ANN ARBOR–Officials of SkySpecs, the provider of asset management for the wind energy industry, now has almost 100 full time employees engaged in automating renewable energy operations and maintenance using unmanned aerial vehicles, software, and operational expertise.

“While we were initially cautious about how the pandemic would affect our business and our customers’ operations, we feel incredibly grateful that we safely and systematically provided the same level of service this year as customers have been used to receiving from us in the past,” said SkySpecs CEO Danny Ellis. “We worked together to find new ways of accomplishing our goals, while continuing to focus on our team’s expansion as well as the growth of our products and services. And our customers were doing the same, so we were able to achieve some pretty incredible things in 2020 despite the remote nature of our interactions.”

Highlights of SkySpecs’ Year in Review include:

* Horizon, SkySpecs’ blade asset management platform saw measurable adoption in 2020, managing approximately 90 gigawatts of the industry’s blade assets. Horizon’s blade asset management tools are also now enabling some of the largest owners, manufacturers, and service providers in the United States and Europe to digitize their operations and maintenance, including work module functionality, repair campaigns, year-over-year damage propagation analyses, vendor qualifications, and blade management operations and planning.

* SkySpecs’ fully automated inspection system achieved numerous milestones in 2020 including the fulfillment of just under 30,000 inspections globally, at nearly a thousand unique wind farms in 24 countries. SkySpecs’ inspections deliver critical data to nearly 33 percent of the U.S. market’s assets.

* The 2020 inspection volume is equivalent to the team’s total inspection volume over the previous three years combined.

* SkySpecs’ offshore inspections continue to increase in the European market, providing inspections for nearly 20% of the global offshore market. The company’s long-standing partnership with Offshore Turbines Services continued in 2020, providing a variety of vessels to meet customers’ unique needs.

* “Industry Conversations,” the company’s recently launched webinar series, provides a platform for stakeholders at all levels of the organization to exchange ideas, learn from one another, and present new ideas and technology in an open exchange. The first two webinars featured EDF’s Matt Sigala, who talked about blade repair strategies, and Nick Gaudern of Power Curve, who presented principles of aerodynamics and their effect on output.

* SkySpecs’ U.S. and European-based teams have grown by 75 percent this past year, and are on track to double that growth in 2021.

“We know that this year is going to be critical not only for our team, but our customers as well,” SkySpecs CTO Tom Brady said. “The newly appointed US administration and the global push to advance clean energy as quickly and efficiently as possible have created the perfect opportunity for innovation and automation of many areas of wind energy. We believe that offering our expertise to an industry that is ready to embrace new ways of doing business in the form of technology, data analysis, and robotics will be instrumental in making renewable energy ubiquitous, and that’s a mission that we’ve lived and breathed from the start. We are pretty thrilled to be living in this moment.”

More about the company at https://skyspecs.com.