GE Vernova Q3 Results, Offshore Wind Struggles Worldwide

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss the IEA's 27% cut to offshore
wind forecasts, GE's wind financials, and Ming Yang's revolutionary
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today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime
Wintery Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall in the Queen city of
Charlotte, North Carolina. Rosemary's in Australia on her way to
Sydney and Yolanda Padrone is here on site at a wind farm in Texas
and there has been a, a number of news articles this week. Joel's
over actually in Copenhagen enjoying, uh, the sites and sounds of
that great city, the International Energy Agency slash its five
year offshore wind growth forecast by. Are you ready for this? 27%
citing policy shifts, obviously in the United States
and [00:01:00] project cancellations across Europe and
Asia. The big one in Asia is the Japan's Mitsubishi pulling out a
couple of projects there when costs, um, more than doubled
according to them. And Denmark is changing from, uh, negative
bidding auctions in favor of contracts for different, so there has
been a, a big pullback in offshore wind. It's not zero, you know,
it's not going to zero at any time. I think there's just a lot of
projects that appear to be reassessing the interest rate
environments, the ability to get turbines, the cost of ships,
everything. And rosemary in Australia, it does seem like there's
been a little bit of a pullback there too for offshore wind.
Uh,  Rosemary Barnes: yeah. I mean it's, it's hard 'cause
we're still like in such a, just a nascent part of the. Industry.
It's still really far from clear whether we need or are going to
get any offshore wind at all. Victoria has some pretty solid
commitments to it. The government [00:02:00] does so.
That's probably as close as, um, anything to being certain that
we'll get some offshore wind. But, um, probably we've all learned,
America has shown us that a political com commitment is not as, you
know, a government commitment is not as locked in as what we
probably would've thought it would mean, um, a few years ago. So,
yeah, we'll see. I think Australia is struggling like the rest of
the world. We're struggling a bit just in general with getting
projects to, um, FID and. You know, getting construction actually
underway and offshore wind is just like, you know, the same
problems but on steroids. So it's no surprise that you'd be seeing
more challenges there. There's been a few projects that have, um,
been canceled or paused, but you know, they weren't at the point
where there were definitely going ahead. So it's, you know, like
there's a huge pipeline that makes almost no sense for how many
projects there are in planning. Obviously some of them are going
to [00:03:00] not go ahead, probably most of them. Um,
and yeah, so we'll, we'll probably see many more cancellations and
I think we'll see at least a few offshore wind farms and probably
those early examples are gonna dictate a bit how easy it is for
other people to follow, or how much anyone even wants to follow.
Allen Hall: Well, is it gonna become a case where. Certain
countries are, uh, focused on certain energy sources like France
and Nuclear, and the UK will be offshore wind, onshore wind, and
solar. Germany sort of a mix of everything, coal for a long time
and they've gone away from nuclear there. But it does seem like
every country has its own specialty and is that where we're headed,
that we're just gonna see the best solution for each particular
part of the world? Rosemary Barnes: It's really hard to get
very decarbonized grids if you specialize too much. Like there.
There really isn't a technology that can just do everything, um, on
its own. So, you [00:04:00] know, solar power is very,
very cheap, but the sun sets at night. So obviously you're gonna,
at the very least, need some batteries to get you through the
evenings if you're relying mostly on solar power and then wind
energy, obviously it's not windy every day, even in really windy
places like Denmark in the uk it's still, you know, there are wind
lulls, so you're not gonna be able to rely solely on that nuclear
power, just kind of chugs along at a fairly, um, you know, constant
output. If you turn it up and down too much, then you're gonna end
up, you need to like overbuild a lot. If you try and size your,
your new, your electricity system just based on nuclear meeting,
peak load, that's a whole lot of reactor that's gonna be not doing
much most of the time, aside from the technical complications with
being able to turn up and down. And then even, you know, some of
the traditional fossil fuels don't do a very good job at responding
flexibly. Coal power has, you know, similar issues to nuclear and
it's probably even harder to turn up and down.
Um, [00:05:00] and then I guess gas is gas Peakers could,
you could probably do everything with gas peakers if you want it.
They can turn on and off very quickly. But, uh, the. Gas picker
plants are not very efficient. So there's very high fuel costs and
not to mention the, um, climate impact of just burning gas all the
time and all of the, um, upstream emissions that come from a gas
system. So I don't think it's possible for anyone to specialize too
much, but of course, every country has technologies that they're
familiar with and comfortable with. It's never gonna be the
sensible engineering decision to just go all in on one
technology.  Allen Hall: Will batteries be the connector?
For most of these technologies, and I bring this up because there's
been a lot of more recent discussions about data centers and
Yolanda hop in here too because, uh, you work for an operator that
was involved with batteries. But the more, and I've been following
this relatively closely the last month in doing more and more
research in it, but like the, the [00:06:00] Colossus two
that Elon's building in Tennessee, there's a big part of that
distribution. From generation to delivery to the AI data center is
a massive amount of batteries because of the up down nature of that
load that they need a buffer. Well, we see more batteries be
deployed because of the AI data centers. And is that, can that be
leveraged the other way to help balance out a grid that does have a
lot of solar? It does have a lot of wind because the data centers
are gonna be generically spread around. Countries.  Yolanda
Padron: Yeah. Uh, yeah, I think it's, it, the data centers
should definitely, I, I mean, it does look like everything's
trending, right? To have them, um, include batteries as part of
their, of their scope to be able to balance everything out. I know
we're seeing, especially in the us like a lot of the, um, the
behind the meter [00:07:00] projects coming online and
taking advantage of the, the wind and solar, but. For those rolls
where we might not get the perfect generation that they need to be
able to exist. Right. Like the batteries will definitely, uh, be
that bridge, uh, to fill the gap there.  Allen
Hall: Yeah. And even in the Colossus case where they have gas
turbine generation and they've taken over an old power plant that
was across the river in um, Mississippi, they're still putting
massive batteries in rosemary. Because the data centers are, I
think the consumption has always been that data centers are gonna
be this kind of constant power input and that the computers are all
gonna be working at maximum all the time. But what they're finding
is that it is not because they're being trained at their moving up
and down from like 10% of capacity to a hundred percent. So the
grid's not made for that?  Rosemary Barnes: No. I mean,
uh, the, the grid's [00:08:00] not, I mean, when did the,
was the grid. Designed or was it even designed, you know, like a
hundred years ago and we kind of just, um, patched, patched it
together as we needed to. It's not like there, there wasn't some
yeah, like type of load that the grid was designed for. People have
always just made do with what they had available and then adapted
to the characteristics of that. I mean, I don't know, do you have
off peak water heaters in the US because in Australia we have like,
you can get a separate, a separate. Signal coming to your house
that will turn on and off, uh, your electric water heater in off
peak times. And in the past, like traditionally, that was always
overnight and it was specifically done. Like we specifically put
all of this infrastructure in place to do that because there needed
to be something to use the electricity that coal power plants were
generating overnight. So, you know, like it was, um, you, you take
what you can get as far as electricity generation and then you, you
use it in the most effective way that you can come up with. Allen
Hall: Let me understand that for a minute because I've never
heard of [00:09:00] this before, and I, I, we, you and I
have been talking about energy for 20 odd years at this point, but,
so they would turn on your water heater in your home to act as a
load for the coal fired electricity plant.  Rosemary
Barnes: You have a separate circuit that has off pa loads on
it, which is usually just a hot water heater. And then you can get,
um, at. Different tariff from your electricity provider.