Uptime Wind Energy Podcast: Gulf Wind Technology Advances Wind Turbine Innovation

Transcript

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Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, along with my co-host, Joel Saxum, and we are in New Orleans, Louisiana, of all places, at Gulf Wind Technology. We have James Martin, who is the CEO of Gulf Wind Technology, and David King, the Chief Technical Officer at Gulf Wind Technology. First of all, welcome to the podcast, guys.

James: Great to be here.

David: Yeah, thanks for coming to visit us.

Alan: We’ve had a wonderful time here today, going through the Gulf Wind Technology offices and workspace. It is impressive. It’s not something I knew we even had in the United States, honestly. You guys have been working for a couple of years on a variety of different projects and technologies. We had a meeting this morning, just full disclosure, about all the things that Gulf Wind has been involved with. I didn’t know that—some of it is top secret still, some of it not top secret. So, James, let’s just start with you. I think people in the U.S. don’t have a lot of experience, don’t haven’t met you before, haven’t worked with Gulf Wind. Could you just give a brief background on what Gulf Wind Technology is as a business?

James: Certainly, yeah. I mean, Gulf Wind Technology, we are all first principles blades engineers, essentially first. We’ve been in the OEM industry for a number of years. We’ve seen some of the challenges that the industry is up against today, and we like to think that we can predict maybe some of the challenges for tomorrow. So with that team, we’ve been able to build assets, equipment, and get ourselves out there as problem solvers and offering technology solutions to basically problems that can reduce the cost of energy over time. So, guess talked about a lot. We’re going to talk about some of the assets we’ve invested in, but yeah, we’ve got reliability products that get involved with today’s problems in the market. We’re really passionate about the products of tomorrow, so more performance products for the future. And we love running projects, so specifically, we’ve been working in our region to open up or demystify, remove roadblocks for the Gulf of Mexico market, which has got some great technology problem statements in there.

Alan: Okay, that’s where we first heard of Gulf Wind, was with the work with Shell and Gulf Wind, right?

James: Yeah, that’s it. It’s a double-edged sword, and we had you on the podcast, in a sense, because we were talking about the first wind turbine being installed in Louisiana, and Gulf Wind is involved with that.

Alan: Yeah, I mean, we really thought, because a lot of our challenges are about how to get technology to product. How can we demonstrate that we can take it off a desktop study in terms of a solution or an idea? How can we show it works? How can we de-risk that for our customers? So the first thing we thought is that we really want to invest, put our money where our mouth is, make sure that we can design, make sure we can test on a subcomponent level, and make sure we can actually spin anything we’re talking about. And yeah, demystify some of that technology, essentially.

Joel: Well, one of the things Alan and I talk about regularly, whether it’s on the podcast or in our many Slack conversations every day, is the fact that there’s not a whole lot of technology development—either company solutions or services—coming out of the United States, right? We know that we are a bit younger of a wind market, as a whole, than our European counterparts, and a lot of solutions come out over there. So some of the performance enhancements, some of those fixes that we’re talking about here, like you guys are working on. I mean, we’re sitting in this—you can see on the camera here, if you’re watching on the YouTube version—that we’ve got blades, and we’ve got a rapid prototyping facility, and we’ve got offices over here and people running around, and there’s a lot of things that can go on here because they have the facility built for it. If you haven’t looked into what Gulf Wind Technology is and what it can bring to not only the global market but the local U.S. market, it’s huge. It’s a game-changer for what we should be doing here, and more operators should be coming in here to talk with the team.

Alan: So with that being said, I know we’re in Louisiana, right? What do the rest of the team and the rest of the outfit look like?

James: So yeah, the core team and where we’re founded is really here—the shipyard at Avondale Global Gateway. Yeah, this is almost the jewel in the crown of former glory North American manufacturing. They used to manufacture giant ships here for the Navy, oil, and gas projects. They had 26,000 people here, so this 30,000-foot facility, it’s our true north; this is our headquarters. But we’ve got a fantastic engineering office actually in Hickory, North Carolina, sort of dead center between Asheville and Charlotte, where our chief engineer and some of our blade inspection and loads teams sit. So, it’s only a few people there, but they very much complement what we’re up to here.

David: No, and just as James mentioned, what we’ve really done is taken that jewel in the crown and filled it with all the things you need to really understand the problem statements in wind. We really dive into the hands-on engineering work that’s needed to drive these problem statements into solutions. That’s really why it’s been such a joy to be part of this Gulf Wind team and to build this team out—because we’ve been able to almost match that handshake between engineering and hands-on work in a very, very real, substantive way.

Joel: So you have the engineering resources, you’ve got the hands-on resources as well. Everybody knows the heat index here in Louisiana is 105 degrees, but it’s comfortable inside. We’re in an insulated, air-conditioned facility that is 125 meters long, and if I look through the camera here, I see this is where there’s a composite repair testing facility. We have rapid prototyping. There’s an actual wind tunnel that you guys built, designed, had calibrated, and are regularly using it down at that end of the facility. So, like what you said, not only do we have engineering resources and all the smart people, but we have the capabilities of testing. If there’s a solution or if you thought about something, you can action it here, test it out, and build a piece to put in the test chamber. I mean, we were right over here earlier when we were walking around. Of course, we’re recording this sitting at a desk, but we were in full PPE walking through here. There’s a material testing station, and snap! We heard the sweet sound of composite failure. And we all turned and said, “Success!” Right? So, but those facilities and those capabilities are here. So, as an operator, if you have a problem—if you have, say, a specific turbine and you’re starting to see an issue in your fleet—you call Gulf Wind Technologies. They can replicate the issue, get into the field, do the inspections, figure out what’s going on, come back here, build what could be the fix, test the fix, and make sure it works.

David: It’s really all about getting engineers as close to the problem statement as possible, whether that’s sending engineers up a tower or having engineers standing around problem statements in a lab setting. We’re trying to bring the field into the lab to really break these problem statements down and understand them. So, you know, as you go through that asset list, it’s all about how do we remove these different barriers that we’ve seen in the past, slow down projects, make things take longer than they really should, and allow us to move quite quickly and rapidly through that kind of prototyping, that fail-forward-fast mentality, and get to something where we can actually offer a solution for a customer. Whether that’s on the performance load side of things, like you mentioned with the wind tunnel, or testing materials, doing subcomponent testing, we really just want to remove those barriers.

James: And as you mentioned earlier, with the turbine down in Port Fourchon, that’s been a huge part of that as well. It’s the top of the testing pyramid where these problems really shake themselves out on these prototype turbines. How can we, in a very quick, rapid, fast way, get to that prototype turbine level? We can make blades for a turbine like that in a couple of weeks, which allows us to move super, super fast through these problems.

Alan: And being so knowledgeable in blades, the root cause analysis ends up at your doorstep quite a bit in terms of engineering review in the United States. That seems to be a relatively growing business, as people realize Gulf Wind is here. They’re going to be tapping you to do that kind of work. What kind of root cause analysis work have you been doing lately?

James: I mean, a lot of what we do is we treat a turbine like it’s a production line for energy. So, we want to break it down in terms of a very repeatable, engineering-based approach to the problem statement. You can brand it as, whether it’s a Six Sigma project and you’re breaking it down into those nice steps with gates, or it’s a first-principles technology development project or product development project. But we start with the business case; it all starts with that. A customer—what do they want out of our solution? What’s their budget for it? What’s the time period that they want it both designed and implemented? How long do they want the solution to last? So, once you go through that defined stage, you start setting up your design experiments, you’re putting your sandbox of engineers together so that they can actually innovate and, like David said, kind of fail forward fast. But using all the tools around us to make sure that we’re working with the customer, lockstep with them. We’re independent, we have high integrity, and we like to create areas for customers to come here. Customers can ship their full blades here, and they can do it under very tight terms, totally confidential. If we see a pattern, we can approach those customers and actually, in a very controlled way, cross-pollinate and create more consortia-driven environments. As we know in this industry, it’s sometimes about removing the barriers. Like we were talking about earlier today, demystifying, getting as close a collaboration between an operator, an OEM, an independent, and a field technician, like David was talking about. But creating that appropriate collaborative space to problem-solve, and then putting together a really robust solution—something that is designed with its end intent in mind. There’s no point in doing something on a desktop or on a subcomponent level if, by the time it’s deployed, that’s when you introduce the variation. So, it’s all about de-risking our approach, essentially.

Joel: So, you’re de-risking what you guys do as a company, but in the grand scheme, you’re de-risking what the global fleet looks like, right? So people can come here, operate under close NDAs, but if they want to collaborate with others, it’s available. I mean, right now I’m looking at one, two, three, four blades, four or five root sections out beyond this door to my left. There are eight or ten full blade sections there, so customers have actually gotten to the point where they say, “We want to ship you a blade; you guys figure it out. We may send some engineers; we may help out.” But when we talk about on the podcast the shroud of secrecy around everything, you guys have created a facility that’s, for lack of a better term, an engineer’s playground to come here and solve these problems for the industry.

David: Yeah, and I think that gets back to the industry need. An operator has a problem with a blade, but it’s probably not just that blade. It’s probably a series of blades that have a similar issue. A lot of times, when an RCA is done, there’s an engineer who comes out to the field, takes some photos of the blade, they may take a couple of samples, maybe, and then they’ll see a report shoved out on the other side. And it doesn’t really get down to the heart of what is really causing the issue. A lot of times, companies that are doing RCA don’t have the mechanical ability to start breaking things apart or cross-sectioning or doing NDT (non-destructive testing). That’s a huge advantage because if I’m a large operator, I’m going to send you that blade to tear apart and figure out what’s going on because it’s not just one.

David: It’s really about approaching it in a systematic way. Whether it’s understanding failure modes, effects analysis, or using that as a tool to extract what the tear-down needs to look like and what we need to be evaluating here. Do we need to be doing mechanical testing, looking under a microscope at parts, or approaching it with a different inspection method? Ultimately, it’s about opening up, for a period of time, innovative solutions around how you can approach a solution coming out of that RCA. You’re not just identifying the problem; you’re also starting to think ahead about what to do about it. How am I going to manage this at scale? How am I going to manage risk? And how am I going to do that at the fleet level, thinking about that from the onset of the RCA, to get the most value out of that exercise?

Alan: And that’s really the critical part because, when it comes down to it, it eventually becomes a money issue. How do I minimize the cost impact, the downtime impact, and my business interruption, to get these turbines back up and running so I can get through their useful lifespan? I think from what we’ve seen today, Gulf Wind Technology has that expertise, for sure, but also has a sense of what the business is. You don’t need to extend a blade for another 20 years if it really only has three or four years of life in it. You need to get it to the end of its useful life. That kind of repair is different from the 20-year repair. That knowledge is really important in how you apply engineering principles to that. So not every problem has the same solution.

James: Yeah, no, time frame matters, absolutely. From our very first problem statement that was a life extension to get through to repower, as you say, or whether it’s one of our more programmatic opportunities—like with the Shell-sponsored Gulf Wind Technology Accelerator—that was about looking actually quite far into the future. That was saying, “Hey, this is a high-risk environment with specific economic challenges. What does that look like? How are we going to remove the barriers, and how are we going to approach it?” So, we like looking at today’s reliability and applying that to what the future might be.

Alan: Let’s walk through the hurricane scenario because this always comes up with the Gulf of Mexico. Shell anointed Gulf Wind to be the company to go look at it, and that’s great. They obviously did their homework and decided to come here, so congratulations on that. But when you put a turbine out in the Gulf of Mexico, there’s always a concern in two phases: one, that it’s essentially low-wind conditions—except when there’s a hurricane, and then it’s super high-wind conditions—that requires a different kind of technology or approach to designing blades. You’ve been working on that for a little while now. Do you have that solution, or are there multiple solutions? What does that look like? We want to put some wind turbines out in the Gulf of Mexico. How does that happen?

James: I mean, from a programmatic approach, I might hand it over to David on the blades approach, but from a programmatic approach, it was about the whole ecosystem of wind in the Gulf. Maybe just leaning out from just the blades part for a minute, but we talked a little about this. It was about the workforce, the infrastructure, and what can be leveraged from oil and gas to actually deploy and take percentage points out of the cost structure, right in the backyard of the Gulf. You just have to go down there to realize that it’s a huge production system. The stats are amazing—the amount of mileage of pipeline, platforms, workforce, cranes—so much stuff that can be transposed into wind. So, it was looking at it from that cost of capital, from the economics of wind, from workforce training, equipment deployment, servicing, and then starting to think at the system level: how can the rotor affect the foundation? What is the foundation design? And I’ll hand the ball to David to talk more about the rotor and loads technology part because that’s also pretty damn interesting.

David: Absolutely. As James mentioned, it really has to be rooted in that business case. If you’re just looking at things from an engineering problem-solving point of view, it’s probably kind of an easy problem to solve. You can put more material in a blade, use more expensive material, and solve the problem. But what you haven’t done is solve the economic problem. You’ve got to come into it with both an engineering hat and an economic hat to make sure you can deploy turbines in an efficient manner that’s going to make the energy competitive in the open market.

Alan: Especially in the Gulf, where you’re going to be in the open market.

David: Exactly. It’s usually not a fixed PPA, and you’re going to be playing with what’s going on in the Texas market, for sure.

Alan: Yeah, like there was that big auction off Galveston with 2GW or something like that.

James: And we’ve learned a lot about that by bringing parties to the table. Our background is blades. We’ve got the assets to demystify that. But from a programmatic approach, it’s about bringing in the experts and being quite humble about where the lessons learned will come from. We showed you a little bit earlier about where we like to collaborate. So, if we can have people that are experts in seabed conditions, deployment, aviation, lightning, migratory patterns, and so on, it’s about getting all the problems on the table and creating an appropriately-sized forum where people can talk frankly, without having a particular lens. That collaboration piece is part of that optimization problem. From an engineering perspective, when you’re listening to all these problem statements, you want to find the optimal solution that incorporates all those design curves—whether it’s a stakeholder management curve, economics, loads—you can boil that down into a lot of different ways. And you want to find the lowest intersecting point between those curves to solve the problem.

Alan: You’re dealing with a lot of blades, and Joel and I walked around the facility and saw a lot of blades. What are the top issues that operators onshore are having with blades at the moment?

David: I can speak to that a bit. A lot of the issues stem from various types of damage, like erosion, which is typical stuff, or lightning strikes. There are a lot of problem statements right now around various manufacturing deviations or quality issues that might have found their way into the field. These are resulting in cracked laminates, cracked Balsa panel regions, or core regions. A lot of these defects need real, true diligence in understanding what’s going on with that problem statement. Again, it comes back to understanding the business case for how to deal with these issues. Is it about getting something through to repower, getting a 20-year life out of it, or just a two-year life? It comes down to understanding these first-principle composite problems and seeing similarities that are coming out of them—whether it’s a crack in the Balsa region, a crack in the root region, or a crack in the spar.

Alan: This goes back to the question of how to monitor this. It’s one thing to notice you have a crack. The second is, what do you do about it? And maybe the answer is nothing. We’ve seen a number of continuous monitoring systems being applied for that exact scenario. The question from every operator is, “How do I know this CMS system works? Which is the best one? I have this particular application; is there a CMS system that works better for that type of problem, like a crack problem or a lightning problem?”

David: Yeah, it’s all about data collection at its core. Whether you’re using a drone inspection, visually looking at something, or using accelerometers or acoustic systems, it’s about capturing data in different forms and understanding what to do with those data streams. One thing we’ve seen is that each data stream might have a different way of capturing a different damage mode. The same solution won’t apply to all damage modes. What we’re doing here at Gulf Wind is categorizing and understanding that in a lab setting, and then expanding it to see how things scale in the field. We’re doing this in a controlled way, eliminating noise and getting rid of variables that could cause variation in the data stream, allowing us to make accurate conclusions.

Alan: If I’m an operator, I would definitely want to call David and get hooked up with that because I have that problem. Every operator that Joel and I have talked to over the last couple of years needs monitoring of some sort. Every one of them needs a monitor, but they don’t know which one to choose.

David: Yeah, and we provide recommendations because we have knowledge of some of that, obviously. But even anecdotal knowledge has a huge amount of value. I think that’s something that data alone doesn’t always capture, especially when the information being received is sometimes confusing or gives conflicting signals. That’s why hands-on experience and anecdotes are important considerations.

Alan: But there’s no place to go besides Gulf Wind Technology right now, honestly. Where else are you going to go in the United States? I know of places that, in theory, could do it, but you’re actually doing it—up and running right now. You would have to start over somewhere else. This is why your leadership in the industry, especially in the United States, is so valuable. We’re ahead of where I thought we were in terms of trying to solve these problems. A lot of it is about talking to people like you and doing a gap analysis.

James: Early on, we worked with the labs—you’ve got NREL and Sandia Labs, and they’re phenomenal partners. They’ve got their wealth of knowledge, and they help us curate what we’re going to invest in. You mentioned turning the lights on and doing those blade autopsies. We use the fact that it’s a shipyard, and we’ve got a mile and a half of the Mississippi River next door. We can roll 35 rail cars onto the site. We could have the largest blade in the world wheeled into the factory here. That’s something we’re really proud of. It’s pretty unique.

David: And then cutting it up, polishing it—you saw the racks of samples earlier. It’s all about turning the lights on instead of just looking around with a spotlight, you know? That’s something we’ve found extremely valuable for what we’re trying to do.

Alan: With respect to, of course, the NDAs you have in place—because we don’t want to lift anybody’s hood too much—what are some of the other projects you’re working on? You mentioned the CMS work over here. Can you give us a couple of examples of what else you’re doing?

David: Yeah, just going around the factory a bit. We do a little bit of composite manufacturing here, whether that’s producing parts that can go in the field and be put on a wind turbine. We also pre-infusion the CMS problem statements. We do a lot of performance characterization, which involves our rapid prototyping lab. In there, we 3D print and scan airfoils, characterize them, and understand how erosion impacts performance, loads, and other factors. One of the key takeaways from the rapid prototyping lab is that we can take an airfoil from CAD and turn it around to an airfoil on the wind tunnel in less than five days. That’s really the aim of that whole facility.

We also do blade tear-downs as part of root cause analysis (RCA). We receive blade components, do the tear-downs, inspect those parts under microscopes, and test them on a stand, or perform NDT (Non-Destructive Testing). Sometimes we cut sections out of them and mechanically characterize those sections. In addition, we do wind tunnel testing, whether it’s for emerging technologies that need validation or for something already in the field that someone wants to understand better.

James: We’ve also got teams actively out in the field. Today, for example, we have two or three teams out there. One team is doing up-tower NDT inspections—inspecting blade roots up-tower. They can complete a turbine in about four hours, so it’s a quick turnaround. Another team is doing repairs in the field, using some custom kit that we’ve developed in-house to bring up-tower solutions. Traditionally, some of this equipment was always thought of as down-tower solutions, but we’ve specced it out to work up-tower as well. That’s been a huge element for us, and of course, we do more traditional composite repairs in the field as well, using trucks and trailers to get fiberglass applied to blades.

Joel: I’ve been looking at your website, and you guys do everything! I mean, Alan and I were looking before we came down here, and it was like, “They do this, they can do that, and this too!” It’s impressive. Basically, if an operator has a problem—whether it’s leading edge erosion on a blade, rapid prototyping, or extreme testing—you can solve it.

James: We’re a young company, and we’ve been involved with a lot of problem statements, like you said. David talked about some of the things being deployed, but we’re really proud of the work we’ve done on root region up-tower repairs and life extension. We’ve been working on that for almost three years now. Our focus is making sure that what engineers designed can actually be deployed as intended.

David: And a lot of that comes down to the cross-functionality of the team. We’ve built the team in such a way that we started with an inputs/outputs look at the design of a turbine. We’ve got people working on site assessments, loads at the system level, loads at the blade level, and then loads within the blade. We’ve also got structural engineers, composite material engineers, and process engineers who have spent decades in factories—building things, repairing things, and doing the full spectrum. It’s really about bringing all that cross-functional expertise under one roof, so we’re not blind to certain areas when we’re putting out a solution or repair method. We’re always thinking about the full spectrum of how it affects everything else.

Alan: You have a lot of talented people on your team. For such a young company, to have that lineup of people on your staff is impressive. There’s a huge résumé behind these names. As an operator, I would want to work with a company that has people who’ve worked for OEMs and understand composites, repairs, and what can go wrong in the field. That’s often the problem: engineers design solutions, but when it gets into the hands of a technician who isn’t familiar with the problem’s scope, mistakes get made. You went through a number of scenarios here where you’re removing variability, or if there is variability, it doesn’t affect overall performance. That’s huge in the repair world.

James: Absolutely. We complement what’s going on at the OEM and operator levels. That’s the feedback loop we get from OEMs and operators, confirming that we’re in the right space. We have a romantic idea of the future of wind energy. We believe in wind. We’re veterans of the industry. We know there are cycles, we know there are challenges, but we’ve seen innovation lead to product. We’ve seen rotor sizes increase and quality improve, even though there are still some quality issues to work through. It’s a young industry compared to some others, but you’re right—you need talent, culture, and collaboration to move forward. We’re optimistic.

Alan: So, James, how do people find you on the internet? How can they connect with you?

James: We’ve got our website, gulfwindtechnology.com. We’re very proud of it. We’re also working on being more active on LinkedIn, talking about the things we’re doing and what’s out there that we can discuss. We really enjoy attending the array of shows and conferences. If you’re down in New Orleans, stop by and check out the facility because it is impressive.

Alan: James and David, thank you so much for inviting us to New Orleans and for showing us the facility. It’s well worth the trip. We’ve learned a ton visiting with you today. Thank you so much.

James and David: Thank you, guys. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

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