Mingyang UK Manufacturing, RWE Cargo Drones

Register for the next SkySpecs Webinar! Allen, Joel, Rosemary,
joined by Yolanda Padron, discuss RWE's pilot project using drones
to transport equipment uptower. Plus Mingyang has announced plans
to invest $2B into a UK offshore wind manufacturing center. And
Renvo' article in PES Wind Magazine highlights the needs for a
convenient spare parts marketplace in the wind industry. Sign up
now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things
wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
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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. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm
your host, Alan Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North
Carolina. And I. Have everybody else on the podcast is in the same
state. Rosemary is in Texas, in Houston, Texas. Joel's in Austin,
Texas, and our newest employee, Yolanda Barone, is in Austin,
Texas. Yolanda, welcome to the podcast. You're, uh, just joined us
a couple of days ago and we're super excited to have you. There's
been a lot going on in the wind business. Uh, Rosemary's actually
over here for a conference and Joel's been
helping [00:01:00] out at that conference. Just so
everybody knows, Yolanda's gonna be our blade expert at Weather
Guard helping us with a, a number of issues that operators have
around the world, uh, for things that Rosie can't take care of.
Call in Yolanda. So leading off this week, an interesting story
from RWE and a big press release about it. Joel, uh, RDB has
achieved a breakthrough in offshore wind logistics. By successfully
testing cargo drones at its German wind farms, and, uh, the first
time in German offshore airspace. Both long range autonomous drones
and short distant cargo drones have been used in daily wind farm
operations. Uh, the pilot project demonstrated how different drone
types can deliver spare parts, tools, and supplies to turbines. Uh,
they were able to move up. About 10 kilograms, which is like
roughly 25 pounds over about 40
kilometers. [00:02:00] That's a pretty good rate. Uh,
this is unique though to Europe because I think in the United
States we're not even allowed to do this, right? Um, you can, it
just depends on getting special permits. So it's called a bv, LOS
or BV loss, uh, beyond visual line of sight. Uh, so you can get, if
you have specific, uh, software packages and you're not over a
major city and certain things, you can get those kind of, um,
certificates from the FAA, but they're not easy. Uh, the, the cool
thing about this is, I mean, let's just put our technician hat on
for a second. Even an onshore wind farm. I'm up tower and I go, oh,
Alan and Rosemary and Yolanda and I are up tower and, and I go, who
brought up the 10 millimeter socket? And none of us did. Now we
have to draw short straws to see you, has to climb all the way down
and get the 10 millimeter and come all the way back up. Whereas
with a drone, you could just fly up, land on the nelle and you have
your tool, but it also means that you don't have
to [00:03:00] bring everything that you might conceivably
need with you up there. So like when you are climbing towers every
day, you've, you're taking so much junk with you every time you go
up, every time you go down and. Like it sounds easy. Oh, they've
got elevators in there. And that's true. You don't have to like put
it in a backpack and climb up a ladder with it. Um, in towers that
have a lift, but it's still, once you get to the top of the lift,
you still have to climb up a ladder to get into the nasal. And then
if you've gotta get out into the hub. And so you are still like
picking up huge bags of stuff and um, yeah. Hauling them above your
head. Always definitely exceeding the limit that you've just done
your special training to promise that you'll never lift more than
20 kilos. Um, you, yeah, it's just like, it's crazy the amount of
stuff that you go schlep around with you because you don't wanna
have to go back down if you forget something. So this means you can
take up your toolkit for what you're expected to need. Of course,
you've got a lot of bulky safety [00:04:00] equipment
that you have to take up 'cause you don't know when you're gonna
need that. Um, but yeah, it's gonna massively reduce the amount of
stuff that you need to take up. Rosa, you bring up a lot of good
points. Right? And that's just the, the daily active operations.
And we're, and we're, I'm just thinking right now with Onshore Wind
Farm, now go offshore and it's, it's boat landings into transition
pieces. The, the amount of HSE risk just to transfer onto, uh, a
tower or off of a tower to get components. It's that much more
complicated. It's that much more HSE risk. So. This makes absolute
sense and these technologies have been kind of floating around for
a while. Um, and one of the big things was, you know, of course
it's just the basics of drone stuff. So it's can we safely lift
this much, can we get the permits to lift this much? Because like
the CAA over in the EU there, they had a limit for a long time as
well of, I think it was. 25 kilograms or something like that for
like the whole drone setup couldn't, it, couldn't exceed that. Um,
so you have to get certain permits [00:05:00] to do all
these different things, but then it was, how do we safely precision
land and take off and deliver the stuff? So new advancements in,
um, LOC localization, so like slam technologies, um, simultaneous
location and mapping. So not just relying on GPS, but actually
sensing what's around you, whether it has, you know, a QR type.
April, April tag codes that the drone camera follows and then kind
of maps itself onto. Or if it's has that, uh, the ability to see
the blades and make sure it doesn't run into them autonomously. So
the, the drone world has matured enough where this technology is
like something that's pretty normal now. You can see these things,
drones, landing autonomously on boats that are driving by
themselves and on the back of cars. Like it's pretty cool stuff.
Uh, but it was only gonna be so long until it made its way into
industrial uses. And this is a great one. You're reducing risk,
you're reducing time, uh, saving money, all of the, you're, you're
literally ticking [00:06:00] every box for operations.
That makes this cool. I, I really like this. Uh, kudos to R to B
for, for making this happen. Well, Yolanda, they should be doing
this onshore too, right? Because a lot of o and m buildings are not
necessarily close to the wind farm. How many wind farms in Texas
have we driven? Ooh. Five, 10 miles just to get to the turbine.
Man, it would be a lot easier just to have a drone, wouldn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it, it would save the team so much time
and just so much effort. Like Rosie was saying, to climb those
turbines. The way we're doing it now is with electric truck, right?
Isn't that, uh, RWE was doing a lot of the Ford, what's the Ford
Electric pickup truck, Joel? Wasn't that RWE or was that Orad? That
was Vestas. The Ford Lightning, we could just buy a bunch of cyber
trucks and they could drive themselves out to the site, I suppose,
if they can last through all the potholes on these sites. That's
another thing you have to think about is technician time and the
wear and tear on vehicles and stuff. If you at these o and m
buildings, if you could, yeah, grab that piece of kit and, oh, I'm
at, I'm at, uh, [00:07:00] tower, you know, WTG 17, but
also the drone delivers you, your, your nuts and bolts or your
package or whatever your name may or your lunch maybe. That would
be a good one too. Cup of coffee. What do I feel like the majority
use of this drone technology will be for lunch? Hot lunch to the
top of the tower. Come on. I'm sure I've told this story before,
but I think it was New Brunswick when I climbed there, everybody
had this specific electric crockpot that they would bring up with
them and they would plug it in first thing, like as soon as they
got up to the um, miss Cell, they would plug in their crockpot and
then they would have a hot lunch. And I had something that I had
bought from the seven 11 'cause that's all there was in town. It
was, it was miserable every single day. Here's a question for you.
I'm gonna ask this one. Maybe we should ask Alex Forer from
Enertech this one. But, um, so as a, as a, um, a, a young worker in
northern Wisconsin, I learned how to warm up my lunch and or
breakfast on the intake manifold of a
log [00:08:00] skidder by wrapping it in tinfoil and
putting it into a certain puff spot in the motor. Is there a thing
in the tower up tower in the Nelle that gets hot enough? If you had
a tinfoil wrapped, say a panini or something, that you could
actually warm it up up there. The gearbox is warm. If it was
running overnight, if the turbine was running overnight, you can
sit some somewhere on the drive train. It's all pretty warm. That
was my hot tip. When I, um, uh, when I was commissioning, uh, some
turbines in Sweden, uh, the client demanded that I was, that we had
an engineer there. Of the whole every day for the commissioning
period of several months. So me and an electrical engineer traded
off. He had actual work to do, but I was just there to satisfy the
client. So I just brought my laptop on and sat on the. Sat on the
gearbox and um, I did get to see the Northern lights on some of
those trips, so, you know, maybe it was worth it.