Show notes
From the surge in lightning strikes damaging wind turbines to the game-changing potential of nacelle-based LiDAR systems, Lars Bendsen of AC883 shares insights on wind farm maintenance. Lars describes how LiDAR installations can boost power output by 3.5%, and warns how ignoring simple pitch alignment issues leads to catastrophic turbine failures.
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Lars Bendsen: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall. Today, we're diving into the costly challenges plaguing wind farms with Lars Bendsen from AC883. From a surge in severe lightning strikes to devastating turbine misalignments, Lars reveals why seemingly minor issues can lead to catastrophic failures, and how cutting edge solutions like nacelle based lidars are transforming maintenance strategies.
Plus, discover why Lars believes too many industry tourists are making decisions that cost operators millions in unnecessary repairs. So get ready for a no holds bar discussion about what's really happening in wind farm maintenance. Lars, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thank you so much.
Appreciate it. Well, you've had a busy blade season and you've had crews all over Canada and parts of the U S what kind of problems were you solving with your blade crews this year?
Lars Bendsen: That was, that was a crazy repair season. Um, and it's not to feed directly into, but it, we had a ton of lightning strikes and lightning repairs higher than I would say the average.
And some of the strikes were severe. So I don't know, uh, you probably know better than me if the weather pattern has been leading up to better or worse. Um, what we do know, we had a really, um, wet summer. We had a ton of weather delays. We had a ton of high winds. We have a ton of rain. Uh, so we had our, our standby time, time was, was higher than usual.
And it's annoying for everybody involved. Owners don't get their job done and money is flying out the window. So. And we don't get the job done either. So, so, so it's really wet that way. So I don't know if that's the aftermath was going on over the winter. I have no idea because you can't really see when this like was there.
Uh, and, and the owners, the owners have a system that can measure when it comes. But. I don't think they're looking at it.
Allen Hall: That's, that's true. Uh, we are seeing more lightning strike damage over this past summer. It's been really bad. I, I think it's just the, the set of storms that came through. But in, in your case with AC 8A3, when you have technicians on site, you're bringing high quality sort of apprenticeship plus technicians that have a lot of training so that when you get into these complicated repairs, you can actually accomplish them properly.
Lars Bendsen: We are, we are getting our people from mostly from Europe, uh, simply because there's no cable, there's, there's no, uh, availability for, for staff in Canada. Uh, so we get them in from Europe on a proper work permit, simply because we are short staffed. Uh, we do pay more. We also get, uh, GWO certified technicians, all of them.
And, um, last year we had about 60 percent that could do. Cat 4, Cat 5. Next year they're all doing Cat 4 and Cat 5. That means on some simple LEP work we could maybe be either be earning less. Or we might be a little more expensive on regular LEP work because it is highly trained technicians. Uh, we learned from last year based on the percentage of Cat 4 and Cat 5 damages.
We simply need to have more flexibility so we won't, we will only have Cat 4 and Cat 5 technicians.
Allen Hall: Do you think there's more Cat 4, Cat 5 damage lately? Because that's what I think. I've seen a lot more
Lars Bendsen: over the last couple years. From, uh, from, uh, 23 to 24 there's a significant increase. Uh, if it's really high, uh, lightning strikes, uh, damages from tailed headspin, everything.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Is that driven by just the lack of understanding that what looks like to be maybe a small pinhole in a blade is really much larger and the operators don't catch it early enough or is there other factors involved there?
Lars Bendsen: I don't know. I think it might be that, um, I mean, everybody knows that all the engineering departments are all owners.
are really lean or in best case lean, but mostly understaffed. So that means the poor guys, they are struggling to keep up with everything. They can't see it. And, um, and, uh, I have, I have a strong, I think I have a strong opinion about the drone inspection all the time, because the AI and the pictures, it's, it, you cannot run an autopilot.
You cannot just take a picture, see that's it. You can't, you simply have to get up there. We had minimum Minimum of 10 blades were simply just a grease spot that was categorized as Category 4. We also had the opposite, where just a grease spot was actually a lightning strike. So we had it, we had it all over the place, so you cannot, you cannot run an autopilot.
Allen Hall: That's interesting because I, I've heard that same discussion from a couple of operators about whether the drone inspection categorization has been correct. But I think as the lightning strikes, uh get more frequent. We're seeing what looks to be smaller damage further down the blade, which would typically be grease.
If you, especially as you get closer to the root of a blade, you always think, well, that's grease from inside the nacelle that's fallen onto the blade. Don't worry about it. But in reality, I think we're seeing more lightning strike damage in more critical areas that lead to this cat four and cat five issues.
Lars Bendsen: Well, uh, you've seen it very often as well. It's a small lightning strike. Once you start opening it up, then you are 16 layer deep. Just an example, right? So we had some of them that looked very small and then you're ending up in a 78, 000, 100, 000 bill, right? Even though it looks very small and therefore, yeah, good.
No, I'm just saying, that's why I don't, I personally, I know it has a ton of opinion about it, but I personally don't think you can run on autopilot, which also go back to the, you know, we've been involved in robotics as well, robotic repair and all that jazz, and I know there's a place in the market for it.
Absolutely. But based on our experience, pure LEP and nothing else is only having, might be 10 percent of the blades. There's always something to look for. There's always an extra damage. There's always something. So we have to get up there anyhow.
Allen Hall: Is that because the industry for the longest time has only inspected like a third of the farm at a time.
So it'd take three years to really get across the whole site. So if you did have damage. It may have sat there for two years before anybody even could identify it. Isn't that changing a little bit though, that meeting operators that are doing a lot more inspection and trying to catch these ideas, you know, these problems early?
Lars Bendsen: No, and I, I agree. And I, I agree. And during the drone inspection, do drew your whole fleet every year? Just do it. It's, it's, it's, it's, uh, it's peanuts compared to whatever, but on that said, I think it's great with drone inspection, but you cannot rely on a hundred percent outer pilot. Somebody has to look at it.
With qualified eye to look at it. And it's better to climb one, one blade. Too many than one, too less, too little, so.
Allen Hall: So the question in my mind when it comes to lightning damage up in Canada is because it's so cold and there's so much freeze thaw that happens. As part of the issue that once you have this wound in a blade that just the freeze thaw over a year or two can really expand it and then cause trailing edge separation and all those sort of horrible things that happen to blades?
Lars Bendsen: Well, I guess as soon as you get more intrusions, uh Uh, then of course, uh, up here, uh, water had a chance to get stiff under zero degrees C. So, uh, so of course then you have a, uh, have an issue.
Allen Hall: That leads into the discussion about, well, it's cold in Canada, which means you guys get the winter first and then it comes down our way, uh, because we're getting close.
Which then gets me into, it's pitch alignment and sort of yaw alignment season for you. Because it's nice to have the fields sort of knocked down and everything frozen. Pitch alignment is a huge problem and what balancing is a huge problem too. What are you seeing out in the field right now?
Lars Bendsen: Well, I'm seeing that owners relying on OEM statements that we can, we can do a.
We can do pitch correction without control, we can do x factor, we can do automatic, uh, yaw alignment, which is, um, which is questionable, when put it that way. And, um, I said, uh, my new word is, uh, there are so many tourists in this, in this industry. They're tourists. They simply don't know what they're talking about.
They come and look at it. It looks nice, but they actually don't know what they're talking about.