Morten Handberg from Wind Power Lab joined us to discuss wind turbine blade fatigue cracks and how operators can diagnose and creative preventative maintenance plans. We also explore subsea cable technology, including a 450 mile cable that now ranks as the world’s longest – are these cables at risk? Can they be protected from natural damage and even sabotage? Plus, a tidal power consortium hits the news cycle, Vestas talks about turbine size and more.
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Show Transcript – Morten Handberg from Wind Power Lab
This episode is brought to you by weather guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPs upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning
protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today’s podcast. Welcome back. I’m Dan Blewett.
I’m Allen Hall.
And I’m Rosemary Barnes.
And this is the Up Time podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime one energy podcast, I’m your co-host, Dan Blewett on today’s episode number one, we’ve got a great friend of uptime coming on the show.
Morten Handberg who is the chief blade specialist from Wind Power Lab. He’ll be joining us to talk about fatigue issues in wind turbine blades. So really deep dove on that we haven’t talked much about much about that on the podcast yet.
So we’re excited to talk about cracks and fatigue and loading and all this good stuff with blades. So look for that in about 20 minutes. first, we’re gonna talk about GE teaming up with GM on rare earth magnets.
Obviously, those are needed for motors, nozzles, etc. So big two big companies teaming up to do some of that mining and some of the legwork. We’ll talk about the largest subsea cable, which is now operating 450 miles long, crazy, long.
We’ll talk about Vestas. They’re installing their v 230 6:15 megawatt at the Australia Test test facility in Denmark, and also some more news from Vestas, one of their executives talking about, you know, this race with wind turbines getting bigger and bigger and some of the costs and potential difficulties about that in the future.
And lastly, we’ll chat a little bit about a consortium led by Orbital Marine, which is the maker of the orbital O2, a two megawatt tidal power machine which we had covered about six months ago. So we’ll talk a little bit about tidal power towards the end.
So before we get going, make sure you subscribe in the show notes of today’s podcast to uptime tech news and to Rosemary Barnes’s YouTube channel, you’ll find both in the links and description below. Remember, you just get an update from us.
If you sign up for old time tech news along with other news from around the web. So first off, let’s talk about GE and GM. They are obviously two big American companies, and they are trying to figure out how they can make sure this supply chain of heavy and light rare Earth magnets and materials will be available
to them for years to come. You know, doing this forecasting is important work. Allan, what sticks out to you? Why do you feel like these two besides the the short g g, maybe like a g r, they could get like a g g t to their a little.
With their little club.
Besides the the names. What sticks out to you? Why are these two companies going to be good partners in this?
Well, they’re hedging their bets is what they’re doing at the moment because they’re concerned about China and trade with China being constricted and the economic situation that’s happening in China at the moment involving real estate. And so the a lot of rare earth minerals come from from Asia, China in particular.
And there’s deep concern in the United States that as our technology moves forward and we get more into the electric motor world, that we’re going to need more rare Earth materials that are in America and Australia and other places on the planet.
But the investment to go get them can be rather large. And if we’re thinking about US independence from some, some key economic players in the world today, they’re going to have to find U.S. sources or Canadian sources to go after those minerals.
So I think this makes sense. What’s what’s interesting about it is worse. Tesla, like GM, must not be friendly with us to Tesla at all. And GE must not be getting along with Tesla because you think Tesla has this kind of figure it out at the moment.
So now Tesla is kind of pushed to the side and really big industrial players are going after those rare earth minerals. And if you can corner of that market, you can really put stress on Tesla. So there’s a lot to this particular agreement, I think.
Rosemary, do you see the same thing? I don’t know. Australia is full of great minerals. Do you have the same issue there?
Yeah. I mean, we don’t manufacture many of the things that need rare earth minerals. So I think for Australia, it’s more relevant form the we want to be a supplier side of it. But I think that the I mean, I’m no expert on Earth minerals, but I am very interested in sustainable mining in general.
And I think that the reason why China produces, I think it’s still more than half of the world, the world’s rare earth minerals. And I think it’s because it’s it’s so far so environmentally damaging to process them or to mine them and process them.
I know that the, you know, old mines that have produced these minerals are really, really degraded. Now those areas, you know, often you can’t grow crops in the area anymore. I think the wastewater is full of right, like high levels of radioactive, yeah, high concentrations of radioactive waste.
And I think that the rest of the world has been happy to let China, you know, go for it because they don’t want to deal with that. So now I do say that this is a good opportunity, really.
While everyone’s worried about trade and I know China threatened to stop supplying certain countries at some point. It’s a good opportunity to clean, clean this up to the point where we can produce them anywhere because I mean, despite the name, they’re not rare everywhere, right?
Every country probably has the capability to to produce if they were happy to make it work within the environmental constraints. So yeah, I think it’s going to be an opportunity and I think it’s past time, though, that we, you know, recognize the reality of these critical minerals and, you know, started to bring them into the 21st century
. Yeah. And I think that’s, you know, we’ve obviously had supply chain issues this past year with COVID, and I don’t know that that you know what the source of all of those is. But, you know, like the chip and the semiconductor shortage has really hurt the auto industry in general.
And I think that’s probably been maybe the pinch that a lot of companies have needed to say, Hey, we me, we probably need to evaluate some of the other supply chain, you know, items that could potentially bite us in the future, whether it’s five or ten years down the road and start to get some of that infrastructure
created because obviously mining operations are complicated, right? And like you said, getting something from one country that might not be friendly or maybe they’re friendly with us today, but might not be friendly tomorrow. You know, you can’t necessarily predict those foreign relations.
And if they they’re to break down, you know what happens to a company and what happens to a supply chain. So yeah, I think that I think this makes a lot of sense. I think both you put out a really good point that it’s this is a really important future forecasting event because the whole electric car and
you know, these are not cells, they require so many new materials that we didn’t need quite and mass and in previous years. So moving on to other gigantic operations, the world’s longest undersea electric cable, Britain’s national grid, there are North Sea Link is now up and running and this is is is 450 miles underwater and it literally
breaks my brain thinking about how we humans did that. Rosemary, how did this happen? This North Sea link is just an incredible endeavor. It’s super impressive, but I just don’t understand how we humans pull this off.
Oh, I don’t know. I guess I’m not so surprised because it’s more of like an incremental thing. You know, someone people have been installing subsea cables, then gradually getting longer, they’re gradually getting thicker. So what actually stuck out to me about this one is that this is the currently the world’s longest 724 kilometers for those who don’t
speak U.S. units. And I know that the Sun cable project that they’re planning on keeping an eye on this one is Australia and one that connects Darwin to Singapore. And that’s eventually the plan is that that’s going to be a 3.2 gigawatt cable and the the subsidy portion of that is 4200 kilometers long.
Well, that’s its current length. That’s kind of gradually getting longer as they survey the seafloor more and find, you know, a look a realistic path rather than just drawing a straight line on a map. So, yeah, this long current longest was it didn’t shock me in its in its length, so much as really highlight how huge the
future future plans are. And, you know, maybe make me question whether or not this is something that’s likely to happen in the near term that we can, you know, just, you know, all of a sudden go five times longer.
So, yeah, but I think the potential I mean, we need way more of these as we get more variable renewables, you need to connect, connect up different geographies where you know, well, in no way it’s good because they’ve got so much hydro, which you can control when you start and stop it.
But, you know, even connecting areas with different wind systems east to west to get, you know, longer duration of solar, that sort of thing. I think we’re going to need a lot more of it. So it is really good to say, see progress happening.
Alan, what are some of the electrical impedance? I’m sure there’s lots of factors involved. I mean, you know, you have a cable that stretches across your house to your stereo system and you have to make sure you have the right, you know, gauge of wire to to properly power your speakers just, you know, 25 feet across your
living room. I mean, how do they pull this off? You know, a 4000 kilometer cable, this 700 kilometer cable that rosemary sticking a kilometer on, I spoil the rest of the world. I mean, how do they engineer this so that they don’t lose so much current?
I mean, is this just like the size of a tree trunk?
Yeah, it’s going to be pretty massive to avoid the losses that would automatically occur here. So there’s really two ways to transmit power today. High voltage AC, which is the way we’ve been doing since the early 9800 when Tesla came around Tesla.
Tesla as a Tesla, the inventor and Westinghouse started transformers in high voltage transmission lines. That’s the that’s the simplest way. And then obviously, the newest way is what we’re doing on some of these offshore wind turbines, which is high voltage DC, which because we have the power electronics now we can we can do that.
So I think this cable is an AC cable. The the issue, there’s a couple of issues you have to deal with here. Obviously, loss, obviously voltage. Obviously temperature. Right? So you’re you’re you’re probably using the ocean to cool the cable down a little bit and begin to show more energy into it.
So it’s kind of going to play a lot of different roles. And when you when you design something like that, if you look back in history of of under undersea cables, it hasn’t gone very well for the first couple of generations and they figure out how to design it.
The hope is here. We’re going from the UK to Norway that we obviously are implementing all those things that we’ve learned. But this is a new territory. It really is, and I think this is probably the first of many.
But technology wise concepts great. I think the implementation is yet to be determined. Hopefully it works, and I think the UK really wants this to work. I think they need it and it just opens up just a whole bunch of doors for the United Kingdom, which is now separated itself, for the most part from the European Union
. It needs partners right and it needs power partners in particular. You know, it shouldn’t put a cable to France. It’s going up north of Norway. So there’s a lot of geopolitical aspects to this, too. It’s not just creating power and sharing power, it’s alliances.
And so when these play out, the ensnaring is cool. But I think probably in these particular situations, it’s about geopolitics.
Well, two points that no one, maybe the next generation of supervillains will tap into other people’s cables and like, steal it like you can steal, you know, television cable. So stay tuned for that. You might need James Bond in the future.
But number two, is there any kind of redundancy for this? So obviously, like if you have a gigantic cable that’s powering thousands and thousands of homes and sending all this power? What happens if it just, you know, gets off goes offline, like something happens like obviously these have we report on a story, you know, months ago that
one of the cables had all of the other words severed, but came disconnected. I mean, it is not a quick there’s not quake, just like, Hey, hey, John, just go, just go. Turn it off, turn on, plug it back into like your router and your your house.
Is there any way to install redundancy or is it just have to be super well built and just hope for the best.
Both, right? That situation where they had the broken cable or the exposed cable happened in my state on the shoreline, where it goes to Block Island, which is a place where they have like six wind turbines. So they’re not actually going very far.
You can see that do shores. So it’s kind of like Scotland to Northern Ireland. You can kind of see between the two. It’s not that far, but they’re having problems right now. I think as we start grappling with more and more offshore and we start talking about 1516, I see a lot of discussions about 20 megawatt machines
at the moment. And the engineering going into those cables is massive. And yet you don’t hear anything about the design of those cables, right? You hear all about the blades and the nozzles and the generators, but the cables like a like, that’s easy.
No, it’s not easy. It’s extremely difficult to make those things and make them work properly. So there’s a lot of work to go, I think.
Well, and going back to my super villain question, this is a serious, you know, we’ve talked about black swan events before. Black Swan events is just something that you could have never really seen coming right. Nine-Eleven Here in the U.S., no one has ever guessed terrorists would hijack planes and fly them into buildings, right?
Does that is anyone thinking about protecting these cables, you know, say, ten years from now again, there’s you know. Well, you know, some bad actor country decides, Hey, we want to put a lot of Europe off the grid, so they have a submarine attack that slowly deepen, you know, deep in the ocean, they go sever bunch of
key arterial cables, you know, is anyone planning for that? I I know you don’t. Neither of you know the answer to that, nor does. Nor do I. But you wonder if anyone’s planning for those kind of things or are you just assuming no one would ever do that?
But no one have seen all these cyber attacks coming either five years ago, right? So it’s our new normal, our new normal. And you wonder about some of the infrastructure, the fact that it is just hanging out at the bottom of the oceans like they can have, you know?
You know, it’s like it’s going to be protected by guards. It’s the ball in the oceans. They send a submarine down there and it’s exposed. I don’t know, Rosemary. What do you think?
And I think definitely it’s too obvious that no one has thought of this, right? So you’re going to have to plan your whole electricity system around there. The knowledge that some, you know, at some point this is going to drop out without warning and may take a while to to fix.
So I mean, the I’m sorry, I keep on hijacking the conversation back to the Sun Cable, but I know that the plan is that that will supply. Originally, it was 20% of Singapore’s power, but I was just on the website now and now they’re saying 15%.
It seems like too much, you know, it sounds instinctively like you can’t have that huge chunk of your power coming from something that could drop out for months without warning. So they’re going to need anyone that’s relying on a large chunk of electricity from subsea cable is going to want to have a lot of redundancy and maybe
a lot of storage. I’m not sure exactly how they’ll do it, but for sure, it’s too obvious that night just didn’t occur to anyone, and they’ll be just really surprised when it happens the first time.
Yeah, well, there nefarious or not. Like you said, you have to hedge your bet. And I think the the pandemic with COVID was an interesting wake up for a lot of people financially, which is like, you know, in the U.S. at least and probably around the world, people say, well, you know, get a good stable job and
a paycheck, but if you’re one stable job, pays all of your bills. And if you’re. You don’t have a lot of money left over a month a month, if you lose that job, you’re in trouble financially really quick.
And I think a lot of people learned that where they have, you know, a side hustle or a second small second income, something to say, OK, if I get let go, if something unexpected happens, I still have X amount of income that I can live off of for a little while.
And I think that’s that was to your point about you don’t want to. You don’t want to power the entire country by one cable because of that cable compromise. You’re in big trouble. Yeah, I mean, Alan, I mean, obviously, it doesn’t seem like there can be any like physical barrier here to prevent this.
But what’s your take on it?
Well, it’s a it’s exactly what’s happening in Europe right now with the Russian pipelines, right, that Russia is holding the most significant part of Europe. Germany in particular hostage. And you just don’t want that situation in Germany, obviously is trying to unwind that.
I don’t know if anybody saw the news. I think it was today or yesterday where Russia would like to send oil their way or natural gas. I forget which one it was probably natural gas to Germany through the new pipeline, and they wanted approval.
You know, can we use this new pipeline? Let us use a new pipeline in and Germany is like, Well, I’m not sure that’s a great idea. Long term, maybe we ought to wait a little bit. So there’s such a there is so much to energy and how it plays into the world economic condition.
Yeah, it just like you guys both said it, it’s seems complicated and having lots of different sources that can be flipped on and alliances, that all seems pretty critical to have that support network to keep everything up and running.
So we’re going to transition now to our interview with Morten Handberg who is the chief blade specialist from Wind Power Lab. He’s a mechanical engineer by trade, has worked in the past as a test and qualification engineer for Siemens wind power and as a blade integrity specialist for Dong Energy, among others.
So really knowledgeable guy, we were really excited to have him. So without further ado, we’re going to take you to our conversation with Morten Handberg. Let’s get let’s get down to it, so we want to talk to you a bunch today about about blade maintenance, you know, and prior to 2014, blades were sold kind of as this
this maintenance free component. But this this I think idea has changed a lot, and it seems like there’s four big areas that really need to be considered. If a company is going to try to maintain their blades long term because they’re not, they’re not maintenance free, right?
So can you speak a little bit to the kind of the four big components of a blade maintenance?
Yeah. But also, I think it’s also important to understand that early blades were designed a lot more conservatively, so they had a much higher, you know, resilience towards erosion that we’re going to dove into an auto fatigue lighting would slip in an issue.
But but when the blade started to grow a lot longer then than a lot of them, then some of the issues that we’re dealing with today, they started to to accelerate and become much more exposed. And also it needs to be taken into account.
So that was why that earlier it was considered more of a maintenance free product. But if we look at look at what needs to go into an internal maintenance plan, then you need to know your blades. You need to know what kind of blade type you have because they are not designed equally.
There are different the design notes out there that affect what kind of wear mechanisms you’re looking at, and then you need to look into what kind of defect, what, what defect there is here. And the key ones are erosion, lightning and fatigue.
So if you know those those four things and that ties into what kind of climate conditions you have, then you have a really good understanding about what kind of blade and what conditions you have and that will put your maintenance plan.
OK, so you kind of build things around erosion, fatigue, lightning and climate. And of course, like you said, climate kind of interacts with with all three of those. So when we talk about a maintenance plan like we’ve talked about insurance a bunch on the show, I mean, is that something that you know, insurance companies are really pushing
? Or is this just like the industry as a whole has realized? Hey, we need to do more proactively rather than just reacting when you know we’ve got a major problem.
It’s something that’s being mentioned, but it’s not something that they are actively seeing that your premiums will get lower if you have a maintenance plan. But I think again, as the blades, the larger turbines they become, they have more years in operation.
You start to see these effects coming again and again. Then at some point, I think that the insurance company will look more favorable unfavorable to an owner who has a maintenance strategy that shows that they are practically inspecting doing repairs to reduce negative effects from fatigue and lightning.
And kind of like, you know, at some point it’ll be like, you know, if you have a house and you don’t lock the door but you have a job, begin to steal a bunch of stuff the insurance company might.
They will probably reimburse you for that. But when it happens four or five, six or seven times the same thing, they’ll start to say, OK, if you don’t lock your doors, then you know, we’re not covering it. And I think we’ll see.
Well, we will see the same, the same things with with with blades and turbines that if an insurance company can see that the that the owner operator is simply not taking care of the acid, then their premiums go will go up or they’ll be removed and the insurance will have to find another place.
You mentioned the home inspection and or the home insurance. And so this to me, especially assets, are changing hands. So, you know, if a wind farm is sold to a different operator, I assume they’re going to do a lot of inspection.
Are they going to start from scratch? I mean, it seems like that kind of that kind of situation, like a home inspection, but for the wind farm, for all the blades would seem to make sense. As you know, like again, you’re selling this big asset and read it re upping the insurance, all that sort of stuff, starting
fresh. I mean, do you see that a lot as that kind of a decent analogy if if assets are being.
Sold now, that is that is very common. So I mean, it’s it’s I don’t think it goes out with that goes on without having some sort of inspection when the assets changing hands and it goes when it goes from one operator to another.
That would be a due diligence of what is the condition of the assets that they want to know what what they’re actually taking over. And do they need to do something when they’re taking over the new asset? And the same with insurance company, if the policy changes with an insurance company or from one insurance company to another
, it’s also very common practice to do a due diligence of it. And Blades have not been the ones with the most focus in the past. But but we see that that is actually something that is that is a high target on our on this undeserved when when they’re being done because there is a lot there’s a lot
more knowledge now on how lightning fatigue and erosion can affect the assets. And that means a lot when when an asset is being transferred.
one, especially today, we’re talking about much bigger blades than in the past, right? So if it was. A 40 meter blade. That’s not going to be nearly as expensive as, you know, a 107 meter blade or something like that today and obviously times three.
So I think it seems like the stakes are a lot higher for when these assets transfer hands, you know, and this reminds me like I remember one of my the first cars, you know, I bought as a as a high schooler.
I just remember feeling at ease when we went to the cellar and he’s like, Do you want with my records of the oil changes like he had changed the oil religiously every 3000 miles. And, you know, it made me feel at ease like, yeah, OK, well, this car has been well taken care of, even though it had
higher mileage. And I think people probably want to see that same thing, especially when these are, you know, obviously multi multi-million dollar transactions. So I think one of the things that we haven’t talked much about on the show is blade fatigue.
And I know that’s something, you know, you guys talk a lot about a wind power lab. So what do people need to know about fatigue? Because obviously, erosion gets a lot of press. Lightning gets a lot of press.
But but tell us, give us, give us a give us an overview, first of of what we need to know about blade fatigue.
Well, it’s a very, very broad area to start with. So, so I mean, we could start, of course, right here right now on fatigue alone, but I’ll try and cover the basics. So, you know, a a blade is being continuously exposed to when, when, when the turbine row rotates, it’s experiencing fatigue loads because it switches between tension
and compression continuously during the rotation. And what you can imagine is that this is the Blades. And then it would continuously just bend upward, you know, continuously in log in in a lot of cycles. And each of these cycles adds to the to total fatigue count, which is called ring flow count, where a certain amount of fatigue
load will then at the world reduced the Blades lifetime with X amount with by amount. And there is something called SunCruz where if if you have a component that is experiencing a certain amount of load at a certain and a certain amount times that, then it will feel.
But if you increase that load, then if the amount of lifetime will will will be reduced, not equal to the load increase, perhaps, but but exponential so from one to single place, from some to 1.1 kilos, that’s a 10% load increase can have just as a hypothetical 100% decrease in lifetime.
So if for one kilo means 20 years of lifetime, then a 1.1 increase can actually had been reduced to ten years. This is just hypothetical, but but it kind of shows to the to the nature of how fatigue loads, how aggressive it can actually be.
If you if you just change, just don’t do it. Those loads, because it has it has a really high impact, and that also ties into icing conditions. If you start to see icing loads, then if you’re not controlling the turbine in the right way, either by curtailing stopping it due to these ice loads, you can actually experience
early life fatigue issues because this ice mass is located at the tip of the plate, where the the it will add the most momentum to it so that that will have a very high effect on on fatigue and fatigue issues.
And we actually see that that we can tie ice ice buildup into actual fatigue damages.
OK, so that’s a pretty big.
It’s.
A pretty big reason to potentially have maybe some deicing solution, whether it’s I mean, I know there’s a lot of different ones on the on the market geologic, you know, we had them on the show. They have a, you know, an ice sensor.
You know, do you recommend then someone, how are they going to measure that so quickly where they can say, OK, we have enough ice where we definitely need to shut these down and get them cleaned off before we go again?
Because you said like that 1% increase over time, you could have a tenfold fold decrease in lifetime. So it seems like the stakes are pretty high.
Again, it depends very much on what kind of blade type you have because some clay types could have higher load capacity. Others will have a lowered that on that. That really depends on what how conservative the blade is, is made and what control mechanisms.
So I would definitely argue that that controls should be in place and also note monitoring of the beliefs. And not all old blades have that. So there will be some natural frequency measurement, but that can that will detect this, this change.
But the big question is, is it that is that too late have enough icing actually buildup that will then increase these loads to reduce the lifetime?
So Martin, when we talk about fatigue, there’s a number of different modes of fatigue. And as the blades have gotten longer, obviously they get heavier and. Obviously, they also get faster tip speed, so just a lot more forces involved.
What kind of fatigue failures are you seeing in the field right now?
So. So a lot of what we’re seeing are long fuel cracks along the along the trailing edge. That’s a quite common one. And we also see some trailing edge cracks closer to the tip leading edge, long tunnel cracks.
And those are the more most common ones very directly related to fatigue because it works in the in the longer, you know, direction of the blade. And but the but the big thing is that if these fatigue cracks are not detected, they will then start to create radial or transverse cracks because they’re because a crack allows for
degrees of freedom within the elite, and it’s unintended degrees of freedom. So that would mean that the crack can move independently. And when it does that, then it actually just accelerates. And when it’s reach a certain point where it can start to to open and close, then then you’ll start to see cracks going perpendicular to the longitudinal
crack. Often, fatigue effects also develop because of an off imperfections in the plate. This is still a handcrafts. They haven’t been automatically produced yet. Yes, some use RTM processes to to cast the blades, but all of the glass is still more or less handled or to agree, had to be handled by by people living in the grass
and in the glass. So there is a there is a risk of of these. No, most of them are then being detected by the QA personnel at the factory. It’s actually quite good at this, but sometimes something slips through the cracks.
And one of the critical ones is a wrinkle. And if you look at the piece of paper like this, if it’s stressed out, this is say, if this is a good lemonades because the Udeh fibers they can, they can hold a lot of tension and compression.
So, so the laminate is working as it should. But then if it’s folded like this, then when the blade is in operation and starts and tries to and and this wrinkle here experiencing it’s experiencing tension and compression it, it will try to to stretch out.
But because it’s cast in a then, then it’s stuck in place. And that means that. And then that that means that it has very low and very low, no load capacity. And then that will lead to a very early life fatigue development.
And this can be some of them are in the surface. Laminates doesn’t have a major major effect. So if anyone goes after this podcast and detects a small fold in the service of limit doesn’t mean that there is a critical issue because it’s often it’s within when it’s inside the Udi’s that they become really structural, especially if
there’s if they’re transverse to the beat direction, then they are critical. But then often you can’t see them, but you can see the effect of them. And that’s also why I would always argue when you’re doing inspections, do internal inspections because fatigue damages, if they are structurally, if they’re structurally critical, they will often be visible from the
inside first when you see them from the outside. There is. It doesn’t mean that this is this is the case every time, but there is a high risk that then it’s too late and then you need to take the plane down to repair and maybe even replace it.
So inside the blade is a little bit of a of a new inspection technology, right? So we used to just put people on ropes and we would expect the outside and we’d look for cracks and split trailing edges and those sort of things.
But it can be very hard because the coatings on the blade can be very thick and May has been repainted once or twice. And so it’s it’s sort of hard to detect those, those beginning problems. So measuring inside because there’s no coatings, you can actually see a little bit more.
What are the technologies used today to look inside of blades and try to see those structural issues.
So you can still send us sending a guy to to inspect in the in the chambers, and he would go in and then look for any anomalies and structural issues inside the body. That actually would be a very, very easy to detect because when you have a crack, you have a determination the the coloring will change from
from olive green to milky white. Sometimes we see that then dry fibers also being in being being detected and categorized as fatigue effects that necessarily the case. But if you see a polygon shape inside your blades, you go.
It’s very likely you have a determination. And if you see an an open tear with white sides and loose fibers stick. If you have a major crack, that’s so it’s quite easy to find this on the inside, actually.
That doesn’t mean that you can see everything because if it’s soft surface or very close to the surface it started, you might not see it because of the the the the light deflection and you still have the coating on the outside.
So it’s easier to see the things that start on the inside of the pipe. And that is the majority of the structural issues. We see that. So if you have something in the wet weather or the box being the spark up or in the city limits, then then then it would be a very easy to detect.
It would only be for the in a third of the plate. If you want to go further out, you would need a robot crawler or a camera that you can. You can hoist down through the Blades. But that’s unless we have a suspicion.
That’s really something I recommend because all critical issues that we see and that are common within the first third of the blade.
And why is that? And that’s great. You cover that because I was actually just going to ask like, what kind of tech do they need to do this inspection inside the blogs? I know obviously they’re getting bigger and bigger.
We’re now some of these new blades. You know, you can stand up and reach up and not touch the other side of it, but you know, they get pretty narrow as they go. So why a why? The first third only is that only where you detect these typically?
And then what other technology to your your techs need to take in there with them?
Well, I mean, you can use a drone that is suitable for internal inspections or a guy, but they would reach more or less the same area. The guy when he reaches the in the third, he would get into a very confined space and I’ve been there.
It’s not fun to get.
So terrified.
In the third. So but it’s simply because I mean, and even the inner third is still more than you need because it’s it’s the blade route that is critical. It’s the start of the weapon that’s critical and it’s the transition zone and then the the shoulder area.
That is where the majority of all the notes are the hit, the hit, the high notes. They are centered around this area because you know that that’s where you get the most. That’s where you have the highest momentum.
And it’s also where the blade is transitioning the note from the weapon back into the route and sell lemonade. That’s also what’s called the transitionary. And so any any imperfection, anywhere that that will show in that area first.
So if you have an issue on the plate and that is the that is the critical area and the further out you get on the Blades for the less load load she’ll have. And that doesn’t mean you can’t have fatigue damage.
You certainly can. But often they would be less critical. So because if you have fatigue damage in the enough in the in the inner section of the of the Blades that can lead to the blade for you quite fast.
If you if you don’t attack on it and you don’t don’t detect it.
What is what is the effect of fatigue on the adhesive joints, the body joints, not just the the fiberglass structure composite there do the the bonded joints also have fatigue limits and accelerated fatigue over time.
Yes, indeed. In most cases, we see that the adhesive joints are often stronger than the laminate, so it wouldn’t be the adhesive joint that feels it would be the surrounding lemonades. When we see adhesive joints failure, then it’s because of adhesive failure.
It’s actually quite rare that we see cohesive fibers 510 failure as a as an effect on the adhesive joints. So that is the main problem is still a fatigue issue. But it’s it’s it’s being guided by for adhesion.
So back to a manufacturing error. So the adhesive joints and so I’m not as worried about unless you have missing adhesive because we know that it’s an issue or you have insufficient men mechanical bonding between the adhesive and the shell or the well.
So when you walk up to a blade and Martin, you’re sort of like a blade whisperer, right? So you can you can you better rub blades enough that you see all the variety of things that’s happened to Blades and you know, the different manufacturers and you’re just familiar with all the the deficiencies and the intricacies of each
one of them. So when you walk up to a blade, what are you looking for and how fast can you say, Hey, that Blade has an issue that one really doesn’t? What does that? What does that.
Like? You see it when you walk into the blade, because again, this structural damage is very easy to detect. And the way you would and the way you would recognize the failure is by looking at how the field pattern is.
So again, if you see a separation between the web and the and the show in the adhesive joint, then you would look at an adhesive failure if you look at a transverse crack over the over the over the shell.
You would look at a wrinkle. So a lot of these damages, because we’ve seen so many things over the years, we instinctively. Almost no, that OK, this is actually the gist, is this the reason why if we see longitudinal cracks, then we would go into the in into the locks and look at how the bay has been
operated. And if we see long stretches of parallel lines, we would look for emergency stops. So there’s a lot of factors there, and there’s a whole guideline that we’re actually building around what, what, what damage, how the damage appearances and how that relates into into the feet, that fatigue damage.
So I don’t know if any of you a mushroom hunters or ever try to open a mushroom book, but if you do, you would get this sort of guide that, OK, it doesn’t have a Red Hat. Is it a white stork?
We’re trying to do the same thing around promptly damage, essentially because it is. It is a multilayer identification that we’re doing and we’re looking at what kind of blade type do we have? How is it structured? What kind of failure modes can we then have?
Because if it’s a deports, would it be? Is it a dual shell? Where is it structural versus nonstructural shells? All of that? And when do you know the major organs and you know the design? You can also then start to derive what kind of treatments that are that are relevant.
I like the analogy because I think eating fiberglass is probably just as deadly as eating random random mushrooms. Yeah, you can’t. You can’t just eat more than a handful of random mushrooms in the vase where you just get a poisonous one.
And that’s the end of you. So great analogy.
So Morten have you ever walked into a facility, seen a blade and said, shut that turbine down right now because it just.
Yes, I used to work as an operator and operational engineer for major utility, and then I would have inspections coming in and then I would look at them at the inspection reports and then, OK, then there was OK, this this damage to this is around this, this critical area here, it’s low single transverse there.
The call up inside men see we need to shut the 44 down. And then the site manager would then respond to me, OK, this is this is that many brands per day? Are you sure? So I would always get to get the costs just to verify whether how certain I actually was.
And so I have I have done that a few times, said that, OK, shut this down right now. Yeah.
And ah, most of.
These systems and are.
Most of these structural damages that you’ll find are the most mostly repairable? Or I mean, how far along do they have to get before it’s like, Hey, we just need a we just need a new blade. I mean.
There is a very there’s a point in time when the repair exceeds the cost of the blade essentially totaled, so to speak. Whenever you need to repair beam laminate or a structural shell, then then you need to have an overlap between each layer.
And that would mean that a crack that if it goes through or delineation, if it goes through enough layers, then in some cases you would use a 50 millimeters per layer in each site. So that would mean that you would actually extended by 100 millimeters for each layer.
Right. And if you have that to do that for 20 or 30 or 40 layers, some plates even have 50 layers. If we’re back to some of the older conservatives, then a relatively small damage would actually would require repair.
That could be that could be four or five or six meters long, even if it’s only in a relatively small area. But that’s because of the the direction of the crank and the number of layers that that it’s impacting.
Mm-Hmm. And then we start to look into, OK, the cost and the downtime of the turbine is that it does that really correspond to the to the value of this blade? But then when you start to go into that direction, then does the new people that fit and then need three blades and there are cases where the
repair is simply too risky because it’s affecting too large an area of the of the of the of the structural parts of the blade. That’s the risk of crypt of the repair being more problematic than the damage itself than than than you wouldn’t repair it.
Then you would just say, OK, we need to replace this. There is no way. Wow. I’ve also seen one where a crane moved a bit too close to the turbine and they didn’t shut down the turbine. And then.
No one.
23 and then all three blades. Wow, that had that and the tip smashed.
Wow.
So there were replacements.
Yikes. I just wish that there were videos of all of these things. I don’t.
Know. Yeah.
I keep pushing that on every episode. Like, That’s good VIDEO Everywhere. So when these incredible calamities happen, we can see them.
I mean, if you’re diving off injured, I mean, recently you guys had a had had an episode where you discussed a train running through a blades. Yeah. So a lot of different things happened to the blade out. I’ve been up there.
Yeah, so lucky, no one was hurt. Now on to, oh yeah, that was crazy.
Oh yeah, I completely agree.
Yeah. So when I say there’s an opera, you’re listening to this podcast, I’m like, OK, we should check out the fatigue of our blades. I mean, how often is someone new to inspect this? I mean, is there any warning signs that they would see from the ground or C from a monitoring system?
I mean, is everyone everyone does need to do this every certain amount of years? Or what do you what do you recommend?
Well, I always recommend doing a subset every year because inspecting all blades every year is just a huge cost factor, especially when we’re talking about offshore and unsure if you’re in a remote location and or a turbine to spread out, then it’s just a huge cost on you to do everything.
So what I normally recommend is to do a subset. It can be ten, it can be 20% so that over a period you actually you actually get through your entire windfarm and that that serves several purposes. If you start by just looking at fatigue, that means that if you within that population can see a certain amount, fatigue
damage is at the same time starting to develop, then you know that this would be representative of the remaining part of the wind farm. So let’s say you see one damage and one fatigue damage. That doesn’t really mean a lot.
And if you then go in and look at what is the root cause of it, is it fatigue related? Is a production related or is it a bird bucket that hit the turbine blades that will tell you a lot about can?
Do we need to expand this? So I would always set up trigger events with my inspection subset and say that if that is exceeded, then I need to do a full 100% inspection. And so that’s normally the way I would approach it.
So don’t just do 20% every year or 10% do the ten or 20 and then look at what did I actually find and what did I learn and what is what does the total of this told me about the current condition of my wind farm?
And is this and I assume this is something they would probably do at the same time as like a leading edge erosion inspection? I mean, do they want to know how many of these services would they want to combine all at once just to sort of maximize downtime so.
Erosion you can do at the same time as fatigue? I mean, fatigue could also do an equal subset on the inside, but erosion, you really don’t need to do a lot because erosion is it’s really varied. It’s erosion is easy to handle compared to the others because it’s predictable and because if you look at 10% of your
wind farm, even if you almost only had ten turbines, and that means one turbine, if you can see a certain amount of erosion on that turbine, then assuming that they’ve been repaired at the same time following the same processes, the remaining nine, they will look exactly the same.
Yeah, so you don’t need to do a lot on erosion. And and there we would normally commence. Follow the evolution from the beginning. And then when you start to see exposed laminate, then do a repair and select the right leading edge repair solution.
But it can, but it can be tied into the fatigue inspection. You don’t need to do anything.
Special and then I know you’re passionate about educating people and helping you know, operators get their their own staff, you know, up to speed to be able to do a lot of these themselves. You know, what does an operator need to do?
They do. They need to always outsource someone from this. I mean, can they train their staff to do some of these inspections? Or or how can they develop a maintenance plan on their own? Because we’ve talked about before in previous conversations with you that, you know, not every wind farm is going to be big enough to have
a maintenance plan, right? Somewhere they’re gonna be small, but they might say, Hey, this is a good thing we should do in the future. So how would you recommend that smaller, smaller wind farms or larger, you know, if they don’t have a maintenance plan for their blades that they go about getting one and getting their staff trained
. They can do something really simple if you only if you have. If you’re a small owner, a farmer having ten turbines, then if if you then do an annual biannual inspection of a subset and then then look at what is the current condition, maybe then get an expert to do it, then you would be in good, good
, good shape anyway, because then you would get the accurate results and understanding of what is actually going on and a wind farm. If you allow to operate and you need to look at what is the conditions across your portfolio and plan major campaigns, then it makes a lot more sense to then go in and then do an
actual maintenance strategy and plan out when do I need to schedule inspections? When do I need to schedule repairs? What kind of opex cost them man looking at from fatigue, lighting and erosion over the lifetime of the turbine of the wind farm?
And you can do a lot of this. If you if you know some of the history of your offshore wind turbines, then you can. You can use that to make trend analysis and then make some pretty good predictions.
Don’t necessarily hit the mark, but you’ll be better off than handling everything on an ad hoc basis so far larger. Operator If you if you don’t have a maintenance plan, then then you don’t have an overview of what your opex cost per piece of.
That is the benefits by doing it in a more structured way. And so therefore, I would recommend this this differentiation between large and small operators.
So Martin, one of the newer technologies on the marketplace is the Ping Monitoring System, which is an acoustic sensor that actually mounts to the wind turbine base. Yeah, some of these fatigue cracks detectable because they make noise or leading edges or trailing edges that are split.
Do they make enough noise that that ping can pick those things up?
I think for a lot of defects, yes, they would have a really good chance because the they changed the yeah, the airflow over the plane because it changes how the blades operate out of the box again back to the degrees of freedom.
So then definitely be detectable. And but it’s always difficult. And I can make an analogy because I also you try to dove a lot into these from the load sensors and the load sensors. They can pick up a lot of fatigue cracks as well.
They can tell you where they are and can have some of the same issue. But at least I can tell you that you have fatigue crack, but it doesn’t mean they you have a go golden ticket because I’ve tried digging through finding a five meter long crack at the tip of my my, my, my blades, looking at
the natural frequencies. And there was no difference. Nothing could be picked up.
Wow.
Yeah. The Ping sensor, on the other hand, have an easy way to to detect that because it was quite open the Blades. So that would have been it would have been very easy. So I think it’s about ActionScript the things being used in combination because I think and especially for internal effects under this, you also have an
internal acoustic sensor, then those defects would not be a puzzle to pick up with an external sensor. So, so again, I think I think we’re back to understanding what kind of problems you actually have on your wind farm and then deciding what kind of monitoring system you have in accordance with that.
And so either one fits all. I really I really think that that that is the way forward.
Yeah, that’s a good perspective. It seems like it’s just so complicated. And like you said, from so many different areas of the blade and so many different things are happening that that makes sense. So Morton, one of the cool things you’re doing is you’re doing a two day course for operators to help educate them about blades, about
maintenance, all that stuff. Can you talk a little bit about what you’re doing? I think that’s that’s pretty interesting. I think people in the industry need to know about it.
Yes. So so I’m starting to make these these courses especially tailored to two operators, but also to loss adjusters or subject matter experts and independent companies that want to know a bit more about the Blades and what’s going on behind the base.
And there will look a lot at what kind of defects do we have out there and then back to how do we actually identify them and by if by by showcasing where under the blade would you find leading at boss and where would you see the eliminations?
Where are wrong lighting attachments common and why? Where would you find voids chipping, peeling and so on, so forth, and also dove into what is causing these different defects? Because when we look at, for instance, voids peeling, chipping the all coal surface defects, they’re all being repaired in the same way.
But they are very different in why they actually are there on the blades. So voids comes from subsurface air inclusions in the in the coating with the filler peeling comes from it’s it’s called workmanship, but it can hold.
It can be. Both materials can also be insufficient cleaning or grinding that simply have have, how do you see, have limited the the adherence between the filler and the pins? And then we’ll just peel off again and then we have chipping.
That is a an added effect to avoid some ocean where you already have an exposed area and then due to environmental, where this defect will continue to chip off off the void or the erosion and accelerate this defect.
So they’re all considered surface defects and often they are being mistaken with each other. But but we try to to dove into why what actually causes and how do you differentiate between them? And we do the same for cracks, denominations and and all sorts of defects, both externally and internally.
And we also go into the more operational parts. So what? Well, what do you need to consider about your environmental conditions that will help you identify when a leader reading it, erosion solutions you should use and where you need leading resolution protection?
So that is just a small snippet of what followed Dove into. And yeah, I can talk for a lot of hours on this subject here. So.
And is that something people can sign up for on the web or how do they get in touch with you about that? If they’re interested.
So they can, they can contact me or my colleagues directly, or they can also contact us through our website and then, yeah, request some additional information about our training courses.
Well, that’s also. So is there anywhere else that people can follow up with you and wind power lab on the web?
So so we have a LinkedIn page where we basically update on our activities and where we are, where we are active and what services that we’re focusing on and promoting. And we also have a website where the where you can learn a lot about our and our assessment and repair recommendation services are through cost analysis and also
our training courses. So there, whatever problem you would have within blades, then you can go and and and find a solution and contact us. And if you if you don’t know what and if you have a problem, but you don’t know what service that would, that would fit it.
Also, just contact us and let’s have a talk about that. That’s that’s always an option. We’re more than happy to talk to the operators and the service providers within the industry and also just just trying on trying to understand the problems they have from their perspective and then see if we have a service that fit them.
Otherwise, just give them a friendly advice.
Awesome. Well, Morten thank you so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it.
Likewise, it was really good to interview.
All right, well, again, we want to thank our guests, Morten Handberg, for coming on talking with us about blade fatigue issues again. Be sure to follow with him in the show notes of this podcast. You can easily find links to all to get in touch with him personally and the company.
And again, what they’re doing is cool with the educational aspect of it. You know, again, with all the big OEMs keeping a lot of their trade secrets, trade secrets close to the vest, which is understandable, there’s not as much knowledge flowing around.
So if you need to learn more about how to maintain your assets or you want to learn more about, you know what they know, then definitely check them out and send a message through the show notes below. So moving on, Vestas is installing their V2 3615 megawatt wind turbine prototype that was announced earlier this year at the
Australian National Test Center in Denmark. So and this is kind of sort of coinciding with an article, a good article in the BBC about, you know, just how fast these wind turbines are getting pushed bigger and bigger. Bigger, right?
So Mianyang, Festus GE, Siemens Gamesa. So they’ve all put out bigger, bigger turbines this year the eight x the 14 222. You know, I hear the Vestas 15 megawatt version and one of their higher ups or illness was the head of offshore product market strategy investors.
Here’s a quick quote from her. She said. You know, it’s happening quicker than we would wish. In a sense, we need to make sure it’s a sustainable raise for everyone in the industry, referring to the, you know, the race for bigger megawatt outputs.
And so, rosemary, all those to you first. I mean, she’s pointing out the need for bigger harbors, bigger equipment, bigger jack of vessels, insulation vessels, all this stuff. And that, you know, it might be a little bit advantageous.
It sounds like to slow down a bit and let some of the infrastructure catch up.
Yeah, I thought it was really weird that, you know, Vestas are one of the key participants in in this race to get bigger wind turbines. And then we have someone from the company saying that it’s, you know, against their will.
It doesn’t really, I don’t know. It’s not it’s not the best marketing, maybe for their their new huge wind turbine. It doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the company is really behind the strategy. So I found that part of it really strange.
And I also do think that, you know, that’s the nature of, you know, participating in a competitive market that you know, whoever can supply what the customers want the fastest is is going to have a competitive advantage. So I kind of I agree, and it’s definitely very hard as an engineer for these companies.
And every time you would get another announcement like this of the, you know, new huge, longer blade or some other massive technology shake up engineers would all be rolling their eyes complaining and yeah, talking about it in the canteen.
But at the same time, you know, like, you know that that’s your job right to to make the the best wind turbine. That is what customers want. So I it’s uncomfortable, but you know, you become an engineer because you want to solve problems, right?
You don’t you don’t become an engineer because you want to keep on doing everything the same for a long time. So yeah, well, that’s yeah, most most engineers are a lot of engineers do that anyway. Some maybe just want a cushy job, but it’s not as fun.
Well, I kind of read this article and wondered if it’s kind of like, you know, you have two boxers in the ring and they’re both like battling it out and then they both kind of look at each other like, Do we want to keep going?
We’ve already gone ten rounds like this one, I call it a draw now, you know what I mean? Like that was kind of how I read it, because you need 11 of you to like, sort of extend that olive branch to say, like, we’ve gone hard enough, maybe we can back off just a little bit and like
, you know, take a breather. Alan, what’s your perspective on this?
Well, I think they’re getting driven by forces outside of Europe, actually and the United States. I think what’s happening is they’re the Chinese and Goldwyn and some others are really pushing the envelope, trying to gain market share. And in that competitive environment, I don’t know what to call it competitive in a sense, because I feel like there’s
the EU and the United States are going to be screaming about dumping like there was with steel a couple of years ago that that the Chinese offerings are going to be so low priced or so. Can so much be below what the market would typically provide that the ease investors and everybody else are really going to start
complaining? The problem they’re in right now is that they have to they don’t. They don’t really have a choice. So as China produces bigger wind turbines, they’re forced to produce bigger wind turbines. The customers are clamoring for them.
And what happens in those conference rooms is a Vestas walk. Sen and pitches brand new wind turbine concept because they don’t even have any hardware at the time, and so we can get the 16 megawatts and the customer goes, That’s awesome.
But my Chinese provider can do it for half the price you can. So guess what? I’m going to choose a Chinese provider. And that’s where I think the real disconnect starts to happen is that the customer base and the European and U.S. manufacturers are really getting into a bind here and something’s got to give.
And the U.S. is probably the United States is going to just outlaw certain types of Chinese winters. I think that will happen. I think that’ll happen in Europe at some point, too. So they’ll just take it off the marketplace.
So the vest bosses and the Siemens Gamesa can be profitable because otherwise, I think they’re in a world hurt competitively.
Yes, I just wanted to add this the new Vestas wind turbine that they’ve announced, they’re installing the prototype 15 megawatt prototype in Arsdale. The cool thing about that is this it’s actually a test wind farm that I visited in my my first ever YouTube video.
So I think the coolest part of this announcement is that this is open to the public. So anyone who is a wind turbine fan could actually show up and watch them install it. And yeah, and check it out afterwards.
I mean, it’ll be around for a long time. So I mean, from a safe distance, I don’t think they’re going to let you, you know, on the construction site. But that’s what piqued my interest. When I saw I saw this announcement, I got to got to get back to Denmark so I can watch the installation.
Yeah, I picture like people carving their names into the bottom of like a tree trunk like Dan loves renewable energy in the bottom of the Oh no, but no, that’s pretty cool. That’s open to the public. Well, we expect to see a full scoop on your YouTube channel.
Yeah, it’s.
Going to.
Get drones. Our guide.
Dog. Yeah.
Mm hmm.
So finally, on the docket today, Orbital Marine, which is the manufacturer of the Orbital O2, is the two megawatt. Very cool. I’m impressed with that tidal power generator that they launched earlier this year. They’re heading a consortium trying to essentially get to a floating tidal energy.
There’s a quote floating total energy when wind generation, grid export, battery storage and green hydrogen production system. So that’s a lot of things rosemary. Is that a little little ambitious, or do you think this is something that I could come to fruition?
Well, I mean, it’s definitely ambitious and I don’t know if I could. It could come to fruition. I don’t know if I would want to bet on the likelihood of that happening. It’s not like this is the first time that anybody has planned, you know, some multi renewable energy hub that includes ocean energy.
I think there’s also one that’s been announced recently in Australia that uses wave wave power from Bombonera. Yeah. So I mean, it’s it’s good to see some, some continuing interest in ocean energy. This one’s tidal. And I think there’s still there’s still so much potential left in the ocean that we haven’t figured out how to tap.
one thing I notice about this is it’s, you know, it’s a big it’s a big device, the two megawatts, right? That’s that’s big four for Tidal. I, I tend to think that in the ocean, especially with wave energy companies have gone too big, too fast and you often see them run out of money before they have managed
to actually test the feasibility of their technology. You really often see some, you know, like just some regular maintenance things all the cable is breaking or, you know, some other component that could be easily redesigned broke. They ran out of money and it’ll end ended.
And I think we’ve seen dozens of examples of of that over the years, whereas if you’d seen one company try a dozen times, you would have a mature technology by now. So I’m a little bit interested in that aspect of it.
But let’s hope that they’ve got one time when I did a video interview and a couple of wave energy researchers, and they said the most important thing for Wave Energy Project is that you have patient money from your investors.
And so I hope that this project has patient money so that they can overcome those little problems that you have in technology development. I mean, you’re always going to have failures and surprises. That’s that’s that the whole point of of trying it out for the first time.
So I hope they’ve got the money to ride that out. And finally, finally get this to go into the mainstream, as that would be really cool and a really good addition to, you know, the renewable energy system.
It’s still a lot of development to go. And I think that if they can get on it in the next two years until they’ve got a chance to break over that wave, so to speak and kind of ride.
Some of the financial positive upsides of it. But if not, it most likely will be dead because as we just talked about, as wind turbines get bigger and bigger and bigger, title just gets smaller and smaller, smaller as a player.
Well, that’s going to do it for today’s episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. Want to thank our guest? Want to thank again our guest, Morten Handberg from Wind Power Lab. Again, follow up with him and he’s shown us this podcast.
Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube and leave us a review. It always helps the show grow. Share it with a friend and we will see you here next week on uptime. one on.
We want to see me pitch the thing. And be sure to subscribe to uptime tech news in the show notes of this podcast, along with Rosemary’s YouTube channel on renewable energy. We’ll see you next week on uptime. Operating a profitable wind farm is all about mitigating costs, minimizing risks and being efficient with maintenance repairs and upgrades.
It’s incredibly expensive to send a team of rope access technicians up tower to make even simple repairs. We also know how costly lightning damage can be, requiring inspection, repairs and downtime for even minor lightning strikes. Maximize the time efficiency of your LPS and prevent future lightning damage by installing our striketape LPS upgrade the next time your
crews are going up on ropes. Learn more in today’s show notes or visit us on the web at Weather Guard Wind.com.
