WindEnergyUpdate goes one-to-one with Blaine Sundwall, director of wind operations and maintenance at Iberdrola Renewables USA, to run through best-in-class strategies for curtailing O&M costs and to gauge the future direction of wind energy regulation in the US.

By Rikki Stancich in Paris

WindEnergyupdate: A lot of turbines are now beginning to come out of warranty. What are the key considerations when it comes to on site turbine O&M?

Blaine Sundwall: Iberdrola has several hundred turbines coming out of warranty right now. We’ve found that probably the biggest cost driver is the gearbox. The crane hire cost is very high, around US150,000 for the mobilization fee.  The gearbox in itself is an expensive piece of equipment, even despite the fact that prices have recently fallen considerably. You need to be intelligent with regard to the oil condition, to ensure that the gearbox has as long a life as possible.

Parts management is also difficult, given the boom-bust nature of components suppliers, which has made it very difficult to have faith in vendors’ lead times.

Then there are the carrying costs of having a big inventory on hand – which is unavoidable given the uncertainty of parts supply.

The industry is maturing a little; some non-OEM part suppliers are offering nice arrangements whereby they will stock something for you but keep the part (gearboxes for example, which require special storage conditions and care) on their shelf.

There are certain vendors who will do that – who hold the part for you and place the warranty on hold until the day you take possession of the part.

Then you also have the labour considerations. But there is generally an industry standard number of technicians needed on site, so there are unlikely to be any hidden or unexpected costs there.

Wind Energy Update:  What are the leading options for remote O&M and how central is remote monitoring to operations?

Blaine Sundwall: We began setting up our remote monitoring 3 or 4 years ago in order to augment plant reliability.

But recently there has been a large uptake in regulatory requirements for remote operations. In the near future I’d say everyone would be required to have 24-7 monitoring.

It was only last year that the regulatory requirements began to increase. The grid operators have new requirements to change the voltages, plant output and point-of-contact for underground digging. The grid operators are changing the rules all the time - I’d say about a quarter of unforeseen costs come from this alone.

The rules in all regions will eventually settle out with regards to data flow requirements, availability and power data and outage reporting and so on.

We recently built a new control room in excess of US$1mn, not even taking into consideration the tens of millions in backend computer systems. For that we have 9 operators on staff, with 2 people on shift, and 24-7 control systems support. We will probably be adding more staff to the team mid-year.

Some type of forecaster schedule is also useful. For this we have a 24-7 meteorological group.

Wind Energy Update:  What regulation exists or is pending with regards to O&M?

Blaine Sundwall: There are a significant number of regulatory requirements.

There is the FERC – the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. While there is no regulatory requirement for us to monitor, that is where the regional transmission operators roll into it – these and the independent systems operators.

There are several overlapping schemes; the FERC has engaged the NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation) to develop and implement reliability standards across industry for all generators. It is pretty onerous – we have folks working on NERC full time. 

Then there is the intermittent resource requirement programme. There is the SLIC, whereby for more than 1MW of outage, you need to submit a SLIC ticket to say that the units are offline. That is a 24-7 operation in itself.

You have ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas), monitoring turbine output and availability. This is currently a voluntary system for recording outages, but it will likely become mandatory in the near future.

The PJM (a regional transmission organisation) has a similar requirement for outages but no requirement for dataflow.

In the upper mid-West there are a number of regulations coming into play – we have a strikeforce of 12 people looking at that. At this stage, it is still uncertain as to what the regulations will be.

There is likely to be localized nodal pricing to help with congestion management, in that it will send a price point for each node in the system will cause generators to come offline to ease congestion.

We regularly get curtailment orders for the mid-west due to congestion. This is a big cost that was not anticipated by industry. In terms of profit and loss, there is a huge cost of lost energy due to curtailment.

WindEnergyUpdate: Are any solutions being tabled to counter these costs?

Blain Sundwall: A handful of things are helping with wind integration into the grid. In the mid-West there is a programme starting to let generators begin self-balancing their reserves, so using other generators energy to balance wind.

There are costs and benefits. If wind is over-generating, geo-thermal would back off. If wind is under-generating, you need to find a resource to ramp up. This approach is a good fit for the middle of the country, too.

This is probably the future to finding plants in a steady state. But operators would have to be sophisticated – there are commercial and technological pieces to the puzzle. And of course, the grid operators would have to sign off on it. 

Then you would need a market place that can offer services from, say, geo-thermal plants to wind generators. Given that it has never been done before, the pricing of the product is unknown.

But there is certainly enough sophistication in the control system to provide the different parties with the required information. It is a big hill to climb, but Iberdrola is probably by far the best positioned to do it.

WindEnergyupdate: What kind of downtime are US operators facing due to supply chain issues/availability of components?

Blaine Sundwall: At the end of the day, it is a financial decision you take with regard to how large an inventory you carry.

We carry a very large inventory, so we rarely face a stock out. But sometimes, carrying a part can be more expensive than the downtime. This figure can change all the time, subject to parts prices, the tax environment (different states have different taxes on equipment), lead times and so on.

WindEnergyUpdate: Can you provide any best practice examples of reducing downtime during routine turbine maintenance?

Blaine Sundwall: We strongly believe in the owner operator model because when operating, owning and maintaining a facility, you have highly-qualified technicians who are there for the long-term.

As such, they have the incentive to do the job right and they notice things that are not necessarily on the maintenance checklist.

They take a long-term view, because the piece of equipment is supposed to last 20 years and, more than likely, they will be the person maintaining the equipment over that period, so it is in their own interest to do a good job. We also provide bonuses based on safety and turbine availability.