Brazil’s wind turbine market is surging! From an installed capacity of 24 GW in 2022, it’s set to soar to a massive 45.20 GW by 2028. But with the majority of turbines in the northeast region facing relentless rainfall, ensuring top-notch blade performance is crucial. Join us as Armando Costa Rego, Founder and CEO of Arthwind, shares insights on how they’re keeping the wind turbines spinning flawlessly amid the boom.

Arthwind – https://arthwind.com.br
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Wind Power Lab – https://windpowerlab.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com

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Arthwind Interview

Allen Hall: I am Allen Hall, president of Weather Guard Lightning Tech, and I’m here with the Vice President of North American Sales to Wind Power LAB, Joel Saxum. And today we’re talking about the need for wind blade inspections and repair planning with our guest Armando Costa Rego, founder and CEO of Arthwind. And Arthwind are the blade doctors of Brazil.

Now, if you’ve been around wind turbines long enough, you know that wind turbines are a critical part of the renewable energy infrastructure, but they’re also complex machines that can be susceptible to damage. And wind blades are particularly vulnerable to damage from ice, wind, and other environmental factors.

And that’s why it’s important to have a comprehensive blade inspection and repair plan in place. This plan should include the schedule for regular inspections and a process for identifying, repairing any damage that is found. And Arthwind is really key part of that. By following a regular inspection and repair plan, you can ensure your, your wind turbine blades are operating safely and efficiently, and you can also definitely extend the lifetime of your wind turbines, which will save money in the long run.

So on this podcast, we’re gonna discuss all of the importance factors of wind blade inspections and repair planning. We’ll also talk about some of the latest technology that Arthwind has used to inspect and repair wind turbine blades. Armando, welcome to the program. 

Armando Costa Rego: Hey guys, thank you very much for this introduction.

It’s really a pleasure to be here the first time after meeting you several times around the world. So now we are here now. 

Allen Hall: So Arthwind’s based in Brazil. You guys are located just outside of Sao Paulo. And you, you, you formed a company because you had a lot of blade expertise. You may, you may wanna give a brief description of, of where you learned about blades.

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah, that’s right. We are located in, near to Sao Paulo actually, Sorocaba. Sorocaba is a a city where Texas has built more than 50,000 wind blades since 2007. So we have here a hub of expertise of the all kinds of blades and all that. At, at 37 meters, 40 meters, 48 and any longers blades.

My, my expertise started in Europe, actually. I was running wind blade maintenance through a, a company, a local company there since 2009, up to 2015. Then I returned to Brazil to manage the operation in South America and decided in 2007 to create my own project called Arthwind to bring the technology to the way how things are getting done, you know, so I was like a terrific critic of how blades is used, being inspected, inspecting that time, taking pictures from the grounds. So I joined partners around the world to, to bring this new technology to Brazil and so far since 2017, we, we had successfully inspected more than 45,000 wind blade inspections. 

Allen Hall: And you’re tied with Clobotics too.

I know you do a lot of drone inspections, which sort of like the first key of any blade inspections to get some drone data up there. And can you explain that your relationship with Clobotics? 

Armando Costa Rego: Yes. Clobotics is our actual partner right now, since 2020. We have inspected since the beginning of our relation almost 7,000 wind turbine in Brazil.

So it’s 21,000 wind blades. So we have found Great reliability and a good connection with the guys from Clobotics and to, to be able to rescale the, the technology. In Brazil, as you know, Brazil, we have a kind of particular market. So we have a, a, a high power capacity factor. So we are talk the average here, what achieves the 50% year basis and have flat wind condition that’s good for the machining.

But in the other side you have modern machines here. So we are talking that we are achieving 26 gigawatts in Brazil with 10,000 wind turbine provides. So if we make that range, power out to put is 2.6 megawatts per turbine in Brazil. 

Allen Hall: That’s huge. Yeah. Brazil has some of the best wins in the world, right?

Armando Costa Rego: Yes, that’s right. So it’s a flat wind constant. Only directional. So if we go to the northeast of Brazil, we have 89% of all fleet installed. In this, in the south we have the other 11. So we have a huge space between the, so the north, the south and northeast. That’s empty. And now the folks are looking to the offshore market.

That will be the upcoming challenge for Brazil. 

Joel Saxum: Some, I guess market knowledge, and, and correct me if I’m wrong, Armando, when we talk about this, but Northeast Brazil’s pretty remote. Most of the wind farms up there are pretty in pretty remote areas. The fact that you guys are bringing advanced technology helps that much more, right?

Because it’s tough to get technicians up there and back and mobilize and mobilize this and mobilize that. So having key technology platforms such, I know you guys have got the Clobotics drone, right? But you also have an internal crawler for doing internal blade inspections. Correct. And if, and if you guys can mobilize all that at once, that’s, that’s that much easier when you guys are that remote.

Armando Costa Rego: Yes, we have a lot of logistic challenges in, in Brazil. So the wind farm is so far from the coast, so sometimes we need to drive 10 hours around the countryside to, to get an inspection done. And yes, we started 2017, so it was much more harder because, you know, we, we, we work with data and it said six years ago this region was not connected to the, the internet, good internet now to high speed internet.

So now all of that is, is solved. And in 2020, after three years inspecting, with drones, we, we were insisting some technology that could bring the internal data to Arthwind because we are avoiding to work with an uptower technician. We are a service provider, but very focused in technology just to insist to change the how the things are get done.

And we created during the pandemic 2020 beginning March. We started with our toy that’s called Arthbot that I have here right now. And it start, go into market, you know, with the first crawler. We inspected the first year like 300 wind turbine the second year 700. And this year since January, we already get inspecting more than 1000 wind since January with this rover.

So we have already the version 2.0 of this rover. So it’s a kinda automated that go collecting data inside the blade. This, if you put the amount of, of new images that the owners can get from this inspection and how it changes the decision is dramatically. So we see that only with the external images.

We cannot combine the puzzle to give really cover all risks behind the OEM maintenance. So for now, I believe, I guess I’d right that we have the most complete package of inspections in South America. 

Allen Hall: That’s huge. Does, does the internal inspections open the door into what’s actually happened with blades A little bit more.

I know for the longest time it was almost all internal inspections, right? It’s all drone inspections. And just recently we’ve, the last couple years really around Covid time that we started doing internal inspections. What have you learned from those internal inspections? 

Armando Costa Rego: Yes. What we learned is that is a critical protocol.

We have a lot of challenges, you know is like is your topic right now, tell that the only the crawler will get the right data for the internal inspection. That to ensure that all damages are very well inspected because, you know there is, is, is is another complex structure inside the blade. So if you would go to the external side and you see a.

White or gray surface, everything that’s not gray is something. So note we can divide now in dirty or, or damaging. Okay. Is another, another layer. So now this damage can be a cracky or, or a cosmetic failure. Inside the blade is completely different, so, The knowledge of the product, how this product is built, is the game changer.

So I, I’m pretty sure that in two years we’ll have modern robots and crawler make it very easy to collect the data, but the analysis will face some challenges to, to, to avoid, to get like false positives and to identify really what is important inside the blade. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, it’s, it’s the, the importance of having the blade engineers look at it, right?

We see the same kind of thing, wind power lab in other parts of the world where, The, you gotta have structural knowledge of these, of these blades, how they’re built, how they’re manufactured, what the, let the different layers mean. But I like the way you put it. I think that’s fantastic. Like at the outside it’s, it’s either white or gray.

And if there’s something different, there’s, there’s something to look at there. But in inside you see wrinkle wrinkles and delaminations and surface cracks, and. Is that cracked deeper? Is it okay, this, this bit of a resin here looks a little bit white? Why is that? Like, and there’s certain reasons and knowledge there that’s, that’s specialized.

It’s not a, and not an as easy as an ai as a silver bullet type thing. 

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah, that’s the point. That’s the point because inside the blade you have environment, high environmental condition. You know, so if you go only with the robot you had oil, we have. Dusty from the blade manufacturing. Sometimes the, the odometry is not so precise, so it needed to, to, to, to restart.

So it is not like scalable. We cannot scale like it 10, 11, 12 turbine in a single day like we do with drones. So we are talking that for the modern machines with plus 70 meters longer blades, we are top to. One blade, one turbine per day or one a half, you know, because we have limited time to 10 hours, we need to climb, be all equip mates.

We need to prepare protocols of safety. Then you start the job. For the drone, no, we put the drone to the ground and fly away around the wind turbine. So if you scale so much, you at loss quality. So if you lost quality, we’re not providing the, the disability that the, the customer is looking for and.

The game change on that. The, the key point is the blade specialist, like you said, Joel. So today we have 22 blade specialists in the back office working constantly analyzing data. So all of these guys do is analyze data for us, data check specification from manufacturing, and to give the better recommendation.

It’s not like only 3, 4, 5, recommendation. All and need to understand deeply. How this product was built to give the right recommendation.

Allen Hall: Armando, I know when we talked previously, you mentioned the number of internal inspection vehicles you have in your fleet. What, what was that number? 

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah. This year was a challenge because we started with four units and now we have 26 units deployed.

Joel Saxum: That’s quite, quite a big change. 

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No. All built by our team. So we have our developers here who is working with the robot. So it’s different now, a services company. We working with tech development with robotics software, but the guys are doing very well because I, I, I, I truly believe that the knowledge of the product that is start to give the technology to, to be employed.

So we have all of this parr inside Arthwind and it make the development fast. Faster than when you had only the tech side of the value chain. 

Joel Saxum: And, and so you guys are, you guys are of course based outta Brazil, but what other markets are you playing in? Are you in Argentina and Uruguay, Chile and everything in the South America, or are you getting further than that?

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah. Right now we are open to, to work. We working in Uruguay, Chile some opportunities of consulting in Mexico. We provide some consulting for United States as well, Europe. So the consulting arms of Arthwind we can. I provide service around the world now only analyzing data, but with some fuel we are planning so far only Brazil, and maybe with the technology of rovers we can explore another land like in North America, only seeing the technology to the customers operate by yourself.

Allen Hall: What, what things are you seeing in Brazil Armando that would be different than would typically see like in Europe and the United States? Just because the, the wind turbines are constantly spinning and producing power, it seems like that’s a rough life for a, a wind turbine. 

Armando Costa Rego: The edge is, is, you know, is I talk to my customer.

So the leading edge will happen. Early or late will happen. So what we saw in Brazil in 2015 when the customers started it with the wind power generation in Brazil, they were not very well, skilled. So they left everything to the manufacturer in a full service agreement. So the manufacturer has carried.

All maintenance protocols and for sure there is some parts of the inspection that was not very well covered. So like erosion, so like lightning strikes. So what we have now, 10 years later that we achieved now in two years of the expiring this contract is that there is a lot, a huge backlog of service to the offered.

So I see a lot of opportunities for leading edge repair right now, but we need to make that smartly. To be cost efficient because, you know, it’s not the same to hit better like a wind farm with 10 wind turbines and to hit better a wind farm with 242 wind turbines. So for this reason, I do believe that the, the robotic technologies will be the game changer to cover all of this backlog. And, and also replying

what did we see different here? You know, I, I, I may not use it anymore to, to the condition of blades in, in Europe or United States. But what do you see here is we have modern, modern products. We have blades manufacturing here in Brazil. We started 8-4 meters longer. And what do you see that we shall inspect in a year?

Blades premature damages is, is still seen, identified now probably some manufacturing the ation not becoming a crack, you know, because it’s not related to wear and tear. But people once see, we cross the data from, from internal where we can see some manufacturing, deviation, but it do not wound, which doesn’t means that it, we will become a defect.

We can track any monitor, for example, just wrinkle that we put, couldn’t know the acceptation criteria from the manufacturer if it’ll become on our OR or not in damaging. We just put money, pour in this damage, you know, because it’s very easy to see a damage, the early stage and to fix it. But the decision to put the hands in this, in this damage to remove the layers is something that we need to, to have a data driven.

So it is data from the internal can explain a lot of the behavior of this damage. How, which will progress during the life cycle. So with all of this data across, I we have a kind of a smart decision. When we decide to make it hit better, why do we reinforce to the customer here, why to make this repair now?

So only because it’s a crack, but let’s look at the historical, how how many cycles it’s have had to achieve this point. So with all of this knowhow, no LEDs and different kinds of blade analyzer we can address a better budget to prioritization to our customer. 

Allen Hall: Yeah, and I think that’s the real key here is, is Arthwind doesn’t just do inspections.

They’re providing the repair pathway and a recommendation on when to do, which is probably the the most important piece of when to spend money to actually repair Blade. And that’s unique. I think a lot of companies do inspections. Some of them just do only the repair sites. They have blade experts on hand.

To, to do the whole package I think is a little unique and that that creates a, a very valuable partnership. If, if I’m operating a wind farm down in Brazil, I will want to work with you because you understand what’s happening and you can help me. If I have a problem, you can help me get it fixed. Is that what your customers are seeing?

Yes, 

Armando Costa Rego: Fortunately we have a a close relationship with our, our customer. Some customer call our field technicians like, Hey, you are our employee here, so we are in our family. So it’s make it easy when we have this relation because we can discuss what is the risk behind. Now we can explain better.

We are not awaiting the rush. So in 2019, we started to audit repairs performed by third party companies, and we did find a lack of quality in the industry. So a lot of company, he bearing blades, he bearing blades. But why is this is buried, this damaging not that? And the protocols was not good. Some of points that we identified during our reinspection is a control of a warranty of those repairs because if you, we back like three, four years ago.

We can invoice the repair, we can receive that, but we don’t have the warranty control. So there’s a lot of money involved with all that. So it can make it reinforce to customers who do not spend money inspecting the blades that they can have a payback on that, you know. So just think it is very rich, you know. 

Joel Saxum: To be honest with you as well, Armando, that’s a global problem.

There’s not a whole lot of blade repair companies out there that are really good, right? Because to do it correctly, you need what, what you need. Skilled technicians. You need a lot of ’em with the problems we have now in the, in the global industry, but you also need to have back office engineers that are very skilled as well, and know the processes.

So now you have, if you can put that team together on the repair side, then you’ve gotta figure out a way to get data back and forth consistently. Right? Because you may have a really skilled technician in the field, but while they’re doing a scarf repair or something of the sort, They may, you know, it’s almost like they need a, you need a engineering, qa, qc step as they go along.

And if you don’t have a good connection of data back and forth that gets, stuff gets lost in there as well. So there’s, there’s a, to get a good auditing trail for repairs is tough. So it’s great that you guys are doing that ’cause we see it all over the place. Yeah. 

Armando Costa Rego: Our history in the wind industry in Brazil was exactly that.

We started the OEM cycle. Inspecting, like operate operating wind turbines. Then we step back to end of a warranty because there was forgotten in the market and there’s a lot of money involved on that responsibilities. It can change contracts during the of a warranty. Then we identified that during the wind end of warranty we identified like several cases caused in the construction.

So now we have teams, squads in the construction make inspection. Also the truck arrive in the wind farm, the drone, already map display and we can analyze the gates where this damage is is caused. So to undertake the root cause, it’s a bad handling procedure like use we find in the farm if it’s during transportation.

So we can charge responsibilities for the transportation company, not to the owner of the wind farm, and it bring to the manufacturing gates. So, and now we have paying auditors auditing daily blade manufacturing process in Brazil as well. So we cover all value chain just to ensure that this blade can in start the operational cycle health and safely,

Allen Hall: But I think that’s a unique piece of Arthwind. And I know when I first talked to you about being inside the factories a blade factories and providing the quality inspection for the owner operators, I thought, wow, that should be done worldwide. It’s, that seems like a really smart move.

I, I don’t know why it’s so much limited to Brazil at the moment, but it it does, it does, doesn’t it produce better quality blades? You’re kind of catching things early before they become really expensive. 

Armando Costa Rego: Yes, we are there. Many to a point. The photos of process to track the non conformancy that is solved before they blade leave the manufacturing process, you know, so, but I think that the most important, if you deploy guys in the, in the wind manufacturing gates before loading to the truck I think it’s a good job to do for the every players, the entire industry know it’s very easy to allocate, audit control in the inside, the manufacturing, manufacturing expedition. As you know, there is a lot of IEP. Sometimes it’s, they, they are not allowed to the manufacturing, so it’s tricky. Our market, you know? 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. But I think that’s something, I mean, we talk about it at Wind Power Lab all the time as well. It’s something that everybody should be doing, right?

Like, I’m not gonna take delivery of, I I, I always joke with Ferraris, I’m not gonna take a delivery of a Ferrari ’cause it’s a, you know, a half million dollar car. If some, if someone’s not, if you’re not looking over it carefully when you take it. Right. But you wanna make sure that there’s, there’s, when you build a home, there’s a home inspector.

Right. That they come and inspect it to make sure they help hold people accountable before you take it. So people should be taking, having inspectors, having third parties that we, you know, in the states we call ’em bird dogs sometimes ’cause they’re out there just kind of like looking around, looking for stuff.

So they, everybody should have that. They should use a third party expertise to be able to control what they’re getting. ’cause you don’t wanna take ownership of some bad blades. And to be honest with you, it happens all the time. There isn’t very many blades we inspect that don’t have an issue.

Armando Costa Rego: Yeah, that’s right.

And if you see when we created Arthwind, I created alone. I founded by myself, and now I have two partners. I don’t have our why. Very clear. You know, we need to leverage the expertise of the wind blade industry. So if we do that in the manufacturing, the all the teams, some repair inspecting end of warranty providing some advising to our customer to make it better.

So I think that we are making very well or paper if we accomplish this communication tool to go away all player of the industry. Because if you see. We only had some statements in the last month in May, launched by DNV to talk about the importance to inspect the blades regularly. So we are talking that to have gigas and gigas around the the world in now we have their paper that we can show and to endorse what we are saying since 2007. So it’s a good moment for us. Companies like Wind Power Lab, Arthwind. That’s not involved to the repair. We are not looking to make money repairing blades.. We just need to address this budget and to make our industry more sustainable economically talking. 

Allen Hall: And Armando, how big of a company are you now?

It seems like you’ve been growing pretty rapidly. Even through Covid. 

Armando Costa Rego: Yes. After Covid, we almost duplicate the company. So today we are, we are almost 115 guys working in the back office. You have 22 wind blade specialists product designer, wind blade designer, lead blade process manufacturing skills.

So all cycle of the product we have in the back office. Since the designing actually the, the, the OEM life cycle. In the field, we have the technicians operating drones, rovers, auditing repair. Everybody have had some contact with wind blade manufacturing industry. And here we have our inside training just to change a little bit, the ship of the guys and to, to look rightly what they need to show up to the customer.

So our fleet of drones today is 11 units, so I’ll have a capacity inspect more than 9,000 wind blade wind turbine on a year basis. It’s 26 rovers and dozens of a specialist to provide service to the customers. 

Allen Hall: So what is next for Arthwind? 

Armando Costa Rego: Oh, you know we see a lot of upcoming challenges.

We see the, the challenge to face to, to, to, to grow the business, basically, or, or workforce. The knowhow is limited. We cannot hiring, train, go to the field. We are very evolved now to, to, to clean up this data and to provide smart advising to the customers right now. So all of the work that we are doing now in Brazil, you know, we are not starting today.

All of our advising becomes since 10 years, 30 years, that we are accumulating the industry and this knowhow old knowhow is helping a lot to address situation if it is modern products that we are seeing Brazil right now.

Allen Hall: So Armando it’s been great to have you on the program. I wanted to have you on the program for a long time and I, we always seem to cross paths in some other country and that, that’s good.

It’s good to see at the, some of these conferences because that’s where a lot of of business takes place. Speaking of business, how do people get ahold of you at Arthwind? 

Armando Costa Rego: Yes, they can find us in the social media. I’m very active in LinkedIn,, so Armando Costa Rego is there with a lot of information about our, what we are seeing now, the blue wave, so is a kind of ritual of our, our, our technicians that is arising the Arthwind flag in the top of all wind turbines that we inspect in Brazil.

We have a lot of client stories in the LinkedIn, articles and also in our website, arthwind.com, Instagram, and also my email. My personal email for sure is armando.costa@arthwind.com.br and we can address here any kind of situation. 

Allen Hall: Great. Hey, Armando, thank you for being on the podcast. I love talking to you and learning about all the things that are happening in Brazil, so thanks for being on the podcast.