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Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Blade Lightning Damage Solved

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.

And these basic LPS systems were never designed for that. So they, they’ve taken the knowledge that they had at 30 meter [00:09:00] blades and they’re applying it to 60 meter blades. Realizing that, oh, maybe it doesn’t work, that we thought it would, that the laboratory testing that we did as part of the IEC compliance is not valid.

As the blades get longer, that’s a reality that the operators are finding out the hard way, so the OEMs know it because they’re getting the phone calls clearly. But the operators are the ones having to go out and spend all the time and the money, generally speaking, at least in the US, to go out and fix all this stuff.

Part particularly it’s if it’s outta warranty, and that’s where the cost structure comes in, that a lot of operators account for a certain amount of lightning damage to happen, and the IEC spec would allow that. However, that number is much higher. And so instead of being a couple of percentage points a year that you’re gonna go off and spend in terms of lightning repair, it’s five times that, 10 times that the numbers are big.

Joel. And I

Joel Saxum: think that’s an important concept to, to say here, let’s spin you back to when you said LPS systems are designed on [00:10:00] incumbent knowledge from old systems. That’s true. That’s what’s happening. If you look at, look at a GE blade, look at a 37 meter, 40 meter blades, the 62 2 meter blades are basically the same thing.

Just like, uh, you know, shift, stretch, print. Right. And that’s kind of what they are. And, and now. We’ve themed data from those cooking in the field. Cooking, I don’t wanna use that term, sorry, pun. Pun, not intended, but, but pun intended, I guess in some cases. But we’ve seen soak time on these blades in the field and in various environments, right?

So a lot of the stuff that we get, because it’s really bad, is the Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Indiana. Um, you know, up through the middle of the United States ’cause the lightning is bad here. Another one that’s a hot spot for us is India. India has really bad lightning, kind of the same, same setup, but we have now seen years of data, the 62 2 and the 56 9, which is essentially the same blade, just a [00:11:00] couple meters longer.

They’ve been in, out in the field since 2019 ish. In, in, in a large way from 20 20, 20 21. So we’ve got a lot of these that are out of warranty. Where the operators are really looking at them and they’re starting to collect a lot of data. And, and that’s the important thing here. And that’s why I wanna go back, like to design the IEC standard and all these things, and, and that that way of testing things is you can pass an IEC test as a certification in a laboratory, but putting these things into the field in a large scale is a different story.

And what we’ve seen over the last few years is a lot of data on these, uh, data from. Here’s your damage reports from your drone inspection. Okay? Now we have years of data of, of lightning damages in these spec for these specific wind farms. We couple that with lightning data from, uh, you know, it might be a remote lightning detection service.

Ideally there’s lightning detection sensors on that. That’s why when we put StrikeTape in the field, we put the eLog ping lightning fleet [00:12:00] sensors on everything we put out because we want to know exactly what’s happening in the field. But we have this damage data. Have this lightning data. So we’re starting to develop a really big history, a complete history that we can draw from statistically of what these turbines are actually doing in the field.

And we’re seeing a completely different story than what is told in the IEC spec.

Allen Hall: Oh yeah. The numbers don’t line up. And when you talk to operators about it, they’re expecting them to, the numbers line up to the IEC spec, because that’s what historically happened with 1.5 G machines. Like, yeah. You know? It works pretty well.

But when they moved to the two x machines and larger, what they found is something dramatically different. And we’ve done a, uh, looked over a couple years of lightning damage in the middle of the United States, down Texas and Oklahoma, and we looked at eight wind farms specifically to see what the lightning damage rates were on ge.

Essentially some one x longer blades, 50 [00:13:00] meter ish blades up to the 62 2. Meter blades and we looked at a sample, what of over 900 turbines, right Joel?

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it was 900 turbines. Uh, we reviewed over 415 damages and, and with that was over 6,000 lightning pulses. So we looked at lightning events, lightning pulses, the total amount of turbines in varied geographies around kind of what we call lightning alley.

And we came up with some, some very interesting results and, and I’m gonna also throw this one in there. The reason we did this was we wanted to see what’s really happening in the field to all of these turbines and then compare it to a wind farm that, from commissioning data on the ground, was, had an additional LPS protection with StrikeTape installed on it from day one before the blades are even slow and the results are, uh, they’re pretty shocking.

Um, what we saw. Is rates of damage. When we say rates of damage, that is lightning strikes to [00:14:00] damages on the blades and we’re gonna, and we also caveated that with a cat three and above. So we don’t care as much about the ones and twos. Those can, the blades can run, not a big deal, but cat three and above, which is going to be the ones that need to be repaired.

What we saw was a 14 to 34% damage rate. So that means strikes. To damages. If you average that out, it was right above 20% across those HA wind farms. So we saw basically one in five strikes causing a damage of cat three to five or above. Uh, to that, those GE turbines in Texas and Oklahoma in our study, those 900 turbines

Allen Hall: and that is equal to dollars.

So one in five lightning strikes causing damage. Pretty much every year you’re fixing blades. It’s a question of how many blades could fix and how expensive is the repair. Some of these repairs have been cat four cat fives, where they have not [00:15:00] been able to repair them. Tips blown off, you know, the split trailing edges, that kind of thing where it just gets expensive to even do the repair.

And then your, your costs are going from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions, depending upon. The severity and whether they need to buy one blade or black or buy three. It just changes the dynamic greatly. And the thing that we were trying to learn with all the study work that we were doing is we did install StrikeTape on a farm in the middle of all these other farms, basically all the same turbine, to see if there would be a, a market difference in the damage rate.

And Joel, we saw huge improvements by putting StrikeTape on these. GE Vern Nova turbines. Yeah,

Joel Saxum: so those, those turbines that we said there, that had that just above 20% damage rate, that was the average. That one wind farm that we installed StrikeTape on was just less than 4%. So five times less damage on that one wind farm that [00:16:00] had StrikeTape on it as compared to all the other ones around it.

Now that’s basically an 80% reduction, right? So that 80% number. You can roll that over to your o and m costs, right? So if you spent a $500,000 on lightning repairs this year, you could expect to only spend a hundred thousand dollars next year if you had Strike Jabon. And, and, and I wanna also say this, this isn’t our first case study, right?

This is not our first study of data. We have multiple from all over the world. We’ve got some that we’ve done in the Mediterranean, we’ve done some in Japan. Very, very bad. Lightning over there. Um, and multiple ones in the US ongoing. Right now we’re continuing to collect this data to show, and we have seen a lot of wind farms with a hundred percent reduction in lightning damages.

We’ve got two of them going on right now in the states, and I was just looking at yesterday that have like, one of them has 15 turbines that we put StrikeTape on and some iLogic ping lightning sensors. They have received 34 strikes over those 15 turbines and zero [00:17:00] damages from those. It’s, that’s the kind of results we wanna see.

Allen Hall: And through this study, Joel, one of the things we were able to do, because we had the drone images and all the data, is we could see where the lightning damage was occurring. Because lightning damage around the tip, like you’re talking about, can be cat one, cat two. A lot of times it’s cosmetic in at some level.

Uh, you can’t get threes, fours, and out at the tip, but generally they’re not too bad. When you start taking strike damage further down the blade, when we’re talking about five meters in 10 meters in, those tend to be more structural, which require more time and more money to repair. And what we were finding in our study is that a lot of the ge, ve, nova blade damage is happening like 10 plus meters from the tip.

It was remarkable ’cause I didn’t think it was happening at that level, but the number of. Of lightning damages that were Cat three, you know, plus down the blade was what, somewhere around [00:18:00] 25% of the damaging strikes were down there. That’s remarkable.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, and it goes completely against what the IEC standard says it should be.

Right. The IEC standard says basically about above 70% of lightning damages should be in the last two meters of the plate, so right near the tip. Not the case, right? We saw a lot of them 10 meters plus that 25% level. And to put this into kind of engineering context, right? Structurally in these designs, say when we’re talking the GE designs right here, that down conductor runs right along the shear web voop, right?

It’s gets attached right to it down the blade. So when you’re 10 meters plus down from the tip and you, that lightning has to connect somewhere and it’s always gonna connect to that down conductor. If it strikes it through the trailing edge, you’re gonna hit the down conductor, but it’s gonna burn a little bit on the shear web.

If it strikes it through the leading edge, it’s got to go through the shear web to get to the down conductor. So no matter what, when you’re 10 [00:19:00] meters down, you’re basically a Cat four or cat five, like you kind of skip Cat three right away. Because you’re into a structural zone. It’s a structural loading element, and it has a lightning damage either through it or adjacent to it.

So that’s got to be fixed now, because what happens to those as well is you lose the structural integrity. That thing runs for another week, another two weeks, another three weeks, and it gets weaker, weaker, weaker. You get a weird wind load, snaps that blade tip and that blade comes around, hits the tower, it can take the tower down.

We’ve, we’ve seen that. We’ve heard of that multiple times. So we want to avoid those kind of things, but that’s a, that was a big realization of this study is there’s actually a lot more damage happening down the blade. But this also goes into, gave us a really good understanding of why this is happening.

After we track some of the strength of the lightning strikes and what is actually going on with the physics of this LPS system, and maybe Alan, you could share that a little bit of why we’re getting strikes further down the blade.

Allen Hall: Yeah, the basic [00:20:00] LPS system is not really attractive to lightning. I mean, it is somewhat attractive to lightning, but looking at data from our friends over at OGs Ping who have all the lightning sensors and we have lightning sensors installed all over the place at the moment, trying to track these, this lightning damage.

And what we found is that the lightning strikes that are getting by the LPS system that are doing that damage down the blade are baby lightning strikes. They’re roughly 15 kamps 1315 kamps. So the, the vast majority of damaging strikes are not these 200 kilo amp off the IEC chart kind of strikes. What they are, are the littler strikes that still contain a significant amount of energy that are getting by the LPS system.

Seeing that down conductor, putting your hole in a blade, pumping some current in there, and creating this big repair, particularly if it goes through the sheer web. So the, the strikes that we’re trying to protect against. From the IEC standpoint, when you’re out in the laboratory and you see the pictures coming from the OEM and they’re, [00:21:00] they got this lightning strike thing going on, they’re looking at big lightning strikes.

That’s what they’re out there testing. What they should be testing for is the ability to capture these little lightning strikes that are doing the vast majority of the damage, particularly, uh, on like these GE for over blades. It’s, it’s amazing when you start to correlate the data, like, why did it, the lightning strike happened five meters down, 10 meters down, well.

Because little lightning strikes these little low amplitude lightning strikes don’t have the, the strength that triggers the LPS system, right? So they don’t really trip the LPS system to work. And that’s where a StrikeTape comes in. Our product from Weather Guard, lightning Tech, is that. You need to turn the LPS system on sooner.

That’s basically what you need to do. You need to have the LPS system start to reach out to these lower level lightning strikes and capture them and redirect them down to the receptor system and the LPS system as it was designed. The only way to do that is to make those LPS systems more attractive, which is exactly what StrikeTape does.

So when you see StrikeTape [00:22:00] out in the field, what you’ll see is that we’re putting StrikeTape near the existing receptors, and it’s not a lot of product that’s on the blades. It’s for actually very little in comparison to the length of the blades, but it changes dramatically the LPS performance. So instead of having these 20% damage rates, we’re down a single digits, low single digits in terms of damage rates.

That’s what you want to see, and that’s how you’re gonna save yourself hundreds or thousands of dollars a year. If you’re in some of these rougher lightning locations like Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, even up in Wisconsin, Minnesota, you can save yourself a ton of money just by putting some simple devices onto your turbine that don’t modify the turbine.

The thing about StrikeTape is it’s on the outside of the blade. It doesn’t change the blade structure. It goes on in a couple of minutes. It’s easy to install. It’s been installed lower all over the world.

Joel Saxum: Th this is where I like to go to the, the, the next steps. What are the action items, right? So if you’re, if you are [00:23:00] interested in looking at how can we protect ourselves further, how can we lower o and m costs?

Unexpected costs, uh, at our site, get ahold of us. Um, of course, my name Joel, do Saxum, SAXU m@wglightning.com or Allen allen.Hall@wglightning.com. And the, what we like to do is every site’s a little different, right? So we like to walk through things to understand what damages you’re taking. Because it could be different depending on topography, the layout of your wind farm, your specific environment.

Sometimes it’s, uh, a little bit different on lightning damages if you’re in a, in tilled fields or if you’re in cattle pasture or if you’re up on a mountain or those kind of things. Change how lightning reacts with your wind farm. We’ve seen a ton of wind farms, so we know these things. Uh, get ahold of us.

So we like to identify the potential sites and we’ll look at your turbines. We, we do a little RFI. Give us some data, give us some background. If you’ve got lightning data. If you’ve got inspection data with your damages, great. Uh, you know where the turbine locations are so we can, we can [00:24:00] locate which turbines are your higher risk ones in your wind farms.

We’ll look at what the installation method is. Um, you know, we go as far as training the technicians onsite or virtually to make sure that they do the, the thing properly, get the installation done. Because when the installation’s done properly, as everybody knows, it’s probably listening to this podcast.

Uh, a product on blade is only as good as its installation. So we’ve simplified that, uh, to the next level, uh, to make sure that this thing goes well in the field and can last the 20 years, uh, left of the lifetime year blades. So, and I wanna reiterate this from, from a couple minutes ago on the podcast, weather Guard Lightning Tech.

We, we want to be your partner in solving your lightning problems. We’re not here to sell you a product walk away. So we are going to train the technicians. We are going to support you. We’re gonna have regular check-ins, we’re gonna look through your inspections with you, give you some advice on lightning damages, what’s actually happening in the field.

We’re gonna put some sensors out there on the turbines that help you in your o and m, uh, processes and operations to know [00:25:00] when you’ve been struck. Which turbines have been struck? Optimize your time in the shield, um, and put our money where our mouth is. Right? We know StrikeTape works. It’s, it’s, we, we sell in the aerospace industry too.

Boeing, Airbus Embryo, Gulf Stream, you name it. They use our same products. Uh, we are protecting over, we’re right around 20,000 blades around the world right now. Um, so we know that we can, we can help operators and, and, uh, we’re here to, we’re here to support.

Allen Hall: And you, you should accept no substitutions. So more recently, uh, GE has clearly been watching our success in the field and new GE blades, particularly 62 twos that are coming outta the field.

And some of the two piece blades that are happening for the Sierra and also Cyprus, uh, they, they are including a lightning diverter, very similar to weather guards. And you’ll see that now you, they’ll, you’re seeing, uh, ge renova engineers add their lightning diverter to improve the LPS system [00:26:00] on their blades, as I assume, because of the customer feedback that they’ve been getting the problem.

And if you’re receiving those blades and you’re doing a lot of repowers in the next year, I think it’ll happen in the United States. It’ll be a lot of it is that. Those devices that LM has created, it’s an LM derived, uh, product don’t last very long in some rough conditions. So the leading edge erosion is a problem, and rain erosion is a problem for those LM GE Renova Lightning diverters.

And we we’re starting to get the complaints coming in. Uh, operators say, I have StrikeTape on my turbines. No, you don’t. You have a an LM GE Renova product. That doesn’t have a great service history and you probably wanna put something on that’s gonna last the lifetime of the Blades, which is gonna be a StrikeTape product.

That’s the difference. So we run into operatives once in a while and they’ll say, oh, how do I know this is gonna work? Well, how [00:27:00] do you know StrikeTapes gonna work? Well, we can prove it ’cause we have a ton of case studies we can just provide to you. You can also talk to our existing customer base. They love to talk about the success of StrikeTape because they’re saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But let’s go look at what GE Renova is doing at the minute. And GE Renova is essentially trying to copy us in, in what we’re doing and how we do it. I would say, and you gotta be careful here, is that you’ll see that a lot of the GE Renova installation is the, their lightning inverter goes with the airflow, which is great, I guess, because they need to protect it from rain erosion.

So they need to put it with the airflow to minimize rain erosion. Uh, and we’ve done rain erosion and testing on those products. We, Joel will just put it up on the website, our rain erosion test of the lm uh, wind power lightning diverters. But lightning is usually coming from the sky, which means that a lightning diverter or StrikeTape product needs to be kind of pointed upwards to work effectively.

And LM won’t do that. Uh, GE Renova won’t do that. [00:28:00] So what you’re gonna see is a lot of, uh, with the airflow, lightning diverters around the receptors, it’s gonna be somewhat effective. Not great. So it looks like it’s added lightning protection, but in effect, it’s just minimal improvement. If you really want to attack this lightning problem, you need to direct a lightning diverter like, uh, StrikeTape towards the sky and try to intercept these lightning strikes that are damaging your blades.

So it’s, it’s simple as that. And if you haven’t worked with weather guard in the past, we’re really easy to deal with. Right. So we we’re experts in lightning protection. We’ve been doing it a long time. We understand. The problems you’re having and we can make it easy. That’s the whole point. So if, if you have lightning damage, choosing StrikeTape is the right solution.

Quick to install, easy to implement, proven track record. We’re gonna give you an eLog ping lightning detection system to put on each tower that you put StrikeTape on so you can [00:29:00] monitor it, you can see the money you’re saving. It’s that simple.

Joel Saxum: So if you made it to this point in our, in the podcast, you’re clearly, uh, needing some lightning protection support, reach out to us, right?

So www.weatherguardwind.com is our website. On the website we have contact forms. You can go through that, or like I said earlier in the episode, Joel dot Saxon, SAXU m@wglightning.com. I’ve always got that email in my hand. So that’s a great way to get ahold of us. The other one, uh, if you wanna get ahold of us right now on that website is a chat function lower bottom right corner.

We’re monitoring it all the time, so we are, we’re always ready for a conversation. Like Alan said, we’re easy to get ahold of, we’re easy to deal with. So now you have no excuses to, uh, get some upgraded lightning protection

Allen Hall: support for your fleet. Yeah, just reach out to weather guard wind.com or just get ahold of Joel and I, we’re on LinkedIn also.

We’re easy to, easy to find out in the world. And thanks for listening, right? We appreciate everybody that’s participated with the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. We put this [00:30:00] podcast together to disseminate great information about what’s happening in wind, and we just thought we had to take a few moments to talk about what we actually do for a day job, which is lightning protection for wind turbines all around the world.

So thank you for listening. We’ll see you here next week on The Up. With Energy Podcast Spotlight.

https://weatherguardwind.com/blade-lightning-damage/

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GE Vernova Q2 Wind Losses, Envision AI Turbine for Fortescue

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GE Vernova Q2 Wind Losses, Envision AI Turbine for Fortescue

GE Vernova posts a record quarter as gas and grid surge while wind orders drop 40%. Plus Envision grid-connects its first AI turbine for Fortescue. Visit https://woma2027.com/ to register speaking and sponsorship interest!

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 YouTubeLinkedin 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!

If you haven’t visited woma2027.com, you should do so right now because we are putting together all of the, uh, events at WOMA 2027, which is March 3rd through 5th in Melbourne at the Pullman, Matthew, Pullman East? Pullman East Melbourne. And it’s packed full. Our, in fact, actually, we have so many people applying to attend the event, we’re getting a little nervous on if the size of the venue is not large enough, and we, we have a lot of people already chime in wanting to be sponsors, which is great.

But I wanna talk about what you will experience at WOMA. We’ve done it for two years now, and the feedback has been great. And Yolanda, you’ve been to the one just this past February, and participated in panels and saw some of the, uh, workshops and was involved in a lot of WOMA 2026. What are you expecting in 2027, and what did you think of 2026?

Yolanda Padron: I thought [00:01:00] 2026 was great. I loved seeing everybody there. Uh, got to meet a lot of new people. It was, it was sweet. There was a lot of r- people returning from WOMA 2025, um, and a lot of new people that were told that that was the event to be at to learn about wind, which was really, really nice to hear. Uh, something that I loved, especially since we’ve been through quite a few conferences since then and before then, was just the fact that, like, you’re, you’re just talking about problems and just talking about solutions, and you’re talking about real stories, and it’s nothing that’s super, super public.

You know, like, you, you can have real conversations with real people. I know during a panel I mentioned a, a solution to an issue that I had seen that was kind of niche, and then, uh, like three minutes later, like I had had some people come up to me and we all talked about the problem that we saw and then [00:02:00]talked about their problem, and it was really similar, and obviously in a totally different continent.

And it was, it was good to, to be able to have those conversations that you usually wouldn’t have elsewhere, especially if everything’s just really, really public and just big and you’re having a lot of people sell at you, and it’s, it’s just something that we’ve really shied away from. What, what was your favorite part of it?

Matthew Stead: I, I think, um, it was really the fact that it was a a technical, useful, helpful conference rather than having some rando talking about things that they’re told to talk to you about

Allen Hall: It’s real answers from real problem solvers. And everybody’s gonna be in Melbourne on the 3rd through the 5th of March 2027.

If you’re interested in attending, you need to go to woma2027.com. If you’re interested in sponsoring, it’s also woma2027.com. There’s limited [00:03:00]sponsorship left, so if you wanna do something, you better get in quick. And if you wanna attend the event, and I suggest that you do, that you visit woma2027.com and get registered today

The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now, your hosts

Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. It’s been a busy day as we record because GE just announced its second quarter earnings and a bunch of things about the business. They had an investor call early, early, early on the East Coast, and even earlier for those on the West Coast of the US, and it was a very good quarter for GE, but a really lopsided one.

Uh, GE Vernova reported second quarter orders of [00:04:00] $24.2 billion, up 88% with a backlog that has now climbed to $176 billion. Free cash came in at $5.1 billion. Man, $5.1 billion is a lot of cash, everybody, which is more than the company generated in all of last year. So they made more in one quarter in cash than made in all of last year, and management is raising its full year guidance, but the strength is coming from gas power and the electric grid, not from wind.

The wind segment saw orders fall 40% and revenue slip 10%, and the company still expects wind to lose about $400 million this year. Although in the investor call, they did say that the forecast for wind in Q3 and maybe even Q4 was to be essentially break even on the EBITDA scale. So that’s a, a, a good number.

It does seem like GE is being more [00:05:00] aggressive on pricing and selective on the projects they are choosing to participate with. Repowers was way down, if I remember correctly. Uh, they are not doing a lot of that at the moment. So there is a slowdown they’re seeing in wind, but they’re more than making up for it in gas turbines and electrification.

Orders for gas turbines are out to ’30, ’31, and I think they’re gonna close out all of ’30, ’31, um, book orders for gas turbines here shortly. So if you want a gas turbine, Matthew, you’re gonna have to get in line because your GE has a long list of, of clients in front of them. What does this mean for wind?

When I hear the discussion where GE is focused on gas and electrification because of the huge cash flow that comes in their door- Does that mean a good positive things for wind because they have the cash to kinda hang around wind? Or is it gonna be set aside for other [00:06:00] more profitable business segments?

I

Matthew Stead: mean, GE’s had a number of setbacks over the years. Um, you know, we know, we know all about them. We’ve been talking about them, you know, multiple times. But, you know, they’ve gotta just wait it out, don’t they? Um, you know, wind is not gonna go away, so they just need to wait it out, get their problems out of the way, get their cash flow in, build the order books again, just wait for things to improve.

Um, I, I think one thing I just wanna pull out, the Sands Ear, i- isn’t that a massive achievement?

Allen Hall: It is. It’s, it’s a colossal engineering achievement on its own. Forget about just delivering and manufacturing all those turbines and getting them installed. And that’s a pattern energy project, and Fairwind I think was involved with that in terms of project development, EPC items.

It’s huge. It’s gigantic. But it may be the last one we see in the United States for a while.

Matthew Stead: And but Vineyard, you know, they’ve gotta resolve that, don’t they? We’ve spoken about that before. Get that one out the way, clear out the decks and, yeah. That’ll come good.

Allen Hall: Rosemary, of our former GE [00:07:00] employees, I guess we have two of them here.

I’m one. Not of wind, but of another division. What’s your thoughts on GE Vernova at the minute?

Rosemary Barnes: These days I see them through the O&M lens. That’s how I work with them, is when my clients need support for all their wind farms and It’s just, it’s just never enough. It’s not a GE-specific thing. Uh, you know, across Australia, anybody with a full service agreement does not…

Uh, the, the company performing that agreement just gives the impression that they just do not have enough, um, uh, enough people. Y- you know? It’s just, just hands or maybe it’s budget. Uh, I guess it, it’s both at the same time. Yeah, I mean, I see some good things like their, the pace of new technologies has slowed and they’re consolidating, which was needed, but it’s just hard to imagine that it’s even gonna be enough considering how many fewer blade engineers that they’ve got now.

Like, how are they, [00:08:00] how are they going to get the, you know, the issues with the platforms that they are, uh, pushing, how are they gonna get all that under control with so many fewer engineers? And will they ever be able to, you know, go back to innovating a- again when they’ve lost so much of their, you know, institutional knowledge?

Allen Hall: Two things they did not mention during the phone call today or in any of the documents that I saw was TPI Composites and that EPC has acquired that and is now operating the factories, uh, making GE blades. And LM Wind Power was not discussed either, although LM Wind Power has been integrated into the overall financials of the company, so it’s not a standalone financial entity like it was last year.

So you can’t really r- read the tea leaves of what’s happening at LM, but nobody talked about or even asked on the investor call what was happening on the wind side. They were very interested in gas turbines and what the order rate was going to be, and GE was concerned [00:09:00] on their side, saying that they’re trying to ramp up production to make more gas turbines, but there’s limitations to how much they can do.

Rosemary Barnes: I guess that’s the s- the zeitgeist now, right? Or it’s the, I don’t know, like, it’s, it’s a sign of the times. Everyone’s obsessed with data centers, and for some reason, data centers are obsessed with gas turbines, um, even though, like, it’s not a fast solution to, uh, y- you know, to, to anything. So I don’t… You know, I’m not saying that building a, you know, a wind farm or solar farms, batteries, those are not without challenges.

But I really don’t think that the, yeah, gas turbine challenge is so much easier than the, um, yeah, than the renewables challenges. It’s a bit weird to me how everyone has just kind of latched onto, “Oh, you need new power, then it needs to be gas.” It’s just a bit weird to me.

Allen Hall: GE was predicting a peak of orders in gas turbines to happen sometime in 2026.

They, they think that the demand curve is gonna trend downward because everybody is already in [00:10:00] line essentially, and it’s five years out, so not many other people are gonna join that line to make it seven, eight years out That also indicates that sort of the d- the demand for gas turbines may be waning a little bit, or there’s just a backlog, they just can’t produce more.

Is that going to then maybe finally open up the best solar wind discussion for AI data centers?

Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I wonder if it’s partly because y- you know, in a lot of cases… So people wanna build data centers, and then those data centers need power. You can’t just plug into the grid in an easy, timely manner. So then now they’ve gotta BYO their own power, and in fact, in Australia they’ve just announced a, a policy where you will have to…

You can bring your own power, and it will have to be renewable, actually, in Australia. So, um, at least that’s, at least that’s a win for, you know, generation source.

Allen Hall: Yeah. The, the AI data center discussion and gas turbines in the United States has more recently been focused [00:11:00] on, on the AI data centers that use those gas turbines, and the number of gas turbines that they’re choosing, and that they’re choosing gas turbines that fall under some sort of EPA threshold on size.

And what is happening, and which, uh, SpaceX has done and some others have done, is they go underneath that threshold on the size of the gas turbines, and then they, you know, and they daisy chain them together, right? So you, you… Instead of having one massive, I don’t know, two-megawatt generator of some sort, you have a bunch of 200 kilowatts, and you just stack them all together.

And the concern is, is that are some of these data centers violating EPA, the… If not the actual rule or the intent of the rule in terms of emissions, and it’s causing a little bit of a stink. It’s, it’s raised enough of, uh, the noise floor about it that you’re, you’re hearing it on podcasts, you’re hearing people involved in AI data ce- [00:12:00] data centers push back on it saying, “It’s all legal.

It’s all legal.” So it’s gonna come to a head pretty quickly in the United States.

Rosemary Barnes: It was some real, like, real sketchy loophole finding, right? Like, I can’t remember the exact wording, but you’re not supposed to be able to just chuck in a diesel generator or a gas turbine in without any kind of planning, right?

But they found a loophole where it’s like, okay, well, you know, it’s just like a truck except for that there’s no truck, and so it was called, like- off-road or non-road use or something. And it’s just, like, clearly not the, um, the meaning of the, of the law, right? The spirit of the law had, like, obviously been broken.

In Australia we have a saying, the pub test. It doesn’t pass the pub test. Like, if you said that to someone in a pub, then they would be like, “What the hell is that? That is not right.” They have closed the loophole. However, I think that they also kind of quietly just allowed them to keep the ones that they had or had planned or something, so [00:13:00] it’s, like, overall by far not ideal.

But I think that it’s just, like, you can, you can do that for a single site, but it’s obviously, like, the more that you do ridiculous stuff like that, that you lose the community ac- acceptance, which they barely had and definitely don’t really have anymore. Um, and secondly, yeah, like people, uh, people close the loophole and they respond.

It’s, it’s much better, and we see it with wind as well. Like, yeah, you can do things technically by the law, but if you wanna have a, you know, sustainable, uh, industry through the years, through the decades, you actually have to kind of, you know, think, “What happens if I do y- push to the furthest extent of the law, um, to get away with whatever I can?”

What’s gonna happen is regulation is gonna come down on you and you’ll lose the ability to kind of self-regulate.

Allen Hall: We’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back we’ll meet a wind turbine that runs on artificial intelligence, Rosie.[00:14:00]

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In the red dirt of Western Australia, a mining company and a Chinese turbine maker are trying something new. Envision Energy says it has grid connected its first [00:15:00] artificial intelligence wind turbine prototype for Fortescue’s Nullagine Wind Project in Pilbara. The full project will use 17 of Envision’s EN182 turbines, each rated for 7.8 megawatts and built to handle mining sites, desert heat, and tough grid rules.

The turbines- The turbines pair a self-erecting tower from Nabler Wind with a hub standing an astonishing 188 meters tall. Behind it all sits Envision’s Energy Foundation Model software that company calls the world’s largest physical AI system. The goal is to swap diesel and gas for wind across the mine’s fleet and processing sites.

So this is an effort by Fortescue to power mining operations with electricity. It’s a pretty ex- exciting [00:16:00] project if you’re watching. The Envision artificial intelligence piece is an aspect that I didn’t know much about, and I still am trying to gather more information on, because there’s not a ton of info about what AI means in terms of a physical system.

And maybe Rosie, you know a little bit more, or Yolande, you can brief us on what this really is.

Rosemary Barnes: We just need to start with a pronunciation lesson, Allen. Sorry.

Matthew Stead: Not Pilbara, Pilbara. Pilbara.

Rosemary Barnes: I, I don’t actually… I hadn’t heard that part about AI and that it doesn’t… I, I don’t know. It’s, it’s such a buzzword that it might not mean anything, you know.

However, there’s so many cool aspects to that project that aren’t related to AI. Um, yeah, the tower height, the tower erection technology. I’m interested to hear that they have taken the heat of the environment into [00:17:00] consideration, ’cause that’s one of the, my obsessions actually, as long as I’ve been working on wind turbines, and ever since I found out how, you know, the materials qualification and certification process works, that it just doesn’t take into account the really high temperatures.

That’s one of the projects that Padlo has going on at the moment, is, um, putting sensors on some turbines to, like, look into that more. Um, yeah, because we do see in Australia a lot of sites have, you know, even within a few years, they might have 20 years of operation left, but we already see a whole lot of cracks that look suspiciously like end of, end of life fatigue cracks on them.

So yeah, we are looking into that more, and it’s very interesting to hear that Envision have taken the heat into consideration. I hope it includes the blade structure as well as just, you know, other turbine components, electronics, and that sort of thing.

Allen Hall: It does sound like they’re pairing batteries or BESS with wind turbines, where the BESS is located at the base of the turbine.

That would make sense in [00:18:00] Australia, particularly around where mines are, because it tends to be very remote, and storing electricity would make sense. The Discussions I’ve seen on YouTube deal with more on the energy trading side, that the wind turbine stores energy, of course, and it does it very efficiently into the best system, and then the AI system sits on top of that to help arbitrage the energy that’s stored in the battery to make more money.

Not a bad way of doing it, but it does lead to a ton of questions about national security, the use of AI, the, uh, and how this is all going to integrate together from a asset manager side. Yolande, I know in the United States we have a lot of restrictions about the technology that is in wind turbines and the, and the firewalls that exist there, where you, you can’t even plug into a wind turbine without having a lot of approvals.

Is AI coming in wind [00:19:00] turbines in the US and the rest of the world, or is this mostly a Western Australia event?

Yolanda Padron: We talked a little bit about a trading company a couple episodes ago, right? And that was a… It sounded like it’s, it’s coming. Um, I, when I first read the article that we’re talking about for Fortescue, I thought this was more of, like, a SCADA self-learning AI type thing, where, like It, it kind of learns from the, from itself, and then maybe it, it tells you you’re more likely to be seeing some sort of blade issue that wasn’t shown before

Rosemary Barnes: I heard, um, Andrew Forrest speak at a smart energy conference earlier this year, and he was talking about not for, um, not for wind, but for the solar and battery projects that they’ve already got there.

He called it a self-healing grid, and AI was the technology that enabled that. And so he, [00:20:00] he was saying, and I can’t remember the, the details specifically either, but when there was a, a disturbance, something that would’ve caused the, you know, without the AI, um, you know, layer looking after everything, a fault that would’ve shut the whole site down was able to self, self-heal with no interruption to supply.

Um, and that that was the kind of AI that, uh, they were talking about. I believe that the new wind farm addition to that is the same sort of thing, where they’re looking at, you know, a very complex system with… I mean, they don’t have energy prices to deal with, uh, in that case because it’s self-contained.

They’re not conne- connected to any external grid. Um, but you know, they’ve got wind, they’ve got solar, they’ve got, uh, so obviously weather conditions related to those two going on. They’ve got batteries, they’ve got, you know, yeah, the, um, availability of every single different… of probably many [00:21:00] thousands of different components in that system that, um, y- you know, you need to make sure that if there’s a failure or when there’s a failure in any one or combination of those things, that you’re always going to be able to reroute around that and kind of heal itself.

So it probably does include some of, of what you were saying, Yolanda, but I think when they say this is the biggest physical AI, like, I think that that might be a little bit of a meaningless term because y- you know, like, there’s AI… It, it could be like… I, I don’t know. It, like, what, what does that mean?

Like, if you have AI that is, um, you know, playing some role in controlling America’s electricity grids, then that would be the biggest, the biggest one, even if it was, you know, like a tiny little, playing a tiny role. I, I, I don’t know what that specifically means and… Is it bad marketing ’cause it’s just confusing and makes you assume that it’s, um, just meaningless buzzword cool [00:22:00]sounding thing

Allen Hall: It’s probably genius marketing because they attach AI to whatever the product is.

So we have AI lightning diverters at Weather Guard. EOLOGIX-PING has AI CMS, and Partload has whatever Partload does, AI-Partload. So that’s the smart move, th- uh, because it does seem to raise the value

Rosemary Barnes: But you know what? Partload is anti-AI because 90% of our work is you get, you know, drone inspections, and they use AI, and then it w- and it works really, w- it works really…

I’d never wanna make it sound like it is bad technology because, you know, the status quo before we had drones with using AI was to just not inspect your blades. So, you know, like, we’re doing much better than that now. But everything that we do is where AI was not able to do it or AI did it wrong. So y- you know, um, like I- we use AI in that everything that comes into us is AI.

Allen Hall: Well, if the same AI [00:23:00] technology that is reviewing blade images is being applied inside of a wind turbine, what do you see as a likely outcome there, Rosemary?

Rosemary Barnes: Well, it’s not, I mean, it’s not the, it’s not the same. And like I said, uh, it’s very easy for me to be like, “Oh, AI, you know, makes all these mistakes,” but it, I only see the mistakes.

I don’t see the 90%-plus of correctly categorized things. I don’t, they’re not relevant to me. Um- Uh, but I think for controlling a complex system, like it, it is… That, that’s a really great application. I mean, I think it’s like with any like super hyped up technology, it’s like really useful in a few things, and that’s what leads to the hype, and then people start to just wanna apply it everywhere.

It becomes the, you know, like when the only tool you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Like, that’s where we’re at. Like AI is this, um, is this hammer that we’ve got, and everyone wants to solve every problem with it. And I do it myself, you know. Like I hate writing LinkedIn posts, and so I’ll work with, with Claude or, um, I [00:24:00] use NotebookLM as well to, you know, I draft my LinkedIn post.

And you’re like, “Well, th- no, that sucks. Do this, do this, do this.” And then, you know, like half an hour later, you’re like, okay, I could very easily have written my own post in less time, and I could… I, I try again and again because I just, I, uh, you know, hate that kind of writing so much. But yeah, I think that like economy-wide, that’s the problem, that everyone is just trying to whack every problem with AI regardless of whether it’s the right one.

Allen Hall: Okay, so there’s gonna be products that are gonna incorporate AI or have AI somewhere hyphenated in the name of the product. What products should not be using AI right now?

Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think there’s… Uh, I wanna add to the… You know, go back a few steps. That calling this the largest, you know, physical AI device is complete rubbish really.

That’s stupid, really. It’s like, like, like what you said, Rosie. It’s like putting an AI machine on a road, and then it becomes the world’s largest AI infrastructure. I mean, that was, that was pretty stupid, um, [00:25:00] really. And that, that’s just marketing. My, my view is if you can’t explain what it does, you shouldn’t be using the word AI So in marketing, you know, you can’t just say, “Oh, it’s AI ’cause I don’t understand what it does.”

You should actually be able to explain, “This is what this product does, and this is why it does it, and we use AI to help make that occur in a smart way.” Rather than just being randomly talking about, um, AI solving all of these complex issues and not actually knowing how it’s done is rubbish.

Rosemary Barnes: To answer your question, Allen, I think AI shouldn’t be used for most creative stuff.

Like video, um, creation, everybody hates it, and companies keep on pushing it, and it sucks. And I think also it’s kind of… It, it makes people so angry, I think it’s gonna backfire if it hasn’t already for most, [00:26:00] most people that are using it. Um, yeah, so that would be one thing. And also, uh, you shouldn’t use too much AI for, like, I see it heaps on LinkedIn now, and it’s, it’s kind of…

Like, at the first time you use AI, you’re like, “Whoa, th- this is pretty, pretty good. Like, this is something, you know, like I could… That’s very similar to the stuff that I, yeah, used to post on LinkedIn or the infographics that I used to make.” But the issue is that, like, it looks that way the first time, but then once you use it a bit and you can recognize that it’s AI, then you see it everywhere and it, it turns you, really turns you off whoever’s put it out there.

And so, like, there’s so much on LinkedIn now where it’s, like, just AI-generated things. It’s… Even if, you know, like, if an expert has created it and edited it afterwards and made sure that the output is accurate, then I wouldn’t call it AI slop. But it is also, like, it’s always too [00:27:00] wordy. It’s, um, you know, it’s just like the style is just clearly e- the h- if the point is that you’re trying to express, “I’m an expert.

These are my expert opinions. I know what I’m talking about,” AI is not doing that for you. Like, you write your post or create your graphic with AI, it’s just not doing that for you. So I think that that is another example of where people shouldn’t be using AI.

Allen Hall: 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 to us on LinkedIn. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. And please, please, please don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.

For Rosie, Yolande, and Matthew, I’m Allen Hall, and we’ll see you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy [00:28:00] podcast.

GE Vernova Q2 Wind Losses, Envision AI Turbine for Fortescue

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