Why wind operations are not what they used to be
- Patricia Junginger
- 3 days ago
- 2 min read
Do you remember what Monday mornings felt like twenty years ago?
There was a comforting rhythm to it. You would walk into the office, the smell of fresh coffee mixing with the hum of the server room. You would start the week with a manageable stack of reports, probably alongside colleagues who had worked on the same turbines for years. Back then, you likely managed a smaller fleet. They were simpler machines. In a way, they felt like old friends: you knew their quirks, their sounds, and their history.
It’s not that everything was perfect. Things broke, but when they did, you knew what to do. You felt a sense of ownership and control. If a serious failure occurred, liability caps usually covered the costs. You went home every day knowing that, for the most part, you had your arms around the fleet.
The slow fade of control
It’s hard to say exactly when that feeling of control evaporated. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, creeping tide.
First, the machines changed. We watched the industry evolve as turbine ratings increased nearly 10-fold over the past decades. We built giants that scrape the clouds, and rotors that span football fields. But as the power output grew, so did the complexity.
Suddenly, the manageable stack on your desk turned into a digital avalanche. Your morning routine turned into a race against a flooding inbox. You are drowning in documents: inspection reports, oil analyses, sensor logs, maintenance records. Hundreds of documents pouring in, demanding your attention.
At the same time, your most skilled technicians are retiring. New talent is scarce. You are left with bigger machines, more data, and fewer hands to help you carry the load. You’re asking fewer people to manage massive, complex fleets using the same manual tools we used decades ago.
When the silence hits
We all tell ourselves we can handle the pressure. Until the day the silence hits.
For one operator, the tipping point wasn't a loud explosion. It was the sudden, dead silence of a stopped turbine on a windy day. A major asset had failed. The diagnosis was catastrophic: the rotor bearing had seized.
The aftermath was painful: the frantic phone calls, the sinking feeling in his stomach as he realized the spare parts would be delayed by supply chain issues and the downtime would stretch into months.
But the real heartbreak came during the root cause analysis. When he finally had time to dig through the issue, he saw it.
It was right there in black and white. One of the oil analysis reports had flagged the presence of fatigue wear particles.
The warning had been sitting in his inbox for weeks. But there were simply so many reports to be checked, that this single, critical line was overlooked. The signal was buried in the avalanche.
Overlooking a few documents turned into a serious financial burden.
The question every operator must ask
You can’t read faster. You can’t hire enough people to read every line of every PDF.
You need to make a decision: you can keep doing things the way you always have and accept the growing risk, or you can admit that the world has changed.
The old ways are broken. The question is: what comes next?
