Huge Turbine Wakes, MIT Steers Turbines, Sandia’s Offshore Vertical Axis Turbine, Gummy Bear Blades

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

As wind turbines have gotten bigger, turbulence has become a bigger problem. It's always affected production, so why are we just now talking about it now? If we can figure out how to make wake steering work across entire wind operations, will productivity gains be big enough to make owners take a chance on it? Warranties and insurance coverage usually discourage changes to yaw alignment... Rosemary and Joel explain why vertical-axis wind turbine designs make sense for offshore projects, but you'll have to watch on YouTube to see their inspired visual aids. And today's burning question is: would you eat a Gummy Bear made of recycled turbine blades? Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com DTU Top Farm Link - https://topfarm.pages.windenergy.dtu.dk/TopFarm2/index.html Yaw Alignment from AC883 - https://www.ac883.com Jessica O'Connor of ArcVera Interview - https://youtu.be/0gXDHhU9YII?t=745 Agile Wind Power - https://www.agilewindpower.com/en Wind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.com 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! Uptime 129 Allen Hall: Welcome to the uptime, wind energy podcast. We have an excellent show ahead. Rosemary Barnes: We've got a couple of stories involving wind turbine wakes and some research and modeling that's been done about yeah. How, how long wakes persist from Avera and also how the wind turbine wakes interact with each other. Rosemary Barnes: And some. Research on optimizing overall output of wind farms. That's come out of MIT and then we'll Allen Hall: discuss some work from Sandia labs on offshore vertical axis wind turbine and the implications of that design and Joel Saxum: last, but certainly not least. We'll talk about what Michigan State is doing when diving into some recyclable resins and creating edible gummy bears Joel Saxum: from wind turbine blades. Allen Hall: it's gonna be a great show. Stay tuned. We'll be back after the music. Allen Hall: All right. Wake turbulence is becoming a more frequent topic in the wind energy community. And it, it seems kind of obvious that when wind turbines spin around, there's probably creating wakes, but I don't think we understood how big those wakes are or how big those wakes are going to be. Particularly when we get offshore and we start talking about 10, 12, 15 megawatt machines. Allen Hall: ArcVera has been looking at it and ArcVera has done some analysis on it and predictions actually more than predictions. They've actually set up a test case in Iowa. So ArcVera predictions are on offshore up to one meter per second, drop in wind speeds due to upstream. Tip fores, essentially that are moving downstream and, and, and disturbing the airflow for the subsequent wind turbines. Allen Hall: And that's on a, on a big 12 megawatt machine. And that's, you know, roughly a 10% drop in the wind speeds, which is significance. So you can see a 10% drop in, in output. And I know we talked about dominion energy on their offshore project, having a, a capacity factor around 42% and I, and Rosemary, and I both agreed that that seems a. Allen Hall: May aggressive because of things like this, the unknown unknowns, well, a fair is saying, Hey, these, these weight losses are, are, are gonna be significant and not, and not just immediately around the wind Turine, which is creating them, but like a hundred kilometers down wind, there's gonna be these significant wakes. Allen Hall: And I think that's new now, the, the piece that I haven't heard before and I is the testing they did in, in Iowa.