The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

This week on Uptime Power-Up, Equinor’s system to keep their offshore floating wind platforms stable, Vestas’s patent for customizing blade root angles, and fresh air breathing device for emergencies.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

Well guys, our first idea of the week is from Equinor, and they have developed a system and patented a system about trying to keep their offshore floating wind platforms stable in rough seas. And that technique involves using the turbine blades to actually control the blade angle and the generator torque to counteract the motions of the seas to provide stability.

There’s a lot of rotating mass on a wind turbine, obviously, so the moment of inertia is there and it’s kind of self stabilizing to a point. But the seas are massive, and they’re still gonna cause the, the floating platforms to bounce a little bit. This is an interesting patent. I always wonder about these systems, what the effectives on the mechanical system, on the rotating equipment.

Does it start to wear on bearings? Does it cause problems further downstream when you try to actively control a turbine from swaying? Phil, this one is interesting in terms of its approach. It’s a relatively new patent though, right?

Philip Totaro: Yeah. So this, this was just issued a couple of weeks ago and that’s why we, we tagged it because we’re tracking, new.

Patent publications and application publications on a weekly basis. We’ve cataloged something like 60, 000 plus at Intel Store at this point. But this one stood out because, first of all, it’s patents from owner operators and independent power producers are, are usually rare and it’s the bigger companies that tend to get them if they get them at all.

So the fact that Equinor actually made it a point to, to patent something in general is, is noteworthy. The other thing I take from this is that they originally filed this. In 2019 in the UK and that was the jurisdiction that they claimed the, the patent priority filing in. The Highwind Scotland site was originally commissioned and started producing power back in 2017.

So, the fact that they came up with this concept. And wanted to basically, I mean Joel will be able to explain this in, in a bit more detail, but it’s almost like they wanted to use the turbine as a giant gyro stabilizer on this floating platform.

Joel Saxum: So some quick math here on what this looks like in the real world.

In the North Sea, the average wave period is about seven to nine seconds. So period of a wave is between crest to crest. So if we’re talking about trying to counteract what a platform might do between a wave, you’re talking seven to nine seconds from crest to crest. Okay. And now you look at the these larger turbines and you’re looking at about the same RPM.

Six to nine RPM, something like that. Six to 10 RPM. So you’re talking, and what I’m trying to get to is, is if you’re going to use a part of the turbine as an act, an active part of the turbine to counteract some of this movement, that’s a lot of cycles on whatever that motor may be. So if it’s a pitch motor or.

So, or a yaw motor moving and a pitch motor moving, you’re going to be doing this for every, basically every revolution of that turbine. You’re going to have to be moving stuff around. And if history shows us anything from some of the active pitch management turbines that we know of out in the field onshore, those motors don’t fare too well in the long run.

So my thought here is while this is a great concept on a, and I don’t know if it’s been deployed and I don’t know if it has to what degree of success. That’s a lot of moving and grooving for a lot of parts up tower when they could be looking at a different way to stabilize this thing.

Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Vestas, and this idea is a way to create the root end of a blade that’s angled slightly, so when it connects to the hub, The, the blade has either a sweep angle back or it’s coned angle forward, so it’s a series of spacers that you can put into the tooling to create this little bit of angularity to the, the blade.

The, I guess the concept, Phil, is that you could customize the root angles to give you sweep or coning. For each turbine, for a specific location in the world and a wind farm to improve power output and maybe even durability, but it does sound rather complex on the application of this technology.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, and it’s, it’s interesting because the, the, this is one of these concepts that we talk about on Power Up Here.

From time to time, that, that’s a bit of an engineer’s fantasy, I’ll, I’ll call it where good idea and technologically feasible, not really a commercially viable solution to potentially a technical problem and a challenge that exists reason being that, like you’re saying, if you start developing site specific designs, while that’s good for, energy extraction and, and can have a beneficial impact on AEP, it makes your operations and maintenance overly complex, particularly around sourcing and storage of spare parts.

But this could be a step in, in a better direction if they could also find a way to make the root end more efficient. Potentially a little more modular where it, it could be kind of swappable. Maybe, it involves some of these shims and, and other kind of approaches that, that have been proposed.

Joel Saxum: Let’s take O& M out of this and start a little bit earlier in the project phase to see if this thing is feasible. And right now I’m looking at financially feasible from a risk standpoint and from an insurance standpoint. Because right now as it sits in the marketplace, and I’m just talking in the US cause that’s what I’ve been dealing with the last few weeks, is, People looking for a blade.

Hey, can you find this blade? Do you, do you know where these blades are? Can I get a set of blades here? Can I get one of these? Can I get one of those? Because I’ve got long lead times. I’ve got business interruption costs that are skyrocketing. I’ve got all kinds of things going on that are non, not conducive to uptime for turbines.

And this is based on what we sit today as basic blades, right? A blade. You name it, blades should work from turbine to turbine. Of course, we know that they have to be matched for weights and bending root moments and all these different things, but it’s hard enough to get those simple blades that are supposed to be manufactured in bulk to go onto these turbines, to keep them running.

I don’t think from a, if you talk to banks right now or, or larger financial institutions or the insurance side of things for risk wise, they’re not going to want to take that risk on. And they’re not going to finance a project that has something like this built into it. That’s my take.

Allen Hall: Our fun patent of the week is a fresh air breathing device for emergency building evacuations.

And it’s from a single inventor, and in response to some tragic hotel fires, the inventor developed this breathing apparatus that’s pretty simple and potentially life saving. It uses a flexible tube that can be inserted through the toilet water trap at the bottom. And excess, quote unquote, fresh air from the building’s plumbing vent system.

It includes optional charcoal filters, and I would option for that. Because you’re just coming into raw sewage, essentially, on the other side. But there is breathable air there, and it can include, like, a mouthpiece, a snorkel mouthpiece, or even a full face mask. Now, I’ve only seen this invention in the movies, in the Kingsman movie, they have this scene play out.

where they have to take a pipe and basically snorkel it through the toilet to breathe to get through the exercise that they’re doing. The only other thing that worries me about this, Phil, is I don’t know if I want to be stuck to this toilet. I’d rather be getting the heck out of the building instead of trying to breathe sewer air.

Philip Totaro: This is also, like we just talked about with the Vestas patent, it’s one of those things where, you know, it’s a very specific thing, like, you’re in a building that’s on fire, and maybe you can’t get out, but somebody can get the ladder, all the way up to where you’re at, and so you need to just buy yourself some time, so your toilet snorkel is is available for you in, in that scenario.

But yeah, I mean, most people, they’re not gonna bust out their toilet snorkel unless they just can’t get out of a burning building in the first place, so I, I don’t know, scenario I would need to, utilize this in, but because I’m probably, if the building I’m in is on fire, I’m, I’m evacuating.

Joel Saxum: I think there’s a couple things you’re, you have to, and I’m gonna go back to, focusing on operations. You gotta make sure you get that hose, first off, all the way up and through the toilet water, so you’re not sucking toilet water. And also, I don’t think you want that hose on the other end to be touching the inside of the pipe in any which way, because then you might be sucking in something that is not nearly as friendly as water.

And on the other side of things, I’m not a lawyer, right, and I will say that, I can say that pretty confidently, I am not a lawyer, but When they write in this patent that it is fresh air, I gotta say they should have used a different word for that because that doesn’t hold a lot of weight for me legally.

Allen Hall: I’m not a lawyer or a plumber but I know that’s the truth.