The crew discusses the Federal Department of Transportation’s concerns over wind turbines interfering with railroads, the USDA’s stance on renewable energy projects on farmland, new treasury rules for wind and solar projects, and highlight the Sunflower Wind Farm in Kansas for its community impact and operational success.

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You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. 

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Hold on tight. I told my producer before we started, this is gonna be a. Bumpy rise. So for all our listeners, hold on. Uh, it’s a lot of news in the wind and solar world at the minute. Phil Tarro is in California. Joel Saxon is back from Australia in Austin, Texas, and first up is the Federal Department of Transportation.

Complaining about how close wind turbines could be to railroads and create an interference, and it’d be a safety crisis. Uh, federal transportation officials and a new scientific research report, [00:01:00 ] Joel, are sounding an urgent alarm about wind turbines being. Too close to railroad tracks and a comprehensive study from California’s Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm confirms, quote unquote confirms that wind farms can severely interfere with critical radio communications used by trains.

Now, uh, what they don’t want you to do is to read the report. That’s what they don’t want you to do. And, uh, as a group of engineers, we’re going to read the report and see what it says. And what it says is that they have a safety system on trains because they used to run into each other quite often. And what they’ve done is they have a overriding system that’s run by radio communication that if a train goes too fast and some of these more frequented train tracks or in.

High density population bases like Chicago or Baltimore, one of these places that they can actually slow the train down or stop the train in some cases, what it sounds like if they’re [00:02:00 ] on a collision course, and that becomes important on commuter rails. And, um, if they have toxic chemicals on trains, that they don’t want them to have accidents.

So they put the system in. And the system is based on Joel. The world’s oldest communication form. 

Joel Saxum: It’s VHF radio, right? So to those of you that don’t know what VHF radio is, it’s basically like, uh, close to the frequencies you’d use as a walkie-talkie as a kid. Um hmm. Right. Uh, or a CB radio. Right. We’re, we’re quite a ways past that now.

Uh, so wifi, cell modems, satellite communications are all regular things within basically any other industry. Uh, of course, but this one, yeah, we’re still using VHF technology that we used. I, that’s been around for a long time for radio communication back from World War ii. Or before that? Oh yeah. 

Allen Hall: Right around World War ii.

How far do those, uh, walkie-talkie radios typically 

Joel Saxum: work? Well, it depends if you, I guess if it depends if you buy ’em from Walmart or if you buy ’em a, [00:03:00 ] a, a professional one. But, uh, depending on what watt radio is in ’em, I mean mile two miles maybe. 

Allen Hall: Exactly. And that’s how this train system works. So every.

Couple of miles, they have a repeater to transmit the signal up and down the train tracks. Well, it became really important because, you know, these wind turbines are interfering with this train signal and may have a collision. So what they did is they commenced the study to go look at if there’s interference, uh, bouncing off the wind turbines, and if you read the report, they talk about wind turbine blades, possibly spinning and creating this interference pattern.

And particularly if the wind turbine blades are made outta metal, it could be this big problem. Well. No wind turbine blade is made outta metal today. And you know, the chances that the wind turbine blades line up in a particular orientation to cross interference is practically 

Joel Saxum: dang near zero. You know, there’s something else we didn’t think about here.

We were kind of talking about this before we talking about metal blades and turbines. Of course, that’s not a thing. Uh, but they did this study in Tehachapi. If you’ve, of course a ton of our listeners have been to Tehachapi. It’s [00:04:00 ]like the wind mecca in the United States, right? Those are all lattice towers.

Lattice towers have. A different effect on radio signals than the Monopile towers that we’re used to that are most everywhere else in the, in the wind industry. But La Latt, lattice Towers can definitely do, do something to radio signal. 

Allen Hall: So my first thought was to reach out to Joel when I read the report and say, Joel, there must be railroad tracks near wind turbines existing already.

Joel Saxum: How many Joel? Yeah. So we, we went and found some data online of uh, basically we know where the turbines are. We, US wind turbine database. Um, and then found the some shape files of where the railroad tracks are in the United States and duplicated their study to put like a buffer on the tracks that one, 1.2 miles took a look at it.

And there is about 6,500 turbines in the United States that are within a mile or 1.2 miles of a railroad track. That makes sense, right? These wind farms are, you know, along highways, [00:05:00 ] uh, a lot of ’em. Um. And railroad tracks follow highways. They’re kind of co-located, right? So of the 75,000 and change there’s about 6,500.

So eight and a half, 9% of turbines in the United States are within a mile or two or a mile, 1.1 or 1.2 miles of, of a railroad track. 

Allen Hall: Well, evidently it’s a concern now, so we have to do something about it now. My first question was, well, this system must work in cities. That’s what it’s there for. There must be buildings and roads and bridges and draw bridges and other things in the way of this signal.

And sure enough, I was right. They, they do have buildings in the way, and you know what they do? They put a repeater in. You put a repeater in, just like a cell phone repeater to make the signal, uh, strength much higher to avoid the interference problem. And it works. So the DOT’s running around right now, and the head of the DOT Sean Duffy is, is exclaiming that, uh, wind turbines are the downfall of the [00:06:00 ] railroad community and they’re gonna push back wind turbines, uh, from railroad tracks.

So Joel, you better prepare for how many turbines to be moved back. 6,000 6,500. Yeah. 

Phil Totaro: So have we gone into crazy land? A couple of things. First of all, Tehachapi never had metal blades. The, even the oldest turbines there, if they had, uh, any kind of blades other than fiberglass, they were wood. Um, and I don’t think Tehachapi had wooden blades, uh, out there for like 40 years.

The funny thing about all this is that it’s, uh, you know, stuff like this, it’s probably not gonna be that much of an issue because, as Joel just mentioned, if you’re only talking about 8% of the, you know, installed base in the United States, well guess what? There’s 92% of the installed base that doesn’t have this problem to deal with.

So that’s, you know. I’d take 92% over 8% any day. And, and, and look, the, the government actually, even though they [00:07:00 ] may kind of sound stupid at, at times or even try to deliberately portray themselves as stupid at times, um, they, they actually do get it. Uh, I know a lot of people are going to, you know, find it funny that I would say something like that.

But if you look, and, and the reason I can say this is if you actually look at what they did with like these IRS tax rules, um, you know. What they’re actually doing is facilitating manufacturing in the United States. So my point of all this is while they’re out there saying, you know, wind turbines are evil, in reality, the industry is actually going to thrive for the next, you know, 18 months or so, we’re, we’re still gonna have problems.

And, and they’re absolutely pouring gas on a fire. Needs to actually be put out rather than have gas poured on it. But the, you know, their rhetoric is one thing and their actual actions are another. 

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