Should OEMs lease equipment? Philip Totaro says the better question is, when will they? The idea may be more attractive to OEMs than it first appears. Crane safety is always important, and new concepts in crane systems should be more efficient and economical, as well as safer. The Uptime crew discusses some of the new designs and RWE’s recent investment in WindSpider.
In parts of Europe, the average age of a wind turbine is 15 years old, so it’s time to talk about repowering – and how to fund it. NREL will award $2.9M to manufacturers of small- and medium-scale wind turbine technology. Meanwhile, NASA is starting to think about wind turbines on Mars. Sure, there are some engineering challenges, but if we can grow potatoes on the red planet, we can do anything.
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
WindSpider – https://windspider.com
Small and Medium US Wind Turbine Companies:
Bergey Windpower Company – https://www.bergey.com
Carter Wind Turbines – https://carterwind.com
Eocycle America Corporation – https://eocycle.com
Pecos Wind Power – https://pecoswindpower.com
Primus Wind Power – https://www.primuswindpower.com
RRD Engineering – https://rrdengineering.com
Sonsight Wind – http://www.sonsightwind.com
Windurance LLC – https://www.windurance.com
Windward Engineering – http://windwardengineering.com
Xflow Energy Company – https://www.xflowenergy.com
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Uptime 145
Allen Hall: Well, as we record this episode, and it is just before Christmas, so as you listen to this, it’s just after Christmas, so I hope everybody had a, had a good holiday, an enjoyable Christmas time. In Australia, evidently they don’t have snow, so as, and Joel is in someplace where they don’t have snow either, but they’re trying to have snow.
Joel Saxum: We have 22 degrees .
Allen Hall: That’s what they’re saying. We up here in the, in the Hardy Northeast will have plenty of snow, it looks like for Christmas. So we’ll have a white Christmas. That’ll be very enjoyable. And this week we’re talking about a number of subjects and the the top one is Phil Totaro comes back on from Interstor of course.
And he had an interesting discussion about wind turbine leasing. Does it make sense for OEMs to lease their wind turbines instead of selling them to make the economics work better for the operators?
Joel Saxum: And we’ll talk about WindSpider, which is a climbing crane or climbing ish crane that RWE investing in to help some of their offshore operations.
And we’ll see, is it gonna be better for offshore construction? Can it help some onshore construction? We’ll see what happens there. And then as well jumping over to the us en re and taking some federal funds and investing into some of these small to medium size wind turbine companies. So Rosemary gives us some tips on where their, where these small wind turbines are useful and.
where they absolutely are not. And
Rosemary Barnes: then we move on to Repowering In Europe, they have a lot of wind turbines that are 15 or even 20 years old. So Repowering is gonna be a big thing in the next few years. And finally, we talk about wind turbines on Mars and yeah, what design changes they would need to make to get them working there and whether that’s gonna help us here on earth.
Allen Hall: I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with Australian Renewables guru Rosemary Barnes and my good friend Fund Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon. And this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Well, we have Phil Taro back from Intel store and check out his LinkedIn page and his website. You can find him@intelstore.com. Phil has done some research on what it costs to operate, maintain, and wind TURs in the United States, and has also kind of crosslinked that with p p a prices. And Phil, would you describe the, the problem that you see coming up in terms of how to operate a wind turbine farm efficiently?
Philip Totaro: Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me. So after several months of doing a lot of research on kind of the average production that we’re seeing in the United States market and thanks to the, the Energy Information Administration for making that data public we’ve also coupled that information with some FERC published power purchase data power purchase contract data, and.
We’ve also been able to using our, you know, financial modeling and some actual o and m contract data that we have we’ve been able to build some basically project pro forma models for almost all the, the operational assets in the us. And what we’re noticing is that the projects that have been built since about 2015 are now at, at least 10 years or longer to see a full net positive return on capital.
Projects that were built prior to 2015, you know, because of a much higher PPA price they’re probably, you know, somewhere between, you know, seven years and 10 years, maybe 12 to see a, a full net positive return on the, the upfront CapEx. So, because the p p a prices have been getting lower and lower and lower and we’ve bounced off the bottom, thankfully, which we saw back in about 2018 19, where, you know, there were some PPAs out there from some of the Midwestern co-ops as well as power marketing companies that were being signed for, you know, between like $9 and let’s say 11, 12, $13 per megawatt hour.
Wow. So the, the production tax credit in the United States has been very helpful for the independent power producers to maintain profitability. Without it, they would have a, a completely upside down project for 50 years you know, before they’d see a net positive return. And what’s happening is there’s, there’s this very interesting conundrum of, you know, when, when a project developer is buying wind turbines, They’re doing it with the premise that they’re gonna operate this asset for at least 20 maybe 25, 30 years.
Sure, yeah. They’re buying turbines that have a design life of 2030 and maybe even 40 years now, according to, you know, some certification with DMV or, or somebody else. And the question is that because the wind turbines, you know, based on some of the previous research we, we’ve talked about wind turbines really only have like a, a useful life before you start seeing a performance drop off of like 10 years.
Right? So the question is, knowing that you’re gonna have to repower for both operational reasons um, the, the turbine performance drops, and because you wanna be able to requalify for the production tax credit, why are we doing you know, a, why are we doing turbines that have a design life of, of 20 years in the first place, or 30 years or 40 years?
Mm-hmm. , good question number one and number two. Why are we not just leasing the equipment, knowing that, you know, instead of signing a a, an equipment purchase contract that is supposed to be for the duration of the project, you know, you’re gonna repower anyway. So why not lease the equipment and then allow the OEM to refurbish it with whatever equipment they want to deliver.
That’s gonna be the best performing equipment after whatever the timeframe is, you know, 10 years, et cetera, if you wanna be able to requalify for the ptc. So it’s not like equipment leasing isn’t new, you know? Mm-hmm. , especially in industrial equipment. But the reason that we’re not using it already in wind energy is, is a bit confounding, especially given some of these other commercial factors that we’re seeing.
Have you
Joel Saxum: heard of an OEM offering that option to. ?
Philip Totaro: Not yet. Okay. And Joel, that’s a great question because what I think is likely to happen is like, let’s say a company like Nordex would try to do it mm-hmm. I don’t think everyone else is necessarily gonna follow suit. Right? I think if you want to have somebody do it, you’re gonna have to have demand from, you know, the next Arrows and Berkshire Hathaways of the world to encourage companies like GE investors to do it.
And once one of the majors in the US does it, you’ll get everyone else to start following line.
Allen Hall: Don’t you have to be your own bank to do that in a sense that you’re, that CapEx and from the operator side, which would be deposited into a, a GEs bank account, now GEs on the hook for that asset. So they have to be able to have enough bank roll to, to go off and do that.
Do the OEMs have enough money stashed away to, to do those kind of lease agreements? ?
Philip Totaro: That’s a good question. The short answer is yes and no . They certainly have enough capital if they wanted to reallocate from other areas of their business. Sure. You know, obviously as we know that some of the, the, some of the wind divisions at a company like ge, Siemens, et cetera, they’ve been suffering.
But they do have the capital necessary to be able to do that if they wanted to. The more operative issue with doing a leasing program is are you really selling somebody equipment or are you leasing them the ability to produce kilowatt hours? And that’s, I think, you know, this is kind of getting a little bit off topic, but you know, it’s the same thing with maintenance.
Like maintenance contracts today are also done on like a per turban per year basis. It ha you know, there’s availability guarantees, et cetera. But it’s not done on, like, you know, we’re gonna guarantee that you’re gonna be able to produce a kilowatt hour or a megawatt hour at, you know, a certain price tag.
And so for equipment leasing, that seems to me to be the more operative thing is, is isn’t that, regardless of the equipment that is being delivered, you know, to be able to produce these, these kilowatt hours, that should be what you’re guaranteeing in addition to, if not irrespective of the, the machine availability that we’re all used to.
Yeah, yeah. It’s different. Like the challenge, I guess the ch well the challenge with it is, is obvious that it’s a, it’s a fundamentally different way of doing business than what everybody’s used to today. And again, it’s, it’s something that we’re, the problem is that there’s not demand for it specifically, but there’s going to be, because again, with PPAs coming down, and things getting more expensive to maintain.
Mm-hmm. , how is the independent power producer not gonna be in the same boat of thin margins just like the OEMs are today? Yeah. You know, prices can’t keep coming down and you don’t reduce costs. Correspondingly, this is one way that you can reduce costs, but it’s a sea change in the way you do business.
Well,
Joel Saxum: a thought is, is like a, a friend of mine runs a, a, a mining company here in Texas, and when they ramp up and ramp down, instead of always buying their big pieces of iron, you know, their big caterpillar D 10 s or whatever, they, they lease them mm-hmm. , but now it’s on unavailability model, so they need to be moving material in that pit.
But if their D 10 goes down and it’s down for more than 24 hours, well, X, Y, z Caterpillar has to show up with a low boy and another D 10 for them to use while they’re fixing that one. Mm-hmm. , you can’t do that with a wind turbine. Right. So that kind of complicates the, the, the business model there as well.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it’s a great point too because you’re, you’re in a position where you’re not only gonna have to still potentially maintain an availability guarantee on, on mm-hmm. the individual turbines in a wind park. But the entire park still has to meet a certain level of production in order to avoid liquidated damages or right.
You know, like substituted power buying to make up for any production losses that you are necessarily going to incur. I think that’s part of almost every single power purchase contract these days. So, so,
Joel Saxum: so here’s a, here’s another question for you, Phil, about this. Now we’re talking ptc, ptc, ptc. Now, if you go to a leasing model, by the word of the law of the IRA bill, you lose the ittc, correct?
Philip Totaro: Technically, yes, because, or would the OEM get it to. ? Well, yeah, that’s a great question because the, the, the operative thing is that if you’re, it’s, it’s predicated on like a sales transaction. Mm-hmm. , you know, whether you’re safe harboring or, or otherwise it, the ITC is predicated on like a sales transaction.
Mm-hmm. Taking place between an equipment vendor and a power producer. So they could tweak that language to say that the Ittc goes to the oem and that’s what I’m, that’s what it would,
Joel Saxum: that’s cause otherwise it’d be like a change of ownership or something. Right. .
Philip Totaro: Yeah. Because again, that’s, that’s one of these things, like I was mentioning before, like right now, everybody’s happy with the fact that there’s certainty with the PTC rules out to 2033, at least at this point, the complication is if PPAs are going to stay at below $20 a megawatt hour, and your average, you know, maintenance cost per turbine per year is gonna be like between 45,000 to 50,000 regardless of the size of the turbine.
Which is where the market’s at, at the moment. that’s creating an unsustainable. I mean, even if you have like a 45 to 50, you know, percent net capacity factor on your asset, you’re still not making enough money. Mm-hmm. , you know, if the PTC goes away after 10 years and you don’t renew it by repowering or refurbishing, you know, your, your asset, you’re, it’s gonna take you like 40 years or plus you know, even longer to, to You know, to see a net positive return on capital, on your assets.
So this is the, you know, the fact that the PPAs are coming down so much is what’s kind of creating this whole situation. But the PPAs keep coming down because we’re still trying to, you know, demonstrate how much more cost competitive we are against fossil fuels et cetera. Only if you’ve got a high price of fossil fuel and a low, you know, cost of wind, you would think, oh, well people would be demanding wind, you know, and solar more, more readily.
But that’s not necessarily the case. You know, if, if you’ve got a high price of natural gas and oil, the companies who invest in natural gas and oil are making money, so they’re gonna keep investing right over there instead of here. Right? So it’s, it’s challenge.
Allen Hall: But that works in a very unique way for the OEMs, right?
They know, based on the production tax credit that it’s a 10 year cycle. . Mm-hmm. . They’ll say that the wind turbines will last 20 years, but the data indicates they’re lasting roughly 10. You know that they’re gonna be back again, looking to buy an upgraded turbine or upgraded blades. Something at year 10.
as an oem, you don’t want that to go away. You don’t wanna turn that 10 year cycle into a 20
Philip Totaro: year cycle. Well, and and the thing is, there have been instances where, you know, one OEM sold their turbines to a project, and then the project was repowered after 10 years with the different OEMs equipment.
Mm-hmm. . That’s right. Now, a lot of that had to do with, you know, the fact that like some companies aren’t still operating or they don’t have a turbine that fits the tower because they don’t want to, you know, if they can avoid it, they don’t want to, you know, take down the tower and they wanna be able to reuse the foundation, et cetera.
All the electrical interconnection, you know, it saves some cost. So basically you’re reselling and reblading the turbine. But there is is also the challenge of, you know, if you’ve got a. , you know, a turbine that’s designed for 20 years, it’s being run harder than it should be. You know, it’s, I mean, to be clear about, you know, sure.
This, this concept like the turbine would theoretically last for 20 years if it was being run consistently inside the manufacturer specified warranty. Mm-hmm. , you know, a design envelope. Sure. The problem obviously is that some companies wanna get maximum PTC value during the first 10 years of their project.
Yeah. So they’re running, run the wheels off of it, that turbine into the ground. True. And they can as much money as they can so that they can at least hope to turn a profit. Yeah. I mean, there’s
Joel Saxum: other, there’s other situations too with the repowering. I mean we hear it all the time, but OEMs just don’t wanna play ball.
Sometimes there’s people I know I’ve spoken to personally that say, Hey, we talked with X OEM that used to own our tur, or that is our turbines. And they told us here’s what the price is gonna be to repower it, we’re gonna handle everything. And they said, well, we’d like to do this and this. And they said, you don’t get the option of that.
This is how your repower’s gonna go. And the, and the, and the asset owner’s like, man, well we okay then. No, we’re gonna do it ourselves. We’re gonna get stuff from over here. And they end up saving 25% of the cost and whatnot and kind of having a customized little project for themselves. And that happens quite readily too.
So my thought is, is as an OEM now, Alan, back to your point of you get that, you get that cash influx of capital when you originally sell the towers, and then you may get another cash influx on year 10. If you could take those two values, even them out in lease payments over that 10 years, it might be better for your business model.
Could be. Mm-hmm.
Allen Hall: Sure. Sure. There’s too many, there’s too many moving variables at the moment. Yeah, right. We, we like to have one or two variables in play. It seems like we have 10 . I always look to American clean, power and wonder. I know they had a change in leadership. I don’t know if everybody noticed that, but American Clean Power had a change in leadership recently.
Mm-hmm. . And I kind of wonder if that’s a result of sort of the, the market situation that we’re in. There’re just too many variables and everybody’s trying to figure out how they’re gonna make money in this marketplace. And as the membership of the acp fluctuates a little bit, that they’re getting demand from their members to say, Hey, let’s stabilize this thing.
And right now, Phil, am I, am I wrong? And it just seems like it’s probably the most unstable, I’ve seen it in the last 10. ,
Philip Totaro: Agreed. And the the operative thing here is, you know, this, this public acknowledgement by the OEMs that they’re struggling financially with low margins and mm-hmm. mm-hmm. and, you know, pricing pressure.
This is all BA based upon is the net or is the net effect of what they’ve been feeling Yeah. For three to five years. Yes. You haven’t even seen the IPPs publicly acknowledged yet that they’re in financial distress because of these lower Yeah. PPA prices and, and how tight things are. So, you know, hopefully what we’ve done is shine, you know, to shine a spotlight on you know, what’s the, the, the coming storm, if you will.
But you’re gonna start hearing more about this soon and, you know, it’s, it. It, it just, it’s, it’s as tight as it’s been in as far as long as I can remember. I mean, years gone by, you know, we had like the PTC go away and then come back, but that was when PPAs were maybe, you know, 50, 60, $70. Right. With PPAs averaging in the past two years, around $25 according to fe data, you can’t screw around sustainable.
You know, you, you’ve gotta, you’ve gotta operate as efficiently as you possibly can right now. So,
Joel Saxum: one, one last question for you, Phil. From my side here now a player that may be poised to take something like this on of course we’ve, we’re always following the news of what’s happening in the marketplace, but it looks like Siemens is about to be taken over by parent company, right.
and they’re making a move to possibly de-list them, de-listing Siemens. Does that give them the flexibility to start maybe playing with some leasing models or playing with some other kind of economic models that for a publicly traded company
Philip Totaro: might be a little bit harder? Yes. And to be clear, they’re de-listing the Siemens sch mesa division.
Right. But it’s still gonna become part of public Siemens energy anyway, right? So, right. Yes. But you know, the, the question is, Like we talked about before, you know, equipment leasing is not necessarily new. Mm-hmm. , but it’s new for wind. Right. And like you mentioned, you know, the fact that you’re still gonna have to maintain a certain level of availability that there, the fact that, you know, nobody’s really used to this type of business model in this industry yet.
This is gonna take a while to implement, but it’s one way, you know, according to the calculations we’ve done, it’s one way that you could indeed smooth out the first, you know, 10, 15, 20 years of, of payments. You know, and ensure a certain amount of cash flow for everybody. The, I ppp, the, the wind turbine oem and the, the, you know, whether it’s a utility or, or a corporate power off taker, you know, they have a certain expectation of, you know, the amount of, of energy they’re gonna receive, so, or electricity they’re gonna receive.
So, you know, that’s. , that’s what this does, is it’s one way of solving a commercial conundrum that we now face. It’s maybe not the only way, but it’s probably gonna be the way that I see the market evolving specifically because it’s, it’s the easiest way to go from just, you know, huge upfront cost and, you know, huge amortized cost in terms of long-term maintenance contract.
Mm-hmm. To something that could potentially you know, get a, a contract that could end up getting truncated if they end up repowering. Especially if, like you mentioned that the asset owner wants to repower with a different set of equipment Right. Then, you know, what happens to the long-term service contract if they switch OEMs?
Yes. You know, there’s, there’s all kinds of commercial considerations.
Joel Saxum: It sounds like. It sounds like if it’s gross this way, a lot of ISPs may be purchased by OEM service departments because they’re gonna
Philip Totaro: need ’em. . Yes. And it, it also probably means that if you’re self-performing, you’re gonna have to get up to speed on equipment makes and models that you may not necessarily be as familiar with.
So the question then goes back to something we talked about a few weeks ago. Mm-hmm. , which was, are the insurance companies that sometimes have to backstop some of these some of these companies, if they don’t balance sheet underwrite themselves mm-hmm. You know, are the insurance companies gonna get on board with this whole thing?
Because that’s the other, that’s the other key to this is the, the insurance carriers have to sign off on Yeah. Whatever this is in order for the financiers to sign off on it, et cetera, et cetera. So there’s a whole, you know, great big value chain here that has to be happy. Mm-hmm. with with any kind of sea change in the way business is done.
So, Phil,
Joel Saxum: for the head of the DOE in 2024, is that what we’re saying?
Philip Totaro: Well, I appreciate the sentiment, but you know what, what, what I’ll say about it, Joel, is that the, you know, , if people have been following what you know, Intel store has been doing for the last, you know, 13 years, you’ll know that we’re kind of on the bleeding edge and sometimes a little bit ahead of the curve with a lot of these things.
I guarantee that in 2023, this is my, my 2023 prediction, everybody for the new year, I guarantee you are gonna be hearing more about I PPP Profitability Challenges in 2023 and beyond. I like it. Well, that’s because of everything we’ve just talked about,
Allen Hall: so that’s a pretty good prediction. Phil, we’re, we’re gonna hold you to that.
Yep. And, and we’re gonna have you back obviously. So everybody check out Intel store, Intel store.com, I N T S, star i n t e l s t o r.com, or just looked on LinkedIn. Just go to end of store on LinkedIn where you can find Phil’s posts about all the things happening in renewable energy. Phil, thanks for joining the program again.
We’ll have you back soon.
Philip Totaro: Thanks everybody.
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Allen Hall: Well, if you’ve been watching the news lately, you’ve seen some cranes tip over both onshore and ship based cranes on some SHO projects. So crane safety is becoming more of more of an issue as Roseberry keeps building bigger and bigger wind turbines.
We. And create bigger and bigger cranes, and then stability becomes an issue. And every once in a while they took over. There was a, the really serious one that happened over in Belgium a couple of weeks ago where Fran Coon reached out about it. And I thought, wow. Scary. Yeah. People were hurt in that, in that accident.
So there’s been a couple of new concepts floated about, and now it looks like some investments are being made. R w e recently signed a letter of intent with a company called Wind Spider. And Wind Spider is a Norwegian based company and who is looking at a, a new modular self erecting crane system.
And the pictures online are interesting. It has a kinda like an rector set around the tower, and then there’s a crane at the top, so it’s able to lift blades and the cells from a ship and then install it on the top of the tower. So it, it. Builds the tower somehow, which is not described at the moment, like least online.
I haven’t seen it. And so it’s a, just a different concept. It’s not a ship based crane, it’s a turbine based crane, which I think it in some cases makes a lot of sense. So they’re saying that it can have a, a lifting capacity of more than 1200 metric tons, and it eliminates one of the pieces of motion, especially for fixed bottom offshore wind turbines.
As the ship bobs up and down and you’re trying to move a, a ship based crane, a a blade for example, and trying to mount it, it becomes sort of a little tricky. And they have obviously different ways of attacking that same problem, but you’re seeing more and more new concepts like this wind spider idea of, of basically connecting something to the tower and using a more steady.
Crane system and I, I think, was it Intercon or one of the wind companies, I think it was Intercon, had tried something like this a year or so ago. If you look on YouTube, they have a really interesting video of a, a tower based crane system. That was, it was the
Joel Saxum: lagr, the lag Way unit, right? Is that what it was called?
Yeah. Log Lagr way. Lagr way. Where they were. The tower was the, the crane was actually climbing the tower. Yes. As it was building it. Yeah. Yes. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s a really smart technology. So r w e is now investing in this space. They can’t be the only operator thinking about this because it’s not only new construction, it’s repairs or, or repowering.
You going to need some sort of platform to repower. Yeah. Joel, is this start to make a little more.
Joel Saxum: when you’re talking like Repowers and stuff like that, I know that the lift works guys have been making some waves. Yes. On the, the, the nelle top crane that they have, and I think there’s another company out there doing the same kind of something along the same lines.
But, you know, being in that the consulting world as Rosemary’s as well, we see things come across like, oh, we have to mobilize a crane to the middle of nowhere just to do this one project. Well, the project just went from being $200,000 to being a million dollars because you have to bring the crane up there, 35 grand a day for that crane and, and yada, yada yada.
Right? So that’s just the onshore portion of it, right? The costs are extreme. So if you can get something like that, I think that lift works, crane, you mobilize with like one or two trucks, boom, boom, up, down, right? Where a crane, like if you bring a, if you, and I’m gonna say that wrong, I always do, but the, the labor, like the labor 1300, I think those things take like 10 trucks to bring the whole thing there, assemble it, it takes a couple days, use it for whatever.
You know, a standby cost, it’s tens of thousands a day, and then once you’re done, it takes a couple days to disassemble it and then back on the trucks and out to the next spot. So any kind of, so, so what I’m thinking is this is the offshore equivalent of that, right? But an offshore, you have to have a specialized vessel where that vessel, that big crane vessel can be millions a day.
Now you’re able to go and take this out on a, basically a, a work boat and mobilize it to the, to the platform and build it up. And you alleviate, okay, so now we’re struggling with Jones Act stuff. In the US we have to build all these yes, specialized vessels. Well, now you don’t have to have as specialized, you still have to have specialized vessels, but not as specialized of a vessel, something that might exist in the marketplace.
And you can throw this crane on there and, and jump it up and, and use it. So it it, to me, it sounds like it’s lowering the cost of construction and possibly some major correctives down the road. .
Allen Hall: Well, yeah, and r w is involved in a couple of offshore projects in the United States. Mm-hmm. and, and a ton of onshore things, so mm-hmm.
investing in this as an operator makes complete sense to me. What I’m wondering is what happens on the design side for the wind turbines? Do you design the towers and the, the cells and the blades slightly different to accommodate, right, to accommodate a crane system like this?
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I don’t know. I think it would have to be most of the des redesign, because I’m just looking at the images here of kind of how that’s like a lattice work over the top of the tower.
It looks like most of the designing that would be different would be in the transition piece or the actual foundation of a floater rather than the tower or the Noel or the blades itself. But maybe Rosemary, you can, you might have some more insight into that than, than we do.
Allen Hall: Right. What do you do with the hundred and 50 meter blade?
how do you handle that? If it’s a, if the crane is based on the turbine itself, how do you, the geometry, it’s a geometry problem at that point. How do you do that?
Joel Saxum: I think, I would say you’d, you, you’d pull it just like you would a normal one, but instead of having a two, a two piece tail and midsection picker, you have a, like the, the, the bracket that goes over the middle of the blade and comes up.
But I don’t know, there’s some, there’s some, there’s some, there’s some kind of candel lever type structure that’s gonna have to be built, that have to be maybe counterweighted to get the blade up if you’re tower based, I’m
Allen Hall: not sure. Right. And, and do you use the two piece blade?
Rosemary Barnes: If you look at that anacon video of their, the trial of their tower climbing crane.
So you can search anacon climbing crane slash anacon clutter cran on YouTube and find it. They do show them installing blades. They show them first installing the tower segments one after the other and it, you know, climbs up the one that it did before to put the next piece in on top. And then afterwards they showed the blades coming up and they’ve got like this brace that they put from close to the, the root of the blade to about halfway along.
And and so yeah, they’re kind of picking it up in two points and then raising it up and then there’s an, an arm of some sort, I don’t know, some kind of, I dunno if it’s a robot arm, but some, some sort of arm that comes out and, and grabs it and, Jigs it into place. It’s, it’s really cool. It’s very hard to describe in words for people just listening, but get onto YouTube and search it cuz it’s it’s, it’s pretty cool the way that they’re able to do that.
And then they’ve got a team of workers, like actual human workers inside the, the hub you know, like normal to kind of, or they don’t catch the blade, the, the big arm catches the blade, but they’re there to, you know to guide, align it properly and get all the bolts in. Yeah, I think, I
Joel Saxum: think the term for that, like, and I don’t know if it’s the exact same thing, but this is from my, my lifting background, offshore.
The term for that like piece in the lifting world will be called a strong back. So it’s like the, where the crane would come down and then it would be like the, the piece that actually, so I don’t, I don’t know if it’s the exact same
Allen Hall: thing, but I think you’re right about that. Well, we haven’t seen it this used in the United States yet.
And if it is being used, the technology’s being used, maybe it’s being used in Europe. . But if you, if you ask in the States right now we’re, we’re using standard crane technology to Yeah. Put wind TURs together right now. Mm-hmm. , it would be a, a total game changer I think, in terms of just technology and, and Joe, I think back to your point, if we’re going to be adding 120,000 wind turbines over the next couple of years mm-hmm.
to get to around 200,000 wind turbines, you, there’s just not enough cranes on the planet to service all those. You’re gonna have to come up with a different idea. Yeah. That’s, something’s a little bit simpler to, to cut up and down. Yeah. Yeah. You’re right.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. If anybody, if anybody, any, anybody listening in the field is using a different kind of crane technology, reach out, let us know how it works.
Send some pictures, some video. That’d be really,
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I was gonna say you guys need that since apparently in the US you’re so keen on repowering everything, every 10 years. Here we go. Yeah. Running, running your assets, assets, hard to get the most of those tax credits. And then, you know, you, you need, you need some more cranes than elsewhere in the world where maybe things are run a little bit more smoothly and gently by the sounds of things
But I, I do know that cranes are a, a, a pain point in Australia as well. You know, the, the cranes are kind of all all accounted for for development. And then the projects I’m working on, that’s always, you know, something unexpected has, has happened. And if it happens after the wind farms finished construction, then getting a crane on site is, is usually the hardest part.
You know, in terms of trying to get things completed quickly, it’s not always easy to get, get a crane out to these remote wind farms quickly. .
Allen Hall: Well, one of the areas we haven’t talked about a lot in the recent past is the small to mid-size wind turbines. And what that group generally means is, are is wind turbines that are less than one megawatt.
And, and there’s a, a cottage industry in the United States that’s been around for a number of years, but you just don’t hear about it very much. Well, that’s gonna change because n r is in putting about 3 million into 11 manufacturers of small and medium scale wind turbines. And they’re looking to make those awards looks like the beginning of next year.
So they provided a list of these wind turbin companies and some of them I’ve heard of before and some of them are, are new to me and I thought I’d just read ’em off so everybody knew where to go search for, if they’re looking for a, a smaller or medium sized wind turbine. You know, Bergy Wind Power, which is a company that I’ve heard of many times before.
Center sorry. Carter Wind Turbines, EO Cycle, America Corporation, nps S Solutions in there’re in Connecticut. Pecos Wind Power, which is in Massachusetts, doesn’t make sense. , no. Pecos just is not a Massachusetts word for sure. No, that’s Pecos win win, right? Exactly. Right. I think the same thing, Primus Wind Power in Colorado.
R r d Engineering, which is also in Colorado. Onsite wind in in Georgia. Endurance. What a great name. Endurance, which is based in Pennsylvania and Windward Engineering down in Utah. And then X Flow Energy Company, which is based in Seattle, Washington. and Rosemary, I you, you get probably the same number of questions as we do at weather guard of, Hey, where can I find a small wind turb?
And I have a farm, I have a a, a state, I want to have some wind energy. Where do I look? It’s sometimes pretty hard to find some of
Rosemary Barnes: these companies. Yeah. The question I get asked more commonly is, you know, I live in the suburbs and I wanna put one on my roof and the answer to that, and they wanna know where they can buy a good one.
And then my answer to that is, you will not find one. Cause that’s a stupid place to put a wind turbine. But this second you know, slightly larger. Kind of turbine for Yeah. People that have a, a bit of land and have actually a decent wind resource to, you know, put the turbine in. That’s something that comes up a lot and it’s a real, like, I find it a real, kind of like a cowboy industry.
There’s so many small wind turbines available and especially a, a lot of really cheap ones that you can get off Alibaba or something. And the internet is just full of people complaining about how they didn’t do what they were supposed to do and offered, you know, the manufacturer claims it’s not physically possible that they could generate that amount of power.
So I always direct people to use certified wind turbines. There is a certification system in, in the us and I think that there’s one in Europe too, but it’s not as widely spread and outta that list of manufacturers that you just read out. Bergy was the only one I’ve, I’ve heard of. I know that.
Actually got a long track record with their turbines and their, at least a sum of their products are certified. And that means that they have to actually you know, test it and measure the output under, you know, the right condition. So, you know, that it, it, it generates what they say it will. And also that it lasts you know, a decent amount of time.
And I just think that that’s a absolute minimum. If you’re gonna be spending thousands of dollars on a, a turbine, then you, you know, you want to know that it’s gonna actually generate some electricity for you because otherwise you just ha hear about people that are like, you know, either it didn’t generate El El any electricity or two.
The second problem is that, that, you know, oh, I just shook itself apart in the first, you know, strong wind event that we had and, and destroyed itself. So I hope that that’s what this this program is going to. You know, be a step towards having more properly certified wind turbines, small wind turbines so that people, consumers can have some kind of trust in, in what they’re, they’re gonna get when they order it.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I think there’s two, two phases there. One is a lot of these companies are looking to, to get that certification and, and then there’s a new interconnect rule. So when the wind turbine connects to the grid, there’s certain parameters that it has to meet in terms of power performance it sounds like.
So those are big hurdles for small companies. Mm-hmm. , when you, we go after those kind of certifications, those are expensive. It’s really hard to, to. Past muster, and especially if, if you have to go back and do a little bit of redesign to go through the process a second time, it, it adds up to, I’m sure quite a bit of money.
So NL is looking to simplify that process, which makes total sense to me. And Rosemary, what are some of the. Proper applications for these wind turbines, where would you see them
Rosemary Barnes: installed? At Farms is the main one, and in, in Denmark on the west coast of, of jet land. It’s super windy and you know, it’s not very densely populated, it’s just a lot of kind of small, medium sized farms.
And I, yeah, talked to a few farmers. I was driving around filming wind turbines for one of the first YouTube videos, actually literally the first YouTube video that I made. And I talked to some, some farmers when I was asking them if I could film that film their turbine. And you know, they would tell me all about how it had worked and, you know, they, they loved it.
That was you can get a, you know, a reasonable size turbine can generate enough power to Yeah, to power a home with, you know, like four or five people living in it they’re still connected to the grid so they don’t have to worry about days when it’s not windy. But I will say having lived in Dubland, there’s not that many days when it’s not windy.
So they probably don’t need to worry that often. That, that’s, that’s a, yeah, like definite easy case. If you’ve got a fair bit of land and it’s, it’s windy. But if you look at a wind map, a wind resource map, a global, you can look up global wind atlas and they’ll show you the wind speed all across the globe.
This area on the west coast of jet land, it is definitely in the, you know, the highest quality of wind resources where people actually live. So it’s not like any random farm anywhere in the world is going to have the same resource, but somewhere like that where you’ve got a good wind resource and enough space definitely makes sense.
And then the second place where it makes sense is where you’re off-grid. So you might not have a really great windy source, you might have much better payback from your solar panels, but you, if you add a winter tur bite, it’s not that good. You’re at least getting some power overnight most of the time.
And if you do have long, cloudy periods, then you know you’re likely to get some yeah, some power from your wind when you’re not getting the solar. So then you’re really paying for the reliability rather than the actual energy itself. And other than those two applications that basically aren’t, aren’t more, more good places to put small wind turbines yeah.
It’s just, you know, people are always showing me these new, new wind turbine designs for, you know, like urban wind turbines or any kind of small wind turbine that just, you know, sits down close to the ground. And the fact is that if the wind is not strong, there is not much energy in the wind and you won’t get much energy out of any kind of turbine no matter how clever the design is or what technological breakthrough they think they’ve got.
You know, there’s a lot of them that say, oh, this works in low wind speeds, and, you know, it’s like things work, but is it worth it if it produces five watts? You know, probably not. Yeah, so. I have pretty, pretty strong feelings about small wind after, you know, the, doing the YouTube for a couple of years now, I get asked about it over and over again and you just can’t, can’t get a lot of energy out of slow wind.
And that means urban wind is never gonna be a thing. Sorry, .
Joel Saxum: Maybe in Chicago, the windy city. .
Allen Hall: Yeah. Maybe not a lot. Yeah. Unless
Rosemary Barnes: you’re downtown. There’s not a lot. New Zealand is the windiest capital city in the
Joel Saxum: world. Is it? I know that one of the, one of the things about small, some of these small wind things, I know like Bergy has it on their website as well, is that they will qualify for ittc and you can get tax, big tax rebates on it.
Like 30. Really? Yeah. 30% it says they have, they’ve got on their website some guidelines on it and some also, you might be able to apply for some state. Tax incentives as well, depending on, of course, where you live. Oh, wow. I’m in Texas right now, so I’m thinking about some of my friends that have some ranches and stuff out towards the western part of the state.
Sure.
Allen Hall: That, that makes complete sense. Yeah. Well, we’ll put the list in the show notes. So if you’re curious about wind turbine, small wind turbines or medium size wind turbines will have. Come to the show notes and you can find the links and, and check ’em out. It’s, it’s interesting technology and I’m glad NRE is, is spending a little bit of money with these companies.
That’s, that’s a good
Rosemary Barnes: idea. I haven’t actually taken a look at that list yet, but I will, it will be interesting to see how many of the turbines are your standard garden variety? Three bladed, horizontal access turbine. And how many of them will feature, there’s, you know, new technologies that keep on popping up in the media multiple times every year.
You know, will there be vertical access, wind turbines in there? Any ducts? Yes. Or any, yeah, anything like that? Yeah, cuz it’s, it’s been in the pasts, been proven impossible for anyone to actually make, you know, a cost effective small wind turbine like that. So, second one
Joel Saxum: on the list is a two.
Rosemary Barnes: Well yeah, that’s okay.
In Denmark there was the popular turbine in Denmark was a two bladed one, a Gaia one there. They’ve gone outta business now, I’m pretty sure. But yeah, for small two blades makes quite a lot of sense.
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Allen Hall: So there’s a big problem in Europe, which is that wind turbines are getting older and they’re getting older at a, an alarming rate. A lot of onshore wind farms in Europe have reached their operational lifetime, and there’s about 14 gigawatts in Europe at the moment that are, they’ve been running more than 20 years.
That’s a long time. And by 2030 there’ll be 78 gigawatts that’ll need to get retired. That’s a big problem. You think We have problems in the states. That’s a big problem for Europe. Denmark, Spain and Portugal have the oldest wind fleets in relative terms. Wind Power Europe has done an analysis there and looked at all these things with the average wind turbine in those three countries of having an age of 12 years old.
Wow, that’s that’s pretty old, right? Yeah. So that’s, that’s getting up there. That’s prime repowering territory. At least in the States it would be. And Germany has the largest installed capacity, which could potentially be repowered with 17 gigawatts that are older than 15 years. That’s, again, a little shocking, right.
So there’s, there’s about 170 wind farms in total that have so far been repowered most of them in Germany and the Netherlands is sort of second in that. But, so there’s, there’s a sort of a national repowering effort that needs to happen in, in the European countries, and based upon what we see here in the United States that effort needed government funding to make, make it happen.
And I’m, I’m wondering if, if that’s the same sort of effort that’s gonna be needed in the European Union, that without some incentives to repower, the operators are just gonna continue leaving their assets out there and let them run until they eventually stop running because there’s no incentive to repower yet.
Rosemary. Process makes sense. I
Rosemary Barnes: think it’s really interesting the difference in the, yeah, the, the twos. This is first, and maybe this is the last topic for the, the, this week’s episode. You know, at the start we hear about how, you know, turbines have a, you know, useful operating life of 10 years, and then they’ve gotta be repowered, which is kind of the US way of running it.
And then here we’re hearing the exact opposite of that in Europe, where they’re kind of, you know, just running them into the ground, just just leaving them as, as long as possible. Because, and I think that the difference is all of the in incentives and regulatory structure. And you can see how you know, it’s not something that’s inherent in the winter.
It’s the same winter Irvine that are being installed. I mean, in fact, the European ones, because they’re so old, they’re obviously, you know much less advanced technology than most of the ones in the US Cause I think you were a little bit, oh well you had a lot of early wind in, in California, I guess.
But I think in general most of the US is a bit, yeah, yeah. A bit later to the party. The Wind energy party. And so yeah, it’s it, it’s a good time now to be starting to repower more of the European ones. Cuz I mean, you think about it, when wind energy first started taking off, which kind of sites were they developing?
They were developing the very, very best wind resources. And so now a lot of these, yeah, 15, 20 year old wind turbines, they’re in really great wind resources. They could be making a lot more energy if you you know, you put new turbines up, but I mean, what counts as Repowering though? Does that mean that you leave the.
foundation in place, the tower in place, the, you know, like how much of it gets left in place to counters repowering, because obviously like a wind turbine 20 years ago. I mean, how big were they a megawatt? They’re gonna be on, yeah, maybe, you know, you can’t just, you can’t just take a one megawatt wind turbine and go put a five megawatt like a one megawatt tower in the cell and put a five megawatt rotor on it that that doesn’t work.
So how far can you get with Repowering maybe when they’re that old? And technology has moved so far. Maybe you’re better off you know, getting rid of it and starting again. So I guess that will be, that will be something, a decision for every, every site to make about what’s the best way to take advantage of this wind resource in the future.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, there may be some decommissioning and then just using the grid interconnects. As long as they stay at the same of course, you know, power faces and whatnot instead of the, you know, changing out a 1.5 per GE one five for a GE 16 generator that may not work. So a, a question or a thought here as well.
So, from w Windpower Lab, we see quite a lot of acquisitions, mergers people buying and selling these assets now in Europe, and we’re helping a lot of them with blade maintenance strategies. So some, a lot of companies are taking on assets that have been in you know, in play for a long time and operation, and they’re like, Hey man, this is, this is the condition they’re in.
What should we do? How do we make, make sure that we get the most out of them? And one of the reasons we’re, we’re, you know, the background analysis of is the prices, the energy prices in Europe right now. Nobody wants to take a winter buy out of commission for. X amount of time to repower it because they’re taking so much advantage.
Like we have, we’ve got trials of stuff we’re trying to do with, with companies that are like, Hey, yes, yes, we absolutely wanna do this trial with you guys and take a look at this, or you know, X, y, Z, but we can’t do it until we have like there’s, there’s gonna be a doldrum week or something because energy prices are so high right now, we’re not even gonna take something out of you know, out of production to, to look at a trial of you know, a new product or an inspection technology or whatever.
So nobody really wants to shut a wind farm, wind farm down to repower it either, just because the, the prices are so high. And I know that’s a, that’s a temporary thing for a long-term problem, but that’s a, it’s a reality as well.
Allen Hall: You, you can’t let those assets set another three or four years. I think you’re gonna have a problem right there.
There’s eventually start
Joel Saxum: break down. Yeah, they’ll start, there’s things will start to fail bad. They’ll have some, some, you’ll get some runaways and some fires and some broken blades, and you’re, you’re gonna run into some safety issues once you get too far down the line. .
Allen Hall: Right. And in, in, in a country like Germany where they’re now really dependent upon every bit of energy they can produce in country, you’re right, Joel’s taking those assets down for six months to repower doesn’t sound like a smart idea.
They’re gonna have to stage it in some logical manner where they can keep the power production up. The energy crisis in Europe isn’t changing in the next six months, I don’t think. And, and if you, if you’re thinking about Repowering, Rosemary, I think you’re right. You’re probably don’t have the opportunity to, to put a two megawatt turbine on a 700 kilowatt tower.
No, it’s just not gonna happen. So isn’t a lot of constraints there, which I go back to my original point is I think you’ll need investment tax credits, something to kickstart that repowering and probably a little bit of governmental oversight to make sure that you don’t take down the grid too much in that transition.
It’s gonna be a busy time over in Europe for repowering for sure. So NASA has been working on putting people on Mars and, and if you’ve been following NASA for any length of time, this is, this has been going on since the US landed on the moon. The next step was always Mars. And if you’re gonna put people on the planet of Mars, you’re gonna have to provide power.
Well, there’s only a couple ways to do that. And you could have a nuclear reactor, which is probably the way it’s gonna start out honestly, but solar power, that, that’s the sort of the next step. And as we’ve seen just recently in the news there’s issues of sand and dust covering up solar panels, on Mars.
Cause there’s just lost a probe that’s been there for about four years because it got covered with dust. So one of the opportunities is wind and NASA has been looking at putting wind turbines on the planet of Mars. Now that comes with a little bit of difficulty because the atmosphere of Mars is about 1% of the atmosphere.
On earth. So if you think about, you stand outside, there’s a 10 mile an hour wind, I don’t know what that is in kilometers an hour six, I get probably 15 or so. You can actually feel the wind pushing on you. Right? So you think about, well, it’s just 1% of that. Well, that’s not a lot of energy in the wind to, to, to make rotating power off a wind turbine.
So there’s, there’s, there’s a, a lot of complexities to it. So I’m curious as to where this is going, but if NASA is working on this, Rosemary, does it have some benefit for like low, low wind areas on earth that we can use some of the same ideas and technologies? Sure.
Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think for low wind speed areas, it’s not like we need some sort of material science breakthrough or something like that.
What you need is low, a bigger rotor at lower cost. So I think it’s unlikely that the solution that they find for Mars is going to be low enough cost that you can, you know, really. Generate a useful amount of cheap enough electricity on Earth, so probably not. But it’s definitely cool to think through what kind of wind turbine would you want on Mars?
And it is a question that I get asked every now and then on my YouTube channel actually. So I think I will have to make a video on this, but, and I haven’t, I haven’t run through the calculations, but like you said, so the air sensity is about 1% on Mars, so that means, yeah, you reduced by a hundred times the amount of power that you get for a certain rotor size.
But I think at least in some places there are higher wind speeds. And then because power in wind varies with the cube of the wind speed, you might make some of that back that way. But it depends if it’s a, a constant high wind speed or if it’s just, you know, occasional storms. And then that’s quite hard to deal with.
The same as on earth, you know, like you don’t tend to see a lot of wind turbines in areas that have a lot of , you know, hurricanes because it’s, there’s a lot of power in that, that wind, but it’s not there all the time. So, you know, you, it’s hard to design a wind turbine that will withstand that, but also be cheap enough to make cheap electricity the rest of the time.
But I think that the killer would really be neither of those two things, but probably the all the, the, the dust, right? It’s a, isn’t it quite a, a harsh environment in terms of the amount of dust and wind that’s around. And probably temperature as well. I think you’re gonna suffer from a lot of problems with leading edge erosion.
I don’t think you’re just gonna be making fiberglass when turbine blades and putting them in on Mars. Especially since for a little while there won’t be a, you know, a lot of workforce to, to be maintaining these turbines. So I think that that’s gonna be the, the difficulty trying to, you know, make something, withstand the margin environment and have low enough maintenance requirements.
Cuz I guess it spare parts will be hard to come by. Even, even if people are living there. ,
Allen Hall: well, I don’t know, you know Matt Damon in that whatever that Mars movie was, The Martian seem to be able to grow the martian. There you go. Was seen to be able to grow potatoes in very difficult conditions and survive for another six months or whatever it was.
We just need, right.
Rosemary Barnes: Just need to clone Leonardo DiCaprio and make a whole wind, wind farm servicing crew out of the Leo clones and then, then maybe we can make it work .
Allen Hall: Yeah. It is a difficult problem, right? I think we, when years ago when I wasn’t around Mars vehicles that were being built in the space industry, it’s just a very difficult place.
Everything about Mars is hard. , the water, wind, dust. Yeah, it solar’s not great there. So there, there’s just a lot of difficulties. I, I don’t if NASA’s attacking this problem, they’d have to go after the, the erosion problem, right? I mean, that’d be the first problem you have to go after and the high wind speeds,
Joel Saxum: right?
But, but imagine if you get to be the company that says, our l e p product was used on Mars. How, how good that would be for your, your brand recognition and marketing and efforts in the you know, in on earth. You could be those guys that’d be getting, they’ll
Rosemary Barnes: be using some crazy material that costs, you know, million dollars a gram or something.
Amount of the, the cost and the maintenance requirements are the, are the killers. It’s just so different that what people will pay for error compared to what they’ll pay for wind and also maintenance. People don’t understand that. No one wants to maintain their wind turbine. You know, they’ve got enough maintenance required already, and anything new you add better be maintenance free or add like 10% extra annual energy production.
Otherwise people aren’t interested.
Allen Hall: All true airplanes are pampered, wind turbines are not, and that’s just the difference. And it makes, it makes it much more difficult. So the, so the Mars experiment we think is a thumbs up or a thumbs down. What do we think here? Thumbs down from Joy. No, it’s
Rosemary Barnes: a thumbs up for being cool.
A thumbs down for being applicable to wind turbines on earth. I would say it’s
Joel Saxum: cool, but I don’t know if it’ll
Allen Hall: actually work. Well, didn’t this just put a helicopter on Mars? What am I wrong about that
Joel Saxum: drone? Mars knows it’s a drone. Yeah, that comes off of the Mars, the new Mars rover. There you
Allen Hall: go. But with, we were able to do that, there’s, there’s your, there’s your example right there, rose.
if they figured out how to put a drone or helicopter on the surface of Mars and, and it could live for any length of time, they must have something figured out. Right. It
Joel Saxum: can only fly, but it can only fly for like, it’s something super, super short. Like it can fly up like 20 meters and then it has to come right back.
Oh. Like, it’s like it flies up, takes a peak. And then as far as I know, maybe the, the, there’s, they’ve got some new missions for it or something. But it’s cause because of power density on board and the ability to fly in that atmosphere, it just can’t do much.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Joel Saxum: I mean, if anybody’s flown, if, if you, if you’ve flown drones in the United States and you’ve flown one in Houston, Texas and you’ve flown one in Denver, Colorado, you’ll, that’s only 5,000 feet of difference in atmospheric difference.
Right. And it’s crazy how much different it, it actually is. And then go from there to 10,000 feet or four. I flew, I flew up at 14,000 feet one time in, in Colorado. You couldn’t fly for a, a, a drone for five, six minutes. That was, you know, and you had no control over it compared to at sea level. And that’s just on earth.
Allen Hall: The atmospheric density makes a big difference. Yeah. As we all know, that’s where all the energy comes from for wind energy. It’s, it’s, it’s in the atmosphere being thick and heavy and moving at some velocity. There’s a lot of energy in there. There you go. And moving fast, just math, right. That’s all it is, Rosemary.
It’s just math. That’s gonna do it for this week’s Uptime Win Energy podcast. Thanks for listening. Please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform. And be sure to describe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie.
And we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Winner G Podcast. Happy holidays.
