Watching wind industry grow, memories from last 20 years
In 2002, fresh out of college, I joined the world of serious work at GE research center in Bangalore. It was amazing.. The whole place was buzzing with passionate people from each walk of engineering, at desks and in labs, wanting to make their mark with their hardwork, ideas, working with each others and colleagues all over the world and creating a good reputation for Indian engineers.
In the same year, as Enron scandal unfolded all over the news, GE acquired the wind turbine business from Enron at a fire sale, and lot of work came to us to learn and contribute to the new business. A German engineer came to Bangalore to train few of us and ran us through the history... "Lets see.. First there was U.S. Windpower, born out of oil crisis from 1970s. It went bankrupt, and was acquired by Kennetech corp. Later Kennetech declared bankruptcy, and was acquired by Zond energy systems. Zond too kicked the bucket and was acquired by Enron, who also acquired Tacke Windtechnik to create Enron wind. And now finally.. Enron has declared bankruptcy and is now acquired by GE wind energy. so.. " the pattern was not lost on us. The fragility of wind business to whim of politicians, lack of consistent policy, entrenched oil & gas interests and waves in oil prices designed by OPEC cartel to stamp out budding wind industry and corporate greed (in case of Enron) all caused these boom & bust cycles, leaving a wake of broken or abandoned wind turbines, dreams and ideals. I marveled at people who suffer such huge personal & professional upheavals and still try to keep the mission going and squeeze gallows humor out of it. The somber responsibility of not letting this business fail again and play my small part in this mission inspired me.
In college I had read a bunch on appropriate technology and had a spiral bound dog-eared photocopy of E.F. Schumacher's "Small is beautiful" on my desk. When working with wind, it was clear that this is a rare technology with little or no negative externalities and is truly appropriate, sustainable and good for the world. Later I realized that it attracts the best kind of people, passionate, good-hearted and simple men & women of action.. Sitting in that conference room I could not have foreseen in my wildest dreams the success of wind industry has had in last 20 years. Now turbines have grown taller and larger. Annual installations year has grown 30 times over, accounts for 8% of energy production in US and 50% for countries like Denmark. Cost has halved in last decade and is now at parity with fossil fuels without subsidy. Wind & solar accounted for 67% of new power generation added worldwide in 2019 and is displacing most polluting coal powered generation. GE renewable energy has been a great steward of Enron's wind business and has grown it many times over. It has wrestled the top US manufacturer spot away from Vestas 3 years in row and has launched world's biggest 15MW offshore turbine which rivals Eiffel tower in height. I bet Schumacher would have approved of this "big yet beautiful" technology which is completely appropriate for the danger of climate change that the mother earth is facing.
But this journey was not smooth by any stretch, and my personal journey somehow got interwoven through it. This is thus the look from the trenches, and it has seeds of both promise and peril that the wind industry still faces.
In Bangalore, as a part of the model based controls team, I had a chance to work on a software feature that can extract more power from a turbine when wind conditions are favorable. This assignment led to my first patent that later launched the Windboost service. As a young researcher, it hooked me onto the rush of research, small and large discoveries and working with early stage ideas with faith & patience. During same time, I found my calling for control design and decided to pursue graduate studies in US in control theory, with no expectation of returning to wind energy. Little did I know what the future had in store.
5 years later, newly married, I started looking for a job and putting finishing touches to the proofs in a math-heavy doctoral thesis. But it was 2009, and the recession following the financial crisis was in full swing, with jobs hard to come by. This is when one day, out of blue, I was contacted by a wind turbine company in California, Clipper windpower. The visit to their headquarters in Carpinteria blew me away. Located on the edge of cliff overseeing pacific ocean, it was 100+ people company with all design engineers under one roof. There was an atmosphere of intense collaboration and missionary zeal to disrupt the industry. People were genuinely good & passionate. Everybody tried to carpool to reduce carbon footprint, and lunch discussions focussed on how wind help fulfil the biblical mandate to be good stewards of this land. After all Clipper was founded by same people who started US wind industry with Zond/Kennetech. They believed in wind energy when nobody else did, and kept at it through all the business cycles. Grown out of a DOE grant, Clipper had launched an innovative 2.5MW wind turbine, the largest onshore turbine at that time and lauched an IPO on London stock exchange.
My third week on the job, I was asked to purchase steel-toed shoes and fly to Windom, Minnesota, where Clipper had a windfarm in the middle of a growing cornfield. We learnt to don the safety harness and climb 24 stories tower. On the first day, I realized the value of the humble moisturizer, because the constant breeze dries out the skin in few hours. Next to a wind turbine, we camped in a trailer for 3 days waiting for the winds to pick up to finish testing.. they stubbornly refused to. But that was an opprtunity to talk to technicians, engineers working on the turbines, know their roots, their improbable journeys to the wind industry, what ticks them and keeps them coming back to such demanding and often thankless job. (Later I met some techs nearing retirement age who would climb 5+ turbines in a day, while overcoming claustrophobia, fear of heights, safety risks... That is roughly the height of the empire state building! ) I also got to learn what annoys them and how my work could help them. Wind industry truly runs on these undersung heros who deal with all issues that fall through the cracks. Easing their pain became my mantra in years to follow. Finally on the fourth day, the wind forecasts started looking up, and all of us postponed our flights, worked on the weekend, and finished the testing while the wind blew..
Work in Clipper was unrelenting. We all had to think like fire-flighters or emergency room triage nurses every day.. It was hard to switch-off the work in evening and weekends.. as the work and life boundaries blurred. I was the only control engineer for many years.. and would get calls at odd hours when anything related to controls/oscillations tripped the turbines. Inability to cope with the sheer volume of issues, forced us to be nimble and develop a self-help big-data tools for site managers to quickly diagnose the true root causes behind such anomalies, which were often sensor errors, vendor quality, aggressive/unexpected winds, human errors and sometimes the design errors (which would come to me). These anomalies/downtime also served as symptoms of the health of underlying components, which steadily grew worse as the time progressed. On paper, larger turbine leads to the lower cost of energy, but large component can fail in unknown ways, are harder to quality control and design rules created for fixed speed rotating machinery in clean rooms may not work for variable speed wind turbine, subject to complex loading and the elements. When I joined, Clipper had gone through two major quality issues or RCAs, and experiencing pains of a growing fleet. There was work.. so much of it.. and not enough engineers. But the high of fixing things and seeing them work was gratifying..
The core problem of wind indutry is that the good news travels quickly, while the bad news comes in late. New sales, new turbine certifications, powercurve test passing and new launches get all the press.. but any systemic design gaps that lead to accelerated life reduction are only discovered later. If nobody is paying attention to the bad news, it will be too late when it becomes forest-fire and the warranty costs can take down the company. This unfortunately did happen at Clipper.
The management had declared success on two major RCAs, around gearbox & blades. They were eager to work on 10MW concept that got all the good press. Significant resources, time were diverted to that effort, even while the core 2.5MW fleet was ailing. There were other distractions as well like launching Clipper's own windfarm control product and Lidar sensing. All this while, we were unaware of true extent of the 'hole in the heart issue' ailing out fleet.
It turned out that our gearbox was very sensitive to the non-axial loads that arise during high wind shear, and its impact was never simulated. The blade sensors that could have seen and reduced this load, were never put on the turbines thinking it was optional overhead and would save costs. The large inventory of such sensors in our warehouses, was later sold at a fire sale to recover cash. The gearbox condition monitoring system was put in place, but not never analyzed, refined or acted upon. All these blind spots, missed opprtunities and lack of foresight led to a string of gearbox failures that started as a trickle, but soon became a steady stream of bad news. Management tried to put a positive spin on it by organizing deep dive gearbox design reviews with independent experts outside our company, and their vouching for our fixes.. but they were too little and too late.
Knowing the business condition, Clipper started searching for a buyer and found one in United technologies. UTC tried to help Clipper with all its corporate and research might, with new product designs and quality fixes, but soon realized the unsustainability of quality issues and started looking for ways to offload risk. The fullest extent of quality issues were clear to us employees only then. Many key people started leaving as they saw the writing on the wall. The morale was very low.. To be able to focus, I pinned to my cubicle a printout of "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster from world war-2 when England was under daily German fire. There was still some magical thinking/hope that we will survive this.. and there must be a point and higher purpose in the daily struggle, perseverence, goodness of people in Clipper.
Finally, a private equity firm bought Clipper and decided to cut their losses. They signalled the plans to shut down the headquarters in California, and only keep servicing unit in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Those last few months were not unlike the sinking of the Titanic. Out of the survival instinct I also started searching for opportunities and found one in GE Research again. But even on the last day, I remember working on a last-ditch effort to make a new sensor-free shear estimation concept work, which could have helped gearbox life extension, as I was gathering my belongings and boxes. Helpless in the knowledge that even the best control design could not have saved the sinking fleet.
Now looking back after 10 years, many Clipper windfarms have received a second lease of life as GE has repowered many of them. The windfarm I visited, Jeffers, has been repowered with Vestas gearbox and blades. This has kept the promise of green energy alive for our customers and stakeholders. What happened in Clipper is by no means an anomaly. Many other OEMs have been plagued by the same conundrum between reliability & platform growth. But the mechanics of the problem also reveals its solution, which is to seek cautious growth while keeping eyes and ears (read fleet data) open for any early bad news, and listening to technicians who are closest to the Genba (kaizen-speak for the place where work happens) and less to others who are prone to confirmation bias.
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