Are segmented turbine towers the future as wind turbines climb higher and higher? Siemens Gamesa named a new CEO recently, and Suzlon has restructured--will the business survive? Some incredible electric storms occurred recently, including a 1.3 billion volt storm in South Africa and a 400 mile long lightning bolt across Brazil.



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Full Transcript: EP16 - Segmented Turbine Towers; Gamesa and Suzlon Shake Things Up; 400 mile Lightning Bolt?



Allen Hall: Welcome back I'm Allen hall.



Dan: This is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection, and ways to keep your wind turbines running.



Allen Hall: Great boy, busy weekend wind turbines again. COVID-19 is having a, a, an effect on everything. I'm just trying to follow. All the news is coming in. It's almost difficult to keep track of all the changes that are happening now in the wind turbine industry. So, uh, let's get to it. I mean, Big big, big changes all over the place.



Uh, you know, we're seeing all kinds of push towards, uh, offshore wind turbines. And I think that's driving a lot of the management changes that are happening. It's also causing a lot of restructuring to happen and boil boy, uh, talk about chaotic. We're in it right now.



Dan: Yeah. So we're going to jump into news in a second, but, so let's talk about this new piece of tech.



That is kind of an interesting, so we talked about concrete, um, wind turban towers, and the last couple episodes, specifically the three D printing, but. Now, they're talking a little bit about segmented wind turbine towers as being potentially the lowest cost alternative for when they get really, really tall, which is obviously like in everyone's future.



So we're talking about how hub Heights above 100 meters. Um, well, well above that more like 200, 200 plus meters, but obviously there's a thousand meters. Yeah. Well, there's a big problem when yeah. You know, they get above a hundred meters because transportation gets really difficult. So. Um, what do you think of these segmented?



So the segmented tower technology is essentially, you know, having segments where you're going to bolt them together and they're going to be easier to ship and you've got to assemble them, but there's going to be much more engineering and. And fasteners and a lot of, a lot of different, like I said, engineering to make these work, but how do you feel about this?



Is it going to be viable? Is that make the most sense?



Allen Hall: Makes most sense? Cause you can be able to transport it. The biggest problem in wind turbines right now is the ability to transport from factory to site and. That's why you see this big push of factories getting shoved toward the Schwar lights, because the wind turbines are getting so much bigger that they need to be going by boat no longer can we just move them on truck?



And when that happens, yeah. You got to think of ways that you can start moving these things on truck reasonably because the weights go up too. So you have a kind of a combinational problem of the sizes get big and the weights get so heavy that they can't really put them on a road. So you've got to figure out ways to reduce.



The overall size of each of the pieces and then okay. And get them on a truck or a ship. So it's, it's a, a real, real unique engineering problem. Uh, just seeing this articles, more recent articles about, uh, building a segments, like the one up in Sweden where they're building it out of wood, which means they're building it in segments.



And then now we're talking about. Basically building metal sections that get bolted together, much like most other metal buildings and structures in the world are built.