Show notes
Carlos Oliveira, CEO of Fibersail, discusses their advanced fiber optic technology for early detection of wind turbine blade damage, reducing downtime and optimizing maintenance for wind farm operators.
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Allen Hall: Wind turbine blade failures cost the industry billions annually. Today we're talking with Fibersail, CEO, Carlos Oliveira About their innovative fiber optic technology that detects early blade damage before catastrophic failures occur. Learn how their shape sensing system is helping wind farm operators reduce downtime and optimize maintenance.
Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.
Carlos, welcome to the program.
Thank you for having me here.
Allen Hall: This is gonna be a fascinating discussion. when I was over at Wind Europe, the activity around your booth was really good. a lot of interested people wanting to learn more about the technology and how to protect their blades and be able to determine early if they have blade problems.
And I think everybody on the [00:01:00] podcast knows that blades are a huge issue financially. And we just don't have enough information about how they are moving structurally or what kind of structural issues they're having. How big do you think this problem is, Carlos?
Speaker 3: I agree with you. So we have quite a busy Wind Europe event.
we were really full all the, time. and I think that, the problem is really, getting out, right? It's every year, more than. Five, $6 billion are being spent in non-planned repairs activities. and this is impacting a lot to the bottom line of the industry. what we knew at fiber cell 3, 4, 5 years ago, that the problem was really big Honda blades.
Now it's mainstream knowledge. big companies are putting billions of euros, in, recognizing losses because of this issue. And more and more customers are coming to us. it's [00:02:00] really a big issue and we believe that, it can really put in danger the wind industry as a whole.
Allen Hall: Yeah. And even if you buy a new turbine today, there is very little information that comes from the blades themselves.
A lot of it is coming from the SCADA system, and that's, those SCADA systems are not designed to detect this sort of. Issues that Fibersail can detect. Correct?
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think it's we are building bigger and bigger blades, using old technology, right? It does not work. you have a mixture for a big explosion happening, and that's exactly what we are seeing.
If in the past, the turbines, they were showing problems after 5, 6, 7, 8 years of operation. Today we have customers that come to us. with big problems in blades after one, two years of operation, some of them still during the warranty period. So it's really becoming a big issue and that's where our shape sensing technology kicks in because we have advanced sensing technology.
For the most [00:03:00] advanced, turbines out there and the new ones, it's really good interior, but the reality is a different story.
Allen Hall: how soon should you install a system onto a blade, particularly a new blade? Should it go in at the factory or, immediately after in the warranty period, or a lot of operators that we have seen, like to install them at year five or six of operation, which seems.
Late to us.
Speaker 3: I tend to agree, we would prefer to have it installed, at the manufacturing. we know it's not, straightforward. and what we're doing, and this is let's say our go-to market strategy, we are working with end customers, the owner operators of the turbines. the ones that have the hurdle, they have the problem to solve.
And we are working with, many of them. We are deploying, we are doing a retrofit installation. And that data then can be used to convince CEMS to integrate this technology. Of course, that's our end goal. we understand it'll take, a bit of time, [00:04:00] transparency, the level of transparency we bring with our, chef sensing technology.
sometimes, people try to avoid it, at the beginning, but we want really to use the data from the field and the value that we deliver to our customers. To push this into the product. So hopefully the next place that, the customers are buying from the OEMs will have, fiber cell technology, inside it.
Joel Saxum: Let me ask you a little bit of a question about that, how it fits into the marketplace. 'cause we're gonna get into the amazing technology that you guys have. But I just wanna understand, because when we talk to operators a lot of times we're like, Hey, I'd love to implement this solution, but hey, I can't do this until end of warranty.
Or it's, I'm under full service agreement for the next five or 10 years, or whatever that may be. And the OE EMM doesn't wanna allow me to put this CMS on or this aftermarket product or these things. and contractually those things can be, those contracts can be pretty tight where you can't even put stuff on that's even air gapped.
How have you [00:05:00] guys dealt with, that, or have you ran into those, hurdles yet?
Speaker 3: Yeah, definitely. We, have, so we, there are different kinds of customers. Of course. If there is no contract, trying to block anything like this, we can, we have an easy entry. And we have some customers like that. others, they really fall into what you said, some of them even during the warranty, period.
we, at Five Cell, we are our position here, we are a solutions provider and we position ourselves as a solutions provider for the industry, not necessarily for one or the other side of the industry. So we don't want to be used. As a source of information for one side of the industry to try to attack the other side.
We really see that the industry has an issue and, we want to provide transparency to avoid costs and to make wind, competitive, source of energy. and so in those, [00:06:00] situations, usually we try to do a cooperation with three parties. So fiber cell gen customer, and the OEM, if possible. So we always try to invite them.
To the table if possible. because, we, have cases where actually, the contract is blocking the entry of, sensing technology like ours, but the customer is losing above the cap of compensation from the O end. So they are losing lost production. So the problem is really big. So there needs to be a, found a solution.
At the same time, the OEM is losing money because they are paying the compensation okay, till the cap. But they are paying a lot of money and they'll need to pay this for 20 plus years. So we position ourselves as a solution provider on both hands. Of course, it's not easy, but as I usually said here with the team, if it was easy, it was already done.
So we are in the. let's
Allen Hall: talk about the technology just for a [00:07:00] moment. It's obviously Fibersail. The technology is in the name, it's fiber, but I, wanna understand a little bit about how are you using the fiber, how it's installed, where does it go? What is the, electronics or the electrical boxes that are connected to it?
What does the system look like?
Speaker 3: as I said, fiber, it's easy. The sail part I can do here a connection, right? Fi fiber cells started measuring the shape of the sail of the sailboat. and now what we're doing is applying the technology to a different cell, right? A blade is a rooted cell and what we are doing is really to get the added level of information of how that sale is behaving, in real time.
And so what, we build actually is our shean technology. That's the unique approach. We built a fiber optics beam that we glue inside the plate. We go from the root till where we can install in the retrofit. Of course, when we do the integration in the product, in the end, we can go all the way to the [00:08:00]tip.
But that's a possibility for a later stage. and basically we encapsulate all the fiber optics, all the. technology that does require, more, detailed level of expertise from the people in the field. We encapsulate everything into a system and then we hand over the system, to a normal field technician that can simply glue our sensor to the blade, plug the power, and then we are on,
Allen Hall: we are working.
Wow. Okay. And how many pieces of fiber would typically go in a blade? Is it a, bundle of fibers in one specific area, or is it. Spread out across the blade structure.
Speaker 3: We have, two products today. We are working onto the next two. they are still, not at commercial level, but basically we have, our shade sensor.
That's our, core technology. But we also have, for example, in our product line, the standard load sensors. It'll be incredible to know that more and more customers also need this kind of data. [00:09:00] even basic load sensing data is not available for the end customer and we can provide it. and so the setup really depends on what the customer wants.
So if the customer just wants, very limited information, for example, we can provide a system with the load sensors in it. If the customer wants, for example, early damage detection, we put our shape sensor in it and we actually had on top. Hotspot sensor to do really the early damage detection. So it really depends on what the customer needs, what we do, we call it internally, tailored made, but at scale it's that we adjust and we make a system using all the resources we have in our product line,