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Your Lightning Surveillance Service

Wind Power LAB’s lightning subscription service – LASSIE – offers the wind energy market a new option for managing lightning risk.

Lightning will strike turbines, what can be done about this? Understanding exactly which turbines to inspect, when, and how, is key. Wind Power LAB's experts have created an automatic rules-based notice system and dashboard that pairs lightning and blade knowledge for actionable insights. Market-leading remote sensing data drives the system backed by intelligence and development from the WPL Team.

Early detection of potential lightning damages.

Significant cost savings.

Reduce the number of lost production days.

How it works:

LASSIE offers major cost savings due to early detection of potential lightning damages, avoiding unnecessary labour, material, and rental cost.

Significant cost savings in excess of 40% can be seen in the instance where LASSIE solutions are used because repairs are detected earlier than expected through the use of such a solution.

By reducing lost production days and avoided inspections, LASSIE adds value to every wind park owner by reducing lost production days by an average of 43%. With growing severity of a damage more production days are lost, making LASSIE an increasingly valuable solution.

Why Choose LASSIE?

Understand the risk of lightning damages through data.

Verify if a lightning strike is within or outside the certification: IEC 61400:24 2010.

Daily notifications if lightning strikes have occurred in close proximity to a wind turbine.

Trigger Service Agreement blade inspection to mitigate risk of catastrophic blade failures.

Recommended wind turbine operation actions based on characteristics of the lightning strikes.

Optimised lightning strike inspection planning.

Mitigate foreseeable lightning risk events

Lightning strikes to a wind turbine blade can create severe damages, even with a lightning protection system (LPS) installed. Lightning can jump from down conductor cables to structural components of a blade internally and cause flashovers with severe impact on blade integrity.

Avoid complications

Response time to lightning strikes is crucial to avoid catastrophic blade failure. Within a short time frame, the damage can cause a blade to collapse or fail, creating major complications.

Smaller lightning strikes have a higher risk of hitting outside LPS receptors, causing possible structural damage to the blade. These events are usually not in scope of Service Agreement blade inspections.

The IEC standard specifies that 2% of all lightning strikes will cause blade damage independent of peak current and polarity.

Manage lightning risk with the rules-based notifications and dashboard.

LASSIE is simply priced at EUR 1 per day per WTG over a minimum 3-year agreement term.

LASSIE offers major cost savings due to the early detection of potential lightning damages, ensuring the efficient use of field resources to prioritise repairs, avoiding significant cost escalation and potential catastrophic blade failure through non-detection.

Our Lightning Analysis Subscription Service Including Expertise (LASSIE) is designed to support wind farms globally.

What to expect:

• Alignment with client on lightning risk they want to mitigate

• Custom creation of rules-based or algorithmic risk warnings

• Onboarding of specific wind farms and wind turbines into system

• System training and exercise/response alignment for client

• Ongoing support of client with system + door opening for WPL services