Wind turbine operators are losing money they do not need to lose. Reactive maintenance, triggered by failures rather than predicted by data, remains the dominant cost model in a sector that has spent 15 years accumulating the sensor data to do better. A new pilot partnership between Aviva and ONYX Insight is betting that the gap between what the data shows and what the industry acts on can be closed.
Aviva’s Global Risk Management Solutions and ONYX Insight, the Macquarie Capital-backed predictive analytics provider, announced the collaboration on 15 July 2026. The arrangement gives Aviva policyholders access to ONYX Insight’s condition monitoring systems, which apply machine-learning models to one of the wind industry’s largest failure datasets — 15 years of historic records across more than 32,000 turbines in 45 countries — to flag emerging issues up to two years before a potential loss event.
The commercial logic runs in both directions. For asset owners, early warning translates into planned maintenance instead of emergency callouts, which typically cost multiples of scheduled work. For Aviva as insurer, the same data strengthens underwriting by reducing the information asymmetry that makes wind portfolios difficult to price. The sector is under additional pressure from ageing fleets and an uptick in serial component defects; Aviva and ONYX Insight are positioning this partnership as a response to both.
ONYX Insight was acquired by Macquarie Capital in 2024 and counts eight of the world’s top ten wind owner-operators among its clients. Its product suite covers drivetrain condition monitoring, blade and tower sensing, SCADA analytics, and remaining useful life modelling. For the Aviva pilot, the focus is on incentivising adoption of that stack among existing policyholders rather than developing new technology.
Chris Andrews, Director of Aviva Global Risk Management Solutions, pointed to serial defects and older fleets as the immediate pressure driving the move: wider adoption of real-time monitoring is, on his reading, a precondition for sustainable growth in the segment.
Alexis Grenon, CEO of ONYX Insight, said the partnership extends his company’s work beyond data collection into the risk-management layer that determines how that data changes operator behaviour — and, ultimately, whether policies in this sector can remain affordable as the transition fleet ages.
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