Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Proactive Inspections – How CICNDT Is Changing Blade Inspections

Wind turbine operators are entering a critical new era: longer turbine lifespans, aging assets, and tighter repowering timelines driven by policy shifts like the Inflation Reduction Act. In this evolving landscape, blade reliability is paramount — and Jeremy Heinks, founder of CICNDT, is on a mission to change how the industry approaches it.

In a recent episode of the Uptime podcast, Heinks spoke candidly about the current gaps in non-destructive testing (NDT) in the wind sector and how CICNDT is addressing them.

What Operators Are Finding – and Missing

Operators who have used CICNDT’s services are starting to understand the power of pre-installation blade inspections. One customer who brought in CICNDT for a sample check of brand-new blades discovered unexpected problems: “The sample showed that they have an issue with these brand-new blades,” he said.

Unfortunately, with the push to deploy stored or newly manufactured blades more than ever, quality issues remain a concern. Heinks and the CICNDT team have noticed an uptick in problems in recent months.

“The quality is definitely down,” he said.

NDT at this stage is not just convenient, it can catch issues before they turn into costly downtime.

When blade inspections show damage that occurred in the factory due to manufacturing issues, or in transport, it’s bad news, but good timing. The best time to fix the blade (and address warranty issues) is prior to installation.

“It is much easier for us to get the technology and the personnel to a blade that’s on the ground, ” Heinks said. “It’s cheaper, it’s quicker… It always comes down to access.”

Legacy Blades, Mystery History

The concern about hidden problems extends to stored blades, many of which have unknown histories. In one case, blades had been stored in a location that had flooded years prior.

“We get out there, we’re scanning laminates… and it just [gave] terrible signal,” Heinks said. Only after researching the site’s history did they learn about the submersion event. “Those are things you’ve got to look at, too.”

Even weather events like high winds can compromise blades on the ground: “They’ll start fluttering in ways they’re not designed to,” Heinks said. “NDT is the only way you’re going to figure out if something is really wrong with them.”

A Modern Toolbox for Deep Inspection

CICNDT’s new lab in Ogden, Utah is outfitted with high-end inspection capabilities rarely seen in the wind industry, yet those tools are commonly used in aviation and defense. The company’s mission is to deliver focused, practical, robust Non-destructive Testing Solutions that address the needs of clients in Aerospace, including the Space Industry, and Renewable Energy.

“We’ve got… robotic CT, laser ultrasound, thermography,” he said, explaining that those technologies allow 3D inspection of components without destruction. “We can scan it and get a 3D image… without having to (enlarge or) damage the defect,” Heinks said.

The approach gives operators unprecedented clarity about issues like bonding flaws, root defects, or main spar cracks, especially in carbon fiber designs.

Blade Bolts: A Hidden Failure Point

Cracked blade bolts is another emerging issue that Heinks noted, and it’s another that CICNDT is well-equipped to address.

“We can definitely do a UT (ultrasonic) blade inspection… Whether it’s installed or not installed on the bolts,” Heinks said. He also mentioned development of a bolt monitoring system using sensors to track fatigue over time.

Critically, this type of proactive check could be performed quickly onsite.

Practical Inspection Strategies, Cost-effective Maintenance

One recurring theme in the interview was the need for practical expertise, and not just using technology for its own sake. “A lot of really cool robotics [are] coming out… [but] they don’t have the experience needed… and therefore, they can miss the mark,” Heinks said.

The goal should be “a practical approach to the inspection with automation.”

CICNDT also offers to train operators to perform “operator-level inspections” so issues can be flagged quickly before calling in a Level II or III technician.

Future-Proofing Wind Assets

With the U.S. wind fleet aging and uncertain repowering timelines, proactive inspections are more important than ever.

“We have a throwaway attitude when it comes to blades,” Heinks said, “but inspection and preventive maintenance is the way to go.”

He pointed to the example of wind farms in Australia and on remote islands, where turbines are expected to run for 30 years or more.

The key to longevity, according to Heinks? It’s plain common sense.

“Budget for more inspection on these things that we know will go bad over time.”

Heinks added that after repairs are made is also an important, and often-overlooked, line-item.

“Post inspection on repairs is always a good idea… It’s commonplace in aviation.”

The Bottom Line: NDT = More Uptime

Wind turbine operations managers should rethink inspection practices before damage becomes downtime. With tools like robotic CT, laser ultrasound, and ultrasonic bolt testing, CICNDT brings aviation-grade diagnostics to wind, and offers a path to asset longevity.

“Sometimes (operators) have had turbines offline for weeks, if not months, because they have an issue they don’t know they can do anything about,” Heinks said. NDT can ‘see’ the problem so a fix can be made – and the equipment can get back in service.

More Uptime is always the goal!

To reach CICNDT:

Call (801) 436-6512 or email info@cicndt.com

Connect on LinkedIn

Web: https://www.cicndt.com/

Listen to the interview Apple Podcasts or on Spotify

https://weatherguardwind.com/inspections-cicndt/

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Motordoc Reveals the True Story of Spain’s Power Crisis

Howard Penrose, President of Motordoc LLC, returns to discuss the complexities of modern electrical grids. The conversation covers the inaccuracies surrounding the Iberian Peninsula blackout, the intricate functions of voltage and frequency control, and systemic issues in grid management. Penrose explains how renewable energy sources like wind and solar, alongside energy storage, play crucial roles in stabilizing the grid.

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!

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

Howard, welcome back to the show. How are you doing? It’s been a bit, a lot has happened since we last spoke. I, I wanna speak about the Iberian Peninsula problem and the blackout that happened in April. Because there’s been a number of inaccuracies about that situation, and you’re actively involved in the groups that look into these situations and try to understand what the root cause was.

That the, the, the Iberian situation is a little complicated. The CNN knowledge, the Fox News knowledge is that solar was the cause of a problem. Yeah, that is far from the truth. You wanna explain kind of [00:01:00] what this, how it progressed over time? It started around noontime Spain and they had a couple of wobbles there.

You want to kick it off?

Howard Penrose: Yeah. First, first my comment is, I like how journalists become experts in, in literally everything, um, from 30 seconds to 30 seconds, right. Basically. The problem had been going on for a little while and, and the grided there had been operating much like it had been for a little while.

And, uh, you know, for years actually, uh, even with the application of alternative energy, we’ll, we’ll call it alternative energy for this, um, you know, so that we don’t bring in that political end of calling it one thing or the other. Alternative energy is what we called it in the 1990s. So, um, in any case.

Uh, they had a number of issues with voltage control, meaning large loads would suddenly drop off and then the voltage would float up [00:02:00] and then, uh, and then they would have to do something to bring it under control. They’re at 50 hertz, so their voltage is 400 kv. That’s their primary grid voltage. They have an alarm trip voltage, meaning an emergency trip voltage, where they strip the line at 435 kv.

So, um, what happened now, the final event happened in 27 seconds, but leading up to that, they had an event where they had voltage float up. And they were bringing that under control. And then down in the southern part of Spain, and we don’t have anything set up like this here in the states, luckily they had all, uh, a whole group of, um, solar uh, plants as well as a gas turbine plant feeding a single distribution transformer.

And the, uh, auto taps on that failed on the low voltage side on step up. So it basically dropped out. So, uh, something like, I, I’m trying to remember off the top of my, my head, [00:03:00] but it was either 300 or 800 megawatts just offline now. It was a lightly loaded day in Spain ’cause it was a beautiful day outside.

Uh, so that makes matters worse. It makes it unstable and really easy for voltage to flow up where people start to think that that, uh, alternative energy was a fault was because we were at 40%. Of the power supply was solar as the morning progressed, so it had climbed up to about that there was a good percentage of wind.

Um, but they had a nuclear power power plant online and several others providing synchronous protection for any type of inertia. They lost one of those plants. The voltage floated up, uh, to um, about 415 to 420 kv. Yeah. Then there was a whole bunch of control issues. So the operators started switching lines.

There was a connection to France. They, they started seeing some oscillations because they were [00:04:00] oscillating against, uh, Europe. And, um, so they switched lines and that caused the voltage to float up again. And they had no, no, none of the equipment. Whether it was solar, wind, or even the synchronous power was set to do, uh, var control, meaning set to do voltage control to bring the voltage back down.

It was all set up for frequency control, meaning that they wanted to control against it, not the, not the alternative energy. Those were set so that they did a straight, what’s called power factor, so they were set to just put out. Exactly what they were supposed to put out. They were not there, they were not set to correct anything, even though they could have been.

And, um, so, uh, at, at about 420, uh, thousand volts, other plants started tripping offline. And as it went up further, even the nuclear plant tripped offline. And then France dropped [00:05:00] offline at about the same time, all across the 27 second period.

Allen Hall: Right. Okay. So this is a unique problem and I think the Iberian Peninsula really raises this issue on a number of levels for the general consumer out in the world.

The grid is actually pretty complicated, but there’s really two things you really want to control there. Voltage, you have to control frequency, you have to control. If you control those two. Pretty much everything else will work the way it’s intended. If either one of those gets outta whack, there’s safety protocols that go into place to protect the equipment, but there’s also other piece of equipment that are trying to bring it into regulation.

When the regulation doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, yes, you can get the voltage outta whack. You can get the frequency to go outta spec, and then clunk, clunk, clunk. Everything starts to disconnect. Like what happened in Spain. My first question about that is it’s a complicated system and there’s a lot of pieces [00:06:00] connected to it.

Who is checking in the US or in Europe or anywhere else who’s checking that? Those control settings are in the right place. They were actually set per the requirements. Spain was talking about in some of their publications that there, the settings weren’t set right. They were, we were, they were not properly set per code.

Who’s checking that?

Howard Penrose: So, so grid code here is set by FIR and nerc. And it sounds like a curse word, a set of curse words, but FERC is the federal side. NERC is actually private. Um, so they set, they set the rules for safety, for power, gener, you, you name it. So, um, and they set the code. Now as an operator, you’re supposed to be, you know, the power generation side.

They still even here, have to do things to meet code. Okay. Is there anybody checking it? No. Uh, the, it’s a site responsibility. Each area, um, goes out and they [00:07:00] forecast expectations. Um, and then, and then of course, within that expectation, you have a lot of companies and cities municipal that will all bid on how much energy they’re gonna consume, right?

Uh, you know, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So, so everybody agrees to it. And then, and then, um, the operators have to determine the reliability. And the availability of energy based upon certain conditions within that grit. Like what, what plants are gonna be, uh, in maintenance and everything else. And, and that’s important because the actual generation companies can’t talk to each other.

They’re not allowed. Okay. Otherwise, it could be considered collusion. So our own laws fight against us.

Allen Hall: The Iberian situation leads into some discussions. What happens in America, because we’re in America and there have been a number of brownouts blackouts, uh, ERCOT has have a couple of situations where they’ve had sort of regional [00:08:00] disconnects of, or larger scale, like a cascading.

Effect, uh, due to, um, control systems that are not happy with one another. So one system knocks out another and then it, everybody goes into safe mode and there’s just this sort of cascading, disconnected that happens. Those events are a little scary to me, just with a, it feels like we’re not talking to one another, and what you’re saying is we’re intentionally not talking to one another because we can’t.

It talk one power producer to another power producer.

Howard Penrose: That’s what the operator’s for. So the, the grid operator is there to take all that information in. Most of it’s run via software. What’s been interesting is, say Ercot, because of the event that happened in 2021. What, uh, happened was everybody went back and looked at it and said, how can we fix it?

It turns out that alternative energy was the way to stiffen the power system. So, um, they’ve now made adjustments to how the, [00:09:00] to, to take more advantage of the capabilities of wind and solar that they didn’t have before, as well as all the new storage systems, uh, including, you know, course battery, which is the, the big buzzword now.

Right? Bess? Um. So battery storage in order to stiffen up the system. A year ago, there was a 16% possibility of a blackout throughout Oliver Ercot. This year it was 1%, even though we have a higher demand this year, and it had nothing to do with traditional systems that had to do with wind, solar, and energy storage, big discussion data centers, right?

As a matter of fact. We already decided at this meeting, we’re not gonna talk about wind and wind storage, wind, uh, solar and energy storage. Next year, PPES, now it’s gonna be power Engineering Society, by the way, the ones who actually do that stuff, right? Uh, it’s gonna be all about data centers because a data center is the most [00:10:00] dangerous thing on the grid.

So remember I mentioned, uh, you know, but somewhere between 300 and 800 megawatts dropped offline and it caused an entire country to lose power. You have to remember, these things are 500 megawatt to 1.5 gigawatts, which is by the way, more than a DeLorean and a data center doesn’t, if it trips, it doesn’t just gradually come down.

It means you lose 500 to 1.5. Um, yep. Like that. Gone.

Allen Hall: Well, I, I think as a, most people are casual users of the electricity grid. They don’t realize how much is planning is done ahead of time. So there are 24 hour forecast and actually year long forecast. You’re looking a year ahead in some cases of what the energy requirements are going to be.

The, the daily forecast for tomorrow are, are the big ones. So you need to know how many generators to have ready and who’s actually gonna be there and they gotta commit, and all these different things have to happen. [00:11:00] That is a really critical feature of the grid. You would think that most, I think most people would assume that there’s just a bunch of coal fire generation.

There’s a number of, uh, gas plants that are up and running. They’re always spending 24 hours a day, and then maybe a little bit of wind, a little bit of solars thrown in there. But for the vast majority of it, that is not the case at all. Like, it’s complicated and, and the, as you have mentioned. It’s planned.

It’s, it’s, it’s planned to some crazy detail and putting something on the, on the system that is megawatt size, okay? Not so bad. Gigawatt size is a problem. Is a problem ’cause that system is not designed to handle that. And yet we’re, we’re going into this in the next year or two or in kind of now honestly, where we’re putting, gonna put these big data center loads on this old system, which is looking 24 hours ahead.

But as you pointed out, data centers can be on, data centers can be off the grid. Can’t [00:12:00] manage that unless there’s something else that can react as fast as the data center does though, there’s only two things that I, well, three. Solar, wind and battery are the only things that can react at that electronic speed of which a AI data center is operating at.

Howard Penrose: Yep. They have electronic controls.

Allen Hall: Right. A, a gas fire turbine can’t do that.

Howard Penrose: Yeah. You have to counter the electronics with electronics and we actually need to have enough of it to counter what’ll happen, you know, like data centers are supposed to be able to island. Meaning island means they get cut off from the grid and they can run on their own.

And, and usually that means they have generation behind the meter, which for those who are watching, you don’t know what that means. That means that you know you have a meter at, say your house, right? So you, that’s what, that’s what the utility looks at to decide how much you’re gonna pay. If you have a generator at your house that is behind that meter, you pay for the fuel for that.

And [00:13:00] if you’re really lucky, you’ve negotiated something so you can put power back through your meter and reduce the amount of power you pay. Right. So the, that meter is the deciding point. It’s a point of common connection between, you know, the grid or that, in this case we’re talking about the local distribution part of the grid versus the grid, which is all those gigantic power lines that are going everywhere that can get as high as.

I think we’re at 750 kilovolts now, uh, for some of them. And we’re talking about going to over a million to reduce the copper, the amount of copper needed, so, uh, or whatever material we’re gonna use at that voltage.

Allen Hall: So the way that ai, Dana setters are, uh, adding to the system in terms of load, the only way to counter that from a gas turbine standpoint or a coal standpoint, or even a nuclear standpoint for that matter, is you have to have.

These systems running 24 7 [00:14:00] just in case Elon decides to turn on the switch, you would have to be burning gas pretty much all the time. ’cause to get that rotating mass in those gas turbines to be able to do that, that is crazy expensive to do. That’s why we deregulated the 1990s. Exactly. So the, the issue gets down to, if we’re gonna have grid stability, you actually need.

Wind, solar and batteries to respond to those instantaneous changes that occur on a system that’s has gigawatt loads plugged into it randomly. And, and second. By the time, if you wanted to make a, a gas turbine world, like it sounds like the administration does at the minute. Those gas tournaments are burning fuel all the time.

Expensive fuel all the time. Your electricity rates to do that. If you have an AI dentist sitter in your area, you’re gonna be paying through the nose to keep that thing running just because, just so that Elon or [00:15:00] Mark Zuckerberg can do their thing. Actually,

Howard Penrose: it’s worse than that if you have a data center in your operating area.

Okay. Which means a lot of states, right? Water and wastewater for the entire nation takes up less than 2% of the energy consumption. Electrical energy consumption, okay? Electric power, just to give you an idea. So flushing your toilet, drinking your water, getting your water bottle, you know, that kind of thing.

All of that stuff, all of that energy is 2%. We are right now at over 8%. For, for data centers by 2030, we’re supposed to be at 15%. By 2040, we’re supposed to be at 25% of all electricity produced. The utilities, all of the grid scale and everything else, the fastest they’ve ever had to build anything other than some of the initial stuff is 2% a year, two to 5% a year.

Okay. Is what they’re used to adding to the grid. Adding power generation. In order to meet the demand, [00:16:00] they have to double present conditions every other year. That’s 50 to a hundred percent growth per year, which nobody globally has ever done. We don’t have the materials, we don’t have the equipment, we don’t have the people, so we don’t have the skillset anymore.

What does an

Allen Hall: efficient grid look like going forward? Howard? And with the constraints. With the constraints, that there’s gonna be limitations on the growth of transmission with the constraint that the current administration is, I’ll say anti wind, anti-solar, or they’re not just level playing field, they’re like actively trying to damage it.

What does the grid look like then?

Howard Penrose: That’s the big challenge. Nobody’s quite aware how we’re going to do it. Um. That’s, that’s all of the conversation now. What does it look like? And the direction [00:17:00] has been changed from a political standpoint so much. It’s like, it’s like going to a company and saying, we’re going to change the direction of the company to 180 degrees.

We’re, we’re no longer gonna build cars anymore. We’re now gonna build, um, stuffed animals.

Allen Hall: I, I think in the electrical, uh, power industry forever. Uh, and I’ve been around a lot of engineers that were involved in the early phases of that, and I used to work next to one of the places where GE built Transformers forever.

So there’s every day around power people. It was a scientific, technical effort driven to provide society a better living. That’s where. All the focus was on the engineering and the technical community and the scientific community. That’s where they were going. They, they made money at it. Yes, they did. If they produce a good product, they would make money at it.

But if you look at [00:18:00] the rigor in which the engineering was produced, it’s a very high standard, very high standard IEE articles written in the 1920s and thirties, even in the seventies and the eighties, and through the nineties, I’d say pretty much. Solid stuff. Not a lot of crazy stuff, not a lot of politics.

Hard. You just wouldn’t see it. You can, I’ve read thousands of papers in my lifetime you wouldn’t see it. I have seen a more recent shift because politics is electrical distribution at the minute. It’s somehow, it, it’s morphed into this other thing, which is, uh, I would say more like oil and gas was in the 1960s and seventies and, and earlier too, where it was a lot of politicians and a lot of money changing hands.

The electrical generation world was not, never really in that, at that level. And it feels like we’re being, uh, uh, uh, we’re taking on, uh, methods and policies and behaviors of other industries, and that’s not gonna be healthy for [00:19:00] that electricity grid.

Howard Penrose: No, no. I, I, the, the stuff that has to happen is big, scary, long-term stuff.

Um, and, and it’s bl and, and solutions are being developed. And, and don’t get me wrong, not everything is, is horribly bad when, when they do what they’re doing, uh, we’ve seen some great innovations coming out, but they’re not going anywhere because as soon as they come out, we change direction. You know, we we’re trying to do something that takes decades based upon the political wins, which are every other week.

You know, think, think about a topic that happened two weeks ago and are they talking about it now? No. And, and it’s just like the power generation stuff. Uh, as soon as they need a distraction again, then you’ll hear something from either side, you know, oh, we need to get rid of this. We need to add, you know, we need to, you know, so the war is, is, you know, politicians and people [00:20:00]without the background to make these decisions when politics decides to get involved.

In infrastructure to the, to, to the micromanaging detail. That’s the problem is they’re micromanaging and, uh, I, I blame 2020 for that. I really do. ’cause uh, prior to 2020 I’ve been calling on the hill ’cause I was the region for energy rep. So it’s a 10 Midwestern states in 1993 through 1995, I, I, I was part of the discussion related to deregulation.

I was not a fan of it for electrical power because we had nowhere to store anything. So it was like we need to, we need time to deal with how it’s going to occur because a large power generation we have is not designed to do what we’re about to make it do, which is turn off, turn off, vary and load. Used to have a big generator, and then you had what was called spinning reserve.

And the spinning reserve [00:21:00] was there so that when you needed sudden power or you needed to absorb something, all of the bumps and grinds that we’re trying to deal with now was sitting there and you were, you were just burning through fuel just to keep the thing turning. It wasn’t actually doing anything other than turning and, um, you know, we survived it.

But it ended up with what we warned about in 1994 for IEE, which was the. Blackout in the northeast in 2003, that was directly related. It was predicted that that would happen because we couldn’t get the relays and controls in place to, to deal with it. So, um, now we’re heading down the path and it’s a much more serious issue.

The, the demand growth is growing extremely fast. Um, we were trying to hold back demand in the 1990s during all of this through the Energy Policy Act in 92 and dealing with, um, demand side management [00:22:00] was the big word. Remember we were trying to do more energy efficiency, reduce demand so that we could use the power we had.

Now we’re saying you don’t wanna do the exact opposite. Use more and more power, um, use it efficiently, but use more and more of it. And, and that’s, that’s the big challenge.

Allen Hall: Howard, it’s been a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. I really enjoy these discussions about the grid, uh, and about keeping, uh, renewables up and running and all the things that motor dock and you are up to.

And, uh, if you haven’t followed Howard’s LinkedIn page, you need to do that. Howard Penrose. Also Howard, how do they get ahold of Motor Doc? How do they get a you Via the web?

Howard Penrose: Um, motor doc.com. That’s M-O-T-O-R-D-O c.com. Uh, or LinkedIn. Uh, you know, we, we watch both. Um, I, we’ve added a lot of people recently, so, um, [00:23:00] uh, so yeah, it’s easier to get ahold of myself or my people now.

So, um, that’s, that’s basically it. That’s probably the easiest way to do it.

Allen Hall: And if you want to see Howard Rant on YouTube, how do you see that? Where, how do, how do you find you on YouTube?

Howard Penrose: Oh, just look up Motor Doc on YouTube. Um, uh, you’ll see something having to do with Sasquatch, I’m sure. So, but, uh, yeah, yeah.

I, I, I don’t go by my own name on, on the internet. I go by, uh, usually motor dock. Which is a nickname I got in the Navy, by the way. It’s from a, from the, the captain of an aircraft carrier when I ran his motor repair shop. So, um, yeah, it’s, uh, it’s been a lot of fun again.

Allen Hall: Yes. And your, your video series, uh, caffeine and Chaos, there’s a ca, chaos and caffeine are brilliant.

Howard Penrose: The chaos and caffeine end. Yes. You’re going to hear about. The coffee I’m drinking. ’cause we, I actually have people now set. [00:24:00] I just got somebody ship me a set of coffee up from Guatemala. So that’s what we’ll be doing tomorrow. Um, and uh, you know, we, we, you know, I started with the veteran coffee and stuff like that, so of course.

But, um. So we’ll talk about that for, and then I’ll spend, I try to keep it down to 10 minutes, but knowing me, I like to talk. So sometimes I’ll hit 30 minutes, but I try to keep it at a conversational level on stuff that’s going on. So the, the next one I’ll do will probably be the sixth one, and that’s gonna be me kind of ranting about, um, you know, what we were just talking about.

I did do one on the Iberian Peninsula. It’s a little more. Um, you know, general public level stuff. So, um, you know, the, that it wasn’t this and here’s how and here’s why, and here’s what the timeline looks like, type thing. Uh, which I did, I think along with, um, um, [00:25:00] aerial resupply coffee. Which was, uh, was good stuff.

Don’t mean to sell him on here, but he, he’s a lot of fun to follow on, on, uh, on LinkedIn as well. Well, thanks Howard so

Allen Hall: much. We enjoy

Howard Penrose: having you and we will talk to you soon. Absolutely. Thank you very much.

https://weatherguardwind.com/motordoc-spain-power/

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Bonus Content: Renewables Opposition & TPI’s Financial Outlook

Allen, Phil, and Rosemary continue the discussion from Tuesday’s episode, diving into renewables opposition and TPI’s financial situation.

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!

Welcome to Uptime, spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: So what we’re talking to energy, everything is difficult, so we wind and solar can be difficult to make money in. But some of the discussion about moving back to coal or, or moving back to older sources of electricity generation, their money losers too.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, probably even more efficient money losers. And on a larger scale, you know, at least wind and solar, you could lose, lose money a little bit at a time and you don’t lose money on the operation.

Um, you know, it’s, it’s all in the, the, the capital cost. Whereas coal can lose money ev every single, every single day that the plane operates. So I [00:01:00]guess that that’s, uh, yeah, that’s true. It’s not as, not as bad as that.

Allen Hall: So is there a industry fix or is there a hope for the future? Right now, I don’t see it.

Rosemary Barnes: I was reading this book for a little while and I stopped reading ’cause I, um, it had some good ideas, but it wasn’t like totally rigorous in its, um, exploration of all the ideas. I think it’s called The Price is Wrong, or something like that. And it’s about how like, it’s not possible to have a renewables industry that isn’t subsidized by the government.

And, um, there’s some, I I, I think that there’s some truth to that, but I would replace. That there’s, it’s impossible to have a renewables industry if that’s not subsidized. Rather say it’s impossible to have an electricity system that’s not subsidized in some way by the government. Um, and yeah, I mean, just rec recognize that and maybe we don’t need to to fight that, but, um, it, it is always turns like so tribal that everyone’s arguing over who’s got the more subsidies or who’s.

More dependent on subsidies. Um, yeah, it’d be easier [00:02:00] if we could all, you know, get on the same page about climate change and just acknowledge what we needed to do. But, you know, if, if wind and solar power never came along and we didn’t care about climate change, then we’d still be subsidizing, uh, yeah, like coal and, and gas and, uh, all the transmission and, uh, I don’t know, infrastructure.

You need to transport those fossil fuels around. Like, you know, we’d, we’d still be subsidizing because people still need electricity and still get upset if it’s, um, you know. So expensive that you are stuck, you know, choosing whether you want to eat this week or heat your home this week. So,

Allen Hall: well, is it because electricity was late to the game?

The railroads sort of blew through the United States and everywhere else in the world because it was easy.

It missed Australia, but yeah, would would’ve been nice.

Allen Hall: But here, here in America, the railroads pretty much owned most of America very quickly. Uh, and got it done before there was any real. Feedback like they would be today, as soon as you wanna put a transmission tower in somebody’s farm field.[00:03:00]

Huge, huge uproar. States are involved, senators are involved. The government’s all over it. There’s committee meetings. Everything gets really slowed down versus 1860s. It just happened.

Rosemary Barnes: But I think the difference as well, like it’s not like transmission didn’t have these obstacles the first time around, right?

When cities or towns were getting electricity for the first time because there were transmission lines going to them, then it was more obvious what the need was. Whereas now people, they’re like, I already have electricity. And um, you know, they don’t, they don’t wanna be disturbed further when the. Yeah, the case isn’t as obvious to them for what the benefit will be to them.

Allen Hall: Is it such that the general public doesn’t realize that their survival depends upon electricity? On some measure, we were just driving and Claire and I, our producer, were just driving through a certain part of the Midwest and we were noticing there were no houses, and then it became obvious, well, there’s [00:04:00] no power.

To this part of the country. There are no transmission lines. There are roads, but there are no transmission lines until you get to a railroad track. And then there are power lines running alongside the railroad tracks, so the railroad and electricity go together. And whenever those two sort of meet, there is a little town, but outside of that zero, that happens on a bigger scale, if you don’t have electricity to power your industry, your cities, your communities.

You’re really in a world of hurt competing against the rest of the world. When do we realize that? Isn’t that why China is going so fast, so hard to electrify? Because it brings civilization, advanced civilization? India’s trying to do the same thing. It seems like in some aspects we just go, well, I don’t need it.

You do need it. Your kids need it, your grandkids need it.

Rosemary Barnes: But there’s a different, um, argument you’re trying to make because, I mean, I [00:05:00] doubt that there’s many towns in the US that aren’t connected to the electricity grid. There’s at least there’s some, there’s, there’s quite a few in Australia, but, um, you know, with microgrids and, and stuff like that.

So maybe that’s a, a bit of a special case. Um, but what you’re talking about in most. Yeah. Places like Australia and the US you’re not talking about getting electricity to places for the first time, which is what they are doing in, um, in China and in India when they’re rolling out, um, new renewables infrastructure, um, you know, like big transmission lines to connect up.

Good. Uh, yeah. Both those countries have, um, high voltage DC. Uh, long, long connections that are, yeah, electrifying parts of the country that haven’t, um, been connected to the grid before. So they’re more, the, the people there are gonna be more like people were a hundred years ago when they were getting connected for the first time in America, or, um, Australia or, or wherever.

Um, their, you know, [00:06:00] the, the benefit to them is obvious. I do think that it’s like with most new technologies where you gotta find the niches where people, like, it’s a, it’s a real solution for them. That’s the first place to roll it out. And people who aren’t really suffering don’t see as much need to change until the technology gets like, so much better.

Allen Hall: Who are the proponents, the loud vocal proponents to bring more electricity to New York City or to Los Angeles or to Houston? I don’t hear them though those voices aren’t nearly as loud as the voices that are saying, we don’t need wind, we don’t need solar. We’re totally fine the way that we are. What am there?

There is a, a very quiet opposition or proponents of electricity, I would say, uh, versus the opposition, which are very vocal about. We don’t need wind and solar. I think they totally do. I don’t understand where they’re even coming from in terms of big picture

Rosemary Barnes: in the big [00:07:00] cities, you kind of maybe hit from two ends because there’s this one kind of, um, one group of people who are climate concerned.

Um, and so they do want renewable energy. However, they think that the solution is that you just need to use less electricity. And so, uh, I think there’s like a really large proportion of city populations of people who. Who are cared about climate change that think that you can solve it by, um, consuming less.

All the things that are left over are, you know, like little incremental things that don’t add up to anything. Like what we’re gonna need to have everyone move to electric vehicles and have everyone move off the gas network and onto heat pumps for heating. Um, you know, there’s so many huge chunks of load that need to be added in order to.

Decarbonize and I don’t think that, I think that, yeah, like the half of the general population, like non-expert population, that should be on the side of the energy transition. I don’t think they realize that. We’ve been really, really conditioned to believe [00:08:00] that if it’s not, you know, if it’s not hurting, it’s not working.

So like it’s like you have to. You have to suffer as a condition for a solution to be plausible. So I think that, yeah, there, um, there’s a lot of, a lot of people that are really obsessed with individual action and how we’ve just gotta convince people that they should, you know, do all those little things.

Um, and I’m not sure they’re aware of just, yeah. Extent of the problem. I

Allen Hall: think you’re right about that. And been listening to a couple of podcasts while working that are still focused on the climate action slant, I’ll call it, to drive, uh, people to do something about their electricity or the coal factory or whatever they got going that.

But that argument is just a losing argument today in the climate we’re in. [00:09:00] You’re not competing against, uh, someone who’s gonna have a discussion with you about climate. You’re competing about someone who is trying to have an economic argument, a strength argument versus a weakness argument. Uh, so the.

You’re talking on the sidelines about climate. When your world economies are colliding, it just seems like the language needs to shift a little bit to focus in on what is gonna move people to some sort of consensus.

Phil Totaro: This, this also goes back to my whole thing with, you know, industry trade associations or lobby groups, because they are very much focused on politics and making everything into a political argument as opposed to leveraging the people that actually have the economic focused argument and data to be able to support [00:10:00] the position.

And it, it’s, we’re just not hearing from the right people. That have the right knowledge and information and, and it’s not just exclusive to the us this, you know, has happened in Europe. Um, I’m sure it, you know, Rosie can speak to how the degree to which this has happened in Australia as well. But the, the reality is you, you, the people with the real.

Knowledge and information that people actually need to be able to meaningfully change their argument and change habits, and change behavior and thought patterns. They get drowned out by the people who shout the loudest or who are politically connected.

Allen Hall: Sure. But that’s been true for time immemorial.

What, what I think is happening at the minute is if everybody wants to talk about power is electricity is power. Basically, it’s what we’re saying. Electricity is economic power. Then you want as much electricity as you could possibly generate. Are you gonna spend [00:11:00] twice as much to do it or are you gonna do it as cost efficiently as you can?

Wind and solar are gonna be those two answers. Plus battery being the third. That’s gonna be the lowest cost way to do it. If you’re trying to grow your economic power relative to all your economic neighbors, that’s the way to do it. So why are we having a discussion about. We’re gonna go back to coal in the United States and we just drove through coal country a couple days ago.

Why are we having a discussion about going back to coal? ’cause it’s so expensive. Why would we do that?

Rosemary Barnes: It’s really weird. ’cause I mean, renewables didn’t kill coal in the US right? It was gas. Gas killed coal.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Oh yeah. Gas killed coal for sure. Well, coal killed coal because you don’t wanna live next to a coal generation plant.

You really don’t. Especially 30, 40 years ago, you totally didn’t before the emission equipment was installed. Not nice. Does that make sense? Like we’re, we’re just not pushing if, if, if the, everybody’s [00:12:00] talking power. Let’s talk power. Let’s talk cheap power. Let’s go,

Rosemary Barnes: let’s buy TPI. Come on Rosemary, let’s go.

I’ve got about $2 50 spare at the moment. So if you think that when it kinda gets to the point where that Yeah, that can give me a, a stake then happy to, to jump in,

Allen Hall: what kind of management, Rosemary, would you put into a TPI? Would you put in a engineering focused management team, or are you putting in a development team?

Are you putting in just a pure, raw, old school manufacturing sort of management and system? What does that type of business require?

Rosemary Barnes: I think that there’s a real tension that makes that like an unanswerable question and why it’s the whole industry is struggling and not just one or two companies based on their decisions because.

You need in the long term, you need a good product. It means you need a good engineering team to design it and, um, you know, maintain a whole lot of, uh, institutional knowledge in, in [00:13:00] house. Um, and to be able to maintain, you know, deal with warranty claims and make sure that you don’t have more in the future.

But that’s super expensive. And the reality of today is that the cost, like the, what you can charge for a wind turbine blade is just, it’s, it’s too low to support that the kind of engineering that it actually needs. And so, um, yeah, that’s why, that’s why no one, no one can make the equation work, you know, to have the product sufficient and to make enough money to stay in business.

I, I don’t know, I kind of, and the way I’ve seen it, probably like the last. Nearly decade that I’ve been saying this is I, I just feel like a bunch of companies are going to go bankrupt, um, over not being able to, you know, whoever has the first, you know, huge warranty claim that they, they just can’t support and they go bankrupt.

Few of them happen and probably people will start, um, you know, some Chinese companies will kind of rush in to fill the void as well, but at the end of the day, you’re still gonna end up, um, you know, like having to move through this [00:14:00] and, and. Pay for the engineering. You, you just like in 20 years time, you can’t be anywhere else.

Um, unless we just didn’t have a whole lot of wind energy growth.

Allen Hall: Let’s talk about wind energy growth for a minute. With the shift, uh, in terms of production tax credits going away in the United States and wind has to stand on its own two feet discussion that’s happening at the moment. When you remove those.

Production tax credits and investment tax credits. Wind is still cheaper. Solar is still cheaper than pretty much any other, well, no, it is cheaper than any other, uh, power Source does that Then when they do that comparison, when you start to say, oh, well I’m gonna put a, a gas fired system in five years from now, I’m gonna pay a fortune for it because everybody wants to do that, versus just buying some wind turbines and solar panels and getting the same result.

Does that allow wind and solar then to raise prices where? They can become more [00:15:00] profitable, more stable over time.

Rosemary Barnes: I, I actually think no, because there’s too, there’s so many companies that are so used to, you know, just slashing costs so much. I just think there’s just too many, there’s too many companies.

Allen Hall: Too many companies in it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And, um, some. Uh, can go for at least a period of time making a loss on every product they sell. But, you know, there’s so many companies, and especially if you include China in, in that, they’re just, uh, I don’t know. It’s, it’s just not, um, viable to me to see how, like, which company is gonna be the one that starts charging more.

Um,

Allen Hall: are you able to have an independent blade company anymore, or do you need to be attached to an OEM?

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see why that it, you know, the reason why that there were. Independent blade companies to start with was, was ’cause people wanted to have more, a more secure supply chain so that, you know, if something happened with one of the, the factories and they’ve still got another option to fulfill all the orders that they’ve got for a certain [00:16:00] platform.

And I don’t see that changing, um, you know, the fundamental reason for it. So, um, yeah, I, I, I, I don’t think anything’s changed there.

Phil Totaro: This also goes back to the argument of, does an industry. Flourish when it’s vertically integrated, or does an industry flourish when you’ve got all these separate little companies?

Allen Hall: It’s more distributed.

Phil Totaro: Exactly. Uh, a distributed model for supply chain, and right now we’re in. That phase of an industry growth where if you wanna be profitable, vertical integration’s, pretty much the way to go. Um, it’s also why it’s slightly confounding. Why ge? Bought LM in the first place because they, you know, brought them in because they wanted Yeah.

To vertically integrate it. But then they said, oh, but you’re, you’re gonna keep selling blades to everybody else and [00:17:00] then we’re gonna go use TPI and maybe some other companies to, you know, source blade designs and, and blades for specific. Makes and models of turbines. So why would you, why would you vertically integrate a, a capability like Blade Manufacturing and then not fully leverage it?

Rosemary Barnes: You know what, at the time that they were purchasing LM and I was working there, no one could understand it. And we kind of came to the conclusion, well, we’re engineers, not business people. So, you know, um, presumably. Presumably makes sense to, uh, a team of MBAs from ge. But now I, I kind of think that it, it, it did, it wasn’t that we didn’t understand, it’s that it didn’t really make sense the, the way that they did it, at, at least, um.

Yeah. I, I, I don’t think that they, I think that the team at the time really did intend to keep LM doing basically what it did, and they didn’t quite realize how much OEMs wouldn’t really like it. Um, like they didn’t like the vibe, even though, [00:18:00] like I can tell you, it really, really, things didn’t change so much at LM in the first few years, but, um, to an external OEMs.

Perspective now they’re buying blades from their competitor. So it doesn’t really feel like as much diversification as it feels like giving away all of your trade secrets to a, a competitor. So I think that they underestimated how much that that vibe would, um, would exist.

Allen Hall: What was the GE drive to change management and change culture at lm At other acquisitions that I’ve been around with ge.

Instantaneously. The old company is over, the new company is here, management changes, structure changes. They’re relatively quick at doing it, and then you’re part of the larger GE almost immediately. At lm, it never seemed to kick in that way. Even though they were selling blades to other companies besides obviously ge, but that hadn’t changed GE at other facilities, they would [00:19:00] still just take it over and call it ge, change the name on the building, and boom, it is now a GE facility and run with it.

Why did they not do that at lm? And was it more of a just cultural difference or was it a financially driven. Decision, I would

Phil Totaro: suggest it was cultural. You think it’s cultural? I, I think so, to be honest, because they, they, with the Danish management, I don’t think they wanted to. Uh, you know, immediately make a significant amount of changes because they knew that LM would lose customers if they immediately kind of vertically integrated LM as now a GE company.

I, I think they wanted to maintain that brand identity. And so more than a financial thing, I think it was a cultural thing and a brand thing to start with. But I think that [00:20:00] ultimately ended up being potentially the wrong thing. Either they could have bought and owned it and operated it as a separate, you know, uh, literally separate, you know, just an owned entity of GE Renova.

But it maintained the brand and, and the, you know, operational philosophy forever. But they, they. Owned it, and then it was like, well, we’re gonna integrate it. We’re not gonna integrate it. They started exchanging all this ip, you know, all the GE Renova Blade technology IP got assigned to LM and then got assigned back to GE Renova.

I mean, they, yeah, I, they, so I don’t think they, they really manage that well.

Allen Hall: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard to know, right? It’s, you can’t predict that. But I’m now curious, Rosemary, because I’ve. Listen to you describe LM quite a bit, and now I know a lot more about Danish culture and Danish companies than five years ago.

Clearly, [00:21:00] if GE had come in and had been, we’re clearinghouse, we’re gonna vertically integrate this company into the greater ge. The employees revolted, would they have lost the critical staff that they needed to run the place?

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think so. Um, where are they? Where are they gonna go?

Allen Hall: No. Well then there’s vest, there’s other, at the time there were a lot of places to go.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And I mean, people were moving, moving around. But you know, it’s, you’re talking about hundreds of engineers all at once in, um, the town Coaling that most of LM engineers work in is, um. 60,000 or something. In that area. In that area. Um, so yeah, uh, it’s not end Danish. People hate to move house,

Allen Hall: but it’s an American company coming into Denmark.

There’s that label that goes along with it. Besides the culture aspects, just having the moniker, the big meatball on the [00:22:00] side of the building would mean something. To Denmark.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. But I, I don’t think that they would’ve seen, um, a sudden rush. I think that they would’ve seen a little bit higher than normal at attrition.

That’s, that’s my gut feeling. Okay. ’cause I just

Allen Hall: feel like in some aspects, GE did try to. Set things up in certain ways to make it run in a certain fashion. In other ways they didn’t, they just left it alone.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no, I think that they took over with one idea and then their GE management changed and had a different idea because it doesn’t make any sense that they, they came in, um, this huge company of 300,000 plus global employees bought a company of about 10, 15,000 at the time.

Um, and then for all of the stuff where it was duplicated between, I mean, except for some, some corporate stuff, I’m sure that some corporate stuff got, you know, LMS version of it got slashed and, um, GE took [00:23:00] over. But for, for the bulk of the stuff that mattered to the company, um, it was the Tony Company whose.

Team stayed. And the GE one left, like there wasn’t a GE Blade team anymore after they bought lm. That was, they now worked for lm. Um, and, you know, across, across the board for everything. Technical, technical, um, that’s how it was. And then they, five years later, they’re like, actually no. Now we’re gonna get rid of the LM team and have the GE one.

I mean, why would you do that? To get rid of the. Small amount of in-house expertise you had, uh, um, one day and then a few years later just flip and like, no, we’re going back to our, like, they didn’t, didn’t retain you. You can’t just slash uh, get rid of a team and then five years later be like, okay, now the team starts up again.

Like, everyone wasn’t just like there hibernating waiting for, um, g to tell them that they could work for them again. So it obviously you would never go into that without your long being, your long-term plan. So that’s why I’m [00:24:00]pretty sure that they changed their mind.

Allen Hall: You could do that. If TPI exists without TPI, I don’t think they make the moves with LM like they’ve done

Rosemary Barnes: because they’ve got the backup.

Allen Hall: Yes. And now that TPI is on the rocks now I wonder if they’re rethinking the lm.

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, gee, I’ll buy T-P-I-T-P-I and uh, re rinse and repeat.

Allen Hall: Well, I don’t think they’re gonna, I you may, they, they may be forced into doing it just to keep the production line going. That happens quite a bit in business where you’re.

Buy your suppliers to keep the supply chain going. But the lm, it felt like for probably a year now, that GE was going to try to sell LM off in pieces or whatever they were gonna do. Does that stop, does GE think No, no, no, no, no, no, no. I don’t wanna do that because I want, I need a factory in North Dakota that makes blades.

I need, I need blade factories. I own blade factories. I don’t wanna lose blade factories, I don’t wanna sell ’em off right now because I’m concerned about my other supplier, [00:25:00] TPI, not being here in a year,

Rosemary Barnes: but it’s too late. They’ve already, LM has like one or two factories left. I mean, some of them are GE factories, but some of them have been just closed or um, sold to competitors.

So. Um, it’s, it’s too, it’s too late for that. That’s why I, I, I, um, yeah. Like I said, you know, when the sale happened, we all assumed that these, you know, you learn something in an MBA and that gives you kind of an insight into how, how to manage these things because like, it obviously is not it, like to the average worker on the floor, it doesn’t make any sense how that you can close something and then realize it was a bad idea and then just open it again.

Like it doesn’t, it’s obvious that it can’t work like that. But that’s just what we see continuing to happen. So I’m questioning if an MBA is even makes you the smartest person in the company.

Phil Totaro: So here’s a message to all of our listeners. By the way, if you’re, particularly if you’re an engineer, if somebody’s making a business move and they can’t explain it to you in a way that you as an [00:26:00] engineer understand it, like Rosie just explained, then they are making a really bad business decision and you need to get.

Outta that ship.

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