What Rosie Learned in Europe’s Wind Turbine Test Labs

Rosie returns from Denmark and shares her experiences seeing DTU blade testing, a lightning lab, and a 15 MW Vestas test turbine. The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript What Rosie Learned in Denmark's Blade and Lightning LabsIntro and Risø blade testingAnnouncer: The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, brought to you by StrikeTape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit StrikeTape.com. And now your hosts.Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm Allen Hall, and I'm here with Rosemary Barnes and Yolanda Padron. Rosemary just came back from her long trip to Germany, and a good part of it was also spent up in Denmark. Rosemary, you visited a number of wind-related companies on your travels, so give us a little update.Rosemary Barnes: I started in Copenhagen and then went over to Roskilde, mostly to see the rain erosion test facilities. But I also got a tour of the rest of the testing, mostly blade testing. There's a really interesting history to that facility. It started out as nuclear power research and had a reactor there. I didn't even realize that.Yolanda Padron: Yeah.Rosemary Barnes: And incidentally, the reason it turned into a wind facility is that they already had all of these amazing wind measurements for the site. That's super important if you've got nuclear power. If there's a meltdown, you need to be able to track where the fallout is going to go. So they knew the wind speeds in the region really well. I was told by my friendly guide that that's the reason it was seen as a really good place to get started on researching wind energy in Denmark. They could put a turbine up knowing what was going on with the wind resource there.Allen Hall: Niels Bohr worked there, right? Is that part of the history?Rosemary Barnes: He worked there. I think it was his facility. I think he set it up. I didn't plan to talk about this, and I haven't actually verified any of it. I'm just remembering what I was told weeks ago. My understanding is that he set it up to do nuclear power research. They don't do that anymore, but they do a bunch of energy work. Mostly it's wind energy, and then a bit with the grid. They're doing some interesting trials with EV charging and how that can integrate into a grid powered by variable renewables. They've got their own little microgrid going on there, and if you participate in the trial, I think you can charge your car for free. All of the businesses I visited in Denmark had rows and rows of EV chargers, though mostly not free.Allen Hall: So you went to the research labs at Risø, the structural labs there. Did you walk through where they were doing blade testing and some of the structural testing?Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. There's actually an American guy there, Derek. He was working at GE in America before that and had worked for TPI for a while, so he brought that expertise to Risø. They've got a bunch of test rigs in there for small blades. I can't remember the exact length, but maybe 20 meters.Allen Hall: Twenty. Yeah.Rosemary Barnes: Which was once a full-scale wind turbine blade, but now it's small scale. It's mostly for research, trying out various new things. They produce blades for other research facilities as well and test them, and they're trying out some new manufacturing techniques.They're also trying new testing techniques. Normally when you test a wind turbine blade, you start with a static test. You basically get some ropes and pull on the blade hard enough to represent the largest gust that blade should ever experience in its lifetime. After that, you do a fatigue test, where you flap it up and down and side to side, one after the other. That takes months. For really long blades it