IWTG Consulting Addresses Turbine Failures

Jon Zalar, founder of IWTG Consulting, discusses the challenges of
wind turbine maintenance, emphasizing the rise in turbine failures
and the importance of root cause analysis (RCA). Proactive
maintenance, proper documentation, and expert consultation will
help to mitigate issues and ensure turbine efficiency. Sign up now
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technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
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YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the
show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on
Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering
tomorrow. Allen Hall 2025: Jon, welcome to the program. 
Jonathan Zalar: Thanks for having me,  Allen Hall
2025: Jon. Let's start with the reality facing wind farmer
operators today. What's the core problem when it comes to turbine
failures?  Jonathan Zalar: There's been a larger number
than they probably experienced like five years ago. I think, um,
you know, the volume of turbines out there and some of the bigger
issues that, you know, people are seeing in the last two to three
years has made owning a wind farm a little more challenging than
before. Um, you know, between blade issues, bolted joint issues,
shoes, and. Overall, like o operations, right? It's been tougher to
keep these turbines up and running, you know, manpower's an issue,
getting people out there to go fix stuff.
It's, [00:01:00] it's been tough for a lot of people I've
talked to.  Joel Saxum: Do you think this is a, a partial
result of like, um, okay, so what we're, you know, on the podcast
in the last few years, we've always been talking about, oh, there's
all kinds of models coming out and there's this, this manufacturer
can put out this many different variations and all these things,
and now. Now we're getting to the age where that family, that group
of turbines that, I guess it's kind, I'm looking at it like a
class, right? That class of, that, those years of turbines are now
getting to the stage where they're out of warranty and they're
coming into, some people are taking, you know, ISPs taking, um,
maintenance of them or an owner operator taking maintenance over
from the OEM. And all of a sudden now there's these issues popping
up and different things that we're, we're kind of in this. Um, like
a swamp of problems with a lot of different models. So, uh, yeah,
like you said, we've we're, we talked a little bit off air here
about RCAs and how to fix things and looking at serial defects and
stuff, but it's just like, it seems like every other
week [00:02:00] someone calls Alan Ryan's like, Hey, have
you heard about this thing with this model? And it's like,
man,  Jonathan Zalar: another one. I think it's a
combination of two things. One. Like I talked about the last time
we had podcasts, there was a, you know, a pretty big push to
increase rotor size, come out with new models for, for every, for
all the os, right? They're competing against each other. Coming out
with a new model every 18 months. And you can ask Phil, but I
believe mostly the OEMs are sold out. If you go back five, six
years, where. A huge expansion in the amount of wind turbines that
have been placed. Right. So I think you combine those cheap factors
and now, yeah, the owners have a lot on their plate, a lot more
than they're  Allen Hall 2025: probably used to. And my
question all is this, the complexity of the turbines. So every new
model that comes out, what I'm seeing is more instrumentation, more
sensors, more stuff, more variability, even in where the components
originate from.  Jonathan Zalar: Right?
Yeah. [00:03:00] I mean, to increase, to be able to meet
that increased demand the OEMs had to get, you know, a lot of
different suppliers for bearings for, you know, maybe two or three
different places to make blades, right? Um, and you're right about
the complexity, right? So like these rowers are getting bigger.
They were trying to keep as many components the same. So you need
better sensing, better controls to, you know, keep those loads
where they work.  Allen Hall 2025: And a lot of times,
uh, when operators have problems, they don't actually realize. What
to do or realize that maybe there's a serial defect and how to
address it and how to suss that out. Now the, the big question is,
is like what's at stake if the operators don't implement some sort
of proper root cause analysis? Uh, what does that sort of downward
spiral look like? Because we have seen operators that do that,
that, that don't try to identify key issues with their turbines.
I  Jonathan Zalar: mean, at the end of the day, it costs
money, right? So if the quicker you figure out
an [00:04:00] issue and if it's a solution for an issue,
the quicker you're gonna solve that problem for your site or your
fleet. Um. Also like making sure you're communicating with the OEM
about your failures so that they can add them to their RCA if
they're working on one, for example. The more data they have, it's
gonna help them come up with a more effective solution.  Joel
Saxum: I think you're, you've gotta, how to put this? You have
to have a specific engineering mindset. So of course we're dealing
with engineers all day long. We're all engineers. We enjoy the
engineering mindset. So it's easy for us to quantify ROI and value
add from an RCA, right? So, hey, we're gonna bring in an expert, or
we're gonna bring in a consultant, or whether it's a, you know, a
big one, A DNV, a UL type, or it's a Jon Zalar, it's gonna cost us
a little bit of money, right? It's gonna cost us. 5, 10, 20, 30
grand, what, whatever that is. But to us, that ROI is easy to
quantify, oh, we had [00:05:00] this issue on this
turbine. We're gonna spend 20 grand figuring out why, what, how,
and how we fix it in the future. Well now we can avoid that blade
failure. Next time we can avoid, you know, a de deductible on an
insurance case, $250,000. So boom, we, if we save one of those, we
paid for the whole RCA. It's easy for us to do that in that
engineering mindset, but to get, sometimes to get. You know, an
asset manager who may not have that engineering mindset, they're
just looking at, um, dollars and cents. They're like, yeah, do we
wanna spend this money? And, and I, I think that that's a, uh, uh,
a mindset, a, an action, an operation that, you know, us as
evangelists for engineering in the industry need to help because we
can help it in a large scale, right? Like if we, if we solve these
problems through RCAs. Then we can avoid 'em in the future and it's
better LCOE for the entire fleet. That's the goal,  Jonathan
Zalar: right? Like even if you identify an issue and you have
the ability to figure out how many [00:06:00] turbines
are affected and like we use a Blade Blade issue, right? If you
only catch the CAT five, that's a much more expensive repair than a
cat two or three. So if you work with somebody to identify, hey,
this lat or you know, this list of turbines have a better chance of
having this problem, let's inspect it a little more, for example.
Or let's proactively add some strength in one area that we know
we're seeing issues that could save a lot of money in the long run.
'cause blade repairs are expensive. They take time, weather out. It
just adds up.  Allen Hall 2025: And what I see when Joel
and I have been around a lot of, uh, wind turbines in the Midwest,
is that the asset managers. Get a lot of complaints from the
neighbors and the landowners. So if they have a blade break or they
have some sort of bearing that's going bad, that's making a lot of
noise. It's a constant set of phone calls from the surrounding
landowners about this problem. So even in the simple things. That
can be [00:07:00] fixed, turn into big problems because
of all the associated people that are around it. I mean, Joel,
you've, you've seen some of these cases where, like a bearing's
squeaking, okay. And the neighbor complains, or a blade breaks and
the, and the owner calls up and say, Hey, why is this blade in my
front yard? Which has happened? And those are real life situations
that, that. You know, re requires somebody with knowledge to catch
them before they turn into that neighborhood problem. Yeah.
That's  Joel Saxum: the intrinsic side of, of the return
on investment, right? Like, you can't measure that, but it's
valuable. And, and I, and we get, this concept comes up a lot to us
because we've been doing a lot of work in Australia lately, and
Australia has a different approach to their neighbors and how they
work within things. And it's very, very, very hands-on. Where in
the states sometimes you see like, oh, well, they're a
non-participating landowner, so we just kinda, you know, move on.
And then you see the Facebook posts that are like, these turbines
take a thousand gallons of [00:08:00] oil a year and they
never run. You know? And if we can, as an industry, if we can avoid
those things by getting on top of stuff with RCA, we can, we can
get ahead of the game, right? We can change the perception of, of
renewables as we move forward. Um, which is, I mean, it's a
difficult battle, but that's, as engineers, we can, we can help
that fight. So I think that this is an important thing. That's why
we're talking to you, Joe.  Jonathan Zalar: Yeah, I
agree. I mean the, the video of the guy who was asking why it
wasn't turning, 'cause there was no wind. I'll never forget that
one.  Allen Hall 2025: So how do we break this cycle of
reactive maintenance and repeated failures? What should we be
doing?  Jonathan Zalar: Continuing that relationship with
the OEM,