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In Allen’s part of the USA, an escaped emu that was on the loose! We then discuss an investigation into a wind turbine collapse at the Akmene wind farm in Lithuania, which was caused by a malfunctioning sensor that provided incorrect data to the turbine controller. The root cause analysis took several months, and the wind farm was shut down until the issue was resolved.
Shifting to policy news, the podcast analyzes the UK’s latest CfD auction round which awarded 1.5GW of onshore wind capacity across 24 projects in Scotland and Wales. Offshore wind was absent from this round due to limited funding availability and inflation concerns. In the US, Equinor and BP are seeking to renegotiate offshore wind PPAs for their Empire Wind and Beacon Wind projects off Massachusetts unless they can achieve a 6-8% rate of return.
On the technology front, we discuss a PES Wind Magazine article from Vaisala about how lidar systems can measure turbulence intensity to improve wind farm performance. Mounting lidar systems on turbine nacelles provides hub-height data to anticipate incoming wind conditions. To close, we cover news that EDF Renewables will repower Africa’s oldest wind farm in Morocco, doubling its capacity to 100MW with new Siemens Gamesa turbines.
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!
PES Wind – www.peswind.com
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: All right, Rosemary, in my neighborhood of Massachusetts, there was an escaped emu and it was on the loose for two weeks in the neighborhoods and they finally, they finally captured this thing. It was roaming around scaring local residents. And in fact, the, the local animal control officer said, Hey, be careful because emus are dangerous.
But they did capture the emu. He would have been left behind by a former owner who moved out of state. And just left the emu behind and the new owners of the property were willing to help cooperate to kind of capture the emu. So the emu will have a new home with a local species expert and I assume that local species expert is in Australia.
So you’re getting another emu, Rosemary. Because Massachusetts is not the right place for those things.
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, all right. That, that hurt, that hurt my ears as an Australian. Can we just clear one thing up? It’s emu, emu. It’s not an emu, it’s an emu. You, you Americans, you know, like you don’t get to take an Australian animal and give it your own, your own name.
Just respect, respect the emu.
Allen Hall: Well, you’re getting a new friend in Australia. I’m going to send that emu right back.
Enefit Green along with GE have been looking at an incident or accident that happened at the Akmene wind farm in Lithuania back in May. And they’ve been conducting a series of evaluations over the last couple of months, where they finally have come to a conclusion and, looked at the findings and determined that this wind turbine fell over and it’s, it’s about a, I think it’s a five megawatt machine fill up in Lithuania.
And there was 14 wind turbines total that the root cause analysis revealed that a malfunctioning sensor provided incorrect data to the turbine controller, resulting in excessive stress on the tower structure and the subsequent collapse of the turbine. So that sounds like, to me, everybody, a single point failure in some GE turbines, and they didn’t turn it back on until, actually, this week, until they got it all figured out.
And this wasn’t the only place where GE had a problem with this size turbine, right?
Phil Totaro: That’s correct although I don’t know that the issues that they previously had in Sweden were necessarily the same issue and the same root cause. This one sounds fairly specific and could be related to either a software issue, an installation error, something that, you know, DN they had DNV kind of look into it and you know, presumably if it were like a, a fleet wide issue, they would have just swapped out some sensors or done something.
This one sounds like, again, it’s a fairly specific issue but they’ve, I have to say, I mean, they’ve had a certain number of teething issues with this, you know, Cypress platform over the past, you know twelve or so months so, glad to see this wind farm back up and running, but it’s definitely a bit disconcerting for, you know, what was supposed to be a new kind of flagship product for them.
Allen Hall: Dr. Rosemary, how do you… Push over a wind turbine tower if everything’s working essentially properly. How does that happen?
Rosemary Barnes: Well, you’d need to get the, you know, end up with a force that was bigger than what was designed for. That would be one option. Or secondly, you would need to get some sort of big imbalance so that, you know, every time if there’s, you know, one blade is making a lot more force than the other blades, then every time it passes the tower, then, you know, like you’re going to have some sort of resonance happening.
So those would be the two main ways. So that could happen from, you know, like a wind turbine has a rated wind speed and above that wind speed, it yeah, but at low wind speeds, it generates more and more power as the wind speed goes up, but then when it reaches the weighted rated wind speed, then they pitch the blades so that it generates less power than it could so that it, you know, stays within the range of what the generator is able to generate.
And that’s also the same conditions that they use to design everything else. The tower strength, the foundation you know, like literally everything in the turbine will be designed around a few extreme load cases. So if you were able to have the turbine producing more and more power beyond the rate of wind speed, then you could see it you know, with too much of a thrust force, the kind of force that tries to push the turbine over.
You could see it with a lot higher thrust force than what it was designed for because the power in in the wind, it varies with the cube of the wind speed. So, you know, it’s kind of like a very steep, steep graph and you can end up with a much, much larger force than what you designed for. So that would be one possibility.
Although, I mean, let’s just take a step to consider that engineers don’t assume that. Everything is going swimmingly and only one thing fails at a time, you know, part of good, good design practice is to consider, you know, what happens if this fails and then it still needs to be safe and, you know, a company with as long of an engineering history as GE, it’s not their first time that they’ve experienced a failure of a single component, you know and having worked there myself and gone through their design process, I know that If it was the case that a single point failure could lead to a turbine collapse, then, you know, that is that’s not really a single point failure that’s a problem.
The problem is their whole design method. And, yeah, I just personally happen to know that it’s not like that. And, yeah, I assume that there were multiple failures, but then I think probably a more likely failure mode for this one is that a single blade had a problem with it, so like maybe it’s maybe the turbine didn’t really know what angle the blade was on, you know, you can get an error in the you know, the setting of the zero angle.
Or, you know, some other error that meant that the three blades were dramatically different to each other or one of them was different. And so then you can, you know, get this big change in force every time a you know, the incorrect blade passes the tower. Then you’re kind of gonna, you know, give it a little, a little push and then eventually you excite the natural frequency and you can cause a failure.
in that way. But again, it shouldn’t, shouldn’t be happening with a single, single sensor failing. There must be other things that happened at the same time.
Allen Hall: Is the fix then to put some sort of vibration sensor, which I thought that there were in most turbines, a vibration sensor, when things start to shake that the turbine shuts down as a safety measure, is, is that the right fix or is it something different?
Rosemary Barnes: There would be some mechanism for seeing if there was an imbalance of any, of any kind. So. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s pretty standard. And aside from that, you know, if, if there is only one or two components that can fail to cause, you know, such a, such a problem as this, you would have to design everything else so the turbine wouldn’t fall, fall down, even if those things happened.
So yeah, it’s, there, there should be like so, so many obstacles. That prevent a turbine falling over. It’s hard to know what combination of them was the issue here. Certainly not one, but it might also be a problem with the, the design process or the approvals process. You know, it might be that they put in a, a new system for…
I don’t know, load imbalance detection, and it turned out that it hadn’t been properly, you know, tested under all sorts of weird, infrequent scenarios and, you know, something else happened. I, I don’t know. It’s, it’s really hard to, to speculate beyond saying that, you know, they’ve, they’ve given one point.
Of failure as their reason. I, I don’t know, maybe they think that it sounds better to say that, oh, it’s just one, one thing happened and we fixed it. But actually I think it sounds worse. It’s like, oh, are you seriously trying to tell us that your whole, you know, engineering design is, is based around the fact that nothing ever fails.
Like that to me, that’s like you have no business being, you know, man manufacturing anything, let alone something, you know, so big and you know, potentially dangerous on, on collapse as a wind turbine. I, I mean, I do know that that’s not the case, but I just think maybe, yeah, they’ve got their PR strategy wrong and that, yeah, what they’re trying to, you know, limit how bad they sound by saying, Oh, just this one thing failed rather than this failed, then this, then this.
Cause it does tend to sound a little bit implausible, I guess, you know, Oh, you know, like it was a perfect storm or one in a billion chance or. Whatever, but that’s the only way that you should be saying failures on big engineering projects, because everybody knows by now and has for, you know, probably hundreds of years that, that when you have enough enough products out there that one in a million things do happen.
And sometimes a one in a million thing happens followed by another one in a million thing. And you still can’t have a, you know, a turbine collapsing under those conditions, that’s just not, not a safe design. So. Yeah, I doubt we’ll ever know exactly the combination of things, but definitely not one thing.
Allen Hall: I just think it was good that they shut the farm down and went to go figure it out instead of continuing on. That was the right move when this first happened. And I think other places in the world, they may have continued to put up farm and cause a bigger problem. So I’m glad they spent the time to go fix it and fix it right.
That’s what it sounds like they did. Over in the UK, the contract for different allocation round five. Phil, you, you watched one through four, right?
Phil Totaro: Indeed. And five was a bit of an interesting result. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Well, they, they awarded about 1. 5 megawatts, 1. 5 megawatts, 1. 5 gigawatts of onshore wind capacity.
And there were 24 wind farms involved at a strike price of 52 and a quarter pounds per megawatt hour. So that’s not a bad strike price, actually, even in the States, it’s a really decent price. All the awards were, happened in Scotland, except one that was down in Wales. SSC Renewables, EDF Renewables, RWE, all the, the big players, as you expect, are involved in this.
It marks a significant growth compared to the previous year. And the number of megawatts that were awarded last year is about 900 megawatts across 10 projects. That’s really good. Offshore wind was absent in this round. And the UK is saying that is still commitment committed to offshore wind, but this allocation round didn’t have any, any offers at all.
And Philip, can you fill us in on what happened on the offshore wind part of this allocation round?
Phil Totaro: Sure. So, it’s basically two things. One is they did not have enough money in the allocation there. I think it was only about 205 million pounds that they had. So, when you have a multi gigawatt offshore wind park, you’re not necessarily going to be able to bid your entire…
You know, power offtake for this auction, you would have either had to do a portion of the power offtake and then wait for a subsequent CFD auction to get the rest of it, or find a private… You know, power off taker, some kind of combination. So, because there wasn’t enough allocation, the offshore wind companies basically sat out.
The second reason they were sitting out is because the, in the UK, the CFD auctions basically triggers a You know, the, the com one of the commercial pieces that needs to be put in place for the projects to subsequently proceed down the approval and permitting pipeline, and then, you know, go get built.
Nobody wants to build their project right now unless they’re already, you know, in the process of doing so because of the inflation pressure that we’ve seen globally that’s impacting both onshore but offshore wind especially. We’ve seen huge issues in the United States with companies either pulling out of projects in Massachusetts.
Rhode Island New York, now they’re asking for big increases all of it due to inflationary pressures, and this is also something that impacted the, the UK CFD5 auction.
Allen Hall: Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues, and PES Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in depth info. You need check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication PES wind at peswind.com.
Well over in the us, BP and Equinor are in the process of renegotiating power purchase agreements for their joint offshore wind projects in the United States. Both BP and Equinor are saying they’re not going to proceed with the U. S. East Coast projects unless they meet a return threshold of somewhere between 6 percent and 8%.
Those jointly developed projects include Empire Wind 1, Empire Wind 2, and Beacon Wind 1 and 2 off the Massachusetts coast. So that’s a lot of projects right there. The PPAs have been secured for Empire Wind 1 and Wind 2 and Beacon Wind 1, totaling 3. 3 gigawatts of capacity. But as we’ve seen most recently with almost everybody offshore on New York, they’re going back to New York and asking for price increases.
So this is a, a bigger term problem. I think obviously AVANGRID has bowed out of his PPA with with Massachusetts and is paying the penalties, about 50 million in penalties. New York doesn’t have that same setup though, Phil, like there, there’s no penalties in New York either. You do it or you don’t, it sounds like.
Phil Totaro: Right, and it’s one reason why, if you recall, about three or four weeks ago, the state of New York put a requirement in place that said you can’t come back, for any new bids, you can’t come back and increase your bid later. So, you know, they’re basically trying to be a bit proactive, taking into account, you know, inflation, but…
What they do with these three projects based on these requests from BP and Equinor is still kind of up in the air. I don’t know if they’re going to make some type of an accommodation for inflation. If it’s just a one time you know, tax rebate or something that they could do, I doubt that they will significantly increase the PPA price because all things being equal, if inflation were not…
a factor. Those PPA prices was anywhere from about 118 up to, I want to say, like 132 for some of those projects. That’s not that preposterous of a price to be able to build a project profitably in a non inflationary driven market environment. But in an inflation driven environment, you’re better off probably not building your project for now.
Now, different to how some other countries work. In the United States, when we do one of these BOEM auctions, you know, there’s no obligation to actually build the project within a specific time frame. So, you know, it’s, it’s frankly one reason why the Gulf of Mexico tender was a little bit confounding in terms of zero bids for the Texas project sites because You know, if you could get them at 55 an acre like RWE did with the one in Louisiana, why not get it and just hold on to the lease rights, build your project when inflation goes down?
The fact that BP and Equinor are having to go back to the state of New York and trying to renegotiate is just not only delaying the project, but you know, it’s, it’s putting It’s constraining the market. It’s putting investments at risk for capital. It’s, you know, capital in, in terms of manufacturing footprint and domestication of technology, et cetera, et cetera.
There’s, there’s all kinds of issues with, you know, delaying something like this. So yeah, it’s still, There’s a lot of things that are a bit head scratching about the, the offshore wind market at this point. And this, this is one of them.
Allen Hall: It is, and let’s walk through the number of projects off the coast of New York that are requesting price increases at the moment.
Ørsted and Eversource have asked for a 27 percent increase for their Sunrise Wind Project, which will raise the strike price from about 110 a megawatt hour to about 140 a megawatt hour. Equinor and BP have asked for increases in all three of the projects they are developing. For Empire Wind 1, they want a 35 percent increase, which would raise the price from 118 to 160 a megawatt hour.
For Empire Wind 2, a 66 percent increase. That would raise the strike price from 107 to about 178. And Beaconwind they’re looking for a 62 percent increase to raise the strike price from roughly 118 to 190 a megawatt hour. Now BP and Equinor or said Eversource are saying the same thing, which is it’s all about supply chain and inflation and the cost of materials.
And it’s, it’s just driving huge price increases. When you’re seeing 60 percent increases in price, I don’t know how the state of New York is going to be able to manage that. And if they can’t absorb it, then I don’t think their projects are going to start. Which then cascades backwards into the OEMs and down the supply chain because they’re expecting to deliver turbines to those offshore sites pretty soon.
What does it do to the GEs and the Vestas and the Siemens that are planning to put turbines in the water? In the next couple of years, do they just wipe out those, those contracts? How does that all work and how big of an impact is this?
Phil Totaro: Yeah, it’s again, it’s a good question. They, they don’t necessarily wipe out the contracts.
The, the OEMs don’t get paid basically until they deliver turbines, or at least the bulk of what they get paid happens once they deliver turbines, they’re installed and commissioned. So a delay in the project. definitely impacts the OEMs. What it ends up doing, though, is they’ve got theoretically enough cash flow because also if you have a delay, it also means that if you’re an OEM, you’re not sourcing all your components.
So you’re basically not spending any money you know, while there’s, there’s a delay happening. But what it does is it impacts them from the standpoint of The lack of revenue recognition means you don’t have the capital to be able to invest in the domestication of your production capacity. And that’s something that the U. S. market desperately needs. To be able to scale the way that a lot of people in the U. S. want to so that’s, that’s one of those challenges where, you know, delays just slow down the the pace of growth in the market and put all these, you know, we’ve talked before on the show about you know, these targets for the United States, like 30 gigawatts by 2030.
I mean, that’s, I mean, we’re completely out the window on, on something like that, not even close. So that’s, that’s the consequence of the Federal Reserve not addressing this inflation pressure in a expedient enough fashion.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay. I have a few questions for you, Phil. Can you, can you help me? And they’re like super, super basic.
So this is like a, explain it to me like I’m, I’m five sort of situation. I mean, first, first of all, we’ve spent the last couple of years being like surprised and shocked at the low prices that these auctions were delivering, where people just, you know, caught up in some sort of irrational exuberance and just, you know, like just got, got overkeen and over committed.
Secondly, inflation, you know, we are seeing some people request up to what is it, 60 something percent increases in their PPA. I’ve seen articles suggesting that offshore wind projects the, the cost of wind turbines has increased by around 40 percent due to inflation and have not seen a plausible explanation for why that is.
I mean, inflation is high, but it’s not 40%, right? So what is the source of the cost increases? Yeah, and then the third, like, really basic question is, You know, the way I understand economics, like pretty much the only economic principle that I understand is supply and demand. There’s so much demand for wind energy, but the which should mean that the, the price should, should go up.
So wind turbine manufacturers should have money to, you know, solve all these problems. But my experience working in the industry and, you know, what we’re seeing now with all of the wind turbine manufacturers struggling is that there, there isn’t a lot of cash floating around like you would expect when there’s a, you know, like a surge in demand for our products.
Phil Totaro: The, the first question on did we have this kind of irrational exuberance on price reductions? Keep in mind that whenever anybody references the things like the CapEx for building offshore or the turbine prices, etc., they’re usually referring to a global average price. What was happening back in around 2020 is you had China ending their federal subsidies for offshore wind.
And so a lot of companies were rushing to get projects built, and they were basically building up their manufacturing capacity to be able to accommodate that. installation rush in China, but it also meant that after 2020, you had kind of an excess capacity of you know, turbine production with a finite amount of demand.
So it necessarily kind of depressed the price a little bit. To a greater extent than it, you know, the global average price, to a greater extent than it might have otherwise around 2020 and into 2021. Commodity costs have certainly increased, and so turban prices are definitely up. But what you also have to realize is turban OEMs, just like any other, you know, consumer products company, et cetera, They’re taking advantage of a a rising interest rate environment and an inflationary environment to claw back some of the margin that they lost during that period where they were having to undercut themselves just to make sales and so anything that lowers capex was, was a good thing and is a good thing.
And that’s what, that’s what a lot of the, the developers were trying to take advantage of. The, the supply demand question is an interesting one because, you know, there was a big demand. That big demand has kind of gone down a bit because of the inflation increase. That’s resulted in, you know, these, these cost increases and, and things like that.
And again, the OEMs and other supply chain companies are trying to still claw back some of the margin that they lost from a few years ago to with where the prices are now and the fact that the prices are increasing you know, it’s, it’s good for, for profit margin, but they still have huge losses that they need to make up for so they might be You know, like cash flow positive or, or kind of net positive in, in this quarter or this year but they still might be carrying a, a, a loss and they may have financed, you know, some debt or whatever they, they did to be able to keep themselves afloat over those leaner years.
So they still have, you know, expenses that they need to be able to cover and. The price increases give, give the supply chain companies an opportunity to try and do that.
Rosemary Barnes: And are the Chinese manufacturers also selling you know, at a loss with a long service agreement to make it up? Or have they got a different model?
Phil Totaro: No, they have a different model. The, the Chinese basically, again, they’re, they’re getting a lot of their components and their input costs. Basically, it’s being subsidized by the government. So they can afford the lower price while still having a certain amount of profit because the government will make up for a bit of the loss that they would otherwise take.
If they were The Chinese would never, if they had to domesticate their production to let’s say Australia or the U. S. or Western Europe, they would be in the same market environment as everyone else and they would not be offering you know, cheaply made and, and cheap costing Chinese turbines in Western markets the same way that they are able to.
As an export from China, that’s why you see a lot of countries putting, you know, a significant amount of import duties on Chinese made goods, you know, whether they’re wind turbine components or otherwise is because they’re able to take advantage of those cheap input costs and cheap labor rates to undercut companies in domestic markets.
So countries like to be able to limit the amount of cheaply made goods from China that, that flow in.
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Allen Hall: Lidar is becoming more and more of a topic for offshore wind as we try to understand what’s happening to the wind before it hits the turbines and the interference from one turbine to another.
And there seems to be some concern about MET towers, putting MET towers out in the ocean and how to do that, and it’s kind of expensive. And do we need more accurate wind measurements? Well, Vaisala’s Windcube, a nacelle based Lidar system they’ve been doing some work on it and trying to hone it in and make it super precise.
And there’s a good article in PES Wind Magazine, walking through the process they did, it took about a year to do some actual measurements and comparisons. I’m trying to understand exactly what you’re measuring with lidar here, because it sounds like. They’re measuring what they call turbulence intensity, and I’m not sure what that is, but it sounds like they’re trying to basically steer the wind turbine in the right direction, maybe to minimize turbulence into the turbine or to turn the turbine in front of the turbine you’re on to minimize the impact that one turbine has on another.
I’m sure it’s not great for the blades and all the load structures there. Phil, what is the. What is the purpose of these turbulence intensity measurements and what are they trying to avoid here with this lidar system?
Phil Totaro: The nacelle mounted lidar is a great idea conceptually at least, because what it does is it puts your wind speed direction and the turbulence intensity measurement at hub height.
And so the turbulence intensity is basically measuring kind of how much swirl and churn you get both upwind and downwind of the rotor. And it can, as you’ve indicated, you can get, you know, an increase in turbulence intensity from the turbines being pointed in a particular direction. Certainly you get this more onshore than you would necessarily offshore.
Onshore you can have kind of complex terrain. Where, you know, the wind is kind of going gently across the plains, and then if you have, like, a bunch of rocks and things that are in the way, it can cause you know, an upswirl of, of the wind and, and it can, you know, have impacts on the loads, it can, you know, on the tower, the rotor, et cetera.
So… It’s something that you need to be able to measure, and if you can measure it, then you can predict the behavior, and if you can predict, then you can control you know, you can alter pitch and yaw, etc. But, again, having a nacelle mounted system gives you the ability to kind of look out ahead of the rotor and anticipate what’s going to happen before it happens.
A lot of time especially with older turbines you, you only have the ability to do kind of a reactionary control. Thank you. Action. So, you know, it’s like you, you will be able to detect gust of wind is happening once it’s already started. The lidar gives you the ability to look forward and determine that, you know, an incoming gust may be about to hit you know, one turbine or one is, that’s upwind of another, and it gives you the, the option to be able to better control the, the entire wind farm, maintain your output, control your loads and, and just generally improve the, the quality of your, your performance.
So it’s a, it’s a great idea.
Allen Hall: Would you end up putting a lidar on every turbine on an offshore farm, or do you just strategically place a couple and then sort of average out the data? How, I, I don’t know how that system even works because. The MET tower system we have right now is like one sample off in the wilderness somewhere.
The lidar is going to give you a lot better data, right?
Phil Totaro: Right. And the one thing with offshore is that we’ve actually been using floating lidar mounted on kind of buoy systems to do not only site assessment but I know there’s a couple of projects in the UK where they’re actually using it for this kind of upwind upwind.
You know, early detection and, and park control. But you don’t actually need one necessarily mounted on every nacelle. The advantage of the ability to strategically place them is… You could have them mounted on, you know, like if you have, if you look at a wind rose and you have kind of a prevailing wind direction where a lot of the incoming wind is coming from, then you might pick like two or three or four turbines in that row if you happen to have them, you know, organized that way.
You could pick turbines that way. But a lot of project sites, they might not have, you know, a single, kind of prevailing wind direction. So, you know, you might need to strategically place these things on on multiple turbines. But again, having the measurements being done at hub height actually helps improve the quality of the measurement if you can avoid the issues that you’ve run into in the past with the blade shadow.
So basically, when the blade swoops by… And a cell mounted lidar, it’s going to block the thing from being able to detect further, further afield. So, my understanding with this is that they’ve made certain improvements to their technology to be able to get a higher quality turbulence intensity, wind speed, and wind direction measurement coming from the, the nacelle mounted lidar.
So again, really, really great concept.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I think it’s a good concept. It’s just amazing to me that we still use mechanical anemometers on some really big machines. It, it seems like. It’s just not the right instrument to do something really complicated with a very expensive product.
You’d want to have more accurate measurements. And I know I’ve seen, I’ve seen the ultrasonic anemometers. Which are really cool, but lidar is like next level, right? It’s like the coolest thing on the block. And I’m, I’m guessing a lot of operators are going to be thinking about this. And if you want to learn more about it, I read it’s in PES Wind Magazine.
So the latest PES Wind Magazine has a full discussion and all the details in there. There’s even a really good picture of the lidar mounted on the nacelle. And if you’ve noticed real carefully, they have a grounding cable there. Like it may get struck by lightning. So I hope it doesn’t get struck by lightning, otherwise the cell is getting smoked, but yeah, it’s a, it’s a really cool piece of technology that I think we’re going to see more of going forward.
So check out PES Wind magazine to get all the details.
Moroccan Agency for Sustainable Energy partnered with EDF Renewables to repower the oldest utility scale wind farm in Africa, doubling its capacity to 100 megawatts. Rosemary, that’s a good deal. The repowering project in Koudia al Baida near Tangier, Morocco, which Tangier, Morocco is a beautiful place, will replace existing turbines, which I believe are old Vesta’s 600 megawatt turbines, with 20 brand new 5 megawatt turbines from Siemens Gamesa.
The wind farm will sell its electricity under a 20 year contract to Morocco and is expected to be completed in the second quarter of next year. So they’ve, they started the process of, of disassembling the existing turbines. And selling those by the way, and then bringing in some new Siemens Gamesa turbines.
So this is a big deal. This is the first repowering project in all of Africa. And it was brought to us by one of our faithful listeners on the podcast. So the Koudia al Baida wind farm in Morocco 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 subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News. Our weekly newsletter and check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the uptime wind energy podcast.
