Concrete Towers, Finding Whales, Winterizing Turbines

TUV Nord is employing drones and AI image recognition to inspect hybrid steel/concrete towers during the warranty period. Who will use them, what will they find, and how much will they save? Vineyard Wind will use Charles River Analytics' Awarion system to protect whales and other marine life. The system's algorithms were developed in part using videos taken on whale-watching tours. And in a move to de-risk its business, AEP sold $1.2B of renewables assets; IRG Acquisition Holdings will pick up a capacity of about 1,365MW. Joel explains why he sees more asset flipping in the future. New standards in the US require turbines to be able to operate for at least one hour in extreme weather; the ruling is effective in four years. Everyone agrees it's too little too late, so what's the real solution? Wisconsin's Quilt Block Wind is our Wind Farm of the Week - listen to find out why. Visit Pardalote Consulting at https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com Wind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.com Weather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.com Intelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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!  Uptime 155 Allen Hall: We've reached 100,000 downloads of this podcast. That's a crazy number. That's amazing. That's amazing. And thanks to everybody out there who downloads and listens every week. Our, our faithful listeners have gotten us to that threshold. It's a, it's a huge number and we more and more people listening to uptime every week, and we appreciate everybody doing that. This week's episode lot going on.  Joel Saxum: T u v Nord does some drone inspections of concrete towers. We talked a little bit about what are they looking for, how can they look forward to more efficiently, you know, kind of following bit of our experience in the Blade World. And then also Charles Rivers Analytics. So they've teamed up with Vineyard wind to work w. With some AI machine learning and some sensor packages, sonar on the, in the, in the water. And basically thermal cameras and color cameras on the top side to look for whales and fishing gear and some other things that keep the impact down during offshore wind farm activities in the east coast. Allen Hall: Then we'll talk about AEP selling their renewables business to invent. And FE matches up with NERC to define extreme cold reliability standards to keep the lights on in places like Texas. And our wind Farm of the week is Quilt Block Wind Farm up in Wisconsin. I'm Alan Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I'm here with my good friend from Wind Power Lab, Joel Saxum, and the soon to be guest host, a fully charged live event in Australia, Rosemary Barnes, and this is the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Rosemary Barnes: Joel Allen Hall: T UV Nord is using piloted drones to inspect concrete towers of wind turbines. And when I first saw this story, it's probably been a month or so ago, I thought, uhoh new concrete wind turbine towers have problems, and evidently they do, and they're working. With an undisclosed partner, and I assumed at the time that it was Nordex cuz Nordex uses a lot of concrete towers. A, a quick search on Google. Said Nordex has got a couple thousand concrete towers out in service, so they're concerned about having cracks in these towers as the age and get to the end of the warranty period. Right now they're just taking pictures and looking for cracks, but obviously someone's gotta fish through those and determine if there are cracks and if there are, if there are cracks, what they're gonna do about 'em.