delivering reliable and affordable wind o&m technology

Delivering reliable and affordable technology to the wind O&M sector

© FC Business Intelligence

Written by: Jason Deign Compiled by: Wind Energy Update

Contributions from:

Dr John Coultate, Head of Monitoring and O&M Consultancy, Romax Technology

Mike Grunow, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, Moventas

Jolynn Kennedy, Senior Product Marketing Specialist, Broadwind

Delivering reliable and affordable wind O&M technologyIndustry Leaders’ Thoughts

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This is a pivotal time for wind energy in the USA. With a record number

of turbines coming off original equipment manufacturer (OEM) war-

ranty, it is the time for wind farm operations and maintenance (O&M) to

come to the fore and shine.

As in a number of other maturing markets, in the US O&M has until

recently taken second billing to the pressing issue of building new proj-

ects. But with support mechanisms such as the Production Tax Credit

now under review, O&M is moving centre-stage.

Financially, while the major concern traditionally has been to reduce

capital expenditure (cap-ex), now wind farm owners and operators are

being forced to look carefully at the operating expense (op-ex) of exist-

ing assets.

This situation means that those tasked with maintenance, repair, and

operation (MRO) now find themselves in an increasingly competitive

environment.

Whereas previously O&M may have meant little more than installing

and monitoring a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA)

system, now it covers a massive range of tasks and processes aimed at

keeping the blades turning.

Innovation is the key to reducing the levelized cost of energy (LCOE),

but wind power O&M providers have little room for blue-sky thinking.

Instead, the market demands rapid cost reduction based on field expe-

rience and proven operational strategies.

What can O&M providers do? Quite a lot, it turns out. In collecting the

views of three leading players from the industry, this report aims to

showcase the mix of innovative thinking and real-life best practice that

is emerging among top O&M companies.

Our aim is to demonstrate what the industry is capable of today while

also providing some insight into challenges that remain to be resolved…

along with a glimpse of the strategies that top players are putting in

place to deal with them.


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The contributors to this report are three experts with a range of

perspectives on wind O&M technology development.

Dr John Coultate is head of Monitoring and O&M

Consultancy at Romax Technology in the UK. His

experiences include condition monitoring, design

analysis, and failure investigation for wind turbine

drive trains ranging from 750kW to 6MW. John has

worked at Romax for over eight years and has a PhD

in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Not-

tingham, UK.

Mike Grunow is vice president of Sales and Marketing

at Moventas in America. A high-performing, com-

mercial executive accomplished in leading teams who

achieve consistent top-line growth and operational

improvements in domestic and international markets,

Mike was formerly director of sales at Trina Solar. Oth-

er former roles include vice president of marketing at

Solyndra and product line manager at GE Energy.

Jolynn Kennedy is a senior product marketing spe-

cialist at Broadwind Energy, one of the first producers

of 100-metre wind towers in the US and currently one

of the largest producers of towers in North America.

Offering a legacy of leadership in precision gearing

systems, built over almost 90 years, Broadwind’s deep

experience and ingenuity in tight-tolerance gearing is

unmatched.


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Over the past couple of years we have witnessed the rapid expansion

and development of the wind O&M industry. What major opportunities

do you cite within the market, what are the biggest O&M trends you are

seeing, and how do you plan on taking advantage of them?

Jolynn Kennedy: Harnessing data and collecting the right data points

to analyze and optimize O&M, vendor selection, and major repairs.

There are companies doing some fascinating work with predictive

analytics and Broadwind Energy plans to work closely with an analyt-

ics-focused company to best understand how and when to serve our

customers.

This type of analytic data will help to improve wind asset management,

reduce maintenance costs, improve wind power production by over

10%, and maximize profits.

Mike Grunow: You’re seeing a large volume of turbines come off of

warranty. North America’s total addressable market, in terms of drive

train O&M, is expected to triple or quadruple based on third-party esti-

mates.

The number one thing that we’re focused on is trying out the right mix

of products and services, localized for each customer segment. We are

segmenting customers based on their behaviour. Some customers like

to do everything up-tower.

Other customers like to do everything in the shop. Other customers like

to buy new, and new only. Some customers self-perform. Some cus-

tomers don’t have any mechanical prowess.

We’ve now opened up our third location in the mid-western US, so

we’ve essentially gone local with the capability to deliver field services

and shop work at three locations where the major wind markets are.

John Coultate: It’s well known that the O&M market is growing very

quickly. Lots of wind farms are coming out of warranty. Many operators

are self-performing O&M after the warranty period.

Many operators are taking a hybrid approach to O&M, where they take

some aspects and they sub-contract other aspects, or they contract

parts of the O&M back to the OEM. Lots of opportunities exist to do

things better. The industry is still learning best practices.

There’s lots of opportunity to make things more efficient, more effec-

tive, and lower cost. What this means for us is many operators still need


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better tools. Tools to monitor their fleet better and manage reliability

problems better.

And also manage it in a scalable way, so rather than managing a single

wind farm, managing the whole fleet, across dispersed locations, ef-

fectively.

Survivability, reliability, and increased performance are central for the

continued development of wind power. What are you going to do

to make a difference in these areas and how will it affect the cost of

energy?

Mike Grunow: Moventus has been a wind-gear and gear manufacturer

for almost 70 years.

We now have that experience focused exclusively on not only making

our gearboxes more reliable for new supply, but also leveraging our

changes, fixes, and upgrades to over 20 competitive gearboxes that we

have reverse-engineered and approved.

Unlike many of the pure-play gearbox manufacturers or service provid-

ers, we can address maintenance and upgrades on almost 80% of the

North American fleet because of the reverse engineering and upgrades.

We eventually sell and warrant a better product, that’s refurbished, than

we took out of the field and used most of the components again.


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John Coultate: Reliability is our bread and butter at Romax. We do

a large amount of consultancy for operators and often this starts off

looking at reliability problems and how we can manage these problems

better.

One of the core things we offer is a condition monitoring service. We’re

currently managing over 2GW of assets globally, looking at things like

vibration and SCADA, trying to detect faults a long time before they

lead to a failure.

The impact on cost of energy of this type of monitoring is very clear. If

you look five years ago in the industry, there wasn’t really a consensus

about condition monitoring, but now it’s much more well-understood.

We’ve got some very simple examples.

For example, looking at main bearing failures, which we have seen a

lot of recently, if you take a wind farm with two main bearing failures

on two different turbines and combine the repair and replacement

procedure on those two turbines you could immediately save over

USD$300,000.

If you can predict, a long time into the future, these failures occurring,

the opportunity for cost saving is very high. That is enabled through

better condition monitoring practices.

Jolynn Kennedy: Particularly around drive train improvements, Broad-

wind Services has contracted third-party inspections on Broadwind-re-

paired gearboxes to test their robust reliability and give peace of mind

to owners that are weary of gearbox issues.

Gearbox failures can be one of the most expensive events for a wind

turbine owner.

Being able to predict the failure prior to the event and following up

by providing a tested and validated gearbox replacement or up-tower

repair is a full-service solution that has the potential to significantly

reduce unexpected costs throughout the lifecycle of a wind unit.

These preventative measures result in the reduction of energy costs

overall. We will also focus on increased performance and proper pre-

ventative maintenance of blades, which are vital to energy production.


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It is critical for service providers to have a good relationship with

owners. What are their primary needs at this time and how are you

responding?

John Coultate: Many of the owners and operators we are working with

are looking at their long-term strategy. As they come out of warranty,

how are they going to manage O&M post-warranty? What things are

they going to bring in-house and do themselves?

Many of the operators we work with want to bring operations and

maintenance in house. They work with us in the short term on things

like condition monitoring service. They get Romax to monitor their site.

But they want to know they’ve got a partner who can transfer the

knowledge in-house.

So initially we’re providing a monitoring service during warranty

and then during the end-of-warranty period we’re supporting them

through that process, through inspections and analysis, and then trans-

ferring our technology over to them.

That means licensing software, training engineers. And that finally en-

ables them to do self-monitoring. It’s that long-term vision we are tying

to support the operators with.

Jolynn Kennedy: We provide owners with a host of turnkey drive train

services offered both on-site and off-site, as well as comprehensive

blade service, inspections, and repair to maximize tower uptime.


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Mike Grunow: We’re finding that turbine operators come in many dif-

ferent stripes. Some like to do their own work, some work up-tower,

others are into replacements and refurbishments. Having that complete

mix of services available and local, at a competitive price, is critical.

With gearboxes, nobody knows when one is going to break, where it’s

going to break, and what model it is. We’re sitting here with our crystal

ball, trying to predict next year which hundred gearboxes are going to

break, in what farms, and what the model is going to be.

We completely understand how each wind turbine manufacturer is go-

ing to need to have a set of suppliers. It’s uncertain what will break and

who is going to have what in stock.

One of the things we are seeing right now that breaks from historical

trends is many large plant owners are entering into long-term contracts

for volume, and trying to lock up volume for gearbox supply.

This is counter to behaviour over the last few years, when they were

buying a single gearbox when they needed it. We worry that there is

going to be a run on gearboxes and an under-supply in the market.

The other thing that’s critical to relationships is communication and

localization.

The United States is one country, but when you get into the cultures of

the Midwest versus Texas versus the West Coast, there really are distinct

cultural pockets and that is why we are localizing, to be close to the

customer.


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With a high percentage of wind assets coming off their warranties

next year, the after-market is about to get even bigger and ever more

important in coming years. How will you innovate to drive costs down

and meet expectations?

Jolynn Kennedy: We are constantly engaging with our customers to

see what their biggest needs are and what keeps them up at night, and

MRO costs are always a concern.

This is how we decided to focus on proactive blade maintenance, up-

tower repairs, and proactive drive train repairs, as we saw the biggest

needs in these spaces.

We are also active in end-of-warranty inspections and plan to maximize

these service opportunities for the benefit of our customers, to uncover

areas where cost improvements are feasible.

Broadwind’s focus has been and will be committed to continuous improve-

ment activities that provide cost-saving value we can pass to the customer.

Mike Grunow: Over the past five years we have serviced and repaired

in-shop over 400 gearboxes. Less than half of those are Moventus

gearboxes. The rest are competitor gearboxes.

So we have developed a very good understanding for where our gear-

boxes fail and where their gearboxes fail. That allows us to develop

much lower-cost and targeted condition-monitoring systems.

These lower-cost and targeted condition-monitoring systems can be

deployed based on the gearbox brand, to determine when that brand

is going to fail. For example, one manufacturer’s brand may fail on the

planetary stage where another may fail in the high-speed bearing.

There’s no use deploying a USD$10,000 monitoring system when you

can deploy a $5,000 monitoring system that just focuses on the key

areas of failure.

John Coultate: Regarding end-of-warranty, we’ve got a large experi-

ence so far. One of the recent projects we did, a UK offshore project—

but the end-of-warranty process, fundamentally, is similar offshore and

onshore—was a wind farm with 88 3.6MW turbines.

It’s actually the biggest offshore wind farm in the world ever to come

out of warranty. Romax did the turbine inspections and analyzed data

for this site to support the operator through the end-of-warranty pro-

cess. It was a huge project.


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There were so many turbines and so much complexity that we had

three teams of staff working shifts on site. It was a challenging project

from a project management point of view. But it was delivered success-

fully and the client was really pleased with the results and the outcome.

In US onshore, the scale of the projects is similar. The transfer of know-

how and capability is easy. About innovations in warranty, on that topic

it’s more to do with longer-term planning.

We’ve got condition monitoring, which gives us a short to medium-

term horizon of things failing.

We’re also working on predictive models, which give us a much lon-

ger-term horizon. We are talking of a one to three years’ horizon and

looking at indications of major components that may need replacing or

maintaining in the long term.

This helps the operators to plan their budgets and their strategies. It has

had a lot of value for large wind farms that require cranes and major

components for the turbine.

It also in our experience has a lot of value offshore, so as the US off-

shore sector starts ramping up I think we will see more innovations like

this being rolled out across the fleet.

Delivering reliable and cost effective technologies will be paramount

to the continued commercial success of the wind industry. What is the

single biggest challenge in doing so, and how do you plan to tackle it?

Mike Grunow: The single biggest challenge in O&M is access to data.

The specific data I’m talking about is the maintenance and failure data

from the North American fleet, which is made up of roughly 40,000

wind turbines.

You have wind turbine owners and operators, you have OEMs, you have

service providers, you have national laboratories that have access to

data.

None of that data is integrated and collated and cut in a uniform man-

ner, and then shared out in a way that can allow for groups of compa-

nies to collaborate.

We participate with the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory on

their Wind Energy Gearbox and Drive Train Reliability Association, and

we are driving for other companies on that group to try to share data

more openly and freely.


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Hopefully that will be an issue that will change. That’s something we

are focused on.

John Coultate: One of the challenges for us is that the people run-

ning wind farms are fire-fighting a lot of problems. Machines fail, things

need fixing, maintenance needs planning. We need to make sure we

keep sight of the longer-term, bigger picture.

For companies like Romax, I think that means working closely with

financial investors, which is something we do a lot of currently. We’re

working a lot on due-diligence projects currently with investors, and it’s

these people who hold the long-term business plan: years 10 to 20.

They’re looking to see long-term returns on investment. So if we can

deploy novel an innovative technologies that have a long-term return

on investment for wind farms, these people are key to getting up and

running.

Jolynn Kennedy: Energy storage may be the biggest challenge for the

wind industry. It isn’t discussed much, since we tend to focus on LCOE,

but technological advancement in this space is absolutely critical to the

competitiveness of this energy source.

Although batteries and potential energy storage is not a core capabil-

ity of Broadwind Energy, we can certainly do our part in driving down

costs for the industry.

We have a number of Six Sigma-trained employees as well as a contin-

uous improvement functional group that spends 100% of their working

day tackling these issues.

We have been able to drive down costs of wind tower production as

well as lead-times to better serve our customers from these efforts. We

are confident that we can continue to contribute to the cost competi-

tiveness of wind energy.


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How are you using latest condition monitoring systems technology to

decrease drive train failures and what are you doing you to bring down

cost to the end user?

John Coultate: Through our routine monitoring, we are always de-

veloping better algorithms and better methods to detect faults. There

is ongoing research and development, and continuous improvement,

going on.

Also, those projects give us really valuable data, from real-life projects

with real-life failures. What that allows us to do is look back at historical

data and say: ‘Here’s a similar turbine, in a similar circumstance, what

was the time to repair?’

It allows us to support the operators, because what the operators want

to know is how long can they continue running a turbine until it fails

and how long in the future do they have to schedule its repair.

There is a virtuous circle where the more projects like this we do, the

more data we get, the better our methods get, we win more projects,

and it keeps feeding itself. It’s really valuable.


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What trends are you seeing with regards to blade maintenance and

repair, and how are you innovating in this area?

Jolynn Kennedy: We see a lot of activity in terms of wind farm owners’

interest in long-term agreements.

We believe it’s a matter of time before these types of agreements take

off as the customer can benefit from cost-savings from economies of

scale and increased potential revenue from a proactively maintained

blade program.

Being able to do up-tower repairs on major components is a key way

for owners to significantly reduce their maintenance costs. What is be-

ing done to innovate in this area and how are you contributing?

Mike Grunow: We have a couple of exciting announcements coming

up this year that we’ve been working on.

I don’t want to let the cat too far out of the bag but in general, histori-

cally, we were the first company to do up-tower bearing replacements

and the first company to do up-tower full helical replacements.

The trend that we hope to follow is to go deeper and deeper and deep-

er into the gearbox up-tower, and enable nearly all the current shop

repairs to be accomplished up-tower on the major gearbox varieties

out there. That is a trend we are going to hope to push, as we’ve done

before.

Secondly, the reality is that wind farm operators don’t have $10,000 per


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turbine to retrofit the turbines with drive-train condition monitoring,

and the majority of these systems coming offline don’t have condition

monitoring.

On a 100-turbine wind farm you’re looking at $1 million in op-ex, a

one-year hit, for the promise of condition monitoring the drive trains.

It’s hard to justify that expense.

But we think there are some novel financing opportunities to spread

the cost over seven to 10 years; take the first-year hit, and spread it. We

hope to be coming to market with that type of solution, and be the first

ones to market.

Wind Energy Operations & Maintenance UsaIndustry Leaders’ Thoughts

What emerges from the views of these experts is a clear recognition of

the growing importance of O&M, plus an obvious eagerness to come to

the market with products and strategies to help operators drive down

LCOE.

Such an attitude could not come at a better time for the US wind market.

Wind is now to all intents and purposes a mature power generation in-

dustry and one that has to be able to compete on equal footing, where

possible, with other established energy sources, including gas, coal,

and nuclear.

The US, in particular, has what some might consider an unhealthy

preoccupation with shale gas. Whatever your views on shale, there is

no doubt it is leading to a radical redefinition of the American energy

market.

Nuclear power, that erstwhile mainstay of US energy policy, is already

being edged out of the mix in some parts of the country. Wind has thus

far held its own, but the types of support that have helped it gain trac-

tion may not be around for much longer.

At this point, if wind is to have a bright and breezy future, it needs as

much O&M innovation as it can get.

This paper was written in Association with the 7th Annual Wind O&M Summit that will take place in Dallas on 14th-15th April 2015:

Optimize your Asset, Explore Latest Retrofits & Improve Data Analysis to Increase Power Production from your Turbines

This high level summit is purpose built to bring together Operators,

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business and networking in 2015.

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The focus this year:

} Performance Enhancement: Increase reliability and reduce downtime to get more power out of the asset for higher return

} Gearboxes: Reduce chance of gearbox failure through service and engineering developments to avoid high repair costs

} Blades: Improve the efficiency of blades for better wind capture using new tech and retrofits

} Life extension: Analyse available data coming off wind farm to improve and extend the lifetime of the asset

} Asset Management: Explore management, finance and planning strategies within the changing O&M market

} O&M Strategy: Discuss multi sourcing, relationship and contract management service agreements in a post-warranty setting

Why you can’t afford to miss O&M Dallas 2015: } Be empowered with solutions –we’re told to come with solutions not problems – so it makes perfect sense to speak with the specialists that can help in our 25+ exhibition hall and understand the specialised solutions available to your O&M challenges

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} Get a handle on where the O&M market is now – Who is the new customer in the O&M market? What role will the ISPs play going forwards? How will OEMs change their model to stay in business? What is the industry doing to be proactive and not reactive? With real time data polling on site, these are the answers you’ll walk away with

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Wind Energy Operations & Maintenance Summit, USA14-15 April, 2015, Westin Galleria, Dallas, TX

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