Show notes
We're joined by Boaz Peled, co-founder and CEO of First Airborne, to discuss their groundbreaking technology that revolutionizes wind resource assessments. First Airborne's cloud-based anemometer system, suspended from a remotely controlled drone, allows highly accurate measurements of wind speed and direction across existing wind farms, significantly improving the efficiency and optimization of wind turbines.
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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 my co host, Joel Saxum. Our guest today is Boaz Peled the co founder and CEO of First Airborne, an innovative company that is revolutionizing wind resource assessments. First Airborne has developed a cloud based cutting edge anemometer system that is suspended from a remotely controlled drone, allowing highly accurate measurements of wind speed and direction at various heights and locations across an existing wind farm.
The groundbreaking technology is poised to significantly improve the efficiency and optimization of wind turbines. We're excited to have Boaz join us to discuss First Airborne's unique solution and his insights on leveraging drones and advanced sensor technology to enhance wind energy production.
Boaz, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. This is going to be an interesting discussion because First Airborne has some new technology, and in wind energy, you don't see a lot of sort of earth shattering technology, but this is one where it's a power producer, right? In the wind business, we're here to produce power.
The power comes from the wind. We need to know as much about the wind as we can. Problem is if you have an existing wind farm with a couple of met towers it can be hard to discern what's happening on a complex site. That's where First Airborne comes in. And would you just briefly describe what your product is?
I gave a little summary and introduction, but it's unique.
Boaz Peled: The best way to think of First Airborne's technology which we call Windborne by the way, it's actually very easy to explain for wind power people. Because what it is a windmast, but it can fly. So it's a flying windmast.
Imagine your windmast just grew wings and started flying any way you'd like to within your wind farm. And back to the question of complex terrain. I think I'd suggest that is simply let's say one kind of exotic application. But the question, which wind is hitting my turbine? Is I think the most maybe sought after question in wind power.
And if you have a flying wind mast, you position it anywhere you like for any for this turbine or the next, and you'll get that answer.
Allen Hall: Because once they've done a site survey, and usually there's a pre survey done before the wind turbines are installed, that survey is pretty good. Depending how old that survey is, that survey may be 20 years old.
It could be that old, right? And things change. And the one that happens mostly in the United States, Joel has pointed out numerous times on the podcast, is there's another wind farm installed in front of your wind farm. And another wind farm in front of that one. So the winds you are now receiving are not what you had initially planned on.
And then trying to understand what those winds are and how to maximize production in that environment is almost impossible without your kind of technology, right?
Boaz Peled: I think I love that example. I think it's a, it's a microcosm of a lot of other things, but it's a really good way to understand that actually in today in wind power, I've been an operator for many years and first airborne has really come out of kind of my, Let's say the shortcomings that I, that myself and my co founders have seen in the industry and to try to figure out how to solve that.
And the first and foremost thing is my turbine producing as it should? That's the most commonplace, expected question you, you may ask, is and the problem specifically with wind turbines, let's say, as opposed to solar farms or let's say other generation types, is that By definition, the fact that the wind turbine is inside the wind is distorting the wind reading.
And then you need a remote sensing device, which is reading the wind that's about to hit your turbine, but not the one that's actually there. Now, given the size of wind farms and the variety of layouts and terrains, and then other, as you say, turbines, which are affecting my turbine, depends on the wind direction.
If I'm stationary, there is just so much data and a lot of invalid data coming in, whether it's because it's waked or because it's interrupted by the own machine. But if you're moving around, in our case, being deployed on an aircraft, if you're moving around, then you're actually picking and choosing where is the right place to measure that free wind, which is going to tell me really what.
The production level should be at that point in time, and then that opens up a world of opportunities on tuning, optimization control settings, software upgrades blade repairs, you name it. The fact of the matter is at the moment, wind power operators simply really, I hope this doesn't sound too large, just don't know whether their machines are operating, what they're producing, what they should be producing.
Joel Saxum: We can look at it at the foundational level, right? So this is talking outside of first airborne solutions, right? But it is a few met towers and basically a model, right? And that's modeling on the, on a statistical or mathematical models that have been developed, and one of the things that Alan and I learned on another with from another guest on the podcast was that, When we talk complex terrain can be as much as a ditch on the side of the road in the middle of a wind farm that isn't perfectly flat.
So when a model is based on basically what a piece of paper flat is, there's, there is no wind sites that are out there that are like that, right? So you're relying on data from the beginning. That is, it's acceptable for the most part, but it's not fundamentally correct because it is based on a mathematical model, and that doesn't fit what the actual real world situation is, and then once you get into oper and that's at the developmental stage.
You get into operations, and the anemometer on the back on the that you're getting your wind reading from is on the back of the nacelle, where the wind has already come through the blades and messed it up anyways. The, what you guys are bringing to the market is really a kind of it's, it, not it is a first of its kind solution to measure ACTUAL wind resource.
Boaz Peled: Exactly. That's the asset you as a developer, that's the asset you bring to the table, right? That's, that's your fuel.
Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah.
Boaz Peled: Now here's the thing. We're talking about site assessment in general. So then whether it's FAT or they model complex rain any assessor will tell you that the errors on, on, on flow models are like 20 percent up and down, in, in some cases, and nobody will argue with that.
That's that's why there's, a lot of drive for within site assessment also to place LIDARs, like what we call roaming LIDARs, move them around to narrow down that that error. But then when you're moving on to operating, when the situation is no more, it's not static, you have maintenance, you have, you have inspections, you have people playing around with your turbine, you have like weather conditions, which are not considered in your model.
The model is good for financing, I think, when you, when, at the time when you're taking over your wind farm, at that very moment, as when you're, you switch on the turbines, and is that the thing I actually bought? Those models go out the window. They're irrelevant at that stage, because that turbine is there real.
Let's measure what's really hitting it and what it's really giving us in return. And then, other devices do this kind of thing. And actually sometimes very accurately. Some LIDARs are very good problem is they can't move and when they can't move, it's a lot, there's a lot of filtering of data and very few turbines, which are actually can be tested.
Once you have a flying LIDAR or a flying windmast, all of a sudden those five or six machines, which you could have, In the best case, maybe tested in a year, turn into maybe 206 machines tested in a year.
Allen Hall: Okay, that's a huge difference. I, it's, if you haven't seen the First Airborne website, you need to go to firstairborne. com and then take a look because you can see the drone and the anemometer being deployed. The anemometer Boaz, I want to just walk through this real quick for everybody who's listening on the audio platforms. So it's a drone. It's a standard quadcopter kind of thing. Then on the bottom of it, it has what looks like to be a submarine, basically an anemometer submarine.
Boaz Peled: I'm going to call it a torpedo, yeah.
Allen Hall: Okay, a torpedo. That falls out of the bottom that's on a data line. And that anemometer just sits there and records data while the drone hovers above it to hold it. And then that data is then recorded in telemetry back to whoever's recording it. Okay. But that allows you to like, to take long duration samples, like several hours worth of data,