@@fnapis That's a dangerous path. You could become another "free energy water powered car modder" in youtube, due to lack of thermodinamics and basic physics knowledge...
Long ago I planned to make a few small scale wind turbines for a turbine wall or putting one on each roof, which I planned to connect to a CVT to stabilize power output... calculated for RPM, but never even considered frequency. Goes to show how there is always more to research... makes me want to go to trade school just to learn about it lol.
What I love: In most channels, a title like this prompts hundreds of totally uninformed comments about why wind power doesn't work. Here, you get lots of comments by actual engineers who know what they are talking about, giving real-world insights into specific issues
Absolutely. I'm no engineer, but I love to hear from those who can discuss issues relating to renewables and help me learn about the subject. It's refreshing not to see a comments section filled with, 'All wind turbines break', 'it can't be done' (often without any mention of what 'it' means), 'what happens when the sun dies?' etc, etc. It's sad knowing that many of these comments are from bots, and they come originally from those who aren't trying to make the world a better place to live in. Thanks to everyone who shares their knowledge!
@@Dr.Kraig_Ren I watch both. My point was that for a channel as "mainstream" as Real Engineering, it's refreshing. The university presentation type videos usually don't get nearly a million views and 3000 comments in a day or so 🙂
The top-level comments here from actual wind turbine engineers are great. The replies to them include plenty of "can't be done" naysaying from fossil fuel shills and nuclear fans who deny the reality of gigawatts of renewable energy and now increasing gigawatt hours of battery storage being installed throughout the world.
As a former wind turbine technician, we should just switch to nuclear. Turbines make a mess and kill lots a birds. I've probably ingested too much grease and hydraulic oil and inhaled too much fiber glass
interesting to see the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) harness the American great plains wind resource, delivering some of the lowest cost and most reliable power to their US customer. Having a more flexible grid is key with dispatchable gas, demand side management and battery storage for inverter based resources. Industry needs to adapt manufacturing and productive output, through material storage and supply chain management to align with the making of products when power is both clean and most abundant.
Producing E-Fuels and burning them in internal combustion engines afterwards has an efficiency of 5-10%. Compare that with battery storage and direct electricity usage at a combined efficiency around 40-50%.
The batteries made out of rare earth minerals that take an enourmous amount of energy to mine and refine? The batteries that degrade? Making efuels only requires electrolysis. And a liquid fuel can be transported cheaply. So take your battery storage efficiency down by a factor of 10.
@@sliwka621 Batteries are NOT made out of rare earth materials! Lithium is not a rare earth metal such as Neodymium. Many electric motors and generators are made out of rare earth metals, although you can make them without them. Of course you can criticize Lithium mining and battery production, but please stay by the facts
I got sad as soon as he mentioned Hydrogen. Often it is a terrible solution being promoted by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons. As long as electrolysis using oversupply of "green" generation makes the Hydrogen, and then that Hydrogen supply replaces existing applications of hydrogen previously using Methan Steam Reformed production...then maybe it makes sense. 1. We are unlikely to ever have much sustainable oversupply of green generation to make Hydrogen with. 2. If we do have oversupply of green generation are we sure Hydrogen production is the best use of it compared to all the other potential uses like storage for future peaks, or making something else, or carbon capture. 3. Before we start dreaming of new applications for Hydrogen like transportation and such, ALL the current demand for medical, industrial and agricultural Hydrogen needs to be converted from Steam Reforming to Electrolysis. As long as some Hydrogen is produced with Methane, the ALL Hydrogen is dirty. Creating new demand for Hydrogen just extends the life and pollution from dirty Hydrogen production. Making hydrogen is a very inefficient conversion of energy. Hydrogen is a fuel needing to be transported and stored which is also terribly inefficient. Most uses of hydrogen are also terribly inefficient energy conversion so it is lost on both ends and the middle. Once you run the math hydrogen is almost never a good option.
The problem with Wind Generators is the effect that Jack Welsh delivered in the 1980's. The small manufacturing industries who built affordable Wind Generators that Consumers could buy, were a threat to industrial scale Power Generator Investors. If the use of small wind generating capacity were available in the USA , the Investors who benefit from Coal and Large Wind Generating production facilities, appear to be provided a bit less profits. Welsh seemed to end the short life of small Wind Generator Companies, as the Tax incentives were removed and the Solar Panels came off the White House.
While they can be a good solution, the environmental impact (unless repurposing an existing reservoir) and the efficiency losses make them a tough sell. But definitely one of the better options
Real Engineering has a video on pumped storage, the biggest problem is the location, finding two reservoir with a high elevation difference is difficult.
With battery storage systems, you have ms, which is millisecond frequency regulation. Lack of flywheel inertia is nowadays a non-existent problem, at least if you are smart enough to drop your fact-resistant attitude.
I never got why wind turbines are made this way. Would the round "blade" from a blower fan be better? It could handle high winds, cheaper to make and less likely to break, less components, could be retrofitted on antenna poles (or any poles for that matter) not as heavy so doesnt need as strong of wind to produce energy. Really dont get the inefficient design.
I'm sceptical about future Hydrogen but we'll see. The thing I'm worried about are the huge blades which are an environmental disaster in the making. They're not really recyclable despite some half ass attempts.
Wouldnt we technically run out of wind if we were to increase wind power usage seeing how wind doesnt really push or convert energy into other things unless its a tree or plant or such so increasing the amount of windmills would make the wind transmit energy more and the wind loses energy ao it goes slower till theres no wind if enough were to be used but yes wind is generated almost constantly but still a thought to be thought i think
(not my area of expertise, educate me) For the frequency synchronising on the grid from the turbine output, are capacitors/capacitor banks a viable remedy? (Even just theoretically) so that could you have the turbine generator (especially direct drive, with the high magnet volume stator) producing Peak Power at any given RPM, and outputting it all to a capacitor & transformer setup that can then pass it along to the grid? As stated at 6:45 stamp, the turbine can't recover from a frequency drop that is due to windspeed, but a capacitor is capable of a quick discharge of energy, and so could potentially jump the output back to the grid hz, or help stabilise the network if a seperate turbine stutters. /If yes on all above, would it make sense to have local grid systems of turbines at each farm, that are all interconnected, aiming for a combined Net KwH/+Hz output, that could then be interlinked to the main grid, allowing for peaks and drops to even each other out?.
Hello Mr. Engineering I recently saw a yt short user using your voice I dont know how to contact you so kindly tell me how I can send you the link to the short so you can take action Regards, A nice viewer
Wind turbine service technician here, actually modern machines doesnt need to achieve 1500-1800 rpm to produce power, thanks to the converter system its possible to start producing usable power as low as around 900-1000 rpm (about 3.5 / 4 m/s of wind on 150m diameter machines at max blade pitch angle). The way its done is simply to lower the voltage frequency on the generator side of the converters (while keeping 50/60Hz on the grid side). The 1500-1800 range is now more of a "max power" range if the wind speed is high enough (4.2MW for a Vestas V150 MK3E for example, at about 11m/s). About the maintenance on gearboxes in fact there is not really much to do most of the time, as soon as the service is correctly done (filter changes, oil levels) they can last more than the 7 years you are speaking without any issues. Of course gearboxes problems are possible, but they are pretty rare compared to the quantity of machines.
Do you remember the old farm windmills that were multi-functional, and lasted for decades? The power shaft would go from the blades, through 2 bevel gears, all of the way down to the ground level, THEN, that power was used, or converted, at the ground level. That old method seems like it would be WAY more efficient, and practical. As opposed to having ALL of the equipment on top of a 300 foot pole.
@@coachbrandon01 You think it's more practical and efficient to have two bevel gears dealing with extremely high torque, connected to a shaft that's potentially 150m long going into a gearbox and generator unit?
Same thing happens in every country, take the superbowl in the US. People open fridges, make coffee, etc. It's just that we're famous for drinking tea. But nobody says this about Japan! Or China? Or India?
The same statistic is done in Germany right now. You can see it in the Water usage while pause of the UEFA European Championship people use the Toilet.
When on a visit to the now closed Hinkley Point B visitor centre, my dad was told by a technician who worked there that one of the most important documents within the control centre of the reactor was, in fact, the Radio Times. For those outside the UK, that is a TV guide magazine. It allowed them to compensate for the spike in energy usage when the soaps finished, for example. 😂 it really is such a British thing, and as a proud English man, it makes me smile, but I digress.
Recently started working for a bearing manufacturer. Among the biggest problems with the bearing replacement is the fact that it requires removing the blades, which requires the use of cranes, which are very expensive and have to be scheduled. Apparently some companies are switching to split-ring bearings, which can be replaced without removing the blades. It's my understanding that they wear a little faster, but they reduce the cost of each replacement so much that it's incredibly worth it. Just thought I'd throw in my two cents to show that there are entire industries working to solve this problem and that it's not unworkable.
How much diesel does it take to transport the crane? How much diesel does the crane use? They're heavy. Tire wear? What about road damage? Maintenance on the crane and equipment that transports it? The turbine spins requiring lubrication... I could go on but yeah.
@@aaadamt964 Guy is talking about bearings. Not diesel consumption on a single one way trip for a thing that then consumes no fossil fuels for the next several decades of its life once it is erected. But you go off about the dozens of gallons of fuel used to transport and set up a better version of energy production than any carbon powered gas turbine in the world. One that will work for decades with minimal maintenance. Gas turbine facilities have teams of people working around the clock. Wind farms have a small team of people going around and checking and maintaining hundreds or thousands of wind turbines. Much better man-hours/MWh ratio. Also, please check how much tire wear occurs on a single trip of transporting each and every component of a wind turbine. If it was the same truck and trailer doing all of the hauling, I doubt the operator would need to replace any tire by the time the entire wind turbine farm was set up.
@@mikes2381 what do you think lubricates those bearings? How often do they need maintenance? Nothing with moving parts just lasts several decades. Google claims those things last 20 years. I wouldn't bet money on them lasting half that if they're meticulously maintained. Hint: they're not.
It is unworkable. Wind energy is the biggest scam in power and transportation. And I would love to see the math on how replacing the bearings with cheaper alternative that requires more maintenance cuts the cost.
wind energy has created a whole bunch of new millionaries, the new Rockefellers. and wind generated electricity is, by far, the most expensive way to produce the juice. Argue away, but why do you think Electricity rates have skyrocketed while all of this new technology has been developed. I truly wonder if the carbon footprint of one of these goliaths is much larger than just burning the old fossil fuels?
@@jerryw6699renewables are the cheapest means of producing electrical energy, have a look at the cost blowouts on nuclear power station being constructed
Thanks for the video, but it's a bit outdated. Wind turbines nowadays have better power control systems that allow the "inertia" effect and allow 50/60Hz output and variable speed without all of the power going through an inverter. The gearbox has a design life equivalent to the turbine's design life (15 years in France generally). On a turbine from REpower I worked on, the flowing was built -in: - It has a winded rotor. No permanent magnets requiring rare earth. - At partial load (low wind): partial load variable speed wind turbines (VSWT) utilize a method where the rotor operates at variable speeds while maintaining a constant 50Hz output on the stator. This is achieved through the injection of variable frequency current into the rotor, which is controlled to match the desired output frequency on the stator side. - At full load (high wind), the pitch changes depending the wind speed and grid frequency to maintain the 50Hz - VSWT can provide an emulated inertial response by using the kinetic energy stored in the rotating mass of the turbine. This is similar to the inertial response provided by traditional synchronous generators. When there is a sudden drop in grid frequency, the turbines can quickly inject additional power to the grid, helping to stabilize the frequency. During frequency drops, the turbine can temporarily operate in overproduction mode, generating more power than its mechanical input by using stored kinetic energy. This rapid power injection helps to counteract the frequency drop. After the frequency stabilizes, the turbine can reduce its output to recover its rotational speed and maintain optimal operating conditions.
A better description of the variable frequency alternator. The 3 phase wound rotor is fed with a sine wave at the difference between 50 Hz and what the alternator rpm is trying to produce. This could be faster or slower. The high power output is inverter frequency controlled by a low power excitation input. This effect is called magnetic amplifier and means no niodymium magnets and no huge loads on inverters. I experimented with this as motor speed control 40 y6ears ago even before mosfets.
Im an offshore wind turbine technician in the US. the platform i work on is a direct drive, no gearbox needed. Those generators are fascinating bits of tech.
I'm not sure whether the logic why direct drives are used in this video is correct: 'not fully understood bearing and gear failure, causing high repair costs'. I think gear life and failure statistics are very well understood in engineering, and maintenance is not a: oepsy it failed again - thing, its statistical. Its true that direct drive turbines just have less points of wear and therefore potential failure modes.
The comments are as educational as the video. This is not a criticisism. It is encouragement to read the comments. This is the first really interesting video I have seen on wind power, good job.
Honestly, the video is somewhat outdated regarding the problems we're currently facing. It's repeating the already solved talking points of fossil executives, not the state of the art solutions to those problems.
I think it absolutely DOES reflect on the creator for having many misleading inaccuracies, what drugs are you smoking that made you think they aren't responsible for giving false- albeit only outdated technically- information? Especially as a channel that is seen as informational/educational the creators only have more responsibility to actually get it right, not to mention it's not like this guy isn't getting paid, and what they're paid for isn't to spread false info.
Yep. That's why during major events, such as the superbowl, those transmissions people are busy as hell. It's also rough when there's been a blackout and when they first turn everyone's power back on. The first second is rough because everyone's ACs, dryers, heaters, etc need more power when they first start
The same thing happens at water and wastewater treatment plants when people get up to go to school/work, they may shower, flush the toilets, and use the sinks around the same time for a few hours. Then there's a few hours before lunch, then dinner, and finally before going to bed. Some plants have FEB's (Flow Equalization Basin) that temporarily hold the waste water until it can be processed during the low usage periods. I'm a former controls engineer and have designed, built, and maintained dozens of those plants around the country. It's amazing to see the infrastructure required to handle all of that. The same with the grid.
I'm an environmental engineer from Texas and I was working at a natural gas plant when the grid went down. Texas doesn't have an requirement for winterization because they don't want to connect to the national grid. It's kind of a 1-2 punch that led to the blackouts. It's kind of a joke with people in my industry that cold weather means we'll be on the phone with the government reporting pollution releases because the plants keep going down when equipment breaks - always on the weekend. I don't think we get enough electricity from wind for the turbines going down to make a difference, even out here in west Texas where it's very flat and windy and there are turbines all over.
During the Texas freeze, wind resources fell to single digit capacity factor, meaning they were no help. A bunch of nat gas failed, but a bunch of other nat gas was scrambling to come online to cover the difference. There just wasn't enough of it. But wind can't scramble to come online at all. If we keep shutting down dispatchable generators in Texas, adding only wind and solar, then the reliability problem will only grow bigger.
Lol 😂😂😂😂 in Germany they hate renewable Energy but have a stable Net with 99,986% Availability!!! And a Lot of they think they German Net is worse...😂😂😂 This German people should BE live in Texas....😅😅😅
little fun fact: enercon brand wind turbines (the ones wich have a egg shaped top housing and are very recognizable at 0:24) are the only widely used turbines w/o a gearbox, they instead have a large "pancake" style generator wich does not need any gears and is made specifically to generate peak power at the lower RPM the blades spin at its also why the housing is egg shaped edit: enercon recently celebrated 40 years and their first direct drive turbine, the E-40 was developed in the early 90s direct drive is nothing new, nothing that needs to "prove itself", its been proven and reliable for over 30 years now
The past few years both Siemens and GE have also devellopped a gearless turbine. The trick is to have more energy gain by having a selective variable rotor speed than the energy loss through the AC-DC-AC conversion.
Definitely not true, that they are the only widely used turbines without gearboxes. As someone else already posted, Siemens Gamesa, General Electric but also Vestas turbines used offshore are exclusively without gearboxes.
@@gehtdichnixan2801you are correct, people think Enercon are the only one because they had the patent, but it expired some time ago so other manufacturers are now using the same technology
Mechanical design engineer of windturbine gearboxes here. I can say that the section of the gearboxes is not 100% correct. Yes the sensitieve part of the gearbox are the bearings, in particular the high speed shaft. But a lot of development is done in the bearing and bearing arrangement to reduce these failures to max 5-10 in a popultion of 1000. Also current gearboxed exist of 2 or even 3 planetary stages. These are just a few things
@@MichaelKobler-yu6fy Indeed, plain bearings are being used in the planetary stages now as well. But they bring their own issues and challenges. Another innovation is the medium speed drivetrain in which the generators rotate at 400-500 RPM, eliminating the need for a high speed year stage. The gearbox section shown in the video would have been 100% correct, for a typical design of around ca. 2010 😊
@@PJke456would you see any benefit from ceramic rolling elements? It was hoped that they'd be more durable than metal, but it looks like they might just end up being lighter.
Couldn't something like a CVT be used to smooth out the frequency variation? I mean there has yo be a massive downside or it would be used. I just don't know what the most relevant downside is here 😅
Currently working on turbines that are 20+ years old. Sure bearings and gearboxes go bad but these things crank out energy like it’s going out of style. And modern turbines are making power from 750rpm all the way up to 1500+ so the wind window is much wider than they used to be. Even the old ones I work on make power at 820rpm. In fact we normally are flagged for making too much and have to shut some towers off on high wind days.
Yes it can put out energy at 750 rpm but if it runs 80% at 750 rpm it is not efficient. You have to shut down the towers because the grid cant store energy. Wind and solar are not a energy source for a stable grid.
Yes but take one look at the UK power generation, Wind fluctuates between 70% of power and none. Power is only worth something if you can use it and often wind power actually makes every other power generation type more expensive (less uptime and more stop and starts for gap filling). This creates a distorted perspective of the cost of wind energy. Most countries are subsiding wind power often in ways most don't recognize as subsides (ie fixed price for power) again producing distorted cost analysis.
@@mitchellcouchman1444 The more wind turbines you have up and down the UK, the less of an effect that problem is going to have. Just having floating offshore wind turbines alone reduces issues with storage by strategic placement.
@@billyredtail no it doesn't, not really, because wind in different places isn't independent. While at the same time replacing other more reliable and actually independent sources like gas, coal and nuclear you do put yourself massively at risk of the energy shortage of winter 2022 when there was minimal wind across all of the UK leading to energy shortages
@@mitchellcouchman1444 absolutely right. It’s not the end all-be all for stability. Just the technology has come a long way. We’re starting to add battery storage in parallel with the wind turbines here in the U.S. and that helps with jumps and dips in energy demand but it also isn’t the final answer. Honestly I’d think closest to perfect solution would be nuclear that is also used to create Hydrogen and that hydrogen powering a gas plant for the fluctuations. But for now the wind business is putting food on my table and my family happy.
Wind turbines don't operate during storms. It spins too fast and the heat on the bearing and gears can cause fires. Also the the blades can bend inward and hit the vertical support causing catastrophic collapse.
I know someone who works for a company developing HVDC links to connect country grids together, really cool tech. Maybe a video about HVDC can be a good complimentary video to this one.
Looking at the ac to dc converter used for the windturbine, wouldn't it be more efficient if these were connected to HVDC connections? Now that I have thought about it for more than 5 seconds, I spot a potential problem. The frequency isn't the problem, due to the ac to dc converter. But I would expect the voltage coming from a windturbine to be much lower than the HVDC voltage. If this expectation is correct, you can't connect windturbines to the HVDC line.
@@Krasbinit’s planned, it’s called hybrid HVDC interconnectors and connects two countries to the same offshore wind resource. So they can both use the wind as well as use it as a hub for connecting more wind directly to existing networks. I’m going to produce a video on it in future (I work for such a company).
I’ve got 220 videos planned so far on the UK grid and grid technology including HVDC. Subscribe and it’ll come eventually :) worked in HVDC for many years.
I completed my masters degree on direct drive power converters a decade ago. The inertia of the turbine is absolutely still present even if not directly synchronised to the grid. Under a surge the controller can have the inverter match the grid demand and slow the turbine down by drawing more power from it than it is currently producing. In fact at the time I was studying it I was informed of techniques to allow the turbines to spin faster storing more energy in inertia if a surge is predicted overriding the MPPT algorithm. It’s not too dissimilar to how battery storage is being used to stabilise the grid
@@96oscarC I’ve not worked on battery inverters but I imagine it’s very similar techniques used when it comes to frequency stabilisation (DC decoupled turbines are just a rectifier and an inverter after all)
Yeah, I would say that there are not even that many synchronous wind turbines anymore. With enercons EP3 4 and 5 series that evolution is also visible, now integrating the inverters right into a "container" behind the direct driven generator. And it's only logical to allow the turbine to spin up slightly above it's maximum power point (in low power usage situations) to have it's inertia as additional regulation headroom for the converter/inverter. Here in Germany, the by far biggest problem is the weak grid not being able to just simply transfer the huge amounts of energy from the north to the south of the country.
I was about to say - that inverter should be programmable, and you should be able to set it to just emulate a large inertial mass, right? Like a motor controller where you can set the output frequency. I never quite got why we have seemed to all collectively program these inverters to be pure frequency followers, when a few control loop settings should let them help, too...
have you heard of the breakthrough in freewheel vs direct drive (regen)motors? its called free gen, grin technologies channel can tell you more about it. Some guy just sat down and thought about the problem and solved it.
It makes absolutely no sense for a small country like Ireland to build nuclear now. All the hassle of international treaties and infrastructure, waste storage costs etc., when they have so much renewable potential!! Much better to build the hydrogen generation and storage facilities along with more investment in tidal and wave and buy from France or even the UK, but we don’t do much nuclear.
Northern Ireland resident here, currently sitting maybe a few hundred metres away from a wind turbine. Great to hear about a topic like this that's right in my back yard (well, in the farmer's field next door). I had noticed a lot more wind turbines appearing across the countryside in recent years - didn't know that the island of Ireland had so much more wind than the average.
@@EdoTyran I can hear a faint, soft noise from it when out in the field a bit closer to it, but nothing from my house. TBH, even rain, road noise or a gust of wind would drown out the sound.
Would drive me absolutely insane if I were stuck living next to these things. Renewables have disgustingly massive form factors. I pray they don't start erecting these abominations in the unspoiled wilderness areas here in NA. They're already beginning to ruin the coastal areas on the east coast, I hope they keep them away from the PNW and Alaska.
I really like your videos, but this time you missed... All those issues you are talking about in this video was solved 10y ago. Synthetic Inertia is mandatory in order to pass Grid Compliance Test, Gearbox issues are real strugle, but nobody is replacing them every 7y and cost is about 500k for full replacement including work and spare parts. Also, in the video, you are showing Enercon turbines, and those do not have any of those issues: No Gearbox, no permanent magnets, Synthetic Inertia is included 20y ago in every turbine...
what about the extreme amount of noise they causes?. There are people who cant live at their houses anymore because companies decide to put up wind turbines nearby
@@francisR46 While this is true, the noise of wind turbines is highly overstated and very, very few people would realistically see any need to move because of the noise they cause. Road traffic causes significantly more noise than wind turbines, and we have not stopped building roads because of it either. The few people who are actually affected seriously by wind turbines, beyond aesthetic complaints, should be financially supported in either sound proofing their homes, or moving. It should not be their financial burden, but it can't stop progress of renewables either.
Inertia can be added artificially. This artificial inertia could even be better than the real inertia. While a real spinning rotor can only slow down from 1800 rpm to 1797 rpm to go from 60Hz to 59.9Hz, with a rectifier and inverter, the physical rpm be changed 20% or more, making far more of that rotational energy available. That energy doesn't even have to be rotational. Battery storage systems could react instantly with their stored power, providing short bursts above their continuous rating. Even solar inverters could be programmed to have artificial inertia. The inverter (and sometimes DC booster) has internal capacitors that can be tapped (though their stored energy is a lot less).
Thank you! I was also missing an explanation of doubly fed induction generators, which allow direct connection to the grid while having a fairly decoupled speed. Those have inertia too.
In many grids the majority of grid inertia is already provided by batteries, as they are extremely well suited for that task. Would have been a good topic to bring up
The problem with chemical batteries is that: 1. They're expensive, especially at the scales needed to deal with the power grids 2. They can only unload so much power within a certain timespan before they start getting damaged
@@edwinhuang9244 “they’re expensive” Private investors pay for them, and then get paid for the frequency response services they provide. Previously that money would go to natural gas plants or other dispatchable sources, but BESS saw a niche where they were competitive and said “hey, we can provide the same service for cheaper”. The grid operators save money, ratepayers save money, and the BESS owners make money. Legacy dispatchable sources get the short end of the stick, but I’m not really a protectionism kinda guy. Also you only need a relatively small battery to do frequency response
yeah and if you want to add more synthetic inertia capacity you just add more capacitors or batteries to the DC bus of the inverter. People really need to get this idea that we need mechanical inertia out of there heads. The grid runs on electricity so electrical only solutions would work fine.
Here in Brazil we have a national electric grid based on hydro power. The large reservoirs provide inertia for the wind energy. The problem for Wind Energy here is that our Hydroelectric power is so cheap that the system’s controller does not let wind energy into the grid (constrained off). Our capacity factor for wind power here is very competitive tough , >45%
as someone who works with frequency converters and know the actual people developing the Haliade X drive, i highly recommend making a video on frequency converters, they are used basically everywhere and always get overlooked. also the DC storage within a converter can be used als 'artificial' inertia, but obviously has nowhere near the capacity of an actual flywheel.
@@PfoohInverters do that but just a little bit because they are delicate electronic devices. Rotating generators can supply a multitude of their rated current for a short while. Inverters can’t do that
@@Pfooh For one thing, you are generally drawing the max power from the wind turbine. You could delay it but there is no option to ramp up power output to meet higher needs.
@@randomvideosn0wherewell, that’s just if you operate wind and solar at 100%. Some large solar farms operate at 70-80% to be able to provide „digital inertia“ in case the grid needs it. That’s why we need massive overproduction by wind and by solar all around the world: to have the luxury of throttling them down
@@Pfooh It's not going to be that difficult. It just needs more research to make sure we don't get it wrong. Until recently there was enough inertia that it wasn't needed, so the engineering wasn't focused on creating artificial inertia.
In Alaska where I live, the villages of Wrangell and Kodiak produce virtually 100% of their energy with a combination of wind and hydro. Kodiak installed its first power grid tied wind turbine in 2009. The village of Kotzebue installed its first utility grade wind turbine in 1997 and currently produces about 20% of its energy with wind, saving close to 280,000 gallons of fuel oil or a little over one million dollars annually. Given the high cost of fuel oil, wind and hydro has played a major, cost-effective role in producing Alaska's energy for quite a number of years. Wind energy in much of the U.S. was first installed experimentally, and especially some early efforts were ill-advised not cost effective. To create practical, cost-effective systems, it is essential to conduct a minimum of a two-year wind study, in a specific location, to assure that a sufficient wind resource exists. It makes no sense to install utility grade wind turbines in a location lacking an excellent wind resource.
Not quite correct - Wrangell and Kodiak produce 100% of ELECTRICAL energy with wind and hydro. And most of it is hydro, which has absolutely nothing to do with wind/solar. Don't count on your hydro being safe from the progressives. Here in WA State, the Biden administration has been trying to take down the Snake River hydro plants, to coddle the Salmon.. Clearly they do not regard hydro as a clean form of energy.
Oil prices are artificially kept high otherwise w/s wouldn't make any sense for their intrinsic EROEI is horrendous (8 to 40 times lower than fossil fuels).
@@PeterBaumgart1a I don't know, do you think that the documented and factual greening of the planet due to higher atmospheric CO2 is beneficial or not? Propaganda works wonders. P.S. Not to mention that we don't even know that most of the CO2 increase is anthropogenic and not the natural consequence of natural warming.
You left out something rather important. Software defined inverters (basically all modern industrial ones) like those used in Battery Electricity Storage Systems (BESS) and Variable Frequency Drives (like those used in wind turbines for frequency conversion) are very good at maintaining inertia on a power grid. In other words, spinning a large mass (flywheels, steam turbines) is not the only way to provide inertia for a grid. Utilities call these frequency response services. Huge flywheels like the one you mentioned in Ireland are made redundant when you're installing large battery storage anyways. It's even entirely possible, though not currently implemented, for EVs doing V2G (vehicle to grid) to provide frequency response services. In the case of the English flipping on their tea kettles during commercial breaks, your EV would charge from the grid during programming, but flip to powering your tea kettle during the commercial break all automatically.
Flywheels aren't made redundant by BESS. Synthetic inertia would require all BESS to maintain sufficient capacity at all times to provide that service. Which defeats the point entirely...
Good post. I would think the advantage the flywheel has vs a battery system is probably a much higher power density. The press release for the flywheel plant states it can store 4000 MWs and they give they give an example of a 500MW load for 8 seconds (so I assume the flywheel's maximum power is 500MW). It's not clear to me reading the press release, but to me it sounds like they describe the frequency stablisation it provides is a passive system that does not require active management (but I could be off on this point).
Inverters are still not great at providing fault current, which is absolutely essential to protecting transmission and distribution circuits. Fuses and relays don't do their job without large amounts of available fault current, and that leads to damaged equipment and worse.
@@EP-bb1rm This flywheel only stores 1.1MWh of energy. A 500MW BESS will have a capacity of 1000MWh to 2000MWh. The BESS are going to be installed anyways, you get the inertia for free. Perhaps there is something specific to Ireland's grid topology that warrants this flywheel, but I'll bet good money flywheels will remain niche.
@@zacksstuff I don't think this is right. Actually this sounds backwards. Fuses and relays don't work better by dumping larger fault currents into them. They have a trip current and a maximum current they can break. The reason the grid needs inertia is so that different parts of the grid don't get out of sync, if they get out of sync a dangerously large fault current will flow between. This is why safety equipment is designed to trip if the frequency gets out of the small defined range, to prevent fault currents the over current devices can't handle before they happen.
In 2015 I worked at a R&D company Artemis that was bought by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to make a variable ratio fluid power takeoff for the (then) largest turbine in the world at 7MW. I was the senior engineer leading the development of the high speed motors that turned the generator shafts that span at 1000rpm supplying synchronous power to the grid and helping with grid stabilisation. That speed was sufficient because of the number of pole-pairs on the generator. There were two prototypes installed: one in Hunterston, Glasgow and the other a floating wind turbine off Fukusfhima, Japan and they were both successful. We won the MacRobert award- the Nobel prize for engineering in the UK. The project was canned after the prototypes- don’t know why. Aside from our solution there are ‘medium’ speed gearboxes that obviously power slower generators. There’s not much on the web about it.
Theres a proposal from last year to install a flywheel for grid stabilization at hunterstone, seems like most things involving politics things happen very slowly.
I always viewed that one from afar - I worked on the Doosan 7-8MW "prototype" that never made it out the design room before also being canned, then later was the site engineer for the Samsung 7MW prototype over in Fife. Funny how the Koreans and Japanese all jumped in at a similar time, trying various novel concepts and then they all decided it wasn't the path they wanted to follow. I wonder if they're kicking themselves now? The Samsung had some interesting tech in it - individual pitch control with dual electric motors per axis, integrated oil-fed main bearing inside a very compact (short) gearbox for the rating plus a full power converter. Odd combination having both a gearbox AND converter but it did meant it could, in theory, provide frequency support and even black start support for the grid.
@@jayryan1956 It was a big fluid drive: a very large pump on the rotor shaft and then smaller hydraulic motors turning the generators. A torque converter is a hydrodynamic device- it uses the momentum of fluid to pass torque from one side to another. I don’t think it can be variable displacement. Our system was hydrostatic- very high pressure (340 bar) piston on the pumps and motors. Because we could change the displacement of the pumps and motors we could adjust the gearing ratio continuously so that the generator span at the desired speed. Our machines were very efficient (96.5% for the pump) and their displacement could be computer controlled with very fast response times- i.e. we could determine how much oil the pump would make for one rotation of the blades and then how many revs the generator for that volume of oil. MHI sold the technology to Danfoss and you can read about it here: www.danfoss.com/en/products/dps/hydraulic-pumps/digital-displacement-pumps/digital-displacement-single-and-multiple-outlet-pumps/
I Think you are giving the impression that the problem of inertia has only appeared since renewables grew in importance, but various issues including inertia have required synchronous compensators in the past. Synchronous compensators, being dumb rotating machines with a flywheel. They are coming back into fashion because of renewables.
That is why most relatively new build renewable farm, both wind and solar, will first send their power to a battery storage, that then deploys to the grid. You lose a little bit of output total but gain massively in term stability. Very few plants I worked on, as a control systems engineer, here in Australia, didn't have these small 30MW batteries solutions to the inertia issue
totally wrong opinion. Steam turbines have all the inertia that system would ever need for primary frequency control. Synchronous condensers were introduced for a different purpose - to continously adjust reactive power in 'problematic' substations. This solution was virtually not present in countries with CHP plants - densely distributed generation can rely mostly on the turbine voltage regulators, solution older than the three-phase grid itself. Rise of SCR-controlled capacitor (and sometimes inductor) banks removed needs for synchronous condensers, although they are still operational and may provide minuscule amount of inertia.
Not to say I disagree with you - but I'd suggest that power electronics didn't make the problem go away - they just made it easier to manage in millisecond timeframes. Spinning reserve (which was needed anyway), non-synchronous compensators and electronic micro-adjustments to generators were then able to manage grid instability much more quickly without the need for rotating compensators - you'll note that these were traditionally put nearby to loads, when the generation might be hundreds of kilometres away. There seems to be a school of thought that all of this will eventually be able to be managed electronically with batteries and capacitors that switch over in hundredths of milliseconds and keep everything online without hitting protection or cascade failures, however with an inertia-less generation side - which is a feature of a renewable grid, if you have any level of inductance/pf, load/supply, phase misalignment etcetc fluctuation... you're instantly relying on your electronics, which isn't necessarily a great place to be. However, it doesn't need to be a hyper-efficient compensator, you can turn a defunct coal or gas power plant in to one.
@@michawisniewski4654 I stand corrected! My point being is that solutions aren't being newly invented for renewables, they have existed for a long time.
The flywheel you refer to is called a Synchronous Condenser. We have a lot of them in the U.S. You disconnect the old steam turbine from the generator and attach a starting motor. You spin the generator up to synchronous speed and synch it to the grid, and then disconnect it from the starting motor. It uses power from the grid to continue running. You then have the spinning mass required to help stabilize the grid. This is currently the best means of voltage and frequency stabilization for all the renewable energy coming on line.
that is not correct. The synchronous condensers do perform the function that you described - but if the inertia required is greater than what their rotor can produce (limited by its mass and diameter), then a flywheel is inserted between the synchronous condenser and the pony motor, with the flywheel being a large cylinder of forged steel rotating inside a casing and supported on bearings. Vacuum is created between the flywheel and its casing to reduce friction and friction losses, including heat. So the guy was right about vacuum but he did not mention or does not know about the electrical part (which is the synchronous condenser) which is meant to convert the mechanical inertia into electrical inertia which can be injected into the grid in case of disturbances
I worked at two sites that had synchronous condensers at the end of long HV transmission lines when I was a teenager. In winter they were warm and the 50 cycle hum was nice to sleep near if you had been partying all night.
The wind flows off the Scottish coast are the greatest, most consistent in Europe. We also have pumped storage in Scotland where water is pumped up during low energy usage times , then released down when energy is required. Wind turbines do not need replacement every 7 years. It’s just a big generator and there are thousands of industrial models used far more heavily without issue in powers stations worldwide.
Yes there just cheaply built reduction gear and the public get charged a massive amount for them when you could buy a quality reduction gear system for a fraction of the green energy sector prices but everything in the green industry is charged at astronomical prices compared to normal machinery
I actually worked with the Delft Offshore Turbine team to work on a new system which has self-aligning piston rolling which don't have the Brinelling effect. These are actually turbines which pump water to a central generator. The weight of the turbine head is thereby reduced and the turbine can therefore be made higher (more wind power).
-- That's smart. So you lose some power production, but through H2O valve/turbine control you can steady your output? What does maintenance look like in salt water? Would Zinc be worthwhile for the fluid systems, or would that be too expensive? A high tech windmill driven water well. I like it.
In 2023, there were 28,677 wind turbines on land in Germany. In December 2023, 1,566 offshore wind turbines (OWEA) with a total output of 8.5 GW were in operation in Germany.
Haliade isn't the biggest nor most powerful wind turbine built - Siemens SG-14-236 is larger and has more output. And i am sure the recent MingJang is even larger. How could he missed that? By tailoring the channel for he US audience. Wind turbines are non synchronous is also not 100% accurate. At least in Germany they are required to balance the grid too.
I'm halfway through the video when I realize after a map of Ireland is show, that this is where he's talking about. That thick Irish accent and my lack of coffee has done me for the morning.
The example with 60 Hz threw me off for a while as well. Just use 50 Hz if you are in Europe, it's good for the Americans to be forced out of their comfort zone once in a while... ;)
I thought his accent was clear and attractive. But it was very amusing when he stated that Ireland was isolated, then a map appeared showing that the Republic of Ireland has a land border with the UK, and the island of Ireland is very close to the island of Britain. In fact you can see one island from the other.
Wait... There are STILL manufacturers using gearboxes? I'm out of the field for a few years but back then it seemed they all were switching to gearless systems?! Is this a US thing?
There’s certainly plenty of operating turbines using gearboxes, even if newer models had all moved on to DD. So gearbox maintenance is still a hot topic in the industry
It's a cost thing. Most if not all onshore turbines have gearboxes. For offshore turbines the cost of maintenance for gearboxes adds up, so there direct drive is more popular.
I don't think it is really gearless but rather single speed gear. Just like in EVs there is still a reduction gear to boost the torque of the electric motor. Still much lower maintenance then a gearbox with multiple gears used in the older fixed speed wind turbines
10 years wind worker, have to say you are well informed. My only complain is about the video itself, looks like you didnt have any script. Came to find what is wind energy problem (yes, its true frecuency control is challenging more than a "problem" IMO) but 90% of the video is about Ireland and how you want to be producing hydrogen for the world to consume. Apart that I think hydrogen will definately never be a energy vector no matter what a politician pushes for it (physics) i think is very far from the topic. Seeing you speak about a topic i fully control, reasures me that when i watch other videos where i am less knowledgable i am being feed good info, keep it up!
I agree that hydrogen is inferior to other options for Energy storage. But we do need a lot of it for the chemical industry. So I don't see why it would not be a good outlet for the energy sector. could you elaborate?
@@MusikCassette electrolisis needs pure water and expensive materials, is not like you put any water in some cheap gadged = H2 + O2. thats why any colour of hydrogen is cheaper than green hydrogen ATM. Can any major disruption occur in any of both problems? yes. Can we have fusion in 10 years as well? same logic says we can
Miner here. There are abundant deposits of rare earth minerals around the world. .. China does it cheap by having no environmental regulations. .. Mining of rare earths is extremely toxic and very expensive to fix. That's why the US shut down their rare earth mines and started bying from China. .. Lithium is also abundant. It's the cost to mine.
@@bimmjim Something our political leaders don't fully understand. People may say that they care about Carbon emissions or climate change... but if you can't breath the air or drink the water, what's the point of all of that? To truly do good by our children, we need to stop buying from countries who have zero interest in environmental protections.
@@Tank50us But... the point is that we need to mine those minerals to stop polluting. We have a choice between leaving an Earth that will need cleanup, and an Earth increasingly hostile to human prosperity.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD I don't doubt that we need the materials. But if the choice is either: A. extract them from a country that doesn't care about workers rights or their own environment, but it costs less. or B. extract them from a country that does care about the workers doing the mining, as well as the environmental impact, and does everything they can to limit the damage, but costs more. Personally, I choose B. After all, at the end of the day, the whole issue with Global Warming means squat if people can't breath the air or drink the water.
Correction regarding your point about inertia at the 8:30 mark. Yes, inverter based power sources like Wind and Solar do not have physical inertia. But they do have an inverter that can spit out whatever waveform it wants. Which from the perspective of the grid is the same thing as inertia. It is very easy to program an inverter to slightly increase its frequency relative to the grid frequency when it detects a drop, which effectively achieves the same goal as a big spinning generator. The only thing you need to do for this, is to have a tiny buffer of potential energy that you aren't feeding into the grid by default. So if your solar panel is providing 100kW of power, you should only feed 95kW into the grid and use the remaining 5kW for frequency regulation. This is not conventionally done because wind turbine and solar panel owners aren't required to do so, and they earn more money by selling the full 100kW. But that's an easy fix with some regulation. Or hell, even just licencing requirement from the grid operator. You don't need to build vacuum sealed flywheels for grid stability at all.
No that's not how this works because for inertia you need to store the energy somehow. What this means is that If you need to put double the energy out for a few seconds, The energy has to come from somewhere and you won't be able to do it. You can use batteries or capacitors, along with the inverter, but there isn't inertia because there's no actual energy buffer. What the inertia means is that if you immediately double the amount of energy you want to draw from it, for a few seconds, You will quickly stop the blades. Even if you're using it at 95% capacity
That's not how it works, when the grid frequency drops it doesn't actually increase the frequency by increasing its own frequency, it increases the frequency by simply running app the frequency that the grid is at, which is slower, but with a tiny bit I'll say is with much much much higher voltage feeding back into the grid to try to get it back up to speed hoping that everyone else does the same thing.
@@pilotavery Yes, that extra required energy is in the 5% buffer you have. The grid experiences a sudden surge in power draw. This manifests as a drop in grid frequency. Your solar inverter detects that drop in frequency and it adjusts its own frequency to be slightly forward in phase relative to the grid. This causes more power to be fed into the grid (The extra 5kw), which counteracts the extra load and thus functions as inertia. You are using that extra 5% of oomph as your buffer. This all happens in milliseconds, resulting in a very smooth grid frequency. Now, if only a single solar power plant did that, it would indeed not have enough buffer power to do that. But if every single inverter on the grid has frequency compensation programmed in, the added load is trivial. To overwhelm the system the unexpected added load to the grid would have to exceed the buffer, and that just doesn't happen. Nobody is suddenly increasing total load on the grid by several percentage points without first informing the grid operator.
@@harmenkoster7451 5% is not enough, When the frequency drops by 1% you usually have about a 50% increase in load. A 5% buffer doesn't really do shit, You have exponentially more and more torque against the inertia...
@@harmenkoster7451A rotating generator can output a multitude of their rated power for a short while. That means at least twice the rated power not just a few percent. Modern inverters do their best like you said but it’s not comparable
Just drove past the construction site for the giant inverter/rectifier for the celtic interconnector , connecting irelands grid to europes .. so its all going ahead
Yeah, I found that bit a weird from Real Engineering. He discusses how wind turbines lack ability to provide grid inertia due to AC-DC-AC conversion, but that's how the interconnector will work. It's going to run on HVDC and without the ability of modern inverters to add "simulated" inertia, wouldn't be helpful at all.
Both solar and wind turbine inverters are programmed to ride-through faults. They do not simply turn off when the grid becomes unstable. The real issue is keeping them all in perfect synchronization. When you have a lot of inverters vs spinning mass it becomes hard to tell what the phase angle is during a fault.
@@MusikCassette Sort of. There is still the problem of suddenly losing wind/sun and all the windmills/solar going offline. The solution to this problem is battery backup to fill in the gaps. Right now we use natural gas peaker plants that rapidly spool up and down to stabilize the gap between production and demand. But the really fast peaks and valleys in demand can be fixed with software.
'Grid Dis-Harmonization' by millions of independent rooftop solar feeds is fascinating to realize any out of phase solar converters are actually DESTROYING power in the grid. This effect can also occur in small fossil grids with relatively large commercial solar. One diesel grid client, faced with surge-and-sag solar feed every time clouds moved in, designed a load bank (giant toaster) to _burn off the solar as heat_ after the solar surges blew up their 6MW generator, so they could still continue to claim Federal carbon credits to pay the solar installation off.😂🎉
Was working on the thrird interconnecting for ireland to wales last few months. Burying the subsea cable amazing project. Now i know a lot more of why that cable is so important
It takes so much energy to compress hydrogen! 600 PSI? Cars run at 80 PSI. Forget the hydrogen part, compress ordinary air and call it good! I've watched videos of a guy who converted a car and ran it on compressed air. Hydrogen power has no place beyond school experiments. Can't be useful unless generated on-demand.
Another huge downsize is the short lifespans on the blades themselves. And the fact that there still is not an actual cost effective way to recycle them. Here in Wyoming they have a massive pit they still bury them in. TX also has massive plots of lands with just stacks of the things. It kinda grosses me out the waste of those blades. I'd be much more open to wind if that can be solved.
13:03 It’s not so cheap! Remember you have to build an electrolyser (that costs a lot) to make it run just a few hours per day. P.S. Please make a video about Fisher Tropsch 🙏🏻
It depends, they could have a high efficiency electrolyzer with expensive membranes, or they could equally have a bunch of lower efficiency ones that stick some cheap carbon rods into the water. If electricity is cheap, then run the cheap one, and when it's expensive, run the expensive one.
It's great to see you do a video about our lovely island, I'm lucky to have the Raheenleagh wind farm on my doorstep. As an engineer I always appreciate the science behind these machines.
Nuclear, hydro…but environmentalist hate hydro…not an option in their ideology and why they’re destroying hydro power dams in America at a insane rate with no back up…they’re ideology of no humane use of natural resources . No hydro dams …stupid is as stupid does.
Your videos are really cool and they make me enjoy learning, I have a video idea for you, the city of Venice, you can talk about it’s construction on millions of wooden stakes, the innovative fresh water collection wells, their waste management system, any other innovative technologies they had, how it is sinking, and the ideas and projects to prevent/reverse this!
My partner was trained to work maintenance with these and many kinds of wind turbines.. The management was ineffective, there were always some injuries, technicians slipping on ice surrounding these towers in the northern states. They have to carry 80+ pounds of gear with them to the top of the tower to the nacelles, to repair them; They have NO cranes, the management companies say it's too expensive. Using a crane to bring the nacelle to the ground for serious maintenance, and parts wear out in a few years; They pay far poorer than they advertise. Most of the managers are not from the states, from Denmark, Netherlands etc. Sometimes there's a language barrier. The workers spend a lot of time, just sleeping up in the nacelles, because they are only allowed to maintain towers on their list which is about 2 per day, at most, so if they are done, they have to just stay there, and wait, sleep in the nacelle. They are extremely HOT in the summer time, extremely cold in the Winter, It's a thankless underpaid job, with lousy management. They offer hourly for workers, so they are not allowed over-time, except in emergencies, and they are constantly looking for mainenance techs, and trying to convert an hourly to salaried, where salaried means you get paid for 40 hours, but expected to work more for the same amount.. This industry is built upon Making Money, not an effective or organized management. Workers work for a couple years, then leave and find a completely different line of work, and swear never to go back, even if they get constant offers from WindFarms.. It's a sad thing; people being treated without regard, and not being current with a sensible and effective maintenance strategy.. I was floored when I heard these stories, daily..
HI-australia is going down this path,now,---pulling down Power Stations that did the job !!--with a gov. that has absolutely no Clue what they doing !!--for the first time in our history,we having "black-outs"-welcome to the third world !!--thanks for posting ,
Thanks for your report. Sorry to hear the bad news, unfortunately quite typical for our world. It's not the technology at fault here, it's the people and corporations behind the projects. Very disappointing that so few people here seem at all concerned about it!
On the point of frequency control/grid inertia--although modern wind turbines do not have a direct connection between the generator and grid, they can still supply "synthetic" inertia. Essentially, if the frequency dips, the power electronic converters are commanded to put out extra power to the grid. On short time scales (seconds), this is called "primary frequency response." It has the net effect of slightly slowing down the speed of the wind turbine rotor, similar to a conventional power plant. On longer time scales (minutes), the power grid typically also needs "secondary frequency response." Here, it's good to have generators available that can put out extra power for 30 minutes or so. For a wind turbine to serve this purpose, it must be "de-rated." A de-rated turbine supplies a fraction of its maximum power output (e.g., say 90% rated capacity). One way to de-rate a turbine is to pitch the blades a few degrees out of the wind. When needed, the blades can be pitched back to optimal for full power output. Source: "Wind Energy Generation: Modeling and Control" by Anaya-Lara, et al.
Anyone else confused as to how a country can keep itself legally responsible to emission goals? Lol like what happens if they don't meet that goal? Is the leader thrown in jail? Does the country pay a fine? If so, to who?
Someone in the comments talked about "the massive amount of noise" from wind generators. I have the things all around me. They seldom make any noise at all. When they do, it is VERY quiet and kind of pleasant. It only lasts for a few seconds and is a low frequency whoosh. When I first heard it, I stopped and listened to figure out what it was. About 3 years ago, they installed a natural gas pipeline about a quarter of a mile from our house. We didn't know it was there. The first time they used it, it scared the crap out of us. It sounds like a freight train. It sounds like a nuclear bomb would sound if it was dropped a couple of hundred miles away.
For a bigger portion of the video than i want to admit i thought we were talking about a small island called Arlan. And now i can't stop hearing it. I live on the west coast of Finland. Wind power + hydrogen plants are a nice combo. Specially when there is a lithium mine less than 100km away and it needs to be processed to lithium hydroxide. Estimated 5% of global production should be coming from here in few years and it is easy to sell when there is renewable energy involved: you can avoid carbon taxes etc. and whoever makes the battery can boast about it in their marketing.
Who knew Ireland's next big export would be wind? 🌬️ Harnessing all that blustery weather for energy is both brilliant and poetic. Cheers to a future where our biggest challenge is keeping the sheep from napping in the turbines!
I'm not seeing wind energy bring down my bills, infact, anything to do with green energy has pushed bills eye-wateringly high, and the reductions at this late point in time have not got back near to the affordable levels. Have been loving the quality content though.
Nobody is talking here about the irritating noise they produce when close to inhabited areas, the huge number of birds they kill, and the impossibility of recycling those materials (especially the blades). The high cost of maintenance was mentioned in the video, though quite white-washed.
Yes, wind turbines can be a problem for many birds, especially if they are located on bird trekking routes. But thousands of times more birds are killed by flying into high buildings.
I agree that nuclear is very good for the production of energy, but from what I understand it’s very expensive because of all the safety concerns. Further more, nuclear makes us dependent of other countries where we buy the uranium. I think that the reason most countries have nuclear is that they need nuclear power for their nuclear weapon arsenal.
@@olavberrig4548 nuclear is not that expensive it matters on the type of reactor as for safty its safer then wind and only slightly more dangerous then solar uranium is also VERY abundent also the same could be said about the rare earth metals needed for solar and wind nuclear also doesnt always make nukes it matters on what type of reactor and such
@@olavberrig4548 It's expensive because of incompetent regulation and because most places forgot how to build them. Regulators force the industry to use reactor types which were obsolete about 70 years ago, make it nearly impossible to make the most minor of improvements, and grossly overestimate the potential damages. There are enough countries exporting uranium and each bit goes so far that it's not really a concern. Even then, there are BILLIONS tons dissolved in the ocean that can be extracted. It isn't economically feasible at this time, but the option is there.
It is not clean and barely safe. It is insane to keep building hyper expensive dangerous technology that just has to fail once to poison a considerable area.
Seems to me , that windmills slow the wind coming across the blades slowing the cooling effects of the wind . On a massive scale this might help cause global warming .
No, it's not, not as long as the WASTE is deadly for 50,000 years! there's NO safe place to store the stuff, they had been putting it in steel drums in a salt mine, steel corrodes in a few years. The mining of uraneum produces dust, radioactive dust gets in your lungs and there's CANCER
@@rokov13Very few people do build them. Because they’re expensive. Nuclear power is roughly twice as expensive on a per kwh basis as natural gas, wind, or solar. Source: US Energy Information Administration. The main advantage of nuclear power is its high capacity factor. Nuclear energy is built because it’s reliable, not because it’s cheap.
it's not the locations as these are all over the world it's that china does almost all of the refining because they do it cheaper by mostly ignoring environmental problems in the refining. to do it clean takes more money so it's more expensive.
It's been found but the infrastructure is not in place for processing. The mine in Kiruna, Sweden is still far away from developing the Rare Earth deposit, so at the moment, China still holds all the marbles.
Rare Earth is a misnomer, as these elements are not rare per se. The issue is the lack of concentrated ores and hence the cost and waste of refining from low grade ores. Now that there are significant uses for these “rare” elements a lot more prospecting is being done.
Rare earths are abundant in a lot of places. Even in western countries. But environmentalists are doing anything they can to prevent the mining of it in the truest NIMBY fashion one can imagine.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: the problem with our power grid is the power's that be, not the powers generate. A large national grid is an idiotic and wasteful exercise in aristocratic arrogance. 85-90% of power shipped via a power grid is WASTED. It's so massive that it's ridiculous. We need distributed small redundant systems just like in computing. We don't need multi-trillion-dollar power grids controlled by mega-corporations or governments... they're stupid. We need whatever makes sense in a region (solar, wind, natural gas, nuclear, etc...) powering a single metropolitan area or even several small grids powering a big metropolitan area. Without the wasteful grid, the math works out without effort. The problem is there isn't a single place for a power struggle to dictate control of.
Ummm.... As an electrical engineer I don't understand what you mean by such a high waste in electricity transmission. Idaho, being the highest in loss, is like below 13%
The gearbox is not coasting multi million dollers. I think price is something arround 500k. Also i think newer Wind Turbines have not a gearbox but a frequency converter to change the frequency.
The 6MW Nordex turbines being assembled South of my house are synchronous and have massive gearing to be directly attached to the grid. I'd bet there is north of $2 million in each gear box.
I agree, total cost of a wind turbine can be estimated to be around 1 million euros per 1MW of capacity. Not very likely that a gearbox costs millions, unless perhaps it is in a really big WTG.
As a Texan who lived through the freeze, our electric grid sucks, but Texan politicians have been fighting over upgrading it state wide. Once again it all comes down to money
Sounds like Texas and the rest of the continental US would have a more reliable power supply if the two grids were interconnected. The extra costs the feds might impose on Texas might help with the reliability of the Texas grid, eg making Texas fit de-icing systems onto Texan wind turbine blades.
I think you mean "how much money can they pocket while their people suffer". I have a friend who lived in Texas at the time, and she and her family had to huddle together by their fireplace after their heating unit shut down as a result of cascading power failures caused by the freezing temperatures. Worse was Governor Abbott and his family fleeing to Mexico while Texans literally froze to death. That friend has moved to a different state with her family.
There’s no “gearbox maintenance” outside of checking oil level for a leak (extremely rare), changing the filter, and opening the gear view port to make sure there’s no chipping or excess wear. The 10 year mark for complete oil change is coming up on our moventus boxes but outside of that, “maintenance” takes about 20 minutes a year.
There most certainly is other maintenance. I’ve been involved in retrofitting gearboxes for years. Factory faults mean bearings need replacement and gearboxes are regularly opened up to pin bearing raceways which are rotating in the housing.
Wind Energy Causes Friction In The Air: Like When You Put To Many Fans In One Room Or To Close Together The Friction In The Air Makes Them Start To Blow Hot Air Under Those Conditions: Then When You Remove The Windmills Or Turbines It Goes From Hot And Potentially Damaging The Sun To Cold Because There Is The Yin Yang Affect: If You Do It Right It Is Neutral Air: Which Is The Aeolis Affect: Do Not Cause Global Heating And Excessive Cold Waves With Excessive Wind Energy It Does Not Sustain The Planets Terrafor: Keep The Right Ammount Of Everything For The Planets Terrafrom!.
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I procrastinate studying actual engineering by watching real engineer videos.
This is the way.
Same brother
Have you tried to study real engineering istead of actual engineering?
@@fnapis That's a dangerous path. You could become another "free energy water powered car modder" in youtube, due to lack of thermodinamics and basic physics knowledge...
This makes you a Real Engineer
Long ago I planned to make a few small scale wind turbines for a turbine wall or putting one on each roof, which I planned to connect to a CVT to stabilize power output... calculated for RPM, but never even considered frequency. Goes to show how there is always more to research... makes me want to go to trade school just to learn about it lol.
What I love:
In most channels, a title like this prompts hundreds of totally uninformed comments about why wind power doesn't work.
Here, you get lots of comments by actual engineers who know what they are talking about, giving real-world insights into specific issues
Absolutely. I'm no engineer, but I love to hear from those who can discuss issues relating to renewables and help me learn about the subject.
It's refreshing not to see a comments section filled with, 'All wind turbines break', 'it can't be done' (often without any mention of what 'it' means), 'what happens when the sun dies?' etc, etc.
It's sad knowing that many of these comments are from bots, and they come originally from those who aren't trying to make the world a better place to live in.
Thanks to everyone who shares their knowledge!
I think you don't watch videos that are more like university presentations and video essays.
@@Dr.Kraig_Ren I watch both. My point was that for a channel as "mainstream" as Real Engineering, it's refreshing.
The university presentation type videos usually don't get nearly a million views and 3000 comments in a day or so 🙂
The top-level comments here from actual wind turbine engineers are great. The replies to them include plenty of "can't be done" naysaying from fossil fuel shills and nuclear fans who deny the reality of gigawatts of renewable energy and now increasing gigawatt hours of battery storage being installed throughout the world.
As a former wind turbine technician, we should just switch to nuclear. Turbines make a mess and kill lots a birds.
I've probably ingested too much grease and hydraulic oil and inhaled too much fiber glass
The problem with it is it doesn't burn oil
Bro says 'car' like 'keuaeurrr'😂😂😂
interesting to see the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) harness the American great plains wind resource, delivering some of the lowest cost and most reliable power to their US customer. Having a more flexible grid is key with dispatchable gas, demand side management and battery storage for inverter based resources. Industry needs to adapt manufacturing and productive output, through material storage and supply chain management to align with the making of products when power is both clean and most abundant.
Producing E-Fuels and burning them in internal combustion engines afterwards has an efficiency of 5-10%. Compare that with battery storage and direct electricity usage at a combined efficiency around 40-50%.
The batteries made out of rare earth minerals that take an enourmous amount of energy to mine and refine? The batteries that degrade? Making efuels only requires electrolysis. And a liquid fuel can be transported cheaply. So take your battery storage efficiency down by a factor of 10.
@@sliwka621 Batteries are NOT made out of rare earth materials! Lithium is not a rare earth metal such as Neodymium. Many electric motors and generators are made out of rare earth metals, although you can make them without them. Of course you can criticize Lithium mining and battery production, but please stay by the facts
The benefit of synthetic fuels is that they have an effectively infinite storage capacity.
Google methanol economy
I got sad as soon as he mentioned Hydrogen. Often it is a terrible solution being promoted by all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons.
As long as electrolysis using oversupply of "green" generation makes the Hydrogen, and then that Hydrogen supply replaces existing applications of hydrogen previously using Methan Steam Reformed production...then maybe it makes sense.
1. We are unlikely to ever have much sustainable oversupply of green generation to make Hydrogen with.
2. If we do have oversupply of green generation are we sure Hydrogen production is the best use of it compared to all the other potential uses like storage for future peaks, or making something else, or carbon capture.
3. Before we start dreaming of new applications for Hydrogen like transportation and such, ALL the current demand for medical, industrial and agricultural Hydrogen needs to be converted from Steam Reforming to Electrolysis. As long as some Hydrogen is produced with Methane, the ALL Hydrogen is dirty. Creating new demand for Hydrogen just extends the life and pollution from dirty Hydrogen production.
Making hydrogen is a very inefficient conversion of energy.
Hydrogen is a fuel needing to be transported and stored which is also terribly inefficient.
Most uses of hydrogen are also terribly inefficient energy conversion so it is lost on both ends and the middle.
Once you run the math hydrogen is almost never a good option.
The problem with Wind Generators is the effect that Jack Welsh delivered in the 1980's.
The small manufacturing industries who built affordable Wind Generators that Consumers could buy,
were a threat to industrial scale Power Generator Investors.
If the use of small wind generating capacity were available in the USA ,
the Investors who benefit from Coal and Large Wind Generating production facilities,
appear to be provided a bit less profits.
Welsh seemed to end the short life of small Wind Generator Companies,
as the Tax incentives were removed and the Solar Panels came off the White House.
Should add a gravity power storage system, too.
While they can be a good solution, the environmental impact (unless repurposing an existing reservoir) and the efficiency losses make them a tough sell. But definitely one of the better options
Real Engineering has a video on pumped storage, the biggest problem is the location, finding two reservoir with a high elevation difference is difficult.
I did not know wind power generation had so many issues. I'll think about it.
With battery storage systems, you have ms, which is millisecond frequency regulation.
Lack of flywheel inertia is nowadays a non-existent problem, at least if you are smart enough to drop your fact-resistant attitude.
Lot of money for not a lot of results.
They all start wearing out the moment they go into service.
No program for recycling the blades.
I wish there were more jobs were you have to watch TV
Is it possible for me to get pictures of the designs used in this video to explain the construction of a wind turbine?
I never got why wind turbines are made this way. Would the round "blade" from a blower fan be better? It could handle high winds, cheaper to make and less likely to break, less components, could be retrofitted on antenna poles (or any poles for that matter) not as heavy so doesnt need as strong of wind to produce energy. Really dont get the inefficient design.
"Ireland is a wind energy paradise."
They're also a paradise for certain, dangerous groups.
Like the USA has.
Basically we need a capacitor
Thanks for the video
An e excellent report, thank you
Do they use hunting gears to reduce maintenance?
I'm sceptical about future Hydrogen but we'll see. The thing I'm worried about are the huge blades which are an environmental disaster in the making. They're not really recyclable despite some half ass attempts.
Harvesting Methane from Cow Farts = Wind Energy
No and impractical.
@@randallbesch2424 Wind ... Farts... Tough crowd 🤣
Wouldnt we technically run out of wind if we were to increase wind power usage seeing how wind doesnt really push or convert energy into other things unless its a tree or plant or such so increasing the amount of windmills would make the wind transmit energy more and the wind loses energy ao it goes slower till theres no wind if enough were to be used but yes wind is generated almost constantly but still a thought to be thought i think
They don't "mill" anything.
Wind costing you more money.. incredible
How many birds do wind turbines kill?
It seems that we are trying to solve one problem by creating other problems! Clever humans :)
(not my area of expertise, educate me)
For the frequency synchronising on the grid from the turbine output, are capacitors/capacitor banks a viable remedy?
(Even just theoretically)
so that could you have the turbine generator (especially direct drive, with the high magnet volume stator) producing Peak Power at any given RPM, and outputting it all to a capacitor & transformer setup that can then pass it along to the grid?
As stated at 6:45 stamp, the turbine can't recover from a frequency drop that is due to windspeed, but a capacitor is capable of a quick discharge of energy, and so could potentially jump the output back to the grid hz, or help stabilise the network if a seperate turbine stutters.
/If yes on all above, would it make sense to have local grid systems of turbines at each farm, that are all interconnected, aiming for a combined Net KwH/+Hz output, that could then be interlinked to the main grid, allowing for peaks and drops to even each other out?.
Hello Mr. Engineering
I recently saw a yt short user using your voice
I dont know how to contact you so kindly tell me how I can send you the link to the short so you can take action
Regards,
A nice viewer
Wind turbine service technician here, actually modern machines doesnt need to achieve 1500-1800 rpm to produce power, thanks to the converter system its possible to start producing usable power as low as around 900-1000 rpm (about 3.5 / 4 m/s of wind on 150m diameter machines at max blade pitch angle).
The way its done is simply to lower the voltage frequency on the generator side of the converters (while keeping 50/60Hz on the grid side).
The 1500-1800 range is now more of a "max power" range if the wind speed is high enough (4.2MW for a Vestas V150 MK3E for example, at about 11m/s).
About the maintenance on gearboxes in fact there is not really much to do most of the time, as soon as the service is correctly done (filter changes, oil levels) they can last more than the 7 years you are speaking without any issues. Of course gearboxes problems are possible, but they are pretty rare compared to the quantity of machines.
Thank you for sharing.
Do you remember the old farm windmills that were multi-functional, and lasted for decades? The power shaft would go from the blades, through 2 bevel gears, all of the way down to the ground level, THEN, that power was used, or converted, at the ground level. That old method seems like it would be WAY more efficient, and practical. As opposed to having ALL of the equipment on top of a 300 foot pole.
Is the parachute incase of fire thing real ?
@@coachbrandon01 That would require a lot more weight, a lot more rotating mass, and bevel gears are less efficient than spur gears.
@@coachbrandon01 You think it's more practical and efficient to have two bevel gears dealing with extremely high torque, connected to a shaft that's potentially 150m long going into a gearbox and generator unit?
The people turning on kettles for tea during ad breaks at 5:45 is probably the most british thing I have ever heard.
Same thing happens in every country, take the superbowl in the US.
People open fridges, make coffee, etc.
It's just that we're famous for drinking tea.
But nobody says this about Japan! Or China? Or India?
The same statistic is done in Germany right now. You can see it in the Water usage while pause of the UEFA European Championship people use the Toilet.
LOL !!!
When on a visit to the now closed Hinkley Point B visitor centre, my dad was told by a technician who worked there that one of the most important documents within the control centre of the reactor was, in fact, the Radio Times. For those outside the UK, that is a TV guide magazine. It allowed them to compensate for the spike in energy usage when the soaps finished, for example. 😂 it really is such a British thing, and as a proud English man, it makes me smile, but I digress.
@@MostlyPennyCat Good question, what do they do in the break in China and Japan or even India?
Recently started working for a bearing manufacturer. Among the biggest problems with the bearing replacement is the fact that it requires removing the blades, which requires the use of cranes, which are very expensive and have to be scheduled. Apparently some companies are switching to split-ring bearings, which can be replaced without removing the blades. It's my understanding that they wear a little faster, but they reduce the cost of each replacement so much that it's incredibly worth it. Just thought I'd throw in my two cents to show that there are entire industries working to solve this problem and that it's not unworkable.
How much diesel does it take to transport the crane? How much diesel does the crane use? They're heavy. Tire wear? What about road damage? Maintenance on the crane and equipment that transports it? The turbine spins requiring lubrication... I could go on but yeah.
Cooper used to make split bearings for the paper industry - wonder if that technology could be used
@@aaadamt964 Guy is talking about bearings. Not diesel consumption on a single one way trip for a thing that then consumes no fossil fuels for the next several decades of its life once it is erected.
But you go off about the dozens of gallons of fuel used to transport and set up a better version of energy production than any carbon powered gas turbine in the world. One that will work for decades with minimal maintenance. Gas turbine facilities have teams of people working around the clock. Wind farms have a small team of people going around and checking and maintaining hundreds or thousands of wind turbines. Much better man-hours/MWh ratio.
Also, please check how much tire wear occurs on a single trip of transporting each and every component of a wind turbine. If it was the same truck and trailer doing all of the hauling, I doubt the operator would need to replace any tire by the time the entire wind turbine farm was set up.
@@mikes2381 what do you think lubricates those bearings? How often do they need maintenance? Nothing with moving parts just lasts several decades. Google claims those things last 20 years. I wouldn't bet money on them lasting half that if they're meticulously maintained. Hint: they're not.
It is unworkable. Wind energy is the biggest scam in power and transportation. And I would love to see the math on how replacing the bearings with cheaper alternative that requires more maintenance cuts the cost.
lol you know you’ve got quite the audience, when you’re first ten comments are ‘I work in this’, ‘I invented that’… 👍🏻
Everyone wants to be important, let em
wind energy has created a whole bunch of new millionaries, the new Rockefellers. and wind generated electricity is, by far, the most expensive way to produce the juice. Argue away, but why do you think Electricity rates have skyrocketed while all of this new technology has been developed. I truly wonder if the carbon footprint of one of these goliaths is much larger than just burning the old fossil fuels?
I think you are a glass half empty sort of bloke, renewables are the best hope we have
@@jerryw6699renewables are the cheapest means of producing electrical energy, have a look at the cost blowouts on nuclear power station being constructed
OR, it could be people defending the wind turbine industry. They don't want any negative (but true) videos on TH-cam.
Thanks for the video, but it's a bit outdated. Wind turbines nowadays have better power control systems that allow the "inertia" effect and allow 50/60Hz output and variable speed without all of the power going through an inverter. The gearbox has a design life equivalent to the turbine's design life (15 years in France generally).
On a turbine from REpower I worked on, the flowing was built -in:
- It has a winded rotor. No permanent magnets requiring rare earth.
- At partial load (low wind): partial load variable speed wind turbines (VSWT) utilize a method where the rotor operates at variable speeds while maintaining a constant 50Hz output on the stator. This is achieved through the injection of variable frequency current into the rotor, which is controlled to match the desired output frequency on the stator side.
- At full load (high wind), the pitch changes depending the wind speed and grid frequency to maintain the 50Hz
- VSWT can provide an emulated inertial response by using the kinetic energy stored in the rotating mass of the turbine. This is similar to the inertial response provided by traditional synchronous generators. When there is a sudden drop in grid frequency, the turbines can quickly inject additional power to the grid, helping to stabilize the frequency. During frequency drops, the turbine can temporarily operate in overproduction mode, generating more power than its mechanical input by using stored kinetic energy. This rapid power injection helps to counteract the frequency drop.
After the frequency stabilizes, the turbine can reduce its output to recover its rotational speed and maintain optimal operating conditions.
A better description of the variable frequency alternator. The 3 phase wound rotor is fed with a sine wave at the difference between 50 Hz and what the alternator rpm is trying to produce. This could be faster or slower. The high power output is inverter frequency controlled by a low power excitation input. This effect is called magnetic amplifier and means no niodymium magnets and no huge loads on inverters. I experimented with this as motor speed control 40 y6ears ago even before mosfets.
Im really getting tired of this channels repeated mistakes and inaccuracies. They are so often such pivotal points of the videos, too.
A majority do not. Grow up.
@@cherriberri8373the comment or is incorrect.
Didn't the vid come out 4 days ago?
Im an offshore wind turbine technician in the US. the platform i work on is a direct drive, no gearbox needed. Those generators are fascinating bits of tech.
How long does the oil last in a gearbox driven generator?
@@volvo09it depends on the platform, but gear oil is usually changed during the yearly maintenance cycles
Battery storage
Had the opportunity to get on a Siemens D11. Amazing machines, and a stark contrast to a traditional drive train
I'm not sure whether the logic why direct drives are used in this video is correct: 'not fully understood bearing and gear failure, causing high repair costs'. I think gear life and failure statistics are very well understood in engineering, and maintenance is not a: oepsy it failed again - thing, its statistical. Its true that direct drive turbines just have less points of wear and therefore potential failure modes.
The comments are as educational as the video. This is not a criticisism. It is encouragement to read the comments. This is the first really interesting video I have seen on wind power, good job.
Honestly, the video is somewhat outdated regarding the problems we're currently facing. It's repeating the already solved talking points of fossil executives, not the state of the art solutions to those problems.
@@Validolemmmmm… I wonder why………
I think it absolutely DOES reflect on the creator for having many misleading inaccuracies, what drugs are you smoking that made you think they aren't responsible for giving false- albeit only outdated technically- information?
Especially as a channel that is seen as informational/educational the creators only have more responsibility to actually get it right, not to mention it's not like this guy isn't getting paid, and what they're paid for isn't to spread false info.
@@Validole I feel like their research either has to be incredibly surface level, or they're actively trying, honestly.
Not the first I've seen but aside from that I agree.
That's hilarious to know an entire county's electrical grid can be tripped by people watching TV and all getting up to make tea at the same time.
Well, the situation is present, no matter how you generate the electricity.
@@akyhnesure theoretically, but its primarily an issue of increased cost of reliable power when utilizing renewables
Yep. That's why during major events, such as the superbowl, those transmissions people are busy as hell.
It's also rough when there's been a blackout and when they first turn everyone's power back on. The first second is rough because everyone's ACs, dryers, heaters, etc need more power when they first start
That was disturbing.
The same thing happens at water and wastewater treatment plants when people get up to go to school/work, they may shower, flush the toilets, and use the sinks around the same time for a few hours. Then there's a few hours before lunch, then dinner, and finally before going to bed. Some plants have FEB's (Flow Equalization Basin) that temporarily hold the waste water until it can be processed during the low usage periods.
I'm a former controls engineer and have designed, built, and maintained dozens of those plants around the country. It's amazing to see the infrastructure required to handle all of that. The same with the grid.
I'm an environmental engineer from Texas and I was working at a natural gas plant when the grid went down. Texas doesn't have an requirement for winterization because they don't want to connect to the national grid. It's kind of a 1-2 punch that led to the blackouts. It's kind of a joke with people in my industry that cold weather means we'll be on the phone with the government reporting pollution releases because the plants keep going down when equipment breaks - always on the weekend. I don't think we get enough electricity from wind for the turbines going down to make a difference, even out here in west Texas where it's very flat and windy and there are turbines all over.
the TVA has Winterization and still Had a 66% nat gas failure Rate dec 23 dec 24,
During the Texas freeze, wind resources fell to single digit capacity factor, meaning they were no help. A bunch of nat gas failed, but a bunch of other nat gas was scrambling to come online to cover the difference. There just wasn't enough of it. But wind can't scramble to come online at all. If we keep shutting down dispatchable generators in Texas, adding only wind and solar, then the reliability problem will only grow bigger.
and on Dec 23 dec 24 2022 Texas did a lot better then the FED GOV TVA
the TVA is on the eastern gird did purchase 10k megawatts from other power companys and still lost dec 23 dec 24 2022
Lol 😂😂😂😂 in Germany they hate renewable Energy but have a stable Net with 99,986% Availability!!! And a Lot of they think they German Net is worse...😂😂😂
This German people should BE live in Texas....😅😅😅
little fun fact: enercon brand wind turbines (the ones wich have a egg shaped top housing and are very recognizable at 0:24) are the only widely used turbines w/o a gearbox, they instead have a large "pancake" style generator wich does not need any gears and is made specifically to generate peak power at the lower RPM the blades spin at
its also why the housing is egg shaped
edit: enercon recently celebrated 40 years and their first direct drive turbine, the E-40 was developed in the early 90s
direct drive is nothing new, nothing that needs to "prove itself", its been proven and reliable for over 30 years now
The past few years both Siemens and GE have also devellopped a gearless turbine.
The trick is to have more energy gain by having a selective variable rotor speed than the energy loss through the AC-DC-AC conversion.
Still waiting for the ‘fun’
@@Monkey80llx then dont watch an engineering video you pillock
Definitely not true, that they are the only widely used turbines without gearboxes. As someone else already posted, Siemens Gamesa, General Electric but also Vestas turbines used offshore are exclusively without gearboxes.
@@gehtdichnixan2801you are correct, people think Enercon are the only one because they had the patent, but it expired some time ago so other manufacturers are now using the same technology
Mechanical design engineer of windturbine gearboxes here. I can say that the section of the gearboxes is not 100% correct. Yes the sensitieve part of the gearbox are the bearings, in particular the high speed shaft. But a lot of development is done in the bearing and bearing arrangement to reduce these failures to max 5-10 in a popultion of 1000. Also current gearboxed exist of 2 or even 3 planetary stages. These are just a few things
Did you have any exposure to plain bearings in those gearboxes? Some manufacturers seem to have transitioned.
@@MichaelKobler-yu6fy Indeed, plain bearings are being used in the planetary stages now as well. But they bring their own issues and challenges. Another innovation is the medium speed drivetrain in which the generators rotate at 400-500 RPM, eliminating the need for a high speed year stage. The gearbox section shown in the video would have been 100% correct, for a typical design of around ca. 2010 😊
@@JanHouben that's correct colleague?😉
@@PJke456would you see any benefit from ceramic rolling elements? It was hoped that they'd be more durable than metal, but it looks like they might just end up being lighter.
Couldn't something like a CVT be used to smooth out the frequency variation? I mean there has yo be a massive downside or it would be used. I just don't know what the most relevant downside is here 😅
Currently working on turbines that are 20+ years old. Sure bearings and gearboxes go bad but these things crank out energy like it’s going out of style. And modern turbines are making power from 750rpm all the way up to 1500+ so the wind window is much wider than they used to be. Even the old ones I work on make power at 820rpm. In fact we normally are flagged for making too much and have to shut some towers off on high wind days.
Yes it can put out energy at 750 rpm but if it runs 80% at 750 rpm it is not efficient. You have to shut down the towers because the grid cant store energy. Wind and solar are not a energy source for a stable grid.
Yes but take one look at the UK power generation, Wind fluctuates between 70% of power and none. Power is only worth something if you can use it and often wind power actually makes every other power generation type more expensive (less uptime and more stop and starts for gap filling). This creates a distorted perspective of the cost of wind energy. Most countries are subsiding wind power often in ways most don't recognize as subsides (ie fixed price for power) again producing distorted cost analysis.
@@mitchellcouchman1444 The more wind turbines you have up and down the UK, the less of an effect that problem is going to have. Just having floating offshore wind turbines alone reduces issues with storage by strategic placement.
@@billyredtail no it doesn't, not really, because wind in different places isn't independent. While at the same time replacing other more reliable and actually independent sources like gas, coal and nuclear you do put yourself massively at risk of the energy shortage of winter 2022 when there was minimal wind across all of the UK leading to energy shortages
@@mitchellcouchman1444 absolutely right. It’s not the end all-be all for stability. Just the technology has come a long way. We’re starting to add battery storage in parallel with the wind turbines here in the U.S. and that helps with jumps and dips in energy demand but it also isn’t the final answer. Honestly I’d think closest to perfect solution would be nuclear that is also used to create Hydrogen and that hydrogen powering a gas plant for the fluctuations. But for now the wind business is putting food on my table and my family happy.
Wind turbines don't operate during storms. It spins too fast and the heat on the bearing and gears can cause fires. Also the the blades can bend inward and hit the vertical support causing catastrophic collapse.
I know someone who works for a company developing HVDC links to connect country grids together, really cool tech. Maybe a video about HVDC can be a good complimentary video to this one.
HVDC really is the under-discussed key to a renewable energy future
Looking at the ac to dc converter used for the windturbine, wouldn't it be more efficient if these were connected to HVDC connections?
Now that I have thought about it for more than 5 seconds, I spot a potential problem. The frequency isn't the problem, due to the ac to dc converter. But I would expect the voltage coming from a windturbine to be much lower than the HVDC voltage. If this expectation is correct, you can't connect windturbines to the HVDC line.
@@Krasbin On Vestas machines the voltage output of the generator is around 600-800 volts, way less than what is needed for HVDC
@@Krasbinit’s planned, it’s called hybrid HVDC interconnectors and connects two countries to the same offshore wind resource. So they can both use the wind as well as use it as a hub for connecting more wind directly to existing networks.
I’m going to produce a video on it in future (I work for such a company).
I’ve got 220 videos planned so far on the UK grid and grid technology including HVDC. Subscribe and it’ll come eventually :) worked in HVDC for many years.
8:15 is that a FULL BRIDGE RECTIFIER?!?!!!11!!1
Calm down BigClive
It's a 2-phase rectifier, I would have thought these generators would be 3-phase.
Yes, that is indeed a *_Fffffuuuuull Bridge Rectifier_*
It’s a Wheatstone bridge
FOOL BRIDGE RECTIFIERRR
I completed my masters degree on direct drive power converters a decade ago.
The inertia of the turbine is absolutely still present even if not directly synchronised to the grid. Under a surge the controller can have the inverter match the grid demand and slow the turbine down by drawing more power from it than it is currently producing. In fact at the time I was studying it I was informed of techniques to allow the turbines to spin faster storing more energy in inertia if a surge is predicted overriding the MPPT algorithm.
It’s not too dissimilar to how battery storage is being used to stabilise the grid
That's interesting thanks for sharing. This is similar to battery emulated inertia or how is it different?
@@96oscarC I’ve not worked on battery inverters but I imagine it’s very similar techniques used when it comes to frequency stabilisation (DC decoupled turbines are just a rectifier and an inverter after all)
Yeah, I would say that there are not even that many synchronous wind turbines anymore.
With enercons EP3 4 and 5 series that evolution is also visible, now integrating the inverters right into a "container" behind the direct driven generator.
And it's only logical to allow the turbine to spin up slightly above it's maximum power point (in low power usage situations) to have it's inertia as additional regulation headroom for the converter/inverter.
Here in Germany, the by far biggest problem is the weak grid not being able to just simply transfer the huge amounts of energy from the north to the south of the country.
I was about to say - that inverter should be programmable, and you should be able to set it to just emulate a large inertial mass, right?
Like a motor controller where you can set the output frequency. I never quite got why we have seemed to all collectively program these inverters to be pure frequency followers, when a few control loop settings should let them help, too...
have you heard of the breakthrough in freewheel vs direct drive (regen)motors? its called free gen, grin technologies channel can tell you more about it. Some guy just sat down and thought about the problem and solved it.
Importing nuclear power while trying to go "green", what waste of money and environmental devastation. Just build a nuclear plant!
It makes absolutely no sense for a small country like Ireland to build nuclear now.
All the hassle of international treaties and infrastructure, waste storage costs etc., when they have so much renewable potential!!
Much better to build the hydrogen generation and storage facilities along with more investment in tidal and wave and buy from France or even the UK, but we don’t do much nuclear.
Northern Ireland resident here, currently sitting maybe a few hundred metres away from a wind turbine. Great to hear about a topic like this that's right in my back yard (well, in the farmer's field next door). I had noticed a lot more wind turbines appearing across the countryside in recent years - didn't know that the island of Ireland had so much more wind than the average.
Can you hear the wind turbine from your home? Wondering if these turbines have noticeable noise when spinning.
@@EdoTyran I can hear a faint, soft noise from it when out in the field a bit closer to it, but nothing from my house. TBH, even rain, road noise or a gust of wind would drown out the sound.
I was working as a technician also in north Ireland. Nice to meet people like you.
Would drive me absolutely insane if I were stuck living next to these things. Renewables have disgustingly massive form factors. I pray they don't start erecting these abominations in the unspoiled wilderness areas here in NA. They're already beginning to ruin the coastal areas on the east coast, I hope they keep them away from the PNW and Alaska.
@@somealias-zs1bw😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢😢
I really like your videos, but this time you missed... All those issues you are talking about in this video was solved 10y ago. Synthetic Inertia is mandatory in order to pass Grid Compliance Test, Gearbox issues are real strugle, but nobody is replacing them every 7y and cost is about 500k for full replacement including work and spare parts. Also, in the video, you are showing Enercon turbines, and those do not have any of those issues: No Gearbox, no permanent magnets, Synthetic Inertia is included 20y ago in every turbine...
what about the extreme amount of noise they causes?. There are people who cant live at their houses anymore because companies decide to put up wind turbines nearby
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Move.
How does synthetic inertia works? Thanks
@@estebanamador7601 inertia is simulated with the help of electronics, since it is just a 60Hz wave.
@@francisR46 While this is true, the noise of wind turbines is highly overstated and very, very few people would realistically see any need to move because of the noise they cause. Road traffic causes significantly more noise than wind turbines, and we have not stopped building roads because of it either. The few people who are actually affected seriously by wind turbines, beyond aesthetic complaints, should be financially supported in either sound proofing their homes, or moving. It should not be their financial burden, but it can't stop progress of renewables either.
Inertia can be added artificially. This artificial inertia could even be better than the real inertia. While a real spinning rotor can only slow down from 1800 rpm to 1797 rpm to go from 60Hz to 59.9Hz, with a rectifier and inverter, the physical rpm be changed 20% or more, making far more of that rotational energy available.
That energy doesn't even have to be rotational. Battery storage systems could react instantly with their stored power, providing short bursts above their continuous rating. Even solar inverters could be programmed to have artificial inertia. The inverter (and sometimes DC booster) has internal capacitors that can be tapped (though their stored energy is a lot less).
Thank you!
I was also missing an explanation of doubly fed induction generators, which allow direct connection to the grid while having a fairly decoupled speed. Those have inertia too.
In many grids the majority of grid inertia is already provided by batteries, as they are extremely well suited for that task. Would have been a good topic to bring up
The problem with chemical batteries is that:
1. They're expensive, especially at the scales needed to deal with the power grids
2. They can only unload so much power within a certain timespan before they start getting damaged
@@edwinhuang9244 “they’re expensive”
Private investors pay for them, and then get paid for the frequency response services they provide. Previously that money would go to natural gas plants or other dispatchable sources, but BESS saw a niche where they were competitive and said “hey, we can provide the same service for cheaper”. The grid operators save money, ratepayers save money, and the BESS owners make money. Legacy dispatchable sources get the short end of the stick, but I’m not really a protectionism kinda guy.
Also you only need a relatively small battery to do frequency response
yeah and if you want to add more synthetic inertia capacity you just add more capacitors or batteries to the DC bus of the inverter. People really need to get this idea that we need mechanical inertia out of there heads. The grid runs on electricity so electrical only solutions would work fine.
Here in Brazil we have a national electric grid based on hydro power. The large reservoirs provide inertia for the wind energy. The problem for Wind Energy here is that our Hydroelectric power is so cheap that the system’s controller does not let wind energy into the grid (constrained off). Our capacity factor for wind power here is very competitive tough , >45%
as someone who works with frequency converters and know the actual people developing the Haliade X drive, i highly recommend making a video on frequency converters, they are used basically everywhere and always get overlooked.
also the DC storage within a converter can be used als 'artificial' inertia, but obviously has nowhere near the capacity of an actual flywheel.
Do you know why you can't build a DC->AC converter that would just work like an inertial system? Switch a tiny bit slower if f
@@PfoohInverters do that but just a little bit because they are delicate electronic devices. Rotating generators can supply a multitude of their rated current for a short while. Inverters can’t do that
@@Pfooh For one thing, you are generally drawing the max power from the wind turbine. You could delay it but there is no option to ramp up power output to meet higher needs.
@@randomvideosn0wherewell, that’s just if you operate wind and solar at 100%.
Some large solar farms operate at 70-80% to be able to provide „digital inertia“ in case the grid needs it.
That’s why we need massive overproduction by wind and by solar all around the world: to have the luxury of throttling them down
@@Pfooh It's not going to be that difficult. It just needs more research to make sure we don't get it wrong. Until recently there was enough inertia that it wasn't needed, so the engineering wasn't focused on creating artificial inertia.
In Alaska where I live, the villages of Wrangell and Kodiak produce virtually 100% of their energy with a combination of wind and hydro. Kodiak installed its first power grid tied wind turbine in 2009. The village of Kotzebue installed its first utility grade wind turbine in 1997 and currently produces about 20% of its energy with wind, saving close to 280,000 gallons of fuel oil or a little over one million dollars annually. Given the high cost of fuel oil, wind and hydro has played a major, cost-effective role in producing Alaska's energy for quite a number of years. Wind energy in much of the U.S. was first installed experimentally, and especially some early efforts were ill-advised not cost effective. To create practical, cost-effective systems, it is essential to conduct a minimum of a two-year wind study, in a specific location, to assure that a sufficient wind resource exists. It makes no sense to install utility grade wind turbines in a location lacking an excellent wind resource.
Not quite correct - Wrangell and Kodiak produce 100% of ELECTRICAL energy with wind and hydro. And most of it is hydro, which has absolutely nothing to do with wind/solar. Don't count on your hydro being safe from the progressives. Here in WA State, the Biden administration has been trying to take down the Snake River hydro plants, to coddle the Salmon.. Clearly they do not regard hydro as a clean form of energy.
Oil prices are artificially kept high otherwise w/s wouldn't make any sense for their intrinsic EROEI is horrendous (8 to 40 times lower than fossil fuels).
@@C_R_O_M________ That's only true if producing CO2 is considered to be free and benign.
@@PeterBaumgart1a I don't know, do you think that the documented and factual greening of the planet due to higher atmospheric CO2 is beneficial or not? Propaganda works wonders.
P.S. Not to mention that we don't even know that most of the CO2 increase is anthropogenic and not the natural consequence of natural warming.
@@C_R_O_M________ Seems like you need to broaden your information sources. (I agree on propaganda.)
You left out something rather important. Software defined inverters (basically all modern industrial ones) like those used in Battery Electricity Storage Systems (BESS) and Variable Frequency Drives (like those used in wind turbines for frequency conversion) are very good at maintaining inertia on a power grid. In other words, spinning a large mass (flywheels, steam turbines) is not the only way to provide inertia for a grid. Utilities call these frequency response services. Huge flywheels like the one you mentioned in Ireland are made redundant when you're installing large battery storage anyways.
It's even entirely possible, though not currently implemented, for EVs doing V2G (vehicle to grid) to provide frequency response services. In the case of the English flipping on their tea kettles during commercial breaks, your EV would charge from the grid during programming, but flip to powering your tea kettle during the commercial break all automatically.
Flywheels aren't made redundant by BESS. Synthetic inertia would require all BESS to maintain sufficient capacity at all times to provide that service. Which defeats the point entirely...
Good post. I would think the advantage the flywheel has vs a battery system is probably a much higher power density. The press release for the flywheel plant states it can store 4000 MWs and they give they give an example of a 500MW load for 8 seconds (so I assume the flywheel's maximum power is 500MW). It's not clear to me reading the press release, but to me it sounds like they describe the frequency stablisation it provides is a passive system that does not require active management (but I could be off on this point).
Inverters are still not great at providing fault current, which is absolutely essential to protecting transmission and distribution circuits. Fuses and relays don't do their job without large amounts of available fault current, and that leads to damaged equipment and worse.
@@EP-bb1rm This flywheel only stores 1.1MWh of energy. A 500MW BESS will have a capacity of 1000MWh to 2000MWh. The BESS are going to be installed anyways, you get the inertia for free. Perhaps there is something specific to Ireland's grid topology that warrants this flywheel, but I'll bet good money flywheels will remain niche.
@@zacksstuff I don't think this is right. Actually this sounds backwards. Fuses and relays don't work better by dumping larger fault currents into them. They have a trip current and a maximum current they can break. The reason the grid needs inertia is so that different parts of the grid don't get out of sync, if they get out of sync a dangerously large fault current will flow between. This is why safety equipment is designed to trip if the frequency gets out of the small defined range, to prevent fault currents the over current devices can't handle before they happen.
In 2015 I worked at a R&D company Artemis that was bought by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to make a variable ratio fluid power takeoff for the (then) largest turbine in the world at 7MW. I was the senior engineer leading the development of the high speed motors that turned the generator shafts that span at 1000rpm supplying synchronous power to the grid and helping with grid stabilisation. That speed was sufficient because of the number of pole-pairs on the generator. There were two prototypes installed: one in Hunterston, Glasgow and the other a floating wind turbine off Fukusfhima, Japan and they were both successful. We won the MacRobert award- the Nobel prize for engineering in the UK. The project was canned after the prototypes- don’t know why.
Aside from our solution there are ‘medium’ speed gearboxes that obviously power slower generators.
There’s not much on the web about it.
Like you guys designed a torque converter that didn’t have direct drive? To the generator?
Theres a proposal from last year to install a flywheel for grid stabilization at hunterstone, seems like most things involving politics things happen very slowly.
There seems a lobby attacking all renewables . Your statement was very interesting and the technology using fluid drive seems the solution!
I always viewed that one from afar - I worked on the Doosan 7-8MW "prototype" that never made it out the design room before also being canned, then later was the site engineer for the Samsung 7MW prototype over in Fife. Funny how the Koreans and Japanese all jumped in at a similar time, trying various novel concepts and then they all decided it wasn't the path they wanted to follow. I wonder if they're kicking themselves now? The Samsung had some interesting tech in it - individual pitch control with dual electric motors per axis, integrated oil-fed main bearing inside a very compact (short) gearbox for the rating plus a full power converter. Odd combination having both a gearbox AND converter but it did meant it could, in theory, provide frequency support and even black start support for the grid.
@@jayryan1956 It was a big fluid drive: a very large pump on the rotor shaft and then smaller hydraulic motors turning the generators. A torque converter is a hydrodynamic device- it uses the momentum of fluid to pass torque from one side to another. I don’t think it can be variable displacement. Our system was hydrostatic- very high pressure (340 bar) piston on the pumps and motors. Because we could change the displacement of the pumps and motors we could adjust the gearing ratio continuously so that the generator span at the desired speed.
Our machines were very efficient (96.5% for the pump) and their displacement could be computer controlled with very fast response times- i.e. we could determine how much oil the pump would make for one rotation of the blades and then how many revs the generator for that volume of oil. MHI sold the technology to Danfoss and you can read about it here: www.danfoss.com/en/products/dps/hydraulic-pumps/digital-displacement-pumps/digital-displacement-single-and-multiple-outlet-pumps/
I Think you are giving the impression that the problem of inertia has only appeared since renewables grew in importance, but various issues including inertia have required synchronous compensators in the past.
Synchronous compensators, being dumb rotating machines with a flywheel.
They are coming back into fashion because of renewables.
That is why most relatively new build renewable farm, both wind and solar, will first send their power to a battery storage, that then deploys to the grid. You lose a little bit of output total but gain massively in term stability. Very few plants I worked on, as a control systems engineer, here in Australia, didn't have these small 30MW batteries solutions to the inertia issue
totally wrong opinion. Steam turbines have all the inertia that system would ever need for primary frequency control. Synchronous condensers were introduced for a different purpose - to continously adjust reactive power in 'problematic' substations. This solution was virtually not present in countries with CHP plants - densely distributed generation can rely mostly on the turbine voltage regulators, solution older than the three-phase grid itself. Rise of SCR-controlled capacitor (and sometimes inductor) banks removed needs for synchronous condensers, although they are still operational and may provide minuscule amount of inertia.
so we are reintroducing a problem we'd already solved thanks to dumb rotating machines with fan blades?
Not to say I disagree with you - but I'd suggest that power electronics didn't make the problem go away - they just made it easier to manage in millisecond timeframes. Spinning reserve (which was needed anyway), non-synchronous compensators and electronic micro-adjustments to generators were then able to manage grid instability much more quickly without the need for rotating compensators - you'll note that these were traditionally put nearby to loads, when the generation might be hundreds of kilometres away.
There seems to be a school of thought that all of this will eventually be able to be managed electronically with batteries and capacitors that switch over in hundredths of milliseconds and keep everything online without hitting protection or cascade failures, however with an inertia-less generation side - which is a feature of a renewable grid, if you have any level of inductance/pf, load/supply, phase misalignment etcetc fluctuation... you're instantly relying on your electronics, which isn't necessarily a great place to be. However, it doesn't need to be a hyper-efficient compensator, you can turn a defunct coal or gas power plant in to one.
@@michawisniewski4654
I stand corrected!
My point being is that solutions aren't being newly invented for renewables, they have existed for a long time.
please do the insane engineering of the SUPERCARRIERS
3 GORGES DAM
Extreme UV Lithography.
Warmongering creepoid.
The Insane Engineering of YOUR MOTHER!
@@MihkelKukkbe respectful idiot
Doesn't matter even if it's a joke
The Haliade-X is not the largest turbine, that's either the Siemens Gamesa 14 (14MW) the Dongfang Electric DEW-18 (18MW)
They cannot even get simple facts straight. Why would anyone believe their prognostications?
The flywheel you refer to is called a Synchronous Condenser. We have a lot of them in the U.S. You disconnect the old steam turbine from the generator and attach a starting motor. You spin the generator up to synchronous speed and synch it to the grid, and then disconnect it from the starting motor. It uses power from the grid to continue running. You then have the spinning mass required to help stabilize the grid. This is currently the best means of voltage and frequency stabilization for all the renewable energy coming on line.
And wind turbines in Germny are coupled to the grid. It is a requirement to build them. Quite a narrow POV in the video again.
that is not correct. The synchronous condensers do perform the function that you described - but if the inertia required is greater than what their rotor can produce (limited by its mass and diameter), then a flywheel is inserted between the synchronous condenser and the pony motor, with the flywheel being a large cylinder of forged steel rotating inside a casing and supported on bearings. Vacuum is created between the flywheel and its casing to reduce friction and friction losses, including heat. So the guy was right about vacuum but he did not mention or does not know about the electrical part (which is the synchronous condenser) which is meant to convert the mechanical inertia into electrical inertia which can be injected into the grid in case of disturbances
I worked at two sites that had synchronous condensers at the end of long HV transmission lines when I was a teenager. In winter they were warm and the 50 cycle hum was nice to sleep near if you had been partying all night.
The wind flows off the Scottish coast are the greatest, most consistent in Europe. We also have pumped storage in Scotland where water is pumped up during low energy usage times , then released down when energy is required. Wind turbines do not need replacement every 7 years. It’s just a big generator and there are thousands of industrial models used far more heavily without issue in powers stations worldwide.
Yes there just cheaply built reduction gear and the public get charged a massive amount for them when you could buy a quality reduction gear system for a fraction of the green energy sector prices but everything in the green industry is charged at astronomical prices compared to normal machinery
True, the entire turbine need replacing (scrapping) every 14 years. But the gear box needs to be replaced before that.
@@NiklasLarssonSeglarfan Incorrect.
Using excess power for hydrolysis seems like another excellent way to prevent waste of energy.
Should be same as Norway people in Scotland should be getting free electric
god made things wind should be free
I actually worked with the Delft Offshore Turbine team to work on a new system which has self-aligning piston rolling which don't have the Brinelling effect. These are actually turbines which pump water to a central generator. The weight of the turbine head is thereby reduced and the turbine can therefore be made higher (more wind power).
Curious, what sort of losses are associated with that and can you then adjust the generator side geometry to maintain 60hz/ 50hz?
-- That's smart. So you lose some power production, but through H2O valve/turbine control you can steady your output? What does maintenance look like in salt water? Would Zinc be worthwhile for the fluid systems, or would that be too expensive? A high tech windmill driven water well. I like it.
@@MarkJacksonGaming Oil is the normal choice for hydraulic fluid
11:08 '"In an ideal world, Ireland could sell wind energy".... "... To France"
In 2023, there were 28,677 wind turbines on land in Germany.
In December 2023, 1,566 offshore wind turbines (OWEA) with a total output of 8.5 GW were in operation in Germany.
Haliade isn't the biggest nor most powerful wind turbine built - Siemens SG-14-236 is larger and has more output. And i am sure the recent MingJang is even larger. How could he missed that? By tailoring the channel for he US audience.
Wind turbines are non synchronous is also not 100% accurate. At least in Germany they are required to balance the grid too.
Oh my!😂
All this cheap POWER, Germany must have very very cheap clean power, NOT :/
And how much do they produce when there's no wind? In GW please.
I'm halfway through the video when I realize after a map of Ireland is show, that this is where he's talking about. That thick Irish accent and my lack of coffee has done me for the morning.
He doesn't have a particularly strong accent as they go.
*ARLAN*
The example with 60 Hz threw me off for a while as well. Just use 50 Hz if you are in Europe, it's good for the Americans to be forced out of their comfort zone once in a while... ;)
I thought his accent was clear and attractive. But it was very amusing when he stated that Ireland was isolated, then a map appeared showing that the Republic of Ireland has a land border with the UK, and the island of Ireland is very close to the island of Britain. In fact you can see one island from the other.
@@CartoTypeelectrically isolated
Wait... There are STILL manufacturers using gearboxes?
I'm out of the field for a few years but back then it seemed they all were switching to gearless systems?!
Is this a US thing?
There’s certainly plenty of operating turbines using gearboxes, even if newer models had all moved on to DD. So gearbox maintenance is still a hot topic in the industry
It's a cost thing. Most if not all onshore turbines have gearboxes. For offshore turbines the cost of maintenance for gearboxes adds up, so there direct drive is more popular.
I don't think it is really gearless but rather single speed gear. Just like in EVs there is still a reduction gear to boost the torque of the electric motor. Still much lower maintenance then a gearbox with multiple gears used in the older fixed speed wind turbines
10 years wind worker, have to say you are well informed. My only complain is about the video itself, looks like you didnt have any script. Came to find what is wind energy problem (yes, its true frecuency control is challenging more than a "problem" IMO) but 90% of the video is about Ireland and how you want to be producing hydrogen for the world to consume. Apart that I think hydrogen will definately never be a energy vector no matter what a politician pushes for it (physics) i think is very far from the topic.
Seeing you speak about a topic i fully control, reasures me that when i watch other videos where i am less knowledgable i am being feed good info, keep it up!
I agree that hydrogen is inferior to other options for Energy storage. But we do need a lot of it for the chemical industry. So I don't see why it would not be a good outlet for the energy sector. could you elaborate?
@@MusikCassette electrolisis needs pure water and expensive materials, is not like you put any water in some cheap gadged = H2 + O2. thats why any colour of hydrogen is cheaper than green hydrogen ATM. Can any major disruption occur in any of both problems? yes. Can we have fusion in 10 years as well? same logic says we can
Still sounds like wind power is inferior, plus it's ruining the countryside
How is it ruining the countryside?
They look nice.
Didn't Norway find a huge ' field' of rare earth minerals recently? I'm sure that this will help curb the costs of them within 10 years.
Miner here. There are abundant deposits of rare earth minerals around the world. .. China does it cheap by having no environmental regulations. .. Mining of rare earths is extremely toxic and very expensive to fix. That's why the US shut down their rare earth mines and started bying from China. .. Lithium is also abundant. It's the cost to mine.
@@bimmjimAll the "green" crap is just outsourcing pollution and human suffering to China.
@@bimmjim Something our political leaders don't fully understand. People may say that they care about Carbon emissions or climate change... but if you can't breath the air or drink the water, what's the point of all of that? To truly do good by our children, we need to stop buying from countries who have zero interest in environmental protections.
@@Tank50us But... the point is that we need to mine those minerals to stop polluting.
We have a choice between leaving an Earth that will need cleanup, and an Earth increasingly hostile to human prosperity.
@@ChucksSEADnDEAD I don't doubt that we need the materials. But if the choice is either:
A. extract them from a country that doesn't care about workers rights or their own environment, but it costs less.
or
B. extract them from a country that does care about the workers doing the mining, as well as the environmental impact, and does everything they can to limit the damage, but costs more.
Personally, I choose B. After all, at the end of the day, the whole issue with Global Warming means squat if people can't breath the air or drink the water.
Correction regarding your point about inertia at the 8:30 mark. Yes, inverter based power sources like Wind and Solar do not have physical inertia. But they do have an inverter that can spit out whatever waveform it wants. Which from the perspective of the grid is the same thing as inertia. It is very easy to program an inverter to slightly increase its frequency relative to the grid frequency when it detects a drop, which effectively achieves the same goal as a big spinning generator.
The only thing you need to do for this, is to have a tiny buffer of potential energy that you aren't feeding into the grid by default. So if your solar panel is providing 100kW of power, you should only feed 95kW into the grid and use the remaining 5kW for frequency regulation. This is not conventionally done because wind turbine and solar panel owners aren't required to do so, and they earn more money by selling the full 100kW. But that's an easy fix with some regulation. Or hell, even just licencing requirement from the grid operator. You don't need to build vacuum sealed flywheels for grid stability at all.
No that's not how this works because for inertia you need to store the energy somehow. What this means is that If you need to put double the energy out for a few seconds, The energy has to come from somewhere and you won't be able to do it. You can use batteries or capacitors, along with the inverter, but there isn't inertia because there's no actual energy buffer. What the inertia means is that if you immediately double the amount of energy you want to draw from it, for a few seconds, You will quickly stop the blades.
Even if you're using it at 95% capacity
That's not how it works, when the grid frequency drops it doesn't actually increase the frequency by increasing its own frequency, it increases the frequency by simply running app the frequency that the grid is at, which is slower, but with a tiny bit I'll say is with much much much higher voltage feeding back into the grid to try to get it back up to speed hoping that everyone else does the same thing.
@@pilotavery Yes, that extra required energy is in the 5% buffer you have. The grid experiences a sudden surge in power draw. This manifests as a drop in grid frequency. Your solar inverter detects that drop in frequency and it adjusts its own frequency to be slightly forward in phase relative to the grid. This causes more power to be fed into the grid (The extra 5kw), which counteracts the extra load and thus functions as inertia. You are using that extra 5% of oomph as your buffer. This all happens in milliseconds, resulting in a very smooth grid frequency.
Now, if only a single solar power plant did that, it would indeed not have enough buffer power to do that. But if every single inverter on the grid has frequency compensation programmed in, the added load is trivial. To overwhelm the system the unexpected added load to the grid would have to exceed the buffer, and that just doesn't happen. Nobody is suddenly increasing total load on the grid by several percentage points without first informing the grid operator.
@@harmenkoster7451 5% is not enough, When the frequency drops by 1% you usually have about a 50% increase in load. A 5% buffer doesn't really do shit, You have exponentially more and more torque against the inertia...
@@harmenkoster7451A rotating generator can output a multitude of their rated power for a short while. That means at least twice the rated power not just a few percent. Modern inverters do their best like you said but it’s not comparable
We need a big ass CVT for the wind turbines so they can always go at 60 hz
That’s what I thought watching this too
CVT drives don't scale well and are both inefficient and have poor service life
Just use some power electronics to match your output frequency. Electrical solutions can be much more reliable and easier to fix
@@mitchellcouchman1444 CVT ? (Current voltage transformer ? circuit )
@@martinhammett8121 I think they mean a CVT transmission considering the context
Just drove past the construction site for the giant inverter/rectifier for the celtic interconnector , connecting irelands grid to europes .. so its all going ahead
Yeah, I found that bit a weird from Real Engineering. He discusses how wind turbines lack ability to provide grid inertia due to AC-DC-AC conversion, but that's how the interconnector will work. It's going to run on HVDC and without the ability of modern inverters to add "simulated" inertia, wouldn't be helpful at all.
I thought he was saying "Arland", and I had no idea where that could be.
@TealJosh interconnector has a whole power grid to take power from or supply it to. Where can excess power appear from or go to in AC-DC-AC bridge?
Both solar and wind turbine inverters are programmed to ride-through faults. They do not simply turn off when the grid becomes unstable. The real issue is keeping them all in perfect synchronization. When you have a lot of inverters vs spinning mass it becomes hard to tell what the phase angle is during a fault.
so it is a software problem?
@@MusikCassette Sort of. There is still the problem of suddenly losing wind/sun and all the windmills/solar going offline. The solution to this problem is battery backup to fill in the gaps. Right now we use natural gas peaker plants that rapidly spool up and down to stabilize the gap between production and demand. But the really fast peaks and valleys in demand can be fixed with software.
@@jahnkeanater I've just imagined the effect the Solar eclipse must have had on the grid, I would be glad to read some essay on that
@@marsjaninzmarsa The eclipse is super predictable. A lot of people with roof solar have data on their solar production dropping during the eclipse.
'Grid Dis-Harmonization' by millions of independent rooftop solar feeds is fascinating to realize any out of phase solar converters are actually DESTROYING power in the grid. This effect can also occur in small fossil grids with relatively large commercial solar. One diesel grid client, faced with surge-and-sag solar feed every time clouds moved in, designed a load bank (giant toaster) to _burn off the solar as heat_ after the solar surges blew up their 6MW generator, so they could still continue to claim Federal carbon credits to pay the solar installation off.😂🎉
Was working on the thrird interconnecting for ireland to wales last few months. Burying the subsea cable amazing project. Now i know a lot more of why that cable is so important
Hydrogen is a giant PITA to work with. It's so small it leaks through solid metal. It's best used for process heat - like concrete and steel making.
It takes so much energy to compress hydrogen! 600 PSI? Cars run at 80 PSI. Forget the hydrogen part, compress ordinary air and call it good! I've watched videos of a guy who converted a car and ran it on compressed air. Hydrogen power has no place beyond school experiments. Can't be useful unless generated on-demand.
you gotta admit, the single source of reliable, cheap, low maintenance, daytime and nighttime available, every season available is Nuclear
ReleaseFreeeEneegyyyTechAndWeCanSayAdios2theseTechs
Another huge downsize is the short lifespans on the blades themselves. And the fact that there still is not an actual cost effective way to recycle them. Here in Wyoming they have a massive pit they still bury them in. TX also has massive plots of lands with just stacks of the things. It kinda grosses me out the waste of those blades. I'd be much more open to wind if that can be solved.
13:03
It’s not so cheap!
Remember you have to build an electrolyser (that costs a lot) to make it run just a few hours per day.
P.S. Please make a video about Fisher Tropsch 🙏🏻
It depends, they could have a high efficiency electrolyzer with expensive membranes, or they could equally have a bunch of lower efficiency ones that stick some cheap carbon rods into the water. If electricity is cheap, then run the cheap one, and when it's expensive, run the expensive one.
It's great to see you do a video about our lovely island, I'm lucky to have the Raheenleagh wind farm on my doorstep. As an engineer I always appreciate the science behind these machines.
If there only was a stable, safe, environmentally friendly, low area impact way of generating a massive amount of power...
Nuclear?
Nuclear, hydro…but environmentalist hate hydro…not an option in their ideology and why they’re destroying hydro power dams in America at a insane rate with no back up…they’re ideology of no humane use of natural resources . No hydro dams …stupid is as stupid does.
@Roger_Gustafsson ... you forgot expensive, slow and not that environmentally friendly
exactly if only
What are uranium talking about
Harmony Turbines don't have these problems.
Your videos are really cool and they make me enjoy learning, I have a video idea for you, the city of Venice, you can talk about it’s construction on millions of wooden stakes, the innovative fresh water collection wells, their waste management system, any other innovative technologies they had, how it is sinking, and the ideas and projects to prevent/reverse this!
My partner was trained to work maintenance with these and many kinds of wind turbines.. The management was ineffective, there were always some injuries, technicians slipping on ice surrounding these towers in the northern states. They have to carry 80+ pounds of gear with them to the top of the tower to the nacelles, to repair them; They have NO cranes, the management companies say it's too expensive. Using a crane to bring the nacelle to the ground for serious maintenance, and parts wear out in a few years; They pay far poorer than they advertise. Most of the managers are not from the states, from Denmark, Netherlands etc. Sometimes there's a language barrier. The workers spend a lot of time, just sleeping up in the nacelles, because they are only allowed to maintain towers on their list which is about 2 per day, at most, so if they are done, they have to just stay there, and wait, sleep in the nacelle. They are extremely HOT in the summer time, extremely cold in the Winter, It's a thankless underpaid job, with lousy management. They offer hourly for workers, so they are not allowed over-time, except in emergencies, and they are constantly looking for mainenance techs, and trying to convert an hourly to salaried, where salaried means you get paid for 40 hours, but expected to work more for the same amount.. This industry is built upon Making Money, not an effective or organized management. Workers work for a couple years, then leave and find a completely different line of work, and swear never to go back, even if they get constant offers from WindFarms.. It's a sad thing; people being treated without regard, and not being current with a sensible and effective maintenance strategy.. I was floored when I heard these stories, daily..
HI-australia is going down this path,now,---pulling down Power Stations that did the job !!--with a gov. that has absolutely no Clue what they doing !!--for the first time in our history,we having "black-outs"-welcome to the third world !!--thanks for posting ,
Thanks for your report. Sorry to hear the bad news, unfortunately quite typical for our world. It's not the technology at fault here, it's the people and corporations behind the projects.
Very disappointing that so few people here seem at all concerned about it!
On the point of frequency control/grid inertia--although modern wind turbines do not have a direct connection between the generator and grid, they can still supply "synthetic" inertia. Essentially, if the frequency dips, the power electronic converters are commanded to put out extra power to the grid.
On short time scales (seconds), this is called "primary frequency response." It has the net effect of slightly slowing down the speed of the wind turbine rotor, similar to a conventional power plant.
On longer time scales (minutes), the power grid typically also needs "secondary frequency response." Here, it's good to have generators available that can put out extra power for 30 minutes or so. For a wind turbine to serve this purpose, it must be "de-rated." A de-rated turbine supplies a fraction of its maximum power output (e.g., say 90% rated capacity). One way to de-rate a turbine is to pitch the blades a few degrees out of the wind. When needed, the blades can be pitched back to optimal for full power output.
Source: "Wind Energy Generation: Modeling and Control" by Anaya-Lara, et al.
When I studied this a decade ago, there was also talk of allowing the turbine to speed up in anticipation of a surge (offsetting the MPPT curve a bit)
Anyone else confused as to how a country can keep itself legally responsible to emission goals? Lol like what happens if they don't meet that goal? Is the leader thrown in jail? Does the country pay a fine? If so, to who?
Someone in the comments talked about "the massive amount of noise" from wind generators. I have the things all around me. They seldom make any noise at all. When they do, it is VERY quiet and kind of pleasant. It only lasts for a few seconds and is a low frequency whoosh. When I first heard it, I stopped and listened to figure out what it was. About 3 years ago, they installed a natural gas pipeline about a quarter of a mile from our house. We didn't know it was there. The first time they used it, it scared the crap out of us. It sounds like a freight train. It sounds like a nuclear bomb would sound if it was dropped a couple of hundred miles away.
For a bigger portion of the video than i want to admit i thought we were talking about a small island called Arlan. And now i can't stop hearing it.
I live on the west coast of Finland. Wind power + hydrogen plants are a nice combo. Specially when there is a lithium mine less than 100km away and it needs to be processed to lithium hydroxide. Estimated 5% of global production should be coming from here in few years and it is easy to sell when there is renewable energy involved: you can avoid carbon taxes etc. and whoever makes the battery can boast about it in their marketing.
I thought the exact same thing. "Where is Arlan?"
Who knew Ireland's next big export would be wind? 🌬️ Harnessing all that blustery weather for energy is both brilliant and poetic. Cheers to a future where our biggest challenge is keeping the sheep from napping in the turbines!
3:14 that's a really strong men!
No mention of the negative visual effect on the pastoral Irish countryside.
Yeah, turbines are not very slightly
Or the number of birds killed.
I think they look cool
@@oldcynic6964 compared to buildings. Why were you not caring when millions of birds are killed by pollution?
I'm not seeing wind energy bring down my bills, infact, anything to do with green energy has pushed bills eye-wateringly high, and the reductions at this late point in time have not got back near to the affordable levels. Have been loving the quality content though.
Nobody is talking here about the irritating noise they produce when close to inhabited areas, the huge number of birds they kill, and the impossibility of recycling those materials (especially the blades). The high cost of maintenance was mentioned in the video, though quite white-washed.
Yes, wind turbines can be a problem for many birds, especially if they are located on bird trekking routes. But thousands of times more birds are killed by flying into high buildings.
@@jenslrkedal9219 highly doubt that
Blades are not lasting as long as predicted. Extremely high maintenance cost and destroy the rural landscape 🤮
Ive been saying this for years, but the best green energy is as far as I can tell. Nuclear
I agree that nuclear is very good for the production of energy, but from what I understand it’s very expensive because of all the safety concerns. Further more, nuclear makes us dependent of other countries where we buy the uranium. I think that the reason most countries have nuclear is that they need nuclear power for their nuclear weapon arsenal.
@@olavberrig4548 nuclear is not that expensive it matters on the type of reactor as for safty its safer then wind and only slightly more dangerous then solar uranium is also VERY abundent also the same could be said about the rare earth metals needed for solar and wind nuclear also doesnt always make nukes it matters on what type of reactor and such
@@olavberrig4548 It's expensive because of incompetent regulation and because most places forgot how to build them. Regulators force the industry to use reactor types which were obsolete about 70 years ago, make it nearly impossible to make the most minor of improvements, and grossly overestimate the potential damages.
There are enough countries exporting uranium and each bit goes so far that it's not really a concern. Even then, there are BILLIONS tons dissolved in the ocean that can be extracted. It isn't economically feasible at this time, but the option is there.
@@admiralkaede More dangerous than solar? Even including the worst credible estimates for Chernobyl puts it miles ahead of the next safest competitor.
@@JacobNeff-oq5km just from stats ive seen but its like REALLY safe
Crazy that we deal with all this rather than invest in safe and clean nuclear power
It's so bad. Nuclear is so much better.
People are scared of nuclear energy.
@@bryantc1701 sadly
It is not clean and barely safe. It is insane to keep building hyper expensive dangerous technology that just has to fail once to poison a considerable area.
People are not scared of solar, wind, deep ocean convection and batteries.
Seems to me , that windmills slow the wind coming across the blades slowing the cooling effects of the wind . On a massive scale this might help cause global warming .
We are not evolving we are devolving. Atomic power was the future and still is.
It’s one of the most expensive sources of energy
@@olivero.1877 Who told you that? You have no idea what you're talking about. If they were to expensive nobody would build them...
No, it's not, not as long as the WASTE is deadly for 50,000 years! there's NO safe place to store the stuff, they had been putting it in steel drums in a salt mine, steel corrodes in a few years. The mining of uraneum produces dust, radioactive dust gets in your lungs and there's CANCER
Free stream tidal energy is the future. Clean, safe, predictable, consistent and reliable with no need for huge battery storage plants.
@@rokov13Very few people do build them. Because they’re expensive.
Nuclear power is roughly twice as expensive on a per kwh basis as natural gas, wind, or solar. Source: US Energy Information Administration.
The main advantage of nuclear power is its high capacity factor. Nuclear energy is built because it’s reliable, not because it’s cheap.
Rare earth minerals have, within the last month, been found in very large quantities in Scandinavia and Japan
it's not the locations as these are all over the world it's that china does almost all of the refining because they do it cheaper by mostly ignoring environmental problems in the refining. to do it clean takes more money so it's more expensive.
It's been found but the infrastructure is not in place for processing. The mine in Kiruna, Sweden is still far away from developing the Rare Earth deposit, so at the moment, China still holds all the marbles.
Rare Earth is a misnomer, as these elements are not rare per se. The issue is the lack of concentrated ores and hence the cost and waste of refining from low grade ores. Now that there are significant uses for these “rare” elements a lot more prospecting is being done.
Rare earths are abundant in a lot of places. Even in western countries. But environmentalists are doing anything they can to prevent the mining of it in the truest NIMBY fashion one can imagine.
@@Tokru86 Indeed, behind China the next 2 largest producers of rare earth metals are the USA and Australia. Both fairly 'western'.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: the problem with our power grid is the power's that be, not the powers generate. A large national grid is an idiotic and wasteful exercise in aristocratic arrogance. 85-90% of power shipped via a power grid is WASTED. It's so massive that it's ridiculous. We need distributed small redundant systems just like in computing. We don't need multi-trillion-dollar power grids controlled by mega-corporations or governments... they're stupid. We need whatever makes sense in a region (solar, wind, natural gas, nuclear, etc...) powering a single metropolitan area or even several small grids powering a big metropolitan area. Without the wasteful grid, the math works out without effort. The problem is there isn't a single place for a power struggle to dictate control of.
Ummm.... As an electrical engineer I don't understand what you mean by such a high waste in electricity transmission. Idaho, being the highest in loss, is like below 13%
The gearbox is not coasting multi million dollers. I think price is something arround 500k. Also i think newer Wind Turbines have not a gearbox but a frequency converter to change the frequency.
The 6MW Nordex turbines being assembled South of my house are synchronous and have massive gearing to be directly attached to the grid. I'd bet there is north of $2 million in each gear box.
I agree, total cost of a wind turbine can be estimated to be around 1 million euros per 1MW of capacity. Not very likely that a gearbox costs millions, unless perhaps it is in a really big WTG.
It probably depends on the size, the big ones cost more
Donald Trump hates wind turbines if that means anything
Donald Trumps hates democracy too. Says wind generators "cause cancer" which shows what?
2:31 did you just show a man crawling up using ropes? You know we have both ladders and an elevator in the tower to get up to the nacelle, right? 😂😂
As a Texan who lived through the freeze, our electric grid sucks, but Texan politicians have been fighting over upgrading it state wide. Once again it all comes down to money
Sounds like Texas and the rest of the continental US would have a more reliable power supply if the two grids were interconnected. The extra costs the feds might impose on Texas might help with the reliability of the Texas grid, eg making Texas fit de-icing systems onto Texan wind turbine blades.
That's because Texas will be it's own Republic soon. It just hasn't been announced yet.
I think you mean "how much money can they pocket while their people suffer". I have a friend who lived in Texas at the time, and she and her family had to huddle together by their fireplace after their heating unit shut down as a result of cascading power failures caused by the freezing temperatures. Worse was Governor Abbott and his family fleeing to Mexico while Texans literally froze to death.
That friend has moved to a different state with her family.
@@LloydWeeber Three grids, not two, and there are DC interconnects. They even have connections to Mexico.
There’s no “gearbox maintenance” outside of checking oil level for a leak (extremely rare), changing the filter, and opening the gear view port to make sure there’s no chipping or excess wear. The 10 year mark for complete oil change is coming up on our moventus boxes but outside of that, “maintenance” takes about 20 minutes a year.
There most certainly is other maintenance. I’ve been involved in retrofitting gearboxes for years. Factory faults mean bearings need replacement and gearboxes are regularly opened up to pin bearing raceways which are rotating in the housing.
@@gavinvdm I suppose it depends on the make and model, ours seem to be the least failing major component at a failing site
Wind Energy Causes Friction In The Air: Like When You Put To Many Fans In One Room Or To Close Together The Friction In The Air Makes Them Start To Blow Hot Air Under Those Conditions: Then When You Remove The Windmills Or Turbines It Goes From Hot And Potentially Damaging The Sun To Cold Because There Is The Yin Yang Affect: If You Do It Right It Is Neutral Air: Which Is The Aeolis Affect: Do Not Cause Global Heating And Excessive Cold Waves With Excessive Wind Energy It Does Not Sustain The Planets Terrafor: Keep The Right Ammount Of Everything For The Planets Terrafrom!.