Big Risk – Lightning Insurance for Wind Turbines

It may get a lot tougher to insure wind projects in the near future, and an increase in the number and severity of lightning strikes is one of the main reasons why. And Morton Handberg, Chief Blade Specialist at Wind Power Lab, says nearly 100% of blades have some “production deviations.” Who should bear the cost of those (and other) liability issues? And who will pay? Allen and Joel say that offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico might be a big deal for Texas and Louisiana.  Meanwhile, Hexicon is offering floating wind platforms built like Ikea packs, giving Allen, Joel and Rosemary a lot to talk about.  

The lightning insurance article by Robert Bates, Head of Claims at NARDAC, is available here: https://nardac.com/how-lightning-damage-affects-insurance-markets/

Wind Power Lab can be reached at https://windpowerlab.com

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 

Uptime 124

Allen Hall: Everybody welcome back to Uptime. We have another great episode for you this week. First off, the companies involved with ensuring renewables think covering lightning damage is too risky and they may drop coverage. Rosemary, Joel, and I discuss the reasons behind this move. Then we, we review a new idea from Swedish based wind project developer, Hexicon who thinks the future is building floating wind platforms like Ikea builds furniture.

Allen Hall: And then Joel and I have a chat with Morton Handberg of wind power lab about inspecting blades at the factory before the Airship to prevent costly repairs and delays at the job site. Stay tuned. We’ll.

Allen Hall: All right guys. So the insurance companies that ensure wind turbines for lightning damage are getting a little antsy about it and are starting to do two things that I’ve seen lately. One. Push operators to keep their wind turbine blades, lightning protection systems, actively working like verified everything’s up in order.

Allen Hall: And second is they’re pushing back on the OEMs because they’re paying out too much money in lightning claims. And there’s an article recent article from Robert Bates. Who’s the head of claims for NARDAC and NARDAC is a insurance broker. And they’ve looked at a number of lightning. Strike damages to renewable projects, which includes wind turbines.

Allen Hall: And so they, they wrote this, this piece describing what the, what the real root of the problems are and what the industry is likely to do. And I think what the industry is likely to do is the interesting piece of this. So what Robert says is that. Lightning activities expect to increase increased by about 12% for every one degree, CEL of warming and they figure the United States could see a 50% increase in the number of lightning strikes.

Allen Hall: I’ve seen differing opinions about that, but it’s just take. Take that for what it is and, and Rosemary, as you well know, as blades get longer and longer, the, they eventually add carbon fiber fiber to them to stiffen them up. So as the turbines get taller, they’re getting struck more often and they’re becoming more of a target for bigger lightning strikes.

Allen Hall: So one of the major claims. Insurance claims is lightning damage. So what does an insurance company do? Well, they’re trying to figure out how to de-risk this. And since the projections are 50% more lightning strikes, that means 50% more damage. That means 50% more payouts. That’s not a situation where insurance companies want to be.

Allen Hall: Well. What they’re basically saying. And what Robert is saying is, and I don’t wanna summarize this for him. He can speak for himself clearly, but everybody go, go read that article is that there’s gonna be much more pushback in the contracts, and there’s gonna be much pushback from the insurers onto the OEMs to the point of maybe not ensuring some wind turbine operators based on where the farm is.

Allen Hall: Now that’s new. I’ve heard of them not ensuring certain types of wind turbines. And I think that. Continue on there’s certain types of wind tur. They don’t not wanna ensure for lightning because of the issues, but if they’re trying to take some of the risk off of the insurance companies and put it onto the operators, that’s not a really a workable situation.

Allen Hall: And to summarize the article, what they’re, what Robert’s trying to get to is that there’s gonna be more reliance on international standards, like the IEC standard to verify that the lightning protection system is working and also more emphasis on basically maintaining the system. So as we have seen recently on to gross Mary and on YouTube, there’s been some pretty interesting, visually interesting lightning strikes to win turbines.

Allen Hall: That’ve got a lot of eyeballs does, does the industry, the OEM side. Start to step up and take more of a lead in the lightning protection system instead of relying on inter international standards or does, does the insurance companies finally step in, like they have done in many other industries and say, we’re not gonna pay for this tough luck.

Allen Hall: You guys figure it out. And, and Joel, you close on the RCA side. Are, are you seeing. Less activity, more activity on the insurance side or the insurance companies getting more involved into some of these 

Joel Saxum: claims. I think what, what I see and what we’re seeing on the insurance side and wind is that you’re starting to see a lot more of the insurance companies lean towards this ensuring wind turbines as a specialty insurance.

Joel Saxum: Of course, we all know it’s a specialty insurance. Sure. But more, more along the lines of really specialty. So more due diligence along. What kind of blades do you. Whereas before, when, when they, like, I know like certain insurance companies, they just did market grabs. We’re gonna soak up all the renewables we can.

Joel Saxum: Right, right. They didn’t look at the, the condition of the blades, the design of the blades, the model of the blades, the age of the blades, all these different things, you know, is the, is the asset owner a prudent operator? Oh, are they maintaining them properly? Yeah. Have they tested the LPs systems? You know, is there a bunch of leading edge erosion that could be you.

Joel Saxum: causing lightning attraction to in the wrong places, those kind of things weren’t thought about in the past. And what we’re starting to see from, from our side is as a blade consultant company is more and more insurance companies are getting diving deeper into the blades to make sure that they’re taking on quality risk instead of just a large book of risk, let’s stick on some quality risk, cuz cuz I mean that, you know, the, the number that was out in 2019 was 3,800 roughly blade cases.

Joel Saxum: in the world that year. Right? And at that point in time, there was about 400,000 turbines worldwide. So you figure 0.1%. If we go by number blades 0.03, 3% of blades are effective. So that’s statistically, you can count that. Now, if you wanna get quality risk, you find the ones that have the best LPs system take those on.

Joel Saxum: If they have bad LPs systems that you don’t like, don’t take those. And then what are the asset owners actually doing? Are they actually maintaining them? What, what does it look like? What does their maintenance program look like? So the insurance companies from, from our side, you’re starting to see the insurance companies step up and, and force.

Joel Saxum: It will force the asset owners here in the next few years to, to be more prudent and provide better records of how they’ve maintained their blade. 

Allen Hall: In Rosemary on the blade design side and you were evolved in deicing or anti-icing of blades. It was probably one of the most difficult things to do in, in the blade world, but you’re also involved with structures, the lightning protection systems on these blades really haven’t evolved very much since I remember some of the first designs back in the early two thousands with the addition to carbon fiber.

Allen Hall: Well, do, are there much, are there really a lot of differences on the light lightning protection systems? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I, I think so. I mean, so I never really. I barely worked with lightning protection until I worked on a carbon fiber blade. Before then the raw was just don’t put anything conductive , you know, past, I don’t know, 10 or 12 meters into the blade, you know, like you, you can’t go very, very far.

Rosemary Barnes: And. Yeah. And even, you know, we had these incredible long list of things that you couldn’t put in there. You know, in case there were like traces of like the factory workers or had blue markers or red, not black because of some I think there’s some graphite in the, the black ones and you know, that kind of track lighting and, you know, stuff, really, stuff like that.

Rosemary Barnes: They really just the, yeah, the rule was just nothing conductive in the. Except for the lightning lightning cable. Wow. And that was a very simple, simple, and, or not always easy to follow, but it was very clear what the, what the policy was. Definitely rules out a lot of options for Di that for blade heating.

Rosemary Barnes: And then when we needed to change to a more effective blade heating system, cause you know, if you can’t put anything conductive out in the, the blade, then it rolls out any like the, you know, like resistive heating type system. Right. So it was just when we were using a hot air system and you, you know, have all the fans, the fans and metal and all the electrical connections are over oversee metal.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So they would all be in the blade root and by the time that the, the air gets out to the tip it’s It’s not as hot and yeah, there were lots of other challenges associated with that system, you know, keeping all the ducks and everything in good condition for the whole life of the blade. So when I worked on a, a carbon, a blade with some structural carbon fiber and we were using a carbon fiber resistive heating system, then , my project became much less like it used to be.

Rosemary Barnes: My project was to design a heating system for a blade. And I really felt like on that blade, my job was like the, the, he, the heating system was 90% lightning protection and 10% heating as like the heating was an afterthought. because the lightning protection was so complicated. Yeah. And I don’t think I can get into the, the details of how we solved these problems, but certainly it did not look anything, anything like the, you know, the old traditional design where.

Rosemary Barnes: A receptor, you know, like a big chunk of copper or something like a hockey hockey puck of, of copper, right at the blade tip and a big thick cable conducting electricity all the way down the length of the blade and connecting it to the, the, yeah. The, the tower and the ground. Yeah. Yeah, that’s how it used to be in the new system was at least a million times more complicated than that, in my opinion, it, it gave me no, no end of, of headaches and Yeah, it’s also one thing to design it, but then another thing to make it.

Rosemary Barnes: And you know, like cuz when you’ve got the carbon fiber the lightning. It always wants to jump over to other conductive materials. Sure. And you’re trying to stop it. So you put an insulator in between them, but you know, there’s a difference between an insulator that you, you know, test in the lab on this, you know, small scale that’s perfect.

Rosemary Barnes: And has never, you know, been, been flexed it, hasn’t gone through a million, a million loads of being loaded and unloaded. Yeah. So then you put that out in, in the field and it suddenly, it’s got some manufacturing defects in it as EV every wind turbine blade does. And it’s got some, you know, small damages as every wind turbine blade does, and then things start behaving differently.

Rosemary Barnes: And I think that it’s because we’ve had this huge change in that what the. The system is trying to do now that, you know, took some time to get the real world experience and, and to learn what, how your design needed to, to be it. You can’t, you just can’t do that in the lab and, and come out with a perfect system the first, first try.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. But already before that, like in the industry Nobody really felt like the certification was enough. Right, right. For sure. It is this general idea, super easy to get a lightning protection certificate. Yes. Not very easy to get a blade that won’t be damaged by lightning. Like everybody is designing to their own internal standards that are, they meet their certification, but then they go beyond that based on field experience.

Rosemary Barnes: So I think that, yeah, it’s just the problem has. More more challenging. And it’s just not the new, new type of lightning protection systems are not quite mature yet. Right. I, in my opinion, pointing 

Joel Saxum: at the pointing at that IEC standard for lightning, it actually leaves out some of the, I guess in some people’s opinions, it leaves out some of the components that are needed to be certified too.

Joel Saxum: As far as metadata around lighting, you know, it stops at. Specific energy basically. And that’s it. Yeah. Where we need to be looking at some more things that aren’t even certified or aren’t even on certification. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. That’s something that’s so common. Like when I work on when I work on root cause analysis RCA, you, you would think that, you know, you got a lightning card in there.

Rosemary Barnes: You should be able to tell if you know, was this damage caused by lightning strike? You never can. Like, almost, almost never it’s. I can’t think of a time when I’ve worked on a project, I was like, oh yeah, well, they’ve got a lightning card. So everything’s clear, it’s it? It was wasn’t installed or it hasn’t been checked for, you know, so, so long that who knows, who knows what it’s telling 

Allen Hall: me.

Allen Hall: You’re right. I think those lightning cards don’t really tell you all that much. It’s a great idea. But the implementation of it leaves a lot to be 

Rosemary Barnes: desired. I think ping is working on a, a better system. Right? What do you know. About that you must be involved 

Allen Hall: involved with. We’re pretty deep into lightning sensor for them.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And the, from, from our perspective, having looked at a lot of lightning strikes to wind turbines. Some of the smaller lightning strikes are doing the most damage and lightning in the aerospace world where I come from and into the, the wind world. There’s really they’re really similar in this way.

Allen Hall: Once the engineering standard has been written. Everybody forgets about what the real physics are because you have a standard and you assume that the there’s been a group of people going through this and that they’ve all figured out how to create this worst case environment, but it’s worst case for the situation they wrote it for when they’re all around the committee table.

Allen Hall: What happens is technology is moving faster than the committees can keep up with. Same thing happens in aerospace. So the, the, the, the lightning and the way lightning behaves a little nuances start to become more of a problem than they were 10 years ago. Cuz the technology’s different aluminum aircraft and a carbon fiber aircraft don’t work the same.

Allen Hall: And there’s, you’re just doing different things on them. Same thing exists on a a fiberglass when term blade versus the fiberglass with carbon spars in it. They just behave differently. I don’t think the industry has figured out how to deal with all that yet. And Rosemary you’re right. I think the flexing is a huge issue and what we test on the airplane world.

Allen Hall: So in the Winterburn world, we always test pretty much the ideal, a brand new. Blade airplane part and show that it works. So we intended it to the effects of aging are massively influential in terms of the types of damage you’re gonna see. And, and because we’re about 10 years into this experimental mm-hmm , this is where we’re at.

Allen Hall: So we we’re learning about what happened in, you know, blades of design in 2012. What’s 2022 now. What kind of effective we’re seeing we’re, we’re not seeing the results we would’ve predicted in 2012. That’s that’s the part, I think the insurance company’s starting to get a little antsy about is saying the, the, the evolution of lightning protection is not keeping up with a pace of blade growth.

Allen Hall: People like Rosemary are designing bigger blades faster than light, and the community can kind of keep up with it. And what are we gonna do? Or is the insurance companies willing to take that risk or are they gonna return it to the OEMs? I think in some cases the OEMs are gonna have to eat it. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, exactly.

Rosemary Barnes: I’m hearing from know, I mostly work with developers and wind farm owners operators, and. I’m hearing that it’s getting harder and harder to get lightning insurance. Sure. And then, so the concern of, of the kinds of clients that I have, it’s, it’s it’s number one. I mean, they don’t want lightning, but almost more serious concern to them is you can never figure out whose fault it is.

Rosemary Barnes: And that makes it really hard for insurance because everybody’s insur each party’s insurance company thinks that it’s not their, it’s not their responsibility. So you can. insurance between, you know, the, the OEM and yeah, I guess their warranty, not, not insurance, but their warranty. And then the wind farm owners, insurance should cover all circumstances.

Rosemary Barnes: But if you can’t, if you don’t know what the circumstance is, then both sides can argue that it’s not their responsibility. And I think that, you know, like, The, the first preference would be lightning protection systems that just worked and you never damaged a blade, but I think most, most developers would be pretty, pretty happy to just definitively be able to say, whose fault is this so that you could just ensure it yeah.

Rosemary Barnes: And get on with it. You know, you accept that it were gonna ha pay a higher premium for a while while we sort out you know, the, yeah. The, the design of these new systems and. How they age, but yeah, as long as you can ensure people don’t really care that much. 

Allen Hall: So one of the things that we’ve been working on the last year or two is looking at those little nuances, those, those lightning strikes that seem weird and that, that are particularly damaging.

Allen Hall: And what’s driving them. And I think, I think we have some ideas on that. And it, it sort of evolves back into, or devolves back into what we’ve learned outta aircraft world too. There’s just totally different. Once you get moving at the speeds and, and at the altitudes that wind turbines are at right now, you’re kind of acting a lot more like an airplane than you were 10 years ago.

Allen Hall: And that’s where, when everybody needs to take a step back, I think, and re-look at the problem. It’s it’s the next couple of years are gonna be. Really painful in the lightning protection community. I think things can be a lot of pressure from the OEMs and from the insurance companies, trying to get the problem solved and we’ll see how the industry responds to it.

Allen Hall: Interesting development. And this article is, is just highlighting that issue. 

Joel Saxum: Get the 

Allen Hall: latest on wind industry news, business and technology sent straight to you every week. Sign up for the uptime tech newsletter at weather guard, wind.com/news offshore wind in the Gulf of Mexico. There are an announcement by the us interior department that they’re going to be ramping up offshore, wind energy, right on the coast of Texas and Louisiana.

Allen Hall: So right in that sort of Northwestern, part of the Gulf of Mexico and there’s one of the sites is gonna be 24 miles off the. Coast of Galveston and Galveston’s just south of Houston and it’s gonna cover about 500,000 acres of a site and potentially power up to 2.3 million homes, which I think Houston is about 4 million people, 5 million people.

Allen Hall: That’s a lot of. Big part of, of Southeast Texas then would be covered by 2.3 million homes. And, and the, the second project could be in port Arthur, which is in near lake Charles, Louisiana, near new Orleans. And that’s about a 200,000 acre site, which could power up to 800,000 homes, which would be. Most of new Orleans in the surrounding area easily.

Allen Hall: Yeah. So this has implications just because of the timing of the announcement. Texas has been going through a not blackouts, but they’ve been asking people to reduce the power usage during the day times in part. Because of some maintenance issues that are going on, but also because the winds die down in the, in the middle of the day, which I think is unusual.

Allen Hall: So if you look at the, the, the wind speeds and the amount of power produced at, from ERCOT, and you have a, you just go to the website, ercot.com, it’ll show you the solar and the wind combined the renewable energy on the, on the. The predictions and what’s, what’s actually happening live. And you see that, that the winds actually slow down during the daytime.

Allen Hall: So the solar picks up where the winds slow down, so they they’re complimentary. So the moving wind offshore sort of adds to that. The. Variability of energy sources. And the, we had a, a comment on YouTube, Rosemary of all places. It was a comment from someone who appears to live in Texas and was upset about the fact that during the hottest part of the day, that the wind wasn’t operating as as much power creating those power.

Allen Hall: Therefore, they had the shutoff air conditioners to, to get through that part of the day. But the energy company ICO knows that. And it’s not, not that the engineers don’t know. They totally know what that distribution looks like, but adding an offshore element to this would add a little more variability because it’s also you some place diversity, Texas is a huge state, right?

Allen Hall: Like rather than, yeah. Yeah. They’re adding to diversity. 

Rosemary Barnes: So that’s a weird complaint to have. You don’t have enough wind in the middle of the day when it’s really hot, because there is obviously another renewable energy technology that correlates very well with the, you know, hot, hot days. So, I mean, that’s an easy solution, right?

Rosemary Barnes: Because solar fats are, are cheaper. If you can use the power when you generate it, then of course you want, you want solar fats. It just sounds like they haven’t got enough solar in that mix yet. Yeah. So, I mean, that’s what it sounds like. Yeah. That right. Wind solves the harder problems usually. So yeah, it’s interesting that.

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, yeah, it is just a bit different to how, how, I guess how things are tracking in Australia. We have the problems from too much solar and not enough wind and sounds like the opposite with, with 

Allen Hall: Texas. So I, I wanted to get to the energy diversity part of this because they said our offshore wind has less variability as compared to onshore wind.

Allen Hall: And if you look at the power prices in Texas, the. Tip of Texas kind of around, I wanna say Brownsville, am I in the right general vicinity? Joel, just at the very tip bottom of Southern part of Texas, the energy prices are much, much, much lower because there’s a whole bunch of wind down there that doesn’t get transmitted up to the rest of the state.

Allen Hall: So if you look at the power prices, it may be a thousand bucks of megawatt hour in sort Dallas area, which is sort of north Texas, but at the very tip of Texas at the bottom it’s, it’s in the a hundred dollars megawatt hour at the peak times. So there’s a huge difference. So. It’s a combination of maybe not having enough wind, possibly needing to add some offshore wind, but also transmission lines seems to be part of the equation too.

Allen Hall: So Joel, it is, does this offshore wind piece basically take, make Houston the renewable capital to the world? If it isn’t already, if this happens. 

Joel Saxum: Well in Houston right now, if you ask anybody in the, in the tech world down there, they’re touting themselves. Now as the energy transition capital of the world, there you go.

Joel Saxum: As by before, it was always the, the energy capital of the world. Yeah. And, and you start to see a lot of moves being made down there. What a better place to do it at all those engineers down there, you’ve had tons of high quality offshore engineers and oil and gas and onshore engineers in oil and gas for, for years and years and years.

Joel Saxum: And now they can make that. But so talking offshore, wind right outside of Houston. I have quite a few buddies that fish down there. And they’ll tell you if I can get a day in the forecast where I’m at like two or three footers, two or three footers, meaning two or three foot rolling waves. Yeah. That’s the day I that’s the day I’m gonna run out to the, to the rigs and go fishing.

Joel Saxum: That’s what they always that’s where all the fish are, you know, south at Galveston, that’s, that’s a hundred miles off. you start heading down the coast store. It’s Mexico. It, it gets closer and closer and closer. So if they’re, if the guys are gonna run out that far, they wait for those two or three, two or three foot wave days.

Joel Saxum: Now a two or three foot wave day is easily on the surface. Fantastic and steady. And that’s why we do on offshore, wind, right? There’s not the topography. There’s not the change in temperature that you have on shore to create turbulent winds or intermittent winds. They’re basically steady most of the.

Joel Saxum: So if they can install a big offshore wind farm there, and then land a cable on shore to bring all that power to Houston and the surrounding area. Fantastic. The thing I worry about, of course, we’ve talked about that before on the show is lake Charles got hit by four hurricanes last year. That’s scary.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because I, I don’t wanna wake up one morning and the beaches of Galveston be covered in, in bla in blades. So that technology needs to be developed. Now, the rest of it, the other problems that exist in the us or offshore wind don’t exist on the Gulf coast. If you’re not running offshore to deep water to do floaters, like you’re in California, right?

Joel Saxum: You don’t have the regulatory environment on the east coast, right? You like the east coast or like the west coast. You have vessels down there that can transport jackets. And that’s what I would build them with that have been already doing it. If you, if, like I said, you could stand on the beach in Galveston with, instead of binoculars and see platforms and rigs and jackets and stuff all over the place.

Joel Saxum: The infrastructure out there is. So the, the ability to install the workforce the regulatory environment outside of federal is a lot better in Texas and Louisiana. So I think it’s that hurdle of the weather. So that’s gonna be the problem. I think, well, this, 

Allen Hall: this evolves into where wind is gonna be developed and offshore wind’s gonna be developed in the United States.

Allen Hall: And I know one of the, we Louisiana talking points is the wind farm off of block island. A lot of that was actually done in Louisiana. So block island is near us in Massachusetts and the far Northeast corner of, of the United States. But yet a lot of the steel on all the techno a lot of the technology at the time was done in Louisiana.

Allen Hall: So I think there’s a little bit of a pride issue there, but just like with Australia where everything’s gonna be, have to be shipped in I think Louisiana, as opposed to is totally okay with just being a, a manufacturing factory site and then just ship the. Foundations the holes, the floating, whatever, to where it needs to go.

Allen Hall: I think that’s, I think that’s gonna happen even on the Northeast. I think it’s, Louisiana’s gonna make a pretty good pitch to take over some of that work. 

Joel Saxum: I would bet that you see even, even jumping the hurdles of, of hurricanes and, and the weather and the Gulf coast. I would bet that you see offshore wind installed in the Gulf before you see it off the shore of California.

Allen Hall: Think California’s gonna be a long haul just because of the regulatory aspects of it. And, and speaking of ingenuity in the US Gulf, a company called Hexicon is talking about making Ikea packs and Rosemary you’re an Ikea user, right? I mean, you spent time in that part of the world where Ikea was everywhere.

Allen Hall: You’ve got some Allen wrenches. Yeah. Everybody has Allen wrenches from Ikea don’t they . 

Rosemary Barnes: Oh, well they made the, they made the cut for the move back to Australia. That little we call ’em Allen keys. Oh, there you go. In Australia. So Allen keys. Yeah. And in scan, I. Ikea, not Ikea. So if you wanna be that painful person that corrects your friend’s pronunciation, like I’m being now and you can, you can whip that out next time.

Rosemary Barnes: Can see next time someone’s is Ikea. It doesn’t, it doesn’t really 

Allen Hall: play well in America. It sounds like icky. Yeah. You know, sticky, icky, right? Yeah. Ikea is a better way to go on the branding there. I think. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. No, it’s hard to apply. They’re make a meat. 

Swedish 

Allen Hall: meatball.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I’m not so excited about their Swedish meatballs.

Rosemary Barnes: But you usually, if you, if you go, you don’t ever go to the cafeteria. I did on occasion. I came to really loathe that place because like no one ever wants to buy their whole apartment of furniture from Akea. Right. Like, true. It’s something that happens because you’re like, I’ve got no storage in my bedroom and.

Rosemary Barnes: You know, at Ikea, you can, you can get a chest of drawers that precisely or pretty closely, you know, they’ve got like lots of different widths, lots of different Heights. You can much more easily find that random thing that will fit in the random space that you’ve got and get some storage in. But yeah, eventually I, I was like, I’m never, I’m never going here.

Rosemary Barnes: again, it’s just like, just how, you know, they make you run that rat maze. You can’t, you can’t just get what you want that’s you 

Allen Hall: to, it is like running a rat maze. Yeah. Yeah. It’s brilliant 

Morten Handberg: marketing by the way. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Its just on a team to drain your energy so that you have to go buy the Swedish meatballs, which is where they make all their money off in, in reality, I guess money off 

Allen Hall: a little more.

Allen Hall: So you can make it through the rest of the store. Exactly. I believe 

Morten Handberg: that you may 

Joel Saxum: only need that chest of drawers, but you end up walking past the bed and the quick cutting board and 

Morten Handberg: the drain. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. My favorite Ikea product though, is this bamboo recipe book holder that it could either sit on the, on the bench or it can sit on like hang off one of their, their rails and.

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, like when you have a recipe book, colder mounted on a, a rail, so that’s right there by your stove. That’s just life changing. So yeah, I do appreciate that one product. From them. Well, 

Allen Hall: you know, you obviously know what an Ikea pack is. It’s those flat packages you get that are extremely heavy. And you’re like, oh my gosh, how come with this weigh this much?

Allen Hall: Well, that, that same sort of philosophy is being applied to floating foundations. And the problem in the United States is like, where are you gonna make all these, these floating platforms that California is never gonna make on, on their coastline? Because it is full of surfers and A hundred billion homes.

Allen Hall: So they’re gonna do it Louisiana, pack them up into containers and put ’em through the Panama canal to get, to get to California. And I don’t think this is a crazy idea. I think this is, this is the way it’s going to happen because it’s just gonna be. At the end of the day, Joel, don’t you see the same thing, it’s just gonna be easier to, to pack it up and, and put it in Conex boxes and put it through the Panama canal and be done with it.

Allen Hall: Instead of trying, like who’s gonna open up a floating foundation plant in Los Angeles, you think that’s gonna happen? 

Joel Saxum: You’re still gonna have to have it. You still have to have a because where are you gonna put together? The 

Allen Hall: Ikea box Mexico? No, I think Baja, I think it’s gonna be in Baja, 

Morten Handberg: right? I might not do the whole thing in 

Joel Saxum: Baja.

Joel Saxum: Bring the deal from Asia, which is cheap. And build them in Baha and then float ’em over. I don’t, I mean, I like, I mean, I can see the concept and I like that idea, but I don’t, it doesn’t seem like a winner to me. It seems like it’s too much work for like the juice isn’t worth the sweets. 

Allen Hall: I don’t know. I, I think there’s a, there’s an artificial barrier, which is California and everything’s more expensive there.

Allen Hall: And Mexico, I think Mexico does make sense. I really do that. If you, if you do it in Baja, it is great. 

Joel Saxum: Now, if you take a container ship, like like I’ve, I’ve worked. These are, this is funny. Actually, I worked in a oil and gas exploration job where they brought a boat full of boats and, and the ships were huge.

Joel Saxum: They were a hundred meters long 14 meter berth. And they brought man one of the jobs, they brought eight of those on one ship, offloaded them there. We did the job, they put ’em back on the ship and they brought ’em back to France. So I, I don’t see why they need to be packed down into Conex boxes.

Joel Saxum: You could probably build 20 foundations and put it on a ship that can go through the Panama canal and build them whole, where all you gotta do is get, when you get to to California, you could build them whole in Louisiana. When you get to California, put a tower on, ’em put them to sell the blades key side and shoot it out there.

Joel Saxum: I think that’s a better idea of bringing less of them at a time, but bringing them almost wholly. 

Allen Hall: I wonder, I do you wonder if there’s tax implications here? I think this is where this is gonna revolve around is the tax implications of where you assemble it. Like how how’s California gonna tax it cuz you know, California has to tax it.

Allen Hall: Right. And there’s no way you’re gonna, not build anything in California and not get taxed 

Joel Saxum: 201 miles off shore, California and outside of the exclusive economic zone, two boats stack them. Bring them 

Allen Hall: in. Yeah, I think that’ll, I think you’re, I think you’re right about that. I think that will totally happen.

Allen Hall: People wanna estimate 

Joel Saxum: the amount of steel for that though, too, right? Yes. So you’re talking when you’re in thousand meters of water, mooring chains, each mooring chain, like the, the general public doesn’t see this, but I mean, like they’re massive, two of those mowing or the size of a car. Yes. Like they’re, they’re huge.

Joel Saxum: So that amount of steel for these things. The steel is not gonna come from domestically. I can 

Allen Hall: take, I can guarantee you never. Yeah. And so , I, I like the Ikea pack idea. I like the idea of a focus manufacturing center in the sort of Texas Louisiana area. Well, Alabama isn’t Alabama. One of the steel states in America, right?

Allen Hall: The iron bowl is one of the football games played down there, cuz it is a huge steel manufacturing area, but they’ll never make mooring change there. I totally agree with you on that. It, it, it is an interesting. Thought process to see where it goes, cuz California, at some point will have wind, but Joel you’re right.

Allen Hall: Texas and Louisiana will have a lot more wind installed before California does.

Allen Hall: Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not actually is very predictable and very preventable. Strike tape is a lightning protection system. Upgrade for wind turbines made by weather guard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPs. So you can stop worrying about lightning damage.

Allen Hall: Visit weather guard, wind.com to learn more, read a case study and schedule a call.

Allen Hall: I’m glad to have you back everybody. This is Morten Hanberg from Wind Power Lab.

Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. It’s really great to be back at, at, at the show again, to talk about blade issues. So 

Allen Hall: Morton you’re the chief blade specialist at wind power lab and, and you are our resident blade whisperer. And, and we were talking a couple of weeks ago.

Allen Hall: Some what you’re seeing on some blades and I, and the, the thing that, that came to the top during that discussion was manufacturing issues that we’re seeing more manufacturing issues, which I think probably related to the quantity of blades we’re having to, to push out and just the, the pace of things and, and it just makes it difficult in the factory.

Allen Hall: So there seems to be a little bit of manufacturing escapes. Kinds of things. Are you seeing out in the field when you go look at a 

Morten Handberg: blade a as you know, it’s, it is still a handcraft to produce blade. So there is still a lot of manual labor and yeah. And, and how do you say manual tooling and work workmanship going into these into the producing these plates?

Morten Handberg: So it is natural to expect a lot of variation in inside plates. But what we’re seeing are, some of them are, you know, the, the old classics void in the, in the filler where if you apply too much filler, then you will encapsulate some air and over time that will then create some service crack reach to the surface.

Morten Handberg: And then you would see on predominantly the leading. We’re also seeing finish works around the LPs receptors and around aerodynamic addon, addons, like VG panels or Sera flaps, where the where, where the sealant finish is sometimes missing. And sometimes it, it, it does, it looks like it’s just been, been applied, you know, then scrape around with the thumb and then, then they left the, they left that that part of it to someone else.

Morten Handberg: And some of that can be explained just by, you know, that they are under a lot of pressure in, in, in hammering out these plates as best as possible. And they don’t have, have a lot of time to do it and maybe not the required training in some cases. So then we’re also seeing some more serious issues that we’re seeing actually quite a lot and more than I had initially expected.

Morten Handberg: We’re seeing a lot of missing adhesive and adhesive issues in. And by missing adhesive, I mean that in between the share web and the blade shells there is in in a lot of the, the major manufacturers, there is an adhesive joint. and that adhesive joint is is made by applying adhesive on the, on the shell or on the, on the share web.

Morten Handberg: And then the, and then the, the parts are compressed together. And then you could, you, you, you press the adhesive out and ideally create an overflow. What we’re seeing is that in some cases, these this insufficient amount of adhesive is being is, is applied to account for the thickness that is required.

Morten Handberg: And then you see these air, air, air gaps or inclusions between the share web and the shell. And that means that you don’t have the, the necessary adhesive to, to to transfer all of those between the share web and the shell. And that can be a huge pro structurally structural problem for the blades.

Allen Hall: Sure. Okay. So let’s talk the, the, the air gaps here for medic I’ve, I’ve actually seen that. So what causes that, is it because the, the, as the tooling’s compressed, it kinda lifts off and, and. Quote, unquote breeze a little bit. So then it creates a void. Is that what’s happening during the manufacturing process?

Allen Hall: Is it constant pressure isn’t applied or, or it shifts? Well, it is, 

Morten Handberg: it is it, it can be two things. It can either be inefficient amount of adhesive applied if it’s manual process instead of a and not an automated one. So that’s one part. The other one is that if insufficient compression is used and the third variable is.

Morten Handberg: Every single blade is unique. And so you will have variations from blade she to blade she from from, and from surface to surface. So you can’t necessarily be guaranteed that the, that the adhesive that you expect to use on blade a is the same as you would use on blade B or blade blade C, there will be variations.

Morten Handberg: And if that is not accounted for, then you will get voids. And it’s not that big a problem. I essentially, because you could actually fix it if you wanted to. If it’s discovered during the. Post processing phase where the blade is being Q Q eight and, and check these areas are easy to identify because we can find them just by sending a drone in through the, through the blade.

Morten Handberg: We can see ’em clear as day. So any QC with sufficient time should find this without any problems at all. And then it would be a matter of reapply reapplying, additional adhesive to account for the 

Joel Saxum: missing a question Morton then as this is kind of a science meets art is what it sounds like, right?

Joel Saxum: You have, there’s a process in place, but you need a good technician. That’s also gonna make sure that everything gets applied properly. It do, have you heard of in the marketplace, any places where they’re starting to automate more of this. Because that’s what it sounds like to me. You have like, I’m, I’m, you know, here, we’re here in Texas, we have the, the big Tesla Gigafactory two hours away.

Joel Saxum: And if you look at some of the LinkedIn posts and things, they’re putting out the automation behind. Factory is, I mean, next, next, next level. It’s amazing. So I’ve seen whisperings of, you know, like mechanical and robotic glue or adhesive appliers in, in some blade factories, but is anybody making big strides to say, guys, we have issues here.

Joel Saxum: We know, we know they’re there. What can we do to solve them robotically or in an automat? 

Morten Handberg: Style, every single OEM has its has their own approach. So some use some would use resin in infusion and RTM process to cast the entire blade. So you don’t have any adhesive joints. Others, they have they have an automated system laying out, out the glass, the, the UD primarily.

Morten Handberg: So that, that is done the same time, the same way each and every time. And I, I, I guess I think you’re right that some also have an automated process for applying the adhesive, but it’s not, it’s not consistent. And no OEM to my mind have fully automated that the entire process everyone has. So.

Morten Handberg: But they haven’t they haven’t made the entire step, but they’re still very heavily reliant on on, on Workman on on, on technic technician skills to complete the task that they haven’t automated. And so far, it’s also cheaper to to produce a lot, to, to do a lot of the processes by hand.

Morten Handberg: By inventing and rolling out new, heavy 

Joel Saxum: machinery. Yeah. The, what comes to mind when you say that is the picture of the 115 meter long Siemens blade. That’s, that’s all over the internet and, and like a row of a hundred people standing down each side of it, and there’s still all kinds of space.

Joel Saxum: Right? The, the, the project itself, the blade itself is so big that to automate that entire thing would, would create a lot of robots. I. Or one big one, I suppose,

Morten Handberg: to, to the same extent, it also requires quite a, quite a lot of manpower to produce it. So it 

Allen Hall: evens out Martin, what quantity of problems are you seeing out in the field?

Allen Hall: Because it seems like these would be very common issue in the factory based on the description of what the, sort of the variables are here. So when you actually go out and look at blades, getting installed into a new site, what percentage of them have bond issues or adhesive issues or other types of manufacturing errors?

Morten Handberg: I think and I don’t wanna sound over dramatic but CLO CLO CLO close to a hundred percent would have some kind of issue. Not all of them would require repair, but you would be able to find something in each and every one, every. Which one would cause a problem further down the road and which defect wouldn’t that can sometimes be sort of a risk management.

Morten Handberg: You know, how how risk a adverse are you in, in your approach on what, what you want to fix and what you want to just stay, stay as it is. But, but there is there there are production deviations. I would like to call them in every single. Some of them. And how many of them we would call out in for a, a, a repair or as in a warranty.

Morten Handberg: That is not a hundred percent. The, some blades actually are passed through the test. But having said that we still look at at a majority within a wind farm that where something needs to be done for every blade. So it is a serious issue. Some of it will then will then say, okay, this is actually an issue.

Morten Handberg: You need to do something about it, but if you don’t do something this year, you’ll probably be fine. But you should do something within, you know, a reasonable amount of time to avoid having fatigue issues down 

Allen Hall: the line. Yeah, it does make a lot of sense. What kind of repairs would be made in those situations?

Allen Hall: Are they, are they just basically replacing missing adhesive or grinding out a wrinkle in a blade? Are they sort of minor repairs or are they really serious repairs where you’re gonna need weeks of time to correct them? If you discover 

Morten Handberg: manufacturing issue that hasn’t evolved into. a severe structural issue yet it would often be a minor repair.

Morten Handberg: So a an adhesive gap that hasn’t cost a deep bonding that would just be reapplying adhesive and then you’re done. So that would be a, a minimum amount of hours, but if it has already starts deep bond, then you’re looking at a large scale repair because he doesn’t have to remove or replace a large section of adhesive.

Morten Handberg: And if you, and that is only, and that is if you’re lucky that it hasn’t led to structural issues in the shell or, or the share web before that. And we also see poor finish of the share web and the share web is a central part of the blade. And. A lot of the, a lot of the OEMs they use what is called a fish mouth finish where they have this perfect half moon shaped finish up the share whip.

Morten Handberg: And you’ll be able to see an example of that in the on the YouTube version. But, and, and the reason why you do that is you wanna distribute the strain. And the strain is is the, is the load of the local load of over the. O over the stiffness that, that defines the strain that you have.

Morten Handberg: And if you have a, if you had a sharp finish of the share web, then you would also switch from a very stiff structure. To a less stiff structure. And that would create a, a large jump in the strain. And that is known to cause a lot of fatigue issues. And the OEMs found out that found that out, that the hard way many years ago.

Morten Handberg: And so they introduced the, the, the, the fish mouth to smoothen out the transition of strain. So it wasn’t a, a, a, a jump. It was, it was a transition and that proved to reduce the fatigue risk. But what we’re now seeing is actually. Sometimes these things that are being ended with, you know, within abrupt step again, at the end, it still has the fish melt, but it, it doesn’t have the, the complete transition.

Morten Handberg: And we can, we can see on some of the some of the blades that we’re seeing out there that, that actually causes fatigue fatigue, eliminations at the, at the start of the shareware. So that is also a severe issue. And luckily we see that in less of the cases, but it’s also a higher severity because it will lead faster to two 

Allen Hall: fatigue issues.

Allen Hall: So is that a manufacturing issue and the cutout of the fish mouth? Where they just don’t get the right depth of, of cut into the 

Morten Handberg: fish mouth. That is a, that is manufacturing issue in the cutout and the finish of the, of the fish mouth that they, they cut it too soon. Or they didn’t, they didn’t start the profile at the right, at the right place.

Morten Handberg: Can be difficult to say, just from the outskirt, looking at, at a picture which is which but the endris result is, is the same. Sure. 

Allen Hall: And obviously it’s a highly loaded and stressed location. It’s one of the most critical parts. Right, right. It’s right near the hub there, you would think that the inspections would catch that or have some sort of variability allowance.

Allen Hall: And if it went out, they would make some Tor sort of repair. What can you do if it’s not cut out properly? What are you gonna do? You, you, you 

Morten Handberg: could re rebuild it. So you, you reestablished the, the, the transition that, that you want. You can do that by lamination. It does require some overlap in, in, into the existing share web.

Morten Handberg: But if you do that the right way, you can actually, it, it can, it can be done. Solutions are available out there for, for this kind of issue. And you wanna do that before you actually see the denomination starting because then, then you have to remove a lot more laminate than than the yeah. Then, then the 

Allen Hall: prefix.

Allen Hall: So then that, that gets at least to the question of blade inspections. Now I, I, when I was down in San Antonio at ACP, If 2022, there was a lot of discussion on the floor about blade inspections at the factory or in the parking lot as you’re leaving the factory or as they arrive on site, if you can catch ’em.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Right. So they’re moving so quickly now, what, what can be done? One of the 

Joel Saxum: things that we ran into there, a and I want to precursor Morton with this to, to think about as well is I talked to some of the guys on the construction side, right. And the construction side guys are saying. I would rather you not do inspections here simply because I have to have these blades up by you.

Joel Saxum: July 1st. And if you start inspecting them on the ground here and I have to get a repair crew and you’re gonna mess up all of my timelines. And if it’s the small stuff, like we talked about, you can get it done in a couple days. But a lot of times, if there’s something big, you know, you might be there for a week or two on, on that set of blades or something.

Joel Saxum: So just something in the background to think about while walking 

Morten Handberg: through this one, I would always prefer that any, any owner factory QC QC of the blade is done at the factory. Because then they, then the O then it’s the, it’s the OEM’s problem to get it fixed before it’s being delivered to site also to your point, Joel, that they are also, they have also signed a contract to deliver blades at a certain date.

Morten Handberg: If they’ve done that, then it doesn’t really matter as much to them when the, when the problem is being fixed, it really matters to them if it’s captured at the factory, because then they, it really can’t leave until that problem is fixed or a solution is found. So there is a high incentive for the owners to get it done at the factory.

Morten Handberg: Obviously, that is what the OEM would least want, because that would mess up their production, that that would create a bottleneck in their end. And I get that. But it it’s also where the most skilled technicians are low located. So they would already have staff there that could fix it before it leaves.

Morten Handberg: So I would strongly argue for that, the problem, if you’re doing it on site. And I would also actually also recommend doing that because you also have transport issues. So even if you have a perfect golden blade leaving the factory, When it reaches the site, you could have a large tremor in it. And if you don’t capture that, then you’ll see it a few year, years later when the shell is starting to, to de detach.

Morten Handberg: So you wanna be ahead of that. And if you don’t do, and if you don’t then discover some issues then to your, to, as you say, the construction team, they have a, they have a, a schedule as well. They have a crane that’s moving around and it’s not going, going to wait or wait for you to, to finish, finish up, repairing the blades.

Morten Handberg: Then you could end up having to fix the blade when they’re on the turbine and then you lose availability. Obviously, it will always be a mix of, of, of the three. And that, that is fine, but I would, I would strongly recommend that factory inspections are done at least once at the factor of every single blade.

Morten Handberg: It would give a baseline of what is the condition of, of 

Joel Saxum: each blade. So ideally, would you have it like a team of inspectors running around in the yard or would you have it right when it comes off the. There’s a guy waiting to with this, with this clipboard. 

Morten Handberg: I think, I think to be fair to the, to the manufacturer, then when the factory has said, this is, this is done, then you would go and, and check it before it leaves the lot.

Morten Handberg: So when it’s in the parking lot, essentially, that would be the right time to do it because when it’s being demoed, that might not give you the right. I mean, you would see a lot of interesting. But then I might not be relevant to you because essentially as an, as a customer, you should expect that the blades you’re getting is fit for purpose, right?

Morten Handberg: So you don’t want to go around checking every single step during the manufacturing process. That’s not efficient for you or for the OEM. So you should trust the OEM that they’re providing you with the, with a fit for purpose blade. And then you check it before the, it leaves the factory and the subset that, that doesn’t fit.

Morten Handberg: That, that, that. You would then mark up the missing issues and then have it fixed before, before the leap. I think that would be the right 

Allen Hall: process. So that, that has a really interesting effect of. Possibly lowering the insurance rates for blades. If, if you’re catching the large structural issues at the factory, you would think then once it gets out into service, that it would reduce the warranty claims that are going to happen.

Allen Hall: Is there a push by insurance companies to ask for inspections at the factory? They’re 

Morten Handberg: not asking for it right now, but I think they’re, they’re looking more in that direction because they also wanna see. The owners and operators to take more responsibility. And I think we would see in the future that there would be a favorability of the ones who are prudent operators.

Morten Handberg: So the ones who do show that they’ve been taking care of their asset from day one, the ones who check the blades at the factory, who know what the current conditions are, who have a maintenance strategy in place to see what is actually, what, what should I do with my blades and what is my history of.

Morten Handberg: Because you will never be rid of damages over the lifetime of the blades. That is something we have to accept. But you need a good way to, to manage the, the issues that you have and not be surprised every time something something get gets damaged. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think that when we talk about the prudent operator idea, a lot of times on my mind keeps floating the construction site, but I’ve seen the guys, the person who’s doing the receiving inspection is also the guy just taking off the straps and pointing ’em where to put the.

Joel Saxum: Right. So having that proper inspector in the factory that, that knows the processes that’s been through ’em that has the blade knowledge, I think is is something not to be missed here as well. 

Allen Hall: And Martin, if you, if you’re walking up to a blade, just brand new and you don’t have any knowledge of this blade previously, how long does it take you to look through the blade, to check all the components and make sure all the bond lines are right?

Allen Hall: How long does that. So if you, 

Morten Handberg: if you only check the bond lines and the surface structure so you’re checking for surface wrinkles, you’re checking for for missing adhesive, you’re checking for finish finishing then a, a blade up to 50, 60 meters would take about half an hour internally. And the same externally.

Morten Handberg: Obviously if you want to do a more thorough inspection that also includes checking the. You know, do, do doing some tap testing or doing some ultrasonic, then, then, then you’re looking more at a data plate. And I wouldn’t recommend doing tap testing of the entire surface. That’s not efficient.

Morten Handberg: , that’s only if you know where, where, where to look. But but, but you can, you can, you can accomplish a lot by doing the, the basic visual check then, then you’re in, in, in, in, in good, in good hands. With the majority of the issues. And then if you see that there is a lot of inconsistency in the adhesive, then you can argue for an ultrasonic inspection because then there could be lungs or, or voids in the adhesive or between the, the spa cap and, and, and the shell.

Morten Handberg: And they’re also important to find, but then you do it based. On on an actual finding that, that you have. And I think that’s more efficient than going straight forward with an ultrasonic straight away as an owner. I think a lot of the Williams they’re actually doing it. Preemptively. And I think that’s, they, they, they, they should continue doing that to make sure that they’re later in tough condition.

Morten Handberg: Yeah. Well, Martin, 

Allen Hall: You’ve really raised a lot of interesting discussion here and things that I, I didn’t know, I, I know inspecting in the factory is, or in the parking lot is becoming much more popular. I didn’t understand why, and now it it’s pretty clear why that is happening. And it does seem like that’s where the industry is going.

Allen Hall: I, I think that makes a lot of sense for everybody to at least consider. Because it will reduce warranty, claims down times, all those things, you can catch it early. You always want to catch it early. So this is, this has been a really interesting discussion. And I know you sent us a bunch of, of images that we’re gonna put in the YouTube version of this episode.

Allen Hall: So if, if you’re not watching on YouTube, check out the YouTube version, because you’ll see images and descriptions of all these things that Morgan’s been talking about today. So. Martin. Hey, thanks for being on the, on the podcast. Again, love having you on I’m sure we’re gonna have you in the future. So thanks for being on this time.

Morten Handberg: It was, it was a great, great place. Looking forward to next time 

Allen Hall: that’s gonna do for this week’s uptime wind energy podcast. Thanks for listening, please take a moment and give us a five star rating on your podcast platform of preference. Be sure to describe in the show notes below to the uptown tech news, our weekly newsletter, as well as Rosemary’s.

Allen Hall: 2 million plus followers YouTube channel engineering with Rosie. And we’ll see you next time on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.