ONYX Insight is a world-leader in continuous monitoring systems for wind turbines. They are continuing to modernize the monitoring of blades with their recent partnership with the South Korea-based drone inspection experts at Nearthlab. This week’s guest Megan Rotondo, Service Development Manager for ONYX Insight, discusses the latest advancements in blade monitoring and how advanced drone imaging can reduce O&M budgets and yield happier turbines.



ONYX Insight - https://onyxinsight.comPardalote Consulting - https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWind Power Lab - https://windpowerlab.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com











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Megan Rotondo Interview



Allen Hall: I am Allen Hall, host of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Our guest today is Megan Rotondo, service development manager with ONYX Insight, and if you don't know ONYX Insight well you're missing out because ONYX Insight is a global renewable technology business that provides predictive analytics and wind turbine monitoring services to owners and operators of renewable energy assets.



Solutions deliver increased energy production and reduced operations and maintenance costs, enabling wind turbine operators to minimize unplanned downtime and maximize investment returns. ONYX Insight are technology agnostic and work across all types of turbines and CMS systems to optimize turbine efficiency.



And you probably, if you do know ONYX Insight, you probably know them from all their drive, train, vibration monitoring equipment, which they're excel at. Megan has a lot of experience in blades, so Megan has a previous experience with GE and Envision on Blade design, so she's a real blade person, and this is why we love having Megan on the program because we can geek out on blades a little bit.



Megan, welcome to the program. 



Megan Rotondo: Thank you. I'm glad to be here. 



Allen Hall: So, ONYX Insight had a recent announcement with Nearthlab, and if people are not familiar with Nearthlab, Nearthlab is based in South Korea and they do drone inspections at a, at a really cool and a couple cool things there. That partnership when it was announced, like, wow, that's super powerful.



It, it sounds like it was a blade engineer. It's gonna give you a lot more access to data and information from the field. Right? Isn't that where, where it was going? 



Megan Rotondo: Yeah. Yeah. We announced the partnership end of March, early April of this year. And really just to, I mean, really coming from our customers, I mean, as part of our expansion, you know, I joined ONYX in 2021 and like you mentioned, best known for drivetrain, CMS.



So really focused on bearings, gear boxes more of the drivetrain on the turbine. However it came from our customers that, you know, we really need to consider the whole turbine when we're talking about predictive maintenance. So this is just another part of that story is, you know, we offer, you know, you do borescopes on gearboxes, you do end of warranty walk down inspections.



We go to tear downs for bearings. So for blades, we need to be able to offer a similar service. So instead of reinventing the wheel, and like you mentioned, we like to be pretty flexible in our technology. This partnership with Nearthlab allows us to offer a more streamlined, like turnkey service. So if someone's working with us on an end to warranty campaign instead of the customer having to search for another company or multiple companies to handle the blade inspections,