Blade Lightning Damage Solved

Allen and Joel give the latest update on lightning blade damage.
They discuss the results of a lightning damage assessment on 900+
GE Vernova turbines. Read the LM Wind Power Lightning Diverter Rain
Erosion test results. Learn more about StrikeTape. 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
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight,
shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the
progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Welcome to the special
edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I have Joel Saxum along
with me. And I'm Allen Hall, and we work for Weather Guard
Lightning Tech, and we have not talked about the lightning issues
that are happening across the United States at the moment. Also, a
good bit of Europe is seeing a number of really catastrophic
lightning strikes, and even in South America. So everywhere you
look right now, you see a lot of lightning damage, right? 
Joel Saxum: Yeah, Allen, I would say this, this spring, early
summer, as opposed to years past, we've been getting more and more
and more calls, and I think it's a combination of things. I think
it's a, it's a combination of, I mean, we've had some extreme
weather, right? There's a pretty, it was
a [00:01:00] pretty, been a pretty wicked lightning
season here in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and the center of the
United States. But we're also hearing that same thing from India
from. Mexico from Brazil, from the Mediterranean, we're hearing it
all over the place. So that's happening. But then there's also some
awareness, right? There's people that are, you know, in the wind
industry as a whole, a lot of, a lot of operators have sat back and
relied on their FSAs to handle things. And, and as these costs
escalate and they're looking at lightning damages, oh, this is
carved out of your FSA or, uh, some insurance companies backing
away from insuring them lightning. You're starting to see more and
more operators and financial asset operators coming to the table
saying, Hey, we have a lighting problem. What can we do to solve
it? And that's why our phone's ringing.  Allen
Hall: Yeah, it's been nonstop for the last couple of months
and, and I would say that some of the damage I've even seen on
LinkedIn is shocking. Uh, even today, looking at images from Japan,
a blade trailing [00:02:00] edges is split wide open.
It's expensive. And the operators you talk to when you. Talk to a
large operator who says it has a couple hundred turbines. They're
spending millions of dollars a year just to keep those turbines
running from all the lightning damage and the engineering staffs
and all the crane work and everything else managing the ISPs. It is
a huge, massive burden on the  Joel Saxum: industry. I'd
like to go back to what you said about seeing it on LinkedIn. So,
uh, I, I just, this is a shout out to all the amazing wind turbine
blade technicians out there and engineers that are supporting them
and getting these things done in the field, because we have seen
some crazy damages on LinkedIn and it seems to be the ones that,
uh, technicians are really proud of fixing, right? Like, look at
this 10 layer repair, three meters this way, this kind of crack,
these kind of things because they're all difficult to repair and
they're very expensive. Repair some of these things. Uh. Teams of
2, 3, 4 people are on them [00:03:00]for two weeks, three
weeks, four weeks. Right. And the cost of all those things starts
to add up. And we're, when we're talking about repairs, of course
you have the repair team, you have the repair materials and the
downtime associated weather and all those things, but, but you
haven't, in the grand scheme of things, contemplated what is the
business interruption cost here as well, because that turbine's
down. And if it's down for a, uh, two, two weeks, three weeks, four
weeks, and you know, you're in high wind season, that's a lot of
production. So the, the reason that we're starting to, I believe,
uh, see a lot of, uh, a lot of phone calls, lot of support, a lot
of things we're doing is because these costs are escalating it. And
the number that I, I was looking at, uh, just this week is so far
in 2025 weather guard with our StrikeTape product. Has either
installed on or is fending kit out or scheduled to be installed on
19 Wind Farms?  Allen Hall: That's a tremendous number.
Actually, [00:04:00] Joel and I have lost track.
Honestly, I have lost track because there's so many phone calls
coming in. I know we have more today even looking to get some
blades protected and. The reason is I think people are starting to
realize, particularly the engineering staffs and all the accounting
functions and those site managers, asset managers that are looking
at the yearly cost of managing these turbines, and that lightning
number is just big. If we're getting into the situation right now
because of the I-R-A bill changes and the one big beautiful bill,
uh, eliminating a lot of the production tax credit incentives for
repowering, uh, you, you start to pay attention to those
expenditures that you probably have paid for in the past. Now's the
time to eliminate them and keep that money into the revenue chain.
It is gonna be a different world in about two years. And as we're
into that transition, what we're seeing is a lot of operators now
reaching out and starting to make a [00:05:00] connection
with Weather Guard Lightning Tech to start the process. Like how do
we improve our blades? We have some old Siemens turbines, we have
GE turbines, we have a lot of one point fives, a lot of two X
machines, which are almost everywhere in the United States at the
minute. How do we protect those turbines? How do we make them
better? How do I stop paying ISPs hundreds of thousands of dollars
for repairs because I need that revenue to make my business
profitable at the end of the year? Yeah, I mean, we, we've talked
about it in the past.  Joel Saxum: It's the, the, the,
the PPTC suspenders as I've called them, I suppose, is you're, you
know, in the past we've been supported by it. It, it's, it's
allowed for a buffer of revenue to come in that, uh, you know, you
can dip into, you can use as your operational. Cash. And when we
talk lightning damages, a lot of times that is unknown, right? It's
something that you may budget for, you may not get any, you may end
up spending a million dollars on this one wind farm because the
erratic nature of lightning. But if you can reduce that to an, a
known level or to a very much lower [00:06:00] level,
you're, you're sitting pretty, right? So what, and, and I wanna go
back to what you said, Alan. A lot of semen stuff. A lot of GE
stuff, uh, that's what we see a lot of, um, and. We've done a lot
of studies. We have a ton of data on the one X and two x GE
machines, uh, as well as the Siemens. I mean, since take the
Siemens and the GAA products, we've been working with Siemens here
at Weather Guard and putting StrikeTape to protect their turbine
blades around the world since 2013. So we have a long track record
of it. We know how to do those. We have, you know, standard
products that go on them. Um, and all it takes is a phone call.
Just get ahold of us and we can walk you through. Physics of what's
happening, lightning damage to, to your specific turbines, why it's
happening, how you can fix it. And then our big thing here at
Weather Guard, of course, is supporting you through that process.
We don't wanna sell you a product, we wanna be your partner in
fixing lightning damages. Now maybe we could talk about that a Alan
A. Little bit. Let's talk about, uh, here, [00:07:00] a
little bit about what's  Allen Hall: going on with some
of these LPS systems. Boy, the LPS systems that are coming out of
the factory over the last, ooh, 3, 4, 5 years, even 10 years ago.
Really basic, they're essentially a, a lightning rod. So it's a, a
metal receptor somewhere around the tip on the pressure and the
suction side, and then there's a cable that runs through the center
of the blade down into the hub area. Then it gets grounded down
into the tower and to to earth eventually. But it's basically a
spinning lightning rod and the concept is. Relatively simple,
right? It's, it's like protecting a building. You put lightning
rods on a building and hopefully the, the lightning hits those
lightning rods and everything is okay. But the problem with wind
turbines, particularly as they get taller, is the physics get to be
a little bit different and. What has happened as Blaze have gone
from roughly 30, 40 meters into the 50 plus meters, and now much
larger than that, even offshore, a hundred plus
meters [00:08:00] is that tip speeds are high. The tip
heights are much higher than they used to be. And the amount of
lightning that they're seeing, uh, is changing because some of the
lightning strikes are actually originating at the turbines. You're
seeing more we call upward lightning. So the number of lightning
strikes that a turbine will take will be dependent upon how tall
that turbine is. So instead of seeing maybe one strike a year, a
lot of the turbines in the United States are seeing somewhere in
the 5, 6, 7 range, depending upon where you're at per year. Now you
think about at over a 10, 20 year time span, that's a number of
lightning strikes. Now, they're all not, may not be the big massive
lightning strikes. It may be what I term baby lightning strikes.
But at the, it still, the number of lightning strikes that you take
increases your chance of having blade damage.