The Global Blade Group Builds Industry Blade Knowledge

Allen and Joel speak with Birgit Junker, co-founder of the Global Blade Group, a forum created to share knowledge and innovation around wind turbine blades. For over ten years, the group has been making blade information more accessible and approachable. For more information on joining the Global Blade Group, email [e-mail]. Link to Blade Handbook – https://www.bladena.com/uploads/8/7/3/7/87379536/cortir_handbook_2019.pdf Fill out our Uptime listener survey and enter to win an Uptime mug! 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! Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, I’m delighted to welcome Birgit Junker, a true pioneer in wind energy blade technology and the co founder of the Global Blade Group. This organization has become the premier forum for the wind turbine blade experts to collaborate, share knowledge, and drive innovation in areas like structural design, Lightning protection and blade inspection technologies. Welcome to Uptime Spotlight. Shining light on wind energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Birgit, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Birgit Junker: Thank you very much and thanks for having me. Allen Hall: I want to start off by looking back a little bit into 2013. What were some of the challenges that when farm owners were facing with Blade technology and maintenance that led you to create the global Blade group? Birgit Junker: To start with Rege from Vattenfall and I, we were relatively new on the owner operator side. And we both found that when we were speaking to our colleagues, they, their eyes just glazed over every single time we said Blade. Cause nobody knew anything about blade. When I was hired at Eon I came from from Siemens. I was hired at Eon. I was told that they didn’t have blade issues. So I should expect to work about 80%, 75 percent on blades. And the rest of the time I should be spending on a drivetrain. 10 years later, when I left, there were 10 blade people. And I never ever had to look at a drivetrain. That was the attitude then. Blades were not a problem. We didn’t have blade problems. Blades were like that black box that you had. You just went out there and counted that they were all there. And you listened just to make sure that there wasn’t anything strange going on. And about, you 99. 9 percent of the time, nothing happened. There was nothing wrong. We even had contracts that said that blades were maintenance free. But then Reg and I started on the owner operator side. We came, we both came from OEMs. I’ve done catastrophic failure investigation. I’ve done field failures. I’ve done all sorts of things for what, 10 years before that. And knew that we did have blade problems. Ian just hadn’t found out yet. So when I started, Reg and I, we decided that we needed to talk to one another because we couldn’t talk to colleagues. Joel Saxum: Birgit, from experiences in the field I would, I want to follow up with that as a hard second. Because so many people Don’t understand even today what’s going on in the with blades. Like I’ll give you an anecdotal problem. I was in a field doing an RCA and out there with a site supervisor who was in charge of 120 odd turbines, big wind farms in the States, right? And he was looking up. He said, yeah, those blades, he’s they’re just, big plastic wings in the skies. And I was like, they’re not actually plastic. And he goes what do you mean? I said it’s it’s like fiberglass and this and that. He’s wait a second. So you mean to tell me that thing’s like a, it’s built like a boat. Like it’s like a fiberglass boat up in the sky. And I said, yeah. And I was like, I was like, that’s more in line of Ben, a plastic wing. And he goes, Oh, he’s I never really knew that. And I said, Oh, further conversations with this this gentleman, he’d been in wind for 15 years and it was running wind farms and didn’t know that the blades were made out of fiberglass. So I think that when you came in, what you’re talking about, it’s the origination story of Global Blade Group here. That could be echoed all over the world. There’s so many people that don’t know. What it really is. You and Reketpale from Vattenfall, so you guys got together, you understood that, Hey, we could talk to each other about these things and try to fix these problems. Did the next conversation go, let’s bring more along? Let’s bring some others along? Birgit Junker: Our ...