In this episode we chat about long duration energy storage – what does the future hold for these types of batteries and power delivery systems? A small floating wind turbine capsized after being hit by a big wave – is this a setback for floating wind? Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina have banded together on wind power – what does this mean for the east coast? We also talk more about winglets and blade design, spurred by a great user question.
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TRANSCRIPT EP34 – Long Duration Energy Storage, East Coast States Form Wind Energy Partnership, Winglets & More
Welcome back I’m Allen hall I’m Dan Blewett and this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running alright welcome back this is the uptime wind energy podcast episode 34 and on today’s show got a lot of news to cover and a couple cool engineering things to talk about so number one we’re going to chat about Maryland Virginia and North Carolina banding together to help further along offshore wind projects in the future we’ll also talk about a recent wind turbine of a floating a small version capsized uh by a pretty big wave so obviously some big engineering implement uh implications there uh we’ll also chat a little bit about a wind power uh cargo ship concept that’s pretty interesting just here on the topic of you know renewables in general and then our engineering segment we’ll talk about uh wind turbine oems pushing services remote uh different offerings that they’ve got going on just to try to boost revenue some long-term energy storage solutions in theory and lastly we had a great listener question about winglets and wing design and so we’re going to chat through a bunch of the aerodynamics of that. So Allen first thing on the on the docket here maryland virginia and north carolina want to basically make their supply chain easier in the future and sort of band together to get offshore wind projects up and running and uh so what are your thoughts on this little alliance well dan i think that makes sense that we some of the states are trying to connect up and utilize resources a lot of times in the united states it’s sort of 50 separate countries and it’s not supposed to be set up that way but it is it is and some of the uh interstate commerce can get a little funky i mean particularly when you’re dealing with offshore projects that will immediately involve the federal government so if you’re smart you want to bring in a consortium of states that all have the same approach so you can plead your case to congress so i think it makes sense to do it i wonder if they’re going to be developing uh some industry closer to the shoreline they’re very similar to what new jersey’s talking about because the opportunity to up and down the coastline on the northeast coastline to put big wind turbines out to sea is really good i think that the winds are as we’ve all been to the beach there there’s decent winds out that way so there’s a lot of power production could be had it could be out far enough that it wouldn’t be necessarily noticeable it has all those upsides to it and uh i think it makes a lot of sense because as we’re going to find out very quickly there’s going to be a big competition uh to provide power up and down the northeast corridor which is a huge power sucks so if you ever you ever see those pictures dan of of uh the united states at night time with all the lights to see where the population centers are so yeah basically from washington dc all the way up to boston is just one continuous streak of light so there’s a lot of power demand there and it makes sense to to add to that power demand by renewable resources if we can but uh it is interesting that the states are starting to band together because new jersey didn’t really do that and rhode island was going on their own also which rhode island is a really small state coastal state and massachusetts was sort of doing their own thing i’m gonna see more of this i think to see more of this consolidation happening pretty soon yeah well it also seems to make sense where it’s like hey well you guys put a factory in your state we’ll make another port we’ll do this thing you know it just seems like a pretty strong alliance where you can say hey let’s try to build x amount of jobs in each section in each state right and kind of just like share the wealth and also hopefully share a lot of the pain points and knowledge and say hey like what’s been working for you guys in north carolina well here in maryland we we had to solve this problem this way it just seems like i mean that’s how country should work right but you’re right i think it’s especially with all the election stuff going on it just seems like everyone’s out you know for themselves but this is a good seems like a really positive thing where hey let’s band together and make this all easier on one another right so yes so yeah smart move especially if you start to have issues right so speaking of which uh the second uh article so in so hurricane epsilon over in spain knocked down a scitec floating wind turbine just a small one i think it’s uh so 30 kilowatts so not a big guy but still we talked about this in the past which is you’re not gonna know a lot of you know if the engineering is going to hold up until it’s actually out there like what does this need to be withstand so what are your what are your thoughts here and about this uh this capsizing of this tournament well the at least initial reports indicate the the waves were 10 meter waves which is in america talk 30 a little over 30 feet ways those are some pretty good waves uh close to the coastline i mean that’s surfing weather in california they’d be thinking that’s awesome in hawaii but that’s not great for a wind turbine and if you start rocking and i think part of it is it’s just if you start that oscillating motion and the waves are coming at the right amount of time uh you can start adding and adding and adding to the overall pitch of the turbine and eventually it may just capsize over similar to if you remember in science class years ago they used to show that picture of the bridge i think it’s in washington state that was oscillating because of the wind the the wind’s coming down the valley and it oscillating oscillate oscillate and it just just broke apart it’s probably something very similar to it where just the the the timing of the waves added up to uh pushing the turbine over but still that what a mess was that the tacoma narrows bridge yeah yes that’s crazy the way that that thing just it just started getting worse and worse and then it was kind of like a harmonic situation where just it couldn’t possibly ever get right again no right and and that’s that’s what you want to watch out for in in the aircraft world is called flutter and wind turbine blades is called flutter you just get this harmonic built in it just keeps getting larger and larger and larger until something gives and stuff breaks yeah serious that’s scary well speaking of engineering so this really interesting concept ship it’s a it’s a potential cargo you know freight freight ship and uh for transatlantic cargo uh capacity and so this thing is it’s just a concept it’s called the uh the ocean bird really impressive website by the way so i don’t know if that gives it any any any credence here but their website if it’s half as nice as their website then you know it’s going to be a success but they say it’s going to be 200 meters long 40 meters high can go 10 knots on the atlantic uh and these 80 meter high sails are essentially just airfoils right so how is this going to work explain this to me it’s like a big sailboat essentially just a lot more aerodynamic and controlled in terms of the airfoil shape so they’re just they’re basically doing things like a wind turbine would do which is creating power thrust from the wind and you know you gotta cut under the wind and propel yourself forward so there’s a little bit of going back and forth in today’s ocean liners i think they kind of go a to b to get between the two ports but this thing is going to have to tack left and right as the winds are going much like when you watch a sailboat race similar to that but not using any energy or very little energy to to put the thing through the water if you don’t need your package immediately then this kind of ship makes sense right sort of longer term shipments or i wonder how much crew would even take it’s got to be or even a reduced amount of crew because there’s just a lot less operationally that’s happening on the ship without having a big motor on it yeah well you wonder if maybe they could have passengers as well on some of these freighters i i know i was just watching one of my favorite movies the royal tendon bombs and in the beginning they’re talking about one of the characters was just on a cruise ship in like a stateroom so i guess at least back in the day you could just kind of hitch a ride on the ship that was gonna be out to sea for a while yeah i don’t know much about that but you know this thing is also beautiful looking this concept so this big white like apple could have designed this ship but you wonder if it’s like hey you know freight it’s also pretty low maintenance so we can throw you know 100 rooms onto it and it can kind of be like double duty not like tons of amenities but seems like maybe that could work you know just like having a you know you have a commercial building downtown and the bottom floor is all retail and then everything above that is residential it could be the same kind of thing just float around from port to port is that is that your what you’re thinking i mean leisure travel travel like a blimp like a blimp like you don’t have to get there that fast when you get there you get there you know and it’s like good for the environment you feel good about yourself because it’s wind power but it’s a pretty cool concept and seems like there’s some money behind it so we’ll see if maybe i mean this country in 20 years could be wind-powered boats and will certainly be electric cars maybe evtol’s and tons of wind power i mean living in blimps would be pretty different we could who knows right we can’t tell the world is so chaotic right now who knows yeah tell you where i’m not going to be living is mars i’m definitely not going to mars well Elon may have something to say about that we’ll see no it’s terribly inhospitable it’s just like there’s nothing that appeals to me especially in COVID after people experience being stuck in their nice homes in america for a couple months who wants to go live in a bubble in in mars no one no literally no one anymore no
um so let’s move on to our our engineering segment here so wind turbine oems are trying to make more money obviously from their existing contracts so service revenue and obviously all these different remote diagnostics stuff like that siemens mesa renewable energy has a new model based diagnostic system so what are some of your takeaways on this is a viable way or are they just trying to like leech more money out of out of these wind farms or what’s what’s the overall business model here well it’s a service contract essentially and they’ll help you diagnose not only the siemens mesa wind turbines but other manufacturers wind turbines because they have a data set that can determine when things are going bad so they just basically put a bunch of instrumentation on the on the wind turbine and then monitor it and then as they see signals that look perturbed or have changed significantly they can flag that and probably provide some sort of data stream as to what has actually happened to a technician to go out and take a look which in my opinion makes a lot of sense most cars today have a very similar technology where the computer actually can diagnose what the problem is in the car which makes the cost of the repair go down but the the article was really odd i thought in that the operators really want nothing to do with it like if it doesn’t produce power then i don’t want it and i got to get that part of it but if we’re going to have a wind turbine operating for 20 years it seems to me the delta cost it’s got to be small enough where it doesn’t matter because you’re saving that you’re producing that much more power because you have the system on there i think that would make a difference to me because if you’re in the power production business having you constantly producing power is at the maximum capability of the of the turbine would what you’re there for so having systems that keep your turbine operating at its peak efficiency would make sense to me but there seems to be a little bit of pushback about it and maybe it’s a cost someone’s done the cost analysis on it maybe the costs are too high still it’s possible yeah and so is this just like siemens mesa renewable energy just wants to take care of themselves but there’s a lot of obviously like o m companies that want that contract too so is what’s the dynamic gonna look like between the two i mean is there gonna be is this like an easy win for these manufacturers or is this actually much more highly contested i i think it’s a lot like the internet world where there will be consolidation so every piece of new technology gets gobbled up by google or facebook or pick em apple doesn’t make any difference they all kind of get consolidated into larger corporations and the artificial intelligence community is having that same thing happen to it as there’s great ideas here here and here they get seen and microsoft buys them up and creates a spin-off of some sort but i i think that same thing thing is going to exist in in the detection business for wind turbines that you need mass right think about the servers you need to make this happen think about the the infrastructure you have to have to make this happen it has to be it’s almost like you have to have like an amazon web services providing that data stream of storage capability because you’re taking a lot of data a lot of data and i it would be hard for us to think that a smaller company would want to take that on maybe that’s where the disconnect is is that there is a lot of backside to that technology that is is not free and only if you have your company of scale like a ge or seems good mesa can you actually make that happen and maybe that’s the disconnect right now is that they don’t realize how much infrastructure it takes to actually do that technology yeah it kind of reminds me of the uh so i read the book about instagram’s founding earlier in the year which oh yeah i don’t use instagram or facebook but it kind of reminds me of that where instagram was growing their user base so fast it just really took off and facebook’s like look you have like nine employees 12 employees and you’re growing way too fast like we can help you with all this like we have we have the people the resources the servers like all that stuff like just just come along and obviously facebook got a great deal you know buying them for a billion ended up being really cheap back in you know compared to what instagram has become which right if facebook hasn’t had been strangling them instagram could have potentially become a bigger social network over time but uh i digress but kind of seems like the same thing where it’s like if you’re a really popular um you know maintenance company and yeah your like analytics stuff is growing and you want to add new software features and analytics features but that’s going to really scale up your server load and all the associated costs with that yeah so like hey just just let us buy you like you know we’ll take care of that come here buddy like we got you right it does it does seem reasonable because you think of data being free for you know people in the real world but it’s not it’s like free you know we do you know i do keyword research and stuff on our websites and they’re like there’s a fee every time it crawls the web right to search for new search scan new websites and that’s right scrape all that data and you just don’t think about that being a real thing but for those in the industry who are in tech and in the server world like all that stuff costs money it’s just we don’t see it right we don’t physically see it that’s why yeah so speaking of um things you don’t see and don’t think about energy storage so interesting article from green tech media what exactly is long duration energy storage so alan well i’ll let you answer that question so what is long duration storage and why should why should people care and why is this important going forward in the future well with renewable energy you’re it’s somewhat unpredictable as to when the energy will be created and it may not be necessarily used at its maximum capacity all the time when it’s operating so if you have excess capacity you like to be able to store that somewhere and then as demand rises you take that stored energy and apply it to the grid and provide energy so it’s a basically a stabilization factor as you as you need energy you pull it off this battery and so you it’s almost like a disconnect between the power generation source and the users you got this buffer in the middle which keeps everything stable right so the the renewable energies can operate at their peak and people can use it on demand that’s the thought process behind it but the problem is if you have to store large quantities of energy standard batteries decay over time so it’s just like having your car battery set out all winter long when you go to start the car it doesn’t may not work because batteries slowly leak most batteries slowly leak energy internally and the resistance inside the battery that’s essentially what happens so you’re always sort of leaking energy if you really don’t want to do that on a large scale you want to be able to store it and keep it so it doesn’t lose capacity over time because you may be sitting on that energy for a while the the issue really then is what is that battery technology that you can store massive amounts of energy at a relatively low cost without losing it and there hasn’t been many big players in that market and now they’re talking about essentially a group of MIT scientists from what i can tell is developing a a sulfur-based battery system
in a solution sulfur is one of the electrodes and then they’ve got a salt on the other side of the other electrode and oxygen is transferring that is a chemical energy that’s transferring back forth to the end of the cathode so it’s a storage battery and the the thing about using sulfur is sulfur is cheap uh unlike lithium which is not as cheap so lithium ion batteries are great storage high energy density and are great for things like cars because you just can’t have the world’s largest battery if you’re trying to put four people in a car you need it needs to have a very high energy density to it uh but the storage capability doesn’t be that long because it’s always plugged in right so even if lithium ions lose capacity over time they’re pretty much all plugged in whenever they’re parked well you don’t you can’t really do that so much on a on a grid storage system whatever energy i’ve stored in it you like to keep at least most of it so when the demand hits you can you can dump it and use it so it sounds like they’re developing a battery and it’s it’s been two three years now that they’ve been kicking this thing around that they’re trying to get to an industrial scale which is where the hard part is trying to get to industrial scale on a renewable energy battery storage system now if they crack that barrier then look out uh the bill gates of the world are going to go crazy the bezos of the world are and google’s they’re going to be grabbing at it like crazy because it’s an instant money maker it’s what it is because there’s if if we’re going to continue to build renewable energy systems around the world we’re going to need a storage system this would be perfect right and it doesn’t sound like the components are all that quote-unquote toxic so you may be able to do something locally in your home maybe even a smaller scale so this is interesting technology but we always get tricked about battery technology that we always have this great new battery technology it’s always three or four years away and we never ever seem to get to that point i’m wondering how far along this really is because um there’s a great need for it now and if it looks like it’s going to become the reality we need to get it going yeah well it sounds like i don’t know if this is a good analogy and i don’t know if an analogy is needed at this moment but kind of reminds me of like refrigerators you know as if you have a farm you can cultivate all this food but you can’t you know freeze it or you know dry it and eat it later you just have all this wasted food so it’s like well why’d we get all this trouble cultivating all this great food that then we have to just it just perishes and i guess that’s been the challenge with electricity yeah up until now like we’re now getting more bountiful with renewable energy so it’s like okay well what do we do with that well and the demand has gone up too so you got two problems that as developing economies continue to grow their demand for electricity is going to get higher and higher and higher especially if we want to try to keep down pollutants out of the air electricity is the way to do that right and so it stops people from burning wood and manure and all these other things so electricity is going to be the big demand for the world is is there a sufficient um and this is where the cost comes in if it and there’s just certain places on the planet where the price matters but not hugely so europe united states right but in uh south america and some countries in south america and some parts of parts of africa or india it’s important that that be scalable to and be efficient and low-cost enough that those kinds of systems can be installed there too that’s the the goal right this is the goal versus systems argument i’m going to make which is it’s great to have this goal and i understand where they’re going but you got to have the assistance in place to make it happen and and so far we haven’t really seen a system in place and as i always say start small build up take your time get to that larger scale we haven’t really seen a small scale development with this yet and we should be seeing it relatively soon if it’s going to be valid technology well we’re gonna wrap up our show with a really thoughtful uh listener question so thank you phil for number one for listening and sending us um your email so here’s his question and this is sort of in reference to one of our earlier episodes about uh winglets can we apply what we see on aircraft wings to win turbine blades you know he says he believes we can because obviously it’s an airfoil but his question is you know are the blade designer and arrow folks really trying to affect induced drag and the span wise flow or is the main focus is that the main focus and is it not so much about really killing vortex drag so alan you said you’ve done a lot of research on this question this past weekend yeah uh on wing design so where do you where do you fall on on what the goal of uh of winglets seems to be okay so so winglets are an interesting bit of technology aerodynamic technology and the first time i came across them was really in the aerospace community learjet was putting them on some of their jets as a fuel efficiency improvement supposedly it reduced the fuel burn by one to three percent and then you other aircraft started picking it up at the time that winglets were evolving and coming about it seemed to be derived somewhat by wind tunnel tests like at some of the nasa facilities and some probably some nasa research from what i can remember that uh were there was reduced fuel burn the question was why and i remember i remember in the aerodynamic community there was like a big debate back and forth if it really is a drag reduction thing or is it or is it mostly just that you’re making the wings a little bit longer so there’s a little more lift out there that was a debate early on on the aircraft side there’s also this aesthetic aspect to winglets and it just looks cool it looks futuristic and so i think a lot of the aircraft on the aircraft side the winglets were put on as a cool feature to make the aircraft look more modern and and customers wanted that ask for it so why not put it on the so the in on the on the aerodynamic side it probably has some advantage but it basically makes the wing longer if you think of it that way and there’s different reasons to do it on aircraft uh it has to do a lot with the size of the aircraft the existing wing structure and how much when you put an aerodynamic feature out towards the the tips that can twist which is what happens you can damage the wing structure so you you’re limited by what you can do there on a wind turbine uh the winglets can do similar things it basically makes the blades longer but on a wing on a wind turbine there’s really no physical constraints there just make the blade longer just go straight out with it so the the curvature of the winglet is a piece that yeah if you’re limited if there’s some sort of restriction on the rotor diameter by regulation code whatever and you want to increase the span of the wing you would could use a winglet this is very similar to what the 737s do that the 737s and the airbus a320s put these winglets on to make the span a little bit longer look right a little more lift without increasing the overall span of the wing so that you can still get in the same slot at the gate and also there’s there’s pilot issues about costs and prices for pilots you pay the pilots based on the size of the airplane so not increasing the wingspan keeps the pilot prices down costs down but on a wind turbine i’m not sure it makes a huge amount of sense as just basically making the blade longer scabbing on a a longer strip of wing blade to catch more air to create more power that seems like that would be the right answer because just like on a wing an aircraft wing a wind turbine blade is manufactured to handle certain amount of loads and there’s a lot of testing that happens on a wind turbine blade and the flexing side the fatigue side and the twisting that can happen and when you put an aerodynamic piece out on the end of that you can really there’s a lever there right and there’s a twisting moment that can happen and you can uh break leading trailing edges open and do some other things you wouldn’t really consider because uh the wind turbine blade is not designed for those loads out there like that so you got to be careful uh and as we see more winglets added on to wind turbines it can’t obviously it can provide that aerodynamic lengthening of the blade but it comes with a risk on the structural side and on the lightning side for that matter so can we apply the aerodynamic efficiencies that we see on aircraft yes in fact if you look at the newest aircraft from boeing on the 787 which is not particularly new but the the boeing triple seven they do not have vertical winglets on them they are tapered they’re tapered wings so they stay in the same plane as the wing there’s no vertical component to them uh that’s evidently from the aerodynamic testing the computational dynamic testing that boeing has done is realize they don’t need the vertical component of it and they don’t need to load the stress on the composite wings that they have which are very similar to wind turbine blades so i’m wondering if the wind turbine industry and the winglets is going to fade over time they’re just going to stick with straight blade extensions unless there’s some overall code restriction yeah well i’m not sure what percentage of wind turbines would even have winglets it doesn’t seem like it’s that popular of a of a power curve upgrade it seems like it’s done but it doesn’t seem like it’s crazy i don’t know i think as the blades get older and the the turbines sort of lose efficiency as we’ve seen in reports where the the efficiency of the turbines decreases in some cases a couple percentage points a year making the rotor diameter larger is a way to bring back that power that you would lose otherwise so and the cost to add on blade extensions can’t be all that much but it’s got to be brought with the structural aspect to make sure we’re not inducing any weird stress loading into the existing blade structure that would cause a failure so i do think you’re going to see more and more extensions happen over time as we try to extend the lifetime of the wind turbines
all right we’re going to wrap up today’s episode of uptime if you’re new to the show welcome if you’re a regular here thank you for your continued support please subscribe to the show and leave a review on itunes spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts don’t forget to check out the weatherguard lightning tech youtube channel for video episodes full interviews and short clips from each show for Allen and all of us at weatherguard stay safe and we’ll see you next week
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