In this bonus episode, Allen and Joel sit with Daniela Roeper, CEO and Founder of Borealis Wind, in Copenhagen to discuss the importance of anti-icing solutions for wind turbine blades. Borealis Wind is a leading company in the wind turbine blade anti-icing sector, and Roeper’s innovative technology has helped to increase the efficiency and reliability of wind turbines, making them more viable in colder climates. Daniela explains that icing is a significant challenge for wind turbine operators, as it can reduce energy production by up to 40%. Most turbines are sensitive to ice buildup, and the turbine will stop automatically when ice buildup is detected. Ice can cause fatigue and early life fatigue to the blades and also cause ice throw, which can be hazardous. Borealis Wind offers a solution to the icing problem with blade heating, which is more effective than the solutions offered by some OEMs.
Borealis Wind – https://www.borealiswind.com/
Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Borealis Wind
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, where we feature the latest advancements in wind energy technology. I’m your host, Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, along with my co-host Joel Saxum, Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power Lab. We are at Windy Europe 2023 in Copenhagen, Denmark, so celebrating all the new technology and industries in wind energy.
Today we have a very special guest joining us. Daniela Roeper, founder and CEO of Borealis Wind a leading company in the wind turbine blade anti-icing sector, Borealis Wind has been in the forefront of developing cutting edge anti icing tech solutions for wind turbine blades. Their innovative technology has helped to increase the efficiency and reliability of wind turbines, making them more viable in colder climates.
In this episode, Daniela will be sharing her expertise on the importance of anti icing solutions in the wind power industry. The challenge is faced in developing these solutions and how Borealis Wind has been able to overcome them and become a leader in the field. So join us as we learn more about the exciting work being done by Borealis Wind and gain valuable insights from Daniela.
So Daniela, and welcome to the Uptime podcast.
Daniela Roeper: Thank you very much.
Allen Hall: So it’s been a, it’s already been a busy week in Copenhagen and. We’re in a place obviously where it’s cold. Yeah. Yesterday though, weather it was mi miserable
Joel Saxum: this morning too. Yeah. The wind was blowing and it was people head headdresses on and Right.
Hats and jackets and
Allen Hall: everything. So we see a lot of icing, I assume up here in Denmark and Sweden and Norway we’re just in Sweden. A lot of icing, lot of problems. It seems like the not coming from an extremely cold climate where you are from in Canada. Icing is a regular occurrence.
Daniela Roeper: Yeah, I think when Canadians are particularly, we work in Quebec, when we look at icing in the rest of the world, it doesn’t look that bad.
But yeah, it definitely, in these colder climates, there are icing problems.
Allen Hall: So the, the operators are losing somewhere upwards. I’ve seen numbers at, at times of 20, 30, 40% in a particular month in terms of energy production because it just shut down. Yeah. Once ice accumulates, that’s it. Unless it fall, once it falls off, you can start up again.
But you, you can’t really run with ice on
Daniela Roeper: your blades. Yeah, exactly. Most turbines are fairly sensitive to ice buildup and they will stop themselves once they determine that there’s ice buildup. And it really depends on the control parameters of the turbine and the operator, I guess the manufacturer of the turbine and how they’ve set it up.
Some are more sensitive than others and that’s because icing can be quite damaging to the turbine if it’s Ver if it’s severe.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. So the, the damage mechanisms, now you’re talking fatigue, early life fatigue, right? Mm-hmm. Is one of ’em, of course. And then you’re talking ice throw, ice damage.
I mean, on the wind power side, we see a lot of these things. Yeah. And so, so for the listeners, think of this, sometimes a piece of ice coming off of a a wind turbine blade can be the size of the hood of a car. Yeah. Right? And if it’s throwing it up in the air or throwing it out, that’s dangerous to people.
But also it could throw it up in the air and then the next blade it can come around and hit it. Yeah. And that icing impact damage is what we see. I mean, that, that goes as far as sometimes you can’t fix it. Yeah. Sometimes that’s a blade replacement. Right? Yeah. And it gets into the structural side of things.
So the, the, the damages and the risks are real here if
Daniela Roeper: it’s not controlled. Yeah. Yeah. I was actually in the n cell of a turbine when a chunk of ice, probably the size of the hood, of a car, fell on the roof of the nelle. And that was terrifying, the noise that made. Oh my goodness.
Allen Hall: Wow. So, as we, as we.
Continued continue to put wind turbines in tougher climates. All the good wind with the least amount of ice is pretty much taken up already. So now we’re on that perimeter cause we’re, we’re pushing into more icing areas. What happens next? Because I think the OEMs have some sort of, kind of solutions that they’re, they’re implementing at times, but it’s always not the greatest for a particular environment as you’re seeing
Daniela Roeper: Well, I think the OEMs have offered some solutions.
What I’ve, I mean, I’m really passionate about the problem of icing and the solution of blade heating, so I think they haven’t put enough effort into what they’re offering. Okay. There are really good wind resources and cold climates that unfortunately will have bad icing conditions, but it’s something that can be addressed with blade heating.
Allen Hall: Okay. So that’s where we get into Borealis wind and, and you started Borealis wind. Back when
Daniela Roeper: it’s okay. So I started the company when I finished mechanical, my mechanical engineering degree in 2015. Okay. So the company started officially at the beginning of 2016, young naive Daniela, thinking, Hey, you know, we’ll put heat in blades.
It won’t be that complicated. Yeah. Turns out it’s very complicated, but. So it started in 2016 with the idea of circulating warm air inside the blade to prevent ice buildup. That has developed a lot since then. So we’re still using this hot air blade deicing method of blade heating. Okay. And we have really refined the product at this point.
So we’ve installed over 20 systems in Canada and. Have five winters of operational validation for our systems.
Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. So can you dive into what the system is, how it generically works? It’s a hot air system. Yeah. But it’s a little, maybe a little bit different than other systems I have seen. So you wanna describe like what’s, what’s all inside the
Daniela Roeper: box here?
Yeah. System. Okay, perfect. So, I don’t know if this is worth explaining. Probably all of your listeners know this, but wind turbine blades are hollow. They typically have a sheer web that runs down the center of them that separates the leading edge and the trailing edge, right? And so, and that shear web gives the blade stiffness and that also gives us an opportunity to prevent airflow from going into the trailing edge.
So we can specifically target the heat in the leading edge cavity where you have the most ice build up normally on the side of the blade. Sure. So inside the leading edge cavity at the root of the blade, we mount a blower, an electric resistive heater. Okay. And then we run fabric ducting all the way to the very tip of the blade.
And we force the heat to the tip as much as we can, and we target the end third of the blade. So that’s the area where we have a lot of convective heat loss while the turbines running. Sure. And also icing is normally the worst there. And then we allow, we release the air from the duct, we allow it to recirculate back and then continue heating that way.
Okay.
Joel Saxum: Couple of things I’ve heard there that I really like fabric ducting. Yeah. Because from the blade point of view lightning. Risk with weather guards sitting here. Yeah. Not wanting to, you know, change the factory LPs systems or in involve any kind of ducting that would be metal or anything convective up there.
That’s key, right? Yes, exactly. And then I think when we had talked off there before the actual power junction, Box where the heater is. It’s right in the root. Correct. Exactly. Yeah. So then it’s kind of inert from the LPs system risks there as well. You’re not gonna attract a wrong lightning attachment in the root section.
Right. I mean, I hope not. If anybody has seen that, please, please let us know. That’s crazy. But yes. So the, the system then resides inside of basically the, the root plate of the blade, the heater does, or where does the heater sit?
Daniela Roeper: The heater and the blower are at the very kind of beginning of the shear web inside the blade.
Okay.
Joel Saxum: Okay. And then you guys have, I think we talked before as well. You’ve been, had DNV take a peek at the
Daniela Roeper: system and they Yeah, we just received our component certificate for the, one of the versions of our design. So for the Siemens 3.2 turbines, we received our component certificate. And then for each turbine model adjustments we make, we have to have a kind of recertification of it.
Yeah. But that’s much easier than the
Joel Saxum: first one. So anybody with a Siemens 3.2 Yep. That’s got icing problems. DNV says it’s ready to go. Yep. Today. Yeah, today.
Allen Hall: So what does that system do if you’re adapting to a GE 1.5? Is there anything that really changes in the system or, or is it just scaling it down a little bit?
For the shorter blades,
Daniela Roeper: it’s pretty much just scaling it down. Okay. So I guess I’ll quickly explain one more thing about our system. So our focus has been on ease of installation, ease of maintenance, okay. And reliability. So everything that could need to be maintained is either we put it in the hub so that it’s really easy to access, or we put it right at the root of the blade.
And those components we’ve also standardized as much as possible and we can use the same blower and heater in different blade lengths. Of course. We can adjust the size of Of the heater. Right? Of the heater, yeah, exactly.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Especially if you go offshore or something. You need a hundred meter blade, you’re gonna need a yes.
Hell of a heater in there. So. So the heating system, let’s just take standard right now that Siemens three, two. Yeah. What is the power draw of that heating system? Just to kind of get a little bit more technical information around it.
Daniela Roeper: So in those blades, we are drawing about 30 kilowatts of heat per blade.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. And those, I mean, our sy so we have some Siemens three point twos that are nice in class three, which is a bit more severe, but also some nice in class two. Mm-hmm. And icing class two, we’re only drawing about I think it’s 22 kilowatts. Okay. But then in the harsh icing climates we’re drawing a little bit more
Joel Saxum: power.
So, so some more, I mean, getting some more metric details then. Okay. So say we say, Joel Wind Farm decides they want to install the system. How many days or how many hours is my turbine down while you install it? It
Daniela Roeper: takes about a week to do the installation. Okay. And the way we do the installation, it’s completely up tower.
Mm-hmm. So we enter the blade as you would to do an internal blade repair. We position the blade horizontal, we, we do the lotto procedure. And we spend about two days per blade doing the installation. And the turbine can actually operate overnight during this period. Oh, sure. So it’s not as much downtime.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. But it’s that you’re, you’re taking a week at downtime to save weeks of downtime in the future. Yeah. Right, exactly. That’s the ROI there. Yeah. Okay. And then I know we talked about as well, so this is, and this was a, something you mentioned the other day when we talked tonight. I really enjoyed it because I’ve seen a lot of blades, if anybody’s in the wind industry.
You’ve seen pictures of blades. You’ve been round blades, and there’s always this, like the tiny access hole. Yeah. And I look at that in the end of the blade and the blade root there, and I go like, I don’t, I gotta stop eating so many cheeseburgers cause there’s no way I’m gonna be able to get in that thing.
And and you had said yes, there’s standard like 500 millimeters across.
Daniela Roeper: Yeah, that’s the sta that’s the minimum. Entrance, diameter. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: So all your parts are made specifically to fit, sometimes it’s modular. Right. Taken into apart to get through that access hole because I mean, I’ve seen them before. I was on a, a blade inspection one time with one of our blade specialists.
And luckily her name’s Aura. She’s fantastic. Luckily she’s really small and she was just like, bloop. And I’m looking and I was like holding the flashlight for her, and I was like, I, I don’t think I could get through there. So kudos to the Blade Techs that are climbing in these things that can, can make that happen for themselves.
So there’s a question for you now. We’re trying to, we’re we’re digging into here people listening to it. What we hope is that they’re interested, they wanna move forward, right? Yeah. That’s the idea. We’re, we’re, you know, uptime podcast, trying to bring new tech to the market to get you guys some traffic and to solve some of the problems in the wind industry.
So from an operations and maintenance standpoint, what, what kind of issues do you run into normally? Or is it like, like an iPhone and it just works?
Daniela Roeper: Okay. With our first systems, it wasn’t like an iPhone. It just works. Yeah. Okay. Do iPhones work? I guess so. No,
Joel Saxum: that’s, that’s a argument for a different day.
Okay. That’s an argument
Daniela Roeper: for a different day. Yeah. So we, we typically do two maintenances per year. One in the fall before icing season, and then one at the end of the icing season. And we have over the last five years sort of figured out what is the right maintenance interval for different components.
Yep. So we have. A procedure now that we follow, and it’s been going very smoothly. We had really high availability of our systems this winter. Most systems were at a hundred percent availability. Oh wow. Which is what
Allen Hall: we want. That’s great. Yeah. Yeah. Fantastic.
Joel Saxum: Great. So are you turning it, are you saying, okay, operator X, Y, Z, they say the forecast as, we might have a storm coming that could develop an icing issue.
We start the heaters now or do you wait until the blazer iced
Daniela Roeper: up? This is something that several people have talked about here at, at this conference, so, okay. So we are. Measuring liquid water content. Mm-hmm. And if you’re a nerd about icing, you’ve heard about how liquid water content has the best correlation to when an icing event happens.
Mm-hmm. So we are using a sensor called the ice Tech Sensors from a company in Quebec, Canada. So when they measure icing conditions, they’re looking for liquid water content. And that tells us when the icing event is starting, that’s before there’s even ice on the blades. And that’s when we start the heating system.
And it’s very, their sensor is extremely accurate. So we start heating as soon as we know the icing conditions have started. Mm-hmm. We keep heating as long as there are icing conditions and the turbine is underperforming, and once the turbine’s at full performance icing event is over, then we stop heating.
Okay, cool. Huh.
Allen Hall: Okay, so then how does it know when to stop or it, I, I was in Sweden, I was watching some of your presentations. Yeah. And I was trying to understand what this icing range is, because if it’s, Warm enough. Obviously there was no ice and it’s, it’s so cold. There’s no ice. There is a very narrow, basically temperature band in which you’re trying to prevent icing.
Yeah. It’s not very wide.
Daniela Roeper: No. Yeah. It’s interesting because at colder temperatures, there’s not enough humidity in the air to cause icing. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So we are normally de-icing or anti-icing above minus five degrees Celsius. So between zero and minus five.
Allen Hall: Okay. So that’s a pretty narrow band of the temperatures, and that doesn’t always exist.
What part or latitudes are you focused on? Is it, are we, are you going all the way down to Texas as possible customers? Like when they had the big ice storm in 2021, is that a potential customer or is it sort of like South Dakota up?
Daniela Roeper: Okay, so I had always kind of thought of it before I got into this as latitude things.
So northern regions would need icing, right? But it’s interesting because you can have more southern latitudes that. Have a lot of humidity and when they get Okay, freezing temperatures of worse.
Joel Saxum: Sure, yeah. Yeah. Because you could, because I mean, I’m from the northern Midwest, right? So I’ve seen ice storms.
Yeah, that’s one, one style. But then also, if you haven’t seen it before, it’s a really kind of a weird phenomenon, but ice fog. Yes. So ice, but to me, ice fog is like, you see it sometimes and you can see it hanging in the air at like a hundred meters, and you’re like, Hmm. If that was a turbine up there, it would just be loading up with that stuff.
Yeah. Cuz of the temperature difference, right? It would, it attaches to everything and you can see it grow on like, you know telephone poles and stuff like that, just, it grows like crystals on them. And so ice fog, I would say is bad. Can be, could be really bad, but there’s only certain areas of the world that that happens in.
Right. And it’s not necessarily latitude dependent, it’s more.
Daniela Roeper: It’s really like microclimate. Yeah. So it’s really hard to say where icing will be worse. And that’s why a lot of predictions when they’ve done site assessments pre-construction for, for how bad their icing will be, they’ve had a hard time estimating it.
Because, well, typically they, they don’t have liquid water content, historical measurements for liquid water content, which would be the best indicator. So they’re using humidity. And historical weather events, and it’s not enough information to tell them how bad the icing will be. Right. Wait, what,
Allen Hall: what’s the difference between humidity and water content?
Daniela Roeper: So humidity, and this is not, I’m not a scientist, so, okay. So, but humidity is how much just water can be held in the air. Okay. But liquid water content are the actual droplets of water. Oh, okay. That are in
Allen Hall: the air. Okay. So it’s the size of water droplets, not just that there’s humidity, there’s moisture in the air, but the droplet size does matter.
Daniela Roeper: Well, not just droplet size and like quantity, like grams of droplets in the air that areed in the But like a
Joel Saxum: volumetric reading almost. Yeah. A density of droplets. So if you wanna know what Houston humidity is, it’s always 90%, it’s fish swim in the air. That’s what it’s like down there
Allen Hall: all year round.
Yeah. Well that, that explains why when Texas got hit, they get hit hard. Yeah. Over a wide region because it’s pretty humid down there. In the springtime, right? That’s Yeah, absolutely. That that’ll bite you every time. So there’s, there’s a a number of customers that have run through this situation where they had an icing study done, determined that they didn’t need an anti-icing system.
They put the 80 turbines out in Wyoming and go Uhoh. Oh. Yeah. Now what? Yeah. So that’s where they call you. So walk me through what happens in that from sort of start to finish. Phone rings is, I got 80 turbines, I have icing problems, and I didn’t expect. What can you do for me?
Daniela Roeper: Okay, well, so yeah, we specialize in retrofits.
So we’d be really excited that they called us, first of all, for 80 turbines. For 80 turbines. We would be nice job cheersing our champagne glasses. And so we first look at their icing conditions and the type of the turbine wallow that they have. Okay. And so we’re trying to determine the size of heater that they need.
So we look at the range of icing conditions they get. The, their blade composition. So the, the thickness of the blade wall, the material and the epoxy that’s used in the blade. So we know how hot we, we can even heat the blade. And then we recommend basically like the size of the heating system. We give them a breakdown, technical breakdown of what we would propose to install.
And then yeah, and then we’d go from there.
Joel Saxum: Quick ROI study and where you go. Yep. So question for you then. Limitations. This is, so this is something for a lot of the market, right? We talked the original one, we talked about that. Siemens three, two. Yeah. It’s a single shear web. Yep. What about a double shear web or a box beam blade or something like that?
Can you, can you guys retrofit into all those different types?
Daniela Roeper: Yep. We’ve been working on our, on our blade adaption, so we do the double shear webs. We do blades that have bulkheads in them. Mm-hmm. A lot of the LM blades have the bulkheads. Yeah. Bulkheads in the tip. Yeah. So we have a tool that allows us to drill holes through the ball heads, and this has all been reviewed.
With blade engineers and we were actually, we had the opportunity to talk with LM about it before we did it, so fantastic. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve been working on our plate adaptions. The box beam is one we actually haven’t done yet because there, we haven’t received that much demand for it until this year.
We’ve actually had a lot of requests for it, so that might be one we do next. Yeah, I mean,
Joel Saxum: Just armchair knowledge. There’s a lot of box bean blades in Latin America and some latitudes. I don’t know why I don’t have a reason for it. I’ve just seen them a lot more down there than I’ve seen ’em in the.
So then I, I, I
Allen Hall: was watching your LinkedIn page and I think there was a, a recent LinkedIn post about how much energy, power you’ve recovered. Oh, yeah. You want me talk to that a little bit? Yeah,
Daniela Roeper: I would love to talk about that. So it’s exciting because we almost doubled it from last year. So as of last winter, we were at 7,000 megawatt hours of wind energy Wow.
That we’d recovered with our blade heating systems. And as of February, this winter, we were at 5,000. So I think. We haven’t done the numbers yet for the rest of the winter, but I think we may have doubled our number of, amount of recovered wind
Allen Hall: energy. Is that just because it’s just a, a worse winter?
It
Daniela Roeper: was what it is. It was a harsh winter. We have, we had more systems installed, so we just completed our biggest project. But it was a harsh winter and a long winter. Yeah,
Joel Saxum: I know like Northern Wisconsin, the started early. Just that climate. I’ll say climate adjustment. Climate change. Climate. I don’t want to start any fires online, but.
Yeah, the, the amount of moisture that was in the air over in the Alberta, that, that kind of stream that comes through there was crazy. Yeah. I mean, we got, we set record all of northern Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin to even, even the western Minnesota got, like, they set all records for the amount of snow that they’ve ever got.
Yeah. Duluth, Minneapolis, all of.
Allen Hall: Well, the Sierra Nevadas, right? Yeah. That they’re at 200 plus percent. Yeah. Snowfall this year up in Nevada, ca, California.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. So as, and so that’s another thought here as well when you’re talking about retrofits, is they may have done the studies when these wind farms were installed, but they were installed 10 years ago, 15 years ago.
Oh. Weather patterns tend to, has changed, changed over time. Yeah. As, as, as it goes, it’s gonna change a lot more in particularly the areas that you guys are targeting
Daniela Roeper: for, for working well, particularly that, and with global warming, with weather. Weather patterns changing. There could be areas that didn’t have icing before that will now have icing.
Yeah. Or like Texas, they said that was a one in a hundred year storm and now they had another one this winter. Yeah,
Joel Saxum: I dropped through that one too.
Allen Hall: So how does someone with an icing problem reach out to you? Obviously I mentioned your LinkedIn page. How do, how do they find you and find borealis?
Daniela Roeper: So the best way, so we have a contact us form on our website.
You can reach us through there. So bore ellis w.com and and LinkedIn is a great way and we have some cool pictures and videos on our LinkedIn page of turbines with our system, without our system. So yeah, it’s awesome thermal
Joel Saxum: camera stuff on there
Daniela Roeper: and thermal camera pictures, which I think are really cool.
Fantastic. Best.
Allen Hall: Thank you. They’re the best for sure. Yeah. Oh, Daniela, thank you for coming on the Uptime podcast. We’re really excited how Borealis is doing, and we’re gonna continue to follow you as the systems get installed across the United States and into Europe. So it’s, it’s a very exciting time.
So thank you for being on the podcast.
Daniela Roeper: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much.
