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The latest Uptime Wind Energy podcast investigates ingenious systems tracking bird behavior near turbines. Hosts Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and blade expert Rosemary Barnes examine radars revolutionizing avian activity alerts. From Robin Radar’s monitoring, new technologies enable prudent wind farm planning around flocks. But can colorful deterrents like green towers really redirect birds? The team weighs wavering research on visual repellents. They also confront repairs rattling turbine reliability – dissecting blade imperfections from microscopic defects to major retrofits. With quality controls failing, can wind power keep soaring? Discover uplifting solutions to bird puzzles and blade bottlenecks only on Uptime – the #1 podcast helping wind work.
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!
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Uptime 186
Allen Hall: Has everybody seen A Christmas Story? Rosemary, I know you don’t have snow, but have you seen A Christmas Story movie?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I, I was subjected to a whole, a whole lot of American Christmas traditions, but that one didn’t come up.
Phil Totaro: I’ve never seen it.
Allen Hall: So in a very Christmas Story fashion, I received this sort of box at the house, and it said Fragile on it.
And then I thought, well, it must be a major award. And then I, I do open it up and sure enough, right over there. Rosemary, can you
Rosemary Barnes: tell what that is? Did you get a, what? Doesn’t that mean that you have 100, 000 subscribers? We have
Allen Hall: over 200, 000 subscribers to our YouTube channel.
Rosemary Barnes: Going crazy. Nice. That’s so cool.
Well, it’s not really
Allen Hall: congratulations. It’s, it’s one of those things like, what am I going to do with this thing? Now that I have it, I’m not sure what to do with it. So I stuck it here behind me figuring like, well, that’s exactly what you do. Yeah. I mean, it’s just, it’s basically a lawn ornament. That’s essentially what it is.
Joel Saxum: I think the next time you go to Texas, you should get a belt buckle made.
Allen Hall: See, that would be cool. I’m with Joel on that one. So the next NASCAR race I go to, I got to have a YouTube buckle, but thanks to everybody on YouTube has subscribed to our channel because we’re, we’re getting really close to a quarter million subscribers on that channel.
And we really appreciate everybody paying attention to us and, and on the audio platform, Spotify and Apple podcasts, we have seen a market, a number of people. listening to the podcast. So we really appreciate it and keep on listening and send us notes. And we really appreciate when our listeners send us notes and tell us things that they’d like to hear on the program, that’s what’s
Rosemary Barnes: wonderful.
Allen Hall: Well, we know there’s an issue with TPI blades and with wrinkles in particular, because TPI has announced that and they’re, they’re making some changes to the quality system and bringing people in, uh, to get back on track, but it also looks like they have a number of existing winter and blades that have.
Wrinkle issues at a minimum. So if you’re paying attention out there in the LinkedIn world, you see some of these repairs going on and Rosemary, I’ve watched, I don’t know, 8, 10 videos over the last couple of weeks of. Repairs that are happening to TPI blades down in Mexico. And those repairs appear to be very close to the root of the, of the blade.
And they’re from the naked eye as an electrical engineer, they look pretty deep and my first thought is like, wow, that’s a lot of work is, is that normal to be doing those kinds of repairs? Uh, at the root end of a blade, right out of the factory.
Rosemary Barnes: Uh, I mean, yeah, it can be. One thing that people don’t realize so much, um, about wind turbine blades is that they’re pretty much all repaired.
Uh, I mean, I’d be pretty surprised to see a blade just come off the production line and not need any repairs. In fact, you do repairs at several stages in the manufacturing process. You would, um, you know, repair before you. Close up the blade if you needed to get at the, you know, the inside surface. And then, um, you know, there’s some things that look like repairs that are just part of the normal manufacturing process.
Like, you know, when you join two halves of the, the blade together, it’s like a clamshell and then they’ll usually, um, put some glass over the, the join and, you know, finish that so that the aerodynamic surfaces, um, is all nice again. Um, but then aside from that, there’ll be usually, you know, a bunch of repairs that need to be done, um, that, you know, wouldn’t be done on every blade, just depending on slight variations in the manufacturing process.
And that’s, you know, part of the design process is expecting those repairs. Um, I know it’s always something that when I was working in the factories and you’d have colleagues that were visiting that were more used to other kinds of manufacturing, say with metals, um, they were constantly surprised at the process of manufacturing process for wind turbine blades because they’re very handmade.
It’s a very manual process. It’s pretty hard to tell from this guy’s LinkedIn who I just, I’m really excited that you found, that you found this resource because normally, you know, you don’t get inside a wind turbine blade factory and you know, I’ve seen all that stuff when I was working there, but it’s not like I’m allowed to take the pictures then videos that I took when I was working in the factory and share them.
Um, usually, you know, this kind of information is super locked down. Um, and so it’s really cool to see it. It’s hard to say if these are normal or not, because it’s like, as this, if every repair that he showed was on the same blade, then I would say, Ooh, that’s, you know. That’s not a super duper looking blade, a lot of repairs on that one.
But, you know, if it’s, you know, if he’s getting 1 percent of the blades out of that factory and, you know, this one needs a root repair and then this one needs a trailing edge repair. That’s not at all unusual from my point of view, except for the fact that, um, it’s apparently being done outside the factory.
So these are issues that weren’t discovered in the factory and need to be repaired later.
Allen Hall: It looked like some of the repairs that were made in the factory, they’re getting re repaired and some of the more critical areas were, uh, the spar web meets the shell. And I guess I would have called the fish mouth, uh, right at the.
There’s some work going on down in that area, which is a highly structural area, right? I mean, that’s not something to be grinding away at normally.
Rosemary Barnes: Usually, and I mean, I can’t speak for every single manufacturer and every single blade and every single factory, but usually. You can repair any defect. It’s, it’s so rare that you would, um, you know, have a, a defect in a blade that you’re like, okay, we’ll just, um, scrap the blade because we can’t fix it.
So, I mean, it is a big deal to have to do a repair at the root. I wouldn’t say it’s super uncommon, but one of the problems is, you know, the way that when turbine blades are made up, they’ve got layers and layers of fiberglass. And you can’t just, you know, cut out a damaged section, um, you know, like drill out a circular section and then slot in another circular section in there because all your fibers are cut.
The way that the structure works with the composite structure is that the loads are transmitted down along the fibers. So anytime you, you cut a fiber, it can’t transmit loads across that cut anymore. So, um, even if you’ve only got to replace one layer, if it’s, you know, on the inside of the blade, then you have to remove everything above it.
And then you have to chamfer. You have to, um, you know, remove. You get all the way down and then you’ve got to grind at an angle so that you have overlap for every layer above it. So, what happens then is repairs can, can grow. At the root you’ve got a lot of layers and so you can end up with really big areas that need to be ground to get enough, um, surface area for that repair to be structural.
Um, and what really causes challenges is when, when you’re grinding to repair one fault, you end up having to grind through another feature, and then you have to repair that. Um, and so they can kind of grow and grow and grow, and it is possible to see repairs that are, you know, like 10 or more meters long or wide because of…
That, that, that he, um, you know, ground through another feature that they had to rebuild and repair at the same time, Joel,
Allen Hall: the TPI has set aside about 30 million for the repairs. And based upon what you have seen so far. How many blades do you think they’re going to end up repairing? Oh,
Joel Saxum: man, just kind of looking at the general economics of it, right?
If it’s 30 million and you’re talking brand new blades, if these are 50, 60, 70 meter blades, they’re 250, 300, 000 a piece. So you’re only talking maybe 100, 120 blades if they were brand new as a replacement cost. That’s not very many. Um, and like Rosemary was saying earlier, you can repair, you can repair anything.
It just depends on when it becomes economical too, right? So these, these repairs in the factory have to be less than the cost of a new blade and the logistics of it. Um, but still 30 million seems like a small number to me to encompass the issue that they have. Phil,
Allen Hall: TPI is worth about 100 million at the moment.
Their cap table is based on current stock price of around 2 and 40. 5 cents per share. A $30 million repair budget seems like a substantial amount of what that company is valued at today. Is that a problem for t p i?
Phil Totaro: Potentially. Um, but you’ve also seen them, uh, make a lot of internal changes recently, you know, which we’ve talked about on the show before.
Uh, they’ve got a new, uh, vice president of quality, uh, in charge, uh, new c e o. So, you know, and a lot of internal changes around their, their manufacturing quality process. So, they’re, they’re trying to get a, a hold on what the issues are and, and fix them. Setting aside the 30 million is an important step for them to be able to indicate that this is how much we think it’s going to be.
But, similar to the Siemens Gamesa issue, that budget could end up growing. Um, so it’s a risk, but it’s not necessarily any more of a risk than Um, you know, what any other company might, might face in terms of, um, their, their kind of, um, you know, ongoing operations, uh, but it’s, it’s something that seems pretty prevalent, um, you know, speaking to a, uh, confidential source, he mentioned to me that their TPI is the subject of a couple of lawsuits.
Um, at this point on the blade quality. So, you know, they, they’ve got things, which, I mean, I don’t want to make that sound like it’s, you know, it’s, it’s something that’s not necessarily a day to day occurrence, but it’s also not something that, you know, the market necessarily needs to freak out about. Um, it’s just a, a situation where, okay, you know, everybody has teething issues when you’re introducing a product, um, particularly a new product.
And I think they’ve done what they can to try and reassure everybody. Um, but it’s gonna take some time before all of those changes and improvements and, and everything start to really… Uh, kind of work their way through the system and, and they maybe don’t have to, um, leave this 30 million set aside. You know, maybe it’ll cost less, maybe it’ll cost more, um, we’ll,
Allen Hall: we’ll see.
Doesn’t that make them very susceptible to acquisition or takeover?
Joel Saxum: Yes. Yeah, especially by people that have big
Phil Totaro: contracts with them. Yeah, but that, that’s kind of the point, Joel. It’s, it’s, you know, just like LM got bought by GE, I mean, that was both a strategic, um, play and there were, you know, there were other, uh, kind of reasons behind, you know, GE wanting to, wanting to acquire LM, um, so the short answer to Ellen’s question is yes, it does make them a potential takeover target, I think.
But keep in mind that what we’ve seen in the past in this industry is not a huge willingness to do an assumption of a large amount of debt. Um, it’s a question of… You know, companies, companies that want to be able to acquire, um, you know, I mean, if the worst happened, you could see TPI get asset stripped, but I don’t see that happening.
I see, you know, somebody coming in and potentially acquiring them to, you know, put something more robust in place if they don’t feel like TPI’s management is, has gotten a handle on things, but it’s too soon to say whether or not that’s necessarily been the case. It
Allen Hall: seems like a very cheap investment at this point because if you were going to build your own factory, a single factory today, I think the number that’s floating around is 500 million dollars.
You could own all of TPI for a hundred.
Phil Totaro: Yes and no, so a couple of things with that. Their market cap may be a hundred, but you also have to take into consideration whatever premium is going to be put on top of it. It’s not going to get you up to 500 million, but, um, you know, the other thing with a new factory is it also kind of depends on what you’re trying to do.
I mean, nobody’s… I don’t think you’re going to see a new factory get built that’s going to be based on fiberglass blade production anymore. So if somebody wanted the TPI fiberglass blade production, that could be a reasonably attractive thing. But keep in mind that with offshore turbines and with larger onshore turbines, We’re moving towards carbon, and we’re moving towards, uh, even carbon glass hybrid, um, blade production.
So it’s, you know, that’s, that’s why the price tag for a new factory might be a little bit more than, um, you know, a conventional fiberglass production, um, capacity. But. It’s, it could make them attractive, but it’s also, you know, if you’re, if you’re in the market for kind of legacy technology, that’s appealing, and they could end up being acquired at some point, but.
It’s the, the industry’s kind of shifted priorities at
Allen Hall: this point. I think Rosemary brought this up where a lot of the blades is particularly in repower aren’t don’t have carbon in them. There’s still GE like 62 twos and 57 meter blades, which TPI builds a lot of those, I’d assume that, uh, I’m GE and I’m worried about supply chain.
Do I just take this thing over and run it just like they did with LM. Rosemary, what do you think about moving to Mexico?
Rosemary Barnes: I would, I’d move to Mexico actually. Um, you know, if the, yeah, and surfing and, and whatever. Yeah. It would depend, it would depend where definitely, but the. For sure. Feel free to send out offers to me for nice jobs near good, good surf locations in Mexico.
I’ll, I’ll consider them. Um, yeah, I don’t know though about, um, ge buying T P I I, I think, I mean, the purpose of T p I, I don’t think there’s anybody that has any blades that are, you know, any turbines that can only have their blades made by T P I. Usually when you’re using an external manufacturer, like either TPI or LM, when power is the same, um, or similar kind of business model, the idea is that you’re diversifying your supply chain.
Um, so, yeah, if TPI folds and that will be bad because everyone will now go to only having one option to make their blades. Um, so, you know, it’s not like it wouldn’t be a big deal. It’ll be a huge big deal, but if GE buys TPI, then I mean, it’s pretty hard to really, you know, keep things totally separate, um, and maintain that diversified supply chain when it’s all the same company now.
So I’ll be surprised if, if that happens, um, but yeah, I guess I have been surprised before.
Allen Hall: Joel, what are the, what are the, what are the odds? Put down the odds that in the hallways of GE they’re talking about this right now. Oh, if you were a
Joel Saxum: fly on the wall in GE, for sure someone’s talking about it.
That’s a water cooler conversation, guaranteed, up in Schenectady or anywhere else. Reality of it, um, I think it’s kind of low and I would cite Rosemary and Phil the same way saying, you know, of course you’re looking at if you got down to a monopoly situation on blades for certain turbine models, the SEC might not like it either.
Um, and now it’s not that big of an industry, so they may not pay attention to it, but. Energy security wise, supply chain, there’s some things that don’t really fit there. You know, the one thing that I’d like to actually ask before we hop off this topic, I want to ask Rosemary a quick question. So they hired the new internal, all the internal changes, like the new quality director.
This person seems, like, imminently important now in the role, and we’re looking at these repairs, and there’s a, there’s a certain, has to be a certain set of a triage that happens, right? Just like a, If you’re in wartime and a bunch of people need help from nurses, who do you pick out? Which ones do you fix first?
Which ones don’t you? So the, what does the triage look like there? Because I guess in my mind, I was always thinking, Ah, it’s gonna be mostly cosmetic stuff in the factory and if there’s a bad structural damage And then it would be like a huge red flag, but it sounds like in that process you’re, you’re saying that Happens, structural things happen quite regularly.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean nearly everything is is structural actually. Um, I guess that there are some Uh, you know, like purely cosmetic things that have to get fixed, but in general, like there’s not really anything in a wind turbine blade structure that doesn’t need to be there either for, you know, the aerodynamics or the structure.
And I mean, it really, every, every bit of fiberglass should be, should be contributing to the structural strength. Otherwise, um, yeah, your design’s not very efficient. So yes, definitely. It’s absolutely true that, um, yeah, I mean, every, every repair, the way that the, they work with the triaging is, um, they usually categorize repairs into.
you know, how important it is structurally and how common it is, like really common categories of repairs. You don’t ever need to get an engineer involved in that because it’s like, okay, if you’ve got, you know, this size, sometimes there are, um, damage is, you know, smaller than so many, um, square centimeters or the diameter, um, is smaller than a certain size.
And it’s in a certain location, then you’re fine to just use this standard repair method. And that would cover the vast majority of, um, the defects that get repaired in the factory. They just, you know, they just look it up in a chart and then go and go and do a repair that they do, you know, every day in the factory.
So no big deal. Um, and then you arrange that all the way through to something that’s more unusual and certain, you know, there’s usually certain critical locations in a blade, um, that varies from blade to blade. Um, but there’ll be critical locations where there is very little extra safety factor. So, um, when you’re repairing there, it’s really important to make sure that you get exactly the original strength back.
Um, and those ones will often be the ones where an engineer will have to, um, calculate what the repair should look like and we’ll have to, you’ll have to get an engineer and quality checking every step along the way to make sure that it’s done correctly. Um, yeah, so that’s, that’s how it works. Thanks. If I were, you know, in charge of going in and, um, looking through all of their quality problems, then I guess you’d be implementing something similar to that.
And then they’ll usually put, put a ranking on, on things, or if it’s, you know, serial defects, things that they’re getting over and over again, you can have a look at, see how much these are costing you, um, to, to repair both in the factory and if they’re making it out into the field. And that will be your answer about which order you should tackle them in.
Um, the, you know, the, the most expensive ones first, either expensive because they’re super, super common, they’re hard to detect, or they’re really lengthy repairs.
Allen Hall: So if the repair company down in Mexico needs a blade expert, just go to partalote. com it’s P A R T A L O T E. com and you can get a little rosemary.
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 PES wind.
com.
Well, at the university of Wyoming researchers are conducted a study on the color of wind turbines and whether it attracts insects or not. So this effort was led by former university of Wyoming master’s student, Madison Crawford. And basically is they painted some wind turbine like. Feature and put it out in the field of different colors on it and just count of the bugs and it turns out that bugs like certain colors and I thought that was weird.
So when turbines that are predominantly painted white attracts insects, uh, also other colors that insects light like are violet and blue. Uh, and the insects didn’t like things that were green, orange, yellow, or light gray, and that seems a little weird. Uh, but, Rosemary, it, it is an important feature, particularly for bats, I think for bats, and for some birds, that if insects are attracted to wind turbines, that less insects means less flying creatures around them, probably less impact to them running into the turbine blades.
Does this research make sense? Do you think this is just a one off sample? And I’m really getting. very cautious about research papers lately because a lot of them are just complete BS or they’re a one off that can’t be repeated, right? And I’m starting to think this about some of these research papers involve wind energy.
Uh, but does, does this make sense to you that if you painted the base of the turbine, like orange, that it would kind of repel insects?
Rosemary Barnes: It, it, I mean, it’s, uh, kind of intuitively a little surprising, like you said, like, why wouldn’t an insect like a green wind turbine? That’s, that’s weird. Um, and I noted that gray is one of the repelling colors.
So, I mean, that, that’s good. A wind turbine blades, at least, I’m not sure about the towers, but the blades, at least, they’re not white. They are like a light gray color, usually. Um, so no big deal to, to paint them slightly gray. Um, yeah, I don’t know if it’ll make a big difference. Uh, I don’t see any problem with, you know, trialing it.
Like we’ve talked before about painting Winterbine Blades black or, you know, one of the three black to repel birds. And, um, I think we’ve been through how that’s actually more of a challenge than it might sound. I don’t see big challenges with painting towers light gray, um, unless there’s, you know, sometimes there’s, um, you know, part of planning approval requires that it’s painted a certain color.
Um, actually it’s interesting, I think the Enercon turbines, at least around Northern Europe, uh, they have really, this really nice green gradient on the bottom, which is very pretty, but maybe that’s, maybe that’s wrong. They should be, should be changing it to a different color because it’s a bug, a bug attracting one.
Although, that said, like, I’m in no problem with bugs at the very base of the turbine, I guess. Yeah. So, I mean, why not try it? But I do agree with you that it’s very easy to just, um, you know, do one, one small trial and find some sort of result unless you’ve got dozens of wind turbines of each color. I don’t think that you can really draw proper statistical conclusions from that.
So I don’t think it is a high quality. you know, uh, scientific analysis. Maybe it’s a start, a starting point for looking into something.
Joel Saxum: Isn’t the sample size a minimum of 30 to have any kind of statistical like strength?
Rosemary Barnes: That’s my rule of thumb. I don’t, I don’t try and do statistics on any less than 30.
And you would need that for each color as well. You couldn’t, you couldn’t just do like two or three from
Allen Hall: each color. And the insects are not the same all around the world. Exactly.
Joel Saxum: This is done in Wyoming. So what time of year in Wyoming, what insects are there? Like a good idea, cool master’s project, but I don’t know if it’s…
It would need more
Rosemary Barnes: validation. It would be a huge project to figure out if this was a real effect. It would wanna have a very big possible impact, um, to, to bother doing all the work that you would need to make it rigorous.
Allen Hall: I don’t know why they don’t paint wind turbines to repel rattlesnakes. I think that’s the bigger , the bigger issue having been about a lot of wind turbines, like there’s a lot of rattlesnakes around several of those wind turbines.
They seem pretty comfortable. Hanging out around those turbines. You’d think you’d paint, paint the turbines to get rid of those things. But I mean, Phil, you, you’ve seen the, um, you remember when we used to put deer whistles on our front of our vehicles? Remember that? You, you’re a, you used to live in Buffalo, right?
Was a lot of
Phil Totaro: deer. Yes. My parents, my parents owned those. Everybody
Allen Hall: had those things, because we were 100 percent certain they would repel deer. And, you know, obviously, didn’t really work all that well. And I feel like it’s one of those kind of studies, like, Well, the neighbors have them, and their car hasn’t been run into a deer lately, so…
We’ll buy the 5 deer whistles, and…
Phil Totaro: I agree with what’s been said regarding, um, you know, the statistical relevance, but also keep in mind that if this could, uh, result in something, you know, if this is the beginning of, of a meaningful study on, um, elimination of soiling, that’s actually a huge performance degradation on, on turbines.
So there may be a reason to, to want to investigate this further. I, I don’t know that it necessarily makes intuitive sense that insects would be guided by any one color or another. Um, especially with the blades rotating at such a fast speed. You know, when you start talking about, like, tip speed relative to the, you know, the speed at which an insect can fly and the relative size
Allen Hall: of it.
They’re just talking towers, but the logic would apply, right? Right,
Phil Totaro: but that’s the point. Like, if… I mean, it’s funny because the whole reason Enercon did the, the, you know, blended, shaded, uh, color scheme on the tower was actually, it was a result of something they had patented, um, thinking that it, it improved social acceptance, um, so it had absolutely nothing to do, they got a regular patent and design patent on it.
Painting your, the base of your wind turbine tower different shades of green. Um, I, I guess it warrants more investigation. But, uh, you know, if, if we can focus on the, the real end result, which is like, let’s eliminate soiling and let’s eliminate insects in proximity to… Turbines, which as you mentioned, potentially eliminates birds or bat, uh, strikes that’s, that’s a desirable outcome.
So performance improvement and safety are, are definitely desirable outcomes. As long as we remain focused on that and not the, uh, you know, my wind turbines now orange. Uh, you know, for, for whatever reason. Alright, let’s, let’s
Allen Hall: do thumbs up, thumbs down on this.
Rosemary Barnes: Rosemary? You can understand. I just like a sideways thumb, like I don’t care, paint it by whatever color you want.
Joel Saxum: Waste of money. Paint is expensive.
Allen Hall: It’s killing the environment. Probably killing bugs while you apply it, so. Just leave the wind turbines alone. Can we just do that?
Joel Saxum: If the base tower comes from the factory coded a certain way, then cool. Otherwise, don’t
Allen Hall: retrofit it. Uh, thumbed through my PES wind magazine and came across this, uh, pretty interesting article.
And I want to talk to Rosemary about this first, which is Robin Radar Systems. So they have a radar system which detects birds and uses it to identify the particular bird and where they’re traveling and all this kind of great stuff, and it’s actually pretty complicated technology. Uh, and it was originally designed to be used around airports to detect birds traveling places where they could collide with an airplane.
Uh, but it’s expanded out further than that, obviously. And the, a couple of. Things from the article, which I didn’t realize is that there’s a lot of research done on bird migration, kind of, uh, bird patterns before the wind farm is installed. In some places, it’s being required, uh, as part of the siting effort.
And I didn’t think that was happening. Uh, at least it’s not happening here in the States. At least I haven’t heard of it. And maybe happening in Europe, and I’m wondering if it’s happening in Australia, and if, if so, then it seems to me like you’re going to need one of these Robin radar systems to, to do that.
There’s not a lot of choices in this space at the moment. Uh, you know, it obviously. If you, if you need to really track birds, you need a pretty sophisticated radar system to do it, because birds aren’t very big.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, well, there are several systems to identify birds. Robin radar is good if you need to detect at night, because the other ones, as far as I’m aware, they’re using vision.
And I think that the, yeah, the, the like AI vision interpreting systems from what I’ve heard do work really nice and reliably during the day. Um, but if you need to, yeah, monitor at night as well, you know, depending on what kind of bird you’re worried about, or if it’s a, you know, a bat, then you’ve obviously, you can’t, you can’t just rely on what you can see to do that.
Bog.
Allen Hall: It’d be hard. Without a radar.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, um, and I, I would be really surprised if it’s. True, but you said that the U. S. isn’t monitoring for birds before wind farms are installed. I mean, you must have environmental, um, uh, regulations that you have to adhere to and do, um, you know, like endangered species checks.
And I guess, yeah, in America, you’re more concerned about the migratory birds than any other kind of bird. Um, So there’s a, there’s a
Joel Saxum: weird juxtaposition there in the U. S. law, law wise. And so, so law wise, the raptors are usually federally protected. So the USDA actually controls those, U. S. Department of Agriculture.
And then, and that’s in cahoots with the U. S. Forest Service. So you have raptor nests where it’ll be like certain eagles, certain owls that you have to stay away from, and that will be all the time. Like, you won’t even be able to build near them. But then there is, then there is also, you know, federal laws around, I did a project last summer up in the northern part of the states where there’s a certain kind of grouse that has a mating, they call it a lek, a mating area, and we weren’t allowed to bring cranes on site until after, you know, mid July to protect that mating area.
So there is some rules, the fact that it’s the states individually, they don’t protect anything really at a state level. So until someone finally sues. To for migratory birds, then the federal white migratory bird act will come into play, uh, but that hasn’t yet.
Allen Hall: Does this change then once, if they’re looking for birds before the farm is installed, I assume if they have a Robin radar system that they will want to keep that throughout the lifetime of the farm, because it’s already kind of set up to know the migratory patterns.
It would be tracking a probably a little bit better than a different vision system. For example, Rosemary, if you had this system in place. Why wouldn’t you just keep it and then it does look like it will also shut down or slow down turbines when it detects a bird and basically do some things that other similar systems are doing, but I guess the key is really nighttime, right?
Is, is that the real mix here? If I had a lot of owls or something like that that’s flying around at nighttime that I would need a system
Rosemary Barnes: like this? Yeah, I mean, it depends if that’s a problem for your, your wind farm. I mean, the first, the best outcome is that you monitor before you build the wind farm and figure out that it isn’t a really, um, you know, dangerous place to put these turbines from any particular bird’s perspective.
And so you end up not, not needing to monitor because you’ll have very few bird deaths and that would cover the majority of wind farms. Um, but then sometimes, uh, you want to put a wind farm in where there are bird problems. And one example, I, when I did a video on wind turbines and birds, I used the example of Cattle Hill Wind Farm in Tasmania, where they have a lot of, um, eagles and the, there’s a, a wedge tailed eagle that is, I think, listed as vulnerable in Tasmania.
And so they, um, you know, they have to be really, really careful not to kill any of those birds. And so… They installed the IdentiFlight system and I, I talked with the guy that was in charge of, um, yeah, all of the environmental stuff for that site and they were, they were super happy, happy with it. Um, and I know there was a nearby wind farm also in Tasmania that was using the Robin radar system.
Um, for a different, different kind of bird, I think. Um, so you do have some AEP loss. It’s definitely better than, you know, you’ve seen some examples in the U. S. where, um, people have complained about bird deaths after a farm’s been built. And the solution has been, okay, well, you just can’t operate a wind farm in these months of the year, or, you know, you have to turn it off every night.
Um, or, you know, something like that. And, and I mean, you can imagine the hit that you can take to AEP from that, especially. Yeah, depending on what season it is, or the time of day, if you know, like overnight is, um, often a very valuable time to be generating, uh, energy, if the wind speeds are higher and solar power isn’t available, then.
You can see higher prices. So if you’re really stuck in that kind of situation, then yes, you’re going to install a system. Well, if you
Allen Hall: want to learn more about Robin radar systems, just go to PES Wind. There’s a good article about it and you can just read copy at PESwind. com.
Phil Totaro: Lightning is an act of God,
Rosemary Barnes: but lightning damage is not.
Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. StrikeTape 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
Joel Saxum: today.
Allen Hall: The Wind Turbine Blade Test Center blast in Denmark opened a new test rig. And on that test rig is the first 115 meter B115 blade from Siemens Kamesa for their 14 236DD Turbine. Uh, that new test facility can test blades over 120 meters long and over 1000 tons. Holy smokes. That’s a big, big rig. Uh, it has some pretty cool features to it.
And if, if you haven’t seen the test center before it’s owned by DTU, Force, and DNV, uh, Rosemary, uh, and everybody, I guess. Uh, the Siemens Gamesa B115 blade testing that’s going on there has to be one of the most watched tests in the world for blades at the moment, just based upon some of the issues that Siemens Gamesa has been having, not in particular with this particular blade, but with what has happened and Siemens Gamesa saying they may have under tested some of their, uh, 4X, 5X equipment.
This is a big deal, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, but I mean, you never get to see the test and they never fail basically. What’s the point of the test? Yeah. I mean, because it’s, you usually make, when you’re developing a new blade, you build one test blade usually. Um, and you also. You don’t build it in, um, you don’t like build it, then do the test.
The tests take months, right? Cause you’ve got to test for fatigue loading so that you’re trying to get a whole lifetime’s worth of vibrations in and it’s accelerated. So you can do it in a few months, but that’s still, you know, months that you’re waiting. And it’s not like everyone sits around twiddling their thumbs, waiting to see if they can go ahead with the project that they were designing the blade for, you know, while the, um, test is, is happening.
You’re making, you’ve got your serial production running for that blade and they’re getting, you know, out to site. So, you’re pretty conservative. You make sure that your blade is going to pass. Every now and then engineers will purposely break a blade, you know, overload it beyond the point, um, that they need to for certification, uh, just to, you know, check if it breaks at the point that their design code says that it should break, you know, to, um, get a little bit, uh, better information.
To get a little bit better information about, um, yeah, the limits of design and material strengths and that sort of thing. But, you know, you do one every few years you would test to the point of failure.
Allen Hall: Well, the point of the test is to make a nice picture evidently, because we just went through a long discussion about TPI and grinding out all these sections in these blades at, uh, sort of random places.
Do they test that?
Rosemary Barnes: Yes, it should have been, and the, the, the repair method will have been tested. Uh, so you know that the, the method that you are using.
Allen Hall: No, I’m, I’m dead serious about that because I know, I know what happens on the airplane side, right? So on the airplane side, I can give you a really detailed summary of how they do all that work.
I don’t get the same sort of warm fuzzy feeling on the blade side because everybody’s complaining about blades quality and they’ve been having blade issues and now, you know, we’re in the middle of a blade test. What are they testing? Are they just testing a brand new fancy blade with all the fixings?
Everything looks good on it. It’s that first blade everybody’s watching it. But
Rosemary Barnes: meanwhile, they’re not, they’re not really, um, that dissimilar to the rest. Yeah. So it will probably be the first or at least one of the very first blades that was made in the factory. So it would have been made slower and with more attention.
But on the other hand, usually, you know, the quality gets better as you go along because you learn the little quirks of your specific. design, but it’s also like, really, I mean, there isn’t an incentive to fudge it because the company is responsible for mistakes that, that get out there. And I know that, um, Siemens Gamesis case they, they have, there’s been, you know, some sort of process has failed, but I would have thought that more of the issue is, you know, like a, a bad serial defect, um, you know, from the point of view of the company, if it’s, um, costing a lot.
You know, maybe I think in like 10, 20, 30 percent would be like massive, um, massive problem that is, you know, like really prevalent. So even in the very, very most common of defects, it’s still less than one in three blades that would have that defect. So, you know, odds are your test blade won’t. Um, and so that’s, that’s one issue, but much more common is that you’ll see an issue and you know, like maybe five or 10 percent of blades and sometimes like you’d like overwhelmingly are not likely to have, um, a defect.
In there, and then you have to make sure that it’s a kind of defect that the, um, test can actually pick up because you can’t, it’s not possible to load a blade in the, um, test hall, um, the same way that it is in, in real life, right? Uh, you just can’t get that, the aerodynamic loads a nice distributed load and there’s gravity and it’s happening over 30 years and you don’t have 30 years to wait to, you know, test your blade.
So there’s some differences and those are usually when there’s a problem it sneaks through for one of those reasons.
Allen Hall: I have seen been on the airplane side where they have to do repairs on a brand new composite airplane, right? It’s in the factory and and Owners will be very vocal about having to accept a brand new airplane that has had some repairs made to it particularly on the exterior Exterior side, very vocal about it to the point of, you can’t
Rosemary Barnes: sell it.
It’s a really good example of the immense differences between the way that the aero industry works compared to wind industry. And, you know, so often I’ve worked with suppliers who wanted to take a product that they have commercialized in the aerospace and they want to apply it to a wind turbine and, um, it’s just, it’s very difficult to do that because.
The, the cost of the product in the first place is just, you know, vastly different what you can do and then also what’s expected in terms of maintenance. So, I mean, I haven’t worked in the aero industry, but I’m going to assume that when they’re manufacturing composite components for aero industry, they’re using prepregs, um, and they’re using autoclaves and, you know, everything is very, very precisely controlled.
So like the difference between a prepreg and, um, you know, just regular fiberglass or carbon fiber fabric used in a wind turbine is in a prepreg the it’s pre impregnated with the resin. So, you know, it’s precisely placed. All the way around every, every fiber you put it, um, yeah, then you put it in a, a mold and it’s going to be heated and probably some pressure applied and you get a very, very consistent product with that.
Whereas, um, with a wind turbine blade, it’s dry fabric that’s just stored in rolls. Um, you, you know, you roll it out, you put some plastic wrap over it, a vacuum, suck resin in, and I won’t say you hope that the resin goes everywhere because it is, you know, like a really, really engineered process. Um, but you can’t control exactly where the resin goes.
It’s not exactly the same every time. So you do get dry spots and you do get wrinkles and you, you do get all these sorts of things every now and then. If you wanted to make it the same way that, um, you know, with the same quality that an airplane wing or, you know, whatever component had, it would just cost you vastly, vastly, vastly more.
We wouldn’t have a wind industry if they were made with, with prepregs. Um, it’s just, you know, so much more complicated. Oh, no, I,
Allen Hall: I completely agree with you on the approach. I just, at what point does it become a little bit tense as the number of repairs and Joel, maybe you have a better feeling for it, but like.
In the aerospace world, we call it the pucker factor, like at what point, like I made so many repairs to this thing that I’m starting to get a little bit concerned about it. And I feel like some of these repairs that are going on are like really approaching that quickly.
Joel Saxum: Well, if I was an asset owner, I would make sure that in the T’s and C’s, I have the ability to reject.
I think that from my knowledge of working with asset owners in the past, dealing with a lot of blade in factory issues, not a lot of people have that contract very well. Demised for themselves, right? They’re usually signing the contract that the OEM gives them That’s a hundred pages long of all kinds of fine print And they just go like, I just need these blades I’m gonna sign off here, but I think that there’s, there could be a little bit more due diligence done on the asset owner Or the actual buyer of the blades Part as far as inspections and the ability to Tell them what they want fixed and the quality of the product that they want to pay for Cause they’re paying millions and millions of dollars for these things They should get Uh, a high quality product and be able to QA, QC it themselves how they want.
Rosemary Barnes: I agree with that in some respects, but if I was an OEM, I wouldn’t sign a contract like that. Um, because people don’t understand the manufacturing process. And it’s one of the most common questions that I answer and reassure my clients. They say, you know, is this, is this repair too big? Is it? You know, are there too many repairs on this blade?
Shouldn’t it at this point just be scrapped and replaced? And, you know, I’m always telling them, no, this is actually really normal. I mean, there are a few occasions where it’s, it’s not normal, you know, um, obviously there’s been a repair that was the biggest one that I’ve ever seen and like, okay, you know, maybe it’s worth monitoring more, but the fact is that the repair methods are certified.
I personally have never worked with an issue that was that the repair method was a problem, that, you know, blades were breaking at repairs, like I, I actually don’t think I’ve ever seen that in my career, that, um, a faulty repair was the cause of a major failure. Sometimes I’ve seen the wrong repair method used in the factory.
And so, um, they have had to go through and replace them all. Um, but it, it’s just, yeah, I don’t think that that’s a reasonable clause to put in a contract because. Um, yeah, I don’t think that the, the purchasers, uh, understand the industry well enough. And I actually, I don’t think that that’s, that’s a problem.
All the other stuff that you said about, you know, inspections and I don’t know, I can’t remember exactly what you said, but you know, I would add, you know, the right to documentation and the, yeah, the right to be able to go up and inspect and install your own equipment in there. Like all that, definitely that should be in the, um, in the contracts.
I would push for that if I’m, yeah, at the stage of being able to advise on that. But. In terms of, oh, is this blade too repaired? Oh, we don’t want it. Like, I just, I can’t say that that’s, that that’s a, you know, a way that the industry can work.
Joel Saxum: What about a production guarantee on something like that? So say, they say as long as, as long as you guarantee production doesn’t get hurt by something that Then that something happened from this repair or these damages in the factory.
Would you be cool with signing off on that saying like if you were TPI and saying like, yeah, we’ll sign off on your uptime based on these repairs.
Phil Totaro: Yeah, but you I mean, Joel, it sounds good in theory, but you’ll never get anyone to. Especially if like an insurance claim got filed about something related to downtime.
How are you going to really prove that it was actually the faulty repair that was directly contributory to the downtime? It’s just, it’s, that’s a tricky situation. You would
Allen Hall: call Partalote at Partalote. com and they would come over and tell you what happened to that blade. P A R D A L O T E dot com. If there, if
Joel Saxum: there’s, if there’s an RCA done and it was, and it’s like, Hey, there’s a failure at the fish mouth as we were talking about, and that’s what, you know, structurally ended up this debonding in the blade coming down.
Well, then I would say that was a repair you did in the factory or should have repaired in the factory. And I want, then, then it’s for insurance companies to sort it out, I guess. But I mean, B. I. claims in the insurance world are regularly three to one of the cost of property damage anyways. Right? So BI is the big thing that you’re concerned about.
Allen Hall: Arbuckle Mountain Wind Farm is a 100 megawatt onshore wind power project located in Oklahoma, in the heart of Lightning Territory. Why not? You know, if you’re going to locate a wind farm, why would you not just put it there? Come on. The highest point in
Joel Saxum: Oklahoma. Yeah, it’s
Allen Hall: evidently because they’re on a mountain.
I’ve never been on a mountain in Oklahoma and I’ve been around a lot of Oklahoma, but they got 50 turbines on this mountain. Uh, and it’s enough, it generates enough electricity for about 22, 000 Oklahoma homes. Now, the thing about these projects is that it really does pump a lot of capital into the community.
And in this Arbuckle Mountain project, it put in about 170 million in the area. And it’s dispersing, obviously, money to the local governments and community. Uh, it created about 140 full time equivalent jobs during construction, as well as 3 permanent jobs of people taking care of those turbines. And through about 2020, 6 million has been spent within 50 miles of the wind farm.
And. That’s really good for the local areas. And because evidently there’s a mountain in Oklahoma, Arbuckle mountain wind farm is our wind farm of the week. 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 subscribing 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.
