Show notes
The hosts cover some recent turbine failures, Onyx Insight's new CEO and strategic acquisitions, research about wind turbine farmland contracts, and an article about hybrid brakes by Dellner.
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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, Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina.
Rosemary Barnes in Australia and Joel Saxon in the great state of Texas. Just before we hopped online to record this podcast, Rosemary was telling us about a number of turbine problems on LinkedIn and. Rosemary wanted to comment on them. These are some of the larger turbines. Rosemary are newer turbines.
Uh, some of them onshore, some of 'em offshore
Rosemary Barnes: for the, yeah, for the most part. Um, yeah, both onshore and offshore. Some a little bit older, but the common thread is, um, [00:01:00] just like spectacular fail failures of multiple blades of one across multiple turbines of one, the one I saw most recently. Had blades smashed to pieces.
It had towers that had just like fallen apart. Like it was, um, like they weren't bolted together. Like it was just blocks stacked on top of each other and they had, you know, just an angry baby had just topped them over. That's what it looked like. And um, I think what's really interesting is reading the comments in those and it just, without fail every single time, the first few comments are gonna be.
Um, justifying how that is just cool and normal, like either by the company itself or the turbine manufacturer itself saying, oh, you know, oh, this was just a prototype. So, you know, it doesn't matter that it fell apart, like. Forgetting about the fact that, okay, it's just a prototype, but it's still an operational turbine that people would've been inside it to install it.
They're inside it to maintain it. You know, people are inside those things. They're not supposed to be able to just fall apart by the time that it gets to that point.
Joel Saxum: I, I, I think I've seen some of these same posts, Rosemary, and one of the ones that I saw recently [00:02:00] was not even, it wasn't new, it wasn't prototypes.
It was, it was like, there's a picture, there's three turbines with, or four turbines and there of the, of the dozen blades in the picture, nine of them are gone. It's just a nelle hub with like little stubs on three turbines, and those are only like 850 kilowatt, one megawatt, 1.5 megawatt machines. They're, they're old.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. And so I think a typhoon went through in that particular case and I made a comment, you know, like it's either poor turbine design or it's really poor site assessment. In either case, it's a failure, right? Like you don't put wind turbines that can't withstand a typhoon in a place that gets typhoons.
Um, but you always, you always say people saying how this is actually great engineering. And I just thought this is just the classic example of that, um, that was written under this latest post, and I'll just read it out. The pictures point to the designers of these turbines. Having done that, designing to a certain wind speed, having done that to a high degree of consistency, I note three failure types [00:03:00] in the pictures, blade snap, tower, buckling and bolt failure, pointing to all parts, having been designed to the same survival.
Wind speed looks like they did their job well. And it's just like, oh, what, you look at this, at this path of like it's Godzilla has run through this wind farm, and you're like, oh yeah, that looks like a job done. Well, well done guys. It's just like, if we can't learn anything as an industry from these kinds of things, then, you know, how can we expect to have a, a bright future for the industry?
Like it? It's one thing to fail, but if you look at a failure and say, that's actually a success that is. Just the worst possible outcome we have. We have to be able to say what went wrong, what do we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? You have to. You have to learn, otherwise you're going backwards.
Allen Hall: Are you worried about unexpected blade root failures and the high cost of repairs? Meet eco Pitch by Onyx Insight. The standard in blade root monitoring. Onyx state-of-the-art sensor tracks blade root movement in real [00:04:00] time, delivering continuous data to keep your wind farm running smoothly and efficiently.
With Eco Pitch, you can catch problems early, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars. Field tested on over 3000 blades. It's proven reliability at your fingertips. Choose eco Pitch for peace of mind. Contact Onyx Insight today. To schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and Experience the future of Blade Monitoring, there's been a series of leadership transitions that is really changing the face of the wind industry.
Onyx Insight. The Macquarie Capital Back Condition monitoring specialist who've had in the podcast, um, has appointed Alexis Grennan as this new chief executive officer Alexis Bringss dearly 20 years of experience from Joel. Schneider Electric where he most recently served as CEO of the digital grid division, and his expertise in smart grid software solutions and energy management systems positioned him to lead [00:05:00] Onyx Insights expansion beyond its current 28,000 wind turbines under monitoring across 35 countries.
So obviously Onyx is a big provider of CMS systems. They are the sole provider of CMS systems on GE turbines at the minute. Onyx is making a lot of moves. They just acquired 11 I recently also. So they're, uh, what it looks like right now. They wanna be the, the leader in CMS.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think it's, if you go deeper into their history a bit.
You know, the couple of CMS solutions around gearbox was really where they started then. Then they got to the eco pitch thing, and then now the blevin. And I think if you're sitting in that boardroom, you're thinking they want to be the center hub for IO ot, IOT being sensors out in the field. Anything that comes in, they want to be able to amalgamate it and help people out in that direction.
Um, you know, a new, a new CEO that has, uh, 20 years at Schneider [00:06:00]with digital grid. That's awesome. Right? Good hire there. I would think. Um, I, I do see this as a trend in wind. You're seeing some more CEOs and senior leadership coming into organizations from outside of wind directly. Some of the bigger capital holders, you know, the Goldmans of the world and the Macquarie's and that kind of things, if they have portfolio companies, you're seeing people be placed in leadership roles that are coming from outside of wind and bringing expertise from, of course, usually energy, software, supply chain, these kind of things that we need, but some fresh blood at the leadership level.
I like to see that.
Allen Hall: Well, the addition of the grid coming into Onyx, is that an expansion plan? Because there is a lot of work going on expanding the grid and monitoring the grid and making the grid carry more energy than what it was originally designed for. And I've listened to a number of podcasts over the last month that talks specifically to it.
It, it is a definite growth area. [00:07:00] You think this could indicate a move into other areas besides just the basic wind? CMS. Solutions.
Joel Saxum: Well, let's think about it this way. So in wind, when you have wind specific companies, you're starting to see intenders or you have been seen intenders for the last few years, even just the most basics inspections.
Okay? We're inspecting blades. Use your RFP. Now those blades say, and blades plus BOP. So we want you to do the transmission lines. And then you're seeing some of 'em that are BOP plus substations. So all the sub, all the way back to the edge of the wind farm where connects to the grid. Um, so companies are adjusting, like you've seen Skys specs adjust to that.
You, you know, whether it's partnerships or expanding things internally and other companies as well, even down to the ISPs starting to do more and more and more because they're being asked to. This makes sense because, uh, at the end of the day, if you're working for a subset of customers, there's only so much budget in.
Of turbine work and if you wanna expand your company and grow, you need to expand in other [00:08:00] areas. So why not just keep it going down the line of connection to the grid, inter, inter wind farm issues, those kind of things out of the wind farm. So I, I don't know if that's ON'S plan, but I can see that. I think that from a strategic standpoint, it makes sense.
Allen Hall: Well, as Schneider is involved in all kinds of aspects of the grid worldwide, so I would assume bringing in a new CEO would open up maybe some horizons to Onyx and maybe there's adjacent businesses that they should be in because they have a lot of technology and they're pretty smart group. They may want to expand outwin just a tiny bit just to, to test the waters, see what they could do there.
Well, going to solar seems like an obvious choice, but there could be other areas that they may want to look at, at least in the short term to see if they can add value.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Grid infrastructure. Right. I think that that's a,