Rosemary Barnes and Allen Hall had a great time at American Clean Power 2022 in San Antonio, TX! They sat down down with Matthew Stead, CEO of Ping, to introduce the latest Ping monitor updates for icing, damage detection and lightning! Kenneth Carter, Editor of Wind Systems Magazine, gave the podcast duo the latest news and insights from the exhibition floor. Nicholas Gaudern , CTO of Power Curve ApS, announces their collaboration with SkySpecs which allows operators to leverage drone images to determine AEP losses – this is a game changer! Don’t miss these interviews…
Check out the latest from Ping at https://pingmonitor.co
Wind Systems Magazine is available here – https://www.windsystemsmag.com
Power Curve ApS is here – https://powercurve.dk
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EP114
Allen Hall: Welcome back to uptown podcast. I’m your co-host Allen hall. Rosemary and I were down in San Antonio and American clean power. Association’s clean power, 2022 conference and exhibition. And why we’re on the show floor. We had three outstanding interviews. And so we’re gonna bring you those interviews to catch everybody up on all the, the comings and goings of clean power 2020.
Allen Hall: First off is Matthew stead. Who’s the CEO of ping and Matthew describes some of the new improvements that are going into the ping system. Our next guest is Kenneth Carter. He’s the editor of when’s systems magazine, and he can, he provides us some insights on all the comings and goings on the show floor that week.
Allen Hall: And then last but not least is Nicholas gardener. The chief technical officer of power curve and power curves has been working with sky spec. On a new system to look at the damage to a, a blade, a leaning edge erosion those kind of pieces of damage, and to determine what the AEP loss would be from. Bugs, dirt, debris, leaning, edge erosion, blade damage.
Allen Hall: They all have an influence on AEP. And instead of just guessing at it now, Nicholas and the team at power curve are actually gonna take those drone scans and combine it with all the knowledge they have a blades and be able to predict what the AEP loss is. And is it enough to really matter? Do you need to fix it or just let it go?
Allen Hall: That’s that’s a really good addition to the, the teoledge of blade. So these three interviews are, are really interesting. It’s worth the time to, to sit through all three they’re about 15 minutes each. So as we recover from clean power, 2022, you can relax and enjoy some really good guests on the uptime podcast.
Allen Hall: Rosemary and I are here at ACP 2022 in San Antonio with Matthew stead from Bing. Welcome Matthew.
Matthew Stead: Thanks Alan.
Rosemary Barnes: Thanks Rosie. Thank you. We’re the Australians outnumbering you today. Yeah, it’s two
Allen Hall: to one, right? It’s usually it’s usually the numbers are reversed typically. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s so we’ve been walking the floor.
Allen Hall: Everybody’s been walking the floor today. Kind of checking out all the activities that’s going on. There’s a
Matthew Stead: good number of people here. It’s huge. It’s massive. Yeah, it it’s big. It’s
Rosemary Barnes: overwhelming. In fact, .
Matthew Stead: It,
Allen Hall: it is. Yeah, no, I think you’re right. It is a little overwhelming. We’ve been to a couple of conferences this year.
Allen Hall: Nothing anywhere near this size. And as Rosemary has been pointing out, there’s just, there’s solar, there’s batteries. There’s all kinds of monitoring systems today. We wanna talk about the monitoring system that really matters here, which is ping.
Matthew Stead: So
Allen Hall: Matthew, you have a couple of really new pieces to ping.
Allen Hall: Plus you there’s been some news on deployment. You. tell us about some of the new
Matthew Stead: development you have. Yeah. Thanks, Alan. So about a month ago we released our ice detection system. So we model ourselves on what wind farm technicians hear and sea. Yeah. And we know that wind farm technicians can hear wind ice builds up.
Matthew Stead: Sure. So, you know, using the inspiration we’ve worked out our algorithms and our codes to put on our. So, you know, in the past we’ve been listening and we still do listen for blade damage, but now we are listening for ice and so early detection of ice build up.
Allen Hall: So it, it is then the thought process is as ice accumulates on the blade, it just makes more noise so that we, we know basically shut it, shut it down.
Allen Hall: Is that, is that the process?
Matthew Stead: Yeah. So there’s probably a few aspects to it. Yeah. Early warning of ice buildup is helpful to then triage actions or. Steps mm-hmm so to be honest there’s a bit of work to be done on the next steps. Sure, sure. And that’s probably the expert of others, including maybe Rosie
Matthew Stead: So I’m gonna careful, I don’t say too much that I don’t know. But really once you know, there’s ice, then you can make decisions. Do you keep running? Do you keep running for three hours? Do you shut down mm-hmm or, you know, what, what is your action from that point? Sure. So I think what we are offering is a very efficient and effective way of knowing when the ice is there in the first place.
Allen Hall: Right. So it is basically the same unit as we all know and love it’s it’s the, the ping unit that’s manically attached to the base of the wind turbine. So is it just a software upgrade to the, to the ping unit or is it a hardware?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a, it’s like listening for a different thing, so, oh, okay.
Matthew Stead: Is purely a firmware update. And the neat thing with our, our tech is we can update it remotely around the world. Oh really? So we don’t have to go and travel and. We love to travel, but we don’t have to go to each one of our 650 devices and upgrade the software.
Allen Hall: So, so basically if you want to add on that, that icing provision, you just make a phone call to you.
Allen Hall: That
Matthew Stead: call yeah. Email phone, call, email. I might be asleep, so yeah, yeah. But yeah, yeah. That’s the way we’re working it up. We are planning for the Northern hemisphere winter that’s coming up. Yeah. I think everyone’s just getting hanging with summer, so yeah. Don’t wanna talk about winter too much.
Matthew Stead: But yeah, that’s, that’s why we were working toward.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think it’s really interesting cuz obviously, yeah, I worked on deicing for nearly five years when I was at LM wind power and worked with a lot of ice detection sensors, and there’s plenty of options out there. But other than the power curve method, where a manufacturer will, you know, look at what power curve, what power production they would be expecting versus what they’ve.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s no other sensor that’s really, so I don’t know. Uninvasive so retrofitable it like easily retrofitable cause I was using some other sensors and a lot of them work well, but you have to actually put them on the blade. So, you know, like you mentioned, I no wants to think about icing in the summer, but definitely that’s when my projects were always, you know, running.
Rosemary Barnes: So you have to get prepared out trying to make sure that cuz you’re always trying to install before the winter because you know, you want your whole winter period. We’re working in sites like Northern Sweden or Canada, where access is not that easy for a construction project during the, the wintertime.
Rosemary Barnes: So, you know, you’ve gotta make sure you’ve thought of everything before the project gets installed. Whereas this is another kind of sensor that you can install after the fact. Yeah. If you, if want to, it just goes on the tower, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think to use it in combination, like none of the ice detection methods are enough on their own.
Rosemary Barnes: They’ve, they’ve all. Pluses and minuses. So I think, yeah, we’ll have to, you really need to get some good, good data, a good partner to project with, to see who you can, how you can use this. Yeah. This new, yeah. New information. Yeah. Cause it is, it is adding quite a different kind of information than, you know, the sensors that you would stick on the blade.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s other ones that are measuring the natural frequency yeah. Of the blade and seeing when that changes and estimating the weight. So, yeah. It’s all kind of pieces of the, the puzzle. So I’ll be yeah. Interested to, to get a look at some data and yeah. Work with some, someone from operations and yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: See, see what you can do with
Matthew Stead: it. Yeah, I think we went to winter wind where we launched the product in Sweden and one of the OEMs was there and they, they talked to us about, you know, many sites, you know, they think about icing, they think about is, is it gonna be a problem? And is it enough of a problem that it’s actually worth doing something about?
Matthew Stead: Yeah. And he said, what happens? What can happen and has happened? Someone goes ahead, doesn’t do the ice package then finds out they’re in trouble. And then what do they do then? Retrofit of existing systems is
Rosemary Barnes: real. Not there. It’s really hard, but it’s, it’s real, really problematic because when you’re citing a wind farm you, you know, you do an icing assessment, your, your bank will require you to do an icing assessment, but the incentive is that you wanna find out that there’s very minimal icing.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Because that makes your project look much more attractive. So the people doing the site assessment, the resource assessment, Kind of incentivized to tell the client what they want to hear. Yep. Which is that there’s low icing and I took to so many operator. Who are discovering after the first few years of your operation, that they’re, they’ve got 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20% annual energy production loss from icing when their assessments are less than 5% and kind of the rough rule of thumb is less than 5%.
Rosemary Barnes: You wouldn’t bother heating your blades because you know, it, it costs money to put the system in and it costs maintenance. You know, it’s not as mature. The blade heating systems aren’t as robust and reliable as the rest. A wind turbine. And so yeah, below 5% you wouldn’t bother, but then if you actually turn out to have 10%, then you’re like, oh my God, now I’m losing, what do you do?
Rosemary Barnes: Millions of dollars. Yeah. And how do you retrofit it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And retrofit, there’s some options, but there aren’t good ones. They’re either really expensive or really ineffective. So yeah. It’s yeah, it’s still, it’s still a real ongoing problem. Yeah.
Allen Hall: So Matthew, you. 600 odd units out in service already.
Allen Hall: I think it’s six 50 now. Oh, six 50. Okay. Very well. And the, the data you’re getting back from those, you, you seem to be able to correlate kinda like what the icing piece you seem to correlate damage, categorized damage it’s. So you can tell when a blade is that category three or category four damage and that’s has, has that been correlated?
Allen Hall: I know that’s one of the. Subject points here at this conferences, trying to get a categorization, a UN unified standard on damage. Is that something that the ping unit can do?
Matthew Stead: Yeah. In some ways we’re trying to steer away from that a little bit. What we’re trying to do is more trending. So as a, perhaps a starting point we’re not categorizing individual damaged, we’re categorizing the total damage on each blade.
Matthew Stead: No, the total turbine, total turbine damage. So we are looking at the total. Total Turine so therefore the individual categorization sort of doesn’t make as much sense. Okay. And so what we are trying to really do is show when there’s a change. So if everything’s static, well, actually is anything changing?
Matthew Stead: Do you need to do anything right? Is really only when things are changing that you need to start thinking about, you know, how fast is it changing? What’s changing, what is the damage? So I think rather than trying to have an absolute accuracy, we’re actually trying. Be better at long term trending over six months, 12 months, 18 months.
Matthew Stead: That’s really what we see our key strength as. Yeah.
Allen Hall: So what, what’s the feedback you’re getting from the field? What are the things that your customers love about ping,
Matthew Stead: ease of installation? That’s obvious. I think my daughter could install it if she wanted to. in fact, she’s done some testing, unpaid.
Rosemary Barnes: Sorry, how old is she?
Rosemary Barnes: Job?
Matthew Stead: 17. Is
Allen Hall: that legal and I’ll show you. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. My first job at 15, I think. Yeah.
Matthew Stead: So it’s all legal. It’s all good. So ease of installation is one of the key things. Yeah. The next thing is knowing what’s going on between visual inspections. That’s what they really love is really, rather than just sort of flying blind throughout the year or every whatever every other year or whatever the time period is.
Matthew Stead: Right. And the next thing is really honing the inspections to the turbines that need. yeah, not old turbines have damage on their blade. So, you know, do you need to put as much effort into those or do you put your efforts into the ones that are more damaged? So I think they’re the sort of three key things that people love.
Matthew Stead: Wow.
Allen Hall: Okay. And so what are the next developments? I know you’ve been working on the icing piece for a number of months. Yeah. What are some of the future project, or can you tell us, can you give us a little insight on some of
Matthew Stead: the new things that are coming? Yeah, actually, perhaps I’ll So we, we were first inspired nine years ago to do the acoustic monitoring of damage.
Matthew Stead: Right. We were first inspired to do ice detection four years ago. Oh, wow. Okay. So it’s actually been a long term project that we’ve been working on. Sure. And I can also say that we’ve been inspired by someone called Alan to measure when a tower’s being struck by lighten. I think
Allen Hall: it’s a good idea. , it’s just my opinion,
Matthew Stead: but I think it’s a great idea.
Matthew Stead: So we were already
Rosemary Barnes: powers getting start. We mean when a turbine. Yeah. When a Turine gets struck, you, you hear the actual event or you hear the effect of it.
Matthew Stead: Ah, no. We’re gonna switch from acoustics to magnetic fields Uhhuh. So currents create a magnetic field. We are going to sense the magnetic field.
Allen Hall: Okay.
Allen Hall: So if you, if you know, when a lightning strike occur, You can find out all the parameters as many, many monitoring sites that actually measure lightning strikes across the us, across the world, actually. Okay. So you can get all the parameters you’s gotta make, you can tell ’em roughly where the strike occurred.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Which, you know, cuz the terms aren’t moving time, time, stamp, time, and a time stamp. If you provide the temp stamp, they can provide the rest
Rosemary Barnes: of the data. And then you’ll be able to say how, how, like the magnitude of the, the story.
Matthew Stead: Nice. I was just gonna give a timestamp. Oh, okay. And then you can call visa
Allen Hall: or I forget how they pronounce their name visa, that they will, they can provide the data.
Allen Hall: There’s a number of extra sources for that, but yeah, they can provide all the data. They can tell you peak current energy specific energy, all the lingo around lightning. So we need that. They have. They have monitors.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Their ways.
Allen Hall: Well, they do, it’s just sort of top secrets. Put it derived outta the nuclear industry, but essentially they have a bunch of monitors,
Rosemary Barnes: but you mean they’re monitoring the, the whole globe for the, and the
Allen Hall: globe.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Right. Okay. And I don’t know about Australia, but I can tell you, at least in the United States, that’s why we here. Well, yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah. No, but it is. I mean, I know it’s a problem. I moved back to Australia about, well, nearly a year and a half ago now. And it, lightning is one of the things that people talk about a lot, a lot in Australia.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I don’t know. If the lightning is like worse, bigger, or, yeah. It’s kinda like Texas bigger or is it bigger? Yeah, I know Japan. I’ve always heard Japan, you know, has you, can’t just put a normal Turbin lightning protection system in Japan and think everything’s gonna be just fine. So I don’t know.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe Australia’s like that, but. Definitely lots of people are talking about lightning complaining about lightning. Not quite sure what’s going on because they thought there was a lightning protection system, but they keep on having blades damaged by it. And then, you know, when someone like me comes in and tries to help you know, be an intermediary in the root cause analysis process so that the owner can understand what the manufacturer is doing on the operators and, you know, People don’t have their lightning cards installed or their, you know, like there’s always questions.
Rosemary Barnes: Well, we don’t actually know. We don’t actually know if there was a strike or how big it was or anything. And then the squabble over who pays is very challenging when you don’t have that information. So, yeah, it seems like
Matthew Stead: that’s why Australia is the right market. Why? Yeah. The timestamp is important.
Matthew Stead: So knowing what’s happening and the lightning corn,
Allen Hall: doesn’t give you a times. And a lot of times on some of the blades that get damaged, the lightning card seems to disappear magically.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So yeah, very, very often.
Allen Hall: right. Am I right about that? Yeah. I mean, I can’t tell you the number of times of the last year where they’ve had a big damage in lightning strike.
Allen Hall: They went to go pull the card card doesn’t exist. Okay. So we’re starting off from ground zero again. Can you tell me when the lightning strike occurred in the last week? That makes it hard.
Matthew Stead: Yeah, right. Also I was speaking to someone here today around the, I. And they were able to confirm to me that some sites are not able to be insured for lightning damage on blades.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. Because
Rosemary Barnes: the, the premium is so high because they are so frequent they’re the risks
Matthew Stead: are so high. Yeah. Yeah. So I think this is a really, obviously a big challenge for the industry. Yeah,
Allen Hall: it is. And the, the thing we’re missing is data on turbines. Yeah. We have the sort of global lightning detection network, but what we’re missing is this.
Allen Hall: Yep on each blade. If we know the times we can really correlate and it’s actionable data for the OEMs too, because that, that loop should feed back into, these are the kinda lightning structure you’re seeing. This is the repetitiveness of it. This is the wind TURs are in Kansas or in Australia. This is the frequency, all those variables.
Allen Hall: We just don’t have the data set really figured out yet. And particularly as, as the turbines get taller, it’s gonna change dramatically. Yeah. It’s it’s it’s good action on your side and, and. I know ping is growing and, and it seems like you’re hiring pretty quickly right now. I’ve been watching a lot of the companies at the ACP this week.
Allen Hall: There’s a lot of hiring going on in, in wind energy and renewables. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It’s great. So you’re, you’re looking for who you’re looking for
Matthew Stead: right now. Well we’ve actually just got four people onboarding right now. You got three, just joined us another. One’s joining us in a couple of weeks, so, wow.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. So it’s been great. Something’s growing.
Allen Hall: Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Wow. Well, Matthew. It’s great. Great to have you here. It’s actually great
Matthew Stead: to see you in person. Yes. It’s great to be here and meet. I meet you both of you in person as well. Yeah, funny.
Rosemary Barnes: We, we should have met already by now, but we haven’t.
Rosemary Barnes: So not in person have to travel
Matthew Stead: around the world. I actually met someone from Melbourne for the first time. So
Allen Hall: here. Oh really? Yeah. Oh, wow. There you go. Thank
Matthew Stead: you. Yeah, it’s great to be here. Great. You so much. Thanks for me. Yeah. Thanks.
Allen Hall: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable.
Allen Hall: Strike tape is a lightning protection system. Upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage. Visit weather guard, wind.com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call today. All right, we’re here with Kenneth Carter.
Allen Hall: Editor of wind systems magazine. Kenneth we know one another, because you’ve, you’ve actually published some articles about lightning protection. Right. Which is super cool. But we, we , we’re down at ACP 2022 we’re down in San Antonio. And you know, we’re a site that publicizes a lot of news articles and tries to get really deep into it, but you’re, you’re way deeper than we are.
Allen Hall: And maybe yeah, yeah. You’re knee deep in it. Right. So the. The, the wind, the wind industry’s changing, it’s evolving very quickly now because of this pushed by the administration to, to put more wind down. What, what is, what are some of the things you’re you’re seeing because you’re, you’re seeing
Kenneth Carter: sort of the whole picture.
Kenneth Carter: Well, I’m seeing a really push for offshore wind. Yeah. And that’s what everybody’s buzz and everywhere’s talking about off shore, offshore, wind. Yeah. And I just learned today that they’re also pushing for offshore wind in the Gulf, which I did not know was a big thing until. All brought about by the governor of Louisiana asking for a, for a, a, a study done by Boham.
Kenneth Carter: So I was, yeah. So I’m looking forward to, to diving more into that and maybe doing an article on, on that aspect of offshore wind, I did not know was even happening. Hmm.
Allen Hall: So yeah, the, the, the Louisiana offshore and the Gulf of Mexico that. Pretty obvious, right. Because it has so much oil
Kenneth Carter: and gas there.
Kenneth Carter: Well, actually, yeah, that’s part of the push for it. Now that the technology is, is increasing where they can do more turbines in the, the low wind areas. Yeah. That’s why they’re such a push on the Atlantic coats for offshore because of wind to hire the win. Yeah. And now with the Gulf though, you’ve got a, a hurricane challenge because right.
Kenneth Carter: It’s kinda like a magnet for hurricanes. It seems. Yeah. So Part of the what they’re looking at, but I think the technology is there where it shouldn’t be big of that big of a problem if they can get the turbines in the water.
Allen Hall: So, Rosemary, I mean, that’s one of the issues about The Gulf of Mexico is the speeds are lower.
Allen Hall: So that means they’re gonna have slightly different turbines. Right? I mean, they’re gonna have to have bigger blades to kind of generate the power they want. Is that essentially what’s gonna
Rosemary Barnes: happen. Yeah. Usually they’ll make a, you know, platform kind of arrangement with the turbines. So they’ll have the same generator and then depending on the wind speed, they increase the, the blade length.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, a low wind speed site will have longer blade. try and keep everything else the same to keep costs down, but that’s a big challenge to make a blade that is efficient for low wind speeds and also come withstand hurricanes, right? Yeah. I mean, it’s not really a challenge to make it it’s a challenge to make it economical because obviously it’s yeah, the blade is mostly designed around.
Rosemary Barnes: The extreme loads and not really around the, you know, the average wind speeds, the blades aren’t, you know, aren’t under that much stress in an average wind speed. Well, the
Kenneth Carter: consensus says that in the Gulf, the winds are higher around Louisiana and Northern Texas area. So that’s what, that’s what the areas are focusing on.
Kenneth Carter: I’m not sure. You’ll see it around Florida or Alabama necessarily, or Georgia. Yeah. Yeah, it can happen, but probably not for a while. I would think.
Allen Hall: So with this push towards offshore, what are some of the issues you’re seeing so far? I know there’s a lot of offshore where we are, but Massachusetts new, York’s getting a lot of winds installed.
Allen Hall: We already have block island up and running. Right, right. It, there seems to be sort of two challenges from what, what we’re seeing is one is the OEMs just kind of struggling because of the cost. And, and the second is they’re getting pushed to put a lot of wind turbines up, but there’s, there’s. The competing nature there that they can’t seem to find a good balance on it.
Allen Hall: What, what are you hearing on the floor here today? Like where do people think that wind is
Kenneth Carter: going? And well, they’re definitely pushing it for the Atlantic side because the continental shelf is easier to put. Oh, true. Yes. You put those turbines in the water. Yeah. They’re looking at west coast. You’ve got a, a much quicker drop off.
Kenneth Carter: So you’re gonna have to deal with floating wind turbine, which is a whole new technology, right. And still developing. I think it’s gonna be really cool once it gets off, off the ground or outta the water that is. And but and there’s lots of, lots of, of research going on in that area. They’ve already leased a lot of the, the the area off the Atlantic coast.
Kenneth Carter: So it’s just waiting for final approvals which is yeah. You know, a bunch of red tape. Yeah. But you’re gonna see. Because they’re the, the goals are just crazy for like by 2 20 30, I guess. What is it? I can’t remember the exact number 30 gigas by 2030. Yeah. And but the strides they’ve made since then is is pretty impressive.
Kenneth Carter: So I, I think they can do it if everyone can get on board and, and get all their ducks in the row as it were and, and get it and get it moving.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It, it, it’s, it’s part of that. Sort of 30 per 30 goal realizable at the moment. I, I, I see kind of conflicting articles. Mm-hmm like a lot of projects are not gonna happen until later there’s, they’re bringing in brand new technology and they’re the new wind terms are brand new.
Allen Hall: They’ve never been tried anywhere in the world, so right. We’re just doing basically clean sheet.
Kenneth Carter: Well, there’s a lot of European models that they’re, that they’re BA that they’re basing that on. Sure. So cause Europe has a lot of, lot of experience with offshore. Yeah. And so they’re bringing a lot of that, the expertise in to to help with that.
Kenneth Carter: The, the thing that I see happening I, I think well, of course, of course COVID also kept us kind of flattened the curve about, of the, of the growth. I think I saw I was in, in. A seminar this morning talking about how 20, 20 and 2021 growth was kind of the same, which is what, what they don’t want.
Kenneth Carter: Right. But they see 20, 22 kind of pushing it back up again. But, but there’s still a lot of COVID fears out there with the supply chains. It’s messed up stuff. It’s all, all the big chain reaction. Yeah. It’s they’re gonna have to deal with before they can get things really smooth and operating and becoming moving
Rosemary Barnes: up.
Rosemary Barnes: And do you see all the growth in offshore or are people still developing
Kenneth Carter: on Shore’s they’re still doing, Offshore’s still model in the us. It’s plenty of cause Texas is a perfect example. Yeah. I think Iowa’s their, their growth is amazing. So yeah, you’re still gonna see a lot of onshore stuff.
Kenneth Carter: Offshore’s not gonna be the, the, the end of it. So cause there’s so much, there’s so much land that’s available that is perfect for
Rosemary Barnes: for wind. Yeah. And do you. What constraints do you see in onshore when the rolling out
Kenneth Carter: as fast as people like maybe policy, I mean, you’ve gotta, and you’ve gotta, and when you’ve got to go into these these areas and, and talk to the people who live there and say, Hey, this is a good thing.
Kenneth Carter: And that’s what I see more happening because a lot of people don’t realize these when you build a wind farm in these area, Well that income coming, the wind farm is going out to that community funding, schools, funding other economic growth. So it’s and that more needs to get out. A lot of people say they don’t like the eyesore.
Kenneth Carter: I personally think they’re really cool. I don’t understand why, why. I mean, you’re okay with these cell towers, but you don’t like the wind towers. What’s the difference. Yeah. Yeah. So but and I think they’re much more majestic looking personally. But but yeah, I think. That’s gonna be a big driver to get, especially in rural areas, because you’ve got some misinformation out there about it that needs to be dealt with, but it really is.
Kenneth Carter: It’s a job. It’s a job maker. It’s an economic boom for the town. I mean, it’s a, win-win in my opinion.
Allen Hall: And we’ve seen a lot of powering going on. Yes. It’s down in Texas because Texas has been in the wind business long enough. Now they’re starting to repower those existing sites. So they know they have good winning.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Kenneth Carter: Well, you know, 20 years is a, is the average lifespan of a wind turbine, right. And technology has just advanced so much in the last few decades alone that you can, you can do this, make them a power with a fraction of the wind turbines they had in the past. Right. so uh, so it’s great to, because they’re bigger and larger and they’re just more efficient because they’ve learned from.
Kenneth Carter: All those decades of, of, of experience
Rosemary Barnes: with that. And I assume that those early wind farms were, you know, the first place that you put a wind farm is in the best, the very best site that you can find. So they’re probably those 20 year old wind farms are very appealing. The resource
Kenneth Carter: that’s there. Yeah. I know 20 years ago just driving through Palm Springs area and just seeing just, just, just the landscapes dotted with wind turbines.
Kenneth Carter: It’s the coolest thing I ever saw. So I think it’s but those are like hundreds that they could probably power the same area for, for half the turbines that are there now.
Allen Hall: And Ken, one of the things other pieces we’re seeing is these power purchase agreements. Mm-hmm, , that’s huge, right? They’re massive.
Allen Hall: And it’s, it’s big names, Amazons, Googles, Facebooks that are going after. Is that growth? Just gonna continue because, oh, I think so. I think so. It’s like, they’re doubling down almost like Amazon’s like really
Kenneth Carter: doubling down on they’re they’re really seeing the the, the PR advantage of really. Oh yeah.
Kenneth Carter: Yes. It’s PR, but it’s also, you know, it’s a good thing. I mean, it’s a, yeah. It’s positive. Right. Uh, And yeah, there, I feel Walmart has a huge P and so they’ve, they’ve done a lot of stuff with oh wow. Queen clean power. Yeah. It’s a so I think it’s just gonna increase because more companies say. This is a good for our company, but it’s also good for the environment and, and good for us too.
Kenneth Carter: So yeah,
Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s a little bit more than P R I C consumers are, are demanding it, you know, they won’t, they won’t buy stuff from Amazon unless they know that it’s a, you know, a zero emissions delivery and that’s true. And I think that, you know an argument that. People have a lot. Is it, you know, about individual action?
Rosemary Barnes: Is that the solution to climate change or is it pointless to do anything on an individual scale? And I tend to think that that’s one of the big things that individuals can do is, you know, support companies that are using renewable energy. And I think that we’ve had clean energy PPAs in the past. And now I think we’re starting to see not just a hundred percent renewables.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, kind of on average, but there’s 24, 7 renewables were every hour of the day. It’s you know, guaranteed clean energy, which is a much harder problem. Obviously you need to add storage and you know, get a lot more smart about it. I see that making a big, a big change in companies that are, you know, taking on that challenge like Amazon and Google is doing a.
Rosemary Barnes: They’re solving some big technical problems that aren’t quite cost effective for, you know, government to do overall. It adds a bit more cost. And so yeah, when people say to me, you know, does individual action matter. I think that that’s one place where, you know, it really, really can get those companies that are making these huge profits, get them to.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, play their part in the energy transition at the same time.
Kenneth Carter: Well, that’s right. Especially during the, the previous administration, you had companies and, and state driven renewable efforts yeah. That were really taking over what the fed federal government was kind of kind of relaxed on for a couple of years.
Kenneth Carter: I think now with all three of those combined with federal government CA having some renewable, renewable. I think it’s gonna fast track a lot of stuff. I’m hoping anyway. Mm.
Allen Hall: So what is new at win systems magazine? What are some of the new things coming up? Like what what’s what’s the latest.
Kenneth Carter: Well, the, our show issue is what we have on the stands now.
Kenneth Carter: Yeah. We, we have a report from American glean power in there that they’ve they generously wrote for us for the, for this, for this issue, talking about the, their, their quarter reports that they, they spent a lot of time on and they were gracious enough to give us an article based on that.
Kenneth Carter: And nice. I have another article in there on, on offshore wind and the foundations and, and how this technology that he’s talking about is a way to increase the longevity of these of, of turbine foundations that should keep them have be replaced, repaired for, for a long time.
Kenneth Carter: Oh, wow. Okay. So yeah, it’s pretty, yeah, it’s, it’s pretty interesting actually. He’s a, he’s, he’s been the frequent contributor to us and he knows the stuff and he’s, he’s very good. But but yeah, that, that’s
Allen Hall: why I read, win a magazine. Is it. Kind of a good highlight of what’s happening out there, but also some technical articles.
Kenneth Carter: Yeah. I, the technology stuff is my personal favorite. So when I came on as editor, six years ago, I was like, oh, let’s do some more tech stuff because I really like that kind of stuff and innovation, because it is such a, a big part of the, of the industry that sometimes gets looked over in, in favor of policy or in favor of, of.
Kenneth Carter: Maintenance issue, which is, which is important, but, but I like to make sure people see, okay, this is what’s happening now. This is what’s gonna happen next mm-hmm hopefully so that’s, that’s my goal. So yeah, that’s, what’s kinda what we’re working on now that’s what’s people can read now, so, and you’re online presence when yeah.
Kenneth Carter: Oh yeah. We have a online presence. We have a website that you can access all of our articles for the past 12 years. And we’ve been, been publishing. And they’re good for reference articles. A lot of people go through there to look at stuff that we’ve published, you know, 8, 9, 10 years ago. Yeah.
Kenneth Carter: That still has some relevance today. So, which I, I like, but but yeah, so we’ve we’ve been, we everything is posted and we also have archives of the actual digital issues were there. So if you wanna look at it like a magazine it’s therefore you look like a
Allen Hall: magazine. Yeah. That’s nice. Yeah.
Allen Hall: That’s. Well, Hey, Kenneth, that’s just been great to have you on, on the show here. Thank you. And yeah, we’ll, we’re, I’ll continue to read and win since this magazine, obviously, and Rosemary will too. yeah, so we, we, we look forward to, you know, the new, the new episodes gonna come out and
Kenneth Carter: appreciate you coming on the program.
Kenneth Carter: Well, thanks so much. I appreciate you having me. I hope I was able to lighten me a little bit. Yeah,
Allen Hall: ping monitor. Is a continuous blade monitoring system, which allows windfarm operators to stay ahead of maintenance. Wind techs can often hear damaged blades from the ground, but they can’t continuously monitor all the turbines. They also can’t calculate how bad the damage is or how fast it’s propagating based on sound.
Allen Hall: But ping can Ping’s acoustic system is being used on over 600 turbines worldwide. It allows operators to discover damage before it gets expensive and prioritize maintenance needs cross their fleet, and it pays for itself. The first time it identifies serious damage or saves you from doing an unnecessary visual inspection.
Allen Hall: Stop flying blind out there. Get Ping’s ears on your turbines. Learn more@pingmonitor.co. We have Nicholas God here from power. And Nicholas has been doing some presentations with sky specs. Now they’re working together. Yeah. We
Nicholas Gaudern: are working together very closely. Yes, yes. In a collaborative fashion. Yes. Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. So
Allen Hall: would you like
Matthew Stead: to describe which
Nicholas Gaudern: what you been working on? Yeah, absolutely. So today’s been real exciting, which we’ve been launching this new partnership that we have between power curve and sky specs. And the whole premise is about making more use of this, this vast amount of data that sky inspects is gathering on all their inspection.
Nicholas Gaudern: So they’re flying a drone around a turbine. They’re collecting thousands of images, and this is all being categorized for all of the structured defects and any kind of anomalies with the blade surface, like cracks, dirt, bugs, erosion. And that’s great, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the aerodynamic performance of the blade, right?
Nicholas Gaudern: So you may want to try to make a decision on how to repair a blade on structural categorization. But if all your blades basically look the same, tructure. The question is, well, which, which should I fix first and why, what, what might I gain? Sure. So what we’ve done is we’ve created this this extra use for the data where we do an aerodynamic analysis based on all of the structural categorization that’s been done.
Nicholas Gaudern: So every single damage that has been captured on the blade and tagged by their experts and their AI system, we actually have a transfer function where we are conversing that to an aerodynamic penalty. so we have this this loss factor, let’s call it okay. For every, every defect that we find on a blade.
Nicholas Gaudern: So we can combine that with a nice detailed arrow model of the blade. And we can then calculate what, what the losses might be.
Rosemary Barnes: So is it like a database of, you know, a crack of this. Length or maybe not a crack, but you know, like a, a blob of this size means a knockdown of X
Nicholas Gaudern: percent ex. Exactly. So if you have like a certain depth of erosion or a certain size of erosion, we can, we can make a penalty score for that.
Nicholas Gaudern: And those penalty scores come from a variety of different things. They come from like a wind time data library. Oh, okay. Of understanding, you know, how those defects affect performance comes from CFD. Stimula. And it comes from all the, the field experience we have from, from working out that, but it all hinges around having a model of the turbine.
Nicholas Gaudern: So we actually go out into the field these laser scan blade, if we need to, we don’t have a geometry and then we have the 3d surface. So from that, we can carry out a CFD simulation or a blade momentum so much any of these really interesting aerodynamic techniques we can apply because we know the real geometry.
Nicholas Gaudern: And then we can look at before and after. What’s what’s the blade do now what might it do if we map this damage onto it? And we do that for everything that’s on the blade. So it might be 150 damages tagged we’ll map everything onto the blade and look at the impact.
Allen Hall: So then is there like a scale that comes out or you you’re, if you give
Nicholas Gaudern: a, an AP number, an AP loss number?
Nicholas Gaudern: Oh, so, so for every turbine you will see this is what the calculation says you are losing. Okay. And the more data you. The better. So every time you fly around the turbine with a drone, you can update your calculation to say, well, how’s it, how’s it changed? How’s it evolved over time.
Allen Hall: So in a sense, then you’re gathering a, sort of a momentous database of leading edge erosion, digitalizations.
Allen Hall: Yep. Correlating that to aerodynamics to an a. So in a sense, will you be able to look at trends then you’ll be able to like, do predictive trends? Like yeah, if we’re gonna put a wind turbine in Texas, for example, we, you will have some data that says, well, in Texas, typically it takes two years before you really care or five years to before you really care.
Allen Hall: And this is the time you’d wanna repair it. And,
Nicholas Gaudern: and the more data you have, obviously the, the better that prediction will be. So if you have, you know, a fly by every six months and you can see how things are evolving, You can then start to maybe draw some conclusions, you know, is, do we have some really good geographical correlations that we can kind of link to certain parts of the country?
Nicholas Gaudern: Are we seeing certain blade types or certain manufacturers, or are seeing erosion evolve in a different way? Because even if you have two blades that are the same length on the same sites that have been maintained in the same way, they’ll probably have different AP losses. And that’s because they’re, they’re all unique products, they kind of handcrafted products.
Nicholas Gaudern: So
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, I wanted to ask, so you’re doing your 3d scanning blades how similar, you know, a blade that should be exactly the same as, you know, all the other ones that, that are the same, same blade type. How similar are they actually? Cause I know like in, I’ve spent a lot of time in winter buy factories and you like the leading edge is, is hand, hand finished.
Rosemary Barnes: And so yeah, are. Or similar enough that the exact same aerody aerodynamic model works for all of them? Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. In, from what we’ve seen. Yes. There may be some small variations, but compared to like the, the damage the erosion does to the profiles, then it it’s fairly insignificant. Oh, okay. So if we, if we see , if we see from only from a certain factory, we scan a blade and, and there’s some, some significant change in leadership, then we can account for.
Nicholas Gaudern: We haven’t actually seen that yet. Typically they’re all, they’re all close enough that the same model for the same turbine just is, is
Rosemary Barnes: applicable. Okay. And how long does it take a three day scan of blade? Typically we do it
Nicholas Gaudern: within a day. Okay. If it’s a really good weather day and everything goes great, maybe just a couple
Rosemary Barnes: of hours.
Rosemary Barnes: And is it done with drones, drones, lasers on them or I mean, the drones do
Nicholas Gaudern: have lasers on them. Squarely enough. Yeah. But they’re not precise enough and there’s a lot of noise in the data. We actually use a long range, architectural scanner. So it’s capturing a few million points a second. So even if there’s a little bit of movement in a blade, we can still capture.
Nicholas Gaudern: Typically we don’t have the blade on the ground that that’s better for everyone and it makes it a lot easier. Okay. But sometimes that’s just not possible. Yeah. So. If we get the weather prediction, right. And we get like a, you know, zero wind day, we can actually scan the blade when it’s still on the tower.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. So you just need to stop the turbine and correct. I guess you need to see the front and the back. Yeah. So we
Nicholas Gaudern: just have stop turbine one blade down, just move the, the laser around in a few different positions and we can capture everything
Rosemary Barnes: we need it’s buddy, because you know, like a lot of times when I was working for LM students often would get in touch wanting a, you know, an.
Rosemary Barnes: A surface models for their research and never give it to them, never, ever, ever with
Nicholas Gaudern: the newer blades. You know, there, there is a bit more interesting aerodynamic design going on, but to be perfectly honest, if you look at the majority of installed blades in the world, they’re all using the same. Airflows, they’re using a knacker airfoil or a DFO, whatever.
Nicholas Gaudern: So, so in terms of like the, the interest I’m not quite sure, always what they’re trying to protect. Because they all kind of look the same, man. Okay. The profiles are stacked in a different order. I mean, I’m kind of making it maybe sound simpler than it is, but once you’ve designed a few blades and you’ve seen a few blades, it’s not that difficult to kind of work out how
Rosemary Barnes: pitch should.
Rosemary Barnes: We were just talking earlier about how secretive the industry was. I was over at TPI conferences. I desperately wanna do a video that shows how wind turbine blade is made. And I thought TPI would be a good option because they make blades for a lot of people thought that they would have, you know, something that they could show you’d think, you know, like most of the factories are still making some blades for that are quite old designs.
Rosemary Barnes: Like, you know, like maybe they’re still making a 40 or 50 meter long, all glass blade. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not high tech, you know, it, it’s a bunch of people that are rolling out yeah. Rolls of you know, glass fabric and then they’re infusing it, it, you know, it’s not rocket lands and it’s been done exactly that way for decades.
Rosemary Barnes: And I, I just don’t see why I can’t, I can’t go in and
Nicholas Gaudern: build is just better to, to share these things have been more people understand blades, whether it be the owners or the operators or the owners, then, then we can make them better. Yeah. And what’s the goal, right? It’s to make them better, to produce more energy.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. So I. That’s why we really are excited about what we’re doing with the sky specs thing, because it’s about understanding blades better. How can you improve them? How can you maintain them in a way that will give you more energy? So we, you know, we’re not trying to knock down particular OEMs.
Nicholas Gaudern: If they’ve got worse performance numbers with that, it’s not about that. It’s about the operator getting the most out of their assets and to do that, you need a nice model of a turbine. And that’s something that we. We’re able to deliver.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’ll be really interesting if you are able to build up data over time and you know, like yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Estimate how, how damage progresses. Cause I know it matters so much where the, like the leading edge erosion is very different in, you know, Scotland compared to in, I don’t know inland Germany or, or something. So I think that would be really helpful for the industry to, you know, when you’re planning your, your business case for the life of the wind farm, you wanna know how often you’re gonna be resurfacing your blades.
Rosemary Barnes: Right. Exactly. I think that, I don’t know the wind industry, it, it feels like they’re still having the battles of 20 years ago. Everyone fighting against each other for, you know, dominance in the wind industry. Energy transition. Now you’re not only competing against other winter by manufacturers. You, you know, you’re competing against solar and storage and right.
Rosemary Barnes: Interconnectors and maybe hydrogen at some point in the future, it’s just, you know, like it it’s everything. And if you can make wind as a whole more competitive, then I think that that will benefit
Nicholas Gaudern: everyone. But also the operator. Let the OEMs like not talk to each other anyway. Mm. There are, there are all the networks going on between the operators, sharing knowledge about blade defects about erosion, about performance upgrades.
Nicholas Gaudern: So this is all being discussed anyway. So we are just, we’re just contributing to that knowledge base. You know, power curve. We, we give out uh, webinar. To whoever wants them on blade technology, blade, AMIC design, because it just helps people understand and make better decisions. It’s nothing secret. You pick up the right textbook for the right paper. You can find this stuff. It’s just not very easily digestive.
Nicholas Gaudern: Sure. So yeah, we are very keen on, on knowledge and we just think it helps everyone make better decisions. So you
Allen Hall: just announced the new technology today at, at the convention. When is it available to the, to the.
Nicholas Gaudern: so you can come and talk to us now. So, so the service the service exists, it doesn’t exist in a way you can just, you know, tick a box and, and order.
Nicholas Gaudern: Right because, you know, it needs to be bespoke to the customer. We need to make sure we understand the customer’s needs and sure. And how it fits in with how they use the horizon system today. So, but no, you can come and talk to us now. We’ve already done some pretty big pilot projects with different customers.
Nicholas Gaudern: Wow. So some of the results are presented today. They were from a, from a live project. Well, we’ve, we’ve come and done this. So, yeah, it’s, it’s really exciting.
Allen Hall: So if you have sky spec data already in the horizon system, can you utilize that data now to do this analysis? Or do you need to do fresh
Nicholas Gaudern: data? No, no, no.
Nicholas Gaudern: It’s you can use the existing data. So that’s the nice thing of the system. So if you’ve got inspection data going five years back, we can give you five years worth of calculations. Whoa. To see how things may have changed in that time. So yeah, no, no new fly by should be required unless there was some issue, but I didn’t, I didn’t see why that would.
Allen Hall: so about half the blades in America have been scan by Skys specs at one time or another. So that database is used. You
Nicholas Gaudern: just imagine the learning we could get from that. It’s incredible.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And you validated it on a one win farm project
Nicholas Gaudern: or? Yeah. So the pilot, so validation has been on one
Rosemary Barnes: win farm over what time period.
Nicholas Gaudern: Three years. Oh, okay. Well, I mean, the project’s been done in like the last six months, but we had three years worth of data to go through and track things. And,
Rosemary Barnes: and you’re saying, obviously you’re happy with the, the correlation
Nicholas Gaudern: it’s looking really great. It’s looking like tallys very well with all the publicly available surveys that we done.
Nicholas Gaudern: So things like NL papers, DTU papers, anything that’s been published about the AP lost due to erosion. It corresponds very well with what we’re seeing and reporting. Good. And also when we see the AP losses on the blades, it’s also correlating very well to winter time studies we’ve done and CFD studies.
Nicholas Gaudern: So every, everything is checking out. Obviously the more data we have, the more confident we’ll be. But yeah, we’re obviously happy enough to, to launch it today. We, we feel we’ve, we’ve gone through enough checks and balances, but the more people use it, the better it will be. A thousand,
Allen Hall: well, it looks like an exciting product and I, I, I think it’s gonna have a lot of influence on the industry.
Allen Hall: And as we’re all trying to squeeze out the last one or 2% of AEP, this is how you’re
Nicholas Gaudern: gonna do it. Yeah. We have to prioritize your own end budget. No, no, one’s got the time on money to fix the whole fleet. You, so if you’ve got a turbine that’s losing and half and another one, that’s only losing half percent.
Nicholas Gaudern: Well, you should go and fix the one that’s losing more. And at the moment, there’s no way to tell. Apart from just the gut feeling. And now we’re bringing a data driven, consistent approach to that. I, I heard it was, and it would just be updated every time you have that new data. So you can track it, learn from.
Nicholas Gaudern: And hopefully just make better and better
Allen Hall: decision. Thanks. Yeah. Well, Cola said, Hey, it’s been great for you. Stop by. Yeah. Thanks. It’s great to see you in the states again. So yeah. Good luck. And we’ll, we’ll be keeping on this new, on this new
Nicholas Gaudern: technology. Great. Great. Talk to you. Thank
Rosemary Barnes: you.
Allen Hall: You.
