I wonder why this is an artist’s rendering and not a photograph of an actual installation.

Maybe it’s because the cost per KWh will be off the charts.

Low-Cost Wind Power?

This made me smile.

What made George Carlin so special was his insights in our society’s woes and his astonishing ability to “kid on the level.”  In this case, he was absolutely correct in his observation that Americans tend to be too busy working, desperate to eke out a living, to have the time or the interest in exploring how our civilization might be able to improve life for all of us.

Others have commented that this is no accident. If you can keep people in a condition that they can barely survive, they won’t get involved with things like protests or voting for progressives.

George Carlin’s Artful Blend of Comedy with Social Commentary

Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Aerones Robots Scale LEP Repairs Across the US

Dainis Kruze and Janis Putrams, co-founders of Aerones, welcome Allen to their new Denton, Texas facility to discuss robotic spray-coat LEP repairs, third-generation internal blade crawlers, and their US-made inspection drone that eliminates Chinese components.

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: Dainis and Janis, welcome back to the program.

Dainis Kruze: Thank you, Alan, for visiting us, uh, in, in our new facility.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Is a great new facility. We’re in Denton, Texas, which is just north of Dallas. Uh, and you move from. Lake Dallas area. Mm-hmm. And we had visited that facility a year or so ago. This new facility is amazing.

It’s what, probably four times the size. Yeah. Maybe a little bit bigger. And it is, uh, indicative of the growing business that Aeros has in the United States. And that’s wonderful. Uh, and I’m glad I could catch you in Texas ’cause I know you, you guys are running around the world all the time. Uh, I think the last time I was at.

A facility with both of you was over in Riga?

Dainis Kruze: Yes.

Allen Hall: Uh, probably two years ago now. Oh,

Dainis Kruze: yeah.

Allen Hall: So I saw the Riga operation and, and now we’re seeing [00:01:00]the, the Denton US operation. You have facilities in other places too, right?

Dainis Kruze: A small one in Australia, but, but yeah, the main facilities in Riga and the second biggest one here in, in Dallas.

Allen Hall: A lot of technology changes since Rose Riga. Uh. Leading edge being the big one, leading edge protection materials. And when I talk to US operators, even operators in Australia, we’re just there. They love the idea and the application of a robot for leading edge repairs.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah,

Allen Hall: it makes total sense. It’s one of those areas that, uh, Rons has shown you can do this with a robot much more consistently.

Has that business grown quite a bit since you first started it?

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. We did more than 500 turbines last year, so we. The plan for this season is about one and a half thousand turbines, so it is growing quite a lot.

Allen Hall: So the, the speed and the quantity of robots here in the United States is must have grown considerably.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Uh, one team now gets [00:02:00] up to 15 turbines a month. So if it’s category one or two turbine, uh, leading edge, uh, erosion, it’s about one day to do one turbine category three. Uh, one turbine is being done in two days, and we are talking about like 12 meter repair. It’s not a spot repair, it’s a full repair, like

Allen Hall: full repair.

Okay.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah.

Allen Hall: And the robot technology and the, the amount of technology on the robot is behind us has grown quite a bit. Uh oh. Yeah. You’re learning as you’re going. Obviously. I looked at a number of robots in at the Denton facility. Smarter robots. More data, more consistency. Particularly because the leading edge protection materials require a lot more care than rope technicians can generally create on site.

Right. Walk us through what this robot is doing, why it’s doing what it’s doing, and, and like the, the quality you get coming out of it. ’cause what I see behind me is really nice. Better than, than [00:03:00] what I’ve seen typically coming out of a factory.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. So multiple things actually we’ve been. Kind of what we’ve been hearing sometimes is that, um, that material’s good, the application seems good, but then it comes off after some time and you don’t understand what’s what happened, right?

Yeah. So we understood to, to make it right. We need to make sure that both the kind of, we take the full ownership for the, for the whole process, for the application. And so we’ve been investing quite a lot in our lab to, to actually understand what the material needs, how the surface needs to be, be prepared.

How do we measure it? How do we make sure the process is right? So actually what we saw is that, yeah, making sure adhesion, uh, is, is right, is is very important part. Also, when you go out there, there’s a quite a spectrum of the weather forecast, like information. You have humidity, you have temperatures, and you need to be able to guarantee the, the, yeah, the output in all of that spectrum.

So yeah, we’ve done quite a lot on, [00:04:00] uh, on those. And

Allen Hall: so from a technology perspective, you’re incorporating all those measurements actually into the robot. So you know what the temperature was when the application was made, you know what the humidity was, you know what the mixture was exactly. Remember the temperature of the, the ingredients that went into make the, the LEP material.

That’s remarkable. And now it’s, uh, I think a lot of people think of LEP as being something you would apply with a, you see it still, you see it with rollers and sort of. Basic human tools. You’re spray coating today. Yes.

Janis Putrams: Yes.

Allen Hall: And the, the smoothness of that coating is remarkable.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. For example, I dunno if you, if you know in factories where the cars are made Yeah.

You don’t see people rolling the car. Yeah. So, because the, the spraying technology, it enables us to actually guarantee the robot when it moves, it moves in a constant speed. It’s not manually, it’s kind of on a cruise control. So it’s, it’s moving in a constant speed [00:05:00] and the spraying is constant. And so yeah, the, the thickness is, is, is always the same.

And also it kind of nicely tempers off on the, on the sides. So there’s no vortexes, kind of, no aerodynamics loss. Uh, so yeah, it, it comes out very, very nice and

well.

Allen Hall: That’s the thing about when you put a leading edge coating on, a lot of times there’s a taped edge or a hard edge there. And then they gotta come back and try to fill it.

Or maybe they don’t fill it and the filler doesn’t stay. It may. I’ve seen all varieties of that. So when you spray coat it, not only do you get a very smooth finish, aerodynamically, you lose the step on the backside. Right. So the, the entire assembly is, is just more aerodynamic. And that’s the reason you’re doing in the first place.

Mm-hmm. It’s not just we’re recovering this shape. Yes, you’re recovering the shape, but you’d like to get some more power outta your, your turbines. That makes sense to me. When you’re, uh, cleaning the blade too. There’s a lot of technology about just getting the blade prepped because we’ve seen so many times where a leading edge coating’s been applied to a very [00:06:00] poorly prepped blade surface, and it just doesn’t stick.

A year later, you’re out doing it again. Describe what you’re doing on the prep side.

Janis Putrams: Yeah, so what we also see, uh, saw that, um, if there’s some damaged material, it’s very important to get it off. If you put it on top of the damaged material, it’s just not gonna hold. So we have one of those robots, it has quite a powerful kind of belt sanding tool, uh, where you can truly take it off.

And then the second tool prepares the surface and also the tool kind of makes sure that it’s not up to the, to the operator to choose which point to, to prepare, but just the tool goes in, in a single step and prepares all of it so we can kind of. Be sure that nothing’s missed. And then when you, when you put it on, uh, then, then what’s gonna, it’s gonna hold.

Dainis Kruze: And to develop that tool. We have a laboratory where two chemical engineers are actually working and testing and doing pulley tests and surface, uh, adhesion tests [00:07:00] and, uh, to get the result, the best result possible. Because, as Ian said, we’re taking, we, we are giving guarantee, uh, of our work. Uh, and we don’t do that.

Oh yeah, it peeled off because the material was bad. We, we, we take the guarantee of application and materials that it’s gonna be stick, uh, is gonna stick and it’s gonna stay there.

Allen Hall: I think there’s a lot into that. And having been to the Riga facility, I understand you have a lot of capabilities there.

When we talk to. Independent service providers and they’re applying materials. They’re not doing all the research. Oh, yeah. That aone is doing. You, you are actually looking at material properties, you’re looking at surface conditions, you’re looking at the chemical reactions that are happening. You’re doing the mechanical pull test.

You’re putting engineering behind it. Oh, yeah. Which, which has to happen. We’re still early in this leading edge protection world. We have, we don’t have 50 years of experience. We have two or three really good years, and we’re still learning and there’s a lot of different materials being proposed right now.

That mechanical testing and evaluation [00:08:00] laboratory really raises the bar.

Dainis Kruze: Oh

Allen Hall: yeah. I think in terms of just what you’re expecting to get out and, and EC saying, you back up what you do. Oh yeah. Which is completely different than the rest of the industry. De describe what that means to an operator that chooses their owns to do leading edge protection.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s a turnkey, uh, solution, right? So, uh, you won’t get in a situation when, um, somebody comes, supplies the material and after a year it peels off and then you, um, have months and months of debating and negotiating, right? Uh, whom to blame, right? So who will take care of that? Um, and in the end, basically, you don’t know either that was a material or that was a applicator.

Um, that’s it, but. The result is not met. Right. So the the, yeah, the the still, the, the blade is not protected. In our case, we take full responsibility, full accountability. If the material is gonna put peel, uh, peel off, we are gonna come and fix it.

Allen Hall: Because I think a EP loss from leading edge erosion is one thing.[00:09:00]

A EP loss from a bad leading edge protection material that’s peeling off is exponentially worse from what I have seen. It just gets very draggy. Yes. And that material just starts to. Actually create massive drag. So you need to get that bad material off. And I think a lot of operators that have used other services probably won’t be calling you this year to go, we need to sand that off and put on something with robot.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.

Allen Hall: Does that then change the dynamic because of the, the amount of robotics, uh, applications you can do in a year where before when we talked to operators, us Europe, robots are nice. But we don’t see the ROI.

Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: Has that flipped on its head now where the robots are just so much faster than rope technicians, that it just makes sense to do it with robots?

Dainis Kruze: I still, we even have systems in our portal where customers can see, um, at which category, how much of efficiency they’re losing, uh, during the year. Yeah. So what is the a a p loss and roughly speaking, it’s like three, four years of return of investment just [00:10:00] on AP loss. If you’re not fixing it at category three, you’re gonna lose in two, three years.

Same amount of money as on investing on, on repairing that. Yeah. So the return of investment is two, three years, uh, worst cases for four years. Um, as we see, um, and not even speaking about, uh, when the erosion happens to, to category four and five, your repair cost is just like at least double or triple. So you don’t want to do that in category fours and fives.

It’s lot smarter to do that at category two, three.

Allen Hall: Oh, that makes a lot of sense. However, I would say that a lot of operators worldwide let it get to three plus. Mm-hmm. Before they start to worry about it. Alright, so the, then the question becomes, am I gonna put a bunch of technicians up on ropes anyway to go fix this?

Or is there a robotic solution that I can fix those leading edge, uh, where the, the, the glue has been eaten away by leading a rosn. Can I fix that without putting technicians on ropes?

Janis Putrams: Right. So currently we are [00:11:00] doing categories like 1, 2, 3.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Janis Putrams: Um, if we have category four repair, we would cooperate with a rope technicians.

They come and laminate, and then the robot does, does everything else. But there’s a, yeah, there’s a new, uh, new technology that we are working on, which is kind of a reinforced, uh, yeah. Application on the leading edge, uh, where we can be able to actually repair category for. Uh, for as well.

Intro: Mm-hmm.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. This, and it’s, um, it’s a uv uh, UV curable solution, uh, which is also great because you can apply it in, in, in, in, in humid environments, in, in colder environments.

Um, and then, and then of course the, the, yeah, the, the leading kind of protection that we put on would go, go on there as well. And, and this is actually quite a, um, amazing, uh, uh, yeah, sample. So for those who don’t know this, this goes into rain erosion, uh, kind of machine test machine. And [00:12:00] uh, and then they get kind of the spin and, and, and rain droplets are, are falling.

And, and, and then you measure how long it lasts. And, and this has been in there for 200 hours and we actually had to stop the test because it was becoming just outrageously expensive. But it’s, it’s like a lifetime, like the, the turbine would not experience this amount of erosion in lifetime, so we thought it was

Dainis Kruze: 130 meters, uh, per second.

Uh, speed. Speed. Um, but, and yeah, as Ian said, like we also have a system in our portal where you can look up your, any wind park in us, and it’ll tell how many hours per year you have this severe, uh, rain, which would be like compatible with, uh. Close to this, uh, speed tip speed and, and the rain. And basically there is no wind park in the world, uh, where the erosion would happen, uh, where the rain would be like 200 hours, like, uh, in, in, in lifetime of the turbine in 25 years.

Hmm. So basically [00:13:00] it’s in most of the cases it’s like four or 5, 6, 7 hours a year, which means like basically it’s gonna last for 30 years, um, like in, in a, on the rain erosion test,

Allen Hall: but really only if the application is good.

Dainis Kruze: Only if the application is good. Yeah.

Allen Hall: That which is the key, right? Yeah. So you can have the best material in the world, you can have the best lab results in the world, but if you can’t repeat it out of the world Yeah.

Then it’s just a waste of time.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah.

Janis Putrams: Yeah,

Dainis Kruze: exactly.

Janis Putrams: There’s another interesting aspect that we, we saw when we, because we, we did a lot of those tests and what we noticed is that the surface smooth smoothness, uh, actually is also very important because like if it’s more like an orange peel, you get those cavities and when the rain droplets hit.

They kind of, they, they creates more like a stress concentrations there just

Allen Hall: a

Janis Putrams: pull. We’ve seen like, like about the performance kind of getting into half. If the, if the surface is not, not, not smooth.

Allen Hall: And that’s what you see in the field when they apply it by hand. It’s not nearly as smooth as what I see on the spray version here with the robot.

Janis Putrams: Mm-hmm. And [00:14:00] once it finds a place where the erosion can start, then it just grows.

Allen Hall: That’s the magic. Right. I, I know a lot of operators don’t think about all those little details. Mm-hmm. But because roads has the ability to do the work, to do the manual motion testing, to do the lab testing, to look at the materials and apply it.

Like it should be that that’s a game changer.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah. And, and scale it. Right. So when we do this with robots, like, uh, like most of the job is done by the semi-autonomous robot. So it’s not again, um, a bottleneck of how many good technicians you have,

Allen Hall: right?

Dainis Kruze: Like it’s, it’s, uh, it’s about technology which is doing the job.

And you will have a consistent result, whether it’s Australia, US, or Europe, you will have exactly the same result, uh, because it was done by exactly the same robot.

Allen Hall: Well, speaking of robots, uh, the latest gen three internal crawler is remarkable. Uh, Yana should give me the details of all the cool features that are on it.

I’ve seen it in video. I haven’t seen it out in the world live [00:15:00] inside of a blade yet, but I will this year. I think there’s a lot of technology in there from your first gen robot to, uh, this third gen. The pictures that I’ve seen downstream are really good. Because it matters and, and because there’s lot of the defects you can’t see on the outside.

You need to be on the inside.

Janis Putrams: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: Uh, core, uh, bonding, most of them. Well, that’s true then. That’s totally true. No, the industry, you’re right. I do, I do think we started off on the outside because that’s what we could do. Mm-hmm. Not realizing that probably we should be on the inside should sort of started there first.

But the robot now is so much better at taking pictures. And if you, if you can take pictures, but the pictures are not so good, why are you wasting your time even taking them?

Janis Putrams: Right.

Allen Hall: Explain what’s all in that robot to take high quality images and to focus on the defects that you find.

Janis Putrams: Right. So kind of, we’ve done a lot of inspections with our previous generation crawler and, and then we, we got a lot of feedback also, and we, we do [00:16:00] ourselves the, the inspections of the, the data, uh, and give, give information to customers.

So we worked our way back. And also not just that, uh, when you go out and do it on a big scale. You get feedback, like, for example, from the technicians, uh, what’s easy for them, like different blade models, maybe some specific blade models have some obstruction in there that you need to drive around. So, so those kind of small details when, when you gather and, and, and, and even just manufacturability to make sure that, uh, yeah, it’s easy and faster to manufacture, easy to maintain.

Um, so, but that’s, yeah, that’s, that’s the kind of, uh, the part on. On the, on the inspection itself, uh, of course it has a improved 360, uh, kind of inspection. So we gather everything. Uh, there’s additional camera for, uh, much detailed kind of areas. For example, the, the root zone, you would want to, to have the kind of the top part inspected [00:17:00] in higher resolution, but also it has like a smart feature where you can tell that, for example, particular area in the blade, if you want that in a higher resolution.

So when it gets there, it, it would point and, and, and take that particular area because maybe there’s a serial defect and you would want it in a much, much higher, uh, higher resolution. Also, what we got feedback from, from customers is that for them, it’s very important that, for example, if there’s a defect, you want to know exactly the size of the defect, and you want to know exactly the distance to the root.

And maybe you want to, you might need to open the blade from the outside and you don’t want to be off by even a half meter. So we’ve been working a lot to, to improve that. But it’s like centimeter precision

Allen Hall: because a lot of the defects are actually happening closer to the root. I, I think lightning company, which is what we are, we get a lot of defects kind of further towards the tip, but the manufacturing defects that really matter are closer to the root [00:18:00] and they tend to, if you think about the root that’s.

The largest diameter part of the blade. So you need to be able to take really good images where the rover is not right next to the damage that matters. Mm-hmm. So you’re looking for megapixels, you’re looking for light intensity, you’re looking for exposures right to be right so that you can actually measure it, track it.

So even if you notice there’s a crack talking to operators, there’s a crack. Okay. But is it propagating yes or no? If you can’t measure it, actually, you can’t tell if it’s growing or not, which is ultimately. What you need. So those improvements are gonna be a, a massive improvement in terms of the operators buying in because we talk to operators all the time, you need to be doing internal inspections.

And they say, yeah, sure. Like, no, no, no, no. You don’t understand. You need to do a set up internal inspections so you understand what’s going on inside your blades because there are a lot of like kind of serial defect things or uniqueness things that happening, or wind, wind specific events that are happening and are causing issues with your [00:19:00] blade.

And that gets me to outside the blade. So, uh, once you’ve done the internal inspections and you should be doing some external inspections, particularly for lightning and some other issues. Question in America right now is you can’t use a drone that has Chinese components in it. There owns drone image.

Those are all Chinese free, ready to go right now to take high resolution images. And there’s actually more technology. Yeah. And this drone that I’ve seen in, in previous versions.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.

Allen Hall: Tell me about that.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s us made, uh, so we, uh, are, are compliant, um, with, with the rule, uh, regulations that you can’t use the Chinese, uh, parts.

That’s one thing. Another thing is like how the technology works. So, um, we have very sophisticated system how the drone flies and scans the blade, uh, the blades and the turbine itself. So we don’t need to put the blades in particular angles like you. [00:20:00] Whatever the blades are being stopped, the drone is gonna be capable of doing that inspection.

Um, that saves time, uh, time and makes it easier. Also, you don’t need to navigate, like if you take the drone and do the inspections yourself, you just push start and the drone does, uh, all the jobs. So you don’t need to fly to point it at the tip of the blade or whatever it’s gonna do. 100% of the jobs is gonna be by, by, by itself.

Um, and also like we have, um, a. Bigger angle, like variety, how we can put the camera. So we always will take the picture from the best angle. It’s not gonna be, look, you’re not gonna look at the crack under an angle. You will look at the, uh, crack directly, uh, onto it and it actually, it actually moves the needle.

It, it, it’s very, very important when you’re reviewing the data.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. So basically what you want to do is like, if you want to take a picture of this. You want to be looking perpendicular to it.

Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm.

Janis Putrams: And, and if the turbine is like this, you, you want like, you want want to look like this and if the blade kind of, you go from the top, you [00:21:00] want to look like this.

So this drone was built, it wasn’t adapted, it was built particularly for wind turbine inspection. So the kind of, it was taken account that it can do all these angles Exactly as, as they need for, for, for blades. So to, to get the, the, the best, uh, inspection data.

Allen Hall: I’m always surprised at the lack of quality of inspection images for cracks.

I see a lot of them because we get sent a lot of lightning damage mm-hmm. Inspections to go through and, but we see the cracks. Also, when I look at the crack, it’s always at an angle and I think, how do those engineers even have a sense of what the scale of that is? Because I can barely see it in this really poor drone image.

Having something that’s actually 90 degrees to the damage is. A game changer because now again, going back to there’s a crack, but what do I do about it? If it’s not growing, I may just live with it. Mm-hmm. But you can’t measure it if you don’t have a good, consistent image of it, which everyone’s thinks about.

Right.

Dainis Kruze: Not only image, but also a 3D model of the blade. So because we are scanning [00:22:00] it with the lighters, we actually have a 3D model of that blade. So we can actually physically measure, we understand what we are seeing, uh, and we can measure, uh, with high precision. So both the internal crawlers and the drones are by far the best, uh, robotic technology for wind turbine inspections, uh, in the industry by far.

Like, uh, yeah. Uh, nothing comparable in the, in, in the industry.

Janis Putrams: Yeah. What Dyna says, it’s that the precision is also important for another aspect, because when you have a drone inspection from the outside, an internal inspection on the inside, and you have this precision, what you get is that, for example, there’s something on the inside of Blade.

And you want to see what’s on the outside. You can flip in, in our portal, you can just flip and look at it from the outside and you say, oh yeah, there’s something on the outside and what’s on the inside. It gives you much better understanding what the defect to release. Is it just on the inside or is it already propagating on the outside?

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, and it’s one click. It’s not reviewing two reports, uh, trying to understand, uh, going back [00:23:00] and forth. It’s just one click you and you get outside.

Allen Hall: Well, let’s talk about the software platform. There is a software platform. It is called the

Dainis Kruze: your Owns platform. Okay.

Allen Hall: You guys gotta

Dainis Kruze: work

Allen Hall: on a name?

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, we, we haven’t blocked on, on the name.

Yeah, we should. We should.

Allen Hall: But the, the Eros platform is a useful platform because you can have all the images you want, but they’re not really useful unless you can correlate it back to what the blade design is and then figure out where. The the crack or the DA or whatever this is going on. Where it is on the blade.

Exactly. So then you can assess whether you need to have a response to it. Do you need to derate the turbine, shut down the turbine, or just let her run? Those are big, important decisions to make because it has to do with profits at the end of the day. That platform allows every the engineers to do that.

You’re seeing more adoption of that platform by the Oh yeah, by the operators.

Dainis Kruze: We are stepping up. Me and Jans, we actually graduated, uh, computer science. So we are software developers by [00:24:00] education, not the mechanical engineers. Uh, uh, and we, we, for, for all of these years, we, we’ve worked more on the robotic technology, how to get the data, how to get the best quality picture, how to, uh, get the, uh, best quality data.

Um, and now we have stepped up on the portal development and, uh, again, uh, in, in, we’ve built the best portal in the industry, like seamless review of the data of internals and externals and lightning protection system tests. Um, and, uh, yeah, the easiness, how to you, you can use the, the system, uh, review the data, uh, navigate, see the.

Um, different kind of analytics and, and help from our blade engineers on decision making, um, is again, the best in the industry now.

Allen Hall: Well, you mentioned lightning protection resistance measurements because it’s something you’ve done for a number of years now, and I run into a lot of operators that say we’ve, we’ve had our drones do the LPS resistance measurements.

They should still be doing those. I think there’s, because Aeros has done it [00:25:00] so well and has a, a nice data set with it. Operators are thinking, I don’t I need to do it anymore.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah. It’s a, uh, it’s

Allen Hall: a conflict, isn’t it? It, it, it’s, you get so good at one thing that, that it changes the dynamic of the industry.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. I, I think, I think that we are a bit, we, we need a bit more data on understanding, um, how much these lightning damages actually cost. Yep. Comparing to what would cost, uh, like a proper inspection campaign.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Dainis Kruze: So kind of in a, in a way, you know, like these lighting damages are not there yet.

Allen Hall: Yeah.

Dainis Kruze: Why should I test anything? Yeah. And when you get that lighting damage and you lose a blade and it have a fire it to fire. Yeah. Or have a fire and you have, uh, hundreds of thousands, if not millions in losses, it’s already too late. It is. Yeah. It’s, uh, and, and that’s, and that’s an issue of the. Chicken and egg.

Uh, yeah, I think in the industry. Uh, but, but I see that the industry [00:26:00]is improving and we do more and more of these lighting protection system tests. Um, customers are becoming smarter on this and, and, uh, I hope, uh, that it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s gonna, and it’s gonna get to the right place.

Janis Putrams: Also, what we saw is that sometimes we, we would give reports to the customer that, for example, for this Blade lightning protection is not working.

So they are asking like, okay, what’s next? Yeah, what do I do with this data? Right, right. So we developed a kind of a tool which helps to actually track exactly where that damage is, where that cable is, is kind of connection is lost. Uh, so it’s kind of like a, I dunno, same as you would kind of, uh, look for, I dunno, golden coins or something.

So it’s kind of a similar technology. The robot goes up and it kind of, uh, slides, kind of scans, uh, very closely to the blade. And when you find the, where the cable problem is, it has actually like a red marker and it can make a mark on the blade. Uh, so [00:27:00] actually if the rob guys, if they need to go up and, and open up the blade to fix the cable, they know exactly where, where to look.

So it’s not, again, you’re not doing it half a meter away or, or you can open up and then fix it.

Dainis Kruze: We call it open circuit finder. For, at least for that, we have the name.

Allen Hall: It’s a very useful thing though. I think the, the more that you get out to site, the more you realize what the problems are, what the priorities are, and design solutions around those. The linet protection one is obviously, is massive, right? Mm-hmm. You just kind of see it everywhere in, uh, particularly United States and Southern United States.

You see leading erosion being the, the number one. And then lightning damage being number two, when you see a lot of operators going after both of those things simultaneously to save money, that’s a massive improvement than five years ago. The, you guys have really changed the industry. There’s, everybody’s starting to think a little bit differently about how they approach the repair [00:28:00] season that, uh, owns, has extended the repair season.

So a lot wider window than it was. It’s not just March to October. Yeah, almost a full year at this point because of the technology the robot brings and the amount of data.

Dainis Kruze: Mm-hmm.

Allen Hall: Now everybody can react because they have something to base their decisions on. That’s, oh yeah. That’s impressive. It’s hard. I know you guys have a hard time seeing that because you’re in the day-to-day of Yeah.

Of trying to run a company has paced in, in Riga and you got places in Australia and America, so it’s a lot. But I do think deep breath, take a look back. You really have influenced the industry in the positive in a lot of ways. Thank you. Congratulations on that. It’s impressive. It really is. And uh, you know, when we talk next time in a year from now, probably you’ll have more done out in the field and you’ll have done several thousand turbines leading edge protection and you’ll have that history and you’ll have that data.

That’s [00:29:00] remarkable. Now your season. Your calendar is getting pretty full with a lot of operators calling you, saying, I need you out here to do leading edge protection and a variety of other tasks. Is there any room in your schedule right now to get on it and, and how do they, how do they get on your schedule?

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah, there is room because we are building 30 additional, uh, leading edge repair robots. So it’s, it’s quite a lot. Like one robot is actually doing, um, up to 150 repairs a year. So it’s, it’s, it’s quite a big capacity. So yeah, we’re building more and more robots. Demand is there. Um, and, and the wind industry is gonna generate more clean energy because of that.

Right. So because bleeding edge erosion affects the efficiency and, and we are fixing that.

Allen Hall: Improving the profitability of all these operators.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.

Allen Hall: Which is what we should be doing. So if you haven’t contacted our owns, just Google our own’s website and go to it. There’s a a lot of information there.

You can get a hold of Dyna, you can get ahold of Giannis via LinkedIn. It’s [00:30:00] really easy to get a hold of these guys and at least start the process. Start thinking about how robots can improve your operation, how it can save you money. Generate more revenue on the production side. Save money on the repair side.

So at the end of the day, uh, your management is happy.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. We even help to do the calculations of return of investment, so it’s easier to justify, uh, with the management and so on.

Allen Hall: Oh, it’s wonderful. Wonderful. Well, Dynas and Giannis, thank you so much for spending some time with me today and showing us around this Denton facility is quite oppressive and congratulations.

And yeah, we’ll, we’ll see you on the road at some point.

Dainis Kruze: Thank you for stopping by.

Aerones Robots Scale LEP Repairs Across the US