Episodes

  • Wind Tech Training Excellence at Deutsche Windtechnik

    Wind Tech Training Excellence at Deutsche Windtechnik
    Feb 20 2025
    Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik discuss their innovative training programs for wind turbine technicians. Momme, as Head of Training Center, and Russ, as Director of Quality and Ops Support, explore how the company is tackling workforce challenges through apprenticeships and advanced training methods in both Europe and the US. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! Allen Hall: Wind Energy is facing a critical workforce challenge, finding and retaining skilled technicians to maintain the growing fleet of turbines. This week we speak with Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik. Deutsche Windtechnik is setting new standards for technician development through their comprehensive training programs, combining hands-on experience with cutting edge technology. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Momme and Russ, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Momme Feddersen: Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you so much. Allen Hall: Well Deutche Wind Technique. Has always, to me, been a really high standard in terms of a company. But that comes through training. And Deutsche Windtechnik spends a great amount of time and energy on the training side. I want to talk to some of the challenges that are out there first, and what are some of those challenges that exist in training wind turbine technicians today? Russ Leach: Yeah, so they're the same ones we've had since my entire time in wind. It's finding the qualified personnel who are ready, available to climb that turbine and do great maintenances and great troubleshooting. The problem has been exacerbated with the growth of renewables with wind, right? They're harder to come by. Um, And we're all fighting for the same people, aren't we? So that's why we have our training programs, right? We have to start people out from nothing many times and build them up and get those competencies out there with them. Um, and, um, that's the main challenge. Plus the distributed nature of the workforce, right? We're, we're across the country here in MoMA, they're, they're across Europe. And, um, so you have to put mechanisms in place to get the training to them many times and get them competent and, and verified as competent many times out where they're at. So it's a combination of Training facilities, which are very valuable, but also training that extends out to the field with the people themselves. Allen Hall: And Mame, let's talk about the technical challenges because wind turbines have gotten more complicated. There's more computers in them. There's more electronics in them. There's more cooling systems. How has that impacted the training of technicians? Did it just make it harder because there's so much new things happening? Momme Feddersen: Here in Deutsche Windtechnik, we have to, we are focusing more and more on the, um, not on the, on the, on the MOOC. Highest moderns, tur, modern turbines, um, but more, um, on the older ones. So, um, but uh, when we look into the future, the, the topics you say are, are exactly the topics we have to, we have to face. Um, what what we did in the past was focusing on the practical side of the training and not focusing on the theoretical side. That's why I think we did a. Kind of, um, interesting approach, uh, how we train here in Germany. Um, as you know, we are a multi brand, uh, company. We are servicing different brands.
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    28 mins
  • Wind Energy O&M Australia’s Success in Melbourne

    Wind Energy O&M Australia’s Success in Melbourne
    Feb 18 2025
    For the first time ever, all the Uptime hosts are in the same place! They discuss the fantastic outcome of the Wind Energy O&M Australia conference last week, highlighting the amazing presentations, attendees, and discussions. Keep an eye out for next year's event! Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: For the first time ever, I think all four of us on the podcast are in The same location at the same time. Rosemary Barnes: If you include our amazing producer. So Allen Hall: this is a unique time and we just finished wind energy, O& M Australia. which was completely packed, insanely full, and it was a day and a half of informative discussions, no sales talks per Rosemary's strict instructions. Good call. To get the information out to the industry and let everybody know what's happening around the world? Is it, Australia is a really unique place, Rosemary. There's a lot going on here. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. And the wind market is definitely unique. We've got a few unique problems. We also, a little bit different to other markets I've worked in, like in in Europe and in North America, where there are a lot of engineers around who've worked on the design and manufacturing side. We don't have those industries in Australia. And there aren't as many people filtering through with that deep technical knowledge. So it's taken us a bit longer to get to the point where one, people realize that they need to have that information. It's not enough to just have, a service agreement and trust that they know what they're doing and that they're acting in your best interest at every moment. And two, for people to begin to, yeah, get that expertise. There was no shortage of, Expertise on the panels. And yeah, my favorite thing about the conference was hearing just conversations going on, just, overhearing people just geeking out over some, really niche topic that they hadn't thought of that they'd heard, someone mentioned on stage, a couple of people connected who didn't know each other, and now they know that they're got the same problem or one of them's got a solution and one of them's got a problem. It's yeah, just exactly what I wanted from the conference. Joel Saxum: I think one of the things I took is this joke was told a few times, literally and figuratively on an island here in Australia when it comes to wind energy knowledge, right? So we tried to, when we put this conference together, we tried bringing some expertise from around the world. Simply because, it's hard to travel down here, right? That's just a simple fact. It's geographically remote. So bringing that expertise in here and And after we went through a bunch of things on stage, a lot of people talking on the sides like, I didn't know this solution existed. Like the Soren Kellenberger stuff from CNC Onsite. I didn't know you could precision machine things up tower. That was just like, to a lot of people that, that exists, right? Lightning protection upgrades do exist. There's people that can do it. There's things you can sense. Shadow monitoring of your fleet. Even when you have an an FSA with an OEM. Oh, this is a great concept. These are things that like in the States. In Europe,
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    37 mins
  • 8-Tree waveCHECK Makes Blade Wrinkle Detection Simple

    8-Tree waveCHECK Makes Blade Wrinkle Detection Simple
    Feb 13 2025
    In this Uptime Spotlight, Erik Klaas and Johannes Leib from 8-Tree discuss their waveCHECK system, which detects and measures surface defects on wind turbine blades. The system uses 3D optical scanning technology to identify wrinkles and other issues with high precision, helping improve quality control in blade manufacturing and maintenance. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're diving into revolutionary blade inspection technology from 8-Tree. 8-Tree's WaveCheck system uses 3D optical scanning and augmented reality to detect and measure surface defects on wind turned blades with unprecedented precision. Joining us is Erik Klaas, the co founder and CTO of 8-Tree, and Johannes Leib, a program manager with 8-Tree, who brings over 15 years of wind blade industry experience, specializing in composites and fiber reinforced plastics. Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Erik and Johannes, welcome to the show. Erik Klaas: We are glad to be on your podcast. Allen Hall: I'm excited to talk to both of you because I've seen your technology on YouTube quite a bit and now on LinkedIn and it's quite impressive. And I want to start by asking really, how are you trying to handle wrinkles? It seems like wrinkles are a huge problem in the wind industry. They're hard to detect and we're getting escapes out of the factory. You want to discuss how big of an issue wrinkles are. And Blades is at the moment. Erik Klaas: Yeah, most likely this is a good topic for Johannes to speak about for one hour. But as I got into this business late, maybe I get to give you my perspective. So when I got into the wind business first, our legacy is in aerospace. So I saw a wrinkle and I never thought it could be such a problem or lead to catastrophic results. What is a wrinkle? I happen to have a separate part here. Which is a mock up that we did. We do this for testing our system. A wrinkle basically is a deviation in the glass fiber layup of a turbine blade. And it's very small, so you can't even almost not see it. But it can lead to the blade cracking in these particular areas where the wrinkle happens. And therefore, the inspector's task is to measure how wide and how high is a wrinkle. And so the ratio between width and height is what they then calculate, and there's a limit to that ratio. And that is what an inspector has to do. And currently, they are doing it with hand tools. And a hand tool is a Dial gauge or it can be what they call a comp gauge. So they push it on the surface so they get the contour of this wrinkle and then with that contour they measure actually the width and the height of it. Allen Hall: It can be very difficult to detect some of these wrinkles because the laminates in these longer blades, the laminate is very thick. So if you have a wrinkle somewhere in the middle of this laminate, the surface Defect or the surface curvature change is minuscule, right? Erik Klaas: It is. And there is a limitation of our technology that I need to speak about. So we can only detect and measure those which are on the top layer. So if they go through the whole layup of layers and they are visible on the surface, we can measure them. And if they only appear in deeper layers, we can't. So you need like NDT measures,
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    26 mins
  • Siemens Gamesa De-Icing, Vestas Permanent Tower Crane

    Siemens Gamesa De-Icing, Vestas Permanent Tower Crane
    Feb 12 2025
    We discuss Siemens Gamesa's advanced blade de-icing system, their blade root repair fix, and a tower designed by Vestas with its own permanent crane system. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: We have really interesting patents this week, Phil, including this first one from Siemens Gamesa, and it is a wind turbine blade with an advanced de icing system. Now, you say to yourself, well, there's been a lot of de icing systems on wind turbine blades. In fact, Rosie has worked on a number of them for LM. But this one's a little bit different. So it It uses a kind of a matrix setup of thermal heating areas arranged in sort of series and parallel connections, and it creates overlapping heating zones that can be very precisely controlled. Now that is very beneficial because a lot of times you More temperature, more heat towards the tip than you do at the root. So you would like the temperature to be graded up towards the tip. It's kind of hard to do a lot of times. But in this situation, you can adapt it to the situation. And this seems smart, but I haven't seen it implemented. And I know Siemens Gamesa owners. Like the icing system. So maybe this is coming out in the near future, Phil. Phil Totaro: Yeah, this would be interesting because this is very different than your conventional like blown air solution, like Enercon and other companies use. Where you could have a scenario where you've got like hotspots and, and heat concentrations at different points along the blades, particularly where you have ribs or bulkheads or something that would kind of get in the way of the airflow. a thermal heating mat with again, different zones where you can kind of trigger, on off to, to try and either prevent ice accretion or actually provide deicing for the blade. So it's, it's a really interesting approach in that it gives you more granular control over where you want to be able to, to de ice and again, based on ice thickness, and you can, monitor your Phil Totaro: performance, or you might have a more sophisticated system that actually monitors how much ice is still stuck on the blade. So. The, the implementation of this I think would be welcome. And it's probably something that, I mean, heating mats are almost inevitably, they do introduce a certain amount of challenges, especially with lightning interactions. But generally speaking, they are a good way for wind turbine blades to to be de iced. So hopefully this does make its way into more commercially available products in the future. Allen Hall: Well, it looks like it will save somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of energy consumption to, to heat the blade. That would be remarkable if you could make a, even a 10 percent change in the amount of power required to heat the blade up. Going to 50 percent would be astounding. And that makes me think you're going to see this, this patent idea Phil Totaro: show up pretty soon. I mean, to be blunt, like, and I'll do respect to Enercon that pioneered a lot of this technology, but volumetric heating is just wildly inefficient, so it's like, something that's a more, cost efficient and thermally efficient solution is probably desirable. Allen Hall: Our next patent is from Vestas and this. Seems like a relatively simple idea, but it evidently isn't because they were able to patent it. So,
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    8 mins
  • Ørsted CEO Change, Shell Leaves Atlantic Shores

    Ørsted CEO Change, Shell Leaves Atlantic Shores
    Feb 11 2025
    This week on Uptime, we discuss Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper stepping down, Shell withdrawing from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, and a study showing only 15% of employees feel their managers are transparent about challenges in the workplace. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxom, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Danish Renewable Energy Company, Ørsted, announced a leadership change, with CEO Mad Snipper stepping down after four years at the helm. Rasmus Erbo. Uh, the company's deputy CEO and chief commercial officer will take over as group president and CEO, uh, in February. Uh, the transition comes as Orsted adapts to evolving market conditions in the offshore wind sector. Now this, uh, I guess around the industry was expected news. Uh, if you had talked to somebody, uh, about offshore in the US, uh, they felt like what had happened over the last year or so was really rough on the leadership at Oersted, part of this too, guys, is that some of it is just happenstance, interest rates rising, the supply chain nightmares that were happening and Mads Knipper would just happen to be there at that specific time. Is, is that the feeling like it was just bad timing, uh, for Mads? Phil Totaro: Yeah, it's, it's part of it, but the, the reality I think is you, you've got a scenario where he, he was there and the buck stops here and all that sort of stuff, um, if you're the boss, but he also was one kind of overseeing a lot of the deals that got him put in place that led to all those impairments that they ended up having. It's like, yeah, okay. Interest rates are high, but. It's like he, he, you know, was there signing off on these, these deals with, uh, PSEG in New Jersey and, uh, Eversource in, in Connecticut, uh, and Rhode Island that were just frankly terrible deals. I mean, it just, they, they ended up, Orsted ended up having to pay. for whatever the utility companies had invested time and money and effort and et cetera, uh, into, you know, the development work on these deals, um, in case they decided to pull out plus, you know, uh, a little extra. And it's like, that's, that's the way it is. You know, you might think that that's typical, but when you get into a deal like this for an offshore wind farm, uh, I mean, we're starting to talk in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it led to this, this multi billion dollar impairment that they had, you know, last year. So, you know, I think I said on the show six months ago that he was likely to be gone, and guess what? He is. Allen Hall: My feeling about it is there's just a little bit of happenstance, but that's the problem at being in leadership You don't get to choose the economic times in which you're running the company and you have to play what the cards are dealt right, I Wouldn't say any offshore wind developer in the United States. This has great numbers at the minute So it isn't like Orsted has is in a different bucket at the minute it but I I I think the, my contention at the time was New Jersey really screwed Orsted. Not the, the government in New Jersey was just negotiating in bad faith. And they wanted to take all the federal tax credits, which Orsted agreed to, and then they needed them back. And then it just went back and forth there.
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    27 mins
  • Shell 2024 Financial Results, Mitsubishi Reviews Offshore Projects

    Shell 2024 Financial Results, Mitsubishi Reviews Offshore Projects
    Feb 10 2025
    On News Flash, Allen and Phil discuss Caverion's acquisition of Huolto-Lepistö, Mitsubishi re-evaluating their offshore wind assets and Shell's 2024 financial report. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.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! Welcome to Uptime News Flash. Industry news lightning fast. Your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, and Phil Totaro discuss the latest deals, mergers, and alliances that will shape the future of wind power. News Flash is brought to you by IntelStor. For market intelligence that generates revenue, visit www.intelstor.com. Allen Hall: Well Phil, a busy week in mergers and acquisitions. Caverion has acquired Huolto-Lepistö’s, a wind turbine maintenance business. Now this acquisition gives Caverion a new base on Finland's west coast. And the acquired business specializes in wind turbine service lifts. Repairs, inspections, and maintenance. There does seem to be a lot more activity in Finland Phil Totaro: for wind. Yeah. And, and as their installed base grows they have a lot of large turbines up there in, in Finland. So I think the average, if I remember correctly based on our data and Intel store, the average turbine size in Finland these days is Something like. 5. 5 megawatts and upwards of like 140 something meter rotor. Again, taking the entire installed base in, into account. So, growing installed base, big turbines, big responsibility, and. Admittedly, I don't know very much about Kaverian as a company, but looking into it after this deal was announced earlier this week it's, it's very interesting how they're trying to position themselves. And the fact that they want to go after the, the wind services market also demonstrates, I think that they're making a commitment to a segment that they see a lot more growth potential with. Allen Hall: Over in Japan, Mitsubishi Corporation is reviewing its offshore wind projects due to significant changes in the business environment. Now, the company leads consortia that won three projects in Japan's first state run offshore wind auction in 2021, and those projects total about 1. 7 gigawatts of capacity. Capacity. The partner company, Chubu Electric, posted an 18 billion yen loss on these projects. It looks like Mitsubishi is trying to reevaluate the profit margin on these projects, and with the high inflation in Japan and maybe even stagnation being discussed, it's going to get a little rough for Mitsubishi. I wonder if they're going to finish these projects. Phil Totaro: Yeah, well, it's funny because Japan was a market with their offshore wind potential that looked, poised to take off. They heavily invested in floating offshore wind demonstrator projects, more than a decade ago. They have a finite amount of, of space on land, obviously, where, They can install onshore wind and solar for that matter. So the exploitation of offshore wind looked like a really promising segment to the market. But they've never been able to get their act together. And I mean, this is frankly a very common thing amongst a lot of governments that, that have a lot of offshore wind potential, resource potential. But they don't have the right structure in place. And you could say the same thing about South Korea. You can say the same thing about Brazil. That they, they've got a tremendous amount of interest and enthusiasm. And frankly, people that want to invest money there, including Mitsubishi, but if they don't get a sense of like how they're going to see a...
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    6 mins
  • Vårgrønn’s Massive UK Offshore Floating Wind Project

    Vårgrønn’s Massive UK Offshore Floating Wind Project
    Feb 6 2025
    In the Uptime Spotlight today is Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, the company building the world's largest offshore wind farm with a government contract: Green Volt. Stephen discusses the massive project's progress, planning, and logistics to be completed by 2030. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.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! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Bull, CEO of Vårgrønn, who is leading the charge in developing some of Europe's most ambitious floating offshore wind projects. Stephen brings over 25 years of energy industry experience and currently oversees Vårgrønn's Impressive portfolio of projects across Northern Europe, including Greenvolt, set to become the world's largest floating offshore wind farm with a government contract. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Steven, welcome to the show. Thanks so much, great to be here. Well, the Greenvolt project is one of the most important Impressive projects going on in the world right now, and you're heavily involved with that, of course, as being the CEO of Vårgrønn and I want to understand a little bit about how that project came together and what problem Greenvolt is trying to solve. Stephen Bull: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's kind of neat to say it's the most exciting project. I think it's, uh, it's quite a scary project in many respects for us as well when you work within the offshore wind sector at the moment, but definitely within floating offshore wind. Yeah. If we sort of dial it back down to the project itself, I mean, what we're solving for here is, is the generic problem with offshore wind in deeper waters. And, uh, and really when you start to push the boundaries beyond 60, you know, 60 odd plus, 70 meter water depths, you need to start to go into the floating territory. Um, and that's something that you find distinctly within the coast of Scotland as well. There's only so much of that seabed that is shallow and then it starts to push out there. So, Scottish authorities, the Scottish Crown Estate, the guys who basically own the seabed license around there, want to have further developments within offshore wind, but um, they are inhibited in the sense that they have deeper waters. Um, at the same time, there's still a quite large oil and gas industry in, of Scottish waters as there is in Norway, as well as the two largest producers in Europe. They also have carbon issues, carbon problems of CO2 emissions from their own Scope 1 emissions. So the Scottish authorities have put together a concept which is called targeted oil and gas. And essentially they've been looking to lease out areas where we could develop offshore wind, both that go straight into the grid. For the benefit of consumers, but also could help decarbonize oil and gas operations as well. So that's the background around it. It's happened pretty quickly. To be honest, we, we received our, uh, you know, essentially our lease just over a year ago, year and a half ago. Uh, we won a contract for difference from the UK government in September. Uh, for 400 megawatts and we're just basically right in the middle of procurement and developing the whole concept now so we could be online by 2030. Allen Hall: Wow, that's a really short timeline.
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    24 mins
  • Wind Turbine Cooling System Improvements

    Wind Turbine Cooling System Improvements
    Feb 5 2025
    This week we discuss cooling system patents, including Siemens Gamesa's method for creating air channels for better temperature control, Goldwind's predictive temperature moderating, and GE's adjustable power output based on component temperatures. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.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! This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: Phil, this episode of Power Up is going to focus on cooling. And as wind turbines get bigger and bigger, thermal controls are becoming more important. You need to make sure that there's no thermal runaways, and with the amount of power. 8, 10, 12, 15 megawatts going on inside of some of these nacelles. You're seeing a lot of patents and innovation around cooling, and this first one is from Siemens Gamesa, and it has to do with the generator itself. And the patent describes a cooling system for the generator that places air channels to better control temperature. Within the generator. Now, the key feature includes the magnet elements arranged in rows with groove like recesses that allow for targeted airflow between the components. Now, that design creates multiple cooling paths with gaps somewhere between like a half a millimeter and ten millimeters wide that enable better heat dissipation. So, obviously Siemens Gamesa sees the future, which is thermal control in a generator, because if you have overheating in generators That can be quite expensive to fix, so they're trying to address it up front, Phil, with this basically airflow pattern. Phil Totaro: Yeah, and, and as you mentioned, not only are generators getting bigger but particularly for offshore, the operational efficiency matters a lot. and how you control both the flux density and efficiency of the generator, balanced against how you have to cool the thing to maintain the kind of an air gap that you need in order to get the efficiency you want. It, it just throws these thermal engineers into complete chaos most of the time. So the way that they're architecting this is so that you can control the airflow in those channels in between the, the magnet holders to prevent hotspots. For the long term, if it keeps happening and you keep getting the hotspot, it can actually cause thermal degradation in the magnets and in The, the generator structure itself. So again, in order to maintain kind of peak operational efficiency, cooling becomes a a critical component to that. Allen Hall: Our second patent is from Goldwind and it is also focused on cooling up and then the cell. And it. Is an idea that is wrapped around really a sophisticated coolings control system that uses predictive temperature monitoring to optimize cooling. And as you can well imagine, as these generators get bigger, there's just a lot of nooks and crannies and you need to be able to monitor the hole in the cell area for temperature increases and to control it. Well, this system connects a cooling device and a yaw controller to a frequency converter that controls the operation based on the predictive temperature. Temperature thresholds. Now the key innovation is ability to anticipate when cooling will be needed and by calculating future temperature profiles and allowing a more proactive reaction to that temperature control. So they're, they're using a lot more information to predict where the temperatures will be and from what it...
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    9 mins