Wind power accounts for 7% of the world’s electricity and about 2% of the world’s energy.  While the overall share is rising, it needs to expand much faster if the globe is to meet its Paris Agreement 2030 sustainability goals.  Among the world’s nations, China, the United States and India are still the world’s leaders, but Japan is coming up fast.  In fact, by 2040, Japan hopes to have one-third of its energy generated by wind power alone.

Ensuring that its wind farms are as efficient as possible has become a top national goal in Japan.  To ensure efficiency, wind turbines need regular inspections, a task that is complicated by their height and remote locations.  Ground-based inspection teams are expensive and can’t always reach the turbines easily.  But the biggest stumbling block is the need to pause the turbine to conduct field inspections, which substantially reduces their output and productivity.  How can this problem be solved?

With drones.

Tokyo-based Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) recently unveiled a new technology that takes two autonomous drones, fitted with relatively small commercial radio emitters that communicate with each other at a low level.  The alternating signals create a so-called “Fresnel Zone” between the two UAVs that operates on either side of a turbine, which allows the drone sensors to detect damage to the installation while it’s still operating at its normal speed.  The system has another great advantage:  Because the emitted radio signals are weak, the drones can perform their inspection without the need for a special communications  license.

NTT hasn’t tested the experimental radio signal inspection system in the field.  It’s still in the proof-of-concept phase, but so far the drone-based system works as designed.  The company’s next step is a larger-scale outdoor test on multiple functioning units to further develop its application to real-world wind farms.

A Korean drone software company, Nearthlab, is following in Japan’s footsteps – but with a different inspection methodology.  The Seoul-based company deploys drones that fly close to wind turbine blades to capture high-resolution images of the structure which are fed into a program for computer-generated data analysis.  The drone’s AI software allows the aircraft to identify the precise shape and position of the turbine’s blades and to calculate the optimal flight path for an in-depth inspection.  The entire inspection process takes as little as 15 minutes, far faster than any conventional ground-based method.

Korea, unlike Japan, does not have a major wind power program currently guiding its national energy strategy – but Nearthlab wants to be ready when it does.  In the interim the company is offering its inspection services to Korean companies in other sectors, especially construction, and to wind power clients elsewhere in the world.  The company’s state-of-the art AI software can be attached to a wide range of hardware platforms, including Chinese DJI drones, but Nearthlabs also produces its own drone models and assembles all of its products locally, to ensure compatibility with local inspection needs.

Japan and Korea are indicative of the growing interest in drone technology to shore up the renewables industry.  Researchers estimate that roughly a quarter of the total cost of wind energy is lost due to disturbances in maintenance and operation.  Improving wind energy competitiveness by improving wind energy system reliability and lowering O&M costs is essential.  Drones can play an important role by speeding inspections, reducing their cost and making them safer and more reliable.