Show notes
Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar! Allen, Joel, Rosemary, joined by Yolanda Padron, discuss RWE's pilot project using drones to transport equipment uptower. Plus Mingyang has announced plans to invest $2B into a UK offshore wind manufacturing center. And Renvo' article in PES Wind Magazine highlights the needs for a convenient spare parts marketplace in the wind industry.
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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, Alan Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina.
And I. Have everybody else on the podcast is in the same state. Rosemary is in Texas, in Houston, Texas. Joel's in Austin, Texas, and our newest employee, Yolanda Barone, is in Austin, Texas. Yolanda, welcome to the podcast. You're, uh, just joined us a couple of days ago and we're super excited to have you.
There's been a lot going on in the wind business. Uh, Rosemary's actually over here for a conference and Joel's been helping [00:01:00] out at that conference. Just so everybody knows, Yolanda's gonna be our blade expert at Weather Guard helping us with a, a number of issues that operators have around the world, uh, for things that Rosie can't take care of.
Call in Yolanda. So leading off this week, an interesting story from RWE and a big press release about it. Joel, uh, RDB has achieved a breakthrough in offshore wind logistics. By successfully testing cargo drones at its German wind farms, and, uh, the first time in German offshore airspace. Both long range autonomous drones and short distant cargo drones have been used in daily wind farm operations.
Uh, the pilot project demonstrated how different drone types can deliver spare parts, tools, and supplies to turbines. Uh, they were able to move up. About 10 kilograms, which is like roughly 25 pounds over about 40 kilometers. [00:02:00] That's a pretty good rate. Uh, this is unique though to Europe because I think in the United States we're not even allowed to do this, right?
Um, you can, it just depends on getting special permits. So it's called a bv, LOS or BV loss, uh, beyond visual line of sight. Uh, so you can get, if you have specific, uh, software packages and you're not over a major city and certain things, you can get those kind of, um, certificates from the FAA, but they're not easy.
Uh, the, the cool thing about this is, I mean, let's just put our technician hat on for a second. Even an onshore wind farm. I'm up tower and I go, oh, Alan and Rosemary and Yolanda and I are up tower and, and I go, who brought up the 10 millimeter socket? And none of us did. Now we have to draw short straws to see you, has to climb all the way down and get the 10 millimeter and come all the way back up.
Whereas with a drone, you could just fly up, land on the nelle and you have your tool, but it also means that you don't have to [00:03:00] bring everything that you might conceivably need with you up there. So like when you are climbing towers every day, you've, you're taking so much junk with you every time you go up, every time you go down and.
Like it sounds easy. Oh, they've got elevators in there. And that's true. You don't have to like put it in a backpack and climb up a ladder with it. Um, in towers that have a lift, but it's still, once you get to the top of the lift, you still have to climb up a ladder to get into the nasal. And then if you've gotta get out into the hub.
And so you are still like picking up huge bags of stuff and um, yeah. Hauling them above your head. Always definitely exceeding the limit that you've just done your special training to promise that you'll never lift more than 20 kilos. Um, you, yeah, it's just like, it's crazy the amount of stuff that you go schlep around with you because you don't wanna have to go back down if you forget something.
So this means you can take up your toolkit for what you're expected to need. Of course, you've got a lot of bulky safety [00:04:00] equipment that you have to take up 'cause you don't know when you're gonna need that. Um, but yeah, it's gonna massively reduce the amount of stuff that you need to take up. Rosa, you bring up a lot of good points.
Right? And that's just the, the daily active operations. And we're, and we're, I'm just thinking right now with Onshore Wind Farm, now go offshore and it's, it's boat landings into transition pieces. The, the amount of HSE risk just to transfer onto, uh, a tower or off of a tower to get components. It's that much more complicated.
It's that much more HSE risk. So. This makes absolute sense and these technologies have been kind of floating around for a while. Um, and one of the big things was, you know, of course it's just the basics of drone stuff. So it's can we safely lift this much, can we get the permits to lift this much?
Because like the CAA over in the EU there, they had a limit for a long time as well of, I think it was. 25 kilograms or something like that for like the whole drone setup couldn't, it, couldn't exceed that. Um, so you have to get certain permits [00:05:00] to do all these different things, but then it was, how do we safely precision land and take off and deliver the stuff?
So new advancements in, um, LOC localization, so like slam technologies, um, simultaneous location and mapping. So not just relying on GPS, but actually sensing what's around you, whether it has, you know, a QR type. April, April tag codes that the drone camera follows and then kind of maps itself onto. Or if it's has that, uh, the ability to see the blades and make sure it doesn't run into them autonomously.
So the, the drone world has matured enough where this technology is like something that's pretty normal now. You can see these things, drones, landing autonomously on boats that are driving by themselves and on the back of cars. Like it's pretty cool stuff. Uh, but it was only gonna be so long until it made its way into industrial uses.
And this is a great one. You're reducing risk, you're reducing time, uh, saving money, all of the, you're, you're literally ticking [00:06:00] every box for operations. That makes this cool. I, I really like this. Uh, kudos to R to B for, for making this happen. Well, Yolanda, they should be doing this onshore too, right?
Because a lot of o and m buildings are not necessarily close to the wind farm. How many wind farms in Texas have we driven? Ooh. Five, 10 miles just to get to the turbine. Man, it would be a lot easier just to have a drone, wouldn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it, it would save the team so much time and just so much effort.
Like Rosie was saying, to climb those turbines. The way we're doing it now is with electric truck, right? Isn't that, uh, RWE was doing a lot of the Ford, what's the Ford Electric pickup truck, Joel? Wasn't that RWE or was that Orad? That was Vestas. The Ford Lightning, we could just buy a bunch of cyber trucks and they could drive themselves out to the site, I suppose, if they can last through all the potholes on these sites.
That's another thing you have to think about is technician time and the wear and tear on vehicles and stuff. If you at these o and m buildings, if you could, yeah, grab that piece of kit and, oh, I'm at, I'm at, uh, [00:07:00] tower, you know, WTG 17, but also the drone delivers you, your, your nuts and bolts or your package or whatever your name may or your lunch maybe.
That would be a good one too. Cup of coffee. What do I feel like the majority use of this drone technology will be for lunch? Hot lunch to the top of the tower. Come on. I'm sure I've told this story before, but I think it was New Brunswick when I climbed there, everybody had this specific electric crockpot that they would bring up with them and they would plug it in first thing, like as soon as they got up to the um, miss Cell, they would plug in their crockpot and then they would have a hot lunch.
And I had something that I had bought from the seven 11 'cause that's all there was in town. It was, it was miserable every single day. Here's a question for you. I'm gonna ask this one. Maybe we should ask Alex Forer from Enertech this one. But, um, so as a, as a, um, a, a young worker in northern Wisconsin, I learned how to warm up my lunch and or breakfast on the intake manifold of a log [00:08:00] skidder by wrapping it in tinfoil and putting it into a certain puff spot in the motor.
Is there a thing in the tower up tower in the Nelle that gets hot enough? If you had a tinfoil wrapped, say a panini or something, that you could actually warm it up up there. The gearbox is warm. If it was running overnight, if the turbine was running overnight, you can sit some somewhere on the drive train.
It's all pretty warm. That was my hot tip. When I, um, uh, when I was commissioning, uh, some turbines in Sweden, uh, the client demanded that I was, that we had an engineer there. Of the whole every day for the commissioning period of several months. So me and an electrical engineer traded off. He had actual work to do, but I was just there to satisfy the client.
So I just brought my laptop on and sat on the. Sat on the gearbox and um, I did get to see the Northern lights on some of those trips, so, you know, maybe it was worth it.