Siemens’ offshore wind CEO says failures to understand cost increases and to compensate for supply chain weaknesses threaten worldwide wind energy goals. Meanwhile, policies like the UK’s taxing wind farms at a higher rate than fossil fuels producers have met with frustration, and regulators may make US offshore developers gun-shy. The team also explores joint mooring systems design and operational issues, discusses some complexities of the Australian energy grid, and considers how sustainable and scalable Voodin Blade Technology’s new turbine blades – made entirely of wood – may be. Spoiler alert: Rosemary has questions.Â
If you have questions about OEM service agreements, insurance claims and liabilities, don’t miss the interview with Intelstor’s Philip Totaro.
Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
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Uptime 141
Allen Hall: Geez, Joel, we’ve had a really crazy week at Uptime. We’ve been skimming through all the news that’s happening and it’s, it’s overwhelming all of a sudden. I don’t know what happens once the, the summer ends and winter hits. It’s like wind energy News Central. The last couple of weeks actually. And, and this week we’re gonna talk about a, a couple of different areas.
We’re talking about a finished company making wind turbine blades entirely outta laminated wood. So that’s very, so much to what they’re talking about with towers. So we may have a wind turbine that’s made entirely of wood. And then we have a really interesting discussion with Philip Daro of Intel store regarding insurance companies and their preference for OEM maintenance contract.
Joel Saxum:Â So after that we’re gonna talk about the success and, and kudos to Equinor for getting the world’s largest floating wind farm. Started up high wind Tampa in there off the coast of Norway. And then we’re gonna jump gears, hop in a plane, go down to South Australia and talk with Rosemary about. About her friends in, in Australia and their grid issues with solar and wind shutdowns.
And, and kind of how that affects and what what we think could happen in the future in that market and in the US market and other markets. And then lastly, eight more draft wind energy offshore areas in the Central Atlantic. So we’re talking about some that are in. 400 meters plus of water, some shallower stuff.
So there’s a little bit of floating, a little bit of fixed bottom but more offshore wind energy planning and areas coming to the
Allen Hall: us. I’m Alan Hall, president of Weather, Gar Lightning Tech, and I’m here with Australian Renewables guru Rosemary Barnes, and my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxon.
And this. Is the Uptime Win Energy podcast.
Rosemary Barnes: All right, Rosemary.
Allen Hall: Finnish renewable product maker. Store Enzo, who is one of the largest private forest owners in the world, is partnering up with German startup. Wooden blade technology. Now it’s spelled V o o d i n. So if you happen to Google that, make sure you spell it correctly, and they are going to make sustainable wooden wind turbine blades.
Now you say to yourself, that seems a little bit crazy, right? Well, it’s not actually crazy because you’re doing it right now. The so the two companies are producing a 20 meter blade section, and it’s, and they’re planning to make an 80 meter. And that 20 meter blade a week is gonna be put in service at the end of this year in Germany.
So they’re, they’re designing these blades, much like we would design fiberglass, winter blades, it’s laminated veneer lumber so they can direct the fibers where they want ’em to go and provide strength so they can make them lighter. Not, probably not as light as fiberglass, but probably pretty light.
And the theory is because it’s recyclable. My, my guess is that they can just grind them up and turn into mulch and then make new blades. So Rosemary. First off, does, does this make sense? Is this, is this a good technology to
Rosemary Barnes: pursue? ? No. That is my, my instinctual kind of response to that. It’s kind of, to me it just really sounds like It sounds, it sounds like a good idea, you know, oh, we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and, and yes, a lot of you know, composite materials do come from fossil fuels, but the problem with fossil fuels isn’t that they exist.
It’s that we burn them and then they make carbon dioxide and go into the atmosphere, you know, so it’s kind of like, you know, is that actually relevant? Also people have this idea that wood is just inherently sustainable and good for the environment and a nice, happy, friendly material. And it can be, but it’s not, it’s not guaranteed.
And a lot of sustainable forestry practices are, are not that sustainable. You know, if you, if you look into it and you know what the average person would consider sustainable it, maybe they meet the technical definition. Not quite the intent that most people would, you know, attribute to that word. And then of course there’s, there’s a limited number of sustainable forests in the world.
Plenty of things that we can do with wood, including just leaving the forest there as a carbon you know, carbon gathering sink Yeah. Resource. So, you know, do you really, really get a benefit from using the wood in this way because, you know, it could be used in another way. So. My instinctive response is, we don’t really need to do this.
It’ll be very, it’s interesting from, you know, an engineering point of view can we, can we make an 80 meter wind turbine blade out of wood? And, you know, we were discussing this before we started recording and it’s like, yeah, maybe, probably is my feeling, but geez, it’s gonna be heavy. And to me it feels a bit like, have you ever seen people sometimes make bike frames, bicycle frames out of bamboo sections and it’s like, it’s just, its really, it’s cool, you know, it’s a bit of a gimmick and it’s like, wow, you can do that.
That’s awesome. It kind of feels like that. So, you know, one wind turbine with wooden 80 meter long wooden blades. Yeah. Like, that’s so cool. What a great engineering challenge or, you know, craftsmanship challenge. There. In terms of, you know, do I think this is gonna roll out and, you know, save significance amounts of co2?
I don’t know. Is it gonna be cheaper than you know, the winter blades? We’ve already got highly, highly, highly doubtful. I don’t think you’re gonna see you know, a blade wooden blade made as quickly as a fiberglass blade. You know, normally winter bone blades are rolling out of a factory line, one per day, and you really think you’re gonna be making.
Or wooden 80 meter long wind turbine blade in one day. I don’t think so. And anything that massively pushes up the cost of wind energy is not good for, you know, CO2 emissions overall. So that’s kind of the reason why I instinctively say like, I would love to see one wooden wind turbine, and not more than that.
Well, how
Allen Hall: does flax fiber fit into. We had talked to green boats and know they’re making boats out of flax fiber and basically organic resin systems. And those boats are fantastic. They are amazing. If you go on the green boats LinkedIn page, you can see some of them, but that seems like it’s a comparable technology to fiberglass and resin system.
It’s like in the same vein, right? So there is, there are renewable ways to do this. Is would the right choice right now. Are there other renew. CO2 eaters that we could use that could do the same job.
Joel Saxum: When, when I think of sustainable logging or sustainable forestry, I’m, I’m, in my mind, I start shifting gears from like two stroke chainsaws to like electric chainsaws and like the big skidder tractors and stuff that run on, like, you know, they’ll go through hundred gallons of diesel fuel a day.
Like, do, do we switch ’em to electric? Does it work? Can that happen to make some, something more sustainable? So, I mean, store Enzo as a company that’s you know, partner. The blade technology companies also partnering with Navion. Yeah. And Maven we’ve talked about before on the show, Maven is the company that’s making the towers, so store end zone.
Maybe they’ve got someone really smart from like Ikea in the background, helping ’em out, making, making these things. That’s what I was thinking about , that’s on, on the desk. You know, this could be the future. But so
Allen Hall: a lot Allen or Rich in their future. Yeah,
Joel Saxum: so with with, you know, if this thing starts to become a more and more mainstream as is anything in wind or renewables or energy in general, you’re gonna start to see more of a microscope on them.
So I would like to see what they believe by the, that the term sustain. So if you know ESG goals can surmount a bit of profit loss as we’ve seen in the past, does it make sense from an ESG standpoint, is it actually sustainable? If we can, I believe Rosemary geniuses like you in the engineering world could make this happen.
You could make an eating meter blade out of wood as we talked about. Is it the best use of wood? Is it actually sustainable? Is it gonna lower the cost, the levelized cost of energy? If it can’t check those three box. I don’t see it becoming a thing.
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Allen Hall: It sounds like South Australia’s had a little bit of bad weather recently. They, they had a, a high voltage transmission tower fall over, and that’s not the first time that’s happened. Because South Australia has a lot of renewables, mostly rooftop solar seems like they’ve had to turn ’em off because they were transmitting that power to the rest of the country.
So that, that one transmission line Was the feed for all that extra power. Now they don’t, now they’re trying to handle too much power in South Australia. So while the electro net, which is the energy company down there, is trying to fix this huge pile on, they think it’s gonna take a couple of of months, maybe longer, to get the, a replacement up.
So they’re, they’re, we’re worried about what to do with all this solar energy that’s hitting the grid. They’re trying to figure out how to manage it so they’re worried about having to shut off certain parts of the solar energy to, to keep from over. Over energy, I guess the existing grid, have you been following this, this sort of catastrophe and electricity grids and, and what are they trying to do to manage it?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, so the South Australia’s a really interesting grid and I talk about it a lot. I think. It’s, I think, the largest gigawatt scale grid that’s predominantly based on variable renewables. So they don’t have any coal power in South Australia anymore. They don’t have hydro. They’ve just predominantly got wind and solar and then they’re using gas as well to, you know, balance everything.
But then the other way that they’re balancing is that they’re connected to the rest of the east coast of Australia and the Australian grid, the the, the nem the national electricity market. So that connects all of Australia except for not Western Australia and not the Northern Territory. But basically every, you know, most, most Australians are connected to this electricity grid.
And so yeah, south Australia has so much variable renewables that sometimes they’ve got a lot less than they need, and other times, and especially in spring, they have a lot more electricity than they need, and yet, spring is the main time where they’re exporting a lot, especially in the middle of the day.
So South Australia, typically, like last year and this year nearly every day in spring, you see negative electricity prices in the middle of the day when everybody’s you know, rooftop solar is generating a lot. And demand isn’t that high. So they had a storm a little while ago. It took down the interconnector to the, the rest of the electricity market.
And so now they’re in their period of time where they would normally be exporting heaps of renewable energy to the east coast and they’re not able to. So they’ve had some problems with blackouts, but yeah, another issue is that when they’ve got more energy more electricity than they need, they’ve got nowhere to put it.
So yeah, it’s just kind of, it’s It, it shows what happens when, you know, you rely on a, something that a single point of failure can, you know, have a large consequence. And I know that they are in the process and we’re already in the process of building a second interconnection. So that, you know, one tower falling down wouldn’t have this problem, but they’re not there yet.
And so, yeah, it’s, it is a bit unfortunate to see all these, you know, green electrons that could have been available. They’re, you know, they’re not being able to be used at the moment, so it’s a bit of a waste.
Allen Hall: Yeah. You have a complicated problem though, because you have so many energy sources. It’d be different if you had.
Power plants producing energy. You could sort of manage that and it’s only so many phone calls you would have to make. Oh, you would just turn it off. Yeah. Renewable energy grid like this. Yeah. You could just turn it off. Right. In this case you have a a, a, I’m assuming thousands and thousands of homes producing electricity that would feed the grid.
Are they able to manage all those? Variables simultaneously and kinda keep the grids stable?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yes. I mean, the, they are able to, to manage things to keep the grids stable and they I’m not sure if they do have all the powers that they want. They have been negotiating for a while trying to get the capability to remotely turn off people’s Solar on their roofs, okay.
For this kind of situation, but also just for the, you know, like the, the regular run of the mill. You know, everybody, there’s too many houses in this area have solar panels on their roofs now, and it’s a really sunny day. There’s no demand in the middle of the day. And so the you know, the, the transmission grid just can’t, can’t handle all this, all these electrons that are trying to rush into the power lines at the same.
So that’s kind of a more, you know, common occurrence. And this is a probably less, less frequent, but similar problem. But I mean, yeah, so solar, rooftop solar, if you add it all up, I think it is the largest generator in the state, but it’s it’s not the only big generator. So, I mean, obviously they can turn off the individual gas power plants and, and do, for the most part, they actually only need to leave two, they need to leave two on for reliability.
But other than that, they can, you know, have them all turned. And then all of the commercial operators, you know, everyone that’s exposed to the market price. Obviously if there’s too, too much in the system, then the price goes low and, and frequently goes negative in South Australia. And so anyone that’s exposed to that is, you know, automatically gonna.
Gonna turn it off if they can, you know, and a wind farm and a solar farm can easily, yeah, just switch off and stop supplying. So I think they have got plenty of mechanisms. And it’s a bit easier when you’ve got this, you know, market based approach rather than a, you know, centralized control and command.
That might be a bit harder to send out the, you know, instruction to every individual generator separately. And please turn off all, it
Joel Saxum: sounds like it’s, it’s like, it sounds like ready made, decentralized, green hydrogen production. Like it could be. Like, like if we get to hydrogen vehicles, hydrogen , every, why you hydrogen station?
Put ’em right in. Right into the grid. Yeah. .
Rosemary Barnes: Yes. I think I
Joel Saxum: would say the fix for it is what, the fix for it is, is a more or a, a more robust, interconnected grid possib. Is that, I mean, yes,
Rosemary Barnes: I think, I think that, or it’s more storage within South Australia or it’s curtailment. You know, people really hate curtailment, they.
for, for electricity to be generated and not used. But I mean, we seek a tell in all, all parts of the electricity system, but also, you know, in other kinds of engineering, like you don’t build a dam so that it’s always full. You know, you build it so that, you know, in the worst case scenario, it will, it will fill up or, you know, like rarely it will fill up.
No one sees the, you know, the top bit of the dam that’s empty and said, oh no, it’s, you know, our dam is being curtail. And the same with, you know, transmission lines or a coal power plant is not sized to be used a hundred percent all the time. It’s sized so that when you need, you know, the, the largest amount when you get your peak load that you know it can, it can supply that.
And the same with, you know, transmission. They’re sized for. That, you know, once in a decade extreme event when you, they just need more than ever. And no one ever complains about alman in any of those things. And so I think people are a bit funny with renewable energy because the, you know, the fuel is free that people get really upset about wasting it.
And , it, it’s just, you know, a matter of economics. It’s really common in all kinds of engineering design, but for some reason people really stick on to not wanting to waste any generation from renewables, more so than they’re worried about wasting other assets that have, you know, been engineered.
Allen Hall: It does raise the issue about the complexity of the grid and I, when I watch YouTube, and I don’t know what YouTube throws up to you guys when you’re like thumbing through YouTube, the recommended videos.
So I, I tend to get these really weird things like engineering with Rosie, and then I get videos about like the power system in Texas. So I get these hour long webinars about what’s going on at er. And there was a really fascinating one. Now, now maybe they know their audience, right? So I’m an electrical engineer and they’re throwing me electrical things, but they, they threw up a video, which was the solar farms in Texas have had two major shutdowns that are just triggered events.
So they’ve had a a disconnect and sort of a cascading disconnect of solar farms because of the way the, the electronics work and. Erhart as a power system. It doesn’t have a way to like, Start it back up again. Like they, they go into protection mode in some, it sounds like in some cases. And it it when you, they started digging into why is this happening?
They realize, of course there’s not just one cause there’s like 10 different reasons why this happens. And every different part of that grid reacts slightly differently. So it, some of them saw the frequency change too low and they were mi they were mismeasured it. Some saw the voltage drop too low, so they shot off.
It was a number of issues. And I was just wondering, as we get to the complexity, like a place like Texas, which is massive, right? You have this massive renewable grid, does become almost, do you have to have a lot more oversight onto what is actually happening at the, even at the home level or at the farm level, on how the energy is produced and how it’s gonna stay on, or does it need to go off?
And how do you, how do you manage all that in a, in a state? Texas or in or in South Australia, which is another large area. I
Joel Saxum: think that, I think part of it is buffer, right? Like Rosemary were saying storage within the grid. Yeah. Because we all talk about how I. There’s advantages to a decentralized grid.
Okay, you have a couple big part, but if you have little places all over the place, it, it’s safeguard, right? You, you eliminate those single points of failure. But if you can, and so then, but then also you make it so complex and then you’re look talking smart grid and all these different things about can we control it back?
And, and you know, in the US as much as you in Australia, homeowners aren’t gonna allow. The man to connect back to their stuff and then that’s not gonna happen. Or they’re gonna fight it tooth and nail. You know what I mean? So, especially in Texas, ERCOT of course. Yeah. Freedom. Yeah. So the, I think the answer is, is creating buffers within the grid, and that is in the form of multiple kinds of storage, battery storage or whatever technologies are, are becoming mainstream now, CO2 and these other different things.
So I think you, you put that energy somewhere and then a load active. Through those sources that, that’s my
Rosemary Barnes: thought. In South Australia, it’s largely about solar. You know, they, they don’t have, you know, a surplus, continuous surplus for days or, or weeks in a row. They have a surplus around midday and then they have a deficit in the, in the evening.
It’s the classic duck curve. So that’s batteries. And. If you do put those in houses, you don’t need the man to, you know, control that. You can have a system where it’s up to that, the householder. And there’s this company in Australia called Red Earth that’s doing that really well. They’ve kind of gamified it.
They’ve got an app and it means that, you know, any individual house that’s got, you know, solar and batteries and maybe an EV and some other loads, they can be their own, you know, micro energy. And so, you know, like the, the app, it’s got P two x, you know, like account, how much money are you making today?
And you know, you watch the spot price and the electricity market and you decide, oh, okay, I’m not going to use my clothes dryer now. I’m gonna wait until, you know, later. And okay, now was a good time that I should not be charging my electric car with my solar power. I should be exporting to the grid because, you know, I can make a lot of money from.
So, you know, the power can, can come down to the individuals and I like the way that they’re implementing it because it you know, you can just, you’re making money off it and it’s fine and people really get into it. And I expect that that’s, that’s how it’s going to, to go in the future. And, you know, you roll that out in a large scale, then you’re gonna see a lot less problems in, in the grid once you get the market set up.
Right. But yeah, that’s definitely. Not just good to go, you know, it’s not like every house could turn that capability on immediately. We need to figure out the, the settings and make sure that everything stays reliable. But I just don’t see there’s any way for us to not have a smart grid in the future.
You know, especially if EVs are gonna be a thing, which they are, we have no choice to just let people do whatever they want, whenever they want with the you know, the electricity grid. You could not let everyone just come home from work at five o’clock and plug their car in and just have it start charging immediately.
I mean, that would, that would crash the grid. So we clearly we’re gonna have to solve this problem and the solution
Joel Saxum: incentivize it other way. Yeah, exactly. Incentivize. So like that V, like there was a V two X pilot in Denmark when they were talking exec. Exact same thing. We’re talking here and what that company sounds like they’re doing, but they were incentivizing people.
Charge their cars in the middle of the night. And you know, and, and it was even to the point where there was charging stations. When you got to the office, you could plug in in the office and you could do energy transfer there. So the V two X platform with the electric vehicles was not only in the home, but it was throughout the community as well.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And octopus Energy in the UK have something similar, like they have an EV tariff and it got cheaper at, you know, midnight or some specific. But that in itself is not the solution because if you get enough people on that tariff, then all of a sudden you’ve gotta spike in demand at that exact time.
So midnight. That’s why, you know, this like spot price watching app or, you know, capability is better because then as a lot of people connect, then the price is gonna go up and so it looks less attractive to the next lot of people that wanna connect. So yeah, I think. Yeah, there’s a lot to figure out.
A lot of details to figure out. Yeah. But Rosemary,
Allen Hall: if, if I gotta get up at one o’clock in the morning to go plug my EV in at, at what point do you just say, you know, I’m just gonna buy a damn
Rosemary Barnes: horse. Yeah. That is not so smart. That’s not smart charging if you have to get up to do it. The smart charging, you’ve got an algorithm that is, you know, watching the price.
You’ve told your car charger, okay, I need 80% charged by six 30 in the morning. Make it happen at. Least possible cost. You know, I’m not saying that.
Joel Saxum: So it’s like Star Trek, .
Rosemary Barnes: It’s, it’s the future make
Joel Saxum: itself. It’s the real future. Yeah. Well,
Allen Hall: I guess, I guess it’s a future. Who knows if we’re gonna get there or not.
It seems like it’s very complicated and the, the more I hear engineers discuss the intricacies of, well, I’ll give you the example. So it’s, so Apple makes a car, Tesla makes a car, Google makes a car, they all respond differently. You start plugging ’em all into the grid. You think the grid’s gonna be. Heck no.
Because they’re all gonna have these different performance standards. They’re all gonna be on, they’re gonna be off. Right. I think that variability is treacherous. Yeah. And without having some stability via battery or something else, I
Joel Saxum: think you’re gonna be in trouble. Now add the the heavy trucking idea in where they’re talking about charging stations for semis and, and Lori’s taking as much energy as a small city in one spot, boom.
Just to charge trucks. Yeah. So I started adding that in you then you really got some management problems.
Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s, it’s a, it’s a complicated grid. I know every. Those that the term, well, it’s just gonna be a smart grid, but what does that mean? Right. At some point, engineers like Rosemary are gonna be there programming all this stuff to make sure it happens.
And then, but we’re, there’s, there’s, there’s like there’s, think about it. There’d be thousands of companies making devices that plug into this grid and, and add energy. You can take energy out. It gets super complicated and I’m not sure we. , what that future looks like and how stable it really will be. I hope it
Rosemary Barnes: isn’t engineers like me programming this stuff cuz I am an absolute hack when it comes to programming.
Basically, you know, I’m writing macros in Excel and that’s, that’s about all I do these days with programming. So luckily there are, there are a couple of people programming these things and they exist. And I think that the, the thing to remember, Alan, is that it’s an energy transition. It’s not an energy step change.
So it’s not like we’re gonna wake up tomorrow. Everyone’s gonna have an ev and a fully smart home with a fully smart grid. It happens gradually. Companies like Red Earth already have their platforms working for the small number of people that are on it. It will gradually grow. So, you know, it limits the size of the problem when things, things go wrong all the time.
And I mean, the Texas blackouts of, you know, a couple of winters ago are an example of, you know, they, they’ve moved very fast and haven’t figured out how to respond in every single situation yet. And so I think that’s why it’s important that it is, you know, a, a gradual transition. But I, I, you know, I feel very confident looking into my crystal ball that this is the way we’re going because it, it aligns economically, you know, people will make money by doing it this way.
So I, I’m sure that it’s gonna happen and you know, it’s an opportunity for companies to make money, but also for individual households to make money. I would expect somewhere like Texas and the US in general to be fast adopters of this because, you know, you guys, you guys love that. Taking the power, power to the individual and making capital capitalism money.
Yeah. It should be the perfect place for it. And yeah, we, we do already say it’s starting to happen in Australia and I would definitely have one of these systems. If I owned my own home, then I would, I would have solar panels and, you know, and a battery and be trading, trading energy and getting really excited about my results every.
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Allen Hall: Well, Joel, I’ve been watching this. Well, we have Phil Totaro back from Mental Store and we’ve been talking about insurance companies and their push to get their insured. To use the OEM service agreements and the OEM companies to do maintenance on the wind turbines, and there seems to be a big push in that.
Obviously the OEMs want to do that because it’s a nice little cash bonus into the revenue streams because the prices of turbines have been suppressed so much. But the independent service providers and the companies that are large enough, they. Provide their own maintenance. They’re not doing a bad job.
I think it, it seems like we just have a dispute in the marketplace. Insurers are pushing one way, operators are saying another thing. And , there seems to be a lot of discussion around that point. So, Phil, can you just kind give us the baseline of what’s actually happening in the insurance market re regarding repair and repair?
Sure. Thanks
Philip Totaro: Alan. So just to preface this, what we ended up doing was we’ve analyzed the energy information and administration’s plant level net monthly and annual production data for renewable energy assets. So they’ve published it for wind, solar thermal generation, et cetera, but specifically for wind.
We took that data and we started looking plant by. At how long before you saw like a 10% or more permanent degradation in aeps. And what we wanted to do was to analyze that and see if there was a correlation between the type of maintenance regime that they were utilizing. So are they on a, an OEM long term service contract?
Are they on a self perform, you know, maintenance regime with an in-house? Capability, like a NextEra and an energy, et cetera or are they utilizing an independent service provider? And what the data shows is that independent service providers actually have the the worst performance or the least good performance if we can maybe.
Put a positive spin on it. But the reason is that most of the independent service providers are maintaining assets that are at least on average, I wanna say it’s like 15 to 16 years or older. The OEMs have less frequency of performance dropoffs on the assets that they’re maintaining, but most of their assets.
Where they have a long term service contract are younger, and you haven’t really seen a performance degradation until you start reaching, you know, like 8, 9, 10 years into the asset life. The, there’s a dichotomy between the two. Between two different types of asset owners who self perform their maintenance.
One are the larger integrated companies like, again, NextEra that actually have remarkably good performance on and, and very low a low percentage of degradation of their assets. Although NextEra, to be fair as well, specifically, they tend to run their turbines into the ground for 10 years and then repower ’em to take advantage of the ptc extension.
But most of the larger asset owners are able to maintain their fleet very well. It’s some of the smaller and mid-sized asset owners who are self-performing that are actually the more challenged in, in being able to do this. And this kind of runs contrary again to the original premise here, which is the insurance companies all think that if you’re an asset owner who’s self-performing maintenance, You’re probably not doing as good of a job as the OEM would, and that’s not entirely
Joel Saxum: entirely accurate.
From Wind Power Lab, we preach to the insurance market and to operators all the time, be a prudent operator. If we’re pointing towards the OEMs as taking on these fsa, these full service agreements, do we run into any kind of, I mean, there’s, there’s two parts to this question, I suppose. Do we run into any kind of nepotism with them?
Hiding some issues or not dealing with some stuff or, or is it better because they may know what’s happening to this certain kind of blade or these certain bearings across their entire fleet? Is do we see any issues arising there as far as trusting them to do the right things or, or is it better for the, for the, a asset owner?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s interesting that you, that you say this cuz this is a, a topic that I, I work on a fair bit. In Australia, nearly all of the assets are done with OEM service agreements for the full life. And the main type of work that I get is when there is a defect, usually a blade defect, and the asset owner is really unhappy with the communication that they’re getting from the, you know, the oem who’s also the service provider.
You know that from the OEM’s point of view, we’ve got the full service agreement. So, you know, it’s on us if if we don’t repair these properly. So just trust. From the asset owner’s point of view, they’re like, you know, , we have a lot of money tied up in, in this wind farm, and I wanna be sure that the yeah, that you know, that you’re doing, doing the right thing with these blade repairs and be sure that there aren’t gonna be more defects pop up.
You know, if there’s a serial defect issue and I’d never understand why it needs to work that way. Why, why can’t we be a bit more, you know, upfront from. What do you think about that, Phil?
Philip Totaro: To answer your first question, yes, there are certainly availability guarantees in, in the service contracts. The other thing that’s also in there are it’s a clause for paying out liquidated damages.
So if. They aren’t maintaining the availability above a threshold. And if the asset doesn’t generate you know, what it should in taken over the course of like a full year. And it’s basically mutually agreed upon that. It’s down to the. You know, the, the substandard maintenance, then the, the OEM pays out a, a, you know, a liquidated damages award to the, the asset owner as a result of the lost production that they should have otherwise achieved.
Had they maintained the, the availability of the asset. So they do have the, an OEM does have a financial incentive from that perspective. To have adequate maintenance. I get the sense that the insurance companies feel that the claims which are filed are really just filed as a placeholder. If they can get someone else to pay out on an issue that might otherwise be their responsibility.
And I think the insurance companies are starting to get wise to. And are starting to reject more claims. I mean, first of all, they, they can’t, you know, they’ve had some assets that have had catastrophic failures throughout, you know, like there was a hurricane back in like, I think like 2017 or 18 in Puerto Rico where it wiped out an entire wind park and the insurance company lost like a hundred million or something.
Wow. Which was a problem. So you know, they’re, they’re taking, the insurance companies are taking a closer look. What they’re ensuring, how they’re ensuring it, and the premiums that they’re actually charging upfront, particularly and why they’re saying that they want OEM maintenance is because they, again, they have this perception that the, the OEM knows the turbine the best and they would be the best positioned to take on the liability particularly under like a full wrap contract.
It’s basically, you know, we agree to provide maintenance and we agree to kind of provide a warranty backstop to any of the major correctives that might be necessary during this the term of this long term service agreement. So it’s the insurance companies like it because it’s taking some of the liability off their books and putting it onto the oem.
But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re actually gonna get better performance because again, going back to what Joel said, The consistency with which you actually service and maintain your asset adequately, according to, you know, OEM specs or your own experience with your own assets. If you have a big enough fleet that’s necessarily going to provide a better a better gauge.
Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s, that’s a, it just seems like the insurance industry. trying to adapt, and even the operators are still trying to adapt to this moving marketplace. They’re learning as they go, and they haven’t created products to, to fit in where the operators and owners may, may need them yet. So there’s a lot more to come, it sounds like.
And Phil, Hey. Hey. Thanks. Thanks for being on the program again. If, if you wanna learn about what we just talked about, insurance and operators and ISPs, and full service agreements, Go to Phil’s LinkedIn page, Philip Totaro or Intel Store’s LinkedIn page, and there’s. Plethora of information. You’re gonna learn a lot in a couple of minutes, and if you have any questions about the things you learned here today, reach out to Philip on his LinkedIn channel.
On his LinkedIn page. Sorry. All right, Philip. Thank you. All right,
Philip Totaro: thanks everybody.
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Rosemary Barnes: Well,
Allen Hall: Joel, I’ve been watching this high Wind Tampa in Wind Farm, which is supposed to be the largest floating wind farm in the world. It’s off the coast of Norway and it’s, if you remember, we talked about this a while ago, where the project is feeding oil and gas. Is it Derek out in the ocean out there or in the, in the sea production rigs.
Yeah. Productions, drilling rigs, right? Yeah. So they’re, they’re putting 11 wind turbines out there. They’re eight megawatts each, so they’re a total of 88 megawatts Ecuador’s running yet they got their first wind turbine up and running, so they’re producing power and they think they’re gonna finish the project in 2023, which is great.
You know that ther. Clicking right along. Now, the thing I noticed about this project is, and I wasn’t fully familiar with it, was something called a joint mooring system. So they, there’s 11 turbines and they’re kind of in two rows, but there’s, they use a unique way of joint of connecting them down to the ocean floor.
And you wanna just basically describe what that is?
Joel Saxum: I don’t know exactly the, the layout of it, but a joint mooring system is a, of course, a cost saving mechanism, right? There’s a, there’s a lot of ways you can mower something offshore if you’re mooring, FPSOs, floating platforms. The other things like, so you can do a suction anchor where you basically put put a a tube, like think about like a paper towel tube, put it into the mud and then suck the water outta the top.
It’ll actually suck the paper towel to break down into the mud. That’s a suction anchor. Yeah. And then you, then you just tie the chain to the top of it, and that’s a suction anchor. Now to the top side, you can do that. You can do it with big anchors, you can do a subsea, micro piles where you drill, drill into the bottom and then basically grout and then run cables up through that, or chaining up through that.
So a lot of ways you can mo, but Okay, when you’re mooring an individual system, say you had to put you, you have to have at least, you know, Three mooring locations, you would think one single for one thing or three just to position it. So if you had to have three anchors, no matter which style of anchor you’re putting in the ocean bottom, for 11 turbines each, you’d have to have 33 of them.
Well, it’s a lot easier just to put a few on each end and then more them, and then more the on the surface or on the subsurface, on the floating surface more, or to tie them together. So, okay, so it’s basically like They’re anchored to each other on the surface, and then on either end and possibly in the middle, they have some individual mooring systems to the bottom.
So it’s just a, a way of cutting down on how many actual anchors they need to put into the ocean floor because they are expensive and time consuming to produce and stall. And then it’s an o and m issue. Okay? It’s an o m issue. That’s the big thing.
Allen Hall: Well, that’s what I was wondering. Right. So in my head, what I was thinking like or something, I use an analogy.
It’s like when you watch a group of like preschoolers or kindergartners and they’re going to recess or going on a little field trip and they’re like chain to one another, you get this long connection anchor.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: The teachers, the anchor, right? But if you watch that line behind them, it’s kind of swaying all over the place because the kids, none of them can walk straight.
So, and, and they’re five, right? And so they’re all going their own different directions. Does that mean that the wind turbines are gonna be kind of floating around relative
Joel Saxum: to one another? You anchored on both ends and, and they have to be, they can be dynamic, but not that dynamic. Remember that they have to have, okay, export cables coming from them that are connected to shore or connected to an oil.
Right. So you can’t just let ’em fla in the wind. They’re not gonna be out there like a, like a snake flowing around. They will be fairly, they’ll be fairly static, but still dynamic. They’ll move a little bit, but they’re not gonna, and then you’ll have I don’t know if, if anybody can see this on YouTube, you’ll have basically the umbilicals and a lot of these will come down into the water column and then have a loop in it that has floats.
That’s how they do it in oil and gas at least, right? When you have a, when you have a riser gas or oil export line or something coming up to the surface, they do this and, and that is to build into it the ability to move and, and groove and shake a little bit. So that that loop can basically take out any moving tension if need be.
Allen Hall: Okay, so it’s a little service loop then,
Joel Saxum: essentially. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Basically. So if there’s movement in it, it doesn’t, it’s not causing stress. Too much stress on the, the export cable and. Okay, so
Allen Hall: if you have two adjacent turbines, is there a cable, a really to cable running between them? So like could you drive a boat between without hitting this cable or is it just something.
I’m just trying to figure out like, does it really block off the area for ships and fishing? It would just block it up because you got these gables. I would, and you can only use it in
Joel Saxum: certain locations. I’m gonna say no, not on the, I don’t know the exact design. Right, but I’m gonna say no, not on the surface.
Okay. They’ll be more on the or the connected on the bottom of the floating concrete structure. So these are kind of designed like a. Okay, so down on the bottom they’ll be connected in, so they go, yeah. Okay. So when they install them, they have a special vehicle there called an an A H T, which is an anchor handling tug, and the tugboat will be there and has it, it’s just a, it’s a big boat with a big work, flat platform out the back.
And then there’s a couple of ROV work class ROVs that will do all the pinning and shackling of these things. So they have these special vessels out there. And we talk about this when we’re coming to the us. There’s not a. There’s no anchor handling tugs, available off the East coast right now, or west coast for mooring.
So these are specialized vessels that do this and, and will, can, can grab the anchors, move the anchors if need be, or zip pump. The suction piles in, but then they have special ROVs that go connect ’em all. It’s, it’s it’s, it’s not a trivial application. Subsea, when they’re installing these. So that, so that’s where we were going to cost, right?
So it’s o and m, cost, operations and maintenance. Right now you have all of these mooring lines and everything, and mooring chains export cables, infield cables to, to inspect that are it’s a whole nother challenge as opposed to just inspecting a mono pile.
Allen Hall: So if one of those cables were to break, that would be a really bad day.
Yeah, that would
Joel Saxum: be not cool. That would not be cool. But luckily there’s a lot of really smart engineers in the world that have been doing those mooring chains for a long, long time. There is some new technologies coming out subsea, micro piles. One of ’em, I know a company out of Ireland that’s doing this.
Some old colleagues actually, that’s really cool. They have a, a sea floor drill. So basically like the drill lands itself on the. Then there’s a robotic drilling platform, and, and they drill down to 8,000 meters. And then they grout it and then they run the chain off the top. So they basically, like, they land this drill on the sea floor, drill holes, grout the whole thing in, and then connect the chains and they leave.
And there’s no suction piles, no anchors, no nothing. And it’s a gr concrete, crowded in. It’s, it’s really cool. And it’s quick. Boom, boom, boom. Wow. Yeah.
Allen Hall: That’s wild. Yeah, it’s pretty neat. Well, Rosemary, if you’re designing a wind turbine and it’s floating like that, do you worry? Do you worry about that from like a blade design or a bearing designing and when it’s sort of, there’s a little, there’s a little play in these things now do, is that a concern on the
Rosemary Barnes: design side?
Yeah, it’s certainly not something that they just, you know, say, oh, she’ll, she’ll be right. Let’s just, let’s just assume that an onshore wind turbine will be, will be fine with these new, new loads on them. And I think it’s also really interesting the, the, the operational, you know, aspects of it. And it’s it’s actually a topic that I, I wanna make a, I wanna make a YouTube video on bloating offshore in general.
One of the interesting topics is you, you know, so now a fixed bottom or an onshore wind turbine, you know, it’s rigidly always, it’s always gonna be vertical, but floating. I mean, there’s gonna be some sort of swaying and then, you know, the aerodynamics are gonna be really affected by that. So it’s on my list of things, find out is how they actually manage that.
You know, are they monitoring. The angle and compensating and, and how I, I’m not actually sure how they do it yet, so it’s, yeah. Sorry. It’s a, it’s a question rather than an answer to your question. . Yeah.
Joel Saxum: You’re adding a couple more degrees of freedom in there, right? The up down left, right? Yeah. Up down,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah.
Compensating with, you know, the tilt, tilt angle of the, the rotor, or, I’ve never heard of a, you know, a turbine having that kind of control. It would make sense that you would get better performance if you, if you did, but yeah, I just don’t know if that’s too complicated compared to the improvement you can get or, I, I don’t even know how big are the angles, you know, that, that we’re seeing.
But if it’s more than a, you know, a couple of degrees and it’s gonna give you a significant difference in In your output, but also the, you know, the loads, the normal wind turbine, all the, you know, the ones that people have been designing for decades, they’re, even the structural design is based around, you know, the, the wind basically hitting at the exact right direction.
And if you all of a sudden you, you know, you got two, three degrees out of plane, then you’re gonna get some weird aerodynamic effects happening and including, you know, potentially stall, which is you know, really, really difficult thing for a structure. To deal with. Also, you know, if you’ve got the waves coming, you know, with a, a periodic frequency, are you gonna start to see some, you know, kind of residents somewhere?
It’s certainly complicated and I, I know that there’s a, a lot of knowledge that’s come from offshore oil and gas and into wind turbines. So I, I don’t, I, I think that the designers of these turbines know the answers to these questions that I, I don’t You think
Allen Hall: so? I don’t, you know, I wonder if this trial by ECU.
And remember, the Ecuador’s gonna be involved in some of these California projects, or is gonna be bidding on them. Like this is a little bit of exposure about how you would build turbines off the coast of California. That’s gonna, they are gonna be floating. Do you have a small test field of 11 turbines like they have right now?
In this, in this mooring system, are you trying out a lot of different control systems and just monitoring what happens? It gives you a little bit of time before you go do it in California. Does that give Eor a huge advantage? It seemed to me that it would.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And this isn’t their first exploding offshore wind farm.
Right. So they, they had the well’s first which has been operating since 2017 in Scotland. That was a bit of a smaller wind farm, but still five six megawatt turbin. So it’s not exactly the same, but certainly, you know, they have, they are doing a lot of development into floating offshore and they’re, they’re learning as they go.
And so this one is, is bigger. It’s what like an 88 megawatt wind farm. And I’m sure they’ll learn something from, from that. And and, you know, from the longer operation of their first. And go bigger and better next time. So I, I do think you’re right that they’re, you know, they’re getting the early lead on some of these these issues, but they have started small.
You don’t see any in a gigawatt floating offshore with farms being out there yet because people don’t know everything yet and they know that they don’t know. So it’s, yeah, right. You learn, take. But if you, but as much as you can from existing wind industry as much as you can from existing oil and gas.
So, you know, you, you hope that you’ve thought of everything that that might happen, but you’re aware that you, you know, you don’t know yet what you don’t know, and so you start small and and pay attention. pay attention to the problems you have so that you can fix ’em for the, the next big of the project.
So when you,
Allen Hall: when California does this auction, or when the federal government does this auction off the coast of California, which is coming in pretty soon, it’s like a couple weeks away when this episode release, it’s probably pretty close. Do you give bonus points to Ecuador because they have a sense of how big of an effort this is, and they probably have figured out and eliminated some of these problem
Joel Saxum: areas.
I think intrinsically it will come in their bid right there. The bonus points will come at the, the level of expertise and knowledge that is displayed in there. Presentation.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And also because we’ve seen a few projects in the US where, you know, developers are like, oh, actually this is gonna be a lot more expensive than we thought.
So now you know, you need to pay us more. So, you know, I would be if I was the state of California, I would be looking at, at that, you know, a little bit wary of somebody doing their first, first project isn’t really gonna happen. Like maybe they’ve estimated it will be cheaper than you know, a high wind.
Bid. But do I trust it and do I trust that they’re, you know, gonna, gonna follow through if it does end up more expensive? So, yeah, I think that it, they’ve definitely put the early runs on the board and that will serve them well.
Allen Hall: I’ll stand up for the wind turine companies and the operators for a moment.
What’s happening in, on the East coast right now, particularly in my little state, is I think abhorrent on some. That the states, not only my state, but a adjoining states, are really sticking it to the operators and the developers of these projects. We’re in a a unique economic time. And the states are just looking the other way.
Why would, why would we get involved in this? Yeah. There, there’s inflation. Yes. There’s high interest rates. Well, how does that affect you? Well, it affects everybody the same, right? As the states grapple for more money and are trying to maintain their budgets in the whole thing. Well, the state of Massachusetts is so overloaded with money.
They’re actually giving some of it back . When, when your, when your operators and your and the companies are telling you it’s gonna cost more money, you need to be listening to ’em instead of pooing them. And I’m, I’m worried about that in California too. Like, does, does what’s happening in my little state affect the auction?
What’s gonna happen? I’m floating wind, California. Does everybody get a little bit gun shy about it and say, yeah, we would’ve bid 2 billion for this, for this site. But you know what? No, not now, not after We’ve seen on some other states we’re just not gonna do that. And maybe, maybe they have people drop out, which is what the scary part is for, for us, is that off show win, which been promised and promised and promised, and be the, the future all of a sudden seems to be stalled in some places, and that’s not healthy.
Yeah, yeah. It’s slowing
Joel Saxum: down for sure. At the, the one thing to, to, for, for us and the listeners here as engineers and technology fans. This is a big win for the wind industry. I believe that we’ve got, yeah, we’ve got an 88 megawatt farm. It’s not, it’s not as big as the gigawatt, you know, dogger banks and stuff, but hey, we’ve got floating wind now at almost a hundred megawatt site.
This is fantastic. So kudos to EOR for making this happen huge and getting it off the ground. There’s gonna be, you know, this is, This is the baby step, you know, this is the, the, the five or the seven turbines offshore in the US that we have. Great. This is really cool. This is the next step. This is floating.
This is the biggest one in the world right now, and there’s more to come from this. So, so it’s a victory for the industry, I believe.
Allen Hall: It’s a big engineering thumbs up for sure. It’s, it’s amazing. It really is amazing and you know, Rosemary’s been talking about it for a couple of years here and it’s actually coming about, so Rosemary’s predictions are coming true and it’s, it’s finally good to see.
I, I just wish we could get over some of these hurdles faster. 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. Be sure to subscribe 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 Wind Energy Podcast.
