Wind Industry Growing Pains: Recycling, Construction, and Seals

This action-packed episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast tackles hot topics like the legal battle over massive piles of unrecycled turbine blades in Texas, construction snafus causing a 2-year delay for a floating wind farm in Japan, a wild new single-blade floating turbine concept inspired by 19th century toys, and ingenious new bearing seals that could solve the chronic lubrication failures plaguing wind farms. The hosts also spotlight the little-known, $700 million Top Crop Wind Farm in Illinois as the wind farm of the week. Grab your headphones and get ready for an energetic dive into the latest happenings in wind. 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! Pardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Uptime 185 Allen Hall: Well, this week I learned that the word buoy is pronounced boy, and I've also learned a number of other Australian words, and I'm not even sure that makes any sense because Rosemary, buoy is a buoy, a boy is a boy, they're really hard to mix up actually, but in this podcast this week, you went to spar boy, and I was totally confused, I had the dictionary out, I was just thumbing through like spar boy, I, I, I'm sorry, I don't know what that means. Rosemary Barnes: Allen, do you say buoyant or booyant? Buoyancy or booyancy? I think you'll see that it's Australians that have this one, right?  Joel Saxum: I got to agree, Rosemary. I'm sorry. I agree with you. I'm agreeing with Rosemary.  Allen Hall: Come on. I've lost two in a row. I lost the emu and I lost buoy. I'm pretty much out of words at this point. Rosemary Barnes: You can, you can name whatever, whatever birds are native. To the US you feel free to name them and pronounce them how you would wish, but emus are emus. They're ours. They're ours. We're claiming them.  Allen Hall: Well, see, this is, this is why, you know, it's good to have a little bit of international flavor on the podcast because us Americans get a little too out of control and Rosemary's here to rein us back in. So as you will listen to this episode, that's exactly what happens multiple times. It's good to have Rosemary on the podcast. So down in Sweetwater, Texas, where we were. pretty close to it last week. There, it's been a big problem down there about the number of wind turbine blades that are just stacked in piles. And Global Fiberglass Solution was trying to recycle them. And those, some of those blades have been there since about 2017. So they've been there a while. And back in roughly 2016, the IRS encouraged wind farms to replace the blades with the tax credits with new blades, right? So there's a, there were a lot of wind turbine blades that came off the turbines and new ones went on. Well down in Texas, they're looking for get those blades recycled and nothing has happened yet. And it's starting to become a little annoying. And the same sort of situations actually happened in Iowa with the same company in Iowa got really upset and. Forced GE or persuaded GE to take care of the problem in Iowa. So GE is recycling the blades in Iowa now This has led to a lawsuit That was filed this past week between GE and Global Fiberglass solutions and Phil, you want to give us the inside details of what's going on here. Philip Totaro: So, basically the, the back of a contract signed in 2017 and then a separate one signed in 2018. Global Fiberglass Solutions had the obligation to start recycling these blades. I think what they were going to do was to shred them and...