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Trump Halts Offshore Wind Projects, DJI Drone Ban Hits Industry

Allen, Joel, and Rosemary break down the Trump administration’s sudden halt of five major offshore wind projects, including Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and parts of Vineyard Wind, over national security claims the hosts find questionable. They also cover the FCC’s ban on new DJI drone imports and what operators should do now, plus Fraunhofer’s latest wind research featured in PES Wind Magazine.

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

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon, and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy

Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, and I’m here with.

Rosemary Barnes in Australia and Joel Saxon is down in Austin, Texas. Yolanda Padron is on holiday, and well, there’s been a lot happening in the past 24 hours as we’re recording this today. If you thought the battle over offshore wind was over based on some recent court cases, well think again. The Trump administration just dropped the hammer on five major offshore wind projects.

Exciting. National security concerns. The Secretary of the Interior, Doug Bergham announced. The immediate pause affecting projects from Ted Eor, CIP and Dominion Energy. So Coastal [00:01:00] Virginia, offshore wind down in Virginia, right? Which is the one we thought was never gonna be touched. Uh, the Department of War claims classified reports show these giant turbines create radar interference that could blind America’s defenses.

Half of vineyard winds, turbines are already up and running, producing power, by the way. Uh, and. I guess they, it sounds like from what I can see in more recent news articles that they turn the power off. They just shut the turbines off even though those turbines are fully functioning and delivering power to shore.

Uh, so now the question is what happens? Where does this go? And I know Osted is royally upset about it, and Eor obviously along with them, why not? But the whole Denmark us, uh, relationship is going nuclear right now.

Joel Saxum: I think here’s a, here’s a technical thing that a lot of people might not know. If you’re in the wind industry in the United States, you may know this.

There’s a a few sites in the northern corner of Colorado that are right next to Nebraska, [00:02:00] and that is where there is a strategic military installations of subsurface, basically rocket launches and. And in that entire area, there is heavy radar presence to be able to make sure that we’re watching over these things and there are turbines hundreds of meters away from these launch sites at like, I’ve driven past them.

Right? So that is a te to me, the, the radar argument is a technical mute point. Um, Alan, you and I have been kind of back and forth in Slack. Uh, you and I and the team here, Rosemary’s been in it too, like just kind of talking through. Of course none of us were happy. Right. But talking through some of the points of, of some of these things and it’s just like basically you can debunk almost every one of them and you get down to the level where it is a, what is the real reasoning here?

It’s a tit for tat. Like someone doesn’t like offshore wind turbines. Is it a political, uh, move towards being able to strengthen other interests and energy or what? I don’t know. ’cause I can’t, I’m not sitting in the Oval Office, but. [00:03:00] At the end of the day, we need these electrons. And what you’re doing is, is, is you’re hindering national security or because national security is energy security is national security, my opinion, and a lot of people’s opinions, you’re hindering that going forward.

Allen Hall: Well, let’s look at the defense argument at the minute, which is it’s, it’s somehow deterring, reducing the effectiveness of ground radars, protecting the shoreline. That is a bogus argument. There’s all kinds of objects out on the water right now. There’s a ton of ships out there. They’re constantly moving around.

To know where a fixed object is out in the water is easy, easy, and it has been talked about for more than 15 years. If you go back and pull the information that exists on the internet today from the Department of Defense at the time, plus Department of Interior and everybody else, they’ve been looking at this forever.

The only way these turbines get placed where they are is with approval from the Department of Defense. So it isn’t like it didn’t go through a review. It totally did. They’ve known about this for a long, long time. So now to bring up this [00:04:00] specious argument, like, well, all of a sudden the radar is a problem.

No, no. It’s not anybody’s telling you it’s a classified. Piece of information that is also gonna be a bogus argument because what is going along with that are these arguments as well, the Defense Department or Department of War says it’s gonna cause interference or, or some degradation of some sort of national defense.

Then the words used after it have nothing to do with that. It is, the turbines are ugly, the turbines are too tall. It may interfere, interfere with the whales, it may interfere with fishing, and I don’t like it. Or a, a gas pipeline could produce more power than the turbines can. That that has nothing to do with the core argument.

If the core argument is, is some sort of defense related. Security issue, then say it because it, it can’t be that complicated. Now, if you, if you knew anything about the defense department and how it operates, and also the defenses around the United States, of which I know a little bit about, [00:05:00] having been in aerospace for 30 freaking years, I can tell you that there are all kinds of ways to detect all kinds of threats that are approaching our shoreline.

Putting a wind turbine out there is not

Joel Saxum: gonna stop it. So the, at the end of the day, there is a bunch, there’s like, there’s single, I call them metric and intrinsic, right? Metric being like, I can put data to this. There’s a point here, there’s numbers, whatever it may be. And intrinsic being, I don’t like them, they don’t look that good.

A pipeline can supply more energy. Those things are not necessarily set in stone. They’re not black and white. They’re, they’re getting this gray emotional area instead of practical. Right. So, okay. What, what’s the outcome here? You do this, you say that we have radar issues. Do we do, does, does the offshore substation have a radar station on it for the military or, or what does that, what does that look like?

Allen Hall: Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but if the threat is what I think it is, none of this matters. None of this matters. It’s already been discussed a hundred times with the defense [00:06:00] department and everybody else is knowledgeable in this, in this space. There is no way that they started planted turbines and approve them two, three years ago.

If it was a national security risk, there is no chance that that happened. So it really is frustrating when you, when you know some of the things that go on behind the scenes and you know what, the technical rationales could be about a problem. And that’s not what’s being talked about right now that I don’t like being lied to.

Like, if you want to have a, a political argument, have a political argument, and the, if the political argument is America wants Greenland from Denmark, then just freaking say it. Just say it. Don’t tie Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, new J, all, all these states up until this nonsense, Virginia, what are we doing?

What are we doing? Because all those states approved all those projects knowing full well what the costs were, knowing how tall the turbines were, knowing how long it was gonna take to get it done, and they all approved them. This [00:07:00] is not done in a vacuum. These states approve these projects and these states are going to buy that power.

Let them, you wanna put in a a, a big gas pipeline. Great. How many years is that gonna take, Doug? How many years is that gonna take? Doug Bergham? Does anybody know? He, he doesn’t know anything about that.

Joel Saxum: You’re not getting a gas pipeline into the east coast anytime soon whatsoever. Because the, the east, the east coast is a home of Nimbyism.

Allen Hall: Sure, sir. Like Massachusetts. It’s pretty much prohibited new gas pipelines for a long time. Okay. That’s their choice. That is their choice. They made that choice. Let them live with it. Why are you then trying to, to double dip? I don’t get it. I don’t get it. And, but I do think, Joel, I think the reason. This is getting to the level it is.

It has to do something to do with Greenland. It has something to do with the Danish, um, uh, ambassador or whoever it was running to talk to, to California and Newsom about offshore tournaments. Like that was not a smart move, my opinion, but [00:08:00] I don’t run international relations with for Denmark. But stop poking one another and somebody’s gotta cut this off.

The, the thing I think that the Trump administration is at risk at is that. Or instead, Ecuador has plenty of cash. They’re gonna go to court, and they are most likely going to win, and they’re going to really handcuff the Trump administration to do anything because when you throw bull crap in front of a judge and they smell it, the the pushback gets really strong.

Well, they’re gonna force all the discussion about anything to do with offshore to go through a judge, and they’re gonna decide, and I don’t think that’s what the Trump administration wants, but that’s where they’re headed. I’m not sure why

Joel Saxum: you’d wanna do that. Like at the end of the day, that may be the solution that has to come, but I don’t think that that’s not the right path either.

Right? Because a judge is not an SME. A judge doesn’t know all of the, does the, you know, like a, a judge is a judge based on laws. They don’t, they’re, they’re not an offshore wind energy expert, so they sh that’s hard for them to [00:09:00] decide on. However, that’s where it will go. But I think you’re correct. Like this, this is more, this is a larger play and, and this mor so this morning when this rolled out, my WhatsApp, uh, and text messages just blew up from all of my.

Danish friends, what is going on over there? I’m like, I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m not in the hopeful office. I can’t tell you what’s going on. I’m not having coffee in DC right now. I said, you know, but going back to it, like you can see the frustration, like, what, why, why is this the thing? And I think you’re right though, Alan, it is a large, there’s a larger political play in, in movement here of this Greenland, Denmark, these kind of things.

And it’s a, it’s. It’s sad to see it ’cause it just gets caught. We’re getting caught in the crossfire as a wind industry. Yeah. It’s

Allen Hall: not helping anybody. And when you set precedents like this, the other side takes note, right? So Democrats, when they eventually get back into the White House again, which will happen at some point, are gonna swing the pendulum just as hard and harder.

So what are you [00:10:00] doing? None of, none of this matters in, in my opinion, especially if you, if you read Twitter today, you’re like, what the hell? All the things that are happening right now. RFK Jr had a post a few hours ago talking about, oh, this is great. We’re gonna shut off this off shore wind thing because it kills the whales.

Sorry, it doesn’t. Sorry. It doesn’t, if you want, if you wanna make an argument about it, you have to do better than that. A Twitter post doesn’t make it fact, and everybody who’s listened to this and paying attention, I don’t want you to do your own research, but just know that you got a couple of engineers here, that that’s what we do for a living.

We source through information, making sure that it makes sense. Does it align? Is it right? Is it wrong? Is, is there something to back it up with? And the information that we have here says. It is. It’s not hurting anything out there. You may not like them, but you know what? You don’t want a coal factor in your backyard either.

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Joel Saxum: When it comes down to sorting through data, I think that’s a big problem. Right? And that’s what’s happening with a lot of the, I mean, generalizing, a lot of the things that are happening in the United States in the last 10 years give it. Um, but people just go, oh, this person said this. They must be an authority.

Like, no, it’s not true. We’ve been following [00:12:00] a lot of these things with offshore wind. I mean, probably closer than most. Uh, besides the companies that are developing those wind farms, simply because it’s a part of our day job, it’s what we do. We’re, we’re, we’re looking at these things, right? So.

Understanding the risks, uh, rewards, the political side of things. The commercial side. The technical side. That’s what we’re here to kind of feed, feed the information back to the masses. And a lot of this, or the majority of all of this is bs. It doesn’t really, it doesn’t, it doesn’t play. Um, and then you go a little bit deeper into things and.

Like the, was it the new Bedford Light, Alan, that said like, now they’re seeing that the turbines have actually been turned off, not just to stop work for construction. They’ve turned the turbines off up in Massachusetts or up off of in the northeast area? No, that they have.

Allen Hall: And why? I mean, the error on the side of caution, I think if you’re an attorney for any of the wind operations, they’re gonna tell you to shut it off for a couple of days and see what we can figure out.

But the, the timing of the [00:13:00] shutdown I think is a little unique in that the US is pretty much closed at this point. You’re not gonna see anything start back up for another couple of weeks, although they were doing work on the water. So you can impose a couple hundred million. Do, well, not a hundred million dollars, but maybe a couple million dollars of, of overhead costs in some of these projects because you can’t respond quick enough.

You gotta find a judge willing to put a stay in to hold things the same and, and hold off this, uh, this, uh, b order, but. To me, you know, it’s one of those things when you deal with the federal government, you think the federal government is erratic in just this one area? No, it’s erratic in a lot of areas.

And the frustration comes with do you want America to be stronger or do you want nonsense to go on? You know? And if I thought, if that thought wind turbines were killing whales, I’d be the first one up to screaming. If I thought offshore wind was not gonna work out in term, in some long-term model, I would be the first one screaming about it.

That’s not

Joel Saxum: reality. [00:14:00] Caveat that though you said, you’re saying if I thought, I think the, the real word should be if I did the research, the math and understood that this is the way it was gonna be. Right? Because that’s, that’s what you need to do. And that’s what we’ve been doing, is looking at it and the, the, all the data points to we’re good here.

If someone wanted to do harm

Allen Hall: to the United States, and God forbid if that was ever the case. That wouldn’t be the way to do it. Okay. And we, and we’ve seen that through history, right. So it, it’s, it doesn’t even make any sense. The problem is, is that they can shield a judge from looking at it somewhat. If they classify well, the judge isn’t able to see what this classified information is.

In today’s world, AI and everything on the internet, you don’t think somebody knows something about this? I do. And to think that you couldn’t make any sort of software patch to. Fix whatever 1965 radar system they have sitting on the shorelines of Massachusetts. They could, in today’s world, you can do that.

So this whole thing, it [00:15:00] just sounds like a smoke screen and when you start poking around it, no one has an answer. That is the frustrating bit. If you’re gonna be seeing stuff, you better have backup data. But the

Joel Saxum: crazy thing here, like look at the, the, the non wind side of this argument, like you’re hurting job growth.

Everybody that goes into a, uh. Into office. One of the biggest things they run on all the time, it doesn’t matter, matter where you are in the world, is I’m gonna bring jobs and prosperity to the people. Okay. How many jobs have just been stopped? How many people have just been sent home? How much money’s being lost here?

And who’s one of the biggest companies installing these turbines in the states? Fricking ge like so. You’re, you’re hurting your own local people. And not only is this, you stand there and say, we’re doing all this stuff. We’re getting all this wind energy. We’re gonna do all these things and we’re gonna win the AI race.

To the point where you’ve passed legislation or you’ve written, uh, uh, executive order that says, Hey, individual states, if you pass legislation [00:16:00] that slows or halts AI development in your state, the federal government can sue you. But you’re doing the same thing. You’re halting and slowing down the ability for AI and data centers to power themselves at unprecedented growth.

We’re at here, 2, 3, 4, 5% depending on what, what iso you ask of, of electron need, and we’re the fastest way you could put electrons to the grid. Right now in the United States, it’s. Either one of those offshore wind farms is being built today, or one of the other offs, onshore wind farms or onshore solar facilities that are being built right now today.

Those are the fastest ways to help the United States win the AI race, which is something that Trump has loud, left and right and center, but you’re actively like just hitting people in the shins with a baseball bat to to slow down. Energy growth. I, I just, it, it doesn’t make any logical sense.

Allen Hall: And Rosemary just chime in here.

We’ve had enough from the Americans complaining about it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard for me to comment in too much detail about all of the [00:17:00] American security stuff. I mean, defense isn’t, isn’t one of my special interests and especially not American defense, but. When I talk about this issue with other Australians, it’s just sovereign risk is the, the issue.

I mean, it was, it’s similar with the tariffs. It’s just like how, and it’s not just for like foreign companies that might want to invest in America. American companies are affected just, uh, as equally, but like you might be anti wind and fine. Um, but I don’t know how any. Company of any technology can have confidence to embark on a multi-year, um, project.

Now, because you don’t know, like this government hates wind energy, but the next one could hate ai or the next one could hate solar panels, electric cars, or you know, just, just anything. And so like you just can’t. You just can’t trust, um, that your plans are gonna be able to be fulfilled even if you’ve got contracts, even if you’ve got [00:18:00] approvals, even if you are most of the way through building something, it’s not enough to feel safe anymore.

And it’s just absolutely wild. That’s, and yeah, I was actually discussing with someone yesterday. How, and bearing in mind I don’t really understand American politics that deeply, but I’m gonna assume that Republicans are generally associated with being business friendly. So there must be so many long-term Republican donors who have businesses that have been harmed by all of these kinds of changes.

And I just don’t understand how everyone is still behind this type of behavior. That’s what, that’s what I struggle to understand.

Joel Saxum: This is the problem at the higher levels in. In DC their businesses are, are oil and gas based though. That’s the thing, the high, the high power conservative party side of things in the United States politics.

The, the lobby money and the real money and the like, like think like the Dick Cheney era. Right. That was all Weatherford, right? It’s all oil and gas.

Rosemary Barnes: So it’s not like anybody [00:19:00] cares about the, you know, I don’t know, like there’d be steel fabricators who have been massively affected by this. Right? Like that’s a good, a good traditional American business.

Right. But are you saying it’s not big enough business that anyone would care that, that they’ve been screwed over?

Joel Saxum: Not anymore

Allen Hall: because all that’s being outsourced. The, the other argument, which Rosemary you touched upon is, is the one I’m seeing more recently on all kinds of social medias. It’s a bunch of foreign companies putting in these wind turbines.

Well, who the hell

Joel Saxum: is drilling your oil baby? This is something that I’ve always said. When you go go to Houston, Texas, the energy capital of the world, every one of those big companies, none of ’em are run by a Texan. They are all run by someone from overseas. Every one of ’em.

Allen Hall: You, you think that, uh, you know, the Saudis are all, you know, great moral people.

What the hell are you talking about? Are you starting to compare countries now? Because you really don’t wanna do that. If you wanna do that into the traditional energy marketplace, you’re, you’re gonna have [00:20:00] a lot of problems sleeping at night. You will, I would much rather trust a dane to put in a wind turbine or a German to put in a wind turbine than some of the people that are in, involved in oil and gas.

Straight up. Straight up. Right. And we’ve known that for years. And we, we, we just play along, look. The fact of the matter is if you want to have electrons delivered quickly to the United States, you’re gonna have to do something, and that will be wind and solar because it is the fastest, cheapest way to get this stuff done.

If you wanna try to plant some sort of gas pipeline from Louisiana up to Massachusetts or whatever the hell you wanna do, good luck. You know how many years you’re talking about here. In the meantime, all those people you, you think you care about are gonna be sitting there. With really high electricity rates and gas, gas, uh, rates, it’s just not gonna end well.

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Allen Hall: you don’t have enough on your plate already. Uh, the FCC has panned the import and sale of all new drone models from Chinese manufacturers, including the most popular of all in America, DJI, uh, and they clo.

They currently hold about 70% of the global marketplace, the ban as DGI and Autel Robotics to the quote unquote covered list of entities deemed [00:22:00] a national security risk. Now here’s the catch. Existing models that are already approved for sale can still be purchased. So you can walk down to your local, uh, drone store and buy A DJI drone.

And the ones you already own are totally fine, but the next generation. Not happening. They’re not gonna let ’em into the United States. So the wind industry heavily relies on drones. And, and Joel, you and I have seen a number of DJI, sort of handheld drones that are used on sites as sort of a quick check of the health of a, or status of a blade.

Uh, you, you, I guess you will still be able to do that if you have an older dj. I. But if you try to buy a new one, good luck. Not gonna happen.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think the most popular drone right now in the field, of course two of ’em, I would, I would say this, it’s like the Mavic type, you know, the little tiny one that like a site supervisor or a technician may have, they have their part 1 0 7 license.

They can fly up and look at stuff. Uh, and then the [00:23:00] other one is gonna be the more industrial side. That’s gonna be the DJ IM 300. And that’s the one where a lot of these platforms, the perceptual robotics and some of the others have. That’s their base because the M 300 has, if you’re not in the, the development world, it has what’s called a pretty accessible SDK, which software development kit.

So they’re designed to be able to add your sensors, put your software, and they’re fly ’em the way you want to. So they’re kind of like purpose built to be industrial drones. So if you have an M 300 or you’re using them now, what this I understand is you’re gonna still be able to do that, but when it comes time for next gen stuff, you’re not gonna be able to go buy the M 400.

And import that. Like once it’s you’re here, you’re done. So I guess the way I would look at it is if I was an operator and that was part of our mo, or I was using a drone inspection provider, that that’s what comes on site. I would give people a plan. I would say basic to hedge your risk. I would say [00:24:00]basically like, Hey, if you’re my drone operator and I’m giving you a year to find a new solution.

Um, that integrates into your workflows to get this thing outta here simply because I can’t be at risk that one day you show up, this thing crashes and I can’t get another one. A lot of companies are already like, they’re set and ready to go. Like all the new Skys specs, the Skys specs, foresight, drone, it’s all compliant, right?

It’s USA made USA approved. Good to go. I think the new Arons drone is USA compliant. Good to go. Like, no, no issues there. So. Um, I think that some of the major players in the inspection world have already made their moves, um, to be able to be good USA compliant. Um, so just make sure you ask. I guess that’s, that.

Our advice to operators here. Make sure you ask, make sure you’re on top of this one so you just don’t get caught with your pants down.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I know there’s a lot of little drones in the back of pickup trucks around wind farms and you probably ought to check, talk to the guys about what’s going on to make sure that they’re all compliant.

[00:25:00] In this quarter’s, PES Win magazine, which you can download for free@pswin.com. There is an article by Fran Hoffer, and they’re in Germany. If you don’t know who Fran Hoffer is, they’re sort of a research institution that is heavily involved in wind and fixing some of the problems, tackling some of the more complex, uh, issues that exist in blade repair.

Turbine Repair Turbine Lifetime. And the article has a number of the highlights that they’ve been working on for the last several years, and you should really check this out, but looking at the accomplishments, Joel, it’s like, wow, fraud offer has been doing a lot behind the scenes and some of these technologies are, are really gonna be helpful in the near future.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Think of Frown Hoffer of your our US com compadres listening. Think of frown Hoffer as and NRE L, but. Not as connected to the federal government. Right. So, but, but more connected to [00:26:00] industry, I would say. So they’re solving industry problems directly. Right. Some of the people that they get funding research from is the OEMs, it’s other trade organizations within the group.

They’re also going, they’re getting some support from the German federal government and the state governments. But also competitive research grants, so some EU DPR type stuff, um, and then some funding from private foundations and donors. But when you look at Frow, offerer, it’s a different project every time you talk to ’em.

But, and what I like to see is the fact that these projects that they’re doing. Are actually solving real world problems. I, I, I, Alan and I talk about this regularly on the podcast is we have an issue with government funding or supportive funding or even grant funding or competitive funding going to in universities, institutions, well, whoever it may be, to develop stuff that’s either like already developed, doesn’t really have a commercial use, like, doesn’t forward the industry.

But Frow Hoffer’s projects are right. So like one of the, they, they have [00:27:00] like the large bearing laboratory, so they’re test, they’ve tested over 500 pitch bearings over in Hamburg. They’re developing a handheld cure monitoring device that can basically tell you when resin has cured it, send you an email like you said, Alan, in case you’re like taking a nap on the ropes or something.

Um, but you know, and they’re working on problems that are plaguing the industry, like, uh, up working on up towel repairs for carbon fiber, spar caps. Huge issue in the industry. Wildly expensive issue. Normally RA blade’s being taken down to the ground to fix these now. So they’re working on some UPT tile repairs for that.

So they’re doing stuff that really is forwarding the industry and I love to see that.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s one of the resources that. We in the United States don’t really take advantage of all the time. And yeah, and there’s a lot of the issues that we see around the world that if you were able to call f Hoffer, you should think about calling them, uh, and get their opinion on it.

They probably have a solution or have heard of the problem before and can direct you to, uh, uh, a reasonable outcome. [00:28:00] That’s what these organizations are for. There’s a couple of ’em around the world. DTU being another one, frow Hoffer, obviously, uh, being another powerhouse there. That’s how the industry moves forward.

It, it doesn’t move forward when all of us are struggling to get through these things. We need to have a couple of focal points in the industry that can spend some research time on problems that matter. And, and Joel, I, I think that’s really the key here. Like you mentioned it, just focusing on problems that we are having today and get through them so we can make the industry.

Just a little bit better. So you should check out PES WIN Magazine. You can read this article and a number of other great articles. Go to ps win.com and download your articles today. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate all the feedback and support we receive from the wind industry.

If today’s discussion sparked any question or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and please don’t forget to subscribe so you [00:29:00] never miss an episode For Joel, Rosemary and Yolanda, I’m a hall. We’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Trump Halts Offshore Wind Projects, DJI Drone Ban Hits Industry

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Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

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Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

Cory Mittleider of Malloy Wind and Loren Walton of NSK on main bearing failures, why the industry is pulling DLC coatings, and the material changes replacing them.

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Allen Hall: Cory and Loren, welcome back to the podcast.

Cory Mittleider: Thanks for having us.

Allen Hall: So we’ve got two bearing experts in one location, and this is the point where we start asking all of our bearing questions. Cory, you’re with Malloy Wind, and we’ve had you on the podcast two or three different times. Loren’s with NSK — we’ve had Loren on at least once before.

Loren Walton: Once, yes.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and that was good.

Loren Walton: I appreciate that. It was fun.

Allen Hall: There are a lot of bearing issues happening in the States at the moment, but also globally. Whatever happens in the States, you can pretty much find in Australia, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, South America, Brazil — everywhere. We’re hearing a lot about main bearings, and there’s a variety of things that I think you two know from being on the inside that we on the outside haven’t heard yet. I want to get some of those stories out and understand what’s going on, because operators are trying to keep their assets running, and bearings are a big issue. Let’s talk main bearings. What are you seeing in the field right now? What kinds of problems are happening?

Cory Mittleider: It seems like operators are coming to us and asking us to supply bearings that no longer have DLC. That’s a bit of a phenomenon lately. For a little over a decade we spent our time supplying bearings with DLC on the rollers to address problems found fifteen years ago.

Allen Hall: DLC is diamond-like coating.

Cory Mittleider: Correct.

Allen Hall: Which is a really hard specialty coating applied to the bearing surfaces to provide hardness and durability — or it’s supposed to provide durability.

Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. It’s a coating that’s one to two microns thick — one to two thousandths of a millimeter — and a very hard material. The big feature was that it’s a dissimilar material to the steel. So when we break through the mixed and boundary lubrication regimes and those asperities touch each other, that dissimilar material prevents the welding and tearing that leads to the peeling damage we saw fifteen years ago. That peeling damage eventually turned into spalling, cracking, and other failures. So it made a lot of sense at the time to turn to something like this to mitigate the peeling.

Allen Hall: So the peeling damage was one of those issues where you basically had some sliding happening. In my electrical world, and from looking at these on the ground, you see things moving relative to one another instead of rolling relative to one another.

Loren Walton: It’s more of a welding and shearing of the contacts. I used a finger analogy last time: think of your asperities as fingers — one set is the roller, one set is the outer raceway. They weld under high load and high pressure, then they shear, leaving behind debris. That’s what creates the beginning of the peeling damage, and then it continues to create more debris, and the bearing starts to basically eat itself alive.

Allen Hall: The start of that process, though — is that a lack of lubrication, or a finish or hardness issue on the bearing?

Loren Walton: I love that question, because this is the crux of the whole thing, and I think it’s the part that gets missed. People immediately want to throw the whole thing out and start over with something different. Fundamentally, when we fixed the surface issue by adding the coating, the problems pretty much went away. We went from one-to-five years of life to ten-plus years, depending on the application — without changing the construction, the bearing type, or the contact angle. Just by adding the coating, we increased life significantly. The root of what you’re asking is that the bearing would operate better if it had the proper amount of separation. It’s not a fatigue issue and it’s not a loading issue. At its heart, the bearing isn’t able to create that separation. There isn’t enough speed, and there isn’t enough of a gap created by the lubricant.

Allen Hall: So ideally you have this almost molecular-scale film of lubricant between the two surfaces. If it isn’t designed properly, or you have an issue, that lubricant gets squeezed out of the space, and at that point you have trouble. That’s some of what I’m hearing on main bearings — especially when turbines have been curtailed and aren’t turning. Is that partly just the fact that there’s so much load?

Cory Mittleider: I think that’s a fundamental difficulty of the main shaft bearing. You’ve got extremely variable loads, from full load to idle, and a wide range of operating conditions — from northern North Dakota in the winter to Texas in the heat this week. High load, heavy load, incredibly slow speed, and even slower if it’s idling. It’s hard to reliably build that film. It’s not necessarily that there isn’t enough lubrication; it’s that the film isn’t building properly where it needs to be to separate the metal and the rolling elements.

Allen Hall: So the diamond-like coating was meant to solve that welding problem — you put the coated bearing in, and it worked okay until more recently, when all of a sudden we started having other issues. To me those aren’t related to the coating itself, but to other things happening up in the nacelle.

Loren Walton: If we recall some of your previous episodes, you were on the forefront of understanding and talking about DLC starting to become an accelerant to failure. I know you talked about it with Cory. Those episodes have aged very well. A lot of people now are recognizing what we were saying years ago and changing their strategy toward removing DLC — whether on bearings for newer turbines, typically two megawatts and greater, or in some cases going backwards and removing DLC as they do additional replacements, and looking for another solution, because there’s potential for additional issues you weren’t expecting by adding the coating.

Allen Hall: The coating is non-conductive, which is part of the issue, because you wouldn’t think bearings are conducting electricity. But as turbines got some of these uptower and downtower converters and inverters connected to the generator, we started seeing current levels — according to Motor Doc, where people like Howard Penrose have gone out and measured currents in the nacelles — of well over a hundred amps running through ground straps and the like, into bearings. That’s a lot of current. If you’re shoving that into a bearing that has DLC on it, you’re going to break it down and create these really hard steel bits stuck inside the bearing, which wear it like pouring sand inside a bearing. That’s what eventually happens, and it has nothing to do with the bearing. It has more to do with the electrical and control systems we stuck up top and didn’t pay much attention to, but probably should have. We created an electrical situation, and now all the upkeep comes to people like you to deal with. You haven’t seen a lot of work to eliminate it, although there are a couple of good attempts happening. The reality is: okay, we have to have a bearing, and I’ve got this current going around from the nacelle. How do I put those together in a way that removes the DLC?

Cory Mittleider: That’s what we’ve spent the last ten-plus years on. As a bearing supplier, we can’t change the whole system. We have to do the best we can to accommodate what’s happening in your system. We would absolutely encourage you, if you can identify and remove the electricity, please do that.

Allen Hall: They should. And there are a lot of people who do.

Cory Mittleider: There’s a pursuit of that, absolutely. But the turbine still needs to run.

Loren Walton: We work very closely with an owner-operator that did a lot of that work. To your point from before, it does sound like, from what they’ve investigated, the current has been there for a while. It’s been there in different models and different turbines. Maybe the way it presented, or its impact, wasn’t to the same extent as what we’re seeing now. That’s where I’d say there’s more to it than just the current. I think I said last time it’s not just a smoking gun. The bearing is sitting in front of a firing squad. You put it all together and now we’re in a tough position. But to Cory’s point, we get brought the application, we get brought the environment, and we get told, “Here, make it work.”

Allen Hall: And you don’t actually see everything that’s happened. You get all the mechanical loads, but they don’t tell you, “Hey, we’re running a hundred amps through this nacelle.”

Loren Walton: No, I don’t remember hearing that.

Cory Mittleider: No, that’s not usually disclosed.

Allen Hall: No one’s ever said that. So that’s a real troubling thing happening in the industry — we’re assigning blame to mechanical components when really it’s an electrical mistake. When you dig into it, what you find is that currents have been running up top for years, but what’s changed now is that with more focus on emissions from inverters, they’ve pushed things into higher frequencies. Higher frequency bands are harder to ground out and get rid of. When things were in the kilohertz range, we could partly ground them and they’d go away. Now we’re working at ten kilohertz and up, and that energy distributes into a lot of places, including the bearings, where it wasn’t before. That’s really hard to deal with. Some electrical designer sitting in a remote location, probably in Germany, designs the circuit, and now you bearing gurus have to go fix it.

Cory Mittleider: And that system’s probably well optimized for that particular package.

Allen Hall: For that particular package, right. It meets all the requirements and does everything they wanted — except for the effect on the bearings.

Loren Walton: You solve one problem and move it to another. That’s ultimately how it works.

Allen Hall: If you’re an electrical engineer, you’d never have thought you were destroying the bearings. The industry has moved quite quickly, though. Everybody started noticing this problem with DLC. They went out to check and figure out what the problem was, and, more importantly, to find a solution. Those solutions are unique, because the reason DLC went on in the first place was to extend lifetime. So if you’re taking the DLC out of the equation, can you still get to those lifetime numbers without it?

Loren Walton: Yeah, and that’s where our message has been that adjusting the material will get you the difference you’re looking for. I want to be very clear: I’m not saying DLC as a solution is bad. When it was applied in the right space — turbines with a lighter duty — it worked great. But once you add in additional factors, it becomes an accelerant to failure at certain points. So it definitely still has its place. But once you move away from DLC, you’re going to be right back where you started — regardless of construction — with the life that was always aided by DLC. Once you’ve removed it, you have to know for sure you’re not going right back to the peeling layers and the spalling you were seeing. From what we’ve investigated, the material changes are where you get that. Having a harder surface combats it, and having a better way to combat any additional debris introduced into the system helps.

Allen Hall: And reducing the possibility of generating that debris.

Loren Walton: Correct.

Allen Hall: So what does that mean in terms of bearing design — different alloys, different heat treats, different coatings?

Loren Walton: The first two, not the third. From the recipe of the steel, adjusting some of the alloying elements, there’s a lot you can do. A lot of people think of engineering mostly through the mechanics of it, but one part of mechanical engineering that doesn’t get talked about is material science. That’s the part we dive into extremely deeply, and it gives you the biggest bang for your buck when you’re moving away from a coating as your — I don’t want to call it a crutch, but as the thing helping you get by — toward changing the bearing from the inside so it lasts better once the coating is gone.

Cory Mittleider: I like describing it as being baked into the cake. It’s not a nice thing added afterward like a coating that’s one to two microns thick. It is the bearing.

Allen Hall: It’s hard to think about steel and a lot of the metals used in the bearing industry as unique chemistries, but they are. There are a lot of varieties of steel, just like there are a lot of varieties of copper or aluminum.

Loren Walton: Yes.

Allen Hall: You’d think steel is just steel — we make cars out of it, airplanes, whatever.

Loren Walton: I was talking to someone who’s more into gears, and even when I spoke of a carbon-nitride version of a bearing versus a carbon-nitride version of a gear, it’s not exactly the same. For all intents and purposes it’s easier for everyone to consider it as steel — one word, means the same thing. But once you get into how much chromium is in it, how much molybdenum, how much manganese —

Allen Hall: It comes down to that, and it can be very small percentages of the total.

Loren Walton: It can make a huge difference. And then you get into the heat treat — your time, your soaking, what you do for quenching. It all matters, and everyone does it differently, so you get different results.

Allen Hall: That’s the kicker. You see a lot of discussions where it’s just, “Oh, it’s been heat treated.” As an electrical engineer I used to see it that way too. But there’s heat treatment and there’s heat treatment. It depends on what you’re doing and what the result needs to be, because you’re changing the whole crystalline structure of the steel. The way you do it and the way you quench it all matters. It’s not one size fits all.

Loren Walton: That’s the part that gets glossed over so quickly, because everyone’s eyes go to what they can see. You change an angle here or there, or the bearing type, and you can see that. It’s different when you don’t have X-ray vision to tell you where all the alloying elements are and in what percentages, and then whether you carburized it, through-hardened it, or carbonitrided it. There’s so much to it that I can see people’s heads start to spin. That’s where we say there are a lot of experts out here — you two are among them, and there are others. Engage in conversations. Ask questions.

Allen Hall: That’s a great call to action — “Cory, help me understand what’s going on.” There’s a variety of bearings out there. Loren’s with NSK, a great bearing company with tremendous history. Those are a couple you can trust. But operators can feel inundated by the guy down the street trying to sell them a bearing, and you don’t know if that’s the right solution for your two-million-dollar wind turbine.

Cory Mittleider: These are critical infrastructure assets. Let’s make sure we understand what we’re doing and why. To Loren’s point, you can open three boxes and they all look the same, but what’s inside is what really matters.

Allen Hall: It’s a tremendously difficult business. With as many main bearings getting swapped out today, over the last couple of years there have been a lot of decisions made on the fly — some correct, some really wrong.

Loren Walton: I’d hesitate to say wrong, because I think people are doing the best they can. It’s not because they’re not trying.

Allen Hall: It’s because they don’t have the knowledge in front of them, or maybe they haven’t made the call to Malloy or NSK yet to get the ground truth.

Loren Walton: What you mentioned a second ago is pivotal. There’s been enough selling that we’ve kind of gotten away from the engineering. People hear “sales engineer” and they cut off at “sales.” If we can get back to the engineering, a lot more people will improve their assets. And it doesn’t have to be just listening to Cory and me — poll the audience. There are a lot of us out here. Everybody has a different background; we all know a little about this or a lot about that. Take the opportunity to learn. I’d liken it to your personal life: you wouldn’t buy a new vehicle or a stereo system without doing your own research. You wouldn’t just listen to the salesperson and buy the first thing you see. It’s the same here. If you’re making decisions without engaging at least the top three to five people in this space, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

Allen Hall: And that’s what happens a lot, because people get pushed. There’s a timeline, especially now with the repower situation — “I’ve got to put something on now.”

Cory Mittleider: Right. And new platforms — the next-generation three, four, five, six megawatt platforms, and offshore — are having their first failures. We need to learn from it. That’s where we’ve worked with operators to participate in the teardown and collect the sample. We get clues, we mark it up, and we do a lot of the investigation — metallurgy, metrology, raceway traces — to inform us on what the problem is on that specific platform.

Allen Hall: As we get to these bigger turbines, some data is coming back on O&M costs relative to a one or two megawatt machine, and it doesn’t scale linearly. It goes almost exponentially, because everything is more expensive. Replacing a bearing on a six megawatt machine is a much more expensive ordeal than on a two megawatt machine. What should we be paying attention to and monitoring more closely on these larger machines? The new shiny turbine is great, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to monitor and maintain it.

Loren Walton: I’d start with verifying all your original fits and clearances. We’ve had cases with a four-point mount main shaft — two main bearings — where one side wasn’t installed properly from the beginning, so it didn’t actually float. It’s supposed to be a fixed side and a floating side; now you’ve got one side that’s not floating, and you get overload. So make sure you’re set from the start. A lot of machines now come already outfitted with instrumentation — vibration monitoring, oil monitoring, different ways to start trending from the beginning. Back when we got started, that wasn’t the case. You got your new turbine and in a lot of cases it had nothing on it — you were flying blind. Now that it’s there, use it.

Cory Mittleider: That’s a good point. Specifically to bearings, something earlier versions didn’t have, and newer ones mostly do, is auto-lubers.

Allen Hall: I see more of those lately.

Cory Mittleider: That’s great from a lubrication-delivery and reliability point of view, but it’s its own little machine. We’ve heard of cases where the auto-luber failed, or ran when it shouldn’t have, or for whatever reason had very large output. So you need regular assessment of the entire system, including uptower.

Allen Hall: You’ve got to monitor everything that’s uptower.

Cory Mittleider: It’s its own little machine. It requires its own maintenance. If you’re relying on it, you’ve got to check it.

Allen Hall: As we move into these larger machines and see more of them deployed, what are the useful things you should be doing in that first year to make sure your bearing is working optimally? Is it just checking vibration levels? Is it getting uptower and doing a quick sweep to confirm the grease isn’t oozing out where it shouldn’t be? Is it that simple?

Loren Walton: Having a regular maintenance interval definitely helps. Even getting grease sampling to understand your baseline levels after the first six months and the first year. In a lot of cases the turbines are under a couple-year warranty, so maybe you don’t have as much access. But as much as you can, getting a baseline is huge, because you’re going to want to compare later. You’ll want to say, “Okay, I took this grease sample — what does it mean? Does it normally run that high or not?” Same for vibration, getting the trending. For main bearings in general, more grease is better than less, because you can never quite get it all out when you’re regreasing. So a lot of that first year or two is about getting a good baseline so you know what you’re actually expecting, and what it means when you take a reading in year two or three.

Allen Hall: What does a grease sample look like in terms of the response you get back? I take a sample, send it to a lab, and it comes back with — what? Is it “good or bad,” or a bunch of chemical numbers about composition and dirt? I’ve never seen one.

Cory Mittleider: It’s a matrix. You can request different versions, but probably ten or fifteen different elements they give you numbers on, in parts per million. Iron and brass will be up there.

Allen Hall: So if you see something floating in the grease —

Cory Mittleider: Silicon, phosphorus, water.

Allen Hall: Water would not be great.

Cory Mittleider: No.

Allen Hall: So those reports come back, and I assume there’s more knowledge needed to interpret the results. What do you do?

Loren Walton: We have some guidelines we share with our partners and customers. If you see a certain amount of parts per million of copper, ferrous material, or the like, we can say, “That’s worth monitoring for a while,” or “You should probably purge it, try to get it out, and see if it stabilizes.” We get those questions and respond in kind. There’s definitely help available. If we work together, we typically have a lot more success. A lot of people right now feel like they’re trying to work in their own silos, and you don’t have to do that. You don’t have to be the subject-matter expert for lubricants, gears, bearings, and everything else. You can reach out to experts who can help, and hopefully that frees up your time to assess and work on other things.

Allen Hall: The turbines are so complex today. It used to be you could have one person on site who knew most of what was going wrong, because they’d made thousands of these things — there was a legacy. When you get to six megawatt machines, where you don’t have a lot of history, particularly in the United States, there’s really no one to ask. You’d better find somebody who knows what they’re talking about.

Cory Mittleider: And the operators are responsible for multiple systems — six or seven or eight systems they’re looking at. We can help with bearings; we’re niche and focused on that. If we can take that off your plate, now instead of six systems you’ve got five to worry about.

Allen Hall: That’s key. There are experts out there, and one thing the podcast is trying to do is give those experts a chance to talk so you know who to ask. Your phones should be ringing right about now, because it’s repower time, and it’s main-bearing repair and replace time, pitch-bearing repair and replace time. There’s a lot of bearing activity going on. I always say call Malloy Wind if you need somebody who really knows their stuff, the technology, and what’s going on internally. How do people get ahold of you two if they have questions? What’s the easiest way?

Loren Walton: I try to be at most of the industry events. We usually hold a booth. And my email, my phone number — I’m on LinkedIn, so reach out there. After our last discussion I had a few folks reach out, actually mostly from other countries. It was interesting; we heard about a few issues before they even hit the US. Some folks were having problems with the larger turbines, and we were able to get our teams in Brazil and Spain involved right away. Then once it started cropping up in the US, I could say, “Yeah, I already solved that.” We can put my email in the show notes.

Allen Hall: We’ll put it in the show notes for sure. And Cory, how do people get ahold of you?

Cory Mittleider: I’m pretty active at the events — ACP, and the Drivetrain Reliability Collaborative is another one we had a couple of months ago. Email, phone, and I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. I’ve had similar experiences to Loren, getting contacted from other countries across the globe. It’s fun to investigate problems and share results in the technical articles on our website, and have people send me a picture of an article I wrote and say, “Hey, let’s talk about this.”

Allen Hall: Your articles are great. Check out malloywind.com — just Google it and it’ll come right to the top. If you have bearing questions or something you’ve seen, that website is a great first place to get some answers. It’s very helpful. Well, Loren and Cory, I love having you on the podcast. We need to have you on more, because there’s a lot going on in the bearing world.

Loren Walton: There are things we didn’t even touch on today.

Allen Hall: You’re always welcome back.

Loren Walton: Awesome. Appreciate it.

Allen Hall: Thank you.

Malloy Wind and NSK on Main Bearing Failures

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