This week we discuss Keystone Tower Systems' spiral-welding technology, which should speed up the construction process and drive costs down. The US DOE likes the sound of that. Meanwhile, Modvion's wood laminate towers also have high-profile investors (Vestas, among others) but Rosemary says steel is more sustainable. Find out what's good, and what's still unknown, about both tower technologies.



Stephen Steen of Poseidon Systems explains how debris monitoring discovers potential failures that vibration monitoring can miss. With more than 10,000 installations, Poseidon's database delivers intelligence that operators can use to get gear boxes fixed or replaced while they're under warranty. Some OEMs are incorporating the information in new designs, too.



Visit Poseidon Systems here - https://www.poseidonsys.com



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! 






Uptime 117



Stephen Steen: You know, we can get a really good understanding of what's happening within that care box from early stage faults, all the way to late stage faults. And so overall that gives us a great opportunity to detect. Relatively early, um, when things are starting to fail and actually track severity of that fault over time as well.



Allen Hall: Welcome to the uptime podcast. I am your co-host Allen hall and I'm here with Dr. Rosemary Barnes and Joel Saxum. We got a really event packed 



Joel Saxum: show. So we're gonna talk about two, uh, emerging tower technologies, one to do a spiral, welding, a technique borrowed from Newland gas industry, and then also laminated wood towers, uh, being built up in the Scandinavian countries.



Allen Hall: And then we have a guest interview with Steven steam, vice president of sales and marketing with post site and systems. And he's gonna talk to us about debris detection and keeping your gearbox running. And 



Rosemary Barnes: we're gonna talk about whether Australia is about to face a skill shortage for workers to drive our really fast energy transition.



Rosemary Barnes: And finally, we're gonna talk about a portable winter turbine that you can take put in a backpack and take camping with you to charge your devices. All right, everybody 



Allen Hall: first topic for the week. Spiral welding of wind Turine towers. And now I, I saw this discuss probably a year, a year or so ago, and it went absolutely nowhere.



Allen Hall: Like nobody in the press picked it up. I, I did some, actually a little bit of deep diving on this company. It's called Keystone tower systems and they have developed sort of large scale spiral, welding. And Joel, you may be more familiar with this, uh, work coming on oil and gas. Uh, you ever seen spiral welding where they make pipes and things like that that are spiral welded together real quick and dirty.



Allen Hall: Yeah. 



Joel Saxum: Yeah. So, yeah, absolutely. But think about, uh, I guess this the E most easy way to think about this is, uh, you ever seen a seamless rain gut? Yeah, sure. Machine. Yeah. Right. So when they have, they have the stock steel, they have the trailer, they run the seamless gutter thing and then kick it out. Right.



Joel Saxum: Right. Of course it's a different process, but it same concept on, on site. You're bringing in stock materials instead of a classical pipeline. Um, building is truckloads and truckloads and truckloads of 40 foot pipes, 40 foot pipes, 40 foot pipes. Right. And then that's, you know, heavy, there's a lot of, uh, you know, a.



Joel Saxum: Combustible materials used to, to create those, a lot of hydrocarbons burn to, to make it.