As wind turbines have gotten bigger, turbulence has become a bigger problem. It’s always affected production, so why are we just now talking about it now? If we can figure out how to make wake steering work across entire wind operations, will productivity gains be big enough to make owners take a chance on it? Warranties and insurance coverage usually discourage changes to yaw alignment… Rosemary and Joel explain why vertical-axis wind turbine designs make sense for offshore projects, but you’ll have to watch on YouTube to see their inspired visual aids. And today’s burning question is: would you eat a Gummy Bear made of recycled turbine blades?

Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com

DTU Top Farm Link – https://topfarm.pages.windenergy.dtu.dk/TopFarm2/index.html

Yaw Alignment from AC883 – https://www.ac883.com

Jessica O’Connor of ArcVera Interview – https://youtu.be/0gXDHhU9YII?t=745

Agile Wind Power – https://www.agilewindpower.com/en

Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.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 129

Allen Hall: Welcome to the uptime, wind energy podcast. We have an excellent show ahead. 

Rosemary Barnes: We’ve got a couple of stories involving wind turbine wakes and some research and modeling that’s been done about yeah. How, how long wakes persist from Avera and also how the wind turbine wakes interact with each other.

Rosemary Barnes: And some. Research on optimizing overall output of wind farms. That’s come out of MIT and then we’ll 

Allen Hall: discuss some work from Sandia labs on offshore vertical axis wind turbine and the implications of that design and 

Joel Saxum: last, but certainly not least. We’ll talk about what Michigan State is doing when diving into some recyclable resins and creating edible gummy bears

Joel Saxum: from wind turbine blades. 

Allen Hall: it’s gonna be a great show. Stay tuned. We’ll be back after the music.

Allen Hall: All right. Wake turbulence is becoming a more frequent topic in the wind energy community. And it, it seems kind of obvious that when wind turbines spin around, there’s probably creating wakes, but I don’t think we understood how big those wakes are or how big those wakes are going to be. Particularly when we get offshore and we start talking about 10, 12, 15 megawatt machines.

Allen Hall: ArcVera has been looking at it and ArcVera has done some analysis on it and predictions actually more than predictions. They’ve actually set up a test case in Iowa. So ArcVera predictions are on offshore up to one meter per second, drop in wind speeds due to upstream. Tip fores, essentially that are moving downstream and, and, and disturbing the airflow for the subsequent wind turbines.

Allen Hall: And that’s on a, on a big 12 megawatt machine. And that’s, you know, roughly a 10% drop in the wind speeds, which is significance. So you can see a 10% drop in, in output. And I know we talked about dominion energy on their offshore project, having a, a capacity factor around 42% and I, and Rosemary, and I both agreed that that seems a.

Allen Hall: May aggressive because of things like this, the unknown unknowns, well, a fair is saying, Hey, these, these weight losses are, are, are gonna be significant and not, and not just immediately around the wind Turine, which is creating them, but like a hundred kilometers down wind, there’s gonna be these significant wakes.

Allen Hall: And I think that’s new now, the, the piece that I haven’t heard before and I is the testing they did in, in Iowa. So they validated in Iowa and it says on the onshore validation study that art fair conducted in Iowa, Wakeford found to travel over 40 kilometers over land. In stable atmospheric conditions.

Allen Hall: Wow. That’s a long ways in American terms. That’s like 25 miles roughly. That’s like the next town over that’s, that’s a, that’s a lot of weight vortices and Rosemary. You talked to Jessica O’Connor when we were down at American clean power in San Antonio. And Jessica gave us, gave you some really good insights about this.

Allen Hall: You wanna describe what all the, all the knowledge she laid on. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So I mean, and people can, maybe we put in the show nights, if we do those, I’m not sure we can put a link to that previous episode. Cause that was really interesting. Yeah, she explained about their model that they’re doing. And I mean, so it’s no, no surprise to anybody in the industry that there’s awake, awake behind a, a wind turbine, slower, slower, more turbulent wind behind the wind turbine then in front.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, we’re all aware that yeah, extracting energy from the wind after all, but what was surprising about their their simulation results when they applied it to offshore, they. The simulations that they frequently do onshore and they validate it, as you said in, yeah. I can’t remember where it was some, some American town and found that the wake persists quite a long way.

Rosemary Barnes: What they did was applied it to the model to an offshore site. And it’s in it’s where there was that recent auction in, in the us around New York area. Right. yeah. Yeah. They’ve just parceled up this bit of, I always wanna say land. It’s not land, but this ocean area they’ve parceled it up. And there’s ton, ton of wind farm projects that are being developed there now.

Rosemary Barnes: And that packed pretty close. Together, you know, like they’ve really just yes, divided it up. Like they’re dividing up fields. It’s not like they’ve left large bits of space in between them and that. Research showed that the wake persists much, much, much further than what people probably expect.

Rosemary Barnes: And I mean, obviously we don’t have access to the, the financial models of everybody who bid in that auction, but it seems. Hard to believe that they would be expecting such extreme losses. And so, yeah, a 10% reduction in wind speed at a down downwind wind farm. It, it yields more than a 10% reduction in power output, right.

Rosemary Barnes: Because the power in wind barriers with the cube of the wind speed. So it’s more like that’s true. 25, nearly 30% lo Loss. And it’s not, it’s not, obviously it depends on the wind direction, but there is a really you know, a prevailing wind direction that is accounting for most of the, the money that the, the wind farm expects to make.

Rosemary Barnes: Right. And I mean, the results that she said one meters per second was not the most extreme by any, any means. That might be a very common amount. Of reduction to see, but, you know, there were examples where you could see, like, I think even four meters per second, it was, it was incredible. Wow. So the, where the simulation is up, up to at the moment it’s validated with the onshore model.

Rosemary Barnes: So offshore is quite different. We don’t know how accurate it’s gonna turn out to be, but it’s certainly, you know, it’s this kind of simulation can give you the, the bounds of what you might expect. And I think if you’re a project developer, you, you really do want to try and find the worst realistic case that you know could happen.

Rosemary Barnes: Because yeah, if you’re gonna consistently see 25, 30%. Power than what you’re expecting. I mean, I don’t know many business cases that have more fat in them than, than that, you know? yeah. So it could be, it could be really, really significant and yeah. Something for developers to be aware of. And maybe also when they are sectioning off these bits of ocean, maybe we’ll need to leave some more space in between wind farms in the future.

Allen Hall: Right. And Joel, you and I have been working on a, on a couple of projects here, looking at vortices off of blades. What comes out of the manufacturer? The, the tip vortices can be pretty substantial, just clean brand new blade. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And, and so for the listeners out there that aren’t a hundred percent sure of what we’re talking about.

Joel Saxum: If you’ve ever seen a LinkedIn or a Facebook or a YouTube video of a turbine, that’s on fire and you can see the smoke. Curling around. Right. That’s what we’re talking about is the wind blows through, and you can see that form behind, behind the structure itself. Now we’re talking about those things. Of course, it’s not gonna be a, you know, a tube of just this one little ESEA it’ll affect all the air around it.

Joel Saxum: And if the, you know, if there’s a bigger array in the wind farm, you’re gonna affect larger weather patterns. So you know, from those small, like a, like you’re saying those, the vortices that we see on the tips. You know, and we look at CFD models quite regularly, and you’re looking at things down to, you know, the size of your cell phone changes so much of that in a large wind farm, especially when we’re talking a hundred meter blades a hundred meter plus blades that extrapolates and becomes a lot, lot larger.

Joel Saxum: So to the one point I was thinking about while you guys are talking now, you know, we know. We’ve seen studies of the highest wind term. I think the wind turbine we ever saw was that one study in Germany where they’re gonna put ’em up 250 meters in the air, right? Most of them onshore 80 meters, a hundred meter tower height.

Joel Saxum: That’s all, you’re gonna really be offshore 150 or so just to get, you know, so the blades aren’t slap in the waves. But do you think, and maybe Rosemary, this is a question for you that these, this, these wakes these massive amount of wakes and disturbances that. when farms can create, could they affect weather patterns in a, in a minute scale?

Rosemary Barnes: yeah, I mean, they must, right? Because they are taking energy out, out of the wind. They’re slowing, slowing the wind and, and changing it. Mm-hmm but I think yeah, and it’s a question that comes up pretty often. It’s one thing that often climate change deniers try to. Try to throw out theirs you know, oh, you’re gonna change the, the weather worse with wind turbines, taking all the energy out of the wind.

Rosemary Barnes: And, and they say it about solar panels too, which is a bit more of a stretch. , you know, we’re gonna take all this energy out of the, the sun and the and the wind, and we’re gonna affect, you know, climate worse than fossil fuels. And I mean, definitely the scale is not remote. Not remotely the same.

Rosemary Barnes: Exactly. Yeah. No. Yeah, but I, I do see from time to time studies that that show, you know, effects on, on local weather, but it’s always, so it’s so, so hard to get good controls for that kind of we a natural phenomenal, it works simp. Yeah, simulations, you know, they need to it’s like that, you know, butterfly flaps, it swings in Australia and you get a, a drought in, I dunno, in China or yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: Something, whatever, whatever the typical example is you weather’s, weather’s chaotic and, and complicated. So. It’s hard to to simulate it. Yeah, and it reminds me a bit of you know, like the rain shadow thing. I know that there was some cases in the, some legal cases in the us where someone who was seeding clouds to get more rainfall on their.

Rosemary Barnes: Farm was sued by the downwind farm. It’s like you stolen my rain and now I don’t have, I don’t have the crop yield and I want retribution. Yeah. And yeah, it’s like, you can say yes, cloud seeding has a statistical impact. Very hard to say exactly. Precisely where and what and you know, quantitatively, and I think it’s the same with the wind.

Rosemary Barnes: Yes. We know some energy taken outta the wind. It’s gonna have some effect, but it’s, we’re not yet at the point where we can pinpoint and say exactly what, and it’s certainly not on the scale of, you know, all the CO2 emissions in the, in the vehicles and climate change. 

Joel Saxum: So the last question and thought I have there.

Joel Saxum: Okay, now that we’re getting closer to, you know, quantitative, you, you mentioned it right now that we’re getting close closer to possibly quantitatively measuring some of this stuff in, in, in mind of the 42% numbers that we saw with dominion. Do you see the possibility in the future or now, or in the future of wind farm operators suing each other?

Joel Saxum: If they’re upwind or down wind taking 

Rosemary Barnes: production? . Yeah, exactly. I, I mean and so yeah, that, that’s what I immediately thought of am American wind farmers suing other American wind farmers. Yeah, because I know that they’ve done it with the cloud seating. But I think that it would be kind of fair enough.

Rosemary Barnes: To Sue, if you had an offshore wind farm, and then a few years later, somebody got allocated one upwind of you you know, put in a big wind farm. And then yeah, I mean, you would be able to document a decrease if yours was there first. I think that would be kind of fair enough, because when you committed to this project and whatever you’re paying for access to that, that space, you know, you did it with, without the knowledge that there was gonna be someone upstream upwind with the.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, the recent auctions, they were all done at once. So they know that these other wind farms are gonna be in there. So then I, I would really say that’s just on them. If they didn’t understand the issue properly, whose fault is it, but theirs, and it really seems likely that they didn’t understand. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah.

Joel Saxum: I’m thinking about like in the north sea right now, where you have you know, some of the historical, the first wind farms, offshore six megawatts and five megawatts and eight megawatts. And. you know, 10 years later, they get a, what we’re looking at now, the V 2 36 or whatever, it’s that’s 15 megawatts gets thrown up in front of ’em.

Joel Saxum: It’s gonna take, gonna start messing up the, the smaller ones downstream, 

Allen Hall: for sure. Definitely. I think there’s, there’s there’s I think leading edge erosion is a big deal in terms of vortices. Yeah. Some of the, the quieting pieces we add VGs will spin the air and probably suck a little energy out of the air more than they would otherwise.

Allen Hall: I. you could in, in theory, put some requirements on what kind of Tices your wind turbo can generate. And at what point do you need to go out and fix leading a DROS if you think about a wind turbine blade versus an aircraft wing, there’s a lot of work done on aircraft wings in the last 20 years on tip fores and, and knocking them down somewhat.

Allen Hall: And I think Boeing and Airbus have done a really good job of doing that, but you don’t see that translate into the. Area, very little almost at, not at all, but if there, if you’re talking about a hundred kilometers of weight V season, the wake you create, you’d wanna try to minimize as much as you could.

Allen Hall: Would you then put in rules to force the upstream when turbines to have vortex mitigation? I think you probably could. 

Joel Saxum: It would be a great marketing strategy for one of the OEMs. Right? Hey, we sold our turbines of these guys. Yeah. And we reduced the tip overseas. You guys should buy ours too, because then we’re all gonna be in line with this 

Allen Hall: making more money, right?

Allen Hall: Yeah. You don’t wanna destroy the next guy. That’s not helpful. Right. Cause Rosemary’s right. You’ll be in court forever. And that’s, that’s not a good place to be, but I, I think a ferry is, is bringing really good data. To this and, and at least getting the discussion in place before we have a couple thousand wind turbines off the coastline and realize we have a big problem.

Allen Hall: So if you, if you’re one of those companies that you are putting wind turbines off the coast of New York, you may wanna talk to Jessica, Jessica O’Connor or a Farra and get the details of the study.

Rosemary Barnes: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system. Upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Rosemary Barnes: Visit weather guard, wind.com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call.

Allen Hall: So a new study outta MIT. And if you’ve, if you’ve been following LinkedIn news reels over the last couple of, of days, you’ll see this article pop up a lot and it’s in the Boston globe and a number of other periodicals. It’s talking about MIT looking at essentially wake steering, the direction you take a, a wind farm.

Allen Hall: Each of the wind turbines. If they’re operated to maximize their power individually. You will get a certain amount of output from the farm. If you think about the, the turbines as part of a larger system, you may not want all your wind turbines pointing directly into the wind to maximize the output. Well, some engineers in MIT will have been looking at this over in India and have run a couple of studies on it and on a, on a decent size, wind farm.

Allen Hall: And what they’re saying, Rosemary is you can increase in certain situations, power up, but by up to 32%, But overall it’s about one and a half to the 3% in real terms from most situations. And this seems like new knowledge. I’m not sure this is really new. Is it? 

Rosemary Barnes: no, it’s funny cuz this is a topic that pops up over and over again.

Rosemary Barnes: And I, I, I’m always surprised at how popular it becomes, you know, in quite mainstream media really, really similar variations on the same thing. The last one that I saw reported heaps, even more than this one was study that was done on vertical access, wind turbines and found that you could, you know, put them closer together than you can horizontal access, wind turbines and.

Rosemary Barnes: That particular study, the vertical access wind turbine one was, you know, like it was so, so, so, so, so preliminary. It was, you know, two dimensional analysis. They used three wind turbines. They used just a couple of different angles of, of, of wind and it’s, you know, not validated with anything in the real world.

Rosemary Barnes: So Yeah, I won’t get to in too much into that one. I can say a lot about that, that study. But this one, it’s a little bit better in that they have actually modeled a range of conditions and they are reporting the, you know, most common improvement. Cuz usually when you see these kind of results you just hear, oh, you know, we’ll get 32% improvement.

Rosemary Barnes: But when you look into the details, it’s like, okay, if you purposely arrange your wind turbines in the most. That the worst possible way. Then you could see 32% less energy compared to the ones, you know, arranged in the best way. So I guess the first place to, to start with responding to this is that wind farm developers.

Rosemary Barnes: Do already consider the effect of the other turbines in the wind farm when they’re locating them. Right. We all know that wind turbines extract energy from the wind and, you know, the wind, the energy and wind is it’s kinetic energy, which means, you know, you can’t, they’re not like consuming air molecules.

Rosemary Barnes: So the only way to remove energy from the wind is to remove wind speed. You know, it’s yeah. It’s half, half MB squared, right? The kinetic energy. So you gotta take some of that, that V V out. And we all have known one since, you know, the start of modern wind turbines over a hundred years ago that that’s how wind turbines work.

Rosemary Barnes: And so therefore necessarily behind a wind turbine, there is lower wind speed. So. Yeah, every time this is reported, it’s always like, oh my God, wind turbines. It’s been found in this breakthrough study that wind turbines remove energy from the wind who, who knew. And it’s always like a little bit offensive because like how dumb do you think that this whole industry of wind energy engines are, that it hadn’t occurred to us?

Rosemary Barnes: That wind speeds are lower behind wind turbines. So that out of the way, and yeah, bearing in mind that we already don’t just line. Directly you know, in a row with the wind turbines and the direction of, of the wind. Yeah. That said wake steering which is what I usually call this effect of, you know, you you don’t consider the control of each Turine individually.

Rosemary Barnes: So, you know, the normal way to operate a wind farm is that each wind Turine has a controller. It knows what its wind speed is and how it should operate to get the most energy that it can. And so the ones in, in, depending on where the wind direction is, the front row of wind turbines will be different, but you know, the front front row wind turbines are probably doing something different to what the back row wind turbines are, cuz they’re seeing different wind speeds, different turbulence and that sort of thing.

Rosemary Barnes: But the new thing with wake steering is that you, you don’t optimize every individual turbines output. You optimize the output of the whole wind farm as a whole. And so you can if you do have some wind turbines, you know, Considering the current wind direction. If you have got some that are really seeing the wake of the turbine in front, if there happen to be a few of them lined up downwind, then you can tilt the front one a little bit.

Rosemary Barnes: So it’s not. Getting the maximum energy. It can cuz you tilt it slightly out of the wind, but then it’s wake moves away from the turbine behind it. So the turbine behind will get more energy. And if you do that cleverly, then you can end up with more energy from the wind farm as a whole. And yeah. So this article is saying that’s, that’s, you know, normal conditions, a few percent, which is in line with what I’ve heard before.

Rosemary Barnes: So I think it’s exciting because it’s a way to get more out of an existing asset without having to install, you know, like new wind turbines or change the blades or anything like that. But it’s not, it’s not easy and we’re not seeing like, you know, this idea’s been around for, I’d say around 10 years or so.

Rosemary Barnes: And you don’t see a huge, huge take up of it because it’s complicated and it affects, you know, the wind turbine structure. Right. It’s not designed for these weird kind of off off access operation. Is it really certified? Yeah. You really gonna get the lifetime OEMs. Aren’t so keen to mess around with that.

Allen Hall: Right. And, and Joel, it went parallel. You guys deal with broken blades all the time and fatigue issues and, and the manufacturing variations that come out of the O. It seems like if I’m not gonna point my turbine directly into the wind and they’re talking about, in some cases up to 20 degrees of, of orientation away from the wind, it seems like you’re putting a lot of extra, maybe flexing loads, bending loads, fatigue, loads onto my blades.

Allen Hall: It, it does. When does that come into play versus the extra power you may generate? 

Joel Saxum: I would say that if you see someone doing this commercially, I would almost guarantee you they’re out of their OEM warranty. that’s the fir that’s the first thing I would think. Okay. Because no, I don’t, I don’t believe, and I could be wrong.

Joel Saxum: Any OEM feel free to contact us and let us know, but I don’t believe that any OEM is gonna say yeah, do that. You should be fine. You know, in, in some of the things we’ve read is, you know, up to 20 degrees, Out of the win. I mean, the, the structural loads that are placed on the blades and the bearings of, you know, pitch bearings and the yacht, bearings, everything, that’s just, it’s, it’s just not quite, they’re not designed to do that.

Joel Saxum: Right. So I would say first off, they’re probably out of their warranty. Second, if I was an insurance company, I would be looking into that as far as putting some more bullet points in my policies because I wouldn’t. To be on the hook for someone changing things up and possibly folding a blade over or messing up a bearing, you know, like you guys know a hub bearing goes that’s that’s, you’re not gonna get that for the same price of a cup of coffee.

Joel Saxum: Right. So I would say there’s, there’s some things, you know, tipping, I would think tipping one and 2% and some, and maybe there’s some studies out there. I know, like we were talking about earlier, WinCo does this commercially they have their Swar. Swarm technology and whatnot. I would be curious to hear from them as far as if you’re moving 1%, have you, have they done studies is, has a certification body looked at this and said, yeah, it looks good to us.

Joel Saxum: Or you know, what is the, the max that we can start moving things around? Cause you go outside of the OEM’s. You know, shut off wind speeds, and then you gotta idle ’em anyways and try to make ’em, you know, not be affected by wind. And it’s the same concept. That’s right. Well, 

Allen Hall: and we’ve worked Joel and I have worked with a company that does Y alignment.

Allen Hall: And so there’s a big emphasis on actually making sure your turbine is pointed the way it’s supposed to be. Yeah, checking the vibration is a big deal. Yeah. It makes the, the turban live longer. So you, there are a couple of companies when we know in particular’s based up in Canada, but mm-hmm, , they’re out running around checking y’all alignment all the time and you’ll say, oh man, these, some of these Turbin are crazy out of alignment.

Allen Hall: So if, if, if most companies are already out of y’all alignment and. Damaging components. And that’s the story that I hear very consistently doing it on purpose. Doesn’t seem like the right way to go, unless you have some concerns from the OEM that it’s going to work, because you know that part about this, which is a little upsetting, is there’s a company called ESCO, which is based in Massachusetts and not very far from us.

Allen Hall: And there are, they are a stones flow from MIT. They’ve been working on this problem for several years and I think they have a better handle on what can and can’t be done. But yet you don’t read the news article about those guys. ESCO is out there doing it. MIT is talking about, you know, something sort of talking about it and self promoting, which is fine.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm , but there’s already players in that space that are already probably five years out in front of what MIT just did not to say what MIT is wrong. It’s good to have more data, but it does seem a little bit odd that MIT didn’t mention WinCo. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You know, down the road, it. Speaking of you know, the experience that we have with some of the groups out there doing alignments.

Joel Saxum: I know that in some of the reports that I’ve seen from them as well, the increase in energy output that they’re trying to gain from the wake steering adjustments here, 1%, 2%, 3%. Sometimes those guys are seeing that 1.1%, 2%, 3% increase in power output just by getting them aligned perfectly because in the vibrations that’s right.

Joel Saxum: They’re, they’re losing that. Right. So if it was my. Wind farm. I would rather say, guys, let’s go and align them perfectly and get that extra 1% or 2%, rather than let’s throw ’em out of alignment and see if we can do the same 

Rosemary Barnes: thing. The, the academic research that has a place and this MIT research, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s validated with a real wind farm.

Rosemary Barnes: So that’s, you know, a big step up from most of the studies of this kind that I see. My problem is almost never with the research. And if you read the paper itself, they’re not, you know, Title of their paper. Won’t be 30% improvement over, you know, idiotically designed normal wind farm. It it’ll be very nuanced and accurate and probably it may well even reference all this other work.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s the reporting. That’s a problem. And I mean, it’s a real challenge to get. You know, report engineering in a way that people can get excited about without being misleading. It’s, you know, it’s a challenge that that I have with my, my channel and maybe why my channel is, you know, one 10th, the side of the size of some of the, the more sensational ones.

Rosemary Barnes: But yeah, I, I, I think that it’s not the research, that’s a problem. And I also wanted to point out I did a live stream on on all different ways of grouping, wind turbines way back, maybe. Maybe it was earlier this year and just looking at the date, it was. Yeah, November, 2021. And there was one really cool resource that I included in that, in the description to that, which I’ll, I’ll send to include in the show notes here, but there’s this DTU simulation called top farm.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s a Python code, but you can, you can run it. I even, I’m not, you know, like real. Computer. Yeah, programming type. I’m a bit of a hack, but even I managed to install it and you can, you can run your own wind farm optimization. And you, you know, you can choose where, what parameters that you know are important and you’re trying to.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, improve the financials of the wind farm overall. So that includes, you know, trying to get more power out of it, but also trying to, you know, minimize the cost of, you know power lines that need to connect these things up and that sort of thing. So I thought that was, that was really cool if people, you know, it sounds really exciting.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s, it’s nice to be able to go and, and play around and see what kinds of yeah, what, what kind of changes you can make that make a difference. Also evidence that this is something that we knew about in the industry. we have bought this, this latest article, if you don’t 

Joel Saxum: believe me I would like to shout out to the person who signed the contract at dominion for 42% uptime.

Joel Saxum: And when they have, when they get near their trailing three year average, and they’re at 41, call WinCo and have ’em crank it up 1% just for that year so you don’t get burned. Keep that in your back pocket. You’re welcome. 

Allen Hall: yeah. At, at a separate shout out to Lars and Jannik Bendsen with AC883. They’re the guys that we have talked to about Yaw alignment and they’re, they’re doing it quite a bit.

Allen Hall: Those two good guys. They’re out hustling and, and making the wind turbines perform a lot better. So it it’s, you know, shout out to those guys. If you’re interested in your alignment, just go to AC883.com and you can find out a lot more about it. 

Allen Hall: All right. So the folks at Sandia have been working on a vertical wind turbine and in particular are vertical wind turbine that is floating offshore. So the. They could come up with this concept. In fact, they patent this design and we’ll put it in the show notes, but it’s essentially, it looks like a.

Allen Hall: Bow from a bow and arrow. So you got this kind of curve blade, and there’s a cable that reaches the top of the blade and pulls it down. So you get this bow like structure with this blade and that cable ties down sort of to the base. And so now you have a vertical axis, wind Turbin and you have three of these things and you can adjust the tension on those cables, pulling those blades to essentially stabilize the thing.

Allen Hall: And they’ve. Working on software to control this vertical access wind turbine with these, this unique blade system. And they got the software because they’re, they’re trying to figure out how to, how to handle the waves and the turbulence and all the things gonna be thrown at a, a floating platforms, even though it’d be anchored down to the sea floor, it’s still gonna be bombing and moving and tilt and stuff.

Allen Hall: I guess my first question. Is, is this design something that would theoretically be used? Cause I it’s. All right right now is in theory. I don’t, I’ve not seen a production in one of these. I’m looking for some, I was looking a line for some in like a, a blade sample or, or something, a test that’s been going on.

Allen Hall: I haven’t really seen anything, but Sandia seems to be progressing down this line. Is this something that we really need is a vertical access, wind turbine that, that sort of floats off. 

Rosemary Barnes: maybe I so vertical access went, turbines said they’re not new at all. And in the, you know, seventies, eighties, early nineties, there wasn’t really a, you know, industry agreement that horizontal access was the only way to go.

Rosemary Barnes: There was plenty of serious research effort, serious development money spent on vertical access, wind turbines and the most successful and biggest of those. A lot like this, this one, the egg, egg beater shape is what it’s, it’s commonly known as, yeah. It’s got there’s some advantages to vertical access, wind turbines, and some disadvantages relative to horizontal axis.

Rosemary Barnes: And for onshore applications, it kind of just worked out that the, the downsides to the vertical axis wind turbines were so much more than the advantages. And so it kind of died out that, you know, evolution killed that, but now we’ve got new constraints, new design requirements for offshore. Do make it seem attractive again.

Rosemary Barnes: So there, there are a lot of companies that are looking at vertical access when turbines for offshore and especially floating offshore. One of the main things is that the center of gravity is much lower because you can put the generator at the bottom of the Turine. And so, you know, like I don’t know if I right.

Rosemary Barnes: How many people, big advantage show versus listen to it, but I’ve got a little wind turbine here, horizontal access one. And I mean, it just looks wrong that that would float, right? Like it, it looks like it just wants to tip over. Whereas with the, the, I don’t have a model of a vertical access one, but you know, it looks like an egg beta and the, the mass is all down the bottom.

Rosemary Barnes: I, I could, should have, I should have planned ahead and brought, brought a whisk with me. Yes, for the show and tell session today. But, yeah. Yeah. So you put the, the generator at the bottom, which makes it, you know, just inherently more stable. You need a smaller floating platform to keep it upright. That’s the number one biggest thing.

Rosemary Barnes: There’s a, you know, there’s a few other differences, but I’d say that’s the, the biggest so , Jill’s going, yeah, it looks, looks like that. Like a lo why do you have that? What is that? I don’t even know. 

Joel Saxum: Sorry, kids set it up for my, one of my nieces set it at my desk. 

Rosemary Barnes: well, 

Allen Hall: it’s kind of like that. Yeah. If you’re watching YouTube, it’s just looks just like, 

Rosemary Barnes: yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So, I mean, there is a reason to, to go that way. You know, as we, we really want to get more floating, wind out there, if we’re gonna be able to explain offshore, wind to areas beyond, you know, the good, the good offshore sites are already filling up you know, in shallow waters that are suitable for the fixed bottom offshore.

Rosemary Barnes: So floating offshore is something that probably. Does need to happen, or at least it will really help the energy transition if we can install a lot. And so does make sense to me, it does make sense to reopen vertical access, wind turbines now and this sand air design it’s. So it’s taken the, the most successful you know, one from the, from the nineties.

Rosemary Barnes: There’s, there’s a really huge one. If you drive. If you drive from Montreal to the LM wind power factory in gas bay and the, you know, gas bay, peninsula in Canada, then you’ll drive past, I think it’s called cap chat or yeah, SHA the Cape of the cat, I guess. And there’s the world’s biggest vertical access wind turbine is still there.

Rosemary Barnes: It’s UN operational, but you know, it’s, it’s this just huge, big egg better. But one of the big challenges with that design was that it, you’ve got this big can leave structure, right? You’ve got a vertical, right. Medical tower, the generators at the bottom blades at the, at the top. And you know, the bearings are at, at the bottom trying to keep this whole structure, you know aligned and stable was, yeah, that was really challenging.

Rosemary Barnes: And the way that they solved that on, on shore was nearly always to put G wires. So they would attach to the top, these G wires that would come out beside. like a tent, you know? But that’s really a lot harder to achieve offshore because you don’t just have land to peg peg, the corners down to, so you would need to make your floating platform, you know, big enough to take those guy wires too.

Rosemary Barnes: And then you’ll eliminate the whole point of that. You could have a smaller a smaller floating structure. So this is a way. Of you know, getting, getting around that, you know, solving the same problem in an offshore appropriate way. That’s my interpretation. And then some of the other stuff the other reasons why vertical access went turbines, like didn’t succeed and kind of died out in the nineties.

Rosemary Barnes: Was because of the, the aerodynamic loads change on a horizontal access, wind turbine. It’s very simple, you know, they they’re the same all the way around. And it’s, it’s really like an airplane wing. Whereas with the vertical access wind turbine, the wind direction is constantly changing relative to the blade.

Rosemary Barnes: So they’re seeing, you know, they get dynamic stall, oh, you know, it’s a, it’s making lift, lift, lift, and then all of a sudden stalls and it’s sudden huge sudden change in drag. Also the materials at the time they were using aluminium, mostly not great in fatigue, which is not great for constantly, you know, you’ve got constantly changing loads.

Rosemary Barnes: You’ve got, you know, severe fatigue impacts. So some of those have gone away with materials. Composite materials are much better for fatigue and we’ve got much better simulation tools for complicated structures like that. Sure. And complex loading. And then the controls as well. You know, if you can control on the millisecond, kind of level, then you can reduce some of that dynamic dynamic loading.

Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, all of those things, it, things are very different. Now we’re trying to do something different and we’ve got much different tools now than we did in the nineties. So I think that’s why we’re seeing, yeah, quite a lot of people pretty interested in vertical access, especially for floating offshore end.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But we’ve 

Allen Hall: created this new Rosemary rule of maturity. The Rosemary rule of maturity is everything takes at least 10 years, maybe 20. So if sand hasn’t built one of these yet, no one has. How far out were 

Rosemary Barnes: the, when turbine B there’s a, there’s a company C 12. They have a very small prototype that they I don’t have the actual size on hand, but they have actually made something and stuck it in the ocean.

Rosemary Barnes: And. It generated power, but I’m pretty sure it was kilowatts, not, you know, and not hundreds of kilowatts. Okay. Not megawatts. Okay. Yeah, definitely not megawatts. There might be one, one or two others. There’s plenty of people that will sell you. sell you a vertical access winter Turine to put in the ocean.

Rosemary Barnes: I super skeptical that those will do what they say. Because I believe that we would’ve seen evidence of it if, if they, if they did well, that’s. Yeah, it’s just did 

Allen Hall: Rosemary. I don’t, because it didn’t take off the time when it needed to take off. Is it too late? And, and our efforts like Sandia and there’s a lot of brilliant people working at Sandia, obviously.

Allen Hall: And they’re they’re have, they have to think 20 years out in the future. That’s their role. But is it sort of too late to go back and do vertical access? Because we, we just don’t and like in the United States, we don’t even have the, the infrastructure to make horizontal wind turbines right. At the moment, let alone do something unique and vertical.

Rosemary Barnes: No, here’s a chance to get in. Wow. No, I see it as quite a classic disruptive technology model. I I, I don’t see that there’s enough of a difference right now that a major manufacturer would have any reason to, to get into this. Right. It’s worse. Technology’s got smaller markets, more expensive. Why would they be interested in, you know, the odd you know, really offshore application where you could install something like this and have someone pay for it that, you know, like, right.

Rosemary Barnes: Someone that recognizes that that has enough value from it that it’s worth paying a lot extra than, you know, compared to a horizontal access, fixed, fixed bottom turbine. . But I do see that if you, you know, extrapolate 10, 20 years out into the future, I do see that if it’s, if it is possible to get floating offshore, wind cheap, that there will be so much of it.

Rosemary Barnes: And so I, I think that this is the example, you know, people are always asking me, what’s the next big thing in, in wind. And Recently as was like, well, you know, winds, winds, mature. They know how to make it cheap. Everything onshore that I see as, you know, new designs that pop up as an alternative to the just standard.

Rosemary Barnes: Three bladed upwind rotor. It, it never makes any sense to me on shore it’s it’s, there’s just, no, the benefits aren’t there, but offshore there’s a chance. I’m not, not saying definitely this is gonna be the future, but it is the first. Time where I’ve been like, yeah, there are some legitimate reasons to, to have a look into this and, and vertical access.

Rosemary Barnes: Isn’t the only way to solve some of these problems. I’m also interested in multi-res. Sure. And you know, maybe there’s others that I haven’t thought of, but I do think that the, yeah, going offshore, like far offshore. Has changed the design constraints enough that we could expect that a different design could end up being, you know, better suited than, than what we’ve got now.

Rosemary Barnes: So mm-hmm yeah. I, I think it’s worth pursuing, I, I wouldn’t bet you know, my house deposit on it, but I might bet a little bit what if I was, if I was gonna bet bet on the future, you know, people say bet your house, but I don’t have a house. I have a house deposit, so that’s all I can. That’s all I can bet.

Allen Hall: Well, if, if SpaceX can land rockets vertical vertically and reuse them, I’m sure we can figure out how to do vertical access, wind turbines. And it’s sort of you’re right about the, that analogy of it’s just the software’s better. The control systems are better. We have a lot more tools. We have better technology.

Allen Hall: We have better composites than we did five years ago. Even the landscape was open. Joel. I think if anywhere that’s gonna be used in the us, it’s gonna be sort of in the Louisiana. Both a Mexico, Texas area where hurricanes are, things can be really devastating, but vertical access probably has a little bit of an advantage in terms of just being a little more durable.

Allen Hall: And the, I don’t know if you saw that recent article. I think it’s this week where the, the bomb B OEM bureau of energy management, I think that’s 

Joel Saxum: right. Ocean energy 

Allen Hall: management. Oh, yeah. Bureau ocean energy management. Right. Sorry about that. That they’re they were talking to Louisiana in Texas about offshore wind and they got some parcel set off in federal waters.

Allen Hall: Texas had a lot of response to that, like questioning about the birds and the habitat. Louisiana was like, nah, whatever didn’t luck. I thought, yeah. You know why? Well, well, you know why they don’t care. One of the reasons why they couldn’t care is maybe they’re not gonna put turbines in federal waters because they, Louisiana is a place where they’ve actually put duties or, or, or, or a percentage of the income generated by wind turbines offshore would come to the state.

Allen Hall: And if you put ’em in federal waters, the feds get to take that money. And I think Louisiana’s thinking, well, we’re gonna keep it. Little more shallower waters. I’m gonna do something that’s a little more reasonable for Louisiana. And the state of Louisiana’s gonna keep all the, the proceeds from that development where Texas probably hasn’t thought of that is not gonna do that.

Allen Hall: So in this situation where you have a really, really unique environmental constraint, Gulf of Mexico winds a little bit lower, get this hurricane thing once in a while, maybe something those vertical wind turbines make sense. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think they, there’s definitely a possibility. I mean, of course, if they’re off the coast of Louisiana, they go from float floaters to fixed bottom.

Joel Saxum: Right. Cuz it’s shallow the whole coast. Right. They would they, they totally would. Yeah, just I’m looking at this design. And it’s, it basically is, you know, like a bottom like tension cables, turning the blades into basically Bo strings. right. Or a bow and then tension cables. Right? So if a H if a hurricane was to come, you release the tension on ’em and then they become neutral.

Joel Saxum: And I think that that’s right. There’s something there. And I, and I think there’s a couple of advantages you know, that we haven’t spoke about with this. Just looking again, I’m looking at the simple picture here. There’s no pitch bearings. There’s no pitch drive systems. There’s no, ya bearing, I mean, there’s a technically one, one big ya bearing, but technically that’s the hub bearing, right?

Joel Saxum: So the, the structure itself component wise is a little bit simpler. Now, the blade structure in composites and, you know, the, the dynamic loads like Mo Rosemary was talking about, you know, when the wind comes through, it change everything changes. And you get the weird stall and, and some other. that’s, that’s a bit more complex, not a bit more, it’s a lot more complex than a standard blade is and understanding how, what the life of the level, what the life of these would be based on, you know, standard operation.

Joel Saxum: And then also getting into, if you’re gonna put ’em into an area where there is hurricanes or some, you know, deeper offshore Wilder weather I don’t know what the, how they’ll last, but, but I think it’s definitely worth investigation. Well, it it’s up 

Allen Hall: to people like. Yeah. I mean, it’s up to people like Rosemary who are designing the, the blade structure to get it.

Allen Hall: Right. Right. And you. Sort of like 50 mess it up, I think. Cause it’s, it’s too new. If I was deciding an airplane to do that, I would think, oh man, my structure skies are really good. And if I had a Rosemary and my airplane team I’d think, oh, this is , but it’s hard. I know how difficult those things are. Right.

Allen Hall: So even if you got the best people on it, it’s still a really, really difficult thing to do. I’ve watched airplanes break in half and us said they weren’t supposed to break in half. And, and those sort of things like, oh man, we missed X. Right. It gets super complicated. Yeah. You need a really 

Rosemary Barnes: pro. You did a really good reason why you were Bo bother.

Rosemary Barnes: And I mean, what you said, Joel, about the, you know, the, the simplicity of the components that can be removed, that is the motivation for at least dozens of vertical access, wind turbine companies that have come and gone over the last 20 years. And none of them have actually been able to make. Something cheaper than a horizontal access one.

Rosemary Barnes: So you know it yeah, that, that’s one of the things with vertical access when turbines it’s, it’s a technology where if you think about it for like one minute, it’s just so obvious that these are better. And if you think about it for five minutes, it’s like, oh wait, but you know, if you. Try and get that improvement, then you’re gonna make this thing harder.

Rosemary Barnes: And if you think about it for 10 minutes, you’re like, oh yeah, actually, no. I don’t think I’ll do that. So I think it’s been pretty well documented on shore that I won’t say that every avenue has turned out to be a dead end and there is one company, agile wind power who have a 750 megawatt lysis swim time turbine prototype, and their, their idea is that they’re going to control.

Rosemary Barnes: 700 kilowatt, 50 kilowatt kilowatt, nearly nearly seven 50 megawatt. That’s big. Thanks. Thanks. thanks for pulling me up. yeah, nearly, nearly a megawatt. So, you know, usually I talk megawatt scale and I’m always adding them in because it’s not quite a megawatt, but at least it’s in the ballpark and they’re they’re.

Rosemary Barnes: Innovation is that they’re using yeah, it’s the control. So they’re going to change the, just the angle of the T of tack of the blades to yeah. Get, get rid of this dynamic store problem. And I mean, they’ve had, they’ve had teething problems. They’re a, a startup, but I wouldn’t totally eliminate that.

Rosemary Barnes: As a viable option, and maybe they will eventually pivot to, you know, to floating offshore because I still don’t see a huge market for, for that. I, and even though if when you talk to them, they don’t say, oh, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna take over all of these sites that are currently being developed with horizontal Lexus when turbines will have.

Rosemary Barnes: Our vertical access one in the future. They’re saying this is for places where a horizontal access turbine doesn’t make sense because you know of noise or because of, I dunno, access problems or right. Turbulence or something. So yeah, it’s definitely, it’s a technology to watch, but I think if vertical access one turbines are gonna do something big and exciting, it’ll be in floating offshore and yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: 1520 years. There you go. That’s my timeframe. 

Joel Saxum: the one, the one place that I have seen vertical access, winter turbines in public working is just outside of the Denver airport. And they have these vertical access, winter turbines that are about the size of, I don’t know, maybe they’re not that big. They’re only built the size of a stop sign or something, but they have ’em installed on the median and they have the blades that are kinda like, like this.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And they’re utilizing, I mean, of course the front, the front range of Colorado’s windy anyway. So there’s always some wind there. Right. But the reason they’re one of the reasons that’s cool that they’re there. If you guys have ever stood on the side of an interstate highway, when cars go by, you know, to blow your hat right off.

Joel Saxum: Well, the traffic is going like this. And so the turbines are in the middle of the median on the barrier wall, spinning with the traffic. As well. So, I mean, there’re probably enough power being generated there to like, make a cup coffee, 

Rosemary Barnes: but, and are they collecting that power concept or are they just spinning?

Rosemary Barnes: Like when like the, you know, toys? No, they’re, they’re connecting. They’re they’re collecting. I 

Joel Saxum: don’t know what they’re powering with. Yeah. They’re connected to something, but I don’t know. I don’t know what. Yeah, but then again, if you know anything about DIA DIA airport, there might be some aliens living underneath it or, you know, well, that’s what I was saying.

Allen Hall: yeah, yeah. It’s a way for Colorado to slow down the driver. So actually taking energy from the cars and slowing it down, you know, somebody’s thinking that 

Rosemary Barnes: I guarantee calling on that all the time to that. Yes. That, yes. Yeah. Come on. Because that’s another common idea that people have is yeah, we should put wind turbines everywhere by, by roads and then someone will respond to you idiot.

Rosemary Barnes: That means you’re just coming from the car, which yeah, I, I think it’s anyway, we shouldn’t get into that. It it’s, it’s not so, so straightforward to me how you would go about analyzing that one way or the other, but yeah. Anyway, let’s move on. Hey, 

Joel Saxum: it’s better than people in west Texas thinking that it’s hot because the wind, the fans are turned.

Joel Saxum: No offense west, Texas. I, I love you guys. I, I love west 

Allen Hall: Texas, but I have seen this. Yeah. yeah. So Michigan state it’s been hard at work, at least a couple of the, the professors there. And , they’ve developed this technology, which is using a combination of glass fiber, or I guess you could just goose carbon fiber too, and a some synthetic and plant based polymers.

Allen Hall: So they’re, they’re Rosemary, as you well know, they’re creating these long polymer changes where you get strength from, but they’re using some plant based some synthetic and they’re then they’re putting in fiberglass or carbon fiber into this thing to create these composite structures. Now some marketing person was genius here.

Allen Hall: He said, well, it’s recyclable. Right? You can break them these polymers down into their independent, smaller chains and reuse them, which, which is great. Right? It’s a recyclable quote unquote resins system. And you can pull the fiber out of them too. So we can, in theory, we use ’em well one of the professors I assumed yeah, it’s a.

Allen Hall: John Dorgan chemical engineer, Michigan state said, well, you can create this circular economy from these, these polymers. Cause you can break ’em down and reuse ’em in Hanit. They can just. You use all the time? Well, what can you make this plant based polymer into, well, you can make it into gummy bears.

Allen Hall: You can make it to food grade quality stuff. And, and so essentially it goes like this. I make a wind turbine. I have this wind turbine blade eventually after 20 years, I need to recycle it. I break it down to its independent components. I put the synthetic stuff in a barrel. I take the fiberglass out and put it over here and then I take the remaining part of it and make it into candy.

Allen Hall: I’m making it into gummy bears. So I light are you see these gum bear images. And I gotta say, guys, who is eating things that have been on a wind turbine. It, it indicates like the people responsible have never been around wind turbines to see how dirty they are. Roseberry. Would you like to describe what typically happens to win turbine over its life?

Rosemary Barnes: Well, I mean, it’s not so dissimilar to, if you, you know, you buy a new plastic piece of garden furniture and you know, maybe you’d be happy to lick it. when you first got it home . But after it’s been in your garden for a year or two, are you still happy to lick that? I don’t think so. I, I don’t, I don’t wanna eat a gummy bear that was recycled from a wind turbine and I.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t really see why it’s necessary either. And I also don’t agree that that’s a circular economy because I , I don’t know how they’re retrieving that after its second life as a gummy bear through your digestive system. But I don’t want any part of that. 

Allen Hall: Well, gummy bears are not digested. I think that’s what they’re saying is just passing through temporarily at, and that.

Allen Hall: Yeah, those would totally be right. Just, it could be infinite. And 

Joel Saxum: is there, we were 

Rosemary Barnes: talking timelines really use for it then? I mean, you could also just shred a normal winter by blade and eat that it’s AER. Is that recycling ly? 

Allen Hall: No. Yeah. Do you not do that? No, no, no, never listen to what engineers have to say about eating things, right.

Rosemary Barnes: We’re not the right group. There’s we’re clearly there. There’s one of those Guinness record type chases who I think he ate an entire airplane is isn’t that a, a thing that’s happened? There’s some guy that just eats random stuff and yeah, if you chop, it’s not gonna, you chop something inerts up and eat it, then it’s not, it’s not gonna do you any harm.

Rosemary Barnes: I, I, I guess I should. Should put the disclaimer that I’m not telling you to go out and just, you know, eat non, non food items, airplanes. But I can’t see why you couldn’t. like couldn’t make fiberglass pellets out of a recycled winter turbine blade and, and, and eat them. And you know, I think that that would be very simple to making gummy bears out of a recycled winter by blade and eating them.

Rosemary Barnes: I don’t see the difference. That’s that’s my point, but don’t do it at home. I think you’ll see. ‘

Joel Saxum: em. You’ll see ’em at a, in, in the next few years, they will be at a trade show and they’ll have packages of these gummy bears. And then we hand them out here, try this, try this wind turbine blade, try this winter turbine blade.

Joel Saxum: There 

Allen Hall: should, right. there should be a rule. If you make a food product outta a recycled material, you gotta make it in the shape of what it was just so I know what I’m buying. This is a winter man. You what I’m saying? I think then it should. 

Joel Saxum: Right. Go look at your, go look at your vehicle. Yeah. Go look at your vehicle.

Joel Saxum: After, after a springtime ride through the mountains, by your house, Allen and see all the bugs on the front. that’s exactly what the leading edge of a wind turbine blade looks like. so maybe that’s maybe that’s. 

Rosemary Barnes: I mean, in my understanding. like you can gummy bears existed before, you know, they became some sort of chemical concoction, right.

Rosemary Barnes: Sugar and gelatin, and some sort of fruit flavoring will give you a gummy bear if you get the, the ratios. Right. Mm-hmm so, you know, there’s some organics there. Maybe it’s the bugs is . Is where that nutritional content comes from. Maybe it’s a, a . There you go. It’s