Ørsted Offshore Blade Install, Degradable Epoxy Resin Composite

This week on Power-Up, Ørsted's offshore blade install method,
SWANCOR's degradable epoxy resin composite, and a precursor to the
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https://www.windaustralia.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. First
patent idea is from our friends over at Orsted, and they are
looking at a really novel approach of installing wind turn blades
vertically rather than the horizontally, which is we do today
offshore. So if you've watched offshore blades being installed,
you've always seen them placed horizontally and slid towards the
hub and everybody tightens them on. Well, that requires a lot of
really tall cranes to, to make that happen. But what Orsted's
thinking about is grabbing the blade kind of by the bottom and
lifting it up vertically. In order to do this, you need a pretty
rigid frame to hold this crane to keep it from the blade
stabilized. So the crane doesn't move too much. And it's, it's,
it's kind of a complicated mechanical problem. However, it does
require a much shorter crane and that is the benefit and getting
big cranes out at sea right now is really hard. Phil, so having a
short crane with a much stronger crane head, I'll call it, Philip
Totaro: Does make a lot of sense. It does. And, and so just for
context, we talked a couple of weeks ago about, Equinor getting a
patent on, technology around optimization of floating platforms.
This is another example of a development and independent power
producer company, Orsted, getting a patent. IP themselves that they
control on something related to, the, the business that they do on
a daily basis. And the reason I'm bringing this up is it's, it's a
bit unique in the wind energy sector because most of the,
Particularly important patents have been held in the past by the
OEMs or other supply chain companies. So for, a company like Orsted
to, to even contemplate doing this is, is fascinating. This is
still in the conceptual phase. There's no rig that they've built
yet. They've probably done some smaller scale bench testing,
potentially. They've certainly done, plenty of computer modeling
on, on this sort of thing. To get it to work. But it is, as Alan
mentioned, an interesting concept because, the, the blade's moment
of inertia, when it's in the vertical position, it, it has the
opportunity to potentially flop around or tip over. But the counter
to that is, as Alan mentioned as well, you need a much shorter
crane boom. And so, these are some of the technical challenges
that, that Orsted is trying to address with introducing this kind
of technology. I guess the question maybe for Joel is, is, does
this seem practical and, and how attractive is this going to be?
Joel Saxum: I think from an operational standpoint, so for real
world value of a patent, and this will happen eventually, and I
don't think it's limited to offshore. I think it will happen
onshore as well. And, and I'm saying this based on the global build
out of wind farms, onshore, offshore, floating, you name it, what
we're doing and the goals we have in place. All of these, do an
easy one. Onshore Windfarm has a big, huge crane, a Liebherr 1300,
and it's got a tail picker and all this stuff, you have to mobilize
two cranes, even though one's smaller than the other. The same
thing with offshore, you have all these specialized vessels, you
have to mobilize this one vessel, it's the only one that can lift
these, 130 meter blades or whatever it may be. We need ways,
innovative ways, to be able to do installations easier. And not
only installations, you gotta think about operations and
maintenance. So as the lifetime, if we get more and more of these
built, yes, construction, but now we're getting to the point where
we have to take and swap blades out, or if there's an issue or
something of that sort. So, things like this need to happen. Does
it make sense for me as an armchair engineer? Of course. Especially
sitting here with Phil and Alan, who are Much better engineers than
I am talking about moments of inertia. And this is, I'm standing
here with my sitting here with my pen and my fingers together
trying to figure out how this balance works. I think it, I think
there is a future for something like this. And kudos to Orsted.
Maybe they're gonna get the license it to a bunch of people. Allen
Hall: Our second idea is a degradable wind turbine blade and
manufacturing method by Swancor Advanced Materials. And if you've
been watching in the news about recycling and wind turbine blades,
there's been a lot of discussion about creating resins that you can
decompose. Well, this is one of them. And they, they're. The idea
is to create this resin. There's a specific chemical compound that
they're creating, but when you break it down, you basically take
the blade and drop it into an alkaline environment at somewhere
around a hundred degrees Celsius for a period of time. And the
resin separates into its intrinsic parts. You can also recover the
fabric that was in the blade. So you basically can start over with
all the ingredients. It's like unbaking a cake in a sense. This is
really important because there's a big movement in Europe to not
landfill used wind turbine blades, and I think that movement about
not landfilling is going to happen here in the United States. So,
SWAN Corps is really set up here for an opportunity, Phil. Philip
Totaro: Yeah, and just for context for everybody, SWAN Corps is a a
partner to a number of the OEMs already including Siemens Gamesa
that has developed, recyclable blade, recyclable blade technology
utilizing, I don't know if it's this specific formulation that
they're describing in this, this patent but it's probably close.
And they're actually doing this together in, in the manufacturing
facilities in Taiwan. as well for some of the offshore blades for
Siemens Gamesa. I believe Squancore is also a supplier to Vestas
and certainly some of the Chinese OEMs, Sonoma and Envision Energy.
So the fact that this is, again, I'm not sure if they're using this
exact, formulation in their commercially available product. But
like I said, it's probably pretty close. And, it's fantastic to see
we just talked about another idea from Orsted that's kind of,
technology readiness level, like four or maybe five for those that
are familiar with that, well, we track the, the technology
readiness levels for all these patents that we catalog at Intel
store. This one's probably a TRL eight or nine. And so again, this
is fantastic to be able to see the progression of technology come
into the market. Joel Saxum: Phil, to, to your point there. A resin
much like this one. I don't know if it's the exact same one. Like
you said, RWE installed 2023 at the Cascasi wind farm offshore. And
there were Siemens Mesa blades. So something like this is being
used in the field right now. My fall down on this one is the same
conversation that you have whenever you talk about recycling wind
turbines blades is what's the throughput of something like this.
Right. So what this patent says is thermal degradation is conducted
60 degrees C to 180 degrees C for 1 to 48 hours. We don't know
exactly what it is. I'm sure that has to do with agitation in the,
in, in the chemicals and these kinds of things, but that's hugely
energy intensive and it's pretty slow. So when we get to the point
where we're having hundreds and hundreds and thousands of tons of
turbine blades to recycle, which we have right now, and it's only
going to grow and grow and grow into the next 10, 20, 25 years,
because that's when, when, by the time these, this resin is into
manufacturing, it will be another 25 years until we have to recycle
them. Can a factory or can a mechanism handle this at scale in the
real world? Because even as it sits right now, we have people that
are having a hard time at scale, grinding these things up to use
them in roadbed materials and other things. So, I like that we're
moving forward in this method, and it could be something really
cool in the future. Does it sound like it's ready for scale? Not to
me. But I hope it is. Allen Hall: Our fun invention is an
interesting one this week. Joel, do you know what beer goggles are?
I wear them like every Saturday . So this is a relative to beer
goggles, and it's similar to what Google Glass was at the time.
It's a set of glasses and on the lenses they put subliminal
messages above the normal sight line, so it's a stereoscopic effect
and so on there it can say, Joel, no beer. And then they can
project that out in front of you on Saturdays so that you can
remember what happened on Sunday. But this, this idea, I have not
seen this implemented, but it is a very unique idea, just putting
something on the edge of your vision all the time that you kind of
lose track of. You don't focus on it because your brain eventually
just tries to ignore it. But some part of your brain may be paying
attention to it. And. Could give you Joel Saxum: some healthy
advice. I think there's, this is, this could be really used in I, I
have a lot of uses,