Show notes
Allen and Joel speak with Birgit Junker, co-founder of the Global Blade Group, a forum created to share knowledge and innovation around wind turbine blades. For over ten years, the group has been making blade information more accessible and approachable. For more information on joining the Global Blade Group, email [email protected].
Link to Blade Handbook - https://www.bladena.com/uploads/8/7/3/7/87379536/cortir_handbook_2019.pdf
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Birgit Junker, a true pioneer in wind energy blade technology and the co founder of the Global Blade Group. This organization has become the premier forum for the wind turbine blade experts to collaborate, share knowledge, and drive innovation in areas like structural design, Lightning protection and blade inspection technologies.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight. Shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Birgit, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight.
Birgit Junker: Thank you very much and thanks for having me.
Allen Hall: I want to start off by looking back a little bit into 2013. What were some of the challenges that when farm owners were facing with Blade technology and maintenance that led you to create the global Blade group?
Birgit Junker: To start with Rege from Vattenfall and I, we were relatively new on the owner operator side. And we both found that when we were speaking to our colleagues, they, their eyes just glazed over every single time we said Blade. Cause nobody knew anything about blade. When I was hired at Eon I came from from Siemens.
I was hired at Eon. I was told that they didn't have blade issues. So I should expect to work about 80%, 75 percent on blades. And the rest of the time I should be spending on a drivetrain. 10 years later, when I left, there were 10 blade people. And I never ever had to look at a drivetrain. That was the attitude then.
Blades were not a problem. We didn't have blade problems. Blades were like that black box that you had. You just went out there and counted that they were all there. And you listened just to make sure that there wasn't anything strange going on. And about, you 99. 9 percent of the time, nothing happened.
There was nothing wrong. We even had contracts that said that blades were maintenance free. But then Reg and I started on the owner operator side. We came, we both came from OEMs. I've done catastrophic failure investigation. I've done field failures. I've done all sorts of things for what, 10 years before that.
And knew that we did have blade problems. Ian just hadn't found out yet. So when I started, Reg and I, we decided that we needed to talk to one another because we couldn't talk to colleagues.
Joel Saxum: Birgit, from experiences in the field I would, I want to follow up with that as a hard second. Because so many people Don't understand even today what's going on in the with blades.
Like I'll give you an anecdotal problem. I was in a field doing an RCA and out there with a site supervisor who was in charge of 120 odd turbines, big wind farms in the States, right? And he was looking up. He said, yeah, those blades, he's they're just, big plastic wings in the skies.
And I was like, they're not actually plastic. And he goes what do you mean? I said it's it's like fiberglass and this and that. He's wait a second. So you mean to tell me that thing's like a, it's built like a boat. Like it's like a fiberglass boat up in the sky. And I said, yeah.
And I was like, I was like, that's more in line of Ben, a plastic wing. And he goes, Oh, he's I never really knew that. And I said, Oh, further conversations with this this gentleman, he'd been in wind for 15 years and it was running wind farms and didn't know that the blades were made out of fiberglass.
So I think that when you came in, what you're talking about, it's the origination story of Global Blade Group here. That could be echoed all over the world. There's so many people that don't know. What it really is. You and Reketpale from Vattenfall, so you guys got together, you understood that, Hey, we could talk to each other about these things and try to fix these problems.
Did the next conversation go, let's bring more along? Let's bring some others along?
Birgit Junker: Our initial goal was to increase the knowledge about blades in the industry. And I am still now after 22 years in the industry, I'm still asked, are blades hollow? So that goes along with your your guy in the U S asking if, glass fiber, really?
But but yeah, the initial goal was to increase the knowledge, but also. And to have a common front towards OEMs and other interesting parties, the first meeting we had was actually with DNV and GL about the the guideline for blade design. And while we were sitting at the table, one of the managers looked at us and said, very discreetly, I've actually never spoken to an end user before.
And these are the people doing the guideline for blade design that all blades are type approved type approved from. And with my normal way of speaking, sometimes I speak without thinking. I just looked at him and said, I guess that was about bloody time.
Allen Hall: It leads to a good point, Birgit.
So what is all this, when you have all this fragmenting knowledge running around from different organizations, how does that affect the performance and maintenance of blades out in the field? If you don't understand some of the fundamentals, what are the consequences of that?
Birgit Junker: You got two two very extreme consequences and then something in the middle.
The. The worst consequence is that people look at them like a black box. Like Joel's American site manager and don't do anything. Especially if they have one of the really old contracts where it says that blades are maintenance free. And then you have the they don't do anything. They run them and suddenly they fail and they get shocked and they're like, Oh my God, something happened.
I don't know what to do. And then you have the other extreme. Where a company will have an independent service provider on blade repairs servicing their blades or the OEM servicing the blade, and they will do repairs that aren't necessary because they are being over eager. They want to make sure that the blades are perfect all the time.
And you don't need that. You need something in the middle. You need to maintain your blades in such a way that they don't fail and you get the expected AEP. But that doesn't mean that you have to repair them every single year. It just means that you need to keep an eye on them, make sure that they don't crack that they don't have cracks in structural areas, that they don't have open leading edges or open tips, that they don't have lightning damages that are severe.
And if you do that, you can cut down on your maintenance. And have a turbine that operates really well.
Joel Saxum: I liken some of this, and this is not just this comet is not just blades, it's drive, train, gearbox, bearings, all these things and wind. So if you have say, we talk about a fleet wide problem.
You have a, we're in the States, a Ford truck. Okay? A Ford truck. There's millions and millions of these things out there. In the hands of all kinds of people. And so when there's an issue with something, there is a tribal knowledge that's so deep that you can reach out in every direction and find an answer.
Everybody has an answer to how to fix this carburetor or whatever it may be on this vehicle. In wind, we have such a small size of a fleet, right? So if you're, say you're a XYZ wind operator and you're a decent size, you have a thousand megawatts of wind production. You may only have 50 of one kind of turbine and 60 of one kind of turbine 80 of one kind of turbine So that's not a very big like statistical fleet to pull information from because failures happen at different rates and different things and different blade Manufacturers then we get deeper and we get into this one was manufactured at this plant versus that and we have this model But they have those blades and so it creates an inherently tough problem for the industry And the answer to it is the same answer that we, or in my opinion, the answer to it is the same answer that we hear at almost every conference, trade show, industry get together.
We hear collaboration and transparency. However, it's hard to make that happen, but that's what you guys have done here. That's what the global blade group is based on is collaboration and transparency, because if you're one operator and now all of a sudden you have, Eight friends that are operators and they can share information from their fleets with you.
Now you have this collective piece of info or collective batch of information that can give you so much more insight into what may be happening on your own fleet. You guys have taken on a lot of projects in this manner. What, what does that look like for collaboration?
Birgit Junker: To start with, we we were on a much lower level.
We were just like, we want to function as small own operators, a back office support. We had companies that were part of the initial, we started being the blade group and then there was the. Scandinavian Blake group or Nordic Blake group.