Germany’s RWE is building the world’s largest floating offshore wind farm in the North Sea, which will be powered by floating solar. The pilot is intended to jumpstart commercialization, which should begin in 2023. Is this a good idea, and if so, where does it make sense? How fossil fuels will continue to be integrated into renewable energy is a sticky subject, and definitely worth discussing. Speaking of integrating technology, Toyota introduced a portable hydrogen cartridge that might make swapping batteries as easy as picking up a new propane tank.
Meanwhile, even as Norway’s Petroleum & Energy Ministry is researching energy transition opportunities for the country, it’s questioning the profitability of Dogger Bank. And Power Curve CTO Nicholas Gaudern explains how Dragon Scales put a new spin on vortex generators.
Visit Power Curve at http://powercurve.dk/
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Uptime 126
Allen Hall: Everybody welcome back to Uptime. We have a great show for this week. We’re gonna talk about floating solar and why Rosemary does not like floating solar and then we’re gonna look at floating wind that is powering oil and gas rigs off the coast of Norway, which Rosemary again, doesn’t like, but then we’re gonna talk about something RO Rosemary really doesn’t like, which is Toyota making hydrogen capsules.
Allen Hall: You can take home and power your microwave with, and then we’ll have a guest interview with Nicholas Gaudern CTO of Power Curve where we’ll discuss the next generation of vortex generators so stay tuned. We’ll be back after the music,
Allen Hall: German energy firm, RWE is investing in a pilot project centered around the deployment of a floating solar technology up in the north sea. And they’re calling it a floating solar park and it’s gonna be installed off the waters off of the coast of Belgium.
Allen Hall: It’s gonna be a half a megawatt peak plant and the company that’s developing this floating solar system, I guess the solar system does that sound right? that sounds odd. This company is named Solar Duck and it’s a floating platform. So it’s a it Rosemary, if you haven’t seen this, it’s a, it’s a triangular set of solar panels on three legs that float above the, the, the surface of the ocean and they connect together.
Allen Hall: Kinda like Legos in a, in a sense they kind of click together. So it’s a floating, moving platform with a bunch of floats on it, and then they anchor it to the ocean floor on the corners. So you got this big triangular floating. Oh, I guess they can mix making into different shapes, I suppose. You got this big floating thing out in the ocean that is collecting solar energy so that the goal of solar duct is to use this demonstration to show that they can do this on, on a grander scale.
Allen Hall: And I guess other companies are doing it. There’s an energy firm. The Portuguese energy firm EDP is is opening a five megawatt floating solar park. So there’s, there’s more than one company doing this. Solar Duck is based in the Netherlands, at least that’s what they show up on, on Google that may be based in other places, but that’s what it shows for.
Allen Hall: Shows them. Does, but Rosemary, does this make any sense as do we need floating solar?
Rosemary Barnes: I, I have actually just recently put floating solar on my list of things that I have to cover because it, I have never seen the point, but. There are enough projects like this enough serious money going into them that I feel like I have to engage more.
Rosemary Barnes: It, I think it’s just because E especially for offshore, I can understand it in you know, in hydro reservoirs. That makes more sense to me cuz one it’s a much less harsh operating environment. Two, it saves a bunch of problems, existing problems with the. Hydro or pump hydro. So, you know, it’ll reduce evaporation.
Rosemary Barnes: You’ve already got the connections there at electrical connections there, and you’ve already got maintenance crews that are gonna be going out there. And I. I can see that. Yeah, you get a bit more better efficiency from solar panel. If you’ve got it on water, then it’s being called and yeah, something that I covered with, I think Glen, Ryan’s been on this show too.
Rosemary Barnes: I, I went and had a look at his son of eight system which is all about cooling solar panels to get better efficiency out of them. And it can make quite a, quite a difference. You can get some something out of it there. And then the other benefit would be that you’re not taking up land in places that are land constrained.
Rosemary Barnes: I guess that’s one kind of benefit that doesn’t sound so valuable to me because we’ve got heaps of heaps of land land around in Australia, just waiting to put solar panels on, you know, whether it’s on people’s roofs or, you know, just in areas. You can combine it with agriculture so, yeah, there’s some benefits, but putting them offshore, just having this flexible, constantly moving electrical connections.
Rosemary Barnes: Offshore salty environment. It just sounds horrible. horrible to maintain just absolutely horrible. And so to me it always looked like way more trouble than it’s worth. Just put them on land or yeah. On some fresh, fresh water where you, you need a solution to evaporation. Yeah. But like I said, so many.
Rosemary Barnes: So many of these projects are popping up that I feel like maybe the economics has changed and I need, need to revisit and reassess my, you know, my interpretation of all the trade offs involved. I can
Joel Saxum: see some advantages in the, in the, on the development side simply because as, as we move forward into wanting to make the, the actual energy transition more, more green in, in marketing we also want it to actually be more green.
Joel Saxum: Right. So when you do an onshore. Photo like utility scale photo V take park, a solar park. There’s when you look at these things, there’s 10 pile drivers out there. There’s a half a dozen, D seven to D 10 big dozers burning diesel fuel you know, scaring up the earth and, and it takes a long time to install these things.
Joel Saxum: You know, you might be a six month project to, to install you know, a large scale. So if you can build these things key side in a facility that exists and then dump ’em in the water and go out, that might be more. Or, or, or how do you say, like, I guess, less carbon intensive to build them in the development stage.
Joel Saxum: But on the other side of this one here, offshore, I. I’m with you, Rosemary. I don’t see any way this thing survives when they talk about going, if you’re saying in a, in a pump hydro reservoir, that’s one thing you might get 2, 3, 4 foot waves in that you’re offshore in the north sea. I mean, you can have 20 meter rollers coming through like that.
Joel Saxum: There’s nothing that can survive that. Yeah, no
Rosemary Barnes: mention salt water.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So does the system make sense from a political standpoint because it’s not seen that’s. I think what we’re seeing in a big push for offshore wind to the United States is that gets it off the land. So there’s less complaints from my local constituents.
Allen Hall: I don’t have to hear them complainant about the wind turbine in their backyard. So there’s, there’s a big push for offshore wind in the states. Does solar have to deal with that same thing? Like where are you gonna put off? Where are you gonna put solar in New York? You’re gonna put it off shore. Where are you gonna put it in New Jersey?
Allen Hall: Where are you gonna put it in North Carolina? Where are you gonna put it in South Carolina? Where? Right. So does it then lend itself politically to be an easier solution where I don’t have to go find these places on land to develop just check it out in the ocean. Does that make sense?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that that’s the only big part of it.
Nicholas Gaudern: That makes sense.
Allen Hall: yeah, I know we talked about years ago. No, not years ago. How long we’ve been doing this podcast? Like two years, maybe it was a year ago. We were talking about the , the electricity in the cables on offshore affecting animals little sea creatures at the brown crab. If I’m remember right off the coast of the UK would get confused.
Rosemary Barnes: Magnetic fail. .
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It confuses as of where to go that just kind of just stop, stop moving. Are we gonna do something similar to what these floating. Platforms are, are, are shark sharks gonna be attracted? There’s a whale gonna come up and bump into them. Did you see that picture of the whale jumping on that boat the other day?
Allen Hall: I think that was in the United States where the whale just flopped onto the boat. I think off the coast of New York. Yeah. Like what, there’s just so many weird things can happen in the ocean. I’m sort of with Joel here where I think of the sea as being this really scary, terrible place. When it, when the weather gets nasty, I don’t know what lives out there.
Allen Hall: It’s hard. Assume they lose boats out there all the time. How are they not going to have difficulty with solar panels?
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe they Don. Well, I think that there are a few of these floating solar offshore floating solar projects or pilot projects that have been installed around the world. So at least soon we should have information about what the maintenance is like in, in reality, cuz at the moment I think most people talking about it, I just, you know, doing thought experiments, imagining what it’s gonna be like.
Rosemary Barnes: Right. So. Yeah, I think we, this is really one of those things where you need to just put it out there and see, see what happens.
Joel Saxum: I was just thinking, it makes sense that R is doing it then, because you would almost, you, you would have to self-insure it. So there has to be someone doing it that has the amount of capital that if they had something went wrong, they would eat it.
Joel Saxum: Right? Like no insurance. Company’s gonna pick up the insurance on one of these right now. Yeah. If
Allen Hall: we can ensure winter Turman for lightning. Have a hard time with solar panels, not on the ocean, I think, but you know, recently you saw that Hawaii is, is just in the process of shutting down. I think it’s its last coal plant.
Allen Hall: They’re they’re taking the last couple deliveries of coal to the islands of Hawaii. And they’re really concerned about that because that’s a significant producer of electricity for the, for the island. Maybe solar floating solar makes sense in some place like. I mean, that’s, that’s a solution. I, I know they have bad weather there too, but I think there are a lot of island nations where this Puerto Rico, Haiti, where this may make a lot of sense.
Allen Hall: Because it’s sort of, you just drag it in and connect it.
Rosemary Barnes: I think it will all depend on land availability for onshore solar. I’d be really surprised if offshore solar ever competes with onshore solar, where it’s possible to put it in. I know it’s a little bit more efficient because it’s cool. But other than that, it’s all downsides.
Rosemary Barnes: And some, you know, big downsides. And in fact, if you go on the solar duck website, land scarcity is the only, the only point that they, they raise about why you need. To put solar panels offshore. So I’m imagining that it could make sense for places like like really densely populated islands, like, you know, Japan, Singapore places like that.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe they can get a little bit. A little bit more energy security, a little bit more domestic energy if they yeah. Go for floating solar. In addition to the floating wind or, yeah, I guess any kind of offshore wind, you know, a few, a
Joel Saxum: few years ago out in California, they were in some of their water reservoirs.
Joel Saxum: They were dumping truckloads of these black plastic balls. The black plastic balls were dumped into these reservoirs to combat evaporation evaporation of the water. Right? So maybe this is a solution that can help places like that as well. And that, I mean, this of course is not onshore. This is or not offshore, this is onshore, but it’s going back to the same thing.
Joel Saxum: Rosemary said, if it’s in a pump hydro facility or something of that sort I think it makes sense to do that. Mm-hmm and you’re not gonna have the wild weather and things. So you have that little bit of cooling. You’re maybe saving some evaporation in the water supply. So I like that idea, but I don’t, I just don’t know about the
Rosemary Barnes: OC.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I think that one place where offshore does make sense and Alan, you’re gonna be surprised to hear me say this, but for offshore oil and gas projects. I think that there, I know that they do need remote, renewable electricity, and you might say, oh, well, you know, we’re in an energy transition. There won’t be any fossil fuel extraction in you know, in 20, 30 years.
Rosemary Barnes: But if you look at that net zero roadmaps, you know, from the IEA, for example, there is still a bunch of, of fossil fuels. And a large chunk of it is not for burning it’s for, you know, make making stuff. Plastics for example which, you know, we’re probably still gonna need in, in 2050, and then there’s some hard to abate sectors that are, you know, gonna have to be yeah applications where we still will be burning fossil fuels and then offsetting the emissions, but there’s a lot of energy needed for processing.
Rosemary Barnes: And at the moment, you know, They’re burning gas or, or something, some other fossil fuel to get that energy. And I know that plenty of these oil and gas companies are looking to you know, to decarbonize at least that part of their of their emissions. And it’s really easy to just kind of get really cynical about these companies.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, just call it all greenwashing . But we are, the reality is that we do need these industries that at least these industries are highly likely to still exist in a net zero world. And so they also need to be cleaned up and it might not be, you know, a huge part of the energy transition, but. There are gonna be, need to be offshore renewable generation and energy storage are, are gonna be some, you know, big, large niches, I think applications.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, sure. Yeah. I would suggest that that would be a good, good starting place for a tech like this because those companies have, have enough money to
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 at weather guard, wind.com/news,
Rosemary Barnes: to deal with a, you know, a pilot project that, you know, ends up costing more than they expected needing more maintenance than they expected.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So just two pieces of this, and this is a good bridge to the next. We get a lot of comments on YouTube from people who are saying well, wind turbines have petroleum products. When the wind turbine fell over in Sweden last week, they dumped a bunch of oil into the landscape. Yeah. We, everybody realizes that there’s petroleum and wind.
Allen Hall: Everybody realizes there’s petroleum making solar cells. Everybody gets that. It gets us the question of, and Rosemary and I, and Joel are not saying we’re gonna eliminate oil. I don’t think that’s the question at all. The question is how do you find a good balance, everybody? To assume engineers are hardliners in anything I think is a wrong move.
Allen Hall: Engineers are probably the most common sense level headed of people you’re ever gonna run across. They’re. We’re trying to find solutions for everybody, right. We’re trying to, to, to help the environment, provide electricity, keep the lights on. make sure you have a car to drive to work. Those kind of things.
Allen Hall: It it’s, this it’s a, there’s a very hard line. It’s like there’s. Two levels here either. You’re for petroleum and you’re and you’re trying to destroy the earth or you’re against petroleum and your environmental nut job. there is, there is, there is, it’s just weird right now. I, and maybe it’s the ization of, of the world, but it just sucks because you like to be able to have.
Allen Hall: Real discussions with people about what your future is likely to be, and we’re missing the we’re missing those discussions. And it, it said it becomes political. And that’s one thing that we’re not on this show is not trying to become political, but I go back to your original point, Rosemary Ecuador is developing wind turbines, floating wind turbines, which is actually the largest offshore floating wind farm off the course of Norway.
Allen Hall: And it’s going to power of all things. Oil rigs, oil and gas rigs out in the ocean. And so this, this project is about a hundred megawatt project, about a half, a million dollars for the whole thing. And it’s going to keep these oil and gas fields with electricity and it’s gonna provide about a third of their.
Allen Hall: Annual power needs. So they they’re putting out Siemens C Mesa 8.6 megawatt machines, which are pretty good size machines and they’re installed on floating concrete structures. And I didn’t understand this floating concrete doesn’t float to me. But it’s on floating concrete structures that are sort of interconnected ensure and anchoring system and is supposed to start producing power in a couple of weeks.
Allen Hall: Now, again, going back to your point, Rosemary oil and gas rigs use a lot of use, a lot of energy. If we can do it more cleanly than they are in the past. That’s awesome. But there’s a big pushback against this saying, well, why are you helping these oil and gas rigs off the coast of Norway? Don’t there Norwegians know you can’t use oil and gas.
Allen Hall: Why are we helping them? And I think that is what are your 2
Rosemary Barnes: cents. I do have 2 cents on this. on the Norwegian
Rosemary Barnes: and I have to start by saying that Norway is, is literally my favorite country to, to travel to it’s this beautiful. All of my best holidays I’ve ever had in my life have all been in Norway, up, up, up north, doing ski tours or surfing or anything it’s it’s incredibly beautiful. However I do find that Norwegians are quite smug about their energy transition and how far they’ve progressed for people who have funded it entirely through fossil fuel money.
Rosemary Barnes: And one time I was in the there’s this beautiful AAL Lego called the Laton peninsula. It’s a series of islands where the mountains just go straight down to the ocean. Did a, a ski trip there. And we always planned to go back to do a surf trip, but didn’t, didn’t make it. And while I was there, they had just announced that they were not going to explore anymore fossil fuel resources in the Lago, cuz it’s such a beautiful natural area.
Rosemary Barnes: And simultaneously they’re attempting to Equin is attempting to start this big project in the great Australian by it, which is a very beautiful Australian area. And just the hypocrisy of it to me was like too, too much to, to handle that. Yeah. Okay. We’re so environmental in Norway, but they. Do continue to expand their their operation.
Rosemary Barnes: And, and that’s the reason why they have been earlier adopters of all these, you know, green technologies. Cause they’ve, it’s a very rich country and I don’t think anybody would pretend that no, I wasn’t rich through fossil fuel profits. So yeah, there is, there is that level of, of hypocrisy there that I find a bit hard, but like I was just saying before.
Rosemary Barnes: Fossil fuels are not gonna go away entirely and Norwegian. Fossil fuels are done better than most. If you look at the like leakage and, and supply chain emissions, if you get it from a Norwegian project, you know, your natural gas say it is far, far less emissions intensive than those same kinds of projects from many other countries.
Rosemary Barnes: So. Yeah, that it’s, it’s not really black and white in my mind, Norway with their, yeah, with their fossil
Allen Hall: fuels. So the most people in America wouldn’t realize that Norway’s a big oil country. It doesn’t seem obvious. It seems cold. It seems like to be a lot of fishing. And our only connection to Norway is what we see in Walt Disney world.
Allen Hall: At Epcot. They had a big exhibition there for a long time. I think they still do. But you go on this little log flu ride, and then you end up in this area where there’s a big mural of offshore or rigs. That what’s the thing. I mean, that’s that’s, and then the last 10 years, I’d say that was still there.
Allen Hall: So there, you know, obviously Norway has a lot of, of energy in there and I, I know it’s a big point of contention by some of the countries, but. It isn’t like Norway’s not looking at renewables so they haven’t shunned it. Right. It seems. They’re just trying to figure out a way to, let me ask you.
Allen Hall: There’s pumped hydro in a way, right? They
Rosemary Barnes: have hydro and they’ve had hydro and a long time, like every other country with really great hydro resources that made economic sense way before anybody cared about climate change. So, and that’s, you know, supplies, the majority of their electricity. And so they’ve got a very clean electricity grid and they, you know, they export their, their oil and gas.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but in terms of wind farms, I mean, it’s, they, they hate wind in Norway’s the impression I get. Every, you only hear about it in the news when there’s you know, some, some protest or, you know, they’re rescinding permission to build a, a wind farm because a community opposition or, you know, something like that.
Rosemary Barnes: So I don’t get their impression seems be that way. Yeah. Although Sweden has a lot of really good news stories for renewables, for wind and for winds mostly at, whereas I only seem to only the negative ones about Norway seem to make it this far south anyway. Yeah, so I don’t get the impression that Norwegian people in general are really pro wind energy.
Rosemary Barnes: Anyway. Even though I know that they’re usually like culturally, they’re pretty environmentally and where they get aware they get out of, in nature a lot in Norway, which I think helps people, you know, care about protecting their environment. But I think that that’s also what’s causing them to be, you know, a lot of Knowledgence to be anti wind because.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, it affects a local environment. It’s, they’ve got sure a lot of beautiful FDS around. They don’t necessarily want wind turbines in, in a lot of them.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it makes sense. But every everybody’s making some change into their energy system. It isn’t like no ways alone and Sweden. It is isn’t neither.
Allen Hall: The United States is part of that same mix. Like you get the same questions out of the United States. I, I don’t think they’re any different. I, what I do see is things are gonna drastically change over the next 20 to 25. And whether they, they find a way to deal with it, they probably will. I mean, they’ll find a way that’s a Norwegian way.
Allen Hall: The SWS will find a Swedish way, the Americans in a fine American way, but I think we’re all gonna get there. I
Joel Saxum: don’t think they’re doing the right thing here by, you know, it may be annoying for them to stare at other people and say like, why aren’t you doing it the same way we’re doing it? Well, you guys are, have a lot more money than we do.
Joel Saxum: So it’s easier for you to make those adjustments. That’s help. I mean, that’s as simple as it is, right. That’s help. So I think what you’ll see there is, of course this is the first offshore wind farm, the first big one there not the first, but the first big one, there will be more and more and more all up and down the road coast.
Joel Saxum: I think so too coast, anytime you see, you know, off the coast of anger, you’ll have one, you’ll have every major city along that coastline you’ll have it. And it’s part of it is driven by the not in my backyard. Yes. Because the landscape is so be. The good wind resources also, right in the, at the top of the crest of that Fjord.
Joel Saxum: Right. So they’re not gonna wanna install ’em there. I, I get it. Also not that because they’ve come quite far in the transition quite a lot further than most develop nations. They don’t use as much that’s true. Electricity as, as some other student. Yeah. Right. So, and, and the population’s fairly small in, in reality.
Joel Saxum: So the transition will be easier for.
Allen Hall: I agree and, and let Rosemary back in. If she wants to go ski in there, let Rosemary
Rosemary Barnes: back. yeah. Now I’m not allowed in. That would be devastating to me. I just, I, yeah, I do love her there. And, and I would say I don’t wanna see wind turbines in all those fields either. I mean, I’d be happy for, for a few projects around, but they.
Rosemary Barnes: The electricity grid is already so green. I don’t see why you need to put them there. There’s other places in Europe that you can put wind turbines and everyone’s connected. And everybody that’s connected to Norway, hydro loves the security that that provides for the, you know, the wind in the, the UK or yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: Or elsewhere in Europe. So I think that they’re playing a different role and they that’s. That’s correct. You know?
Allen Hall: All right. Toyota is a Toyota of the automobile maker. Is developing portable hydrogen cartridges. I don’t know if everybody seen those on the web. I stumbled across it a couple of weeks ago and I just thought it was interesting.
Allen Hall: Why is Toyota working on portable hydrogen? Well, I, I think they’re trying to figure out the politics of energy in Japan and probably United States. And if hydrogen is, is gonna become the renewable energy of choice, That means you’re gonna have to get hydrogen almost everywhere. How are you gonna, how are you gonna do that?
Allen Hall: Well, Toyota has come up with these cartridges that are about a foot and a half long. Sorry, I’m gonna speak in it. American American terms, it weighs about 11 pounds. So what they envision is sort of, you, you drop off this little cartridge at your local retailer grocery store Toyota dealer. Pick up a new one that’s full and you, and you take it back to the house or your apartment and use it for energy.
Allen Hall: They say that one of those cartridges will hold about enough electricity to power, a microwave for three to four hours. Now why they chose to power a microwave for three to four hours is their example. Doesn’t make a sense to me because I, who was doing that, but okay. Maybe Rosemary, you can run the calculations there, determine how much power this little cartridge has.
Allen Hall: But hydrogen it’s one of those low carbon fuels. And I think they’re getting pushed by the government to try to figure out if they can adopt. Clean hydrogen is, is that the way of the future are Joel, are you and I gonna be cooking hot dogs on a hydrogen grill? Is that kinda kind where this is going?
Allen Hall: Cause that’s what those discourages look like is they look like something like a small propane tank. I guess you think about that.
Joel Saxum: What is, what is something in that same form factor used for today and how well has that been adopted? So you have the little water that we call ’em two and a half pound tanks, right?
Joel Saxum: Little tiny propane tanks use. Basically, I use those for my, my camping stove. Right. I think I use one in my like mosquito machine. Yeah. That’s true. Mosquitoes away sitting on the deck in the Midwest. And I think that’s,
Allen Hall: you don’t have to get rid of that, Joel. Oh, wait a second. My, did you tell Rosemary my pro did you tell Rosemary what the, what the mosquito machine actually does?
Allen Hall: It attracts mosquitoes. No, I’m not gonna say that. So it attracts mosquitoes by Creighton CO2. Right? So mosquitoes finds humans because we emit CO2. So they’re like mosquitoes, like little CO2 attractive insects, and that’s how they find you missing a couple other things. But yeah, so you make these mosquito traps, you, you burn propane, it makes CO2 and the mosquitoes are attracted to it.
Allen Hall: There you go.
Joel Saxum: You will also attract every frog. Oh, that’s cool. they will sit, right. They’ll sit right out in front of your mosquito cap, you know, capture and wait and eat all the mosquitoes as they come in. I say, I would say the only other thing that I use those little propane cylinders for is my ice Sawer for ice fishing.
Joel Saxum: Mm. So with that being said, I. See a lot of use for them for this, this idea simply just because there’s things that exist in that same form factor, different fuel of course, but they’re, they’re kind of a pain and I don’t really use ’em. Yeah, it
Allen Hall: doesn’t seem like in a, a really good system. But if Toyota is trying to introduce this, introduce hydrogen to the consumer.
Allen Hall: What’s one way to do it, do it around things you use in the household. That way you build a comfort level with using hydrogen. I don’t Rosemary’s shake in her head. And I would, as the engineer, me agree with the Rosemary because hydrogen is, unless they make a scent to it. I always hydrogen doesn’t smell like anything.
Allen Hall: It’s very light and it burns clear. You can’t see it burns. So if it’s burning. You can’t tell it except for the heat that’s coming off of it. It doesn’t seem like a very consumer friendly fuel to use in an apartment.
Rosemary Barnes: No. There’s so many, so many problems with this and I mean, so there’s a lot of. You know, I often complain about things people wanna do with hydrogen and I, I, no, really.
Rosemary Barnes: And you might think that this is just more of that. My opinion on, on these cartridges is just more of that, but it’s like, they don’t take any of the, the reason why people propose hydrogen. For so many things is because there’s a lot of, you know, problems that are hard to solve that even though hydrogen is inefficient and expensive, difficult to transport and explosive, you know, because the problem that they’re trying to solve is hard enough.
Rosemary Barnes: You would consider hydrogen, but here they’ve got a product trying to solve a bunch of easy problems that already have solutions and they wanna add in all those things. I just think. That’s incredible. And does anybody actually, I mean, I have a soda stream machine and we just had like a month or two months soda streamless because neither of us could be bothered to go change the cartridge.
Rosemary Barnes: And we even recently bought a second cartridge so that, you know, we could always have one swapped and ready to go. And of course we just run out both cartridges. So I don’t think I’m abnormally lazy. My, my partner. Might suggest the opposite, but I just, why would you do that? If you could just connect something to electricity and just power it off that.
Rosemary Barnes: And I mean, any of the things that that they’re saying you would do with this, you know, it’s still a small amount of energy and this, this cartridge Any, you can electrify any of those things. And in fact, they mostly are already electrified. Why would you go to something that brings something explosive and expensive and inconvenient into your home?
Rosemary Barnes: To replace something that is already perfectly well served by electricity, it’s just. It’s total nonsense. I just don’t even know why you would bother even, you know, mocking up a, a little plastic representation of what this hydrogen cartage would look like, because it just shouldn’t have made it out of that initial, you know, like boardroom brainstorming session.
Rosemary Barnes: It belongs on the whiteboard and never, never progressed further.
Allen Hall: I’ll I’ll I’ll give you a similar comparison. Is it a, maybe it’s an analogy. It’s not, it’s not an analogy, but it’s. Years ago I was at the Indianapolis 500 Speedway. It’s in the springtime, the big race is gonna happen in a couple of weeks. And we’re at this event for solar vehicles of all things.
Allen Hall: We had a solar car race that we were participating as the college. And at that place, they had a coal fired car. Like they, like, it was a car that was driven, fueled by. I thought that is just the bizarres thing. Why does someone bring a cold fire car to a solar powered car race? And the reason is, is that coal was making an argument like, Hey, we can be used in different forms.
Allen Hall: Right? And I think this is the problem with hydrogen as no one sees it as being a, a vehicle fuel. They see it as being the Hindenberg . So you have to find a way to bridge that gap between a a. Cleaner fuel, I guess. And Rosemary, I know there’s all problems with hydrogen. I get
Rosemary Barnes: it. Yeah. It could be cleaner fuel.
Rosemary Barnes: We to have correct you there, it’s not currently a cleaner fuel. It’s currently a more dirty fuel, but it could be cleaner one day. when we, it could be, yeah. When we have more green hydrogen than, than we need to use for existing applications. Yeah. Just, just had to add that. Gonna fill our trunk continue.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m gonna fill our,
Allen Hall: our trunks, Joel, with these hydrogen cartridges so that we can power the microwave at the house. See if like where
Rosemary Barnes: it’s going. Oh, the microwave example is just the best because it’s just like, so detached from reality. Yeah, I don’t know how many of your view of our viewers have, are fans of the movie mean girls , but there’s the perfect, perfect analogy from, from there.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m gonna make it anyway. Maybe let’s see if anyone comments, if anyone gets it, it’s too late now just Toyota. Just needs to stop. Trying to make fetch happen with hydrogen. They’re just, they’re just trying and trying and trying to make hydrogen a thing for, you know, for anything. This is. This is just a step too far.
Rosemary Barnes: I, you know, I’ve gotten used to them, pursuing it with passenger cars that makes a million times more sense than these cartridges and it doesn’t make much sense. So, yeah. Move on hydrogen. Sorry, move on. Toyota, please. You’re embarrassing yourself.
Allen Hall: So Rosemary, Rosemary votes. No, Joel and I are gonna abstain
Joel Saxum: yeah.
Joel Saxum: And, and on Wednesdays we work that’s exactly.
Allen Hall: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system. Upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
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Rosemary Barnes: I am wearing. I am wearing pink, kind of, but it’s it’s Tuesday here now, currently
Allen Hall: no. So next we have an interview with Nicholas gardener CTO of power curve, and he’s gonna describe a, a new invention. It’s an update on vortex generators called dragon scales. Really cool update. Well, Nicholas, welcome back to the podcast. Nicholas Gour, everybody CTO of power curve and power curve is a, a deep intensive company focused on blade aerodynamics and blade improvements and blade add-ons to make your blades perform even better than what the OEM even envisioned.
Allen Hall: And Nicholas, welcome back in the, on the podcast.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Thanks a lot, Alan. It’s really nice to, to come back on. Yeah. Looking forward to talking to you today about The exciting topics we’ve prepared together. The
Allen Hall: one hot topic , which appeared out LinkedIn recently is something called dragon scales.
Allen Hall: And you just kind of announce it to the world, a LinkedIn like, oh, Nicholas has been working on something really cool here, so let’s hear about it. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. We kind of just kind of throw it out there. Yes. What are dragon scales? So dragon scales are a new type of vortex generat. So they are still a vortex generator.
Nicholas Gaudern: They still can be used in the ways we use vortex generators today. And I guess we’ll, we’ll get into that later, but the whole idea of the dragon scale is to make a better vortex generator. And by better, we mean one that still does the great job that BGS do. So they recover loss lift, or they boost lift where you need it.
Nicholas Gaudern: But to do that with lower drag, So you will put the VGs on the blade. They’ll still have that great beneficial effect. The drag of the VG itself, the dragon scale is lower than a standard VG. So that means on any given installation, that array will give you more AEP.
Allen Hall: Now we’re gonna put the image of dragon scales on the YouTube version of this podcast.
Allen Hall: So if you’re listened to the audio version, you want to go to YouTube so you can actually see these dragon scales, but Nicholas, can you describe visually what dragon scales look like? Cause they’re different than standard.
Nicholas Gaudern: VGs a standard VG. Typically in, in the wind turbine world is a, a triangular thin sticking up from the blade pretty much vertically.
Nicholas Gaudern: So it’s just a triangle. When you look at it from the side, you see a few of the different kinds of BGS out in the world, but the triangular BG is, is dominant. So with the dragon scale it looks very different. Firstly, because there’s not just one element to to the vortex generator, we actually have multiple.
Nicholas Gaudern: Fins, if you want to call them multiple fins, making up the tri and scale VG. So I think in the image you can see on the YouTube version, we have three fins instead of one triangular fin. And if you actually look at those fins from above, you’ll see that they are not flat plates. So again, typically VG, is there a flat plate?
Nicholas Gaudern: Just very simple 2d thing. The dragon scale is fully three dimensional. So it actually looks like a number of little air foils, stacked, one behind the other. And you can imagine maybe if you took like a slice through an aircraft wing, for example, when it was taking off and the slaps are extended or if you were to take a slice through the front wing of a racing car, indie car or something then you would see this kind of cascade or multiple.
Nicholas Gaudern: Airfoil configuration. So the dragon scale is taking a little bit of inspiration
Allen Hall: from that. Yeah. It kind of looks like the sort of the leading edge or the, the front end of a formula one car, a modern formula one car is what dragon scales look like. The existing VGs sort of look like. Something out of 1980s, automobile racing.
Allen Hall: And there’s a huge difference between those two, right? Yeah. May, maybe even older. Yeah. Yeah. Right. It, it, it seems to be a lot more aerodynamic. And when you, you see for the first time, you’re like, oh, that’s, that makes a lot of sense. it seems like a modern take on vortex generators. And we haven’t had much change in vortex generators ever really
Nicholas Gaudern: on wind.
Nicholas Gaudern: No, no, no. We really, we really wanted. To focus on that because you know, a VG is, is a great product. I think basically all of the major OEMs are using VGs. So they’re very accepted within the industry, but that I think has made the development side of things. Very complacent. Everyone knows that VG is a useful and, and work.
Nicholas Gaudern: So it’s just kind of there as a thing. It’s it’s kind of strange that no, one’s really come out of the box and said, well, a VG doesn’t have to look like this. So many ways you can create a vortex. It doesn’t have to be a triangular plate. So we just really push the boat out in terms of the imagination and the R and D effort to, to say, well, how can we do this in a, in a, with a modern twist?
Nicholas Gaudern: What can we, what can we use all of this advanced CFD that we now have at our fingertips? What can we use that? can we use it to iterate very quickly on lots of different designs? You know, we’ve got some great new wind tunnels around the world. The, the Danes technic university DTU at Zu has this wonderful new wind tunnel that the industry is, is using.
Nicholas Gaudern: And it allows you to test it very high res numbers on very big air oils. So we just kind of wanted to use all these tools that we had at our disposal brand new wind tunnels, high ends number, wind tunnels. Lots of CPU power for CFD. Let’s just bring all those things together and, and use it to make something that just pushes the, the boundary a little bit.
Allen Hall: So these new dragon scales, are they different in terms of where they will be installed on the blade? Does that, does that change cord wise, like front to back on the blade or is it basically in the same location that like we typically see? It’s a
Nicholas Gaudern: really good question. So the way we design the dragon and scale.
Nicholas Gaudern: In order to sort of be, to be fair when we were making the comparisons in CFD in the winter was to say the position’s the same as today. So we have a triangular thin, we have a dragon scale fin, which does better, and the dragon scale does a lot better, but what this also means as we haven’t gone into all the possibilities of how we can really take advantage of this extra performance.
Nicholas Gaudern: From the dragon scale. So if we just were to replace an existing V G a with a dragon scale, V G a you’d get more AP easy, very, very straightforward. But what we can now dig into is if we shift the cord device positions a bit, if we shift the spacing a little bit, if we shift the Heights a little bit, maybe we can squeeze even more out of it.
Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s gonna be really exciting as the next phase of development to see. You know, where, where can this where can
Allen Hall: this take us? But that the only way you can do that is with the technology that you have in, in that you do true CFD analysis on blades. And a lot of the blades that are designed and out in the field today have not had any CFD analysis done on them.
Allen Hall: It it’s, I think it’s kind of assumed that the OEMs are doing that, but they’re typically not. They’re using Beem to the analysis, right?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. So I think if you look at any blade that’s More than five or six years old and actually probably even a lot more, more recent than that. No, they haven’t had much, if any CFD work done on them at all.
Nicholas Gaudern: And traditionally that was because it was very computational expensive. And also Ben does work well. And if you are always just focusing on making the road a bigger.
Nicholas Gaudern: You’re not trying to squeeze every last drop out of a rotor because your focus as a business, someone like Vest’s GE Siemens is just getting the next product out. So I think, you know, power curve, we have a very different objective, of course we’re not designing new blades and selling wind turbines.
Nicholas Gaudern: We’re trying to optimize blades that already exist. So that means, you know, we put a lot of focus on that CFD that D paradynamic understanding. Because it allows us to optimize rotors that may have not had all the attention they could have had spent on them. And that’s fine. You know, I OEM has a lot of different constraints to, to meet, whereas we are, we are focused on just maxing out the, the performance within the envelope
we
Allen Hall: have with Fiji’s.
Allen Hall: There’s a. Consistent question about adding any VG or any aerodynamic modification onto a blade. Is, does it affect the blade structure? Is it gonna cause things to wear out sooner? I I’ve seen that question pop up even more recently. Are there, are there issues with VGs in terms of load and performance overall lifetime wise
Nicholas Gaudern: in the industry, there’s been a few examples of some Erna upgrades that maybe weren.
Nicholas Gaudern: Thought through as well as there could have been, there’s been some really kind of huge devices stuck onto blades. And although they’ve been shown to add performance, generally, if you’re adding something that can attract a lot of load, like become a load carrying structure in its own, right. Or that really changes the stiffness distribution of the blade that can lead to some issues.
Nicholas Gaudern: But for the add-ons that Powerco provides. Fijis G lacerations. They’re very small light pieces of plastic. So they’re not in any way going to attract any load. They’re not gonna become a load carrying or, or a stressed component. And in order to really dig into to that and how it impacts the turbine, we’ve actually gone through a really detailed validation study with the UL the, the certification body.
Nicholas Gaudern: So what we’ve done together with the UL is we. Got them to assess all of our design methodology and go right back to basics everything we do in a design CFD, CAD FEA, a elastics they’ve gone through with a fine tooth comb. Every one of our processes, kinda like a vetting process, if you will. And then we’ve had to submit a lot of documentation talking about how our products are manufactured and how they’re installed.
Nicholas Gaudern: And after all this assessment to the IAC standard you all were able to issue as a statement saying that according to this assessment, the power curve VG and gurney flat products can be considered a load neutral. So what that means is if you put it on a wooden turbine, those products are not going to damage the gearbox, the tower, the foundations, they’re not going to have any adverse effects on those other components that is already considered within.
Nicholas Gaudern: Certification margin, the safety margin of that machine. Well, that’s
Allen Hall: good. That’s a really serious concern and, and glad you guys answered that. So what a VG does on a blade, there’s a sort of a little trick that a VG does, right? On a lot of airfoils airplane, airfoils wind tur blades, formula one cars.
Allen Hall: There’s a, there’s a point in which you have separation for a variety of reasons, regardless of what causes separation. So the VGs basically take the air and shove it back down into the blade to make not so much more lip, but less drag or what what’s, what’s the aerodynamic description of what they do.
Nicholas Gaudern: Kind of a bit of both kind of, bit of both. So I think I like to, to think of a vortex generator as As kind of affecting the health of a boundary layer. So the boundary layer being that thin layer of flow, that’s very close to the surface of an air flow. That’s where all the action happens. That’s all the forces are interacting to give you flow separation, flow, attachment, laminate, turbulent, transition, all these things that affect a turbine performance, kind of all goes on in the boundary layer.
Nicholas Gaudern: So when that boundary layer is unhealthy and it can be unhealthy for a number of reasons, such as The design of the AFO giving a very strong adverse pressure gradient or contamination on the leading edge, meaning that there’s kind of more instability within the flow. All these things reduce the health of the boundary layer and mean that it’s more likely to separate a detach from the surface before it reaches the trailing edge of the AFO.
Nicholas Gaudern: And as soon as you have that boundary left, starting to peel away from the surface, then you you lose. And you get more drag and typically they’re both come together. So that’s bad for your wind turbine on two counts loss of left and increase in drag will both reduce your AEP. So what a VOR generator does, as you were saying earlier, it kind of helps to stick that flow back down.
Nicholas Gaudern: So you can imagine that that vortex that’s being created behind the fin. It’s got a very low pressure core, and that’s helping to suck high energy fluid. Down to the surface. So you’re bringing down this high energy fluid, you’re giving that boundary layer real kind of kick of energy. And that means that it can remain fully attached for much longer.
Nicholas Gaudern: So if you’re, if you have your boundary layer more fully attached, then you will get a recovery of any lift that you are losing. and you would typically also reduce the drag because you haven’t got this big thick boundary layer. That’s that’s coming
Allen Hall: off the trailing edge. So essentially the money you’re making off of wind tur and the power you’re producing is directly related to that boundary layer.
Allen Hall: And if that boundary layer gets turbulent or gets messy, you’re losing money
Nicholas Gaudern: straight up. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that kind of that word messy is, is quite relevant here because it kind of talks. The flow. The flow actually looks messy if you look at it in a, in a wind tunnel, but also it kind of links to the things that cause it and messy, you know, a leading edge can look messy, it can be eroded, it can have dirt on it.
Nicholas Gaudern: It can have bugs or dust, whatever that’s messy that gives you a messy flow, a messy boundary layer. And it does mean you lose AEP. So, you know, vortex generators are, are a powerful tool because. You can use them all over the blade. You can use them down in the root and you can use them out towards the tip.
Nicholas Gaudern: And they’re both doing the BG is still doing the same job. They’re creating their vortex. They’re reducing separation. But the really interesting thing is what is causing that separation. So down in the root of the blade, it’s typically because the AFOs are very thick. They have strong adverse pressure greens.
Nicholas Gaudern: The boundary layer can’t stay attached. So it’s a, it’s a geometry thing. It’s a shape thing. Whereas out at the tip the boundary layer typically will be fully attached unless the blade gets dirty or eroded. So in those situations, the VG is there not because there’s something fundamentally wrong with the design of the, but because the airflow is being contaminated and the health of that boundary error is decreased.
Nicholas Gaudern: So the VGI is, is recovering loss. When it’s out towards the tip, if
Allen Hall: a blade has leading edge erosion and pretty much all blades have some level of leading edge erosion that I immediately makes the boundary layer messy. Right. That just, there’s no way to get around that. It’s gonna be messy. Do VGs correct that or can they bring back where we store the losses that you would’ve have from leading edge ocean?
Allen Hall: Yes. Whoa.
Nicholas Gaudern: Okay. So that’s a really important quality. So. When you have that erosion, that contamination you lose performance, you lose lift the VG, recovers that lift back, which means you get your AEP back. So
Allen Hall: not only can you maintain your AEP, the, the, especially with the dragon scales, the dragon scales will give you more AEP than the original blade would,
Nicholas Gaudern: right?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. So, so your dragon scale, VGs, let’s say you had a blade with regular VG layout standard VG layout. That will recover AP your AP will look better than the turbine did without the VGs with the dragon scales. We see the potential to get another half percent or so AEP. So let’s say the blade today has a VG layout from power curve, state of the art.
Nicholas Gaudern: It’ll recover you 2% AP 2% more AP than you were before. Put the dragon scale. Hopefully around the two and a half percent AEP number.
Allen Hall: Okay. Those are big numbers. If you think about 1% can be a lot in terms of revenue power, production, and revenue from a, a single winter in generator. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: The amount of energy that a turbine produces in the year is huge.
Nicholas Gaudern: So 1% can be really, really valuable. So we’ve seen a lot of very attractive business cases. If you can only add half a percent. That’s that’s still a good business case, right? So
Allen Hall: your return on investment is what typically, how, how many
Nicholas Gaudern: months? Normally we, Ty, we typically work in years, but not many years.
Nicholas Gaudern: So kind of two to three years is often the kind of return investment we see with, with a lot of projects. It’s it’s really, as you can imagine, it’s very heavily dependent on power price. And that varies massively around the world. So obviously the more you get paid for your energy, the quick you payback.
Allen Hall: Well, with the recent prices, jumping in electricity prices are jumping at least in the United States and probably around the rest of the world. It should be . The return on investment should be really, really good. I think the price of electricity in the near future is not going down. Right. It’s so is it easier?
Allen Hall: Can you, can you install these, these dragon scales on the, do you have to bring the blades down to install ’em or can you install them up tower?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Up tower’s absolutely fine. So the actual installation process will, will be exactly the same as as any other VG that we, that we have today. So most of our installs that we do at power curve, they’re from rope access.
Nicholas Gaudern: So the process with the dragon scale would, would be the same. We actually have an installation that’s just happened in Denmark as as the first trial installation of this product in the field. Looks great. Looks really cool out on the blade. So we’re looking forward to gather some, some more data from that and yeah, then we’ll be out there hunting for some.
Nicholas Gaudern: Some launch customers that we can discuss, you know, the potential of these products and what they could do for their fleet.
Allen Hall: And there’s a lot of repowering projects going on in the United States at the moment. Does this make sense if you’re repowering to put on dragon scales, especially since you have the blades on
Nicholas Gaudern: the ground?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, I mean, I think I would say that Anytime you have a blade on the ground should absolutely assess the potential for, for upgrades. So it could be VGs go flaps, serrations, lightning protection, you know, any of these upgrades that are gonna improve the blades performance and it’s robustness.
Nicholas Gaudern: You should look at doing it on the ground because obviously it’s a lot cheaper. It’s a lot easier. So I would really encourage any operator who has. A repowering project coming up or a replating whatever. Give give power curve, a call. And we can talk about. The potential for, for upgrading that blade.
Allen Hall: Definitely. So yeah, if, if you’re repairing a project in the next year or two, it makes a lot of sense to, to at least look at the dragon scales as a potential money producer. That’s what it is. It’s just gonna produce you more money and. That’s the goal of, of running these winters is to have a profitable business and it makes a lot of sense.
Allen Hall: So if, if anybody’s interested, I think check out power curves website, you can reach out to Nicholas directly. I think via LinkedIn just checked out his LinkedIn page. You can reach him there. And yeah, it looks like a really cool technology.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Thanks a lot. We we’re really proud of her. It’s been in the works for the last year or two.
Nicholas Gaudern: The winter results were just amazing. We were, we were so pleased with what we saw. So yeah. Looking forward to the next stage of the of the product development.
Allen Hall: Yeah. We’re looking forward to seeing dragon scales are more winter turbines. It’s, it’s gonna be a, a really cool advancement for winter blades at Nicholas.
Allen Hall: I really appreciate your time today and, and really glad to have you back on the program. We’re we’ll have you back on in the future. Thanks so much. Great to talk, John.
Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks a.
Allen Hall: To see of vortex generators by good bit. So this is a really interesting interview. Stay tuned for Nicholas Godder of power curve.
Allen Hall: That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for listening, please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. Be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to uptime tech news, our weekly newsletter.
