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How Active is Active Pitch Control for Wind Turbines?

In this episode of Uptime, Joel Saxum and Allen Hall sit down with the CEO of AC883, Lars Bendsen. AC883, a Canadian ISP specializing in blade repairs, has gained recognition for their unique approach to pitch alignment during the frozen ground season. Pitch misalignment is a topic of growing importance in the wind energy industry, and in this discussion, Lars shares his insights on its impact and challenges. He raises thought-provoking questions about the effectiveness of active pitch management and its potential limitations in practice. Join us for this engaging conversation as we delve into the complexities of pitch alignment, mass imbalance, and other critical aspects of wind turbine maintenance.

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!

Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
AC883 – https://www.ac883.com

AC883 Interview

Allen Hall: We’re here at CanREA with Lars Bendsen of AC883. If you are familiar with AC883, they are an ISP up in Canada that does all kinds of blade repairs. And one of the more interesting things that they do that’s unique is pitch alignment. So this is pitch alignment season when the ground freezes over and they take their equipment out and make sure your blades are pointing in the right direction.

And which Evidently, it is a thing that a lot of blades are not pointed in the right direction.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, Lars has shared that with us. Big problems all over the place.

Lars Bendsen: It’s for sure a topic that’s become more and more evident. There’s more and more people out there doing the same or similar way of detecting a pitch misalignment.

Yeah. Of course, there’s more awareness around it now than there was when we started doing it with our methods of doing it. So it’s for sure become a topic. There are also more engineering reports coming out from NREL. And from sorry, from the German Institute as well. Yeah. So there’s ton of rebar coming out of the damages that misalignment causes.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s like running a car down the highway without an alignment on the front

Lars Bendsen: end. You’re gonna just… It’s funny, if you have your right tire and your car is unbalanced, you go in right away to get it changed. Which you don’t do with your turbine, you just let it run. Yeah, because turbines are cheap, right?

Yeah, exactly. It better cost any money.

Joel Saxum: Ha! We’ve been talking with Lars, of course, always great conversations, the knowledge that he has. And the AC 883 team and we’ve stumbled upon a theory that we want to talk about. So it, with the knowledge of pitch alignment and what you guys see out in the field, and of course seeing all kinds of different OEMs and issues that pop up, you’ve come across one specifically that we’ve been talking about.

Want to share that with us?

Lars Bendsen: Absolutely. I think it’s me throwing it out there and also to get some great feedback. So it’s my theory. And what we have seen is the the topic on active pitch. Which means you’re twisting the blades half a degree every time you pass the tower. And the reason they do that is?

Let’s do it because if you take some of the the, what do you call it, the What do you call it? I lost the word, right?

Joel Saxum: What do you call it? It’s like Wind buffeting causing

Lars Bendsen: deflection. Take the other way so we don’t have that and you can actually run in higher winds as well. Okay,

Joel Saxum: yeah. Yeah, because you don’t want that way if you’re running in high wind speed and there’s a lot of force coming by when that tower passes or when that blade passes the tower each time you get like a basically a pressure area of wind

Lars Bendsen: and what they’re trying to do is it’s a little bit of a reversed wake yeah going like that yeah and you get them by more pressure on the tower so that’s why i’m trying to avoid it and that means all you can actually expect the design envelope that’s not my theory that’s a fact by using active pitch you’re extending to this the same you design envelopes, you get more megawatts out of the same turbine.

Allen Hall: So it’s an efficiency move? It’s supposed to be, yeah. Now, you go out and measure hundreds or thousands of blades while they’re running, right? The turbines are running, you’re actually watching as the blades sweeps in front of the tower and you’re determining pitch alignment from that little snapshot there.

So you can see where active pitch alignment happens, right? Yeah,

Lars Bendsen: we should be able to see it. But we can’t. So we have clients that, we asked him to take the active pits off. So we have, I have a more true measurement off the blades of the rotors state, so to speak, but some of them forgot to do it or cannot do it himself.

So they’re running with active pits because depending on what access they have to their own controller from the OEM. Yeah, or what service they have, they might be don’t even have access to do it. Yeah. They have to call the OEM. to take the active pitch away. And that’s way too common in the industry.

That shouldn’t happen. It’s that’s, I think that’s a different topic. Yeah. Of the balance between Mona and OEMs, that’s a different topic. Yeah. that we have seen with or without active pitch, there’s no difference in the misalignment. When

Joel Saxum: that blade comes by and it’s supposed to be moving that half degree back and forth, when you guys are doing your pitch alignments with your actual laser instrumentation, you don’t actually see it.

We don’t see it.

Allen Hall: Now is that a, a, a. A function of the pistons that are driving the blade not functioning properly, which is a thing because you see a lot of oil and a lot of debris around those pitch actuators.

Lars Bendsen: I think it’s it’s many things. It could be the pitch actuator is not working properly.

That’s one of the issues. Yeah. I also, but it’s more consistent. So if it was that issue, it would be the, it would be only on one blade, but it’s on all three blades. If that was the real

Joel Saxum: issue. If the pitch motor was bad, you would see it on, one of them would be bad or something like that. Just

Lars Bendsen: be oil everywhere.

Yeah. Okay. But we don’t. So my theory is, and based on the real, what we call experienced technician in the field, is that it doesn’t work. So in theory, if you see we have the blade that’s 50 meters long, running on, on rated speed, let’s say 7 or 8 meters per second. We have about 40 to 50 ton of pressure onto the blade as it swipes down to 40, about 40 tons of pressure to the blade.

And we have a two horsepower motor, a two kilowatt motor up here, trying to switch it plus minus five degrees, but in an angle of 10 degrees with 15 RPM. And that

Joel Saxum: blade itself weighs 10

Lars Bendsen: tons? And yeah and the flexibility in the blade, which you, it’s built in because you want to have a flexible blade.

So how is that going to work? You want a two horsepower motor? 50 meters down, turn a turn a flexible blade with 40, 40 tons of pressure on. Your theory is starting to make sense. That’s my two cents. I’m interested to hear if anybody… I doubt probably a ton of those listening are gonna disagree with me, and that’s okay.

That’s what we’re here for. That’s my theory, and that’s what I’ve heard and what I have seen. And also talking to pitch guys, they love it. Because they’re selling a lot of pitch cylinders. We’re getting a lot of pitch cylinders. Because the thing is here, you’re basically only… twisting the rubber sealing.

You’re not actually moving anything. The rubber is flexible itself because it has to be. So you’re just twisting the rubber sealing and that got worn out so the blade

Joel Saxum: is not moving. So what you’re saying is when that blade is sweeping down and it gets near the tower at six o’clock, that the pitch, the active pitch management is engaging that motor to turn that blade a half degree and then turn it back.

But because of the forces on the blade, it can’t actually do that. At a two horsepower motor. And so it’s just basically spinning the motor or pitch cylinder is just spinning in itself up top.

Lars Bendsen: Yeah it’s because there’s a rubber ceiling up here. Yeah. So it basically just twisting the rubber ceiling and not actually doing it.

And I think even if it didn’t, even if it didn’t, was either it was a fixed connection without a rubber seal, then would it then be able to do it 50 meters down

Joel Saxum: with 40

Lars Bendsen: it just strip the motor. I would’ve just strip the

Joel Saxum: motor. Yeah. Either way, if this thing is doing this. It’s moving like that. And if you’re talking 15 RPM for the rotor, that’s four times, or what’s

Lars Bendsen: the math on that?

That’s 45 times.

Allen Hall: Yeah, 45

Lars Bendsen: times

Joel Saxum: a minute. That’s a lot of movement

Lars Bendsen: within that thing to get hot, constantly. So my theory, and based on what we have seen, there’s no difference in our system, whether they use it or not.

Allen Hall: How would they know that the system worked in the first

Joel Saxum: place? They would have had to have had tested

Allen Hall: it.

They would have had to have laser shot it, right? How would you know… You can obviously see the motor working, if you’re up in the cell. You can see that twist happen. But how do they know what’s happening way down at the tip? I believe,

Lars Bendsen: of course, you can see the control system that is working.

It does its job. They can see that. Of course, the actuator is moving. They can see that. But it’s a physical moving down on the blade. Can you see it? We’re producing power on the last third of the blade. Yeah. Whatever, from the tip up. Yeah. One thread up, that’s where you’re losing power. But do they actually move down there?

We can’t see it.

Allen Hall: So if you can’t see it, that means that either one or two things is happening. Either it’s not moving the blade at all, or you’re putting some unique torsion into the blade. The blade’s absorbing the rotation you’re trying to impose on it, so you’re twisting the blade every time it comes around the

Lars Bendsen: tower.

But it’s interesting, if it was working as it’s supposed to do, then we would see a difference, because every blade is different. All blades are handmade, so unless they have exactly the same twist, which is, I doubt they would have, but if

Joel Saxum: they had, you would see different levels of deflections. Yeah.

But, either way, the design of active pitch management is going to have a wear part in the pitch cylinder, it’s going to introduce structural fatigue within the blade, so is the juice worth the squeeze even if it was? Because we’re saying that’s not working as a

Lars Bendsen: theory. Yeah, I don’t know the theory behind the blades, if it really has that high an impact.

That’s, somebody had to read more school books than I have to figure that out. So I don’t know that, only from an engineering perspective, because the blades are flexible. Anyhow, they have to be built flexible. And just the fact that they have to be built flexible is that, my theory is, it doesn’t work.

You cannot twist that 50 meter blade in that short time, 45 times per minute, and come back. So that’s my true sense from the, from my experience.

Joel Saxum: So if you were, if you had an operator sitting with you right now at the table across from us, and they had active pitch management in their turbines, what would you tell them?

Lars Bendsen: Depending on the wind scheme, you have to be careful about that. What wind scheme do you have? Let’s say in low wind, very low wind, you might be, would have that twist. I don’t know why you would use it in low wind. Why would you need it? No, I agree. That’s my point. In high wind, I cannot see the need for it.

I can’t. But I would love to see if somebody would argue against me and tell me why I, my theory is wrong and show it to me physically. I want to see that twist coming. I would love to see it. I hope it works.

Joel Saxum: Because otherwise it would just be like, Hey, I know you have this in your turbines, but shut it off.

Cause you’re just causing yourselves. You’re not you’re actually costing yourself more because now you have another O and M part that you have to. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Allen Hall: Because the concept between. By active pitch from a blade standpoint as blades get longer is you could make lighter blades you could use that flexibility to your benefit make the blades lighter He transports a whole bunch of money materials, right?

That’s the thought process in it But if it doesn’t actually do the task, then you’re really at a big risk But also it’s a major problem

Lars Bendsen: the theory behind this also take the load off the tower, right? So that’s right that means you can cruise happy. You can increase Your design criteria from, I’m just saying 2 megawatt to 2.

3 megawatt, as an example, by having four enforced active bits. If it doesn’t work, are you then going over your design envelope, or are you just squeezing it to 105%?

Allen Hall: So I want to take this discussion over to mass and balance. Yeah. So mass imbalance seems like it’s a more peculiar failure mode or not so much failure mode a missed opportunity.

I’ll call it that especially on a blade Swap out. Yeah, they have a blade damage problem They’re gonna put a new blade on it and they just slap on a new blade That doesn’t necessarily mean that blade is matched with the other two that already exists so now they have this kind of this really weird rotation aspect where It seems like two of the blades are moving faster than the third one.

Yeah, true. How do you detect that, and, first, describe that. Like, how do you measure to know that one blade is off weight wise? Okay.

Joel Saxum: The first part, you gotta start with getting the blades

Lars Bendsen: served. Yeah, first of all, we need to, when we are measuring, first things first, we’re getting the same angles so they are all aerodynamically aligned.

Okay. Start there. Okay. And after that, then we’re measuring the mass imbalance. And we’re doing on a rotation because we come to call it shiang. If everything works well, it should be 120 degrees between the blades, right? But it, we are measuring the plus and minuses time that comes down a long time or many degrees is that delta from blades A to blade C to blade B, how much is they in between?

And if one is always coming down, a heavy blade coming down faster that way, then it goes up slower to the next one. So we measuring the delta between and the rotational speeds ’cause it should go like. 100 right? But it has always this, if you have the mass imbalance.

Allen Hall: So that, that is torture on a gearbox and a drivetrain, right?

Absolutely. Main bearings?

Lars Bendsen: So there is a, there are two things. If, then one thing is the aerodynamic balance, unbalance. If it’s within reason, whatever that means, within a degree, of course it has an impact on the drivetrain. But if you have extreme aerodynamic imbalance, four or five degrees, which we have seen, then that’s equally bad as mass imbalance.

So back to the mass imbalance. Let’s say now we have aerodynamically balanced. Now we have the mass imbalance. And as you said, change the blade. We had some that should be weighted out. They should be balanced. Everything should be good. The client did not tell, then the clients do not tell us if they have a blade repair.

They tell us after the fact. Oh, why is this one out? Oh, by the way, we actually changed the blade. So on one of them we found there was 82 kilos missing in chamber number two. 82 kilos missing. The turbine could not run over 70 meters per second. It was stalling. Sure. And the blade tip on, you see the, what do you call it?

When you see the rotation from the side, the blade tip delta was five feet. It was one meters and one meter 20. So

Joel Saxum: like basically as the blades passed the tower, one of them was closer to the tower by

Lars Bendsen: five feet. It was actually, no, it was closer to away from the tower. Okay. Because if you see those 82 kilos missing.

It’s not heavy enough, not big enough. It’s actually, it’s further away from the tower. And that was a median 20, so that’s 4 feet. You can see that with your blind eye. We can see it and we can hear it. We can hear the whistling. Yeah, that’s crazy. 100%.

Allen Hall: What percentage of blades have mass imbalances out there?

Lars Bendsen: From what we have seen, we have done about 1, 000, 1, 200 blades. Might be more, not blades, but turbines. Might be done more, I can’t remember. But turbines from. Zero to four years old and say four to eight and over age. Let’s try to do that. The newer turbines is about 15, 20 percent out of bounds.

And once you move up, then you’re about 30 to 35%. And once you get over eight years old, it’s 35 to 50 percent out. Whoa. And that’s, I could go more detailed, but that’s rough numbers. For sure, sorry, but GE turbines older than eight years. That’s 50 percent out. Gemesa turbines, 8 years old, we had a site of more than 100 turbines.

52 were out of bounds. So that’s some examples. Okay, that’s a

Allen Hall: lot. That’s a lot. Way more than I was thinking it was. And that’s mass imbalance or pitch

Lars Bendsen: imbalance? That’s aerodynamic. Aerodynamic

Allen Hall: imbalance. Yeah. Okay. And mass imbalance, where do you think the

Lars Bendsen: number is?

I don’t, I can’t, it’s hard to quantify. I can’t do that because we only see it if we are being called out. All via catching it by

Joel Saxum: coincidence. One of the things that I always wondered about is insurance case, blade gets swapped out. A lot of times they say, hey, we gotta put three new blades up because we can’t find one.

Or if they have a safe harbor blade sitting at the O& M building, hey, that one actually, the weight cert’s close enough, da. Would you recommend that, hey, if you’re gonna swap a blade out, no matter if it’s one blade, or you’re doing a whole rotor set, if it’s a case like that. Come out and get the pitch alignment

Lars Bendsen: checked.

Should for sure get it done anyhow when you’re changing one blade. Yeah. Because the zero mark doesn’t really give you much. It’s not very accurate. Yeah. So we have to get the message somehow, or get it adjusted. Could be the vowel laser, or someone else, but you need to get it mapped out.

Another thing that’s important is that, the spec sheet from the one turbine we had that was really severe, that was a spec sheet from from LM. Tells you where the weight is. And it turns out that person who made that balance did not follow that spec sheet. She was just missing 82 kilos. Wow. So that’s another thing as well.

ISPs, independent contractors, seems not always being educated to the work they do. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that’s an industry wide problem. That’s industry wide, but also many turbines are, of course, mostly placed in rural areas. So how do you get qualified? Yeah,

Joel Saxum: it’s tough. That boils down to the technician issue that we’re always talking about.

Yeah, right training

Allen Hall: is what just one thing Back me up on the GE aero dynamic alignment issue. Is that just a wear and tear on the structure, that the twisting of the blade, having done so many cycles, that it doesn’t, they don’t behave the same as the age? Because that would make sense to me. That on…

Yeah. Structural fatigue, yeah. It’s a structural fatigue issue. I think

Lars Bendsen: also that’s so the GE, of course, is electrical bits. There could be an encoder that doesn’t work properly. Or might be the controller get the signal, it does move. But actually it doesn’t. So that’s one thing, and then of course the, I’m just saying the Vestas, the the Siemens, that’s hydraulic bits.

And there you see that’s leaking pit cylinders they’re wandering because they’re slowly leaking, so you don’t get the movement they think they

Joel Saxum: get. What? It’s easier to see that if you’re up in the nacelle, or looking in the hub, it’s easier to see a problem with the hydraulic bits.

Lars Bendsen: Electrical bits you can’t really see it. Yeah.

Allen Hall: So if that’s so prevalent. What kind of AEP loss is that? That turns into power production issues. Yeah.

Lars Bendsen: There is power production. You’re losing power in the low wind area. Not as much in the high wind area. You trade off in high wind, you get way more vibration.

Yeah. But you’re losing, you have less vibration in low winds, but you’re losing power in high wind. You get way more operation where you’re using your gear pass.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You’re wearing

Lars Bendsen: components out prematurely. You’re gonna pay either way, , you’re gonna pay in little bit one way and missing production. Yeah.

Allen Hall: What are the first signs that you know you may have a pitch alignment issue? Is the SCADA system chipping off before you’re in high wind conditions? Are you getting alarms, let’s say? Something is wrong?

Lars Bendsen: Vibration alarms. Vibration alarms, you get that from the ABA. A lot of vibrations in this turbine.

It’s stalling after seven meters per second. Let’s check that. And then we’re going out and then we’re digging into it. And mostly we find out it is a aerodynamic imbalance or a mass imbalance.

Allen Hall: I know one of the… issues from GE more recently over in Europe was they had a couple of blades snap off and then they traced it back to a single sensor in the turbine now I’m catching it soon enough, like there’s an issue with the sensor.

Yeah, that’s the story we’re being told today. Yeah, I’ve seen that story a couple times now, so it seems to be a pretty consistent story. So if that’s the case, is that basically a load imbalance, an aerodynamic imbalance, then that it’s not catching…

Lars Bendsen: Of course, if you don’t catch the vibration regardless of where it’s coming from, already there you have an issue because then again you’re going to pay later. If it’s from, if that could have been caught by the sensor working and thereby you could adjust your blade, I don’t know, but that’s an option.

Allen Hall: What’s the issue though? Is it an aerodynamic imbalance? Not shipping the sensor. Forget about the sensor for a minute. The sensor is there to capture gross errors, right? So if they had a gross error, and in a blade, which would cause the blade to fatigue and break, I would assume that’s a vibration sensor of some sort and that the issue would be, could

Lars Bendsen: be as simple as pitch alignment.

Could be, yeah. But we see, vibration level, we see that caused by both. Okay. The shorter vibration level could be caused by aerodynamic imbalance, but that’s more a vibration level. If you have a massive imbalance between the oscillation of the tower, and then you’re down to the foundation, and then you’re really in trouble.

Allen Hall: Yeah, because I think that has a lot to do with repowering. So we talked to Onyx Insight for instrumenting towers for the amount of sway they have. Yeah. There’s a couple of companies doing this, but basically they’re monitoring the towers from the sway they have because it helps them determine the structural integrity of the foundation when they go to repower.

Put a slightly bigger blades, maybe a slightly bigger generator on this thing. They have to know what the foundation is doing, and it takes 12 months to do it. But my guess is that when they monitor some of those turbines, they must be seeing some decent amount

Lars Bendsen: of sway. We are seeing, we can see sway up to 600, 700 millimeters.

Half a meter and more. Whoa. But one thing is the sway, but what if we have the isolation?

Allen Hall: It’s not back and forth, it’s left and right. No, it’s actually elliptical. Yeah, it’s elliptical right. Yeah. That’s a big problem for a

Lars Bendsen: foundation. That’s why we have seen, tower collapse and we have seen the change of foundations.

It’s out there. We went to sites where basically there’s no dirt around the foundation because it’s all shaken apart. Wow. It’s horrible. Sometimes it’s scary, but you see a lot of stuff, but I do believe by, we were one of the first movers doing this. We have a ton of people doing it with different technologies.

SCADA data, which can be done to, might be more data heavy. And more on the backend of the engineering department. Heavy. There’s high speed cameras, different ways of doing it. Sure. But it’s the same issue we’re trying to address. So by we have more people out there doing it. It’s got more awareness, I believe that people know.

Yeah. Oh my be is not only a 83 finding stuff. Yeah. But there’s actually a lot of findings out there.

Joel Saxum: Speaking of finding stuff, Lars, I got a question for you. ’cause this is something that I was actually talking to someone last night about. Is blade bolts. Yeah. So blade bolts, whether it’s pre tensioned, post tensioned, however they’re tightened, Torqued, over torqued, under torqued issues with the torquing guns when they go on, all these different kind of things.

If there was an issue in either the blade bolts torquing, breaking, or say the actual pockets that they’re epoxied into starting to move, Would you guys be able to find that with your pitch

Lars Bendsen: measure as well? I think it would be hard for us to tell that is a root cause. But there’s a lot of boxes we check once we we can see it’s in balance, right?

Check, that’s good. If we still have vibrations, but we have no tower movement, okay, then we might be looking at the drivetrain. Yeah. There could be some gearbox or main bearing issues. If we, is that also in okay, but we still have a lot of sway, let’s check the imbalance, the mass imbalance, which we’re also checking, right?

So we get the report fully from right away.

Joel Saxum: So it’s, so you’re using your pitch alignment methodology as a

Lars Bendsen: diagnostic tool. Yeah, it’s more than just, it’s more than just a, what do you call it measurement tool. We also get a lot of checking boxes. Is it that? Is it that? Is it that? It could be different reasons.

Blade twists. We have detect, we have detected huge what do you call it failures in blades. We had a tip that was twisting five, six degrees compared to the rest, and there was a crack in the blade. That we that was by pure coincidence. That was not why we were on site. But we see a lot of stuff, a lot of boxes you can check.

Once we do that analytics. And it takes seven, eight minutes. That’s it. And we get the whole report. Then we are checking some KPIs if they are okay. And then we move on to the next. Or we analyze a little bit on site. What it is.

Allen Hall: So we’re in the peak pitch alignment season. Because the ground is frozen.

That makes life a lot easier. And

Lars Bendsen: We have more constant wind than in the summer. So we need a constant wind speed. What’s your, what,

Joel Saxum: what are your constraints for actually

Lars Bendsen: doing it? Roughly between four to ten, ten meters per second. But it’s more important we need the number of rotations. We need roughly six RPMs.

That means a GE meters, 37 meters. Slaves, yes, they’re spinning way faster than a 53 meter blade. But roughly 7, 7 RPM would be good for us.

Allen Hall: So then, this is the time to be calling AC883, right? Where at the end of October, the ground’s starting to freeze up in Calgary, clearly. Absolutely.

It’s moving south rapidly because you want to get ready for the season. The peak production season. Yes. And you want to have your blades aligned to get rid of some of these. Exactly. Historical problems that are happening.

Joel Saxum: Or if you want to talk to Lars about his active pitch management. Yeah, you’re going to have to talk

Lars Bendsen: to Lars to definitely talk about that.

Oh, absolutely. I’m happy to take the discussion. And I’m happy to be turned around. I would love that.

Allen Hall: So how do we find you on

Lars Bendsen: the interwebs? Interwebs is just ac883. com. Okay.

Allen Hall: AC883. com. Yeah. It should be right there. Okay. And then also only you can check out on LinkedIn or you can, especially if you have alignment issues, you can reach Lars directly on LinkedIn. Talking about the act of vigilante.

Lars Bendsen: I’m happy to take this discussion. I’m happy to take this discussion. I’m happy to cave in. Totally happy to do that. That’s just my practical two cents. And there’s probably a bunch of engineers that can tell me different. I would love that.

Perfect.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Lars has been fantastic. We don’t get to see you so much just at conferences because we all that’s how this works. But yeah. And this has been great and I, and this has been a great conference in Canada and we appreciate all the support you’ve given to Weather Guard. Yeah.

And it, it’s been fantastic. Really. It has been. Thank you. My pleasure. Really, we appreciate all the effort there. So yeah, you have to take us out for a steak tonight or Joel and I just steak

Lars Bendsen: tonight. . Absolutely.

How Active is Active Pitch Control for Wind Turbines?

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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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