Can wind turbine blade anti-icing coatings help prevent downtime and power loss? Brian Huskinson, CEO of Elemental Coatings, says yes. In this episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, Brian explains how Elemental's anti-ice coatings help increase the speed at which a blade can shed accumulated ice, where it will make sense for wind farm operators to apply it, expected durability, the underlying technology, safety and non-slip applications and more. Watch this episode on YouTube here.



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Transcript - Brian Huskinson, CEO of Elemental Coatings on Wind Turbine Blade Anti-Icing Coatings







Welcome back i'm Allen Hall; 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 all right welcome back to the uptime podcast i'm your co-host dan blewett and i am joined here by my other co-host or did you say other co-host your host Allen how do we do this Allen how are you good good interesting guest this week huh yeah so Brian Huskinson is here with us today he is the CEO of Elemental Coatings, a Houston based company and let me run down a little bit about about Brian's background he's uh an impressive guy um Harvard educated also has his Ph.d in Materials Science from Harvard where he did a lot of research on grid scale energy storage so at the very end of this podcast definitely stick around we talk about some of that and some of the research he's done and talk a little bit about the the grid scale energy storage after college he went to work for McKinsey and company the legendary consulting firm worked for them for five years and today he is the CEO of Elemental Coatings uh which was founded back in 2018 and they're really getting moving on this anti-icing coating that has applications in wind energy in aerospace i mean in slip and fall like all sorts of safety issues uh you know this coating can help because it helps ice uh shed quickly where it'll fracture and sort of slide off and you can you know get rid of it and get on your way so alan what were some of your takeaways from our conversation with Brian well Brian's company has very very interesting technology because of the way that they de-iced uh structures surfaces it's not the typical uh sort of hydrophobic things you see at home depot it's a lot more technology into it and it has a lot more applications so it can be used in aerospace it can be used in on wind turbines it can be used on homes uh so the the applications are are nearly endless but Brian's company has really positioned themselves i i think uh to to be uh going into wind turbines and to apply the coating to a winter blade to help keep ice off the wind turbine blades would be huge particularly in the united states and the midwest of the united states where a lot of wind turbine blades don't have ice de-icing technology this coating can be added secondarily on an existing blade and help keep the ice off the blades that's huge yeah and obviously since the the texas power outage disaster back in uh i guess was it january now i'm losing track of time february february earl earlier this year in 2021 you know we we wanted to have some different experts with potentially different solutions to what might be done about this because it's not clear uh you know we had la say yet to go from WICETEC out of finland and they supply blade heating technology right so that was one you know bona fide solution and then uh Brian with Elemental Coatings this is a solution that maybe makes sense for those where you know the expense of blade heating isn't isn't going to add up because it's not going to be right for every and there might be potential where...