Angela Krcmar, Global Sales Manager for Firetrace International, joined us on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast to discuss the relatively unknown danger of wind turbine fires. A fire occurs in 1 out of every 2000 wind turbines, on average, and with the cost and size of these machines rapidly increasing, the need for fire suppression systems is growing.



Ms. Krcmar has recently written a pair of articles on wind turbine fires: The Burning Issue of Wind Turbine Fires (Powerengineeringint.com) andThe True Cost of Wind Turbine Fires & Protection (windpowerengineering.com).







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. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 



Transcript: EP43 - Angela Krcmar of Firetrace on Fire Suppression Systems for Wind Turbines



All right welcome back to the uptime podcasters episode 43 and on today's episode we've got a great guest Angela Krcmar from Firetrace is here and she's going to talk to us all about fire suppression technology in wind turbine cells well and just in wind turbines in general so alan is a great conversation with Angela what were some of your takeaways from it well i didn't realize the number of fires that were happening in wind turbines it's a lot more than you think just because it's hard to keep track of their random events and so you just don't see them all the time but fire traces suppression systems are amazingly one simple and effective and and so as you as i essentially was describing how the system worked and how it was laid out and how it didn't affect electronics afterwards and it didn't infect any employees that were could have been in the area at the time the fire had started and suppression system kicked off you realize like this system is really well thought out and effective and it's surprising that it's not used in many more places than it is today and so the the hope is that as fire suppression becomes standard and wind turbines as we go forward because it's just one of those systems you really don't want to do without yeah well and we've talked at different points uh about insurance claims and force major and all these different aspects of owning and operating a wind turbine and as they get uh bigger and more expensive and especially as they're located way offshore it's just really hard and this is one of the kind of not funny but you know she's just talked about hey if you don't have a fire suppression system or if you have a assistant that alerts you but doesn't actually put it out you're just going to get a notification that your turban is going to burn to the ground it's just like you're just not going to be able to get there and do anything about it it's just going to burn out of control if it gets to that point which is crazy to think about because these machines are so expensive so it was really interesting to hear just about the solutions the way they've evolved um how it is pretty friendly because like you said if you sort of think of some of these uh retardant foam situations where they're just like filling a room full of foam but that's not what they do at all they do something that's way cleaner and simpler and and uh safer than that so it was a really interesting conversation well i think as you as you listen to the episode you realize that fire safety is just one of those aspects that we need to be implementing and i hope that a lot of operators around the world hear this and can reach out to fire trace and understand how that system works and how it can be used on their particular site all right so again our guest today is Angela Krcmar she is a global sales manager at fire trace international she's been with the company 12 plus years she's pre previously a senior business development manager and uh she just has a ton of expertise we read a couple of her ...