Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Vaisala Xweather: Annual Lightning Report Ranks Wind Farms
Lightning struck wind turbines in the U.S. over 77,000 times in 2023 alone. Vaisala Xweather Insight experts detail how their advanced National Lightning Detection Network tracks each bold strike in real-time. Learn how wind farm operators tap into this data to optimize turbine safety and uptime during fierce storms.
Visit their website: https://www.xweather.com/ and read the report!
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Vaisala just published his 2023 lightning report, and if you haven’t seen it yet, better get online and check it out. One of the key items in that report is 77, 000 lightning strikes occurred to wind turbines in the U. S. in 2023.
So we thought it’d be a pretty good topic for a podcast because we’ve, Joel and I have seen a lot of lightning damage across the United States and 77, 000 lightning strikes is probably one of the reasons why. And if you’re not familiar with Vaisala, Vaisala is XWeather System, which is where that data comes from is in advance, whether intelligence platform provides businesses and organizations with accurate real time.
Weather insights and a lot of sites that we go to, Joel and I go visit, have the XWeather system. And that system integrates data from multiple sources into a sort of a unified view and analyzes current and historical trends and generates hyper local forecasts using artificial intelligence. And as part of that XWeather system is the National Lightning Detection Network, NLDN.
And we’re going to use that acronym throughout this podcast. The NLDN is a network of over a hundred ground based sensors across the U. S. that detects cloud to ground and cloud to cloud lightning strikes in real time. That system is operated by VISLA, and it uses sensors to pinpoint lightning strike locations, polarity, amplitude, and other key characteristics like specific energy.
And that network provides critical lightning data for early warning systems, research, and weather sensitive operations like wind turbines. With a detection efficiency over 90 percent nationally, the NLDN sets the standard for accurate real time lightning detection and mapping. Our guest today, we have two of them, Martin Murphy, Senior Scientist at Vaisala.
And Martin has a degree in meteorology from Penn State and a PhD in atmospheric science from the University of Arizona. And he has worked with Vaisala and its predecessors for over 27 years. One of his focuses is on analysis and validation of lightning detection systems, and he’s a co author of two patents related to lightning detection.
Martin, welcome to the program.
Martin Murphy: Thanks
Allen Hall: And Hans. Hans is the Vaisala product manager for Xweather, and we’ve had Hans on the podcast before, and we see Hans at all the trade shows across the United States. So Hans, welcome back to the show.
Hans Loewenheath: Thank you. Thank you for having me.
Allen Hall: So guys, I want to dive in first into the NLDN.
And since Martin’s here, I want to understand Or explain to everybody what the system is, because we travel around the United States quite extensively, and we meet with a lot of operators, and when we say, did you check the NLDN, the National Lightning Detection Network, they kind of go, what? What is this thing?
Joel Saxum: You get these glass, glassy eyes, like, what are you talking about?
Allen Hall: But it’s an immensely valuable resource, not only in the United States, because there’s a global lightning detection system, too the NLDN, though, has been around a long time, 40 plus years. And Martin hasn’t been there the whole time, but he’s been around in a long time.
So Martin, you want to just describe what this system is and sort of what it does and why we care so much about it?
Martin Murphy: Yeah so the as you mentioned earlier, the NLDN is a collection of over a hundred sensors just within the continental U. S. And these sensors are basically radio receivers that just sit there and listen for particular signals that are emitted by lightning discharges.
And then it filters out other things that are not related to lightning discharges. And and that’s done at the level of the individual sensors. When the sensors find something that looks like it came from a lightning event, they measure all kinds of parameters. They measure a time of arrival, when the signal got to the sensor.
They measure an angle of arrival. They measure a peak amplitude and a number of other characteristics of the signals that we receive, and then each sensor, when it sees one of these, it ships it back in near real time to what we call our central analyzing system. And we have a brand name for that, which is the TLP, but it’s essentially a central analyzing system that collects in all the data from the more than 100 sensors as it comes in real time.
And the central processor’s job is to figure out which sensors saw which lightning events at the same time. And then use all the measurements from the different sensors that saw them, the angles, the times, the amplitudes, to determine the position of the lightning discharge, the time of the lightning discharge, estimates of the peak current, and other parameters that can be derived from that.
And then that all gets done. within about 15 seconds or even a little bit less now of when the actual lightning occurs and then it is delivered to the end users. And we do all of that from a couple of different data centers and then the monitoring of the system to make sure that it stays up 24 7, 365.
99. 99, et cetera, percent uptime is actually done here at our office in the suburbs of Boulder, Colorado. And in fact, upstairs from me is what we call our Network Operations Center or NOC. And the NOC is where all that activity takes place.
Allen Hall: So the NLDN, when it first started, was a relatively simple system because when you get down to the fundamentals of it.
Each little sensor is basically two antennas at 90 degrees to one another. Is that essentially it? Is that it’s picking up the lightning signal that’s rushing to it. It’s just like when you’re driving down the road with, you have AM radio on. I don’t know who has AM radio anymore, but when you hear that crackling noise in the AM radio, it’s like, oh yeah, right?
So it’s picking up that crackling noise in that signal, in that frequency band. But those two antennas help to locate, like, generally locate which direction that thing is coming from, and then because you have multiples of them, that you’re able to triangulate where that signal comes from.
And then, on top of it, it gets to then process, like, what the amplitude of that thing is. Is that the real core fundamentals of it? But that started a long time ago. That system has evolved. And when I walk through, like, what that system looked like originally?
Martin Murphy: Yeah and so originally, 40 plus years ago, 45 years ago, when the first sensors were actually developed in the late 1970s, they literally were just two antennas at 90 degree angles to each other.
And all they could measure was the angle of arrival of these little, crackling signals in the, kind of that AM frequency range, or, even lower in frequency than that. As time went on, especially once GPS became widely available, We could add in time of arrival and do it very accurately.
And time of arrival actually turns out to have advantages because the position accuracy that you can get out of time of arrival is less dependent on the distance that you are away from the sensors. And so adding the time of arrival and the angle of arrival information together was a big advantage to the development of the NLDN.
So, in the, so going all the way back to the beginning. In the late 1970s to around 1980, there was a network of just the angle measuring sensors that covered basically the western third, roughly, of the continental U. S. and Alaska. And that was developed for the Bureau of Land Management to look into forest fires generated by lightning.
And then, shortly after that, kind of toward the 1980 time frame, 1979 the National Severe Storms Laboratory and the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Oklahoma became very interested. Because, obviously, severe thunderstorms, a lot of lightning, there’s a good reason to want to try to study these things and find out if there are patterns.
And so they did some projects in the early 80s, late 70s, to use small networks of these direction finding sensors, because they still didn’t have the time measurement in them yet at that time. And then, later on not much later on, like 81, 82 some sensors that were originally deployed in one of those field campaigns were moved to upstate New York because some researchers at the State University of New York, Albany, were getting very interested in lightning and also the capabilities of detecting lightning.
And over time, that system got merged with a a small network of direction finders that was owned and operated. I think it was NASA Wallops Island Flight Facility in Virginia. And that eventually grew into what was called the East Coast Lightning Detection Network. And then later in the 1980s, all these groups started talking to each other and said, Hey, can we build out a full U.
S. wide National Lightning Detection Network. And so by late 1988, I think, is when they had it fully ready to go. So I think 1989 was the first year when the complete continental U. S. was covered with NLDN.
Joel Saxum: So, Martin, I got a question for you on that just on that respect. So, we say right now, the complete continental United States covered by NLDN, right?
Over a hundred sensors that are out there. Is there any places, and I’m looking at range and this kind of thing, right? Because there’s a lot of remote places in the United States as well. And we’re starting to see with some of these big transmission projects, Wind farms being installed in remote places, like one that comes right to mind, that SunZia project down in New Mexico.
It’s in the middle of nowhere. Same thing with the the big project, the Sierra Madre Chokecherry up in Wyoming. That project is, it’s gonna be a thousand turbines, but it’s in the middle of nowhere. Are there any places in the U. S. where you would say, Hey, we feel more accurately the NLDN can characterize and position lightning here?
then say here or this is a gap or is there any of that kind of going on? Or do you say, Hey, basically universal coverage at the same accuracy level across the country.
Martin Murphy: Yeah. The great thing about these the frequency range where the sensors operate is that the signals that are generated by lightning.
propagate over the surface of the earth. And so we have to take into account, we have to apply corrections to the time measurements and the angle measurements to take into account measurement errors, but that doesn’t limit the coverage. So you can have a lightning strike that’s in the absolute middle of nothing in, Wyoming or Montana, and it will be seen by, upwards of 20 sometimes sensors that are in various other places around the U.
S. In fact, the highest amplitude lightning discharges might be seen by more than 30 different sensors. So you could have an event that’s in Montana and a sensor in Oklahoma or Missouri will capture it. If it’s high amplitude enough. So we really don’t have to worry about non uniformity too much in this, in that regard.
Joel Saxum: For the listeners out there, I want to give an idea. This is something that was taught to me a long time about positioning. So, positioning these lightning strikes. Imagine yourself, a lot of us are sitting in a room or in a car or whatever right now. And take take your head. And tie a string to it, tie a string to your hat, and you put it into the corner of the room over there, and the corner of the room over there.
If it only seemed by two sensors, you can, and tie that string in, you can still move your head. Once you tie in a third one, and then if you were to say, hey, this is the direction they came from, now all of a sudden you can’t move your head very much. Tie in a fourth and a fifth one, and all of a sudden, you’re pinned right down, right?
That is how the lightning detection network works. That will position these things from seeing him from multiple sensors.
Martin Murphy: Pretty much. That’s a, that’s an interesting analogy.
Joel Saxum: It was a GPS teacher a geomatics professor that taught me that one.
Allen Hall: The more sensors, the better. Well, and because we have someone like Martin on the scene, and Ryan, his co his partner in crime there, Vaisala that are doing a lot of the research behind Lightning, you have brains And universities behind this for a long time, right?
So there’s Arizona was involved, right? University of Albany, SUNY Albany was involved, and a lot of researchers, Oklahoma. Was involved, obviously, because of the weather, so not only has the system developed on the sensor side, but the brains behind it about understanding how lightning signals propagate and the intricacies there and how to adapt to the.
The resistance of the earth and those kind of weird effects has all been incorporated already. That’s all done.
Martin Murphy: That work is, has been done over the last 40 plus years.
Allen Hall: So now we have a system that is working nationwide and there’s a global system that basically does the same thing. But because it’s been there for 40 years, the accuracy is really high.
And I don’t think people understand what that system will generate. Because the latest generation that I’ve worked with or seen, it’ll tell you what the amplitude of a lightning strike is. It’ll tell you the polarity, right? That is correct. How does it do that? How does it know and how accurate is that?
Martin Murphy: The amplitude is? So the amplitude is basically determined by the addition of some more things beyond the original two two crossed loop antennas. So then. There was a third antenna, which is an electric field antenna, which is basically a flat plate that sits on top and that’s how you determine whether it was positive or negative.
And that is accurate to, 99 plus percent because there’s, there’s really not much work involved in determining the polarity. The amplitude is seen by each individual sensor at different distances, of course, because they’re all, in different places. So the first step that we have to do to deal with amplitudes is apply a normalization.
And the way we do it is pretend that all the sensors are exactly 100 kilometers from the lightning. What signal amplitude would they have measured? And then there are some other correction factors that, that can be applied to that to take into account some of the propagation effects that that, we were just speaking about earlier.
And once we have all of those then all of the different sensors, once we have their normalized amplitudes, we can apply a relationship to get an estimate of the peak current of the lightning stroke. And that is accurate to around 15%.
Allen Hall: Wow, okay, because a lot of instruments that we use on wind turbines are good within like three to five percent typically and with temperature variations that can get a little squirrely too, being within 15 percent is Really accurate for a system that is not directly on the object, like a tower or a wind turbine.
Martin Murphy: It’s not directly there.
Allen Hall: Right. Yeah. So to, but that system as the NLDN over time has gotten more accurate because you learn where the little percentage points lie, right? That you can hone that in. I think today, if you ask an operator in the United States, a wind turbine operator specifically. Like, how accurate could you think you can measure lightning?
They would tell you, probably 50 percent plus or minus. That’s not the case. The NLDN is actually telling you what that strike was, the polarity of the strike and the amplitude of the strike really accurately. So if your wind turbine does take a strike, you will know. What hit it? Almost instantaneously, and the bonus is the specific energy, which is basically the energy that the lightning discharge applies to your wind turbine or building, whatever that is, a specific energy is a little bit different, though.
That’s like a area under the curve kind of number. How do you measure that? And how is that sort of created? numerically in the system.
Martin Murphy: Yeah, so actually that is something that we cannot measure directly precisely because we’re trying to do this stuff from remotely sensed radio frequency signals that don’t cover the complete waveform of the current is obviously necessary in order to get specific energy.
So the way we have to do it is kind of through a back channel. There’s, there are relationships between peak current and specific energy that we can apply. than to make estimates of the specific energy. So these are indirect estimates of the specific energy. And the other aspect of lightning detection from long distances, which we don’t have a complete solution to yet, although we keep working on things, is to try to get the continuing current.
If there’s any continuing current after the return stroke itself, which produces those high amplitude crackly radio frequency signals. The continuing current produces signals that are much different and are not, they don’t detect, they don’t produce signals that are detectable at long distances that way.
So we have to try to come at it from a different point of view. And so those are all things that are ongoing research projects.
Allen Hall: I’ve seen that output and the discussion really gets into is there a lot of continuing current, a lot of energy in this lightning strike, is that a damaging lightning strike or what’s the term there, metal we would melt metal something to that effect.
Which seems to be right. Like I’ve seen damage that has happened in the field. I’ve seen the NLDN’s prediction of it. And that pretty well aligns, right? If it says it wasn’t a damaging strike. That’s pretty much true. So the accuracy in which you’re able to do that with remote sensors is amazing.
To tell you, hey, that strike probably was damaging. You better go look what your wind turbine is to see if it is damaged. Right. It’s an indication of I need to go do something that’s actionable data. And this is where Joel and I have been for the last year about giving operators and owners actionable data.
The NLDN does that today. That is already there.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, looking at this report, right? So when you guys put out the report 2023 Vaisala lightning, you put some extra statistics in there that are very interesting. Specifically, we’re in the wind industry. We deal with lightning, right? So to us, it was like, Oh, like a little piece of candy came out, so we started looking through this thing and some of the most interesting things I saw in here. This is a couple of stats I want to read off. 20, in 20 counties, now we’re not naming specific wind farms because we don’t want to do that right now, right? But in 20 counties in the United States, most of these all in the Midwest or in the that, I call it the I 35 corridor, basically, from Texas to Minnesota.
So, it, there is 20 counties where there’s greater than 5 stroke, lightning strokes per turbine in 2023. And in that data as well, there’s three more counties that took over 10 strokes per turbine in 2023. Now, these numbers are way higher than you usually hear from people. Like, some of those things you hear normally in the world, Ah, average, might take one turbine might get struck once a year, twice a year.
Some people in different areas of the world say one, I’ve heard one strike per lifetime, which is crazy. Maybe, yeah, maybe in areas where there’s no lightning, which, that happens as well, right? It’s different geographically, but the fact that you guys put a bunch of data together, if you’re in the wind industry, and you haven’t looked through this report yet.
Just Google Visalo weather or lightning report 2023 and it will be the first link that pops up and it’s an active PDF you can float through. I don’t, Hans, do you want to talk about this report a little bit, how you guys decided to do some of these things?
Allen Hall: So, because Hans you’re the head of the XWeather system, right?
You’re the product manager for the XWeather system. The XWeather system uses the NLDN as part of its overall weather coverage, right? It’s a bigger scope in terms of, if a storm’s coming. XWeather tells you, and it then adds the NLDN to it. So it’s a really cool system. You want to walk into what this, all this lightning data helps you with in the XWeather system and how that works?
Hans Loewenheath: Yeah, absolutely. So with the NLDN, that’s really the foundation of our XWeather system, along with the GLD 360 Global Lightning Detection Network, where we’re detecting over 2 billion events each year across the world. And with. Both of those lightning detection networks were able to utilize that data both in real time and in archived historical analysis type of use cases and serve those use cases via different APIs or data feeds or software monitoring systems and analysis systems and with this annual lightning report, We’ve been now this is our 7th annual lightning report that we’ve done and it’s something that we’ve all been super proud of, but we’d like to use the report as a way to really showcase.
How you can use this XWeather lightning data and come up with some really interesting insights. Really there’s too many stories to tell. So it’s really hard to edit down the report to actually be something that people want to read it and successfully get to the end of the report. But, with this wind energy analysis, that’s something that we introduced new for this year and we’re really excited about it.
And basically what we did, we just looked at the 2023 data pulling from our API endpoints and analyzed for the more than 75, 000 turbine locations from the USGIS turbine database and looking at cloud to ground only lightning strokes within 200 meters of all of those turbines. And then analyzing that result.
Yep. 200 meters. So there’s, a little bit further distance where, some other events could have. Hit the turbine but that’s, not something we could have said with such high certainty here. So with a little bit more conservative approach here, certainly some of the rankings and values could have been even higher.
But even with that conservative approach, I think that the results are pretty impressive.
Allen Hall: Martin, one of the questions I get asked about the NLDN is it can determine if a lightning strike has happened, but it doesn’t know how many times it has been, how many strokes it had. In a negative lightning strike, there tends to be multiple strokes, right?
And they’ll say, well, it’ll tell you the first stroke, but it won’t pick up all the rest. That’s incorrect, right? That system knows every piece of lightning current that has entered that wind turbine. Correct?
Martin Murphy: The the NLDN measures individual strokes. Now, they are grouped into the flashes that they came from, but the fundamental measurement is individual strokes.
Allen Hall: The discussion in the industry at the moment, Martin, I’m going to bring you into some inside baseball in this crazy wind turbine world that we live in, is that, well, these upper lightning strikes, no one can detect those. Wrong. That is wrong. And I’ve looked at data over the last year that NLDN does it just fine.
Right. If there’s, if there is an impactful lightning strike, when I say impactful, I mean, there’s more than a couple of thousand amps, like two, two Ka, two kilohamps going into a turbine, NLDN picks all that up. And it’ll pick up multiple turbines reaching out to the sky simultaneously. It clearly does that.
So the discussion, your NLDN system or in which you’ve helped develop over a number of years. It’s doing a wonderful job of picking up lightning strikes to turbines, upward and downward. It just doesn’t have to pick up these little faint wisps of quote unquote lightning that happen to the sky, because nobody cares.
It only matters if, and Joel, this is our discussion, it only matters if something happens, like there’s a significant amount of energy being deposited, then Martin’s system says, yeah. There’s been a stroke there. It does do that. So Martin, I, you may be getting a little bit of a bad rap here because people don’t know.
And this is why you’re on the podcast is because I want them to hear from the guy himself. It does the magic.
Martin Murphy: It does. Yeah.
Hans Loewenheath: You mentioned that the two kilo amp mark is, kind of something that the NLDN can really pick up. We designed the NLDN with a really consistent and even distribution of the sensors across the contiguous or continental United States.
And that allows us with our really exceptional sensor technology to pick up these events and do so in really remote locations. Martin, I think you’ve done some analysis as far as some of those minimal detectable peak currents across the United States, anything that you can share from that?
Martin Murphy: Yeah, actually we did a couple of years ago we had a request from another research group to see if we could give them an idea of what the minimum detectable signal level is in the NLDN, and so basically what we did is just took all of the lightning events from three or four year period and across the continental U. S. Gridded them on some, 10 or 20 kilometer by 10 or 20 kilometer grid, and in each grid box we looked at the lowest 5th percentile and maybe even the lowest 1st percentile of the peak current amplitudes that were being detected. And just plotted it across the entire country to see how uniform it is.
And it’s pretty uniform.
Joel Saxum: So you weren’t picking up a bunch of people arc welding or anything?
Martin Murphy: We weren’t going quite that low.
Joel Saxum: It wasn’t like there was a pipeline project here and you could see a line of welders going down it?
Martin Murphy: Not quite that level of sensitivity.
Allen Hall: Yeah, but it picks up everything that we care about in the wind world.
And it’ll pick up things that are above 200 kiloamps. I’ve seen data that says. It’ll pick up big, those big rare strikes, but big strikes, right?
Martin Murphy: Yes, it’ll pick up the rare big ones.
Allen Hall: It’ll do everything that, I don’t know, on a wind turbine that we care about today. And this is a odd discussion that’s happening in the wind community at the moment because they’re just now awakening to the fact that there’s a system out there that’ll do everything that they want and they just need to tap into it.
And this is part of the XWeather Insight system, right?
Hans Loewenheath: Yeah, absolutely. So with XWeather Insight, we launched that earlier this month in January at the Consumer Electronics Show. And XWeather Insight really is a weather confidence platform enabling users to, really optimize their safety and efficiency for.
For their daily operations and within the protect module specifically, users are able to, tap into that XWeather lightning network with the NLDN or the GLD 360 and configure their own real time lightning alerts for, actual lightning events detected in relation to, their relevant locations or assets like a wind farm or, okay.
Even individual wind turbines. And then you can also set up alerts on the forecast for lightning. So, for technicians out there up in, up tower, right? So not only can you look at, where the actual events occurring right now and how far are they away from where I’m at, but you can also get an alert on how far in advance is lightning likely to occur within my, threshold distance here that, okay.
Got it. I’ve got 30 minutes here, I think, before I need to, come down tower.
Joel Saxum: Allen, and I, like I said, we talk to a lot of operators out there, all over the world. Every one of them by an HSE, health standard, safety standard needs to have some kind of weather alert service. They have to have it.
It’s a no brainer, right? You can’t be sending people up tower without weather stuff. But now that you’re able to forecast this. So this is the way, this is one of the things that pops up a lot. You have asset owner one and you have an independent service provider who’s working on their turbines.
And at the end of the day, and this is a weird thing, right? But at the end of the day, someone’s going to get billed for the downtime. So this is one of the things that keep keeping people safety safe is the most important thing, of course, in the field at all times. So having the ability to forecast when these people, Hey, we may have lightning in an hour, get off the blades or get out of the nacelle.
That’s fantastic. That’s tier one, right? But at the end of the day, there’s also some really interesting things you could do here to, to proof. You’re billing. This is a, I know that’s a weird thing to say, but like, Hey, if I had this many hours where we had lightning within this area, that’s downtime that you got to pay for my people.
I think that’s a very valuable thing for any independent service provider or on the opposite side, the asset owner, the person paying the bills to go back against and QA, QC, what that accounts receivable looks like.
Hans Loewenheath: With this system, yeah, you can have an accurate record of, when things have happened when the storm has left the area and, really make those comparisons I think that the trouble comes in when you’re looking at two different systems that have, different detection capabilities obviously we’re biased with the National Lightning Detection Network in our XWeather systems but we pride ourselves on high detection efficiency and picking up every storm.
Allen Hall: In the U. S., I think the thing we’re running across, Joel, is that these farms are so large that maybe a storm on one part of the farm and not on the other. It is getting insane. And with Sunzea, that’s going to be the case down in New Mexico, clearly, right? That this farm is so big that it’s covering a couple hundred square miles.
Joel Saxum: Size of a wind farm. Allen and I were driving in the Midwest, Kansas, Oklahoma the other day. And I, we were driving and it started to get dark out and I could see some things in the distance. I said, I think that’s the wind farm we’re going to. And I looked at the clock. When we got to the wind farm, it was another 43 minutes.
Right? We could see that thing for, that’s how big it was. And then once we got into the wind farm, we drove for another 15 minutes before we went through it. Like, this is the size and scale of these things.
Allen Hall: So having an accurate prediction on where the storm is going does help out the operator tremendously, and the technicians.
Martin Murphy: It is a thunderstorm tracking method that literally just uses the individual lightning events. But we have to do some preprocessing to do the flash clustering, like we were talking about, the multiple strokes going in the same flash and where are the cloud lightning events coming from, making sure that we’re getting the storm centroids as accurately as we can, and then following their motion over time so that we can produce an accurate estimate or as, as accurate as we think we can of the projected future.
Trajectory of the storm. And then the, another thing that we do inside the lightning threat zone algorithm is we monitor what the activity appears to be doing in terms of whether it’s there’s a potential of growth or decay of the thunderstorm. And decay is actually quite important because we don’t want to issue a forecast that says you’re going to have lightning in an hour if the thunderstorm is going to be gone in 10 minutes.
So the idea is to try to stop the algorithm from over forecasting. Thunderstorms as best we can.
Allen Hall: The storms in different phases have different lightning threats, correct? There’s the I’ll give you the example that everybody brings up the bolt out of the blue that’s a phase of a thunderstorm right where those tends to happen.
Martin Murphy: It might be associated with a phase or it may just be the particular charge structure of the thunderstorm.
Allen Hall: You’re using the lightning data what’s happening internally inside the clouds To then help predict, like, where the center of this thing is, direction it’s moving, and how it’s progressing.
Hans Loewenheath: And we can do that just with the lightning information, so offshore, onshore, we can provide this technology to any current or future wind farm that might need this service. And there’s no, no radar or no other information needed for that.
Allen Hall: So there’s new wind farms that are being built off the East coast of the United States.
You got them covered already.
Hans Loewenheath: Absolutely.
Allen Hall: They’re in a strong lightning zone. Martin, am I wrong about that? Off the East coast of the United States and those, and just not very far offshore. It’s some pretty strong lightning.
Martin Murphy: Yes, there can be a lot of thunderstorm activity over there.
Hans Loewenheath: Yeah, and then you throw in a helicopter and some of that activity in the storm, that’s that’s not a situation you necessarily want to be too close to.
Allen Hall: So if one of those offshore wind farms or the onshore wind farms in the United States or even globally wanted to learn more about XWeather Insights and all the NLDN things. Where do they go, Hans?
Hans Loewenheath: Yeah, first place is xweather.com. And from there you can navigate to the XWeather Insight Platform, ask for a demo, we can get people set up with the trial today.
And you can also check out the annual lightning report there from the homepage of xweather.com.
Allen Hall: And if they want to tap into Martin’s brain, can they connect to you on LinkedIn, Martin?
Martin Murphy: I am on LinkedIn, yes.
Allen Hall: Just look up Martin Murphy, Vaisala. Yeah, he’s a busy guy, clearly a busy guy. But if you have a really interesting lightning question, I think he may be able to answer for you and Hans can do the same thing, too.
Because where else do you go today? You got to go to the experts and that’s why we have the podcast is to highlight these people that are doing the good work behind the scenes and to make sure everybody stays safe out there. So Hans, Martin, this has been fantastic to have you on the program.
And we’re going to have you back soon because lightning season’s coming. So we’ll as we progress through, we’ll have you back on. Let’s see how it’s going. We’d like to just get an update as what lightning to wind turbines looked like in the U S and around the world. So thanks for being on the podcast.
Martin Murphy: Thanks for inviting us.
Hans Loewenheath: Absolutely. Thank you for having us.
Renewable Energy
Trump’s Destruction of Renewable Energy Benefits His Support Base, and That’s All that Matters
The death sentence that Trump has imposed on renewable energy in America is good for two groups: a) Big Oil and b) the MAGA crowd that rejects science and wants nothing more than to own the libs, aka “libtards.”
The unforeseen problem for the common American is that solar and wind are by far the least expensive sources of energy, so that the ratepayers in the U.S. are soon going to be shucking out huge amounts of extra cash each month.
Of course, this doesn’t account for the increases in the effects of climate change that, though they are devastating our planet, won’t be affecting the folks in Oklahoma too badly for the next few years while Trump does his best to profit by turning our Earth into a wasteland.
Trump’s Destruction of Renewable Energy Benefits His Support Base, and That’s All that Matters
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
WOMA 2026 Recap Live from Melbourne
Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda, joined by Morten Handberg from Wind Power LAB, recap WOMA 2026 live from Melbourne. The crew discusses leading edge erosion challenges unique to Australia, the frustration operators face getting data from full service agreements, and the push for better documentation during project handovers. Plus the birds and bats management debate, why several operators said they’d choose smaller glass fiber blades over bigger carbon fiber ones, and what topics WOMA 2027 should tackle next year.
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!
[00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts. Welcome to the Uptime Winner Energy podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Pone, Rosemary Barnes, and the Blade Whisperer, Morton Hamburg.
And we’re all in Melbourne at the Pullman on the park. We just finished up Woma 2026. Massive event. Over 200 people, two days, and a ton of knowledge. Rosemary, what did you think? Yeah, I mean it was a, a really good event. It was really nice ’cause we had event organization, um, taken care of by an external company this time.
So that saved us some headaches, I think. Um. But yeah, it was, it was really good. It was different than last year, and I think next year will be different again because yeah, we don’t need to talk about the same topics every single year. But, um, yeah, I got really great [00:01:00] feedback. So that’s shows we’re doing something right?
Yeah, a lot of the, the sessions were based upon feedback from Australian industry and, uh, so we did AI rotating bits, the, the drive train blades. Uh, we had a. Master class on lightning to start off. Uh, a number of discussions about BOP and electrical, BOP. All those were really good. Mm-hmm. Uh, the, the content was there, the expertise was there.
We had worldwide representation. Morton, you, you talked about blades a good bit and what the Danish and Worldwide experience was. You know, talked about the American experience on Blades. That opened up a lot of discussions because I’m never really sure where Australia is in the, uh, operations side, because a lot of it is full service agreements still.
But it does seem like from last year to this year. There’s more onboarding of the technical expertise internally at the operators. Martin, [00:02:00] you saw, uh, a good bit of it. This is your first time mm-hmm. At this conference. What were your impressions of the, the content and the approach, which is a little bit different than any other conference?
I see an industry that really wants to learn, uh, Australia, they really want to learn how to do this. Uh, and they’re willing to listen to us, uh, whether you live in Australia, in the US or in Europe. You know, they want to lean on our experiences, but they wanna, you know, they want to take it out to their wind farms and they ga then gain their own knowledge with it, which I think is really amicable.
You know, something that, you know, we should actually try and think about how we can copy that in Europe and the US. Because they, they are, they’re listening to us and they’re taking in our input, and then they try and go out. They go out and then they, they try and implement it. Um, so I think really that is something, uh, I’ve learned, you know, and, and really, um, yeah, really impressed by, from this conference.
Yeah. Yolanda, you were on several panels over the, the two days. What were your impressions of the conference and what were your thoughts [00:03:00] on the Australia marketplace? I think the conference itself is very refreshing or I think we all feel that way being on the, on the circuit sometimes going on a lot of different conferences.
It was really sweet to see everybody be very collaborative, as Morton was saying. Um, and it was, it was just really great about everybody. Yes, they were really willing to listen to us, but they were also really willing to share with each other, which is nice. Uh, I did hear about a few trials that we’re doing in other places.
From other people, just kind of, everybody wants to learn from each other and everybody wants to, to make sure they’re in as best a spot as they can. Yeah, and the, the, probably the noisiest part of the conferences were at the coffees and the lunch. Uh, the, the collaboration was really good. A lot of noise in the hallways.
Uh, just people getting together and then talking about problems, talking about solutions, trying to connect up with someone they may have seen [00:04:00]somewhere else in the part of the world that they were here. It’s a different kind of conference. And Rosemary, I know when, uh, you came up to with a suggestion like, Hey.
If there’s not gonna be any sales talks, we’re not gonna sit and watch a 30 minute presentation about what you do. We’re gonna talk about solutions. That did play a a different dynamic because. It allowed people to ingest at their own rate and, and not just sit through another presentation. Yeah. It was made it more engaging, I think.
Yeah, and I mean, anyway, the approach that I take for sales for my company that I think works best is not to do the hard sell. It’s to talk about smart things. Um, and if you are talking about describing a problem or a solution that somebody in the audience has that problem or solution, then they’re gonna seek you out afterwards.
And so. There’s plenty of sales happening in an event like this, but you’re just not like, you know, subjecting people to sales. It’s more presenting them with the information that they need. And then I, I think also the size of the conference really [00:05:00] helps ’cause yeah, about 200 people. Any, everybody is here for the same technical kind.
Content. So it’s like if you just randomly start talking to somebody while you’re waiting for a coffee or whatever, you have gonna have heaps to talk about with them, with ev every single other person there. And so I think that that’s why, yeah, there was so much talking happening and you know, we had social events, um, the first two evenings and so.
Mo like I was surprised actually. So many people stayed. Most people, maybe everybody stayed for those events and so just so much talking and yeah, we did try to have quite long breaks, um, and quite a lot of them and, you know, good enough food and coffee to keep people here. And I think that that’s as important as, you know, just sitting and listening.
Well, that was part of the trouble, some of the conference that you and I have been at, it’s just like six hours of sitting down listening to sort of a droning mm-hmm. Presenter trying to sell you something. Here we were. It was back and forth. A lot more panel talk with experts from around the world and then.[00:06:00]
Break because you just can’t absorb all that without having a little bit of a brain rest, some coffee and just trying to get to the next session. I, I think that made it, uh, a, a, a more of a takeaway than I would say a lot of other conferences are, where there’s spender booze, and. Brochures and samples being handed out and all that.
We didn’t have any of that. No vendor booze, no, uh, upfront sales going on and even into the workshop. So there was specific, uh, topics provided by people that. Provide services mostly, uh, speaking about what they do, but more on a case study, uh, side. And Rosie, you and I sat in on one that was about, uh, birds and bats, birds and bats in Australia.
That one was really good. Yeah, that was great. I learned, I learned a lot. Your mind was blown, but Totally. Yeah. It is crazy how much, how much you have to manage, um, bird and wildlife deaths related to wind farms in Australia. Like compared to, I mean, ’cause you see. Dead birds all the time, right? Cars hit [00:07:00] birds, birds hit buildings, power lines kill birds, and no one cares about those birds.
But if a bird is injured near a wind farm, then you know, everybody has to stop. We have to make sure that you can do a positive id. If you’re not sure, send it away for a DNA analysis. Keep the bird in a freezer for a year and make sure that it’s logged by the, you know, appropriate people. It’s, it’s really a lot.
And I mean, on the one hand, like I’m a real bird lover, so I am, I’m glad that birds are being taken seriously, but on the other hand, I. I think that it is maybe a little bit over the top, like I don’t see extra birds being saved because of that level of, of watching throughout the entire life of the wind farm.
It feels more like something for the pre-study and the first couple of years of operation, and then you can chill after that if everything’s under control. But I, I guess it’s quite a political issue because people do. Do worry about, about beds and bats? Mm-hmm. Yeah, I thought the output of that was more technology, a little or a little more technology.
Not a lot of technology in today’s world [00:08:00] because we could definitely monitor for where birds are and where bats are and, uh, you know. Slow down the turbines or whatever we’re gonna do. Yeah. And they are doing that in, in sites where there is a problem. But, um, yeah, the sites we’re talking about with that monitoring, that’s not sites that have a big, big problem at sites that are just Yeah, a few, a few birds dying every year.
Um, yeah. So it’s interesting. And some of the blade issues in Australia, or a little unique, I thought, uh, the leading edge erosion. Being a big one. Uh, I’ve seen a lot of leading edge erosion over the last couple of weeks from Australia. It is Texas Times two in some cases. And, uh, the discussion that was had about leading edge erosion, we had ETT junker from Stack Raft and, and video form all the way from Sweden, uh, talking to us live, which was really nice actually.
Uh, the, the amount of knowledge that the Global Blade group. Brought to the discussion and just [00:09:00] opening up some eyes about what matters in leading edge erosion. It’s not so much the leading edge erosion in terms of a EP, although there is some a EP loss. It’s more about structural damage and if you let the structure go too far.
And Martin, you’ve seen a lot of this, and I think we had a discussion about this on the podcast of, Hey, pay attention to the structural damage. Yeah, that’s where, that’s where your money is. I mean, if you go, if you get into structural damage, then your repair costs and your downtime will multiply. That is just a known fact.
So it’s really about keeping it, uh, coding related because then you can, you can, you can move really fast. You can get it the blade up to speed and you won’t have the same problems. You won’t have to spend so much time rebuilding the blade. So that’s really what you need to get to. I do think that one of the things that might stand out in Australia that we’re going to learn about.
Is the effect of hail, because we talked a lot about it in Europe, that, you know, what is the effect of, of hail on leading edge erosion? We’ve never really been able to nail it down, but down here I heard from an, [00:10:00] from an operator that they, they, uh, referenced mangoes this year in terms of hail size. It was, it was, it was incredible.
So if you think about that hitting a leading edge, then, uh, well maybe we don’t really need to, we don’t really get to the point where, so coding related, maybe we will be structural from the beginning, but. Then at least it can be less a structural. Um, but that also means that we need to think differently in terms of leading edge, uh, protection and what kinds of solutions that are there.
Maybe some of the traditional ones we have in Europe, maybe they just don’t work, want, they, they won’t work in some part of Australia. Australia is so big, so we can’t just say. Northern Territory is the same as as, uh, uh, um, yeah. Victoria or uh, or Queensland. Or Queensland or West Australia. I think that what we’re probably going to learn is that there will be different solutions fitting different parts of Australia, and that will be one of the key challenges.
Um, yeah. And Blades in Australia sometimes do. Arrive without leading edge protection from the OEMs. [00:11:00] Yeah, I’m sure some of the sites that I’ve been reviewing recently that the, the asset manager swears it’s got leading edge protection and even I saw some blades on the ground and. I don’t, I don’t see any leading edge protection.
I can’t feel any leading edge protection. Like maybe it’s a magical one that’s, you know, invisible and, um, yeah, it doesn’t even feel different, but I suspect that some people are getting blades that should have been protected that aren’t. Um, so why? Yeah, it’s interesting. I think before we, we rule it out.
Then there are some coatings that really look like the original coating. Mm. So we, we, I know that for some of the European base that what they come out of a factory, you can’t really see the difference, but they’re multilayer coating, uh, on the blades. What you can do is that you can check your, uh, your rotor certificate sometimes will be there.
You can check your, uh, your blade sheet, uh, that you get from manufacturer. If you get it. Um, if you get it, then it will, it will be there. But, um, yeah, I, I mean, it can be difficult to say, to see from the outset and there’s no [00:12:00]documentation then. Yeah, I mean. If I can’t see any leading edge erosion protection, and I don’t know if it’s there or not, I don’t think I will go so far and then start installing something on something that is essentially a new blade.
I would probably still put it into operation because most LEP products that can be installed up tower. So I don’t think that that necessarily is, is something we should, shouldn’t still start doing just because we suspect there isn’t the LEP. But one thing that I think is gonna be really good is, um, you know, after the sessions and you know, I’ve been talking a lot.
With my clients about, um, leading edge erosion. People are now aware that it’s coming. I think the most important thing is to plan for it. It’s not right to get to the point where you’ve got half a dozen blades with, you know, just the full leading edge, just fully missing holes through your laminate, and then your rest of your blades have all got laminate damage.
That’s not the time to start thinking about it because one, it’s a lot more expensive for each repair than it would’ve been, but also. No one’s got the budget to, to get through all of that in one season. So I do really [00:13:00] like that, you know, some of the sites that have been operating for five years or so are starting to see pitting.
They can start to plan that into their budget now and have a strategy for how they’re going to approach it. Um, yeah. And hopefully avoid getting over to the point where they’ve missing just the full leading edge of some of their blades. Yeah. But to Morton’s earlier point, I think it’s also important for people to stop the damage once it happens too.
If, if it’s something that. You get a site or for what, whatever reason, half of your site does look like terrible and there’s holes in the blade and stuff. You need to, you need to patch it up in some sort of way and not just wait for the perfect product to come along to, to help you with that. Some of the hot topics this week were the handover.
From, uh, development into production and the lack of documentation during the transfer. Uh, the discussion from Tilt was that you need to make sure it is all there, uh, because once you sign off. You probably can’t go back and get it. And [00:14:00] some of the frustration around that and the, the amount of data flow from the full service provider to the operator seemed to be a, a really hot topic.
And, and, uh, we did a little, uh, surveyed a about that. Just the amount of, um, I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, it was bordering on anger maybe is a way. Describe it. Uh, that they feel that operators feel like they don’t have enough insight to run the turbines and the operations as well as they can, and that they should have more insight into what they have operating and why it is not operat.
A certain way or where did the blades come from? Are there issues with those blades? Just the transparency WA was lacking. And we had Dan Meyer, who is from the States, he’s from Colorado, he was an xge person talking about contracts, uh, the turbine supply agreement and what should be in there, the full service [00:15:00] agreement, what should be in there.
Those are very interesting. I thought a lot of, uh, operators are very attentive to that, just to give themselves an advantage of what you can. Put on paper to help yourself out and what you should think about. And if you have a existing wind farm from a certain OEM and you’re gonna buy another wind farm from ’em, you ought to be taking the lessons learned.
And I, I thought that was a, a very important discussion. The second one was on repairs. And what you see from the field, and I know Yolanda’s been looking at a lot of repairs. Well, all of you have been looking at repairs in Australia. What’s your feeling on sort of the repairs and the quality of repairs and the amount of data that comes along with it?
Are we at a place that we should be, or do we need a little more detail as to what’s happening out there? It’s one of the big challenges with the full service agreements is that, you know, if everything’s running smoothly, then repairs are getting done, but the information isn’t. Usually getting passed on.
And so it’s seems fine and it seems like really good actually. Probably if you’re an [00:16:00] asset manager and everything’s just being repaired without you ever knowing about it, perfect. But then at some point when something does happen, you’ve got no history and especially like even before handover. You need to know all of the repairs that have happened for, you know, for or exchanges for any components because you know, you’re worried about, um, serial defects, for example.
You need every single one. ’cause the threshold is quite high to, you know, ever reach a serial defect. So you wanna know if there were five before there was a handover. Include that in your population. Um, yeah, so that’s probably the biggest problem with repairs is that they’re just not being. Um, the reports aren’t being handed over.
You know, one of the things that Jeremy Hanks from C-I-C-N-D-T, and he’s an NDT expert and has, has seen about everything was saying, is that you really need to understand what’s happening deep inside the blade, particularly for inserts or, uh, at the root, uh, even up in, with some, some Cory interactions happening or splicing that It’s hard to [00:17:00] see that hard to just take a drone inspection and go, okay, I know what’s happening.
You need a little more technology in there at times, especially if you have a serial defect. Why do you have a serial defect? Do you need to be, uh, uh, scanning the, the blade a little more deeply, which hasn’t really happened too much in Australia, and I think there’s some issues I’ve seen where it may come into use.
Yeah, I think it, it, it’ll be coming soon. I know some people are bringing stuff in. I’ve got emails sitting in my inbox I need to chase up, but I’m, I’m really going to, to get more into that. Yeah. And John Zalar brought up a very similar, uh, note during his presentation. Go visit your turbines. Yeah, several people said that.
Um, actually Liz said that too. Love it. And, um, let’s this, yeah, you just gotta go have a look. Oh, Barend, I think said bar said it too. Go on site. Have a look at the lunchroom. If the lunch room’s tidy, then you know, win turbine’s gonna be tidy too. And I don’t know about that ’cause I’ve seen some tidy lunchroom that were associated with some, you know, uh, less well performing assets, but it’s, you know, it’s [00:18:00] a good start.
What are we gonna hope for in 2027? What should we. Be talking about it. What do you think we’ll be talking about a year from now? Well, a few people, quite a few people mentioned to me that they were here, they’re new in the industry, and they heard this was the event to go to. Um, and so I, I was always asking them was it okay?
’cause we pitch it quite technical and I definitely don’t wanna reduce. How technical it is. One thing I thought of was maybe we start with a two to five minute introduction, maybe prerecorded about the, the topic, just to know, like for example, um, we had some sessions on rotating equipment. Um, I’m a Blades person.
I don’t know that much about rotating equipment, so maybe, you know, we just explain this is where the pitch bearings are. They do this and you know, there’s the main bearing and it, you know, it does this and just a few minutes like that to orient people. Think that could be good. Last, uh, this year we did a, a masterclass on lightning, a half day masterclass.
Maybe we change that topic every year. Maybe next year it’s blade design, [00:19:00] certification, manufacturing. Um, and then, you know, the next year, whatever, open to suggestions. I mean, in general, we’re open to suggestions, right? Like people write in and, and tell us what you’d wanna see. Um, absolutely. I think we could focus more on technologies might be an, an area like.
It’s a bit, it’s a bit hard ’cause it gets salesy, but Yeah. I think one thing that could actually be interesting and that, uh, there was one guy came up with an older turbine on the LPS system. Mm. Where he wanted to look for a solution and some of the wind farms are getting older and it’s older technology.
So maybe having some, uh, uh, some sessions on that. Because the older turbines, they are vastly different from what we, what we see in the majority with wind farms today. But the maintenance of those are just as important. And if you do that correctly, they’re much easier to lifetime extent than it will likely be for some of the nuance.
But, you know, let. Knock on wood. Um, but, but I think that’s something that could be really interesting and really relevant for the industry and something [00:20:00] that we don’t talk enough about. Yeah. Yeah, that’s true because I, I’m working on a lot of old wind turbines now, and that has been, um, quite a challenge for me because they’re design and built in a way that’s quite different to when, you know, I was poking, designing and building, uh, wind turbine components.
So that’s a good one. Other people mentioned end of life. Mm-hmm. Not just like end of life, like the life is over, but how do you decide when the life end of life is going to be? ’cause you know, like you have a planned life and then you might like to extend, but then you discover you’ve got a serial issue.
Are you gonna fix it? Or you know, how are you gonna fix it? Those are all very interesting questions that, um, can occur. And then also, yeah, what to do with the. The stuff at the end of the Wind Farm lifetime, we could make a half day around those kinds of sessions. I think recycling could actually be good to, to also touch upon and, and I think, yeah, Australia is more on the front of that because of, of your high focus on, on nature and sustainability.
So looking at, well, what do we do with these blades? Or what do we do with the towers of foundation once, uh, [00:21:00] once we do need to decommission them, you know, what is, what are we going to do in Australia about that? Or what is Australia going to do about that? But, you know, what can we bring to the, to the table that that can help drive that discussion?
I think maybe too, helping people sort of templates for their formats on, on how to successfully shadow, monitor, maybe showing them a bit mute, more of, uh. Like cases and stuff, so to get them going a bit more. ’cause we heard a lot of people too say, oh, we’re, we’re teetering on whether we should self operate or whether we continue our FSA, but we, we we’re kind of, we don’t know what we’re doing.
Yeah. In, in not those words. Right. But just providing a bit more of a guidance too. On that side, we say shadow monitoring and I think we all know what it means. If you’ve seen it done, if you haven’t seen it done before. It seems daunting. Mm-hmm. What do you mean shadow monitoring? You mean you got a crack into the SCADA system?
Does that mean I’ve gotta, uh, put CMS out there? Do I do, do I have to be out [00:22:00] on site all the time? The answer that is no to all of those. But there are some fundamental things you do need to do to get to the shadow monitoring that feels good. And the easy one is if there’s drone inspections happening because your FSA, you find out who’s doing the drone inspections and you pay ’em for a second set of drone inspections, just so you have a validation of it, you can see it.
Those are really inexpensive ways to shadow monitor. Uh, but I, I do think we say a lot of terms like that in Australia because we’ve seen it done elsewhere that. Doesn’t really translate. And I, if I, I’m always kind of looking at Rosemary, like, does it, this make sense? What I’m saying makes sense, Rosemary, because it’s hard to tell because so many operators are in sort of a building mode.
I, I see it as. When I talked to them a few years ago, they’re completely FSA, they had really small staffs. Now the staffs are growing much larger, which makes me feel like they’re gonna transition out an FSA. Do we need to provide a little more, uh, insight into how that is done deeper. [00:23:00] Like, these are the tools you, you will need.
This is the kind of people you need to have on staff. This is how you’re gonna organize it, and this is the re these are the resources that you should go after. Mm. Does that make a little si more sense? Yeah. That might be a good. Uh, idea for getting somebody who’s, you know, working for a company that is shadow monitoring overseas and bring them in and they can talk through what that, what that means exactly.
And that goes back to the discussion we were having earlier today by having operators talk about how they’re running their operations. Mm. And I know the last year we tried to have everybody do that and, and they were standoffish. I get it. Because you don’t want to disclose things that your company doesn’t want out in public.
And year two, it felt like there’s a little more. Openness about that. Yeah, there was a few people were quite open about, um, yeah, talking about challenges and some successes as well. I think we’ll have more successes next year ’cause we’ve got more, more things going on. But yeah, definitely would encourage any operators to think about what’s a you A case study that you could give about?
Yeah, it could just be a problem that’s unsolved and I bet you’ll find people that wanna help you [00:24:00] solve that problem. Or it could be something that you struggled with and then you’re doing a better job and Yeah, I mean the. Some operators think that they’re in competition with each other and some think that they’re not really, and the answer is somewhere, somewhere in the middle.
There are, you know, some at least small amounts of competition. But, you know, I just, I just really think that. We’re fighting against each other, trying to win within the wind industry. Then, you know, in 10, 20 years time, especially in Australia, there won’t be any new wind. It’ll just be wind and solar everywhere and, and the energy transition stalled because everyone knows that’s not gonna get us all the way to, you know, a hundred percent renewables.
So, um, I do think that we need to, first of all, fight for wind energy to improve. The status quo is not good enough to take us through the next 20 years. So we do need to collaborate to get better. And then, yeah, I don’t know, once we’re, once we’re one, wind has won, then we can go back to fighting amongst ourselves, I guess.
Is Australia that [00:25:00] laboratory? Yeah, I think I, I say it all the time. I think Australia is the perfect place because I, I do think we’re a little bit more naturally collaborative. For some reason, I don’t know why, it’s not really like a, a cultural thing, but seems to be the case in Australian wind. Um, and also our, our problems are harder than, uh, than what’s being faced elsewhere.
I mean, America has some specific problems right now that are, you know, worse, but in general, operating environment is very harsh Here. We’re so spread out. Everything is so expensive. Cranes are so expensive. Repairs are so expensive. Spares spare. Yeah, spares are crazy expensive. You know, I look every now and then and do reports for people about, you know, what, what’s the average cost for and times for repairs and you know, you get an American values and it’s like, okay, well at a minimum times by five Australia and you know, so.
It, there’s a lot more bang for buck. And the other thing is we just do not have enough, um, enough people, enough. Uh, we’ve got some really smart people. We need a lot more [00:26:00] people that are as smart as that. And you can’t just get that immediately. Like there has been a lot of good transfer over from related industries.
A lot of people that spoke so that, you know, they used to work for thermal power plants and, um, railway, a guy that spoke to a guy had come in from railway. Um. That’s, that’s really good. But it will take some years to get them up to speed. And so in the meantime, we just need to use technology as much as we can to be able to, you know, make the people that good people that we do have, you know, make them go a lot further, um, increase what they can do.
’cause yeah, I don’t think there’s a single, um, asset owner where they couldn’t, you know, double the number of asset managers they had and, you know, ev everyone could use twice as many I think. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I think something that we really focused on this year is kind of removing the stones that are in people’s path or like helping at least like to, to say like, don’t trip over there.
Don’t trip over here. And I think part of that, like, like you mentioned, is that. [00:27:00] The, the collaborative manner that everyone seemed to have and just, I think 50% of our time that we were in those rooms was just people asking questions to experts, to anybody they really wanted to. Um, and it, it just, everybody getting the same answers, which is really just a really different way to, to do things, I think.
But more than, I mean, we, we we’re still. We’re still struggling with quality in Australia. That’s still a major issue on, on a lot of the components. So until we have that solved, we don’t really know how much of an influence the other factors they really have because it just overshadows everything. And yes, it will be accelerated by extreme weather conditions, but.
What will, how will it work if, if the components are actually fit, uh, fit for purpose in the sense that we don’t have wrinkles in the laminates, that we don’t have, uh, bond lines that are detaching. Mm-hmm. Maybe some of it is because of, uh, mango size hails hitting the blades. Maybe it’s because of extreme temperatures.
Maybe it’s [00:28:00] because of, uh, uh, yeah. At extreme topography, you know, creating, uh, wind conditions that the blades are not designed for. We don’t really know that. We don’t really know for sure. Uh, we just assume, um, Australia has some problems with, not problems, but some challenges with remoteness. We don’t, with, uh, with getting new, new spares that much is absolutely true.
We can’t do anything about that. We just have to, uh, find a way to, to mitigate that. Mm-hmm. But I think we should really be focused on getting quality, uh, getting the quality in, in order. You know, one thing that’s interesting about that, um, so yeah, Australia should be focused more on quality than anybody else, but in, in, in the industry, yeah.
Uh, entire world should be more focused on quality, but also Australia. Yeah. But Australia, probably more than anyone considering how hard it is to, you know, make up for poor quality here. Um. At the same time, Australia for some reason, loves to be the first one with a new technology, loves to have the biggest [00:29:00] turbine.
Um, and the, the latest thing and the newest thing, and I thought it was interesting. I mean, this was operations and maintenance, um, conference, so not really talking about new designs and manufacturing too much, but at least three or four people said, uh. Uh, I would be using less carbon fiber in blades. I would not be, not be going bigger and bigger and bigger.
If I was buying turbines for a new wind farm, I would have, you know, small glass blades and just more of them. So I think that that was really interesting to hear. So many people say it, and I wasn’t even one of them, even though, you know, I would definitely. Say that. I mean, you know, in terms of business, I guess it’s really good to get a lot of, a lot of big blades, but, um, because they just, people, I don’t think people understand that, that bigger blades just have dramatically more quality problems than the smaller ones.
Um, were really kind of exceeded the sweet spot for the current manufacturing methods and materials. I don’t know if you would agree, but it’s, it’s. Possible, but [00:30:00] it’s, it, you know, it’s not like a blade that’s twice as long, doesn’t have twice as many defects. It probably has a hundred times as many defects.
It’s just, uh, it’s really, really challenging to make those big blades, high quality, and no one is doing it all that well right now. I would, however, I got an interesting hypothetical and they’re. Congrats to her for, for putting out that out. But there was an operator that said to me at the conference, so what would you choose hypothetically?
A 70 meter glass fiber blade or a 50 meter carbon fiber blade, so a blade with carbon fiber reinforcement. And I did have to think quite a while about it because there was, it was she say, longer blades, more problems, but carbon blade. Also a lot of new problems. So, so what is it? So I, I ended up saying, well, glass fiber, I would probably go for a longer glass fiber blade, even though it will have some, some different challenges.
It’s easier to repair. Yeah, that’s true. So we can overcome some of the challenges that are, we can also repair carbon. We have done it in air, air, uh, aeronautics for many, many years. But wind is a different beast because we don’t have, uh, [00:31:00] perfect laboratory conditions to repair in. So that would just be a, a really extreme challenge.
So that’s, that’s why I, I would have gone for carbon if, for glass fiber, if, if I, if I could in that hypothe hypothetical. Also makes more energy, the 70 meter compared to it’s a win-win situation.
Well, it’s great to see all of you. Australia. I thought it was a really good conference. And thanks to all our sponsors, uh, til being the primary sponsor for this conference. Uh, we are starting to ramp up for 2027. Hopefully all of you can attend next year. And, uh, Rosie, it’s good to see you in person. Oh, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s exciting when we are actually on the same continent.
Uh, it doesn’t happen very often. And Morton, it’s great to see you too, Yolanda. I see you every day pretty much. So she’s part of our team, so I, it’s great to see you out. This is actually the first time, me and Rosie, we have seen each other. We’ve, we’ve known each other for years. Yeah. Yeah. The first time we actually, uh, been, been, yeah.
Within, uh, yeah. [00:32:00] Same room. Yep. And same continent. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s been awesome. And also it’s my first time meeting Yolanda in person too. So yeah, that’s our first time. And same. So thanks so much for everybody that attended, uh, woma 2026. We’ll see you at Woma 2027 and uh, check us out next week for the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.
I looked through a few of the many thousands of responses to the question above on social media and have concluded:
If you ask uneducated people who know essentially nothing about global warming, you’ll find that nothing can stop it, because it’s been going on since the origin of the planet. Others say that God controls the planet’s temperature.
If you ask climate scientists who work in laboratories around the globe who have been studying this subject for decades, you’ll find that there are two key answers: a) decarbonization of our transportation and energy sectors and b) halting the destruction of our rain forests.
As always, we have a choice to make: ignorance or science.
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