Volkswagen just invested in EnerKite’s airborne wind turbines. How practical are they? Allen, Rosemary and Joel discuss the possibilities. RWE just bet on small wind and Ryse Energy, with about 400 installations. What would make small wind more viable? Hint: certification would help. Can the right software cut out the middleman in drone inspections? North Dakota’s Thread is on it.
Scotland’s SSE has installed the world’s deepest offshore wind turbine. The 2,000 ton turbine sits in 58 meters of water. Meanwhile, DNV has deemed Entrion’s 100-meter FRP monopile feasible. How do these developments change the floating vs. fixed bottom argument? Joel explains how rock bags work and why scour protection is important. Our Wind Farm of the Week has 377 GE turbines in 4 locations. Listen to find out why it’s a big deal!
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
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Uptime 162
Allen Hall: We have a packed show for you this week. To start off, we talked about Volkswagen connecting with EnerKite and Rosemary has done a bunch of research on these kite projects that generate power and what it means and is it a good idea. And then we look into small wind power with Ryse Energy, which has been supported by RWE.
Joel Saxum: We’re gonna talk to about our friends in PES Wind Magazine. This month or this quarter I should say over from North Dakota Thread and what their software solution and, and drone enterprise looks like.
Rosemary Barnes: And then we’re gonna head offshore. Scotland is installing the world’s deepest fixed bottom offshore wind turbine.
At, I think it was 68 meters. And there’s also a hundred meter monopile from Entrion that they’re proposing. And we delve into a little bit about floating offshore as well, and about how, how that’s going to compete with fixed bottom in the long term.
Allen Hall: And then our wind farm of the week is Western Spirit Wind in New Mexico, so stay tuned for it.
I’m Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum. And Australian renewables Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, I know you have talked about the flying kite power generation systems and Volkswagen must have seen your videos. So Volkswagen Group charging in EnerKite have submitted a proposal to the federally funded. Techno high project which involves using airborne wind turbines to generate electricity for mobile charging points and anarchy will provide flying wind turbines, which the company claims could yield twice the annual energy compared to ground lodge turbines.
The the system uses wind catching kite to pull a rope producing large forces that are converted into electricity. And the project, it’s called ric Mobile Charging infras. And it will run through the end of 2024. EnerKite is led by former World Champion in speak, hiding Christian Gephart, and they’re working on the first product stage for the E K 200, which is the model of this kite.
And Rosemary, you had done a bunch of research on this on your site. Does this make sense to use Kite to power up mobile? Car charged ports.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe. Maybe it does. It’s interesting to see EnerKite with this agreement, cuz they’re, they’re not the front runners. I mean, they’re one of the, one of the front runners I guess.
But I hadn’t seen any commercial sales from anybody other than Skysails and airborne wind yet. So it’s good to see that. Diversifying a bit, but it’s not, and as far as I know, and according to their website, they don’t have a product ready to go off the shelf yet. They’re still testing prototypes and, and stuff.
So I guess that’s why it’s a research project with, with Volkswagen. So. In the long term, I, I think it may make sense, but there are a few a few issues that need to be taken care of first that I find it hard to believe that they’re gonna be ready by the end of 2024 ready to actually start rolling these out.
The biggest one is just regulatory at the moment. All of the, you know, flight of these systems, at least in Europe, All the test flights are in special test areas, you know they haven’t yet figured out how it’s gonna work when they’re flying above, you know, roads or you know, anywhere, anywhere near where people might go, which presumably they would have to if they’re going to be powering you know, charge points unless you wanna also build really lengthy transmission lines to get the power.
The power there then you are going to be putting them in built up areas and, you know, you’re gonna be worried about what happens if there’s a, a crash and a kite falls down onto the road or something like that. So, I would say regulation is gonna be the, the biggest and longest hurdle because, I mean, it’s not just that Ana Kite has to demonstrate that their system is safe.
There needs to be a whole regulatory system developed that they can fit into, because obviously the EU doesn’t just allow anybody to, you know, fly whatever they want, wherever they want. Right. I mean, you’d, you’d know about that. And then there’s a few technical problems like that no one has solved yet, including ANA kit, which is autonomous launch and landing.
And also, you know, how it goes in difficult weather conditions. So, like I said, sky Sales is the furthest advanced in this technology. And they have their autonomous launch and landing. Roughly ready, or it’s ready under good conditions. But they still have, I think, 2.5 operators on hand at all time.
So yeah, it’s like two. Two people and an assistant, or maybe it’s 1.5, I can’t remember. Anyway, more than one person that’s, that needs to be there to actually fly this stuff. They’ve got, you know, a pilot and a co-pilot kind of and obviously that massively affects the commercial viability of it, but you know, it’s a temporary thing while they iron out the kinks.
Yes, but I think with Sky Sales, It’s a bit of a different commercial strategy cuz their initial sales are mostly like islands. They’re actual islands, so they’re island grids and also, you know, physical islands. So they’re replacing diesel generators and diesel in remote locations is so expensive and so they have like a really strong incentive to try something else that works.
Yeah, and with a airborne wind energy system, you can install it much quicker than you can a, you know, a fixed, a fixed wind turbine and it’s a lot less permanent. So, you know, if you’re putting it in a sensitive environmental area, then you don’t need to, you know, dig and build a foundation. It just all comes in, in a shipping container and you just, you know yeah, un unpack it from there in a, in a day or two.
So yeah. So to me, The island application makes much more sense for that. Early adopters kind of, yeah, part, part of their, their growth plan. Because, you know, there’s a lot of good reasons why these applications can’t just use regular wind energy, so it doesn’t really matter that it’s more expensive and more of a pain for now.
So they’ll be able to work out. Those issues in on those customers. Whereas for car charging, I mean obviously this is gonna be in areas where there’s a lot of people and there’s gonna be an electricity grid nearby. There’s plenty of regular wind farms that are connected to the grid. So yeah, I guess that it would make sense if they couldn’t install a regular wind turbine for some reason.
But if they could, then. For sure be the cheapest option now. But I do agree that there’s at least a possibility of this ending up the cheaper option in. 15 ish years maybe. So, you know, if they’re thinking long term, then, you know, it’s good to have a a, a bet on Yeah, a bet each way. So a bet on this side is makes sense to me.
Joel,
Allen Hall: have you ever been to Burning Man?
Joel Saxum: Should I answer this
Allen Hall: question? Well, it may incriminate
Joel Saxum: you. All right. I’ve been to the Burning Man grounds. I’ve never been to actual Burning Man Festival. All right. So,
Allen Hall: you know that it used to be, there was really, it was just you take a tent, you stay out in the desert, and.
Quote unquote, fun weekend, and it’s gotten a lot more upscale recently where they have sort of air conditioned tents and all this, and catering and all this stuff. The problem is there’s no power out there, right? So isn’t this inner Kitt solution a perfect situation where you’re out in the desert for a week?
And you put a bunch of these kites to power your Tesla and your tent and your catering
Joel Saxum: service? I think so. And so I, I see it in a couple of different realms as well. So I think emergency and disaster response. So in the US thinking, fema Red Cross, if you can roll in with a semi, you might not even have to take the chip and container off of a semi-trailer.
Pull in with the Semitrailer launch and now you’ve got kilowatts of power for everybody around and you’re not running diesel fuel, you’re not creating all those fumes, those things, if you’ve ever been to electrical Burning Man, the same thing. They had these issues at the festival a long time ago, not a long time ago.
They have it ongoing. But they, they, they first brought it up a long time ago was there’s so many nasty fumes in that area. Of just, it’s just generators running all day long, every day, right? So you’re smelling that, you’re like, oh, we’re gonna go out to the desert and be one, and then it’s just diesel fumes and gas fumes all the time.
So you have that, that issue. So the same thing, like if you’re, and I know this is a stretch, right? But like I’m thinking tailgating, RVing, all these different kind of things, camping, that off-grid type stuff. Been looking at some campers lately my better half and I have, and it’s amazing to see how many of them.
Have an option for any kind of solar panels or anything of this sort. It’s all aftermarket stuff. I would think that almost every manufacturer, I mean, you’ve got some of these, we’re looking at tra trailers to pull behind the truck, right? So some of these are 20, 30, 40 feet long, all this roof space. No solar panel, like put a, that should be one big solar array up there in my mind.
And with a battery
Rosemary Barnes: bank, that’s b that’s bizarre. Is there some sort of like ideological opposition between RVs and solar panels, cuz definitely those types of vehicles in Australia are. Covered in solar panels because that’s the, by far, the easiest way to get electricity. And it’s, it’s quiet and you don’t have to refuel it and it doesn’t smell.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. In the, in the US when you walk into the RV dealership, the first, you, you run into banks of generators before you run into a little thing of solar panels. And the solar panels a lot of times are like the size of a notebook and it’s like this is a battery tender to keep your, your one battery for raising your platforms up and down.
It’s like, why aren’t we running? Camper
Rosemary Barnes: that way. Yeah. That’s insane to me. They, it must be like willful. It must be on purpose cuz even, you know, like actual just car campers or Yeah. Get a literal tent out of your backyard outta your backyard, outta your Your car and you camp in that, plenty of people like that will then, you know, unroll a, a, you know, a bunch of solar panels and use that to, you know, power a a, a a little cooler or you know, recharge effort and something like that.
It’s just, it’s very, it’s very convenient and cheap. And do you guys have Goal
Joel Saxum: Zero? I dunno. So Goal Zero is, Off-grid living basically is solar panels and they have battery banks and chargers and all this kind of stuff. And that like every once in a while you’ll see some of those things for sale at one of these RV dealerships.
But in my mind, I would think, why not have a pop-up mini wind turbine and have the, but it’s only specialty brands and I think it’s just a cultural thing a lot, a lot of the people buying RVs of that sort in the US are the older generation that’s now retired and they’re gonna go travel around and that’s not really what they’re looking for, but you’d think.
It would be a perfect convenience. Like, oh, hey, by the way, now if it’s bright out, you don’t have to charge your batteries by running a generator. But it’s, it’s odd. I, I agree. But those are the things I’m thinking of a miniature version of like this inner kite thing. If you are anywhere where there’s any wind and you had this on the, in a.
Box on the top of your camper. Mm-hmm. Up you go. And, and now you’ve got power.
Rosemary Barnes: There is, there is one available. I’m just, just gluing it now so I can remember the name and check if it’s actually available for order. And I would love to get my hands on one of these and and test it out for the channel.
But it’s by Kite X and it’s called the Wind Catcher. And it’s yeah, the website’s being slow to load, but it’s, yeah, it’s a small portable system. You unfold a, a campsite and I’m gonna assume that it’s not autonomous, but yeah, it’s yeah, there is, there is a portable one, but
Joel Saxum: if you had, if you had, I, I, I envision a, a camper that has an app.
Everything has an app, right? You should be able to pull your phone up and be like, just like the Tesla has, and be like, oh, hey, your camper is, your batteries are 40%. Oh man, we should launch the wind turbine to charge ’em up, up, charge ’em down. It goes. Now, now the kids can wa watch Netflix in peace. I know
Allen Hall: Rosemary says she went to uc.
Davis. Did you go to Burning Man? That’s pretty close.
Rosemary Barnes: No, I didn’t, but I would. I would love to. And I think Jill’s definitely, or both of you are right, that this would be a great addition to of solar panels is obvious thing. If it’s in the desert, then you know you’re gonna have clear skies during the day, most likely.
So some solar panels and batteries would be your first step, but That is would be a great place to add in these high airborne wind energy once they have ironed out the, the kinks and got the regulation sorted. Definitely.
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Allen Hall: R D B has been busy again in a 15 million funding round. R W E Energy Transition Investments has led the growth funding round of Rise Energy, a UK and Spanish manufacturer of small wind turbines, rise energy, which is sorry, installed more than 4,000.
Small wind turbines plans to expand its energy as a service model in our new markets and expand its technology offerings with those funds. The new markets rise Energy is targeting include the U S A U A E and possibly India. Makes a lot of sense. The company plans to invest in, its, in its new technologies, become certified for a number of markets and expand its manufacturing capability.
And R to B thinks that rise energy has the potential to be a major force for good in reducing greenhouse gas emissions and providing some reliable and sustainable sustainable energy access. R w. It seems like week after week r d B is doing something interesting in the renewable energy space and investing in small wind.
I think this makes a lot of sense. Cuz there aren’t, like we just talked about there, there are a number of potential uses for it that. It hasn’t grown to the, to the place where it probably should be in, in America right now. Joel, do you think, it seems like there’s not a lot of small wind here
Joel Saxum: right now.
No, absolutely not. And I think Rosemary is has done a couple videos on small wind turbines as well, and where they’re good and where they’re not, of course talking about, you know, ranch lands, farmlands versus inner cities and those kind of things, and where it actually fits. But again, The us the general population, depending on where you are in the country, has not taken a hold of this distributed grid, small make your own power type stuff.
Like, you know, we drove into this we’re in a, in Houston now we’re in the suburbs here and driving into this new subdivision where my better half and are staying here for the next few months. We saw solar panels on the roofs and I was like, oh man, this is awesome. Finally, someone diving into solar panels and roofs, cuz in Texas, in the suburbs you just don’t see that cause ah, they don’t look that good on the roof or whatever.
But you might have, you know, 300 homes in a square mile and not a solar panel on ’em, and you’re thinking, and it’s Houston, this, they should be on all these houses. So I was happy to see them here. The same thing I I, to be honest with you, I’ve traveled all over this country from left to right and. Can count in one hand the amount of small wind turbines I’ve seen, and all of them have been on ranches and most of them have been in Wyoming.
To be honest with you. So
Rosemary Barnes: that’s interesting. That’s kind of similar to Australia for wind, but for solar, I mean, e everyone’s got it regardless of your, you know, how much you care about the environment or what your political leanings are. It’s just, you know, it just makes so much sense and it’s very easy and cheap in Australia compared to the us.
So it makes more sense here than it does even in Texas where you’ve got. Sun. But I, I also keep an eye out for small wind when I’m traveling around, and I do see it every now and then. But what I’m looking for is is that turbine turning and. Well, I don’t know. I haven’t been keeping statistics, but definitely less than half, the half the time.
They’re turning and sometimes they’re spinning so fast. I’m pretty sure that it’s not connected to anything. It’s just y you know, it’s a, it’s a pinwheel dec decorative which is, you know, which is f fine, especially vertical access. Wind turbines do just look super cool as a garden ornament. So you know, it’s ex expensive if you buy a, buy a turbine and just use it for a garden ornament, but it’s up to the, the owner.
But I think this, this plan with by R W E and with, with Rise, it’s a little bit different to that though. I don’t think that what they’re expecting is that people are gonna be buying these units and sticking them on a house in the suburbs. Like you said, I’ve done some videos on that and I mean the, the wind resource.
Is just not right to do it in an urban area wind speeds are, are too low because there’s buildings and trees and everything blocking, blocking the wind. It’s very turbulent, so that makes it hard on the wind turbines. Plus they do make some noise and some vibrations, so you’re gonna struggle there.
If you. Wanna get a decent amount of wind, you really wanna put it at least 10 meters up on a tower. And you know, like local planning doesn’t necessarily allow you to have a 10 meter tower in your backyard. I wouldn’t be that thrilled if my next door neighbor put a, a 10 meter high small wind turbine.
But the kinds of markets that they’re talking about, it’s similar to what I was saying Sky Sales are doing, trying to displace diesel generators cuz it’s just so expensive to run as diesel generator. So you, you know, you have I don’t know, it’s an easier entry for any kind of startup wind energy.
If you can displace diesel, then people have a lot. A lot of money that they’re willing to spend on that. So it’s distributed sort of in the sense that it’s, you know, it’s going into rural communities and probably places that either are not connected to the main grid or they’re not well connected. Or in the case of Australia, there’s a lot of talk about resilience because bush fires come through and sometimes.
Cut places off for, you know, for weeks or months, you might be cut off from the main electricity grid. So there’s a lot of work in place to try and get more resilience at the, you know, at the end of the, the transmission line. So those are the kinds of places where, where this would make sense. And I am really pleased to see more emphasis on, on small wind and especially on certification of it, because it’s really lacking that there’s a certification of these kinds of systems.
And so even when you get people that have a, a good location for a small wind turbine, and I think that the. Project, it’s talking about, I think it said like three to 60 kilowatts. So it is a home or a small farm sized amount of power or a small community. I guess it’s 60 kilowatts. You’ve had a few of those and that’s can do quite a few homes.
So even where people, you know, might live on a, a, a ranch that is expensive to, you know, connect all the way to the grid, they’re buying the small wind turbines that are available to buy now are mostly not certified and you. You just get so many people, you look search it online, you’ll see so many people that have just bought something that did not do what it said it would.
They often break quite quickly and then, you know, like they’re, they’re rated at some ridiculous wind speed or you know, their sales. The sales information is either incorrect or just so I dunno, misleading that people are generally not buying small wind turbines and just being really, really happy with it.
So I think that it’s definitely needed to get the certification right. There is a small wind certification. There’s only. Five or 10 different turbines on there. But they will test it under, you know, specific conditions and then it, they’ll say, you know, how much, not just its peak power, but how much did it make over, you know a period of, of testing hours.
So, That will be good.
Joel Saxum: I got a question for you, Alan, and maybe just cuz this is a US economics thing, so I’m doing a little armchair thinking while Rosemary is giving us the, the good technical detail. What if a bank or some other institution, a co-op or something in like Western Kansas or Texas, Oklahoma came, came up with a tool that was a capital tool to be able to support more of these being installed.
So what I’m thinking is, is the reason that a lot of these aren’t installed, it’s a capital expenditure that people just don’t have the money for. I don’t know exactly what a 50 kilowatt or a 60 kilowatt or 40 whatever costs, but if you had a a bank or some kind of financial institution that would come and say, Hey guys, we would like to help expand this as an ESG stamp, or whatever you wanna say.
Let’s install these on, on homes and we’ll share the. Upside with you. So if you’re, if you’re getting paid back from the grid, once you’re connected and once you use up all the power you need and then you get, cuz that’s kind of how the program works in the US at least. If you, if there was a bank that would create a loan program or a function of that sort where they would share in the upside of it, I think you could see some more of these getting installed.
Cause right now it’s, it’s the, one of the barriers to e entry is. Right. It costs money to get these things installed. So maybe if someone stepped up to the plate and said, you know what? We’d like to help with this distributed grid idea and to, to help the general public maybe they could build a function within a, a financial or economic function within a bank or some other financial institution to help.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah. I think there’s some obvious places where that can happen. Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, even up in South Dakota, those things are possible. And because there are are a number of community banks in those areas that are really tied to the surrounding area, they know their banker. That, that plays into helping out the community.
And I think you’re right. It, it’s a question of like Rosemary, you’re saying some of these winds are big enough, they can support 4, 5, 6 homes on them or one large dairy farm. So you’re all the way up. In Wisconsin it may be the same thing. And until those financing for them, it’s really hard for a single homeowner to, to take the plunge.
And Rosemary’s also right. In the Midwest, I think a lot of people have gotten, have tried it and gotten burned over the years. So think back, back in the 1980s until now, there’s been a lot of companies kind of come and go. That certification is really important. If they’re gonna buy something of that expense, they need to make sure that it works and does what it says it’s gonna do again.
The banker makes a big difference there.
Rosemary Barnes: You know, in terms of financing, I I recommended a book to you last week after the podcast. We were chatting, and I recommend that you read, I can’t remember what it’s called in Australia I think it’s called The Big Switch. It’s by Sol Griffith, who started the Electrify America and also Australia.
He’s big on on financing. You know, electrification, opportunities for homes for, for homeowners. There are a few options in Australia for solar panels. And I don’t know if all of the things that he talks about in his book are available yet, but it’s talking about things like, you know, if you install a, a heat pump instead of a, a gas boiler in Australia, at least that is Oh yeah, that’s cheaper than, so you’ll save money on your, your bills.
And the same is true for a lot of different electrification things. Same with, you know electric vehicles that your running costs are gonna be cheaper than if you have a petrol car cause of maintenance and fueling costs. So there are banks that will give you a loan based on the idea that you’re gonna have more disposable income to you know, so you, the saving that you make is the payment that, that you make.
So that’s available for solar panels, at least through, I think it’s Macquarie. In Australia. And yeah, it’s definitely a big opportunity and something that, that needs to happen to really accelerate electrification. Cause, you know, over the total, total lifetime all of these new electrification technologies save money, but, It doesn’t help you if you know your boiler is broken today and you only have, you know, a small amount, you wanna spend the least amount of money today to replace it, then you’re gonna replace it with another gas boiler.
But if you could have some finance that you know, covered the gap and then you repaid it based on your bill savings Throughout the life of the, the product, then that would be a much lower hurdle to, to overcome. So I think, yeah, you’ve raised a really, really critical point that financing is something that needs to mature for this to, you know, take off rapidly.
Yeah.
Joel Saxum: And as we always say, like the, the borderline or the, the, the stop on financ. Is ensuring right? So the stamps from whoever’s gonna certify these things go a long ways to insurers accepting it, because nobody’s gonna finance unless you can ensure it. They’re gonna have, everybody wants their protection, right?
So if they don’t, if we can, if we can work towards getting all of these things certified or not all of them, but the good ones certified and they have a stamp on ’em, then they can be insured, then we can finance ’em and we can move this thing forward faster.
Allen Hall: So the new P e S WIN magazine came in the mail.
If you haven’t gotten your copy, check out PS win.com and you can just download it. And I was thumbing through there. There’s a lot of good articles. It comes out quarterly, so when you get it, there’s a lot to read. It’s, there’s good material throughout the whole magazine. There’s an article on thread and Thread is based in the United States.
It’s a drone company, but it’s got a little bit unique spin and. I’m trying to understand all the things that they do, and I’m, I’m really just starting to learn about thread. Joel, I know you know a lot more than I do on it, but can you explain sort of what the model is for Thread, because it’s a little bit different than other drone companies?
Joel Saxum: I would dial back. One step there. And I don’t think I would classify threat as a drone company. I think I’d classify ’em as a software company. I’d classify ’em as a software company. Right. Cuz they’re building, they, while they, while they have created some drone technology to, to inspect wind turbines they’re also using drones to collect data on utility assets and, and other things of that sort.
And, but at the basis of it is the software platform for, for. Diagnosing what the state is telling you, right. And being able to properly manage it. So one of the things that they’re doing in Wind, I know, cause I’ve talked with Pete over there and gray Byers, they’re, they’re chief Business Officer a little bit is They’re enabling and, and it’s really smart.
They’re enabling the asset owners or ISPs or even OEMs to be able to inspect on their own for, for, for wind turbines. So in Wind Power Lab, we’re always preaching to some of our clients, like, let’s, let’s motivate proper inspections. You know, when when drone inspections came, came hit the market, autonomous drones specifically hit the market, it was, they started to get so cheap that everybody was just, Boom, a hundred percent of the fleet, let’s go, let’s go do an inspection.
And there’s a lot of people that still do that today. And you’re there, you know, you’re, there’s nothing wrong with that, but you’re, you’re catching your own possibly propagating issues and you, you’re getting an update every year on every turbine and this, so those, those are good things. But I think if you look back now and say, okay, autonomous drone inspections have been around for 5, 6, 7 years.
And if you were to look at the, the inspection results over 5, 6, 7 years, I think in a, in a, in a portfolio, you’re gonna see a lot of turbines. You may have paid 350, 400 bucks, 500 bucks inspection, and nothing really happened. Nothing changed, right? So one of the things Thread is doing is while they’re enabling the people on the ground to do it, so instead of X, Y, Z wind calling a b ABC drone company to come out and do their, their annual inspection.
Paying for mobilization, paying for weather, downtime, all these different, you know, shutting wind turbines down when they, they may be in peak wind that day, like they may be creating a lot of kilowatt hours and being very profitable. But since the guy’s on site and we gotta pay for him, we gotta shut these things down and, and let him inspect where.
If you had a drone on site, some people trained to, to use it. I mean, it’s autonomous technology, so you basically have to have a part 1 0 7 and be able to land the thing if something goes wrong. It’s, it doesn’t take a whole lot of Piloting skills to do that. No offense to anybody flying autonomous drones.
But it enables the, basically the inspection arm of any asset owner, i s p, whatever, to be more efficient and effective, right? So they can be more cost effective. And hey, if there’s low wind today or we’re not doing anything, let’s go up and do some inspections. Or if we had lightning roll through a wind.
Yesterday, let’s do some inspections. I know we, we we’re always telling that, saying that in wind power lab, like, you know, regularly inspect if you had lightning come through, check the turbines, or check this side of the wind farm or whatnot. If you know where their lightning strikes were, we, but if you’re waiting a year now to inspect.
And you know that you had, you don’t know if you had lightning damage or not. You might possibly have some large issues looming. And that’s when we see a lot of blade failures, right? Because sometimes you have inspections where damage just grows and grows and grows and grows. And if you would’ve stopped it on day 10 or day one or day two, instead of day 180, you would’ve saved money in the cost to fix it and or could have saved a catastrophic failure.
So, That’s one of the things I know Thread is doing is, is enabling the, the people on the ground to be able to do their own inspections. I think that’s smart. And another thing is, You know, they’re, they’re a big plat, they’re a big data platform, so they’re, they’re trying to take in as much data as they can and help people be proactive instead of reactive.
Allen Hall: Right. Their data platform is called Unity with Two Eyes, but that seems to be a big driver for a lot of owner operators is the, is the data platform that if that interface is not workable, they just don’t like to use it. But I, I, I think in, in Thread’s case, they’re really working on making that, that I.
Helpful to the owner operator, right? Because if they’re gonna be doing their own inspections, kind of what they’re doing, then they need to be able to quickly sort out what’s what and focus attention where they need to. And I, I think that’s where threat is going. It’s, it’s a unique business approach, right?
It sort of takes out the middleman. Out of the inspection profits and probably needs to right there. There’s a lot of wind farms that need that service and still will. But I think some of the wind farms and the operators have moved on that they’ve figured out how to do that and just need a tool, which is what Thread is providing.
Yeah, they
Joel Saxum: want to make the, the process more efficient. Right. So when you talk about integrations, like if you, if you’re a soft, if you’re an autonomous drone company and that’s what you do, you may not have the expertise on staff to. Have an SAP integration or you know, have a proper API handles into someone’s system.
These larger operators, they don’t want to have. I know, I don’t, I, I hate when I have to log into Netflix and YouTube, TV and Hulu and have three different logins. I would hate to, you know, be an be an asset operator or o and m person responsible and have this login for this platform and this login for this platform.
And so Thread’s got some, some smart software guys. It’s a lot of the the larger. We’ll say like software slash data acquisition companies do to be able to integrate into some of these players. So the, I think that there’s, you’re, we’re starting to see a more advanced version of what was a drone company.
Right. You say you have the, the, the Zeit. The Zeit view guys that have recently got a bunch of cash and they’re evolving and they’ve got a big back office, office staff that is software heavy as well. Right. They’re very smart at what they do. Skys specs. 80 million, right? I know. Thread. They came outta North Dakota as a drone company, right?
And they got a bunch of non-dilutive funding and now they’re growing and growing and growing. So you’re starting to see like drone company inspection, company 2.0 pop. As opposed to, Hey, we can offer an autonomous drone inspections. That’s great. Now everybody can do that. What else do you got?
Allen Hall: Rose Murray.
Isn’t that the dream though? If, if you’re a blade designer and having to maintain blades, don’t you want just be able to have access to images that are more recent than six months ago?
Rosemary Barnes: I’m not sure if it’s a dream for the manufacturers. It’s maybe it’s a, a nightmare for them because you’re gonna pick up, pick up a lot more.
But it’s certainly something that, you know, the kind of work that I do with you know, working with serial defects in, in wind farms and root cause analysis and stuff, when you’re in that phase where you’re trying to figure out, you know, how worried do we need to be about this problem? You know, we’ve got a few.
Failures, usually the first one or two you found out about accidentally cuz you know, you just happened to be doing something else to that blade and, and notice something. And then you know, root cause analysis, the, the affected population tends to grow and grow and grow for a while. And you never know how, how.
Quickly something is gonna progress. That’s one of the problems with composite materials. You know, you can statistically say how fast, you know, the damage is going to be apparent in a population you can do testing and say, you know, we expect this defect has a fatigue. A, a blade with this defect has a fatigue lifetime of, you know, one year instead of 30 or two years instead of 30.
But that, yeah, that’s statistical. That doesn’t tell you any individual blade, and you can never have very much confidence. And the problem is that, you know, once the defect starts like the way that the crack propagates, it, it, it’s not like it’s gonna, even if you know, you know, on average it’s gonna make you know, 20 millimeters over a year this crack.
It’s not happening, you know, one millimeter every month. It’s like nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. 10 millimeters and then nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. Your blade’s broken. That’s, that’s kind of how it works. And so when I’m getting involved in these cases, I’m like, you know, the manufacturer is always like, oh, you know, we’re sure that this is not gonna happen.
Quickly. It’s you know, it’s all fine. We’ll continue inspecting the blades once a year, and I’m always wanting more information. And to be a little bit more, more cautious for the way that they’re running the, the wind farm. And it is gonna be so nice when we have more options available to be inspecting much more frequently.
Yeah. And in the case of lightning, as well as what Joel was saying about, you know, catching and damage early before it, you know, Breaks before it’s a catastrophe. It’s not just about preventing the damage, it’s also about assigning blame. So, you know, if you catch a damaged blade the day after a lightning strike and y you know, you’re, you’re pretty sure that the lightning strike was within the, the parameters that it’s certified for.
Then it’s quite easy to be like, okay, the lightning system didn’t behave as expected. Whereas if it happens a year later, you’re not sure what lightning strike did it. And also, you know, a little bit of damage that could have been repaired in, you know, a couple of hours with a couple of rope. Tax. That’s different to then, oh, we just let it, we just let it run.
And now the blade’s broken. I mean, that’s, you know, you’re not gonna get the manufacturer to pay for that because you couldn’t be bothered to inspect it. So I think there’s so many benefits to being able to inspect much more frequently. And you know, I say this nearly every time we talk about easier maintenance, but it’s gonna be especially critical offshore, you know, You just, we, we can’t keep on doing maintenance and managing defects the same way offshore as we do now on shore.
It’s just, it’s not, it is not gonna work. Once we have, you know, so many offshore wind farms, So we need solutions like this. Joel and I were
Allen Hall: just talking before the podcast about wind turbine that got damaged by lightning a couple of days ago. And I went back to look at all the lightning strikes that had occurred in that general area.
And this is sort of the middle of Kansas there. Over one evening there had to be a thousand lightning strikes
Joel Saxum: or more. Or more. It was crazy.
Allen Hall: It was insane, right? And so you just know when those kind of. Pass over your farm. You probably have lightning strike damage, or there’s a pretty good chance you’ve taken a number of lightning strikes.
Damage is the question mark. You, you need to be checking that. When those storms hit the next day, you better be out there doing some inspections because like you’re, you’re right, Rosemary, if you don’t catch it at the right time, it could be catastrophic and that sometimes those cracks propagate faster than you.
It’s the perfect case for thread, right? It’s to be able to go out there the next day, fly the drone, check out your turbines, go, yes, we’re good or no turbines two, eight and 12. Need to be shut down until we can get a closer look. We got a call you know, wind Power Lab to come in and do an internal inspection.
There you go. There’s your, there’s
Joel Saxum: your case, right? You know, the, the other thing not to be missed here is that when you go to Blades usa, when you talk to anybody that is in the Blade world, they’re talking like, man, if we, we, if we get more data, if we get more data, if we could look at this, we could look at this.
This has the capability. These, these advanced software platforms have the capability. And, and that quick ability to go and inspect and collect this data has the ability to give blade engineers and Blade o and m specialists you know, This data to be able to look at, so use case. Look at offshore wind, like, like you were talking Rosie and leading edge erosion.
If you’re looking at leading edge erosion and you look at one year, two year, and you see, you can see the general propagation of it. Now there’s quantitative studies out there to, to get into forecasting this, but qualitatively you could just look at it and say like, okay, basically this leading edge erosion is, is last, is, you know, is.
To a stage at two years where we need to do something about it. And if we do the same thing again, then we’re gonna be back here again in two years, spending a million dollars with an S o v, doing an LAP campaign. So now that we have all this data and we can see how long this is actually gonna last. We figured out what our, you know, OPEX budget looks like we need to change something or we can continue to do the same thing, whatever, but you’re getting more data this way to be able to make those decisions properly.
Deep Voice Guy: Ping Monitor is a continuous blade monitoring system, which allows Windfarm operators to stay ahead of maintenance. Windex can often hear damaged bleeds from the. But they can’t continuously monitor all the turbines. They also can’t calculate how bad the damage is or how fast it’s propagating based on sound, but ping can ping’s.
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Allen Hall: All right, so there’s records being said all the time across the world in offshore, when industry and Scotland is a place where a lot of those records happen, while the Scottish Energy Company s s. Has set a new record by installing the world’s deepest offshore wind turbine foundation. The 2000 ton foundation was installed at a depth of over 58 meters, and as part of a 3 billion, billion pound sea green offshore wind farm, which is being developed in partnership with French oil company.
Super major. Overall the wind farm will be fully operational this summer and is capable of powering an equivalent of 1.6 million homes. Holy moly. That’s a lot of homes guys. SS E’s, chief Executive Officer Allister Phillips Davies said that the installation marked a significant step in towards completing the project and demonstrating how the company is pushing the boundaries of technology to drive change.
Ss e is is planning to invest 12 and a half billion pounds in 20 by 2026 in various renewable energy projects. Wow. 58 meters is a long way, Joel. That’s a lot. Pretty deep.
Joel Saxum: 58 meters is the depth of the water, right? That’s the depth of the water. So think about this now, that 58 meters is the depth of the water.
You’re gonna be at least 10 to 20 meters below the mud line. And then you’re gonna be another probably, I don’t know, seven to 12 meters above the water. So you’re thinking 60. You’re 80, 80 meters high. And, and I believe this is, if this is a, if this is a foundation, this isn’t a monopile, so this is a jacket.
So this thing is huge, like, absolutely massive. You think you’re, you’re, you’re step, you’re, you’re setting a football field on end and building it out of steel. You know, and then think about the, and the width of the founda. Like it’s just, just massive. Like to stand next to something like this would.
It’ll just
Rosemary Barnes: blow your mind. Can I just step in and be a little bit pedantic about this? It’s the, it’s the, the deepest fixed bottom offshore wind turbine. Right? Of floating. Yeah. Yeah. So we’re talking, we’re talking fixed, fixed bottom records being broken. Yeah. Which I guess is relevant to floating as well, cuz obviously the deeper that you can install a fixed bottom turbine, the less of a case there is for.
Floating for now at least. I know a lot of people think that floating is eventually gonna end up cheaper than, than fixed bottom in a lot of cases. But, you know, we’re a long way a away from that now at least. Well, inion
Allen Hall: disagrees on floating because intron wind is working with D M V on a monopole concept that.
Is in for water depths up to 100 meters. So they just went intron wind, just went through a process with D N V as a feasibility study and D N V blessed it said, yeah, this is totally feasible and can proceed on to further development and, and qualifications. So there, there’s a lot of question marks about floating.
Winds and trying to determine how deep you can actually make a mono pile, and it looks. This, this inch on wind application is basically a really tall monopile with some cables anchored to the sea bottom, much like a circus tint is put up, right? Got the main pole and a couple of of cables coming off it.
So it’s not true. Monopile Joel, it’s a quasi monopole. I would call it. But I think it’s, isn’t it about just keeping it cheaper and just using the same ships and things you already have? So the complexity is, is less, I, I think that’s where they’re going here.
Joel Saxum: I don’t, I don’t see the advan, I don’t see the advantage of it.
This is where I’m thinking, and maybe Rosemary along the same lines, is this floating wind is, You’re gonna put, you have to put anchors and or sub micro piles in for the, basically what would be G wires, right? So why not just put a floating platform out there? You gotta do that anyways for the floating platform.
Or does it make the installation that much cheaper and easier with the hundred meter monopile?
Rosemary Barnes: I guess that it’s also about technology readiness, cuz obviously, you know, a floating, floating platform is gonna move around a bit and it makes a big difference to how much power you can generate if you’ve got, you know, like a, your rotor is slightly off access and that’s going to reduce your power and cause some funky, funky loads that it wasn’t designed for.
So, you know, we don’t quite yet probably know How well the, the floating wind can perform or, you know, with the current technologies at
Joel Saxum: least. But I would, I would think, like, okay, so Alan, you and I the other day had a, a conversation with the gentleman about a tension leg platform. So attention leg platform, attention leg platform would do in a hundred meters of water would basically eliminate much of the petrol heve of the, of the floater.
But again, like you said, Rosemary, now I’m just, I’m kind of combating myself, but the idea of using a monopile would be two or three piece monopile buried in the mud. It’d probably be easier. It’s probably a quicker t r l level nine product than anything floating.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But I do think, I mean, it sounds out there that floating wind would eventually become cheaper than, than fixed bottom, but there are a lot of of.
Advantages to it once it matures a bit more. I mean, the foundations are, are easier, right? The you know, the, the, it it kinds of loads that it has to withstand a bit easier to deal with in the, the foundations. And then also it should use less. Steel, I would’ve thought less materials need to be in, in the, you know, in the sea floor and in the tower.
So that would be an advantage in the long run too. And then one other one that people talk about is you know, if you’ve got like a major fault and you need to, you know, take I don’t know. It’s big components of, you know, say you’ve gotta get blades down and replace bearings, replace generators or bits of the tower.
You can tow off floating wind turbine back to the port and do that work there. Whereas it’s gonna be a. So expensive. If you’ve got you, you know when you’ve got turbines in a hundred meter deep water, they’re usually quite far out. If you’ve gotta get crews out there every single day and equipment sitting out there, I don’t know, build a floating hotel for them, it, it’s gonna be very expensive for major faults.
So I can see, I probably am in the camp that believes that eventually floating will be cheaper than fixed bottom. But I. Timing it. It’ll be, in my opinion, at least 10 years, maybe it’s gonna be 20 years before we see that. So yeah, I don’t know. What do you think about that, Joel? Yeah,
Joel Saxum: I think you’re, I think you’re correct, Rosemary.
I think that once we see some more development and we start to see commercial scale, Larger commercial scale deployments of offshore floating wind, the cost will become, will come down. I, I fully believe that, and what I’m thinking about now is we kind of know some of the technical limitations or technical hurdles that offshore floating wind is fighting against.
Cuz we we’re talking with people in the industry regularly. This is kind of a. I mean, it’s not a crazy concept, right? But it’s a newer concept and I’m wondering what kind of technical hurdles they had to chump or, or please the DMV people as they certif, you know, certified the feed study to get to the point where they could say it’s good to go.
And the, the, the big one I’m thinking of is Viv, right? Vortex induced vibration. I wanted
Allen Hall: to, to run this by you. Have you ever heard of Ridgeway Rock? They’re based in Northern Ireland. That business is amazing. They put, they make bags of rocks and they sell it, and they’re known like worldwide for these bags of rocks, which are used to prevent scour and to kinda hold down transmission cables and a bunch of other things that do, do you, can you describe what that business is or what it’s all about?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, so RO Ridgeway rock bags is, if you’ve ever worked offshore, there’s a thing called a mattress. And a, a mattress goes on instead of something laying on it. Sometimes it goes on top of something. So with the current subsea, everything’s moving all the time. If you’ve ever looked at any kind of imagery of the, the sea floor, it looks just like the waves on the beach look, or in the desert.
Dunes looks the same thing in this undersea. But the difference is, is most of that is like silty and soft and moves very easily when you, you can. A tool. This, this happens with ROVs and sub-sea operations all the time. You can drop a tool if you drop a tool from an ro. Usually it’s gone because it just goes into the silt, like you’re not gonna get it back.
So when you have like say an offshore wind and farm installation, those knot, those, those two to three knot currents coming around, the monopiles that are into the bottom are gonna create scour, right? It’s just like when a creek flows by and there’s a rock and there’s that pool of water behind it that kind of digs out underneath the rock.
The same thing happens as water passes by the turbine tile or the monopile. So you’d put these, you’d usually do rock dump. And a lot of times it’s just big ship and they’re just taking a, a crane dumping rocks, right? If you miss on your rock dumpster, you put ’em in the wrong place, you can very easily damage things.
But these rock bags make it a lot more controllable. And they basically build them. You can build them keyside or you can build them on out on the, out on the vessel as well, but it makes it more controllable to do drop larger sums of rocks that stay together. So think of, think of. If you had a garden hose running across your yard, and when you crank on the water, that garden hose moves and flexes a little bit.
Think of that. Think of that being the power cable or the oil export line or anything, but laying on the sea floor. So you have that force moving it, but you also have water flowing over the top of it, left and right and back and forth. So you wanna put some rocks or mattresses along along it to keep it pinned down to the.
Bottom of the sea, basically. And that’s what these rock dump bags are for. So you go out there and place them on top of the pipeline or the export cable or what whatnot to keep them from moving. Because if they move, they start to flex. It’s just like, Bending a paperclip, eventually
Allen Hall: they break. I think that’s an amazing business, and the more I see them on LinkedIn, the more I just think that’s genius.
There’s a lot of technology behind it. I was watching a YouTube video from them where the bags themselves are made outta recycled plastic for a variety of reasons. I thought they were just made out of like chain link fence, like you kind of see here in the states along the interstate highways, but it’s, no, it’s a, it’s a.
Plastic recycled plastic bag that has to last a really long time. On the ocean bottom. It’s, it’s kind of amazing, right? You just, you just don’t think about all the associated businesses that are tied up in offshore wind. That’s one of them. Yeah, absolutely. Our wind farm of the week is Western Spirit Wind.
In New Mexico, it is actually four separate energy projects. Red Cloud Duran Mesa, Kleins Corners and Tecolote. There is a little over a gigawatt of installed capacity. Western Spirit Wind represents the most wind power ever constructed in a single phase in the United States. It started in, it opened in 2021.
It has about 35 employees on site. And Rosemary, they use GE wind turbines. There are 377 GE wind turbines varying in size from 2.3 to 2.8 megawatts. And Western Spirit is a feeder for California. That energy is sent to kind of the Los Angeles area, to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.
So you gotta cross a couple of states to get yourself from New Mexico all the way to California. But local, it’s a little crazy. But it’s great for the local community in, in New Mexico. So about 3 million a year is paid in property taxes in the, in the three counties that these wind farms are in. And the transmission line also contributes another about a million dollars a year in taxes.
So there’s 4 million bucks hit in the local community from these, from that wind farm. So that’s pretty cool. So Western Spirit Wind Project out in New Mexico, you are our wind farm of the. 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.
