WIND TURBINE BLADE INSPECTION SERVICES MARKET ANALYSIS

Market Challenges And Opportunities

Global Wind Turbine Blade Inspection Services Market Drivers:

Government adopting renewable source of energy, creating awareness of job in market

Governments U.S. and Canada adopting renewable source of energy, in order to reduce carbon footprint. This is expected to be major factor for increasing demand for wind turbines. Increasing industrialization has led to high demand for electricity, which inadvertently had led to rising greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), emissions in the atmosphere.

Creating awareness of job in market

Wind power is an important driver of jobs and investment in the U.S., and a crucial pillar of the Biden administration’s plan to Build Back Better. Currently, wind power supports over 120,000 jobs and has brought in over US$ 65 billion over the past five years in the U.S. These socioeconomic benefits will be amplified once the U.S. offshore wind market takes off, which could generate an additional US$ 166 billion in new investment by 2022 and support 80,000 jobs annually by 2035.

Global Wind Turbine Blade Inspection Services Market Opportunities:

Increasing Turbine Height and Diameter

Increasing the height and diameter of the wind turbine is expected to aid in wind power generation at offshore. Increase in turbine height aids in increasing energy generation by 3.52% and 6.28% for 80 m to 100 m, and for 80 m to 120 m hub heights, respectively. For instance, Vestas has enhanced the capacity of its V164 wind turbine from 7MW to 8MW by increasing its diameter of 164 m or 538 ft. Moreover, EDF Energy built wind turbines as high as 492 ft, in order to boost energy generation by 37%. Thus, increasing height and diameter of wind turbine is proportional to increasing electricity generation. Therefore, increasing demand for electricity is expected to increase demand for larger and higher wind turbines. However, these larger wind turbines include glass fiber-reinforced polyester blades that weigh about 9,000 kg each. Increasing weight and height of turbines proportionally increase the probability of edge erosion, damage from lightning and dynamic and aerodynamic imbalance among others, which further increases demand for regular inspection services.

Growing adoption of IOT solutions

Adoption of IoT solution for wind turbine inspection is increasing as it helps wind-farm operators to avoid the high maintenance cost and down time, increase turbine reliability, minimize downtime, and avoid catastrophic failure. Moreover, the major benefits of IoT includes real-time data analysis, increasing resources optimization, and improvement in operational management. Thus, the benefits of IoT (Internet of Things) data is expected to help in identifying issues related to maintenance in advance. This data is send to the wind turbine operator about the issues of the remote wind turbine, which requires maintenance, in order to avoid costly downtime or damage. Therefore, IoT is expected to help in improving efficiency of inspection and reduce cost of maintenance, as it provides wind turbine operators the real-time data for increasing the performance and reliability. Hence, the use of IoT technology for maintenance of offshore wind system will aid in growth of the market in the forecasted period.

Global Wind Turbine Blade Inspection Services Market Restraints:

Lack of skilled labor for conducting inspection, High Cost of Automated NDT Equipment

Lack of skilled labor is a major challenge for growth of the North America wind turbine inspection blades market. Growing demand for wind turbines will proportionally increase the demand for the inspection of these wind turbines, in order to minimize maintenance cost and increase the life of wind turbine blades. Since the components of wind turbines are very complex, it becomes difficult to identify defects by manual inspection.

High Cost of Automated NDT Equipment

Automated NDT equipment is aiding in replacement of manual equipment. These provide high quality of inspection and deliver high quality of products. The factor negatively affecting demand for automated NDT equipment is its high investment cost. Since, the set-up cost of the NDT automated equipment is very high, the adoption of these products is fairly low by small-scale organizations. Additionally, new technologies are also complex in nature, which in turn increase the cost of training for the company. Therefore, this factor will restraint growth of the market to a certain extent.