Jinjoo Lee
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Podcast Appearances
So just to step back a little bit, there are these heavy duty, really efficient, large turbines out there.
But there's such a big backlog for those.
We're seeing that jet engines can be converted into natural gas fired power turbines.
And in fact, a lot of major power equipment manufacturers make what are called aeroderivative turbines, which are modeled after these very jet engines.
What we're seeing now, though, are companies converting jet engines into aeroderivative turbines because the demand is that high.
Although aeroderivative turbines are considered to be pretty like space efficient because they need to be on a jet.
They have to be pretty small.
And compared to some other types of equipment out there, they're also cleaner burning.
Yeah, so natural gas is sort of seen as a preferred power source for data centers.
Nuclear takes a very long time to build.
Solar and wind equipment is more available, but they are intermittent.
So they're only available when it's sunny or windy.
Natural gas is sort of the base load.
It can be always on as long as there is fuel available.
So these jet engines turned aeroderivative turbines are filling a need that the existing natural gas power equipment cannot fill.
And how do we convert a jet engine into a turbine?
So one of the companies that's doing this, they're called FTAI Aviation.
They mentioned that the design process itself took about a year and a half, but the conversion process itself is pretty quick.