Show notes
Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Philip Totaro, and Joel Saxum discuss the evolution of wind turbine blade inspections, from external drones to internal rovers. They debate the potential of AI in predicting damage progression and managing repair priorities, with Rosemary emphasizing the complexity of crack propagation in composites. Joel highlights Top 7's innovative drone technology for detecting lightning protection system faults in blades, as featured in PES Wind magazine.
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!
Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: On the mean streets of Lowville, New York, Phil that's your neck of the woods. The local Kraft Heinz plant has reclaimed the Guinness World Record for the largest cheesecake. Tipping the scales at a whopping 15, 008 pounds. Yes, that's right. That's seven and a half tons of creamy goodness.
Joel Saxum: I absolutely love cheesecake. My brother loves cheesecake so much that's what he had at his wedding. He had a smorgasbord of different kinds of cheesecake that you could pick from.
Allen Hall: They broke the record, almost double the record that was held from a team from Russia. So here we go. Now we're back into the 1980s.
Olympic hockey
Philip Totaro: exit no that's great that's good that's a good thing we should be world domination in cheesecake size
Allen Hall: and
Philip Totaro: wait.
Allen Hall: Yeah why did we get an invite joel i don't understand we should've been top of the list to come to lowville.
Philip Totaro: That's yeah that's what i'm saying like did they pass it out to everybody in town like how do you eat a cheesecake seven tons of cheesecake.
Allen Hall: They donated to local food bank is what they did after everybody had a slice or two or three. But 15, 000 pounds of cheesecake. What's that in metric tons, Phil? Come on. I need a sense of this for the Europeans in our audience. 6. 8 metric tons. That's a lot of metric tons, but this, these are the things you got to keep your eyes open for, right?
So if they're going for a world record. And anything food related, they need to be calling the Uptime Podcast and at least give us a heads up so we can plan our travel accordingly, because this cheesecake thing seems like we missed out.
I'm Alan Hall and here are this week's top news stories. In our first story, Vestas has secured its largest onshore wind project to date in Japan. The company has received a 134 megawatt order from Invenergy. for the Inaniwa Wind Energy Center. The order includes 32 V117 4. 2 megawatt wind turbines and a 20 year service agreement.
Deliveries are expected to begin in the first half of 2027 with commissioning planned for Q1 2028. Moving to Spain, Windar has started preparatory work to construct a new monopile factory. The facility will have the capacity to manufacture monopiles up to 12. 5 meters in diameter, 3, 500 tons, and 130 meters in length.
With an annual capacity of 100 to 120 monopiles, the factory aims to supply wind farms in the North Sea, the Baltic Sea, as well as the East Coast of the United States. In a significant development for the Mediterranean region, nine Southern European Union member countries have pledged to turn the area into a renewable energy hub.
Officials from Cyprus, Slovenia, Malta, Croatia, Greece, Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain are focusing on harnessing offshore wind and solar energy. They aim to set up a joint renewable energies project across borders and have called on the European Commission to conduct a study on the region's renewable energy potential.
Shifting to Sweden, Northvolt has announced a revised scope of operations in response to challenging market conditions. The company will focus on ramping up its first 16 gigawatt hour production capacity at Northvolt ET. resulting in the redundancy of approximately 1, 600 employees. Northvolt will suspend the expansion project at Northvolt at this time.
and slowdown programs at Northvolt Labs. In India, Xcel Composites and its joint venture Koneko Xcel India have won a bidding process to supply poultry to Carbon Planks for wind turbine spar caps to Vestas. The products will be manufactured in KECI's new factory in Goa, India, with deliveries estimated to begin in the last quarter of 2025.
This agreement extends an existing multi year frame contract and deepens the collaboration between the companies. And Denmark is making strides in wind turbine testing capabilities. R& D Test Systems has completed the foundation of a test bench for main bearings at the Offshore Renewable Center in Odense Port.
The facility will be able to test both geared and direct drive main bearing arrangements for 25 megawatt turbines. The project, supported by a 10 million euro grant from the Danish Greenlab program, is expected to be delivered in 2025. Lastly, Nikon Corporation is set to provide Eurus Energy Holdings Corporation with a riblet film for wind turbine blades, aimed at improving wind turbine generation efficiency.
In Japan's first such verification test, the film will be attached to turbine blades at the Yurisoya Misaki wind farm. Nikon anticipates that the Riblet film could improve wind power generation efficiency by approximately 3%. That's this week's top news stories. After the break, I'll be joined by my co host, renewable energy expert and founder of Pardalote Consulting, Rosemary Barnes, the founder and CEO of Intel Store, Phil Totaro, And the Chief Commercial Officer of WeatherGuard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxon.
Lightning is an act of God, but lightning damage is not. Actually, it's very predictable and very preventable. Strike Tape is a lightning protection system upgrade for wind turbines made by WeatherGuard. It dramatically improves the effectiveness of the factory LPS, so you can stop worrying about lightning damage.
Visit weatherguardwind. com to learn more, read a case study, and schedule a call today.
Allen Hall: It's almost fall in the northern hemisphere, which means that blade inspections are occurring. A lot of drone inspections are happening right about now at the end of season after all the repairs have been done.
So you're typically seeing two scans in some wind farms. One in the spring, one in the fall, just to keep track of how things are progressing. But there's been a recent big shift, I think, in from moving away from external drone inspections, which had been the norm, to a lot more of internal rover inspections.
With a little automated car with the cameras on it and the lights and the beepers and the whole thing. And I think the industry has really learned from that. I've been talking to a number of blade engineers and we were at Sandia last week that the significant structural defects are turning up sooner on the inside.
And that's a big shift, Rosemary, I think, because for so long, we were just doing drone inspections and when we got to standardized drone inspection, that was the big deal. But. Now we're doing inside and outside.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I actually wondered this because of a job I was on recently They were going to go do internal inspections that I mean to be honest I hadn't even been doing external inspections properly But yeah They were going to go do some internal inspections and I just wondered how they actually get into the blade like I know that you can get in between the two webs and trailing edge is mostly pretty clear, but in the leading edge between the front web and the leading edge, there are bulkheads all the way down these bits of foam or whatever.
They're structural, mostly not, mostly to assist with manufacturing, but they're blocking off the cavity. You can't just crawl into the leading edge cavity and crawl all the way down, no matter how small you are, because you're going to encounter these solid obstacles. What do they do about that?
Are they punching their way through them, which it being, like I said they're not primarily structural, but they're not structural. How do they manage that?
Allen Hall: I don't think they're doing anything at the bulkheads. I think a lot of it is right between the spars, the shear webs. And I think from what I can tell so far, are they not looking for problems with core splice areas, transverse cracks?
Which are the Cat 4, Cat 5s that you would need to know. I know they have leading edge and trailing edge dis bonds, but the big ones seem to be in the mid span region.
Rosemary Barnes: That's true, that they would catch most of the catastrophic, like most of the catastrophic stuff would happen on the main laminate, which is, yeah, right down the middle where it should be possible to get a really long way down, so I guess they can probably capture most of it.
But yeah the system that, or the, one of the things that, I know that they're looking for with drone inspections is, when lightning flashover happens, then that can cause damage on the inside. And you might not see it on the outside until it's like a category five and the blades about to snap in half.
That can obviously happen on the leading edge. And yeah, but I guess maybe they're not catching all of that, but they're catching other damage that. Might cause big structural problems. Makes sense.
Philip Totaro: Wouldn't it make sense to have a channel running the length of the blade adjacent to the one of the, like the front or the rear spar so that you could put, rather than a Rover,