Goldwind Tower Cooling, Enercon Predictive Power Output Model

This week on Power-Up, Goldwind’s coil pipe system for cooling towers, an idea from Enercon for a predictive model of power output under certain weather conditions, and an interesting alarm clock patent from the 1800s.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the uptime podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor’s Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

Our first idea is from Goldwind. It is a concept where they have a specialized coil pipe system for liquid cooling in wind turbines, mostly offshore it appears. It is designed to handle the rotation between the nacelle and the tower. So you can think about all this coiled tube in the tower itself and the nacelle is spinning around.

So it Keeps everything organized, so it doesn’t twist, bend, and kink where the fluid flow would stop. Phil, this one’s a little interesting to me because I haven’t seen a lot of cooling happening in towers, but obviously GoldWind wants to proceed with this idea to mostly for their offshore turbines, it looks like.

Philip Totaro: Yeah, this is designed for larger machines where they’re gonna leverage either using the tower as a heatsink or some other downed tower mechanism where they can dump waste heat and theoretically minimize the size of the radiator that they have on the nacelle. And keep in mind that GoldWind, because they’re using a permanent magnet generator, they have different requirements up tower for for the, the magnet cooling and stator cooling.

So what’s kind of fascinating about this to me is that, you’ve got certainly for, for transmitting, electrical. Current and things like that. You have things like slip rings. You even have kind of hydraulic slip rings when you want to be able to move, from a, from a rotating frame of reference to a fixed frame of reference, you, you can use kind of a, a, an equivalent of a hydraulic slip ring to, to pass fluid that way.

This is literally like a twist loop the same way that we have kind of an electrical cable twist loop in the upper part of a, the tower and nacelle but it’s specifically designed for liquid coolant. And so, kudos to them for kind of creativity and ingenuity. Whether or not this is going to be more efficient than a nacelle mounted radiator, I’m not.

So it’d be interesting to see some feedback or some data on that, but it’s it’s definitely a unique and kind of fascinating way of developing a liquid based cooling system and implementing it in a way that’s going to help them. Address other considerations, design considerations, like wanting to minimize the the volume and the, the size, and frankly, the weight of an uptower radiator or a cell mounted radiator.

Allen Hall: Our next idea is from Waban Properties, and it is a concept for using weather data, in particular, more widespread weather data. coupled with performance of a wind turbine over time to create a predicted model for the power output under certain weather conditions. And this idea seems to be driven, Phil, from grid restoration or black start scenarios where they need to turn The grid on restarting the grid and they need to know what power is going to be delivered with some relative accuracy That’s hard to do for wind turbines unless you have a predictive method, which is what wobbin is talking about

Philip Totaro: Yeah, so just to just to clarify for everybody to woven properties is like an ip holding subsidiary of intercom in germany, so this is the the vehicle that they use to kind of capture and and monetize their intellectual property Now, the, as for the idea itself, what’s a bit interesting and unique about this is the fact that they are taking historical turbine data and park data, which that’s nothing new to be able to develop some kind of forward looking forecast.

Similarly, you can look at, actual global or even local data. weather forecasting data and use that to help develop a power forecast that there’s plenty of people out there doing that sort of work in, in the industry. We know a few of them on, on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

So, the, what’s unique and interesting though about the, this Enercon invention is the fact that they’re combining this both of these kind of methods for developing a A power forecast that allows you to get a narrower confidence interval by leveraging both the historical data combined with the the weather forecasting data from both individual turbines and the global forecast.

Or regionally focused data that kind of surrounds the the entire wind park that they have. So, anything that they can do to try and improve that confidence interval is a good thing. As, as many people who work in power forecasting know, this is a very clever way of approaching. This kind of a technical challenge where you want to be able to improve the, the confidence interval on your weather forecast and your power forecast.

Allen Hall: Our fun patent of the week comes from Samuel Applegate. And this is a, a, a kind of a unique alarm clock idea. Now you may have seen something similar more recently called the Slappy Clock. Which is like this rotating hand that slaps your face when you’re supposed to wake up when your alarm bell goes off and you don’t like waking up.

This is a much calmer system than the, than the slapping hand bit. It’s like a grid of that’s suspended above the sleeper and there’s a bunch of strings hanging down in a grid pattern. At the end of these strings is, are corks. And when you’re allowed to sleep, this cork system lifts off and doesn’t bother you.

As soon as the alarm bell goes off, it sort of lowers down. So it’s kind of like you’re surrounded by a bunch of corks and strings, like you’re being caught in a cobweb. So it’s, it’s trying to wake you up slowly, not to really alarm you up. However, I wonder if this idea was really ever effective because hard sleepers can sleep through anything.

This device seems like it’s not going to be enough to wake up the difficult sleeper.

Philip Totaro: And I’ll tell you what, Alan, this invention was actually conceived of and the patent was granted back in 1882. So, the fact that something that was that kind of unique and original more than a hundred years ago could influence, some of the, some of the IP and the technology of, of today and, and the slappy, which I do not use, by the way.

I, I actually normally wake up with the sun in the morning. It’s, much more pleasant way to do things. But, for those people that might be heavier sleepers, I don’t know, this could work, the slappy could work. But it depends, I guess it depends on how heavy a sleeper you are.

Allen Hall: You’re never gonna beat that rooster in your window. That’s the best.