Wind turbines face a wide spectrum of lightning damage, from superficial surface marks to entire blades being blown away. We spoke with Matthew Stead, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Eologix-Ping, about the pitfalls of overlooking lightning risk management and the importance of effective monitoring technology.

Eologix-Ping provides solutions for monitoring blades for damage, icing, and lightning events, and Stead emphasizes practical, data-driven approaches: combining precise lightning data with on-tower monitoring and acoustic damage detection helps operators prioritize inspections and avoid unnecessary site visits. Drawing on roughly 3,000 lightning events affecting turbines across the Americas, APAC, and EMEA, Stead argues that actionable, integrated datasets can dramatically cut technician time on site and accelerate repairs.

“We’ve observed a wide range of lightning effects on blades, from surface damage that does not require repairs to catastrophic events where a strike blows up part of a blade, and the remaining blades hit the tower, causing its collapse. The most common types of lightning damage to the blades requiring operator action include puncturing, delamination, debonding, and tip damage. However, it’s important to remember that most lightning strikes do not harm turbines. But when it does, repair costs can range up to $10 million, though most of the events we see fall in the $5,000 to $50,000 range.

One event that really struck me happened in the Nordics during winter: an upward lightning stroke, a rare type of lightning, but one that is increasingly common as turbines get taller. The operator was puzzled because they had little information about the lightning event. We later received a vivid photo of a red blade tip that had been liberated and stuck into the snow. In another case in Texas, we detected the lightning strike and the damage. The damage looked severe across the full chord, but the operator assessed it as completely superficial and left the turbine running for years.” 

“Many operators get caught out because they do not understand or account for lightning risk during the development stage of the wind project. As a result, there are cases when lightning becomes one of the biggest (and most costly) ongoing issues. When damage occurs, they have to deal with it retrospectively; it often becomes a three-way tussle among operators, manufacturers, and insurers.

The longer disputes over who is responsible drag on, the longer the turbine might be idle. Faster analysis and resolution are crucial for returning the turbine to operation. The industry analysis reflects the reality, showing long downtimes for lightning-related claims, with some operators holding backlogs of dozens of repairs.” 

“In Xweather’s analysis, there is a clear uptick in the number of turbines that get four or more strokes for 2025. Across the Eologix-Ping monitors, the average number of cloud-to-ground strikes per tower is about 4.4 per year. That pattern is partly a measurement effect—we tend to monitor where lightning is already a problem, so our sample is skewed—but the raw counts are still meaningful.

Regional variation shows that APAC (Japan) is higher in our sample, around 5.8, while other regions are lower, so it’s not uniform everywhere. There are plausible physical reasons for the trend: bigger towers and longer blades increase exposure, and there are hints that changing weather patterns are also a factor.

We still need to learn more about why some towers are struck more frequently than others, and we need better monitoring and improvements to the lightning protection system performance to reduce risk.”

“We combine our blade monitoring with Xweather strike data because customers simply cannot afford to inspect every turbine after a reported strike. In your data sample, we see that some sites see up to ten strikes per turbine per year; that workload would be unmanageable without smart triage.

By matching Xweather’s location data to our detections, we can tell operators with confidence exactly which tower was hit. That correlation reduces the number of inspections required and the time spent by site technicians. Operators apply their own triage rules, and if a strike isn’t significant enough, they won’t dispatch an inspection, because site technicians are already overloaded and cannot be sent to check every reported event.

We are tying these together even further to notify operators after a strike when there is damage based on a step change to the acoustic signature of the blade. We also see that operators eagerly use alerts from Xweather, allowing field teams to receive timely warnings and stay safe when storms approach.”

For the 2025 issue of the Annual Lightning Report, we sat down with Terry Boston, Founder and Board Member of Grid Protection Alliance, to discuss the relationship between the modern electricity grid and lightning. Terry has spent his career at the center of the world’s biggest energy challenges. He’s explained grid reliability to Congress and the White House and built partnerships everywhere from South Africa to South Korea. Terry earned respect across the industry as he rose through the ranks at TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), led PJM Interconnection (Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Maryland Interconnection), and served on influential boards that shape the future of power. When it comes to keeping the lights on, few people bring a broader or deeper perspective. 

With his unmatched industry experience, Boston offers an insider’s look at how data-driven approaches are shaping the future of grid resilience amid nature’s unruly forces.

“The sheer scale of the US transmission grid speaks for itself: it spans about 500,000 miles—enough to wrap around the globe 100 times at the equator. That number alone hints at its unprecedented significance and the sheer scale of what we’re dealing with. When I worked at TVA, we had 16,000 miles of transmission line just in our system, and it would take three months of daylight hours to do a visual inspection by helicopter. ”

“The National Academy of Engineering, which was established back in the 1860s by Abraham Lincoln to advise the government on science and engineering matters, was once asked to list the most important engineering developments of the last century. Not surprisingly, electrification and the grid came out on top. Nothing has improved our standard of living more..”

“In the early days, we worked with Weyerhaeuser, a large paper manufacturing company in the forests of Mississippi. Their operations were so sensitive to lightning that they would shut down whenever they heard crackling on the AM radio or saw a storm front approaching on radar. ”

“That got us thinking: what if, instead of relying on a single antenna at a place like Weyerhaeuser, we used multiple antennas to triangulate the exact location of lightning strikes? By analyzing the intensity of the radio noise, we could reliably gauge the strength of each lightning stroke, measured in kiloamps.”

“As we began measuring both the occurrence and intensity of lightning, we discovered we could control many of our system operations in response to lightning activity. This shift from guesswork to science-based monitoring allowed us to make smarter decisions about where to place protection and how to respond to storms.”

“Lightning is the most common cause of momentary outages. Let me share a few examples. The 1977 New York outage—this affected Long Island and some of the boroughs, though not Manhattan—was caused by lightning taking out two 345 kV lines and triggering a cascading event. Another, much larger in square miles, happened on June 25th, 1998, when a lightning strike in the Midwest caused a cascading failure that went all the way up into Manitoba.

The most expensive one that I’ve encountered involved the highest intensity lightning stroke ever measured on the TVA system—the Tennessee Valley Authority, which manages one of the largest public power systems in the United States. This was a 300 kA stroke. The lightning detection network in Tucson initially dismissed it as an error or noise because it was such a high-intensity event. But it actually tripped off two nuclear plants, and you’re talking one to two million dollars per unit per day in lost generation.”

“Lightning damage isn’t limited to just the transmission line itself. When a high-intensity strike hits close to a substation, you have to worry about damage to transformers and other equipment, which can be costly and time-consuming to repair. On the lines themselves, the most common problem is tracking on the insulators—lightning leaves marks that reduce the insulation level, making the line more vulnerable to future strikes.”

“These days, with advances in fault location technology from organizations like the Grid Protection Alliance, we can pinpoint the likely fault location to within one or two structures. That means instead of searching miles of line, crews can go directly to the problem area, saving time and reducing the risk of extended outages.”

“The beauty of what we have now is that it’s all science-based. Long, long time ago, if there was a piece of equipment failure or a momentary outage, we’d just say, ‘Oh, that had to be lightning.’ There was a lot of guesswork, and lightning was often blamed for outages that might have had other causes. Now, with the lightning detection network, we can pinpoint exactly where and when a strike occurred. For example, we can say that at structure 1223, a 100-kA stroke hit, and we know the root cause of that outage.”

“Once we got enough antennas in place to measure lightning, we actually discovered that lightning didn’t cause as many outages as operators had assumed before. Other things—like trees brushing a line or falling in the forest—can cause faults that look similar but are actually different in nature. Today, we can use science and data to separate fact from assumption.”

“One of the most significant breakthroughs in grid protection has been our ability to actually measure lightning—both its location and its intensity—and use that data to decide exactly where to install metal oxide varistor lightning arresters. This targeted approach has dramatically reduced equipment failures across the network."

“But the world is changing fast. Today, we are in a digital economy, and even momentary outages are unacceptable for the quality of power we deliver. The grid’s performance has improved, but the demands on it are only growing. The importance of not having interruptions, both momentary and extended, on the grid is greater than ever. As we look to the future, we need to keep pushing for even better data, smarter analytics, and more resilient infrastructure to meet the needs of a world that depends on uninterrupted power.”

“After the ’77 blackout, operators in places like New York started rearranging generation as storms approached—a strategy known as contingency analysis. The goal is to always run the system so that if any single element fails, customers won’t lose power; we call this operating under N-1 conditions.”

“More and more often, operators rely on real-time weather and lightning data in their control centers, watching the lightning flash density before it gets to their system, knowing it’s going to put the grid at risk."