Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Repurposing Retired Turbine Blades with REGEN Fiber
Wind turbine blades are getting a fresh new life thanks to REGEN Fiber’s innovative recycling process! Their mechanical process turns old blades into top-notch construction materials. REGEN’s can turn any blade into strong, clean fiber that passes all the tests. With wind farms desperate for sustainable solutions, this Iowa-based startup is gearing up to start recycling blades at scale. Their new facilities will give old blades a new purpose in buildings, roads and more as the wind industry upgrades to bigger and better turbines. Out with the old, in with the recycled – REGEN Fiber is spearheading a recycling revolution for the wind sector.
Check out REGEN Fiber
Contact Jeff Woods! jwoods@regenfiber.com
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Allen Hall: I’m Allen Hall and I’m here with my good friend Joel Saxum and on this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast, we have a really interesting topic. As of 2020, there were over 720,000 tons of blade material around the world that needed to be disposed of or recycled. With more wind farms being built every year, this number will continue to grow.
Landfilling the blades is problematic. Their large size makes transportation and burial difficult and expensive. So finding an effective way to recycle the blades is becoming an urgent priority for the wind industry. Companies and researchers are currently exploring how to design future turbine blades for easier recycling, but wind farm operators need better recycling and disposal options for existing old blades, some promising recycling methods are being developed. And we are speaking with 1 of the companies investing in new recycling methods, REGEN Fiber. Our guest today is Jeff Woods, director of business development at Travero and Travero is the parent company of REGEN Fiber. Jeff, Welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Woods: Thank you.
Allen Hall: Obviously, we know we have a lot of problems with old blades and in the United States. It does create a lot of publicity of pictures, of blades being buried and more recently in Iowa where you are and also down in Texas.
There’s been some disposal issues where blades have been sitting out for a long time and haven’t been recycled like they were supposed to be. And this is creating quite the clamor for wind turbine OEMs and operators.
Jeff Woods: It is. It’s a problem that I think when the industry got rolling
decades ago, there was a lot of passion about getting a renewable energy resource literally up in the air and running to produce electricity in the region here, particularly in the central Midwest, where we’ve got more wind tunnels and you can shake a stick at quite literally and, for a long period of time, there really wasn’t a lot of problems.
Yeah, a few blades were getting damaged through lightning or storms or hail or whatnot. But boy, in the last I’ll Five, seven, 10 years as some of these farms have approached, the 20 year mark in particular, which is generally accepted as a benchmark time for the lifespan for some of the original blades that are out there.
They’re coming down they’re stressed, they’ve been damaged. They need to be replaced. You’ve got the inflation reduction act now which is compelling even more ferns to absolutely amp up on steroids. What the future of wind energy production in the United States looks like. So you have a lot of companies that are talking about going in and repowering existing turbines, knocking existing turbines down entirely and replacing them with much bigger much more efficient units.
And that’s all great, but if you’re in this part of the world you’re quite aware of piles of blades stack up in certain parts of Texas certain parts of Iowa Nebraska, Wyoming, a lot of blades that have been landfilled. You said 720, 000 tons of material out there that needs to be processed.
There’s obviously over 70, 000 towers in the United States today and more coming. And I just don’t thank the industry or society in general today for a wind energy source that is other otherwise sustainable and circular wants to know that these are being buried in landfills whether it’s in whole or in part.
And right now the current incumbent recycling solution is to have them used as a co combustion product with coal in cement processing in kilns around the Midwest. And I think it’s certainly better than landfilling, but I think there’s people now questioning, is that really a sustainable use. Yeah it’s better than coal, but is that longterm what we need to do with blades? I think that’s compelled a lot of firms to look at what can we do with the wind blade when it comes down out of the sky. And we’re certainly one of those firms. And since we’re here in Iowa and ultimately our parent company is Alliant Energy, the third largest regulated wind producer in the United States.
So it’s something that corporately that we have very much on our mind down the road. For what’s. What are we going to do with these blades when they come down? And it’s an active discussion topic with anybody you talk to that’s in the industry today.
Allen Hall: And I think because you’re located in Iowa, the pressure is really on for your local area.
We were looking at the stats for 2022 and 100 percent of energy delivered by MidAmerican, which is your energy provider in Iowa, was 100 percent renewable. So it tells you how much renewable energy is being generated in Iowa, and it’s typically somewhere at least 60 percent of that is wind. That’s amazing amount of wind energy, and we have driven through Iowa, and I’m from Nebraska originally, so I’m in Iowa occasionally.
It’s remarkable how the landscape has changed in terms of wind energy that it has become a really valuable resource for Iowa. But it also has to have the end of life approach, what happens at end of life, because you’re, with the IRA bill, and we were just down in Texas, where a lot of repowering is happening, there are blades all over the place.
And you, I think it has really become an imperative for companies like you have, Regen you’re bringing new ideas to the forefront here and trying to do something different besides burning the blades and I want, can you walk through what your solution is and what your regens approaches to recycling turbine blades?
Jeff Woods: Yeah, sure. And I’ll start with how this all got it’s origins, if you will .We’re partners with a firm in Des Moines, Iowa folks that come from the fiber industry that also have a materials handling background. And, as they drove around Iowa and saw all these blades and started reading the newspapers about what are we going to do with these things other than put them in a landfill or burn them with their background they thought there, there might be means to do this in a different fashion.
And there are certainly people looking at other types of processes and having some success. Those generally involve heat and chemicals, thermal reactions, and all kinds of fancy terms. Our approach is, maybe a little more Iowa right? It’s a little more simple. I use the analogy of sometimes the best things start out with a couple of guys in the garage and that’s how this started.
And then really when we met them, how can we scale this up to a point where you’re dealing with an entire blade or an entire tower coming to you in a short period of time and reprocessing it, which gets into a whole litany of other issues that the industry faces. And I would contend will be other
issues down the road, which is how are you transporting these efficiently? Are we want to make sure we’re not transporting these blades halfway across the country. Cause that’s going to be the next carbon footprint reduction thing that the industry needs to be aware of is you can’t take blades from Eastern Oregon to west of the Mississippi river or close to it.
That, that is very expensive. And It’s it just uses a lot of carbon, right? So our solution is largely, it’s entirely really mechanical. It brings together the best of some of the industries that we see out here some stuff from grain processing, some stuff from traditional recycling.
And it’s a lot of rinse and repeat. And I can’t get into too many deals. We have a patent pending on it, but it’s really, our desire is to, you talk to the folks that own the wind farms, are there major contractors that are doing the work? And it’s interesting because the industry from my perspective has a lot of different people that like to do things different ways.
Some firms like to control each piece individually. I’ll work with the contractor on getting it to the ground and I’ll work with the person doing what I call the field work and I’ll work with you separately As the recycler, if you will. To other folks that are like, just take care of my problem.
I don’t want to deal with it. I just want a sustainable solution that I can tell that I’ve got a certificate of recycling or certificate of otherwise beneficial destruction, I’ll call it. We’re really willing to work with anybody in a different way, the different way they want. We’ve met a lot of people in this space at some of the events that we’ve been to.
I think there’s a lot of very qualified and capable people out there that can do everything from the field work to the shredding the niche gets into the recycling solutions a little bit and that’s where we
stand.
Allen Hall: I bet. I think we first met your company down in, at New Orleans at ACP.
Jeff Woods: We did.
Allen Hall: Yeah. There was nobody else that was talking recycling at that convention, which was very odd because it’s such an important part of the life cycle of renewable energy. It just seemed like we would run into more companies like yours and we didn’t. So that’s why we’re talking to you. But, when we had that first discussion, I was really trying to understand what you do what is the magic here?
And I think you broke it down really well at the time, which is you’re not bringing the blaze to your facility to get machined up. They’re coming to you in football size pieces.
Is that right?
Jeff Woods: Generally speaking, if you talk football and less that’s in the sweet spot, that’s in that four to six inch chunk range and down.
Cause when the folks in the field are doing the work there, the blades land there when they show up. And they’ve got two weeks to get it off the job site. Cut it into sections and those sections traditionally get transported someplace and then shred or a firm brings in a mobile shredder and does field shredding.
So what we’re really dealing with is the chunks we’ve ran things through our pilot facility. Some of the pieces were, three inches wide and two foot long down to fibers. And somewhere in between is really our sweet spot, but we can introduce those to what we’re building here in Cedar Rapids of Fairfax, Iowa, actually, our main line operation, which will be our biggest production facility.
We can feed that feedstock into the front end of the system and a few minutes later on the back end of the processing line outcomes, we have the ability to actually make different sized products. So if you think about what’s going into it, it’s the composites and the fibers. It’s the balsa wood.
It’s the foam, there’s some residual metals in there from lightning wire and other things. We have magnets that are in the system, right? And as we do our slough, it’s, we have the ability to separate out certain sizes at certain parts in the line. And then do some finishing, if you will, of the product at the end that gets it into different states.
We have the ability to turn it into certain sizes of fibers. We’ve tested with various people fibers that are what I’m going to call pencil like, that almost compete as a mini rebar, if you will and could actually be used in those types of applications. If you think about…
Road construction, highway construction some of it might be that type of product all the way down to the powders and any process that like ours where you do, you’ve naturally got what we refer to as fines, right? A percentage of material that is down, or if it gets a little off spec, it makes sense just to grind it into a powder.
And that has applications flowable fill sub bases for roads, things of that nature. We’re very pleased with all, any scale of the process that we’ve done so far we’ve gotten very similar results. And the testing on those various results has all been the same to meet, certain accreditations by labs that have to say, your product meets and performs at these certain industry accepted specifications for the ends used that we’re targeting.
But it’s pretty, it’s it’s a long process. We do a lot of different things to it in the middle of it. But so far, knock on wood without the use of heat and chemicals We’re able to get the end products from the blade into products that are desired by certain markets.
Joel Saxum: A couple of questions, and basically boiling back. One thing was, I like the idea of, it’s almost, your processes are almost agricultural so I like the concept of Occam’s razor, if you’ve ever heard of that, being basically like, a lot of times, the simplest solution is the answer. So instead of involving pyrolysis and heat and all the energy that takes or some complicated chemical formulas and then, all of the struggles that those can come with as far as, pollution or anything like that or, getting rid of them in certain ways.
You’ve boiled it down to something I like. I like the term very Iowa like. It’s very mechanical. We have some processes here. One of the, one of the questions then would be. The first one, and this is just one for my own interest. How many different products have you guys produced to date?
Different solutions, different kind of, like you said, roadbed, I’m sticking to that one because that’s what I said the other day, I said roadbed materials is great but yeah, so how many different solutions are
you guys putting out?
Jeff Woods: Yeah, maybe not five different solutions, but five different products that have applications in different things, if that makes sense.
So products that can be used as flowable fill. Perhaps with some additives, something of a fly ash replacement, it has certain pozzolanic capabilities and then we’ve had interest from both molding compound companies, and I think if you talk, frankly, if you talk to other people in the space that are in the business of recycling wind turbine blades, you’re going to hear some, but it’s not like we’re doing anything revolutionary in terms of end markets because other people are going after bolt molding and sheet molding compound companies.
And then just a lot of people that just want to know, can we put that in, can we use that and make it an additive and siding for houses, trims for houses, could it be used in other types of applications? I think the thing with us, you talked about some of the folks that have tried this early on and, maybe struggled is.
I think we’re a little less obsessed with trying to come up with an actual end product, as opposed to a product that people can use in their applications. Part of what we’re trying to do is stay in our lane and be a recycler that makes a reliable product with a good life cycle assessment score that can displace carbon in certain applications, like the concrete industry.
That’s a big differentiator between us is I’m not trying to turn it, return it to virgin fiber, if that makes sense.
Joel Saxum: And so that’s the question that we came up with, right? Was when we talked on the podcast the other day about this, the issues that are going on in the market right now, that if you’re reading the news about wind industry, you know what we’re talking about.
But it was Rosemary brought this up and it was very smart. Concept is. Okay, say we’re talking structural concrete. Now, structural concrete has to be pressure tested, mag tested, all these different tests to make sure that it gets to a certain strength. Now, and we all, we can all understand that as engineers and armchair engineers, wherever you are, you want to make sure that your product that you’re putting out is good.
Now, if it’s structural concrete, say in the base of wind, Wind Tower Foundations, it has to have certain PSI, certain strengths, certain flexibilities even. How do we make sure that the products that you guys are producing, because as we know, inside the blade, like you said earlier, foam, balsa wood, resins mats, all these different components, how do we make sure that when that gets ground up or gets put into certain things, that when if it was the product was to go to concrete, you don’t end up with Foam in the concrete or, how does the end product users know that the product that they’re getting from you is of high enough quality?
Will pass those standards where labs are testing it to make sure. How do you guys do
that?
Jeff Woods: So I’d say that really two answers to that. One is through our material separation capabilities where the foams and the balsas really get pulverized down into the soil stabilization type materials. And then through our process, we have a good means of getting what I’m going to just broadly refer to as good, clean fiber.
That I think you probably saw examples of it in New Orleans, Allen where we had bowls of the various hydroponics that we were there. And when people run their hands through the, we’ll soon have a video on our website where people can go in and see. And I’ve, I’m actually distributing some powders that are going into a cement truck in my hands.
And it’s amazing how clean it is. To that point, we have then tested those clean fibers and mixes thereof in accredited labs to meet certain ASTM standards and passed with really outstanding performance. Some of the quirks of our product are that it actually helps the absorption of other materials.
It’s good stuff. And then ultimately what what an end user, wants to know on the end use application at the wind industry. Is what are your processes around that? Are you going to be ISO certified? Are you going to have all, and ISO certification comes with, you have to be in production for a little while and have certain plans and all that, but certainly in our purview and our pre work is all about being ISO certified from a quality perspective and using good consistent feedstocks.
Which, this material is generally as we move forward, some of this stuff has sat around Iowa for a long period of time, but it stays, it’s shelf life is really good, albeit there’s a few trees growing out of some of it in certain locations that gotta be cleaned up at some point.
Joel Saxum: Some rattlesnake eggs, and maybe a rabbit or two.
Jeff Woods: They’ve made a Jeff Woods mascot, it’s a critter running around a blade pile in a place I won’t mention, but it’s a little furrier than I am, I know that. But yeah, it’s just… Doing things right and being open and transparent with your customers about what they want, our solutions are, and working with them together.
Joel Saxum: The commercial question I want to ask is, as this problem of recycling wind turbine blades has become more mainstream, more and more mainstream, you’re starting to see, because I’m always active on LinkedIn people pop up, company pop, company X, company Y, company Z, hey, we recycle blades, hey, we recycle blades, will you guys take Recycled blades from these others, say, we would almost call them subcontractors, right?
Because there’s people that’ll go out, someone will contract them to, to remove their blades and recycle them. They may not have their own recycling process, but they’re really good at getting the blades down, getting them cut up, figure out the logistics, and maybe getting them to you guys. Do you
guys do that?
Jeff Woods: Yeah, so we’re agnostic as to where the blade comes from. We’ve, I think to date, we’ve received blades from probably, and keep in mind, we’re not up and running yet we’re gonna have one facility operational around the end of the year, the main facility in Cedar Rapids here second quarter ish next year but in terms of where the blades are, we’ve got people calling us from coast to coast, quite literally It’s amazing to me, particularly since the Inflation Reduction Act came out, how many people are suddenly in the space of I grind blades.
I process blades. Sometimes it feels like anybody that’s ever ran a wood chipper thinks they’re in the blade recycling business. But you know what, that’s their space for them to figure out and their headaches. Whether it’s some of the major blade manufacturers, or some of the big engineering firms, or contractors that have been engaged to take down the blades, to mom and pops, if you will, that call us saying, I’ve got three blades coming from here.
Is this something that you would be interested in taking? We talk to everybody, we just to know what type of blade we’re dealing with for planning purposes more than anything.
Allen Hall: I want to ask a question that actually Rosemary asked during our podcast, which was, there’s a variety of different kinds of resin materials that are being used on blades and different manufacturers have different kind of approaches to things, so obviously the blades are slightly different.
Does that affect your end product at all of if they’re using a specific epoxy or polyurethane or whatever else is being used today, does that really matter in your process?
Jeff Woods: It has not. We have tested a RAM material from every blade manufacturer that I can think of all of whom have their own, McDonald’s secret sauce, so to speak, and how they do things.
And it just hasn’t mattered in terms of how it works and are running it through the actual operation. And nor has it mattered in terms of the testing results for the end product.
Allen Hall: That’s amazing. So your end customers then are they local to you for the product? There’s got to be a line of people at your doorstep ready to take the material because it does improve their existing products.
Especially for road bases and things like that, even concrete, right? It makes it stronger. Provides a lot of benefits. What is your in customer who are, who generally are they? Are they local? Are they national? Where are they coming from?
Jeff Woods: They’re all of the above. Keep in mind that a lot of the national firms that are in a concrete or asphalt industries, they might own 50 plants around the United States or 50 different companies around the United States or operations all over the United States of North America.
They are, I would say, literally could be anywhere. That said we do have a strong regional emphasis. I’m not going to exclude anybody and if they’re a thousand miles from here, they want all the material and the commercial terms are agreeable to all parties. That’s fine by Jeff. But certainly we want to A.
We’re an Iowa company trying to solve a problem that’s big in Iowa. So we do talk to a lot of Iowa companies about our solutions. And isn’t it a great message if, we could, we’re all doing this for each other and helping out ourselves. But there are certainly, if you look at the and I’m going to broadly label it as the concrete industry sometimes, and to an extent the aggregates industry and what they’re Scrutiny has been, as a contributor to global warming, they’re very interested in knowing that this solution is out there where, and these folks use massive amounts of reinforcing fibers in, whether it’s roadways, whether it’s, whether concrete or asphalt, whether it’s precast concrete, there’s just, to the pavers in your yard, right?
These folks use lots and lots of fiber and we’re just a fraction of it, right? We’re never going to displace virgin fiber under any scale, but I think that for a portion of their usage, we offer them a very compelling ESG message and carbon reduction footprint score. And most of those firms have significant goals to be reduced carbon or be carbon neutral by 2030.
So our timing is right by that. So strong interest from the industry. But consistent messaging also that it’s great you’ve got to meet performance scores to Joel’s points that are parallel with existing products cause they, they can’t be responsible for putting our material and I’m just going to a warehouse floor.
And then the owner calls up two years later, and guess what? I got cracks in the warehouse floor, right? The products got to perform and they compete every day against firms of all different types, shapes, and sizes. And some of them have more interest in compelling ESG messages than others.
We can’t be What I’m going to say we have to be cost neutral. The other third thing that, and this is going to sound a little bit funny but many of these companies are companies that have heard similar pitches before whether it’s from wind turbine blades, maybe at different levels. In other words, I want to give you chunks of this stuff, just throw it in a roadway, right?
Or I want to, I’ve given you fiber sources from other materials. That didn’t pan out. So there is a sense of, and there have been other people in the market that have tried it with other products. So we talked to people about putting our materials in fiber boards and things like that. There is a sense of this is all great.
We need to know you’re real, right? Because some of the things we talked about early on, Allen people are, that is very fresh and raw in certain people’s. Brains that sales pitches can be sales pitches. We need to know that you’re real, right? And legit.
Allen Hall: Does the state of Iowa play into this at all in terms of the state government, even local governments?
And are you seeing similar, anybody from a government standpoint say, Hey, REGEN this is really cool. What you’re doing in Iowa. Why don’t you come over to Wisconsin or where Joel is or come Oklahoma, Texas, obviously it seems like there’s a market for you and it would benefit the state that maybe the state regulators or even the legislature would be interested in bringing you down.
Jeff Woods: Yeah, the state of Iowa, certainly the agencies that we’ve talked to about it, and it’s really known that all of them are excited about our solution. Our outreach to other states, we’re really kicking in an earnest, through associations, so we’ll… We’ll start to get awareness out there, particularly as we look to take this to other locations.
So we’re not transporting those blades all over North America. I would say as much as the States, the wind industry is driving where they would like to see facilities, right? And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pull up any heat map on where our wind turbines in North America and say, where would these facilities make sense?
So I’m not disclosing any trade secrets there. And I would say that some of the potential end users that we’ve talked to that have become familiar with us through events like a world of concrete, or we’re going to the concrete expo next week, a huge event asphalt events that they say, man, we’d like to have that close to us because a lot of these firms went to sourcing fibers from overseas and felt some of the disruption in the supply chain that came right after COVID and the volatility and a supply of material.
And cost associated with it. So it’s, there’s a little bit of that reshoring aspect in there. So yeah, a lot of positive momentum for it. We just need to finish the job.
Allen Hall: And I know our listeners are going to be interested in picking this up, especially a lot of operators, right? So the operators in the United States are all looking for, like you’ve mentioned, they’re looking for recycling solutions, because if they’re not
already in the middle of a repower. They are planning repowers for the next five to 10 years, right? That takes, things take time and they need to be putting people like you in place as part of their repowering solution, right there to get the blades recycled and to use it for something beneficial to society and not just necessarily burn them like is currently happening.
So this is a really interesting approach. And I, as soon as your patent gets issued, I want to read it. I want to understand what goes on. And maybe if I’m on Iowa, maybe you can give me a little sneak peek through the factory.
Jeff Woods: We’ll walk you through the factory tomorrow. You’ll just be blindfolded.
Allen Hall: It’d make it a little difficult.
We really appreciate having you on the podcast.
How do people reach out to you and connect with you at REGEN?
Jeff Woods: So they can they can call me (319) 786-3698. Old guys like me still answer the phone once in a while. Or they can email at jwoods @regenfiber.com.
Allen Hall: And the website is regenfiber. com.
Thanks for being on the podcast and we love to have you back. So I’m serious, when you guys open the doors to outside eyes, we’ll be interested in taking a tour.
Jeff Woods: You’re more than welcome.
My maternal grandfather was born in southeastern Pennsylvania in 1903 and told me when I was a boy that in the 1920s, times were so good that saloon owners would offer a free lunch, consisting of bread and butter, cheese, cold cuts, pickles and the like. “Sure, they were hoping you’d buy a glass of beer for a nickel, but they really didn’t mind if you didn’t and simply scarfed down a free sandwich.”
He went on to tell me that nowadays, there’s a popular slogan: There’s no such thing as a free lunch, “but believe me, there was at the time.”
From today’s perspective of greed and selfishness, this whole story sounds like a fairy tale. Corporations and the congresspeople they own want one thing: to suck the life out of us.
Wind Industry Operations: In Wind’s Next Chapter, Operations take center stage
This exclusive article originally appeared in PES Wind 4 – 2025 with the title, Operations take center stage in wind’s next chapter. It was written by Allen Hall and other members of the WeatherGuard Lightning Tech team.
As aging fleets, shrinking margins, and new policies reshape the wind sector, wind energy operations are in the spotlight. The industry’s next chapter will be defined not by capacity growth, but by operational excellence, where integrated, predictive maintenance turns data into decisions and reliability into profit.
Wind farm operations are undergoing a fundamental transformation. After hosting hundreds of conversations on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, I’ve witnessed a clear pattern: the most successful operators are abandoning reactive maintenance in favor of integrated, predictive strategies. This shift isn’t just about adopting new technologies; it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we manage aging assets in an era of tightening margins and expanding responsibilities.
The evidence was overwhelming at this year’s SkySpecs Customer Forum, where representatives from over 75% of US installed wind capacity gathered to share experiences and strategies. The consensus was clear: those who integrate monitoring, inspection, and repair into a cohesive operational strategy are achieving dramatic improvements in reliability and profitability.
Takeaway: These options have been available to wind energy operations for years; now, adoption is critical.
Why traditional approaches to wind farm operations are failing
Today’s wind operators face an unprecedented convergence of challenges. Fleets installed during the 2010-2015 boom are aging in unexpected ways, revealing design vulnerabilities no one anticipated. Meanwhile, the support infrastructure is crumbling; spare parts have become scarce, OEM support is limited, and insurance companies are tightening coverage just when operators need them most.
The situation is particularly acute following recent policy changes. The One Big Beautiful Bill in the United States has fundamentally altered the economic landscape. PTC farming is no longer viable; turbines must run longer and more reliably than ever before. Engineering teams, already stretched thin, are being asked to manage not just wind assets but solar and battery storage as well. The old playbook simply doesn’t work anymore.
Consider the scope of just one challenge: polyester blade failures. During our podcast conversation with Edo Kuipers of We4Ce, we learned that an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 blades worldwide are experiencing root bushing issues. ‘After a while, blades are simply flying off,’ Kuipers explained. The financial impact of a single blade failure can exceed €300,000 when you factor in replacement costs, lost production, and crane mobilization. Yet innovative repair solutions, like the one developed by We4Ce and CNC Onsite, can address the same problem for €40,000 if caught early. This pattern repeats across every major component. Gearbox failures that once required complete replacement can now be predicted months in advance. Lightning damage that previously caused catastrophic failures can be prevented with inexpensive upgrades and real-time monitoring. All these solutions are based on the principle that predicted maintenance is better than an expensive surprise.
Seeing problems before they happeny, and potential risks
The transformation begins with visibility. Modern monitoring systems reveal problems that traditional methods miss entirely. Eric van Genuchten of Sensing360 shared an eye-opening statistic on our podcast: ‘In planetary gearbox failures, they get 90%, so there’s still 10% of failures they cannot detect.’ That missing 10% represents the catastrophic failures that destroy budgets and production targets. Advanced monitoring technologies are filling these gaps. Sensing360’s fiber optic sensors, for example, detect minute deformations in steel components, revealing load imbalances and fatigue progression invisible to traditional monitoring. ‘We integrate our sensors in steel and make rotating equipment smarter,’ van Genuchten explained.
Other companies are deploying acoustic systems to identify blade delamination, oil analysis for gearbox health, and electrical signature analysis for generator issues. Each technology adds a piece to the puzzle, but the real value comes from integration. The impact of load monitoring alone can be transformative.
As van Genuchten explained, ‘Twenty percent more loading on a gearbox or on a bearing is half of your life. The other way around, twenty percent less loading is double your life.’ With proper monitoring, operators can optimize load distribution across their fleet, extending component life while maximizing production.
But monitoring without action is just expensive data collection. The most successful operators are those who’ve learned to translate sensor data into operational decisions. This requires not just technology but organizational change, breaking down silos between monitoring, maintenance, and management teams.
In Wind Energy Operations, Early intervention makes the million-dollar difference
The economics of early intervention are compelling across every component type. The blade root bushing example from We4Ce illustrates this perfectly. With their solution, early detection means replacing just 24-30 bushings in about 24 hours of drilling work. Wait, and you’re looking at 60+ bushings and 60 hours of work. Early detection doesn’t just prevent catastrophic failure; it makes repairs faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
This principle extends throughout the turbine. Early-stage bearing damage can be addressed through targeted lubrication or minor adjustments. Incipient electrical issues can be resolved with cleaning or connection tightening. Small blade surface cracks can be repaired in a few hours before they propagate into structural damage requiring weeks of work.
Leading operators are implementing tiered response protocols based on monitoring data. Critical issues trigger immediate intervention. Developing problems are scheduled for the next maintenance window. Minor issues are monitored and addressed during routine service. This systematic approach reduces both emergency repairs and unnecessary maintenance, optimizing resource allocation across the fleet.
Turning information into action
While monitoring generates data, platforms like SkySpecs’ Horizon transform that data into operational intelligence. Josh Goryl, SkySpecs’ Chief Revenue Officer, explained their evolution at the recent Customer Forum: ‘I think where we can help our customers is getting all that data into one place.
The game-changer is integration across data types. The company is working to combine performance data with CMS data to provide valuable insights into turbine health. This approach has been informed by operators across the world, who’ve discovered that integrated platforms deliver insights that siloed data can’t.
The platform approach also addresses the reality of shrinking engineering teams managing expanding portfolios. As Goryl noted, many wind engineers are now responsible for solar and battery storage assets as well. One platform managing multiple technologies through a unified interface becomes essential for operational efficiency.
The Integration Imperative for Wind Farm Operations
The most successful operators aren’t just adopting individual technologies; they’re integrating monitoring, inspection, and repair into a seamless operational system. This integration operates at multiple levels.
At the technical level, data from various monitoring systems feeds into unified platforms that provide comprehensive asset visibility. These platforms don’t just display data; they analyze patterns, predict failures, and generate work orders.
At the organizational level, integration means breaking down barriers between departments. This cross-functional collaboration transforms O&M from a cost center into a value driver. Building your improvement roadmap For operators ready to enhance their O&M approach, the path forward involves several key steps:
Assessing the Current State of your Wind Energy Operations
Document your maintenance costs, failure rates, and downtime patterns. Identify which problems consume the most resources and which assets are most critical to your wind farm operations.
Start with targeted pilots Rather than attempting wholesale transformation, begin with focused initiatives targeting your biggest pain points. Whether it’s blade monitoring, gearbox sensors, or repair innovations, starting with your largest issue will help you see the biggest benefit.
• Invest in integration, not just technology: the most sophisticated monitoring system is worthless if its data isn’t acted upon. Ensure your organization has the processes and culture to transform data into decisions – this is the first step to profitability in your wind farm operations.
Build partnerships, not just contracts: look for technology providers and service companies willing to share knowledge, not just deliver services. The goal is building capability, not dependency.
• Measure and iterate: track the impact of each initiative on your key performance indicators. Use lessons learned to refine your approach and guide future investments.
The competitive advantage
The wind industry has reached an inflection point. With increasingly large and complex turbines, monitoring needs to adapt with it. The era of flying blind is over.
In an industry where margins continue to compress and competition intensifies, operational excellence has become a key differentiator. Those who master the integration of monitoring, inspection, and repair will thrive. Those who cling to reactive maintenance face escalating costs and declining competitiveness.
The technology exists. The business case is proven. The early adopters are already reaping the benefits. The question isn’t whether to transform your O&M approach, but how quickly you can adapt to this new reality. In the race to operational excellence, the winners will be those who act decisively to embrace the efficiency revolution reshaping wind operations.
Unless otherwise noted, images here are from We4C Rotorblade Specialist.
Contact us for help understanding your lightning damage, future risks, and how to get more uptime from your equipment.
Download the full article from PES Wind here
Find a practical guide to solving lightning problems and filing better insurance claims here
Wind Industry Operations: In Wind’s Next Chapter, Operations take center stage
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
BladeBUG Tackles Serial Blade Defects with Robotics
Chris Cieslak, CEO of BladeBug, joins the show to discuss how their walking robot is making ultrasonic blade inspections faster and more accessible. They cover new horizontal scanning capabilities for lay down yards, blade root inspections for bushing defects, and plans to expand into North America in 2026.
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: Chris, welcome back to the show.
Chris Cieslak: It’s great to be back. Thank you very much for having me on again.
Allen Hall: It’s great to see you in person, and a lot has been happening at Blade Bugs since the last time I saw Blade Bug in person. Yeah, the robot. It looks a lot different and it has really new capabilities.
Chris Cieslak: So we’ve continued to develop our ultrasonic, non-destructive testing capabilities of the blade bug robot.
Um, but what we’ve now added to its capabilities is to do horizontal blade scans as well. So we’re able to do blades that are in lay down yards or blades that have come down for inspections as well as up tower. So we can do up tower, down tower inspections. We’re trying to capture. I guess the opportunity to inspect blades after transportation when they get delivered to site, to look [00:01:00] for any transport damage or anything that might have been missed in the factory inspections.
And then we can do subsequent installation inspections as well to make sure there’s no mishandling damage on those blades. So yeah, we’ve been just refining what we can do with the NDT side of things and improving its capabilities
Joel Saxum: was that need driven from like market response and people say, Hey, we need, we need.
We like the blade blood product. We like what you’re doing, but we need it here. Or do you guys just say like, Hey, this is the next, this is the next thing we can do. Why not?
Chris Cieslak: It was very much market response. We had a lot of inquiries this year from, um, OEMs, blade manufacturers across the board with issues within their blades that need to be inspected on the ground, up the tap, any which way they can.
There there was no, um, rhyme or reason, which was better, but the fact that he wanted to improve the ability of it horizontally has led the. Sort of modifications that you’ve seen and now we’re doing like down tower, right? Blade scans. Yeah. A really fast breed. So
Joel Saxum: I think the, the important thing there is too is that because of the way the robot is built [00:02:00] now, when you see NDT in a factory, it’s this robot rolls along this perfectly flat concrete floor and it does this and it does that.
But the way the robot is built, if a blade is sitting in a chair trailing edge up, or if it’s flap wise, any which way the robot can adapt to, right? And the idea is. We, we looked at it today and kind of the new cage and the new things you have around it with all the different encoders and for the heads and everything is you can collect data however is needed.
If it’s rasterized, if there’s a vector, if there’s a line, if we go down a bond line, if we need to scan a two foot wide path down the middle of the top of the spa cap, we can do all those different things and all kinds of orientations. That’s a fantastic capability.
Chris Cieslak: Yeah, absolutely. And it, that’s again for the market needs.
So we are able to scan maybe a meter wide in one sort of cord wise. Pass of that probe whilst walking in the span-wise direction. So we’re able to do that raster scan at various spacing. So if you’ve got a defect that you wanna find that maximum 20 mil, we’ll just have a 20 mil step [00:03:00] size between each scan.
If you’ve got a bigger tolerance, we can have 50 mil, a hundred mil it, it’s so tuneable and it removes any of the variability that you get from a human to human operator doing that scanning. And this is all about. Repeatable, consistent high quality data that you can then use to make real informed decisions about the state of those blades and act upon it.
So this is not about, um, an alternative to humans. It’s just a better, it’s just an evolution of how humans do it. We can just do it really quick and it’s probably, we, we say it’s like six times faster than a human, but actually we’re 10 times faster. We don’t need to do any of the mapping out of the blade, but it’s all encoded all that data.
We know where the robot is as we walk. That’s all captured. And then you end up with really. Consistent data. It doesn’t matter who’s operating a robot, the robot will have those settings preset and you just walk down the blade, get that data, and then our subject matter experts, they’re offline, you know, they are in their offices, warm, cozy offices, reviewing data from multiple sources of robots.
And it’s about, you know, improving that [00:04:00] efficiency of getting that report out to the customer and letting ’em know what’s wrong with their blades, actually,
Allen Hall: because that’s always been the drawback of, with NDT. Is that I think the engineers have always wanted to go do it. There’s been crush core transportation damage, which is sometimes hard to see.
You can maybe see a little bit of a wobble on the blade service, but you’re not sure what’s underneath. Bond line’s always an issue for engineering, but the cost to take a person, fly them out to look at a spot on a blade is really expensive, especially someone who is qualified. Yeah, so the, the difference now with play bug is you can have the technology to do the scan.
Much faster and do a lot of blades, which is what the de market demand is right now to do a lot of blades simultaneously and get the same level of data by the review, by the same expert just sitting somewhere else.
Chris Cieslak: Absolutely.
Joel Saxum: I think that the quality of data is a, it’s something to touch on here because when you send someone out to the field, it’s like if, if, if I go, if I go to the wall here and you go to the wall here and we both take a paintbrush, we paint a little bit [00:05:00] different, you’re probably gonna be better.
You’re gonna be able to reach higher spots than I can.
Allen Hall: This is true.
Joel Saxum: That’s true. It’s the same thing with like an NDT process. Now you’re taking the variability of the technician out of it as well. So the data quality collection at the source, that’s what played bug ducts.
Allen Hall: Yeah,
Joel Saxum: that’s the robotic processes.
That is making sure that if I scan this, whatever it may be, LM 48.7 and I do another one and another one and another one, I’m gonna get a consistent set of quality data and then it’s goes to analysis. We can make real decisions off.
Allen Hall: Well, I, I think in today’s world now, especially with transportation damage and warranties, that they’re trying to pick up a lot of things at two years in that they could have picked up free installation.
Yeah. Or lifting of the blades. That world is changing very rapidly. I think a lot of operators are getting smarter about this, but they haven’t thought about where do we go find the tool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And, and I know Joel knows that, Hey, it, it’s Chris at Blade Bug. You need to call him and get to the technology.
But I think for a lot of [00:06:00] operators around the world, they haven’t thought about the cost They’re paying the warranty costs, they’re paying the insurance costs they’re paying because they don’t have the set of data. And it’s not tremendously expensive to go do. But now the capability is here. What is the market saying?
Is it, is it coming back to you now and saying, okay, let’s go. We gotta, we gotta mobilize. We need 10 of these blade bugs out here to go, go take a scan. Where, where, where are we at today?
Chris Cieslak: We’ve hads. Validation this year that this is needed. And it’s a case of we just need to be around for when they come back round for that because the, the issues that we’re looking for, you know, it solves the problem of these new big 80 a hundred meter plus blades that have issues, which shouldn’t.
Frankly exist like process manufacturer issues, but they are there. They need to be investigated. If you’re an asset only, you wanna know that. Do I have a blade that’s likely to fail compared to one which is, which is okay? And sort of focus on that and not essentially remove any uncertainty or worry that you have about your assets.
’cause you can see other [00:07:00] turbine blades falling. Um, so we are trying to solve that problem. But at the same time, end of warranty claims, if you’re gonna be taken over these blades and doing the maintenance yourself, you wanna know that what you are being given. It hasn’t gotten any nasties lurking inside that’s gonna bite you.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Chris Cieslak: Very expensively in a few years down the line. And so you wanna be able to, you know, tick a box, go, actually these are fine. Well actually these are problems. I, you need to give me some money so I can perform remedial work on these blades. And then you end of life, you know, how hard have they lived?
Can you do an assessment to go, actually you can sweat these assets for longer. So we, we kind of see ourselves being, you know, useful right now for the new blades, but actually throughout the value chain of a life of a blade. People need to start seeing that NDT ultrasonic being one of them. We are working on other forms of NDT as well, but there are ways of using it to just really remove a lot of uncertainty and potential risk for that.
You’re gonna end up paying through the, you know, through the, the roof wall because you’ve underestimated something or you’ve missed something, which you could have captured with a, with a quick inspection.
Joel Saxum: To [00:08:00] me, NDT has been floating around there, but it just hasn’t been as accessible or easy. The knowledge hasn’t been there about it, but the what it can do for an operator.
In de-risking their fleet is amazing. They just need to understand it and know it. But you guys with the robotic technology to me, are bringing NDT to the masses
Chris Cieslak: Yeah.
Joel Saxum: In a way that hasn’t been able to be done, done before
Chris Cieslak: that. And that that’s, we, we are trying to really just be able to roll it out at a way that you’re not limited to those limited experts in the composite NDT world.
So we wanna work with them, with the C-N-C-C-I-C NDTs of this world because they are the expertise in composite. So being able to interpret those, those scams. Is not a quick thing to become proficient at. So we are like, okay, let’s work with these people, but let’s give them the best quality data, consistent data that we possibly can and let’s remove those barriers of those limited people so we can roll it out to the masses.
Yeah, and we are that sort of next level of information where it isn’t just seen as like a nice to have, it’s like an essential to have, but just how [00:09:00] we see it now. It’s not NDT is no longer like, it’s the last thing that we would look at. It should be just part of the drones. It should inspection, be part of the internal crawlers regimes.
Yeah, it’s just part of it. ’cause there isn’t one type of inspection that ticks all the boxes. There isn’t silver bullet of NDT. And so it’s just making sure that you use the right system for the right inspection type. And so it’s complementary to drones, it’s complimentary to the internal drones, uh, crawlers.
It’s just the next level to give you certainty. Remove any, you know, if you see something indicated on a a on a photograph. That doesn’t tell you the true picture of what’s going on with the structure. So this is really about, okay, I’ve got an indication of something there. Let’s find out what that really is.
And then with that information you can go, right, I know a repair schedule is gonna take this long. The downtime of that turbine’s gonna be this long and you can plan it in. ’cause everyone’s already got limited budgets, which I think why NDT hasn’t taken off as it should have done because nobody’s got money for more inspections.
Right. Even though there is a money saving to be had long term, everyone is fighting [00:10:00] fires and you know, they’ve really got a limited inspection budget. Drone prices or drone inspections have come down. It’s sort, sort of rise to the bottom. But with that next value add to really add certainty to what you’re trying to inspect without, you know, you go to do a day repair and it ends up being three months or something like, well
Allen Hall: that’s the lightning,
Joel Saxum: right?
Allen Hall: Yeah. Lightning is the, the one case where every time you start to scarf. The exterior of the blade, you’re not sure how deep that’s going and how expensive it is. Yeah, and it always amazes me when we talk to a customer and they’re started like, well, you know, it’s gonna be a foot wide scarf, and now we’re into 10 meters and now we’re on the inside.
Yeah. And the outside. Why did you not do an NDT? It seems like money well spent Yeah. To do, especially if you have a, a quantity of them. And I think the quantity is a key now because in the US there’s 75,000 turbines worldwide, several hundred thousand turbines. The number of turbines is there. The number of problems is there.
It makes more financial sense today than ever because drone [00:11:00]information has come down on cost. And the internal rovers though expensive has also come down on cost. NDT has also come down where it’s now available to the masses. Yeah. But it has been such a mental barrier. That barrier has to go away. If we’re going going to keep blades in operation for 25, 30 years, I
Joel Saxum: mean, we’re seeing no
Allen Hall: way you can do it
Joel Saxum: otherwise.
We’re seeing serial defects. But the only way that you can inspect and or control them is with NDT now.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Joel Saxum: And if we would’ve been on this years ago, we wouldn’t have so many, what is our term? Blade liberations liberating
Chris Cieslak: blades.
Joel Saxum: Right, right.
Allen Hall: What about blade route? Can the robot get around the blade route and see for the bushings and the insert issues?
Chris Cieslak: Yeah, so the robot can, we can walk circumferentially around that blade route and we can look for issues which are affecting thousands of blades. Especially in North America. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah.
Chris Cieslak: So that is an area that is. You know, we are lucky that we’ve got, um, a warehouse full of blade samples or route down to tip, and we were able to sort of calibrate, verify, prove everything in our facility to [00:12:00] then take out to the field because that is just, you know, NDT of bushings is great, whether it’s ultrasonic or whether we’re using like CMS, uh, type systems as well.
But we can really just say, okay, this is the area where the problem is. This needs to be resolved. And then, you know, we go to some of the companies that can resolve those issues with it. And this is really about played by being part of a group of technologies working together to give overall solutions
Allen Hall: because the robot’s not that big.
It could be taken up tower relatively easily, put on the root of the blade, told to walk around it. You gotta scan now, you know. It’s a lot easier than trying to put a technician on ropes out there for sure.
Chris Cieslak: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And the speed up it.
Joel Saxum: So let’s talk about execution then for a second. When that goes to the field from you, someone says, Chris needs some help, what does it look like?
How does it work?
Chris Cieslak: Once we get a call out, um, we’ll do a site assessment. We’ve got all our rams, everything in place. You know, we’ve been on turbines. We know the process of getting out there. We’re all GWO qualified and go to site and do their work. Um, for us, we can [00:13:00] turn up on site, unload the van, the robot is on a blade in less than an hour.
Ready to inspect? Yep. Typically half an hour. You know, if we’ve been on that same turbine a number of times, it’s somewhere just like clockwork. You know, muscle memory comes in, you’ve got all those processes down, um, and then it’s just scanning. Our robot operator just presses a button and we just watch it perform scans.
And as I said, you know, we are not necessarily the NDT experts. We obviously are very mindful of NDT and know what scans look like. But if there’s any issues, we have a styling, we dial in remote to our supplement expert, they can actually remotely take control, change the settings, parameters.
Allen Hall: Wow.
Chris Cieslak: And so they’re virtually present and that’s one of the beauties, you know, you don’t need to have people on site.
You can have our general, um, robot techs to do the work, but you still have that comfort of knowing that the data is being overlooked if need be by those experts.
Joel Saxum: The next level, um, commercial evolution would be being able to lease the kit to someone and or have ISPs do it for [00:14:00] you guys kinda globally, or what is the thought
Chris Cieslak: there?
Absolutely. So. Yeah, so we to, to really roll this out, we just wanna have people operate in the robots as if it’s like a drone. So drone inspection companies are a classic company that we see perfectly aligned with. You’ve got the sky specs of this world, you know, you’ve got drone operator, they do a scan, they can find something, put the robot up there and get that next level of information always straight away and feed that into their systems to give that insight into that customer.
Um, you know, be it an OEM who’s got a small service team, they can all be trained up. You’ve got general turbine technicians. They’ve all got G We working at height. That’s all you need to operate the bay by road, but you don’t need to have the RAA level qualified people, which are in short supply anyway.
Let them do the jobs that we are not gonna solve. They can do the big repairs we are taking away, you know, another problem for them, but giving them insights that make their job easier and more successful by removing any of those surprises when they’re gonna do that work.
Allen Hall: So what’s the plans for 2026 then?
Chris Cieslak: 2026 for us is to pick up where 2025 should have ended. [00:15:00] So we were, we were meant to be in the States. Yeah. On some projects that got postponed until 26. So it’s really, for us North America is, um, what we’re really, as you said, there’s seven, 5,000 turbines there, but there’s also a lot of, um, turbines with known issues that we can help determine which blades are affected.
And that involves blades on the ground, that involves blades, uh, that are flying. So. For us, we wanna get out to the states as soon as possible, so we’re working with some of the OEMs and, and essentially some of the asset owners.
Allen Hall: Chris, it’s so great to meet you in person and talk about the latest that’s happening.
Thank you. With Blade Bug, if people need to get ahold of you or Blade Bug, how do they do that?
Chris Cieslak: I, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best place to find myself and also Blade Bug and contact us, um, through that.
Allen Hall: Alright, great. Thanks Chris for joining us and we will see you at the next. So hopefully in America, come to America sometime.
We’d love to see you there.
Chris Cieslak: Thank you very [00:16:00] much.
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