Cement Decarbonization, EU Election’s Impact on Renewables, Co-Locating Solar and Wind

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Rosemary discusses emerging technologies from companies like Calix and CarbonCure to reduce emissions from cement production. Phil and Joel analyze how the European Parliament election results could impact renewable policies and the growing trend of co-locating wind, solar and battery storage projects. Plus Invenergy’s Purple Skies project is the Wind Farm of the Week!

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 on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit 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.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Allen Hall: YouTube star Alex Choi, known for his car stunt videos, has been charged with, by federal authorities, for orchestrating a dangerous video involving a helicopter and a Lamborghini. The 24 year old content creator allegedly directed a video called Destroying a Lamborghini with Fireworks, in which two individuals in a helicopter shot fireworks at a speeding Lamborghini in the El Mirage.

Dry Lake Bed in San Bernardino County, of course, California. Troy faces a maximum of 10 years in federal prison if convicted of causing the displacement of an explosive or incendiary device on an aircraft. Now, Rosemary, I assume you have seen this, being the YouTube star that you are. You have seen this video of them shooting off Roman candles from this helicopter?

Rosemary Barnes: It hasn’t come up in my suggested videos, no.

Allen Hall: I’ve seen it like 12 times.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I’ve seen it and it’s awesome. I feel bad for these guys. They created a cool video. But if you go by the letter of the law, there’s a lot of things illegal about this. It’s like the same concept of if you shoot a drone down with a firearm, you can get the same exact penalty as if you shot down a plane with people in it.

Because they’re both aircraft that are covered under law by the FAA. So the FAA has got some pretty stinch stringent laws, and if you don’t tow the line, you can get in a lot of trouble, as evidenced by This awesome video of shooting fireworks from a fire, from a helicopter at a Lamborghini in the desert.

Philip Totaro: If precedent is anything, we had a guy in Santa Barbara County who, during COVID, took up his little, tiger cub plane or whatever single engine prop, and did a YouTube video of him crashing his plane. He got six years. These guys can probably expect a little more than six.

Allen Hall: Wow.

Don’t mess around with airplanes. I think that’s the whole point of this is don’t do stupid stuff around airplanes. They’re not toys, boys and girls. They are definitely not toys. And the Wild West is over. Maybe you can do that in Australia, but you sure can’t do that in the United States anymore.

Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, and here’s this week’s headlines. The International Energy Agency’s latest report reveals the clean energy investment landscape across top countries and regions. The United States invested 280 billion in clean energy in 2023, up from 200 billion in 2020.

Europe leads with the highest clean energy to fossil fuels investment ratio, spending more than 10 euros on clean energy for every euro invested. And fossil fuels. China saw the most robust growth in solar, wind and nuclear power, while India’s clean energy investments reached 68 billion in 2023, a 40 percent increase from the 2016 to 2020 average.

In related news, the increasing occurrence of negative electricity prices in Europe is raising concerns among investors about the profitability. Renewable energy projects. Negative pricing has become more frequent as solar and wind production ramp up. While consumers benefit from the free electricity during these periods, investors worry about the impacts on returns.

Germany, Europe’s biggest power market, had about 300 hours of prices below zero last year, and that may double in 2024. The solution lies in building more energy storage systems, such as batteries, to absorb excess electricity and stabilize prices. However, the current scale of energy storage deployment is.

Insufficient to mitigate the impact of negative pricing fully. Experts estimate that Europe’s energy storage capacity needs to increase sevenfold. By 2030 to effectively address the issue. And in Iowa region fiber, a subsidiary of Alliant Energy has opened a wind turbine blade recycling facility. The facility aims to divert 30, 000 tons of scrap wind turbine materials annually by shredding the blades and transforming the extracted components into premium products for use in construction materials such as concrete and asphalt.

The eco friendly process provides a sustainable alternative to burning or land filling the blades. Reduces the carbon footprint of construction projects and enhances the durability and environmental resistance of materials. Region 5 has also established strategic partnerships nationwide to expand its recycling efforts.

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. Phil, over in Europe, the European Parliament elections are in, and this has caused a lot of consternation in the renewable energy markets.

As is being described in the United States, the European Parliament is shifting right. And the word I hear a lot on the U. S. news is far right. Now, I’ve done some research into that, and I don’t Far right in the United States and far right in Europe are not really the same thing. So it’s moved a little bit to the right and it seems like a little more off center may be the best way to approach it because I think some of the left and the right have picked up some some votes or some elections.

Here’s the rub, and Rosemary, I could use your input on this too. It does seem like the, there is a push within Europe from some portion of the citizenry to slow down renewables and to go a little bit slower than what the current pace is. Now, is that The European Parliament doesn’t have that much oversight, the European Commission seems to have the most oversight over what actually happens in Europe at the moment.

Do these Parliament results really change the landscape for renewable projects in Europe, or is it just a little bump in the road?

Philip Totaro: It changes them from the perspective of Influencing national elections as a result of these parliamentary elections, France already has announced a snap elections, Belgium Belgium’s prime minister announced that he’s going to step down and there’s going to be a reelection for the PM there.

So the real influence of this is in pushing some of the member states in the EU. A little bit further to the right, which could have the consequence of having objection to or non adoption of some of the policies that have been proposed, like around this Green New Deal that they want to and that, frankly, Wind Europe got behind and has also been trying to champion.

The reality of it is it can eventually have an impact. Anything that’s in the pipeline right now, probably unlikely to get affected by it, as long as, they’re far enough along the permitting process. But anything that’s earlier stage, That was hoping to get sped up as a result of permitting reforms in, in, France, Germany, Italy, Spain some of these things are looking a little more tenuous at this point.

And as we know, the markets never particularly capital markets, never like uncertainty. They don’t want to put foreign direct investment into Countries where there’s uncertainty about what the policy regime is going to be because they want to be able to provide certainty to the returns.

Joel Saxum: Phil, let me ask you a question here.

And this is pardon my ignorance on the European Parliament. But do they, they don’t have direct influence over the country? So if I was a German developer and I was selling power within Germany and it’s not crossing my borders, the European Parliament can’t do anything for me or against me. It would only be if I’m going across borders or what is their actual influence?

Philip Totaro: No, it’s a, that’s a great, it’s a great question. So yes, that you’re correct in that the European Parliament only does things at the EU level where it crosses country borders. However Since a lot of the there’s two, two things at play here. One is the shift to towards a little more center, right? In Europe is again, influencing what’s going on in the individual countries.

So as I just mentioned with France, Belgium, you’re even seeing some things in Spain, you’re likely to see things in the Netherlands and a few other countries as well. Where this shift to the, the center right is gonna, play out in the individual countries and their country level parliament elections or, president or PM elections could could end up being influenced by this outcome.

Generally what happens when. Things start becoming more protectionist and more kind of conservative is it slows down free trade, which is bad for the renewable sector, and it slows down foreign direct investment, which is bad for the renewable sector. So as you mentioned, while you’re right, they don’t have a regulatory influence on what happens in any one specific country.

Other than how that is harmonized throughout the entire EU, so that when they want to enact policies across the entire EU, Parliament, can vote to adopt recommendations from the European Commission and Parliament. If they do that, there’s, presume presumption of ratification by all the member states of the EU and therefore adoption of whatever policies are done at the EU level.

So that can happen. necessarily have an influence again if there are some of these permitting reforms that they were trying to enact that were going to be, you wide, those are things that are potentially in jeopardy at this point, again, also, In each member country, if there are permitting reforms, for example, that they were trying to adopt, the shift to the center right could slow down or stop those country level adoptions, irregardless of, even Poland.

Poland is. Going through a big discussion right now where they’re trying to reduce the setback from 1000 meters to 500, and it would open 41 plus gigawatts of wind energy and solar potential in the market. If they did that, but they, they have to be able to reduce those though and get those setback reductions approved.

If they’re going to adopt that, then, it opens up market potential, but, things shifting to the right a little bit throws that into question.

Allen Hall: Rosemary is the only one that lives underneath the parliamentary system. France just called for general elections, snap elections as it’s being described in the United States.

That’s not something we’re familiar with. We have elections every two years, generally every four years for president. So there’s a set schedule. When snap elections happen in a parliamentary system, Does that just destabilize the government temporarily? Does it, what does it do for investment? I’m just wondering if I want to do some offshore work in France right now, is that, this is, does it seem like the right time to do it?

Because it does seem like there’s going to be some significant change in the government structure.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t even know the exact amounts of time that it is in Australia, but it’s approximately every three years you have to have an election after a certain amount of time and you can’t have it earlier than a certain amount of time.

And so the government is always, the government has the advantage of getting to choose exactly when in that window that it will have an election. And yeah, they’re always choosing are they doing really well on their opinion polls early? Then let’s have an early election. And if they’re not, they’ll probably push it later.

We also do have another way to have an election outside of that cycle. Most countries probably do. If something really bad happens in Australia the trigger is if the government can’t get its budget passed, then, you And they try, I think it’s twice, then they can yeah, call a double disillusion election where, you know, like all of the, everything is spilled and up for grabs.

Yeah, so I I don’t know exactly how they do it in France. They’ll obviously be a caretaker period between when they announce the election and when the new government starts and how long is that in France? I don’t know.

Allen Hall: If Macron’s party took what they described in the U. S. as a beating in the European Parliament voting, it seems like they’re calling an election at a time of weakness, not of strength.

And I think you described it how I would think of it, is you want to call an election while you are strong, not weak, but Macron’s calling it when he seems to be the most weak he’s been in a couple of years. Why? What’s the play there?

Rosemary Barnes: The European elections feel very separate to the country elections, at least that’s my experience when I lived in Denmark, and sometimes something that happens with the European elections can cause a backlash against it in the next yeah.

The election of the, yeah, president or parliament or whatever it is that the individual countries are doing. So yeah it’s possible that they expecting something like that in France. The other thing is that, yeah, you wouldn’t want to call an election when you’re in a weak position, but if you see your position getting weaker and weaker as every day goes on, then earlier is still better.

Even if you’re currently weak, you better than waiting a year until you’re like really just. So yeah, it’s more to do with how they see the trend going over the next little while rather than where they’re specifically standing now.

Allen Hall: Phil, if Marine Le Pen has more of a say in French government, what does that mean for renewables?

Philip Totaro: Not good things because she’s come out years ago when she was trying to contest an election with Macron and said she wants to gut the renewables industry, particularly wind energy. Not a big fan. So that would be Although, to be honest, if she wins, her party is unlikely to get a significant majority so they’re still going to have to work together and they’re still going to be, opposition from people that are still pro renewables.

She’s very pro conventional power generation and nuclear wants to keep that going. And, at the end of the day, it’s, again, it’s going to destabilize investment and particularly foreign direct investment in France for the, especially with the offshore.

What would you even overthink about that election since they have operations in France? That is a complicated question because it comes at a time when, are they really going to maintain a significant footprint there anyway if they’re You know, are they going to keep LM? That’s an open question.

Are they going to sell off individual factories? Are they going to make those factories GE factories? I have, nobody knows actually at this point. So that is a big uncertainty at this stage.

Joel Saxum: Throw in there for these renewable companies that are based in France as well. We just talked about GE talk NG, EDF, there’s some big players over there.

French labor laws are not friendly to the company themselves. So that adds another layer of complexity into any kind of things that happen in the renewables industry over there.

Allen Hall: It’s an amazing turn of events because the United States, the European Parliament elections were not really discussed before they happened.

And now they’re a very frequent discussion on the news and on podcasts all across the states. It’s amazing how fast things turn. So the new PES Wind Magazine, speaking of Europe, has just arrived from the United Kingdom via the King’s Post, right? It’s not the Queen’s Post anymore, it’s the King’s Post.

Joel Saxum: That’s not Europe.

Allen Hall: Oh, sorry, Joel. It’s You’re right, but some part of the staff is working from France. I do know that. The new PES Wind magazine came out and I just received it. If you haven’t gotten your copy, just go to peswind.com and you can just read it online. This thing is full of really good articles.

The one I saw, I was looking through and I thought of Rosemary was this article by Hitachi Energy because they were discussing about HVDC and how that is going to get implemented wider and wider. And some of the government decisions and the policy and regulatory environment and interest rates are playing into things like Hitachi developing newer and newer systems.

And I thought, wow, this is, Really pertinent to a lot of discussions. We’ve had them on uptime over the last several weeks if you haven’t seen the new PES win magazine Go get it at peswind.com because it’s just full of great information Rosemary there’s been a big push in the United States to decarbonize cement factories And I think that push is happening all around the world And I know you’ve been doing a little more of a deep dive on it than I have Do you want to describe what is happening in the cement world?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah cement is last time I checked, it’s about 8 percent of global emissions, cement being the like glue that goes inside concrete. So everywhere you see concrete, then yeah, the, the main structural component to that is cement. And also that’s the main contribution to its emissions. And it’s, usually lumped in the, it’s always lumped in the hard to abate category of emissions because it’s not like decarbonizing electricity.

You can use renewables instead of fossil fuels and decarbonizing transport. A lot of that is just going to be swapping out electric cars for fossil fuel powered cars with cement. The emissions don’t mainly come from burning fossil fuels. 60 percent of the emissions actually process emissions because to make cement, you take calcium carbonate, which is limestone.

And you need to yeah, you need to turn that into lime. So you turn limestone into lime and the chemical reaction releases CO2. So it’s CO2 that’s been trapped underground in a fossil. Limestone is essentially fossilized sea creatures. And then you’ve got to release that CO2. And so it’s like a non negotiable part of that chemical reaction.

And cement isn’t the only thing that uses lime. Lime’s used in a lot of different industries, but anywhere that you have you turn limestone into lime, you’ve got CO2 that’s being released. And there’s just no way around that. The technologies that people are looking at to address this include carbon capture, that’s one of the simplest ideas.

And in fact, carbon capture is better suited to cement production than most other places where people were considering carbon capture because the CO2 is quite concentrated. Compared to how it is in in a fossil fuel power plant, usually the CO2 is only coming out, maybe 10, 15 percent of the flue gases are CO2.

So it needs to be concentrated and in the cement plant, it’s much higher. And I was actually recently a few weeks ago, I visited an Australian company, Calix who have a new kind of calciner, which is basically an oven or a kiln. that is used to make this reaction from limestone into lime.

And they’re doing it a bit differently instead of getting the, it needs about 900 degrees Celsius. And instead of getting that with a flame right in the middle next to the ground up raw meal, they’re heating it indirectly from they got a big metal tube. They heat it up from the outside to heat it hot enough that it starts to glow and radiate.

And then the material inside breaks down and the CO2 is released, but because you’re not burning something inside it it, it doesn’t get all mixed in with other stuff. You basically get a very close to completely pure CO2 stream coming out. So you don’t need separation technology. You just need to grab the CO2 and yeah, take it away.

Do something else with it. Yeah, so that’s one option, either traditional CCS or this kind of new CCS from Calix. And then there’s a few other technologies as well in play. Some American startups that are looking really interesting. There’s actually there might be Canadian. I can’t remember exactly, but say North American carbon cure, take CO2 that captured from somewhere else.

And then they use that in the in the concrete curing process, they add CO2. So it’s being sequestered and also improves the chemical properties. There’s another company called Sublime who are making something that is chemically identical to Portland cement, but it doesn’t ever start, it doesn’t start from limestone.

So it starts from materials that never had that CO2 to be released. So you can end up with something chemically identical without having to release any CO2. So that’s interesting. And then some of the biggest gains are going to be made with actually getting better at specifying how much cement we need to use.

Cause it’s, it’s such a cheap and versatile material. It’s, it’s everywhere. Everyone that lives in a city knows how ubiquitous concrete and cement are. But it’s often used in applications where you could use something else instead, or you could use less of it. So there’s a big push to, Yeah, to make sure that all the, I don’t know, building codes and civil codes around bridges and whatever are actually specifying performance rather than telling you exactly how that you’re going to make it and that, the aim is that you will be able to use less.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, has there, have there been demonstrator projects to evaluate these processes and materials?

Rosemary Barnes: Yes. Yeah the, so I was visiting Calix in their facility near Melbourne. So I saw the several stages of calciner, the, calciner is the word for the kind of furnace, oven, kiln, whatever you want to call it, big hot tube.

They’ve been through several different iterations and they have some projects in Europe now in traditional, existing cement manufacturing facilities where they are replacing bits of it at a time. So they’re already reducing emissions there. And the, yeah the cement that comes out the end is pretty good.

is identical. They do all the quality testing. So that’s pretty, pretty far advanced and ready for the scale up. It’s a cool technology because it’s very modular. They’ve got one, one size tube at the moment, and that’s, small scale in terms of the throughput of a traditional cement manufacturing facility.

But to scale up, they just need more of the same tube. They don’t need to, everything is the final size by now. So it will just be a matter of. Of rolling out more of them. Yeah, so that’s pretty cool.

Allen Hall: When do you think you’ll, we’ll see wind turbine foundations using these new processes and materials?

Rosemary Barnes: I haven’t seen anybody that has actually commented on the procurement of concrete.

You could have it immediately. I think one reason why it might not be as fast as you might think, cause it sounds obvious, right? Like a wind turbine manufacturer, of course they should, they’re really worried about their supply chain and everything. A lot of them have net zero commitments.

They’ve been through all their factories and sourced renewable electricity and all that sort of thing. But the way that wind farms are rolled out, usually the foundation is done by a local engineering company. It’s not the wind turbine manufacturer that does it. And so the emissions from it aren’t on their books necessarily.

They’re not on the wind turbine manufacturers books. Maybe the developer or the owner of it would care in the end, but there is a bit of a separation there that probably doesn’t make it as early a target. But it’s one of my hopes for the industry for, yeah, for concrete, but also for other materials like steel, I would love to see government support these new technologies that are needed by procuring the green alternatives, because in, I don’t know, everything that I’ve looked at, there are green alternatives, they cost more, sometimes a lot more, sometimes just a little bit more.

But the way that technologies get cheaper and by where that, that what Bill Gates calls a green premium, the amount of extra costs that you have to add on top for a green version of something compared to a fossil fuel version. The way that shrinks is by having more and more of that product rolling out.

And, in terms of concrete, like that’s, governments are one of the biggest procurers of that. You’ve got to think of all the urban concrete that’s out there. And footpaths sidewalks I don’t know, bridges def, defense. Yeah. It’s just there’s a real opportunity to make a difference if they would start procuring that way.

And it’s easier than forcing it on, private companies who usually don’t like to be told what to do. Yeah, I would say that’s the that’s a big opportunity actually to support these new technologies, which exist. In a lot of cases, cement’s never, it’s never going to be like, like wind energy is cheaper than, a coal power plant and in most places or electric cars are also going to be one day cheaper than buying a petrol car.

Cement with carbon capture is never going to be cheaper than just letting it out into the atmosphere. But the, so it’s always going to be an economic challenge to actually, you have to want to do it. It’s not just going to, the technology won’t take care of itself. So it is going to need some government support.

And I think that’s a, yeah, that’s a really way, good way to support it and get that green premium to shrink as fast as possible.

Joel Saxum: You’re onto something there though. Definitely Rosemary, like in the United States. A lot of these big heavy highway projects so if you’re building a residential home and there’s a crew and we’re pouring concrete, if we pour 20 or 30 yards in a day for a floor and maybe 20, 30 yards for walls or something, that’s a big pour, 40, 50 yards a day that’s massive for a residential construction crew.

Go to a heavy highway project. And they’re pouring thousands of yards a day. That money comes from the government to pay for all those things. So if they, if there’s a place that you want to get to an economy of scale, then those projects could be that, that Trojan horse to get some of this stuff to reduce the cost.

Because if you’re repaving like a, a highway, chunk of a highway from say Austin to San Antonio, there’s hundreds of thousands of yards of concrete there more than they’ll pour. for years in that area. So there’s a vehicle there for it.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so too. For steel as well.

All sorts of things. I would much rather see a government supporting in that way than, some of the other support mechanisms that they have chosen.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, you had a video. A couple of months ago, if I remember correctly, that was talking about reducing emissions from cement.

And since you have visited this factory, are you going to have a new video coming out about it?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. There’s I’ve just got the nearly final edit from from my editor and because he’s European, he’s about to go off on holidays for three weeks. The final version will come out after that.

Allen Hall: That’ll be interesting. So everybody just check out Engineering with Rosie. You’ll see the factory tour and how we’re going to decarbonize cement. That’s fascinating. Thanks, Rosemary.

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Allen Hall: Joel, when we were down in Oklahoma and Texas, one of the things we noticed was the integration of multiple kinds of renewables plenty of solar facilities, a ton of wind, you saw battery storage, you saw data centers, you, we saw all of it gas pipelines being put in still, all energy sources are on the table down in Texas.

But it does seem like the combo of solar and wind on the same plot of land or nearby, not the situation at the moment. Is that something that’s coming up? It does seem like an obvious choice. If you have a wind development site, you have room for some solar. And what are the limitations that prevent people from doing that?

Joel Saxum: It just makes sense, right? There’s numerous benefits for co-locating energy production systems or energy storage systems. You’ve already procured the land. You’re already dealing with those landowners on permits. You’re already have interconnection there. You’ve already developed the roads and pads. There’s so many cost saving mechanisms here that it’s amazing that this hasn’t been more of a thing.

Some people say, if you read a lot of articles online or looking through some of the national lab stuff, some people are pointing at subsidies for saying, this is why we haven’t seen a lot of these things co located or hybridized together because we didn’t need to. Because the subsidies took care of some of the cost balance things, and didn’t force developers to basically optimize the financial models for these things.

What you’re starting to see a lot more of these come online or at least be in pipelines and be planned. So there’s a couple of things to consider here as well. Co located and hybrid are two different things. So co-located would be like, if I have battery storage, you. And I have wind on the same site, but they’re not connected at whatsoever.

They’re just into the same interconnect and we’ve saved some money by developing them, but a hybrid power plant would be if there’s coordinated operations of the sub components of them.

Allen Hall: Does the financial model look better, Phil, when you throw battery onto a wind site? Does it make economic sense to do it, or are we not in the place like Europe is right now?

We have net, or Australia, where there’s negative pricing in the States.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, you even mentioned at the top of the show, Germany, seeing, or even, Spain and a few other markets in Europe that are facing negative pricing. This is becoming a little more common because of an increase in curtailments that is a natural consequence of adding more variable power generation from renewables to the grid.

Now, you can balance the grid during, the middle of the day with solar and, evening, nighttime, and early morning with wind typically, because we know wind drops off a little bit during the middle of the day. But that’s the whole point of having solar there to pick up. But batteries are becoming much more prominent in places where people want to be able to do energy arbitrage.

And that’s for us in the United States. That’s the Southwest Power Pool and ERCOT and a little bit in, in California as well. Where we’ve seen, periods of negative pricing out here too. But it’s starting to become more commonplace and to go back to your earlier question of why isn’t this necessarily happening everywhere it’s happening where they need to grid smooth or time shift first, but it’s probably going to become more prominent.

I don’t know that every single, wind farm or solar park necessarily needs to have on site co located, or hybrid system, where again, it’s, integrated into the same substation or it’s, even companies like GE and Siemens have investigated putting the little batteries on the turbines themselves just part of the electrical connection.

The question now is You know, we have a lot of storage in the interconnection pipeline as well. And at the end of the day, megawatts or megawatts, it’s just a question of, do you want to be able to produce from power generation, store them in the battery and deploy later, or do you want to be able to.

Just produce your megawatts and produce your electrons and feed that in. It basically comes down to much more sophisticated grid studies that are going to be necessary from the regional ISOs and, anyone else that serves as a, an energy regulator from that perspective.

Allen Hall: So if interconnects are the problem in trying to get an interconnect so you can plug into the grid, why would you not put storage on your site? Because the regulator doesn’t really care what the generation source is, right? It seems If I have a wind site, why would I not, especially in Texas, why would I not be putting storage there?

Philip Totaro: For the most part, yes, there are some technical challenges that I don’t think we have time to get into. And I’m also probably not the most sophisticated expert on the actual battery storage technology to be able to say, how they need to be integrated. But the, at the end of the day, the.

The storage that’s being deployed is usually being deployed hybrid with solar just because of the need to be able to time shift away from the middle of the day where, COVID really caused a lot of shifting patterns in. Electricity consumption demand. We now have with what everybody typically refers to is this duck curve.

We’ve got it in California. They’ve got it down in Australia. As well where you just have this, bit of a peak in the morning dip in the middle of the day. Where people are now, just not consuming as much electricity as they used to, they’re not in the office, they’re not in the house, they go out in the middle of the day, whatever.

And then, late in the afternoon and throughout the evening, there’s a huge spike again. So we need that storage to be able to time shift. We need that storage hybridized or co located. With solar to be able to time shift the the power generation to meet demand wind. It’s a little it’s a little more challenging, because we have a much longer, potentially much longer duration of storage that we’d require because you’re talking about from, 67 PM at night until about 67 PM in the morning.

Is when you have your, ramp up and peak wind and then your ramp down again. But in order to get that wind that’s being produced overnight, time shifted to, 7, 8, 9 o’clock in the morning when the demand is there. You need storage technology that may or may not be capable of time shifting that long.

Normally a lot of these things can only do 3, 4 hours, 5 hours. Starting to talk about doing 12 hours worth of time shifting for, megawatts. We’re talking about hundreds of, potentially hundreds of megawatts. That requires a much different system design. And frankly, a much different business case than what everyone is, has necessarily explored at this point.

Allen Hall: Joel, let me ask you about the data centers we saw in Texas and how prevalent they are and the fact that I’ve read a couple of articles more recently saying the data centers cannot really live on renewable energy because they cannot go down. Those data centers have to continue running. So they’re talking about now putting in natural gas, yeah, peaker plants to keep those data centers up and running.

Does it, first of all, that doesn’t make any sense. I understand what they’re trying to do, but it doesn’t make any sense. But is the demand so high that’s going to be the outcome? That they’re going to be putting in natural gas peaker plants just to keep the, your Apple iPhone running?

Rosemary Barnes: But it’s not the, it’s not the data centers that are saying we need gas peaker plants.

It’s the I don’t know what the system is set up like, but is that, yeah, the grid operator is saying, Oh I’ve heard that AI, I have heard that AI is a thing. And so we’re going to need all this new demand and it can only be done by gas picker plants. And partially because they have left it so late to think about adding new capacity that the only, they can only go for the fastest yeah, the fastest option.

And also what they. And also what they already know. So I, I have seen a lot more cynical takes on it than that, that, they want to guess pica plants and have reverse engineered for, why that should be, but I’ve seen some really creative solutions being suggested for for data centers.

The growth of. Power is not as much as you would expect from data centers. We are still adding new data centers and that’s new loads, but the increased computational requirements for AI have been offset by improved efficiencies with the, within the, yeah the chips are doing more for more calculations for less energy now.

And. AI, AI algorithms are getting better at yeah, just, more efficient at doing the same things, but also not all like when you think of a data center, you’re thinking, Oh, when I send an email or I want to pull something off the cloud, or I want to do a Google search, it has to happen exactly when I want it.

But with AI, like a lot of the energy is spent training new data sets and. That’s for any company that has an idea for a new AI product that they want, it’s like a huge cost that they’re going to have to pay for all that number crunching essentially. And there are companies now that are saying, okay you can If you want to buy this data, these data services from us, it’s really cheap between 10 AM and 2 PM and the rest of the time it’s really expensive.

And for companies that are cost conscious, they’re like, Oh, okay, I can, save a huge amount on my development costs by doing my anything that can be shifted to those hours. I will. And so I think that. People are in the early stages of this AI boom, and it sounds in some ways similar to, I remember when the, the internet was becoming a thing and everyone’s Oh my God, we’re going to need, this many new power plants to supply all the extra energy for the internet.

But actually, electricity usage has been pretty flat over the period since the internet, even though, people were right that the internet was a big thing and everybody is using it. So I think that, yeah, things that people are going from, like a tiny little bit of information and making huge extrapolations far into the future when things will be very different.

And we’re not they’re doing it in the way that’s imagine if. This was a worst case scenario. And we generated electricity in the stupidest possible way and that we use the electricity in the stupidest possible way, then we would need this much. But it turns out that, in a capitalist society, there’s a lot of people whose company was the company’s success will depend on them not doing things in the stupidest possible way.

And nothing’s going to turn out in this worst case scenario that people foresee at the very earliest days of a

Allen Hall: I guess you haven’t met Microsoft, Rosemary.

Rosemary Barnes: I didn’t say the smartest way. I said not the stupidest way.

Allen Hall: That’s what I’m saying. Have you met Microsoft?

Joel Saxum: Taking all these things into consideration, there’s another thing that battery storage does that people don’t regularly think of, right?

They just think of like energy storage. However, the majority of the battery’s usage on the grid is for normalizing frequencies when power sources are coming up, down, or demand gets spiked, or demand goes low, because that’s how you need to even these things out, right? Say, take the ERCOT grid.

The ERCOT grid is becoming more and more reliant on renewables, which are You know, solar coming online, power coming offline, and you have different frequencies and different, the grid being built out. And basically it was built out in a non smart way, getting smarter now, but to normalize these frequencies, you need that storage as well.

So now if you’re implementing new power generation facilities, Why not put that grid frequency, basically levelizer, right on site where the power coming off of that site is intelligently managed before it even hits the grid. I think that’s another value add for adding storage systems to any renewables.

So it goes, it also goes to show here, there’s, I have some numbers in front of me. This is from a report from 2020, end of 2022. So these numbers are now 18 months old. However, at that point in time. Utility scale, solar plus storage. There was 213 plants in the United States for a total capacity of 12 gigawatts.

And wind plus storage at that point in time, there was only 14 plants in the entire United States that had those combined. And if you go wind plus solar plus storage. So like the trifecta that was only five plants in all of the United States, and that was for like less than 700 megawatts.

It hasn’t been adopted at a huge rate, but it’s looking to be like smart investment and smart build out. We’ll see more of this in the future. Invenergy’s Purple Skies project in southwest Minnesota is going to move forward. They’ve been working on this thing for three to four years now. And it’s as a pseudo replacement for the Sherco coal plant shutting down in Becker, Minnesota I’ve actually lived not too far from that for a little while went to school in St.

Cloud So I know that one. Xcel Energy is huge in this area So Xcel Energy is actually building a new 345 kV line and this project the Purple Skies project will be connected to that Invenergy even opened a regional office in Marshall, Minnesota. So this wind farm facility You Is going to be down by Lake Benton, Lake, by the Lake Benton Wind Farms.

If if you’ve been in the wind industry for a while, the Lake Benton Wind Farms have been along for a long time. They’ve got some Zond Z50 machines, I think from 1998 or something’s installed on those farms. So this one is neighbors to that. So in that area, there’s a geographical feature called the Buffalo Ridge.

And it is a nice high Ridge with a lot of good wind resource. Lateral is wind. Blow there heavily, but it blows regularly and consistent. So it is a very large project. Eventually that’s ultimate goal is to be a thousand megawatts in three phases. It’s across 110, 000 acres. They’re still in the middle of permitting and getting all the permissions for this but they are going to start the first phase, which will be two to 250 megawatts in 2026.

Good thing here, Southwest, Minnesota, a lot of farmers but the locals are used to energy and they’re welcoming the project. Good. So the last thing to think about here is the purple skies project in Minnesota. Is this a tip of the hat to Prince’s purple rain being close to his hometown? Maybe, but we’ll never know.

Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. And please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribing in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, and also subscribe to Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie.

And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.