SkySpecs CEO Danny Ellis joined us to talk about the fully automated wind farm, and his vision for using data and autonomous drone inspections to revolutionize operations and maintenance in the wind energy industry. How can Skyspecs' automated, high-tech wind turbine drone inspections impact the wind industry? And how can their proprietary Horizon software use data analytics to make operations and maintenance easier and more cost-efficient than ever? He shared his big vision with us in Uptime Episode 13.



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Full Transcript: Uptime EP13 - SkySpecs CEO Danny Ellis Wants to Create the Automated Wind Farm



Dan Blewett: [00:00:00] Alright. Welcome back to Uptime. So we've got an awesome guest today. Danny Ellis, the CEO of SkySpecs is here with us. Allen. So having already recorded this conversation, what were some of your takeaways from, from Danny Ellis?



Allen Hall: [00:00:21] To me. It's about the technology, Danny and SkySpecs are bringing it to the wind turbine market.



They are really pushing the envelope in terms of technology. It's not a drone company anymore. It is now a data company and a, a management company to make sure that you wind turbines are operating at their optimum and you can prevent. Really severe damage by using the technology in their horizon software.



It's an amazing piece of equipment they have in an amazing piece of software. So a very interesting interview with Danny.



Dan Blewett: [00:00:57] Yeah. I, just hearing the way they can do these models of, of the wind turbine, the way their drones, you know, their operators basically take them out, hit star and the drone.



Automatically flies, maps out the, you know, all three blades, you know, scans for damage, and then they can give that all that data back to their customers. And the horizon software is pretty intense. I, I mean, some of the things you just wouldn't think about, like, Oh yeah, I could get my own drone and, and inspect my own wind turbines, but.



He rings up a lot of really good points, which is you're going to get that close to the blades, even when they're not spinning without crashing that thing over and over and over to do 15 wind turbines in a day, which is, which is what they can do. And to have them doing that in an automated way. Cause that's, I think that was my big takeaway is how they were engineering for scale.



Not just for like, yeah. Anyone could grab a drone and just go survey a drone or a turbine for one day, but can you scale that? Right? That's why it's gotta be automated. Right. And, yeah, that's that's right. And then that's not the point. Anyway, the point like you said, is that they need to, so these wind turbine operators need that data to say, okay, well we know we have cracks in these blades.



These ones need repairs. These won't have some minor damage that we don't need to repair or Hey, SkySpecs. Like what do we, what do we do with this data? Like, do we need to repair every wind turbine blade? No, this one has a little bit of damage. Should we do that one now? Or should we put that off for the future?



You know, what's the best bang for our buck. and that seems like the big selling point for their software, which is, Hey, we'll inspect it. We can do it really efficiently. And. We're going to give you all the data and we're going to help you interpret it and say, and give you some suggestions about what you should do with it.



Allen Hall: [00:02:38] Yeah. And it's also the ease of use of the software. It's, it's very interactive. Things are on the cloud. you can access it at any time and it's in the data is secure from the second.