Chinese Airborne Wind Turbines, Extended Blade Lifetimes

The crew discusses the Chinese S1500 airborne wind turbine, how
NLMK DanSteel manufactures steel for offshore wind, and results
from ORE Catapult showing extended blade lifetimes. Sign up now for
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technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
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today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro,
and Rosemary Barnes.  Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime
Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall in the Queen City,
Charlotte, North Carolina. I'm here with Rosemary Barnes and.
Australia Phil Totaro's in California and Joel Saxum's back home in
Texas. We've all decided that we're not gonna talk about anything
negative this week. That's good. Phil did have his pre-recorded
rant. That's always good. So there, there is some dirt going on out
there in wind, but I don't think we're gonna talk about it this
week 'cause we just need a little bit of a break. The top of the
order is, uh, this Chinese flying wind turbine that looks like a
Zeppelin, and [00:01:00] they have supposedly tested over
in China, the world's largest airborne wind turbine, and it's
called the S 1500. It's developed by Beijing's Saws Energy
Technology, and it made us made in flight recently in Hames. The,
it looks like a Zeppelin and, and Rosemary, there has been a
previous version of this that was around, but I don't think it went
to anywhere, but it looks like it's what? It's about 40 meters
tall, about 40 meters wide and about 60 meters long. So it's sort
of this long tube. And inside of this tube they have 1200 kilowatt
generators. So they're creating power up at altitude, and they have
a cable that bring down all the power. Down to earth. It's kind of
like a heliostat and some of these, uh, other tethered systems. My
question is, why are we trying that now? And especially in China
where they have huge, massive wind turbine is [00:02:00]being
built. Why this?  Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Uh, I don't
know. I often question why China makes certain decisions with
investments they make. 'cause they have, um, yeah, invested in a
whole bunch of. Out there technologies as well as dominating most
of the mainstream ones. And, uh, what I usually come up with is
that they've gotta try everything. Strategy, very, very similar
concept came out of MITI think that they developed it originally as
a power generating thing, you know, basically just based on the
idea that, um, wind speeds are way higher the further up you go. So
they wanna. Get, get up into those really high, um, wind speeds
that, you know, way higher than what a tower can reach for a
traditional wind turbine. And yeah, this, these original concept
that I saw out of MIT, that originally they were planning to use it
for power generation, then I think that they pivoted to
telecommunications. Um, and then I believe that they pivoted to not
doing that anymore. Um, so I haven't looked at it recently. Could,
could be that [00:03:00]I'm a little bit outta date on that.
But it is interesting to see a concept picked up that. Like, I
don't think anybody would really say that that was the most
promising of all the different kinds of airborne wind. Um, yeah. So
it's interesting to see that that's the one that's been picked up.
I think it's got some promise in that it's, it's true that the wind
resource is much better at, um, at high wind speed, but there are a
whole lot of challenges that need to be overcome. Um, so it's not
yet I would say sure whether this. Is any of these technologies are
ever gonna go anywhere? Um, we're kind of at the point now where
some companies are ready to find out, but it's um, yeah, definitely
not taking over the world anytime soon.  Joel
Saxum: Yeah. I was gonna say, Rosie, I tend to agree with you.
I, we've, there's the one I'm thinking about, Alan is the, it was
containerized and it was like we had a winch. He let led the thing
up and went up to higher altitudes. I just. I think there's too
many moving parts to these [00:04:00]solutions to be something
that's gonna be done at scale. I think there's a great use for them
in say, I don't know, military operations or disaster response, um,
those kind of things. Or very remote areas where you can't get
anything else in, you know, like a Caribbean island or some crazy
thing like that. I think there's, there's possibility there.
However, to do this at scale. I just don't see it, right? This
one's, this is by far the biggest one. I think I've heard of 1.2
megawatts. That's a lot of juice, right? That's creating a lot of
energy. So I think that you can see this like, oh, we're trying to
go to scale with this thing, but. What's the practical use? I
think, Phil, you actually said it before off air, like this is a
solution looking for a problem almost.  Phil
Totaro: Yeah, and it, what's funny to me about this is
there's, there's a couple of things here. One is what you just
mentioned, Joel, like the economies of scale on doing this as some
kind of displacement to conventional power generation is just
completely [00:05:00] impractical because we have so much
infrastructure in place that's not associated with. With Airborne,
but we actually looked at, I just wanna say like 12 years ago as a
company, we did the math on whether or not this type of technology
made sense to use in, you know, like islands or, um, you know,
displacement of like diesel generation basically, uh, places like
Alaska or the Caribbean, like you said. Um, so the math came out
like if the price of oil is above. Something like 120 bucks a
barrel, then a solution like this makes sense. Uh, otherwise you're
probably better off, especially now. 'cause again, when we did this
analysis, it was years ago, but batteries are easily more
dispatchable now. You know, the technology, this is one of those
things like you were saying, like, yeah, the technology works and
you can make this like a TL nine, but [00:06:00] for
what? Like, nobody's gonna pay for this.  Rosemary
Barnes: I don't think that they're up to TL nine yet. 'cause
there's some like, it, it works. And they've done autonomous
operation, like in steady state operation. They've done some
autonomous, um, like launches and. I dunno, what's the opposite of
a launch? Um, pulling, pulling back in. You can't just stay up
there through any kind of storm, right? So they have to be able to
launch and, um, re retract land, um, under deploy. You have to be
able to do that autonomously if you are gonna imagine, you know,
this having any kind of scale. And I think that, yeah, autonomous
launch and, um, landing has been done. But not in all conditions.
At least last time I looked into it deeply, they, that was the last
bit that was left. It's like, yeah, it can, can be done
autonomously in good conditions, but not bad ones. Um, yeah, so I
think that there's still some proving out to go and I think that
failure raise a really good [00:07:00] point that it
becomes like the further that other technologies develop, the less
likely it is that airborne wind can catch up. And also that people
like those early. Early markets are going to want it now. Islands
obviously solar panels, um, are already deployed on a lot of
islands. And then when you do have batteries so cheap that you can
start to build up a whole day, a couple of days, you know, a week
worth of batteries would probably not be a totally non-comparable
cost to the airborne wind. And also just so much less maintenance
required. So much less that can go wrong.  Joel
Saxum: You know, there's one thing I wanted to touch on here
that we, we skipped, we kind of, we breezed by it because we do, we
talk about these things all the time, but for people that are,
aren't used to r and d or aren't used to technology development. T
when we mention TRL nine on the show here, uh, Phil mentioned it,
Rosemary mentioned it. That is a scale. TRL one through
TRL [00:08:00] nine, and it is, it was developed by NASA
a long time ago, but basically TRL one means concept and idea all
the way through. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 9 means commercially
ready. We're ready to roll with this product as a, as a thing. So
when we say a one of those levels, that's what we're referring
to.  Allen Hall: The United States had something very
similar, or it still does, I think along the east coast they put up
Aerostats around Washington DC and they had a little radar
underneath them so they could look over the horizon. So along the
east coast there are these big, massive aerostats, and I don't know
if you recall or not, but several years ago, probably 10 years ago
now, they had one of those aerostats break loose in Maryland and
that cable. That holds it to the earth is conductive. So every
power line it came across, started creating shorts and blackouts
all along this pathway until it finally crashed in Pennsylvania. I
think they had an F 16 [00:09:00] chasing it for a little
bit, uh, once it broke free. But I remember that happening and
thinking, man, that is a really difficult engineering, uh, design
to create something as big as a basically a BLI size piece and have
a cable and have it hold it. For eternity.  Rosemary
Barnes: That's one of the biggest challenges. As aside from
the autonomous operation, one of the biggest challenges is just the
materials, properties of the cable itself. Because Yeah, the, the
tether to get,