The Global Blade Group Builds Industry Blade Knowledge

Allen and Joel speak with Birgit Junker, co-founder of the Global
Blade Group, a forum created to share knowledge and innovation
around wind turbine blades. For over ten years, the group has been
making blade information more accessible and approachable. For more
information on joining the Global Blade Group, email
tgbg@statkraft.com. Link to Blade Handbook -
https://www.bladena.com/uploads/8/7/3/7/87379536/cortir_handbook_2019.pdf
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co
host, Joel Saxum. Today, I'm delighted to welcome Birgit Junker, a
true pioneer in wind energy blade technology and the co founder of
the Global Blade Group. This organization has become the premier
forum for the wind turbine blade experts to collaborate, share
knowledge, and drive innovation in areas like structural design,
Lightning protection and blade inspection technologies. Welcome to
Uptime Spotlight. Shining light on wind energy's brightest
innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall:
Birgit, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Birgit
Junker: Thank you very much and thanks for having me. Allen Hall: I
want to start off by looking back a little bit into 2013. What were
some of the challenges that when farm owners were facing with Blade
technology and maintenance that led you to create the global Blade
group? Birgit Junker: To start with Rege from Vattenfall and I, we
were relatively new on the owner operator side. And we both found
that when we were speaking to our colleagues, they, their eyes just
glazed over every single time we said Blade. Cause nobody knew
anything about blade. When I was hired at Eon I came from from
Siemens. I was hired at Eon. I was told that they didn't have blade
issues. So I should expect to work about 80%, 75 percent on blades.
And the rest of the time I should be spending on a drivetrain. 10
years later, when I left, there were 10 blade people. And I never
ever had to look at a drivetrain. That was the attitude then.
Blades were not a problem. We didn't have blade problems. Blades
were like that black box that you had. You just went out there and
counted that they were all there. And you listened just to make
sure that there wasn't anything strange going on. And about, you
99. 9 percent of the time, nothing happened. There was nothing
wrong. We even had contracts that said that blades were maintenance
free. But then Reg and I started on the owner operator side. We
came, we both came from OEMs. I've done catastrophic failure
investigation. I've done field failures. I've done all sorts of
things for what, 10 years before that. And knew that we did have
blade problems. Ian just hadn't found out yet. So when I started,
Reg and I, we decided that we needed to talk to one another because
we couldn't talk to colleagues. Joel Saxum: Birgit, from
experiences in the field I would, I want to follow up with that as
a hard second. Because so many people Don't understand even today
what's going on in the with blades. Like I'll give you an anecdotal
problem. I was in a field doing an RCA and out there with a site
supervisor who was in charge of 120 odd turbines, big wind farms in
the States, right? And he was looking up. He said, yeah, those
blades, he's they're just, big plastic wings in the skies. And I
was like, they're not actually plastic. And he goes what do you
mean? I said it's it's like fiberglass and this and that. He's wait
a second. So you mean to tell me that thing's like a, it's built
like a boat. Like it's like a fiberglass boat up in the sky. And I
said, yeah. And I was like, I was like, that's more in line of Ben,
a plastic wing. And he goes, Oh, he's I never really knew that. And
I said, Oh, further conversations with this this gentleman, he'd
been in wind for 15 years and it was running wind farms and didn't
know that the blades were made out of fiberglass. So I think that
when you came in, what you're talking about, it's the origination
story of Global Blade Group here. That could be echoed all over the
world. There's so many people that don't know. What it really is.
You and Reketpale from Vattenfall, so you guys got together, you
understood that, Hey, we could talk to each other about these
things and try to fix these problems. Did the next conversation go,
let's bring more along? Let's bring some others along? Birgit
Junker: Our initial goal was to increase the knowledge about blades
in the industry. And I am still now after 22 years in the industry,
I'm still asked, are blades hollow? So that goes along with your
your guy in the U S asking if, glass fiber, really? But but yeah,
the initial goal was to increase the knowledge, but also. And to
have a common front towards OEMs and other interesting parties, the
first meeting we had was actually with DNV and GL about the the
guideline for blade design. And while we were sitting at the table,
one of the managers looked at us and said, very discreetly, I've
actually never spoken to an end user before. And these are the
people doing the guideline for blade design that all blades are
type approved type approved from. And with my normal way of
speaking, sometimes I speak without thinking. I just looked at him
and said, I guess that was about bloody time. Allen Hall: It leads
to a good point, Birgit. So what is all this, when you have all
this fragmenting knowledge running around from different
organizations, how does that affect the performance and maintenance
of blades out in the field? If you don't understand some of the
fundamentals, what are the consequences of that? Birgit Junker: You
got two two very extreme consequences and then something in the
middle. The. The worst consequence is that people look at them like
a black box. Like Joel's American site manager and don't do
anything. Especially if they have one of the really old contracts
where it says that blades are maintenance free. And then you have
the they don't do anything. They run them and suddenly they fail
and they get shocked and they're like, Oh my God, something
happened. I don't know what to do. And then you have the other
extreme. Where a company will have an independent service provider
on blade repairs servicing their blades or the OEM servicing the
blade, and they will do repairs that aren't necessary because they
are being over eager. They want to make sure that the blades are
perfect all the time. And you don't need that. You need something
in the middle. You need to maintain your blades in such a way that
they don't fail and you get the expected AEP. But that doesn't mean
that you have to repair them every single year. It just means that
you need to keep an eye on them, make sure that they don't crack
that they don't have cracks in structural areas, that they don't
have open leading edges or open tips, that they don't have
lightning damages that are severe. And if you do that, you can cut
down on your maintenance. And have a turbine that operates really
well. Joel Saxum: I liken some of this, and this is not just this
comet is not just blades, it's drive, train, gearbox, bearings, all
these things and wind. So if you have say, we talk about a fleet
wide problem. You have a, we're in the States, a Ford truck. Okay?
A Ford truck. There's millions and millions of these things out
there. In the hands of all kinds of people. And so when there's an
issue with something, there is a tribal knowledge that's so deep
that you can reach out in every direction and find an answer.
Everybody has an answer to how to fix this carburetor or whatever
it may be on this vehicle. In wind, we have such a small size of a
fleet, right? So if you're, say you're a XYZ wind operator and
you're a decent size, you have a thousand megawatts of wind
production. You may only have 50 of one kind of turbine and 60 of
one kind of turbine 80 of one kind of turbine So that's not a very
big like statistical fleet to pull information from because
failures happen at different rates and different things and
different blade Manufacturers then we get deeper and we get into
this one was manufactured at this plant versus that and we have
this model But they have those blades and so it creates an
inherently tough problem for the industry And the answer to it is
the same answer that we, or in my opinion, the answer to it is the
same answer that we hear at almost every conference, trade show,
industry get together. We hear collaboration and transparency.
However, it's hard to make that happen, but that's what you guys
have done here. That's what the global blade group is based on is
collaboration and transparency, because if you're one operator and
now all of a sudden you have, Eight friends that are operators and
they can share information from their fleets with you. Now you have
this collective piece of info or collective batch of information
that can give you so much more insight into what may be happening
on your own fleet. You guys have taken on a lot of projects in this
manner. What, what does that look like for collaboration? Birgit
Junker: To start with, we we were on a much lower level. We were
just like, we want to function as small own operators, a back
office support. We had companies that were part of the initial, we
started being the blade group and then there was the. Scandinavian
Blake group or Nordic Blake group.