Windpower Engineering & Development - OCTOBER 2017

A FEW GIFT IDEAS FOR THAT SPECIAL WIND TECH / page 6 October 2017

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HERE’S WHAT I THINK

Editorial Director | Windpower Engineering & Development | pdvorak@wtwhmedia.com

A few observations from the offshore wind industry

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savvy Brit recently suggested that the U.S. offshore wind industry should take advantage of European experience.

The reason, he said almost in confidence, was that “We’ve made most of the mistakes already.” It’s hard to argue with that logic. Letting novices head up unfamiliar and complex construction projects sounds like a formula for failure.

But in a sense, we do want novices leading unfamiliar and complex construction projects. In particular, we want those people managing the offshore wind farms in U.S. waters because the experience will be priceless. Experience and competition breed innovation and lower costs. Realistically, however, doing it without foreign assistance is unlikely.

Certainly there is a lot to learn. And as an interested observer, here are several observations that come to mind.

First, onshore work is a comparative piece of cake.

Offshore costs are outrageous and will have to come down.

The first U.S. offshore wind farm south of Block Island, R.I. came with a hefty price tag, some $50 million per turbine.

Home owners will be hard pressed to pay for such projects.

A recent online report claimed the average Norwegian home paid the most in Europe at 30 ¢/kWh. Meanwhile, a panelist at the recent Chadbourne Global Energy and Finance Conference said production costs in Europe had fallen to 10 ¢/ kWh. For comparison, a First Energy electric bill for Midwest homeowners put costs at 6.63 ¢/kWh. But there is hope for lower pricing. A feature story in this issue discusses two significant ideas, one that may partially automate construction and another for lower cost floating structures.

Larger turbines are necessary and coming. It’s hard to imaging turbines larger than 10-MW but some construction firms are betting that 13 to 15-MW turbines within the next few years could keep developers competitive. Consider a 500-MW project. It could proceed with 5-MW turbines now in production on 100 towers, or not-yet-prototyped 10-MW turbines on 50 towers. The latter would mean 50 fewer foundations, towers, transition pieces, less cable, and fewer connections.

The excited talk about offshore work is froth on the industry. By one count, U.S. planners foresee 28 offshore projects with a total potential capacity of 23,735 MW. Most projects, however, take 10 to 15 years from start to finish and that timer only recently started. Such megawatt figures are fun to talk about, but realistic completion dates for more than a few wind farms are around 2027. (The Icebreaker project in Lake Erie could finish by 2020.) Leases have been let for just a few projects, and the foundations, towers, turbines, and cables have not been ordered and won’t be for years.

Plan on a short supply chain. Too much dependence on Europe sends the supply chain across the Atlantic.

And plan on at least two U.S. chains to promote competition and prevent bottlenecks. Any offshore wind farm should be as much a job creator for the U.S. as a power generator.

The future is floating. There is not much shallow water, 40 m or less, around the U.S. Maps from NOAA provide accurate depth details. The Hywind floating wind farm in Scotland should be the initial U.S. model. Water in the North Sea measures 30 to 40-m deep out for miles so monopiles there make sense. The idea of sighting turbines in shallow water around vacation spots like Cape Cod may bring years of delays, as it did for Cape Wind. Opposition from residents and professed supporters continued for more than a decade. Hence, the least contested sites will likely be far out in deep water.

Of course, these few observations just scratch the surface of managing offshore wind farm construction.

Financing and risk, other areas where there is a lot to learn, sound like Greek to the untrained ear. But if you like learning, the wind is your industry. W

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10/4/17 12:28 PM

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10/4/17 12:10 PM

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OCTOBER 2017 • vol 9 no 5

CONTENTS

D E PA R T M E N T S 01

Editorial: A few observations on the U.S.

30 Safety: Keeping wind techs safe from

06

Windwatch: Wind tech gift guide, Lighter

32 Condition monitoring: Finding the cost

18

Policy: Offshore potential bigger than we think

22

Project management: Training drills for

36 Turbine of the month: You can’t buy this

25

Reliability: The three pillars of modern wind-

38 Operations & Maintenance: How vortex

28

Bolting: Avoiding the big pinch

64 Downwind: A tough turbine for typhoons

offshore industry

smaller generators, OffGridBox, Coldest wind farm, and Wind work around North America

better project management

resource assessment

18 ON THE COVER

A crane carefully lifts a 126-m rotor to an offshore turbine at the Nordergründe wind farm in the North Sea. Nordergründe features 18 Senvion 6.2M126 wind turbines with an installed capacity of 111 MW. Photo courtesy of Senvion

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jobsite hazards

of curtailment

34 Software: O&M software design will decide how well it is used

VAWT, but you can buy its power

generators boost wind-turbine performance

F E AT U R E S

42 Automating construction and a floating foundation of geopolymer concrete could take big bites out of offshore construction costs

If new techniques do not bring down costs of constructing wind farms offshore, the industry will be difficult to justify outside of government largess.

Fortunately, the two ideas here suggest it is still possible to take sharp knifes to high costs.

48 O&M strategies for offshore wind work

Suggested solutions to offshore O&M challenges come from a range of organizations. Most ideas involve monitoring systems that predict a need for preventive maintenance. The primary goals: Avoid turbine downtime and costly network faults.

53 Going digital: The substation gets a makeover

The substation plays a critical grid role. It acts as the motherboard of the power industry, controlling and directing power on demand, and making sure the lights stay on.

58 The future of cable maintenance and repair in offshore wind farms

Now that the U.S. offshore wind sector has one working wind farm and more projects in the pipeline, it’s a good time to start thinking about the future of the subsea cables that transmit electricity to the mainland grid.

www.windpowerengineering.com

OCTOBER 2017

10/4/17 5:35 PM

PRIEBE

PENG

MARRAM

KUNSMAN

JUHNKE HENDRICKSON

GROSS EICHELBERGER

BURGER

BLITSTEIN

ABEL

CONTRIB U TO R S

OCTOBER 2017

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JANICE ABEL, Principal Consultant at ARC Advisory Group, is the lead analyst in areas of enterprise manufacturing intelligence, manufacturing execution systems, operational analytics, batch management software, and operator training simulators. Abel has more than 25 years of experience researching and consulting on automation technologies, which spans the entire spectrum of process and manufacturing industries.

RYAN BLITSTEIN is the Director of Renewable Energy at Uptake, a predictive analytics company in Chicago. The company develops products that make industries more productive, efficient, safe, and secure.

TYLER BURGER, a mechanical engineer with PMI Industries Inc, has worked in the marine energy for four years. His focus is on marine renewable energy such as wind, wave, and tidal.

His specific areas of interest are the cables used to transmit power and lines used to hold devices in place. The preservation of the environment for future generations means a lot to Burger, so he’s dedicated to making a positive impact on the way we convert energy. For more on the latest innovations offshore wind and marine renewables, visit his company’s Ocean Engineering Blog.

DR. SCOTT EICHELBERGER has served in many roles at Vaisala and 3TIER (prior to its acquisition), including energy assessment analyst, application and product manager, and technical business development manager. He has personally conducted and reviewed hundreds of wind assessment reports. Eichelberger received his Ph.D in atmospheric science from the University of Washington, and his B.S. in meteorology and mathematics from Texas A&M University.

ALAN GROSS is President of AMG Bolting Solutions, Inc., a leading provider of complete turnkey bolting solutions.

MATTHEW HENDRICKSON is Head of Energy Operations at Vaisala. He has managed energy assessments for more than 4,500 MW of operating wind farms, and more than 30,000 MW of preconstruction projects. Prior to Vaisala, Hendrickson led EDPR’s North American Assessment group as Director of Energy Assessment from 2003 to 2011.

He has a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Houston.

AXEL JUHNKE is Managing Director, Germany at independent technical consultancy, K2 Management. With an educational background in mechanical engineering, Axel has been in the wind industry since 2008, consulting on and project managing wind energy projects, before joining K2 Management to lead its German operations.

STEVEN A. KUNSMAN is the Director of Product Management and Applications for the product group Grid Automation Systems in North America — a part of ABB’s Grid Automation business unit within its Power Grids division.

He is based in Raleigh, NC. Reach him at: steven.a.kunsman@us.abb.com.

LANCE MARRAM is in charge of Senvion’s growing operations in North America, where the company’s regional business now has an installed capacity of over 2.6 GW of wind energy, which is generated by almost 1,300 turbines across 13 U.S. states and Canadian provinces. For more than 15 years, Marram has served as a senior executive for global wind-turbine manufacturers and in consulting and advisory roles for wind-energy developers. His extensive experience spans a full spectrum of sales, business development, and operations functions across North America, Central and South America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and other emerging markets.

BINGQING PENG is a Data Scientist at Vaisala working within the energy divisions R&D group to continually advance and improve the accuracy of its renewable energy assessment and forecasting methodologies. She has a master’s degree in statistics from the University of Washington and B.S. in mathematics from Nanjing University.

MARYRUTH BELSEY PRIEBE has a special interest in clean tech, green buildings, and renewable energy. In recent years, Priebe has worked as the senior editor of The Green Economy magazine. She is a regular blogger for several green business ventures and has contributed to the editorial content of eco-living websites (including ecolife.com and greenyour. com). Reach Priebe at jadecreative.com.

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OCTOBER 2017

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A FEW GIFT IDEAS FOR THAT SPECIAL WIND TECH OCTOBER 2017

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YOU GOT THEIR LIST and you checked it twice.

However, this holiday season you want to go the extra mile because of all the hard work the wind technician in your life puts in throughout the year. Unsure of where to start?

Lucky for you, the staff here at Windpower Engineering & Development has been tracking news of potentially useful tools and devices for the person brave enough to make the 80-m climb up a turbine tower no matter the weather.

We present our 2nd annual wind technicians gift guide.

windpowerengineering.com

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W I N D W A T C H

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1. WINTER WARMTH

When the weather outside is frightful, workers may appreciate the N-Ferno Thermal Jacket and Bibs. The new outwear pieces from Ergodyne keep workers warm, dry, and safe by providing the first layer of defense against frigid working environments. Both are made with a water and wind-resistant 500 denier outer shell that’s breathable — letting out sweat and moisture while keeping out snow, rain, and wind. The new jacket and bib feature 3M Thinsulate Insulation, which helps workers retain warmth during those long days outside at wind sites. The N-Ferno jacket also features an adjustable and removable hood, water-resistant audio pockets, adjustable cuffs with spandex sleeves (to keep in warmth), and reflective high-visibility accents.

Ergodyne ergodyne.com 8

2. HOLIDAY HARNESS

Give the gift of comfort and safety with the re-designed Journeyman FLEX harness. FallTech has upgraded its Journeyman FLEX to include extra padding and straps that offer moisture-wicking linings and more secure webbing.

FallTech’s proprietary CamLock torso adjusters on the aluminum models allow for simpler, onehanded adjustment that lock in place throughout the work day. A Visi-Lock Quick Connect buckles on the chest and legs include a visual indicator that displays green when properly fastened.

Also, strategically positioned Hip D-rings helps optimize a worker’s positioning for comfort and efficiency. Both the FallTech Journeyman FLEX aluminum and steel harnesses meet OSHA 1910.269 & 1926 and ANSI Z359.1.-2014, and are rated to 425 lbs (193 kg) capacity.

Fall Tech http://falltech.com

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3. GIVE ‘EM GRIP

Avoid bruised knuckles and keep those hardworking hands safe (you know, for hanging tree ornaments and wrapping — and unwrapping — gifts) with the 3M DBI-SALA Comfort Grip Connector. Wind techs working uptower typically connect and reconnect their snap hooks dozens of times a day. The new Comfort Grip Connector from 3M Fall Protection makes the task safer and easier by providing workers flexibility to anchor easily in multiple orientations. When connected to a vertical or transverse application, such as a pipe or ladder, the hand-guard pin shears in the event of a fall, so the connector aligns with the direction of the fall and remains securely anchored.

The Comfort Grip is designed and certified to arrest a fall when loaded in multiple orientations, and for up to 3,600 pounds in transverse and gate strengths.

3M Fall Protection 3m.com

www.windpowerengineering.com

4. GIVE ‘EM GLOW

Thanks to this new reflective vest from Ty-Flot, the special wind tech in your life can ensure visibility and quick access to tools at a jobsite.

The MOLLE Retractable Tool Vest is ergonomically designed with angled webbing for safe, quick, and easy access to tools and equipment. Reflective accents provide for clear worker visibility. Durable tool pockets are woven strategically into the vest to allow unobstructed use of a body harness or D-Ring harness. For enhanced safety, a secure locking system ensures pouches are never inadvertently released.

Additionally, the vest is made of breathable mesh and is customizable with multiple adjustment points for girth and height.

Ty-Flot, Inc. ty-flot.com OCTOBER 2017

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W I N D W A T C H

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5. ELECTRIFY THEIR LIFE

With quick adjust torque settings, a smooth, continuous power flow, and an electronic bolt counter, what more could a wind tech ask for in a torque wrench?

Rad Torque, makers of the E-RAD BLU pneumatic series of torque wrench tools, now offer a digital V-RAD series of electric-powered torque wrenches. The V-Rad has fully programmable preset torque settings with a torque range up to 2,500 ft. lbs, and is available in 120 and 220V. Every tool includes a reaction arm, retaining ring, storage case, operation manual, and calibration certificate with ISO 17025 accreditation.

Rad Torque http://radtorque.com/ products/digital-v-rad/

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9 7 6. SAFETY FIRST

Hand injuries are one of the top safety problems wind techs have on the job, yet many are preventable. With Tillman’s ANSI Level 4-rated 1766 gloves, you can give the gift of hand protection.

These lightweight 15-gauge nylon gloves offer excellent abrasion resistance, comfort, and dexterity. The 1766’s are made of a seamless knit nylon shell with a noncoated, open back for breathability. A durable, nitrile micro-foam coating in the palm of each glove absorbs oils and provides for better gripping power and cut resistance. The Tillman 1766 is available in five sizes with colored cuffs for easy identification.

Tillman http://jtillman.com 10

7. LET IT SNOW! (OR RAIN) Whether rain, snow, or sweat is pouring down, it will go unnoticed by the wind tech who snags a pair of Brass Knuckle’s new Orange Crush eye protection this holiday season.

These glasses channel moisture away along the brow line and a comfortable rubber gasket seals the glasses snugly against the face. Currently, only Orange Crush features this unique type of liquid splash protection from a traditional dust goggle.

Coupled with Brass Knuckle’s N-FOG PLUS anti-fog coating standard on every pair, Orange Crush is ideal for outdoor use, regardless of the weather. Other features include super-flex temples that hug any sized face and TempleTouch technology that grips the sides of the head comfortably with molded-in nibs for non-slip performance.

Brass Knuckle brassknuckleprotection.com

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8. WORKING LIGHT FROM A BRIGHT STAR

This suggestion, for a light that you can aim while keeping your hands free, came from motorcycle maintenance tips. Don’t leave home without it. The 120 lumen light comes from what Ironton calls Superbright Nichia LEDs. The lens telescopes to focus the beam or opens it for a flood light. Three output settings allow 50%, 100%, or a strobe for who knows what. Up to eight hours run time on 50% and three hours at 100%. The bulb life should last a career or 100,000 hours.

Northern Tool tinyurl.com/northerntool-headlamp

www.windpowerengineering.com

9. EMERGENCY BACK-UP

SKYLOTEC’s DEUS 3700 makes an ideal stocking stuffer, and provides wind techs with an extra safety device while working uptower. The DEUS 3700 is an easy-to-use and reliable tool for escape, self-rescue, or assisted rescue. In the case of an emergency, it lets multiple workers evacuate a tower with only one device and without re-rigging. It is equipped with fire-resistant rope that is safe for use in extreme situations (such as the unlikely event of a event of a fire in the hub of a wind turbine). This lightweight rescue device with a centrifugal brake can be worn on the body with other personal-protective gear, and works up to a height of 180 m for a maximum load is 140 kg.

The DEUS 3700 is third-party tested and certified to ANSI, CSA, and EN standards.

SKYLOTEC skylotec.com OCTOBER 2017

10/4/17 12:40 PM

W I N D W A T C H

12 10 11 10. BORESCOPE BLISS

For those who specialize in gearbox O&M work, Gradient Lens has announced a new Deluxe Kit for its popular Hawkeye V2 Video Borescope.

The new Hawkeye V2 Deluxe Kit includes a 4-way articulating V2 videoscope with optional V2 stand, V2 Rigidizer, 90º prism tip, and closefocus tip. The new V2 with optional accessories gives technicians the tools necessary for broad visual inspection of any generator or turbine. The V2 Deluxe Kit also comes inside a newly designed Hawkeye V2 carrying case.

The case is waterproof and resistant to corrosion and impact damage.

Gradient Lens Corp. gradientlens.com OCTOBER 2017

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11. THE GIFT OF FLIGHT

Just in time for the holidays, Yuneec International announced the H520 sUAS, the company’s first drone product dedicated to commercial use. The H520 system is for licensed UAS pilots, but a drone may be on the wish list of a few wind techs. It incorporates enterprise-grade cameras and mission planning software for careful flight and inspection use around wind towers and blades. The H520 drone also features high-visibility Hazard Orange fuselage, and a six-rotor design capable of emergency flight with only five rotors.

Yuneec International http://us.yuneec.com

12. KNEEL IN COMFORT Kneeling has never been safer, says the developer of the recoil kneepads. The devices were developed by an engineering student who wanted to ease her father’s knee pain that came from his work in the trades. The company now develops other lines of safety clothing. Regarding the pads, they reduce the pressure on knees by 76% and provide comfort and prevents injury. The company says the pads also reduce the risk of developing arthritis, bursitis, and osteoarthritis.

The recoil feature comes from six springs to improve stability. The company says it protects better than standard foam and gel kneepads.

Recoil Kneepads recoilkneepads.com windpowerengineering.com

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W I N D W A T C H

Axial flux generator ready to take weight and problems out of nacelles A SMALL STARTUP IN BELGIUM is finalizing the development of a prototype generator, which is lighter, smaller, and more efficient than conventional designs of similar output. Inventor and Magnax founder Peter Leijnen say his axial flux 100-kW prototype weights about 850 kg, which is significantly less than a traditional direct-drive generator that typically weighs 4,000 kg or more. The advantages of the new technology include higher efficiency (96% to 97%, depending on the size of the machine), reliability, and scalability with relatively low production costs. While the prototype will be installed in a medium-scale, direct-drive wind turbine, Leijnen adds that Magnax’ focus is on developing megawatt-sized machines for large-scale wind turbines.

“The idea for a new generator came when a client asked me to develop a new type of wind turbine, which requires a direct-drive generator and significantly

Magnax directdrive generators will allow avoiding troublesome gearboxes.

challenge lay ahead in turning the technology into a design that could be produced with a high degree of automation on an industrial scale, and with power ratings up to several MWs.

The idea for a new generator came when a client asked me to develop a new type of wind turbine, which requires a direct-drive generator and significantly lower weight. So, I decided to build one. lower weight,” says Leijnen. After some market research, he concluded that no existing generator would fit the requirements. “So, I decided to build one. Previous research indicated that the target could only be met by the socalled ‘axial-flux’ topology that works for generators and motors.”

Fortunately, Ghent University, which is close to where Leijnen lives, had been researching axial-flux technology over the last six years. Still, a considerable 12

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Based on the calculations and electromagnetic simulations from the University, Leijnen’s team designed and built the 100-kW prototype “in two years of hard-core R&D and prototyping,” he says.

Despite their electromagnetic superiority over radial-flux machines, axial-flux designs pose serious production challenges. Leijnen says that is the main reason most generators today use a radial flux.

www.windpowerengineering.com

The first challenge, he says, was finding a way to accurately fix and position the stator teeth and the windings in the stator, which is difficult because there are high magnetic forces acting between the rotor and the stator. The air gap must be kept uniform and small.

“The second challenge lay in cooling the windings, which is difficult because they are deep within the stator, and between

With equal diameter, the Magnax design is about half the length and a third of the weight of a conventional generator of similar output.

The three-unit design is a concept illustration.

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W I N D W A T C H

The large hollow shaft on Magnax Machines provides ample space for the integration of a load-bearing system, which is independent of the generators internal bearing. This allows designing a load-bearing system that fits the application. In addition, says Leijnen, the axial air gap, means even deflections of the bearing system do not affect the air gap.

It is also possible to use the internal Magnax Machine bearing alone in cases where only torque loads are applied.

He says he’s convinced that wind power will remain the largest fraction of renewable energy generation, even with solar rising exponentially. “With innovations like these, wind-generated power will eventually become cheaper than fossil energy, even with submegawatt turbines in standalone applications. Offshore wind has even greater potential. Technical advances will enable the construction of everlarger turbines, thus further driving down energy costs. Deployment on such a large scale and over such vast spaces as the ocean will necessitate low or even no-maintenance components, and our generators, being direct-drive and having encapsulated windings, will be hard to beat on this front, too.”

the two rotor disks. The third challenge is that traditional axial-flux machines are notoriously difficult to manufacture and it’s next to impossible to highly automate their production. Radial-flux machines are easier to manufacture because they use more or less the same principles of wellknown induction generators.” Leijnen says the new, patented mechanical concept solves the challenges and enables highly automated manufacturing.

Electromagnetic calculations on axialflux machines, he adds, are particularly difficult and require a huge amount of FEM simulation and analytical calculation.

“Parameters such as terminal voltage, iron losses, eddy-current losses in the permanent magnets, copper losses, torque ripple, and cogging torque must be calculated before you can even start on the mechanical design. Over the past six years, Ghent University has been gaining expertise in this field, specifically for axial-flux machines. So they created the electromagnetic model, which I then translated into a mechanical design using our new concept,” says Leijnen.

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So what is next for Magnax? “From a product development perspective, I have a clear view of how we can further innovate with these machines. Not only in the wind industry but also for other uses such as elevators and aircraft,” he says.

Leijnen adds that since the concept is proven, his co-founder Daan Moreels is preparing a go-to-market plan. “It will take some time to find the ideal use cases and co-creation opportunities, but we’ll continue to further leverage industrial innovation with direct-drive motor and generator technology that outperforms conventional technology in weight, efficiency, reliability, and costeffectiveness. This way we support the global transition to fully renewable power generation and ultra-efficient machines.” W

LEFT: Radial fluxes and hence forces, project radially in most conventional generators.

Magnax proposed an axial flux design which present several advantages and design challenges.

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Wind (and solar) powered OffGridBox could be useful after the hurricane passes THE DEVELOPER OF A CLEVER RESCUE SYSTEM called OffGridBox, says it houses the equipment to produce potable water and provide power where none was before, or thanks to mother nature, once was. The developer originally conceived the box for less developed regions of the planet where there was no access to sustainable, reliable electricity and safe water.

The company, based in Italy, says that it takes only a few hours using a small crane and a pickup truck to deliver and start. What's more, it also provides basic training to local maintenance operators — no matter their education level. It's a great opportunity to empower women, they say, while providing the basics of life.

The Box empowers women several ways, says Bas Berens, VP European Partnerships for OffGridBox. “First of all, we will employ two to three women to manage each Box. That totals to 375 women for the 150 boxes we plan to install next year. They will be trained to operate the box, after which they can explain to rural communities how it all works, and do basic maintenance. They will be responsible for distributing the clean water and battery packs and for collecting money to pay for the services. The women will also receive a bonus when they expand the customer base, so they will learn some marketing and sales skills,” said Berends.

Secondary employment for women, he adds, may derive from the availability of electricity for use in barber shops, retail shops, and other small businesses that can stay open after dark. Watch the video: http://preview.tinyurl.com/ogb-video

“Apart from the positive effects for these specific women, we also believe the solar energy and clean water will bring huge benefits for all participating women: they will have healthier lives due to the purified water and absence of dirty kerosene fumes that once lit their homes at night. They will also have to spend less time collecting fuel for a fire to boil dirty water. Using electric light instead of kerosene lamps or candles also let's women cook more efficiently.”

Berends says a next step for the OffGridBox is to add connectivity as an extra service to customers through WiFi hotspots powered by the Box’s solar generated electricity. This will help rural people connect, get information about prices for their produce, and possibilities for employment, and thereby empower themselves.

Power for the Box equipment will come from a small wind turbine and solar panels, and potable water comes from an onboard filtration systems driven by pumps and batteries. The solar panels also collects rain which is funneled to an onboard tank.

The Box has already served in one disaster relief mission in the Philippines after a typhoon wiped out power, communication, and safe water. Like the southeast U.S., the only certainty was that the sun would rise in the morning and there would be water of poor quality.

However, the OffGridBox sustained a small number of people with renewable power and sterilized water. W

TOP: A peek inside the box shows controls, batteries, water purification equipment, and the blue, water-storage tank. The solar panels can be photovoltaic or concentrating power.

BOTTOM: The solar panels also collect rain water. OffGridBox says it is helping NGOs, schools, hospitals, businesses and homeowners around the world produce clean power and water.

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Tahkoluoto: The world’s first offshore wind farm for icy conditions Enerpac’s Synchoist loadpositioning system was used to install the heavy gravitybased foundations at the Tahkoluoto offshore wind farm.

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A CITY THAT HAS BURNED DOWN and been rebuilt nine times is bound to have grit and a long history. Yet according to many travel sites, Pori is a “west-coast gem,” situated by the Kokemäenjoki river in Finland. The seaside city is said to have a relaxed atmosphere, with summers that are comfortable and temperatures that hover in the low to mid-70’s (and don’t worry, the last major fire was in 1852). Winters, however, are another story.

Winters are typically long, dry, cold, and cloudy.

But that did not deter offshore wind developer, Suomen Hyotytuuli, a company that also considered Pori a gem and particularly for its wind potential. The power production company’s mission is simple: produce wind-generated electricity for its shareholders, which are primarily Finnish investors. However, the company clearly enjoys a challenge because it decided to build an offshore wind farm in the shallow coastline off of Pori where winds are weak and the sea is freezing.

The company’s 40-MW Tahkoluoto offshore wind farm was recently commissioned (ahead of schedule), and includes 10, 4-MW Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy wind turbines that are 90-meters tall, with a rotor diameter of 130 m.

“Conditions for offshore wind power in Finland differ from those in the North Sea — and include a sea that freezes, a shallow coastline, a hard seafloor, less wind,” says Toni Sulameri, the Managing Director for Suomen Hyötytuuli. “Plus, wind farms that are located near the coastline are different from the conditions in the North Sea and demand a different kind of technology.”

Tahkoluoto is considered Finland’s first offshore wind farm built specifically for icy conditions on offshore foundations. In fact, it is considered the one of the first in the world build to withstand ice loads. (Ohio’s Icebreaker offshore wind project in Lake Erie may be the second if construction begins as planned next

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year.) Constructed about 0.5 to 3 km from shore in water depths between 8 to 15 m, the wind turbines at Tahkoluoto were mounted on gravity-based steel foundations that were made to endure, and even resist, heavy ice loads. The foundations are filled with rock material and have a unique conical top with a height of about 25 m. It is designed to reduce “ice ridges” or ice buildup common during Pori winters.

The installation of the gravitybased foundations was no easy task.

Enerpac’s Heavy Lifting Synchoist loadpositioning system was selected as the best option to maneuver the initially hollow foundations (weighing up to 500 tons each). As each foundation was lowered through the splashzone and accurately positioned on the seabed, the Synchoist system was used below a crane’s hook to ensure that the foundation remained as close to vertical as possible. This prevented damage to the leveled seabed surface and facilitated the subsequent addition of the turbine tower.

corner, and a diesel-hydraulic power pack with battery backup.

An operator performed the highprecision maneuvering of the foundations wirelessly (via the Synchoist system), and worked alongside the foundation installation team. This let the operator lift and lower each cylinder independently to balance, tilt, and position the load in response to feedback from four leveling sensors on the foundation.

Wind farms located near Finland's coastline work in different conditions than those in the North Sea and demand different technology.

“We wanted the X-frame lifting tool to be completely self-contained without any hoses or wires connected to the vessel.

This way we had maximum flexibility in the movement of the foundation,” says Xavier DeMeulder, Marine Operations Manager, Suomen Hyötytuuli Oy. “The Synchoist

Finnish wind-farm developer, Suomen Hyötytuuli, provided a map showing the progress of construction during installation of the 40-MW Tahkoluoto offshore wind farm off the coast of Pori, Finland.

To safely handle the foundation lift without distortion of the transition-piece flange (it connects the turbine tower), an X-frame lifting tool was developed that connected to the flange. This tool is comprised of a lifting frame with four SyncHoist, self-contained PLC-controlled, push-pull hydraulic cylinders at each 16

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foundation, on the vessel, just above the water, 3 to 4 m into the splash-zone, and then 5 cm above the foundation. Synchoist made the job of installing the gravitybased foundations a good deal easier than using a tailor-made leveling system. The first foundation took 12 hours to install, later foundations took 8 hours as the team became more proficient,” he adds.

The Tahkoluoto wind farm is expected to produce about 155 GWh of electricity

per year. Its main co-operation partners were: Siemens Gamesa (turbines), Technip Offshore Finland Oy (offshore foundations), ABB Oy Power Grids (substation), Pori Energia Sähköverkot Oy (grid connection), Prysmian Finland Oy (offshore cable), Jan De Nul NV (marine operations), Finnish Sea Service Oy (offshore cable installation), and Blue Water Shipping Oy, Finland (port operations and logistics).

A consortium of eight Finnish utility shareholders, led by Suomen Hyotytuuli, financed around 85% of the project, with an additional €20 million ($23.7 million) from the Finnish government.

Technically, the wind farm’s preparation began years ago when a pilot turbine was finished in 2010. “Despite the long development time, the 10 turbines were installed more than a week ahead of the schedule,” says Sulameri. “Going all the way back to planning and authorization, the project’s progress has been helped by the positive attitude of all the interest groups.

All parties have done everything possible to make this project a success.” W

wireless control was excellent, enabling us to make adjustments of as little as 5 cm.”

During installation, the level of the foundation was measured and, when necessary adjusted, at every stage of the lift. DeMeulder explains: “First at the quayside before the lift — this was to establish the center of gravity for each

www.windpowerengineering.com

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Wind work around North America The U.S. wind industry owes much of its growth to Texas. With well over 21,000 MW, the state accounts for nearly one-quarter of the wind capacity in the United States. Over 22,000 Texans work in the industry, many of who maintain the 12,000-plus wind turbines in the state. So, after the devastation Hurricane Harvey left in its wake after making landfall near Corpus Christi, it is impressive and yet perhaps not surprising that wind companies are giving back and showing up to support recovery efforts.

Several companies in the American wind energy industry have agreed to join in for a $1 million donation to Hurricane Harvey repair and rebuilding efforts, and as keystone partners of Habitat for Humanity’s Habitat Hammers Back initiative. Fortunately, all Texas wind turbines emerged unscathed from the storm’s destructive path. But many people did not fare so well. They lost homes, businesses, and more.

Learn about Habitat for Humanity’s hurricane recovery efforts, and how you can help, at habitat.org.

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Target to power about 150 stores with wind

Target, one of the largest retailers in the U.S., is expanding its investment in renewables and sustainable operations. The company recently signed a long-term contract for 100 MW of new wind generation capacity from the Solomon Forks Wind Farm in Kansas.

It is expected to cover the average power needs of 150 stores. Renewable Choice Energy helped arrange the deal.

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Bachmann Electronic is installing their fully integrated condition-monitoring system (CMS) at Ontario’s first utility-scale wind site. The 200-MW Melancthon wind farm has 133 turbines and was commissioned in 2008 by TransAlata, one of Canada’s largest power producers. TransAlta has also contracted Bachmann to upgrade many of the existing GE 1.5 turbine controllers to its new MC205 line.

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U.S. launches initiative for offshore wind standards

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The U.S. Department of Energy, in collaboration with the NREL, BOEM, and AWEA, has formed an Offshore Wind Technical Advisory Panel to develop a set of standards for the offshore wind industry. These standards will provide a platform for the BOEM to establish compliance requirements for reliable offshore wind facilities that safely serve the U.S. electric supply.

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Siemens Gamesa to repower two wind farms in Texas

Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy has been selected by NextEra Energy to repower two wind farms in Texas.

The newly repowered wind projects are expected to boost efficiency and deliver up to 25% more annual power production, while extending service life. Both wind farms currently feature Siemens’ SWT-2.3-93 turbines, which will be upgraded to the SWT-2.3-108 units.

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BC opens largest and unique wind farm

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Pattern Energy officially launched its 179-MW Meikle Wind Farm in British Columbia, Canada. Meikle Wind proved unique because of the rare discovery of dinosaur tracks during construction, which were donated to the Tumbler Ridge Museum. This project provided more than 500,000 person-hours of construction labor, with more than 30% of the contracts awarded to First Nation-affiliated contractors.

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A request for wind power in the Carolinas

Duke Energy Carolinas (DEC) has issued a request for proposals (RFP) for up to 500 MW of wind capacity in the Carolinas. The RFP is open to new or existing or wind facilities, for 100 to 500 MW of delivered capacity, and transported into DEC’s transmission system by the end of 2022.

DEC owns 35+ solar facilities in the region but currently no Carolina wind projects.

windpowerengineering.com

Ontario wind farm gets CMS upgrade

Texas wind farms gain battery storage

E.ON began construction on two Texas Waves energy storage projects, at the existing E.ON Pyron and Inadale wind farms in West Texas. Texas Waves consists of two 9.9-MW short duration energy storage projects using lithium-ion batteries, which will become an integral part of the wind facilities. The systems will provide ancillary services to the ERCOT market.

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UMaine’s floating offshore wind turbine passes review

Offshore consultant, ABS, has completed a review of the Front End Engineering & Design documentation for the VolturnUS, a floating offshore wind turbine developed by the University of Maine Advanced Structures and Composites Center. After 10 years of development, UMaine expects the VolturnUS concept to attract private investment from the U.S. and around the world.

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P OL I CY Lance Marram CEO Senvion North America

Offshore wind setting sail in North America

Senvion has adapted its 6.2M152 wind turbine to the floating offshore foundation, developed by the EolMed consortium. Up to four turbines are set for installation in the French Mediterranean Sea in 2020. The 6.2M152 features a rotor diameter of 152 m, which corresponds to a larger drivetrain, and enables the 6.2M152 to generate more cost-efficient offshore energy.

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e are slowly beginning to consider harnessing the wind off of our coasts in North America by developing more offshore wind-power projects. To date, a small five-turbine wind farm and a handful of pilot projects have been developed in the U.S. The industry has been focused on setting standards, developing regulations, and auctioning offshore waters for potential development. While, in Europe, the offshore wind sector continues to grow and is successfully working on measures to reduce costs.

The industry standard for offshore turbines is a nominal capacity of 5 to 6 MW. In the near future, 10+ MW turbines are expected. While the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Germany are leading in offshore wind power, the U.S. is learning from such frontrunners. Most experts agree that in North America, the potential for offshore wind power means one thing: huge economic opportunities.

Offshore considerations In recent years, wind farms in the UK and Europe have moved from 6 to 12 miles to 24 to 62 miles offshore – and further.

This typically leads to project installations in deeper waters. No matter how far off the coast, the installation of offshore wind turbines requires special jack-up vessels and platforms. These platforms, and some of the vessels, are equipped with movable legs that can be extended as required. They are typically fitted with a crane, and also offer a large deck space.

In key markets, mainly monopile and jacket structures are used for shallower waters. In addition to jackets, which will probably be used as a default in the U.S., tripod foundations (both based on concepts used by the oil industry) are found

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WINNING THE BATTLE

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in shallow and deeper waters. Floating structures come into play at a water depth of 50 m and beyond. They will enable the industry to unlock new offshore opportunities far off the coast and in deep waters in the future. For example, this will be relevant in California and Hawaii.

New turbine installation by average Distance from Coast and Water Depth

Senvion has adapted its 6.2M152 wind turbine to the floating offshore foundation developed by the EolMed consortium. The French Environment and Energy Management Agency has awarded EolMed the installation of four Senvion 6.2M152 turbines in the Mediterranean Sea for the first floating pilot wind farm in France, which is set for installation and commissioning in 2020.

Offshore projects typically require more sophisticated project management. Given the large size of many offshore turbine components, it is ideal to produce them in coastal areas, close to harbors where they can then be loaded onto a ship for transport.

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The foundations, particularly in deeper waters, are a major cost factor for offshore wind farms. One-third of the offshore project costs are the foundations, the electrical system, and turbine installation. However, with the technology becoming more mature, the UK and Europe have seen significant price drops over the last years and the industry in general is expecting costs to continue to fall.

Offshore will be big In addition to the complex foundation structures, offshore wind turbine components are big, heavy, and powerful.

As the components are exposed to heavy wind and salt water, they have a standardized coating for offshore use that prevents corrosion. Offshore turbines are also equipped with redundant components and a highly sophisticated monitoring system that helps avoid unnecessary downtime.

Given the sheer size of many offshore components, it is ideal to produce them in coastal areas, close to harbors where they can be quickly loaded onto a ship.

Most companies charter jack-up vessels to build offshore wind farms. Offshore projects require more sophisticated project management. The overall construction takes much longer than onshore. For a 100-MW onshore project in the U.S. the construction process takes about eight to nine months, whereas two to three seasons are required to complete an offshore project.

The offshore construction process is mainly constrained by wave height and wind speed. The installation of the turbines may not necessarily take longer but the weather risks, of course, are higher than onshore.

Offshore opportunities Offshore wind provides new economic opportunities for coastal areas – particularly in the U.S. where there are an increasing number of commitments to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions and provide clean, cost-effective energy. Wind-power projects off the coast can make use of the large amount of free, untapped space, while being sited close enough to existing substations and transmission infrastructure.

The need to manufacture components close to the place of shipment opens up potential

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economic opportunities and benefits for a whole range of local companies and coastal communities. For example, oil and gas industry suppliers can find a new niche by serving the offshore wind segment.

“The offshore wind industry’s economic potential has often been considered just out of sight on the horizon, much like how operational turbines themselves appear from coastlines. But the fledgling offshore wind industry is finally reaching maturity, promising gigawatts of clean energy and billions in economic opportunity,” writes Silvio Maracci of Energy Innovation in a Forbes blog post published last July.

Interest in offshore wind power is growing, and this is particularly apparent in the United States, where offshore investors and developers are closely observing the market. W

Share of different distances from coast on the cumulative number of turbines

WindEnergy Hamburg 25 – 28 September 2018 Running in parallel

The world’s leading expo for wind energy in co-operation with OCTOBER 2017

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PR OJ ECT MANAGEMENT

Axel Juhnke M a n a g i n g D i r e c t o r, G e r m a n y K2 Management

Training drills for better project management

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ould you go to war without properly planning or training for the mission? It is a heavy question, but one that has resulted in a strategy now recognized by military and business leaders alike. It goes a little like this: plan, prepare, and practice, practice, practice.

The strategy used by several armed forces is known as the Rehearsal of Concept exercise, or ROC drills, and its aim is to provide prep work and risk management to those in the field. ROC drills let soldiers and military leaders rehearse battle plans in advance of a mission. A similar strategy is also gaining momentum in business.

Applied to the wind industry, this concept sees all key project stakeholders gather in a “war room” of sorts to plan, prepare, and practice a project’s construction phase as a type of live rehearsal.

Of course, the stakes of a wind project are inconsistent with those of war. However, a crossindustry management approach lets project 22

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leaders tap into techniques that are already used successfully in other fields. The aim for the wind industry is to effectively anticipate, mitigate, and manage risks that could affect multi-million (and billion) dollar projects over a lifetime. If implemented successfully, the strategy creates transparency between stakeholders and developers, increases safety measures, and can save project costs.

The dress rehearsal Project design and planning is predominantly based on assumptions of what may or may not work at a given project site. Certainly, a contractor may have past experience under his or her belt, but each project and site location is different with unique characteristics and challenges.

By performing a set of ROC drills, project teams can review and test the assumptions prior to implementation. A well-run project can save time and costs, and avoid unnecessary

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snags. For example, imagine a crew and vessels placed on standby during offshore construction because initial timeline plans (the “assumptions”) failed to match reality. It happens, but this is a costly delay that can be avoided with a finetuned rehearsal run or ROC drill.

Tue Lippert had a long career history in the Danish Navy before joining DONG Energy. He is now a Senior Project Manager at K2 Management, and makes a good point: “People can easily ‘fall in love’ with their own ideas, so it is crucial to test and challenge the plans and assumptions before ever going live.” This is particularly true with multi-megawatt power projects.

While at DONG Energy, Lippert successfully introduced the ROC drill concept during construction of UK’s Westermost Rough Offshore Wind Farm, a project with a capacity of over 3,000 MW. It was the first offshore wind farm in the world to make commercial use of 6-MW wind turbines with 75 meter-long blades.

Over 900 people were involved in the offshore construction of the wind farm.

However, Lippert says ROC drills can be used on all projects. “Whether small, large, on or offshore, the drills can create value for developers and contractors across the entire project execution.”

He adds that once potential risks are identified, it is important to link them with an action. “Then move on to secure the flow in the ROC drill. The aim of ROC drills is not to get lost in problem solving, but to identify risks and critical interfaces to enable project teams to turn assumptions into facts.”

To provide an analogy, Lippert suggests imagining musicians from an orchestra practicing solo until performance night. “Developing a wind project without ROC drills is like asking an orchestra to rehearse every instrument and voice in solitude. Then, on the opening night of a concert, the orchestra is expected to come together for the first time and play Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 together — flawlessly.”

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT

The performance ROC drills for each project differ and are based on the wind developer’s needs, and the project goals and challenges.

To begin, specialists and project managers from each department meet in a war room of sorts, with a large map of the wind site and models that represent key equipment and structures (such as the substations, wind turbines, and vessels). This provides visuals for the construction process.

Project managers then explain their role and plan for the project, with input from an independent technical advisor, to determine an ideal course of action (based on the project goals of other departments who are also working on the site). This allows managers, say of the vessel operators to interact with those of the turbine installers, who then may interact with the safety manager, and so on. Together, the full project team rehearses the project execution from start to finish.

“There are always several unexpected findings, and often, more than 100 critical considerations that come up during ROC drills for a wind project,” says Lippert. In fact, of the projects that K2 Management has conducted ROC drills on, each project alone has saved hundreds of thousands of Euros and untold amounts of time by using this assumptions-testing process.

ROC at work.

A K2 Management Rehearsal Of Concept (ROC) drill takes place between the project managers and development team of the Jeonnam offshore project in South Korea.

Practice can make perfect, and rehearsal drills may ensure each step of a project goes off without a hitch.

However, it is important to prepare for the unexpected.

Imagine a boxer in a championship battle who refuses to change his fight plan or adapt his next move based on his opponent’s actions. There are times when a change in game plan is the best course of action, and it is essential to roll with the punches for success.

The same theory holds true for wind projects that encounter unexpected challenges. In the complex, 24

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deadline-driven world of wind, flexible project management is key. In fact, the agile management methodology is a form of project management that ensures flexibility through an iterative, incremental method. It anticipates and expects changes in plans because of the variable nature of people and complex projects.

The MoSCoW method (must have, should have, could have, won’t have — and yes, pronounced like Moscow) is commonly used in business to prioritize courses of action based on changing circumstances. It is a helpful method that can be applied at various project stages, used to decide which requirements to complete first, which can wait, and which to exclude.

A smart yet flexible approach to project management continually evaluates progress, expectations (i.e. costs and deadlines), and adjusts plans accordingly.

The big picture While changes are sometimes inevitable, it is important to keep the end goal in mind. A management concept that originates from the defense industry, called systems engineering (sometimes referred to as systems thinking), can help keep track of the big picture. It accounts for the parts of a system, by examining the linkages and interactions between the components, but within the whole.

With systems engineering, the overall system is just as important as its individual parts. A broad-spectrum view is important to increase efficiencies between parts or departments, and potentially save costs.

So while it is critical to break down (and even practice) the steps that lead to project’s completion, systems engineering maintains that it is just as valuable to account for the interactions between the steps. For a wind project, developers must ensure that a turbine’s foundation meets its tower specs, and that turbines are placed in the ideal spot in relation to one another to account for the wave effect, and so on. Each construction step affects the next stage. As such, seemingly minor changes (a one-day delay in tower delivery, for example) can throw off an entire project timeline.

A project manager using a systems engineering approach can manage unavoidable delays, and schedule or reschedule tasks to save costs because he or she sees the big picture.

The wind industry is one full of innovation, new and exciting technology and modern techniques, all of which are to be expected in such a relatively new sector. However, sometimes reinventing the wheel is not worthwhile, and when risk management outcomes can mean the difference between a profitable project or one rife with issues and costly challenges, looking to other industries for successful risk management techniques can provide a framework for success in wind projects of the future. W

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RELIABILITY

Scott Eichelberger Ph.D. Energy Assessment Analyst and Application & Product Manager Va i s a l a

Bingqing Peng Data Scientist Va i s a l a

Matthew Hendrickson Head of Energy Operations Va i s a l a

The three pillars of modern wind-resource assessment

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tremendous amount has changed in wind-energy technology over the past decade, including the size and capacity of wind turbines along with the business models used to site and finance them. The methods for calculating a project’s annual energy yield have also advanced over the last 10 years.

Previously, an industry-wide underperformance of 10% or more was typical. So, wind-resource analysts were forced to do a deeper evaluation of the way project risk was understood and quantified in energy estimates to learn why and how to improve wind performance predictions.

Following significant validation work across the industry, many consulting firms have demonstrated the calibration of their energy estimation methods compared to actual production data. However, the results showed that most methods performed well — on average. To this day, considerable project-to-project variability in terms of uncertainty remains in validation studies, providing ample incentive to continue to advance wind-resource assessment methods.

Wind-resource assessments have a direct impact on which projects are financed and constructed, and which ones are not. A reduction in uncertainty also improves financial terms for developers. In addition, when wind projects perform closer to expectations, it strengthens the trust between consultants, developers, the financial community, policymakers, and the general public.

While the wind industry continues to gain experience, today’s competitive environment makes it imperative to take advantage of the latest scientific advances, which may increase accuracy, performance, and improve the cost-effectiveness of wind-farm development by reducing the scope and duration

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of measurement campaigns. With tighter financial markets and a push toward more challenging project locations, it is important to ensure that the employed method of wind-resource assessment uses the most sophisticated technology available for siting, optimizing, and financing wind farms.

The three pillars The goal of a wind assessment is to accurately estimate the wind resource and energy output of each wind turbine for a project site over its lifetime, typically 20 to 30 years or more. However, assessments often start with short-term measurement records from a few different points at the project site. So, it is necessary to find a way to translate these measurement records into reliable estimates of wind behavior and power generation at each turbine location over the lifetime of a wind farm.

This is far from a simple task, particularly because other challenges arise due to permitting costs, aggressive timelines, and tight budgets.

Furthermore, accurate wind-resource assessment requires years of expertise and advanced tools in weather and data science.

To create a cost-effective, reliable wind project assessment, while adhering to the market demands of speed and accuracy, a three-tiered approach has proven ideal. It entails use of: 1. Sophisticated physical models 2. Onsite observational data 3. Machine-learning algorithms, which fuse physical models with observational data.

Currently, the most advanced computer or physical model available (which uses physics’ based rules

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10/4/17 5:22 PM

MACHINE LEARNING IN ACTION In a recent case study, Vaisala used a combination of NWP models and observations to develop a machine-learning algorithm to more accurately estimate turbulence intensity (TI). TI is an important factor in wind-resource assessment for site suitability, turbine selection, and wake and turbine performance losses. However, it typically can only be measured at point locations via met towers, or estimated using compute-intensive models.

Mesoscale NWP models, such as WRF, can estimate TI for reasonable computational costs, but can exhibit situational-dependent biases.

To resolve these limitations, Vaisala researchers developed a machine-learning algorithm that is applicable in any geographic location and uses much of the WRF model’s output variables as predictors to produce an improved TI field.

Gradient-boosting regression models produce a first estimate of TI, then variance adjustment is used to better match the observed TI distribution from a large existing training database of diverse, globally distributed met towers. The machine-learningbased TI model is compared to a simple TI model based on physical principles rather than empirical training. The gradient-boosting regression model shows a significant advantage over the baseline model using an independent test set of diverse, globally distributed met towers (as shown in the tables).

The histogram of TI values are for the observational data, as well as for each of the three models: Baseline, Machine Learning, and Machine Learn with Variability Adjustment.

Notice the good agreement in the third chart. The histograms represent the aggregated data across all 29 test sites.

The scatter plot compares observed and predicted TI values at each of 29 test sites. The green squares denote the Baseline model, and the red triangles represent the Machine Learning with Variability Adjustment model. Typically, dots matching up with the trend line are more favorable (the red dots show better agreement than the green dots from the baseline case).

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RELIABILITY

to explain and predict the physical atmosphere) is the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model. WRF is an open-sourced numerical weatherprediction (NWP) model that has been collaboratively developed across many institutions, including the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, and the Forecast Systems Laboratory.

WRF plays a key role in the threetiered approach because it calculates the fine-scale spatial structure of wind resources across a project site (i.e. turbine-toturbine wind speed variations), and the long-term climate variability of the wind resource (i.e. monthto-month and year-to-year wind speed variations). Weather and climate are extremely complex to predict and understand. The WRF model’s ability to capture a larger percentage of the physical and dynamical processes driving the timevarying atmospheric variability leads to more accurate results, and it is currently the most technically complete model.

Onsite measurements are a key investment in a wind farm’s resource assessment because the data provides a “ground-truth” understanding of conditions at the site. In fact, in an ideal world, observations would be collected at every potential turbine location. However, this is impractical and far too time and cost-prohibitive, so advanced models such as WRF are used instead. Observational data are also employed to verify the physical model results, with the aim of reducing overall uncertainty of the windresource assessment. This step is necessary because even the most advanced physical model provides imperfect data, so its results are corrected using observations.

Machine-learning algorithms are the preferred approach for reducing model errors and improving results.

Machine learning is the use of artificial intelligence, which provides a system the ability to learn and adapt through

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RELIABILITY

experience without being explicitly programmed. The algorithms are able to identify patterns in large existing data sets, and then these patterns can be applied to new data sets. Machine learning has a wide range of applications including security, online search, financial trading, facial recognition, and marketing.

For wind applications, machinelearning algorithms analyze the rich data sets from the WRF model and compare them to onsite observations.

The algorithms “learn” how the physical model results can be adjusted or corrected to better match the observed data. The corrective algorithms use many different predictor fields from the model, such as temperature, pressure gradients, shear, and stability. Once the time-varying corrective algorithms are developed, corrections can occur for places and periods without direct observations, such as over the past several decades at all turbine locations.

The pitfalls of shortcuts The combination of all three pillars delivers the highest quality wind-resource assessments and helps keep uncertainty as low as possible. If one pillar is missing, the assessment is degraded and the project development costs of a wind farm will likely increase.

For example, if onsite observational data is of poor quality, additional pressure is put on the physical model and machine-learning algorithms to accurately capture wind variability and translate this information into energy estimates. Without the ability to compare the results against reliable measurement records, a developer must rely on the physical model and machinelearning algorithms and hope the system has the capability to accurately simulate all aspects of a site’s meteorology. A sophisticated physical model, such as WRF offers greater reliability. However, analysis uncertainty increases without onsite verification.

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the observational met campaign.

The Wind Atlas Analysis and Application Program (WAsP) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are two examples of other physical models that are used in the industry for wind-resource assessment. However, both approaches simplify the equations of motion in the atmosphere and only provide steady-state results.

These simplifications allow for faster processing, but at the expense of a comprehensive analysis of the weather variability at a project.

When such models are used for an assessment, the machine-learning algorithms provide diminished value because the data fails to accurately capture the complex flow patterns of the atmosphere. To help keep uncertainty

physical model (merged with onsite observational data via machine learning algorithms) will provide increased accuracy when making predictions farther away from measurement sites. This allows developers to use a sparser met campaign (one with fewer measurement points or equipment, such as met towers or remote sensors) without sacrificing the quality or uncertainty of the windresource assessment. Depending on the measurement equipment, reducing even a single measurement location may save a developer hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The three-tiered pillar approach can be used whenever the objective is to better predict wind behavior and variability, and understand how this

The combination of all three pillars delivers the highest quality wind-resource assessments and helps keep uncertainty as low as possible. in check, a more rigorous met campaign with additional measurement sites is needed, which can significantly increase project development costs.

Without machine-learning algorithms, it is necessary to use less advanced methods to correct the model data using the observations (e.g. a simple bias removal via algebraic methods).

Non-learning methods also fail to take advantage of additional weather data from WRF model simulation. By omitting this additional weather data, non-learning methods tend to be less efficient and open the possibility for increased errors.

These errors may be mitigated with additional measurement sites, but that also increases development costs.

When all three components are used together in an assessment, it is possible to minimize development costs by reducing the scope and duration of a wind-measurement campaign. This is partly because a

translates to power generation. For example, these same principles can be employed in a range of applications beyond pre-construction wind resource assessment, including short-term operational wind forecasting and longterm seasonal forecasting — which are critical for energy integration, plant operations, and budget planning.

As the wind industry continues to mature in its approach to quantifying project risk, techniques founded in weather and data science will gain additional traction and lead the way to improved accuracy and reduced uncertainty. W

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10/4/17 12:53 PM

B O LT I NG Paul Dvorak Editorial Director Windpower Engineering & Development

HTL Group says its hands-free bolting tools are easy to use, and with accessories, they significantly reduce the risk of hand-related injuries and dropped objects.

Avoiding the big pinch

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he general construction industry has plenty of horror stories of how employees are injured. Bolting tasks should be fairly benign but they are not.

Hydraulic and electrically powered equipment generate thousands of foot-pounds to tighten bolts. One stat says about 50% of construction injuries are to hands and fingers.

Although most bolting-equipment manufacturers and wind-farm safety managers constantly preach safety, it takes only a brief lapse of attention to put fingers where they should not be and suffer the painful consequences.

At least two companies that have recognized the hazard have also developed tools to keep construction worker’s hands and those of wind techs on O&M crews out of harm’s way.

This first one, from UK based HTL Group, comes in a line of tools called Hands-Free Bolting.

The company says the product range can help prevent common injuries when using bolting equipment in an array of industry sectors.

HTL adds that although the product have many mechanical applications, the devices are well suited to the controlled-bolting market due to the challenges faced when working on bolted joints on the ground or at height.

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The products are said to be easy to use while accessories also significantly reduce the risk of dropped objects and hand-related injuries.

The patented range includes the No-Flog 2, a The Safe T lets a single person simultaneously operate the wrench and its hydraulic pump. The RSL series (2.5-in. square drive) has only three moving parts and tolerates up to 10,000-psi operating pressure. The square drive is interchangeable with hexagon cassettes.

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B O LT I N G

backing spanner that provides a safe, self-supporting, and hands-free tool to eliminate the need for a flogging spanner as a backing tool. Other tools in the Hands-Free line include a Back-Up Nut, Safety Valve, Tool Handle, and safety kits.

The second pinch-avoiding product comes in two RSL torque wrenches from Hydratight. The company says the wrenches are intended to increase safety and minimize the possibility of pinching during bolting operations.

The Safe T lets a single person simultaneously operate the wrench and its hydraulic pump. The tool houses three control buttons. Two main operation buttons must be pressed at the same time.

This avoids the accidental hydraulic-pump activation by pushing only one button.

We’ve thoroughly tested the Safe T and it is ready for use.

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Products ▪ Hydraulic Torque Tools ▪ Hydraulic Pumps – Torque – Electric or Air ▪ Hand Torque Wrenches and Multipliers ▪ Electric Torque Wrenches ▪ Hydraulic Bolt Tensioners • Top side – Wind – Custom (by design) ▪ Hydraulic Pumps – Tensioning - Electric or Air ▪ Industrial tools – Lifting Rams, Pumps and Accessories ▪ Industrial Impact Sockets ▪ Hydraulic Hoses ▪ Torque Tool Testers / Measurement Equipment ▪ Hand Tools

In-House

Should the operator release his or her hands, the torque wrench and hydraulic pump immediately cease to operate. Typically, one technician operates the torque wrench and another controls the hydraulic pump. With the Safe T, any chance of miscommunication in a noisy environment is almost eliminated thereby improving the safety of the operation.

“We’ve designed versions for use with electric and air pumps, and the low-profile design option will work with hex wrenches in tight spots,” said Chad Brooks at Hydratight. “The tools are made with a lightweight, durable aluminum housing and large diameter buttons for ease of use by a single technician. Models RSL20 and RSL30 (output torques of 18,843 and 28,002 lb-ft) have built-in loops for lifting straps.

We’ve thoroughly tested the Safe T and it is ready for use,” he said. W WINDPOWER ENGINEERING & DEVELOPMENT

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SA F E TY

Alan Gross President AMG Bolting Solutions amgboltingsolutions.com

Keeping wind techs safe from jobsite health hazards

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he long-term effects of working as a wind technician takes a toll. Symptoms, such as joint pain, carpal tunnel, hearing loss, and other lower back or upper limb disorders can sneak up on workers over time and cause longterm pain or injury.

Unfortunately, anyone who works in construction, manufacturing, transportation, or the O&M sectors are at risk of experiencing safety hazards because of exposure and potential overuse of power tools. According to the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics, this impacts at least 13% of the U.S. labor force.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that occupational hearing loss is the most common symptom for such workers. It occurs most prominently in the manufacturing industry, where the CDC says 72% of recorded illnesses were reported. This percentage only accounts for proven hearing caused in the workplace, and must qualify as hearing impaired for Anyone who works in manufacturing or operations and maintenance is at risk of hearing loss and vibration-related conditions because of overexposure to repeated noise and overuse of power tools. Fortunately, these conditions can be minimized or prevented with appropriate precautions.

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The TTB LION-.25 is one example of a battery-powered torque gun that serves as an alternative to impact wrenches. It emits no hammering or loud noise while in use. In fact, LION Gun’s noise emission is 70 to 75 dB, which is below the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s recommended 85 dB for safety.

the case to have made the report. This means there are likely a number of unreported cases.

Research shows that vibrationrelated conditions are also becoming more common in the workplace. For example, handarm vibration syndrome (HAVS) is a blood circulation condition caused by overuse of vibrating tools, regardless of type. HAVS can occur from repeated use of small tools, such as an electric drill, and large ones, such as a jackhammer.

From the kitchen to a jobsite You may not think a drill could do damage but, in 2010, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work (or EU-OSHA — Europe’s version of OHSA (the Occupational Health & Safety Administration in the U.S.) published a report with this finding: “As a result of increased levels of production and the corresponding need to introduce new workers to the assembly lines…work-related upper limb disorders rose in the kitchen appliances manufacturer.”

So what does an electric mixer have to do with an electric drill? It turns out that the Prevention and Protection Service, which helped conduct the study, suspected a correlation between the vibrations

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SAFETY

Although some companies list decibel and vibration levels on tools and equipment, it is not mandatory to do so. Wind techs should take extra safety precautions and use protective equipment when working near loud noises or with vibration tools.

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generated by appliances and tools, and the increasing number of pathologies. An addendum to the original study was added stating that the Agency was correct in its assumption.

EU-OSHA immediately put forth a plan to reduce these risks: “The aim was the elimination at source of the risk from vibrations transmitted to the hand-arm system by bringing the vibration exposure to below the action values defined

by Directive 2002/44/EC, by substitution of the pneumatic screwdrivers that produce higher levels of vibrations.”

One hurdle stood in the way of achieving the goal. At the time, it was not easy to find an electric drill, screwdriver, or impact gun, which (in addition to reducing vibrations) had characteristics specifically tailored to the activities carried out in the manufacturing or construction industries.

Impact guns, often used in the wind industry, release a significant amount of vibration and noise because of the tool’s power mechanics. But just think of the potential damage on its user: a thrashing device within the gearbox repetitively strikes to offset reaction forces. The tool can also act as a hammer to weaken bolt studs and induce tension reduction.

Designing an economic tool that could reliably do its job, while providing users with a safe, ergonomic hold is no easy task.

Fortunately, some companies are participating in the challenge. As one example, HYTORC and sister manufacturer TORC, LLC offer the TTB LION.25, a battery-powered torque gun that serves as an alternative to impact wrenches. The LION Gun’s noise emission is 70 to 75 dB, which is below the industry recommended 85 dB for safety.

Setting standards While many company and workers now take safety precautions, and are aware of the risks of loud noises and repeated exposure to vibration tools, there is still cause for concern.

For example, although some manufacturers list decibel and vibration (dB) levels (volumes)

on their products, it is not yet mandated to do so. Therefore, how can a worker tell if a jobsite or tools are causing harm?

As a frame of reference for sound, consider a typical conversation’s volume measured in decibels.

It’s about 60 dB. An impact gun can be as loud as 100 dB, and even worse, a hammer drill is nearly 115 dB. The decibel scale is logarithmic so 70 dB is twice as loud as 60 dB. That makes it easier to understand how an impact gun or hammer drill can cause extreme damage to the ears.

Unfortunately for vibration risks, there is no current standardized method for measuring a vibration exposure period. Typically, exposure durations are quantified by reviews of work histories, observations or employee interviews. Research to date so far has found that these methods are notoriously inaccurate.

Without precise measurements, it is difficult to accurately predict how a vibration-related condition may threaten a worker’s future ability to perform his or her job. If there is even minor cause for concern, it may indirectly impact a worker’s job security. So it is important for workers to develop good safety habits while on the job.

Current data indicates that risk of HAVS depends on the intensity of vibration and the duration of exposure. The daily vibration, exposure action value (A) for a worker completing a single task or using a power tool can be calculated based on the magnitude of intensity and exposure duration. Therefore, it follows that the higher the intensity and longer the exposure, the more hazardous for the employee.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) provides helpful information on how to gauge safe decibel levels and reduce exposure to harmful vibrations.

In addition, even seemingly minor personal protection gear (such as safety gloves or noisecancelling headphones) may help delay or prevent the effects of hearing loss or HAVS. It is also an employers’ responsibility to effectively train workers and ensure a safe working environment. Studies have shown that when employers are committed to safety and injury prevention, employees are more likely to share that dedication and regularly don protective devices.

Workers’ compensation can add up quickly, particularly in the construction and O&M industry.

That said, worker safety should take precedence.

Employers should consider protection gear and tools that are reliable, and that increase production time, worker safety, and job security. W

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CO ND I TION MONITORING

Janice Abel Principal Analyst ARC Advisory Group

How much does curtailment really cost?

Analytics shows, and recoups

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large renewable-energy company applied recently developed data-mining software to uncover how much it lost during curtailments and found the sum exceeded six figures. But showing its ISO the figures based on solid data, Avangrid Renewables (formerly Iberdrola Renewables) was able to reclaim $30,000 to $100,000 per year based on the ISO contract, wind curtailment, and wind availability.

According to Brandon Lake, formerly a Senior Business Systems Analyst at Avangrid Renewables, the software took only 45 minutes to learn how to apply and access over 250,000 tags (a sensor endpoint) to start getting the answers and insights he was looking for. This is a significant improvement, he said, over many competing solutions.

The two graphs illustrate the potential of a proper data analysis. The left image presents a confusing picture. The right plot has isolated two data streams for a more insightful comparison.

The problems Avangrid Renewables is a subsidiary of Avangrid and part of the Iberdrola Group. The Renewable-energy company collects a wide variety of data from many different sources. However, gaining useful insight from the data in the past was a challenge.

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to voluntary curtailments to meet contractual obligations. Wind power companies in the U.S. must curtail generation at certain times to balance supply with demand under contractual obligations with the local ISO and to ensure safe operations.

However, renewable-energy companies can be compensated for lost generation if they can accurately calculate, document, and report the monetary value of what they would have put on the grid during curtailment periods. An inability to do so leads to lost revenues.

“Prior to implementing the new technology, the company was not able to report the losses accurately and was losing money,” said Lake.

To complicate things, the company collects a wide variety of data from its wind turbines and other operational assets, along with data from weather, pricing, and market-data systems. Additional data sources include the OSIsoft PI System, the company’s in-house SCADA system, and others. Then it responds to signals from the Independent System Operator (ISO).

Avangrid wanted to bring the data together in one place so it could better visualize and understand it.

The company had to dig into this mountain of data to determine how much power it was not allowed to produce and the curtailment’s economic impact. Under its

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contractual agreement, the ISO would only compensate Avangrid for its curtailment losses if it could produce sufficient proof of the impact. “We knew we were losing money, but to determine the actual impact required investigating years of turbine data,” Lake said. That was difficult and time-consuming.

Solution To alleviate the situation, Avangrid deployed the data investigation and discovery technology from Seeq, a newer company with a new approach to helping industrial organizations gain business value from their data. Without duplicating data, Seeq integrates it from existing databases, historians, and analytics without tampering with the systems of record.

According to Lake, the speed and ease of using Seeq made sense to further examine the cost of shutdown time. “With the software, we were able to isolate the events, add analytics, and determine what was happening in just hours. In the past, this would have taken days or weeks,” he said.

The company was able to visualize the information on screen, determine the curtailment time, and add pricing and other potential power set points.

This let Lake’s team combine the information to determine several what-if scenarios between potential and actual production to determine losses. Once Avangrid Renewables isolated the time periods, it was able to sum the data to determine what it was missing. By exporting the data from Seeq to Excel, Lake could add price information and determine the cost to the company.

While losses from a single turbine for a day seem insignificant, they add to eye-opening sums when multiplied across the company’s entire fleet and years of operation. The company is now looking to expand the tool with additional factors as well as in other potentially revenue-producing areas using additional attributes.

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Benefits Lake identified a few benefits that Avangrid Renewables received from using the Seeq system. These included an ability to: • Find key points in the data and to examine large amounts of data from multiple sources • Isolate incidents in the data that would have taken exponentially longer using Excel alone or other tools • Transform industrial-process data into useful information and actionable intelligence • After isolating an event, the user can expand the time frame and quickly adjust the queries for other wind farms • Significantly reduced the time required to investigate and gain the needed insights and analysis, from months or even years to hours. W

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TOP: The green shaded area illustrates unsold generation from a curtailment period. The red area indicates down time for uncertain reasons and further analysis.

BOTTOM: Individual data streams can be examined for clear and easily understandable plots.

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S O F T WA R E Ryan Blitstein Director of Renewable Energy Uptake

A software developer from Uptake joins a technician atop a wind turbine in Iowa to better appreciate the data a tech needs. The best predictiveanalytics software will be easily to use by technicians when they are in challenging physical environments.

Design of predictive analytics software will determine whether it is used and its usefulness

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atch most any spy movie and you’ll see a command center with walls covered with computer screens. The hero may view satellite data while numbers scroll and images flash across other monitors. The hero takes it all in, makes a decision, and saves the day.

Now walk into a typical wind-farm operations center and you’ll largely see the same thing. One screen plots graphic trends from wind-turbine SCADA systems while another screen provides the same information but for turbines from a single manufacturer.

More screens connect to internal databases for parts, materials, work order information, and more.

Unlike in the movies, a wind-farm O&M center with many screens displaying information from different systems does not save the day. It makes work harder and longer, and decisions more confusing. It also threatens to undercut the promise that predictive analytics holds to make the wind industry more productive, reliable, safe, and secure.

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What O&M software should do As more predictive-analytic software enters the market, those most successful will provide intuitive features.

The software will be built around users’ needs, and reduce the number of screens to a few, so the right people take the right action at the right time.

Today, we can generate insights that predict a part failure before it happens, thanks to massive amounts of data coming from sensors throughout a wind turbine and significant advances in data science. But those insights are meaningless until a technician in the field or a remote-monitoring center takes action. If workers have tasks they must perform every day, but the software makes each task more cumbersome, the tasks may not get done. This means preventable problems may go unaddressed, leading to higher costs and turbine downtime for wind operators.

Last year, research firm Forrester found that clunky and confusing software prevented workers from quickly accessing critical information needed for

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their jobs. The same survey found that 65% of workers ignored data needed to make decisions because it had to be pulled from several different systems. Sixty-two percent delayed completing a task because of multiple system login requirements.

To ensure productive action One way to guarantee that action is taken: Create a user experience that is useful, enjoyable, and helps people do their jobs. The value of predictive analytics is that it is unconstrained by current data science capabilities.

The real challenge is getting those predictions into the hands of the right people, in a way that they can easily use the information.

Give an iPhone to a four-year-old or an 80-year-old, and they will likely be able to use it with a little training.

The operations of wind companies are certainly more complex than a typical mobile app, but the industrial world stands to benefit greatly from the user experience research and design techniques of the consumer world.

To achieve this, leading predictive analytics developers will build software around users, not data. However, developers will need to do more than just collect and provide data. Each user—from technician to CEO—has different day-to-day problems and uses different segments of data to solve them.

If developers can learn how each section of a workforce operates and understanding the workflow, they can improve the predictive software’s user interface. For example, a software developer may have to climb a turbine tower with a wind technician to understand the work environment. This may lead to an interface that works within the environment’s physical constraints.

While a user interface can be tailored for different roles, it should be built on the same data to provide everyone a single version of “the truth.” The CEO’s high-level overview should be generated from the same data that the wind-farm operations manager uses to cut work orders for technicians.

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Earlier this year, users at two of Berkshire Hathaway Energy’s subsidiaries had the opportunity to test the predictive-analytics software they chose for their wind fleets. The developer of the predictive analytics software, Uptake, asked the customer to use it for a few hours and then come back and report what they didn’t like. The users reported that certain information was too high level while other information was too detailed. The feedback led to changes in the software and greater use to stop problems before they start.

provides a full picture. This effort allows minimal training once the switch is flipped on. Intuitive software can save time and provide more efficient insight, and help operators do their jobs better.

Having just one screen at a control center with a single view of the world won’t excite Hollywood. But intuitive predictive-analytics software that forecasts problems before they occur, lets workers solve them before an unplanned turbine shutdown. And that is more heroic than anything on the big screen. W

Building intuitive software for the industrial space requires fixing technical bugs and improving the product and business processes. Just as data science models get “smarter” with more data from sensors, those models can also get smarter when technicians provide feedback on the quality of a recommendation.

Finally, when decisions must be made, knowing the full extent of a wind operator’s data and centralizing it (data from an IT system, workflow, parts inventory, and key performance metrics among others)

Easy to understand data gets attention and action. There is little deciphering to the data that reports on the condition of site 167. Assets 27 and 4 are offline. The problems with Asset 4 appear under the View History column.

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T UR BI NE OF T HE M O NTH

Paul Dvorak Editorial Director Windpower Engineering & Development

You can’t buy this turbine, but you can buy its power Left: The WIND•e20 uses three segmented blades to produce power from 20 to 100 kW, depending on generator size. The spinning blades appear solid to birds so they fly around the working turbine.

Below: The foundation requires only excavation by a common backhoe. The pads are precast concrete that can be removed when the contract completes.

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his turbine design and its developer break all the rules − in a good way − around the design and marketing of industrial equipment. For instance, you cannot buy the WIND•e20 onsite wind turbine, but developer CGE Energy will install it on qualified property and sell you its power for an agreed upon period. This method cleverly makes renewable energy available even to non-profit organizations. And if the contract is not renewed at its end date, the company will haul the 105-ft turbine away, foundation and all.

There’s more. Let’s start with the foundation.

It’s a prefabricated in four sections. The company president and CEO Bryan Zaplitny says prep requires no more than a common backhoe on a 20 by 20-ft square piece of land. “Factory preparation of the foundation allows more control of the concrete than

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would an outdoor pour. This is just one of the ways we streamline the adoption of sustainable energy.

Most importantly, we can be good stewards of the planet and reuse the foundation elsewhere.”

Just about everything about this turbine is unusual. For instance, its installation is considerably simplified versus other methods. It does not need a crane, for example. Zaplitny says that after his company and a client agree on a power requirement and duration, a single flatbed trailer will arrive with the turbine. Several legs will raise

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TURBINE OF THE MONTH

The transport carriage also doubles as an erection mechanism that tilts the turbine onto its prepared foundation.

the turbine off the trailer and the truck will depart.

An installation rig then unfolds the turbine (it’s in two hinged pieces), and the tower and turbine tilts up onto the foundation. Recall that a utility-scale turbine requires a crane that ships on about 21 semi-trailers.

The three blades sit flush with the tower during shipping. For the blades to open, a hydraulic device at their base rises to let the rotor take its 44-ft diameter “egg beater” or troposkein shape. After making proper electrical connections, the turbine gets to work, the vertical-axis design allowing the turbine to capture wind from any direction. Batteries and other electrical equipment, such as the inverter, will be housed in the base. An array of solar panels can also be part of the arrangement. A video of an installation is here: http://cgeenergy.com/technologies/wind Zaplitny is planning on four outputs, 20, 50, 65, and 100 kW (depending on available wind and local size regulations), all based on the same foundation, tower, and blades. Power is transmitted downtower by a shaft to the generator at the base for easy maintenance and access. “If a client decides it wants more power and the site wind can provide it, the original generator can be swapped out for a larger unit,” he adds.

The airbrakes or trim tabs, only on center sections of each blade, provide air braking in high winds. Rotational speed is limited to 80 rpm. Other conventional brakes are in the lower tower base of the turbine, along with the generator and electrical equipment for easy access.

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Even though the blades appear curved, each is made of 11 sections with hinged connections. The rotor will be limited to about 80 rpm by using several aviation-style airbrakes in the center sections of each blade, and by two brakes in the tower. The design has been granted several patents in the U.S., with several more still pending in the U.S. and Europe,” he says.

Zaplitny says that WIND•e20 has received support from the Audubon Society because it minimizes bird strikes. “The theory is that the spinning blades appear as a solid object to birds, so they fly around the blades instead of into them. We have seen this first hand during our prototype testing. Vertical-axis wind turbines have an excellent track record with regard to birds, bats, and other wildlife,” he says.

Regarding maintenance, orienting the main shaft vertically rather than horizontally allows a significant reduction in parts. With fewer parts, reliability improves over more complex designs. Zaplitny says WIND•e20 is built of about 2,500 components, give or take a few nuts and bolts. Conventional horizontal-axis wind turbines (HAWT) contain approximately 8,000 components.

The graph shows the power outputs for the 20, 50, and 65 kW rated turbines.

Lastly, while noise issues continue to dog HAWTs, and unfortunately wind turbines in general, the design here is considerably quieter and poses no problem.

The company recently commissioned the construction of a one-tenth scale model to demonstrate its method of installation. Roush Industries has used advanced rapid prototyping methods to fabricate the demonstration unit. That company will also provide components for full-sized units. The CGE and Roush teams currently work on building other demonstrations units to facilitate presales of the production WIND-e20 turbines. W

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O PE R AT I ON S & MA I NTE NANCE

Michelle Froese Senior Editor Windpower Engineering & Development

The blades of large, pitch-regulated wind turbines typically have suboptimal aerodynamic properties at the root. Vortex generators, attached to the root section of a turbine blade, can help improve performance by energizing flow around the surface.

This helps reduce flow separation and increases the performance of the entire turbine, in terms of power, loads, and service life.

How vortex generators can boost wind-turbine performance and AEP

M

eeting AEP or annual energy production targets is an ongoing challenge in the wind industry. AEP is the amount of electricity a wind farm generates over one year. While any faulty turbine component can impact energy production, analyzing the aerodynamic design of turbine blades is one of the first steps to optimizing a turbine’s wind capacity.

Similar to an airplane wing, wind-turbine blades work by generating lift from their shape. Typically, blades are shaped to generate the maximum power from the wind at the minimum costs, but manufacturers are continually looking for ways to develop more efficient designs and increase production.

So, how can a wind operator increase wind-farm AEP from turbine blades? “ We have a few options,” shares Charles Kasmer, a Customer Account Manager with O&M provider, EDF Renewable Services. He first points to pitch and yaw controls, which refer to

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the blade angle adjustment and turbine orientation, respectively. “We have pitch optimization, which a lot of OEMs are doing right now. They’re going in and adjusting pitch parameters for greater accuracy.

We also have yaw optimization, which is correcting the yaw offset of a turbine tower. Then we also have a third option: blade aerodynamic optimization. This can be done through vortex generators or VGs.” These small devices adhere to a turbine blade to modify the surface airflow and can optimize the aerodynamic performance.

“Vortex generators are not new technology.

The aerospace industry has been installing VGs on airplane wings for decades to increase the lift.

Recently, we have seen automobiles come out with VGs to increase efficiency.” Kasmer says the main reason VGs are attracting so much industry attention is because the devices offer proven AEP improvements. “In fact, many turbine and blade

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OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE

Each turbine blade has a unique shape and properties, so the position of vortex generators are customized for each blade to maximize performance.

OEMs are now are offering VGs from the factory because the devices have a good track record and can maximize a wind turbine’s output and efficiency.”

He says EDF Renewable Services recently announced a partnership to install 3M Wind Vortex Generators on all wind turbines the company services across the U.S. A look at blade design According to Santhosh Chandrabalan, the 3M Global Business Manager for wind energy, wind-turbine designers typically must balance manufacturing capabilities with efficiency. “A wind blade’s design cannot be aimed solely at maximizing aerodynamics,” he says. “Some design compromises can lead to aerodynamic stall, which causes a reduction in efficiency and lower AEP. Furthermore, surface roughness and leading edge erosion can amplify the issue.”

Adhesion has been our top concern because it leads to a number of other potential problems.

Unfortunately, these losses in efficiency can impact the bottom line for the wind turbine owner with untapped potential compounding throughout the years. Research shows that leading-edge blade erosion can cause up to 20% in AEP losses.

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Enhancing blade performance VGs can offset some of a blade’s efficiency losses due to design and installation limitations. These small attachments, typically made from metal or plastic, regulate the boundary-layer airflow by helping it stay attached to the turbine blade for a longer period — thereby, increasing lift and, hence, AEP. Despite their benefits, VGs have come with a fair share of problems over the years. Kasmer points out that the devices have had blade-adhesion issues. “VGs occasionally fall off,” he says. “Adhesion has been our top concern because it leads to a number of other potential problems.” For example, there are environmental concerns where VGs have fallen off in farmer’s wheat or cornfields, affecting crops or farm equipment.

“Safety wise, we also have need to ensure that no one is at risk from a falling VG,” Kasmer says. “Costs are yet another issue to take into account.

When a VG falls off, there are additional device and maintenance costs, not to mention a reduction in the AEP that we were initially forecasting.”

And then there is the cost to reinstall the devices, which leads to unplanned turbine downtime and lost AEP. To develop a VG that works well for its intended role and adheres reliably, materials and the environmental conditions are key considerations.

For example wind speeds, along with the location of a vortex generator, can vary the performance of VGs — and that means correct installation procedures are imperative. Although liquid adhesives have been used for installations, most adhesives are too rigid to stand up to the flexing forces caused by differences in the material properties of the blades and the VGs. “First of all, it is important to start with a vortex generator that doesn’t age quickly, and that means selecting design materials that are long lasting. That’s easier said than done because at a wind farm, VGs undergo severe weathering,

www.windpowerengineering.com

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OPERATIONS & MAINTENANCE

which includes heat, cold, wind, rain, hail, and so on. Next, it is necessary to use an adhesive that is durable and flexible.”

However, Chandrabalan and his team at 3M quickly learned that rigid adhesives are not an ideal solution for attaching VG’s. For attaching upgrades to a wind blade, an acrylic foam tape is often an excellent alternative to liquid adhesives and mechanical fasteners. Acrylic foam tape is durable, easy to apply, and can withstand dynamic residual forces even in harsh conditions. These tapes can be used for applications where reliable bonding or sealing is needed.

An acrylic foam tape has the advantage of flexibility, which accommodates the flexing and fatigue forces that are encountered by the turbine blade. It can also stand up to various temperatures and weather conditions the blade may be subjected to. These characteristics of the acrylic foam tapes ensure that its functional qualities are kept intact even after five years of field operations.

can figure out the optimal position to install the vortex generator on a particular turbine in the blade model. It helps us ensure that we have the optimum output from a VG install.”

The Smart Visualization analyzes different wind speeds, direction, and flow separation to optimize VG placement. The results? According to Chandrabalan, wind operators can expect to see a 1.5 to 3% increases in AEP, with the 3M Wind Vortex Generators. “Low-wind speed locations will typically see a better gain in AEP than higher wind sights.

So what does this all mean?

“It means that wind operators can expect a payback period of about one or two years, depending on their wind farm. This includes installation cost, the material, and the downtime for the installation.

Overall, it means VGs payoff in terms of increasing AEP.” W

Optimizing blade aerodynamics helps achieve a significantly higher energy yield, for higher profitability.

The increase is dependent on the turbine site, type, and condition. However, long-term field tests show increases in annual energy production of 2.0% or more.

Alongside material selection, Chandrabalan says it is important to consider the ideal position to install vortex generators on a particular blade. 3M, along with their partner Smartblade, have developed what it calls “Smart Visualization.”

“Smart Visualizations enables us to characterize the wind flow on a rotor blade to accurately identify the flow separation and address it,” he says.

“By performing a thorough analysis and using a complex algorithm, we OCTOBER 2017

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Automating construction and a spar buoy of geopolymer concrete could take big bites out of offshore construction costs Paul Dvorak • Editor If new techniques do not bring down costs of constructing wind farms offshore, the industry will be difficult to justify outside of government largess. Fortunately, the two ideas here suggest that is quite possible to take sharp knifes to high costs.

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BELOW: A transport barge with a rotor and nacelle assembly approaches a tower.

RIGHT: The barge and carrier hands the nacelle and rotor off to the tower.

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BUILDING OFFSHORE WIND FARMS is outrageously expensive, especially for the nascent U.S. wind industry which is on a steep learning curve. The only wind farm in U.S. waters is reported to have cost around $300 million for five turbines with a modest combined capacity of 30 MW. Obviously, costs will have to come down if the industry is to grow.

Even though the European developers have been working in offshore wind longer, they have also struggled with costs.

Good news: There is no shortage of ideas for cutting costs.

Of the ideas presented here, one proposed design lets a carriage climb a prepared tower to place the nacelle and rotor without a jack-up vessel. In the second, a specially designed ocean-going barge serves as production platform and delivery vessel for a large spar buoy and wind turbine. This idea works best for the deep water around much of the U.S. that prohibits seabed based foundations prevalent in European waters. Here’s a closer look.

Goodbye jack-up vessels, hello SENSE A new wind-turbine installation and maintenance idea could cut the cost of energy from future deep water sites by around 9%, and from nearshore sites by 4%. That is the conclusion of a £200,000 ($260,000) detailed analysis by the Innovate UK Energy Catalyst on the Self Erecting Nacelle System (SENSE, senseoffshore.co.uk ). The study suggests that the technology could let industry dispense with the costly use of jack-up vessels.

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SENSE calls its invention a modular, removable transport, and installation system that mounts on a standard large construction vessel. It would also serve maintenance tasks including the change out of larger turbine components.

The company says there is currently no proven technology capable of installing the next generation of turbines and towers on foundations in water depths greater than 60m, apart from building larger and more expensive jack up vessels.

“Wind turbines are getting bigger and developers want to exploit deep-water sites,” said Sense Offshore Managing Director Patrick Geraets in a press release. “How are these turbines going to be installed? SENSE is an answer – faster, cheaper, independent of water depth, with worldwide application, and it is scalable to the larger turbines coming to market in the next five years.”

Wind turbines are getting bigger and developers want to exploit deep water sites.

It works like this In a nutshell, the system consists of a multi-purpose construction vessel capable of carrying two or three turbines, a mechanism for transferring the turbine to the tower, and a

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Automating construction and a spar buoy of geopolymer concrete

The carriage ascends a tower with the nacelle and rotor (to the right). Geraets team has also designed a tower to accommodate the SENSE system.

tower-climbing device. The company says this arrangement is capable of transferring loads of up to 700 tons from vessel to tower, and in significant wave heights. Geraets says the high weight capacity is intended to handle the coming 10+ MW turbines.

The nacelle and rotor are assembled at the dockside with the rotor flat on the deck with the nacelle vertical. The transport carriage is fitted to the rotor assembly.

The construction vessel transports the rotor assemblies to the wind farm where towers have been installed in a conventional manner. Each rotor-nacelle assembly rides on permanent rails onto a handling system on the vessel, which uses heave-compensated positional control (compensates for ship movement) to target and co-ordinate a transfer to rails mounted on the tower. Once the rotor assembly locks onto the tower, the vessel detaches and moves away to install another turbine.

A crew in the tower connects a power and control umbilical to electric power so the rotor assembly can climb the tower on the transport carriage. The carriage clamps to and climbs ratchet rails on the tower, like a cog railway.

The rotor assembly is supported at its center of gravity with the blades fixed horizontally until it reaches the top of the tower.

There, hydraulic equipment pivots the rotor assembly 90° and the transport carriage lowers the rotor assembly onto the tower.

A crew bolts it into place. Once secured, the transport carriage returns to the bottom of the tower where it is retrieved by the construction vessel. In rough weather, the rotor nacelle assembly might remain at the base of the tower until the weather improves.

At the tower top, a hydraulic system on the carriage rotates the nacelle 90° and places it on a tower platform. The construction crew then bolts the nacelle in place.

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could take big bites out of offshore construction costs

www.windpowerengineering.com

Geraets says the tower tracks will be permanent. “We estimate they add about 10% to the cost of a standard tubular tower.

However, our proposed three−legged lattice tower, which will match the use of SENSE lowers the cost of the tower with tracks by a conservative 8% below a tubular tower and equivalent to 0.15% off the LCoE. This design will be suitable for monopole, jacket fixed foundations, and all types that float” Conventional installation methods average around 24 hours per turbine, but Geraets’ team suggests that turbines can be installed in parallel using several SENSEequipped vessels for a shorter construction program. Shorter installation periods significantly reduce the construction-finance risk profile, and the interest costs of large wind farms by generating early revenue.

What’s more, weather-critical operations span a shorter duration, letting the system take advantage of narrow weather windows. The company also says the concept easily scales to projected 10 MW+ turbines, while the market may not quickly provide large crane vessels to keep pace with this development curve.

The study The Innovate UK study was carried out for SENSE Offshore by a project team of contractors including GBG, PHG Consulting, Industrial Systems and Control, BVG Associates, Knowtra and James Fisher Marine Services. In deep water, 70m and more, the study estimated the system could slash around $147 million from the capital expenditure (CapEx) on a $6.6 billion, 1,200-MW wind farm and trim $33.5 million each year off operating expenditures (OpEx).

In shallower sites with water depths similar to North Sea, where farms are served by jack-up vessels, the study says the technology could save $99 million in CapEx and $11.7 million in OpEx per year.

CapEx savings come in part from the use of more readily available construction vessels at competitive prices. These vessels can be mobilized at shorter notice than crane vessels.

OpEx gets significant cuts because large crane vessels are not needed for major component replacements, leading to lower

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mid-life refurbishment costs. In the event of a major failure, the complete nacelle and rotor assembly can be "swapped out" without replacing the individual components.

The result is a turbine that is back up and working in one weather window.

In addition, the study says SENSE would improve access for external O&M turbine inspections. In particular, it can provide a mount for a secure platform for blade inspections and repair.

“A partner or investor could be an existing construction company looking to expand its offering to the offshore wind industry to include large turbine installation and maintenance, or a new entry eyeing this growing and substantial market,” said Geraets.

A patent covering the SENSE installation system has been filed and the company is planning the next stage of its development, a working prototype, which would bring the technology to market by about 2020. A good animation of the system is here: tinyurl.com/SENSE-animation.

Construction and delivery on one vessel The first floating wind farm, launched this year off the coast of Scotland, uses several huge spar buoys made of steel rolled and welded by conventional methods. While many developers are convinced the spar buoy is the ideal floating platform, a few suggest there are better ways and materials to manufacturing the buoy.

“The consensus of developers working with the designers and universities is that the spar buoy design offers one of the best solutions as a floating substructure for turbine foundations,” says AMFConcepts Principal Andrew Filak.

He says the structure, characterized by a small water-plane area and a large cylindrical mass below the surface, has found increased favor in deep-water applications. “Spar buoys have been designed for installations in depths of 400 to 2,400 feet. The buoys’ draft of 360 feet below the surface helps resist the heave motion. Ballast placed low in the buoy gives the system a low center of gravity OCTOBER 2017

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making it quite stable and resistant to pitching and rolling assisted by its stationkeeping design,” he says.

The problem, as with most work offshore, is the cost. Filak says the turnkey cost in 2017 for a 7-MW floating deployment using conventional materials and methods is $50 million.

The turbines carried by the buoys would be direct-drive designs because they offer developers of deep-water offshore sites the potential to capture the market with significant cost savings. The costs would be done by delivering a fully assembled 7-MW direct-drive design to a deep-water site at a turnkey cost in 2018 for $35 million.

The turbine, station keeping equipment (anchors and cables), power-feed costs are the same. The significant differences are in the construction of the spar buoy, assembly, and commissioning of the turbine. The costs cited include transport of both components to the site, tie down, and placement of the turbine atop the buoy.

Filak calls his design the U.S. Spar Buoy (USSB) foundation and recommends building it using a geopolymer concrete.

Geopolymer is a material that, unlike steel, does not degrade in seawater. The Zeobond Group in Australia is one manufacturer of the material. Reinforcement would come from a corrosion-resistant, steel-free rebar.

Construction begins and ends on an ocean-going deck barge built to construct the spar buoys and deploy them to a deep-water wind farm.

The drawing provides a few details for a completed spar buoy and turbine.

Buoy construction is executed dockside. The first component, an end-bell starter section, measures 40-ft diameter by 30-ft high. This first component is cast on the dock and then set into a lowering well on the barge. The slip formwork and its staging are placed in four pie-shaped quadrants onto the end-bell starter.

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Automating construction and a spar buoy of geopolymer concrete

could take big bites out of offshore construction costs

Plan view of self-propelled catamaran OGDB for the U.S. Spar Buoy

The deck plan (a top view) shows on the left, winch cables and the spar buoy work area, and on the right, where the transition piece and wind turbine would be assembled. The dual-hull catamaran barge measures 480-ft by 60-ft wide connected by a bridging structure 300-ft by 50-ft by 10-ft deep flush with the deck plate and centered fore and aft on the outside hulls. This provides a deck plan of 72,600 ft2.

How it’s made The buoy is made by slip-forming the concrete, a method similar to extruding a material. This method addresses the major problem of forming a large, round tube-type structure with internal struts tied to a second internal tube. The design makes it easier to place rebar and concrete. The concrete mix would slip form at two feet per hour, which requires a formwork heated to 85°F minimum to heat cure the material.

This form rate is a big plus because it provides fully cured concrete in 24 hours. “This feature lets the slip form rise at four times normal placement, and achieves a port-to-site production window of under two weeks for the construction and deployment of the turbine,” he says.

The greatest threat to marine concrete structures is water, either fresh or salt. “With time, water penetrates conventional concrete through unseen cracks and natural porosity, and rusts steel rebar. Even protective rebar has coating failures and deterioration. Seawater also directly attacks the chemistry of conventional (Portland) cement causing rapid failure. What causes a conventional binder to fail at sea is a high percentage of Calcium compounds, about 70%, which come under attack by the Sulphur compounds in seawater. This rots the concrete. Polymer concrete, however, has an expected life of nearly 100 years and would let a spar buoy support at least three generations of wind turbines,” explains Filak.

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The illustration provides a closer look at a few spar buoy details.

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The barge To avoid the expense of conventional manufacturing methods, Filak’s company has designed a buoy-building deck barge.

“It will comply with the 1920 Jones Act, which allows only qualified U.S. vessels built domestically and crewed by U. S. citizens to carry cargo from U.S. port to U.S. port,” he says.

The barge serves as a construction, transportation, and deployment platform all in one. The barge is secured dockside with ready access to materials and resources while the spar is slip formed at one end. At the same time, the wind turbine is assembled at the other end.

When construction of the buoy finishes, its own propulsion will move it out to the wind-farm site with both components onboard. Onsite, the spar is deployed at 50 foot-per-hour into the water, water ballasted down, and moored into location by standard station-keeping methods.

The barge then rotates 180° to mount the wind turbine’s transition unit over the spar, which is then de-ballasted, joined, and mechanically locked to the transition component to support the turbine.

Sketch of typical OGDB with U.S. Spar Buoy & WTG departing from quay

A completed spar buoy and wind turbine would look like this leaving the assembly quay for the deployment area.

The consensus of developers working with the designers and universities is that the spar buoy design offers one of the best solutions as a floating substructure for turbine foundations.

Two developments make it possible to build on the barge. One is a multi-functional structural tower, on the left in the barge drawings. It is made of high-strength, manlift mast sections. The port side, forward leg of the tower supports a rack-and-pinion man lift. The second development is a water ballast system that keeps the barge balanced as the buoy is slip formed upward.

At the other end of the catamaran barge, the transition component supports the turbine as it is assembled over the forward slot.

Filak says this opinion, with accurate input, identifies a unit cost at $5.2 OCTOBER 2017

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million per spar buoy (excluding the cost of the turbine) for construction, assembly, and delivery, in under two weeks, to a station-keeping crew in a 100-unit wind farm. This installation cost is a fraction of the current floatingfoundation costs.

Another plus: The geopolymer concrete cement binder supports aggressive global carbon reductions by producing 80% less CO2, and in a much shorter fabrication process. Readers can find more detail of AMFConcept’s barge and buoy here: tinyurl.com/buoy-barge. W windpowerengineering.com

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Compared to onshore wind farms, offshore projects incur costs that are 10 to 50 times higher, many of which are related to outages that stem from subsea cable failures.

O&M strategies

for

offshore wind & cable work M ARYR U T H B E LS E Y P R I E B E | I Q P C G M B H | J A D E C R E AT I V E

The offshore wind industry presents a new set of O&M challenges. But solutions are coming from a range of organizations. Most of these include monitoring systems that predict when preventative maintenance is required for turbines and the cables that connect them to the transmission grid. The primary goals: to avoid turbine downtime and costly network faults.

EVERY DOLLAR SPENT on a wind farm after it’s commissioned affects the bottom line, so efficient operations and maintenance (O&M) costs are crucial to the profitability of wind energy.

While O&M costs represent up to 25% of the total lifetime costs of a wind farm, these costs have fallen 20% since 2014, according to MAKE Consultancy.

Equipment, condition-monitoring systems, and maintenance plans are improving quite rapidly.

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Many experts, including those from cable supplier HVPD Ltd in the UK, estimate that these types of faults are preventable, and that some of the most significant savings the offshore industry can achieve will come from a more holistic approach to condition monitoring.

That means using systems that predict when preventative maintenance is required for turbines and the cables that connect them to the transmission grid to avoid costly faults on the network.

www.windpowerengineering.com

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O&M strategies

for

offshore wind & cable work

On average, at least 10 subsea cable failures are declared to insurers each year in the offshore wind sector. While the frequency is low, according to data assembled by GCube Underwriting, the financial severity of these incidents for project owners and financiers is high — such that they account for 77% of the total global cost of offshore wind farm losses.

(Request GCube’s full report at http://tinyurl. com/CableFailures)

Managing offshore O&M One method to ensure O&M costs remain manageable and does not cut too much into the bottom line is to monitor wind equipment and its critical networks.

Condition-monitoring systems (CMS) for wind farms are not new.

CMS can provide a comprehensive overview of current wind-turbine function and condition, letting operators stay ahead of the O&M game. Through use of accelerometers, oil-particle counters, and many other points of data collection, a CMS can pinpoint early warning signs of pending turbine problems and potentially 50

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save wind operators significant equipment downtime and costs.

For medium and high-voltage substations, SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) systems provide a similar role, and are typically used to remotely monitor from a central location and acquire information about a substation’s function and performance. The core functionality of a SCADA system is communication, which is key to a successful monitoring system.

Although the first versions of SCADA systems relied on wiring to transmit data to a point where it could be bundled together for analysis, more advanced SCADA systems use fiber-optic connections for extremely fast, reliable connections.

Today’s SCADA suppliers have all agreed on a standard communication protocol: IEC 61850. It has vastly improved the results across the industry. Incoming data is displayed on sophisticated user interfaces graphically to illustrate the real-time state of all elements monitored by the system. Potential problems, such as cable and electrical faults, can be quickly pinpointed within a few seconds, allowing maintenance teams to deploy quickly to avoid downtime as much as possible.

SCADA can provide more insight about critical networks than conventional CMS options. However, use of SCADA and CMS can fully optimize monitoring and remote communication of a wind farm, which is essential at offshore wind farms.

The 129-MW Van Oord Luchterduinen offshore wind farm in The Netherlands provides one example of a SCADA control system at work.

Alstom’s CG WindAccess engineered the system that uses open communication protocols to provide easy integration

www.windpowerengineering.com

between the 43, onsite wind turbines and other assets, such as substations and transmission lines. WindAccess collects and analyses information to help system operators improve the performance of their farms and proactively address potential problems.

In this case, CG WindAcess’ SCADA system also integrates with a CMS, which means it can incorporate data from across an entire wind farm including its substations. The communication data from the turbines and substations make it possible to operate the wind farm like a conventional power plant at the gridconnection point.

Most offshore wind companies, such as Siemens and Vestas, have developed advanced power-plant regulation modules that provide numerous power-management features, such as active and reactive power regulation, power ramping, voltage control, and more. In some cases, the systems can be combined with other third-party equipment such as capacitors or converters.

Independent advisory consultancy, DNV GL's SCADA system takes provides a common platform for multiple renewable projects. The system comes as an in-house or a subscription service, and automatically collects data from both on and offshore wind farms. Users can review and control the current status of a project, manage and analyze data, and create reports via a web browser.

Holistic monitoring A SCADA system with integrated CMS can provide more comprehensive information about wind-farm health.

To this end, a study by consultancy HVPD examined a more holistic approach to condition monitoring for subsea medium and high-voltage cable networks used in offshore wind projects.

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WindAccess SCADA system is designed to collect wind-farm information, such as wind speed and substation operation, and then analyze the input to help system operators improve the performance of their projects.

(Image: Alstom)

The early cable failures were studied to determine the potential for a CMS to provide early warnings against incipient cable-insulation faults that would direct preventive maintenance crews and avert unplanned outages.

The findings indicated that a crosscorrelation of all condition and state parameters was significant for an adequate level of diagnostic data for cost-effective implementation of preventative maintenance. A holistic system includes the integration of a number of factors beyond cable function, such as: • • • •

Weather and tidal data Partial discharge events Reliability of the cable sheath current Power flow and quality of individual cables and the network as a whole • Overvoltage and overcurrent events Compared to onshore wind farms, offshore versions incur costs that are 10 to 50 times higher for outages that stem from cable failures. Digging up the seabed floor to locate and fix a cable fault is no simple or inexpensive task. So the need for a holistic monitoring system is critical to uptime and return on investment.

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Security risks Despite the benefits of SCADA and CMS, they can present security risks.

In fact, even the most secure system may provide an opportunity for wellorganized hackers to take control over energy systems remotely. Some companies have learned of this vulnerability the hard way.

Back in 2012, smart technology company Telvent (owned by Schneider Electric), reported to its customers that hackers had breached their firewall and accessed SCADA system project files. The perpetrators, believed to be a hacker group known as Comment Group, also left malicious software in their wake. Such project files may contain information on a customer’s network.

Researchers in Finland recently evaluated Internet-facing SCADA systems and found thousands of unsecured systems – 2,915 in all. The survey only included an estimated 30% of all Finnish IP address space, so it is assumed there are even more vulnerable systems in automation and manufacturing industries.

Compared to onshore wind farms, offshore versions incur costs that are that are 10 to 50 times higher for outages that stem from cable failures.

Fortunately, such risks are continually being addressed by innovations in security and data protection. New regulations and vigilance in this area requires companies to assess their IT architecture and equipment of current systems against existing vulnerabilities. For example in the U.S., the Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, a section of the Department of Homeland Security, is tasked with providing a controls-systems-security focus as part of the national Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center. It provides analyses of windpowerengineering.com

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O&M strategies

for

offshore wind & cable work

The University of Manchester is currently leading a consortium to investigate advanced technologies, such as robotics and artificial intelligence, for the operations and maintenance of offshore wind farms.

vulnerabilities and malware threats to control system environments and it offers asset owners onsite assistance and remote analysis to support discovery and recovery efforts.

Advanced AI & robots Secure access to offshore wind data is a challenge that researchers at the University of Manchester are attempting to address in a new way. The main issue, according to UK asset management firm the Crown Estate, is safe and secure remote access, which they say eats up 80 to 90% of offshore O&M costs.

So to improve O&M at offshore wind farms, the University is leading a consortium to investigate robotics and artificial intelligence. The use of robots will allow operations in difficult or hazardous environments, such as subsea. Here they will inspect cables in high-voltage environments and high-voltage equipment, and around wind turbines checking their

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mechanical structures.

In addition, advanced sensors will employ sonar techniques to assess subsea cable wear and degradation.

Predictive and diagnostic techniques will also allow picking up problems early, while simple and inexpensive maintenance will allow quickly fixing them.

The ÂŁ5m project will investigate the use of advanced sensing, robotics, virtual-reality models, and AI to reduce offshore maintenance costs. This is a step in the right direction, at least with regard to the UK government. It has introduced regulations that require O&M costs to fall 25% by 2020 with the goal of making offshore wind more financially sustainable.

If offshore wind-farm operators intend to meet the goals of lower O&M costs, they will have to address the issue with better communication of all wind components. And for that they will, inevitably, rely on advanced technologies such as CMS and SCADA systems — and now potentially even robots and AI. W

www.windpowerengineering.com

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Going digital:

A LO O K AT T H E M O D E R N S U BSTAT I O N

S t e v e n A . K u n s m a n · Director of Product Management & Applications · ABB | abb.com

Digital substations can boost the flexibility and responsiveness of transmission and distribution grids by capturing and using accurate, real-time data to control grid stability and react quickly to changing grid conditions.

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A UTILITY-SCALE WIND FARM must be accompanied by a substation or two. Equipment in the substation transforms voltage and governs the interface to the transmission grid. The substation plays a critical role and essentially acts as the motherboard of the power industry, controlling and directing power on demand, and essentially making sure the lights stay on.

To do so, electrical substations have typically used miles of copper cabling for point-to-point connections, measuring currents and voltages, and controlling the circuit breakers for power switching and protecting substation equipment. However, copper is expensive.

It also has limited capacity for one measurement or a single control signal (important for power delivery and condition monitoring), and introduces potential safety risks to workers and equipment.

This conventional design and aging control equipment results in costly testing and maintenance, and restricts the communication of important information useful for identifying an asset’s health and determining when equipment maintenance is required.

Grid operators of conventional copper-run substations must make periodic site visits to collect information on equipment, efficiency, faults, or failures.

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Going digital:

A LO O K AT T H E M O D E R N S U BSTAT I O N

If operators were able to leverage digital technology and power systems in real time, it would mean significant improvements in grid reliability, increased site and worker safety, and reduced power interruptions.

Enter, the digital revolution. Digital substations reduce the electrical connection between high-voltage equipment, let the grid run more efficiently, and create a safer work site. This is done by replacement of copper signal wires with fiber-optic connectivity.

Additionally, the industrial internet of things (IIoT) is able to offer data on demand to optimize overall substation performance — often letting operators work from the comfort and safety of an offsite office.

Digital substations are not a new idea to the power industry, but the technology has been slow to adopt because of old processes, regulations, and an aging transmission grid. Times are changing, however, thanks to advances in fiber-optic communications and digital technologies.

Substation automation systems have largely replaced conventional equipment at the station level in modern substations. However, there is still a significant quantity of conventional equipment and copper wiring at the bay and process levels, between the primary and secondary equipment. (Note: IEC 61850 is the standard that defines substation communication protocols and the need for interoperability between systems from different vendors.)

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From copper wires to digital pathways Every copper wire in a substation is a potential electrical-shock risk, whether it is from a current transformer (or CT — which is used to measure ac power), a potential circuit (or PT, a voltage transformer), or a 125 Vdc control wire. The secondary circuit on a highly inductive current transformer poses the largest safety risk. A potential hazard results when an energized current transformer wire is unknowingly disconnected.

From inductive circuit theory, current flowing through an inductive circuit does not change instantly from five to zero amps. When an open CT circuit occurs, the inductive circuit can produce hazardous, high-voltage conditions that pose a safety threat. Depending on the secondary load, high voltages may build and lead to flashovers and arcing, which puts substation personnel at risk of serious injury or worse.

In addition, there is possible equipment damage and downtime from arcing or fire, which means lost power and revenue.

The defining feature of a digital substation is the process bus replacing

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CTs and PTs with non-conventional instrument transformers. This is when sensor technology digitalizes the analog power system measurements.

Additionally, the process bus means copper control wires are replaced with digitized binary information for breaker status and control. A switch to digital can cut the quantity of copper wires in a substation by more than 80%, which is a significant cost savings.

Most importantly, the elimination of open-current circuits and the replacement of the copper control wires minimizes exposure to high-voltage electricity and reduces the risk of damaging equipment.

Going digital Digital substations are gaining traction as commercial installations are recognizing the benefits. There are several reasons for this including the availability of new, high-performance digital sensors and stand-alone merging units that are easy to install. The units also offer cost savings and shorter installation times because fewer copper wires are required.

High-voltage measurement has also recently improved to offer more reliable sensors with greater accuracy, better performance, and the ability of direct digital outputs to the process bus. By going digital, the sensors preserve signal integrity and ease of connections through fiber communications. Also, unlike previous optical sensors, which were far from reliable in some cases, new fiber-optic current sensors combine the optical-current with redundant systems. Redundancy ensures fault tolerance and, in the event one system goes down, the secondary or redundant system is active.

For example, one modern non-conventional instrument transformer (NCIT) family of combisensors, use redundant sets of Rogowski coils for current measurement and two independent capacitive dividers for voltage measurement. A Rogowski coil accurately measures alternating current without the impact of saturation typically experienced in conventional CT’s. The design’s redundancy (which includes the associated electronics for digitaliziation) allows for two completely independent and parallel protection systems. The result is excellent availability, accuracy, stability, and performance.

Another advantage: This modern sensor contains no oil that is typical in a conventional CT so it is OCTOBER 2017

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environmentally friendly and extremely safe. Standalone merging units that bridge the gap between analog conventional instrument transformers (ITs) and the digital process bus. This is important because older, conventional substations were never built for a digital network, and IT replacement for substation retrofits are costly. So, stand-alone merging units allow for the use of existing CT and PT while upgrading the protection and control system to digital technology.

NCIT sensors and merging units digitalize CT or PT signals but to achieve interoperability from different manufactures, the industry relies on adherence to open standards.

Meeting standards Wide-scale adoption of digital messaging for substation communication is only possible if it is based on a common standard. The use of NCIT and stand-alone merging units digital outputs must adhere to IEC 61850 process bus communication standard. The International Electrotechnical Commission’s IEC 61850, Communication Networks and Systems for Power Utility Automation, is a comprehensive standard defining a communication architecture and philosophies that specify how substation devices should work and communicate. This includes what is important to communicate, and how fast.

Guidelines and standards are essential in achieving multi-vendor interoperability and the windpowerengineering.com

Retrofitting a conventional substation for digital functionality.

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Going digital:

A LO O K AT T H E M O D E R N S U BSTAT I O N

benefits of a digital substation. IEC 618509-2 process bus standard in substations has provided a platform that all manufacturers can develop to achieve the goal of interoperability.

For process bus communications, IEC 61850-9-2’s (released in 2004 and revised within the past few years) provides the streaming sampled measure values. That means modern sensors digitalize the power system current or voltage measurements into a package of synchronized values that are “communicated” to the protection and control devices.

Interestingly, the standard does not define the sensor types or specific means for the digital transformation. Instead, it defines a merging unit that collects the sensor information and prescribes a standard way to package and communicate the output. This means the intelligent electronic devices or IEDs — the microprocessor-based controllers for protecting and controlling the transformers and circuit breakers — that come from different suppliers can be mixed on the same bus without concern for communication incompatibilities.

The exchange of sampled values between modern sensors or non-conventional instrument transformers, and intelligent electronic devices for protection functions, allows for the real-time digital information exchange.

The advantages to replacing copper with a digital process bus include:

capability. These allow easily extending or adding new functions with minimal outage time.

• Higher standardization through IEC 61850 compliant and interoperability with various manufacturers’ equipment • Faster, more efficient communication and asset health information comes from connecting to a higher-level system, such as one for substation automation, Asset Health Center, or SCADA software.

This allows continuous monitoring of all connected equipment.

Communicating over fiber Faster, more efficient communication is an important benefit of going digital. It generally means quicker response times, maintenance and service, and increased system availability.

This is partially done by replacing copper wires with fiber-optic connectivity.

However, to realize its full value, a digital substation needs more than just digital sensors feeding data into control centers.

It needs autonomous intelligence shared between substation equipment and the utility network control center, and this is where the industrial internet of things comes into play.

One of many benefits with IIoT means data can be collected via sensors on equipment in the field through cloud-based

software, filtered, and analyzed in real time, 24/7. Algorithms can then help to provide insight for predictive and prescriptive maintenance and risk reduction that continually optimize the grid and improve a substation’s efficiency and cost effectiveness.

What’s more is IIoT can prove just as useful for the end-user and utility customers as it can at the digital substation and control center. IIoT can obtain, analyze, and predict electricity use and enhance consumer experiences by ensuing the lights stay on when needed and they power-off when not. In this way, power is saved and so are utility costs.

As power-generation sources become increasingly distributed, intermittent, and volatile, achieving high levels of control and performance requires a more intelligent and reliable grid. This is now possible thanks to advances in grid automation technology in recent years, including the development of digital substations. A fully digital substation is smaller, more reliable and has reduced life-cycle costs. It also offers increased safety and is more efficient than its conventional analog equivalent.

Add in the industrial internet of things, and that digital data can be optimized for safe and efficient use for utilities and customers. W

• Increased system availability by replacing electro-mechanical, static, or even outdated digital secondary equipment with modern numerical devices bundled to a real-time communication network • Lower costs of materials by going from many copper cables to a few fiber-optic communication cables — which means reduced costs for cables and associated equipment, such as cable trenches and installation material • Greater system and personnel safety, replacing CTs with NCITs, there is zero risk of inadvertently opening CT circuits and testing bits and bytes over fiber versus troubleshooting the dc control wires • Improved functions come from a fully distributed architecture, coupled with advanced communication and process 56

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Jay Marino, Lab Manager for PMI, installs a synthetic rope sample for tension testing to ensure compliance with rated breaking strength.

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The future of cable maintenance and repair in offshore wind farms Now that the U.S. offshore wind sector has one working wind farm and more projects in the pipeline, it’s a good time to start thinking about the future of the subsea cables that transmit electricity to the mainland grid.

Ty l e r B u r g e r

Project Engineer and Marine Energy Specialist

C

ables are often treated as an afterthought in offshore wind farm development — but cable damage accounts for as much as 80% of insurance pay-outs on these projects.

I’ve learned this first-hand through work on the engineering team at PMI Industries in Cleveland, Ohio, where we build premium accessories for subsea transmission cables and sonar-array cables used to hunt for oil and gas

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· PMI Industries Inc.

deposits. Our experience in the hydrocarbons industry give us a perspective on the role of subsea cabling in offshore wind along with wave and tidal technologies.

We’ve been talking about subsea cabling challenges for the past couple years on our Ocean Engineering Blog, and thought it time to write about the future of cables in offshore wind projects.

Hence, this article. But before we start predicting the future, let’s confront the present.

windpowerengineering.com

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Theoffuture cable maintenance and repair

in offshore wind farms

Unique challenges for subsea cables No matter how much time, money, and energy a company devotes to developing offshore wind farms, it’s all for naught if the electricity cannot reach the mainland grid. Subsea cabling could become the weak link in an offshore wind farm.

From what we have seen, here are the main cabling issues the offshore wind industry faces: Changing ocean terrain − It is possible to bury transmission cable according to plan, but the subsea terrain can shift in as little as six months. Or, an underwater landslide can leave the buried cable exposed, increasing the risk of damage and corrosion.

cables are designed for a static application so they have little elasticity. Stresses and strains from ocean currents, installation, and repair processes can stretch cables to their breaking point.

Thermodynamics − Transmitting electricity over cables creates heat. Even though the cables typically pass through cool or cold water, the contrasting temperatures can cause wear or produce other unanticipated flaws.

Complex repairs − Cables usually suffer two kinds of damage: physical breakage and performance degradation. Of the two, physical breakage is somewhat easier to fix because it is possible to find the two ends,

locations and diagnosing problems.

Technology is also getting better at monitoring the entire subsea cable grid and providing alerts when faults crop up.

Downtime expense − Given the high cost of offshore wind development, wind farm managers must hold the line on downtime because lost electricity flow means lost revenue from the grid operator. Given the inherent delays from weather, availability of repair vessels, and difficulty tracking down the source of cable problems, engineers must make sure they’re doing all they can to prevent cable woes during the design phase of a project.

That’s enough on the problems. Let’s move on to the future possibilities for subsea cables.

Offshore wind cabling: What’s on the horizon The future of offshore wind lies beyond the view of beachgoers, many of whom consider offshore wind farms an eyesore.

This is a big deal in North America because so many coastal areas depend heavily on tourism. With that in mind, these factors should have the greatest influence on offshore wind cabling in the years to come: Floating platforms − Installing wind turbines on floating platforms solves a host of problems. For example:

Terrence Mathis, Engineer for PMI, reviews test data at PMI’s dynamic tension test machine controller console. Here, test parameters can be programmed for data such as tension, elongation, torque, rotation, torque balance, twist resistance, and more.

Unpredictable weather − Imagine that an underwater landslide is severe enough to cause a cable malfunction. Now you have to hire a ship and crew to find the source of the malfunction and fix it as soon as possible.

But bad weather may delay repairs for weeks or months, depending on the locale of the wind farm and site of the breakdown.

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haul them up to a ship, splice them together, and get the cable back in operation. With performance degradation, it is necessary to find the exact location of the fault on an intact cable before starting repairs, and that is a much tougher bit of detective work.

Monitoring − Portable, unmanned, underwater vehicles are becoming essential to examining subsea cable

www.windpowerengineering.com

• Coastal views remain scenic because floating platforms can be installed beyond the view of beachgoers.

• Stronger winds farther from shore produce more electricity and with greater reliably.

• Installations are simplified because they are floated into place.

• Turbines are easier to repair and decommission because they’re mobile.

• Floating wind farms can be installed in much deeper water than their solid-foundation counterparts, opening development opportunities in regions with narrow continental shelves, such as those off the coasts of California and Japan.

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Theoffuture cable maintenance and repair

in offshore wind farms

However, floating wind farms are more costly than existing technologies and installation techniques. These are preventing wider adoption.

But what about the cables? As you can imagine, a turbine platform moving with the waves will require dynamic transmission cables that can adjust to the platform’s motion. As noted earlier, current transmission cables are static.

They are put in one location and hopefully stay there. Commercial-scale floating platforms will require innovations in dynamic power cabling.

Automation − Could floating platforms essentially install themselves — cables and all?

Most likely, yes. Many cabling installation and repair jobs require teams of divers, presenting risks that translate into high costs, which automation could reduce in two areas: •

Advanced subsea vehicles. Autonomous and remotely operated mini-subs can do a lot of underwater work without exposing divers to the risks of the ocean environment.

• Self-connecting and disconnecting cables. Connecting cables to devices is often done manually. But because these operations are essentially mechanical and repetitive, they can be automated.

constant monitoring could make it possible to pre-configure a floating wind farm near shore, tow it out to a specific anchor point, and connect it to the grid with much lower potential for human error, creating more opportunities for economies-of-scale that make these wind farms more viable.

Synthetic cables − High-tech synthetic fibers such as aramid provide the strength of steel at a fraction of the weight, which makes them an alluring option in a host of subsea applications, including power cables. They’re easier to handle and not as susceptible to corrosion as steel-armored cables.

While these benefits will help synthetics make inroads against traditional steel cabling, there is one caveat: Adding an attachment point (a “termination” in our trade) can cause a synthetic cable to lose up to half of its tensile strength. At PMI, we addressed this challenge by designing a “strength member termination” that can preserve up to 75% of the cable’s tensile strength. Terminations for steel cables preserve all of the cable’s tensile strength, which can be a point in favor of sticking with steel.

Additive manufacturing − Additive manufacturing is a fancy term for 3D

printing, which starts with a threedimensional image on a computer that is connected to a device that builds the object one thin layer at a time. Most 3D printers work with plastics, but parts also can be printed done with metals.

This creates the potential to build spare parts on the fly rather than wait for them to be shipped in from far-off locales, which would cause delays of days or weeks. Of course, there are lots of particulars to be worked out — to print parts on site you must have the proper raw materials, whether they be plastic, steel, or a composite that hasn’t been invented yet. But as 3D printing moves further into the mainstream, it stands to reason that the devices and the materials they use should evolve in unison.

Good things on the horizon Offshore wind is one tiny blip on the U.S. coastline today, but it won’t be that way forever. As manufacturing, development, and installation costs fall thanks to the maturing European offshore wind market, it seems certain that U.S. offshore wind development will accelerate in the next few years.

It’s sure to be a great ride for windpower engineers. Just don’t neglect your cables. W

As these technologies mature through use in other industries, they’ll give offshore operators more opportunities to shave costs and become more competitive with fossil fuel power.

Internet of Things (IoT) − Pervasive networked sensors are becoming more common in manufacturing operations, and this will likely happen in offshore wind as well. Sensors can be developed to monitor the electricity flow on specific lengths of cable and send telemetry data to a central processing hub that will monitor everything happening on an offshore wind farm in real time.

Software can be written to detect subtle changes in current that indicate a cable has a flaw that can be repaired on a schedule rather than on-the-fly in an emergency, which is naturally much more expensive. Data could be transmitted via satellite to avoid the possibility of losing data to a damaged cable.

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The PMI helical rod cable termination is installed in a testing machine to sample the terminationn’s dynamictension capability and measure a maximum grip.

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333

326

c. Total Paid and/or Requested Circulation (Sum of 15b (1), (2), (3), and (4)) Outside County Nonrequested Copies Stated on PS Form 3541 (include (1) Sample copies, Requests Over 3 years old, Requests induced by a Premium, Bulk Sales and Requests including Outside County Nonrequested Copies Stated Association on PS FormRequests, 3541 (include Names obtained from Business Directories, Lists, and other sources) (1) Sample copies, Requests Over 3 years old, Requests induced by a Premium, Bulk Sales and Requests including Association Requests, Names obtained from Business Directories, Lists, and other sources) d. NonreIn-County Nonrequested Copies Stated on PS Form 3541 (include quested (2) Sample copies, Requests Over 3 years old, Requests induced by a Premium, Sales and Copies Requests including d. Distribution NonreIn-County Bulk Nonrequested Stated on PSAssociation Form 3541Requests, (include (By Mail from Business and other sources) quested Sampleobtained copies, Requests Over Directories, 3 years old, Lists, Requests induced by a (2) Names and Distribution Premium, Bulk Sales and Requests including Association Requests, Outside (By Mail Names obtained from Business Directories, Lists, and other sources) the Nonrequested Copies Distributed Through the USPS by Other Classes of andMail) (3) Mail (e.g. First-Class Mail, Nonrequestor Copies mailed in excess of 10% Outside Limit mailed at Standard Mail® or Package Services the Mail) Nonrequested Copies Distributed Through the USPSRates)

by Other Classes of (3) Mail (e.g. First-Class Mail, Nonrequestor Copies mailed in excess of 10% Limit mailed atCopies Standard Mail® or Outside Packagethe Services Rates)Pickup Stands, Nonrequested Distributed Mail (Include (4) Trade Shows, Showrooms and Other Sources) Nonrequested Copies Distributed Outside the Mail (Include Pickup Stands, (4) Trade Shows, (Sum Showrooms Other e. Total Nonrequested Distribution of 15d and (1), (2), (3)Sources) and (4)) e. Total Nonrequested Distribution (Sum of 15d (1), (2), (3) and (4)) f. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and e)

No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date

0

0

0

0

352

155

685

481

8,693

8,154

Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and e) Copies not Distributed (See Instructions to Publishers #4, (page #3))

621

113

g. Copies not Distributed (See Instructions to Publishers #4, (page #3)) h. Total (Sum of 15f and g)

9,314

8,267

Total (Sum ofand/or 15f and g) Paid Requested Circulation i.h. Percent (15c divided by f times 100) i. Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation (15c divided by f times 100) 16.

I certify that 50% of allof myOwnership distributedforcopies (electronics and print) are legitimate or in paid 16. X Publication of Statement a Requester Publication is required and willrequests be printed thecopies. issue of this publication.

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OCTOBER 2017

Ad Index_10-17_Statement of Ownership_Vs1.indd 63

WINDPOWER ENGINEERING & DEVELOPMENT

63

10/4/17 3:32 PM

A wind turbine fit for a typhoon “TO SUPPLY SAFE ELECTRICITY TO ALL HUMAN BEINGS through innovation in wind energy." This is the mission of Atsushi Shimizu, the Founder, President, and CEO of Challenergy Inc., a wind innovation company in Japan. It seems a fitting mission worthy of attention in light of the tsunamis that have hit other countries and recent hurricaneforce storms, such as Harvey and Irma, which devastated parts of the Gulf Coast and Florida.

In fact, the effects of recent natural disasters inspired Shimizu to change career paths and open his own clean-energy company. He was an engineer at a major electronic manufacturing company when the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami hit in 2011, followed by the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear incident.

“I was totally shocked by the catastrophic disaster caused by the nuclear power plant, and then I decided to dedicate the rest of my life to realize the energy shift by my own challenge,” he wrote on his website (https://challenergy.com). “I personally think this is our generation’s obligation to show the path to the sustainable society for the future generation by non-use of fossil and nuclear energy.”

Shimizu took that obligation seriously. After the catastrophic events of 2011, he dedicated his engineering talent and career to clean energy from wind power. The result: the Magnus Vertical-Axis Wind Turbine (VAWT). The Magnus is no ordinary turbine, however. Shimizu knew he wanted to invent a wind turbine that could also turn disaster into something good, such as clean and reliable electricity.

Magnus is the world's first typhoon-tolerant turbine. “Although there are the existing wind turbines which may not be ‘broken’ by a typhoon, you cannot find any other technologies other than Magnus VAWT, which can generate the electricity from a typhoon,” he says.

By using the Magnus effect instead of the blades on a conventional horizontal-axis design, Shimizu says the Magnus VAWT can control its generation according to various wind speeds and directions. The Magnus effect is a lifting force typically associated with a spinning object — or in this case, possibly a typhoon — that drags air faster around one side,

6 4 WINDPOWER ENGINEERING & DEVELOPMENT

Downwind 10-17_Vs2.indd 64

creating a difference in air pressure that moves the object in the direction of the lower-pressure side.

The Magnus VAWT has an egg-beater shape that uses three vertical rotating cylinders and a central column or rod. The cylinders rotate to generate the Magnus effect, which kick-starts rotation of the entire turbine. By tightening the center rod, it is possible to control the rate of the cylinders’ rotation and adjust the speed of the turbine. This prevents overrotation, which could damage the turbine, and ensures the blades never spin out of control despite severe winds.

Nevertheless, Shimizu says the Magnus is designed to withstand typhoons with wind speeds of 80 meters per second. What’s more, a full rotation of the Magnus VAWT spins at a much slower rate than that of a conventional wind turbines, and this provides environmental benefits. For example, there is less noise or chance of bird or bat strikes.

Unconvinced? Well, Challenergy won the backing of the Japanese government, for further development and received a two-year grant from the New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization that totaled about 55 million yen (or $535,000). The company also raised additional capital from crowd-funding.

In July 2015, the Challenergy team simulated their invention and found the Magnus VAWT could achieve an efficiency of 30%. In comparison, HAWTbased turbines typically hit 40% efficiency — but they cannot operate in a typhoon. Then, in July of 2016, Shimizu and his team tested their first turbine prototype in southern Okinawa. It was a small, one-kilowatt capacity unit, but it survived winds that would typically shut down a three-bladed turbine.

According to Shimizu, Challenergy is aiming to commercialize a 10-kW Magnus VAWT by 2020, in time for the TOKYO Olympics and Paralympics.

“We will never stop up-sizing the capacity.

We are aiming to achieve megawatt-class turbines in the future,” writes Shimizu. W

The Magnus VAWT is about 7 m (23 ft.) high, with three rotating cylinders instead of blades. It is intended to generate electricity in normal and severe winds, such as those from storms or even a typhoon.

www.windpowerengineering.com

OCTOBER 2017

10/4/17 3:11 PM

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