Show notes
Joseph Chacon, CEO of Padge LLC, discusses the impact of electrical harmonics on wind turbines and solar systems, providing insights into causes, consequences, and effective solutions for improving power quality.
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!
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Joe, welcome to the show.
Joseph Chacon: Thank you. I appreciate it.
Allen Hall: Well, I'm glad we connected, uh, through Jon Zalar, I believe, and we don't talk electrical power creation or what that. Kind of power we're creating and what the effect of that power is on systems downstream very often, uh, the Uptime podcast, because there's so many wind turbine issues, is mostly focused on mechanical problems.
But we're finding that more and more problems may have an electrical origin. We wanted to get an expert in here that would be you to come help us on harmonics because there are requirements about harmonics.
Joseph Chacon: There are, uh, IEEE five 19 governs [00:01:00] the requirements for harmonics. At the point of common coupling.
Allen Hall: That's correct. And your prior experiences with ge, which is now GE Renova down in South Carolina, that's correct. But you were involved, maybe give a brief description of the things you're working on because when electrical people talk, um, kind of gets lost in translation. You were knee deep, maybe waist deep, maybe eyeballs deep and electrical
Joseph Chacon: power at GE Renova?
No, not, not knee deep, not weight deep, waist deep. I was baptized, completely immersed all the way in. I came shortly after the Enron acquisition. Um, I was one of the electrical engineering managers at the time. We had, uh, I think two or three at the time. Um, this was pretty early on. Uh, I got out of that because, uh, I'm, I like management, but I, I like electrical engineering, so I wanted to go back to being an individual contributor.
Um, so I've touched just about [00:02:00] every electrical thing you can think of in a wind turbine. And also in solar
Joel Saxum: as well. You know, a little bit of a sidebar here 'cause I want, we want to definitely get into this deep technical conversation, but Joe, you touched on something that happens to people, right? You're a really good engineer, you've run a team, you've solved some problems.
So now you get promoted to management, but you don't get to engineer as much anymore. So you get, like, you get, you start being leadership and like doing all these things, how to manage people, how to run a team, this, that, and that's great. We need that. The industry, every industry globally, we need to be able to do those things.
But for engineers that have engineer at heart, and I'm, I'm also looking at you, Alan Hall. Uh, they, they wanna be able to engineer, right? They wanna be able to do stuff to make a difference to, to, to get hands on with a problem. So, so you, so you've done that though, right? That that's you, you are now, uh, Josh Shahan is, uh, pad LLC and
Joseph Chacon: pod is short for Padre, which is what my kids and grandchildren call me.
They just shortened it from Padre to podge. 'cause saying two [00:03:00]syllables was too much and I liked it.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I like that. Okay, so, so, so like we said, uh, you, you, you guys, you're getting deep into harmonics and other issues. You get called in by Solar Farms to solve problems and, and this is the thing Alan and I were kind of talking about off air a little bit is.
W we have a bit of a culture like in wind right now of electrical problem, swap, swap apart, swap apart in, swap apart out. But nobody's looking at the, the root cause of why or why did this thing fail, and how can we, you know. Make this more robust for the future. And that doesn't just stop at components in the turbine.
It's, it's BOP, you know, and this is, like you said, also solar and, and other industrial facilities as well. But that's what you tackle, right?
Joseph Chacon: Yeah. And you know, you mentioned John Zellar, uh, great, great root cause analysis guy. Uh, does fishbone, uh, ad modeling, things like that, um, what's your observation that you're seeing?
I think is correct. People ignore. [00:04:00] One of the fundamental root causes for a lot of issues, um, not just in renewable energy, but anywhere you have, uh, large amounts of nonlinear loading, uh, these days. That's primarily coming from data centers. Um, with the advent of the diode six pulse front end, uh, variable frequency drive, uh, IGBTs, any type of switching device.
It's only getting worse. It will never get better because we are putting more and more non-linear loads on the utility and fewer and fewer linear loads. Even our lighting today, we don't use incandescent anymore. It's all either LED, well, we used to do fluorescent, but LED is a horrific offender for harmonics.
So, and I hate to pick on that technology because. They all really are. Um, so a solar inverter, a wind turbine converter, uh, a UPS, any type of [00:05:00]device is going to introduce more harmonic content into the grid. So you got the issue where the device itself has harmonic content, couple to a grid that's getting more and more harmonic content already on it.
So the situation is definitely getting more and more exacerbated.
Allen Hall: So some of those harmonics have really significant consequences. Uh, if you go to podge LLC on YouTube, you can watch some of the discussion there and walk through the equations about what harmonics can do to equipment on generators. Up in the the wind turbines, you can actually damage some of the Y connections on those, uh, defi generators.
It can causes all kinds of problems. And I know one of the issues that's, and it's being sussed out right now, so we're talking about it live as it's happening, is, uh, they're seeing transients come from the line back up to, to the turbine and are causing problems to the electronics. Straight harmonics.
And the same thing coming [00:06:00] out of some of the turbines is the harmonics can be strong. And in one of your videos you talked about what kind of damage you can do with a transformer if you have harmonics that are significant enough. It's, it's surprising. How you can shorten the life of a transformer
Joseph Chacon: correct, or any magnetic circuit, uh, generators, motors, transformers, anything that's going to take, uh, electrical conversions to magnetic conversions and back or vice versa, any type of thing like that.
Uh, they cause extreme dielectric stress and extreme temperature changes. Um, and both of 'em are damaging. To devices like transformers, motors, generators, et cetera.
Allen Hall: Yeah, because transformers and all that sort of magnetic equipment is designed to work around a core frequency. Typically 50 hertz or 60 hertz, depending on where in the world you are.
When you put other frequency components on that equipment, it's not designed to do that. So that turns into a lot of heat a lot of times, [00:07:00] and then you over temp or shorten a lifetime of. Transformers on the pads and up tower in some cases that don't. If you have a failure like that, uh, at a wind farm, I saw it most recently, uh, a couple of weeks ago, where they're replacing transformers, like, wow, it's only been there a year or two.
That shouldn't happen. There are other, so those kind of failures, unless you're paying attention, are just gonna repeat, right? Because replacing a. Pad transformer with another pad, transformer doesn't remove the source of the problem. It just puts in another fuse in the circuit.
Joseph Chacon: Correct. And you know, let's say you put it in, in pick a year, January of 2015, and your harmonic content from utility can change over time.
So many times it's worth just taking a look at it. Um, in one of the videos you talked about. I promoted a [00:08:00] Fluke 1777 power quality analyzer tool that I use, and I rent that tool out to people that are wanting to do a study. Uh, and that's an economical way to do a study. Um, the technician or engineer or whoever puts that in does not necessarily need to know a lot about harmonics to set that up.
Uh, you're going to be putting in either three or four cts, depending upon whether you're a four wire or a three wire system. Then connections to your bus for voltage, and then you turn the fluke on and you verify that your currents are going in the right direction. So in Phase A current, it's phase A voltage, and you start a session and then you mail it back to me and I'll give you the report.
Um, and it does a lot more than just harmonics. Uh, and I basically, I run an IEEE five 19 report. It does sags swells, it does super harmonics. It does intra harmonics. Super harmonics [00:09:00] are harmonics that are higher than 50, um, 50 times the fundamental. So that's 50 times 60, uh, for 60 hertz people, or 50 times 50 for 50 hertz people.
And you, you mentioned Alan, that Transformers motors are designed for a certain frequency. Um, if you take a motor or a transformer and look at it, it's gonna tell you the frequency. Sometimes it's dual rate at 50 or 60. Um, but the engineer that designed that transformer motor is gonna take certain things into account related to the magnetic side to make sure that it's able to operate for that broad frequency range.
Low frequencies are quite bad. In fact, as you get towards dc DC you can't use magnetic circuits as a rule.