From the surge in lightning strikes damaging wind turbines to the game-changing potential of nacelle-based LiDAR systems, Lars Bendsen of AC883 shares insights on wind farm maintenance. Lars describes how LiDAR installations can boost power output by 3.5%, and warns how ignoring simple pitch alignment issues leads to catastrophic turbine failures.
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Lars Bendsen: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall. Today, we’re diving into the costly challenges plaguing wind farms with Lars Bendsen from AC883. From a surge in severe lightning strikes to devastating turbine misalignments, Lars reveals why seemingly minor issues can lead to catastrophic failures, and how cutting edge solutions like nacelle based lidars are transforming maintenance strategies.
Plus, discover why Lars believes too many industry tourists are making decisions that cost operators millions in unnecessary repairs. So get ready for a no holds bar discussion about what’s really happening in wind farm maintenance. Lars, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thank you so much.
Appreciate it. Well, you’ve had a busy blade season and you’ve had crews all over Canada and parts of the U S what kind of problems were you solving with your blade crews this year?
Lars Bendsen: That was, that was a crazy repair season. Um, and it’s not to feed directly into, but it, we had a ton of lightning strikes and lightning repairs higher than I would say the average.
And some of the strikes were severe. So I don’t know, uh, you probably know better than me if the weather pattern has been leading up to better or worse. Um, what we do know, we had a really, um, wet summer. We had a ton of weather delays. We had a ton of high winds. We have a ton of rain. Uh, so we had our, our standby time, time was, was higher than usual.
And it’s annoying for everybody involved. Owners don’t get their job done and money is flying out the window. So. And we don’t get the job done either. So, so, so it’s really wet that way. So I don’t know if that’s the aftermath was going on over the winter. I have no idea because you can’t really see when this like was there.
Uh, and, and the owners, the owners have a system that can measure when it comes. But. I don’t think they’re looking at it.
Allen Hall: That’s, that’s true. Uh, we are seeing more lightning strike damage over this past summer. It’s been really bad. I, I think it’s just the, the set of storms that came through. But in, in your case with AC 8A3, when you have technicians on site, you’re bringing high quality sort of apprenticeship plus technicians that have a lot of training so that when you get into these complicated repairs, you can actually accomplish them properly.
Lars Bendsen: We are, we are getting our people from mostly from Europe, uh, simply because there’s no cable, there’s, there’s no, uh, availability for, for staff in Canada. Uh, so we get them in from Europe on a proper work permit, simply because we are short staffed. Uh, we do pay more. We also get, uh, GWO certified technicians, all of them.
And, um, last year we had about 60 percent that could do. Cat 4, Cat 5. Next year they’re all doing Cat 4 and Cat 5. That means on some simple LEP work we could maybe be either be earning less. Or we might be a little more expensive on regular LEP work because it is highly trained technicians. Uh, we learned from last year based on the percentage of Cat 4 and Cat 5 damages.
We simply need to have more flexibility so we won’t, we will only have Cat 4 and Cat 5 technicians.
Allen Hall: Do you think there’s more Cat 4, Cat 5 damage lately? Because that’s what I think. I’ve seen a lot more
Lars Bendsen: over the last couple years. From, uh, from, uh, 23 to 24 there’s a significant increase. Uh, if it’s really high, uh, lightning strikes, uh, damages from tailed headspin, everything.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Is that driven by just the lack of understanding that what looks like to be maybe a small pinhole in a blade is really much larger and the operators don’t catch it early enough or is there other factors involved there?
Lars Bendsen: I don’t know. I think it might be that, um, I mean, everybody knows that all the engineering departments are all owners.
are really lean or in best case lean, but mostly understaffed. So that means the poor guys, they are struggling to keep up with everything. They can’t see it. And, um, and, uh, I have, I have a strong, I think I have a strong opinion about the drone inspection all the time, because the AI and the pictures, it’s, it, you cannot run an autopilot.
You cannot just take a picture, see that’s it. You can’t, you simply have to get up there. We had minimum Minimum of 10 blades were simply just a grease spot that was categorized as Category 4. We also had the opposite, where just a grease spot was actually a lightning strike. So we had it, we had it all over the place, so you cannot, you cannot run an autopilot.
Allen Hall: That’s interesting because I, I’ve heard that same discussion from a couple of operators about whether the drone inspection categorization has been correct. But I think as the lightning strikes, uh get more frequent. We’re seeing what looks to be smaller damage further down the blade, which would typically be grease.
If you, especially as you get closer to the root of a blade, you always think, well, that’s grease from inside the nacelle that’s fallen onto the blade. Don’t worry about it. But in reality, I think we’re seeing more lightning strike damage in more critical areas that lead to this cat four and cat five issues.
Lars Bendsen: Well, uh, you’ve seen it very often as well. It’s a small lightning strike. Once you start opening it up, then you are 16 layer deep. Just an example, right? So we had some of them that looked very small and then you’re ending up in a 78, 000, 100, 000 bill, right? Even though it looks very small and therefore, yeah, good.
No, I’m just saying, that’s why I don’t, I personally, I know it has a ton of opinion about it, but I personally don’t think you can run on autopilot, which also go back to the, you know, we’ve been involved in robotics as well, robotic repair and all that jazz, and I know there’s a place in the market for it.
Absolutely. But based on our experience, pure LEP and nothing else is only having, might be 10 percent of the blades. There’s always something to look for. There’s always an extra damage. There’s always something. So we have to get up there anyhow.
Allen Hall: Is that because the industry for the longest time has only inspected like a third of the farm at a time.
So it’d take three years to really get across the whole site. So if you did have damage. It may have sat there for two years before anybody even could identify it. Isn’t that changing a little bit though, that meeting operators that are doing a lot more inspection and trying to catch these ideas, you know, these problems early?
Lars Bendsen: No, and I, I agree. And I, I agree. And during the drone inspection, do drew your whole fleet every year? Just do it. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s peanuts compared to whatever, but on that said, I think it’s great with drone inspection, but you cannot rely on a hundred percent outer pilot. Somebody has to look at it.
With qualified eye to look at it. And it’s better to climb one, one blade. Too many than one, too less, too little, so.
Allen Hall: So the question in my mind when it comes to lightning damage up in Canada is because it’s so cold and there’s so much freeze thaw that happens. As part of the issue that once you have this wound in a blade that just the freeze thaw over a year or two can really expand it and then cause trailing edge separation and all those sort of horrible things that happen to blades?
Lars Bendsen: Well, I guess as soon as you get more intrusions, uh Uh, then of course, uh, up here, uh, water had a chance to get stiff under zero degrees C. So, uh, so of course then you have a, uh, have an issue.
Allen Hall: That leads into the discussion about, well, it’s cold in Canada, which means you guys get the winter first and then it comes down our way, uh, because we’re getting close.
Which then gets me into, it’s pitch alignment and sort of yaw alignment season for you. Because it’s nice to have the fields sort of knocked down and everything frozen. Pitch alignment is a huge problem and what balancing is a huge problem too. What are you seeing out in the field right now?
Lars Bendsen: Well, I’m seeing that owners relying on OEM statements that we can, we can do a.
We can do pitch correction without control, we can do x factor, we can do automatic, uh, yaw alignment, which is, um, which is questionable, when put it that way. And, um, I said, uh, my new word is, uh, there are so many tourists in this, in this industry. They’re tourists. They simply don’t know what they’re talking about.
They come and look at it. It looks nice, but they actually don’t know what they’re talking about. A yaw alignment is one thing, but say we can correct your yaw alignment. No, you can’t, because you can static align your turbine. But turbines are misaligned differently in different wind bins. So you need a dynamic alignment.
Yaw alignment, not a static yaw alignment. And the only thing you can do is static, you cannot do any dynamic yaw alignment. Um, very simple, uh, just to give you a, just a brief, I mean the, the, the equipment sitting behind the rotor, that means the, the anemometer, uh, cup anemometer, sensor, whatever you have, is sitting behind the rotor.
That means it’s sitting in turbulent, in turbulent wind. And it’s always chasing whatever has happened already. They get the information later and then try to chase the wind. Uh, there are some OEMs that don’t, because also you cannot yaw yaw bearings and brakes, et cetera. So but there’s also some OEMs that they’re allowing up to 7.
9 degrees before they do anything. And then they have, you know, uh, when you boil an egg, you have a watch that’s starting and they have a counter for 30 seconds. If it stays above 8 for 30 seconds, they start yawing back towards zero. And that’s the better one of them, they’re doing that. So that’s the, that’s the dynamic yaw alignment that you need to have.
I have no, we have no stake in LIDARs per se. We know them, we work with them, but we don’t have any monetary stake in it. Uh, but you need a Nacelle based LIDAR, basically, if you want to run optimal. That means you’re measuring 80 meters in front of the turbine in a clean airstream, that you get a way more accurate.
Uh, well wind speed and, and wind direction measurement. And then you connect that to controller and then that control your yoing, your yours. You’re not changing any, your strategy. You’re still doing the same. You don’t overdo the yawing. You just wanna make sure that you have a more accurate read on speed and direction where scan feeds into your pits.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Let, let’s, let’s talk about lidars for a minute because, uh, I know you and I have had a couple of discussions about Lidars. I don’t see them used very much in the United States at the moment. Uh, because I don’t think people really understand them, of what the, how they can use them for operational purposes, I, I think they see them as sort of a calib, kind of a calibration issue, and then once they’re done, they’re kind of move on.
But you’re saying that the LiDAR can really improve your operational performance.
Lars Bendsen: Oh, absolutely. Uh, you have, of course, I think it’s misinterpretation because there’s only, basically only one supplier of nacelle based LiDARs. There’s a ton of ground based LiDARs. There’s measuring up and kind of measuring in a cone when you do site assessment.
And that’s totally good for that. But this is a nacelle based LiDAR. Two beam. They can also get into four beam so we can measure wind shear. But for operational purposes, it’s actually more to get the wind speed and wind direction more accurate. And that is connected to the controller. With a, it doesn’t matter which controller, and that means that will do your, uh, your alignment in each wind bin.
Allen Hall: Okay, so the LiDAR is acting as an alignment tool constantly to try to correct for what the OEM equipment didn’t
Lars Bendsen: do. It’s kind of a third party, uh, call it, uh, anemometer just measuring 80 meters out in front of the turbine. And it does, and it does more accurate because it is laser basically, right? Right.
Right. Right.
Allen Hall: The implementation of LIDAR on turbines is what? Does every turbine have a separate lidar, or is a LIDAR good for a couple of turbines around it?
Lars Bendsen: No, you do. You do it on every single turbine because you cannot remote control. You cannot remote connect to every turbine’s controller. We had to be connected to the, to the controller.
And it’s very simple. We do a two turbines a day, so it’s not a big thing to do. It takes a couple of hours to get it aligned, connect to the controller. It’s very simple, actually.
Allen Hall: What does that process look like? Because now you got me curious. I’m taking, I’m taking this LIDAR unit. I’m bringing it up tower.
I’m mounting it to the top of the nacelle. I’m maybe doing a little bit of alignment to get it. Focus in the right place. And then I’m plugging that into the SCADA system, the control system? In
Lars Bendsen: the
Allen Hall: controller
Lars Bendsen: itself.
Allen Hall: Oh, in the controller itself.
Lars Bendsen: Yeah, and it’s a failsafe system. It’s running on different bus connections.
It’s too technical, also for me. But it’s a failsafe system, so if something goes wrong with the LiDAR, or the LiDAR can’t see heavy fog or something like that, then it goes back on the controller. on their own original anemometer. So it’s not, there’s no danger to it. Um, right now we have huge success on, uh, V82 in the US and Canada.
Um, the V82 is a bit of a different animal because it’s a stall regulated turbine. Uh, but again, uh, I talked to a colleague of mine said, well, that guy should change the, uh, the algorithm. He was not, he was not working that day. So, uh, so, so it’s not, it’s not very accurate. It’s not. Uh, so that’s one thing.
So V82 specifically, and also an interesting is that when a V82 running above radio wind speed, it very often come up with an alarm and shuts down. Alarm 236 or whatever it’s called, the flap wise, so it simply shuts down in high wind because it’s running at over speed because it’s only stall regulated.
So, What we are doing is running down on a ton of vibrations, that’s why it stops. So, um, so we are misaligning the turbine on purpose above radio wind speed. Below we are running as close to zero as we can. But above rated wind speed, we are misaligning the turbine. That removes the, uh, the vibrations and we also have a less load on that turbine.
So we’re actually opposite what you normally would think.
Allen Hall: You can produce more power having a little bit of an offset because the turbine doesn’t shut down.
Lars Bendsen: And we have now on, um, we have of the more than 200 turbines we have outfitted in Canada and the U. S., we are seeing, uh, we’re seeing, say, AP gains of 2.
8 to 3. 5 percent AP. And that’s without the extra uptime. That is just because of AP power. That’s remarkable.
Allen Hall: Getting 1 percent today can be a lot, because the turbines are usually pretty good, but if you can squeeze out more than that, that’s remarkable. Where is the LiDAR generally used at? What kind of farms be interested in LIDAR.
Is it kind of ridgeline farms or the wind can be a little more unique or is it in the flat plains of Kansas and Oklahoma and Canada?
Lars Bendsen: Well, of course, the more, the more obstacles you have in front of your turbines, the worse it gets. Uh, I’ve seen down in Mojave Desert, actually, on, on, on the side down there, the turbines on the same side are basically 90 degrees.
Misaligned from each other, but they’re both right. They’re, they’re well aligned, but of course the wind is simply coming around like that. So it looks weird when you’re driving there. They’re 90 degrees different or they the same wind farm, but they’re both correct. Aligned.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I would say something is wrong.
Stop the turbine. But yeah,
Lars Bendsen: but no, they’re both right. . So, uh, but that’s, that is really, so that’s, that’s one thing I think is the critical, we talk about maintenance. The, uh, the, the, um, again, back to my old phrase that some of VM have bored. The rotor is the motor, and it means if the rotor is not aligned in pitch and yaw, mass imbalance, et cetera, then you’re paying for it.
Allen Hall: That makes a lot of sense then. So knowing more about the wind with LiDAR has a, what kind of ROI is that on a LiDAR system?
Lars Bendsen: Well, depending on, uh, what market you’re in on the AP or the PPA, of course, right? So, so that’s depending on, but, uh, but we have seen less than a year. We also seen, uh, depending on, uh, what you’re in, right?
What is your, uh, what is your, uh, your factor up to your capacity factor, your PP, et cetera, so it’s not a, it’s not a, uh, one size fits all we have to look at it and, and make smart decisions, right? Boy,
Allen Hall: any ROI less than a year, I want to get involved with.
Lars Bendsen: This will actually get fired for not doing it.
Allen Hall: Right. You should. That’s too easy. Yeah. It sounds interesting. So let’s, let’s bump into pitch alignment and unbalanced rotors, which are very prevalent. Joel and I were traveling across Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas quite a bit this year. It’s fairly easy to see rotors that are imbalanced or that they’re just not, you can tell because there’s a little bit of wobble going on there.
Yeah. And often you can hear it. You can hear it. Yes.
Lars Bendsen: So what is the solution for that? How do they fix it? Well, first of all, we have to measure if it’s imbalanced and, uh, if, if it’s, uh, if it’s aerodynamically balanced or not. That’s, that’s number one. Let’s figure that out. Do we have the same pitch angle?
Regardless of what it is, it has to be the same. And it has to be the same all the time. Actual pitch or not is to be the same. So, uh, and they’re not, um, based on, on our, we had done more than, I think we had 2, 500 turbines now in the US and Canada, and, um, based, based on age of the fleet and also the, the, the manufacturer, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s crazy And, and people, they know it, but they don’t do anything.
And that’s where back to what I said before, but we have too many tourists in our industry, so the decision making, right? So I’m just took my note here. Uh, we talking to, to, to an engineering department. They understand it. Engineering and no money. They just, they just have to nod. Yeah, it’s good. Passing it down to the site, site looks at it.
They think it’s a great idea too. Now they have to sell it to either director of operations or asset management. Some director of operations, they understand it. But if you have money now, we can’t put it on import because that’s already cut in. So it absolutely Zero fat on that bone. There’s no money left for anything, projects like that.
And then sometimes we go to the as a manager, which might be often, or sometimes it’s a commercial, or you’re the person, less technical. And that’s where, that’s where the tourists come in because they simply don’t know technically enough about it.
Allen Hall: Well with an unbalanced rotor, It’s an almost inevitable.
You’re going to destroy a main bearing set. You’re going to probably take down a gearbox with it if you let it go on long enough. And in some of these cases that I’ve heard, the control cabinets are moving around so much that they’re damaging the control cabinets. At what point do you say it’s worth, I can’t replace control cabinets anymore, I’m just going to do a pitch alignment and be done with it.
It seems like an obvious choice.
Lars Bendsen: Sometimes what we have seen on, especially hydraulic pits, that it’s not as bad as you think, it’s way worse. So, um, we have had a customer change the cabinets. Three or four times a year. And they don’t know what it is. They just have vibrations. So now they buy vibration sensors.
Now they’re looking at extra bearings for the gearbox. Now they look at all kinds of stuff without looking at the front of your rotor. Look at the rotor. That’s the root cause. For 99 percent of your troubles.
Allen Hall: Well, I’ve heard of turbines, not often, but occasionally, where the, where the turbine enters the ground, right?
Or the tower enters the ground, that there’s gaps, big gaps, like almost a foot wide, whereas the turbine’s been swaying around, it’s pushing the soil away from it so much, which means, that’s, at that point, you have major problems, and I’m surprised I see Uh, the technicians and I hear stories about throw more gravel into the hole that’s happened near the tower because the tower is swaying so much like, like that’s going to solve it.
Lars Bendsen: It’s, it’s beyond right. It’s just really when we have, uh, I won’t mention the name of course, we have one customer we kind of rested our case. We can spend more time. That customer had amount of issue on foundation, even turbines falling over, shutting down sites. Second site they’re running, we have evidence that 60 percent of turbines are misaligned, but we cannot get 100, 000 to fix it.
You know what? That’s fine. We have tried now for a couple of years. We rest our case. We told you. We proved it. We measured 10 of your turbines. We know it is. We rest our case. We cannot spend more time if you don’t want to do it. And that is typically one of these situations that comes up to commercial people.
Far away from the site, they only look at dollars. Do we really need it? Do we really need it today, this year? And then the poor guy from operations said, well, we don’t technically need it this year, but, and then they shut it down. Done. So we kind of just resting our case. And, uh, that, but that’s, there is, there is more, there’s sophisticated owners and it has might be less sophisticated owners.
There’s also the owners that, um, financial owners, they get the 8%. We don’t want to hear about it. We do not want to hear. And the, uh, as a management company. Don’t want to take that battle because now their business case looks bad. They get the 8%. And now we’re adding custom operations. Can’t do that. Just gonna pay for gearbox.
Allen Hall: Well, you know, yeah, they like paying for gearboxes clearly How much is a pitch alignment typically to do in terms of time? Is it a day? An hour?
Lars Bendsen: Depending on again if it’s an older, just say V80 You have to go up and change the pit ramps. Our measurement takes 10 15 minutes and then to get it Stop the turbine, get it done, and go back again.
Might be an hour and a half, two hours. And we can re measure, and then it’s okay, and it’s up running. So it’s a two hour operation, worst case scenario. On a newer turbine, many of them, you have a tablet down tower. Siemens 2 3 on many of those. You can simply just put in on a tablet, put an offset in on blade A, B, C.
And it’s running, it’s a five minutes, 10 minutes operation.
Allen Hall: So I assume you can do multiple towers a day then. So you’re talking about in a couple of days, you can do a complete wind farm. Yeah. And stop all the vibration, all the main bearing replacement issues, the gearbox issues, the foundation issues, the cabinet issues in literally a couple of hours
Lars Bendsen: per tower.
We can for sure remove the root case in many of the cases. Again, it’s not like one size fits all. But in many cases we could do that. And, um, let’s say when the turbines are between eight and 12 years old, for sure, 50%, uh, roughly 50%, uh, are misaligned to a certain degree. Um, the better turbines, Siemens 2 3, hands down, they’re the least misaligned turbine, but it’s still about 30%.
And if they’re misaligned, it’s not too, too bad. Siemens has actually a part of their service scope to look after a misalignment. As the only one, as far as I know, they have a bracket they put in, and that works somehow. It’s better than nothing. It’s not ideal, but it’s And I say, okay, it’s, it’s, it’s doable way better than anything else.
Some OEMs don’t even have it in their service scope. Yeah. I, I’ve seen mostly that they don’t have it in the service scope at all. We also have a client where the OEM is supposed to look after that. It’s a pits where they get turbine. I don’t want to want an inch named a brand because some people might be guess where it is.
But, uh, the OEM service screen is supposed to look after that, but they don’t do it. And then the owner said, well, I’m not going to pay for it because they should do it. We have done the whole campaign. So we have put it out there and it’s more than 50 percent of the fleet. And now we have done a project.
We have followed it for two years. And of course, a pitch, sorry, a hydraulic pitch will leak all the time. So the turbo we just adjusted two years ago, that’s all misaligned again. Two years later, not crazy, but it’s been wandering. It’s been misaligned again. Who’s going to pay for that? If it’s a part of the OEM service concept, but they don’t do it, then the owner don’t want to pay for it.
But the owner’s gonna pay anyhow.
Allen Hall: Right, at the end of the day, the owner’s gonna pay anyhow. They
Lars Bendsen: just pay next to the
Allen Hall: gearbox. Well, yeah, you can do a very inexpensive pitch alignment test, or you can replace a gearbox. There’s sort of your choices right now. And I know, well, this is busy season for pitch alignment.
As we get into winter and the ground freezes, and you guys can get out there and do dozens of turbines. Uh, what do people do if they have pitch alignment problems? Do you see their towers swaying? Or the rotor moving in unusual ways? How do they get ahold of you? How do they contact you?
Lars Bendsen: Well, uh, we have the best website in the world, so a3.com.
So, uh, that’s, that’s as simple as it is. Um, and we have equipment, we have, we have capacity. We are doing right now. We are might be gonna buy an extra sort of equipment. It’s quite expensive piece of equipment. We are, we are running, but we are considering buying one more, uh, because we are, we are quite busy for sure.
Doing this year, I think we are six or 700 turbines. We’re done. Uh, this, this season alone. Um, so I think also that, and promotion or not, we know what we are
Allen Hall: doing. Here’s, here’s the, here’s the rub. You can get this done, get the pitch alignment done now, right? When it’s windy season in the wintertime in the United States, this is where everybody makes all their money, but you want to make sure your turbine is operating at peak performance and it doesn’t take much time to get this done.
The problem is, is that if you wait too long. Lars and AC 883 are going to be booked and you’re not going to be able to get them lined up to do this. So if you want to get it done You better get on ac883. com or get ahold of Lars via LinkedIn and get rolling now. And the same thing for the blade repair season.
I’ve had a lot of people contact Joel and me about blade repair season next year. We’re trying to find technicians or we need a capacity. We got problems. We need, we have cat fours and cat fives. We know they’re coming. They need to be reaching out to AC883. Also to get ready for next season because otherwise you’re not gonna have anybody on site.
Uh, so Lars Thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s great to connect again, and we’re going to see you in Nashville At the O& M.
Lars Bendsen: That’s true. And the Ole Miss down there in Nashville. That would be interesting So the San Diego is a new Nashville and Nashville is new San Diego
Allen Hall: I’m going to miss the ocean, but it’ll be a good time in Nashville.
Thank you so much, Allen.
https://weatherguardwind.com/ac883-lidar-pitch/
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.
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 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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