Show notes
Allen Hall and Joel Saxum visit Gulf Wind Technology in New Orleans, where they sit down with CEO James Martin and CTO David King to explore the company's innovative work in wind turbine technology. The conversation delves into Gulf Wind's unique facility, their approach to solving industry challenges, and their role in developing wind energy solutions for the Gulf of Mexico.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my cohost, Joel Saxum. And we are in New Orleans, Louisiana, of all places, at Gulf Wind Technology. And we have James Martin, who is the CEO of Gulf Wind Technology, and David King, the Chief Technical Officer at Gulf Wind Technology.
And first of all, welcome to the podcast, guys. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for coming to visit us. We've had a wonderful time here today going through the Gulf Wind Technology. offices and workspace. It is impressive. It's not something I knew we even had in the United States, honestly. And you guys have been working for a couple years on a variety of different projects and technologies.
And we had a meeting this morning, just full disclosure, about all the things that Gulfwind has been involved with. I'm like, whoa, all right, I didn't know that. Some of it is top secret still, some of it not top secret. James, let's just start with you. I think people in the U. S. don't have a lot of experience, haven't met you before, haven't worked with Gulfwind.
Can you just give us a brief background on what Gulfwind Technology is as a business?
James Martin: Certainly, yeah. Gulfwind Technology, we are all first principles, blades engineers essentially, first. OEM industry for a number of years. We've seen some of the challenges that the industry is up against today, and we like to think that we can predict maybe some of the challenges for tomorrow.
So with that team, we've been able to build assets, equipment get ourselves out there as problem solvers and offering technology solutions to basically problems that can reduce the cost of energy over time. It gets talked about a lot. We're going to talk about some of the assets we've invested in, but yeah, we've got reliability products that get involved with today.
The problems of today's market. We're really passionate about the products of tomorrow. So more performance projects for the future. And we love running projects. So we like, we specifically, we've been working in our region to open up or demystify, remove roadblocks for the Gulf of Mexico market.
Which have got some great technology problem statements in there
Allen Hall: Because that's where we first heard of gulfwind was with the work with shell gulfwind, right?
Yeah, that's It's a double edged sword and we had you on the podcast in a sense because we were talking about the first wind turbine being Installed in louisiana and gulfwind is involved with that.
James Martin: Yeah, I mean we really thought Because a lot of our challenges about how to get technology to products how can we demonstrate that we can take it off a desktop study in terms of a solution or an idea, and how can we show it works? How can we de risk that for our customers? So the first thing we thought is that we really want to invest put our money where our mouth is, make sure that we can design, make sure we can test on a sub component level, make sure we can actually spin anything we're talking about.
And yeah, demystify some of that technology, essentially. One of the things
Joel Saxum: Allen and I talk about regularly, whether it's on the podcast or in our many Slack conversations every day, is the fact that there's not a whole lot of technology development, either companies, solutions, services, coming out of the United States, right?
We know that we are a bit younger of a wind market as a whole than there is our European counterparts and a lot of solutions come out of them. So the, some of the performance enhancements, some of the those fixes that we're talking about here, like you guys are working on. We're sitting in this, you can see on the camera here, if you're watching on the YouTube version, that we've got planes and we've got a rapid prototyping facility.
And we've got offices over here and people running around and There's a lot of things that can go on here because they have the facility built for it. If you haven't looked into it, both wind technologies and what it can bring to not only the global market, but the local U. S. Market. It's huge. It's a game changer for what we should be doing here, and more operators should be coming in here to talk with the team.
So with that being said, I know we're in Louisiana. What is the rest of the team and the rest of the
James Martin: outfit look? Yeah, the core team and where we were founded is really here at the shipyard, Abendale Global Gateway. Yeah, this is almost the jewel in the crown of former glory North American manufacturing.
They used to manufacture giant ships here for the Navy, oil and gas projects. They had 26, 000 people here. So this, this 30, 000 square foot facility. It's our true north. This is our headquarters. But we've got a fantastic, we got an engineering office actually in Hickory in North Carolina.
Dead center between Asheville and Charlotte where our chief engineer and our, some of our blade inspection and our loads teams sit. So it's only a few people there, but they really much complement what we're up to here.
David King: Yeah, no. And just as James mentioned, all we've really done is taken that, that jewel in the crown and filled it with all the things you need to Really understand the problem statements and when really dive into the hands on engineering work that's needed to drive these problem statements into solutions.
And so that's really why it's been such a joy to be part of this Gulf wind team to build this team out is because we've been able to almost match that kind of handshake between engineering and hands on work in a very real substantive way. So you have
Joel Saxum: the engineering resources, but you've got the resources as well.
We're in so everybody knows, the heat index here in Louisiana is 105 degrees, but it's comfortable here, right? So we're in an insulated air conditioned facility that is 125 meters long. And if I look through the camera here, I see this is where there's a composite repair testing facility. We have rapid prototyping.
There's a wind, there's an actual wind tunnel that you guys built design. Had calibrated and are regularly using it down at that end. And so what you would need, like you said, is Hey, not only do we have engineering resources and all the smart people, but we have the capabilities of testing of, Hey, there is a solution.
What if we thought about this? Let's action it here. Let's test it out. Let's build a piece and then put it in the test chamber. We were right over here earlier when we were walking around. Of course, we're recording this sitting at a desk. We're in full PPE walking through here. And there's a material testing station and SNAP!
We had the energy. The sweet sound of composite failure. Yeah, that's right. There we go. And then we all turned. Yay! Success, right? But those facilities and those capabilities are here. As an operator, you have a problem. You have a, you say you've got, you name the turbine XYZ turbine, and we're starting to see this kind of issue in our fleet.
Call Gulf Wind Technologies. They could replicate the issue with them, get in the field, do the inspections, figure out what's going on, come back here, fix it. Build what could be, will be the fix, test the fix,
David King: and make sure it works. And it's really all about getting engineers as close to the problem statement as possible.
Whether that's sending engineers up tower, having engineers stood around problem statements in a lab setting, or trying to bring the field into the lab to really break these problem statements down and understand them. As you go through that asset list, it's been all about how do we remove these different barriers that we've seen in the past, slow down projects, make things take longer than they really should and allow us to move quite quickly and rapidly through that kind of prototyping that fail forward fast type mentality and get to something where we can actually offer a solution for a customer, whether that's on the performance load side of thing with, like you mentioned, the wind tunnel or whether it's testing materials, doing subcomponent testing, really just want to remove these barriers.
And as you mentioned a little bit earlier, With the the turbine down in Port Fouchon, that's been a huge part of that as well, is what's that, that, top of the testing pyramid where these problems really shake themselves out on these prototype turbines, and how can we, in a very quick, rapid, fast way, get to that prototype turbine level.
We can make blades for a turbine like that in a couple weeks, really, which allows us to, again, move super, super fast through these
Allen Hall: problems. And being so knowledgeable in blades, the root cause analysis ends up at your doorstep quite a bit in terms of engineering review in the United States.
That's, seems to be a relatively growing business as people realize Gulfwind is here. They're going to be tapping you to do that kind of work. What kind of root cause analysis work have you been doing lately?