Deutsche Windtechnik’s Repower Approach

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum speak with Tyler Gifford, Director of
Repower at Deutsche Windtechnik, about the impact of the Inflation
Reduction Act on wind turbine repowering. They explore the 80/20
rule, overcoming challenges, and optimizing older wind assets to
improve reliability and efficiency. Fill out our Uptime listener
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co-host
Joel Saxum. Today we're diving deep into one of the most
significant developments in wind energy, the Inflation Reduction
Act, and its impact on wind turbine repowering. Joining us is Tyler
Gifford, director of Repower at Deutsche Windtechnik. Tyler leads
Repowering initiatives across nine wind energy facilities in five
states, managing over one gigawatts. Of clean energy capacity. His
hands-on experience with multiple turbine platforms and deep
understanding of wind farm operations makes Tyler the perfect guest
to discuss the complexities of wind turbine repowering under the
IRA. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's
brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen
Hall: Tyler, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Guys,
there's a bunch of questions that we want to ask you about the IRA
bill and how Repowering is happening, but as we talk across the
United States, there seems to be a lot of challenges there. What
are some of those challenges that wind farms that are getting close
to Repowering are facing? As they start to make some of these
decisions? Tyler Gifford: Good question, Allen. I mean, typically
with Repowering, a lot of people think of, I'm gonna tear the tower
down and I'm gonna start fresh and I'm gonna put a whole new one
up. So what we think about is there's another approach to this, the
80 20 and the IRA has really introduced a new opportunity in the
industry to where we can take older assets that are, have been
operating reliably for years. And you, you can evaluate, understand
your fair market value, and there's an opportunity to where that
fair market value is so low to where you can go out and you can
understand what, what is a value add upgrade for this, this asset.
Does it ha doesn't necessarily have to be a whole drive, train or
take off the hole in the cell and put a hole in the cell on it. It
could be that your fair market value is so low that you wanna
evaluate. Typically owners wanna evaluate two things they want.
Hire a EP, they want to increase a EP or they want to improve
reliability. Those are the two big things that owners want. So
with, for, so for Deutsche Wind Technic, that's what we do. We meet
with those owners and we understand, okay, you may have an asset
that's 2015 or 15 to 20 years old but there's a way that, that you
can take advantage of these PTCs, just like the bigger operating
assets out there. So we'll evaluate, look at, what, what are your
pain points? What's causing you to lose reliability, lose
availability. What's causing turbine or what's causing technicians
to have to go out there and climb? What are your pain points? And
then we start to target those pain points by finding upgrades that
will go after those, those things that are causing causing. Those,
those reliability concerns. So that could be things, it could be
drivetrain it could be, it could be that you need to focus on your
blades. But it could also be smaller things, things that get
overlooked. It could be condition monitoring systems that some of
these older assets just don't have. It could be different things
like sensors and controller systems and, and things that day to day
are causing. Towers to come offline and causing owners pain and
causing owners money, and we can qualify them for these PTCs
without possibly the cr, the large crane costs, without possibly
having to pull big expensive permits and things like that. Joel
Saxum: Yeah. So what we're. What we're diving into here is just a
different way of looking at repowering. So classically, everybody
thinks repower, I gotta take a whole new, to sell a whole new
everything. Because what they're looking to do is basically
requalify for PTC. This is the joke that Phil always says, we're
PTC farming, not wind farming at some points in time. But it
doesn't have to be that difficult. It doesn't have to be that
capital intensive is what you're saying by the IRA rules that 80 20
rule. So it, I wanna clarify the 80 20 rule that's, you've got to
put. 80 is 80% of the value of the asset back into it. Exactly.
Joel? Yep. Okay. And and it's, and, and it's based on the
individual asset, correct? Tyler Gifford: Individual asset, yeah.
The, the IRS sees it as a facility, so it's turbine by turbine. The
IRS defines a turbine as a facility. Okay. So. Joel Saxum: Because
some wind farms, I mean, we know one wind farm. We were talking to
someone the other day, they had like four different types of
turbines on it. It's like, how do you value all these? So, so
that's the next, I guess, part of it, or a big part of it when
Allen says, what are the challenges people take if you're gonna go
down this route of a. Upgrade, refurbish type repower. How do you,
how do you get the value of these things? Is it, is it consultants?
Do you guys do it at DWT yourself? How does the operator do it?
Like what does that look like? Typically, what you Tyler Gifford:
gotta find out is, okay, I got this 15 to 20-year-old asset. Can it
run another 15 to 20 years? So that's gonna be through a number of
channels. And at DWT Yeah, we'll partner with you from the
beginning stage of understanding what's my fair market value. We
don't do that in-house, but we have many people that we work with.
So you gotta understand what's your fair market value. Then you
gotta understand what's my integrity of my asset? What is can, can
the, can the machine base, can the foundation, can these tubes
handle another 15 to 20 years of extended life that we're planning
on providing you? Once you understand that, and you can go through
a number of independent engineers, engineering firms that can help
you determine that, but then we come in and really help you put
together what we call an optimized 80 20 repower package. We're not
gonna hand you a package and say, here's a drivetrain package in a
couple upgrades. Take it or leave it. No. A a a Siemens two three
repower to another Siemens two three Repower may look completely
different. 'cause what we wanna do is we wanna look at, well,
what's historically, what, what does the fault data tell you?
Where, where are your pain points? It's possible that you could
have done retrofits or site-wide sweeps or made upgrades through
the years that you don't have weaknesses that other owners do. It's
possible that you could have replaced drive, train components. You
could have done a, a generator bearing sweep and taken away that
weakness. So we don't want to come in and tell you to replace all
your generators when you've already made those upgrades. We wanna
make sure that your, your return on investment Allen Hall: is as
high as possible. So the, the goal is from a turbine by turbine by
turbine approach is to take that turbine, make it better, let it
live another 10 to 20 years. And still meet this 80 20 rule. That
makes a lot of sense because the issue I think a lot of operators
are having at the moment, if they want to put a new turbine in,
there's not a lot of new turbines you can buy right now that that
assembly line is pretty well booked out. And if you want to get the
production tax credits rolling sooner rather than later, and the,
and you like the turbines, you have your technicians understand the
turbines you have. The 80 20 rule allows you to keep that same
turbine, but just make it better. How does, how do you do that
then, as Deutsche Windtechnik? Obviously you're bringing a lot of
knowledge to the table about a lot of different turbines because
Deutsche Windtechnik is huge and you work with a lot of different
turbines. Do you have a, like an engineering group internal that
comes in and says, yes, this GE 1.5. Generally has these problems.
These are things that we can focus on specifically because we have
the knowledge of the turbines a hundred percent. Tyler Gifford: So
the biggest thing where we flip the script is transparency. So with
any owner, they wanna operate their asset. They want to op, they
wanna optimize it, they wanna run things the way, the way they
wanna run it. So the biggest thing for us is we want that too. We
wanna support you. If you have issues, we wanna partner alongside
of you. We have US-based engineers right here in the us. That are
based in Houston, Texas. And then we also have an extensive
engineering support team over in Europe, over in Germany where we
have, you know, we have our mechanical engineers, our electrical
engineers, our blade engineers. We have specific GE engineers,
specific Siemens engineers. Whatever you need, we have the
engineering support that, that can help you optimize your assets.
So when we think about that, when building a repower package, we
think about. How do, how do we improve the way that you're
currently operating? Maybe it's that for the longest time you've
had things that you wanted to adjust or wanted to change, maybe
with your current controller system that you just haven't been able
to do that. So then let's target that with a new, you know, third
party,