Should OEMs lease equipment? Philip Totaro says the better question is, when will they? The idea may be more attractive to OEMs than it first appears. Crane safety is always important, and new concepts in crane systems should be more efficient and economical, as well as safer. The Uptime crew discusses some of the new designs and RWE's recent investment in WindSpider.



In parts of Europe, the average age of a wind turbine is 15 years old, so it's time to talk about repowering - and how to fund it. NREL will award $2.9M to manufacturers of small- and medium-scale wind turbine technology. Meanwhile, NASA is starting to think about wind turbines on Mars. Sure, there are some engineering challenges, but if we can grow potatoes on the red planet, we can do anything.







Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com



Wind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.com



Weather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.com



Intelstor - https://www.intelstor.com



WindSpider - https://windspider.com







Small and Medium US Wind Turbine Companies: Bergey Windpower Company - https://www.bergey.com Carter Wind Turbines - https://carterwind.com Eocycle America Corporation - https://eocycle.com Pecos Wind Power - https://pecoswindpower.com Primus Wind Power - https://www.primuswindpower.com RRD Engineering - https://rrdengineering.com Sonsight Wind - http://www.sonsightwind.com Windurance LLC - https://www.windurance.com Windward Engineering - http://windwardengineering.com Xflow Energy Company - https://www.xflowenergy.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 145



Allen Hall: Well, as we record this episode, and it is just before Christmas, so as you listen to this, it's just after Christmas, so I hope everybody had a, had a good holiday, an enjoyable Christmas time. In Australia, evidently they don't have snow, so as, and Joel is in someplace where they don't have snow either, but they're trying to have snow.



 



Joel Saxum: We have 22 degrees . 



Allen Hall: That's what they're saying. We up here in the, in the Hardy Northeast will have plenty of snow, it looks like for Christmas. So we'll have a white Christmas. That'll be very enjoyable. And this week we're talking about a number of subjects and the the top one is Phil Totaro comes back on from Interstor of course.



And he had an interesting discussion about wind turbine leasing. Does it make sense for OEMs to lease their wind turbines instead of selling them to make the economics work better for the operators?



Joel Saxum:  And we'll talk about WindSpider, which is a climbing crane or climbing ish crane that RWE investing in to help some of their offshore operations.



And we'll see, is it gonna be better for offshore construction? Can it help some onshore construction? We'll see what happens there. And then as well jumping over to the us en re and taking some federal funds and investing into some of these small to medium size wind turbine companies. So Rosemary gives us some tips on where their, where these small wind turbines are useful and.



where they absolutely are not. And 



Rosemary Barnes: then we move on to Repowering In Europe, they have a lot of wind turbines that are 15 or even 20 years old. So Repowering is gonna be a big thing in the next few years. And finally, we talk about wind turbines on Mars and yeah, what design changes they would need to make to get them working there and whether that's gonna help us here on earth.



Allen Hall: I'm Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech,