In this episode we discuss ducted wind turbines, which have a ring around the blade circumference, wind turbine fire severity and suppression systems, lightning strike density and how deaths are on the decline despite a higher population, and the new patent lawsuit between Siemens Gamesa and GE wind energy.
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Full Transcript: EP30 – Ducted Wind Turbines? Plus Wind Turbine Fire Suppression & Lightning Strike Density
welcome back i’m Allen hall i’m Dan Blewett and this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running all right welcome back to the uptime podcast and on today’s episode we’ve got a actually really interesting show so first thing we’re going to cover today is new lawsuit from Siemens Gamesa kind of firing back at GE uh over their Haliade X uh offshore wind turbines so we’ll talk about some of that we’ve had a bunch of litigation it seems like recently in the news so we’ll talk about siemens games versus GE uh we also have we’ve had a really interesting strange bizarre lightning season here in the us and really all over the world uh so we’re gonna chat a little bit about that of course so one of one aspect of it is that you know we have fewer lightning fatalities than ever in part because of covet but yet we also have a just a terrible fire season from lightning uh so we’ll chat there and then our engineering segment we’re gonna talk about ducted wind turbines so this is a new idea in small wind turbines and obviously this is one of the big things in evtols which we talk about in the struck podcast our aerospace engineering podcast and so ducted fan technology has been around for a while but does this work for little wind turbines and will it potentially work for for bigger ones we’re also going to talk about a snafu with a semi truck pulling a wind turbine blade and just some of the transportation issues in general and then lastly wind turbine fires which don’t seem to get too much publicity but are going to become more and more of probably an insurable event or something that people are going to want to be insured against going forward as these uh turbines continue to get bigger so alan let’s start with siemens gamesa suing ge they’re back in the in the ring again so it looks like they’re they’re suing ge potentially a little bit because they’re upset that and this is what ge was claiming that this is just a counter suit they’re just upset that we are trying to block them from being in the u.s market over their own property intellectual property infringement but siemens gomes says that no your nacelles your direct drive technology and your Haliade X is infringing on our technology and uh the way they cool their generators is infringing so what have you got on this well i think both of those things can be true that one is infringed on the other and vice versa that that can always be true i think the question is really what drives all this and market factors tend to drive lawsuits to one company to another if everybody’s making plenty of cash and they’re having great sales they don’t really think about suing the other guy unless it’s just egregious but in this particular case because cove has hit and things have slowed down and there’s really no quick ending in sight you start to feel that cash crunch and both GE and Siemens Gamesa are in that cash crunch category then you start really trying to protect what you have and yeah that’s what it seems like right now we just got this sort of combat mortal combat going on and trying to each one protect their own territory it makes sense but the only groups to get rich out of this are the attorneys that tends to be what happens uh i don’t think there’s going to be any you know here’s here’s the thing you see these articles go back and forth saying siemens mesa did this and ge did that but when it all settles out it’ll be pretty quiet you really won’t hear anything it’s probably negotiated in the back room somewhere and uh if they get smart they’ll just say hey you know peace and let’s figure out how to make this work and everybody just get back to making wind turbines which is what they should be doing but i i just think that right now just because everybody is in a cash crunch these kind of things tend to pop up more often so the u.s might see the fewest lightning fatalities on record this year can you tell us a little bit about why the washington post is reporting that well it is unique because as the country we’ve we’ve there’s more people every year obviously there’s more people i think in terms of population i think we have roughly the united states about two million immigrants into the country per year uh at least in the last several years plus the the the birth rate and all those things that play into so there’s just a larger 300 yeah yeah so we’re like 331 today it sounds like there you go right uh so the the and we tend to spend a good bit of time outdoors and it’s just a bit at least a fairly recent push to get outdoors particularly with covid to get outdoors and to do things yeah outside to do yeah right so you’d think that the camping and there’s a big push to go out camping and do all those things and just to get outside just to maintain your sanity you think that the the the lightning strike deaths will actually jump because people are spending more time outdoors but it actually gone down a lot yeah it’s counterintuitive you’re right it is right uh so either we’re spending a lot more time indoors which i don’t think is probably true or there has been a substantial decrease in number of lightning strikes and i think that’s probably more the case that the lightning strike frequency is has dropped uh in combination with the amount of fossil fuels that are being burned the factories that are running the amount of heat in the atmosphere all those different things are changing and it’s it’s when you have some substantial change in the atmospheric properties that kind of falls out a lot of times in terms of lightning strikes so it’s not i don’t think it’s unusual to see the lightning strike decrease the number lightning strikes decrease i just wouldn’t think necessarily it would drop down to the lowest recorded levels of lightning deaths and it’s super that they’re extremely low but we need to be studying the other side of it right dan don’t you think that it’s the lightning dust maybe this is just the way people are behaving there’s a little maybe everyone’s a little more cautious maybe that’s part of it too um taking less risk yeah yeah i can’t think of like a great reason considering you’re right a lot more people are not in the bars they’re out in the park right so you would you’d think they’d go together but they’re not so i mean is the density of lightning strikes increase or decrease or i mean i know we talked about this before it takes time but you have to measure it yeah when it’s over it’s hard to tell when you’re in the middle of it right you have to kind of get all the lightning seasons data together and go back and start comparing to previous years and particularly with the lightning density maps that happen uh you have to be careful how you look at that data so hopefully by december january when things settle down the united states that we can go back and take a look and see what’s going on because it may have broader implications to uh to how we run things in the in the country and maybe also how we deal with lightning strikes and keeping people safe that maybe there’s something that we’ve done recently that’s changed all that we need to figure that out well so speaking of lightning there were nearly 14 000 strikes over a three-day period in august and that is pretty much the the ignition source of about 900 wildfires that are you know going on in northern california so why is it if if although the deaths are lower why is this happening well the having been to northern california a couple times recently uh it’s it’s funny because it’s the what you hear on national news is all there’s been a number of lightning strikes it’s unusual to have lightning strikes and it’s causing all these fires to occur yes it could be that there are more lightning strikes and it’s a freak storm fine that’s probably true but it wouldn’t be outside the law of probability that that would happen but northern california right now is extremely dry everything about is dry unless it is irrigated it is dead or near death grass trees plants it’s just it’s just this barren burnt wasteland and that’s before the fires start and you can see where the fires have rolled through and i can’t imagine the fire agencies can even really try to slow them down all that much because there’s so much fuel even outside the forested you know the things you see are mostly the forced area but just the sort of the napa valley which is burning right now i drove right through the napa valley a month ago dry dry dry and then you see vineyards that are perfectly green because they’re irrigated and dry dry dry so seeing thinking that fires are going to the napa valley that make complete sense when i drove through it like it would wouldn’t take all that much but i i think you have to you know you think you have to sort of know that lightning strikes are going to cause fires and sort of be prepared for it on the an amount of combustible material that’s laying on the ground right now and sort of be prepared for it it isn’t like this hasn’t happened before in california well two things one how do you how do you prepare for it i mean are we going to irrigate like where are we going to irrigate such massive pieces of land like can you really do anything about these forests where a lot of them are starting fire breaks probably is the thing is that they probably have some fire breaks in them but my guess is that having advanced forestry like like i would say like we do on the east coast we don’t have as dry of conditions as they have in northern california but there are sort of built-in fire breaks at times uh just to slow things down and it would be a huge effort to slow it down in california but now you’re having built-in fire breaks because the fires have ravaged so widely that you have built-in fire breaks eventually it’s gonna you know you’re gonna get to the rainy season some of the stuff is gonna stop but right now it’s just a disaster big disaster yeah well and it seems to circle back to what we talked about um in our episode with matt malkin and alex byrne which is that we still just don’t know that much about lightning nope i mean would you agree it’s just like we kind of understand that if it if it gets you you’re going to be you’re going to either be down for the count or yeah hurting and it might you know set off a little big chain of events but i mean as far as you know these numbers conflicting like deaths are down wildfires are up right um you know strike frequency and density seems to be changing consistently i mean we talk about the tokyo sky tree that huge structure in tokyo like changes the whole like electrical environment in that area it just seems like there’s a lot we still just don’t know right there’s too much randomness to it and we haven’t really studied it all that much which is a shame because in this particular case with the number of wildfires in the hundreds of thousands of acres that have already burned in in california north and south by the way as most of california is on fire that we should have some sense of of the likelihood that was going to happen to do something about it but now obviously it’s just like human nature once you have the fires then you’re going to go back and fix it so hopefully this doesn’t happen again we can do something on the back side but i think we just need to be vigilant about it on the lightning side is trying to understand what’s what some of these effects are and why they’re happening and to give everybody a heads up when it may occur again that would be really helpful but we have to be pretty vigilant on holding uh sort of the scientific community and the political community uh on the next steps it’s like uh when we had the hurricanes in louisiana where they and we had a hurricane it wiped out new orleans and then they started to build the levees and things but they weren’t really finished and then we had another hurricane that ravaged the unfinished levee system why are we not holding people accountable for that i don’t know it’s crazy yeah well and of course it seems like buildings have been pretty well protected since you know ben franklin invented the lightning rod i mean we don’t hear sky skyscrapers going down or of a chunk of it shearing off and falling to the you know the streets of manhattan which is what exactly what used to happen before the lightning rod right like a church just got you know made out of wood just gets struck and set ablaze all of a sudden or a concrete structure just gets hit and a huge chunk of it slides off or goes down right so that’s right that doesn’t happen anymore which is pretty amazing and that’s why ben franklin was such a revered human all over the world like he completely solved that problem essentially but now that we have these like you know like alex alex burns said like the way these things spin just is fundamentally different oh yeah atmosphere to something that’s just stationary and yeah and so yeah it’s uh it’s just crazy well it does make you wonder if they started putting some essentially lightning strike towers or lightning rods in the forest would it change the dynamics of the number of lightning strikes they’re having see if you can drive that energy in the ground without causing a fire that’s a great situation and we’re only talking about uh yeah a small copper wire was all it would take quite honestly it wouldn’t have to be anything very complicated uh to do and to try to either want to attract lightning to this thing and like you’re saying change the dynamics such that you can control or where you control lightning strikes you see this all the time in wind turbines so on wind turbines on a field of wind turbines the as the storms in the united states move from west to east like most places in the world not really different and when they move west to east the furthest west wind turbine is the is the one that gets struck the most just because the first one in line if we did something similar like that into the forest we could probably knock down number lightning strike damaging lightning strikes absolutely
all right so as we move on talk a little bit more about engineering let’s jump to ducted wind turbines so if you don’t know what a ducted wind turbine is it’s just when it has this uh what how do we how do we phrase this alan circle without saying yeah without using because i learned in elementary school you never use the the word in the definition so it’s just got a shield around yeah so it’s got a circle around the circumference of the blades yeah and just what what so what is the aerodynamic property of the of the duct it helps focus the airflow and there are some tricks you can play with ducted fans on increasing airflow through the fan the way you shape those ducts so you can get an increased efficiency or more power generated by a set of rotating blades on the opposite side on the aircraft side we you use it to increase the thrust right but it comes with other drawbacks but in a stationary thing like a wind turbine if you if you can reduct the air and force that air into the power generating blades you will increase the efficiency of the system thereby you could i think that the thought process is that you could use a constrained size blaze but have more power out of it so the compromise is that if you didn’t have that ring you would have bigger blades which makes it harder to make to put than the wind turbine up in a tight location like on top of building so you can actually have a smaller system with more power generation which is exactly what you would want right it just adds a little more difficulty on the on the engineering side to do that because if you can imagine uh if you had 100 meter long blades if you wanted to put a ring around it it gets a little tricky pretty big yeah i gotta start using 3.14159 times whatever it gets real complex got to break out your graphing calculator right but i mean so they don’t have these on propellers of airplanes why why is it not on the front of an airplane they sort of do well they don’t on to traditional propeller airplanes uh they don’t but all the sort of nasa studies back in the 80s and you see a lot of it on the electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft today they the first proposed designs are always these ducted quote-unquote ducted fans so that they can get more thrust out of them the problem is is that on an airplane you have to fly with those ducks all the time which which is a negative aerodynamic consequence of having the ducks but on a wind turbine oh gotcha doesn’t really matter because it’s pretty much stationary right it’s always pointed into the wind so you can do that i think the concept is really interesting i haven’t seen a lot of traction on it yet because we in at least in the northeast united states a lot of times there’s restrictions on wind turbines particularly quote-unquote personal wind turbines and a lot of towns they’re prohibited it’s only the big gigantic two megawatt machines on top of the mountains are allowed the smaller ones you would typically see on a farm in the midwest or not allowed which is bizarre but whatever but if we can get more efficiency out of it those places like in the midwest that would normally use them for generate power for a pump somewhere and make a lot of sense uh to increase the power generation capability of one of these things yeah and so on on the uh ducted wind turbine company ductedwind.com they claim that it makes about twice the twice the energy of a of a turbine the same size so with conventional open blade design um now for lightning implications could you just make that ring out of metal and just like that’s your lps now all of a sudden i mean it’s kind of protecting the rest of it right yeah they won’t want to make it out of battle because that’s hard and heavy yeah well no it’s not as heavy as fiberglass what they want to do is make it at the lowest cost material they could probably make it out of and the stiffest material they can make so that usually ends up being some sort of composite most likely fiberglass and if lightning is going to hit this thing it’s going to hit the docked it’s where it’s going to hit it’s the outermost part of it and and so it makes sense to put some sort of lightning protection on that on that duct whether it be uh just some copper wire wrapped around it or some could use on aircraft metallic expanded foils on it or even just put a lightning rod above it to attract it away from the duct any of those would work but you’d want to do something there because if that duct gets damaged next thing it’s gonna do it’s gonna move or break or run into one of those blades and then you have a much larger problem if the duck gets damaged so what it’s the consequence of the duck getting damaged and smack it into one of the blades and then who knows what the consequence of that is yeah well and also as i looked at this i mean how close do the tips of the blades have to be to the the inner edge of the duct that would be effective aerodynamically because that to me seems like okay this is up there for 20 years or 10 years or whatever and one day the winds really crazy and it’s flexing a little bit in a big wind and it starts to nick the blade does the whole thing just get just just ripped to shreds by its own power uh could based on speed and the wind at the wind at that particular time it could the the separation between yeah i can talk aerodynamics for a second but i don’t want to get too deep into this but essentially it kind of goes like this uh the ducted fans all that there are certain parameters about space between the duct and the fans and the the curvature of all of it and how much weight it is right so there’s a there’s a bunch of trade-offs on how much duct there is versus how much blade there is and what the shapes of the blades are and how air is moving that’s where computational aerodynamics has made a huge stride and this is why these things are possible is because we can do it on a computer don’t have to make it in real world but it depends it really depends so the gap between the blade and the and the ring so to speak is variable depending on what you’re trying to accomplish uh so yeah i think you’re right i mean if if if that ring starts to sag or starts to get or any sort of vibration and that ring smacks into a blade that’s bad day really bad day adios winter night
all right moving on this is a pretty funny story out of minnesota so a semi truck driver carrying a 250 foot long wind turbine blade somehow misses stop or missed his turn in this downtown area and got trapped so he missed the truck bypass got stuck in this small town in minnesota and alan do you know what his solution was he had to back up for about a mile they said about a pedestrian’s pace and just like walking like three miles per hour man to finally get where he could get on this bypass and then get back on the road but that just sounds like an absolute nightmare there goes the afternoon right there the yikes i mean if you when’s the last time you had to back back down something am i stuck in an alley or just i mean any distance oh uh well it actually happened the other day kind of went wrong way down the street ended up backing out of it but it wasn’t very hard it wasn’t a mile maybe a hundred feet like going the wrong way let’s let’s go back uh okay so it’s a regular occurrence so this really hits home to you guys got it yeah got it but i i wouldn’t say see but the thing about this this this when they’re moving these wind turbines is that because they’re such a wide load and a long load they’re that they kind of check two boxes and that they usually have uh a driver that’s in front of the tractor trailer that directs where to go and in front of them is the state patrol officers the state patrol officer the front and the back usually when you see these caravans going down the road so somebody in the front did not take the right turn and my guess is that the tractor trailer was just following that they just followed the leader and got got down into town like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa we’re gonna start knocking down street lights and knocking down uh power lines with this this blade that’s behind me or hitting buildings because i can’t turn the corner which is probably what they’re gonna knock down the 7-eleven when he makes that left turn and so the only thing to do is to back out and man alive that takes a lot of driving skill to do that i don’t know how they fire these drivers honestly because you really have to know how to drive particularly now you’re putting this thing in reverse it weighs a tremendous amount you got this trailer way away in the back of you you really can’t see what’s going on and now you’ve stopped all traffic and i’m sure people are honking in the whole and now that reporters are coming out taking pictures of you you’re just thinking man i need to get out of here and you’re gonna be sitting there well at three miles an hour it must have taken them 20 minutes to get back out of there oh man what what an afternoon huh yeah it reminds me of so baltimore had a blizzard when i was living there those are the f i think the first year after i graduated from college and it was it like it was so much snow like two feet in the span of like two weeks or something or just you couldn’t you couldn’t put it anywhere so a lot of these really long like baltimore uh you know neighborhood roads with there’s a rojo home roll home yeah you would get i i remember this one time i was halfway down the street and a car just met me like head to head and we just like stared at each other angrily until one of us moved and it wasn’t the best neighborhood so i was like all right i’m gonna go and i backed up i backed up like it took me like four minutes to back out of this because they’re all just one lane because all everywhere you park was just packed with snow yeah and that was only a you know a couple hundred feet back up it was a long it was a long backup by anyone’s standards but certainly not a mile like this with a huge wind turbine blade in it so like my heart goes out to this man yeah because of course he’s in the the the guy that gets his picture taken is the one driving the tractor trailer not the guy the lead vehicle right so the car on the tractor trailer is like huh i was just following the guy in front of me uh what do i have to do with it right but you know just facing the paper and on the news and everything else yeah but i think that those tractor-trailer drivers are sort of a special breed uh that is not an easy job to do it takes a lot of skill and coordination and i you gotta tip your hat to those guys yeah so our last topic for today so interesting uh article on windpowerengineering.com about wind turbine fires and some of the protection systems that are available to do that or to take care of those those big turbines but it doesn’t sound like these are very often installed that’s what i gathered from reading it yeah but it’s potentially a a growing problem and also something that is going to make more sense to just go ahead and install as these things get more and more expensive so i mean where do you find the tipping point is on between uh we don’t really need that too well this probably makes financial sense it’s a cost benefit analysis it always is and when the cost becomes sort of inconsequential or when the cost and the and the risk you know start to outweigh one another that’s when you get somebody to decide on when to put the system in so as no argument’s made sort of like this because it happens on lightning it’s the same argument a lot of different things are wind turbines as wind turbines get bigger and it’s roughly a million dollars per megawatt so a 12 megawatt machine is roughly 12 million dollars the relative cost of everything else drops way down all the little systems that go can be added on to it like a lightning protection system uh fire suppression system uh other monitoring systems that can go on the wind turbines get relatively inexpensive and at that point it’s like oh it doesn’t really make any difference because in the in the 12 million dollars you’re going to spend on this thing i’m going to put another fifty thousand dollars to make it uh last longer so the risk reward starts to play off and that’s when people start to make better decisions but there’s this the fire thing is weird because uh the number of fires you see in a year is relatively high i think that you see pictures all the time of turbines catching fire now the degree of how far that fire burns the ones you really see a lot of the ones where the hole in the cell’s burned and the blades are on fire and the whole thing collapses to the ground that’s bad bad stuff uh so you so what causes those fires most likely gearboxes or some so electrical fire up in the turbine that’s where that’s going to happen but we haven’t seen a lot of fire suppression systems or really i think they have fire alarm systems i think that happens but what are you going to do if once it’s on fire how are you going to walk the buckets get yeah get the buckets guys all right mostly these wind turbines are out in rural areas and they just don’t have the equipment to spray water that high not like they would even matter yeah so they just kind of let it burn out is what it looks like just stay away from let it burn to the ground and start over well and it’s you know you imagine that as it starts to burn at all at what point you’re like uh probably just a total loss i mean that’s what they do with you know you spill some spill some water in your laptop they’re not going to go in and like try to figure out all the little there’s like nope total loss see ya you know you right getting off getting even a moderate fender bender today’s or today and yep right off the car is a loss yeah that’s true yeah things uh i can’t imagine that they would just be like oh yeah we checked it out and yeah it only burned for a couple minutes so we’ll just keep it running like you got to imagine everyone’s like this this was on fire for even a little bit like right see ya like let’s just replace all of it big risk big risk a little reward there and the way to put out those fires the only way to get it up to because all the most all the fires well they start in two places they start up and then to sell where the generating equipment is or they stop start start the transformer down on the ground but the only way to fight the fire and then the cell really and the only way to get up there is through the tower and there’s no way it makes any reasonable sense yeah who’s cli who’s climbing that thing yeah that makes zero sense right and you know how they uh some of the uh and some of these rural well even like a in a and a gas station right and a gas so let’s just put apple’s apples a little bit and gas stations at least on the east coast every single one has a fire suppression system now whether it works or not who knows you know hopefully we never find out but they’ll have some minimal fire suppression system in them because that’s the law but if the gas station burnt down next to you really not that big of a deal probably because there’s five other gas stations within 10 minutes drive right so we have more more fire suppression in the gas station than we do in the power generation station that doesn’t seem to make sense to me quite yet but again it’s still wind turns are still relatively new industry and when these fires occur they’re out in some rural area and most of civilization doesn’t know it’s even occurred yeah well i guess now that i think about it really does seem kind of strange that they don’t have these because the only possible way to put this thing out is what one of those firefighting helicopters yeah oh yeah and the only thing i’ve ever seen that’s even remotely close to being able to put these out of these new drones that can carry several well several hundred pounds which would be let’s just say it’s 100 gallons of water you could take a drone up there and start spraying water on it but a hundred gallons of water is probably not going to go that far if this fire is rolling pretty good all right we’re going to wrap up today’s episode of uptime if you’re new to the show welcome if you’re a regular here thank you for your continued support please subscribe to the show and leave a review on itunes spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts don’t forget to check out the weatherguard lightning tech youtube channel for video episodes full interviews and short clips from each show for alan and all of us at weatherguard stay safe and we’ll see you next week is downtime causing you financial pain and putting a stop to your power production for months on end it’s no secret lightning strike damage is a major cause of wind turbine downtime this damage is preventable with our easy to install strike tape lightning protection system for wind turbine blades our incredible engineering build quality materials and edge sealants withstand up to five times more abuse in the toughest weather and lightning conditions and we’ve got the research to prove it if you’re tired of constant downtime we can help reach out to us at weatherguardwind.com and schedule a free call we’ll get your uptime back in no time
