This whitepaper addresses the experience gained with operating wind turbine blades in a lightning prone area and utilizing lightning measurement systems (LMS) to optimize inspection and maintenance schedules.
The paper is written by Polytech's Søren Find Madsen and More Energy's Georgios Politis and was first published in April 2025 at the WindEurope event in Copenhagen.
See Søren's brief walkthrough of the whitepaper:
The process followed has been to correlate blade damage patterns with measured lightning waveforms, such that these accumulated findings enable preventive maintenance.
The work has underlined the fact that it is significantly cheaper to fix minor problems before they escalate to complete blade breakdown.
Annual savings in repair cost of 1300-4300 EUR/MW installed, plus increased availability of value 1500 EUR/MW installed are demonstrated.