Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Does the Massive WindRunner Plane Make Sense? Plus CLS Wind’s Innovative Assembly System
Allen, Rosemary and Phil debate whether WindRunner, a huge airplane proposed to transport wind turbine blades offshore, makes sense for the industry. Plus they discuss an article from the latest edition of PES Wind Magazine from CLS Wind about their lifting platform used to assemble wind turbines. Allen and Phil learn that Rosemary is a five-time Wheel of Fortune champion!
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: Do you have game shows in Australia, Rosemary? Is that a thing?
Rosemary Barnes: Hey, I was a five time carryover champion on Wheel of Fortune.
Allen Hall: What?
Rosemary Barnes: What whoa. Rosemary, what was that? I was a five time carryover champion on Wheel of Fortune. I don’t know if they, is it the same in the US when you win an episode, you get to come back the next day?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I did that five times. I was on six, six episodes.
Allen Hall: How much money did you win?
Rosemary Barnes: It’s not as rich as, I didn’t win any cash. There’s no cash in the Australian one. And it’s not as rich as the U S one. I think I won like 20, 30, 000 worth of stuff. Yeah, it was pretty, pretty good as a uni student.
I want to, Bed and like saucepans and a couple of lazy boy recliners, one that had massaging in a fridge, and one a houseboat cruise one how did I electric guitar what else did I want? Oh, and all sorts of stuff. So much.
Allen Hall: Did this really happen, Rosemary?
Rosemary Barnes: This really happened when I was at uni.
Allen Hall: Why we’ve not seen video of this? Why is this not on YouTube? I don’t understand.
Rosemary Barnes: I have a VHF of it. I have been thinking that I should chase down the studio and see if I can get the recordings. So I’m sure that they’re archived, but I don’t know how easy it is to get your hands on it.
Allen Hall: Our producer needs this video badly. We have to get this back on the internet. Come on. Really? I didn’t know that. It’s not in your CV. Why wasn’t that in your CV?
Rosemary Barnes: It used to be, it did literally used to be in my CV. Wheel of Fortune couldn’t have slipped in there somewhere? It’s probably not anymore, but for a very long time, it was on my CV in other.
And it was one it’s a good way to see if people read your CV because there’s no way you’re reading that and not mentioning it at the interview. And two, when people did read it, then it’s a really great icebreaker, you know, cause it’s just Oh, okay. Before we get started, we just have to chat about that.
And then it’s, you know, it’s a fun little thing to talk about and you then, you know, then you’re friends. And then the rest of the interview goes very nicely. Okay. That’s like a hot point. Pro tip for interviews is include something like that on there that will you know, be a way to start the conversation and have everyone be relaxed before the interview.
Allen Hall: Okay. I think Rosemary’s been holding back. We’ve been burying our soul every week and Rosemary’s. Keeping the Wheel of Fortune thing under wraps.
Philip Totaro: Now, I mean, the only thing I could put on my CV is that I used to live next to Rick James. I mean, what the, you know, like
Rosemary Barnes: Allen can put on that he’s married to a real rocket scientist.
So that’s a good one.
Allen Hall: This is true. It’s sort of guilt by association there.
A startup called Radia founded by MIT trained rocket scientist, Mark Lundstrom is developing the world’s largest cargo plane called the WindRunner. Now you’re asking yourself why is it called the windrunner and it’s an airplane because it’s meant to transport wind turbines, of course And rosemary pointed this article out to me a couple of days ago with A whole bunch of calculations about the megawatts per mile traveled or something of the sort So okay, we need to talk about this And get it out, all out, we’ll get out of our systems about this airplane.
Now let me give you the, let me give you the promo on this. If this thing works, it would enable the installation of onshore wind turbines pretty easily by just sticking them in the back of this airplane and flying them to the site because the way this airplane is designed, it will, it could conceivably take blades as long as.
I think 120 meters long.
Rosemary Barnes: But how long a runway does it need to take off and land? Is there a suitable runway in proximity to every onshore wind farm that wants 120 meter long blades?
Allen Hall: Based on the shape of that airplane, it would be about a mile long runway, which is pretty easy to do. There’s all, there’s thousands of them in the United States, maybe tens of thousands of them in the United States.
Rosemary Barnes: Next question. Do people want such large rotors on onshore wind turbines? I mean, offshore you put a rotor on a tower that is barely taller than the, you know, the blade so that you just make sure that it’s never going to hit the water and, you know, add a tiny bit of a safety factor in case there’s a huge storm that’s, you know, unpredicted But onshore, you need to get up away from wind shear.
You can’t, you know, you, because the, so wind shear is the effect that slows down the wind close to the ground. So there’s a big difference between wind speed at the ground and the wind speed, a hundred meters up and, you know, 150 meters up. So you can’t have such a big wind gradient that you’ve got your blades really close to the ground and an onshore wind turbine.
You’ve got 120 meter long blade, I’m going to say you’re going to want 150 meter tall tower. Is that we’re just, I don’t understand why the aeroplane is the first part of this puzzle. If we’re going to move to that, wouldn’t the push come from people who are like, okay, we’ve got this gigantic onshore wind turbine, if only we had a way to install it more places than where we can currently get it to.
And then, you know, windrunners like, ah, solution. Here it is, but I haven’t seen anybody requesting really large onshore wind turbines that can’t be transported.
Allen Hall: So my answer to that is that they’ve already raised a hundred million dollars and they’re valued at a billion dollars. So I don’t have to answer that question.
Just follow the money. I think what’s happening is they realized that building a blade factory is really expensive and you can fly blades into places and building a runway that’s a mile long is not particularly hard to do. And. Subsequently, I do think there’s applications for package delivery or like an Amazon service.
Remember Amazon tried to start, or it has started its own airline essentially or freight service. So they fly their own airplanes or rent airplanes to fly around to carry cargo. When Amazon thinks about the next stage of that, they’re gonna get bigger airplanes. That’s just what’s gonna happen. And this would feed that market also.
So I think there’s sort of two parts to it. You can question the efficiency of it and all that stuff. I totally fine, but somebody thinks it’s worth a hundred million. They’re valued at a billion dollars. So somebody thinks it’s worth a billion dollars today. So there must be some rationale behind it.
Rosemary Barnes: But let’s just be real here. There are a very large number of highly valued companies, especially at startups. And especially there’s a lot of clean techs that have no prospect of ever Making any money that have, you know, like just because they’ve got a high valuation doesn’t, I think that’s a crazy way to think of it.
Oh, because people have invested money in it, then it must be worth that much money.
Allen Hall: I mean, if the world was all right, Microsoft wouldn’t exist, right? That if it came down to whether it was useful or not, there’d be a lot of products that didn’t exist, but it depends on where the money is and if they can.
provide transport in a, in an efficient way. And they may want to develop their own wind farms, probably where they’re going, then maybe they want to have their own airplane to go do this thing. And the upper end of the cargo lifting world in the airplane market is being destroyed one airplane at a time at the moment.
So there’s not a lot of really big airplanes to go do this job. And if you need them, it usually runs the last. The numbers I heard to get a flight of the Russian airplane that does a lot of this is about a million bucks a flight. That’s pretty good money if you can get it.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And how often is that being done?
Almost never. I mean, I’ll read out what I sent you when I questioned about whether this was sensible because I’m doing a a video on shipping at the moment. So I’ve been comparing different modes of transport. I’ll read out a quote from my upcoming video to transport one ton of goods, one kilometer in a cargo ship takes about 1.
4 to 1. 7 to four megajoules of energy rails, a bit higher around 2. 4 to five road is seven to 18. So you know, there’s the range low end for cargo ship 1. 7 high end for road is 18. And then for air travel, it’s 200 to 350 megajoules per ton kilometer. It’s, you know, like it’s a hundred times more energy.
Fuel is a significant cost. It’s just, I mean, you can make it a little bit more efficient, but you’re never gonna bring that to the point where you would choose air over any other method of transport. If you had any kind of a say in it. And yeah, so I just, I don’t see the pull for it. It’s not like people are crying out to install these gigantic wind turbines and there’s no other way but to transport it by aeroplane, you know?
And even if it turns out that we do end up wanting to install gigantic offshore size wind turbines onshore, there are other solutions as well that we’ve covered on this channel. I mean, there’s Split blades, there’s thermoplastic blades will be coming in the future. You’ll weld them together on site.
There’s towers that you can print in situ or, you know, other ways of building towers on site instead of transporting the sections the tower sections in a, you know, one whole cross section at a time. I just think this is a classic case of a solution looking for a problem and sounds cool, which is a really great way to get.
millions of dollars of investment. And yeah, I think that’s going to be the end of it. I mean, for sure they might pivot into transporting packages or something where there’s a bit more of a margin. And it’s important that people really care about the extra speed. You know, that’s something that they were willing to pay more for.
But you know, wind turbines are planned wind farms are planned years in advance. And I know from working in the logistics that the cheapest mode of transport Is a really important part of the planning of the whole project from the start. And they do transport blades by aeroplane every now and then once in a blue moon.
You know, obviously not as large as what this aeroplane can do, but. You know, it has been done before and it’s, you know, it’s either because someone massively stuffed up and you know, there’s something, the whole project is ground to a halt because of some transport issue, or it’s a gimmick to be like, Hey, look at this cool thing we did.
Allen Hall: There is no gimmicks in aerospace because it costs too much money.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no gimmicks in aerospace. I mean, aren’t there like a hundred startups in in personal air taxis that are maybe crying out as being the exact definition of a gimmick? I mean, come on.
Allen Hall: They’re not gimmicks. They either succeed or they fail horribly.
There really is no middle ground. I mean, it has destroyed the careers of many a person that have gotten into aerospace and felt. Phil’s been in aerospace. He’s seen it too. There’s been a lot of airplane designs that were great on paper and had some reasonable amount of funding that never got to the end.
In today’s world, to build that airplane, Billion, maybe a little more, maybe two to get that airplane built because of just the factories and the people and stuff.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Let’s be clear. They haven’t built one.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I mean, it’s definitely a design. They haven’t built the first airplane yet, but it wouldn’t take them all that much time to get, at least get a prototype up in the air.
I don’t think it’s really getting it sort of, as Phil has pointed out to me numerous times before we started this conversation, the FAA is going to have A lot to say about it. That’s probably where they’re the slowdown will occur.
Philip Totaro: Yeah, I mean, the FAA is one thing. Let’s talk in addition to what Rosemary just mentioned in terms of energy efficiency per ton kilometer per ton mile.
There’s also cost per ton mile or cost per ton kilometer, which is the metric that they use in the logistics world to figure out how. You know, you move things in a cost efficient manner. We looked at similar technology to this about 13 years ago with a dirigible, actually two different dirigible companies that wanted to do a heavy lift cargo for you know, on site transportation and installation of blades or, and, or towers, or in some cases, the whole turbine where you just literally pick the whole turbine and.
You know, that’s fully assembled in a factory controlled environment, or, you know, reasonably controlled environment. And then you know, you just install the whole turbine like you would in, in offshore, for instance. The problem is, not only does the cost per ton mile not trade at all. Again, it’s, if you’re talking about the you know, order of magnitude difference between truck and rail versus air in energy, That Rosemary just mentioned.
It’s about the same factor in terms of cost per ton mile between truck and rail and, you know, air transport, including either sky crane by conventional helicopter or you know, air freight, you know. For cargo. So the reality of this is it’s never gonna, the industry is so locked into low cost solutions that they’re absolutely never going to adopt something this expensive.
The other problem is also getting the FAA permits to be able to do. You know, if you’re going to, I mean, what’s the point of doing this? If you can ship, you know, hundreds of blades on a rail car and then offload them onto trucks and then do your last mile, quote unquote, last mile transportation through trucks.
Why other than speed, what are you really getting out of transporting, you know, a handful, like maybe up to three blades at a time for one turbine, you’re going to have to make 70 trips to fully outfit your wind farm with, you know, parts delivered by an airplane. So it just I don’t this is one of those it might be technologically feasible, but it’s not commercially viable and it’s just, Doesn’t seem to trade for me.
Allen Hall: Maybe the answer is in the question. Founded by MIT trained rocket scientists. What if this has something to do with moving rocket parts around? Starship.
Philip Totaro: Which again makes a lot more sense than wind turbine blades.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Remember they moved the space shuttle on top of the 747, which was crazy to see by the way, but That happened.
So we’re talking about rocket parts?
Rosemary Barnes: No, if it’s one, one offs, it makes a lot more sense than where you’ve got to set up, you know, like you’ve got a wind farm, you transport many of the same thing and you did the same installation over and over again over a period of months or years. If it’s a big one it can’t like it, I just can’t wrap my head around this ever being a better solution than, you know, the kinds of things that Phil mentioned a minute ago.
Okay. But if it’s one off, really expensive things that are, you know, fragile and you, it’s not worth setting in place all the other things that you have to worry about, then yeah, sure. You know, if it’s transporting things to a remote launch site. Could make more sense. And also who calls himself a rocket scientist?
That’s what I want to know.
Philip Totaro: I’m a rocket scientist. Thank you very much.
Rosemary Barnes: I’m a rocket scientist too. I did a course, you know, I did a year of aerospace engineering. I did a, I did the course on jet propulsion. And I remember thinking as I passed that exam, Hey, I’m officially a rocket scientist now.
Allen Hall: There’s only one person in this group that actually is a rocket scientist, and that’s my wife.
Because she did launch rockets into space, and she is a Princeton trained rocket engineer. Alright fair enough. Yeah, so there is a rocket scientist and so let me, I’ll throw one more thing at you because I think this is another place to go. I mean, Airbus has built special airplanes to haul airplane parts around and so has Boeing.
Both of them have designed special airplanes to haul airplane parts around. Fuselage sections, wings, the whole bit, right? So this would just fill that market. I do think we’re missing the pointer that Fed, FedEx exists for a reason because people want things quickly. And if you go down to Memphis at nighttime and watch all the airplanes coming in and out of Memphis, there’s a lot of cargo that’s moved that you wouldn’t otherwise pay for.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, it’s for that time when you spent. When you spent six years planning a giant wind farm and then you realize at the last second, oh no, we forgot to order blades. We better overnight them. That’s the problem that this airplane is solving, which does not exist. And I think that you’ve really hit the nail on the head where you have mentioned, you know, this is someone coming from an aero background taking Like the kind of thing that’s done in the aero industry and thinking that it’s going to apply to wind turbines.
StrikeTape is literally the only one that I know about. And I don’t know how much you have to change things, but these really expensive solutions that you come up with for aerospace, you know, and I saw it all the time in de icing, you know, the kind of solution that you can have in aerospace, it can be so much more expensive.
It can involve so much more, you know, human intervention as well, you know, wind turbine stuff. It’s. It’s cheap and it’s it’s things that you can roll out and they’re durable and they just last without anybody, you know, poking around and maintaining all the time. So to me, this is just another, like a really expensive and well funded example of someone making the same mistake that, you know, just because they perceive that the wind industry has a similar problem to what has already been solved in aero that The aero solution is going to apply, they just, it, it never works with a single exception of StrikeTape.
Philip Totaro: The final reason why I don’t think this is going to work for wind turbine component transportation, at least unless it’s an extreme one off situation, is let’s, we forget the insurance industry. They have to sign off on whatever the mode of transportation is. And at the end of the day, this is not something that they’re going to get on board with very quickly and easily.
This is a monumentally expensive way. There’s huge risk. You’ve got things that are normally transported by truck and rail now being flown overhead you know, over population centers and things like that. The insurance industry and the FAA are going to have a field day with this. And it’s, I guess, maybe pun intended, but it’s never going to get off the ground.
Allen Hall: If the folks at Radia are looking for a lightning engineer to help them with the design, it’s call Weather Guard, we’ll help you.
Hey, Uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues and PES Wind is written by the experts so you can get the in depth info you need.
Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication, PES Wind at PESWind. com.
So I actually. Brought the PES Wind Magazine with me today because I have forgotten it the last couple of weeks. So if you haven’t gotten your latest edition of PES Wind, it’s out and you can get it at PESwind. com and they’re this one is this episode of the magazine and this edition of the magazine has a lot of great articles in it and the one I saw that we want to talk about is the CLS Wind and their lifting platform to assemble a wind turbine.
So they kind of If you think about the way you build a tower, you shove this really big crane and it lifts this tower section up, you stack it, you bolt it on, you go to the next one. So it takes a lot of big cranes to get this job done. What they’ve done instead is made like a cog train. Rosemary, do you know what that is?
If you’ve ever been to up a steep mountain in Switzerland and you take one of those trains and it has a cog on it.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, the rack.
Allen Hall: It’s similar to that On the backside of a wind turbine. Pikes Peak has a similar train. Phil, you’ve been on one of these things. So it’s like a, it’s like a geared system with the platform that raises the next section of the wind turbine up and then you just slide it over and drop it on, bolt it on, keep going.
So it makes like a built in elevator with the turbine. Now, we’ve seen a lot of ideas about how to install turbines faster, right? That seems to be a big pain point with cranes because cranes, you got to call the cranes, got to be there and it’s expensive. This system, and others like it, are really trying to revolutionize the way we build wind turbines, and what I’m guessing is, the backing behind it to do this, is there an industry drive to do something like this, which is unique and probably will save a bunch of money, versus just the rapid need to get Turbines deployed is there a disconnect there and that should we be looking at something more like a CLS wind system?
Which is more integral with the turbine and makes it cheaper to install do the OEMs just not care Once it goes out the door, they’ll figure it out.
Philip Totaro: I mean for offshore I actually think this makes some sense with or you know, this or something kind of akin to this type of a solution It’s not the first time it’s been proposed And Valmont actually is probably the company that investigated this very early.
They had patents dating back to 2001 or 2, I want to say. Kind of a lifting, basically a lifting platform where you could kind of, you know build the turbine. Sequentially, there’s also companies out there like Nabrawind is also, you know, trying to do towers and they’ve, you know, done some demos in Spain and in Africa, and they licensed the technology to China.
I, conceptually, I like the idea of, you know, again, whether it’s a slip form tower or, you know, what CLS Wind is doing conceptually, I like it. The challenge is kind of twofold. One, I think it makes a much more sense for bigger either onshore turbines or definitely for offshore if you’re talking about like an 18 to 20 or you know the Chinese are now trying to design you know 25 offshore wind turbines I think you probably need a solution like this to be able to install it because you were never going to have a boom crane big enough to be able to do you know like a, you know, 280 meter hub height because it’s got a, you know, 400 meter rotor kind of a, you know, on a 30 megawatt wind turbine.
So you’re necessarily going to have a solution like this if you want to go really big offshore. We’ll never have vessels that are going to be capable of doing the installation or the maintenance on components. So I think this is a good idea kind of conceptually aside from some of the commercial challenges, the biggest thing is also, you know, whether or not this thing is actually built to withstand you know, cause these, Alan, you were talking about like these systems in Switzerland or whatever.
They get serviced very frequently. This thing, I don’t know if it’s now an extra thing that you’ve got to service and maintain as part of the turbine to be able to do your component swap outs. You know, it, it does add some cost and complexity, but it does also facilitate you going to, you know, potentially a large onshore or definitely a huge offshore turbine.
Allen Hall: Let me ask Rosemary this because the wind catcher system, right. There’s a store that wall of wind turbines. Does that. Approach to building something that massive requires something like the CLS wind system in order to build it efficiently that you need to sort of hoist it up in place with a little more technology than just being a big crane out.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, no, they’ve got their own like assembly and maintenance infrastructure kind of incorporated into the wind catching. Design. So it’s like as lifts that run up the, I don’t know, the you know, there’s that big grid structure with the little rotors in it and there’s all these, you know, verticals along.
So on the verticals, they have these lifts and they can slot blades in and out and other big components in and out that way, because yeah, they’re imagining. you know, obviously if you go from I can’t remember the exact number, but if you go from, you know, one rotor to 49 different rotors, if it’s a seven by seven grid, then you’re probably going to need to do maintenance more often.
Right. So they’re imagining that you’re going to be able to have to be able to get those components in and out. So they’ve integrated the installation and maintenance as part of it. And also for saying. You know, like many others that installation is one of the things that’s getting, you know, the challenge of installation is getting harder, faster than the size of the turbines grow, you know, a little bit bigger turbine is starting to make a lot bigger headache for installation.
Most of the people that are coming up with innovative turbine solutions for offshore, especially really have installation and maintenance. So some of the core reasons why they say that things need to go a different direction than just making things really huge. That, and I mean, there’s a few other things as well, but those are amongst the most important.
So yeah, I think I think it is time to, to stop just thinking about doing things the way that they have been done and just go bigger, because some things are starting to get really ridiculous, like the cranes. And I mean, in Australia, even for onshore wind turbines in Australia, If you’ve got you know, a blade defect problem on a wind farm that was commissioned a while ago.
And you know, all your installation stuff is gone, you know, that, that crane is gone and it’s installing another wind farm. It’s not so easy to get your hands on one in Australia, even for the onshore turbines. You know, even, you know, Even for the, it might be a solution that you create because people with the, that are installing really big wind turbines that, you know, they have a need for it.
They just simply can’t install it without that. But I do see that it will filter downwards as well into the kind of existing existing technology. They also have a bit of a problem. You know, it’s not something that is make or break for. the existing wind farms, but it is certainly, you know, on the blade defect problems that I work on, a lot of the times it’s dragging out what, you know, might have been a couple of month campaign might turn into closer to a year because you’ve got to worry about getting the crane on site and that sort of thing.
Allen Hall: Wow, so maybe the CLS wind type system would make sense then, be able to just basically bolt something on and then elevate it down on a platform. That’d be cool.
Rosemary Barnes: Is it something that needs to be, does it need to be there from the start? Is it, you know, is it, does design change to the turbine you can just come back to an existing turbine and, you know, install a few components and then away you go?
Philip Totaro: If it’s not designed to do that, they should design it to do that because I think that’s a good idea.
Allen Hall: It is good. Like you said, Australia is probably the marketplace for this because the access to cranes, right? It would you design the towers to handle this system? And then when you need to do a major an MCE You just do it and you don’t have to wait for a green to come out.
It makes infinite sense That’s gonna do it for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast Thanks for listening. Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
Does the Massive WindRunner Plane Make Sense? Plus CLS Wind’s Innovative Assembly System
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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!
The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who is recovering from a very serious illness, Matthew Stead, who has been healthy pretty much all the Australian winter, and Yolanda Padron in sunny, hot Austin, Texas. Welcome, Rosemary
Rosemary Barnes: Thank you. I am recovering from man flu, and I say man flu because it’s just a cold, but I’m complaining a lot about it.
Allen Hall: there’s gonna be a new name for Siemens Gamesa. So it was Siemens and then Gamesa’s a separate company. They merged. Siemens Energy, uh, broke off from Siemens AG. So [00:01:00] that’s a very well-known name, Siemens. It’s– Everybody knows Siemens at this point around the world.
And the, the one family had, as a company, had s- label on everything, right? So it’s, uh, Werner von Siemens started it 150 years ago. It’s been a long time since Siemens was started, but it’s everywhere. It’s on turbines, transformers, and power plants around the world, and now they’re changing their name, right?
So when Siemens Energy broke off from Siemens AG, they, they had a limited time they could use that name, so they have rebranding themselves or are about to rebrand themselves, and I wanna pronounce this right, Omterra. O-M-T-E-R-R-A. Now, we did a little research on this, and I think it’s Latin for all of the world.
It’s kind of a conjoined, uh, set of words, Latin words, kind of a, a schmear in a sense. So, uh, so the company that, you [00:02:00] know, that spun off in w- roughly 2020, if I remember this right, Matthew, does that sound right? It was roughly 2020 when Siemens Energy was established on its own. Uh, they’re gonna be changing their name to Omterra.
So instead of seeing, seeing Siemens Gamesa publications or Siemens Gamesa wind turbines, I guess they’re gonna have this new name, Omterra. What do we all think?
Matthew Stead: I think it’s great. I think, and if you go back to, you know, GE Vernova, um, I, I thought Vernova was a bit weird for a while, but now it just rolls off the tongue and easy. It just makes so much sense. Um, so I’m, I’m, I’m for it. I, I like it. I’ve already… You know, can already say it. It took a lot longer to say Vernova than it’s taking to say
Terra.
Rosemary Barnes: I think that it– But it’s not Vernova, it’s GE Vernova, right? So everyone knows what it is. Whereas my understanding is it’s not Siemens Omtera, it’s just Omtera, which makes it sound like a new budget kind of [00:03:00] brandless, history-less, uh, company. So that’s… Yeah, I’m no
branding expert, but I think that, uh, like they, they must have not been able to use the word Siemens at all, um, because otherwise you surely would, because it has a very…
Outside of, you know, their blade issues and bearing issues of a couple of years ago, they do have a, like a solid engineering reputation across many fields, so you wouldn’t probably intentionally divorce yourself entirely from that. So, um, yeah, I, I think it will take some getting used to for me
Matthew Stead: but everyone remembers. I mean, it’s not like– The people in the wind industry know their heritage, they know their history, so I don’t think it matters. I mean, you know, you know, they, they purchase the Senvion, you know, technologies or, you know, licenses in Europe. You know, y- y- you don’t forget these things, so I don’t think it matters.
I think it’s just a, it’s a color, it’s a, it’s a label
Yolanda Padron: I think it’ll be fine. I just think that there will be a little [00:04:00] bit of confusion down the line as with everything, right? Like I’ve, I’ve been on the side of conversations where I have to explain like Siemens versus like SGRE on paper and it’s like, oh, it’s– this is why th- there was that paper trail, uh, because people would think it was an absolutely different thing.
Um, so I, I can totally see those conversations coming, coming to play in the future where someone thinks that Ontier is a completely different entity that maybe they changed OEMs or something, um, for a site. But nothing a little history lesson won’t fix, I guess.
Matthew Stead: You just want people talking about you
Rosemary Barnes: Name change every year
Allen Hall: Change your name every year. Well, that’s, that’s one way to approach it. I w- always wonder what the boardroom looks like and sounds like when this discussion is going on, because Siemens, Siemens Energy is a big company, and there had to be outsourcing of this to probably several marketing firms, mostly [00:05:00] in Germany, I’m guessing.
And they came back with a bunch of pitches, and eventually they picked one. But boardrooms are probably not the place to pick a name. And I always think like, “Oh, you just had such a opportunity to do something really cool or really impressive.”
Allen Hall: Well, we’ll see how it goes with Omterra. The, it’s gonna be, I’m sure, a huge marketing effort, and you’ll probably see commercials for it during the Super Bowl.
Developers are [00:06:00] eyeing Britain’s next big renewables auction and have been waiting to learn the rules and most importantly, the price. Well, this week the UK government delivered both. It confirmed a package of changes to the CFD scheme ahead of allocation round eight, aimed at simplifying the process and keeping good projects from being tripped up by some paperwork.
So AR7 was super successful, and they’re hopefully gonna have a, a great allocation round eight. Uh, unchanged from last round, here are some pieces to it. AR7 brought in 15 gigawatts of, of new capacity, uh, well below the ceilings, and the government is betting that that’s stability from AR7’s gonna exist for AR8, so they’re keeping the pricing limits the same.
And let me give you some of the numbers here. So everything’s in 2024 prices, just so we have a baseline here. It, 113 pounds per megawatt hour [00:07:00] for fixed bottom offshore wind, 271 pounds for floating offshore wind. That’s, uh, pounds per megawatt. And then 92 pounds per megawatt for onshore wind, and s- 75 pounds per megawatt for solar. So 271 pounds per megawatt hour in 2044 dollars is, you know, you’re probably talking, what, 290 pounds per megawatt hour. That’s a really good strike price or ceiling to allow, uh, some more floating wind into the UK waters
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the UK have this newly signed agreement with Japan, right, to, to progress development of that technology. I feel like I, I haven’t looked up any numbers to back this up, but I feel like the gap between fixed bottom and floating is narrowing. It’s barely more than double now, which, um, yeah, I think is not that bad considering how little development there has been for floating offshore wind compared to fixed bottom.
So [00:08:00] yeah, I think that it is an interesting technology to develop. I, I know with the, um, auction rounds and ’cause it’s a government thing, it’s easy to think, “Oh, why are you spending any money on anything other than the cheapest one?” Because y- you know, like, it, it feels weird that the government would play, you know, when they’re purchasing power for their grid, that they would do any more than trying to just get, you know, bulk power at the cheapest price possible whilst ensuring, you know, reliability.
Um, but in the previous or the previous, the one– last one or the one before that, they had quite a few tidal projects announced that certainly, you know, an expensive and not mature technology. But I think that you can’t say the same thing about floating offshore wind. I think that it is on a, like a good, a good development trajectory, and there are certainly places on Earth where floating offshore is one of the most appealing technologies.
You know, if you think of through to 2030s, 2040s, there’s plenty of places where, um, you know, slightly higher [00:09:00] price paid for floating offshore wind will still be worth it because they have so few other options available. So it makes sense as an industry to in- invest in capabilities there.
Matthew Stead: think it’s a really interesting method. It seems to be really successful, the contract for di-difference approach. So, um, I’m, I’m surprised that it’s not adopted more widely, um, in other locations,
Rosemary Barnes: it is around a bit.
I would like to see it, like, in, in Australia, we are, we are developing some new wind projects, but not as fast as we need to, to, you know, hit our upcoming targets. And I think, like, while the government is doing some things to help move or help incentivize developers, it’s not working that well, and maybe CFD would be a, you know, a bit of a better way to, like, just actually guarantee that these projects are gonna go ahead.
Allen Hall: Australia has a shipping problem. there’s been a concern at state-owned transport hubs are becoming less supportive of [00:10:00] wind energy projects with ACEN Renewables saying that they will now have to truck a large transformer from a wind project or for a wind project in northern New South Wales from the Port of Adelaide.
That’s not necessarily close. And h- they also said that the Port of Brisbane has refused to accept passage of some big transformers for a solar farm. also there’s some, uh, something about blades not being able to be accepted in certain ports. Like some of the, uh, Australian state-managed or state-owned ports are not accepting renewables.
Rosemary Barnes: I think
also that blades in Queensland can only be transported to site like one per day with a full police escort or something. It’s wild to
me ’cause, you know, like I lived in, in Denmark for so long and there were blades going up and down just the normal highway every single day, multiple like, uh, and three– they would go in sets of threes for obvious reasons.
Um, yeah, but the, the, the [00:11:00] Queensland government changed like a, a year ago or, or so, and it changed to a very anti-renewables government and they just threw all of the state’s renewable plans in the bin,
Allen Hall: such a recent change that when they, at least the news articles I’ve seen about it, I’ve only seen a handful, that they have, um, like last year some big transformers, like really difficult to move items have come through those ports and they’re just not letting them through now. How does that work?
If you have a, a, a legal right to build a wind farm or a solar farm or, or substation or whatever’s going on there, how do they reconcile not allowing those components to come through a port? In what world does that make sense?
Matthew Stead: I mean, most of the ports are– yeah, most of the ports are privatized, so it’s up to the individual commercial entity that’s running the port, I would, I would imagine. So it’s beyond the control of the government, would be my first guess.
Yolanda Padron: it seems like it’s an, a federal sort of thing that would give permits.
Matthew Stead: No, I mean, I’ve done a bit of work in the Port of Melbourne and, [00:12:00] um, it’s facilitated by the government, uh, state government, not federal, and but the ports are largely privatized.
Rosemary Barnes: I just pulled up an article and it says that it’s state-owned transport hubs are becoming
less supportive of wind energy projects. Um, yeah, and that’s the reason for why they’ll have to get that transformer in northern New South Wales, so very close to Queensland. They have to go from Adelaide, where you live, Matt, all the way through South Australia, maybe Victoria, New South Wales, and then, yeah, up to nearly the border.
Allen Hall: Is that just a temporary blip that the next election cycle it’ll revert back or is this something that’s more long term?
Rosemary Barnes: uh, it’s not obvious that it’s gonna flip straight back, that’s for sure
Allen Hall: [00:13:00] for years, the race in wind has run mostly in one direction: bigger and bigger blades, bigger towers, bigger machines.
And now a chief engineer f- at one of China’s largest turbine makers says it’s time to pump the brakes. Bo Juul Petersen, uh, Goldwind’s chief engineer in Denmark, argues that scaling turbines up no longer makes economic sense. So it’s not an engineering question, it’s an economic question. His reasoning rests on a simple rule of geometry, the square cube r- law, which says that as a turbine grows, its materials and costs climb faster than the rotor area that earns the revenue.
Past a certain point, he says, bigger simply costs more than it makes. Have we crossed that threshold yet? Is 20 megawatts that, [00:14:00] uh, pivot point where it doesn’t make any more sense to make a larger turbine?
Matthew Stead: didn’t we have problems when we went from three to six?
Allen Hall: One to two.
Matthew Stead: I, I, I think, uh, I think it’s good that someone’s actually coming out and saying this
Yolanda Padron: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Rosie’s on the podcast.
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, ex-excuse me, this is one of my topics of obsession that I constantly carry on about. I made a whole, a whole video about it with, um, equations to back up my opinions about scaling, um, and a very nifty tug of war metaphor between economic factors that favor big wind turbines and economic fav- factors that favor small ones.
And I think that we’re always a little bit ahead of, of what the right, the right balance is between those. So, you know, the benefits from having bigger turbines are that, um, you have fewer electrical connections, for offshore especially, that means less subsea cables and, um, yeah, just like much faster Faster construction of all that, you [00:15:00] know, less, uh, substructures and less, less of everything to install, less of everything to maintain as well.
You know, it doesn’t take so much longer to get up and do your annual maintenance checks of a big turbine compared to a small one. Like, it takes longer, but not, not that much longer. Um, but then all of the structural factors favor smaller turbines over bigger ones. blades especially, as they get longer, you get so many more problems in O&M, but they don’t show up on the developer’s spreadsheet, you know. The spreadsheet that you’re using to decide, um, your f- your final investment decision, it, it doesn’t, it doesn’t know that you’re gonna have a whole bunch of blade issues.
It doesn’t wanna know and so I think that that’s one factor that has pushed us past the economic point of where wind turbine size should be. And I think the other thing is prestige. I know that when I worked at LM, you know, we had the longest blade in the world.
It was 88 meters, was our first, um, world record that we set while I was working there. They’d had many before that. We had– They [00:16:00] had a, like, one-to-one scale printout of it that they took to WindEurope or WindHamburg, um, that everyone stood in front of, and then they lost it to somebody, and then they got it back again with the blade for the Halieade-X.
And we all know how well that went to, you know, have the world’s longest blade. Y- you know, it wasn’t so easy to make it, turned out. It’s very easy to announce and not so easy to make, um, with reliable quality. And now we’ve got all these Chinese companies, especially MingYang, is constantly announcing the world’s biggest something.
Um, don’t sell so many of them, but it’s not the point, isn’t to sell them, it’s to have the prestige of making the world’s biggest something.
Allen Hall: Yeah, what would be the technology breakthrough that would allow it to be more stable at a 20 or 25 megawatt? Because right now I’m, I’m seeing 1% improvement here and there, not 5%, 10%.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, 1% improvement will eventually add up to what, what you need. Maybe it’s in
20 years’ time, not 10 years’ time. But y- you know, like you can imagine anything. maybe [00:17:00] they start somehow, like aero and automotive manufacturing technologies get cheap enough that we can start making wind turbine blades with all prepregs instead of y- you know, um, you know, dry fabric and infusion.
For example, maybe 3D printing gets cheap enough that you can make your whole, whole blade from an additive process. Like a- anything like that. But it can also be other things like maybe the cost of subsea cables in- increases like a whole lot, and then if, you know, like things on one side getting more expensive can make it more worthwhile to save hard problems somewhere else. So that’s why I say it’s like a, it’s a, a ve- it’s a multivariable optimization problem that changes every time you have a…
Like for every project to project from year to year, it’s always gonna be slightly different. So I don’t think it’s wise to definitively say 20 megawatts is the threshold that we should never cross. Like I, I don’t agree with that.
Allen Hall: It’s one of those arguments, I think, about [00:18:00] any sort of technology about where the endpoint is. There’s too many variables to predict it. I always point to aviation in which older airplanes will hang around and hang around and hang around until the fuel price goes up enough where it doesn’t make sense to operate them.
So they will fly an airplane un-until they can no longer structurally do it. But if the price of oil shoots up and the price of aviation fuel bumps up, those airplanes get parked, and then they’re buying the new airplane with a more efficient engine. It’s a similar thing, I think. There’s just– You can’t tell where the technology’s gonna go or what the economic impacts of any part of that business will force you to do something different.
So it’s gonna be higher than 20 megawatts, guarantee you that.
Yolanda Padron: Well, it’s one of those things too, right? Where if we’re repeating the, the same blade type and we’re getting smarter about operating that same blade type, then the economic cost goes down, [00:19:00] right? Like, eventually. ‘Cause then you’re not just experimenting on every new thing or having to take all of the, the funding into tr- specializing techs or getting very specialized techs onto your site and finding a new– kind of the wheel every so often. [00:20:00] So speaking of larger wind turbines, evidently we’ve been doing this all wrong, that we’ve had the calculations for the, uh, Betz limit has been off, and, uh, a group of MIT engineers, I guess, uh, have, have made a breakthrough.
Allen Hall: So basically every wind turbine that is spinning today is based on some fundamentals, uh, math, empirical data in, in some level, but on formulas that have led us to design the wind turbines and that core formula called the momentum theory. And if you hear blade designers who hang around blade designers, which I don’t necessarily recommend, but if you do hang around blade designers, they, they’ll say the momentum theory, momentum theory, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.”
It, it, the– MIT is saying it breaks down exactly at the operating point where modern turbines try to live. Um, so for a century the fix [00:21:00] was a patchwork of corrections and useful, but with no real theory behind them. Now, a team at MIT said it has rebuilt the math from first principles, creating what they call a unified momentum model. It even nudges at the famous Betz limit, the century-old ceiling on how much energy a rotor can capture, and it bumps it up by a few percentage points, and that would be the first uptick to the Betz limit in over 100 years. All right, Rosemary, as our official Betz limit expert, does this make any sense?
Have the MIT folk something new?
Rosemary Barnes: a wind turbine blade, its aerodynamics are just the same aerodynamics as what keeps an airplane in the sky, right? It’s, it’s all the… It’s just an airfoil. It’s just facing a wind speed, um, you know, a local wind speed. It’s complicated by the fact that [00:22:00] a wind turbine blade is also rotating, so the wind speed is different along the whole span, and that’s, uh– and so is the flow angle, and that’s why blades are twisted and tapered.
Um, but you know, essentially when you wanna figure out how much energy, uh, a wind turbine is gonna generate or you wanna design the blade so that it optimizes that amount, you’re just slicing it up into a whole bunch of little bits of 2D flow, exactly the same as an, an airplane. So if it doesn’t work for wind turbines, then it shouldn’t work for airplanes either.
So that’s one fundamental thing. And also at Betz limit, it’s not like it’s not driving design. It’s more like if you, if your design exceeds the Betz limit for a, um, a horizontal axis wind turbine, then you– it’s like a sanity check that you’ve done something wrong. Uh, that’s, that’s what I would say you would mostly use it for.
Um, but what I don’t understand, and maybe Alan, presumably you did read the, read the research or at least the press [00:23:00] release. Are they arguing that y- um, like the tips of a wind turbine blade are rotating, are moving fast enough that it’s approaching transonic flow? ‘
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a rental number thing.
Rosemary Barnes: there’s different types of aerodynamic equations depending on how fast the, airfoil’s moving.
And my understanding is transonic is like 0.8 Mach, um, 0.8, which is 274 meters a second, which is more than double what, um, the fastest tip speeds are currently. So I would think that you’re not quite approaching that yet. They’re– It’s not like a cutoff that, you know, all of a sudden at that exact, exact speed the air behaves totally differently.
But, um, y- yeah, like it seems far enough away that it’s not that relevant. But is that what they’re getting
at or, or is it something different?
Allen Hall: I like doing sanity checks when I read things from MIT. So what blade [00:24:00] manufacturers and/or wind turbine OEM has designed a set of blades and go, “Oh my gosh, we’re getting more energy than what we calculated,” and not thought to themselves, “Huh, maybe we should look into that”? It’s, it’s, it’s hilarious almost that all the engineers working in wind for 100 years wouldn’t have stumbled across this, where the turbine produces more power than the Betz limit would say it would.
Y-
Rosemary Barnes: yeah, as many people have commented on, you know, any one of my YouTube videos about wind turbine aerodynamics, if they would just put more blades in there, then, you know, less wind would just fly through without ever being, um, y- without ever hitting a blade.
So, you know, like obviously wind turbine, uh, blade aerodynamics people are stupid because if they weren’t, then they would see that you just put more blades in and you get more, twice as many blades, twice as much energy and w- What about three times as many blades? Three times as much energy.
And I [00:25:00] didn’t even go to MIT and that’s just, you know, like just
brilliant
Allen Hall: Obvious
Rosemary Barnes: off the top of my head here.
Allen Hall: it’s sort of ludicrous, honestly, and I see these things in wind occasionally. I see it more often in other areas, particularly aerospace, where, where you just have to go, “What are we spending time on?
Really? We’re working on this? On a fraction of a percentage point that we may have a slight error in?” Like, it does not matter. What are you gonna do with that?
Rosemary Barnes: there’s two issues. One is that the person writing up the press release is not the person that did the research, and they will always blow it up to be much more groundbreaking than the engineers who actually worked on it probably think it is.
So, the, like, I think you have to, like, reserve your criticism of the work and try and criticize the press release. And then the second error that I commonly see is that people don’t have an un- good understanding of a status quo. So they think that they have smashed the status quo, but really it’s more to do with them not understanding the status quo than it is through [00:26:00] some legitimate, like, massive im- improvement.
So it could well be that this is all very good and correct work, just with limited practical implication. That would be my most expected, um, from this.
Allen Hall: Rosemary, how many times a month do you get queries about wind turbine improvements that are just physically impossible?
Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I mean, if I read all of the comments on my YouTube channel, then probably quite, quite frequently. But, um, yeah, the most common one is just people thinking you can just add more blades and get a proportional increase in, um, in energy, you won’t get more power from adding more blades if that’s the only thing that you do, because in a well-designed wind turbine, which modern ones are, every, e- every air molecule that goes through the rotor disc is gonna interact with the, um, with, with a blade.
That’s how it’s, it’s designed. The blades are moving really fast, and so every molecule doesn’t get hit, but, you know, every, every molecule is affected and has some energy extracted from it. Um, then the other thing is people [00:27:00]who think if you reduce drag, like if you can come up with a lower drag airfoil or a higher lift airfoil, then you think, they think that that relates to more energy proportionally.
So they’re like, “Oh, this airfoil has twice as much lift, so it’s gonna be twice as much power.” It’s like, actually, you know, wind turbine designers are aware of the full range of, you know, airfoils that are available, including high lift ones, and they’re not using it because, you know, the same reason the airplane wings aren’t just, you know, like the highest, highest lift airfoil.
Y- you know, it’s more of a lift to drag ratio type thing, and that’s true for wind turbine blades as well, but also there’s structural considerations probably more so in a wind turbine blade than there are in, um, in airplane wings. So, you know, there’s some sacrifices made for that. Um, yeah, but those are the two, two main families of, of mistakes that I’d say people make.
Allen Hall: So
Rosemary Barnes: Matt
Allen Hall: up to his hand up for
to MIT media representatives
Matthew Stead: uh,
I had a couple of sort of quick and simple points. The first of all, uh, I’m actually a graduate of [00:28:00] MIT. I’ve graduated from, uh, from a course at MIT. Um, so that’s the first thing. Um, not in engineering. Um, the next one is like, so what? I mean, we can’t even reliably measure, um, you know, AEP the other one is all models are wrong.
Yolanda Padron: But not just wind
Matthew Stead: the world is not perfect. All models are wrong, so trying to improve something that’s wrong, you know, might help a little bit, but does it really matter?
Rosemary Barnes: But it is also the job of academics to improve these models. So there’s nothing wrong with MIT spending a lot of energy to, um, you know, improve on an incorrect model with another incorrect model. Uh, if it’s more useful, that’s great, and even if it’s not, like isn’t that the job of
Matthew Stead: yeah.
Matthew Stead: you should add to where it has the most impact on humanity. You should actually put the effort into areas that have a greater impact on pushing the boundary. You know, pushing small boundaries does not help the world
Allen Hall: Matthew is an MIT graduate, [00:29:00] the one thing that Matthew brings to the table is real-world experience. And that if you shelter yourself inside a laboratory at MIT, and I understand why you would do that, because I’m sure it’s a very pleasant place to work, and there’s a lot of benefits to that.
However, the way that MIT used to work back in the day, and not everything was roses then, but oh, okay, y- that people had industry experience. They had a knowledge of what was going on on the ground, and they were engineers, and they realized that formulas and reality don’t always align. And maybe we lost that somewhere in the ’80s and, or ’90s, but it does continue to be a problem, where back to Matthew’s point, if you’re going to use that amount of brain energy, put it to something that can help the world.
This isn’t necessarily helping the world That wraps up another episode of the Uptime: Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, and I’m sure that it will, we’d love to hear from [00:30:00] you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
So for Yolonda, Rosemary, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime: Wind Energy podcast.
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