The whole Uptime crew is back together this week! They debate the future of segmented wind turbine blades--are they needed anymore? Plus Vestas moves to boost its services business by fully acquiring weather forecasting firm Utopus Insights. Also, Fraunhofer's development of a drone-sprayed, biodegradable blade coating to prevent icing, and the challenges of mapping offshore wind farm sites and currents using subsea acoustic technology.



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Allen Hall: Okay, Rosemary, I was just saw the news article today where the Australian Post is going to stop delivering daily and you're only going to get your mail occasionally in Australia. And I'm wondering like how the heck that works. If you, when your mom sends you cookies, it's really important that they actually get there on time.



Now you have to sit there in the post office for a couple of days before they reach your doorstep. I don't know how that works. That's one part of a functioning civilization is that the mail arrives on time. Would you like to explain?



Rosemary Barnes: Yeah it's letters. Letters are going to be delivered every second day now instead of every day.



Yeah, so if your mum cooks you biscuits, then you can still get them delivered promptly. I think it's, the same trend that you're seeing in the US, I'm sure, and that everyone's seeing around the world, is that in terms of delivery, the profits are to be made in the parcel delivery. And letter delivery just is something that they're forced to do because, you need to have a post system, but everyone's just losing money on that part.



So they're trying to, lose less money without reducing the service too much. But how often do you need a letter delivered? It doesn't matter if it was delivered one day later. That's what, there's still express post obviously for that. If you need something delivered.



I'm fine with it. I'm going to, I'm going to be okay with this change.



Joel Saxum: There's a talking post so I'm back in Houston now and Houston being a big hub in the United States. I ordered something on Amazon today at 2 p. m. and it was here at 4 30. That is just crazy to me.



Like the, how fast, and it was just like some random dude in a car pulled up and ran over and, here's your super glue. I was like, oh dang, thanks man.



Allen Hall: So Vestas is increasing its expansion of the service business, I think. They've announced the acquisition of Utopus Insights. So they had purchased, actually purchased the company back in 2018 for roughly 100 million. Utopus Insights provides weather forecasting for solar and for wind. And that they have a platform which is pretty popular that a lot of the industry uses called Scipher.



And so it has advanced forecasting techniques. And we've seen some of these companies around at some of the conferences like ACP. That they're trying to predict tomorrow's or next week's weather. So you know how much energy you're going to be producing. But because Vestas already owned it, it looks like they're going to pull it all in house and make it a quote unquote Vestas company now instead of an investment.



This is interesting, Joel, just because as we wandered around Blades Europe and talked to some of the Europeans. Vestas is trying to make a big splash in the service business with the full service agreements and now looks like in some of the weather prediction.



Joel Saxum: Yeah,