Were you at Blades USA last week? This episode was recorded live in Austin!We saw a lot of progress and heard about the need for more data and better solutions, especially for predictive analysis and predictive maintenance. Rosemary and Allen break down how data gathering and management are helping to find blade faults during the warranty period. Which is obviously good for owners and operators, and maybe in the long run, good for OEMs too.

Speaking of OEMs, Rosemary offers great insight into the many ways blades can be at risk before they’re even installed, and what operators need to know, and do, to minimize their liability. She may have a little advice for OEMs, too. Tune in for that, and also to find out what the industry is beginning tounderstand about lightning damage. Our Wind Farm of the Week segment returns next week.

Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com

Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com

Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com

Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

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 158

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m here with Blade Guru and Australian renewable expert, Rosemary Barnes. This particular episode we’re going to dedicate to the Blades USA Forum and some of the, the presentations I have seen today wrapped around sort of blade maintenance and how.

keep your blades as as good as you can, working to produce energy. It’s a tough business if you’re an operator or an independent service provider. It’s rough. There’s a lot of work to keep blades running. So we’re gonna hear about that and, and then we’ll talk a little about some of the secondary.

Problems with blades, mostly lightning, which was a very hot topic this week, so stay tuned and it’s gonna be a great show.

Rosemary, I’m in Austin, Texas for the Blades USA Forum this week. It is packed. And you’re missing out. You should be. You should be in Texas. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Yeah. I I, I’m a bit jealous. But maybe, maybe next year. Yeah, there’s, 

Allen Hall: there’s a, a lot of good presentations. This is the first day, there’s another day tomorrow.

So this is Wednesday when we’re recording. And there’s all kinds of. Vendors and different kinds of presentations. And I, I really wanted to talk to you as a blade expert because this is a Blades US Forum, U usa blades USA Forum about all the different activities around blades and whether you can kind of shed some light on whether some of these things are gonna become reality or is it just nice to haves because the presentations were really.

Had a lot of different perspectives. So let, let me, let me give you some, gimme some general highlights. There was a really, actually a really good presentation on all the data and there that seems to be a, a big emphasis here is we need more data. And I came to the same conference last year. It’s in Austin also.

And the, the, the emphasis last year was, Hey, we gotta do two things. We need to get more data and we need to be able to categorize damage. . So that’s like a, a mostly a universal standard to holes in blades. Like is it a level one? Not, so don’t worry about it, I’m just gonna monitor it. Or is it a level five?

I gotta do something immediately. Those are the two big ones. On the data side, it was by getting more drone images and and instrumenting blades. So over the last. , there’s been a lot more drone images and more emphasis on actually putting in sensors in these blades. Now, now, now the engineers who, like you, always want more data and I always want more data.

Now that they have the data, they can’t process it all. 

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think that’s pretty, pretty normal situation. , I think it’s 

Allen Hall: a little funny cuz it had a chuckle if you have a thousand turbines in your portfolio. It’s almost impossible to sort through all those drone images. And then the, the subject becomes, well, how do we try to categorize all that data so we can actually do some predictive analysis?

Like these particular blades made from this particular factory are gonna have this particular problem in a year. That was where the, the industry ceases to be going, and that from an OEM perspective. Does that make sense for someone who made blades like you, does that make, does that make sense? Is, is that the right approach to what to do with that data?

Rosemary Barnes: OEMs probably don’t like it because if you’re doing that, then you’re finding faults e earlier than they would’ve otherwise, and so you’ll find them within the warranty period when you might have previously found them out of the warranty period. So maybe the OEMs don’t like it, but in the work that I’m doing now, Consulting company, Ute Consulting.

I’m doing a lot of work on, on blade defects, and what I am seeing is that it’s not just about having data and analyzing the data, it’s about the quality of the data as well. Because, I mean, I feel like when you said at the start, we need more drone images and I, I, the last thing that, that I need in the projects I’m working on is more drone images.

What I need is for the drone images to actually. Do what they’re supposed to do and pick up the damage because you know, an, an image that shows that doesn’t show damage that you went looking for is worse than having nothing. At least if you didn’t have that image, you wouldn’t know whether there was damage or not.

But when you have a drone, go up there and say, this, this turbine’s all clear, go for it. And then it turns out later. Oh, actually you, these 10% of these blades do have this defect and they were previously all cleared for it. You know, that’s, that’s obviously worse than, than not knowing anything at all.

So I hope that people aren’t getting too far ahead of themselves, but I. Do think that they are, because I see, you know, some of the projects that I work on or the campaigns that I work on, you, you see, you know, drone images and they go with a different company, then they go with a different company.

And so you know, the, the quality is the quantity. Is too high and the quality is too low Currently, or at least I think that there are some players that are doing good work, but not everybody is, and not everybody is using the good ones. So I, I would like to see some better way to be able to you know, qualify a drone in inspection and, you know, like there could be standardization or, you know, , yeah.

Some, some sort of certification that, yeah, this this drone technology is able to, you know, pick up these kinds of defects and certified by a third party. That would be super, super, super useful. Cause at the moment it does feel a bit like the Wild West where people, you know, seem to pick a drone inspection company at random.

And then yeah, like I said, you end up. A real, a false sense of security, which is, which is terrible because yeah, I’ve definitely worked on many projects that where blades have been cleared as been free of a defect. And then months later when, you know, somebody went up and rope access found that the defect was there the whole time.

Allen Hall: There was a couple presentations showing the progression of damage transverse cracks being probably the biggest issue. Like, what do you do with this? And it. Highly loaded area. You don’t want to go in there and start repairing it too early. And if it, if, if the blade’s gonna survive for its lifetime, probably don’t wanna touch it at all.

And there was some, there were some really interesting photos watching that. But they, they, in order to do that sort of progression study, you need to take drone inspection photographs at least twice a. . That’s the only way you can then predict and create a model. I guess what it sounded like in order to create a model of what that crack is gonna propagate, like you need to have touchpoints and you just can’t do that every other year.

You need to do it twice a year. So you’re essentially having double data , especially in blades that you know have issues. It sounded like some blades they knew had issues out of the factory. and that series of blades carries these particular parameters. And so you just know I’m gonna go out there and I’m gonna drone in the spring, and I’m gonna drone again in the fall.

That just comes with the territory and that. , everybody’s pretty much 

Rosemary Barnes: accepted that, that’s so interesting that people are taking blades that they know have cracks have begun, and being prepared to leave them operating and monitor them because, you know, one thing that you, you learn when you study composites and crack propagation.

You, you can work statistically and, you know, figure out on average cracks will propagate at this rate. An individual crack. It doesn’t, you know, grow one millimeter per month, ev every month for, you know, its whole lifetime. It’ll be 10 millimeters in one month, then none for a year, and then another 50, and then, you know, and then it breaks catastrophically.

That’s how cracks propagate. They don’t, they don’t follow the nice theoretical. Yeah, pre , predictable paths. So I, I would certainly, I, I’ve certainly never recommended to somebody that they that they continue operating a blade with a, a crack in a, a highly loaded area. I, I mean, you can leave. You can leave cracks in certain areas when they’re, you know, where it’s, it’s, even if it did progress, it wouldn’t affect the blade structure.

But if it’s in a, a critical area, you know, you gotta say, take that out of operation. And when they’re, they’re very bad, you know, a very highly loaded area, then you know you’re gonna have to take it, take it down ASAP to, to repair it. Because even just sitting there, even if you’re not operating the turbine, it’s still loaded.

When, you know when the wind blows and. . Yeah. So it’s, it’s really difficult though, to check progression. Yeah. Well 

Allen Hall: it’s, I think it’s, it’s a matter of managing all the crews, right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Yes. And you mentioned, you know, you need more frequent inspection of, of blades with no one damage. And I think if you know that there’s damage in, in a blade than Six months is still unlikely to capture the, you know, you wanna know on this day, the damage was this, and on the next day the damage was, was this kind of you need to be able to, to catch it.

Not just that, you know, oh, at some point in the last six months, the crack progressed, but you, you don’t, , you don’t know that that was, you know, happening constantly every day. I, I would say you either need a really large fleet of, of blades with the damage that you’re looking at, and then, you know, six monthly might be fine.

Or if you’ve got a few blades, you need to be monitoring them much more frequently. And that’s an argument that I’m constantly having with yeah, with the service the people that are, you know, in charge of the service of. Turbine blades because obviously it’s a pain. But to me that’s the benefit of the drone inspections is that you can get out there.

I mean, there’s some some technologies that will scan a whole, a whole. Rotor for blade defects in, you know, just two or three hours of downtime, you can do that more than every, every six months. You, you can, and they should be when they’re, you know, if they actually wanna learn something about how cracks are propagating then they will need much more frequent data and yes.

in particular. If you know, you know that you’ve got a defect and you are trying to argue that you shouldn’t have to take all the blades down and repair them, then I, I would think that it’s fair enough that you’re. That you are inspecting the blades much more frequently than they’re usually trying to, to do them once a year is a pretty standard interval for, you know, regular wind farm servicing to, yeah, scan the blades once a year.

Do you know drone, drone inspect them once a year and I think it’s gonna be way more than that if you are, if you know that you’ve got D 

defects. 

Allen Hall: Well, the Omega Rotondo from Onyx Insight was on one of the panels this morning and. I always listen to her and she’s been on the podcast, so she’s a really good resource.

She was talking about the categorization of damage and, and trying to get some standards around that. And, and she did mention that last year also when she was on a panel hearing her say similar things this year, reemphasize the fact that. They may not have enough data, they may not have maybe as frequent of data as they would like, but there’s, there’s, there’s too many wind turbines in America.

Maybe there’s a lot of wind TURs in America right now. And so if you’re trying to manage them with a limited amount of staff, I’m not sure how you’re going to do that. And you don’t have to. You’re gonna have to delay some of the inspections because you couldn’t even look at the data. And so they’re, I, they’re taking a more.

Probabilistic approach. You saw some probability numbers pop up today. The chances that this, this damage goes from cat three to Cat five is 60% over the next five years, and those kind of predictive numbers, again, I, I think you’re right, Rosemary. It’s really hard to predict anything specific on a particular blade, but they seem to have some decent results so far.

on groups of blades, manuf by manufacturer, or most likely by manufacturer and size slash wet factory. It was produced at, it seems to have a, a bigger play, and Megan was actually bringing up with some of these bigger blades. The, as they get bigger, the accuracy of the applies. And I thought, oh, that the applies are not always applied in the same way.

shifts that you, you, the same blade factory’s not gonna produce the same structural blade every time. And I thought that was a good input and because you’ve been closer to it , I just wondering what your thoughts were about that. Are blades pretty consistent? Is there, is there a lot of margins unlike overlap supplies that you don’t worry about too much?

That one blade’s a little bit stronger than another, or one blade’s stiffer than another based on the shift it was produced? 

Rosemary Barnes: No. If, if it’s affecting, if it’s varying to the extent that it’s affecting the blade properties, that’s a quality problem, and that is definitely, Not normal. And I’ve been involved in plenty of yeah, serial defects that were the result of one shift using an old work instruction or, you know, something like that.

And so you end up with these, you know, shift shift discrepancies and that’s f for sure not okay. And you know, something that has to be. Rectified by the manufacturer. But I will say that wind turine blades have much higher tolerances in everything than most kinds of manufactured products. So we used to work, obviously when I was working at lm it’s a blade company.

So we’re very used to composites, but we would often have people from, you know, the turbines that we were designing the blades for. Would come and they were largely used to working with some of the other turbine components, which are, you know metallic structures and dealing with much tighter tolerances.

So people were shocked. Sometimes, you know, there might be the, the placement of the I dunno, component A might have a tolerance of plus minus 50 millimeters. And I mean, if you ever worked. Manufacturing of anything but composites, you would probably be absolutely just shocked and appalled and think, what have you got, you know, interns making your, your designing your blades or, or making them in, in charge charge of the whole thing.

You got your high school work experience students or, or what, how can you end up with a, a tolerance like that? But that is the reality of, you know, it is a very handmade structure. The supplies get laid. Accurately within a tolerance. And the whole thing is designed so that you know, no matter what combination of tolerances you get, you know, this ply A is, you know, right at one edge of its 50 millimeter tolerance and ply B is at the exact opposite, you know, or the other way around, you’ll still have adequate safety for that.

For. That blade that’s manufactured like that. And so it sounds kind of low tech, but to enable the low tech manufacturing, it means you need high tech design work because you need to be able to cover, you know, a wide range of blades that get made. So yeah, I guess to answer your question, yes, the blades do differ and certainly there’s a significant weight difference between blades that’s like they have to You know, wait until several blades are made and then they will match three that will go together in a set based on them being a similar weight.

And they have to add extra, extra weight to the blades too. And some, you know, balance, basically to balance them in a set. So then they don’t all come off exactly the same. But the structural properties of a matched set should all be within, within spec. Yeah, they are. If they’re not, then that’s a, that’s a manufacturing defect.

And you know, whoever bought that turbine can, can request that it is fixed by the manufacturer. Get the latest on wind industry, news, business, and 

Allen Hall: technology sent straight to you every week. Sign 

Rosemary Barnes: up for the uptime tech 

Allen Hall: newsletter@weatherguardwind.com slash news. Let me ask you this, because I think this is tied to the concerns about the repeatability of the manufacturing effort, which will was related to shipping damage or, or more specif.

Quality defects that are created in the factory not being addressed, and the blades being shipped. Secondarily, blades are being transported and they’re being, obviously there’s some damage when they get shipped. These big, huge, massive blades. The trailing edges get a little crunched once in a while, and then at the, probably the I always think is this.

The concern I have the most is when they start in putting the blades onto the hub. Like there things happen in there that are not great for blades. And that seemed to be a, a concern. Like no one is inspecting the blades when they kind of, before they come outta the factory, after they’re shipped to the site and after they’re up on the tower.

There’s really not a lot of inspections done there. And I know Joel preaches this to me all the time. Joel’s like wind power. Can go down to the blade manufacturing site and look at the blade, make sure the blade is correct before it leaves the factory. So if you catch something at the factory, you can fix it there where you have all the experts and the tools to do it versus trying to do it in the middle of Nebraska where you don’t have all those things.

And I thought that made sense, but it is a little odd. It, it maybe, I think the operators basically assume that the blades, most blades have some level of defect when they come out of the factory. I, I. In the back of my head, the whole time I’m hearing this, I’m thinking, Rosemary, is she gonna shake her head?

No, that’s not, that’s not the case. , the plates are pretty. Built when they came out of the factory, right? 

Rosemary Barnes: Y yes and no. I don’t, I don’t think he’s totally wrong. Definitely that’s right. But I mean, a lot of people are shocked to learn, you know, when you make a brand new wind turbine blade, ev, every single blade is gonna have some number of defects that have to be fixed in the factory.

That’s just, just definite. Maybe in the past when they were very small, some of them were perfect, but I I, I certainly. You, you know, it’s, it’s common to have dozens of defects that you have to fix in, in the factory. That’s just, again, it sounds like low tech. You don’t have your process under control, but it’s, it’s like if you wanted to avoid that, the blade would just cost so much more.

You’d have to use the same kind of manufacturing methods that they use in, you know, in aviation or the auto industry. They’re using a lot more prepregs and autoclaves and stuff, and. That’s expensive for any size component, let alone, you know, when turbine blades are bigger than any airplane wing or or car.

That’s for sure. So it’s, you know, it’s done to get the, the overall cost low and the repair processes are very controlled. You know, they have to, the same way they have to certify a blade design to make sure, you know, third party verifies that it’s gonna be strong enough to last the stated lifetime.

In the, yeah, in the conditions stated, they also have to certify their repair methods. So, It, it, it ends up the same y you know, there’s no difference. Yeah, there’s, there’s no difference in the expected lifetime or anything between a blade that had a hundred repairs in the factory compared to one that had, you know, say five.

So that, that is shocking to a lot of people, but that’s, That’s how it works. And that is actually good engineering. I spend a lot of time , you know, calming, calming people down to asset owners down. No, no, you know, it is, it is normal. And they’re like, well, you know, if it’s had 18 repairs in the factory, then they should have just given us a new one.

And it’s like, well, no, they never do that. It’s so rare to scrap a blade in the factory that is just, you know, so , so costly. So that, that is, A last resort, and it’s super rare that you would have a kind of defect that couldn’t be fixed. It happens occasionally, but you know, if it’s happening frequently, then you’re gonna spend considerable engineering resources to get that under control.

Allen Hall: If I wanted to inspect my blaze before they got installed or, or on, onto the hub is, are there enough people to do that at the rate that we need to build wind turbines? How many engineers would you have to have out on the. No, definitely not in America. There’s no way we’d be able to 

Rosemary Barnes: do that. The problem is that you need, you need someone with blade specialist blade knowledge.

So probably somebody that’s worked for a manufacturer in the, in the factories, or at least somebody who’s, you know, working for, you know, a com, a company that has a lot of people like that where they’ve learned from and. It’s, you know, if you catch it right there at the very end, then I mean, once it’s already installed, then I mean, that’s very difficult to address.

So you, you mentioned, you know, inspecting them coming out of the factory and that’s, Probably a, a better place, but you’re not going to, if you’ve got a wind farm, you know that’s gonna have 500 turbines in it. You’re not gonna have an employee camped out at the factory for a year while they make all the blades for that.

And I mean, the manufacturer would almost certainly not be so keen on that either, but they’re inspected constantly. So, you know, if you follow kind of the blade through the manufacturing process, the first thing that happens is that the two shells are up when and down when shells get Get made and then while they’re still in the mold then they will be inspected, the quality will be inspected, and they do some repairs there in, in the mold.

And then they will close the blade and dold it. And then they will do inspection then, and then that’s where the bulk of the repairs would get done in that stage cuz it’s out of the mold and not holding anything up. Then once all that’s done, it’ll get weighed and the sets will be balanced.

And then. Often a customer, well usually a customer would come and do at least a first item inspection to make sure that, you know, they were happy with the manufacturing process and the quality of the product by the end of that. And they might do a, a bit more especially if they weren’t so thrilled with what was going on their first inspection.

then it gets transported to site. And damage during transport is super common. Yeah, like really annoyingly, annoyingly common. And I, I don’t know what it was about the projects that I worked on, but I, I swear like 30% of the blades that, for prototype turbines that I was working on got transport damage sometimes in like really spectacular ways as well.

I won’t, I won’t go into the details. You know, like it, it’s a Murphy’s law situation. All sorts of absolutely ridiculous, you know, acts of God happen to these turbine blades as they’re being transported around the world. Then I, I mean, any, anybody that is managing construction of a winds farm should be checking the blades bef once they’re onsite, before they go up, because that’s also.

often the last time that it’s not your fault that damage happened. You know, if so if you can inspect them when they just come off the truck, then you can say, okay, this was the, you know, the transport company’s problem, or likely the OEM arranged the transport. So it’s you know, their, their issue.

And then the bys get up on the, on the Yeah, on the turbine, they’re installed on the turbine, and you can get damage there too. And I guess for completeness, you would want to check them there, but by the time that you’ve got the blades up on the turbine, then you know, like to get them down is gonna be pain painful.

It is still, you know, good to have that information then if you, if you can because then you can, you know, address it while you’ve still got the crane on site, while the fact factory is probably still making those blades. Cuz if you get to it in, you know, a year, two years time, it might still be within warranty, but you’ve got, now you, you know, if your construction is finished, all the cranes have gone.

And I don’t know about in the US but in Australia, the. Cranes are really constrained and so it’s not so easy. And these wind farms are in the middle of nowhere. I was looking at one the other day that I was hoping to go visit and it’s like an either a 10 hour drive or I could do a one hour flight and a five hour drive to get there.

You know, that’s , that’s kind of As, as easy as it is to reach. So, you know, it’s not so easy to just get a crane there for the one blade that you’ve got a problem with. And then if the factory isn’t making the blades anymore, then you’ve got a huge problem and you can wait up to, or even over a year to have your blades replaced.

So it might be, yes, you found it within the warranty period. The manufacturer is it, it’s, it’s up to them to remedy the situation. and you’ve probably got some C clause in your contract that, you know, liquidated damages. If there’s, you know, like a, if there is some issue that’s a manufacturer’s fault that stops you from generating revenue from your wind farm, then you’ll claw some money back.

But it is, Incredibly stressful and you never get everything back. And it also really, really damages relationships, is what I’ve noticed between the, you know, the asset owner and the, the manufacturer. So I mean, for, for that last point, I, I never understand why the manufacturers aren’t more aware of that fact that the relationships are so easily damaged and you know, it, they, in my opinion, the.

Wind turine manufacturers could do a much better job of you know, looking after their, their customers to make them feel supported through the process instead of, you know, they always seem to wanna set it up as some sort of adversarial fight between two parties. And I, I just, it, I always say that makes issues drag on so much longer than you.

They need to you end up, you know, without trust and you end up having to do a lot more engineering work and tests and proving and, you know, all that sort of things. So, That’s my, that’s my little rant from from my perspective, you know, I get in to manage the relationships, I think as much as the engineering of it.

Well, 

Allen Hall: the next level of difficulty, which came up today was what happens when we go offshore because you may not be able to repair the blade on the turbine once you’re offshore 15, 20, 30 miles. How does that work? And, and some of these repairs probably involve taking the blade off and. At that point, just replacing it with a different blade.

The trouble being, there’s not a lot of Jack vehicles or jack ships in America, so you, you don’t have the ability to go do that. Once, once the farm is installed offshore in America, you’re pretty well stuck and you may end up shutting the turbine down until you can find a a jack vessel to. And, and it’s just really expensive, right?

So there, there’s a lot of concern offshore for the same reasons they’re seeing these onshore issues happen, even if the manufacturers are putting a lot of emphasis on correcting issues and they think they are. But those, you’re 10 xing the costs once you go offshore. But I think the had a pretty good success record in Europe.

Whether that translates to America or not, I, I think that. A big unknown at the moment. 

Rosemary Barnes: I still think that we’re, we’re in early days even in Europe. Yeah, they’ve had offshore wind for a long time. But the really big blades, the really big turbines, they are new. You know, there was a big change, let’s say before or after a hundred meter long blades.

I, I think that’s a, like a pretty. Big divide. Before a hundred meter, like shorter than a hundred meter blades were easy. longer than a hundred meter blades is, is hard. For offshore. There’s definitely some shorter than that. Blades on shore that are are proving to be difficult. But I think, you know, cuz they’ve only been around for a while and the way that you see defects in composite materials at at least I’m, I’m not sure so much.

The rest of the components, but they describe it as like this bathtub curve. So you know, where it’s fatigue damage that’s the, the issue you see. Yeah, so the start of the, the bathtub, early in it’s life you see a lot of defects and then it drops off pretty quickly. And then for the majority of the life, you know, so say if you make it to five years with no damage, then you’re probably gonna make it close to the end of the life.

But then towards the end of the life, then you see that the defects rise again. So that’s the other side of. The bathtub, and I don’t think that we’re all the way down to the , the basin of the the, you know, the flat part of the bath for any of those really big offshore wind turbines anywhere in the world yet.

So it won’t surprise me to see. more of them in the next few years. And then the other thing is that the number of these big turbines that are coming out is, you know, rising very fast and hopefully will continue to rise very fast for the next decade. So and because it’s statistical, you know, if you have only a few really big turbines, they might have a long operating.

But you don’t have enough turbines to see, you know, a defect that affects 1% of blades. You, you might miss entirely if you’ve got a, a wind farm of only, you know, 20, 30 turbines. But when you start to have thousands, then that will be a big issue. So I really hope that, you know, I think this is where all the drone stuff is.

It’s really key that the technology. Gets good and better than it is now in time to catch that, that big emerging problem.

Allen Hall: Hey uptime listeners. We know how difficult it is to keep track of the wind industry. That’s why we read p e s Wind Magazine. P e s Wind doesn’t summarize the news. It digs into the tough issues. And p e s Wind is written by the experts, so you can get the in-depth info you need. Check out the wind industry’s leading trade publication.

PS Wind, PS wind.com.

Rosemary. The second part of this blades USA Forum discussion is around lightning. And every presentation that had to do with blades and monitoring came to the discussion of lightning. The lightning last year was an issue, but it wasn’t nearly as big. And I, and when I talked to people last year, they’re kind of poo-pooed me and like, yeah, you know, it’s a thing.

It’s now, now at like a top two issue. Last year I said it’d been top five. It’s now a top two based on what I saw here. So everybody’s wanting to know like, what are the, what are the blade manufacturers doing to keep their blades alive? On the offshore side, the discussion was some of the OEMs are going to put on a metal tip to the blades to protect ’em from lightning.

And I had just a, a brief chuckle at that. And bend. Other ones are not talking about it at all. Probably gonna stay with basic standard designs as they use onshore. So there’s not a lot of development in the lightning protection world. Weirdly enough, we’re, my little company is probably the only ones doing something really significant that’s been broadly used at this point.

But the, the second half is monitoring, like, there’s a lot of monitoring systems out in the marketplace and, and they can do all kinds of wonderful things. You know, an engineer gets a gizmo Rosemary, you’re an engineer. So if you get the one with a lot of bells and whistles and, and and lighted buttons, that’s the one the engineers typically pick.

Because that’s what I would pick. Why not? Right? I’m not paying for it, it’s not coming out of my salary. But the, the operators don’t wanna do that, right? Because the bills are so big. If if it’s $5,000 a turbine and you have a hundred turbines, you know, you just do the math, right? It ends up being a lot of money.

So the cost of monitoring on the lightning side is big and I, and we’re partnered with Ping at this conference, we tend to do booths together just to save cost. And Ping has this lightning sensor, which just sticks to the turbine and it tells you whether that the turbine’s been struck or not, which is 99% of what you need to know, and it’s a couple hundred dollars a year instead of being several thousand dollars a year.

But in, in terms of what’s shaking in the industry, it seems like lightning. I literally saw four presentations about lightning. More than that, I think I saw five today about lightning. There is a a big shift in, Hey, we need to get this lightning thing under control. . So maybe, maybe that’s a change in industry.

And I, I don’t see the OEMs leading that effort, by the way. I see the operators pushing that as it, it’s expensive to, to fix. Do you hear rumblings about improving blade lightning 

Rosemary Barnes: protection? Yeah, for for sure. I mean, you might not, they might not be publicizing it a lot, but they’re definitely working on it in intensely.

And I think it’s pretty hard to get enough experts to really you know, I think most companies are fighting over the experienced lighten. People at, at the moment and have been for a few years. But I don’t think that you’re gonna see OEMs talking about it a lot until they have the solution. You know, I think that they’re still in you know, problem solving mode and it’s not really great to publicize that you’ve got this big problem.

So that’s probably why you don’t hear them talking about it, but definitely doesn’t mean they’re not taking it seriously. . Yeah. But so who were the who, you said you saw a bunch of presentations on Lightning. What, what kinds of of companies were wanting to talk about Lightning? Some of our 

Allen Hall: operators operators being the big one, right?

When they talk, you wanna listen? Phoenix Contact, give a presentation about Lightning. One of our competitors just talking about some lightning stuff. Actually there’s two competitors of ours that we’re talking about some lightning stuff today. So I just. Chuckled through it, but because it’s complicated, right?

And I, I think it’s, it’s, it’s just like any other problem, Rosemary is, is you think, well, it’s just lightning, right? We’ve been protecting buildings from lightning since Ben Franklin time. How hard could this freaking be? And the answer is, it’s super difficult. It’s, it’s sort of the blade structure issue.

Well, we’ve been making blades for 30, 40 years. How hard can this be? Well, it’s really hard because it’s changing so fast and the industry’s very competitive and there’s a lot of constraints on it. It’s not as easy. You’d think, and you know, we’ve been doing a lot of research on some of the lightning aerodynamic pieces and it, we, we think that’s the way to go.

Clearly the rest of the industry is still scratching their head about it. But if I come back to this conference next year and we’re still stuck, and that’s not a great 

Rosemary Barnes: day. Why aren’t you giving presentations? Cuz you’re talking about it in the podcast or, 

Allen Hall: yeah, I mean it because it costs $20,000 to talk.

Rosemary Barnes: Are you kidding? 20,000. Can, can I take this opportunity to have a huge rant about , about how they do conferences? These. This, is it new or is it just that? I used to go to academic conferences and now I go to industry ones. But I, I, I don’t usually, I don’t speak, I definitely don’t pay to speak. I’ll, I’ll, I often get asked to moderate a panel or, or something like that, and I, I definitely don’t pay , don’t pay for that.

And I rarely get paid. Sometimes I do. But as, so I’m usually there as a participant and for the networking. everything. And I absolutely hate this model where people pay to give presentations because it makes the presentation suck. And so you are stuck there for what sounded on paper, like an interesting presentation, but it’s just a 20 minute long sales brochure from someone who may very well not know.

You know, it’s. Kind of company that wants to pay that much money. Either they’re a huge company and those ones are usually fine, or it’s someone that’s just entering the market and wants to get their name known. And so they don’t know anything about, they know less than the audience on what they’re talking about.

I mean, I, I hate that you go to a, a conference and you suffer through a few of those and in the end you end up not going to any of presentations, just going to the networking drinks. That’s the only useful thing. And I can it continue like that? It’s just, it, it seems. Just two. You know, they’re just really ignoring the needs of the, the audience.

Why would anyone pay 20 grand if no one was going to the presentations? And surely, I mean, I’m going to less and less and less of them. Yeah. Anyway. Big, big ramp, but I, I reckon it’s a, it’s a mistake to do it that way is my opinion. I think you should focus on having good content at your conferences and then make your money from the, the booths and the ticket sales and you know, sponsors instead of, it’s just such a conflict of interest.

I mean, I don’t have, on my YouTube channel, I don’t. Oh, pay me $10,000 and you can you know, come and, and talk about what you want. I mean, people, people do get in touch with me to try and say, oh, we’ll pay you. Yeah. Like people will pay like five or $10,000 to come on a live stream and talk about whatever, and I will a hundred percent say no because one, it’s never good.

Speakers that wanna pay you that much money. It’s always someone that you know is not, not really good. And two, it totally removes your credibility. Yeah. You know, if someone has, has paid to come on. And isn’t that the same for the conferences that I, I, I don’t get it. And yeah, I just wanted to take this chance to have a, a big rant.

I, I, no, I, 

Allen Hall: I think it’s a difference between the United States and Europe and the York conferences are much less, much less expensive. They tend to be much more technic. and have useful information to pull from them pretty much on every presentation. The ones in America are sort of 50 50 that way. There, there’s some really useful information.

There’s some good stuff Today, particularly from the operators, I thought, bang on some of the paid presentations. I, I didn’t, I’m not an operator, so that’s not directed at me, but it, I, I didn’t get as much out of them. , but that’s just the model we’re in at the moment. And it, it is a shame. I’m gonna take myself out of it just for a minute and say, okay, look.

Someone like Matthew Stead at Ping who knows a lot about blade damage and blade monitoring, that’s someone who needs to be on his stage and he’s good on his feet and he can speak well in front of a large group and he’s entertaining. That’s someone who I would allow to speak to bring more people into my conference.

That’s what I would do. I. , I think anybody’s ever invited Matthew up for free to come speak. And that’s a shame because he could add a lot to these conferences. I, I, I could probably do something very similar, but, you know, I just have a podcast. What do I know? 

Rosemary Barnes: number, number one Wind Energy podcast, isn’t it?

Allen Hall: Yeah, it is at the moment. It is. And, and, yeah. But you know, we’re, we’re in a competing space, Rosemary, because the people that hold the conferences. PR firms, marketing firms and we’re kind of in that space too. So in a weird way, we’re sort of competitors. I don’t look at it that way. I think anything can do to help wind energy is going the right direction.

So I don’t think of it that way. Anybody wants to participate in this space, more power to you because we need more voices. We need to get the word out that wind energy is gonna be the future and we need to be. Actively promoting it and fixing problems that we have, which is why I love you having you on the podcast because she helped sit the industry straight, 

Rosemary Barnes: which is great.

Oh, sharks a, I think Australia is going the same way as the US so maybe and, and I, I have pretty much stopped going to conferences here unless there’s you know, a really specific reason to go. So it sounds like maybe, maybe Europe is the, is the place for me to go to when I’m gonna go to a conference.

Make it the European one. We’re going 

Allen Hall: to winter wind after we got finished with this conference this week where we hop on an airplane and head to Sweden with peeing and Aron. Dana Cruz is here and, and Greta is here with them. And they’re headed to Sweden. I think they’re headed to Sweden. So a lot of people are heading to Sweden next week to talk.

 And it is gonna be a totally different atmosphere. It’s gonna be much more collegial. They have a tour of a chocolate factory, which I’m gonna find interesting. Swedish chocolate. I don’t think I’ve ever had Swedish chocolate. I’ve had a lot of German and Swiss chocolate but no Swedish chocolate.

And, but you can see the difference, right? We’re not having those. We have, we have wine mixers in America, or hard liquor mixers in America. Over in Sweden. It’s trying to stay warm and , check out chocolate factories. It’s gonna be fun. That’s gonna do it 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 and be sure to subscribe in the show notes below to Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter. As well as Rosemary’s YouTube channel Engineering with Rosie, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.