What O&M teams actually ask, written by the people who run the campaigns. No hype and no figures we cannot stand behind.
Spain closed 2024 with 22,486 wind turbines installed. Every one of them needs blade, tower and nacelle maintenance, and until recently that meant one thing: a person hanging off a rope tens of metres up.
No maintenance manager says their turbines do not need cleaning. What they say is that this year is not the year. The two statements look contradictory and they are not.
It is the first question in almost every conversation and the one with the worst answers online. Plenty of articles quote round numbers without citing where they came from. We are not going to do that.
In this business the technology is not the barrier. Drones can be bought and there are operators across Europe. What cannot be solved in six months is getting into the site of a major utility.
The technical part of a drone cleaning campaign is the easiest bit to plan. What drives the calendar is aviation filing and weather, in that order.
The nacelle is the part of a wind turbine with the least surface area and the most questions: where the streaks come from, why the wind farm seals it before the team arrives and what is left when the job is done.
Wind turbines are cleaned in one of three ways: by hanging a person off them, by bringing a machine up to them, or by flying a drone. Each solves different things, and it pays to know which before asking for a quote.
The tower is the part of the turbine everyone sees and the one that generates the most cleaning orders. Almost always for the same reason: oil streaks running down from the nacelle.
A drone inspection is visual: it sees what a camera sees. That is far more than can be seen from the ground and rather less than some presentations promise. It pays to know where the limit is.
On a dirty blade two things coexist that look alike and have nothing in common: soiling, which is cleaned, and leading-edge erosion, which is repaired. Confusing them is expensive in both directions.
Two quotes with the same price per machine can cost very different amounts. The cost of cleaning a wind turbine depends on six things, and the downtime, which appears on no invoice, is usually the largest.
Three data points are enough: number of turbines, location and rotor diameter. We come back with a fixed price per machine and scope within two working days.