Rosemary interviews two wind experts, and you’re guaranteed to learn from both of them: Jessica O’Connor from ArcVera Renewables describes how wakes from large rotors cause a significant energy loss. Stability is the key – and the amount of loss is stunning. Then Brian Hill from Bachmann Electronics discusses turbine automation, focusing on North American installations, including cybersecurity for and repowering of older turbines.
But wait, there’s more: like GM Ventures (yes, that GM) pouring $10M, and some project management expertise, into wind catching technologies. Plus, palm-tree inspired wind turbine designs (with the blades in the back?!) may withstand hurricanes. Some of the design elements are already proven, but how powerful can flexible blades be?
Visit ArcVera here – https://arcvera.com
Visit Bachmann here – https://www.bachmann.info/en
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Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Uptime 119
Jessica O’Connor: What we’re seeing is something that is. Really shown in any other wake models that are, you’re trying to capture those external wakes is that these external wakes are lasting for over a hundred kilometers. Yeah, that’s insane. It’s waking the entire array. Just the Southern array is waking the entire.
Jessica O’Connor: Collection of array.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the uptime wind energy podcast, Rosemary what’s first on our list this week,
Rosemary Barnes: we’re gonna be talking about some wind turbines being designed in Colorado with the university and collaboration with NREL and they have Palm tree inspired, wind turbines to survive. Hurricane forces. And we’ve got a couple of fun interviews that I recorded while I was at Texas clean power conference a little while ago with Jessica O’Connor of Avera about awake model that they’ve developed for offshore wind and Brian Hill of Buckman about some of their control system retrofits that they can do.
Allen Hall: And then we talk about GM. Yes, the GM and the United States makes all the automobiles is investing in multi turbine technology. Interesting development. We’re also
Joel Saxum: gonna talk about a consortium of energy producers in the United States that are putting together $6 billion to invest into someone to make them solar panels here.
Joel Saxum: All right, Rosemary.
Allen Hall: Palm tree, wind turbines. I know this is gonna go right to your design engineering instincts. So the university of Colorado, sorry, Colorado university Boulder, which is a
Joel Saxum: beautiful place. Gotta get it right. Get it right. It’s a very beautiful place.
Allen Hall: It has a great, it’s a great campus by the way.
Allen Hall: They’re they’re doing some research there with, in the United States where they’re looking at basically backward wind turbines. what I mean backward wind turbines is the blades are in the back and the cells in the front. And instead of having three blades they’ve are using two blades. And the, the rationale behind this is that in theory makes them more hurricane resistant, tolerant to big wind gusts.
Allen Hall: Now, I, I don’t understand that part of it, but it’s and Rosemary, this is where you can help us a little bit. Mm-hmm so the blades are supposedly are lighter. They need to be, they can be more flexible because there’s less chance they’re gonna run into the tower. Yes in the reverse situation. Okay. But that’s the claim to fame is with the tube bladed system with.
Allen Hall: Pointing backwards. So when turning pointing backwards that they could handle much higher wind speeds and then it would make them possible for places like Louisiana, Alabama, and the Gulf of Mexico. And on the Atlantic kind of North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida regions, where there’s some really strong winds during hurricane season, but they’ve been doing, I think they’ve been working this for about six years.
Allen Hall: And they call it the segmented ultralight, morphing rotor, two bladed downwind rotor that evidently has some really good performance, but Rosemary, is this something new? Is this something that we’ve already done in the past or is this some new technology? What is, what is happening here?
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, there there’s probably some new structural design methods or an analysis.
Rosemary Barnes: That part is probably new. Downwind rotors. Definitely not new two bladed, wind turbines, definitely not new. This is usually my answer to everything, you know, like nothing nothing’s new. So in the nineties, you know, no one really knew what kind of wind turbine we would end up with. And people tried like everything.
Rosemary Barnes: And plenty of people tried downwind, rotors, and two bladed, wind turbines. And. There’s a few, there’s a few advantages and there’s a few disadvantages. And back in the nineties, the disadvantages seem to pretty much outweigh the advantages. So it’s a question of whether now you’ll get the, the opposite where you find the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, the main thing with the downwind rotor is when the wind blows it bends the blades away from the tower. So you don’t have to worry about your, you know, the deflection of the blade. Isn’t really a constraint. . But it’s not people think that, you know, that’s the only design constraint when you’re designing a wind turbine blade, but it’s just one of, of several.
Rosemary Barnes: So it needs to not be so flexible that it can hit the tower. It also needs to be strong enough that it doesn’t break under those loads. There’s also buckling is a problem, you know, like when you crush an aluminum can then the, you know, once you get started the thin walls, very easily just crumple and a wind turbine blade is also a thin wall structure, so it can do the same thing.
Rosemary Barnes: And then the final, main design constrain is fatigue because wind turbine blades see a lot of small, but very frequent loads. Like for example, Gravity loading every time, you know, the blade rotates to the three o’clock position. It bends one way. And then when it gets around to the nine o’clock position, it’s bending the other way and, you know, wind turbine, blade rotates millions of times in its lifetime.
Rosemary Barnes: And so those small ads loads can add up. Like when you bend a paperclip repeatedly back and forth, you know, like one bend won’t the force isn’t enough to break it, but after 50 bends, it, it, it might be So, you know, a good wind turbine blade, structural design balances, all of those. And you end up with a, you know, a, it, the it’s not true that for a normal wind turbine blade, if you took away the design, the design constraint of deflection, you know, not hitting the tower, that you would then be able to reduce the weight by like 20%, because you know, they’re optimizing everything together.
Rosemary Barnes: Plus a normal wind turbine blade has plenty of ways that they can, you know, get around the tower striking problem. One of the most striking ones is if you ever see a wind turbine blade on a wind turbine on a still day, you’ll notice that the blades curve away from the tower. So they make them pre bent.
Rosemary Barnes: So they got extra, extra distance to go before they hit the tower. They also, you know, make the blade stiffer by using carbon fiber. Yeah, those are some of the, the things they can do. So. A normal circumstances. I would say like a wind turbine has been pretty well optimized for, well, not optimized maybe, but you know, they’re doing a pretty good job of making a, a good design for the upwind design.
Rosemary Barnes: But maybe under this hurricane condition where there is such a big difference between the extreme loads and the regular loads, maybe, maybe then it makes sense. There are down disadvantages as well from the downwind design. The main one is that every time it passes the tower. So in the, you know, six o’clock position of the blade, it’s suddenly in a shadow.
Rosemary Barnes: It doesn’t see any wind, so it can snap back. And so I mentioned that fatigue loading is a problem for wind turbine blades. So, you know, you’re adding in this huge, extra fatigue load where the bay violently often bends every time it passes the, the tower. So that’s. Main downside. Also I, one more thing, a flexible blade has to be stiff enough to actually do what it needs to aerodynamically.
Rosemary Barnes: Do you know if it bends so much out of the wind that it’s not , you know, can’t act, act like a wing and it’s not gonna make any power. Yeah. You’re defeating the purpose. So it’ll be interesting to see if it makes sense for this hurricane condition. But Joel,
Allen Hall: having lived down in Houston, we’re gonna need some type of.
Allen Hall: High wind resistant wind turbines in the Gulf of Mexico, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you looked at last year over the last few years, you can see the presence of hurricanes getting greater and greater and greater in the Gulf. This year. The Noah has a forecast of 65% more activity possible in, in the Gulf and hurricane activity in general United States.
Joel Saxum: So you’re talking three to. Possible major hurricanes, right. And that’s gonna be a non-starter in the Gulf. Unless we can figure something else out to combat the the weather that’s happening. As we talk about on the, on the podcast here, the, you know, extreme weather and climate change is gonna continue to increase these events as it goes forward.
Joel Saxum: So, I mean, I know I saw I think it was Ming, Ming yang outta China just released a typhoon class. Wind turbine to kind of combat the same thing. So it’s good that, you know, we’ve that an NRES working on this and some of the universities are working on it and hopefully we see something into production that we can trust in a
Rosemary Barnes: hurricane here.
Rosemary Barnes: Interesting that you mentioned Ming yang, cuz they’re one of the companies who have actually manufacture downwind Roers with two blades on them in the past. I’m not, I’m not sure why they moved away from it, but there are, there are quite a few manufacturers who have, you know, made megawatt scale, wind turbines in either or both of the tube blade or, or downwind.
Rosemary Barnes: So it’d be interesting to see if MI yang reviving their, their downwind tube blade concept. I couldn’t find a lot of information on it last time I was researching it, but yeah, I think it’s definitely a matter of just You know, finding the, the right place for the, the, the technology. And yeah, if we, you know, in the nineties, when people were mostly looking into this in the early two thousands, it was much more about finding the really good, easy wind sites to develop.
Rosemary Barnes: And now I think, you know, we’re trying to put wind turbines everywhere. And so yeah, somewhere that has hurricanes on occasion. Would be, you know, a place that normal wind turbine design just might not suit. So
Allen Hall: can you afford to be not as efficient in hurricane prone areas with the design, just so you can tolerate the once or twice or three times a year.
Allen Hall: Massive winds. Is, is that the
Rosemary Barnes: compromise then? Yeah, and I think it would be like structurally efficient would be the the, the trade off, you know, like you should be able to make it as aerodynamically efficient or very, very close. You’re probably gonna need definitely to pay more attention to your design, you know, really flexible structure structure it’s supposed to deflect a lot is, is hard.
Rosemary Barnes: I mean, that’s one of the problems with just regular wind turbine blades, deflect, you know, 10% of their length and that’s, that’s massive, or, you know, any structural engineers that aren’t working with, wind turbine blades. They’ll be shocked to find out that that’s how much these things are moving and that’s just.
Rosemary Barnes: You know what you expect and you say that all the time, when people take a technology from say the arrow industry and try and put it in a wind turbine blade, it’s like, oh yeah. But you know, these things, these things move, you know, this is not a rigid structure that you’re installing your, your product into though.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s it’s a challenge.
Joel Saxum: I maybe it’s worth it. I think it’s a word it’s just a matter of time before we see the effect of what a hurricane can do to the current technology. Because if you look at the Gulf coast in Texas just inland in Corpus Christi, south Padre, all along Mustang island, there’s turbines that are within a mile of the beach.
Joel Saxum: Ooh. So it’s, it’s just like, you know, we had last summer, there was a bunch of hurricanes that came into St. Charles Louisiana in the last two years. They, they have just gotten pounded. I feel really bad for those people. But if some of those hurricanes turned west down the coast, There’s a whole bunch of wind farms, right?
Joel Saxum: In, in line with what could be catastrophic damage from a hurricane, just waiting to till one hits there. Wow.
Allen Hall: Wow. Well, we’ve seen the effect of tornadoes on wind turbines where the, the blades just look, look like they have wilted and you see those pictures pop up on Facebook and all the social media sites pretty frequently, but I haven’t seen anything related to a hurricane damage yet, so, but we’re go, we’re going to, we obviously need to get out to the Gulf of Mexico.
Allen Hall: So it’s just a matter of.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay, we’re gonna do a quick commercial break. And when we come back, there’s a couple of interviews that I recorded recently in Texas at the clean power conference. We’ve got Jessica O’Connor of Avera and she tells us about a wake model that they have applied to some of the new offshore wind sites in New York.
Rosemary Barnes: Very interesting results that they have there. And also Brian Hill of Buckman who do control systems for wind turbines, and they have some interesting technologies that are available, especially for retrofiting old wind turbines,
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Rosemary Barnes: We are recording live from the exhibition floor at clean power 22 in in San Antonio, Texas. So anyway I have here, Jessica O’Connor from Avera renewables. Can you tell me a bit about what you guys are doing?
Jessica O’Connor: Sure. So arc Vera really is on two sides of, of the analysis where the resource meets the machine.
Jessica O’Connor: And this is in wind solar and in battery storage. So on one side, we have atmospheric scientists and they’re doing the wind resource assessment from prospecting all the way through financable energy yields, uncertainty analyses. This includes a lot of different kinds of wake modeling. We do our own kind of Mele scale modeling in various kinds of resolutions.
Jessica O’Connor: And we do operational analyses and repower analyses. And then we also have an engineering team. So the engineering team, which I’m primarily on, does a lot of the technical, technical due diligence, and then technology diagnostics. So this would be. RCAs root cause analyses end of warranty inspections lows, analyses Pretty string gauges on everything mm-hmm and but we also do power performance testing.
Jessica O’Connor: So that, that is actually a really neat part of our business because it, it connects our wear analyses to our engineering capabilities. So really it is where the resource meets the machine or the wind meets the winter
Rosemary Barnes: turbine. Yeah. Okay. So the reason why your booth caught my eye or walked past and you have this really cool wake simulation.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think. Of some of those recently auctioned offshore sites, right. Is in New York. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. The New York bite. Yeah. And so they had like two, no three offboard different parcels of ocean surface, like guess you’d call it the land. Yeah. Near each other and that have, yeah, they’ve just been there.
Rosemary Barnes: People have purchased the right through auction. Mm-hmm to develop a project.
Jessica O’Connor: 4.37 billion.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So that’s something we’ve talked about a bit about on the podcast. Cause that’s, that’s CRA it was crazy. The it’s crazy. The amount of money that’s. That’s gonna change hands there. And so you’ve done this cool wake simulation where you have one, I think there’s a really prevailing wind direction in the, what is it kind of like from the Southwest?
Rosemary Barnes: So from the Southwest. Yeah. And so. One wind farm gonna be there. And then there’s two, three in the, the wake of that. And you’ve done some, some modeling that shows there’s like a significant, gonna be a significant effect on the down the downwind wind farm. So, yeah, that’s right. Yeah. Can you tell me about that, that model and, sure.
Jessica O’Connor: So for, for background, we first used this model to test operational wind farms onshore. To see this wind farm is being, has just been built. This wind farm has been built for a long time, but they are waking each other. And there is a significant amount of energy loss because of it. And the model that we’re using, which is Wharf w FP.
Jessica O’Connor: So weather research forecasting with wind turbine. Prema.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. You Americans really love acronyms. I, I know it’s when I lived here, I had to really learn to speak like the language of acronyms
Jessica O’Connor: cause and in offshore wind there’s even more acronyms. So it’s like speaking an alien language. Yeah. So with whaf it’s a Mele scale model and it is all of the physics within the atmosphere or most of the physics within the atmosphere in kind of CFD, computational fluid dynamics domain, and this.
Jessica O’Connor: All, all of the atmospheric boundary layer. And what we’re doing is using reanalysis data to represent the spacial wind resource for the w w F P wind farm ization. We’re putting in momentum sinks. So these are actuator discs within the model. Now I’m, I’m just an engineer. So I’m speaking to that as, as
Jessica O’Connor: Well, as I can, I don’t speak atmospheric scientist, but as far as I understand, they’re putting AC actuary discs within the model to represent the winter turbines. So this is a momentum sink mm-hmm . So as the wind is hitting the momentum sink, energy is taken out of the wind. Mm. So we’re we run the model twice, one for ambient conditions and one with the momentum sinks in the turbine position.
Jessica O’Connor: And what you saw, which is a very beautiful, colorful array of colors is the Delta between those two models. And the New York bite really caught our attention because, well, first of all, all of the money that was spent for those lease areas, it’s tremendous and a little bit daunting, but , but also they’re so close to each other and they’re so large and they are all lined up in the prevailing wind direction.
Jessica O’Connor: So, what we did was we took the two Southern most arrays and we populated them what 0.7, five nautical miles, north, south, and one nautical mile east, west 15 megawatt theoretical wind turbine, 240 meter rotor diameter. So enormous
Rosemary Barnes: theoretical. that? That’s what they’re going to use by the time they
Jessica O’Connor: install those.
Jessica O’Connor: Right. They certainly seem to be planning to yeah. They wanna use the largest and the greatest. , but what we’re, what we’re seeing is something that is not really shown in any other wake models that are, you’re trying to capture those external wakes is that these external wakes are lasting for over a hundred kilometers.
Jessica O’Connor: Yeah, that’s insane. It’s waking the entire array. Just the Southern array is waking the entire collection of. So from the second array away from the most Southern one, I don’t wanna name the arrays cuz we’re not associated with the owners, but the, the mid array, we found 13% energy reduction deficit just because of external weights.
Jessica O’Connor: So this is not even considering the internal wake effects that are going to also occur with these large rotors. Yeah. When we filled in the next array, we found 26.6%. Loss in this other external array. And granted, we were cherry picking the days and times we did look at all of the seasons, but we cherry picked the data so that it was all going in that primary wind direction, but it is the primary wind direction.
Jessica O’Connor: So we, we expect to see something similar to that in the losses for external waste.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And the The way that you visualized it in the little animation that I saw you say, how many meters per second deficit there is? Yes. In the downwind. Wind farms. And it was, you know, usually one or two meters per second deficit and sometimes four meters per second, even like a really long way.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It was getting black down wind. Yeah. Yeah. And I was really surprised cause I know the rule of thumb is, you know, you put wind turbines, six diameters apart, and then you’re supposed to have enough wake recombining that, you know, that everything’s, you know, pretty, pretty. After that, but I mean, six diameters of a, you know, 250 meter wind turbine does not equal hundreds of kilometers.
Rosemary Barnes: Why does it ? Yeah, so I was really surprised at how long it persisted for, and honestly, we were too. And do you think that the people that have the companies that have, you know, won these auctions do you think that. That. I mean, they must have obviously done some modeling. You don’t spend that much money and just on a whim, you
Jessica O’Connor: yeah.
Jessica O’Connor: You know, do a lot. They’re not, they’re not dumies . Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So there, there, a lot of them are experienced in Europe and understand that there is an issue because of long distance wakes. And so not knowing exactly how they were taking into account. I assume that they had some sort of deficit because of external wakes, but not really being able to model that.
Jessica O’Connor: it was probably just an educated guess. Mm-hmm . And so what we are able to do, and what we showed at IPF a few weeks ago was something that they hadn’t seen before. And there was a lot of concern and of course we want to validate and we want to have the discussion looking at operating offshore wind projects, get their operational data.
Jessica O’Connor: You know, obviously it needs to be more than one array and see if what we’re modeling in this, in this format is a correct assumption or a correct way to
Rosemary Barnes: model it. Okay. So you said that this was based on your model that you use on onshore yes. Wind farms. And I assume you validated that onshore.
Jessica O’Connor: Yeah.
Jessica O’Connor: So we use that there’s a, a particular couple of projects. I think it was in Iowa that. We had our client was I think, the Southern most. And it was for a due diligence. There was, it was for an M and a, and they wanted us to evaluate what those external wakes were. And we did and found that the, the losses found in the operational data were within 15% of what we were modeling.
Jessica O’Connor: Okay. So it was validated using operational.
Rosemary Barnes: And do you get the, the wake? Does it persist a lot longer offshore than offshore? And why is that
Jessica O’Connor: stability? So on offshore offshore, the, the atmosphere is stable most of the time. So you I’m less
Rosemary Barnes: mixing. Yeah. It’s not mixed from outside air coming into the wake, right?
Jessica O’Connor: Yes. But onshore you have more mixing unstable conditions during the day, but at night you do have. Or at least in this area, that those stable conditions where you have these long wakes that are propagating, but offshore it’s, it’s a lot more
Rosemary Barnes: prevalent. Yeah. Okay. So your next step will be to validate offshore Gosh.
Rosemary Barnes: I
Jessica O’Connor: hope so. well, one of the reasons why we PR we have been presenting this is we want developers to work with us. Yeah. To help us validate it. Yeah. So that we can support them in their next ventures for offshore wind or onshore wind too. But offshore wind is such a big investment that we would hope that they wanna do their due due
Rosemary Barnes: D.
Rosemary Barnes: And I mean, it’s one thing in New York where, you know, kind of everyone’s developing at the same time and they’re aware of what else is being right sold. But imagine if you had an offshore wind farm and then somebody built one, you know, that you weren’t expecting up wind from you, then that would be quite, quite shocking.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah.
Jessica O’Connor: Well, even if it was just 80, 80, if it was as far as 80 kilometers to even have a 5% energy deficit because of somebody
Rosemary Barnes: else’s. Development makes a big deal. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well that’s all the time we’ve got to talk today, but I’ll be really interested to see how you go. If you do manage to, you know, get a partner to develop with to, to work with.
Rosemary Barnes: And I wanna hear you. Your results. Yeah. Thank
Jessica O’Connor: you. Yeah. I appreciate this this time. I obviously love talking about this stuff. So any opportunity. It’s great.
Rosemary Barnes: And I have with me here today, Brian Hill, he’s from Backman. And yeah, Brian, can you tell us what, what is what is Backman doing? What’s a history.
Brian Hill: Bachman is a 53 year old privately held company. That’s is a key automation provider for the wind industry. The company started in automation for industrial plastic manufacturing and was an early player in the wind business.
Brian Hill: The first 17,000 GE wind turbines have Bachman controls in. And over 120,000 wind turbines in the world have Bachman automation.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Right. So that’s a big, big base that you’ve got to start with. So what are you, what are you working on now? What are your exciting, exciting things that you’re, you’re
Brian Hill: working on?
Brian Hill: Well I’m the general manager for north America for Bachman and Bachman has two primary customer bases. One are the OEMs providing. Automation to manufacturers of wind turbines. And in my market, in, in north America, we’re focused on operating wind turbines and trying to extend the life have turbines achieved their planned life that when they were manufactured.
Brian Hill: And so we’re helping bring some of the older wind turbines into the 21st century and, and Power quality and cybersecurity are all important facets of, of what we’re helping bring these older turbines when that was a, not, not a focus when some of these were manufactured, you know, 10, 15 years ago.
Brian Hill: And so originally turbines were, when I first got involved in wind, you know, they said it would be a. 25 to 30 year turban life. And people were hoping, you know, if they took good care of ’em, they’d lived to be 40 years. And what we’re seeing is these turbines that were from that vintage need need some extra help in order to keep spinning.
Brian Hill: And in, in my mind too some of these older turbines are being repowered and, and being eliminated. If you’re concerned about the environment and you know, is that a really, if, would it be better to keep those running and improve them and rather than replacing them and all that effort and scrap and environmental, you know, impact yeah, that’s avoided.
Brian Hill: So okay.
Rosemary Barnes: So the reason why I I thought that you are an interesting company to, to talk to on the podcast was about your control system retrofit. Right? Okay. So can you tell me a bit about what that is and, and what circumstances that would be appealing?
Brian Hill: Sure. So yeah, our, our controls retrofit solutions are a, a primary focus for us.
Brian Hill: Reason being is. Our first entree into the market were turbines that where the OEM disappeared, they went out of business clipper turbines Z turbines or older turbines. And they’ve got a big fleet of, of turbines out there that no longer were being supported. And we had owners coming to us asking for help and trying to like, what do we do now?
Brian Hill: We, we have down turbines, we have controls. We, we have spare parts that. You know, we can’t get, and so we were responding to that market
need.
Rosemary Barnes: And are these turbines that your control systems were already in
Brian Hill: or no. No. So what, what we would do is completely rip out the old controls and put in our, our, our Bachman system, a, a modern compartment type control system.
Brian Hill: And so. Now, and we would also replace the operating software on the turbine too. So, so the original OEM software was no longer in there. And we created a template based on IEC standards for operating a wind turbine. So we can pretty much do a retrofit for any, any wind turbine. The caveat to that is there has to be enough of ’em because there’s a fair amount of engineer.
Brian Hill: Effort to figure out all the IO and, and controls requirements for individual turban. So it, it can’t be one of those orphan turbines where there’s only two in the country and mm-hmm so,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah. Okay. And one of the reasons why this you know, caught my attention was because. In Australia. I know I just removed back there recently.
Rosemary Barnes: And I had only been working in, in Europe and north America before. And they’re doing things a bit differently in the wind industry in Australia. Most of the developers you know, it’s like a, a financial company, a bank or something, and they’re not operating the wind farm themselves. They own it. And.
Rosemary Barnes: They’ve got a service agreement, the OEM typically, and through my consulting company, pad consulting I’m often in there trying to, you know, resolve issues that they, they might have usually with you know, the blade quality. But it can also be operational stuff. Right. And I’ve noticed that the owner of the winter turbine just has absolutely no, no capability.
Rosemary Barnes: Really know what’s going on in their, their winter turbine. I can’t even, you know, I’ll recommend, you know, putting a sensor into, to monitor a, you know, a fault and, and see how it’s progressing and the OEM with the service contract. It just just says no. And I’d feel that was crazy that, you know, they would, they would own a winter turbine and not, not have the capability to.
Rosemary Barnes: To even install a monitoring system in there. And I was talking to one of your colleagues yesterday and he mentioned that that’s something that you have actually helped help companies with,
Brian Hill: right? Yeah. One of the interesting things in the, in the wind space that I, someone told me many years ago earlier on in my wind career, when you and I was developing wind farms and, and looking at buying wind turbines, According to the OEMs.
Brian Hill: You never really own a wind turbine. You, you, we let you use our wind turbine and it’s a, it’s a weird you know, dichotomy or whatever, the correct way to describe it. But it, we have a lot of customers that are frustrated with that scenario and they, they want the control back in their hands. They paid, you know, huge money for.
Brian Hill: Huge assets and want, want to be able to control them and have be able to make those changes you’re talking about. So what our solution does, it, it’s more of an open system and we, we allow those types of things, extra sensors to be added extra solutions to be added on the back end of the, the you know, control scheme.
Brian Hill: So yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: And does it always involve ripping out the whole, like all of the control hardware? Or can you
Brian Hill: yeah, yeah, there’s variations of that. So it kind of depends. We have SCADA solutions that, that can replace the OEM SCADA system that will allow you know, similar thing. And it, it allows that IO and, and the different.
Brian Hill: Extra components to be added on. So again, it kind of puts the control back in the hands of the, of the owners. Again, a lot of these what we hear from a lot of owner operators, they’re very frustrated with that, you know, lack of control and, and
Rosemary Barnes: And cause there’s a lot of interesting things developments happening in the operation of wind farms as a whole now, you know, like I, I, my background part of my background’s in aerodynamics, so I’m really interested in like wake steering.
Rosemary Barnes: Right, right. And that sort of thing. So I guess at this would be a way that you could, you could get that capability and in existing wind farm,
Brian Hill: is that right? So well, so there’s it. We can provide that with, with one of our controlled retrofits. So. To be able to do that with an one of the OEM’s operating system.
Brian Hill: You, you would have to get their permission and that’s the, the beauty of our retrofits is again, it puts the control back in, in your hands. So we, we now have an open you know, parameters and, and modification of, of the turbine is now in your, your hands with our retrofit. There’s I’m unaware of any OEMs that would allow you to, to make a, make a major change like that in, in wake steering, unless they’re buying it and then they’re going to add their markup on it.
Brian Hill: And so we’re, we’re, we just had a meeting earlier today with a company that has a a grant from the, I think, national science foundation to actually try to, I. Wake steering and extreme seeking you know, modifications to the, to the operation of the wind turbine. And they were asking, do you think there’s any way, you know, we could do this with a, a turbine.
Brian Hill: That’s not one of the one of the OEM, you know, standard operating systems. And I, I can’t think of any and that’s so we’re, we’re gonna be talking to them about testing out. There are algorithms on, on one of the turbines that we’re retrofiting okay.
Rosemary Barnes: But it sounds like it’s a big, a big investment, right?
Rosemary Barnes: You’re not going to, you are not gonna change your whole control system just to do small, small tweaks, I guess this is for, for major. Yeah. So major problems I wanna
Brian Hill: solve. Well so the, one of the ones that we’ve we’ve retrofitted our Mitsubishi 1008 turbines. Awesome. Not, not trying to cash shade on any, any of the OEMs they’re one that Mitsubishi has more or less pulled out of the us market.
Brian Hill: Customers are complaining about support and lead time on, on getting replacement parks. And so those they’re looking at turbines down. So all of a sudden you know, these modifications are, you know, kind of pay for themselves. Mm-hmm because. You’re talking about availability of turbines and, and yeah, I guess if you more efficient
Rosemary Barnes: operation months, months months of downtime.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And that’s exactly what expensive we’re
Brian Hill: talking and, and high cost for replacement of, of the, you know, these older control modules. Yeah. So that’s where some of the economies come in and then the opportunity to more efficiently. Run the turbine, having the access to those wake steering and, and improvements.
Brian Hill: What, what we try to do with our retrofits are improve the the wind wind curve. The basically the the cut in speed and the level of operation on the, on the wind curve and decrease the loads on the turbine. One of the one, one of the common things that we’ve seen too is these various improvements from some of the OEMs are now creating extra stress on the turbines and decreasing the, the long term life of the, the turbine with the, with low and with uh, with loads.
Brian Hill: So we’re trying to extend those lives with, with these improvements and improve the, the economics. So, yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: okay. Well, I think that’s all, we’ve got time to talk about today, but it’s really interesting. I wasn’t aware that it was possible to yeah. Replace the whole whole control system. So I definitely, you know, where, where you’ve got winter by owners in a bit of a desperate situation, it looks like there is, there is something so they can do
Brian Hill: about it’s late at the end of
Rosemary Barnes: the time.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. okay. Well, yeah. Thanks so much for coming in and
Brian Hill: talking with us tonight. Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time.
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Allen Hall: So the largest us manufacturer of automobiles in the United States, general motors is now in, has investing into wind shockingly because it doesn’t seem like something they’re ready to do yet.
Allen Hall: But GM also has a, a, a venture part of their business. And the GM venture group has invested in a 10 million round with wind catching systems. And if everybody remembers seeing the wind catching system, it’s that large grid of wind turbines on a, basically a bunch of steel rails, it’s about as tall as they Eiffel tower.
Allen Hall: And there’s multiple wind turbines installed on this sort of vertical grid. And they, they got other investors in it too. They have fur north, north energy and have fun. And, and they’re trying to commercialize this massive wall of wind turbines by 2027. And GM’s chief sustainability officer Kristen, sorry.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Kristen Siemens said as GM continues to move forward. Towards an all electric future. It’s critical that we simultaneously drive the transition of the grid to low carbon energy sources. So what GM is essentially saying is we’re gonna be building electric cars. We need to make more electricity.
Allen Hall: We’ll invest in, in some electricity generating ventures. This is a little bit unique. And I, I, I wonder if it’s not the last time we’re gonna see something like this or are guys, or do, do we think more. Companies outside of the normal wind energy spectrum are gonna be investing and putting some money where their
Rosemary Barnes: mouths are.
Rosemary Barnes: I think. Yes. And I think so based on the companies that get in touch with my consulting company, I alert consulting. We do due diligence into renewable energy technologies. And this is one that I get inquiries about a lot. So I, I do see a lot of people. I mean, there’s a lot of money that wants to go into clean.
Rosemary Barnes: And they don’t, you know, they might have big engineering team in house, but they don’t have the, you know, the like industry specific knowledge to be able to say, you know, are there this company we’re thinking of been investing in, are they, do they claim stack up? You know, is it accurate? Are they representing their competitors accurately?
Rosemary Barnes: Is this thing they claim is a huge innovation. Is it really the, you know, claims that they’re making about improved deficiency, reduced costs you are, they plausible and. . Yeah, so I, I definitely seeing a lot of, a lot of companies maybe in related industries that want to get into renewables. And, and I think that’s great because we, we do need more investment in these technologies, especially big, bold ones, like wind catching.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe not wind catching specifically, but you know, companies that are trying to do things differently. I think there’s a big place for that. And I don’t think big innovations in wind energy are gonna come from, you know, the major manufacturers making incremental changes.
Joel Saxum: Well, one of the concepts here from their some of their press releases is GM is actually going to give, lend some project management expertise to them as well.
Joel Saxum: So they’re actually getting into the development process with them. Whereas some of the other larger monies coming into renewable energies are in the form of PPAs and some other things that will, of course spur the energy, the industry along, but GM is actually saying, we want to go and be partners with these guys.
Joel Saxum: We wanna help them out. We wanna lend some of our project management expertise to, to further this technology. And I, I think that’s F.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Is it really helpful though? I mean, my first instinct is, Ooh, I’m not sure I want that. Just because it’s, it’s so difficult. Jump industries. It’s, it’s nearly impossible for someone who’s been working in automotive to then move into win because they just think differently.
Allen Hall: They’re they’re not the same industry. They, they work totally differently. They have different regulatory requirements have different engineering requirements. It just seems so difficult to do. I mean, the thought is great, obviously in providing some meaning procurement, I think that could really help, you know, buyers.
Brian Hill: pretty much the same. No better where you
Joel Saxum: think if you have someone that’s yeah. say someone is a, you know, a six Sigma black belt. There you go. Or, or has a, a project management specialty or something. Yeah. That, that can transfer from, you know, in technology. If you do technology development at GM, you can probably manage technology development for something else.
Joel Saxum: Totally agree. I just, I just like the idea that they’re, they’re, they’re not just saying here’s some money. See what you can come up with. They’re saying here’s some money let’s stand next to you on the podium here and try to drive this thing to the
Allen Hall: finish line. Yeah, it does. It does stem a lot of good to have someone as large as GM standing next to them.
Allen Hall: It should bring in more revenue you or not revenue, but more venture capital it’ll drive venture capital, for sure.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Well, I think that some of the most successful VC. Money injection into companies is when they have people also holding their hand, instead of just angel investors that give a bunch of people money and say, see what you can come up with in five years, when you look at these different groups you know, like say like Chevron technology, ventures and stuff, a lot of times they’ll, they’ll help them along and, and lend some expertise and, and whatever through the process.
Joel Saxum: And those are the ones that you see it to be a little bit more successful, I guess, in. So we’re
Allen Hall: interesting development on the solar front. And I know we don’t talk about solar all the time, but I thought this was a, a new novel piece in the solar industry where a number of companies are creating a consortium to support a domestic solar manufacturing effort.
Allen Hall: So there’s several companies, AEs, ClearWay, energy groups, Cypress Creek, renewable. And de Shaw renewable investments are creating a consortium to purchase somewhere between six and seven gigawatts of crystal and Silicon solar modules annually. So that’s a decent number of, of solar panels and it’s called a us solar buyer consortium.
Allen Hall: And the whole intent is to support domestic solar chain expansion and to drive the so America. Solar industry and. As part of this start of this process. So they they’ve launched an RFP request for proposal to find qualified manufacturers in the states who can form a longer term partnership. So they wanna take some of the smaller solar manufacturers.
Allen Hall: Cause there are no real large solar manufacturers in the us and they want to see if they can expand capacity and create an a local American solar manufacturing base. That is really unique. And because we don’t have a lot of solar manufacturing in the United States that recent numbers from 2020 said there was about 230,000 people involved in the solar industry from start to finish from making solar panels to installing them own homes and buildings.
Allen Hall: But roughly 13% of those were actually in the manufacturing sector. So about 30,000 jobs were in actual solar panel manufacturing at some stage, which is relatively small, right. Tesla has. What three times that number of employees easily making cars. So this is a, a different way of thinking about the problem and, and it’s, it’s basically taking it out of the federal government and state government’s hands and putting into private industry.
Allen Hall: Now, my question is to both of you, is, does this same sort of event or consortium form in the wind industry, because they’re really. Are not big long term players in the us in terms of wind OEMs, GE, which was based in the United States, they moved their headquarters to Paris, France. So Vestus Nordex GE Sulan.
Allen Hall: What are the other ones? All the Chinese manufacturers. They’re not in the states. They’re not based in the states. We really don’t have a long term us wind manufacturer. Does this happen on the wind? .
Brian Hill: I
Joel Saxum: mean, I, I think the offshore push could drive some of that. And some of the reason being is a lot of those components are so large that they need to be built Keyside.
Joel Saxum: So it’s it kind of kickstart the idea of a little bit more local manufacturing or, or us based manufacturing. The, I, the idea to me though is, oh man, I hope . I really do hope because to me, this is like last week we talked about the DPA act the. Production act from biting. Yeah. Putting 545 million into renewable energy and whatnot.
Joel Saxum: This solar group putting together comes, it’s a private industry equivalent. Right. Basically. Right. But 10 times the investment. Yes. Right. So if the private industry can come up with 10 times the investment for, for solar man, what a great thing for, for wind. You know, we do have some here, we do build some blades in the United States.
Joel Saxum: Sure. Yeah. But quite, quite a bit of that is right across the border in. Mexico. And I know there is some blade manufacturing for some of the east coast wind going on up in Canada. Right. But I do know there’s, there’s a couple little things kicking off on the east coast to, to jumpstart it, but I I’d have to push it over to Rosemary.
Joel Saxum: What do you think about the United States coming up with 6 billion to inject into the wind manufacturing? .
Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting. I, cuz we don’t have manufacturing of, of a lot of stuff in Australia. And we used to have, there was one, I think there was investors factory here and it closed because the investment environment was so dire that was in the.
Rosemary Barnes: Early two thousands. I think that that happened. So I have been interested the whole time that I was working at LM wind power. I was, you know, every time I would go around to the different factories, I’d be like, you know, so, so why is there a factory here? And what is it that, what conditions do you need to get a, a factory?
Rosemary Barnes: . And so one of the ones that spent a lot of time at was gas bay in Canada, actually, I think that’s probably my favorite, favorite factory I went to is so beautiful there and really, really nice yeah. People. And that was a local guy who had, you know, left the area to go to university and, you know, just really wanted to get some manufacturing in his area.
Rosemary Barnes: It’s an area that is, you know, mostly defined by seasonal work otherwise. And so, you know, they really wanted the jobs. And so. He, he pushed and lobbied and government and, and that sort of thing. And generally the conditions that you need is one like some sort of like big nearby demand to service. Two, the government does often the local government does sweeten the deal.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, they’ll give the land, make the land available for the factory for free or, you know, something else along those lines. And I think, you know, something that’s in the favor of local manufacturing everywhere. Is that wind turbines are getting huge, like really, really huge shipping the, you know, supply chains and logistics have been problematic for everything.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think that there’s a lot of headaches to be solved by manufacturing locally. I think that’s gonna help a lot and yeah, a bit of government support especially like build a wind turbine factory. You don’t wanna use it for a year and then close it down, you know? So you want that certainty that there’s still, you’re still gonna be making a product that people want in five years, maybe, you know, 10 years would be nice.
Rosemary Barnes: I think that those conditions combined is what’s needed. That’s
Allen Hall: gonna do it for this week’s uptime energy podcast. Thanks for listening and make sure to follow Rosemary’s YouTube channel, where there’s always great new content. And we’ll see you here next week on the uptime wind energy podcast.
