Breakthroughs in Offshore Wind Energy Costs Coming?

Breakthroughs in Offshore Wind Energy Costs Coming?

A Boston startup, T-Omega Wind, is challenging the conventional wisdom about how best to capture the potential for offshore windfarms by focusing on a radical new way to design floating platforms.  Their goal is to drop the costs of offshore wind 70-80%. 

The trend in offshore and onshore wind farms has been to just take the land-based designs and put them on base fixed on the ocean floor.  To get power cost per MWh down, the designs have trended toward increasing the height and blade length in the typical pinwheel-on-a-stick designs.  The biggest individual wind turbine is now the 13 MW offshore Haliade-X from GE (260 m high—like an 80-story building—with 220 m blades).  But this approach has led to the need for thick-walled (3 inch thick) steel towers to carry the weight and resist the force of the wind plus husky bearings to support the turning shaft between the blades and the generator assembly.  These are placed on an offshore mounting base in the deep sea that is also very costly.  As a result, it is not clear that the increased scale is really achieving the intended results in lower cost of electricity, except in the windiest offshore locations.  The sheer size brings its own complications in maintenance.  The DOE reported that the average cost was $84/MWh with a range of $61-116/MWh.    

The US is by no means a leader in offshore wind with only 42 MW currently operating and 932 MW under construction compared to 50 GW operating currently worldwide.  To meet renewable resource goals, offshore wind capacity is going to have to increase dramatically.  President Biden has set a goal of 30 GW by 2035 with a cost reduction to $45/MWh.  Some of the best wind sites are in deep waters off the West Coast and Maine.   In those areas, the sea floor drops off so quickly, sinking a fixed base for offshore turbines is likely to be economically unrealistic.  

The major alternative has been to use a floating platform, but with the tall turbines the floating base needs to be quite large and tethered to the seafloor with cables and a number of heavy concrete and steel anchors.  The CEC has adopted an aggressive goal of 5 GW of offshore wind by 2030 and 25 GW by 2045.  To meet that goal with competitive power costs, it is likely some innovation is going to be needed.

The T-Omega approach is very different.  It uses a stable, lightweight, four-leg structure that is allowed to float with slack (in order to turn into the wind).  It looks like a Ferris wheel, with the wind turbine and the generator supported on each side rather than trying to balance everything on top of a tower.  

This design takes the load off the bearing, means the steel legs can be much lighter weight, and the mass of the floating structure below water is virtually eliminated.  In the standard design, there may be 1500 tons above water, and 6000 tons underwater to keep it upright.  T-Omega is not far enough along to make any credible claims on cost, but just from the elimination of thousands of tons of steel their goal of a massive cost reduction is likely to be achieved.

If the CEC goal for offshore wind is to be achieved, it is going to take dramatic innovation in the design of floating systems.  T-Omega may be only one of many ideas, but it is one of the best we have seen.

Here is a good article with more details if you are interested.  In particular, the test of a 1:60 scale model in a wave tank at the end of the article is a good demonstration of the viability of their idea.

Thomas Hall

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Simon is the Chair of CleanStart’s Board. A seasoned energy executive and entrepreneur with 45 years of experience in business, government, and non-profits.

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Soar Optics Improving the Rapid Detection of Harmful Microplastics

Soar Optics Improving the Rapid Detection of Harmful Microplastics

You can pretty well see plastics trash everywhere you look.  That’s a recognized and growing problem.  Until recently what has been overlooked is the hazard posed to human health from the plastic trash you don’t see—particles so small they are hard to see without a microscope.  These micro-particles are now prevalent in fish, in drinking water, and have now been detected in people.  They are in the digestive track for sure, but the question that remains is how many more organs are affected.  Recently, these microplastics have been found in human blood.  If you think having your arteries plugged with cholesterol is bad, imagine the potential damage from tiny, non-degradable, hard plastic particles clogging capillaries and small blood vessels.  And more research is continually uncovering even more adverse impacts from microplastics.

How did this problem sneak up on us?  It’s not like no one knew about the existence of microplastics.  The issue has been tracking where they are going.  The testing for microplastics has been time- and labor-intensive.  Analyzing one sample accurately can take ten hours on existing analytic equipment that costs over $300K, according to an EPA scientist.  

Steve Barnett (CEO) and Peter Hansell (COO) cofounded Soar Optics to tackle this problem.  Soar depends on a well-known technology called Raman spectroscopy to analyze samples by looking at their light scattering patterns.  Soar has been working on this for years, but now is ready to launch its first products.  Steve has a background of founding three other companies and has 25 years working with Raman spectroscopes to analyze many kinds of samples.  But he saw a glaring gap in the market where there is an urgent health concern and an existing technology that is not up to the task.  His “special sauce” is perfecting a rapid and inexpensive detection tool to uncover where these microplastics are, where they are coming from, and where they are going.  

Soar’s timing could not be better.  Just in September of this year, the State of California adopted rules for the testing and detection of microplastics, and for establishing limits on how much can be in water and still be considered safe.  The focus on microplastics was given a priority by a 2018 law amending the state’s Safe Drinking Water Act.  Raman spectroscopy has been approved as a detection method.  Over 2700 water agencies and others in California will be required to do this testing.

Now Soar has stepped in to make the detection fast, inexpensive, and highly accurate even for the smallest particles.  Their ultimate goal is to sell a dedicated, automated analyzer that even small agencies and industrial facilities can buy to meet these new requirements and expected enhancements of those requirements over time.  But their first goal is to offer the specialized Raman microscopes and  analysis-as-a-service on a subscription basis to get revenues started as fast as possible to demonstrate the effectiveness of their technology.

As a company, they hope to be profitable in their third year, with gross margins exceeding 55%.  They are looking for a small investment (<$1 million) or contract to complete their equipment development and get started on marketing.

Thomas Hall

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Simon is the Chair of CleanStart’s Board. A seasoned energy executive and entrepreneur with 45 years of experience in business, government, and non-profits.

CleanStart Sponsors

Weintraub | TobinBlueTech Valley, Revrnt, 

Moss AdamsPowerSoft.biz, Greenberg Traurig, California Mobility Center

“Personal Microgrid” Device Allows Customers to Use Alternative Sources in Outage

“Personal Microgrid” Device Allows Customers to Use Alternative Sources in Outage

Your power goes out.  You flip a switch to use your batteries, your EV, your solar panels, or your emergency generator and your home is functioning again.  Sounds simple.  It isn’t.  And it is one of the hottest areas for innovation in the transformation of the utility business,

It can be done in a clumsy way by running power cords throughout the house.  It can be done dangerously by jury-rigging a double mail end connector between a generator and a home outlet to energize a home.  It can eventually be done by a number of devices now being developed by dozens of clever innovators (see our blog on SPAN with its programmable power panel at our May 12 meetup with a programmable panel, and on WallBox with a two-way charger to connect an EV to the home) but they so far are expensive.  Now PG&E engineers have come up with a simpler solution that may be much less expensive.  It could be a key to let homeowners operate as their own “personal” microgrid in times of outages.

The PG&E device is a “collar” inserted between the smart meter and the meter plug on the home.  It has a tail to plug in the power sources from the home.  It can be used with a battery storage device or a small generator.  It is not made to be used to connect a car or solar PV panels that do not go through a battery buffer, as we understand it.  The home owner has to manually disconnect from the grid and trip off all the circuits in the home panel that will not be served, leaving on the ones that are deemed “critical”.   At the end of the outage, the homeowner will reconnect to the distribution grid and restore all the breakers to the “on” position.  PG&E isn’t selling it yet, so we don’t know the price, but other devices we have reviewed cost $5-7,000 to do these functions.  Surely it will be less.

Here is an article that explains more about what PG&E is doing, if you want to dive into it. 

Thomas Hall

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Gary Simon is the Chair of CleanStart’s Board. A seasoned energy executive and entrepreneur with 45 years of experience in business, government, and non-profits.

CleanStart Sponsors

Weintraub | TobinBlueTech Valley, Revrnt, 

Moss AdamsPowerSoft.biz, Greenberg Traurig, California Mobility Center