Billy Watts, CEO of Siemens’ Wind Service Americas.

Along with being one of the top turbine manufacturers, Siemens is also strongly committed to safety in the wind industry. In 2013, the company opened a 40,000-square-foot Wind Service Training Center in Orlando, Florida. It is one of four wind-training centers that Siemens operates globally.

In this WindTalk podcast Billy Watts, the CEO for Siemens’ Wind Service Americas, discusses the importance of fall protection and safety training, as well as having skilled turbine technicians in the wind industry.

This WindTalk podcast is brought to you by ExxonMobil.

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GEV offers RUK GOW2015 exhibition visitors a chance to see the full potential of the Habitat, which provides technicians with a weather-protected maintenance environment.

Visitors to the Renewable UK Global Offshore Wind exhibition (RUK GOW2015) will be first to see GEV Wind Power’s full-size Habitat, which takes place June 24-25, 2015 in London.

The Habitat provides a weather-protected maintenance environment for wind technicians. It enables a technician to travel to the top of the turbine’s blade on the access platform, attach the patented seal and extension sleeves before inflating the Habitat at the desired location on the blade. While remaining warm and dry, the technician is also able to control the temperature and humidity of the environment immediately surrounding the repair area.

At the exhibition, the Habitat model will be mounted to the outside of a Power Climber blade-access platform and visitors will be able to walk around to explore and experience its exciting potential. The Habitat lets an engineer conduct essential blade maintenance in a weather-protected environment, which provides a massive step forward in meeting the needs of field owners keen to maximize production and operators who want to reduce wastage from lost maintenance days.

Just before the entering the platform walkway at the show, visitors can also learn more about the Panoblade camera, which rapidly captures high-resolution images of an entire turbine blade surface, alleviating the need for “hands on” inspection. The Panoblade camera is already being used in the field by GEV Wind Power clients and has recently been used to inspect over 70 offshore turbines in less than three weeks.

Alastair Gadney, GEV Wind Power’s projects director, comments: “There are significant cost-effective and simple advantages of utilizing this remote blade inspection system. With only one operator required to inspect up to five onshore turbines per day or three offshore turbines, this system will offer exceptional savings in both time and money.”

Once within the Habitat, visitors at the show will be encouraged to trial GEV’s bespoke tablet App, I-RIS (Intuitive Reporting and Inspection System), and record maintenance activity and photograph areas of repair. I-RIS enables technicians to submit near real-time reporting on turbine maintenance activity, which significantly improves the efficiency of maintenance reporting and facilitates timely project management, whilst providing considerable cost savings across the offshore wind sector.

“Renewable UK is the perfect opportunity to showcase our cost-saving innovations,” concludes Alastair. “We launched the Habitat at Renewable UK 2014 in November, via a virtual reality simulation. Eight months on, and with a host of testing and development behind us, it’s great to be to be exhibiting at RUK GOW2015 with a full scale model in which visitors can immerse themselves and experience something pretty close to that of a working technician.”

GEV Wind Power
www.gevwindpower.com

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