Gulf Wind Technology Advances Wind Turbine Innovation

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum visit Gulf Wind Technology in New
Orleans, where they sit down with CEO James Martin and CTO David
King to explore the company's innovative work in wind turbine
technology. The conversation delves into Gulf Wind's unique
facility, their approach to solving industry challenges, and their
role in developing wind energy solutions for the Gulf of Mexico.
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my cohost, Joel
Saxum. And we are in New Orleans, Louisiana, of all places, at Gulf
Wind Technology. And we have James Martin, who is the CEO of Gulf
Wind Technology, and David King, the Chief Technical Officer at
Gulf Wind Technology. And first of all, welcome to the podcast,
guys. Great to be here. Yeah, thanks for coming to visit us. We've
had a wonderful time here today going through the Gulf Wind
Technology. offices and workspace. It is impressive. It's not
something I knew we even had in the United States, honestly. And
you guys have been working for a couple years on a variety of
different projects and technologies. And we had a meeting this
morning, just full disclosure, about all the things that Gulfwind
has been involved with. I'm like, whoa, all right, I didn't know
that. Some of it is top secret still, some of it not top secret.
James, let's just start with you. I think people in the U. S. don't
have a lot of experience, haven't met you before, haven't worked
with Gulfwind. Can you just give us a brief background on what
Gulfwind Technology is as a business? James Martin: Certainly,
yeah. Gulfwind Technology, we are all first principles, blades
engineers essentially, first. OEM industry for a number of years.
We've seen some of the challenges that the industry is up against
today, and we like to think that we can predict maybe some of the
challenges for tomorrow. So with that team, we've been able to
build assets, equipment get ourselves out there as problem solvers
and offering technology solutions to basically problems that can
reduce the cost of energy over time. It gets talked about a lot.
We're going to talk about some of the assets we've invested in, but
yeah, we've got reliability products that get involved with today.
The problems of today's market. We're really passionate about the
products of tomorrow. So more performance projects for the future.
And we love running projects. So we like, we specifically, we've
been working in our region to open up or demystify, remove
roadblocks for the Gulf of Mexico market. Which have got some great
technology problem statements in there Allen Hall: Because that's
where we first heard of gulfwind was with the work with shell
gulfwind, right? Yeah, that's It's a double edged sword and we had
you on the podcast in a sense because we were talking about the
first wind turbine being Installed in louisiana and gulfwind is
involved with that. James Martin: Yeah, I mean we really thought
Because a lot of our challenges about how to get technology to
products how can we demonstrate that we can take it off a desktop
study in terms of a solution or an idea, and how can we show it
works? How can we de risk that for our customers? So the first
thing we thought is that we really want to invest put our money
where our mouth is, make sure that we can design, make sure we can
test on a sub component level, make sure we can actually spin
anything we're talking about. And yeah, demystify some of that
technology, essentially. One of the things Joel Saxum: Allen and I
talk about regularly, whether it's on the podcast or in our many
Slack conversations every day, is the fact that there's not a whole
lot of technology development, either companies, solutions,
services, coming out of the United States, right? We know that we
are a bit younger of a wind market as a whole than there is our
European counterparts and a lot of solutions come out of them. So
the, some of the performance enhancements, some of the those fixes
that we're talking about here, like you guys are working on. We're
sitting in this, you can see on the camera here, if you're watching
on the YouTube version, that we've got planes and we've got a rapid
prototyping facility. And we've got offices over here and people
running around and There's a lot of things that can go on here
because they have the facility built for it. If you haven't looked
into it, both wind technologies and what it can bring to not only
the global market, but the local U. S. Market. It's huge. It's a
game changer for what we should be doing here, and more operators
should be coming in here to talk with the team. So with that being
said, I know we're in Louisiana. What is the rest of the team and
the rest of the James Martin: outfit look? Yeah, the core team and
where we were founded is really here at the shipyard, Abendale
Global Gateway. Yeah, this is almost the jewel in the crown of
former glory North American manufacturing. They used to manufacture
giant ships here for the Navy, oil and gas projects. They had 26,
000 people here. So this, this 30, 000 square foot facility. It's
our true north. This is our headquarters. But we've got a
fantastic, we got an engineering office actually in Hickory in
North Carolina. Dead center between Asheville and Charlotte where
our chief engineer and our, some of our blade inspection and our
loads teams sit. So it's only a few people there, but they really
much complement what we're up to here. David King: Yeah, no. And
just as James mentioned, all we've really done is taken that, that
jewel in the crown and filled it with all the things you need to
Really understand the problem statements and when really dive into
the hands on engineering work that's needed to drive these problem
statements into solutions. And so that's really why it's been such
a joy to be part of this Gulf wind team to build this team out is
because we've been able to almost match that kind of handshake
between engineering and hands on work in a very real substantive
way. So you have Joel Saxum: the engineering resources, but you've
got the resources as well. We're in so everybody knows, the heat
index here in Louisiana is 105 degrees, but it's comfortable here,
right? So we're in an insulated air conditioned facility that is
125 meters long. And if I look through the camera here, I see this
is where there's a composite repair testing facility. We have rapid
prototyping. There's a wind, there's an actual wind tunnel that you
guys built design. Had calibrated and are regularly using it down
at that end. And so what you would need, like you said, is Hey, not
only do we have engineering resources and all the smart people, but
we have the capabilities of testing of, Hey, there is a solution.
What if we thought about this? Let's action it here. Let's test it
out. Let's build a piece and then put it in the test chamber. We
were right over here earlier when we were walking around. Of
course, we're recording this sitting at a desk. We're in full PPE
walking through here. And there's a material testing station and
SNAP! We had the energy. The sweet sound of composite failure.
Yeah, that's right. There we go. And then we all turned. Yay!
Success, right? But those facilities and those capabilities are
here. As an operator, you have a problem. You have a, you say
you've got, you name the turbine XYZ turbine, and we're starting to
see this kind of issue in our fleet. Call Gulf Wind Technologies.
They could replicate the issue with them, get in the field, do the
inspections, figure out what's going on, come back here, fix it.
Build what could be, will be the fix, test the fix, David King: and
make sure it works. And it's really all about getting engineers as
close to the problem statement as possible. Whether that's sending
engineers up tower, having engineers stood around problem
statements in a lab setting, or trying to bring the field into the
lab to really break these problem statements down and understand
them. As you go through that asset list, it's been all about how do
we remove these different barriers that we've seen in the past,
slow down projects, make things take longer than they really should
and allow us to move quite quickly and rapidly through that kind of
prototyping that fail forward fast type mentality and get to
something where we can actually offer a solution for a customer,
whether that's on the performance load side of thing with, like you
mentioned, the wind tunnel or whether it's testing materials, doing
subcomponent testing, really just want to remove these barriers.
And as you mentioned a little bit earlier, With the the turbine
down in Port Fouchon, that's been a huge part of that as well, is
what's that, that, top of the testing pyramid where these problems
really shake themselves out on these prototype turbines, and how
can we, in a very quick, rapid, fast way, get to that prototype
turbine level. We can make blades for a turbine like that in a
couple weeks, really, which allows us to, again, move super, super
fast through these Allen Hall: problems. And being so knowledgeable
in blades, the root cause analysis ends up at your doorstep quite a
bit in terms of engineering review in the United States. That's,
seems to be a relatively growing business as people realize
Gulfwind is here. They're going to be tapping you to do that kind
of work. What kind of root cause analysis work have you been doing
lately?