Weather Guard Lightning Tech
Wind Catching Systems: Offshore Modular Multirotor Technology
Rosemary interviews Ivar Knutsen, Senior VP of Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching Systems, to discuss their innovative floating offshore wind concept. Wind Catching’s design features a grid of small wind turbines that benefit from the multirotor effect and enable easier installation and maintenance compared to traditional large offshore turbines. Wind Catching will also present at the Multi Rotor 2024 seminar June 12-13. You can find more information here: https://multirotor24.zohobackstage.eu/MR24.
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update 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 Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
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Rosemary Barnes: Welcome to a special episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Rosie Barnes, and I have today with me Ivar Knutsen who is the Senior Vice President for Technical and Supply Chain at Wind Catching. Thanks for joining us, Ivar.
Ivar Knutsen: Thank you for inviting us, Rosie.
Rosemary Barnes: Okay, so for those who don’t know, I’m just gonna quickly start by summarizing what the concept of Wind Catching is.
So basically it’s a grid of wind turbines that is floating offshore. So you’ve got a whole lot of small wind turbine turbines arranged in the grid, and they’re benefiting from being close to together with the multirotor effect, which we’ll get into later. And obviously there’s also, more modularity all the.
Turbines are arranged in this grid so that they can all yaw at the same time to face a differing wind direction. And yeah I’ll hand it over to you Eva to explain more about what the concept is and yeah, why you decided that this was a, an interesting company to get involved with.
Ivar Knutsen: It has become apparent to us that there are fundamental differences Between a bottom fixed and a floating wind turbine and they those differences are so big that you might need to Take a second look at that, you need to maybe consider a completely new approach to the design, but also to the operation.
So we find that multi rotors have three or four key benefits. One is that you’re actually able to avoid. The infamous tow to port. If the turbines are sufficiently small, you can handle them offshore and perform a turbine replacement offshore without using a crane vessel. You just need to bring people aboard a unit as long as you have the right technology to, to do that.
And as, as we see it, there are no options for. Return to port for big single rotor floaters today, there are many concepts out there, but we don’t see any of them as being tackling the real problems is that it’s going on in an offshore environment with a lot of motions. The other thing we also find very interesting about multirotors is that you decouple the turbine development from the sort of the development, both on the supply chain, but also on capacity.
So if you can go from 20 to 30 to 40 megawatts without developing new turbines for every single step, that’s interesting. If you can use the same turbine, But you can change your installed capacity by building on your support structure. That is a very interesting part of the multirotor concept.
And the other thing is that with a standardized turbine, you can actually enable a much broader supply chain. You can enable local content in each country because the sophistication required to turbine is much lower. And the reason for that, this is that if you now look at the biggest turbines and the turbines expected to come later.
With blade lengths of 120, 130 meters to overcome the scaling effect where the weight of those blades should scale cubically with the length. They actually scale by the square and that is done by introducing more and more sophisticated technology in the blade design and manufacturing, which is really important.
Prohibitive to local content. You can’t build those plates just anywhere.
Rosemary Barnes: Let’s cover though what you said about the modularity and the supply chain. So I think that’s really interesting. I think that’s something that most people are aware of that, modular technologies tend to reduce their cost faster.
If you look at the difference between solar panels and wind turbines, that’s a big difference is that the solar panels are a lot more modular and they’re yeah, can make the exact same thing many more times, which tends to lead to, yeah, getting better at manufacturing that thing and, making it cheaper.
Then there’s other physical thing that you mentioned about how the structural scaling laws, the amount of wind that you capture it scales with the square of the length of the blade, but the volume scales with the cube. So you actually. Don’t get a better structural outcome from having a big, one big rotor.
You have a better structural outcome, like a, less material should be able to be used if you have a lot of small rotors than one equivalent large one. Yeah, so maybe you can talk a little bit more about that benefit that you expect to get from the modularity and the supply chain.
Ivar Knutsen: What we’re working on now is a 40 rotor unit. So a 40 rotor floater which we see as perhaps the lower scale or at least the lower region of what we see as a fully commercial, not the pilot size, but they fully commercial size. And I say for three rotors and the turbine we are designing is a one megawatt, 30 meter diameter turbine.
So 40 rotors is 40 turbines 40 megawatt. Having said that we have. That kind of scalability on the turbine rating, we wouldn’t probably wouldn’t differ in turbine diameter in rotor diameter, because that has implications on the, how the design of the structure, not only the, how you scale the structure, but the whole sort of arrangement of the structure.
But of course, turbine rating is something you can play with on project specific basis, because we do see project. Different types of projects, different types of markets. Even if you start looking at electrification projects, where what we see, interestingly, when I say electrification electrification of oil and gas platforms, which is, has been done in Norway for some time, and it’s probably coming to Scotland as well.
They are often very clear and they have a clear cap on what they can receive of power because their facilities can’t receive any above, any sort of access power can’t be Received or utilized.
Rosemary Barnes: So yeah, you mentioned a couple of terms there that not everyone might be familiar with. So you mentioned that there the rating is higher.
Ivar Knutsen: So meaning basically we have a higher rated wind speed and a bigger generator relative to the rotor size.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. And it’s usually an economic optimization to figure out what that size should be. And you’ve come up with a different answer than. Than others. Is that what you’re saying?
Ivar Knutsen: Absolutely. And and it’s an interesting question because you’re coming back to why our turbines like they are today. And that’s not a straightforward question to answer, because there’s so many, there’s an evolutionary history that has led them in a certain direction. But if you consider very large offshore turbines today, we see that the rated wind speed has gone down.
typically gone down to now. If you see turbines 10 years ago, they were maybe had ratings of 12 meters per second. And now we’re see down to 10. 5. You could get immense capacity factors by just reducing it down to say rating at a five meter per second. And you would get like a very good capacity factor, but it doesn’t make sense.
Rosemary Barnes: You wouldn’t get a lot of annual energy production though.
Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. So what I would say is that for very large rotors what I believe is that the cost of generator size, so increasing a generator size by 5 percent for a 15 megawatt turbine is, has immense consequences. First off, you actually have to build this, but you have to install it and you have to transmit the rotor loads through this.
And this comes from the same kind of scaling law, but that applies to us as well. It just applies in the other direction. So we have a very, a much, much lower impact on that. So we could increase our generator size or decrease our generator size by 20%. And it wouldn’t really matter too much.
Rosemary Barnes: Because it’s still a very small generator compared to what we’re used to handling.
Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. So you’re saving three tons of generator weight per turbine, maybe if you make a substantial change. And as long as you can handle the turbine well. Why not just make a big generator? And that’s what we’re doing.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. Okay. That’s really interesting. And I’m sure that there are, a thousand different little tiny things like that, that are different for your design than a regular configuration. But I just want to go back to one other technical point that you mentioned that people might not be familiar with.
You said one P and three P that’s a tower passing frequency, right? Which I guess when you’ve got a single. tower with a, a three bladed rotor on it, then that’s obvious what that means every time that the yeah, there’s a certain frequency of when the blades are passing the tower. Your design has this big grid latticework there’s not just one tower and three blades anymore, there’s What have you got, 120 blades if you’ve got three blades per rotor and all sorts of components of a tower latticework.
That’s opening a huge can of worms structurally, right? Because I know that, resonant frequencies and all those sorts of things and dynamic loading yeah, all these aerodynamics interferences. Have all been things that the history of wind energy is, littered with people that were surprised by these effects, and had, sensible looking designs that just, shook themselves apart.
So what have you, I’m assuming that a lot of the development that you’ve been done has been on under understanding how these are gonna work for your unique design. Can you tell me a bit about what you have done there?
Ivar Knutsen: Yeah. It’s absolutely right. Because we see that. Because when you design the traditional turbine, you want to tune your tower to have a certain natural period or a certain set of natural periods.
And if you have a lattice work, you basically have thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of structural modes that where one turbine could by chance trigger a vibration far away at the other side of the lattice, just by, because there’s this you happen to trigger some, it’s like an interior of a car.
There’s always something rattling and it’s almost impossible to design your way around that kind of rattling because you’re exposed to so many different frequencies, different motor RPMs. Basically we’ve said that there’s no way to try to design your way around that you need to embrace it and accept it.
So what we’ve done, two things we’ve done we have a fairly big distance between the blade and the tower. So we have about five meters, which for such a small rotor is actually quite a long distance. So, and we’ve done some work on seeing how big that distance should be before the kind of the aerodynamic pulse cost.
On the on the rotor, but also on the structure is lessened. And the other thing we’re doing, and that’s we’ve done a few structural simulations where we applied vibrations to all the turbine locations and starting extracting the responses in all these members. And what we’re looking for is we’re not looking for these single extremes.
We’re looking for what is the average fatigue damage that this. Applies to the structure so that you can add it to your fatigue budget when you’re doing a fatigue design of the structure and by that you can obtain stress amplitudes. And you can see the stress amplitudes caused by this and try to say, okay, there’s this fussy picture that we don’t know exactly what’s happening inside this fussy picture, but we know that the envelope of it.
So we will design our way. around this kind of, we have a top and bottom and say, okay, we will accept what’s going on in there. And that’s the approach.
Rosemary Barnes: When you say you’ve done tests, are you talking computer simulations? Are you talking small scale models in wind tunnels?
Ivar Knutsen: Computer simulation. So we’ve done a, in a time domain software.
Rosemary Barnes: Early on you mentioned about maintenance strategy. I think that’s something else that’s quite interesting with this multi rotor design. So yeah, if you’ve got 40 wind turbines and one of them gets knocked out, what’s that two and a half percent power reduction. I’m assuming it’ll also cause some, funny structural things, but you’ve already mentioned that your design, your plan is to not have yeah, you’re not designed so that the frequencies matter that much that would affect it, I’m assuming.
Guess you’ll know for sure when you’ve built one, but how would it work? One rotors out, so you send out a repair crew or you wait for two, three, four, like at what point, and do you have to stop the whole 40 to go work on one? Cause I’ve, I climbed wind turbines for my work and you, you definitely, you don’t want to be up there while it’s cranking.
Yeah, what’s the strategy?
Ivar Knutsen: So imagine the event you have 40 turbines. If you look at failure rates on a number of failures per turbine we account for turbines stopping or. That we choose to stop them because we have some alarm on some sensor that not sure what’s going on there, but let’s stop the turbine.
And then we say, okay, let’s, this is happening now in December, a very difficult time in Europe for doing anything offshore. But as you say, it’s a very small percentage of the total production, so we can just leave that for now. And then we see that, okay. We have, we are planning with regular intervention campaigns.
So once the two rotors have stopped or maybe three rotors have stopped, okay. We decide to do an intervention campaign and and maybe basically that is limited by the ability to put people on board a unit. So which are the same limits as any kind of both floating and bottom fixed have today that you have a.
wave height limitation of around two and a half meters and a wind speed limitation of 15 to 20 meters per second, actually quite high for these walk to work systems. So you send out this your service ship with your crew, your small team. And They use this elevator they shift the elevator to right position.
They try they move to the right turbine. They do an inspection. And either they decide that, okay this, that was a faulty sensor. There was nothing wrong. And or there was something significantly wrong. And you either restart the turbine or you do something or you plan for a longer, a more substantial replacement.
And yes. Would you stop all the rotors at that time? So what I’m understanding is that some developers or operators of wind farms, they are happy to have people on the TP when the rotor is going. And it’s a sort of a risk Management thing, I would say that you wouldn’t have any kind of rotors moving in vicinity of this elevator because when that’s moving, regardless of if there’s people on it or not, because you’re doing stuff very close to moving rotors.
So you don’t want to lose a spanner and then it falls onto a rotor, which is already spinning or something. That’s so it is a risk management thing that you do. It’s not technically impossible to do it. So, Basically, the system we have allows you to have a working, a safe working platform at your turbine, just next to your turbine, allowing you to do an inspection, but also allowing you to do a blade replacement or a complete miscellaneous replacement.
So for the blade replacement are what we’re working on is basically to have a rack of blades that you prepare the rack of three blades on shore in your warehouse and the blade stays in those in that rack until on the elevator and until the You’re up next to the turbine. So you have your blade rack right next to your turbine, allowing you to do a complete rotor replacement.
And our target is that we should be able to do that during one shift. And if we were to do a turbine replacement, we would have to take the blades off, bring them down to deck, and then do the turbine separately, at least in the first round, but we can do it but. The idea is that we don’t do repairs up there.
If they’re running in the, the difficulty of doing a turbine replacement should be sufficiently low that you don’t bother with it, just swap it. So idea is that you have a pool of turbines and blades on shore. And you can rotate. So if you have one turbine with some slight issue, okay, we’ll swap it out and we’ll figure out on shore what’s going on with that turbine if we want to do something which means that the criticality of having a turbine failure.
It comes lower, so you don’t need to design it so that you absolutely sure that it never fails.
Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. It’s a really dramatically different approach and it does seem like you’ve covered a lot of a bit of a best of both worlds because, there’s a reason why people have gone bigger and bigger for offshore turbines and, a lot of it’s to do with the number of connections, electrical connections that you need.
It’s just simply expensive to have Yeah. Underwater cables and connection points and everything, but you would still have fewer of those, but you also get rid of yeah, a lot of the downsides of the really big turbines that you’ve already mentioned.
Ivar Knutsen: So with turbines becoming very big, it has like a commercial momentum.
That means that yes, you can do innovation, but. The costs of doing something significantly different become prohibitive to doing it because yeah, there there’s so much invested now in the current direction, the factories, the designs that it’s becoming more difficult to disrupt.
And what we find very interesting is that there’s a whole range of onshore OEMs that are not in offshore wind today. And basically for them to enter offshore wind is an enormous technical lift and commercial lift. So they, let’s say a onshore OEM who wanted to enter offshore wind today, what would they need to do?
Probably they would need to launch a 16, 17 megawatt offshore turbine. And that’s that just the cost of developing something like that is enormous. So it is prohibiting them from it’s certainly Makes it very difficult for them to enter the market, meaning that new OEMs are not likely to come in soon.
What we think we can offer with a multi rotor approach is that we can actually introduce these new OEMs to the offshore wind market. Because a one megawatt turbine, there’s a significant higher number of companies that can do that. Also on the component side. That’s where you can use more local suppliers.
We see that in Norway we see it in Scotland to produce a generator or produce a fairly straightforward 15 meter epoxy blade. There’s a lot more companies that can do that. And that I think is good that you can broaden your supply chain. Because I think the supply chain is perhaps one of the biggest constraints we have in offshore wind today.
Rosemary Barnes: So you mentioned so far you haven’t built any prototypes for testing, but I assume that would be the next step would be to it will be a step to build a unit and get it out in the water. How far along the path to that are you? When do you think we’ll see that?
Ivar Knutsen: So what we’re doing is that we have our turbine development program.
We have a license to test a prototype in Norway. So from the regulator We actually did a a model test two weeks ago in a tank in Norway. So we did a hydrodynamic model test of quite a, it’s quite a big model hub. We’ll share some pictures soon. Then we’re working towards this this 40 megawatt unit.
And. Saying, okay, what are the big validation needs? What are the big sort of uncertainties? And we’re tackling those and then seeing, okay, how can we pilot this specific problem in order to understand it as well as possible? So say blade passing effects, two blades passing at high speed. How do you understand that mechanism and that the physics best?
CFD, maybe not, wind tunnel, yes, maybe, or maybe all of that. So that’s how we’re thinking at the moment. Can I actually, in the last minute, promote that the University of Strathclyde and University of Hamburg are hosting a multirotor seminar in June? We had one in Hamburg last year, which was very good, very interesting.
It is a seminar for those infected by the multirotor virus. And I invite people to look it up on LinkedIn.
Rosemary Barnes: Thank you so much for talking to us about Wind Catching. I’m definitely going to be following your progress closely. I hope you’ll keep us up to date and I really wish you the best of luck.
Ivar Knutsen: Thank you very much.
https://weatherguardwind.com/wind-catching-offshore-modular-multirotor/
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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