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

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
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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,