Show notes
We made buildturbines.com to help people join the wind industry! In the news, Siemens Gamesa has received certification for their 15 megawatt SG14 236DD offshore wind turbine, 63 of which will be used offshore in the German Baltic Sea. They are also expanding a blade facility in Aalborg, Denmark. We discuss Bill Gates' TerraPower nuclear project in Wyoming, moving to a discussion about where nuclear energy is a good solution. Then we move to the legal battle between EDP Renewables and the state of Wisconsin over restrictive local wind ordinances. And we highlight Canvus, a company that is recycling wind turbine blades into furniture and art. The Wind Farm of the Week is DTE's Meridian Wind Park in Michigan!
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!
Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Joel, we built a new website. buildturbines.com.
Joel Saxum: And it looks fantastic. I'm here to tell you.
Allen Hall: And this website is devoted to those future technicians, people that are looking to get a job in wind and don't know where to start.
Joel Saxum: I mean, the idea really comes from this, Allen. We've talked to so many people out in the field through our websites, through the podcast all over the places in the wind industry and around the wind industry.
Of, Hey, how do I get in? How do I get one of these jobs? And, the wind industry scrambling, every recruiting department is saying to their company, Hey, everybody, here's a recruiter. We need as many people as possible. Where can you find this? Do you have a friend here? Can we get some people here to the point where the DOE has put out a study?
Through NREL as well. That's there says we need over a hundred thousand, close to 125, 000 wind turbine technicians by 2030. It's the fastest growing job in America.
Allen Hall: Yeah, and if you visit some of the training facilities, particularly the community colleges, they cannot get enough students to keep those programs alive.
So we're at a real impasse at the moment. We need to be reaching out to those future technicians and the future engineers that will be helping keeping these wind farms up and running. And that's why we started build turbines. com.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. The idea is we're going to put a bunch of information on your articles about being a wind turbine technician.
We have some of this stuff. We talk to these people every day, right? Why not share this information on another platform? So what's, what we're going to put forth the qualifications that you need for certain types of jobs, what the salaries look like, what the outcomes could possibly be for a career.
And we want to get this website and this information. We're going to continue to build on it. So we'll ask everybody from the industry. If you're a training center, if you're an ISP, if you're a utility, if you're anybody in the wind industry looking for technicians or want to have some words into, hey, this is what the language we'd like to put in.
These are the things we'd like to use to attract people. Get ahold of us. We'll want to put it on this website because we'd like to get this thing in front of everybody high schools and. Young people everywhere mid career, people transitioning anywhere. That's a great opportunity for a fantastic career.
That's only going to grow. So we need these people. So let's do a roundup everybody and do our part to get as many technicians out there as we can.
Allen Hall: And that's what the Uptime Podcast is all about. Communicating with the wind industry and raising it up and making it bigger and better every day and build turbines as part of that.
So visit buildturbines.com.
Welcome to the Uptown Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'll be joined by Rosemary, Phil and Joel after these headlines. Good news from Siemens Gamesa this week. They have received the type certification for their massive 15 megawatt SG14 236DD offshore wind turbine from TUV NORD. The turbine has already secured eight megawatt worth of orders and will be used in major projects like RWE's Thor Wind Farm in Denmark and Ørsted's Hornesea 3 in England.
Up in Aalborg, Denmark, Siemens Gamesa is set to expand its blade factory in the port of Aalborg. The company will receive about 27 million euros from the Danish Green Investment Fund for this growth. The expansion will add about 400, 000 square meters to their premises for storing wind turbine blades.
And Siemens Gamesa has signed a deal to supply 63 of its 15 megawatt turbines for the 945 megawatt Jannecker offshore wind project in the German Baltic Sea. This project is part of Germany's ambitious plans to reach 30 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 and at least 70 gigawatts by 2050.
2045. The European Investment Bank is providing a 1. 2 billion euro green loan to RWE for the construction of the Thor Wind Farm in the Danish North Sea. The 1. 1 gigawatt project will be Denmark's largest wind farm consisting of 72 Siemens Gamesa turbines. Once operational, it will produce enough green electricity to power over a million Danish households.
The project is part of RWE's broader 55 billion euro investment in renewables and clean energy technologies from 2024 to 2030. And Germany's latest offshore wind auction has awarded 2. 5 gigawatts of capacity in the North Sea, bringing in 10 billion. Three billion euros for the government. NBV secured a one gigawatt area with a bid of one billion euros, while Total Energies won a 1.
5 gigawatt site for about two billion euros. Notably, RWE withdrew from its partnership from Total Energy, citing economic reasons. These projects are scheduled to begin operation in 2031, marking significant progress in Germany's offshore wind expansion plans. In the United States, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management has given final approval for the construction of Sunrise Wind, which will be New York's largest offshore wind farm.
Located south of Martha's Vineyard and east of Block Island, the 924 megawatt project could power over 320, 000 homes annually. Oersted and Eversource, the companies behind Sunrise Wind, are making significant investment in New York's offshore wind workforce and supply chain. For Including a 200 million contract with the Long Island based contractor.
Construction is set to begin this year with operations expected to start in 2026. In Downer, Virginia, Dominion Energy has begun construction on what will be the nation's largest commercial offshore wind farm located Off the Virginia Beach coast, the 9. 8 billion project will feature 176 turbines capable of producing 2.
6 gigawatts of electricity. The project includes extensive environmental protections, such as construction timing to avoid well migration and noise reduction techniques. Dominion plans to complete the project by late 2026. And that's this week's top news stories. Now here's our panel. Renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of IntelStor, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of Weather Guard, Joel Saxum.
Bill Gates's nuclear power company, TerraPower, has broken ground on the new nuclear reactor plant in Wyoming. It's a natrium plant and it's expected to be operational by 2030 and will generate about 350 megawatts of electricity with the ability to boost output to 500 megawatts during peak demand.
Now, in theory, it could power about 400, 000 homes. What is unique about it is where it is, and it's right across the way from a coal plant that's scheduled to be decommissioned, so they're going to try to replace that coal fired plant with a nuclear plant. The Natrium plants, which are a little bit different, are a sodium cooled fast reactor, which means they have a, instead of using water for cooling and handling all the interactions with the nuclear material, It's sodium, and obviously sodium is a metal, so it doesn't expand water does, so there's less pressure, it's basically ambient pressure, so it's usually a little bit easier to use as a coolant.
And it has other benefits, like the reactor can use pretty much any nuclear waste to power it. So it has some advantages here. Now, if you have seen Rosemary's YouTube video on Engineering with Rosie talking about, is nuclear power right for Australia? That has generated a lot of feedback online. And I wanted to talk to Rosemary about this because in Australia, nuclear is probably not the right answer, but this, when they're discussing this natrium plant in the U S where there is not a whole bunch of renewable power, particularly where this is up in Wyoming, does a nuclear reactor then start to make a little more sense, especially since it does have the ability to be flexible on some sense
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so the key thing that I think most of the controversy surrounding my video, most of the people that were very worked up about it failed to see the word Australia in the title that nuclear is, I used, I called it four reasons why nuclear power is a dumb idea for Australia.
So it's, a bit of a provocative title. So I wasn't, I intended to stir something up. That's how you, that's how you get more views on your content. That's the reality. But I'm definitely not saying that nuclear power is dumb just that it doesn't make sense for Australia.
And it's not really, it's not too much to do with nuclear technology itself. It's a little bit to do with it,