EP84 – Turbine Blade Fatigue Cracks – A Growing Problem?

Morten Handberg from Wind Power Lab joined us to discuss wind turbine blade fatigue cracks and how operators can diagnose and creative preventative maintenance plans. We also explore subsea cable technology, including a 450 mile cable that now ranks as the world's longest - are these cables at risk? Can they be protected from natural damage and even sabotage? Plus, a tidal power consortium hits the news cycle, Vestas talks about turbine size and more. 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!  Show Transcript - Morten Handberg from Wind Power Lab This episode is brought to you by weather guard Lightning Tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape retrofit LPs upgrade. At the same time, a strike tape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic, long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward thinking wind site owners install strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today's podcast. Welcome back. I'm Dan Blewett. I'm Allen Hall. And I'm Rosemary Barnes. And this is the Up Time podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime one energy podcast, I'm your co-host, Dan Blewett on today's episode number one, we've got a great friend of uptime coming on the show. Morten Handberg who is the chief blade specialist from Wind Power Lab. He'll be joining us to talk about fatigue issues in wind turbine blades. So really deep dove on that we haven't talked much about much about that on the podcast yet. So we're excited to talk about cracks and fatigue and loading and all this good stuff with blades. So look for that in about 20 minutes. first, we're gonna talk about GE teaming up with GM on rare earth magnets. Obviously, those are needed for motors, nozzles, etc. So big two big companies teaming up to do some of that mining and some of the legwork. We'll talk about the largest subsea cable, which is now operating 450 miles long, crazy, long. We'll talk about Vestas. They're installing their v 230 6:15 megawatt at the Australia Test test facility in Denmark, and also some more news from Vestas, one of their executives talking about, you know, this race with wind turbines getting bigger and bigger and some of the costs and potential difficulties about that in the future. And lastly, we'll chat a little bit about a consortium led by Orbital Marine, which is the maker of the orbital O2,