Sivakumar Jayapal

ZF is a global technology company supplying gear systems for vehicles and industrial technology. ZF Wind Power designs modular gearbox platforms and produces complete powertrains for wind turbines. Sivakumar Jayapal, Chief Service Officer at ZF Wind Power, talks with Windpower Engineering & Development about its new interactive service Thrive.

Below is an excerpt of ZF’s Wind Spotlight with Windpower Engineering & Development, but be sure to listen to the full episode here or on your favorite podcast app.

What is Thrive?

Thrive is ZF Wind Power’s new service brand, which we launched in 2022. As a global leader in the wind industry for the gearbox and powertrain, we aim to empower a sustainable future with our partners by our service offerings. Our unique service concept helps our wind park operators, consumers and customers to get the most from the wind power to generate limitless green energy. “Thrive” means to prosper, to be fortunate. We embody that definition to the power of our service. For us, service is not reactive, but rather being proactive. It is not only about maintaining and keeping the wind turbines alive, but about continuously optimizing to thrive and prosper.

What does Thrive’s tagline ‘For continuous availability’ mean?

With Thrive, we strive for continuous availability for our partners and their wind projects. Thanks to our customer-centric mindset, availability of the gearbox and the spare parts along with our global footprint, we can ensure the wind power continues to reach consumers 24/7 through the year.

How do you guarantee this availability?

Thrive offers a complete service package. We bundled everything together, including worldwide field support, workshop repairs in 90 days, global replacement pool, spare part management, and we also train our partners. All these are supported by our unique digitalization approach, a service powered by analytics. This includes different digital offerings like ZF’s customer dashboard, intelligent powertrain, spare part optimization. We also work as partners with our customers and tailor our offerings to their preference. That’s key because it’s not that they have to get the full package. There is no standard or a fixed approach. We always develop a personalized package together with our partners, which suits their business model, they have a choice to select in any six of our offerings.

What is the gearbox pool and how does it work?

Thrive offers an international pool for its partners. This gearbox pool contains new and refurbished gearboxes from all major brands and multiple turbine models. Using the digital Thrive platform, customers can go into zfthrive.com and order a gearbox of their choice, which will be shipped within five days. The gearbox pool provides many opportunities for our partners such as low personal stock, less downtime and replacement gearboxes when a gearbox needs service.

This podcast is sponsored by ZF Wind Power.

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In April 2023, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore signed the Promoting Offshore Wind Energy Resources (POWER) Act, enacting the state’s new 8.5-GW offshore wind target while highlighting the local workforce development and domestic supply chain features of the bill. This was just the latest example of the offshore wind industry’s emphasis on “local content” in these massive projects.

Block Island Wind Farm
Credit: Orsted

Less than a year ago, the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) approved two leases for large offshore wind projects off the coast of North Carolina, known as the Carolina Long Bay (CLB) sale. That lease auction pioneered a new local content requirement where bidders were invited to include a local content commitment to receive a percentage bonus on their bids. This extra bidder credit required developers to commit to helping establish a domestic supply chain for offshore wind as well as commit to funding workforce development programs for the offshore wind industry.

However, offshore wind developers, as well as the policymakers who make the rules for offshore wind, have so far not made the connection between the drive toward domestic economic development known as “local content” and the varied uses of geospatial data. Full understanding of that connection should lead policymakers to expand their thinking on local content requirements and include geospatial “content” and related services in offshore wind lease auction rules like the bonus bidder credit.

The core of geospatial data analysis is the gleaning of useful insights into the local conditions that meaningfully impact a project or business objective. The basic need for this in federal offshore wind leases is that the required site assessment plans (SAPs) and construction and operations plans (COPs) must contain detailed information about the affected geographies and an analysis of the physical impacts on the local area. What is less obvious is the connection to increasingly important local socioeconomic impact assessments that underlie local content rules. These lease requirements can have a strong tie to geospatial data in topics such as location-dependent livelihoods, local economic activity, displacement of people and businesses, and transmission line siting.

Fundamentally, the real objective of local content policy is not the amount of physical material made in the United States, but the longer-term structural growth in local economic activity. But the word “content” implies physical materials, which has led to a focus on supply chains, manufacturing and construction. In the CLB example, there was some evolution in this thinking in that the bonus was awarded for commitments to local workforce development, but even then, the focus was on the workforce involved in construction and operation of the physical facilities.

The CLB commitments demonstrate some of the limitations in prioritizing things like the physical supply chain. Even in the long-term, the total offshore wind potential off the coast of North Carolina is unlikely to spur a North Carolina supply chain, manufacturing facilities or even significant port construction beyond the minimum needed for delivering the CLB wind farms. What may ultimately prove more valuable in the long term is the development of a “services infrastructure” that is both local and can be provided to other geographies. As geospatial analysis is recognized as an integral part of the offshore wind development process, the development and economic activity of geospatial services can be an enhancement to the scope of local content benefits.

Even further, geospatial services could be used to help assess other local socioeconomic impacts. Traditional thinking on geospatial data and offshore wind development is focused on local physical conditions relevant to project deployment. Typically, this includes the environmental impact of the construction and presence of large pieces of infrastructure such as transmission facilities and the turbine platforms themselves.

However, a recent report on offshore wind development noted that “formal BOEM guidance for developers includes assessment of not only environmental hazards, water quality, biological resources, endangered species, and archaeological resources, but also social and economic resources.” Latest technology and advances in geospatial analysis could not only provide comprehensive physical impact assessments, but also insights into the impacts and benefits regarding these social and economic resources.

For example, geospatial analysis could more accurately assess disruptions to economic activity on sea (fishing, water recreation, etc.) and on land, such as access to or transit across lands where new transmission lines are sited. On the other hand, similar analysis could be applied to economic benefits from increased grid capacity and lower cost energy in the area such as attracting businesses and jobs.

Building a domestic industry in geospatial services can be a significant contributor to domestic economic benefits from offshore wind projects. Other countries are ahead of the United States in terms of offshore wind development experience and expertise, but geospatial data collection and analysis specific to offshore wind are key work areas where the United States can catch up to and someday surpass other countries. Furthermore, training and providing experience in geospatial jobs is a valuable form of workforce development in that these can be more highly paid jobs that are less temporary than construction jobs.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning some other advantages of designating geospatial services as local content:

• International trade law: Supporting domestic geospatial services does not run afoul of the legal issues with “subsidizing” domestic products and manufacturing.
• National security: Domestic data collection and services avoid national security concerns regarding both visibility into the data as well as foreign supply chain risks.
• More local activity: More of the offshore wind development process, like the early phases of planning and design, can be local content activity versus just the construction phase.

Ultimately, while the CLB offshore wind lease auction was successful in securing major local content commitments, the scope of what was considered local content was still limited to traditional thinking. As a result, the projects may not realize their full potential for bringing economic value to the United States and North Carolina. Going forward, policymakers should strongly consider how geospatial data and services can greatly increase the economic benefits sought by local content policies.

Sloan Freeman is Director of Hydrospatial Solutions of Geodynamics, an NV5 company. She is a licensed NC Professional Land Surveyor and has completed the NC Military Business Center’s Defense Contractors’ Academy and Duke University’s Research Costing Compliance training. Prior to founding Geodynamics, Sloan worked in the research sector of marine ecology and environmental policy at the Duke University Marine Lab where she managed and coordinated multi-million dollar research grants and projects in the field of coastal and ocean science. As Principal in Charge at Geodynamics, she manages long-term IDIQ contracts with the USACE and coordinates collaborations with partners in coastal engineering, natural resource agencies, and for the US Navy, NOAA, and BOEM.

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With recent pro-renewables legislation passing in both the United States and Canada that encourage energy storage adoption, the North American wind industry enters a new era. This intermittent energy resource can now more easily be supplemented by energy storage to provide a dispatchable electricity solution. This makes wind power competitive not only at the cost level, but also in reliability.

From Stantec’s extensive experience, we have found historical serial decrements in capex for wind paired with energy storage. It is now possible to baseline the lowest cost of electricity for an intermittent wind generation project at around CA$0.04/kWh. Furthermore, including dispatchability via energy storage could range up to 50% of additional cost depending on the desired duration as well as site- and system-specific factors. At such competitive prices with reliable power delivery, the end users do not need to fear where their power comes from, and grid operators can receive desired electricity to specifications.

Reliability of wind + storage

The variability of wind power has been studied profoundly by numerous associations, agencies, and laboratories, including NREL. These groups have accumulated a plethora of historical information and created wind models capable of predicting the wind power at different hub heights with a previously unseen accuracy. The increasing availability of high-quality wind resource databases means that feasibility-level assessments of wind resources can be undertaken for a fraction of historical costs. Of course, many projects have site-specific challenges such as icing or rapid elevation differentials that may still require meteorological mast studies. But nonetheless, the information gathered over the years provides a smoother road to accurate estimates. An early example of how this can be applied was shown by the Saskatchewan Research Council’s (SRC) reliable wind storage system, known as the Cowessess First Nation Project. From a request-for-proposal to the final performance summary, SRC provided a first-hand source of data on implementing a grid-connected wind and storage system.

Credit: Avangrid Renewables

It is clear to Stantec that we can meet the specific needs of the industry with renewable power and storage. Increasingly, our clients are pushing us to develop energy plans that support both sustainability and resilience goals. We see sustainability-driven projects in the commercial sector, such as NS trains in the Netherlands, and Raglan Mine in the mining sector, as present and future beneficiaries of the wind and storage systems’ synergy. The key to implementation success is an ability to adequately control the system. Within Stantec, we routinely use software-based modeling and optimization approaches to assess the resource, define power demand and delivery at points of interconnection, and fast-track commercial operation dates of our projects.

The question of reliability certainly becomes more substantial for off-grid projects. It has become clear to us that diversifying energy generation by including other sources such as solar further improves reliability. For instance, during low-wind, high-sunlight intensity hours, the burden of meeting the demand load can be partially or fully offset from storage systems to solar generation, thus potentially prolonging the lifespan of the storage setup by decreasing the number of cycles. Historically, we have seen that, due to the unavailability of grid connection coupled with site-specific topographies, the cost of energy storage often becomes the deciding factor. At larger scales, for example, with continuous 50 MW of demand, a system would require 200 MWh of energy storage to meet four hours of electricity requirement. With the latest NREL projections, the capex of the batteries this size is estimated at over $68 million today. However, accounting for a projected 35% drop in cost by 2030 and existing tax incentives, in the next 10 years project owners could expect the capex to be less than half of what we are seeing today, making fully renewable solutions even more attractive. All of that, naturally, with the lowest greenhouse gas emissions power sources.

Wind + storage options

What are the energy storage options for wind farms? Shigeki lida and Ko Sakata provide a good illustration of available options based on the storage scale and required duration, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Various technologies for electricity storage

For the lower scale projects, Mehrdad Gholami’s recent research paper provides guidelines to achieve the required level of satisfaction and can be used by the industry to appropriately size the battery and meet reliability demands. For the larger, longer duration projects, however, the figure illustrates that there is challenge in implementing lithium-ion battery storage. From Stantec’s accumulated experience, at this scale, the high financial premium of lithium batteries in today’s market repels owners from pursuing it. Large-scale alternatives with the most experience or potential are pumped storage hydropower (PSH) and hydrogen. As the U.S. Dept. of Energy notes, PSH provides energy arbitrage opportunities, bulk power and black start capabilities, operational flexibility and non-energy benefits such as flood control, drought protection, recreation, water supply and irrigation. PSH, of course, is highly dependent on the available land’s topography. And in case of non-applicability, it is often hydrogen storage that can provide many of the same benefits as PSH at reduced physical space requirements. That’s why our teams include experts in PSH and hydrogen storage solutions with decades of accumulated experience and expertise.

As a very high-level case study, let’s consider some fabricated numbers of a possible wind farm with battery system. Assuming a wind and storage site with a constant 50 MW of electrical power demand, 28 turbines (6-MW each) totaling 168 MW of installed capacity, a typical Weibull distribution of wind speed with A and k factors of 8.5 m/s and 2, respectively, and a battery with eight hours of demand capacity totaling 400 MWh. One perspective on this system is to look at it from a viewpoint of the battery. Figure 2 shows a histogram of battery charge levels between 0% and 100% over a period of around four months. Whenever the level goes above 100%, the battery is fully charged and the turbines are producing over 50 MW of electricity. This surplus energy can potentially be sold to the grid, if feasible. In cases when the level goes under 0%, the battery is depleted, and the turbines are producing less than 50 MW of power. This displays the periods of energy deficit which can be met with a grid or other solutions such as a solar generation and/or a backup generator.

Figure 2: Available energy as a percent of battery charge

Depending on the location and wind variability at a given time, the energy surplus over a long term will be similar to the energy deficit over the same period. In other words, the electricity deficit purchases can be partially offset by the surplus sales, making the system economically attractive.

As the country’s largest emitters are working to meet government decarbonization goals, the demand for clean electricity is growing dramatically. The conventional approach of using natural gas generators is not feasible anymore due to the greenhouse gas emissions. That’s why energy storage is coming under the spotlight of importance. Additionally, many of the larger emitters are sited in remote locations where grid connections are infeasible. Yet, there is still a requirement to find alternatives to the traditional gas turbines that have become insufficient in meeting the decarbonization goals.

Stantec sees wind as a reasonable economic source of power, coupled with the appropriate energy storage solution. With existing carbon taxes and caps, government decarbonization goals, new tax incentives and ever-decreasing cost of technology, there is a critical first mover advantage of clean power and storage resiliency as a distributed source. Many regions can take advantage of the investment tax credit and help us clear the air of CO₂ excess.

Ivan Mednikov is a Renewable Energy Analyst at Stantec with 2 years of professional experience as a structurer and a salesperson of synthetic financial derivative products. He earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto and a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering with a financial engineering option at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. At his previous role, Ivan was responsible for the development of optimization methodologies of global equity custom baskets by analyzing extensive universes of financial data and advising large institutional clients on statistical analyses. At his current tole, he is responsible for the development of hydroelectric and wind power systems as well as optimization of energy usage and decarbonization strategies.

Ivor Shaw is a civil engineer with over 42 years of experience in the energy and power sector in Canada, Ireland, and the US. He has been involved in the development, design, construction, rehabilitation, and commissioning of wind and hydro projects and applications to improve the client’s return on investment. He is a wind, hydro and power delivery specialist with experience in planning, management, design, evaluation, project management, procurement and construction management. Ivor has been involved in multiple complex projects developing innovative and reliable installations in hydro, wind, T&D, and hybrid power projects for public and private entities, ranging from 1-300 MW. He has experience as an owners engineer in IPD, EPCM and EPC approaches, and due diligence.

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