RES Acquires Sulzer Schmid, EDF Enters Korean Market

This week, Allen, Joel and Phil discuss RES acquiring drone inspection company Sulzer Schmid, EDF Renewables entering the Korean offshore market, and Equinor's choice to downsize their renewables division.



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Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech. And I'm here with the founder and CEO of IntelStor, Phil Totaro and the chief commercial officer of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, Joel Saxum. And this is your News Flash. News Flash is brought to you by our friends at IntelStor. If you want market intelligence that generates revenue, then book a demonstration of IntelStor at IntelStor. com. RES has acquired Solzer Schmidt. A Swiss firm specializing in autonomous drone inspections for wind turbine blades. This acquisition aims to strengthen RES's digital solutions and operations and maintenance services. Solzer Schmidt's 3DX blade platform uses autonomous drones for wind turbine blade inspections, providing 100 percent coverage and high quality inspection data, which is one of the reasons that RES acquired them, obviously.



Phil, there's just, does seem to be a number of inspection companies and O& M companies merging to grow bigger and bigger at the moment.



Philip Totaro: There is. And what's interesting about this deal isn't so much, the, the companies specifically getting together. It's the fact that yet another O& M company or an O& M generalist.



Is getting a specialist in doing something, whether it's blade inspections, whether it's gearboxes, whether it's anything. This has been happening over the past six or, nine months and we've been talking about it on, on Newsflash. And the reality of this is, this is yet another kind of piece of the puzzle where you're gonna see more and more consolidation in the O& M space because the generalist O& M firms need the, the specialists not only for the contracts that they've got in place but also these capabilities because a company like res can bring scale to what they're doing here and it's it's an impressive thing.



We didn't see any financial details of the deal disclosed, but it's still an impressive opportunity for for both companies to be able to. Continue moving forward together.



Joel Saxum: So, Sulzer Schmid and the ebb and flow of drone companies has kind of its own carved out spot. They do a lot of work in the, in Europe.



They recently had a contract to inspect over 4, 000 turbines with Vestas over in Europe. I think they've had it for two years. So that's very impressive on their side. They've gone in some of the technological directions of some of the others with You can fly your own, train your pilots on site fly your own drone.



Here's a smaller drone with an autonomous flight software as a, as as well as their, big enterprise drones to do inspections, but what's really, it really is a shining part of their business is their software as a service. So that 3DX blade platform, if you've ever used it is very, very good.



It's seamless. It's easy to look at inspections. The quality is there. So, big, good pickup by R. E. S. to grab Soltar Schmidt in my mind, probably the, the best fit for someone to grab right now of the large drone inspection companies, you have your Skyspecs and stuff, and they're starting to grow arms and legs themselves, whereas Soltar Schmidt has remained in the kind of that The niche that's good for an acquisition.