Jason Moody from GreenSpur discusses their innovative axial flux generator technology, which promises to reduce weight and complexity in wind turbines, offering greater efficiency and lower maintenance costs.

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Today we're excited to have Jason Moody, chairman of GreenSpur, joining us to discuss a generator technology that could fundamentally alter the path of wind energy. While the wind industry has been scaling up turbine sizes, we've hit a critical challenge. Generators are becoming massively heavy, complex, and expensive to maintain.

GreenSpur is taking a different approach entirely. They perfected axial flux generator technology that can dramatically reduce weight, eliminate cooling systems. And use any type of magnet from simple faite to rare earth materials. This isn't just another incremental improvement. It's a completely different way of generating power that could solve some of offshore wind's biggest headaches.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Jason, welcome to the program. Thank [00:01:00] you. Thanks a. Hi Joel. Well, let's start off with the elephant in the room for offshore wind turbines manufacturing. Uh, there's some fundamental challenges that are facing them as we approach sort of the 20 megawatt stage and getting further offshore. Weight becomes a big problem.

Jason Moody: Yeah, it does. For, for years they've been getting bigger and bigger, and you can see that the industry just wants to push for that next size. But with that, the generators are getting very, very heavy. So the last direct drive generator that we evaluated was in excess of 150 tons. Now, that's not a, not a small machine anymore, but what what we're trying to do is introduce a new technology.

That can hopefully address that problem and some others as well. 

Allen Hall (2): So when you put a very heavy generator on top of a tower, that increases everything underneath of it, right? 

Jason Moody: Yeah. The foundations grow exponentially. The [00:02:00]steelwork and the structure has to grow. Then the cell itself, just based on size, lot more composite parts.

Everything's bigger. 

Joel Saxum: So we're talking like here, kind of traditional offshore wind fixed bottom right. That's an issue. The foundations have to grow, uh, exponentially to get these, to hold up this weight. But when another thing that's happening globally, right? The big push for floating offshore wind. So if now you're talking about putting more and more and more weight on something that's actually dynamic, right?

So that kind of, uh, what does that do to the, the whole system. 

Jason Moody: That's a, it's a different, um, engineering challenge, but it's mainly in the steel structure and the ballast in, in those, uh, in those systems. So the street, the steel pylon becomes very thick, becomes very heavy, uh, to hold that weight on top.

But most of the time what you found in these newer next gen floating systems is they've gone to geared systems, which is a big move in the whole industry for both onshore, offshore, and, and everything in between. Everyone's moving to hybrid [00:03:00] and geared systems, 

Allen Hall (2): and hybrid and geared systems get even more complicated, which is the problem, right?

Is that we're, we're trying to lower the cost of energy, but as we go bigger in scale, we sort of lose those efficiencies. It, it doesn't scale up with the efficiencies. It actually,