Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Blade Repair Academy’s Expert Technician Training
Blade Repair Academy in Tennessee offers comprehensive blade repair training programs for technicians. Alfred Crabtree, Founder and CEO, and Sheryl Weinstein from SkySpecs highlight the importance of technician competency, hands-on experience, and standardization in the wind industry.
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Allen Hall: Alfred and Sheryl, welcome to the program.
Sheryl Weinstein: Thanks.
Allen Hall: So we’re in Dunlap, Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, uh, and also close to. Chattanooga Chattanooga, and we’re in the Smoky Mountains ish region.
We’re
Alfred Crabtree: no, we’re, we’re, you could consider it Appalachia for sure. Sure. Okay. Uh, we’re on the, in the valley called the Seche Valley, uh, which splits the Cumberland Plateau. So we’re, we’re in a valley and we have hills a thousand feet above us here. Yeah. Either way. It’s beautiful.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. It’s a great drive in here.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. It’s a unique place. Yeah.
Allen Hall: And we’re at Blade Repair Academy, which, uh, if you’re not familiar with Blade Repair Academy, you should be. Uh, because a lot of the good training that happens in the United States actually happens to play repair, repair Care blade, repair academy. Uh, yeah, it’s been a long week at uh, OMS this week and we got the introduction today.
This is the first time we’ve been on site. That’s right. And, uh, we wanted to see all the cool things that are happening [00:01:00] here. And it really comes down to technician training competency. Working with blades, working with tools, knowing what you’re doing up tower when you’re on the blade, which is hard to train.
It’s really hard to train, and both you and Cheryl have a ton of experience being up on blades and repairing blades and scarfing and doing all the critical features that have to happen to make blades work today. It’s a tough training regimen. There’s a lot to it and a lot of subtleties that don’t always get transferred over from teachers to students unless you have.
Done it for a number of years. You wanna kind of just walk through the philosophy of Blade Repair Academy?
Alfred Crabtree: Yes. The, uh, you’ve, you’ve outlined quite well some of the issues. The environment where we work is very hard to take a ti the time to put somebody through a training regimen. We’re so constrained by weather windows and then.
You know, even if the weather’s nice, lightning can come, wind [00:02:00] speeds can cut off your workday. So production, production, production is what’s important. And Cheryl and I both come from the rope access method. And in the rope access method, 95% of the time you’re up there alone. And if you’re up there and you’re producing, you’ve got your blinders on.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: And you’re not ready to share with somebody else what to do.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: With the basket or platform, you can have two even three people up on Blade, but it still has all these constraints of get the job done, get the job done. There’s a lot of stress up there. And having the bandwidth to take on new information or to challenge some preconceived notions or try, that’s not the place to do it.
So knowing that. Blade Repair Academy is built so that we have an environment that simulates all of the up tower stuff without being up tower. And you’re gonna have the time you need to invest in your learning without consequences. Right. So it’s a very much a [00:03:00] about creating the right environment to uptake the new information.
And we have found a lot of help from. Manufacturers and suppliers in the industry to sponsor us because obviously it behooves them to have their materials in the hands of trainees. So we’re also able to help companies come up with, uh, new solutions, try new products.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: New, uh, you know, what’s the best practice.
For this, if you’re up on Blade and you have a way of top coating and you get a new product and your way of top coating doesn’t suit that product, well chuck it down. I’ll never touch it again. Yeah. Because I did not perform well here we can, we can give you training. We have, of course, been trained by the suppliers about what’s the best product to use, what’s the best way to go about things, and then, and then we can disseminate it.
So that’s the fundamental reason why the space is. Is [00:04:00] what it is.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I think that that’s, that’s a good segue to be honest with you, right here, right behind these doors you have a classroom. That’s right. Right. So in this facility, all composed in one, we have a classroom here we have your additive and subtractive.
I liked how you said that to us when you’re giving us the tour. Uh, but we’ve got a, a grinding booth basically over here and we’ve got, um, a layup area here where you can teach. 16 people at a time.
Alfred Crabtree: That’s right. Yeah. That would be max
Joel Saxum: for sure.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah.
Sheryl Weinstein: And in a vertical surface, so, ’cause all the stuff that you’re doing in the field, right, is always in a vertical surface.
Mm-hmm. So there’s a, there is a big difference between working where gravity is sort of against you, especially with larger laminations and things like that. So being able to do your training and simulate the same, a similar way that you would work in the field is pretty critical, I would think.
Allen Hall: And actually working on.
Actual repairs. Simulated repairs, yeah. Mm-hmm. Now, don’t explain how you created them, because I know secret sauce. It’s a secret sauce. Yes. But I did look at the blade [00:05:00] damage. It, it looks exactly like a lightly strike. Yeah. Which a predominant amount of repairs are about, unless there’s, you know, serial defects, as Cheryl has pointed out numerous times, but.
Being able to repair something that’s quasi real is critical because we’ve been to other places and the repairs are, well, I’ll take a hammer and I’ll hit this and, okay, sure you got a DA, you gotta repair that. But that’s not real. And getting, getting the people to use the tools in the right way, vertically
Speaker 2: mm-hmm.
Allen Hall: Is the key. Because although the, the, the article, the test sample isn’t moving around like you are up on a blade, it’s still difficult. And unless you have the proper techniques and the approaches, yeah, it’s gonna be dang near impossible. We explain some of the blade repairs that Joel and I have seen more recently is like.
It’s a little rough and it shouldn’t have to be so rough because it is a skill that you have to learn and acquire over time. But you have to know the fundamentals. That’s what Blade Repair Academy is here to teach you those [00:06:00] fundamentals. Like, yes, it’s gonna take time, but if you work it this way, at least you’re gonna be successful.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. And if you’re managing a team of employees who are doing this, it, it would be great to have the insight of what your teams. Strengths and weaknesses are, yeah, you can figure out how to deploy people, but also how to, you know, maybe fix some of those problems. Mm-hmm. Our panels that you brought up are standardized.
Everyone looks exactly the same. It’s the exact same makeup, and we standardize the damage. So when somebody has to repair damage here, the core removal size is the same on everyone. That way when we’re comparing the reports, you can actually have a apples to apples comparison of the, the trainees. Outcome.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: And now you, you know, in, in the model that you talked about where people will go to a, you know, their junkyard of blades and they’ll find spots on blades to put their eight guys on. Those eight people are not gonna be doing the same repair. And even if they are collecting data, what are you [00:07:00] comparing?
It’s not
Joel Saxum: apples to apples. Yeah. It’s not.
Alfred Crabtree: So we really tried to start from the beginning, fresh with a whole new idea of how to approach this. Mm-hmm. By not being attached to an ISP, we don’t have to deal with. Oh, here, use all our leftovers. Yeah. Yeah. That’s your training budget. Yeah. Yeah. And oh yeah. We, you know, we’re an, we’re a owner operator, so yeah.
Go work on that blade in the grass. Mm-hmm. That those limit what precious time we have available to train. Yeah. So this thing from the ground up is about. Making as much advance in the skillset and understanding that technician in the, in the week that they’re here.
Joel Saxum: I think that was a really cool thing we touched on as well.
Your, your team here as well, Cheryl. Thanks for traveling up to, to hang out with us. Offer some insights too. But you guys, because you’ve been in the people that have developed a curriculum yourself, Cheryl, your, some of your team sitting over here, uh, and, and people around the industry that have helped out with the place, you have the ability of like, okay, we have.
Eight brand new technicians. Let’s make [00:08:00] sure we walk through how to measure from the trailing edge to the blade center up, mark this thing out, these kind of things all the way to some stuff that I didn’t really think about that much. Like I’ve used an angle grinder before, right? But I’ve never looked at five different ones and decided which one would be the best for my hands.
Thinking about it up on the blade, how you’d handle it with your fingers, these kind of things like, I was like, man, that’s, those are real insights that you’re not gonna get to learn. Like why put someone up to let them have a whole season or a whole summer, two summers figuring out how to hold a grinder?
Well, when they can learn from someone that’s been doing it for years and years and years and can teach them these things. So from advanced or from very beginners learning fundamentals to advanced training, you guys have gotta cover here.
Alfred Crabtree: There’s something here to glean for everybody, and even if you are a well experienced technician, maybe what you’re gonna get most is learning how to talk the language of the new techs and the new hires who are getting the.
Introductory course training. You know, our, our el our basic course is called support. It’s 40 hours [00:09:00] and it’s really about making, uh, an employee who can support a lead. And then if that person follows up with the lead training in a whatever interval of time of their choice, which is kind of another benefit here, we can train you any week of the year.
That is where we start to really get this, we call it the retention vortex. Right where we layer up technician training and somebody who’s had level two now gets a level one with them. Now there’s some synergies. Now they’re getting some really efficiencies. A commonality of language, a commonality of process, you know, eliminating variables.
Uh, and that’s how you’re gonna have to build new net capacity and build new teams
Allen Hall: and that common language. Is really unique, but that comes from your experience in the field, mostly at rope partner, where you both really got your teeth in this industry.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Allen Hall: But communicating to one another correctly so you can pass along to the next crew or even explain what you did to the engineer, the.
Properly [00:10:00] there is. There is a culture to it. There is a language to it, and you just don’t pick that up. By going from wind turbine to wind turbine. You pick it up in training from someone who knows how to do it. It’s really critical.
Sheryl Weinstein: It’s pretty critical to have baseline training. I think it is also very important to follow it up with field experience and skills building because every blade model is different.
Every repair is different. You’re always gonna encounter something that deviates from that like standard approach to your repair. You have to kind of know how to problem solve, and that kind of only comes with the field experience, but having a more standardized training to start with, it’s something that industry doesn’t really have and is really needed.
I think across the board it also helps, you know. Owner operators or even OEMs kind of track their ISPs and understand what level of text do you have, what experience do they have and how, how does that differ across their different [00:11:00] levels? If we have one ISP training one way over here and another one training another way over here, and they have different sets of certifications.
It’s really hard to keep that all together and evaluate it as an owner operator or an OEM, you know, using a vendor. So I think having a place like Blade Academy that’s agnostic and separate from like, you know, the actual ISP really helps to standardize that a bit more.
Allen Hall: Yeah, because the key is we’re getting to, well, we’re gonna cross a hundred thousand turbines in the United States pretty quickly.
Yep.
Joel Saxum: Before 2030, or probably rated about 2030.
Allen Hall: Right. That’s. Soon. Mm-hmm. How are we gonna manage that? And there’s a lot of new people coming into the industry, obviously. How are we gonna train ’em up properly? How are we gonna communicate to one another? And there’s just so much movement in the industry. I.
It makes it hard, I think, because weirdly enough, I think ISPs develop their own little culture about how to deal with things, and then they hop to the next company and it’s a different language. Exactly. And that needs to go away. Yeah. There’s a,
Alfred Crabtree: there’s a branch of business that’s [00:12:00] OEM centric and there’s a branch of business that’s asset owner.
Yeah. Post warranty. And those are really two different things. And, and there’s a veil of secrecy between one and the other. Yeah. And we kind of feel here at Blade Repair Academy that we’re like this polyglot that can talk to everybody because we don’t have, we’re not an ip You’re not competing, we’re not an O You’re not competing.
Yeah, we’re not competing. But we, we, you know, we have the, we wanna provide this data as a clearinghouse. You know, we talk about certification in the non standards. Well, the way we deal with it is we’ll give you a certificate. And it’s got our brand on it. But you know, what does that mean? Yeah. What? That And $4 will get you a Starbucks the way we do it, maybe not even then.
Right? The way, the way we, not four bucks
Sheryl Weinstein: for Starbucks, maybe 10
Alfred Crabtree: and a half hour wait in the line. But the way you know, what we do is we provide you with a deliverable. We knew, we knew that. Okay. Our certification is, you know, ether.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: But [00:13:00] this report. That everybody who comes through here generates that you can compare.
Now you’re gonna have to go to work and study these reports when you get ’em as a deliverable.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: As a, you know, an employer, but we we’re giving you what you need. Mm-hmm. To make some decisions about what do I have to work on, what else do we need to improve upon?
Allen Hall: Yeah. Not everybody’s built for this job, but you wanna be able to suss that out.
Earlier rather than later. Yeah. Right. I mean, there’s other things to do with wind turbines that don’t evolve blade repair. And if they don’t necessarily have the skillset or the comprehension to do some of these more complex things, maybe blade repair is not it. Right. But rather know that now. Yeah.
Right. And the Blade Repair Academy is a place to do that because there’s a standard there, right? Mm-hmm. And I, I, as Joel has pointed out, yeah, there’s a lot of erratic training that goes on. Mm-hmm. You can’t compare student A to student Z. Blade repair academy. You can.
Alfred Crabtree: We can. Mm-hmm. Right.
Allen Hall: And if, if I’m an ISP, I want that.
Sure. I want you to tell me [00:14:00] who’s on top and who’s kind of the middle so I can make decisions about where to deploy ’em and who and who to put ’em with.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. ’cause at the end of the day, every ISP, uh, every ISP that’s trying to grow and scale effectively is trying to do that at the end of the year, right?
Yeah. They’re looking through, they’re grading their technicians, finding out who’s the next lead, who’s this, who’s that? But this is a great way to do that, sort them through in a controlled setting. I mean, we sat in, in your training facility in the actual classroom here, and you walked us through some of the online, the online training platform that you have built.
Some of the things the students have to do before they get here, and then kind of how you walk ’em through things, and it’s impressive. It’s good stuff, right? So when you have that combined with the both sides of blade repair, subtractive, additive, right? You get to get this, this holistic view of what that blade technician can do.
Yeah. Right? And that’s, that’s one of the things you guys offer here, which I think is fantastic.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. And we’re trying to constantly improve, you know, we’re talking with OEMs about dissemination of operating procedures or work instructions, share with us [00:15:00] work instructions. We’ll build analogs. That we can train to.
Mm-hmm. And we can test off of it. We can verify skill sets. You know, we have a lot of serial flaw campaigns out there that are critical. And do we wanna unleash anybody on it or do we want to know that those people can do it? I think everybody wants to know that they can do it, whether they’re the.
Technician themselves, or the person writing the checks.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: Everywhere in that loop wants to Now not everybody wants to pay for it. Yeah. But we all need it.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Alfred Crabtree: And so somewhere along the line, you’re paying for it in the forms of our favorite acronym, COPQ. That’s
Joel Saxum: right. Cost support, quality. You know, speaking about the idea of serial defects or known problems in the industry and how to prepare people for those, how do you prepare people for those?
Well, they gotta get the experience by just. Grinding away Top coat and getting into him. I walked in here and I looked at this blade sample we have here, and I was looking at it and I go, it looks like a 48.7 C Oh yeah. Buddy walks over you like our 48.7 C I’m like, [00:16:00] man, you guys did a good job on, you know, like, so, so I made a lot of money on 48.7, you know, so to walk in here and see these different tickets that you guys have built, you know, carbon plank and different things with carbon spars and hey, we’re gonna do a carbon spa repair.
We have this boom, now we can work on it. Mm-hmm. You know, and we’ll
Alfred Crabtree: work with you to solve your problem in a really quick, efficient manner. Mm-hmm. You know, I think one of the things that we have is operational readiness. Most people who are training in-house flip their hat around for a couple weeks and train composites.
Mm-hmm. In a limited capacity in the warehouse or at the dock at the truck during January. During January, whatever. And then they flip their hat back on and they go deal with it. And I think the hiring situation is so tough. Like working at Height, you probably need to make sure somebody can tolerate working at height.
Yeah. Before you invest in composite training, I mean. You have so many things you have to juggle in your particular situation. When do I put money in this person? We get that. [00:17:00] And so we’re open all the weeks of the year. So we can do this at any time. Of course, everyone wants it in the end of first quarter.
Mm-hmm. You know, right before the season starts. So we have a, you know, you have to, you gotta schedule with us, but we can really do this anytime. And so you don’t have to one and done and live with it.
Speaker 2: Mm-hmm.
Alfred Crabtree: You know, it. You can fit the training into your hiring schema wherever you feel fit, and you can hire people.
And if there are stars, bring them in for their secondary, they’re execute their lead training whenever you want. You know, so you can, we can be very flexible and in the advanced stages we will make what you need, you know, obviously has to make business sense for us, but we’ll make blades to replicate the problems you’re facing.
Sheryl Weinstein: And I think in terms of like what you were saying when you’re working on, you knows whether we wanna call them recurring issues or serial defects. A lot of it is awareness, right? It’s awareness [00:18:00] of understanding the blade structure, at least at a basic level. It’s awareness of understanding what you’re looking at.
It’s, you know, we’re only gonna better inform the industry and the OEM if our technicians have a level of awareness to sort of bring up things that they see as they’re doing repairs. So if they notice that, for example, the, the fibers are misaligned, right? That could indicate that that was a wrinkle, and them having that level of communication or documentation will only help then inform the OEM.
Like, is this the reason behind that problem? And so I think like. You know, with Alfred and, and the curriculum here at Blade Academy, them kind of, you know, setting a standard for how, how you know, the structure of the blade, the different types of blades you may see, whether they have carbon fiber in them, or you know, fiberglass, UD spars.
Where those things are located, [00:19:00] what to be aware of as you’re removing damaged material. It’s really critical to the overall quality and just the awareness of the tech on the blade and that feedback loop that we’re lacking so much in this industry.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and we have our boilerplate products that come from, you know, like, uh, Cheryl was my mentor at RP and wrote partner, and she taught me a lot and a lot of the.
The, the way we do things here comes from the rope, a rope access paradigm, which, you know, actually is backward compatible because if with rope access, you’re doing things alone.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Alfred Crabtree: So if we’ve have ways and, and processes that allow that to happen alone, then when you’re on a basket or a platform with an extra person, you can only benefit Yeah.
That much easier. Yeah. Um, it’s where we come from, you
Joel Saxum: know, and, and that’s a good point, right? Like when we’re sitting here, rip Blade Repair Academy. Alfred, you’re here. Cheryll, you’re joining us today. These are two X blade technicians that have been on all kinds of blades. They have been up and down on ropes.
So it’s training by [00:20:00] trainers who have been the technicians that’s important. Who have seen the problems. Yeah, yeah. You know, who have lived, have lived that road life. We talked, you’re joking about living in hotels, right? Mm-hmm. Like that have done, gone through that, right? So you’re learning from people that aren’t just like, oh, I hate the idea of going to a university and learning HR or something, whatever, from someone who’s never done it in the real world.
Yeah. You know, uh, the trainers here have done it in the real world, um, and it shows.
Alfred Crabtree: Thanks, man. And you know, the other thing too is our tagline is practical and contemporary. And the thing is, I’m no longer contemporary. Like I left the field years ago. I rely on folks like Cheryl, who’s still in the, in the Blade Services game over there at Skys Specs.
She’s on, she’s got a full subscription to the cereal floss that are out there.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Probably the best one in the industry, to be honest with you.
Alfred Crabtree: Well, you know. Uh, I think so. I don’t know anything about serial flaw, but it’s, it’s input from the rest of the industry that’s gonna allow this to continue.
Otherwise, we’re gonna be, you know, [00:21:00] a 10-year-old standard that isn’t relevant anymore and that’s not what we want to do. So, outreach like Cheryl and I are talking about, Hey, what is it in your product line that should be in our product line? And I want to talk to OEMs and, uh. Owner operators, you know, what is it?
What are your pain points? What in your fleet is needing attention? And of course, we’re gonna do all this with the business case, right? Mm-hmm. Like we wanna take LEP products and place them head to head and give a two day clinic or seminar to stakeholders, to purchasers. You know, we wanna give our, our two, our five day course condensed into two days.
Where people who are stakeholders who are making decisions about where to place technicians, they should get out here and gr and grind a little bit and get a little empathy for their position. Hard work. The hard work of the
Sheryl Weinstein: hard work that it is. Yeah. And then kind of understand
Alfred Crabtree: from another side where the [00:22:00] communication breakdown is.
’cause it’s, it’s not all the texts, right? Mm-hmm. You know, they have a, you gotta understand how heavily loaded they are, you know, when they’re in the field. Mm-hmm. Um, so we’re, we’re at the place now where we’re really looking to do some outreach and talk to, uh, regulatory bodies that are starting to come up with standards, right?
Like the IEC group met and pro produce a draft standard and they’re gonna work on the repair standard. And that’s a, a little bit of a ways away, but I can’t sit around and wait for, for standards to come to me. So we got this thing started. If you build it, they will come. You guys came, you know, Cheryl came and, um.
We we’re really proud of where we’re at, but at the same time, it’s like, okay guys, the rest of the industry, now we’re here. Now you need to know, now you need to take advantage of us. Mm-hmm. And help tell us what you need. So I think the
Sheryl Weinstein: LEP thing is a really good call out because I do see a lot of customers questioning what do I choose?
How do I know [00:23:00] what to choose? Absolutely. Should my vendor be telling me what to choose? And that’s what happens in many cases, is that the ISP just kind of tells the owner operator. This is what you should use. Well, why, and, and what, you know, how have we ever really sized up like one against the other?
Like in any true, I don’t know, study? No. And a lot of the, a lot of the like. Those different types of LEP, the, the companies that you know have these, they don’t have a lot of good documentation on showing like how their products stand up. I mean, it’s kind of, it’s more theory based than anything. I mean, they put ’em through rain erosion tests and whatever, but.
It’s, I feel like that’s a tough space. It’s also a very, like, um, a very tough scope of work to have high quality at. So more training around it is necessary. You know, repair companies don’t wanna use their high skilled repair techs for the LEP because they need them for the more complex repairs [00:24:00] yet. The LEP is so susceptible to quality issues, and if you’re gonna pay an extreme amount of money to, you know, put the LEP to fix your erosion, put the LEP on blades, hope for a performance improvement, and then it fails in a year.
I. That’s no help to anybody. So these different products, they also come with different price points. Like, can we really value the shell over the coating? I, I just find that this is a tough space. And so doing something like that and doing more training around LEPI think is probably pretty important. Yes.
You know, unless the robots are gonna take it over and then, well, even then, I think it’s the only app.
Allen Hall: The application, that’s the variable there. And not having people trained up for that particular LEP product is a huge problem because it’s super risky. You’re risking all that money and time and having to do it all over again and removing LEP that has been improperly applied.
It’s a nightmare. [00:25:00] Nightmare. Total nightmare. You don’t want that to happen. And I’ve seen sites where that’s happened, getting technicians. Trained properly for the right material and doing that here up in Tennessee is, is the right approach. It’s risk reduction, which is what the industry is in right now.
Risk reduction.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah. Yeah, we, we’ve beliefs. That’s a great way to put it. You know, if you hire somebody. We were talking earlier how there are like two models. One is like the New York Yankees, where you’re going to be buying all the expensive free agents. You can poaching people from other, you know, trying to get experienced talent.
You’re paying a premium for them, but you aren’t gonna know until halfway through that season how that person is performing. Yeah. You know, that is a lot of. That was, that is a lot of variability that you could control. Mm-hmm. And in a seasonal business, those weeks are really multiplied by two or three.
Right. In terms of like the impact on your revenue and your opportunity to make money. It’s risk reduction, like Alan was saying. Yeah. It’s
Allen Hall: all risk, right? Yeah. And the, [00:26:00] the way that the industry is moving and the pace at which is moving right now, risk reduction starts to move to the top five years ago.
We do a lot of risky things because we’re making money. Interest rates are low and, but today we cannot afford to do that. And if you watch the industry change right now, it is gonna be more focused than ever in having proper technicians on site that they complete the job that they were intended to do.
Precisely, accurately, and once, not twice. Once. Yeah. And that is gonna be the marker of the, whether this industry grows or not. Mm-hmm. And that’s why Blade Repair Academy is needed so much. Now, Alfred, how do you interface with the ISPs, OEMs, and the operators in terms of getting people out here? How do they, how do they push that button and say, Alfred, I’m gonna send you 40 technicians next week.
How does that, how does that go? I don’t quite have that down
Alfred Crabtree: yet. But, uh, you know, it, we talked earlier, it’s a small world. You know, blade repair is small. There [00:27:00] we mentioned if you, there’s a hundred people in the industry you need to know and then you’ve covered it. Um, our, I think we’ve been, we’ve been kind of riding this new wave of like, oh, who’s this new kid on the block?
And, and we can kind of be quiet and still are mysterious. And I pop up at a conference and host a round table or whatever. Uh, so far. It’s mainly been our personal network, which is large enough in this gig to, to get people in. ISPs are much more likely to do it small is ISPs are much more likely to do it.
Owner operators, they’re trying to build their training centers. They have a little different, that’s a different model though. It’s a different model. Um, they’re, they’re tougher to get. So primarily it’s been ISPs. We have definitely a, a, a curriculum for new hires, right? We call it support, but we’re [00:28:00] reluctant to go sell that to the street or to the public.
Like, Hey, enter the industry here, because we don’t quite yet have that, you know, guarantee that people will recognize our certificate and. Use it to hire people. I don’t quite have that system in place. However, I have so much interest from the Department of Labor to support us in creating an occupation.
They want us to build apprenticeship programs. We need corporate sponsor, we need a big employer or to to buy in, and then we can create an apprenticeship program. Then we can find public money for people to get some support to get into a new, a new industry. So, well, they
Allen Hall: need to come out here. They need to come out to Dunlap.
And visit the facilities, talk with you, understand what the philosophy is, see it up close. There’s a lot of them have been to other places. Sure. And see what the differences are here. And, and that’s gonna be the decision maker. They’re gonna see what the product walking out the door is and [00:29:00] go into the classroom and, and get the grinder, right?
Yes. Get, get your hands dirty a little bit. Yeah. And realize, yes, this is what I was looking for to begin with. I just couldn’t find it. And I found it here in Tennessee.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, I, I think you’re right. And, and we, we are slowly, you know, bringing people in that we know, like the reason why y’all are here and some other folks have visited us this week is because o and m was in Nashville.
And I was like, come on, come on. We’re only two hours away. We’ll buy you lunch. Come on. Pretty place. Yeah. You have to see this place to understand it because we are sort of, you know, outsiders, right? I mean, we’re, we’re from the, the industry, but we’re not. We’re not a spinoff of any company. We’re not a division of an ISP.
We’re totally organic and unique in a, in a part of the world that doesn’t have any wind. So, yeah. Uh, but once you get here, you get it. The economics make sense. You know, we couldn’t do what we’ve done anywhere else as cheaply as we’ve done, which means we feel like we’re super value rich for what you’re paying and for the amount of time that you’re spending [00:30:00] here.
Allen Hall: Oh, 100%. Uh. Let’s give the ISPs, the OEMs and the operators, uh, where to go. What’s the website? Where can they find you on LinkedIn?
Alfred Crabtree: We’re at blade repair academy.com. Uh, we’re located in Dunlap, Tennessee. We’re on Blade Repair Academy at LinkedIn. I’m Alfred Crabtree. You can find me there. Uh.
Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s where you need to go because that’s how the process starts.
If you want to have high level technicians that really know how to work on composites and are working with real materials on simulated, but. Pretty realistic damage. Yeah. Weirdly realistic. Yeah. Secret sauce. And to get some sort of validation and to kind of get graded. Mm-hmm. And so you have a, a, a sense of how they’re doing.
You’re going to have to go to Blade Repair Academy. You need to get out to Tennessee and you better check it out because I, Alfred, I gotta be honest, this place is gonna get crazy busy [00:31:00] and I’m gonna have. ISPs calling me saying, can you get a hold of Alfred and get me inside? Can you get me in? No, I can’t because it’s Alfred’s deal and Alfred’s gonna run this thing.
We’re very approachable and, but very approachable. Keep calling, he’ll answer and take care of you, but it’s gonna get busy because the philosophy here is the right one. Thanks. So congratulations for putting this together and thank you for the invite. Uh, it is been a pleasure to see it. It’s uh, it, it’s great to know that you are around and you’re helping the industry.
Alfred Crabtree: Thank you. We appreciate it and you guys are a great clarion for the industry. A great voice. So, uh, those words, uh, right in the fields. And I wanna thank Cheryl too for coming out. I haven’t seen her for a while. It’s funny ’cause today I, on my phone, you know, five years ago today, she and I were here before this business existed as rope partner employees working on r and d week doing infusions.
So, uh,
Sheryl Weinstein: the space has transformed. It’s amazing. Yeah. You guys have done a, a [00:32:00] really great job. Like I, yeah, I think you’re definitely pushing the industry into a, like a new realm. Bringing something that, that it really needs, you know, that we don’t have at the moment or that we didn’t have.
Alfred Crabtree: Yeah, well hopefully, uh, it improves everybody’s quality of product and the bottom line.
’cause uh, you know, that’s what we’ll do. We’ll affect your bottom line for sure.
Allen Hall: So Sheryl and Alfred, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Thanks guys. Right,
Sheryl Weinstein: thank you.
https://weatherguardwind.com/blade-repair-academy-training/
If you own or manage a commercial property in Australia right now, energy costs are probably already giving you a headache.
Power prices jump around, demand charges can be high, and tenants are asking tougher questions about sustainability and operating costs.
That’s why solar paired with battery storage has moved far beyond a nice idea. For most of the Australian businesses, it’s now a practical, commercial decision.
Wandering what’s more?
Well, in businesses, solar and batteries aren’t just about cutting emissions; they also protect cash flow, improve property value, and give businesses greater control in an ever-changing energy system.
So, now let’s walk through how it all works, what incentives are available, and why more Australian businesses are making the move now in 2026!
In this blog post:
-
Why Solar & Batteries Matter for Australian Commercial Properties?
-
Government Rebates & Incentives for Solar: 2026 Updates!
-
How to Choose the Right Solar & Battery System for Your Commercial Property?
-
Commercial Solar in 2026: What the Financial Returns Look Like
-
Solar Panel Policies & Market Trends| What to Watch!
-
Future Growth Forecast for Commercial Solar in 2030: What’s Next!
-
Final Thought | Why 2026 Is the Year to Act?
Why Solar & Batteries Matter for Australian Commercial Properties?
Commercial energy use is big and often expensive. Every day, offices, retail stores, manufacturing facilities, and warehouses consume large amounts of electricity during daylight and after dark.
Traditionally, businesses pay peak rates for grid energy during working hours, and then again for nighttime power. That’s where solar plus storage flips the script:
Solar Panels: Cutting Your Daytime Costs
Solar PV systems convert sunlight into electricity. In Australia’s abundant sun-rich climate, rooftop solar is a no-brainer:
- Australia has among the highest rooftop solar penetration in the world, and commercial rooftops have huge capacity for panels.
- Solar reduces dependency on the grid during peak rates, ensuring immediate savings on energy bills.
Battery Storage: Power After the Sun Goes Down!
Solar alone is great, but what if your business still needs power at night? So here comes the power of battery storage.
Batteries store surplus solar power generated throughout the day and discharge it when you need it most, such as during evening peak times or during grid outages.
For many commercial setups, having battery storage means:
- Lower peak demand charges.
- Backup power resilience during blackouts.
- More control over energy usage patterns.
Solar panels combined with solar storage can transform a commercial property from a passive energy consumer into an active energy optimiser.
Government Rebates & Incentives for Solar: 2026 Updates!
In Australia, government rebates and
incentives in 2026 are strengthening the business case for commercial solar and battery systems.
The federal government has dramatically expanded support, making it a particularly compelling time for businesses to
act.
1. Renewable Energy Rebates Under Small-Scale Technology Certificates
Both solar panels and battery storage systems qualify for Small-scale
Technology Certificates (STCs). These certificates are tradable, that translate into a direct upfront
discount on installation costs:
- Batteries earn STCs based on their usable capacity, and these are typically applied as an instant point-of-sale
discount via your installer. - Solar PV systems also attract STCs, which substantially reduce the net price.
2. Cheaper Home Batteries Program Extended to Businesses
Since 1 July 2025, the federal Cheaper Home Batteries Program has been
offering significant battery rebates and, importantly, businesses can access benefits too.
Key points:
- Eligible batteries installed alongside solar PV systems receive STC-based rebates.
- For 2026:
Batteries installed before 1 May 2026 have a higher STC factor (a higher rebate per kWh).
From 1 May 2026, the rebate is tiered by battery size, with higher support for the first 14kWh and gradually less
for
larger capacities.
- The program runs until 2030, but rebate amounts decrease each year. This means the earlier you install, the more
you benefit.
The federal rebate is available to commercial
properties as long as the system meets eligibility requirements.
3. State-Based Rebates & Incentives
State-level
incentives can stack on top of federal support, giving commercial properties even more value:
- NSW Peak Demand Reduction Scheme (PDRS) offers additional battery rebates and VPP connection bonus payments.
- Victoria’s Business Renewables Fund and other local programs support larger solar and storage projects.
- Queensland offers interest-free loans and targeted incentives.
- South Australia’s Home Battery Scheme provides rebates for battery installations tied to smart energy networks.
However, these vary greatly by region, so businesses should talk with accredited installers and local energy agencies
to understand stacking opportunities.
4. Tax & Depreciation Benefits
Beyond rebates, commercial solar and storage investments can be tax-effective:
- Immediate or accelerated depreciation on assets (subject to ATO rules) can produce valuable upfront tax
deductions. - Solar + battery systems are treated as capital assets, which can accelerate the return on investment.
How to Choose the Right Solar & Battery System for Your Commercial Property?
Choosing the
right system isn’t one-size-fits-all. Here’s a step-by-step guide for sizing and designing what you need.
Step 1: Energy Audit
Start with a detailed energy audit to understand daily and seasonal load patterns. This informs:
- How much solar capacity do you need
- What battery size makes sense for backup power
For instance, if you have a warehouse with high daytime loads, you might prioritise solar capacity. For an office
that uses power after hours, a larger battery makes more sense.
Step 2: Solar Panel Selection
Commercial systems range from tens to hundreds of kilowatts (kW). System options:
- 20–100 kW rooftop systems for small-medium businesses
- 100 kW and beyond for large facilities or multi-site portfolios
Larger arrays often qualify for LGCs (Large-scale Generation Certificates) if they exceed the STC threshold, which is
another way to reduce costs.
Step 3: Battery Sizing
Battery capacity is measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). So, ask yourself:
- Do you want to reduce peak demand charges?
- Do you want emergency backup?
- How many hours of stored power do you need?
A battery that is about 20–50% of peak demand can deliver strong savings, but your energy audit will help refine this
estimate.
Smart Management & VPP Integration
Did you know that nowadays most modern batteries are VPP-capable? This means they can join the Virtual Power Plant
network
This connection allows aggregated batteries to transmit stored energy into the grid at peak times for added value,
often with payments from network operators or utilities.
Also look for:
- Energy management software to optimise usage.
- Time-of-use tariff compatibility to shift power consumption into cheaper periods.
Commercial Solar in 2026: What the Financial Returns Look Like
Undoubtedly, commercial solar with battery storage isn’t just a green, sustainable solution; it’s financially savvy.
How? Let’s find out!
Reduced Energy Bills
Solar power offsets expensive grid power during daylight. Add batteries, and you reduce:
- Peak demand charges
- Night-time grid consumption
Savings vary by site, but on average, many businesses report reductions of 20–50% or more in annual energy spend.
Rebate Impact
Solar STCs can knock thousands off upfront costs. Battery rebates, especially in early 2026, are significant.
An 10kWh commercial battery could attract several thousand dollars in rebate support alone.
Payback Period
For many commercial setups, payback periods of 3 to 7 years are achievable, and tax benefits can further improve them.
In Australia, major tenants also value energy-independent buildings, supporting higher rental premiums.
Solar Panel Policies & Market Trends| What to Watch!
Honestly, understanding government policies and trends in the Australian energy market isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. It takes proper time and research to find your exact match.
So, here are key trends and cautions you should take into account while planning to install solar and battery storage in your property:
Rebate Step-Downs
Rebate values decrease every year through to 2030. Therefore, later installs receive less government support than earlier ones. So, timing matters; act fast.
Feed-In Tariffs Are Evolving
In Australia, state feed-in tariffs for exported solar vary widely and are under review.
In some states, such as Victoria, midday solar export credits have been proposed to drop sharply, making batteries for storing and using your own power even more valuable.
Installer Accreditation
To claim rebates, systems must be installed by accredited professionals and use certified equipment. This ensures compliance and warranty security.
Future Growth Forecast for Commercial Solar in 2030: What’s Next!
Australia’s energy landscape is changing fast. More renewables are coming onto the grid, batteries are becoming essential for keeping the system stable, and policymakers and market operators are rolling out new ways for distributed energy resources (DERs) to create value.
Therefore, solar paired with batteries is no longer just about generating power; it’s increasingly seen as a flexible asset that can support the grid when it’s needed most.
At the same time, commercial microgrids are gaining traction, with groups of buildings sharing solar and storage to boost reliability, cut energy costs, and better manage peak demand.
Taken together, these shifts are making commercial solar more valuable than ever, cementing its role as a key part of Australia’s move toward a smarter, more decentralised, and low-carbon energy system by 2030.
Final Thought | Why 2026 Is the Year to Act?
If you’re a commercial property owner, don’t worry much! In Australia in 2026, solar and battery storage isn’t just a sustainability project; it’s a strategic investment.
Also, with current government rebates, state incentives, and tax benefits, you can dramatically lower upfront costs while future-proofing your energy usage.
Plus, as grid export tariffs evolve and demand charges climb, the economics of self-generated and self-stored power only get stronger.
This is the moment when smart businesses make the leap not just to cut costs, but to take control of their energy future.
Wanna join this energy revolution? Contact Cyanergy, your most trusted partner, and win a free solar quote today!
Your Solution Is Just a Click Away
The post A Guide for Solar & Battery Storage for Commercial Properties appeared first on Cyanergy.
A Guide for Solar & Battery Storage for Commercial Properties
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Morten Handberg Breaks Down Leading Edge Erosion
Morten Handberg, Uptime’s blade whisperer, returns to the show to tackle leading edge erosion. He covers the fatigue physics behind rain erosion, why OEMs offer no warranty coverage for it, how operators should time repairs before costs multiply, and what LEP solutions are working in the field.
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!
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Morten, welcome back to the program.
Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen. It’s fantastic to be back on on, on the podcast. Really excited to, uh, record an episode on Erosion Today.
Allen Hall: Wow. Leading as erosion is such a huge worldwide issue and. Operators are having big problems with it right now. It does seem like there’s not a lot of information readily available to operators to understand the issue quite yet.
Morten Handberg: Well, it, I mean, it’s something that we’ve been looking at for the, at least the past 10 years. We started looking at it when I was in in DONG or as it back in 2014. But we also saw it very early on because we were in offshore environment, much harsher. Uh, rain erosion conditions, and you were also starting to change the way that the, the, uh, the coatings [00:01:00]that were applied.
So there was sort of a, there was several things at play that meant that we saw very early on, early on offshore.
Allen Hall: Well, let’s get to the basics of rain erosion and leading edge erosion. What is the physics behind it? What, what happens to the leading edges of these blades as rain? Impacts them.
Morten Handberg: Well, you should see it as um, millions of, of small fat, uh, small fatigue loads on the coating because each raindrop, it creates a small impact load on the blade.
It creates a rail wave that sort of creates a. Uh, share, share loads out on, uh, into the coating that is then absorbed by the coating, by the filler and and so on. And the more absorbent that your substrate is, the longer survivability you, you’re leading into coating will have, uh, if you have manufacturing defects in the coating, that will accelerate the erosion.
But it is a fatigue effect that is then accelerated or decelerate depending on, uh, local blade conditions.
Allen Hall: Yeah, what I’ve seen in the [00:02:00] field is the blades look great. Nothing. Nothing. You don’t see anything happening and then all of a sudden it’s like instantaneous, like a fatigue failure.
Morten Handberg: I mean, a lot of things is going on.
Uh, actually you start out by, uh, by having it’s, they call, it’s called mass loss and it’s actually where the erosion is starting to change the material characteristics of the coating. And that is just the first step. So you don’t see that. You can measure it in a, um, in the laboratory setting, you can actually see that there is a changing in, in the coating condition.
You just can’t see it yet. Then you start to get pitting, and that is these very, very, very small, almost microscopic chippings of the coating. They will then accelerate and then you start to actually see the first sign, which is like a slight, a braided surface. It’s like someone took a, a fine grain sandpaper across the surface of the plate, but you only see it on the leading edge.
If it’s erosion, it’s only on the center of the leading edge. That’s very important. If you see it on the sides and further down, then it’s, it’s [00:03:00] something else. Uh, it’s not pure erosion, but then you see this fine grain. Then as that progresses, you see more and more and more chipping, more and more degradation across the, the leading edge of the blade.
Worse in the tip of it, less so into the inner third of the blade, but it is a gradual process that you see over the leading edge. Finally, you’ll then start to see the, uh, the coating coming off and you’ll start to see exposed laminate. Um, and from there it can, it can accelerate or exposed filler or laminate.
From there, it can accelerate because. Neither of those are actually designed to handle any kind of erosion.
Allen Hall: What are the critical variables in relation to leading edge erosion? Which variables seem to matter most? Is it raindrop size? Is it tip speed? What factors should we be looking for?
Morten Handberg: Tip speeds and rain intensity.
Uh, obviously droplet size have an impact, but. But what is an operator you can actually see and monitor for is, well, you know, your tip speed of the blade that matters. Uh, but it is really the rain intensity. So if you have [00:04:00] sort of a, an average drizzle over the year, that’s a much better condition than if you have like, you know, showers in, in, in, in a, in a few hour sessions at certain points of time.
Because then, then it becomes an aggressive erosion. It’s not, it’s, you don’t, you get much higher up on the. On the, on the fatigue curve, uh, then if it’s just an average baseline load over long periods of time,
Allen Hall: yeah, that fatigue curve really does matter. And today we’re looking at what generally is called VN curves, velocity versus number of impacts, and.
The rain erosion facilities I’ve seen, I’ve been able to, to give some parameters to, uh, provide a baseline or a comparison between different kinds of coatings. Is is that the, the standard as everybody sees it today, the sort of the VN curve
Morten Handberg: that is what’s been developed by this scientific, uh, community, these VN curve, that that gives you some level of measure.
I would still say, you know, from what we can do in a rain erosion tester to what is then actually going on [00:05:00] the field is still very two very, very, very different things you can say. If you can survive a thousand hours in a rain erosion tester, then it’s the similar in the field that doesn’t really work like that.
But there are comparisons so you can do, you know, uh, a relationship study, uh, between them. And you can use the VN curves to determine the ERO erosion aggressiveness. Field. We did that in the bait defect forecasting that we did in wind pile up with DCU back in 2019, uh, where we actually looked at rain erosion across Europe.
Uh, and then the, uh, the actual erosion propagation that we saw within these different sites, both for offshore and for onshore, where we actually mapped out, um, across Europe, you know, which areas will be the most erosion prone. And then utilize that to, to then mo then, then to determine what would be the red, the best maintenance strategy and also, uh, erosion, uh, LEP, uh, solution for that wind farm.
Allen Hall: Oh, okay. Uh, is it raindrop size then, or just [00:06:00] quantity of raindrops? Obviously drizzle has smaller impact. There’s less mass there, but larger raindrops, more frequent rain.
Morten Handberg: If you have showers, it tends to be larger drops. Right. So, so they kind of follow each other. And if it’s more of a drizzle. It will be smaller raindrops.
They typically follow each other. You know, if you’ve been outside in a rainstorm before we just showered, you would have sense that these are, these are much higher, you know, raindrop sizes. So, so there is typically an a relation between raindrop size and then showers versus a drizzle. It’s typically more fine, fine grain rain drops.
Allen Hall: And what impact does dirt and debris mixed in with the rain, uh, affect leading edge erosion? I know a lot of, there’s a lot of concern. And farm fields and places where there’s a lot of plowing and turnover of the dirt that it, it, it does seem like there’s more leading edge erosion and I, I think there’s a little bit of an unknown about it, uh, just because they see leading edge [00:07:00]erosion close to these areas where there’s a lot of tilling going on.
Is it just dirt impact worth a blade or is it a combination of dirt plus rain and, and those two come combining together to make a worse case. Uh, damage scenario.
Morten Handberg: Technically it would be slightly worse than if it were, if there is some soil or, or sand, or sand contamination in the raindrops. But I mean, logically rain typically, you know, comes down from the sky.
It doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t mix in with the dirt then, you know, it would be more if you have dirt on the blades. It’s typically during a dry season where it would get mixed up and then blown onto the blades. Honestly, I don’t think that that is really what’s having an impact, because having contamination in the blade is not something that is, that would drive erosion.
I think that that is, I think that is, that is a misunderstanding. We do see sand, sand erosion in some part of the world where you have massive, uh, sand, uh, how do you say, sandstorms [00:08:00] coming through and, and that actually creates an, an abrasive wear on the plate. It looks different from rain erosion because it’s two different mechanisms.
Uh, where the sand is actually like a sandpaper just blowing across the surface, so you can see that. Whereas rain is more of this fatigue effect. So I think in the, theoretically if you had soil mixed in with rain, yes that could have an impact because you would have an a, a hardened particle. But I do, I don’t think it’s what’s driving erosion, to be honest.
Allen Hall: Okay, so then there’s really two different kinds of failure modes. A particle erosion, which is more of an abrasive erosion, which I would assume be a maybe a little wider, spread along the leading edge of the blade versus a fatigue impact from a raindrop collision. They just look different, right?
Morten Handberg: Yeah, so, so sand erosion you could have spreading across a larger surface of the blade because it, because it doesn’t bounce off in the same way that a raindrop would, you know, because that’s more of an impact angle and the load that it’s applying.
So if it comes in at a, at a st [00:09:00] at a, um, at the, at the, at a, at a steep angle, then it would just bounce off because the amount of load that it’s impacting on would be very limited. So that’s also why we don’t really see it on the, um, uh, outside of the leading edge. Whereas sand erosion would have a, would, would have a different effect because even at a steep angle, it would still, you know, create some kind of wear because of the hardened particle and the effect of that.
Allen Hall: Okay. So let’s talk about incubation period, because I’ve seen a lot of literature. Talking about incubation period and, and what that means. What does incubation period mean on a leading edge coating?
Morten Handberg: So that is, that, that is from when you start having the first impacts until you get the, the, the change in structure.
So when you get to the mass loss or first pitting, that would be your incubation period, because that is from when it starts until you can see the actual effects. Would say that, that that is what would be defined as the incubation period of leading into erosion.
Allen Hall: Okay. So you wanna then maximize the incubation period where the coating still looks mostly pristine [00:10:00] once incubation period is over and you get into the coating.
Are there different rates at which the coatings will deteriorate, or are they all pretty much deteriorating at roughly the same rate?
Morten Handberg: I mean, for the really high durability. We don’t really have good enough data to say anything about whether the, um, the, the period after the incubation period, whether that would actually, how that would work in the field.
We don’t really know that yet. I would say, because the, um, some of the, the shell solutions, some of the high end polyurethane coatings, if they fail, typically it’s because of workmanship. Or adhesion issues. It’s has so far not really been tied in directly in, into leading edge erosion. Uh, the ones that I’ve seen, so typically, and, and, you know, all of these high-end coatings, they’re just, they, they have shown, you know, some of them you couldn’t even wear down in a rain erosion tester.
Um, so, so we don’t really know. Um, how, [00:11:00] how the, how the shells, they would, they, they, they, they, how they would react over the five, 10 year period because we haven’t seen that much yet. And what we have seen have been more of a mechanical failure in, in the bonding
Allen Hall: that, I guess that makes sense. Then operators are still buying wind turbine blades without any leading edge coating at all.
It is basically a painted piece of fiberglass structure. Is that still advisable today or are there places where you could just get away with that? Or is that just not reality because of the tip speeds?
Morten Handberg: For the larger, I would say anything beyond two megawatt turbines, you should have leading edge protection because you’re at tip speeds where, you know, any kind of rain would create erosion within, um, within the lifetime of the late.
That is just a fact. Um, so. I don’t, I don’t see any real areas of the world where that would not apply. And if it, if you are in a place where it’s really dry, then it would typically also mean that then you would have sand erosion. Is that, that, [00:12:00] that would, I would expect that it would be one of the two.
You wouldn’t be in an area where it couldn’t get any kind of erosion to the blades. Um, so either you should have either a very tough gel code, um, coating, or you should have have an LEP per urethane based coating. On the blades,
Allen Hall: well do the manufacturers provide data on the leading edge offerings, on the coatings, or even the harder plastic shells or shields.
Does, is there any information? If I’m an operator and I’m buying a a three megawatt turbine that comes along with the blade that says, this is the li, this is the estimated lifetime, is that a thing right now? Or is it just We’re putting on a coating and we are hoping for the best?
Morten Handberg: The OEMs, as far as I, I haven’t seen any.
Any contract or agreement where today, where erosion is not considered a wear and tear issue, there is simply no, no coverage for it. So if you buy a turbine and there’s any kind of leading [00:13:00] edge erosion outside of the end of warranty period, it’s your your problem. There is no guarantee on that.
Allen Hall: So the operator is at risk,
Morten Handberg: well, they’re at risk and if they don’t take matters into their own hands and make decisions on their own.
But they would still be locked in because within the warranty period, they will still be tied to the OEM and the decisions that they make. And if they have a service agreement with the OEM, then they would also be tied in with what the OEM provides.
Allen Hall: So that does place a lot of the burden on the owner operator to understand the effects of rate erosion, particularly at the at a new site if they don’t have any history on it at all.
To then try to identify a, a coating or some sort of protecting device to prevent leading edge erosion. ’cause at the end of the day, it does sound like the operator owner is gonna be responsible for fixing it and keeping the blades, uh, in some aerodynamic shape. That that’s, that’s a big hurdle for a lot of operators.
Morten Handberg: The problem is that if you have a service [00:14:00]contract, but you are depending on the OEM, providing that service. Then you have to be really certain that any leading edge erosion or anywhere on the leading edge is then covered by that contract. Otherwise, you’re in, you’re in a really bad, you’re in a really risky situation because you can’t do anything on your own.
Because if you’re a service contract, but you’re beholden to whatever the, your service provider is, is, is agreeing to providing to you. So you might not get the best service.
Allen Hall: And what are the risks of this? Uh, obviously there can be some structural issues. Particularly around the tips of the blaze, but that’s also power loss.
What are typical power loss numbers?
Morten Handberg: Well, there is a theoretically theoretical power loss to it, but for any modern turbine, the blade, the, the turbine would simply regulate itself out of any leading erosion loss. So, so the blades would just change their behavior that the turbine would just change, its its operation [00:15:00]conditions so that it would achieve the same lift to the blade.
So. Uh, any study that we have done or been a part of, uh, even, you know, comparing blades that were repaired, blades that were cleaned, blades that were, uh, left eroded, and then operating the, uh, the deviation was within half, half percent and that was within the margin of error. We couldn’t read, we couldn’t see it even for really, you know, really er road blades.
Of course there is different between turbines. Some turbines, they, they could show it, but I haven’t seen any data that suggests that erosion actually leads to a lot of power loss. There is a theoretical loss because there is a loss in aerodynamic performance, but because blades today they’re pitch controlled, then you can, you can regulate yourself out of that.
Some of that, uh, power laws,
Allen Hall: so the control laws in the turbine. Would know what the wind speeds are and what their power output should be, and it’ll adjust the [00:16:00]pitch of each of the blades sort of independently to, to drive the power output.
Morten Handberg: Typically, erosion is a uniform issue, so what happens on one blade happens on three.
So it’s rare to see that one blade is just completely erod in the two other they look fine. That’s really rare unless you start, you know, doing uh, abnormal repairs on them. Then you might get something. But even then, I mean, we’re not talking, you know, 10 per 10 degrees in, in variation. You know, it’s not, it’s not anything like that.
It’s very small changes. And if they would do a lot of weird DA, you know, uh, different angles, you would get instant imbalance and then, you know, you would get scatter alarm. So, so you would see that quite fast.
Allen Hall: Well, let me, let me just understand this just a little bit. So what the control logs would do would increase the pitch angle of the blaze, be a little more aggressive.
On power production to bring the power production up. If leading edge erosion was knocking it down a percentage point or two, does that have a consequence? Are like when you [00:17:00] start pitching the blades at slightly different angles, does that increase the area where rain erosion will occur? Is like, are you just.
Keep chasing this dragon by doing that,
Morten Handberg: you could change the area a little bit, but it’s not, it’s not something that, that changes the erosion, uh, that the erosion zone, that that much. It’s very minimal. Um, and one, one of the, another, another reason why, why you might see it might, might not see it as much is because voltage generator panels is widely used in the industry today.
And, and Vortex panel, they are. Uh, negating some of the negative effect from, uh, leading erosion. So that also adds to the effect that there, that the aerodynamic effect of leading erosion is limited, uh, compared to what we’ve seen in the past.
Allen Hall: Okay. So there’s a couple manufacturers that do use vortex generators around the tip, around the leading edge erosion areas right outta the factory, and then there’s other OEMs that don’t do that at all.
Is, is there a benefit to [00:18:00] having the VGs. Right out of the factory. Is that, is that just to, uh, as you think about the power output of the generator over time, like, this is gonna gimme a longer time before I have to do anything. Is, is in terms of repair,
Morten Handberg: it does help you if you have contamination of the blade.
It does help you if you have surface defects off the blade. That, that any, uh, any change to the air, to the aerodynamics is, is reduced and that’s really important if you have an optimized blade. Then the negative effect of leading erosion might get, uh, you know, might, might, might get, might get affected.
But there are, there are still reasons why I do want to do leading erosion repairs. You should do that anyway, even if you can’t see it on your power curve or not, because if you wait too long, you’ll start to get structural damages to the blade. As we talked about last time. It’s not that leading edge erosion will turn into a critical damage right away, but if you need, if you go into structural erosion, then the, then the cost of damage.
The cost of repairing the damage will multiply. Uh, [00:19:00] and at, at a certain point, you know, you will get a re structure. It might not make the blade, you know, uh, cost a, a condition where the blade could collapse or you’re at risk, but you do get a weakened blade that is then susceptible to damage from other sources.
Like if you have a lighting strike damage or you have a heavy storm or something like that, then that can accelerate the damage, turning it into a critical damage. So you should still keep your leading edge in, in shape. If you want to do to, to minimize your cost, you should still repair it before it becomes structural.
Allen Hall: Okay. So the blades I have seen where they actually have holes in the leading edge, that’s a big problem just because of contamination and water ingress and yeah, lightning obviously be another one. So that should be repaired immediately. Is is that the, do we treat it like a cat four or cat five when that happens?
Or how, what? How are we thinking about that?
Morten Handberg: Maximum cat, cat four, even, even in those circumstances because it is a, it is a severe issue, but it’s not critical on, on its own. So I would not treat it as a cat five where you need to stop [00:20:00] the turbine, stuff like that. Of course, you do want, you don’t want to say, okay, let’s wait on, let’s wait for a year or so before we repair it.
You know, do plan, you know, with some urgency to get it fixed, but it’s not something where you need to, you know, stubble works and then get that done. You know, the blade can survive it for, for a period of time, but you’re just. Susceptible to other risks, I would say.
Allen Hall: Alright. So in in today’s world, there’s a lot of options, uh, to select from in terms of leading edge protection.
What are some of the leading candidates? What, what are some of the things that are actually working out in the field?
Morten Handberg: What we typically do, uh, when we’re looking at leading edge erosion, we’re looking at the, the raw data from the wind farm. Seeing how, how bad is it and how long have the wind farm been operated without being repaired?
So we get a sense of the aggressiveness of the erosion and. Um, if we have reliable weather data, we can also do some modeling to see, okay, what is the, what is the, the, uh, environmental conditions? Also, just to get a sense, is this [00:21:00] material driven fatigue or is it actually rain erosion driven fatigue?
Because if the, if the coating quality was not, was not very good, if the former lead leading edge, it was not applied very, very, very good, then, you know, you still get erosion really fast. You get surface defects that, uh, that trigger erosion. So that’s very important to, to, to have a look at. But then when we’ve established that, then we look at, okay, where do we have the, the, the, uh, the structural erosion zone?
So that means in what, in what part of the BA would you be at risk of getting structural damage? That’s the part where that you want to protect at all costs. And in that, I would look at either shell solution or high duty, um, put urethane coating something that has a a long durability. But then you also need to look at, depending on whether you want to go for coating or shell, you need to look at what is your environmental condition, what is your, you know, yeah.
Your environmental conditions, because you also wanna apply it without it falling off again. Uh, and if you have issues with [00:22:00] high humidity, high temperatures, uh, then a lot of the coatings will be really difficult to process or, you know, to, to. Uh, to handle in the field. And, you know, and if you don’t, if you don’t get that right, then you just might end up with a lot of peeling coating or uh, peeling shells.
Um, so it’s very important to understand what is your environmental conditions that you’re trying to do repairs in. And that’s also why we try not to recommend, uh, these shell repairs over the entire, out a third of the blade. Because you’re, you’re just putting up a lot of risk for, for, uh, for detaching blades if you put on too high, um, uh, how do you say, high height, sea of solutions.
Allen Hall: Yeah. So I, I guess it does matter how much of the blade you’re gonna cover. Is there a general rule of thumb? Like are we covering the outer 10%, outer 20%? What is the. What is that rule of thumb?
Morten Handberg: Typically, you know, you, you get a long way by somewhere between the outer four to six meters. Um, so that would [00:23:00]probably equivalate to the, out of the outer third.
That would likely be something between the outer 10 to 15 to 20% at max. Um, but, but it is, I, I mean, instead of looking at a percentage, I usually look at, okay, what can we see from the data? What does that tell us? And we can see that from the progression of the erosion. Because you can clearly see if you have turbines that’s been operating, what part of the blade has already, you know, exposed laminate.
And where do you only have a light abrasion where you only have a light abrasion, you can just continue with, and with the, with, with the general coating, you don’t need to go for any high tier solutions. And that’s also just to avoid applying, applying something that is difficult to process because it will just end up, that it falls off and then you’re worse off than, than before actually.
Allen Hall: Right. It’s about mitigating risk at some level. On a repair,
Morten Handberg: reducing repair cost. Um, so, so if you, if you look at your, your conditions of your blades and then select a solution that is, that is right for that part of [00:24:00] the blade
Allen Hall: is the best way to repair a blade up tower or down tower is what is the easiest, I guess what’s easier, I know I’ve heard conflicting reports about it.
A lot of people today, operators today are saying we can do it up tower. It’s, it’s pretty good that way. Then I hear other operators say, no, no, no, no, no. The quality is much better if the blade is down on the ground. What’s the recommendation there?
Morten Handberg: In general, it can be done up tower. Um, it is correct if you do a down tower, the quality is better, but that, that, that means you need to have a crane on standby to swap out blades.
Uh, and you should have a spare set of blades that you can swap with. Maybe that can work. Um. But I would say in general, the, your, your, your, your cheaper solution and your more, you know, you know, uh, would be to do up tower. And if, and again, if you do your, your, your homework right and, and selecting the right, uh, products for, for your [00:25:00] local environments, then you can do up tower then leading it, erosion.
Not something that you need to, you should not need to consider during a down tower. Unless you are offshore in an environment where you only have, uh, 10 repair days per year, then you might want to look at something else. But again, if we talk for offs for onshore, I would, I would always go for up, up tower.
I, I don’t, I don’t really see the need for, for, for taking the blades down.
Allen Hall: So what is the optimum point in a blaze life where a leading edge coating should be applied? Like, do you let it get to the point where you’re doing structural repairs or. When you start to see that first little bit of chipping, do you start taking care of it then there I, there’s gotta be a sweet spot somewhere in the middle there.
Where is that?
Morten Handberg: There is sweet spot. So the sweet spot is as soon as you have exposed laminate, because from exposed laminate, uh, the repair cost is exactly the same as if it was just, you know, uh, a light abrasion of the coating because the, the, the time to, to, um, prepare the [00:26:00] surface to apply the coating is exactly the same.
From, you know, from, from, from light surface damage to exposed laminate. That is the same, that is the same repair cost. But as soon as you have a structural damage to your blade, then you have to do a structural repair first, and then you’re, you’re multiplying the repair time and your repair cost. So that is the right point in time.
The way to, to determine when that is, is to do inspections, annual inspections, if you do 10% of your wind farm per year. Then you would know why, what, how the rest of your wind farm looks like because erosion is very uniform across the wind farm. Maybe there are some small deviations, but if you do a subset, uh, then, then you would have a good basic understanding about what erosion is.
You don’t need to do a full sweep of the, of the wind farm to know, okay, now is my right time to do repairs.
Allen Hall: Okay, so you’re gonna have a, a couple years notice then if you’re doing drone inspections. Hopefully you put, as you put your blades up, doing a drone inspection maybe on the ground so you [00:27:00] have a idea of what you have, and then year one, year two, year three, you’re tracking that progression across at least a sampling of the wind farm.
And then, then you can almost project out then like year five, I need to be doing something and I need to be putting it into my budget.
Morten Handberg: When you start to see the first minor areas of exposed laminate. Then the year after, typically then you would have a larger swat of, of laminated exposure, still not as structural.
So when you start to see that, then I would say, okay, next year for next year’s budget, we should really do repairs. It’s difficult when you just direct the wind farm, maybe have the first year of inspection. It’s difficult to get any, any kind of, you know, real sense of what is the, you know, what is the where of scale that we have.
You can be off by a factor of two or three if, you know, if, um, so I would, I would give it a few years and then, uh, then, then, then see how things progresses before starting to make, uh, plans for repairs. If you [00:28:00] don’t have any leading edge erosion protection installed from the start. I would say plan, at least for year, year five, you should expect that you need to go out, do and do a repair.
Again, I don’t have a crystal ball for every, you know, that’s good enough to predict for every wind farm in the world, but that would be a good starting point. Maybe it’s year three, maybe it’s year seven, depending on your local conditions. That is, but then at least you know that you need to do something.
Allen Hall: Well, there’s been a number of robotic, uh, applications of rain erosion coatings. Over the last two, three years. So now you see several different, uh, repair companies offering that. What does the robotic approach have to its advantage versus technicians on ropes?
Morten Handberg: Obviously robots, they don’t, they don’t, uh, get affected by how good the morning coffee was, what the latest conversation with the wife was, or how many hours of sleep it got.
There is something to, with the grown operator, uh, you know how good they are. But it’s more about how well, uh, [00:29:00] adjusted the, the controls of the, of the, the robot or the drone is in its application. So in principle, the drone should be a lot better, uh, because you can, it will do it the right, the same way every single time.
What it should at least. So in, so in principle, if you, you, you, when we get there, then the leading it then, then the robot should be, should outmatch any repair technician in, in the world. Because repair technician, they’re really good. They’re exceptionally good at what they do. The, the, the far majority of them, but they’re, they’re still people.
So they, you know, anyone, you know, maybe standing is not a hundred percent each time, maybe mixing of. Um, of materials and they’re much better at it than I am. So no question there. But again, that’s just real reality. So I would say that the, the, the draw, the robots, they should, uh, they should get to a point at some, at some point to that they will, they will be the preferable choice, especially for this kind of, this kind of repair.
Allen Hall: What should [00:30:00] operators be budgeting to apply a coating? Say they’re, you know, they got a new wind farm. It’s just getting started. They’re gonna be five years out before they’re gonna do something, but they, they probably need to start budgeting it now and, and have a scope on it. ’cause it’s gonna be a capital campaign probably.
How much per turbine should they be setting aside?
Morten Handberg: I would just, as a baseline, at least set aside 20,000 per per blade
Allen Hall: dollars or a Corona
Morten Handberg: dollars.
Allen Hall: Really. Okay.
Morten Handberg: Assuming that you actually need to do a repair campaign, I would say you’re probably ending up in that region again. I can be wrong with by a factor of, you know, uh, by several factors.
Uh, but, um, but I would say that as a starting point, we don’t know anything else. I would just say, okay, this should be the, the, the, the budget I would go for, maybe it’ll be only 10 because we have a lesser campaign. Maybe it will be twice because we have severe damages. So we need just to, to, to source a, um, a high end, uh, LEP solution.
Um, so, so [00:31:00] again, that would just be my starting point, Alan. It’s not something that I can say with accuracy that will go for every single plate, but it would be a good starting point.
Allen Hall: Well, you need to have a number and you need to be, get in the budget ahead of time. And so it, it’s a lot easier to do upfront than waiting till the last minute always.
Uh, and it is the future of leading edge erosion and protection products. Is it changing? Do you see, uh, the industry? Winning this battle against erosion.
Morten Handberg: I see it winning it because we do have the technology, we do have the solutions. So I would say it’s compared to when we started looking at it in 14, where, you know, we had a lot of erosion issues, it seems a lot more manageable.
Now, of course, if you’re a, if you’re a new owner, you just bought a wind farm and you’re seeing this for this first time, it might not be as manageable. But as an, as an industry, I would say we’re quite far. In understanding erosion, what, how it develops and what kind of solutions that that can actually, uh, withstand it.
We’re still not there in [00:32:00] terms of, uh, quality in, in repairs, but that’s, um, but, but, uh, I, I think technology wise, we are, we are in a really good, good place.
Allen Hall: All the work that has been done by DTU and RD test systems for creating a rain erosion test. Facility and there’s several of those, more than a dozen spread around the world at this point.
Those are really making a huge impact on how quickly the problem is being solved. Right? Because you’re just bringing together the, the, the brain power of the industry to work on this problem.
Morten Handberg: They have the annual erosion Symposium and that has been really a driving force and also really put DTU on the map in terms of, uh, leading edge erosion, understanding that, and they’re also trying to tie, tie it in with lightning, uh, because, uh.
If you have a ro, if you have erosion, that changes your aerodynamics. That in fact changes how your LPS system works. So, so there is also some, some risks in that, uh, that is worth considering when, when, when discussing [00:33:00]repairs. But I think these of you, they’ve done a tremendous amount of work and r and d system have done a lot of good work in terms of standardizing the way that we do rain erosion testing, whether or not we can then say with a hundred uncertainty that this, uh, this test will then match with.
With, um, how say local environment conditions, that’s fine, but we can at least test a DP systems on, on the same scale and then use that to, to, to look at, well how, how good would they then ferry in in the, um, out out in the real world.
Allen Hall: Yeah, there’s a lot too leading edge erosion and there’s more to come and everybody needs to be paying attention to it.
’cause it, it is gonna be a cost during the lifetime of your wind turbines and you just need to be prepared for it. Mor how do people get ahold of you to learn more about leading edge erosion and, and some of the approaches to, to control it?
Morten Handberg: Well, you can always re reach me, uh, on my email, meh, at wind power.com or on my LinkedIn, uh, page and I would strongly advise, you know, reach out if you have any concerns regarding erosion or you need support with, um, [00:34:00] uh, with blade maintenance strategies, uh, we can definitely help you out with that.
Or any blade related topic that you might be concerned about for your old local wind farm.
Allen Hall: Yes. If you have any blade questions or leading edge erosion questions, reach out to Morton. He’s easy to get ahold of. Thank you so much for being back on the podcast. We love having you. It
Morten Handberg: was fantastic being here.
Cheers. A.
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