Show notes
We talk with Ben Ackers, CEO of PelaStar, a company revolutionizing the industry with their tension leg platform design. PelaStar's innovative technology provides stability for large wind turbines in deep water conditions, paving the way for cost-effective and efficient floating wind farms at scale. Visit https://pelastar.com/ for more info!
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. With the increasing demand for clean energy, offshore wind has become a crucial component in the global energy mix. However, many of the world's best wind resources are located in deep waters where traditional fixed bottom foundations are not feasible.
And this is where PelaStar comes in. PelaStar is changing the floating offshore wind industry with their 10 leg platform design, which provides stability for large wind turbines in deep water conditions. Our guest today is Ben Ackers Chief Executive Officer at PelaStar. Ben brings a wealth of experience in the maritime industry to lead PelaStar's efforts in making floating offshore wind a reality on a large scale.
Ben, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. There's a lot to talk about because with the recent auctions or the outlines of some offshore wind sites off the coast of Maine, and then obviously off the coast of California, floating wind is going to be huge in the United States, and it's already becoming something of an item over in Europe.
You at PelaStar have been trying to answer some of the problems that we have with floating offshore wind and maybe you can just give us a little bit of background on PelaStar and what you're working on right now.
Ben Ackers: Absolutely. First of all, PelaStar is, as you said, a tension leg platform which sets it apart from a lot of the platform technologies that you'll see that have been deployed in demonstration and pilot projects. We're really the next generation of technology that the industry needs to bring down the cost of energy for utility scale floating wind farms. We started developing PelaStar around 2009. The idea comes out of our parent company, Glosten, which is a naval architecture, marine engineering consulting firm headquartered in Seattle.
We've been around for over 65 years. And as our engineers were looking at the challenge of how do we put turbines offshore? We evaluated the different archetypes of the time. Semi submersible spars. And ultimately landed on tension leg platform is what we thought would be the best way to bring down the price of energy in the long run by developing platforms that have the lowest mass and the least amount of motion to drive down capex and operating costs.
Joel Saxum: So a quick question then there, we'll dive right into it is you highlighted what you believe the Or what in, it's physics, right? But what the tension leg platform has advantages over some of the other technologies that are out there, because like we, we talked about a little bit off air there's a lot of options and ideas and demonstrators and stuff, but nobody has really taken that the front runner, the pole position in the race for what's going to be built at scale in offshore floating.
So that's The tension leg platform idea. What are the advantages of it over some of the others?
Ben Ackers: Principally, the classic advantages of a tension leg platform are that you can design a platform, a hull with the lowest mass of any of the systems because we're not using the platform itself to provide stability to the turbine.
We simply need less mass. steel or as others might use concrete to provide that stability. And then we're stabilizing the platform with tendons that are vertically stiff so that we have very little vertical motion and very little rotation of the system because it's basically a rid, effectively a rigid structure in the vertical direction.
Now it does, it is soft in the horizontal direction, so there is some movement back and forth. But ultimately. By restraining that motion, we provide the turbine with an ideal environment for operation. So we keep motions down low enough so that turbine is producing power and with an efficiency equivalent to if you'd put that turbine on a monopile.
Joel Saxum: That that's hugely important, right? Because we're, you mentioned CapEx in, a couple of minutes ago, but OpEx, because Allen and I, we were always talking, we're all engineers at heart and thinking, you got this turbine up there and now you've introduced a few more degrees of freedom with some of the floaters, right?
We're talking Highwind Scotland and stuff like that, where now you used to have the monopile and you have a little bit of movement in it, but now you have this and all kinds of rotation and all those things. So you're actually it's possible in my mind that you guys are taking out some of the future O& M costs by possibly saving on bearings or rotating equipment by lowering some of that movement.
Ben Ackers: That's absolutely what we'll leave, but it goes beyond just reducing wear and tear on the turbine, which is obviously really important, but it's also about accessibility and workability, right? Because in the conditions in which we're maintaining offshore wind turbines today even in shallow water, where we're using SOVs with walk to work gangways, CTVs, daughter craft to board the platforms, our platform is not moving.
And with our central column design, we present as a monopile. So you just translate all of those things that have already been matured in offshore wind today. And we can use those same systems, same procedures, same equipment to get people on and off the platform. Whereas other platforms that have more motion, that becomes a greater challenge.
So we're either those platforms are, you're either going to have to limit. The times that you can actually access the platform because of that motion, or you need to build more robust equipment to deal with the relative motions between the platform itself and the vessels you're using to access it.
And that's all going to cost money. And then once you get people on the platform if the platform's moving, they can simply just get less done. They're less efficient versus being on a stable platform to get their work done.
Allen Hall: So the basic PelaStar design I've seen on your website, and your website is fantastic by the way, people should go there, check it out, just go to PelaStar, I think, PelaStar. com, and you can see all the details there's basically a monopile type tower, and there's five steel legs coming off to the side, like spider, and then there's tension lines going all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. It's that simple. And the one of the unique features I thought was the ability to transfer the components to the assembly site, like everything can be barged up.
So you don't have, you can make the system pretty much anywhere, put it on a ship, haul it to the site and assemble it right at the coast line, I assume at a dock and then just tug it out to where you need to be. So you've thought about this from a lot of different aspects. It's really simple. But it does a very difficult task at the same time.
There's always that fine line. Where's all the magic in all this? Is, there's always that real, that piece that makes it all tie together. Is it the tension lines? Is it the anchors that make all this possible?
Ben Ackers: First of all, simplicity is The the cornerstone of our design philosophy that in order to take advantage of the TLP, this low mass structure, our goal is to leave as little complexity in the water as possible.
And a lot of times people will say, it looks too simple. There's gotta be, there's gotta be something more to it. And there is a lot to it. So first of all, there, there are so many factors to consider in design that you already know how hard it is to design for turbines, either even on land or Fixed offshore turbines the interaction with the environment and the complexity of the turbine, its loads, the wind loads, the control system, all of that requires a lot of work and a lot of fine tuning.
And you can't just go to a clean sheet of paper, draw a platform and see if that works. It, it takes a lot of iteration, a lot of optimization to bring this all together. Now there's certainly complexities to address a platform like PelaStar that's designed for excellent operation and low construction cost is one that is also harder to install.
And so our some of where that secret sauce is, how do we get that platform that when the, those arms go underwater. It loses stability. How do we get it installed? So we've developed an installation system called crawl down installation where we float the platform out to the site. And then we deploy tendons with the platform and those tendons are extra long, longer than they have to be.
So that we can grab onto those with tools we call jacking tools and actually pull the platform down to its installed draft. And then we can remove those excess lengths of the tendon, remove all the special tooling that is that, that is complex, get that off the platform so it doesn't stay at sea.
So we don't have to buy 500 copies of that equipment, take it to the next platform. reuse it for installation. But I, you asked what about the tendons?