Tilt Renewables’ Dr. Liz Beavis on Wind O&M in Australia

Dr. Liz Beavis, Asset Manager at Tilt Renewables, joins to discuss O&M contracts, balance of plant, and lessons from Australia's biggest and oldest wind farms. Contact Liz on LinkedIn or by email. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Liz, welcome to the program. Thanks,  Liz Beavis: Alan. I feel I'm a long time listener. First time caller, so it's exciting.  Allen Hall: You are a long time listener and thanks for doing that. Uh, and Liz, I just find you to be a wealth of knowledge and, uh, we met on a couple occasions since I've been in Australia and it's just, uh, a fun to connect here because I think a lot of the things that are happening in Australia need to be spread around the world. A lot of, uh, good o and m practices happening in Australia, uh, from hard lessons learned. So that's what I want to dive into today. And then the first one is, I don't think many people realize this, that you went. From commissioning, Australia's largest wind farm, Cooper's gap to managing seven [00:01:00] of the 10 oldest operational wind farms in the country. So you got some of the biggest, newest to some of the oldest assets. Uh. Uh, my question is like, when you started that, did you just kind of assume like wind, wind farms or wind farms or wind turbines or wind turbines and you could just basically own and end them the same, or do, or did it just occur to you immediately like, I need to take a different plan of attack here? Liz Beavis: I think I, I knew nothing about wind farms when I turned up at Cooper's Gap, so, so yeah, I got my, well, okay, we'll go right back to the start. So I was working at a thermal power station and I was just thinking. There's no future in coal. How do I get into renewables? And then a wind farm got built like 50 kilometers from my house. I can, I can see it in the horizon. Um, and I thought, oh, they're not gonna need a chemical engineer there, but I wonder if they need a site manager or something. And then the site manager role came up, I applied for it. So the services site manager. So, [00:02:00] um. That was July, 2020. That's when I first started listening to the podcast. 'cause I thought I better find out something about this industry before I do my job interview. And so I've been listening ever since. But, um, yeah, so I don't know. I was just lucky to get that role. And I turned up and, um, I think it was the end of September, 2020 first time I'd ever set foot on a wind farm 'cause of COVID and everything. I didn't, I didn't go there for the interview. My manager was in Thailand. I just turned up. And, um, so they, they'd finished construc, they'd built all the towers where they hadn't finished commissioning. And so we're still working out of construction, dongas, you know, temporary buildings and um, and there was hundreds of people on site and it was just the absolute chaos of. Constructing a two hundred, a hundred and twenty three turbines. You know, like there's just people everywhere. And I thought, wow, I've just gotta figure out what I'm supposed to be doing here. There were a few technicians. I found out how many technicians I supposed to have. Just started recruiting, started figuring out what I was supposed to be doing there, and I just [00:03:00] learned so much. In the two years we took over the new r and m building. We had failed gear, boxes, generators, transformers, overhead line, underground line, pretty much. Anything that could fail failed, and I got to see what we needed to do. Um, but through all of that, I was also thinking, oh, how do I manage this wind farm better? I don't know anything about wind farms, and I'm reaching out to the other GE sites, but the, the next biggest site was 75 turbines, and all of the rest of them are 30 and 40. So they're saying to me, oh, you just get a team to go around. And I'm thinking. Well, that's six weeks of work. You know, like, like everything is so much bigger on a bigger wind farm. And then I'd reach out to the, the American sites. That had big wind farms, but their contracts were so different, and I didn't understand at first, I started to realize, well, their contracts are completely different and their focus is different, and so they're not facing the same issues that I'm facing. Um, and then, you know, even speaking to a wind farm in [00:04:00] Sweden that was a similar size, but they, you know, they. They have to think about climate and what work they can do in winter. So I started to, as you said, you start to think, well actually everyone farms very different. And it's, um, you know, you can learn from others, but you really need to understand how your conditions are affecting what you can and can't do. Um, and then, so then I got the job at Wally Power Services with as a portfolio manager for the renewables, um, fleet There. And yeah, a whole lot of really old turbines. And it was just so interesting to see that contrast between the new turbines and the old ones and um, and also being a independent service provider, what we could do and what the technicians. So many clever technicians out there on wind farms, just figuring stuff out and, and fixing things that if you tried to do that within the OEM, you get really hamstring Engineers say, oh no, you can't. You can't do that. You can't fiddle with that. Whereas once you're released from that, for better or worse, [00:05:00] the technicians are just off sorting things out. So that was really interesting to see that contrast. And now I'm with, um, tilt Renewables. So I'm the asset manager for Cooper's Gap and Silverton Wind Farms. So I'm, I'm now seeing from the owner's point of view how we actually manage these contracts with the OEMs and with ISPs and how we, how can we do r and m better? Matthew Stead: And from the, um, from the ISP, um, experience, um, compared to your experience now, what are some of the biggest differences that you've observed between the old, the other sites and the, and the new site?  Liz Beavis: Yeah, I think it, it's really just that you're on your own. Um, so you're relying on good technicians. To figure things out, you can, you need a parts and service agreement with the OEM, um, so you can reach out to them and ask for support, but they're, you are the lowest priority. So yeah, you don't always get information, [00:06:00] so you just gotta be set up to figure things out. But then that does give you the freedom to make changes and to, to fix the things that you're saying, whereas. Often the OEMs are so, uh, stuck with that mindset of, oh, we, we don't want people to know we've got a serial defect. So we'll just keep kind of patching things up and hopefully, hopefully no other sites find out about this. You know, instead of just saying, Hey, we know this is an issue, here's a good way of fixing it. 'cause just all I understand, all of the liability that throws, that, that flows from that, uh, you know. You can't handle it. Allen Hall: Does that change your perspective, knowing all those things? Do you have a, just a unique background in so many ways where you've seen, uh, pretty much all sides of wind operations. How do you think about that now? How are you, are you are addressing contracts differently or are you thinking about the way you staff differently just from your experience?[00:07:00] How does that play into it?  Liz Beavis: Yeah, so definitely from a owner's point of view. I understand what the limitations are of the OEMs and the ISPs, and so I know, I know what I can push them to do and what I can't push them to do. And even though you've got the contract in front of you and you know it, it says you're gonna do this, there's certain things where you, you know, that you need to let it slide because it's just not reasonable to push it. You just, you just know that they can't achieve things. Um. But then also going into new r and m contracts, you kind of know what's critical, what to ask for, what, you know, what, what we need to make sure that we're getting right from the start.  Allen Hall: How do you sort that out? Because I've heard, uh, I've talked to many operators. that are doing O&M and they look at the contract much like you, and then they, they look at the contract and go, okay, here's are the things I can probably get. Here's the things I can't get. How did you come to that determination is just because you've been so close at all this time? Because I think a [00:08:00] lot of people in wind that are new look at that contract, as the rule of law and you're gonna get everything in there. But I think the more experienced people realize it's more of a negotiation or starting point, even  Liz Beavis: particularly, uh, like Comparing construction to O&M I say, construction's the. sprint and O&M's the marathon, and you're in a relationship with this O&M provider for 10, 15, 25, 30 years, depending on your contract terms. So you can't go in at year three and just have a big fight with each other And you know you, need to, You need to be able to work together. So it's understanding what the value drivers are on both sides and, um. And focusing on that. So, you know, for us as the owner, we, we just want generation. So even though availability is what's in the contract, really what we want is generation. So if we can figure things out together to get the maximum generation,...