Theresa Trevor, Director of Marketing, SkySpecs brings PES her view on how to improve efficiency in our industry, by the use of data: not just its collection. Digitization is the answer.
The past two years have revealed the near-term need for digital transformation of the energy industry in order to maximize ROI and minimize risk for owners. Digital transformation is the process of devising new business operations and processes that integrate digitized data, which results in a sustainable advantage.
Currently there is a great deal of inefficiency embedded in the wind energy industry. Among those inefficiencies is the lack of data that allows stakeholders to make decisions and draw conclusions. Disparate data sources, a lack of tracking, and a fragmented communication chain can compound the problem.
While steps need to be taken from multiple directions, it’s important to first be aware of the some of the challenges that are facing the industry with regard to digitization and data overload.
The amount of data generated is growing faster than most in the industry can keep up – and it’s all over the place
There are many technologies that are driving data acquisition faster than ever before. SkySpecs, as an example, collects blade data using AI-powered robots. In as little as 15 minutes we’ve collected images of all sides of all the blades on a wind turbine, and that data is accessible within days, streamlining the entire inspection process, which results in more data, more quickly.
To date, SkySpecs has collected over 3 million blade images. That’s no small amount of data for owners, technicians, and engineers to make sense of.
While this data is shared, viewed and annotated in a digital format by our software, it is extracted many times. This can take the form of downloads, pdf reports, spreadsheets, which in a way stops the digital process short. Add other types of disparate data that is being created at breakneck pace, and you’ve got an industry buried in data that isn’t immediately useful.
Data analytics produce insights more quickly
Operators need to reconfigure their operations in order to make use of the insights provided. This is a prerequisite for bringing down operating costs and increasing the lifetime value of the assets. In today’s technological landscape, data analytics is an automated process, which makes insights possible, and these insights can be produced quickly if the format of that data is consumable and high-quality.
