*

Aerones' robots halve wind turbine maintenance time,

reducing

downtime costs

*

Funding led by US investors Activate Capital and S2G

Investments

*

Aerones plans further $15-$20 million debt raise

By Virginia Furness

LONDON, June 3 (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.