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The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strikeTape.com. And now your hosts. Allen Hall Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m Allen Hall and I’m here with Rosemary Barnes. And Fergus is here. Hi. Welcome to our top story. This week is a wind turbine collapse that happened in South Korea at the Changpo Wind Power Complex in Yeongdeok, and the turbine lost a blade. There’s some video here that was recorded when the turbine collapsed, so it happened a couple of months ago, and investigators have been trying to determine the cause of that failure. They’re having a little bit of difficulty because they would like to access the SCADA system of that turbine because that would have a lot of more information about [00:01:00] how the tower was operating at that particular moment. And they’re having trouble in that it is a Vestas turbine and Vestas has not released the SCADA data and it’s citing an expired warranty. Now, Rosemary, this leads to a lot of problems because obviously there’s a ton of sensors in wind turbines today, and they can help determine causes of failures pretty rapidly. But without it, you’re just really looking at video in this particular collapse. Rosemary Barnes It’s amazing that you can look at video. The video is far more useful than the SCADA data is, probably. Um, yeah, it’s, well, I’ve never actually, like, I’ve worked on a lot of RCAs and I’ve never actually got to see video footage of the incident, so that’s actually really cool that they’ve got this dash cam footage. Looking at it now, you can, um, see the lower, probably two thirds of the turbine tower, so you can see the blades coming past. I wish the video would start just like 10 seconds earlier. [00:02:00] Um, because maybe you can see a bit of wobble in the tower. You can see that one of the blades is already missing a tip, or the tip kind of flies off anyway, so maybe it was bent. So definitely looks to me like the root cause was that there was a blade failure. The, um, part of the blade broke off, caused a rotor imbalance, which then meant that one of the blades hit the tower and then it’s really easy for a tower to buckle once it’s got some damage in it. So that, that in itself, like, that’s not an uncommon scenario. Um, and yeah, for sure, like you would ask for the SCADA data, but, uh, I don’t think it’s accurate that they’re saying. There must have been a faulty sensor or something because when there’s a rotor imbalance, it should stop, um, stop the turbine. But I do know from experience, it does not always stop the turbine quickly enough to stop this hap