21 – Crawling Repair Robots and Supercomputer Wind Calculations Plus Better Offshore Wind Farm Financing

In this episode of the uptime podcast, we discuss crawling wind turbine blade repair robots and how supercomputers are being used to calculate wind jets offshore to optimize placement of turbines. Lastly, floating wind turbine farms are getting a boost with new loan options. Learn more about Weather Guard Lightning Tech’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. Have a question we can answer on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast? Email us!  Full Transcript: EP21 Crawling Repair Robots and Supercomputer Wind Calculations Plus Better Offshore Wind Farm Financing Dan Blewett: This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make wind turbine lightning protection easy. If you're a wind farm operator, stop settling for damaged turbine blades and constant downtime. Get your uptime back with our strike table lightning protection system. Learn more in today's show notes or visit  dot com slash strike tape. Allen Hall: Welcome back I'm Allen hall. Dan Blewett: I'm Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection, and ways to keep your wind turbines running. All right, welcome back. This is uptime episode 21. And on today's show, we've got a bunch of great topics for you. First off, we're going to talk a little bit about financing for offshore wind. So there's a, a new type of loan that's become common on with onshore wind farms, but it looks like it might become viable soon for offshore. So is exciting. We'll talk a little bit about hydrogen. Um, Jeremy's got some things in the works. Uh, GE is also using. Supercomputers to figure out air flow, some of these complex, um, just types of circulation out there in the ocean. Pretty interesting. So they can kind of predict what some of these off shore sites, um, what they might yield. And then we're also going to talk a little bit about crawling robots, flying drones, some new technology in. Uh, when blade, uh, damage detection. And lastly, there's a pretty interesting paper on leading edge erosion that we're going to cover a lot of really interesting takeaways from that. Allen Hall: A lot of exciting things in, in wind news this week. Uh, w what I really want to talk about that G supercomputer, cause I think that's a cool technology, but let's start off with the offshore wind and the financing you want to describe that a little bit deeper? Dan Blewett: Yeah. Yeah. So non-recourse loans could really lower. Wind energies fixed costs. And it's suddenly, this is basically in, I guess, unsecured isn't exactly the right word, but on leveraged loan, is that how you interpret this? Allen Hall: Right? Uh, would be like, uh, getting a mortgage on your house, but they can't come take the house if you don't make it the payments. Dan Blewett: Yeah. So it sounds like it's basically secured by the, by the future profits.