EP29 – Technician Safety, Uprating a Turbine and Wind Turbine Yaw Misalignment Problems & Solutions

In this episode we discussed wind turbine yaw misalignment and its common causes and solutions. We also talked through a recent turbine technician death, and what this tragedy means for the wind industry. Lastly, how easily can wind turbines be uprated to an increased power output? We dove into the GE Haliade X turbine's 13MW version, which is uprated from the original 12MW design. 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 show? Email us!  Full Transcript EP29 - Technician Safety, Uprating a Turbine? Plus Wind Turbine Yaw Misalignment Causes Welcome back i'm Allen hall. 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 Alright welcome back to the uptime podcast in today's episode the big two nine we're to cover a bunch of different topics number one unfortunately there was a death of a technician falling from a turbine so we'll chat a little bit about the implications for the industry there was also another broken blade on a wind farm out in illinois and uh we're also going to chat a little bit about some i guess there's been some a decrease in lightning recorded in the lower 48 states here in the U.S. So Allen's gonna talk about why that might be happening and some of the implications there but obviously in our first segment here you know there's uh some of the the pushback against wind energy is stuff like this you know safety worker safety uh broken wind farm blades and the safety concerns that they they hold so that's you know as much as wind energy is an important uh green seemingly good for the environment good for everyone there's always some downsides that uh you know pr and we have to kind of cover so in our engineering segment we're going to talk with the halle 8x turbine being upgraded from 12 to 13 megawatts and we'll chat a bunch about yaw misalignment and the power reduction that that causes and how we can kind of uh solve that issue so now let's talk first about the the worker death so unfortunately a 39 year old man fell to his death at the langford wind project in texas um cotton just awful thing but i mean what are the implications here for the for the industry it means this is going to have more regulations coming i mean is this an osha thing or definitely osha definitely oh she'll be on top of it and local regulators will be all over it and trying to figure out exactly what happened and usually when you're going up on a on a turbine you're not by yourself uh so there's probably some witnesses to what happened i i'd be surprised uh with as much safety equipment and and gear that are provided to the technicians that it was a gear problem but maybe it was um but there seems to be if you if you're around the wind turbine industry much at all you realize that there's paramount emphasis put on safety gear falling safety protocols check double check you're working around electricity and you're working at high out height places and it it is you so you got the steel toe twos you got the harnessing you're clipping in everywhere uh you've got the ...