Are wind turbines wearing out faster than the advertised, typical 20-year lifespan? New research says yes, and we discuss what this means for the industry. We also discuss turbine blade engineering and how carbon fiber spar can reduce weight by 20-30% over all-glass blades. Hydrogen power and long distance power transmission cables are also on the docket in this wind energy podcast episode.



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Full Transcript: EP18 - Are Wind Turbines Wearing Out Faster than Advertised? Fiberglass vs Carbon Fiber Blades and More



Dan: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard, we make wind turbine lightning protection easy. If you're a wind farm operator, stop settling for damaged turbine blades and constant downtime. Get your uptime back with our strike table lightning protection system. Learn more in today's show notes or visit  dot com slash strike tape.



Allen Hall: Welcome back I'm Allen hall.



Dan: I'm Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection, and ways to keep your wind turbines running.



Welcome back. This is uptime episode 18 Allen. What's a what's the word this week.



Allen Hall: The future of wind turbine technology is bright, more, more green shoots, more activity. It's looking better and better every week. It doesn't feel like it, it certainly doesn't feel like it, but the data indicates that positive things are happening.



So keep some pause, sort of thoughts, go in and hope for some momentum. And we, we keep moving, especially Europe, Europe's doing seem to be really well and getting through those Cobra nights, teen thing, United States, not so much, which, uh, It gives the EU at a huge advantage. Quite honestly, people are going back to work.



Kids were in school, over in Europe. We're still in the United States. We're still not talking about going back to school colleges or my saw some more notes yesterday. Obviously Harvard is not going back to school. I think Prince is not going back. A lot of the Ivy league schools are not going back.



There's no in the fall. Um, No, the you's going to have a six month advantage on the United States, so that we're going to have to see how that plays out. What's new in Europe.



Dan: Um, yeah. Uh, you know, DC's just chugging along. I think we're doing fine. Uh, it's interesting that we were on the last ones to open back up and seemingly doing really well.



The numbers have continued to come down. They're on a very tiny increase, like. 30 cases to 50 cases kind of thing, but it's, it's pretty, it's pretty quiet here. Um, so yeah, I mean, things are, things are feeling more normal, I suppose, but anyway, so in today's show, we're going to cover, get a couple, a couple of different topics.



We're going to talk about this a really interesting 470 miles. Uh, underwater cable, um, between Denmark and UK, we're going to talk about hydrogen power a little bit. And the future of that in renewable energy. Um, a little bit more about carbon fiber versus fiberglass, as far as construction of some of these turbine blades, which are just, just enormous, which is a common theme everywhere.



And the wind industry. I'm also interesting white paper came out about the lifetime analysis of wind turbine components and kind of measured and discussed some of the simulations. And then versus a little bit of reality that maybe they're not lasting quite as long as we hope and think they are. And so, you know what, maybe some of the, uh, implications are there of, you know, if these are gonna wear out sooner than.



Then we think then how do we need to adjust maybe like profit forecasts and other stuff like that. So, um,