The Transition Faster Conference: Let's Talk Wind

Keynote speech

Opening session - Energy transition: Fast but not fast enough

Our C-Suite Panel will discuss how the energy industry can take the lead by promoting ideas, sharing innovation and finding ways to work together with other sectors to transition much faster – leaving no one behind and making use of emerging and established technologies. Areas we want to cover with the panellists are:

• What must Industry Leaders do to drive the transition of their company/industry?
• How can Diversity and Inclusion help to outperform the forecasted pace of the transition?
• How to mitigate the anticipated impact of climate change without slowing down the transition?

10:00 - 10:30 Meet the experts

Emerging markets - Offshore wind: Managing risk amidst tropical cyclones and earthquakes

Emerging offshore wind markets are playing a significant role in growing the portion of wind energy in the global electricity mix. But it will also bring new challenges for wind industry stakeholders, for example on how wind turbines structures should be designed for tropical cyclones and earthquakes. This topic is of high importance in offshore markets in the Asian Pacific region like Taiwan, Japan and Korea as these regions are often struck by these heavy forces of nature. Currently, a clear industry approach giving guidance on this is missing, which often leads to longer-lasting coordination work between e.g. turbine manufacturer, designer and wind farm developer. We will look at this challenge by presenting the results for the very first time of DNV GL’s ACE JIP – a project which has caused a stir in the industry.

11:00 - 11:30    Meet the experts

Merchant risk - Hedging risk through PPAs

The merchant landscape is spreading around the globe. National governments are cutting off feed-in tariff schemes and moving to subsidy-free environments. With this backdrop, all the areas of a project that may have an impact on the financial model, get additional relevance. Resource assessment must be developed in a very accurate way. CAPEX and OPEX of the projects need to be strictly defined, and markets for selling the energy need to be developed. Different markets have tackled the merchant environment with different mechanisms. Wind hedges have become extremely popular in the U.S. Portfolio management is usually done by big players to ensure a set amount of energy for the offtakers, as the use of PPAs as a tool to make projects bankable, has spread globally. This impacts all services in the wind energy value chain. From wind measurement campaigns to shorten the time to market of projects, optimization of the CAPEX and the OPEX of the projects via Benchmarking, due diligence assessments in order to ensure the bankability, lifetime extension to cover the whole plan of the FM, and finally, power price forecasting to build a solid foundation of revenues to raise the project finance. The different players involved will provide their points of view, from financiers and investors (with opposite targets in principle) to developers, and owners who will be operating under these rules. This session will explore the use of PPAs as a tool of making the projects bankable and asks whether PPAs are here to stay or whether they are just a passing fashion?

12:15 - 12:45    Meet the experts 

Merchant risk - Power price forecasting

The landscape for investing in energy projects has changed radically in recent years. The players, the technologies, the market forces have all evolved considerably. This makes it both more challenging and more crucial to accurately determine the risk associated with investing in a particular energy project.

If energy production has a low captured price, due to grid curtailments, cannibalization of pricing, or restrictions due to incoming projects at the same interconnection point, it could lead to the collapse of cashflow.

Power price forecasting (PPF) can give you a deeper understanding of merchant risk to support decision making in energy investments.

13:30-14:00    Meet the experts

Technical development - Floating wind: The power to commercialize

In this session, our panel of global experts will outline some of the ways stakeholders in the floating offshore wind industry can work together to harness new technological developments and help bring about step-change improvements to an emerging industry. The panel will discuss:

• Some of the key environmental and logistical challenges facing the scale-up of floating offshore wind technology and what is being done to address these
• How the learnings from fixed bottom wind and other relevant technologies are being applied to help bring floating wind technology to market on a mass scale faster, whilst minimizing risk
• The role of policymakers in creating a pipeline for floating wind that will support investment in the technology over the next decade
• Which countries are currently leading the way in the development of floating wind technology and how this might impact the trajectory of the industry over the next decade

14:45 - 15:15    Meet the experts

Technical development - Next generation blades: continuing the reduction of COE

In this session, we will explore the challenges presented for next-generation rotors, and the corresponding blade technologies anticipated to enable continued COE reductions with larger blades. Experts will speak on topics including increased use of carbon fiber in blade structure, increased criticality of lightning protection with tip height and inclusion of carbon, structural health monitoring and other technologies to optimize reliability, and transportation constraints for onshore turbines along with enabling technologies such as segmented and modular blades.

17:45 - 18:15    Meet the experts

Key takeaways of the day

Keynote speech

Wind farm planning - Living with blockage: our new reality

Over the last couple of years, wind-farm-scale blockage (in short ‘blockage’) and its impact on the estimated yield of a wind farm has made an unwelcome appearance onto the stage of wind resource assessment. Since Ørsted’s announcement in October 2019, the wind industry has moved forward with the acceptance that blockage exists, and following DNV GL’s lead, many consultants now include blockage in their energy production assessments (EPAs).  

However, a consensus has not been reached in the wind industry on how blockage should be modelled or accounted for, and the many models out there still lead to a large variation in the predicted blockage for a given wind farm. 

In this session, you will hear from two major wind farm developers, who will reveal what blockage means for them, how they go about quantifying (modelling/measuring) the magnitude of its effects and how they deal with it from an operational/development perspective. They, together with DNV GL, will also discuss the need for accurate and validated blockage models and the difficulties that need to be overcome to achieve them. You will learn about the models currently available to quantify the impact of blockage on a wind farm EPA, as well as find out about the cutting-edge developments happening in the field. 

14:45 - 15:15    Meet the experts

Life management - To extend, optimize or repower? That is the question.

Having a full awareness of how much life is left in a wind turbine allows owners, developers and investors of wind farms to develop appropriate strategies to optimize maintenance spending, energy production and potentially extend the life of the project. In all cases, accurate estimates of an asset’s lifetime help to quantify its value and ensure cost-efficient energy generation.  

Lifetime extension is not the only option. Optimization or repowering or rather developing a strategy on these items is possible, though complex, as influenced by different conditions for future operation: uncertainty on component failures, OPEX, power market volatility, lifetime uncertainty, potential benefits from partial or full repowering.  

Owners strive for the most advantageous choice, and digital twins can help in these decisions as they provide insights calibrated on the specific environmental conditions. 

In this session, we’ll explore the most recent experiences and the solutions adopted by well-known operators and we’ll discuss insights on lifetime management.

16:00 - 16:30    Meet the experts  

Wind farm strategy & management - Leveraging data to maximize energy capture and minimize O&M costs

Every wind project collects data, but how can that data be leveraged to maximize energy capture and minimize O&M costs? Proactive steps can be taken beyond typical baseline monitoring to achieve more optimized project operations. 

Owners and investors often hold energy production risk for operational wind plants, yet the industry lacks standard tools and practices for monitoring energy production to ensure losses are minimized and opportunities to upgrade turbines are capitalized. Further, technology to turn operating data into useful insights is maturing and showing real value for those utilizing it. 

This session will highlight cutting edge practices employed by top tier operators, including monitoring techniques and pitfalls, common “silent” sources of degradation, failure prediction technology, high value performance upgrades and technology on the horizon to keep an eye on. 

17:45 - 18:15    Meet the experts

Wind farm planning - On the Critical Path: Meeting the permitting regulations in the U.S.

The offshore wind industry is on the precipice of substantial growth, with over 30GW of offshore wind targeted for procurement by 2035. While there are significant lessons learned from Europe that can be implemented in the U.S. with respect to technology, supply chain, and logistics, the regulatory regime for offshore wind in the U.S. is unlike anywhere else. With a combination of state and federal decision-makers that are not always aligned, this is one of the most significant challenges that need to be overcome in the U.S.  

In this session, DNV GL will host leaders from the U.S. offshore wind industry to discuss the specific areas within the permitting process that have been challenging, how they are similar to the experience in the European market, and what sets the U.S. market apart. 

19:00 - 19:30    Meet the experts

Key takeaways of the day

Keynote speech

Grid integration - Ancillary services: Wind power's contribution to grid stability

On- and offshore wind farms represent a growing share of the global power supply. In some regions, wind farms have already achieved a dominant role in electricity supply, e.g. in Denmark and Germany. This leads to both significant contributions to load coverage and an increased need for system stability. Against this backdrop, integrating wind power into the grid requires both comprehensive considerations of the daily operation of the electricity grids, through optimized system management processes as well as fundamental active contributions to securing ancillary service provision by the wind farms themselves, since conventional large power plants are gradually being phased out as classic ancillary service providers.  

13:15 - 13:45    Meet the experts

Green hydrogen: What's next?

Amid the backdrop of the European Clean Energy Package, Hydrogen has risen again like a Phoenix of the energy markets. After a short career in the early 2000s Hydrogen is back on the scene, bringing with it a lot of potential. It is an energy vector that could lead to the decarbonization of hard to turn industrial sectors. High power transport like trains, heavy trucks or even ships and planes could be Hydrogen-powered. To start this Hydrogen revolution, early uptakers of the Hydrogen supply chain are looking at green Hydrogen. Industries and manufacturers producing fertilizer, steel or Petro-chemicals are turning their vision towards locally produced Hydrogen, which takes advantage of the low electrical power coming from renewables and an upscale of the electrolyser industry. This change, in addition to bringing the green label to their supply chains, will make their supply chains more secure, and at a more controlled price. After the early uptakers, high power transport such as ships or planes might be the next stop for Hydrogen. The sky is the limit, and this has never been truer! 

13:45 - 14:15    Meet the experts

Grid integration - Wind power as driver for offshore grids: Transmission grid specific solutions

With the increasing dominance of wind power and the growing performance of individual wind farms, especially offshore wind, the focus is on the ability of these wind farms to integrate into the transmission grid. Especially large offshore wind farms must be precisely matched to the respective transmission grid in order not to jeopardize its system stability, neither in normal operation nor in the event of a fault. This was the case, for example, on 9th August 2019 due to improper fault behaviour on the part of a big offshore wind farm in Great Britain. On the other hand, it is precisely because of these large offshore wind farms, some of which are very far from the coast, that there is now the possibility of constructing cross-border offshore networks. This session will explore the challenges and opportunities for grid integration.

14:30 - 15:00    Meet the experts

Battery storage: Supporting a renewable future

Battery storage has been deployed in the energy market for the last five years. The latest capacity payment schemes in US, UK and Australia, together with a decrease in the cost of batteries means that battery storage is now able to supply the grid with services that are very much needed in certain areas. The improved reliability of the technology, combined with the penetration of renewable energy creates a framework where storage can provide the baseload needed to move closer to a 100% renewable future. Storage can foster the trading of energy, avoiding cannibalization, while supplying the grid with reliable energy from renewables.  

The management of storage assets, combined with the renewable ones, will provide the grid with new services and response capabilities while creating new revenue streams for the projects. During this session, a panel of experts will discuss how to develop technologically reliable projects, and solid revenue streams to increase bankability.  

15:45 - 16:15    Meet the experts

Battery storage: Storage and wind in North America

The United States has led the charge in global energy storage deployment. Stationary storage was initially deployed primarily as stand-alone assets with the most readily economic uses cases being ancillary services and regulation for grid-connected assets and demand charge reduction for behind the meter installations. In more recent years, a significant shift has occurred with the majority of storage deployment coming to the form of the hybrid renewable energy plants. These hybrid plants have been dominated by storage paired with solar generation. The portion of solar projects in North America which include energy storage is increasing rapidly, as much as a quarter of proposed solar projects include storage. These projects include both contracted hybrid Power Purchase Agreements as well as merchant solar + storage project. The coupling of storage with solar has been partly due to the nature of solar energy characteristics but also the Investment Tax Credit. Increasingly, the time value of energy is being prioritized and monetized. This is observed with both corporate procurements focusing on 24/7 renewable supply and the state-level policy focusing on clean peak standards. As we move towards cheaper forms of storage, new technologies for storage and an increasingly volatile grid full of intermittent renewables how will wind and storage fit together?  

17:00 - 17:30    Meet the experts

Key takeaways of the day