Is using wind turbine blade copper caps for lightning protection a sound engineering strategy? Will they solve Vestas' lightning damage problems? Plus, we discuss Liftwerx cranes and how they can make gearbox and blade swaps a much faster, less costly procedure for wind farm operators.

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EP27 - Wind Turbine Blade Copper Caps for Lightning Protection? Plus Liftwerx Cranes for Up-Tower Repairs

All right. Welcome back to the uptime podcast. In today's episode, we've got a couple of topics today. First, we're going to talk about Vestas. Obviously they had $175 million lightening damage problem. And it appears that they've tried to solve a lot of those problems with copper sleeves. So we're going to talk about that retrofit and how that might be working and some of the engineering behind it.

Uh, we're also going to talk about some different crane options. Um, you know, Liftwerx is one of the crane operators out there. That's sending these small cranes up to the top of turbines to then, you know, swap out gearboxes, swap out blaze doula. It's a really interesting repair work. And then we're also going to chat a little bit about small wind turbines, which will be a recurring theme on our side.

And today we're gonna talk about, uh, my best watt. Which is a pretty interesting company out of Europe that allows you to kind of custom design a turbine for your piece of land, which is a really interesting solution. I mean, it sounds almost, I don't want it to be good, too. Good to be true. That you could have something that customized on.

I don't know when you get these industrial size. Solutions. They don't seem to be customizable to that extent. So Allen let's jump right into Vesta. So obviously they had 175 million million dollar lightening problem. And what are they doing to solve it?

Allen Hall: Well, just keeping our ear to the ground because Vestas didn't really describe where this problem was or what they were doing to correct it.

But some of their suppliers looked like they were starting to talk a little bit. So there's a discussion a little bit. Thing on LinkedIn talking about putting copper sleeves on the tips of blades. And I've had seen that for investors in the past that Vestas had created this. Um, no, we'll probably put it in the show notes here, but essentially they got asleep probably about, Oh, how about a half a meter or so tall?

And it just slides over the end of the tip and then ended up getting grounded to the receptor that's near there. So they have to stop the turbine. Try to put this copper premade sleeve over top and attach it to the tip. And, uh, grounded from what I've seen, I've only seen it. I've seen a couple of things online talking about how they do this.

So, um, I've seen adhesives also seen at one place, it looked like there was fasteners going into the, to the, to the blade. So that basically what they're doing is taking,