Vestas and Lightning Decision Support System (LDSS) have signed an agreement under which Vestas is to get lightning protection for its fleet of wind turbines across the US from LDSS, Weather Decision Technologies, a leader in global weather decision support systems.

Forty wind farm customers are already using LDSS to optimize safety at their sites across the Central Plains, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska, Kansas, Minnesota and Iowa. The software is expected to be spread out further over the next months, as wind farm development continues.

In short, LDSS allows users to prepare ahead of a lightning storm with site-specific lightning alerts. According to the company, it's easy to install, provides an interactive GIS viewer allowing site managers to view lightning strikes in real time.

One of the greatest benefits for Vestas from this partnership is better safety conditions for the company's service and maintenance workers who sometime spend hours inside a wind turbine tower, in the most difficult atmopsheric conditions. A lightning strike during a service or maintenance session could seriously hurt these workers, or even cause fatal injury. Apart from human safety, the wind turbines themselves are prone to serious damage resulting from lightning strikes, which can be quite costly for the operator, not to mention the dead period during which the machine is not generating power, and is thus not cost effective.

One of the more advanced features of the software is its ability to track lightning strikes in real-time but also the ability to alert about strike occurences within a predefined radius. This, and many other parameters, help the operators decide when and which protective measures to take.

[source: Weather Decision Technologies, image: Weather Decision Technologies]