A Vestas V150 blade broke and fell to the ground in Iowa, resulting in 46 turbines being stopped for a root cause analysis. Humidity within a wind turbine can cause significant electrical issues; we discuss solutions for keeping turbines dry, even off-shore. ZX Lidar has been approved for Siemens Gamesa turbines, so we talk through the implications of lidar as a primary measurement tool for wind speed.



Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 







Transcript: EP32 - Vestas Blade Issues Continue; Humidity Causes Electrical Problems; Lidar Wind Turbine Speed Measurements



This is the uptime podcast on today's episode. We are going to chat in our first segment about news. We're going to talk about Vestas blades that are still having problems. It sounds like at this point, they're going to shut down a bunch of turbines in a large wind farm. And so Iowa is kind of like the hotbed for investigatory, um, analysis here.



So we're going chat about that a little bit. And our engineering segment today, we're going to talk about. High humidity and some of the issues that can cause especially in offshore wind, uh, LIDAR, this is a not new technology obviously, but the application here, uh, on measuring wind turbine speed, especially in remote locations is really interesting.



And lastly, we're going to chat a little bit more about fires and some of the reporting it and some of the, uh, Implications for people's emotions, getting in the way and not allowing their reputations, perhaps to be damaged by saying, Hey, we have had a fire here and, you know, we need to return that, that data to the, uh, the rest of the world.



So, Alan, let's jump into Iowa and Vestas. So V one 10, two megawatt. Wind turbines seem to be having some problems.



Allen Hall: They are, it's surprising because it's, it seems like it's relatable to that particular turbine or lightning and the lightning protection system from news reports, local news reports in Iowa.



They seem to be focusing on the lightning protection system. And in fact, they've shut down about 45 or 46 turbines in which have indications of lightning strikes near them or to them. Because they're concerned about the subsequent structural damage, internal damage to these blades and whether it's causing some other catastrophic effect, because blades breaking off is, is really catastrophic from the structural standpoint.



I, I don't know the question really right now is what. Is the possible failure mode. Is it really lightening or is it high winds? Because with lightning strike tends to come high winds, thunder storms bring high winds, and we can sometimes confuse that we've had a recent lightning strike with also having a recent storm pass through and we we've overloaded the AA structure.



And then didn't notice the internal damage that was caused the blade. Don't you think that some of this may be just straight? Hi. Hi. Hi wins. At this point, Dan is just, seems like there's just too, too many of these issues.



Dan: Yeah. That'd be really curious to see what happens in the root cause analysis when they come back with, you know, a, you know, a reason that this is all happening, but yeah, it seems.



I don't know, kind of implausible that lightning is destroying so many of these, right. I mean, they've had a couple of now they're just really nervous that there's some underlying defects, so they want to check them all. But yeah, there's too many turbines around where if lightning was causing this many to fail, it'd be more of a problem somewhere else.



So it seems more just like a, either a manufacturing defect, which they probably realize that that's a piece of it at this point or. You know? Yeah. It just doesn't seem like lightning, even though it obviously is an expensive problem to fix it doesn't...