Show notes
The crew discusses the Chinese S1500 airborne wind turbine, how NLMK DanSteel manufactures steel for offshore wind, and results from ORE Catapult showing extended blade lifetimes.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall in the Queen City, Charlotte, North Carolina.
I'm here with Rosemary Barnes and. Australia Phil Totaro's in California and Joel Saxum's back home in Texas. We've all decided that we're not gonna talk about anything negative this week. That's good. Phil did have his pre-recorded rant. That's always good. So there, there is some dirt going on out there in wind, but I don't think we're gonna talk about it this week 'cause we just need a little bit of a break.
The top of the order is, uh, this Chinese flying wind turbine that looks like a Zeppelin, and [00:01:00] they have supposedly tested over in China, the world's largest airborne wind turbine, and it's called the S 1500. It's developed by Beijing's Saws Energy Technology, and it made us made in flight recently in Hames.
The, it looks like a Zeppelin and, and Rosemary, there has been a previous version of this that was around, but I don't think it went to anywhere, but it looks like it's what? It's about 40 meters tall, about 40 meters wide and about 60 meters long. So it's sort of this long tube. And inside of this tube they have 1200 kilowatt generators.
So they're creating power up at altitude, and they have a cable that bring down all the power. Down to earth. It's kind of like a heliostat and some of these, uh, other tethered systems. My question is, why are we trying that now? And especially in China where they have huge, massive wind turbine is [00:02:00]being built.
Why this?
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Uh, I don't know. I often question why China makes certain decisions with investments they make. 'cause they have, um, yeah, invested in a whole bunch of. Out there technologies as well as dominating most of the mainstream ones. And, uh, what I usually come up with is that they've gotta try everything.
Strategy, very, very similar concept came out of MITI think that they developed it originally as a power generating thing, you know, basically just based on the idea that, um, wind speeds are way higher the further up you go. So they wanna. Get, get up into those really high, um, wind speeds that, you know, way higher than what a tower can reach for a traditional wind turbine.
And yeah, this, these original concept that I saw out of MIT, that originally they were planning to use it for power generation, then I think that they pivoted to telecommunications. Um, and then I believe that they pivoted to not doing that anymore. Um, so I haven't looked at it recently. Could, could be that [00:03:00]I'm a little bit outta date on that.
But it is interesting to see a concept picked up that. Like, I don't think anybody would really say that that was the most promising of all the different kinds of airborne wind. Um, yeah. So it's interesting to see that that's the one that's been picked up. I think it's got some promise in that it's, it's true that the wind resource is much better at, um, at high wind speed, but there are a whole lot of challenges that need to be overcome.
Um, so it's not yet I would say sure whether this. Is any of these technologies are ever gonna go anywhere? Um, we're kind of at the point now where some companies are ready to find out, but it's um, yeah, definitely not taking over the world anytime soon.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I was gonna say, Rosie, I tend to agree with you.
I, we've, there's the one I'm thinking about, Alan is the, it was containerized and it was like we had a winch. He let led the thing up and went up to higher altitudes. I just. I think there's too many moving parts to these [00:04:00]solutions to be something that's gonna be done at scale. I think there's a great use for them in say, I don't know, military operations or disaster response, um, those kind of things.
Or very remote areas where you can't get anything else in, you know, like a Caribbean island or some crazy thing like that. I think there's, there's possibility there. However, to do this at scale. I just don't see it, right? This one's, this is by far the biggest one. I think I've heard of 1.2 megawatts.
That's a lot of juice, right? That's creating a lot of energy. So I think that you can see this like, oh, we're trying to go to scale with this thing, but. What's the practical use? I think, Phil, you actually said it before off air, like this is a solution looking for a problem almost.
Phil Totaro: Yeah, and it, what's funny to me about this is there's, there's a couple of things here.
One is what you just mentioned, Joel, like the economies of scale on doing this as some kind of displacement to conventional power generation is just completely [00:05:00] impractical because we have so much infrastructure in place that's not associated with. With Airborne, but we actually looked at, I just wanna say like 12 years ago as a company, we did the math on whether or not this type of technology made sense to use in, you know, like islands or, um, you know, displacement of like diesel generation basically, uh, places like Alaska or the Caribbean, like you said.
Um, so the math came out like if the price of oil is above. Something like 120 bucks a barrel, then a solution like this makes sense. Uh, otherwise you're probably better off, especially now. 'cause again, when we did this analysis, it was years ago, but batteries are easily more dispatchable now. You know, the technology, this is one of those things like you were saying, like, yeah, the technology works and you can make this like a TL nine, but [00:06:00] for what?
Like, nobody's gonna pay for this.
Rosemary Barnes: I don't think that they're up to TL nine yet. 'cause there's some like, it, it works. And they've done autonomous operation, like in steady state operation. They've done some autonomous, um, like launches and. I dunno, what's the opposite of a launch? Um, pulling, pulling back in.
You can't just stay up there through any kind of storm, right? So they have to be able to launch and, um, re retract land, um, under deploy. You have to be able to do that autonomously if you are gonna imagine, you know, this having any kind of scale. And I think that, yeah, autonomous launch and, um, landing has been done.
But not in all conditions. At least last time I looked into it deeply, they, that was the last bit that was left. It's like, yeah, it can, can be done autonomously in good conditions, but not bad ones. Um, yeah, so I think that there's still some proving out to go and I think that failure raise a really good [00:07:00] point that it becomes like the further that other technologies develop, the less likely it is that airborne wind can catch up.
And also that people like those early. Early markets are going to want it now. Islands obviously solar panels, um, are already deployed on a lot of islands. And then when you do have batteries so cheap that you can start to build up a whole day, a couple of days, you know, a week worth of batteries would probably not be a totally non-comparable cost to the airborne wind.
And also just so much less maintenance required. So much less that can go wrong.
Joel Saxum: You know, there's one thing I wanted to touch on here that we, we skipped, we kind of, we breezed by it because we do, we talk about these things all the time, but for people that are, aren't used to r and d or aren't used to technology development.
T when we mention TRL nine on the show here, uh, Phil mentioned it, Rosemary mentioned it. That is a scale. TRL one through TRL [00:08:00] nine, and it is, it was developed by NASA a long time ago, but basically TRL one means concept and idea all the way through. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 means commercially ready. We're ready to roll with this product as a, as a thing.
So when we say a one of those levels, that's what we're referring to.
Allen Hall: The United States had something very similar, or it still does, I think along the east coast they put up Aerostats around Washington DC and they had a little radar underneath them so they could look over the horizon. So along the east coast there are these big, massive aerostats, and I don't know if you recall or not, but several years ago, probably 10 years ago now, they had one of those aerostats break loose in Maryland and that cable.
That holds it to the earth is conductive. So every power line it came across, started creating shorts and blackouts all along this pathway until it finally crashed in Pennsylvania. I think they had an F 16 [00:09:00] chasing it for a little bit, uh, once it broke free. But I remember that happening and thinking, man, that is a really difficult engineering, uh, design to create something as big as a basically a BLI size piece and have a cable and have it hold it.
For eternity.
Rosemary Barnes: That's one of the biggest challenges. As aside from the autonomous operation, one of the biggest challenges is just the materials, properties of the cable itself. Because Yeah, the, the tether to get,