Monitoring Solutions for Aging Wind Turbines: eologix-Ping

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,