EP30 – Ducted Wind Turbines? Plus Wind Turbine Fire Suppression & Lightning Strike Density

In this episode we discuss ducted wind turbines, which have a ring around the blade circumference, wind turbine fire severity and suppression systems, lightning strike density and how deaths are on the decline despite a higher population, and the new patent lawsuit between Siemens Gamesa and GE wind energy. 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: EP30 - Ducted Wind Turbines? Plus Wind Turbine Fire Suppression & Lightning Strike Density 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 all right welcome back to the uptime podcast and on today's episode we've got a actually really interesting show so first thing we're going to cover today is new lawsuit from Siemens Gamesa kind of firing back at GE uh over their Haliade X uh offshore wind turbines so we'll talk about some of that we've had a bunch of litigation it seems like recently in the news so we'll talk about siemens games versus GE uh we also have we've had a really interesting strange bizarre lightning season here in the us and really all over the world uh so we're gonna chat a little bit about that of course so one of one aspect of it is that you know we have fewer lightning fatalities than ever in part because of covet but yet we also have a just a terrible fire season from lightning uh so we'll chat there and then our engineering segment we're gonna talk about ducted wind turbines so this is a new idea in small wind turbines and obviously this is one of the big things in evtols which we talk about in the struck podcast our aerospace engineering podcast and so ducted fan technology has been around for a while but does this work for little wind turbines and will it potentially work for for bigger ones we're also going to talk about a snafu with a semi truck pulling a wind turbine blade and just some of the transportation issues in general and then lastly wind turbine fires which don't seem to get too much publicity but are going to become more and more of probably an insurable event or something that people are going to want to be insured against going forward as these uh turbines continue to get bigger so alan let's start with siemens gamesa suing ge they're back in the in the ring again so it looks like they're they're suing ge potentially a little bit because they're upset that and this is what ge was claiming that this is just a counter suit they're just upset that we are trying to block them from being in the u.s market over their own property intellectual property infringement but siemens gomes says that no your nacelles your direct drive technology and your Haliade X is infringing on our technology and uh the way they cool their generators is infringing so what have you got on this well i think both of those things can be true that one is infringed on the other and vice versa that that can always be true i think the question is really what drives all this and market factors tend to drive lawsuits to one company to another if everybody's making plenty o...