Key Takeaways from the Texas & Oklahoma Tour, IRA Debate

Joel and Allen discuss their Texas and Oklahoma wind farm tour,
finding tight budgets and lack of technicians are causing operators
major struggles. Then the team discusses whether Inflation
Reduction Act incentives are effectively driving more clean
electricity generation or creating misaligned incentives for
hydrogen over expanding wind power. Sign up now for Uptime Tech
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episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn
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Philip Totaro: Joel wants to do a billboard. In Texas to advertise
Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and StrikeTape. That's a pretty good
idea, but I got a better one. What if you did a TV ad, or like a,
an ad you could post up on LinkedIn, but recreate the episode from
the Twilight Zone, Terror at 20, 000 Feet, but instead of there
being like a little monster on the airplane wing that William
Shatner is all scared of, how about it's just like lightning
strikes that get, diverted by strike tape and then, but you
recreate the ethos. And then nothing happens. Allen Hall: It could
be good. William Shatner is still alive. He's like 92. Yeah, he,
I'm sure we could sign him up Philip Totaro: to do that. I'm
telling you. This is actually, this is why I had the idea because
his production company contacted me about six or seven years ago
and they wanted me to do an infomercial with him. And it was
actually fairly reasonable price. So we should talk off air and
look into this. That's a thing. Why didn't you do Joel Saxum: that?
If we could get William Shatner to do a strike dig commercial. Come
on. Phil, how much was it? Was it four figures? Three figures?
Three figures, that's what I'm talking about. We spent a lot on
barbecue this week. We're trying to recover. Allen Hall: Joel and I
have been down in Oklahoma and Texas going to a variety of wind
farms and meeting with the O& M folks, the site supervisors,
just to see what's top of mind there. Really great discussions.
Some of the best discussions about Wind energy I've had in the last
couple of years because everybody's so frank about it and Joel
maybe you can give top of mind what some of your insights were.
What are we chopped liver? Joel Saxum: No. Just so we're clear, the
conversation with you guys are great as well. We're, I don't know.
I'm not discounting those. Yeah, no, but you're not running a wind
farm, Phil. Not yet. So if you take this whole thing as a loop it
into one big ball. So Allen and I did this tour. Allen is still on
the tour. I'm back at home. But. We talk with these, you walk in
the door at an O& M building, you're in Texas and Oklahoma,
they welcome us in. If the door is open, someone's there, come on
in, let's chat. And people are willing to, I think part of it is,
some of the wind farms we visited, they're in the middle of
nowhere, so they're not getting a whole lot of visitors. So when
they see some people in general, they're like, oh this is cool,
people. But of course, we're out there, we are visiting wind farms
we know have lightning troubles, WeatherGuard, lightning tech,
strike tape product, we can help with that. But the, one of the
overreaching goals is just to go out there and talk with people. We
want to see what's going on in the industry. What are they, what
are the problems are running into daily from technicians to. Today
we heard about bats and then we, pitch bearings and blade issues
and only so much budget to do so many repairs. And we've, some wind
farms, we've erased our bait, almost erased our blade budget, blade
repair budget. And it's like April for the year. Just really
interesting conversations, but for the most part, everybody's
willing to learn and interact and chat and share some successes,
some failures, some things they've learned. And I guess from that
respect, Allen and I have acted like bees buzzing around from
flower to flower spreading pollen and information across Texas and
Oklahoma in the last few weeks. Allen Hall: A couple of things that
kind of stick in the top of my mind from the last several days is
the number of issues that operators are having on site with
turbines, the list of really significant. Repair jobs is high. And
so the technicians are just going from fire to fire in a lot of
cases Some of them have been very proactive not physical fires. No
there have been some fires I saw some of those this week, but the
other piece is that there seems to be like a little bit of An
approach issue and maybe I viewed it as regulated assets and
unregulated mark the assets. So the regulated market is the power
company groups that run wind farms and then the unregulated ones
are feeding the ISOs and playing the power market. They have a diff
totally different approach about maintenance and what they can
afford and what they don't want to pay for. And at full service
agreements or their approach there is totally different. It does
seem like the regulated folks have a better handle, maybe because
they have more revenue to play around with to maintain the wind
farms. Unregulated folks seem to have more constraints on budget.
Joel's right. A lot of the blade budgets and repair budgets have
been eaten up and it's April. And the amount of money even today,
Joel, at lunch when we were talking to a pretty good sized
operator, the issue about blade budgets was crazy. It's pretty much
all gone. And I, that's a big driver for the marketplace right now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, you, we ran into some people where it was like
yeah, we've got a couple, we've got a couple hundred grand. for
these 100 turbines for the blade repair budget. Like you get into
one, one big repair or you know a week where you get a crew winded
out or weathered out on site and you're gonna eat through a huge
portion of that budget. And the grand scheme of things, if you're
doing 20, 000 repairs, that's only 20 repairs across 300 blades.
That's not going to cut it. You're not going to be able, there's no
way with that amount of money, you're going to be able to keep up
on the damages that you have. Allen Hall: So the there's really
budget. The budget constraints are real and it's becoming more and
more of an issue. The concerns about the OEMs there's really two
players in the United States right now if you talk to operators,
it's GE and Vestas. Those are the two. We heard nothing about
Nordex, zero about Siemens Gamesa, which was awesome. I was shocked
about that. Siemens Gamesa was seen by a lot of the technicians and
the site managers as being old technology. That everybody has moved
on since. Which is not what Siemens is doing, but that's the
impression that I think, that Wade Aulo they're having. And that
is, Changing the landscape, I'll call it of how wind is going to
develop in the United States. Two big players popping out right
now, GE is trying to write the ship from what I can see, and just
talking to operators, and Vestas is trying to sell into sort of
GE's marketplace. Now that has implications. Way beyond the United
States because what does happen in the United States sends a
trickle over to other places. This I think, and my concern coming
out of this is OEMs are getting killed right now, money wise.
Operators, there are not a lot of operators making huge sums of
money here. Everybody is really tight on funds. Everybody is trying
to get their operations as lean as they humanly can. And that
means. People and budgets, just general budget. So if you look at
some of these sites where they should have a lot more people, it's
a handful, it's crazy low. It's amazing. They can even participate
at a level to keep the wind turbines up. Joel? Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Some sites where, you know, 90 turbines here, 120 over here, the
sites an hour and a half apart, one site manager that runs both of
those sites or one site manager running three sites, we've, we even
saw that. Which is crazy. The same thing too, like Allen said,
we've talked to some people over lunch that just a couple of
engineers for a thousand turbines that I just, I don't see how you
can keep up with that. Rosemary, when you guys were working, I
guess you're in the design and blades and things of that sort. Did
you ever hear any of these whisperings or stuff, stories from the
field about this kind of, these kinds of things? Rosemary Barnes:
No, actually not so much. People are. You don't, I don't know, it's
not enough to just talk to individual. Wind farm owners, operators,
and get a picture because, I would have talked to, I don't know, I
would climb it maybe one or two different farms per year. So that's
the number of, pieces of information you get. And one of them in
particular just, loved everything about our turbines compared to
the one that he had before. And so I had nothing but amazing
things. And. That doesn't mean that's the true picture, but yeah, I
think that, I don't know, this is a case for, overall data being
what you probably need. And the other thing is that, people tend to
go with the same turbine over and over again because you obviously
you learn how the quirks and how to manage it and that sort of
thing. And so I don't know that there's that many people out there
who are actually working. Intimately with a bunch of different
yeah, operating systems, to be able to really get good information
about the difference. I guess that, technicians that move around,
they will definitely get a sense and, You hear stories about, about
good and bad things,