CEO Josh Riedy explains how Thread's UNITI software platform enables intuitive data management and analysis for drone inspections at wind farms, creating integrated "electronic medical records" for turbines. Visit their website: https://thread.one/

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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. If you've been paying attention to the drone inspection business, you may have noticed some significant changes in the last couple of years. The amount of data being acquired is astounding where the industry once lacked sufficient data.

Now we're overflowing with it and new ideas and businesses are trying to solve the data overload problem and bring more of a uniform approach to inspections. Be that wind turbines, transmission lines, substations. Our guest today is Josh Riedy CEO and founder of Thread, and Thread is based in North Dakota in the central part of the United States.

Thread has developed some really interesting products and is really simplifying the way that we handle data. Josh, welcome to the program.

Josh Riedy: Thank you, Allen. Glad to be here.

Allen Hall: So we have a massive problem that the industry is going through at the moment where we want to acquire more data and that's what Thread does in their platform.

And let's talk about that in a moment here, but I want to understand the scope of the problem because we, Joel and I have been around talking to operators lately. And here's one of the things they tell us, and it happened this morning, actually, on a zoom call they want to acquire more data.

They want to acquire the wind farm, the turbine, the blade, but also the transmission line, all the substation. They want to gather drone images of all of it. And the problem they were having was what to do with all the data that actually happened today.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. How do we manage it all?

Allen Hall: Yeah. And this revolve back to our conversation about what Thread is doing to answer that call.

So maybe you can describe what you're doing to answer the call of we have a lot of data.

Josh Riedy: Allen and Joel. Thanks for having me again. And you touch on the heart of the problem. There is too much data and not just too much data. It's sensitive information. It is not meant to be in the public sphere, and that is a huge consideration.

So the goal of Thread and our passion since 2018 has been to take that information and make it relevant to the customer, to the stakeholder that needs that information. And that's not simple, because no large organization is just one modality. There are many different groupings within a given organization that have different needs.

And to get that right has been a pursuit for some time, but I do believe we are on the right track and we're able to show the world that.

Allen Hall: I have really seen a shift Josh in what the engineers are asking for it was for the longest time Let's take some images of blades and then they're like wow I got this I can got some images of blades with drones This is fantastic Why am I not doing everything around this wind turbine and that means looking at the tower looking at the cell going down to the base of plant, right?

So the BOP and then those large operators are like, Hey we own everything out to the substation here, folks.