Rosemary and Allen review the latest news from Dominion Energy’s offshore negotiations with Virginia and the Siemens acquisition of SGRE. Low-cost offshore gravity foundations are installed France with great results – will they be the future in offshore? Allen is excited about a YouTube video from ArcVera on wake turbulence. Back at WindEnergy Hamburg Allen and Joel discuss the latest in AeroLightning with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve.
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ArcVera YouTube Video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPz5JN0UBoM
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Uptime 140 Audio Pod Cut 1
Allen Hall: Rosemary Joel is enjoying himself in sunny California. So it’s just you and me for this episode. And we have a, a special guest here, actually. Rosemary, you wanna introduce everybody?
Rosemary Barnes: Yep. This is my, my little boy who’s. Four and a half weeks old and just so, so keen to get started on engineering communication that he’s decided to join the podcast today,
So
Allen Hall: we’re excited to have him along with us. And we, we talk about some really interesting topics this week. Dominion Energy is finally settled with the state of Virginia on their offshore wind costs. And that’s good news. Spanish regulators have agreed to let Siemens, me. Be acquired by Siemens in a $4 billion plus takeover.
And Siemens is also trying to restructure itself as part of its mystro program to, to really grow that company. And then we have Rosemary. I go back and forth about some gravity based foundations that are being installed in France, which are, is an interesting technology because it just lowers the cost of foundations.
It’s a little complicated in terms of, of how they’re deployed, but it’s lower cost and you think you’re gonna see that in the United States. And then I, I crossed a video from a ArcVera recently on YouTube, and everybody just subscribed to ArcVera’s YouTube channel because they have really cool things there.
We talk about wake turbulence on offshore wind farms, and our career has published some of their research in a long webinar. It’s about an hour long, but it’s well worth the time to, to sit through that and understand the difficulties in the, in the concerns about wake turbulence on offshore winds.
At the end of this, we have an interview with Joel and I do over in Germany. We sat down with Nicholas Ern, CTO of Power Curved. We talk about pretty much all things aerodynamics, lightning and wind, Turbin blade, so that’s a really great interview. Stay tuned for that. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with Australian Blade Whiz, Rosemary Barnes and Joel living it up in California.
And this. Is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, Rosemary, it’s, it’s great to have you back and Dominion Energy. Is resolved their dispute with the state of Virginia. Like I said before, when Rosemary comes back, the world starts to settle down a little bit. Things are, things are calming down, there’s less fires to put out, and one of them is this dominion energy state of Virginia issue.
And remember that Dominion’s gonna to put about 176 wind turbines off the coast of Virginia and the state of Virginia through some of the regulatory bodies, was asking for a 42% capacity factor in domin. Said no and very strongly said no. So that went back and forth and they’ve been working to settle the disagreement, which is what a good company does.
They have agreed to look at capacity factor, but in a, in a situational review. So if the capacity factor falls tremendously or by some defined amount, they’re gonna go to a board and have to explain what’s happening. So, for example, if they had. Some sort of serial defect in the wind turbines. They can go to the state and say, look, it’s a serial defect in the wind turbines.
We don’t have to, we shouldn’t be held responsible for something that we didn’t do right, that we’re working to resolve it. Therefore, the state should give us some leeway. And it sounds like the state’s gonna do that, but there’s also another little piece about the development costs because the state was concerned about how much money dominion may come back and ask the state for it, for this project.
and they’ve set some parameters around it, but the parameters are very odd in a sense. So Dominion’s responsible for the full cost of the project up to 10 billion. So between 10 billion or 10.3 billion and 11.3 billion, if it, if the range goes somewhere in there dominion and consumers are gonna pick up those costs.
If it goes above 11.3 billion, dominion is required to pay those additional costs. And then if it gets above the magic number of 13.7 billion, everybody goes, hold on, we’re gonna have a review. So there. 3.2, 3.5 billion roughly of wiggle room in this development. So Rosemary, it seems like the capacity factor, which you said shouldn’t be a thing, the capacity factor has been resolved, but they also have this development cost distribution.
Graduated piece, are you think this is gonna get applied to other projects that are going on offshore in the US or other projects around the world now that this has been established as a framework?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting to see the, yeah, like three tiered plan for if their construction costs overrun, and I think the top tier is like over 30%.
Cost blowout, which ordinarily would be a lot, but I think that with a lot of projects going on these days, that’s the sort of cost increase that you’re regularly seeing now from, you know, depending on how long the project planning duration is. But cost can definitely increase that much in a normal project timeframe now.
So it wouldn’t surprise me if we did get up to that. And then I guess we’ll be in a situation similar to some of the other projects. Where you all of a sudden, you know, after years of, of planning and business cases and you know, making sure that everything makes sense, all of a sudden you’ve got a project that’s too expensive to ever make money.
And you know, I, I guess at that point you’ll see the project canceled, which I don’t know if you start to see a lot of that happening in You know, the US offshore wind, considering that you don’t have a lot of completed projects yet, it doesn’t sound good for the industry and good for, you know, getting companies to have confidence in the pipeline, the confidence that they would need to start building factories and, you know, training workers and building ships and, and all that sort of thing.
You know, to implement the ambitious plans that the US has for offshore wind by 2030. So, I think that’s a, that’s a big risk. I was really pleased to see that they didn’t end up including anything to do with the capacity factor in their performance guarantee because, I mean, that just made no sense.
And I think that would definitely turn off future developers if, if that, you know, set a precedence. So I’m glad to see that they got rid of that particularly silly request that they had. So yeah, now we just wait and see how much prices go up to see whether this project will actually end up
Allen Hall: coming off.
One of the participants in, or co-signers in the Dominion state of Virginia dispute and the settlement was Walmart of all companies because they’re one of the largest employers or maybe the largest employer in the state of Virginia and what they’re one of the largest energy uses in the state for sure.
So that, I thought that was a little unusual that Walmart was actually involved in these negotiations at, at such a high visible level. It makes you wonder if companies like Amazon and Google and Facebook are involved in energy discussions with state regulators and the operators. Are they, because they use so much energy in different states, do you think they’re at the.
Arguing for their, for their, for their company to keep energy prices low. I
Rosemary Barnes: think it probably differs on a case by case basis depending on like how, how much of the, you know, the grids energy that user is using. So traditionally the large energy users were like aluminum melts. I know that in New South Wales, the state that Sydney’s in, the aluminum selter at Togo uses like 10, 15% of the state’s electricity.
And so they’re absolutely involved in discussions. You know how the grid’s gonna work and reliability, and there’s agreements and, you know, from time to time they reduce their demand so that, you know, they can prevent blackouts and that sort of thing. And I think that the same thing happens with yeah, with, with large energy users, especially like where there’s data centers and stuff that can use up a lot of, a lot of energy.
I visited a visited one in in Denmark where that was playing a, a significant role. So. It doesn’t surprise me, and especially if those energy users have got power purchase agreements, PPAs with the wind farm that make up a large, you know, proportion of it, then of course they have a massive, massive interest in making sure that the deal comes off and stays at a, you know, at the price that that is what that they
Allen Hall: agreed to.
Walmart may have had a hand in the capacity faster discuss. They may be in the one that was really driving it because, yeah, well, unstable energy would be a problem for Walmart, particularly for a data center. And at
Rosemary Barnes: the same time, if there’s an agreement that the, you know, drives the company bankrupt, then that is not gonna be beneficial for any of those energy users either, because right then they’re going to not have the, the, the power that they, they have purchased.
So I think that they’re, they’re keen to see the agreement.
Allen Hall: Rosemary since you’ve come back, Siemens has decided to buy the remaining third of Siemens Gamesa, and they’ve been talking about this for a while. Actually, I think back in May, they introduced this concept of buying the remaining third, and there has been more of an effort on Siemens’s part to write the ship in some sense because they already owned two thirds of the company.
So they offered 4 billion roughly for a little over 4 billion euros for the remaining third of Siemens, MEA and the , they offered a premium of like 27% or 25, roughly 25% over the, the existing share price. So that’s a pretty sweet offer. And it sounds like Siemens, once this deal goes through and the Spanish regulators have approved it, which they have now, Siemens is going to.
Take Siemens ga mea off the stock market. So it it’ll be a, a privately held company part of Siemens Larger, which I, I think makes sense long term just to get Siemens ga mea rolling in the right direction. A lot of wind turbine OEMs are in financial straits at the moment, I think. Do you think that the Siemens acquisition and just firming up Siemens ESSA’s books is is a good first
Rosemary Barnes: step?
Yes, I think so. From working in the industry and did. Did little bits and pieces of work with some Siemens Guma projects, but not a lot. But just the general impression is that the culture’s never really meshed that well between Siemens and go mea. And it did. You definitely always knew if you were talking to a Siemens person or a Gamesa person.
And so I think that from that point of view, and you know, that continued for years and years after they, they merged. So even just from that perspective, it makes sense to me that they would try to not separate out again, but, you know, do something like this to resolve the cultural issue. Because, you know, normally when you merge it’s so that you can find some efficiencies and, you know, remove duplication and save money in that way.
But since the CO, it’s still always felt like two companies, I can’t imagine that they did that very successfully. So maybe this is an opportunity now. They can just be all Siemens. Siemens has, you know, they basically, my understanding is they bought Gamesa or they merged with Gamesa to get the offshore capabilities.
Now they’ve, they’ve got that, they’ve got a reputation for offshore now. I think that it, it makes sense and is, yeah, I’m sure that their executives are looking at every option that they can to get costs down and profit profitability up in particular. And I think this is a pretty, pretty good approach to try that.
Allen Hall: So over the last 12 months Siemens Gamesa signed about, I’m gonna put this in dollars. Alright, so it’s about 12. Billion dollars worth of deals. They have a backlog of about 35 billion. And the, so the revenue for the last 12 months was about, 10 billion, but they’re gonna lose, over those 12 months, they’re gonna lose about a billion dollars.
So they brought in 10, spent 11, and they’ve had a program in place called the Misra Program, which was launched in the spring that was giving them a, a way to create long term stability. Now, as part of that, there’s a reorganization that’s happening and starting on January 1st. So Siemens buying the controlling interest of Siemens gaa.
Is in that timeline of January 1st, we’re gonna be in a little different position as an organization and financially as part of this myall program, they’re gonna announce layoffs of roughly 3000 people. But it doesn’t sound like they’re gonna be so much layoffs as retirements early. Yeah. It doesn’t sound like they’re gonna be forced, forced layoffs.
It just sounds like there’s gonna not hire people for a while, and they brought in. A new person, a cto Morton, P Guard, Rasmussen, and on LinkedIn when that happened and when they made that announcement, there was a lot of, of chiming in with thumbs up for that that engineers and technical people thought that was a, a good appointment.
So things were gonna look up for Siemens sch. Rosemary, you’re right, the off. Bit of their business is where they’re headed. In, in fact, that’s one of the three points they pointed out in, in press release. They said offshore demand is gonna be big and they wanna be a part of it. And then they’re gonna try to obviously leverage some of the relationships with suppliers to provide stability.
So that all makes sense. I think the plan is good. It’s just implementing it and. Think you’re right about Game Mesa and Siemens just having different cultures and different approaches to designing wind turbines, and it looks like that’s gonna come to an end. They’re gonna be under the Siemens banner and hopefully one big, happy, profitable company.
Get the latest on wind industry, news, business, and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news. Well, Rosemary, I came across this interesting article talking about gravity based foundation. So over in France they’re working on a wind farm.
The. Wind farm, I’m sure I’m butchering that name. There’s 71 71 offshore wind turbines with and each of the wind turbines have a capacity as seven megawatts and they’re Siemens Gamesa wind turbines. They’re using a slightly different kind of foundation here in the States. We’ve been using monopiles for the most part, they’re using gravity based foundations and that were assembled at a port near the actual, the final installation.
These are less expensive foundations, so basically of a. Bottom and like a steel tube that pops out the center of them. And they are float floatable, I guess some of them are floatable, but these in particular are put on a barge and drug out to the location and a crane picks ’em up and just drops ’em to the bottom.
But the useless material. I guess the only drawback to them is they have to prepare the sea floor to accept them. So they, you gotta create a pad on the sea floor, so you may end up dredging the sea floor to make it level. So when the foundation hits the bottom, it’s, it’s actually pointed in the right direction.
It says oil and gas have used these in the past, and I have seen them in oil and gas, but I haven’t seen them used in wind before. Does this make a lot of sense on some of these shallow. Depths of, of offshore wind, making these things up to like 150 while up to 180 feet tall. So they’re fairly tall, they’re big, they’re big foundations.
But does this make sense just because it uses less materials?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, well, I mean, foundations isn’t something that I know a lot about, but it is one of the most interesting parts, I think, of the offshore wind race. You know, there’s all sorts of different technologies making their way from oil and gas over to wind, which makes sense cuz you know, oil and gas industries had decades to figure out what works where and under what conditions.
So, yeah, it’s it’s interesting design. It looks to me like a just giant concrete conal flask. Can you remember from, you know, your high school chemistry class? Those, those conal flasks and I saw they’ve got, I don’t think, I tried to forget , you know, I was famous in my high school chemistry for setting the.
The setting, the the bench on fire nearly every time fire was involved and something would get set on fire. And I did continue that through to my professional career. I have , I have been involved in a couple of burning incidents there too. So yeah, that’s one of my, one of my special skills. If you wanna know if your product can catch fire, then get me to test it and I’ll Yeah.
always trying to find ways to, ways to break products as fast as possible, you know, in the, in the lab rather than in the field. And yeah, fire is one of my specialties. So anyway I, they have a video on the, on the website, on the article that I read describing it that shows them, and they’re nearly five tons each, so, you know, that’s large.
They’re just, you know, kind of stucking them onto, onto barges and dragging them out. And My immediate thought looking at them was, oh, this must be a less disruptive way for the, you know, for the sea floor. But as you point out, it’s, it’s not just a matter of, you know, dragging it out to sea and just dropping it in the ocean and then it’s done.
There is a, you know, a bit of preparation that needs to come first. So I’m not sure that they are actually any, any less disruptive, but, Certainly if you’re using less materials, then that is gonna be a benefit in the, in the long run. Especially now when, you know, we see commodity prices are, are so crazy and project costs are blowing out, so Right.
The less you’re using, the less scope that there is for, you know, problems to happen. So yeah. Looks, looks interesting. And Yeah. Offshore foundation’s definitely something I’ve gotta get more into and, and learn more about because there’s so much different technology and I, yeah, gotta, gotta find out more.
Allen Hall: Well, it, it makes you wonder if they’re making these foundations for seven megawatt machines. I’d assume you just scaled up for a 20 megawatt machines. That that’s where we’re going in the United States. I think we’re pushing the boundaries there. At that point when you have such large turbines, costs start to matter because everything grows exponentially, right?
Kind of by the cube factor somewhat. So doesn’t it make sense? If you can’t put in less expensive gravity based foundations, you’re just going to do that.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s the square, the square cube law that describes how, how, you know, things scale and the topic of a recent video of mine. So thank you for, thank you for bringing that up,
You’re welcome. It’s, it’s a really interesting topic though, because, you know, people always think, oh, bigger is better for, for winter turbines. And one of the questions that I get asked constantly is, what’s the optimal size of a wind turbine? How big are they gonna get before it’s, you know, optimized and my opinion on.
That at any given moment in time, they are optimized. The, the, you know, the size that manufacturers are selling is especially chosen to give you the lowest cost of energy. And then as things change, like either, you know, cost of something comes down, or a technology improves, then the optimum size changes.
And so that. To me is a reason why we see this divergence between onshore and offshore wind turbines. The offshore ones are not constrained by transport as much as onshore ones are. So, you know, like an onshore wind turbine, it’s blades have to travel on roads. Usually it’s tower sections have to travel on roads.
So they’ve got like a stronger, a stronger phenomenon trying to keep them smaller than offshore wind where you can just build your wind blade or tower factory on the, you know, on the port basically. So it never has to go on a road. And yeah, so that’s why I think we see offshore wind turbines getting, getting so much bigger than onshore.
And yeah, so I made a video about it. If you wanna check it out,
Allen Hall: please do. Everybody should check out Engineering with Rosie. There’s tons of great information there. I saw an inter interesting video on YouTube of all places that was off the engineering with Rosie channel. Cause that’s usually where I go every morning is to see what’s new on engineering with Rosy.
But a Vera. I posted a couple of YouTube videos and one of them was of their CEO Greg Lee Pulos. I’m probably mispronouncing that, and he gave an, it’s an hour long presentation, so you need to go to the Arc Fair’s YouTube channel and go look for this webinar. But it was about offshore wind flow modeling.
And they described some of the results of their research about how far these wakes can progress behind some of these wind turbine farms and how one wind turbine farm can roll into another with its wakes. And when you put two wind farms simultaneously, one behind the other, the third, the third one to line is really getting hammered and can be up to like 20% losses of energy.
And having checked out that video, there’s only been a couple of views on it, but that’s an important, really important piece to offshore wind to make sure that when we do develop these sites, that we are not losing energy, that we haven’t, just like we talked about with Dominion Energy. They, the capacity factor drops, they’re, they’re in trouble with the state while.
There’s a number of times and the predictions are really good cause they actually did the bite area off the coast of New York, Rosemary, where they looked at what those wind farms would run into for several days. I think they looked at like 15, 16 different days from 2021. A model it with wind tur was there.
It was remarkable. How much energy loss would be on average is like three 5% energy loss, which is a lot, and then some days up to 20, maybe a little over 20. So I just wanted to highlight that. Because these wake, wake issues, were just getting the computational power and the techniques to do it. And during this presentation they talk about the, the now old technique to predict the, the power losses versus this new technique that a fair has been working on.
It, it’s remarkable. You talk with Jessica O’Connor. San Antonio during acp this past spring, and she, she, I think she hinted at what this presentation is. Do you wanna provide us a little more up information about all the work that Arc Vera was
Rosemary Barnes: doing? Yeah, so they have a awake model that they have developed ons shore and you know, they’ve validated it onshore with, with real data.
So it’s, yeah, it’s a, a big giant model. I, I’m not sure if it’s cfd, but some kind of atmospheric modeling. Where they can predict. How far that the, the weight persists behind individual wind turbines and wind farms. And they thought, you know, like us, it’s really interesting that there’s all, like so many new offshore wind farms planned in this one area and thought, well, why don’t we apply this onshore model?
We’ve got to this area of the ocean to see what’s gonna happen when all these wind farms are installed. And the results were surprising and gave a, you know, a much, much, much higher. Loss in energy that persisted much further than you probably would’ve expected. I can’t remember off the top of my head the, the figures, but it was, you know, a few meters per second.
Quite a lot of the time, depending on the wind direction. And I mean the, the consequences of that, if it’s, if it turns out to be true, were gonna be pretty profound, I think, because people have paid a lot of money for the right to develop these areas. Yes. So some of the ones that have got, you know, a spot in the ocean that is, you know, particularly unfavorable cause, you know, certain prevailing wind directions.
And so if you’re, you know, downwind from a bunch of . A bunch of big wind farms, then definitely seeing big enough losses potentially that your business case would be shot. And then also I think it’s, it’s interesting to refer back to, you know, this idea, we talked about the idea of having a capacity factor guarantee from the, the Dominion Project.
And that’s not going ahead, but the normal way that people do performance guarantees is, you know, with some sort of algorithm based on the wind speed. And I, I think you’d wanna be really careful if you’ve got a performance guarantee like that. You’re gonna be, wanna be really careful to specify exactly where the wind speed is measured, because you know, if you are measuring it at you know, some existing met Station that isn’t very close to your wind turbines.
You might see much higher wind speeds there than what your wind farm is actually seeing. And you could end up, you know, with really severe penalties for underperforming. So that’s interesting. I haven’t watched this webinar yet and I, I will because I find this topic really interesting, something people ask about a lot.
Yeah. But the last, when we talked to Jessica, they hadn’t validated it offshore yet, and I assume that’s still true because, I mean, unless they’re going to, to Europe, it would be hard to, you know, you can’t validate it in the US yet, at least, because the wind, that’s sort of what they did. You know, they’re in planning.
Yeah. Yeah. He talked
Allen Hall: about the go to Europe or they talked about the, well, they, they, he was showing images from Denmark, right? What? That’s where the biggest software site is. Oh, yeah. So they were showing comparisons between, you know, here’s the clouds in Denmark, across. Horn, rev site, and this is computationally what we come up with.
It was, there’s an alignment there. It’s, it’s pretty accurate. And, you know, one of the, one of the things that Gregory was talking about was the inversion layer. When the, when air is stable and you get an inversion layer, which in the states you get in the mornings and evenings, probably like most places in the world where like if you have a chim.
Helps up, smokey, gets up to a certain level and just kind of hangs there and stops doesn’t rise up anymore. When stable air, these wakes can get really strong and that’s one of the things that their model now incorporates is air stability. So they need a whole bunch of supercomputer time to get these models to run.
It’s really computationally intensive because the atmospheric models and the meteorological. Are so integrated in and then you’re throwing in wind turbines and wakes up wind turbines. You can imagine how much computer time that must take to do that. And, and this is the first time I’ve seen this level of presentation about weight turbulence offshore.
It’s remarkable. And they walk through, like you were saying, they walk through the economics of this, of here’s how many gigawatt hours of energy you’re likely to lose if you’re in this site. In the bite, in the bite. It was remarkable and I that needs a little more exposure. Like you and I have been talking about.
Some of these projects become profitable at the slightest little margins. Hm. Wake board seas can be a
Rosemary Barnes: big impact there. Yeah. I be, I have them on on a live stream. I’ve better invite them on a live stream of engineering with Rosie to cuz yeah, it’s something I get asked about a lot. And also, you know, you see modeling pretty frequently.
People do modeling of vertical access, wind turbines this, that have the feel of this. It’s, it feels like those are similar analyses to what they’ve done here. But in and they always get reported very, very widely because the results will usually show, you know, well when ver access wind turbines are five times more efficient than, you know at capturing energy out of a offshore area.
And my criticism for those models is always, they’re always two dimensional. They’re never validated against, you know, real. Offshore wind farms because, you know, there aren’t any big vertical access wind turbines even on shore anymore. So I always take those results with a grain of salt, whereas this one, at least their onshore work is very well validated.
And sounds like I have to obviously watch this webinar now to find out what the validation they’ve done now for offshore, but it sounds like they’re starting to validate that too. So, you know, it’s. It’s actually something worth paying attention to in, in this case because, I mean, what I found with in my PhD research, I did a little bit of CFD cuz I needed to get some low distributions for structural design of wind turbine blade.
And while I was, you know, learning how to set up my CFD model, I found you took the parameters right then you can get any answer you want. So if you don’t have a way to validate your your analysis, then it is absolutely meaningless. Yeah, and it’s the most common cause I think of people thinking that they have some, you know, breakthrough energy invention that, you know, maybe it breaks the exceeds the bets, limit or breaks the law of thermodynamics.
And it’s usually because. They think too much of their CFD model. So yeah, validation is the key to that, and that’s what really sets this analysis apart. So the,
Allen Hall: the YouTube channels to subscribe to probably in order really engineering with Rosie a Vera. And then if you have some time, you should subscribe to the Weather Guard Lightning Tech channel where you can watch uptime, , the uptime videos, which are really helpful.
Make it part of your routine every.
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Well, we are at Wind Energy Hamburg in Hamburg, Germany of all places, and we’re here with Nicholas Ern. Of course. I got my co-host Joel Saxon from Wind Power Lab and we’re, we’re at B6 4 94, which is, which is our home for the next year or four days where we’re talking in all things wind energy and wind turbines and wind turbine blades.
And it’s this Nicholas from Power Curve has joined us and Nicholas. Power Curve – all of a sudden, just before the show, I was on my phone and like, oh my gosh, they’ve got a brand new logo on LinkedIn and, oh, look at this brand new webpage. It’s actually a huge improvement. It has a ton of information on it, which I always want to see.
Yep. You wanna explain the new logo, what’s going
Nicholas Gaudern: on and Absolutely. It’s it’s been a long time in the making as, as new websites often are, but we, we knew it was time for refresh. We weren’t really refl reflecting all of the offerings that we have to the market. And I don’t think we were kind of giving people enough clues about what to expect from working with us, you know, and, and the service we provide and the level of dedication we have to, to our customers and, and making their, their turbines better.
So we really wanted to sort of have a bit of a, a clean sweep of everything, make sure the content was fully up to date, and just showing all the great stuff we’re working on. . We have a new color scheme. We have a new logo. Yeah, just a whole new visual identity rebranded and ready to take over the world.
Something like that. Yeah,
Allen Hall: something like debut debuting here at in Hamburg at Wind Energy
Nicholas Gaudern: Hamburg. Yeah. There, the, the website launched yesterday. We wanted to make sure we were just in time for the for the show. And already we’ve had some, some great feedback. Yeah. So
Allen Hall: question for you. My, one of my favorite futures of your old.
was the AEP calculator that you had on this Aha. Yes. Is it still
Nicholas Gaudern: there? It is still there. Fantastic. It’s still there, but it’s been made even more user friendly. Oh man. Look at you. So you can go through that. You can look at the kind of business cases you might expect for installing our upgrades. So look at the payback periods, the extra you’re gonna get generated, and it’s just now much more easy to navigate, to give you that kind of quick check on how, how much money you are missing out on making.
Right?
Allen Hall: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that’s a big. Topic of discussion even on the floor here this morning, today’s Tuesday, so it’s the first day of the show and many customers have come by already talking about my blades have leading edge erosion. My blades aren’t making the power they’re supposed to. It seems to be a pretty constant theme for the show at this point.
What are some of those things that power curve can do to get some of that performance? Yeah, well
Nicholas Gaudern: there’s, there’s a few different avenues we can take depending on, on what the customer wants and what fits best with, with their operations. So we have like a, a hardware, like, let’s call it, where we look at offering various solutions to, to boost performance and to recover energy that’s being lost from the turbine.
And the key product for that is Vortex Generat. And they can be used in lots of different ways to, to improve the performance of a blade. So that’s, that’s kind of the solutions side of things where it’s very much focused on getting equipment onto the blades to make them perform better. But we also now spend a lot of time on digital services.
So we, we have a number of tools that we can deploy to help a customer understand the state of their blades and what it means for their product. So if they have damages on a blade defects, if they have l e p, what is that doing to power performance and is it being done in the most optimal way?
What can be done to improve it? Yeah. This, this digital service aspect of of what we do now is becoming really big and we’re getting a lot of excellent feedback with, with the customers we’re working with.
Allen Hall: Is, is that the service that you’re offering with Skys specs?
Nicholas Gaudern: That is one of them, yes. Okay. Yeah.
So the Skys spec service That we call the Erosion Evaluator. That is a service that is offered by Sky Specs, where all of the Sky specs data, so all of the structural inspection data for any defects or damages on the blade that is all processed, tagged, categorize, and then power curve. Use all of that information along with a, a very detailed aerodynamic model of the turbine to calculate the AEP loss from those.
So you then have this amazing tool that says, what am I losing on a turbine specific basis due to erosion and damages? And then that gives you this very powerful tool to say, well, which turbine should I fix first? Should I prioritize? What should I do with them? You know, no one’s got the money all the time to repair their turbines, all turbines every year, right?
You need a way to prioritize.
Allen Hall: So a question that Alan and I talk about the differences a lot of times on the show. The European markets, the Scandinavian markets you know, British markets, the US market, and how asset owners treat things different. Yep. Do you see with those new digital services a difference in who’s actually asking for them?
Is it a lot of people on in the US market? Is it a European market? Who, who’s focusing on that
Nicholas Gaudern: from an asset side? I would say we, we have customers in both the US and Europe who are quite focused on the digital services. I would say that the US. Is more interesting at the moment in terms of the requests we’re getting, and I think that tends to be because the wind farms tend to be so much larger.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So that 1% means a
Allen Hall: lot to someone with Yeah,
Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. 200 turbines out there. Exactly. And you really do need to prioritize your, your repairs just because you have so many turbines to deal with, so, right. Yeah. I, I think the US is probably a key market for that, for that erosion evaluator service, but I think this kind.
Digital service approach, digital twins. Really deep understanding. I think all the operators want in on that now because the OEMs are not making their lives easier. The OEMs do not want to share aerodynamic data. They do not want you understanding AP loss. So I think we we have a great opportunity there to.
To educate. Yeah, absolutely. When
Allen Hall: people need, they need something, they’re, they’re kind of playing around with, I know there’s something here, I’m not sure. Call the experts. Yes. Right. You, when you, when you need to fix your car. These, especially these brand new ones with all the electronics and everything, and you’re like, ah, and there’s something around here.
I’m going to the dealership, like I, I know they, or, you know, I’m gonna
Nicholas Gaudern: go and take that. Someone that knows what they’re doing. So, no, I think, you know, we, we have a really, I would say, unrivaled expertise in blades and that’s not, that’s not being bighead too much, I don’t think. It’s driven by the fact we’ve looked at so many blades.
We don’t just look at vest’s, blades, we look at all blades, vest, Siemens, ge, whoever. And that just gives us a very unique perspective. Yeah. That I don’t think a lot of people have understand all the
Allen Hall: nuances and how they can play together. And if this blade has a little bit of this design Yep. When we go to adjust this blade that’s having an issue that’s similar to that one, we could
Nicholas Gaudern: have just, yeah.
We can draw on that data experience and track record. Yeah. Yeah.
Allen Hall: So one item I want to get to that is new on your website is arrow. Yes. And so we’re introducing this whole new concept to the world this week, which is a combination of lightning neurodynamics, which doesn’t seem obvious at first, and it’s just been a partnership between, we guard Lightning Tech Power Curve, wind Power Lab, and also Matthew and Ping down in Australia on, on the monitoring side.
But the key feature. So understanding what’s happened with Lightning is in part the aerodynamics around the LPs system because it’s not obvious that turbulence can cause problems for the LPs system. Yep. And as you’ve done a number of CFD analysis on different blades, the LPs systems are almost always in a really turbulent area, even new from the factory.
You wanna describe that a.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And, and the air lightning thing is, is really exciting. And I remember the, the first, or one of the first conversations we had Alan quite a long time ago now. Yeah. Where, where you were kind of throwing some questions and problems at me. And we were, we were sparring about it and suddenly things started clicking right.
That you, you cannot separate aerodynamic behavior and aerodynamic performance and the effectiveness of a lightning protection. And I think up until this point, they’re just treated as two completely separate boxes with different needs and different requirements. And actually there’s so much overlap that you, you have to consider them together.
And what we found pretty early on is that if you look at the flow around the tip of a blade you can get some very complicated three dimensional structures. I think a lot of people listening will, will, will know that you have quite a large vortex that’s shed Sure. From the tip of. That’s a very complicated 3D flow structure that drives other 3D flow structures around the tip, right?
The tip is also the bit of the blade that gets damaged first from erosion and contamination and things like that. So suddenly you have a very sub optimal surface, let’s call it. You have a, a large vortex structure. You have a design that probably hasn’t had an awful lot of attention paid to it.
Most blades are designed in a predominantly two dimensional design space. Right? Right. So what all this comes together to mean is that you have a very complicated system of flow structures around the tip, and you have a lightning protection system that is trying to kind of you maybe phrase this better.
I’m look kinda like, you know, throw ions out into, into the end. Yeah, it is. Yeah, sure. And they’re gonna get. Right. They’re gonna get blown around by this, by this highly turbulent and, and intricate flow structure we see there. So if that’s happening, you’re not gonna get effective lightning protection.
You’re just not gonna get enough strikes hitting where it’s safe to do so. So on that, on that receptor pad, so what we found is that if you work hard to control the flow around the tip, right, then you are going to make your lighting protection system much.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And that’s the key is lightning is just hot air.
Yes. . And it’s affected by the airflow of the wind turbine. It’s affected by the wind. And if you, if your LPs is in a position where there’s a lot of turbulence, you gotta remember that the, the blade is rotating 90 degrees, 120 degrees, because lightning is relatively slow. It may take a half a second, maybe longer in that time.
Yeah. To attach and to travel behind it. So lightning is constantly chasing the blade around the. , it has a hard time to do that if it’s very turbulent and lightning will find a place to go. It’s already traveled, 4, 5, 6 miles to get to the blade itself, and it’s looking for this last meter or two and it’s, it will find a home one way or another.
And what we’re seeing is the, the aerodynamic data correlates with the lightning damage data. It’s very shocking in, in a variety of different ways. As a lightning engineer, the first thing we look at is where’s the lightning attaching? And the question I get all the time is, well, why is it a meter from the tip?
Well, it turns out that it’s a meter from the tip because that’s where the air’s clean. Clean, yeah, yeah,
Nicholas Gaudern: exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. A big difference. I think, you know, the more we looked at it, the more kind of obvious it became that there there has to be a link between these two things. And yeah, we talk about that on the website and we now have this, this partnership with UL and, and the other parties.
and I just think there’s this real opportunity here to, to make a step change in understanding and mitigation Right. Of of lightning protection. Yeah. Because for too long it’s just involved zapping things that are station on a test rig . Right. And that’s not good enough.
Allen Hall: No. As we found out it’s not right.
All the IEC testing that’s done and there’s a lot of IEC testing done, particularly on new blades. And that’s always very successful. At least the, the information I get it on new blades is we pass the IEC test, which it should, but when they get in service, the results are totally different. You were talking with these brand new blades clean surface, like this table we’re sitting on, right?
Everything is nice. The corners are, you know, the leading edge looks perfect, everything and the wind flows a beautiful way over that, or the air flows a beautiful way That, and to CFD analysis in the design phase or right outta the factory. But if you put that blade as soon, you know, one year. Yep. You’re already getting erosion on the tip.
Two years, three years, 4, 5, 6. And if it’s not maintained, all of a sudden that tip is, you’re not getting near the same cfd analysis if you did it again with all those damages and erosion and all those things. So you get this dirty air and, and this is what the air
Nicholas Gaudern: Absolutely. You know, the default place to put a receptor is maybe, you know, half a meter, maybe less, maybe even less than that.
Away from the tip. Yeah. Right. So you’re putting it in the most challenging area. For the lightning to, to make that connection. Right? So, and that’s what we see. We see so many strikes that are occurring as you sound, one meter, two meter, three meters away from the tip. The lightning wants an easy life . It does.
It
Allen Hall: needs one. It needs one. It needs one. You don’t see, like from the wind power lab lab side of things, we’re always looking at bulk data, right? We’re looking at what, right? You know, a wind farm’s full of inspection data. What does it look like here? What does it look like here? And when you see a wrong lightning attachment, it’s never.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Right.
Allen Hall: Somewhere else. Yeah. It’s usually, they’re usually in these weird spots and, and we’re like, why does, why do, you know, prior to these conversations and, and going through this, why does this always seem to happen in this spot? Well, that’s where the air finally got clean. Yeah. And it’s, it’s as simple as that.
Yeah. And that, I think that’s the really important key here is when we start looking at lightning protection, we have a lot of people just this morning reaching out about lightning protection on blades that had massive damage, hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to. My first response is we need to look and see what the CFD says about your blades.
Cause we would love to put strike tape on everything. I mean, that’s our, that’s our core product that pays the bills, right? Yeah. But we were not gonna do it until we are sure that we’re gonna have the, the maximum lightning protection we can provide. And that requires some CFD analysis and talking to when Power Lab about the blade structure.
And what’s happening on the inside that we need to know about.
Nicholas Gaudern: It’s a system, right? It’s a complicated system. It’s a complicated system. You have to look at it as such, realistically.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It’s one of the more complicated systems, maybe besides blade deicing. Yes. Those are probably the two most complicated systems.
Cause they touch so many areas that it’s, it’s, it’s a very difficult challenge. I think we’re finally up to the challenge now. I think this team here is gonna be able to deliver on what we’re talking about. And every customer you’ve talked to over the last week or two, or. Is really engaged with it.
Yeah, because it makes sense. Finally, lightning makes sense. That’s why I had a lightning strike right there, right? Yeah, that’s right. It’s, it looks, it seems obvious now, but a year and a half ago wasn’t
Nicholas Gaudern: obvious. No, not at all. Yeah.
Allen Hall: You’re starting to see the, the one of the reasons this product comes up, as well as the markets are starting to adjust to it, the insurers, you know, at some levels don’t want to insure some lightning protection systems cause they don’t work.
Right. So this is, this is a way. Solidify that market. Take the risk out of it. And in the whole scheme of things that lev lowers the level less cost of energy for everyone. Yeah, because insurance premiums can come down, people can get back on risk. The operators aren’t, you know, a blade folds. If, if one blade goes and it folds over, maybe it hits the tower.
Maybe you just have to replace that one blade. If you have to replace all three blades cuz a weights, certificates, or something. You’re talking a million and a half dollars. Right. And whether that’s on the insurance company or the asset owner or the oem, that raises the cost of energy for everybody. Yes.
Right. So if we can, if we can do our part by lowering everything in the, in the market and reducing that risk, it’s a win. Yep. Absolutely. And that was, again, another thing that happened this morning was the number of times, a few, was three or four times just this morning, where the potential customers or people experience in the industry were talking about.
How they’re in a fight with the OEM or they’re in a fight with the insurance company because they had a lightning strike and the lightning strike caused a bunch of damage. Right. Which it doesn’t always do, but when it does, it becomes massively expensive. It’s not a quickie fix. It’s when Power Lab knows.
Absolutely. It can be a lot more deeper inside, and then those get super expensive quickly. So there’s this, hopefully we’re adding to that convers. Adding to the discussion and just raising awareness and yeah. I, I think that’s probably the most important part. This is why I like the website, by the way, just because it, it starts to tie it together.
Yeah. And
Nicholas Gaudern: that’s, that’s what we, we just realized that we were very focused on, on a product, right. For a long time. Sure. And our main product was Vortex generators. That’s fine. But you know, it’s just so much more than that. It’s about that relationship with the customer. It’s about sharing knowledge and understanding.
And building a trust that, that we know their blades better than almost anyone else. Right? And that means we can offer the solutions, we can offer the consultancy, the digital services. So we’ve got all these things in the toolbox that allow them to know their blades better than, better than the oem.
Right? It’s a bold claim, but I mean, I think compared to the state now, general state, I think it’s probably
Allen Hall: fair. I think a lot of. Customers would agree with it. Yes. Yeah, exactly. At this point, yeah. And it just, walking around the floor, we, we got a preview last, last evening to walk around the different places of the floor.
There are a couple of other companies that are offering blade add-ons, but here’s, here’s what I see that makes power curve just completely different than the majority of the. It’s the ability to understand what is actually happening on the blade and to do that CFD analysis and, and to have the actual blade scans, not a theoretical model of the blade, but to scan a blade, get the real blade, and do a, a really tight analysis.
So what you get see on the computer screen is actual, but probably it’s, it allows you to do those little fine details in terms of like BG Place. that gets you a another half a percentage point. Yeah, I
Nicholas Gaudern: completely agree. And it’s a lot of the devices particularly Vortex generators, they’re well known, right?
Sure. They’ve been around a long time. Yeah. OEM’s used them so they, they’re a proven technology, but that kind of doesn’t really do the engineering justice. Yeah. They’re proven. But that, that doesn’t mean you can just chuck them on the blade and they work. You have to, as we’ve seen, yeah. As we’ve seen, yes.
You have to do a lot of very careful and diligent engineering. You have to underst. The root causes of the problems and yeah. And that involves getting real blade geometry and doing proper modeling and proper analysis. Yes. And just take the guesswork out it. Right. And that’s, that’s what we spend our time doing.
Right. And sharing that with the customer. Yes. You know, we’ll, we’ll share our CFD results. We share our modeling results. There’s, there’s nothing hidden. We want to have that conversation and, and be open because then everyone, everyone wins.
Allen Hall: So having those that customer be involved with the process is huge.
Because they don’t tend to be CFD
Nicholas Gaudern: analysis. No. But what they do know is they know the performance of their turbines best than anyone. Right. They know what’s going wrong with them. They know the nuances of each machine. They, they know the local climate conditions and the service histories, and we take all that in.
We listen to. And we take that into our analysis and, and our design process when we’re designing the kits. And I think that is what sets us apart, that attention to detail and that focus on listening to what the customer knows. And they know a lot. They do. They know so much. Yeah. So that’s, yeah. We take it all in.
Allen Hall: Well, Nicholas, it’s been really great to see you in Hamburg. We get to see each other occasionally at conferences. , it’s like three or four times a year we cross. Somewhere on the planet. So it’s good to see you again. I’m really excited about the website. Congratulations on the website and congratulations.
All the CFD work you’ve been doing on a lightning. It’s been a busy, it’s been a busy couple of months, but you, you made it to the show. That’s, congratulations. So it’s No thanks
Nicholas Gaudern: lot. It’s great to see you again. Thanks. Yeah, it’s great to see you too. And, and you too, Joel. And I’m really glad you, you like the website.
You must have been one of the first views, I think. I’ll give you the thumbs up real quick. Give us awesome. So, yeah I hope for, hope some of our listeners will will check it out as well. So there’s a lot of really nice information
Allen Hall: on there. We’ll put the, the link in the show notes, so everybody.
That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube Channel Engineering with Rosie.
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