What happens when a hurricane rips through one of the off-shore wind farms soon to be built in the U.S.? Can wind farms actually obstruct, absorb and decrease the destruction of a hurricane, as some researcher say? The Carolinas to the Gulf of Mexico encompass a third of U.S. coastline, and so in this episode we discuss wind turbines and hurricanes, the engineering, what we've learned from oil rigs, and what the research says. Plus - we discuss the Orbital Marine O2 tidal turbine, a very cool and powerful tidal power generator just now being deployed in the North Sea. Watch this great video on the O2 here and watch today's podcast on YouTube here.



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Can wind turbines withstand hurricanes?



0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow, learn more in the show notes of today's podcast.



0:37Welcome 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.



0:57All right, welcome back to the uptime wind energy podcast. I'm your co host, Dan Blewett. On today's show, we're gonna talk a lot about our great oceans. First we're gonna start with not wind energy, but tidal power, the orbital otoo, which is the super cool title power generator, two megawatts just getting deployed now into the Orkney Islands. So we'll chat a little bit about that. And then we're gonna talk about offshore wind and and in respect to hurricane. So this is something that I was thinking about a lot recently did a bunch of research for today's show. Because as wind power continues to, you know, gain traction the US in the offshore market, you know, the US is a pretty favorable environment for typhoons. So, we'll talk today about a lot of the engineering challenges and just the unpredictable nature of installing offshore wind farms in the US, a lot of which might be in the way of Hurricane alley. So Alan, first let's start with the orbital oh two, we were just checking out this YouTube video of the launch of this thing. It's like the size of a 747. It looks super well built looks very cool. I'm pretty impressed by it. What's your take here, it is cool looking. It's enormous in size, it's hard to get a perspective on it until you because it's when you see it in the water, it doesn't have any scale. to balance it off of when you see it mounted to the shipping truck, or whatever you call the moving vehicle what all I know, it must be 100 wheels on this thing. It's it's massive. It's really, it's really massive. It's interesting, but isn't it? I know that there's been a lot of discussion about wave technology and some title stuff over the last 20 years have I ever can recall. But this scoring in a slightly different direction where it's purposely designed vehicle for a particular spot in the world, I think to think the tides there are pretty strong. In the in the just the movement of the water, there's pretty strong. And what do we say it was? How many megawatts? Was it going to be a peak power? Was it?