ORE Catapult Blade Survey, Siemens Gamesa Turns a Profit

ORE Catapult wants industry blade failure data, Siemens Gamesa posts its first profit since 2022, and Vattenfall sweeps Denmark's offshore auction. Fill out the ORE Catapult survey!

The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime's Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary's "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Sted, and Yolanda Padron. And it has been a real interesting week out in the renewable land, uh, if you've been watching some of the news, and we're gonna talk about a number of those stories this week.

But I wanna lead off with what ORE Catapult is doing over in the UK. So if, if you haven't followed ORE Catapult, they are a, a research investigative arm and a huge proponent of wind, offshore wind in the United Kingdom, and they've done a, a tre- really tremendous amount of work in some of the, uh, particular problems that exist in wind trying to help [00:01:00] 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. Uh, a lot of it is asking specific questions about torsional stability of blades.

Have you seen more difficulty with torsion? Is... Do we need a torsion test? I think that was one of the questions. Uh, also looking at ranking of the different issues that happen with blades in particular. That's what I noticed. Uh, you know, where's lightning? Where's blade connections? Where's structural issues?

Where do you rank all those different things? And I, I have not seen a survey like this in quite a while. Is this something that we need to do more of? I know [00:02:00] ORE Catapult will get a huge amount of feedback, at least I hope, over in the UK and, and around Europe. I don't think many Americans are gonna be contributing to that too much since you 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: Yeah, I think these surveys are a really good idea. Uh, the only thing that scares me from the owner side is that sometimes there's a little bit of, uh- Teams don't really love the idea of sharing information that might seem like it's, um, like intellectual property to their internal teams.

Even if as an engineer, of course, you love the idea of sharing and finding out like, um, what everybody else is, is experiencing on their site. Um, 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 [00:03:00] for everybody to use.

I know I looked at the survey myself and some of the questions kind of gave people the, the opportunity to kind of anonymize their data and then just kind of share it and have it. It seemed like it, it would probably be a platform that everybody could look at or everybody that, 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, to be able to be a bit more prepared, um, since a lot of these sites are from different own- owners. But I think it's a really good idea.

Allen Hall: The survey asked questions about leading edge erosion, torsional loads, root joint integrity, lightning damage, manufacturing defects, which is a big [00:04:00] issu