Show notes
For the first time ever, all the Uptime hosts are in the same place! They discuss the fantastic outcome of the Wind Energy O&M Australia conference last week, highlighting the amazing presentations, attendees, and discussions. Keep an eye out for next year's event!
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You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: For the first time ever, I think all four of us on the podcast are in The same location at the same time.
Rosemary Barnes: If you include our amazing producer. So
Allen Hall: this is a unique time and we just finished wind energy, O& M Australia. which was completely packed, insanely full, and it was a day and a half of informative discussions, no sales talks per Rosemary's strict instructions. Good call. To get the information out to the industry and let everybody know what's happening around the world?
Is it, Australia is a really unique place, Rosemary. There's a lot going on here.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. And the wind market is definitely unique. We've got a few unique problems. We also, a little bit different to other markets I've worked in, like in in Europe and in North America, where there are a lot of engineers around who've worked on the design and manufacturing side.
We don't have those industries in Australia. And there aren't as many people filtering through with that deep technical knowledge. So it's taken us a bit longer to get to the point where one, people realize that they need to have that information. It's not enough to just have, a service agreement and trust that they know what they're doing and that they're acting in your best interest at every moment.
And two, for people to begin to, yeah, get that expertise. There was no shortage of, Expertise on the panels. And yeah, my favorite thing about the conference was hearing just conversations going on, just, overhearing people just geeking out over some, really niche topic that they hadn't thought of that they'd heard, someone mentioned on stage, a couple of people connected who didn't know each other, and now they know that they're got the same problem or one of them's got a solution and one of them's got a problem.
It's yeah, just exactly what I wanted from the conference.
Joel Saxum: I think one of the things I took is this joke was told a few times, literally and figuratively on an island here in Australia when it comes to wind energy knowledge, right? So we tried to, when we put this conference together, we tried bringing some expertise from around the world.
Simply because, it's hard to travel down here, right? That's just a simple fact. It's geographically remote. So bringing that expertise in here and And after we went through a bunch of things on stage, a lot of people talking on the sides like, I didn't know this solution existed. Like the Soren Kellenberger stuff from CNC Onsite.
I didn't know you could precision machine things up tower. That was just like, to a lot of people that, that exists, right? Lightning protection upgrades do exist. There's people that can do it. There's things you can sense. Shadow monitoring of your fleet. Even when you have an an FSA with an OEM.
Oh, this is a great concept. These are things that like in the States. In Europe, we've been doing for quite a long time and these things are there, but it's just not down here because it's a smaller market as well.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It's also hard for Australian Australians that are working in the industry, can't all get over to those international conferences.
And to be honest, they're not always great either. They're, often very sales pitchy and yeah, cover the same topics over and over again, the kind of more lowest common denominator stuff, rather than that really technical. Geeky stuff that sometimes you just need .
Phil Totaro: So I was fortunate enough to moderate the operator panel where it's funny because we all joked before the event that might be one of the more contentious things that would come out of this is, the challenges that are being faced by owners and operators with these full wrap service contracts.
But I was struck by the remarkable amount of, maybe they were biting their tongue a little, but the remarkable amount of collaboration that they were talking about and espousing and saying, we, we want to be able to, we're a small market and we need to be able to depend and rely on each other.
And so we can't burn bridges and we can't, do things to, to disrupt the the OEM relationship. Even if we choose to, eventually rely on an independent service provider. So that was very that was very interesting. And it was a very free flowing dialogue. Not only in that session, but throughout the whole day and a half.
People actually opened up. Which is one of the things we wanted with developing the program. Was we wanted people to start talking. And they did
Joel Saxum: sometimes when you do a panel and you say, Hey, can we get some questions from the audience? And you have to like pry one out. Oh, I know Alan, you and I, when we're at conferences, it's usually you and I, Hey, I got a question.
We had no shortage of that at every single panel. We were running around with mics. Here's a question. We got a question over here. We've got a comment over here. And I think the spirit of that culture, Went through the whole event up until the second day when we're doing
roundtables.
Joel Saxum: You were, I was in the back of a few of them guiding some things.
You were bouncing through, man, there's conversations going on over here.
Yeah. I know I was
Joel Saxum: in one I had there was like 30 people in there and nearly half of them had different questions during the roundtables. So the audience here the wind industry here in Australia, it's hungry for knowledge.
Phil Totaro: Absolutely. And actually that's one thing that I didn't get a chance to say at the end was, We're all here for you, not only the four of us, but the companies organizing the event, anybody that came from the States we came or anywhere else around the world, for that matter, we came because we are interested in helping the Australian market grow.
The whole thing with us doing events is we're not event planners, as Rosie said at the end of the session, but. We don't measure success based on, how many pictures we get taken shaking hands with a politician. We measure success based on how many megawatts go in the ground and how efficiently you're able to operate them.
So whether you need Rosy's, technical expertise, whether you need lightning upgrades, whether you need, CMS and sensor technology from eLogic's Ping, or, any kind of strategy consulting or benchmarking that we can provide at Intel Store. Ask us. Please rely on us. We're here to help you, and we want to help you, and I will bear the 15 and a half hour flight to come all the way back down here very gladly.
One thing
Joel Saxum: we should touch on there too, as we said, the four of us here, Matthew Stead and Thomas Schlegel from Eologics Ping. They're not in this room right now, but they were key components of putting this thing together. Of course, Ping is a Australian born company. So the local connections here and all the way down to where we should go eat.
That was fantastic, but much, much more than that. We wish those guys could be sitting here with us, but everybody's got to travel.
Allen Hall: Melbourne has been a great city. I've been pleasantly surprised. I thought it was gonna be really too hot, according to Rosemary. I
Rosemary Barnes: think it's gonna be 37 today, so you may still
Allen Hall: get that wish.
We did enjoy walking along the river. The restaurants are fantastic. There's just a buzz to the city, which you don't necessarily see the United States at the minute. So everywhere we walk, even this morning, there's just people. Happily walking down the street and going to their offices and having coffee.
And it's, it is a lively city, which is enjoyable. You don't always see that wherever you travel. So that was quite nice. And the, the piece I pulled out of yesterday was the expertise that Australia has developed, and I thought a lot of the things that Operational side should be coming over to the United States, actually, particularly on noise.
I thought the session on noise was really informative about how the operators deal with noise and how they try to address it and how they deal with the neighbors. We don't have that. And we just don't do that. No. At all. In the States. Rarely. And it is a huge stumbling block. Yeah. But some of the approaches that Tilt and some of the other companies that were represented were surprisingly good.
Thought out and were planned ahead. They weren't just trying to be reactionary. They were proactive about noise.
Rosemary Barnes: I think it's cause I think Australia got hit turbine syndrome thing. And Yeah. Yeah. I know that you had problems with people thinking wind turbines made you sick in the United States.
Maybe it was as bad as here, but it was pretty shocking here. Like even while I was doing my PhD, like just just sitting in an office by myself running finite element analysis models and publishing in academic papers,