When green goes global

Claus Myllerup analyses the challenges facing energy producers in an increasingly energy hungry world in an executive interview for the magazine Next generation Power and Energy.

“We are seeing amazing progress in renewable energy solutions that would otherwise have taken decades to reach”
-Claus Myllerup

P&E. What's changed in the power and energy industry in terms of renewable energy source?
Claus Myllerup. A lot of things have changed, but one of the most important aspects is the scale of production. The technology concerning renewable energy is still a fairly young technology if you compare it to say the oil and gas industry. Twenty years of development is not a long time, and even less when you consider the rapid changes in market structure that have happened over the last few years. Some countries have great experience with wind power, but others have gone directly from small scale production to major energy conglomerates setting up entire wind and solar farms.

How is mass-scale production of renewable energy a technical challenge?
Let's use the wind power industry as an example. A wind turbine is an extremely complex piece of machinery. Getting the full return on investment from it means understanding its individual elements, but the truly crucial part is understanding how these parts operate together. The energy produced by a wind turbine is less stable than that produced by a regular power plant. When it transfers to the grid, the grid reacts by sending small torque fluctuations back into the wind turbine, which affects the shaft speed at the generator and consequently the power output, and so on.

These are the factors that influence the operability of a single turbine, add to that the factors of setting up 50 of them, as is the case with the new wind farms. Here you also have to consider the variations in load, some turbines may experience more load than others due to their positions. And wind turbines are being considered for very arduous locations with complex sea bed challenges or extreme weather conditions.

And how does this affect the market structure?
The increase in demand has naturally led to an increase in supply with new manufacturers pushing the competition for quick and efficient solutions. Technologically this means that the road from idea to construction is much shorter and there is less time to correct the inevitable teething troubles. This calls for at lot of trouble shooting later on. Economically, the new market structure means that there are huge sums of money invested in these products, both from a supplier point of view and an energy producer point of view. This is a good thing. This means that both suppliers and producers have highly skilled technicians working together to perfect this new technology. But it also means that there is so much at stake for both parties when a piece of machinery breaks down that it may be impossible to work out a solution without an independent technical expert assessment.

Where do we go from here?
I think it's important to remember that despite the technical challenges, mass production of renewable energy is in fact taking innovation to a whole new level. We are seeing an amazing progress in renewable energy solutions that would otherwise have taken decades to reach. New challenges require new skills, and the change in market structure has strengthened the collaboration between universities and companies in terms of research. We also see an increased exchange of knowledge and experience between industries and across disciplines.

There is a strong political focus on decreasing the impact energy consumption has on our planet. At the same time we have a responsibility to expand the accessibility of energy to give emerging economies a chance to develop their industries and institutions. The only way of combining these two goals is through continuous technological and economical investment in renewable energy solutions.

Claus M. Myllerup is Managing Director of Lloyd's Register ODS, technical investigation and analysis. With 20 years of experience, Myllerup has served as Chairman for American Society of Mechanical Engineers' International Gas Turbine Institute Conference and is an external lecturer at the Technical University of Denmark. He has a PhD in mechanical engineering.