ORE Catapult Blade Survey, Siemens Gamesa Turns a Profit

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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** (0:17)
Welcome to The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And it has been a really interesting week out in the renewable land. If you've been watching some of the news, and we're going to talk about a number of those stories this week. But I want to lead off with what ORE Catapult is doing over in the UK. So if you haven't followed ORE Catapult, they are a research investigative arm and a huge proponent of wind, offshore wind in the United Kingdom. And they've done a really tremendous amount of work in some of the particular problems that exist in wind trying to help solve them. They have a survey that's out. And if you haven't seen it, you can just Google ORE Catapult and put in survey, and you'll come to either an article or get to their site. And Rosemary and Yolanda, there's a couple of particular items that they're asking questions about.
A lot of VIT is asking specific questions about torsional stability of blades. Have you seen more difficulty with torsion? Do we need a torsion test? I think that was one of the questions. Also looking at ranking of the different issues that happen with blades in particular. That's what I noticed.
Where is lightning? Where is blade connections? Where is structural issues? Where do you rank all those different things? I have not seen a survey like this in quite a while.
Is this something that we need to do more of? I know ORE Catapult will get a huge amount of feedback, at least I hope, over in the UK and around Europe. I don't think many Americans are going to be contributing to that too much. They don't have a lot of offshore wind. But is this going in the right direction? Do we need more of these industry surveys about structural blade issues?

**Yolanda Padron** (2:19)
Yeah, I think these surveys are a really good idea. The only thing that scares me from the owner's side is that sometimes there's a little bit of teams don't really love the idea of sharing information that might seem like it's intellectual property to their internal teams, even if as an engineer, of course, you love the idea of sharing and finding out what everybody else is experiencing on their site.
And so I really hope that the teams can really look, like their internal teams can really look past that because this would be a really great tool for everybody to use. I know I looked at the survey myself and some of the questions kind of gave people the opportunity to kind of anonymize their data and then just kind of share it and have it. It seemed like it would probably be a platform that everybody could look at or everybody that shared could look at. And I think that it could be really, really good for operators to be able to know kind of if what they're seeing on site is normal and just to be able to see what they're signing up for when there's a new site coming in or if it's a site that's been operational for a while, you can see what's, hopefully, what's happening to a quite older site than yours. So just to be able to be a bit more prepared, since a lot of these sites are from different owners. But I think it's a really good idea.

**Allen Hall** (3:51)
The survey asked questions about leading edge erosion, torsional loads, route joint integrity, lightning damage, manufacturing defects, which is a big issue right now, extreme loading events, which also is coming about more often.
Repair performance and end of life fatigue. So there's a series of questions about that. And when do you experience these items in the lifetime of a blade? Is it more towards the beginning of the operation or more towards the end? It is important to know because how you go about managing blades depends on that. The torsional questions were more specific.
In your experience, how well understood are the effects on blade longevity of torsional loads compared to bending loads? And I think that relates back to some of the issues that have been seen on some offshore blades where there's no existing test for torsion because it's so hard to do. Whereas bending loads, we pretty well understand that it can do lifetime testing essentially for bending loads. So the torsional one, I think, is going to raise a lot of question marks to hopefully with people and we can come up with a better approach to that.