SeaTwirl VAWT, More Wind Tech Jobs, Siemens Gamesa 5X Blade Issue

SeaTwirl has a contract to develop a new VAWT based on their earlier designs – Rosemary provides insights. Wind and solar jobs are abundant in the U.S. with a significant portion in construction with Texas and California leading the nation. Rosemary, Joel and Allen then look into a Siemens Gamesa 5X blade failure at a new wind farm in Brazil. What can done to repair the 5X blades and where there issues during the blade certification?

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Uptime 174

Allen Hall: We kind of got sidetracked a little bit because of the Siemens Gamesa 5X blade breaking down in Brazil. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but that’s interesting. Everyone wants to hear about that.

Allen Hall: I do because I have a, a real bone to pick about the way that that blade was tested. And, and I I just need to understand from Rosemary in this episode, you, you hear me question her like, what is going on?

Why didn’t I catch it in testing? And Joel’s being very sly cause I feel like he knows more than he’s telling us, but. Between Rosemary and I, we actually have a bet and I’m gonna end up sending her $20. I know that I am. To Australia, but I think it’s a good bet. I think we need to hash out what’s happening.

Right. Rosemary? I think we need to figure out what’s happening with Sema Ga Meza. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. So we, we speculate a lot about what’s going on. We’re kind of piecing it together. Nancy Drew’s story Nancy Drew’s style from the little reports that we’re, we’re hearing, and I, I think, you know, we got a lot more information in the, the latest one that we talk about in today’s episode.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And we also talk about renewable technicians being in huge demand in the United States, particularly in construction. And then, The SeaTwirl vertical axis wind turbine that looks like they have another project up in Europe. So it’s pretty exciting. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the Vice President of North America and Sales for Wind Power LAB.

Joel Saxum, an international renewables expert, Rosemary Barnes on this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Sea Twirl and Kontiki winds have signed an MOU to explore opportunities for electrifying offshore assets using sea twirls floating wind turbines. So this sounds interesting because we haven’t heard a lot outta SeaTwirl lately. So SeaTwirl makes these vertical axis wind turbines. But SeaTwirl has received a purchase order, which is the first step to making money, and that’s where they need to get right to develop.

They’re gonna develop a smaller wind turbine they call an S 1.5 to, to, to withstand all of the torture of the North Sea. It’s SeaTwirls first commercial revenues, and it’s a milestone for the company. So that’s fantastic. Now Rosemary, this is a little bit different. So what’s happening here is they’re going to, the contiki wind is gonna combine SeaTwirls vertical axis floating wind platform with an existing farm.

So it’s basically gonna plug in a turbine into an existing farm not create a farm for these SeaTwirls. So it sounds like it’s sort of a one-off, but it’s on a trial basis, but they’re getting paid to go make this turbine. That’s a really good first step, right? To actually get a part in service. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think it is a logical next step.

I’ve been following SeaTwirl a bit. Part of the consulting work I do, I is involved with, you know, innovative wind technologies and so I follow what’s going on in some of these new. When companies for some of my clients and yeah. So maybe I can just talk through a little bit about what their, their history has been per SeaTwirl and this is their first, it’s, it’s not really a sale cause it’s, yeah, it’s the purchase order for development, but it makes it sound like they’re brand new, but they’re not.

It was, they tested their first prototype in 2007. And then that was by the inventor tested that. So SeaTwirl was founded a few years later. In 2012, 2015, they installed their first SeaTwirl’s first prototype. Their, what they were calling an S1, which is a 30 kilowatt prototype, and that was installed the c outside of Luc Gill in Sweden.

So that’s been going now for eight years and they have got videos on their, their website and they do every now and then, you know, stop in to check in on progress and how it’s going. So I haven’t looked in, in, in the last maybe nearly a year now, so I’m not exactly sure it’s still in there, but it’s got, you know, quite some operating hours on it.

And then they began manufacturing for their S2, their second version, one megawatt unit. In 2020 and they’re still saying that they’re planning to install that this year, but the last update that they had on their S2, other than this proposed I think that this development funds is supposed to be for the S two.

Their last update was in November last year where they had placed an order for some bearings. So I expect that it’ll probably be pushed through to next year or later. So, yeah, I think it definitely makes, makes sense now to put in, you know, a single turbine in an existing wind farm. You know, they don’t have to reinvent every wheel in a, in an offshore wind farm, you know?

I have. Sort of been a bit critical of their development process that they’ve just immediately gone offshore. I think if I was the owner of SeaTwirl, then I probably, cuz they’ve got yeah, a vertical axis wind turbine and bloating. And, It’s, you know, it’s very different from existing offshore wind turbines.

And if it was me, I would want to be testing out as much of that onshore as I could because, you know, the offshore environment is it’s harsh, but it’s also really difficult to get out there. So, you know, like there’s a lot of failures associated just with the fact that it’s in an offshore environment.

But there’s also some things that would’ve. Failed onshore. You know, like while they’re figuring out exactly how the aerodynamics work, they’ve got, like I said, it’s a vertical axis wind turbine, so it’s not as well known. The aerodynamics about that. And the, you know, kind of. Full scale operational behavior is not as well known as horizontal axis wind turbines.

And so every time that they have to, you know, replace a, a bearing that wasn’t spect right, it turned out, or you know, repair a blade that suffered fatigue damage or, you know, I’m inventing these problems, but assuming that they would’ve had a lot of problems of that kind, it’s really expensive to do that when you’ve gotta get, get out and offshore.

So Yeah, that, that would be the only thing that I would probably do differently. But it is good to see that they’re piggybacking onto an existing, existing project to hopefully, you know, get this out and get real operational experience. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: I, I think this makes sense on the financing side, right? Go slow, get things working, figure out all your engineering problems, and then sort of move on and in, in the US on.

Technician side, which seems to be a big area of growth. There is massive numbers of jobs in wind and solar at the moment. California and Texas are leading in clean energy deployment and also have the most wind and solar jobs. Solar and wind accounted for 87% of the new electric power generation jobs in 2022.

All right, so solar is obviously much larger than wind in terms of total jobs. Cause if you’ve. Driven across the United States recently, like Joel has. There, there are solar panels going up everywhere, and there’s, there were 300, well, there’s 340,000 jobs in solar alone in 2022, Joel. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think part of the why solar has the boom and why, I mean wind is, is as well, right, but a wind farm versus a solar farm, say.

10 gigawatts to 10 or 10 megawatts to 10 megawatts. There’s just less. And that’s not big, right? But that’s, there’s less people that need to maintain that solar farm. However, when you’re installing the solar farm, it takes piles of people because basically installation of a solar farm is five phases, right?

You’re looking at the civil and the civil and pre-construction, all the dirt work that needs to be done. Then you have survey, survey and layout goes, goes with that one as well. And then there’s pile driving. Then there’s the mechanical installation, then there’s the electrical installation. And if you’ve ever driven past one of these sites, when they’re in the middle of that mechanical or pile driving installation, cuz mostly it gets rolls on, right?

You start, civil work starts, it’s just about 50% done. Then the pile driving starts, they get through and as they move through, then the mechanical guys start and they move through. The electrical guys start. But you can have. Hundreds of people. I mean, there’s trucks everywhere and little side-by-sides and skid steers and people running around like rats on these things, they’re just all over the place.

It’s like organized chaos. Sometimes it’s just chaos. But there’s a lot of jobs in construction and solar. It’s, it’s huge. And then once they’re commissioned, they just don’t take as much to maintain as a wind asset does. Right? There’s no rotating equipment. There’s no blades, there’s no, you know, the mechanicals are pretty much in place.

If there’s an issue, it’s a, you can dispatch someone to go troubleshoot it or something like that. So that’s why there’s a little bit of a disparity there in the jobs, 

Allen Hall: I think at Solar and Wind Con, at least based on data here, we’re seeing this is, this is all a Department of Energy put out some stats.

Con construction makes up a significant portion of the renewable energy jobs with about half of them. Of those construction, about half of solar jobs are in construction. About a third of of the jobs in wind are around construction. What seems about right, based on what I have seen. But yeah, it seems like maybe some of the, probably some of the better paying jobs appear to be in construction.

Obviously there’s travel involved and some late nights and weekends on the construction side. But it’s probably yeah, probably gonna make a little more money in construction at the moment. Cause there’s more demand. 

Joel Saxum: You know, one of the things I talk to, I talk to a lot of wind energy companies, ISPs and everybody, we talk and we talk all the time about the shortage of workers.

But now the problems, people are starting to dig into the problem a lot more in the field and trying to understand. At this point in time, the majority of the people are soaked up the the people that are knowledgeable. Right. And if you are knowledgeable and you’re not working in July in the US, maybe you need to take an internal look at yourself.

Cause there’s something you’re not doing right as a person because there’s jobs everywhere, right? So the trouble now is that almost everybody knew to the field is going to be 100% green is gonna need to be trained somehow. Because the, the anybody that’s got experience in these, in this sector is they’re working.

Allen Hall: So the big place is if you’re gonna be in wind and work, wind construction, you’re gonna be where at this right now. Like what? In 2023? Where are the hot spots for a wind construction? 

Joel Saxum: The wind corridor in the us of course you’re in Texas, you’re up in, through the Midwest, Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota. Quite a bit actually in Illinois is what I’ve heard.

But then you’re getting some east, eastern Nebraska, a lot of, actually quite a bit of wind farms going up in Wyoming. In, in California. A lot of repowers going on, but I don’t see a lot of brand new wind farms going on 

Allen Hall: out there. I think California’s mostly solar, right? It seems like wind is sort of dying off there.

Joel Saxum: Solar’s anywhere they can get in the queue and get and, and get a permit accepted. To be honest with you, the lot, a lot of solar on the east coast. Right? The Carolinas and Virginia and stuff, they’re putting in solar everywhere over there. Cause that’s the renewable energy. Source there. You’re not doing wind farms over there unless they’re offshore because the wind resource onshore is nil.

Allen Hall: So the outlook for wind jobs is really high. And just looking online, obviously the government in the United States goes and does surveys and tries to get a sense of it. I think the be the better way to fill the pulse of the wind industry. Is to look at the job posting boards, monster.com. LinkedIn. I saw a LinkedIn post today.

People are looking for 10 technicians coming up in July. It’s like, it’s already July and you need 10 technicians. Yikes. It’s a little late. But yeah, if, if you’re competent, you should be able to find some work at the moment. Yeah, indeed. Yeah, indeed is another place. Yeah, those, those are good places to check.

I, I know people reach out to me occasionally like, Hey, where are the wind jobs like, Go to the job boards. That’s where all those jobs 

Joel Saxum: are posted. Scroll through LinkedIn. Every ISP is hiring

Allen Hall: I think technicians miss out on, on the LinkedIn piece. I think the, the companies post on LinkedIn, but I’m not sure all the technicians are there.

There are significant portion of technicians on LinkedIn, but you see a lot of technicians still hanging around Facebook. And I don’t know, think the job postings are there. Go to LinkedIn, right? Absolutely. Check 

Joel Saxum: out LinkedIn as we speak on this. I just put in Wear zero no no place, and put wind turbine technician into indeed an 839 jobs showed up.

Your top ones, your top ones will give a little shout out here. Our top ones are airway services, which I think Vesta owns part of them. Sky Climber, GE Renewable Energy, actually hiring, traveling technicians. E D F. Vestas Rangel Renewables. We know the team over there. A A E Es Siemens is hiring some traveling technicians, duke for some large corrective people.

So lot, a lot of opportunities out there 

Allen Hall: and the way that the lightning season has been this spring so far, there’s a lot of blade repair jobs at the moment. So, yeah, a lot of jobs. Keep your eyes open. Check out LinkedIn.

Rosemary Barnes: Ping Monitor is a continuous blade monitoring system, which allows wind farm operators to stay ahead of maintenance. Windex can often hear damaged blades from the ground, but they can’t continuously monitor all the turbines. They also can’t calculate how bad the damage is or how fast it’s propagating based on sound.

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Allen Hall: Well, it happened down in Brazil. A Siemens Gamesa 5X machine blade broke and the lucky operator was Engie. So down at the Santo, a Augustino wind farm blade snapped off Engie decided to to shut down the farm at least temporarily, to figure out what is happening. And now we’ve, we’ve heard through the grapevine in the news reports that the, the, the blades for the 5X machines seem to have some sort of defect.

I’m, I’m guessing that this is not the last time we’re going to hear this, but it sounds like Siemens Gamesa has crews out trying to talk to customers, talk to Blade companies, just trying to one understand, and, and two, reassure everybody they’re gonna try to take care of the problem. But Joel, have you heard much, or Rosemary, have you heard much of like what the exact issue is and.

What, what companies and operators are supposed to be looking for on, on these 5X blades. 

Rosemary Barnes: I haven’t heard anything. But Joel’s grapevine is probably. Higher quality than mine. 

Joel Saxum: I was going to defer to Rosemary cuz I don’t wanna be the one that says what, what I’ve heard. So I’ll tell you this, Allen, we, we’ll stay tuned in the next few weeks and when I’ve got something definitive where I feel comfortable sharing, I’ll share it.

However, we have the, it, it is known in the industry, like in the, in North America at least, that the 5X SG 145s have got some issues. Again, I, I don’t wanna be the one who says exactly what I. What I believe they are until I can be 100% certain on you. But I would imagine that with this happening right now there’s some Siemens game Mesa engineers on a plane, hopefully heading to Brazil if they’re not already there already diving into this thing to, to better understand it.

I think they know what the issue is. But when you finally get a failure, it’s nice to. Get your hands on it, understand exactly what the failure mode is, because the more details you can get forensically about the failure mode, the better you can engineer a retrofit to fix it. 

Rosemary Barnes: But maybe we can do a little bit more speculating now based on this latest bit of information.

Cuz I guess I’ve been just, you know, piecing it together to kind of drip by drip by drip the The announcement from the c e o a few weeks ago that we spoke about, well, a couple episodes back, was obviously alerted us beyond a shadow of a doubt that it wasn’t just rumors that maybe there were issues that, you know, definitely there are with this particular turbine.

But now we see, so this wind farm that. You know, it was affected this time it’s 434 megawatts, so not small. Assuming that they’re all the same turbine, it’s not normal that you would, you know, mix up types. So they’ve got, you know, over a thousand blades. It’s not, I I don’t think it’s commissioned yet.

Right. They’re in the middle of installing it. From what I can gather. They’ve totally suspended. Work on that. So, I mean, I’ve worked on some pretty serious blade failures before. And they will stop the affected turbine for that. If it’s super duper serious, they’ll take the blade off the turbine for that.

But this is not just. That they are stopping a turbine from operating. They’re not just stopping turbines from operating across the whole site, you know, they’re not even continuing to install. So they’re we can learn a couple of things about it from that first, that it is a significant defect because it’s occurred before Turbine was even commissioned probably, or if, if it was commissioned, that specific one, it was very, very early days.

So, It’s likely not a fatigue issue. It’s something big that it’s hard to even imagine how that blade would’ve passed the, you know, static tests, let alone the fatigue test and then fail so quickly in the field. We know from what the CEO said that they think that this issue affects, was it 15 to 30% or something?

So you know a lot. I think that they’ve also suspended manufacturing of these blades in their factory in Brazil at least. So perhaps they’ve isolated it down to that one factory, but sounds like they’re gonna expect that they’re gonna have to do a major redesign at a minimum. But what they’re.

Strategy is to mitigate the blades that are already out there. They’re not installing them on turbines. You know, that’s significant cost. If they’ve got workers and equipment that’s sitting around doing nothing. Now that’s not for fun. That’s because they think that that wasted money is less than what they would have to spend to fix these blades up tower.

Or maybe it’s so serious that they can’t fix it up tower. So. Yeah, that’s kind of where we’re at. So I mean, maybe it’s a benefit here that I haven’t heard too much on the grapevine because I know that I’m not saying anything that I shouldn’t be because I’m just piecing this all together from, you know, public information saying that anybody, anybody can come by.

But I mean, is it even possible that they could be looking at replacing all of those blades? I’ve never, it’s so rare that you ever replace even one blade. I’ve, you know, worked on some. Some defects where you had to maybe replace half a dozen or so would be a huge, huge, big deal. But could it, could it be that they don’t have a solution for this and may not.

Repair solution happens occasionally. I’d never seen it fleet-wide before, 

Joel Saxum: though. I do know, like in, I’ve seen it before, where you can have a fleet-wide issue and have to go undo a massive repair or retrofit, basically campaign, right? Whether that’s up tower or down tower, it’s kind of remains to be seen.

But I, I’ve got to think or I got to hope for Siemens sake that there’s something that they can do to rectify this issue. That is hopefully an up tower repair. Is is in what happens In my mind, yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: But it seems to me like they’re at least worried that they won’t be able to find an up tower repair.

And I mean, I’ve worked a bit with you know, like developing new repair methods and getting them certified. So it could just be that they have to come up with a new method and they’re working through the process to get that tested and, and certified so that they can, they can roll it out. Usually, like there’s not a lot that you couldn’t re repair in a, in a blade.

Some of the big things are, you know, there’s issues around like protrusions or, or something like that, then that’s difficult to fix. And a lot of stuff to do with carbon, carbon fiber. There’s not it’s not possible to repair everything like that, but otherwise it’s a matter of. Is this repair gonna be so intensive that it would actually be cheaper to replace the, the blade?

Because, you know, when you’re trying to repair bits of composite material, you, you can’t just, you know, like cut, cut out the damaged part and Plug in a new one. You have to, cuz the strength is transmitted through the, the length of the fiber. So when you cut it, then there’s no way to transfer the, the loads from, you know, one cut fiber to the next one.

You need to do a really long chamford joint so that it’s a, you know, gradual transition and you’re getting some load transfer. And so you can imagine that when you have like a, a defect that you’ve gotta cut out, then you need to shafer around the edges. The, the size of the repair grows and grows and grows.

And then you start, you know, okay, so it gets bigger and now you had to cut away, you know, the bit that was over the web or something. So then you’ve got a new feature that you’ve got to figure out how you’re gonna transfer the load back down to the web like it was supposed to. You know, and get the.

The glue joint right and everything, and you can end up, if there’s a lot of layers affected and it’s in a bad location, you can end up with AEG growing and growing and growing until it might be, you know, like 10 meters or more. And then you start to be basically trying to rebuild your whole blade in field and it’s, it’s not worth it.

It must be something like that. Yeah. 

Joel Saxum: Let’s do some armchair math on it. Right. We know that right now, if I had to go one turbine, have to mobilize a crane and replace three blades, the cost of three new blades. Plus the crane can be upwards of 1.3, 1.5 million US dollars. So, and that’s, you know, you’re gonna mobilize the crane.

You’re gonna do, so we’ll say, just say a million dollars per turbine. That’s $333,000 that you get to basically fix the blades that are out there. So each blade, you’d have that much, 333,000 if you have it still up tower, that is man, six months worth of a team on there at least. With a 360 degree platform, you can do a lot of work in that amount of time, but there’s no way in hell there’s that many technicians and horsepower available in the in, in the market to do that kind of retrofit campaign.

It’s just not gonna happen. And cranes like it, like it’s just not gonna happen. 

Rosemary Barnes: They’re lucky to, you know, a certain sense because they are still in construction, so they’ve still got the cranes there. Their blade is still in production. So that’s at least something. But I think that there’s another piece of information we can gather from this new story as well, which is that the problem is worse than what they thought it was when we heard that announcement from the CEO a few weeks ago because they were continuing to install more of this blade that they knew was affected.

And they wouldn’t have done that if they expected it to a blade to break up tower. You know, that’s obviously the, the effect of their failure is worse and faster than they were expecting it to be. So that $1 billion figure that they estimated before, I mean, we knew at the time that those figures don’t get smaller.

Right. That, you know, any, any serial defect campaign you’ve ever worked on, they just grow and grow and grow and grow. So I think we’re starting to see, we’re seeing the first pardon he growth now that bigger would have to be blown outta the water. And it was huge to start with. There’ll 

Joel Saxum: be some wild lawsuits that come from this because, so here again, from the insurance side of things, insurance there’s two different policies where there’s multiple policies, right?

But there’s two big, there’s, there’s a ton of policies, but there’s two very large separations and that is construction policy. And operating policy. So you’re gonna have the construction and sometimes the construction policies won’t have business interruption. Costs on them, but now you’re starting, starting to get into massive business interruption costs because the technically some of ’em haven’t started operation, or maybe these are commissioned just like days ago, and so they technically have started, but you don’t even have a backlog of what the business interruption cost would be.

But business interruption costs and insurance of regularly three to one property damage, right? If you’ve got a half a million dollars in property damage, a lot of times business interruptions, one and a half. So the sorting this out in this big battle that’s going to come because this insurance companies aren’t gonna pay for, they’re not gonna wanna pay for it, right?

They’re gonna sue Siemens, ga Mesa to say, you guys are the ones that are on the hook for this. And then the acid owners kind of caught in the middle. The queues that are stacked up are gonna suffer that. It’s, it’s, it’s not pretty, I, 

Allen Hall: I just don’t understand coming outta aerospace, like how this wasn’t caught in the structural testing.

What happens it feels like. On the lightning side, I feel like things, it’s the same things happening on the lightning side. Like there’s all these certifications and everybody’s happy, and these wind turbines get out in the field and they get blown up and, and now on the structural side, I don’t understand how they have passed a structural test and yet, Shortly thereafter, they knew they had problems.

I mean, how long have you been talking about the five x problem? For like, months. Right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Year. Yeah. I’m, I’m with you now. I wasn’t last time we spoke because I assumed that it was a, a smaller slower bolt. But now that one has broken within, you know, very, at most, you know, a very short period of operation that.

Really suggests that that should have been picked up in the testing because I do, I, I do think that the structural testing of wind turbine blades is far closer to reality than what the lightning testing of, of wind turbines is. There are still, there are still issues, you know, you can’t get when you test a wind turbine blade, you have to a, apply the load in, you know, fixed positions.

So for the structural test, they attach some. Straps at certain, you know, points along the span of the blade and then they pull it to bend it. Right? So it’s not exactly the same as when gust of wind blows a blade, and that’s acting continuously over the, the whole blade. But in certain key points, especially at the blade root where the loads are the strongest the stresses are the, the highest.

That is a pretty good representation of you know, what happens and fatigue load y Yeah, yeah. It, it is at the, at the blade root. Yes. Not, not everywhere along the, the span of the blade, but it’s very rare that you would see, you know, a real structural problem towards a tip of the blade, cuz the loading is so much less.

Cause you know, it’s like a big cantilever beam. Right. When you load a. A beam. The the, where it’s supported, that’s the, the biggest load. And that’s it. It should break either close to that where the stress are highest or it will break in a a discontinuity of some type. So either where the material changes suddenly or the geometry changes suddenly, that’s where you see stress concentrations.

Or a defect would also be a kind of discontinuity where you get a big stress concentration around there. And so you can those would be the two places that you would see a failure. Fatigue testing is, is also fair. Fairly similar in that, you know, they get a couple of ecis on the bio. I think I, I went through the process last episode.

Maybe I feel like I’ve, I’ve explained this recently. Yeah. And they, you know, they get the blade. Wobbling at its natural frequency and keep it going. And so, you know, for it, it’s not completely accurate the whole way along the blade again, but, you know, towards the, the route it is doing a pretty good job of representing the, the major loads.

What it can’t do is some of the you know, less frequent or less severe things, so you d can’t accurately represent gravitational loading because you don’t change the, the direction in the same way that, that it does on a wind turbine. And then the other thing which ties into I think another article that you have on the list for today, you can’t accurately represent the load distribution and the way that that causes twisting and torsion, that is, that is not really adequately covered by.

The physical testing that is done on wind turbine blades, but you know, overall it, they are in general doing a good, a good job of representing it. And the evidence of that is that y you know, they are pretty reliable over, you know, decades of operation. This is, this is the first time that I’ve, and, and I mean, I don’t know exactly what’s happened, but it seems to me like this should be an issue that was caught in testing and it, it hasn’t been.

And I think that, This is the first time I’ve seen something so egregious like this in my, in my career, that should have been caught in testing, structural testing, but wasn’t. 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.

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Allen Hall: I’ll go back to Joel’s point, which is the insurance companies are gonna be looking for a somebody else to, to hold responsible and so will Siemens Casa, 

Joel Saxum: the Siemens CASA’s, holding the smoking gun and they’ve already put it out in a press release, 

Allen Hall: but they’re as, as Rosemary has described to me many times, the blade has been.

Certified it’s been blessed, approved, whatever you want to call it, by the certification body, right, that says you do these tests, we’re good to go and use in the field. Something is missing here. Is it the, is it the, the testing, the required testing to get that approval? There’s something missing in there.

Is it that the testing wasn’t performed correctly and or something was missed or an oversight? Is it beyond that? I think that’s where this ends up. I don’t, because it’s happening so soon. In a lifetime of these blades, you start looking back up the chain and saying, okay, there was a couple of gates that we had to pass through and checkpoints and we s it passed.

But how, 

Joel Saxum: well, I mean, okay, so, so I’m reading an article from 2021 here on Renews and that’s says that UL is the certification company that did it. So UL has to give the type certification, right? You’re a type two s, you’re a type whatever, blah, blah, blah. I don’t, I think that we have to understand what circumstances the blade failed under before we can point back to the certification body as well.

Well, 

Allen Hall: time. Time out. Well time out. Because I do think if you’re the certification body, it’s your, you’ve taken on the responsibility, in my opinion. To be doing the advanced work, right? You need to be looking four or five years ahead so that wind turbine operators don’t get into this problem or, and OEMs get into this problem.

You’re supposed to be thinking ahead, designing these tests, bringing in industry experts like Rosemary to come sit around the table and go, Hey everybody, we need to improve this, that, and the other so that we can get rid of, of future problems, and this is the way you’re going to. As an industry move forward.

That’s what all the governing bodies, certification bodies are there for. I always, the FA haven’t worked with the FAA and been in that situation a lot of times. Yeah, you can’t, can’t ignore them. Right. 

Joel Saxum: I agree with you a hundred percent there, but as it sits right now, if we’re just looking at facts, we don’t know the circumstances at what this blade filled under and they might have been outside a certification.

Right. The certification may still stall. So then, so we can’t point fingers there yet. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And also, I mean, the, the fact that they’ve shut down, they’ve suspended a specific factory as you know, as part of the, the evidence that we’ve got. I’m assuming that they’re making this blade in more than one factory and that they’re not suspended.

The other ones it’s, it’s possibly a huge factory stuff up. You know, that they have they have accidentally, Rolled out a manufacturing process or got, you know, a wrong fabric or something that wasn’t in the certification 

Joel Saxum: package. I have heard this though, like rosemary’s not wrong. I’ve heard that before.

Where the, you go back to the, the. The supplier of the turbine blade, and they can do their root cause analysis internally and go back and say like, sorry, our suppliers switched out a resin that we weren’t aware of that past certification here, but we didn’t know blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that that can happen.

So that’s possible that that could happen. However, that is a breach of qa, qc. Processes, I’m sure. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Or so someone could have mislabeled a, a weight of fabric and, you know, they’ve been putting in a lighter, a lighter fabric than they, they should have been in a certain place. Or someone put a, a mold marking in the wrong place so that, you know, applies is going up to the wrong place.

Like all that sort of stuff happens from time to time, but I’ve, I’ve never seen it happen. You know, with this kind of effect and this kind of consistency and yeah. Consequence 

Joel Saxum: by the press releases and stuff, I’m still in my mind saying, this is a serial defect, this is a design issue. That’s where I’m at still.

Allen Hall: But Rosemary, you’re design injured, you’re saying It’s not 

Rosemary Barnes: No, no. I’m not saying it’s not. I’m saying it could be, it, it could be a, a factory thing. That would be the only way that you could say it wasn’t a problem with the, the testing or the certification body. The other thing that I think is unlikely, but I guess you’ve gotta gotta raise is that the certification body were misled because you know, they do put a lot of trust in the information that they’re given from the engineers, in the manufacturers.

And, and I don’t know if you followed the, the, the Boeing That was at the max or y Yeah, case. Well, so, you know, there’s some sort of parallels there. I mean, a lot of the time when I was following that case, I was like, you know, all the things that were being slammed in the mainstream media. I’m like, yep, standard engineering.

Standard engineering, standard engineering. You know, that’s the sort of, you know, how engineering works in any industry and, you know, you, you guys just don’t know how anything that you, anything you use is made or designed or manufactured. So yes, there is A tight relationship between manufacturers and certification bodies.

Sounds dodgy, but couldn’t possibly be any other way because, you know, the certification bodies are never going to be more knowledgeable than the manufacturing companies and have you know, enough re resources. They would need to be bigger than the manufacturing companies, you know, to have more, more resources available to recreate from scratch.

Without actually having access. You know, the, so usually they’re taking the the manufacturer’s word for it on how strong their materials are. And a few other, a few other things like that. But it’s also, it, it gradually. Increases with time, the amount of trust, you know, you might get less trust the first few times that they certify something, but after a while when they see that, you know, the, the things that you’ve told them you know, have proven to be true, then yeah, they, they are taking a word for it, a fair bit, but they’re also taking your word for it that, you know, when you say this design is, you know, very similar to the previous one, that you were already certified.

They take your word for it, that you’re actually gonna make that blade that you that you had them certify as, as well, and Yeah, but I mean, you can’t put the certification body in the factory to watch every single blade and every single worker. I just struggling to see how you could really have an arrangement without, well, I mean, we saw in the, the Boeing case that they’re also taking their, their word for it a lot.

Aerospace is also more, more critical because people’s lives are much more at stake than they are in wind. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Well it is, but is, is the temperature of the planet more important than, you know, one airliner? I think that people would, most people would say yes, right? I mean, this is a huge setback. It’s, it’s not, we’re gonna fix this next week, Rosemary, and I think the certification bodies are supposed to be having seen it from the other side.

The certification bodies are supposed to bring together the technical experts to put them from the different companies in a room to decide what the process would be on the certification side. And verifiably, he’s doing the right thing. But also, and this is where a aviation comes into play. They have a production certificate.

There are f a people in factories until they can stand up a quality organization that can show they’re competent. The F FAA sits there and anything that happens that is abnormal off drawing, any deviation, it gets oversight. All kinds of oversight. And so companies can go on for years with the FAA having direct 

Joel Saxum: oversight.

That’s not a certification body, that’s a, that’s a federal agency. 

Allen Hall: Well, you’re gonna end up with federal, federal laws against blades breaking off. Well, you’re just, you’re gonna do it. You keep breaking blades like this. And this happened in the United States. If this happened in New York, offshore in New York, there would be laws.

That’s the, you don’t wanna end up there. I think you don’t wanna end up there. And I think if you don’t as a certification group, and there’s many of ’em, there’s not just one you, you better be thinking ahead. Let’s go back 

Joel Saxum: to the idea of just talking about certification bodies. So now we know there’s a bunch of them, right?

D nv, bureau of Verta as ul like there’s a, there’s a stack of groups out there. And they’re technically for, so for listeners as well, they’re technically not like agencies of a government. They’re privately held companies. They are just the ones that say that they’re looked at as the, the experts in the space that can certify to say, yes, this one will work.

So they go to a third independent party. The OEMs do go to the third independent party, which is the one of these certification bodies, and they come back and say, it’s good. So, so here’s a thought for you though. Now we’ve been, we talked about last week too, and since 2010, it’s been model after model, after blade type, after blade type, just thrown at ’em.

Do you think there’s a bit of almost like complacency in like, oh, we got another review coming. Yeah. Another month later. Boom. You’re good. Here’s another one, another month later. Boom. You’re good. 

Allen Hall: Is it a big, short situation? 

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t know. I’ve, I’ve noticed some real clogging of their systems at the moment.

Like it’s, it takes a long time to get anything through one of those agencies at the moment from what I’ve seen. So I feel like maybe they’re continuing to you. You know, I, I say that they’re taking longer to get through stuff at the moment. So if they’ve got a higher workload, then it doesn’t seem to me like they’re just rushing things through to.

To keep, keep business flowing. 

Allen Hall: No one says that there is. They are. But if you design a system where that can happen, it will happen. The system’s designed that way. Right. This is the same thing about the, the mortgage bonds in 2007 and a right. You had the different rating agencies competing against one another for the, the, the triple A rating on a bond that was full of Bs and Cs.

It’s 

Rosemary Barnes: a big short, but I think that one thing that keeps everyone honest along the way to a certain extent, like if I was a, a manager or an executive at Siemens, go mea, and I knew about this issue and was tempted to conceal that so that it could get through certification. It’s only, you know, like a year later after that, I don’t know when they certified this blade, but you know, like it’s not very long before this is gonna come back to bite you.

Far worse than a delay in your certification would’ve, you know, like it, it’s hard to imagine unless, was there somebody, you know, was the guy that was their VP of engineering? Like, did someone retire six months ago or something like that would be the only way that I could really see that. Oh, I can’t be bothered to deal with this.

You know, one more problem, just, you know, like, sign off everything, everything’s fine. I’m, I’m retiring. Because otherwise, like, if the guy’s still there then I feel like, what, what did they gain from from trying to hide something like this? I feel like maybe. They diminished, they didn’t believe engineers.

It was so serious. Possibly, but I can’t imagine it was blatant, blatant fraud because there’s just you know, a guarantee that it, you’re gonna get found out and it’s gonna be come back and be pinned on you. You know, 

Allen Hall: the way to obscure this is to push it back on the certification body and saying, we did the test to the standard.

We are good. We did everything that was asked to best, which is, which would be absolutely, I think every wind turbine blade manufacturer has been down this route. We’ve did everything we were supposed to do and there’s a, there’s a problem with the standard abs are freak Aly. They have 

Rosemary Barnes: to go there. I’ll be so surprised if that’s the outcome from this.

I, I mean, this standard has been working for decades. This is not, the conclusion from this is not that the standard is not is just grossly inadequate. The standards are getting ref refined over time, all, all the time. But why? 

Joel Saxum: There’s no way the certifi, the certification bodies. They’ve got good enough lawyers where they’re not gonna, they’re not gonna sweat over this thing.

They’re not gonna have a, they’re still gonna have a Christmas 

Rosemary Barnes: bonus, terrible reputational damage if it was pinned on them. But I, I would be really surprised to see the problem coming down to certification body. And in any case, none of the manufacturers are really relying on certification as the proof that their turbine is good enough.

The proof your turbine is good enough is that it, it does, it does what it says, and that you don’t get warranty claims and that you know the performance is good enough that your reputation means that people come and buy from you Again. Like the, you know, with lightning, you know, is the most obvious. Example of it, it’s, it’s so easy to get lightning certification past the, you know, certification tests for lightning compared to having turbines with lightning protection systems that actually perform as expected in the field.

That’s the harder part. You know, people are somewhere in between the two, but nobody is just like, oh, we’ve got lightning certification, you know, that’s job done. We can, you know, we can, can stop working on, you know, on this now. Have you 

Joel Saxum: heard that? Joel Dock and Lightning will be here until the freak cows come home, man.

I got a, a 

Allen Hall: crisp American $20 bill. I’ll certify that. I’m gonna set it aside. If the certification, if we start reading stories about the certification body in Siemens game, Mesa, I 

Joel Saxum: I’ll pay you one cuz there it ain’t gonna 

Rosemary Barnes: happen. I’ll give you an Australian $20. I’ll make up 

Allen Hall: the envelope to Roseberry right about now.

Try put in the mail by the 

Rosemary Barnes: time it gets there. Yeah, he, he is your American $20. I have been around this in the aviation 

Allen Hall: too long. I just know how this always ends up, you know, it’s, everybody points to the next stage down the path. It’s, I 

Joel Saxum: think it’s inevitable. I know some people at ul. I’ll give ’em a call and see what the inside scoop is, see if they’re getting phone calls yet.

All right. 

Allen Hall: Joel will be the judge. Joel. Joel will be our spy. And we’ll, and we’ll just send out an anonymous slack saying Rosemary is right, and I’ll put a stamp on it to Australia and away it’ll go, and she’ll have a nice coffee on me. 

Joel Saxum: How about that? Instead of oh oh seven, it’s D oh oh five x for this one.

See, this is 

Allen Hall: a good, so this is what this whole podcast is about, right? Putting three people on who don’t necessarily agree, but are all trying to get to the right answer. I think it’s one thing Rosemary think it’s another. It’s totally fine. I think this is good to hash this out because this has to be happening at every water cooler at every o e m and operator in the world right now.

Right. At least I hope it is. 

Joel Saxum: Especially if they have an order place for S G R E five X turbines. Our 

Allen Hall: wind farm of the week is Appaloosa Run Wind Farm in Upton County, Texas, which is owned by NextEra Energy. It’s near Midland and Odessa, Texas, kinda central Texas. They have 61 GE 2.8, 1 27 wind turbines.

Pretty cool site. The project was expected to cost around $260 million and all that money went into the surrounding community. That’s, that’s a could bit of of coin. The, the farm is up and generating electricity just recently and they have a virtual per power purchase agreement with DuPont des. And Rosemary, that’s a big US company but they’re gonna take off 135 megawatts from that farm.

And this part of DuPont’s acting on climate goal of reducing absolute greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, including sourcing 60% of electricity from renewable energy by 2030 and achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. So, pretty cool project between NextEra. And DuPont. So Appaloosa Run Wind Farm. You are our Wind farm of the week.

That’s gonna 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. Check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.