Latest / The Manufacturing Podcast with Fexingo: Factories, Supply Chains, and Industrial Business / How a Dutch Factory Uses Underwater Drones to Inspect Offshore Wind Turbines
Transcript
- Lucas: So there is a factory in the Netherlands that, until about seven years ago, built massive harbor cranes — you know, the kind you see lifting shipping containers at Rotterdam. And they have completely reinvented themselves as a manufacturer of underwater drones for inspecting offshore wind turbines. Luna: Wait — from cranes to underwater drones? That is a pretty dramatic pivot. What triggered it? Lucas: Well, the crane business was cyclical and getting squeezed on margins by Chinese competitors. Meanwhile, offshore wind in the North Sea was exploding. The company — it is called SeaTec Robotics, private, about 400 employees — realized that their core competencies in heavy lifting, precision hydraulics, and marine-grade welding transferred directly to building remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, that can operate at depths of fifty meters. Luna: Interesting. So they leaned into their existing engineering DNA rather than starting from scratch. Lucas: Exactly. And the market need was clear. A typical offshore wind turbine needs its foundations, its transition pieces, and its blades inspected every year. Traditionally, you send a crewed boat with divers and a sonar rig. That costs around fifty thousand dollars per turbine per inspection, and you can only do it in a narrow weather window. SeaTec's drone does the same job for about two thousand dollars, can operate in rougher seas, and it collects data continuously. Luna: Two thousand versus fifty thousand — that is a twenty-five-to-one cost difference. How does the drone actually work? Lucas: It is about the size of a carry-on suitcase, made of carbon fiber composite to keep it light but durable. It has four thrusters, a high-def camera, a sonar array, and a robotic arm that can scrape off marine growth if needed. It swims along a pre-programmed path around the turbine structure, taking thousands of images and sonar scans. Then it surfaces, the crew downloads the data, and AI software stitches it into a 3D model that highlights corrosion, cracks, or biofouling. Luna: And the AI does the defect detection automatically? Lucas: Partially. It flags anomalies for a human inspector to review. But the company says the false positive rate is under five percent now. They trained the model on about a hundred thousand labeled images from past inspections — including some from their own crane days, oddly enough, because they had decades of corrosion data from harbor structures. Luna: That is a smart reuse of data. So what is the business result for SeaTec? Are they profitable? Lucas: They do not disclose exact numbers, but they told a Dutch business journal that their drone division reached operating profitability in 2024, and revenue grew about sixty percent year-over-year in 2025. They now have a five-year contract with Vattenfall — that is one of the largest offshore wind operators — covering over two hundred turbines. Luna: So they replaced a labor-intensive, weather-dependent service with a scalable, data-rich one. That is the classic industrial automation story. Lucas: It is, but with a twist. Unlike a lot of factory automation that displaces low-skilled workers, SeaTec actually hired more people. They went from about 250 employees in the crane business to 400 now. The new jobs are in software, sensor integration, and remote piloting. So the skill mix changed, but the headcount grew. Luna: And I imagine the work is safer. No divers in cold, choppy North Sea waters. Lucas: Exactly. The company recorded zero lost-time incidents in the drone division since launch. Compare that to the diving inspection industry, which has a fatality rate that is something like ten times higher than construction. Luna: That is a powerful selling point for the utilities too — safety record matters when you are a regulated company. Lucas: It absolutely does. And it ties into a bigger trend we are seeing in manufacturing more broadly: legacy industrial companies retooling for the renewable energy supply chain. We have covered factories making solar panels and wind turbine blades, but the support infrastructure — inspection, maintenance, repair — that is a huge market too. Luna: And that market is about to get a lot bigger. Global offshore wind capacity is projected to triple by 2030, according to the Global Wind Energy Council. That means thousands more turbines needing annual inspections. Lucas: Right. And SeaTec is not alone. There is a Norwegian company, Eelume, that makes snake-like drones for subsea inspection. And a Scottish startup, Orobotix, that uses autonomous surface vessels to launch smaller inspection drones. But SeaTec is interesting because it is a factory that literally changed what it makes — not just optimized an existing product line. Luna: That kind of pivot is hard. You have to retrain your workforce, reconfigure your production lines, and convince customers that you can deliver a completely different product. How did they manage that transition? Lucas: They did it gradually. For the first two years, they ran the drone line as a skunkworks project within the crane factory — just a small team in one corner of the shop floor. They used the same CNC machines and welding robots but programmed them for carbon fiber molds instead of steel beams. The CEO told me that the hardest part was not the technology; it was the sales process. Crane buyers are port authorities and shipping lines. Drone buyers are offshore wind farm operators and utilities. They had to build a completely new customer network. Luna: And that takes time and money. Did they raise outside capital or fund it internally? Lucas: Internally. They had a strong balance sheet from decades of crane profits, and they reinvested about fifteen percent of annual revenue into the drone project for three years. That is a big bet, but it paid off. By 2023, drone revenue covered its own R&D costs. Luna: And speaking of bets — you know, this podcast is ad-free and listener-supported. If today's episode moved your thinking in some small way, that is the link: buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It helps us keep bringing these stories. Lucas: Yeah, honestly, if it was worth a coffee to you, that is all we ask. And it keeps the show independent and free for everyone. Luna: Absolutely. So back to SeaTec — one thing I find fascinating is the data side. Once you have a 3D model of every turbine, with year-over-year comparisons, you can start predicting failures before they happen. Lucas: That is exactly where they are heading. They are building a predictive maintenance platform that analyzes trends in corrosion rates and bolt fatigue. One early result: they identified a batch of turbines where the coating on the transition piece was degrading twice as fast as expected. The operator replaced the coating during a scheduled outage rather than waiting for a failure, saving an estimated three million dollars in emergency repair costs. Luna: So the drone is not just a cheaper inspection tool — it is a data generator that enables better asset management. Lucas: Exactly. And that is the kind of value that justifies a long-term contract. SeaTec now offers inspection as a service: the utility pays a fixed annual fee per turbine, and SeaTec provides the drone, the pilot, the data processing, and the predictive analytics. It is a recurring revenue model, which is way more stable than selling cranes one at a time. Luna: And it de-risks the utility's maintenance budget. They know exactly what inspection costs will be for the next five years. Lucas: Right. And that is a powerful lesson for any manufacturer thinking about a pivot. It is not just about what you make; it is about how you sell it. SeaTec changed its business model from project-based to subscription-based, and that changed everything. Luna: So what is next for them? Are they expanding into other types of underwater infrastructure? Lucas: They are. They just announced a pilot with a Norwegian aquaculture company to inspect salmon farm nets for tears. And they are exploring oil and gas decommissioning — inspecting old platforms before removal. But the core focus remains offshore wind, because that is where the fastest growth is. Luna: It is a great example of a factory that used its industrial know-how to ride a macro trend. And it is a reminder that the manufacturing sector is not dying — it is evolving. Lucas: It is. And the companies that survive are the ones that can look at their capabilities and ask, 'What else could we build with these?' Luna: Well, for SeaTec, the answer was a twenty-fivefold cost reduction for offshore wind inspection. Lucas: And a factory that went from building cranes to flying robots under the North Sea.