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Wednesday, 30 September 2026dailybeirut.com
Tech & Science
Cyberhawk, an Ondas subsidiary, won a three-year contract with SSE to expand drone inspections into offshore wind turbines and renew its iHawk platform agreement.
Cyberhawk has secured a new multi-year agreement with SSE’s regulated electricity network businesses, SSEN Transmission and Distribution. The deal extends the company’s role from onshore power lines to offshore renewable energy assets, marking a significant expansion of its inspection services.
The agreement runs for three years, with an option to extend it by another two years. Under these terms, Cyberhawk will provide specialist drone inspection and surveying services across SSE’s electricity networks in mainland Britain. This move integrates drone-based technology into a broader segment of SSE’s energy operations.
A key component of the new deal is the awarding of Lot 2 for offshore wind turbine inspection. This brings Cyberhawk’s services to SSE’s offshore renewable energy assets. As offshore wind farms become increasingly important in the energy mix, operators face challenges in inspecting large numbers of turbines in difficult environments.
Beyond physical inspections, Cyberhawk recently renewed a separate multi-year agreement with SSE for iHawk as a Service. This digital infrastructure intelligence platform turns inspection data into a centralized digital record. It combines imagery, geospatial information, and AI-assisted analytics to organize information around individual assets.
The system aims to help utility operators move beyond simply spotting problems. By identifying potential risks and managing follow-up work, it provides teams with a clearer picture of infrastructure condition. For companies managing thousands of miles of networks, this distinction is critical. Collecting millions of images offers limited value if engineers must manually sift through data to determine priorities.
Cyberhawk CEO Chris Fleming stated the company was “extremely pleased” to continue its relationship with SSE. He noted that this represents the third major long-term agreement between the two entities, following two previous five-year deals. The partnership has existed for more than a decade, focusing on using drones to inspect critical infrastructure while reducing the need for personnel to conduct potentially dangerous field inspections.
SSE plans to invest £33 billion ($43.75 billion) in energy infrastructure by 2030. This substantial investment creates a significant amount of infrastructure requiring inspection, maintenance, and monitoring. The evolving role of drones reflects a shift from niche alternatives to detailed visual data capture across huge areas, supported by software and AI.
For Cyberhawk and other drone companies, this trend suggests a growing market for repeatable, data-driven inspections rather than one-off flights. Commercial drone technology is moving away from simply putting a camera in the sky toward building entire inspection and asset-management workflows around collected data. With power networks, offshore wind turbines, and the iHawk platform now covered by long-term agreements, Cyberhawk positions itself as part of the digital infrastructure-management system behind some of Europe’s largest energy networks.
