Episode Details

American Clean Power’s Q1 report shows the weakest quarter since 2023, China plugs an undersea data center into offshore wind, and thermal imaging spots hidden blade damage.

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Allen Hall: 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

Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Rosemary Barnes, Matthew Stead, and Yolanda Padron. And three out of the four of us, everyone except Rosie, went to Houston this past week. Matthew, you were on the floor. Yolanda, you were on the floor this week. What did you think?

Matthew Stead: I think there was a few sort of common themes that I picked up. One, the obvious one which keeps coming up every time is insurance and lightning, and insurance, and all those sort of things. probably the other point that I observed was really strong supply chain. they had everyone, all the people, e- even people, building boxes.

And [00:01:00] so they had boxes, transportation, cranes, really strong, supply chain. also really strong on the batteries, like the CATL batteries, et cetera, et cetera, and solar. I think that seems to be getting a bit more, a bit more, mature and more obvious. obviously blades, lots of people talk to us about blades, maybe ’cause we talk about blades.

But, lightning root issues, blade bolts, those sorts of things, leading edge erosion, robotic repair, et cetera, et cetera. a bit about, add-ons like PowerCurve, were fairly visible, so that was good. but there was a lot of secret meetings in rooms away from the actual event.

so that was one observation. and the other observation was perhaps not so many operators that actually [00:02:00] work on a day-to-day basis. That was my subjective impression 

Rosemary Barnes: Speaking of secret meetings in rooms, what were you guys doing around the time of ACP? 

Matthew Stead: So the Australian American Chamber of Commerce organized a special event, with two Australian companies to launch a new product, which monitors lightning and then transmits the results using satellite communications.

So it was very open, but invitation only, Rose. 

Rosemary Barnes: I, actually, I- the comments, ’cause people are always, after our first go organizing wind O&M event in Australia, I would hear about it from people who didn’t, just chatting at, on, different wind farm sites. They didn’t know I was involved, and they’re lik