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Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap

Published in: Wind, Talking Point, Exclusive Articles

Global fleet, local knowledge: closing wind’s expertise gap image

As wind fleets expand across increasingly diverse operating environments, the expertise needed to solve their problems is becoming more dispersed. Closing the industry’s knowledge gap means connecting local challenges with specialist experience from across the global wind sector and beyond.

An operator finds something on a blade they have not seen before. Who do they call? The engineer who designed that blade moved on years ago. The service provider has not seen the problem either. Somewhere in the world, there’s probably a person who has spent 15 years working on precisely that failure mode. But there’s no reliable way to find them.

That scenario plays out again and again. It’s rare that a problem is unsolvable. A solution exists somewhere. The bigger problem is finding that solution, or the person close to solving it.

Wind has become a large, geographically dispersed industry with roughly 1.3 TW of installed capacity. The technical knowledge required to keep it running has dispersed with it. The knowledge is real, deep and often highly specialized, but it is scattered across the globe in small teams working in different markets.

This is not the first global industry to discover that no single organization can hold every discipline, and that different parts of the world present different problems.

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