Can integrated photonic sensing make wind farms more efficient? PhotonFirst says yes. Are Modvian’s wood turbine towers really more eco-friendly than some existing manufacturing methods? Vestas and other investors think so. Rosemary and Allen discuss sustainable designs and new recycling technology. Rosemary wants more information on Vestas’ announcement that its novel chemical process breaks epoxy back down into virgin materials, as well as some details on Norway’s Wind Catching Systems. Vancover’s Veer and Pattern Energy would probably agree that more data is always a good thing,as the companies are working together to optimize operational performance. Speaking of which…Â
O&M is on our minds as we prep for Clean Power’s Operations, Maintenance and Safety Conference in Orlando next month. Will you be there? Let us know! Our wind farm of the week is the Budweiser Wind Farm at Thunder Ranch in Oklahoma, where Enel Green Power helps Anheuser Busch produce its beverages more sustainably. Every week, Uptime reviews the industry’s news, technology, and cool wind farms. Plus, a bonus episode on robots this week.
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
PES Wind Article – https://pes.eu.com/exclusive-article/monitoring-makes-good-sense/
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Uptime 152
Allen Hall: Rosemary, the big news here in America is that there was a balloon floating across the United States that we all watched slowly drift from one ocean to the other.
Rosemary Barnes: I can’t figure out what on earth that was, it was for, or what the cause was. And I, I agree. I would probably shoot it down too. You know, so, so that you’re sure.
But that’s what I’m saying. Super, super weird, right?
Allen Hall: Super weird. Yeah. It was a very strange week for that to happen. So next time there’s a balloon, there’s, hopefully they’ll send it south. It’s tough sending it to America. Cause it’s freaking out America at the moment. And, and speaking of freaking out There’s a lot happening in wind news this week.
It, the every day is just a plethora of, of really cool stuff. This week we’re gonna talk about integrated photonic sensing, basic fiber optic sensing in winter blades, and that’s, Based on our article we saw in Power and Energy Solutions Magazine, and then we take a deep look at Vestas announcing a method to recycle the epoxy resin in existing wind turbine blades.
So breaking down the epoxy into virgin components so we could reuse to make more wind turbine blades. Really cool
Rosemary Barnes: technology. Yeah. And then we talk about another project that investors have invested in, the mod vn wooden wind turbine powers. And I talk a little bit about whether it’s really more sustainable than steel will be in the future.
And then onto wind catching that it’s a new kind of offshore wind turbine with like a, a grid array of small wind turbines. And I try the questionable tactic of hoping that they will hire me to help them with their development by criticizing them a lot. So let’s see, let’s see how that goes for me.
And then we’ve got the Wind Farm of this week is the Budweiser Wind Farm at Thunder Ranch in Oklahoma.
Allen Hall: Also just to note, Weather Guard Lightning Tech is going to be at American Clean Power O&M in Orlando, Florida in the beginning of March. So if you’re down in Orlando, stop and say hi. I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and my good friend Joel Saxum is on an airplane this week headed to wind turbine site and the soon to be guest host of Fully Charged Live in Australia,
Rosemary Barnes is here, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Allen Hall: Well, Rosemary, I saw an article in Power in Energy Solutions Magazine on Photon First, which is a company based in an in the Netherlands, and they do fiber optic sens. , but with a twist to it. And I, I thought of you first when I saw this article because we know anything you put into a blade really can’t be conductive for lightning reasons.
It, it’ll blow up the blade. So the, the option is to put fiber optic into the blade and to do sensing that way because fiber optic is made out of plastic and if wont attract any lightning, but there’s obviously some difficulty with it. because it’s expensive. So you can put little fiber optic sensors up in the blade, but then at the sort of the hub, you get all these electronic boxes and those boxes are expensive.
So these photon first is coming up, what they call photonic integrated circuits. So they’re, they’re integrating the light circuit, the fiber optic circuit with electronics. It’s like, it’s all one piece, which is obviously much smaller and can work faster, and it’s powered by the laser and the light and everything.
So it’s a, it’s a. Good combination. So the, the trick is, you know, right now if you, if you ever played around with fiber optic systems, they, they basically use what they call a fiber brag grading piece of optic, which is a, a piece of fiber optic that has been, has little grates in it and it bounces different frequencies around.
So if it, as it gets moved around, it sends different frequencies of light back and forth. So it’s sort of a complicated way of telling you something’s been bending or being squeezed or moved. You use, used it for temperature too. , but this photonic integrated circuit is a little bit different because it’s all integrated so it can lower the price of these measure.
To like blade load or vibration or temperature, it is gonna dramatically reduce the cost of these fiber optic systems, which I, I think has always been the barrier, right? It’s just been a cost-driven
Rosemary Barnes: problem. I have used some fiber optic systems before to measure like natural frequency, I think was the main one.
And on paper they’re way better, more reliable, don’t conduct lightning. You can, you know, run them next to lightning cable without worrying about noise. But in practice we always had problems with the reliability. There was just so often, there were so often down cables breaking on installation or maintenance crews who would go into the blade for some other reason.
Would, I dunno, cri crimp, crimp too much and break the cable or something. Cause I think fiber optics cables are glass, right? They’re not, I don’t think they’re plastic. I think they’re, yeah, they’re glass. And if you cheap ones are Oh, right, . And if you, Do too tight a bending radius, you know, if you try and coil them up too tight or even if you just, you know, tread on it and kink it, then you break it.
And of course no one realizes until the crew’s down and you gotta, you know, send someone up there later on. So how, how do these. Transmit the, the information after they’ve got the, the, so the sensor is the, this photonics, but then are they still using glass fiber optic cables to, to transmit that information?
Yeah. So, right.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So some of the logics actually happening on the fiber. Think of it that way.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Okay. It’s slick solution. Yeah, it sounds cool. I, I, I think, yeah, that the, I dunno, usefulness of it will be dependent on two things. One is how yeah, reliable they are and how robust, I guess is a better word than reliable.
And. Two, I don’t know most when farm operators aren’t that good at dealing with a lot of data, they kind of don’t necessarily want more data. So I think this will suit those kind of operators that are really keen to get in there and extract an extra, you know fractions of a percent of a e p. So, definitely interesting to see.
See. . See how that can be used by the industry, right? And in
Allen Hall: the aerospace world, we’ve used fiber optics for a number of years. I remember early on that we tended to avoid it for the same reason. You, you spoke about rosemary, that if a mechanic stepped on the, the fiber, would tend to break it. And if you’re crawling around on an airplane or crawling around in a hub, a wind turbine, it’s not a place that’s a step, right?
And so, sometimes, You can bump into it and break it relatively easily. That’s gonna be one of the hurdles for sure. But I think the fiber optic in generally has gotten better. You’re starting to see it a little more in aircraft which means that it overcomes some of those problems. But did, didn’t, didn’t you use fiber optic on some of the test turbines, it seems like, to where that’s been used the most on, on the one-off test turbine were.
Monitor, load a monitor torsion that you would load it with optics up front?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. More so on test turbines, but a lot of those things, they’re trying to get it, you know, fleet wide so that you can use it for monitoring or you know, Predictive maintenance, structural health monitoring, all those sorts of things.
People want to be able to get that data regularly to one, know what a normal wind turbine looks like in terms of the, the data it sends out. And two, to be able to realize really quickly when something is changing in one of the turbines so that they can say, oh, okay, you know, this blade might have a crack developing, or I don’t know.
There’s a, a bearing. Fault or, you know, some sort of misalignment of, of something. It, yeah, it’s all, all those kinds of things. A lot of, a lot of the predictive maintenance related to rotating components
Allen Hall: on a test turbine. Were you installing the optics after the blade was built or were you actually putting fiber in as part of the layup of the blade?
Both,
Rosemary Barnes: Usually. Well, it depends. There’s a few systems that are trying to measure the natural frequency of the blade, cuz there’s a bunch of stuff that you can tell when the natural frequency changes, either the, the masses changed or the structural properties of the blade have changed. And those, they just put on the, the web of the blade and they only put them not very far down.
So you can walk in even, you know, when it’s already up on the turbine. You could walk in and install that if you wanted to, but, Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of easier to do it in the factory, but it’s kind of not, it, it would be if everyone was used to a big coil of fiber optics being at the root of the blade and being careful with it.
But in reality, people weren’t used to that. And so there were a lot of failures. It’s not, it’s not a problem that should exist, but it, it, I guess it’s, you’d call it a teething problem. And we saw that a lot, so kind of for wide offs, it’s probably better to do, to do it at the end, you know, on site.
But then you’ve gotta start working with the installation crews. And that’s for me, you know, cuz I was working in a, a factory, then there’s a whole, you know, different lot of people that you’ve gotta fit into their workflow. So it’s just like logistical things like that, that are the problem.
It’s not really something with the technology. Yeah. And then, I mean, there is the possibility that you could use. In other places, I know that there were some really highly instrumented blades made both by LM and probably other companies too, that were trying to get a bit more clever about, you know, knowing exactly how much the blade was flexing, for example, in operation.
And that was it. It’s suffered from being expensive, like you mentioned. So this would potentially be a solution for that. Not that reliable or robust was the second problem, but the biggest killer for that was that the market just. Wasn’t that interested in it. They certainly weren’t interested in experiencing any pain at all to, to get that extra capability that, you know, they didn’t wanna pay anything more, they didn’t want any more downtime, they didn’t want any more yeah, o and m costs associated with it.
So I think, yeah, that, that was what has. Killed that, cuz I mean for, you know, at least 10 years we’ve had the capability to be instrumenting blades up and knowing all sorts of things and yeah, not just blades, but all, you know, everything inside a turbine you could be monitoring the I dunno, vibrations, temperatures, strain, all, all sorts of things.
But it ends up being a big distraction from, you know, the operator’s core business of. Making sure the turbo’s running and making money from it. And yeah, kind of, you know, monitoring this data daily, dealing with the larger volumes of data and what to do with that. And you know, or do you have, now you have to employ a data analyst or teach somebody how to analyze the data and and store it.
And then, you know, it’s like 10, 15 years down the line when you actually. See a benefit and by then everybody can’t be bothered. And you know, cutbacks have meant that you’ve stopped looking at the data and yeah, so that’s kind of it. It’s was one of those problems where there’s heaps of potential, but nobody really has the time.
It’s not anybody’s core responsibility, so it always just kind of gets. Gets kicked, kicked onto the next person and ignored, which is a, you know, it’s a shame the
Allen Hall: Netherland is putting so much money behind this because there’s many other applications for fiber and especially this photonic, integrated circuits and a variety of applications, aerospace being one of them.
But if you get into larger blades for offshore, Turbines, especially when you don’t have a lot of information on the performance offshore. Does it make sense to do some of your blades with some optics in them so you can
Rosemary Barnes: monitor maybe the farm? Yes and no. I, I think it just suffers from that same problem of no one can kind of, if it’s not something that you need to operate the turbine, then it’s you know, everyone’s got a long to-do list and.
it ends up at the bottom of it. Well, I,
Allen Hall: I, I do think they’re gonna be coming interplay, and we’re gonna see if we start to see ’em in aerospace, which we are, then the transition to wind is right there. And, and aerospace will get some of the bugs out. I, I think the technology’s really interesting because the data rates are really high.
Yeah. It’s fast, simple. It, it solves a lightning issue. It really fits into that blade technology. I think you’re right. Getting acceptance in the industry is gonna be the hardest part, but that’s true of anything going out to blades
Rosemary Barnes: today. So, yeah, no, I think another reason why I’m negative about it is because I, you know, when I entered the industry, I’m like, oh my God, we should be doing stuff with data cuz you know, I used a lot of data in my, you know, previous, previous work and in my PhD.
I, I use data mining techniques. I’m like, we could be doing so much more the wind industry so backwards, I don’t use data. And then, you know, you go talk to a few operators and people working on designing control systems and you know, they’re kind of just like, oh yeah, that’s a nice, nice naive thing to think that you’re going to do something so clever as that.
But we’re all busy and we can’t bothered.
Allen Hall: Everybody who’s interested can check out photon First’s article and Power in Energy Solutions Magazine. We’ll put the link in the show notes below.
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Allen Hall: All right, so the hot news off the press from Vestas is that they’ve been working with a couple of organizations on a blade recycling effort that involves existing blades. So they, they presented a solution that renders epoxy based turbine blade. As circular without the need for any design changes.
So you can take the existing blade from LM that’s made with an epoxy resin system and break it down into virgin material, which is I think the holy grail for wind turbine blades. If you can break apart the epoxy into its components and reuse that, that’s amazing. So Vestas has. Working with within the Ctech Initiative and that’s a partnership with Olin and Stena Recycling, and it can be used basically to any blade that’s in service today.
Once they mature this technology, there will no be, no need to redesign blades for new resin systems. And that’s, I know we’ve talked about that on the podcast previously. So you could actually have a system where you decommission a blade, pull all the epoxy resin on it and make a new blade. That is amazing.
Now they’re talking. Getting it up to scale and all those things. It sounds like, like a two year cycle here to, to develop it and get into full scale. But they, they’re saying that the, the chemical process was developed with ahas University D T U Olin and other partners of the SeaTech Project. So it’s like a industry coalition looking to recycle blades.
And they’re also saying, Rosemary, that it uses existing widely available chemicals to, to break apart these epoxies. My, my first thought when I read this this morning was, what are these magic chemicals that breaks apart epoxies? They can get ’em back to their verging parts. How do they, how does that even work?
Is that a thing?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And what’s the byproducts of that or the energy input? Yeah, I, I don’t know. I promised after the last segment I was gonna be more, more positive about the , the next one. But it’s like, I, I get really sick of these announcements where it’s like, yeah, we’ve got these, like super cool.
Technology, it’s you know, users all really commonly available materials and it’s like just totally awesome. And we’ll let you know when, when that’s matured. It’s like, well, you know, if you haven’t got any details at all, it’s not ready yet. It’s, you know, you haven’t even got a timeline to it being ready.
I don’t know. Why, why announce that I, you know, I can announce that I’ve got the same thing for all the, you know, evidence that they, they have given about it. And like you say, if it’s, you know, commonly available materials, it’s not like epoxy resins and Composite products made with epoxy resins have been tested for many, many, many, many, many chemicals.
All the common ones, because you need to know you know, if I’ve gotta, you know, clean this blade and I, you know, say I clean it with acetone, is that gonna dissolve my blade or not? So yes. You know, like it’s not , it’s not like, This is a brand new thing that no one ever, you know, knew anything about what reacts with epoxy cured epoxy before.
So they’re at the one hand, they’re arguing all just super mainstream, normal. Just go down to What, what’s it called? The bowhouse. That’s the like big hardware store that they have in Denmark. Do you just ? Just go to Bowhouse and, and buy, you know, buy a bottle of his stuff and splash it on your winter turine blade.
And then it’ll just like, you know turn into virgin fibers and Virgin Epoxy. You just make a new blade. So on the one hand it’s like, yeah, this is just like totally easy and cheap and normal. And then on the other hand, it’s this, you know, amazing technological breakthrough. It, it’s like you can’t really argue both at the same time, can you?
So I
Allen Hall: don’t think so. Yeah. Right, because we’ve talked about epoxies on the podcast many times, and when you make these, you’re making these changes, molecular chains, right? They’re complic. Molecular chains, epoxies are, and to break them in the right way where you can undo what the chemical reaction has done.
Right? The chemical reaction when you mix a and b components together produces heat, right? Cause there’s actually energy given off to, to make these bonds happen. And that’s a really structured. Molecular reaction that’s happening and you’re, you’re trying to reverse engineer that in a clean way. That can’t be easy.
No, it’s gotta be a handful
Rosemary Barnes: of chemicals when you cure to do that, a thermostat re like a epoxy. The polymers are like, you know, strands of spaghetti. And then they not only tangle, but they also cross crosslink. They join, join together actually. Right. And it’s like the same way, you know, when you fry an egg, it goes from liquid to solid.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen anyone unf fry an egg, but that’s kind of what they’re saying, that they have come up with a way to unf fry an egg. Using really normal materials and, and I’m sure that they have, but I would, you know, we haven’t been giving any details, so you can’t, you know, weigh the, the pros and cons of it, or assess whether it’s gonna ever be scalable or anything like that.
But not every recycling process. Ends up saving energy or saving materials. You know, it might be that you have to put in so many chemicals that are, you know, less abundant than than what goes into an epoxy resin. Or you have to put in so much energy that it’s not worth it. Or, you know, the process releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and so it’s not worth it.
Like it’s not Recycling sounds like, oh yeah, of course you would recycle if you could, but not every recycling process should be done. You don’t always get a better environmental outcome, and I think people sometimes get a bit too obsessed with circularity or, you know, a circular economy. Sounds amazing, but you do still have to look at every process and if it’s worth doing, and I mean, wind turbine blades in landfill aren’t really doing anything very bad for the environment, so I.
Want to see them recycled if it meant a bunch of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, or even if it was a really energy intensive process because at the moment, you know, energy means emissions or it means, you know, taking green energy that could have gone to something that is currently using dirty energy.
So Yeah, I will have to be negative on this one until I see some more details and I, yeah. I just want people to stop making these announcements at such an early stage before they’re willing to release any tiny scare of information that you might be able to, you know, make an assessment by. Well, like we’ve
Allen Hall: pointed out before though, a lot of the energy used to recycle the blade is in the transportation of it.
So you could, if you could bring this chemical process to the site, the wind farm, and do it under a, a tent of some sort. , that would be fantastic. Then you wouldn’t be transporting it. That would make a lot of sense. But if you have to haul these blades back to, to the Netherlands or the Denmark, wherever this is gonna happen.
Yeah, that doesn’t make any sense at all. Or you haul ’em across the United States. It doesn’t make any sense at that point. You’re probably buried there off bearing in them locally. It’s, yeah, it’s a weird trade off. But yeah, those are some of the other engineering pieces that have to go with the analysis of the process.
Right.
Rosemary Barnes: Yep. Yeah. So we keenly await more details fester, please. Please share
Allen Hall: ves has put a 11 million, almost 12 million into mod beyond the Swedish Wind Company or the Swedish company that’s developing the modular wind Turman Towers made from wood. So Mov Navian announced the news a couple of days ago saying that the vest capital was raised as an over-subscribed convertible note issue.
So they had a lot of companies or investment firms put money into movon. So it beyond sort of the Vestis Ventures they had some money from Almi and Vests, Greentech, the European Commission’s, e I C fund course Corrected vc, and Simia vc. Well, those are some pretty big names. So if you remember, Rosemary, this is the laminated wood sections that they, you know, built like a quarter of the circumference.
And then they, you bolt these pieces together to make a tower and, and Maana saying, producing a a wooden tower cuts emissions by 90% when compared to conventional steel tower of the scene. Height and load, which I’m reason why they’re probably getting a lot of this, this investment in it is because of the CO2 reduction.
And that the modular nature of these sections, you can, they can stack ’em on a truck, makes it easier to, to move around. They’re doing similar things with steel. But it may be easier to do with wood. So they’re saying, Hey, you know, it does save a lot of co2 and the production of these things is this, and, and investors is putting some serious money, 11, 12 million.
There’s nothing to sneeze at. So is this something that’s gonna see more action outside of Sweden now, or outside of sort of the northern European countries? Or is this coming to America?
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think so. , I like the modularity of it, and transport is a legitimate problem that for onshore wind that needs a solution.
So that’s, that’s, that’s the main. Innovation that I think we need. The, what they’re saying about 90% emissions reduction compared to steel. I mean, we’re getting, we’re gonna get green steel that’s well under underway now. There’s, you know, several alternative processes that you can use that will reduce emissions from steel by the same amount or more.
I mean, we talked about it last week, I think we talked about electric arc furnace new. Yeah. And then so that, you know, is for recycling steel, but there’s also several processes for making virgin steel, you know, from iron ore including using hydrogen. And there’s a, a project in, in Sweden that’s already sent their first, well, a year or two, maybe two years ago now, they sent their first shipment of, of steel made with green hydrogen to Volvo.
I, I think it was it was a car manufacturer. Anyway. Oh wow, okay. Should, should be valpo, I guess if it was in Sweden. Yeah. And then also there’s electrochemical processes like the one that Boston Metal is doing. And that one’s a bit further away from. I mean, they’re making steel with electricity, but not at commercial volumes.
And it will be, you know, the end of the decade before they get their first small commercial orders done. And you know, 2030s they’ll be ramping up. So yeah, I don’t know. Wooden wind turbines come on before that. And they would wanna have a lot of advantages other than just the admissions reduction, I think to replace steel since green steel is, is well and truly on the way.
But the other thing is that it’s so. Robbery the emissions associated with sustainable timber, and I know there’s Swedish forests in particular, there’s a lot of controversy about how sustainable they actually are. And even if we take their word for it, that this is, you know, CO2 neutral, all of this.
Or, or you can say it’s CO2 negative as well with, with wood because you know, there’s a carbon in in that. And if the tower stays up for 50 years, then that carbon is not going into the atmosphere for 50 years. And a new forest is probably growing in the place where it came from an absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere.
But it really matters how you manage that forest. What’s happening to the soil carbon what processing you’re doing to the wood transport. All these things really matter, and it’s certainly not, not a sure thing that you’re gonna end up with a CO2 negative or neutral product at the end out of the, made out of the wood.
And then aside from that, There’s a finite amount of space that we can, you know, devote to sustainable forestry and no shortage of things that we can make from wood. So, you know, is this really you know, if you think globally, is this actually reducing emissions or is it just kind of, you know, like a portioning less emissions to wind that are now instead gonna go to, I don’t know, buildings?
Cause there’s not enough timber for for, for making buildings anymore. So yeah, it’s kind of. It’s kind of iffy. I don’t think the sustainability part of it, that’s not gonna be. It, it, it’s not obvious to me that there’s value there in the sustainability. But the modularity, that’s cool. And maybe they’ll end up using the modular designs with steel towers.
So green steel towers, who knows? .
Allen Hall: Right. Well, it does seem like every country, every part of the world has its own solution for a tower. And every, every different country needs to figure out what that best solution is. And the United States has probably recycled steel, like NUCO is betting on here.
Mm-hmm. . And in Sweden, maybe it’s. Yeah, it’s, it’s totally fine, right? Find this best solution for your particular application. It depends on where you are. So this Movon solution may work great in
Rosemary Barnes: Sweden. Yeah, good luck to it. There are some really cool tower technologies around. I really like the like self-directing towers where, you know, like instead of having a, a crane stack sections on top of each other, you have something like that crawls up like a, like a koala or something, crawls up and builds itself as it goes.
I like those. And also there’s some, some 3D printing stuff, which, which sounds pretty cool. What, what about you? What, what’s your, what’s your favorite tower technology? The spiral. Spiral welding? Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah. The spiral welding one, which we haven’t seen a lot of. And it’s been in development for a couple of years.
Yeah. And they think the company’s based in Colorado, but they haven’t heard much of them in the last six months. But that I think makes a lot of sense because it gets rid of the transportation. Because you’re taking sheet steel and welding it on site and putting the towers up. So it’s sort of a modular concept, not far from what ion’s doing, but doing it in steel instead.
So it’s a cool concept, but we’re gonna see all kinds of ideas because the number of wind TURs we have to build here in the States, we’re gonna build like 120,000 wind turbines of the next several years. We’re gonna have all kinds of new ideas because you need to lower the cost and make it cheaper. And complexity’s gotta get lower and all, all kinds of different factors play into it.
I, I’m good. That’s good. I think it’s good. And it’s really about time. We saw some. Pushing of advancement to simplify and lower the cost of installing wind turbines.
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Allen Hall: Norway’s wind catching system. It’s, everybody’s seen pictures of this online, on LinkedIn or wherever you get your news from. They’re the developer of that big wind catching, floating offshore wind technology who has a bunch of wind turbines on a, on a kind of a steel grid. Are they secured a pre-project grant of, again, I’m gonna say it’s in Norwegian terms, it’s 9.3 million.
Crowns Caros, right? Which is about about a million dollars from Inova. And if, if you’ve been following them they’ve had a number of different scale up systems they’ve been working on and presenting. And this is what we call, what they’re term, a pre-project to help mature and validate the te.
And then really get better cost estimate when they build a full scale wind catcher. So they’re gonna build a, a, a smaller scaled system. Makes a lot of sense. So this is the second grant to wind catching systems that they’ve received from Inova. And Inova is a big supporter of the technology and the team, and they’re saying, Hey, we gotta go.
We need to make this, make this happen for offshore installations. And which is a, a good idea. And so the, the, you know, a couple of things about this system, which I think hopefully gonna figure out is in Rosemary, you can point out where I’ve gone wrong here, is that because it has so many wind, wind, catch, wind turbines on this grid can become maybe a little bit of mechanical nightmare here of trying to get all this stuff working at the same time.
But you pointed out, maybe be easier to maintain. I, I’ve been seeing some things from like on Wake Vortices. Off of standard wind turbines, horizonal axis wind turbines. I’m now curious if, if the wind catcher’s gonna go out there. Like what does a weight vortex, vortex look off a, a biscuit wall of turbines?
Is it massively big or about the same as a, you know, conventional turbine? It, it’s interesting technology. I just don’t know a lot about it.
Rosemary Barnes: It is interesting and it’s I get periodically. I mean, people are always asking me about this one, and I have been in some Twitter and LinkedIn arguments related to this.
People are very, very sure about some aspects of the design that they’re very wrong about. And I get frustrated because they have got a. Idea for several reasons. There are several legitimate engineering effects that can work in their favor and they just seem determined to, one, they, the benefits that they list on their website are like totally dubious and
Secondly, they just seem really determined to develop it in the. Stupidest way as well. So I mean, it’s hard to follow exactly what their design is doing then, because they’re not like installing, you know, a bunch of prototypes where you can follow and say, oh, what does the design look like now? What does it look like now?
They’ve mainly just got, well, they’ve entirely just got like computer rendered images on their website. But they seem to want to design their own small turbine to then put in a grid, which I think is the first mistake that they should definitely be buying off the shelf. There’s plenty of people have already, you know, suffered all of the, the headaches from developing a small wind turbine, wind catching, doesn’t need that headache.
That’s been, that’s been done. And then why, I don’t know why they won’t just. Like a three by three grid of these onshore somewhere and take some damn measurements. Instead of just trying to raise millions or billions to put these large megawatt size systems out at sea so that, you know, they can go down the, the same path that like wave energy converters and stuff have have gone down where, you know, oh, your cable has failed and now you’ve gotta wait two months for a weather window to fix it.
And in the process you weren’t bankrupt. Kind of, you know, just seems like what’s gonna happen. But, you know, it is hard to follow when you just look at in, at their website every now and then. And I have occasionally tried to get in touch with them without any luck. But yeah, I, I did wanna talk a bit about what’s, what the good idea is because this, I keep on having arguments with it on LinkedIn with like some really you know, high profile in the LinkedIn world, high profile people who have really certain opinions about about their design and, and why it won’t work.
So the first thing that is, should not be controversial, but people don’t seem to understand is when. Four small wind turbines in a, a grid, two by two grid. The swept area from those four small wind turbines, if they’re, you know, they’re stacked close together, it’s gonna be the same as one, one wind, a larger wind turbine that’s in that, you know, that’s got twice the diameter, that’s the, the same area that’s just geometry.
And I did have to actually do a mathematical proof. To prove that point to someone on LinkedIn who, who never , never admitted that I was right and also was incredibly patronizing about my experience and said that I needed to go to that. Told me that there was several books available on wind turbine structural design.
And I thought that was quite patronizing for someone who is not an engineer. Said that to me. And I have a PhD in structural design of wind turbine blades, so I was, I was miffed . Anyway, so that’s, That’s the first point that the swept area of a wind catching system with, you know, a whole bun, an array of a tiny wind turbines, it’s gonna have the same swept area as one big wind turbine.
So the amount of energy that they can capture should be roughly the same because the efficiency doesn’t, a big wind turbine is not more efficient than a small one. People make that mistake as well. They assume that it’s gonna be more efficient, but you, you don’t see a strong, a strong relationship there between size and efficiency.
So it’s the first thing. And then there’s two effects that they have working in their favor that to me indicate that this is an idea worth pursuing. And the first one is that, like with structural scaling laws, they’re gonna use less materials in their wind turbines than one large one would. So you, there’s a thing called the Square Cube Scaling Law where the the area.
That, that wind turbine sweeps, that’s what determines the power output. That varies with the square of the blade length, but the the material usage is related to the volume, which varies with the cube of the blade length. So, you know, you increase the blade length, you get you get the square of the blade length in power and the cube of the blade length in mass and materials cost.
So, Both the blades and the generators and everything like that, they should use less materials. But that said, they do have some structure. Weird grid structure instead of a single tower. That might be a pain. And then the second thing is when the, what’s called a multirotor effect, when you put, when turbines close together, there is something that happens with the with the wakes, the way that the wakes interact.
So you see a faster wake recovery from four small wind turbines close together than you do from one large wind turbine. So it should mean that you can put them closer, closer together. And yeah, it’s, it’s a little bit, a little bit. Better. It’s kind of like, imagine you’ve got a whole, imagine that this wind catching system is like a whole wind farm of small wind turbines, but they all move together.
So you know, like a normal wind F farm, when the wind changes direction, now all of a sudden you’ve got some wind turbines and a shadow of other ones. But the wind catching system, it’s all gonna yaw together. So you’re never gonna have anything in the shadow of it. And then, yeah, and then the wake recovery is faster, so you can put another system closer.
So those things are interesting, but it’s very complicated. Probably like most technologies, you’re gonna find out that the, you know, disadvantages that you , that you discover as you’re implementing it outweigh the advantages. So I’m not saying that, you know, you should invest all your money on this company and I’ll definitely make heaps of money.
Not that I’m obviously ever offering invest investment advice. But I do think that there’s a there’s a couple of real principles that are worth pursuing, but you don’t see them on the wind catching website. They’re not mentioning that they’re, they’re mentioning things about, you know, using it at a higher wind speed than a normal wind turbine.
And it’s like, yeah, well, a normal wind turbine could do that too if the economics stacked up. I mean, anyone. Put a bigger generator on a , on a, on any wind turbine and have its rated wind speed, be it a higher wind speed and you know, get a better annual energy output. Or you can undersize the gen generator and get a great capacity factor.
Those are the two things that, you know, new entrant to wind are always. Trying to be like, oh, capacity factor’s amazing, or, our AEP is amazing, but it doesn’t really matter. Those things in isolation, if you’re not considering the finances of it, those things don’t matter. And that’s why, you know, we talk about levelized cost of energy, and that’s what a regular conventional wind turbine is, super duper optimized to get the lowest cost of energy.
And that’s, that’s why they. You know, a rated wind speed of, you know, 12, 14, whatever meters per second, and not 20 meters per second. Not cause they couldn’t but because it’s, the economics don’t stuck up. So I’d love to work with wind catching and help them, help them because I like their idea and I hate how they’re implementing it.
Allen Hall: Well, they’re still, they’re still saying that one full scale wind catching. Will produce 75 megawatts of energy of power, so it’ll be equivalent to five 15 megawatt machines, 75 megawatts on one. Rack, basically. It’s what it is that, does that seem,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, it’s because mathematically possible, yes, it seems gonna be big.
It does, but it won’t, that’s not gonna be the design they end up with because it will be so expensive. So that they get that by saying on their website, it says, right, conventional turbines limit energy output above 11 or 12 meters per second by pitching the blades. And they do that because they you know, the generator is, is sized for their power at that wind speed.
And above that there’s more power. So they need to, yeah. And they’re saying we’re not gonna do that. Yeah. Okay. Well, you know, that means you’ve got a generator that most of the time is gonna be seeing much slower wind speeds. You, you just got a really expensive generator with a low capa. They’re just gonna have very low capacity factor from this.
So their rated wind sp their turbine rating may well be five times a conventional wind turbine. But they’ll almost never generate that. And you know, they’re gonna have a terrible cost of energy, right? So that, that’s not the advantage. That’s got nothing to do with, you know, their, their I unique idea has nothing to do with that.
That’s just something that anybody could do. Yeah. And there’s , there’s other, there’s other ones as well, like that. I I dunno why they won’t communicate the, the actual essence of their, their idea. Yeah. They
Allen Hall: haven’t yet. Well, they, they’re, they’re saying that, they’re saying that the pilot project is gonna be installed on the west coast of Norway.
In 2023 this year. So we should hear something about some smaller scale system by the end of this year, and then we can kind of see what this thing looks like and, and
Rosemary Barnes: see what I heard. So, I mean, the website says it delivers electricity at grid parody now, which is a bold claim from someone that hasn’t installed a prototype.
I mean, what’s the, what’s there now? You know, they haven’t even made one. How do they, how do they know how much it’s gonna cost in, you know? It’s annoying. I haven’t really probably endeared myself to them. I, it’s hard, it’s hard to say if my goal is to, yeah, they hire me to, to do their , their technology development and then I, I just criticize them all the time.
Yeah, but it, it’s so frustrating cuz you know, like a good idea of it’s implemented badly makes everyone think that that was a bad idea. And then, you know, you never go back to it and everyone’s like, oh, you have to make every wind turbine, just like everyone that’s gone before it, because no new ideas don’t work.
So, That’s why I get frustrated, ,
Allen Hall: well, you, you, you need engineers that are opposing views because otherwise you end up with a, usually a not great idea at the end. Turning something into a real product requires differing of opinions to hash out what is a good solution for a product. And yeah, it seems like they’re still developing that.
It’ll, it’ll come and there’s just more to see. And I’m curious, I’m really anxious to see what happens at the end of this year if they have the pilot. Operating and what kind of numbers it’s producing. It’s good for wind energy to, to do this now. Yeah.
Rosemary Barnes: And if wind catching are listening and they, they don’t hate me because I , I was mean about their technology development.
Please, please invite me to see a prototype and I’ll make a video on it for my win my YouTube channel. All right,
Allen Hall: so our wind farm of the week is the Budweiser Wind Farm at Thunder Ranch in Oklahoma. So the Budweiser Wind Farm is sort of on I 35, right off I 35 between Wichita, Kansas and Oklahoma City towards the northern Oklahoma border.
And the site is a partnership between, you know, green power and Anheuser Bush and the energy from this wind farm. To make Anheuser-Busch 100% working on renewable energy. So all the, the, the products they make are made with clean energy. Anja Busch push purchases about 150 megawatts of power from Thunder Ranch under p p a.
And there are lemme get the numbers here. There’s 200, it’s a NU 298 megawatt project. And a 120 turbines. So, Congratulations. Budweiser Wind Farm at Thunder Ranch. You are our wind farm of the week, and finally we have some really cool names with some wind farms in America. We were looking for some because of the Thor Wind farm over in Europe.
We’re, we’re trying to find those wind farms with cool names, so we’re gonna stick to this trend for a while. Congratulations to Budweiser Wind Farm. 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.
And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
