Episode Details

Allen, Rosemary, and Yolanda, joined by Morten Handberg from Wind Power LAB, recap WOMA 2026 live from Melbourne. The crew discusses leading edge erosion challenges unique to Australia, the frustration operators face getting data from full service agreements, and the push for better documentation during project handovers. Plus the birds and bats management debate, why several operators said they’d choose smaller glass fiber blades over bigger carbon fiber ones, and what topics WOMA 2027 should tackle next year.

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[00:00:00] The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com and now your hosts. Welcome to the Uptime Winner Energy podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Pone, Rosemary Barnes, and the Blade Whisperer, Morton Hamburg.

And we’re all in Melbourne at the Pullman on the park. We just finished up Woma 2026. Massive event. Over 200 people, two days, and a ton of knowledge. Rosemary, what did you think? Yeah, I mean it was a, a really good event. It was really nice ’cause we had event organization, um, taken care of by an external company this time.

So that saved us some headaches, I think. Um. But yeah, it was, it was really good. It was different than last year, and I think next year will be different again because yeah, we don’t need to talk about the same topics every single year. But, um, yeah, I got really great [00:01:00] feedback. So that’s shows we’re doing something right?

Yeah, a lot of the, the sessions were based upon feedback from Australian industry and, uh, so we did AI rotating bits, the, the drive train blades. Uh, we had a. Master class on lightning to start off. Uh, a number of discussions about BOP and electrical, BOP. All those were really good. Mm-hmm. Uh, the, the content was there, the expertise was there.

We had worldwide representation. Morton, you, you talked about blades a good bit and what the Danish and Worldwide experience was. You know, talked about the American experience on Blades. That opened up a lot of discussions because I’m never really sure where Australia is in the, uh, operations side, because a lot of it is full service agreements still.

But it does seem like from last year to this year. There’s more onboarding of the technical expertise internally at the operators. Martin, [00:02:00] you saw, uh, a good bit of it. This is your first time mm-hmm. At this conference. What were your impressions of the, the content and the approach, which is a little bit different than any other conference?

I see an industry that really wants to learn, uh, Australia, they r