February is notorious for wintry and icy weather in the Northern Hemisphere. Joel and Allen discuss the recent blast of ice in Texas, the problems for blades damaged by ice, and how technicians battle their cold and wet nemesis.

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151 Bonus

Allen Hall: This is a special bonus episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, and I have Joel Saxum here. Joel’s down in Texas at the moment, and they’re having some pretty massive ice storms. It seems like January, February in Texas is quite the adventure, and there’s been some blade damage and ice being thrown, and a lot of RCAs and evals happening on blades.

Allen Hall: And that’ll just be a good time to discuss since it is winter. What to do about some of these icing conditions and how we’re handling in them and what’s the, some of the path forward.

Allen Hall: Joel, would you like to just give us an idea of what you’re seeing right now? 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I’ll tell you I’ll give you the environmental conditions in Texas right now and then kind of talk about some of the things we saw on the field in the last few days. But and this is for people who maybe you’re in an area of the world that doesn’t see icing or you are, and you may have some great feedback to, to tell us.

Joel Saxum: But right now, so I’m in, I’m in between San Antonio and Austin, Texas, and I’m looking out the window, and this is not normal for this corner of. But there’s a pin oak tree in the front yard that’s probably got, I don’t know, 5,000 pounds of ice in the, in the leaves and branches. I mean, there I, there’s, there’s 14 inch branches that are just boom, bent right down to the ground, right?

Joel Saxum: So, All there’s power lines failing. There’s I mean there’s a half inch of ice on the deck everywhere. I drove last night. We had a wind on the wind power lab team. We did an RCA up in Northern Texas. We were up by Up by Wichita Falls. And so we had to do some traveling around the state and the Dallas Fort Worth, metrop just got pounded with snow and ice, something that normally doesn’t happen there, right?

Joel Saxum: You think Texas, you’re thinking, oh, you know, shorts, shorts and long sleeved shirt or something in the, in the wintertime when you’re good. But I mean, I, I counted in one stretch of highway yesterday while traveling 19 different accidents because of the icing on the roads. Wow. Right. And so, so when you think about this now, there’s some, some general thoughts.

Joel Saxum: It rains, it’s 32 degrees. If the blades are cold, they’re gonna pick that ice up and as they, they travel around, they’re gonna get ice and more ice and more ice and more ice. Also that that happens, but it also can happen where you may not even be getting any ice on the ground, any accumulation of rain or sleet or anything like that, but a hundred feet above you, there may be this fog layer and that sometimes is an ice fog.

Joel Saxum: And when things spin around in that ice fog, it’s almost worse because of the way it builds up on the wind turbine blades, they lose performance. And then once they get kind of jagged and, and spiky with the, the ice build up on the edges, it just tends to build up more and more and more and more. So an ice accumulation that’s not shiny and clean tends to build up even more and more ice.

Joel Saxum: So in the last few days in Texas the majority of wind farms saw some kind of an icing. . You know, there’s a lot of ways to, to protect against that. We’ve been talking on the show regularly about de-icing coatings and some other things of that sort. But when it really comes down to it, there’s some damages and some safety.

Joel Saxum: Items that we always for at the Wind Power Lab site, try to get people to, to understand. If you’re operating a wind farm right now in Texas, you really can’t go out into the field. You can’t stand underneath these turbines if they’re still operating because there’s, when that ice starts to break loose.

Joel Saxum: Think a hard hat isn’t gonna save you from a a 20 pound piece of ice that’s been thrown 300 feet through. Sorry. It, it is what it is. So there is things that people try to do when they’re operating wind farms, sometimes pitching blades, different ways manually through the control systems.

Joel Saxum: You can get ice to chip off, fall off and that works sometimes, but for the most part, you’re waiting if you’re not prepped for it, right? If you don’t have a blade heating system, which is, you know, Elements within the blades that they’ll send electricity through, and they actually heat the blade, which is like an arctic package, which basically no turbine in Texas has, you know, that’s more, right.

Joel Saxum: That’s a, that’s a, that’s an Alberta and a Sweden and Norway type thing. The Arctic packages If you don’t have that, a lot of times you’re just waiting for the ice to slough off. And you may, some people keep running their turbines in it and you know, watch the vibration arms and the SCADA data and if the vibration gets to be too much, they may shut them down to avoid bearing damage.

Joel Saxum: But we do see some in the, you know, in the RCA world we do see some RCA end end of warranty. Campaigns, we’ve seen the exact same wind turbine make model blade in a warm climate at an end of warranty campaign have two or three damages per blade versus in a, in a frozen climate that was ran when they were iced for two or three years.

Joel Saxum: Mm. Have hundred damages per blade. We’ve seen it, it, this isn’t this isn’t me saying I think I’ve heard of that before. This is me seeing the report that it, it has happened. . So there’s a lot of, lot of damages that can come. I mean, ice throw, think about this too. 20 pound piece of ice blade worn around ice.

Joel Saxum: Lets loose. It may throw that ice straight up in the air. When that ice comes back down, blade number two comes back around, smashes right into it. So now you’re hitting a 20 pound piece of ice at the leading edge of your turbine blade, and you’re gonna end up with impact damage if that is left undiscovered or you know, left, left to its own devices.

Joel Saxum: Pitching or a, a peeling chipping of the coatings that can get into a structural repair very quickly as well. So I. . Yeah. 

Allen Hall: It’s, it’s, there is so much mass to pieces of ice. I know. When you see it on a, some ice, on a massive blade, you don’t really think that much about it. Mm-hmm. , the blades are so strong and powerful, you think, well, that ice is not gonna have any effect.

Allen Hall: But those are big pieces of ice. And the analogy allies use, well, it, it took down a space shuttle, right? Yeah. ice broke off, hit the space shuttle, broke off some tiles, you know, and it ended up catastrophic. The same kind of thing happens structurally in terms of wind turbine blade. If it snaps off ice and it runs into another blade, man, the impacts are enormous and they’re focused.

Allen Hall: When composites do not like that kind of direct Right tangential force on the surface. And, and they’ll crack, they’ll fail. You can actually poke a hole in them if you get enough force there. It just, they’re just not designed for. , which is I think, the trouble, 

Joel Saxum: yeah. Think about it from a, from a really, like, I, I try, I always try to break things down into a practical sense, right?

Joel Saxum: So you’re driving down the highway and some hunk of ice or snow or something comes off the top of a semi-truck, flies through the air and it maybe it hits the road, or, or you’ve been unlucky enough to have one hit your car or your windshield, same thing. Bigger pieces of ice. And now yeah, that blade might be coming around in 175 miles.

Joel Saxum: and instead of being a metal car that it hits, or the pavement that it hits, it’s a composite structure. Yeah. So it, you know, there’s, there’s our friends Ping of the show. They have in their, it’s one of their newest versions of the ping monitor. They can detect icing buildup, which is fantastic.

Joel Saxum: So, you know, if the icing is very, Uniform on the blades and it builds up the same on all of them. You may not get a vibration alarm through your SCADA system, but you may still have B icing buildup that you won’t know about. the ping, the ping monitor can pick that up, can say, Hey, you’ve got an icing event going on here.

Joel Saxum: You should maybe, you know, you can eliminate some damage by shutting down or, or whatnot. But at least you’re in the know. Then you have a better, better way of making decisions, whatever you wanna keep ’em running or, or not, right? So Ping Ping does that right? Ping can do that for you. There’s other, other most other blade monitoring systems.

Joel Saxum: These all, there’s a lot of CMS systems coming out into the world, right? whether 

Allen Hall: they’re, you know, iLogic. Yeah. Talk to iLogic 

Joel Saxum: for a second. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. iLogic, because that’s is a pretty smart system where they’re putting essentially temperature patches, I’ll call ’em. Mm-hmm. that talk. remotely to a controller so it knows what the temperature is on the blade and it can tell if there’s ice being built up.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , cuz they have basically an ice sensor in each of them. So they’ll put multiple of these little patches onto the blade and that, that’s a really smart move because it’ll tell you if, if the blade is actually free of ice, so you can start back up again. Mm-hmm. , which is a big problem as you still know when to start.

Allen Hall: Right. So there’s a lot of good products on the market. Ping E Logics being I think some of the leading ones at the moment. And, and then, you know, sort of secondarily is the anti ice coating or the is phobic coating. We’re calling them Ni Ice being the one that’s the coating deur because Arron has been talking about it and using it.

Allen Hall: and as is applying it from what I can tell, watching YouTube and LinkedIn and N Ice as a company is based outta Kansas. It’s not Norwegian or Danish or a German 

Joel Saxum: company, weirdly. You would think it’s sounds Yeah. German company. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Right, right. It’s not based in Sweden. Where’s coal? That’s in Kansas.

Allen Hall: Doesn’t get that cold in Kansas. And then Elemental coatings, which is, we’ve had ’em on the podcast. They’re based out. Texas Houston area, I believe, and they have done some more recent work on their coding. At least I have seen some, I think, more recent information where they’ve been working in the aerospace world with Boeing and testing their coatings for durability in like a rain erosion environment.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , and it has. . Last, last I saw they were doing really well. So there are some new materials, chem, chemicals, chemistries, coatings to put on blades that could help reduce the amount of ice and cause What are you gonna do in Texas? At this point when the blades are already up, you got thousands of wind turbines, thousand, tens of thousands of blades out there.

Allen Hall: Yeah. What are you, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna try to apply coating? That’s probably your only 

Joel Saxum: choice. Yeah. And, and then there’s an ROI on it too. Right? So with these coatings, right, it classically, with these coatings, everybody’s worried about, I put it on, does it last a winter? Does it last two winters?

Joel Saxum: Does it last three winters? Yeah. Right. So anybody that’s developing these coatings from like, you know, the, the consultant side of me, when we talk to them, we always. You know, have you done a rain erosion tests? How does it hold up? On the leading edge, right? Yeah. Oh yeah. Okay. So, so, so as we said this, I just had a branch break off about an eight inch branch, just break off and land in the yard.

Joel Saxum: I was like, what is that noise? Yeah. So the ice, the ice is, the ice is real going on right now, so, so the, as I’m, sorry, I digress. But back to the, the case there, when you’re testing these coatings, it’s just like testing an l e p coating. You need to make sure you do a rain erosion test. So there’s also the rain erosion test.

Joel Saxum: There’s a hardness test. There’s and I’m gonna say this one wrong, I always forget the term, but the, basically the, the test of how well it six sticks to the subs. how, well, how when you put it on, yeah. An adhesion test, how well it can stick to it and how, how it stays. So another one to think about as well is a blade flexes, right?

Joel Saxum: So as that blade flexes, does it continuously, is your coating so hard that it cracks and. A as that blade flexes and moves. So these are all things to think about, right? When you’re trying to choose these things and why everybody has a little bit of their hair up about ’em in the industry. Do they work?

Joel Saxum: You know, we’ve heard from of, of Nine ICE that they’ve been on some turbines for a few years and they’re still still working. That’s fantastic. Good. You know so, so those of you that don’t know about anti icing coatings, most of them are applied to the leading edge and then about. 18 inches to two feet down the blade because that’s the, the fat part of the blade that will, you know, pick up ice and stuff.

Joel Saxum: A after that, basically everything kind of sloughs off. You’re not gonna build it up on the, on the back. You might build it up on the trailing edge a little bit, but that doesn’t affect it as aerodynamically. So that’s, and how it’s applied, basically, I like the nine ice coating is can be rolled, can be sprayed.

Joel Saxum: Erroneus is spraying it with their robots. I know that they’ve used.

Joel Saxum: Peter two six company in the US Blade platforms, I think. But applied it from platforms. You can roll it or spray it, you can apply it with guys on ropes. If you, sure, if you’re doing, if you have blades on the ground, you can do a, a whole rotor in a day, no problem, and get it back up if you’re doing a repower or something like that.

Joel Saxum: But the ROI piece comes back into. if we put it. So what is the business interruption cost that we lose when we, when we have an icing event? So if we have to shut these turbines down, how much money are we losing and does that cost make up for the cost of installation? Or you can go, you can go another route and you can actually ensure against that, that downtime.

Allen Hall: But well, since the last big icing event in Texas, I don’t think there’s been a lot of changes made to the blades. I know they’ve done a lot to the infrastructure. keep the, everything connected. I think they had problems with the grid. It was at 2021 when they had the, the big ice storm. Mm-hmm. they had grid problems.

Allen Hall: They have natural gas problems. The pipelines froze. It was a combination of events that cascading to the big power losses. Yeah. Yeah. Cascaded on ’em. But I mean, we talked to Dr. Who out of Iowa State and that. Podcast is available on YouTube, and he was, he’s a researcher who looking into icing of winter and blades, and he has a, there’s a wind tunnel at Iowa State, so they have an icing wind tunnel.

Allen Hall: And he, we had ’em before that podcast and he was describing some of the techniques that are using to create anti ice or phobic coating. And a lot of it’s based on natural materials, the way flour or. Critter animal handles icing. So different ways, different structures at a really small scale, very fine scale, which is part of the issue with erosion, leading edge erosion on these really fine structures that they just can’t take the, the pummeling from the rain over time.

Allen Hall: Mm-hmm. , it wears them out. , but they were looking at, I, I rem remember this specifically. Cause I had, I asked him were there some potential coatings that could survive on a wind turine? He said, surprisingly yes. They were testing some at the moment. Mm-hmm. . And that was a year or two ago. And he wrote the book

Allen Hall: He’s the guy who wrote the book. So there’s actually a book on wind turbine. Blade anti ice de-icing. And if you go on Amazon and you can look at Dr. Who it’s just hu Dr. Who mm-hmm. and, and pull up that book. And so it should have all the details. , but it’s time. Joel, am I wrong? Because Texas is not gonna have fear of wind tur, and it’s only gonna have more.

Allen Hall: And you’re in a bad spot just because of the cold Canadian air. I don’t know why we blame it on Canada, but we always blame Canada. The cold Canadian air coming down with that nice warm gulf of Mexico moisture, , and then colliding right in Dallas Fort Worth west Texas, right? And then you have these massive ice storms.

Allen Hall: And so it’s a unique place where you may not have that kind of icing in like Wisconsin. Right? It’s not the same type of, yeah. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And if you’re wind turbines in Wisconsin, basically it snows or it doesn’t . Right. You know, it’s gonna be, and it’s gonna be cold, really cold. It’s not gonna hang out around 31 degrees or 32 degrees in rain for a week.

Joel Saxum: Right. It’s just not gonna happen. But I think Well then that’s what you, well, you, you mentioning that I think. So speaking with the insurance companies about, you know, the increase in natural catastrophes that we’ve had over the last few years and that, you know, there’s outdated models for the insurance companies in some of these, in some respects for natural catastrophes as we have.

Joel Saxum: When people say global warming, they’re always thinking. They take it so literally, like it’s global warming. Now global warming is in different areas of the world where the whole temperature China comes up, but it change. Weather patterns and it makes more extreme weather patterns. So if anything is to show you now, like this icing event here in Texas is not normal.

Joel Saxum: This doesn’t normally happen here. You know, every, it’s not like it’s, you know, once a month in the wintertime this happens. This is not a normal thing. And then, you know, we had that event in hu, you know, I was in Houston when we had that, the freeze in 21 and that in 21, that freezing event did more dollar value damage than hurricane.

Joel Saxum: and Hurricane Harvey dumped 48 inches of rain on. Yeah, 

Allen Hall: it was wide or spread. Yeah, it was wider spread when you drop electricity and freezing temperatures. 

Joel Saxum: Problems. Yeah. Well, in, in Texas, because, like around, so around Houston, they wanted, they want to market homes with the most amount of square feet possible.

Joel Saxum: You don’t get to, you don’t get to charge for your square footage of your utility room. So how do you get around that? Right. You make your utility room in the attic, so put your water heater in the attic and then wait until the temperature drops to 15 degrees and see what happens. . And that’s what happened across the sub.

Joel Saxum: There was, there was subdivisions with roofs that were raining, right? So , man, the, the cost is extreme. But, so you’re gonna see more and more of, of, I think over the next, you know, 20 years of, of. The, the frequency of events like this where if you were an operator, it may, might be smart to start looking at arctic packages for your wind turbines, Iowa, Kansas, north Texas, Oklahoma, you might have to.

Joel Saxum: Mm-hmm. You know? 

Allen Hall: Yeah. So this goes back into a discussion we were having the technology changes in the, the, the outcome. Where you end up is maybe a lot different than where you thought it would be. So you, you pursue a path of like electrically heating blades. That seems to be the yep. Way that we do it right now.

Allen Hall: But these other technology coming in the ping, the e logics, the mm-hmm , dyna ice, the elemental coatings come in and maybe change that whole dynamic where it just, instead of using kilowatts hunters of kilowatts to heat these blades, megawatts, probably in some cases to heat these blades. Now we’re back into something that’s relatively.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And maybe cost effective to go do Yeah. You’re 

Joel Saxum: mon for sure. You’re monitoring it, right? So I, I’d like to see an, yeah, an roi. So here’s an interesting one. What if you did an roi? Someone did an ROI study. So there’s a, out of one of the universities up in North Dakota, a company sprang up that developed a retrofit for a he in blade heating fan.

Joel Saxum: So basically sending hot air in one chamber and hoping it comes around the other chamber and pops out, so, right. Simple enough idea, right? I don’t know, but I don’t, sure. I don’t know what the energy consumption of that unit is. So if we could look at what is the energy consumption of that unit and what kind of downtime can it save you from?

Joel Saxum: So what’s the cost ROI on that? And then we look at what would be the cost ROI to a ping or an iLogic or a Phoenix contact, or a 11 i mm-hmm or some one of these CMS systems saying, Hey, we know. And then also cuz because the big, the big thing that’s, it’s, it’s tough to tangibly estimate is if you run these blades with ice on them, how many years of life are you taking?

Joel Saxum: Like how much, how much structural fatigue are you in introducing there? Then 

Allen Hall: I think I talked to Lars Benson about this cuz he’s Canadian. He knows snow. 

Joel Saxum: He’s Danish. Don’t say he’s Canadian. He’ll get mad at you. . 

Allen Hall: Well, sorry, he’s part Canadian, part Danish. I I’ll, but he’s said in Canada along up, we can call him Canadian on some level.

Allen Hall: Right. There you go. He’s got the maple leaf, right? . But the, he, whoever I was talking. At dinner one time, I probably lost track because of the alcohol. But he was talking about the amount of damage that happens to blades because of the ice. I’m pretty sure it was him. Yeah. It’s like, yeah, you can really shorten the lifetime with these blades.

Allen Hall: Just little tiny things, you know, he’s, these, they’re big into the pitch alignment. Mm-hmm. . Mm-hmm. Fix, which totally makes sense to me, and how they can extend a lifetime of winter. Mm-hmm. . But the ice is the other piece. Like, man, there’s so much problem with ice and the loading and the unloading, you know, lifetimes 

Joel Saxum: get shortened.

Joel Saxum: There’s a, there’s a, there’s a company I talked to not too long ago that does some c m s stuff and the, they’re one of the differences that they do in the market, and I’m not gonna say their name because I really haven’t, we haven’t talked enough where I’m ready to throw ’em out. Like they kinda. some, some, some information from their board and whatnot.

Joel Saxum: But the difference is, is they’re monitoring 24 7 and because they’re monitoring 24 7, rather than just like grabbing a blurb of data and sending it out, blurb of data, sending it out because they’re monitoring 24 7, they can actually start to calculate some of those fatigue, life damage defects type type things of that sort.

Joel Saxum: So they might be able to tell you, Hey, this, this icing event that lasted four days took. Nine months of life off of your blades. And, and that starts to get really interesting to me. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: So let me ask you this, if you’re a technician Yep. And you’re in Texas and there’s not a lot of icing in Texas Yep.

Allen Hall: And you’re on, on the farm and you see ice in these blades, I assume there’s some safety protocols Oh yeah. That come into place. Do they just close off access to the facility so you don’t get hit with ice or what? What is the standard procedure there? 

Joel Saxum: Standard procedure, I would say is, yeah, you, you’ll put a exclusion zone.

Joel Saxum: Just like if you have a damage. If you had a blade that cracked off or something up tower, you always put an exclusion zone around it. There’ll be signs, cones, this thing like, don’t go here if it’s an, if it’s a farm, wind, farm wide. I would say most people are going to the o and m building and having a lot of coffee that day and catching up on some paperwork cuz they’re not going to the field.

Joel Saxum: The other thing I know, I know some prudent operators will, there’s, there’s normally always ranchers, you know, landowners and other things on site. They will send out a, they’ve gotta usually a communication system with those people as far as an email chain or a text or something like, Hey, just letting you know, we might have some ice up on the blades.

Joel Saxum: don’t go hang on underneath them. Maybe keep your cattle in well away from ’em. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. Keep your cattle in you. Well, in, in, in terms of getting access to the turbines and climbing up in the Neals and being up on the outside, even with, they’re just a little bit of ice. Not saying some of these huge storms, but even when it’s just icing conditions, I assume they put restrictions on what you can and cannot do you, you’re like, you’re not climbing on top of an A cell.

Allen Hall: No, absolutely not. 

Joel Saxum: And you’re not. Okay. You know, basically once you get to the point where there might be ice accumulation, even if it’s close, It’s exclusion zone time. Like you’re not going to the, you’re not, you’re not going to that base of that turbine at all because it’s just, it’s just too dangerous.

Joel Saxum: It’s too risky. You can’t, I mean, a, a hunk of ice comes off that thing. Even, even a, a small five pound piece of ice. If we could, we could do the quick math on what kind of velocity it can reach from that high. Right. It’ll smash your windshield. It would your hard hat. You almost might as well not have a hard hat.

Joel Saxum: To be honest with you, at the damage. The damage it can do. Yeah. 

Allen Hall: Being like, hit with a Buick from feet. Yeah, exactly. That’s pretty much gonna feel like, yeah. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And they, they’ve got some, and, and everybody’s got a little, couple tricks up their sleeve as far as, like I was saying kind of earlier in the, the, this, this little bonus episode of you pitch a little bit, you know, wait till the sun comes out, and then you’ll, and then you’ll pitch, pitch the, the, you know, the pressure side and get some sunlight on it.

Joel Saxum: And then you’ll pitch it and get the pressure side, get some sunlight on it, then hit, hit the. The leading edge, and then you might unlock the rotor and let it spin and see if it’ll slough some of it off. Like, but you can do that all remotely, right? Like that’s done from a laptop and a truck. You better, yeah.

Joel Saxum: You’re not, you’re not climbing under, you’re not going into the tower and running the controls in there to do that. So yeah, you can, A lot of times I’m sure it’s 

Allen Hall: happened. Are do you It’s, that’s happened. It’s hand up, I’m sure. 

Joel Saxum: Come on. We don’t, we, it’s Texas instead of hard hats is cowboy. 

Allen Hall: Well, you know, yeah.

Allen Hall: just a kind of Midwest way of doing the doing stuff. I’m not saying it’s right, I’m just saying that it, it would’ve happened especially 10 years ago. Yeah. 20 years ago, you know, probably been 

Joel Saxum: the way they did it. And on the other side of it, there is a lot of, there is a lot of operators, so we talk about fatigue life and all these things.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You know, in the United States, as we all know, kind of how things operate. 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years. When these blades have a 25, 20, 25 year lifestyle, they’re repowering anyways. So there’s a lot of people that are just like, run it. Don’t worry about the ice. If we get an alarm that says you’ve got some damage, maybe we’ll shut ’em down.

Joel Saxum: Otherwise let ’em buck. A lot of people do that too, , to be honest. I’m just, you know. Yeah. Hey, it’s all about the, 

Allen Hall: it’s all about the dollar at the end of the day. Yep. It’s what it is. Well, this has been an earlies ting discussion, Joel and I, I, I’m sorry you’re in an ice storm, but I think it’s good to highlight the safety right now.

Allen Hall: If you’re near wind turbines, that have ice on ’em. Be careful, technicians. Be careful out there. It’s, 

Allen Hall: it’s a gonna be a rough winter. 

Joel Saxum: Absolutely. Yeah. You guys are, you guys are the ones that make all this, all this happen for all of us, so we can’t afford to lose any of you. Stay safe around the icy turbines.

Allen Hall: Stay safe.