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E2: Building wind farms vs nuclear
77 Plays3 years ago
In this episode Carlos & Jason chat all about wind farms, Hinkley point C, and the metaverse.
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Transcript
Introduction to Hosts and Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everyone and welcome to the Offsite podcast where we chat all things construction, technology and everything in between. My name is Carlos and I spend most of my days talking to construction teams about how we deliver projects. And I'm Jason and I spend most of my time building and designing software that construction teams use to deliver their projects.
00:00:20
Speaker
So today we're talking about the mammoth amount of wind farms being built around the world, Hinkley Point C, and Forreal's new Metaverse, which they've named Infoburse. Can't wait.
Wind Farms: Growth and Logistical Challenges
00:00:31
Speaker
First up, wind farms. Now, everyone knows there's a big push for renewables. It's hard to miss that. But to give a little bit of context around the scale, because I don't know much about wind farms, I just wanted to know, what are we actually doing in construction world? So in the EU, 2022,
00:00:48
Speaker
We delivered 15 gigawatts worth of turbines. That translates to about 3,000 new turbines, which is 30% up from the year before, so it's obviously growing massively. No mean feat from a construction point of view as they're all, I think they average 300 feet plus. So Jason, as an engineer, what's the immediate challenge here?
00:01:07
Speaker
So as an engineer or as a project manager, my brain immediately goes, how would I manage that type of project? And each project normally has something about it that's uniquely challenging. And for a wind farm project, these turbines are massively spread apart. And so when you've got 3,000 of them, or whatever the project is, and 100 of them, or something, you're talking about a project over such a large geographical area.
00:01:33
Speaker
And on top of that, if it's offshore, if you think about how you would manage on a day-to-day basis a project that's a couple of kilometers or miles of rail or road or something, the go-to is obviously everyone in a room once a day, or all the engineers in a room once a week. Every team. Yeah. And so all those things suddenly become challenged. Booking inspections in time for someone to make it to an inspection, the logistical challenge associated with that type of project, I think, would be
00:02:02
Speaker
would be what's unique about it. So I think a project like that must need to lean on, I guess, one better planning, because better planning is like the antidote to logistical challenges normally. And then probably some way of virtually replacing the everyone in a room once a day or everyone in the room once a week. I'm just reflecting on some projects that we've worked on before.
00:02:27
Speaker
You're putting me on the spot here. But yeah, there was a massive wind farm project in Norway. Yeah, the logistics is nuts because we were primarily used for the infrastructure. It's not just the sort of they build pad foundations, which are going to facilitate the turbine structures, but they actually had to build infrastructure to deliver the job because you're in the middle of nowhere. There's no roads and you need trucks and deliveries and everything else that comes.
00:02:51
Speaker
It was pretty mega, but it was clear that a company like Vestas, they're not like a typical contractor. Wait for the game, Joe. I need to stop. You're doing it. It's not like a typical contractor where you've got big white collar teams on the ground. They clearly have a relatively small central team managing projects around the world, and they're just sort of ticking over. So it was clear to them that they needed tech.
Geographical Organization of Large Projects
00:03:14
Speaker
They had things like teams, and obviously AFIX then allowed them to actually remotely collaborate around a plan.
00:03:21
Speaker
and be able to build out as a team, which is geographically spread around the world. So yeah, pretty interesting.
00:03:29
Speaker
So we've got like, we've got this geographically spread out project. So typically if you think about what would happen on a construction project, normally you think about the org chart, you've got projects in normally like broken up geographically. So you'll have like the East team or the distance team. And then there's a manager that's like co-located with their sub team and they're kind of, you know, maybe some people on a cabin and some people in an office kind of nearby, that's like a 10 minute walk or something. You're interacting with each other.
00:03:55
Speaker
Yeah, but then at some point on this project, you've got to have people that are, you know, let's even take an offshore. They're nowhere near, or there might be like an hour and a half's drive or something from other people.
00:04:09
Speaker
Yeah, it's like a significant challenge. I think like planning is like the antidote to logistics, logistical challenges. So like being aware of inspections instead of booking them the day before you've got to book them a week before. If you need materials to an area, you need to plan for those materials two weeks before.
00:04:29
Speaker
You're not calling in concrete from a virtue plant. No, you're not calling in concrete. And I don't know if you've seen, but the size of the foundations on these wind type ones are enormous. I think there's that case study on the website that shows one of the footings for the project in Norway. And it's, they're mega. So massive projects with, the good thing about them is they're very repeatable.
Weather Challenges in Construction Projects
00:04:52
Speaker
Like once you build one footing, they're often- Yeah. Imagine each pad is the same spec.
00:04:58
Speaker
So from what type of challenges you typically get on projects, this is probably like 20 out of 10 on logistics, and then maybe less complex on everything being unique to itself. If you compare it to something like a rail project like Crossrail, where every station there were completely different challenges,
00:05:18
Speaker
Yeah, you can imagine you're building structures, tall structures in high wind locations. So even that alone, you're like screwing yourself on the conditions immediately. Yeah, you'd have to, every project would have to have like a weather expert that guesses the weather.
00:05:35
Speaker
Yeah. Today, we're going to do it. Yeah. Maybe not. Talking at Crainage, good segue into Hinkley Point C. So this week, we saw, I think, Ed Miliband was visiting Hinkley. There's a big theme and agenda around nuclear energy, hydrogen. Nuclear is obviously a big, reliable source of energy. And at the moment, with the likes of Ukraine, obviously, we could see that. I like how you segued via Crainage and not via wind versus nuclear.
Nuclear Energy Logistics at Hinkley Point C
00:06:02
Speaker
Just to keep it not controversial. That's a really good point. He likes to keep people guessing. Yeah, it's a clear reliance on importing energy so there's obviously a big drive for nuclear. But the opposite problem to a wind farm which is spread over miles or hundreds of miles
00:06:21
Speaker
You've now got crazy congested sites, which are obviously costly. How do you start to think about that from a logistical point of view? Like you said, it's like the opposite problem. I reflect on an LNG project done as a young engineer. LNG? Liquefied natural gas.
00:06:41
Speaker
fossil fuels. When you would try to maneuver around the side, like when things were being built, the size of like lay downs and the coordination of like lay down of the materials for this person or this team, you know, because you've got essentially
00:07:03
Speaker
It's like a whole city of buildings and it's not just building this building, it's building this building while the neighboring building is being built and your cranes are next to each other. I imagine probably a bunch of them, I don't know, maybe are in the same slow path as each other.
00:07:20
Speaker
So yeah, like the entire opposite problem to like a wind farm. I would imagine reflecting on what we used to have to do was like, yeah, planning ahead for like what space I need to lay stuff down. If I'm in six months going to install pipe racks or something, where are those gonna be stored? Well, at the moment they're being occupied by another contractor and then another contractor is gonna come in and use the space. So there's like, they become like a lot of,
00:07:51
Speaker
Interrelationships between different whether it's contractors or teams in the same company Around like space being used across the site. You might call like yet like the communal spaces How does that actually get managed though? So surely you've got lots of teams that aren't even managed by the same individuals Are they fighting for it or is there a planner somewhere saying?
Tech in Construction: Communication and Visualization
00:08:13
Speaker
Based on schedule, this area needs to be for these guys first. On that size of project, again, drawing on my own experience, the type of stuff that's obstructing one team from another, that one person's putting in the space of another team, personally, is not the type of stuff that gets picked up and moved in a day. So you can't really fight for it. It's not like there's a fight on a day-to-day basis of who's going in this space. It's usually like, I'm three to six months out.
00:08:43
Speaker
My delivery is arriving. I'm planning to put it here. Your stuff needs to be gone. Because if that's getting delayed, then we've got a problem. Should I be talking to my supplier about delivery dates?
00:08:54
Speaker
Often, especially on these projects, stuff is more and more prefabricated and modularized. These modules also have a storage yard that is not infinite. So stuff backs up and backs up and backs up. Yeah, long-range planning and high-level coordination of that space is super important. I imagine there's probably also some amount of day-to-day shit fight around cranes moving and... You've got your plant and materials.
00:09:22
Speaker
presumably as they're moving you're actually shifting logistics route like pedestrians and actually I take that back there would definitely be a day today should fight around yeah all that is that unsafe is that like seen as a risk when you change pedestrian routes because it's new and it's unfamiliar
00:09:38
Speaker
Yeah, I imagine it would definitely be the on a project that has like a fairly static route, you can build quite like an infrastructure around it. So people don't go off that route. Yeah. But if it's constantly changing, like the standards can slip and all that sort of stuff. So I imagine there is some element of that.
00:09:57
Speaker
But yeah, now that you mentioned definitely a crane moving from one spot to another, like a haul route or something, if there's any trucks moving anything, that would definitely be a day-to-day ship flight. So I don't know. I don't know how they manage that. Yeah, especially if you're moving big car. Yeah, if you're moving big car, everyone just has to get out of the way. They just had to build its own railway tracks cast into the ground for it to ship along. So then even crossing those tracks would be it. You'd have to probably build up a temporary platform to cross them.
00:10:26
Speaker
Yeah, it would be a battle. Yeah, the scale is, it's crazy. Obviously we luckily got to see it the other day and I think that was pretty far. That's right. When did you go out to Inclay? Back end of last year, so we went on a site tour. There was something like 56 tower cranes. Like, yeah. Each tower crane, you're going to correct my construction long edge here, but the turning circles all overlap. Yeah, that's what I was saying. The slew radius would definitely like come from. Yeah, so they were like,
00:10:55
Speaker
There's like this whole operation just to turn them all. You know, like I just have this image of like, this one at the end wants to turn. So this one needs to turn. And then like... Yeah, they will just order to do one lift on the other side. I don't get it. Anyway, right. So, final topic. Froevial have been shouting in the news about something called Improverse, which has been sort of loosely described like a metaverse. They claim it pulls together... You say loosely described, as in it's in the name.
00:11:24
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's something that's related for I guess. People like me can understand it then. So they say it pulls together virtualization, augmented reality, AI, behavioral science, digital twins, a whole list of tech stuff and it's being tested on a bunch of projects. A lot of the content
00:11:43
Speaker
is buzzwordy from collaboration to immersive stuff. What's your thoughts on the initial information we can see? You're asking me. Well, given I don't even know what the metaverse is, to me, it's just a bunch of bobbleheads talking to each other. I think it's like a Facebook version of The Sims, right?
00:12:01
Speaker
Yeah, so it's the bobblehead version of the symphony. Given I don't know what that is, I guess if you go back a couple of years when everything BIM was the hot topic, you just group a bunch of concepts and just jam it like it's all BIM enabled, it does feel like they've just taken a bunch of things and jammed it together and tried to make a word that sounds like Metaverse.
00:12:23
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It looks good on the pitch of the tender. I have no idea what it is though. Yeah. So we on Crossrail, we had, I can't remember the name for it. Beep that one, Joe. They had these square rooms where they had like four projectors to produce like 360 images of what was effectively the BIM model. And you could go in without, you could wear the goggles and you could sort of move around and look at stuff. It was like,
00:12:49
Speaker
shit and gimmicky. It was just the BIM team or people that didn't have real jobs playing in it and that they used it to show visitors. So it was like a flashy thing, but it didn't really add actual value. Do you reckon from the limited information that we have, do you reckon it's somewhere in there or do you think they've actually... I think at some point something like this is going to be valuable. I think the main problem that it's like seems to try and solve is around communication of the site constraints. Maybe communication of a plan if we think about 4D type of things.
00:13:19
Speaker
The anything headset related always ends up like you cannot put 50 people in a room and unless you who's got they don't even have enough budget for a hard hat that you're not getting a hundred VR headsets anytime soon.
00:13:34
Speaker
So anything like that feels kind of really gimmicky and just for a sales pitch for someone visiting the site or something. But yeah, communication being this core problem of getting more and more people across a project aware of how it's going to be built, how their part feeds into it.
00:13:53
Speaker
That is a major problem in construction to be solved. Anything in that space would be valuable. I don't see headsets doing it.
Role of Technology in Project Management
00:14:03
Speaker
We have seen examples of things like in the article, they use a mission room. And we've seen the mission room be used on a couple of different projects. It works well for like, I don't know, what size of room would you say?
00:14:16
Speaker
And I think more than 20, 25 people, it's tough. Yeah, so you can do quite a substantive meeting with leads of an area, or if the project wasn't too big, you could stagger sub-teams in there. But yeah, on the projects that we've seen that use, it works. That's better than a bunch of headsets.
00:14:38
Speaker
Yeah, you touched on the learning how the job is built. Previous jobs, and Barry Miles at QS, not an engineer, so you just get slapped a bunch of drawings and then you kind of look at the program, but you don't really think, right, it's based slapped in columns and how the job is sequenced. And I've seen a whole bunch of decent ones that I think Synchro producers and a few others where they say they show slapped going in at their walls and everything else. So it's good from a surface level to see how the job is kind of built.
00:15:06
Speaker
But it's definitely not enough to actually plan because it's so high level. So I think it's having a purpose. But the thing that gets me with those visualizations is like people post saying, oh, and it's taking me four weeks to build. I'm like, yeah. The plan changes on site every day. So if you need four weeks to build it, it's going to be over. But yeah, that's definitely true. Like when you would start on a project as an engineer, you'd spend like
00:15:30
Speaker
You'd still be like six months in discovering, like learning what, by the end, the whole set of plans become like intuitively navigable. But it takes an age to get there. Yeah, yeah. And you end up with that weird project language that no one else understands. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You end up just from the set of drawings, you can walk through the project in your mind. But that takes a lot of time and not, like that's only a subset of people on the project that have that much exposure to the plans that you,
00:15:59
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
Summary and Conclusion
00:16:01
Speaker
And it's the good project managers, you say something and you can see them think for one second ago. There's no riser in that area. Yeah, exactly. So summary of that topic is, it's a gimmick. We've just made a wild set of subs from what it is and then slagged it off.
00:16:18
Speaker
Which is great. So keen to see actually what it is when they release a bit more information. Right, that's all we've got time for today. As always, thank you very much for listening. Thank you.