In the picturesque landscape of Prince Edward Island, Canada, a growing problem has emerged involving 10 Acciona turbines, installed back in 2014. These once-reliable turbines now have significant main bearing issues, necessitating extensive overhauls. This development has created tension, given that these turbines come equipped with a robust 15-year warranty, yet power production has plummeted by a staggering 70%.

In the most recent edition of PES Wind Magazine, Eleven-I takes center stage to shed light on the advantages of in-blade accelerometers and CMS monitors. Rosemary and Phil join forces to dissect the engineering intricacies, delving into both the benefits and associated costs of augmenting blade sensors. The burning question of whether flow batteries can make a meaningful contribution to the energy grid is also on the table. Notably, the US Department of Energy (DOE) is extending a generous offer of nearly $400 million in loans to EOS Energy Enterprises, with the aim of establishing a state-of-the-art factory in Pennsylvania, capable of churning out a staggering 8GWh of flow batteries annually.

Rosemary, our resident expert, takes the reins to elucidate the physics underpinning flow batteries, while Phil introduces Allen to the myriad potential applications these innovations hold for the power grid. And, as the cherry on top, we shine the spotlight on the Timbermill Wind Project in scenic North Carolina, our Wind Farm of the Week!

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! 

PES Wind – www.peswind.com
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

Uptime 182

Allen Hall: Well, Phil, did you get a new helmet for that crazy electric scooter that you have? 

Phil Totaro: Oh, I, I’ve got a helmet. Don’t worry. It’s a fancy, it’s a fancy one. And it’s very aero. It’s I, I won’t give, give them shameless product placement, but it’s, you know, if, if you’ve watched the Tour de France or you’re watching the Vuelta España right now cycling race.

You, you will see them wearing the same ones in the individual time trial. 

Allen Hall: Well, we were just at a NASCAR race and one of the things I was paying attention to was the helmets that they wear. And recently there was an accident in NASCAR. This car literally just spun end on end for about 10 rotations and then hit the dirt.

And the guy walked out of it and I thought, my gosh, helmets have really improved over the last couple of years. I’m not sure several years ago to be able to walk away from that as well. And hopefully they’re using the same technology in your helmet, Phil, because. You’re going really fast. You’re like probably going too fast.

Phil Totaro: No, I’m actually, it’s, it is for, for where I live, which is Santa Barbara, California, it’s a fantastic way of getting around town and any place that actually has the infrastructure with a lot of bicycle lanes and, and you know, just good infrastructure for being able to do this, it’s a, it’s a much better way for me to be able to get around town than a car and it’s faster.

Less time and less money parking, et cetera. So it’s it, it works 

out all right. 

Allen Hall: See Phil saving the planet one scooter at a time.

So up at the Hermanville wind farm in Eastern Prince Edward Island, Canada, they’re having a big problem with wind their wind farm, which is only producing about 10 percent of the power that it’s supposed to, the farm opened up in 2014 and despite having a 15 year warranty. The provincial government is taking charge of repairs due to the wind farm’s importance of achieving their zero net zero carbon emissions under that 15 year warranty bill they have been receiving money and instead of repairs from Nordex.

So Nordex is paying them for the last power, but isn’t really able to help them on the, on the turbines themselves. Now, the repairs are estimated to cost about 10 million dollars, and it mostly has to do with main bearings, and they had one turbine that has really, has failed main bearings, and four others that are closed, so they’re going to start pulling off the whole rotors, and go ahead and fixing all that, but the government’s going to have to go do that, because Nordex is not, or cannot fix these wind turbines, because they’re older Acciona machines.

Now, Phil, this can’t be the only place this is happening, right, that on an older machine, it’s not that old, it’s, it’s not even 10 years old at this point. What happens here on these long term contracts if they’re not going to support replacement parts? 

Phil Totaro: It’s a bit problematic, Allen, because in Canada, Nordex doesn’t have a significant amount of field service representatives.

In spite of the fact that they may have these, these long term warranty contracts it’s just not a big enough market for them, at least at this point, for them to, to maintain the, the level of staff that would theoretically be required. So that’s kind of one issue. It’s interesting because they are getting new sales of turbines in the Canadian market, so hopefully that gives them enough to be able to, to come back in and potentially help alleviate the problem.

But the second aspect of this is that because this is an Acciona you know, 3 megawatt turbine, it’s not in production anymore, and getting spare parts could be problematic unless they’re going to cannibalize other 3 megawatt turbines. So, it’s, this could be a bit of a conundrum, I mean, keep in mind that Acciona also has these turbines deployed in the U. S. Obviously in Spain Brazil and a handful of other Western European markets sparingly. But this is a pretty big challenge to actually even be able to get spare parts. And frankly, you hear this happening quite a lot these days. Even a turbine that is potentially 5, years old and definitely anything that’s older, may or may not have a significant inventory of spare parts anymore.

So you’re either talking about finding something that can be refurbished or… Manufacturing a new kind of like a new spare if you will which can get pricey. So, I, I think the only way that this problem gets solved is the expensive way. 

Allen Hall: And the expensive way is what? It’s expensive way, just keep paying the, paying the operator to, or the power losses until.

You get sued, or I don’t know where this ends. I assume it ends at a lawsuit. 

Phil Totaro: Could, but I mean, as long as they’re paying the liquidated damages they’re, you know, they’re technically within their contractual obligation. The problem is that they don’t want just the money, you know, they, they need something to produce power up in, up in Prince Edward Island.

So as you mentioned, this is a significant portion of their, their power consumption. there. So they need something for generation. I mean, cash in their pocket allows them to go buy diesel fuel or something else that, you know, can, can power some of the power generation units they have in Prince Edward Island.

But they want the wind turbines and they want them to work. So this is a, this is kind of a an issue that’s resulted from companies moving so fast with the introduction of new products and retiring legacy products. too quickly. You know, we, we tend to liken the wind energy industry to the automotive industry, but if you’ll notice, they don’t just make like radical changes year over year.

They, they reuse some of the production tooling and you know, to make parts for, for various models 15, 20, 25 years. Specifically because they want to be able to get that leverage in those economies of scale. But we’ve suffered from this, I’ll call it disease, in the wind energy market where everybody thinks that bigger turbines are better, and to a point, they are.

But this is exactly one of those consequences of just moving too quickly through your product portfolio and ignoring your, your legacy products. Because when they 20 year operational life, sometimes 25 or 30 years. And with the exception of the United States, you don’t have a PTC driven reason to repower after, you know, 5, 10, 15 years so you’re waiting for 20 or 25 years to repower your asset once the, the power purchase contract’s been exhausted and once the turbine life has been exhausted.

Rosemary Barnes: Is there a similar issue with Turbine manufacturers that have, you know, gone out of business as well. You know, there’s a lot of turbines that are about, you know, 15 or so years old where the manufacturer just doesn’t exist anymore. They might’ve been bought by somebody else, but it’s not like they continued making two different kinds of turbines after they bought the second company.

And I know when I talked to wind farm operators in Australia that are facing this problem, a lot of them are going down the route of trying to get, you know, third party parts or, you know, design and and test their own parts so that they can go through and maintain these older wind farms. And, you know, in some cases they’re, they’re over 20 years, but.

You know, I still find, except for the fact that you cannot get spare parts anymore. So I guess, you know, then you raise the issue of the auto industry. That’s another example where you’re usually able to get a, you know, a non OEM replacement part for cheaper. That might not be as good, but I think that that’s, you know, that’s also an option.

For this particular site with the Nordex turbines or anybody that’s got a wind turbine that’s unmaintainable. I think we have come across a few companies that are working on that. There was somebody who was replacing operating systems even for, for certain turbines where they weren’t, you know, supporting it anymore.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the, the warranty then though, you know, cause at the moment they’re getting liquidated damages. If they take matters into their own hands and repair the turbines themselves, does that mean one, they’ve lost their warranty? I mean, of course you lose your warranty if you start putting different parts in it.

Do liquidated damages stop? It just sounds like a, you know, a terrible financial deal to actually fix these, these wind turbines. So I don’t know, Phil, if you have any sense of how the contract would look under those circumstances, but. It is really interesting because like, you know, when you’re signing on for a contract, you think, oh, okay, so we’ve got, we’ve got this 15 year warranty and you know, it’s backed up by this liquidated damages clause.

So everything’s fine. But, you know, like think through the actual scenario of where, where they are now. What, what are the solutions there? It’s hard to kind of think that detailed, I think when you’re writing the contract. 

Allen Hall: So when this podcast comes out, the Husum, and I know I’m mispronouncing that, I cannot pronounce that word.

It’s the German word. But the Husum Wind Conference will be going on in Husum Germany, which it sounds like most of the wind industry is going to be over there. We’re not going to be there but one of the things that comes out during these big conferences is PES Wind. And I got my latest copy of PES Wind in the mail the other day.

Was stumbling through it. And there’s a really interesting article by the people at Eleven-I and Eleven-I does CMS measurements of blades by putting accelerometers in the blades and then using, from what I can read some really powerful software to look at the vibration modes and the flexibility of the blades, and then give us a sense of how well the blades are doing health wise.

And I haven’t seen a lot of that being used. In the field, particularly here in the States, I have seen it used if they have blades that have known issues where they’re trying to detect it quite early. So it’s sort of interesting to, to, to hear some of the details behind the scenes. So Rosemary, how do these accelerometer CMS blade monitoring systems work and why, from what I can tell, they’re not heavily deployed.

Why are they not deployed in a lot more places? 

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, are they not heavily deployed? I mean, they’re not in. Every, every blade, I’ve used them a lot in you know, prototype systems and people are using them a lot where they’ve got icing systems. Cause you can use it to, you know, detect some stuff to do with blade icing, but yeah, to explain how they work, it’s an accelerometer.

And I guess it’s similar to the kind of accelerometer that you’ve got in your. Your phone, you know, it can measure movements, I guess, basically, not accelerations, literally. And what they can do from that is they can tell the, the frequency, you know, so the, the blade is bending backwards and forth from different loads.

And, you know, every, every structural resonates at.

That depends on a lot of things, including, you know, the length, the mass, the stiffness. So if any of those properties change, then the frequency is going to change. And so that’s basically how they, you know, they, they figure out that something’s wrong. And then, you know, beyond that, how they actually go from a change in frequency to saying, okay, you’ve got a structural defect or you’ve got extra mass on your blade.

That is, I guess, in the, the, you know, special IP of each accelerometer company. 

Allen Hall: It sounds like there’s a lot of software behind the scenes to analyze all that, because you’re, you’re getting a bunch of frequency data back essentially, right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I mean, you, as a wind turbine operator, you don’t see the frequency data, you know, all that it’s like kind of like a black box and it out pops some information that, you know, tells you, Oh yeah, you’ve got to something’s changed.

And, you know, this is what, this is what we think it is. So when I was using it on you know, in de icing systems. Then it’s basically looking at is it possible that there is an icing situation going on? We have detected that it seems like your blade weighs a bit more than it did, you know, a few, a few minutes ago.

And so you can kind of deduce that, okay, if it, you know, all of a sudden a blade weighs more than it used to, then that is probably from icing. If, you know, if it’s around zero degrees and Yeah, and you would otherwise expect, I think. So, 

Allen Hall: Eleven-I was saying they only need about three accelerometers in each blade.

That doesn’t seem like quite enough somehow. But maybe they’re if the software’s right, you probably can learn a lot in, in giving the amount of times that it’s rotating around doing the same thing. It must be must be accumulating enough data to do something with it, obviously. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Well, even with a single, when I was using it, it was just a single location.

You put a sensor on the blade web, usually somewhere where you can like close enough to the root of the blade that it.

And then it’s, you know, there’s a wire that goes down to, through the, the blade route and eventually talks to the turbine controller in, in most cases, or it can be a standalone system if you don’t need to use it for controls purposes. And, you know, just from one, one sensor, you can tell. A lot, the natural frequency of the blade, but I guess if you’re looking for structural damage, which you would, if you’re, you know, you’re trying to monitor an individual blade over time and see changes that might be about to lead to some sort of failure, then you’re going to be relying on the fact that if you’ve got like a small fracture or something, then it’s going to slightly change the stiffness, the flexibility of the blade.

And I’m I’m just speculating here because I’ve never worked on a system that had multiple sensors in it, but I’m assuming that if you have more than one sensor, you’re probably going to be better able to tell where, where that fault might be located, because it’s probably not that useful to say somewhere on the blade, something has happened, you know, go and just to go over the entire blade with a fine tooth comb from the inside and out.

Over the whole length, you know, that’s a bit of a needle in a haystack sort of situation. So yeah, like I said, that’s, that’s me speculating, but I’m assuming that that’s what the multiple census is about. 

Allen Hall: I’m wondering on offshore turbines, because the blades, all the blades there, the United States are going to be new to the U S and we don’t have anything that big.

Do, is it make sense to put this kind of CMS system in, you know, the Eleven-I system to monitor blades? Because what do you know? And the turbines are pretty far away from shore. It’s not easy to get to. It seems like you got to have some sort of monitoring system on the blades. 

Rosemary Barnes: We are starting to see more and more maintenance type stuff.

So, I mean, aside from monitoring blades themselves, there’s a lot, a whole lot of companies that are looking at any kind of rotating component and checking for, you know, changes in, in vibrations associated with that. Cause you know, if you’ve got one bearing, that’s got a flat spot on it, then it’s going to you know, it’s going to vibrate differently than it used to.

And so. There’s a ton of different companies working on that and also because it’s not just the wind industry that you know, needs that kind of monitoring and preventative maintenance. And, you know, like obviously you can save a lot by maintaining a dodgy bearing or maybe it’s even just, you know, like you’ve got a leak and there’s no grease in there anymore or, you know a bit of gravel got in there or, you know, something like that.

You can imagine. Like we were talking before about those Nordex turbines that have problems in the main bearing and you’ve got to remove the whole rotor to replace that. So if you can get in early and prevent that from happening, you can just imagine the immense costs that can be saved. So that’s a really standard standard kind of thing.

Then with the blade condition monitoring, I mean, that’s another thing we’ve been talking about a lot on the channel on the podcast. Is about manufacturers that are having these serial defects with, with blade failures. And in some cases we’re seeing, you know, like catastrophic failures where a blade snaps in half.

And you know, a whole turbine collapses like rare, but if you know that this has happened on occasion with the type of failure that you are expecting in a, you know, a fleet of blades. then you can imagine that it’s really nice to be sure that a blade is not going to fling itself onto, you know, some service personnel or.

Phil Totaro: By the way, to address one of your other questions, Allen, this, the reason that you’re not seeing as much of this technology deployed onshore has been largely because of cost and you will see more CMS used in offshore, not just because, as you mentioned, they’re so far away from shore and less accessible to service techs.

To be able to detect issues and, and, you know, conduct periodic inspections. Offshore turbines are just more highly censorized because they can afford to be. You know, you, you’re paying, you know, 1. 6, 1. 7 million a megawatt for an offshore turbine. Although not in China, but most of the rest of the world, you’re paying that.

Back in the days of, you know megawatt for onshore turbines, you weren’t really able to afford a CMS if you’re an asset owner because it was going to eat into your, your asset profitability. 

Allen Hall: Phil, I wonder if there’s two… Good examples here, more recent examples that would make sense to put an Eleven-I type system in.

One is the Siemens Gamesa with the 5x blades where they have a lot of blades out in service and you know there’s going to be an issue. So just insurance wise, why would you not do something like this just to make sure you don’t have a failure? Because detecting composite issues it really difficult right? You may know the BA

I think, what did they say? 30 percent of the blades have some issues. So you may be part of the 30%. You may be part of the 70 percent that doesn’t have an issue. But the only way to know is to instrument it. And I think the second one is as these turbines get bigger, like you were saying, even onshore, like there’s gotta be a threshold.

Like in the megawatts, where it does make sense to put a n Eleven-I CMS system in. 

Phil Totaro: Yes, Certainly onshore, once you, once you get, like, beyond 5 megawatt, yeah. 

Rosemary Barnes: I, I think the, there’s kind of two, two strategies. For offshore, Things turbine is expensive to start with. So it’s you know, a smaller incremental cost addition to add these, you know, straight out of the factory.

And secondly, a maintenance costs a lot, a lot higher, you know, it takes a lot more of an effort to get, get a maintenance team out to an offshore turbine. So you’re going to be much more likely to see these, you know, straight out of the factory systems installed in offshore turbines. For onshore, I definitely don’t think that you’re going to, going to be paying for, you know, the state of the art system to be installed on every turbine, unless you’ve got a specific reason.

So, you know, like I mentioned earlier in the case of where you’re expecting icing, then that might be one reason why you would have accelerometers in there as an additional ice detection sensor. Cause none of the, none of the ice detection sensors are very, you know, are perfect. So you usually combine multiple systems.

And then the other thing would be where you know that you have potentially got a problem and you know, like in the case that we’ve talked about on this podcast before, where you know, Siemens Gamesa has this blade wrinkle problem and you know, the affected fleet. So, you know, okay, my wind farm. Has this problem, you know, it’s got affected blades and you know, that in the very worst case, this results in catastrophic blade failure, a blade folds in half and a turbine collapses.

So you really want to be sure for safety point of view and also, you know, just for public relations as well. It’s really, it’s a really bad look, right? And so you want to be really sure, but something like that’s not going to happen. And this is a sort of. Issue that I work on a lot with the, the work that I do at Parlo Consulting when I go and help wind farm owners that have defects in their, their blades on their wind farms.

In most cases, you’re trying to keep the turbines operating right? You don’t wanna just shut down your turbine for what could be. I mean, it can be a, a year, right? If you need new blades and you don’t have a crane on site and they’re not making a blade anymore, or you know, they’re going flat out making blades for other customers.

You know, it’s not always easy to get these problems fixed quickly, especially if it’s a whole fleet wide problem. So you’re trying to leave the turbines operating, but the customer always wants to know, is it safe to do so? The manufacturer can never really say for sure. You can only say statistically, you know, we’ve got 10, 000 effective blades and we’ve had two catastrophic failures, you know, like the odds aren’t high, but it’s not, it’s a nonzero risk.

And then that’s when you’re looking for sensors that you can have to give you an early warning because, you know, it’s like the main, the main struggle that I have with the work that I do. Okay. We recommend more frequent monitoring how frequently, well, there’s like actually no interval where you can say definitely this is safe and.

You’re not going to have a catastrophic, catastrophic failure in between inspection intervals because composite materials by their nature, they, they fail in unpredictable ways. And so you do have to look statistically and you can, you know, say, okay, this is growing it. You know, one millimeter per day or whatever, but that’s, that’s an average.

It’s not gonna, it’s not growing, a defect is not growing one millimeter per day. It’ll be zero, zero, zero, 10, zero, zero, zero, 50 broken. You know, that’s, that’s how it works. So I doubt that these systems are very easy to install as a retrofit, like you could put one accelerometer in pretty easy. Cause you just, you know, go into the blade and walk in and glue it onto the web.

You know, connect up a cable, that’s not such a huge deal, but if you’ve got multiple sensors, then you’re probably going to need to have a rope access team cut into the blade and stick them on and have wireless communication. So robots, you still, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff inside a blade and when you get down to the tip part of the blade, there’s not a lot of, there’s not a lot of space even for a robot.

Yeah. So. I think you do usually end up cutting in when you want to put stuff in the blade. That’s, you know, towards the tip. And in that case, yeah, it’s not, not probably going to be the easiest, most cost effective thing, but it might be cheaper than keeping a turbine shut for a year. 

Allen Hall: You know, Rosemary.

I get the PES Wind in the mail and there’s a ton of information in this issue and everybody’s over in Germany ought to pick up a copy because I’ve only read through about a quarter of it and it’s, there’s a lot of good articles in this magazine. I think if you’re in the industry, you want to know what’s happening around the world in terms of wind energy.

You gotta get a free PES wind magazine. Just go online. It’s peswind.com. It’s free. 

Phil Totaro: Lightning is an act 

Rosemary Barnes: of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it’s very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Visit WeatherGuardWind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today. 

Allen Hall: The U. S. Energy Department Loan Programs Office is offering a conditional commitment for about 400 million in a loan guarantee to a battery manufacturer near Pittsburgh, of all places, Eos Energy Enterprises, with the aim of expanding a battery factory to large scale energy storage for the U. S. power grid. If this loan goes through, this commitment will support the construction of up to four production lines in Turtle Creek. PA to produce zinc bromine battery energy storage systems. And by 2026 the project expected to produce eight gigawatt hours of storage capacity annually. And when I talked to Rosemary about this initially, she said eight gigawatt hours.

That’s a lot of. Energy storage. Well, hopefully it is. Now there’s they’re saying that’s equivalent to powering 300, 000 typical homes instantly or meeting the annual electricity needs of about 130, 000 homes if fully charged and discharged daily. So it gives you a rough sense of it. The project is expected to create 50 union contractor construction jobs and as many as 650 new operations jobs when at full capacity.

So, flow batteries, which is what this is, right? So they’re a different kind of battery than lithium. Ion, obviously, and there seems to be sort of two competitive battery systems right now, lithium ion and these different kinds of flow batteries and Rosemary had recently created a video about this basically the same kind of flow battery with a company down in Australia.

So the Australians obviously are ahead of the Americans, shocker, but. Rosemary, does, does this make sense in terms of what Australia knows about this particular kind of flow battery? And is it something that can be deployed on, in a large scale form in the United States to really… Provide that sort of peak power when needed.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. So this battery, it’s a, it’s a hybrid blow battery. So in a regular blow battery the way that works is they’ve got two chemical components dissolved in electrolyte, liquid electrolyte and that electrolyte stored in external tanks, and then it gets pumped through a reaction chamber.

And a chemical reaction happens that either basically adds or subtracts electrons. So, you know, when you’re, you’re, you’re charging it, then you supply electricity and you change it into one chemical compound. And then when you want to discharge, you run the reaction backwards and you, you know, get a flow of electrons coming out from that.

And the key thing. About flow batteries is that it’s really cheap to increase the storage duration because you can just like the electrolyte should be really cheap. I mean, there’s no point in a flow battery if you’ve got a really expensive electrolyte, but. Electrolyte is cheap. It’s just in a big plastic tank.

And if you want to go from a one hour battery to a two hour battery, then you just double the size of your, your tanks. And, you know, you can have 10 times that you can have a, you know, a 10, 10 day battery if you wanted like huge swimming pools of electrolyte. So that’s the key difference with lithium ion, lithium ion battery, the power and the energy are much more closely linked.

So if you want to double the storage duration of a lithium ion battery, you don’t quite double, but you nearly double the cost. Whereas for a flow battery, it will be just a small incremental change. This kind of zinc bromine battery is a little bit different to that. It does, it’s not purely reactions happening with the electrolytes.

So it’s, it’s the same. Hey, did you ever make a lemon battery in your high school chemistry class, anybody, or maybe any, any listeners? It’s. Basically the same thing so it, it’s like a zinc plating machine basically used as a battery. So to charge the battery, electrolytes pumped through two half cells in the battery stack and in one half cell zinc ions gain electrons and become metallic zinc, which then it coats the the electrodes.

And then in the other half cell, the bromide loses an electron and becomes complex bromide, which deposits on the other electrode. So the first half of the process uses electricity to power the pumps. And then to get that electricity back, the reaction runs in reverse and electrons are released to provide an electric current.

And so you need, because, you know, one half of the reaction is plating zinc on the electrode if you want to double the amount of energy stored, you need to double the size of the, or the surface area of those electrodes. So that’s how it differs to you know, a traditional flow battery. Yeah, so the consequence of that is that a pure flow battery’s energy and power can be completely separated.

The longest storage duration just purely comes from larger tanks and in the zinc bromine battery energy stored on the zinc plating, so you need more surface area on the anodes. But that system with the, you know, the electroplating should end up in a, a more compact system than a pure flow battery.

Allen Hall: And it sounds like the process has been figured out in the flow battery. I guess the question is now, does it make financial sense to create flow batteries in large scale? When there’s the lithium ion battery is becoming so prevalent and the costs are being driven down and Phil does, does, does it make sense to do that?

Phil Totaro: Well, like Rosemary said, it depends on the application. If you’re looking for something that can provide short term kind of grid smoothing or like low or zero voltage ride through capability, then. You know, like a lithium ion, you know, co located on site with either the, the wind farm, the solar farm or a hybrid project that, that might be, or even just connected to your substation, like, that might be the ideal thing to do.

The flow battery would be better the better application of the flow battery would be for You know, using it for kind of time shifting power delivery to the grid for price optimization. So, for instance, you know, you’ve got a lot of solar production middle of the day, but later in the afternoon when the solar drops and the wind is coming up, you might have a time frame where you might otherwise have to throttle you know, fuel to your, your thermal power.

You know, like your coal or natural gas powered turbines. The flow battery would theoretically displace some of that peaker plant type of applications. Although again, it depends on the specific type of usage. And, and other, you know, commercial factors. So, those are kind of two aspects of it.

The, the real question is also the provision for ancillary services. You know, I don’t think there’s been a clear cut winner in terms of a battery technology that would be best applicable for, You know, like a wholesale ancillary services slate of capabilities. I think, again, it’s kind of application specific.

So like if you need extra reactive power for whatever reason that might tend towards one technology, probably lithium ion would be better suited that or a super capacitor based you know, short term energy storage capacity might be better suited to that than a flow battery, for instance. So, you know, different, different applications will.

Different applications will have different requirements. 

Allen Hall: So we just haven’t seen a lot of flow batteries being used in the United States. I know at American Clean Power down in New Orleans in the spring, there were companies showing flow batteries. There’s one behind us in the stand behind us there.

So I just thought that was interesting because there were just lithium ion batteries everywhere. And the, if the flow batteries are a possibility, what I’m wondering, and the same thing for lithium ions, really. You know, there is a real labor problem in wind, which is the wind season is when it warms up around April, late March, and then it ends around October, early October, where the repairs are done, all the installations are going on, and then the vast majority of the United States.

So the technicians kind of get ramped up in the summer and, and by wintertime, they’re looking for another job does, does this make sense from stability of the grid to have, you know, a wind technician in the summertime didn’t mean doing battery work in the wintertime. And does, does flow batteries kind of fit into that from a, just, just from a national security job perspective, making sure the systems run properly, does, is that where flow batteries may come in?

Because it’s pretty, I assume if we listen to Rosemary’s or watching Rosemary’s YouTube. It doesn’t look super complex, but it does need maintenance, for sure. 

Phil Totaro: The question goes back to what we were talking about before in terms of the type of application. A flow battery would… You know, that’s providing like a longer term duration and, and storage capacity.

It would necessarily require more maintenance during kind of off peak times. So in theory, yes, but I don’t know if we have enough. Like you said, I mean, there hasn’t been a significant amount of deployment of these even like the older, you know vanadium redox type of batteries that were kind of a predecessor technology to the zinc bromine.

The, a lot of these flow batteries that have been deployed were really just prototypes and test articles as opposed to something that’s intended to provide a significant amount of time shifting of you know, stored power and deployment to the grid. So it, it, I don’t know if we have enough data yet to be able to answer your question conclusively, but in theory, yes They would, they would definitely have a different type of application than the on site, you know, whether it’s, you know, substation specific or, you know, wind turbine or solar installation specific battery storage capacity that would be for short duration grid smoothing type of applications.

Those, I would assume they would need kind of… Constant, periodic maintenance in the same way that that the power generation equipment itself would. 

Allen Hall: It just seems like the Loan Programs Office from the Department of Energy has been really active lately and you know, this, this is one of several projects and listen to several podcasts about that Loans Program Office.

So it, it does seem to be playing a significant role in the decision making process. Of what the technology will be in the United States. As of, I think that the data here indicates like there’s about 160 applications to the. Loans program office at the moment requesting about a one hundred and thirty nine billion dollars in loans.

So pretty much everybody’s walking to the door of the program office there is asking for about a billion dollars. I want a billion dollars. Well, Rosemary, you need to put in an application. Well, move to America. We can get you set up with a billion dollars in a factory. It sounds like. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I don’t know what my factory will make.

But I just wanted to talk a little bit about this, this company that I I’m, I visited when I made my hybrid flow battery videos called Redflow. And the reason why I thought that they were really interesting and worth a video is because they’ve been going since 2010. So, you know, way before, everybody started getting excited about flow batteries. So I thought it’s interesting. I always like to show my videos, how the technology development cycle goes. And so, you know, they’ve had systems out and realized there were things wrong and had them come back and fix them and change their design.

I can’t remember exactly how many iterations they’ve had, but I feel like it was like about six different Generations of their technology. And that, so that whole time, you know, since then they’ve been. Managing to, you know, make money with, with product sales that are different to what we’re trying to use flow batteries for now, like obviously in 2010, you didn’t need to do a whole lot of energy arbitrage for, you know, smoothing out the, the duck curve from too much solar power during the middle of the day.

And the applications that they have mostly been selling for like remote telecommunications things. So, you know, in Australia you have very dispersed communities, some of them not grid connected. And yes, so you need telecommunications in those small towns and they have solar power mostly, but of course, even though it’s nearly always sunny.

Not a hundred percent of the time. And so they’re using these flow batteries to support that. And so it really suits. That kind of usage case in a way that lithium ion really couldn’t where you need to charge it up and then it just needs to sit there for, you know, days, weeks, months and then be, you know, ready to come on when you need it.

So that’s the application that they’ve been using to, you know, get all that that time, those development cycles. And now that people need energy storage for totally different reasons and, you know, much, much bigger potential market that now they’re starting to expand into larger and more modular systems.

So, yeah, originally they were selling 10 kilowatt hour batteries and these days it’s tens to hundreds of megawatt hours. And I know that there’s a two megawatt hour installation in California that they just completed in December of last year. And that’s kind of like. Small scale for the new application.

It’s going to, you know, it’s going to get bigger from there, but yeah, it’s been really interesting to see how, how that’s evolved. The technology is the same, but what we need it to do is different. And so, you know, it’s changing accordingly. 

Allen Hall: So why wouldn’t the US government just buy Redflow and just.

Do the deal bring over the states and start making these things because the problem is rosemary and as we discussed beforehand a little bit anytime everybody this is an american thing i’m not going to push this on any other country because i see it in america mostly which is there’s hey we invented this thing and we’re not going to look at the rest of the world and see what they’ve done.

And in the meanwhile you know, the Japanese or the Australians or the Chinese, whoever it is, has, has worked out all the little kinks in the process and is way, way ahead of us. And, and yet we, we try to recreate the wheel a little bit. Does it make sense at this far in the energy transition to stop screwing around and just go, look, we need to find the best company that does this.

We need to grab hold of the technology and we’re going to bring it to where we’re going to bring it to America in this case. And go, so we’re just stop wasting time. 

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I think, I mean, it’s not like Australia is super advanced and, you know, we have gigawatts of flow batteries in our electricity grid, so I don’t think we’re so, so far ahead.

No, but you do have a history. We’ve got a long history on a small scale, so that’s definitely something. And I do agree that there’s a risk, you know, this project that’s been announced in the U. S. is eight, eight gigawatt hours. And I don’t, I don’t know the history of the company that got that contract, but I, I, my understanding is it’s not super long.

So, you know, I would worry that anytime that you develop a new technology, you have, you have issues and your, your prototype and you know, your pilot projects and you know, all that. So if your pilot project is a few megawatts, that’s very different to if it is gigawatts already. So I guess it will depend that there’s this huge.

Difficult ballence, a lot of places in the energy transition right now where we need to move really fast, but that kind of goes against your standard good engineering, you know, product development process, which would be more cautious. So there’s a lot of, a lot of tension that happens due to that. I mean, if you get it right.

Then it’s much cheaper to just immediately go large scale. 

Allen Hall: If you get it wrong, 

Rosemary Barnes: it’s over. Yeah, it can, it can be over. And I would worry that you’re going to damage the reputation of, of low batteries or maybe battery energy storage as a whole. Yeah, from, you know, billion, billions of dollars being seen to be wasted on this technology.

You know, people tend to think. They don’t think, Oh, this project, we learned a lot from this project that had, you know, issues. People think, blow batteries don’t work, you know, that’s the kind of, you know, everybody doesn’t have an engineering education and, and realize that failures are learning opportunities.

Most people think you should be getting value for money for your pup, you know, your taxpayer money. And that means that your project should work, which is, you know, you can understand why people think that, but it’s just that that’s not how innovation and product development work unfortunately. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. I, I think the problem here in the States is that we’ve had more recent issues in the photovoltaic world, right.

With Solyndra, which Again, was I think a billion dollars got poured into that company and solar, solar panels, right? They’re going to make solar panels in the States, I think in Massachusetts, if I remember correctly, and it went belly up, right? And so the, the feeling of a lot of the electorate United States is like the federal government is not really good at choosing winners and losers here, particularly in the renewable energy space.

And we just don’t want another Solyndra. So everybody needs to be super careful about what’s going on. And I, that, that’s why I bring up, why not? de risk it as much as you can and, and bring in, even if they hired some of the Red Flow people to come over and gave them a grand time over in Western Pennsylvania and show them and just, you know, pick their brains, that, that would be worth doing.

I think any technology like this, it’s, which is relatively new. You almost have to do that. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I mean, I’m sure that they have this company what is it, EOS Energy Enterprises. I’m sure that they have the expertise that they need. And from the loan program’s perspective, I’m assuming and hoping that this won’t be the only flow battery company that they provide a loan to.

That there will be… You know, other, other companies. And so they diversify that way because I think it is, it is a stupid idea for governments to pick winners. I mean, it’s bad enough when they pick winners in terms of technologies, because, you know, usually it’s government isn’t full of engineers with a, you know, a whole lot of commercial experience.

And so. That’s bad enough, but you know, even worse than picking technology winners is when they pick companies within those technologies. So, I mean, I think that the IRA and, you know, the general vibe of the, the U S government at the moment is basically just go big on everything all at once. And so I will be really surprised if this is the only long duration storage play they make, or even if it’s the only.

Flow battery play that they, they make, I would really hope to see you know, a thriving ecosystem of flow battery companies competing with other long duration energy storage and, you know, battle it out and the, you know, may the best technologies win. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. And that raises a really good point.

Rosemary, Phil, the, the venture capital money going into a new amount of energies right now is low. A new technology in particular, you just don’t see. A lot of, of cashflow that way. And obviously that’s why EOS reached out to the federal government to try to, to get a loan. It is amazing in this transition that the venture capital.

is on the sidelines here. 

Phil Totaro: Yes and no. They also have long memories, unfortunately, and they’re also harking back to the times of Solyndra and, frankly, other companies that were significantly VC backed about 10 or 15 years ago. And it didn’t work because they weren’t Coupling that investment in these companies with federal policy that was necessarily facilitating the market environment in which they could thrive.

And so I will agree with Rosemary that rather than governments picking winners, specific winners and losers, they need to create an environment in which anybody that wants to thrive.

You know, providing subsidies is one way in which a lot of governments have done that. And, you know, while some people may complain about it, it, it works. I mean, the reality is that governments will either up front subsidize or subsidize through You know, incremental costs spread out over, you know, the, the lifetime of projects that they invest in or facilitate et cetera, you know, we all, as taxpayers, we all pay for this one way or the other.

So at the end of the day, it’s, you know, just how do you want to see… Your, your money invested and what type of, of a return are you prepared to, you know, what type of a risk are you prepared to undertake to see a return? 

Allen Hall: Well, I’m, I’m prepared that some of these projects actually get to completion.

That’s what I’m prepared for. And I just don’t know how the administration DOE at the moment is going to accomplish that. Giving out loans helps somewhat, but it’s the. It’s a picking and choosing. I think it’s gets to be problematic and, you know, maybe, maybe they’ve chosen wisely here, but it does seem like the track record for the DOE hasn’t been great as of the last 10, 15 years.

So we’ll see how this turns out, but you just hate for technology to get killed because it’s a little early and they’re betting big. Apex Clean Energy plans to build the Timbermill Wind Project in sort of Northeastern North Carolina. And Google has signed up PPA for the entire 189 megawatts of electricity that would be generated by the wind farm.

That electricity is going to support Google’s data centers. On the grid with in Google’s obviously trying to get to 100 percent clean energy by 2030. The timber mill wind project is about a 350 million initiative with featuring 45 turbines And the construction has started it’s going to run through 2024 and they will be using vestas v150 machines So nice big machines approximately 300 workers will be involved in the construction and it’s projected to have about a 33 million dollar economic impact on the area this will be the second wind farm in North Carolina.

There’s not a lot of wind farms, obviously in North Carolina, but this would be a pretty good size one right here. And so Timber Mill Wind, Wind Farm in North Carolina by Apex Clean Energy is our wind farm of the week. That’s going to do it for this week’s Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Thanks for listening.

Please give us a five star rating on your podcast platform and subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News. Now, Uptime Tech News is full of the articles that we can’t get to on the air. So there’s a lot of good information that we find and corral and present it to you in Uptime Tech News. So go ahead and go online and just Google it, Uptime Tech News, and you can register for that and it’ll come right to your

email inbox. And also check out Rosemary’s YouTube channel, engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.