the phone and talking. It’s, it’s a thing. My people go, “Can we answer the phone one?” No. Um, but, but yeah, we, we, y- when you call us, you’re not just dealing with a single person. Right. The Motordoc is far more expansive. Right now, we [00:25:00] just got our partnership with, uh, Hitachi and, and Juliet- Yeah, that’s great

and stuff like that. Uh, we’re helping them with certain things. Uh, we’re partnered with some of the big OEMs, almost all of them, um, you know, helping identify the issues, you know. And, and when users contact us, often they’ll tell us what’s going on, and we’ll, we can, uh, sometimes say, “Yeah, it’s this, and here’s how we prove it.”

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s the, that’s the beauty- Yeah … of calling Motordoc. So I need my operators that, that watch the show- Yeah … worldwide, go online, go on LinkedIn, get ahold of Howard, get ahold of Motordoc, and get started. Yep. Howard, thank you- And- … so much for being on the podcast. Yeah. This is fantastic. I love talking to you because-

it’s, it’s like talking to, you know… Uh, no, really, it’s talking like someone who’s a real good industry expert, who’s been there a long time, and understands- Yeah … how this

[00:26:00] works.

MotorDoc Finds Bearing and Gearbox Faults in Minutes

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The Fine Art of Appealing to Idiots

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The fascism of the early 20th Century taught us all the key elements of the playbook (see below).

In particular, when a leader identifies an enemy like Islam as a grievous threat and pledges eliminate it, one might think that such a position would generate suspicion, rather than adoration.

No so here in the United States, where tens of millions of uneducated Americans would happily elect Trump an absolute leader for life, in the way of Putin and Xi.

The Fine Art of Appealing to Idiots

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