From the surge in lightning strikes damaging wind turbines to the game-changing potential of nacelle-based LiDAR systems, Lars Bendsen of AC883 shares insights on wind farm maintenance. Lars describes how LiDAR installations can boost power output by 3.5%, and warns how ignoring simple pitch alignment issues leads to catastrophic turbine failures.

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Lars Bendsen: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. I'm your host, Allen Hall. Today, we're diving into the costly challenges plaguing wind farms with Lars Bendsen from AC883. From a surge in severe lightning strikes to devastating turbine misalignments, Lars reveals why seemingly minor issues can lead to catastrophic failures, and how cutting edge solutions like nacelle based lidars are transforming maintenance strategies.

Plus, discover why Lars believes too many industry tourists are making decisions that cost operators millions in unnecessary repairs. So get ready for a no holds bar discussion about what's really happening in wind farm maintenance. Lars, welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast Spotlight. Thank you so much.

Appreciate it. Well, you've had a busy blade season and you've had crews all over Canada and parts of the U S what kind of problems were you solving with your blade crews this year?

Lars Bendsen: That was, that was a crazy repair season. Um, and it's not to feed directly into, but it, we had a ton of lightning strikes and lightning repairs higher than I would say the average.

And some of the strikes were severe. So I don't know, uh, you probably know better than me if the weather pattern has been leading up to better or worse. Um, what we do know, we had a really, um, wet summer. We had a ton of weather delays. We had a ton of high winds. We have a ton of rain. Uh, so we had our, our standby time, time was, was higher than usual.

And it's annoying for everybody involved. Owners don't get their job done and money is flying out the window. So. And we don't get the job done either. So, so, so it's really wet that way. So I don't know if that's the aftermath was going on over the winter. I have no idea because you can't really see when this like was there.

Uh, and, and the owners, the owners have a system that can measure when it comes. But. I don't think they're looking at it.

Allen Hall: That's, that's true. Uh, we are seeing more lightning strike damage over this past summer. It's been really bad. I, I think it's just the, the set of storms that came through. But in, in your case with AC 8A3, when you have technicians on site, you're bringing high quality sort of apprenticeship plus technicians that have a lot of training so that when you get into these complicated repairs, you can actually accomplish them properly.

Lars Bendsen: We are, we are getting our people from mostly from Europe, uh, simply because there's no cable, there's, there's no, uh, availability for, for staff in Canada. Uh, so we get them in from Europe on a proper work permit, simply because we are short staffed. Uh, we do pay more. We also get, uh, GWO certified technicians, all of them.

And, um,