Revolutionizing Wind Assessment with First Airborne

We're joined by Boaz Peled, co-founder and CEO of First Airborne,
to discuss their groundbreaking technology that revolutionizes wind
resource assessments. First Airborne's cloud-based anemometer
system, suspended from a remotely controlled drone, allows highly
accurate measurements of wind speed and direction across existing
wind farms, significantly improving the efficiency and optimization
of wind turbines. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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. Our guest today is Boaz Peled the co founder and CEO of
First Airborne, an innovative company that is revolutionizing wind
resource assessments. First Airborne has developed a cloud based
cutting edge anemometer system that is suspended from a remotely
controlled drone, allowing highly accurate measurements of wind
speed and direction at various heights and locations across an
existing wind farm. The groundbreaking technology is poised to
significantly improve the efficiency and optimization of wind
turbines. We're excited to have Boaz join us to discuss First
Airborne's unique solution and his insights on leveraging drones
and advanced sensor technology to enhance wind energy production.
Boaz, welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Thanks for having
me. This is going to be an interesting discussion because First
Airborne has some new technology, and in wind energy, you don't see
a lot of sort of earth shattering technology, but this is one where
it's a power producer, right? In the wind business, we're here to
produce power. The power comes from the wind. We need to know as
much about the wind as we can. Problem is if you have an existing
wind farm with a couple of met towers it can be hard to discern
what's happening on a complex site. That's where First Airborne
comes in. And would you just briefly describe what your product is?
I gave a little summary and introduction, but it's unique. Boaz
Peled: The best way to think of First Airborne's technology which
we call Windborne by the way, it's actually very easy to explain
for wind power people. Because what it is a windmast, but it can
fly. So it's a flying windmast. Imagine your windmast just grew
wings and started flying any way you'd like to within your wind
farm. And back to the question of complex terrain. I think I'd
suggest that is simply let's say one kind of exotic application.
But the question, which wind is hitting my turbine? Is I think the
most maybe sought after question in wind power. And if you have a
flying wind mast, you position it anywhere you like for any for
this turbine or the next, and you'll get that answer. Allen Hall:
Because once they've done a site survey, and usually there's a pre
survey done before the wind turbines are installed, that survey is
pretty good. Depending how old that survey is, that survey may be
20 years old. It could be that old, right? And things change. And
the one that happens mostly in the United States, Joel has pointed
out numerous times on the podcast, is there's another wind farm
installed in front of your wind farm. And another wind farm in
front of that one. So the winds you are now receiving are not what
you had initially planned on. And then trying to understand what
those winds are and how to maximize production in that environment
is almost impossible without your kind of technology, right? Boaz
Peled: I think I love that example. I think it's a, it's a
microcosm of a lot of other things, but it's a really good way to
understand that actually in today in wind power, I've been an
operator for many years and first airborne has really come out of
kind of my, Let's say the shortcomings that I, that myself and my
co founders have seen in the industry and to try to figure out how
to solve that. And the first and foremost thing is my turbine
producing as it should? That's the most commonplace, expected
question you, you may ask, is and the problem specifically with
wind turbines, let's say, as opposed to solar farms or let's say
other generation types, is that By definition, the fact that the
wind turbine is inside the wind is distorting the wind reading. And
then you need a remote sensing device, which is reading the wind
that's about to hit your turbine, but not the one that's actually
there. Now, given the size of wind farms and the variety of layouts
and terrains, and then other, as you say, turbines, which are
affecting my turbine, depends on the wind direction. If I'm
stationary, there is just so much data and a lot of invalid data
coming in, whether it's because it's waked or because it's
interrupted by the own machine. But if you're moving around, in our
case, being deployed on an aircraft, if you're moving around, then
you're actually picking and choosing where is the right place to
measure that free wind, which is going to tell me really what. The
production level should be at that point in time, and then that
opens up a world of opportunities on tuning, optimization control
settings, software upgrades blade repairs, you name it. The fact of
the matter is at the moment, wind power operators simply really, I
hope this doesn't sound too large, just don't know whether their
machines are operating, what they're producing, what they should be
producing. Joel Saxum: We can look at it at the foundational level,
right? So this is talking outside of first airborne solutions,
right? But it is a few met towers and basically a model, right? And
that's modeling on the, on a statistical or mathematical models
that have been developed, and one of the things that Alan and I
learned on another with from another guest on the podcast was that,
When we talk complex terrain can be as much as a ditch on the side
of the road in the middle of a wind farm that isn't perfectly flat.
So when a model is based on basically what a piece of paper flat
is, there's, there is no wind sites that are out there that are
like that, right? So you're relying on data from the beginning.
That is, it's acceptable for the most part, but it's not
fundamentally correct because it is based on a mathematical model,
and that doesn't fit what the actual real world situation is, and
then once you get into oper and that's at the developmental stage.
You get into operations, and the anemometer on the back on the that
you're getting your wind reading from is on the back of the
nacelle, where the wind has already come through the blades and
messed it up anyways. The, what you guys are bringing to the market
is really a kind of it's, it, not it is a first of its kind
solution to measure ACTUAL wind resource. Boaz Peled: Exactly.
That's the asset you as a developer, that's the asset you bring to
the table, right? That's, that's your fuel. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Yeah.
Boaz Peled: Now here's the thing. We're talking about site
assessment in general. So then whether it's FAT or they model
complex rain any assessor will tell you that the errors on, on, on
flow models are like 20 percent up and down, in, in some cases, and
nobody will argue with that. That's that's why there's, a lot of
drive for within site assessment also to place LIDARs, like what we
call roaming LIDARs, move them around to narrow down that that
error. But then when you're moving on to operating, when the
situation is no more, it's not static, you have maintenance, you
have, you have inspections, you have people playing around with
your turbine, you have like weather conditions, which are not
considered in your model. The model is good for financing, I think,
when you, when, at the time when you're taking over your wind farm,
at that very moment, as when you're, you switch on the turbines,
and is that the thing I actually bought? Those models go out the
window. They're irrelevant at that stage, because that turbine is
there real. Let's measure what's really hitting it and what it's
really giving us in return. And then, other devices do this kind of
thing. And actually sometimes very accurately. Some LIDARs are very
good problem is they can't move and when they can't move, it's a
lot, there's a lot of filtering of data and very few turbines,
which are actually can be tested. Once you have a flying LIDAR or a
flying windmast, all of a sudden those five or six machines, which
you could have, In the best case, maybe tested in a year, turn into
maybe 206 machines tested in a year. Allen Hall: Okay, that's a
huge difference. I, it's, if you haven't seen the First Airborne
website, you need to go to firstairborne. com and then take a look
because you can see the drone and the anemometer being deployed.
The anemometer Boaz, I want to just walk through this real quick
for everybody who's listening on the audio platforms. So it's a
drone. It's a standard quadcopter kind of thing. Then on the bottom
of it, it has what looks like to be a submarine, basically an
anemometer submarine. Boaz Peled: I'm going to call it a torpedo,
yeah. Allen Hall: Okay, a torpedo. That falls out of the bottom
that's on a data line. And that anemometer just sits there and
records data while the drone hovers above it to hold it. And then
that data is then recorded in telemetry back to whoever's recording
it. Okay. But that allows you to like, to take long duration
samples, like several hours worth of data,