Wood wind turbine towers: are they here to stay? Will they catch fire if struck by lightning? Is it worth it over steel? We also discuss battery technology, leading edge erosion and what causes it, and more.

EP9 - Wood Wind Turbines & More: Full Transcript

All right. Welcome back. This is the uptime podcast is episode nine. I'm your cohost Dan Blewett. I'm joined here remotely by a lightening expert, Alan Hall. Alan, how are you? Hey, Dan, how are you? Crazy week this week, huh? Yeah, man, we were busy and, uh, DCS extended their lockdown until June 8th, so like longest in the world.

Uh, but till wait till when? June, June, June 8th, June 8th. Oh my gosh. Yeah. We're going to be out of lockdown next week. Uh, and I, it's sort of County by County a little bit, but I, I doubt that we're gonna. Washington D C is unique because it's its own entity, right? I guess so. And someone was asking me, they're like, well, DC doesn't have a governor.

Is it like, does the mayor have the power to do that? And I, I assume so. I don't really know. Of course. Seems like all the governors are getting sued and losing anyway. So it's like, I don't even know what's happening in our country. It's like, okay, no one has the power to do anything. So let me go. Let's go.

Right. Yeah. No, I think, uh. I was telling you earlier, listening to CNN is making me nuts. Uh, it's just constant new, normal, new, normal. Well, when has society been a normal, I don't know when that is. And reporters talking about new normal, it seems to me is. Just abs from an engineer is, and this is an engineering perspective on all this, there is no normal, because every day we're trying to make the world a little bit better, or it's changing in some way or another, and there is no normal.

So tomorrow is different than today as it was different than 10 years ago. So what, right. Yeah. I mean, I get that, but there's, this is definitely some sort of new normal, like I have to wear masks to go in an elevator, like that's not. That's not normal to you use that term. Well, I get that. Yeah. Okay. So have you ever been in an airplane where people smoked?

No. Alright. Right. You ever been in an office where people smoked? No, I was right. You ever use a rotary telephone? Like what? The actual dial, you had to spin the damn thing. A millennial, you know that I haven't, no. I grew up on Instagram actually. I didn't tick down much, much on much past all that. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Fair enough. Fair point. Fair point. Right. I mean, I was in Seattle on September 11th things changed that day. We had a new normal that day. I had plastic silverware on my flight back, which had never had before. That was a new normal. Yeah. Every day. Every day is a new day, and the humans adapt.

If we haven't adapted to the changing environment than we have been gone a long time ago. We're not Dodo birds. We're able to think through some things and, and you know, work through the situation we're in right now and we will work through it and we'll get back to some sort of a quote unquote normalcy, whatever.

That was great. Yeah. Right. I think we're okay. Yeah. I'm just suffering from coronavirus talking about it. Fatigue. It's like literally the only thing anyone can talk about. It's becoming very obvious that we just, it's so front of mind for everybody. Very, very front of mind. Yup. That's crazy. But yeah, so speaking of which, as I transition out of coronavirus forever, I'm on the docket today.

We're going to talk about w, uh, wood wind turbines, which is a pretty interesting thing. Obviously, not all of the circuitry, but you know, the towers, right? Um,