Blades fail faster and more frequently than expected – and DNV has done a lot of research on how, and why, that’s true. Allen, Joel and Rosemary discuss in detail what DNV describes as Thechallenges of wind turbine blade durability. Since Equinor has more experience in floating wind than anyone else, is the company’s decision to postpone its Trollvind offshore initiative “indefinitely” a setback to the industry or a reasonable decision? In the UK, National Robotarium and Fugro are partnering on UNITE, a £1.4m project to develop autonomous and semi-autonomous ROVs capable of conducting subsea inspection, and maintenance and repair tasks. What’s so new about it?
Visit 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
DNV Report – https://www.dnv.com/Publications/the-challenges-of-wind-turbine-blade-durability-243601
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Episode 169
Joel Saxum: All right, Allen, I gotta tell you some news. I was floating through LinkedIn today. FabricAir bought Borealis Wind. Borealis Wind’s been acquired.
Allen Hall: Get out.
Joel Saxum: I’m telling you, and, and the, you know, what makes me, I’m, I’m super happy for Borealis Wind but Daniela Roeper, if you’re listening, why we didn’t get the exclusive to, to let this out.
Joel Saxum: We don’t know.
Joel Saxum: Where’s the love?
Allen Hall: Where is the love? Exactly.
Joel Saxum: So we’re, we’re, we’re gonna jump into some things this week. Maybe talk about this FabricAir and Borealis tie up here later on. But what we’re gonna discuss now is Equinor actually pausing an offshore floating wind farm just kind of based on basically commercial right now.
Joel Saxum: Is what it looks like, the technical side and the commercial side not lining up to be the project they want right now. And then also just a quick segment on e r for wind turbine services. So a project that Fugro’s involved with and some other government agencies. To basically electrify and autonomize some of the offshore wind farm maintenance activities in the North Sea.
Joel Saxum: And then we take a look at the recent publication from DNV on the challenges of wind turbine blade durability, and we ask Rosemary and Joel their thoughts on the industry leading publication from DNV. Talking about all the, the blade problems that exist and what to do about them. And Joel and Rosemary provide some really good perspectives on that.
Joel Saxum: And then our wind farm of the week is the Rattlesnake Road Wind Farm up in Oregon. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales for Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum and renewables expert Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Joel Saxum: Up in Norway, Equinor has put the Trollvind project on hold due to technical, regulatory and commercial challenges. The project was aimed to address the electrification needs in the oil and gas industry and provide power to the Bergen area. And obviously in Norway, anything offshore is gonna be floating.
Joel Saxum: So the, the problem appears to be that the floating technology that they were going after, Wasn’t fully developed enough for Equinor and obviously the project financing everything got more expensive over the last couple of years and, and the project didn’t make any sense anymore. So they’re, they’re not necessarily killing it, but they’re just waiting to for the technology to develop a bit more.
Joel Saxum: So I, I think this is a real interesting case because off the coast of Norway, and this is off the south, West coast of Norway where this, where this farm was supposed to be. It’s really tough environment there. Right? And, and because they had to do, they were trying a unique way of doing floating offshore with the cables, you know, suctioned into the sea floor there.
Joel Saxum: They just felt like they didn’t have the technology breakthrough that they needed. And, and Joel, I, I think this is gonna be pretty common as we get further and further north, right? It, it’s, it’s a rough area to put wind turbines in.
Joel Saxum: Think it’s gonna be common right now if with offshore floating wind, right?
Joel Saxum: Because there’s what we’ve talked about over the last six months year of all this floating wind. Floating wind is, there’s so many different designs. There’s so many different engineering teams to working on this problem. We know there’s ways to do it. We know there’s tension leg platforms and spars and there’s this floating here, and we can more this way or we can more that way.
Joel Saxum: But then have we really decided, can we just take the same nacelle and tower or nacelle and bearings and blades and throw ’em on these things? We don’t, you know, my armchair engineering opinion, I say no. But all of this stuff isn’t quite sorted out. So you see, we’ve talked, so I don’t know if it’s necessarily talking about.
Joel Saxum: Yes, it’s rough seas. Southwest Norway, the whole Norwegian coast can get pretty bad, but I think it’s just floating wind in general. If someone right now says we’re gonna, we’re gonna put in a floating wind farm, that’s gonna be utility scale. I don’t think the industry’s ready for it. We have California that has the whole floating thing going on, and we’ve been hearing now, I mean of course some of this is regulatory driven, but 20 thir, 32 before we see anything out there is, is some of the words that we heard at acp.
Joel Saxum: So, I mean, that’s, that’s nine years down the road, so I, I don’t necessarily think it’s. Environmental conditions, I think it’s just floating wind in general’s not quite ready for utility scale.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And, and I just got a PES Wind magazine came in the mail and there’s an article actually about Norway and off and offshore wind and how difficult it is.
Allen Hall: And article is really good because. There’s a lot of nuances here. It’s not as easy as we’re just gonna put some wind turbines out in the water. They, they need to do a bunch of work out there first, and they, I mean, obviously Norway has a lot of experience in oil and gas, but this is a little bit different, right?
Allen Hall: It’s just a little more complicated
Rosemary Barnes: problem. Yeah, but I think that you know, like you said, the, the big big markets for floating offshore wind are gonna come in the, the 2030s. And so companies like Equinor are trying to get that lead now. I’m mean, most of the floating offshore wind farms that are in place already are Equinor ones.
Rosemary Barnes: So you know, they have built up leading experience and I guess they felt like this one was moving a bit too fast, but, For now, and you know, someone like Norway, it might seem like, oh, this is a really stupid way to put a wind farm in because there’s plenty of opportunity for fixed bottom offshore wind in you know, in Northern Europe.
Rosemary Barnes: So why bother going to the expense of developing new technology for floating wind? But the long game is that floating wind isn’t gonna be competing with fixed bottom wind. It’s gonna be competing with other ways that countries like, well, you know, states like California, countries like Japan places that.
Rosemary Barnes: Don’t have the possibility to really build a lot of any other kind of renewable energy technology. They’re gonna be having floating offshore wind, or they’re gonna be looking at, you know, really expensive solutions like importing liquid hydrogen or, you know, something like that. Or in the case of, you know, Japan trying to build.
Rosemary Barnes: Interconnectors with their neighboring countries who they’re maybe not that politically friendly with. So I think it’s wrong to consider floating offshore in comparison to fixed bottom offshore or onshore for that matter. Definitely the, yeah, the lucrative opportunities that companies like Equinor want to be the leader for are, are going to be in places where they don’t have other alternatives.
Rosemary Barnes: And I think once they get. Through all that and, you know, learn from those kind of projects, which will be, you know, expensive. There is the scope for floating offshore to, to come down and be eventually be cheaper than fixed bottom. It’s, you know, it’s a possibility. It should be less resource less materials intensive.
Rosemary Barnes: There are some advantages for maintenance and that sort of thing. So I still think, you know, over in the timeframe of a decade or two that it’s definitely a promising technology. I think that this. This particular project will be just a, a tiny hiccup. And, you know, you’ve gotta remember that it comes in the in the, the environment of, you know, every infrastructure project is having huge problems at the moment with supply chains and that sort of thing.
Rosemary Barnes: So, you know, it isn’t surprising that they wanna put a pause on, on this one and focus the wind turbines that they can get, the steel, that they can get, you know, onto projects that they know are gonna make money now. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: And in the grand scheme of things, nor the Norwegian Electrical grid is. 90 plus percent renewable already, right.
Joel Saxum: It’s all, it’s mostly all hydro, so it’s not like they’re hurting for energy or hurting for renewable energy. Most of this stuff would probably be exported. So at this point in time, maybe it, it, it makes sense financially like they’ve, like they’ve decided to pump the brakes.
Allen Hall: Equinor has such a vast amount of experience and offshore wind that they can assess these things probably better than any company on the planet at the moment.
Allen Hall: And I think they’re making. The right decision for now for sure, or over in the uk. The National Robotarium and Fugro are collaborating on the development of an electric, remotely operated vehicles for maintenance and repair tasks on offshore wind turbines. So Joel, this is right in your wheelhouse. The, the partnership is part of a 1.4 million pound underwater intervention for offshore renewable energies called the Unite Project.
Allen Hall: So you always have to have an acronym, right? Always an acronym. United States, uk, it’s same thing. Gotta have an acronym. The Unite aims to enhance health and safety in the offshore wind industry by reducing the need for potentially hazardous maintenance emissions conducted by crude support vessels. The eROVs as they’re called, will address various sector challenges including reducing carbon emissions, improving term.
Allen Hall: Turbine productivity and making maintenance and repair exercises more cost effective. Inefficient. So Joel what they’re thinking is a lot of these offshore wind inspections and surveys can be done remotely with a battery powered vessel. Is, is that seeing plausible in the long term or even the short term?
Allen Hall: Short
Joel Saxum: term man. So these projects have been going on for quite a while. This isn’t the first one of its of its type. The first, some of the first projects were, alright, let’s go out to, with our normal vessel, crude vessel, and we’ll put a r o v in the water. And now we’re gonna make it a little bit more.
Joel Saxum: Efficient by giving it some kind of machine vision or something, right? So now it can follow the, it can do an inspection of the monopile, say subsea by following it itself. And instead of having a pilot fly it, you remove that pilot cost, but then you’re also more efficient in getting it done. So that was step number one.
Joel Saxum: That’s cool, right? So now we’ve got something that can autonomously inspect a monopile or a cable route or something like that from the vessel. So at the same time, those, those developers were creating autonomous surface vessels, which, like, X Ocean has one Drs. Teledyne good. The Gavia system.
Joel Saxum: Kongsberg has some, there’s a, everybody makes ’em now. They’re surface vessels that are basically, Robotic and you can launch them from another vessel or from shore and they can go out and do route surveys or other things of that sort. So now you’ve got the same. You’ve got, Hey, we can do this. R O V here.
Joel Saxum: Now let’s take that ov, let’s cut the umbilical and let that thing be an autonomous underwater vehicle to like survey a cable route by itself. So now you take that same machine vision, smart stuff, put it in the water, and it can follow a cable route and inspect a cable route by itself without having the vessel.
Joel Saxum: Super cool. Now you’ve gotten a couple of different things here. Now you take that a U v. And a sv and then you put those together. So now you can go keyside, you can be onshore in the port, and you can lo launch a vessel that cruises out by itself and then releases an autonomous underwater vehicle. It becomes the, the, basically the, the, the primary up, up top, the secondary vehicle goes down, does its inspections, comes back, mate, back to that primary vehicle, and then they go back to shore.
Joel Saxum: And now you can do it all in electric power. Or hydrogen power that’s happening as well.
Allen Hall: How many of these vehicles could they possibly need? Now the UK is planning to have like 11,000 offshore wind turbines in the near future. And, and obvious, obviously, they’re gonna keep putting them out there until they don’t.
Allen Hall: No more need for electricity, I guess. So you’re talking about maybe 15, 20,000 wind turbines offshore. How many of these vessels would they, would they need to go do this work? Five, 10, a hundred thousand?
Joel Saxum: Probably a hundred. I would say you, you need, you, you’re the, the, if you look into operations and maintenance for offshore wind farms, there’s a lot more going on than you think.
Joel Saxum: It’s not just changing oil and looking at the blades every once in a while. There’s a lot of things that happened in Sub-Sea and even top sites. So there’s, I mean, there’s been a few programs. I know Perceptual Robotics was a part of a program taking in one of those ASVs out with the drone on top of it, launching at Keyside from shore.
Joel Saxum: Autonomously driving it out to the wind farm and then taking a drone off from the deck and inspecting the blades and coming back. So now imagine if you had that vessel with a drone on it and with an a U V. So you can go out to a turbine, drop the a u v, do the subsea inspection, take the drone off, do the top side inspection, come back, boom, boom, land, and both move on to the next one.
Joel Saxum: You’re removing the, the ROI on that is amazing because you’re removing a 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a day sov with. 60 people
Allen Hall: on it. Are there regulatory restrictions on that kind of operation where you have a remotely controlled
Joel Saxum: vessel? Yeah, abs absolutely. I mean, it’s, well you have the, you know, drone regulations, but then you have the same kind of things for you, you know, that vessel needs to be able to abide by all maritime laws.
Joel Saxum: So it has to, I mean, there’s, there’s autonomous vessels. Ocean in Flin, ocean Infinity has created the Armada fleet. They’re 73 meters long a piece. And they’re ghost ships. There’s nothing else. There’s no, you don’t need anybody on ’em technically to drive ’em for, to operate ’em. So this stuff, see, this stuff seems like, it seems like science fiction, right?
Joel Saxum: It’s not. It’s go, it’s going on every day right now.
Allen Hall: Hey uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And p e s Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in-depth info you need.
Allen Hall: Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication. PES Wind, PES wind.com. Well, over the weekend I was at an urgent care facility and I had a lot of free time on my hands. So what did I do? I started looking up Wind Power Lab’s, LinkedIn page and reading all the things that were posted. And one of them was the new DNV report on the challenges of wind turbine blade durability.
Allen Hall: I thought, well, I got a couple hours to kill. Let’s go through this thing, and it was a remarkably big, remarkably good. Document summarizing all the blade issues I think all of us have been talking about, and to see it in a sort of condensed form out out of DNV, which is obviously, so everybody respects is a good start, right?
Allen Hall: So let, let me summarize what they see are trends in wind turine blades. One higher uncertainty in blade maintenance costs for new blade models. True significant blade. Problems affecting the industry, including top tier turbine and blade manufacturers requiring large time consuming inspection campaigns.
Allen Hall: Boy, don’t we know about those significant numbers of turbine collapses due to blade failure. Yep. An increase in severe lightning damage, particularly on blades with carbon components. And yes, we all have experience with that. Structural blade damage initiating from relatively minor. Features that would not have been expected to have propagated in the past.
Allen Hall: For example, at conventional details such as core ramps, rosemary and then higher incidents of severe leading edge erosion early in operating life. Have they have, they, I think we all here have seen all these things that Rosemary has. Been probably a lot closer than Joel and I, but does that make sense to us, Mary, that all these are the sort of the highlights for blade problems
Rosemary Barnes: at the moment?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s interesting cause I haven’t been working in this, this part of the industry for more than a few years, right? So I haven’t seen. Seen a trend. I’ve, I’ve been surprised in My background was working for wind turine manufacturer, and before that it was in academia designing, you know, the research and new methods of design.
Rosemary Barnes: And so I’ve seen the, the broad trends in the industry. But then when I came into working on defects and helping manufacturers you know, resolve issues with potentially serial defects, I’ve been surprised that there were so, so many that they were so common. But I didn’t get that snapshot of. I’ve only got a snapshot.
Rosemary Barnes: I haven’t got that experience from 10 years ago. How many blade cereal defects did we DC in wind farms? I’ve only seen what it’s like now. So this is really interesting to see this report and have them be able to provide that trend over time and say, yeah, okay. This the amount that we’re saying now, it.
Rosemary Barnes: Is an unusually large number of of failures compared to what we saw in the past. And it makes sense. It fits in with what I know. Like I’ve noticed with, with Lightning, I was working a lot with the Lightning team when I was working for a manufacturer. And so I did see the change there that, you know, the previous Lightning systems were a lot more simple and they worked pretty well.
Rosemary Barnes: They did what everyone expected them to do. And then with the newer systems, everyone kind of realized that, you know, blades are really changing a lot. They’re getting longer fast, they’re getting new materials in them. And things are a bit different now that blades are so long and with these new materials than it means that a lot of the technologies are complicated and have changed quickly.
Rosemary Barnes: I definitely felt that in the, the period that I was working for the manufacturer that, you know, the start of the time when I was there, I think I started in 2016 at that company. Things moved at a nice safe pace that engineers could feel okay with. You know? Things are changing, but we’re all confident in it.
Rosemary Barnes: And then a couple of years into that role, all of a sudden it’s like, we’ve gotta move fast. We’ve gotta put out a longer blade. We’ve gotta, you know, if you wanna keep up in the market, we’ve gotta put out bigger and bigger turbines. We’ve gotta use carbon fiber, we’ve gotta I dunno, all these other technologies, protrusions and I don’t know, there’d be a dozen of them.
Rosemary Barnes: That all came in within a few years, and then a few years after that, you start seeing, okay, a lot of these really fast projects have have issues, which I mean, you would definitely expect that you can’t change things and have it you know, do exactly what you expected every time. So it, it does make sense to me that.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s a lot of, a lot of failures are, are resulting now from that. And it’s, yeah, it’s good to see it all put together in one place. So you don’t
Allen Hall: think it’s technical challenges as much as the speed at which the industry had to move?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. The speed that the industry had to move Highlighted the technical challenges because in the past, you know, you would’ve had, the company would’ve been working on one or two, two new technologies like this, and they probably would’ve taken a lot longer to you know, feel good about putting it out.
Rosemary Barnes: But you know, there’s been some really big changes now that have happened in just a, just a few years. So you know, you don’t have time anymore to say, okay, this is a new technology. We’ll test it in the lab first, then we’re gonna make a test blade and see how that works. Then we’re going to put it up on a test wind turbine and wait a few years to see how that performed.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we’re going to roll it out gradually and then keep on learning from the experience and bringing it back in because, I mean, when you do it like that, it takes, first of all, that process takes many years. But secondly, if you’ve just got a couple of test turbines, that’s not enough instances to start to see, you know, statistical rates of, of failure.
Rosemary Barnes: And that’s what you get when you’ve got you know, even if you did go through that whole process, I said, and you’ve got, you know, like one test turbine at the end of your five year, you know, technology. Campaign one test turbine that’s been out there for two years, and that would be like a super conservative, slow way of developing a new technology.
Rosemary Barnes: Then, you know, so that’s got three blades on it. And then, okay, now we’re doing cereal production and you don’t, you know, do a little bit of cereal production if you want to. Get the, the benefits of of that whole process and how, you know, everything is designed to get costs down, down, down, down, down.
Rosemary Barnes: That means that you are, you know, putting a blade outta the factory every single day. And you know, every other factory that’s making components for the wind turbine needs to be operating maximum on the one thing over and over and over again to make that cheap. So, You go from one test turbine up to at least hundreds and more likely thousands of wind turbines out there with this same design.
Rosemary Barnes: And then failures don’t happen immediately. They happen, you know, after a year, two years, three years. Usually in that first few years period is when you start to see the bulk of the, the problems. But then there’s thousands of turbines out there. And so it. You, it’s a, it’s, it’s a delayed res response.
Rosemary Barnes: So of course the manufacturers are then going to go back and you know, make changes that they need and that’s totally normal, you know, iterative design process. However, there are hundreds of wind farm owners that are distraught over the fact that they’ve got these big. Failures and you know, in the case of a wind turbine blade or any other component big component like that, it’s no trivial matter to replace these.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, getting a crane out there to a site after it’s already been fully commissioned and, you know, all the cranes have gone. Getting a crane back there can take a long time. I, I dunno what it’s like in every country, but in Australia there’s not that many cranes around that that are, you know, big enough to install these modern a hundred meter plus tall wind turbine.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Towers and. All the parts on them. And then, you know, other complications. How’s the, have the factories, the turbine factories that they moved on from that particular design and now they’re, you know, cranking out another one. It might mean that you have to get, you know, for example, in the case of a blade, you have to get a blade out of the outta the yard and a mold, sorry, a mold outta the yard and bring it back into the factory and then set it back up just to make you know, a few blades to replace it.
Rosemary Barnes: It can take a year, you know, to replace a blade. And I don’t know that, I think probably a lot of wind farm operators listen to this podcast. I don’t think that any of them would like the thought of they’ve got a turbine sitting by idle now for a year while they wait for a new blade for, you know, a manufacturer defect that everyone accepts is, is their fault, but doesn’t make you feel any better about every day that goes past with your turbine shutdown.
Rosemary Barnes: So Yeah, it’s just, it’s a natural consequence of moving so fast. We, we need the technology development to happen, but it kind of all, I don’t know, it didn’t happen gradually. You might have expected we’ve had utility scale wind turbines since the nineties or so. Say Why is it that in, yeah, the 20 teens, we had this sudden acceleration in technology development that’s causing headaches now.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, it might have been nicer if we’d been able to smooth, smooth it out over that whole. Period, but it’s not the way it’s worked out. And we’ll definitely reap the benefits in, you know, 2030. I’m sure all the turbines will have moved past this crunch. And hopefully, you know, the pace of change will slow down a little bit.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, it should But yeah, for now, it can feel like things are out of control. And you know, I I, I bet that the warranty departments of the wind turbine manufacturers are really crazy busy at the moment based on the amount of work that I’m, I’m seeing.
Allen Hall: Well, that’s where DNV comes in here, because I, they have picked up on all those things, Rosemary and, and I, I think they’re trying to, Plug the gaps with some of the recommendations.
Allen Hall: So I, I want you, Joel, and you to hear some of these and, and provide feedback on them because Rosemary, from the manufacturer’s perspective, Joel from the aftermarket and seeing these blades in service, I, I think they, DNV has done a pretty job of, of figuring out ways to eliminate some of these problems first conduct.
Allen Hall: Detailed blade diligence prior to manufacturing new blades for a project which would ideally include design for manufacturer reviews. Such reviews evaluate the intersection between blade design, manufacturing, and quality processes to identify previously uncovered risks. I, I think that’s a, first of all, good thing we do it in aerospace all the time.
Allen Hall: I haven’t seen it much in wind, but this makes sense to me. Oh, that’s a great
Joel Saxum: shameless plug for DNV’s business development department. Right, because that’s what they do. That’s what they do. They’re the ones who certify ‘
Rosemary Barnes: em. But they have certified these blades also. I mean, let’s, let’s be clear. I mean, aren’t they also you know, insulting their own, their own process?
Joel Saxum: They should say we should conduct more detailed blade due diligence before we let these guys go? No, I, I think they, they do. Yes. All of ’em are certified, of course. But I think that the tough thing here is, unless it’s in the certification process, GE. Siemens Vestas, they’re not gonna open up their playbook to give to anybody.
Joel Saxum: They’re not gonna give it to Wind Power Lab. They’re not gonna give it to an asset owner. They’re not gonna give it to. And ensure they’re not gonna, just not gonna do it. So unless it’s the body that is certifying the process, that those are the only people outside of the OEM that get to see these designs.
Joel Saxum: I think
Rosemary Barnes: that the NB might be being a little bit naive here, because, I mean, I don’t know about you, Joel, you work on root cause analysis as well, right? Yeah. The ones that I’ve worked on, the root cause analysis that I’ve worked on, it’s not like you get the root cause and you’re like, oh, well, You should have known not to do that.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s always a new technology and it has caused a new failure mode that, that no one had ever seen before. It’s not something you would check off if you went through and, you know yeah, like witness the manufacturing of a blade and it would be obvious to an outside observer that this is going to cause bad quality.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s, it’s new, new stuff where you don’t know yet how it breaks. And I mean, I, I often say that, you know, I’ve got like, 20 years engineering experience now in the, the. The main point of that is that I know how things break, right? That’s any of us that have been in the the field for a long time. You can look at something, you can say, okay, this is gonna break here, here, here, and here.
Rosemary Barnes: So we’re test for that. There are dozens of great engineers with decades of experience on any one of these blade projects that have looked at it and said, this is where it’s gonna break here, here and here. And they have. You know listed out the, the things that they think could go wrong and during these really fast periods of development, sure.
Rosemary Barnes: They’re not gonna get to every single one of those risks that they’ve identified. And it causes a lot of angst in the, you know, in the canteen the engineers are talking together, you know, stressing about a risk that they’ve foreseen that they can’t test. But that’s not always a thing that ends up going wrong.
Rosemary Barnes: And it’s quite normal in an engineering design process that, you know, you prioritize your risk. You do the, the ones that you think are likely to happen, and you do the things that would’ve really bad consequences if they happened.
Joel Saxum: Here’s, here’s one thought as well. In the engineering world, composites specifically are very hard to model, and the reason being is because from.
Joel Saxum: Piece to piece, you know, you were using balsa wood, right? That’s a natural phenomenon. So like, it’s not like you have this X grade steel and you’re going steel to steel that those things are easier to model. It’s easier to model the aluminum frame of a car than it is to mo and see where it will fail and what will happen under loads and these things than it is to have a a composite structure.
Joel Saxum: Because a composite structure by. Design is inherently this art meets science. Not everything is perfect. So that, so those are tough as well. Right, and and what we see, I know from the RCA standpoint, Rosemary, like you’re saying, is you can do all the due diligence you want on the design. Yes. But you have designers.
Joel Saxum: These are things coming outta the factory, right? You have design errors and then you have manufacturing errors. Two, two completely separate things because we, we see a lot in the RCA world where it may have been designed just fine, but all of a sudden, like, you know, the sheer web isn’t glued properly, or you have a kissing bond instead of a good mechanical and chemical bond and in a joint or something of that type, so, so, Some of those things, though, when you see them, right?
Joel Saxum: Like we’ve seen fleets of blades that have in the leading edge where there’s an overlap in the leading edge where they, where they sandwich together, they bite together, and then they put a, you know, put a, basically what would be a piece, the glue that sticks them together in the tape, on the backside as for bad terms.
Joel Saxum: But those things aren’t, aren’t properly mated. Right. So that technically when you see a bunch of those, that looks like a manufacturing area, but it’s actually a design error because it’s the design of how you manufacture them isn’t proper. So some of those things, how long and, and how long do you get to review, you know?
Rosemary Barnes: I think that you’re definitely right, but I would, I wouldn’t agree that a design era and a manufacturing error are completely separate because you, if you work at a, a manufacturer as a designer, then your job is to design for a manufacturer. So it’s very easy to you to make a recommendation, oh, you should be designing for manufacturer of.
Rosemary Barnes: Course they are, you know, that’s what they have, you know, they decades of experience these manufacturing companies. And all of their learning has been about, you know, this is the way we designed it, this is how it’s actually built. So they either change the design to avoid that error or they. You know, they, they know the strength of the real as-built material, not, they’re not just going off, you know, little perfectly made samples that they’ve tested in a lab and then making their design off that.
Rosemary Barnes: And then, you know, crying when the real manufactured wind turbine blade isn’t strong enough. They maybe did that, you know, back in 1980 and. You know, learned from it. And there’s a big, you, you know, when you look at old wind turbines and look at a lifetime extension, one of the, the big reasons why you’re able to extend the life often of a wind turbine blade that should have already used up its life is that we know so much more now about the actual strength of these these components as built.
Rosemary Barnes: So you can say, okay, we used to use a safety factor of, I don’t know, five. Five times, and now we know that it’s actually okay to use one of, of three and a half times or, you know, whatever the the factor may be and the specific example. So yeah, I, I definitely, you’re right, and I mean, I’m certainly never looking at root cause analysis where they find the root cause was that the design was just wrong.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s always that the manufacturing did not allow the fi finished blade to have the design intent. And so, Yeah. Yeah, you’re definitely right that that’s the issue. And I guess DNV is right, that that’s the issue. But DNV is wrong to say the solution is designed for manufacture when that is most definitely what is already happening.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s a, it’s a bit, it’s a bit easy, right? Oh, you should think about how these products look when they’re actually manufactured. They’re saying that too, a manufacturer, you know, like the bulk of the employees in any of these companies are manufacturing employees. They’re not, you know, design engineers are, you know at LM Wind powers, a few hundred design engineers.
Rosemary Barnes: And then there’s, you know, 10,000 manufacturing employees. So you, you know, it’s, come on. They, they do think about manufacturing. Let, let
Allen Hall: me go through a couple more bullet points here from DNV cause I think this is important and, and they’re gonna touch on some of the things. Rosemary, you mentioned, and Joel, you mentioned them too.
Allen Hall: Reference DNV’s Turban review reports which include risk statements and technical evaluation of specific blade models based on ex DNV’s experience. So sort looking back and then applying what you learned from them previous blades onto new blades. Makes sense. Evaluate blade manufacturing facilities capabilities and processes.
Allen Hall: This includes review of factory conditions, process capabilities, and process blade fabrication, quality, quality, system effectiveness, and the finished product. So again, If blades are made in different factories around the world, all the producing the same level of quality, all they all doing the same thing.
Allen Hall: That’s a, a, a decent approach. Monitor blade production. Okay, this is, this is the interesting one. Monitor blade production, which may include witnessing manufacturer. Of and evaluating the quality of blades for a given wind project. This process seeks to reinforce good quality, prevent or capture flaws, and possibly influence blade manufacturers to modify or improve processes that result in quality lapses and escapes.
Allen Hall: So what they’re saying is putting another set of eyes that’s not getting paid by the manufacturer into the facility to monitor for quality. A separate oversight.
Joel Saxum: So we speak about that with a lot of clients at Windpower Lab. Right now we’re doing a large project for an operator in the EU where they’re getting some blades made and they had their first few of the blades delivered to site.
Joel Saxum: It’s a a phased out site. And when they got them on site, they went to go hang them and they had issues already. So they’re like, Hey, we need, we need you guys to look at this thing. So we talked to, we’ve done it in multiple manufacturing facilities, audit, basically audits of the process. And then I think the next bullet here we’ll talk about, probably it goes along the same thing, is inspecting them as they roll off the line, because you can repair them on at the factory much better than you can repair them in the field.
Joel Saxum: And then, If you’re not following your process, cuz that’s the big thing, right? So you hold, when we do these site see site visits and these QA Q C things, they hand us their processes and we go through the processes and then look at the. End product. And if the end product doesn’t match what the processes say, then they’ve gotta go back and fix it.
Joel Saxum: And sometimes there’s just stupid stuff, right? Like, like handling mistakes. There’s a crack in the, in the gel coat because they grabbed it in the wrong spot or something like that. Stuff happens all the time. But yeah, you’d be actually really surprised to see that these blades coming directly off of the manufacturing floor are, are already.
Joel Saxum: Full
Allen Hall: of defects. I think insurance companies are gonna get to what the next DNV bullet point is, which is inspect blades and assess for inspection results. And DNV goes on to say, this may include detailed internal and, and external inspections and new blades before or after installation on the turbine, as well as at the end of warranty and during operations phases of the wind project.
Allen Hall: So, Joel, you’ve hit right on it. The, in the insurance industry is gonna force this. This is not gonna be a D M V driven thing as much as the cost of insurance.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting though, because most of these suggestions are already things that are, you know, well known in the industry and are being done. I’ve seen a lot of cases where, you know, there, there has been all the proper inspection, quality inspection throughout the process, but because it’s a, a new.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, a new design feature, say either a new material or a new manufacturing process or, or something like that. It. It turns out that the inspection process actually wasn’t suitable for it, but they didn’t realize until I started seeing failures and did a root cause analysis. I’ve seen a few of those where it’s like, you know, we with three day Scandal, this exact feature I have the images that show there’s no flaws here, and yet you know, a year of operation after.
Rosemary Barnes: Year of operation in the field, we got cracks forming what on earth is, is going on. And then they realize, oh, okay. We thought that this inspection process would be suitable. But it turned out not to be. And I think the, the underlying thing for all of this is, All this stuff is well known. It’s all been doing to it a certain extent.
Rosemary Barnes: You could do it more, and that’s easy to say. You know, just do, do more, take more care. Don’t make these mistakes. And that if you said something like that, then you would fit in very well in the engineering department and any of these manufacturing companies. The engineers really want to be very cautious and make sure the product that they’re designing is gonna be good.
Rosemary Barnes: But there’s this commercial pressure of everybody else’s making bigger wind turbines. Everybody else has these new features. You know, company X has carbon fiber blades. Now Company Y is using Pultrusion. Company Z has 150 meter long blade. And so it’s not possible for a company to say, no, we’re gonna go, we’re gonna go safe.
Rosemary Barnes: And we’re only going to make what we know. A hundred percent is not gonna fail because they’re not gonna have. You know, any sales. And so maybe in five, 10 years time, their competitors are gonna go bankrupt from all of the warranty claims. But they will have gone bankrupt before that because they had no sales for a few years.
Rosemary Barnes: So that’s the real tension that you know, stuff like this can’t actually solve that. How do you. How do you solve those sorts of problems? To me, I think that you, it’s necessary to periodically go through phases where you have a lot of failures in the field and fix them and learn from it. Then you’ve got the technology and you’ve got the robustness in a few years.
Rosemary Barnes: But the period that we’re in now, it’s very difficult and it. For the greater good. That makes sense. But for any individual windfarm operator, they’re still stuck with assets that aren’t performing as they should be. And it’s a lot of work for them to get, you know, get what they deserve. They deserve to have fully functioning wind turbines for the amount of money that they paid.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s not on them to wear the, you know, the cost of their experimentation of the manufacturer. So, yeah. Anyway, lucky that there’s people like Joel and me that can, can help them get the outcome that they need on each of those
Joel Saxum: projects. A lot of this paper that we read here is, I mean, you’re reading down the menu of services that we offer at Wind Power Lab to protect asset owners, right?
Joel Saxum: Monitor blade production, do the inspections, you know Instrument them when you can monitor them from lightning, make sure that there there’re good quality coming outta the factory. Like these are things that you would think are no-brainers. And rosemary, you do make a point where like, yeah, they’re staying, they’re stating things that are known in the industry.
Joel Saxum: But it’s a surprising how many operators don’t actually do this. Right. So what, like, the term, the term that was used in oil and gas that I, you know, I take over here as well, is having a bird dog. In the field, it’s the same thing. It’s used on offshore vessels, whatever. But the bird dog is the client rep.
Joel Saxum: That’s that person that is an independent third party hired by the client to come and say, or an asset owner to go and look at the, the turbine blades. And that person becomes their, their eyes and ears to make sure that they buy a good quality product. And that person is a, you, is a seasoned engineer, knows what they’re talking about, knows what they’re looking at, and it’s amazing how many things that you can pick up at that, at the early stages that just aren’t.
Joel Saxum: Aren’t seen.
Allen Hall: All right. The last two things from DNV are implement a robust blade management program for your new or operating wind projects, including proactive inspections and quality control for field repairs. Rosemary and Par Delo and, and Joel at Wind Power Lab. Sound familiar? Standard stuff.
Allen Hall: Standard stuff, right. The last one, which. It affects my little businesses. Analyze and use data from various types of sensors, including turbine based, lightning sensors, load sensors, et cetera, to monitor blade durability and lightning activity. So I think what we’re saying is you need to be monitoring and inspecting your stuff, is to keep it that simple.
Allen Hall: Look at what you own and make sure it’s working right. And put some sensors on sensors on it so it simplifies your
Joel Saxum: job. Yeah. Know what’s going on in the field. Right, especially when you have, when you have, and, and that’s what I kind of go back to before about people not knowing is that what’s happening a lot in the world now is it’s not so many, not as many people that are big asset owner operators.
Joel Saxum: So there’s a difference between an asset owner and an asset owner operator. Right. Your, your, your big time players, your next eras, your rws, your edfs, like here in the States, they’ve got blade engineering teams. They’re looking into CMS systems. They have robust inspection plans. They’re monitoring things.
Joel Saxum: You know, they’re, they’re looking at lightning data. They’re doing these other stuff. But there’s a lot of asset owners out there that are basically financial companies. Right. They don’t have engineers on staff. They don’t have people on site. They buy the turbines. They develop the site or buy, buy. The site already developed.
Joel Saxum: And then they have an FSA where the OEM takes over and watches after the thing for ’em. So they just don’t know these things, but then they end up getting caught. End of warranty. All of a sudden they got all these damages to, to take care of or, or they get caught having to re repay to repair lightning damages because it was a part of their contract.
Joel Saxum: They don’t, but they didn’t monitor for lightning damage and these different things. So there’s a lot of people out there that are. Flying blind and, and so they say great things. A lot of people are doing this stuff and it’s things, you know, but if you’re not a specific engineer, it’s complicated. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: It’s better to read a document like this or listen to experts like Rosemary or, or the, you know, the company I work for, Windpower Lab or, or when dealing with Lightning, Allen or any of these CMS companies or other experts in the field. Learn the lessons from the experts instead of trying, instead of taking the black eyes and the lumps yourself, Joel,
Allen Hall: over the weekend, because I was sitting there in that urgent care, I decided to put out a little summary of what I thought on the lightning aspects because the, the DNV article goes on to say for lightning, things as to they’re gonna update the i e C spec for lightning.
Allen Hall: And they’re, they’re going to Suggest, I don’t wanna say requires cause it’s not a requirement, but it will be cuz insurance companies are involved to put some lightning monitors on your turbines so you can see the current wave form, all the lightning pulses and that kind of thing. I don’t. Beening in the lightning world a long time.
Allen Hall: I’m not sure what you’re gonna do with that data. It’s just like too much info, right? And we already have that info. It’s too complicated for operators to sift through, like, what are you gonna do with
Joel Saxum: it? That’s why we created the Lasi system at Wind Power Lab, right? It’s gotta be simpler. We will do it in the background for you and then just give you notifications of.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Here, this is what you need to do. This is the, here, here’s what you need to do to your turbine. Not necessarily, here’s all the, the engineering data, data analysis, data science that you have to do. Like that’s, you know, people don’t have time for that. I think the
Allen Hall: lassi system makes a lot of sense. In places where we’re seeing there’s a lot of lightning strike.
Allen Hall: And you’re, you need high levels of accuracy. I think putting on a lightning sensor makes a lot of sense. The, the one from Ping is probably the least expensive one on the market at at the moment because it tells you you’ve had a lightning strike, an actual lightning strike, and then it can determine if there’s damage to the blade and send out on the large slope.
Allen Hall: That makes sense. On the. Cost side of it for sure. And, and Joel, you’re right. If, if you’ve got a farm, it’s not a lot of turbines. You’re not in a strong lightning area for sure. The la the lasting system makes total sense even on large wind farms in the states, because at least gives you a sense of what the hell’s going on.
Allen Hall: If you don’t have anything on your. Blades right now you’re turbine. Now that at least gives you some oversight to it, right? Monitor them somehow modern, but it doesn’t have to be expensive or complicated. And, and that’s what I want everybody to hear is like, don’t, don’t, don’t make it too complicated. And after reading this, I’ve been in three separate industries.
Allen Hall: In my career, start off in spacecraft, which you make one or two spacecraft maybe a year, moved over to aerospace where you’re making dozens, maybe a couple hundred of aircraft a year, and then being around this wind turbine business a little bit where you’re making thousands of something a year, right?
Allen Hall: Because of the quantity. It changes the way that the manufacturing and the engineering have to happen. And as Rosemary was pointing out things have to go faster, right? When you’re producing thousands of things, you just gotta be faster. What I have noticed in all three industries is just the level of quality changes dramatically as you get in and the organizations change, but to a company.
Allen Hall: The ones that I’ve seen work are ones we’re manufacturing and engineering are working together. They’re not two separate siloed organizations. The engineers are not free from criticism for manufacturing, and the manufacturing’s not free from criticism, criticism from the engineers. They need to be kind of coupled together and the, the management over top of those companies needs to force that interaction.
Allen Hall: So it’s not, I design it and then I don’t worry about it. No. You’re designing it and you’re living it, what’s happening on the floor, that’s where you seem to get the best kind of product coming out. And engineers don’t like getting your hands dirty. Let’s just face it. Like a lot of engineers like to sit up there and type on the computer.
Allen Hall: It’s nice and have your coffee and your thing and it’s Sure. And a lot of manufacturing doesn’t like talking to engineering because upstairs in their air conditioned offices, you know, it’s the nature of the business. You’re exactly
Joel Saxum: right. And one of the issues that we have within the wind turbine business.
Joel Saxum: Is logistics, right? Because these blades are getting so damn big that if you’re gonna build a wind farm in, in India, I, there’s, there’s factories over there, right? They’re not getting designed there. They’re getting designed in Germany. They’re getting designed in vest in Denmark or, or wherever. And, and there’s manufacturing all over the place.
Joel Saxum: So those engineers aren’t in there embedded in the
Allen Hall: factory. It makes it hard as soon as you open the second factory, and Boeing went through this, right? So Boeing went through this, I’ll use Boeing as an example, because they had problems when they had all the factories up in Washington where all the engineers were.
Allen Hall: Then they opened a factory to make the 7 87 down South Carolina. And sure enough, right, they started having problems because of the lack of oversight. I think that’s that. The engineer couldn’t walk down on the coffee break and kick the tires on an airplane. They were now 2000 miles away from it. Those interactions create problems and Boeing’s been teething through those.
Allen Hall: And I think it’s a sim similar thing that we see in wind where engineers and the manufacturing are thousands of miles apart.
Joel Saxum: Ping Monitor is a continuous blade monitoring system which allows Windfarm operators to stay
Rosemary Barnes: ahead of maintenance. Windex can often hear damaged blades from the ground, but they can’t continuously monitor all the turine. They also can’t calculate how bad the damage is or how fast it’s propagating based on sound, but ping can ping’s.
Rosemary Barnes: Acoustic system is being used on over 600 turbines worldwide. It allows operators to discover damage before it gets expensive and prioritize maintenance needs cross their fleet, and it
Joel Saxum: pays for itself the first time it identifies Sirius damage or saves
Rosemary Barnes: you from doing an unnecessary visual inspection.
Rosemary Barnes: Stop flying blind out. There,
Joel Saxum: get ping’s ears on your turbines. Learn more@pingmonitor.co.
Allen Hall: Joel. Our wind farm of the week is the Rattlesnake Road Wind Farm up in Oregon. So EDP renewables, north America is actually celebrating the 15th anniversary of the Rattlesnake Road Wind Farm in Arlington, Oregon. And Arlington is like in the center of the state right along the border with Washington.
Allen Hall: Nice area. By the way. The 103 megawatt project in Gillum County produces enough energy, power, the equivalent of 29,000 Oregon homes annually. Rattlesnake Road represents an estimated capital investment of 226 million and contributes to the local economy in a variety of different ways. During construction, the project created more than a hundred.
Allen Hall: Full-time equivalent jobs, and it currently employs 17 permanent positions to operate and maintain the project. Yikes. Rattlestick Road has also contributed more than 23 million worth of spending within the 50 mile radius as everybody goes out and buys gas and has sandwiches
Joel Saxum: and snacks at lunch.
Joel Saxum: Coffee. Yeah. Gotta have that.
Allen Hall: Yeah. All, all the good stuff. And, and in addition, the, the wind farmer has dispersed more than 8 million to landowners through land lease payments and paid more than 13 million to local governments area schools, et cetera in form of payments and taxes and those kind of good things.
Allen Hall: So it’s a huge money dump in the, it’s sort of middle of Oregon. That’s a great thing. Right. And it’s a 15 year project so that Joel, you know, they’re gonna be getting ready for a repower probably in the next year or two. Absolutely.
Joel Saxum: You know, this is, I wanna stop you there for a second, Allen. And I’m, I like that we’re going through some of these stats here because in the background for our listeners here, we’ve been talking about some of the public relations and, and things that we feel maybe the wind industry doesn’t do that well.
Joel Saxum: And sharing this year, 8 million to landowner lease payments in the area, 13 million to local governments with benefits for schools and emergency services infrastructure. I’m sure they helped with some roads and things around there. $23 million just spent in the community. This is one wind farm in the United States.
Joel Saxum: There’s hundreds of wind farms. This is a, this is, you know, there’s 70. 2000 and change tur wind turbines around the country. So this is just a small snippet of what the wind industry gives back to the world as
Allen Hall: well. Yeah, I, I think this is great. So congratulations to Rattlesnake Road Wind Farm. You are our wind farm of the week.
Allen Hall: Joel, you know, we, we were on Twitter and we’re getting a pretty good response from him already so people can check out whether our Lightning texts Twitter page, and you can watch full episodes of the Uptime podcast. But Joel, you’re on Twitter also. Yeah,
Joel Saxum: so @JoelSaxum is my handle on Twitter, but what Mym trying to focus on is the same things we do on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Joel Saxum: So you can see that’s kind of what I’ve got Twitter set up for, but it is to share some of the innovation technology permitting things. The government. Activities within wind what the OEMs are doing, and all the above all over the world. So the same thing we’re doing with the, with the podcast, where Sharon as well on Twitter, come and come and check it out.
Joel Saxum: Yeah,
Allen Hall: Rosemary’s on Twitter also, so you can check out Rosemary. Rosemary’s Twitter handle is @engwithrosie.. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
Allen Hall: And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
