New research and work on thermoplastic blade construction has yielded some excitement in the community, and Allen and Rosemary discuss the commercial viability of these turbine blades. Vestas has invested in S&L Access crane technology, and their Salamander Quick Lift looks like a step in the right direction. The small Block Island wind farm now has four of its five turbines stopped for "routine maintenance"...but is something bigger at play?



Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. 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. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! 







Transcript: EP73 - Will Battery Fires Set Renewables Back? Thermoplastic Blade Tech + Vestas Invests in Cranes



This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you're wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape 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 strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today's podcast. Welcome back. I'm Dan Blewett



I'm Allen Hall.



And I'm Rosemary Barnes



And this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am your co-host Dan Blewett - on today's episode. We're going to talk about a recent battery fire from one of the Tesla mega packs burn for about three straight days until



it burn itself out in Victoria, Australia. So we'll talk about some of the implications and whether we should be concerned about battery technology as it takes off, whether that's going to be a problem for renewables. We'll also chat a little bit about the Block Island Wind Farm, which has five turbines up in New England.



Four of them are currently offline, and they've got some subsea cable issues that might need to be reburied. So we'll talk through some of the problems are having there. We're also going to talk a little bit about the fishing sector sector.



Get Rosemarie's take here on some new reporting from The Guardian about, you know, whether the UK is sacrificing their fishing sector for offshore wind and whether this is really a Zero-Sum game or if everyone can get along. We'll talk about some new technology in cranes, the salamander lift system and what that means as Vestas investors invests in



that technology. And lastly, kind of our big topic today, we'll talk about thermoplastic blades, some interesting technology about how to ban them using metal foils. And, well, this is going to be a sustainable practice, whether it will work with lightning issues and all that.



So we've got two great minds on blades here. So before we get going, I want to remind you, you can sign up for uptime tech news in the show notes of today's podcast, no matter where you're listening on YouTube, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher.



Just click below and you can sign up for our weekly newsletter where we'll send you an update on the podcasts and all of the latest news around the market. So let's get going. Alan, I know you want to talk batteries.



So this big mega pack fire out in Australia sounds pretty scary. What what was the story here with Tesla on this fire?



Well, they don't have any details yet. And Rosemary may have a little more because she's a little closer to it than we are. But it's a big lithium ion pack battery packs out. And they were in construction mode, it sounded like.



And they had an accident in a fire.