『The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast』のカバーアート

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

著者: Allen Hall Rosemary Barnes Yolanda Padron & Matthew Stead
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Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Yolanda Padron, and Matthew Stead break down the latest research, tech, and policy.Copyright 2026, Weather Guard Lightning Tech 地球科学 生物科学 科学
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  • Pardalote Studies Australian Blade Erosion and Heat Fatigue
    2026/07/30
    Rosemary Barnes, CEO and founder of Pardalote Consulting, joins to discuss their new grant-funded study of blade erosion and heat fatigue in Australia. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall 2025: Well, Rosemary, welcome back to the show. Rosemary Barnes: Thanks, Allen. Great to be here. For, it’s been a while since we did one of these one-on-one episodes, like a, yeah, a proper, proper guest. Allen Hall 2025: Well, this is kind of a celebratory episode because your company, Pardalote Consulting, has been awarded, uh, some funding from the Australian Capital Territory’s government for the Energy Innovation Fund. Rosemary Barnes: It’s a really good program that the ACT government has to try and get energy innovation In the state. It’s not a state actually, it’s technically a territory. Little more than just Canberra, the city. Uh, but there are actually quite a few, like, really interesting energy-related companies here, partly ’cause of the, the fund I think helps, but also just tracing back like, [00:01:00] uh, y- you know, in the 20-teens, Australia had a really conservative government that hated renewable energy, and the ACT government had a commitment at that time to 100%, um, 100% renewable electricity for the, the government. And that was one of the only programs that was resulting in a lot of, um, you know, clean energy projects being built, and one of the conditions that they put on that, uh, for people that would win PPAs with the ACT was that you had to have your headquarters in Canberra. So we’ve actually got quite a few, quite a few really cool, innovative companies out of here. Um, like Neoen’s headquarters here. Windlab, uh, yeah, was, was founded here and still has a lot of people here. Pardalote obviously, and you know, a few other companies as well. So despite it being a small city of like, I don’t know, maybe it’s up to 400,000 or something people by now, um, yeah, there is actually quite a lot going on here for energy. Allen Hall 2025: And the Energy Innovation Fund is funded by the wind and solar operators in the area, and your particular [00:02:00] effort has really global consequences. You’re focusing on two areas involving how wind turbines survive Australia, but more, uh, of relevance is to just really tough conditions which exist not just in Australia but around the world. What two areas are you going to focus on? Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. So the two focus areas are leading edge erosion and high temperature fatigue, which we can probably get into the definitions of those in a minute. But basically my, um– what led me to wanna have a project like this was that when I moved back to Australia in 2021, I– and I started working in O&M, uh, I noticed that the wind turbines that I would look at, the blades that I would look at here behaved really differently to the ones that I worked with overseas. You know, es- especially with leading edge erosion, like often I would be doing a condition assessment of a, you know, a new wind farm. Um, might only have been operating for, you know, two years. That’s a pretty common time for people to get in and do a condition assessment [00:03:00] because their warranty period is about to end and they wanna, you know, make sure that everything is okay. Um, and I would just notice that often, like 90, 100% of blades would already have bad erosion after just a couple of years, which is super-duper fast. And then there are some tools available to check, um, like what kind of erosion are you likely to experience on your site. Like is it a higher severity erosion site or a, a low severity one? Um, and you basically, you know, the status quo globally is to just look at the annual rainfall, um, and the tip speed. And if you’ve got, you know, high for both of those, that’s a bad erosion site. And if you’ve got low for both of those, it’s a, a low erosion site. But when I plotted out the wind farms that I knew had really bad erosion problems onto, you know, a chart with those two axes, I just saw a random distribution of dots. You know? Like, this was not– uh, this had no predictive value for Australian wind farms. And so that led me to believe that, okay, um, you know, things are a bit [00:04:00] different here. Makes sense, you know, most of the knowledge that we have about how wind turbines operate, it’s been developed and validated mostly in Northern Europe. You know? Like it’s,...
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    32 分
  • Dominion Absorbs $800M in Tariffs, Nordex Profits Double
    2026/08/03
    Allen covers Dominion’s $800M tariff hit, Eversource’s 84% profit drop, Nordex’s record quarter, and a looming floating wind vessel shortage. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Good Monday, everyone. Let us start this week with a number. Eight hundred million dollars. That is what tariffs on steel and aluminum added to Dominion Energy’s Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. Dominion President Bob Blue shared the damage on a second-quarter earnings call. Two hundred and thirty million dollars … just in the latest quarter alone. That is on top of the five hundred and eighty million from the quarter before. The project is eighty-one percent complete. Thirty-one turbines are already spinning … producing more than four hundred and fifty megawatts. But the finish line just moved. Completion is now expected by the end of twenty twenty-seven. Weather delays. Vessel maintenance. And some particularly complicated turbines to install. Blue says the project will still save customers money. And Dominion expects to pocket more than five hundred million dollars in savings from grid upgrade cost shifts. The total price tag … eleven-point-six billion dollars. Now … if Dominion is feeling the squeeze in Virginia … Eversource up in New England is feeling something worse. The utility’s second-quarter profit dropped eighty-four percent. Net income fell to just fifty-three-point-seven million dollars. Why? A one-hundred-and-sixty-four-million-dollar charge tied to the offshore wind projects they already sold. South Fork Wind. Revolution Wind. Eversource got out of offshore wind back in twenty twenty-four … but the bills keep coming. Higher-than-expected payments to Global Infrastructure Partners are dragging down the bottom line. So one company builds through the pain. Another walks away … and still pays for it. But here is some good news. Over in Hamburg, Germany … Nordex just posted a quarter that would make any CEO smile. Sales up sixteen percent. EBITDA … more than doubled … to two hundred and twenty-four million euros. Margins hit ten-point-three percent. Net income … one hundred and eleven million euros. Up from thirty-one million a year ago. And orders? Up thirty-two percent. Three-point-one gigawatts of new turbine orders in just one quarter. Their total order book now stands at eighteen-point-four billion euros. Nordex CEO José Luis Blanco confirmed the full-year guidance. The onshore wind giant is not just surviving. It is thriving. Now … let us go to sea. Classification society ABS says floating offshore wind is about to create a brand-new problem. Not enough ships. A new report says demand for large anchor-handling vessels and multipurpose support vessels will surge as floating wind projects go from small demonstrations to full commercial scale. Here is the number that tells the story. A single one-gigawatt floating wind farm needs about one hundred and ninety-eight anchors … and nearly two hundred kilometers of mooring lines. That is far more than a single deepwater oil and gas platform. ABS says shortages in certain vessel classes could hit as early as twenty twenty-nine. Global floating wind capacity is expected to grow from about two hundred and seventy megawatts today … to fourteen gigawatts by twenty forty. The race for ships … has begun. And speaking of ships … Japan just finished building one. Mitsui O.S.K. Lines held a naming ceremony in Nagasaki for the Wind Whale. Japan’s first coastal deck carrier built specifically for offshore wind. One hundred and forty-nine meters long. A flush deck designed so that monopiles, towers, blades and nacelles can roll right on from the stern. It even has dynamic positioning … so it can transfer cargo directly to installation vessels at sea. Built in China by Taizhou Sanfu Ship Engineering … the Wind Whale will carry foundations from a factory in Okayama to construction sites around Japan. A country that once built ships for oil … now builds them for wind. And finally … back home in Iowa. The state Supreme Court ruled that the CEO of Global Fiberglass Solutions can be held personally liable for dumping thirteen hundred used wind turbine blades across the state. CEO Donald Lilly and another executive argued they were never in Iowa. The court disagreed. Lilly signed the contracts. Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird put it plainly. They were hired to recycle used wind turbine blades. Instead … they dumped them. Four hundred blades piled up along Interstate 35 near Ellsworth alone. The lesson? You can build an industry on ...
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    4 分
  • Blade Breaks at He Dreiht, Suzlon Posts Record Quarter
    2026/08/04
    A V236 blade fails during construction at He Dreiht. Plus a 53 GW US wind forecast, Suzlon’s record quarter, and what turbine noise really measures. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape. Protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit striketape.com. And now your hosts Allen Hall: Welcome to the “Uptime Wind Energy” podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes. And to lead off this week, s- there’s been some trouble in the North Sea. On July 22nd, a blade failed on one of the turbines at EnBW’s 960-megawatt He Dreiht offshore wind farm. Uh, EnBW spokesperson said there were no injuries, thank goodness, and that the authorities were notified immediately, which is generally the case in Europe. They’re very safety conscious, of course. But the machine was a Vestas V236, which is a– that 15-megawatt offshore turbine that Vestas is offering. And He Dreiht is where the platform [00:01:00] has made its debut. So Vestas and EnBW are working together on an investigation, an RCA, a- along, uh, looking at the environmental impact because parts of the blade landed in the water. And the, the images I saw online were like a sheer web that was being pulled in onto a ship, so big pieces of blade. Uh, there’s gonna be 64 of these turbines going into that wind farm, but this is probably a little bit of a weird thing because it does seem like that the wind farm is under construction when the blade broke, which is not the first time this has happened, right? That we’ve seen blade breaks at, uh, Vineyard Wind and at Dogger Bank on the GE side. Is this just a construction issue, Yolanda, you think? Or is it some sort of, uh, vibration that’s happening during construction that’s putting extra stress on the blades? Yolanda Padron: We were talking about it a little bit offline and how it might be a loading [00:02:00] issue because it’s not, uh, it’s not in the optimal operating, uh, conditions, right? Uh, but this is– It’s– I don’t like that it’s becoming a trend more than an anomaly from what we’ve seen on this podcast. Uh, Matt, I know you work a lot in solutions, right? What, what would you recommend people start doing? Matthew Stead: Yeah. I think, um, more and more there’s ways of just checking out, you know, pre-construction, um, you know, some of the vibration modes, some of the unusual, um, wind loading when it’s in standstill, you know, different yaw angles and so forth. So there, there’s more and more ways of, um, checking out what the blade is doing when it’s in those unusual, um, sort of pre-con, pre-operation phases. So, um, you know, for instance, um, we do know that there is some sort of sometimes edgewise or flatwise vibration, which, um, you know, maybe is not normal, um, and maybe could be, be [00:03:00] thought about in a bit more detail. Um, certainly I know there are some research organizations which are looking into this and also, you know, things like blade twists. Um, so what is actually happening in terms of the, um, the twisting of the blade along, along its axis. Allen Hall: I think the last time this happened, I remember going back and looking at patents about how to protect the blades during this construction phase. So you wanna prevent the blade from generating lift from sideways winds pretty much. So the designs that I saw were like putting like a, a netting across the blade to disrupt the airflow so that it wouldn’t generate lift. But I haven’t really seen that implemented. Maybe it is being implemented, but these loads are a little odd, right? I, I, I’m wondering if there’s any IEC certification test that looks into them, uh, just because it’s, it’s happened a couple of times now, more than a handful. Matthew Stead: We, we saw, um, we saw that picture of some blades on the ground. [00:04:00] You remember they were in storage. Um, there was a, a strong wind that came across them when they were in storage, and there was some, some flutter and, you know, some, some damage it caused, uh, even when they were on the ground. Um, yeah, I think just thinking out loud, you know how on some, you know, wind stacks and, or, you know, turbine stacks and, um, you know, poles, you know, exhaust stacks. Sorry, that’s the word I’m looking for. Exhaust stacks. They have the, the spiral around it. You know, it’s for around vortex shedding. So maybe it’s an opportunity for, for Rosie to ...
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    34 分
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