EP49 – Did Wind Power Actually Fail Texas? Can Turbines Work in Cold Weather? Plus, Big Off-Shore News

The power outage disaster in Texas in February of 2021 proved to be a calamity with multiple variables to blame and countless fingers to point. But with many conservatives claiming wind power a failure...is this really so? What could have prevented it? Is there technology to winterize wind turbines? In other news, South Korea and Spain both announced big wind farms in the works, and Dan and Allen also discuss natural composite nacelles made by Greenboats, de-icing technology, wooden wind turbine towers backed by Vestas, and broken down conductors. 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!  EP49 - Did Wind Power Actually Fail Texas? Can Turbines Work in Cold Weather? Plus, Big Off-Shore News 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 i'm your co-host Dan Blewett our fearless host Allen hall is back with us today so excited to have him here and in today's episode we got a pretty wide range of guitars obviously one of the big ones that we'll cover at the end is what happened in texas right really big news wind turbines uh very much in the spotlight uh but before we get there we're going to talk about Iberdrola building a pretty or potentially building a pretty big uh wind floating wind farm off of the coast of spain south korea on track to build the world's biggest offshore wind farm um vestas investing in some wood tower technology we'll also talk about down conductors there's been some issues with some breakages we've kind of been peeking at on linkedin and we'll also talk about a couple of composite upgrades to both blades and the cells and lastly we'll circle back to the texas uh power nightmare that really uh took over the country by well took over the press cycle in the us recently so Allen welcome back glad to have you back on the show first and foremost yeah good to be back so let's start with uh with Iberdrola so obviously floating wind we talked about that a bunch it's starting to pick up um speed right there's more and more of these popping up and that's a good thing long term because now they're going to be able to hey we've got more data more of these out there bobbing in the ocean like cauliflower right and so some you know see how well they work because they're obviously seems like pretty well proven but not nearly as proven as other means of uh offshore wind right the off the offshore part is interesting in the sense that uh we're not really limited on the size of turbines right so the growth of wind turbines in terms of output size going to the 20 megawatt plus is going to happen offshore and the capability to have literally gigawatts of power generated offshore is is really right on the precipice of that so there's so much technology and energy being pumped into offshore wind right now and that's where the growth is going to occur in that offshore wind sector we're going to see a lot of great engineering changes and engineering improvements and just attacking a problem which is really difficult which is as these turbines get bigger and bigger and bigger how are you going to handle the loads how you're going to be able to distribute the amount of energy coming of...