Show notes
Jason Moody from GreenSpur discusses their innovative axial flux generator technology, which promises to reduce weight and complexity in wind turbines, offering greater efficiency and lower maintenance costs.
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Today we're excited to have Jason Moody, chairman of GreenSpur, joining us to discuss a generator technology that could fundamentally alter the path of wind energy. While the wind industry has been scaling up turbine sizes, we've hit a critical challenge. Generators are becoming massively heavy, complex, and expensive to maintain.
GreenSpur is taking a different approach entirely. They perfected axial flux generator technology that can dramatically reduce weight, eliminate cooling systems. And use any type of magnet from simple faite to rare earth materials. This isn't just another incremental improvement. It's a completely different way of generating power that could solve some of offshore wind's biggest headaches.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Jason, welcome to the program. Thank [00:01:00] you. Thanks a. Hi Joel. Well, let's start off with the elephant in the room for offshore wind turbines manufacturing. Uh, there's some fundamental challenges that are facing them as we approach sort of the 20 megawatt stage and getting further offshore. Weight becomes a big problem.
Jason Moody: Yeah, it does. For, for years they've been getting bigger and bigger, and you can see that the industry just wants to push for that next size. But with that, the generators are getting very, very heavy. So the last direct drive generator that we evaluated was in excess of 150 tons. Now, that's not a, not a small machine anymore, but what what we're trying to do is introduce a new technology.
That can hopefully address that problem and some others as well.
Allen Hall (2): So when you put a very heavy generator on top of a tower, that increases everything underneath of it, right?
Jason Moody: Yeah. The foundations grow exponentially. The [00:02:00]steelwork and the structure has to grow. Then the cell itself, just based on size, lot more composite parts.
Everything's bigger.
Joel Saxum: So we're talking like here, kind of traditional offshore wind fixed bottom right. That's an issue. The foundations have to grow, uh, exponentially to get these, to hold up this weight. But when another thing that's happening globally, right? The big push for floating offshore wind. So if now you're talking about putting more and more and more weight on something that's actually dynamic, right?
So that kind of, uh, what does that do to the, the whole system.
Jason Moody: That's a, it's a different, um, engineering challenge, but it's mainly in the steel structure and the ballast in, in those, uh, in those systems. So the street, the steel pylon becomes very thick, becomes very heavy, uh, to hold that weight on top.
But most of the time what you found in these newer next gen floating systems is they've gone to geared systems, which is a big move in the whole industry for both onshore, offshore, and, and everything in between. Everyone's moving to hybrid [00:03:00] and geared systems,
Allen Hall (2): and hybrid and geared systems get even more complicated, which is the problem, right?
Is that we're, we're trying to lower the cost of energy, but as we go bigger in scale, we sort of lose those efficiencies. It, it doesn't scale up with the efficiencies. It actually, you start getting more complicated because the generator itself is a limitation.
Jason Moody: It is not just on electrical efficiency either.
It's, it's limited because a lot of these generators, as they spin faster, they get hotter. And then with hotter generators, you need fancier and, and more high tech cooling systems and, and there's another point of failure. So the LCUE really does start to suffer in these more complex advanced systems.
Joel Saxum: The size of these things too, like as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, we're trying to scale up like.
The idea of working on something, like, I think about this like working on a truck, right? You go from working on a truck or working on a car to working on, uh, a semi go from that to working on, you know, a big boat engine or [00:04:00] something of that sort. And now we're still talking at small scale, but the tools, you need, the ability to handle and move things like it becomes exponentially more difficult.
So as we get to, I know like we were talking earlier off air, Siemens has their 21 and a half megawatt machine installed. I can't imagine the amount, the, the types of tooling, lifting mechanisms and stuff just to be able to work on the things. So that's, that becomes even more of an impasse, especially in offshore operations as we're trying to keep these things running.
Jason Moody: Yeah. There's a whole booming and emerging industry on the infrastructure just to move and install these parts, uh, offshore. It's, uh, just to hoist some of this big heavy equipment up into the na cell. It's, uh, it's. Really quite difficult, but getting even more difficult as time goes on
Allen Hall (2): and there's more components up tower than ever before.
As we get to these bigger generators, cooling is a massive issue and if you follow, uh, all the patents by all the OEMs right now, you'll see that they're trying to figure out ways [00:05:00] to provide cooling up tower to the generator and all the gears and everything else moving up top. And it, it becomes a massive problem.
So not only do you have a very heavy generator and relatively complex generator, now you're adding a coolant system, which is another complicated, heavy system on top of it.
Jason Moody: Yeah, you're absolutely right, Alan. It, it is getting more complicated and the thermal management in the new cell, it is, it's only going to get worse.
Allen Hall (2): Greens spur is doing something radically different. And I've been following Greensboro for, for a number of years now because, uh, you have been based in part of, been supported by ORE Catapult and you have a different generator design. It's actually not a new concept, but maybe the implementation I would describe as new.
But moving from a standard sort of two cylinder design, you have a rotor. And you have a stator on the outside, which we see in cars and everywhere. It's basically every [00:06:00] generator or motor in the world has these two rotating, these two cylindrical pieces. Moving from that into an actual flux design. And when we talk about flux, we're talking about the magnetic fields that are generated to make these things spin or to create power, actual has a lot of advantages that haven't been.
Taken, taken into consideration when we're building massive wind turbines.
Jason Moody: Yeah, precisely. And thanks. Um, the, the way that Greensboro has approached this isn't using a brand new technology. It's, the way to describe it is to perfect it in a new application. So axial flux as a generator. Um, it's been around a long time and the advantages of using axial flux as a generator have been well documented and known.
Uh, for, for, again, a long time. But what we've managed to do is we've scaled it from what might be a desktop size, um, unit up into the multi megawatt sizes. Now we've [00:07:00] got, um, uh, a generator that's, um, been tested at the ORE Catapult, and, and that's three meters in diameter. It's, it's a huge machine. Um, and, and that's some of the benefits of Axial Flux can be seen in how you control and how you can manage the, the magnets being on the tire face instead of the tire tread,
Allen Hall (2): right?
And so now you have a series of discs. You have a what call a state or disc and a rotor disc, and they kind of, you can stack them together. So as you want to add more power production, you just add more discs, which, uh, is a really simple way of changing the size of a generator. But the, the key is, is that you have, uh, the coils stationary.
You have the magnets on another disc, and they're spinning around, which is what's creating the power. You can use a lot of different magnets in this particular design. You can use [00:08:00] standard, simple off the shelf magnets or rare earth magnets. It's sort, and it, your, the actual design is sort of ambivalent to it.
Jason Moody: Absolutely. One of our, uh, one of our taglines, one of our USPS and how we've, um, adopted the design methodology is to be magnet agnostic. Drivetrain agnostic, which means we can be geared or direct drive even down to the, the coil material. We're completely adaptable and scalable to whatever our clients might need.
The key is it's very quick to, to change these parameters in our modeling software so we can easily design the most optimized, uh, generator.
Allen Hall (2): You can really drive the weight down in sort of two ways. You can use rare earth magnets, much more powerful, and you can also remove the copper and put in aluminum for the coils, which drives weight down.
So at the end of the day, you have and. You have a very efficient design, but you can also dump the cooling system. You don't need a [00:09:00] fluid cooling system to create, for this generator to maintain its power output.
Jason Moody: Yeah, so if we were to go tor to toe with a traditional radial system of, let's just pick 15 megawatt, we would expect to be 25% lighter,