The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

• Wind Tech Training Excellence at Deutsche Windtechnik

  Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik discuss their innovative training programs for wind turbine technicians. Momme, as Head of Training Center, and Russ, as Director of Quality and Ops Support, explore how the company is tackling workforce challenges through apprenticeships and advanced training methods in both Europe and the US. 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! Allen Hall: Wind Energy is facing a critical workforce challenge, finding and retaining skilled technicians to maintain the growing fleet of turbines. This week we speak with Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik. Deutsche Windtechnik is setting new standards for technician development through their comprehensive training programs, combining hands-on experience with cutting edge technology. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Momme and Russ, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Momme Feddersen: Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you so much. Allen Hall: Well Deutche Wind Technique. Has always, to me, been a really high standard in terms of a company. But that comes through training. And Deutsche Windtechnik spends a great amount of time and energy on the training side. I want to talk to some of the challenges that are out there first, and what are some of those challenges that exist in training wind turbine technicians today? Russ Leach: Yeah, so they're the same ones we've had since my entire time in wind. It's finding the qualified personnel who are ready, available to climb that turbine and do great maintenances and great troubleshooting. The problem has been exacerbated with the growth of renewables with wind, right? They're harder to come by. Um, And we're all fighting for the same people, aren't we? So that's why we have our training programs, right? We have to start people out from nothing many times and build them up and get those competencies out there with them. Um, and, um, that's the main challenge. Plus the distributed nature of the workforce, right? We're, we're across the country here in MoMA, they're, they're across Europe. And, um, so you have to put mechanisms in place to get the training to them many times and get them competent and, and verified as competent many times out where they're at. So it's a combination of Training facilities, which are very valuable, but also training that extends out to the field with the people themselves. Allen Hall: And Mame, let's talk about the technical challenges because wind turbines have gotten more complicated. There's more computers in them. There's more electronics in them. There's more cooling systems. How has that impacted the training of technicians? Did it just make it harder because there's so much new things happening? Momme Feddersen: Here in Deutsche Windtechnik, we have to, we are focusing more and more on the, um, not on the, on the, on the MOOC. Highest moderns, tur, modern turbines, um, but more, um, on the older ones. So, um, but uh, when we look into the future, the, the topics you say are, are exactly the topics we have to, we have to face. Um, what what we did in the past was focusing on the practical side of the training and not focusing on the theoretical side. That's why I think we did a. Kind of, um, interesting approach, uh, how we train here in Germany. Um, as you know, we are a multi brand, uh, company. We are servicing different brands.

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  28:03
• Wind Energy O&M Australia’s Success in Melbourne

  For the first time ever, all the Uptime hosts are in the same place! They discuss the fantastic outcome of the Wind Energy O&M Australia conference last week, highlighting the amazing presentations, attendees, and discussions. Keep an eye out for next year's event! 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! You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: For the first time ever, I think all four of us on the podcast are in The same location at the same time. Rosemary Barnes: If you include our amazing producer. So Allen Hall: this is a unique time and we just finished wind energy, O& M Australia. which was completely packed, insanely full, and it was a day and a half of informative discussions, no sales talks per Rosemary's strict instructions. Good call. To get the information out to the industry and let everybody know what's happening around the world? Is it, Australia is a really unique place, Rosemary. There's a lot going on here. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. And the wind market is definitely unique. We've got a few unique problems. We also, a little bit different to other markets I've worked in, like in in Europe and in North America, where there are a lot of engineers around who've worked on the design and manufacturing side. We don't have those industries in Australia. And there aren't as many people filtering through with that deep technical knowledge. So it's taken us a bit longer to get to the point where one, people realize that they need to have that information. It's not enough to just have, a service agreement and trust that they know what they're doing and that they're acting in your best interest at every moment. And two, for people to begin to, yeah, get that expertise. There was no shortage of, Expertise on the panels. And yeah, my favorite thing about the conference was hearing just conversations going on, just, overhearing people just geeking out over some, really niche topic that they hadn't thought of that they'd heard, someone mentioned on stage, a couple of people connected who didn't know each other, and now they know that they're got the same problem or one of them's got a solution and one of them's got a problem. It's yeah, just exactly what I wanted from the conference. Joel Saxum: I think one of the things I took is this joke was told a few times, literally and figuratively on an island here in Australia when it comes to wind energy knowledge, right? So we tried to, when we put this conference together, we tried bringing some expertise from around the world. Simply because, it's hard to travel down here, right? That's just a simple fact. It's geographically remote. So bringing that expertise in here and And after we went through a bunch of things on stage, a lot of people talking on the sides like, I didn't know this solution existed. Like the Soren Kellenberger stuff from CNC Onsite. I didn't know you could precision machine things up tower. That was just like, to a lot of people that, that exists, right? Lightning protection upgrades do exist. There's people that can do it. There's things you can sense. Shadow monitoring of your fleet. Even when you have an an FSA with an OEM. Oh, this is a great concept. These are things that like in the States. In Europe,

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  36:41
• 8-Tree waveCHECK Makes Blade Wrinkle Detection Simple

  In this Uptime Spotlight, Erik Klaas and Johannes Leib from 8-Tree discuss their waveCHECK system, which detects and measures surface defects on wind turbine blades. The system uses 3D optical scanning technology to identify wrinkles and other issues with high precision, helping improve quality control in blade manufacturing and maintenance. 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! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're diving into revolutionary blade inspection technology from 8-Tree. 8-Tree's WaveCheck system uses 3D optical scanning and augmented reality to detect and measure surface defects on wind turned blades with unprecedented precision. Joining us is Erik Klaas, the co founder and CTO of 8-Tree, and Johannes Leib, a program manager with 8-Tree, who brings over 15 years of wind blade industry experience, specializing in composites and fiber reinforced plastics. Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Erik and Johannes, welcome to the show. Erik Klaas: We are glad to be on your podcast. Allen Hall: I'm excited to talk to both of you because I've seen your technology on YouTube quite a bit and now on LinkedIn and it's quite impressive. And I want to start by asking really, how are you trying to handle wrinkles? It seems like wrinkles are a huge problem in the wind industry. They're hard to detect and we're getting escapes out of the factory. You want to discuss how big of an issue wrinkles are. And Blades is at the moment. Erik Klaas: Yeah, most likely this is a good topic for Johannes to speak about for one hour. But as I got into this business late, maybe I get to give you my perspective. So when I got into the wind business first, our legacy is in aerospace. So I saw a wrinkle and I never thought it could be such a problem or lead to catastrophic results. What is a wrinkle? I happen to have a separate part here. Which is a mock up that we did. We do this for testing our system. A wrinkle basically is a deviation in the glass fiber layup of a turbine blade. And it's very small, so you can't even almost not see it. But it can lead to the blade cracking in these particular areas where the wrinkle happens. And therefore, the inspector's task is to measure how wide and how high is a wrinkle. And so the ratio between width and height is what they then calculate, and there's a limit to that ratio. And that is what an inspector has to do. And currently, they are doing it with hand tools. And a hand tool is a Dial gauge or it can be what they call a comp gauge. So they push it on the surface so they get the contour of this wrinkle and then with that contour they measure actually the width and the height of it. Allen Hall: It can be very difficult to detect some of these wrinkles because the laminates in these longer blades, the laminate is very thick. So if you have a wrinkle somewhere in the middle of this laminate, the surface Defect or the surface curvature change is minuscule, right? Erik Klaas: It is. And there is a limitation of our technology that I need to speak about. So we can only detect and measure those which are on the top layer. So if they go through the whole layup of layers and they are visible on the surface, we can measure them. And if they only appear in deeper layers, we can't. So you need like NDT measures,

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  26:27
• Siemens Gamesa De-Icing, Vestas Permanent Tower Crane

  We discuss Siemens Gamesa's advanced blade de-icing system, their blade root repair fix, and a tower designed by Vestas with its own permanent crane system. 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! 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: We have really interesting patents this week, Phil, including this first one from Siemens Gamesa, and it is a wind turbine blade with an advanced de icing system. Now, you say to yourself, well, there's been a lot of de icing systems on wind turbine blades. In fact, Rosie has worked on a number of them for LM. But this one's a little bit different. So it It uses a kind of a matrix setup of thermal heating areas arranged in sort of series and parallel connections, and it creates overlapping heating zones that can be very precisely controlled. Now that is very beneficial because a lot of times you More temperature, more heat towards the tip than you do at the root. So you would like the temperature to be graded up towards the tip. It's kind of hard to do a lot of times. But in this situation, you can adapt it to the situation. And this seems smart, but I haven't seen it implemented. And I know Siemens Gamesa owners. Like the icing system. So maybe this is coming out in the near future, Phil. Phil Totaro: Yeah, this would be interesting because this is very different than your conventional like blown air solution, like Enercon and other companies use. Where you could have a scenario where you've got like hotspots and, and heat concentrations at different points along the blades, particularly where you have ribs or bulkheads or something that would kind of get in the way of the airflow. a thermal heating mat with again, different zones where you can kind of trigger, on off to, to try and either prevent ice accretion or actually provide deicing for the blade. So it's, it's a really interesting approach in that it gives you more granular control over where you want to be able to, to de ice and again, based on ice thickness, and you can, monitor your Phil Totaro: performance, or you might have a more sophisticated system that actually monitors how much ice is still stuck on the blade. So. The, the implementation of this I think would be welcome. And it's probably something that, I mean, heating mats are almost inevitably, they do introduce a certain amount of challenges, especially with lightning interactions. But generally speaking, they are a good way for wind turbine blades to to be de iced. So hopefully this does make its way into more commercially available products in the future. Allen Hall: Well, it looks like it will save somewhere between 20 and 50 percent of energy consumption to, to heat the blade. That would be remarkable if you could make a, even a 10 percent change in the amount of power required to heat the blade up. Going to 50 percent would be astounding. And that makes me think you're going to see this, this patent idea Phil Totaro: show up pretty soon. I mean, to be blunt, like, and I'll do respect to Enercon that pioneered a lot of this technology, but volumetric heating is just wildly inefficient, so it's like, something that's a more, cost efficient and thermally efficient solution is probably desirable. Allen Hall: Our next patent is from Vestas and this. Seems like a relatively simple idea, but it evidently isn't because they were able to patent it. So,

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  8:14
• Ørsted CEO Change, Shell Leaves Atlantic Shores

  This week on Uptime, we discuss Ørsted CEO Mads Nipper stepping down, Shell withdrawing from the Atlantic Shores offshore wind project, and a study showing only 15% of employees feel their managers are transparent about challenges in the workplace. 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! You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxom, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Danish Renewable Energy Company, Ørsted, announced a leadership change, with CEO Mad Snipper stepping down after four years at the helm. Rasmus Erbo. Uh, the company's deputy CEO and chief commercial officer will take over as group president and CEO, uh, in February. Uh, the transition comes as Orsted adapts to evolving market conditions in the offshore wind sector. Now this, uh, I guess around the industry was expected news. Uh, if you had talked to somebody, uh, about offshore in the US, uh, they felt like what had happened over the last year or so was really rough on the leadership at Oersted, part of this too, guys, is that some of it is just happenstance, interest rates rising, the supply chain nightmares that were happening and Mads Knipper would just happen to be there at that specific time. Is, is that the feeling like it was just bad timing, uh, for Mads? Phil Totaro: Yeah, it's, it's part of it, but the, the reality I think is you, you've got a scenario where he, he was there and the buck stops here and all that sort of stuff, um, if you're the boss, but he also was one kind of overseeing a lot of the deals that got him put in place that led to all those impairments that they ended up having. It's like, yeah, okay. Interest rates are high, but. It's like he, he, you know, was there signing off on these, these deals with, uh, PSEG in New Jersey and, uh, Eversource in, in Connecticut, uh, and Rhode Island that were just frankly terrible deals. I mean, it just, they, they ended up, Orsted ended up having to pay. for whatever the utility companies had invested time and money and effort and et cetera, uh, into, you know, the development work on these deals, um, in case they decided to pull out plus, you know, uh, a little extra. And it's like, that's, that's the way it is. You know, you might think that that's typical, but when you get into a deal like this for an offshore wind farm, uh, I mean, we're starting to talk in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and it led to this, this multi billion dollar impairment that they had, you know, last year. So, you know, I think I said on the show six months ago that he was likely to be gone, and guess what? He is. Allen Hall: My feeling about it is there's just a little bit of happenstance, but that's the problem at being in leadership You don't get to choose the economic times in which you're running the company and you have to play what the cards are dealt right, I Wouldn't say any offshore wind developer in the United States. This has great numbers at the minute So it isn't like Orsted has is in a different bucket at the minute it but I I I think the, my contention at the time was New Jersey really screwed Orsted. Not the, the government in New Jersey was just negotiating in bad faith. And they wanted to take all the federal tax credits, which Orsted agreed to, and then they needed them back. And then it just went back and forth there.

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  27:22

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