In episode two, we discuss wind turbine transport logistics and turbine blade graveyards – what happens to those huge blades when they’re taken out of service – where do they go? Allen Hall also dives into some of the research on new lightning protection systems coming out of China.
Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast? Email us!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Transcript: EP2 – Wind Turbine Waste & New Lightning Protection Research
Dan: Hey welcome back! This is episode two of the Uptime Podcast. I’m your co-host DanBlewett and I’m joined here by lightning protection expert Allen Hall. Allen how’s it going out there?
Allen: Great Dan, how are you?
Dan: Good. What’s the latest on your quarantine?
Allen: Everybody’s still quarantined. They announced the other day that the schools are all closed until May 4th. Everybody was supposed to go back April 7th roughly, so they pushed it back another 30 days. We’re going to be in self-isolation for at least another 30 days. They closed all non-essential businesses, which means pretty much everything is closed from out here right now.
Dan: What’s your family doing to keep from going stir-crazy?
Allen: Well for right now we’re trying to get outside a little bit. It’s actually close to 60 degrees today, so it’s nice to see some sunshine.
Dan: I know, tell me about it.
Allen: Earlier it was a blizzard outside and now we have had some decent weather and got a couple of texts this afternoon saying that people were heading outside to get some of the sunshine. Hopefully it’s a little bit of a turnaround, otherwise if we get stuck at the house for another 30 days it’s going to be trouble I’m feeling.
Dan: Have you ever played any of those family home games? I think they’re by jackhole. The ones called quiplash? You can do it on like Xbox or any of those systems and you can also play on the web. I think it’s like a subscription fee, my brother-in-law has it and my sister. But you all like sign-in so you create a room and then everyone has a room code and you go to the room code. They’re on their company’s website and you all enter the room code, then you’re all in and then you use your phone as your playing device. There’s like trivial ones, there’s ones where you like you all draw a thing and then you try to guess who drew it.There’s lots of really quirky games, it’s pretty fun.
Allen: I haven’t heard of that .
Dan: Well I mean anything to kill the time right now. I think my family tonight is going to try to do a zoom call and screen record that, so I think if we screen captured the game and all logged in on their phones it should work. We’re going to try that out but it’s a fascinating time right now.
Allen: You’re speaking about zooming everything together, there’s been so much zoom calling going on it seems like the Internet has come to a crawl at least in Western Massachusetts. It’s really slowed down a good bit because everybody’s trying to do work from home and doing video calls, which is good right. I mean at least we have the option, but it does slow down the internet
Dan: The old “interwebs” is heavily heavily loaded at this time.
Allen:Definitely loaded. There’s a guy in front of the house this morning fixing the internet cable and I thought well ok, at least the repair guys are still out there. I’m sure they’re pretty busy ‘cause any outage is going to a crisis right now.
Dan: If people lose the internet and they lose Netflix and Hulu, the world is going to literally implode like a Dark Star. It’s going to be a mess.
Allen: It’s going to go bad fast.
Dan: You mean I have to talk to my family and friends? You mean I have to play board games, I have to read? We’re not capable of doing that as a society, not today.
Allen: Not today no.
Dan: Last episode we talked a little bit about the growing size of wind turbines. You can probably tell by my accent I call them wind turbines, but I’m going to start softening that “i”. With these wind turbines getting bigger and bigger and bigger, blades are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. The composite materials are extremely durable because they have to be. You briefly mentioned some of the issues with blade waste. When these turbines go out of commission, those blades have got to go somewhere. We were chatting about this off-camera. How big of a problem is this for the industry right now?
Allen: It’s just really starting about now because based around when the wind turbines went up, it’s roughly a 15-20 year lifespan. Back in the early 2000s, particularly in the United States, there’s a lot more wind turbines going up. They are starting to reach their useful life. We’re pulling the blades off and taking the towers down, the nacelles down and then trying to dispose of the blades. I’ve seen a couple of interesting articles, I think there was one on Bloomberg the other day where they were talking about essentially burying the blades. Putting a deep hole in the ground and putting the blades in. The blades are made out of mostly fiberglass, some resin system, epoxy or it’s mostly epoxy of some sort, and balsa wood is a big one. Balsa wood is used as part of the reinforcement to make it a stiffer structure. Then there’s some metal work and things kind of down at the bottom where it attaches to the hub wind turbine. They’re essentially burying them. I’ve seen a couple of places where they’ve chopped up those wind turbine blades and are trying to rebuild other things with them which is possible. I mean it’s chop fiberglass which you can use in different things. But they’re so massive, it’s hard to easily dispose of something that big. There’s a struggle right now, it really is a struggle.
Dan: I mean you look at the size of them, especially when you’re driving by in a car or something. The onshore wind farms aren’t nearly as big as some of the gigantic offshore ones. I was out flying a drone getting some footage and taking photos of these for some content that I’ve been creating, and you don’t really get a sense of the scale of these things until you’re up close. I was at this wind farm in West Virginia, and I was getting really close to it. I was approaching, and then I went up the hill. There were no turbines in view, and then as I got to the crest of this hill suddenly one was there. And it was almost scary. You’re like oh my god, that thing’s enormous. And when you really get up close you start to see the gravity of how big these things are. And you start thinking about repairing them and installing them– all of this stuff. They’re really massive machines. As the scale keeps increasing, what other problems is the industry facing?
Allen: Well there’s a couple of bigger issues right now with scale. One when manufacturing something that big, it gets very difficult because you need new tooling for it to make something that big. And then once you make it how do you move it? A lot of times factories are built nearby, relatively near where the wind turbine farm is going to be. They can usually take them by truck and truck them over to the final destination. I think in Belfast, Northern Ireland they’ve been doing things where they’re making blades and then putting them on ships and then shipping them out from there. It’s hard to move something as massive as these wind turbine blades. The cell towers are the same thing. It’s all the same problem. Up here in Western Massachusetts where it’s pretty hilly, they have to put in roads so the trucks can make it up to the top of the mountains where they’re going to install the wind turbine blades. Then obviously there’s a lot of infrastructure that has to happen to mount something so massive so it doesn’t tip over. There’s concrete work. A lot of groundwork has to happen, and then once it’s installed obviously you have big cranes. Everything gets massively larger particularly as you get out in the ocean. The cranes and the machinery it takes to put these things together gets massive.
Dan: I was watching a video. I think it was on Instagram, I’m sure that a bigger clip is on YouTube. They were taking this huge blade and trying to get up this winding mountain road. And it was on this truck that could raise the blade vertically so that it could accommodate some of these I mean really sharp turns. I mean sharp turns that you would have to slow down for driving in a little Coupe DeVille or something. I was looking at the mechanism on this thing and I’m like – good grief. Because it’s the same as when you have a pretty long couch and it won’t fit horizontally down and you have to lift it up with your partner. It’s the worst thing ever.
Allen: It’s exactly like that.
Dan: You’re doing that on a massive scale on a truck. That blade goes to its most vertical position, whatever that is, and those trucks probably can’t have much margin for error. I mean they’re going to tip, if you get a big gust it could blow the whole truck over. It’s got to be really scary.
Allen: If you’ve ever watched one of those things go down the road there’s a lot of people in front and back. And particularly here where you can see them go up the mountains there’s a lot of people watching on either side and around. The winds have to be right, and you have to find the right day. It can’t be snowing outside. There’s a lot of things that can go in your favor to get the thing put together. It’s not simple. Many years ago I worked on a program where they were to take an airship and lift up things like this, wind turbine blades. Basically pick them up at the factory and fly them where they’ve got to go and then drop them down. And of course that never happened, but in an ideal world that would be something you can do. Because if you go across the Midwest in the summertime most times going down to Interstate 70 or interstate 80 in the Midwest you’ll see wind turbines on trucks going up on the highway. There’s a lot of them. It’s surprising the number they can produce at any one time. But thinking about the scale of management or something like that – it takes a lot of organization and a lot of coordination to do that safely.
Dan: When you think about it, it’s so painstaking and expensive of course. It takes so much manpower to get it where it needs to go. And once you finally install it you want to take every measure and every precaution to keep them in service so you don’t have to replace a dang blade somewhere down the road. I know there’s tons of redundancy on them and there’s lots of engineering, but what are they doing to keep them in service as much as they can?
Allen: Well, when they started, one of the things they obviously have to do with any composite structure, be it an airplane or a wind turbine blade, or even Corvettes which are made out of fabric glass for a long time, is you want to make sure that structure is sound. It’s a little bit different than something’s made out of metal where you can kind of see a deformation or things of that sort. What you’re seeing in a composite piece is there’s multiple layers of fiberglass and balsa wood inside. If those layers internally start to buckle with respect to one another or if they become what we call delaminated, so they start to separate over time, that’s got to get fixed. And originally they would put repair people or inspectors on ropes and they’d go down a kind of tap test. There’s a bunch of visual techniques you can use to inspect the blades. They would go up and down the blades to make sure each of the blades is structurally still okay. Because your worst case scenario is you miss some significant structural deformation or degradation and that blade goes bad and it breaks. That’s your worst case nightmare because the cascading effects are expensive. But more recently what we’re seeing is a lot of robotics being used: cameras on drones or drones that are physically attached or somehow stick to the blade and kind of climb up the blade. They’re inspecting the blades that way to get some better assurance of the structural integrity of the blade because ultimately in any composite structure the key is to keep following up and repairing them. If you keep them in decent shape over time, you can extend the lifetime. If you abuse them, not take care of them, like anything you have that takes a lot of wear and tear, it’s going to shorten its lifetime. There’s a big emphasis on maintaining, inspecting. Because of the ease of it we can do things robotically with drones and with really high-tech cameras and we can do a lot more inspections and it’s a lot faster than it used to be. I think the number of inspections and then the quality of inspections are going to go way up, which should also help extend the life time of some of these blades.
Dan: It’s interesting you talk about drones. I was reading an article about the DJI company and their founder Frank Wing, who’s still a young guy I think in his mid to late 30s. But DJI owns 77% of the US drone market. I mean they destroyed their competition. I think their next biggest single company competitor is like 3% share of the US drone market. It’s huge. They said it’s almost problematic because DJI’s now competing with themselves on pricing. They’ve done so much to price other people out of the market. DJI’s drones are better, and they’re cheaper now than others. Now they’re struggling to outdo themselves almost on price. But there’s a new competitor in the drone market called the impossible drone where their CEO worked for Tesla. He’s actually building the frame of these drones out of a battery. You can basically pack way more energy storage into this drone rather than having removable battery packs. The impossible drone right now claims about two hours of battery life in flight time versus about 30 minutes or maybe a little more for a DJI drone. Which is really interesting.
Allen: That’s a good conceptual thought. They’re actually taking the structure and making the structure rechargeable. Is that what it is?
Dan: They said with Tesla cars the battery is integrated, and it essentially is the frame. And that’s how they have such a low center of mass. They have really good cornering and acceleration and stuff like that because of it. It’s kind of applying those principles to the drone which is really interesting.
Allen: Wow. Well obviously drone time and battery life for anything we’re using today is totally huge. If you can extend the life of a battery or keep a drone in the air longer it makes things so much more efficient.
Dan: And of course the one caveat that I was thinking of as I was reading is in the camera market. Almost all of those ProModel audio recorders and receivers and lavalier mics actually run off replaceable batteries. And the thought is that if your drone is the battery and it doesn’t have a rechargeable replaceable battery that you can pull out and pop in a fresh one, then you’re limited to two hours. And then you have to stop and recharge. Whereas if you have another drone or any battery-operated thing it might only be in the air for thirty minutes but if you have eight batteries you can be in the air for four or five six hours. If you’re in a really remote location you don’t have to stop and actually charge it. I guess there’s give-and-take with whether plugging in the device is better versus having the rechargeable. Because if you’re an audio guy or audio girl and on set for ten hours and you’re in charge of the mics, you’ve got to replace the batteries like all the time. These thousand-dollar microphones and microphone receivers, you can’t put them down and charge them for two hours while you grab your other thousand dollar one. You need to pop new batteries in and go. It’s an interesting kind of back and forth with all that. What other innovations do we have right now as far as maintenance?
Allen: The big one for wind turbine blades right now is a combination. It’s making sure that the blade structure’s there. There’s three things actually. There’s a lot more work in terms of inspection. The drones are really big, and the cameras are using the drones. Some of the thermal aspects – you can do some thermal cameras to do some inspection. The second is what kind of fiber is going into the blades. Because the blades are getting so large they need essentially stronger fiber, and that’s carbon fiber. They’re moving away from fiberglass in some aspects and putting stronger fiber in. Carbon fiber has been used in the airplane industry forever, but it’s more expensive. That’s why your airplanes are so much more money than a wind turbine blade. The wind turbine industry has been using cheaper materials, still acceptable materials for the environment they’re in. But when the blades get so big you need to put stronger fiber in, so they’re putting carbon fiber in. The third thing is they’re doing a lot of things on lightning protection because one of the biggest structural damage causing events is lightning. The lightning protection systems are changing over time. They’re getting smarter. They’re retrofitting a lot of the wind turbine blades that are out in the field right now with better lightning protection, again to get into the longer service life, extend the blades out as far as they humanly can to get the most energy out of them before they have to remove them.
Dan: That makes sense and there’s a lot of fail-safes as well. I’ve seen a lot of videos of when turbines go wrong, whether they get hit by lightning and they catch on fire or the nacelle catches on fire. You’ve seen a couple more that are in a storm, and they get spinning so fast that they get out of control. Then they eventually explode essentially.
Allen: Something’s gone wrong in those situations because they know what the wind speeds are, and they know how fast the system is spinning. They have braking systems. They have a couple different systems. Basically the blades rotate and pivot similar to a propeller on a lot of propeller driven aircraft. The propeller actually rotates a little bit. It’s similar to a sail on a sailboat. Take the sail out of the wind and it doesn’t rotate as fast. They can do that; they also have essentially what looks like a set of disc brakes inside the nacelle. There’s brake pads and a rotor. It grabs hold of it and slows the thing down. When those things don’t work and it has some computer failure or some significant mechanical failure, then it can spin to the point of going catastrophic.
Dan: Those videos are pretty intense. Some people that live close start to peek out the window, and they’re like “That thing’s acting strange!” They pull out their camera, and two minutes later they’re like “Good grief! This whole thing goes!” They catch that moment on a camera.
Allen: If you think about how much energy is in one of those, when one of those wind turbines let’s go like that. The weight of those blades and how fast they’re moving, when it all comes apart there’s a tremendous amount of energy in that explosion. It’s not dynamite for example, but when that thing lets go there’s a lot of energy there so you don’t want to be anywhere near it. Across the Midwest you see people taking pictures of that kind of stuff and getting, I think, way too close. You have no idea where those parts are going to go, how it’s going to come apart. It’s better to let it get back and let it go.
Dan: When they’re doing their thing and spinning at it their normal pace, the tips are still going 100-plus miles per hour. Visibly going way too fast – what are they, 200 300 miles per hour at the tip speeds at that point?
Allen: When they let loose like that they’ve gotta be right. The tips speeds are roughly in the hundred to 200 mile an hour range depending on the design of the wind turbine blade. If they get let loose, they’re moving. They’re going to go as fast until the structure can no longer handle it. That’s when it will all let go. It will go as fast as a human can and then boom that’s it, it’s over.
Dan: Then the pole that they’re attached to the ground with, it’s like it’s made of wet cardboard at that point.
Allen: Think about the way it’s designed. It’s designed to take load straight down through it, a little bit of wobble so there’s some side loads it will take. If the blade hits it, it’s not meant to take that at all, and it just buckles. It has massive silos, and if one of the blades comes out, which tends to happen, then there’s a huge wobble. It can’t take those blows either, and it basically self-destructs. It folds over. It can’t take those loads. It’s made for normal operation. The thing I’ve noticed about the way those nacelles and the towers are assembled and designed they tend to crumple. They don’t go spreading out all over the place. They tend to go straight down. From a safety standpoint that’s exactly what you want. You don’t want it flipping off and getting pulled out of the ground and flipping over to the next wind turbine and hitting the next wind turbine over. If it all collapses around itself, you still have a mess, but it’s not cascading. That is the worst-case nightmare, particularly in a fire situation where it moves from one wind turbine to the next one. That’s a big problem.
Dan: There’s a funny soundbite of our current president talking about how dangerous wind turbines are to birds. How dangerous are they actually to birds, and do birds pose any threat to the device itself?
Allen: The birds don’t affect the wind turbines. There’s two schools of thought about it. I’ve read differing opinions about it. There’s been a lot of research, because birds dying around wind turbines is a thing, and particularly bats. The industry is doing a lot of different things to discourage birds and bats from getting closer. There’s a suction effect that goes on, if you can imagine. On an airplane wing the air moving over top of the wing is moving faster than on the bottom of the wing. It creates this pressure differential, and that’s what creates lift. On wind turbine blades, it’s a very similar thing. You get these big pressure waves, and the pressure waves are so massive that it can basically disorient or damage the bird / bat. It essentially kills them. It’s not really avoidable. If you get so close to the turbine, it’s not something you can do. Recent research I’ve seen explore ways to discourage birds and bats from getting close to the wind turbines to begin with, so that those events don’t happen. There’s not a lot you’re going to do here, but it is important. The reason you’re putting wind turbines up to begin with is to have a greener economy, because you care about the environment. The animals around us are important to us, so we need them as part of the ecology. Last summer I saw a number of papers talking about the bird and bat situation, and different testing things that are going on around the United States where they’re trying to discourage those animals from flying around wind turbines. I think you’re going to see some success there. I know that the industry is monitoring it. I know people really care about it, and they should. It’s like anything else, we’re learning from the experience and making it better, which is what we as engineers should be doing.
Dan: We could have a ball turret on the bottom of the turbine, and when something gets close, it senses them and shoots food the exact opposite way. These are my good ideas.
Allen: If you’re a bird / bat, what else is moving at those speeds that’s that massive at that altitude? Nothing. It isn’t like next to the ground, there’s a truck coming by. I think a lot of animals at this point realize there’s a truck coming by and get out on the way. Wind turbines are a new thing in their environment and this takes a while for everybody to adapt to one another.
Dan: It’s an interesting dynamic between trying to reduce our footprint on Mother Nature and harvest these renewable energy sources while also not disrupting the ecosystem.
Allen: It’s one of those things that in another podcast we should come back through it, because I do think there’s some really interesting work that’s going on in that area. We can talk about that in specific, because we ought to give a shout out to some of the people who are actually working on that problem.
Dan: You solve one problem, then you create two more little ones that you then have to address. That seems like part of the industry expanding.
Allen: One of the things that we’ve been working on here at Weather Guard Lightning Tech over the last couple of months is doing a bunch of research in particular with wind turbine blades. As part of our StrikeTape product we’ve been going back through some research. During some of these podcasts I want to talk about some of the things that we have seen in some more recent papers that have come up, particularly in places like ResearchGate and those research oriented websites where people are starting to publish their papers. I’m going to talk about one today in particular that I found was interesting. I was looking through it again last night. It’s called a review on experimental study of wind turbine blade lightning protection systems, and it’s produced by the North China Electric Power University in Beijing, China. You can find that paper on ResearchGate and download off the Internet. They had a really interesting theme, because they had tried essentially three different ways of providing lightning protection to a wind turbine blade. They metallized the very tip of the wind turbine blade. They put on three receptors along the length of the wind turbine blade. Then there was a third technique which involved looking at salts and contamination on the surface. They did some lightning tests on that. The interesting thing about those different configurations is that they thought that one of these has got to work. What they found was that they were submitting lightning strikes to these different configurations, and they would test it. You have laboratories outside with a 5.4 mega volt high voltage generator, which is used to simulate the high voltage effects of lightning. It also tells you where lightning is likely to attach. It’s what we call a lightning attachment test. It gives you the idea about if our lightning protection system is working the way that it should, and is it as efficient as we think that it is. When they ran these tests one of the things they noticed straight out is that polarity mattered. The polarity of the high voltage generator mattered in terms of the success of the lightning protection system. From what I can read from the paper is that when the lightning generator was negative polarity (that means the blade is positive polarity), the lightning protection systems worked really well. It doesn’t really matter what the configuration is. When the lightning generator is positive polarity (and that makes the blade negative), they had a lot more punctures and randomness to where the lightning would attach on the blade. That’s something we actually see out in the field is some randomness as to where lightning will attach to a blade. They did some really interesting tests basically orienting the blade, whether it was vertically straight up with the tip pointing in the air towards the lightning generator which is above it, or laying on its side like a 30 degree angle. Way different results in the lightning protection system in how efficient it was. When the blade moved from directly pointing straight up towards the sky where the lightning generator was, that worked pretty well. As soon as you start to rotate off that you start having big changes in the efficiency of the lightning protection system. It points out a couple of things. It highlights the really key facts here. All these lightning protection systems they were testing have a copper cable running up and down the blade. And then they have something at the end of the blade, be it a receptor or a metallized tip at the end. And the copper conductor, the down conductor that’s stuck inside the blade, even though you can’t see it, is still active. Lightning can see that thing is essentially what it boils down to. Lightning can still see that thing. As you move the blade from pointing straight up to pointing on its side, that down conductor in the blade is still as attractive as ever. In fact it’s probably working harder than the aluminized tip or the single receptor at the blade end in terms of being attractive. That is a big deal. What they were simulating in the lab is actually something we have seen in real life data coming back for the field. We’re seeing lightning strikes on standard blade protection systems in cases where we have a receptor near the end of the blade. Those receptors aren’t as efficient, and it looks like there’s really two reasons why. One is a polarity, what the polarity of the lightning event is because sometimes the positive is up high and then the negative charge down low in the cloud. But those can flip over and there’s a lot of variation in that. And then the second is the orientation of the blade. Where it is relative to the cloud seems to make a big difference. It tells you that you really have to do your homework in terms of lightning protection. You need to be looking at not the easy configuration, which is to point the blade up in the sky to see if something hits it, yeah okay looks great! Off we go. What happens in real life, and what they have found in this paper, is that as you get in real-world situations, the probabilities go down in terms of efficiency which means the likelihood of having some structural damage to the blade goes way up.
Dan: More variability of where it can hit.
Allen: I think the interesting thing about it is that–and I wonder if I if we’ll ever get a chance to talk to these researchers to see what they would say–I think from our experience, what you want to do on a wind turbine blade is start the ionization process and control where things start on the blade every single time. And that’s what our StrikeTape product does. But that data also proves that when you don’t do it. So if you don’t control where things start, it becomes random. It becomes random, and that’s the trouble when you get randomness in any sort of thing. Especially if you’re talking about a 20 year lifespan and going through a lot of thunderstorms and a lot of rain events. Eventually over time the odds don’t get in your favor. It’s unlikely you’re going to make it 20 years without having some strike.
Dan: For sure. So with these down conductors, do they have any kind of shielding? Do they have any kind of insulation? I mean can that be a potential improvement, or are they completely bare copper wire?
Allen: They’re both. It used to be that they were pretty much all bare wire, or if they had some insulation on it was minimal installation for handling. Then they get buried in or wrapped in the fiberglass of the blade. It keeps them from moving around. The thing you don’t want is the cable constantly banging around back and forth on the structure. More recently I’ve seen a lot of work done where they put a very thick plastic coating over that wire to act as an insulator. This is to try to prevent that wire from becoming energized and reaching out into space and trying to connect with the thunderstorm. In my opinion that’s going to be somewhat effective, particularly early, but over time as things wear and tear the insulation is not made for this. Designing a piece of wire with a piece of insulation on it in the hopes that lightning doesn’t ever get there, you’re going to keep things from getting there, is a little murky. I think the initial trials of it would make sense. If you took a brand new blade and you had a brand new cable and it’s got this nice coating of plastic insulation over top of that down conductor, it’s probably going to do pretty well in the lab. It may work great in the lab. But there’s a lot of wear and tear on these blades over time. If that installation becomes damaged then you’re back to square one again. So we’re going to have to let it play out a little bit. I’ve seen some reports come back so far that have said it does help, but it’s not completely eliminating the problem, which is punctures of the blade. So anything you do to help reduce the cost or increase the survivability of the blade or reduce the number of damaging strikes you should do. But there’s also a cost impact with trying to use a cable with a very thick insulator. So there’s differing opinions about it. I think it can work in some aspects, I think it probably can’t hurt. I wouldn’t know if I can rely on it for the next 20 years.
Dan: Have you seen how they filled electrical junction boxes now, in some situations, with silicon? That’s pretty cool and you wonder if that could be applied–you couldn’t do it over a whole blade because there is so much of it–in maybe like a channel that the blade’s in or that the conductor’s in. If you could install it where it’s fixed and then fill it in with silicon or something. That was really interesting, one of those like why didn’t I think of this 20 years ago. You fill the whole box with silicon and it’s impervious to everything.
Allen: Well I think there’s a sense of scale there. On household items that have a little bit of voltage on them, thousand volts or two thousand volts, those plastics can do pretty well. But the problem with lightning is that the voltages get so dang high. You’re talking about millions and millions of volts and you’re talking about a very tough environmental situation. That’s where I start to scratch my head and say, you know, plastics are not really made for this. Is this going to last all that long? We don’t really have any data.
Dan: It lasts a long time in the ocean, right? Wherever you don’t want them, they last.
Allen: We’re finding that with the group that’s out recovering the plastics out in the ocean right now. It’s surprising. I’ve been trying to follow those guys Ocean Cleanup with Boyan Slat…but they’re doing a lot of great work. And that’s one of the things–I was talking to my wife about this the other day–like plastics are lasting forever. They’ve been in the ocean hanging out there for years and years and years.
Dan: The baleen whales have got little water bottles from 1975 still in their stomachs unfortunately.
Allen: Yeah, we’ve got to do better. We’ve got to do better. And we are obviously, we’re trying to do better.
Dan: At least sea glass becomes jewelry 20 years later. You can come claim it, and we can repurpose it that way. Well, Allen, great episode today. Good chatting with you! We’ll be back here next week on the Uptime Podcast and probably dive into some more of this research. I think it’s a good direction to go in, and there’s so much with the spread of information with the old Internet. There’s obviously more sharing of information than there was 20 years ago in a lot of ways.
Allen: It’s a lot easier to get access to information now, no doubt.
Dan: If you’re listening at home, thank you for being here. Be sure to subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts. Give us a subscribe and a like on YouTube because we have video versions of all these episodes. Check out our Instagram page, LinkedIn Facebook, and Twitter for clips of the show. Thank you Allen, and we’ll see you here next week!
Allen: See you next week!
