GreenSpur’s Axial Flux Generator Innovation

Jason Moody from GreenSpur discusses their innovative axial flux generator technology, which promises to reduce weight and complexity in wind turbines, offering greater efficiency and lower maintenance costs.

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Today we’re excited to have Jason Moody, chairman of GreenSpur, joining us to discuss a generator technology that could fundamentally alter the path of wind energy. While the wind industry has been scaling up turbine sizes, we’ve hit a critical challenge. Generators are becoming massively heavy, complex, and expensive to maintain.

GreenSpur is taking a different approach entirely. They perfected axial flux generator technology that can dramatically reduce weight, eliminate cooling systems. And use any type of magnet from simple faite to rare earth materials. This isn’t just another incremental improvement. It’s a completely different way of generating power that could solve some of offshore wind’s biggest headaches.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Jason, welcome to the program. Thank [00:01:00] you. Thanks a. Hi Joel. Well, let’s start off with the elephant in the room for offshore wind turbines manufacturing. Uh, there’s some fundamental challenges that are facing them as we approach sort of the 20 megawatt stage and getting further offshore. Weight becomes a big problem.

Jason Moody: Yeah, it does. For, for years they’ve been getting bigger and bigger, and you can see that the industry just wants to push for that next size. But with that, the generators are getting very, very heavy. So the last direct drive generator that we evaluated was in excess of 150 tons. Now, that’s not a, not a small machine anymore, but what what we’re trying to do is introduce a new technology.

That can hopefully address that problem and some others as well. 

Allen Hall (2): So when you put a very heavy generator on top of a tower, that increases everything underneath of it, right? 

Jason Moody: Yeah. The foundations grow exponentially. The [00:02:00]steelwork and the structure has to grow. Then the cell itself, just based on size, lot more composite parts.

Everything’s bigger. 

Joel Saxum: So we’re talking like here, kind of traditional offshore wind fixed bottom right. That’s an issue. The foundations have to grow, uh, exponentially to get these, to hold up this weight. But when another thing that’s happening globally, right? The big push for floating offshore wind. So if now you’re talking about putting more and more and more weight on something that’s actually dynamic, right?

So that kind of, uh, what does that do to the, the whole system. 

Jason Moody: That’s a, it’s a different, um, engineering challenge, but it’s mainly in the steel structure and the ballast in, in those, uh, in those systems. So the street, the steel pylon becomes very thick, becomes very heavy, uh, to hold that weight on top.

But most of the time what you found in these newer next gen floating systems is they’ve gone to geared systems, which is a big move in the whole industry for both onshore, offshore, and, and everything in between. Everyone’s moving to hybrid [00:03:00] and geared systems, 

Allen Hall (2): and hybrid and geared systems get even more complicated, which is the problem, right?

Is that we’re, we’re trying to lower the cost of energy, but as we go bigger in scale, we sort of lose those efficiencies. It, it doesn’t scale up with the efficiencies. It actually, you start getting more complicated because the generator itself is a limitation. 

Jason Moody: It is not just on electrical efficiency either.

It’s, it’s limited because a lot of these generators, as they spin faster, they get hotter. And then with hotter generators, you need fancier and, and more high tech cooling systems and, and there’s another point of failure. So the LCUE really does start to suffer in these more complex advanced systems. 

Joel Saxum: The size of these things too, like as we get bigger and bigger and bigger, we’re trying to scale up like.

The idea of working on something, like, I think about this like working on a truck, right? You go from working on a truck or working on a car to working on, uh, a semi go from that to working on, you know, a big boat engine or [00:04:00] something of that sort. And now we’re still talking at small scale, but the tools, you need, the ability to handle and move things like it becomes exponentially more difficult.

So as we get to, I know like we were talking earlier off air, Siemens has their 21 and a half megawatt machine installed. I can’t imagine the amount, the, the types of tooling, lifting mechanisms and stuff just to be able to work on the things. So that’s, that becomes even more of an impasse, especially in offshore operations as we’re trying to keep these things running.

Jason Moody: Yeah. There’s a whole booming and emerging industry on the infrastructure just to move and install these parts, uh, offshore. It’s, uh, just to hoist some of this big heavy equipment up into the na cell. It’s, uh, it’s. Really quite difficult, but getting even more difficult as time goes on 

Allen Hall (2): and there’s more components up tower than ever before.

As we get to these bigger generators, cooling is a massive issue and if you follow, uh, all the patents by all the OEMs right now, you’ll see that they’re trying to figure out ways [00:05:00] to provide cooling up tower to the generator and all the gears and everything else moving up top. And it, it becomes a massive problem.

So not only do you have a very heavy generator and relatively complex generator, now you’re adding a coolant system, which is another complicated, heavy system on top of it. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, you’re absolutely right, Alan. It, it is getting more complicated and the thermal management in the new cell, it is, it’s only going to get worse.

Allen Hall (2): Greens spur is doing something radically different. And I’ve been following Greensboro for, for a number of years now because, uh, you have been based in part of, been supported by ORE Catapult and you have a different generator design. It’s actually not a new concept, but maybe the implementation I would describe as new.

But moving from a standard sort of two cylinder design, you have a rotor. And you have a stator on the outside, which we see in cars and everywhere. It’s basically every [00:06:00] generator or motor in the world has these two rotating, these two cylindrical pieces. Moving from that into an actual flux design. And when we talk about flux, we’re talking about the magnetic fields that are generated to make these things spin or to create power, actual has a lot of advantages that haven’t been.

Taken, taken into consideration when we’re building massive wind turbines. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, precisely. And thanks. Um, the, the way that Greensboro has approached this isn’t using a brand new technology. It’s, the way to describe it is to perfect it in a new application. So axial flux as a generator. Um, it’s been around a long time and the advantages of using axial flux as a generator have been well documented and known.

Uh, for, for, again, a long time. But what we’ve managed to do is we’ve scaled it from what might be a desktop size, um, unit up into the multi megawatt sizes. Now we’ve [00:07:00] got, um, uh, a generator that’s, um, been tested at the ORE Catapult, and, and that’s three meters in diameter. It’s, it’s a huge machine. Um, and, and that’s some of the benefits of Axial Flux can be seen in how you control and how you can manage the, the magnets being on the tire face instead of the tire tread, 

Allen Hall (2): right?

And so now you have a series of discs. You have a what call a state or disc and a rotor disc, and they kind of, you can stack them together. So as you want to add more power production, you just add more discs, which, uh, is a really simple way of changing the size of a generator. But the, the key is, is that you have, uh, the coils stationary.

You have the magnets on another disc, and they’re spinning around, which is what’s creating the power. You can use a lot of different magnets in this particular design. You can use [00:08:00] standard, simple off the shelf magnets or rare earth magnets. It’s sort, and it, your, the actual design is sort of ambivalent to it.

Jason Moody: Absolutely. One of our, uh, one of our taglines, one of our USPS and how we’ve, um, adopted the design methodology is to be magnet agnostic. Drivetrain agnostic, which means we can be geared or direct drive even down to the, the coil material. We’re completely adaptable and scalable to whatever our clients might need.

The key is it’s very quick to, to change these parameters in our modeling software so we can easily design the most optimized, uh, generator. 

Allen Hall (2): You can really drive the weight down in sort of two ways. You can use rare earth magnets, much more powerful, and you can also remove the copper and put in aluminum for the coils, which drives weight down.

So at the end of the day, you have and. You have a very efficient design, but you can also dump the cooling system. You don’t need a [00:09:00] fluid cooling system to create, for this generator to maintain its power output. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, so if we were to go tor to toe with a traditional radial system of, let’s just pick 15 megawatt, we would expect to be 25% lighter, 40% smaller physically and nor water cooling system.

We would have air cooling, water leak. That is tor to toe with an equivalent existing design out there today. 

Joel Saxum: So this, it kind of brings me to a question. You, we’ve been talking of course with you, Jason, fantastic technology, but we’ve been talking about a lot of offshore heavy weight. As we get bigger as we get bigger.

But can your designs be optimized? Say I, I think personally, one of the next, uh, frontiers for wind energy is, is low wind applications. Like, um, you know, like look at the United States. We’re talking like the southeast side of the United States where there’s no wind energy now, but we could optimize for its low wind speeds, five meters a second, [00:10:00] seven meters a second, things like that.

Can your designs be optimized for like a low wind speed turbine as well? 

Jason Moody: Yeah, that’s a great question, Joel. Now over the last sort of five years, we’ve worked with many of the ma I would say, successful vault companies. So the, the vertical access version of, of what’s currently out there and what you might see is a, a traditional turbine, but these vertical access turbines, they spin on the other axis and they’re typically used in much lower level and low or unpredictable winds.

And they have a lower startup talk now, axial flux, especially our, that can be optimized. Um, they have a, a low starting talk. They have a higher efficiency, so they are very well suited for those vault applications. The challenge in that market is that there’s not many of those vault companies that have.

Entered serial production yet. So we’re still nurturing a kind of nascent market, but we’re very much in there and we’re perfect partners for that type of technology. [00:11:00]

Allen Hall (2): And you’ve been working on this, green Spurs been working on this for over 10 years now. Mostly with ORE Catapult. You have a, a ton of intellectual property that’s been derived out of all the work you’ve done.

And now, uh, the latest, uh, information I’ve seen is that you are at TRL. Seven, which is a huge milestone. You wanna explain what TRL seven means in terms of a development cycle? 

Jason Moody: So, yeah. TRL seven is a scale between one to nine, uh, with TRL one being an idea on the drawing board and TRL nine being serial production to achieve.

TL one to six is building, uh, a generator all the way up to, um, kind of testing it. Seven and beyond is when you start getting into the operational environments. Now we’ve just dipped our toe into TL seven by combining all of our build experience with our new simulated experience in real [00:12:00]operational environments that have been submitted to our project, um, by, by partners, so we can then really test what our generator can do in actual turbine conditions.

Allen Hall (2): Right? Which is the hardest part of any development cycle is getting real data. And once you have that real data, then you can start scaling it into what a, a full size unit would be. And that’s where everything starts to really roll. Uh, Greensboro’s been doing this a long time, which to me just validates what you’re doing and.

Having watched from the outside, I’m an electrical engineer, so when I first ran across Green Spurs, like, oh, they’re doing something different. They’re thinking about the problem differently. They’re addressing the magnet problem, the rare Earth magnet problem. They’re addressing the weight problem, which is going to come up.

And Joel, and this is when we were still building like eight megawatt generators. And I thinking, well, the, the future’s only gonna get bigger. This makes total sense now. Now, from a manufacturing standpoint, it [00:13:00]does involve a slightly different process than what we have been doing historically. When we’re winding these coils around these cylinders.

Is it something and, and most of that work has gone offshore? Quite honestly, it’s, it’s not in the us it’s not in the uk. It’s mostly not in Europe for, for the most part. Does this open up the door now because of the sort of simplicity of it and the, the elegance of the design to be manufactured in the uk?

Jason Moody: Well, a couple of years ago we were focused on direct drive technology as the rest of the industry was as well. Uh, we thought that was the future and in a direct drive configuration, these machines are hundreds of tons. The uk it’s not set up for a hundred ton manufacturing of any rotating equipment. So we never had ambitions and we never thought that it would ever come to fruition if we did.

But now, if you were to use, um, the geared configurations or the hybrid drive situation, the machines become much smaller, much lighter. And I mean, [00:14:00] one of our, one of the biggest designs we’ve done is only nine tons. Now that is manufacturable in the UK and any western world. Nine ton generator and we can build that.

That changes our thoughts, that changes our strategy. 

Joel Saxum: I think this is an, a really important, uh, like a basically keynote from this podcast to take away. Is that what the innovations that you guys are working on that engages the industrial complex in the uk, the industrial complex in, in the eu, in the United States, wherever you want to build these things, it can be done.

And one of the big problems that we hear, of course Alan and I go to. Basically every wind conference you can think of, um, you guys just finished up the global offshore wind there in the uk and, and a lot of the conversations over the last few years have been supply chain, supply chain, supply chain. And you don’t just hear it within our industry.

You hear it, uh, at high government levels, you hear it, you know, rare earths is a buzzword. All of these things. So you guys have the. The idea that you can manufacture [00:15:00] locally, you can engage, you know, your, your local communities to build these things, but also you’re easing your supply chain constraints by the ability to use rare earths different kind of magnets.

Um, it’s something that the rest of the, the industry just hasn’t. It’s like, it’s like they’re stuck, stuck in like the mud in the background of something we’ve been doing for 20, 30 years, 40 years, 50 years, you know, the same kind of technology. And there’s something, there’s a, there’s a nice, beautiful, shiny object sitting here and nobody’s grabbed it yet.

Um, but, but can you, can you talk to us a little bit about the supply chain, um, and how you guys can basically optimize that to get these things built? 

Jason Moody: Yeah. Again, a really great question and one that, um, really goes back to the roots of Greensboro. We were born as a company to try and address the, the rare earth supply chain, the issue around magnet supplies and.

Throughout trying to perfect our technology to work with the lowest power [00:16:00] of magnet, which we did do. Um, we stumbled upon, upon perfecting or making very good axial flux technology. So we didn’t just create a rare earth free generator, we created a really good generator, full stop. It just so happens to be magnet agnostic.

Now, we’ve only talked about using, uh, rare earth magnets, the top end of the power density and the lowest phite magnets. But there’s a whole world of magnets in between that, uh, that are not explored yet. There’s a lot of development even in the US with narron. Those guys are developing some incredible, uh, new magnets.

And we’ve partnered with Nron a few years back and we are one of their conduits into, into wind should they come, come up with a commercial product or available product. So, so there’s a whole lot of gap magnets that would work in our architecture that could not work in the traditional radial flux designs.

Allen Hall (2): Well, let’s walk down that pathway just for a moment. Because of the [00:17:00] actual design. It’s a series of discs. So if you wanted to. Check one magnet versus type versus another. You would just be sliding a disc out, putting another disc in. If you think about the way we would make a standard generator today, it would be really complicated.

It would take a long time to do that. The actual sets itself up to be a little more developmental, where you can do things on the fly that you wouldn’t be able to do on a standard generator radial design. 

Jason Moody: Yeah, you’re right at a conceptual level. Um, in practice it’s not as easy as sliding one out, sliding one in, but on a conceptual level it’s an awful lot easier than, um, than a radio system.

Yeah. Because a radio system, you have to change pretty much the whole design. With an axial, you are only changing one plate. 

Allen Hall (2): Right. And is there, I assume there’s a, a, a good bit of software that goes along with it, which is where some of the efficiency comes from and from power electronics, I assume both of those.

What are [00:18:00] those sort of milestones in terms of software development and maybe even, even on the electronic side that help make an a design more efficient? 

Jason Moody: So there are, there are several elements that have helped us unlock the, the, the real power of axial flux in our technology. Uh, one of them is we have the ability to use an adaptation of the whole back rear.

For those who don’t know what the Halback Array is, it’s a a special way to place the magnets, to manipulate the flux in the direction that you wanted. So instead of flux from a magnet going in both directions, half of it wasted half of it at your coils. We force it all up. The corals increase the power density where we need it, so we can use that.

Whereas you cannot use a haul back effectively in a radial design. So all of a sudden we can use these low powered magnets and any and anything in between. But of course, you can also do the same technique with the the powered markets, with the Neos. End up with an incredibly power dense machine. [00:19:00] Now that’s an, that’s an exploration for a little bit later on.

It shows that our roadmap is, is far from over. We can improve even further than where we are now. 

Allen Hall (2): And the simulation tools you developed because you were at ORE Catapult and have built a generator of a significant size, how refined have, have those models been over the last year or two? ’cause it sounds like you really have honed in on.

What a particular magnet could do, what a particular coil setup could do. How we set this up, what a gearbox would be. How, how, how defined or how high level is that competency on the simulation side Right now, 

Jason Moody: we spend a lot of time, uh, developing what we call our multiphysics model. That has the electromagnetic modeling.

It has the thermal, it has the structural all embedded into a couple of different tools now that iteratively feeds itself until we come up with the right design. Now, how that correlates with [00:20:00] reality is within a few percentage points. So we simulate, uh, simulated what we did on the test bench in ORE, and it was predicted very, very closely.

We have a good degree of confidence that what we see at the computer screen is reality. 

Joel Saxum: So I want to ask you a couple questions about like operational things, because. The, the, the idea that you can get rid of cooling systems, that’s amazing because I know, like here, I’m in Texas, right? So that’s a big problem for all of these guys.

They’re going up tower just with air compressors to blow out radiators to keep these things cool. Uh, but you’re, you’re reducing the complexity. And in that, my mind goes, that makes operations a lot easier and maintenance a lot easier. What does that look like for the lifetime of, of one of these axial flux generators?

As in, you know, a, a serial product in a turbine, 

Jason Moody: in an axial flux permanent magnet, iron list generator. ’cause we have no, we have no iron losses and [00:21:00] things we have with iron list status. There are no wear parts, zero. Nothing touches apart from the bearings. The only thing that wears is the bearings. So.

Because we’ve designed this axial flux, uh, machine or all of our machines around standard, well-known name, brand bearings that are already used in the industry, the lifetime is tied to the bearing and they are maintainable as well. So when you take away the cooling, uh, failures, that could be as, as associated with quite a large portion of the failures out in there, and you take the already known lifecycle and lifetime of a bearing.

It can be, it can be no worse than the existing tech. It can only be better. And the inference is, I mean, we haven’t got one in the field to tell you permanent to tell you exactly, but the inference is it cannot be worse, but it will be better is what we’re, what we’re trying to articulate. 

Joel Saxum: I mean, you’re removing [00:22:00] heat, right?

And heat is a big failure in any kind of mechanical component. I mean, that’s 

Jason Moody: when we got the, the latest report back from the RE Catapult, the fact that it came back so cool. Um, was just amazing to us. We thought it would come back cool, but it’s come back as such a, a thermally efficient machine that, uh, it surprised us.

Allen Hall (2): Let, let me take it into the electrical domain. Also on an axial versus a radio design. There’s a lot of radio generator failures that are due really fundamentally to the design. You have to put. Coils in a certain way, do they have these tight bins. They’re going around these sharp corners. The way you have to try to insulate ’em to protect them, and all that eventually fails.

Dead stop. We know it’s, that’s where the failure modes are. That’s why there’s a number of companies that are out servicing for those events and why you see a lot of generator repair shops trying to fix those known failures. Aio, from what I’ve seen on [00:23:00] your design. Addresses almost all of those upfront to to increase that lifetime.

It’s crazy when you think about how much time and energy we spend fixing generators, because we knew when we bought it, it was gonna fail in this particular way. Get it from the bearings or from the electrical work. It doesn’t really matter. You still have to this generator out and do fixes. Axial removes a lot of that.

So from an operation side, what are we talking about here? Are we talking about. Thousands of dollars a year, tens of thousands of dollars a year in terms of reduced maintenance costs. What, what 

Jason Moody: realm are we at here? I couldn’t possibly estimate how big it is, but it’s certainly higher than tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s uh, it’s a big number. Yeah. Just to flesh out a little bit on that, um, on that comment about the coils. So in traditional radials, you have really complex winding paths, and that’s a lot of the time. That’s where you get your short circuit failures. I. [00:24:00] With what we’ve done, we use flat aluminum bar, and then it’s anodized and then it’s fully potted and encapsulated.

This can, it’s fully protected. From both the environment and itself. 

Allen Hall (2): That’s a huge thing. I know when we talk, we don’t talk a lot about generators on the show, Joel, and just because we just know that how they perform, they been around over a hundred years. There’s no new innovations. No there. There is none.

There is literally none. Right. So we all come in from an o and m perspective on wind turbines operations, knowing I’m going to have to rip out two, three generators maybe a year depending on the size of the farm and like. Get a crane and do all this stuff, and it’s like inherent into the LCOE Greenburg’s attacking that fundamental understanding of how we think about LCOE.

You wouldn’t need a rewind in 

Jason Moody: the maintenance schedule for this generator. 

Allen Hall (2): Well, and, and I think this gets, really, gets down to the core of what, uh, [00:25:00] Greensboro is trying to accomplish now, is that you’re changing the way we think about creating power at the fundamental level, at the generator level. What does this look like?

What do you see this in, in 2, 3, 4, 5 years? What do you think Greensboro is doing and where can’t it be implemented? You know, first where, where are we going first? Here 

Jason Moody: we’ve taken this technology as far as we can reasonably take it without one of the big players standing up and listening. And now it’s time for them to really help us along the way and put our generator in one of their turbines.

We need the help of one of these, uh, one of these industrial partners to come on board, get in touch with us, and, um, we’ll see where it takes us. But I’m quite sure it’s gonna revolutionize the industry 

Allen Hall (2): and the UK’s willing to invest in this. If more recently you’ve seen efforts by the government and the crown of state willing to put money where their mouth is and to support companies like Greens Spur, which [00:26:00] is the right thing to do.

So you’re not going alone on this mission to create this new. Type of generator, maybe an old type of generator. It’s been around a long time, but to, to put it in, into wind turbines and to implement it the way that it needs to be done. This is remarkable. And, uh, I, I know we, we, we talk to a lot of technology companies and, and they’re, and they’re helping, right?

Everybody’s trying to help lower the cost of energy. But when you attack that generator, you are going at the heart of costs. That is where the industry needs to go. And I’m so glad everybody at Greensboro has been dedicated to do this. ’cause it’s not easy. 

Jason Moody: It’s been playing in the land of giants, but I think we’ve really got something and that’s what’s driven us for so long.

Allen Hall (2): So if you’re a large operator or you’re an OEM and you haven’t looked at axial flux generators, you need to be doing that now. You can always Google Greens Spur that are on the internet. There’s a ton of information on the website, also on the LinkedIn page, so you [00:27:00] can follow the development there. Jason, thank you so much for being on the program. We love what Greens Spur is doing and let’s stay in contact because as things develop, uh, we want to educate the world and make sure that everybody hears all the excited things that are happening at Greens Spur.

Jason Moody: Perfect. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you very much guys.