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The interface problem: scope gaps in wind farm construction
If you decide to divide the work on building your wind farm among several companies, you will likely save money. However, the trade-off will be coordination issues. This is the problem that shows up when two subcontractors are standing next to a half-finished cable trench, each one explaining why the other should complete the work….
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Grouting the Tower-Foundation Interface — Materials, Process, and Quality Control
The small layer that carries the full weight of a wind turbine — and why getting it wrong can be catastrophic. There is a thin layer of material between the steel tower of a wind turbine and the concrete foundation it sits on. It is typically 20 to 50 millimetres thick, it weighs less than…
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Wind Farm Foundation Repair: A Real Case Study
When a gravity foundation cracks, how do you diagnose the problem, design the fix, and execute the repair — all while the turbine stays in place? Wind turbine foundations are designed to last 25 to 30+ years, matching the operational life of the turbine. They are massive reinforced concrete structures, typically buried several metres underground,…
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Wind Turbine Aerodynamics — How a Wind Turbine Extracts Energy
You don’t need to design blades to understand how they work. But understanding the basics will make you a better project engineer. This is an aerodynamics crash course with the practical essentials that a BoP engineer should have in their mental toolkit. Let’s start from first principles. A wind turbine converts kinetic energy from moving…
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Wind Measurement — What Can Go Wrong
The wind measurement campaign is the foundation of every wind farm project. The instrument at the heart of that campaign — the humble cup anemometer — looks simple, but getting accurate data out of it is anything but. Most of us in the BoP world are not wind resource specialists. We receive the wind assessment…
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Substation Earthing Design per IEEE 80 — Step by Step
A practical walkthrough of the calculations behind a safe grounding grid, using a real wind farm substation as an example. If you have ever opened a substation earthing calculation and found yourself lost between decrement factors, mesh voltages, and geometric correction coefficients, you are not alone. IEEE Std 80 — the IEEE Guide for Safety…
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Wind farm internal roads optimization
In parallel with the optimization of crane pads (you can find the article on the topic here) I am also trying to automate the calculation of wind farm internal roads. At the moment I have developed three solutions: the first joins the turbines looking for the minimum spanning tree (MST), i.e., the shortest possible connection….
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110kV Substation Layout: Single vs Double Busbar Configuration
How to choose the right busbar arrangement for your wind farm? Every onshore wind farm needs a grid connection substation, either an existing or a brand new one. And if you need to build a substation for your wind farm, one of the very first design decisions you’ll face — one that shapes the entire…
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BoP –> Sourcing
And so, after 15 years of BoP, I decided to start a new chapter and move to Sourcing. I think I will be able to update the blog from time to time thanks to friends and colleagues who are still in BoP. If you happen to have experience in the field and would like to…
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Internal roads optimization: an update
These vacation days I am managing to find time to work on my “automatic wind farm optimization” project.Yesterday I managed to add a new feature to the optimization of wind farm internal roads.In the new version, the algorithm is also able to consider existing roads and “no-go-areas” (areas that cannot be used due to environmental…
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Dobberzin WF
The photos below, stolen from LinkedIn, are from one of the last tenders I worked on. It is of the Dobberzin wind farm, with the Nordex concrete tower installed. Interesting to note how the keystones are assembled and joined together by grouting. Enjoying the blog? Get the full book Wind Farm Balance of Plant —…
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Wind farm crane pads optimization: a solution with QGIS
QGIS is a great open source GIS software that I often use to display information in various formats (e.g. SHP). It has an interesting number of additional plug-ins that enhance its capabilities. Over this Christmas break I managed to find a few hours and have virtually finished developing a plug in that helps define the…
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Wind farm BoP optimizer
After several years pondering the possibility, I finally decided to try to build an app that automatically optimizes the BoP of wind farms. So, with the help of relatives who kept their children busy during the Christmas vacations and Claud.ia (Anthropic’s artificial intelligence) I began to complete the various elements. The idea is to solve…
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Power Factor and Reactive Energy Compensation in Wind Farms
A practical look at why capacitor banks end up in every wind farm substation, and what you need to understand about reactive energy compensation to specify them correctly. If you have been involved in the electrical design of a wind farm substation, maybe you have seen a capacitor bank in the single line diagram. It…
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From Environmental Impact Assessment to Construction
If you see the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) as a box-ticking exercise sitting between the developer and the permit, something written by environmental consultants, approved by authorities, filed away and forgotten – you should think again. That is a mistake. Every EIA contains a list of commitments, promises the developer makes to the community and…
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Optical Fibre Cables in Wind Farms — A Quick Guide to What Goes in the Trench
A short overview of the fibre optic cables used in wind farm SCADA networks: why they are dielectric, how they are built, and what to look for in a specification. If you have worked on a wind farm, you know that alongside the medium voltage power cables running from each turbine to the substation there…
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Lomas de Taltal
Another interesting video, again stolen on LinkedIn. It is about the wind farm developed by Goldwin in Taltal (the official name I believe is ‘Lomas de Taltal’). The area is especially interesting since it is one of the most extreme deserts in the world – we are in northern Chile, between Atacama and Antofagasta. If…
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Rotational Stiffness: The Check That (Often) Drives Foundation Size
Yes, sometimes the diameter of your gravity foundation is not governed by soil bearing capacity… Sometimes, when you run all the foundation design checks (bearing capacity, sliding, overturning, settlement…) you discover that the one that actually sizes the foundation is none of the above. It is rotational stiffness. This is the check that could drive…
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BoP cost in China
I stole this video from Gang Wang’s LinkedIn post. I saw in his profile that we were colleagues at Vestas years ago. A typical 20x5MW-191 HH160 hybrid ONWTG 100MW project’s CAPEX breakdown in CN mid-east low wind speed area: WTG: 1,600 RMB/kWHybrid Tower: 800 RMB/kWBOP: 1,400-1,800 RMB/kW The video is especially interesting for two reasons:…
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Esteyco’s braced foundation: an update
This article is an update to the post I have made some time ago on Esteyco’s Braced Foundation. I have been contacted by David Sarrasín, Product Development Director at Esteyco. He provided an interesting presentation of the braced foundation solution. He also gave me more context on the solution. This is the additional info he…
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