Show notes
We discuss how using continuous monitoring systems (CMS) can prevent catastrophic blade damage from transportation and lightning. We also share insights from GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik on potential industry growth. And TPI Composites has hit the milestone of manufacturing their 100,000th blade.
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Allen Hall: On this week's Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, we discuss how continuous monitoring systems could prevent catastrophic blade damage due to transportation issues and lightning strikes. And that's a good discussion. GE Renova, CEO Scott Straza sees a soft entree wind market through early 2025, highlighting potential growth in Repowering projects.
TPI composites manufactures their 100,000th blade. Congratulations. And our wind farm of the week is the Jericho Rise Wind Farm in upstate New York.
You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by bill turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today.
Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
Allen Hall: in his first appearance at Barclays Conference. Since GE Vernova's spinoff, CEO Scott Strazik offered a sobering assessment of their wind business while highlighting some positive developments. Now, Strazik, uh, described the onshore wind market.
Is currently very soft, quote unquote, with weak order expectations for the first half of 2025, though he noted opportunities in Repowering projects and certain international markets that could, uh, at least partially offset North American weakness. Now, one of the things that was mentioned during the Scott Straza, um, conference or discussion was that they are doing internal inspections and a lot of them using crawlers, which I, I believe is are from Aeros, where they're looking at.
Uh, the blades at the factory internally after transportation, and then once they're up on tower trying to capture any defects that are happening. And this, at, at, when I saw this, I thought, oh, it goes back to Phil's comment that a lot of damage is actually happening during transportation. And that there maybe they're trying to, uh, work on that transportation piece or at least be able to make some claims that their blades have been damaged during transportation.
That's a unique piece 'cause I don't know any other. OEM that is doing that many inspections at the moment. Joel, do you know any of
Joel Saxum: others that are doing that? I know they should be. Uh, but, but, uh, yeah, same page. I don't know anybody that actually is. I think it's a, a bit of a. It's good market response, to be honest with you, from my opinion, because I mean, you know, we've, we've seen so many blades that are brand new or within warranty having issues.
Well now you can trace them back. If you get that inspection done at the factory, you put in a, uh, basically a, a. Data point of traceability. If it was good then and it got to site and then all of a sudden there's a damage, well that happened during transportation and handling. So you can start to say, that was your fault.
This is who should pay for this. These are the things that are being traced. Right. Um, and we did see in a presentation, uh, just yesterday or two days ago from Arons that they were putting statistics to the findings of their internal crawlers. And one of them was rad at like that. 70% from root to tip mark where that handling happens.
There was a spike in damages that they're finding. And it was mostly all related to handling, so I don't know of any others. I know it's actually kind of hard to get anybody as, even as an operator, get any of these OEMs or blade manufacturers to agree to get inspections done of the factory.
Allen Hall: Joel, do you think that some of the damage is caused by the cradles or the saddles that are used during transport, or is it more about just the roughness of the roads and the, the trucks that are used to move the
Joel Saxum: blades around?
Well, it's ha, it's handling. Uh, for the most part because if you can eliminate how many times you have to handle anything, you can avoid damages. This is why offshore wind farms have a, a problem as well, because if you're going to move, even if the factory is key, the factory's close to keyside for those blades, you still have to get them out of the factory, into the lay down yard to the key, and then craned onto the vessel, and then crane, you know, moved on the vessel and then craned off the vessel.
And if you're in that Jones Act situation, like we are here in this. States, you've got to move them twice offshore. That's just not good, right? Uh, you don't want to be, you want to handle these things as minimal amounts as possible, because at the end of the day, they're fragile. How many blades Allen have we seen where like the trailing edge has like a little.
Crunch in it, you know, a lot too, way too many.
Allen Hall: Rosemary. Is there a lot of structural reinforcement that happens on these longer blades for the lifting points and the transportation points?
Rosemary Barnes: No, they don't. Uh, I, I mean they definitely, um, consider that, uh, as a potential failure mode, but they're not.
Necessarily trying to reinforce a blade as they are trying to make the cradle so that it won't damage the blade and put it in a location where there is some, um, reinforcement there. I'm not a hundred percent sure that it's like purely one way direction. They might, you know, know where the cradles roughly have to go and make sure that there is, you know, like a bulkhead or something there that can, um, stiffen, stiffen up that area a bit locally.
But they're definitely, they definitely don't want, you know, a bunch of extra weight added purely for the. Point of transportation, because then it's up there on the turbine weighing more than it needs to for 20, 30 years. And that affects every, every other component. The, you know, bearings, the. Um, drive, train the tower.
The foundations all need to be beefed up a little bit extra because of the extra weight.
Allen Hall: Phil, what is the cost to the industry due to transportation damage? I think that number's big.
Phil Totaro: Yeah. It's, it's in the millions and we've actually been rerunning our calculations, um, recently. So, um, blade transportation damage is actually now number three.
Um, lightning damage to blades has actually overtaken it as being the number one issue. Um, which may or may not be a good thing, I guess, depending on what area of the business you're in. Certainly if you're selling people lightning protection technology, uh, maybe that's good. Um, but, uh, blade root cracking, uh, is also now a big issue.
But all three of those, so. Lightning damage, blade root cracking and transportation damage are like your top three, uh, issues. And it's all well into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, uh, in annual, um, operations and maintenance expenditure just for the US market alone. Unfortunately, we don't have data on, um, the faults and failure rates in other countries yet.
Um, but based on recent conversations, uh, with my new friends in Australia that. Uh, it looks like we may get some data.
Allen Hall: Alright, so after the break, I want to highlight what Phil was discussing here about the hundreds of millions of dollars in transportation expenses do to damage and what we're doing about it or what we can do about it.
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Visit eLog ping.com and take control of your turbine's health today. Okay, Phil. If there's so much damage happening from transportation and lightning, by the way, it does seem like CMS should be used to detect it. Now it looks like GE is actually gonna use the internal rovers from Aeros to inspect them, but are there any CMS systems on a.
Truck or on the cradle when blades are being transported at the minute?
Phil Totaro: No. No way. That's that's way more sophisticated than this industry would ever employ. And way more expensive than anything we would ever choose to do if we can't even get people to put CMS systems on turbines. Um, you know, even 4, 5, 6 megawatt turbines, then we're not gonna have, you know, any kind of, uh, fault and failure detection on the, the transportation systems themselves.
Not to say that that wouldn't probably catch certain issues and, you know, you can certainly put like strain gauges and accelerometers on the truck, uh, or on a cradle. Um, and some people may in rare occasions use things like that. Um, but it's not standard
Joel Saxum: for sure. Yeah, Phil, I was gonna mention that. Not standard as well, right?
So in Hamburg, two years ago, I ran into a company that was doing just this. They had a sensor that was about the size of a cell phone, and it's really basic sensor, to be honest with you. It's just GPS communications, a battery, and then an accelerometer and a gyro inside of it. And they were, it's the same kind of stuff that's used to track fleet vehicles, right?
Like, oh, this is this vehicle, this is, so,