In this episode, we tackled positive vs negative lightning and the difference in destruction caused by each. We also talked about new research into scale testing of wind turbine blades, and the implications for properly lightning testing blades reaching enormous 100+ meter lengths.

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Transcript: Positive vs Negative Lightning

Dan: All right. Welcome back. This is the Uptime podcast. This is episode six. I'm your cohost Dan Blewett, and here on the Uptime podcast we talk about wind turbines, lightning protection, and everything renewable energy. I'm joined by my cohost, Allen Hall, lightning protection expert. Allen, how are you doing?

Allen: Hey, great. Dan, how are you?

Dan: Doing well, quarantine week, whatever. We don't even know anymore. Where are we? What day is it? Is it nighttime? Is it daytime? What's happening? It's raining outside. So you can't go outside today, but how's, how's your quarantine? 

Allen: Uh, everybody is just, uh, quiet. Uh, I had a phone call today of all things from someone I haven't talked to in quite a while, and he's got, uh, three younger kids asked him how it was go with to have the kids home all the time.

And he says, well, yeah. It's going. Um, yeah. It's hard to explain it to younger children and the older ones know more about what's happening and, and can kind of understand it. But the younger ones, I'm not sure if it's just kind of overwhelming pleasure of not being at school, or is it just complete total boardroom?

So they probably actually bounce from one edge to the other on the boredom to excited scale all day. Uh, yeah. It's gotta be hard. 

Dan: Well, that's the thing with summer vacation as a kid, I mean, you're out of school and you're so excited, but then you have lots of stuff to do. But then when August rolls around and you're like running out of stuff to do, and you're sitting at home and there's no baseball games and your friends on vacation, you're like, ah, I don't like school, but I kind of want to go back.

And that's gotta be everyone's constant state right now. I mean, there's only so much to do in your house, even though video games or you know. Much more prevalent they were when I was a kid at least. 

Allen: Oh. And they probably make it a killing right now. Right. Video games are going to be a hot, hot, hot online video games.

It gotta be exploding just like Netflix and Amazon and all those video services and zoom. Right. So that the, the online presence has gotta be just huge right now and good for them, I guess. You know, at least they're there for us. 

Dan: Yeah. What was funny, we were talking about, uh, you know, some of the future of.

Travel and you know, autonomous vehicles and how it will allow us to travel so much faster. But at the same time, this quarantine has also really accelerated the technology of staying at home and doing stuff digitally and stop having so many meetings in person cause they're superfluous. So you wonder if we're almost going in opposite directions.

Like yeah, we could take an autonomous aircraft and five years to get to a meeting really fast, but let's just do zoom because. 

Allen: It's easier. Yeah. 

Dan: So they're almost fighting each other. But 

Allen: I kind of wonder that. I wonder, cause I've done a number of zooming. I had done a number of zoom meetings before this, this, this happened, and obviously now I do them all on, on zoom.

We've been using zoom as our platform and it, at least with zoom, you kind of feel like it just, the way it's set up, it's, it's simplistic, it's easy to use. You can get on it, get off at it. So it's not. A complex system. But um, it's, it's funny cause I thought that when we, when we did, uh,