Is community ownership of off-shore wind farms going to continue to gain traction, thanks to companies like Ripple Energy? Can you really buy shares in a wind farm, and is it a smart investment? Plus, the Ocotillo wind farm in California has been shut down as a turbine collapses – what’s going on down there in the desert? We also discuss the Romotion camera, Spanish Gas Tax, re-powering SGRE platforms and the state of leading edge erosion.
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!
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EP81 – Own a Share of an Off-Shore Wind Farm? Plus, Romotion Camera: Can it Replace Drones?
This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you’re wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPS upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning
protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett.
I’m Allen Hall,
and I’m Rosemary Barnes,
and this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Podcast. I’m your co-host and blew it on today’s show. Big list of topics are discussed.
Number one, community ownership of offshore wind farms. Is this possible? So interesting company called Ripple is one of a few different companies on the Web who are starting to try to break up essentially commodities, if that’s the right word, into where you can buy shares of them.
There’s another company is doing this with artwork. So if you want to buy a share of a Picasso, essentially you could do that. And this is kind of the same concept. So we’ll talk about. That’s interesting idea. We’ll also talk about this new Spanish gas tax.
There’s a lot of issues with natural gas and and the price of it overseas right now and how that’s going to affect the wind industry. So it’s an interesting story about the ocotillo wind farm. It looks like it was a pretty rushed sort of project, had a lot of controversy, a lot of native people in the area
who are opposed to it. And it’s been having consistent problems and it’s currently shut down. So we’ll talk about some of the implications there. We’ll chat about leading edge erosion. There’s a new article about a small company getting some funding out of Scotland and raising some questions here about, you know, what what is leading edge erosion look
like right now is the current state of these fixes and solutions and kind of where we headed. We’ll also talk about Siemens, the Mesa’s five platform, how they’ve upgraded that. And lastly, we’ll talk with the row motion camera, which is a pretty cool piece of technology to take photos of wind turbine blades while the wind turbine is
still operating and rotating at a high speed. So before we get going, I want to remind you to subscribe to uptime tech news, which you’ll find in the podcast show notes or description if you’re watching here on YouTube.
That’s just our weekly update email where you’ll get an email of the new episode, helpful links, you know, all the other stuff around the Web if you want to stay up with wind energy news. And be sure to subscribe to Rosemary Barnes is awesome engineer with Rosie Channel, which is here on YouTube.
And we have a sponsor livestream with her a couple times a month. So check that out. A lot of good stuff out coming out of Rosemarie’s YouTube channel. So let’s start here with Ripple Energy. It looks like there are a UK based company.
And essentially, if you go on their website, it just says it’s pretty straightforward. I think they do a good job of explaining what they do, which is that, hey, you can reserve a share of our next wind farm project.
So they’re, you know, buying wind farm projects and then you can buy a piece of it and help to offset your own costs. This is sort of that community ownership model. So, Rosemary, I’ll throw this to you first.
Does this seem like the future or does this seem like there’s only something that’s going to fit select people?
I’m not sure about the future. It’s definitely the past. When I was living in Denmark, it’s pretty common there, or at least it was back when the wind industry was maybe a bit more small scale, a bit less about, you know, building wind turbines, wind farms with hundreds of turbines.
And I actually had a friend, a colleague at my old job who was on the board of his local community, wind turbine. It was just one single turbine. And they got to, you know, be in charge of the operating and manufacturing schedule and stuff like that.
And, you know, they could even climb up and have a look and tweak the settings. And and it was very profitable as well, because turbines that were installed like a decade or more ago in Denmark actually had really generous tariffs.
So I thought that was typical and I was desperate to get involved in something like that. But all the you know, all the shares have already been snapped up long ago in Denmark. We have one community, wind farm in Australia, in Victoria.
I was actually supposed to visit to do a climb and make a video on it, but the pandemic stopped that for a while. But that one started because some developers wanted to make a wind farm in the area, met with a lot of community opposition.
And then this one local guy was like, this is a shame. I’m going to drum up community support. And then in the end, they managed to raise. What was that? Yeah. Nine point eight million dollars raised from two thousand co-operative members to put up to wind turbines.
And that was I think it was installed in about, oh, 2010 or something like that. And it’s been going ever since, but we’ve only got that one. So then this new one where it’s seems to have a bigger wind farm and now they’re talking offshore.
It’s a bit harder to see how it. It’s not like that old kind of community involvement where you really feel like you own it. Like, I don’t think just because you’ve bought shares in an offshore wind farm, you’re really going to feel like that’s my wind turbine, that I only know one, one thousand.
So I like and I mean, I just because I love wind energy so much, I would buy shares like something like that if I could. I think the payback period was something like 12 years or something, which is a bit more than what you would get for rooftop solar in Australia.
So probably makes more sense in the UK where that that’s probably a decent, decent pipe. OK, for, you know, way that you can get involved in renewable energy on a personal level.
That’s a good point, because obviously, like I’ll give you an example, my parents have solar panels on top of their house, like they got approached by a company a long time ago, said, hey, based on where your house is and where this how much sun you guys get, like you’d be a great candidate for this, would you
want to do? And they’ve done it and it’s really lower their utility costs a lot. That’s a pretty common story, obviously. But yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, these shares in a wind farm might make less sense and might have a longer payback period than than than solar.
So, I mean, Alan, how does this strike you? You’re more of our our our business guy here on the podcast. Does this seem like this is a viable thing or is this sort of a sort of like, I don’t know, more fluff than substance?
It’s a real thing. And we we’ve we’ve done it in America for a number of different places and times. You know, most of the electricity generation in the states, especially if you could talk about the Midwest and heading, you know, through Montana, Wyoming, where everything was local.
And so it was a local investment to create the local electric company or the local telephone company, for that matter. And I don’t think the UK has been that way. So this this is a little bit of a different play.
When electricity happened in the United Kingdom, it tended to happen like city by city, like one of the first cities in the U.K. that was electrified was Manchester. All right. What does a big industrial city. So it was it kind of grew from the major cities and spread outwards.
And I think it was more of a governmental effort. So it is unique now that the average citizen can now buy a part of a winterman, invest in a winterman. I think that’s the unique part, because, you know, U.K. is not that big of a place compared to America.
Right. So a lot of it was organized in the U.K. has been much more organized and America has been for many hundreds of years more. So it’s a little bit of a different tact, I think. And it may not be that common in the U.K., where it is pretty common in a lot of the places of the
world. So from a business standpoint, though, I wonder how efficient this is going to be, because in any sort of investment like this, there’s only a certain amount of patience that investors will have on return on investment if it doesn’t start returning on investment.
The whole thing will sink. And that will be a problem because they’ll never be this asset out in the ocean that no one owns. And that’s not a good thing. So I wonder what the downside protection is in something like this.
You know, what the upside is to get a lot of good wind and are selling a lot of electricity and gas prices rise, which means electricity prices rise and everybody’s happy. But if it if it happens to fall.
Yeah. You could lose your investment. That’s your worst case option. And that’s where, you know, that’s the downside of markets. And you don’t really want to do that with an electrical grid. In my opinion, too much turbulence in the electrical grid is not good for the average citizen.
Yeah. So I mean, with Rypple, it looks like you’re going to invest as little as twenty five pounds and you could you could invest in as much as 120 percent of your yearly electrical consumption. So this isn’t like stocks.
It’s like you’re investing in the wind farm itself, like at the wind farm, you know, goes gangbusters. Like when you’re not investing in Morstead, for example. It’s not like a you’re investing in the overall company. And it looks like it’s a little unclear, but it looks like Ripple is the like the digital like they’re the they’re the
software platform that connects these co-ops with the people who can invest in them. So or Ripple doesn’t actually own on the wind farm. A co-op on the wind farm. And Ripple is sort of supplying like the software solution to connect buyers with them, which makes a lot of sense like that, that that makes sense because a co-op
doesn’t necessarily want to, you know, get all this technology infrastructure in place to do that. That’s well, that’s the that’s the technology that Ripple’s providing.
Right. So they’re acting like a middle man and an electric electricity marketplace. Think of it that way.
So, for example, ripple affects a lot like a property manager for a building, like here in D.C. There’s tons of apartment buildings. The ownership doesn’t lease out, you know, whoever the investors who bought that building owned it and built it and they don’t lease you your apartment.
They’re going to handle that off to a property manager. And that’s essentially what Ripple does. They’re the property manager for for this co-op connecting people. So so. Yeah, but you’re right. I mean, there’s definitely some risks. I mean, nothing is as risk free, but it’s an interesting new way to invest in this.
And one of the things I had mentioned was that kind of a similar thing, which is not quite the same, but this interesting company, masterworks, this has nothing to do with wind energy. But like masterworks is another platform.
And this it seems like to be a trend in the digital space. Masterworks lets you buy a shares of masterworks will buy a painting like a priceless two million dollar painting. You can buy a share of it. And then they’ll sell that painting later, like five, 10 years from now, trying to get a certain return.
So it’s just interesting, like the way technology has opened up people to get involved in different things that they could otherwise never afford. Like if you want to own a wind farm, good luck, you know, raising a hundred million dollars.
But now you can own fractional ownership of like. Lots of different things like paintings, you know, wind energy, et cetera, et cetera. Beyond just the traditional stock market. So I think that’s cool. But moving on, let’s talk about this Spanish gas tax.
So over in Europe, there’s a lot of trouble with rising natural gas prices. This is really boosting electricity costs. And so basically in Spain, they’re going to impose charges of 40 to 80 euros on wind farms if they don’t buy gas and are earning what they call, quote, unquote, a windfall profit.
So they’re basically going to kind of penalize wind farms for. You know where the natural gas, whenever a natural gas exceeds 20 euros per megawatt hour. You know, these are all zero carbon electricity producers are going to have to give back access renumeration.
So, Alan, what do you think about this? It seems like a mess. A lot of people are really upset. So there’s are going to shut down a lot of wind farms.
Sure. Well, because there’s no revenue being generated. If the if the the government is going to come in and take all the added revenue, then they’ll just quit. I mean, there is consequences for doing that. And I think it’s funny that that the government can think like, well, they’re making too much money.
We know how to use their money better than they do. So it does take it. Well, the response to that is like, well, you’ll take nothing more to shut it all down and walk home. Right. And again, it goes back to the consequences.
You’re playing with fire here. Like there are people who need that. Electricity in Spain historically hasn’t been the most reliable in terms of electricity generation. You know, they used to shut down the power and electricity at nighttime in certain big cities.
So electricity generation is needed. And if you keep playing around in those marketplaces like that, you’re not going to find anybody willing to invest in them or to promote them or to run them. And that’s I think that’s the trouble when the European Union is weird in this situation.
I think, Rosemary, because I think the European Union would put pooh-pooh this. Right. They would think this is not right. But I guess the Spanish government is saying they can do whatever they want to. Does that make sense right now?
Well, I’m not an economist at all, but it seems weird that they’ve got a big problem with with gas supply. And so, you know, that’s causing the price of electricity to go up because there’s, you know, not not enough generators.
So they take the one group of people who have invested in something that is, you know, increasing reliability and punishing them for having invested in. Yeah. In in something that they clearly desperately need to diversify their. Yeah. Their operations say, oh, the generation sources.
So I think it’s really weird from that point of view. And I doubt that we’re going to they’re not going to go so far that people are going to start shutting wind farms, because obviously that’s just going to exacerbate their problem much worse and make the government look very, very bad and the people that rely on the
electricity. So I’m sure they’ll sort it out. But yeah, it is a really it’s really weird. It’s hard to understand what they’re even trying to get at in this in this aspect. So I’m going to wait and see how it plays out, because it can’t end here like this.
I mean, is this like a bailout, Alan? Who are we to watch? Yeah. Well, my office.
Well, no, I don’t think so. I think there’s been a lot of governments in the EU. Greece being one of them, Spain being another. There’s Italy being another that financially has been really been hurting before. Covid happened from the last economic downturn.
So now that Coba has happened, a lot of the industrial parts of the large countries have been shut down. So therefore, tax revenues drop. Therefore, you can’t afford to do the things that the state wants to do. So they’re going to start going after every points of revenue and providing and creating these little tax take backs are
going to call they’re going to take back from the quote unquote, wealthy and distribute it to whoever they feel like, I guess. But that doesn’t make things better. It just exacerbates the problems you already have and puts it can’t and can’t put economies in really big tailspins here.
So they’re really playing, in my opinion. They’re playing with fire like you don’t want in a fragile economy, a situation to start just randomly taxing corporations because corporations are smart, business people are smart. They see that happen to one industry.
They think it can happen to me also. So here’s what I’m going to do to protect myself. That’s not good. Right. And so the bigger picture is some of these countries got to, you know, figure out the economic conditions and figure out how to to survive.
And this is not a good way to go historically.
Well, looks like there’s going to be a legal challenge. The Renewables Association, APOR, is threatening to take the government to court, but I don’t know. I mean, is the rest of the world as litigious as America, like in America?
There’s anything you don’t like. Just go ahead and sue them for like the next five years and just tie it up in court. I don’t know. I mean, Rosmarie, obviously you’re not in Spain, but do you know much about the these legal challenges in the in the rest of the world?
I think Australia I’ve noticed Australia is getting more that way. Recently, we’ve got like a whole spate of politicians especially that are suing.
Don’t let us don’t let us rub off on. You don’t live
here. They’re like suing people for saying Slimane on Twitter, you know, like a politician says sue someone for something crazy like that. And there’s a YouTube of getting sued. I actually got a little bit scared and got legal advice.
Advice, because I don’t want to be sued by any politician. So in Australia, we’re getting more that way, although I think that businesses have always sued to, you know, maintain their their rights. So it doesn’t surprise me that businesses would do that everywhere, even if, you know, in general, the country isn’t as litigious of it, if you
are. It would be very harmful to the industry. You can’t just, you know, change the rules so that any time that times are good, that you don’t make any money. I mean, when wind farms and Sullivan says, well, you know, they’ve got variable variable pricing and they rely on those really hot periods of high prices to make
up for the times when there’s low prices. So I think it’s easy to say, oh, yeah, they’re raking it in right now. But when you look over the, you know, the lifetime of a wind farm is going to be good times and bad times, and you need both to make the business case stack up.
So I think it I think it will be a huge shame if it goes ahead. And I’ll be incredibly surprised if they do something that would ruin that, because the renewables industry is huge for Spain. You know, they benefit from it.
So, yeah, I think it’ll work itself out. But it’s a weird announcement that they’ve chosen to, you know, be so antagonistic.
Yeah. I mean, it definitely this was in the U.S. This would be I mean, there is so many legal challenges already floated out there. So the fact that this is threatening me make sense. Like if I was a business in Spain.
Yeah, this would be something you definitely at the lawyers involved with, because it’s potentially you had to have a major impact of not shut you down. So that makes sense. But yeah, we’ll keep an eye on this. And it’s a great time to just remind you of that.
Rosemary supports all politicians equally and unequivocally. She loves all politicians. So just put that under your thumb. Are moving on. So. Over in California, there’s a farm, the ocotillo wind farm. This is about it looks like maybe an hour and a half due east of San Diego, pretty close to the Mexico border.
But this has been a controversial wind farm from the beginning. They’ve had a couple of wind turbines throw blades. They’ve had one recently collapse. And this was not without controversy in general from the beginning. And now the fact they’ve had like relatively you know, they’ve had reoccurrences of incidents like major safety incidents over and over.
We’re now finally the wind farm is shut down, at least temporarily. It’s not permanently closed. But the the feds essentially are moving in and figuring out what’s what’s been going on, because I guess in the past, an entire blade was thrown like near a place where there is maybe a foot traffic.
And there’s just been a lot of the concerns, I guess, that were voiced. Of course, many you know, many communities voiced concerns. The new wind farms, some of them are founded, some of them are not. But in this one, it seems like a lot of corn.
Terms, you know, were well founded. Alan, what was your take on this situation, Ocotillo, and is this seems a little bit out of the ordinary that this would be shut down like this. But then again, it seems like they have had a lot of problems.
They have. And it’s I don’t know if it’s particularly unusual, but I think, you know, it gets down to whether some workmanship issues, whether some installation foibles that happen, or is it just the environment that the Winterich are in or causing additional problems that they hadn’t envisioned from the design standpoint, I don’t think anybody really has a
handle on that yet. And and lately what we’ve noticed is more of a tendency to shut down all the turbines in a particular wind farm site and to get the engineers back on site to figure out what’s happening, to have a plan of attack, and to also communicate that to the to the local community.
I think that’s probably one of the better moves that the wind turbine operators have done lately, is when they’ve had issues like we seen in Iowa recently where they had some wind turbine blades break off from looks like lightning issues.
They really were. They really took the lead on it. I thought the operators there took the lead on it and also made sure everybody understood what was going on. They started shutting down some of the turbines. This all makes sense.
And I think it’s the right thing to do because what you’re what your worst case situation and these sort of failure events is the local community just completely loses faith and really starts driving the politicians to shut it down.
And I know the current vice president was actually involved in some O’Hurley litigation with this wind farm site and decided that she had a conflict of interest and didn’t essentially do anything. But, you know, they have connections to start reaching out to politicians and could shut this thing down in California.
Anything can happen any moment. That’s one thing you know about California. So I’m a little I’m a little concerned about the engineering side of it. And Premiere Rose-Marie can talk a little bit more about the engineering side of the wind turbine.
But I think politically and just sort of the the the the communication is is getting better, and that’s a good thing.
Yeah. Do you remember a few weeks ago we talked about another American wind farm that was just decrepit and falling apart and with that one. Mm hmm. Yeah. And there was it was some manufacturer that doesn’t exist anymore.
And I was like, okay. So they never their design just wasn’t wasn’t up to scratch and that’s why they went bankrupt. But these ones, Siemens, Gamesa turbines, I don’t know for sure, but I’m assuming that there are thousands of the exact same turbine installed without problem elsewhere in the world.
So it makes it a bit more interesting. And when I read a few articles on this and it seems like there’s been some allegations of fraud with the developers, I know that they misrepresented the wind speed and they don’t make as much energy as was, you know, promise.
So that’s a financial issue, but should make that engineering job easier. I mean, they should be less loaded. So I don’t know what’s going on. But it’s really strange that, yeah, this one wind farm full of Siemens Comesa turbines is, you know, an unsound, whereas all the other ones that are installed around the world, I mean, you
don’t you’re not hearing if there are a lot of wind farms with this turbine falling apart to the extent that this one has, where it’s multiple turbines, something like two towers of buckled and blades have been thrown, including one on to a onto a track.
I mean, we would we would have heard about that and a big problem for the company. So I think, yeah, we’ve got to look politically and as well for the real cause of this.
Well, this is in the desert. So if you look this up on Google Maps like I have, it’s like and that’s what I don’t I don’t quite, I guess, as much. I mean, obviously there could be vocal opponents in any any place.
But this is not really this is not really like an inhabitable area, like this is smack in the middle of the desert. It’s not that far from the closest town is El Centro. But it’s I mean, this is the only outskirts of town.
This is a desert on desert land, kind of like between the mountains. So, yeah, are some highways that run through it and maybe a trail or two. But otherwise, this isn’t like really in people’s backyards is at least the way it looks like on the map.
But I mean, Rose-Marie, do you think it’s just the temperature? I mean, this looks I mean, this is a legitimate desert here. So is it just maybe the brutal heat and wind? But obviously wind is not a problem.
But I mean, yeah,
because there’s no wind than there should have been, maybe. Or I wonder if maybe they’re not being maintained correctly or if there was some dodgy installation happened or something, something that would mean that this wind farm and not the other wind farms that use the same turbine are having that problem.
Yeah, there’s plenty of turbines and deserts and and it’s there’s issues. It’s hard. The sand is abrasive, but doesn’t sound like that’s a really obvious cause for the specific problems that they’re having.
Well, Rosemary, what causes the winter and to hit the tower, like how do you how do you get that? To occur and to have the tower essentially fall over from that.
Well, I think the most obvious way is when the blood structure gets damaged in some way so that when it loads, it bends more than it should. I yeah, I mean, I couldn’t say why. I often it happens from a lightning strike, which I’m sure you’re familiar with.
Yeah. I mean, for it to happen one time, okay. Yeah. It could be a manufacturing fault if it was a serial defect with all of these types of turbines. You’d see it a lot elsewhere. It’s, what, nearly 10 years old now.
It’s not like I just can’t see how you could have so many issues with one farm and none elsewhere. So it’s weird.
Does does it blade, pitch, drive, drive that like so if the pitch of a particular blade decoupled or was commanded or had some sort of hydraulic issue where it was positioned incorrectly. Wouldn’t that be able to drive the blade into the tower?
Just a pitch? Yeah.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, when wind speeds get high, they have to start regulating. They’re reducing their power output so that the generator can keep up. And if that didn’t happen, then you might see at a high wind speed too much load on the blade and it could bend and hit the tower.
So I guess that’s a possibility. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, I never thought of that before. So, yeah. So I guess they’re going to shut it down and do a root cause analysis and really get to the bottom of it. But I think that’s a good point, that these are Siemens Gamesa turbines that are successful, well engineered turbines that are doing fine, most other places.
So the question is here, right. Why are they doing so poorly here? And what’s the what’s the variable at play? So moving on, we’re it’s all about leading edge erosional, but so there’s an interesting story from a news Adobe is just of a small Scottish company, Ed Solutions.
They’ve gotten some funding recently, 700 euro or 700000 euro for their armer edge solution for leading edge erosion. Now, we’ve talked about leading edge erosion a bunch. And the greater point isn’t of today isn’t really like this company and what they’re doing, because there’s a lot of companies that offer leading edge erosion solutions.
There’s robotic repairs, there’s wet repairs. There’s, you know, these plastic shields that are epoxy, Don. But Rosemary, like where is the where is the current state? And this seems kind of weird that that they’re still throwing money and doing testing like there’s a lot of companies that are doing this.
But it sounds like leading our direction just really isn’t solved yet and that they’re still looking for potentially new solutions. Is that the kind of the climate of it at the moment?
Yeah, that’s right. They’re definitely still looking for solutions. There’s a wide range of products available that make a big improvement, but definitely the issue isn’t solved. And I think it is one of the major few major, top major headaches that when when farm developers and operators are experiencing now, I think it’s one of those problems that’s really
it. It’s hard to imagine why it’s so hard to solve. It seems like once you’ve identified that this is a problem, then you would just fix it and then it would be gone. But it’s incredibly difficult to make a material that is going to withstand the conditions that some wind turbines are in.
And it’s not all wind turbines. I think it’s interesting that this is from Scotland, because people always bring up the coast of Scotland as like one of the worst places to install a wind turbine in terms of leading edge erosion.
They just have. But a lot of rain, the droplet size of the rain is particularly problematic there. Maybe they’ve got some dust and stuff in there. I’m not sure. But yeah, that’s a particularly harsh place to try and have a leading edge lasts for 20, 30 years.
Wow. And you’ve done a lot of leading edge erosion testing on strike tape, your lighting protection tape. What’s tell me about the droplet size. That’s interesting. I don’t know that much about it. Is a smaller droplet worse as a bigger droplet?
Worse. I mean, is there something in the middle?
Yeah, it depends. And that’s that’s part of the issue. And I think or Catapult Over in the UK is doing a good bit of extensive research on droplet size and the effect of droplet sizes on leading edge erosion, which is a very fascinating topic because it also has applications in other areas like aircraft.
And the I think in the last I would say the last two or three years, we know more about leading edge erosion and sort of the dynamics of why why a water droplet can be so catastrophically damaging to something that’s pretty rugged otherwise.
Right. Winters are pretty rugged. Things of fiberglass, epoxy systems are pretty rugged. So how can a droplet of water actually do that much damage? And it has to do with how the water droplet hits, the hits the surface and then kind of reflects there’s a kind of a shock wave that comes backwards.
And in that shockwave, that shockwave tends to want to rip things apart at a microscopic level. So it is like one water droplet wipes out a hole leading edge. It’s it’s the repetitive nature of that. It’s sort of like a sandblasting effect with water.
So in our in our experiments and we’ve done a lot of rain erosion testing at our facility and the water droplet size plays into it really heavily. Angle of attack, how the water droplet hits, the surface plays into it a great deal.
So what we’re seeing right now, I think, is trying to develop some standards around it and then prove it out in service. And I think what we’re finding is our first cut out at about five years ago in terms of rain erosion testing.
And what we thought worked is now been out of service for five years. And we’re finding it works in most places, but not all. And that’s why. Or a catapult stepping in to provide some more technical leadership there.
The latest one, I think this is interesting. I think Rosemary will think it’s interesting, too, which is they’re talking about using essentially what an airplane uses, which is sort of a hardened NICCOLÒ leading edge, like on helicopter rotor blades, use a sort of hardened, hardened metal as a leading edge to protect the leading edge.
That’s one of the solutions are talking about for wind turbines. And I know you you looked at heating wind turbines and I thought, well, you put a piece of metal out there. How well is that going to go icing wise?
And it just introduces a lot of complexity than just leading edge erosion, wouldn’t it?
Well, I’d be most worried about the lightning protection of the system. Then if you’ve got something conductive, then you have to make sure that it can handle a lightning strike. And you know that the path of the lightning follows a non damaging route, as I’m sure you’re intimately aware of all those challenges.
It also just sounds like it doesn’t. Fit the manufacturing process to owl of a wind turbine blade. I mean, you’d be making a pretty poor decision, made part to get the right shape, and then you have to make sure I mean, every wind turbine blade is not the exact same shape because there is a fair amount of
hand finishing. So I think that that that would be more complicated than than it sounds. I actually did hear a couple of years ago about some interesting directions that the that they’re going with, you know, technologies to get around this not surfaces, but actually detection and control.
So they were identifying what types of rain caused that erosion, because it’s not like all rain causes erosion of a certain types of rain that really cause a massive amount of damage in a short amount of time, and then the rest is OK.
So if you can identify what those periods are and maybe slow down the turbine a bit during those conditions, then you can potentially just for a small hit in. You know, it’s not very long that you have to reduce your output and save a lot of damage that way.
I haven’t followed up on how that’s going, but I did at the time a couple of years ago. I think that that sounded like a promising, promising path.
So is it more like the heaviness of the rain, like a like a really big downpour, like really big droplet size, or was it something like there’s frogs in it, like, well, what’s what are we talking about?
What are we talking here?
I haven’t seen anyone test for frogs specifically. Yeah, I think heavy, heavy rain. And if it’s if it’s dirty, that can be like little bits of dust in that. I think that that’s bad. So in someone researching hail, some certainly some people think that hail causes bigger problems, but I know other people think it doesn’t.
So, yeah, I’m not totally up to date on exactly where that is. Maybe maybe Allen is is more more current on that.
Allen, how does the atmospheric conditions, how do they interact with rain? So if it’s like really dusty outside or just you’re in a kind of a windy, you know, like desert environment. I mean, I assume that every time it rains, it’s sort of collecting that dust inside it as it goes, right?
Yeah. I said
works. Yeah. If you notice on your car when it rains that your car gets dirty because there’s there’s dirt in the water, so to speak. So it’s not pure water falling from the sky. And any sense. Right. And that does add to it a little bit.
I think what or a catapult and some of the researchers up in Denmark have been looking at really focused on the last year or so is something called the acoustic acoustic impedance of the leading edge protection. So it kind of falls into my world, which is like antennas and RF stuff and logical, crazy electrical stuff where you’re
you have a shockwave that’s hit the leading edge and you want to just let that wave move forward and not get reflective back. It’s in the reflection back that everything gets torn apart. So if you can keep the acoustic impedance of your materials pretty stable and kind of shock absorber, then that’s not a word shock absorber.
Definitely not a word. No question. No chance. That’s a word. No, I
think we all know what it means, though, that you want to absorb that energy. And we got it. Yeah, that’s sort of the energy in and not have it reflected back and try to tear everything apart. So acoustic impedance is like something that people who make like air pods think about or high end speakers think about.
It’s not something that we typically think about on a wind turbine or an airplane or anything else that gets hit by the rain. So it’s kind of a new area and there’s not a lot of data about it, but that’s where the technology and where the research is being focused at is on this acoustic impedance bit.
So we’ll see what comes out of it. It’s interesting, we’ve dabbled in a little bit, but there’s just some really serious research going on in that area right now.
So last question. So, Rosemary, obviously you talked about it being really difficult to put it like a you know, if a nickel leading edge was a solution that was viable, it’d be really difficult to do that. But in general, why like why are all these secondary companies doing retrofits?
Like why? Why don’t factories just make better leading edges? This is my question.
Well, they they do. I mean, every manufacturer has a leading edge protection product, whether it’s a surface that they own, proprietary and surface, or if it’s something that they’re bringing in from like 3M has a wind type product, which is probably, I don’t know, the default standard.
And not everyone orders it. You know, it costs it costs more. Some wind farms have a lot of problems with leading education. Don’t go into new areas where they don’t know yet that they’re going to have a problem with leading edge erosion.
Yeah. So you can order a product that adds cost or you can order the blade without a protection and add your own. Or you might have done, you know, the modeling and. Have an estimate that the amount that you would have to add in maintenance is less than the amount that it would cost to install the leading
edge protection so they choose not to. So definitely everyone has a product available. Some are better than others. Some have you know, some have better reputations than others in the industry. But it’s definitely an area that a lot of smart people are paying a lot of attention to and companies are spending a lot of money trying to
come up with better solutions. So at the end of the day, it’s a hard problem to solve harder than it sounds like it should be.
So Siemens, Gamesa, speaking of, they have upgraded their five X platform and they have to tutor our minds in this platform. The Yazji. Six point six dash one fifty five in the dash 170, which that number just refers to the meter length.
So 155 or 170 meter length blades. And they have a flexible power rating between five point six and six point six megawatts. So it sounds like they’ve upgraded these to six point six, Alan. I mean, when they have these flexible power platforms, like what are they waiting for?
I mean, is it just new like software upgrades coming out or I mean, what’s the why not? Why doesn’t every platform just have the top rating from the get go?
Well, it’s just because the technology gets better over a five to ten year period. And so the generators get get better. The blades get better. Everything gets gearboxes get better. Everything gets better. Electronics gets better. So, you know, the foundations of the wind turbines, which are the towers and the nozzles are just a housing unit or a
support unit. So you can put whatever it will support in there in terms of a generator and also electronics cabinets. So you could dramatically increase the amount of power, like if you go in front of five megawatts to six point five.
Right. And that’s like a 30 percent improvement, some crazy number like that. That’s a huge step up in terms of energy output. And so you start running the numbers. Well, how much energy it can I produce? How much am I selling it for?
If. So what is my return on investment? If I can basically take out this old generator, which is essentially paid for, maybe get something for it on the use market, putting a new generator and recover that investment in a year or two?
A lot of people are going to do that. And I think in the United States right now, you’re seeing a lot of that upgrading of the generators, the blades, some of the control circuitry and that kind of thing.
Software to generate more power with the same platform that’s going to be that’s going to be more of the standard than building new onshore in the U.S.. I think it’s going to be a lot of reusing what’s already there because it’s built and the permitting goes away.
All the all the complexity goes away. So you can just produce more power. I think that makes a lot of sense. And Rose-Marie, I don’t. Is that same thing going to happen in other parts of the world to not just the U.S.?
Oh, well, I mean, I don’t think that a wind turbine behaves too differently in the U.S. how it does somewhere else with similar wind speeds. I mean, I was a bit surprised to see that they’ve got they’re calling it the same platform.
And I think that they were calling it their five point X platform. So it’s weird to see it as six foot six megawatt generator and the five point X platform. And I think normally, I mean, my understanding of how the platforms work is, you know, you’re trying to keep as much of the turbine in common as possible
to, you know, so you can get your economies of scale and have a lot of turbines produced in the run and then trying to make it so that it suits the the conditions. So, you know, the first way they did that was basically you put the same turbine in a lower wind speed area.
You got to have longer blades to be able to use the generator at that, you know, you would have in a higher wind speed area. So that’s pretty normal that you’d have two blade length. So the 155 diameter is going to be for a high wind speed area.
And then, you know, you use the same generator with the one 70 meter diameter in a lower wind speed area. So that’s all that’s all pretty normal. But then to increase the the size of the generator, then it means that you’re able to capture higher wind speeds, because obviously, if you got a five point eight megawatt generator
at above a certain wind speed, it’s you’re not going to be able to get as much power as there’s more power available in the wind than what your generator can actually handle. Say, upgrade the generator. You can capture more of that.
And I mean, it’s basically just a big balancing. You know, you’ve got your Alcoa equation, levelized cost of energy, you got your capital cost, and then you’ve got the energy that you produce and sell. And you’re just trying to balance that so that you overall end up with the lowest cost.
So I guess it’s just giving more specific options to really precisely suit local conditions. That’s that’s my interpretation of it.
So it sounds like maybe kind of the way like example, Ford Motor Company would use the same frame of a of a truck as they would on an SUV, as well as they try to reuse parts just to kind of save a manufacturing.
Allen, is that a good, good analogy?
Yeah, it’s like if you have an old Mustang and you decide to put a bigger motor in it, it’s kind of like that. You know, you start using a lot of the components of the car, but you have more output.
Very similar. So last on the docket today, the roll motion camera, which is really cool, and basically this is solving one problem, which is can we not shut the wind turbine down to take photos of it? Obviously, drone inspections are a huge thing and like drones are going to be ubiquitous.
If they’re not already ubiquitous, maybe they’re already. Who here votes for you? Drones being ubiquitous already today. Yeah. I mean, it’s like the best one of the best applications for it. Right. But the real motion camera is a ground based camera.
It’s got a little track, you know, can drive it around and then it’s going to rotate with the wind turbines, going to figure out how fast it’s going. Adjust itself to sort of rotate with it so we can take essentially still photos of a full speed rotating windscreen, which is really cool.
It’s obviously got a pretty long zoom and it can just let it keep going and get good photos. Now, the question, I think, is, is this going to be better than a drone inspection or is it just going to be something that’s going to fit some customers and not others who don’t want to spend have the expense
of a big fall drone inspection and shut down for a day or two? I don’t know. Where do you see this fitting in? Because I definitely seems like it has, you know, a use case. Well, what customers do you think this is going to be be right for?
I think it’s going to have to show itself to be less expensive overall to to take the images and the drones pretty inexpensive. And it can do it fairly quickly. The camera method on the ground, while technically a great accomplishment, I don’t know if it can keep up with how fast some of those drones can can scan
these turbines. The only you know, the only difference between the two is ones spinning once. Not so maybe in shutting down and restarting. There’s that time Delta there that can kind of even it out, but it doesn’t feel like it.
And I’m also wondering like it gets down to the expense of the thing. You know, the cameras are in the technology and the high the big lenses that go along with that are not cheap, whereas we’re we’re buying these drones for almost nothing today.
So the cost is where I think it’s just going to choose a winner. There’s obviously going to be places where the camera is going to be used because maybe they don’t allow drones like Washington, D.C.. Right. I mean, there may be places where you can only use a camera.
And they
also know wind turbines in D.C., but
not yet. Right. Yeah. Right. So it’s just going to be a little bit more fascinating because I know how hard it is in the because we’re in it in the wind turbine industry. When you come out with a technology product, how hard it is and how many years you have to grind at it before the industry really
accepts it, you’re in. Well, I’ll give you a good example with with Pinc and Matt Stead. You know, I think he was working on it seven, eight years before it really got going. That’s the kind of timeframe it takes for the industry to kind of accept you and then bring you into the the chain of of buying
decisions. So I’m wondering, because of drones have got such a head start whether the drones are going to wind out in the end just because of that problem.
Rosemarie, what’s your take?
Well, I think I think there is some potential here, and I haven’t seen the images that it can take, because I guess that’s the thing. I mean, are they like crystal clear, like a drone image would be? Because the boats still are.
They are slightly blurry. They’re slightly blurry. Then there’s probably not not too much potential. But I think they’ve got several advantages over drones. The first one, obviously, you don’t need a shot down. And also, it makes scheduling maintenance a little bit hard because you don’t want to shut your turbine down.
If the it’s a really good wind and the price of electricity is higher than, you know, you you don’t want to shut down for any reason. So there’s that advantage, which is maybe not a huge one. But I think the second thing is that it’s taking photos of the blades while they’re loaded.
So to me, that was a really interesting thing. So I bet that you can see more cracks from a blade that, you know, like a smaller crack would be visible on a way that’s loaded because, you know, you imagine when you bend something that the crack will open up a bit, that there’d be that.
And also you would be able to see if one of the blades was perhaps bending more than the other ones more than it should be. You’d be able to say that, too. So I think that if those two things, if you really can say that information, it provides an earlier warning signal, then the drone inspections, then I
think that that would be a huge advantage. So I actually think that there’s quite a lot of potential here as long as the images are really good quality.
I was watching some video on it because it’s super cool technology. OK, so it’s got me hooked when it’s got some new software camera system. So what it’s doing, it’s actually taking images along the. Blade as it rotates and it’s splicing them together with software.
That’s essentially what it’s doing. And the images, obviously what they showed on YouTube looked really good. So my guess is that they’ve got, you know, the imaging software to get in and look at the blade and know where it’s looking at also so that it can splice them is to go there.
So it’s it’s a compound image, much like with drones. The drones do the same thing. So it’s almost giving you a similar in product, the Rosemarie’s. Right? I think on the on the stress in the blade and looking to see whether it maybe damage.
I’m curious. I’ve not ever seen a wind turbine where I saw one blade bending more than another. And probably and thank God that there has never seen that, because that sounds scary. But if you did it, you would be able to notice it.
And that’s an interesting piece, because you may be able to pick out real structural defects in the blade while watching it move that you wouldn’t otherwise pick up. And that’s a really interesting thought. And maybe that’s where they’re headed, is that this is a blade under stress.
Let’s look at it there versus and being still. That’s interesting.
One, it could and it could be like a bigger piece of the puzzle. So say you do drone inspections of every turbine in your wind farm and a couple of them have some, you know, like maybe you need a little dig a little deeper and then maybe you do take photos while they’re under load or something like
that. So it could have that. But yeah, it’s like I said, I think the key is whether or not they’re too late to really compete with drones and the ubiquitous nature of the transactions. Yeah. So that’s going to do it for today’s episode of the Upsilon podcast.
Thanks so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, wherever you’re listening or watching again. You can sign up for our time check news, our weekly update on the podcast and news around the Web in the show notes below.
And be sure to subscribe to Rosemary Barnes YouTube channel, which you’ll find also in the show notes or description. Thanks again. We’ll see you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance, repairs and upgrades.
It’s incredibly expensive to send a team of rope access technicians up tower to make even simple repairs. We also know how costly lightning damage can be requiring inspection, repairs and downtime for even minor lightning strikes. Maximize the time efficiency of your techs and prevent future lightning damage by installing our strike tape loops upgrade the next time your
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