Here’s an uncomfortable truth about wind O&M: almost everyone in the chain is paid to do the wrong thing.
Last week I wrote that some wind projects have become structurally uninsurable, and that the root cause is misaligned incentives and siloed data. A few of you reached out asking the obvious next question: fine, so what does “aligning the value chain” actually mean in practice? Here’s how I think about it.
Picture the parties involved in keeping a turbine healthy and generating: the owner-operator, the inspection and data providers, the repair vendors, and the insurer. Today each of them optimizes for their own slice. The inspection company is paid to find defects, not to see them fixed. The repair vendor is paid per job, so volume — not durability — is what fills the order book. The insurer prices off whatever data it can get, which has historically meant inspection findings with no visibility into whether the recommended repair was ever actually done. And the owner sits in the middle, absorbing the AEP loss and the budget overruns when these handoffs fail.
None of these parties is acting in bad faith. They’re each behaving rationally inside the box they’ve been put in. The problem is that the boxes don’t connect, so the rational local decision is often the wrong decision for the asset. An inspection report that doesn’t drive a timely repair is just a PDF. A repair that is not fed back into the risk picture is invisible to the people pricing the risk. Data used for pricing but not for action does not bend the loss curve — and we have now had years of evidence that it does not.
The fix isn’t more drone flights or another dashboard. It’s changing what each party is rewarded for.
Imagine the same chain, but with two things added: the data is integrated end to end — inspection findings, the work actually performed, and the resulting condition all live in one record — and the financial upside from a healthier fleet is shared across everyone who contributed to it. Now the incentives flip. The inspection provider benefits when its findings lead to fixes that measurably reduce loss, not just when it logs another defect. The repair vendor is rewarded for work that holds up over time, because durability now shows up in the shared data and the shared economics. The insurer can price off maintenance reality rather than guesswork and can reward the operators who maintain well instead of forcing them to subsidize the ones who don’t. And the owner finally has a system where doing the right thing — maintaining properly and on time — is the thing that pays.
That last point is the heart of it. For most of the past 15 years the “right” maintenance behaviour has been the financially punished one: you spend the money up front and hope the longevity benefit shows up years later, on someone else’s spreadsheet. When the upside is shared across the value chain, timely and proper maintenance stops being a cost centre and becomes the mechanism everyone profits from. The interests that have been pulling against each other for a decade start pulling the same direction.
This is the difference between integration as a technology story and integration as an incentive story. Connecting the data is necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Plenty of data has been connected over the years without changing behaviour, because the rewards still flowed the old way. You have to do both: integrate the information and integrate the economics. When you do, preventive maintenance stops being something the industry endorses in principle and quietly underfunds in practice and becomes the default — because for the first time it’s what everyone in the chain is paid to want.
Danny Ellis and I are soft launching what we’ve built around exactly this idea at a private dinner adjacent to Cleanpower 2026 in Houston next Tuesday, June 2nd. A few seats remain for owners and operators who want to see it first. DM me or Danny.
#WindEnergy #AssetManagement #CLEANPOWER2026
