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GE Vernova Q3 Results, Offshore Wind Struggles Worldwide
Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda discuss the IEA’s 27% cut to offshore wind forecasts, GE’s wind financials, and Ming Yang’s revolutionary 50MW dual-rotor turbine. Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar!
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here’s your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wintery Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Rosemary’s in Australia on her way to Sydney and Yolanda Padrone is here on site at a wind farm in Texas and there has been a, a number of news articles this week. Joel’s over actually in Copenhagen enjoying, uh, the sites and sounds of that great city, the International Energy Agency slash its five year offshore wind growth forecast by.
Are you ready for this? 27% citing policy shifts, obviously in the United States and [00:01:00] project cancellations across Europe and Asia. The big one in Asia is the Japan’s Mitsubishi pulling out a couple of projects there when costs, um, more than doubled according to them. And Denmark is changing from, uh, negative bidding auctions in favor of contracts for different, so there has been a, a big pullback in offshore wind.
It’s not zero, you know, it’s not going to zero at any time. I think there’s just a lot of projects that appear to be reassessing the interest rate environments, the ability to get turbines, the cost of ships, everything. And rosemary in Australia, it does seem like there’s been a little bit of a pullback there too for offshore wind.
Uh,
Rosemary Barnes: yeah. I mean it’s, it’s hard ’cause we’re still like in such a, just a nascent part of the. Industry. It’s still really far from clear whether we need or are going to get any offshore wind at all. Victoria has some pretty solid commitments to it. The government [00:02:00] does so. That’s probably as close as, um, anything to being certain that we’ll get some offshore wind.
But, um, probably we’ve all learned, America has shown us that a political com commitment is not as, you know, a government commitment is not as locked in as what we probably would’ve thought it would mean, um, a few years ago. So, yeah, we’ll see. I think Australia is struggling like the rest of the world.
We’re struggling a bit just in general with getting projects to, um, FID and. You know, getting construction actually underway and offshore wind is just like, you know, the same problems but on steroids. So it’s no surprise that you’d be seeing more challenges there. There’s been a few projects that have, um, been canceled or paused, but you know, they weren’t at the point where there were definitely going ahead.
So it’s, you know, like there’s a huge pipeline that makes almost no sense for how many projects there are in planning. Obviously some of them are going to [00:03:00] not go ahead, probably most of them. Um, and yeah, so we’ll, we’ll probably see many more cancellations and I think we’ll see at least a few offshore wind farms and probably those early examples are gonna dictate a bit how easy it is for other people to follow, or how much anyone even wants to follow.
Allen Hall: Well, is it gonna become a case where. Certain countries are, uh, focused on certain energy sources like France and Nuclear, and the UK will be offshore wind, onshore wind, and solar. Germany sort of a mix of everything, coal for a long time and they’ve gone away from nuclear there. But it does seem like every country has its own specialty and is that where we’re headed, that we’re just gonna see the best solution for each particular part of the world?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s really hard to get very decarbonized grids if you specialize too much. Like there. There really isn’t a technology that can just do everything, um, on its own. So, you [00:04:00] know, solar power is very, very cheap, but the sun sets at night. So obviously you’re gonna, at the very least, need some batteries to get you through the evenings if you’re relying mostly on solar power and then wind energy, obviously it’s not windy every day, even in really windy places like Denmark in the uk it’s still, you know, there are wind lulls, so you’re not gonna be able to rely solely on that nuclear power, just kind of chugs along at a fairly, um, you know, constant output.
If you turn it up and down too much, then you’re gonna end up, you need to like overbuild a lot. If you try and size your, your new, your electricity system just based on nuclear meeting, peak load, that’s a whole lot of reactor that’s gonna be not doing much most of the time, aside from the technical complications with being able to turn up and down.
And then even, you know, some of the traditional fossil fuels don’t do a very good job at responding flexibly. Coal power has, you know, similar issues to nuclear and it’s probably even harder to turn up and down. Um, [00:05:00] and then I guess gas is gas Peakers could, you could probably do everything with gas peakers if you want it.
They can turn on and off very quickly. But, uh, the. Gas picker plants are not very efficient. So there’s very high fuel costs and not to mention the, um, climate impact of just burning gas all the time and all of the, um, upstream emissions that come from a gas system. So I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to specialize too much, but of course, every country has technologies that they’re familiar with and comfortable with.
It’s never gonna be the sensible engineering decision to just go all in on one technology.
Allen Hall: Will batteries be the connector? For most of these technologies, and I bring this up because there’s been a lot of more recent discussions about data centers and Yolanda hop in here too because, uh, you work for an operator that was involved with batteries.
But the more, and I’ve been following this relatively closely the last month in doing more and more research in it, but like the, the [00:06:00] Colossus two that Elon’s building in Tennessee, there’s a big part of that distribution. From generation to delivery to the AI data center is a massive amount of batteries because of the up down nature of that load that they need a buffer.
Well, we see more batteries be deployed because of the AI data centers. And is that, can that be leveraged the other way to help balance out a grid that does have a lot of solar? It does have a lot of wind because the data centers are gonna be generically spread around. Countries.
Yolanda Padron: Yeah. Uh, yeah, I think it’s, it, the data centers should definitely, I, I mean, it does look like everything’s trending, right?
To have them, um, include batteries as part of their, of their scope to be able to balance everything out. I know we’re seeing, especially in the us like a lot of the, um, the behind the meter [00:07:00] projects coming online and taking advantage of the, the wind and solar, but. For those rolls where we might not get the perfect generation that they need to be able to exist.
Right. Like the batteries will definitely, uh, be that bridge, uh, to fill the gap there.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And even in the Colossus case where they have gas turbine generation and they’ve taken over an old power plant that was across the river in um, Mississippi, they’re still putting massive batteries in rosemary.
Because the data centers are, I think the consumption has always been that data centers are gonna be this kind of constant power input and that the computers are all gonna be working at maximum all the time. But what they’re finding is that it is not because they’re being trained at their moving up and down from like 10% of capacity to a hundred percent.
So the grid’s not made for that?
Rosemary Barnes: No. I mean, uh, the, the grid’s [00:08:00] not, I mean, when did the, was the grid. Designed or was it even designed, you know, like a hundred years ago and we kind of just, um, patched, patched it together as we needed to. It’s not like there, there wasn’t some yeah, like type of load that the grid was designed for.
People have always just made do with what they had available and then adapted to the characteristics of that. I mean, I don’t know, do you have off peak water heaters in the US because in Australia we have like, you can get a separate, a separate. Signal coming to your house that will turn on and off, uh, your electric water heater in off peak times.
And in the past, like traditionally, that was always overnight and it was specifically done. Like we specifically put all of this infrastructure in place to do that because there needed to be something to use the electricity that coal power plants were generating overnight. So, you know, like it was, um, you, you take what you can get as far as electricity generation and then you, you use it in the most effective way that you can come up with.
Allen Hall: Let me understand that for a minute because I’ve never heard of [00:09:00] this before, and I, I, we, you and I have been talking about energy for 20 odd years at this point, but, so they would turn on your water heater in your home to act as a load for the coal fired electricity plant.
Rosemary Barnes: You have a separate circuit that has off pa loads on it, which is usually just a hot water heater.
And then you can get, um, at. Different tariff from your electricity provider. There’s the regular and then the off peak timing. ’cause this is before anyone had any smart meters and you actually like, you know, the dumb old meters, they knew how many kilowatt hours you had used in a quarter, you know, but they didn’t know hourly.
Um, so this was a way that you could give a cheaper rate for people to heat their hot water. Overnight when there wasn’t enough natural load to be able to use up all of what the coal power plants needed to keep on putting out. ’cause you can only turn them down to a certain base load. Makes sense to use resources efficiently, like of course it does.
Um, that’s why it’s, I just find it really [00:10:00] weird how, um, like really. Emotionally upset, but people get really, get their feelings hurt by the idea that the energy transition might mean that you would change your behavior based on, um, you know, like what the, uh, electricity generation happened to be like that day, but it’s always been done.
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GE Re Nova’s Wind Business’ Engineering. Somewhat of a comeback and a third quarter. Results came out today as we record and revealed, uh, EBITDA losses narrowing to just $61 million from 317 million a year ago. An improvement of over 1000 basis points, which means 10%. Uh, the turnaround strategy, from what I could tell, is starting to work.
The wind services for onshore wind is up by 50. 3%, uh, in offsetting some equipment, uh, payments. And then the CEO Scott Straza emphasized that the company’s focused on profitability over volume with better pricing and reduced offshore contract losses, driving the improvement. They’re still waiting for a payment, it sounds like, from one of the cancellations.
Of around $500 million. So that’s still hanging out there. I wonder who that is. Uh, [00:12:00] but, uh, the, the booked orders this quarter are slightly down for wind. In general, GE thinks, Renova thinks they’re gonna close out Dogger bank and vineyard wind in 2026, which is sort of what we’ve been talking about on the podcast.
It’d be hard to finish both of those this year. So this is sort of a positive sign in, in, in terms of the larger GE with all the electrification and grid, uh, and gas turbines that GE is selling. There’s a huge upside there. Although the market was not particularly happy with this announcement today, I think it dropped a couple of percentage points.
Although since becoming a separate company, they’re up like 300%. It’s crazy. So if you invested on that opening day, which was like what, back in April a couple of months ago, you have done extremely well and I, is there hope for the onshore wind market for GE in the us or is it mostly [00:13:00] going to be. Yolanda, is it gonna be overseas?
Is that where GE needs to go right now because of the slowdown in us,
Yolanda Padron: I think until things for when stabilize a bit more in the US it’ll have to be outside of the us Right. Like their, like you mentioned, their current model relies a lot on having, I mean working a lot more on repairs and everything than actually building new sites.
Um, and I think. We’ve talked about wind in the US maybe ramping down a little bit while everything stabilizes a bit more for that. Yeah, I think it, it makes sense for GE to, to look elsewhere for now.
Allen Hall: Is there a stabilization of the marketplace coming? I know a lot of the talking heads and the, the banking units and if you listen to podcasts, financial podcasts, they’re saying, well this is really good for wind and solar to go through this little period of, uh, becoming more efficient.
And I [00:14:00] think. Uh, the prices of wind turbines have dropped pretty well and solar have dropped a lot. The, the industry is very efficient at the moment. It really has more to do with financing, from what I can tell.
Rosemary Barnes: Wind energy, is it cheaper in the US than it was like two years ago, three years ago, five years ago?
Allen Hall: Yeah. So because you’re generally putting up fewer turbines ’cause the turbines get larger and that they’re more efficient. Right. Um, the. They’re designed more specifically for the winds in a particular area, like low wind and middle wind conditions. I think overall they have been more efficient and as you know, having worked at LM every penny counts.
Rosemary Barnes: Maybe I have the opposite beauty to you. I’m having a, a bit of a, I don’t know, slump in my optimism. I’m, in general, I’m a naturally pessimistic person and um, it’s one of the reasons. That I work in, the energy transition is because I actually feel much more optimistic about progress the more that I, I [00:15:00] know about it.
But at the moment, wind energy, I, I, I’m pretty sure it is not accurate to say wind energy is cheaper, getting cheaper in Australia. It’s costing more. To put turbines in in Australia than it used to. And then I’m also super cynical about, you know, the efficiency savings and cost savings, especially of big companies like ge because what I see is them, they, uh, you know, have a bunch of quality problems from, you know, the work that they were doing in the late 20 teens, um, maybe, yeah, early 2020s.
Bunch of quality problems. So then that costs money. ’cause you know, you’ve got warranties to pay out on and um, things to fix and sales that get canceled. And it seems to me like their solution to that. Their money saving is we’ll just fire most if not all of the engineers. So that’s really good way to save money this year, but it’s not very good way to make sure that you don’t have more warranty problems next year and the year after.
Not a good way to make sure that you’re [00:16:00] able to. Uh, you know, come up with solutions to problems in a timely manner. It’s kind of like, is this the beginning of the end? Because once they’re gone, how do you get them back? I mean, maybe in one or two years time, it’s gonna be an amazing time to be a blade engineer because, um, you know, everyone will be, will be desperate, desperate for, for you.
But it’s, um, uh, I, I, I don’t, I, I can’t get on board with the, you know, the efficiency gains that like, that we’re seeing at the OEMs at the moment.
Allen Hall: I know you’re just a wee kindergartner when the year 2000 was around, but if you think about 20 years ago, there was, at least in the United States, no one was thinking about wind and really few people were thinking about solar and maybe unless you lived in California.
But today, solar is everywhere. You can drive down the street and see solar in most places, and wind is in a lot of parts of the United States and the world at the same time. So. The amount of growth in the industry in the last 20 years has been truly [00:17:00] remarkable. And to say it’s gonna go through some cycle, I think is normal.
Every industry goes through booms and busts.
Rosemary Barnes: I think in the past it was more of a manufacturer by manufacturer basis, so you know, vest would have some quality problems and then they would, you know, get it back under control and a few years later they’re fine Again. LM had quality problems and then got it back under control.
And you, like I said, it kind of cycled through. But now, like who is not having blade problems at the moment? Nobody. I honestly, I don’t. I, I don’t think there’s anybody not having, having problems at the moment. Um, and yet people are laying off more engineers than they’re hiring, that’s for sure. By, like, by a significant margin.
What I think that the industry needed was to do a better job of selling the same platform over and over and over again, so that it got really well known, and then moving up to the next one. After sufficient testing of new [00:18:00] features, then, you know, move up to a new platform and sell a lot of that. Use less engineering by having less design.
Yeah, less designs that you are trying to support at the same time, less new designs that you’re trying to develop. That’s the way to reduce the cost you’re spending on engineering, not to continue to have, you know, millions of different designs and features and constant, constant growth for the sake of growth.
Um, maybe that’s a segue into the next topic. Um, but you know, like you can’t do that without a whole lot of engineering. So it is like, you know, you, you choose, either you have heaps of engineering and heaps of innovation, or you kind of just, um, settle down and do one thing really well, and then you can have less engineering
Allen Hall: as wind energy professionals.
Staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues [00:19:00] facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES Wind has the high quality content you need.
Don’t miss out. Visit PS wind.com today while the contrast couldn’t be starker while Western manufacturers struggle, as Rosemary has pointed out. China’s been Yang. Spart Energy Group is preparing the world’s most powerful wind turbine, a two-headed 50 megawatt giant that. Dwarfs anything that’s currently operating, uh, production supposedly begins next year at a facility in Guangdong Province.
Uh, Ming Yang plans off of this tournament at below $1,400 per kilowatt. So remember we’re talking about Rosemary and the price per kilowatt is going down where the Ming Yang is truly really trying to drive it down. If, if you look at the. Numbers in comparison to European manufacturers, that’s a pretty low number.
Even in comparison to existing Chinese manufacturers. That number is still like a 20% [00:20:00] discount.
Rosemary Barnes: Is that the price that you would get it for a project in Europe? So with, um, you know, IAC certification ’cause I know that they work to a different certification standard in, in China and that it costs a bit more to, um, have it, you know, designed to pass the.
The is a stunt that everybody else uses.
Allen Hall: Exactly. So the question is, and going back to the engineering thing, it’s a two-headed turbine. So it’s got that V platform, it’s an offshore floating turbine of course. And it’s got that V connection and it’s got two heads, two uh, the cells, and two massive rotors on it.
That has to have a lot of engineering behind it. I hope it does. They haven’t built one.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s, uh, so they’ve done, they’ve done some parts of it before. I mean, they’ll make like a really, a really huge offshore turbine, but it’s not like there are. Hundreds or thousands of 25 megawatt turbines out there in the ocean.
There are not hundreds or thousands [00:21:00] of floating wind turbines of any kind in the ocean, and there are not hundreds or thousands of, um, multi rotors of that, you know, v design that they’ve done. So it’s three, it’s three really big hard things or combined in one. Um, and yeah, it’s a big. A big step before they probably, they probably don’t know the, all of the, the risks and failure modes of any of those three individual things.
And now they’re gonna combine them and get new, new problems from combining things together. So. It will be for sure. A lot will be learn from this. Um, I, it seems like too big of a step to be like, yeah, you’re gonna be able to order one of these and have a gigawatt wind farm with these put in and, you know, 2028.
That’s not within this realm of reality. But as a learning exercise, I mean, that’s what China does really, really well. They don’t plan to the extent that, um, [00:22:00] Western companies do. They don’t. Get every I dotted and t crossed before they will actually execute on a project. And you can definitely learn way more that way, but with much bigger risks
Allen Hall: in terms of certification and standards.
For a turbine that is non-standard, how many years would it take to create just the specifications and the test process to validate it? I, I think we’re talking about a minimum of. Five years of all the committee meetings, you’d have to have to even get close to having something where like A DNV could put a stamp on it, right?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, there’s a whole bunch of potential failure modes that don’t exist in the turbines that we have today and the standards that we have today. I mean, the standards haven’t even kept up with just regular, like garden variety, one turbine on a stick, three blades, you know, all of that. There’s heaps of, heaps of common failure types that aren’t really covered [00:23:00] by the standard, so.
Um, yeah. I mean, when you get up to, to two turbines and I think that they counter rotate is, is that right? That they’re going opposite direction? I think you need that so that you don’t get funky tower dynamics happening. Um, however, uh, there are still going to be weird things happening with the aerodynamics.
Like di dynamic flow stuff is gonna cause weird things and that causes fatigue is the, you know, the main problem that you get from. Just, you know, just small. It might be, yeah, even just small loads that you didn’t expect in places that you didn’t expect them. Um, and fatigue damage can happen very quickly if it’s a, you know, if it’s a really big, big load.
But if it’s a, just a small but larger than expected load somewhere, it can take two years, five years, 10 years. Um, but then you get fleet wide failure. Um, and so it’s, it isn’t something that it’s very easy to, uh, test for at a scale. You know, with a scale model. So, [00:24:00] you know, in that sense it probably is the right thing to do to build a full sized one as soon as possible and, and learn those things.
You know, it makes me feel uncomfortable because wind turbines are things that people have to climb up in there to install them. People have to climb up in there to maintain them like a lot in the early days, especially with a new system. And so the fact that it could, you know. Fall apart. Risks are reduced if you make sure no one’s climbing it when winds are high.
’cause that’s usually when you’ll see failure. But it’s, it’s still higher than I would feel comfortable with. I wouldn’t like to be climbing inside, um, this turbine ever. Um, but yeah, it, it is. I can’t deny that that is probably the fastest way to, you know, progress technology.
Allen Hall: Alright, Yolanda, if, uh, Rosie’s offshore wind company decides to buy these 50 megawatt wind turbines as an asset manager and thinking about how, [00:25:00] how you would operate these turbines, what would be your top complaints right now?
Or top worries?
Yolanda Padron: Rosie mentioned earlier, right, that it would be in a perfect world. All of this innovation would be driven by engineering. Right? And being able to test these things over and over and over again, and being able to see exactly what problems we’re facing and how we can solve them for the most part.
Right. And just kind of all going up together in getting these, you wouldn’t really know. And we go back to that risk issue, right? You wouldn’t really know. What you’re buying at this point? Me personally, of course it was. If it was Rosie, I’d trust her with my life. So yeah, if Rosie’s doing it, yeah. But anybody else, you know, we won’t, we don’t know what they’re testing.
I mean, you, no one wants to be the Guinea pig,
Allen Hall: right? Well, someone will have to be, if they plan on selling it, someone will have to be the Guinea [00:26:00] pig. But it’s probably an operator in China, or maybe Mi Yang itself will have to deploy them. But. At some point, just listening to the, to the news in Europe, there’s a lot of push to bring in Chinese turbines that don’t have a lot of.
History or verifiable history, doesn’t it just raise the asset risk? I would say, whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down everybody. The finance group, slow down.
Rosemary Barnes: You don’t see a lot of them in, um, Europe or you know, outside of the, um, outside of China yet. And. I mean, I wouldn’t consider it de-risk just because you’d seen a demo turbine turbine in China.
I wouldn’t consider it de-risk because you saw a whole wind farm of these in China, because they do do separate designs for separate, um, geographies. Uh, you know, they, like I said, with the certification, they, they change the design to be able to. To pass that. And, you know, even if you are making it safer, if you’re, you know, adding material, it doesn’t, it doesn’t always mean that it’s becoming more reliable.
Like you have to, you know, the track record [00:27:00] needs to be for the turbine that you’re actually buying, not something that they’ve assured you is very similar.
Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for joining us as we explore the latest in wind energy technology and industry insights.
If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas. We’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe. So if you never miss an episode and if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show and we’ll catch you here.
Next week on the Uptime Window G Podcast.
https://weatherguardwind.com/ge-vernova-offshore-wind/
My personal reaction to Trump flags is more of pity than offense. Life is tough enough without being deprived of a moral compass and even a meager level of intelligence.
In any case, we see such displays in ever-decreasing numbers, as Trump’s approval rating continues to fall, due to the president’s cognitive decline and brazen criminality.
One has to wonder how much more gas Trump has in the tank when he calls those who disapprove of him (especially blacks and women) “low IQ.”
Aren’t we approaching a point when this type of stupidity will cease to be effective?
There must be a bottom of the pit we’ve fallen into.
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
PowerCurve’s Innovative Vortex Generators and Serrations
Nicholas Gaudern from PowerCurve joins to discuss SilentEdge serrations with up to 5 dB noise reduction, Dragon Scale VGs for AEP recovery, and their approach to products that actually perform in the field. Contact PowerCurve on LinkedIn for more information.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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 show.
Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks, Allen. Always a pleasure.
Allen Hall: Well, there’s a lot of new products coming outta PowerCurve. And PowerCurve is the aerodynamic leader in add-ons and making your turbines perform at higher efficiency with less loss. Uh, so basically taking that standard OEM blade and making it work the way it was intended to work.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. We
Allen Hall: like to
Nicholas Gaudern: think so. Yeah.
Allen Hall: And there’s a, there’s a lot of new technology that you’ve been working on in the lab that you haven’t been able to explore to the, introduce to the world, so to speak. Yeah. And we’ve seen some of it from the inside of, you know, you’re working behind the scenes or working really hard to get this done, but now that technology has been released to the world, and we’re gonna introduce it today, some new trailing edge.
[00:01:00] Components. Yeah. That really, really reduce the noise. But they, they look a little bit odd. Yes. There’s a lot of ADON dams going on with
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: With these. So what, what do you call these new trailing edge parts?
Nicholas Gaudern: So, so what you have in your hand here? This is the Silence edge, uh, serration. So this is our new trailing Edge Serration products.
Now, most people, when they think of training restorations, they are thinking of triangles.
Allen Hall: Exactly.
Nicholas Gaudern: These Dino tails. Dino Tails, that’s the Siemens, Siemens name for them. Pretty, pretty standard. You see ’em on a lot of turbines now. Sure. And they work, you know, they do do a job. They do a job. They reduce noise.
But like with lots of things in, in aerodynamics, there’s lots of different ways that you can solve a problem and some are better than others. So we’ve worked for a long, long time in the wind tunnel, uh, in the CFD simulations, and we’ve come up with this pretty unique shape. We think,
Allen Hall: well, the, the, the shape is unique and if you, if you look at it, there’s actually different heights to the, the triangle, so to speak.
To mix the air from the pressure and the [00:02:00] suction side to reduce the, the level of noise coming off the blade
Nicholas Gaudern: e Exactly. So we have, uh, we have an asymmetry to the part. We have these different tooth lengths. We have, uh, a lot of changes in thickness going on across the part. So it may be a little bit difficult to see on the camera, but these are quite sculpted 3D components.
They’re not, they’re not flat stock white triangles. No, no. There’s a lot of thickness detail going on here. We’ve paid a lot of attention to the edges. We’ve paid a lot of attention to these gaps between the teeth as well. So all of this is about trying to figure out what is the best way to reduce noise.
And something that not a lot of people will, will admit, but it’s true, is that as an industry we don’t really understand the fundamentals of how serrations work.
Allen Hall: It’s a complicated
Nicholas Gaudern: problem. It’s a really complicated thing. Problem, yeah. Yes. So trying to simulate it in CFD is an absolute nightmare. The, the mesh sizes required, the physics models required are really, really difficult.
So what we found is that you’re probably better off spending [00:03:00] most of your time and money in the wind tunnel. Yes. So, so we go to DTU, they have this wonderful, uh, air acoustic wind tunnel, the pool of core tunnel. It’s one the best tunnels in the industry for doing this kind of work. It
Allen Hall: is
Nicholas Gaudern: because you can measure acoustics and aerodynamics at the same time.
So this allows us to do a lot of very cost effective iteration for this kind of design work. So we know what’s important. You know, we’ve, we’ve studied all the different parameters of serrations lengths, aspect ratios, angles, thicknesses, all this kind of stuff. And it’s about bringing them together into a, into a coherent product.
So this is, this is a result of a lot of design of experiments, a lot of iteration, and combining wind tunnel and CFD to kind of get the best of both of those tools. So,
Allen Hall: so what’s the. Noise reduction compared to those standard triangular trailing aerations. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: So there’s lots of different ways of, of thinking about noise reduction, but I think probably the most useful is the O-A-S-P-L.
So this is the overall sound pressure level. Right. Is kind of what [00:04:00]typically you’ll be measuring in an IEC test.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s measured in decibels, but a way to decibels because it’s important that we’re waiting to what the human ear can actually hear. Right. Perceive. Exactly. So that’s the numbers we report.
For the field test we’ve recently completed with Silent Edge, we’re seeing up to five decibels of O-A-S-P-L noise reduction.
Allen Hall: Okay. So what’s that mean in terms of what I hear on the ground?
Nicholas Gaudern: So that is an absolutely huge reduction. It’s multiple times of reduction because you know, decibels on a log scale,
Allen Hall: right?
Nicholas Gaudern: So five DB is is enormous. It’s
Allen Hall: a lot. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really interesting is that if you have a turbine that’s running in a noise mode, just one decibel reduction. Of power, sound, sound, power level might be three or 4% P loss. I mean, that, that’s, that’s huge. Think about that loss. So if you need to reduce noise by five decibels to get within a regulation, imagine how much a EP you have to throw away by basically turning down the [00:05:00] turbine to do that.
Allen Hall: That’s right.
Nicholas Gaudern: So that’s really what the, the business case for these kind of products is. It means you can escape noise modes because as soon as you use a noise mode. You are throwing away energy.
Allen Hall: You’re throwing well you’re throwing away profits.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.
Allen Hall: So you’re just losing money to reduce the noise.
Now you can operate at peak.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.
Allen Hall: Power output without the creating the noise where you have that risk. Right. So, and particularly in a lot of countries now, there are noise regulations. Yes. And they are very well monitored.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.
Allen Hall: We’re seeing it more and more where, uh, government agencies are coming out and checking.
Yes. ’cause they have a complaint and so you get a complaint. Oh, that’s fine. Or someone can complain. Yeah. You know, you need to be making your numbers.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And, and the industry needs to be good neighbors, you know? It
Allen Hall: certainly does.
Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, we have to make sure that people are, you know, approving and comfortable with having wind turbines in their backyard.
Sure. And noise is a big part of that.
Allen Hall: It is.
Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah. Ap sure. That’s really important. Being a good [00:06:00] neighbor also important.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: Meeting the regulations. Obviously you have to meet the regulations. So this product, um, has been through a really long development cycle, and we’re now putting the final touches to the, to the tooling.
So this is available now.
Allen Hall: Oh, wow.
Nicholas Gaudern: Okay. Great. Um, and we’re hoping that in the next uh, few months we’ll be getting even more turbines equipped out in the field with, with the technology.
Allen Hall: So, oh, sure. There’s a, you think about the number of turbines that are in service, hundreds of thousands total worldwide.
A lot of them have no noise reduction at all.
Nicholas Gaudern: No. No.
Allen Hall: And they have a lot of complaints from the neighbors.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.
Allen Hall: Trying to expand wind into new areas, uh, is hard because the, the experience of the previous Yes. Neighbor
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.
Allen Hall: Grows into future neighbors. So fixing the turbines you have out in sight today helps you get the next site.
I know we don’t always think about that, but that’s exactly how it works. Yeah, of course. Uh, we need to be conscientious of the people of the turbines we have in service right now. So that we can continue to grow wind [00:07:00] globally and more regulations on noise are gonna come unless we start taking care of the problem ourselves.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep. And another really important thing with Serrations is that you have to design them so that they don’t impact the loads on the rest of the turbine.
Allen Hall: Right. And people forget about that.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: Can you just, can’t just throw up any device up there. And think, well, my blade’s gonna be happy with it. It may not be happy with that device.
Nicholas Gaudern: You have to really carefully understand what the existing blade aerodynamic signature is.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Nicholas Gaudern: How is that blade performing? What is the lift distribution across the span? Yeah.
Allen Hall: Right. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: So what we do, and we, we’ve talked about it before we go and laser scan blades. We build CAD models, we build CFD models so we can actually understand how much lift a blade can take and what’s the benefit or the penalty of doing so.
So these serrations are designed by default to be load neutral. They won’t increase lift. They won’t reduce lift. That’s what
Allen Hall: it should
Nicholas Gaudern: be. That’s where you should start,
Allen Hall: right?
Nicholas Gaudern: And maybe there’s some scope to do something else [00:08:00] on certain turbines, but you shouldn’t, you shouldn’t guess. You, you need to calculate, you need to simulate, you need to think very carefully about that.
So that’s what we do with these, uh, with these serrations, we go through this very careful aerodynamic design process to make sure that they reduce noise and that’s it. They don’t increase loads, they don’t reduce AP by killing lift. And that’s, that’s an important aspect.
Allen Hall: Well, that’s the goal.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes,
Allen Hall: exactly.
I don’t necessarily want to increase power. I don’t wanna put more load in my blade, but people do that. I’ve seen that happen and man, they regret it.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, regret it. There’s, there’s some pretty wild claims out there as well about observations can and can’t do. And uh, like with lots of things, it’s important to just do the simulations, speak to some experts and, um.
Yeah, maybe take the, the less exciting path, you know, sometimes,
Allen Hall: well, no. Yeah. Well, less exciting path where I don’t have a broken blade.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.
Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s a lot less exciting. It’s, it’s definitely more profitable. Now, the Dragon Scale Vortex generator has been [00:09:00] around about a year or so.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep, yep.
Allen Hall: And the thing about these devices, and they’re so unique, interesting to think about because you typically think of a vortex generator as this being this little bit of a fence.
Where you are tripping the air and making it fall back down onto the blade.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yep.
Allen Hall: A really, it works.
Nicholas Gaudern: It works.
Allen Hall: But it’s it’s
Nicholas Gaudern: been around a long time.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Yeah. It, it does, it does do this thing. And they, they were, they came outta the aviation business. We use ’em on airplanes to keep air flow over the control surfaces so we can continue to fly even in close to stall conditions.
All that makes sense. And airplanes are not a wind turbine.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: So there’s different things happening there. So although they work great on on aircraft, they’re not necessarily the most efficient thing for a wind turbine where you’re trying to generate power and revenue from the rotation of the blades.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.
Allen Hall: So this is a completely different way of thinking about getting the airflow back onto the blade where it produces [00:10:00] revenue.
Nicholas Gaudern: And what’s really nice is to actually see this together with silent edge, because historically, and maybe not even historically. Serrations VGs, they’re triangles. They work, they do a job.
But that doesn’t mean you can’t do it in a different way. In a better way.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: And that’s the same principles from applying with Silence Edge and Dragon Scale. We want to work the flow in the most efficient way possible.
Allen Hall: Right. You’re trying to get to an
outcome.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.
Allen Hall: Efficiently.
Nicholas Gaudern: We want to, we want to target very specific things on the blade, and that’s where you can see there’s a few different styles of Dragon Scale that we have on the table here.
We have some that are two fins. We have some that are three fins. We have different sizes, and this is because they’re tailored to different parts of the blade. So these three Fin Dragon scales, their focus is ultimate lift. We are creating a really powerful vortex through this combination of three air foils, if you imagine, um, the inside of a Turbo fan.
You have these cascading air force. [00:11:00] You look at the leading edge slacks on an aircraft. You look at the front wing of a Formula one car. It’s that kind of concept.
Allen Hall: It’s like that,
Nicholas Gaudern: and it’s these air force that are cooperating with each other.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: To end up with a more beneficial result. ‘
Allen Hall: cause an air force by itself does a function, but when you combine airflows together in the right way
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly.
Allen Hall: You can really control airflow efficiently, less losses. More of what you want out the backside. Yeah, exactly. It’s, it’s the backside you’re trying to work on, on a VG or, or dragon scales. You’re trying to create this flow which gets the airflow back onto the blade to create power. We,
Nicholas Gaudern: we want as much attached flow as possible and down exactly down in the roots of a blade.
We have to have really thick aerofoils, you know, blades about round. They’re basically cylinders.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: And that, that’s essential, right? We have to have the blade take a lot of load into the root aerodynamically. They’re horrible.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: So this is where these, uh, these powerful Dragon Scale VGs come into play because what they do is they’re [00:12:00] reenergizing the flow over the aerofoils, and they’re ensuring that that flow remains attached for much, much longer than if those bgs weren’t there.
So down in the root, you’ll get significant boosts to the lift that those sections can generate. And what’s more lift? It goes to more torque, it goes to more power, goes to more a EP. So these dragon scale VGs in the root are there to boost, lift, and boost EP out on the tip of the blade. Things are actually a little bit different because it’s way different.
You shouldn’t really have stall there to begin with if your blade’s been designed well.
Allen Hall: But if you have leading edge erosion exactly. Or some other things that are happening, you can have real aerodynamic problems.
Nicholas Gaudern: So yeah, as soon as you have erosion, uh, maybe your stall margin is not as big as you thought it was.
You’re starting to get some significant losses of lift Yes out towards the tip of the blade. So that’s where these, uh, TwoFin uh, variants come in. So it’s still a dragon scale vg, it’s still the same concept of these cascading error foils. Yeah, but these are [00:13:00] designed for basically ultimate lift to drag ratio.
Mm-hmm. So we don’t really want more maximum lift outta the tip. We kind of have enough, but what we do want is to keep stable attached flow and we want to do it for the less, uh, least drag penalty possible. So basically we want to get rid of as much parasitic drag as we can. These two fin dragon scales, we are seeing 25 plus percent improvements in lift to drag ratio.
Compared to a standard triangle vg. I mean that’s huge.
Allen Hall: That that is really
Nicholas Gaudern: huge.
Allen Hall: That’s huge, right? Because people have seen these, uh, triangular VGs in a lot of places. And one thing I’m noticing more recently is that those VGs, because they’re so draggy, they tend to flutter and they tend to break in just off.
Nicholas Gaudern: Interesting.
Allen Hall: So you’re having this failure mode because this thing is just blocking the air, getting the air to trip.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: It’s not efficient. It does have its downsides ’cause it is. D definitely drag. Just face it, it’s it, is it a draggy [00:14:00] 1940s technology? That’s what it is. Where with the dragon scales, now we’re doing things a lot more efficiently and thinking about how do I get the airflow that the blade designer originally wanted?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes,
Allen Hall: because the blade designer, they’re really intelligent people. They’re, they’re sitting designing blades. But the reality is what you design is on an ideal airflow, and what you have out in service are totally different things. As, as it turns out, the shape of the airflow is not what you think it is because it comes out of the tool and there’s a lot of touching with by humans that are grinding on the leading edges and doing the things that have to be done to manufacture it.
So you don’t really have an ideal blade when it comes out of the
Nicholas Gaudern: No. You
Allen Hall: never do factory. No, you never do.
Nicholas Gaudern: And it’s not polished either.
Allen Hall: It’s not polished. Right. So
Nicholas Gaudern: when you go to the wind tunnel, you have a perfect profile. Yes. And it’s polished. And it works basically. It
Allen Hall: works great. It
Nicholas Gaudern: works great.
Allen Hall: The theoretical and the actual match.
Yeah. In reality they do. I think a lot of operators are not [00:15:00] connected with that reality of, Hey, that Blade should be producing this amount of revenue for me, and it’s not. And you hear that discussion all the time, particularly in the us. It should be producing this amount of power. I’m doing all the calculations.
We are not producing that power. Why? The blade length’s saying, but the power’s not coming out of it. Well take a look at your leading edge, take a look at your yard full of shape and realize you’re going to have to do something like dragon scales to get that E energy. Exactly. Revenue back.
Nicholas Gaudern: You need to do a full aerodynamic health check.
Basically you do. And see what are all the possibilities to improve my blade performance. And some of it is down to the fundamental shape of the blade,
Allen Hall: right?
Nicholas Gaudern: But some of it is down to blade condition. Yes. Blade Blade manufacturing quality.
Allen Hall: Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: Uh, what kind of paint did they put on it? What day of the week was it made?
And all these things can be compensated for by VGs and you’ll get more revenue out at the end.
Allen Hall: You say? ’cause what happens? The, the, the scenario which is hard to visualize unless [00:16:00] you’re an A and emesis, is that there comes on the suction side, and it should be, in a ideal sense, rolling all the way to the back edge of the blade and coming off.
What happens is though, is that. When you get leading edge erosion is that the air flow actually separates. Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: It
Allen Hall: doesn’t
Nicholas Gaudern: always make it, yeah.
Allen Hall: Doesn’t make it to the back edge. Yeah. And so you can see that, especially if, if there’s dirt in the air, you can look on dirty blades, you can see where that separation line is, and a lot of operators have sky specs, images or Zeit view images, and then go back and look at the blades.
It takes two minutes to go. I have
Nicholas Gaudern: particularly down in the root, you’ll see it.
Allen Hall: Oh, in the root all the time. You, you
Nicholas Gaudern: see it really clearly that that separation line
Allen Hall: all the time, you really see that separation line. I’m seeing it more and more up towards the tip. Interesting. That’s where the lightning protection, yeah.
Systems sit.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: I see a lot of airflow that is not front to back on the suc. Well, you
Nicholas Gaudern: have a lot of three dimensional flow out there.
Allen Hall: You do towards the tip you do. And you realize how much power you’re losing there. And I think operators are just throwing away money.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, exactly.
Allen Hall: So you could [00:17:00] put dragon skills on it very efficiently, very quickly.
Get that revenue back into your system and it’s gonna stay. So even if leading edge erosion happens, the dragon scales are gonna compensate for it. It’s gonna get the airflow back where it should be.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. And the nice thing about this is, you know, we are building on well over a decade of upgrading turbines with aerodynamic components.
Oh yes. So this technology stands on the foundations of all of that work. In terms of the materials, the work instructions. Um, the fatigue calculate, you know, everything
Allen Hall: Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: Is built on thousands of installations that we’ve done. Yes. So, although it’s a new technology aerodynamically, it’s not really new in lots of sensors.
Allen Hall: Well, I look at it this way. If you turn on Formula One today and look at what the new generation of cars running around as you look at the, that front. Yes. Uh. Fin. Yeah. What do I call it? Air foil shape in the front. It’s super complicated.
Nicholas Gaudern: The sculpting of the [00:18:00] surfaces is really impressive,
Allen Hall: right? There’s a lot of thought going into those surfaces versus you turn on a Formula One race or go on YouTube and look at a Formula One race from the 1980s.
Yeah, it’s basically a piece.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: To provide down downforce. That’s it. The aerodynamics wasn’t really there, so we come a long way and a lot of that technology that happens in Formula One that happens in aviation eventually rolls down into. Yeah. Wind.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly
Allen Hall: right. So we, we, although we are not designing Formula One style blaze today, we’re taking that same knowledge and information and we’re applying that back in.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. We’re
Allen Hall: secondarily we,
Nicholas Gaudern: which is a right thing to do. We’re taking, taking inspiration from all these different aerodynamic fields and, you know, picking the best
Allen Hall: Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: From what’s available and just allowing ourselves to be a little bit more creative.
Allen Hall: Yes.
Nicholas Gaudern: And thinking outside the box a bit. There’s so many ways to do this as we’ve been saying.
And the import. And the
Allen Hall: data’s there.
Nicholas Gaudern: The data’s there. Exactly.
Allen Hall: The data’s there because you’ve been at the DTU Yep. Uh, wind Tunnel, which also has the acoustic piece to it. Yeah. So you have measured data from a reliable source. [00:19:00] You have field data, and you know, you put all these together, you’re gonna get that improvement back.
You’re gonna get your invest back, you’ll be more profitable.
Nicholas Gaudern: So Dragon Scale, focus on the AP. And that a EP will, uh, vary depending on the turbine.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Nicholas Gaudern: But we’ll assess the turbine and, and decide the best configuration, and then say silent edge. That’s the focus on the noise reduction. And we’re seeing up to five decibels OASP on the field.
It’s, which
Allen Hall: is crazy.
Nicholas Gaudern: It’s even more That’s really good that we were hoping for, you know?
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Nicholas Gaudern: So we, we know this is gonna be a, a great product.
Allen Hall: It looks very interesting.
Nicholas Gaudern: It does.
Allen Hall: It does it. It looks complicated and you think air airflow is complicated. It’s a compressible fluid. It’s not easy to, to just assume it’s gonna do what you think it is.
Yeah. You need to get into the tunnel. You need to replicate, you need to do all that work, which is expensive in time consuming. That’s why you go to someone like Power. Curver knows what they’re doing in the wind tunnel, knows how to measure those things and know when they’re getting nonsense. Out of their computer.
I
Nicholas Gaudern: mean, you, you’ll pay thousands and thousands of [00:20:00] Euros dollars a day to run a wind tunnel.
Allen Hall: You will.
Nicholas Gaudern: You’ve gotta Absolutely. You’ve gotta turn up with your plan in hand, that’s for sure.
Allen Hall: Oh, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think there’s a lot of assumptions because it, aerodynamics is hard. You know, you watch these blade spin around, you don’t realize how complicated these devices are.
They are complicated. Those air force shapes we are running today have been through a lot of history, a lot of history to get to where we are now. Now we’re just gonna take him into the next generation. This, we’re bringing ’em into the two thousands. In sort of a
Nicholas Gaudern: sense, what I’m hoping to see is, you know, with the OEMs, some OEMs do it already, but it’s important to think about these components when you’re designing new blades as well, you should because then that will allow you a much bigger design space to work in.
And
Allen Hall: a lot less customer complaints.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: Where’s my power?
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, these products, particularly the VGs, are really important tools for PowerCurve robustness. And some OEMs have known this for a long, long time.
Allen Hall: Yep.
Nicholas Gaudern: And you’ll see VGs on most of their blades. Mm-hmm. Others not so much. And that’s a design choice.
It’s a design philosophy. Um, and I think it may not [00:21:00] be the right one, you know?
Allen Hall: Well, I think the operators are asking to get the most out of their turbines. Yeah. Why shouldn’t they? They should be asking for that.
Nicholas Gaudern: I think for a, for a long time, and it’s not just in wind devices, like these have been considered, you know, band-aids fixes when you’ve, you’ve messed something up.
But I feel that’s a really negative way to think about products like this. They’re doing something that the kind of raw air fall shape on its own cannot achieve. Sure. Oh no. Right. You know, you might be able to mold some interesting stuff. Uh, as part of the blade, it’s very difficult to, to recreate the kind of aerodynamic effects that these products, uh, have.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: So they shouldn’t be considered bandaids or fixes. No. They should be considered opportunities. And ways that you can maximize performance and unlock areas of the design space that previously weren’t accessible to.
Allen Hall: Sure. Every possible component that deals with fluid air is moving this way.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: Jet engines, you look at jet engine, how much more is going into those jet engines today in terms of this kind of [00:22:00] technology?
Yeah. All the race colors, doesn’t matter what class, where it is, is all looking at this anything to do with aircraft, it’s all over this.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah,
Allen Hall: exactly. Or, or doing this today. It’s just wind that’s behind
Nicholas Gaudern: wind. Wind is
Allen Hall: significantly
Nicholas Gaudern: behind. No,
Allen Hall: it’s not magic. It’s proven technology. It’s
Nicholas Gaudern: just good engineering.
Allen Hall: Well, it’s good engineering and if you call PowerCurve, they’re gonna help you under to to, to understand what you have today and what you could have tomorrow.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: And how this, these devices will improve your revenue stream.
Nicholas Gaudern: Exactly. You know, we will look at your blades, we’ll give you some good advice and maybe that advice will be that.
You know, a certain product isn’t right for your blade. Right. That’s fine.
Allen Hall: That’s an answer.
Nicholas Gaudern: That’s an answer.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it is.
Nicholas Gaudern: But let’s, let’s look at the blade. Let’s see what’s possible, and let’s just have a, have a proper conversation about it over some real data, some real
Allen Hall: facts. Right. I think that’s the key, and a lot of operators are afraid to talk about aerodynamics is it’s, it’s a difficult area to, to start the conversation on, right?
Yeah. But I think at the end of the day, when I work with PowerCurve, and I’ve worked with you guys for a [00:23:00] number of years, the answers I get back are intelligent and they’re not. Super complicated. This is what you’re gonna see. This is the improvement. And then we can, this is how we’re going to show you can get that improvement.
It’s not magic,
Nicholas Gaudern: no
Allen Hall: power crews backing up with data, which I think is the key, right? Because you’re the, you do hear a lot of noise in this industry about magical products that’ll do all these things. Particularly aerodynamic ones. Yes. PowerCurves, the ones really bringing the data.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And we have, we have the track record now.
We have like we do 17, 1800 turbines. Should be over 2000 very soon with our products on. Yeah. So we have a lot, we have a lot of data to draw on to know that we’re doing a good thing.
Allen Hall: Well, and speaking of that, because one of the questions that always pops up is, well, we have put these new VGs or trailing edges on, are they gonna stay on?
How durable are they?
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And that’s a, that’s a really important question to ask was it doesn’t matter how fancy aerodynamic product is, if it falls off the blade.
Allen Hall: Right.
Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, we’ve spent a lot of, uh, time and effort looking at how we should be fixing these products on. [00:24:00] So we use a, uh, a wet adhesive.
We specify a plexus adhesive to put our products in place. Really good adhesive. It’s a great adhesive and it means that they are not going anywhere. Basically. It’s a very, uh, forgiving adhesive. Uh, and it’s a very high spec. So we, we don’t use, uh, sided tape. We might have some of our products for some initial tack to help, you know, get the clear, the clear outta the line exactly.
But in terms of the bond itself, that is with a, a proper structural adhesive. So one thing that we are really proud of is that we haven’t got any, uh, reported failures of our panels over all the installations we’ve made. And that’s a combination of materials, but also geometry, work, instructions, adhesive.
It’s, it’s the full package. So it’s something that, um, yes, say we’re very proud of. And I think it’s, it’s a big part of what we do at PowerCurve, making sure the product is the right shape. Sure. But also making sure it stays on the blade.
Allen Hall: Well, you see it [00:25:00] from OEMs who have all kinds of aerodynamic treatments on there, and they’ll double set a tape to the blade, and then those parts are on the ground.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah. And double-sided tape. You can get some really nice spec tape. Sure.
Allen Hall: You,
Nicholas Gaudern: yeah. But it’s not
a
Allen Hall: 20 year device.
Nicholas Gaudern: No. And the installation tolerance required on surface prep is really, really high. So it’s possible. It’s just harder. I think it’s riskier,
Allen Hall: it’s risky.
Nicholas Gaudern: So, you know, I think for us, the adhesive is, is the way to go.
And, and it’s been proven out by the, by the track record.
Allen Hall: And some of the things we’ve seen over in Australia is when trailing ulcerations have come off, it’s been a safety concern. So now you got
Nicholas Gaudern: absolutely
Allen Hall: government officials involved in safety because parts are coming up. Turbine.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah.
Allen Hall: You
Nicholas Gaudern: can’t have these components flying, flying through the air.
That’s, that’s not safe.
Allen Hall: That’s because PowerCurve has done the homework.
Nicholas Gaudern: Yes.
Allen Hall: And has the track record. That’s why you wanna choose PowerCurve. So how do people get a hold of PowerCurve? How do they get a hold of you, Nicholas, to start the process?
Nicholas Gaudern: So, um, you’re welcome to reach out to us in lots of different ways.
We’re on LinkedIn. Uh, we have our website, [00:26:00] PowerCurve, dk, um, so yeah, LinkedIn websites. There’ll probably some links on this podcast as well to get in touch. But, um, yeah, whatever way works best for you.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s gonna be a busy season. So if you’re interested in doing anything with PowerCurve this year, you need to get on the website, get ahold of Nicholas.
And get started, uh, because now’s the time to maximize your revenue.
Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks a lot and great to talk to you,
Allen Hall: Nicholas. Thanks so much for being back on the podcast.
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