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ArcVera CEO Discusses Optimizing Wind Farm Performance and Viability

This episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast features an interview with Gregory Poulos, CEO of ArcVera Renewables, to discuss how the company’s work is helping operators improve wind farm performance. We discuss wind resource assessments, wake modeling, repowering with new turbine technology, evaluating offshore wind resources, and accounting for risks like future nearby wind farm development. ArcVera helps make wind power more viable and cost-effective through services spanning a project’s full lifetime, from initial prospecting to operations to eventual repowering decades later.

Reach out to ArcVera and get your wind farm performing better! https://arcvera.com/contact/

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Allen Hall: Welcome back to this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. ArcVera Renewables is the leading provider of renewable energy technology services, including wind resource assessments, technical due diligence, project engineering, and O& M support.

ArcVera’s work in the wind industry is helping to make. Wind energy more affordable and reliable. The company’s services are helping developers to build new wind farms and improve the performance of existing wind farms. As a result, wind energy is playing an increasingly important role in the global energy mix.

In this podcast, we’ll explore ArcVera’s work with ArcVera’s CEO, Greg Poulos. Welcome to the program.

Gregory Poulos: Thanks for having me on, guys. It’s great to be here. Hi, Allen. Hi, Joel. Good to see you again.

Allen Hall: Yeah, so the last time we got together was in New Orleans at ACP, and that was a good time. That was a really crazy convention.

I know since we have left there Joel and I work in the lightning space and you’re in the wind in the wind space, actual wind, the productive part of the wind industry business. It’s been a busy summer. I assume you guys have been busy with all the projects and all the IRA things have been happening, trying to evaluate performance of farms and what, where to put new farms and what’s going on offshore.

I’m really interested to pick your brain here.

Gregory Poulos: Yeah all of those things globally. Absolutely.

Allen Hall: ArcVera’s been around for about 40 years at this point. Can you just give our listeners a brief introduction as to all the things you do around the wind industry?

Gregory Poulos: Absolutely. So we work on on the wind side.

We also work in solar and battery storage. But on the wind side, we work just as in solar and storage through the full project lifetime. So in wind there’s a prospecting phase where A developer or somebody trying to create a wind farm is looking for a spot or they have a spot in mind and they need to know if it’s going to be economic.

It should they invest more in there in the development. So we help folks understand how windy a certain site may be using our vast experience and also advanced modeling tools. Some which we discussed at ACP um, a variety of other things, including our meteorological expertise about flow over complex terrain. There’s a lot of free material out there that is inaccurate, and so we help narrow the band of to what the real answer is.

Ultimately you have to measure on site and so you have to use lidar, sodar or meteorological towers most commonly offshore, they call them floating lidar or flidar but so we’ll recommend the configuration design and where to place those systems. Monitor all those systems after their installed, inspect them all with an eye toward eventual financing.

You need to have a nice tied up story around your energy production, and it all starts with getting excellent data measured. So we work with them through the entire development process, analyzing data, creating reports related to energy, evaluating the different turbine technologies that are available in the correct hub height to place those at for a given meteorological regime and wind speed based on IEC Standards. Design the turbine arrays, do the energy work, and then ultimately, after a long process that is too long to describe in my brief introduction to what we do a turbine is purchased and an offtaker is found ultimately who will buy the power or you take merchant risk and you go to the bank, get your money.

And we work with the clients through that with technical reports in support of financing wind farms. And, uh, during construction, we do some work on the construction site. Depending on how things are going, we’ll review the contracts for operations and maintenance, review the turbine supply agreement.

And then after construction, there’s all sorts of operational side work we can do. Including forensic analysis of performance power performance testing with the I. C. R. E. Standard certification that we have and all the way through. And then 30 years later, you might repower depending on the situation.

We’ll come back and do it all again. With repowering it.

Joel Saxum: Something to focus on here is what Allen and I, because, with Weather Guard, we’re always talking lightning with people. They call, hey, I have lightning issues, I have lightning issues. And one of the things that we focus on with everybody who calls is the simple fact that there is not a blanket you can throw over and say, This is how lightning works.

It does, in a certain sense, but every site is different depending on the technology installed, depending on the topography, the local geography, the local weather patterns, all of these things go into fact when you’re making decisions on what to do, whether it’s O& M decisions, why, for us, of course, why is lightning striking me this way, what can I expect in the future, I have damage here, why is this happening, what’s going on here. What you guys are focusing on as well, Greg, is, yeah, there may be an idea of, Hey, wind blows here in this county, and we think we have this for a wind resource.

However, when you really want to nail it down and get into the nitty gritty and get some bankable insights, you need to talk to the experts and have them do a per site actual investigation and give you some real insights.

Gregory Poulos: Yeah, that’s correct. There’s a whole process to this that, being around for 40 plus years, at least the original founders, not me, I was 12 when the original founders started.

A set of gurus that existed in those early days, basically over time, came up with more and more rigorous methods to study wind farms and get the answer right. You make mistakes, you make corrections so all the methods of energy assessment have steadily improved over time, and they’re constantly changing as we discover new things, such as the long range wakes topic we discussed last time. So there are new things emerging as the industry changes, but yeah you absolutely have to follow a protocol. And we serve on the standards committee for the international electrical technical commission, the IEC. And there’s a new standard that’s actually going to be coming out I’m not sure the exact timing, a year or two after all the processes are done or new called IEC 15 61400 15 2.

Anyway, that’s underway with a bunch of industry, current industry experts that are all working together to formulate a standard for that process. But there are very well established practices already. Very well known practices that are used to create bankable wind assessments.

Allen Hall: There’s a big repowering effort in the United States and I want to touch on that point for a minute.

When I talk to existing wind farms that have been around 10, 20 years and they’re getting to that repower stage, when you ask them what the expected power production was from that site, Uh, when they started to build it and what the actual is, there’s a big discrepancy between those two typically. So the data they had went, I think a lot of times it didn’t use an ArcVera-type service when they put these farms out there, they just put some met towers up, got some general numbers and starts putting farms up.

That’s really not the way to do it. So when they come to a repowering situation. What’s the right approach there to actually get some hard numbers because they’re going to put different technology and typically on these new sites and they need to know, do I need to put low wind speed turbines up here?

Do I need to raise the tower hub height a little bit? What’s that process look like?

Gregory Poulos: That process is, is pretty straightforward once you have the right information. In some cases we have the old data from the original wind farm in our database. Because we did work on it before. Maybe they didn’t do a bankable assessment, but we might have been, had the data, happened to have the data in house.

That’s happened several times. But except for that we also advise them to put up new meteorological measurements around the site for a year prior to doing the repowering assessment. Sometimes there isn’t time for that. And you, there’s a a second method to evaluate the energy production on a site, which involves using the actual SCADA data, the power production data from those farms that have been the, from the farm that’s been operating all that time.

You can use that information and Reverse engineer how the wind blows and then re engineer that to create an operational repowering forecast using modern turbine technology, which is usually much taller. And so you need some knowledge of what the shear is at a site like that. In other words the change in the wind speed with height, you have to understand that if you’re going to go higher.

It’s going to be windier generally at a particular location. That’s not always true in topography. Sometimes it’s windier downhill anyway. I didn’t want to get that, sneak that in real quick. But but for the most part, except in certain places like complex California valleys where the wind speed actually decreases with height.

You need to understand how the new, how energy from new modern turbines with bigger rotors, taller hub heights will work. And you have to reverse engineer the data because you don’t have any meteorological information to go on. Let’s say the original net towers were very short anyway, very old technology, very low quality, not much to work with even with the old data for modern techniques, consistent with modern techniques. So you have to reverse engineer the power production at that farm, try to understand how the wind blows there, and then reconstruct what a new turbine at a taller hub height might produce. It’s very uncertain and compared to a full measurement campaign, but it can be done.

Allen Hall: How does LiDAR play into those measurements? Do you need to put LiDAR up at some of these sites to really understand how the wind is moving versus altitude or some of the perturbations you’re getting from the landscape.

Gregory Poulos: You can certainly use LIDAR. You can use meteorological towers or SODAR.

LIDAR is handy certainly. It generally observes the wind speeds to uh, 120 to 200 meters above ground, depending on the settings and characteristics of the site. Lasers that come out of LIDARs bounce off particulates in the atmosphere. So if the atmosphere is very clean, sometimes they don’t return a signal.

Sodars can be used as well and they have different characteristics and meteorological towers are the long standard that’s existed in the industry. A lot of the standards are actually based on anemometers, um, in the wind turbine design. So using LiDAR and sodar creates a little uncertainty in the turbulence measurements.

In any case. They’re very helpful. Absolutely. And many of our clients are using LIDAR and SODAR all around the world to supplement meteorological measure, meteorological tower based measurements and to go higher, above. It’s very expensive to build a very tall net tower. In many parts of the world, so you put up a shorter one and supplement it with information from a lidar or a stodar that looks above the net tower height.

Joel Saxum: Digging back into the repower issue, and this is one of the reasons why I think someone going to do a repower should contact ArcVera, simply because you guys are also doing this long distance wake research, right? So you’re understanding what’s happening down wind and whatnot. So as again, as say XYZ wind farm was installed in 2010 and there are what’s 2023 now about 2013 because someone’s taking perfect advantage of PTCs.

So in that 10 years in that area. There more than likely has been some neighboring wind farms installed, either downstream, upstream, next to it. While you guys are, yes, you have some constraints of this is where the existing towers are, we’re going to assimilate new, possibly new technology onto these existing towers.

However, around this area, there has also been local changes in the wind resource because of these additions. Now, ArcVera has a bunch of specialized knowledge that others may not have around this long distance wake changes that may affect the production. So it, this, in this case right now is my thought.

If I’m doing a repower, I’m calling ArcVera because they’ve got not only the knowledge, the existing knowledge of the wind resource within that wind farm, but they have a specialized batch of knowledge. You guys have a specialized batch of knowledge of what could be going on around, and the long-term wakes affecting it.

Gregory Poulos: That’s right. With the modeling technique that we described in the last podcast we have the ability to recreate the impact of new wind farms being built. Over time so you can do a simulation with and without those wind farms in place and get a more accurate estimate of how that affects ongoing energy production.

The other you can use that method, but you have to have knowledge of when wind farms went in the types of turbines that are there. You have to have all the power curves and all the specs of those wind farms as well as the wind farm you’re trying to build to really understand how that is going to affect things.

Yeah, we can do that, and it’s certainly something we do every day. It’s complicating. Those same issues are complicating day to day wind energy resource assessment for new wind farm builds as well as repowers.

Allen Hall: Computational power it takes to do that, it’s got to be tremendous, right? That’s a really difficult model.

Gregory Poulos: It is. It’s definitely a specialized activity. The we run on supercomputers in the cloud. For generally thousands of processors operating simultaneously for a day or five days or, whatever it happens to take for the particular instance. And then you get terabytes of data and you have processing methods to take that down to just the answer you need.

There’s a lot more information there you throw away because it’s a commercial application. You could probably do a master’s degree or PhD with most of that every run every day. But it’s very sophisticated stuff. Involves a lot of automation to get down to a commercially viable pricing.

You’re taking something that 10 years ago would cost a million dollars probably, and you’re doing it for 25, 000 or 50, 000 or maybe less.

Allen Hall: So let’s jump offshore. And I know, ArcVera, you have a presence worldwide. Let’s just start there. Where are all your offices at?

Gregory Poulos: We have subsidiary offices operating in Brazil since 2011, I believe was the first major inroads there.

And then South Africa since 2015. And in Bangalore, India, since 2020, during the pandemic, we opened that one.

Allen Hall: I want to touch on the offshore piece because I know India is planning on a lot of offshore and that looks like it’s on the, it’s like the East coast of the United States. Everything’s on the Eastern side of India is where they’re planning all that.

So all the wind’s going to come off land onto the turbines and then on the, in, in the New York bight area, same thing. With all the changes that are happening in the who’s going to put wind turbines where situation in the New York Bight? How do you know what that resource is going to look like when you finally someday put in turbines or putting turbines in the water?

Gregory Poulos: You don’t know what’s coming. That’s the hardest part of the build out risk calculation. So you have to do scenarios. Ocean wind being temporarily canceled, it may come back, right? So you can say, okay we have a reprieve for a little while, but eventually the wind is going to flow through some new wind farms where ocean wind was originally planned and take some of the power out of the wind before it reaches our wind farm.

So we can operate Scott free for a little while, but then they’re going to come later. So you have to assess that. And just so you understand the risk, there’s not too much you can do about it, other than just take a haircut or not build your wind farm. But it’s good to understand the magnitude. If it’s a small magnitude, you could say, okay that’s going to be acceptable even long term, or it may be, okay, for 10 years, we’ll make X.

And then after 10 years, we’re going to assume those are going to be built. And can we handle that financially and, or how would, what would we do in that instance? Because there’s no current laws for reimbursement for future wind farms to existing wind farms. That’s what you have to do, is just evaluate the various scenarios.

Allen Hall: And do you, would you need to know the kind of turbines that would be installed in front of you?

Does that matter all that much? I guess maybe the hub height would matter.

Gregory Poulos: You can make very good assumptions even if it’s not built about what it, what the likely effects are going to be. But depending on how long it is, it could be quite a bit different, right? This could be a really different technology.

We don’t know what’s coming, but Using the three bladed upwind machine assumption, there are certainly standards for expected thrust and power production. That you can apply and make assumptions about the type of turbine just based on experience that very realistic at least it no more uncertain than the rest of the process.

Allen Hall: Yeah, So what happens when we’re talking about wind off the coast of New Jersey places like Atlantic City, right? They built big casinos and there’s big buildings and the build out will continue along the coastline in New Jersey, I assume for a while and even New York for that matter.

When they start building structures right on the edge of shorelines, I assume that affects the wind offshore, right? That’s part of these wakes that are created that seem to go for 50, 100 kilometers?

Gregory Poulos: Sure, yeah. If you were to build wind farms onshore and the wind were from onshore to offshore, they would deplete the wind resource to some degree.

And that effect would be felt in the offshore wind farms. And the reverse is true if the wind blows the other direction. The when the wind blows from onshore to offshore, it also blows the temperature structure over the land, over the ocean. And so it’s suddenly, it’s over warm, let’s say in the summertime, you have very warm air over land, the sun’s up, it’s hazy, hot, and humid.

In New Jersey, New York, and the wind is from the southwest that gets blown over the relatively cold ocean that creates a stable atmosphere, which lengthens the wake effect and makes it worse. There are effects of just the weather that’s occurring onshore if it’s being advected in the terminology of atmospheric science, it’s being moved offshore only.

Joel Saxum: You’re on the big word of the day, wind right now, Greg. Evected.

Gregory Poulos: Evection, there you go.

Joel Saxum: So I’m going to, I’m going to throw an odd one at you and Allen this isn’t in our questions that we threw, but I was just thinking about it as we’re talking offshore. So on the podcast, we have talked about some new technologies and we’ve had some on.

So some of these new technologies, of course, floating offshore wind is going to be new. And I believe that, and I don’t, this is me armchair engineer, right? I believe that those platforms could cause the wake changes as well, because there’s actually a different angles of incidents as they move offshore.

But the other things I’m wondering is, has ArcVera investigated, that they can talk, that you can talk about? Or maybe even just on the side or on the water cooler, the ideas of say, the sea twirl or the wind wall and those kind of technologies that are On the horizon, maybe that are startups that might become commercialized at some point.

Have you investigate investigated any of those?

Gregory Poulos: We haven’t investigated them officially under contract, that kind of thing. But certainly we’ve seen the announcements. There’s a long history of turbine technologies that have been tried of different types. Nothing to date has yet beat the economics of three bladed upwind, upwind turbine. That, that’s not to say there aren’t some strong advocates for other technologies and that others may in fact come out. We do have the experience in house to evaluate them, but we haven’t looked at those specifically. What you off, what you get when it’s early stage is extremely expensive because it’s one off type stuff.

So until it’s commercially viable, you really have to invest a lot of money to get it off the ground, even if it’s more efficient. It might not make it.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, there’s a lot of hurdles there, right? To new technology. And then, not only is the technology development hurdles, but then you have to get past the commercial and political hurdles in front of it as well.

I think some of those technologies may be, they’re very interesting to watch and to look at. But they’re getting them to a commercial status, as Phil Totaro will tell you from IntelStor getting them commercialized is a lot different than being technologically feasible.

Gregory Poulos: Yeah, are they being used for small wind, say house, household style, or farms, farm scale, or are they being utility scale?

It, for the three bladed upwind turbine, utility scale seems to be prime.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think that one of the, one of the big problems here is that what people maybe don’t understand that haven’t seen the whole picture of wind is that yes, like it might be technologically feasible, but then you also have to get the insurance companies to agree that they’ll take this risk on and put it out at a large scale.

And that’s a difficult thing to do when they’re already taking the losses that they do take with the offshore wind that we’re working with today.

Gregory Poulos: Yeah, that’s a standard practice part of due diligence. As you go into financing, or insurance can also get these same reports, you do a turbine technology review.

The less risk is associated, the least risk is associated with small changes from an existing proven technology. If you’re doing something brand new. There’s going to be a risk premium associated with that applied. Basically, you’re going to have to pay more for the money, the loan that you’re going to get because of the risk.

And there’ll be other conditions applied which makes it just a more expensive project in the end, the rates of return drop.

Allen Hall: There’s a lot of interesting areas in wind and to just. knowing what’s happening in the wind energy business. And it all starts with you, Greg, honestly, right? So if you don’t know what the wind is, you do not know what your energy production is going to be.

And that’s why people consistently call ArcVera for knowledge and advice on, on, what those projects will look like, Greg, how do people get ahold of ArcVera? How do they contact you? How do they connect up?

Gregory Poulos: They can certainly contact me. I’m just greg.poulos@arcvera.com. And through our website naturally, right?

So there’s an info button there and you can contact us easily through that arrangement. And there’s also direct contact information for various people on our website anytime. Yeah, please, send a note along, I’ll get you, I’ll get people in touch with the right individuals, technology, technical experts at our company to handle their particular problem, wind, solar, or battery storage.

Allen Hall: It’s a great discussion every time you’re on the podcast. We got to touch base in another couple of months. I know there’s a lot happening in wind at the moment, particularly offshore. And as things develop, I want to touch base. And thanks for being on the program. Love to have you back.

Gregory Poulos: My pleasure.

ArcVera CEO Discusses Optimizing Wind Farm Performance and Viability