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Windar Photonics LiDAR Optimizes Wind Farms

Antoine Larvol, CTO of Windar Photonics, discusses how their continuous wave LiDAR technology enhances wind turbine performance through optimization and monitoring, increasing AEP and reducing loads, particularly for legacy turbines.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on FacebookYouTubeTwitterLinkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.

Alright, we’re here in Phoenix, a CP, clean power, uh, 2025. So I’m, uh. Sitting with Antoine Larvol from, he’s a CTO from Windar. Yep. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Uh, we’ve been, uh, happy enough to get actually to sit inside your booth where it’s nice and qui. Quiet and isn’t it nice? Yeah. We got glass behind the camera here and people are walking by, walking by, walking by.

Um, so this morning, uh, we, we talked yesterday a little bit about what wind photonics does. Yep. Of course, from our, uh, some of our other friends around the world. We’ve heard about some, some campaigns you’ve done in the United States, which have been. Really successful. So yeah, congrat good. Congratulations there.

Yeah, thank you. Um, and, and as, as a lot of things in the wind industry, Windar, photonics based in Denmark.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah.

Joel Saxum: So you guys, uh, bring it, bring in that Danish [00:01:00]technology. We’re here, of course, bringing it to the US market at a CP, the American Clean Power Show. So welcome to the States. Thank you. Um, it’s a short one, but a

Antoine Larvol: good one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

Joel Saxum: exactly. So, so I want to talk a little bit about what Windar photonics and, and it is a LIDAR based sensor, correct?

Antoine Larvol: Yes. Right. So. We do continuous wave base, uh, lidar. Yep. Uh, main product is a two beam version mm-hmm. Where you shoot, uh, at 80 meters in front of the turbine. Mm-hmm. And you basically alternate from one beam to the other.

And measure wind speed and direction upfront, the, the turbine among others.

Joel Saxum: Right. So we’re talking about, uh, if you, if you’re in the wind industry, you’ve ever seen these lidar units that are put actually, you’re the cell mounted, correct? Yes. Okay. Yeah. So, and, and, uh, we’re looking more on the optimization, retrofit monitoring side of things.

Yeah,

Antoine Larvol: exactly. So we’ve never been a resource assessment company. Yeah. Or we don’t look at power curve verification and stuff like that. We really [00:02:00] focus on. Retrofitting those, existing turbines. And then add value to In terms of information to, the customer, Yeah. With the mon monitoring side of things.

Yeah. And, from day one, that’s been the goal of Windar Making something cheap, robust. That can just stay there and measure with good availability, wind speed, and direction coming to your turbine.

Joel Saxum: I love it. so we wanna squeeze as much as we can outta these turbines. And you guys are increasing AEP that’s, the name of the game.

Yeah. Right.

Increasing AEP below rated. and then above rated you decrease loads. Increase uptime. and we basically do that by going on the line of the wind direction. that you then feed to the turbine controller and then we can actually adjust the, yaw position of the turbine according to our information.

So I want to talk a little bit, we, we chatted a little bit offline about the, technology behind it, right? Yep. And people in the wind industry, if you’re around the wind industry around resourcing or you’re around optimization, you’ve heard [00:03:00] lidar. Yep. You know what I mean? And, but I don’t think.

A lot of people know exactly what lidar, what it does, how it does it. Yeah. What is the technical, where’s the magic coming from? Exactly. It’s just a black box. It’s just a, technically, I guess it’s just a white box. Yeah. For the wind photonics. But how do, how does the lidar work to measure actual wind speed coming into the turbine?

Antoine Larvol: Yeah,

Joel Saxum: so

Antoine Larvol: we basically focus laser light, and we do a focus point at 80 meters in front of the turbine. And basically there where your light concentrates on a specific location, then you hit particles in the air, pollen, water droplets, dust, whatever. Dust. Yeah. Okay. Whatever is there. And then you will, have a certain frequency of the light you emit, and that will just bounce on those particles and come back with a slight shift in frequency.

And that’s doppler shift. And then. Analyzing this shift, then you can derive a wind speed along the beam Of, the, [00:04:00] lidar.

Joel Saxum: So

Antoine Larvol: we’re

Joel Saxum: talking about like a bunch of really, really smart trigonometry kind of

Antoine Larvol: Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have a bit of optics. Yeah. Trigonometry. Uh, and, uh, yeah, it’s a bunch of optics.

Hardware, uh, software. A lot of software. A lot of software, yeah. Uh, to analyze that and squeeze as much info out of this. Right. We do, uh, you can derive wind speed, wind direction. You can look at turbulence. Mm-hmm. You can, uh, detect our wake, uh, is going on. So you can actually detect whether or not your turbine is in the wake.

Uh, and then based on that, then you will do different ing strategy in order to make the most of your turbine. Right. Decrease loads or increase, uh, outputs.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. So and mean. That’s what, uh, the uptime podcast we’re here about. When we bring technology, we talk to. Smart people like yourself, Antoine. Thank you.

We, we want to pick the, pick out the solutions, right? Like what, how are you guys helping the wind industry? And that’s the important thing here. So we’ve [00:05:00] talked about two, basically, kind of two tracks that you guys go down and one of ’em is optimization. Yep. And one of ’em is monitoring.

Antoine Larvol: Yep.

Joel Saxum: So let’s, let’s start with optimization.

What does that look like from wind?

Antoine Larvol: Yeah, I mean that’s a bit the unique part of wind. Uh, so we do lidar, uh, but actually the. Like this good selling product is this, uh, wind technology. So basically what it does is that we go on the line of the wind direction, uh, of the sensors from the primary secondary sensor from the turbine, and then we go on that line, read this info that they are measuring, and then, uh, correct this info according to our measurements.

Ah, okay. What’s going on out there is that, you know, those, uh, devices are placed behind the rotr. So they’re basically, uh, biased by the blades, basically turning in front and creating a lot of turbulence. You also, you have some effects depending on the, your misalignment of the turbine. And so basically you don’t have a great [00:06:00] measurement from, from those devices.

So what we bring is that, right. We measure upfront, so we are unbiased and then modify, the information, the wind direction information, and then feed that to the turbine controller so we can actually, yo. The turbine the way we want.

Joel Saxum: So in a really simple way, you guys are creating what is an amazing wind speed and direction sensor.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So for this WindTIMIZER we only use wind direction information. And then basically improve what the turbine is given as information about. Relative wind direction of the nacelle Right. So yaw error. and then we correct that. So we increase, energy production below rated wind speed.

And then we have different strategies above rated wind speeds, aiming at reducing loads and increasing uptime. So the way we do that is actually we introduce small yaw misalignment, depending on wind [00:07:00] speed, in order to achieve that. Especially decreased loads on, blades.

Yeah. and the drive train rate.

Joel Saxum: So in, let’s, talk a case study, right? We wanna, we always want to give examples, right? Yeah. So, so in the states we had, we talked about you guys are focusing on more, well not globally really, but you’re focusing on more of like the last generation of turbines, not the brand new ones.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So we are like really focusing at the moment on all this generation of. G 1, 15, 16. Two three. Yeah. 87 97 V 80, V 82. V 90, uh, seven, uh, maybe 2 92. Okay. Like this kind of turbines. Yeah. Uh, that’s been not there for, for a while. And basically where you don’t have a lot of offering on how to squeeze more power.

And they’re not supported anymore by manufacturers, right? Yeah. Uh, so that’s where we come in and offer that to. To be able [00:08:00] to, to produce more power, decrease load. Right. So the way we do that, usually when, uh, a new customer approach us is that you will do a deployment of like five units in a, in the farm.

Mm-hmm. Uh, basically pick randomly, uh, if, uh, five turbines and then we will install, uh, technology. You install like in three, four hours you’re done with installing the system. Oh, nice. On the tripod. Uh, wire that to the turbine controller. And then, uh, you will start this toggling campaign. So what we do is that we turn on the technology for 70 minutes and then turn it off 70 minutes.

This way you have a slight shift over of the period over the day. Mm-hmm. So you don’t always hit exactly the same time. So in case there’s, you know, any effect, recurring effect, and you go away from that, and then you will do this toggling on and off for like a period of like three, four months, depending on wind conditions.

And once you have like enough data on every wind, wind. You will analyze, uh, [00:09:00] what’s the power production difference when the union, the system is on versus off. Right. Okay. And then, um, yeah, compare that. Hopefully you gain some power. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, we know that those turbine out there, uh, actually, uh, arm is aligned, right?

So we know what to expect. I mean, we, uh, we did exactly that for some, uh, customers with, uh, V 80 twos. Mm-hmm. Uh, and you usually find like six and a half degree, uh, average. Oh, wow. Uh, your misalignment Wow. That you then correcting it, you, you reach like two, seven, 3%. Yeah. AP gain and uh, and that’s, so what we’ve done a while back with some customer, they verified the data.

We did our report at the time Vest was distributing for us. Mm-hmm. So they also did the report. We will agree. That was within 2.73% AP gain, man, I think. Yeah. And then they went to, to roll out the farm. Right.

Joel Saxum: Wow. So they rolled out the whole farm after getting the two. Yeah. Well of course you would. Right.

That [00:10:00] that’s the business case. That makes sense.

Antoine Larvol: I mean, you actually prove that you gained something. Yeah. So, hey, go

Joel Saxum: for it. Right. So if I’m sitting on a V, you know, like if I’m just gonna run with that example of V 82, those are mostly probably installed. 2000 man, 2000, five to 2000 around that. Yeah. 10 ish.

So I’ve been, I’ve owned a wind farm. Say I’m in the States, I’ve owned a wind farm for. 10, 15, 20 years for whatever reason, I haven’t repowered it or whatnot. And all of a sudden someone comes along and says, I can get you two and a half, 3% more a EP.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. I mean, we are rolling out all those farms at the moment, right?

Yeah. I think we are on 60, 70% of the whole fleet in the US at the moment. Yeah. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: I’m jumping on that if that’s me. Yeah. Um, you know, we had talked, like I said, off air. You guys have over a thousand units out. Yeah. But just in the last year, your, your deployments have ramped up big.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah, we did like more than 500 I think last year.

Wow. I think we are doubling that this year. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Uh,

Antoine Larvol: so

Joel Saxum: good

Antoine Larvol: for you guys. Yeah, it’s going great, doing

Joel Saxum: big things for the industry. I like it. Um, so yeah, I guess we’ll for that moment if you have a V 82 wind farm or something Yeah. We

Antoine Larvol: probably [00:11:00] contacted you already. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Give these guys a call back.

Uh, ’cause they’re gonna get you more power and, uh, more revenue. I guess it’s at the end of the day. So optimization, you’re, you’re adjusting ya, you’re, you’re correcting for loads. You’re, you’re fixing some of these things, but there’s also a monitoring piece to this.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah. So that actually came, uh, from those rollouts we did.

Um, there’s like some security concerns when you go and actually install those hundreds of units on the farm. That’s, that’s huge in the United States. Anything you’re putting on right now? Exactly. Cybersecurity. Cybersecurity. So toing campaign, we, we usually do modems. Uh, 3G uh, modem connected to the. To the unit, but that doesn’t fly when you do rollouts.

Right? So what we did, uh, is actually then package all our monitoring tool, reporting tool data, graving tool and processing, uh, all kind of, uh, alarm flags in case like something goes wrong with any of those units. So we packaged all this into a an [00:12:00] os. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then we can directly deploy that on customer servers.

And then this way they can monitor the lighter fleet. Mm-hmm. Uh, real time and then generate reports, uh, and see that basically those units are, are running fine. Right? Yeah, yeah. Everything on, on premise so that it’s not Yeah, exactly. You’re not worrying. Exactly. So we don’t have access to it. Uh, it’s fuel integrated, integrated in the network, and we just hands off Yeah.

Let the unit run, you know? Yeah. Uh, and then as part of that. Then we also developed some new modules that we produce, uh, we propose to the customer and, uh, yeah, one of them, for example, is this, uh, turbine performance monitoring module where, you know, we have very good wind speed data. Uh, we can actually measure also, uh, rotation, rotational, uh, rotational speed of the turbine.

And then, uh, mixing those two, having air density. Then you can actually track performance of, of the turbine over time. Okay. Uh, within [00:13:00] plus, minus 0.5%. Wow. Um, and then, yeah, that’s basically that. Right. You will see then, uh, whether, you know, you have some kind of leading edge degradation Yeah. On certain specific units.

And then we are looking into, you know, looking at turbines individually, but eventually. In some mirror, whatever. Uh, look at turbines like once against the other as well. Yeah. Um, we integrating, uh, some rotor balance detection, for example. Okay. Uh, so we just trying to add more and more value to the customer so that they have a proper view of the asset.

Right. Yeah. Usually what we see that people do in the industry is that, you know, they look at scada, right? Yeah. That’s what you have, that’s what you can do. Uh, so. You do power curve assessment and whatnot with your scada, so you believe in this wind speed, wind direction from those an anemometers. Mm-hmm.

But we know by experience that that’s not accurate. Right? Right. So you might end up making, [00:14:00] um, wrong decision because you’re just given wrong information. Right. And you have companies out there, you know, they’re doing ai, machine learning, modeling, whatever. Great. But. You know, if the data is wrong, uh, yeah, you can do whatever you want.

You will reach wrong conclusions, right? Yeah. Uh, so that’s what we bring value. We actually have the. The proper wind speed so we can do properly the monitoring. Right.

Joel Saxum: Uh, what are the, the saying, the old saying comes to mind for me? Like, you can’t make chicken soup out of chicken poop. Right. So if you, something like that.

So if you don’t have good data coming in, sometimes all the, all the AI models in the world and things, you can make

Antoine Larvol: great modeling, whatever. Yeah. But it may not be true. Right? Yeah.

Joel Saxum: And I don’t wanna to, I don’t wanna like stop that idea ’cause I think it’s great as we move forward. No, no. I mean, we have nothing

Antoine Larvol: against the idea.

Joel Saxum: It is just.

Antoine Larvol: You know, you’re using wrong info, right? Yeah. So you’re gonna

Joel Saxum: lead to wrong conclusions and that’s it. Right? So in my mind, I’m thinking about another, another use case for the window, like the windows, the monitoring portion of it. And it is, you talk to all of these [00:15:00] people about when you, when you mentioned erosion monitoring for per performance.

When you talk to all these people about, uh, what’s the performance degradation of, of this erosion happening on the leading edge or. If we put LEP on, do we get this performance back and stuff? And I’m thinking, I’m, I’m talking to all the researchers that are listening to this. You guys should be using your sensors to validate a lot of this research that’s going on, on these wind turbines.

Yeah. I mean, you, you track,

Antoine Larvol: I mean, since you have the LIDAR out there anyway, you know, yeah. You might as well use the data and then track properly how your asset is doing over time. Right. Um. And that’s the whole idea, right? Squeezing most information from Yep. What we have, right? Yep. And you know, we know turbulence, uh, conditions.

We know wind speed. We know, uh, wake, whether it’s wake or not. Mm-hmm. We know air density. We just mm-hmm. Put some module there and then you can just basically track then your performance over time. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then have this done [00:16:00] automatically. Mm-hmm. Uh, and then I just have, go check a dashboard.

And be like, okay, past six months, how has this turbine been doing? Mm-hmm. Okay, great. You just stay nice and clean and then suddenly you can pinpoint and target exactly the one that goes wrong in the farm. Right? Yeah. And then, I mean, we are not going to fix your leading edge erosion. Right. You still need to have, go out there, repair it yourself, right?

Yeah. But at least we can point out Okay. There’s a problem there. Right? Yeah.

Joel Saxum: You know, and one of the things I wanna make sure we touch on is we brushed past the cybersecurity thing. Yeah. Talking with all of the asset owners that I deal with every day, friends in the industry, CMS companies, you name it.

Cybersecurity is becoming more and more of a frontline issue within the wind industry. Yep. Everybody’s concerned about it. Anything you try to put on a turbine, especially if it’s connected to a controller, connected to electronics, it’s over the air, it’s on the cloud. Everybody’s ah, everybody has their hair up on the back of their neck about it.

So you guys have taken the risk [00:17:00] out of that thing. By putting everything on premise. Yeah. I

Antoine Larvol: mean we, we’ve, it’s our own tools. yeah. At window we always develop our own tools in the house. we have a great software team doing that, and, and then they basically package the just stuff we’ve been developing for the past 10 years.

Yeah. Into an OS and that you can just deploy at the customer. And then this way you have like automatic reporting about your lidars. your turbines. You can, directly interact with those lidars, turn them on, turn them off, start those towing campaign, get some, information about how much AP you gained, stuff like that.

Joel Saxum: Fantastic.

Antoine Larvol: Yeah.

Joel Saxum: so message that I want to get out to the wind industry, if you, have some turbines that are legacy turbines that are out there. And you wanna get two point a half to 3% more revenue generated outta those turbines. Yep. You need to call wind photographers and a bit more time, I mean, less loads.

Yeah, less [00:18:00] loads. Extend the life of those blades. I mean, we know that those

Antoine Larvol: turbines are, have some issues. Right. So it’s, uh, it’s pretty straightforward to make a business case. Right. Fantastic. So Antoine, how do people get ahold of you? Uh, we have a website. We are online. We are on LinkedIn. Okay. Uh, so yeah, you just go on the window, photonics.com and, uh.

And then reach out to us. Right. Fantastic.

Joel Saxum: Well, Antoine, thanks for, uh, joining the Uptime podcast here. Thanks a lot again, live here from, uh, in Phoenix. It’s hot outside, so let’s stay inside. Yes, and I’d read it. Yeah. Thank you.

https://weatherguardwind.com/windar-photonics-lidar/

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American voters are being told that progressives hate America.

This type of crap may have some level of acceptance among our least intelligent voters, but fortunately, they’re nowhere near the majority.

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Omterra Rebrand, Goldwind Warns on Turbine Size

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Omterra Rebrand, Goldwind Warns on Turbine Size

Siemens Gamesa rebrands as Omterra, Goldwind questions ever-bigger turbines, and MIT revisits the century-old Betz limit.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTubeLinkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, who is recovering from a very serious illness, Matthew Stead, who has been healthy pretty much all the Australian winter, and Yolanda Padron in sunny, hot Austin, Texas. Welcome, Rosemary

Rosemary Barnes: Thank you. I am recovering from man flu, and I say man flu because it’s just a cold, but I’m complaining a lot about it.

Allen Hall: there’s gonna be a new name for Siemens Gamesa. So it was Siemens and then Gamesa’s a separate company. They merged. Siemens Energy, uh, broke off from Siemens AG. So [00:01:00] that’s a very well-known name, Siemens. It’s– Everybody knows Siemens at this point around the world.

And the, the one family had, as a company, had s- label on everything, right? So it’s, uh, Werner von Siemens started it 150 years ago. It’s been a long time since Siemens was started, but it’s everywhere. It’s on turbines, transformers, and power plants around the world, and now they’re changing their name, right?

So when Siemens Energy broke off from Siemens AG, they, they had a limited time they could use that name, so they have rebranding themselves or are about to rebrand themselves, and I wanna pronounce this right, Omterra. O-M-T-E-R-R-A. Now, we did a little research on this, and I think it’s Latin for all of the world.

It’s kind of a conjoined, uh, set of words, Latin words, kind of a, a schmear in a sense. So, uh, so the company that, you [00:02:00] know, that spun off in w- roughly 2020, if I remember this right, Matthew, does that sound right? It was roughly 2020 when Siemens Energy was established on its own. Uh, they’re gonna be changing their name to Omterra.

So instead of seeing, seeing Siemens Gamesa publications or Siemens Gamesa wind turbines, I guess they’re gonna have this new name, Omterra. What do we all think?

Matthew Stead: I think it’s great. I think, and if you go back to, you know, GE Vernova, um, I, I thought Vernova was a bit weird for a while, but now it just rolls off the tongue and easy. It just makes so much sense. Um, so I’m, I’m, I’m for it. I, I like it. I’ve already… You know, can already say it. It took a lot longer to say Vernova than it’s taking to say

Terra.

Rosemary Barnes: I think that it– But it’s not Vernova, it’s GE Vernova, right? So everyone knows what it is. Whereas my understanding is it’s not Siemens Omtera, it’s just Omtera, which makes it sound like a new budget kind of [00:03:00] brandless, history-less, uh, company. So that’s… Yeah, I’m no

branding expert, but I think that, uh, like they, they must have not been able to use the word Siemens at all, um, because otherwise you surely would, because it has a very…

Outside of, you know, their blade issues and bearing issues of a couple of years ago, they do have a, like a solid engineering reputation across many fields, so you wouldn’t probably intentionally divorce yourself entirely from that. So, um, yeah, I, I think it will take some getting used to for me

Matthew Stead: but everyone remembers. I mean, it’s not like– The people in the wind industry know their heritage, they know their history, so I don’t think it matters. I mean, you know, you know, they, they purchase the Senvion, you know, technologies or, you know, licenses in Europe. You know, y- y- you don’t forget these things, so I don’t think it matters.

I think it’s just a, it’s a color, it’s a, it’s a label

Yolanda Padron: I think it’ll be fine. I just think that there will be a little [00:04:00] bit of confusion down the line as with everything, right? Like I’ve, I’ve been on the side of conversations where I have to explain like Siemens versus like SGRE on paper and it’s like, oh, it’s– this is why th- there was that paper trail, uh, because people would think it was an absolutely different thing.

Um, so I, I can totally see those conversations coming, coming to play in the future where someone thinks that Ontier is a completely different entity that maybe they changed OEMs or something, um, for a site. But nothing a little history lesson won’t fix, I guess.

Matthew Stead: You just want people talking about you

Rosemary Barnes: Name change every year

Allen Hall: Change your name every year. Well, that’s, that’s one way to approach it. I w- always wonder what the boardroom looks like and sounds like when this discussion is going on, because Siemens, Siemens Energy is a big company, and there had to be outsourcing of this to probably several marketing firms, mostly [00:05:00] in Germany, I’m guessing.

And they came back with a bunch of pitches, and eventually they picked one. But boardrooms are probably not the place to pick a name. And I always think like, “Oh, you just had such a opportunity to do something really cool or really impressive.”

Allen Hall: Well, we’ll see how it goes with Omterra. The, it’s gonna be, I’m sure, a huge marketing effort, and you’ll probably see commercials for it during the Super Bowl.

Developers are [00:06:00] eyeing Britain’s next big renewables auction and have been waiting to learn the rules and most importantly, the price. Well, this week the UK government delivered both. It confirmed a package of changes to the CFD scheme ahead of allocation round eight, aimed at simplifying the process and keeping good projects from being tripped up by some paperwork.

So AR7 was super successful, and they’re hopefully gonna have a, a great allocation round eight. Uh, unchanged from last round, here are some pieces to it. AR7 brought in 15 gigawatts of, of new capacity, uh, well below the ceilings, and the government is betting that that’s stability from AR7’s gonna exist for AR8, so they’re keeping the pricing limits the same.

And let me give you some of the numbers here. So everything’s in 2024 prices, just so we have a baseline here. It, 113 pounds per megawatt hour [00:07:00] for fixed bottom offshore wind, 271 pounds for floating offshore wind. That’s, uh, pounds per megawatt. And then 92 pounds per megawatt for onshore wind, and s- 75 pounds per megawatt for solar. So 271 pounds per megawatt hour in 2044 dollars is, you know, you’re probably talking, what, 290 pounds per megawatt hour. That’s a really good strike price or ceiling to allow, uh, some more floating wind into the UK waters

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, the UK have this newly signed agreement with Japan, right, to, to progress development of that technology. I feel like I, I haven’t looked up any numbers to back this up, but I feel like the gap between fixed bottom and floating is narrowing. It’s barely more than double now, which, um, yeah, I think is not that bad considering how little development there has been for floating offshore wind compared to fixed bottom.

So [00:08:00] yeah, I think that it is an interesting technology to develop. I, I know with the, um, auction rounds and ’cause it’s a government thing, it’s easy to think, “Oh, why are you spending any money on anything other than the cheapest one?” Because y- you know, like, it, it feels weird that the government would play, you know, when they’re purchasing power for their grid, that they would do any more than trying to just get, you know, bulk power at the cheapest price possible whilst ensuring, you know, reliability.

Um, but in the previous or the previous, the one– last one or the one before that, they had quite a few tidal projects announced that certainly, you know, an expensive and not mature technology. But I think that you can’t say the same thing about floating offshore wind. I think that it is on a, like a good, a good development trajectory, and there are certainly places on Earth where floating offshore is one of the most appealing technologies.

You know, if you think of through to 2030s, 2040s, there’s plenty of places where, um, you know, slightly higher [00:09:00] price paid for floating offshore wind will still be worth it because they have so few other options available. So it makes sense as an industry to in- invest in capabilities there.

Matthew Stead: think it’s a really interesting method. It seems to be really successful, the contract for di-difference approach. So, um, I’m, I’m surprised that it’s not adopted more widely, um, in other locations,

Rosemary Barnes: it is around a bit.

I would like to see it, like, in, in Australia, we are, we are developing some new wind projects, but not as fast as we need to, to, you know, hit our upcoming targets. And I think, like, while the government is doing some things to help move or help incentivize developers, it’s not working that well, and maybe CFD would be a, you know, a bit of a better way to, like, just actually guarantee that these projects are gonna go ahead.

Allen Hall: Australia has a shipping problem. there’s been a concern at state-owned transport hubs are becoming less supportive of [00:10:00] wind energy projects with ACEN Renewables saying that they will now have to truck a large transformer from a wind project or for a wind project in northern New South Wales from the Port of Adelaide.

That’s not necessarily close. And h- they also said that the Port of Brisbane has refused to accept passage of some big transformers for a solar farm. also there’s some, uh, something about blades not being able to be accepted in certain ports. Like some of the, uh, Australian state-managed or state-owned ports are not accepting renewables.

Rosemary Barnes: I think

also that blades in Queensland can only be transported to site like one per day with a full police escort or something. It’s wild to

me ’cause, you know, like I lived in, in Denmark for so long and there were blades going up and down just the normal highway every single day, multiple like, uh, and three– they would go in sets of threes for obvious reasons.

Um, yeah, but the, the, the [00:11:00] Queensland government changed like a, a year ago or, or so, and it changed to a very anti-renewables government and they just threw all of the state’s renewable plans in the bin,

Allen Hall: such a recent change that when they, at least the news articles I’ve seen about it, I’ve only seen a handful, that they have, um, like last year some big transformers, like really difficult to move items have come through those ports and they’re just not letting them through now. How does that work?

If you have a, a, a legal right to build a wind farm or a solar farm or, or substation or whatever’s going on there, how do they reconcile not allowing those components to come through a port? In what world does that make sense?

Matthew Stead: I mean, most of the ports are– yeah, most of the ports are privatized, so it’s up to the individual commercial entity that’s running the port, I would, I would imagine. So it’s beyond the control of the government, would be my first guess.

Yolanda Padron: it seems like it’s an, a federal sort of thing that would give permits.

Matthew Stead: No, I mean, I’ve done a bit of work in the Port of Melbourne and, [00:12:00] um, it’s facilitated by the government, uh, state government, not federal, and but the ports are largely privatized.

Rosemary Barnes: I just pulled up an article and it says that it’s state-owned transport hubs are becoming

less supportive of wind energy projects. Um, yeah, and that’s the reason for why they’ll have to get that transformer in northern New South Wales, so very close to Queensland. They have to go from Adelaide, where you live, Matt, all the way through South Australia, maybe Victoria, New South Wales, and then, yeah, up to nearly the border.

Allen Hall: Is that just a temporary blip that the next election cycle it’ll revert back or is this something that’s more long term?

Rosemary Barnes: uh, it’s not obvious that it’s gonna flip straight back, that’s for sure

Allen Hall: [00:13:00] for years, the race in wind has run mostly in one direction: bigger and bigger blades, bigger towers, bigger machines.

And now a chief engineer f- at one of China’s largest turbine makers says it’s time to pump the brakes. Bo Juul Petersen, uh, Goldwind’s chief engineer in Denmark, argues that scaling turbines up no longer makes economic sense. So it’s not an engineering question, it’s an economic question. His reasoning rests on a simple rule of geometry, the square cube r- law, which says that as a turbine grows, its materials and costs climb faster than the rotor area that earns the revenue.

Past a certain point, he says, bigger simply costs more than it makes. Have we crossed that threshold yet? Is 20 megawatts that, [00:14:00] uh, pivot point where it doesn’t make any more sense to make a larger turbine?

Matthew Stead: didn’t we have problems when we went from three to six?

Allen Hall: One to two.

Matthew Stead: I, I, I think, uh, I think it’s good that someone’s actually coming out and saying this

Yolanda Padron: Whoa, whoa, whoa. Rosie’s on the podcast.

Rosemary Barnes: yeah, ex-excuse me, this is one of my topics of obsession that I constantly carry on about. I made a whole, a whole video about it with, um, equations to back up my opinions about scaling, um, and a very nifty tug of war metaphor between economic factors that favor big wind turbines and economic fav- factors that favor small ones.

And I think that we’re always a little bit ahead of, of what the right, the right balance is between those. So, you know, the benefits from having bigger turbines are that, um, you have fewer electrical connections, for offshore especially, that means less subsea cables and, um, yeah, just like much faster Faster construction of all that, you [00:15:00] know, less, uh, substructures and less, less of everything to install, less of everything to maintain as well.

You know, it doesn’t take so much longer to get up and do your annual maintenance checks of a big turbine compared to a small one. Like, it takes longer, but not, not that much longer. Um, but then all of the structural factors favor smaller turbines over bigger ones. blades especially, as they get longer, you get so many more problems in O&M, but they don’t show up on the developer’s spreadsheet, you know. The spreadsheet that you’re using to decide, um, your f- your final investment decision, it, it doesn’t, it doesn’t know that you’re gonna have a whole bunch of blade issues.

It doesn’t wanna know and so I think that that’s one factor that has pushed us past the economic point of where wind turbine size should be. And I think the other thing is prestige. I know that when I worked at LM, you know, we had the longest blade in the world.

It was 88 meters, was our first, um, world record that we set while I was working there. They’d had many before that. We had– They [00:16:00] had a, like, one-to-one scale printout of it that they took to WindEurope or WindHamburg, um, that everyone stood in front of, and then they lost it to somebody, and then they got it back again with the blade for the Halieade-X.

And we all know how well that went to, you know, have the world’s longest blade. Y- you know, it wasn’t so easy to make it, turned out. It’s very easy to announce and not so easy to make, um, with reliable quality. And now we’ve got all these Chinese companies, especially MingYang, is constantly announcing the world’s biggest something.

Um, don’t sell so many of them, but it’s not the point, isn’t to sell them, it’s to have the prestige of making the world’s biggest something.

Allen Hall: Yeah, what would be the technology breakthrough that would allow it to be more stable at a 20 or 25 megawatt? Because right now I’m, I’m seeing 1% improvement here and there, not 5%, 10%.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, 1% improvement will eventually add up to what, what you need. Maybe it’s in

20 years’ time, not 10 years’ time. But y- you know, like you can imagine anything. maybe [00:17:00] they start somehow, like aero and automotive manufacturing technologies get cheap enough that we can start making wind turbine blades with all prepregs instead of y- you know, um, you know, dry fabric and infusion.

For example, maybe 3D printing gets cheap enough that you can make your whole, whole blade from an additive process. Like a- anything like that. But it can also be other things like maybe the cost of subsea cables in- increases like a whole lot, and then if, you know, like things on one side getting more expensive can make it more worthwhile to save hard problems somewhere else. So that’s why I say it’s like a, it’s a, a ve- it’s a multivariable optimization problem that changes every time you have a…

Like for every project to project from year to year, it’s always gonna be slightly different. So I don’t think it’s wise to definitively say 20 megawatts is the threshold that we should never cross. Like I, I don’t agree with that.

Allen Hall: It’s one of those arguments, I think, about [00:18:00] any sort of technology about where the endpoint is. There’s too many variables to predict it. I always point to aviation in which older airplanes will hang around and hang around and hang around until the fuel price goes up enough where it doesn’t make sense to operate them.

So they will fly an airplane un-until they can no longer structurally do it. But if the price of oil shoots up and the price of aviation fuel bumps up, those airplanes get parked, and then they’re buying the new airplane with a more efficient engine. It’s a similar thing, I think. There’s just– You can’t tell where the technology’s gonna go or what the economic impacts of any part of that business will force you to do something different.

So it’s gonna be higher than 20 megawatts, guarantee you that.

Yolanda Padron: Well, it’s one of those things too, right? Where if we’re repeating the, the same blade type and we’re getting smarter about operating that same blade type, then the economic cost goes down, [00:19:00] right? Like, eventually. ‘Cause then you’re not just experimenting on every new thing or having to take all of the, the funding into tr- specializing techs or getting very specialized techs onto your site and finding a new– kind of the wheel every so often. [00:20:00] So speaking of larger wind turbines, evidently we’ve been doing this all wrong, that we’ve had the calculations for the, uh, Betz limit has been off, and, uh, a group of MIT engineers, I guess, uh, have, have made a breakthrough.

Allen Hall: So basically every wind turbine that is spinning today is based on some fundamentals, uh, math, empirical data in, in some level, but on formulas that have led us to design the wind turbines and that core formula called the momentum theory. And if you hear blade designers who hang around blade designers, which I don’t necessarily recommend, but if you do hang around blade designers, they, they’ll say the momentum theory, momentum theory, like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it.”

It, it, the– MIT is saying it breaks down exactly at the operating point where modern turbines try to live. Um, so for a century the fix [00:21:00] was a patchwork of corrections and useful, but with no real theory behind them. Now, a team at MIT said it has rebuilt the math from first principles, creating what they call a unified momentum model. It even nudges at the famous Betz limit, the century-old ceiling on how much energy a rotor can capture, and it bumps it up by a few percentage points, and that would be the first uptick to the Betz limit in over 100 years. All right, Rosemary, as our official Betz limit expert, does this make any sense?

Have the MIT folk something new?

Rosemary Barnes: a wind turbine blade, its aerodynamics are just the same aerodynamics as what keeps an airplane in the sky, right? It’s, it’s all the… It’s just an airfoil. It’s just facing a wind speed, um, you know, a local wind speed. It’s complicated by the fact that [00:22:00] a wind turbine blade is also rotating, so the wind speed is different along the whole span, and that’s, uh– and so is the flow angle, and that’s why blades are twisted and tapered.

Um, but you know, essentially when you wanna figure out how much energy, uh, a wind turbine is gonna generate or you wanna design the blade so that it optimizes that amount, you’re just slicing it up into a whole bunch of little bits of 2D flow, exactly the same as an, an airplane. So if it doesn’t work for wind turbines, then it shouldn’t work for airplanes either.

So that’s one fundamental thing. And also at Betz limit, it’s not like it’s not driving design. It’s more like if you, if your design exceeds the Betz limit for a, um, a horizontal axis wind turbine, then you– it’s like a sanity check that you’ve done something wrong. Uh, that’s, that’s what I would say you would mostly use it for.

Um, but what I don’t understand, and maybe Alan, presumably you did read the, read the research or at least the press [00:23:00] release. Are they arguing that y- um, like the tips of a wind turbine blade are rotating, are moving fast enough that it’s approaching transonic flow? ‘

Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s a rental number thing.

Rosemary Barnes: there’s different types of aerodynamic equations depending on how fast the, airfoil’s moving.

And my understanding is transonic is like 0.8 Mach, um, 0.8, which is 274 meters a second, which is more than double what, um, the fastest tip speeds are currently. So I would think that you’re not quite approaching that yet. They’re– It’s not like a cutoff that, you know, all of a sudden at that exact, exact speed the air behaves totally differently.

But, um, y- yeah, like it seems far enough away that it’s not that relevant. But is that what they’re getting

at or, or is it something different?

Allen Hall: I like doing sanity checks when I read things from MIT. So what blade [00:24:00] manufacturers and/or wind turbine OEM has designed a set of blades and go, “Oh my gosh, we’re getting more energy than what we calculated,” and not thought to themselves, “Huh, maybe we should look into that”? It’s, it’s, it’s hilarious almost that all the engineers working in wind for 100 years wouldn’t have stumbled across this, where the turbine produces more power than the Betz limit would say it would.

Y-

Rosemary Barnes: yeah, as many people have commented on, you know, any one of my YouTube videos about wind turbine aerodynamics, if they would just put more blades in there, then, you know, less wind would just fly through without ever being, um, y- without ever hitting a blade.

So, you know, like obviously wind turbine, uh, blade aerodynamics people are stupid because if they weren’t, then they would see that you just put more blades in and you get more, twice as many blades, twice as much energy and w- What about three times as many blades? Three times as much energy.

And I [00:25:00] didn’t even go to MIT and that’s just, you know, like just

brilliant

Allen Hall: Obvious

Rosemary Barnes: off the top of my head here.

Allen Hall: it’s sort of ludicrous, honestly, and I see these things in wind occasionally. I see it more often in other areas, particularly aerospace, where, where you just have to go, “What are we spending time on?

Really? We’re working on this? On a fraction of a percentage point that we may have a slight error in?” Like, it does not matter. What are you gonna do with that?

Rosemary Barnes: there’s two issues. One is that the person writing up the press release is not the person that did the research, and they will always blow it up to be much more groundbreaking than the engineers who actually worked on it probably think it is.

So, the, like, I think you have to, like, reserve your criticism of the work and try and criticize the press release. And then the second error that I commonly see is that people don’t have an un- good understanding of a status quo. So they think that they have smashed the status quo, but really it’s more to do with them not understanding the status quo than it is through [00:26:00] some legitimate, like, massive im- improvement.

So it could well be that this is all very good and correct work, just with limited practical implication. That would be my most expected, um, from this.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, how many times a month do you get queries about wind turbine improvements that are just physically impossible?

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, I mean, if I read all of the comments on my YouTube channel, then probably quite, quite frequently. But, um, yeah, the most common one is just people thinking you can just add more blades and get a proportional increase in, um, in energy, you won’t get more power from adding more blades if that’s the only thing that you do, because in a well-designed wind turbine, which modern ones are, every, e- every air molecule that goes through the rotor disc is gonna interact with the, um, with, with a blade.

That’s how it’s, it’s designed. The blades are moving really fast, and so every molecule doesn’t get hit, but, you know, every, every molecule is affected and has some energy extracted from it. Um, then the other thing is people [00:27:00]who think if you reduce drag, like if you can come up with a lower drag airfoil or a higher lift airfoil, then you think, they think that that relates to more energy proportionally.

So they’re like, “Oh, this airfoil has twice as much lift, so it’s gonna be twice as much power.” It’s like, actually, you know, wind turbine designers are aware of the full range of, you know, airfoils that are available, including high lift ones, and they’re not using it because, you know, the same reason the airplane wings aren’t just, you know, like the highest, highest lift airfoil.

Y- you know, it’s more of a lift to drag ratio type thing, and that’s true for wind turbine blades as well, but also there’s structural considerations probably more so in a wind turbine blade than there are in, um, in airplane wings. So, you know, there’s some sacrifices made for that. Um, yeah, but those are the two, two main families of, of mistakes that I’d say people make.

Allen Hall: So

Rosemary Barnes: Matt

Allen Hall: up to his hand up for

to MIT media representatives

Matthew Stead: uh,

I had a couple of sort of quick and simple points. The first of all, uh, I’m actually a graduate of [00:28:00] MIT. I’ve graduated from, uh, from a course at MIT. Um, so that’s the first thing. Um, not in engineering. Um, the next one is like, so what? I mean, we can’t even reliably measure, um, you know, AEP the other one is all models are wrong.

Yolanda Padron: But not just wind

Matthew Stead: the world is not perfect. All models are wrong, so trying to improve something that’s wrong, you know, might help a little bit, but does it really matter?

Rosemary Barnes: But it is also the job of academics to improve these models. So there’s nothing wrong with MIT spending a lot of energy to, um, you know, improve on an incorrect model with another incorrect model. Uh, if it’s more useful, that’s great, and even if it’s not, like isn’t that the job of

Matthew Stead: yeah.

Matthew Stead: you should add to where it has the most impact on humanity. You should actually put the effort into areas that have a greater impact on pushing the boundary. You know, pushing small boundaries does not help the world

Allen Hall: Matthew is an MIT graduate, [00:29:00] the one thing that Matthew brings to the table is real-world experience. And that if you shelter yourself inside a laboratory at MIT, and I understand why you would do that, because I’m sure it’s a very pleasant place to work, and there’s a lot of benefits to that.

However, the way that MIT used to work back in the day, and not everything was roses then, but oh, okay, y- that people had industry experience. They had a knowledge of what was going on on the ground, and they were engineers, and they realized that formulas and reality don’t always align. And maybe we lost that somewhere in the ’80s and, or ’90s, but it does continue to be a problem, where back to Matthew’s point, if you’re going to use that amount of brain energy, put it to something that can help the world.

This isn’t necessarily helping the world That wraps up another episode of the Uptime: Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, and I’m sure that it will, we’d love to hear from [00:30:00] you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

So for Yolonda, Rosemary, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime: Wind Energy podcast.

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If any of us had been asked before Trump’s arrival on the political scene how we would feel if the United States government descended into abject corruption, became the disgrace of the civilized world, and wanted our opinion on the incarceration of an American president, we would have dismissed it with a laugh.

Now that it has actually happened, we say that removing Trump from office and sending him to prison is the very best outcome possible.

That’s why 70% of Americans and close to 100% of others in the developed world will rejoice the moment that Trump is no longer a figure in world events.

Trump Headed for Prison?

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