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IntelStor Insights into Wind Turbine Blade O&M Costs
Phil Totaro, CEO of IntelStor, dives deep into the latest trends and data surrounding onshore wind turbine blade operations and maintenance costs. He discusses the strategies and innovations being employed to optimize blade performance, reduce downtime, and drive down costs.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. As the wind energy industry continues to grow and mature, the focus on reducing costs and improving efficiency has never Been more important. Operations and maintenance costs can account for a significant portion of the total cost of energy production, making it a critical area of concern for wind farm operators and energy users alike.
In this episode, Phil Totaro, CEO and founder of IntelStor, will share the latest data and trends related to Onshore Wind Turbine Blade Operations and maintenance costs, which everybody’s wondering about is going to provide some valuable insights into the current state of the blade industry and how we manage blades.
You also discussed some of the strategies, innovations being employed to optimize blade performance, reduce downtime, and ultimately. Drive down costs, so whether you’re a wind farm operator, an energy user, or just simply interested in the future of renewable energy, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.
Welcome again. Thanks, Allen. Thanks for having me. So the IntelStor report you just published, and there’s some news about it on LinkedIn, is really fascinating because Joel and I have been wandering around Oklahoma and Texas and other parts of the country looking at blades. And there is a lot of concern.
About the costs associated with damaged blades and how to forecast that and how to appropriately budget for them, particularly in terms of all the new types of blades that are being introduced, the bigger generators, the three megawatts, the four megawatts, the six megawatt machines versus the one and a half and two megawatts that we’re kind of used to it becomes really a guessing game for a lot of operators because they don’t have a sense of How much is it going to cost me to operate this turbine, and how do I manage that, and how do I appropriately schedule my technicians?
Like, how many technicians do I need for a season? These are subjects that come up all the time, and, and if you’ve been around anywhere in Canada or the United States over the last year, there’s so much more talk about it now. And this is where your new tool comes in, your Onshore tool. Basically estimator or looking at turbine size versus the types of damage a blade may suffer.
Phil, will you, will you walk us through what this tool is at the top
Philip Totaro: level? Sure. Of course. So, What we have been repeatedly getting asked about is, for the ISPs we work with, they want to understand the, a detailed market forecast. And the only way to get to a detailed market forecast is, we obviously know based on the work that we already do, how much capacity we’re expecting to be installed.
And that’s not based on like estimates, that’s based on actual pipeline of turbines. And so we know in markets like the United States or Brazil, where, there’s reasonably good detailed publication of those turbine sizes, we, we’ve built out that, that pipeline. But what we then needed to do was determine, all right, how many of those units are going to be online within the next, 10 years or so?
What’s the, most importantly, what are the top kind of failure modes? And then what’s the probability and, and kind of the annual failure rate for each one of those type of failure modes on the turbine as a whole. And then we started looking at blades in particular because it, as it turns out, most people will recall either anecdotally or through some previously published information that gearboxes were probably the most expensive.
Item in terms of downtime that you could have on a smaller turbine. But as we go bigger the gearboxes and generators have actually become more slightly more reliable. You still have, your, your periodic faults and failures. But they’ve developed a lot of technology through either modularization or other up tower cranes and things like that that allow you to service gearboxes, generators, etc.
in situ. Blades, if you’ve got a major issue, you probably still need to take it down. And that can either involve a single blade swap kind of, crane mechanism or a big crane. And it’s basically all that said, what’s happening now with bigger turbines is the bigger the turbines go, the The more cost is involved because of the amount of repair time and the crane cost associated with undertaking that type of repair.
So as compared to gearboxes or generators or pitch systems and, and maybe main bearings that used to be like the, the biggest causes of, O& M expense and, and the biggest impact on downtime. Blades are now kind of, unfortunately, taking the, the lead. And I guess right up your alley, lightning is probably still, like, one of the number one causes of both minor repairs and major.
Repairs and replacements.
Allen Hall: Yeah, so we’re seeing the, the common faults that existed on the one and a half megawatt machines and two megawatt machines when they move up to three and four megawatt machines. They didn’t always require a crane. Pretty much when you get to three megawatts, four megawatts, you’re going to require a crane from most of the, the major items.
Any sort of trailing edge bond line on the back end to lightning damage to any, anything internal. Boy, it just seems like there’s a real risk reward to using a larger turbine at the minute. And, and that’s where I think this data is very interesting because we, we are moving away from the one megawatt machines.
We obviously we’re kind of the one and a half to two range at the moment. Right. And then we’re going to be in the threes. What does that mean in terms of operational costs? What do we need to be planning for here? Do we need to be ordering more cranes? Do we need to have other plans
Philip Totaro: to deal with this? So there’s a couple of things at play here.
One is Besides lightning damage, one of the number one expenditures that you’re going to have is actually been a fatigue failure in the route. That’s again, according to the data we’ve got, as far as the probability of occurrence and, and the annual failure rate, that’s one of the highest impact repairs that you’re going to have.
Again, besides lightning damage and followed closely by transportation damage, which, unfortunately, transportation damage is just kind of part of the cost of doing business, so to speak. But it can, it can vary. You can get to site and notice that you’ve got a few little things, maybe in the chips in the top coat that you just need to fix, or you could actually have some some severe issues with leading or trailing edge cracking or other things, you might get to site and notice that you’ve got some, missing parts or, or things like that.
Maybe they’re the the root inserts weren’t weren’t aligned perfectly correctly or, or something like that, when you go and try to install. So. There’s all kinds of things that, that can, have an impact here, but those are, those are probably the, the top issues you’ve got.
And then, you’ve, you’ve still got, while it’s infrequent, a full separation of the blade is probably the, the number five thing that happens in terms of total cost impact. So we’re looking at just for the U. S. market, by the way this year, it’s about 2. 5 billion in blade repairs that we’re anticipating are going to be necessary.
By 2030, we’re talking about 3 billion. And by, we, we only did our projection out about 10 years, but by, within 10 years, it’s going to be around 3. 3 billion. And that’s assuming that you have turbines that have no service lift. For turbines with a service lift, thankfully and since most, three, four, five, six megawatt turbines are gonna be installed that way from, from now on We’re looking at, anywhere from about two and a quarter billion up to, maybe three billion within ten years.
So, whether you’ve got a service lift or not, we’re talking, close to three billion dollars in, in a blade repair market alone that is Going to need to be serviced and those costs are continuing to inch up. So the other aspect of this that, that you asked about was regarding the growth in turbine size and, and power rating.
And what we’re noticing is that it’s not necessarily reducing the. The frequency of occurrence and the annual failure rate for specific failure modes. You’re still seeing lightning damage. In fact, with longer rotors, you may we don’t have enough data, unfortunately, because there’s not enough turbines out there, but you may actually see an increase in lightning damage as a result of longer blades.
So the reality of this is these, we’re kind of considering these estimates to be a bit conservative at this point. And we’re, we’re looking at a scenario where as turbines are getting bigger, Yes, you get more power out of it but you also get a higher impact on your downtime because for a single turbine going down, you’re not only talking about the repair cost and time you’re also talking about the, the loss of production.
And with that much of a, of an impact on lost production, it’s actually just as financially impactful to the asset owner. Because keep in mind that when we calculate these repair costs and the numbers I’ve just quoted, that’s literally only the, the actual cost of repairs. That’s not even taking into account the downtime which we will be kind of factoring into this.
When we kind of expand on this analysis later, later this year we want to be able to get down to a point where we can see what that impact is going to be on, on owners depending on the, the frequency of occurrence and regional distribution and all that, that sort of thing.
Allen Hall: So what I have seen from the field is as operators have chosen larger turbines, it seems great, right?
There’s less wires in the ground, fewer pads. Concrete everything adds up on that side, right? So it’s just less stuff, but what I’m seeing on the blade side is blades are newer less service history Transportation tends to be more of a problem You see more blade damage from transporting and lifting because of the blades have just gotten bigger and they’re harder to manage On top of that the the unknowns are still there, right?
so instead of We don’t have a good understanding, in some cases, in the early in the design phase of some of the twisting moments and, and the weird things you see out in the field. So you just experience it once they get out there. So instead of having a one and a half megawatt machine in which you have a proven service history, you get it up with this new big massive blade out there.
And what I’m seeing is that the failure rates go up. Not down. So the, the history we have with smaller blades seems to stop with those smaller plates. That’s not, you’re not having a, like a 3 percent failure rate doesn’t seem to be steady across platforms. What seems to be happening as the platforms get larger, the failure rates go up.
So even though you’re putting in fewer turbines, you’re, you’re still working against the failure rate going up. So you’re still roughly losing, you’re losing more power out of the farm than you were previously by having larger turbines is what it So is there really a savings? And this is where I want to get to folks.
I think this is the interesting piece to the analysis is, is it actually less expensive to put more turbines in of a lesser
Philip Totaro: power rating? If the availability is better and the reliability of the components is better, then yes. And, but here’s the thing, here’s the catch on why everybody wants a bigger turbine is because it’s necessarily a bit lower upfront CapEx.
It can, it can lower the, like you said, it’s a fewer number of pads, fewer electrical connections, et cetera. So everybody thinks about it in terms of, Oh, I’ve got to finance this, this project. And we’ve got to reduce the upfront CapEx as much as possible. So how can we do that? Well, let’s get the biggest turbines we can get.
And that’s the mentality. That’s what’s being, so basically what’s happening is developers and. The asset owners that they’re, if they’re doing a build and transfer a business model the asset owners and the developers who originally built the projects, they aren’t necessarily taking into account this total cost of ownership.
They’re assuming that, certain fault and failure rates that are underestimating what we’re actually seeing. And what it’s resulting in is actually bigger losses because of all the things we just talked about, what you’re seeing in the field and what we’re seeing from data.
Allen Hall: So the end of store data becomes really critical here because if you’re making those decisions, you need to understand a craneless repair versus a crane repair.
And the fact that it multiplies it times a hundred, a lot of cases on the cost and then the business interruption and all the other things that come with it. There is a real trade off here. We are crossing this threshold, which you guys are identifying of size versus quantity, right? That’s what it is.
Bigger size or more quantity. You need to pick one. The data, we don’t have a lot of data yet, and this is where I think the end of store data becomes really critical to the decision process, right?
Philip Totaro: Well, we hope so. And, and look, we’re, we’ve built this based on a data set that’s been collected from various independent power producers ISPs, and some academic research papers.
But we need more. And so this is a call to action, and frankly, an opportunity for asset owners and operators will pay you royalties for access to some of this information. You don’t have to give us like necessarily site specific data. We would certainly prefer to have turbine specific data so that we could identify which OEMs are really kind of, or which products are really the, the red headed stepchild, if you will, of the, the product family.
But we need to be able to quantify it. I think a lot of people know, kind of anecdotally, it gets talked about, texts from different sites talk to each other, Oh, this thing’s a big pain in the butt. That thing’s not, but You know that we need to quantify it and and in quantifying it at the end of the day, the reason that we do what we do with all this data is we’re trying to tell a story and we’re trying to attract investors to this industry.
Okay, we’ve got a good story to tell. Despite the fact that we’re going to have this, this O and M challenge, we’ve got a really good story to tell in terms of cost of energy in terms of, greening the electric system there, there’s a great story to tell here, but we need data to be able to convince people that we’ve got, a place where they can feel confident in parking their money.
The more data we can get our hands on in terms of fault and failure rates, in terms of, time it takes to do a particular type of repair, which, frankly speaking, It doesn’t necessarily have to be that sensitive, okay? It’s, we’re, we’re just trying to, come up with the best estimates that we can so that we can all work together to try and attract more investment to this industry.
That’s ultimately what we need to be able to do, and, and having the data at our disposal as an industry to be able to tell that story is absolutely essential.
Allen Hall: Does this help us better understand where the next plateau of wind turbine sizes will be? Like GE and Vestas have done offshore at 15 megawatts, is there going to be a data point crossing where you say, All right, 3 megawatts is as far as we should go onshore because it is the most efficient machine we’re going to be able to build and transport and install and maintain today.
Anything bigger than that is going to be trouble. For Doesn’t that data lead us to that kind of decision matrix and also in terms of PPAs? Because the PPA market is a sort of a fixed market out there And if you know what that sort of ballpark cap is for PPAs You’re really trying to keep your costs well underneath those PPAs ideally
Philip Totaro: that’s going to have a decision matrix too, right?
Well, and keep in mind something that we’ve been analyzing recently, which was If you’ve got a PPA that’s below what you’re getting for production tax credit revenue, so basically if your PPA is below, like, let’s say 26 a megawatt hour or, 26. 80 or whatever it’s indexed to these days, if you’ve got a PPA below what you’re getting for PTC revenue, you are absolutely dependent not only on the PTC revenue, but you are absolutely dependent on high availability.
If you do not have high availability, you’ve got a big problem, a revenue problem, and you’re not only going to have to repower, but you’re probably going to have to repower with refinancing a substantial portion of your project site. In that repowering cost any residual value that you haven’t already paid off from the original project, you got to carry that over if you’re debt refinancing your project or whatever you’re doing you’re, you’re going to have a certain amount of, of money left over that you’re going to have to include in, in that refinance.
The more you can pay that down, the faster it, which again, translates back to high availability. The, the faster you can generate revenue on your project, the faster you can reduce the residual value of your project down to a point where you’ve, you’ve broken even and you’re seeing a net positive return on capital that is essential in terms of financial health and, and portfolio viability.
The good news is we’re seeing merchant market prices trend back up there around, 35 to 40 this year. But, going back a few years, I mean, you were seeing power purchase contracts in the U. S. market get executed down like 10, 11, 12 for, for some projects. Now they might have only been like a three or five year duration on that On that PPA, but it’s still a problem, like you, if you’re not going to be able to then transition into a merchant market, if you’re going back to these, power off takers that are only going to pay you like 15 bucks a megawatt hour, you have to be on top of your availability.
Because availability equals PTC revenue equals financial viability of your project. And that’s
Allen Hall: where the IntelStor data comes in, right? Because IntelStor has done the analysis in all the wind farms in the United States to look at availability, which then goes to how the turbines are maintained, the type of turbine that is installed, all those little variables that do produce an availability number.
In a store has, you can go back and look and say, well, this turban did really well in this part of the country because they’re using this type of maintenance scheme. Maybe I want to repeat that because I know what my output will be at the end of the day. Well, my payback
Philip Totaro: time will be right. Absolutely.
And this goes back to what I just talked about. We’re trying to tell a story about. If there’s a particular asset owner or operator that’s doing a really good job and has a really financially healthy portfolio, that’s the kind of, place that investors want to be able to park their money.
That’s the type of, the people who originally developed that project. They’re going to get, an easier time of it, trying to go get financing. The people who are owning and operating those projects are going to have an easier time of it going and getting financing. And it’s largely down to the fact that they’ve taken things like this O& M challenge seriously.
They, they’ve recognized the fact that we’re seeing these issues and they’re getting on top of it by being proactive with their maintenance. Because of, again, all these things we just talked about, you need high availability, you need to reduce your OpEx cost, you need to reduce the frequency with which things fail, and you need to be able to detect that something’s going to fail earlier, so that before you need to call out a crane, you can, you can address it, and you won’t have that that escalation of cost that you necessarily see.
Thank you. So this was, I mean, look, I’ll go back to when we had our IntelStor event the O and M in San Diego, back in February, there was an independent power producer who was there that specifically asked for this. They, they wanted to know how much, we’ve got a finite amount of, of budget to spend, how much can we realistically.
Get out of, addressing all the things that were like a cat 4, cat 5 damage on, on the blade that we have to address to be able to get it back up and running. But going down into things that were maybe cat 2 or cat 3. Should we really put off doing the maintenance on those or are we going to get to a point where we’re going to incur a substantially increased cost later because we’re going to have more crane callouts than we would otherwise have?
And anytime you can reduce crane time, everybody already knows inherently that’s, that’s critical. And I
Allen Hall: think this data from what I’ve reviewed of it drives you to some questions about continuous monitoring systems. very much. And other types of systems just to, to keep your turbine from, and that could be technicians having more touch time with the lifts inside the turbines where you can get up and down and take a quick look like, like blade bolts seems to be a big issue, pitch bearings, big issue, right?
That seems to be industry wide. You, you have to stay on top of these things where before, I think, five years ago, ten years ago, you weren’t as on top of them, you didn’t need to monitor them, your farms were smaller even, and now that we kind of crossed this threshold, we’re like, Sunzea, which is, I don’t know how many turbines, 650 turbines or something like that.
Those numbers are massive. There’s no way you’re gonna be able to monitor all those turbines. Doesn’t that, with the, especially with the data you have, and the failure rates, and the projections forward, doesn’t that really force your hand into some sort of continuous monitoring systems so that you can then keep track of what your failure rates are and get ahead of some of these maintenance items.
Philip Totaro: The good news is that the reason that condition monitoring had such a hard time getting adopted with smaller turbines was because of As a percentage of cost of the overall turbine capex, a condition monitoring system was just too expensive. But the technology’s improved, the cost per kind of installed megawatt, shall we say, has come down a little bit.
Over the years based on just economies of scale with deploying more CMS systems. But as turbines get bigger, you can more sort of easily afford I’ll, I’ll say a full kind of condition monitoring system. If you’re getting up to the point where you have a four, five, six megawatt turbine, you’re almost going to want this because you also frankly, whether you’ve got a service lift or not, if you can avoid sending a tech up tower, That right there is, or multiple techs up tower, that right there is saving you, potentially thousands if not millions of dollars across your entire fleet during the course of a year.
If, if we go back to the data we just calculated, Cost Delta between for just for blade repairs for if you assume nobody’s got a service lift versus there’s 100 percent service lift adoption, it’s a diff it’s a difference of 300 million just in the time that techs are taking to climb towers. And that’s, again, that’s just for blade repairs.
We haven’t even done the math on, pitch systems, main shafts. Gearboxes, generators, converters, et cetera. Everything else that might necessitate having a tech go up tower. So, not, we’re, we’re not necessarily doing a, an advertisement for, the service lift companies, but, if I’m, if I’m the sales guy at a service lift company, I should expect my phone to be off the hook at this point.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I would imagine. So the, the IntelStor data is pointing everybody in the right direction. And I think the industry is starting to wake up to what, what data IntelStor has and the power it has and the advantage it gives you going forward, particularly as we build out more turbines across the United States and all over the world.
This data becomes important in the decision making process. So, Phil, how do people get ahold of you and check out IntelStor’s data?
Philip Totaro: They can visit our website, www. intelstor. com, intelstor.com/contact. You can reach out to me on LinkedIn, any way you can get in touch. We’re always happy to have a conversation, and we’d love to be able to help you.
https://weatherguardwind.com/intelstor-wind-turbine-blade-om-cost/
Renewable Energy
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 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!
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/
Renewable Energy
American Draws the Line
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.
Renewable Energy
Transmission Major Topic at Georgia Power Hearing
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:
- Clearly marking which transmission projects support which electricity needs
- Waiting to approve new transmission projects until the associated load growth has reached key interconnection and construction milestones
- 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.
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