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Blade Platforms: Revolutionizing Blade Repair Access

In this episode, Petr Bartusek from Blade Platforms discusses how their truck-mounted platforms, capable of safely reaching over 100 meters, are transforming wind turbine blade repair access. With increased speed, skill utilization, and 24-hour shift capabilities, using Blade Platforms minimizes turbine downtime and maximizes efficiency in blade repair campaigns.

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!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum, today, we’re tackling a critical issue in the wind industry. Accessing wind turbine blades for repairs. And our guest is Petr Bartusek, commercial VP of Blade Platforms. And Blade Platforms is a truck mounted platform company based in Abilene, Texas.

And with wind turbines hubs reaching new heights, traditional repair access methods can be slow and inefficient. Blade Platforms solves this problem with a fleet of machines that can safely reach over 100 meters, allowing technicians to quickly and efficiently repair blades while minimizing turbine downtime.

Today, Petr will share how Blade Platforms is transforming blade repair access and discuss the future of this innovative company in the wind industry. Petr, welcome to the show.

Petr Bartusek: All right. Thanks for having me.

Allen Hall: So Joel and I happened to visit your facility in Abilene. And the reason we did was because of speed.

It comes down to quickness and our strike click take application where we’re touching a lot of blades, we have to get up and down very quickly because we touched so many blades simultaneously, which is a common industry problem. If you’re going to fix one blade pretty easy, you can use whatever method.

But when we’re. At some farms that have a hundred, 200, 300 plus turbines, it becomes so slow and efficient that there has to be a new way to do it, a faster way to get on blade and to make repairs. And this is where we stopped. And Abilene met with your folks down there at Blade Platforms. It is impressive the speed at which you guys move and it has really changed the industry.

And we, Joel and I have been around a lot of parts of Texas and Oklahoma and we see Blade Platforms. And now we understand why, because you’re really changing the industry.

Petr Bartusek: I’ll add, it’s not just speed, I think. There’s a couple of things. You get speed, you get skill, and you get time utilization, right?

So the speed kind of speaks for itself, right? I tell everyone on a 12 hour day, We’ll do 11 hours worth of work, right? So you got some truck set up time and, some idle time that just, you cannot monetize that, that, that’s one aspect. The other thing is utilization of time and that, these sites are, on windy projects, right?

So you’re, you don’t put turbines where the wind doesn’t blow. So you have to be able to operate in increments of time. When that happens. I use a traditional means of access or ropes or suspended platforms. It’s the rigging time and everything else that goes into it changes the dynamics of what you’re doing because, let’s say you got a rig for two hours, then you go up and you get a three hour weather window.

Then you got to go down and maybe or maybe not, you have to pull it a day. If at two o’clock a storm roll in or something will happen. So for us, we get, six hours worth of work. There’s three hours storm going through. All of a sudden we can take a, three hour lunch to kill that storm, weather a storm, and then we go work again.

So that’s what I would call the time utilization. Third aspect, which is skill or training, right? And the way I look at it is the older you get as a skilled technician, the less likely you are. To be one, I hang on the ropes. So let’s say you’re 20 year old. This is fun. You’re 40. You may have some midsection weight, you may have some bum knees.

You know, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge and you. Basically could become a liability rather than an assets to a traditional access company. Whereas with us, if your knees a little bum, it doesn’t matter if used to be 175 and now you’re 275. It’s not that big of a deal because the basket can handle 1, 300 pounds.

So we can then effectively monetize or help our customers monetize The skill that particular technician has already built up over, let’s say, 10, 15, 20 years. So I think that those are the 3 advantages that I see. It’s the time utilization and the skill utilization that comes with it.

And I’m not even talking about the safety aspects of, being up there where, there’s 4 redundant systems or how you can get down and. You don’t have to worry about anything.

Joel Saxum: And I can speak to that too, Petr. So I know that you guys have some aid in house that can help someone with a bit of a blade issue if they need it. But if a company has technicians that they need to put up there, this is not, you don’t have to come to site and do a three day training mechanism or something when this, when the. Blade Platform’s truck shows up, there’s a technician with it, there’s a, there’s someone who can operate it I was there, like I was gonna say, I’ll speak to this we came to the Abilene facility, saw the fantastic facility when you pull in, all the trucks everywhere being worked on the army of people maintaining these things and making sure they’re ready to go at a minute’s notice, I did an orientation with one of your techs on site who was fantastic.

Rigged, the guys rigged me up for a harness and showed me where to hook off and all these things. And within 5 minutes I was up 200 and some odd feet in the air. Just a little scared, I’m gonna be honest with you. I think I was the one who actually said, Okay, that’s high enough, we’re good here. I have a beautiful view of Abilene, Texas, right from the sky.

But what I’m saying or what I’m getting at there is if you have technicians or if you have people on the ground already, they don’t need to go through a big training program to do this, right? It was literally 15 minutes of orientation, safety rigging up a harness, which if you’re in a wind industry, you already probably have your own or you know how to do it anyways.

And then Going up and you’re ready to work, right? It was like, now we’re ready to go.

Petr Bartusek: Yeah, that’s exactly it. As long as you have your basic wind search, which is your, safety GW now, which, it’s becoming the prevalent requirement it’s more of an orientation for you, Hey, here’s where you’re going to step here is where you’re going to clip your lanyard.

And then you’re good to go. And then other than that, you’ve been trained for everything. So you’re right. Our unit will roll up to site. Or whoever needs to use it, but I would call self contained. That means there is an operator in the basket. They’ll do all the work. And we also have a ground control technician.

That’s somebody who manages the ground, make sure nobody gets underneath because there is a drop zone. If something were to happen, this person can also serve as a secondary rescue. So if you’ve never seen these units as a future potential customer it’s out of sight, out of mind. Almost.

We roll in, we’d set up everything and we take your super skilled technician or inspector or whoever that needs to be and take him up and then they got to do whatever they got to do. We do have a limited capability. So helping mostly our OEM customers in house, but. Our bread and butter is truly truck rental and access and truck sales.

Joel Saxum: The majority of platforms or the majority, I’m saying platforms as in turbines, right? The majority of the turbines out in the fleet in the United States right now are, or let’s say North America in general, are under a hundred meter hub height. A lot of them, 80 meters, 90 meters for the majority of the fleet.

It’s pretty odd that you get turbines over a hundred meters. So what that means is I know that you guys have trucks at all different levels, like you have 30 meter access all the way to a hundred meter access, correct?

Petr Bartusek: Correct. Yeah, we go 30, 50, 70, 75, 90, and then 103.

Joel Saxum: That’s flipping a football field on its nose and going from the end of the end zone to the end of the other end zone.

Not the, not just the end lines, but the whole thing. That’s huge. You’re 330 feet and you’re 340.

Petr Bartusek: 336 is almost 340. These trucks are actually the highest reaching trucks that exist in North America, South America, probably in Europe.

Joel Saxum: So with these, all these different heights, right? So if you wanted to go just work on the tip of a turbine blade, great.

If you want to go up the side of the tower and look underneath the nacelle, great. If you want to go and work the whole blade length of the tower, we can do that as well. But all of these different heights also have different kind of wind restrictions to go with it, right? Because you’re not going to be up at 100 meters with a 20 meter per second wind, like that’s just not going to happen, right?

But what do the wind restrictions look like for you guys? Because I’m just looking at weather windows.

Petr Bartusek: Yeah for us traditionally, especially on a newer fleet we have what’s called an extended wind regime. So the truck is 12 and a half meters a second, 16 meters a second, and 19 meters a second that you actually can go and operate.

It may have a restricted envelope, so you may not able to hit the full reach. So 90 meter truck, you got only hit. 80 meters at 19 meters a second. And you may not hit the full outreach, which is up to 130 feet. Then you may be limited to a hundred feet on outreach, during those dicey conditions, nobody will want to do anything crazy.

And most wind farms will catch you off at 12, 12 meters a second anyway, because it’s just considered the safe. safe practice. I think for us where it comes in is that, Hey, I know the truck can handle a lot higher wind gusts. So everybody’s safe and then it allows you to finish a job in an emergency situation.

So that’s the use we’re looking at for the extended working at a low based on extended wind regime.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because at the, in a general rule of thumb, there isn’t many turbines out there that you would even lock out after 15 meters per second. Most of them you just feather the blades negative and let it sit up there.

You’re not going to be able to work on them no matter what the access method is that’s wind speed.

Petr Bartusek: Yeah, that’s right. And, operators want to make money too. We can generate, they want to add the other day that’s their business. We get it. And again, that’s why I know we have the capability and capacity.

We don’t really, dangle the carrot much in front of people because it’s, we’re going to work to a point where it’s safe. And where are we adding value? So if, let’s say you’re working just on the tip, and you start getting 30 meters a second, we could probably still be there. The tip may be flapping to where it’s just not safe for the basket or it’s you’re just, you can be up in the air, but you’re creating zero value because you can’t actually do the work.

It depends on where you’re working on that flight. If I’m somewhere, mid span or max core, there’s a lot less movement. Okay. On that blade, so it could still be possible to finish the job, but at a tip, it just poses a whole other dimension.

Joel Saxum: Okay, so we’ve talked about 30, 30 all the way to a hundred meter reach height.

How many trucks do you guys have? What does the fleet look like?

Petr Bartusek: Pushing close to 40, it’s 35 plus. There is a pipeline of about 10 trucks being delivered each year. As we have it, we’re currently still evaluating the mix. I know this is more of a wind show, but we’ve made a huge leap into the transmission space which is adjacent market for us.

That changed our mix a little bit. We operate in other spaces too, like aerospace construction, building big stadiums and highly bridges and whatever else just needs some special equipment like this, but our bread and butter is traditionally going to be wind power.

And transmission, right? With. You’re talking about the average hub height being 80, 90 meters. Your workhorse truly ends up being a 90 meter machine which is a 295 footer. So that means that no matter what happens, you’re going to roll on the side, you can hit it and you don’t have to worry about it because it’s a, it’s an overall workhorse.

Now, if you know you’re only structuring a campaign that’s geared maybe towards strike tape and leading edge protection, Then the 50 or 70 meter variety will likely do. And, there is obviously money savings because it’s a cheaper machine to start with. But it’s going to be limited to that particular campaign that you’re doing.

Allen Hall: And what are the restrictions about moving such a large vehicle around in the United States? Are there permits and things that need to be pulled before? Bringing it some parts.

Petr Bartusek: The problem with the DLT generally is that each state has individual DLTs. There is not like a federal DLT that would make everything super easy.

So each state may have different requirements on weight, actual spacing and how much weight you can have on each axle, basically 30, 50, 70 meter variety. You can drive around the U. S. without any issues at all. That includes California which is not a super friendly state to large equipment.

The 90 meters virtually drivable everywhere except a couple states where they may need to get low boyed. And, it’s just, it’s a permit situation of 1 to 3 days wait, depending on what each state requires, and the 100 meters, they’re about 50 60. I would say about half of the states are.

Road friendly and half of the states are not. So sometimes you end up having to piecemeal Hey, we’re going to drive here. Then you’re going to put it in a low boy, fortunately own a low boy in house. So that makes moves a lot easier on us. And then, again, you get to unload it and you can drive.

It has to do with the overall weight of the vehicle or axle spacing.

Joel Saxum: But when it, when it comes to access within a wind farm, at one point in time, all of these wind farms were built with heavy trucks having to move usually big crawler cranes in, so the roads are, the roads and pads are good for you guys, the bridges, the bridge crossings, the roads around the wind farms once you get to the site, there’s, there should be no issues, no matter what the place is, unless it’s like, Hey, you can’t, put a, put an outrigger out here because the sage grouse is mating this spring or something like that.

You might run into a deal, but there’s nothing we can do about those.

Petr Bartusek: No, generally there are no issues at all. Especially if the turbine operator or, the construction company was a good steward to the County. If they were not, sometimes we walk into the hornet’s nest, they just close.

And I say, Hey, we know it’s not you guys that, that build it or, it’s. It’s not an angry landowner that, didn’t want to sign and now he doesn’t have a turbine on his field and his neighbor has five turbines and all of a sudden this guy has a brand new truck every year and neighbor doesn’t.

There’s that type of dynamic we walk into. There is some specific seasonal issues like, where there’s a little whale mating or some salamanders somewhere in California or, you’re going to have frost loss up north that, that kick in or if you had heavy rain somewhere in the Iowa cornfields or, even in the corpus area, then the ground is too soft.

So you may wait 2 or 3 days for it to dry, but yeah, no, we don’t have access issues. I think there is one site somewhere in New Hampshire that we have to get a little bit of a. So with a tractor just because the grade was relatively steep, but if any, if a truck can get there, if a car can get there, we usually don’t have issues and our truck are, all wheel drive and rear steering, so we can navigate sites pretty well.

Allen Hall: I think I’ve been to that site in New Hampshire. It is very steep. So that makes a lot of sense. So do you cover Canada as well as the United States? What’s your territory here?

Petr Bartusek: We so we specialize in the U. S. We have the ability to go to Canada. I don’t necessarily pursue it actively, passively we do it.

But there is just so much work in the U. S. for our trucks that, that to actually focus on Canada, it’s borderline counterproductive, nothing against Canadians, I like hockey and everything else. But the service window is so much shorter up there than it is stateside because of the climate and certain provinces have certain restrictions, and, French Canada being one of the harshest ones.

That it, it poses a whole new aspect in terms of, how you bill how you kind of work around labor laws, what you cannot do. So it, again, customer orders it, we’ll bring it there or bring it to the border and they can take it, we’ll deliver it. I say yes, but I don’t seek it out.

Joel Saxum: That’s a market that could greatly benefit from the efficiency of the trucks, right? But if it’s not, if it’s not good, if it’s not as good for your business model, like I get it, like just stay down here and make money where the hate.

Petr Bartusek: What they could benefit is something we discovered by accident about two years ago.

Actually, we discovered we were the beneficiary. Some of our customers discovered it and they’re saying, Hey, the machine doesn’t get tired. Why don’t we run two shifts? That’s something that probably should be utilized in Canada. That is, there is so much work that you truly cannot get everything done in a season.

And especially of the shoulder sort of season. The weather’s a little dicey. So he tried to compress everything into where she was saying may through September in an ideal case. And if everybody had their wish, it would be like June through August. So at that point, how do you.

How do you handle the limited capacity of trucks or technicians that want R& Rs and everything else that is happening? So we’ve been with a couple of our customers. We’ve been running a 24 hour shift. That means I actually have two sets of operators and they have two sets of light decks and we run around the clock.

And that truly is, we’re into what I’ve called the peak season.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, take advantage of the good weather windows, right? Yeah, we know that, like if you’re working on site, even in the U. S., once September hits and October starts looking, if you’re working anywhere north of basically South Texas, you have the possibility of snow or some other bad weather moving in, why not?

You could get two weeks worth of, Or four weeks worth of work done in two weeks if you run night shifts. That’s just makes sense.

Petr Bartusek: And with less of a standby risk, right? So your actual two weeks. Could mean six weeks in real life, right? Cause it gives you a factor, a standby.

So yeah, it’s not everyone’s receptive to it. Again, I did not invent it. I’m sure this is being used because the petrochemical industry all the time during shutdown and turnaround, but, some of our customers came to us and say, Hey, this is what we want to do. And, always figure out how to say yes.

So that is my job, virtually and then operation guys have to figure out how they gonna deliver on that.

Allen Hall: That does seem like a really good idea. And I know there’s a lot of operators that have used Blade Platforms, but there’s still a substantial number that haven’t used your services yet.

How do they reach out to you, Petr? How do they get ahold of Blade Platforms?

Petr Bartusek: So the easiest way is the 21st century, that’s www.bladeplatforms.com. That probably will guide you to our 1 800 number, or, eventually get you to someone who you’ve talked to and they can get to me. I don’t mind sharing my number.

That’s 469-371-4284. If someone needs to get me direct.

Allen Hall: If you need Blade Platforms services, go to bladeplatforms. com. Check out their website, get ahold of Petr. They are really efficient and are experts on blade upgrades and blade repairs. So this Petr, it’s been great having you on the podcast.

Thank you so much for joining. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thanks for having me.

https://weatherguardwind.com/blade-platforms-turbine-blade-repair-access/

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Green Eagle’s ARSOS Automates Wind Farm Operations

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Green Eagle’s ARSOS Automates Wind Farm Operations

Alejandro Cabrera Muñoz, CEO and founder of Green Eagle Solutions, discusses their ARSOS platform and how it helps wind farm operators manage technical complexities, market volatility, and regulatory changes by automating turbine issue responses for increased productivity and revenue.

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 FacebookYouTubeTwitterLinkedin 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!

Wind Farm operators face mounting challenges from managing thousands of diverse turbines to navigating the energy markets and constant regulatory changes. This week we speak with Alejandro Cabrera Munoz, CEO, and founder of Green Eagle Solutions. Green Eagle’s ARSOS platform gives control rooms immediate responses to turbine issues, which dramatically increases productivity and captures more revenue from their turbines.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Alejandro, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3: Thank you, Allen. Thank you for having me here today.

Allen Hall: so Green Eagle Solutions is in a unique space of the renewable energy marketplace, and you saw a problem several years ago, particularly in the control rooms of [00:01:00] wind operators. What is that problem that you identified?

Speaker 3: Yeah, Allen, I think it, it’s, It’s a challenge that, most of our customers, which are generally large operators, are facing today. But it’s a challenge that have been, growing, in the past years. So first of all, it’s, it goes along with the penetration of renewables in the industry, right?

So we have, due to all these many years of aggregating new wind farms and solar plants, We are seeing how the complexity, the technical complexity of operating and supervising these assets is growing exponentially, right? So we now have customers with thousands of wind turbines that have, different models, different versions of, controllers, And also different healthcare issues that they have to take care of. So the technical complexity is a fair, the first [00:02:00] factor that, it’s has to be tackled from a control room, And, makes, operations quite, challenging. Along with this, we have market volatility. So in the recent years especially, we are seeing how, Negative pricing and optional markets are now affecting operations in a daily, basis. Basically in every 15 minutes you dunno if you’re gonna produce or not. Up until recently it was as simple as if you had wind resource, you would produce energy from wind farms. If you had solar, you produce energy from solar plants.

It’s not like that anymore. So the market is quite, volatile. that adds a lot of complexity from the commercial point of view of, Of the assets. And the last, factor that is actually becoming, an increasing challenge for everyone is the regulatory changes. So basically due to the penetration of renewable energies, what we see is that all governments, all grid operators and our market operators are constantly issuing [00:03:00] new adapt, new regulatory changes, that everyone has to adapt to no matter what.

it doesn’t matter if you have an all wind farm or a newer wind farm. Or you prepared or not, like everyone has to be adapted to, to the new regulatory, changes. the three things are actually affecting, our customers and we are trying to solve all these issues, the way, the, best way that we can, right?

So most of our customers, we just have a control room full of people. they will do their best effort to accommodate these challenges. The reality is that we have to. Deal with, people, procedures, and, systems, and we, if we don’t put these three things in place, it’s impossible to cope up. With the complexity that we are dealing with, and that’s where we come in.

Joel Saxum: I think you painted the picture of a really good problem that’s not just like local to the eu, local to India, local to South America, whatever. it’s a global issue, right? You have the, massive build out of different kinds of [00:04:00] technologies that need to be managed in different ways that, bring their own issues, their own delivery to the grid, those kind of things.

and then you, and as Green Eagle has, painted the picture like, Hey, we saw these issues. This is where we come in, this is where we step in. So in that, what kind of inefficiencies are you seeing in the traditional wind farm operations versus what you guys are bringing to the table now?

Speaker 3: So just to give a few examples, and I think I, I can be quite, precise on this. let’s say that a wind turbine gets some fault because of, high temperature on the gearbox, and it’s a. It’s an automated response from the manufacturer that the ban is gonna stop for safety measures, right?

So in many cases. This is solved from the control room point. from the control room by waiting for an operator to just, follow a procedure, right? So this procedure takes a lot of time. Why? Because you are not only paying attention to one winter turbine band, you may have 2000 winter turbines, right?

[00:05:00] So you have to first identify, which is a model of winter turbine band that is affected by this issue. Then you have to go through the manual, then you have to check what are the parameters, and the whole process takes minimum half an hour if you wanna do it properly. The problem is when you have other issues like high wind speed, right?

So normally when you have high wind resource, which is basically when you can produce more energy, is when your assets suffer the most. And so they’re more prone to errors, they’re more prone to go get on fault. So if you take a look at these times, the country room, response time is actually gonna go up in hours, right?

So this one of the one simple example is a end-to-end full haling procedure that takes between. 20 minutes, two hours, depending on how you have a structure, your systems, people, and procedures, right? So this is the first thing that we can tackle. Like just as an example with our software, we can automate the whole process end to end.

That means that this problem is never gonna be dealt with. From an operator, This is gonna be [00:06:00] automated. This is an, this is never gonna become an issue for an operator ever again.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And I think this lends itself to software obviously, that there’s, if you look at these control rooms, if you, or especially if you looked 3, 4, 5 years ago.

It’s pretty chaotic in there. And if you are on the market for electricity and the price is fluctuating and you have turbines popping on and off, you have a crisis and it’s very hard to sort that out and to get the turbines up and running if you need them to be, to produce power so you can make money.

’cause ultimately we’re trying to maximize the revenue to our company. And that cannot be a human response. We’re too slow. Humans are too slow to respond to all this. And because we’d have to know every nuance to every turbine or solar farm makes the problem immensely impossible. So that’s where you have developed a piece of software called.

ARSOS and it’s a system approach to a very complicated problem. So you want to explain what ARSOS does 

Speaker 3: [00:07:00] effectively, what, what ARSOS does is to provide immediate response to whatever issue you have already a procedure to deal with, right? So let’s take into account the, previous example that, that we were using, in this case.

And, there are hundreds of different cases where a wind turbine is gonna stop. Every wind turbine is gonna, can have potentially hundreds of different. Scenarios where it’s gonna go on fault and require human attention or attention from remote. So the first thing that we can, provide is, immediate response time.

I think all the investment funds, IPPs or utilities, can now rely on a system instead of, relying on people. They can rely on a system that is gonna do effectively. The first phase actually is gonna do exactly the same. With immediate response time, this is what our source is all about. according to our experience, we have identified if you, could take 100% of the issues or incidents that can impact, the availability of the assets.

We have identified that at least [00:08:00] 80% of those incidents can be managed autonomously. Among that 80%, almost 75% of them can be resolved autonomously, and the other 20%. It can be just dispatched to, technicians on site so they can actually go on the turbine and fix the issue on site. So this, this is, this is our goal.

We can multiply by five the operational capacity of our customers. but along with that comes many other benefits. So the, main one, we already tackling that, right? So immediate response time with that comes, increase of productivity because we don’t need operators to be doing repetitive tasks anymore, so they can actually do other.

Added value activities, but immediate response also provide with an increase of availability, which also translate into an increase of production and again, translate into additional revenue. So effectively what we’re doing is to transform a traditionally thought of, center of cost, like the, it is a [00:09:00] control room.

We can optimize the control room to a point where it’s no longer a center of cost. Actually an opportunity to turn that into a center of revenue. We can actually improve the operations. We can actually capture more revenue from our assets. But we can only do that through automation.

Joel Saxum: So when you’re talking with operators, okay, so I’m, right now I’m imagining Alejandro on a sales call and you’re talking with them and you have, you may have in that room, some energy traders.

You may have some of the operators from the ROC, you may have. an engineer in charge of it, an asset manager, someone of that sort, and you start talking through the problems that you guys can solve. Which ones make the light bulb go on the most? Is it the revenue? Is it like, Hey, we can actually pull more revenue outta here, or is it, Hey, operators of the control room, we’re going to ease your life.

Which, which of these are the breaking points that make people go, yes, we want to use Green Eagle?

Speaker 3: Yeah, that’s a great question, Joel, and unfortunately it’s not that simple to answer. I wish I had the, right answer to that. [00:10:00] But the reality is that every type of customer has different, interest.

and I’m gonna give you a few examples. if you’re a trader, what you’re gonna value is the capabilities to participate in advanced, optional markets, right? Especially in Spain, we are the most used, technology to participate in secondary markets and c services, restoration reserves and so on.

So we enable our customers, the traders in this case, to participate in all these markets with zero efforts so they can focus on trading. But all the infrastructure, all the communications, all the actual management of curtailments is done automatically. So they can just focus on trading. but that’s what they, see, right?

If we were talking to an IP for instance, ISPs are generally, focused on or driven by, service level agreement based on availability, right? So if they say, if they, if their commitment is 97% of availability, they’re [00:11:00] gonna try to reach that, right? So that driven by the availability. but that’s it. they’re not necessarily capturing more if the availability goes higher than 97% or if the site is being operated better, or if the site is being actually producing more.

Sometimes they’re not incentivized by that. This is why, the reason, this is the reason why we are not normally focused on large utilities and large operators because, effectively, large utilities and IPPs, they, if they’re large enough, they’re gonna have everything in house. So they’re gonna see the benefits at all levels.

They’re gonna increase the productivity, and they’re gonna improve their operational model as a whole. So that’s why, we are targeting, these larger operators.

Allen Hall: I know a lot of the different operators have their own models of how to respond to particular alarms. Everybody does it differently depending upon a lot of it’s where you are in the world, where your wind turbines are and how your wind turbines respond to certain conditions.

So they’ve [00:12:00] developed these sort of procedures themselves. Are they able to integrate their existing procedures into the ARSOS platform where. Basically they’re taking the human outta the loop, but just automating it, making it simpler for the control room to run these turbines. 

Speaker 3: That’s a great question, Allen.

of course, yes. and this is something that, we’ve been, seeing from day one. at the beginning when we thought, let’s, automate all these processes and all these procedures, I, we thought that we were gonna find like a common ground of how to deal with this model of turbines. However, what we see is a complete different way to.

To operate a fleet. And it depends on both commercial, and operational strategies. for instance, a utility that is gonna keep their assets for 20 years, they’re gonna have be paying attention of what is the most effective way to operate, taking care of the healthcare, of the assets. So it’s gonna be more conservative, it’s gonna be more long-term thinking.[00:13:00]

on the contrary, if, let’s say that you have a portfolio that you’re gonna sell in two years. That may drive, you to a more aggressive protocol. So you may want to, hire the higher the availability, increase the production, even if that comes at a cost of, a little bit more fatigue on the winter turbines.

So it all depends on how, what you wanna get for your fleet. what’s important is that we allow, we provide the technology. We don’t tell our customers how to operate. Actually, they have. They have more knowledge than us, to be honest. They know their assets, they know how they behave, and if you ask them, they know exactly that Tar van, three out of 2000 in this wind farm has this issue, and the other one that has a different issue, they already know that stuff.

So we’re not gonna tell them how to operate their fleet, but we allow them to do whatever they think is best for turbine. By turbine, I mean with our software, you can actually define different protocols and assign each protocol to one turbine. That means that, for instance, [00:14:00] if you, change the, the gearbox of one tarn out of 2000, right?

Normally you, what you would like to do is that the next day everyone is paying attention to the tarn in case something happens, right? but you have 2000, so that’s actually not very realistic. So in that case, what you do is that you configure out protocol that is designed for that specific model of turbine, and that takes into account that the gearbox was replaced recently.

So if there’s an alert, on a fault related to a gearbox. Then the response is gonna be taking that, it’s gonna take that into account. So obviously this kind of things can only be done if you’re based on, automation. Otherwise you just, have to rely on a few notebooks that you have in your control room and that they’re static.

They never change. they’re the same for 20 years and they never evolve.

Allen Hall: Yeah, they’re the same for every turbine. And that’s just a approach that we need to give up, that we need to move on as an industry to be more efficient in what we do. So how. [00:15:00] Does an operator, and I know you’re working with a lot of large operators and have a lot of turbines under your systems.

How does the RSOs implementation take place? What does that look like?

Speaker 3: All right, so it depends on the, I would say on the digital maturity of our customers. So it depends. Some of them already have a very strong network. Secure network. They have a, let’s, say, one of our customers in the, us, right?

So they already have a NERC department in place. basically what, first we need to understand what, they have already in place and how we can fit into that, solution in this, in the most, let’s say most, most demanding scenario. We are, gonna deploy your software on premises. So it depends on whatever they have already in place with the, we deploy your software, we provide them with the installers.

We provide them with the procedures and they are autonomous to, to install it. Obviously with our support, from remote [00:16:00] in, in other cases, in the other extreme, we have customers that don’t have a large portfolio. They don’t have these large IT and nerc. Department, in place. So in for smaller portfolios, we can actually connect from our cloud.

Our cloud, we make sure that it’s cyber security. We have all the certification in place. and this is the solution that we have. So we have, our cloud is connected to an onsite, piece of software that we install on, the edge, and they’re connecting securely. And that’s how we do it. in terms of architecture, I think it’s important, to get deeper into.

Why we are, proposing a, we are also establishing a different, way to do things because it also has to do with the architecture itself. if you take into account, the NERC rules in the US but also any cybersecurity policy, it is basically gonna go against any kind of [00:17:00] optimization, in the operations, right?

Because when you have so many issues, as we mentioned before. The tendency is gonna be to, okay, so this let’s centralize everything into one place where I can actually manage everything, efficiently, right? So one place centralize. I can control everything from this place. I have a control room here. I.

That’s it. Now that goes totally against cyber security policies, philosophy, right? Which they would like to have everything isolated from each other. So you have to actually go to the site and push the button right there. Now we have a, I would say the best solution, that covers this, both worlds, right?

So we have a solution that allows you to centralize the configuration. Distribute the autonomous control. That means that instead of relying on a centralized control room where the operators are pushing the button, so in the control room, you actually don’t push the buttons. You have the control room to supervise and to define the protocols itself.

Then these protocols are. Sign to each turbines, [00:18:00] the right protocols, but then the control is actually done autonomously on site. So even if your control room gets disconnected from the sites, from the network, you lose connectivity to your control room. You cannot access for whatever reason to your control room, you can be certain that your sites are still being operated in the same way.

If you could access your control room. So this is actually compliance with the cyber security policies at the same time that is allow, is providing you with what you were looking for to begin with, which is efficiency in operations.

Allen Hall: When an operator installs the RSO system, what are the typical things that they’ll see immediately?

is it just easier to operate the turbines, it just requires less staff? Are they producing more revenue? What are those success stories look like?

Speaker 3: Yeah, success stories look like this. Just like any automation attempt at the beginning, everyone is suffering from a little bit of, control, fism, right?

So it is okay, am I losing control of this? So we already have a system to deal with this. So what we do, basically, we install [00:19:00] our software in parallel to your control room. it works as a shadow mode, in a simulation mode. So basically what it does is to say, if this was active, what would it do?

Automatically versus what actually, what, are my operators actually doing? So we can actually compare for a few weeks or a few months, the performance of the automation versus the performance of the, current room. So normally when we propose this, customers, I will say in the mindset, it’s okay to test this for two, three months and then.

Go ahead and say, okay, let’s activate it. I no longer want to do this manually. It’s a waste of time and resources, right? The reality is that as soon as we put it in place and they see how it works, how it re respond immediately instead of. The delay that comes from operators, it takes, I would say, no more than two weeks until they’re already ready to put it, in production mode.

Allen Hall: When they see the lost revenue, [00:20:00] they would immediately turn it on and start making some more money.

Speaker 3: It takes between two weeks, no more than a month for sure.

Joel Saxum: I hear water cooler conversations. That would be like the ro the robot beats you guys again, you

Speaker 3: know. automation has a very interesting effect.

It’s that. I would say it’s a vicious cycle. So once you see something working autonomously, the brain works in a very interesting way. It’s you never want to do that manually again. It’s am I doing it? It doesn’t, it does not make any sense anymore. so it triggers, whole, efforts to just more of it, right?

More of it. It’s okay, if we’re doing a. POC with 10 sites, but you have 30 sites. You want it in the 30 sites as soon as possible. If you’re doing it to automate a few cases, but you know that you can actually automate more cases. You wanna do it as soon as possible as well. So it triggers, once you start this process, there’s no way back.

it triggers this vicious cycle where you are constantly thinking, okay, what’s the next thing [00:21:00] that if possible, I don’t wanna do it again. It’s very exciting.

Joel Saxum: I’m thinking about when I used to write reports in Excel and I learned, I finally learned how to do a macro in Excel, and then I was like, why I’m never writing another basic one of these reports again.

I could just push a button and it does it all. and it’s life changing, right? So once you get onto that, there’s just, there’s, people that are wired that way too, right? I used to have a, mentor that was wired. How can we do this better, faster, more efficiently? And it, he was trying to put that into everything we did.

Once he figured out a little way to do here, a little way to do here was, how can we make this better? so you guys have been working, really hard to get this system out through the Green Eagle ASO solution out in the marketplace. Based on the success you’re seeing, what does it look like for the future?

What’s the next step?

Speaker 3: So I think that the, in the future what we see, at least what we are aiming for is that every wind farm should have a system like ours. I don’t really care if it’s ours or not, but it should work that way. as a, [00:22:00] from a technical point of view, it’s it doesn’t make any sense that not all wind farms are running with a system like ours.

So that’s the way we see it. Like it’s, Getting momentum. I think it took a while for us to, take off and to get large customers to use our software, but now that large customers are using it, and the system is more than validated. We already have this running in over 10,000 wind turbine vans.

So I think it’s more than proven that it works and that we are solving a problem that no longer exists anymore. This is how we see it, the wind industry in the next, three to five years. All of the wind farms should come with this, and essentially we’re trying to make it come with a software like ours from day one.

So even if they’re already still connected to the manufacturer. It only, this can only benefit in the long run, right? but starting from day one. So this is what we are working on and how to get there as soon as possible we can encourage our customers to, [00:23:00] to start using this automation. To enable them to take back control of their assets to their operations, to not rely on someone else to do your, the operations of your site.

if you wanna get out of the manufacturer and work with an ISP, you can also make sure that the response time from their control room is also gonna be immediate with the software. So as soon as you have it, you’re gonna see the returns. And actually, we also work with our customers to. To prove the increase of revenue that they experience.

And we, the benefits of automation also is that you can measure the impact, right? So we generally work with our customers. We can measure the impact in their operations and we normally capture like a third of what they are gonna receive. So it’s like a no brainer to use our software. And for that reason, we believe that three to five years from now, every wind farm is gonna be running autonomously.

Allen Hall: Wow. That would be amazing. And the Green Eagle Solutions website, if you haven’t [00:24:00] visited it, you need to, it’s green eagle solutions.com. There’s a. Great information on that site. If you want to dive in deep or just take a cursory look, that’s the place to start. Alejandro, if they want to connect with you to learn more about ARSOS and what it does, how would they do that?

Speaker 3: the most, straightforward way to write an email to sales@greeneaglesolutions.com.

Allen Hall: That’s a good place to start. And you can also find Alejandro, LinkedIn also. Alejandro, thank you so much for being with us today. Tremendous product, very interesting technology. I. Thank you so much for having me today.

https://weatherguardwind.com/green-eagle-arsos/

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American Draws the Line

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At left, Bill Madden checks in from Boise, Idaho.

And he makes an excellent point; until recently, Idaho loved Trump.

This is all terrific news.  It’s nice to know that, at a certain point, American draws the line against hatred and stupidity.

America Draws the Line

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Transmission Major Topic at Georgia Power Hearing

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Shortly after Memorial Day, the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) convened to hear testimony from parties asking for improvements in Georgia Power’s Integrated Resource Plan (IRP): the utility’s ten-year infrastructure plan for deciding what gets built, where electricity will flow, and who will pay for it. Multiple parties recommended improving system reliability and reducing costs through more comprehensive analysis of regional needs for transmission lines.

However, Commissioners and the utility were reluctant to move away from a traditional approach that relies heavily on Georgia Power building in-state power plants to meet the state’s growing energy needs. Like much of the Southeast, Georgia is experiencing new weather patterns, population growth, and the addition of major new individual electric loads on the system. These trends require a wide range of actions, including new and expanded transmission lines, in order to maintain reliable electric service.  Georgia Power’s ten-year plan includes billions of dollars of new in-state transmission lines to connect both new power plants and major new industries to the grid.  

The need for more energy will drive new transmission investments for Georgia Power, regardless of whether the utility chooses to build new power plants or increase connectivity to neighboring utilities. The status quo of Georgia Power’s closed transmission planning risks inefficient decisions showing up in your electric bill.

Improved Stakeholder Engagement, Role of Multi-Value Strategic Transmission

During the hearing, outside experts promoted the Carolinas Transmission Planning Collaborative as a successful model for stakeholder engagement that Georgia Power and its parent company, Southern, should follow when planning transmission locally through the Integrated Transmission System (ITS). Stakeholder meetings of the Carolinas Transmission Planning Collaborative, called the Transmission Advisory Group or TAG, are open to any individual or organization that signs up in advance. 

In contrast, Georgia’s ITS process all occurs between Georgia utilities behind closed doors. And while stakeholders can attend a separate southeast regional meeting (Southeast Regional Transmission Planning, often called “SERTP”) hosted by Southern with other utilities to discuss regional transmission planning across multiple companies, it merely conducts a limited number of studies and does not have direct input into Georgia Power’s local plans.

Additionally, Georgia Power’s process prioritizes using local transmission lines within a utility’s service area to maintain system reliability. While “keeping the lights on” is the paramount goal of utility operations, this approach ignores a wide array of other effects that the size and location of transmission lines have on the grid. These effects include which power plants are used the most often, the opportunity to use cheaper generation for the system, improved power flows during hours of high-electric demand, and the availability of assistance from neighboring utility systems if a local power plant fails.

All of these additional factors are evaluated in a more robust transmission process called “Multi-Value Strategic Transmission” (MVST). In 2023, Duke added an MVST process to the Carolinas Transmission Planning Collaborative, in response to direction from the North Carolina Utilities Commission. Duke acknowledged the value of MVST in their filing to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. “To be positioned to reliably address the many dynamic demands facing the transmission grid, including not just the generation transition, but greater electrification, increased electric vehicle adoption, and new economic development, including from prospective customers with significant energy demands to power data centers or manufacturing hubs, Duke Energy needs to evolve its planning process from siloed planning for reliability, economics, and public policy.” Duke’s first round of the MVST process is expected to conclude by the end of 2025.

Grid Strategies recently examined the value of building three regional lines across the Southeast using MVST. They found that if SERTP built three new regional transmission lines instead of local projects, the average residential customer would save $4.47 per year. That’s about half of what customers are paying for Georgia Power’s Vogtle Unit 4, which added about $8.95 to the average customer’s bill. For system planning, if the Georgia Public Service Commission ordered Southern Company and Georgia Power to consider regional transmission lines as least regret projects with multiple benefits, these savings to ratepayers would only increase.

Interregional Transfer Capability enhances Georgia’s grid when it is constrained

Despite indications that a more public process and more comprehensive analysis could save customers billions of dollars, some members of the Georgia Public Service Commission were concerned that reliance on neighboring systems would undermine reliability. Georgia’s state law for integrated resource planning, however, lists power purchases from neighboring states as one of six possible sources of supply of power. During Winter Storm Elliott, Georgia Power was able to keep the lights on only because of emergency purchases from Florida Power and Light to Southern. Without Florida’s support, Georgia Power would have seen outages

Congress also has tackled the issue of transmission lines needed for interregional coordination during severe weather.  A Congressionally-mandated November 2024 Interregional Transfer Capability Study found that current transfer capability between Southeastern utilities is insufficient during extreme weather. Additional reporting by Grid Strategies concluded that rising load growth will put additional strain on a local utilities’ generation, further increasing the need for transfer capability not only between southeastern utilities, but also with utilities in other regions, allowing a utility to receive power from a region not experiencing high demand at the same time.

During the IRP hearing, Georgia Power cited recent blackouts in Louisiana as an example of why transmission planning should remain a local, utility-by-utility process rather than be regionally coordinated. Louisiana is part of a regional transmission organization named MISO that stretches from the Gulf to Canada. But, in the words of New Orleans City Councilman JP Morrell, the lead regulator of the power company Entergy in the city of New Orleans, “If we had better transmission, we could have flowed power from other parts of the state and other parts of this nation to keep power on.” In this case, MISO had proposed improved transmission ties into southern Louisiana but state regulators didn’t approve the cost. When a nuclear power plant went down, transmission was inadequate to transfer power from elsewhere in the region.

Improved Engagement enhances Transparency and “Right-Sizing” the Investment 

As we outlined in our previous article, Georgia Power has the opportunity to improve its transmission planning by following our recommendations, which include: 

  1. Clearly marking which transmission projects support which electricity needs
  2. Waiting to approve new transmission projects until the associated load growth has reached key interconnection and construction milestones
  3. Planning for batteries and solar based on their real-world support of the grid

These recommendations would be further enhanced by Georgia Power adopting open engagement with stakeholders and looking at a broad array of benefits when upgrading the grid. Beginning these processes now for both local and regional transmission planning will save Georgia ratepayers money, support growing demand for electricity, and keep the lights on.

The post Transmission Major Topic at Georgia Power Hearing appeared first on SACE | Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

Transmission Major Topic at Georgia Power Hearing

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