Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Phil Totaro and Joel Saxum discuss the situation in Taiwan where Orsted has another ship delay that is pushing back the completion of the offshore project. In Norway, World Wide Wind received the green light to trial their small counter-rotating turbine off the coastline. Billionaire Bill Gates has backed a US-based startup that looks towards vertical blades on an oval track to generate low-cost electricity – Rosemary has doubts. Then the crew digs into the newly financed effort to photograph rotating blades using drones. Plus, Windy Hill Wind Farm in Australia is our wind farm of the week! It’s an action-packed episode!
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
Uptime 191
Allen Hall: Rosemary, I was watching X the other day and they had a little video from Canberra. I thought, Oh my gosh, I know someone from Canberra. And it was at the airport where a lady evidently missed her flight and decided that she was going to get out on the tarmac and then flag down the airplane on the tarmac.
So she was literally out on the tarmac. There’s video of her trying to alert the pilot, like what the pilot is going to do. I don’t know. But the question in the aerospace community and the airplane community is how did somebody get on the tarmac in Canberra? I assume there’s a couple of gates or guards or something before he could hit the airplane.
and second of all, was that you?
Rosemary Barnes: It wasn’t me. It’s been a long time since I missed a flight. it has happened in my life, but not recently. And yeah, Canberra is not the largest airport, technically international. but in reality, it feels more like a rural airport, but there are locking doors between the, yeah, the departure lounge and the tarmac.
So a little bit surprised. I guess someone stuffed up and forgot to lock a door.
Allen Hall: I hope that’s the case because the pilot was concerned about it. Yeah. She’s lucky. She didn’t get sucked into an engine. That could have happened. That could have really happened. It was very serious. yeah, hopefully everything goes better in Canberra.
And this weekend on the podcast, we have a lot of crazy, interesting news from all over the world. We’re talking about new wind turbines off the coast of Norway. We’re talking about new wind turbines in the United States of all things. plus Ørsted is in trouble again in Taiwan. This is a crazy week for wind energy, so stay tuned, there’s a lot ahead.
If you have some free time in early February, you probably ought to go to Denmark and, go see the Leading Edge Erosion of Wind Turbine Blades conference that’s going to be held outside of, or in, where DTU is. Because Joel and I are going to be there, of course, because where else would we be in February?
It’s one of the colder places on the planet. But we are talking about leading edge erosion, and I know Rosemary is a big fan of leading edge erosion and, trying to squash it, in our times at LM. But there’s a lot of people that’s going to be at this conference that we know that have been on the podcast.
Morton Handberg from Wind Power Lab, Nicholas Gaudern from Power Curve’s going to be there, Dainis Kruze from Aerones. Christian Bachman, DTU, so there’s a number of really interesting talks that are happening and it’s all, it’s not like there’s multiple rooms, there’s one place where all the action is and you’re just going to get, a fire hose of really useful information.
So if you’re interested in attending that conference, I do think there’s still some tickets available. Just go to www. conferencemanager.dk/5LEE and that’ll take you to the details and how to register and attend that conference. hopefully we see some of you there in February.
Oslo based startup World Wide Wind has received approval to test their novel floating wind turbine designed off the coast of Norway. The current prototype is a 30 kilowatt turbine that measures about 20 meters high and has two sets of pronged counter rotating blades. It’s like a whisk. Like when you’re making cookies, it’s looks like that.
The design features a vertical axis turbine that can freely spin, obviously, and it tilts with the motion of the waves. So this, wind turbine kind of leans over to one side. The ballast and all the Good stuff are under this, under the water. The this, obviously this pilot is just a 30 kilowatt machine, but they’re planning on trying to build a 1. 2 megawatt machine by 2025. And they’re considering this new technology to be a Tesla moment for the wind industry. Rosemary, is it a Tesla moment for the wind industry? You need to remove Elon Musk from that discussion, right? Every time we talk about Tesla, it always emotes down to Elon Musk, but taking Musk out of it, is this a Tesla moment for wind?
Rosemary Barnes: Can I take it right back to Elon Musk?
Allen Hall: Oh, I just tried not to.
Rosemary Barnes: Because I think that this isn’t, it’s… It’s not necessarily a Tesla moment, but I think it is an Elon Musk moment, but maybe more the, Twitter purchase rather than the, Tesla or SpaceX kind of event.
Allen Hall: Should we rename it? Y or Z or something. Is that what you’re saying?
Rosemary Barnes: No, but seriously, I’m not as negative on these kinds of new wind turbine technologies as I know everybody else is. I think that for floating offshore wind, I think that, the design that evolved and became the best onshore is, not ideally suited for floating offshore wind.
if you just think about trying to make a regular wind turbine float, you can imagine it, put it in your bathtub, your little wind turbine model, it’s going to fall over. And that’s the same problem that, yeah, everyone that’s trying to do floating offshore wind is, trying to come up with different.
Different ways to get around that. The fastest thing to do is to take an existing turbine and just modify it so that it will, float. And that’s, that reduces risks in a lot of ways, because you already know that the turbine part of it works. So you already know how the aerodynamics works and work.
And now you’ve just got to add on all the, floating and bobbing and yeah, waves and, all those sorts of things. All those new uncertainties are on top of, existing mature known technology. But if you were starting from scratch and there was no onshore wind, I feel 100 percent sure that the, three bladed turbine, horizontal axis at the top of a very tall tower, that’s not what you would end up with if you were starting from scratch offshore.
Yeah so understandably, there’s a whole, bunch of different kinds of wind turbine technologies that are trying to break into this floating offshore space. And vertical axis is a big category of those. There’s other ones like SeaTwirl, Aerodyn. Yeah. and there are some big benefits cause the with a vertical axis wind turbine, the generator can be right on the bottom. you can put the heavy part in the water, which obviously makes it a lot easier to float and be stable. Yeah, so that said it just because that may well have been the way that we went, if onshore wind never existed, it doesn’t mean that is going to be the, the design that wins out because it’s not just about what would be the best technology if you’re starting from scratch, when we’re not starting from scratch. Regular, the kind of wind turbine that we’re all used to seeing, horizontal axis, three blades on top of a tall tower, that design has had decades and decades to reach maturity.
And, delivers reliable electricity now at a cheap cost most of the time. And when you’re trying to develop new technology, doing it in an offshore environment is got to be the hardest place that you could do that, especially floating offshore, which are designed to go and, really deep water far away from the coast.
So I think, when you look at any one specific company that’s developing a new offshore wind technology, I would say they’re, most likely to fail, but it wouldn’t surprise me if A couple of them did succeed. At least, I’ll give them, I’ll give them a chance. yeah. this particular design, I, don’t really see it.
I would love to see the prototype that I presume that they, Tested a prototype extensively in wave tanks and onshore, to, work out as many of the kinks as they could before they took it into the really expensive operating environment. I haven’t seen a lot of that yet, I think it might be a case of, trying to hype up a technology to get investors and get a lot of money to do development.
But then, yeah, it’s really challenging offshore. You look at what a lot of wave energy companies have done. They’ve raised enough money to make one prototype. And then of course experiences a lot of problems because, that’s what a prototype is for. And also because you’re trying to test it in the most ridiculously harsh operating environment anywhere.
And so they fail and that would be my expectation for most of these companies too. If I was, investing a lot of money in one of these companies, I would try really hard to get enough money to develop it onshore properly first. And then, gradually and incrementally de risk it offshore, but just, you need so much money and so much patience with your money to be able to develop in that way.
And that’s just not what we say when, investors are used to. I don’t know, making, money off a new app or whatever other kind of, technologies that they’re used to. So yeah, unfortunately the consequences, a lot of failed companies along the way, but.
Allen Hall: Isn’t timing the most important factor in offshore wind or do you have any low interest rates, a willing public to purchase the power, the Permits to put it in the water, all the cabling, everything coming together at just the right moment.
And if you miss that moment, you’re probably looking at another 10 years. And that moment pops up again.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, but I think it’s, I think it’s more than, I think we could expand that conversation from offshore wind. Offshore wind is what we’re talking about now, because that’s what we talk about. That’s what the podcast is about.
That’s what we’re all interested in. But I think any new technology adaptation. Has the same problem, right? It has to be at just the right moment, and there’s not usually an aha moment where it just pops in. the internet now, we couldn’t imagine life without it. But the internet existed for about ten years before it really became a thing, right?
Think about, we talked about Tesla a little, just a little bit ago. Tesla cars have been around since 2011? 2010? And when they first came out, people, you’re still fighting the technical versus political conversation battle about EVs, even though now almost every manufacturer that makes a, an automobile makes an EV.
I think offshore wind, and the trouble is exactly what Rosemary said, when All of these investment companies that have a lot of capital are usually looking for a quick, throw the capital in, we want it to explode, we want to sell it in a year or two, they want that quick investment cycle.
But offshore wind is going to be a longer investment cycle, simply because there’s a lot of engineering to do, and you need that, you need, the rest of the world to basically take it, to believe that it’s going to work, to believe that it’s good, and to, get it on the grid. So it’s going to take a while.
There’s going to have to be a lot of things that fall into place to make it work. Eventually it will. Do I believe that we’ll have massive large scale floating wind by 2030? Anywhere in the world? No. but 2040 or 2050, we’ll see it. We’ll see it in our lifetimes.
Allen Hall: Phil, has the funding dried up for projects like this?
With the Interest rate hikes and Ørsted losing so much money on projects in New Jersey, it just would seem if I was to pitch a new offshore wind turbine, there’d be very little response from the Venture capital markets and investment groups.
Philip Totaro: The short answer is yes. If, you want to introduce a radical technology like this, the first thing they do is you go build yourself a time machine, go back about 35 years and introduce it in the market at that point in time.
Because we’re already to a point where, and this is what engineers just don’t always get, and God bless them, I, am one, I love them. But, they just don’t understand the difference between technological feasibility and commercial viability. Just because something is technologically feasible, and by the way, I do believe that this thing that they’re putting out in Norway can work.
But, that doesn’t mean that it’s commercially viable. The reason being that we see a huge supply chain. That would need to be established. different supply chain than what we already have, it’s a different type of, yes, they’re still using cold rolled steel, but it’s probably, different steel, different fixtures, different methods for construction assembly, potentially different bearings than what we’re already using.
We need supply chain scale and a radical technology like this does not help and accomplish that goal. So it’s just, it’s, never going to get off the ground or, in the water. This, it’s a science project at this point.
Allen Hall: Let’s raise the stakes a little bit. Let’s look at the new Siemens offshore wind turbines and the new, like the Haliad X from GE, which are relatively new.
The risk involved with those turbines is still relatively high, right? It’s because we don’t have a lot of experience with them and, so there is a lot of technology going on in offshore wind. It’s just pretty much in two platforms. Not a lot of history right there.
Philip Totaro: But you also have a multi billion dollar company behind the development of that, not some startup that’s got like maybe a few million bucks and a hope and a pipe dream.
It takes tens of millions, hundreds of millions now, even designing and developing and commercializing a brand new, 15, 16 megawatt offshore wind turbine. You’re talking about, in terms of non recurring engineering, somewhere in the ballpark of about 230 million U. S. plus then supply chain, which basically puts it up to close to a billion dollars that you’re going to have to invest in because you’re talking about factories.
You’re talking about, assembly capabilities. You’re talking about vessels to support everything that you’re constructing. Now, with floating wind, that’s where you do get an advantage, because you can do everything quayside and tow it out. it’s not necessarily as much capital, but, the fact that we’re already, there are any number of technologies that, it’s, and, we’ve talked about some of them on the show.
A spiral welded onshore wind turbine tower. Great idea conceptually, but look at how much money has already been invested in transportation fixtures for a conical steel tube tower from a factory to a project site. You are never going to introduce a radical new technology, and at this point in the industry’s mature state of maturity. And do it if you’re just some random startup.
Joel Saxum: So here’s an interesting one for you, Phil, because I was talking with some people online about this today on a LinkedIn post. So I saw this post from, okay, we know this big nasty storm has hit Europe in the last week. I can’t remember the name of it, starts with a c. But there was some video of a floating offshore wind turbine test unit, basically prototype, offshore Spain.
And the post was like, hey, we took 10 meter waves and we took 100 kilometer an hour winds through this storm, and this is how the thing acted and it survived. And everybody was, yay, yay, yay, awesome, that’s cool. And it is. However… This is, that’s a mid stage between what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the worldwide wind, coming in from TRL zero from a napkin scratch book out to develop some completely new thing offshore.
That’s one thing, that’s super difficult. Right now we’re in the stage where we’re adapting regular fixed bottom wind turbines, basically the nacelle and, the whole unit blades and everything to go onto a floating offshore wind farm, or a floating offshore platform. And we’re still just figuring that out, because the con The conversation was, if this is a normal nacelle, with the same pitch bearings and yaw bearings and main bearings, and rotating equipment and blades that are on a regular fixed bottom offshore wind turbine, how are they handling all of these extra degrees of freedom of this thing tipping back and forth and moving, and has the engineering been done to a adapt that?
Because as we know right now, in just, in onshore wind turbines, where they’re concreted into the ground, we’re having blade issues, early life fatigue blade issues, early life fatigue drivetrain issues. So now we add a bunch of movement into that. So we’re even still at that stage. Let alone a completely new product.
Get the latest on wind industry news, business, and technology sent
straight to you every week.
Sign up for the Uptime Tech Newsletter at weatherguardwind. com slash news.
Allen Hall: Ørsted’s 900 megawatt Greater Changhua 1 and 2a wind farm off the coast of Taiwan is experiencing further delays due to supply chain bottlenecks.
It sounds very similar to what happened in New Jersey with Ørsted. 111 jacket foundations and 100 turbines have been installed so far. I’ve heard 100 and 101, 102 turbines installed, with 89 of them commissioned and generating power. But there’s about 10 to 11 wind turbines that have yet to be installed.
And the problem is, that the vessel availability. That they’ve had some bad weather or weather conditions where they weren’t able to use the vessels they had and the vessels are going to sail off and work on another project, it sounds like, so they’re going to have to push back the completion of that project until the beginning of 2024.
That project was, it started generating power in April of 22 and has a bunch of Siemens Gamesa wind turbines. So it seems again, ship availability is driving the project schedules around the world, and which leads to project profitability, I would assume, the longer these projects take to get completed and turned on, Phil, wouldn’t you think it’s just adding extra cost to Ørsted’s already, burgeoning, negative outlook?
Philip Totaro: It is. And look, we’ve known for a while that vessel availability was going to be a big issue. There’s plenty of vessel development going on in China, but they’re using it in their domestic market.
And you’re probably going to have a hard time getting a Chinese vessel repurposed for, a project that’s being built by a Western company, even in Taiwan. And certainly you’ll have a hard time getting a, Chinese, constructed vessel, for, other, other, European projects unless the vessel was specifically commissioned by, a European, design company, uh, or operator.
So in this case, we’ve run into this situation again, where a company like Ørsted, they’ve got a fixed schedule, and any kind of supply chain delays, that are necessarily going to impact their time schedule, it’s going to, have these knock on effects. And they even said knock on effects, specifically. And this is one example of that. We’re gonna see this continue to be an issue until probably about 2026 or 2027 when more vessels will become available. There are several, that are being fabricated. Again some are actually being fabricated in China, but they’re dedicated to, European companies that are going to use them in, in, your, for European projects.
There’s a few that are being built in the United States, for Jones Act compliance, and, the Koreans are building some vessels as well because they’ve got a whole burgeoning market. This, the problem will eventually resolve itself, but we’re just in this, period of, uncertainty, if you don’t already have a vessel booked, you’re probably going to have a hard time getting one, and if you’re seeing any kind of cost or schedule overruns, with your project right now, it could leave you in a lurch where, you only have, maybe 90 percent of your project built and you’re just gonna have to wait a while to, to build the other 10 percent of it.
Allen Hall: Rosemary what’s happening in Australia on offshore wind and ship availability? Are schedules getting slid to the right because of supply chain issues and in particular ships?
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, offshore in Australia is still, we’re still figuring out how to develop a site and how regulations would work and all that sort of thing. It’s not that no work has been done, but I’m pretty confident that no one has actually placed any orders for any turbines yet. Yeah, I guess that’s the plus of, being a slow mover is everybody else can, sort, sort out all the problems.
Allen Hall: Heirloom Energy is a U. S. startup that is backed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is funded by Bill Gates, essentially. And there’s some Google people involved with this. Conceptually, it’s, a series of vertical axis blades that are on a track and they go around an oval, like a NASCAR race, it’s very similar actually. But the blades pitch as they roll around this racetrack and they generate power somehow through the track and the movement of the blades, so it is like a vertical axis wind turbine without the hub. That there’s a just a track that goes around it. And the reason they’re building is because they think it’s easier to build. And they have a 50 kilowatt prototype Being tested in Wyoming and they plan to scale it up to something utility scale. They’re saying that the levelized cost of energy from the system is about 13 per megawatt hour, which seems really low.
And they’re predicting CAPEX is about a quarter of what current wind turbines have. That sounds like a company that hasn’t been involved in wind too long and hasn’t had to build anything big. Put it out in remote locations. They also expect that they won’t need concrete foundations. So I don’t know if they’re just going to put some of those camping stakes in the ground and just hold this thing down.
They haven’t been around a good Kansas wind either, evidently. So the thought of this right now is just really interesting. Like why, Bill Gates has a lot of money, Rosemary. And why, like where would this be used where you couldn’t put up a standard three, a standard horizontal axis, wind turbine and create power.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s a lot to talk about here, but before I talk about why I want to talk about how. Does anybody know how does this generate electricity? So I understand there’s blades on a track and they, they get pushed by the wind. And so there’s some rotational motion. Great. Okay. But where’s the generator, where’s somewhere there’s got to be something turning some magnets, right?
Philip Totaro: Yeah, there are magnets in the track and it works like a maglev train. So the same physics that works to, levitate a maglev train. It’s the same thing, just in reverse.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. So that’s interesting. One thing I love about this technology is that they have a video of an actual thing on their, on their website.
So like I, if it’s a computer generation, it’s really well done because it’s in this patchy grass and, like some looks a little bit, cobbled together. But they seem to have a small scale prototype. That sets them ahead of at least 99 percent of new wind technologies that I see and that we talk about on this channel.
But, yeah, they list a lot of the benefits of their technology. And some of those are really interesting because, like they’ve got listed that it’s got a lower profile, so it doesn’t need a tall tower. It’s better for views. Yeah, so that’s really nice, except that we all know that the wind speed gets faster, the further away from the ground that you get. There’s a reason why we bother to put a hundred meter, 120 meter tall towers on wind turbines.
It’s because you want that good wind speed, and yeah, the power in wind scales with the cube of the wind speed. So if you go up high enough to get, double the wind speed, then you’ve got eight times as much power. That might be one reason why they’re saying that some of their figures are a bit funny because they say it’s less than one 10th, the cost of a turbine and one third the LCOE.
So if the cost is one 10th, why you are only getting one third, of LCOE. Why isn’t LCOE also 10%. And I guess that’s because they know that it’s not gonna capture very much wind. So yeah, that’s, it’s interesting and I fall for this trap that I think other people do where you say, Oh, this is backed by, Breakthrough or it’s yeah, it’s backed by Bill Gates.
So someone must’ve done good due diligence. And I think that’s generally, the assumption with, or the way that investors work with, hard tech or, yet new energy technologies that actually involve hardware and actually need to, physically perform other than just… it’s not like an app where if you get a good business model and some, network effect and great advertising, then you can scale and make a lot of money.
if it’s an actual physical technology, then you can’t, you can’t cheat the engineering. It actually, it will actually work or it, won’t. And if it doesn’t, then you might, be able to list and make a lot of money to build a prototype. Once that doesn’t go anywhere people aren’t going to be buying them.
And there’s no long term potential in a company whose engineering is bad. And I think that it’s very common for investors to see, Oh, this big name, company or individual has invested in this. They must have done really great, engineering due diligence on it. So it’s all sound. Let’s chuck our money in as well.
And yeah, from the brief look that I’ve had at the website, I see a lot of red flags with this one. I would be, usually I’m trying to not be such a fun sponge and, try and at least allow the possibility that some, new technology is going to do something. I really struggle to see, the point in this one.
Philip Totaro: Dear, Bill Gates, Please contact Intelstor, because we have actual experience in the commercialization of new technologies, and we can tell you what’s gonna work and what isn’t, so stop wasting your money! And call us instead.
Rosemary Barnes: There’s enough information on the website that you should be able to, yeah.
Engage Intelstor, engage Pardalote consulting, there must be any number of other people that can, do what we do.
Philip Totaro: And anybody, somebody that has experience in the actual industry.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Go through a list of claims and, just look at them. It’s also. I don’t, I know most people are just listening and not watching, but I have, I’m showing this book that I have called wind machines that I bought off eBay.
It’s from 1980 and it’s got all these crazy kinds of, new technologies that were new back in 1980. And I love it for, any new technology that you see now, you can always look it up. Look it up in this book and find something similar. And yeah, this one now I’m struggling to find the page, but this one’s no exception.
There are designs just like that listed in, yeah, in this book from 1980. So yeah. Okay. It’s a, it’s new. No, one’s been working on it in 30 years, but, there’s, probably. Probably there have been, probably there’s been lots of high school science classes and, lots of backyard inventors that have been working on this and very quickly came to the realization that this isn’t going to scale, and abandoned it.
Yeah. Anyway. Oh, so here it is. But those people listening at home, I’m just showing a. a picture in the book of, some sails attached to a little cart and the idea is that you put those, yeah, you put those little carts on a track and they get pushed around them and generate electricity, which is basically what this is, except for with, yeah, the addition of, maglev.
There’s a video on my YouTube channel where I had Paul Guipe as a guest. We talked about our red flags for assessing new wind turbine technologies. And that was, yeah, one of the ones that we, featured in there of it.
Allen Hall: Paul has great stories. They’re all memorized cause you can’t find them anywhere.
Now, seriously, the thing about Paul is that he remembers all that stuff and when it happened, because if you were to go back and it happened pre internet, So it makes it almost impossible to find the history of some of these stories. And he’s just a good place to, to learn very quickly.
And his, he has a couple of books, obviously that provide some of these details, but yeah, the history of wind is murky. It’s like the history of casinos. It’s about the same level early on.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So the video on my channel is called Back to the Future of Wind Energy.
Hey, uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES wind magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news, it digs into the tough issues, and PES Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PES Wind at PESWind. com.
Allen Hall: A new project is developing in the drone technology space to inspect offshore wind turbine blades while they are spinning. Partners include RWE, DTU Wind Energy. QualiDrone, which is a relatively new company, and the Energy Cluster Denmark group. Currently, the wind turbines are stopped when drone images are taken, just because it makes it easier.
But supposedly new drone and AI technology can, identify damage while the blades are rotating. So there’s a, there’s an effort mostly led by RWE to go take a look at this technology and they hope to reduce the cost of inspections. Obviously, when you turn off the, a big 12, 15 megawatt turbine to do a drone inspection, you’re losing a lot of production.
So that they’ve, there’s about 2. 3 million in a budget to go look at this with about a million dollars coming from EU funding and to until late 2025. So they have about two years to work this out, but guys, I’m just wondering, taking pictures of an object that’s moving at roughly 200 miles an hour in very strong winds in the ocean is extremely difficult.
This, is this a very, is this a problem that can be solved quickly?
Joel Saxum: I don’t think so. and I’ll take it, this is a, so one of my lives I lived was drones for a long time. Fixed wing drones and rotorcraft drones, and sensor basically fusion with these drones. So whether you were taking thermal cameras and adding RGB cameras and tying them all together.
But it was all about, inspections and that’s what it was. Whether it was oil and gas or wind turbines or different kinds of assets. So you run into some physics problems here, right? So you know that the new iPhone has a 48 megapixel camera on it. However, the difference between that and while they’ll never be able to take as good a pictures as say like a DSLR, like an actual big camera, they simply don’t allow enough light in.
So to get a good picture, a good accurate picture, you need to have a lot of, pixels per space. And you need to be able to gather light quickly. So to take it, so let’s think about the thing. if you’re going to take a try, try to taking a still image of a turbine blade coming by. So say that thing’s coming by at 200 miles an hour, you need to be able to see.
And what we talk about hairline cracks legitimately pull a piece of hair out of your head. And you need to be able to see that, right? You’re talking one pixel per millimeter is about the maximum that anybody will allow in a drone inspection campaign anymore. So when you get a big tender, it will say one millimeter per pixel is the largest we’ll go.
It used to be three millimeters per pixel. So the smallest, basically, raster little square on the image was 3 mm Now it’s down to 1 mm. And it’s only going to keep getting smaller. there’s, phase 1 out there has a 100 megapixel camera that can take, I think they’re down to 0.4 mm per pixel. Those images are getting better and better. But now we’ve got to think about this. Something’s going by you at 200 miles an hour. You need to be close enough to it that you can see that hairline crack with your, the resolution of your camera. So if you have a hundred megapixel camera, you need to be probably within 20 meters of it to see that thing.
Now you have to think about the movement of that blade coming by it 90 meters per second, 200 miles an hour or so. And now you have to go take a picture so fast that you get zero motion blur within one millimeter. So you’re saying that, lens has to capture the image. And record the image, I can record it afterwards, but it has to capture the image while that blade hasn’t moved the thickness of one millimeter.
While it’s going 200 miles an hour. It’s there’s just not simply physics that can capture that yet if you’re trying to take a still image. Because you can’t allow enough light into a camera sensor to do that. You’ll have to be moving with it at some level. And I don’t know if it’s moving the drone. Romotioncam has done the… The rotating camera, where it’s on the ground and the camera actually matches to the RPM of the wind turbine and takes pictures. So that’s a thing, but now we have to also think about this. When you’re taking drone imagery, for inspections, you need to cover four surfaces.
So you need to cover pressure side of the blade, suction side of the blade, the trailing edge, and the leading edge. So how are you gonna, you also have to make sure that you can get the leading edge and the trailing edge. Which is be, pictures from basically… 90 degrees to the turbine to capture all these things.
So there’s, it’s a novel idea. If someone can figure it out, you will get a lot of orders. You’ll have a full, you’ll, be swamped with work because of exactly what Allen was saying. Shutting down these turbines costs a lot of money. And as It’s not, the global fleet isn’t Mitsubishi M1000As anymore, where it’s only 1 megawatt when they shut them down.
3, 4, 5 MW onshore is normal. 12 and 15 going up to 18 and higher in the global marketplace. Offshore is going to become the new norm. So when you shut those down, you’re costing thousands of dollars an hour. So for solving this problem would be fantastic. However, it is a hell of a feat that’s going to do if they can make it happen, because you’re fighting physics to make it happen.
Allen Hall: Joel, would they use a series of drones? Like you’ve seen at carnivals and festivals, these drones that are flying in a pattern. Like I saw one recently, I think it was on Tik Tok or Twitter or X or whatever they call it today. It looked like a skeleton that was moving through the air and it’s just this really core, uh, coordinated approach of flying drones.
Could you fly multiple drones simultaneously to create like a grid to capture the blade as it spins across so that you could then assemble an AI processed image? From taking multiple, photographs? Yeah.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, you could do that. So how that works usually is all of those drones are programmed individually.
It’s a software in the background. And they use differential GPS for the positioning. So regular GPS, like the GPS you have on your cell, phone, isn’t accurate to 5 meters maximum. And that’s horizontal. Vertically it’s 10 meters and 20 meters out. It’s just positioning from one ear to the other.
But now, if you use differential GPS technology, you can get that down into a 10cm, 20cm range. And so that’s what they have to use ground based stations and differential GPS to get that to work. So you could do that, absolutely. But now you’re also doing this. You’re putting multiple drones in the air within a minimum of 50 or a maximum of 50 meters away from a rotating turbine.
So inside of these units they have a lot of technology and things that will update at high rates of speed. Now you’re actually seeing the controllers within drones operating at 50 hertz. So 50 times a second they’re giving it updates. Hey, you’re moving left, go back right. Hey, you’re moving right, go back left.
That happens 50 times a second within a drone now on a normal basis. There’s even more, there’s processors that’ll do 200 times a second. So if you’re doing that, but a big strong, say you’re in 10 meters per second winds and a gust comes at 20 meters per second, in one second that drone could get pushed 10 meters. That happens, right? So now you have this turbine spinning in front of it, and you’re sitting with these, all these drones out in front of it, and now if you put multiple ones in the air, that’s a possible way of solving this issue. However, you still have to be able to capture images with no motion blur in them while the turbines are go the blades are going by at 90 meters per second.
You still have that physics problem.
Allen Hall: So you’d have a, a lead drone. It’s like when the geese fly south for the winter, you have to have a lead drone out front to… A lead duck drone up front to capture what the gusts are coming and all the turbulence, right? You’d almost have to do that. How else are you going to do that, fix that problem, right?
Am I crazy, Rosemary? You need a lead duck in this situation?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, why not? But you could, for your lead duck, why not get an actual duck and with a helmet with some instrumentation on it?
Allen Hall: Now you’re talking. That’s a cost reduction effort. I like it.
Rosemary Barnes: Why reinvent the wheel when you already have, an animal that knows how to, fly and communicate and, all that sort of thing.
Allen Hall: That’s something that Bill Gates could fund right there. The lead duck right there. We ought to call it lead duck. Lead Duck LLC.
Joel Saxum: So, this week’s Wind Farm of the Week comes from Rosemary’s homeland of Australia. It is the Windy Hill Wind Farm. It’s 20 Enercon E40 turbines. They’re each 600 kilowatts. So it’s a 12 megawatt wind farm providing enough power for about 3, 500 homes. The project was built in 2000 has since had three owners, the Stanmill Corporation, Transfield Services, and Ratch Australia Corporation.
The wind turbines are located in private land that continues to be used as a dairy farm and actually has been a part of a cute. Part of a few court cases that have spurred on some international noise around wind turbine effects on local population. There’s some, there’s some good Google searches here.
So each tower is 44 meters high, uh, relatively small. Remember they were built in 2000. The turbines is used at the facilities are Enercon E40s again. They can rotate at speeds between 14 RPMs and 38 RPMs. One of the most important things about this wind farm. According to, according to TripAdvisor, The Windy Hill Wind Farm is the number three of eleven things to do in Ravenshoe on the Queensland Tablelands.
Philip Totaro: Ravenshoe? Sorry. Ravenshoe?
Joel Saxum: Is it Ravenside? It said Ravenshoe.
Rosemary Barnes: No, you have to, you have to leave, leave Ravenshoe. I was waiting for that.
Joel Saxum: No, no. It’s Ravenshoe for sure.
Rosemary Barnes: I did actually, you know, they say it’s, what would you say? Number, number three tourist activity. And I actually went there as, as a tourist with some colleagues.
We were on the way between Cairns airport and, um, uh, some mining tenements inland, and we stopped off and had a look and everybody was, was very interested to have a look at those. Yeah. Little wind turbines that could still going. 23 years later, not a bad effort. And you can see in the distance, there’s a lot of, uh, new wind farms being built in the area because, um, yeah, Queensland is such a great wind resource, so that’s very interesting.
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 Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
