Padge LLC Prevents Harmonics Damage

Joseph Chacon, CEO of Padge LLC, discusses the impact of electrical
harmonics on wind turbines and solar systems, providing insights
into causes, consequences, and effective solutions for improving
power quality. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email
update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored
by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on
Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering
tomorrow. Allen Hall: Joe, welcome to the show.  Joseph
Chacon: Thank you. I appreciate it.  Allen
Hall: Well, I'm glad we connected, uh, through Jon Zalar, I
believe, and we don't talk electrical power creation or what that.
Kind of power we're creating and what the effect of that power is
on systems downstream very often, uh, the Uptime podcast, because
there's so many wind turbine issues, is mostly focused on
mechanical problems. But we're finding that more and more problems
may have an electrical origin. We wanted to get an expert in here
that would be you to come help us on harmonics because there are
requirements about harmonics.  Joseph Chacon: There are,
uh, IEEE five 19 governs [00:01:00] the requirements for
harmonics. At the point of common coupling. Allen Hall: That's
correct. And your prior experiences with ge, which is now GE Renova
down in South Carolina, that's correct. But you were involved,
maybe give a brief description of the things you're working on
because when electrical people talk, um, kind of gets lost in
translation. You were knee deep, maybe waist deep, maybe eyeballs
deep and electrical  Joseph Chacon: power at GE Renova?
No, not, not knee deep, not weight deep, waist deep. I was
baptized, completely immersed all the way in. I came shortly after
the Enron acquisition. Um, I was one of the electrical engineering
managers at the time. We had, uh, I think two or three at the time.
Um, this was pretty early on. Uh, I got out of that because, uh,
I'm, I like management, but I, I like electrical engineering, so I
wanted to go back to being an individual contributor. Um, so I've
touched just about [00:02:00] every electrical thing you
can think of in a wind turbine. And also in solar  Joel
Saxum: as well. You know, a little bit of a sidebar here
'cause I want, we want to definitely get into this deep technical
conversation, but Joe, you touched on something that happens to
people, right? You're a really good engineer, you've run a team,
you've solved some problems. So now you get promoted to management,
but you don't get to engineer as much anymore. So you get, like,
you get, you start being leadership and like doing all these
things, how to manage people, how to run a team, this, that, and
that's great. We need that. The industry, every industry globally,
we need to be able to do those things. But for engineers that have
engineer at heart, and I'm, I'm also looking at you, Alan Hall. Uh,
they, they wanna be able to engineer, right? They wanna be able to
do stuff to make a difference to, to, to get hands on with a
problem. So, so you, so you've done that though, right? That that's
you, you are now, uh, Josh Shahan is, uh, pad LLC and  Joseph
Chacon: pod is short for Padre, which is what my kids and
grandchildren call me. They just shortened it from Padre to podge.
'cause saying two [00:03:00]syllables was too much and I liked
it.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, I like that. Okay, so, so, so like
we said, uh, you, you, you guys, you're getting deep into harmonics
and other issues. You get called in by Solar Farms to solve
problems and, and this is the thing Alan and I were kind of talking
about off air a little bit is. W we have a bit of a culture like in
wind right now of electrical problem, swap, swap apart, swap apart
in, swap apart out. But nobody's looking at the, the root cause of
why or why did this thing fail, and how can we, you know. Make this
more robust for the future. And that doesn't just stop at
components in the turbine. It's, it's BOP, you know, and this is,
like you said, also solar and, and other industrial facilities as
well. But that's what you tackle, right?  Joseph
Chacon: Yeah. And you know, you mentioned John Zellar, uh,
great, great root cause analysis guy. Uh, does fishbone, uh, ad
modeling, things like that, um, what's your observation that you're
seeing? I think is correct. People ignore. [00:04:00] One
of the fundamental root causes for a lot of issues, um, not just in
renewable energy, but anywhere you have, uh, large amounts of
nonlinear loading, uh, these days. That's primarily coming from
data centers. Um, with the advent of the diode six pulse front end,
uh, variable frequency drive, uh, IGBTs, any type of switching
device. It's only getting worse. It will never get better because
we are putting more and more non-linear loads on the utility and
fewer and fewer linear loads. Even our lighting today, we don't use
incandescent anymore. It's all either LED, well, we used to do
fluorescent, but LED is a horrific offender for harmonics. So, and
I hate to pick on that technology because. They all really are. Um,
so a solar inverter, a wind turbine converter, uh, a UPS, any type
of [00:05:00]device is going to introduce more harmonic
content into the grid. So you got the issue where the device itself
has harmonic content, couple to a grid that's getting more and more
harmonic content already on it. So the situation is definitely
getting more and more exacerbated.  Allen Hall: So some
of those harmonics have really significant consequences. Uh, if you
go to podge LLC on YouTube, you can watch some of the discussion
there and walk through the equations about what harmonics can do to
equipment on generators. Up in the the wind turbines, you can
actually damage some of the Y connections on those, uh, defi
generators. It can causes all kinds of problems. And I know one of
the issues that's, and it's being sussed out right now, so we're
talking about it live as it's happening, is, uh, they're seeing
transients come from the line back up to, to the turbine and are
causing problems to the electronics. Straight harmonics. And the
same thing coming [00:06:00] out of some of the turbines
is the harmonics can be strong. And in one of your videos you
talked about what kind of damage you can do with a transformer if
you have harmonics that are significant enough. It's, it's
surprising. How you can shorten the life of a transformer 
Joseph Chacon: correct, or any magnetic circuit, uh,
generators, motors, transformers, anything that's going to take,
uh, electrical conversions to magnetic conversions and back or vice
versa, any type of thing like that. Uh, they cause extreme
dielectric stress and extreme temperature changes. Um, and both of
'em are damaging. To devices like transformers, motors, generators,
et cetera.  Allen Hall: Yeah, because transformers and
all that sort of magnetic equipment is designed to work around a
core frequency. Typically 50 hertz or 60 hertz, depending on where
in the world you are. When you put other frequency components on
that equipment, it's not designed to do that. So that turns into a
lot of heat a lot of times, [00:07:00] and then you over
temp or shorten a lifetime of. Transformers on the pads and up
tower in some cases that don't. If you have a failure like that,
uh, at a wind farm, I saw it most recently, uh, a couple of weeks
ago, where they're replacing transformers, like, wow, it's only
been there a year or two. That shouldn't happen. There are other,
so those kind of failures, unless you're paying attention, are just
gonna repeat, right? Because replacing a. Pad transformer with
another pad, transformer doesn't remove the source of the problem.
It just puts in another fuse in the circuit.  Joseph
Chacon: Correct. And you know, let's say you put it in, in
pick a year, January of 2015, and your harmonic content from
utility can change over time. So many times it's worth just taking
a look at it. Um, in one of the videos you talked about. I promoted
a [00:08:00] Fluke 1777 power quality analyzer tool that
I use, and I rent that tool out to people that are wanting to do a
study. Uh, and that's an economical way to do a study. Um, the
technician or engineer or whoever puts that in does not necessarily
need to know a lot about harmonics to set that up. Uh, you're going
to be putting in either three or four cts, depending upon whether
you're a four wire or a three wire system. Then connections to your
bus for voltage, and then you turn the fluke on and you verify that
your currents are going in the right direction. So in Phase A
current, it's phase A voltage, and you start a session and then you
mail it back to me and I'll give you the report. Um, and it does a
lot more than just harmonics. Uh, and I basically, I run an IEEE
five 19 report. It does sags swells, it does super harmonics. It
does intra harmonics. Super harmonics [00:09:00] are
harmonics that are higher than 50, um, 50 times the fundamental. So
that's 50 times 60, uh, for 60 hertz people, or 50 times 50 for 50
hertz people. And you, you mentioned Alan, that Transformers motors
are designed for a certain frequency. Um, if you take a motor or a
transformer and look at it, it's gonna tell you the frequency.
Sometimes it's dual rate at 50 or 60. Um, but the engineer that
designed that transformer motor is gonna take certain things into
account related to the magnetic side to make sure that it's able to
operate for that broad frequency range. Low frequencies are quite
bad. In fact, as you get towards dc DC you can't use magnetic
circuits as a rule.