Joel and Allen dig into Duke Energy dealing their renewables business for $4B, and Intelstor’s Philip Totaro provides insight. Meanwhile, blade production ramps in the US with TPI signing a 10-year deal with GE to restart an Iowa plant. Louisiana and Texas are big winners in the future of offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico. Plus, a special interview with WindESCo’s Jonathan Kossuth about their Find, Fix, Measure system to improve turbine performance.
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Uptime 139
Allen Hall: Joel, we have a really interesting show. So much has happened in the last couple of days, so we’re trying just to catch up here at Uptime and give you the latest and greatest of Wind Energy News. Duke Energy is. Putting their renewable business up for sale and there’s talks of, of it being around $4 billion and they have suitors already, which is amazing.
So there’s, there’s transactions happening in wind and then TPI composites and GE make a 10 year agreement in Iowa. For reopening a plant. Thank goodness. It’s about time we see some blade plants opening in the us
Joel Saxum: so we are gonna jump down to the Gulf Coast and talk about Texas and Louisiana. Why we think that they’re gonna be offshore wind winners in the us.
It’s ready to go down there. We just gotta worry about some hurricanes.
Allen Hall: And then I have an interview with ESCO’s, Senior Director of Customer Success Analytics, Jonathan Kath. And we go back and forth about all the technology that ESCO is bringing from SCADA data, enhanced SCADA data, and all the little defects they can find in your wind turbine and how to to improve the efficiency.
And it’s crazy how. Well, their software analytics are they, They can really improve the performance of wind turbine. So we have a really busy show. Stay tuned. More to come. I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab. Joel Saxon Rosemary’s on a well-deserved break, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, Joel Duke Energy has decided to sell its renewable business, which is a complete shock. I don’t know anybody in the business community that was No. Heard anything about it. Yeah, right. Everybody figured Duke was in it for the long term, but they, the estimate for the business is about $4 billion and it sounds like they have.
Tentative offers or aggressive bidders for, for that business. And it sounds like Duke is trying to bankroll themselves a little bit with the $4 billion. You could do a lot with $4 billion but they’re trying to build up cash for. Taking on other projects. So they’re, they’re doing a lot of energy transitioning through in the next several years and they, they figured they better have some cash on hand, especially if interest rates are higher.
They’re at the same time, they’re actually cutting, cutting costs. They’re cutting about 300 million in costs. So 4 billion in the bank if they could sell the renewables business plus another couple hundred millions in savings, they’re trying to, trying to protect themselves, and I think rightly so. But is this the first of, of this type of, of business sale or, or such?
A large asset of renewables hits the blocks? I,
Joel Saxum: I don’t know if it’s the first I. This size, man, Definitely the biggest one we’ve ever seen come across, right? Yeah. You see, you see a wind farm getting sold here and there, or a solar asset or something like that. Like it makes sense when, especially if you, you know, say you.
You know, if, if Allen Energy has two, two wind farms next to my three wind farms, well it might make sense for me to buy those then, then I can consolidate assets and onm people. Sure. And, and you get cash. And I have a decent business model they operate because it’s not adding a whole lot of overhead to my o and m costs.
So like that stuff happens. Right. But 4 billion. That’s big time. Right. So they’ve got over three gigawatts of, of power generation facilities. And they, most of them in the US of course Duke is a, a big energy company in the southeast is where they’re based at, I think South Carolina. North Carolina.
Right. North Carolina, yeah. And I know they do have some assets in South America. I think they’ve got it’s not a whole lot. Like I said, the majority of it is up here, but you saw what, two weeks ago we talked about Osted doing a, a group sale of some assets, Right. They called it right. Down farming or what
Allen Hall: they call, Right, Yeah.
Down
Joel Saxum: farming. Yeah. Yeah. So they, they did the same thing. And what it looks to me like is a cash grab now, I guess, or not a cash grab, but a cash clean up the balance sheet, get some more cash in the business so that you can you know, invest in, you know, maybe it’s investing in more development.
That’s great. So if the, if there’s more companies like this that have the ability to do it, More power to ’em. And I think that maybe the IRA bill spurs some of the stuff on, Right? So there’s some, there’s some tax credits to be had and there’s some, some money to, some funding to be had from the federal government if you’re developing new.
Allen Hall: Right. Well, does that raise the, the value of the asset though is, is that what Duke is thinking is because the production tax credits are back, that the value of those assets just. Well, it
Joel Saxum: depends on the age of the assets, right? So if all your assets are 10 years in one day, well, they’re not eligible for PTC anyways, and then you’d have to repower them.
And there’s, you know, there’s of course repowering schemes where you can get back up and running with a higher name capacity and, and then make some more money off it. But if these assets are, and I don’t know exactly what Duke’s entire portfolio looks like, but if these assets are in that 6, 7, 8 year old range, there’s still some PTC legs left on them.
That makes it for a, you know, an interesting business outlook, especially depending on who’s looking at it, right, Like off air. We talked a little bit about that, so, So what do you think about who might be interested in this thing? A
Allen Hall: for $4 billion is just not a lot of companies that can afford that.
The
Joel Saxum: lists starts
Allen Hall: to shrink, the list gets really short, quickly, Right. Next era probably is in the, in play. There’s a couple that come to. Are they in the mood to invest right now and to make that. For, you know, you’re taking four book billion off of your cap table in a sense. Yeah. Big time by doing that, right?
Yeah. So it is Now the time to do that, you’d have to have a lot of runway, right? So companies at the moment in the United States are looking to protect themselves and have cash because with inflation and everything else that’s happening, you, you, you go to not making a lot of revenue, maybe going negative for a while.
You wanna make sure the business has enough cash to. Six months, a year, two years worth of down, down economy. Clearly Duke’s doing that or Ted’s doing that. A large, a lot of big organizations are doing the same thing. Who’s, who has all the war chest to do to make that transaction today? I, I think that’s a pretty small number, but Duke thinks they have a, may have a, a bidder or a couple of bidders.
Joel Saxum: I mean, capital’s expensive right now too, and it’s only in, in the near future. It only looks like it’s gonna get worse. So, you know, big players out there. Of course, you have your next era, Eola, Iberdrola, Alon grid, however you wanna slash that up. They’ve got some cash or some, some, some stroke. The other thought, Is maybe there’s some oil majors that wanna make some move.
So maybe there’s some people that wanna do it. Well, maybe Elon wants it. I don’t know. He just spent 44 billion. I don’t, Maybe it’s an early Christmas gift or something. 4 billion. That’s Trump change for him.
Allen Hall: Well, could it be someone like a Facebook? Could it be a Zuckerberg? Could it be an Amazon? Could it be one of the, the, the companies that uses a lot of power, just grabs hold of the assets?
Mm-hmm. , Walmart. How about Walmart, Right? They have that that the gig giga ppa, giga PPA thing. Yeah. Right. It, it, maybe that’s what’s happening is that the, the companies that consume large quantities of energy take hold of those assets and just manage them. Not gonna run them, but that they would
Joel Saxum: just manage them.
Do you think there’s any, any play here for buying part of it and part piecing it off? Or is it just like, Hey, this is gonna be one lump.
Allen Hall: That’s where the Walmart, That’s what my thought was with Walmart, because that’s what Walmart’s been doing, right? With all the suppliers, right. They buy the big farm and then they parse it out to all their suppliers.
I’m not sure how they work those negotiations. The whole thing’s a little weird, but yeah, I think if you’re Walmart and you want your suppliers to be in the renewable business or using renewable energy, but they can’t afford to do it on their own, especially manage it Walmart or manage it, you just buy into it.
So, Creating a financial instrument. Isn’t that what Walmart just did? I guess they created a financial instrument to invest in renewables. Yeah, there you go. So,
Joel Saxum: you know, I think that the interesting thing will be here, of course, who buys it? That’s always gonna be interesting. But second. What does Duke end up doing with the capital that comes out of it?
So, you know, of course they’re gonna clear some balance sheet stuff, but they’re looking at cutting an additional a hundred million in cost from operations and they, previously, I set a $200 million cost cutting goal. I mean, just, just getting rid of the, the o and m costs of three gigawatts of renewables is gonna save.
Right. That’s no, no problem. I don’t, I don’t see why it wouldn’t. So,
Allen Hall: well, this is where we, we need to talk to Philip Totaro. So the one thing we’re, we’re working on right now, and, and we’re gonna have Philip on the podcast here shortly, hopefully in the next couple of days to talk to some of these issues because his company, Tel Store does a lot of research into the different farms across the United States and actually around the world.
And I wonder if he has a pretty good insight as to what Duke’s assets. Worth you know, what does it look like PPA wise? How old are they? What’s the value, rough value of the, of the assets? Because I think that’s gonna be the question mark for everybody that is looking to, that’s kicking the tires right now.
It’s like, yeah, what, what is this thing? Where are, first of all, where, where is early assets at? And, and second of all, what are they all worth? And what’s the productive life of them, right? Mm-hmm. buying a used. You wanna drive it a little while, kick the tires, check the oil, make sure everything’s running right, make sure it shifts gears properly before you buy it.
Joel Saxum: Make sure you don’t buy it and then have to put a new transmission and tires and ball joints and everything in it. Yeah, we don’t wanna do that. So we’ll, we’ll follow this one definitely because it’s really interesting that it’s a huge sale. Huge. And I mean, it’s a direct big impact to the energy security in, in America.
Right. I wanna make sure that, or in my mind, I wanna hope that this thing gets sold to a US operating company rather than someone overseas.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That, that crossed my mind earlier today too. Yeah. I, I, I wonder, I I do, I do wonder about that. Like I said, we just have to wait and see how this comes together, but I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot of eyes.
Well, Joel and I had a little bit of a dispute about Duke Energy and its renewable business, and I proposed that the production tax credit may make Duke or incentivize Duke to try to offload that renewable business because it just made it more valuable. Joel said he didn’t think so. So we brought in an expert.
We brought in Philip Totaro from Intel store, and if you haven’t followed Philip on LinkedIn, you’re missing out because he. Providing great insight into the renewables business. Wind in particular. He does solar also, but he’s a data analyst, and I thought, well, who would better know than Philip Totaro? So Philip, welcome to the show.
Thank
Philip Totaro: you, Alan. I
Allen Hall: appreciate you having me. So what is the deal with Duke Energy than the renewable business? Why is Duke trying to sell that business now? What’s driving that? Well, Alan, I
Philip Totaro: think you’re going to win this debate with Joel. The production tax credit and more specifically, the basically semi-permanent extension of the production tax credit through the Inflation reduction Act is what has motivated a lot of asset owners that have either an operational portfolio of wind and solar assets.
Or more particularly project developers that have greenfield project development sites in a, in a rather extensive portfolio to contemplate you know, basically the, the extension of the PTC makes this type of a portfolio much more valuable. And it’s, it’s actually led to a more recent deal as well with Brookfield Renewable Buying Scout Clean Energy from Quinn Brook Infrastructure.
That deal was entirely motivated by the passing of the ira. So what Duke is doing now about six to nine months ago, they were actually looking at their portfolio. Trying to evaluate what they wanted to do with their business. Do they wanna stay in renewables? Do they want to start co-investing in offshore projects?
Offshore wind projects in North Carolina, for instance. You know, so they’ve kind of taken this opportunity with the passing of the IRA to say, now’s a good time to divest what we have. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re, they’re out of renewables all. You know, it just means that this particular chunk of their asset portfolio is something they want to consider divesting at this point.
And you. 4 billion is an interesting number. We’ll see if they get what they’re asking for, but you know, it, it could end up being more than that depending on how excited the market goes with this and how hot the m and a market becomes.
Allen Hall: So their assets are distributed all over the US and South America.
Does those assets in South America are not affected by IRA production tax credit at all? No.
Philip Totaro: And what’s interesting though is they, they have, I think it’s three wind parks in Bolivia. Most of them just got recently built and they’re they’re basically saying, Alright, you know, we have this portfolio.
I don’t know what triggered, to be honest, what triggered their interest in the bivian. There hasn’t been anything particularly motivational from a policy standpoint like we have with the production tax credit in the US to say we, we have to, you know, go deep in, in wind energy in Bolivia, which is not the biggest market in the world to begin with.
But it’s, it’s a recently built portfolio that would also, you know, serve somebody well who’s active down. As far as the US goes, they’ve got a, an asset portfolio that’s about 3.1 gigawatts of operational wind offshore wind, and about three, just under 3.3 gigawatts of solar pv. So it’s, you know, What, a little over 6.4 gigawatts for 4 billion.
You know that, that sounds like a, a pretty fair
Allen Hall: price. These are really interesting bits of information in that I’ve only seen from End store and you, Philip. So this is fantastic. And if you haven’t seen Phillip’s site, go to end store on the web, check ’em out on LinkedIn. All these great stuff on Phillips LinkedIn page.
You’re gonna learn a lot about the industry. So, Philip, thanks for being here and we’ll have. Soon. Thank you again, Alan.
Philip Totaro: I appreciate.
Allen Hall: 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, there’s some positive news on the blade front.
TPI is gonna reopen. Its. Blade Factory in Newton, Iowa. They, they signed a 10 year agreement with GE to manufacture blades there. The project’s gonna reopen and the facility’s gonna reopen in 2024, and it’s been closed since the end of 2021. So TPI made blades. In Iowa from roughly 2008, if I remember right, 2008 until about 2021.
And then this didn’t have any more orders, so they, they shut her down and it Yeah, which is a big problem because Newton, Iowa. Was where a man appliances were made for a long time, and then that ended up getting closed. So they, they went from closure of this. They make dishwashers and all kinds of things over there that closed, and then the blade factories kicked open and that.
Spread new life into the community, then that obviously closed when the downturn happened and Covid hit. But it looks like there’s new life and a 10 year agreement is, is a great deal for tpi. It gives you some stability, but there, it, it’s funny how it’s not open until 2024, Joel.
Joel Saxum: Well, I, from what I was reading in a couple of different articles and little news clips and stuff, it was, it was looking like they’re gonna have, they’ll be full steam in 2024.
Okay. I think in 2023 they’ll start to ramp up. And it was basically like in 2024, we will probably have seven to 800 jobs, which is Wow. Massive for a, for a small community. Right. So, Right. It was when, when they closed down that TPI factory was the biggest employer in that county, I. . Oh, I’m sure. Yeah, probably.
Yeah. And, and so it’ll bring it back and that 10 year agreement, you know, like in, in business when you have a customer, And that customer’s like, Hey, we want you to invest. We want you to, you know, buy new trucks and ramp up with us. But they don’t give you , you know, some visual on how long it’s gonna be or anything.
But when them say, when GE comes in and says, Hey man, 10 years, let’s get this thing up and moving. Well, that, that makes a business decision easy. Right? Then you’re like, 10 year we got some runway. Hell yes. Let’s get this thing moving. I mean, you know, GEs looking forward to, or look, you know, looking at the crystal ball thinking, you know, the IRA bill, PTC funds are back rolling and they must have got some, some orders in.
I’m excited for it. I think it’s great. It’s great. It
Allen Hall: you think it’s repower or new? I
Joel Saxum: think it’s new. Okay. Yeah, there. I mean, there is some, there is some stuff going on with some GE blades out in the field right now where they, they may need to make some old models again but with some tweaks to them.
But for the most part, I think that , There’s, there’s just a big push here. I think that it’s, there’s repowering is going on. Yes. But there’s gonna be more new installs. I mean, like, I talked to a guy last week, 10 12 jobs, 12 development jobs coming in in the last month, month and a half. Whoa. This is a early stage civil company, right.
So they’re like, Yeah, it’s, it’s happening. And, you know, that’s, you know, a lot of solar in there and stuff as well, but it’s renewable energy development, so I’m really excited for this. I, we talk in the background about, man, it seems like all we’ve had is bad news lately for the, for the last while this, these layoffs and those layoffs and this, this court case and this, that, and these guys pulling a ppa and now it’s like, Hey man, some good news.
Great, cool for the people Iowa. Good for the wind industry in the us. Yeah, it makes me smile to read that. So
Allen Hall: is it, is the effort then to just reopen the, the plants that you closed? There’s a, there were a number of plants I think so that got closed. Right. And instead of building, Yeah. Are you think they’ll be doing anything offshore wise?
Or you think it’s all onshore just
Joel Saxum: of where they’re It’s gotta be. Yeah. I mean, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no way to get blades easily to, I mean, I guess you could get ’em over to the Mississippi and float ’em down, but I think the locks
Allen Hall: are too short. That’s what I’m wondering. Yeah. That, that was one of my questions was, is this a possibility of getting them down river to don’t to think so, to Mississippi, Louisiana, right?
No. Okay. Policy would say, I would say, Where else you gonna do
Joel Saxum: it? . Yeah. I mean, it’s possible, but it’s, it’s moth reopening a mothball factory. While it may be expensive, it’s a lot cheaper to build a brand damn new one. Right, right, right. And so, so the molds are still there. I’m sure they kept them, you know, for these existing blades that are still in production or stuff that was not out of production too late where they’d be repower like you said.
Right. So the molds are there, the factories there. And I, and I hope. Maybe, maybe a lot of the people in that town left and went and got other jobs, but I hope that they’re just gonna get some of that talent right back. Right. So they’re not completely retraining their whole staff. They’ve got some people that know what they’re doing.
So we don’t, you know, you can alleviate some quality issues there, hopefully. So
Allen Hall: it’s good for the community. It’s good. Yeah. So my blade list in my head right now is LM up in North Dakota. . That’s essentially it right now in the US and then LM up in Canada for ge. So those are the two. Everybody else is closed at the moment, I think.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, TPAs got that factory in. Madam Mora down just across the border from Texas in Mexico. Two
Allen Hall: miles, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then is, I don’t, I’m sure Siemens is making blades in Colorado still. I think that may still be happening, so there’s not a lot of blade activity. So just opening one facility is like a huge percentage wise improvement in terms of capability and production.
Yeah, absolutely. It’s creation. Yeah. So it’s a, it’s a, that’s a, it’s a good move and I’m, I’m glad that ge at least believes that they’re gonna need a place for 10 years. When I first saw this news, there was a little trickle about it. I thought, Oh, they got one project. They’re gonna flip it open and close it again.
But 10 years is a long time. That’s really hope, hopeful. And like, and the production tax credits obviously are playing into this. That’s, that’s what the hope was, right? The, the IRA bill was, the whole point of that was to, to kickstart onshore and offshore wind and looks like it’s doing it now.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I would be willing to bet that there’s some smart financial people in the, in the background at GE that are taking advantage of some of the.
I think there was some 30% when you reinvest this, that, and, and getting some of their reopening and, and cleaning out the, the factory costs page for by the IRA bill. So, so you,
Allen Hall: you think they got a bunch of, of accountants with the green visors on late at night pencils and hats
Joel Saxum: calculating. Like, I, Hey, hey, if we buy some ppe, is that, does that count for reopening?
Get it. Go get it on the list. Let’s go. . Yeah, I mean, I hope so. I mean, that’s what the funds are there for, right? I would like to see them go to something like this to help out that community in Iowa. Yeah. Then, I don’t know, get thrown away into some innovation project that never sees a
Allen Hall: lot of day. Yeah.
I’m with you. The interior department has tapped Texas and Louisiana for offshore wind develop, and I think we all agreed that that’s where it was going to happen anyway. But they’ve defined two areas. The first wind energy area is about 24 nautical miles off the coast of Galveston. Texas, and that’s about 500,000 acres with a potential to power, about 2.1 billion homes.
So that’s a decent size area. And the one near to Louisiana is, is about 50 nautical miles off the coast of Lake Charles. Louisiana and it’s about 170,000 acres and has the potential to power about 750,000 homes. So both those projects are pretty large. Obviously the winds in that area are lower than they are off the East Coast, but there’s ways to get around that, Obviously just bigger turbines.
Bigger blades, whole thing. So the next step is for bomb to start their leasing process. So they gotta go through a number of steps before they can. Put up the proposed sale notice and get the comment periods and all those things going, but the process has started. Now my question is, and there’s been a lot of discussion in sort of global wind energy press about this is well, since the east coast is having such a difficult time getting some of the, the staging areas set up and some of the environmental concerns addressed.
I still think Texas, Louisiana have a pretty good shot of having some offshore wind up and running pretty fast. Do you think the same thing, Joel?
Joel Saxum: 100%. The only thing there, the only hurdle there is the weather. How are we gonna combat these hurricanes? Because, I don’t know, we’re we’re talking 56 tical miles off of Lake Charles.
Yeah. Two, the last summer, full summer I spent in Houston was two years ago. They got hit by three hurricanes in one summer in Lake. Woo. Because I was in Houston and I’m going and we’re sitting there watching, watching the news, watching news, getting all prepared, and then every one of ’em was like, just went east.
And then Lake Charles wham. And then another one comes through and you’re like, Oh man, I hope this isn’t the one. And then just goes East, Wham Lake Charles. And it felt so bad for the people over there you know, to the point where you people were prepped up and ready in Houston and they started just.
Screw it. Let’s put all our generators and stuff on trailers and get ’em over to Lake Charles. Right, So the people over there. Yeah. So, okay, so you have the port facilities
Jonathan Kossuth: exist.
Joel Saxum: Oh, sure. They’re already there. They’ve been servicing oil and gas platforms offshore for 40 years, 50 years. So that’s there. So everybody knows the ports are there.
You have landings to bring your cable short. No problem. It’s Texas is open for business. That’s what the governor says. They’ll make it happen .
Allen Hall: You do have, Isn’t it funny though, because the, the press, some of the press you read about these, these two leases is, oh, Texas has gotta catch up in the renewable business and they’re all oil and gas and Texas and Louisiana, Like, they got the most,
Joel Saxum: they have the, they got the most wind in the whole country by a, by a long shot in
Allen Hall: Texas.
Yeah, I was probably in the ballpark. Right. In terms of just percentage wise, But come on. Texas has been a leader in renewable energy forever in the United
Joel Saxum: States. I think, I think 20, The last time I looked at was like 24.3% of wind towers in the United States were in Texas. Yeah. Like that’s, one state has a quarter of the capacity.
Those, I don’t know if those name plate capacity or towers, but, but either way. So, And the other, the other, one of the other hurdles there. Is all the geoscience stuff that’s been going on in, in, on the East coast for a long time. We’ve been talking about this. Yeah. Yeah. The geoscience profile. Set in stone off the coast of Texas, everybody knows exactly how it is.
They know the depth, they know the compositions. They know like, Yeah, you gotta go and do it again. But they know what’s out there. They know what to expect. They know what they’re getting into. Everything is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Cuz they’ve done it already. They’ve already put jackets in, in the ground.
They have all the manufacturing facilities. They’re, they’re ready to rock. Sure. The, most of the, most of the wind turbine blades that come from overseas. Come into the Port of Houston anyways, so like the shipping, the logistics is all set up, like everything’s ready to go. Everything’s
Allen Hall: all set up for them.
How, How do they swing and miss on this? Speaking of swing and miss, congratulations to the Houston Astros for winning the World Series. Right. You notice it. That’s right. Houston is a huge area. I think in America, especially on the East coast. You don’t think of Houston as being in a really large city. I think it’s like the.
Fourth largest city in America. Yeah. It’s a huge place. And yeah, there’s a lot of capability there. And you’re right, oil and gas have been there forever and shipping forever, right? Yeah. And they have, they have the resources engineering, they got technicians, they have steel, they got shipping, they have all the things they need to go make, make winter turbines happen.
Joel Saxum: You know, one of the things that I actually been talking with some of my friends in the renewable energy insurance sector is they’re talking. Houston being the, the Wall Street of renewable energy. Yeah. That’s gonna be, that’s, that’s the next, that’s the next step. Like they’re, they’re, they’ve got some, you know, you’ve seen a lot of the innovation and energy transitions, efforts going sim you know, floating in there and all those good engineers are there.
And now you’re starting to see, like, I just read a thing the other day, GQ Insurance, GCU is one of the biggest renewable energy insurers on this side of. Right. They’re now like, Hey, we’ve been, we’ve had a presence here. We had a presence here. We’re putting people in Houston. Lloyd Warwick is there.
Like, there’s a, there’s a ton of big companies down there. And it’s based on a lot of the big players and insurance, of course, our marine risk insurers. So the Houston being that energy hub, offshore oil and gas for the global, global sector. It’s s. London, Houston for offshore insurance, and now it’s, it’s becoming that way for renewables as well.
So it’s just, it’s, I mean, everything’s floating in there. You’re gonna see, I’m surprised there isn’t more renewable energy companies there. Like
Allen Hall: there’s, there’s, they will be, There are already a ton of them in Texas. Right. , I can think of several off the top of my head. And, and they, Texas will is the leader and will be the leader.
Boston is trying to compete for that, but they’re, they just don’t have the people, the resources, the technology that, that Texas has. So it’s, it’s gonna end up in Texas just like pretty much everything else at the, at the moment
Joel Saxum: and the business atmosphere. That’s what I say, like make that joke about Governor Abbott saying Texas is open for business, but it’s literally on, on billboards when you drive into the state.
Texas is open for business. That’s why I’m in California right now. Right. I’m out here gonna actually talk with some insurers about solve their pain problems and we, California, everybody’s going from here to Texas, so, Right. That’s just. Reality.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Joel’s in California and shirt sleeves, and I’m in Massachusetts and, and long sleeve looking like I’m ready to go.
Chop down some wood. So winter is coming everyone, It’s, it’s almost here, right?
Joel Saxum: Yes. So, So I mean, if I’m looking at this right, 750,000 plus 2.1 million, you’re looking at the capability of being able to provide power for two and a half to 3 million homes in that Wow. In that Houston Lake, Charles Galveston, Beaumont Bay City area down there, and I think the population down there is probably right around 15 million.
So I
Allen Hall: was gonna say 15. Yeah, I was gonna say 15 also. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: So you’re gonna provide you’re gonna provide possibly, For just residences, you might cover 50% of the residences, or 40, 30% of the resides is with this one project or the top
Allen Hall: available. There are other renewables that they have going in that part of Texas.
Joel Saxum: They’re getting pushed in there. Yeah. Yeah. I mean it all, it’s, you’re starting to see if you follow the transmission lines out to West Texas, because that’s where the wind is. Of course, you’re now seeing like little. Solar farm, Solar Farm, Solar farm, all along the whole corridor. I know some ranchers in between Houston and San Antonio that all of a sudden like, Hey, what’s going on out here?
Like, you’re the renewable energy guy. Oh, there’s hooking into the grid cuz it’s easy, it’s simple. And the guys have, it’s, it’s that interconnect play, right? It’s simple. There’s no, there’s not a whole lot of infrastructure and cost to, to get in there. So like this one right here off offshore Galveston, I.
The, the load, one of the biggest load bases in the country is right there. So boom, you’re down.
Allen Hall: Yeah. The whole projects get much simpler. Right. I, I think if you think about East coast, offshore, West coast, offshore, Gulf of Mexico, offshore, probably your lowest barrier to entry is probably Gulf of Mexico, excluding the hurricane bit for a second.
It’s probably Gulf of Mexico. But you even had,
Joel Saxum: there’s a. What’s the name of the company that just popped up in Louisiana? Not popped up. They’ve been around for a little while now. Gulf Wind Technology. Don’t know ’em. They’re, they’re, they’re, one of their premises around the company is to do research into like hurricane proof, typhoon proof wind turbines, Gulf wind technology.
Let’s take,
Allen Hall: take a look. Well, in Rell, did that exercise recently on making the blades hurricane fruit By making them. Or bendable. Yeah. Right. So obviously companies are looking at it and al’s looking at it too. And you’re gonna need to do it because like you said, once projects get the go ahead from state legislatures in Louisiana and Texas, it won’t be long before those things kick off and just, and are making some noise.
So
Joel Saxum: good. Yeah. And hey, nobody wants a, nobody wants a beach full of fiberglass, so No.
Allen Hall: No, they don’t.
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So Jonathan, welcome to the Uptime Win Energy podcast. Thank you. It’s great to be here, Alan. We have Jonathan Kath f Esco, and Jonathan is the senior Director of customer Success and. Esco is a fellow Massachusetts , one of the companies of Massachusetts. We’re another one that makes two of us in Massachusetts that involved in wind energy, and so it’s nice to have another Massachusetts company on the podcast.
I think you’re the first one from Massachusetts that we’ve had in the podcast. So congratulations, you’re your first in line. It’s good to be here. You guys do some really interesting things at Esco and I wanna talk about today, the find fix measure. System you have because I’ve heard discussions about it, There’ve been a lot of places, it comes up quite a bit.
Like how do we squeeze out the last couple percentage points of aep? There’s a lot of different talk about how to do that, but ESCO’s been a leader in that field for, for a number of
Jonathan Kossuth: years. Yeah. So we’ve been you know, developing fine fix measure over the last six years or so. You know, the company is now eight years old.
We’ve been working, you know, focusing on how do we improve energy for turbines. You know, since 2016 we started with Ys alignment was really, you know, how can we identify and fix Ys alignment? And so we approach, we approached this from the point of view, No hardware, you know, we don’t wanna use hardware, we wanna be a SCADA only solution.
And. One of the things that we’ve really focused on over the years is using high speed SCD data. So we are looking for high speed data on the order of seconds. You know, if you can get this one second data, that’s the best we find Yas alignment. We can work up to about 30 seconds, you know, 32nd sample rate.
Allen Hall: Wow. Okay, So fine fix measure is a, basically using the existing hardware on the turbine engine and the SCADA system and just acquiring more of that data. Is that the, The fundamentals of it,
Jonathan Kossuth: Right. So, yeah. So we’ll take this high-speed SCADA data, we’ll do some analytics, some of it machine learning, some of it more straightforward analytics, but we’re really looking to identify opportunities where turbines are not operating.
Generally, we call it optimally.
Allen Hall: I think there’s a lot of non-optimal turbines at the moment. If you just drive around, we drove to Midwest this summer and you could just see, you could see it while driving down the interstate. So yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of fine tuning that needs to happen on wind turbine.
So how does the system basics, what’s the basics? Constructions of the system you’re using existing high speed SCADA data. What are you doing with that
Jonathan Kossuth: data? So we’ll analyze, we, you know, ingest it from the customer. They might give us, here’s a year’s worth of data today, or we’ll start acquiring data in real time.
We process it in the cloud, so we ha we’ve broken this down into what we call fines, right? So we have 60 or so issues or fines that we’re looking for now that have been basically fully automated. You know, we feel comfortable with the algorithm, but we’re looking to evaluate things. Rated power performance, rotor speed behavior, pitch angle behavior.
You know, how are the sensors performing, The temperature sensor perform. Is it measuring a good temperature? Is it, you know, slightly off, you know, a couple degrees off can make a difference. How’s the anemometer look? Is the initial cell transfer function working okay?
Allen Hall: Okay, so you’re actually pulling down really refined data, things that maybe others are not looking at.
You’re, you’re pulling temperature data that’s, you’re really deep inside the turban actually pulling out information that. You wouldn’t think is obvious. I mean, if I, if I was gonna pull information from a turbine, I wouldn’t think about temperature data. What are you using that information for? What are you doing with that data?
Jonathan Kossuth: Two things. We compare the turbine, you know, is it, is, its performance changing over time, you know, in each of these different categories. So we break them down. How does the pitch behavior look? How does the rotor behavior look over time? So we compare its performance to itself over time, but we’ll also compare these metrics to other turbin.
To say, you know, how is this turbine performing compared to turbines that are nearby?
Allen Hall: So you’re pulling high speed SCADA data, you’re processing that data. What can you do once it comes off the cloud? What things are you doing back to the turbine? Like what areas are you focusing on to make improvements to the turbine?
So what we would do,
Jonathan Kossuth: so we run these analytics and then we have a portal that the customers could log into and they would see the results of our fines. So when we find issues that are fix. You know, hence the fix, you know, we’ll flag these issues to the customer and for some issues we can just say, Go change this parameter, and the turbine should be fine.
Other issues may take another round, you know, of investigation, a little more focused investigation. You know, if we see you know, if a pitch angle is not correct. There might be two or three reasons that that pitch angle’s not correct. So we wouldn’t just say, Go change this parameter, but it sparks the next level of investigation.
You know, are these pitch angles different because you change the blades on that turbine and, and you didn’t tell anybody, you know, or you know, we, we, and we try and get this information ahead of time, but sometimes information slips through the cracks, so it would spark that level of conversation. Do these turbines have different blades you.
Which is one reason you might have a different pitch angle, but you know, and then eventually we’ll say, if they say no, we’re like, All right, let’s change the parameter, you know, to make it correct. Or maybe we have a conversation with the oem. Is there a software change that the customer, you know, may not know about that has a different pitch angle?
Is there a reason for that? So we don’t wanna just say, this turban has a different pitch angle. Let’s make it look like the others. We really would wanna understand why that’s the case. So we would have, you know, a checklist of a conversation that we would want to do. You know, you think about your check engine light comes on in your car, you don’t fix the whole car, you bring it to the mechanic to understand why that light came on.
So, you know, we wanna be a little bit of a check engine light that your performance isn’t what we would’ve expected it to. Let’s figure out what the next level is. Well,
Allen Hall: that’s a good analogy because I think you’re talking about even deeper, like before the warning light even comes on, there’s a lot of codes that are happening on in the car that you don’t get to see, but you plug into it like I just did recently.
You plug in, you’re like, Oh, there are some places where the, The engine is not at optimum performance. It hasn’t flagged anything yet, but they probably need to be addressed. It sounds like you’re down that deep into a tur.
Jonathan Kossuth: Yeah, and we’ve actually seen some issues like you said, below that alarm level.
We had an example where a turbine was operating at rated power, you know, as the wind was strong enough that it was in its rated power region. But we saw the power dropping and coming back up, dropping, coming back up over, you know, period of hours. And it would do this multiple times. So, and this was flagged by our high, one of our high speed power fluctuation tools.
We look at, we look for a high speed. Power behavior, do that evaluation and long discussions with the customer. The OEM finally tracked it down to a bad, the cell fan in the, up, in the, the cell that wasn’t operating. So it wasn’t cooling the, the part, so, you know, the, the turbine itself said, Oh, my temperature’s too high.
I should reduce the power to cool the turbine, the turb, and that would work perfectly. The turbine would cool and they would say, Oh, my temperature’s good enough. Let’s go back. To rated power, but the OEM alarm logic wasn’t logging this. It wasn’t happening for a long enough duration to trigger an alarm that the customer would see.
You know, that would get elevated to the customer, like I said, with the check engine light. But we were able to see that very easily with our tools, get the fan fixed, and get them the performance back that they were looking for.
Allen Hall: Well, you don’t really consider those odd failures of, and what the effect is on the long term health of a turbine raising and lowering temperature like that is not super healthy.
on a, on a turbine, just like pitch alignment is not a great thing. If you’re, if you’re off, you can do a lot of damage to bearings and long term it can be very expensive, so you’re able to catch those sort of nuance. Early failure conditions before they turn ’em to very expensive costly repairs.
Jonathan Kossuth: Right.
And that’s sort of a side effect of our approach though, right? We’re really after power. So this shows up as a power. It showed up as a power issue. But yes, there’s also a lifetime component in that as well. And we also had another issue where we saw the generator speed was fluctuating very rapidly, but around.
Around the correct speed, you know, but it was just, you know, it should have been 1500 RPM as an example. It would go between 16 and 1400, you know, on the order of seconds. But the average was 1500. So that’s something, again, our tool flagged. It was showing up in the power fluctuations as well. So our tool flagged this as a power fluctuation, but when you look at the 10 minute stats, it looks fantastic because it’s happening at such a fast.
10 minute average would say, This turbine is generating its rated power. But we would say, Well, actually you’re going plus or minus 10% about your rated power all the time. So in that case, the impact on aep, which is what we’re after, isn’t really there. Our tool still flagged it. We raised it to the customers more of a lifetime issue.
Like, Hey, you know, your generator can’t be. Lasting is long with this kind of issue happening.
Allen Hall: Those are really serious things. And if, if you detect some of these issues early on, what, what does esco, You’re not changing, ESCO’s, not changing the term turbine parameters. You’re just telling the customers so they’re alerted to it.
There’s no, there’s no feedback loop here through esco, right? Esco gets all the data and then informs the customer as to next steps
Jonathan Kossuth: that focuses on our fix. Like so for example, for Y misalignment. We know for most turbines how to correct yams alignment. So we’ll give the customer instructions, you know, Oh, you have a seamen Turbin, then you should do this.
If you have a GE turbine, you should do that, you know, for different OEMs. We’ll give the, how they can do that. And a little bit of that depends on their arrangement with the oem, you know, But we’ve worked with OEMs to get changes made even when people have had full service agreements. So we’re very proud of that.
That’s something we’ve done. We’ve been able to get that done. So in those cases, we would work with the customer and the OEM to increase the power of the farm. I mean, cuz really ultimately all three parties want the turbines to perform as well as possible. And carrying that message through, we’ve been able to get, you know, make changes on turbines that, you know, even under full service agreement.
So that’s something that we’re excited about, that we’ve been able to.
Allen Hall: Because Modesto’s been around for a while. You’ve been doing this fine fix measure piece. Do, are you starting to be able to categorize types of turbines and or issues that certain turbines have and other ones don’t? Just because you have the, the high speed data to look at it?
Yeah, So yeah, we know
Jonathan Kossuth: like if we get a farm, you know, a new project to work on and it’s a certain oem, I’m not gonna name any names in case I slip on something, but you know, we know what things tend to happen more often. With certain OEM models versus others, but we don’t gear our analysis to that. You know, we run all of our checks, you know, we run, we have 60 plus checks growing all the time.
We’ll run all of those checks and you know, for some cases we might have to adjust the algorithm a little bit because we know oem, you know, turbine model A, this issue manifests itself a little bit differently, so we might have to look for it a little bit differently. And B. So we might say, you know, for turbine A, it has a pitch issue for this, or turbine B has a pitch issue that way, and the way we detect it might be a little bit different because we know we’re looking for slightly different behavior
Allen Hall: in those cases.
That’s interesting. So you’re actually tailoring your algorithms to the specific turbine that you’re looking at
Jonathan Kossuth: In, In a couple cases, yes. For the most part, our algorithms are OEM agnostic. You know, we’ve worked really hard. To be that way. You know, Yas alignment is OEM agnostic. The, the, the only thing that does matter is how you implement fixes.
You know, that’s very targeted towards the oem, but there are a couple other, Yeah, I mean, there are some features that exist on some turbine models, but not others. We run those checks, even though we know they aren’t gonna happen, You know,
Allen Hall: on that, on that TURINE model. So I, I went to your website. If everybody’s watching and listening, ought to go to ESCO’s website and take a look at all the information there.
One of the things I noticed was a little discussion about Cut end, cut out. And it, it seems so obvious at the time, like, Oh yeah, that makes a lot of sense. If the cut in is not right and the turbines just trying to start up startup and it can’t or it won’t because of the, the way the SCADA system’s set up that that’s not healthy.
What, It’s not healthy until you’re not producing any power. What can, when Duco do in those sort of cut, in, cut out situations? So we
Jonathan Kossuth: have some cut in, you know, checks and some cut out checks. Those are also. Intertwined with the cell transfer function checks and anemometer checks, because those all become intertwined to some extent.
You know, things like cut in and cut out. So we also do a cut in evaluation. You know, we’ve had a couple farms where the turbines weren’t, the winds were low, but they were high enough that they could start and the turbines just wouldn’t start. The controller wasn’t optimized for this type of lower wind site is probably the, you know, the real solution.
We were able to show, but this doesn’t show up in 10 minute data. So if you looked at the 10 minute power curve, it wouldn’t, it wouldn’t strike you that there’s something odd at the farm. But when you look at the high speed data, we would see over a course of, you know, 30 to 40 minutes, the turbine would continually try and start up.
The wind would support a startup, but the controller just wasn’t optimized in that case. So we were able to work with the customer, make some adjustments to the parameters, and get the turbines to. And you know, that actually is a lot of energy because this is a lower wind site. I think we got them like one and a half percent aep just because instead of not running all those times, they’re able to run.
Right? I mean that a little bit added up becomes a lot. That’s, that’s a lot of energy. It is a lot of energy. It’s and so the other thing we see with cut in and cutout is for farms that have something like a bat curtailment. You know, we wanna make sure. We wanna protect wildlife, you know, you know, acknowledge the requirements of the backer tail with both, with respect to time and wind speeds.
But we also wanna make sure the turbines operating when it can be. So if your a cell transfer function is off, some turbines may not be operating when they could be. And that’s another thing that we’ll check by doing. You know, pacio temporal comparisons, we’ll compare across to other turbin. and over time to say, you know, looking back and forward in time, are you cutting in at the right wind speeds and cutting out?
And compared to other turbines, how are you doing as well? So those are another opportunity where you can get energy just by making sure the turbine is operating as efficiently as possible and, you know, I say no, when you look at the cutout side, you know, same thing, the cell transfer function problem or bad parameter settings, all your turbine shutting down sooner than they should, you know?
And for those that have a soft cutout, does that soft cutout look like it’s behaving well? So we’ll kind of do these sanity checks to make sure things look good for that.
Allen Hall: Now that you have all this data and you’re digging through it all, what are some of the most common. Issues on turbines and at least let’s just say the United States.
What are the common, like anemometers seems like a anemometers fail all the time. I mean, I’ve seen piles of them at some operators sites, you know? Oh yeah. Simple device. Yeah. But it’s constantly moving. It eventually fail. What kind of failure modes are you seeing sort of consistently, consistently through the industry?
Jonathan Kossuth: Worldwide, we have about 5,000 turbines that we’ve done analysis on. And you know, we talked about just the US I’m not quite sure how it breaks down in terms of us, but you know, about 40% of them or so have had yams alignment of a magnitude worth correcting. Okay. That seems high. Yeah, and it, it, it does depend on oem, right?
Some OEMs are better, you know, on average across everything. That’s about what we’ve seen. We’ve seen a lot, you know, a lot of issues that we’ve seen, you know, some cut in issues, rated power behaviors, not necessarily. The oscillations that I talked about earlier, but just settings may not be correct.
Turbines not reaching rated power for one reason or another. You know, sometimes it’s just parameter settings. They may have done some work on the turbine, you know, they derated it to do some work and then forgot to, or thought they, you know, we’ve all done that, right? Like, I thought I clicked enter, you know, so but everyone’s so busy.
If you’re in charge of 3000 turbines, you’ve thought you’ve done that and you’ve moved on, you may not come back to check that. And you’re gonna look at that power curve for a while, you know your 10 minute power curve and say, Oh yeah, I know that was curtailed because we just fixed it. It should be fine now.
It’s gonna take you longer. But we would flag that more in real time and say, Hey, wait a minute. That’s turbans not operating the same. You know, we’ve seen pitch pitch settings. Be different across turbines. Sometimes it’s related to blades. Sometimes they’ve swapped blades back and forgot to change the pitch settings.
So that’s, that’s a little bit of, you know, low hanging fruit. But, you know, we’ve done some pitch optimization stuff is something we’re starting to get into as well. How do you find the best minimum pitch? So a lot of things like that, you know, we’re seeing a lot of tempera. Sensitivities in turbine, so we’re investigating that now as well.
That’s sort of a newer area. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Temperature on the high side or the low side, or both?
Jonathan Kossuth: Say high side. You know, warm is always bad for everything, right? Yes. tends to be too cold is bad, but warm is always bad for everything. Wow. Okay. So.
Allen Hall: Because the system is so simple to implement, I, I would imagine that you know, your customers that once they turn the system on, realize like, Wow, alright, here’s an immediate AEP improvement.
What kind of AEP improvements are you seeing on
Jonathan Kossuth: average? So I think across our whole fleet, for all the farms we’ve done, I think we’re averaging just so this is averaging, you know, just over 1%, you know, for most, for most farms. Some farms are super well run, You know, people are just concerned, so there’s not a lot there.
Others, you know, people might be overwhelmed or just need some help or not know where to look for something, so they’ll be on the higher side. But I believe our average has been just about over 1% across, you know, we’ve done about a hundred different projects, so, you know, that’s a nice robust number
Allen Hall: that we.
In a non-interfering way. I mean, you’re talking about just taking existing data. There’s no hardware hookups, there’s no extra stuff to do. There’s no wires to run. You’re getting a 1% a improvement just by using your algorithms and high speed data. That’s amazing. That’s really amazing. And
Jonathan Kossuth: with the portal, you know, for some of these results, if there’s an issue, some of the, you know, and there’s different time scales for the results, right?
Some things we can tell you as quickly as in like five to seven. That this looks like a problem. Other issues might take 10 days, 30 days. You know, our yas alignment is three months, you know, to get that down. So, you know, you, you hook up, you start giving us data. Within a week we’ll start, you know, we’ll be running our initial checks.
If there’s an issue there, we’ll highlight it, you know, And as time goes on, we’ll run more of these cases as we get a sufficient data. Cuz we’ve learned over the last six years how much data we. For everything. Like our yas, our yas in its fourth generation, you know, so we’re pretty confident in that algorithm.
It’s, you know, it’s, it’s compared favorably to lidar. Oh, really? Yeah. So, you know, we’ve done some li We actually, we have a case study. You can go to our website and download that case study where we did a comp. Yeah. We had a third party do this validation. NG did this validation for us and our results match their lidar comparison.
So now you can get the results of fixing yamice a. Without having to lu up and down a lidar or even just lu it to different sites, if you wanted to do an upward looking
Allen Hall: one. Wow. That’s, that’s impressive. So the, we talked about, we were just in wind energy hub. The technology, those companies that have been around for 4, 5, 6 years have really.
Grown to the point of now they’re, you’re dangerous, right? You, you have all the data, you know where you’re going. You can really attack problems quickly and that’s where the industry needed to, needs to be right now. And it’s good to have companies like ESCO out there that have looked at that data and say, Okay, here’s the things we can fix.
Here’s where we can make an improvement. Let’s get on it. Because the next few years, I think these little, little incremental improvements are gonna make a big difference, particularly in the. In the United States we view wind cuz the, you know, one of the knocks on wind and just really inefficient, doesn’t run all the time, but ESCO’s taking some of that unreliability out of the system and that’s great to hear.
Right?
Jonathan Kossuth: Yeah. And we’re hoping, you know, to make the sites each site, we’re hoping to make them more efficient, you know, generate as much power as they can for the location that they’re in. You know, you can’t change your turbine model. You can’t change your turbine’s location. So how do you get the most out you can for where you are is really what we’re after.
Allen Hall: Do you, are your customers mostly picking you up and, and, and using your products as Thes are new or as they’ve been around for a couple of years and they’re trying to squeeze out that extra percentage point? Or both? We
Jonathan Kossuth: actually have a range of that, you know, so we have older turbines where people are trying to squeeze as much out as you know, commission dates 20 2007, 2008.
But we’ve had newer ones where people are like, Hey, this thing’s been running for two years. We’re not getting the pre-assessment power, we thought, can you guys take a look? You know, we’re we’re coming in as a third party in that case to say, Can you guys take a look? I’m not satisfied with the answers I’m getting.
You know, maybe the, maybe there’s something else, you know, going on. Can you guys help take a look at that? And, and we try and be collaborative. You know, we, we all wanna be a team, the oem, the customer, and WinCo to get more power. So we try and work with everybody, you know, to get that, to get that.
Allen Hall: Jonathan, it’s been great to have you on the podcast.
If, if someone’s trying to reach you or Esco, how, how do they contact you?
Jonathan Kossuth: So they can just reach us through the website. I think just esco.com is probably the best way to reach out to us. I think we have a contact us page there as well.
Allen Hall: Great. Fantastic. Jonathan, thanks so much for being on the program and we’ll stay
Jonathan Kossuth: in touch.
All right, great. Thank you very much, Alan. Great to.
Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Win Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and 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.
And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Win Energy Podcasts.
