Okay, special guest today, Eric Lance, who's a group manager at the National Renewable energy Laboratory. For those of you don't know, National renewable Energy Laboratory or Enroll is the leading renewable energy research institution in the US. Eric leads a team of 40 some wind researchers looking at questions related to win technology and policy, both in the US and globally. So really happy Eric was able to fit us in his very busy schedule. Welcome Eric. >> Thanks Paul. Happy to be here. >> So I've got a question for you, I talk about that ahead of time. But let me just jump right in. In the course we've been talking about wind futures, we talked about wind status now in terms of 600 plus gigawatts installed worldwide and some of the promising approaches from floating platforms to larger turbines. But what do you see as particularly promising new wind technologies that are worth keeping an eye on? >> Yeah, sure. There's quite an array you mentioned already that folks are looking at floating offshore wind applications and as well as fixed bottom offshore wind applications. I think offshore wind is very exciting space. My view on the future of wind energy is that we're going to need as much of it as we can possibly get while balancing the deployment of wind energy with sort of social, ecological and and competing use constraints. So, offshore wind certainly kind of alleviates some of those constraints by providing, new areas to deploy and potentially less conflicted areas. I think that sort of drilling down a little bit more deeply within that, some of the technologies that are going to serve the onshore wind industry well, our continued turban scaling. So, turbines have grown quite larger over the last several decades and we actually expect them to continue growing. Presumably at some point, there may be a plateau in our leveling off in the continued growth of turbine size, but we haven't seen that yet. And turbine scaling continues to be something to to look out for it. It provides the opportunity to get you into a better wind resource that higher above ground levels. And it also provides opportunities for sort of efficiencies in the construction and installation side of things. So, there's a cost benefit as well as a resource and energy production benefit from it. Some of the other areas of research that are very active right now are smart management of the resource or the atmospheric flow. So how do you best manage the resource in order to minimize the negative impacts on other turbines within an array? And then also within areas between plants. So, if you get two plants, they're too close together, they can impact the energy production from one another. And so how can you use manage the resource in a more smart and controlled fashion? There's also sort of smart management solutions to wildlife and ecological challenges. Obviously the wind energy industry as a green industry wants to consider the impacts on the rest of the ecological system. And so integrating technologies in that can help minimize or mitigate impacts on wildlife is really important. And something that's going to be especially critical I think when we're talking about very high wind penetration futures, very large deployments of wind energy. Potentially terawatt scales deployment of wind energy. Just a few others to mention here. You've probably heard or we'll hear about hybrid renewable energy plants. So, this could be wind plus batteries. It could be wind plus batteries, Plus PV. Could be other types of generation that's co located at a particular site. That allows you to take advantage of sort of the the resource complementarity between wind and solar, but then also incorporate battery storage in order to to further balance out the variability that might happen between wind and solar. One of the advantages of co locating is that you can make better use of the infrastructure that's in the place where the plant is situated. And that infrastructure is both sort of the balance of station construction side of things, but also just the transmission in an interconnection. Obviously for a technology like wind energy transmission is a is a very big deal into maximizing the utilization of the transmission interconnection and the transmission through the development of a hybrid solution can be advantageous. So, that's another one to keep an eye on. There's a few more far out that I'm particularly intrigued in and kind of keep in the back of my mind. And today, you pretty much see the same type of turban, 100 maybe 200 megawatt plants. In some cases, you have much smaller. In some case you have much larger. I think that the future is going to actually have a lot more diversity in terms of the types of plants that it will exist. You might have, 10 megawatt hybrid facilities in relatively more densely populated or more and more areas that have more conflicted citing challenge. In some locations, whereas you might also then have really densely packed gigawatt scale deployments and clusters in other parts of the country where that's feasible to do. And so you'll see a much broader spectrum of types of wind plants that exist. And the technologies that's going to take to do that are, are also super important things like the management of the atmospheric and resource flow and then hybrid solutions. The advancement of both of those are really important in in those two sort of bookends of possibilities. Within that, I also see the ability to really tailor sort of maybe a more bespoke application of either individual turbine technologies or those types of plants to the unique local characteristics that are necessary. Either needed from the power system in terms of the reliability of the system or to offset distribution level upgrades that you might otherwise have to make or to accommodate the specific citing constraints that exist in those locations. That's a smattering. I think a lot of those are going to apply in both onshore and offshore applications, but obviously the relative penetration of those into the different on and offshore applications are really going to bury. >> Yeah, so thanks. There's lots of ideas, some of which we haven't talked about in class. I appreciate you bringing those up. So, kind of a flip side of, of these many new technologies and kind of technical approaches our market issues. [COUGH] And there are market uncertainties, market challenges that we know about now price, competition, solar. And then there may be ones we haven't, we don't know about but are looming. There was in your mind or some of the key we'll call a market or funding or basically execution uncertainties that you see now and that you think may become more prevalent or more of concern in the future. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, one that you've probably talked about already is economics price competition from other technologies. But also with increasing penetrations, you might experience more curtailments, which has impact on the viability of a given plant. Whether it's wind or otherwise, but in this case wind. So, economics is going to continue to be a big factor. It's been remarkable the cost declines that wind NPV have been able to achieve over the last decade. But at the same time, we're still in this period of unprecedented sort of low cost for natural gas too. And there's this sort of tension that as you increase renewables, you might actually decrease demand for some of the fossil fuels and then that further lowers or or keeps low the prices for those technologies or applications. So, I think economics is always going to be something that exists as a potential constraint. For wind specifically, I think two additional ones and one of them you probably talked a lot about. Maybe another one is a bit less so, but transmission, I think all renewables are somewhat location constrained. But relatively speaking, I think wind is probably among the most location constrained certainly compared to PV. And so, the need for transmission for wind is, is really potentially very important. And that's going to continue to be a barrier. We have not, we've proven to be able to make small gains in the deployment of transmission over the last 10 years, primarily on a regional basis. But I think to get to the very high penetration, high renewable futures that we might be looking at in the next 23 decades. Further development of transmission is going to be pretty important, coupled with that is how you manage some of the citing challenges. And I already talked about some of the technological approaches to managing citing both from a public acceptance perspective, but also a wildlife a wildlife perspective. I think that's going to be another nontrivial factor or uncertainty. That's going to really require a lot of time and energy from researchers and from the industry in order to help or enable win to achieve the level of energy production from wind that might be possible. There's challenges that extend from a legal perspective and who has jurisdiction in certain places with respect to wildlife issues. But there's also sort of you know, local concerns around public acceptance, things like shadow flicker and noise that can play a big challenge. And enabling wind energy to achieve the scale that's, that's possible maybe in the, in a little bit in the shorter term. And this is probably not necessarily a long term problem, but the the goals are becoming increasingly ambitious. Most of our work was focused on sort of looking at scenarios out to 2050 over the last decade or so. Our past work in the last decade has looked out to 2050. But with the new administration coming in, it appears at least that they're looking to accelerate some of those goals. And so some of the scenarios that we talked about achieving in 2050. They now want to target has at least as goals for 2035. And so the ability to scale the technology and the deployment of the technology to achieve some of those is going to be another constraint. Those are probably the kind of constraints that you'd like to have as a, if someone who might want to be in a renewable energy business. But the, that's also something that's very real. And then that compound some of the sighting whether it's wildlife for public acceptance types of issues. And even the transmission issues, transmission lines tend to take a long time to get permitted and approved. And so, how do you orchestrate all of these things to come together at the same time? I think when you talk to wind developers today, they're very concerned about the transmission problem. And if we have to wait 10 years to get that fixed, but in the meantime we should be installing whatever 100 gigawatts of wind and solar a year in order to achieve some aggressive 2035 goal. That's going to be a real challenge to have to work through. >> Great Eric. I appreciate that you gave a wonderful overview of both the technical opportunities, exciting ideas out there as well as some of them may be short or medium term challenges we're going to face. So, I just want to thank you again for your time and appreciate your fitting us in. Thanks so much. >> Happy to do it. >> Take care Paul.
