Weather Guard Lightning Tech

FabricAir’s Innovative System Proactively Prevents Costly Turbine Icing

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum had a great conversation with Daniela Roeper of FabricAir, formerly Borealis Wind, regarding their innovative wind turbine blade heating system to mitigate icing. They discuss the system’s impressive new capabilities, including advanced controls, analytics, and an efficient service model, now enabled further through the strategic Borealis acquisition, to provide exceptional value for wind farm owners. Roeper shares insightful perspectives on overlooked icing costs and explains how this optimized technology can boost production at icy sites. With FabricAir’s substantial resources supporting ongoing enhancements, the future shines bright for effectively tackling troublesome turbine icing.

Learn more and reach out! https://www.fabricair.com/ice-protection-systems/

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Allen Hall: We’re at CanREA the Electricity Transformation Canada 2023 event, and because it’s so icy, we decided to grab Daniela Roeper, who was formerly with Borealis Wind, who is now VP at FabricAir. So we have a lot to discuss, icing wise, on turbine blades. It must be a huge discussion point this week because it is terrible outside.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, there’s a half inch of ice on every bar.

Allen Hall: Oh yeah, everywhere.

Daniela Roeper: Couldn’t ask for better marketing.

Allen Hall: No, this is great.

Joel Saxum: And the fantastic marketing that you guys did with the ice scrappers at the booth.

Allen Hall: Oh, yep. Spot. Perfect timing. Spot on. Yeah. I gotta grab one of those before we leave. Yeah.

Daniela Roeper: Free ice protection systems for your vehicle.

Joel Saxum: The base model.

Allen Hall: Yeah. So lot’s happened since we have spoken to Borealis and you, which just realized ’cause you reminded me.

We, we talked in Copenhagen, which was earlier this year. But a lot has happened since then, so maybe you could give us a timeline of what you’ve been through over the last couple of months.

Daniela Roeper: So we spoke at the end of April, and in June we closed a deal with Fabricare to become part of the FabricAir group.

FabricAir is an HVAC company, they’ve been around for 50 years. They produce fabric ducting, which is used in many different industries. And they’ve been our fabric duct supplier since we started the company. And there was a very good strategic fit. So as of June 1st, we are officially part of the FabricAir group, and Borealis Wind is the product line in FabricAir.

Otherwise, the system itself hasn’t changed, so that stays the same, and we have some exciting developments with our business model that I want to share, but I don’t know if I should do that yet.

Allen Hall: Let’s work our way up to that. FabricAir, if you don’t realize makes all the ducting for all the air conditioning and heating systems in a lot of factories and buildings around the world.

In terms of your product, though, it’s like a toughened, almost like a fire hose consistency of material. Is it Kevlar? What is this magic fabric that you stick in blades?

Daniela Roeper: We are using Cordura fabric.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Daniela Roeper: Which is a fabric you may have heard of. It’s advertised on work pants, backpacks, military gear.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s really tough stuff. Exactly. Okay. That makes a lot of sense then. Alright, so FabricAir is based in Denmark, right? But they have a lot of facilities all over the world. They’re a big company.

Daniela Roeper: Yes. They have offices worldwide, I believe in 16 countries.

Joel Saxum: Oh, wow. I didn’t know that.

Daniela Roeper: Yeah, and they have a manufacturing office in Lithuania, and they’ve also just opened one in Mexico.

Joel Saxum: Okay. So will you guys get to take advantage of that in the future?

Daniela Roeper: Our plan is to keep the manufacturing in Canada as we have it now. As we grow, there may be an opportunity where it makes sense to outsource some of that.

But we’ll look at that down the road.

Joel Saxum: Will you also keep your basically the Borealis Wind team has stayed the same.

Daniela Roeper: Yep.

Joel Saxum: And you guys are all still in Canada. Nobody’s being forced to move to Denmark or anything like that.

Daniela Roeper: No, we’re all still in Canada, all still in our office. The team’s the same, product’s the same.

So in a lot of ways, Borealis Wind still is. We’re still offering the same service and product that we were before, but now with significantly more resources behind it.

Allen Hall: That move to FabricAir and being a larger organization then opens up your envelope a little bit in terms of the type of icing events you could possibly cover, right?

Because part of the issue with the system originally was it’s a little expensive. And that drove you to be in a limit icing condition when you spoke at Winter Wind in Sweden.

Was that was this year also, right?

Daniela Roeper: That was, yeah.

Allen Hall: Oh my God. Okay. Okay. So I’ve been a lot of places this year.

So in Winter Wind the presentation was really interesting and you had a lot of advocates for the system there. I was sitting next to a person who had used that system and couldn’t believe how great it was. But it was a really severe icing. The pictures I saw was like massive amounts of ice on turbines.

The sweet point is to broaden that market space, right? To try to get down to the Texas freeze situation. Does FabricAir now allow you to do, expand that envelope a little bit.

Daniela Roeper: Yes, and I have so much to say, so give me a minute because I’m excited about this. The misconception has always been that you need really severe icing to make a blade heating system or ice protection system make sense.

And our goal has been to break that misconception that you can have a blade heating system at a moderately iced site. And that has been our target, so we’ve been working in the class 3, 4, 5 icing severities. Whereas previously it’s like class five sites that were considered to need blade heating systems, right?

And our goal now with this is to access that class two market, which is by far the largest market for icing.

Allen Hall: Sure. Yeah, and the reason you can do that is what drives that opening of to get down to class two.

Daniela Roeper: So with these additional resources that we have access to and with FabricAir’s 50 years of history in HVAC.

We have a little bit more buying power than we did before and our focus is on reducing the cost of the system through scale and through standardization of components. And also we are pivoting to a system as a service model.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Daniela Roeper: So our customers will pay an annual fee for the system and we will be responsible for the installation of the equipment, maintenance, monitoring, everything.

Joel Saxum: That’s fantastic.

Daniela Roeper: And they will have a, a positive ROI every year. So they would have icing recoveries that would be greater than the price they’re paying for the system. And we guarantee the availability of the system as well. So we guarantee the system will be 95 percent available during the winter.

Joel Saxum: Wow. Huge. In any industry, in wind industry specifically, we see this all the time. It’s hard for asset owners, or asset managers to want to adopt a new technology. Because they’re taking a risk, right? We talk about it all the time with the StrikeTape product. We’re constantly doing trials.

We’re always having to prove the products. Nobody really wants to take a risk on something new. And while your product makes absolute sense pragmatically, it is a capital risk for all these people. And what you guys are doing with that commercial model is taking the risk on basically yourself and making it simple for them to adopt it.

And I, I think that’s a novel approach. It’s a fantastic idea.

Daniela Roeper: Well said.. Thank you. You should be pitching this.

Joel Saxum: I can. For sale all the time.

Allen Hall: You’re a SaaS model now, so if anybody is familiar with all the Silicon Valley talk, right? A SaaS is a very popular model to fund widely accepted concepts, right?

You pick a SaaS model not because you’re going to sell ten of these things. You pick a SaaS model because you’re going to sell thousands of these. And that changes sort of the market dynamics on icing. Because the noise before, the complaint before, was this, Oh, it’s so expensive, I don’t want to do it, right?

That’s the ERCOT.

Joel Saxum: It’s the capital of the upfront.

Allen Hall: It’s upfront capital, right? The upfront capital would stop people from even discussing it. But you’ve taken that away, opening the door to many more organizations and operators to take advantage of this.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, and many more budget sectors within those organizations. OPEX money instead of just CapEx money.

Allen Hall: If you’re opening up OPEX money, I’m imagining how this goes. In the mechanical side of wind turbines, gearbox replacement, blade repair, all those, everybody pays up front. Everything’s up front. Or maybe there’s a little bit of leeway. To come in with a mechanical system, with a SAS model, is unique in wind, as far as I know.

Not even the drone operators offer anything really like that too much. It tends to be, pay for service as it’s delivered. You’re setting the industry on its head a little bit. How is that going? This is probably, is this the first big conference you’ve been at since that announcement?

Daniela Roeper: It’s the first big conference, yes.

Allen Hall: So what’s the feedback so far?

Daniela Roeper: It has been good. Okay. And I have seriously questioned our customers because I think the perspective can be, oh, they’re just trying to make more money off of this by making it a SaaS model. And that is not the intention with this. We want to take the risk away from our customers. So we want to take full responsibility for the system.

We want to guarantee that it’s going to be functional all winter. We want to make sure they’re making their returns. We’re going to take the risk of the ROI on the hardware on us. Yeah.

Allen Hall: So what do you have to lose? I guess I’m working on it on the operator’s side. You come in, you install the system.

I don’t write you a check until it’s installed, I assume. And then I send you a check for the year.

Daniela Roeper: Exactly. So we’re basically trying to put money in people’s pockets.

Allen Hall: And they don’t, yeah, if you’re trying to give me money, I think the rule is to take it.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, the business case is easy to quantify, right?

You go to operator XYZ and say, How much downtime did you have last year? Your PPA price is this is how much you lost. We’re going to give it to you for this, and we’re going to maintain it ourselves. Okay, it seems pretty simple to me. The business case doesn’t take that long, I can scratch it on a napkin.

Daniela Roeper: Yeah, that’s the goal, that’s the goal. Okay. But I’m, this is our first big conference presenting this concept. So, we have good feedback so far.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s new to industry, I think, at least in North America for the most part, which I think drives a really good discussion because your entry into that space could have been better timing in terms of ERCOT, right?

So Texas is trying to propose regulations that keep wind turbines up and running, right? That’s one of, and so there’s been a lot of pushback in the industry to say, the operators to say everything’s so expensive. You’re just taking that argument away from and say, no, it’s not. It’s not expensive. In fact, it’s going to save you money over the long run, or even in the short run.

You’re going to be making money off the system every year.

Joel Saxum: What it sounds like to me, and this is an overreaching statement maybe, but, the FacAirare acquisition of Borealis Wind. You guys right now in building this new commercial model, having these resources behind you, it’s like you’re pulling the bow back right now.

January 1st when winter hits, you guys are ready to let it fly. And grow and grow. That’s fantastic for you.

Allen Hall: Let’s get down to the nitty gritty. If I’m interested in installing this system, What is the lead time? Now with Fabric Air, I assume there’s obviously a lot more power there and faster churn.

A month to be installed? What’s the flow look like? I call you and say, Daniela sold me. Let’s go.

Daniela Roeper: It depends on the quantity, too. And it depends on the time of year. I would say it’s about a three month lead time. Okay. And we typically don’t install in January, February. But that could be different if it’s in Texas.

It may not be an issue to install in January, February.

Joel Saxum: That’s what you want.

Allen Hall: So if it’s a three month lead time, that’s above industry standards right now. Lead times are six months to a year for a lot of components. If you can get them, to turn on an anti ice system in a couple weeks really is amazing.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, so if you’re listening to this and you want to have an anti ice system, you need to call now.

Daniela Roeper: You need to call now if you want it before Christmas. Yeah.

Allen Hall: So is there anything new on the product side in terms of development or what’s the next generation look like? Maybe we should ask that question. Is the next generation coming? Because it must be coming.

Daniela Roeper: It is coming and it is lighter than ever before. It has fewer metal components. It is We’ve optimized the heating controls and we’ve upgraded our heater to maximize the power output and I don’t want to give too much away, so I’m trying to give you information without being too vague.

But and we’ve, over the past few months, we’ve been building a really comprehensive dashboard of the system that the site managers can have access to as well, but right now we’re using it to monitor the systems. Okay. And the customers can have access to it as well if they’re interested in it.

Allen Hall: So there’s a cloud component to this?

Daniela Roeper: Yes.

Allen Hall: So what does that cloud component look like? If I’m an operator and I do want to see this, what am I looking at?

Daniela Roeper: So At the moment, our customers have access to a user interface that shows them all of the data from their site. What we’ve been building is we’ve been collecting all the data, putting it on the cloud and putting it into a data visualization platform.

Sure. That allows you to go through the data on a much more detailed scale than you’re able to in our user interface right now. So if you want to look on a, like on a top level. What’s the system performance overall? You can see that or you can drill down and you can see down to each sensor output What’s happening with the system?

Allen Hall: Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay, so it’s even like a debug feature if you’re an operators to see how it’s going on Okay, so that’s very useful for you to if there is an issue You know immediately where to go into it.

Daniela Roeper: And for our search. Yeah for our service offerings. Our goal so really what we want to do is kill this idea that blade heating systems are only for severely ice sites, right?

Yeah, and that’s why the functionality, like the availability of the system the efficiency of the system is so important and that’s why that data analytics and that monitoring of the systems is also so important.

Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. So at the end of the day this cloud based system, it’s, is it going to give you a sense of how much power you’re producing versus what you would have produced?

Daniela Roeper: Yes.

Allen Hall: Was that one of the options that’s going to be on this thing, I hope?

Daniela Roeper: Yes, that will be. And that is something we’re monitoring now. Right now it’s We work with IceTek and they do the analysis of the performance as a third, separate third party. And we provide that to our customers, but we do want to build that into the cloud version as well. So you can see that live and see the performance.

Joel Saxum: Oh, sure. Yeah, it’s a good sales tool.

Allen Hall: Oh, yeah. It’s a fantastic sales tool. So let’s talk IceTek for a minute because we’re going to have IceTek on the podcast, hopefully. IceTek is your ice detector manufacturer system. It’s unique because it’s specialized to you a little bit.

Because you’re using advanced techniques to detect when ice is about to occur, not after the fact, like when ice is occurring, that’s easy, right? It’s the pre buildup to ice, it’s likely to occur, that gives you the advantage in terms of de icing the blade, preventing icing but also lowering the amount of power the system uses.

Do you want to just get into that a little bit? Because it’s a complicated thing, when it was first described to me, I was like, okay, I get it. I think the main point is you’re actually using less power to heat the blade.

Joel Saxum: Yes. From my side on the operational thing with blades, I’m looking at it like this.

If you know exactly when to turn that on so you don’t actually build up ice, because built up ice is fatigue. It’s fatigue. Ice throws are dangerous for people around, but they’re really dangerous for your blades. I’ve seen a lot of insurance cases where you throw off a hunk of ice the size of a truck hood into the air, and then the next blade comes around and hits it.

So you’re, with IceTek, working in cohesion with your unit. You won’t have ice throes anymore because it’ll be turning on right at the right time.

Daniela Roeper: Okay, sorry, now I just have to talk about that because you got me on a topic. There are so many costs associated with icing that people don’t realize. And not only those safety incidents techs refusing to work, downtime because your techs aren’t able to access the turbine, damage, all that stuff, those are costs that people don’t look at.

But as we’ve seen with IceTek, and they can talk about this more than I can, They’re seeing that customers are underestimating their icing performance loss by 40 to 50 percent. Because icing is very hard to identify. If you’re just looking at status codes, you’re just looking at the times when the turbine knows it has ice on it.

But there are a lot of other status codes that are caused by icing, but they don’t come up as an icing status code, like a pitch error or tower vibration or something like that.

Allen Hall: Okay. Which is wear and tear.

Daniela Roeper: You should ask them about that and listeners should tune in for that podcast as well to hear from them.

So I’ll tell you about their sensor. I talked about it last time and I got a little bit of flack from them that I, it wasn’t the best scientific description. So you should ask them for that. But they’re measuring liquid water content, which is directly correlated to ice buildup on blades. And so as soon as they’re measuring conditions, liquid water content that would form ice on the blade that tells us to trigger our system.

So at that point, the blades are still free of ice. We get a head start. We can heat up the blades. Prevent as much of that ice formation as possible. And that also tells us when we are outside of what we call our operational envelope. So if it’s extremely severe, say it’s minus 20 degrees Celsius, 15 meter per second wind, we would need much more power to keep the blades heated than we, than financially makes sense to do.

So in that case, it’s better for us to wait until conditions warm up a little bit, turn the heating system on two hours or four hours later, and then remove the ice. So that allows us to optimize how much consumption we have. On another note, I’ve also heard the misconception that blade heating systems use so much energy, they don’t make sense.

It’s also not true. So we use about 4% of the energy that’s recovered by our system. We use 4% of that to keep the blades.

Joel Saxum: That’s a pretty good ROI too. Yeah.

Allen Hall: And the reason you were able to do that is how?

Daniela Roeper: So our system is only so say for a two or three megawatt turbine. We’re drawing a hundred kilowatts.

Okay, so if the turbine can operate and in the winter capacity factors are typically higher. But say that if the turbine can operate at 60 percent of its 3 megawatt capacity, we’re using a very small percentage of that to heat the blades or keep the blades heated.

Allen Hall: Okay So in the way that you’re heating the blade just to walk through this real quickly is you have a basically a fabric tube that runs up along the leading edge and it dumps hot air out at the top. Yes, and then that cycles back around the fabric tube back down to your heater. So you’re constantly keeping warm air warm, right? You’re not constantly warming up cold air. You’re you’ve got this sort of nice warm space that you built.

Joel Saxum: So here’s a question for you.

Has anybody ever called you and said, Hey, Daniela, we have the blade heating system. Can we warm the blade up and do an internal blade repair in the winter?

Daniela Roeper: Actually they have, and I. Our teams, when they go for winter maintenance, they do warm the blade up for themselves a bit before they continue to.

Joel Saxum: They’re on the system like, hey, we’re gonna be there in 15 minutes, warm it up.

Yeah. I get it, I would too. It’s a side perk. Yeah, absolutely. A warm, nice place to work. I like it.

Daniela Roeper: Hey, it’s better than trying to do something with your hands at minus 20.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it frees up, yeah.

Daniela Roeper: No way.

Joel Saxum: Absolutely. It’s qualified under an HSE consideration.

We had to turn it on.

Allen Hall: So the, so now the… you have an improved system. You’re making advancements in the cloud side and the data response side. It sounds like obviously you’re taking advantage of the reliability of the system now to use it as a SaaS product. That’s got to be a huge advantage.

And one of the, I know one of the questions that I hear about is these ice phobic coatings. So ice phobic coatings tend to build up ice and then sling it. That seems to be the approach. It’s slippery. Will they work in conjunction with your heating system? If somebody’s already put an ice phobic coating on, which there’s been a lot of trials of a lot of different systems.

So there is some of that out there. Would they have to remove that system at all? Or would it even matter anymore? You could still operate with the coating that’s on there.

Daniela Roeper: You can still operate with the coating that’s on there. That’s no problem. Some of our customers have tried them together. That’s not my data to share.

Okay.

So the system works well whether there’s a coating on it or there’s no coating on it. So you don’t need, you don’t need an is phobic coating for the heating system to work well.

Allen Hall: Okay. ‘Cause I’ve heard a lot of discussion like if you put an icephobic coating on, it just makes it work better.

But you’re, what, your approach you’re using is a little bit different than the ice phobic coatings work. So the icephobic coating would even really matter anymore. I think they’re getting ahead of you’re way ahead of what the ice phobic coatings are doing. Proactive versus, yeah. It’s more proactive thing.

And I think. The discussion we’re hearing back from industry is there’s a lifetime to that. So it lasts a couple of years. You have to reapply it with an internal heating system that’s especially the SAS model, it’s one and done. It’s getting maintained anyways. They’re gonna come down and maintain it, so we don’t have to worry about it.

Daniela Roeper: On that topic of lifetime, I want to add a new perspec, a new thing to consider. Okay. With the SAS model, if, And unfortunately, this is the case, but it, blades are almost being considered consumables at this point because there have been so many blade failures. But one of the beauties of our system and the SAS model is that if you do have an issue with the blade, we can move the heating system to a different blade and it doesn’t add any extra cost.

Or if you decide to repower or upgrade, we can bring that heating system to the next blade. We can add a duct extension if the blade is a few meters longer, we’ll add a duct extension. And you’re still able to use that same heating system. And our goal with the software’s, or sorry, the system as a service model is that we want to reduce the waste created by our system.

So we want to repurpose as much as we can and refurbish as many components as we can to reduce the waste or what ends up in a landfill from our system. And that ties into that as well so that we can, we would reuse the same system for a larger blade and just add a duct extension.

Joel Saxum: And you’re keeping costs down for your client that way as well.

Daniela Roeper: Yeah, and we’re keeping costs down.

Allen Hall: Oh yeah, sure. That’s awesome. So Is repowering one of those places where your system gets installed? Is that the easy time? The blades are on the ground, they’re going to put new blades up.

Daniela Roeper: That is a great time. That’s a, it’s a great time. If you’re repowering, that’s something I would think about.

And it is going to be a factor in the Quebec market in Canada. It is planned to be a requirement for repowers that they will have to add a blade heating system because of the impact of icing in Quebec.

Allen Hall: When did that happen?

Daniela Roeper: That has just been in discussion in the last, I would say, year and a half.

Allen Hall: Is that just Quebec province, or all the provinces?

Daniela Roeper: That’s just the province of Quebec at the moment. And it’s not formalized yet, so none of the sites are at the point in Quebec yet where they will be repowered, but it has been, so that was a requirement in the RFP they did for new sites this past year and it is planned to be a requirement for the repowers, but those are still, I would say we’re still five, seven years away from that.

Joel Saxum: Do you think FabricAir was reading that bit of news when they purchased…

Allen Hall: When they called you? Yeah.

Daniela Roeper: Perhaps. I

Joel Saxum: Tell you what, we talked with you guys the last few shows we’ve been at. Your booth now looks fantastic. Completely upgraded. Thank you. The company has matured fantastically.

Congratulations on the FabricAir acquisition. I think it’s going to be big things on the horizon.

Daniela Roeper: Thank you. Thank you. And for me, I want to say, I’m really grateful for FabricAir that their ambition and their support for this product is incredible. So I’m really excited for what we’re going to be able to do together.

Allen Hall: So if someone wants to reach out and get a hold of you and to put this new Borealis system by FabricAir in, how do they do that?

Daniela Roeper: Check out our website. It’s easy to contact us through there.

Allen Hall: Is it borealiswind.com?

Daniela Roeper: BorealisWin. com or fabricair.com you can find us on either one.

Allen Hall: Nice, okay.

Daniela Roeper: You can find us through either email address,

Allen Hall: LinkedIn?

Daniela Roeper: And on LinkedIn. Okay. And we have some really cool icing videos on LinkedIn, if someone wants to check those out.

Allen Hall: I’ve seen some of that. They’re very good.

Daniela Roeper: Yeah, good. And send us an email and we will set you up.

Allen Hall: All right. Daniela, great to have you back on the podcast and we’ll run into you again.

But this is a sweet time for you. It’s winter time. Go get some

sales. This is awesome.

Daniela Roeper: And thank you for having me again. It’s a pleasure.

Joel Saxum: Absolutely.

FabricAir’s Innovative System Proactively Prevents Costly Turbine Icing