Published

2 years ago

November 9, 2023

Alice Rush

Icetek Innovative Icing Sensor From CanREA Electricity Transformation Canada 23

At Electricity Transformation Canada 23, Icetek’s André Bégin-Droulet explains their thermodynamic icing sensor that detects onset and intensity. The technology optimizes turbine operations to reduce downtime and damage while improving grid reliability. Icetek provides expertise and data analysis services alongside the product for maximum value.

Check out IceTek at icetek.ca

And follow their LinkedIn

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!

IceTek

Allen Hall: At Electricity Transformation Canada 2023, we’re here to talk ice detection with André Bégin Droulet with Icetek. And icing. Welcome to the program.

André Bégin-Drolet: Thank you, thank you for having me.

Allen Hall: So Icetek is a new ice detection system that I was first introduced to by Borealis Wind. And Daniela said we got this new ice detector and it’s fabulous.

It tells us all these great, wonderful things about ice that we never knew before and I had never heard of it. Which was odd, because we live in a place where there’s a lot of snow and ice. I usually hear about ice detection. It’s a thing that happens. But Icetek is a relatively new company based in Quebec.

André Bégin-Drolet: Yeah, exactly. So it’s we started the company in 2020. So that’s three years from now. But it’s a spin off from a university project. We, I’m a mechanical engineering. Professor Laval University in Quebec City. We developed the sensor throughout the research for the last 15 years. So we did a lot of research, academic research.

It was a tool for us to understand icing on wind turbines. And then I started a partnership with Daniela a research partnership with them to help them be be better. And this is where it it all started, where… After the project, she asked, can we buy those sensor? They were not for sale ’cause it were a research product, at the moment. And then, yeah, this is when the university encouraged us to to go and start a spinoff company for that.

Allen Hall: Because the problem is not just knowing that there’s ice. The problem is trying to know that ice is coming.

That’s the trick. And a lot of the ice detectors that are out there are really binary. That ice is here. Ice is left, but in an operational sense, in a wind turbine, it doesn’t really help you all that much. Leads to a lot of downtime. Yeah,

André Bégin-Drolet: so ice is a very complicated problem. Ice can take different incarnations, freezing rain, blaze ice, rime ice, ore frost different types under different conditions, and we learned that through our 15 years of research that it can take different Incarnation and we designed the sensor so that we could know when it start.

So the really onset of icing when there’s no icing visible, but the conditions are prone to icing. And then what’s the intensity of icing? What’s the amount of liquid work content in the atmosphere when it stops the meteorological icing. ’cause when the meteorological icing is over, you can still have ice on the structure.

Is still, is this still icing? Yes, but it’s called instrumental icing, persistence of icing. So all these different phase of the icing, you need to understand them. And as you mentioned, it’s not a binary.

Allen Hall: No, definitely isn’t. And I know Daniela trying to explain that to me several months ago. And it just went, there was a lot going on there.

So I’m glad we have time to sit down and discuss it. Okay. Let’s just walk through what the sensor is. Because it looks different than any other icing sensor that I’ve ever seen. It’s a, it’s a metallic cylinder. Yeah.

André Bégin-Drolet: We’re using a thermodynamic approach. Okay. We’re having a heated cylinder, that we know the amount of heat that we fed into that cylinder.

We also know the surface temperature of that cylinder, because we have those temperature probes inside the cylinder, but close to the walls. And we also measure the air speed, the air temperature, relative humidity solar radiation. Based on all these parameters, we do modeling, what should be the surface temperature, knowing all those parameters.

And then we compare.

Allen Hall: So it’s more than just detection of ice itself, you’re detecting… Basically, temperature, the amount of heat pulled off the cylindrical sensor, you have a solar sensor. This is really fascinating because when I saw the sensor the first time, I wasn’t sure what was the magic piece here.

But it’s more than just one sensor. In order to do this calculation, you need actually multiple sensors. So you have temperature, true temperature, true air temperature. You have the sun condition, sun out, no sun. And then you have wind speed with the ultrasonic FT sensor. Yeah, which is a really nice sensor.

Okay, so that’s high quality stuff. But then inside of this cylinder, this metal cylinder, there’s circuitry. There’s a

André Bégin-Drolet: brain inside. There’s a brain inside something that would not have been possible to do 20 years ago through the democratization of electronics and microchip and everything. So we do live calculation inside the sensor using all these parameters and we…

And inside the sensor, we model, so we do live modeling of the surface temperature of of these cylinder. And why we use cylinder is because they’re easy to model. Yeah, we went for that.

Allen Hall: It’s a basic model. It’s an aerodynamic model.

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s an aerodynamic, thermodynamic.

Allen Hall: Exactly. And it’s simple to do sort of CFD, thermodynamic model.

Okay so now you have. One, two, three, four different sensors. You have a brain inside of it. And in that brain is a bunch of software, I assume? And that software is taking all those parameters and trying to figure out, Okay, ice is about to come, ice is over. Did you have to create those models yourself?

Did you go to a wind tunnel to do that? How did that all get done?

André Bégin-Drolet: It was developed through academic research. We had access to all these wind tunnels, infrastructures, and everything. We come with a background of 15 years of academic research. Where we did all this stuff. We went through a cold climate chamber to simulate the icing. We used all this knowledge, this academic knowledge. To come up with this nice product.

Allen Hall: So where was the icing wind tunnel at? Is that in Canada?

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s in Canada. It’s in Quebec City. So it’s a refrigerated wind tunnel that was built in the 60s. It’s a closed loop wind tunnel. It goes over two floors.

And it’s all wood. But we retrofitted the icing in there. We had to dry the tunnel after each run, but it was a very unique

Allen Hall: Yeah, because you usually don’t put water in these wind tunnels. That’s a forbidden thing to do. So you had to, must have twisted some arms there, convinced some people to let you get their fabulous wind tunnel wet.

André Bégin-Drolet: Yes, but we dried it. It was built in house. We know how to rebuild it. Yeah. We had that leverage and that’s what’s fun in the mechanical engineering department. What? We do things and we can place things.

Allen Hall: Sure, sure. Why was that tunnel there originally?

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s been there for a while.

It’s been there for a while. It’s, it was not refrigerated at the time. Yeah. This unit was added in the early or late 1990s. Okay. And then they built on that. Okay. Two different, experiment. It’s used for teaching as well.

Allen Hall: Okay. Making parkas and hats and all the Canadian gear, gloves.

Is that how they check all that equipment?

Joel Saxum: Canada goose checks.

André Bégin-Drolet: Exactly.

Allen Hall: It’s a good promotional tool for Canada. Okay, so you have all these resources at your fingertips. You’re, you’ve created this basic instrument. You’re now taking it to a wind tunnel. You’re validating it, you’re coming with curves or empiric.

Are you doing empirical measurements?

André Bégin-Drolet: We do a lot of empirical curve. Okay. In the wind tunnel. Alright. But then the real test was when it was on a turbine. ’cause when you’re on a turbine, you’re behind the rotor. There’s a lot of, there’s some weight, there’s turbine density mess, and it’s messy. The wind flow is messy. And we redid some institute calibration or, empirical curves on site and we also added cameras there so we had a side view of the sensor so we could measure the ice accumulation on the structure and then correlate our model and fine tune our model for and we have a different calibration for each turbine type.

Oh really? Yeah, because it depends on where it is located On the nacelle?

Allen Hall: On the nacelle, yeah. Okay, so I wanted to get into that because it relies so much on the airflow and the parameters around the airflow. How sensitive is that if you have to, so you’re taking a base model out to, let’s say a GE 3X, the magic turbine is in Canada at the moment.

So you’re installing it on the turbine, on the nacelle. You have a calibrate, it’s already calibrated itself. It’s close, right? It’s close. Yeah. It’s already calibrated. Yeah. You just go through an adjustment phase to understand are you understanding the local environment, or is it more specific to the aerodynamics around the, that nacelle and turbine?

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s specific to the flow that will go around these inter cylinder, because this is the piece that we’re investigating, those two probes. And we have two for redundancy. We know that ice will fall from the blades and will damage, and might damage the instrument. And so..

Allen Hall: If they don’t, if they install Borealis, it won’t damage it.

That’s why you install Borealis, so you don’t damage your icing instrument.

André Bégin-Drolet: And I’m fortunate enough to have a lot of very intelligent people surrounding me. Yeah. And we, with the instrument and with the brain that’s inside the instrument, we’re about to do automatic calibration. So we set it up there and it knows it has its own algorithm that will day after day.

Fine tune the model and we know when there’s no icing. So this is when we tune the…

Allen Hall: So it gets better with time. Kind of like Joel, better with time.

Joel Saxum: The outputs from the system, right? He said this dumb this down to someone that’s a like me and it’s gonna be on a site. What is it going to tell me and what actions do I take from it?

André Bégin-Drolet: So the first thing is going to tell you it’s the onset of icing. Yeah, so At that time, the conditions are prone for icing.

You should take some actions.

Joel Saxum: It’s a cloud based, I’m going to get an email, or I’m going to be able to check in?

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s we are, we’re very flexible. Okay. At the moment we, on some system, we’re integrating into the scada. We have also modem cellular communication feeds data through the cloud, and then it can text, it can email depends on the customer.

Everybody has something different. With the Borealis system, we’re Hardwire to their system directly and we will trigger when to start and stop the IPS.

Allen Hall: So does your system work in conjunction with some other systems that may be on the turbine already?

André Bégin-Drolet: Yeah, we’ve, we’ve, worked with the turbine operators a lot.

And they work with turbine manufacturers. So we had an agreement to trigger other IPS systems as well. Just to optimize the operation of those systems. So this is a direct value for the customer as they’re seeing the use right away of the sensor and they’re optimizing their operations.

Joel Saxum: So one thing I want to talk about again, I’m putting my operator hat on is we’ll offer.

We were talking about this a little bit. Of course, you guys are in Quebec and Canada. Almost everything is a fixed PPA price. So the markets are going to stay stable. But there is places in the world say like down in Texas where it’s an unregulated power markets. The power prices that are purchasing prices in the market can go up and down and up and down.

And we know that we saw, what, 9, 000 a megawatt hour? Yeah. Oh yeah. During the ice storm down there. So if you had assets that were able to produce during that, you could have really banked some capital away. You could have made some money. A lot of revenue there. So how can you guys help other people, when you’re not necessarily triggering an IPS system or triggering a heating system to turn on?

What are the other advantages for some people? ,

André Bégin-Drolet: Since we detect the onset of icing, it can give you an indication to stop bidding on the market. Yeah. You will produce at that time, but you know that in three hours from now if ice continues at the rate it’s going now. It’s not a binary.

We give it intensity value so we can Forecast what’s going to happen in three hours so you can stop bidding on the market. So you can stop because you will start stop producing so you will not be able to Come up with those bids.

Allen Hall: Which is a requirement at ERCOT, right? So the regulation that’s happening at ERCOT right now is saying you have to give us some warning.

We can’t just have you flipping off in 15 minutes. You’ve got to give us some advanced warning whether you’re going to be on or off.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because it causes, the problem it causes down there is cascading browning. Where things all of a sudden this plant goes down, this plant goes down, then you all of a sudden have an unstable grid and then this one will go down.

So being able to notify the grid operator…

Allen Hall: Right

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s a, it’s a major advantage for the grid operator, but so far it’s been very difficult to get to them. We’ve been working a lot with the operators that have the problems, but then as soon as you get larger, you have to. It’s the larger organizations that have different issues.

Allen Hall: I think they’re all trying to understand the issue and they don’t realize the capability you’re bringing to the marketplace right now. Because it’s so different than what you would normally see.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, one of the other advantages we talked about with an operator is the ability to know when to shut your turbines down to avoid… Structural structural damage to your blades, or that damage or fatigue that will build up over time. When you run in ice, I’ve personally seen the same turbines in southern latitudes that are installed in northern latitudes, and the ones in northern latitudes having much more damage internally than the ones in the southern latitudes. And that is directly equated to running them with a bunch of ice. The advantage there is… That knowing when the ice is coming, because you’re going to accumulate less ice when you’re not spinning.

André Bégin-Drolet: Yeah, exactly. So when the turbine is spinning, it accumulates a lot of of ice. So the idea behind the early stopping of those turbines is to stop producing early on, so it will accumulate less ice, and then…

Once the event is over, as we can also tell when the event is over, then you can restart the turbine more rapidly than if they had run through the event. Some of the research has shown that there’s gain using this strategy.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, because sometimes you see turbines that have run in during an icing event and they have just massive amounts of ice on them.

Then they finally shut ’em down. ’cause the vibration alarms are going off and all that stuff. And then that ice sits on those turbines. It might be a week. Oh yeah. And it sits on there. Now, if you had shut it down early, you wouldn’t have accumulated all that ice and you’d be able to turn it back on.

André Bégin-Drolet: Exactly. And then you, while the other turbines are down like seven days, if you were able to restart your turbines. So one day and it, that’s, that means six day of product production. Yeah. For one day of preemptive stoppage at the beginning. So

Joel Saxum: It’s a, it’s a. I would say it’s a gamble, but it’s a good gamble.

Allen Hall: That’s a good bet. No, that’s a good bet. Yeah. Especially some of these marketplaces. So the Icetekh brand name is just hitting the markets from Borealis side. You guys, obviously, ATC Canada. You’re out here promoting the product, which is good. There’s a definite marketplace.

Canada. U. S. Nordic countries. Nordic countries. Sweden. Norway. Finland. Yep. Germany. Pick them. Have you seen acceptance of the products over in Europe yet? Because it seems like an obvious fit there.

André Bégin-Drolet: Yeah, we’ve started to have discussion. Obviously for us, it’s more difficult to sell over there than to sell locally.

We started exporting to the U. S., which was our objective for our year two. Yeah. It’s a big success for us. We’ve been through the whole process of exporting to the U. S. And then we want to go to the European market. And one big milestone that we’re looking at is… It’s working with the OEM, so being integrated in their supply chain becoming a sensor installed or at least offered as an option for the customer.

And I strongly believe that this sensor can help the OEMs have better products.

Joel Saxum: That’s fantastic. So how many units do you have out in the field right now?

André Bégin-Drolet: We have a little bit over 30 units in in the field we’re in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan we’re in Texas, Pennsylvania uh, Illinois Minnesota, and so on.

Joel Saxum: So for listeners that are thinking about this as new technology, Icetek’s been around, you guys, there’s 15 years of research been into the product, and now it’s proven, it’s out in the field, it’s working, and people are benefiting.

André Bégin-Drolet: With the we’re not just selling a product was also providing our expertise and our services. So usually what our sales cycle is pretty long. But we also after the product is installed we provide services for the data analysis and sometimes it works the backwards. So we will start analyzing data from the turbine and after that we will recommend to install it and I sensors. So this service or this data analysis will lead To hardware.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I was wondering about that aspect. We know that sales cycle. Oh, yeah, intimately.

Joel Saxum: We live that same cycle. StrikeTape and lightning. We’re in the exact same thing. Analysis, consulting, and then put the strike tape on.

Allen Hall: Yeah, then we sell a thousand, right? So it, but it takes, it’s the gestation time is, tends to be long in wind.

But in your case, because you have this really cool instrument and it’s providing data back to you smart people. Does that then create a little bit of a development like, oh, we learned in Pennsylvania that this kind of icing happens in this sort of situation that we didn’t know.

André Bégin-Drolet: There’s no big surprise.

I think it’s always different for every site and for every event and everything, but we with Daniela from Borealis she had access from the ice map from all over the world. So the these different ice maps and what we took is we took the database from all the wind sites all over the world and merge these two database together.

So now we know where ice is and on what turbine it’s a wind customer contact us. We already know that they’re experiencing the problem because we’ve correlated the database from the wind turbine site to the icing maps.

Joel Saxum: And and here’s a, this is a side note I’m thinking, but if I was looking at being a wind developer and I was sighting in the northern latitudes, you guys might be someone I’d call, regardless of the instrumentation, just for, as a process of going through my, my, my sighting reviews and things like that. What are the damages we may be looking at or what are the hazards we may be looking at with icing? Based on your knowledge.

André Bégin-Drolet: And the losses yeah, and state losses as turbines are getting bigger. The IPS are getting more mature with Borealis and the OEMs have also their system. They’re getting better. So the losses are going down, but there’s still losses caused by, by, by icing. You have to anticipate them. They’re going to be there.

Joel Saxum: It’s, and it’s something that developers know before they try to take a final investment decision on a wind farm.

Allen Hall: It’s. Such a weird marketplace, because you talk about operators that installed a farm five, ten years ago, and anticipated ice loss, versus what actually happened?

Widely different. Yeah, they were told a nice song and dance story about, Oh, a percent or two. This is the Rosemary story. So Rosemary’s giving me some insight on this, having been an icing person. They usually say, oh, it’s a percent or two, and you get five percent is the pain point, like five percent downtime, but put a…

a de icing system in, but I think the PPA prices in some of those places in Quebec, a percent or two makes a big deal.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, and with talking with Daniela earlier, there’s some laws coming possibly down the pipeline in Quebec as well that will focus around maintaining uptime wind assets based on ice.

Allen Hall: As wind has become a couple percentage point of the energy grid to, in Iowa, 60%, 70 percent electricity is generated from wind. Icing is now a bigger deal because if you cut off 70 percent of electricity in Iowa, there’s a lot of Iowans that are gonna be cold.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, a lot of people gonna ride around their tractor for heat for a while.

Allen Hall: Absolutely. They’re gonna fire up that wood furnace. Yeah on the pellet stove.

André Bégin-Drolet: And we’re based out of Quebec So we focus a lot on that market and there’s a lot of icing and at the moment It’s only 3 percent 4 percent of wind penetration in the network. Yeah, but as this number Will increase and will grow it should become Big issue on how to deal with icing and losing these big wind farts one after the other and balancing the grid.

Allen Hall: The cascading, as Joel pointed out, the cascading effect is probably the biggest risk to the energy grid because they start disconnecting and then they kick off some solar and it, and as we found out in Texas, you don’t even understand how it’s happening. You just know that it’s happening and you don’t want it to happen anymore.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, here’s a, and here’s a question for you as well. Could your system, this IceTek instrumentation, help out servers knowing when they’re going to need it?

André Bégin-Drolet: It’s a good question. You know that icing occurs in winter months. There’s less sun also during these periods. I don’t know, it’s a complicated question.

Obviously, this provides data. It’s what you do with the data.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I’m thinking more along the, like the unregulated market, the same idea of when you’re going to be able to bid and when not to.

Allen Hall: Oh, that’s because it’s a trading market. Yes. You need to know when to bid. PPA, yeah.

Wow. Okay. Andre, how do people find Icetek to learn about the technology? How do they get a hold of you? How do they learn about all those cool things you’ve built?

André Bégin-Drolet: We have a webpage, icetek.Ca. Okay, it’s I C E T E K. I C E T E K. Dot C A. Okay. We also have a LinkedIn page where we try to update some material. We just posted a time lapse of an icing event just to show people or educate people on the icing type that’s occurring.

And try to be present on social media as well. Give us a call and drop us a line.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Okay check out Icetek’s webpage. Andre, thanks for being here. Thanks for taking some time to explain the technology. It looks really… Congratulations.

André Bégin-Drolet: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Icetek Innovative Icing Sensor From CanREA Electricity Transformation Canada 23

Renewable Energy

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes

Published

18 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes

Bret Tollgaard from Sunrez joins to discuss UV-curing prepreg that cuts blade repair time by up to 90% and has recently recieved OEM approval.

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!

Allen Hall: Brett, welcome back to the program.

Bret Tollgaard: Thanks for having me again.

Allen Hall: So a lot’s happening at sunrise at the moment. Uh, there’s, uh, activity with sunrise materials on a lot of blades this year.

Over the last couple of years actually, ISPs, operators, OEMs, are realizing that UV curing is a huge advantage.

Bret Tollgaard: Turns out there’s a lot of value added, uh, to the entire process when utilizing UV cure, uh, pre-req.

Allen Hall: So the, the pre pres are, have been available for a couple of years. The qualification though was always the concern.

Has the OEM qualified this material? Are they gonna give you the blessing? Does this show up in the manual? If I call the OEM, are they gonna say they have talked to you guys? A lot of those hurdles have been cleared at this point.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, great question. And we are happy to announce that we have finally been approved by a large OEM for use on the epoxy blade for now all general kind of repairs.

We have several more OEMs that have already passed their phase one mechanical testing, and we’re iterating through now [00:01:00] their, uh, secondary and tertiary kind of tests. And so we do expect to be fully qualified by several OEMs before the end of the year, which should make the ISPs integration and utilization of our materials much, much easier.

Allen Hall: So the, the, the problem you’re solving is repairs in the field for the most part, or sometimes in the factory. Mm-hmm. But a lot of times in the field that those repairs. It happened quite a bit. They’re the same repair, the same area, the same kind of thing over and over and over again. And wetting out fabric on site takes time.

Particularly if you’re using standard materials, you have to bag it. You have to apply heat in some cases to get it to kick, and then you have to wait several hours for it to cure. So in the repair cycle time, most of your time is waiting.

Bret Tollgaard: It sure is. Uh, and on top of all that, we all know that there aren’t enough technicians in this industry to even do all the repairs, uh, that would like to be done.

Yeah. And so to really kind of streamline all of that, [00:02:00] uh, we’ve rolled out a couple of new things and we’ve had a lot more interest in some pre consolidated preki patches for customers. Uh, if a particular blade model has an issue that is a standardized kind of repair. We’re actually now building custom prepregs, or we will build the appropriate width length, stack it, consolidate it, uh, wrap it between our films.

So then all the customer has to do when they get on site is, uh, you know, do do the appropriate surface prep. Scarfing, apply a little bit of our UV surface primer to the backside of that patch. But now they can go up tower, single peel, stick, roll out, and then they’re cured.

Allen Hall: And that’s a. How many hours of saving is that?

It’s gotta be like six, 12 hours of saving, of, of

Bret Tollgaard: labor. It’s upwards of 80 to 90% of the labor that’s gonna actually need to be done to apply that. Otherwise, and then same thing too. We’ve had a couple instances where we took a several day repair down to one, to two to three hours. And these are multi-meter long repairs that were fast tracked because we pre consolidated preki [00:03:00] everything.

Some were in flat sheet forms, some were much longer on rolls, where you’re actually then rolling out with a team. Um, and so we’ve been able to demonstrate several times, uh, over the last 12 months, uh, the, the value that a UV cure preprint.

Allen Hall: Well, sure, because that, that would make sense. The issue about wetting out fabric in the field you just done in the back of a trailer or something, somewhere like that.

Usually it is, it’s that you’re never really sure that you got the fabric wetted out. The experienced technicians always feel like, have done it enough that they get very consistent results. But as you mentioned, getting technicians is hard and, and there’s so many repairs to do. So you’re doing those wetting out composite things takes practice and skill.

Just buying it, preki it, where you have control over it. And you guys sell to the military all the time. So that, and you’re, are you ass 91 qualified yet? You’re in the midst of that?

Bret Tollgaard: So we, I mean, a, we just got ISO certified, uh, at the end of last year in December. So our [00:04:00] QMS system and everything like that’s up to date, that’s huge.

Another big qualification for the OEMs that want to see, you know, true quality and output.

Allen Hall: That’s it. I, if I’m gonna buy a preki patch, so, uh, uh, that would make sense to me, knowing that. There’s a lot of rigor as a quality system. So when I get out the the site and I open that package, I know what’s inside of it every single time.

Bret Tollgaard: Well, and that’s just it. And like we got qualified based on the materials that we can provide and the testing that’s being done in real world situations when you’re wetting out by hand and you’re vacuum backing and you’re trying to cure. It is a little bit of an art form when you’re doing that. It is, and you might think you have a great laminate, you got void content, or you haven’t properly went out that glass ’cause humidity or the way the glass was stored or it was exposed.

The sizing and the resin don’t really bite. Well. You might think you have a great repair, but you might be prematurely failing as well after X cycles and fatigue. Uh, simply because it’s not as easy to, to truly do. Right? And so having the [00:05:00] pre-wet, uh, pre impregnated glass really goes a long way for the quality, uh, and the consistency from repair to repair.

Allen Hall: Well, even just the length of the season to do repairs is a huge issue. I, I know I’ve had some discussions this week about opening the season up a little bit, and some of the ISPs have said, Hey, we we’re pretty much working year round at this point. We’re, we’ll go to California. We’ll go to Southern Texas.

We’ll work those situations. ’cause the weather’s decent, but with the sunrise material, the temperature doesn’t matter.

Bret Tollgaard: Correct. And I was actually just speaking to someone maybe half hour ago who came by and was talking about repairs that they had to do in Vermont, uh, in December. They could only do two layers of an epoxy repair at a time because of the amount of the temperature.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Whereas you could go through, apply a six or an eight layer pre-reg cure it in 20 minutes. Uh, you know, throughout that entire length that he had and you would’ve been done. That’s, and so it took several days to do a single repair that could have been done in sub one hour with our material.

Allen Hall: I know where those wind turbines are.

[00:06:00] They weren’t very far from, we used to live, so I understand that temperature, once you hit about November up in Vermont, it’s over for a lot of, uh, standard epoxy materials and cures, it is just not warm enough.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, we, we’ve literally had repairs done with our materials at negative 20 Fahrenheit. That were supposed to be temporary repairs.

They were installed four or five years ago. Uh, and they’re still active, perfectly done patches that haven’t needed to be replaced yet. So,

Allen Hall: so, because the magic ingredient is you’re adding UV to a, a chemistry where the UV kicks it off. Correct. Basically, so you’re, it’s not activated until it’s hit with uv.

You hit it with uv that starts a chemical process, but it doesn’t rely on external heat. To cure

Bret Tollgaard: exactly. It, it is a true single component system, whether it’s in the liquid pre preg, the thickened, uh, the thickened putties that we sell, or even the hand lamination and effusion resin. It’s doped with a, a variety of different food initiators and packages based on the type of light that’s [00:07:00] being, uh, used to, to cure it.

But it will truly stay dormant until it’s exposed to UV light. And so we’ve been able to formulate systems over the last 40 years of our company’s history that provide an incredibly long shelf life. Don’t prematurely gel, don’t prematurely, uh, you know, erode in the packaging, all those

Allen Hall: things.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly.

Like we’ve been at this for a really long time. We’ve been able to do literally decades of r and d to develop out systems. Uh, and that’s why we’ve been able to come to this market with some materials that truly just haven’t been able to be seen, uh, delivered and installed and cured the way that we can do it.

Allen Hall: Well, I think that’s a huge thing, the, the shelf life.

Bret Tollgaard: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: You talk to a lot of. Operators, ISPs that buy materials that do have an expiration date or they gotta keep in a freezer and all those little handling things.

Bret Tollgaard: Yep.

Allen Hall: Sunrise gets rid of all of that. And because how many times have you heard of an is SP saying, oh, we had a throwaway material at the end of the season because it expired.

Bret Tollgaard: Oh, tremendously

Allen Hall: amount of, hundred of thousands of dollars of material, [00:08:00]

Bret Tollgaard: and I would probably even argue, say, millions of dollars over the course of the year gets, gets thrown out simply because of the expiration date. Um, we are so confident in our materials. Uh, and the distributors and stuff that we use, we can also recertify material now, most of the time it’s gonna get consumed within 12 months Sure.

Going into this kind of industry.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, but there have been several times where we’ve actually had some of that material sent back to us. We’ll test and analyze it, make sure it’s curing the way it is, give it another six months shelf, uh, service life.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, and so you’re good to go on that front

Allen Hall: too.

Yeah. So if you make the spend to, to move to sun, you have time to use it.

Bret Tollgaard: Yes.

Allen Hall: So if it snows early or whatever’s going on at that site where you can’t get access anymore, you just wait till the spring comes and you’re still good with the same material. You don’t have to re-buy it.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And with no special storage requirements, like you mentioned, no frozen oven or frozen freezer, excuse me, uh, or certain temperature windows that has to be stored in, uh, it allows the operators and the technicians, you know, a lot more latitude of how things actually get

Allen Hall: done.

And, and so if. When we [00:09:00] think about UV materials, the, the questions always pop up, like, how thick of a laminate can you do and still illuminate with the UV light? And make sure you curate I I, because you’re showing some samples here. These are,

Bret Tollgaard: yeah.

Allen Hall: Quarter inch or more,

Bret Tollgaard: correct. So

Allen Hall: thick samples. How did you cure these?

Bret Tollgaard: So that was cured with the lamp that we’ve got right here, which are standard issued light, sold a couple hundred into this space already. Um, that’s 10 layers of a thousand GSM unidirectional fiber. Whoa. This other one is, uh, 10 layers of, of a biox. 800 fiber.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Bret Tollgaard: Uh, those were cured in six minutes. So you can Six

Allen Hall: minutes.

Bret Tollgaard: Six minutes.

Allen Hall: What would it take to do this in a standard epoxy form?

Bret Tollgaard: Oh, hours,

Allen Hall: eight hours maybe?

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. About for, for the, for the post cure required to get the TGS that they need in the wind space, right? Absolutely. And so yeah, we can do that in true minutes. And it’s pre impregnated. You simply cut it to shape and you’re ready to rock.

Allen Hall: And it looks great when you’re done, mean the, the surface finish is really good. I know sometimes with the epoxies, particularly if they get ’em wetted out, it doesn’t. It [00:10:00] doesn’t have that kind of like finished look to it.

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And the way that we provide, uh, for our standard, uh, you know, pre pprs are in between films and so if you cure with that film, you get a nice, clean, glossy surface tack free.

But as more and more people go to the pre consolidation method down tower, so even if they buy our standard prereg sheets or rolls, they’re preki down tower, you can also then just apply a pre, uh, a peel ply to that top film. Oh, sure. So if you wet out a peel ply and then you build your laminate over the top.

Put the primer and the black film over when they actually get that up on tower, they can then just remove that fuel ply and go straight to Sandy or uh, uh, painting and they’re ready to rock.

Allen Hall: Wow. Okay. That’s, that’s impressive. If you think about the thousands and thousands of hours you’ll save in a season.

Where you could be fixing another blade, but you’re just waiting for the res, the cure,

Bret Tollgaard: and that’s just it. When you’re saving the amount of labor and the amount of time, and it’s not just one technician, it’s their entire team that is saving that time. Sure. And can move on to the next [00:11:00] repair and the next process.

Allen Hall: So one of the questions I get asked all the time, like, okay, great, this UV material sounds like space, age stuff. It must cost a fortune. And the answer is no. It doesn’t cost a fortune. It’s very price competitive.

Bret Tollgaard: It, it really is. And it might be slightly more expensive cost per square foot versus you doing it with glass and resin, but you’re paying for that labor to wait for that thing to cure.

And so you’re still saving 20, 30, 40 plus percent per repair. When you can do it as quickly as we can do it.

Allen Hall: So for ISPs that are out doing blade repairs, you’re actually making more money.

Bret Tollgaard: You are making more money, you are saving more money. That same group and band of technicians you have are doing more repairs in a faster amount of time.

So as you are charging per repair, per blade, per turbine, whatever that might be, uh, you’re walking away with more money and you can still pass that on to the owner operators, uh, by getting their turbines up and spinning and making them more money.

Allen Hall: Right. And that’s what happens now. You see in today’s world, companies ISPs that are proposing [00:12:00] using UV materials versus standard resin systems, the standard residence systems are losing because how much extra time they’re, they’re paying for the technicians to be on site.

Bret Tollgaard: Correct.

Allen Hall: So the, the industry has to move if you wanna be. Competitive at all. As an ISP, you’re gonna have to move to UV materials. You better be calling suns

Bret Tollgaard: very quickly. Well, especially as this last winter has come through, the windows that you have before, bad weather comes in on any given day, ebbs and flows and changes.

But when you can get up, finish a repair, get it spinning, you might finish that work 2, 3, 4 later, uh, days later. But that turbine’s now been spinning for several days, generating money. Uh, and then you can come back up and paint and do whatever kind of cosmetic work over the top of that patch is required.

Allen Hall: So what are the extra tools I need to use Sunz in the kits. Do I need a light?

Bret Tollgaard: Not a whole lot. You’re gonna need yourself a light. Okay. You’re gonna need yourself a standard three to six inch, uh, bubble buster roller to actually compact and consolidate. Sure. Uh, that’s really all you need. There’s no vacuum lights.

And you sell the lights. We do, we, [00:13:00] we sell the lights. Um, our distributors also sell the lights, fiberglass and comp one. Uh, so they’re sourced and available, uh, okay. Domestically, but we sell worldwide too. And so, uh, we can handle you wherever you are in the world that you wanna start using uv, uh, materials.

And yeah, we have some standardized, uh, glass, but at the same time, we can pre-reg up to a 50 inch wide roll. Okay, so then it really becomes the limiting factor of how wide, how heavy, uh, of a lamette does a, a technician in the field want to handle?

Allen Hall: Yeah, sure. Okay. In terms of safety, with UV light, you’re gonna be wearing UV glasses,

Bret Tollgaard: some standard safety glasses that are tinted for UV protection.

So they’ll

Allen Hall: look yellow,

Bret Tollgaard: they’ll look a little yellow. They’ve got the shaded gray ones. Sunglasses, honestly do the same.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: But with a traditional PPE, the technicians would be wearing a tower anyways. Safety glasses, a pair of gloves. You’re good to go. If you’re doing confined space, work on the inside of a, a, a blade, uh, the biggest value now to this generation of material that are getting qualified.

No VOC non [00:14:00] flammable, uh, no haps. And so it’s a much safer material to actually use in those confined spaces as well as

Allen Hall: well ship

Bret Tollgaard: as well as ship it ships unregulated and so you can ship it. Next day air, which a lot of these customers always end. They do. I know that.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, so next day air, uh, you know, there’s no extra hazmat or dangerous goods shipping for there.

Uh, and same thing with storage conditions. You don’t need a, a flammable cabinet to actually store the material in.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Bret Tollgaard: Um, so it really opens you up for a lot more opportunities.

Allen Hall: I just solves all kinds of problems.

Bret Tollgaard: It, it really does. And that’s the big value that, you know, the UV materials can provide.

Allen Hall: So. I see the putty material and it comes in these little tubes, squeeze tubes. What are these putties used for?

Bret Tollgaard: So right now, the, the existing putty is really just the same exact thickened, uh, resin that’s in the pre-print.

Allen Hall: Okay.

Bret Tollgaard: And it’s worked well. It’s, it’s nice we’re kind of filling some cracks and some faring, some edges and stuff if things need to be feathered in.

But we’ve [00:15:00] been working on this year that we’ll be rolling out very, very soon is a new structural putty. Okay. So we’ll actually have milled fibers in there and components that will make it a much more robust system. And so we’ve been getting more inquiries of, particularly for leading edge rehabilitation.

Where Cat three, cat four, even cat five kind of damage, you need to start filling and profiling before any kind of over laminates can really be done properly. And so we’re working on, uh, rolling that out here very, very soon. Um, and so that will, I think, solve a couple of needs, um, for the wind market. Uh, and then in addition to some new products that we’re rolling out, uh, is gonna be the LEP system that we’re been working on.

Uh, the rain erosion testing showed some pretty good results. But we’re buying some new equipment to make a truly void free, air free system that we’re gonna it, uh, probably submit end of April, beginning of May for the next round, that we expect to have some very, very good, uh, duration and weather ability with,

Allen Hall: because it’s all about speed,

Bret Tollgaard: it’s durability.

Allen Hall: All about e

Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And ease of use by someone in the [00:16:00] field. Yeah. Or OEMs on, you know, in the manufacturing plant. Um, there has yet, in my opinion, to be a true winner in the LEP space. That is just the right answer. And so by applying our materials with the really high abrasion resistance that we expect this to have and be as simple to do as it really appeal, stick and cure, um, we think it’s gonna be a bit of a game changer in this industry.

Allen Hall: Well, all the sunrise materials, once they’re cured, are sandal

Bret Tollgaard: correct.

Allen Hall: And I think that’s one of the things about some of the other systems, I always worry about them like, alright, they can do the work today, but tomorrow I have to come back and touch it again. Do I have a problem? Well, and the sun rests stuff is at least my playing around with it has been really easy to use.

It’s, it’s. Uh, things that I had seen maybe 20 years ago in the aerospace market that have they thought about using the material not only [00:17:00] in the factory, but outside the factory. How easy is it to adapt to, how easy to, to paint, to all those little nuances that come up? When you’re out working in the field and trying to do some very difficult work, uh, the sunroom material is ready to go, easy to use and checks all the boxes, all those little nuances, like it’s cold outside, it’s wet outside.

Uh, it’s, it’s hot outside, right? It’s all those things that, that stop ISPs or OEMs from being super efficient. All those parameters start to get washed away. That’s the game changer and the price point is right. How do. People get a hold of you and learn about the sun rose material. Maybe they, you can buy through fiberglass or through composite one.

Mm-hmm. That’s an easy way to do, just get to play with some samples. But when they want to get into some quantity work, they got a lot of blade repair. They know what they’re doing this summer or out in the fall or this winter come wintertime. How do they get [00:18:00] started? What do they do?

Bret Tollgaard: Well, one of the first things to do is they can reach us through our website.

Um, we’re developing a larger and larger library now for how to videos and install procedures, um, generating SOPs that are, you know, semi, uh, industry specific. But at the same time too, it’s a relatively blanket peel and stick patch, whether it’s a wind turbine blade, a corroded tank, or a pressure pipe. Um, and so yeah, www.suns.com Okay, is gonna be a great way to do it.

Uh, we’re actively building more videos to put on, uh, our YouTube channel as well. Um, and so that’s kind of gonna be the best way to reach out, uh, for us. One of the big things that we’re also pushing for, for 26 is to truly get people, uh, in this, in industry, specifically trained and comfortable using the products.

At the end of the day, it’s a composite, it’s a pre impregnated sheet. It’s not difficult, but there are some tips and tricks that really make the, the use case. Uh, the install process a lot easier.

Allen Hall: Sure.

Bret Tollgaard: Uh, and so just making sure that people are, are caught up on the latest and greatest on the training techniques will [00:19:00] go a long way too.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s only as good as the technician that applies it

Bret Tollgaard: e Exactly.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s great. Uh, it’s great all the things you guys are doing, you’re really changing the industry. In a positive way, making repairs faster, uh, more efficient, getting those turbines running. It’s always sad when you see turbines down with something that I know you guys could fix with sun.

Uh, but it does happen, so I, I need the ISPs to reach out and start calling Sun and getting in place because the OEMs are blessing your material. ISPs that are using it are winning contracts. It’s time to make the phone call to Sun Rez. Go to the website, check out all the details there. If you wanna play with your material, get ahold of fiberglass or composite one just.

Order it overnight. It’ll come overnight and you can play with it. And, and once you, once you realize what that material is, you’ll want to call Brett and get started.

Bret Tollgaard: A hundred percent appreciate the time.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Thanks Brett, for being on the podcast. I, I love talking to you guys because you have such cool material.

Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, no, we’re looking, uh, forward to continuing to innovate, uh, really make this, uh, material [00:20:00] splash in this industry.

Sunrez Prepreg Cuts Blade Repairs to Minutes

Renewable Energy

Infringing on the Rights of Others

Published

23 hours ago

March 19, 2026

Alice Rush

I agree with what Ricky Gervais says here; I would only add that there are dozens of ways religion impinges on others.

In my view, the most common is that it impedes our implementing science in things like climate change mitigation. If you believe, as is explicit in the Book of Genesis, that “only God can destroy the Earth,” you have a good excuse to ignore the entirety of climate science.