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In this episode, Allen and Joel speak with ABB’s Daniel Gerber, Senior VP, Global Product Group Manager Wind, System Drives and WindESCo’s Founder and CEO Mo Dua about their companies’ new partnership. They are combining ABB’s capabilities in wind turbine electrical systems with WindESCo’s optimization software platforms. This collaboration aims to help wind farm operators monitor the health of electrical components to reduce downtime and maximize energy production. Plus, we discuss pilot projects planned for 2024 to demonstrate the value of jointly leveraging ABB’s converter expertise and WindESCo’s analytics.
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Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am Allen Hall and I’m here with Joel Saxum, and we have some really interesting guests today. We have Daniel Gerber, Senior Vice President, Global Product Group Manager, Wind System Drive from ABB, and he’s based in Zurich, Switzerland. And also Mo Dua from WindESCo.
Mo is the founder and CEO of WindESCo, which is based in Massachusetts, my, my state. And the reason we’re talking here today is because there has been a minority stake in WindESCo from ABB. And when this news release popped out a couple of months ago now, I thought, man, this is a great alignment. Finally, the wind industry is doing something on the electrical side that is interesting, because everything we hear is on the mechanical side.
It’s all about blades, leading edge erosion, how the gearboxes are breaking, how everything’s leaking oil. But the, a lot of the improvements that are going to happen in wind energy and in the production side are going to happen because the electrical control system and the converters and everything downstream are working properly and doing what they should.
And this is where WindESCo and ABB come in together. So Daniel and Mo, welcome to the program.
Daniel Gerber: Hello, welcome, and thanks for having me. Thank you.
Allen Hall: So would you like to just describe what brought the two of you together and how that relationship started and what the plan is for the combined effort.
Daniel Gerber: We at ABB, we have a strong commitment in decarbonizing the power generation. And therefore the wind business for us is a strong part of our strategy. Our customers are asking us, what can we do actually to improve the situation, to get more out of our equipment, more out of our turbines. How can we make them as available as possible?
And we at ABB, we have 17, 000 converters in the field, more than 21, 000 generators in the field operating. So we have a couple of years of good experience. And what we try to do is to find a partner, which can basically help us to bring a 360 degrees view on this. And we found with WindESCo, a partner, which has a credible offering into the market.
And basically allows us to not just see the electrical part, but as well have the mechanical parts together. And therefore we found that WindESCo is one of our preferred partner in this collaboration.
Mo Dua: Yeah.
Thank you, Daniel. From my perspective, WindESCo has been a company that’s been hyper focused on addressing the challenges in the wind sector.
And as you guys know, there’s a lot of challenges in the sector, a lot of moving parts right in the sector also. So We have ourselves been looking to expand beyond just performance optimization into asset health monitoring. And our customers have been sharing with us a lot of the challenges that they are facing on the electrical sides, right?
Electrical systems are becoming even more important because offshore turbines are mostly electrical, right? Most of these offshore turbines don’t have gearboxes. So it’s just been a point that keeps coming up again and again. And ABB has so much depth of experience in the electrical side with generators, converters and motors that really allows us to expand beyond mechanical into electrical and really address the pain points of the industry.
So ABB with its global footprint and leadership in the electrical subsystem was just an ideal partner for us. The deal happened. It took time. Of course, ABB is a big company. But there was a lot of alignment. So the deal happened fairly quickly.
Allen Hall: And Joel well knows, and we’ve been out to some wind sites just recently, where the effort is primarily on the mechanical.
And when you look at even converters in particular, because this is an ABB sweet point. That a converter is just pulled and replaced. Anything electronic on a wind turbine is pulled and swapped. They’re removed and replaced. There is very little in terms of optimization there. It is just to keep it running.
And I think what we’re seeing is there’s a lot of turbines, and when the turbines go through the development cycle, They’re made to produce power, but they may not be producing it the most efficient way. And this is where WindESCo’s fine fixed measure comes in part, and plus the swarm in terms of wind asset.
It’s a, to look at the electrical side and it’s about time we did that So I want to touch on that and Mo maybe you can touch on this from your perspective. It does seem like the electrical side of the turbines have not been touched very much in terms of control Optimization and performance.
Mo Dua: Yeah, you raise a good point there Allen because it is an area that has not been addressed, or I want to say it can be addressed much better, right?
So the maximum number of events leading to downtime is on the electrical side. And typically what we’ve heard is if there is a fault on the electrical side the site people mostly just reset the fault without addressing the core problem, right? What is it that the fault keeps coming up, right? So they would just reset the fault and continue with the turbine.
And what happens then is the converter fails, right? And the power module, I’ve heard power module blow up and there’s shrapnel all over the place. So owners have asked us, right? They have asked us, can you figure out why this power module failed? Can you figure out what led to the failure? What exactly has failed? Is it a $5 condenser or is it something more expensive that has failed? Because we got to go replace the whole thing. And the third most important thing is, how do I reduce this failure rate? And what is happening is because this is also something we’ve heard from our customers is some sites like some of the sites in eastern Canada, the humidity is going up quite a lot because there’s a lot of precipitation. And when the humidity is going up, they’re having more converter failures and downtime because of electric and this is something we’re seeing in other parts of the world also.
These are the challenges that I think the industry needs to mature. The industry wants to mature. And these are the challenges we will be addressing with ABB’s help.
Joel Saxum: Yeah it likens me to, okay, so mechanical things usually get fixed fairly commonly, right? Even if you’re going let’s just take this back to the general populace.
A vehicle, a truck, a car, whatever like that. If the brakes are bad, you can see that, you can fix it. If the transmission goes bad, you can figure that out, right? You won’t be able to shift gears, or it won’t go, or a rear end blows up, or something like that. You can fix that, because it’s physical, but how many times, I know, like in my life, and whatnot Oh, we have some electrical gremlins, we would call them, in the machine, right? We got electrical gremlins in this car, and at that point in time, man, it really takes someone who’s super knowledgeable to diagnose that problem, to chase that thing down.
You got a guy sitting in there with, or, two or three, couple girls, couple gals. Everybody’s got test lights and meters and they’re trying to figure out where this could be and how this fault could happen and these things. So you start to get into this really complicated fixes for problems. And that’s why up tower or out in the field, big major components just get swapped, right?
Electrical components are just like, ah, we can’t figure this out boom, stick a different one in. And then you have that situation like you’re talking about, Mo, where there might be something different that’s causing this converter, this electrical component to fail down the line. And what they’re basically doing is just resetting the stripped circuit breaker constantly.
We used to see this in the oil and gas world, where they had a button on some of these mechanical things called a Murphy switch. You guys ever hear of a Murphy switch? So a Murphy switch is basically Murphy’s Law, whatever could go wrong, would go wrong, right? So they had these buttons that they would install called Murphy switch, and when you’d hold in the Murphy switch, it would override all the breakers, and let you run.
So there’s veh these vehicles that used to be in the oil and gas field that you’d be, the thing would shut down, there would be these old Cummins motors, whatever, and they would shut down. Cause they couldn’t figure out what was going electronically. And if you just held the Murphy switch and it would run, but there was no telling what damage it would do to the rest of the machine, but you’d get home.
But that was about it. That’s what you guys are taking on here is the fixing these electrical or addressing these electrical issues that just go, ah, I don’t know, guys, we’ll just move on and put a different piece in.
Daniel Gerber: Yeah. And let me maybe chip into this. I think the age of the converter plays here a big role, right?
The newer models you can imagine, they are like a car. They can diagnose themselves. They know what they are at. They as well can find out what is wrong with them. They can basically provide you the information, what has to be changed, what has to be done as long as you use the correct software with it.
It will basically give you a feedback. However, since we are knowing some of our wind turbines, they are in the field already more than 20 years. The technology 20 years back was slightly different and we have as well, the fact in the field that some of the producers of the equipment might not exist anymore.
And I think this brings a lot of challenges to the industry for that. Our products in general at ABB, they are circular in terms of circular economy by design or by default, they are made to be repaired. And we have as well the offering for that in terms of repair workshops all around the world where you can bring a module, we can open it, we can diagnose the problem, we can give you a feedback and then typically we repair them and bring them back.
So there is a possibility of doing that, of course. However, I understand the frustration maybe if a supplier a couple of years back does not exist anymore. And now I think there are people sometimes a little bit in stress of what to do now because there is a speaking partner missing and maybe here we can help as well in the future.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And I think that’s key, right? Because we do have this 20 year problem of particularly converters of the technology has improved so much. And ABB is running on the forefront of that. Converters are so much smarter than they were. And if you have an older turbine and a converter dies, what are you going to do?
Hopefully you’re going to put a new ABB in its place that actually gives you some information about on the performance side. But the repair side, I think, is really the critical piece at the moment. I think a lot of operators, particularly in the United States, will pull a converter out and put a new one in and put the old converter back in the O& M building and just let it sit there.
And they don’t realize that those things are repairable, that they can recycle them, put them back in use, and that’s where the knowledge of ABB comes in, because you guys at ABB are doing a tremendous job of creating converters that can have a longer lifetime. And Daniel, I think you ought to talk to that a little bit, because I don’t think a lot of operators know that right now.
Daniel Gerber: Yeah. Let’s talk about this. Our products, they are designed to live as long as possible. Of course, as you have mentioned earlier Electronic has a defined design lifespan, so that it will not live forever. But actually our converters are designed that you can replace the critical parts after 15, 20 years
depending on let’s say the mission profiles and the circumstances they were running. Because you can, as as Mo earlier said, different environmental factors might be better or worse for the converter. For example, if the design of the turbine house is not well done, it can have an impact on the converter lifetime because you might have humidity in areas where there shouldn’t be humidity.
These are all different factors which play here together. However, in any case. The electronics and the modularity of the products are actually designed that they can be repaired and lifetime extended. We offer as well now, for example, an upgrade kit for the control platform to make all the math, to make all the models connectable and to have new functionality, for example, in the area of grid code compatibility of all the converters, all these things are coming because they are really needed.
Allen Hall: So this, this next generation of the converters that are out in the field at the moment. The communication piece of this is, I think the most important part. Because we all think about a wind turbine. We think about the blades, the generators and all the mechanical aspects, but what we’re really producing is electricity.
And electricity happens with the converters. Without the converters, you have nothing. And so they become a critic critical piece of that power chain. Having more data there, I think makes infinite sense. And to be able to basically self diagnose or to upgrade in some cases, if you have old converters to upgrade into something that has a basically a self a data feature that provides a data stream that then WindESCo could plug into and help monitor what’s happening. I think that makes infinite sense here because we seem to be missing some of the obvious gains in the industry on the electrical side. This is one of them on the converter side.
And I, this, if you listen, people will talk in the field about ABB is that obviously high quality product, right? Then you’ll hear that all the time. I think what they’re missing is all the benefits and features that are inside a converter at the moment because they just don’t realize the changes and the upgrades that have been made in even the last 10 years.
It’s remarkable.
Daniel Gerber: I think to that point, important is that you have all the information available. And I think there is where we believe WindESCo has a really great coverage with their product. And if we can add there some of our converter knowledge, you get a 360 degrees view and I think this is what he in the end actually need to have for the right measure at the right time in place.
Joel Saxum: Mo, let me ask you a question, then, how this fits into something. Because Allen and I have been talking about this in the background. And we’ve been talking about CMS and some other items, is we’re starting to get to the age, at least in the United States, Europe has been there a little bit longer than we have where a lot of these turbines are being, are mature, right?
And now we’re getting to those decisions where it’s lifetime extension decisions. How do we make sure that this turbine runs up to its 20 or 25 year life? And in some cases past it, right? Because we actually have heard from some people in the industry saying, Yeah, we’ve got a mandate to run these turbines for 30 years now.
That’s five and ten years beyond their expected life. How can you guys help the industry with that lifetime extension problem? Or lifetime extension decision, maybe, is the question?
Mo Dua: Lifetime is a complicated subject, right? That probably deserves its own podcast. Certainly where we can help is with the health monitoring of the turbine subsystems.
And like Daniel said, and Allen pointed out, there’s a whole wealth of information that is sitting in the converter. And I’m not going to get into details right now, but there’s, we think of getting data from wind turbines at one second, five second. And when you go into the converter, you go into kilohertz frequency of data.
And a lot of different streams of data, and I wasn’t aware of it till I chatted with my friends at ABB. And they made us aware that there’s a whole wealth of information sitting in the converter that can be used for health monitoring of other components in the wind turbine, right? So there’s a lot of data that has been actually locked up sitting in that, according to ABB, this is the most intelligent piece of the turbine.
I’m sure anyone who makes their component thinks it’s the most intelligent, but there’s basically a whole bunch of data sitting in the converter, right? Which can be leveraged to optimize the whole turbine.
Allen Hall: Mo, you opened the door, so I gotta let Daniel at least walk through it a little bit.
Daniel, what are some of the things that the converters can do that people don’t even realize today?
Daniel Gerber: Yeah, We are in a very early stage on this, and I think there is an entire world to be explored. However, important is that you start with it. And this is what we are doing right now together with WindESCo.
We have kicked it off in order to look into how can we combine mechanical and electrical data into a product. And we have started. But we are far away of having here the final solution. This is just the starting point of our work and the collaboration between the two companies. And the important thing here is that we speak the same language.
We have technical folks on both sides, which have the same language, which they talk. I think this is the environment which we have to create in order to get here something out.
Allen Hall: It’s such a good partnership together. It’s going to make a big difference in the wind industry. And as Joel pointed out, there’s a lot of lifetime extension work going on.
And as the operators start looking as what they’re planning for 2024 and into 2025, particularly in the United States with the IRA bill, there’s a lot of opportunities to improve the turbine they have to be much more productive. And that’s where the ABB WindESCo connection happens. What’s so what’s the future here, guys where is this relationship going?
What’s some of what’s give us a little bit of insight. You got to give us a little bit of a sneak peek here as where this is going and what we can expect to see.
Mo Dua: Yeah. Of course the product teams are working very closely together. In 2024, what we are doing is we are doing pilot projects on the electrical side. And we are probably going to entertain about three or four projects because of limited capacity, right? And a few turbines for each of these pilot projects just to show the world the value of the joint product here. And really what we’ll be doing is taking that data out of the converter and addressing those key problems that they have highlighted, right?
When is the converter going to fail? Why is it failing? How can I reduce the failure rate? So that’s the first step in introducing this whole new concept into the industry. Yeah. So that’s the plan for 24 is start with a few pilot projects.
Joel Saxum: I got to imagine anybody that is in charge of business interruption costs has to be knocking on your door right now.
Anybody that suffers from that, it’s going to be going. Yes. Please give it to me now.
Daniel Gerber: I think we are at the starting point right now, as Mo said, we are starting with the converted data as a first part. And then I think over the next coming years, we want to expand this so that we could look not just at the convert, but at the electrical drive train, because I think then is the value that’s coming together.
And you have different products together. And if you have all the information like we have in the WindESCo platform, you can then hopefully give a feedback. Not just for one product, but for several components within the, in the turbine. I think this is our ultimate goal, but this takes time. This will not be tomorrow, but I think we are on a good, and a good starting point here to get this one day done.
Joel Saxum: Okay, so Mo and Daniel, I asked you guys about Lifetime Extension. However, of course, we know the market is a little bit different here in the United States. A lot of times Lifetime Extension isn’t even a word that’s spoken inside of the building. It is just repower 10 years. We’re going to put new ones up.
And at that repower, a lot of people take that opportunity to upgrade, to install retrofit other items, right? So sometimes it’s a completely driven by whoever the, the company or OEM or service provider, they say, just give me a package and I’ll upgrade. However, there’s a lot of other people out there that are picking and choosing ad hoc, off of a menu and building their own solutions for Repower. So how do you guys fit into the Repower equation on the WindESCo side and ABB?
Mo Dua: So you recognize the definition of Repower is different in Europe and different in the United States. So how Daniel generally thinks about repower is different. How people here think about repower is after 10 years, I get requalified for PTC, right?
That’s repower here. So I think there’s a lot of avenues that we’ve discussed. For example, upgrades to the converter, right? Upgrades on the generator is one thing. Like Daniel said, the generation or the technology of converters has changed tremendously in the last 10 years. And the owners can benefit with newer converters, which are data enabled and have higher availability.
So that’s one aspect. The other aspect is SWARM. I think you guys have covered this in a previous podcast. SWARM leads to more AEP and it’s a good solution, not for all wind plants. But for some wind plants, which are losing a lot of energy to wakes. And then recently, even the analytics solution we have fine fixed measure was being used for repower to really improve the performance of the wind plant.
So the owner said, Hey, we want more AEP, not just higher reliability. We want both reliability as well as AEP. And so we worked on a package to give more AEP using just analytics as an upfront solution. So increase the output of the wind plant in the first six months to one year, which they can benefit then for the whole life.
So I think there’s a real opportunity on the repower side with both the solutions from ABB as well as WindESCo.
Daniel Gerber: To add from ABB’s perspective, we see the repower opportunity, not just as replacing full turbines. We see this more like a tailored menu, which depending on the age of the park, the location and the health state of the turbine we can offer you different upgrade possibilities.
Be this together with your OEM or together with your servicer, the partner upgrade provider. I think we have flexible opportunities to either replace or refurbish existing drives. Upgrade them or as well replace or help to replace the entire drive train. I think we have here many, which we can offer to everybody who is in need.
Allen Hall: I think this is exciting because you’re talking my language, electrical and making the electrical systems work better. And this is the time, we’ve reached that time where we have enough brainpower and enough knowledge on the turbines to make the turbines better. So this is a great connection between ABB and WindESCo.
So how does everybody reach out and find You on the internet, Mo. I guess just go to WindESCo’s website, windesco.com
Mo Dua: We have a contact us link on our page. So reach us at windesco.com.
Allen Hall: And Daniel, ABB is a big company. So how do they get ahold of the converter division of ABB?
Daniel Gerber: So you can either go on our webpage, which is the easiest one.
However, I think we are present in 80 countries in the world. So if you have a real need reach out to your local ABB units, they can find us. And maybe they can even help you to get a physical contract in your region. And they know exactly what we can offer and how to connect to us. And they can for sure help you to have your the right contacts in place where you are and we will come there.
Allen Hall: Mo and Daniel, this has been fantastic to have you on the program. I’m really excited about what the future brings for both of you. And yeah, we’d love to have you back on the program because you can tell us all the great things you’ve been working on. And I’m excited to see what the future looks like.
