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. A yaw alignment is one thing, but say we can correct your yaw alignment. No, you can’t, because you can static align your turbine. But turbines are misaligned differently in different wind bins. So you need a dynamic alignment.
Yaw alignment, not a static yaw alignment. And the only thing you can do is static, you cannot do any dynamic yaw alignment. Um, very simple, uh, just to give you a, just a brief, I mean the, the, the equipment sitting behind the rotor, that means the, the anemometer, uh, cup anemometer, sensor, whatever you have, is sitting behind the rotor.
That means it’s sitting in turbulent, in turbulent wind. And it’s always chasing whatever has happened already. They get the information later and then try to chase the wind. Uh, there are some OEMs that don’t, because also you cannot yaw yaw bearings and brakes, et cetera. So but there’s also some OEMs that they’re allowing up to 7.
9 degrees before they do anything. And then they have, you know, uh, when you boil an egg, you have a watch that’s starting and they have a counter for 30 seconds. If it stays above 8 for 30 seconds, they start yawing back towards zero. And that’s the better one of them, they’re doing that. So that’s the, that’s the dynamic yaw alignment that you need to have.
I have no, we have no stake in LIDARs per se. We know them, we work with them, but we don’t have any monetary stake in it. Uh, but you need a Nacelle based LIDAR, basically, if you want to run optimal. That means you’re measuring 80 meters in front of the turbine in a clean airstream, that you get a way more accurate.
Uh, well wind speed and, and wind direction measurement. And then you connect that to controller and then that control your yoing, your yours. You’re not changing any, your strategy. You’re still doing the same. You don’t overdo the yawing. You just wanna make sure that you have a more accurate read on speed and direction where scan feeds into your pits.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Let, let’s, let’s talk about lidars for a minute because, uh, I know you and I have had a couple of discussions about Lidars. I don’t see them used very much in the United States at the moment. Uh, because I don’t think people really understand them, of what the, how they can use them for operational purposes, I, I think they see them as sort of a calib, kind of a calibration issue, and then once they’re done, they’re kind of move on.
But you’re saying that the LiDAR can really improve your operational performance.
Lars Bendsen: Oh, absolutely. Uh, you have, of course, I think it’s misinterpretation because there’s only, basically only one supplier of nacelle based LiDARs. There’s a ton of ground based LiDARs. There’s measuring up and kind of measuring in a cone when you do site assessment.
And that’s totally good for that. But this is a nacelle based LiDAR. Two beam. They can also get into four beam so we can measure wind shear. But for operational purposes, it’s actually more to get the wind speed and wind direction more accurate. And that is connected to the controller. With a, it doesn’t matter which controller, and that means that will do your, uh, your alignment in each wind bin.
Allen Hall: Okay, so the LiDAR is acting as an alignment tool constantly to try to correct for what the OEM equipment didn’t
Lars Bendsen: do. It’s kind of a third party, uh, call it, uh, anemometer just measuring 80 meters out in front of the turbine. And it does, and it does more accurate because it is laser basically, right? Right.
Right. Right.
Allen Hall: The implementation of LIDAR on turbines is what? Does every turbine have a separate lidar, or is a LIDAR good for a couple of turbines around it?
Lars Bendsen: No, you do. You do it on every single turbine because you cannot remote control. You cannot remote connect to every turbine’s controller. We had to be connected to the, to the controller.
And it’s very simple. We do a two turbines a day, so it’s not a big thing to do. It takes a couple of hours to get it aligned, connect to the controller. It’s very simple, actually.
Allen Hall: What does that process look like? Because now you got me curious. I’m taking, I’m taking this LIDAR unit. I’m bringing it up tower.
I’m mounting it to the top of the nacelle. I’m maybe doing a little bit of alignment to get it. Focus in the right place. And then I’m plugging that into the SCADA system, the control system? In
Lars Bendsen: the
Allen Hall: controller
Lars Bendsen: itself.
Allen Hall: Oh, in the controller itself.
Lars Bendsen: Yeah, and it’s a failsafe system. It’s running on different bus connections.
It’s too technical, also for me. But it’s a failsafe system, so if something goes wrong with the LiDAR, or the LiDAR can’t see heavy fog or something like that, then it goes back on the controller. on their own original anemometer. So it’s not, there’s no danger to it. Um, right now we have huge success on, uh, V82 in the US and Canada.
Um, the V82 is a bit of a different animal because it’s a stall regulated turbine. Uh, but again, uh, I talked to a colleague of mine said, well, that guy should change the, uh, the algorithm. He was not, he was not working that day. So, uh, so, so it’s not, it’s not very accurate. It’s not. Uh, so that’s one thing.
So V82 specifically, and also an interesting is that when a V82 running above radio wind speed, it very often come up with an alarm and shuts down. Alarm 236 or whatever it’s called, the flap wise, so it simply shuts down in high wind because it’s running at over speed because it’s only stall regulated.
So, What we are doing is running down on a ton of vibrations, that’s why it stops. So, um, so we are misaligning the turbine on purpose above radio wind speed. Below we are running as close to zero as we can. But above rated wind speed, we are misaligning the turbine. That removes the, uh, the vibrations and we also have a less load on that turbine.
So we’re actually opposite what you normally would think.
Allen Hall: You can produce more power having a little bit of an offset because the turbine doesn’t shut down.
Lars Bendsen: And we have now on, um, we have of the more than 200 turbines we have outfitted in Canada and the U. S., we are seeing, uh, we’re seeing, say, AP gains of 2.
8 to 3. 5 percent AP. And that’s without the extra uptime. That is just because of AP power. That’s remarkable.
Allen Hall: Getting 1 percent today can be a lot, because the turbines are usually pretty good, but if you can squeeze out more than that, that’s remarkable. Where is the LiDAR generally used at? What kind of farms be interested in LIDAR.
Is it kind of ridgeline farms or the wind can be a little more unique or is it in the flat plains of Kansas and Oklahoma and Canada?
Lars Bendsen: Well, of course, the more, the more obstacles you have in front of your turbines, the worse it gets. Uh, I’ve seen down in Mojave Desert, actually, on, on, on the side down there, the turbines on the same side are basically 90 degrees.
Misaligned from each other, but they’re both right. They’re, they’re well aligned, but of course the wind is simply coming around like that. So it looks weird when you’re driving there. They’re 90 degrees different or they the same wind farm, but they’re both correct. Aligned.
Allen Hall: Yeah. I would say something is wrong.
Stop the turbine. But yeah,
Lars Bendsen: but no, they’re both right. . So, uh, but that’s, that is really, so that’s, that’s one thing I think is the critical, we talk about maintenance. The, uh, the, the, um, again, back to my old phrase that some of VM have bored. The rotor is the motor, and it means if the rotor is not aligned in pitch and yaw, mass imbalance, et cetera, then you’re paying for it.
Allen Hall: That makes a lot of sense then. So knowing more about the wind with LiDAR has a, what kind of ROI is that on a LiDAR system?
Lars Bendsen: Well, depending on, uh, what market you’re in on the AP or the PPA, of course, right? So, so that’s depending on, but, uh, but we have seen less than a year. We also seen, uh, depending on, uh, what you’re in, right?
What is your, uh, what is your, uh, your factor up to your capacity factor, your PP, et cetera, so it’s not a, it’s not a, uh, one size fits all we have to look at it and, and make smart decisions, right? Boy,
Allen Hall: any ROI less than a year, I want to get involved with.
Lars Bendsen: This will actually get fired for not doing it.
Allen Hall: Right. You should. That’s too easy. Yeah. It sounds interesting. So let’s, let’s bump into pitch alignment and unbalanced rotors, which are very prevalent. Joel and I were traveling across Kansas and Oklahoma and Texas quite a bit this year. It’s fairly easy to see rotors that are imbalanced or that they’re just not, you can tell because there’s a little bit of wobble going on there.
Yeah. And often you can hear it. You can hear it. Yes.
Lars Bendsen: So what is the solution for that? How do they fix it? Well, first of all, we have to measure if it’s imbalanced and, uh, if, if it’s, uh, if it’s aerodynamically balanced or not. That’s, that’s number one. Let’s figure that out. Do we have the same pitch angle?
Regardless of what it is, it has to be the same. And it has to be the same all the time. Actual pitch or not is to be the same. So, uh, and they’re not, um, based on, on our, we had done more than, I think we had 2, 500 turbines now in the US and Canada, and, um, based, based on age of the fleet and also the, the, the manufacturer, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s crazy And, and people, they know it, but they don’t do anything.
And that’s where back to what I said before, but we have too many tourists in our industry, so the decision making, right? So I’m just took my note here. Uh, we talking to, to, to an engineering department. They understand it. Engineering and no money. They just, they just have to nod. Yeah, it’s good. Passing it down to the site, site looks at it.
They think it’s a great idea too. Now they have to sell it to either director of operations or asset management. Some director of operations, they understand it. But if you have money now, we can’t put it on import because that’s already cut in. So it absolutely Zero fat on that bone. There’s no money left for anything, projects like that.
And then sometimes we go to the as a manager, which might be often, or sometimes it’s a commercial, or you’re the person, less technical. And that’s where, that’s where the tourists come in because they simply don’t know technically enough about it.
Allen Hall: Well with an unbalanced rotor, It’s an almost inevitable.
You’re going to destroy a main bearing set. You’re going to probably take down a gearbox with it if you let it go on long enough. And in some of these cases that I’ve heard, the control cabinets are moving around so much that they’re damaging the control cabinets. At what point do you say it’s worth, I can’t replace control cabinets anymore, I’m just going to do a pitch alignment and be done with it.
It seems like an obvious choice.
Lars Bendsen: Sometimes what we have seen on, especially hydraulic pits, that it’s not as bad as you think, it’s way worse. So, um, we have had a customer change the cabinets. Three or four times a year. And they don’t know what it is. They just have vibrations. So now they buy vibration sensors.
Now they’re looking at extra bearings for the gearbox. Now they look at all kinds of stuff without looking at the front of your rotor. Look at the rotor. That’s the root cause. For 99 percent of your troubles.
Allen Hall: Well, I’ve heard of turbines, not often, but occasionally, where the, where the turbine enters the ground, right?
Or the tower enters the ground, that there’s gaps, big gaps, like almost a foot wide, whereas the turbine’s been swaying around, it’s pushing the soil away from it so much, which means, that’s, at that point, you have major problems, and I’m surprised I see Uh, the technicians and I hear stories about throw more gravel into the hole that’s happened near the tower because the tower is swaying so much like, like that’s going to solve it.
Lars Bendsen: It’s, it’s beyond right. It’s just really when we have, uh, I won’t mention the name of course, we have one customer we kind of rested our case. We can spend more time. That customer had amount of issue on foundation, even turbines falling over, shutting down sites. Second site they’re running, we have evidence that 60 percent of turbines are misaligned, but we cannot get 100, 000 to fix it.
You know what? That’s fine. We have tried now for a couple of years. We rest our case. We told you. We proved it. We measured 10 of your turbines. We know it is. We rest our case. We cannot spend more time if you don’t want to do it. And that is typically one of these situations that comes up to commercial people.
Far away from the site, they only look at dollars. Do we really need it? Do we really need it today, this year? And then the poor guy from operations said, well, we don’t technically need it this year, but, and then they shut it down. Done. So we kind of just resting our case. And, uh, that, but that’s, there is, there is more, there’s sophisticated owners and it has might be less sophisticated owners.
There’s also the owners that, um, financial owners, they get the 8%. We don’t want to hear about it. We do not want to hear. And the, uh, as a management company. Don’t want to take that battle because now their business case looks bad. They get the 8%. And now we’re adding custom operations. Can’t do that. Just gonna pay for gearbox.
Allen Hall: Well, you know, yeah, they like paying for gearboxes clearly How much is a pitch alignment typically to do in terms of time? Is it a day? An hour?
Lars Bendsen: Depending on again if it’s an older, just say V80 You have to go up and change the pit ramps. Our measurement takes 10 15 minutes and then to get it Stop the turbine, get it done, and go back again.
Might be an hour and a half, two hours. And we can re measure, and then it’s okay, and it’s up running. So it’s a two hour operation, worst case scenario. On a newer turbine, many of them, you have a tablet down tower. Siemens 2 3 on many of those. You can simply just put in on a tablet, put an offset in on blade A, B, C.
And it’s running, it’s a five minutes, 10 minutes operation.
Allen Hall: So I assume you can do multiple towers a day then. So you’re talking about in a couple of days, you can do a complete wind farm. Yeah. And stop all the vibration, all the main bearing replacement issues, the gearbox issues, the foundation issues, the cabinet issues in literally a couple of hours
Lars Bendsen: per tower.
We can for sure remove the root case in many of the cases. Again, it’s not like one size fits all. But in many cases we could do that. And, um, let’s say when the turbines are between eight and 12 years old, for sure, 50%, uh, roughly 50%, uh, are misaligned to a certain degree. Um, the better turbines, Siemens 2 3, hands down, they’re the least misaligned turbine, but it’s still about 30%.
And if they’re misaligned, it’s not too, too bad. Siemens has actually a part of their service scope to look after a misalignment. As the only one, as far as I know, they have a bracket they put in, and that works somehow. It’s better than nothing. It’s not ideal, but it’s And I say, okay, it’s, it’s, it’s doable way better than anything else.
Some OEMs don’t even have it in their service scope. Yeah. I, I’ve seen mostly that they don’t have it in the service scope at all. We also have a client where the OEM is supposed to look after that. It’s a pits where they get turbine. I don’t want to want an inch named a brand because some people might be guess where it is.
But, uh, the OEM service screen is supposed to look after that, but they don’t do it. And then the owner said, well, I’m not going to pay for it because they should do it. We have done the whole campaign. So we have put it out there and it’s more than 50 percent of the fleet. And now we have done a project.
We have followed it for two years. And of course, a pitch, sorry, a hydraulic pitch will leak all the time. So the turbo we just adjusted two years ago, that’s all misaligned again. Two years later, not crazy, but it’s been wandering. It’s been misaligned again. Who’s going to pay for that? If it’s a part of the OEM service concept, but they don’t do it, then the owner don’t want to pay for it.
But the owner’s gonna pay anyhow.
Allen Hall: Right, at the end of the day, the owner’s gonna pay anyhow. They
Lars Bendsen: just pay next to the
Allen Hall: gearbox. Well, yeah, you can do a very inexpensive pitch alignment test, or you can replace a gearbox. There’s sort of your choices right now. And I know, well, this is busy season for pitch alignment.
As we get into winter and the ground freezes, and you guys can get out there and do dozens of turbines. Uh, what do people do if they have pitch alignment problems? Do you see their towers swaying? Or the rotor moving in unusual ways? How do they get ahold of you? How do they contact you?
Lars Bendsen: Well, uh, we have the best website in the world, so a3.com.
So, uh, that’s, that’s as simple as it is. Um, and we have equipment, we have, we have capacity. We are doing right now. We are might be gonna buy an extra sort of equipment. It’s quite expensive piece of equipment. We are, we are running, but we are considering buying one more, uh, because we are, we are quite busy for sure.
Doing this year, I think we are six or 700 turbines. We’re done. Uh, this, this season alone. Um, so I think also that, and promotion or not, we know what we are
Allen Hall: doing. Here’s, here’s the, here’s the rub. You can get this done, get the pitch alignment done now, right? When it’s windy season in the wintertime in the United States, this is where everybody makes all their money, but you want to make sure your turbine is operating at peak performance and it doesn’t take much time to get this done.
The problem is, is that if you wait too long. Lars and AC 883 are going to be booked and you’re not going to be able to get them lined up to do this. So if you want to get it done You better get on ac883. com or get ahold of Lars via LinkedIn and get rolling now. And the same thing for the blade repair season.
I’ve had a lot of people contact Joel and me about blade repair season next year. We’re trying to find technicians or we need a capacity. We got problems. We need, we have cat fours and cat fives. We know they’re coming. They need to be reaching out to AC883. Also to get ready for next season because otherwise you’re not gonna have anybody on site.
Uh, so Lars Thank you so much for being on the podcast. It’s great to connect again, and we’re going to see you in Nashville At the O& M.
Lars Bendsen: That’s true. And the Ole Miss down there in Nashville. That would be interesting So the San Diego is a new Nashville and Nashville is new San Diego
Allen Hall: I’m going to miss the ocean, but it’ll be a good time in Nashville.
Thank you so much, Allen.
https://weatherguardwind.com/ac883-lidar-pitch/
One of the most remarkable characteristics of Donald Trump is his shamelessness. No matter how many lies he gets caught in, he’s always willing to tell one more–one that’s even more outrageous.
One would think that he and his supporters would eventually reach a limit, but the answer is clearly that such a limit does not exist.
Dogger Bank Wake Lawsuit, EverWind Hydrogen Farm
Rosemary previews Pardalote’s new hands-on blade repair course. EverWind’s Ocean Lake, Canada’s largest wind project, will feed a green hydrogen and ammonia plant in Nova Scotia rather than the grid. Plus BP’s exit from an offshore project in Japan, and the wake-effect lawsuit pitting SSE, Equinor, and Vårgrønn against RWE’s Dogger Bank South.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Allen Hall 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes is back this week.
Rosemary, you’ve been to a number of training courses over the last couple of weeks. The first off was GWO. What was your experience at GWO training?
Rosemary1: It was the fourth or maybe even fifth time that I’ve done it. Um, I did it a few times in Denmark and then, uh, this is the second time doing it in Australia. also, this was my first time doing first aid in Australia. Last time they did GWO here, but my first aid was still valid from Europe, so I, I didn’t redo it. And it’s like so much about [00:01:00] snakes and spiders and jellyfish But a good, good rule of thumb, not 100% accurate, but good rule of thumb, if it is something from the ocean that stung you, then you put something warm on it, and if it’s something from the land that stung or bit you, then something cold on it,
Allen Hall 2025: well, how often do you usually take GWO training?
Rosemary1: You gotta do it every two years to be valid. I don’t do it every two years because, um, if you do it every two years, like within two years, then you can do the refresher course. So that’s three days instead of four However, um, because I don’t climb constantly, like often it will be six months or more in between climbs, I’ll just do it before I know that I’ve got a climb.
all the other people except for one were technicians who, you know, have been working for a while.
So they’re also doing the full course, not the refresher. So they get a little bit more practice than I do. But, um, it’s just not often enough. Y-you know, like every time I go it’s like I, I really feel the need to have the refresher, um, because I’m just not fully on top of it. ‘Cause it’s [00:02:00] not just that you need to know what to do. You need to be able to… Like if you need to use it, you’re gonna be freaking out, you know?
This is the worst thing that’s probably ever happened in your life, and now you’ve gotta remember all your training. It’s like you want it to be actually second nature to some extent. So yeah, first day is manual handling, which is v- you know, very– That one’s very easy and I would be happy to never do that again.
Like I will always remember that. Um, then you got fire, um, fire safety awareness, and that one’s just fun ’cause you just get to, um, light fires and put stuff out then first aid, which I definitely always want a refresher on.
The CPR dummies at this place, they had lights, um, and it lit up green if you were doing it right, and I haven’t used a dummy that was so advanced before, so that was quite good. I realized I wasn’t pressing hard enough. and then yeah, last two days is working at heights training, which is the most intense ’cause you got your harness on all day and, um, you know, climbing up and down and rescuing people.
this was Rite Training in Goulburn, and, um, the [00:03:00] instructor’s name was Claire. highly recommend doing that one.
Allen Hall 2025: Is that a general requirement in Australia that you have GWO before you can climb?
Rosemary1: Like, yeah, they will sometimes, um, let you climb if you are babysat by people. I would not recommend other engineers, like if you’ve never climbed a wind turbine before, like I would really not recommend that you just go up with a team and haven’t done the training because you do need to be able to use a ladder safely and, um, you can, y- you can easily, like even inside the nacelle, you could easily hurt yourself really badly if you’re used to working in an office, uh, you’re upping your danger level by, you know, like many, many, many times by going up a turbine and it’s just something that you gotta take seriously.
Allen Hall 2025: How busy are the courses in Australia? Are a lot of technicians trying to get in and get trained?
Rosemary1: No, it’s people that have a job that are getting trained. But there were heaps of techs in this course. There were maybe eight or so, which is also part of the reason why it took a really long time.
Allen Hall 2025: So [00:04:00] this week, as we record, y- you’re presenting a blade repair course for engineers and technicians. a completely new area that you’re, uh, going into in terms of offering advice and expertise that it’s really hard to find on the planet. It’s probably a, a, a busy or, or requested course, I would imagine, in Australia, where you just don’t have access to a lot of the manufacturers.
Rosemary2: it’s a, it’s a course for just for engineers or technical type people, um, but including hands-on stuff. So the way that I I forced this to come into being was just the last five years. I, um, you know, I started working a lot on wind turbine blade repairs and, um, people would ask me, you know, “Have these repairs been done right?”
And the thing is that the only repairs that I had anything to do with when I was working at LM were weirdo ones, right? [00:05:00] Where the normal, like a technician couldn’t, couldn’t handle it. It was outside of, um, yeah, their, their standard, uh, kind of repairs that they can do for whatever reason. and now in the work that we do at Part Load, it’s primarily normal repairs, and I just didn’t know exactly what technicians know. You know, how do they, how do they know whether they can repair it or not? What do they know before they go up there?
When are they calling the engineer? Um, all that sort of stuff, like the normal stuff. eventually it became less about me learning, ’cause like I said, I kind of picked up most of it. Um, but now I’ve got staff that I’m training up to be, uh, you know, composites engineers and to work with these kinds of issues. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks involved in what we do when we, like, assess the condition of a wind farm.
A lot of what we do is look main- manually looking through photos and thing- if things are classified right or not. I [00:06:00] Found this guy from Direct Wind Services, Jurij Eska. He’s a blade engineer. He’s worked in Europe and then come back to Australia, so a little bit like me. And, um, I just worked with him on a few projects and I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, this guy, uh, he really gets it.” And I asked him, “How do you, how do you train your technicians?
What course do they do? Maybe I can do that course.” And he said, “Oh, we train them ourselves.” And so then I asked him to put this course together. So where we started off the course yesterday, that was, um, uh, an indoor session where I was talking through how are blades designed, uh, certified, tested, manufactured, um, what kinds of manufacturing defects can you see and what do they do about them in the factory?
‘Cause you know that they’re doing a lot of repairs in the factory already before you ever see a, a brand new blade. and then the next three days we’re going to be working on, um, yeah, grinding and [00:07:00] infusions and a bit of a, a bit of theory about, um, composite repairs.
Allen Hall 2025: What do you feel like are those key skill sets that engineers should know how to do, maybe not as well as a, a professional technician that does it a lot, but at least at a beginner’s level should be able to complete them before they start repairing blades on their own and giving advice about how to repair blades?
What, what are those key items?
Rosemary2: part of it is that I want them to be able to understand what is a bad damage and what’s not a bad damage cause you look a lot at images from the outside, but it’s really about what’s on the inside and how deep it goes is the real thing.
So, um, it’ll be about learning, you know, developing some judgment about, um, how bad it can be and how bad it can look on the outside. We’re not gonna be looking at so many real damages ’cause like obviously we’re just dealing with pieces that are in the, um, in the, uh, workshop and Yuri has [00:08:00] made some samples for us, um, purposely made them badly so that we’ve got some, you know, damage to find.
Allen Hall 2025: Are you addressing carbon fiber at all?
Rosemary2: Uh, I actually haven’t asked about that. I don’t think so. Carbon fiber is, um, is a real pain to work with because it’s conductive. Like, even grinding it makes a bit of a hazardous work environment. We did talk a little bit about the different materials yesterday and, um, about pultrusions. And actually, it turns out Yuri used to work somewhere where they, uh, manufactured pultrusions, and I had always, I was always under the impression that a pultrusion is, you know, like, perfectly s- perfectly straight.
That’s the point. And he’s like, “No way.” No way. There’s waviness in the pultrusions
Allen Hall 2025: And on March 3rd through 5th at WOMA 2027, Rosie, you’re gonna give part of this course as part of WOMA, right?
Rosemary2: Little, little mini course. We’ll have to decide what, what makes sense to include, ’cause it was… Yeah, I went through really a, a fair [00:09:00]bit about blades yesterday, you know, like why they are shaped the way that they are. So we had to talk about aerodynamics and, um, why they’re made of composite. So we had to talk about, you know, like composite materials, like how, how they, how they work So I don’t know if, uh, people wanna write in comments that m- we should, we should do some sort of, um, poll beforehand to see what are the topics that are most interesting to people, ’cause I think we’ll have a half day, right? So we’ll need to be, we’ll need to be focused.
Allen Hall 2025: the description of repairs and what repairs should look like could be tremendously valuable. Everybody who has seen a repair always wonders, “Was that repair done right?” And s- and if you can have some general tools to know, like, “Uh, maybe there’s something not quite right here,” or, “That looks like a solid repair,” that would be a tremendous help to the industry, p- particularly for asset managers
Rosemary2: Yeah. And you know what I think is even more useful than being able to pick out when it’s wrong is to be able to know when it’s right. You can– Y-you know, like it is so– [00:10:00] It’s such a relief. Like it takes such a mental load off you when you’re just like, “Yeah, that’s all, that’s all good. That’s normal. Okay, I know that that– I knew that that would happen, so this is not a surprise.”
‘ know, once you know you can make that judgment, you can do it very quickly and focus your attention where it should be, so you don’t need to stress for an hour over every repair. You’re just like, “Yeah. Good, good, good, good, good.” And then, “Mm, please explain why you have chosen to not, not repair this, but just put a Band-Aid over it.”
that’s the goal of this training is to get everybody, y-you know, technical people, not people who wanna ever be a blade repair technician. They’ve got their own training that covers what they need to know. But this one is just, yeah, getting people like asset managers or my employees to learn what they need to know about composites, given that they have already got a strong engineering education.
So, um, you know, they know a lot of the stuff, but just need to know the composite-specific stuff and wind turbine blade-specific stuff
I will run this course again, by the [00:11:00] way, ’cause there was a lot of people who wanted to do it I couldn’t fit in. So it’ll happen at least once. I’ll keep on running it until everybody that wants to do it has, has done it. But, um, yeah, feel free
to get in touch
Allen Hall 2025: So if you wanna attend Rosie’s short blade course at WOMA 2027, just visit woma2027.com and register today
Allen Hall 2025: [00:12:00] Well, over in Canada, they just approved a, really a wind farm big enough to power a small city, and almost none of the electricity is going to the grid, which is a very interesting aspect to some of the things that are happening in Canada at the minute.
So up in Nova Scotia, uh, they’ve conditionally approved the Ocean Lake Wind Project. This’d be the largest wind farm in the province’s history. Up to 158 turbines will rise, uh, generating as much as 1.2 gigawatts of power. But this power is not headed to households in Canada. Nearly all of it will be feeding Everwind Fuels’ green hydrogen and ammonia plant at Point Tupper, where clean electrons will become a fuel that can be shipped across the ocean to Europe. And Matthew, there’s been a lot of [00:13:00] projects like this in Europe that have stopped more recently, particularly in northern Europe and up in Scandinavia, uh, on the hydrogen side. Or at least they’ve slowed them down. Canada seems to be going into that breach maybe to fill that void. And is there a marketplace for this to occur up in Canada?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting. Um, you know, like you say, a number of canceled projects, and in Australia there’s been numerous canceled projects. So I like, um, the analogy or use of the term hopium rather than hydrogen, um, where, um, everyone’s hoping hydrogen will be the answer. Um, although, you know, what I, what I’ve read and understood is that, um, you know, the commercials just don’t really stack up and, um, yeah. So in terms of South Australia anyway, um, there was some major, um, hydrogen, uh, development planned with, um, you know, it, it never stacked up. So, you know, it sounds like a great [00:14:00] idea, um, but I’m not sure that the commercials will ever stack up unless you’ve got that guaranteed offtake for the, for the ammonium
Allen Hall 2025: Yolanda, what kind of uphill battle is this to get this wind farm up and running knowing that it’s one customer and that commercial market is a little shaky at the minute?
Yolanda Padron: what we saw, they have a lot of ca- caveats, right? So they’ve, they need to secure the customers before they start building and before they do anything, um, behind the meter. But it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s a pretty big wind farm, and it’s pretty far up north. But I mean, we, we talked to someone in, in northern US today who was having icing issues.
So I mean, of course we know Canada is no, no stranger to that, if they do make it work, I think it’d be really, really exciting to, to have sort of one technology power another, um, instead of just what we’ve been hearing a lot of the potential data centers and, and just wind po- [00:15:00] powering data centers.
Matthew Stead: Why not data centers? You know, seriously, like you said, Yolanda. why not go something that does have commercial demand?
Yolanda Padron: we’ve talked a lot about the potential of da- data centers, right? And we’ve talked a lot about people wanting to do them. Um, but there’s also a lot of talk of potentially doing data centers up in space and a lot of talk of maybe what if we do it offshore or, you know. And so I think there’s a lot of what ifs with data centers.
Of course, there’s a lot of what if with this, but just from a technology standpoint, I think this is really intriguing to have something that’s, that’s a little bit even more out there than what we’ve heard so far
Allen Hall 2025: Is it a build it and they will come type of s- situation here that hydrogen and ammonia may be the, the first offtake, but realistically, if that doesn’t work out, they can still connect to the grid and feed Canada, feed the Northeast of the United States or something else
Matthew Stead: Also, um, like Japan has [00:16:00] also expressed strong demand for, um, ammonia, and so, you know, they- they’re on the East Coast, aren’t they? So, you know, shipping it from East Coast to Japan is not gonna be so, so easy. I stick by what I said before. It’s hopium. it’s not a plan
Allen Hall 2025: I just saw an article today talking about Airbus continuing on with a hydrogen aircraft, and I think they were gonna work with a Japanese firm to work on that together. Six months ago I thought that died, but maybe it’s still in the offering. Maybe there’s an offtake for hydrogen. B- besides the, you know, replacement for some of the, uh, more unpleasant gases that are used in steel production and in some other industry things, maybe part of this is airplane fuel.
Which ammonia is one of those offerings also, right? The, there’s been a number of efforts to turn ammonia fuel into essentially jet fuel. They configure the engines to burn ammonia, which is a possibility. It does seem remote though, [00:17:00] honestly. There doesn’t seem to be a huge pull for hydrogen, and there’s not a, a major market for ammonia at at least at the moment.
So I don’t know. It, it’s… When you’re talking about gigawatts of capacity you’re gonna build, you, you hopefully have an offtake
for it
Yolanda Padron: if they designed it for it being not connected to the grid, right, it just is kind of like a behind the meter thing, and then could they later retrofit it into there? Like, how would all that permitting and everything
Allen Hall 2025: I–
well, that’s a great question. I– There are a number of, uh, connections between the United States and Canada at the moment. guess is that when they place this wind farm, they have that alternate route lined up, just like any wind farm in here in the States, that you’ll find them real close to high-voltage transmission lines.
Generally, those are the easy ones because transmission lines cost money and take time for permitting. I’m not sure Canada has those kind of restrictions, right? But Nova Scotia is not the easiest place in the world to do heavy construction work, just the [00:18:00] nature of Nova Scotia. It will be fascinating to see how they progress with this, but it’s something to keep an eye on because a lot of other projects like this have slowed down
Matthew Stead: Do you remember when some of the OEMs were talking about, um, putting electrolyzers on their offshore wind turbines? So the, the theory, the theory was you’ve got offshore wind turbine, you don’t connect it to the grid standalone, um, and you generate hydrogen or, uh, possibly ammonia on the actual wind turbine.
And then every now and then you just decant it, you know, drive up with a boat, you know, plug in the hose, and then suck out the hydrogen or ammonia. So, um, yeah, once again, all of those have gone quiet, haven’t
they?
Allen Hall 2025: speaking of Japan, a global oil giant is walking away from the Japanese offshore wind project, uh, but the project’s not dying. BP has told its Japanese partners it intends to withdraw from a wind farm planned off Yamagata Prefecture, uh, apparently worried about [00:19:00] profitability. The 450-megawatt project sits, uh, just off the coast, and it is led by trading house Marubeni, which says it will press ahead without BP.
Kansai Electric and Tokyo Gas remain on board also. So BP’s exit follows really a, a brutal year for Japan, where Mitsubishi has, and some others, have pulled out of, uh, at least three projects so far, uh, over rising construction costs, and I think a lot of that’s tied to inflation. Uh, the ambition’s still there for, uh, for a number of companies, but it’s just getting harder and harder to do projects in Japan.
Is this just the nature of the economy in Japan at the moment, or is this more about Japanese policy on the offtake,
Matthew Stead: I, I’m not really deep into the details but, you know, it just appears to me like a blip. I mean, there, I think there’s a lot of commitment in Japan to, you know, carry [00:20:00] out their offshore developments and I, I think this is probably more just a blip, um, and a little, you know, internal corporate, you know, argument rather than a sustained issue on offtake agreements and so forth
Allen Hall 2025: Well, Yolanda, how hard is it to keep partners on a wind development in general? Are there a lot of moving pieces there until the turbines hit the water or hit the
earth?
there’s
Yolanda Padron: I think a lot of moving pieces, but not, uh, I haven’t seen a lot of changes once it’s been publicly announced and everything’s, you know, everything’s been signed and everything. Um, I do think this is really interesting. I know we’ve talked a lot about, about having, about the idea of like sometimes people think wind’s really expensive, and the way that we’re gonna make wind work is just making it cheaper for everybody and just optimizing it as much as possible, um, and, and just being, having the turbines be as resilient as possible, right?
And I think such a strong player just backing out maybe [00:21:00] will incentivize some of the people in Japan to sort of try to see how they can optimize it a little bit more. I’m really excited to see it. I don’t know. It’d be… I think it’d be a nice it
Allen Hall 2025: Isn’t the bonus to offshore wind the price stability? Although the price may be higher today than you may be happy to pay, the stability of that price is a huge leverage point when you compare it to things like oil and gas or natural gas, um, in particular, which are highly volatile, that for electricity, at least you have this fairly steady source at a fixed price that you can plan out 10 years, 20 years, 25 years, maybe even 30 years. And as batteries become more prevalent on the grid, that the math even gets better over the years. Isn’t that the bonus? And, and if [00:22:00] everybody can focus on the long-term effects to the economy is where all the action will be?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, I mean, when I first, um, started looking into wind, you know, 10 plus years ago, I, I won- wondered why. Why would you build offshore with all that expense? And then, you know, it became clear to me just around the, um, you know, the diversity, you know, the, the fact that you might get more wind at times that you don’t get onshore wind, and the fact that it’s more consistent.
Um, yeah, and, you know, so those… I- it’s really a trade-off, isn’t it? Between the capital costs and the, um, more reliable, more consistent, um, offshore wind. So I think, you know, I, I was convinced at the start, I thought it was crazy, but then obviously it’s, it’s a, it’s a… it makes sense
Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I agree. And I think, uh, depending on where you’re having your offshore wind farm, you run into things that you maybe haven’t run into before, right? I know onshore we run into a lot of things in the [00:23:00]US and Australia that we, you know, the, the turbines just maybe weren’t designed for, or there wasn’t a lot of research being done because it was being done in Europe and, and the conditions are really different.
Um, and just the same way, you know, the sea is different in different places. There’s different depths. There are diff- different things that you need to worry about. but yeah, I, I completely agree that there’s a lot more generation, um, offshore. It’s, it’s bigger turbines. Um, there can be bigger, larger costs. You know, if you need to do a blade replacement or something, it, it can get, again, really expensive really quickly. But, but it’s, it’s a trade-off for sure.
Allen Hall 2025: We’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we wanna talk about a place where wind is being fought over versus projects slowing down
[00:24:00] over in the UK, there’s a big fight about offshore wind, and not just about where wind turbines will be planted, but more about how they will affect other wind turbines.
So RWE is defending the UK government’s approval of its three-gigawatt Dogger Bank South project, which won its consent order, uh, basically a month and a half ago. Uh, but the developers next door are taking that approval to court. Equinor, SSE, Vårgrön own the neighboring 3.6-gigawatt Dogger Bank wind farm, and they have filed for j-judicial review.
Their argument is technical, but the price tag is not. They say wake effects, where one wind farm steals the wind from another due to turbulence, could cut their output and cost them between €500 million and [00:25:00] €669 million over the life of their project. That’s a lot of money, Matthew. A half a million euros is not something to ignore.
It looks like this is headed to some judicial court or maybe arbitration. Wake effects, which are actually not that well understood from what I can tell at the moment, there’s a lot of discussion and argument about, uh, how real are they or, or what effect they can have on power output. Uh, there’s a lot of money at stake, and the location of some of these wind farms is pretty close to one
another
Matthew Stead: you know, we always, always talk about, you know, AEP loss and, you know, the, the challenge is actually measuring it. And, um, you know, I’ve heard different numbers, but, you know, plus or minus half a percent of AEP loss, um, appears to me from what– in discussions, you know, the, the limit of what you can actually ever measure on a good day.
Um, I just wonder, I mean, while those numbers, you know, €500, um, [00:26:00] million is a, is a big number, um, but what is that as a percentage of the overall output of that, of that facility? Um, I, I don’t know the answer, but, you know, if, if it’s, you know, half a percent, I think you’d be struggling to, um, struggling to justify that, that wake effect loss.
I mean, you know, going back to what you said, Allen, you know, there are wake effects of some sort, but it’s a question of how much. I mean, that-that’s why aircraft don’t take off, um, too closely, isn’t it? Because there’s wake effects. Um, so it’s definitely a given, definitely a given. Um, but, you know, how much of an impact it truly is.
Um, and I mean, there’s always other variables, you know, variables in the weather, you know, wind patterns, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, and how much do this– does this actually compare to those other, other variables?
Allen Hall 2025: Yolanda, how would you even mitigate wake turbulence on an adjacent wind farm? Are there ways to do that today?
Yolanda Padron: I think the, the aerodynamics, Allen, would [00:27:00] be a lot more in your court than, than in mine.
Matthew does have a really good point. I mean, what are we… With the UK wanting to ramp up offshore as much as they want to ramp up, right? They’re not going to just cancel a large project, and they need to… I mean, it’s not, uh, there’s a finite amount of space, right? So what, I mean, what, what are you, what are you gonna do?
It’s like, it’s what, like, what happens in onshore where you, you really hope maybe that you don’t get a wind farm that’s really, really close by. Um, but you might also want to plan for it. I mean, I know of sites that have le- that lease a little bit of extra land so that way no one else can lease it, or that they can, they can use that to, to travel between turbines.
Um, and it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s kind of… Isn’t it kind of just part of it, part of the trade?
Allen Hall 2025: it has to be, right, at some point. [00:28:00] The question in my mind about all this is how much wake is there? Is it directly impacting the adjacent wind farm? Is there– are there things that can be done to minimize that wake turbulence? I think the answer is yes, but as wind turbine blade designers, I haven’t seen the same level of wake reduction that we have seen more recently in aerospace.
It’s complicated to do some of these things on a wind turbine blade. You’re mass-producing. You’re making a blade a day or a blade in a day-and-a-half timeframe. Are you gonna design this really aerodynamic tip to go on to reduce the wake on a particular wind farm? Probably not, right? So it’s, it’s– is it worth doing that versus the, the cost it would be?
So it’s gonna cost 500 million euros in loss to an adjacent wind farm. Do you put that 500 million into the design effort and the molds and [00:29:00]everything else to make these blades different? Uh, it’s a tight trade-off, right? It– from the engineering side. It may be better settled in the courts, honestly. Just it may be cheaper to do it that way.
Matthew Stead: Uh, I, I was gonna go down a different avenue. I mean, obviously there’s always curtailment. There’s always curtailment due to grid congestion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, maintenance. I mean, if they, if they just– when wind is coming from a certain direction, they could just de-rate and, uh, just not absorb as much energy, um, out of the wind when the wind is coming from that sector.
And so that would be a way of, um, not modifying the turbine, just de-rating it under a certain wind condition. I mean, the same thing occurs with noise curtailment all the time. Um, so there’s, there’s noise modes. There could be a, a wake loss mode. We should trademark that
Allen Hall 2025: Well, you know who’s gonna make money out of this no matter what? The
lawyers.
Allen Hall 2025: [00:30:00] Well, in this quarter’s PES Wind magazine, there are a number of great articles, and you can download the entire magazine and all those great articles at peswind.com. There’s a nice little article from Enerpac Tool Group, and if you’re not familiar with them, they make a, a number of tools that are handy in the wind industry.
Uh, and, you know, routine torque checks is kind of a pain, right? And the problem with a lot of those checks is that you have to haul around a heavy hydraulic pump to do it. And so if you’ve ever been to a trade show and seen some of these [00:31:00] pumps, it is a pain. And if you h- have to move around, especially on a w- wind site a lot, you really don’t wanna have a heavy pump that maybe is made for something, uh, more robust.
Uh, and you need something that’s portable. That’s what you really need, right? So the Enerpac Tool Group has really created this, uh, LU series they call. Which is a lightweight, portable, hydraulic pump, which is for intermittent work, which is what happens on most wind sites. It’s intermittent. Uh, so the product line director, Angie Wallace, uh, talks about this and says technician feedback has shaped this new tool, uh, from multiple carrying handles and an upward-facing gauge.
And that is a big thumbs up from me. When you put the gauge on the side of the tool where you can’t see it, such a problem. It’s like they’ve never used it. Well, obviously, the Enerpac has been talking to technicians, and they put the gauge where the technician can actually see it. Uh, and it’s designed to go through towers and, and tight [00:32:00] spaces.
Uh, so this is made specifically for offshore conditions. It’s ruggedized, and it’s a great tool. And a lot of times, Matthew, when you s- see the technicians about and some of the tools they carry, you’re like, man, that is not a good tool for this. That is, that is too much to be hauling around, particularly uptower.
It’s nice that we can see some tools that are designed job
Matthew Stead: I, I’m completely convinced. I, I don’t have much to say. Um, I mean, my, my day job is, um, you know, designing products and working out what products we’re going to, to work on, and, you know, the customer is the main voice you should listen to, um, at least in the first step. So always listen to the customer first, and I think from what you’ve described, customer first, and then develop the product to suit the application.
Yeah, so yeah, I’m convinced
Allen Hall 2025: Yolanda, you’ve seen Interpack on sites, haven’t you? It does seem like I run across them once in a while at some of the US
sites
Yolanda Padron: Every once [00:33:00] in a while. I do gotta say I love the idea of when, like, actual, like, boots on the ground people’s feedback is taken into consideration for, for anything really. And so this is, this just makes me really happy because I think a lot of times, like, as engineers, like, we love the idea of just, oh, I’m gonna do this really cool fancy thing, and then it’s just it- no one can use it, or a very specialized person has to be able to use it.
And so actually doing, you know, modifying a product so that it, it makes sense for the people using it, and I know we’ve, we’ve all talked about it a lot internally and, and we continue to work towards making it easier and easier on, on the people actually installing the product. Like, this is, this is really exciting.
Allen Hall 2025: So if you need a lightweight pump for tightening some bolts uptower, particularly if you’re offshore, take a look at this Enerpac line of LU lightweight series tools. It’s well worth it. And at that same time, you should check out PES Wind magazine. Just go to [00:34:00] peswind.com
That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out directly to Rosemary, and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. for yolonda, Matthew, and Rosemary, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.
Looks like communism! is the new mantra of the GOP. It’s coming from the least intelligent of their leaders to the least intelligent of their followers.
Could work!
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