How Low Cost CMS Stops Catastrophic Damage

We discuss how using continuous monitoring systems (CMS) can
prevent catastrophic blade damage from transportation and
lightning. We also share insights from GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik
on potential industry growth. And TPI Composites has hit the
milestone of manufacturing their 100,000th blade. Fill out our
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technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape
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Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes'
YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: On this week's Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast, we discuss how continuous monitoring systems could prevent
catastrophic blade damage due to transportation issues and
lightning strikes. And that's a good discussion. GE Renova, CEO
Scott Straza sees a soft entree wind market through early 2025,
highlighting potential growth in Repowering projects. TPI
composites manufactures their 100,000th blade. Congratulations. And
our wind farm of the week is the Jericho Rise Wind Farm in upstate
New York. You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast
brought to you by bill turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of
the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now
here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and
Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: in his first appearance at Barclays
Conference. Since GE Vernova's spinoff, CEO Scott Strazik offered a
sobering assessment of their wind business while highlighting some
positive developments. Now, Strazik, uh, described the onshore wind
market. Is currently very soft, quote unquote, with weak order
expectations for the first half of 2025, though he noted
opportunities in Repowering projects and certain international
markets that could, uh, at least partially offset North American
weakness. Now, one of the things that was mentioned during the
Scott Straza, um, conference or discussion was that they are doing
internal inspections and a lot of them using crawlers, which I, I
believe is are from Aeros, where they're looking at. Uh, the blades
at the factory internally after transportation, and then once
they're up on tower trying to capture any defects that are
happening. And this, at, at, when I saw this, I thought, oh, it
goes back to Phil's comment that a lot of damage is actually
happening during transportation. And that there maybe they're
trying to, uh, work on that transportation piece or at least be
able to make some claims that their blades have been damaged during
transportation. That's a unique piece 'cause I don't know any
other. OEM that is doing that many inspections at the moment. Joel,
do you know any of Joel Saxum: others that are doing that? I know
they should be. Uh, but, but, uh, yeah, same page. I don't know
anybody that actually is. I think it's a, a bit of a. It's good
market response, to be honest with you, from my opinion, because I
mean, you know, we've, we've seen so many blades that are brand new
or within warranty having issues. Well now you can trace them back.
If you get that inspection done at the factory, you put in a, uh,
basically a, a. Data point of traceability. If it was good then and
it got to site and then all of a sudden there's a damage, well that
happened during transportation and handling. So you can start to
say, that was your fault. This is who should pay for this. These
are the things that are being traced. Right. Um, and we did see in
a presentation, uh, just yesterday or two days ago from Arons that
they were putting statistics to the findings of their internal
crawlers. And one of them was rad at like that. 70% from root to
tip mark where that handling happens. There was a spike in damages
that they're finding. And it was mostly all related to handling, so
I don't know of any others. I know it's actually kind of hard to
get anybody as, even as an operator, get any of these OEMs or blade
manufacturers to agree to get inspections done of the factory.
Allen Hall: Joel, do you think that some of the damage is caused by
the cradles or the saddles that are used during transport, or is it
more about just the roughness of the roads and the, the trucks that
are used to move the Joel Saxum: blades around? Well, it's ha, it's
handling. Uh, for the most part because if you can eliminate how
many times you have to handle anything, you can avoid damages. This
is why offshore wind farms have a, a problem as well, because if
you're going to move, even if the factory is key, the factory's
close to keyside for those blades, you still have to get them out
of the factory, into the lay down yard to the key, and then craned
onto the vessel, and then crane, you know, moved on the vessel and
then craned off the vessel. And if you're in that Jones Act
situation, like we are here in this. States, you've got to move
them twice offshore. That's just not good, right? Uh, you don't
want to be, you want to handle these things as minimal amounts as
possible, because at the end of the day, they're fragile. How many
blades Allen have we seen where like the trailing edge has like a
little. Crunch in it, you know, a lot too, way too many. Allen
Hall: Rosemary. Is there a lot of structural reinforcement that
happens on these longer blades for the lifting points and the
transportation points? Rosemary Barnes: No, they don't. Uh, I, I
mean they definitely, um, consider that, uh, as a potential failure
mode, but they're not. Necessarily trying to reinforce a blade as
they are trying to make the cradle so that it won't damage the
blade and put it in a location where there is some, um,
reinforcement there. I'm not a hundred percent sure that it's like
purely one way direction. They might, you know, know where the
cradles roughly have to go and make sure that there is, you know,
like a bulkhead or something there that can, um, stiffen, stiffen
up that area a bit locally. But they're definitely, they definitely
don't want, you know, a bunch of extra weight added purely for the.
Point of transportation, because then it's up there on the turbine
weighing more than it needs to for 20, 30 years. And that affects
every, every other component. The, you know, bearings, the. Um,
drive, train the tower. The foundations all need to be beefed up a
little bit extra because of the extra weight. Allen Hall: Phil,
what is the cost to the industry due to transportation damage? I
think that number's big. Phil Totaro: Yeah. It's, it's in the
millions and we've actually been rerunning our calculations, um,
recently. So, um, blade transportation damage is actually now
number three. Um, lightning damage to blades has actually overtaken
it as being the number one issue. Um, which may or may not be a
good thing, I guess, depending on what area of the business you're
in. Certainly if you're selling people lightning protection
technology, uh, maybe that's good. Um, but, uh, blade root
cracking, uh, is also now a big issue. But all three of those, so.
Lightning damage, blade root cracking and transportation damage are
like your top three, uh, issues. And it's all well into the
hundreds of millions of dollars a year, uh, in annual, um,
operations and maintenance expenditure just for the US market
alone. Unfortunately, we don't have data on, um, the faults and
failure rates in other countries yet. Um, but based on recent
conversations, uh, with my new friends in Australia that. Uh, it
looks like we may get some data. Allen Hall: Alright, so after the
break, I want to highlight what Phil was discussing here about the
hundreds of millions of dollars in transportation expenses do to
damage and what we're doing about it or what we can do about it.
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control of your turbine's health today. Okay, Phil. If there's so
much damage happening from transportation and lightning, by the
way, it does seem like CMS should be used to detect it. Now it
looks like GE is actually gonna use the internal rovers from Aeros
to inspect them, but are there any CMS systems on a. Truck or on
the cradle when blades are being transported at the minute? Phil
Totaro: No. No way. That's that's way more sophisticated than this
industry would ever employ. And way more expensive than anything we
would ever choose to do if we can't even get people to put CMS
systems on turbines. Um, you know, even 4, 5, 6 megawatt turbines,
then we're not gonna have, you know, any kind of, uh, fault and
failure detection on the, the transportation systems themselves.
Not to say that that wouldn't probably catch certain issues and,
you know, you can certainly put like strain gauges and
accelerometers on the truck, uh, or on a cradle. Um, and some
people may in rare occasions use things like that. Um, but it's not
standard Joel Saxum: for sure. Yeah, Phil, I was gonna mention
that. Not standard as well, right? So in Hamburg, two years ago, I
ran into a company that was doing just this. They had a sensor that
was about the size of a cell phone, and it's really basic sensor,
to be honest with you. It's just GPS communications, a battery, and
then an accelerometer and a gyro inside of it. And they were, it's
the same kind of stuff that's used to track fleet vehicles, right?
Like, oh, this is this vehicle, this is, so,