Show notes
ONYX Insight has acquired UK-based ELEVEN-I, a company that specializes in advanced blade monitoring technology. The acquisition shows the wind industry's move towards supporting companies that can prevent expensive turbine breakdowns.
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Twenty twenty-five has been a record-breaker for energy deals - over four hundred billion dollars in acquisitions, the highest in three years. But buried in all those massive oil and gas mergers is a quieter revolution happening in the wind fields of the world.
It started in March last year when Macquarie Capital, the Australian investment giant, made a move that sent ripples through the wind industry. They acquired Onyx Insight, a British company that had been quietly revolutionizing how wind turbines are monitored. Onyx wasn't just another tech startup - they were monitoring seventeen thousand turbines across thirty countries, serving seven of the world's top ten wind operators.
Macquarie knew what they were buying. This wasn't just about the technology - it was about the data. In the wind business, data is the new oil, and Onyx had been collecting it from turbines spinning from Texas to Tasmania.
But Macquarie wasn't finished.
A few days ago, Onyx announced they had acquired Eleven-i, a smaller British firm run by Bill Slatter. While Onyx could monitor most parts of a wind turbine, they had a critical blind spot: the blades themselves.
Slatter had spent six years perfecting sensors that could detect blade problems weeks before they became catastrophes. His technology had successfully spotted a crack smaller than one meter, three weeks before the most sophisticated drones could see it. In an industry where a single blade failure can cost millions and shut down entire wind farms, that's pure gold.
Here's what they don't tell you about the wind industry: it's not just about building bigger turbines anymore. As these giants grow longer than football fields and taller than skyscrapers, they're failing in ways nobody anticipated. Blade detachment, tower collapse, catastrophic gearbox failures - the list goes on.
The smart money - and we're talking about some of the biggest infrastructure funds in the world - has figured out that the real value isn't in building more turbines. It's in keeping the ones already spinning from falling apart.
The math is simple: artificial intelligence and data centers are driving electricity demand through the roof. The U.S. could see data centers consuming twelve percent of all electricity by twenty twenty-eight. That's staggering demand that can't wait for new power plants to be built.
So investors are swarming companies that can squeeze more power out of existing infrastructure. Onyx, with its Macquarie backing, can now offer wind farm operators something they've never had: a complete picture of their turbine's health from the foundation to the blade tips.
The Eleven-i acquisition fits perfectly into Macquarie's broader energy strategy. They've been on a buying spree - solar developers, waste management companies, renewable energy platforms. In Australia alone, they've completed sixty-five acquisitions across the energy sector.
But here's the bigger picture: the wind industry is consolidating at breakneck speed. Just like oil and gas, where the top fifty companies have been whittled down to forty through mega-mergers, renewable energy is heading the same direction.
The survivors won't be the companies that build the most turbines. They'll be the ones that can keep them spinning reliably for twenty, thirty, even forty years.
As Dr. Zhiwei Zhang, Onyx's chief commercial officer, puts it: "Failures don't just drive unplanned costs - they can escalate into catastrophic events, including blade detachment and full turbine collapse."
The wind industry's gold rush days of easy government subsidies and guaranteed returns are over. What's left is the harder work of engineering reliability into machines that must withstand decades of punishment from Mother Nature.
In this new reality, a small British company that learned to listen to wind turbine blades whisper their troubles has become worth millions to one of the world's largest infrastructure investors.
And Bill Slatter? He didn't just sell his company and walk away. Last month, he announced on LinkedIn that he was taking on a new role as Director of Blade Products at Onyx Insight. After six years building Eleven-i, he's now helping integrate his blade-whispering technology into a global platform that monitors turbines on five continents.
The acquisition wave rolling through renewable energy isn't just about money changing hands. It's about building the technological backbone for a world running on wind, solar, and batteries instead of coal, oil, and gas.
The companies getting swallowed up aren't failing - they're succeeding so well that the infrastructure giants can't afford to let their competitors have them.
This consolidation represents a fundamental shift in renewable energy from growth at any cost to operational excellence and reliability - a maturation that signals the industry's evolution from startup phase to industrial scale.