PowerCurve – Turning Blade Photos into Power

For our bonus this week, Allen talks with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve, at WindEurope 2023. In a new breakthrough process, PowerCurve leverages drone inspection photographs from SkySpecs and 3D laser scans to create highly accurate aerodynamic models of wind turbine blades. These high-resolution models allow PowerCurve to predict the AEP of blades in-service. This new offering is being used by operators world-wide to leverage blade aero upgrades and leading edge protection devices. PowerCurve - https://powercurve.dk 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!  PowerCurve Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, president and CEO of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and we are here in WindEurope 2023 in Copenhagen with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve. Welcome,  Nicholas Gaudern: Nicholas. Hey, Allen. Nice to you. Back on with you.  Allen Hall: So the, there's a lot happening in Copenhagen this week. there are so many operators here. And, and OEMs. so the first time we've seen GE Renova show up and, and a number of shows, but I've met so many new operators or, and that are really just diving into when they're buying assets and they're now, they're trying to figure out how to maximize those, those, assets. And one of the things that we hear at our booth is we need to get the aerodynamics cleaned up. Yes. And I said, well, you need to go down a couple of. Blocks in this conference center and talk to power curve because, power curve knows about your blade and can make them more efficient. So I, I know you guys have been totally busy. We've pretty much give, got handed out. Every handout we brought, it's already been distributed. This is only the second day of three. so it's been a tremendous conference. What, what are you hearing from some of the operators in OEM this week?  Nicholas Gaudern: Yeah, it's, it's really interesting and, and, yeah. It is a huge conference. The attendance is great. I think the atmosphere is really nice. There's a lot of positivity, I would say around the industry at the moment, which is really nice to be part of. I think one of the biggest things we've been discussing with, with people visiting our booth is how do you understand, how best to manage your blade over its lifetime? So there's a lot of attention being paid to. So how'd you get the most out of your blade at, at all points of its life? So not necessarily, you know, getting the very best blade at the beginning or the end, but just, just kind of tracking progress, tracking performance, and taking appropriate mitigation methods at, at the, at the best possible time. And that's something that we've been focusing quite heavily on for the last couple of years. So if you understand the. The blade aerodynamics in, in great detail, you can start to map on the impacts of the real world blade conditions. Yeah. So when a blade's out in the field, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's suffering. It's suffering. It, you know, it's in this really a aggressive environment sometimes, particularly offshore. You've got heavy wind, rain, dirt, bugs, ice, and all of these things are, are really. Challenging from a performance perspective, and if you want to optimize how much energy that blade's producing. Yeah, yeah. So one way you can, look at that is to take,