Show notes
Allen and Joel give the latest update on lightning blade damage. They discuss the results of a lightning damage assessment on 900+ GE Vernova turbines. Read the LM Wind Power Lightning Diverter Rain Erosion test results. Learn more about StrikeTape.
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!
[00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Joel Saxum along with me. And I'm Allen Hall, and we work for Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and we have not talked about the lightning issues that are happening across the United States at the moment. Also, a good bit of Europe is seeing a number of really catastrophic lightning strikes, and even in South America.
So everywhere you look right now, you see a lot of lightning damage, right?
Joel Saxum: Yeah, Allen, I would say this, this spring, early summer, as opposed to years past, we've been getting more and more and more calls, and I think it's a combination of things. I think it's a, it's a combination of, I mean, we've had some extreme weather, right?
There's a pretty, it was a [00:01:00] pretty, been a pretty wicked lightning season here in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the center of the United States. But we're also hearing that same thing from India from. Mexico from Brazil, from the Mediterranean, we're hearing it all over the place. So that's happening. But then there's also some awareness, right?
There's people that are, you know, in the wind industry as a whole, a lot of, a lot of operators have sat back and relied on their FSAs to handle things. And, and as these costs escalate and they're looking at lightning damages, oh, this is carved out of your FSA or, uh, some insurance companies backing away from insuring them lightning.
You're starting to see more and more operators and financial asset operators coming to the table saying, Hey, we have a lighting problem. What can we do to solve it? And that's why our phone's ringing.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it's been nonstop for the last couple of months and, and I would say that some of the damage I've even seen on LinkedIn is shocking.
Uh, even today, looking at images from Japan, a blade trailing [00:02:00] edges is split wide open. It's expensive. And the operators you talk to when you. Talk to a large operator who says it has a couple hundred turbines. They're spending millions of dollars a year just to keep those turbines running from all the lightning damage and the engineering staffs and all the crane work and everything else managing the ISPs.
It is a huge, massive burden on the
Joel Saxum: industry. I'd like to go back to what you said about seeing it on LinkedIn. So, uh, I, I just, this is a shout out to all the amazing wind turbine blade technicians out there and engineers that are supporting them and getting these things done in the field, because we have seen some crazy damages on LinkedIn and it seems to be the ones that, uh, technicians are really proud of fixing, right?
Like, look at this 10 layer repair, three meters this way, this kind of crack, these kind of things because they're all difficult to repair and they're very expensive. Repair some of these things. Uh. Teams of 2, 3, 4 people are on them [00:03:00]for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks. Right. And the cost of all those things starts to add up.
And we're, when we're talking about repairs, of course you have the repair team, you have the repair materials and the downtime associated weather and all those things, but, but you haven't, in the grand scheme of things, contemplated what is the business interruption cost here as well, because that turbine's down.
And if it's down for a, uh, two, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, and you know, you're in high wind season, that's a lot of production. So the, the reason that we're starting to, I believe, uh, see a lot of, uh, a lot of phone calls, lot of support, a lot of things we're doing is because these costs are escalating it.
And the number that I, I was looking at, uh, just this week is so far in 2025 weather guard with our StrikeTape product. Has either installed on or is fending kit out or scheduled to be installed on 19 Wind Farms?
Allen Hall: That's a tremendous number. Actually, [00:04:00] Joel and I have lost track. Honestly, I have lost track because there's so many phone calls coming in.
I know we have more today even looking to get some blades protected and. The reason is I think people are starting to realize, particularly the engineering staffs and all the accounting functions and those site managers, asset managers that are looking at the yearly cost of managing these turbines, and that lightning number is just big.
If we're getting into the situation right now because of the I-R-A bill changes and the one big beautiful bill, uh, eliminating a lot of the production tax credit incentives for repowering, uh, you, you start to pay attention to those expenditures that you probably have paid for in the past. Now's the time to eliminate them and keep that money into the revenue chain.
It is gonna be a different world in about two years. And as we're into that transition, what we're seeing is a lot of operators now reaching out and starting to make a [00:05:00] connection with Weather Guard Lightning Tech to start the process. Like how do we improve our blades? We have some old Siemens turbines, we have GE turbines, we have a lot of one point fives, a lot of two X machines, which are almost everywhere in the United States at the minute.
How do we protect those turbines? How do we make them better? How do I stop paying ISPs hundreds of thousands of dollars for repairs because I need that revenue to make my business profitable at the end of the year? Yeah, I mean, we, we've talked about it in the past.
Joel Saxum: It's the, the, the, the PPTC suspenders as I've called them, I suppose, is you're, you know, in the past we've been supported by it.
It, it's, it's allowed for a buffer of revenue to come in that, uh, you know, you can dip into, you can use as your operational. Cash. And when we talk lightning damages, a lot of times that is unknown, right? It's something that you may budget for, you may not get any, you may end up spending a million dollars on this one wind farm because the erratic nature of lightning.
But if you can reduce that to an, a known level or to a very much lower [00:06:00] level, you're, you're sitting pretty, right? So what, and, and I wanna go back to what you said, Alan. A lot of semen stuff. A lot of GE stuff, uh, that's what we see a lot of, um, and. We've done a lot of studies. We have a ton of data on the one X and two x GE machines, uh, as well as the Siemens.
I mean, since take the Siemens and the GAA products, we've been working with Siemens here at Weather Guard and putting StrikeTape to protect their turbine blades around the world since 2013. So we have a long track record of it. We know how to do those. We have, you know, standard products that go on them.
Um, and all it takes is a phone call. Just get ahold of us and we can walk you through. Physics of what's happening, lightning damage to, to your specific turbines, why it's happening, how you can fix it. And then our big thing here at Weather Guard, of course, is supporting you through that process. We don't wanna sell you a product, we wanna be your partner in fixing lightning damages.
Now maybe we could talk about that a Alan A. Little bit. Let's talk about, uh, here, [00:07:00] a little bit about what's
Allen Hall: going on with some of these LPS systems. Boy, the LPS systems that are coming out of the factory over the last, ooh, 3, 4, 5 years, even 10 years ago. Really basic, they're essentially a, a lightning rod.
So it's a, a metal receptor somewhere around the tip on the pressure and the suction side, and then there's a cable that runs through the center of the blade down into the hub area. Then it gets grounded down into the tower and to to earth eventually. But it's basically a spinning lightning rod and the concept is.
Relatively simple, right? It's, it's like protecting a building. You put lightning rods on a building and hopefully the, the lightning hits those lightning rods and everything is okay. But the problem with wind turbines, particularly as they get taller, is the physics get to be a little bit different and.
What has happened as Blaze have gone from roughly 30, 40 meters into the 50 plus meters, and now much larger than that, even offshore, a hundred plus meters [00:08:00] is that tip speeds are high. The tip heights are much higher than they used to be. And the amount of lightning that they're seeing, uh, is changing because some of the lightning strikes are actually originating at the turbines.
You're seeing more we call upward lightning. So the number of lightning strikes that a turbine will take will be dependent upon how tall that turbine is. So instead of seeing maybe one strike a year, a lot of the turbines in the United States are seeing somewhere in the 5, 6, 7 range, depending upon where you're at per year.
Now you think about at over a 10, 20 year time span, that's a number of lightning strikes. Now, they're all not, may not be the big massive lightning strikes. It may be what I term baby lightning strikes. But at the, it still, the number of lightning strikes that you take increases your chance of having blade damage.