Podcast: Play in new window | Download
The Uptime team does a deep dive on the Mingyang Ocean X offshore turbine, exploring it’s engineering features and possible effect on the offshore wind turbine market. Plus, you can wind two free NASCAR VIP tickets with Kyle Weatherman by entering at https://weatherguardwind.com/contest/!
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!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Before we start the show, we have an announcement. Our favorite NASCAR driver Kyle Weatherman has two VIP tickets to the Hollywood Casino 400 NASCAR Xfinity race, and you can win these tickets. The race is held at the Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kansas. On September 28th, which is a Saturday, VIP tickets include premium access to the race, the pit area and the garage.
You can watch the race on pit road and hang out with Kyle Weatherman and the DGM racing team. You will need to provide your own transportation to and from the race but it’ll be a great event. In order to enter this contest you need to visit weatherguardwind.com slash contest where you can enter.
I’m Allen Hall and I’ll be joined by the rest of the Uptime hosts after these news headlines. The UK’s latest renewable auction has given a significant boost to the offshore wind sector. With a record budget of 1. 5 billion pounds, the auction awarded contracts to 131 wind, solar, and tidal projects, capable of generating almost 10 gigawatts of capacity.
Notable winners include Orsted’s Hornsea 4 project in Iberdrola’s East Anglia two, and three projects. However, analysts note that this still falls short of the capacity needed to meet the country’s target of 60 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030. The UK has reached a significant milestone in wind power generation capacity.
The country has surpassed the 30 gigawatt mark of combined offshore and onshore wind installations. This milestone was achieved with the commissioning of SSE Renewable’s 443 megawatt Viking Wind Farm. in Shetland this past June. According to Renewable UK, the UK’s current wind capacity can meet the annual power demand of over 26 million homes and reduce carbon emissions by more than 35 million tons per year.
In Sweden, Vattenfall has decided to pause the development of the Swedish Krikers Flak offshore wind power project due to unfavorable investment conditions. This project, located about 30 kilometers south of Trollberg, was estimated to generate 2. 7 terawatt hours of fossil free electricity annually.
Fattenfall cited the lack of a reasonable connection point to the national grid offshore as a key factor in this decision. U. S. wind energy investment has seen a significant boost in the first half of 2024, according to Bloomberg NEF’s Renewable Energy Investment Tracker. While solar investment fell by 12 percent to 26.
5 billion, wind projects secured 12 billion in funding. This surge has contributed to a 63 percent increase in total renewable energy investment in the U. S.
Orsted, the Danish company developing Rhode Island’s first commercial offshore wind project, has announced plans to expand its presence in the Ocean State. The company will open a new engineering, procurement, and construction hub in Providence, relocating to a 17, 000 square foot office building. Orsted also plans to double its existing 100 person workforce in Rhode Island in the coming years.
Over in New Jersey, the leading light wind project is facing challenges. The company has requested a pause from the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities through late December due to difficulties in securing a turbine blade manufacturer. This setback follows Orsted’s decision to scrap two offshore wind farms in New Jersey last year, citing financial infeasibility.
Western Australia has declared a new offshore wind zone off the coast of Bunbury, but with significant modifications. The area has been reduced by half to 4, 000 square kilometers and pushed further offshore, now starting at least 30 kilometers from the coast. This change aims to address concerns from local communities, particularly recreational fishers.
The zone has the potential to support 11. 4 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, enough to power the entire main grid’s current demands. And in New Mexico, they’re set to grow. to see two new massive wind projects on state land. EDF Renewable’s Silver Stallion project in Grant County will generate 400 megawatts, while Energex Renewable Energy’s project in Hidalgo County will produce 150 megawatts.
These projects are expected to bring over 146 million in revenue for land beneficiaries, primarily public schools. The projects will likely take about three to five years to become fully operational. And that’s this week’s top news stories. After the break, I’ll be joined by my co host, Renewable Energy Expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Intel Store, Phil Totaro, and the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard, Jules Sexum.
Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today.
Allen Hall: We haven’t talked about this item. For a number of weeks and I know it keeps popping up. So I thought this is a good time to discuss it, which is the Mingyang OceanX the V turbine has two 8. 3 megawatt nacelles on a V shaped floating platform.
And what this means for the industry as we’ve been discussing for a number of weeks, months at this point as turban sizes get bigger and bigger, they seem to have more problems that are almost unrecoverable at some level, particularly when they’re out in the ocean and this Ming Yang approach seems to simplify it because they’re using two smaller, simpler turbans that are just bolted together.
And I want to get Rosie’s opinion on this. Thanks. Just to understand, is this a good idea and is it making energy cheaper by this approach?
Rosemary Barnes: I like the, it’s called a multi rotor concept when you have two or more rotors on the same tower. And I quite like it for a few reasons. So one of the advantages is there’s like a slight aerodynamic advantage from putting rotors close together.
But I think the bigger advantage is that you can have the smaller rotor, which is, like a more reliable design. That’s better known, we’ve been making rotors of that size, like an eight megawatt rotor is a lot more yeah, like well known and I’m a lot more experienced making that size rotor than there is of a 16 megawatt one.
So you can expect better reliability. It’s a lot easier, to get a factory that can make components of that size you would expect less defects and less like dire consequences if you stuff something up a little bit. And you can get that, but at the same time, get the advantage of having fewer electrical connections, fewer turbines to like fewer sites to visit, to do maintenance.
That sort of thing. So it is a best of a both world type thing. Minyang aren’t the first ones to do it. Vestas like quite a few years ago now, like maybe five or more years ago, they had a multi rotor design that I think had four rotors on the one tower. And they made one, tested a concept turbine and got some interesting results, but found that it wasn’t necessarily yeah, like a economically viable at that time, I think that theirs was for onshore.
And then there’s other like new concepts like wind catching and yeah, a few other lesser known ones that are also like looking into that. So yeah, I do think that, like going bigger and bigger with rotors is causing a lot of problems. Seems like I even see that onshore as well as offshore.
And so I think that the multi rotor concept is like a really good chance to try to get the best of both worlds with the both big and small kind of.
Joel Saxum: There’s some interesting parts of this thing though, too, being that it is for offshore floating because again, we’re in the, we’re in the early stages of offshore floating when there’s not really a whole lot out there for, utility scale, large installments at all.
So you have a, they’ve integrated some other. Cool marine stuff that’s been done before but into this new concept. So there is a, on the back of this thing, it’s a single point mooring system. Like in the oil and gas world. We use it on an FPSO, which is like a big floating production facility.
So you take a big thing and you just mow it on one point so that it can actually wind vein around as the prevailing wind direction changes the whole floating. mechanism changes instead of just like we’re used to with the pit, the turbine yawing itself. They also put in some weight saving stuff here, some weight and ease of construction savings, as far as not having to have for a 16 megawatt tower, which would be this thing would be a massive piece of steel, very heavy, huge bearings, all kinds of different things.
What they ended up, what they were able to do here is to put small, smaller steel Basically, what would be the towers at angles and then cable stay them back and forth so you have less steel It’s a bit lighter a bit easier to handle key side So there is some there’s some really cool things that they’re doing here and maybe some of these maybe this thing goes Commercial and it’s economy of scale and they build a bunch of them And you see them start to get deployed either, you know in the APAC region or around the world Or, they do this and they take some of the concepts from it that proved to work really well and use it in the next generation of whatever they’re going to do for floating offshore.
Allen Hall: I have some other unique pieces here, Joel, which I think are interesting. They’re using ultra high performance concrete as part of the floating platforms, like Three floats and concrete arms to connect them. I’m assuming it’s all pre stressed just to simplify it and make it more efficient. But they’ve basically tried multiple things in this design, right?
It’s not just the V, right? The You have all the cables, the stay cables and all that together. So you probably put in what 10 different kinds of technologies at the same time. Is that indicative of just going for it? Let’s just build it. And if it stays together, we’ve got this really cool platform we can then build upon, or is it, Hey, we’re just checking out different technologies.
I’m going to put one out in the water and. Wait a year to see what happens.
Joel Saxum: I would be willing to bet within Ming Yang, you have those two camps probably fighting with each other. Or at least you would if that was an engineering project in the western world. You would have people saying, let’s just go for it and try it.
Or the other half going we’ll see what comes of it. And we’ll use the technologies that may make sense and may not. Either way, there’s a couple of episodes of The Power Up here, isn’t there, Phil?
Philip Totaro: Yes where we’ll talk about the the technology that they’re using. But I wanted to actually go back to something Allen asked, which is whether or not this is better LCOE.
And I’m actually going to come down on the side of no taking into account the fact that this is not yet at scale. The reason that I think it’s not going to actually be better LCOE is because we already have Certain scale with monopile and other technologies. I know this is a floating one, but my point is that this idea of having multiple hubs and rotors on the same like tower and foundation structure, while there are absolutely rosemary’s right, there are certain aerodynamic benefits to it.
The balance of plant. Doesn’t give you as much savings as you think because you still need a certain amount of material now. You don’t need, to foundations. I will concede that. But if you need a thicker, bigger foundation, you’re still spending the money. There’s also, different failure modes that are potentially introduced with the technology like this that aren’t yet a understood or be we don’t have a standardized way of doing an RCA and repairs for this sort of thing. So keep in mind that right now this is a science project, quote unquote in China while they investigate the viability of this. But keep in mind a couple of other things. Mingyang wants to do floating for some of these Italian offshore projects where they signed an MOU to build a factory there.
They also just today, as we record signed an MOU with Unison in South Korea to build offshore turbines in Korea. Now I’m assuming that these are going to be more traditional ones, but keep in mind as well that there’s a ton of floating projects that are lined up in South Korea, so this technology, if they want to adapt it could end up being scaled up and used in that market.
So there, there are some, there’s kind of benefits and drawbacks on both sides, but I’m not quite sold on the idea that the LCOE is going to be as, as good as what we currently have in the industry.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But I think that like when you calculate LCOE, you need to know the long term operating and maintenance costs, which for floating offshore wind is.
I don’t think that well known at the moment. Like we just saw the high wind Tampa and the first first commercial floating offshore wind farm has just come offline for months to have major maintenance done just a few years into the project lifetime. So I think that there is still, we’re still in the the period of floating offshore wind where we should be trying a lot of different ideas. And I feel like that’s the strength of Chinese technology development is that they just, they don’t spend I don’t get sucked into analysis paralysis. They don’t spend a lot of time deciding what is the very best thing that we could do next.
It’s more okay, what are all of the possible ideas, including some that are just like, seem outrageous or stupid at first analysis. Yes. They just try it all and then see which one succeeds. And I don’t think it’s such a big deal if, the, there’s like spectacular failures now and then, but yeah, I just feel like I see that in all kinds of Chinese technology development, you’ll get energy storage they’re not only dominating lithium ion batteries, they’re also installing flow batteries much larger than anywhere else in the world. They’re also installing, yeah, lots of pumped hydro even gravity energy storage, like that energy vault concept. They’ve got a couple of those being built in China where everywhere else in the world they’re like, this is clearly a dumb idea.
So yeah. I just think that’s their, it’s got to be their strategy, right? Like just the brute force method to try absolutely every idea. Then you’re guaranteed to have the best one that is, you’ve got the best one like automatically because you tried everything. Whereas if you, Pick winners.
Then you might miss the good one.
Joel Saxum: I think there’s something interesting to be said there about Chinese innovation as well, because classically Chinese and innovation isn’t really two words that go together. They’re usually a me too on the development side. They just follow what everybody else is doing.
They don’t really come out with their own thing. And if you look at this Ming Yang concept from the surface, it looks like this big, crazy new thing. But. But as you’ve stated, Vesta’s tried a multi rotor concept. A lot of the things that they’re using in the marine portion of this, the actual floating foundation, they’ve been done in other areas and for other kind of infrastructure, but now they’re all just being pieces being put together on one thing.
But yeah, it is interesting to say or to see. The difference in innovation I guess it’s, I wouldn’t say innovation. I’d say it’s just, to me, it’s the capital behind it. Like the, a lot of times the Chinese government is just get here’s the money, do this. Here’s the money, do this. Whereas in other places in the world, you have private money needs to do that.
And it’s harder to fail at innovation doing that way.
Allen Hall: Who’s the author of the book you like about when you do big projects, what’s the name of that author?
Rosemary Barnes: Bent Flubia, How Big Things Get Done.
Allen Hall: How Big Things Get Done. And there was a recent podcast. where he was talking about projects in China. And I think in particular, I think it was hydro and trying to get data on what the energy produced was, uptimes and those sorts of things.
And he said, the data out of China is so hard to get, and you’re not going to get be able to tap into it. So it’s really hard to tell how a lot of these projects turn out, which then the rest of the world has to basically repeat.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s true. I didn’t use the example of those like hydro is one of those things where it’s like always a fairly unique project to do.
Like you can’t do one hydro project and go, Oh, we know how to build the next dam because it’s a different dam, the the geography is different. You have to start from scratch to a certain extent each time, but I think it’s under, it’s undeniable what they’ve achieved with batteries and solar panels.
And I guess to a certain extent, like there is some government subsidy involved that is skewing how cheap they’ve really become, but like for sure, China learned how to make solar panels very quickly, very efficiently, very cheaply. And I think that it’s it’s not just like unfair to not give them credit for the innovation that that came with that.
But it’s also I think that it’s not helping us to be so obsessed with the fact that’s thinking that’s lesser than the, the science. I think that we’re really. Handicapping ourselves by minimizing the role that, that engineering and even other stuff like project management and finance, they’re having a big impact on the costs of these projects and.
Yeah, if we’re just like, we’re just supporting more and more like early level science, I think we’re just going to miss out again. We’re going to have another example of yeah, like missing the boat on the next solar power or the next, like lithium ion battery chemistry or whatever.
Philip Totaro: Keep in mind too, one, one other thing to add on this or a couple of things. First is this design actually wasn’t Ming Yang’s, it’s actually done by a European company Ming Yang’s licensed this technology from Aerovide Engineering now that said Rosemary’s right that they’ve absolutely taken in.
The technology from wherever they got it from and they’ve scaled it, but they’re the reason and I actually wrote a piece for this in recharge back in 2016 that was like watch out for the Chinese and their innovation because it’s about to explode and guess what so the reality of it is the reason that I wrote that back in 2016 was the fact that the Chinese companies were getting all these profits.
And they were installing so much, even domestically, that they were getting a ton of cash. So it’s not just that they get, a certain amount of government support. We all know that they do to a certain extent. But it’s the fact that they had a bunch of profits that they could plow back into doing basic R& D.
But that they don’t just get something up to, like a TRL or something. And then stop like we tend to do in the West. They took it all the way to TRL nine, some of these, not every single technology or innovation that they had, but the things that they thought were good ideas they brought them into, commercial production.
So this is, what we’re talking about this floating platform is one example of something that it could go into commercial production. It might not, but. It demonstrates the fact that they’re actually willing to put some cash behind doing, like a full scale prototype and not just like some design engineering and bench testing on things.
They want to be able to get things up to TRL 9 so that it gives them more ammunition when they want to be able to go and strike these deals that they’re trying to get internationally. This is all part of a very long term strategy. They don’t look till next financial quarter.
They look at the next 50 years and in 50 years, China wants to be the dominant force in the world. On energy technology,
Joel Saxum: our wind farm of the week is from Republic County, Kansas near Bellevue. It’s the high banks wind project from next era. And this is to date as next era has a really good website that gives you some details about this project and they stayed on it to date.
Invested approximately 1. 8 billion dollars into Kansas direct investment including eight operational wind energy centers So the high banks wind project will provide the county 224 million dollars in tax revenue over its life approximately 149 million in landowner payments and it Sponsored 350 construction jobs So the wind turbine is the largest wind farm and or the wind turbine farm is the largest one in kansas as well It’s 233 GE2X wind turbines capable of generating approximately 600 megawatts of energy.
The project has 15 full time jobs on it and there’s a couple of really interesting things around it. There’s a lot of information online and I just dug through some of the economic impact. And there was an interesting statement where Kansas has a law where new wind farms can apply to be tax exempt for the first 10 years but what Nexter ended up doing here is instead of claiming that completely they got the tax exempt status but they decided that they would give basically a donation back to the county in lieu of taxes So they have a statement here and an agreement with the county that says As a new member of the local business community, NextEra wishes to demonstrate good citizenship by making a commitment to assist the county in improving and maintaining a physical, business, and social environment benefiting all members of the community, and directly contribute to the county for potential impacts of the wind project within or upon the county by making contributions to the county.
And they have all kinds of different kind of items that they can contribute to and all these different things, but what it basically pours out to is every year NextEra will write a 750, 000 check to the county that their wind farm is located in. Yeah! And, furthermore, the life, there was a study done by, on this particular wind farm done by Kansas University.
The Institute for Policy and Social Research finds that the total benefit to society and this comes from hard payments, tax payments also getting into ESG goals of offsetting climate change and other things. But the total benefit to society from this High Banks Wind Farm by Nextera in northern Kansas is 2.
5 billion with a B. High Banks Wind Project from Nextera up in Republic County, Kansas, you are our Wind Farm of the Week.
Allen Hall: That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter.
And check out Rosie’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
