Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Monitoring Solutions for Aging Wind Turbines: eologix-Ping
Allen Hall and Joel Saxum interview Matthew Stead, co-founder of eologix-Ping, about the company’s growth, industry challenges, and their innovative sensing solutions for aging wind fleets. They discuss the benefits of eologix-Ping’s acoustic sensing, lightning detection, and blade monitoring technologies.
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 special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with co host Joel Saxun. We are in Minneapolis for the 2024 American Clean Power with the co founder of eologix-Ping, Matthew Stead.
Matthew Stead: Thank you, Allen.
Allen Hall: Matthew, welcome back.
Matthew Stead: Thank you. It’s great to be here. I actually was here with you a year ago.
Allen Hall: Oh, that’s right. In New Orleans. Yeah. So it has been a year since the merger of eologix and Ping. So a lot has happened over that time year’s time span?
Matthew Stead: Absolutely.
Allen Hall: Uh, we should touch upon that. I want, first want to get your opinion of what this convention has been relative to New Orleans last year, what your thoughts were, what the interfaces have been with your customers.
What’d you think?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think industry’s growing, fleets getting older, design issues, Every month, every six months, every twelve months, there’s more and more challenges we’re seeing, and I think that was reflected in the discussions we had here.
Joel Saxum: I think you’re getting that, it’s just being communicated, right?
Yeah. Hey, we have this problem, what can you do to fix it? I sat with someone last night at dinner and they literally just said I’ve got this. I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to do that. Who can do that? I said nobody can do all three, but this company can do this and this. I said, Pingmealogic can monitor for this and we can, you can do this for this.
And there’s some gearbox stuff for that. So people are looking for solutions for their plaguing problems. And I think that is exactly what you said as the fleet ages, right? It was before everybody was just like trying to catch up. And now you’re getting engineers into places. We do talk to a lot of people that are hiring engineers.
Hey, this person’s brand new to our team. Whether it’s from the insurance side, asset owner side, even ISPs. I talked to an ISP. Hey, we got a great new blade engineer to help bolster our ability to repair blades. It’s oh, that’s fantastic for you guys as well. So more engineering help. And that’s just giving more bandwidth to the basically the stakeholders in industry to solve these problems.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we’re all here to help.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. For sure. This is the place for it.
Allen Hall: We have seen a lot of engineers this week with specific problems. Mostly blade problems, occasionally bearing problems, even though it depends on the platform. There’s some platform with a lot of bearing issues at the moment.
And we have seen a narrowing down of the possible solution companies. And that’s what I noticed this week. The number of drone companies has really diminished robot companies way down. It’s around pretty much left, right? Because there’s so dominant in that market space. And then when it comes to acoustic sensing, remote sensing, continuous monitoring, that’s the logic’s ping at the minute because of the, Really gets down to cost, right?
And what the product can do. So you packed a huge amount of information in this little tiny package that doesn’t require any wiring. And that just has opened up the opportunities for eologix-Ping. I think it, there’s, everybody was talking to, what can we do? And when they come to our booth, we say, eologix-Ping has the most cost efficient, readily adaptable, on the go product.
That’s awesome. Just stick it on and go. And which is a game changer, right? So the continuous monitoring systems that we were, we’re seeing a year ago that were these big monster boxes with the wires everywhere.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: They’re essentially gone.
Joel Saxum: They’re for engineering projects. They are. And you’re not going to roll, you’re not going to roll that out.
Fleet wide recalls. Yeah. Yeah. Cause at the end of the day, this is what we need to be able to do. We need to enable the guys in the O and M building to know what they need to do and prioritize. So like the lightning strike. I don’t need to know every bit of metadata about that. I need to know which turbine got hit.
Matthew Stead: Did I get hit? Which one?
Joel Saxum: Go look at it. Yeah. Or is there an issue here? Because at the end of the day, every CMS system tells you at one point in time, go look at the turbine. So if you can do that in the most cost efficient way, that’s the answer.
Allen Hall: Even the number of engineers that were here, when we talked to them, and how many assets do you have, how many turbines do you have?
We have thousands. How many blade engines do you have? Two!
Matthew Stead: Not enough.
Allen Hall: There is no way you’re going to be able to monitor that many turbines without having a tool. Yeah. There’s no way. Too much data. Too much data, not enough simplicity to it, and you can’t quickscan, which is the problem I see. That eologix-Ping is fixed, is the quickscan,
Matthew Stead: What’s the hot list?
What’s the top 10%? What’s the top 20%?
Allen Hall: Yeah, you got to get to that list really quickly, every morning.
Joel Saxum: And you can take a look. And you can scale and install on a wind farm in a day. The way I look at that is I could, if I got my shipment of ping sensors, right? Of the acoustic ones, and I had, here, boys, put this in the back of your truck, and we’ll put this on every tower we have out there.
Okay, they’re done at the end of the day. And all of those turbines are now monitored. Whereas if you have to install, Get up in the blades and this and that. It said the ability to scale up the monitoring effort is not there.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. And that’s where we started. So I think when I founded the business, I didn’t try and design a product and then try and sell it.
I spoke to the customers, what can you afford, what are your challenges, what do you need? And then we designed a product to suit that. And that’s the way it should be, right? It should be. That’s a huge problem.
Joel Saxum: Okay, so this is a conversation I have regularly. I’m a bit plugged in some of the the VC world and the tech world in Houston.
And there’s people that go to these places, Greentown Labs, the ION, that walk in there and just say Hey, wait a minute. Do you have basically a development partner? Have you talked with some, instead of breezing by a bar room conversation of primary market research, are you actually engaged with these clients and solving the specific problems they have?
Otherwise you’re making a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t work. Yeah. It doesn’t work that way.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. So I’m really pleased that you’re relaying what we set out to do. Yes.
Joel Saxum: Yes.
Matthew Stead: Yes. It’s been worth the effort. It’s been worth the effort.
Allen Hall: I took that tour along with Joel. If you’ve been listening to the podcast very long over the last month or so, you’ve heard about our travel log of going through West Texas and up through Oklahoma and looking at all kinds of turbines.
There are problems everywhere. Cranes are out right now fixing blades. There’s a lot of pitch bearing issues. There’s a lot of structural issues inside. And then when we had stopped to talk to the OEM supervisors and managers of those sites, they’re saying, Hey, We have so many problems, we can’t monitor it.
And some of them we just need to monitor. We just going to have to put a monitor on and they’re looking at solutions or trying to figure out how to monitor a hundred turbines that have some sort of internal blade issue that they know of. How are they going to do that? Either you’re going to send a technician around to do that every couple of weeks, which just kills your technician.
They’re already killed. Yeah. Yeah. They’re already stressed. You’re gonna have to bring in some outside crew to go do it. Super expensive. Yeah. Or you’re gonna put some sort of continuous monitoring system in. Now, when we stopped at one of those offices, we said the internal blade monitor From eLogic’s ping is the quick solution because it does so much and everybody is just mind blown.
There’s no wiring. Do you want to describe how that system works?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, so there’s two parts. We have the listening sensor, which has got a lovely windshield, which looks beautifully black. So that’s intelligent listening sensor and now we have the power and comms module and power and comms module power.
but also the lightning detection sensor. So putting them both together. So we’ve got the intelligent listening sensor and the power and comms module, and we just plugged them together. It turns it on and slap it on with the magnets onto the tower.
Allen Hall: And so that’s the internal internally inside the blade, which is where the technicians were going with me that are saying, okay.
Yeah, but I can’t really see in this dark blade. How am I going to monitor it? I’ve seen other systems where I got to put strain gauges on and all this stuff. I got wiring everywhere. And that is, it’s too much. It’s going to take me 10 hours and stop for blade. That’s crazy. The in blade solution just sticks to the closeout panel, right?
Matthew Stead: For the logic spring version of it. So the in, in blade one, we’ve got two parts to it. Once again, the listening sensor, and then we’ve got a kinetic power supply. , that’s it. You plug them together, turns on. It’s got all its comms, that’s it. And it’s all on the closeout panel.
Allen Hall: And that doesn’t even talk to the SCADA system in the tree?
Matthew Stead: No, completely. No it’s a completely separate, completely. Each blade is separately talking through cellular comms back to the cloud. So even each blade doesn’t talk to each other. ’cause there’s no wires between each plate. So each system is one per plate.
Joel Saxum: So you’re solving the cyber security issues there too.
Yeah, because there is none.
There’s no connection
Matthew Stead: to the tower. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry it bolts to the close up yeah.
Allen Hall: But we’re talking about a couple of bolts a close up panel versus all kinds of wiring.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. Yeah. There’s no way No power coming from the hub, you don’t have to get past the slip ring get past the pitch bearing None of that stuff.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s gonna be the solution We see across the middle of the United States this summer And as everybody gets used to the fact of we need to go monitor, we need to be spending a little bit of money to go do it. Not a lot of money, but a little bit of money to go do this. The eLogic’s ping is the quick, simple way to get there.
And let’s go outside of the internal inspection, where we’re getting the outside of the blade, things we can visually see. We’ve been using, Weather Guard has been using the eologix-Ping lightning detection system with some of our customers to detect lightning strikes. So they have StrikeTape product on.
Yeah. We want to show them they’re taking strikes and just record and monitor it. Yeah, no damage. We want to show there’s no damage and the key to that system, which is working so well in customer’s love, is the same thing with the internal sensor is, it’s so easy to see it. Yeah.
Yeah. It doesn’t take really any training at all. You just open your laptop, look at the screen, it’ll tell you if it took a strike. It actually sends you an email. Yeah. It says, hey, you’ve been struck. Oh. And the added feature now, the new feature on the lightning side is what?
Matthew Stead: So now we correlate when there’s a lightning event determined from our sensor.
We know the tower’s been struck. Now we correlate Xweatherr data. So Xweather is recording the polarity. Cloud to ground, and so I’ve got killer amps, so now we can correlate a real event with the Xweather data.
Allen Hall: And we had a real life situation with that system and some of these horrible Oklahoma storms.
They had a recent storm just west of Oklahoma City, and if everybody remembers back, there was tornadoes and all kinds of horrible things from that storm. One of the things that happened there also was they had Essentially, all the lightning strikes in that part of Oklahoma were positive lightning strikes.
Yeah. And they were huge.
Yeah. 100 kiloamps each. So the turbines with StrikeTape were hitting, getting hit with 140, 160 kiloamp strikes. Those are big strikes in the United States. And they were all positive. And positive strikes tend to be the ones that damage the blades. Yeah, absolutely.
Those are the ones that most likely damage the blades. The ping, you got to pick them up every time. Yep. Every time on top of it, it was picking up. We had some notifications of this turbine got struck, but this one also had a leader on, which was a couple hundred amps. So we picked up the really high one.
We picked up ones that were under 500 amps to a turbine. So it alerted us to that. Yeah. So now we have a better understanding of what has happened out in the real world, because what did the operator do? They sent technicians out. To the turbines that were struck.
Matthew Stead: Not doing a random inspection over a field.
Not knowing which ones to inspect, or which ones got hit.
Allen Hall: Some of these farms, as Joel knows, we drove around them, are 10, 20, 30, 40 miles across. It takes an hour to drive from one end to the other. Yeah.
Joel Saxum: You’ll burn up a technician real quick their whole day just looking at turbines. So if you have a hit list, say in the morning, hey, turbine 4, 7, 10, 12, and 6 got hit last night in that storm.
Yeah. Go look at them. Perfect. That’s easy.
Matthew Stead: Yep. Rather than spending the whole day driving around. Yeah, these guys are flat out. The industry is stretched for results. And
Allen Hall: They’re all fixing pitch bearings and main bearings, right?
Matthew Stead: So they don’t have time to be running around looking at blades.
They got other things to do. Making their life easy.
Allen Hall: Yeah.
Matthew Stead: Yeah.
Allen Hall: So the acoustic piece, which is the brain, the heart of the eologix-Ping system, that has evolved over time. So the first generation of the acoustic. It is from the software side. He’s gotten a lot smarter since absolutely scary, smart.
Yeah. So inside that little acoustic sensor, if you see it, you’ll, if you look at the base of a tower that has a pink sensor on it, it’s pretty easy to pick out inside that black death star looking piece, there’s microphones in there. There is what we’ll see. Exactly. There’s okay. There’s six microphones in there and there’s a microprocessor.
Exactly. And it’s about the size of a deck of cards. Yeah. Roughly. So in there is a lot of processing power though. Yeah. So the understanding of what’s happening with the blade isn’t happening remotely. It’s actually happening on the tower.
Matthew Stead: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And that software has evolved because you’ve been on so many turbines all over the world.
You now have to understand like how a Siemens turbine performs and what noise it makes and what it means. You have understanding what a GE or an LM blade makes versus a TPI blade makes. They all make slightly different noises with different problems. So if you buy that system now, you have all that history already built into the acoustic sensor.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. We’re approaching 1400 towers now under monitoring. Wow. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I think a year ago we were probably about 500, 600. Okay. Yeah. So starting to, yeah. You see that ramp up happening. I’m pleased to take orders of another thousand today.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. P. O. is booth 434.
Matthew Stead: We can deliver now, so that’s probably the key thing as well.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And the one of the issues that everybody thinks about is okay, we’re in remote Texas. How does this thing connect up? Like, how does it work? If it’s not hooked up to my SCADA system, do I have to have Ethernet on site? What is, how does that actually work? How is it transmitting data and where does that data go?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, so we’re using cellular comms. And we’re using like a machine to machine comms, which is part of the 4G family. It’s 4G, but it’s called LTE M which is low power, long range. Actually in the U. S. We’ve only ever had one site where we really had challenges on comms. And that one site was near a military facility.
So maybe there was some other, that makes sense.
Allen Hall: So as long as you, your cell phone works, your technician, cell phone works, your Samsung works.
Matthew Stead: Our system works even if they don’t, because we’ve got longer range. Yeah, exactly. Cause we’re transmitting hundreds of bytes not voice. So probably.
Anywhere in the states, the continental United States. Apart from near that military facility. Yeah, no, we’re good. This year we should also be coming out with a satellite version. So if there are any black spots, you’ll have it. So
Allen Hall: is that a start? Offshore, yeah. Offshore, yeah, I wanted to talk to offshore.
But the communication bit, Starlink and those kinds of systems, that’s the next gen. Yeah. Is that already in process? Yeah, that’s this year.
Matthew Stead: That’s this year? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So we’ll have more of a hub and spoke approach. So you’ll have a central hub talking to each of our devices and then that will then start linking up to Elon or whatever.
Yeah. Okay. Okay. Hopefully not to him personally, but sometimes he’s listening. He might be listening.
Allen Hall: The offshore piece also because the onshore has been so successful. Obviously offshore’s the next gen and that’s where a lot more risk is in terms of new turbines and new environments that don’t have a lot of previous history.
Joel Saxum: It was, it’s a just Hey, east coast US offshore, it’s going to be a different animal.
Allen Hall: Yeah, we’re seeing everybody start to be worried about it. We talked to an operator, a really big operator that was concerned about that, particularly offshore, who also was using your system. over in Europe to trial it and what they told us and you weren’t in the room when they told us is Hey, the ping works.
Everything else we tried doesn’t work. It gives us erroneous data, a lot of false positives. We’re sending technicians out to check things that don’t exist. When we have a ping alert, it’s real and it’s actionable. So is that sort of development process that’s happened offshore in Europe? Is it starting to move towards the United States?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, absolutely. We also believe in like triangulation, like getting multiple sources of data so that, no false alarms. That’s really our aim.
Yeah. Yeah. We’re also now measuring on the blade with the eologix OnBlade, former eologix OnBlade sensor. Now we know exactly how the blade is moving or we, through, censoring.
Allen Hall: And let’s talk through that because Some of these new blades have weird dynamics. GE went through that effort on one of their blades that there were some deflection issues and they ended up putting some counterweights in basically to, to solve it. Yeah. But we’re seeing because blades get longer and the structure’s a little bit different and the environment as Joel pointed out is unique at times that you need to have a little bit of understanding of how the blades are actually moving in wind, no wind situations because changes there in The way the blade undulates Yeah.
Indicate problems. And there’s really no way to do that right now without putting a bunch of strain, eight time sensor on it. Yeah. So how does that system work then? If I wanna understand how my blade is moving, particularly, they got a new farm and I’m thinking like Sunz, right? So Sunz, there’s a thousand turbines out there.
Crazy. And all those turbines are new.
Joel Saxum: The blades are new. Everything about ’em new and the, those turbines don’t even have type certificates yet. No. As we learned,
Allen Hall: it would be a smart move. That’s a pattern energy project, right? So it would be a smart move if I’m patterned, not that I’m patterned, not that they would hire me to do this, but in my head, I’m thinking I just need a monitor to see how things move for a while.
Yeah. Then I’ll understand what good looks like versus problem. It does make sense, you think, to put some of those eologix-Ping sensors on Blade, especially when they’re on the ground. Yeah, exactly.
Matthew Stead: That’s the best time to do it.
Allen Hall: Just instrument it, put them up, start getting some data. The engineers at Pattern, the Blade engineers, are superb, right?
But they are overworked and they have a lot on their plate already. And we’re going to build the world’s largest wind farm, pretty much. Yeah. So the workload just got even a little harder. Is that the right approach then from a continuous monitoring standpoint?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, that’s the direction we’re going.
We’ve got one product out there at the moment, which talks about pitch misalignment continuously where they need to. Okay. But our sensors are able to go, up until about 20 percent mark, 80 percent from the root. And we can measure the vibration. So we know what the blade’s doing, how it’s moving.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, this is the next step for us. If I was someone who had the new two piece plates. I would put sensors, I’d put them on either side of the two piece, the joint.
Matthew Stead: No comment.
Allen Hall: I’d want to know. I think Joel, you’re right, is that it’s new technology. It has a little bit of history. That history has shown some weakness in the design. And I know there’s been a lot of effort to resolve that. But if I’m buying those blades now. Safeguard yourself. You want to safeguard myself. It’s a lot cheaper to detect it early than to detect it late.
Joel Saxum: Orders of magnitude. Yeah, absolutely. Especially, you want to make sure if there’s something developing, you catch it before you’re into warranty period.
Allen Hall: Oh, gosh, yeah. Once the warranty ends, the fight escalates.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: Yeah, the lawyers become involved and it gets ugly. The last piece I want to talk about is the icing sensor.
eologix has an on blade icing sensor. The Ping unit, the acoustic sensor, can also detect ice. It seems like there’s a lot of operators in the United States, Texas, all the way up in Minnesota, Canada that have icing issues and they talk about them on a downtime. And we had talked to our care about that too.
Joel Saxum: Yep yep. Yeah, I actually spoke with quite a few people here about icing this week. And I think it may have something to do with us being in Minneapolis. Yep. Ha. It’s beautiful outside of the mountains. Yeah, it’s fantastic. It was a beautiful week. But the people that are here from a stakeholder standpoint, there are, National Grid Renewables is here in town.
And Xcel Energy is headquarters, is down the street. And so the people that operate in these cold climates are here at this show. So I’ve heard more talk about icing. Here than I have, than you do normally.
Matthew Stead: Yeah.
I think, For us, ice is the core of, where we started with the eologix side. Yep.
Absolutely the core of where we started, but the future is ice and beyond, the damage and the like. That’s really where we’re going, but it’s where we started, so we, we’re monitoring, we’re stopping, we’re restarting where it’s safe. Yeah, and we’ve got, a whole fleet of problems, a fleet of sensors there.
Joel Saxum: So you’re, but the fleet of sensors, whether it’s the acoustic side, the lightning detection, icing detection, vibration, displacement, like anything that’s affecting a blade from an environmental standpoint, basically you guys, you’re picking up. Yeah. Yeah, that’s why we want to offer everything. It’s like holistic environmental monitoring for intern.
Yeah.
Allen Hall: And the way that the eologix-Ping model is set up right now, the economic model, is you choose the things that you need.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. You turn on the pieces you need. Don’t need it, don’t buy it.
Allen Hall: If you’re in Southern California, it’s not going to snow.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. Probably don’t need the icing. Not in Australia.
Allen Hall: Or Australia.
Matthew Stead: I always think it’s a bit funny, I’m trying to sell, or work with customers around icing, and yeah, there’s no icing in Australia.
Allen Hall: No. The Rosemary has been skiing there. Yeah, she tells us there’s snow.
Matthew Stead: There is snow. There’s just no turbines there.
Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s right, yes. So this has been great to have you visit the United States again, Matthew.
It’s great to be here. And spend some time at American Clean Power. And it’s been a tremendous week, I think, for everybody who has participated.
Joel Saxum: And people that went to the Twins game last night and watched the Twins win.
Matthew Stead: And our team won.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Thank you. Yeah. So Matthew, thanks for having on the podcast.
How do people reach out and connect with eeologix-Ping to get some continuous monitoring on their turbines?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, just eologix-ping.com. Yeah. Okay. They’ll find the right people. And or me personally, if you wish, matthew.stead@eologix.com.
Okay. Wonderful. Cool. There we go. Matthew, thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Thanks guys.
https://weatherguardwind.com/monitoring-solutions-turbines-eologix-ping/
Renewable Energy
Green Eagle’s ARSOS Automates Wind Farm Operations
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
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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