EP51 – Wind Turbine Blade Heating – How Does it Work? with Lasse Hietikko of WICETEC

Lasse Hietikko, Business Development manager at WICETEC, joined us to talk about the big problem of wind turbine blade icing, and how their WIPS wind turbine blade heating systems can prevent it. In Texas, the lack of foresight for potential freezing conditions led to disaster, causing wind power to come to a halt with ice-covered turbines. Learn more about WICETEC and their WIPS technology here. Connect with Lasse on Linkedin here. 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. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!  TRANSCRIPT: EP51 - Wind Turbine Blade Heating - How Does it Work? with Lasse Hietikko of WICETEC https://youtu.be/3tSSjat2QnY welcome back to the uptime podcast i am your co-host Dan Blewett no Allen hall on the show today but we've got a great guest Lasse Hietikko from WICETEC is here and he's going to talk to us about blade heating technology so obviously we were looking for someone for the show to talk about you know some of the issues that happened in texas right obviously terrible disaster with you know all forms of electrical energy of electricity going out in texas obviously wind uh turbines were a part of the problem right they iced they had winterization issues they froze and uh they lost power so we want to have someone come in who actually has a solution to this so Lasse is the business development manager for WICETEC and WICETEC is a Helsinki Finland based company and what they do is they have blade heating technology so it's essentially a carbon fiber mat that they lay on the leading edge that has you know resistive heating similar to what's in the rear view windshield of your car where they'll kick on when temperatures when you know the sensors on the turbine say hey this is a icing condition you know those will kick on and they'll prevent ice from forming on the basically two-thirds of the blade the most important aerodynamic region so not the root but the outer two thirds almost all the way up to the to the very tip so it's really interesting um the fact that this is a it's been out there this is not new technology um and he as he he speaks to that this is something developed in the 90s and they have the IP this at WICETEC but it just isn't always deployed in all these new sites so a lot of it's done in the factory they do a lot of installations in the factory and they're just now getting into retrofits which is obviously going to be of of significant interest now that we've had this texas disaster we've seen the damage it can do um if uh you know winterization is a problem and you get one of these sort of black swan event kind of uh winter storms so you know Lasse has a uh he's a masters in mechanical engineering from what is now Aalto university in in Finland um and you know he's an expert on on this technology on blade heating on the economics of it and whether it's going to make sense for eith...