Show notes
Allen Hall and Joel Saxum interview Matthew Stead, co-founder of eologix-Ping, about the company's growth, industry challenges, and their innovative sensing solutions for aging wind fleets. They discuss the benefits of eologix-Ping's acoustic sensing, lightning detection, and blade monitoring technologies.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with co host Joel Saxun. We are in Minneapolis for the 2024 American Clean Power with the co founder of eologix-Ping, Matthew Stead.
Matthew Stead: Thank you, Allen.
Allen Hall: Matthew, welcome back.
Matthew Stead: Thank you. It's great to be here. I actually was here with you a year ago.
Allen Hall: Oh, that's right. In New Orleans. Yeah. So it has been a year since the merger of eologix and Ping. So a lot has happened over that time year's time span?
Matthew Stead: Absolutely.
Allen Hall: Uh, we should touch upon that. I want, first want to get your opinion of what this convention has been relative to New Orleans last year, what your thoughts were, what the interfaces have been with your customers.
What'd you think?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, I think industry's growing, fleets getting older, design issues, Every month, every six months, every twelve months, there's more and more challenges we're seeing, and I think that was reflected in the discussions we had here.
Joel Saxum: I think you're getting that, it's just being communicated, right?
Yeah. Hey, we have this problem, what can you do to fix it? I sat with someone last night at dinner and they literally just said I've got this. I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to do that. Who can do that? I said nobody can do all three, but this company can do this and this. I said, Pingmealogic can monitor for this and we can, you can do this for this.
And there's some gearbox stuff for that. So people are looking for solutions for their plaguing problems. And I think that is exactly what you said as the fleet ages, right? It was before everybody was just like trying to catch up. And now you're getting engineers into places. We do talk to a lot of people that are hiring engineers.
Hey, this person's brand new to our team. Whether it's from the insurance side, asset owner side, even ISPs. I talked to an ISP. Hey, we got a great new blade engineer to help bolster our ability to repair blades. It's oh, that's fantastic for you guys as well. So more engineering help. And that's just giving more bandwidth to the basically the stakeholders in industry to solve these problems.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And we're all here to help.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. For sure. This is the place for it.
Allen Hall: We have seen a lot of engineers this week with specific problems. Mostly blade problems, occasionally bearing problems, even though it depends on the platform. There's some platform with a lot of bearing issues at the moment.
And we have seen a narrowing down of the possible solution companies. And that's what I noticed this week. The number of drone companies has really diminished robot companies way down. It's around pretty much left, right? Because there's so dominant in that market space. And then when it comes to acoustic sensing, remote sensing, continuous monitoring, that's the logic's ping at the minute because of the, Really gets down to cost, right?
And what the product can do. So you packed a huge amount of information in this little tiny package that doesn't require any wiring. And that just has opened up the opportunities for eologix-Ping. I think it, there's, everybody was talking to, what can we do? And when they come to our booth, we say, eologix-Ping has the most cost efficient, readily adaptable, on the go product.
That's awesome. Just stick it on and go. And which is a game changer, right? So the continuous monitoring systems that we were, we're seeing a year ago that were these big monster boxes with the wires everywhere.
Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Allen Hall: They're essentially gone.
Joel Saxum: They're for engineering projects. They are. And you're not going to roll, you're not going to roll that out.
Fleet wide recalls. Yeah. Yeah. Cause at the end of the day, this is what we need to be able to do. We need to enable the guys in the O and M building to know what they need to do and prioritize. So like the lightning strike. I don't need to know every bit of metadata about that. I need to know which turbine got hit.
Matthew Stead: Did I get hit? Which one?
Joel Saxum: Go look at it. Yeah. Or is there an issue here? Because at the end of the day, every CMS system tells you at one point in time, go look at the turbine. So if you can do that in the most cost efficient way, that's the answer.
Allen Hall: Even the number of engineers that were here, when we talked to them, and how many assets do you have, how many turbines do you have?
We have thousands. How many blade engines do you have? Two!
Matthew Stead: Not enough.
Allen Hall: There is no way you're going to be able to monitor that many turbines without having a tool. Yeah. There's no way. Too much data. Too much data, not enough simplicity to it, and you can't quickscan, which is the problem I see. That eologix-Ping is fixed, is the quickscan,
Matthew Stead: What's the hot list?
What's the top 10%? What's the top 20%?
Allen Hall: Yeah, you got to get to that list really quickly, every morning.
Joel Saxum: And you can take a look. And you can scale and install on a wind farm in a day. The way I look at that is I could, if I got my shipment of ping sensors, right? Of the acoustic ones, and I had, here, boys, put this in the back of your truck, and we'll put this on every tower we have out there.
Okay, they're done at the end of the day. And all of those turbines are now monitored. Whereas if you have to install, Get up in the blades and this and that. It said the ability to scale up the monitoring effort is not there.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. And that's where we started. So I think when I founded the business, I didn't try and design a product and then try and sell it.
I spoke to the customers, what can you afford, what are your challenges, what do you need? And then we designed a product to suit that. And that's the way it should be, right? It should be. That's a huge problem.
Joel Saxum: Okay, so this is a conversation I have regularly. I'm a bit plugged in some of the the VC world and the tech world in Houston.
And there's people that go to these places, Greentown Labs, the ION, that walk in there and just say Hey, wait a minute. Do you have basically a development partner? Have you talked with some, instead of breezing by a bar room conversation of primary market research, are you actually engaged with these clients and solving the specific problems they have?
Otherwise you're making a solution for a problem that doesn't exist. It doesn't work. Yeah. It doesn't work that way.
Matthew Stead: Yeah. So I'm really pleased that you're relaying what we set out to do. Yes.
Joel Saxum: Yes.
Matthew Stead: Yes. It's been worth the effort. It's been worth the effort.
Allen Hall: I took that tour along with Joel. If you've been listening to the podcast very long over the last month or so, you've heard about our travel log of going through West Texas and up through Oklahoma and looking at all kinds of turbines.
There are problems everywhere. Cranes are out right now fixing blades. There's a lot of pitch bearing issues. There's a lot of structural issues inside. And then when we had stopped to talk to the OEM supervisors and managers of those sites, they're saying, Hey, We have so many problems, we can't monitor it.
And some of them we just need to monitor. We just going to have to put a monitor on and they're looking at solutions or trying to figure out how to monitor a hundred turbines that have some sort of internal blade issue that they know of. How are they going to do that? Either you're going to send a technician around to do that every couple of weeks, which just kills your technician.
They're already killed. Yeah. Yeah. They're already stressed. You're gonna have to bring in some outside crew to go do it. Super expensive. Yeah. Or you're gonna put some sort of continuous monitoring system in. Now, when we stopped at one of those offices, we said the internal blade monitor From eLogic's ping is the quick solution because it does so much and everybody is just mind blown.
There's no wiring. Do you want to describe how that system works?
Matthew Stead: Yeah, so there's two parts. We have the listening sensor, which has got a lovely windshield, which looks beautifully black. So that's intelligent listening sensor and now we have the power and comms module and power and comms module power.
but also the lightning detection sensor. So putting them both together. So we've got the intelligent listening sensor and the power and comms module, and we just plugged them together. It turns it on and slap it on with the magnets onto the tower.
Allen Hall: And so that's the internal internally inside the blade, which is where the technicians were going with me that are saying, okay.
Yeah, but I can't really see in this dark blade. How am I going to monitor it?