Morten Handberg Answers the Big Drone Inspection Questions

Morten Handberg answers the big questions around drone inspections, including how often to inspect, how many turbines to sample, and how much AI results should be qualified. Contact Morten on LinkedIn The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast is brought to you by Weather Guard Lightning Tech, creators of the StrikeTape Ultra LPS retrofit. Subscribe to Uptime’s Substack newsletter. And check out Rosemary’s "Engineering with Rosie" Youtube channel. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Episode Transcript Speaker: [00:00:00] Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow Allen Hall: Morten, welcome back to the program.  Morten Handberg: Thanks, Allen.  Allen Hall: It is drone inspection season. Everybody in the Northern Hemisphere is either having drone inspections done right now or about to, before the, the winter weather hits. There are a lot of decisions to make, of course, when you're doing drone inspections, and Morten, you and I were just talking about some of the difficulties with drone inspections, particularly, and the, the highest level one is always how often and how many should we be thinking about it when we're gonna do drone inspections? How, how often should you do it, and how many turbines out of the total should you sample?  Morten Handberg: Well, it really depends on what it is that, that you want to see, [00:01:00] uh, and, um, what it is that you want to achieve. I would always argue for doing annual, uh, uh, blade inspections, um, both internally and externally, because you want to know what is the overall condition of your wind farm. That's not to say that you need to inspect every single blade every single year. I don't think that necessarily adds value. Uh, if you have a service contract that covers that and gives you an annual inspection, that's great. But there might still be a benefit for you to do a, your own sets, uh, because your service contract will typically not cover internal inspections, and it will, it will limit the amount of information you have available that you can then use to understand your, uh, your wind farm condition, of your blade condition, and also what actions you need to take in terms of erosion, lightning, structural damages. So I will always go for arguing for a subset, uh, both externally and internally, and then divide it out into the wind farm, uh, because you want to have [00:02:00] a, a, a, as divided a, a pool of ins- of, uh, of, of, uh, in your subset as possible, because that give, gives you the broadest understanding about what's going on. And from there you can then decide, okay, is there something serious going on? Is there any seal defect? Are there major lightnings? Is erosion an issue? And then you can trigger more inspection, but so, so you can use it to, to, uh, argue for more value in inspections.  Allen Hall: But Morten, I have a full service agreement, and my OEM is doing inspections, I think. Isn't that good enough?  Morten Handberg: It's a good start, um, and it means that they are fulfilling their part of the service agreement. Um, but- How they categorize and to what detail that you can get access to really matters in terms of what value you get out of it. If you only get the report and you only get the thumbnails, then you only see a, a small piece of what is actually going on on the blade. If your OEM is doing, um, [00:03:00] you, you know, if they are, if they're doing the best job in the world and they're pristine in all of their assessments, then okay, that's good. But, um, I don't think that, y- you know, it's, uh, we, we can, we, most of us can probably agree that, that it's not always the 100, 100% that, that we, that we see from these inspections because they are, they're done in massive amounts, and that means that the quality in the reporting goes down. So, so it, it limits you in what you can actually learn from these reports, both in terms of the quality and the assessment, but also just in the amount of information that is in the report. And thereby, if you really wanna have a good understanding about what is actually my wind turbine co- my wind, uh, wind farm condition, then having your own, own data set really helps you out. Allen Hall: But Morten, usually when an OEM provides a, a set of inspections, it is just a, usually, like, just a couple of turbines. And I assume that the OEM is just telling me about the, the things that are serious. Everything else must be okay, right?  Morten Handberg: Well, typically, it's everything that they show. Um, so, [00:04:00] um, at least some of the reports that we see that, you know, every single defect is, is, uh, that they have found is marked out. Um, but there is a, there can be a lot of inconsistencies in, in how things are annotated, um, both in terms of structural, in terms of erosion defects, uh, and If you wanna make a, if you wanna have a, a, a claim or you want to make a, um, an, a, make a proper repair campaign, then having the, having the right annotation and the, and the, and the correct, uh, assessment is really important for you because it's really important when you plan a repair if you know that it's this contamination or is it a crack. It's really important for your leading edge erosion campaign to know is the cause of my erosion because of rain erosion or is it because of peeling from, uh, poor adhesion or is it because of voids in, um, in my, uh, in, in, in the blade that is causing the coating to fail because that means a lot in, in terms of what solutions you [00:05:00] should, you should use to, to mitigate it. Allen Hall: Is there a, a better approach? Uh, because what I see somewhat globally at this point is that if an operator has a full service agreement and they're running, let's just say they're running 10, 15, 20 different farms and they're spread out over a large geography. So the, there isn't like you can drive between them. They're hundreds of miles apart. There's no way that the owner operator can get into that level of detail. They have to let the OEM drive that ship, so to speak, where they, they, at least the first cut is done by the OEM. Has that historically been the best method or it, does that lead to problems down the road? Because I, I think the quality and the maybe the consistency there of, of the inspections varies from year to year and who the supplier was that actually did it. Was it the [00:06:00] OEM with a DJI drone and one of their technicians doing inspection, or is it, or, or was it like a proper drone company that has high resolution, uh, inspection equipment doing that, uh, series of inspections? There just seems to be so many variables here. But me as the owner operator, there's not enough time in the day for me to go do all this myself. I have to rely on somebody to, to do the right thing. What is that mix? Like, how much do I rely upon that OEM to provide the information, the, the really, the real information? Is it 100%? Like I completely have to totally trust them? Or is it more of like a 20%, like I'm going to sample what there's, what they're telling me myself? I'm gonna... I need to do a, basically a double inspection, a re-inspection of what I was told to make sure that was true. Uh, where is that, where's that line? Morten Handberg: I think that if you are a seasoned operator, you've been running your wind farm for 10, 15 years, you've been [00:07:00] using your OEM for all that time, and they have provided good reporting for you, and you've been happy with the results, and you've been happy with the repair campaigns, then you'll probably have a re- pretty good regional management of that area, and then I would be okay with that. Um, but that is not always what we see. Um, so it's, it's fair to, to, to pressure test it and to make sure that what you're being, uh, provided is accurate. So I would say if you're, if, if your, if your wind farm is new or you're new to your relationship with your OEM, then doing a subset will give you some, uh, good understanding what is the OEM actually providing you, and are you seeing the full, full picture, and are their annotations correct? Um, if that matches one-to-one, then that means that the O&Ms go and doing a good job, which is good, and that's what we want. If not, then you know [00:08:00] that you have-- that there is a need for you to take, uh, some more control in order to keep your asset healthy, which is what we want, and to be proac- be more proactive in handling some of the, some of the issues. Because if you're not, then you could end up with severe erosion issues that are being neglected or misrepresentate-- misrepresented. You could end up with structural damages that are either, uh, blown out of proportion, that where they are-- where the, the method to, to rectify it, uh, means that you-- it's something that could be repaired is getting replaced, which means a massive amount of cost on your side. Um, could also be that a, uh, that a serious issue is getting, getting ne- neglected and then turns into something much more severe, um, afterwards. A- and again, it's about finding out where that balance is. Uh, and again, there, uh, the easy way is simply-- It's not-- The best way is not for you to do [00:09:00] a full sweep, one-to-one, 100% inspection of everything, because that will just, uh, that will just mean a lot of data that you need to de- you need to manage and control. You might not get full value out of it. That's very doubtful. But doing a smaller subset of, you know, some, you know, um, 10, 15 percentage, uh, of the wind farm will give you an understanding about where you actually are in, in, in the, in the, in the condition of your wind farm. And something I would, I would actually argue for it both within warranty, during warranty, and also afterwards. Because within warranty,...