Goldwind Tower Cooling, Enercon Predictive Power Output Model

This week on Power-Up, Goldwind's coil pipe system for cooling
towers, an idea from Enercon for a predictive model of power output
under certain weather conditions, and an interesting alarm clock
patent from the 1800s. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the uptime podcast focused on the new,
hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow
along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we
discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will
charge your energy future. Our first idea is from Goldwind. It is a
concept where they have a specialized coil pipe system for liquid
cooling in wind turbines, mostly offshore it appears. It is
designed to handle the rotation between the nacelle and the tower.
So you can think about all this coiled tube in the tower itself and
the nacelle is spinning around. So it Keeps everything organized,
so it doesn't twist, bend, and kink where the fluid flow would
stop. Phil, this one's a little interesting to me because I haven't
seen a lot of cooling happening in towers, but obviously GoldWind
wants to proceed with this idea to mostly for their offshore
turbines, it looks like. Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is designed for
larger machines where they're gonna leverage either using the tower
as a heatsink or some other downed tower mechanism where they can
dump waste heat and theoretically minimize the size of the radiator
that they have on the nacelle. And keep in mind that GoldWind,
because they're using a permanent magnet generator, they have
different requirements up tower for for the, the magnet cooling and
stator cooling. So what's kind of fascinating about this to me is
that, you've got certainly for, for transmitting, electrical.
Current and things like that. You have things like slip rings. You
even have kind of hydraulic slip rings when you want to be able to
move, from a, from a rotating frame of reference to a fixed frame
of reference, you, you can use kind of a, a, an equivalent of a
hydraulic slip ring to, to pass fluid that way. This is literally
like a twist loop the same way that we have kind of an electrical
cable twist loop in the upper part of a, the tower and nacelle but
it's specifically designed for liquid coolant. And so, kudos to
them for kind of creativity and ingenuity. Whether or not this is
going to be more efficient than a nacelle mounted radiator, I'm
not. So it'd be interesting to see some feedback or some data on
that, but it's it's definitely a unique and kind of fascinating way
of developing a liquid based cooling system and implementing it in
a way that's going to help them. Address other considerations,
design considerations, like wanting to minimize the the volume and
the, the size, and frankly, the weight of an uptower radiator or a
cell mounted radiator. Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Waban
Properties, and it is a concept for using weather data, in
particular, more widespread weather data. coupled with performance
of a wind turbine over time to create a predicted model for the
power output under certain weather conditions. And this idea seems
to be driven, Phil, from grid restoration or black start scenarios
where they need to turn The grid on restarting the grid and they
need to know what power is going to be delivered with some relative
accuracy That's hard to do for wind turbines unless you have a
predictive method, which is what wobbin is talking about Philip
Totaro: Yeah, so just to just to clarify for everybody to woven
properties is like an ip holding subsidiary of intercom in germany,
so this is the the vehicle that they use to kind of capture and and
monetize their intellectual property Now, the, as for the idea
itself, what's a bit interesting and unique about this is the fact
that they are taking historical turbine data and park data, which
that's nothing new to be able to develop some kind of forward
looking forecast. Similarly, you can look at, actual global or even
local data. weather forecasting data and use that to help develop a
power forecast that there's plenty of people out there doing that
sort of work in, in the industry. We know a few of them on, on the
Uptime Wind Energy podcast. So, the, what's unique and interesting
though about the, this Enercon invention is the fact that they're
combining this both of these kind of methods for developing a A
power forecast that allows you to get a narrower confidence
interval by leveraging both the historical data combined with the
the weather forecasting data from both individual turbines and the
global forecast. Or regionally focused data that kind of surrounds
the the entire wind park that they have. So, anything that they can
do to try and improve that confidence interval is a good thing. As,
as many people who work in power forecasting know, this is a very
clever way of approaching. This kind of a technical challenge where
you want to be able to improve the, the confidence interval on your
weather forecast and your power forecast. Allen Hall: Our fun
patent of the week comes from Samuel Applegate. And this is a, a, a
kind of a unique alarm clock idea. Now you may have seen something
similar more recently called the Slappy Clock. Which is like this
rotating hand that slaps your face when you're supposed to wake up
when your alarm bell goes off and you don't like waking up. This is
a much calmer system than the, than the slapping hand bit. It's
like a grid of that's suspended above the sleeper and there's a
bunch of strings hanging down in a grid pattern. At the end of
these strings is, are corks. And when you're allowed to sleep, this
cork system lifts off and doesn't bother you. As soon as the alarm
bell goes off, it sort of lowers down. So it's kind of like you're
surrounded by a bunch of corks and strings, like you're being
caught in a cobweb. So it's, it's trying to wake you up slowly, not
to really alarm you up. However, I wonder if this idea was really
ever effective because hard sleepers can sleep through anything.
This device seems like it's not going to be enough to wake up the
difficult sleeper. Philip Totaro: And I'll tell you what, Alan,
this invention was actually conceived of and the patent was granted
back in 1882. So, the fact that something that was that kind of
unique and original more than a hundred years ago could influence,
some of the, some of the IP and the technology of, of today and,
and the slappy, which I do not use, by the way. I, I actually
normally wake up with the sun in the morning. It's, much more
pleasant way to do things. But, for those people that might be
heavier sleepers, I don't know, this could work, the slappy could
work. But it depends, I guess it depends on how heavy a sleeper you
are. Allen Hall: You're never gonna beat that rooster in your
window. That's the best.