Weather Guard Lightning Tech
DSPTCH: Revolutionizing Wind Farm Management
Allen Hall and Joel Saxum interview Alex Jones, co-founder of DSPTCH, about the app’s evolution from a wind farm locator to a comprehensive operations management and IRA compliance tool for renewable energy. They discuss new features, prevailing wage and apprenticeship tracking, industry adoption, and how DSPTCH improves efficiency and safety in wind farm operations.
Visit https://dsptch.app/ or download at https://dsptch.app.link/.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. When we first discovered the software app DSPTCH, Joel and I used it to find wind farms but DSPTCH is so much more than a wind map today. DSPTCH is now widely used by operators for managing projects, handling forms, timesheets, apprenticeship tracking, and so much more.
Our guest is Alex Jones, co founder and president of DSPTCH. Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Jones: Yeah, thanks for having me.
Allen Hall: So I. Went back into my DSPTCH app and got access to the online computer version of the DSPTCH app and was just astounded at all the advanced features you’ve added roughly over the last year.
I think I, I picked up the app when we were in New Orleans at ACP and. it to full fine wind farms, particularly with technicians on site that didn’t know where their own wind turbines were. So it was really helpful there, but you want to talk about some of the things you guys are doing now?
Alex Jones: Yeah, for sure.
This year at OMS, we launched a new product the safety side, we call it oversight and it really just gives asset owners and EPCs, really anyone who wants to come in Yeah. The ability to manage that site, add points put in emergency documents, emergency contacts. And we’ve really gone long on that front.
So we had one of our clients and utility partners reach out and they were making flyers for DSPTCH for fire departments, EMS, so on and so forth. And we were like, okay explain what you’re doing. And we’ve turned that into a product now, and we’ve seen a huge surge in local first responders, emergency teams getting on there’s been a few Incidents recently in the industry and then you add in tornadoes and wildfires and all these other things.
So people are looking to map. Hey, I want to know where my tornado shelters are. I want to know local emergency response teams phone numbers for emergency contacts and then even things like helicopter landing points. So we now support adding all of those things to the map and then updating any information like about the site itself, adding documents, those sorts of things.
And so we’ve really seen that take off and become a part of site orientation for a number of asset owners and so on. And it’s evolved into a pretty neat safety tool.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. I was thinking about this I’m speaking from the mind of a traveling wind turbine technician, right?
Cause this comes from my oil and gas past every site you go on every O& M building you visit. They hand you your sheet of paper. This is your ERP, your emergency response plan. This is where the, the tornado shelter is. This is where the O& M building is. Here’s the closest hospital, all these different things.
Now you have a living one that’s in your phone. Every technician has their phone on them all the time. That’s just a given, right? So then, and if there is a massive update, Oh, we’re using a different thing. Are we moved the truck? Cause we’ve seen the, Alan, you and I have seen those moving tornado shelters, right?
Basically you just pick them up on a truck and put them somewhere else. They’re crazy. But that’s a living document now, right? You’re not scrambling or you get in your truck and you’re like, Oh man, someone got bit by a snake. Who do I call? And you’re going through the ERPs or in the advisor or in, tucked away in the back of the seat or something like, Oh, what’s that phone number?
Now you know, you have it. Cause you’re on, you’re on wherever you’re at XYZ wind farm. Boom. You’re boom. There it is. That’s fantastic. So the oversight part of the product gives people the ability to claim, Hey, this is my wind farm. And then, Hey, we’re going to add all these different things in.
They can keep it private or is it all public or how does that work?
Alex Jones: Yeah. So a few different ways we have the ability. So we’re rolling out pretty soon the site checking capability. So anybody who’s physically on site, we’ll get access to a little bit extra. You can’t have company documents, company forms.
One of the things that we’re working towards is right now our form tool allows you to have a sort of a single pane of glass. So the idea is any vendor, any technician that comes to your site, you’re getting full tracking of every work order, every, QA, QC document against a turbine and all of that just being a nice standard way that you don’t have to have PDFs and CSVs and all those things flying around for every internal and external vendor.
And then to some degree, it allows a number of these companies as they move to self perform to just improve their ability to do that. They’re not locked into some tool or have their data behind a paywall. If they pick one partner or the other. And then we’ve seen a large adoption with EPCs lately, just.
They want to map lay down yards, roads before they’re there. One of those stories we had was, getting a gearbox during a cell delivered to the wrong tower. Now you’ve got, crane sitting idle, you’ve got folks sitting idle and it’s okay, I’ve got to go find a flatbed, get them to come back out here, pick it back up and move it a quarter of a mile.
And by the time you’re done with that, it’s okay, we had two days of everybody kind of twiddling their thumbs, waiting around for one thing to move. And Yeah, that’s been a nice use case. I think the safety side is really where we’ve seen the most uptick, but now with all this new build growth, it’s a frantic phone call or text message of hey, why isn’t this site in DSPTCH?
And it’s like you are, You’re literally building a lay down yard right now. I don’t know how you thought we would know that.
Joel Saxum: But if you’re killing those inefficiencies, right? Those are the things that just plague large projects. Rosemary on the podcast always talks about the book of how big things get done.
But there’s some practical use to that, right? Logistics inefficiencies on site because in this world too, it’s You may have an, like you say, you have an EPC contractor out there. Okay there may be 20 people on the site when it starts, and by the time that thing is over with, there may have been 500 different people roll through that site in 6 months, if you’re building a wind farm, from 5, 10, 15 different subcontractors, and all these different people, so knowing that they’re all on site, they have a live map, basically a customized version of Google Maps to get around the site, know where to put things, know what to do killing inefficiencies, that’s huge.
We, I say in this, cause we had a conversation with Heli Service USA yesterday, and it was all about how can we tackle inefficiencies in offshore wind. Now that’s what their goal was that you guys are doing the same thing, but for onshore wind, tackling those inefficiencies.
Alex Jones: Yep. And we’ve seen some interesting things come out of it.
We’ve had a few sheriffs let us know that And I had never put my self in the position of a local sheriff, but if a angry landowner calls and says there’s a loud turbine or one leaking oil, it becomes, their responsibility to track down who owns this turbine, where’s the O& M building, this, that, the other, and they’re, They may have received some onboarding documentation, but yeah, they, they have to track all that down.
So we’ve got a handful of sheriff’s departments that really like the fact that they can, open up a, open up the app, figure out who owns that, where the on end building is. And then some feedback from our folks have been the construction on building and the operational on building may be different.
And so somebody’s, vendors are calling and they’re like. Hey, I think I’m here. And really they’re at the, O and M building from the construction phase, and then it’s 30 minutes, all these sorts of silly things that happen just day over day.
Allen Hall: Let’s talk about the IRA bill and what it means for keeping track of your employees and the apprenticeship piece of that.
It does seem the paperwork requirements have grown quite a bit. And keep, and knowing. Who’s doing what and where they’re at on top of it. I understand that I don’t have employees in that situation. However, I was noticing on the app, you can actually track that now.
Alex Jones: That’s right. Yeah. We got thinking of, Hey, we’ve got these really interesting site maps.
We know where every tower is, where assets are or so on and so forth. How do we tie that into making IRA compliances here? And so as you traverse counties, you The wage determinations for what you’re supposed to pay people for failing wage change. And if you have a time card, one, we’ve got geocoding on the time cards.
And then two, if someone logs time to a particular tower, we know what county that’s in. And there’s, it’s not like there’s a sign on some of these glitchy roads that you’ve just entered Lincoln County. But that has, Like implications, the wage determination and rate you’re supposed to pay people can change and there’s even sites that cross state lines, which adds to the complexity, so our view was there are, if we’re going to actually achieve the clean energy goals that we’ve set out, We need to find ways to make sure that there’s a really wide tent of folks who provide those services.
And so when you think about, crane operators who’s who have, a single admin who’s doing payroll, doing invoicing, doing all those things. And that person now has to figure out all the hoops and complexities that come with prevailing wage. It becomes dizzying. And quite frankly, some of them just say, I’m not going to, take this work because the headaches are too much.
And so we, we’ve done things from, every single state and province level, overtime calculations are out of the box, doing those at a day level, this, that, the other, really just making it as turnkey as possible so that folks can comply and the adoption has been really exciting. We’ve seen a bunch of folks getting on, particularly on the smaller vendors and adoption among EVs amongst EPCs, and then.
Kind of surprising to us is we’ve gotten pulled into hydrogen and CCUS projects and now even projects that are getting transmission funding via the bipartisan infrastructure law are required to comply with some of the same prevailing wage and apprenticeship ratios. Yeah we’re quickly going to where clients are asking us to go, but the dizzying requirements and compliance check boxes you got to hit we’re just trying to make that a lot easier for everybody out there.
Joel Saxum: Let me ask you this one, the CCUS project. So for people who don’t know what those are, it’s carbon captures, of course. Yeah, and underground storage and sequestration for some people, but so in those projects what are they what employees, what are they tracking? Are they, how does that work?
Alex Jones: So a number of sites where they’re building out, entire pipeline networks going from a CO2 source and then to an actual injection site building some of the injection sites themselves. And so one. Crossing a ton of different counties, a lot of folks working on there between folks delivering the actual steel for the pipes inspecting welds, welding, so on and so forth.
And end of day, the technology we’ve built allows you to comply, whether it’s a hydrogen electrolyzer, whether it’s a CCUS project and then transmission very similarly, you’re, If you think about Sunziya, how many counties that would touch you’ve got these just mega projects where if you’re the average payroll clerk and you’re supposed to know exactly what county every hour of every work day was spent for each individual employee, it’s like, yep, nevermind.
I don’t want to do this. Gotten ahead of what we think are the biggest audit risks. On the apprenticeship side, what we do is there’s a number of tools out there, but none of them really have the, Ability to work across vendors. And so since we’ve got, right now we’re at roughly 26, 000 users on DSPTCH.
We believe that represents an excess of 80 percent of the, wind and solar techs in the U S and Canada. If somebody is working on a project and they are an apprentice working alongside a journeyman or another company you can have your DOL apprentice logged hours verified by a journeyman from another company and all of that rolls up so that both the employer can see it.
The EPC can see it. And then if you have a separate apprentice sponsor, so if you have a community trade organization someone like Airstreams coming in and being your apprentice sponsor, they’re handling the DOL logs, all of that jazz in conjunction with, the employer that’s supposed to report that up to the EPC or the asset owner or so on and so forth.
And so we really just smashed all of that into one pane of glass. And now you’re getting that reporting. Every single day instead of looking at it for five weeks and rear view mirror of hey We’ve been out of compliance for the past month. So you know that I think is making things a lot easier and then you know when we were talking with the department of labor their quick audit check seems to be hey, dol apprentice logs and then You know, dump us your payroll logs and let’s find the weeks where someone was on PTO and R& R and yet they log some apprenticeship hours.
And since a lot of the existing solutions in the market aren’t your timekeeping slash payroll or whatnot system, when they start to find those little red flags that’s when you get invited to a, multi year audit. And I think that’s what everyone’s trying to avoid. We’ve made it so that After you do your time card, you’re only able to allocate those overtime eligible hours.
Your jury duty hours, PTO bereavement you can’t allocate more than what you actually worked. And then you can get that verified by anyone, whether they work at your company or another company.
Allen Hall: So the adoption rate’s very high, but there’s like another roughly 20 percent that hasn’t adopted the DSPTCH app, which is astounding, quite honestly, because every technician that I have run into over the last year is using it.
And so for those who haven’t downloaded the free app, what do they, what should they expect to see on their phone when they download the app?
Alex Jones: Yeah. So when you download the mobile app both on Google and Apple app store, you get a full map of every single, wind, solar battery site, Met tower EV charging station that we can find in US Canada and Mexico, and then the ability to dive down into those see individual towers, make some models of those towers, and then increasingly information about, site contacts emergency procedures, so on and so forth.
And all of that kind of map feature really drives a lot of the, Oh, I found this cool product. It saves me a bunch of time. And then we also do if you put in like your GWO ID, we’ll pull in all your certs and we’ve maps, call it 300, 400 or so industry standard certs that you can upload. And I’ll give you reminders when those are going to expire.
And then if you go onto the website, you can claim any one of the sites that you like and make edits, update tower numbers, this, that, the other. And right now we get, we review all the edits, but the internet has not broken us. So I’m excited about that. Techs just are passionate that, this is actually tower nine, not tower eight, and they’ll go in and fix that, but no, one’s come in and, graffitied any tower data so far.
Joel Saxum: So the last time we had you on the podcast, Alex, you were at like 4, 000 people signed up and you said a little bit ago, you’re at 26, 000 now. That’s six and a half, six and a half times ish growth. That’s huge.
Alex Jones: Yeah we really haven’t spent any money on advertising. It’s been word of mouth from the folks in the field.
And, as soon as we start seeing that, trailing off, we probably need to go, figure out what else we can do to make tech slides a little easier. But right now that organic growth is the biggest compliment in my world.
Allen Hall: So Alex, what should the ISP or operator expect in the back office?
Because there’s a lot of backs office people now using DSPTCH to, to manage their projects. What does that look like?
Alex Jones: Yeah. So you can build out a project, um, inside DSPTCH. You can invite your vendors to join as different subcontractors, and then you get real time visibility into the hours that are being logged, the apprentice logs as they come in, the ratios across the project and then the ability to export just a bunch of data that export and or directly integrate with your payroll system.
Information about, daily overtime hours overtime According to every single state level overtime calculation and all of that, just coming in a nice, neat package. So you don’t necessarily have to jump payroll providers in order to comply or all sorts of hoops that people are going through today.
And then. The ability to push in all of your payroll data. We do a bunch of different calculations that I have a lot of gray hairs to attest. Do fringe benefit calculations and hourly rate calculations so that you can then submit certified payrolls and WH 347 documents and this, that, the other.
Allen Hall: Does that then have a, from a site supervisor’s standpoint, there’s, as you can well imagine, right?
Every site supervisor, particularly these large sites, they’ve had 20, 30, 40, 50 plus. People on site every day scattered around a dozen miles or more. What does the site supervisor use DSPTCH for today because it seems so powerful?
Alex Jones: Yeah, so site supervisors will come in. When you sign up for oversight, we do a heavy handed initial onboarding.
So we go through hey, let’s check this road network. Are there any minimum maintenance roads that you don’t think fire trucks or ambulances get through? We’ll go edit those so that, we’re not navigating someone down the wrong roads. And then they’re able to go in, edit all the points all the information and data there.
They can go create new forms. Upload documents that are available for anyone who comes to that site. And then visibility into at least their folks as they’re on site. Last known locations for all those folks. You do have the, tornado alert or whatnot. It’s more than just walkie talkies.
It’s Hey, I need to make sure that I count noses or whatever you want to think of it as. Where I don’t know where Bob is or whoever might be still lingering on site.
Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s really key. And we have seen a number of really bad storms. And I know the first thing everybody’s trying to do is where is everybody at?
Is everybody okay? Getting that heads up and DSPTCH can help with that. That’s fantastic. What, so what does the future look like for DSPTCH? I you’ve grown it so quickly over a wider, basically project management area. Where’s the push now? What, where are the requests coming from and what does that look like?
Alex Jones: Real time lightning alerts, adding that into oversight, and then we think that the way some of the products today approach it is a little odd. We think of what is the duty of care of somebody when they show up to your site. If you’re an asset owner it doesn’t really matter what logo someone has on their shirt.
You want to make sure that they’re safe. And our view is if a site is subscribed to oversight, anyone who shows up to that site would get lightning alerts, just provided to them as a function of being there. And then for folks that want to sign up as a company, our thought would be no matter what site they’re at.
They’re able to get site, alerts.
Joel Saxum: I’m thinking about a nice if you’re a site supervisor, anybody that has logged into your site can get push notifications and stuff from the, that, that’s huge.
Alex Jones: Yeah. So that’s that’s on the near term horizon. And then we’re just chasing down a number of the the long term maintenance efforts.
So you know how detailed some of that stuff can get.
Allen Hall: So there are two ways to download DSPTCH, right? There’s a way to download it on your phone, and then there’s an online Desk based version, laptop based version. Can you explain how to get to both of those?
Alex Jones: Yeah. So mobile app is on both Google play and Apple store.
You can download it, DSPTCH, no vowels, DSPTCH totally free to you, just navigation profiles, certs, all that fun jazz. And then. On dsptch.app, um, you can go on the website and claim a site poke around, see some of the functionality we have around forms and jobs and timekeeping. And see what you think.
Allen Hall: It’s such an amazing piece of software and you’ve done great things with it. And just by the adoption rate alone, it tells you it’s, it is making a real mark on the wind industry and associated industry and capture, which is great. That’s fantastic. Thank you. And as things continue to grow, you got to come back and keep us informed because it’s a really cool thing.
And it has made tremendous changes in the wind industry. And that’s good. Thanks Alex for being on the program.
Alex Jones: Yeah, no, absolutely. Thanks for having me.
https://weatherguardwind.com/dsptch-revolutionizing-wind-farm-management/
Wind Industry Operations: In Wind’s Next Chapter, Operations take center stage
This exclusive article originally appeared in PES Wind 4 – 2025 with the title, Operations take center stage in wind’s next chapter. It was written by Allen Hall and other members of the WeatherGuard Lightning Tech team.
As aging fleets, shrinking margins, and new policies reshape the wind sector, wind energy operations are in the spotlight. The industry’s next chapter will be defined not by capacity growth, but by operational excellence, where integrated, predictive maintenance turns data into decisions and reliability into profit.
Wind farm operations are undergoing a fundamental transformation. After hosting hundreds of conversations on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, I’ve witnessed a clear pattern: the most successful operators are abandoning reactive maintenance in favor of integrated, predictive strategies. This shift isn’t just about adopting new technologies; it’s about fundamentally rethinking how we manage aging assets in an era of tightening margins and expanding responsibilities.
The evidence was overwhelming at this year’s SkySpecs Customer Forum, where representatives from over 75% of US installed wind capacity gathered to share experiences and strategies. The consensus was clear: those who integrate monitoring, inspection, and repair into a cohesive operational strategy are achieving dramatic improvements in reliability and profitability.
Takeaway: These options have been available to wind energy operations for years; now, adoption is critical.
Why traditional approaches to wind farm operations are failing
Today’s wind operators face an unprecedented convergence of challenges. Fleets installed during the 2010-2015 boom are aging in unexpected ways, revealing design vulnerabilities no one anticipated. Meanwhile, the support infrastructure is crumbling; spare parts have become scarce, OEM support is limited, and insurance companies are tightening coverage just when operators need them most.
The situation is particularly acute following recent policy changes. The One Big Beautiful Bill in the United States has fundamentally altered the economic landscape. PTC farming is no longer viable; turbines must run longer and more reliably than ever before. Engineering teams, already stretched thin, are being asked to manage not just wind assets but solar and battery storage as well. The old playbook simply doesn’t work anymore.
Consider the scope of just one challenge: polyester blade failures. During our podcast conversation with Edo Kuipers of We4Ce, we learned that an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 blades worldwide are experiencing root bushing issues. ‘After a while, blades are simply flying off,’ Kuipers explained. The financial impact of a single blade failure can exceed €300,000 when you factor in replacement costs, lost production, and crane mobilization. Yet innovative repair solutions, like the one developed by We4Ce and CNC Onsite, can address the same problem for €40,000 if caught early. This pattern repeats across every major component. Gearbox failures that once required complete replacement can now be predicted months in advance. Lightning damage that previously caused catastrophic failures can be prevented with inexpensive upgrades and real-time monitoring. All these solutions are based on the principle that predicted maintenance is better than an expensive surprise.
Seeing problems before they happeny, and potential risks
The transformation begins with visibility. Modern monitoring systems reveal problems that traditional methods miss entirely. Eric van Genuchten of Sensing360 shared an eye-opening statistic on our podcast: ‘In planetary gearbox failures, they get 90%, so there’s still 10% of failures they cannot detect.’ That missing 10% represents the catastrophic failures that destroy budgets and production targets. Advanced monitoring technologies are filling these gaps. Sensing360’s fiber optic sensors, for example, detect minute deformations in steel components, revealing load imbalances and fatigue progression invisible to traditional monitoring. ‘We integrate our sensors in steel and make rotating equipment smarter,’ van Genuchten explained.
Other companies are deploying acoustic systems to identify blade delamination, oil analysis for gearbox health, and electrical signature analysis for generator issues. Each technology adds a piece to the puzzle, but the real value comes from integration. The impact of load monitoring alone can be transformative.
As van Genuchten explained, ‘Twenty percent more loading on a gearbox or on a bearing is half of your life. The other way around, twenty percent less loading is double your life.’ With proper monitoring, operators can optimize load distribution across their fleet, extending component life while maximizing production.
But monitoring without action is just expensive data collection. The most successful operators are those who’ve learned to translate sensor data into operational decisions. This requires not just technology but organizational change, breaking down silos between monitoring, maintenance, and management teams.
In Wind Energy Operations, Early intervention makes the million-dollar difference
The economics of early intervention are compelling across every component type. The blade root bushing example from We4Ce illustrates this perfectly. With their solution, early detection means replacing just 24-30 bushings in about 24 hours of drilling work. Wait, and you’re looking at 60+ bushings and 60 hours of work. Early detection doesn’t just prevent catastrophic failure; it makes repairs faster, cheaper, and more reliable.
This principle extends throughout the turbine. Early-stage bearing damage can be addressed through targeted lubrication or minor adjustments. Incipient electrical issues can be resolved with cleaning or connection tightening. Small blade surface cracks can be repaired in a few hours before they propagate into structural damage requiring weeks of work.
Leading operators are implementing tiered response protocols based on monitoring data. Critical issues trigger immediate intervention. Developing problems are scheduled for the next maintenance window. Minor issues are monitored and addressed during routine service. This systematic approach reduces both emergency repairs and unnecessary maintenance, optimizing resource allocation across the fleet.
Turning information into action
While monitoring generates data, platforms like SkySpecs’ Horizon transform that data into operational intelligence. Josh Goryl, SkySpecs’ Chief Revenue Officer, explained their evolution at the recent Customer Forum: ‘I think where we can help our customers is getting all that data into one place.
The game-changer is integration across data types. The company is working to combine performance data with CMS data to provide valuable insights into turbine health. This approach has been informed by operators across the world, who’ve discovered that integrated platforms deliver insights that siloed data can’t.
The platform approach also addresses the reality of shrinking engineering teams managing expanding portfolios. As Goryl noted, many wind engineers are now responsible for solar and battery storage assets as well. One platform managing multiple technologies through a unified interface becomes essential for operational efficiency.
The Integration Imperative for Wind Farm Operations
The most successful operators aren’t just adopting individual technologies; they’re integrating monitoring, inspection, and repair into a seamless operational system. This integration operates at multiple levels.
At the technical level, data from various monitoring systems feeds into unified platforms that provide comprehensive asset visibility. These platforms don’t just display data; they analyze patterns, predict failures, and generate work orders.
At the organizational level, integration means breaking down barriers between departments. This cross-functional collaboration transforms O&M from a cost center into a value driver. Building your improvement roadmap For operators ready to enhance their O&M approach, the path forward involves several key steps:
Assessing the Current State of your Wind Energy Operations
Document your maintenance costs, failure rates, and downtime patterns. Identify which problems consume the most resources and which assets are most critical to your wind farm operations.
Start with targeted pilots Rather than attempting wholesale transformation, begin with focused initiatives targeting your biggest pain points. Whether it’s blade monitoring, gearbox sensors, or repair innovations, starting with your largest issue will help you see the biggest benefit.
• Invest in integration, not just technology: the most sophisticated monitoring system is worthless if its data isn’t acted upon. Ensure your organization has the processes and culture to transform data into decisions – this is the first step to profitability in your wind farm operations.
Build partnerships, not just contracts: look for technology providers and service companies willing to share knowledge, not just deliver services. The goal is building capability, not dependency.
• Measure and iterate: track the impact of each initiative on your key performance indicators. Use lessons learned to refine your approach and guide future investments.
The competitive advantage
The wind industry has reached an inflection point. With increasingly large and complex turbines, monitoring needs to adapt with it. The era of flying blind is over.
In an industry where margins continue to compress and competition intensifies, operational excellence has become a key differentiator. Those who master the integration of monitoring, inspection, and repair will thrive. Those who cling to reactive maintenance face escalating costs and declining competitiveness.
The technology exists. The business case is proven. The early adopters are already reaping the benefits. The question isn’t whether to transform your O&M approach, but how quickly you can adapt to this new reality. In the race to operational excellence, the winners will be those who act decisively to embrace the efficiency revolution reshaping wind operations.
Unless otherwise noted, images here are from We4C Rotorblade Specialist.
Contact us for help understanding your lightning damage, future risks, and how to get more uptime from your equipment.
Download the full article from PES Wind here
Find a practical guide to solving lightning problems and filing better insurance claims here
Wind Industry Operations: In Wind’s Next Chapter, Operations take center stage
Weather Guard Lightning Tech
BladeBUG Tackles Serial Blade Defects with Robotics
Chris Cieslak, CEO of BladeBug, joins the show to discuss how their walking robot is making ultrasonic blade inspections faster and more accessible. They cover new horizontal scanning capabilities for lay down yards, blade root inspections for bushing defects, and plans to expand into North America in 2026.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Chris, welcome back to the show.
Chris Cieslak: It’s great to be back. Thank you very much for having me on again.
Allen Hall: It’s great to see you in person, and a lot has been happening at Blade Bugs since the last time I saw Blade Bug in person. Yeah, the robot. It looks a lot different and it has really new capabilities.
Chris Cieslak: So we’ve continued to develop our ultrasonic, non-destructive testing capabilities of the blade bug robot.
Um, but what we’ve now added to its capabilities is to do horizontal blade scans as well. So we’re able to do blades that are in lay down yards or blades that have come down for inspections as well as up tower. So we can do up tower, down tower inspections. We’re trying to capture. I guess the opportunity to inspect blades after transportation when they get delivered to site, to look [00:01:00] for any transport damage or anything that might have been missed in the factory inspections.
And then we can do subsequent installation inspections as well to make sure there’s no mishandling damage on those blades. So yeah, we’ve been just refining what we can do with the NDT side of things and improving its capabilities
Joel Saxum: was that need driven from like market response and people say, Hey, we need, we need.
We like the blade blood product. We like what you’re doing, but we need it here. Or do you guys just say like, Hey, this is the next, this is the next thing we can do. Why not?
Chris Cieslak: It was very much market response. We had a lot of inquiries this year from, um, OEMs, blade manufacturers across the board with issues within their blades that need to be inspected on the ground, up the tap, any which way they can.
There there was no, um, rhyme or reason, which was better, but the fact that he wanted to improve the ability of it horizontally has led the. Sort of modifications that you’ve seen and now we’re doing like down tower, right? Blade scans. Yeah. A really fast breed. So
Joel Saxum: I think the, the important thing there is too is that because of the way the robot is built [00:02:00] now, when you see NDT in a factory, it’s this robot rolls along this perfectly flat concrete floor and it does this and it does that.
But the way the robot is built, if a blade is sitting in a chair trailing edge up, or if it’s flap wise, any which way the robot can adapt to, right? And the idea is. We, we looked at it today and kind of the new cage and the new things you have around it with all the different encoders and for the heads and everything is you can collect data however is needed.
If it’s rasterized, if there’s a vector, if there’s a line, if we go down a bond line, if we need to scan a two foot wide path down the middle of the top of the spa cap, we can do all those different things and all kinds of orientations. That’s a fantastic capability.
Chris Cieslak: Yeah, absolutely. And it, that’s again for the market needs.
So we are able to scan maybe a meter wide in one sort of cord wise. Pass of that probe whilst walking in the span-wise direction. So we’re able to do that raster scan at various spacing. So if you’ve got a defect that you wanna find that maximum 20 mil, we’ll just have a 20 mil step [00:03:00] size between each scan.
If you’ve got a bigger tolerance, we can have 50 mil, a hundred mil it, it’s so tuneable and it removes any of the variability that you get from a human to human operator doing that scanning. And this is all about. Repeatable, consistent high quality data that you can then use to make real informed decisions about the state of those blades and act upon it.
So this is not about, um, an alternative to humans. It’s just a better, it’s just an evolution of how humans do it. We can just do it really quick and it’s probably, we, we say it’s like six times faster than a human, but actually we’re 10 times faster. We don’t need to do any of the mapping out of the blade, but it’s all encoded all that data.
We know where the robot is as we walk. That’s all captured. And then you end up with really. Consistent data. It doesn’t matter who’s operating a robot, the robot will have those settings preset and you just walk down the blade, get that data, and then our subject matter experts, they’re offline, you know, they are in their offices, warm, cozy offices, reviewing data from multiple sources of robots.
And it’s about, you know, improving that [00:04:00] efficiency of getting that report out to the customer and letting ’em know what’s wrong with their blades, actually,
Allen Hall: because that’s always been the drawback of, with NDT. Is that I think the engineers have always wanted to go do it. There’s been crush core transportation damage, which is sometimes hard to see.
You can maybe see a little bit of a wobble on the blade service, but you’re not sure what’s underneath. Bond line’s always an issue for engineering, but the cost to take a person, fly them out to look at a spot on a blade is really expensive, especially someone who is qualified. Yeah, so the, the difference now with play bug is you can have the technology to do the scan.
Much faster and do a lot of blades, which is what the de market demand is right now to do a lot of blades simultaneously and get the same level of data by the review, by the same expert just sitting somewhere else.
Chris Cieslak: Absolutely.
Joel Saxum: I think that the quality of data is a, it’s something to touch on here because when you send someone out to the field, it’s like if, if, if I go, if I go to the wall here and you go to the wall here and we both take a paintbrush, we paint a little bit [00:05:00] different, you’re probably gonna be better.
You’re gonna be able to reach higher spots than I can.
Allen Hall: This is true.
Joel Saxum: That’s true. It’s the same thing with like an NDT process. Now you’re taking the variability of the technician out of it as well. So the data quality collection at the source, that’s what played bug ducts.
Allen Hall: Yeah,
Joel Saxum: that’s the robotic processes.
That is making sure that if I scan this, whatever it may be, LM 48.7 and I do another one and another one and another one, I’m gonna get a consistent set of quality data and then it’s goes to analysis. We can make real decisions off.
Allen Hall: Well, I, I think in today’s world now, especially with transportation damage and warranties, that they’re trying to pick up a lot of things at two years in that they could have picked up free installation.
Yeah. Or lifting of the blades. That world is changing very rapidly. I think a lot of operators are getting smarter about this, but they haven’t thought about where do we go find the tool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And, and I know Joel knows that, Hey, it, it’s Chris at Blade Bug. You need to call him and get to the technology.
But I think for a lot of [00:06:00] operators around the world, they haven’t thought about the cost They’re paying the warranty costs, they’re paying the insurance costs they’re paying because they don’t have the set of data. And it’s not tremendously expensive to go do. But now the capability is here. What is the market saying?
Is it, is it coming back to you now and saying, okay, let’s go. We gotta, we gotta mobilize. We need 10 of these blade bugs out here to go, go take a scan. Where, where, where are we at today?
Chris Cieslak: We’ve hads. Validation this year that this is needed. And it’s a case of we just need to be around for when they come back round for that because the, the issues that we’re looking for, you know, it solves the problem of these new big 80 a hundred meter plus blades that have issues, which shouldn’t.
Frankly exist like process manufacturer issues, but they are there. They need to be investigated. If you’re an asset only, you wanna know that. Do I have a blade that’s likely to fail compared to one which is, which is okay? And sort of focus on that and not essentially remove any uncertainty or worry that you have about your assets.
’cause you can see other [00:07:00] turbine blades falling. Um, so we are trying to solve that problem. But at the same time, end of warranty claims, if you’re gonna be taken over these blades and doing the maintenance yourself, you wanna know that what you are being given. It hasn’t gotten any nasties lurking inside that’s gonna bite you.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Chris Cieslak: Very expensively in a few years down the line. And so you wanna be able to, you know, tick a box, go, actually these are fine. Well actually these are problems. I, you need to give me some money so I can perform remedial work on these blades. And then you end of life, you know, how hard have they lived?
Can you do an assessment to go, actually you can sweat these assets for longer. So we, we kind of see ourselves being, you know, useful right now for the new blades, but actually throughout the value chain of a life of a blade. People need to start seeing that NDT ultrasonic being one of them. We are working on other forms of NDT as well, but there are ways of using it to just really remove a lot of uncertainty and potential risk for that.
You’re gonna end up paying through the, you know, through the, the roof wall because you’ve underestimated something or you’ve missed something, which you could have captured with a, with a quick inspection.
Joel Saxum: To [00:08:00] me, NDT has been floating around there, but it just hasn’t been as accessible or easy. The knowledge hasn’t been there about it, but the what it can do for an operator.
In de-risking their fleet is amazing. They just need to understand it and know it. But you guys with the robotic technology to me, are bringing NDT to the masses
Chris Cieslak: Yeah.
Joel Saxum: In a way that hasn’t been able to be done, done before
Chris Cieslak: that. And that that’s, we, we are trying to really just be able to roll it out at a way that you’re not limited to those limited experts in the composite NDT world.
So we wanna work with them, with the C-N-C-C-I-C NDTs of this world because they are the expertise in composite. So being able to interpret those, those scams. Is not a quick thing to become proficient at. So we are like, okay, let’s work with these people, but let’s give them the best quality data, consistent data that we possibly can and let’s remove those barriers of those limited people so we can roll it out to the masses.
Yeah, and we are that sort of next level of information where it isn’t just seen as like a nice to have, it’s like an essential to have, but just how [00:09:00] we see it now. It’s not NDT is no longer like, it’s the last thing that we would look at. It should be just part of the drones. It should inspection, be part of the internal crawlers regimes.
Yeah, it’s just part of it. ’cause there isn’t one type of inspection that ticks all the boxes. There isn’t silver bullet of NDT. And so it’s just making sure that you use the right system for the right inspection type. And so it’s complementary to drones, it’s complimentary to the internal drones, uh, crawlers.
It’s just the next level to give you certainty. Remove any, you know, if you see something indicated on a a on a photograph. That doesn’t tell you the true picture of what’s going on with the structure. So this is really about, okay, I’ve got an indication of something there. Let’s find out what that really is.
And then with that information you can go, right, I know a repair schedule is gonna take this long. The downtime of that turbine’s gonna be this long and you can plan it in. ’cause everyone’s already got limited budgets, which I think why NDT hasn’t taken off as it should have done because nobody’s got money for more inspections.
Right. Even though there is a money saving to be had long term, everyone is fighting [00:10:00] fires and you know, they’ve really got a limited inspection budget. Drone prices or drone inspections have come down. It’s sort, sort of rise to the bottom. But with that next value add to really add certainty to what you’re trying to inspect without, you know, you go to do a day repair and it ends up being three months or something like, well
Allen Hall: that’s the lightning,
Joel Saxum: right?
Allen Hall: Yeah. Lightning is the, the one case where every time you start to scarf. The exterior of the blade, you’re not sure how deep that’s going and how expensive it is. Yeah, and it always amazes me when we talk to a customer and they’re started like, well, you know, it’s gonna be a foot wide scarf, and now we’re into 10 meters and now we’re on the inside.
Yeah. And the outside. Why did you not do an NDT? It seems like money well spent Yeah. To do, especially if you have a, a quantity of them. And I think the quantity is a key now because in the US there’s 75,000 turbines worldwide, several hundred thousand turbines. The number of turbines is there. The number of problems is there.
It makes more financial sense today than ever because drone [00:11:00]information has come down on cost. And the internal rovers though expensive has also come down on cost. NDT has also come down where it’s now available to the masses. Yeah. But it has been such a mental barrier. That barrier has to go away. If we’re going going to keep blades in operation for 25, 30 years, I
Joel Saxum: mean, we’re seeing no
Allen Hall: way you can do it
Joel Saxum: otherwise.
We’re seeing serial defects. But the only way that you can inspect and or control them is with NDT now.
Allen Hall: Sure.
Joel Saxum: And if we would’ve been on this years ago, we wouldn’t have so many, what is our term? Blade liberations liberating
Chris Cieslak: blades.
Joel Saxum: Right, right.
Allen Hall: What about blade route? Can the robot get around the blade route and see for the bushings and the insert issues?
Chris Cieslak: Yeah, so the robot can, we can walk circumferentially around that blade route and we can look for issues which are affecting thousands of blades. Especially in North America. Yeah.
Allen Hall: Oh yeah.
Chris Cieslak: So that is an area that is. You know, we are lucky that we’ve got, um, a warehouse full of blade samples or route down to tip, and we were able to sort of calibrate, verify, prove everything in our facility to [00:12:00] then take out to the field because that is just, you know, NDT of bushings is great, whether it’s ultrasonic or whether we’re using like CMS, uh, type systems as well.
But we can really just say, okay, this is the area where the problem is. This needs to be resolved. And then, you know, we go to some of the companies that can resolve those issues with it. And this is really about played by being part of a group of technologies working together to give overall solutions
Allen Hall: because the robot’s not that big.
It could be taken up tower relatively easily, put on the root of the blade, told to walk around it. You gotta scan now, you know. It’s a lot easier than trying to put a technician on ropes out there for sure.
Chris Cieslak: Yeah.
Allen Hall: And the speed up it.
Joel Saxum: So let’s talk about execution then for a second. When that goes to the field from you, someone says, Chris needs some help, what does it look like?
How does it work?
Chris Cieslak: Once we get a call out, um, we’ll do a site assessment. We’ve got all our rams, everything in place. You know, we’ve been on turbines. We know the process of getting out there. We’re all GWO qualified and go to site and do their work. Um, for us, we can [00:13:00] turn up on site, unload the van, the robot is on a blade in less than an hour.
Ready to inspect? Yep. Typically half an hour. You know, if we’ve been on that same turbine a number of times, it’s somewhere just like clockwork. You know, muscle memory comes in, you’ve got all those processes down, um, and then it’s just scanning. Our robot operator just presses a button and we just watch it perform scans.
And as I said, you know, we are not necessarily the NDT experts. We obviously are very mindful of NDT and know what scans look like. But if there’s any issues, we have a styling, we dial in remote to our supplement expert, they can actually remotely take control, change the settings, parameters.
Allen Hall: Wow.
Chris Cieslak: And so they’re virtually present and that’s one of the beauties, you know, you don’t need to have people on site.
You can have our general, um, robot techs to do the work, but you still have that comfort of knowing that the data is being overlooked if need be by those experts.
Joel Saxum: The next level, um, commercial evolution would be being able to lease the kit to someone and or have ISPs do it for [00:14:00] you guys kinda globally, or what is the thought
Chris Cieslak: there?
Absolutely. So. Yeah, so we to, to really roll this out, we just wanna have people operate in the robots as if it’s like a drone. So drone inspection companies are a classic company that we see perfectly aligned with. You’ve got the sky specs of this world, you know, you’ve got drone operator, they do a scan, they can find something, put the robot up there and get that next level of information always straight away and feed that into their systems to give that insight into that customer.
Um, you know, be it an OEM who’s got a small service team, they can all be trained up. You’ve got general turbine technicians. They’ve all got G We working at height. That’s all you need to operate the bay by road, but you don’t need to have the RAA level qualified people, which are in short supply anyway.
Let them do the jobs that we are not gonna solve. They can do the big repairs we are taking away, you know, another problem for them, but giving them insights that make their job easier and more successful by removing any of those surprises when they’re gonna do that work.
Allen Hall: So what’s the plans for 2026 then?
Chris Cieslak: 2026 for us is to pick up where 2025 should have ended. [00:15:00] So we were, we were meant to be in the States. Yeah. On some projects that got postponed until 26. So it’s really, for us North America is, um, what we’re really, as you said, there’s seven, 5,000 turbines there, but there’s also a lot of, um, turbines with known issues that we can help determine which blades are affected.
And that involves blades on the ground, that involves blades, uh, that are flying. So. For us, we wanna get out to the states as soon as possible, so we’re working with some of the OEMs and, and essentially some of the asset owners.
Allen Hall: Chris, it’s so great to meet you in person and talk about the latest that’s happening.
Thank you. With Blade Bug, if people need to get ahold of you or Blade Bug, how do they do that?
Chris Cieslak: I, I would say LinkedIn is probably the best place to find myself and also Blade Bug and contact us, um, through that.
Allen Hall: Alright, great. Thanks Chris for joining us and we will see you at the next. So hopefully in America, come to America sometime.
We’d love to see you there.
Chris Cieslak: Thank you very [00:16:00] much.
Hillsdale College is a rightwing Christian extremist organization that ostensibly honors the United States Constitution.
Here’s their quiz, which should be called the “Constitutional Trivia Quiz.”, whose purpose is obviously to convince Americans of their ignorance.
When I teach, I’m going for understanding of the topic, not the memorization of useless information.
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