The Future of Wind Power

ANDREW GARRAD

If you have ever been on an aeroplane and looked out of the window, you will see the wing, and you can't see it, but the air is flowing over the wing, and that's sucking the aeroplane up into the air, and it's truly remarkable. It’s called lift. And exactly the same thing is going on, on the blade of a wind turbine. As the wind turbine blade rotates through the air, the air sucks the blade exactly like the air sucks the aeroplane into the air. And then that blade is attached, up to a shaft, and then into a gearbox, and then into a generator. So as the generator turns, electricity is produced.

ROMA AGRAWAL

The future is wind power and it's here to stay. That's what today's guests, the 2024 QEPrize laureates, want everyone to know. Over the past four decades, Andrew Gerrad and Henrik Stiesdal have made seminal engineering contributions to wind power. Resulting in pioneering systems and designs that are now present in almost all modern wind turbines, operating both onshore and offshore today. Thanks to these advances, wind turbine technology has transformed the potential of the wind power generation and will play a central role in transitioning to the zero emissions electricity system of tomorrow.

So join us as we hear from two global experts on the rise of wind power. From establishing the foundations for the modern wind turbine.

ANDREW GARRAD

We were patronised and ridiculed, and now wind energy, at least in some parts of the world, has become mainstream. I think we probably haven't made enough noise about that.

ROMA AGRAWAL

To the phenomenal developments of recent decades.

HENRIK STIESDAL

Wind power compensates 3 to 4 percent of global emissions, but it needs to compensate 30 to 40 percent of global emissions. Before we are done. And solar power needs to do the same or more.

ROMA AGRAWAL

As we enter a new era of wind power and are propelled into the future, join us as we look to the possibilities of a new world.

I'm really excited to be talking about wind power today with our two expert guests Andrew and Henrik. I would love if you could both introduce yourselves briefly. So Andrew, maybe we can start with you, please.

ANDREW GARRAD

My name's Andrew Garrad. I've spent the last 45 years in the wind business. I'm now retired, or at least nominally retired. I started a consulting company in 1984, ran that until about 2017.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Thank you so much, Henrik?

HENRIK STIESDAL

Yeah, my name is Henrik Stiesdal. I'm a Danish citizen and I've been in wind power for about as long as Andrew has. I was involved in the design and manufacturing and implementation of wind turbines and was in the industry from early days and until about 2014 when I retired. However, in my retirement, I still work now in a small company that develops climate solutions and one of those solutions is still in wind power, that is a concept for floating offshore wind power.

ROMA AGRAWAL

I'm going to guess that, as both of you have said that you're retired, but not really retired, that you're really passionate about what you do? So, Andrew, maybe, can you tell me what you were doing in your parents field when you were a child?

ANDREW GARRAD

Yes, well, I think Henrik and I both started our wind energy careers in our parents field. I started in 1971. I built a prototype wind turbine, which I have to say was not at all successful, unlike Henrik's. In those days, we weren't talking about climate change, we were talking about slag and ash and other environmental issues, not climate change. And decided this was a good thing to get going on.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Henrik, can you tell us a bit about how you got into the industry?

HENRIK STIESDAL

I got started in 76 with the first small turbine. It went on through 77 and in 78 I built the first solar real wind turbine for my parents farm. That reigned for many years and provided enough power to allow the farm to have a considerable export to the public grid.

ROMA AGRAWAL

That's amazing. Can you maybe just describe that for us a little bit? Like, how did you make it? What was it made of?

HENRIK STIESDAL

It was 12 metres tall. So I welded the tower from angular steel and built the blades and built the whole structure and the top of the machine, built the controller. And then a few things like the bearings, and the gearbox, and the generator were way beyond what you could do as an individual player. So I found those components on the junkyard. I searched across Denmark for equipment that would fit into the turbine. In 1978, I got connected with a local machine shop owner, who was also interested in wind and he did not want to do what I did, which was to build a one off machine for private purposes on the family farm. He wanted to build a machine that was made of new components and could be multiplied and sold to customers. And we did that in the course of 1978 and 1979. And then a bigger model that was 18 metres tall and had the same diameter, but had a 30 kilowatt generator. And we sold two of them, one to a local farmer and one to somebody who was also local but not a farmer. And they basically worked very nicely. And then we were left with the question, what do we do now? I did not consider it safe or realistic to establish a factory. So we ended up finding licensee that could build the turbines on a licence and so to speak, develop the whole business, but did not have to do the initial development themselves. That company was the Danish company Vestas, which is now a very big player on the wind power scene.

ROMA AGRAWAL

What do we mean by wind power, Andrew?

ANDREW GARRAD

If you have ever been on an aeroplane and looked out of the window, you will see the wing, and you can't see it, but the air is flowing over the wing, and that's sucking the aeroplane up into the air, and it's truly remarkable. It’s called lift. And exactly the same thing is going on on the blade of a wind turbine. As the wind turbine blade rotates through the air, the air sucks the blade exactly like the air sucks the aeroplane into the air. So the air is sucking the blade around, and the blade turns through the air. The blade turns faster, the faster the wind is, that's controlled and then that blade is attached, three blades usually, attached to a hub, to a shaft, and then into a gearbox, and then into a generator. So as the generator turns, electricity is produced.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Henrik, can you tell me a bit about the Danish concept?

HENRIK STIESDAL

When I built these turbines with my friend, the first one that I built for myself relied quite a lot on how the old Gedser turbine had been built here in Denmark. There have been periodically an upswing in wind power over the last 135 years or so in Denmark. There was a big move towards local wind turbines at farms back in the 1890s and early 1900s, and that was gradually replaced by other means of electricity production. Then during both the First and Second World War, we suffered shortages of fuels, having no natural resources here in Denmark, and wind power in both cases had a significant revival. Then in the 1950s, one of the big Danish utilities had a chief technical officer who had by then sat through two World Wars and felt every time that our electricity supply could have benefited from more wind power. So he persuaded his company to build three different demonstration models. The next one always bigger than the former one, until in 1957 he built a 200 kilowatt unit, 24 metre diameter turbine at the southernmost point of Denmark, a place that's called Gedser. And this turbine became a sort of model for what we did in the late 70s. It reigned for 10 years and was then stopped because oil had become too cheap. But it still showed us that it could be done and in many ways how it could be done. Then over the year where I developed the marketable version, we introduced a couple of new features including, making the turbine operate at a lower speed in low winds and at higher speed in high winds. And ultimately this package of solutions became known as the Danish concept. Not at the time when we developed it, but at a later time when the Danish companies that had essentially learned from these experiments either by acquiring the licence as Vestas did, ended up supplying this type of concept to the big wind farms that came up in California from about 83 and up until 86, 87. And since they were very different than the American turbines, and also then some turbines from the Netherlands and Germany and so on, they became known as turbines applying the Danish concept. And that was when the name came into use for what we did. We did not have the fancy tools that Andrew and others developed over the years. So our approach was also to simply use some more material, more steel, more fibreglass, in order to allow for the fact that we didn't really know fully what was going on. The Danish concept as it started out in 78, 79 stayed in the mainstream for the next 15 to 20 years, about.

ANDREW GARRAD

It's very interesting to look back on the history, the importance of the Gedser machine cannot be overemphasised. I think I'm right, Henrik, in saying that NASA invested in instrumenting that machine.

HENRIK STIESDAL

What happened was that the Americans actually started earlier than the Danes, they started already in 74, looking at utility grade turbines, and ended up having a lot of problems with them because they had a completely different concept. They had the rotor on the lee side of the tower and they had a two plated arrangement. And ultimately they came to the Danish government with an inquiry saying, we do have quite a lot of challenges. We know that this old machine worked, apparently, like a sewing machine. What would you say to us funding restarting it and running it for a couple of years, and could you do the testing?

ANDREW GARRAD

I think what we're seeing now, of course, is a coalescence of lots of different things and climate change is suddenly come to the fore, and energy security has come to the fore, and so those things have come together to create a perfect set of conditions for development of renewable energy technology. But, political will and clear political strategies are absolutely crucial and from time to time we've seen those, and Henrik’s mentioned the early Danish initiative, which was very important. And now we desperately need that consistent message.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Henrik, can you talk us through how this new language that we're using around climate change and the climate crisis has affected wind power, and what that's changed with the design and practice?

HENRIK STIESDAL

That has actually been my own prime driver and it remains so as the prime motivator. It has not really had any effect on how we do wind. We still do wind turbines with the same development methodology, where you seek optimising the ratio of performance per cost, that has been the sort of tangible driver of what we have been doing in the industry, but it's clear that for those of us who work with it, we have observed not only for ourselves but also for our colleagues, how the climate motivation has become much, much more important. For me it's clear that things are changing these years, we are in a period of escalating international tensions. When I grew up, nuclear war was the big scare picture and luckily, and fortunately, after the initial Gorbachev, Reagan meetings, and so on, in the 80s that fear started declining. And after the wall came down in 89, nuclear war was much throttled down as a risk in our lives. Even though we had rogue nations developing nuclear programs. Now it's a much bigger thing. But still, even in that perspective, I have no doubt that the biggest problem for our time, and even bigger for our children's and their children's times, will be global warming and climate change. And that is the ultimate motivation for what we do. As we sit here and talk, we have passed the 1000 gigawatt capacity of wind power, 1 million megawatts of wind turbines, and that is a very big step showing how we are progressing, but we need to get much, much further than that.

Wind power compensates 3 to 4 percent of global emissions, but it needs to compensate 30 to 40 percent of global emissions before we are done. And solar power needs to do the same or more.

ANDREW GARRAD

The challenge is now just how to do it. It is immensely frustrating that we all recognise the challenge and the dangers of climate change, and everybody has these goals and perhaps they move the goals a bit from time to time because that doesn't really cost them anything. Well actually Vestas, which Henrik mentioned earlier on, has a little slogan it’s been using recently, which is that, ‘a plan is not a wind farm’ and I think that's a very good slogan. Plans are cheap, but executing the plans is what we need to do. And we need to do it quickly. I mean, if we really have an urgent matter to deal with with climate change, then we don't have to wait for 10 years for a regulation to be changed or moved or for somebody to sign a bit of paper. We could just do it. But the physical limitation is the grid. We simply have not built the grid that we need. I think that's pretty much anywhere in Europe, in order to decarbonize and electrify our society. It isn't there and it won't suddenly appear by magic in 2049 to meet the 2050 goal. No, we have to be doing it now. And there are lots of studies and lots of reports making this point, but nothing is happening. So, the biggest obstacle we have is not our technology, it's actually building a grid, and we know how to do it, and so that again is probably regulation and permitting. Now, we're talking very much in the microcosm of Northern Europe, and the situation is different elsewhere in the world, even different elsewhere in Europe. Elsewhere in the world, there are huge resources and we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that everybody is constrained as we are to go offshore and make things more complicated. If you're in Texas or Utah or Minnesota or Morocco or Argentina, I mean, there is just a huge amount of space.

HENRIK STIESDAL

Yeah, we of course have a number of challenges ahead of us. There's one challenge, which is that even though that resource is not exploited at all in most countries, there is ultimately a space limitation of what you can do where people live. That fortunately we solved many years ago by starting going offshore. Offshore wind energy is more expensive than onshore wind energy, but it basically at the same time removes the obstacle of placing industrial equipment in the landscape. That solution has been very efficient. Having said that, the complexity of regulations has been steadily growing during my time in the industry. When I built my own first turbine, there was to be a permanent installation and had, therefore to have a permanent building permit and so on. It took about three months from I wrote to the authorities saying I would like to install a wind turbine, until I had all permits in place. That was in 1978. In 1989, the Danish government decided to build the first offshore wind farm. We installed it in 91, and the planning process had by then taken one year. Ten years later, we built the first large project outside Copenhagen, 20 big turbines in a nice curve between Sweden and Denmark. And there, the authorities wanted a change in the installation pattern. So, some of the desires that the developer had, had to be reconsidered. But even taking that into account, from the very first approach to the authorities, and until the final permission was in place, took two and a half years. Nowadays, despite the fact that we know so much more, it very often takes four, five, six, and more years to get your planning permission. And that is a major obstacle. You can then say, what is not a challenge? And what is very much not a challenge anymore is the technology itself. What we set out to do, without thinking as big as it got, I certainly never thought of that in the early years, my perspective was much more narrow than what this ultimately became. But what we still fundamentally set out to do was to create this as a product that could make a difference in the energy supply. That has worked. It is not a challenge. There's of course always improvements to be made. But they are all something that comes out of ordinary innovation and competitive pressure and so on. Just like as in the car industry or as in any other consumer good industry, you always have to keep improving. So the challenges are, interestingly enough, not about what we do, but about the context in which we do it.

ANDREW GARRAD

I think what we've shown in the wind industry and now the solar industry as well, is it can be done. You know, when Henrik and I started, I was sort of patted on the head, saying you know, when you grow up, you'll understand that you can only make electricity by burning coal or splitting the atom. We were patronised and ridiculed. And now wind energy, at least in some parts of the world, has become mainstream. And that's terribly important. I think we probably haven't made enough noise about that. In Britain last year, 39 percent of our electricity came from renewables. So I think we've shown that given the challenge, engineers are very, well, very good at rising to a challenge, maybe engineers are not so good at articulating the challenge. So what's been demonstrated by the wind industry is that this is serious stuff. This is not fringe activity. This is part of the electricity generation spectrum. And I think an important step that was reached also was the change of motivation. So the likes of Henrik and I, and I think almost all of my staff when I was running a company, were involved in this business because we were highly motivated by all the things that Henrik's listed. And that probably remains the same, but there came a time also where it became commercial. You know, you could make money out of it. And that's, from my mind, that's a very good thing. Then it moved from being a fringe ideological activity into mainline business and industry. It's a sort of natural stage.

ROMA AGRAWAL

Henrik, just to wrap up, could you tell us how you feel about the future of this technology?

HENRIK STIESDAL

I feel very optimistic about it. I think that wind power has come to stay. It's now almost 50 years since we started in earnest in Western Europe with what you would call the modern area. It has gone from being a costly alternative that only existed due to subsidies, to being cheaper than any other form of producing electricity. I don't see why it shouldn't stay like that. And therefore that it's, in my opinion, a total obvious thing that it will be a main driving source of electricity in the future. What brighter future could you look for than that? We have had enough of the toasts and speeches. We need action.

ROMA AGRAWAL

I really enjoyed that conversation and my takeaway is pretty similar to my conversation with Andrew Blakers, who was one of the laureates of the 2023 QEPrize for the photovoltaic cell technology. And that is, that the engineering is there, the technology is there and what we need is for the political will for global cooperation, to get on with it and just get it done. You've been listening to Create The Future, a podcast from The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering and Peanut and Crumb. This episode was hosted by me, Roma Agrawal, and Produced by Tess Davidson. To find out more, follow QEPrize on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Thanks for listening.