Siemens Gamesa Expands Offshore, Nuclear Power Debate, Wisconsin Wind Farm Opposition

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

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.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – 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, but it’s mostly to do with the fact that we have so such amazing renewable energy resources, such amazing wind and solar in particularly. And then the technological aspect is that nuclear doesn’t combine that well with a lot of variable power because, the traditional nuclear reactors really like to cost a lot of money to build it.

The fuel is not that expensive, but there is a fair bit of labor that’s required to keep the plant safe. And those things don’t vary that much depending on how much power you’re generating, so in the video I had four, four main reasons why it doesn’t make sense for Australia. The first one is that it’s too slow.

We don’t have nuclear already. It’s technically illegal on both the federal and most of our states as well have have laws banning it. The second one is it doesn’t play nicely with wind and solar power. So nuclear really prefers to have steady output or traditional nuclear, at least. The only countries with both a lot of nuclear and a lot of variable renewables are Sweden, which has 30 percent nuclear and 20 percent wind.

And Finland has 35 percent nuclear and 16 percent wind. But both of those countries also have a lot of hydro 40 percent and 20 percent respectively, and hydro is a renewable resource that is very flexible. You turn it on and off when you want to. The third reason was that it’s too expensive. So it’s expensive.

Everywhere, basically less expensive in countries that are building just lots and lots of it. Nuclear power is expensive and when you have alternatives that can do the job like Australia does, lots of wind and solar, then it doesn’t make sense to pay that extra. And the final point in my video was that nuclear power, it solves a bunch of really difficult problems, but they’re not problems that Australia has.

One, it provides constant baseload power, but especially in Australia, baseload is dead by now. There is so much rooftop solar that there are a lot of times during the year, months in the year where every day in the middle of the day, There’s so much rooftop solar that’s providing close to the entire demand of the whole grid.

The big thing that people say about nuclear as well, like wind and solar are a variable. And what about when the sun and shine don’t blow for weeks in a row? Dunkel flouter, they call that in Germany and Australia, it literally doesn’t have those problems. When you look at the last, we’ve got 42 years of good weather data.

And yeah, when you look at. The data, the widespread dunkle flutter across the whole Australian grid they last hours frequently, occasionally a day, but like literally never weeks. In the last 42 years, there were no weeks below 50 percent and the worst ever winter month was around 70 percent of the whole year average.

Yeah, like in countries where you have those problems, nuclear is going to be a really good solution for them, at least to make up a big chunk. So yeah, the video I did was really Australia specific.

Allen Hall: It raised a good point, I think, in that there are a variety of different energy grids, different energy mixes.

France is different than Sweden, Sweden is different from Australia, Australia is different from the US. So it isn’t like. Hydro is great in some places where they have it, right? And it doesn’t really work in the desert. But nuclear is one of those pieces where you can plug it in where needed and I was trying to get out of that video, which is really good, by the way, that what’s the complimentary piece for nuclear?

And if it’s hydro, then that would make sense to me. Like you need to pair those two together to get to a more flexible grid, so to speak.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think you need hydro cause you can do it with storage. If you have to, it just with batteries or whatever it is.

Allen Hall: Yeah. But it’s a today problem though.

It’s a, we don’t have the batteries today to do 500 megawatts. At least in the United States.

Rosemary Barnes: It is plausible. It’s just it wouldn’t happen instantly, but if you’re embarking on a new nuclear project, you’ve got 10 years to sort your batteries out, and I think you could have hundreds of gigawatts of batteries in 10 years.

If that’s what you set your mind to. But I think, I don’t think it’s so much about what’s a good country for nuclear. I think it’s more like nuclear can go anywhere but it’s not the first solution with the other alternatives that are out there now, the costs that they’re at now, nuclear is the biggest, most versatile, but also probably the most expensive option.

So you use it where you have to, and if you can use something else, then you do.

Allen Hall: Let’s ask the question, Rosemary, the Department of Energy is throwing 2 billion at this project and the investors are putting another 2 billion behind it. So there’s 4 billion going into this. Does that sort of upfront money into a new style of nuclear reactor change the economics going forward, or is it still going to be expensive and long term?

Rosemary Barnes: It’s going to help with the development of this one, but if you look at competitors to this, like new scale, they, I can’t, I, I heard the figures recently about how much they’ve spent and they haven’t got a lot to show for it at this point. They’ve got the technology, but they don’t have projects.

I don’t think it’s enough on its own.

Philip Totaro: The person that’s championing this in Australia is named Peter Dutton, and they’ve done estimates of how much this plan is going to cost. And it’s 600 billion dollars, Australian dollars, but still. And it’s the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization did an estimate that said this is only going to produce like 3.

7 percent of the electricity in Australia. If they actually built all these nuclear reactors. So this is a, as Rosemary’s saying, it’s a preposterous idea to do it in Australia, but, if you had already built nuclear technology and you wanted to upgrade, potentially you could retrofit some of the pre existing plants with newer technology that might operate a little more efficiently, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense if you’re renewables resource rich.

Okay. It doesn’t make sense to go nuclear versus going down the renewables route. Think about how much, we would get out of 600 billion, even again, Australian, but like that, that builds, almost a hundred percent of the needs of, Australia’s like electricity market. It could be fully renewable with 600 billion instead of spending it on nuclear, which is only going to produce 3.

7%. You spent 600 billion fighting Russia.

Joel Saxum: That’s what I was just going to say. Or if you’re the U. S., you could fund a few wars.

Allen Hall: Right.

Joel Saxum: So it isn’t 600 billion has not been thrown around. This is, I think this is a side conversation from this one, but very intimately related to it. The general person reading these news articles, whether it’s Rosemary’s video that she did or it’s.

We’re not gonna allow turbines, we’re putting a moratorium on turbines here, or we’re gonna, nuclear energy here, or the dangers of this or that. The general public has no clue about the intricacies of what we just talked about. Hey, gas peaker plants can fire up and produce power on demand.

Wind only works when there’s wind, or if you have batteries, or you have a solar, like how these different types of generation interact with the grid, how, what are the ins and outs of hydropower? Why is it good? Why could it be bad? These kind of things, people just look at it like these are just energy generation sources as they’re all the same, which they’re not.

They just don’t mix. Some of them don’t mix with each other depending on how the grid is built out, or what is available for natural resources in the area, any of those things. This is something that’s, could be, like a, someone should come up with a nice matrix of all the power generation things that we’d use in.

Allen Hall: Who is sitting down with the spreadsheets?

Joel Saxum: Nobody.

Allen Hall: That’s what I’m trying to get at, Joel, is like, who is doing that now to say, hey, a nuclear reactor in Wyoming is the thing to do. Versus batteries in Arizona. Where does that all fall together? Who’s putting that spreadsheet

together? This article here that says this thing could power 400, 000 homes in, in, and it’s in the Southwest corner of Wyoming where there is nothing.

There’s only 250, 000 homes in the whole state. But

The energy is going to go down to Arizona, down to Nevada and to Colorado. Los Angeles, right? That’s where it’ll eventually end up. Yeah,

Joel Saxum: There’s raw materials. You’re there’s uranium all over Wyoming. So that’s nice,

Allen Hall: yeah, but I think to Rosemary’s point, because Rosemary just brings up, hey, we could build the grid better. Okay. But who is looking at that? What is the agency? Who is the group of people that has an outline of what this looks like? Because I don’t think in the United States, there is, I’ve never heard of them.

You would think it’s the DOE, but. You would think, but it doesn’t appear to be.

Rosemary Barnes: There’s so much research, so much modeling about those kinds of systems, but. It’s really hard. A lot of them, maybe even most of them have really I don’t know, they’re coming at it from a specific angle, so someone from, and you can get whatever answer you want by tweaking your assumptions enough.

We’re going to do a live stream with a friend of mine, who’s an accountant with this platform key numbers where you can, change all of the assumptions and see what the answer, what different answer you get. People complain are in levelized cost of electricity. Calculations, they always assume 30 year lifetime for nuclear power, but really, it should last a hundred years.

So that’s not fair. You change that number, see what happens. On the other side, people against nuclear, like you never factor in waste disposal costs or yeah, decommissioning of the plant, put that in, see what happens to the cost. And yeah, we’re just going to go through and change.

All those assumptions.

Allen Hall: But is the problem though that because we’re so far down the electricity grid build out that you’re only minutely changing some of the variables because the grid is 100 percent right now. It’s completely built out for the population that you have today. It’s built out.

So you have to start somewhere. And if you’re starting from that 100 percent build out, now you’re going to add 1, 2, 3 percent a year. You’re not going to change the majority of the grid anyway. Is that where that goes?

Rosemary Barnes: In the CSIRO GenCost report, they’re definitely including quite a lot of extra transmission.

If you assume that you have a lot of wind then you are going to need to build a lot of new transmission and that’s included.

Allen Hall: That’s where I wanted to get to Rosemary, with your nuclear discussion was, we’re playing around with the generation side. But that doesn’t seem to make any difference in reality.

It’s the transmission side where we’re going to struggle, but we’re not really focused there at the minute.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I think there’s a lot of focus on transmission. It’s just so hard in, especially in the U S it’s pretty hard in Australia. I think it’s like incredibly hard in the U S there’s a lot of stuff.

I don’t think it’s going to turn out to be as much of a problem as it seems today, that transmission, because there are a lot of other things you can do, especially when you’ve got a lot of distributed energy, like a lot of rooftop solar and more and more. Household batteries as well.

Allen Hall: Is that where the answer lies though?

We should be really focused on how to transmit electricity versus generate it. We know how to generate it pretty well. We can plug in solar, we can plug in wind pretty quickly, even plug in nuclear or hydro. But the problem is getting it distributed where it needs to be, where there’s high wind, great solar to where the cities are.

That seems to be the problem, particularly in the United States. That’s where the problem lies today.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It, I think again, it’s like really local, like what’s this generation, there’s transmission and there’s energy storage. Those are the three big things. And which one is the biggest will vary from country to country.

At the moment in Australia, I personally think that we’re focused too much on storage and not much enough on generation. Wind is not getting built out at the rate that it will need to yeah to get to 90 percent renewables in yeah, 10, 15 years. But we’re building lots and lots and lots of batteries.

A battery doesn’t generate energy. You need energy to store in a battery for it to be useful to you. So yeah, I expect in a year or two, we’re going to see an adjustment of where our attention is focused in Australia.

Allen Hall: So Australia will be focused on. New additions and the United States we’ve built on, we’ll be building hopefully transmission lines.

It’s transmissions is the only thing slow in it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. What the solution is going to depend on how easy it is to build storage. If it’s easy to build storage, you’ll get a lot of solar. And if it’s easy to build transmission, you’ll get a lot of wind. I think that’s more the. The question while people are really focused on solar panels and wind turbines, they’re missing the point.

It’s a little bit, yeah, a little bit removed from that.

Allen Hall: Everybody should go watch Rosemary’s video, Nuclear in Australia, and then comment on it. Leave it a really long worded, heated comment because she reads all of those.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and then if you disagree when you disagree with the assumptions, then you go back and check out the live stream that I did with John, the recording will be up after we do it and then you can see what difference the yeah every assumption we’ve gone through the comments and found the most common things that people complain about as being bad assumptions and we’re going to change them and show real time what difference that makes to the economics.

So yeah, go through and check that out.

Allen Hall: Up in Wisconsin, there is a legal battle unfolding that could have some really far reaching consequences for renewable energy across the state. There are two towns in central Wisconsin that are being sued by EDP Renewables or their subsidiary, which is Marathon Wind Farm, LLC, over the restrictive wind ordinances that they’ve put in place.

These local ordinances, which were enacted About a year ago are stricter than the state laws and are part of a growing trend in the United States of local municipalities applying more restrictive laws to wind and solar. in their local neighborhood. So even though the state may allow wind farms to be developed the local ordinances is effectively don’t.

So this is what the lawsuit is about and EDP is going to push the case here because this is one of probably a dozen or more places where they could have done this. This is Joel’s territory. He’s from Wisconsin. He knows this area. Is this area of Wisconsin ripe? For wind at the moment.

Joel Saxum: So where these are, remember you were talking Marathon County.

So you’re smack dab in the middle of the state. Marathon County is, there’s like a little trifecta there with Wausau, Stevens Point and Marshfield and Wisconsin Rapids, there’s a, it’s a little population center there in the middle. It’s not traditionally a place where there’s wind energy, right?

Wind, if you’re in the wind industry, you don’t think of Wisconsin as a place there’s a lot of wind farms. There’s a few in the southwest corner along the southern side where it’s more farm country type things, right? And this is agricultural country up there in Marathon County where they’re looking.

But and Allen, you and I were talking about the software, so I’ll give a little bit of a history lesson to the state of Wisconsin here, but this is most of the Midwest, right? The original surveys were done in the early 1800s, mid 1800s, and there’s a lot of. Six mile by six mile townships in the middle of this thing.

Each of these places that is being sued by EDP, their towns, people say oh, it’s a town, it’s a city. These are country towns, right? Their townships with their six miles by six miles square, about their third, so 36 square miles. And between the two of them, so 72 square miles, there’s only about 2, 500 people that live.

In the whole area, those 2500 people farmers work in the local area there. They’re going to have their thoughts and I’m going to go back to the idea of this is more my thought that wind and solar and renewable energies are more of a bipartisan issue. It’s more of a political issue than it is a technological issue.

Because in these areas here, there’s no real reason to not have wind, right? It’s not oh, there’s a protected area or something or a bird population or you’re going to fly away for ducks or something of that sort. Or there’s, golden eagles that are protected by whoever. That doesn’t exist here in the center part of Wisconsin.

That’s not a thing. So I go backwards to these townships are passing laws or regulations or whatever for the local thing. Their populations are less than 2, 000. I think one of them was less than a thousand, so of 900 people. There’s just no possible way or statistically there’s no way that there’s an actual grid energy or grid or any kind of expert there.

I love Wisconsin. That’s where I’m from. I’m from one of those townships of 6 miles by 6 miles. It only has 500 people in it. And I can tell you right now that the town commissioner there has no business passing a law about what kind of energy production is done on the land because they don’t have the requisite knowledge to make that decision.

So that’s part of what’s going on here. To me, it seems like it’s more of just a political issue. We don’t want those dang turbines in our backyards. Then actually this could help. This is a good thing. There’s some, there’s a population center on the outskirts of this stuff that could use some good renewable energy and jobs.

You’re talking about some big wind farms going into, there’s 15, 20 full time jobs that could come from this and a lot of tax based revenue.

Allen Hall: So these local governments do not have a lot of extra funds to go for. lawsuit and a lot of times, they’ll try to negotiate their ways themselves out of a lawsuit because the lawyer fees can add up so quickly.

What is a likely scenario here? I’m surprised that EDP hasn’t tried to negotiate this already. I’m really shocked that they’re going down the legal route.

Joel Saxum: I think the legal route has to be, in my mind, it has to be a scare tactic because yes, if you go to bat, if EDP goes to battle with these townships, unless some organization steps in on the behalf of these townships and pays for the legal fees, EDP will blow them out of the water in a month in legal fees.

They just won’t be able to afford it. The tax, the revenue that these places have, it’s nothing. It’s peanuts. It’s spent in. Grading roads and putting salt down in the wintertime. I know it’s, but it’s twofold, right? If you, then if you are ADPR and you’re going to sue your way into creating a wind farm here, you’re automatically going to piss off everybody.

Everybody in that county, everybody in that township, you’re going to make them angry. If I’m EDPR, to be honest with you, you’re better off pulling out. That’s the way I see it. I don’t like that, but it’s what I see.

Allen Hall: Is it a longer term play though, Phil, that EDPR is looking in the future and going, okay, we’re going to repeat this process again and again, we need to get the state to step up and to enforce the laws that the state controls what happens on the ground.

Not the local town.

Philip Totaro: Because keep in mind that the state actually already has a law on the books that places a restriction on townships and counties passing these kind of ordinances unless three conditions are met. one of three. First is protect health or safety. Second is do not significantly increase the cost or decrease efficiency versus the whatever conventional power source they have now.

And third is allow for an alternative system of comparable cost and efficiency. So basically what that all means is if you’re taking, if you’re retiring a coal plant and putting wind in, then it’s got to perform at the same level. Now, necessarily, wind doesn’t have the same capacity factor as coal, so you’re gonna have to build more megawatts, but it takes up less space, and it’s obviously less polluting.

I’m not sure what legal ground these townships and counties have to stand on to say that they’re meeting any of these criteria. So they’re going to have a hard time fighting this, as Joel mentioned, not to mention just the cost, but the legal argument that they can make probably doesn’t really hold a lot of water.

This is probably on their part just something to slow down the process or make it more expensive for the developer. But, it’s creating this animosity on both sides, which is, leading to a general trend where, again, in, in a state like Wisconsin, they’ve already got A state level law on the books that says that you can’t do this.

Illinois is another state where they had to pass a law overturning the the local authorities control over permitting of projects. Because too many counties and townships in Illinois were doing the same thing just trying to put ordinances in place that were slowing down or stopping development of wind and solar, and the state had to step in.

Because we know that, we are never going to get a federal policy, a coherent federal policy on this, the states are the ones that have to step up and, take matters into their own hands which is what a lot of people want anyway. It’s, states rights has always been at the core of this country.

But at the end of the day, this is what’s unfortunately going to be necessary because People are, making these decisions based on a political motivation in all likelihood and not a commercial one. And that’s necessarily leading to this animosity that Joel’s talking about is that, because people are just behaving in a way that doesn’t lend itself to a collaborative and cooperative environment with project developers that come in and say, we want to help you.

We want to, build this thing. It’s going to be better. It’s going to, reduce pollution. It’s going to do all these things. We just have an environment where, you know for whatever reason, people just don’t want change. Don’t we need to have people on the ground? Yes. So, what’s leading to this happening?

Is, about 10 or 15 years ago, our lobby groups in this industry used to have, grassroots representatives with boots on the ground. And over time, they’ve shifted focus from grassroots efforts to federal policy, particularly PTC extension, and most recently, the IRA bill, which, to its credit, is doing something to attract You know, foreign companies to domesticate production.

It is doing something to promote investment in renewable projects because of how lucrative the production tax credit is. But I’ve, I get the feeling that they’re stretched a little too thin because it’s left a lot of the grassroots efforts that they used to do from, the kind of the OEA or ACP level.

Is now in the hands of regionally focused groups that are probably criminally understaffed and criminally under resourced in terms of budget and just the resources that they have to be able to go out and fight all these fires because now you have, according to this Columbia University report, which we’re Most of you will remember my famous rant last year about how I was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

This year, I’m positively apoplectic about it because it’s gotten worse. We have another 55 counties or townships, in addition to what we already had last year, that have passed ordinances that are precluding wind and or solar development. And the only way that this is allowed to happen is if we don’t have the grassroots outreach.

And the only way it gets solved is if we do. We have to be out there fighting a lot of these fires again with boots on the ground. And that means that there’s gonna have to be a shift in the allocation of resources away from Washington and what’s going on in Washington to what’s going on in the state.

Legislatures where the states, as we just talked about with Wisconsin and Illinois, the states are going to have to take control over whether or not they have the power to preclude counties and townships from blocking wind and solar development, just on a purely, non scientific, mostly political basis.

And let’s be real. That’s what’s going on here. I, that’s the only way I see this happening and getting better for us as an industry.

Joel Saxum: If you send someone from Washington, D. C., I don’t care who they’re associated with, ACP, AWEA, Joe Biden, doesn’t matter. If you send someone from Washington, D.

C. to central Wisconsin to talk to them about wind farms, they’re gonna get laughed out of the building. It’s not gonna work. It’s, you can do grassroots stuff the grassroots in central Wisconsin has to come from a farmer from Iowa or someone else from central Wisconsin that is in the same boots they’re in.

They’re just like, it’s just simply not going to happen. I’m saying this from experience. Like you’re not going to even okay. So I’m a sports hunt. I just hunted a lot in Northern Wisconsin my whole life. That is a very heavily conservative area. They don’t trust anybody from Madison.

Even though it’s the capital of the state to come up and have a town hall meeting about the deer season. They’ll push them out of the frickin state, out of the auditorium in the high school over deer hunting. They’re not gonna, they’re not gonna have someone from Washington, D. C. come in and tell them about what, putting wind farms in their backyard.

It’s not gonna work. So you have to figure out a grassroots efforts to do this, yes. But you gotta figure out the right people to do it. You have to have someone that the people on the ground are gonna trust or at least align with before they agree to some of these things. That’s why we’ve actually talked Allen and I have talked with multiple people that are veterans that are doing that, that are doing this outreach that are, that have been through our military, and they’re going out and talking with people in the field.

It’s someone that they can align with, someone that people can trust. But you’re not gonna, you’re not gonna take people from D. C. think tanks to Nebraska and Oklahoma and Kansas and tell them that wind farms are good, they’re gonna get pushed out.

Philip Totaro: And not for nothing, but in, on the back of the Labor Department releasing yet another report that says that wind technician is the number one job in the United States, again, for whatever, the third or fourth year in a row.

Joel, that’s really not the worst idea I’ve ever heard is to have the people who are, getting the benefit of, and a lot of them are veterans, get the people who are employed to work on and maintain and operate wind farms, go out there and tell their story about how, coming out of the military, this has changed my life and given me, the same kind of purpose that I had when I was in the military.

To be able to have them go out and tell that kind of story to, the people who are their neighbors will have so much more meaning and so much more impact, and it’ll get people away from these hysterical arguments about, property values that it’s already been debunked and all this other, anything you want to infrasound, it’s already been debunked.

It doesn’t matter to a lot of these people because they’re so locked into a way of thinking that Because they’ve got somebody that’s feeding them this, all this dis disinformation. The only way you counter that is by having somebody that they can trust, somebody from their local community who could tell ’em straight up what’s really going on out there at these wind farms.

And the techs would be great spokespeople to be able to go do that.

Joel Saxum: The guy that you might be at the local bar in a corner having a beer with on Friday. That’s the guy you want to talk to. That’s good for these meetings.

Allen Hall: If you’re going to let the states lead the way in terms of setting up the electricity grid and creating the necessary power, then the governors and their staff need to be involved in directing that.

And I haven’t seen a lot of governors get involved in renewables too much. Probably down in Texas, Joel, is where I’ve seen the most, right? Governor Abbott seems to be pretty involved in those things, but a lot of other states, not so much. And if they’re having difficulty at the local level, that’s where the governor and the staff needs to step in and try to negotiate that.

And I don’t see much of that happening at the minute, maybe because they’re too busy doing other things, but it is part of their responsibility. In the latest PES Wind, And if you haven’t received your copy, you can go online to PESWIN. com and read it online. There’s an article that I found interesting, which was it’s a company called Canvas and Joel, you and I saw this and Phil, you saw it too.

When we were in Minneapolis, they’re taking sections of recycled blades or recycling blades into pieces and then making. Furniture out of it. We saw some of that in Minneapolis at ACP. And, but also they’re having artists paint these pieces to make them more architecturally pleasing. And this whole operation is run out of Ohio, outside of Cleveland, Ohio.

And, remember Joel, when you and I were walking down the highway that one day, we were like, Oh, there’s artists here painting these turbines.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I honestly thought it was something that ACP was just doing for the show, right? Sometimes they have those things. Or was it like ACP O and M this year, we were in San Diego and they had a top gun, like Tom Cruise look alike people.

Or when we were somewhere else and they had some people line dancing in San Antonio or something like that. I was like, Oh, this is some gimmick that ACPs did. I didn’t realize it was a company that was doing this and it was a part of the, and they’re in the aisles. I stopped and watched a couple of different artists paint on these things.

They were fantastic. I even Over by our booth on the far East end of the conference center. There was a bunch of these kind of set up in a little area. I went and took a couple of meetings and calls from them and sat down in the furniture and tucked away into the corner and had a phone call.

It was comfortable. But yeah, really cool. So you see a lot of people of course, recycling blades is all the a lot of the talk on the, in the industry right now. And it’s, now there’s, we’ve got companies doing it, we’ve got people making making, New end user products.

We can, we’re doing the cement kiln thing and we’re making a lot of things out of recycled wind turbine blades. But upcycling is also a thing. Upcycling, you’re seeing University of Georgia or Georgia Institute of Technology was making some bridges. They’ve done some bridges I’ve seen over in the UK and in Denmark, Ireland, Poland.

Yeah. Yeah. So there’s a lot of things going on in that space and canvas out of the, out of Ohio there. They’re doing some really cool stuff. I’m making like picnic tables and outdoor furniture and civic art, some other things. So yeah, more things happening in that wind turbine recycling world.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It looks like they can recycle about 2000 blades a year doing this is what they’re had the capability to handle. So that’s exciting. Pretty cool stuff. And if you want to see more about wind energy and all the different aspects and where the technology is headed. Then check out PES wind at PES wind. com.

Joel Saxum: So Michigan’s largest wind park from also Michigan’s largest producer of and investor in wind DTE is now online. It’s called Meridian wind. It’s right in the from our Michiganders, it’s right in the middle of your knuckle when you make the mitten to show the state. So it’s a 225 megawatt park, a 77 GE 2. 8. 1 27 meter rotor turbines cost roughly around $300 million. It was built mostly by Michigan workers and can power over 78,000 homes. So it’s part of that $300 or part of that $300 million investment by DTE was over $4 million paid to local landowners who are hosting aspects of the project.

So with the commissioning of Meridian Wind Park, DTE now has 20 wind parks in its new renewable energy portfolio. And a total investment in renewable energies of over 3 billion dollars. They also plan to add approximately 1000 megawatts of new renewable energy each year starting in 2025. DTE is making some big moves.

One of the cool things about this project, on top of the staff that are already working there since 2023 when this thing was built they expect to create 12 to 15 more jobs to support operations administrative duties. So as a rule of thumb, if you’re not used to the wind industry we have typically one wind turbine technician for every 8 to 10 turbines.

So they’ll have probably eight wind turbine techs out on site full time. So some new jobs to central Michigan with a lot of investment congrats DTE on meridian wind.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter and watch Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie.

And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.