Offshore Vessel Collision, 1.2 GW Farm in South Australia

In this episode, we discuss an offshore vessel collision in the
North Sea, highlight Louisiana's offshore wind ambitions, the
latest developments in South Australia's renewable energy
expansion. Plus we highlight an article from Buoyant Works in PES
Wind Magazine. Register for the upcoming SkySpecs' webinar on
turbine repair challenges! 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
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Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes'
YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: On Wednesday, April 30th at 11:00
AM Eastern, get that on your calendar. SkySpecs, Uptime and PES
Wind are hosting our next session of a 10 part series of wind
related items on their webinar. So this time it's gonna be about
the the biggest challenges facing turbine repair teams today. And
we're gonna have four experts besides Joel and me. I guess we don't
count as experts, Joel. So we're gonna be talking to real experts.
Sheryl Weinstein from Sky Specs, Alice Lyon from Lyon Technical
Access. Craig Guthrie, who I've known forever from Takkion, and
Jose Mejia Rodriguez from RNWBL. We'll be there to, uh, explain how
you should be planning for this repair season. What are some of the
approaches that the operators use and what works and what doesn't
work? Things that if you're in the repair business or if you work.
For a large, uh, operator or even a small operator you want to hear
and participate in, there'll be a q and a session. So get all your
questions ready, but [00:01:00] you first have to register and you
can register in the link and the show notes below. Do not miss this
event. April 30th, 11:00 AM Eastern. You won't wanna miss it.
Speaker 2: You're 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. Allen Hall: Up in the Netherlands, three crew members were
injured when an offshore support vessel struck a windman
foundation. In the North Sea and the Royal Dutch Sea Rescue Society
had to evacuate two of the injured crew members from the privately
owned vessel. And a third uh, crew member went to get medical
attention once they got back to port. Now, this occurred about 15
miles from the Netherlands shores, and the Dutch have opened an
[00:02:00] investigation, and my first responses to reading this
news was. How are we driving ships into foundations still? And
Joel, can you explain all the technology that is there to prevent
you from doing this? Joel Saxum: Well, every one of these vessels
that operates in that environment is going to have a, a helm
display, right? That's gonna have all of the things called stent
and aids to navigation. So it's gonna have all the buoys,
everything in the water that you could possibly run into. Some of
'em even have detailed stuff like pipeline data and stuff so you
don't drop your anchors in certain places. But either way, they're
gonna ha they're gonna have knowledge of this besides the fact that
you can look out the window and see the tur, see a turbine that's
500 feet tall in front of you. That's a different story maybe. Um,
but a lot of these vessels too, of this size. So this is a, um, a
support vessel offshore. So there's all kinds of different classes
of boats, things they do. But this thing may work in a wind farm.
It may work for oil, uh, platforms, it may work for the fishing
industries. Like it can do a lot of different stuff. But as a, as a
[00:03:00] emergency response. Uh, vehicle. They also should be DP
one. And when I say DP one, that's dynamic positioning. So that
means that you should be able to have a button in the, in the
vessel that says, boom, hold me here. And, uh, DP one means you
just have one methodology of, of positioning. So that's like GPS.
I'm at this GPS point. Hold me at this GPS point. Um, so there's a
lot of safety mechanisms built into these things, and there's a
chain of command and all these vessels. I think it said it was
crude by eight people. Correct? Correct me if I'm wrong, Alan. That
sounds about right. For a hundred, 150, 150 foot operating vessel,
eight people's. About right now, everybody has their own job,
right? There's a captain, but there's usually this, you know, a
second mate and there's other people on the vessel that someone at
all times is looking forward or is supposed to be at least. Uh, but
like Phil said earlier today, when we were kind of doing some
podcast planning, if you saw the pictures of this thing in port, it
looked like it ran square on into the turbine headfirst. I Allen
Hall: think it was the, uh, [00:04:00] mechanical error or where an
operator error just from the damaged photos. I think it's Joel
Saxum: operator error. I think that's someone not chain of command,
not paying attention Phil Totaro: somehow. Well, it's just one of
those, the, you know, unfortunate and frankly frustrating things
that, and this is, I believe in the last five or six years, the.
Sixth vessel that's run into something like a foundation under
construction or an operating wind turbine or something out there.
Um, I mean it's happened in Germany and, and now. Here in, in
Holland with the, with the Holland Coast, uh, three and four
project is my understanding Vattenfall project out there, um, with
the Siemens 11 megawatt turbines. So it's unfortunate that this
keeps going down, but I don't know what I mean. To Joel's point, I
don't know what more. You could do with technology to warn you that
something's out there. 'cause in addition to everything that Joel
mentioned, we [00:05:00] also know where the wind turbines are
located. There's, there's geo coordinates for all the turbines in
the wind farms and there's theoretically some kind of geofencing
around the wind farm that tells you, Hey, by the way, you're
entering this zone. Which I mean, as an SOV, presumably you're
supposed to be kind of nearby, but. I just don't like, I don't
know. I mean, this isn't a technological problem to, to me this is,
this keeps sounding like human error. What's the next step? Joel
Saxum: Phil is the next step. We put like a, we put radar on the
transition piece with like an audible alarm. Like when something
gets within 500 meters, it just goes. I don't know what else you
can do. I mean, they can't see Phil Totaro: him apparently, so they
gotta hear him. Maybe. I don't know. Well, to be clear too, I don't
think this was like, uh, you know, a situation where they had fog
and or some other kind of obstructed vision. It was a, to my
understanding, it was a reasonably clear day. So I just don't
understand how that's gotta be some level of human failure, how you
[00:06:00] just smash into a thing that's that big, uh, you know,
right in front of you. It's Joel Saxum: like fog being one thing or
like pours visibility. But I'm looking at the picture of this
vessel and this vessel has. A radar on it. It has its own radar, so
it's gonna pick it up on the screen next. So no matter what, you
should have either been able to look out the window or look at the
screen and see the thing in front of you, or look at the GPS
coordinates of the, the, you know, problems Phil Totaro: out there.
So, I, I don't know to, to answer Joel's question, I don't think we
need more technology, uh, because even though you could, you know,
avail yourself of, of radar on every vessel, I mean. Those that
gets expensive and somebody's gotta pay for it. And guess who ends
up paying for it? Is, you know, the vessel operator ups their
contract. The, you know, project developer has to increase the
overall cost of the project and then it takes them longer to, to.
Get paid back with the the PPA and or CFDs or whatever other
mechanism they have, [00:07:00] and we as electricity rate payers
are the ones that end up paying for that at the end of the day. So
I don't, you know, if this is something that can be solved without.
Additional technology upgrades. I'm kind of all for that, but
something needs to be done as far as like, Hey, there's a big thing
like, you know, a few hundred yards right in front of you. Try not
to hit it. You know, Allen Hall: speaking of not running into wind
turbine foundations, there's actually an article in PES win, and if
you haven't downloaded the latest addition of PES Wind, you can do
that on your own@pswin.com. You just type it into the old Google
and. Push the button and there it is. Now, there's a lot of great
articles in this quarter's edition and a good bit of offshore in
it. The article I wanna highlight today is from Buoyant Works, and
if you've been to the Buoyant Works website, you can see all this
sort of the polyurethane bumpers that they have created for not
only the. The towers, but also the CTVs, which is really important
because they [00:08:00] do run into one another once in a while and
it has become more of an issue is that, uh, there's damage on some
of these vessels. And just trying to minimize the, the complexity
of trying to get close to a turbine without damaging it is, is a
huge problem. And if you have read the article here, and I
encourage you to do that on your own. There's a lot going on, uh,
as these CTVs approach these turbines and just trying to avoid
damage and trying to keep from having bump incidences where the,
the crew gets rocked is important here. And Joel, as you have
pointed out many times, safety is of the utmost here, uh, on these
crew transfer vehicles. Joel Saxum: Yeah. If you haven't been
offshore, there's something to understand, uh,