Show notes
Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss the IEA's 27% cut to offshore wind forecasts, GE's wind financials, and Ming Yang's revolutionary 50MW dual-rotor turbine. Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar!
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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wintery Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Rosemary's in Australia on her way to Sydney and Yolanda Padrone is here on site at a wind farm in Texas and there has been a, a number of news articles this week. Joel's over actually in Copenhagen enjoying, uh, the sites and sounds of that great city, the International Energy Agency slash its five year offshore wind growth forecast by.
Are you ready for this? 27% citing policy shifts, obviously in the United States and [00:01:00] project cancellations across Europe and Asia. The big one in Asia is the Japan's Mitsubishi pulling out a couple of projects there when costs, um, more than doubled according to them. And Denmark is changing from, uh, negative bidding auctions in favor of contracts for different, so there has been a, a big pullback in offshore wind.
It's not zero, you know, it's not going to zero at any time. I think there's just a lot of projects that appear to be reassessing the interest rate environments, the ability to get turbines, the cost of ships, everything. And rosemary in Australia, it does seem like there's been a little bit of a pullback there too for offshore wind.
Uh,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah. I mean it's, it's hard 'cause we're still like in such a, just a nascent part of the. Industry. It's still really far from clear whether we need or are going to get any offshore wind at all. Victoria has some pretty solid commitments to it. The government [00:02:00] does so. That's probably as close as, um, anything to being certain that we'll get some offshore wind.
But, um, probably we've all learned, America has shown us that a political com commitment is not as, you know, a government commitment is not as locked in as what we probably would've thought it would mean, um, a few years ago. So, yeah, we'll see. I think Australia is struggling like the rest of the world.
We're struggling a bit just in general with getting projects to, um, FID and. You know, getting construction actually underway and offshore wind is just like, you know, the same problems but on steroids. So it's no surprise that you'd be seeing more challenges there. There's been a few projects that have, um, been canceled or paused, but you know, they weren't at the point where there were definitely going ahead.
So it's, you know, like there's a huge pipeline that makes almost no sense for how many projects there are in planning. Obviously some of them are going to [00:03:00] not go ahead, probably most of them. Um, and yeah, so we'll, we'll probably see many more cancellations and I think we'll see at least a few offshore wind farms and probably those early examples are gonna dictate a bit how easy it is for other people to follow, or how much anyone even wants to follow.
Allen Hall: Well, is it gonna become a case where. Certain countries are, uh, focused on certain energy sources like France and Nuclear, and the UK will be offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar. Germany sort of a mix of everything, coal for a long time and they've gone away from nuclear there. But it does seem like every country has its own specialty and is that where we're headed, that we're just gonna see the best solution for each particular part of the world?
Rosemary Barnes: It's really hard to get very decarbonized grids if you specialize too much. Like there. There really isn't a technology that can just do everything, um, on its own. So, you [00:04:00] know, solar power is very, very cheap, but the sun sets at night. So obviously you're gonna, at the very least, need some batteries to get you through the evenings if you're relying mostly on solar power and then wind energy, obviously it's not windy every day, even in really windy places like Denmark in the uk it's still, you know, there are wind lulls, so you're not gonna be able to rely solely on that nuclear power, just kind of chugs along at a fairly, um, you know, constant output.
If you turn it up and down too much, then you're gonna end up, you need to like overbuild a lot. If you try and size your, your new, your electricity system just based on nuclear meeting, peak load, that's a whole lot of reactor that's gonna be not doing much most of the time, aside from the technical complications with being able to turn up and down.
And then even, you know, some of the traditional fossil fuels don't do a very good job at responding flexibly. Coal power has, you know, similar issues to nuclear and it's probably even harder to turn up and down. Um, [00:05:00] and then I guess gas is gas Peakers could, you could probably do everything with gas peakers if you want it.
They can turn on and off very quickly. But, uh, the. Gas picker plants are not very efficient. So there's very high fuel costs and not to mention the, um, climate impact of just burning gas all the time and all of the, um, upstream emissions that come from a gas system. So I don't think it's possible for anyone to specialize too much, but of course, every country has technologies that they're familiar with and comfortable with.
It's never gonna be the sensible engineering decision to just go all in on one technology.
Allen Hall: Will batteries be the connector? For most of these technologies, and I bring this up because there's been a lot of more recent discussions about data centers and Yolanda hop in here too because, uh, you work for an operator that was involved with batteries.
But the more, and I've been following this relatively closely the last month in doing more and more research in it, but like the, the [00:06:00] Colossus two that Elon's building in Tennessee, there's a big part of that distribution. From generation to delivery to the AI data center is a massive amount of batteries because of the up down nature of that load that they need a buffer.
Well, we see more batteries be deployed because of the AI data centers. And is that, can that be leveraged the other way to help balance out a grid that does have a lot of solar? It does have a lot of wind because the data centers are gonna be generically spread around. Countries.
Yolanda Padron: Yeah. Uh, yeah, I think it's, it, the data centers should definitely, I, I mean, it does look like everything's trending, right?
To have them, um, include batteries as part of their, of their scope to be able to balance everything out. I know we're seeing, especially in the us like a lot of the, um, the behind the meter [00:07:00] projects coming online and taking advantage of the, the wind and solar, but. For those rolls where we might not get the perfect generation that they need to be able to exist.
Right. Like the batteries will definitely, uh, be that bridge, uh, to fill the gap there.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And even in the Colossus case where they have gas turbine generation and they've taken over an old power plant that was across the river in um, Mississippi, they're still putting massive batteries in rosemary.
Because the data centers are, I think the consumption has always been that data centers are gonna be this kind of constant power input and that the computers are all gonna be working at maximum all the time. But what they're finding is that it is not because they're being trained at their moving up and down from like 10% of capacity to a hundred percent.
So the grid's not made for that?
Rosemary Barnes: No. I mean, uh, the, the grid's [00:08:00] not, I mean, when did the, was the grid. Designed or was it even designed, you know, like a hundred years ago and we kind of just, um, patched, patched it together as we needed to. It's not like there, there wasn't some yeah, like type of load that the grid was designed for.
People have always just made do with what they had available and then adapted to the characteristics of that. I mean, I don't know, do you have off peak water heaters in the US because in Australia we have like, you can get a separate, a separate. Signal coming to your house that will turn on and off, uh, your electric water heater in off peak times.
And in the past, like traditionally, that was always overnight and it was specifically done. Like we specifically put all of this infrastructure in place to do that because there needed to be something to use the electricity that coal power plants were generating overnight. So, you know, like it was, um, you, you take what you can get as far as electricity generation and then you, you use it in the most effective way that you can come up with.
Allen Hall: Let me understand that for a minute because I've never heard of [00:09:00] this before, and I, I, we, you and I have been talking about energy for 20 odd years at this point, but, so they would turn on your water heater in your home to act as a load for the coal fired electricity plant.
Rosemary Barnes: You have a separate circuit that has off pa loads on it, which is usually just a hot water heater.
And then you can get, um, at. Different tariff from your electricity provider.