Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: Wind power is big, and it's getting bigger. Wind generates
Speaker 2: about ten percent of the electricity in the United States,
Speaker 2: even more in parts of Western Europe, and companies like
Speaker 2: Vestas Wind Systems sell billions and billions of dollars of
Speaker 2: giant wind turbines every year. To a large extent, this
Speaker 2: giant global industry was created by a few tinkerers in
Speaker 2: rural Denmark in the nineteen seventies. They weren't PhDs, they
Speaker 2: weren't running venture backed startups. They were students and farmers
Speaker 2: and teachers who were reacting to the skyrocketing price of
Speaker 2: electricity and trying to figure out a way to make
Speaker 2: clean power in a windy place. Maybe the most important
Speaker 2: tinkerer was Henrik Steesdale. He started out as a farm
Speaker 2: kid who liked to build stuff, and today, almost fifty
Speaker 2: years later, he's still building. I'm Jacob Goldstein and this
Speaker 2: is What's Your Problem, the show where I talk to
Speaker 2: people who are trying to make technological progress. My guest
Speaker 2: today is Henrik Steesdale. Over the past several decades, Henrick
Speaker 2: has solved lots of big wind power problems. His latest
Speaker 2: is this, how do you build giant floating wind turbines
Speaker 2: cheaply enough that you can have offshore wind power anywhere
Speaker 2: in the world. Henrick got a start in wind power
Speaker 2: back in the nineteen seventies when he was just out
Speaker 2: of high school. The price of oil had gone way up,
Speaker 2: and he wanted to help his parents figure out a
Speaker 2: cheaper source of electricity for their farm. So his dad
Speaker 2: took him up to a small college near the farm
Speaker 2: where a few people were trying to build a wind
Speaker 2: turbine to help power the college.
Speaker 3: So we've end office so that and was fascinating. It
Speaker 3: was fascinating because of, so to speak, the spirit of
Speaker 3: it that they had an issue then they did something
Speaker 3: about it. It was really a sort of intriguing and
Speaker 3: exciting when you when you have this attitude, at least
Speaker 3: the perceived problems are not that big. So when we
Speaker 3: came home from that visit, we immediately went to work
Speaker 3: and built a little rotor that we mounted on a
Speaker 3: water pipe so that you could hold it in your
Speaker 3: hand and then you could go out in the wind
Speaker 3: and have its spin and get a feel. I still
Speaker 3: have it. Actually it's a little more than a meter diameter.
Speaker 2: Okay, and so what is it it's like a metal
Speaker 2: pipe with with with the.
Speaker 3: Arms on it, it looks like a two bladed propeller.
Speaker 2: Okay. And did you have a little welding shop or something.
Speaker 2: How do you even build that?
Speaker 3: No, there was just built out of wood.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: So, and then the shaft was bolted to the wooden
Speaker 3: propeller and then you could take it and go out
Speaker 3: in the wind. And it didn't work very well. And
Speaker 3: then we experiment with the shape of the blade and
Speaker 3: suddenly we got it right. And then it just went mad.
Speaker 3: You know, you went without There was a windy day,
Speaker 3: as many days a windy here, and then it started
Speaker 3: rotating and then it kind of ran away in your
Speaker 3: hand and spupun with many hundred revolutions per minute, about
Speaker 3: six inches from your nose.
Speaker 2: This is an exciting moment.
Speaker 3: It is. I can tell you if you do that,
Speaker 3: you actually shouldn't try this at home, because once you
Speaker 3: do that, then you were hooked for life. So based
Speaker 3: on that, and given that I had some time before
Speaker 3: I was called off for the army, I said, could
Speaker 3: we do something bigger?
Speaker 2: Something bigger, like to generate power.
Speaker 3: It's something bigger, to learn more, but just has an
Speaker 3: experimental device.
Speaker 2: So you're just kind of playing.
Speaker 3: At this point, we were just kind of playing. It
Speaker 3: was mostly me. My dad helped me every now and then,
Speaker 3: but he was working and didn't have much time. So
Speaker 3: what I did was that, since it was just for
Speaker 3: experimental purposes, I built a frame on the farm wagon,
Speaker 3: and then I could run the wagon out in the
Speaker 3: field when it was windy and do experiments with it,
Speaker 3: and then I could take it back into the barn
Speaker 3: again when I was done.
Speaker 2: So this like a wagon that you hitch to the
Speaker 2: back of a tractor or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah, pull it out with a tractor, and then we
Speaker 3: could test it out there. I was able to measure
Speaker 3: that on a windy day, this little rotor could produce
Speaker 3: significantly more electricity than what we used on the farm.
Speaker 3: Then you can take me onto something. And based on that,
Speaker 3: I said, couldn't I build a turbine that should power
Speaker 3: the whole farm even when it was not that windy,
Speaker 3: mounted on a tower and build it genuine wind turbine.
Speaker 3: And that is what I did. I bought a welding
Speaker 3: machine and taught myself to weld, so I could build
Speaker 3: a tower. We bought a lath so that I could
Speaker 3: turn the shaft and so on. At the junk It
Speaker 3: cost us at that time fifteen cents a kidro.
Speaker 2: So you're saying it was at the junkyard. So they
Speaker 2: were selling it like for scrap. When you say fifteen
Speaker 2: cents a killer, they're selling it like by the pound. Essentially, Yes, exactly, fantastic,
Speaker 2: but they worked. You took it home and you plugged
Speaker 2: it in and it worked.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, it was from nineteen fourteen. So
Speaker 3: I took it home and made it work. Let's put
Speaker 3: it like that. But once it worked, then I could
Speaker 3: use it for this, for these things. So it all
Speaker 3: worked out, and in seventy eight we were able to
Speaker 3: install the turbine and it ran for thirteen years.
Speaker 2: So you build this tower for your family farm, how
Speaker 2: do you come to license it to this? What it
Speaker 2: was then a you know, local little cream manufacturer vest Us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it was actually not mighty signed here for
Speaker 3: the family farm. That was licensed, okay, because there was
Speaker 3: something I had welded myself. I'd built the blades myself.
Speaker 3: I had found old equipment at the junk yard and
Speaker 3: so on that was not licenseable. You could not base
Speaker 3: a production.
Speaker 2: You can't license buying an fifty year old lathe and
Speaker 2: fixing it up.
Speaker 3: Ay, that doesn't work. But I happened to meet a
Speaker 3: local blacksmith who was also wind interested, and there were
Speaker 3: a lot of people who were interested in winter at
Speaker 3: the time. And he was not a bookish person. He
Speaker 3: didn't read or write well, but he was a very
Speaker 3: very good craftsman. And then gradually we figured out we
Speaker 3: could work together in the way that I could design
Speaker 3: it for him, and then he could in return do
Speaker 3: some machining for my turbine that I didn't have equipment for.
Speaker 3: So I ended up and he didn't have any money.
Speaker 3: I didn't have any money he wanted. It is still
Speaker 3: done from new parts, because he was already thinking about
Speaker 3: doing it professionally. So we of course had an issue
Speaker 3: how would we get such a thing funded? But then
Speaker 3: I discovered, purely by chance, that there was a new
Speaker 3: sort of subsidy that had been created for inventors within renewables.
Speaker 3: And I wrote to the government body that arranged this,
Speaker 3: and then they actually wrote back and said, we'll send
Speaker 3: over somebody to speak to you, and then a very
Speaker 3: nice person came over spoke with him, and then two
Speaker 3: weeks later I had a check for about ten thousand
Speaker 3: dollars in the mail, and then it was kind of
Speaker 3: now we had the means, Now we could do it.
Speaker 3: So I designed a turbine and he built it, and
Speaker 3: he built it and installed it at his workshop which
Speaker 3: was out in the countryside, and it worked, and then
Speaker 3: we kind of said, could be there actually something here
Speaker 3: that really could become a business. So purely by chance,
Speaker 3: a friend of ours was it. He had the use
Speaker 3: of a small plane and was flying, I think mostly
Speaker 3: for pleasure, and he had flown over Vests and had
Speaker 3: seen that they had a wind turbine installed. It was
Speaker 3: not operating, but one could see that they were interested
Speaker 3: in wind, otherwise they wouldn't be doing.
Speaker 2: This, just to be clear. He'd flown over the sort
Speaker 2: of headquarters of this local company called Vestes, Okay.
Speaker 3: And then I basically picked up the phone and called
Speaker 3: them and said, we know that you're interested in wind,
Speaker 3: shouldn't you get a license to a proper turbine? Which
Speaker 3: was a little cheeky, if you can say, but they
Speaker 3: were interesting enough to come over and have coffee.
Speaker 2: They were a company that had made farm equipment and
Speaker 2: cranes and that sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, there were a couple of hundred people and
Speaker 3: they were interested. So we made a deal whereby they
Speaker 3: would pay a certain amount for each turbine. And that's
Speaker 3: how they got started in wind. That was biting out
Speaker 3: this license and starting to do the production of our machine.
Speaker 2: And Vestas became a giant, right, a global giant in
Speaker 2: making wind turbines.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, they very quickly, they were, They were really good.
Speaker 3: They very quickly got a significant share of the market
Speaker 3: here and Denmark. And when then the California market started
Speaker 3: booming around nineteen eighty three due to some test credit
Speaker 3: arrangements that were implemented to motivate people to invest in wind,
Speaker 3: they were very well positioned to go in and take
Speaker 3: a good part of that market. And that is what
Speaker 3: they did.
Speaker 2: And I remember I happened to grow up in California
Speaker 2: in the nineteen eighties, and I remember there was a
Speaker 2: wind farm, a bunch of wind turbines you would see
Speaker 2: east of San Francisco when we were driving to San Francisco.
Speaker 2: Were those based on your design? Those those turbines.
Speaker 3: There may have been forty different manufacturers, so you may
Speaker 3: well have seen some of our turbines, and you would
Speaker 3: surely have seen a wide rain sell of other turbines
Speaker 3: if they were running and operating every day. There would
Speaker 3: have been hours just.
Speaker 2: Joking how ones that were spinning were the ones that.
Speaker 3: You built the ones who are spinning years.
Speaker 2: Henrik worked with Vestas for several years. He helped put
Speaker 2: the company on a path to become one of the
Speaker 2: biggest wind companies in the world. Today, Vesta sells around
Speaker 2: fifteen billion dollars worth of turbines every year. He went
Speaker 2: on to work for another wind company, where he helped
Speaker 2: build the world's first offshore wind turbines in the early
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties. He retired in twenty fourteen, and then he
Speaker 2: unretired in twenty sixteen and started his own company. And
Speaker 2: today he's still at the frontier of wind power, trying
Speaker 2: to solve a new set of problems.
Speaker 1: That's after the break. Now back to the show.
Speaker 2: When Henrik retired in twenty fourteen, he thought he'd go
Speaker 2: back to his roots as a tinkerer, but at a
Speaker 2: bigger scale. He didn't want to work for a company.
Speaker 2: He didn't want to run a company, but he wanted
Speaker 2: to keep working on offshore wind offshore wind is great.
Speaker 2: You get nice steady winds out in the ocean. You
Speaker 2: can put the turbines out of sight in the sea,
Speaker 2: but still relatively close to dense populations on the coast.
Speaker 2: But there was this big problem with offshore wind that
Speaker 2: Henrik wanted to help solve. Offshore wind turbines are built
Speaker 2: on platforms that have to sit on the ocean floor,
Speaker 2: and that limits where you can put them.
Speaker 3: They can't go out to maybe sixty meters water deips,
Speaker 3: but most of the world has much deeper waters than
Speaker 3: sixty meters. We have been able to build up a
Speaker 3: very big offshore wind industry in northwestern Europe because the
Speaker 3: north sea dead water is quite shallow and you can
Speaker 3: build very large offshore wind farms out there. We have
Speaker 3: built large offshore wind farms, but most of the worlds
Speaker 3: you can't do that because it gets too deep.
Speaker 2: There is a potential solution to this, build turbines on
Speaker 2: floating platforms. If you can do that, you could have
Speaker 2: offshore wind basically off of any coast in the world.
Speaker 2: It would be amazing. People have been working on this
Speaker 2: problem for years, but it's hard. Offshore wind turbines are gigantic,
Speaker 2: like almost as tall as the Eiffel Tower. And when
Speaker 2: Henrik looked at the work people were doing on floating
Speaker 2: wind and reflected back on his decades in the wind business,
Speaker 2: he saw this one problem in particular, people were not
Speaker 2: paying enough attention to making floating wind turbines cheap enough
Speaker 2: to be widely adopted.
Speaker 3: I was just slightly annoyed that they were not doing
Speaker 3: it in an industrial manner. Industrialization is the way that
Speaker 3: things get to be cheap a hah. So wind started
Speaker 3: out as being more costly than fossil fuels. Now it
Speaker 3: is cheaper than fossil fuels. Solar powers the same will
Speaker 3: was very costly twenty years ago. Now it's much cheaper
Speaker 3: than fossil fuels. And there you could of course ask
Speaker 3: yourself how what is the difference? And it's a mixture
Speaker 3: of technology development that we got better at designing the stuff,
Speaker 3: but much more importantly that we got professional in the
Speaker 3: manufacturing of the equipment. So it was made in syrup.
Speaker 2: Essentially economies of scale rather than crafts, people building them
Speaker 2: one by one, figuring out how to exactly use factory
Speaker 2: mass production to bring down costs.
Speaker 3: Yes, as you and I city and talk. I have
Speaker 3: an iPhone. I think I paid five hundred dollars for it.
Speaker 3: It has, you know, as people said, more computing power
Speaker 3: than nasahead when they sent people to the Moon. It's
Speaker 3: a small video camera, it can show films, it can
Speaker 3: do everything. I paid five hundred dollars for it. If
Speaker 3: I was going to get the only one in the world,
Speaker 3: I'll probably pay fifty million. But I pay only five
Speaker 3: hundred dollars because a million or millions are.
Speaker 2: Made, hundreds of millions, I'm sure. Yeah. So that's the
Speaker 2: problem with floating offshore wind turbines is they're making them
Speaker 2: one at a time, and as a result, they're extraordinarily expensive,
Speaker 2: prohibitively expensive.
Speaker 3: Yes, and I thought, maybe I could do something that
Speaker 3: was suited for cereal production. That's what I don't want
Speaker 3: to run a company make it. Maybe I could make
Speaker 3: something that I just kind of presented to the world
Speaker 3: and say, here has some good ideas, there's a design,
Speaker 3: go out and do it. So that's what I spent
Speaker 3: the first years of my retirement on was to develop
Speaker 3: things like that. At the end of the day, I
Speaker 3: had to realize that that would not work because they
Speaker 3: did not want something that was, so to speak, open source.
Speaker 2: You were just trying to make a design that anybody
Speaker 2: could use.
Speaker 3: The big developers, the people actually making wind farms happen,
Speaker 3: they did not want something that was in the open
Speaker 3: source and was a free fall. They wanted there firm
Speaker 3: and fixed design that had a cost associated with it.
Speaker 3: And that meant that in the end I had to
Speaker 3: run a company. I had to establish a company.
Speaker 2: What I did, what's happening with the floating wind project?
Speaker 3: That's going well. We set out with this idea of
Speaker 3: industrializing so that we simply took up the challenge of
Speaker 3: making a very big steel structure in a factory. The
Speaker 3: wind ship and itself is a very big steel structure.
Speaker 3: Each blade is significantly longer than a football field. And
Speaker 3: there could say, how can you ever build such a
Speaker 3: big machine two hundred and fifty meters tall in a factory,
Speaker 3: And the answer is you don't. You build the components
Speaker 3: and then you just put it together out in the field.
Speaker 3: And we simply took inspiration from that saying, okay, what
Speaker 3: we have been doing there, and myself had the good
Speaker 3: luck to be part of that, was to figure out
Speaker 3: a way to do big structures but still have the
Speaker 3: benefit of mass production. Let's use that thinking also for
Speaker 3: the floating foundation. So that's what we have done. All
Speaker 3: the components are made in a factory. We have then
Speaker 3: figured out a way to connect them in the port
Speaker 3: so that they actually end up constructing a hole floating structure.
Speaker 3: But all the components were made in a factory benefiting
Speaker 3: from this mass production. So we have had a good
Speaker 3: luck to have some big power companies fund the project
Speaker 3: for us. They're not co owners of the company, but
Speaker 3: they had us pay for the prototype. So we built
Speaker 3: the components in twenty and launched it in twenty one
Speaker 3: and it has been operating since then off the coast
Speaker 3: of Norway.
Speaker 2: Right now, it's floating out in the sea, spinning and
Speaker 2: generating power even as we speak.
Speaker 3: Yes, as you and I are sitting here talking, is
Speaker 3: out in the sea at two hundred meters water depths
Speaker 3: producing today on the order of three make wads of
Speaker 3: power all the time. It powers something like a thousand households.
Speaker 3: As you and I sit.
Speaker 2: Here and talk, your goal with the project was to
Speaker 2: get to mass production, right is that happening?
Speaker 3: Yes, off your wind is and that goes aso for
Speaker 3: floating is somewhat burdened with very long planning permission times.
Speaker 3: So what we're doing now is we're building a small
Speaker 3: demo project with a number of turbines, but much larger
Speaker 3: than the first one. That's a really big machine, two
Speaker 3: hundred and thirty six meters diameter, and it'll go off
Speaker 3: the north coast of Scotland. Hope to get it out
Speaker 3: in a couple of years. We have started welding on it.
Speaker 2: Now, So it's a very long time that you have
Speaker 2: been doing this now, and you know, you started when
Speaker 2: there was essentially no wind industry and now it is
Speaker 2: this giant, international, billion dollar industry. And I'm curious, if
Speaker 2: you step back from that, do you feel like you
Speaker 2: have some insight into kind of how to make big
Speaker 2: industrial change in the world.
Speaker 3: And good question. The conditions when we created the wind
Speaker 3: industry were very favorable. There was a big poor from society.
Speaker 3: Society wanted things to happen. There was a very big
Speaker 3: support from the government sort of mentally and also so
Speaker 3: cunderstand economically for people to establish things, and that way
Speaker 3: we hit, without knowing it at the time, as sweet
Speaker 3: spot of making such a thing happen. But I learned
Speaker 3: a lot about what it takes to make things happen,
Speaker 3: and to a very last extent, it's about a motivation
Speaker 3: from service society, and then it's a matter of getting
Speaker 3: what we call frame conditions right, the surroundings of what
Speaker 3: you do need to be right for the development. Then
Speaker 3: you can essentially make anything happen.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a minute with the lightning round.
Speaker 1: Now it's time for the lightning round.
Speaker 2: So I'm just going to ask you a bunch of questions.
Speaker 2: Now it's sort of fast and we can kind of
Speaker 2: run through them. I have a couple of Denmark questions
Speaker 2: for you. What's one thing I should do if I
Speaker 2: go to Jutland.
Speaker 3: If you go as a private individual, Yeah, again, good question.
Speaker 3: Go to the west coast and visit some of the
Speaker 3: small port cities or port towns and see how life
Speaker 3: is there. It's very different from big city life. If
Speaker 3: you are traveling in a more professional manner, make sure
Speaker 3: to go and visit the wind turbine factory or a
Speaker 3: steel tower factory. It is they are in the middle
Speaker 3: of nowhere, in the flat countryside and it's super exciting.
Speaker 2: I think if I were there on vacation, I might
Speaker 2: still want to go to the wind turbine.
Speaker 3: Factory, Yes you should.
Speaker 2: Yes, are Vikings overrated or underrated?
Speaker 3: I think most of us are somewhat embarrassed about having
Speaker 3: your national identity resting on plunder and murder. I think
Speaker 3: that they were. They were extraordinarily sharp when it came
Speaker 3: to their tools, So they made these wonderful ships that
Speaker 3: could go anywhere. They went as far as you know,
Speaker 3: up the big Russian rivers and down to Constantinople.
Speaker 2: And to North America and America in.
Speaker 3: An open boat. So I think that for their skills
Speaker 3: they are definitely not overrated. For their human qualities, I
Speaker 3: think that sometimes there are a few sort of compassionate elements.
Speaker 2: Lacking underrated as engineers, overrated as humanists.
Speaker 3: Perhaps, yes, that could be a good way to put it.
Speaker 2: If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying
Speaker 2: to solve in say, five.
Speaker 3: Years, if everything goes well. My biggest personal ambition is
Speaker 3: to make a difference on the climate when it comes
Speaker 3: to implementation. So that's actually not an engineering task. That's
Speaker 3: more about trying to solve this conundrum that everybody knows
Speaker 3: what needs to be done for the green transition. It
Speaker 3: can't go too fast. It is going much too slow.
Speaker 3: How do you make that happen? And if I could
Speaker 3: in five years time say there are things that happened
Speaker 3: because of our efforts that wouldn't always have happened, that is,
Speaker 3: of course, would be a fantastic thing.
Speaker 2: What's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying
Speaker 2: to solve a hard problem.
Speaker 3: I think that the most important thing is that you
Speaker 3: are not seduced by your own rhetoric. The most important
Speaker 3: thing when you're developing new stuff is to be honest,
Speaker 3: not only about the positive prospects, but also about the challenges.
Speaker 3: You should not fool yourself with false oaps. And as
Speaker 3: somebody also said, persistence is the biggest virtue. Persistence in
Speaker 3: the face of adversity which will surely come.
Speaker 4: Henrik Steesdale's company is called Stevesdale Makes Sense. Today's show
Speaker 4: was produced by dath Russello. It was edited by Sarah
Speaker 4: Nix and engineered by Amanda Kwong. You can email us
Speaker 4: at problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find
Speaker 4: me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and
Speaker 4: we'll be back next week with another episode.
Speaker 1: Of what's your problem,