Allen sat down with Nicholas Gaudern, CTO of PowerCurve, at ACP in Minneapolis to discuss the importance of aerodynamic blade optimizations and upgrades during wind turbine repowering. PowerCurve's AeroVista tool can help operators address leading-edge erosion and suboptimal blade designs to mitigate aerodynamic losses.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I am at ACP 2024 in Minneapolis with Nicholas Gaudern the CTO of PowerCurve. And PowerCurve is based in Denmark, and they are aerodynamic blade experts. And Nicolas background is with Vestas, and now he's a freelancer, so to speak, at PowerCurve.

And PowerCurve is where WeatherGuard goes for aerodynamic help. Yes, and a lot of other operators around the world reach out to power curve. So we thought it'd be a good time to talk to Nicholas because of all the repower activity in the United States and aerodynamic upgrades that should be happening on the ground.

Nicholas Gaudern: Yes. Yeah.

Allen Hall: That, that the opportunities being passed by, which is a total mistake, absolutely total mistake. And Nicholas, welcome to the program. And I want to walk through that.

Nicholas Gaudern: Thanks for having me back Allen. It's really nice to talk to you again and and another show. So always good.

Allen Hall: So in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, all over the United States, the IRA bill is kicking in and there's a lot of repowering happening at the moment.

And when I talk to operators about lightning protection, they're like, yeah, absolutely. We need to put additional lightning protection on because we know from the previous blades that they were not great. And we've heard rumors that these blades are not great. Our new blades are not great. So for lightning protection, that's pretty easy, but they also don't they don't think about the aerodynamic aspects.

Nicholas Gaudern: No not necessarily. And I think it's it risks being a really big missed opportunity. Yes. Because whenever you've got a blade on the ground, that is obviously an easier time to be doing any upgrade work, repair work, enhancement, whatever you want to do. So when you've got a blade on the ground, you should absolutely be considering the optimization potential, the aerodynamic optimization potential.

So when you're repowering, you may think that you have the latest and greatest blade. It's very unlikely that you do. The blade may have been designed many years ago. And even if it is more recent, we haven't come across a single blade that we can optimize, not a single one. And that's not because the OEMs are doing a bad job.

It's just that they have a lot of different constraints. That can be time pressure, it can be cost, it can be materials, whatever. It maybe means they haven't spent as much time as they could have done on squeezing every last bit of aerodynamic performance out. Which is fine. Maybe, the business case for them doesn't support that.

But for the operator, it absolutely does. Because if you can get another half percent, one percent, two percent AEP over the lifetime of that product, That's a hugely powerful lever to pull.

Allen Hall: Because the blades, let's just choose a 2X machine. Sure. Which there's a lot of 2X machines going in the United States at the moment.

Those 2X blades were designed pre pandemic. Yep. Most likely.