California Offshore, Wakes and Whales, Drilling to the Center of the Earth, Thunder Snow Apocalypse, Intelstor’s Philip Totaro

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

Allen and Rosemary discuss the California offshore auction that finished below expectations, and discuss the latest news from researchers on whale habitats. MIT engineers pursue microwave drilling to the earth's core for thermal energy sources, and a freak snow storm in NY creates a snow apocalypse with multiple upward lightning strikes to wind turbines. Then Allen discusses PPA's and onshore wind economics with Intelstor's Founder and CEO Philip Totaro. Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com Wind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.com Weather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.com Intelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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! Uptime 143 Allen Hall: Hey, Rosemary. We, we left Joel out in the cold somewhere. He was supposed to be traveling from northern Wisconsin to Texas, but we can't see enough to find him anywhere. I, I, my guess he may be back in the snow. So it's just US two this week, which is super awesome because we really get to do a show, just the two of us anymore. So what do you, what do you have on the list this week? Rosemary Barnes: Well, we've got the recent auctions for offshore wind in California. So it's gonna be floating offshore wind, and then we have microwave drilling technique to make deeper holes for geothermal power. Allen Hall: Then we have some discussion about whales off the coast of Massachusetts and how wind turbines can affect the zooplankton. And then we had a thunder, snow, thunder, snow apocalypse off of Lake Ontario recently, and researchers up there have instrumented that whole area and have recorded lightning strikes that happen to wind turbines. So there's gonna be a lot of good information coming out of there. And then I have an interview interview with Phil Totaro of IntelStor. When we talk about. PPAs of onshore wind and the operational risks evolved on some really low PPA prices that some of these operators are, are have in place. So it's a really interesting episode. Stay tuned. I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with Australian Renewables guru Rosemary Barnes. Joel Saxon is out in the field doing some good work and will be back next week. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Rosemary. We just finished the California auction for all those offshore plots. There were actually five plots that were up for bid. They had about little over 40 different companies that were. We were able to bid. They went through a little process to get vetted. So there's like 43 of them that were vetted to go, and they were off auctioning off about 370,000 acres sort of in central and Northern California. The, the plot up north is really close to Oregon, actually, so it's pretty far north and they think they're gonna generate 4.6 gigawatts off these sites. So that's a lot of power. It's like a million and and a half homes. They're gonna. Well based on predictions, I think they were thinking it was gonna go well over a billion dollars in bids, but it didn't get there. It went to 757 million, which is roughly $2,000 an acre. And the bite auction on the east coast was about 4 billion, and that turned out to be about $8,000 an acre. So the water's. Coast of California over about a quarter of the price of the ones off the East coast, which I guess sort of makes sense just because it's floating California versus fixed bottom New York. So that was an interesting bidding process. Rosemary, it went on for a day and a half,