Monitoring Defects for Wind Farms with Ping

‍Ping is a hardware and software monitoring solution for wind farms.

It listens to blade noise signatures and uses algorithms to detect defects before they cause more severe damage. The team spun out of an acoustics consulting company that saw the opportunity, so they really know their stuff! It can save money both from catching the damage early to avoid more costly repairs, and because routine visual inspection (which can be quite costly) can now just be targeted to the turbines that “sound funny” (yes, that’s a technical term).

The team is getting a lot of traction for onshore wind farms globally, but they have just started testing a unit for offshore conditions as well. The benefits there are even bigger since inspections and repairs are much more difficult and costly.

Beyond that, there are a number of other markets where finding the “squeaky wheel” can bring a lot of preventive maintenance benefits by using a relatively cheap microphone with smart algorithms (eg conveyor belts, but there are many other examples).

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Customer Focus

• Wind farm operators, maintainers and/or owners 
• Turbine OEMs

Challenges

Long sales cycles. Like most new insurance or insurance-like products, the value only becomes really clear when an incident happens, which can take time on a small scale POC. The value can also accrue to different people in different scenarios.

Highlights

After 3 years of hardware iteration and bug fixing combined with thousands of hours of audio, the product works amazingly well and the customer traction is really starting to kick in. It’s time to scale!

Report Card

1. Team: Experts with a commercial and pragmatic approach
2. Product: Now perfected. Super easy to install and use – as close to plug and play as it gets
3. Market: Big just for wind and really big beyond
4. Momentum: Conversion from POC by big players is demonstrating the traction
5. Impact: Indirect but meaningful in improving wind power production efficiency

From The Founders

‍Company Name: Ping Services

Themes: Powering, Energy, Remove emissions, Business

Summary: We reduce wind turbine operations and maintenance costs

Product stage: Traction

Founder: Matthew Stead

Capital raising: Likely in the next 6-12mths

Company mission: Our mission is to increase the adoption of renewable wind power generation

Why the team wants to solve this problem

Our purpose is to optimise the operations of industrial assets. We are starting with wind turbines. We do this using IoT acoustic sensors with edge computing.

Photo by Matt Artz on Unsplash

Photo by RawFilm on Unsplash

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Disclosure Note:

The author is an investor in this company.