Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Dogger Bank Wake Lawsuit, EverWind Hydrogen Farm

Rosemary previews Pardalote’s new hands-on blade repair course. EverWind’s Ocean Lake, Canada’s largest wind project, will feed a green hydrogen and ammonia plant in Nova Scotia rather than the grid. Plus BP’s exit from an offshore project in Japan, and the wake-effect lawsuit pitting SSE, Equinor, and Vårgrønn against RWE’s Dogger Bank South.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter 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 YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

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 2025: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Matthew Stead, Yolanda Padron, and Rosemary Barnes is back this week.

Rosemary, you’ve been to a number of training courses over the last couple of weeks. The first off was GWO. What was your experience at GWO training?

Rosemary1: It was the fourth or maybe even fifth time that I’ve done it. Um, I did it a few times in Denmark and then, uh, this is the second time doing it in Australia. also, this was my first time doing first aid in Australia. Last time they did GWO here, but my first aid was still valid from Europe, so I, I didn’t redo it. And it’s like so much about [00:01:00] snakes and spiders and jellyfish But a good, good rule of thumb, not 100% accurate, but good rule of thumb, if it is something from the ocean that stung you, then you put something warm on it, and if it’s something from the land that stung or bit you, then something cold on it,

Allen Hall 2025: well, how often do you usually take GWO training?

Rosemary1: You gotta do it every two years to be valid. I don’t do it every two years because, um, if you do it every two years, like within two years, then you can do the refresher course. So that’s three days instead of four However, um, because I don’t climb constantly, like often it will be six months or more in between climbs, I’ll just do it before I know that I’ve got a climb.

all the other people except for one were technicians who, you know, have been working for a while.

So they’re also doing the full course, not the refresher. So they get a little bit more practice than I do. But, um, it’s just not often enough. Y-you know, like every time I go it’s like I, I really feel the need to have the refresher, um, because I’m just not fully on top of it. ‘Cause it’s [00:02:00] not just that you need to know what to do. You need to be able to… Like if you need to use it, you’re gonna be freaking out, you know?

This is the worst thing that’s probably ever happened in your life, and now you’ve gotta remember all your training. It’s like you want it to be actually second nature to some extent. So yeah, first day is manual handling, which is v- you know, very– That one’s very easy and I would be happy to never do that again.

Like I will always remember that. Um, then you got fire, um, fire safety awareness, and that one’s just fun ’cause you just get to, um, light fires and put stuff out then first aid, which I definitely always want a refresher on.

The CPR dummies at this place, they had lights, um, and it lit up green if you were doing it right, and I haven’t used a dummy that was so advanced before, so that was quite good. I realized I wasn’t pressing hard enough. and then yeah, last two days is working at heights training, which is the most intense ’cause you got your harness on all day and, um, you know, climbing up and down and rescuing people.

this was Rite Training in Goulburn, and, um, the [00:03:00] instructor’s name was Claire. highly recommend doing that one.

Allen Hall 2025: Is that a general requirement in Australia that you have GWO before you can climb?

Rosemary1: Like, yeah, they will sometimes, um, let you climb if you are babysat by people. I would not recommend other engineers, like if you’ve never climbed a wind turbine before, like I would really not recommend that you just go up with a team and haven’t done the training because you do need to be able to use a ladder safely and, um, you can, y- you can easily, like even inside the nacelle, you could easily hurt yourself really badly if you’re used to working in an office, uh, you’re upping your danger level by, you know, like many, many, many times by going up a turbine and it’s just something that you gotta take seriously.

Allen Hall 2025: How busy are the courses in Australia? Are a lot of technicians trying to get in and get trained?

Rosemary1: No, it’s people that have a job that are getting trained. But there were heaps of techs in this course. There were maybe eight or so, which is also part of the reason why it took a really long time.

Allen Hall 2025: So [00:04:00] this week, as we record, y- you’re presenting a blade repair course for engineers and technicians. a completely new area that you’re, uh, going into in terms of offering advice and expertise that it’s really hard to find on the planet. It’s probably a, a, a busy or, or requested course, I would imagine, in Australia, where you just don’t have access to a lot of the manufacturers.

Rosemary2: it’s a, it’s a course for just for engineers or technical type people, um, but including hands-on stuff. So the way that I I forced this to come into being was just the last five years. I, um, you know, I started working a lot on wind turbine blade repairs and, um, people would ask me, you know, “Have these repairs been done right?”

And the thing is that the only repairs that I had anything to do with when I was working at LM were weirdo ones, right? [00:05:00] Where the normal, like a technician couldn’t, couldn’t handle it. It was outside of, um, yeah, their, their standard, uh, kind of repairs that they can do for whatever reason. and now in the work that we do at Part Load, it’s primarily normal repairs, and I just didn’t know exactly what technicians know. You know, how do they, how do they know whether they can repair it or not? What do they know before they go up there?

When are they calling the engineer? Um, all that sort of stuff, like the normal stuff. eventually it became less about me learning, ’cause like I said, I kind of picked up most of it. Um, but now I’ve got staff that I’m training up to be, uh, you know, composites engineers and to work with these kinds of issues. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks involved in what we do when we, like, assess the condition of a wind farm.

A lot of what we do is look main- manually looking through photos and thing- if things are classified right or not. I [00:06:00] Found this guy from Direct Wind Services, Jurij Eska. He’s a blade engineer. He’s worked in Europe and then come back to Australia, so a little bit like me. And, um, I just worked with him on a few projects and I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well, this guy, uh, he really ...