Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Drone Inspection Certification, BladeRobots Goes Solo, U.S. Energy Trends

This week we explore drone inspection certification stirring up Europe and the spin-off of Bladerobots from Vestas. Plus U.S. vs. Australian power trends, wind farms’ community impact, and the potential of AI. And, could single blade turbines solve lightning issues?

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Allen Hall: Rosemary, I don’t know if you have pancakes down in Australia, but in America, it is a big deal. And do you have Eggo’s? Do you know what an Eggo is? An Eggo waffle or an Eggo pancake? Is that a thing? Go to the grocery store or the market, whatever you call it in Australia, and you get a frozen waffle or frozen pancake?

Is that a thing?

Rosemary Barnes: Why would you do that? What? Pancake batter takes about five seconds to throw together from stuff that you’ve definitely got in your pantry and fridge.

Allen Hall: That’s too long, Rosemary. You have not visited

Rosemary Barnes: America lately.

I’m gonna guess it’s full of high fructose corn syrup and other such ridiculousness.

Allen Hall: No. The high fructose corn syrup is poured on it in the form of syrup. See. Eggo is a big brand name in the United States for making frozen waffles. Let go of my eggo. Commercials that have been around forever and also pancakes, but for national pancake day, and this is brilliant, this is a brilliant piece of marketing, Eggo built a pancake shaped house in Tennessee to rent out for national pancake day.

The Eggo House of Pancakes is decorated like a stack of pancakes down to a butter chimney. It has pancake beds, bean bags, syrup fountains, and is stocked with frozen Eggo pancakes. Now, this one single house is in Gatlinburg Tennessee, which is the pancake capital of the South, and you can book a three night stay there in March.

And I’m looking into this. I’m seriously looking into this. It’s part of Eggo’s National Pancake Day. How about that, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: Is it like Shrove, is it Shrove Tuesday? Is that?

Joel Saxum: No, that’s what the high fructose corn syrup’s for.

Allen Hall: You should see this thing. It’s actually quite impressive. They did a good job with it.

It’s like the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. You can’t miss this thing. Look at Rosemary, I think she got red. Why are you turning red?

Philip Totaro: I’m with her. I don’t know. I don’t get it.

Allen Hall: It’s like the Mr. Peanutmobile. It’s the same sort of thing. Joel, we gotta come up with something like this for StrikeTape.

Joel Saxum: We can do that. I can do that.

Rosemary Barnes: They obviously do have great branding because, like pancakes cost about 20 cents worth of ingredients. There’s like nothing to them. And they’ve managed to sell them pre made in a box. That’s bizarre to me.

Allen Hall: They are delicious.

Joel Saxum: USA .

Rosemary Barnes: Can’t get on board. Sorry. No culture clash.

Joel Saxum: The second chin, that’s Eggo waffles.

Rosemary Barnes: Now there’s a commercial.

Joel Saxum: I work in the wind industry. You know how I make sure the wind doesn’t blow me away every morning? I eat Eggo waffles.

Allen Hall: U. S. electricity generation dipped by roughly 1 percent in 2023 from its record high in 2022. So from roughly 2007 to 2023, generation was only up about 2. 3%, which seems odd based on population growth and things that are happening in the United States. So it’s this report that we’re seeing pop around different places about electricity generation in the United States.

is unusual. Natural gas is the dominant producer or fuel for electricity in the United States, hitting about a little over 40 percent of the total generation due to rosemary. It’s low price and the plants are really efficient. And so the recent, the Biden administration actually canceled a port.

to export natural gas, which then further lower the price. So right for us, but coal Australian coal dipped to a low of less than 16 percent of the share of electricity in the United States down from 50, 50 percent in 2001. If you’re around the United States in 2001, you can see coal trains running everywhere across the United States.

You don’t see that much anymore. So coal is way down, natural gas is way up and renewables are about almost 23 percent of electricity producing in the U. S. Now, when it comes to wind generation, this is really interesting what are the top wind generating states? Obviously Texas, right? That’s an easy choice.

Iowa second, Oklahoma third, Kansas fourth, Illinois fifth, California sixth. That’s way down from where I thought it was. And solar has hit a new high at about almost 6% matching hydro. But obviously solar is growing a lot faster than hydro is going to grow over the next couple of years. Now battery storage, which is another area of interest in the United States.

It, the capacity is booming was 16 gigawatts added in 2023 and another 16 gigawatts expected this year to hit a total of. 32 gigawatts and the battery shift is where batteries are mostly focused at is California and Texas. And we’ll have a story here in a minute, but Texas is going to outpace California on battery storage.

Rosemary, I think that’s an interesting point. And in the United States, coal is dying, natural gas is way up. So the amount of energy produced. The United States is relatively flat, but the generations completely changed over the last roughly 20 years. And I don’t think that’s the same everywhere around the world.

It’s a little, the United States is an oddball, isn’t it, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s it’s, I think that the, like the biggest trends in there, the, the replacement of coal with gas is probably nearly 100 percent due to. The amount of domestic gas exploding in that period in the U S so all of a sudden it became very plentiful and incredibly cheap.

And so yeah, that also combine that with the fact that gas is more flexible than coal. Of course, if you would go for a call under the, sorry, you would go for gas over coal in those circumstances. And I think it also does make it a little bit. Harder for renewables to win out just purely on cost like they are elsewhere.

Because if I look I didn’t have time to do any detailed research, but I’ve just quickly pulled up the data for Australia’s generation over the last year. And we’ve got 18. 3 percent from solar, 13. 2 percent from wind, 7. 2 percent from hydro. Yeah, only 4. 8 percent from gas, even though we have, a lot of gas exports here, I think that we’re more free in the export market.

We don’t we, on the east coast, at least of Australia, we don’t reserve any for domestic consumption. It’s just a free for all people, the miners or, yeah, the, Developers can choose to send all of their gas overseas if they want. And so that means that we have the the international price for gas is our price for gas as well, because they’re choosing, where to send it based on cost.

Yeah, on the West Coast, they have a domestic reserve and so their gas is cheap over there and actually I can, I’m on the Open NEM site is a very interesting site to look at Australian electricity information and I can split it out and see Western Australia over the last year 35. 3 percent from gas.

So that’s maybe an example of the difference between when you have cheap gas versus when you don’t have cheap gas because you are. Tied to export prices, which have been high recently. Yeah, so I think that’s really interesting. I know. Yeah, in Australia renewables is growing a lot because of that expensive yeah, the expensive alternatives of coal and gas.

Coal power plants are closing down because renewables are pushing them out. Whereas in the U S that happened a bit earlier that the coal plants closed down, but it’s because gas, it out. Yeah, he really highlights how, when the economics are on the side of the energy transition, things move fast.

And when they are not, then it’s it’s like a wagon stuck in mud or something, you’ve got the government trying to push, push with subsidies and things like that, but it’s tricky. Yeah. And the state of wind energy in the U S I was just listening to a breakdown of it recently.

Someone was doing a review. I think it was Jesse Jenkins. Was doing a review of like the IRA a year on has it actually done the things that it was supposed to and wind is really languishing way below the peak installation and I think it was 2019 and 20 when it peaked. But it’s basically all to do with the, yeah, tax credits and when they have phased in or out, like wind is not standing on its own two feet in the U.

S. like it is in Australia, so it’s.

Joel Saxum: I’ll give you something a little background of that as well when we’re talking the difference between gas and coal. Gas right with the fracking boom. Everybody’s a fracking. That’s where the gas comes from So not only did you have these classical oil fields where this is, you know from 2000 on why it got so cheap Where people think you know, like the Permian Basin in Texas and and something in Oklahoma But all of these oil and gas fields that blew up North Dakota, the Marcella, the Marcella Shale out in, then you have the Appalachians.

That’s all gas. So it’s all, there’s oil mixed in with it, of course. But that’s a lot of where all of our gas capacity comes from, so the amount of rigs out there just pumping gas is one thing, right? But then you have the other side of it, where even if you’re mining coal, now you’ve got to move this stuff.

The logistics of coal mining is a pain. You use rail cars, you’re moving it by trucks to the rail, a lot of times the rail are right into the mines and things like that, yes, but with gas, that’s all pipelines. So once you install that pipeline, you don’t have to pay for the transportation logistics of that fuel anymore.

Some maintenance, of course, yes, but it’s not nearly as what it is, as expensive it is to rail and truck things around the country. Another thing on this report, Rosemary, I wanted to ask you as well is, okay, so one of the problems we know we have in renewables is getting things into the queue, right?

In the United States, solar, you’re hearing solar. People are going to start and a lot of the IPPs are starting to install a lot more solar capacity than they are wind simply because of the economics of it. But the question I have is about battery. So we said 16 gigawatts added in Texas.

Was, or no, 16 gigawatts added in 2023, another 16 gigawatts going to be added in 24, Texas and California dominating. The question is, and this is a technical question because I don’t know it. If you’re already connected to the grid and you’re using the batteries as a storage or a buffer mechanism, is that a completely different thing in the permitting process?

And maybe, I’m not expecting you to know that in the United States, but from a technical standpoint. Are you affecting the grid so much that it would be a new permitting process?

Rosemary Barnes: I know that people are using energy storage as a transmission upgrade or a new transmission alternative. I know examples in both Australia and the US.

In Australia, there’s a mining town or a remote town in the inland New South Wales called Broken Hill. They are connected to the grid, they have a transmission line, but it needs an upgrade. But instead of doing that, they have elected to build a big, they’re building compressed air energy storage.

I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, hundreds of megawatts. I’m pretty sure, low hundreds and I think eight or 10 hours storage. And they’re doing that instead of upgrading the transmission, cause obviously a transmission is sized around the peaks, right? The times when you’ve got the most energy.

So it’s not like it’s. Got the same amount of power, it’s not full all the time. So if you have some storage, you can actually just cover the little excess, the bit that your peak would exceed the capacity of the power lines. You can just cover that by battery storage. You don’t need nearly as much as what you might think you would need for even a, like a big regional town.

And the same thing in the U S there’s, like industrial projects that can’t get or industrial projects or there are renewable projects that can’t get enough transmission connection. They’ve got. They can connect up some certain amount of power immediately, or maybe they can’t, but they know that in a few years they will be able to, so what they can do is look at storage to cover the shortfall temporarily, or maybe in the long term.

I can’t remember there was a term for it, but it’s not off grid, but it’s, something similar to off grid in a way, like behind the meter, I don’t know, there was a term for it, but yeah, that, that would be behind the meter, but it’s not, I guess it’s similar to how a house is doing it, but now it would be a whole wind farm or data center or something.

Would be using storage to buffer that and yeah, while they wait for the transmission to catch up, but it’s not just renewables that, it could be sorry, it’s not just battery storage. It could be batteries, but it could also be diesel generators. And in some cases that is actually, they’re finding that’s cheaper, especially when.

They only need it for a year or two.

Joel Saxum: My thought around it was, is I know we have there’s just problems all over the place in the permitting queues. And if a company has capital to deploy and they need to, or want to deploy it this year, it’s if it’s easier just to go and add some battery storage and you have capital deploy.

And it’s in your strategic plan or whatever maybe just go spend your money doing that instead of trying to get new generation online that is, may or may not be able to because of permitting processes.

Philip Totaro: But it is, Joel, it is considered a separate permitting process for a battery. If you have a wind facility and you want to add solar and or storage to it, it’s, you go through a permit.

Again, and in an interconnection study as well.

Joel Saxum: I listened to a lot of ERCOT stuff, and ERCOT’s been calling the last couple years since the winter storm that we had. They’ve been calling for battery storage, and all of a sudden you see all this battery storage pop up. And in my dumb mind, I’m like, man, that was quick.

They called for it, and now it’s here, and it’s online. How did that happen?

Philip Totaro: Yeah, although there’s a bigger reason for that, particularly why California and Texas is because energy traders love to be able to time shift power so that they can price hedge and make Allen, I think we talked about this maybe Joel and Allen and I all talked about this on Newsflash a few weeks ago.

about the energy traders in Europe. This is what energy traders in the U. S. are now trying to do, but they’re leveraging it off of the battery storage that’s being deployed.

Allen Hall: Yeah, because down in Texas, in this year, in 2024, they’re planning to put 6. 4 gigawatts of new batteries on the grid.

And that’ll surpass California, which is only going to put 5. 2 gigawatts out there. And this is a total flip, right? ’cause California has been leading in batteries for a while, but Texas is gonna overcome them very quickly. And again, and as Phil was pointing out, it’s due to the fluctuating prices and they’re playing that difference in price with batteries, which makes sense.

So even though California has been trying to push a lot of batteries, the market is much more acceptable to projects in Texas. So it’s easier to get permitting and get it installed.

Philip Totaro: One last thing, you also see a lot of negative pricing in ERCOT, and nobody likes negative pricing, so they’d rather spend additional capital putting the battery in to time shift the power to when they can actually get a positive price, so for instance, Have your wind produce overnight and then deploy it in the morning between, let’s say, 6 a.

m. and 10 a. m. And, you just made a lot more money than if you had to dump the power overnight because there’s no load. Or insufficient demand.

Allen Hall: So this gets to another discussion that’s been popping up online, which is all electricity going to generation going to become local. And I’ll point out an article that happened in my home state, Nebraska, where they’ve been working on this power line that was going to go to about 250 miles north south in Nebraska and central Nebraska.

It’s called the R Project. So it’s Nebraska Public Powers R Project. It’s supposed to help connect the grid nationally. And, but they haven’t made any move on construction in 12 years after they proposed doing this thing. And they’re running into Ranchers and environmental groups that don’t want the power lines there and private property rights are pretty strong in Nebraska.

So there isn’t a power line. And now they’re running into all kinds of difficulties because the feds and the Nebraska are fighting about those lawsuits. So essentially nothing’s happening. So where that power needs to get delivered, they’re gonna have to figure out a different way. And like we’re talking about with batteries and transmission lines like Rosemary pointed out, they’re not at max capacity all the time.

And as Phil’s pointed out, because of the negative rates, it starts to make sense where you may be putting batteries in your neighborhood to pick up cheaper power, just so you can run during the daytime with some renewable. I think that’s where we’re headed, everybody. The states and the localities are not playing along in some of these.

Transition efforts, and there’s not much you’re gonna do about it.

Philip Totaro: I’m running, right now, off batteries.

Allen Hall: There you go.

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Alright, over in Europe Deutsche Windtechnik drone inspection system received validation from TUV Nord.

Now the article is really in depth about this thing but essentially what it sounds is that Deutsche Windtechnik has a specific drone they use in particular ways. They’re looking at the outside of the blade, obviously, but they’re also doing things around lightning protection systems to, to verify they’re working.

But TUV Norton actually came up with some criteria for doing this and then applied a stamp of approval to the Deutsche Windtechnik’s system for drone inspections. Now, this is completely different than anything in America because it’s what happens in the States is you hire a company like Skyspecs to do it, or you have one of your technicians who’s qualified to fly a drone.

Go out and start taking pictures of your wind turbine. We haven’t seen any effort to put a label or an approval onto a drone system. This seems odd. Maybe it’s a European approach, but when we were at San Diego at ACP MNS. There seems to be a lot of discussion about creating standards for everything.

Everything needs to have an approval, it has to be a standard to it. So there’s uniformity in the industry. If I want to hire a drone inspection, all the drone inspections will meet this criteria, would be one of those efforts. Is this just the beginning of the drone inspection? Approval market is there a rationale to do this?

Do we need this? Is this going to expand into other

areas? I don’t understand the point of this. What are they certifying? That they’re definitely going to capture all of the important information. There’s no way they’re going to be certifying that because I know there’s plenty of well established inspection techniques that definitely miss, miss big, major things.

That’s, basically the entirety of. Blade defect work that I do is, addressing issues that should have been caught, but weren’t so I just, what are they? Certifying.

Rosemary, you’re right. I think they’re certifying that it can catch blade damage and in the scans, and that has enough resolution and whatever the rate that they’re taking photos with, that it will catch those defects of whatever level they, two and above, I would

guess.

There’s no way they’re guaranteeing not to miss anything or something like that. Like that would be really handy if they could say, we’ve inspected it. It’s clear. We guarantee it. I guarantee you that is not what they’re doing. Then there’s no way that anybody is going to inspect your blades and be like, it’s definitely fine.

It’s, that’s not what happens. I

think of what it is they’re walking through the process. They’re developing a, they developed a standard to walk through your processes and see if they’re okay. It’s the same thing as okay, you can have a blade repair company and another blade repair company, but one of them is ISO 9001 approved in their processes.

So in the grand scheme of things, people trust that other company more. They’re like, that one is more legit because they’re certified. This is the first of its kind to my knowledge of certification from a third party certification body of a specific drone solution in the wind industry. I don’t know of any other ones that do it, but because they did this now, I could see others going Oh man, we’ve got to have that because eventually it could turn into this.

Tender process. If you’re not ISO 9000, like if you’re here, you’re going to go torque and tension bolts. You got to be ISO 9001 approved. You got to be on ISNet world. You got to be all these different stamps to your company to say that you have quality HSC process as your quality documentation, your this, that, your other thing.

That’s normal in that ISP space. Gonna, if this is a thing now, it could become this fan. And I know DNV is also working on a standard for image classification for cat categories, right? So there could be these things where it could be X, Y, z, wind farm, or wind. IPP, we’re putting our tender up for the next three years.

If you’re a drone company and you want to come and bid. Give us your, what are they calling this thing? D I N E N, something, 1702, blah blah blah blah blah. They’re gonna say, where’s that stamp, and where’s your classification stamp, to make sure that your stuff is good to go. I could see that happening. But

there, there are countries where They mandate that you have a product certification to be able to sell a wind turbine, for instance.

But there are other countries that don’t mandate it. The companies that go through a process of getting a certification, they do it because they want to be able to sell certain places, and then it’s just a nice to have. In other markets that don’t actually require you to have the product certification to be able to sell

turbans.

Yeah or insurance requires it. Exactly.

That’s what I’m saying though, is if you’re a bank or an insurance, you’re gonna want that stamp more

than not. Some of it’s a capital markets thing too, right? So I dial it back to my oil and gas experience, and there was If you were going offshore with an ROV, when you were gonna try to work for a major, a Chevron, a Shell, a BP, whatever, and you didn’t have that thing UL certified, you weren’t allowed on the rig.

So you immediately dequalified yourself, disqualified yourself from work because your piece of kit, your ROV or instrument or whatever wasn’t certified. They’re not gonna let

you on. I think we’ll have to wait and see how it turns out, because I think in the early term, people are going to be like me and say, what do I get for having this certification?

And currently the answer is nothing, but if assuming that they’re not providing a guarantee that they don’t miss anything, which like, I would honestly, I would take, like a large bet that’s not what’s happening because it’s stupid. But maybe in the future, the, they get the reputation that all of the drone inspection companies that have this certification are also the most accurate.

Maybe then we’ll trust it, but for now like what I haven’t seen or, got the impression that anybody thinks that there’s, like real standout methods and best practices on how you would do things and you can do a checklist approach to say, if it meets all this, then it’s going to be good quality.

I don’t think the industry is there yet. And I don’t think that this, certification process has made such a big leap all in one go. Off on the side quietly, figuring out this large problem without anybody knowing about it. And all of a sudden, yes, now. We know how to tell you if this drone inspection is going to be good without, at the moment you they will give you examples of images that they have taken and defects that you can see and, like the same photo before and after damage, you get stuff like that to qualitatively get the.

Trust in the system that it’s doing what you want. And I personally would still get more trust from having seen that from then from having a stamp from Tufnord. I, like I, I don’t trust this product yet. But that may change as time

goes. I agree with you, Rosemary and I can go back to the number the number of the certification.

Now, this shows you it’s early in life. It’s TN-P-V01-001. That means we’re pretty early.

Rosemary Barnes: Why couldn’t you remember that, Joel? It really sticks in your mind.

Allen Hall: Rolls right off the tongue.

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So sticking on the robot. Drone theme here Vestas is standing up Blade Robots as a standalone company. And we saw this, Joel, over in Copenhagen. Wind Europe. Wind Europe. Yeah, sure. It really cool product. What Blade Robot is, Phil, I don’t think you saw this up close, but it, the blade goes horizontal.

And they drop a robot on it, and then it repairs the leading edge. That’s essentially what the robot does.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, I’ve seen these before.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s an interesting piece of hardware. Obviously, it’s a Vestas outgrowth. Vestas makes turbines. They know there’s leading edge erosion problems. They know it needs to get fixed.

So they created their own little company called Blade Robots to go do this. They installed a couple of people at the head of the company. Michael Svensson, who was formerly of Ventus Wind Services, and a new chairman, Johnny Thompson, who was co CEO of MHI Vestas Offshore Wind, Joel. So that’s where the MHI Vestas Offshore Wind people went.

Joel Saxum: Blade Robots?

Allen Hall: Blade Robots has attracted some investment from Skagen. And Vestas Ventures holds a majority stakes still in that effort, but I think, again, the whole Deutsche Windtechnik, getting the certification, made me think about this Blade Robots piece because it’s in the same part of the world.

Are we going to start seeing some standards pushed out for leading edge repair and some of the other things that are happening in the robot world, because as Rosemary’s kind of pointed out, the consistency is the key. And do we have minimum performance guarantees or do we need to have some standards so that not every operator in the world has to go vet the system?

That’s where, a DMV or certification body would step into, right? That’s the whole point of them is to get rid of every operator having to repeat the same qualification tests. Is that where we’re headed? And is that something that Vestas would have a leg up on?

Joel Saxum: I would say maybe down the road, but that, if you’re talking robotics, blade repair, robotic LEP, these kind of things.

We’re way too early for it. It’s too immature. There’s really only three and a half companies playing in that space. One doing it full on, right? So it’s just, it’s so early and it’s such an immature technology set. Now, it’s going to, I fully believe, this is my opinion, I guess as I have an Aerones sweatshirt on, that’s what I’m saying, I fully believe that robotics are the future of wind turbine maintenance, and I think that there’s going to become more and more solutions that will be, right now we’re talking LEP, I think there will become, I talked to someone the other day about scarf repairs, and they’re like, there’s no way, they can’t do that, I’m like, man, it’s actually pretty simple to do with AI vision things, how deep you are, and that’s, I can code that’s not that hard so I think that we’re just talking blades I think there’s going to start to be more torque and tensioning tools that are roboticized and some other things.

But that’s just me so I think in the future, yes, we’ll run into these things where we’re going to have some standards that will need to come out. But at this point it’s so early.

Allen Hall: It’s definitely early. I’m not sure if robots are the future, but it appears that way at the moment.

Joel Saxum: Have you seen Terminator?

Allen Hall: I have. I believe that children are our future. Teach them well and let them lead the way.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, send them to robotic school so they can have a good job in the future.

Rosemary Barnes: You can get them the Elon Musk brain chip and help them become a robot of the future.

Allen Hall: I could use one of those right now.

Joel Saxum: The CEO of NVIDIA, though, just said that you don’t have to teach kids to code because AI is going to do it for them now.

Rosemary Barnes: I, can I add a personal anecdote for that? Because So I during my PhD days, I felt that knowing Python scripting in Python would be a useful addition to my repertoire.

I am like such a hack at coding. I can do it, but I suck. And so I’m like, I’m going to learn Python. And I bought a book, like a. And a week later I gave up on that and just hacked my way through with I think I used MATLAB code and I learned the, yeah, APDL for for ANSYS as well.

They’re proprietary scripting language. I did it mostly in that. Anyway, fast forward to recently I needed to, for my consulting work, I needed to get access to like literally thousands of zip files on this data repository of energy data. And extract them all and get each CSV file into a, an individual page in an Excel spreadsheet.

And I have started asking ChatGPT to help me with coding. And so I’m like, ChatGPT, could you help me write a write a macro for for Excel to do this and ChatGPT is you don’t want to do that. You should write a Python script. And I’m like, no ChatGPT. I know that Python is really hard and too hard for me.

So let’s do the, let’s do the macro. What would, you stupid robot. And and so we started writing the macro and it got, it was so impossible with all these permissions. Anything I gave up on my, all right, I asked my brother, who’s like a computer science guy. And he’s Oh, you should do a Python script.

It’ll be easier to start from scratch. ChatGPT had me up and running in half an hour. I had my Python script working and was troubleshooting debugging, everything. It worked. So yeah, ChatGPT is the future for coding, I would say. And I might’ve said a month or two ago, I might’ve said as if you can avoid learning to code.

But now I think, yeah, it’s not going to be about learning to code. It’s going to be about teaching kids to think like algorithmically so that they can oversee robots to code. And I know a lot of my, a lot of my friends that do code professionally say I’ve gotten so lazy. Like I’m never on GitHub anymore.

I’m just asking ChatGPT because I know it’ll know the answer. And it’s crazy how good it is at it actually.

Joel Saxum: Last summer, I heard someone say Python. I can barely put a night crawler on a fishing hook.

Allen Hall: I don’t have, where am I supposed to go with that? Like that. There’s no out

to that.

Rosemary Barnes: That can be just the end. Then the podcast just finishes silence after that. .

Joel Saxum: The interesting thing here in this blade robot though is scag and invested them. Because Skagen is a blade repair company, and they’re the first blade repair company that I’ve seen as an ISP that said, I’m going to invest in technology that’s going to replace our technicians.

Allen Hall: No, it won’t replace technicians, just make them more efficient.

Philip Totaro: Compliment the technicians.

Rosemary Barnes: It just amplifies it. It’s just a productivity enhancement. Fine. Like maybe, like with my work, I use ChatGPT a lot and I could have hired a full time grad to train to do all this stuff, except that I couldn’t have, because I don’t have the money to do that.

My choice wasn’t between a human person to do this or ChatGPT. My choice was between doing less work or doing more with ChatGPT. And actually my company will grow faster because of that and because of using it. And then I’ll be more likely to hire someone. And I just think.

Like maybe for some big corporations, it will at some point be a matter of, oh, we actually need less people to do this layoffs because we’ve got chat GPT and AI filling that role. But I think overall it’s really a productivity enhancement. That’s not so different to other productivity enhancements we’ve had in the past.

Allen Hall: You gotta write this date down because Rosemary and Elon Musk agree on something.

Rosemary Barnes: And we agree on a lot of things. If he’s talking about energy, I not 99 percent of the time, I agree with him on energy. And I think that he is like an energy system genius. But 99 percent of the time when he talks about things that aren’t energy, I do not care to listen to him at all. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Brain implants. Where does it, where’s the limit at Rosemary? Now what things are in and what things are out? Should we should discuss that. What’s in? What’s out?

Joel Saxum: Where do you draw the line?

Allen Hall: Where, yeah, where is that line? We need to know.

Rosemary Barnes: I bet that brain chips are inevitable, but it doesn’t mean that we have to feel comfortable about it.

Joel Saxum: I’ll volunteer for it.

Allen Hall: That’s an engineering person saying that.

Rosemary Barnes: I reckon, and I hope that it doesn’t happen in my lifetime because, and probably all of us, anybody that has gained, a certain advantage in their professional world by learning things fast, Once everyone’s got brain chips, then we’re no longer gonna have that advantage and we’re, what’s the difference gonna be between, we’ll be doing a, a lower lower enumerated job in the future if everybody is just as capable as anybody else at learning things.

Philip Totaro: I’ll tell you what, I’m waiting for the day when I can download my consciousness into AI. And then I will basically live forever.

Allen Hall: No one wants my consciousness.

Joel Saxum: As long as my chip doesn’t run on Power BI, I’m alright. I don’t need the graphs churning on Power BI in there. Give me something else.

Allen Hall: Rosemary has the question of the week. So rosemary, go ahead.

Rosemary Barnes: On my Engineering with Rosie Patreon. We have a discord server and somebody has written in a question in regards to lightning and wind turbines, would a single blade turbine be superior in that it can be stopped in a six o’clock position.

So blade hanging down the bottom. Or a turbine with two blades stopped at three and nine o’clock when high electrical potential is detected. So I’m guessing that his idea is that, instead of having a blade right up making the wind turbine even taller, you put the blades in lower positions and avoid being so high and avoid getting struck by lightning.

So I thought that was the perfect question for you guys being the lightning experts that you are, lightning and wind energy experts. What do you think? Is this an idea?

Allen Hall: Oh, it’s an idea, but there’s a better idea, which is just to keep the turbine rotating and making money. That’s the best idea. And the way we do that is to make the LPS system a lot better than it is right now.

So there’s been a lot of effort for all around the world to stop turbines. That quite a bit where if there’s a thunderstorm around, they believe they’re putting in the. Putting the blades as low as they can go is the right solution. But it doesn’t really change the fact that they’re going to get struck by lightning.

It really doesn’t move the needle much. So yeah, you probably could change it a little bit. It looks like the data from rotating versus non rotating is just a couple of percentage points. It’s not like 30%, 40 percent less. The real magic here is let’s just make an LPS system that works. Now, Rosemary, you were sitting at the lightning desk at a blade manufacturer.

Is it possible? It seems like to us, this is us, Weather Guard saying we, we’ve been able to do the magic. So we’ve stopped pretty much lightning damage in every blade we’ve been on. The OEMs have not. Why?

Rosemary Barnes: I can’t answer that. I will say though, that I would, it, lightning protection is such a nightmare , when you’re developing any other part of a blade, and you have to worry about.

Doing what the lightning people tell you to do, and it’s not very much of a discussion, like nearly every other requirement of a blade, it’s a bit of a two way discussion, if I needed to when I’m, putting my de icing system in a blade, if I needed to drill a hole somewhere through some structural component.

I’d go talk with, the chief engineer of structural design and he’d say, Oh, it’s that’s a really bad place to put it. If you need a hole can you put it, off to the side away from the lane, main laminate, or can make two holes of this smaller diameter instead of that one, like it’s a.

He’ll tell you what are the reasons why he’s saying we can’t do that and help you find a solution. Whereas with lightning, it was much more, Oh, we actually don’t a hundred percent know why. We just know that, when this, we’ve had a design that looks like that in the past, it was really bad.

So we never do that again, but we’re not a hundred percent sure why. And then. Another complicating factor is that the simulations are so freaking expensive. You don’t run a whole bunch of computational simulations for lightning. You try to run one and, for a really complex design, you might plan on two and hope that you don’t have to do three or more, but it’s not like you’re trying something, tweaking it, trying something, tweaking it like you can with structural design with a finite element model, you can run, so many different.

Goes of it, they’re also not super accurate, as you’re probably aware, just because you have a simulation that shows that lightning damage isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t mean that you’re not going to see it.

Joel Saxum: I can see, so the user’s question I completely understand the concept, right?

Let’s just try to keep those tips up from being high. Let’s keep them low. I get that. However, at the end of the day, even if you have three and nine o’clock, you’re still the highest thing out there. It’s, you’re still going to get hit. That’s gonna happen no matter what. And if you look at the IEC standard, how they test wind turbine LPS systems.

It’s a test where you have you’re to the floor as, and the floor becomes the plane of the cloud. So yeah, you test it, you test at 90 degrees to the floor, 60 degrees to the floor, 30. 30 and 10 and it is and when you get down to that 10 degree spot It’s really hard to get LPS attachments properly how you want them. And so if you went down to a zero flat plane That whole yeah, it’s gonna be really actually would probably to be honest with You’d probably be worse off if you had a three o’clock nine o’clock twin blade or wrong lightning attachments if it was stopped in a storm.

Allen Hall: You’d be better off pointing it straight up in the air and have an LPS system that works.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Wow.

Allen Hall: But that’s a good question from Patreon. And everybody needs to reach out on, get to Rosemary’s discord server. I didn’t, Rosemary, I didn’t even realize you had a discord server. I don’t, I’m not a part of the discord server. I feel like I’m an outie, not an innie.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s because you’re not a Patreon. You have to join us for Patreons only. Patreons are that support the Engineering with Rosie YouTube channel and help support this in-depth engineering analysis.

Allen Hall: How would I do that? How would I join the Rosemary Patreon group?

Joel Saxum: I’m already in the Rosemary fan club.

Rosemary Barnes: You’re not in the official fan club. This is the fan club.

Allen Hall: Nor will you be.

Rosemary Barnes: www.patreon.com/engineeringwithrosie, but it is pretty fun. There’s about 200 of us now in the group and yeah, so there’s, yeah, there’s quite often there’s some fun, fun discussion on the discord and on Patreon and yeah, you get early access to videos and it’s really helpful for me because, such a great group of people that really have in depth knowledge about a lot of topics, so I’m often getting, amazing feedback from that group.

So yeah, feel free to join.

Joel Saxum: All right. Our Wind Farm of the Week this week is Locket Wind. It’s located in Wilbarger County, Texas. So the project generates 184 megawatts of onshore wind power, which is enough electricity to power more than 56, 000 homes. It became commercial in July 2019. So this is an Orsted project.

But Orsted’s basically vehicle for developing in the States Lincoln Clean Energy is who developed it. There’s 75 GE 2. 5 machines out here. What I want to highlight this week on this one is something we don’t normally dive into. Floating around the internet, I did find one of their application to the Vernon County Independent School Board while they were in the process of building this wind farm.

In Texas, people that don’t know this, the school boards actually have a lot of power. At the municipal level, they can influence county boards and decisions that happens around there because of a lot of the money that comes in. But there’s a, it’s a hundred and some odd page document, but I pulled a couple of cool things out of it.

So in its applicant, I’m going to read from it. So in its application, the applicant has, and so the applicant, they’re talking about Orsted, they committed to six new qualifying jobs, and they set the minimum salary for them, and that minimum salary Is on section one E is pays at least a hundred and ten percent of the county average weekly wage for manufacturing jobs in the county where it’s located.

So that’s pretty cool. Wind farm comes into town and they’re legally guaranteeing that they’re going to pay more on that wind farm than the average wage in the town. They also have things in here for how many hours of work that the person won’t be transferred from area to area, that they will be working and living in that county.

Or not necessarily living, but they’ll be working in that county. Not created to replace previous employees. It even goes as far as stipulating that they will have health care benefits and all kinds of stuff. Another one that they put in here is that they will, the revenue gains will be realized by the school district in support of this finding the some independent experts there.

Where they’re going to initially add 180 million to the tax base in the county for that one wind farm. When Orsted built this thing, 200 construction workers were anticipated at the peak of construction. And then they had a minimum of, they have a minimum of 6 permanent jobs on this site. Some cool documentation, you can find it if you want to Google it, but shows the value that wind farms Bring to the local communities.

So Locket wind from Orsted in North Texas. You are a wind farm of the week.

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

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