Is community ownership of off-shore wind farms going to continue to gain traction, thanks to companies like Ripple Energy? Can you really buy shares in a wind farm, and is it a smart investment? Plus, the Ocotillo wind farm in California has been shut down as a turbine collapses - what's going on down there in the desert? We also discuss the Romotion camera, Spanish Gas Tax, re-powering SGRE platforms and the state of leading edge erosion.



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! 







EP81 - Own a Share of an Off-Shore Wind Farm? Plus, Romotion Camera: Can it Replace Drones?



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 strike tape 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 Podcast. I'm your co-host and blew it on today's show. Big list of topics are discussed.



Number one, community ownership of offshore wind farms. Is this possible? So interesting company called Ripple is one of a few different companies on the Web who are starting to try to break up essentially commodities, if that's the right word, into where you can buy shares of them.



There's another company is doing this with artwork. So if you want to buy a share of a Picasso, essentially you could do that. And this is kind of the same concept. So we'll talk about. That's interesting idea. We'll also talk about this new Spanish gas tax.



There's a lot of issues with natural gas and and the price of it overseas right now and how that's going to affect the wind industry. So it's an interesting story about the ocotillo wind farm. It looks like it was a pretty rushed sort of project, had a lot of controversy, a lot of native people in the area



who are opposed to it. And it's been having consistent problems and it's currently shut down. So we'll talk about some of the implications there. We'll chat about leading edge erosion. There's a new article about a small company getting some funding out of Scotland and raising some questions here about, you know, what what is leading edge erosion look



like right now is the current state of these fixes and solutions and kind of where we headed. We'll also talk about Siemens, the Mesa's five platform, how they've upgraded that. And lastly, we'll talk with the row motion camera, which is a pretty cool piece of technology to take photos of wind turbine blades while the wind turbine is



still operating and rotating at a high speed. So before we get going, I want to remind you to subscribe to uptime tech news, which you'll find in the podcast show notes or description if you're watching here on YouTube.



That's just our weekly update email where you'll get an email of the new episode, helpful links, you know, all the other stuff around the Web if you want to stay up with wind energy news. And be sure to subscribe to Rosemary Barnes is awesome engineer with Rosie Channel, which is here on YouTube.



And we have a sponsor livestream with her a couple times a month. So check that out.