The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

By: Allen Hall Rosemary Barnes Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro
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  • Summary

  • Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Phil Totaro break down the latest research, tech, and policy.
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Episodes
  • AC883’s Guide to LiDAR and Pitch Alignment

    AC883’s Guide to LiDAR and Pitch Alignment
    Jan 10 2025
    From the surge in lightning strikes damaging wind turbines to the game-changing potential of nacelle-based LiDAR systems, Lars Bendsen of AC883 shares insights on wind farm maintenance. Lars describes how LiDAR installations can boost power output by 3.5%, and warns how ignoring simple pitch alignment issues leads to catastrophic turbine failures. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Lars Bendsen: 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. Today, we're diving into the costly challenges plaguing wind farms with Lars Bendsen from AC883. From a surge in severe lightning strikes to devastating turbine misalignments, Lars reveals why seemingly minor issues can lead to catastrophic failures, and how cutting edge solutions like nacelle based lidars are transforming maintenance strategies. Plus, discover why Lars believes too many industry tourists are making decisions that cost operators millions in unnecessary repairs. So get ready for a no holds bar discussion about what's really happening in wind farm maintenance. Lars, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Well, you've had a busy blade season and you've had crews all over Canada and parts of the U S what kind of problems were you solving with your blade crews this year? Lars Bendsen: That was, that was a crazy repair season. Um, and it's not to feed directly into, but it, we had a ton of lightning strikes and lightning repairs higher than I would say the average. And some of the strikes were severe. So I don't know, uh, you probably know better than me if the weather pattern has been leading up to better or worse. Um, what we do know, we had a really, um, wet summer. We had a ton of weather delays. We had a ton of high winds. We have a ton of rain. Uh, so we had our, our standby time, time was, was higher than usual. And it's annoying for everybody involved. Owners don't get their job done and money is flying out the window. So. And we don't get the job done either. So, so, so it's really wet that way. So I don't know if that's the aftermath was going on over the winter. I have no idea because you can't really see when this like was there. Uh, and, and the owners, the owners have a system that can measure when it comes. But. I don't think they're looking at it. Allen Hall: That's, that's true. Uh, we are seeing more lightning strike damage over this past summer. It's been really bad. I, I think it's just the, the set of storms that came through. But in, in your case with AC 8A3, when you have technicians on site, you're bringing high quality sort of apprenticeship plus technicians that have a lot of training so that when you get into these complicated repairs, you can actually accomplish them properly. Lars Bendsen: We are, we are getting our people from mostly from Europe, uh, simply because there's no cable, there's, there's no, uh, availability for, for staff in Canada. Uh, so we get them in from Europe on a proper work permit, simply because we are short staffed. Uh, we do pay more. We also get, uh, GWO certified technicians, all of them. And, um,
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    28 mins
  • Jupiter Bach: The World’s Nacelle Cover Manufacturer

    Jupiter Bach: The World’s Nacelle Cover Manufacturer
    Jan 9 2025
    Andreas Kipker, CEO of Jupiter Bach, discusses their dominance in wind turbine nacelle and spinner cover manufacturing and major U.S. expansion plans, including a new 20,000-square-foot facility in Pensacola and two decades of partnership with GE Vernova. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. And today we have an exceptional guest who brings deep insight from one of the wind industry's most important manufacturing sectors. Andreas Kipker is the CEO of Jupiter Bach, the world's largest supplier of nacelle and spinner covers for wind turbines. Andreas joins us at an exciting time for Jupiter Bach the company just celebrated a remarkable 20 year partnership with GE Vernova and broke ground on a 20, 000 square foot expansion of their Pensacola, Florida facility. And today under Andreas's leadership, Jupiter Bach operates state of the art manufacturing facilities across Europe, Asia, and North America. The company's focus goes beyond just manufacturing. They're driving innovation in composite materials and. Engineering to help reduce the levelized cost of energy for wind power. Andreas, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Andreas Kipker: Thank you very much. Pleased to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. Allen Hall: Well, Jupiter Bach is the world's largest supplier of nacelles and spinner covers. Could you give us just a sense of what your global footprint looks like? Andreas Kipker: Absolutely. Happy to do that. Yeah, so, um, In the global market, we consider ourselves leaders. We have, um, we have factories. We have four main manufacturing facilities one in China two in Europe, then Poland and Lithuania, and then one in Sonia, Florida. Um, and then adding to that's where we do our composites. And then, and in addition to that, we have we have a number of assembly sites that are. closer to servicing this Nacelle manufacturing plants assembly plants of our customers. So they're spread. Somewhat in the same regions, but but closer to customers. Allen Hall: Well, you just recently celebrated 20 years with G. E. Vernova, which is remarkable. And you're also expanding a facility down in Florida to another 20, 000 square feet. What is your footprint right now in Florida alone? Andreas Kipker: I'm a little bit in doubt, actually, the exact number. We're around 100, 000 square foot in in, in, in Florida today of, um, of. on the roof. And then it's a process that takes a bit of outdoors storage at outdoor space as well. So, the site itself is significantly bigger. You will know this from blade manufacturing plants as well, that the parts are quite big. So it takes a little bit of storage around. But yeah, we're super excited to have to have longstanding relationship with with several of our customers, but G we just we just reached this milestone. Um, um, so yeah, proud of that. Joel Saxum: I think it's important to to talk about nacelles here, right? Like when you see, when you say when we're in the wind world, where Alan and I touch most of the time, everybody in the large manufacturing space, you hear about gearbox manufacturers, bearing manufacturers,
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    24 mins
  • LM Wind Power Blade Power Loss Tool, ZF Rotating Gearbox

    LM Wind Power Blade Power Loss Tool, ZF Rotating Gearbox
    Jan 8 2025
    On Power-Up this week, LM Wind Power's method using thermal imaging to estimate power performance, ZF's system which allows the generator to be rotated independently from the gearbox, and a patent for a flame-throwing trumpet. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Register for Wind Energy O&M Australia! https://www.windaustralia.com Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Phil Totaro: This is Power Up, where groundbreaking wind energy ideas become your clean energy future. Here's your hosts, Allen Hall and Phil Totaro. Allen Hall: First up this week, Phil, is an idea from LM Wind Power, and this idea uses thermal imaging to turbine turbulence and then to use that data to predict the power calculations and energy production. on an actual wind turbine blade. So this approach is thermal imaging can detect turbulence and losses on a blade. If you can use that data then in a calculation, in a predictive model, then you can pretty well estimate what the power output of a turbine would be. This is a really useful piece of information. If you're trying to predict the outcome of a wind farm and what the power production will be like. Phil Totaro: Yeah. And this is, this is not new in terms of utilizing, infrared technology. We've actually done this before in the industry, not only for, remote inspections and things like that. But to apply this technology to an operational asset where you're using that output for modeling purposes is unique because what they're able to actually detect is changes in surface roughness. So when it comes to figuring out leading edge erosion and how much is that actually dinging your performance and your annual energy production, this comes in kind of handy. But it's my understanding that, LM isn't the only company that's been investigating this, right? Allen Hall: Yeah. There've been several efforts in the EU to do this. We've had some of them on the podcast. The technique is very fascinating, because you wouldn't think you could see turbulence with an infrared camera and, but you can. And once you do that, then you can use the BEM method of calculating power production, which is how a lot of Blazer design is with the BEM method. The tools are all available. The missing link was just really determining how much turbulence there was on a blade. And this idea makes an infinite amount of sense if it can be put into production. There's a lot of theoretical things we talk about on the podcast that are really hard to implement. This is going to be one of them. Getting some real thermal images off of blades is not the easiest thing in the world to do. Phil Totaro: Yeah, but it makes for a valuable IP for a company like LM to own and there's a high degree of likelihood that this technology could be obviously leveraged by GE their parent organization, or even licensed to some of these other companies. Our next Allen Hall: idea is Phil Totaro: from ZF Frederick Allen Hall: Schaffen, AG, and it is a patent that presents an innovative design for maintaining wind turbine gearboxes with integrated generators. Now, the key innovation is a special gearing system that allows the generator rotor to be rotated independently from the gearbox output shaft during maintenance. And this enables technicians to safely position and lock the rotor for service without having to completely remove the gearbox.
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    9 mins

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