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 ass