256: Props to Canada – Building Wind Turbines

 On today’s episode of still to be determined, we’re giving big props to Canada. Well, we’re not giving them, in fact, they’re buying them. Anyway, they’re building wind farm. So we’re going to talk about that. We’re also going to talk about our previous episode. Hi everybody. Welcome to still to be determined.

This is of course the followup podcast to Undecided with Matt Ferrell, which takes a look at emerging tech and its impact on our lives. For the last time, I am not Matt Ferrell. I am his older brother, Sean. I’m a writer. I write some sci fi and I write some stuff for kids. And I’m just generally curious about technology.

Luckily for me, my brother is that Matt from the aforementioned Undecided. And as always, he is lurking here with me, even now, lurking in the background. Hi Matt, how are you today? I’m doing pretty well. How about yourself? I’m doing okay. We’ve got a little bit. We’re not gonna talk about the weather today.

No, we’re not going to do it, but we are going to talk about stars. The sun, she is higher in the sky. She is in the sky longer. We are about, if my math is correct, a little past halfway to getting to spring. Yes. And yes, I cannot tell you how the spring, it cannot arrive soon enough. I need daylight. I need sunshine.

I need, I said I wasn’t going to talk about the weather and I’m not, but yes, I’d like to put away my winter coat. Well, to relate it to our topics that we typically talk about. I always like February because my solar production goes like through the roof because the sun is getting high enough now where it’s like starting to make a difference again.

So it’s like, I like the pun there unintended. I could tell solar production going through the roof. That’s right. So, as we always like to do, we like to visit your comments on our previous episode. And of course, the last episode that was released was episode 255. Matt, can you believe it’s been 2 55? I can’t wrap my head around that.

Do the math. That’s practically five years.

What are we doing? Five years, imagine if we had started this when we were kids, oh my God.

What would we have been talking about? We were probably like star Wars, star Trek, much like our other podcasts. We’d be talking about star Trek. Anyway, episode 255. This was one in which Matt had shared his conversation with Dr. Ramin Mehdipour and Professor Seamus Garvey. Both from the university of Nottingham about their research into ice source heat pumps that of course is a phrase that as you say it your brain is simultaneously directing your mouth to say those words in that order ice source heat pumps and another part of your brain, possibly even larger than the first part, is going that doesn’t make sense. But yes, let’s make the heat by using the ice.

That’s what they’re doing. And quite a few comments on this one that were along the lines of, okay. Yeah. Okay. Research get it. Scientists like to answer questions. Scientists like to say, well, if I pull the do hickey and put it in the, what’s it, does it make a thingamabob? And then somebody is like, we’ve got the results.

We have thingamabob. But a lot of people are like, uh, useful, it starts to raise the question of what’s the application. So, yeah, before we get into some of the most specific comments about this one, I’m curious about Matt, your feelings about this one. I know that right now. Application of this kind of technology is probably not something that anybody can draw a direct line between this use case and this tech say like, ah, here’s where we could use it.

Or is there, what do you think? Well, they’re what they’re proposing and to clarify, they’re engineers. So they’re not like playing around with some theoretical physics problem that they’re just showing, Hey, this actually works. It’s like a, no, this is an engineering problem. Can we, can we solve the engineering issues to make this a practical solution?

That’s what they’re doing. And they’re proposing this for use in the UK. Like they’re actually proposing this to replace natural gas cheaply and efficiently in the UK. So They’re saying it is I have I have doubts, but it’s one of those it doesn’t matter in my mind for why I’m interested in this It’s like it’s as fascinating to me that there’s some counterintuitive things at play here with. That when you freeze ice at the freezing point, you actually have a higher, you know, like ratio of heat energy output at that moment.

So they’re capitalizing on like the whole science around what they’re doing It’s just fascinating and if they can pull this off, it’s gonna be pretty astounding I don’t I honestly don’t think they will pull it off completely because I don’t think they’re gonna be able to get the UK government to sign on to like to do this and if they did do it it’d have to be in a very small pilot study but it’s one of those. I I’m kind of like in the corner kind of rooting for them like maybe they can do this, but I think it’s kind of a long shot, but it’s still fascinating to kind of learn, why it potentially works and I’m actually putting together a full undecided video, to dive deeper on this to explain some more of the details of the science, that goes beyond the conversations I had with them. Again I’m not advocating this as a my personal opinion is I’m advocating for this as oh, this is the solution Checkbox, we’re done.

It’s more of just a kind of geeking out on the science of like, wow, that kind of makes my brain hurt thinking you can use the heat from ice, making ice to make a heat pump, actually make your home warm enough to live in in the winter. It’s so cool. That is so cool. Pun intended. Yeah. Well, that goes in line with comment from Baba Rudra.

Who says, very cool, ha, it’s an interesting idea and I get where they’re coming from, but I’ll admit that I’m a bit skeptical that this would be an economically viable solution. It seems to my possibly limited mind that you’d be putting a lot more energy into the system than say electric baseboard or heat pumps, but maybe that’s why I’m not Dr. Babarudra.

I mean, that kind of like, it’s, it’s in parallel to what you just said. Yeah. You are not putting more energy into the system. I mean, it’s still a heat pump where it’s like the amount of energy you’re putting the system, you’re getting more heat energy out of it. It’s not going to be, and they were upfront about this.

It’s not as efficient as like what I have in my house was a, which I have a geothermal ground source heat pump system, not even close to that. And an air source heat pump system versus this is a little closer as far as efficiency. But the whole reason that you’d want this over an air source heat pump system is for an air source heat pump system.

You have to have put that gigantic like fan thing on the outside of your building. It’s the condenser unit, all that kind of stuff. This bypasses all of that. So it’s like, there’s a, from a, a cost to put it into place. It’s much cheaper than trying to roll out per unit air source heat pumps. Um, so that’s kind of their pitch is like.

This is the most economical way to very quickly transition people over to heat pump technology. So counterintuitive? Yeah. But it’s, it definitely just put out more energy than you put into it, which is still bonkers to me. It is. It is strange. It’s hard to wrap your head around. I can’t help it. When I see tech like this talked about the sci fi writer part of my brain says, okay, a space station.

Where you have a rotating ring of some sort that has these around the ring. And as each part of the ring eventually rotates to face the sun, it would warm up. And then as it rotates away, it would cool back down. And you have these in that ring so that as they rotate away from the sun, they cool there’s freezing of something inside that wall, which then generates heat pump energy into the station.

Like I could, I can’t help, but look at this and say, okay, they’re already sounding like sci fi. So what’s the sci fi application here? I can’t, I can’t get away from that kind of thinking. Well, to me, that’s like the only place where I can say like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

In the conversation with Dr. Medhipour, he brought up how it was, it was outside of the scope of this conversation, but they, they were talking about how once you have the ice, there’s other things that you can do with that ice to get use out of it again. So it’s not like. In this, in the system that we’re proposing now, just imagine that it’s like you get this slushy that comes out the end and then you just kind of try to shuttle that away and it melts back into water, then just kind of evacuate somewhere.

He was talking about how like you in a system, they’re also doing research around, okay, now you have the slush, that’s basically ice. We’ll hold onto it as ice and you can reuse that for like cooling systems and things like that where it’s like a super, super computer or something like that. Right. So you reuse it again for some kind of cooling and in that using it for cooling, it remelts into water that could, you know, it’s like he’s thinking of like, Oh, you use it in this way when it turns into ice and use it this other way when it’s ice going back into water.

So he’s like thinking about these different approaches where you’re getting like you’re double dipping into it, which. Again, I just love this stuff of engineers see a problem and then it’s immediately like, well, I think I can solve that. Ooh, I think I can do this too. It’s like, I just love the way engineers think about the problems in our world around us and how they can figure out how to fix it.

Taking what you just said and adding it onto what I said, I’m now envisioning the space station and it’s heating and cooling. And then in one of the astronauts is like. I could really go for a refreshment and then it goes over to a slushie machine and it’s just like, it doesn’t have any flavor. A big cherry slurpee.

It doesn’t have any flavor, but it sure tastes like science.

There was one other comment I wanted to share. This one from DragonsGhost who wrote, instead of ice, why not some sort of water brine so that it can go to a colder temperature without freezing? Saltwater concentrate from desalination maybe. An ice slurry just has so many potential problems with clogging.

Is there some kind of additional layer to the research that goes in this direction where it’s not so much let’s make ice as let’s go with super cold water as salt water can actually go below the freezing temperature of pure water. But that’s where it gets that unintuitive part. It’s like they actually want to hit that freezing point.

It’s all about the phase change. Like when a material. Changes phases, that’s what they’re playing with. So they actually want it to go into that freezing point. So if you go use salt water, you’re sidestepping that. And then once you go in that path, that you’re talking about almost like a typical heat pump, like you’re using some kind of antifreeze kind of thing.

So it’s like, or propane, you know, as your liquid in the system, like whatever it is, you’re trying to find things that won’t freeze up and can get you to the temperature ranges that you want to perform at. So it’s like, it’s. It’s that’s what the whole part about it that makes it so counterintuitive. They want to hit that phase change.

So putting salt in it wouldn’t really, uh, solve the problem. On that note I’d like to, uh, suggest that I’m looking forward to Matt’s new T shirt. It’s all about that phase change. On now to our conversation about Matt’s most recent. This is of course, the hidden work behind wind energy. This is his most recent episode in which he shared video of himself visiting a site in Saskatchewan, Canada, where they were putting up pretty enormous fan blades. Yes, they were. A pretty ridiculous shot of a truck hauling a blade and trying to make a left turn on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. And when I, for those of you who haven’t watched the video, if you want to see a whole lot of nowhere, check out the video, there are some shots of guys in hard hats pointing and laughing and having a great time standing out there looking at these turbines and you’re like, there’s nothing around you.

You’re not near anything. So Matt, do you want to talk a little bit about the trip? What was the trip like overall? Just like logistically and time timeline wise, like how did this all come together? How long was the trip for you?

The trip was over a course of a few days that for me to do this and it happened last summer. It took me a while to put this together and get it out the door for the video, but it happened last summer and. It was just a, like, I knew somebody who knew somebody essentially, um, there was a photographer that I’ve become friends with Andrew, uh, who has a business called awesome photography. And I’ve had dealings with him in the past and he lets me know about, like, I’m doing a job on this thing.

And he’s like, I got hired by this company to do photos of this, these wind turbines. And so he introduced me to some people at RES had a couple of phone calls with them. I was like, I’d love to come out and got approval to kind of come out. So I flew myself out there and. Talking about in the middle of nowhere.

This part of Canada is gorgeous, Sean. I mean, it is absolutely gorgeous out there. But there’s nobody out there. I flew in the place I flew into, I can’t remember where it was, what airport I flew into, but I flew in and then I had like a two and a half hour drive or two hour drive just to get to the hotel I was staying at, which was on the, was on the reservation.

And it was a casino hotel and driving there, I landed and I was driving there at sunset and saw the most beautiful sunset, you know, as I’m driving away from the city where the airport was. And then I started getting into more and more remote areas. And then the road was like, just as pin straight as you can imagine.

And you look to your left, it’s farmland. You look to your right and it’s farmland as far as you can see. And it’s now getting dark. And now it’s like 10 o’clock at night and 1030 at night. And I just, I feel like if my car breaks down right now, I’m screwed because I’m not passing any cars. I’m not seeing any other cars.

I am so like in the middle of nowhere, I got a little alarmed at night, but this whole process took about, I don’t know, it was like three or four days. Um, I went there, stayed in this nice little, uh, Community. Had to drive another 45 minutes from that community to get to where the wind farm was being built and they were super gracious with me.

Um, I was really impressed how RES kind of just like, welcome to be in and, uh, Chad Serafin, who was the kind of project manager who took me around everywhere. He was like, he was awesome. Like, he just. Super welcoming. They let me do whatever I wanted. They were like, what do you want to see now? Do you want to see this?

Okay, let’s go see that there was no restrictions for what they let me do. Um, I even got to sit in on some of the meetings that they had where the workers came in that they called a pod meeting. Where they, it’s like a standup. I used to do this at my day job, like in the morning, you have this 10 minute standup.

It’s like, what did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? Are there any challenges you have to deal with? And it just goes around the room. And it was like, I got to sit on this pod meeting and hear like all the different people and what they’re doing. But it was just a really fun kind of behind the scenes I never expected to get. And this is one of those things for me. The life of a YouTuber is weird. It’s like it’s opened up doors that you would think is not possible. I’ve seen things that I just. I just feel that you can’t unsee that far, but the fact that it’s like the fact that I got to see this, I just feel very kind of like honored that I was able to see this and get access to this. And I really appreciate what, uh, RES let me do.

Yeah, it’s very, it’s very cool that you just by following your curiosity and turning your curiosity into a channel, that curiosity has then been rewarded with some insider moments to directly answer those questions and that curiosity you have. I think that is really wonderful.

And so I’m, I’m from that perspective, I’m super excited for you for those opportunities for, for companies like this, to reach out to you. Some of the questions around this video involved, not so much questions as much of sharing of personal background. Some people who have actually been involved in building wind farms, including wind farms in this part of Canada, uh, jumped into the comments. But there was this one that stood out to me from Tellerman regarding biomimicry. Tellerman writes, I still remember when the idea of putting the serrations on the trailing edge of a windmill blade was being discussed as a potential innovation based on observations of an owl’s wing and how the scraggly feathers on the trailing edge break up vortices and allow them to fly silently.

I love to see the biomimicry in action. Fascinating relationship to Like, oh, this is what happens over here, and maybe we can apply that idea over here. Uh, is there anything else either in the wind farm technology or in any of your research, in any of the things you’ve looked into where you’ve recognized a biomimicry aspect to, oh, we’ve taken this thing that exists in nature and we’ve figured out a way to apply it over here in this new technology?

Yeah, um, there’s a solar panel tech, like there’s organic solar cells that are commonly being used for like, um, transparent solar for like a window. Um, there’s a lot of the organic solar cells that’s mimicking how plants do photosynthesis, which is like so cool. This is like, my brain hurt. It’s so, so cool.

Uh, a good friend of mine. I was, Ryan who runs the channel Ziroth. He helped me with the Yoshino battery video. He just put out a video like literally this week, just a couple of days ago about a, uh, bladeless, uh, propeller, like system for like boats. There’s no blades that turn. And what it’s doing is it’s the, the researchers are mimicking uh, bell jellyfish, how a bell jellyfish like undulates. And so just imagine a donut, like a, um, a rubber kind of like donut next to the mech of the metal donut. And it just undulates in and out and it’s mimicking that jellyfish kind of system. Interesting. It almost sounds to me like it’s doing the same sort of thing that a mister humidifier does, with the small plate at the bottom that vibrates and vibrates molecules up through the chamber and it turns into it looks like steam, but it’s actually water droplets. So it’s that’s that’s crazy. That’s fascinating. Yeah, so it’s this stuff is kind of bubbling up. Like I’m seeing it in solar panels.

Ryan’s seeing it in these propeller motor jet like designs. Um, so early days, is it going to actually turn into something? But the fact that more and more researchers and scientists are looking to nature to figure out, oh, why does that work? Can we do that in a mechanical way? Um, there’s companies that have figured out how to, um, like the foot of a gecko, how it’s able to climb up a wall, have mimicked how that works and the channel Veritasium has a fantastic video about that and how they’ve created these robotic, Like, limbs that can like literally climb a wall just like a gecko by mimicking that what they’ve seen in nature. You’re going to see this more and more over the coming years. Um, I don’t know.

I find this endlessly fascinating. I love that. Uh, I believe it’s three M. Has something similar to the gecko foot pad tech in the form of pads that you put on your eyeglasses to keep them from sliding down the bridge of your nose. And I believe they call it their gecko tech and it’s little tiny filaments that look like little tiny little tiny hooks that don’t hurt.

You put them on and then your glasses are not supposed to slide down your face. There was this comment from Victor Benner, who pointed out that he used to be a long haul truck driver, and he says, I used to transport embedment rings for the towers, crucial foundation parts. It was amazing how, as time passed, the towers kept getting bigger and bigger.

If you go to another farm check, check out If you can see just how much concrete is in the ground, it’s a mountain of material. I delivered in both the United States and Canada. They were all great, but the safety levels were definitely better in Canada. And as far as bird kill rates at wind farms, one of the additional benefits of the larger towers was that there are fewer bird impacts compared to the smaller towers that spun at higher speeds.

One farm I delivered to in British Columbia had a unique problem with local wildlife. Bears grizzly bears. Everyone have a great day. Thank you so much Victor. I liked the idea that yeah, bird kill gets better the higher you go. Yeah. And the slower moving you go. It kind of does make sense when you think about like, okay, you give the birds like large number of birds are not going to be flying super, super high and you combine that with, well, if you make the blades move a little bit slower, it’s going to give them a chance to adjust better to, Those things as a potential threat. What other things do you know about that they’re doing to keep, uh, animal impact and wildlife impact to a minimum in this kind of wind farm?

I’ve read about systems that, uh, Do a noise just keeps people keeps a wildlife away like you as a human can’t hear it, but animals can. Another one that’s super simple and it’s crazy like really that’s all you have to do you paint one of the blades black, that’s it. It’s just because it’ll that difference allows a bird who’s seeing in kind of like a high contrast It stands out and they understand. Oh, I got to stay away from that thing and they kind of avoid it. As you pointed out The higher you go, the less of these impacts you have, which also kind of leans into the number of animals that are killed by turbines like this is.

It’s not that it doesn’t happen. It’s just grossly overblown. And it’s one of those, it’s when you look at the numbers and then you put it in context, it’s like, Oh, it’s bad, but it’s not like that bad. We put up with, Oh, we’re killing deer and things that cross our highways. Yeah. Not great. We should do something about that.

You hear people say, Oh, it’s killing birds on wind turbines, but yet nobody talks about all the deer that get killed by cars. It’s just like. Cherry picking information, cherry picking facts, um, and also newness. I imagine there’s a newness aspect. It’s like you grow up like we did and you knew about the death of deer or other animals on the highways just because from a very early age we were exposed to it.

And then this technology is more new. So the change becomes the news. It’s the, yeah. There are these animals that are being killed by this new technology. That’s not great. Let’s stop that. So I think that there’s a newness aspect that plays into it. But at the same time, we shouldn’t be building things that do that.

If we can avoid it, like we should find ways to mitigate it. So it’s like, we do need to find a way to start a war against the birds. I, yeah, there’s a film by Hitchcock that explains why we shouldn’t do that. But this comment from PSN Jimmy. Struck me as interesting when he wrote, it’s funny that the location is specifically chosen because it’s windy and then they are lifting the blades up on cranes, trying to move them really accurately for assembly.

Very impressive. Yeah. Jimmy, you’re not wrong. I thought the exact same thing. I’m like, well, you need, you can’t build this where it’s not windy, but how do you build it where it is? What’s funny is I had a conversation, it was off camera with Chad. Was, we were at one of the build sites where they were getting ready to load up the nacelles and stuff like that to get it up.

And we, as we were waiting for that to happen, Chad was having a conversation with the onsite person that was actually doing the work about the different wind turbines they’ve built. Oh yeah, I’ve, I did the vestus, blah, blah, blah, and I did this thing from like, they were talking about all the different brands of turbines they’ve all dealt with, and then they started rattling off the way each one of them handles stabbing the blades in.

And they all do it in radically different ways. And they were like, one of them was saying, I’m not going to name brands here, but they were basically saying, well, this brand sucks because it’s like the hardest one to put the blades in because they, they didn’t think through how you’re gonna have to do it.

And it takes like so long and so much effort to get it in there. And then this brand is amazing. You don’t even have to go in horizontally. You just go in from the bottom and it’s like, you just kind of lift it up and then it goes right into place. It’s like butter and like boom, boom, boom, boom, you got all three on there.

It’s like, it takes like a couple hours to get all the blades on. And then they were talking about the ones that at this site, they were like, this one’s pretty good, too. It’s a little more difficult because you’re going horizontally, but it’s much better than the other one. It was it was really funny to hear them rattle through all the stuff they’ve had to deal with, depending because every company does it different.

And there are definitely it sounds like brands of wind turbines that are not just well engineered, but they were engineered in a way to speed up production of. Right. Putting them in there and then also maintaining them. And then others were just like, let’s just make the best wind turbine we can. And they didn’t think through of the logistics of how you actually put it together.

Yeah. So it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating to me that there’s these kinds of like, they’re not a universal way that built. So my video shows just one of the many ways that turbines are put together. In a weird way, it plugs in at a very, very different scale to the right to repair conversation that we’ve had so many times.

Yeah. It really does kind of like, Oh yeah, this is a wind turbine. What do you do if it breaks? You’re kind of out of luck. Yeah. You’re kind of out of luck. You’re going to need to buy a new wind turbine as opposed to, yeah, we’re trying to build a thing that you’re going to be able to maintain over time and keep it working efficiently without having to reinvest from the very starting point.

Two last comments here. One from big fins who just wanted to share that. Yes, wind turbines can even be built in rugged mountainous terrain. Big Fins writes, I hosted a Bechtel Corp project manager who oversaw their first wind project in West Virginia. I got a great site tour. This was in rugged Appalachian mountains, which made transit and construction extra difficult.

I, I mean, hats off to all the people who are endeavoring to put in sustainable energy production wherever possible in conditions that would not be considered easy or logistically easy. And, you know, we just now have had a conversation about Matt had to drive for basically, hundreds of miles to get to a remote location that’s flat as a pancake, where the biggest issue for those trucks was, well, we got to make this left hand turn on this dirt road in the middle of nowhere.

I cannot imagine what this is like for those places where it’s mountainous, where. There is no, well, we’re going to design the road so that that left hand turn is easier. It’s, Oh, we’ve got the road we’ve got. And I’m wondering if in your research, you’ve seen any of those locations where the logistics are, Oh my God, why did they pick here? Other than the fact that there was no other choice.

Well, that does play into it. Like when they’re planning these out, they’re doing not just. Mapping of like, which has the best wind consistently over X amount of time, how much can it actually produce in this location, but they’re also factoring in, can we even build it this location as part of the whole logistics, which leads to, I’ve talked about this on other videos, airships, one of the reasons that airships have become kind of like back in the public consciousness again, and companies are chasing it is some of them are talking about, they can deliver wind turbine parts to wherever you want, like logistics kind of goes out the way of like, you just take it to this airport, you load it onto a blimp, the blimp goes to exactly the location you want to drop and drops right on site. You don’t have to worry about roads. You don’t have to worry about driving it through, uh, cities and doing narrow like bridge problems.

None of that. It all goes away. Being a helicopter. Yeah. Yeah. And then there’s a company that’s actually designed a plane that can land on like a dirt strip. Like, so it basically like if you’re in the middle of nowhere, no problem, we can still land this plane there. And it has been designed to hold turbine blades.

So like, same thing. So it’s like, this is a problem for logistics of building these things. And there are companies springing up around it and you brought it up before it’s a very young industry. Now we’re starting to see like the side companies like springing up around it to support the logistics of making this stuff easier and easier to make.

Which is really, really cool. Our last comment, this one from Harry 1010, Harry writes, I regularly enjoy these real deep dives into sustainable tech. I guess you could say I’m a big fan. Yes, everybody. That’s your invitation to jump into the comments and let us know what you thought about this episode. As you can tell your comments are a huge part of this program, even when they are full of terrible puns.

Comment, like, subscribe, share with your friends. Three, four, very easy ways for you to support the podcast. And if you’d like to support us more directly, you can click the join button on YouTube, or you can go to stilltbd. fm. And hit the join button there. Both of those allow you to throw coins at our heads.

We appreciate the welts. Then we get down to the heavy, heavy business talking about big blades. Thanks so much everybody for taking the time to watch or listen. We’ll talk to you next time.