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UK Drops Offshore Wind Tariffs, Ming Yang in Germany

The crew discusses the UK removing tariffs on offshore wind equipment, Vineyard Wind’s final blade shipment from New Bedford, and Ming Yang joining Germany’s offshore wind association.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead, Rosemary Barnes and Yolanda Padron.

And the UK is really gearing up for offshore wind and they’re making some really smart moves and. One of them is, uh, the change in tariffs. So the British offshore wind manufacturers have been fighting really an uphill battle for a long time and for years. The companies that build turbines and components in the UK have faced import tariffs on the materials needed most, which tends to be steels like steel.

Uh, cables, specialized parts from overseas all carried a tariff with it. Well, now the federal government has acted to [00:01:00] remove those tariffs on offshore wind equipment. The move is expected to save UK manufacturers tens of millions of pounds every year. And for an industry trying to cut costs and scale up that kind of relief could make the difference between winning.

Losing contracts, and I’m surprised the UK has waited this long and I think other countries have the same problem. Obviously the US is taring the heck out of everything at the minute, but uh, a lot of European countries do put tariffs on the raw materials and the components that are used to make wind turbines.

That’s not a smart long term move if you’re trying to deploy. Gigawatts of offshore wind.

Matthew Stead: Well, I, I think, uh, the recent events in the world show that energy security and not importing energy is a wonderful thing. And so this completely aligns with that, um, that objective. So I think that’s why we all agree with you, Alan.

Allen Hall: Well do, is there a, a. A threshold here where other countries start to do it [00:02:00] and for whatever reason there’s, there’s tends to be tariffs on energy in all forms of it. Right. And there and on steel in particular, that seems to be a big area of concern. Are we gonna start to see some of those come down just to lower the cost of wind turbines and to deploy the middle of the water?

’cause there is a lot of steel in an offshore wind turbine.

Matthew Stead: It’s been like China. I mean China has, you know, a lot of clean energy, low cost energy and it is to their advantage. So I, I think it’s a entirely logical approach and I would’ve thought it’s, if you’re a good on policy, you would definitely be looking at this.

Allen Hall: Is this has been a concern of the UK steel industry, which has been diminishing over the years? Uh, so it’s always been a pain point with the uk. They’ve been trying to stand up their own steel industry and forever they had a big steel industry In the uk you think of all the. The steel that was built from late 18 hundreds all the way up to the 1980s and nineties.

Uh, but it does sound like you, you gotta pick and choose your battles here. And maybe the UK has [00:03:00] finally said, okay, the, the steel battle is a separate issue within offshore wind, and maybe we gotta do something different.

Matthew Stead: I mean, I think Australia did the same thing ages ago. I mean, we had a car, car industry and you know, we just didn’t have the scale.

So, you know, Australia’s picking its battles and um, yeah, I mean, you can’t be good at everything, so you know why not. Uh, get the, the lower cost energy and um, deal with it that way.

Rosemary Barnes: Australia has actually just announced, you know how Australia’s got the policy to support clean energy technology manufacturing in Australia.

And they started with, um, solar panels and then they’ve also got something related to battery cells. Well, they just announced wind turbine tower manufacturing, um, which is very simple. The reason why Australia doesn’t have, um, wind turbine tower manufacturing anymore. Is just because we can’t compete on price with Asia, um, in general and China specifically.

It’s interesting now to be like, okay, let’s support Australian [00:04:00]manufacturing of wind turbine towers when like there’s no technological barrier. It’s pure cost, cost issues. I would really love to see the Australian government supporting some of the new manufacturing methods and you know, like we’ve seen that Fortescue has invested in.

Um, in Ena Lift, the Spanish, Spanish company, um, ESCU has, has bought their tower manufacturing. Um, it’s, it’s like modular, advanced thing that’s gonna work well for remote areas. Otherwise it’s just like, pay a bunch of money so that we can make towers more expensively, but we can sell them at a competitive rate with the Chinese.

And I don’t know, to me that’s not very strategic. I always prefer we support the next, the next thing.

Allen Hall: Whatever happened to spiral welding and making towers on site. I think that died about a year or two ago because they were trying it here in the United States and about building ’em at the wind farm.

But it sounded like just setting it up to [00:05:00] build the spiral mechanism, the, the cold, uh, forming plus all the welding on top of it. It got to be so expensive to install on site that it was just easier to, to build a central location, which I think they were going for. I’m not even sure that in today’s world, because of the advanced technology in the existing way of manufacturing is so good and inexpensive that it makes any sense to try anything else.

It just seems like it’s, there’s just stamping out parts right now.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, no. I mean, we definitely need new, new methods because we’re really constrained on how tall towers can get if you just wanna make a steel cylinder and ship it out in, you know, whole pieces, like whole cross sections and. Um, put them together vertically.

That’s you. You know, like we’ve, we’ve gotten about as tall as we’re gonna get for that because if you want to go any taller, you’re gonna have to start massively increasing the thickness of the tower to make it stiffen up. And that just means way more steel to keep material costs reasonable. You need to increase the diameter, um, beyond [00:06:00] what you can transport on the road.

Um, but I think that it’s like the, the, the problem is definitely real and well established, but it’s like with many other. Problems. You know when you start thinking, okay, we’ve got a solution to this problem at that time, there aren’t other solutions, so you’re sure that you know you’re gonna win. And so spiral welding was one of the early ones.

Oh, we can fix this problem, but. While they’re developing that and trying to get the capabilities where it needs to be, the cost down, you’ve got a dozen other competing ways that you could solve that problem. And they include like, um, some manufacturers, I think Vestus is one. They’re cutting longitudinally.

And so instead of, um, shipping out towers in a single cross section, it’ll be like four. And then they’re bolted together on site. Um, and then Concrete Towers is another one. The Naber Lift, um, thing that I mentioned.

Matthew Stead: Wooden towers.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, wooden Wooden towers is, uh, another one I’ve covered, uh, [00:07:00] on my YouTube channel.

Matthew S...