Susan Giordano explains Triton Wind Profiler's remote sensing technology

Beyond Zero's Matthew Wright and Scott Bilby speak to Susan Giordano, General Manager of Second Wind, a Massachusetts company that has developed advanced wind measurement technology used by wind farms worldwide, including the Triton Wind Profiler.

Second Wind's Triton Sonic Wind Profiler is an advanced sodar system that provides accurate wind data across the entire blade sweep of today's largest wind turbines. Tritons are being used for wind resource assessment programs, for greenfield prospecting, micro-siting and turbine suitability, measuring wind speed and direction shear, and other applications. Advanced wind measurement technology is used worldwide by wind farm owners, developers, and consultants to understand and improve the financial performance of wind projects.

Beyond Zero speaks to Susan Giordano GM of Second Wind

download

Transcript

Scott Bilby: Now today on Beyond Zero, we are speaking to Susan Giordano, she is the General Manager at Second Wind, a Massachusetts company that has developed advanced wind farming technology used by wind farms worldwide.  Of particular interest to us as Beyond Zero today is their Triton Wind Profiler, a remote sensing system that provides wind assessment data.  Welcome to the show Susan. 

Susan Giodarno: Thank you gentlemen.

Matthew Wright: I have to get you to say Massachusetts because it is almost impossible for us Australians to say Massachusetts. 

Susan Giordarno: You did very well.  Massachusetts. 

Scott Bilby: I think I could even spell it. Now Susan I’d like to ask you, it’s a question we ask most people on our show.  We’d like to know how you first got interested in renewable energy?

Susan Giodarno: Well, when I was young and impressionable back in the day, I read a book by a guy called E.F Schumacher, I don’t know if you know who he is, he also wrote Small is Beautiful.  The book I read was called Good Work and the thesis of the book was that worthwhile work was only the work that provided essential goods or services so that kind of got me started thinking about career directions.  So I went to work for a electric utility company early in my career I realised ‘well okay, energy is an essential service’.  When I met Walter Sass, one of the founders of Second Wind in 1985, I really admired his initiative of choosing wind energy as a career and creating his own opportunity by founding Second Wind.  After we were married, I couldn’t help but get involved in the company.  The rest of the employees brought me in as General Manager in 1990 and the rest is history.

Scott Bilby: So you have been General Manager there for twenty year now, is that correct?

Susan Giodarno: It is.

Scott Bilby: You can’t have been doing this new technology, sodar technology for that whole time though?

Susan Giodarno: No we only actually introduced the sodar product in 2007.  We’ve been doing wind measurement products in the wind energy industry since 1980 actually our company have. 

Scott Bilby: That’s an impressive history

Matthew Wright: So I guess, can we find out what the traditional wind measuring technology was that you originally started with?

Susan Giodarno: Sure actually Second Wind was the first company to make a data logger exclusively for the wind industry.  The way people have been doing it for years and years is you put up a mast as you would call it over there, a tower we would call it here.   In Australia the masts are about 100 metres tall right now to measure the wind for wind projects and on that mast you put a number of anemometers which hopefully your listeners are familiar with – those spinny things with the cups – and the wind, and some wind beams and other sensors.  At the bottom of the tower you put a data logger like the one that we make and that will transmit the data usually these days wirelessly to usually most industry send files via email.  So that is pretty much the old school, traditional, tried and true way of doing it.

Matthew Wright:  So basically they’ve got a mobile phone in the bottom of them and that’s sending them over the data network is sending the data back to base.

Susan Giodarno: Exactly and we actually introduced a few years back, as part of rethinking the way wind measurement is done, we introduced a satellite based data service that is at least in the US and I think it is true is Australia, in remote locations you don’t really have good cellular phone service.

Scott Bilby: That is correct.

Susan Giodarno: Here is the US, not so much is Australia, we aren’t standardised on GSM, we have two or three different standards.  So you can’t move a logger from place to place and assume that it will connect.  So a satellite service that we introduced called SkyServe, our logger will automatically synchronise with the satellite and instead of sending it to someone’s email account we send it to a website base secure internet based service, kind of like the idea of having Gmail.

Matthew Wright:  Obviously in each country, the meteorological services do wind monitoring and can give a fairly general overview of wind resources. Can you tell us what, why it is so important for wind developers, wind prospectors to do a resource assessment on their actual site and how that is likely to differ from the generalised meteorological services data?

Susan Giodarno: Sure.  Meteorological services data comes from different sources.  Sometimes it’s from very short towers, like ten meter towers located at airports, sometimes it’s based from satellite observation, from high altitudes that doesn’t really reflect on the conditions that you see at ground level.  But the main difference is that wind energy is very, very site specific.  Unlike solar energy where you can pretty much just made a broad statement about the solar resources in a particular region.  With wind energy it can vary tremendously across even from one kilometre away.  Think of how windy it is when you are at the beach versus when you are only a few streets away, it’s not windy.  And so, that’s the reason why you need to measure at your individual sites. 

Scott Bilby: We would like you to, given the background you have just given us, explain a little bit about the Triton Wind Profiler and what makes it special?

Susan Giodarno: Sure.  Would you like me to talk about what sodar is, because Triton is basically a form of sodar? 

Matthew Wright: That would be great. That would be great for our listeners.

Susan Giodarno: Fantastic. So sodar is a way of measuring the wind without a mast.  In the wind industry we call technology like this remote sensing.  So, sodar is similar to sonar, like the kind bats and dolphins use, so we bounce audible sound pulses off of moving air and that way we can sense wind speed and direction.  It’s actually pretty amazing.  So we will send an audible sound pulse up, we will listen to the echo and we can tell be how quickly the echo returns, what level we are measuring.  So if it returns very quickly we would be measuring 30 metres, if it returns a little bit slower, maybe 80 metres and depending on where the echo came back relative to where it was sent up I can tell how fast and the direction the wind speed is moving.  So if the echo comes back a great distance from where I sent up the sound, wind must be moving pretty fast.  We can see also further direction from that as well.  So that’s basically sodar.  The reason our company decided to develop the sodar was because Walter Sass, one of our founders, he was really frustrated at the way that wind assessments were being done in the USA.  The masts that we were using, that everyone in the industry was using, how much shorter than the turbines we were using and over time the wind turbines have gotten, i mean, all my career at Second Wind, the wind turbines have gone from 10 metre rotor diameter to 100 metre rotor diameter.  And the towers are that much taller too, so over the years, the turbines have grown taller than the masts we use to measure the wind.   Walter did a little back of the envelope calculation and realised a 60 metre met mast measures only the bottom 20% of the wind that a wind turbine on an 80 metre tower would see.  And he realised that sonar was probably the most cost effective solution to measure the wind at the heights that the turbines are with the best ability to operate for extended periods of time in remote locations like a data logger does.  Triton is a result of that vision – it’s rugged, it’s accurate, and it has such a low requirement that it can run definitely on two solar panels in places like Australia. 

Matthew Wright: I was reading that uses 7 watts which is pretty low.  Most compact fluoro lights are twice that power consumption.

Susan Giodarno: Exactly.  What 7 watts is in power consumption is equivalent to a very small fluorescent bulb.

Matthew Wright: Now can you tell us about how the industry has got confidence in the sodar systems.  Have they been tested I assume, alongside the conventional wind monitoring systems? 

Susan Giodarno: Absolutely.  When we introduced Triton, there was really healthy scepticism around the product, everyone is used to doing things one way, we bring out another way that is basically, essentially invisible.  We are sending up pulses of sound and listening to the echoes and telling people what the winds are.  Of course there was some scepticism and we started out right away by doing studies alongside towers in every single environment that we could think of.  In the prairies, in the deserts, in the mountains, by the sea shore and we, not only did we do it with Triton customers we also took Triton to a couple of different national laboratories to measure against towers there.  We have a Triton at the national laboratory in Colarado, USA and we also placed one at the Dutch National Energy Research lab in the Netherlands there.

Scott Bilby: Can I just ask a question about uses for the Triton wind profilers.  They can be used for determining the viability of wind farm sites and the location of individual wind turbines.  Are they also used after the wind farm has been established?

Susan Giodarno: Yes.  That is a use that hasn’t been used enough for but we are really trying to emphasise it recently because when you put up a wind farm, it is really important to make sure that your turbines are producing as effectively as they possibly can.  Compared to other forms of energy, wind has a really high capital cost, that is to say that the generators cost per mega watt more than a coal generator or a gas generator, but the fuel is free so that is the cool part.  It means that making the most of the fuel is critical for the financial success of a wind project.  We are encouraging customers to place Tritons in front of turbines so that they are seeing the exact same wind that the turbine is and in order to determine that the turbine is operating properly and to identify any extreme conditions that could be causing the turbines to have premature wear. 

Scott Bilby: How many Triton Wind Profilers do you need for how many turbines?  What is the ratio there? If you were testing the wind output? 

Susan Giodarno: Depends on how the site is laid out.  If you have a fairly flat uniform site you might only need a handful of Tritons, but if you have a complicated sites along a ridge line with alot of variation in terrain then you may need more, you may need 7 or 10.  It depends of the layout of the site.  We have worked on some sites that extend for miles across a ridgeline and we have worked on other sites that just look like a chess board. 

Matthew Wright:  My understand is that conventionally a wind turbine, with blades leading into the wind has the monitoring station on the back of the nacelle that is the section that holds the gear box and all that.  What is the advantage of feeding into the control system from the monitoring units up front, in terms of annual output?  Have you got any real life data or simulated data about how much more power you can get out of a wind turbine?

Susan Giodarno: Well, let’s see.  So that is kind of a complicated issue.  Right now there aren’t any commercial wind turbines that are operating based on any kind of sensors that are not located on the individual turbine.  The manufacturers of the turbines say that even though the sensors that are mounted on the nacelle are basically seeing the wind that is totally affected by the wind moving through the moving rotor.  They say that they have made the adjustment.  The benefit of the Triton can have is that it can verify those measurements because each site is going to have a different level of turbulence and a different level of sheer and in order to verify that that control anemometer on the turbines is actually providing accurate information to the turbines, it’s a lot better to verify with a Triton.  You can do it with a tower too but a Triton or another sodar is mobile so you can move it from turbine to turbine and you don’t need to erect it with a crane or any other heavy equipment so really Triton is going to be able to allow wind farm operators to do something that they were never able to do before. 

Scott Bilby: We’re speaking with Susan Giodarno, General Manager at Second Wind, a wind measurement technology company.  Susan, the traditional sort of wind monitoring tower, is it possible that they could – because they are a big tower with big arms on them and they have got sensors and stuff – can they ice up in the cold and is that something that the Triton can overcome by having a heater or something installed?

Susan Giodarno: Yes.  It is possible to get heated anemometers actually to go on these towers.  They are very expensive, they are a few thousand dollars each and they run on electricity or propane which means that you aren’t really able to, if you need to service the tower with fuel you won’t be able to either locate the remote....in addition the ice can sometimes accumulate on the tower to the extent that the tower will just fall right over.  They are designed to withstand a certain amount of ice but Mother Nature will sometimes dish out above average weather conditions.  The Triton definitely not fall over in the event of ice so that is an advantage and you can be confident that the ice won’t affect the measurements.  Triton is equipped with a heater for cold climates that will actually melt the snow right out the Triton using a very efficient propane electric system.  I hope that answered your question.

Matthew Wright: Yeah, I think it does.  The other thing about it is that in some jurisdictions I’m assuming that planning approvals are required for wind monitoring stations and obviously that wouldn’t be the case with a ground based sodar system?

Susan Giodarno: Yes, that is very true.  The key to installation is partly due to the fact that you don’t need a permit for it and that other thing is that is your exploring and area sometimes you don’t want to be sticking a hundred metre tower in the air announcing what you are doing.  Whether you don’t want your competitors in the wind industry to know that you are exploring a certain area or that you are concerned you are going to raise community objections before you have even decided to develop the site.  A lot of our customers really appreciate the stealth of having a remote sensing system like Triton. 

Matthew Wright: Now I’m just wondering, you are talking about the wind turbines growing in height and we have been looking at some of Enercons E126  - these units actually have a hub height of 138 metres and rotor diameter of, I think, 126 metres.  Is the Triton able to scale to monitor that wind resource?

Susan Giodarno: Practically, I have to say the Triton goes up to about 200 metres so we won’t get the exact tippy top of that rotor, I have to confess that it’s true.  As tower get taller we may have to adapt our technology to measure higher heights.  That would be, I suppose, Triton 2.0.  But at least to doing a lot better then you would be doing with a 100 metre tower or 80 metre tower or 60 metre tower. 

Matthew Wright: Absolutely. And also with that existing wind monitoring that has gone on in terms of modelling for future wind resource, is scaling up 60 - and I realise the advantage of the way Triton’s profiling all different altitudes - but how well does 60 or 80 metre data scale if people are trying to use older monitoring data when people are trying to make decisions about the future versus 10 metre meteorological data?

Susan Giodarno: As I tried to explain before, the wind resource varies tremendously from site to site so a lot of the practice of the past has been to take the top of the most available tower, whether it is a 60 metre or 40 metre tower and use a standard formula to make assumptions about the wind at higher heights.  But what we are finding is now that we are able to measure the wind higher up is that those assumptions don’t always square with reality.  There are sites that have less wind than is expected up at the heights above to tower and there are sites that have a lot more wind than we expected and that is going to make a huge difference in the ability of these projects to be financed and built. 

Scott Bilby: Now, I just wanted to ask a question, I’m not sure if it is rather a silly question or not.  I was just wondering is a country was rainy, so you might have rainy or foggy weather, does that effect the sound waves and so does the Triton compensate for that?

Susan Giodarno: That was a good question too.  You guys have really done your homework.  Yeah, rain can affect the sodar.  It comes across to the Triton, rain will come across like a very high vertical wind speed and we can detect the effect rain in the data and we have developed up some algorithms to filter it out and we are continuing to evolve those algorithms.  Fog doesn’t effect it at all.  We have quite a few units operating in foggy locations as well as rainy locations.  Fog doesn’t effect it however if you are measuring the wind using lasers, which is lidar as opposed to sonar, fog with definitely mess you up.

Matthew Wright: Can you tell us the advantages and disadvantages of lidar versus sodar?

Susan Giodarno: Sure, that would be great.  The reason we picked sodar over lidar is that we are pretty high tech company and we could have gone either way.  The reason we went with sonar was that we knew that the system costs would always be lower.  Lasers are pretty high technology, they use pretty exotic materials and the cost was going to be a long time coming down to the place where we are with sodar right now.  Sodar costs about 20% of the cost of a lidar.  Another reason we picked sodar over to develop is that we knew that the power requirement of the sonar would always be less than the power requirement of the lidar.  We felt like in order to really replace towers in the environment we would need to make sure that the product that we developed would be able to operate independently for months and months and months at a time without being visited the way people do with metmasts.  Because a laser inherently requires more power to operate in order to generate that very precise beam, it is always going to require more power.  That is kind of the two main differences between the products. 

Matthew Wright: There must be some advantages to a lidar if it costs five times as much and some companies are offering them?  Is there anything in particular that the lidar does that is an advantage that is why people are going to pay that cost premium?

Susan Giodarno: Well, besides the fact that lasers are very cool, lasers are not affected by sounds in the environment.  Sodar, because it uses sound, if it hears sounds outside of it, it can be effected.  If there is a lot of noise, it is going to have trouble hearing the return echoes.  From time to time it has problems with creatures that are around that make sounds at around the same frequency range, it can affect the readings.  So, sonar does have some weaknesses.  As I mentioned lasers are effected by fog, sodars are effected by rain.  The other thing about lidar units is that they are smaller and more compact.  Sonar has to be bigger to get the sound up into the atmosphere with the speakers and physical way that we make the sound. 

Scott Bilby: Did you just say that the Triton is a bigger set up? Does it take long to set it up on site and once it is one site, how long can it sit out there?

Susan Giodarno: It actually sets up pretty fast.  We can get a Triton set up by one person in about two hours and we can be looking at data on the internet within another hour easily.  The product has been designed to be really easy to set up.  A lidar I think it comparable in terms of set up time obviously it would depend on the specific model from one to the other and different manufacturer products.  Our Triton’s because of the low power requirement can operate indefinitely without needing to be visited.  It has extremely high reliability, it has 98.5% reliability and because of the solar panels in a place like Australia, it will just keep running indefinitely.

Matthew Wright:  It must be difficult now to justify conventional wind monitoring masts.  Is the whole industry moved to sodar and/or lidar systems now? It must be really hard to justify a whole work crew to get a mast up?

Susan Giodarno: I think there is a lot of conservatism in the industry and because banks are involved, banks as we know are quite conservative.  But I think there is growing pressure on the part of wind developers to use this technology because of the cost savings especially with the taller masts.  In the USA we are still using 60 metre masts so the 60 metre mast set up in cheaper than a Triton.  On the other hand I think that customers are really starting to appreciate the advantages of high height data. 

Scott Bilby:  It just that there hasn’t been enough reliable data coming out for enough years for the conservative banks to get behind the sodar system, the Triton system?

Susan Giodarno:  That’s right.  And especially because we really think Triton is a great leap forward from other sodar.  So perhaps banks and other engineers are used to sodar operating with less reliability or less accurately so we really have to prove ourselves on a case by case basis. 

Matthew Wright:  So I guess you are saying that your product is superior to some of the other offerings that have been in the past?

Susan Giodarno: We are technologists.  So we definitely believe that our technology is the best. You have to understand where we are coming from.   I think it is.  I do believe it is.  I think out independent research studies show that it is really accurate, as accurate as anemometers fundamentally and it’s as reliable as anemometer stations.  So we are hoping that we are already the leading remote sensing system in the wind industry that we will start to really gain on traditional met systems as well.

Scott Bilby: Now I know that the Triton systems are being used in New South Wales by a company called Wind Prospect and I’m just wondering where else around the world the Triton is being used and can you tell us a little bit about where to from here, what are your plans in the coming next year or two?

Susan Giodarno: Sure.  So far the Triton system falls on four continents.  Australasia, Africa, Europe and North America.  We are hoping to increase the presence of Tritons in all those markets.   We’re looking forward to continue to improve the product, improve our data communication infrastructure and really be part of the wind measurement texture the way that wind is measured around the world.  

Scott Bilby:  And you are based in Massachusetts? Do you have other offices around the world? What are your expansion plans?

Susan Giodarno:  We have an office in the UK to serve the European market.  We actually have a partner in Australia, we work with a company called WISE based in Brisbane. 

Scott Bilby:  That is great news Susan, we would like to thank you very much for speaking with us today.

Susan Giodarno:  Thank you very much for inviting me.  It has been great having the conversation with you from so far away.

Scott Giodarno: It was very informative, Thank you very much

Matthew Wright:  And lots of fun.

Susan Giodarno:  Well thanks, I’ve had a great time too.

Transcript by Ana