The Wind Power Pioneer Still Pushing the Frontier

Published Jun 15, 2023, 4:05 AM

Henrik Stiesdal got his start in wind power back in the 70s. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. He went on to help create the modern wind industry. Five decades later, he’s still pushing the frontier.

Pushkin.

Wind power is big, and it's getting bigger. Wind generates about ten percent of the electricity in the United States, even more in parts of Western Europe, and companies like Vestas Wind Systems sell billions and billions of dollars of giant wind turbines every year. To a large extent, this giant global industry was created by a few tinkerers in rural Denmark in the nineteen seventies. They weren't PhDs, they weren't running venture backed startups. They were students and farmers and teachers who were reacting to the skyrocketing price of electricity and trying to figure out a way to make clean power in a windy place. Maybe the most important tinkerer was Henrik Steesdale. He started out as a farm kid who liked to build stuff, and today, almost fifty years later, he's still building. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest today is Henrik Steesdale. Over the past several decades, Henrick has solved lots of big wind power problems. His latest is this, how do you build giant floating wind turbines cheaply enough that you can have offshore wind power anywhere in the world. Henrick got a start in wind power back in the nineteen seventies when he was just out of high school. The price of oil had gone way up, and he wanted to help his parents figure out a cheaper source of electricity for their farm. So his dad took him up to a small college near the farm where a few people were trying to build a wind turbine to help power the college.

So we've end office so that and was fascinating. It was fascinating because of, so to speak, the spirit of it that they had an issue then they did something about it. It was really a sort of intriguing and exciting when you when you have this attitude, at least the perceived problems are not that big. So when we came home from that visit, we immediately went to work and built a little rotor that we mounted on a water pipe so that you could hold it in your hand and then you could go out in the wind and have its spin and get a feel. I still have it. Actually it's a little more than a meter diameter.

Okay, and so what is it it's like a metal pipe with with with the.

Arms on it, it looks like a two bladed propeller.

Okay. And did you have a little welding shop or something. How do you even build that?

No, there was just built out of wood.

Okay.

So, and then the shaft was bolted to the wooden propeller and then you could take it and go out in the wind. And it didn't work very well. And then we experiment with the shape of the blade and suddenly we got it right. And then it just went mad. You know, you went without There was a windy day, as many days a windy here, and then it started rotating and then it kind of ran away in your hand and spupun with many hundred revolutions per minute, about six inches from your nose.

This is an exciting moment.

It is. I can tell you if you do that, you actually shouldn't try this at home, because once you do that, then you were hooked for life. So based on that, and given that I had some time before I was called off for the army, I said, could we do something bigger?

Something bigger, like to generate power.

It's something bigger, to learn more, but just has an experimental device.

So you're just kind of playing.

At this point, we were just kind of playing. It was mostly me. My dad helped me every now and then, but he was working and didn't have much time. So what I did was that, since it was just for experimental purposes, I built a frame on the farm wagon, and then I could run the wagon out in the field when it was windy and do experiments with it, and then I could take it back into the barn again when I was done.

So this like a wagon that you hitch to the back of a tractor or something.

Yeah, pull it out with a tractor, and then we could test it out there. I was able to measure that on a windy day, this little rotor could produce significantly more electricity than what we used on the farm. Then you can take me onto something. And based on that, I said, couldn't I build a turbine that should power the whole farm even when it was not that windy, mounted on a tower and build it genuine wind turbine. And that is what I did. I bought a welding machine and taught myself to weld, so I could build a tower. We bought a lath so that I could turn the shaft and so on. At the junk It cost us at that time fifteen cents a kidro.

So you're saying it was at the junkyard. So they were selling it like for scrap. When you say fifteen cents a killer, they're selling it like by the pound. Essentially, Yes, exactly, fantastic, but they worked. You took it home and you plugged it in and it worked.

No, no, no, no, it was from nineteen fourteen. So I took it home and made it work. Let's put it like that. But once it worked, then I could use it for this, for these things. So it all worked out, and in seventy eight we were able to install the turbine and it ran for thirteen years.

So you build this tower for your family farm, how do you come to license it to this? What it was then a you know, local little cream manufacturer vest Us.

Yeah, so it was actually not mighty signed here for the family farm. That was licensed, okay, because there was something I had welded myself. I'd built the blades myself. I had found old equipment at the junk yard and so on that was not licenseable. You could not base a production.

You can't license buying an fifty year old lathe and fixing it up.

Ay, that doesn't work. But I happened to meet a local blacksmith who was also wind interested, and there were a lot of people who were interested in winter at the time. And he was not a bookish person. He didn't read or write well, but he was a very very good craftsman. And then gradually we figured out we could work together in the way that I could design it for him, and then he could in return do some machining for my turbine that I didn't have equipment for. So I ended up and he didn't have any money. I didn't have any money he wanted. It is still done from new parts, because he was already thinking about doing it professionally. So we of course had an issue how would we get such a thing funded? But then I discovered, purely by chance, that there was a new sort of subsidy that had been created for inventors within renewables. And I wrote to the government body that arranged this, and then they actually wrote back and said, we'll send over somebody to speak to you, and then a very nice person came over spoke with him, and then two weeks later I had a check for about ten thousand dollars in the mail, and then it was kind of now we had the means, Now we could do it. So I designed a turbine and he built it, and he built it and installed it at his workshop which was out in the countryside, and it worked, and then we kind of said, could be there actually something here that really could become a business. So purely by chance, a friend of ours was it. He had the use of a small plane and was flying, I think mostly for pleasure, and he had flown over Vests and had seen that they had a wind turbine installed. It was not operating, but one could see that they were interested in wind, otherwise they wouldn't be doing.

This, just to be clear. He'd flown over the sort of headquarters of this local company called Vestes, Okay.

And then I basically picked up the phone and called them and said, we know that you're interested in wind, shouldn't you get a license to a proper turbine? Which was a little cheeky, if you can say, but they were interesting enough to come over and have coffee.

They were a company that had made farm equipment and cranes and that sort of thing.

Yes, yes, there were a couple of hundred people and they were interested. So we made a deal whereby they would pay a certain amount for each turbine. And that's how they got started in wind. That was biting out this license and starting to do the production of our machine.

And Vestas became a giant, right, a global giant in making wind turbines.

Yes, yes, they very quickly, they were, They were really good. They very quickly got a significant share of the market here and Denmark. And when then the California market started booming around nineteen eighty three due to some test credit arrangements that were implemented to motivate people to invest in wind, they were very well positioned to go in and take a good part of that market. And that is what they did.

And I remember I happened to grow up in California in the nineteen eighties, and I remember there was a wind farm, a bunch of wind turbines you would see east of San Francisco when we were driving to San Francisco. Were those based on your design? Those those turbines.

There may have been forty different manufacturers, so you may well have seen some of our turbines, and you would surely have seen a wide rain sell of other turbines if they were running and operating every day. There would have been hours just.

Joking how ones that were spinning were the ones that.

You built the ones who are spinning years.

Henrik worked with Vestas for several years. He helped put the company on a path to become one of the biggest wind companies in the world. Today, Vesta sells around fifteen billion dollars worth of turbines every year. He went on to work for another wind company, where he helped build the world's first offshore wind turbines in the early nineteen nineties. He retired in twenty fourteen, and then he unretired in twenty sixteen and started his own company. And today he's still at the frontier of wind power, trying to solve a new set of problems.

That's after the break. Now back to the show.

When Henrik retired in twenty fourteen, he thought he'd go back to his roots as a tinkerer, but at a bigger scale. He didn't want to work for a company. He didn't want to run a company, but he wanted to keep working on offshore wind offshore wind is great. You get nice steady winds out in the ocean. You can put the turbines out of sight in the sea, but still relatively close to dense populations on the coast. But there was this big problem with offshore wind that Henrik wanted to help solve. Offshore wind turbines are built on platforms that have to sit on the ocean floor, and that limits where you can put them.

They can't go out to maybe sixty meters water deips, but most of the world has much deeper waters than sixty meters. We have been able to build up a very big offshore wind industry in northwestern Europe because the north sea dead water is quite shallow and you can build very large offshore wind farms out there. We have built large offshore wind farms, but most of the worlds you can't do that because it gets too deep.

There is a potential solution to this, build turbines on floating platforms. If you can do that, you could have offshore wind basically off of any coast in the world. It would be amazing. People have been working on this problem for years, but it's hard. Offshore wind turbines are gigantic, like almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower. And when Henrik looked at the work people were doing on floating wind and reflected back on his decades in the wind business, he saw this one problem in particular, people were not paying enough attention to making floating wind turbines cheap enough to be widely adopted.

I was just slightly annoyed that they were not doing it in an industrial manner. Industrialization is the way that things get to be cheap a hah. So wind started out as being more costly than fossil fuels. Now it is cheaper than fossil fuels. Solar powers the same will was very costly twenty years ago. Now it's much cheaper than fossil fuels. And there you could of course ask yourself how what is the difference? And it's a mixture of technology development that we got better at designing the stuff, but much more importantly that we got professional in the manufacturing of the equipment. So it was made in syrup.

Essentially economies of scale rather than crafts, people building them one by one, figuring out how to exactly use factory mass production to bring down costs.

Yes, as you and I city and talk. I have an iPhone. I think I paid five hundred dollars for it. It has, you know, as people said, more computing power than nasahead when they sent people to the Moon. It's a small video camera, it can show films, it can do everything. I paid five hundred dollars for it. If I was going to get the only one in the world, I'll probably pay fifty million. But I pay only five hundred dollars because a million or millions are.

Made, hundreds of millions, I'm sure. Yeah. So that's the problem with floating offshore wind turbines is they're making them one at a time, and as a result, they're extraordinarily expensive, prohibitively expensive.

Yes, and I thought, maybe I could do something that was suited for cereal production. That's what I don't want to run a company make it. Maybe I could make something that I just kind of presented to the world and say, here has some good ideas, there's a design, go out and do it. So that's what I spent the first years of my retirement on was to develop things like that. At the end of the day, I had to realize that that would not work because they did not want something that was, so to speak, open source.

You were just trying to make a design that anybody could use.

The big developers, the people actually making wind farms happen, they did not want something that was in the open source and was a free fall. They wanted there firm and fixed design that had a cost associated with it. And that meant that in the end I had to run a company. I had to establish a company.

What I did, what's happening with the floating wind project?

That's going well. We set out with this idea of industrializing so that we simply took up the challenge of making a very big steel structure in a factory. The wind ship and itself is a very big steel structure. Each blade is significantly longer than a football field. And there could say, how can you ever build such a big machine two hundred and fifty meters tall in a factory, And the answer is you don't. You build the components and then you just put it together out in the field. And we simply took inspiration from that saying, okay, what we have been doing there, and myself had the good luck to be part of that, was to figure out a way to do big structures but still have the benefit of mass production. Let's use that thinking also for the floating foundation. So that's what we have done. All the components are made in a factory. We have then figured out a way to connect them in the port so that they actually end up constructing a hole floating structure. But all the components were made in a factory benefiting from this mass production. So we have had a good luck to have some big power companies fund the project for us. They're not co owners of the company, but they had us pay for the prototype. So we built the components in twenty and launched it in twenty one and it has been operating since then off the coast of Norway.

Right now, it's floating out in the sea, spinning and generating power even as we speak.

Yes, as you and I are sitting here talking, is out in the sea at two hundred meters water depths producing today on the order of three make wads of power all the time. It powers something like a thousand households. As you and I sit.

Here and talk, your goal with the project was to get to mass production, right is that happening?

Yes, off your wind is and that goes aso for floating is somewhat burdened with very long planning permission times. So what we're doing now is we're building a small demo project with a number of turbines, but much larger than the first one. That's a really big machine, two hundred and thirty six meters diameter, and it'll go off the north coast of Scotland. Hope to get it out in a couple of years. We have started welding on it.

Now, So it's a very long time that you have been doing this now, and you know, you started when there was essentially no wind industry and now it is this giant, international, billion dollar industry. And I'm curious, if you step back from that, do you feel like you have some insight into kind of how to make big industrial change in the world.

And good question. The conditions when we created the wind industry were very favorable. There was a big poor from society. Society wanted things to happen. There was a very big support from the government sort of mentally and also so cunderstand economically for people to establish things, and that way we hit, without knowing it at the time, as sweet spot of making such a thing happen. But I learned a lot about what it takes to make things happen, and to a very last extent, it's about a motivation from service society, and then it's a matter of getting what we call frame conditions right, the surroundings of what you do need to be right for the development. Then you can essentially make anything happen.

We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Now it's time for the lightning round.

So I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions. Now it's sort of fast and we can kind of run through them. I have a couple of Denmark questions for you. What's one thing I should do if I go to Jutland.

If you go as a private individual, Yeah, again, good question. Go to the west coast and visit some of the small port cities or port towns and see how life is there. It's very different from big city life. If you are traveling in a more professional manner, make sure to go and visit the wind turbine factory or a steel tower factory. It is they are in the middle of nowhere, in the flat countryside and it's super exciting.

I think if I were there on vacation, I might still want to go to the wind turbine.

Factory, Yes you should.

Yes, are Vikings overrated or underrated?

I think most of us are somewhat embarrassed about having your national identity resting on plunder and murder. I think that they were. They were extraordinarily sharp when it came to their tools, So they made these wonderful ships that could go anywhere. They went as far as you know, up the big Russian rivers and down to Constantinople.

And to North America and America in.

An open boat. So I think that for their skills they are definitely not overrated. For their human qualities, I think that sometimes there are a few sort of compassionate elements.

Lacking underrated as engineers, overrated as humanists.

Perhaps, yes, that could be a good way to put it.

If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying to solve in say, five.

Years, if everything goes well. My biggest personal ambition is to make a difference on the climate when it comes to implementation. So that's actually not an engineering task. That's more about trying to solve this conundrum that everybody knows what needs to be done for the green transition. It can't go too fast. It is going much too slow. How do you make that happen? And if I could in five years time say there are things that happened because of our efforts that wouldn't always have happened, that is, of course, would be a fantastic thing.

What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve a hard problem.

I think that the most important thing is that you are not seduced by your own rhetoric. The most important thing when you're developing new stuff is to be honest, not only about the positive prospects, but also about the challenges. You should not fool yourself with false oaps. And as somebody also said, persistence is the biggest virtue. Persistence in the face of adversity which will surely come.

Henrik Steesdale's company is called Stevesdale Makes Sense. Today's show was produced by dath Russello. It was edited by Sarah Nix and engineered by Amanda Kwong. You can email us at problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and we'll be back next week with another episode.

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