Allen Hall interviews Anders Røpke, CEO of Wind Power LAB, about their innovative software product, LASSIE. LASSIE helps wind farm operators detect and mitigate lightning damage to their turbines by analyzing global lightning data and providing alerts when turbines may be at risk. With its affordable subscription model and seamless integration, LASSIE offers a cost-effective solution for protecting wind farm assets and maintaining a prudent operational track record. Visit https://lassie.windpowerlab.com/ for more information!



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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I have a special guest today, Anders Røpke, who is the founding partner and CEO of Wind Power LAB, which is based in Copenhagen, Denmark. And Wind Power LAB is an expert on blades and things around blades, but we're here today not to talk necessarily about blades directly, but we're here to talk about lightning protection and lightning detection and what operators can do to make their Wind farm, less susceptible to big lightning damage.



Yeah, that's Anders, well, welcome to the program.



Anders Røpke: Thank you very much. Thank you for having me, uh, I'm sure.



Allen Hall: So we're, we're in San Diego, which the weather's a lot better than Copenhagen at the moment. Uh, I was in Copenhagen a week and a half ago, two weeks ago. It was snowing, cold, miserable, and here it's nice and sunny, and there's a beach, and it's, it's not a bad place to be.



So we're at, uh, ACP OM&S and talking all things, of all things, lightning. And so Windpower LAB has developed a new, it's basically a software product or an app, so to speak. It's called LASSIE.



Anders Røpke: It's called LASSIE, like you know the watchdog. Yes. Because we need something or someone to take care of our wind turbines.



Yes, we definitely do. And as you could tell earlier in the week here in California, you had really poor weather. Horrible weather. Thunderstorms and whatnot. And let's bring out the elephant in the room, the lightning. Lightning issues, right? And, um, with this product of ours, our offering is, you know, you can simply just go out and inspect the turbines that is in risk.



Yes. And, um, how is that possible? Well, we use, it's a global solution. It's something you can just add coordinates of the turbines to the system. And by doing that, you'll get an overview of the relevant lightning strikes within the area where you have your turbines. Right. Yes. So let's say you have. In the States, wind farms are huge, 500 turbines, which one should I inspect after this, after the lightning storm?



Allen Hall: Big, great question to have.



Anders Røpke: So it might be in the Southeastern part of the wind farm, right? But again, why should you do it? And hopefully the turbine survived the thunderstorm because they're designed for it, but let's go check anyway. So we can pinpoint where to go and check. You get a work order list, you get all the relevant, uh, lightning data information.



And then we relate this to the IEC standard and the blade type, the LPS system you have installed. Do we have any certain risk on those specific turbines you should address? That's a good insight.



Allen Hall: Okay, so the LASSIE system is taking some of the global lightning network data and saying, okay, we know where the lightning strikes occur.