What happens if a wind turbine gets struck by lightning?

You might be surprised to learn this is not rare. To wind turbines, ‘getting struck by lightning’ is less like bad luck and more like an inevitability. Wind turbines are so easy for lightning to hit that they’ve been captured attracting a bolt every three seconds during a storm. On average, each wind turbine blade gets struck 1-20 times each year, depending on how storm-prone the location.

So how does a wind turbine take hundreds of bolts of lightning over its lifetime and stay standing? In this video we’re going to find out about the science of lightning strikes and the tricks engineers use to make sure getting struck by lightning is no big deal.

And we’re going to find out what happens when they get it wrong.

Thanks to lightning engineer Allen Hall from Weather Guard Lightning Tech for help with this video. Allen will be joining me for a livestream soon https://youtube.com/live/sq5qZzVPLTY so put all your burning (pun intended) questions in the comments or join us LIVE.

Also big thanks to Tom Warner for his permission to use his amazing lightning footage. You can find more videos from Tom on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@ztresearch/v... and find a wealth of information about lightning on his website: https://ztresearch.blog/aboutztresearch/

The Engineering with Rosie team is:
Rosemary Barnes: presenter, producer, writer
Kevin Irman: research, calculations, assistant editor
Javi Diez: editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierdie...

If you would like to help develop the Engineering with Rosie channel, you could consider joining the Patreon community, where there is a chat community (and Patreon-only Discord server) about topics covered in the videos and suggestions for future videos and production quality improvements.   / engineeringwithrosie  

Or for a one-off contribution you can support by buying a coffee ☕️ here —
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/engwithr...

Bookmarks:
00:00 Intro
00:46 What exactly is lightning?
01:49 How does lightning ‘choose’ what to strike?
02:48 Wind turbine damage from lightning strikes
05:55 Wind Turbine Lightning Protection System
07:30 Why the LPS is not foolproof
08:30 Lab-scale Tests and how lightning attaches
10:29 Certification vs Reality
11:15 Other causes of LPS failures
12:52 Limited testing period
13:55 Outro

Sources:
Upward Lightning at the Willow Creek Windfarm, Dashcam, 2023-06-23
Tom Warner
   • Upward Lightning at the Willow Creek ...  

Where lightning hit the most in the U.S. in 2021
Kasha Patel and Hannah Dormido
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weathe...

Study on Lightning Protection Methods for Wind Turbine Blades
Naka et al., 2005
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/...

Lightning protection of wind turbine generation systems
Yokoyama et al., 2011
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/...

Numerical tools for lightning protection of wind turbines
Madsen et al., 2013
https://backend.orbit.dtu.dk/ws/porta...