Show notes
Vattenfall is researching more bird detection methods, Norway and Denmark are setting ambitious offshore wind targets, Australia's first offshore wind projects are progressing nicely, Western Australia is using Tesla Megapacks for battery installations, and U.S. wind generation declines in 2023.
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Allen Hall: Our friend from the UK, Derek Rutherford, ran a poll, and he sent this to me not long ago, and I just have forgotten to put it up here, but he ran a poll about what are the biscuits that are most likely to be consumed when out on a UK wind farm. And a biscuit in the United States doesn't mean anything, and a biscuit in the UK means a cookie, it's a cracker cookie, it's a common, it is a cookie, like an oatmeal cookie, that's the way I, Taste it, that's what it tastes like.
There's really no equivalent in the United States. So they ran a poll, it was very interesting because there, it was a definite choice here. So there was four, rich tea, bourbon, hobnob, and fig roll. And I think I have tried fig roll it's not my thing.
Philip Totaro: Chocolate digestive isn't even one of the how do, this is not a legitimate poll.
I'm sorry this, if chocolate digestive is not on the list, then we have a problem.
Joel Saxum: That's what we, that we eat, there's a box of them in the, in our living room right here, so again, my better half from Newfoundland they were the last British colony in Canada. So we drink tea and have digestives.
Allen Hall: When you have tea, you can't have chocolate and tea. Those two just do not go together. It's so uncouth. The Queen would never do that. It's almost like gingerbread. So the survey results are really fascinating. 61 percent of your wind turbine technicians in the UK prefer hobnobs.
Philip Totaro: Alright, that I believe.
But again, they weren't given the option of chocolate digestives, so I still think this is not a legitimate poll.
Joel Saxum: He did throw some chocolate in there because the bourbon is chocolate. It has a chocolate cream filling. , right? It's not bourbon flavored. It doesn't have bourbon in it.
Philip Totaro: Although if it did, that might be number one, Joel.
Joel Saxum: And when farm sites, I think that the bourbon cookie is, it's named after some like French Aristo aristocracy.
Allen Hall: But I, if we're gonna ask the same question in the United States, I'm not even sure what the list would consist of. And I think that was what my, piqued my curiosity is if we're talking about cookies, we get rid of all the illicit things, right?
Now we're down to Oreos, some sort of chocolate chip cookie. What else? Twinkies? Ho Hos?
Joel Saxum: You got to say, you got to say what's for, what's the most popular lunch thing, right? It's going to change. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like the most popular lunch I would say probably in Texas is. Burritos or tacos?
Because there's literally taco trucks that pull up to O& M buildings and sell tacos at lunchtime.
Allen Hall: That's just true. See, but there's a difference in the UK because they have a break, right? There's a there's a morning tea break that happens. Yeah, like America we have to work through till dinnertime, but if you were to have a break in America Say at 10 a. m. right? You say, okay, I've been working since six. It's 10 a. m. It's black coffee. It's just black coffee. Oh, that it may be just black coffee. That may be the answer, Joel. So that's where our money should be invested into is black coffee because all the wind farms are going to be built. Is that where we're going to invest it?
Joel Saxum: Hey, who's investing in it early is our friend Armando from Arthwind. He's got the Arthwind coffee company.
Allen Hall: That. Coffee is brilliant, by the way, just, it smells so good. Armando is going to make a killing in the United States. We got to get a kid in and we have to get in on that business.
Vattenfall is conducting bird detection research at the Holland Sea, Koest, Zuid wind farm. In the Netherlands, in that area, there's millions of birds that are crossing across the North Sea there in the spring and the fall, migrating, and what they're doing is they're installing infrared cameras to work 24 7 and using AI to detect falling objects.
The falling objects are birds. Evidently birds that are impacted by the wind turbines but the infrared allows them to see this in bad weather. I guess the birds maybe have the birds have a hard time seeing in the bad weather. So they run into the wind turbines. Maybe that's what they're checking for.
Evidently the sensitivity of this system is pretty good. They can see a small bird 120 meters away and large birds about 300 meters away. This seems to be a continuing effort across the world. Now, are we going to settle on a solution to detect birds and determine when to slow down wind turbines or maybe shut them off and during migration patterns?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that we've settled on two different types, depending on the conditions. There's Ones that are using computer vision, just taking images, videos of the area and AI is analyzing it to see when they can literally see a bird and and then they can say how fast it's going and when you would need to slow down or stop your wind turbine to stop a collision.
And that works really well. But only in daylight, so it doesn't work overnight and perhaps it doesn't work when it's really foggy or cloudy or something like that. So when you can't use the vision based systems, then you've got to go to infrared. Bit sad that they're tracking birds that are falling through the sky, it would seem like they've set their ambitious low in this case.
The other systems I've seen, they're tracking a bird and saying, okay, it's coming, slow the turbine, we don't want it to die. And this one, they're just like, okay, a bird died, note that for next time. I'm not sure. Maybe this is, the first phase of the study.
Joel Saxum: I think this one's odd though, because there's these studies have been going on for a long time and there's all kinds of technologies like Rosemary, you're saying there's commercialized versions of different products out there that can do this, and I, I know of one that uses radar that can, same thing that can see at night or through the, through clouds or bad weather, So why they're like, Oh, we're going to take this study on and we're actually going to put a press conference, a press release out about it. It's you guys are like five years behind the game and I know that there's a, there's site specific challenges, right?
Because when you say we can, we're going to do. One solution to monitor for birds or bats or for raptors or whatever. That doesn't really work because you may be monitoring in Australia. You might be monitoring offshore North sea. You may be monitoring onshore in Germany, right? There's different kinds of birds.
There's different kinds of bats. There's. different environmental conditions, so you have to adjust for those, but the solutions are there this is, this shouldn't be a study to see how many die that we're past that as an industry.
Allen Hall: I will say, on the aerospace side, we've been putting infrared cameras in the noses of airplanes so the pilots can see through horrible weather, and it is remarkably good.
In the last even in the last three or four years, the next generation's coming out, and it is impressive, so I, it makes sense. Thank you. That they're going to try to use this technology and win, because it has advanced so far, that, and the costs have come down to more reasonable levels, that infrared may be the way to go.
Union Pacific has shipped the longest wind turbine blade in the company history. So Union Pacific is the big company. train operator, railroad operator in the United States. They shipped an 80 meter long blade for Vestas, which is part of their Vestas V163 4. 5 machine. Which they've been talking about that turbine for a couple years at this point, but they moved that We want to move a whole series of blades from Colorado down to Brownsville, Texas, and then shipped out to Texas to somewhere else in the world.
So the trick here, Rosemary, is that UniPacific has figured out a way to move 80 meter long blades across a significant portion of the United States. And when you were working with LM, One of the issues was above, when you get to these longer blades that you, GE decided to make a two piece blade so they could move it in and out of different ports and across the country.
Now that Vestas is moving 80 meter blades via train. Is a two piece blade even needed or will it be needed at some point anyway?
Rosemary Barnes: I don't know. It's all very fuzzy limits, when you say you can't transport a blade over a road that's above a certain distance, it's, it's challenging too, but you've, we've all seen probably on social media, see videos of blades going through mountainous regions and there are trucks that can actually tilt the blade up close to vertical when it goes around a bend so that it can get around tighter corners.
That's an alternative solution. I don't know the specific train route. I would expect that, it worked for this particular route that it had to do. But when they're when they're doing, when they're doing the logistics of blade transport, they're checking a specific route, they're like,