Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Wind Catching Systems: Offshore Modular Multirotor Technology
Rosemary interviews Ivar Knutsen, Senior VP of Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching Systems, to discuss their innovative floating offshore wind concept. Wind Catching’s design features a grid of small wind turbines that benefit from the multirotor effect and enable easier installation and maintenance compared to traditional large offshore turbines. Wind Catching will also present at the Multi Rotor 2024 seminar June 12-13. You can find more information here: https://multirotor24.zohobackstage.eu/MR24.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have today with me Ivar Knutsen who is the Senior Vice President for Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching. Thanks for joining us, Ivar.
Ivar Knutsen: Thank you for inviting us, Rosie.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay, so for those who don’t know, I’m just gonna quickly start by summarizing what the concept of Wind Catching is.
So basically it’s a grid of wind turbines that is floating offshore. So you’ve got a whole lot of small wind turbine turbines arranged in the grid, and they’re benefiting from being close to together with the multirotor effect, which we’ll get into later. And obviously there’s also, more modularity all the.
Turbines are arranged in this grid so that they can all yaw at the same time to face a differing wind direction. And yeah I’ll hand it over to you Eva to explain more about what the concept is and yeah, why you decided that this was a, an interesting company to get involved with.
Ivar Knutsen: It has become apparent to us that there are fundamental differences Between a bottom fixed and a floating wind turbine and they those differences are so big that you might need to Take a second look at that, you need to maybe consider a completely new approach to the design, but also to the operation.
So we find that multi rotors have three or four key benefits. One is that you’re actually able to avoid. The infamous tow to port. If the turbines are sufficiently small, you can handle them offshore and perform a turbine replacement offshore without using a crane vessel. You just need to bring people aboard a unit as long as you have the right technology to, to do that.
And as, as we see it, there are no options for. Return to port for big single rotor floaters today, there are many concepts out there, but we don’t see any of them as being tackling the real problems is that it’s going on in an offshore environment with a lot of motions. The other thing we also find very interesting about multirotors is that you decouple the turbine development from the sort of the development, both on the supply chain, but also on capacity.
So if you can go from 20 to 30 to 40 megawatts without developing new turbines for every single step, that’s interesting. If you can use the same turbine, But you can change your installed capacity by building on your support structure. That is a very interesting part of the multirotor concept.
And the other thing is that with a standardized turbine, you can actually enable a much broader supply chain. You can enable local content in each country because the sophistication required to turbine is much lower. And the reason for that, this is that if you now look at the biggest turbines and the turbines expected to come later.
With blade lengths of 120, 130 meters to overcome the scaling effect where the weight of those blades should scale cubically with the length. They actually scale by the square and that is done by introducing more and more sophisticated technology in the blade design and manufacturing, which is really important.
Prohibitive to local content. You can’t build those plates just anywhere.
Rosemary Barnes: Let’s cover though what you said about the modularity and the supply chain. So I think that’s really interesting. I think that’s something that most people are aware of that, modular technologies tend to reduce their cost faster.
If you look at the difference between solar panels and wind turbines, that’s a big difference is that the solar panels are a lot more modular and they’re yeah, can make the exact same thing many more times, which tends to lead to, yeah, getting better at manufacturing that thing and, making it cheaper.
Then there’s other physical thing that you mentioned about how the structural scaling laws, the amount of wind that you capture it scales with the square of the length of the blade, but the volume scales with the cube. So you actually. Don’t get a better structural outcome from having a big, one big rotor.
You have a better structural outcome, like a, less material should be able to be used if you have a lot of small rotors than one equivalent large one. Yeah, so maybe you can talk a little bit more about that benefit that you expect to get from the modularity and the supply chain.
Ivar Knutsen: What we’re working on now is a 40 rotor unit. So a 40 rotor floater which we see as perhaps the lower scale or at least the lower region of what we see as a fully commercial, not the pilot size, but they fully commercial size. And I say for three rotors and the turbine we are designing is a one megawatt, 30 meter diameter turbine.
So 40 rotors is 40 turbines 40 megawatt. Having said that we have. That kind of scalability on the turbine rating, we wouldn’t probably wouldn’t differ in turbine diameter in rotor diameter, because that has implications on the, how the design of the structure, not only the, how you scale the structure, but the whole sort of arrangement of the structure.
But of course, turbine rating is something you can play with on project specific basis, because we do see project. Different types of projects, different types of markets. Even if you start looking at electrification projects, where what we see, interestingly, when I say electrification electrification of oil and gas platforms, which is, has been done in Norway for some time, and it’s probably coming to Scotland as well.
They are often very clear and they have a clear cap on what they can receive of power because their facilities can’t receive any above, any sort of access power can’t be Received or utilized.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, you mentioned a couple of terms there that not everyone might be familiar with. So you mentioned that there the rating is higher.
Ivar Knutsen: So meaning basically we have a higher rated wind speed and a bigger generator relative to the rotor size.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it’s usually an economic optimization to figure out what that size should be. And you’ve come up with a different answer than. Than others. Is that what you’re saying?
Ivar Knutsen: Absolutely. And and it’s an interesting question because you’re coming back to why our turbines like they are today. And that’s not a straightforward question to answer, because there’s so many, there’s an evolutionary history that has led them in a certain direction. But if you consider very large offshore turbines today, we see that the rated wind speed has gone down.
typically gone down to now. If you see turbines 10 years ago, they were maybe had ratings of 12 meters per second. And now we’re see down to 10. 5. You could get immense capacity factors by just reducing it down to say rating at a five meter per second. And you would get like a very good capacity factor, but it doesn’t make sense.
Rosemary Barnes: You wouldn’t get a lot of annual energy production though.
Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. So what I would say is that for very large rotors what I believe is that the cost of generator size, so increasing a generator size by 5 percent for a 15 megawatt turbine is, has immense consequences. First off, you actually have to build this, but you have to install it and you have to transmit the rotor loads through this.
And this comes from the same kind of scaling law, but that applies to us as well. It just applies in the other direction. So we have a very, a much, much lower impact on that. So we could increase our generator size or decrease our generator size by 20%. And it wouldn’t really matter too much.
Rosemary Barnes: Because it’s still a very small generator compared to what we’re used to handling.
Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. So you’re saving three tons of generator weight per turbine, maybe if you make a substantial change. And as long as you can handle the turbine well. Why not just make a big generator? And that’s what we’re doing.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Okay. That’s really interesting. And I’m sure that there are, a thousand different little tiny things like that, that are different for your design than a regular configuration. But I just want to go back to one other technical point that you mentioned that people might not be familiar with.
You said one P and three P that’s a tower passing frequency, right? Which I guess when you’ve got a single. tower with a, a three bladed rotor on it, then that’s obvious what that means every time that the yeah, there’s a certain frequency of when the blades are passing the tower. Your design has this big grid latticework there’s not just one tower and three blades anymore, there’s What have you got, 120 blades if you’ve got three blades per rotor and all sorts of components of a tower latticework.
That’s opening a huge can of worms structurally, right? Because I know that, resonant frequencies and all those sorts of things and dynamic loading yeah, all these aerodynamics interferences. Have all been things that the history of wind energy is, littered with people that were surprised by these effects, and had, sensible looking designs that just, shook themselves apart.
So what have you, I’m assuming that a lot of the development that you’ve been done has been on under understanding how these are gonna work for your unique design. Can you tell me a bit about what you have done there?
Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. It’s absolutely right. Because we see that. Because when you design the traditional turbine, you want to tune your tower to have a certain natural period or a certain set of natural periods.
And if you have a lattice work, you basically have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of structural modes that where one turbine could by chance trigger a vibration far away at the other side of the lattice, just by, because there’s this you happen to trigger some, it’s like an interior of a car.
There’s always something rattling and it’s almost impossible to design your way around that kind of rattling because you’re exposed to so many different frequencies, different motor RPMs. Basically we’ve said that there’s no way to try to design your way around that you need to embrace it and accept it.
So what we’ve done, two things we’ve done we have a fairly big distance between the blade and the tower. So we have about five meters, which for such a small rotor is actually quite a long distance. So, and we’ve done some work on seeing how big that distance should be before the kind of the aerodynamic pulse cost.
On the on the rotor, but also on the structure is lessened. And the other thing we’re doing, and that’s we’ve done a few structural simulations where we applied vibrations to all the turbine locations and starting extracting the responses in all these members. And what we’re looking for is we’re not looking for these single extremes.
We’re looking for what is the average fatigue damage that this. Applies to the structure so that you can add it to your fatigue budget when you’re doing a fatigue design of the structure and by that you can obtain stress amplitudes. And you can see the stress amplitudes caused by this and try to say, okay, there’s this fussy picture that we don’t know exactly what’s happening inside this fussy picture, but we know that the envelope of it.
So we will design our way. around this kind of, we have a top and bottom and say, okay, we will accept what’s going on in there. And that’s the approach.
Rosemary Barnes: When you say you’ve done tests, are you talking computer simulations? Are you talking small scale models in wind tunnels?
Ivar Knutsen: Computer simulation. So we’ve done a, in a time domain software.
Rosemary Barnes: Early on you mentioned about maintenance strategy. I think that’s something else that’s quite interesting with this multi rotor design. So yeah, if you’ve got 40 wind turbines and one of them gets knocked out, what’s that two and a half percent power reduction. I’m assuming it’ll also cause some, funny structural things, but you’ve already mentioned that your design, your plan is to not have yeah, you’re not designed so that the frequencies matter that much that would affect it, I’m assuming.
Guess you’ll know for sure when you’ve built one, but how would it work? One rotors out, so you send out a repair crew or you wait for two, three, four, like at what point, and do you have to stop the whole 40 to go work on one? Cause I’ve, I climbed wind turbines for my work and you, you definitely, you don’t want to be up there while it’s cranking.
Yeah, what’s the strategy?
Ivar Knutsen: So imagine the event you have 40 turbines. If you look at failure rates on a number of failures per turbine we account for turbines stopping or. That we choose to stop them because we have some alarm on some sensor that not sure what’s going on there, but let’s stop the turbine.
And then we say, okay, let’s, this is happening now in December, a very difficult time in Europe for doing anything offshore. But as you say, it’s a very small percentage of the total production, so we can just leave that for now. And then we see that, okay. We have, we are planning with regular intervention campaigns.
So once the two rotors have stopped or maybe three rotors have stopped, okay. We decide to do an intervention campaign and and maybe basically that is limited by the ability to put people on board a unit. So which are the same limits as any kind of both floating and bottom fixed have today that you have a.
wave height limitation of around two and a half meters and a wind speed limitation of 15 to 20 meters per second, actually quite high for these walk to work systems. So you send out this your service ship with your crew, your small team. And They use this elevator they shift the elevator to right position.
They try they move to the right turbine. They do an inspection. And either they decide that, okay this, that was a faulty sensor. There was nothing wrong. And or there was something significantly wrong. And you either restart the turbine or you do something or you plan for a longer, a more substantial replacement.
And yes. Would you stop all the rotors at that time? So what I’m understanding is that some developers or operators of wind farms, they are happy to have people on the TP when the rotor is going. And it’s a sort of a risk Management thing, I would say that you wouldn’t have any kind of rotors moving in vicinity of this elevator because when that’s moving, regardless of if there’s people on it or not, because you’re doing stuff very close to moving rotors.
So you don’t want to lose a spanner and then it falls onto a rotor, which is already spinning or something. That’s so it is a risk management thing that you do. It’s not technically impossible to do it. So, Basically, the system we have allows you to have a working, a safe working platform at your turbine, just next to your turbine, allowing you to do an inspection, but also allowing you to do a blade replacement or a complete miscellaneous replacement.
So for the blade replacement are what we’re working on is basically to have a rack of blades that you prepare the rack of three blades on shore in your warehouse and the blade stays in those in that rack until on the elevator and until the You’re up next to the turbine. So you have your blade rack right next to your turbine, allowing you to do a complete rotor replacement.
And our target is that we should be able to do that during one shift. And if we were to do a turbine replacement, we would have to take the blades off, bring them down to deck, and then do the turbine separately, at least in the first round, but we can do it but. The idea is that we don’t do repairs up there.
If they’re running in the, the difficulty of doing a turbine replacement should be sufficiently low that you don’t bother with it, just swap it. So idea is that you have a pool of turbines and blades on shore. And you can rotate. So if you have one turbine with some slight issue, okay, we’ll swap it out and we’ll figure out on shore what’s going on with that turbine if we want to do something which means that the criticality of having a turbine failure.
It comes lower, so you don’t need to design it so that you absolutely sure that it never fails.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s a really dramatically different approach and it does seem like you’ve covered a lot of a bit of a best of both worlds because, there’s a reason why people have gone bigger and bigger for offshore turbines and, a lot of it’s to do with the number of connections, electrical connections that you need.
It’s just simply expensive to have Yeah. Underwater cables and connection points and everything, but you would still have fewer of those, but you also get rid of yeah, a lot of the downsides of the really big turbines that you’ve already mentioned.
Ivar Knutsen: So with turbines becoming very big, it has like a commercial momentum.
That means that yes, you can do innovation, but. The costs of doing something significantly different become prohibitive to doing it because yeah, there there’s so much invested now in the current direction, the factories, the designs that it’s becoming more difficult to disrupt.
And what we find very interesting is that there’s a whole range of onshore OEMs that are not in offshore wind today. And basically for them to enter offshore wind is an enormous technical lift and commercial lift. So they, let’s say a onshore OEM who wanted to enter offshore wind today, what would they need to do?
Probably they would need to launch a 16, 17 megawatt offshore turbine. And that’s that just the cost of developing something like that is enormous. So it is prohibiting them from it’s certainly Makes it very difficult for them to enter the market, meaning that new OEMs are not likely to come in soon.
What we think we can offer with a multi rotor approach is that we can actually introduce these new OEMs to the offshore wind market. Because a one megawatt turbine, there’s a significant higher number of companies that can do that. Also on the component side. That’s where you can use more local suppliers.
We see that in Norway we see it in Scotland to produce a generator or produce a fairly straightforward 15 meter epoxy blade. There’s a lot more companies that can do that. And that I think is good that you can broaden your supply chain. Because I think the supply chain is perhaps one of the biggest constraints we have in offshore wind today.
Rosemary Barnes: So you mentioned so far you haven’t built any prototypes for testing, but I assume that would be the next step would be to it will be a step to build a unit and get it out in the water. How far along the path to that are you? When do you think we’ll see that?
Ivar Knutsen: So what we’re doing is that we have our turbine development program.
We have a license to test a prototype in Norway. So from the regulator We actually did a a model test two weeks ago in a tank in Norway. So we did a hydrodynamic model test of quite a, it’s quite a big model hub. We’ll share some pictures soon. Then we’re working towards this this 40 megawatt unit.
And. Saying, okay, what are the big validation needs? What are the big sort of uncertainties? And we’re tackling those and then seeing, okay, how can we pilot this specific problem in order to understand it as well as possible? So say blade passing effects, two blades passing at high speed. How do you understand that mechanism and that the physics best?
CFD, maybe not, wind tunnel, yes, maybe, or maybe all of that. So that’s how we’re thinking at the moment. Can I actually, in the last minute, promote that the University of Strathclyde and University of Hamburg are hosting a multirotor seminar in June? We had one in Hamburg last year, which was very good, very interesting.
It is a seminar for those infected by the multirotor virus. And I invite people to look it up on LinkedIn.
Rosemary Barnes: Thank you so much for talking to us about Wind Catching. I’m definitely going to be following your progress closely. I hope you’ll keep us up to date and I really wish you the best of luck.
Ivar Knutsen: Thank you very much.
https://weatherguardwind.com/wind-catching-offshore-modular-multirotor/
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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