Weather Guard Lightning Tech

Inside Aerones’ Robotics Innovation Hub – The Future of Wind Turbine Maintenance

Allen and Joel flew to Riga, Latvia to meet with Dainis Kruze and Greta Krumina from Aerones. In this exclusive interview, they discuss how Aerones is transforming wind turbine maintenance with advanced robotics and AI, from lightning protection systems testing to leading edge repairs and more. Allen and Joel get a tour of their new manufacturing space and offices, where the team is at work. This is a glimpse into the future of renewable energy maintenance.

Visit Aerones’ website: https://aerones.com/

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Allen Hall: Welcome back to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, and I’m here with Joel Saxum, and we are in Riga, Latvia with Aerones. We’re actually at Aerones with Dainis Kruze and Greta Krumina. And we came all the way to Latvia because we wanted to learn where you guys are at. And obviously this repair season has been pretty busy and we’ve seen you all over the world.

But we haven’t seen the latest innovations and robots and where this new facility is.

Joel Saxum: This thing here.

Allen Hall: Yeah, so you guys moved into a new facility. Yes. This year. Yes. And we’re only showing part of the facility. A small part. A very small part. A very small part, this is the manufacturing facility where all the robot manufacturing happens at in the design process.

But there’s another building next door, which is six stories. And you’re four of those stories. And they’re full of engineers and technicians and customer support people. Yeah, so there’s just a lot going on in Latvia at the moment. I think we, the thing that I wanted to come see, and we traveled, I don’t know, two, three thousand miles to get here, was to understand where you guys are at.

And how far you have advanced from when I think we first met, which is probably three years ago now. There’s a lot that has happened. The robot designs have matured greatly. Everything has Yeah, the number of services provided is It’s wild. It’s crazy.

Joel Saxum: You walked us around yesterday, and we just This is for this, and this is for that, and this is another service we do here, and this is a special project we’re working on here, and this is this.

Oh man, this is so if you thought of Aerones a few years ago as a company that does some robotic tower cleaning and that was cool, you’ve got to see this. Because what you can see in the camera right now is, like Allen said, the manufacturing facility, behind that wall is a complete machine shop, CNC, lathes.

5 axis machines, welding, testing, all the above, and you’re just seeing one building here behind us. Two stories of offices, a rapid prototyping room over here with 15 3D printers and all kinds of people running around in full Aerones gear, getting stuff done.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and hats.

Joel Saxum: We’re talking here, why don’t you guys give us a rundown of where you’re at.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah In the last three years we’ve done a lot. The team, Aerones has done a lot. We’ve built what we dreamt to build. We’ve done what we what we wanted to do. And like finally we are maturing into a growth stage company and not the startup anymore. In the very beginning we understood that like just with the cleaning or just with lightning protection system tests it’s not going to fly.

So there are a lot more problems on the blades and a lot more problems on the turbines. Where the robotics and analytics and new technologies is inevitable. If we want to, if the renewables wants to fight with the, basically the fossil fuel industry like to be, it needs to become more effective.

It needs to become cheaper. And one thing is to build more effective turbines. But another thing is like how to maintain them properly and better.

Joel Saxum: Absolutely. And you can see that by what you guys have listened to the market. You’ve listened to the customers in the business development and sales side. And they’ve come back and said, Hey, we need this, or we would like this, or this is a pain point.

And you can see internal crawler inspection. You can see, tell me what these are all about. Leading edge.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s a leading edge repair. It’s a coating application. Yeah.

Joel Saxum: So all of the primary market research that they’re doing listening to the industry and we were here yesterday talking, again we’re here for the Uptime Podcast, but we also have day jobs at Weather Guard working with our StrikeTape product. We thought, you know what, how can we, how could we install it with Aerones robots as well, to make it more efficient for the entire industry. Here having a couple conversations with Dainis and Greta and Janis and some of the team. And then all of a sudden this morning we had some rapid prototyping models, jigs on the table when we walked in the door. The capability of the engineering team here.

We’ve talked with them yesterday, right? Around 35, 40 engineers up on the fourth or fifth floor. Just make, just making stuff happen. So it’s quite impressive.

Dainis Kruze: 55 engineers.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Wow. The thing I noticed was having been to a lot of engineering organizations and manufacturing organizations and worked in a number of them. There’s a, there comes a certain precipice or a certain point in the business where you have to go big scale. You have to have drawing revisions. You have to have the ISO certification. I want to talk about that. You have to have somebody managing where all the components are all around the world. Those things are in place. Those systems are in place. Having those systems in place allows you to scale at a much faster rate than two or three years ago where everything is trying to make all these moving pieces happen.

And I think that is where the advantage is in Aerones today. It’s because you’ve grown and you’ve found the space. You’ve installed the system so that you can react anywhere in the world to whatever the situation is. And I know there’s some top secret programs that we had a little glimpse of yesterday.

You could do rapidly. A operator and oem calls and says hey Dainis. I need this done and I need it done around the world. Sure We have the systems in place to make it happen.

Greta Krumina: That’s the answer. Yeah.

Allen Hall: So you let’s talk about the ISO piece. You have three different ISOs. Yes. What are the three?

Greta Krumina: 45001, 14001, and 9001. Yeah. Yes. Those three.

Joel Saxum: Those are the three important ones.

Allen Hall: Those are the ones that matter.

Joel Saxum: And they’re difficult, so coming from a background where I was part of an audit teams trying to get those and making it happen to do it in a scale this size with this big of a team with so many things you have going on, because not only do you have manufacturing. You have engineering and engineering revisions.

You’re doing the actual manufacturing with 30 percent of your own manufacturing right in house. Scaling that to be more. And then on top of that, you have field operations.

Greta Krumina: Yes. And that. It’s a big part.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, having the field operations. Greta, we were talking about this yesterday. For product development for a robotics company, the way you guys are set up is fantastic.

Because you have your technicians, your Aerones employees, that have a little bit of an engineering background going to the field. So the people that are using the robots in the field have a direct, closed feedback loop to the engineering teams.

Greta Krumina: And that is so important.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Hey guys, this didn’t work. Or hey guys, this needs to be a little bit better.

We need to make this quicker in the field. These kind of things. And I know we just, we had dinner last night and Dainis was showing us hey, this is a productivity tool we use in the field to, to understand what’s happening. Because we noticed that we had different teams that this was taking this long and this was taking this long.

So to revamp our processes, make sure everybody’s on the same page. They’re doing a lot of really cool stuff in the background here that you, it’s like you said, not a startup. Oh yeah. We’re moving here.

Dainis Kruze: It’s like one thing is to build a robot which is the fun part, but another thing is to build a company. And the company is not about the robots, the company is about the operations, how you do the job.

Do you keep it safe? Do you keep it efficient? And we’ve done a great job I think on this thing and we’ve done a lot of mistakes during the process. But, but we’ve learned fast we’ve improved, we are improving all of the technology, all of the software in the background.

So whenever we do some mistake we make everything. That we don’t do that mistake again.

Greta Krumina: And there’s a saying actually, if you are correcting your mistakes, then it does not count as a mistake.

Joel Saxum: I like it. I like it, yeah. It’s the learning curve. Yeah, you’re not on the learning curve, you’re riding the learning curve of robotics in wind.

Greta Krumina: Oh yeah.

Joel Saxum: So there’s going to be some pitfalls, there’s going to be some things that didn’t work out quite perfectly. However, as long as you learn from them, you make those mistakes, you make those adjustments and move forward. That’s what’s going to move the industry forward.

Allen Hall: You’re doing things no one has done before.

So it’s a learning curve all the time. But the, I think the now versus two, three years ago is that all that experience is built into the design of the product and the way you apply and approach certain problems is different because you’ve learned from those situations. And I think that’s why the scaling is happening now.

You have to go through those difficult times to get to here.

Joel Saxum: Oh, yeah.

Allen Hall: And now’s the time to go. Because it’s been validated. I think it from walking around and seeing all the systems in place. And that’s, you’re, I’m a systems guy, I’m an engineering guy. I wanna know that what’s going on.

I know. I know that what this chaos means. And if you don’t have systems, if you don’t have an ISO in place, it gets a little out of control. But you’re managing it and to the point where now you’re outside of Latvia, right? You have a facility in the United States.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, Dallas.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, speak to us about the scale. You guys are set to scale and you’re doing it. So speak to us about where you’re at now, where the next frontiers are for markets.

Greta Krumina: United States is our main market. It’s, I believe it’s going to be like that for a while. But we are super happy. We have set our facility there in Lake Dallas.

So that is our base right in Texas. That’s the second home away from home. And yeah, we’re super happy because they are, obviously it’s not at the scale like this here. But yeah, we have the operation center there. We have the robots come in, they get maintained, they get sent out to the field.

The technicians come in. There’s also the technicians home and base. And slowly from next year, we’re going to also start to put administrations in their business development team. And it’s really gonna. grow as the second home away from home. So super excited about that one. And in terms of technicians, then we have around a hundred technicians that are working all around the world.

Yeah. Around 60 percent of those are based in the U S. It’s not a startup as what we’re saying. And those teams on the field we are putting actually a lot of technicians that are coming from Latvia. We are again, now mixing also with the locals, but it’s We are really working on that feedback loop that we mentioned. Because as we are seeing coming from tower cleaning now to the LPS and then now to the repair robot. We definitely see that we can do complicated things.

We can’t like the robots actually are there. We are challenging ourselves with these things like we are like, we need to get there. How are we going to get there? And step by step we are making it happen. So the next step is like crack repair. We gonna, we really want to go into a more complex, like fiberglass repair. And just get things done more efficiently and solve the industry’s problems.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, and you’re doing it globally right now I know we talked yesterday walking on this kit’s going to Brazil tomorrow.

Greta Krumina: Yeah, there’s Brazil. There’s Australia. There is Europe Yeah, Canada also, so so it’s going pretty well.

Allen Hall: Yeah, the number of trailers and equipment in Dallas itself was tremendous, right?

Because there’s a number of wind turbines across obviously the United States a lot of wind turbines You have to have scale. You just can’t have one robot bouncing around.

Joel Saxum: It looks like a large, like, when you, if you were to drive past, the images and videos you’re showing us of the shop. If you were to drive past that, or visit that facility, you would think this is a large blade repair ISP.

Allen Hall: Oh, easily, yeah.

Joel Saxum: In the US. You’re never gonna think, oh, this is some robotics startup company just getting going. No. These guys are, This is a forward operating base, they’re

making stuff happen.

Greta Krumina: And reflecting your point of visiting, this is our goal. We want to invite our customers or partners next year to our facility in Dallas to actually visit us there. Because obviously this is something impressive but It’s, as you said, it’s long hours of flight and miles. And it’s not that you can get to it in a couple of hours to get to Latvia, although we are also inviting everyone here, because this is impressive. And, this is the real deal.

Joel Saxum: Highly recommended. If you get the chance to come to Latvia. Dainis Greta, Janis, the team, go out to dinner with them, go out to dinner, get the tour, hopefully you don’t get stuck in the snow.

Allen Hall: The city’s beautiful. It’s a very modern European city. Coming from the States, I had really no expectations, I had no idea.

So I was just open to anything.

Joel Saxum: Amazing staff. Yeah. Friendly people. Like you guys have got, you’ve got the whole gig going on here.

Allen Hall: It’s impressive yeah. And I do think this is a good base for you, obviously. As you expand across the United States and keep growing, I wanted to see yesterday, and we took the full tour yesterday, so I got to see a lot of robots. Leading edge protection, obviously huge in the United States and Europe.

It’s, it is, it’s a massive problem. The robot I saw and the amount of effort going into getting consistency and the blade in the back, right? So they have a test blade.

Joel Saxum: 150 different iterations of the spatula for putting the MSB in.

Allen Hall: Yeah, and the different kinds of products you’re applying.

That’s impressive. Oh, yeah. The icephobic coatings is a similar thing. You want to walk through what that is and, yeah.

Dainis Kruze: So we’re working now with a lot of data and building the platform, how to. We believe that robotics is the only way how to turn the industry from corrective to preventive maintenance.

Yeah, so how about the efficiency and of the maintenance is like how we are seeing these blades falling down. And for larger turbines when one blade is falling down it’s actually taking entire turbine. So we see it as a problem and one thing is to do faster inspections. The second thing… like faster and better inspections.

The second thing is to do proper and preventive repairs. And therefore, we’re going to these like from the repairs, the easiest part was to build the leading edge repair robot. Also, what we saw, like for one, 1. 5, maybe even two megawatt turbine, leading edge erosion, the loss of the efficiency is not that severe that the repair is basically OPEX.

Like you just invest into the repair. And with the larger turbines, like 2. 5 megaturbines, it’s a no brainer. Basically, the repair maintenance of the leading edge pays for itself, and you’re actually getting more money out of the turbine. So it’s CapEx investment.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely.

Dainis Kruze: So that’s our calculation. And therefore we start to understand that, hey, this is a point when the turbines are becoming bigger and bigger, this is a point when it makes sense to maintain the leading edge rather than to spin it to Category 5 and repair it.

Joel Saxum: We’re sitting here in front of …we’ve been talking about the blade robots, right?

But this is another robot that you guys have designed in house. Yeah. And this is the internal inspection machine.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. This is Generation 2 Internal Inspection Crawler. We’ve done thousands and thousands of turbines. And what we see, the data, what we get, we see that for larger blades, internal inspections are actually more important than the drone inspections.

Yeah. You see a lot more cracks and a lot more problems. And it’s things that are inside.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s things that are like structural issues. Oh yeah, like critical ones. You’re looking at, oh man, this blade might come down. Yeah. You need to be looking inside the blades.

Greta Krumina: Or we can’t put up this blade.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. For sure. You know what, it’s something we talked about yesterday. You guys lots of blade inspections. You’ve been doing a ton of them. You said thousands and thousands of internal blade inspections. But you’ve recently added some engineering support on that side too.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we know how like blade specialists which have worked for more than 15 years in the wind industry repairing the blades doing the analytics what where how needs to be repaired and so on. So now we have in house these kind of people.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah, we walked into the analytics, this is the analytics room yesterday, and it was just a bunch of people with headphones on in front of their computers. Yep, this looks like analytics to me. These guys are getting it done. That’s where the real insights are coming from.

Dainis Kruze: And these guys are actually training the AI to do the job.

So at the matter of the scale, we don’t believe that you will have sufficient amount of people to go through the data and understand and do the proper suggestions, dive deeper in, in all of those problems. So they are training the AI how to recognize how to give the recommendations for the cracks.

And one more interesting thing about this crawler. When we began to build it, many of the companies were coming and saying no, it’s not necessary. We do the root inspection with with the humans. We do the internal inspections, stick your head in the blade, look around, maybe even walking and like this flashlight and taking some pictures of the things.

And like the main problems are in the root area of the blade. And we started to do these inspections. And from already from thousands of turbines, we see that a lot of level category five and fours are actually deeper inside of the blades where humans couldn’t get in. We’ve saved tens of blades in just this season which would definitely fall down if we wouldn’t do the inspection.

Greta Krumina: But then even comparing the data, like I have customers that want, for example, there is a site that is pretty critical. And by re inspections, the technology allows us to see if the crack is growing or not. And by actually, yeah, but by, by millimeters like the difference. And I get, I think again, like the technology allows us to make so much more sophisticated decisions, strategic decisions. If we are looking at the budgets, maybe there are some companies, but I haven’t heard when they’re saying this year I managed to do it on the budget. I have some money left. What I’m going to do. It’s always like running back and trying to like strategically think, okay, I have this much money.

What am I going to repair? Because I have so many things actually to do that. It’s like you need like strategic and critical decision making and the technology is allowing us to do that.

Joel Saxum: Yeah we sat through a couple of some presentations that you’ve been giving to the market yesterday.

And it was interesting to see a lot of, because you guys have been on so many turbines whether it’s LPS testing, drain hole cleaning, internal inspections, all the above. You’ve been on all fleets, all across the world. Thousands of blades. So you were able to, you were able to actually even just for the commercial presentations, derive a lot of insights.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.

Joel Saxum: Oh we, one of them yesterday said nine, the average of 19. 4 percent of LPS systems are not in, in perfectly intact in the world. Broken. That’s scary. If I were, if I’m an insurance person listening to this, I’m thinking 20%. Then I need to be talking to my policy holders and my underwriters to say, hey, someone needs to be doing something about these LPS systems.

Aerones is seeing 20 percent failure in testing on them.

Allen Hall: And I think you guys have the data. Because you’ve tested so many, and the thing about LPS systems and why they weren’t tested was because it was difficult to do. It took so much time, a person on a rope, you got these cables, it’s a complicated thing.

The robot simplifies that process greatly. Plus it adds a couple of other features. You can clean the drain holes. You can clean the drain holes while you’re there. Extra bonus things can happen.

Joel Saxum: And maybe next year we can install StrikeTape.

Greta Krumina: Yeah, exactly. I just wanted to say next year we want to start applying the StrikeTape.

Dainis Kruze: So yeah. How I’m looking at this like the industry suffers from the lightning a lot, like for years already. And the turbines are becoming bigger. So they’re higher and higher. And so the static electricity when they’re spinning and also the global warming is increasing the lightning. And then you ask to the industry Hey, but what do we actually do to mitigate this problem? And you understand that nothing. We just insure the turbines. And do you inspect? Do we improve the lightning protection systems? Do you put the lightning stripes? Do you inspect the turbines? Do you repair the lightning protection systems?

Greta Krumina: Just keep the fingers crossed, nothing’s gonna happen.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, it’s, nothing is actually being done. And so we have the data now that it proves that you actually can repair the 20 percent of the turbines lighting protection systems. And avoid and improve the systems lightning protection systems .And basically avoid 90 percent of your problems because of the lighting.

And that’s what we are seeing. It’s, there are no problem which you couldn’t solve, like human wouldn’t be able to solve. It’s just a matter of will.

Allen Hall: A large part of the LPS problems is corrosion, is big, is corrosion because the drain holes are plugged. And who goes up there and opens up drain holes?

Greta Krumina: Nobody does that.

Allen Hall: Nobody does it, right? Because it’s difficult to do, and it’s a pain to do, but the robot gets rid of all the problems, right? It’s fast, it goes up, it cleans it out thoroughly, you can show that it’s clean, so you have video proof and a record that it’s clean, and then, yeah, then your LPS system will live longer, because it’s not always in water.

Joel Saxum: It’s like a, the way that your robots are designed as a kits as well, right? Like I’ve, Greta, you and I have spoken in the past, Hey, I can be on site. Great. We can test the LPS. We can clean the drain holes. Now we could do an LEP repair. We can clean the tower. We can do an internal inspection.

I’ve got a crew. Oh Man, we can do all this stuff with just this one crew mobilize.

Greta Krumina: Yeah. I just wanted to mention this is also my kind of personal goal from the business and Aerones perspective. And some like very often, actually I’m putting myself into customer’s shoes. And what do you want?

You do not want 10 contractors coming to your site. You want that one…

Joel Saxum: One point of contact.

Greta Krumina: Yeah, exactly. You want that one, one stop shop. And this is where we are trying, I think, to go, and this is where we will be, in terms also of the blade repair. And it’s just a matter of time.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. And when the time, you can see the time progressing here.

Yeah. We saw some stuff yesterday that was, wow, we’re way further than we thought. I Had read some, an EU project about possible blade repair with robots. In the last six months or whatever, and I’m looking here, I’m like, Why are they doing this project? It’s done. it’s Here, it’s almost ready impressive.

Allen Hall: NDT, let’s talk NDT while we’re here. So NDT is finally coming to scale, robot wise. It’s no longer a very specialized technician flown in from Italy or wherever they’re coming from to scan the blade by hand and provide a report six months later. If you’re lucky. That you’re trying to simplify that and you’ve designed a specific robot.

We’ve designed a specific robot to go do that. You want to describe what that is and how that works? Because I think it’s really insightful into the approach and how useful that will be into industry.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah like we, we started with lightning protection system tests. Then we built the internal inspection crawler.

Then we started to do also the drone inspections. And it’s like you can put the parallels with the health industry, right? So you want to go to the hospital, which can do the visual inspection, which can do the x ray, which can do like MRI and…

Greta Krumina: Not just the blood tests.

Dainis Kruze: And like every crack starts with some air bubble, right? And we, as we see that NDT is inevitable next step of the evolution of the, of the maintenance and inspections of the turbines. But and of course you go to the customer and you say Hey we can do NDT, but it will be like 10 days of the downtime of the turbine and so on by hand.

Joel Saxum: It’s hard to find an NDT technician, let alone one that goes on ropes.

Allen Hall: That there’s a very small group.

Dainis Kruze: So we understood that the robots could do the job faster. And we’ve been looking in active thermal. We’ve been looking into ultrasound, x rays and so on. And so now we are testing already the first version of the ultrasound robot inspection robot.

And we put big big expectations on that technology.

Greta Krumina: And I want to say thank you to FORCE Technology because like these guys, they have been our partners and they are the experts in the industry. We truly believe also in their technology. So I think by joining two forces, it’s going to work great.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah. When you and whether you’re in oil and gas or above ground storage tanks or anything that runs in the NDT world, composites, aircraft… FORCE technology. So they’re an established player. They’re good at what they do. They’re some of the best in the world and they’re always innovating and making new technology as well.

So joining them with you guys is a, that should be a home run.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.

Joel Saxum: So next frontiers for Aerones. Offshore?

Greta Krumina: It has to happen. It has to happen. Yeah.

Dainis Kruze: We’re already doing trials. And like I’m talking about the scaling and everything like the industry is scaling right now.

We’re building more turbines, not only more, but also bigger. And one of the biggest problems is actually not the robots or but the, one of the biggest problems is that we can’t scale at the human, at the labor.

Allen Hall: Yeah the technicians.

Dainis Kruze: The robots are enabling us to do the job more efficiently.

And we are training, not the humans, we’re training the robots to do the job. And it make, we make the process much easier. So it is what it is. And yeah, the robots is going to be inevitable part of the, of this transition. And also like the robots are actually getting a lot more data.

We’re getting smarter about the decisions, right? Those two parts are very they’re going hand in hand, right? So it’s not just to build a robot, but also how you treat the data, which you’re getting with it. And we see that we need to get dive deeper and deeper in these inspection tools. We need to get to the next step of the NDT tests and other tests and, and I think that yeah, we’re on the right way.

Allen Hall: What’s next?

What are the next steps?

Dainis Kruze: Next steps? Make the robots even more efficient and automation. So basically, what we’re what we’ve been doing right now like the next step of the development of the robots is we know that the robots can do the job. We can repair the leading edge, we can do the lighting protection system test, we can do the internal inspection, we can do the drone inspection, we can do, cleaning and soon enough we will be able to do the crack repairs and ultrasound inspections and other things.

The next thing is how to make it even faster. So if we can do a coating application for two turbines a day, can we do three turbines a day? If we do internal inspection for three turbines a day, can we do four turbines a day? So the speed is going to be one of the major part of the maintenance of the turbulence, like the downtime is challenging ourselves and also automation, and how to get to from three to four, it’s basically to build the AI, to build the software, which is which is smarter and doing the job better than the human might do.

Greta Krumina: Because I don’t know if you know the story that in the beginning we were, barely doing one turbine a day for lightning protection system tests. Obviously, that was the very beginning, when we actually had the idea to make the robot to do those tests. And then the day came when we did six turbines a day.

So it’s about keep challenging yourself. And we saw also that in technician size. Obviously safety is always the number one thing also for us, and hence we have the app, hence we have the tasks for the technicians and so on. But you could see from the technicians, the guys were like, okay, three is the max that we can do. And they kept challenging each other and they were like, I think we can do four and that we can do four and then we can do five. And it’s I think this is what we’re trying to do also internally. Not to set the limit, but like to understand that even what you think is the limit, it’s not.

Allen Hall: Right.

And I want to touch on Danis’s point about AI for a minute. I don’t want to give away everything that I saw yesterday. However, I do think if you’re an operator and you’re running a farm, you don’t realize the powerful software and AI that’s been put into the backside of the robots, or even sometimes the front side of the robots, that are doing some of these tasks.

It’s not a very, I think there’s sometimes a simplistic look. Okay, there’s an internal rover that’s driving through, it’s taking some pictures. Yeah, that’s the easy part. The hard part is taking that data and doing something with it and using photographic features, AI to interpret that and to come out with something useful.

So you’re not just throwing thousands of images at a blade engineer in Texas to go look through. You’re giving them actionable information. I think the key here, Joel, and we heard this in Amsterdam at the conference was we need actionable. Yeah data, so I know what to do.

Joel Saxum: Tell me what to do.

Allen Hall: I don’t need ten months of my engineers looking through this stuff. I need Aerones to tell me these blades get fixed, these wait a year, these need LEP, these need LPS. That’s the kind of level which you’re delivering. That is the real game changer in my opinion is that its actionable. That’s huge.

Dainis Kruze: And I can give an example like you see a meter big or three feet, like big crack from outside, nothing from inside. It’s one decision. Three feet, a big crack from outside and 10 feet, big crack from inside. It’s completely another, it’s completely another decision.

Joel Saxum: Shut it down.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, exactly.

Joel Saxum: Get the crawler out of there.

Dainis Kruze: Yeah, and we have so many situations.

Greta Krumina: We have those situations, yeah.

Dainis Kruze: So many of those situations with the drone, it’s like white, nice. It’s beautiful blade. and From inside it’s eight meters, of a crack and and so the inside, of the technology gives you another perspective how to make the decisions.

Allen Hall: And that’s the key, right? Is as the energy transition is happening, we need actionable information.

Dainis Kruze: Oh, yeah.

Allen Hall: Not just megabytes, terabytes of information. We need something we can react to. I think Aerones is doing that now. That’s the transition. That’s the real key to the next couple of years.

Dainis Kruze: One crawler gets 35 gigabytes of data.

Allen Hall: Wow.

Dainis Kruze: Like from one turbine.

Greta Krumina: That’s from one turbine.

Allen Hall: Wow.

Dainis Kruze: So in one day, the guys are collecting more than 100 gigabytes of data. So how to get through it, how to analyze that and give a valuable information out of it.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, so now extrapolate that to a utility scale wind farm in the United States. Yeah. 100 turbines.

Allen Hall: 200 turbines.

Joel Saxum: 200 turbines.

Allen Hall: 300 turbines.

Joel Saxum: Terabytes of data. And some, someone or something, has to make insights out

of it.

Dainis Kruze: Oh yeah.

Allen Hall: Yeah. That’s the key. And this is why we’ve come to Latvia is that we wanted to see this firsthand. And to touch and feel and to meet everybody and see the new facility, which is magnificent by the way.

So congratulations to you both. Yeah, we’re really impressed and thanks for the invitation to come. Yeah, if you’re working in operations and you’re planning your blade repair seasons for the coming spring. You better call Greta, get on the phone right now and book that time. Greta, Danis, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

We love having you on and I know we see you at shows all the time and that’s fantastic, but it’s really good to meet here.

Greta Krumina: And I want to say thank you for coming because I know it was not a short flight and it’s winter outside. It’s snowing. It’s not easy to even get to our office, to be honest, at this time of the year, but it has been a pleasure and thank you so much for coming.

Dainis Kruze: Next time in Dallas.

Allen Hall: Yeah. Let’s do that. That’s a good idea. We’re going to be there.

Inside Aerones’ Robotics Innovation Hub – The Future of Wind Turbine Maintenance