But again, there is never a perfect solution. The main challenge as of today for such a solution is the maintenance of a vast drone system across the windfarm. Flying drones in high-wind conditions (ideal locations for windmills unfortunately) inherently comes with risks of drone failure. Implementing such a system off-shore would also require deeper research into how sea conditions such as sea mist might affect drone hardware.

I have also personally found it challenging to gather windmill blade data off the internet. Most such data is protected as commercial IP or just not available in a digitised format. And so training a reliable image detection system might require close collaborations with industry leaders and OEM’s in the windmill manufacturing and energy space in order to access such datasets.

But regardless, I’ve found companies on track to develop and implement very similar solutions, notably, the Lilypad project by Marshall Aerospace. They have been successful in securing key partners for developing both the drone hardware capability and also the software requirements to build such a project. There is also currently a company, Sulzer Schmid, based in Switzerland who has successfully implemented similar solutions for on-shore based systems. If you’re interested in learning how new companies fare in such markets, these companies are definitely worth a look.

That said, I hope you now get an idea of the wind energy market and the challenges we face maintaining such a massive infrastructure. If you’d like to speak to me about my research into this and learn more about what I found please feel free to get in touch.