What is your role with Firetrace?
I joined Firetrace five years ago, with a past in various aspects of the energy industry like solar, storage, energy efficiency, demand side management, software as a service for energy, etc.
I was eager to join Firetrace at that time to start up our new product development team and to grow our clean-energy business, which was fledgling at the time. My current role is VP of Commercial, responsible for sales, marketing, customer service, talent and culture, business optimization, and product management within the company.
In Firetrace’s recent report, “Take Two: Securing Wind’s Second Life,” it takes a deep dive into repowering. Why should aging wind turbines be repowered?
It’s a really critical time for the industry where a few things are happening at the same time.
One is that there are fleets that are aging that have been aging for maybe the past 20 years or so, and they’re going to be reaching their end-of-life.
The new turbines that are being installed currently have a much higher level of efficiency and capacity than our older turbines have. It’s a really critical time to be able to take advantage of that. They also — because they’re so much more efficient — take up a lot less physical space. I believe it’s about 27 percent less room that these newer turbines occupy.
That allows for another step in the energy transition, which is things like co-location of battery energy storage so these systems can be much more stable and reliable as a primary energy source.
It also reduces the impact for developers because they don’t have to wait quite as long or go through the very inconsistent and arduous processes of permitting or waiting for a new interconnection, etc.
Why is repowering becoming a key priority for wind operators?
We have a lot of aging infrastructure that is starting to pop up. More than half of Britain’s onshore fleet is going to face end-of-life decisions within the next nine years, but since wind assets started to be installed in the early 2000s, their asset age is coming up. Another reason, as anyone in the energy industry space knows, is that the growth of the market is really scaling up quite heavily so that there’s a massive amount of energy demand needed and capacity that’s needed from these areas. Without repowering, both in Europe and in the U.S., we will end up missing clean-energy targets or wind targets — not to mention the exponential growth and energy demand. In the U.S., it’s expected to grow by 20 percent within the next four years.
How can regulatory complexity and these differing frameworks in the U.S. and Europe be a potential barrier to these repowering goals?
When I worked directly in solar generation, this was a massive, massive impediment for the industry, and it’s the same for wind. Both in the U.S. and in Europe, even though it’s regulated, it’s ironic because there’s a lack of standardization and a lack of clarity.
There’s just a lack of standardized processes making things very confusing for the developers. In Europe in particular, there are really long delays in permitting. It can be almost a decade — nine years or so — just to receive a permit. There are also rules that are emerging in some areas about spatial regulations and how far away turbines can be from existing construction, etc. Those of us in the U.S. have witnessed for the past year how damaging the lack of clarity and hostility around the tax incentives can be in making things amenable for developers.
What features can be added to U.S. repowering projects that can ensure these tax credit thresholds are reached?
In the U.S., those tax credit thresholds are partially calculated by an 80/20 rule around the value of the new equipment that’s on site. So, in many cases, 80 percent of the value of that equipment must be new equipment. Apart from the very obvious fact that fire suppression would protect the assets and the communities involved, it can also add to the value of the new assets that are on the project, therefore making things more likely to be qualified.
How does fire risk management factor into the turbine repowering?
We talked about modern turbines being much more efficient, which is wonderful. They can produce that much more energy; however, they’re also larger. That means the areas that are most combustible are also larger. Things like the size of the transformers, transformer rooms, the lubricants involved, etc. There’s just a lot more of that in the concentrated spaces where fires are more likely to start.
It’s also — just as with any type of machinery that is in isolated spaces or that large —impossible to really fight fires in traditional ways, so they can’t be accessed by firefighters. There’s also an additional financial risk that comes about because smaller turbines were also cheaper.
Having downtime from losing one or having to have downtime to repair one was perhaps a cumulative value of $11 million. Now, for larger turbines, they can get up to an estimated $33 million. On the other side of that, we’ve found that we come in at different stages with our partners, who range from manufacturers, OEMs to owner-operators, and utilities. We’ve found that sometimes, if we come in as a retrofit when the turbines are already up, that adds an additional cost for them because then they’re losing downtime by having to shut things down to install the fire suppression.
Whereas if they do it early on and they’re repowering, then all of that happens at once, and there isn’t a need for loss of downtime in the future. So, it’s how and when you go about installing the fire suppression.
And then, finally, like we talked about with the co-location of battery energy storage systems alongside the generation, there’s also obviously the additional hazards of having fires extend — not that I want to be sensationalist in that sense, either, because there’s enough of that in the media, but it’s obviously possible, especially since some wind-turbine fires start with lightning strikes.
Community acceptance when dealing with wind has always been a challenge in the industry. Does that change when it comes to repowering projects?
In some communities, because they’re already used to having a wind farm on that site, they may be less resistant to something new happening. But when they see construction starting, maybe more traffic starting, and they’re also seeing that perhaps there’s a bigger turbine going up, then, of course, people are often concerned.
There’s also, as we talked about in Europe, that the media has been quite sensationalist highlighting these fires and turbines and using it as a way to garner opposition or paranoia. We’ve also found in our work that when we are working with a developer or design firm and the community to get permitting, we go in and say there’s going to be fire suppression.
It allays quite a lot of fears in the community because they’re seeing there’s proactive investment from the developer or the parties involved in developing to keep them safer. Having fire suppression involved as part of the discussion or proactive part of development has helped things get approved with community-based projects.
Data centers require massive amounts of power to operate. Has that become a major incentive for repowering projects? And how so if that’s the case?
It feels a bit like data center conversations and energy conversations have all become one big conversation, and it’s definitely a very linked conversation where data centers’ most limiting factor for development is energy supply as well as water supply.
For the energy world, trying to figure out how to deal with that 20 percent growth and demand over the next six years that we have talked about, it would be impossible to get there without repowering. There are often years of delays sometimes involved in either getting a new interconnection or permitting. There’s a massive amount of additional costs that would go into building a greenfield project that wouldn’t be as high with a repowering project, not to mention just the efficiency of it all.
In our report, we mentioned that failing to convert and potentially double the capacity of the 41 GW of legacy U.S. wind power set to retire by 2030 would really cause a big missed opportunity to safely fuel this technology expansion for AI. Also, as you may have seen in the media, according to the International Energy Agency, 20 percent of data centers risk having operational delays due just to insufficient power.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention that we didn’t talk about?
We’re really invested in this repowering study so we could get ahead of any challenges for our partners, for our customers, their communities, and their end users. We are really trying to help ensure that we can empower a successful energy transition with the stable and safe transition to repowering or addressing of this repowering.
More info www.firetrace.com/take-two
