Bret Tollgaard, president of Sunrez, explores how UV-cured resins are transforming wind turbine blade repair by dramatically reducing cure times from hours to minutes. Sunrez’s technology enables repairs in extreme temperatures and high humidity, extending maintenance seasons and increasing turbine uptime. Drawing from decades of experience across aerospace and marine applications, Tollgaard demonstrates how pre-impregnated UV materials are helping operators and repair teams save thousands of dollars per repair while getting turbines back online faster.
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Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we’re joined by Bret Tollgaard, president and CEO of Sunrez Corporation, a pioneering force in UV curing technology. Under Bret’s leadership, Sunrez has emerged as an industry leader.
Welcome in developing advanced UV cured resins and composites particularly for wind turbine blade repair. Based in El Cajon, California, Sunrez brings nearly four decades of expertise in UV curing technology. Today, we will explore how their cutting edge solutions are addressing some of the most pressing challenges in wind turbine maintenance.
Bret, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thanks for having me, Allen. Appreciate it. We know there’s a lot of challenges in the repair business at the moment on using standard materials resin systems out on blades. Particularly as it gets colder in the springtime and the fall where seasons get cut short and you still have blades to repair.
Everybody always has blades to repair. So you hear about this large rush to get blades stabilized to get to the next spring. That’s a big problem for the industry right now. How much of that do you see of people just saying, I don’t know what to do, I can’t get my blades fixed before the season. It’s where SunRez comes in with UV cured materials, right?
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. Really one of the biggest values that we add for our customers is time. And we save time in a tremendous amount of ways. One, the time for the repair window is greatly increased because we don’t really require any heat to cure and kick off our UV curing resin. You can cure at much colder temperatures and much hotter temperatures without any impact from the ambient air.
Temperature or humidity. So you can hear materials a lot deeper into the season, so you’re no longer constrained by how cold it is outside. It’s really then, at that point, what kind of worker wants to get out, up on top of that wind tower.
Joel Saxum: I think a big thing there too, Brad, is, we’re talking about UV cured resins being able to extend seasons, but what it can do within a season, right?
So when you’re talking like a major repair that you got grinding layer, grinding layer, and all of a sudden you’re three weeks into this thing. A three week repair, if you’re able to, boom, cure fast, boom, cure fast, move to the next step, that might shorten that thing down to a week? So is that possible?
Is that much time savings?
Bret Tollgaard: Absolutely. So one of the big things that UVCure resins do is they use the light photons from either the sunshine or one of our handheld LED lamps to cure our, kick off our resin. And so what we can do is we can cure up to a quarter inch thick laminate in under five minutes.
And depending on the light intensity that you have and the surface area that you’re trying to cure you can really fast track your repairs. And so we provide pre impregnated sheets of fiber to the wind market. So you don’t have to worry about mixing any resin up tower, getting the right amount on there, vacuum bagging, heat blanket, et cetera.
We provide pre impregnated sheets that have the optimum amount of resin for mechanical properties and adhesion to the wind turbine blade. And so what that allows customers to do is to actually peel, stick, and cure a laminate piece. To go ahead and repair that surface really quickly.
Allen Hall: And I think there’s really two marketplaces I’ve seen your materials used out in the field.
One is just major structural repairs that it just gets so cumbersome to do. The UV cured makes sense. The other one is I have a blade that I has some substantial crack in it. And this is interesting cause I ran across this in Oklahoma of all places. Blade with a huge crack in it. And they had temporarily patched it to hold it together using your material just for sense of speed.
Let’s just stabilize it and move on and fix other blades and the farm will come back to this, which is really hard to do with existing resin systems.
Bret Tollgaard: Our prepregs in general are used in kind of three primary areas. Corrosion resistance, not quite as applicable to the wind market, but cosmetic and structural repairs.
And so they lend themselves really well to doing large, thick laminates. But also for smaller cosmetic things or even zippering certain cracks. So something that you might have seen where they have staged pre pregs to do some crack propagation mitigation. They’re using a variety of instances and really the technicians can get up and down tower just so quickly.
And so that’s where one of the big advantages of UV cure materials comes into place is how quickly they can get repairs done
Joel Saxum: from a commercial standpoint, Bret. There’s a lot of advantages here. So if I’m an ISP a blade repair company, I want to come to my clients and say, Hey, we’ve got a way to do this faster.
This bid, maybe a chance for an ISP to get in front in the bidding process or through an RFP. And now if I’m an operator, I’m thinking the same thing. Hey, this is going to be, it could have been a three week repair. Now a one week repair, or especially places like I’m in Canada and our blade repair season is only 12 weeks long.
And I’d like to extend it to 20 weeks or 24 weeks or something. There’s so many advantages to this. Where are you seeing the most draw? Is it the operators themselves? Is it ISPs? Is it the OEMs? Where’s this coming from?
Bret Tollgaard: So it’s a little bit of everything. So historically on the wind market, we actually partnered up with GE and LM five, six years ago, and they were the ones who really brought this material into the wind market.
They saw the value in it. And at that point in time, we actually had a styrenated resin system. So had VOCs, it was a flammable material. It was a vinyl ester based system, but they still saw the merit and being able to complete jobs extremely quick. And it wasn’t that different from some of the, epoxy issues that there were then that there were in the past since then we’ve sold a little over 50, 000 patches.
Sold tens of thousands of square meters of material into the wind market alone. And now we’ve brought out a new material actually in 2024, it’s our 7355 vinyl ester resin system. And so it’s non styrenated, no VOC, no haps, all single component. And now we’ve introduced that into the entire wind market.
And one of the things that will really help ISPs gain the confidence in the material is having some of the other OEMs come through, validate it, certify the material, and really check it off saying this works well with our epoxy or polyester blades. And so that’s been our big focus for 2024 is gaining a little bit more exposure.
Introducing people to the material. But then we also have a track record of both, cosmetic and structural repairs in this market.
Allen Hall: And I think that’s key. And your experience outside of WIND is also valuable. I know you’ve been helping a number of different applications, ship based at times, aerospace is another market you’re in.
Those are really helpful in the WIND market also, because it gives you more just world experience, world knowledge that you’re bringing to the table when you come back to help the WIND industry.
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah, absolutely. So Sunrez was actually founded in 1986. It’s focused almost exclusively on UVCure resins, putties, and prepregs.
And so on the decades of R& D that we’ve done applications installs, new builds, et cetera we’ve gained a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience on how to really best service a customer’s specific repair requirements. For the wind market, it’s not that different from, let’s say marine, for instance, where you’re, going to be repairing composite components.
So we know how to make them stick. We know how to get the right structural properties. And being able to deliver that to, in a form factor that technicians up tower can actually use is a big challenge, but something that we’ve really worked on. And think we’ve come up with a pretty good package.
Allen Hall: How does the UV resin systems work? What is the magic in there? Because you, I’ve seen them over time, especially in aerospace, and now I’m seeing your material in a lot of places. What’s the chemistry? What, what’s actually happening when it says a UV resin?
Bret Tollgaard: Oh, that’s a great question, Allen.
So traditional resins, let’s say for an epoxy, for instance, you have a part A and a part B, you mix them together, and then you have a certain amount of time before they start to gel and then ultimately harden. And oftentimes to really get full mechanical and thermal properties, you have to elevate the temperature and cure it in an oven, post cure it with a heat blanket, or even an autoclave.
UV cure is completely different with respect to the way things actually cross link. And this is coming from a mechanical engineer, not a chemist, but simply put UV curing resins have something called photo initiator in them. Photo initiators are activated a tremendous amount of different rays ways and wavelengths.
There are hundreds of different photo initiators. And so you will blend a specific resin and concentration of photo initiator or photo initiators, depending on what you’re going to be curing with. But ultimately what happens is the light photons actually kick off make the photo initiators react then with the resin and or the monomers around them to crosslink and get a solidified part.
And so you don’t have any heat doing any of the work to make the resin molecules activate. It’s literally all the light photons hitting those photo initiators and going. And so what that means is you really need to pair the photo initiator with the light source. For instance, we’ve been doing stuff in the past where we sold to surfboard repair customers who were used in a broad spectrum sunlight that works relatively well, but you now have a broad spectrum of initiators to activate.
There are different ones that are good at surface curing, some that are better at depth of curing, and the light intensity, the dwell time that’s going to be on that, all of that really makes a really big difference with respect to the type of laminate that you can UV cure.
Allen Hall: Okay, so that explains a lot, because when you actually see UV cured resin systems kick off, They look hot.
Like there, there’s still a chemical reaction that’s happening there, but the photo initiators are essentially blocking that chemical reaction until they get exposed to, to, to the specific frequency of light, and then they step out of the way and the reaction happens. That is really unique because I, one of the things especially on winter blades is that generally you’re outside, so there’s gen to be sunlight.
Do you recommend just using the sunlight to cure the resin systems, or is it better to have a specific frequency light and to really get on top of it to make sure it cures out?
Bret Tollgaard: For the wind market in general, and the type of quality that we’re all really striving for, it’s absolutely recommended to be curing with a specific device.
Whether it’s one of our handheld lamps, which is something like one of these little guys. We’re teaming up with a group to do LED blankets as well, or sheets that you can just wrap around it and it’s all there’s thousands of LED lamp LEDs on there, excuse me and so there’s a variety of different curing methods that can be done, but to guarantee that depth of cure and your adhesion to that repair surface that’s really recommended because the sun at different times of the year, But softer for amount of light, depending on the Northern Southern hemisphere is the blade in the shade, or is it tilted?
And so you really can’t control as sufficiently as you can with, an actual curing device.
Joel Saxum: Bret, when I talk to any technician that’s used this stuff in the field, or even blade repair people that like, Hey, have you used this yet? Here’s how it works. All of every one of them, either their eyes get big and they explain how awesome this, a UV cured resin was, or their eyes get big and they go, what?
What is that? And that’s amazing to me that not that many people have heard about it. The one thing I wanted to share with you is I did get that was part of the feedback from some people that have used UV resins in general. And I don’t know if they were Sun Res or what else is out there, but they were saying, to get clarification on how we use the lights.
And what light source to use and because they’re like, early days, like I tried the one person said that to me one time, I tried UV cured resins on a boat one time, and they were like, one, I was trying to set it up. I took a sheet off and the thing cured and I had to grind it out and fix it. But you guys have gone to extra steps to make sure that this thing is easy to use in the field and you’re making that process combination of working with GE and work with other operators and stuff.
What are some of the special steps that you guys do to ensure the quality in the field and ease of installation?
Bret Tollgaard: One of the things that we do is we have an extensive lab here at Sunrez. We do mechanical testing. We’ve got a, 100 kilonewton instron for mechanical tests and coupon sampling. We have a DSC here, which is very valuable to us.
The DSC will measure the degree of cure, and then also some of the thermal properties that the TG most importantly, and so what we’ve done in the past and what we continue to do every time we’ve come out with a revised formula or different fabrics, for instance, that different customers might want to use E glass, S glass, et cetera.
We will cure. in field conditions. And then you can measure the mechanical properties of that part. Then also we can throw it in the DSC to really make sure that we’re getting the full mechanical and thermal benefits of a UV curing system. So for instance, most of the time our customers, we recommend curing with our lamp from 14 inches away.
When you do that, you can cure a 20 layer UD1000 prepreg in under 10 minutes. That’s almost a half inch thick.
Joel Saxum: That’s a day long usually.
Bret Tollgaard: That’s just it. And so there is a footprint though, that led light emits enough light intensity to cure 20 layers. As you start to go farther out and farther out, there’s less light because that led light on the top loses some of that intensity and that focus, right?
And so every LED creates a signature footprint. And then we’ve done all the testing internally to say, okay, from 14 inch distance, you’re going to be able to cure, I’ll say a nice round number two square feet, or if you go to 16 inch, you can hear three square feet, et cetera. And so we can give you the footprint that it’ll cure at the depth of cure that you can expect.
And then we can do some of the adhesion properties of that as well. And so we’ve built a catalog with our LED equipment to really make sure it’s as easy for the operators to use. And for some of the cosmetic repairs, it’s two layers of biax, or you throw some combi in there. The sun will cure that in under five minutes.
And so one of our LED lamps will certainly be and if you do have a cosmetic repair, you can put that light farther away because now you have a larger footprint, less light intensity, but you don’t need all that intensity to only cure a couple layers of material. And so we try to build this structure and this guideline for customers to follow.
To make it as easy to use as possible.
Joel Saxum: So Bret, we’ve talked a lot about the limitations of the traditional or classic resins, the time, the workability, these kinds of things that can be a pain. And one of the big items there is humidity, right? So temperature is one thing it has to cure at a certain temperature, but there’s also humidity and when you’re working in like I’m in Austin, right?
Not too far from here. There’s a lot of wind farms right along the coast in Texas. And those wind farms have huge limitations because of humidity. How does the UV cured products work within that?
Bret Tollgaard: Our stuff’s been known to cure underwater. Impact on curing with humidity is not that large of a deal for the material itself.
Now, on the humidity side of things, what you really need to look after is what your substrate you’re bonding to. If you’ve got standing water on there, you’re going to be bonding to that standing water. And so you do need to make sure that you have a nice clean surface. So that to actually be able to bond to, but yeah, the humidity itself won’t impact the cross linking and the curing of our materials.
Allen Hall: And what are the costs of UV cure material compared to the non UV brethren? Is it about the same or is less expensive, more expensive?
Bret Tollgaard: It’s going to be a slightly more expensive for them, the square foot of material that they’re actually going to be purchasing based on just pure fabric and resin alone.
Once again, a lot of our stuff comes pre impregnated. We do sell liquid resins, whether it’s infusion, really low viscosity, hand laminating resin, but for the wind market, we found the pre pregs to really add the most value to the customers. And so yeah, cost per square foot is going to go up a little bit.
But when you’re peering in five minutes versus six hours and there’s no mixing to do and the technician really has to just trim out the proper size part, peel off the backing film, roll it out with a hand roller, and then peel off the UV blocky film that’s on top. They add, or they save. Hours and hours per repair.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. At the most repair materials are 10 percent of a repair. It’s all, most of the costs in repairing blades, it’s all in just labor. It’s labor. It’s time. The materials is usually pretty small. So a slight increase in cost of materials will well over make up for itself in the grand scheme of things.
Bret Tollgaard: The ROI is incredibly short when using UV cured prepregs.
Allen Hall: So what forms does the UV cured prepregs come in? Come in. I’ve seen these little patch kits that you can buy online. It’s your material. It’s in a four line package. Is that how it generally comes or is it on rolls or how do you expect this to show up on site?
For the
Bret Tollgaard: wind market in particular, having a smaller style prepreg that’s easier for one or two people to handle has shown the greatest advantage. And traditionally we’ll sell them in flat sheets that are 300 millimetres wide and about 750 millimetres long. And so those flat sheets are easy for people to go, to stack, to build, and it’s easy enough to overlap as well.
But we’ve also had some more people ask us for continuous length rolls. And so now we’ve actually been building some 10 metre long versions that are still 300 millimetres wide. And so we’re starting to get those into the field to see what feedback and stuff we have from a broader range of customers to see if that continuous length will then serve more of advantage for a trailing edge repair or something along those lines where they don’t necessarily need or have the desire to continue to stack and overlap pre breaks.
Joel Saxum: Bret, LEP product.
Bret Tollgaard: We’re certainly looking in that direction. We have a couple of things in the works that we think is going to be really big for 2025 on the LEP side of things.
Allen Hall: So how’s it gone in the field? I obviously I’ve seen some of your materials up close out in the field, but you must be having a lot of success.
If you’ve done 50, 000 of these kits, that’s a lot of kits. How is it going out there?
Bret Tollgaard: So far so good. The feedback that we get from the customers is usually pretty positive. We are certainly open to understanding packaging things and that sort of stuff to make it easier for the customers to use in the field.
But by and large, we’ve had very positive feedback. We’ve had customers install in negative 20 degree Fahrenheit weather that was supposed to be a temporary winter repair to get them through to the summer, but it’s been going now for 3 straight years without needing to be replaced. Customers like that.
And then the other side of the thing is we’ve had customers in Puerto Rico, where some weather and storms were coming through, but they were to get up and down tower. Fixed that blade, get it spinning, and didn’t have to sit there for four days waiting for the rain to actually pass them by. And so we get a lot of positive feedback from that standpoint, where it’s just the time savings to be able to get up and down tower as effectively as possible.
And so people are pretty grateful for that kind of repair opportunity.
Allen Hall: What is generally that time savings for your materials versus the standard prepreg materials?
Bret Tollgaard: Yeah. So time savings alone on, I’ve found smaller repairs, anywhere from two to six layers thick are several hours in the four to five hours per repair, because there’s no heat blanket required.
Which are anywhere from 3 to 6 plus hours, from what I’ve heard. And then also it comes pre impregnated. So everyone, all they really have to do is trim the prepregs to the appropriate size for that laminate schedule. And then the way that our prepregs come is they’re formed with a backing film, our pre impregnated fiberglass sheet.
We have a clear film over the top of that and then we have an orange UV blocking film that’s just lightly spray adhesive to that clear film. And so what that will allow customers to do is peel off the black backing film, stick it to your repair surface, take a standard three or six inch bubble buster roller to roll out any air that might have been in between the prepreg and the substrate.
If you’re building up more layers, you generally, they’re going to be slightly larger and slightly larger than the one underneath it. And so you can always have UV protection with that transparent orange UV blocking film over the top. You can build up your layers by removing the films in between. And then when you’re all said and done you peel off that orange UV blocking film.
You can leave the clear one on so you get a nice, hard, tack free surface. And you expose it, the sunlight will once again start to kick it off, but you use that LED lamp to really get in there and make sure you get the proper depth of cure. But in under five, generally under five minutes, we’ll tell people you’re eight to 10 minutes long.
For a little bit of a safety factor but you’re done curing in under 10 minutes, whereas you don’t have any extra components like a vacuum bag, a vacuum itself to pull, a heat blanket to tape and just, then wait for hours on end for that to actually go and hope that the blade is in the massive heat sink.
Tons of advantages in having a pre impregnated sheet coupled with a sub 10 minute cure.
Allen Hall: Joel, if you’re saving four or five hours per repair, how much money are you saving
Joel Saxum: Four or five hours per repair. If you’re talking just technician time. So let’s just take it as a concept of you got two technicians on ropes.
Each one of those technicians is going to be between 95 and 120 an hour. So we’re talking, so say we make some easy numbers. We’ll say 200 bucks an hour for that rope team. And that’s a cheap rope team. That’s not that’s a not, yeah. So you’re talking for five hours, thousand dollars. And that’s if everything goes perfectly, because now when you extend time, you also extend volatility and you also extend circumstances that you may not want, right?
So that’s a minimum right there. Bam. Thousand bucks. And we haven’t talked about a thousand dollars there, but let’s talk about the uptime for that turbine, because what we hear all the time, Allen from the field, uptime is the most important thing. Uptime is the most important thing. We need these turbines spinning.
So if, we’re saying, this is how much money you’re going to save on technicians. You’re also going to get five more hours of production out of that turbine.
Allen Hall: Yeah, I think about that. Someone just handed you a thousand dollars. For changing to a better material. Would you take it? Yes, all day.
I would do that all summer long that because it makes Infinite sense to do it. Yeah, I’d be glad please Bret Send me more because that’s the way that this works is as Joel pointed out You’re cutting the downtime of the turbine being off, but also you’re getting those technicians moving on to something else It’s just a huge money savings.
That’s why GE Vernova and so many others are switching to these Sun Res UV systems it’s Quite amazing. Bret, you’ve done so much already. You guys have been in business a long time. You’re based in the United States. You’re out in California. You have a long storied history.
What’s coming in 2025? What should we be watching for?
Bret Tollgaard: For the wind market in particular, the LAP side of things is definitely one of the hot button products that we’ve been working on and plan to roll out. We have a couple of different solutions. One there a pre preg solution, but then also a A more putty based option for people.
We do have a couple other kind of cool UV cure products that we are working on in the wind market that we’ll release in due time. But we’ll keep that in the back pocket for now. But really it’s just even more market penetration. We sell UV curing resins anywhere from bathtub to surfboard repair technicians.
We have some Amish folk who use it to make saddles for horses. We sell to the defense industry Marine, industrial sectors. So really we’ve been a small company for a rather long time. But we’re expecting some pretty significant growth in the next year, plus as we get some deeper market penetrations, a variety of these things where really we’re just starting to displace Other composite resin systems, mostly epoxy.
We have some filament winding customers actually who had a six to 12 hour post cure in an oven that we got down to 90 seconds. And so when you see that kind of time savings you’re opening up more mandrills, your production lines increase, you can automate the heck out of a lot of different things.
And yeah we’re ready for some more disruption.
Joel Saxum: Bret, you’ve been around the industry for a while. Multiple industries, say the industry, we’re in wind, right? You’ve been across all kinds of composites industry. What’s the craziest repair that you guys have used Sunrez UV cured repairs on?
Bret Tollgaard: Sunrez really started manufacturing prepregs during Operation Desert Storm, Desert Shield, eighties and early nineties. We had a lot of material going to the Middle East and originally it was used for doing spot repairs. On a variety of different things, but it ended up being used as a lot of armor repair.
But two really interesting repairs was an IED explosion at the bottom of a Humvee. It’s, it’s damaged, there’s holes, it needs to be filled so it can actually go and be used again. The guys in the field went up, installed our repairs underneath it, but they’re out in the middle of the desert and there’s no LED light.
So what do they do? They use the sunshine and they get a mirror and they bounce the sun off the mirror to cure to the underside of a Humvee. And so that reinstated the strength.
Joel Saxum: That’s super cool.
Bret Tollgaard: Exactly. And so that was one of the really unique things. And the other one that I heard was our materials were literally used on the leading edge of the A 10, the Warthog to help to help reinstate its ability to fly.
And so when you’re over and you’re in harm’s way. They have these BDRs, Battle Damage Repair Kits. And to really make sure that you can get back home and you reinstate the ability for the airfoil to work properly, you cover all those bullet holes, and you at least now have a plane to get back to back home.
Joel Saxum: That to me sounds like a leading edge repair. That really would work.
Allen Hall: It works on an airplane. I’m sure we can make it work on a wind blade. Bret, this is amazing. And Sunrez is doing amazing things at the minute. And we appreciate you having on the podcast. How do people get a hold of Sunrez? Now they’ve heard all this great about all the great advancements in the materials they can have for wind turbine blades.
How do they get a hold of Sunrez?
Bret Tollgaard: Easiest place to go is the website, www. Sunrez. com. S U N R E Z. We’re generating it, we’re starting a YouTube channel so we can actually make some more how to videos and ease of use things. We are same thing on LinkedIn and Instagram where we’re starting it all.
Yeah, the website’s great. Contact us through there. Phone number’s on there as well. And that would be the best way to reach us.
Allen Hall: Brad, thank you so much for being on the podcast. Great material. We’ll see it again in 2025. Thanks so much for being on. I appreciate the time. Thank you.
https://weatherguardwind.com/sunrez-blade-repair/
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.
Hillsdale College is a rightwing Christian extremist organization that ostensibly honors the United States Constitution.
Here’s their quiz, which should be called the “Constitutional Trivia Quiz.”, whose purpose is obviously to convince Americans of their ignorance.
When I teach, I’m going for understanding of the topic, not the memorization of useless information.
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