EP68 – Fisherman, Repowering Old Wind Farms, Plus Carbon Fiber vs Glass Blade Debate

Are environmental and economic concerns posed by fisherman and advocacy groups valid, given commercial fishing's impact on marine life? We discuss the repowering of a 240MW wind farm in the midwest, along with general implications for old wind turbines, and discuss carbon fiber vs glass fiber in the future of blade construction. 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. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!  EP68 Transcript - Fisherman, Repowering Old Wind Farms, Plus Carbon Fiber vs Glass Blade Debate 0:00This episode is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. At Weather Guard, we make lightning protection easy. If your wind turbines are due for maintenance or repairs, install our StrikeTape retrofit LPS upgrade at the same time. A StrikeTape installation is the quick, easy solution that provides a dramatic long lasting boost to the factory lightning protection system. Forward Thinking wind site owners install StrikeTape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today's podcast. Welcome back. 0:38I'm Allen Hall. 0:39I'm Dan Blewett. And this is the uptime podcast where we talk about wind energy engineering, lightning protection and ways to keep your wind turbines running. All right, welcome back to the uptime podcast. I'm your co host Dan Blewett. On today's episode, we're gonna talk about the levelized cost of energy. So renewable, renewable sources, including solar and wind are now the lowest to electricity forms, which is pretty cool news. We'll talk a little bit about fishermen and some of their worries some of their woes as far as offshore wind coming to the US. Siemens Gamesa has their 11 megawatt offshore turbine now certified as typhoon resistant. We'll talk a little bit about glass first carbon fiber repowering for old wind farms, and some of the challenges and just interesting tech involved there. So before we get going wanna remind you that in the description of this podcast, whether you're on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, number one, leave us a review, we'd really appreciate it. But number two, you'll find uptime tech news, which is our new weekly newsletter, you can easily subscribe to that and just get a notification from us every Thursday morning, when the podcast drops. So it's right on your inbox, you can click through or listen to the new episode, as well as get some other interesting tech news from around the web, as well as clips from the past. Pat from past episodes, so be sure to sign up for uptime tech news in the description of this podcast. So Alan, how are you sir, let's start with the levelized cost of energy. renewable sources are now cheaper than ever, and solar is in the number one spot with a $37 cost. And onshore wind is now second with $40 per megawatt hour. So this has been a pretty big change a long time coming, the this cost decrease. And now well below gas and other other other forms 2:40it has in the latest data is interesting to look at. on the solar side,