November 5, 2019
SPECIAL DELIVERY
Historically, some big things have happened in Boston Harbor: the Boston Tea Party, for instance, which helped galvanize the American Revolution. This week, though, the port was host to a historic behemoth of a different sort: a wind turbine blade that’s helping revolutionize the renewable energy industry. Longer than a football field, the blade belongs to GE Renewable Energy’s Haliade-X 12 MW, the world’s most powerful offshore wind turbine. Installed off the coast of, say, New Jersey — where the Danish offshore wind farm developer Ørsted recently selected the Haliade-X for its planned Ocean Wind development — just one of these machines will be capable of powering roughly 5,000 U.S. homes. First, though, the blade needs to be put through its paces. That’s where Boston comes in.
A breeze blows in Beantown: The blade that arrived in Boston Harbor is for the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Wind Technology Testing Center, or WTTC, where it’ll be subjected to conditions that simulate more than 25 years in service at sea. The WTTC is the only location in the U.S. that can test and certify a blade of this size; GE is also testing blades and other components at a facility in the U.K., and the company has built a prototype of the turbine in the Netherlands. The Global Wind Energy Council estimates that the world’s offshore wind market will grow to 120 gigawatts by 2030, making the Haliade-X “the right turbine at the right time,” said John Lavelle, CEO of GE Renewable Energy’s Offshore Wind business. “Because it is the most powerful machine in the industry, it allows our customers to drive down the cost of wind energy and speed the adoption of clean, renewable energy.”
Learn more here about the world-traveling Haliade-X 12 MW offshore wind turbine.
GILLED TRIP
Like tech employees and baristas at bustling cafes, salmon don’t stay still for long in the Pacific Northwest. Born in fresh water, salmon soon take off downstream to mature in the ocean, then head back upriver to spawn when they’re older. Bears are a natural obstacle to salmon on their return, but their trip downstream is no walk in the park: The fish have to contend with hydropower dams. The turbines in those dams help churn water into electricity — a great selling point for humans, but less so for fish, who don’t have any houses they need to light or smartphones they need to charge. For fish, in fact, the turbine blades present the risk of collision. Engineers working on the Columbia River are teaming up with their counterparts at GE Renewable Energy to help give those fish a smoother ride.
Fishing for solutions: The idea of the high-tech project is to marry computer modeling with the latest turbine technology — and perhaps create a blueprint for hydropower plants around the globe. Using digital models, GE Renewable Energy engineers were able to identify the places in the turbine where fish were most vulnerable. Adjusting the spacing of the vanes, for instance, they were able to give the fish more room to maneuver — while maintaining a smooth flow of water. “Reducing the risk here for the fish is not detrimental to turbine efficiency,” said Laurent Bornard, a hydraulic consulting engineer at GE Renewable Energy. There are close to 10 power plants on the Snake and Columbia rivers that are especially concerned with salmon migration, Bornard added, but the tech’s potential doesn’t end there — GE is also working on fish-friendly hydro turbines in Southeast Asia’s Mekong River, as well.
Learn more here about how engineers are helping migrating salmon go with the flow.
HER GENERATION
Oil accounts for 42% of Saudi Arabia’s gross domestic product, and 90% of its exports — but increasingly, the country is looking beyond the crude. Three years into its Saudi Vision 2030 plan, the kingdom is already making good on goals to reduce its reliance on oil and imported goods and boost industrial and manufacturing centers. GE has been with it every step of the way: A supplier of equipment for the country’s very first oil refinery, the company is now a key player in these emerging economies. Take, for instance, the GE Manufacturing & Technology Center campus in the Saudi city of Dammam. One of the largest gas turbine service facilities in the world, GEMTEC is also the workplace of people like Rouiah Bakhsh — a young female engineer who might go her entire career without touching a barrel of oil.
Parts and labor: A recent alum of GE’s Operations Management Leadership Program, Bakhsh oversees a team of about 30 technicians who repair gas turbine parts. With more than 70 customers in 40 countries, GEMTC’s status as a link in the local and global energy business helps drive Saudi manufacturing: It’s Saudi suppliers and factories that meet the center’s demand for instantly available spare turbine parts. If Bakhsh and her colleagues are drawing a new picture of Saudi Arabia as a diversified economy, she’s also challenging myths of female engineers as a rare sight in the kingdom: “Don’t believe everything you read,” Bakhsh said. “I have never faced any issues with any colleagues or customers, and my leaders have always been supportive.”
Learn more here about the young engineer helping manufacture the future of the Saudi economy.
COOLEST THINGS ON EARTH ?
1. Block And Roll
Researchers at MIT designed a system of smart blocks that can move on their own steam, jump over and climb atop one another, and communicate among themselves using a system of bar codes. In disaster situations, they might be able to assemble into a temporary staircase.
2. Lightning Charge
A team of Penn State engineers came up with a way to charge electrical vehicles in 10 minutes with enough juice to allow them to travel 200 or 300 miles; crucially, the technique doesn’t degrade their batteries.
3. Mind Reader
In the week’s most sci-fi development, researchers in Russia trained artificial neural networks to reconstruct images from people’s brains based on signals picked up from an electroencephalograph. The AI’s no Rembrandt, but it’s still surprisingly accurate.
Learn more about this week’s Coolest Things on Earth here.
— QUOTE OF THE DAY —
“This has really been a collaborative effort on the part of the company to be part of solving the challenges associated with the energy transition…We think the Haliade-X is the right turbine at the right time as the offshore industry globally and particularly here in the US is poised to take off.”
— H. Lawrence Culp Jr., GE chairman and CEO
Quote: GE Reports. Image: GE Renewable Energy.
ENJOY THIS NEWSLETTER?
Please send it to your friends and let them know they can subscribe here.