In episode two, we discuss wind turbine transport logistics and turbine blade graveyards - what happens to those huge blades when they're taken out of service - where do they go? Allen Hall also dives into some of the research on new lightning protection systems coming out of China.

Transcript: EP2 - Wind Turbine Waste & New Lightning Protection Research

Dan: Hey welcome back! This is episode two of the Uptime Podcast. I’m your co-host DanBlewett and I’m joined here by lightning protection expert Allen Hall. Allen how’s it going out there?

Allen: Great Dan, how are you?

Dan: Good. What’s the latest on your quarantine?

Allen: Everybody’s still quarantined. They announced the other day that the schools are all closed until May 4th. Everybody was supposed to go back April 7th roughly, so they pushed it back another 30 days. We’re going to be in self-isolation for at least another 30 days. They closed all non-essential businesses, which means pretty much everything is closed from out here right now.

Dan: What’s your family doing to keep from going stir-crazy?

Allen: Well for right now we’re trying to get outside a little bit. It’s actually close to 60 degrees today, so it’s nice to see some sunshine.

Dan: I know, tell me about it.

Allen: Earlier it was a blizzard outside and now we have had some decent weather and got a couple of texts this afternoon saying that people were heading outside to get some of the sunshine. Hopefully it's a little bit of a turnaround, otherwise if we get stuck at the house for another 30 days it’s going to be trouble I’m feeling.

Dan: Have you ever played any of those family home games? I think they’re by jackhole. The ones called quiplash? You can do it on like Xbox or any of those systems and you can also play on the web. I think it’s like a subscription fee, my brother-in-law has it and my sister. But you all like sign-in so you create a room and then everyone has a room code and you go to the room code. They’re on their company’s website and you all enter the room code, then you’re all in and then you use your phone as your playing device. There’s like trivial ones, there’s ones where you like you all draw a thing and then you try to guess who drew it.There’s lots of really quirky games, it’s pretty fun.

Allen: I haven’t heard of that .

Dan: Well I mean anything to kill the time right now. I think my family tonight is going to try to do a zoom call and screen record that, so I think if we screen captured the game and all logged in on their phones it should work. We’re going to try that out but it’s a fascinating time right now.

Allen: You’re speaking about zooming everything together, there’s been so much zoom calling going on it seems like the Internet has come to a crawl at least in Western Massachusetts. It’s really slowed down a good bit because everybody’s trying to do work from home and doing video calls, which is good right. I mean at least we have the option, but it does slow down the internet

Dan: The old “interwebs” is heavily heavily loaded at this time. 

Allen:Definitely loaded. There’s a guy in front of the house this morning fixing the internet cable and I thought well ok, at least the repair guys are still out there. I’m sure they’re pretty busy ‘cause any  outage is going to a crisis right now.

Dan: If people lose the internet and they lose Netflix and Hulu, the world is going to literally implode like a Dark Star. It’s going to be a mess.

Allen: It’s going to go bad fast.