Episode Details

David King from Gulf Wind Technology returns to discuss serial uptower blade repairs, passive load shedding, and data-driven testing.

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Allen Hall : David, welcome back to the program. 

David King: Yeah, I’m so glad to be here. A lot’s happened since the last time I was on, so, uh, this is gonna be great. 

Allen Hall : It’s been about a year. Mm-hmm. And last year we were at OM&S in Nashville, and you were talking about root fusion, and this is the insert fix uptower for the blade inserts, right?

So we’re having a lot of blade bolt issues, and the inserts are starting to pull out or become loose, and the blades are moving around. A lot of our operators in the States are trying to solve that problem, and they don’t wanna remove the blades and bring anything down tower. They would like to fix it uptower.

That’s where your solution came in. How’s that going? 

David King: Yeah, so I mean, it, it’s really been a five-year journey for us. I mean, we’ve been doing this- I remember that, yeah … for a [00:01:00] very long time. You know, it started like any process does, with a problem statement. Sure. And we’ve been working through from problem statement, you know, going through process development, going through structural development, going through pilots.

Uh, we did a, a huge pilot deployments about three years ago, where those were being monitored. Um, we’re now in a position where we’re in serial deployment, and that’s what’s really exciting. You know, we’re doing about 200 blades a year, uh, of, of serial deployment. We’ve, we’ve done that now, uh, we’re going into our second year of that.

Nice. So we’re extremely excited by that. That comes with its own sets of challenges as you scale up. How do you maintain quality? We even touched a little bit on a few of these things last year. Um, but yeah, we’re really excited to be doing that. Uh, we’re trying to keep it, you know, again, process-driven.

How do you simplify a process that allows you to scale up appropriately, train people appropriately? A- a- and that’s what we’re really excited about this year, is being able to bring this, uh, so that we’re not, um, you know, basically supply constrained, ’cause there is a lot of demand for this, and still able to maintain a very high level of, of quality as w