U.S. Politics Holds Back Offshore Wind, TPI Creates 3D-Printed Blade Tooling

Allen, Rosemary, and Phil discuss the state of wind energy
development and the potential impact of the upcoming U.S.
presidential election. They also cover TPI Composites' partnership
with the University of Maine and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to
utilize 3D printing technology for producing wind turbine blade
tooling. 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
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Alright, did you see this the situation in Colorado where
someone who was just released from jail tries to steal a pickup
truck? Or, I don't know what you call it in Australia. What do they
call it in Australia? It's not a pickup truck. A ute. A ute. A
utility vehicle. But! This thief. Rosemary got into the truck and
realized it has a clutch. It's got a third pedal. It didn't know
what to do. They got re arrested that they tried to put the, tried
to drive the truck, didn't know what to do. Got it in neutral and
the truck rolled down the road and hit a fire hydrant. But,
Rosemary in the United States, Clutch, a manual transmission
vehicle is like non existent anymore. You get to, it is very hard
to purchase one. I don't know about Australia. You still have
clutch cars? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I know. Even when I lived in
America and it was 20 years ago now, and there was nothing but
automatics in America and in Australia, it's mostly manuals. It's
also a point of pride. Like I don't imagine there would be many
hardened. Hardened criminals in Australian jails that wouldn't know
how to drive a manual. That would just be like really, it would
feel really pathetic to them. But it is something that I have
thought about because obviously electric cars don't need gearboxes.
Like my son he's one now by the time he learns to drive, it'll be
all electric cars. And certainly we're only going to have electric
cars. And. He, yeah, he'll never learn to drive a manual unless I
will most likely really have to go out of my way to find some
classic car to, to teach him in and why he won't need that skill.
Philip Totaro: It's going to be like the inverse of Mad Max. It's
like you're going to have to search for petrol. Rosemary Barnes:
There should be actually an energy transition version of Mad Max
because now that we know about solar power and and wind energy,
like a lot of the premise of Mad Max doesn't really, it's, it
wasn't really future proofed, right? If we had, if we did descend
into a Mad Max dystopia tomorrow, I think that energy wouldn't be
the big problem. It would be other stuff. Philip Totaro: It's going
to happen in November anyway, don't worry. Allen Hall: GE Vernova
reported a wider than expected loss in its first quarter post
spinoff results. The company's win segment saw a significant 40
percent decline. Phil, this is a problem. 40 percent decline in
orders, primarily due to lower demand for onshore equipment as
North America customers continue to navigate the permitting process
or permit process for their projects. And this decline obviously
was offset by GE Vernova's power segment, which experienced a 6
percent jump in sales. So the wind side is getting hammered because
they can't get permits. And everybody's struggling and
interconnects is with other Problem I assume, Phil, this is driving
sales, not only at GE, but also at Vestas, right? That they're
having sales problems because the interconnect, the grid, there's
no interconnects. And then the permit process has gotten a lot
longer. What are we doing to ourselves here? Philip Totaro: This is
also what's plaguing Siemens Gamesa to a certain extent, although,
again, yes, they're not selling onshore turbines, but they're, the
rest of their kind of power generation business is bolstering the
losses being seen by the wind segment. So it's happened, like you
said, it's happening to Siemens, it's happening to GE, it's
happening to Vestas. And, everybody's suffering because the
government hasn't sped up the permitting process. And, we've talked
ad nauseum about the the interconnection queue issues where, there
are something like two terawatts worth of wind and solar and
battery storage projects in the interconnection queue in the United
States right now. And most of it's not gonna actually get built
especially a lot of the solar I think like 1. 2 terawatts or
something of that is, is solar. There's 81 gigawatts of wind in the
U. S. right now that has actually been consented and is either
already under construction or has the opportunity to start
construction within the next 18 months or so. But we're still
suffering with lack of transmission availability to be able to get
these projects in the ground and the the independent power
producers are freaking out about it because they're losing the
opportunity to collect production tax credit revenue. Having an
impact on merchant power prices. It's having an impact on as you
just mentioned, turbine sales and being able to close deals.
Because keep in mind the OEMs don't recognize revenue. They get a
little bit of, an upfront payment when they signed a turbine supply
contract, but they don't really collect the bulk of their revenue
until they. Deliver the turbines, and the project is officially
commissioned. Allen Hall: In the GE case, they're still forecasting
revenues, total revenues, this year of 30, so they must be seeing
an uptake or an uptick in wind orders over the next couple of
months? Is that going to happen if the interconnects all Philip
Totaro: backed up? Presumably some of the interconnection issues
will be resolved. There's new transmission lines being built in the
northeast, the midwest, and there are some upgrades going on in the
the Southwest. And then obviously, Pattern is building the Sunzea
project which will have a lot of, GE turbines. But those, those
orders were already announced and again, it's just, they weren't
going to see any revenue off that until probably 2026 or so anyway
when the whole thing's finally done. So yeah, they're they're
expecting an uptick in orders. And it looks like it's still gonna
be a fair amount of, 2. 8, 127s and probably some new these new 3.
6, 154s as well. Allen Hall: I asked you on the show floor in
Minneapolis who, or which administration, it's not who, but which
administration has installed more wind. in their tenure, the last
Trump administration or the current Biden administration? Because
the feeling is that the Biden administration will have planted more
wind turbines. But I don't think that's the case, right? Philip
Totaro: No it actually was Trump which is fascinating.
Installations went up until 2020 when COVID happened. And that
obviously had an impact leading into the Biden administration, but
they've had several years now to work out a lot of these issues
that we're still talking about. Rosemary Barnes: But isn't that
partly because if you end a subsidy or end a tax credit, that is
actually going to vastly bring forward a whole lot of Projects
that, if you've got a project that you were planning to install in
two years time, but the tax credit will end in one, then you're
going to try really hard to bring it forward, is it we all know
that Trump wasn't some like super pro wind energy leftist greenie.
He, he's been pretty vocal about his opposition to, to wind
turbines. So by, if he implemented policies that would have seen
something to do then that might actually make it look like he was
really great for wind energy, but then, the tax credit ended at
some point. Things died off for a while. And then the IRA is, in, I
think in some ways we talked about it a few weeks ago, in some
ways, the fact that the IRA is so generous to things like hydrogen
is, pulling attention away from wind. And yeah, it's a bit, we
ended up with a bit of a Philip Totaro: surprising result.
Obviously with these interconnection issues we're talking about, it
takes three or four years to get a project, developed, consented,
permitted, and then, put in the ground. So it's not anything that
was being built in 2016 or 2017, wasn't something that happened
during, Obama's second term anyway. The fact that it happened
during Trump's term is one of those like political realities of
being able to take credit for something that your predecessor did.
But it's also a question where, it's dropped. Again, COVID had an
impact, but it, the installations in for wind in the U S have
dropped so precipitously in the past three years that one wonders
what. Biden's administration has really been doing. And to their
credit, the fact that we've got 81 gigawatts of wind in that
consent queue and construction queue is good. The challenge is
still now the interconnection queue is bottled up to the point
where we should be seeing more solar is going to overtake wind by
everyone's predicting it's going to be this year, but it's not
because they're not going to install 60 gigawatts of solar this
year. But by next year, solar will probably overtake wind in the U.
S. in terms of capacity installed. And, you're right, Rosemary,
that attention and, more importantly, resources have been diverted
away from Easing the, queues for environmental permits and the
interconnection queue for wind to be able to get on the grid
faster. Wind, the whole point with this is wind is a proven
technology. So why are we giving tons of money? To anything that's
not, I, it's I get why you want to,