Allen and Joel speak with Allan Larson, VP of CMS Products at SkySpecs, about their remaining useful life estimates for operators. By predicting component failures, operators can create better maintenance schedules, saving time and money.

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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. And today we're diving into a critical challenge facing wind farm operators, predicting component failures and optimizing maintenance schedules. Imagine if wind farm operators could instantly gauge the cost impact of their decisions And automatically assign a dollar value to the risk.

It sounds like science fiction, but it's actually becoming a reality through innovative approaches to remaining useful life assessments and automated risk detection. In today's episode, we'll explore how these technologies are revolutionizing wind turbine maintenance. Helping operators reduce downtime, cut costs, and extend the lifespan of their assets.

We'll learn how advanced analytics and artificial intelligence are enabling more precise predictions and smarter decision making in a WinFarm world. Our guest is Allan Larson, the VP of CMS products at SkySpecs. In his role, Allan leads all aspects of product development for the Horizon CMS platform, which is crucial for wind turbine drivetrain monitoring and diagnostics.

As part of SkySpecs product team, Allan manages the product roadmap, conducts market research, and oversees the development and launch of new features. His expertise is key. In condition monitoring systems and AI based fault detection for wind turbines makes him a key player in shaping innovative solutions for the wind industry.

Allan welcome to the show.

Allan Larson: Thank you.

Allen Hall: That was pretty good, wasn't it? That was a pretty good intro. I feel pretty good about myself now. Play it when you go home from the show here, yeah. That's the rap, people. Uh, so, you're a drivetrain specialist. CMS drive space.

Allan Larson: Yes. Specialist. These days, that's what I've become.

Yes.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And that is, uh, obviously a really needed, uh, knowledge base, particularly as the number of wind turbines has grown dramatically and we're rapidly producing turbines. We also rapidly produce drive train problems. And CMS is going to be the only way for us to dig ourselves out of a little bit of a hole on gearboxes and bearings and some of the drive train issues.

Uh, what do you see as sort of the top level issues out in the field today and what are you, what are you hearing?

Allan Larson: Well, I mean, I think about it not so much in terms of, uh, which, uh, which failure mode is occurring most today or whatever. It's more, um, the failure modes that you have today is something that we need to detect early so we can act on it, right?

And, uh, that's what CMS is all about. It's about this early and accurate detection of failure. of drive train failure modes so you can take appropriate action at the appropriate time.

Allen Hall: Yeah, it's been a very busy crane season in the middle of the United States. We've noticed a lot of gearboxes and main bearings being replaced.

The CMS systems are going to play a bigger part in that. I think a lot of operators are becoming much more aware that CMS is needed on drive train.