This week on Power-Up, Ørsted's offshore blade install method, SWANCOR's degradable epoxy resin composite, and a precursor to the Google Glass!

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Allen Hall: Welcome to Power Up, the Uptime Podcast focused on the new, hot off the press technology that can change the world. Follow along with me, Allen Hall, and IntelStor's Phil Totaro, as we discuss the weird, the wild, and the game changing ideas that will charge your energy future.

First patent idea is from our friends over at Orsted, and they are looking at a really novel approach of installing wind turn blades vertically rather than the horizontally, which is we do today offshore. So if you've watched offshore blades being installed, you've always seen them placed horizontally and slid towards the hub and everybody tightens them on.

Well, that requires a lot of really tall cranes to, to make that happen. But what Orsted's thinking about is grabbing the blade kind of by the bottom and lifting it up vertically. In order to do this, you need a pretty rigid frame to hold this crane to keep it from the blade stabilized. So the crane doesn't move too much.

And it's, it's, it's kind of a complicated mechanical problem. However, it does require a much shorter crane and that is the benefit and getting big cranes out at sea right now is really hard. Phil, so having a short crane with a much stronger crane head, I'll call it,

Philip Totaro: Does make a lot of sense. It does.

And, and so just for context, we talked a couple of weeks ago about, Equinor getting a patent on, technology around optimization of floating platforms. This is another example of a development and independent power producer company, Orsted, getting a patent. IP themselves that they control on something related to, the, the business that they do on a daily basis.

And the reason I'm bringing this up is it's, it's a bit unique in the wind energy sector because most of the, Particularly important patents have been held in the past by the OEMs or other supply chain companies. So for, a company like Orsted to, to even contemplate doing this is, is fascinating.

This is still in the conceptual phase. There's no rig that they've built yet. They've probably done some smaller scale bench testing, potentially. They've certainly done, plenty of computer modeling on, on this sort of thing. To get it to work. But it is, as Alan mentioned, an interesting concept because, the, the blade's moment of inertia, when it's in the vertical position, it, it has the opportunity to potentially flop around or tip over.

But the counter to that is, as Alan mentioned as well, you need a much shorter crane boom. And so, these are some of the technical challenges that, that Orsted is trying to address with introducing this kind of technology. I guess the question maybe for Joel is, is, does this seem practical and, and how attractive is this going to be?

Joel Saxum: I think from an operational standpoint, so for real world value of a patent, and this will happen eventually, and I don't think it's limited to offshore. I think it will happen onshore as well. And, and I'm saying this based on the global build out of wind farms, onshore, offshore, floating, you name it, what we're doing and the goals we have in place.

All of these, do an easy one.