Is it just us or does this show feel more info-packed than usual? The US may or may not see blackouts this summer, and either way, Australia could be the place to look for answers. Rosemary explains why rooftop solar is cheaper Down Under than it is in the States, and describes some chemical-free battery storage options. Joel says we need to stop calling it battery storage.

Megan Rotondo of ONYX Insights shares much insight into just how difficult it is to establish standards in the wind turbine industry. More data is good, but even “all” the data may not deliver standards in all operational issues. Rotondo also describes just a few of the variables that affect maintenance and operational issues. Hint: Risk tolerance plays a part in every decision.

Visit ONYX Insight here – https://onyxinsight.com

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! 

Uptime 118

Megan Rotondo: we also have a product called AI hub, which kind of takes in a multitude of data is a little more focused on answering, you know, answering the question of once you have the data, you have an alarm now, what do you do? Kind of trying to close that loop. So trying to bring in. Multitudes of data for various components and track, you know, the repair cycle and learning from looking into the damage or alert or alarm that you’re getting for your wind farm.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the uptown podcast. I’m your co-host Allen hall. I’m here with Dr. Rosemary Barnes and Joel S and we got a very packed show today, probably our best show ever, actually, but we’re gonna talk about why we keep hearing that some blackouts are looming in the United States and what we think might be some contributing factors and possibly how we can fix that.

Joel Saxum: And then that will flow as well into. Our presidential administration engaging the defense production act to inject half a billion dollars or so into the renewable. Industry to get it moving a little bit 

Allen Hall: faster. And then I have a, a guest on mega Rotondo from OnX insight. We have a, a really in depth conversation about blades, blade, design, and predictive blade failure.

Rosemary Barnes: And we’re gonna talk about a new factory being opened up for an alternative storage technology alternative to lithium iron they’re compressing CO2, and they’ve just opened their first battery facility in Sonia Italy. 

Allen Hall: All right. First topic. Blackouts in the United States. So there’s a lot of discussion on the news channels.

Allen Hall: And even, especially online, there’s going to be blackouts in certain parts of the United States, or at least that’s a prediction. And the discussion point seems to be laid around two things, climate change and renewables. Solar and wind being the two primary ones, not hydro. Okay. So the there’s a, there’s a sort of consensus brewing because of the political nature of what’s happening in the states at the moment that solar and wind are gonna take down the grid.

Allen Hall: Very similar to what happened in Texas during the ice storm. But in this is the hotter side of that. This is a summertime case. And so I, Joel, I think at Joel, you had poked at me about this. So I went and did a bunch of research and I went to the online resources where there’s actual data and it’s, it’s a complicated mix.

Allen Hall: If you can imagine a country as large as the United States has 300. 30 ish, million people and the electrical grid for such a large country. It’s gonna be a combination of factors and it’s not universal. It’s not solar and wind. But I think some of the, the rational of why they’re gonna have grid problems this summer should be discussed because it, they do need to be addressed on some level.

Allen Hall: So the middle of the United States were Joel, where you’re at right now. Pretty much Wisconsin, all the way down to like Louisiana. It’s like. Big electrical grid for the most part. And a lot of coal plants are coming off. They’re just gonna shut ’em down. It’s difficult to getting cold. Some of the minds are shutting down, so they’re taking some, like it’s like two to 3% of the production is, is being eliminated over time.

Allen Hall: They’re also having some issues of the power lines going down. They have a major, like it’s like a four mile section of powerline that went down. That they need to get up and run it again. But seminar stringing things on the Western side of the United States. So the lack of snow over the wintertime hurts hydro, right?

Allen Hall: So the, the hydro dams don’t treat as much energy. So that’s affecting California in sort of the Southwest, the United States and then Texas. There’s a prediction that Texas is gonna be warmer. And it sounds like it’s sort of headed that way right now that just putting a additional already there. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s this week pretty there it’s triple digits all over the state right now. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Right. So Eric co, who is the Texas power system has extra power to deal with those situations in wind and solar. So wind and solar are providing the power in the afternoon and late afternoons to handle the excess demand.

Allen Hall: Also in the Midwest, there’s a quasi drought. So they’re having issues of like in the Missouri river, which is used to cool, a bunch of power plants. There’s not as much water in the river, so it’s not as efficient to cool. So there’s a variety of different reasons why the grid, the United States is having trouble.

Allen Hall: And if you can imagine, if you have power excess power in one part of the country, you may not necessarily be able to get it to the other part of the country who needs it just the way the grids set up. So as we’re talking about this. How do we, how do we kind of push back on this narrative of renewables or the source of all problem?

Allen Hall: Like, what are those talking points? Because like, in all these situations, it’s, it’s complicated. It’s not, there’s no one simple answer. It’s not one variable. 

Joel Saxum: Well, I think some of it, like if you look into the storm, the winter storm that happened in Texas at winter storm Urie, and you saw pictures, we talk about misinformation quite often here.

Joel Saxum: You saw pictures of the frozen wind turbines, like, oh, it was all the wind turbines fault. But if you read the reports and the, the root cause analysis of how some of those things happened, it was. Nons, insulated, you know, wellheads and, and natural gas lines and some other things that these power plants went offline.

Joel Saxum: So you’re fighting against some misinformation. There that’s one thing, but then there is also some reality to it. Distributed power to the grid. As I think we can all agree is a good thing going forward, but we have to make sure that we can get that power to the grid integrated into the grid.

Joel Saxum: Right. And then spread. so there’s a few projects going on. I know. There’s a, you know, there’s a big wind farm in Southern Wyoming. That’s been in play for 15 years and it looks like they’re finally gonna get it built, but that’s on the tail end of a $3 billion power line bringing all that power to, from Wyoming to California, Nevada, Arizona.

Joel Saxum: Right. You know, so, so there, that’s going on. There’s a couple other projects big transmission lines of connecting grids back and forth across the Rocky mountains and some other things. So. As these coal plants and stuff. And we go through our energy transitions, start to come offline to me. I would just like to see more of the renewables, but split spread out, right?

Joel Saxum: If you’re, you might not have wind in, in central Iowa and a county north, you might not have it at that point in time. But if we can get a, the hybrid solution in where we have some battery storage and then we can get all those things tied into the grid in a smart way and upgrade that infrastructure.

Joel Saxum: Then we’re on a better way to alleviating some of these, you know, rolling blackouts and brownouts and whatnot. 

Allen Hall: Rosemary is any grid in the world really set up to go fully renew. 

Rosemary Barnes: Right now. I think that we’re getting closer to that in some parts of Australia. I mean, obviously there are some pretty close to a hundred percent renewable grids, like in, in Iceland for example, but you know, they’re doing it a lot with anywhere that’s using a lot of hydro and geothermal in geo.

Rosemary Barnes: Doesn’t have these big, these big. Challenges of the variable renewables grid, but the place that’s furthest ahead on that is south Australia. They’ve got I think over 60% renewables variable, renewables. They’ve got no hydro, so it’s just wind and solar. And they’ve reached over 60% over the last year.

Rosemary Barnes: From, from those sources, they’re connected to the rest of the Australian grid, but still, you know, 60% is a lot in a, a multi gigawatt scale grid. It’s the, the most in the world. And then, yeah, Australia is moving as a whole is moving pretty fast in that direction. And we actually have really similar challenges to what.

Rosemary Barnes: Anticipating for this summer in the, the us is what we’re actually right now. Like, as we record this there’s warnings at the next couple of days in Queensland and new south Wales, that there will be there will be a shortfall in in supply. If. People don’t either reduce their demand or if some generators don’t come on.

Rosemary Barnes: And the interesting thing about that is, you know, usually anytime there’s a crisis conservatives will always blame renewables, and they are trying to do that this time. But it’s hard because. Queensland has the most coal dominated grid out of anyone and also has the most pub yeah, publicly owned generation assets and new south Wales is the second most coal.

Rosemary Barnes: And so they’re the ones that are having the problems and they’re really renewable, dominated grids are, are not having the problems. So it’s a harder, a harder message for people that wanna blame this one on renewables. 

Allen Hall: As an engineering podcast and having worked on a lot of engineering programs, you, you can, well, imagine that the engineers and the staff that are working the transmission lines and the power production facilities, regardless of what they are all realize what the difficulties are, right.

Allen Hall: They’re not oblivious to this. They push out a report every year, talking. Summer outages, winter outages. They’re on top of the situation, but it, it is, feels like we’re at the point now we’re now dealing in larger scale. So if I’m in Missouri and I got a power plant in Missouri, Can I get my power to California, no answers.

Allen Hall: And that is no, you really can’t. So now we’re dealing with things at a national level and if the engineers are making decisions, it seems like to me, we’re at the federal level now. And some recent things happen at the, with the, the federal government where the president is using the defense production act.

Allen Hall: To throw about a half a billion dollars and, and in the United States, a half a billion dollars is nothing to drop on the bucket, but they’re gonna put some money behind solar transformer and grid components, heat pumps, insulation, and electrolyzers for hydrogen fuel. Now if we’re really serious about having an electrical grid handle these sort of blackout situations and getting power generation on the grid and being more distributed, Joel, where solar and wind are in more random places than a large power plant.

Allen Hall: Are we ever gonna get there with really a drop in the bucket in terms of finances? It doesn’t seem like the federal government’s on top. When you get transmissions lines installed, we need to connect these pieces together. It isn’t, it’s like the federal government is not listening to the engineers that are telling them what this should look like.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Reading into what you see with the, the defense production act that Biden is encouraging. Now this 545 million in funds. To me, it looks like it kind of mirrors what PTC funds are and wind. So they can use it. They can use it to put in an order, the government can put an order from private industry or they can use it to subsidize via tax base or anything.

Joel Saxum: It gives them the ability to do these things. But, but so now if let’s look at the offshore, wind in the us and, and how the private industry has done this, we put these bids out and now. All of these, these projects are inked. And what it has done is allowed people to start building Jones, act vessels and start building key side facilities for wind because that, that work is coming and that money’s flowing.

Joel Saxum: So if I could, if I could have a crystal ball, I would think take this $545 million and start and do it very visibly, make it very visible to the, to the. Private markets to see, okay. The government is starting to, to put some cash into this, to put some money into this, to help move those things along as a small catalyst, because 545 million, that’s one, you know, if you just said, how much money do you have?

Joel Saxum: That’s one wind project, like it’s gone. Right. But if you could spread that, spread that out for some high, you know, the Some hydrogen projection things and some other, other markets that need it. And you have it very visible. Maybe it will. Oh, okay. The government is supporting this. The people are supporting this.

Joel Saxum: It’ll spur the private industry to kind of use it as a catalyst. And that’s, that’s my best hope for it. 

Allen Hall: Well, and then there’s always some piece in which the federal government has purview. There’s only things, there’s some things that, that only the federal government can do. And going across state lines and putting large transmission lines in when it comes to federal rules that are probably limiting that.

Allen Hall: They’re they’re the roadblock. And unless they’re willing to do something about it, it won’t change Rosemary. I assume you have the same problem down on Australia that the federal government says a lot of things, but when it actually comes into implementation, it seems to not be doing the work. It’s like too difficult, you know 

Rosemary Barnes: what, until, you know, we just had a change of government.

Rosemary Barnes: We talked about that last time. But until that point we had a federal government that went out of their way to not talk a lot about you know, anything. They certainly didn’t have any bold vision for renewables. And it was the states that, that got on with the business of actually right. You know, announcing and doing.

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, it’s interesting, but we definitely have the same transmission issues. I think that’s a worldwide problem. It’s probably a good topic for another episode actually in, in depth because there is some interesting, there are some interesting solutions being tried to, to get, you know, remove some of the obstacles to rolling out transmission fast.

Rosemary Barnes: Sure. Cuz it’s really hard. Cause you know, you gotta go through a lot of people’s properties. I’m sure you have the same, same basically. And you, you can’t just. Pick and choose which ones they’ve all got a, you know, they’ve all got a link up. It’s not like a wind farm where you could just, you know, put, not put turbines on this person’s place and put them somewhere else.

Rosemary Barnes: You’re not gonna like, you know, have a transmission line that, that snakes around to yeah. Take care of what people that, which people wanna be involved. But I think if, if it was up to me to make a big, fast change, I would. Put the transmission problem that needs to be solved, but I don’t think it’s gonna be fast.

Rosemary Barnes: Even if you could solve the, you know human element I’d be working on which parts of the network are struggling and helping them to install a lot more rooftop, solar or community solar community batteries, so that they didn’t always need as much transmission into or out of that area. To me, that would be by far the fastest way to make a big impact.

Rosemary Barnes: And I know that there are big differences in how much rooftops, all costs in Australia compared to the us. I think it’s twice as much in the us and in Australia permitting will take one day and in the us it’s commonly six months. So there are some, so definitely some bureaucratic things that, you know, would be perfect for a government, even a, a local government.

Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s I think it’s local government that causes a lot of these issues in the us. You know, if you wanna solve your , your city’s energy problems, then help people to get solar. Cheaper and yeah, like the, the doubling in cost between Australia and the us, it’s not because we pay half as much for our solar panels.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s it’s because we pay half as much for, you know, all of the soft costs, everything else. So I think that that would be a really fast way. You can make a difference in one year, you know, if you really. Got stuck 

Allen Hall: into it. Well, I think we’re gonna come back to this transmission line, how we’re gonna support the grid.

Allen Hall: That’s gonna have to be a topic of conversation because we’re kinda getting toward the breaking point here and it doesn’t feel like there is very little movement on it, so let’s, let’s hit it. And I think I know topics 

Rosemary Barnes: in the next couple, somebody working on that maybe, maybe we could interview, 

Allen Hall: Yeah, that that would be fantastic.

Allen Hall: We’re take a short break right here. And after the break, we’re gonna have Megan Rotondo service development manager of Onyx insight, and Megan is a blade expert and also a blade sort of diagnosis expert. She’s actually taking data from all kinds of wind turbines and putting brain power to it. To do predictive failure modes, which is really interesting.

Allen Hall: So after the break, Megan Rotondo of Onyx insight, 

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Allen Hall: Hey Megan. Thanks for being on the show. Megan Rotondo everybody from Onyx insight and, and Megan, you’re a service manager, service development manager for, at Onyx insight with a really deep expertise in, in blade design. And we had talked previously. about all the things you’ve done and it’s remarkable.

Allen Hall: Actually, you have done a lot of interesting blade things and I get asked all the time. About, Hey, what do I need to do to get into window? Or if I want to design blades, what do I need to do? And I think your background is really ideal because it explains sort of the pieces you have to put together to be really good at.

Allen Hall: Designing blade. So Megan, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. So you, would you just give us a brief background of just your work experience and what your educational experiences are? Sure. 

Megan Rotondo: Yeah. I come from the engineering world, so I went to Cornell and graduated with a master’s of engineering.

Megan Rotondo: In mechanical engineering, but my original undergrad was in civil. So I was always interested in structures and how to design, you know, big civil structures. But also while at school I was on a project team that builds, builds race cars and so naturally being on a project team, you work with composites.

Megan Rotondo: So usually in the racing. Space it’s carbon fiber composites. So that’s where I learned a little bit about composites and got pretty interested in them. So when you take my degree in kind of big civil structures and composites the natural progression was to look at winter turbine blades. That’s how I really started into looking at winter turbine blades is in my master’s program and in the us one of the biggest OEMs in wind turbines is, is GE.

Megan Rotondo: So immediately kind of started looking at that and ended up at GE and a leadership program. And that’s where, you know, my entire career has started and ended up in, you know renewable energy and more specifically in blades due to my interest in composites. And from there, you know, I stayed in renewable energy.

Megan Rotondo: I worked for a Chinese OEM who has a design office in, in the us. And after that Got got an it to kind of look at the operations and maintenance space outside of, you know, kind of the original design kind of complete the life cycle of the product. And I moved to Onyx site in the beginning of 2021 to start looking at the operations and maintenance for, for blades damages, how to maintain them, how to repair them and anything that could go wrong with a blade.

Allen Hall: So you just, you. Started as, as a civil engineer, decided to be mechanical engineer got interested in composites, you start working with blades, which is actually a very typical story and that they kind of find their way into blades and wind energy and really stick with it. But that means probably changing jobs a couple of times, and doing a, a little bit of moving around and taking on support task and just learning from the ground up.

Allen Hall: That eventually leads you into the, the role you’re in, which is more of a predictive maintenance, RCA type role. And now OnX insight, which if you’re not familiar with OnX insight, it’s, it’s a predictive maintenance company essentially. And is everybody knows, has been doing a lot of things in drive train for a long time.

Allen Hall: So you, you walk into OnX insight that OnX insight already does condition monitoring. Right. They have a, just a. Plethora of options there. You want to describe sort of what OnX insight 

Megan Rotondo: does. So OnX is an interesting company. Yeah, as you mentioned, they come out of drivetrain. So vibration based monitoring using accelerometers, it’s pretty established field and most industries.

Megan Rotondo: But at the time when they’d come in is a little bit new for wind and OnX has kind of got three parts to it. It has the hardware side. So our products like eco CMS or eco pitch, which are actually the physical hardware needed. To monitor your gearbox main bearing generator and somewhere with eco pitch to monitor pitch bearings.

Megan Rotondo: So there’s the actual physical hardware development that’s owned by OnX. And then of course with that there’s software. So in order to you, can’t just have the hardware you need to take in the data and analyze it. So OnX has our own software platforms to do multitude of things related to the drivetrain monitoring.

Megan Rotondo: There’s. Software to look at the analytics coming in from the accelerometer data. So the vibration data manipulate it and be able to trend it alarms. And we also have a product called AI hub, which kind of takes in a multitude of data is a little more focused on answering, you know, answering the question of once you have the data, you have an alarm now, what do you do?

Megan Rotondo: Kind of trying to close that. So trying to bring in multitudes of data for various components and track, you know, the repair cycle and learning from looking into the damage or alert or alarm that you’re getting for your wind farm. We also have field pro, which is like an inspection software, so that actually, you know, mobile device you’re out in the field as a tech, you know, doing an inspection, this came out of just the way Onyx works.

Megan Rotondo: It’s kind of coming at a customer issue. So naturally, if you’re getting alerts about your gearbox, you need to go do a borescope inspection. It was difficult to get, you know, quick data or you have a turban you have a tech up tower and you need to get some good data. So that was kind of built out of just being able to use your, your cell phone and have an app to take data and go through the, the tower.

Megan Rotondo: Upload things to a database and it would come directly back to the engineers. So that’s the software side and then the engineering side, which is where, where I sit at Onyx. So the company was really built out of design engineers originally from, you know, the drive train side. And that’s the basis for, onyx’re not just a sensor company or a hardware company.

Megan Rotondo: We’re just a software company with really good, you know, development or analytics. We have wind turbine engineers in house because we wanna first develop the software that and hardware that actually solves problems. It’s not just a nifty piece of hardware or software. And then also it also, you know, you can dive into the physics of the problem.

Megan Rotondo: So you’re not just looking at the, the high level data or analytics. You’re actually. Understanding why these problems occur and that adds that extra level to the analysis and vibration analysis that they did originally. And now we’re expanding and I’ll get into that. Cuz yeah, I do blades but yeah, you kinda have to have that background.

Megan Rotondo: So you’re not just saying that there’s an alarm or an alert. You now have that extra level that Onyx can provide. We’ve seen a lot of these. This is what this type of failure looks like, and this is what we recommend you do because of it. So that’s where it comes into blades. So OnX is looking into kind of full turbine condition monitoring.

Megan Rotondo: And as always, we start with engineering. So I joined to bring the blades expertise. We have ex electrical expertise in house now and tower and foundation. Expertise as well and pitch bearings, of course, as 

Allen Hall: one of the blade experts, and you just have a tremendous amount of experience everybody knows, or pretty much everybody today is using drone data.

Allen Hall: And what you get is just a whole lot of pictures and sometimes they’re spliced together sometimes or not. Depends on who’s doing the project actually. And from that, it just is overwhelming. It’s just a lot of data, but can you, are you able to sort of manipulate that data and look at it for, at a sort of a top level and say, Hey, these are the kind of things we’re looking for.

Allen Hall: These kind of blades have these issues. And we’re trying, trying to just track like crack progression or eating leading edge erosion. How, how does that fit into the AI hub, 

Megan Rotondo: World? So currently it can bring in kind of the blade data that That is coming from, from a drone inspection company. Usually focused on those that you wanna repair.

Megan Rotondo: The other piece that we’re looking at, which is more of a high level. So currently right now, although I’d love to get crack progression in AI hub. Currently right now it’s looking at a little bit more high level. So looking at maybe an aggregation. So part of, part of AI hub has like a data exploration space.

Megan Rotondo: Where you could bring in more of the high level data. So looking at maybe number of turbines or amount of number of blades that have damages or the amount of damages on those blades tied with maybe some SCADA data or number of emergency stops that were on that tur. So that’s more of the data exploration space.

Megan Rotondo: And that’s more of a high, a high level. There are definitely some more detailed analysis on that track progression level or trending, which is not currently fit into AI hub. It’s yeah, a lot of players in the space don’t know yet what to do. With all this data. There’s a lot of there’s a lot of really good data out there.

Megan Rotondo: I mean, we’ve. The industry has now been doing drone inspections for about five years. And along with those images is coming that metadata, which is, you know, where you’ll find the length and width and location and defect type and surface of the blade. And that data is just massive. And the PR the problem with that data is it’s very dirty data for lack of a better word.

Megan Rotondo: You know, it’s subjective a lot of times. One company or even person within a company, looking at that data will say, it’s a severity three. And then another company will say it’s severity four. And then, you know, the owner operator goes in and changes it to a severity two . So there’s a lot of variation in that.

Megan Rotondo: There’s also a variation in the location. So it may say one year it’s. 27 meters along the blades fan. And then the next year, the same company, the same drone, just from, I guess, errors in the, the location of, you know, where the drone is and how it’s sizing it. You know, it’ll say that 27.8 meters also sizing sometimes when you draw the box around the crack, You may say, oh, well, there’s a bunch of little ones.

Megan Rotondo: We’ll just draw a big box. That’s one defect. And then the next year someone’s like, you know what? These are all little cracks. I’m gonna draw five little boxes. So if you’re trying to compare, you know, how did that crack progress just on a data level. So you’re not physically cuz you wanna look at a hundred packs, so you’re not gonna look through each image.

Megan Rotondo: You wanna do some data analysis. You wanna do some trend. That’s gonna confuse the, the trending, because it’ll say that you had one large crack, even though, you know, there’s nothing to tell you that there’s a multiple cracks in there. Versus, you know, next year it turned into 10 small cracks. So it’s really hard, you know, you have to think of clever ways to normalize that data.

Megan Rotondo: You can try to do this on area or kind of, you know, where it’s located, you have tolerances to handle the, you know, span location issue. So there’s a lot that can be done, but I think the industry hasn’t quite cleaned up the data enough to, to move forward with that like really detailed crap progression.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s, it’s very manually intensive work to do. And so is, is the, the key then really standardization. I know. That has popped up a lot in the last year or so, just describing what damage is and everybody using the same definition of damage. It doesn’t, there is no standard right now and which, which makes it hard.

Allen Hall: Right? I mean, how do you, how do you have predictive tools if you don’t have. The underlying data and consistency in that data. And, and, and what do we do 

Megan Rotondo: about it? That’s a great question. And I think coming in from design and my engineering background design engineering, I was all for standard. I was like, we, we chef a standard , you know, this makes sense.

Megan Rotondo: Why, you know, a crack is a crack. We should have a standard, I think, looking at the damages and actually being in the industry and really thinking about it a little more. I think it’s more difficult than it seems at service level because of the way blades are designed blades are designed with loads envelopes and even those, even those envelopes are statistically determined.

Megan Rotondo: So there’s a lot of probability and estimations and then sites. Are cited based on their own load envelope, which is discerned by met mast. And again, this is wind, so tons of variability. So you may take one turbine with one loads envelope. This is just one piece of puzzle. You’re gonna put it at your site.

Megan Rotondo: And that blade is gonna see its site specific loads. And of course, that site, you know, site a over here just made the load envelope. Like it’s, it’s got a little bit of margin and it’s just fitting. So it’s seen pretty high loads for its design. The next site. Yeah, they have, they have a little bit of margin.

Megan Rotondo: The, the wind is doesn’t have as much variability there’s as much turbulence. But you know, it made sense to site and put that same exact turbine and blade design over here at site B. So then if those two blades have a crack that’s of similar size, In a similar location. So a standard would say, okay, you have a trailing edge transverse crack on your, you know, manufacturer a turbine which were designed at two class, you know, three low, you know, all these standards that we work off of.

Megan Rotondo: You have these two site site, a site B. If you standardize it, you would say, you know, either always repair when it reaches a hundred millimeters or, you know, let it go until it reaches 300 millimeters. If you try to set this generic standard, what you’ll ha what I could definitely see happen based on, you know, how these laser designed and how composites work is site a, you know, doesn’t repair it because that’s what, you know, our standard came up with.

Megan Rotondo: And then it, it progresses immediately to a half in, you know, half a meter, crack, major damage, and then site B doesn’t repair it. And it doesn’t really grow, you know, maybe in three years they, they get to it and it’s no big deal. And this is the same, the same blade, the same crack. So you, when you, when you think through this logically as, this is what I wanna standardize.

Megan Rotondo: It’s totally different growth rates. So I there’s, there’s so much challenge and nuance and detail. When you start diving in to the actual workflow of what happens in these decisions and the physics of, you know, where turbines and blades are cited, the different load variability, the different fatigue cycles they see it, it makes it more challenging.

Megan Rotondo: I think, to some level, some kind of standard. Be helpful. But I can see where it will just cause more problems to, to try to be 

Allen Hall: rigid from an outsider’s viewpoint. That all seems crazy, right. That basically every blade it’s, its own living, breathing thing and it needs its own separate diagnosis almost when you see a crack on a blade, it’s not the same as a yeah.

Allen Hall: In Colorado. It’s not the same as Massachusetts. They’re just not gonna be the same result. And so how does. Drive then. I mean, how do, how do you then incorporate that into a sort of predictive model? Is there even a really a way to do that or just need a lot of smart people like you, looking at a lot of photos to figure out what ought to happen 

Megan Rotondo: next.

Megan Rotondo: There’s definitely stuff, you know, more standardization and more analysis we can do on a high level to help with predictive maintenance, using lots and lots of data and kind of establishing baselines in terms of. What regions on certain models and certain areas, you know, you can try to aggregate if you have enough data and provide kind of some baseline of experience.

Megan Rotondo: So I think that data analysis is still very important. But then there’s always that second layer, I think there always will be an engineer who needs to look at that and make sure that makes sense, trying to, you know, go at your, at least for your own farm, establish, you know, your risk tolerance. What makes sense, you know, for your site and your risk level, and then kind of start tracking your data and targeting in on a few key issues.

Megan Rotondo: So there’s different ways of looking at this. And I think it’s site specific and, and owner operator specific. 

Allen Hall: So is the key then consistent monitoring and blades are weird, right? Because there really is no blade active blade monitoring. There’s nothing inside the blade’s telling you about the structure at all.

Allen Hall: At least not on a large scale. So is it then every year, particularly early on, you need to be doing some drone inspections of every blade. Is that where it needs to go? Just so when you get to years, 5, 6, 8, 10, where it really starts to matter, you, you have this progression because with, with, without having that initial data, you just, you don’t wanna start at your five, right?

Allen Hall: I mean, you. Lose a progression, which is what you’re using to do at your analysis with. 

Megan Rotondo: Yeah. And it’s, it’s kind of a hot topic because there’s, there’s pros and cons and it’s that typical, you know, like optimization problem where if you do too many repairs too early, you’re kind of spending too much money on that repair.

Megan Rotondo: And then if you’re. Waiting until you get, you know, a catastrophic failure, you’re gonna spend way too much money because you’ve let it go too long. The tricky thing is finding that middle point. So that’s, and so it, it really does depend and that’s where, that’s where the high level analytics can help.

Megan Rotondo: So understanding just generally, you know, what’s the load level, what’s the side level from the get go, you know, are you. High high, highly loaded site. You know, lots of turbulence, turbulence, intensity, you know lots of precipitation for erosion having kind of failure, just general failure rates which Onyx does a little bit of work in as well, just understanding from really high level, what what’s the failure rate based on certain site conditions or turbine models or design types.

Megan Rotondo: Understanding what those failure modes are from a high level may determine when you start your initial inspection. I think within the warranty period, it’s good to have a baseline. But you shouldn’t be seeing, unless there’s some major, major design issue, you’re really not gonna be seeing, you know, those little cracks that are gonna grow throughout the lifetime, starting from year one.

Megan Rotondo: What, you know, I’m kind of learning and gaining from the industry is seeing that. Year five is when you may start to see things pick up. And year 10 is definitely when you’re gonna be seeing that the smaller cracks starting to progress on a fatigue basis that you can maybe trend and, and, and take a look at.

Megan Rotondo: So it really depends on if you’re concerned. You’ve seen, you know, that model have a certain up blade, have a certain failure on someone else’s farm. Or you’re concerned about the manufacturing quality, cuz you did an assessment and the factory wasn’t up to, you know, high, high standards. Then you may wanna start your inspections early to catch any kind of Des designer manufacturing issue that would happen early in its life.

Allen Hall: Well, that’s really, that’s a really important, right. You’re bringing this whole bunch of information to all the listeners out there, this kind of data isn’t readily available to a lot of people. So it only comes to experience, right. So where does this all get hashed out? Where does the industry sit down with itself and say, you know what?

Allen Hall: You need to be doing a third of year farm every year scans. And that’s the industry standard. Where does that? Where does, who leads that conversation? Where does that happen at? 

Megan Rotondo: Oh, I wish I knew most people would look to the certification bodies to, to lead that no matter who leads the effort it’s gonna need to be from.

Megan Rotondo: Those who deal with operations and maintenance. So the, you know, owner and operator who carry a lot of the risk. And I think the OEMs who have, you know, they also carry risk and do service contracts would, could provide value by insight as well to the maintenance, but either way, I think it probably will be, needs to be led from, you know, a, an in.

Megan Rotondo: Kind of standpoint. So a certification body who deals with multitudes of every, every, you know owner, upper, every OEM to kind of lead this effort and then bringing in the input from basically every everyone who has to deal with that. So all the ISPs like Onyx and, and various others who assess the damages should be involved as well as obviously the owner operators who have to repair those damages repair.

Megan Rotondo: I mean the whole industry. Needs to come together, but it is, it is tricky cuz it is valuable data. You know, it takes a lot of work and a lot of money and resources to get that data. So I don’t think it’s gonna be easy I don’t think it’s gonna be easy to have, even if it was through someone like a certification body to bring all this together.

Megan Rotondo: I know there’s been attempts to do that. Usually on a regional basis, I. The EU has a program, that’s looking at cost of maintenance and they have an independent service provider leading that just based on, you know, government grants and in the us, you know, organizations, nonprofit or, or yeah, independent organizations, research institutions have led a couple of these efforts and probably in other parts of the world as well.

Megan Rotondo: So I think on a regional basis, it’s a little bit easier to. Kind of narrow in and, and look at it, but it is difficult cause you can’t get everyone, you can’t force everybody to come to the table and give up, give up their data. 

Allen Hall: Right. And is it really give, is it, is it giving up data or is it really just setting that sort of baseline?

Allen Hall: There’s a big difference between those two, right? You’re not giving why you say, you know, every three years you need to be inspecting your turbines. That’s , that’s not deep information. Right. You know, if it was, Hey, these Siemens. Blazes have an issue when they have wind gusts of X, you know, that’s, that’s a little deeper, right.

Allen Hall: That’s way down into the noise. And, and yeah, I would consider that to be sort of private information, but we just don’t need to have that sort of basic infrastructure for people like you to know what we’re looking at. Right. So just there is, if you’re missing data, it’s really hard for you to help, right.

Allen Hall: You need data to be. To the operators. 

Megan Rotondo: Yeah. And that’s, that’s why, you know, we try to work with as many customers as possible to, to understand it from a broader, you know, that’s a benefit, honestly, of being in an, in an ISP independent cuz you’re not stuck with one fleet. It’s great to see what’s happening across, you know, the industry and globally too.

Megan Rotondo: So understanding what’s happening in various turbines. And that’s, that’s definitely, it’s, it’s difficult though, because even something as simple. As that you can probably do only a third a year on your younger turbines may not be applicable to, to some models, you know? So, so yeah, it’s, it’s a very high level approach.

Megan Rotondo: And that’s, I think how the industry has gotten, where, where they’ve got to, which is pretty much each owner operator decides on their. To the best of their ability, what they wanna do. And they reach out to various, you know, companies like Onyx or any other is P and who deals with blades. And that kind of says, this is what I’m doing.

Megan Rotondo: And then, you know, we, we say, oh yeah, that’s a great idea. Or, you know, they may come to us saying, this is what we’re doing. And we’re having a lot of failures or this is what we’re doing. And our budget is super high. We wanna figure out how to make. We wanna optimize this. We wanna reduce our blade maintenance budget and it’s very, it is very specific.

Megan Rotondo: So it could be beneficial to have a standard that that’s the high level. And, you know, and I think that’s where people like they like to have some kind of baseline is, is a good recommendation, but then when it comes down to it for your site, you’re probably gonna have to, to optimize if you wanna, you.

Megan Rotondo: Maximize the amount of, you know, performance and minimize the downtime and extract all the value that you can, you will have to be site specific. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. I mean, that’s a, that’s a very interesting viewpoint of it. And obviously, because you get to see a variety of different turbines and term problems and you get to see us and outside the us, what’s happening, you have a very unique perspective on it.

Allen Hall: And I think this is where. Onyx insight adds a lot of value is honestly, is it just because it’s not tied to a particular operator or OEM it, you guys get to see everything and that’s the benefit. And, and when we, we all show up at the same conferences, so we’re at conferences and we’re, we’re all kind of bawling back and forth a little bit.

Allen Hall: It does seem to revolve around just consistency, just being consistent. And let’s try to raise the bar a little bit for an industry. And I know, and everybody’s working hard to do that, but sometimes we don’t really set that floor. We don’t really share a lot of information. So it makes it hard to, to do that.

Allen Hall: And, you know, we, we need a lot of people, more people like you, Megan, honestly, is that when you bring a lot of expertise to the conversation and that makes this, the discussions that much more focused and enjoyable as an engineer, I mean, it, those top level sort. Discussions around the edges. Don’t really matter if we’re talking about really trying to reduce cost, then we need engineers deeply involved that actually know something and have firsthand experience to come back and say a that’s crazy, or yeah, that that’s great.

Allen Hall: We should be doing more of that. And this is why we want to have people like you in the program, which is why you’re here today is that we are trying to get this message out to people like, Hey, there. There are so many brilliant engineers working on these really difficult problems, way deeper than we would really think about.

Allen Hall: And it takes that sort of expertise in companies like on insight, they gotta be making the difference of a renewable future. It’s 

Megan Rotondo: the way it is. Operations and maintenance has so much opportunity and especially in blades there’s a lot of smart people out there trying to figure. What we should do to, to just minimize this, you know, blade repair, budgets have ballooned and, and it’s just because we need to, we need to really understand what’s happening out there and, and dive a little deeper than, yeah, just the high level.

Megan Rotondo: Oh, we just, you know, we wait till a blade falls off or we, we are repairing every crack. So we there’s a lot of nuance in there. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. We we’ve heard those conversations and it’s a little scary, but yeah, we have, we’ve heard that because it is a way it is one way to manage. Not the way I would manage it, but it, it is a way to manage it and, and Onyx is growing, right?

Allen Hall: So Onyx insight is actually how many engineers work there right now? How many people are working at Onyx right now? A little 

Megan Rotondo: over hundred might even have crossed the one 20 mark at this point, cuz we also have, I mean, we have monitoring engineers and you know, consulting engineers and then software developers of software engineers.

Megan Rotondo: So there’s a, there’s a lot, there’s a lot in the, in the works, but A’s definitely growing and. Blades we we’re looking for, for good blade engineers because they are a very hot topic and we have a lot of blades work 

Allen Hall: and you’re, you’re you’re based in Colorado is Onyx insight just in 

Megan Rotondo: Colorado. No, we have, we have offices globally, so we’re, you know, Colorado is our us office and then we’re headquartered in Nottingham in the UK.

Megan Rotondo: And we also have offices in Spain. Korea Australia, China. We cover all the regions. It’s truly global company. 

Allen Hall: So if, if I’m a Blaine engineer and, and I want to get to Onyx insight, I wanna reach out to Megan. Megan, how do people find you 

Megan Rotondo: through our website is, is a really good way. So yeah, you can just go to Onyx insight.com and, and reach out to contact us and our sales, our sales team and sales engineers will definitely get you in touch with myself.

Megan Rotondo: Or any of our other engineers across the globe for, for any issues that you may have blades or otherwise, Megan, this 

Allen Hall: has been a great discussion today. I really appreciate you having on the, on the program and let’s stay in touch because I, I know these blade issues are gonna continue on and, and as the industry evolves, I want to get your feedback on how things are going.

Allen Hall: So this is, it’s really great to have you in the 

Megan Rotondo: program today. Thank you so much for inviting me. This was an awesome opportunity. 

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Allen Hall: So big, thanks to Megan Rotondo of on’s insight.

Allen Hall: Great amount of information from Megan and we’ll have Megan back on the show. Hopefully soon switching subjects slightly, cuz Rosemary brought up the discussion of localized energy storage. There’s a company called energy do, and if you haven’t seen this online, there’s, there’s some YouTube videos showing how this works, but they’re basically created a CO2 battery storage facility.

Allen Hall: So they, they, they are just completing a facility in Sarnia, Italy. It’s a 20 megawat 200 megawatt hour installation, and it’s gonna be fully functional by 2023, but it’s up and running at this point. And it’s a system that can store energy for up to 10 hours at roughly half the cost of lithium ion batteries.

Allen Hall: And it’s a closed loop system. So Joel, what they do is they. Carbon dioxide. They compress it. They cool it. They turn it into a liquid. They put it in storage tanks. That’s the storage part. When they want to use that stored energy, they expand it back up through a turbine. It spins a, it spins a, a turbine to make electricity.

Allen Hall: Therefore you have a closed system, storage battery. That’s not chemically based. So to speak like a lithium ion, but it’s actually sort of physical gas compress. Was it a gas cycle, essentially? Yeah. Yeah. It’s a gas cycle system. And the reason I bring it up is that like Rosemary was saying, like in the United States, we need to have local energy storage to handle these ups and downs of the grid.

Allen Hall: How do you do that quickly? I don’t know if there’s enough capacity in the world to build batteries fast enough to have localized energy storage. But carbon dioxide is everywhere. we could build carbon dioxide, storage area, right. Yeah. Right, right. Joel, does this make any sense, particularly in a country as big as the us?

Joel Saxum: Yeah. There’s a couple things I really like about it. And one of them being. This technology, isn’t all brand new, right? These processes oh, true. Or these Indi individual processes are known, but they’ve, you know, conglomerated them into a novel process to do this battery storage. So there’s no bottleneck for development.

Joel Saxum: It’s it’s we understand how to do it already. And of course, like you said, we’re not the going to have to mine something or anything like this CO2 is readily available. And I think it could be expanded to different types of, of gases as well. But so I like, I like that side of it. I think the other thing I’d like to see, and this is a an energy storage issue, I think across the industry, I think we have to get away from calling them batteries.

Joel Saxum: And the reason being is, is battery from a technical sense works. But when you’re talking to the general public, they think of battery as something that’s a physical, like a lithium ion battery. Like when someone says battery storage, right? If I say battery storage to a guide on the street, he thinks of how.

Joel Saxum: You know, dura cell de size batteries. Can you put in one building? So, so I like the I, I really like the concept here, but I think I don’t like CO2 battery. I like CO2 energy storage facility and I think that would do better for it. Mm-hmm but I, but. But as it sits, they say it’s ready to go and we can install it in large quantities.

Joel Saxum: The supply chain is or large, you know, capacities. The supply chain is there. The technology’s developed. I, I see we hit the ground running with it. 

Allen Hall: Domar Australia has probably already built similar things to this. I know pumped hydro is the, the great savior in Australia and rightly so, it’s pretty simple.

Allen Hall: Right? You pump water up, you store energy in the water cuz of gravity and you let it come back down. Create electricity again. So it is a yeah. Quote unquote, like Joel is saying , it is a battery B more like an energy storage system. It’s pretty effective. Isn’t it? It’s yeah. Seems simple 

Rosemary Barnes: enough. Yeah. I mean, this is one of the areas that I work on a lot with my, my consulting company, part of it consulting.

Rosemary Barnes: And I, as I look a lot at the different, different options that you have, and also sometimes I’m designing systems for, you know, people that have a big, you know, off, off grid. Project energy intensive project. So it’s really interesting, like to compare when you look, you know, on paper at, at what a system, you know, pro systems pros and cons are compared to when you’re actually try and integrate it.

Rosemary Barnes: And when I’m designing something, I always end up either recommending lithium ion batteries. If it’s relatively short duration storage needed and pump hydro, if if the Terrain allows. And if it’s a longer duration storage that’s needed or, you know, like overall system reliability, cuz they’re just much, much cheaper.

Rosemary Barnes: So I know that there’s energy domes as it’ll be half the storage cost of Lithion battery, but I let’s wait and see, but I do note that there are plenty of auctions for storage duration storage projects with durations, similar to that. Especially in California, there’s been a lot recently and lithium mine battery.

Rosemary Barnes: Projects have won those, you know, it’s a reverse auction, so, you know, they’re bidding in the cheapest for yeah. Even at least eight hours now. Nearly every case there has been occasionally some alternative technologies that make it to the last, the last you know, little bit, but you know, nothing stopping energy dome from bidding on these projects.

Rosemary Barnes: And if they could really come in at half the cost of lithium mine, then they would be winning them. So yeah, as I say, I’m skeptical about. The problem with like, like Joel said, I, I like this technology cuz it’s a lot of aspects. Like not new aspects. Like we, we been able to compress and uncompress fluids for, you know, a long time compressed air energy storage is one that’s fairly mature, fairly mainstream.

Rosemary Barnes: And the, you know, the CO2 version has some advantages relative to that in terms of the, the density of the energy that’s stored. But they do suffer from low efficiency compared to, you know, lithium mine battery, or be around. 90% pump hydro, at least above 80%. And yeah, compressed fluids, you know when you actually see working systems and take real data, it’s, it’s quite a lot less than that so far, but there are, is scope to improve it somewhat.

Rosemary Barnes: But again, like if you’re using mature technologies than you’ve got less scope to make massive improvements in technology. So yeah, I. I think it’ll be useful for places where you can’t have pumped hydro and, you know, if we do see lithium ion prices it continue to increase from, you know, supply chain problems.

Rosemary Barnes: Then I think we’ll need a variety. And this would be one of the potential ones that could, you know, find a fairly big niche. 

Joel Saxum: I’m I was just thinking, as you were speaking there, Rosemary of and this is a. Expanding the topic a little bit, but but I’ve been talking with quite a few people involved in the carbon sequestration storage CO2 over here in the United States.

Joel Saxum: And I’m thinking about this is 20 megawat 200 megawatt hour plant can supply, you know storage for eight hours. What if we expanded this thing in a, a grand grand, grand scale to the point where we’re using the compressed gas that’s stored in assault dome. Under the Sur under the surface of the earth.

Joel Saxum: Right. And all of, of a sudden this is turned into a 500 megawatt facility, right? It’s justt just a thought if it’s doable or not, 

Allen Hall: we do 

Rosemary Barnes: things big in America. Yeah. They are doing that with compressed air. There are some projects where they plan to use a salt cave as their storage and definitely for hydrogen.

Rosemary Barnes: That’s one of the, the leading ways that people are planning to store long durations of. But just on the energy zone website and they’ve got 67, 66 0.7 kilowat hours per cubic meter. So yeah. You can see, you know, from that how much space you would need for how much energy and I, I don’t know if you actually asked it, but it was other.

Rosemary Barnes: Thought you were going to ask if it could be, you know, like a way of sequestering CO2 out of the atmosphere. And for that, I, I would expect that it’s not gonna be a meaningful amount of CO2 sequestration, but I definitely hope that they, you know, take it from the atmosphere rather than making it specifically for this purpose.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, that would be a good use for some of the CO2 from the direct air capture. But I don’t think it’ll. A lot 

Joel Saxum: active projects of that sort, right? There’s a, you guys have heard of air products, right? They, they supply gases and air for all over the place. They’ve got a four and a half billion dollar project going on in Louisiana right now.

Joel Saxum: That is going to be, it’s gonna be CO2 sequestration, hydrogen storage, salt, dome, all, all of these things that we just spoke of. And the DOE behin