The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast

By: Allen Hall Rosemary Barnes Joel Saxum & Phil Totaro
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  • Summary

  • Uptime is a renewable energy podcast focused on wind energy and energy storage technologies. Experts Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Phil Totaro break down the latest research, tech, and policy.
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Episodes
  • Wind Tech Training Excellence at Deutsche Windtechnik

    Wind Tech Training Excellence at Deutsche Windtechnik
    Feb 20 2025
    Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik discuss their innovative training programs for wind turbine technicians. Momme, as Head of Training Center, and Russ, as Director of Quality and Ops Support, explore how the company is tackling workforce challenges through apprenticeships and advanced training methods in both Europe and the US. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update 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 Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Wind Energy is facing a critical workforce challenge, finding and retaining skilled technicians to maintain the growing fleet of turbines. This week we speak with Momme Feddersen and Russ Leach from Deutsche Windtechnik. Deutsche Windtechnik is setting new standards for technician development through their comprehensive training programs, combining hands-on experience with cutting edge technology. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Momme and Russ, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Momme Feddersen: Thank you. Good to be here. Thank you so much. Allen Hall: Well Deutche Wind Technique. Has always, to me, been a really high standard in terms of a company. But that comes through training. And Deutsche Windtechnik spends a great amount of time and energy on the training side. I want to talk to some of the challenges that are out there first, and what are some of those challenges that exist in training wind turbine technicians today? Russ Leach: Yeah, so they're the same ones we've had since my entire time in wind. It's finding the qualified personnel who are ready, available to climb that turbine and do great maintenances and great troubleshooting. The problem has been exacerbated with the growth of renewables with wind, right? They're harder to come by. Um, And we're all fighting for the same people, aren't we? So that's why we have our training programs, right? We have to start people out from nothing many times and build them up and get those competencies out there with them. Um, and, um, that's the main challenge. Plus the distributed nature of the workforce, right? We're, we're across the country here in MoMA, they're, they're across Europe. And, um, so you have to put mechanisms in place to get the training to them many times and get them competent and, and verified as competent many times out where they're at. So it's a combination of Training facilities, which are very valuable, but also training that extends out to the field with the people themselves. Allen Hall: And Mame, let's talk about the technical challenges because wind turbines have gotten more complicated. There's more computers in them. There's more electronics in them. There's more cooling systems. How has that impacted the training of technicians? Did it just make it harder because there's so much new things happening? Momme Feddersen: Here in Deutsche Windtechnik, we have to, we are focusing more and more on the, um, not on the, on the, on the MOOC. Highest moderns, tur, modern turbines, um, but more, um, on the older ones. So, um, but uh, when we look into the future, the, the topics you say are, are exactly the topics we have to, we have to face. Um, what what we did in the past was focusing on the practical side of the training and not focusing on the theoretical side. That's why I think we did a. Kind of, um, interesting approach, uh, how we train here in Germany. Um, as you know, we are a multi brand, uh, company. We are servicing different brands.
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    28 mins
  • Wind Energy O&M Australia’s Success in Melbourne

    Wind Energy O&M Australia’s Success in Melbourne
    Feb 18 2025
    For the first time ever, all the Uptime hosts are in the same place! They discuss the fantastic outcome of the Wind Energy O&M Australia conference last week, highlighting the amazing presentations, attendees, and discussions. Keep an eye out for next year's event! Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update 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 Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by BuildTurbines. com. Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: For the first time ever, I think all four of us on the podcast are in The same location at the same time. Rosemary Barnes: If you include our amazing producer. So Allen Hall: this is a unique time and we just finished wind energy, O& M Australia. which was completely packed, insanely full, and it was a day and a half of informative discussions, no sales talks per Rosemary's strict instructions. Good call. To get the information out to the industry and let everybody know what's happening around the world? Is it, Australia is a really unique place, Rosemary. There's a lot going on here. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, I think so. And the wind market is definitely unique. We've got a few unique problems. We also, a little bit different to other markets I've worked in, like in in Europe and in North America, where there are a lot of engineers around who've worked on the design and manufacturing side. We don't have those industries in Australia. And there aren't as many people filtering through with that deep technical knowledge. So it's taken us a bit longer to get to the point where one, people realize that they need to have that information. It's not enough to just have, a service agreement and trust that they know what they're doing and that they're acting in your best interest at every moment. And two, for people to begin to, yeah, get that expertise. There was no shortage of, Expertise on the panels. And yeah, my favorite thing about the conference was hearing just conversations going on, just, overhearing people just geeking out over some, really niche topic that they hadn't thought of that they'd heard, someone mentioned on stage, a couple of people connected who didn't know each other, and now they know that they're got the same problem or one of them's got a solution and one of them's got a problem. It's yeah, just exactly what I wanted from the conference. Joel Saxum: I think one of the things I took is this joke was told a few times, literally and figuratively on an island here in Australia when it comes to wind energy knowledge, right? So we tried to, when we put this conference together, we tried bringing some expertise from around the world. Simply because, it's hard to travel down here, right? That's just a simple fact. It's geographically remote. So bringing that expertise in here and And after we went through a bunch of things on stage, a lot of people talking on the sides like, I didn't know this solution existed. Like the Soren Kellenberger stuff from CNC Onsite. I didn't know you could precision machine things up tower. That was just like, to a lot of people that, that exists, right? Lightning protection upgrades do exist. There's people that can do it. There's things you can sense. Shadow monitoring of your fleet. Even when you have an an FSA with an OEM. Oh, this is a great concept. These are things that like in the States. In Europe,
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    37 mins
  • 8-Tree waveCHECK Makes Blade Wrinkle Detection Simple

    8-Tree waveCHECK Makes Blade Wrinkle Detection Simple
    Feb 13 2025
    In this Uptime Spotlight, Erik Klaas and Johannes Leib from 8-Tree discuss their waveCHECK system, which detects and measures surface defects on wind turbine blades. The system uses 3D optical scanning technology to identify wrinkles and other issues with high precision, helping improve quality control in blade manufacturing and maintenance. Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update 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 Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes' YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, we're diving into revolutionary blade inspection technology from 8-Tree. 8-Tree's WaveCheck system uses 3D optical scanning and augmented reality to detect and measure surface defects on wind turned blades with unprecedented precision. Joining us is Erik Klaas, the co founder and CTO of 8-Tree, and Johannes Leib, a program manager with 8-Tree, who brings over 15 years of wind blade industry experience, specializing in composites and fiber reinforced plastics. Joel Saxum: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Erik and Johannes, welcome to the show. Erik Klaas: We are glad to be on your podcast. Allen Hall: I'm excited to talk to both of you because I've seen your technology on YouTube quite a bit and now on LinkedIn and it's quite impressive. And I want to start by asking really, how are you trying to handle wrinkles? It seems like wrinkles are a huge problem in the wind industry. They're hard to detect and we're getting escapes out of the factory. You want to discuss how big of an issue wrinkles are. And Blades is at the moment. Erik Klaas: Yeah, most likely this is a good topic for Johannes to speak about for one hour. But as I got into this business late, maybe I get to give you my perspective. So when I got into the wind business first, our legacy is in aerospace. So I saw a wrinkle and I never thought it could be such a problem or lead to catastrophic results. What is a wrinkle? I happen to have a separate part here. Which is a mock up that we did. We do this for testing our system. A wrinkle basically is a deviation in the glass fiber layup of a turbine blade. And it's very small, so you can't even almost not see it. But it can lead to the blade cracking in these particular areas where the wrinkle happens. And therefore, the inspector's task is to measure how wide and how high is a wrinkle. And so the ratio between width and height is what they then calculate, and there's a limit to that ratio. And that is what an inspector has to do. And currently, they are doing it with hand tools. And a hand tool is a Dial gauge or it can be what they call a comp gauge. So they push it on the surface so they get the contour of this wrinkle and then with that contour they measure actually the width and the height of it. Allen Hall: It can be very difficult to detect some of these wrinkles because the laminates in these longer blades, the laminate is very thick. So if you have a wrinkle somewhere in the middle of this laminate, the surface Defect or the surface curvature change is minuscule, right? Erik Klaas: It is. And there is a limitation of our technology that I need to speak about. So we can only detect and measure those which are on the top layer. So if they go through the whole layup of layers and they are visible on the surface, we can measure them. And if they only appear in deeper layers, we can't. So you need like NDT measures,
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    26 mins

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