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Anyone who thinks rapid global decarbonization is out of reach should take a look at the floating wind turbine sector. Floating wind seemingly popped up out of nowhere in just the past couple of years, and it has already hooked up with the splashy new green hydrogen trend. Too bad those pesky cryptocurrency speculators are sucking up all the clean kilowatts, but that’s another new trend and a whole ‘nother can of worms.

Floating Wind & Green Hydrogen To The Rescue

For those of you new to the topic, putting a wind turbine on a platform that floats is a technologically difficult exercise, but the payoff is huge in terms of rapid decarbonization. Floating platforms can be tethered to the seabed in deeper waters and/or farther from shore, which takes advantage of prime wind speeds while minimizing opposition from coastal communities.

The green hydrogen angle comes in for squeezing the most available juice possible from wind turbines. Hydrogen is a zero emission fuel that can be combusted to run turbines, or deployed in a fuel cell to generate electricity. At the present time, though, almost all of the global hydrogen supply comes from natural gas. That’s going to change because low-cost renewable energy has upended the economics of hydrogen production, making it financially feasible to “split” hydrogen gas from water with an electrical current.

Since hydrogen acts as a transportable energy storage medium, water-splitting provides a way to salvage excess energy from wind turbines or solar panels. The case for wind turbines is especially strong because winds generally pick up at night, when electricity demand goes down.

Other sustainable hydrogen pathways include biogas, industrial waste gas, wastewater, and waste plastics, but water-splitting seems to be attracting the most attention these days.

Pie In The Sky? No, Wind Turbines That Float

Into this picture steps a venture called Cerulean Winds, which has come up with a financing formula for scaling the floating wind-plus-hydrogen connection to the national level.

The idea would have seemed far fetched just a few years ago, but both the floating wind industry and the green hydrogen industry are rapidly maturing.

“Cerulean utilises a tuned infrastructure project finance (IPF) construct with integrated delivery and finance that is proven for the offshore floating environment,” Cerulean explains. “At its core is the comprehensive understanding of risk for floating infrastructure and the most appropriate allocation of these risks across our partner and stakeholder ecosystem,” the company states.

Cerulean’s “Blueprint” model is aimed at cutting the timeline between applying for a license and producing clean kilowatts. According to the company, its Blueprint platform also provides for more flexibility than the conventional centralized power plant structure, which is a key point in the distributed energy landscape of today. Energy storage and cross-border trading are also in the mix.

Serial Oil & Gas Developers Turn To Green Hydrogen

The new Cerulean proposal is billed as the “UK’s largest offshore decarbonisation development.” At a cost of £10 billion, it would sport at least 200 wind turbines floating wind turbines with integrated green hydrogen systems, in two North Sea areas, West of Shetland and Central North Sea.

Before you get too excited, one leading aim of the project is to provide clean electricity to existing offshore facilities, namely, offshore oil and gas drilling sites. Cerulean projects that 3 gigawatts in hourly capacity will go to the oil and gas industry. Still, that leaves 1.5 gigawatts per hour in capacity for green hydrogen production systems to be located on shore.

If the offshore oil and gas angle sounds rather unappealing, it is. However, the reality is that switching millions of automobiles, buildings, and other systems over to clean power is a time consuming process. A movement is already afoot to replace diesel and gas generators on offshore drilling platforms with clean power. The Cerulean proposal is part of that trend, ramped up with the green hydrogen angle.

Cerulean has just submitted a seabed lease request to Marine Scotland, so if anything happens out there in the North Sea it could be a long way off. However, Cerulean has already set the contractor and financial wheels in motion, and in that regard the project does demonstrate that the oil and gas industry could pivot rapidly into low carbon mode, if it chose to do that.

“Cerulean Winds is led by serial entrepreneurs Dan Jackson and Mark Dixon, who have more than 25 years’ experience working together on large-scale offshore infrastructure developments in the oil and gas industry,” the company explains. “They believe the risk of not moving quickly on basin wide decarbonisation would wholly undermine the objectives set out in the recent North Sea Transition Deal.”

To sweeten the pot, Cerulean anticipates undercutting the cost of conventional gas turbine power for offshore platforms. According to the company, oil and gas operators would not incur any up-front costs from the switchover.

Floating Wind, Green Hydrogen, & Green Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

To make the case for speeding up the lease approval process, Jackson and Dixon are appealing to the potential for the wind-plus-hydrogen project to create thousands of new green jobs. Ideally the fossil energy jobs will phase out over time, but in the meanwhile Cerulean aims to show that the floating wind plus green hydrogen combo can maintain employment in the fossil sector while adding new green jobs to the economy, at scale. According to the company’s analysis, over the next five years the project will help preserve 160,000 oil and gas jobs while adding 200,000 new green jobs.

More Bad News For ExxonMobil

“The development of green hydrogen at scale and £1 billion hydrogen export potential” is another key pot-sweetener offered by Cerulean, and that should really give gas stakeholders the heebie-jeebies.

Looking at you, ExxonMobil. In terms of making global decarbonization happen, the company has lagged far behind Shell, BP, and other legacy fossil energy companies. Instead of pumping more money into proven clean tech fields like wind and solar, ExxonMobil banked on algae biofuel while doubling down on shale gas in recent years, apparently with the idea that it could continue making fossil energy relevant by comparing gas emissions to coal emissions.

The idea of natural gas as a “bridge fuel” has fallen flat for a number of reasons, including evidence that the recent spike in natural gas emissions may have offset any gains from pushing coal out of the power generation picture.

Now that hydrogen fuel cell demand is up, ExxonMobil and other natural gas stakeholders are been banking on increased demand for hydrogen to fuel the global economy’s thirst for natural gas. However, schemes like the Cerulean floating wind proposal are quickly shutting that window.

Gas stakeholders could try leaning on the exploding cryptocurrency market to pitch their wares. Speculative crypto mining is an energy intensive process that could help prop up both gas and coal producers for years to come.

To be clear, not all cryptocurrency is speculative. The firm Power Ledger, for example, is deploying a crypto-plus-blockchain model that helps electricity users share excess clean kilowatts.

It’s the speculative crypto market that has become a huge public relations problem for industries looking to decarbonize. Banking, real estate, auto sales and other high-dollar sectors have been getting cryptocurrency-curious, but energy consumption by crypto mining systems has become a public relations ball-and-chain.

As leading global corporations move into the supply chain phase of decarbonization, crypto miners are vulnerable. Switching to renewable energy is one solution, but in the context of the urgent need for climate action, any sector that adds to the global energy demand load will have to make the case that it is not simply playing carbon whack-a-mole with clean energy resources.

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Image: Floating wind turbines via US Department of Energy (credit: Josh Bauer, NREL).


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China installs the world’s most powerful wind turbine

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China installs the world's most powerful wind turbine

China’s Dongfang Electric has installed a 26-megawatt offshore wind turbine, snatching the title of world’s most powerful from Siemens Gamesa’s 21.5 turbine in Denmark.

Photo: Dongfang Electric Corporation

The Chinese state-owned manufacturer announced today that it has installed the world’s most powerful wind turbine prototype at a testing and certification base. This turbine, the world’s largest for capacity and size, boasts a blade wheel diameter of more than 310 meters (1,107 feet) and a hub height of 185 meters (607 feet). Dongfang shipped the turbine’s nacelle earlier this month – the world’s heaviest – along with three blades.

This offshore wind turbine is designed for areas with wind speeds of 8 meters per second and above. With average winds of 10 meters per second, just one of these giants can generate 100 GWh of power annually, which is enough to power 55,000 homes. That’s enough to cut standard coal consumption by 30,000 tons and reduce CO2 emissions by 80,000 tons. Dongfang says it’s wind resistant up to 17 (200 km/h) on the extended Beaufort scale.

In May, Dongfang said it had completed static load testing on the turbine’s blades, and the turbine is now undergoing fatigue testing, which could take up to a year before the turbine is fully certified.

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Read more: Trump just killed all offshore wind zones as US power needs surge


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John Deere joins the robot revolution with GUSS acquisition

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John Deere joins the robot revolution with GUSS acquisition

The autonomous ag equipment experts behind the GUSS robotic sprayers have been developing their AI tech as part of a JV with John Deere for years — and now, that marriage is official. John Deere has acquired 100% of GUSS, and has big plans to pick up that tech and run with it like a … well, you know.

The latest battery-powered GUSS autonomous sprayer made its debut at the 2024 World Ag Expo show in Tulare, California, last summer, where executives from Deere called it, “the world’s first and only fully electric autonomous herbicide orchard sprayer.”

Since then, interest in automated ag equipment has only grown — fueled not just by rising demand for affordable food and produce, but by a national labor shortage made worse by the Trump Administration’s tough anti-immigration policies as well. It’s specifically those challenges around labor availability, input costs, and crop protection that GUSS and John Deere have been spending millions to address.

“Fully integrating GUSS into the John Deere portfolio is a continuation of our dedication to serving high-value crop customers with advanced, scalable technologies to help them do more with less,” explains Julien Le Vely, director, Production Systems, High Value & Small Acre Crops, at John Deere. “GUSS brings a proven solution to a fast-growing segment of agriculture, and its team has a deep understanding of customer needs in orchards and vineyards. We’re excited to have them fully part of the John Deere team.”

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About GUSS


GUSS autonomous farm sprayer; via John Deere.
GUSS autonomous farm sprayer; via John Deere.

The GUSS electric sprayer is powered by a Kreisel Battery Pack 63 (KBP63), which has a nominal energy capacity of 63 kWh, enabling the machine to operate for 10-12 continuous hours between overnight (L2) charges.

The GUSS electric sprayers feature the Smart Apply weed detection system that measures chlorophyll in the various plants it encounters, identifying weeds embedded among the crops, and only sprays where weeds are detected. The company claims its weed detecting tech significantly reduces the amount of chemicals being sprayed onto farmers’ crops, resulting in “up to 90% savings” in sprayed material.

John Deere’s deep pockets will support GUSS as it continues to expand its global reach, and help the group to accelerate Smart Apply’s innovation and integration with other John Deere precision agriculture technologies.

“Joining John Deere enables us to tap into their unmatched innovative capabilities in precision agriculture technologies to bring our solutions to more growers around the world,” says Gary Thompson, GUSS’ COO. “Our team is passionate about helping high-value crop growers increase their efficiency and productivity in their operations, and together with John Deere, we will have the ability to have an even greater impact.”

GUSS-brand autonomous sprayers will be sold and serviced exclusively through John Deere dealers, and the GUSS business will retain its name, branding, employees, and independent manufacturing facility in Kingsburg, California.

More than 250 GUSS machines have been deployed globally, having sprayed more than 2.6 million acres over 500,000 autonomous hours of operation.

Electrek’s Take


John Deere and GUSS Automation Unveil Electric Option and Smart Apply Upgrade

Population growth, while slowing, is still very much a thing – and fewer and fewer people seem to be willing to do the work of growing the food that more and more people need to eat and live. This autonomous tech multiplies the efforts of the farmers that do show up for work every day, and the fact that it’s more sustainable from both a fuel perspective and a toxic chemical perspective makes GUSS a winner.

SOURCE I IMAGES: John Deere.


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Tesla asks court to throw out $243 million verdict in fatal Autopilot crash case

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Tesla asks court to throw out 3 million verdict in fatal Autopilot crash case

Lawyers for Tesla filed a motion asking a court to throw out a recent $243 million verdict against the company related to a fatal crash in Florida in 2019. The case is the first instance of Tesla being ruled against by a court in an Autopilot liability case – previous cases had ended up settled out of court.

To catch up, the case in question is the $243 million Autopilot wrongful death case which concluded early this month. It was the first actual trial verdict against the company in an Autopilot wrongful death case – not counting previous out-of-court settlements.

The case centered around a 2019 crash of a Model S in Florida, where the driver dropped his phone and while he was picking it up, the Model S drove through a stop sign at a T-intersection, crashing into a parked Chevy Tahoe which then struck two pedestrians, killing one and seriously injuring the other.

Tesla was also caught withholding data in the case, which is not a good look.

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In the end, for the purposes of compensatory damages, the driver was found 67% responsible and Tesla was found 33% responsible. But Tesla was also slapped with $200 million in punitive damages. The plaintiffs reached a settlement with the driver separately.

Tesla said at the time that it planned to appeal the case, and its first move in that respect happened today, with lawyers for Tesla filing a 71-page motion laying out the problems they had with the trial.

In it, Tesla requests either that the previous verdict be thrown out, that the amount of damages be reduced or eliminated, or that the case go to a new trial, based on what Tesla contends were numerous errors of law during the trial.

The table of contents of Tesla’s filing lays out the company’s rough arguments for why it’s requesting the verdict to be thrown out, with Tesla seeming to throw several arguments at the wall to see what sticks:

  • I. Tesla Is Entitled to Judgment as a Matter of Law (or at Least a New Trial) on Liability.
    • A. The Verdict Is Unsupported by Reliable Expert Evidence.
    • B. Plaintiffs’ Design-Defect Theories Fail as a Matter of Law.
      • 1. Tesla’s 2019 Model S Was Not Defective.
      • 2. McGee Was the Sole Cause of Plaintiffs’ Injuries.
    • C. The Failure-to-Warn Claim Fails as a Matter of Law.
      • 1. Tesla Had No Duty to Warn.
      • 2. Tesla Provided Extensive Warnings.
      • 3. The Asserted Failure to Warn Didn’t Cause the Crash.
    • D. Tesla Is Entitled to a New Trial If the Record Cannot Sustain the Verdict as to Any Theory on Which the Jury Was Instructed.
  • II. Highly Prejudicial Evidentiary Errors Warrant a New Trial on All Issues.
    • A. The Improper Admission of Data-Related Evidence Prejudiced Tesla.
    • B. The Improper Admission of Elon Musk’s Statements Prejudiced Tesla.
    • C. The Improper Admission of Dissimilar Accidents Prejudiced Tesla.
  • III. This Court Should Grant Tesla Judgment as a Matter of Law on Punitive Damages or at Least Significantly Reduce Punitive Damages.
    • A. Florida Law Prohibits the Imposition of Any Punitive Damages in This Case.
    • B. Florida Law Caps Punitive Damages at Three Times the Compensatory Damages Actually Awarded Against Tesla.
    • C. The Due Process Clause Limits Punitive Damages Here to No More Than the Net Award of Compensatory Damages.
      • 1. Tesla’s Conduct Was Not Reprehensible.
      • 2. A Substantial Disparity Exists Between the $200 Million Award of Punitive Damages and the $42.3 Million Award of Compensatory Damages.
      • 3. Comparable Civil Penalties Do Not Justify the Punitive-Damages Award.
  • IV. This Court Should Reduce the Grossly Excessive Award of Compensatory Damages to No More Than $69 Million.

In short, Tesla blames the driver (who was found 67% liable) fully for the crash, says that the Model S and its Autopilot system were state-of-the-art and not defective because “no car in the world at the time” could have avoided the accident, that it provided proper warnings even though it didn’t need to, that evidence was improperly admitted to prejudice the jury against Tesla, and that the punitive damages are excessive.

After looking through the document, Tesla’s main contention seems to be with the admission of various evidence that it says prejudiced the jury against Tesla.

Indeed, the only exhibit attached to the filing is a transcript of a podcast episode where one of plaintiffs’ experts talks about evidence that Tesla withheld data, which Tesla says should have been inadmissible and prejudiced the jury against it.

The plaintiffs repeatedly asserted that Tesla had deliberately withheld or tried to delete data, which required them to bring in third party experts to discover and examine the data.

Tesla says that the only reason these arguments were brought into court was to make the jury feel like there was a coverup, even though Tesla claims that there was no coverup. By repeatedly mentioning this, Tesla says the jury had a more negative view of the company than was fair.

It also says that Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s statements about Autopilot shouldn’t have been admissible, and that they prejudiced the jury against Tesla. Tesla says that the statements by Musk shown at the trial were irrelevant to plaintiffs’ case, exceeded the limits the court had set on which statements would be admissible, and that the admission of these statements “would disincentivize companies from making visionary projections about anticipated technological breakthroughs.”

You can read through the full filing here.

Update: After this story was published, plaintiffs’ attorneys reached out with their own statement

“This motion is the latest example of Tesla and Musk’s complete disregard for the human cost of their defective technology. The jury heard all the facts and came to the right conclusion that this was a case of shared responsibility, but that does not discount the integral role Autopilot and the company’s misrepresentations of its capabilities played in the crash that killed Naibel and permanently injured Dillon. We are confident the court will uphold this verdict, which serves not as an indictment of the autonomous vehicle industry, but of Tesla’s reckless and unsafe development and deployment of its Autopilot system.”  

Brett Schreiber of Singleton Schreiber, lead trial counsel for plaintiffs Dillon Angulo & Naibel Benavides.

Electrek’s Take

Reading through the filing is persuasive at first, but remember that this is only one side of the story – and Tesla is well-known for never budging an inch in legal or reputational matters. (Update: for a quick reaction from “the other side,” see the statement by plaintiffs’ attorneys directly above).

Thinking a little deeper, the filing does rely on a similar “puffery” argument which Tesla has used before. The idea here is that Musk’s statements should be ignored because he, as the CEO of the company, has an incentive (and well-known tendency) to overstate the capabilities of its vehicles.

Lawyers did not use that exact word here, but they do claim that Musk’s statements are “forward-looking” and “visionary.”

But, for a guy who talks so much that he wasted $44 billion on a $12 billion social media site (twice) so that he could force his words in front of every user every day, denying that his words have an effect is a strange legal argument.

Indeed, Tesla has a history of not doing paid advertisements in traditional media, and has relied on Musk, and specifically Musk’s twitter account, to be the company’s impromptu communications platform. Musk even closed the company’s PR department, instead taking on the full burden of that himself.

So to argue that Musk’s statements shouldn’t be admissible, or that they didn’t set the tone for the organization, is more than a little silly.

While Tesla and Musk did state many times that Autopilot was not full self-driving (although, neither was the feature they marketed under the name, ahem, “Full Self-Driving”), the balance of Musk’s statements describing Tesla’s features definitely could have led a driver to think that the vehicles were more capable than any other vehicle on the road.

This is why it’s strange that Tesla also argues that “no other car” could have stopped in the situation of the crash. If your company is constantly claiming that you have the best, safest, most autonomy-enabled vehicle in the world (including in this filing, where it is referred to as “state of the art”), then who cares whether other cars could have done it or not? We’re talking about your car, not anything else.

Further, Tesla said that admitting these statements will put a chilling effect on every corporation’s ability to project anticipated breakthroughs in tech. To this I say, frankly: good. Enough with the nonsense, lets focus on reality, and lets stop excusing lies as corporate puffery, across all industries.

But this is an example of Tesla trying to have it both ways, to pretend that Musk’s statements are just puffery but also that they are important to breakthroughs and that silencing Musk would harm the company. Yes, it probably would harm Tesla’s outreach – because Musk’s statements are roughly the only source of Tesla’s advertising, which is why they ought to be heard to establish what the public thinks about the capabilities of Teslas.

And while Tesla says that cases like these would “chill” development of safety features if manufacturers are punished for bringing them to market, the punishment here isn’t for bringing the feature to market, it’s for overselling the feature in a way that set public expectations too high. Other features have not received this sort of scrutiny because other features don’t get pumped up daily with ridiculous overstatements by the company’s sole source of advertising.

On the other points, I’m not a lawyer. I’m not up to date on the specific limits to punitive damages in Florida. But on the surface, it seems fair to me that if a company was found to withhold data in an important case, after declining a settlement, that some level of significant punishment is fair.

After all, withholding data in a single non-fatal crash that wasn’t even their fault is what led Cruise to shut down operations everywhere. That may have been an overreaction and would certainly be an overreaction in this case with Tesla, given the driver’s responsibility for the crash. But in this case, the damage done to people (a death) was greater, and the damages Tesla is being told to pay ($243 million) will not lead to a shutdown of the entire company. Especially considering this is the same company that just managed to find tens of billions of dollars to give to a bad CEO.


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