Weather Guard Lightning Tech
ArcVera CEO Discusses Optimizing Wind Farm Performance and Viability
This episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast features an interview with Gregory Poulos, CEO of ArcVera Renewables, to discuss how the company’s work is helping operators improve wind farm performance. We discuss wind resource assessments, wake modeling, repowering with new turbine technology, evaluating offshore wind resources, and accounting for risks like future nearby wind farm development. ArcVera helps make wind power more viable and cost-effective through services spanning a project’s full lifetime, from initial prospecting to operations to eventual repowering decades later.
Reach out to ArcVera and get your wind farm performing better! https://arcvera.com/contact/
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Allen Hall: Welcome back to this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. ArcVera Renewables is the leading provider of renewable energy technology services, including wind resource assessments, technical due diligence, project engineering, and O& M support.
ArcVera’s work in the wind industry is helping to make. Wind energy more affordable and reliable. The company’s services are helping developers to build new wind farms and improve the performance of existing wind farms. As a result, wind energy is playing an increasingly important role in the global energy mix.
In this podcast, we’ll explore ArcVera’s work with ArcVera’s CEO, Greg Poulos. Welcome to the program.
Gregory Poulos: Thanks for having me on, guys. It’s great to be here. Hi, Allen. Hi, Joel. Good to see you again.
Allen Hall: Yeah, so the last time we got together was in New Orleans at ACP, and that was a good time. That was a really crazy convention.
I know since we have left there Joel and I work in the lightning space and you’re in the wind in the wind space, actual wind, the productive part of the wind industry business. It’s been a busy summer. I assume you guys have been busy with all the projects and all the IRA things have been happening, trying to evaluate performance of farms and what, where to put new farms and what’s going on offshore.
I’m really interested to pick your brain here.
Gregory Poulos: Yeah all of those things globally. Absolutely.
Allen Hall: ArcVera’s been around for about 40 years at this point. Can you just give our listeners a brief introduction as to all the things you do around the wind industry?
Gregory Poulos: Absolutely. So we work on on the wind side.
We also work in solar and battery storage. But on the wind side, we work just as in solar and storage through the full project lifetime. So in wind there’s a prospecting phase where A developer or somebody trying to create a wind farm is looking for a spot or they have a spot in mind and they need to know if it’s going to be economic.
It should they invest more in there in the development. So we help folks understand how windy a certain site may be using our vast experience and also advanced modeling tools. Some which we discussed at ACP um, a variety of other things, including our meteorological expertise about flow over complex terrain. There’s a lot of free material out there that is inaccurate, and so we help narrow the band of to what the real answer is.
Ultimately you have to measure on site and so you have to use lidar, sodar or meteorological towers most commonly offshore, they call them floating lidar or flidar but so we’ll recommend the configuration design and where to place those systems. Monitor all those systems after their installed, inspect them all with an eye toward eventual financing.
You need to have a nice tied up story around your energy production, and it all starts with getting excellent data measured. So we work with them through the entire development process, analyzing data, creating reports related to energy, evaluating the different turbine technologies that are available in the correct hub height to place those at for a given meteorological regime and wind speed based on IEC Standards. Design the turbine arrays, do the energy work, and then ultimately, after a long process that is too long to describe in my brief introduction to what we do a turbine is purchased and an offtaker is found ultimately who will buy the power or you take merchant risk and you go to the bank, get your money.
And we work with the clients through that with technical reports in support of financing wind farms. And, uh, during construction, we do some work on the construction site. Depending on how things are going, we’ll review the contracts for operations and maintenance, review the turbine supply agreement.
And then after construction, there’s all sorts of operational side work we can do. Including forensic analysis of performance power performance testing with the I. C. R. E. Standard certification that we have and all the way through. And then 30 years later, you might repower depending on the situation.
We’ll come back and do it all again. With repowering it.
Joel Saxum: Something to focus on here is what Allen and I, because, with Weather Guard, we’re always talking lightning with people. They call, hey, I have lightning issues, I have lightning issues. And one of the things that we focus on with everybody who calls is the simple fact that there is not a blanket you can throw over and say, This is how lightning works.
It does, in a certain sense, but every site is different depending on the technology installed, depending on the topography, the local geography, the local weather patterns, all of these things go into fact when you’re making decisions on what to do, whether it’s O& M decisions, why, for us, of course, why is lightning striking me this way, what can I expect in the future, I have damage here, why is this happening, what’s going on here. What you guys are focusing on as well, Greg, is, yeah, there may be an idea of, Hey, wind blows here in this county, and we think we have this for a wind resource.
However, when you really want to nail it down and get into the nitty gritty and get some bankable insights, you need to talk to the experts and have them do a per site actual investigation and give you some real insights.
Gregory Poulos: Yeah, that’s correct. There’s a whole process to this that, being around for 40 plus years, at least the original founders, not me, I was 12 when the original founders started.
A set of gurus that existed in those early days, basically over time, came up with more and more rigorous methods to study wind farms and get the answer right. You make mistakes, you make corrections so all the methods of energy assessment have steadily improved over time, and they’re constantly changing as we discover new things, such as the long range wakes topic we discussed last time. So there are new things emerging as the industry changes, but yeah you absolutely have to follow a protocol. And we serve on the standards committee for the international electrical technical commission, the IEC. And there’s a new standard that’s actually going to be coming out I’m not sure the exact timing, a year or two after all the processes are done or new called IEC 15 61400 15 2.
Anyway, that’s underway with a bunch of industry, current industry experts that are all working together to formulate a standard for that process. But there are very well established practices already. Very well known practices that are used to create bankable wind assessments.
Allen Hall: There’s a big repowering effort in the United States and I want to touch on that point for a minute.
When I talk to existing wind farms that have been around 10, 20 years and they’re getting to that repower stage, when you ask them what the expected power production was from that site, Uh, when they started to build it and what the actual is, there’s a big discrepancy between those two typically. So the data they had went, I think a lot of times it didn’t use an ArcVera-type service when they put these farms out there, they just put some met towers up, got some general numbers and starts putting farms up.
That’s really not the way to do it. So when they come to a repowering situation. What’s the right approach there to actually get some hard numbers because they’re going to put different technology and typically on these new sites and they need to know, do I need to put low wind speed turbines up here?
Do I need to raise the tower hub height a little bit? What’s that process look like?
Gregory Poulos: That process is, is pretty straightforward once you have the right information. In some cases we have the old data from the original wind farm in our database. Because we did work on it before. Maybe they didn’t do a bankable assessment, but we might have been, had the data, happened to have the data in house.
That’s happened several times. But except for that we also advise them to put up new meteorological measurements around the site for a year prior to doing the repowering assessment. Sometimes there isn’t time for that. And you, there’s a a second method to evaluate the energy production on a site, which involves using the actual SCADA data, the power production data from those farms that have been the, from the farm that’s been operating all that time.
You can use that information and Reverse engineer how the wind blows and then re engineer that to create an operational repowering forecast using modern turbine technology, which is usually much taller. And so you need some knowledge of what the shear is at a site like that. In other words the change in the wind speed with height, you have to understand that if you’re going to go higher.
It’s going to be windier generally at a particular location. That’s not always true in topography. Sometimes it’s windier downhill anyway. I didn’t want to get that, sneak that in real quick. But but for the most part, except in certain places like complex California valleys where the wind speed actually decreases with height.
You need to understand how the new, how energy from new modern turbines with bigger rotors, taller hub heights will work. And you have to reverse engineer the data because you don’t have any meteorological information to go on. Let’s say the original net towers were very short anyway, very old technology, very low quality, not much to work with even with the old data for modern techniques, consistent with modern techniques. So you have to reverse engineer the power production at that farm, try to understand how the wind blows there, and then reconstruct what a new turbine at a taller hub height might produce. It’s very uncertain and compared to a full measurement campaign, but it can be done.
Allen Hall: How does LiDAR play into those measurements? Do you need to put LiDAR up at some of these sites to really understand how the wind is moving versus altitude or some of the perturbations you’re getting from the landscape.
Gregory Poulos: You can certainly use LIDAR. You can use meteorological towers or SODAR.
LIDAR is handy certainly. It generally observes the wind speeds to uh, 120 to 200 meters above ground, depending on the settings and characteristics of the site. Lasers that come out of LIDARs bounce off particulates in the atmosphere. So if the atmosphere is very clean, sometimes they don’t return a signal.
Sodars can be used as well and they have different characteristics and meteorological towers are the long standard that’s existed in the industry. A lot of the standards are actually based on anemometers, um, in the wind turbine design. So using LiDAR and sodar creates a little uncertainty in the turbulence measurements.
In any case. They’re very helpful. Absolutely. And many of our clients are using LIDAR and SODAR all around the world to supplement meteorological measure, meteorological tower based measurements and to go higher, above. It’s very expensive to build a very tall net tower. In many parts of the world, so you put up a shorter one and supplement it with information from a lidar or a stodar that looks above the net tower height.
Joel Saxum: Digging back into the repower issue, and this is one of the reasons why I think someone going to do a repower should contact ArcVera, simply because you guys are also doing this long distance wake research, right? So you’re understanding what’s happening down wind and whatnot. So as again, as say XYZ wind farm was installed in 2010 and there are what’s 2023 now about 2013 because someone’s taking perfect advantage of PTCs.
So in that 10 years in that area. There more than likely has been some neighboring wind farms installed, either downstream, upstream, next to it. While you guys are, yes, you have some constraints of this is where the existing towers are, we’re going to assimilate new, possibly new technology onto these existing towers.
However, around this area, there has also been local changes in the wind resource because of these additions. Now, ArcVera has a bunch of specialized knowledge that others may not have around this long distance wake changes that may affect the production. So it, this, in this case right now is my thought.
If I’m doing a repower, I’m calling ArcVera because they’ve got not only the knowledge, the existing knowledge of the wind resource within that wind farm, but they have a specialized batch of knowledge. You guys have a specialized batch of knowledge of what could be going on around, and the long-term wakes affecting it.
Gregory Poulos: That’s right. With the modeling technique that we described in the last podcast we have the ability to recreate the impact of new wind farms being built. Over time so you can do a simulation with and without those wind farms in place and get a more accurate estimate of how that affects ongoing energy production.
The other you can use that method, but you have to have knowledge of when wind farms went in the types of turbines that are there. You have to have all the power curves and all the specs of those wind farms as well as the wind farm you’re trying to build to really understand how that is going to affect things.
Yeah, we can do that, and it’s certainly something we do every day. It’s complicating. Those same issues are complicating day to day wind energy resource assessment for new wind farm builds as well as repowers.
Allen Hall: Computational power it takes to do that, it’s got to be tremendous, right? That’s a really difficult model.
Gregory Poulos: It is. It’s definitely a specialized activity. The we run on supercomputers in the cloud. For generally thousands of processors operating simultaneously for a day or five days or, whatever it happens to take for the particular instance. And then you get terabytes of data and you have processing methods to take that down to just the answer you need.
There’s a lot more information there you throw away because it’s a commercial application. You could probably do a master’s degree or PhD with most of that every run every day. But it’s very sophisticated stuff. Involves a lot of automation to get down to a commercially viable pricing.
You’re taking something that 10 years ago would cost a million dollars probably, and you’re doing it for 25, 000 or 50, 000 or maybe less.
Allen Hall: So let’s jump offshore. And I know, ArcVera, you have a presence worldwide. Let’s just start there. Where are all your offices at?
Gregory Poulos: We have subsidiary offices operating in Brazil since 2011, I believe was the first major inroads there.
And then South Africa since 2015. And in Bangalore, India, since 2020, during the pandemic, we opened that one.
Allen Hall: I want to touch on the offshore piece because I know India is planning on a lot of offshore and that looks like it’s on the, it’s like the East coast of the United States. Everything’s on the Eastern side of India is where they’re planning all that.
So all the wind’s going to come off land onto the turbines and then on the, in, in the New York bight area, same thing. With all the changes that are happening in the who’s going to put wind turbines where situation in the New York Bight? How do you know what that resource is going to look like when you finally someday put in turbines or putting turbines in the water?
Gregory Poulos: You don’t know what’s coming. That’s the hardest part of the build out risk calculation. So you have to do scenarios. Ocean wind being temporarily canceled, it may come back, right? So you can say, okay we have a reprieve for a little while, but eventually the wind is going to flow through some new wind farms where ocean wind was originally planned and take some of the power out of the wind before it reaches our wind farm.
So we can operate Scott free for a little while, but then they’re going to come later. So you have to assess that. And just so you understand the risk, there’s not too much you can do about it, other than just take a haircut or not build your wind farm. But it’s good to understand the magnitude. If it’s a small magnitude, you could say, okay that’s going to be acceptable even long term, or it may be, okay, for 10 years, we’ll make X.
And then after 10 years, we’re going to assume those are going to be built. And can we handle that financially and, or how would, what would we do in that instance? Because there’s no current laws for reimbursement for future wind farms to existing wind farms. That’s what you have to do, is just evaluate the various scenarios.
Allen Hall: And do you, would you need to know the kind of turbines that would be installed in front of you?
Does that matter all that much? I guess maybe the hub height would matter.
Gregory Poulos: You can make very good assumptions even if it’s not built about what it, what the likely effects are going to be. But depending on how long it is, it could be quite a bit different, right? This could be a really different technology.
We don’t know what’s coming, but Using the three bladed upwind machine assumption, there are certainly standards for expected thrust and power production. That you can apply and make assumptions about the type of turbine just based on experience that very realistic at least it no more uncertain than the rest of the process.
Allen Hall: Yeah, So what happens when we’re talking about wind off the coast of New Jersey places like Atlantic City, right? They built big casinos and there’s big buildings and the build out will continue along the coastline in New Jersey, I assume for a while and even New York for that matter.
When they start building structures right on the edge of shorelines, I assume that affects the wind offshore, right? That’s part of these wakes that are created that seem to go for 50, 100 kilometers?
Gregory Poulos: Sure, yeah. If you were to build wind farms onshore and the wind were from onshore to offshore, they would deplete the wind resource to some degree.
And that effect would be felt in the offshore wind farms. And the reverse is true if the wind blows the other direction. The when the wind blows from onshore to offshore, it also blows the temperature structure over the land, over the ocean. And so it’s suddenly, it’s over warm, let’s say in the summertime, you have very warm air over land, the sun’s up, it’s hazy, hot, and humid.
In New Jersey, New York, and the wind is from the southwest that gets blown over the relatively cold ocean that creates a stable atmosphere, which lengthens the wake effect and makes it worse. There are effects of just the weather that’s occurring onshore if it’s being advected in the terminology of atmospheric science, it’s being moved offshore only.
Joel Saxum: You’re on the big word of the day, wind right now, Greg. Evected.
Gregory Poulos: Evection, there you go.
Joel Saxum: So I’m going to, I’m going to throw an odd one at you and Allen this isn’t in our questions that we threw, but I was just thinking about it as we’re talking offshore. So on the podcast, we have talked about some new technologies and we’ve had some on.
So some of these new technologies, of course, floating offshore wind is going to be new. And I believe that, and I don’t, this is me armchair engineer, right? I believe that those platforms could cause the wake changes as well, because there’s actually a different angles of incidents as they move offshore.
But the other things I’m wondering is, has ArcVera investigated, that they can talk, that you can talk about? Or maybe even just on the side or on the water cooler, the ideas of say, the sea twirl or the wind wall and those kind of technologies that are On the horizon, maybe that are startups that might become commercialized at some point.
Have you investigate investigated any of those?
Gregory Poulos: We haven’t investigated them officially under contract, that kind of thing. But certainly we’ve seen the announcements. There’s a long history of turbine technologies that have been tried of different types. Nothing to date has yet beat the economics of three bladed upwind, upwind turbine. That, that’s not to say there aren’t some strong advocates for other technologies and that others may in fact come out. We do have the experience in house to evaluate them, but we haven’t looked at those specifically. What you off, what you get when it’s early stage is extremely expensive because it’s one off type stuff.
So until it’s commercially viable, you really have to invest a lot of money to get it off the ground, even if it’s more efficient. It might not make it.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, there’s a lot of hurdles there, right? To new technology. And then, not only is the technology development hurdles, but then you have to get past the commercial and political hurdles in front of it as well.
I think some of those technologies may be, they’re very interesting to watch and to look at. But they’re getting them to a commercial status, as Phil Totaro will tell you from IntelStor getting them commercialized is a lot different than being technologically feasible.
Gregory Poulos: Yeah, are they being used for small wind, say house, household style, or farms, farm scale, or are they being utility scale?
It, for the three bladed upwind turbine, utility scale seems to be prime.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that one of the, one of the big problems here is that what people maybe don’t understand that haven’t seen the whole picture of wind is that yes, like it might be technologically feasible, but then you also have to get the insurance companies to agree that they’ll take this risk on and put it out at a large scale.
And that’s a difficult thing to do when they’re already taking the losses that they do take with the offshore wind that we’re working with today.
Gregory Poulos: Yeah, that’s a standard practice part of due diligence. As you go into financing, or insurance can also get these same reports, you do a turbine technology review.
The less risk is associated, the least risk is associated with small changes from an existing proven technology. If you’re doing something brand new. There’s going to be a risk premium associated with that applied. Basically, you’re going to have to pay more for the money, the loan that you’re going to get because of the risk.
And there’ll be other conditions applied which makes it just a more expensive project in the end, the rates of return drop.
Allen Hall: There’s a lot of interesting areas in wind and to just. knowing what’s happening in the wind energy business. And it all starts with you, Greg, honestly, right? So if you don’t know what the wind is, you do not know what your energy production is going to be.
And that’s why people consistently call ArcVera for knowledge and advice on, on, what those projects will look like, Greg, how do people get ahold of ArcVera? How do they contact you? How do they connect up?
Gregory Poulos: They can certainly contact me. I’m just greg.poulos@arcvera.com. And through our website naturally, right?
So there’s an info button there and you can contact us easily through that arrangement. And there’s also direct contact information for various people on our website anytime. Yeah, please, send a note along, I’ll get you, I’ll get people in touch with the right individuals, technology, technical experts at our company to handle their particular problem, wind, solar, or battery storage.
Allen Hall: It’s a great discussion every time you’re on the podcast. We got to touch base in another couple of months. I know there’s a lot happening in wind at the moment, particularly offshore. And as things develop, I want to touch base. And thanks for being on the program. Love to have you back.
Gregory Poulos: My pleasure.
ArcVera CEO Discusses Optimizing Wind Farm Performance and Viability
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
PowerCurve Recovers India AEP, Silent Edge Cuts Noise
Nicholas Gaudern, CTO at PowerCurve, joins to discuss India AEP gains, DragonScale VGs, and Silent Edge noise reduction.
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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow
Allen Hall: Nicholas, welcome back to the podcast.
Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Great to be back.
Allen Hall: So there’s a lot going on at Power Curve, and I saw some news online about Power Curve in India.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: Which is a new development.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, so we’ve been working in India for, for some years now, and we have, uh, more than 100 turbines out there with our equipment on, primarily vortex generators so far.
And what we’re seeing in India is some of the highest AEP gains we’ve ever recorded with our vortex generators And I think a lot of this is being driven by the fact that in certain parts of India, there’s some very unique, uh, environmental conditions, climatic conditions, and there’s parts of the year, like the dry season up in [00:01:00] the north of India, where you’re getting this very sticky dirt accumulating on the blades.
And it’s really quite dramatic when you see the photographs, but that means that the blades are actually starting to, to stall, have flow separation on them.
Allen Hall: I’ve seen pictures of that. Yeah. I was really shocked at the time, uh, ’cause I didn’t know it was just kind of a black, gooey- Yeah … kind of tar-like substance- Yeah, yeah
on the blades, and, uh, it, it was only on there a limited time. As soon as the monsoons come through and the rains hit, it would wash, eventually wash it off. Yes. But while it’s there, you could see the airflow over the blade surfaces. You, you could definitely see separation happening really early on those blades.
Dramatic.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, absolutely, and I think the, um… Like you say, it’s not all year. No. But it doesn’t have to be all year to have a huge impact on, on how many, you know, megawatt hours you’re getting out the other end. So there’s a few months of the year where this problem is particularly severe, maybe sort of December through to February, something like that.
And what we’re finding is that when you see, uh, the power curves for these [00:02:00] turbines, some of them aren’t even hitting rated power. They’re not able to hit rated power because there’s so much flow separation on the blades.
Allen Hall: Wow.
Nicholas Gaudern: And that, I mean, just imagine that. You’ve got a two megawatt turbine, for example.
Maybe it doesn’t cast- get past 1.5 megawatts for this, uh, time of the year. I mean, that’s crazy.
Allen Hall: Does the turbine try to adjust itself when that happens? Because the pictures I s- have seen indicates, like, the turbine is pitching the blades to, ’cause it knows- It can- …
Nicholas Gaudern: what the wind
Allen Hall: speed is- I mean, yeah … and it knows what it should be putting out, and it’s not putting that out.
Nicholas Gaudern: It’s very turbine specific, kind of controller logic specific, but what we see is even the turbines that try to do something, they’re very limited in how much pitch authority they have from the controller. They might be able to just do a little bit, a degree. Okay. Two degrees. You know, very, very small pitch adjustments.
And when you have this kind of dirt on the leading edges, a degree of pitch ain’t gonna save you really. Um- N-
Allen Hall: no. And I think that’s what we’re seeing. And it’s not gonna get that power back. No, no.
Nicholas Gaudern: No.
Allen Hall: But does it add extra load onto the blade structurally over [00:03:00] time when you do that?
Nicholas Gaudern: In terms of the pitching, or-
Allen Hall: Yeah, in terms of the pitching, where you’re trying to be more aggressive on the angle of attack to get the power out of the turbine.
Potentially. And the winds are still pretty strong, you just, the blades are inefficient.
Nicholas Gaudern: I think it’s one of those things where there’s, there’s so many interconnected items with the dirt and the controller and the structure. It’s actually pretty difficult, I think, to say with confidence how much life impact you would have from that.
But what I would say is the more that you might end up trying to pitch, if that’s what’s going on on some machines, that obviously puts wear on the pitch bearings themselves. But yeah, I think at the moment we’re kind of at the beginning of really trying to understand how some of these turbines do deal with this phenomenon.
But what we’re trying to do is get to a point where the turbine doesn’t really have to deal with it. Because if you fix the problem at the source, which is stop the flow separating, then the controller doesn’t really have to, to worry. It doesn’t have to try to, to fix it itself.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That makes a lot more sense.
Just the number of images I’ve seen over the last couple years from India-
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:04:00] Yep …
Allen Hall: you realize how difficult it is to operate a wind turbine there.
Nicholas Gaudern: So even when we, um, have this issue for a few months that we’re resolving with the VGs, we can still be seeing over the whole year more than 5% increases in annual energy production.
Because those months are really important. Um ‘
Allen Hall: Cause that’s when they need the
Nicholas Gaudern: power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. For sure. And this is primarily coming from the vortex generators towards the tips of the blades. So that’s where you’re having this, uh, heavy contamination issue, and that’s where all the power would be produced.
So kind of the outer third of a blade is 50, maybe 60% of the power production of a turbine, maybe closer to 50. So that means that if you have a problem out there, it’s, it’s a big problem in terms of your annual energy production. So-
Allen Hall: Right …
Nicholas Gaudern: the VGs are, what they’re doing is they are, they’re injecting energy back into the flow.
Allen Hall: Redirecting the flow, in a
Nicholas Gaudern: sense. So, so basically you have all this contamination on the leading edge. It’s generating more turbulence. The flow isn’t able to retain, uh, remain attached [00:05:00] across the entire chord length. So the VGs are putting energy back into the flow and allowing it to remain attached all the way to, uh, to the trailing edge.
Allen Hall: So even with the blades are dirty-
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes …
Allen Hall: you get that power out- Exactly … put, that you really desire or-
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah …
Allen Hall: are paying for. Yeah. You, you paid a lot of money for that turbine- Yeah, exactly … you need to get the power out of it.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And-
Nicholas Gaudern: So of course, you know, that suggests that if you had a, a super clean blade, you went and pressure washed it, uh, you would get, uh, an increase in power as well, and that’s true.
You, you- That’s true … you will do. But that’s a one-time thing. Um, so- And
Allen Hall: it’s expensive to do- Yeah … and time-consuming.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. Maybe a few days later, the dirt’s back. So- Sure … you know, it’s not really a sustainable thing for you to be going out washing these blades the whole time. And washing the blades may not be great for the surface of the blade either.
So, you know, a VG is just sat there the whole time. It doesn’t matter if it’s dirt, bugs, erosion, frost, it’ll recover those losses that, that you’re seeing.
Allen Hall: Do the VG installations in a situation like that, [00:06:00] the actual location differ because of the contaminants that are present and the kind of, uh, leading edge effects that you’re seeing?
Do you design it for that environment? Or- Yeah … is every- Oh, you do. So- Yeah, we
Nicholas Gaudern: do. I mean, typ- typically our, our VG arrays are turbine model specific. But in India, we’re finding we’re actually having to be more site specific as well. Oh,
Allen Hall: wow.
Nicholas Gaudern: Because some of this contamination is so severe, we’ve seen that we need to design the VG layout a little bit differently to make sure that we’re giving enough, uh, energy recovery potential when you have these really severe, uh, situations.
Allen Hall: Are you using the AeroVista tool to do that? How do you, how do you quantify the contamination that’s happened on the leading edge at a particular moment or roughly on scale a- and then try to model that? That just seems like a difficult computation.
Nicholas Gaudern: It is. And, um, you know, we’re, we’re getting better all the time.
AeroVista is definitely part of that. So AeroVista’s primary function really is to look at, um- [00:07:00] AEP losses due to structural damages, things like erosion. But actually, erosion behaves very similar to dirt when it comes to, like- It, right … aerodynamic behavior. Yeah. So we can actually use kind of the AeroVista engine to help us understand what is the loss from different levels of contamination.
So we can add contamination levels into AeroVista, as well as, uh, erosion. And we can start to look at, well, what happens if the blade looks like this? What if it looks like this? And then this gets combined with our computational fluid dynamics, our CFD models that we’re running, three-dimensional, two-dimensional.
We sometimes do some aeroelastic modeling as well. So we basically have a big toolbox, and like with any engineering problem, it’s about picking the best tool for the job. So we just go in, and we have all these great tools, and we, we put them together in a workflow that allows us to design the, the best solution for each site that we look at.
Allen Hall: And it’s not India-specific in terms of leading-edge contamination. No. I’ve seen pictures from the US, Brazil, um, [00:08:00] Australia, a number of places where there’s just bugs. Yeah. Right? Those, especially in places where there’s large bugs- Yes. … you kind of get this splatter effect going on. Yeah. And you can have a really contaminated blade surface.
In the US, in the middle of the US, you’ll have grasshopper season, and-
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, absolutely …
Allen Hall: tho- those grasshoppers are big, and they splatter. And they leave a disaster. We’ve seen
Nicholas Gaudern: that in, uh, in the Midwest, for sure. Oh, yeah. Some really, really severe contamination from bugs.
Allen Hall: And you, you don’t think about, as an engineer or a site supervisor, that- All right.
This sort of, uh, grasshopper season that happens is affecting my AEP, but 100% it is. And that stuff is gooey, so if you ever drive through the Midwest in the summertime- … you run through, uh, any kind of insect swarm and try to get it off your vehicle. Yeah. It takes some scrubbing.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. It re- it really does.
And imagine when you’ve gotta go up there for, like, 100-meter diameter rotor.
Allen Hall: Right. ‘
Nicholas Gaudern: Cause that’s quite a challenge. So I think, yeah, they have all these challenges, uh, in terms of environmental conditions, and a lot of people consider aerodynamic [00:09:00] behavior blades quite binary. Either the blade is clean or the blade is dir- Or it’s dirty
or it’s dirty. Right. But it’s this entire spectrum. It’s everything in between, and I think that is kind of a little bit of a different way of thinking about the problem. And then it makes the argument around why to put VGs there kind of, uh, easy to, to answer, because the blade is never really truly clean.
Allen Hall: No. I… Unless it’s right after a rainstorm- Yeah … I rarely see clean blades. Okay, so the … If VGs are going on, are you using the DragonScale VGs to solve some of the India problems, some of the contamination problems?
Nicholas Gaudern: So DragonScale’s not in India yet. That’s something that we’re looking at. So we, um, we got all the tooling finished for DragonScale some months ago now, and we’re shipping DragonScale kits.
Uh- Oh, wow. Okay … not, not to India yet, but they are out in, in the field, and we’re gonna be having some more out just in the next couple of weeks, actually, which is quite exciting. We’re doing our first project, um, in Canada.
Allen Hall: Oh.
Nicholas Gaudern: So we’re starting to kinda come across the, the pond with the VGs now, [00:10:00] with the DragonScale VGs.
Allen Hall: So the DragonScales, uh, uh, uh, thank you for bringing a, a sample here today, but the, the DragonScales are really interesting in terms of just the way the airfoil shapes are and how they’re s- kinda stacked and layered- Yeah … and there’s different depths to them, heights to them, to get the flow back where you want it to.
Yeah. And it, I guess it depends on where you are on the blade. If you’re near the root, they’re gonna look something like this. Exactly. Yep. If you’re getting near the tip, they’re
Nicholas Gaudern: much
Allen Hall: smaller- Yeah, we have some smaller ones. Yep … scale, scale of this. So- This then, the Dragon Scales do require a little bit of computational knowledge of what’s going on- Yep
with the blade. And as you say, they- You just can’t willy-nilly stick
Nicholas Gaudern: them on … they’re, they’re quite different. You know, they’re quite different from a standard triangle of VG.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: And, you know, there’s lots of ways that you can create a vortex aerodynamically. And triangles- Sure … create a vortex, sure, but they, they really create one through a process of separation.
Yeah. You have a flow hitting this, this plate that’s angled to the flow. It’s rolling over the top, and it’s tripping into a, into a vortex. But that’s quite a draggy way [00:11:00] of- It is … creating a vortex. Yes. Um, so VGs work. We’ve seen that. You know, we have more than 2,000 turbines now with VGs, so we, we know they work.
Yeah. But Dragon Scale, the whole idea is not that we … This is still a VG. It’s still creating a vortex. Sure. But it’s doing it in a much more efficient manner, so we get the same lift recovery benefits, lift boosting benefits, but at a much lower drag. So we have a better drag ratio. ‘Cause it’s the drag, right?
Allen Hall: It’s the drag. The little triangular-
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah …
Allen Hall: vortex generators are draggy.
Nicholas Gaudern: So anything you stick on a blade, it, it has a drag. It has a parasitic drag component. Um, they have a huge benefit that outweighs that. That’s why we put them on.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: But of course, you can always do better. And I think here we really try to take inspiration from, from lots of the aerodynamic developments we’ve seen over the past decades in aviation and motorsport and, and these other disciplines.
Allen Hall: Right. I always say these look like a Formula One
Nicholas Gaudern: add-on. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. A bigger blade. Or maybe some front slats of a aircraft or some, uh, gas turbine cascading elements- Oh, sure.
Allen Hall: Yeah …
Nicholas Gaudern: these
Allen Hall: kind of things. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: Gas turbine people would easily recognize this. Yeah, [00:12:00] I
Nicholas Gaudern: think so.
Allen Hall: Uh, so the, the Dragon Scales then in terms of, uh, the location of them on the blade, would it differ than the triangular VGs in terms of generic location?
A, a
Nicholas Gaudern: little bit, but broadly it’s the same because- Okay … you know, ultimately the fundamental physics of what we’re trying to do hasn’t changed.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Nicholas Gaudern: Um, so we’re kind of, we’re addressing the same areas of the blade. But the Dragon Scale gives us a bit more flexibility. We can have these three fin versions that create a very powerful vortex, so we find those down in the root, ’cause that’s where we just want as much lift as possible.
Right.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, but out at the tip we actually have a two fin variant. Oh. Because there we’re, we’re more focused on L over D. We wanna maximize our lift-to-drag ratio.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Nicholas Gaudern: Because that’s where the drag really hurts you, out towards the tip.
Allen Hall: So are they in a strip form then? Yes. Very similar to the triangular VGs?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. So the, the smaller ones on the strip, just because they’re only, like, five millimeters high.
Allen Hall: Yeah. They wanna
Nicholas Gaudern: see more- So otherwise it’s, it’s kind of watchmaking if they’re individual- … little pieces, uh, going down on the blade. O-
Allen Hall: okay. Yeah. Well, that’s fascinating. All right. Uh, I wanna talk about [00:13:00] Silent Edge before I, I lose you today.
The Silent Edge product has been out in the field- Mm-hmm … and there has been some noise testing done, which I always think is very interesting because I’ve- Yeah … I’ve watched videos from, mostly from DTU, explaining how they do this, where they got the microphones around. And like- Yes … wow, that’s a really complicated test to go pull off.
But you just got through a series of these-
Nicholas Gaudern: We did …
Allen Hall: noise tests with Silent Edge. And you have the results back.
Nicholas Gaudern: We do, yeah. I mean, it was a really exciting, um, test program, and we were partnered together with, uh, Statkraft, who very kindly lent us a few of their wind turbines up in Sweden. Uh, and we are working with the Danish Technical University, DTU Wind, to help with the measurements and actually figure out what’s going out on the turbine.
So this was a project that we were, um, able to secure some funding from, from the Danish, uh, EUDP. So that’s the Energi [00:14:00] Teknologisk Udviklings- og Demonstrationsprogram.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. Nothing to do with the EU. It’s a very, it’s a Danish thing. Danish, yeah. But there is EU in the name. Right. Um, so they supported this project with Statkraft and DTU, and what we found is that when we put a Silent Edge on a, uh, it was like a two, two and a half megawatt machine, it had no serrations before.
Okay.
Allen Hall: So we measured- So just a out of the factory blade.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly, and it was in good condition. It had had a recent repair campaign, so the blade was in, in good shape. And then what we did, uh, or what DTU did, is they went out and they measured the noise of this turbine according to the IEC standard.
So there’s an IEC standard on how you should measure noise and what microphones to use and how to post-process it, and then we installed the Silent Edge serrations. And firstly, before we’d even done any measurements, we had people out at site, and they, they live out there. They’re the technicians. They see these- Okay
turbines every day, and they went, “What, what have you, what have you done to, to this turbine?” Because it sounded so different. It sounded much [00:15:00]quieter. The, the quality of the sound was very different, and they just, they just stepped out the car and went, “Wow.” “This is, this is really impressive.” Um-
Allen Hall: So what, give me a description of what the sound is.
I know generally, when you come with a standard blade, it has that kind of shoop, shoop-
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly … shoop. It basically just really brings down that perceived loudness of the sound, so it’s just a m- it’s a much quieter sound, and we’re also taking out quite a lot of low frequency component.
Allen Hall: Okay.
Nicholas Gaudern: That’s what- These serrations are really targeting the lower frequencies, so kind of around the kilohertz and, and under.
Allen Hall: Mm.
Nicholas Gaudern: That’s where these things are really starting to bring down the, um, the decibels.
Allen Hall: This- So, okay. So Silent Edge is, uh, sort of a unique design, or is a unique design i- in terms of the- What you see on the typical trailing edge, which are a bunch of triangles or dino tails, right? Yes, dino tails. Yes,
Nicholas Gaudern: yeah.
Allen Hall: Dino tails is, was the generic term for years, and they looked like dino tails, so, so it’s a good description- Yeah … of them. But these more, look more like a cathedral in
Nicholas Gaudern: a sense. Yeah, these, these are quite different though. So we have kind of this iron-shaped, uh, tooth fundamentally, [00:16:00] but we have three different tooth sizes, uh, and they’re asymmetric.
Allen Hall: Mm.
Nicholas Gaudern: And I would love to come here and tell you that we know exactly how this works. Um, but I can’t unfortunately, and, and that’s just how it is sometimes with engineering. We cannot simulate this in the detail required to really understand exactly why each geometric feature does what it does. And if someone claims they can do that, then, then I may be a bit suspicious.
Or, or I’d really like to talk to them, one of the two. Um, but that means that to develop this kind of product successfully, you have to go to the wind tunnel. Okay. Because the simulation is so demanding. So we go to the wind tunnel. We spent a lot of time in the Paul Ricard wind tunnel at DTU, so we can measure aerodynamics and acoustics at the same time And we went with lots of components and 3D prints, and we iterated through design paths, and we came up with this, I think it’s a really wonderful shape we’ve ended up with.
And it was proven out in the field because the final result was we reduced the overall sound [00:17:00] pressure level of the turbine by five decibels. And that is- Whoa … that is huge.
Allen Hall: That’s a lot.
Nicholas Gaudern: So in terms of, like, perceived, uh, loudness of the sound, that’s like a 30% reduction. So this is why the, the technicians who st- stepped out the car heard such a difference, because it’s a massive reduction in, in what the turbine produces.
So
Allen Hall: you’re lowering the decibels coming off the, the trailing edge. Yeah. But also moving around the frequencies so it’s a little less-
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, so a lot of that- … uh- That… So the- …
Allen Hall: noticeable
Nicholas Gaudern: also … the five decibels, that’s, that’s this OASP, or we call it overall sound pressure level. This is an integration of all of the reductions we see across the frequency spectrum.
Oh,
Allen Hall: okay.
Nicholas Gaudern: All right. So we’re getting more reduction at lower frequencies. Right. Good. There’s also some high frequencies. But the lower frequencies matter more. So what we do when we’re doing acoustic measurement is we A-weight, we, we weight the, the noise because it relates to how the human ear perceives sound.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Nicholas Gaudern: So it matters more to you, the one [00:18:00] kilohertz frequency than the 20 kilz- kilohertz frequency.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Can’t hear
Nicholas Gaudern: 20 kilohertz. E- exactly. So that’s right at the upper end. So we weight the results, and this is part of the ICE standard, to understand how the human ear perceives the sound.
Allen Hall: Oh, wow. Okay.
Nicholas Gaudern: Um, and this is where we get our, our five decibels
Allen Hall: from.
So this, this was really an iterative process then- Yeah … in the DT laboratory. Yeah. Ooh, wow. I didn’t realize that. Mm-mm. I, I figured you had gotten relatively close by computational methods and then- We- … honed it a little bit …
Nicholas Gaudern: we, we come sort of computate… We do a lot of computation around the angle of the serrations, because the angle of the serration is really critical for, uh, lift generation and loads.
Allen Hall: So when you’re speaking of angle, you’re talking about- E-
Nicholas Gaudern: exactly … this angle back here at the- You can see that angle there. Okay.
Allen Hall: Yeah,
Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. Because you don’t want to put a serration on a turbine and add 20% to the lift of the blade. Right. No. Because-
Allen Hall: That’s not- …
Nicholas Gaudern: lift means loads. Yeah.
Allen Hall: You know? Right. You’re adding load.
Nicholas Gaudern: So you have to be very careful about how you design these products to make sure that you’re not gonna add extra load to the turbine. And, and on the flip side, you also don’t wanna reduce lift significantly, which then [00:19:00] there’ll be less power produced. So it’s a bit of a balancing act, and this is where the computation comes in.
We do a lot of CFD on these to make sure that we’re, we’re handling the loads correctly.
Allen Hall: And how important is the material choice- Yeah … in terms of the noise quieting? Is there a little bit to it about, well, one, durability. Yeah. You, you want to put them on once and leave them forever, so there’s a lot of interactions between the air and these parts that are gonna flex and bend, and you got- I think there’s, you know-
20 years of
Nicholas Gaudern: doing
Allen Hall: that …
Nicholas Gaudern: the, you’ve, you’ve s- you’ve hit the, hit the nail on the head there. The durability is critical. Yeah. It doesn’t matter if you put these products on the blade, and they perform beautifully for six months and then fall off or, or snap or whatever.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: So no, we, we make these products out of the same material as our VGs, and this is a material, uh, it’s an ASA, uh, plastic.
And we’ve had these out in the, in the field for a long time now, so we know- It’s- … this, this is great.
Allen Hall: It’s ex- it’s kind of a flexible material.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, there’s
Allen Hall: a little b- It’s stiff but flexible.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly. There’s a bit of give in there- Yeah … uh, which is important, but it’s very impact-resistant. Uh, it doesn’t really suffer much in terms of [00:20:00] UV aging, which is obviously critical- Oh, wow.
Yeah … when you’re, when you’re- Very critical, yes … out in the field. Yes. So yeah, we’re, um, we’re really happy with the material choice because we know from all our other campaigns with VGs that they last. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sun, rain, ice, snow. These products can survive out in the field for 20 years.
Allen Hall: That’s one of the things I’ve noticed, uh, looking at a lot o- of blade photos with OEM trailing edge serrations. That the little triangles on the back edges break off.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And I think- There’s
Allen Hall: a lot of them. I was shocked on
Nicholas Gaudern: some sites. One thing you have to be very careful as well is, is lifting and handling as well.
Oh. So, you know, sometimes if these products are installed in the factory, then how do you safely transport that blade and lift that blade?
Allen Hall: You really can’t.
Nicholas Gaudern: So in some ways it’d be better if you put them on at site, but obviously I, I know that’s not always possible. No. So we’re typically acting, um, as, you know, a retrofit.
Mm-hmm. So in that sense we, we minimize a lot of that risk of the, the transport and handling that the OEMs may have to deal with.
Allen Hall: So [00:21:00] what’s next for Power Curve? What’s h- happening this summer?
Nicholas Gaudern: So we’re gonna be really pushing to get Silent Edge and Dragon Scale out in the field more. Yeah. Um, Dragon Scale is, is really exciting, and we’re gonna get our, our first, uh, turbines in different countries equipped with these products.
And Silent Edge, uh, we’re currently putting some of the finishing touches on the, um, the tooling, the injection molding tooling. So the part we have in front of us, this is actually one that we had in the wind tunnel. So this one here is a 3D print. A very nice 3D print. Oh, yeah, it’s- Uh, it’s had vapor smoothing on it, so the surface- It is really smooth
is, is super nice. And you can put these out in the field. So the, the trial with Statkraft was actually with 3D-printed components. If you wanna do a trial for a few months, it’s very possible to do it with 3D prints. Oh. And I, I think they’d actually last way, way longer than that, but, you know, the test was designed to put them on, measure them, take them off again.
Yeah. And that’s what we did.
Allen Hall: Offshore.
Nicholas Gaudern: Mm.
Allen Hall: Uh, uh, w- we’ve had some people write into the podcast talking about offshore wind turbines. And in the States, offshore wind turbines are [00:22:00] usually 10, 15, 20 miles from the shore, but that’s not always the case. Over in Japan and some other areas, the turbines are pretty close to shore.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, def- They’re
Allen Hall: almost-
Nicholas Gaudern: They’re definitely near-shore …
Allen Hall: they’re almost- Yeah. Yeah, yeah … onshore turbines, but because they’re offshore, they get really big, right? So y- you can build a really big offshore turbine. And some of the comments we have received is, “Hey, these turbines are noisy.”
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And, you know, the, the water surface can do some weird things-
Allen Hall: Well, that’s what I wanted to know
acoustically. Okay. Yeah. That’s what I wanted to know- Yeah. Yeah … because if you have trees and hills that kind of block the noise- Yeah … that’s easy. But if you have a turbine and you live on the, essentially the beach- Yep … or real close to the shore- Yeah … that turbine is right there. In some cases in Japan, it’s not very far.
Yeah. You can see it.
Nicholas Gaudern: Particularly on a still day, you know, when you have a very flat water surface, that can mean that sound is able to propagate a little bit further than maybe it otherwise would.
Allen Hall: So is there a, a real need then to pay attention to the acoustics and noise- Yeah … coming off of offshore wind turbines?
Nicholas Gaudern: [00:23:00] I think, uh, c- certainly the near-shore, the things you’re describing now. Yeah. Offshore’s an interesting question because I think often, if I think about the UK and, and Denmark, they are quite offshore, and I think in that, in that sense, the noise is much less of a, a concern. And I think it may be more driven by regulatory r- requirements- Mm-hmm
than actual, you know, neighbor complaints perhaps. So noise is interesting because people put serrations on for different reasons. Yeah. Some put them on because there’s a regulation. Yeah. Uh, some put them on because they want to be shown to being a good neighbor, you know, doing the best they can to reduce noise- We should
Allen Hall: try to-
Nicholas Gaudern: which we should absolutely be doing …
Allen Hall: do that every time we can.
Nicholas Gaudern: And some are doing it because they have curtailment on their turbines.
Allen Hall: Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: So in order to meet a regulation perhaps, they have to basically turn down the turbine, and it means that it spins slower. And if it spins slower, the noise is lower, sure.
But the power output is also lower. And what we found is that on some turbines that are in noise modes, they’re losing 3, 4, 5% AEP- Ooh. Ouch … [00:24:00]every year because they’re having to turn down the turbine to meet a regulation or to, to satisfy, you know, uh, neighbor relationships. But just imagine what that means for finances if you put a serration on.
You can turn the turbine up again, which you’re now addressing the noise at the source, so you don’t actually have to stop it spinning slower. You’re actually killing the noise where it’s being generated.
Allen Hall: So there’s a big financial incentive- Yes … to look at trailing edge and try to quiet them as much as you can, particularly onshore.
I think that case has- Yeah … been well made over time. I’m always shocked that a lot of operators that, uh, even in the US Midwest, and we s- we drive around quite a bit in the Midwest, there’s a lot of turbines that are near homes.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah,
Allen Hall: absolutely. Y- you know, there’s one or two or three homes. This isn’t like there’s a suburb right there, but there are homes out there, and, and they would like to have enjoyment of their property.
Yeah, of course. And if you can knock down the noise a little bit, it would make it
Nicholas Gaudern: a much more pleasant place. Well, if you take, you know, if you take 30-plus percent off the perceived loudness, that’s, you know-
Allen Hall: Oh, that’s very noticeable … that’s gonna, that’s gonna make a difference. Yeah, you’ll get a thank you letter- Yeah
for [00:25:00] sure. So that’s exciting. The- Yeah … all this is exciting. It- It’s
Nicholas Gaudern: gonna be, it’s gonna be a really great summer, I think, to get more of these components out in the field.
Allen Hall: So if, uh, an operator or an asset manager wants to get ahold of Power Curve, understand what Silent Edge is, and how to get it installed or put some dragon scales on this season, how do they do that?
Nicholas Gaudern: So you can check out our website, uh, powercurve.dk. That has all of our contact details on. Uh, you can find me on LinkedIn, uh, as well. I’m often around these, uh- … events that we find- Yeah … uh, in different countries. So no, look, look us up, reach out by email, phone, whatever, and we’d be very happy to talk to you.
Allen Hall: Or reach out to the India office.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes, that’s something that we’re hoping to have up and running, uh- So
Allen Hall: if you’re
Nicholas Gaudern: in India- …
Allen Hall: later this year. Yeah. Reach out. Yeah, that, that’s gonna be an exciting advancement. Yeah. Great. For
Nicholas Gaudern: sure.
Allen Hall: Nicholas, it’s great to have you on the podcast again.
Nicholas Gaudern: Nice talking to you, [00:26:00] Allen.
I saw an interview earlier today, in which a TV news journalist (I forget which one) predicted that the threat of communism is going to be the central theme of the Republican leading up to the midterm elections.
This makes sense, given that the target audience is largely unaware that:
In the 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy led this nation through a nightmarish effort to imprison anyone with any ties to communism. This is now regarded as one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S. history.
and
There are dozens of social democracies around the globe that offer the citizens extremely high qualities of life. The countries at the top of the World Happiness Rankings are, in order,
- Finland (Score: 7.764)
- Iceland (Score: 7.540)
- Denmark (Score: 7.539)
- Costa Rica (Score: 7.439)
- Sweden (Score: 7.255)
- Norway (Score: 7.242)
- The Netherlands (Score: 7.223)
Now, many MAGA folks can’t find Finland on a map of the world, but it’s that very level of ignorance that makes all this horsecrap work.
Trump is working hard to dismantling NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the largest collection of American scientists focusing on climate change. He proposed a budget cut of $1.7 billion, or about 27% for 2026. More to the point, he shut down NOAA’s website, that, formerly, gave everyone on Earth the ability to look at key climate-related data.
In response, those scientists, knowing that we can no longer trust the U.S. government for real climate science, have set up Climate.us.
More here, from NPR.
Looks great to me!
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