EP73 – Will Battery Fires Set Renewables Back? Thermoplastic Blade Tech + Vestas Invests in Cranes

New research and work on thermoplastic blade construction has yielded some excitement in the community, and Allen and Rosemary discuss the commercial viability of these turbine blades. Vestas has invested in S&L Access crane technology, and their Salamander Quick Lift looks like a step in the right direction. The small Block Island wind farm now has four of its five turbines stopped for "routine maintenance"...but is something bigger at play? 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!  Transcript: EP73 - Will Battery Fires Set Renewables Back? Thermoplastic Blade Tech + Vestas Invests in Cranes This episode is brought to you by weather guard lightning tech at Weather Guard. We make lightning protection easy. If you're wind turbines or do for maintenance or repairs, install our strike tape 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 strike tape today to increase uptime tomorrow. Learn more in the show notes of today's podcast. Welcome back. I'm Dan Blewett I'm Allen Hall. And I'm Rosemary Barnes And this is the uptime podcast bringing you the latest in wind energy, tech news and policy. All right, welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I am your co-host Dan Blewett - on today's episode. We're going to talk about a recent battery fire from one of the Tesla mega packs burn for about three straight days until it burn itself out in Victoria, Australia. So we'll talk about some of the implications and whether we should be concerned about battery technology as it takes off, whether that's going to be a problem for renewables. We'll also chat a little bit about the Block Island Wind Farm, which has five turbines up in New England. Four of them are currently offline, and they've got some subsea cable issues that might need to be reburied. So we'll talk through some of the problems are having there. We're also going to talk a little bit about the fishing sector sector. Get Rosemarie's take here on some new reporting from The Guardian about, you know, whether the UK is sacrificing their fishing sector for offshore wind and whether this is really a Zero-Sum game or if everyone can get along. We'll talk about some new technology in cranes, the salamander lift system and what that means as Ve...