Carlos Oliveira, CEO of Fibersail, discusses their advanced fiber optic technology for early detection of wind turbine blade damage, reducing downtime and optimizing maintenance for wind farm operators.

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Allen Hall: Wind turbine blade failures cost the industry billions annually. Today we're talking with Fibersail, CEO, Carlos Oliveira About their innovative fiber optic technology that detects early blade damage before catastrophic failures occur. Learn how their shape sensing system is helping wind farm operators reduce downtime and optimize maintenance.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Carlos, welcome to the program.

Thank you for having me here. 

Allen Hall: This is gonna be a fascinating discussion. when I was over at Wind Europe, the activity around your booth was really good. a lot of interested people wanting to learn more about the technology and how to protect their blades and be able to determine early if they have blade problems.

And I think everybody on the [00:01:00] podcast knows that blades are a huge issue financially. And we just don't have enough information about how they are moving structurally or what kind of structural issues they're having. How big do you think this problem is, Carlos? 

Speaker 3: I agree with you. So we have quite a busy Wind Europe event.

we were really full all the, time. and I think that, the problem is really, getting out, right? It's every year, more than. Five, $6 billion are being spent in non-planned repairs activities. and this is impacting a lot to the bottom line of the industry. what we knew at fiber cell 3, 4, 5 years ago, that the problem was really big Honda blades.

Now it's mainstream knowledge. big companies are putting billions of euros, in, recognizing losses because of this issue. And more and more customers are coming to us. it's [00:02:00] really a big issue and we believe that, it can really put in danger the wind industry as a whole. 

Allen Hall: Yeah. And even if you buy a new turbine today, there is very little information that comes from the blades themselves.

A lot of it is coming from the SCADA system, and that's, those SCADA systems are not designed to detect this sort of. Issues that Fibersail can detect. Correct? 

Speaker 3: Yeah. And I think it's we are building bigger and bigger blades, using old technology, right? It does not work. you have a mixture for a big explosion happening, and that's exactly what we are seeing.

If in the past, the turbines, they were showing problems after 5, 6, 7, 8 years of operation. Today we have customers that come to us. with big problems in blades after one, two years of operation, some of them still during the warranty period. So it's really becoming a big issue and that's where our shape sensing technology kicks in because we have advanced sensing technology.

For the most [00:03:00] advanced, turbines out there and the new ones, it's really good interior, but the reality is a different story. 

Allen Hall: how soon should you install a system onto a blade, particularly a new blade? Should it go in at the factory or, immediately after in the warranty period, or a lot of operators that we have seen, like to install them at year five or six of operation, which seems.

Late to us. 

Speaker 3: I tend to agree, we would prefer to have it installed, at the manufacturing. we know it's not, straightforward. and what we're doing, and this is let's say our go-to market strateg...