By Virginia Furness
LONDON (Reuters) -Latvian tech company Aerones, which counts GE and Enel among its customers, has raised $62 million to fund a global roll out of robots and other AI-enabled solutions to protect and maintain thousands of wind turbines in over 30 countries, its CEO told Reuters.
Wind power accounts for almost 10% of the world's energy generation and is growing rapidly but the majority of turbines are still maintained by hand, causing days-long blackout periods which cost energy companies and turbine operators huge sums.
Aerones' robots can maintain and service vast wind-turbine blades in a minimum of half the time it takes for humans to do so, providing an efficient, safe and cost-effective solution for growth, its co-founder and CEO Dainis Kruze said.
“The industry is scaling really fast and maintenance is tough,” he said. “The wind turbine downtime costs more than the labour itself and that bottleneck is driving up the cost of renewable energy.”
“We don't wait until the blade is already on the ground but work out how to prevent that blade from falling to the ground,” he said.
The equity funding round was led by U.S. investors Activate Capital and S2G Investments. Aerones is also backed by a 4 million euro grant from the EU Innovation Fund and an additional 30 million euro funding round in 2023.
Aerones is scaling rapidly in United States so it was important to bring on U.S. partners this time, Kruze said. The firm last year opened an office in Dallas, Texas and is hiring and training local people.
The company plans to return to the market to raise around $15 million to $20 million of venture debt later this year, Kruze said.
Since 2020, Aerones has enabled nearly 400,000 MWh of additional clean electricity and helped avoid 165,000 tonnes of carbon emissions, the company said in a statement.
(Reporting by Virginia Furness; editing by David Evans)
