Allen and Joel recap their experience at the 2023 Blades Europe Forum, discussing key differences between the European and American wind industries. They touch on topics like thermal imaging for blade inspections, EU-funded blade research projects focused on actionable results, perspectives on the value of FSAs, and handling the data deluge from modern turbine sensors. They also recount visiting Aerones' extensive Riga facilities, detailing how the drone services provider has grown into a sizable global operation. Overall, they found Blades Europe to be more academically focused than the American version and gained several useful wind industry insights from the Amsterdam conference.



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Allen Hall: We went to the Van Gogh Museum before Blades Europe. And that was one of the cooler things we saw in Amsterdam. We didn't have a long time there, but it was fascinating to see the self portraits. That was the little highlight was a bunch of self portraits by Van Gogh of himself, with the ear, without the ear.



Both ears, both still there. Yeah. And he looked like a guy from Northern Europe, right? So there's an early, there's actually a photograph of him as, I don't know, 18, 19 year old kid, and he's like clean shaven. He's got both ears. He looks like a person you'd run into on the street today. A lot of tourists come through Amsterdam, of course, a lot of UK youth that we noticed were running around having a good time and good for them. But yeah, a crazy week on the road. We spent the whole week over in Europe. We went to Amsterdam, we went to Riga, Latvia, and then we ended our tour in Copenhagen for a night.



So a whirlwind tour and stay tuned because we have a lot to discuss about Blades Europe Forum.



Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Joel Saxum. And we just got back from Blades Europe Forum 2023 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. And we sat through all the sessions, at least the vast majority of them, so that you didn't have to. And we wanted to touch on some of the highlights that we saw at the Blades Europe forum.



Because there was a lot of good information there and a lot of good discussion points. And as Joel and I discussed in between sessions and at dinner the United States and Europe are going in different directions. And I wrote a LinkedIn post about it, which got a lot of traffic. So we should talk about that too, Joel, while we're at it.



Joel Saxum: Like Allen was saying, one of the things we notice here is, okay the audience at Blades USA, when you're there, if you're in the Blades world in the United States, you've probably been to Blades USA, or at least one of your colleagues has. The reason being is it's a lot of operators, right? So there's performance engineers, there's an eng, performance analysts.



There's blade engineers, there's mechanical engineers, there's all these asset managers. There's the people responsible for making sure that the blades are running on. Your wind farms are at blades. You Blades, USA, right? I think, what was the last year, about 200 people there Allen in, in Austin?



Allen Hall: Yeah, maybe a little more.



Joel Saxum: Yeah, so to get a little bit of a different view on it this event is, you would think, an on the outside of carbon copy. Haymarket puts on this, it's through Wind Power Monthly. Blades USA, Blades Europe. Same logos,