Podcasts about oems

Airframers' 2025 delivery totals are in. Aviation Week's team grades Airbus, Boeing and the smaller OEMs on their production performance last year.

Rod Bull is CEO of Komatsu North America… He leads a team of thousands building and supporting machines that move dirt, mine resources, and keep our world moving. Starting as an analyst, he worked his way through other OEMs, eventually landing at Komatsu with their acquisition of Joy Global in 2017. He officially took over as CEO of Komatsu North America in 2025. Learn more about Komatsu at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/komatsu/posts/?feedView=all Learn more about Komatsu North America at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/komatsunorthamerica/posts/?feedView=all Follow Rod Bull on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rod-bull-6136904b/ Learn more about attending the 2026 Ariat Dirt World Summit by visiting www.dirtworld.com!Questions or feedback? Email us at dirttalk@buildwitt.com! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What if EVs were an asset to the power grid instead of a challenge? From off-peak incentives to powering data centers with parked cars, the future of intelligent EV charging is closer than many of us think.   ChargeScape is paving the way with a unified software platform that gives utilities a single, direct connection to tap into EV load flexibility from some of the world's largest automakers. Created as a joint venture between BMW, Ford, Honda, and Nissan, the company builds on more than a decade of innovation and delivers powerful value to not only to utilities, but to OEMs and drivers alike.   Listen in as we sit down with Joseph Vellone, CEO, to discuss how ChargeScape is helping utilities, automakers, and EV drivers tap into real-time vehicle data, optimize home charging, and even turn EV batteries into revenue-generating grid assets.   We'd love to hear from you. Share your comments, questions and ideas for future topics and guests to podcast@sae.org. Don't forget to take a moment to follow SAE Tomorrow Today — a podcast where we discuss emerging technology and trends in mobility with the leaders, innovators and strategists making it all happen—and give us a review on your preferred podcasting platform.   Follow SAE on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Follow host Grayson Brulte on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

*** We'll be taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period and will be back in action mid-January.That means that although there won't be any new episodes for a few weeks, we'll be taking another look back at some of our favourite episodes.  ***Are you sick of playing the guessing game when it comes to setting up the suspension and tyre systems in your race or road car? If you've ever felt like you're throwing alignment adjustments, damper settings, and spring rate changes at the pit wall just to see what sticks when making changes to your or your customer's vehicle, then this episode with Bruno Finco of Optimum G is going to be a perfect listen.

Recorded live from AIM Expo, Sam and Tony sit down with Lindsey Scheltema, Director of the United States Motorcycle Coaching Association (USMCA), to talk about raising the standard of motorcycle coaching nationwide.Lindsey shares how certified coaching helps create safer riders, stronger dealer relationships, and lifelong customers—and how the MotorcycleCoaching.org app connects riders with trusted coaches across the country. A must-listen for dealers, OEMs, and anyone focused on growing the next generation of riders.

Don Burnette, Founder & CEO, Kodiak joined Grayson Brulte on The Road to Autonomy podcast to discuss taking Kodiak public and why the company's strategy has always been about de-risking autonomy with optionality. As part of their de-risking strategy, Kodiak has deployed an asset-light business model where partners including Atlas Energy Solutions own and operate the trucks, allowing Kodiak to focus on the AI software.During the episode, Grayson and Don discuss the strategic importance of Kodiak's partnership with Bosch to develop a redundant, OEM-agnostic platform that unlocks scale across multiple OEMs. With their partnerships and business model intact, Kodiak is preparing to launch driver-out commercial over-the-road operations in the second half of the year, setting the stage for a broader expansion into physical AI.Episode Chapters0:00 Taking Kodiak Public3:36 Asset-Light Autonomous Trucking Business 12:10 Unstructured Driving 14:31 Kodiak's Platform Agnostic Strategy 21:45 Bosch Partnership 27:47 Preparing for Driver-Out Over-The-Road Operations 34:10 Over-The-Road Business Model25:38 Future of KodiakRecorded on Monday, January 12, 2026--------About The Road to AutonomyThe Road to Autonomy provides market intelligence and strategic advisory services to institutional investors and companies, delivering insights needed to stay ahead of emerging trends in the autonomy economy™. To learn more, say hello (at) roadtoautonomy.com.Sign up for This Week in The Autonomy Economy newsletter: https://www.roadtoautonomy.com/ae/See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kicking off 2026, Tu and Lei return from CES in Las Vegas with firsthand insights into how the global auto industry's center of gravity continues to shift toward China, AI, autonomy, and robotics.  This episode unpacks why CES is no longer about cars, but about who controls the software, silicon, sensors, and robots that will define the next decade of mobility. From Geely and Great Wall's growing U.S. ambitions, to Hyundai's robot-only keynote, to Ford's quiet but meaningful autonomy reset, the hosts connect dots that most headlines missed.Tu and Lei also break down the Geely “coming to the U.S.” scoop, Rivian-style AI days spreading to legacy OEMs, and why Western automakers are increasingly borrowing from China's playbook—from ADAS and silicon strategy to embodied AI and robotics.The episode closes with a deep dive into autonomy's three tracks (L2++, consumer L3/L4, and robotaxis), the growing importance of LiDAR scale, and why Donut Labs' solid-state battery and in-wheel motor reveal could become a true industry disruptor—if it scales.Fast, candid, and packed with on-the-ground context, this episode explains why CES 2026 marked a turning point—and why the race is no longer just EVs vs ICE, but ecosystems vs incumbents.___

Scott Jennings of Anaplan talks about retail inventory optimization, planning challenges, AI & how Anaplan enables retailers to sell more and carry less.   [03.37] An introduction to Scott, his background, and experience in the industry. "Siloes are present functionally across different pieces of the business, whether it's merchandise, supply chain or finance. But they're also persistent inside the systems that support those different groups – and that's where it gets tricky." [05.53] An overview of Anaplan and what they do. [06.53] How retail planning has historically worked, and the limitations of that approach. "Retail suffers from siloed planning, disconnected processes and latent decision-making, which leads to buying the wrong inventory and having the wrong inventory at the wrong place at the wrong time, with little ability to adjust based on market feedback." [09.58] Why retail planning is arguably more complex than CPG or consumer goods supply chain planning. "Retail is detail." [12.55] How challenges and limitations have impacted the industry, particularly in light of additional external factors like increasing customer demand. "Getting ahead is important. But being able to react in an agile way, in season, is also extremely important. Retailers have fallen behind because that demand signal is all over the place." [16.14] From data to specificity, the foundations needed for retailers considering AI solutions, and the problem of 'testing fatigue.' "People are sick of testing and learning." [22.25] How retail planning technology will continue to evolve over the next 12 to 24 months. [24.28] Scott's advice for retailers looking to implement AI in their planning and ensure successful implementations. "It starts with the ROI you're looking to drive… If you can't define the ROI: skip it." [28.39] The biggest opportunities for retailers embracing evolving technology and a new approach to retail planning. [30.08] How Anaplan Intelligence and its retail engine enables retailers to harness the power of AI to plan at a granular level not possible before, and the importance of hyper-localization. [33.01] How Anaplan focuses on retail-specific best practices to achieve higher forecast accuracy and boost sell-through rates for their customers, ultimately helping them sell more and carry less. [34.37] What Anaplan is focusing on for 2026.   RESOURCES AND LINKS MENTIONED:   Head over to Anaplan's website now to find out more and discover how they could help you too. You can also connect with Anaplan and keep up to date with the latest over on LinkedIn or YouTube, or you can connect with Scott on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more from Anaplan, listen to Emily Nicholls talk about how integrated business planning helps automotive OEMs navigate EV growth on episode 499: Navigating the EV Revolution, with Anaplan. Check out our other podcasts HERE.

Why does fixing your car seem so expensive, and is repair truly a better value than buying new? In this episode, John Rush pulls back the curtain on the true cost of auto repair, drawing on decades of industry experience. Listeners will discover how understanding what's behind each repair bill can help them make smarter choices about maintaining or replacing their vehicle. From oil changes that aren't “cheap” anymore to labor rates that include more than just wrench time, John explains what actually goes into every repair bill. What are non-billable hours, and why do they matter? Why can't a reputable shop quote you a price over the phone? And how do insurance requirements, training, certifications, and a growing technician shortage drive prices higher—often out of customers' sight? John also tackles parts quality, warranties, and why OEMs are really assemblers relying on vast supply chains. With new cars averaging around $55,000, John walks through the math of cost per mile and explains why many drivers are choosing to invest in the vehicles they already own. Is chasing the cheapest repair really a deal—or a risk? This episode challenges assumptions, explains the economics behind the shop door, and helps drivers make smarter, more confident decisions about repairs versus replacement.

As the industry moves past the A2L transition, the conversation is shifting from compliance to innovation. In this webinar, we'll highlight our latest advancements—including our dual refrigerant technology—designed to give contractors, distributors, and OEMs more flexibility and efficiency. Learn how to leverage these solutions to stay competitive in a changing repair vs. replace market and prepare for what's next. Sponsored by ADP

Serial owner of 17 Fox Body Mustangs (plus several Panther Police Interceptors) breaks down some highlights of this growing modern classic as it nears age 50. Ford holds on as Mustang fever goes through fat years and lean years. Honda, Toyota, GM, Mopar, Porsche, VW, Mercedes, Nissan and even Tesla learn lessons from an OG carmaker. Visit fastcarsandfreedom2 for Joe's videos celebrating muscle cars and pony cars. Send us your hate mail or love notes to CarsThePodcast@gmail.com

Send us a textTwo truths can exist at once: golf is thriving, and some of its boldest experiments still can't find the right stage. We start the year by proving why the local game matters most—new energy in the Vegas Golf Network, a private Facebook group where real debates live, and our fresh “Joker Low Net” format that rewards players who go low! We also welcomed Relic Body Arts as a sponsor and spun up live giveaways because community isn't a slogan for us; it's the point.Gear lovers get plenty to chew on. Callaway refreshed the Chrome Soft family and teased the Quantum driver, with materials and cover tech designed to add speed without sacrificing feel. We talk about where gains might come from, how fitters will test the claims, and why early-access fittings at private clubs can be a cheat code for smarter buying. Then we press into the TGL problem: elite players, clever tech, but buried time slots and an audience left guessing. Our fix is simple—put it on Golf Channel in prime hours, replay it smartly, and partner with OEMs to explain equipment choices in real time so the product tells a story the average golfer can follow.The heart of the show is a fog-drenched round at Paiute that reminded us why we play. With visibility down, we moved up a tee box, hit more short irons, tightened dispersion, and tied a personal best. It wasn't about ego; it was about making the course fit the day and the body. That theme rolls straight into putting: a quick posture reset led to a shorter putter and a better stroke. If you can't reach a studio, grab a roll-out mat, a mirror, and a yardstick to lock in start line and face control. For newer golfers, we lay out a sane gear path—shop quality used sets or get a fit, and if you're slicing, buy one lesson and actually do the work.We finish by spotlighting the LPGA at Shadow Creek, a full-field event at a bucket-list course that most fans will never step on. That's how you build intrigue the right way. The West Coast swing is loading—Sony, AmEx, Farmers, Phoenix, Pebble, Genesis—and we'll be ready with takes, gear notes, and more community wins.If this mix of real-world golf, gear honesty, and smarter practice vibes with you, tap follow, share the show with a golf buddy, and drop a review. Your support helps us grow the community and bring you more fittings, giveaways, and deep-dive episodes all season long.Support the showSpecial thank goes out to our show sponsors:

The automotive industry is undergoing a major shift — not just toward AI-powered, software-defined vehicles, but also toward a new culture that challenges traditional ways of working. Listen in as we sit down with Amol Gulve, Software-Defined Vehicle and AI Expert, for a candid discussion on why the pace of innovation is both exhilarating and challenging for legacy automakers. Amol breaks down the traditional seven-year vehicle development cycle and why it's incompatible with an AI-driven world, challenging OEMs to rethink everything from architecture and procurement to culture and org structure.   From the future of AI in vehicles to the cultural shifts inside OEMs, you'll get an inside look at the questions defining the next decade of mobility — and why trust, transparency, and smarter standards will shape the road ahead.   We'd love to hear from you. Share your comments, questions and ideas for future topics and guests to podcast@sae.org. Don't forget to take a moment to follow SAE Tomorrow Today — a podcast where we discuss emerging technology and trends in mobility with the leaders, innovators and strategists making it all happen—and give us a review on your preferred podcasting platform.   Follow SAE on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Follow host Grayson Brulte on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

The transition from being a rockstar in your vertical to leading at the C-suite level is one of the hardest jumps in modern business.  Not because you aren't capable, but because the job changes faster than anyone prepares you for, and the timeline to become effective has collapsed from years to months. You used to have a multi-year runway to listen, learn, and settle in. Now the proving ground has accelerated, and you're expected to think enterprise-wide, set direction, shape culture, and operate with conviction almost immediately. And that's where so many leaders get blindsided. They step into the role with deep expertise, strong track records, and every intention of succeeding. But they quickly discover that the behaviors that powered their rise don't automatically translate to the top job.  The stakes are higher, the scrutiny is sharper, and the margin for a slow learning curve is gone. Boards, investors, and teams are already forming judgments before you've even taken your seat. And without realizing it, new executives find themselves operating on outdated instincts in a completely different environment. Bill Koch is a former CEO who now coaches leaders navigating some of the most high-pressure environments. He helps new CEOs compress the transition, build real executive presence, and operate with clarity and confidence. In this episode, we talk about how to accelerate that transition, how to understand how you're actually being perceived, and how to adapt fast enough to avoid losing ground in your first critical months.   You'll also learn: Why the jump from functional mastery to C-suite leadership is so challenging How the timeline for becoming effective has collapsed, and what that means for new executives. The behaviors that helped you rise and why they can quietly derail you in a senior role. How to understand the difference between vertical thinking and enterprise thinking. Why a 360 assessment is often the first real mirror a new executive has ever seen. How boards and teams perceive you long before you think they do Why private equity environments expose leadership weaknesses faster than any other setting. How to cultivate executive presence that signals quiet confidence, not overcompensation. The importance of building a “personal boardroom” to think clearly under pressure.   About the Guest Bill Koch is an executive coach with more than 25 years of C-suite and senior leadership experience across public companies, private enterprises, and private equity–backed firms. A former CEO himself, Bill brings a rare blend of operational depth, boardroom insight, and executive maturity to his coaching practice. His work centers on one mission: helping high performers become highly effective enterprise leaders. For more than a decade, Bill has served as a trusted advisor to CEOs and senior executives navigating high-pressure, high-visibility roles. He coaches leaders across Fortune 500 companies, growth-stage organizations, and academic institutions—guiding them through pivotal transitions, accelerated timelines, and complex leadership challenges. His clients turn to him to gain clarity, sharpen judgment, and build the confident executive presence required to lead at the top. Bill's clients include American Express, Apple, Boeing, Goldman Sachs, John Deere, Mars, MGM, McKesson, Toyota, and others. To learn more, visit https://www.kochleadership.com/ or read Bill's latest insights on Forbes.    About Your Host Craig Picken is an Executive Recruiter, writer, speaker, and ICF Trained Executive Coach. He is focused on recruiting senior-level leadership, sales, and operations executives in the aviation and aerospace industry. His clients include premier OEMs, aircraft operators, leasing/financial organizations, and Maintenance/Repair/Overhaul (MRO) providers, and since 2008, he has personally concluded more than 400 executive-level searches in a variety of disciplines. Craig is the ONLY industry executive recruiter who has professionally flown airplanes, sold airplanes, and successfully run a P&L in the aviation industry. His professional career started with a passion for airplanes. After eight years' experience as a decorated Naval Flight Officer – with more than 100 combat missions, 2,000 hours of flight time, and 325 aircraft carrier landings – Craig sought challenges in business aviation, where he spent more than 7 years in sales with both Gulfstream Aircraft and Bombardier Business Aircraft. Craig is also a sought-after industry speaker who has presented at Corporate Jet Investor, International Aviation Women's Association, and SOCAL Aviation Association.    Subscribe, Rate & Review Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm, so our show reaches more people. Thank you! 

Allen and Joel are joined by Nathan Davies from Lloyd Warwick to discuss the world of wind energy insurance. Topics include market cycles, the risks of insuring larger turbines, how critical spares can reduce downtime and costs, why lightning claims often end up with insurers rather than OEMs, and how AI may transform claims data analysis. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Nathan, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. So you are, you’re our link to the insurance world, Nathan, and there’s been so many changes over the past 12, 24 months, uh, not just in the United States but worldwide. Before we get too deep into any one subject, can you just give us a top level like, Hey, this is what’s happening in the insurance world that we need to know. So there’s  Nathan Davies: obviously a lot of scope, a lot of development, um, in the wind world. Um, you know, there’s the race to scale. Um, and from an insurance perspective, I think everybody’s pretty tentative about where that’s going. Um. You know, the, the theory that are we trying to [00:01:00] run before we can walk? Um, what’s gonna happen when these things inevitably go wrong? Uh, and what are the costs gonna be that are associated with that? ’cause, you know, at the moment we are used to, to claims on turbines that are circa five megawatts. But when we start seeing 15 megawatt turbines falling over. Yeah, it’s, it’s not gonna be a good day at the office. So, um, in the insurance world, that’s the big concern. Certainly from a win perspective at least.  Joel Saxum: Well, I think it’s, it’s a valid, uh, I don’t know, valid bad, dream. Valid, valid risk to be worried about. Well, just simply because of like the, the way, uh, so I’ve been following or been a part of the, that side of the industry for a little while here the last five, six years. Um. You’ve seen The insurance world is young in renewables, to be honest with you. Right. Compared to a lot of other places that like say the Lord Lloyd’s market, they’ve been writing insurance for hundreds of years on certain [00:02:00] things that have, like, we kind of know, we know what the risks are. We, and if it develops something new, it’s not crazily new, but renewables and in wind in specific haven’t been around that long. And the early stuff was like, like you said, right? If a one megawatt turbine goes down, like. That sucks. Yeah. For everybody, right? But it’s not the end of the world. We can, we can make this thing happen. You’re talking, you know, you may have a, you know, your million, million and a half dollars here, $2 million here for a complete failure. And then the business interruption costs as a, you know, with a one megawatt producing machine isn’t, again, it’s not awesome, but it’s not like it, uh, it doesn’t break the books. Right. But then when we’re talking 3, 4, 5, 6. Seven megawatts. We just saw Siemens cesa sell the first of their seven megawatt onshore platforms the other day. Um, that is kind of changing the game and heightening the risk and makes things a little bit more worrisome, especially in light of, I mean, as we scaled just the last five, [00:03:00] 10 years, the amount of. Failures that have been happening. So if you look at that and you start expanding it, that, that, that hockey stick starts to grow. Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, of course. And you know, we, we all know that these things sort of happen in cycles, right? It’s, you go, I mean, in, in the insurance world, we go through soft markets. We go through hard markets, um, you know, deductibles come up, the, the clauses, the restrictions, all those things get tighter. Claims reduce. Um, and then you get sort of disruptors come into the market and they start bringing in, you know, challenging rates and they start challenging the big players on deductibles and preferential rates and stuff like that. And, and then you get a softening of the market, um, and then you start seeing the claims around up again. But when you twin that with the rate of development that we see in the renewables worlds, it’s, it’s fraught for all sorts of. Weird and wonderful things happening, and most of them are quite expensive.  Joel Saxum: Where in that cycle are we, in [00:04:00] your opinion right now? So we, like when I first came into the market and I started dealing with insurance, it was very, we kept hearing hardening, market hardening, market hardening market. But not too long ago, I heard from someone else that was like, Hey, the market’s actually getting kind of soft right now. What are your thoughts on that? And, and or may, and maybe we let, let’s precursor that there’s a lot of people that are listening right now that don’t know the difference. What is a hard market? What is a soft market? Can you give us that first?  Nathan Davies: When you’re going through a soft market, it’s, it’s a period where they’ve either been, um, a limited volume of claims or the claim values have been quite small. Um, so, you know, everybody gets. It’s almost like becoming complacent with it, right? It’s like, oh, you know, things are going pretty well. We’re having it. It looks like the operators, it looks like the maintainers are, are doing a pretty good job and they know all of the issues that are gonna be working through in the lifetime of these products. So for the next however many years, we can anticipate that things are gonna gonna go pretty well. But as you see those [00:05:00] deductibles come down, you start getting more of the attritional claims, like the smaller values, um, the smaller downtime periods, all that sort of thing, start coming in as claims. And all of a sudden insurers are like, well, hang on a second. All of a sudden we’ve got loads and loads of claims coming in. Um. All of the premium that we were taking as being bled dry by, by these, these attritional claim. Um, and then you get like a big claim coming. You get a major issue come through, whether it’s, you know, a, a serial issue with a gearbox or a generator or a specific blade manufacturer, and all of a sudden the market starts to change. Um, and insurers are like, well, hang on a second. We’ve got a major problem on our hands here. We’re starting to see more of this, this specific piece of technology being rolled out, um, worldwide. Um, we are in for a lot of potential claims on this specific matter in the future, and therefore we need to protect ourselves. And the way that insurers do that is by [00:06:00] increasing or deductibles, um, increasing their premiums, all that sort of thing. So it’s basically that. Uh, raises the threshold at which a claim can be presented and therefore minimizes the, the outlay for insurers. So that’s sort of this, this cycle that we see. Um, I mean, I can’t, I’ve, I’ve only been in loss adjusting for six years, so I can’t say that I’ve seen, you know, um, multiple cycles. I’ve, I’m probably at the end of my first cycle from a hardening to a softening market. Um. But also, again, I’m not in the underwriting side of things. I’m on the claims side of things, so I own, I’m only seeing it when it’s gone wrong. I don’t know about everything else that the insurance market sees.  Joel Saxum: Yeah, the, the softening part, I think as well from a macro perspective, when there’s a softening market, it tends to bring in more capital. Right. You start to see more, more and more companies coming in saying, Hey, I’ve got, [00:07:00] and when I say companies, I mean other capital holders to beat for insurance, right? Like these, the big ones you see, the big Swiss and German guys come in and going, like, I got, I got $500 million I’ll throw into renewables. It seems like to be a good, pretty good bet right now. And then the market starts to change and then they go, uh, oops. Yeah.  Nathan Davies: And that’s it. You know, you’ve got the, the StoreWatch of the renewable insurance market like your G cubes and, and companies like that who’ve been in the game for a very long time. They’ve got a lot of experience. They’ve been burned. Um, they know what they want to touch and what they don’t want to touch. And then you get. Renewables, everybody wants to be involved. It covers their ESG targets. It’s, it’s a good look to move away from, you know, your, your oil and your coal and all the rest of it. So, of course, companies are gonna come into it. Um, and if they’re not experienced.  Allen Hall: They will get banned. How much reliance do operators have at the moment on insurance? Because it does seem like, uh, Joel and I talk [00:08:00]to a lot of operators that insurance is part of their annual revenue. They depend upon getting paid a certain amount, which then opens up the door to how sort of nitpicky I’ll describe it as the claim. They’ll file. Are you seeing more and more of that as, uh, some of the operators are struggling for cash flow, that there are going after more kind of questionable claims? Um, I think it depends on  Nathan Davies: the size of the operator. So you’ve, you’ve obviously got your, your big players, you’ve got your alls and your rws and all of those sort of guys who, the way that they manage their insurance, they’ve probably got, you know, special purpose vehicles. They’ve got, um, sites or clusters of sites that they manage finances independently. They don’t just have the one big or pot. It’s, it’s, it’s managed sort of subdivisions. Um. Those, those guys, we don’t typically tend to see like a big push for a [00:09:00] payment on account partway through a claim. It’s, it’s typically sort of the smaller end of the scale where you might have, um, an operator that manages a handful of smaller, um, assets. The way that we look at it is if you don’t ask, you don’t get, so when we talk to an insured, it’s like. Present your costs, you know, we’ll review them and it’s, it’s better that you present all of your costs and insurers turn around and say, you’re not eligible for this. You know, that that element of it will be adjusted, um, rather than not present something. And it’s like, well, you know, your, your broker then comes further down the line when they say you could have claimed that element of, of the cost. So, um. Typically that’s the approach that we take is, is present everything and we’ll work through and let you know which elements aren’t claimable.  Joel Saxum: When we’re talking insurance policies, there can be, you know, like an operator, an owner of a turbine asset can have them. Then there is construction policies and [00:10:00] there’s the EPC company might have a policy and ISP may have a policy. So, so many policies because at the end of the day, everybody’s trying to protect themselves. Like, we’re trying to protect the bottom line. Tr that’s what insurance us for, that’s why we’re here. Um, but so, so, so, so gimme a couple things. Like in your opinion as, let’s look, well, I wanna stay in the operator camp right now, say, during a non non-commission policy, a actual operating policy, wind farm is in the ground, we’re moving along. What are some of the things that, from an, from a loss adjuster’s perspective, that a operator should be doing to protect themselves? I mean, besides. Signing an insurance contract. Yes. But is it, is it good record keeping? Is it having spares on site? Is it, what does that look like from your perspective when you walk into something,  Nathan Davies: if you were to take the insurer’s dream operator, that would be somebody who, and you, you’ve kind of hit the nail on the head with a lot of those points, Joel, the, the. The golden [00:11:00] operator would have like a stash of critical spares because the last thing they want to be relying on is, um, an OEM who, you know, they, they’ve, they’ve stopped manufacturing that bit of kit three years ago. They now want to sell you the latest and greatest. It’s 18 months lead time or something like that. Oh yeah, absolutely. And so you are now having to look at potentially refurbishment through. Whether that’s through sort of approved, um, processes or not. Um, you might be looking at, um, sort of, um, aftermarket providers. You know, there, there’s, as soon as you are looking at an aged asset, you are, you are in a really complicated position in terms of your repairability. Um, because, you know, a as we know, you get to sort of that three, five year period after you’ve purchased the product, you’re in real jeopardy of whether or not it’s gonna be. Gonna have that continued support from the original equipment manufacturer. So [00:12:00] critical spares is a really good thing to, it’s, it’s just obviously a really good thing to have. Um, and how you can manage that as well is if you have, um, a customer of sites that are all using the, the same equipment, you could sort of share that between you. There, there could be. Um, so we, we’ve sinned that where, um. An umbrella company has multiple sites, multiple SPVs. Um, they were all constructed at the same sort of time. They’ve got the same transformers, you know, the same switchgear, same infrastructure, and they hold a set of spares that cover these, all these sites. ’cause the last thing you want to do is buy a load of individual components for one site. You are then paying to maintain them, to store them to, you know, there’s, there’s a lot of costs that come with. Along with that, that you, you don’t wanna be covering. If that’s just for the one site and it’s the [00:13:00] eventualities, that may never happen. So if you’ve got multiple sites and you can spread those costs, all of a sudden it’s a lot more, um. Could  Joel Saxum: you see a reality where insurers did that? Right? Where like a, like a, like a consortium of insurance companies gets together and buys, uh, half a dozen sets of blades and generators and stuff that they know are failures that come up, or they have a pool to pull from themselves to, to avoid these massive bi claims. Nathan Davies: Yeah. I mean maybe there’s, maybe there’s the potential for a renewables pool. I mean, it’s always. Complicated. As soon as you start trying to bring sort of multiple companies together with an agreement of that sort of scale, it’s gonna be challenging. But, um, I mean, yeah, in an ideal world, that would be be a great place to be. Um, so critical spares is, that’s, that’s a key thing we, we have seen. So we, we’ve got, um, one account that we work with that they’ve actually got a warehouse full of critical spares. [00:14:00] So they, they have a lot of, um, older turbine models, um, sort of typically, um, 2015 through to, well, yeah, from about 2012 to 2015. Um, these sites were commissioned so they knew there was a, a finite lifetime, uh, replacement blades, generators, gear, boxes, what have you, and it’s like we’ve. A huge number of assets. So what we should do is retain certainly a number of gearboxes and generators that you, we can utilize across, um, the fleet. And obviously they then keep a rolling stock of refurbishment and repairs on those. But they, they basically included in their, their premium spreadsheet, they’ve got all of their individual sites. Then they’ve got a warehouse that is full of all their spares, and that is an inuring asset, is their warehouse full of critical spares. Joel Saxum: So what  Nathan Davies: happens to  Joel Saxum: that  Nathan Davies: person then? Does  Joel Saxum: their premiums go [00:15:00] down? Because they have those spares, they’ve got really low deductibles on their bi. So there’s a business case for it probably, right? Like if you’re sitting there, if you’re, if you’re, you’re an accountant, you can figure that out and say like, if we hold these spares for this fleet, like if you’re, if you’re a fleet, if you have a homogenous fleet, say you’ve got a thousand turbines that are basically all the same model. W you should have centrally located amongst those wind farms, a couple of blade sets, a couple of generators, couple of pitch bearings, couple of this, couple of that. And you can use them operationally if you need to, but it’s there as spares, uh, for insurance cases. ’cause you’ll be able to re reduce your insurance premiums or your insurance deductibles. Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. I don’t know a lot of operators in, at least in the United States that have done that, I’m thinking more of like Australia where it’s hard to get. Parts, uh, you, you probably do have a little bit of a warehouse situation. That’s really interesting because I, I know a lot of operators are thinking about trying to reduce their premiums and simple things like that would, I would imagine it make a huge difference [00:16:00] in what they’re paying each year and that that’s a smart move. I, I wanna ask about the IEC and the role of certification in premiums. What does it mean and how do you look at it as an industry? Uh, one of the things that’s happening right now is there’s a number of, I think some of the major IEC documents in, in our world, in the lightning world are going through revision. Does that, how do, how do you assess that risk that the IEC specs or the sort of the gold standard and you have the certification bodies that are using them to show that the turbines are fit for purpose. Is there a reliance upon them? Does, does it help reduce premiums if there’s an I-E-C-I-I, I’m not even sure how the industry, the insurance industry looks at it. Or is it more of how the turbines perform in the first year or two, is how, what’s gonna really gonna drive the premium numbers? I mean, insofar as  Nathan Davies: I eecs, it’s, that’s a really tough question. It’s, it’s [00:17:00]interesting that you ask that. ’cause um, I mean certainly from the lightning perspective, the, the IEC. We look at on that the blades need to withstand a lightning strike of a known value, but even within that, they, within the IEC, there’s an allowance of like 2%, I think, um, for blade strikes that can still cause damage even if they’re within the rate of capacity of the LPS. Um, so in the insurance world, this is a big gray area because each, um, operator has a, a turbine, uh, has a blade failure because of a lightning strike. They’ll then immediately go to the OEM and say, um, you know, we’ve had had a lightning strike, we’ve had a blade failure. Can you come and repair or replace the blade? Sure, no bother. Um, down the line, we have an insurance claim for this repair or replacement. And insurers are like, well, what’s the lightning data? And if that’s within the [00:18:00] LPS standard, it’s like, well, why have. Why is this not covered under warranty? And, you know, you, your OEMs will always turn around and say, force majeure. Um, it’s, it’s that 2%. So the IEC, even though that’s, you know, it’s, it’s best standards, it still has a degree of allowance that, um, the OEMs can slip through and be like, well this, this falls with insurance. And again, I can only speak for what I’ve seen, but that is. We see, I’d say, um, Lloyd Warwick, we probably see 50 plus notifications a year for blade damage from lightning and, um, almost every time if it’s within the capabilities of the LPX, the OEM or say towards majeure and Atlanta with insurers. Allen Hall: Well, is there a force majeure for gearboxes or generators or transformers? [00:19:00] Is, is there a 2% rule for transformers? I don’t, I don’t think so. Maybe there is, but it is, it, it is a little odd, right, that, that there’s so many things that are happening in the insurance world that rely upon the certification of the turbine and the sort of the expected rates of failure. I have not seen an operator go back and say, we have a 3% rate of, of damage of my transformers, so therefore I wanna file a claim. But that, that doesn’t seem to occur nearly as often as on the lightning side where it’s force majeure is used probably daily, worldwide. How do we think about that? How do we, how do we think about the transformer that fails versus the lightning damage? Are they just considered just two separate things and uncontrollable? Is that how the insurance industry looks at it? If we, if we would  Nathan Davies: talk about transformers. So the fact is that we see on those can vary from, you know, it’s, it’s a minor electrical component that that goes, um, [00:20:00] which is relatively easy to pin down. But then at the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a fire where it’s. You know, with all, all the will in the world, you could go in and investigate, but you’re not gonna find the cause of that fire. Um, you know, the damage is so great that you, you could probably say, well, the ignition point is there because that’s where the most damages occurred and it’s spread out. But, but how is that occurred? The know, and we, we do have that, that happens not frequently, but um. You know, as an engineer, I, I want to get to the bottom of what’s caused things, but, but all too often we come away from a claim where it’s like we don’t know exactly what’s caused it, but we can’t confirm that it’s excluded in the policy and therefore it, it must be covered and, you know, the claim is valid. Um, so in, in terms of causation and the standards and all the rest of it.  Joel Saxum: It goes to an extent. So this is a, this is another [00:21:00] one. So Alan was talking about lightning and blades. Then we talked about transformers a little bit. I wanna talk about gear boxes for just a second, because gearbox usually, um, in, in my, my experience in, in the wind world, claims wise, it’s pretty black and white. Was it, did it, did it fail? This is how it failed. Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Did was maintenance done at blah? So I heard the other day from someone who was talking about, uh, using CMS. On their, on their gener, on their, uh, gearbox, sorry. So it was an operator said, Hey, we should be, and, and a company coming to them saying, well, you should be monitoring CMS. This is all the good things it can do for you operationally. And the operator, the owner of the turbine said, I don’t want it, because if I know there’s something wrong, then I can’t claim it on insurance if it fails. Does that ring  Nathan Davies: true to you? Part of our process would be to look at the data. Um, so we know nine times out of 10 there is condition [00:22:00] monitoring, there is start out there, there, all this stuff. The operator, um, assistance tools, and if we can look at a gearbox vibration trend. Um, along with, you know, bearing temperature, uh, monitoring and all that sort of thing. And if you can see a trend where the vibrations are increasing, the temperatures are increasing, um, and there’s no operator maintain maintenance intervention, then, you know, if, if you, if you’ve received an alarm to say, Hey, there’s something wrong with me, you should probably come and have a look and you’ve done nothing about it, then. It’s,  Joel Saxum: it’s not great. Okay. So, so that, so that it rings, it kind of in a sense, rings true, right? That what that operator was saying, like the way their mind was working at that stage. ’cause this is, this is during, again, like, so we, Alan and I from the uptime network and just who we are, like we know a ton of people, we know [00:23:00] solutions that are being sold and, and this her about this. And I was like, man, that seems like really shortsighted, but there’s a reality to it that kind of makes sense, right? If they don’t have. I, it, it just seems unethical, right? It seems like if I don’t have the budget to fix this and I don’t wanna look at it, so I’m just waiting for it to fail. I don’t want the notifications so then I can claim it on insurance. ’cause I don’t wanna spend the money to go fix it. Like, seems, seems not cool.  Nathan Davies: Yeah. So the, I mean the, the process, the process of the insurance claim, if, if you want to look at it in almost an over simplistic way, um, a claim is notified. Um, to trigger an operational policy, there needs to be proof of damage, right? So in this instance, your gearbox has failed, whether that’s gear, teeth have have been pulled off, you’ve had a major bearing failure, whatever it is. So there’s your damage. So insurers are now [00:24:00] engaged. Um, the rules of the game. It’s now on insurers to prove that whatever has caused that damage is an exclusion. So in this instance, um, you know, that might be wear and tear, gradual deterioration, uh, could be rust. Um, and, and part of that is poor workmanship. Um, so if they have knowingly like. Cover their shut, their eyes covered, their ears just ignored this gearbox slowly crunching its way to, its, its inevitable death. You know, it, it’s not reasonably unforeseen. It’s not an unpredictable event. This was going to happen if you can see that, that trend, um, towards the failure, um, and in that light, it would, in theory be an uninsured event. Um, but [00:25:00] we know that. 90 plus percent of owner operators have, at least on their drive train, they have some sort of condition monitoring, whether that’s, you know, temperature sensors, vibration sensors, uh, noise sensors, you know, all that sort of stuff. We know that it’s there, but what’s really interesting in the claims process is. The first thing that we’ll ask is, where’s your proof of damage? Let’s see your alarm data, your scarda data, all this sort of thing.  Joel Saxum: Does the RFI get responded to?  Nathan Davies: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and it’s like, oh no, we, you know, we don’t have the SCARDA data. And we’ve had instances where a company, a company had turned around and said, oh, we don’t have any SCARDA data for the time of this event. It’s like, oh, that’s interesting. And worked our way through the process. And eventually insurers were like, you know what? We’re, we’re gonna deny this one. We’re not. Things aren’t adding up, we are not happy with it. Um, and all of a sudden out the woodwork, we get scar data, we get the, the insured’s, um, failure report, [00:26:00] which I mean, there was computational flow dynamics. There were, there were like all sorts of weird and wonderful data that had been thrown into the, this failure analysis. And it’s like, well, you’ve done our jobs for us. Why did you not just hand this over at the beginning? We know that this stuff exists, so. Just, just playing, playing dumb itch. It’s just a frustration really.  Allen Hall: It does seem like the operators think of loss adjustment in insurance companies as having a warehouse full of actuaries with mechanical calculators and they’re back there punching numbers in and doing these calculations on. I lost this gearbox from this manufacturer at, at this timeframe, and, and I understand all this data. That’s not how it works, but I do think there’s this, uh, assumption that that. Uh, there’s a in wind energy that because of the scale of it, there’s a lot of, of backend research that’s happening. I, I don’t think that’s true, or, I mean, you can tell me if it’s true or not, [00:27:00] but I don’t think so. But now, in the world of AI where I can start to accumulate large sets of data and I have the ability to process it with just a single person sitting in front of a laptop, is it gonna get a little harder for some of these claims that have Mercury, just really shady histories to get? Approved.  Nathan Davies: I, I think that’s inevitable. You know, whenever we go and speak to an insurer, you know, insurers are always interested, are interested in what’s the latest claims data, what are the trends that we’re seeing, all this sort of thing. So we’ll sit down with them for an hour and a half and we’ll say, oh, this was interesting. This is what went well, this is what didn’t go so well. And then they always sort of grab us just as we’re about to leave and we’ve, we’ve said our goodbyes, and they’re like, so you guys have a. Claims database. Right? Every time. Yep. And it’s like, how’d you feel about, about sharing your data? And it’s, it’s every insurer without failure. They’re like, let’s see your claims [00:28:00] database. Okay. Right. So we can share, we can share some information. Obviously it needs to be sanitized. We don’t want to provide identifying information, all that sort of stuff. You’re looking at thousands and thousands of lines of data. And the big problem that we have with any database like this is, it’s only as good as the data that’s been entered, right? So if, if every claims handler, if every loss adjuster is entering their own data into this database, my interpretation of, of a root cause failure, maybe different to somebody else’s. So what we are gonna start seeing in the next year to three years. Is the application of AI to these databases, to to sort of finesse the poor quality data that’s been entered by multiple, you know, it’s, it’s too many cooks. Spoiled broth. All of these people have entered their own interpretation of data, will start to see AI finesse [00:29:00] that, and all of a sudden the output of it will be. Really, really powerful, much better risk models. Yeah. And I think that’s, that’s inevitable in the next two to five years. Um, and I think insurers will, but again, the, we go back to the cyclic thing. So the, the data that we have is the claims that we’ve had over the past however many years, but all the while that the OEMs are manufacturing. New gearboxes, new generators, new blades. We don’t know about the problems that are gonna come out the woodwork. We can tell you about failures that might happen on aged assets, but we can’t tell you about what’s gonna fail in the future. Allen Hall: Well, is there an appetite to do what the automobile world is doing on the automobile insurance? Have basically a plugin to monitor how the driver is doing the State Farm drive safe and [00:30:00] save. Yeah. Your little black box is, is that where eventually this all goes? Is that every turbine’s gonna have a little black box for the insurance company to monitor the asset on some large scale, but then that allows you then to basically to assess properly what the rates should be based on the actual. Data coming from the actual turbines so that you, you can get a better view of what’s happening.  Nathan Davies: I mean, it’s challenging because obviously you can only get so much from, from that monitoring data. So arguably that’s, that’s like the scarda data. But then there’s, there’s the multiple other inputs that we’re looking at. I’d say the vast majority of claims come from some form of human intervention. And how do you record that? Human intervention.  Allen Hall: Right? You, it’s like getting an oil change in your car. If the guy forgets to put the oil plug in. Pretty much you’re, you’re gonna get a mount down the road and engine’s gone. [00:31:00] And that’s, that may be the, that may be ultimately where this all goes. Is that a lot of it’s just human error.  Nathan Davies: Yeah. It’s, you know, we, we can take the, the operating data, you can start to finesse maintenance reports and, and try to plug that into this data stream. But you can guarantee, like you can absolutely bet your bottom dollar, but when there’s an insurance claim and it’s like. That one key document that you need that will answer that question, nobody knows  Allen Hall: where it is. This has been a great discussion and Nathan, we need to have you back on because you provide such great insights as to what’s happening in the insurance world and and the broader wind energy world and. That’s where I like talking to you so much. Nathan, how do people get a hold of you? Can they reach you via LinkedIn?  Nathan Davies: Yeah, I’m on LinkedIn. Um, you can also find me, um, on the Lloyd Warwick website. Sounds great.  Allen Hall: Nathan, thank you so much for being on  Nathan Davies: the podcast. Right. Appreciate it. Thank you so much [00:32:00] guys.

Happy New Year! The guys dive into the first 2026 podcast with news of the RAM TRX making its return. For Topic Tuesday, they're asked what cars they'd like to experience for one night, one day and one week, but would never be allowed to own or drive again! They debate non-GM enthusiast car choices for Zindrick in Iowa, who drives 1000 miles a week! Then, Jeff F is currently waiting to get less-upside-down with his current daily, but he's got the itch for something new. Social media questions ask how you keep your car clean if you don't like car covers, how far in advance do OEMs send press launch invites, and how are incidents handled on EDD road rallies? Audio-only MP3 is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and 10 other platforms. Look for us on Tuesdays if you'd like to watch us debate, disagree and then go drive again! 00:00 - Intro 01:41 - RAM SRT TRX Pickup Is Back!! 07:19 - AZ Rural Highways To End Speed Limits? 12:03 - Topic Tuesday: One Night, One Day, One Week 27:39 - Announcements: Everyday Driver + Hooked On Driving 2026 33:06 - Car Debate #1: GM Sucks You In 55:59 - Car Debate #2: Waiting To Become Less-Upside-Down 1:12:22 - Audience Questions On Social Media  Rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, and subscribe to our two YouTube channels. Write to us your Topic Tuesdays, Car Conclusions and those great Car Debates at everydaydrivertv@gmail.com or everydaydriver.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda examine TPI Composites’ Chapter 11 proceedings, including the Oaktree Capital secured debt controversy and Vestas’ acquisition of two Mexican factories. With remaining assets heading to auction in January, they discuss what operators should consider as blade supply uncertainty grows. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Allen Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxum and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy  Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’m here with Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum. Rosemary Barnes is on holiday. We’re here to talk about the TPI composites, uh, bankruptcy hearings, and there’s been so much happening there behind the scenes. It’s hard to keep track of, but we’ve done a deep dive and wanted to give everybody at least a highlight of what has happened over the last couple of months. So, uh, if you do own vessels or GE turbines, you understand what the situation is. As we all know, TPI composites, gee, was the world’s largest independent of wind blade manufacturing. Uh, they [00:01:00] were, it, they built blades for renova, Vestas, Nordex. They built blades for almost everybody, uh, names that basically power the global energy transition. And then, uh, if, and a lot of people don’t know this, but back in December of 2023, uh, TPI struck a deal that is drawing some fire. Right now, TPI swapped $436 million in preferred stock for. $393 million in secure debt held by Oak Tree Capital and by August of last year, just a couple of months ago, TPI filed for Chapter 11. Now the Blade Makers assets are being carved up and sold, and two of wind energy’s biggest players are stepping in to keep production running while the bankruptcy plays out. Now, Joel and Yolanda, I, I think the bankruptcy of. TPI sort of came to the industry as a little bit of a shock. Obviously [00:02:00] the, the price had fallen quite a bit. Uh, if you’ve watched the stock price of TPI composites had been dropping for a while and didn’t have a lot of of market value. However, uh, GE and Vestas both have manufacturing facilities basically with uh, TPI composites and, and needs them to produce those blades. So the filing of the bankruptcy, I’m sure was a nervous point for Vestus and GE being really the, the two main ones. Joel Saxum: Well, I think we talked about this a little bit off air. Is it, it shouldn’t just be Vestus and GE nervous about this now. It should be every operator that’s in either in development or still has blades under warranty. Uh, so, and this is a not a US problem, this is a global problem. ’cause TPI is a global company that serves, uh, global industry all over the place, right? We know that a large percentage of their throughput was GE and Vestas, but also Siemens ESAs in there, you name it, right? The, any major operator’s gonna have some blades built [00:03:00] by TPI or op major, OEM. So. There isn’t gonna be much of a, uh, dark corner of the wind industry that this issue doesn’t touch. So I think they, the, one of the issues here is, um, we’ve, we’ve, we’ve heard about some issues going on with TPI, but it was almost like a, ah, they’re not, they’ll, they’ll be okay. They, so, so something will happen. I mean, Yolanda, you had said. What was it that you said ear earlier? Like, uh, the kind of the, the, the feeling about it.  Yolanda Padron: They’ll take care of it. You know, OEMs will take care of it and we’ll be fine.  Joel Saxum: Someone’s gonna support this thing.  Yolanda Padron: Yeah. I, I think teams, you’re, you’re definitely right. Teams really do need to at least think of a, of a plan B or a plan C to have when the dust settles so you’re not scrambling.  Allen Hall: Yeah. And it hasn’t really played out that way. Uh, Vestas has stepped in a little bit and GE has stepped in. Not in terms of acquiring any of the major assets, but I think the first question is what is Oaktree Capital’s, [00:04:00] uh, role in all this? And that is being played out right now in front of the bankruptcy court. Uh, so when you go to bankruptcy, there’s obviously a lot of oversight that happens there, uh, and. When TPI composites entered bankruptcy, the accreditors committee had a bunch of questions about that transaction. Uh, they pointed to a December, 2023 refin refinancing deal with Oaktree and in which creditors were really suspicious of basically saying that TPI was already insolvent in 2023 and Oaktree exchanged equity for secure debt jumping ahead of everybody else in line to get paid. So because they Oaktree has secured debt, they’re first in line to get paid. If, uh, weather Guard was involved selling parts to TPI, which thank goodness we weren’t, we would be unsecured. They wouldn’t have to pay us. So Oaktree would get paid first and everybody else is unsecured, gets paid [00:05:00] later. Uh, that’s okay. I mean, that’s the way they, uh, they structured it. But this has led to a problem, right? So that oak tree. Uh, was supposed to release about $20 million in funding to keep the factories open, and that, that happened just a couple of weeks ago, and Oaktree refused to do it. So the amount of cash flow to keep the factories open was a real issue. TPI was in front of the court saying, we’re in trouble. We’re gonna become insolvent. We don’t have cash flow to keep the doors open. So the blade factories nearly shut down a couple of weeks ago. However, there was a, the settlement, uh, just after that, uh, in regards to Oaktree about when the payouts happen, what Oaktree will receive, and which basically it’s, most of whatever’s gonna happen here. So whatever, uh, TPI decides to sell or can sell, Oaktree is gonna be the recipient of those funds for most of it. I think the  Joel Saxum: difficult thing here for. The [00:06:00] general listener, me included, is understanding that this is a very complicated legal process that’s governed and it’s global, right? So it’s governed in certain court systems in different places. And because there is also the idea of like say in the, in the United States, the SEC Securities Exchanges Commission, that kind of regulates these. Publicly traded companies. There’s a lot of lights and there’s a lot of lawyers and there’s a lot of jargon involved in this thing. And, but basically what what we’re saying is, is the way the process works when you have a, uh, a bankruptcy and insolvency, if a company has debt to certain people, there may be a list of a hundred people. There may be a list of two, doesn’t matter. There’s certain classes of debt, right? And Oaktree has secured debt, which means. If they get paid first, if there’s anything, right? If this bankruptcy goes and, and gets, sell this, sell that, sell this, whatever’s left, goes to the secured debt and then it goes to unsecured debt. And [00:07:00] there’s sometimes there can be different classes of unsecured debt as well. And, but if there’s not, some of it just goes by like date or value or everybody gets a percentage, it just kind of all depends on how it works out in the specific court system that the stuff takes care of. But that person. That is the top. Um, in this case, Oaktree Capital, right? Based out of la but offices all over the world, they got about $200 billion in real estate equity and debt assets or, uh, I guess valuation. I wouldn’t say assets. Um, they are the debtor in possession, so they’re the one that’s kind of like top of the heap. They’re kind of controlling how the. The restructuring and or sale goes alongside the court system.  Allen Hall: And the trouble is, is that when you have unsecured and secured debt, everybody that’s unsecured wants to get paid. So any material supplier that has been for in selling product to TPI over the years [00:08:00] usually has a 30, 60, 90, maybe 120 days of, of after they deliver the product to they get paid. In that timeframe, if bankruptcy happens, all that product that’s sitting on the floor at TPI, you sort of lost it. You know, you can’t get it back and you’re not gonna get paid for it for if, if, if ever, what do you do? And so you start, you know, you start filing claims, but those, those claims most likely will never get paid. Or if they will, they’re going to get pennies on the dollar.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. And I would imagine like, so, you know, when we, when we sit here and say from the weather guard hat, right? We put a. They go to a client, net 15, net 30, we expect to get paid in that amount of time. That’s kind of how our, basically US forwarding credit to someone else. That’s how it works. And if you work within the wind industry, you know that the OEMs, because they are the OEMs, they have a heavier hand. Sometimes they’re net 90, net one 20. Um, once they, once they’re cool with your invoice. So you could see that some of these people that have, [00:09:00] uh, and TPI falls within that OEM category, right? Um, you can see that they more than likely will have had longer, more favorable terms for themselves with some of these sub-suppliers. And the sub-suppliers are, think about TPI blades. It is composites, it is fabric, it’s resins, it’s all of those supply companies. Um, and you know, there may be, uh, some other. Dead in there that you’re not, we’re not sure of. We saw some stuff with some OEMs, maybe they have some exchange agreements you paid up front for some blades or something of that sort. You didn’t get ’em. I don’t know. But there is also, and this is the one that kind of hits home to some of our listeners, um, not only some of our listeners are those supply chain companies that support them, um, but a lot of them are ISPs. Right? So we were just talking to someone who, you know, just a couple weeks ago that had done some inspection work, uh, for, for TPI that. They’re not gonna get paid for it. Um, we have seen on the creditors list of some ISPs that we know they’re not gonna get paid, and those are people out [00:10:00] doing warranty repairs and those kind of things over a course of time. And they may have had a net 30, net 60, net 90 days payment, but I’m sure that stuff is well and long gone. They probably have invoices due for a year now. Uh, but it, this, the, the, this downfall of TPI, what’s going on with them, it affects a lot of people in the wind industry. Um. Be being, having been on the short end once in my career of an unsecured debt, uh, when a, when the client or the, uh, um, purchaser of services, but went into bankruptcy and losing a whole bunch of cash, and there’s nothing you can do about it, um, except for. Be mad and stew over it and learn from your mistakes. Uh, that’s a tough place to be. Speaker 5: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind energy o and m Australia [00:11:00] 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions, not speeches,  Allen Hall: the problem. With TPI has been keeping the doors open and they went in front of the court and said, we have a liquidity problem. Uh, Vestus bought those two factories, those two LLCs for $10 million each. That was the agreement During that transaction, TPI asked for another $55 million, uh, and it’s in the transcripts. You can go listen to this dental, listen to it, but obviously the vest representatives were. No [00:12:00] way. We’re not doing that. We are in good faith. De decided to buy, uh, these two pieces. So 10 million bucks a, a factory is. Pretty decent price, but they are still in a liquidity challenge. So GE Renova and Vestus, uh, don’t want the Blades manufacturing to stop. They have customers who need blades and so they need these TPI factories to keep running. GE Renova is providing emergency financing. Uh, through what the court calls, uh, Erna, G-E-R-N-A, it’s a liquidity agreement. Uh, they also signed a long lead materials agreement to keep raw materials moving into the plants. Vestas provided cash advances to keep production going at the Mexico facilities also. So for now, everything continues to be running, but essentially GE and Vestas are pro paying for the materials. To keep the production line going and there’s this, there’s on the back end of this TPI is essentially. Gonna charge, um, [00:13:00] GE vest less for the blades when they roll off the line because they advanced some those funds. So, TPI as an organization is still trying to continue to produce blades and trying to honor their commitments as much as they can, but they need cash and the, the place they’re going to go get it or have been getting it from as Vestas in GE Renova. So you  Joel Saxum: one would expect that either Vestas or GE Renova would eventually just say like, we’ve got to buy you. Is that a reality? Because it doesn’t seem like it from the court documents and stuff. It seems like they’re, they’re kind of, they don’t want to get their hands into back or back into, in GEs case, this blade manufacturing, uh, faculties, right? They’re okay right now providing cash for you guys to keep your operation running and providing us with the things we need. But we don’t actually want to take it over. That’s what it feels  Allen Hall: like. Uh, well, Vestus did, right? So Vestus took over two factories in Mexico. GE has not done [00:14:00] that yet, and there’s no indication from the proceedings that I read on all the documents that GE has made any move to do that. Vestus definitely stepped in and wants to keep the two factories running, uh, with the issues with ge, Renova and LM at the minute, and there was a lot of layoffs at LM just before the new year. It’s a question of what GE will do, and it doesn’t seem like as of right now, GE is going to buy factories. Now that being said, uh, TPI composites has deadlines to meet and some auctions to run. Uh, the remaining assets, the non vestus. Portion and the, the Turkish operations, which were sold way earlier, uh, all of the remaining assets go up for bid on January 26th. And if no outside buyer steps in, which is very possible, Oak Tree Capital can use its debt as currency to take ownership of from what is called a credit bid. [00:15:00] From there, uh, the secure lender could convert that debt into equity and, and so basically what happens is Oak Tree Capital. Would be the holder of the company for whatever remains. But you would think that GE Viva, uh, would want to have some piece of this to keep the blade factories running, but there’s no indication of that. No one from GE has said anything. None of the filings indicate that GE wants to go ahead and or ge. Viva wants to go ahead and buy the factories. Nothing like that has happened. So there may be, uh, some more financial transactions at play here, but as of right now, everything that remains for TPI composites is gonna be in the auction block. Someone could walk up and for several million dollars, obviously, uh, acquire it and  Joel Saxum: in theory run it. So, I mean, Alan, you and I talked about this this morning a little bit. We have seen more [00:16:00] layoffs at lm. Right. We saw more people depart and it sounds like that building is basically a ghost town over in Denmark. GE is basically scuttling LM down to nothing, and they will more than likely either sell off whatever LM has or discontinue whatever that business model is, if that’s where they’re going, blade wise, wind wise. At the same time, they’ve also said, we’re not building any more g offshore turbines.  Allen Hall: What are they  Joel Saxum: doing? I don’t see them having the, the, the, the thirst to go scoop up or put any money into TPI, but it’s like a catch 22. ’cause they need them to fulfill the orders and stuff that they have. Right now what we’re staring at is basically oak tree composites. Allen Hall: There’s no chance of that. The oak tree doesn’t know how to run that business. They’re gonna have to hire somebody to go do that. Even if they did, you still got factories in Iowa, a bunch in Mexico, other [00:17:00] places. You have all these assets kind of spread all over the place. It’s not like running an automotive dealership on the corner, you’re, you’re running a major operation with thousands of employees and producing these massively complex blades. There’s only a handful of companies that would be even possible that we could acquire that and run it with any competency at all right now.  Joel Saxum: So does oak tree being, being that oak tree is the debtor in possession and if, if possible with, or if possible, if it, if it rolls this way with the plan toggle, right. Where they would basically, the cell would convert them into equity holdings and they would own it. Are they the gatekeepers to who can bid? Like do they control ge? You can bid vest as you can bid? Or does the court control that?  Allen Hall: The court controls all of that. So it’s all part of the chapter 11 proceedings. Anybody can walk up and put a bid in. And now whether it qualifies or not is, is a good question, but anybody can walk up and, [00:18:00] and make a claim for what remains. There’s, there is a process that will happen there, but who else would it be? Nordex? I don’t think so. Is is Vesta gonna buy more? I don’t think so. So the concern is obviously for TPI, what is it gonna look like going forward? If you have purchased Vestus turbines or GE Renova turbines, are you gonna have the blades that you have purchased in time? Great questions to ask. I think on the other side is if you do own GE Renova or Vestus turbines and they’re made by TPI, where the technical aspects lie, what do you do where, what should you be thinking about if you’re a large operator of some of these turbines? How I should be planning for the future here? What are you thinking about?  Joel Saxum: So let’s divide it into two categories. One of them is turbine blades on order supply chain, supply [00:19:00] chain, and the other one’s being turbine blades already in production or received order.  Yolanda Padron: I’m not sure that we can fully look at them separately though, right? Because if you have them, if, if they’re yours and they’re under a service agreement or something. Eventually you might be in the queue for a replacement that you need, right? That your OEM would be on the hook for.  Joel Saxum: That raises another question there then does. I don’t, ’cause I don’t know this. Maybe you do. Alan does a bankruptcy qualify as a force majeure event?  Allen Hall: Not in terms of like lightning would be, but, but in terms, yeah, sure.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. But can they claim force majeure and be like, uh, out of our control? So now the turbine supply agreements are, you know, basically have to be rewritten. Timelines have to be rewritten. Yolanda, to your point, if we have a blade that we need for production, am I not responsible for LDS anymore because the blade manufacturer went into, uh, bankruptcy?  Yolanda Padron: I think it’d be more of [00:20:00] either Now you’re not just. In the queue for TPI Blades. But you’re in the queue for whatever we can retrofit there, right? That they could put in.  Joel Saxum: Yeah. The alternative is you need a whole set though, right? So if we say like, I need a blade from TPI, or I need an entire set of LM blades, now you’re triple the cost. Who has to pay for that?  Yolanda Padron: I really would hope that it, they wouldn’t go this route, but I think some OEMs would just hit liquidated damages. And stop.  Allen Hall: That’s what I think too. I mean, we’ve seen that happen with some of the OEMs. Is that the, uh, LDS and that’s it. There is nothing going forward. They’re, they’re fine doing that. That’s the only play that they have. I, I am deeply concerned what GE Renova is about to do in the wind business because of their gas turbine and everything else are so profitable. And they just announced that the wind business in 2026 is not likely to make any. Positive cash flow. [00:21:00] It, the, the discussion inside of GE Renova, at least at the sort of the boardroom level, must be really tense because in, in theory, they could buy TPIs assets in the factories and run them, but they just went through essentially a liquidation process with lm. Do they want to run another company, especially when they’re bleeding cash in that particular business? I think the answer GE historically has been no. If we’re not number one or number two, we’re getting the heck outta that business. That was the Jack Welsh of running ge, and anybody that worked for GE knew that loud and clear because they said it all the time. Those same people that grew up in that GE culture are now in the boardroom, and what are they likely to do? They’re likely to follow that advice. Because it’s just what they know. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the school they went to. Are they gonna change their mind and say, A longer term play is wind [00:22:00] and we wanna stay in it and we’re willing to lose a couple hundred million dollars a year for the next couple of years, and now we’re gonna run a Blade Factory with several thousand employees down in Mexico. I just don’t see it. Uh, not that I could be totally wrong about that. Probably am. Uh, today, sitting at the beginning of January of 2026, I don’t think GE Renova wants to be in the blade manufacturing business if they can at all avoid it.  Yolanda Padron: I think it’s important for owners to start thinking a lot more about educating their internal teams on what they can. So if it’s through, if you know people within your OEM that you can trust and that can help you. Learn how to self-service some of your blades. That would be great if it’s through ISPs that you can trust. If it’s a hodgepodge of items. I think it’s really important for owners right now to start building that up because it will take a while. I. And, and the risk [00:23:00] is there.  Allen Hall: That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, and if today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you found value in today’s conversation, please leave us overview. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show. And we will catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Welcome back to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering® Podcast. AI agents are your next customers. Subscribe to our Newsletter: https://theultimatepartner.com/ebook-subscribe/ Check Out UPX:https://theultimatepartner.com/experience/ In this exclusive interview, Vince Menzione sits down with Darryl Peek, Vice President for Partner Sales (Public Sector) at Elastic, to decode how Elastic achieved the rare “triple crown”—winning Partner of the Year across Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Cloud simultaneously. Darryl breaks down the engineering-first approach that makes Elastic sticky with hyperscalers, reveals the rigorous metrics behind their partner health scorecard, and shares his personal “one-page strategy” for aligning mission, vision, and execution. From leveraging generative AI for cleaner sales hygiene to the timeless lesson of the “Acre of Diamonds,” this conversation offers a masterclass in building high-performance partner ecosystems in the public sector and beyond. https://youtu.be/__GE0r2fPuk Key Takeaways Elastic achieved “Pinnacle” status by aligning engineering roadmaps directly with hyperscaler innovations to become essential infrastructure. Successful public sector sales require a dual approach: leveraging resellers for contract access while driving domain-specific co-sell motions. Partner relationships outperform contracts; consistency in communication is more valuable than only showing up for renewals. Effective partner organizations track “influence” revenue just as rigorously as direct bookings to capture the full value of SI relationships. Generative AI can automate sales hygiene, turning scattered meeting notes into actionable CRM data and reducing friction for sales teams. The “Acre of Diamonds” philosophy reminds leaders that the greatest opportunities often lie within their current ecosystem, not in distant new markets. If you're ready to lead through change, elevate your business, and achieve extraordinary outcomes through the power of partnership—this is your community. At Ultimate Partner® we want leaders like you to join us in the Ultimate Partner Experience – where transformation begins. Keywords: Elastic, Darryl Peek, public sector sales, hyperscaler partnership, Microsoft Partner of the Year, AWS Partner of the Year, Google Cloud Partner, partner ecosystem strategy, co-sell motion, partner metrics, channel sales, government contracting, Carahsoft, generative AI in sales, sales hygiene, Russell Conwell, Acre of Diamonds, open source search, observability, security SIM, vector search, retrieval augmented generation, LLM agnostic, partner enablement, influence revenue, channel booking, SI relationships, strategic alliances. Transcript: Darryl Peek Audio Episode [00:00:00] Darryl Peek: I say, I tell my team from time to time, the difference between contacts and contracts is the R and that’s the relationship. So if you’re not building the relationship, then how do you expect that partner to want to lean in? Don’t just show up when you have a contract. Don’t just show up when you have a renewal. [00:00:13] Darryl Peek: Make sure that you are reaching out and letting them know what is happening. Don’t just talk to me when you need a renewal, right? When you’re at end of quarter and you want me to bring a deal forward, [00:00:23] Vince Menzione: welcome to the Ultimate Guide to Partnering. I’m Vince Menzi. Own your host, and my mission is to help leaders like you achieve your greatest results through successful partnering. [00:00:34] Vince Menzione: We just came off Ultimate Partner live at Caresoft Training Center in Reston, Virginia. Over two days, we gathered top leaders to tackle the real shifts shaping our industry. If you weren’t in the room, this episode brings you right to the edge of what’s next. Let’s dive in. So we have another privilege, an incredible partner, another like we call these, if you’ve heard our term, pinnacle. [00:01:00] Vince Menzione: I think it’s a term that’s not widely used, but we refer to Pinnacle as the partners that have achieved the top rung. They’ve become partners of the year. And our next presenter, our next interview is going to be with an organization. And a person that represents an organization that has been a pinnacle partner actually for all three Hyperscalers, which is really unusual. [00:01:24] Vince Menzione: Elastic has been partner of the Year award winner across Microsoft, Amazon, and Google Cloud, so very interesting. And Darrell Peak, who is the leader for the public sector organization, he’s here in the Washington DC area, was kind enough. Elastic is a sponsor event, and Darryl’s been kind enough to join me for a discussion about what it takes to be a Pinnacle partner. [00:01:47] Vince Menzione: So incredibly well. Excited to welcome you, Darryl. Thank you, sir. Good to have you. I love you. I love your smile, man. You got an incredible smile. Thank you. Thank you, Vince. Thank you. So Darryl, I probably didn’t do it any justice, but I was hoping you could take us through your role and responsibilities at Elastic, which is an incredible organization. [00:02:08] Vince Menzione: Alright. Yeah, [00:02:09] Darryl Peek: absolutely. So Darrell Peak vice President for partner sales for the US public sector at Elastic. I’ve been there about two and a half years. Responsible for our partner relationships across all partner types, whether that’s the system integrators, resellers, MSPs, OEMs, distribution Hyperscalers, and our Technology Alliance partners. [00:02:26] Darryl Peek: And those are partners that aren’t built on the Elastic platform. In regards to how my partner team interacts with our team. Our ecosystem. We are essentially looking to further and lean in with our partners in order for them to, one, understand what Elastic does since we’re such a diverse tool, but also work with our field to understand what are their priorities and how do they identify the right partners for the right requirements. [00:02:50] Darryl Peek: In regards to what Elastic is and what it does elastic is a solution that is actually founded on search and we’re an open source company. And one of the things that I actually did when I left the government, so I worked for the government for a number of years. I left, went and worked for Salesforce, then worked for Google ran their federal partner team and then came over to Elastic because I wanted to. [00:03:11] Darryl Peek: Understand what it meant to be at an open source company. Being at an open source company is quite interesting ’cause you’re competing against yourself. [00:03:17] Vince Menzione: Yeah, that’s true. [00:03:18] Darryl Peek: So it’s pretty interesting. But elastic was founded in 2012 as a search company. So when you talk about search, we are the second most used platform behind Google. [00:03:28] Darryl Peek: So many of you have already used Elastic. Maybe on your way here, if you use Uber and Lyft, that is elastic. That is helping you get here. Oh, that is interesting. If you use Netflix, if you use wikipedia.com, booking.com, eBay, home Depot, all of those are search capabilities. That Elastic is happening to power in regards to what else we do. [00:03:47] Darryl Peek: We also do observability, which is really around application monitoring, logging, tracing, and metrics. So we are helping your operations team. Pepsi is a customer as well as Cisco. Wow. And then the last thing that we do is security when we’re a SIM solution. So when we talk about sim, we are really looking to protect networks. [00:04:03] Darryl Peek: So we all, we think that it’s a data problem. So with that data problem, what we’re trying to do is not only understand what is happening in the network, but also we are helping with threat intelligence, endpoint and cloud security. So all those elements together is what Elastic does. And we only do it two ways. [00:04:18] Darryl Peek: We’re one platform and we can be deployed OnPrem and in the cloud. So that’s a little bit about me and the company. Hopefully it was clear, [00:04:24] Vince Menzione: I’ve had elastic people on stage. You’ve done, that’s the best answer I’ve had. What does Elastic do? I used to hear all this hyperbole and what? [00:04:32] Vince Menzione: What? Now I really understand what you do is an organiz. And the name of the company was Elasticsearch. [00:04:36] Darryl Peek: It was [00:04:37] Vince Menzione: elastic at one time when I first. Worked with you. It was Elasticsearch. [00:04:40] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. Yeah. So many moons ago used to be called the Elk Stack and it stood for three things. E was the Elasticsearch which is a search capability. [00:04:48] Darryl Peek: L is Logstash, which is our logging capability. And Cabana is essentially our visualization capability. So it was called Elk. But since we’ve acquired so many companies and built so much capability into the platform, we can now call it the elastic. Platform. [00:05:00] Vince Menzione: So talk to me about your engagement with the hyperscalers. [00:05:02] Vince Menzione: You’ve been partner of the Year award winner with all three, right? I mentioned that, and you were, you worked for Google for a period of time. Yes. So tell us about, like, how does that work? What does that engagement look like? And why do you get chosen as partner of the year? What are the things that stand out when you’re working with these hyperscalers [00:05:19] Darryl Peek: and with that we are very fortunate to be recognized. [00:05:23] Darryl Peek: So many of the organizations that are out there are doing some of the same capabilities that we do, but they can’t claim that they won a part of the year for all three hyperscalers in the same year. We are able to do that because we believe in the power of partnership, not only from a technology perspective, but also from a sales perspective. [00:05:39] Darryl Peek: So we definitely lean in with our partnerships, so having our engineers talk, having our product teams talk, and making sure that we’re building capabilities that actually integrate within the cloud service providers. And also consistently building a roadmap that aligns with the innovation that the cloud service providers are also building towards. [00:05:56] Darryl Peek: And then making sure that we’re a topic of discussion. So elastic. From a search capability, we do semantic search, vector search, but also retrieval augmented generation, which actually is LLM Agnostic. So when you say LLM Agnostic, whether you want to use Gemini, Claude or even Chad, GBT, those things are something that Elastic can integrate in, but it actually helps reduce the likelihood of hallucination. [00:06:18] Darryl Peek: So when we’re building that kind of solution, the cloud service provider’s you’re making it easy for us, and when you make it easy, you become very attractive and therefore you’re. Likely gonna come. So it becomes [00:06:28] Vince Menzione: sticky in that regard. Very sticky. So it sounds like very much an engineer, a lot of emphasis on the engineering aspects of the business. [00:06:35] Vince Menzione: I know you’re an engineer by background too, right? So the engineering aspects of the business means that you’re having alignment with the engineering organizations of those companies at a very deep level. [00:06:44] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. So I’m [00:06:45] Vince Menzione: here. [00:06:45] Darryl Peek: Yeah. And being at Elastic has been pretty amazing. So coming from Google, we had so many different solutions, so many different SKUs, but Elastic releases every eight weeks. [00:06:54] Darryl Peek: So right before you start to understand the last release, the next release is coming out and we’re already at 9.2 and we just released 9.0 in May. So it’s really blazing fast on the capability that we’re really pushing the market, but it’s really hard to make sure that we get it in front of our partners. [00:07:10] Darryl Peek: So when we talk about our partner enablement strategy, we’re just trying to make sure that we get the right information in front of the right partners at the right time, so this way they can best service their customers. [00:07:19] Vince Menzione: So let’s talk about partner strategy. Alyssa Fitzpatrick was on stage with me at our last event, and she Alyssa’s fantastic. [00:07:25] Vince Menzione: She is incredible. Yes, she is. She was a former colleague at Microsoft Days. Yes. And then she, we had a really interesting conversation. About what it takes, like being in, in a company and then working with the partners in general. And you have, I’m sure you have a lot of the similarities in how you have to engage with these organizations. [00:07:42] Vince Menzione: You’re working across the hyperscalers, you’re also working with the ecosystem too. Yes. ’cause the delivery, you have delivery partners as well. Absolutely. So tell us more about that. [00:07:50] Darryl Peek: So we kinda look at it from a two, two ways from the pre-sales motion and then the post-sales. From the pre-sales side. [00:07:56] Darryl Peek: What we’re trying to do is really maximize our, not only working with partners, because within public sector, you need to get access to customers through contract vehicles. So if you want to get access to some, for instance, the VA or through GSA or others, you have to make sure you’re aligned with the right partners who have access to. [00:08:12] Darryl Peek: That particular agency, but also you want domain expertise. So as you’re working with those system integrators, you wanna make sure that they have capability that aligns. So whether it is a security requirement, you wanna work with someone who specializes in security, observability and search. So that’s the way that we really look at our partner ecosystem, but those who are interested in working with us. [00:08:30] Darryl Peek: Because everybody doesn’t necessarily have a emphasis on working with a new technology partner, [00:08:36] Vince Menzione: right? [00:08:36] Darryl Peek: So what we’re trying to do is saying how do we build programs, incentives and sales plays that really does align and strike the interest of that particular partner? So when we talk about it I tell my team, you have to, my grandfather to say, plan your work and work your plan. And if you fail a plan, you plan to fail. So being able to not only have a strong plan in place, but then execute against that plan, check against that plan as you go through the fiscal year, and then see how you come out at the end of the fiscal year to see are we making that progress? [00:09:01] Darryl Peek: But on the other side of it, and what I get stressed about with my sales team and saying what does partners bring to us? So where are those partner deal registrations? What is the partner source numbers? How are we creating more pipeline? And that is where we’re now saying, okay, how can we navigate and how can we make it easier? [00:09:17] Darryl Peek: And how can we reduce friction in order for the partner to say, okay, elastic’s easy to work with. I can see value in, oh, by the way, I can make some money with. [00:09:25] Vince Menzione: So take us through, have there been examples of areas where you’ve had to like, break through to this other side in terms of growing the partner ecosystem? [00:09:33] Vince Menzione: What’s worked, what hasn’t worked? Yes, I’d love to learn more about that. [00:09:36] Darryl Peek: I’ll say that and I tell my team one, you partner program is essential, right? If you don’t have an attractive partner program in regards to how they come on board, how they’re incentivized the right amount of margin, they won’t even look at you. [00:09:49] Darryl Peek: The second thing is really how do you engage? So a lot of things start with relationships. I think partnerships are really about relationships. I say I tell my team from time to time, the difference between contacts and contracts is the R and that’s the relationship. So if you’re not building the relationship, then how do you expect that partner to want to lean in? [00:10:07] Darryl Peek: Don’t just show up when you have a contract. Don’t just show up when you have a renewal. Make sure that you are reaching out and letting them know what is happening. I like the what Matt brought up in saying, okay, talk to me when you have a win. Talk to me when you have something to talk about. [00:10:22] Darryl Peek: Don’t just talk to me when you need a renewal. When you’re at end the quarter and you want me to bring a deal forward, that doesn’t help ab absolutely. [00:10:28] Vince Menzione: So engineering organizations, sales organizations, what are, what does a healthy partnership look like for you? [00:10:35] Darryl Peek: So I look at metrics a lot and we use a number of tools and I know folks are using tools out there. [00:10:41] Darryl Peek: I won’t name any tools for branding purposes, but in regards to how we look at tools. So some things that we measure closely. Of course it’s our partner source numbers, so partner source, bookings, and pipeline. We look at our partner attached numbers and pipeline as well as the amount or percentage of partner attached business that we have in regards to our overall a CV number. [00:11:00] Darryl Peek: We also look at co-sell numbers, so therefore we are looking at not only how. A partner is coming to us, but how is a partner helping us in closing the deal even though they didn’t bring us the deal? We’re also looking at our cloud numbers and saying what amount of deals and how much business are we doing with our cloud service providers? [00:11:15] Darryl Peek: Because of course we wanna see that number go up year over year. We wanna actually help with that consumption number because not only are we looking at it from a SaaS perspective, but also if the customer has to commit we can help burn that down as well. We also look at influence numbers. [00:11:27] Darryl Peek: Now, one of the harder things to do within a technology business is. Capturing all that si goodness. And saying how do I reflect the SI if they’re not bringing me the deal? And I can’t attribute that amount of deal to that particular partner, right? And the way that we do that is we just tag them to the influence. [00:11:44] Darryl Peek: So we’re able to now track influence. And also the M-S-P-O-E-M work that we are also tracking and also we’re tracking the royalties. And lastly is the professional service work that we do with those partners. So we’re looking to go up into the right where we start them out at our select level, we go to our premier level and then our elite level. [00:12:00] Darryl Peek: But left and to the right, I say you gotta go from zero to one, one to five, five to 10, and then 10 to 25. So if we can actually see that progression. That is where we’re really starting to see health in the partnership, but also the executive alignment is really important. So when our CEO is able to meet with the fellow CEO of the co partner company that is really showing how we are progressing, but also our VPs and others that are engaged. [00:12:20] Darryl Peek: So those are things that we really do measure. We do have a health score card and also, we track accreditations, we track certifications as well as training outcomes based on our sales place. [00:12:30] Vince Menzione: Wow. There’s a lot of metrics there. Yeah. So you didn’t bring, you didn’t bring any slides with that out? [00:12:35] Darryl Peek: Oh, no. I’m not looking at slides, by the way. [00:12:40] Vince Menzione: Let’s talk about marketplace. [00:12:42] Darryl Peek: All right? [00:12:42] Vince Menzione: Because we’ve had a lot of conversations about marketplace. We’ve got both vendors up here talking about marketplace and the importance of marketplace, right? You’ve been a Marketplace Award winner. We haven’t really talked about that, like that motion per se. [00:12:55] Vince Menzione: I’d love to s I’d love to hear from you like how you, a, what you had to overcome to get to marketplace, what the marketplace motion looks like for your organization, what a marketplace first motion looks like. ’cause a lot of your cut a. Are all your customers requiring a lot of direct selling effort or is it some of it through Marketplace? [00:13:14] Vince Menzione: Like how does it, how does that work for you? [00:13:15] Darryl Peek: So Elastic is a global organization. Yeah. So we’re, 40 different countries. So it depends on where we’re talking. So if we talk about our international business, which is our A PJ and EMEA business we are seeing a lot more marketplace and we’re seeing that those direct deals with customers. [00:13:28] Darryl Peek: Okay. And we’re talking about our mirror business. A significant amount goes through marketplace and where our customers are transacting with the marketplace and are listing. On the marketplace within public sector, it’s more of a resell motion. Okay. So we are working with our resellers. [00:13:39] Darryl Peek: So we work our primary distribution partner is Carahsoft. So you heard from Craig earlier. Yes. We have a strong relationship with Carahsoft and definitely a big fan of this organization. But in regards to how we do that and how we track it we are looking at better ways to, track that orchestration and consumption numbers in order to see not only what customers we’re working with, but how can we really accelerate that motion and really get those leads and transactions going. [00:14:03] Vince Menzione: Very cool. Very cool. And I think part of the reason why in, in the government or public sector space it has a lot to do with the commitments are different. Absolutely. So it’s not government agencies aren’t able to make the same level of commitments that, private sector organizations were able to make, so they were able to the Mac or Microsoft parlance and also a AWS’s parlance. [00:14:23] Vince Menzione: Yeah, [00:14:24] Darryl Peek: definitely a different dynamic. Yeah. And especially within the public sector. ’cause we have Gov Cloud to work with, right? That’s right. So we’re working with Microsoft or we’re working with AWS, they have their Gov cloud and then we Google, they don’t have a Gov cloud, but we still have to work with them differently. [00:14:35] Darryl Peek: Yeah. Within that space. That’s [00:14:36] Vince Menzione: right. That’s right. So it makes the motion a little bit differently there. So I think we talked through some of this. I just wanna make sure we cover our points [00:14:43] Darryl Peek: here. One thing I’ll do an aside, you talked about the acre of diamonds. I’m a big fan of that story. [00:14:47] Vince Menzione: Yeah, let’s talk about Russ Con. Yeah, [00:14:49] Darryl Peek: let’s talk about it. Do you all know about the Acre Diamonds? Have you all heard that story before? No. You have some those in the audience. [00:14:55] Vince Menzione: I, you know what, let’s talk about it. All [00:14:56] Darryl Peek: See, I’m from Philadelphia. [00:14:57] Vince Menzione: I didn’t know you were a family. My daughter went to Temple University. [00:14:59] Vince Menzione: Ah, [00:15:00] Darryl Peek: okay. That’s all I know. So Russell Conwell. So he was, a gentleman out of the Philadelphia area and he went around town to raise money and he wanted to raise money because he believed that there was a promise within a specific area. And as he continued to raise this money, he would tell a story. [00:15:14] Darryl Peek: And basically it was a story about a farmer in Africa. And the farmer in Africa, to make it really short was essentially looking to be become very wealthy. And because he wanted to become very wealthy, he believed that selling his farm and going off to a long distant land was the primary way for him to find diamonds. [00:15:28] Darryl Peek: And this farmer didn’t sold us. Sold his place, then went off to to this foreign land, and he ended up dying. And people thought that was the end of the story, but there was another farmer who bought that land and one time this big, and they called him the ot, came to the door and said you mind if I have some tea with you? [00:15:43] Darryl Peek: He said, all right, come on in. Have a drink. And as he had the drink, he looked upon the mantle and his mouth dropped. And then the farmer said what’s wrong? What do you say? He says, do you know what that is? No. He said no. Do you know what that is? He says, no. He said, that’s the biggest diamond I’ve ever seen, and the farmer goes. [00:16:01] Darryl Peek: That’s weird because there’s a bunch right in the back where I go grab my fruits and crops every day. So the idea of the acre diamonds and sometimes that you don’t need to go off to a far off land. It is actually sometimes right under your feet, and that is a story that helped fund the starting of Temple University. [00:16:16] Vince Menzione: I’m gonna need to take you at every single event so you can tell this story again. That’s an awesome job. Oh, I love it. And yeah, they founded a Temple University. Yeah. Which has become an incredible university. My daughter, like I said, my daughter’s a graduate, so we’re Temple fan. That’s great story. [00:16:31] Vince Menzione: That is a very cool, I didn’t realize you were a Philadelphia guy too, so that is awesome. Go birds. Go birds. All right, good. So let’s talk, I think we talked a little bit about your ecosystem approach, but maybe just a little bit more on this, like you said, like a lot of data, a lot of metrics but also a lot of these organizations also have to under understand the engineering side of things. [00:16:53] Vince Menzione: Oh, yeah. There’s a tremendous amount to become. Not everybody could just show up one day and become an elastic partner [00:16:58] Darryl Peek: absolutely. Absolutely. So take us [00:16:59] Vince Menzione: through that process. [00:17:00] Darryl Peek: Yeah. So one of the things that we are trying to mature and we have matured is our partner go to market. [00:17:06] Darryl Peek: So in order to join our partner ecosystem, you have to sign ’em through our partner portal. You have to sign our indirect reseller agreement. ’cause we do sell primarily within the public sector through distribution. And we only go direct if it is by exception. So you have to get justification through myself as well as our VP for public sector. [00:17:21] Darryl Peek: But we really do try to make sure that we can aggregate this because one thing that we have to monitor is terms and conditions. ’cause of course, working with the government, there’s a lot of terms and conditions. So we try to alleviate that by having it go through caresoft, they’re able to absorb some, so this way we can actually transact with the government. [00:17:36] Darryl Peek: In regards to the team though we try to really work closely with our solution architecture team. So this way we can develop clear enablement strategies with our partners so this way they know what it is we do, but also how to properly bring us up in a conversation. Also handle objections and also what are we doing to implement our solutions within other markets. [00:17:55] Darryl Peek: So those are things that we are doing as well as partner marketing. Top of funnel activity is really important, so we’re trying to differentiate what we’re doing with the field and field marketing. So you’re doing the leads and m qls and things of that nature also with partner marketing. So our partner marketing actually is driven by leads, but also we’re trying to transact. [00:18:10] Darryl Peek: And get Ps of which our partner deal registration. So that is how we align our partner go to market. And that is actually translating into our partner source outcomes. [00:18:18] Vince Menzione: And I think we have a slide that talks a little bit about your public sector partner strategy. [00:18:23] Darryl Peek: Oh yeah. Oh, I share that. So I thought maybe we could spin it. [00:18:25] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. [00:18:25] Vince Menzione: I know you we can’t see it, but they can. Oh, they can. Okay. Great. [00:18:29] Darryl Peek: There it’s there. [00:18:30] Vince Menzione: It’s career. [00:18:31] Darryl Peek: One thing, I think this was Einstein has said, if you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. So that was the one thing. So I always was a big fan of creating a one page strategy. [00:18:39] Darryl Peek: And based on this one page strategy one of the things when I worked at Salesforce it was really about a couple things and the saying, okay, what are your bookings? And if you don’t have bookings, what does your pipeline look like? If you don’t have pipeline, what does your prospecting look like? [00:18:51] Darryl Peek: Yeah. If you don’t have prospecting what does your account plan look like? And if you don’t have an account plan, why are you here? Why are you here? Exactly. So those are the things that I really talk to my team about is just really a, it’s about bookings. It’s about pipeline. It’s about planning, enablement and execution. [00:19:05] Darryl Peek: It’s about marketing, branding and evangelism, and also about operational excellence and how to execute. Very cool. So being able to do that and also I, since I came from Salesforce, I talk to my team a lot about Salesforce hygiene. So we really talk about that a lot. So make, making sure we’re making proper use of chatter, but also as we talk about utilizing ai, we just try to. [00:19:21] Darryl Peek: How do we simplify that, right? So if we’re using Zoom or we’re using Google, how do we make sure that we’re capturing those meeting minutes, translating that, putting that into the system, so therefore we have a record of that engagement with that partner. So this is a continuous threat. So this way I don’t have to call my partner manager the entire time. [00:19:36] Darryl Peek: I can look back, see what actions, see what was discussed, and say, okay, how can we keep this conversation going? Because we shouldn’t have to have those conversations every time. I shouldn’t have to text you to say, give me the download on every partner. Every time. How do we automate that? And that’s really where you’re creating this context window with your Genive ai. [00:19:53] Darryl Peek: I think they said what 75% of organizations are using one AI tool. And I think 1% are mature in that. But also a number of organizations, it’s 90% of organizations are using generative AI tools to some degree. So we are using gen to bi. We do use a number of them. We have elastic GPT. Nice little brand there. [00:20:11] Darryl Peek: But yeah, we use that for not only understanding what’s in our our repositories and data lakes and data warehouses, but also what are some answers that we can have in regards to proposal responses, RP responses, RFI, responses and the like. [00:20:23] Vince Menzione: And you’re reaching out to the other LLMs through your tool? [00:20:26] Darryl Peek: We can actually interact with any LLM. So we are a LLM Agnostic. [00:20:29] Vince Menzione: Got it. Yep. That’s fantastic. And this slide is we’ll make this available if you don’t have a, yeah, have a chance. We’ll share it. I [00:20:36] Darryl Peek: am happy to share, yeah. And obviously happy to talk, reach out about it. Of, of course. I simplified it in order to account for you, but one of the things that I talk about is mission, vision of values. [00:20:45] Darryl Peek: And as we start with that is what is your mission now? How is anybody from Pittsburgh, anybody steal a fan? Oh wow. No, there’s a steel fan over [00:20:54] Vince Menzione: here. There’s one here. There’s a couple of ’em are out here. So I feel bad. [00:20:57] Darryl Peek: The reason why I put immaculate in there is for the immaculate reception, actually. [00:21:00] Darryl Peek: Yes. And basically saying that if you ever seen that play, it was not pretty at all. It was a very discombobulated play. Yeah. And I usually say that’s the way that you work with partners too, because when that deal doesn’t come in, when you gotta make a call, when you’re texting somebody at 11 o’clock at night, when you’re trying to get that at, right before quarter end. [00:21:17] Darryl Peek: Yeah. Before the end of it. It really is difficult, but it’s really creating that immaculate experience. You want that partner to come back. I know it’s challenging, but I appreciate how you leaned in with us. Yes, absolutely. I appreciate how you work with us. I appreciate how you held our hand through the process, and that’s what I tell my team, that we have to create that partner experience. [00:21:32] Darryl Peek: And maybe that’s a carryover from Salesforce, Dave. I don’t know. But also when we talk about enhancing or accelerating our partner. Our public sector outcomes that is really working with the customer, right? So customer experience has to be part of it. Like all of us have to be focused on that North star, and that is really how do we service the customer, and that’s what we choose to do. [00:21:48] Darryl Peek: But also the internal part. So I used to survey my team many moves ago, and I said, if we don’t get 80% satisfaction rate from our employees how do we get 60% satisfaction rate from our customers? Yeah. So really focus on that employee success and employee satisfaction. It’s so important, is very important. [00:22:03] Darryl Peek: So being able to understand what are the needs of your employees? Are you really addressing their concerns and are you really driving them forward? Are you challenging them? Are you creating pathways for progression? So those are things that I definitely try to do with my team. As well as just really encouraging, inspiring, yeah. [00:22:19] Darryl Peek: And just making sure that they’re having fun at the same time. [00:22:21] Vince Menzione: It shows up in such, I, there’s an airline I don’t fly any longer, and it was a million mile member of and I know it’s because of the way they treat their employees. [00:22:29] Vince Menzione: Because it cascades Right? [00:22:30] Darryl Peek: It does. Culture is important. [00:22:32] Vince Menzione: Yeah. Absolutely. [00:22:32] Darryl Peek: What is it? What Anderson Howard they say what col. Mark Andresen culture eat strategy for [00:22:37] Vince Menzione: breakfast. He strategy for breakfast? Yes. Very much this has been insightful. I really enjoyed having you here today. Really a great, you’re a lot of fun. You’re a lot of fun. [00:22:43] Vince Menzione: Darry, isn’t you? Amazing. So thank you for joining us. Thank you all. Thank And you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be sticking around for a little while today. I’m sticking around for a little while. I’ll be back in little later. I think people are gonna just en enjoy having a conversation with you, a little sidebar. [00:22:55] Darryl Peek: Absolutely. I’m looking forward to it. Thank you all for having me. Glad to be here. And thank you for giving the time today. [00:23:01] Vince Menzione: Thank you Darryl, so much. So appreciate it. And you’re gonna have to come join me on this Story Diamond tool. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Ultimate Guide to Partnering. [00:23:12] Vince Menzione: We’re bringing these episodes to you to help you level up your strategy. If you haven’t yet, now’s the time to take action and think about joining our community. We created a unique place, UPX or Ultimate partner experience. It’s more than a community. It’s your competitive edge with insider insights, real-time education, and direct access to people who are driving the ecosystem forward. [00:23:38] Vince Menzione: UPX helps you get results, and we’re just getting started as we’re taking this studio. And we’ll be hosting live stream and digital events here, including our January live stream, the Boca Winter Retreat, and more to come. So visit our website, the ultimate partner.com to learn more and join us. Now’s the time to take your partnerships to the next level.

Allen and Joel are joined by Jeremy Heinks of CICNDT to discuss the critical need for pre-installation blade inspections, especially as safe-harbored blades from years past are rushed into service. They cover advanced NDT technologies including robotic CT scanning, blade bolt inspection for cracking issues, and how operators can extend turbine life beyond the typical 10-year repower cycle. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow. Allen Hall: Jeremy, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me. Well, the recent changes in the IRA bill are. Pushing a lot of projects forward very quickly at the moment, and as we’re learning, there’s a number of safe harbor blades sitting in yards and a rush to manufacture blades to get them up and meet the, uh, treasury department’s criteria for, for being started, whatever that means. At the moment, I think we’re gonna see a big question about the quality of the blades, and it seems to me. The cheapest time to quickly [00:01:00] look at your blaze before you start to hang them is while they’re still on the ground. And to get some n DT experience out there to make sure that what you’re hanging is appropriate. Are you starting to see that push quite yet? No, not not at Jeremy Heinks: the level we’d like to see it. Um, as far as getting the inspections in, yeah, we have been seeing the push to get the, get these blades out. Uh, but, uh, the, the, the few that we have been able to get our eyes on aren’t looking good. The quality definitely down. And we’ve just had a customer site come back with some, some findings that were surprising for a brand new blade that hasn’t been the up tower yet and in use. So, um, it is much easier for us to get the, uh, technology and the personnel to a blade that’s on the ground. It’s cheaper, it’s quicker. We can go through many, many more blades, uh, with inspections. Uh, it’s just access is just easier. Always comes down to access. Joel Saxum: That customer that you had there, like what was their [00:02:00]driver? Right? Did they feel the pain at some point in time? Did they, did they have suspicions of something not right? New factory? Like, I don’t know. Why would some, why is someone picking that over someone? Not because like you said, overwhelmingly. The industry doesn’t really do this. You know, even just getting visual inspections of blades on the ground before they get hung is tough sometimes with construction schedules and all these different things, moving parts. So you had someone that actually said, Hey, we want to NDT these blades. What was their driver behind that? Jeremy Heinks: So we, uh, we had done a previous, uh, route of inspections on some older ative of theirs that were, Speaker 5: um, Jeremy Heinks: getting. Kinda along in the tooth, if you will. Uh, so they’ve added some experience. They saw what we could bring to the table as far as results and, and, and information and data on those blades. Uh, and it all turned out to be, um, pretty reliable. So, um, you know, we educated them on, you know, if you have new blades coming in or even use the blades coming in for replacement, that it’s not a bad idea to get at least a, a sample it. And, uh, [00:03:00] basically that’s what they call us in to do. They had some brand new blades come in. For some new turbines they’re putting up. And, uh, they wanted the sampling. We did a sampling and the sample showed that, uh, they have an issue of these, these brand new blades. Joel Saxum: So, okay, so what happens then? Right? Because I’ve been a part of some of these factory audits and stuff, and when you catch these things in the factory, you’re like, Hey, where we got these 30 defects? And then the factory goes back against their form, their form, you know, their forms and they go, okay, material checklist is a, we’ll fix 24 of ’em. The other six are on you or whatever that may be. What happens when you find these things in the field at a construction site right? Then does that kick off a battle between the, the new operator and that OEM or, or what’s the action there? Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, so we’ve been on the OEM side and been through what you just explained, um, multiple times and helped a bunch of the OEMs on that stuff, that stuff. But unfortunately, when you’re in the field and you find the same thing, it’s, it’s a whole different ball game. Um, they typically. We won’t see any of that. We don’t, we won’t be able to [00:04:00] see what the OEM actually does unless we have informa, you know, information or channels that, that are a little bit different, uh, than normal to, uh, get that information. So, um, but yeah, so we, we’ll give this information over to the customer. Uh, they’ll go to their supplier and then that’ll turn into a. To a dance and, uh, where everybody’s trying to pass the buck, basically, right? So, um, unfortunately that’s the way it’s been. We will see how this one turns out. It, it all depends on, on the relationship between that OEM and the customer and the end user. Joel Saxum: So, so this is my, my last question about this and, and then I want to, of course, jump topics we have a lot of talk about here today. But the question being, okay, so say they do repairs. Is it then a good idea to bring you guys back in after those repairs are done to say NDT? Everything looks good here. Um, basically clear to fly. Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. [00:05:00] So, uh, post inspection on repairs is always a good idea. Um, the aviation side is, it’s commonplace to, uh, post in inspect repair. So yeah, definitely, uh, we’d wanna come back. Um, you know, and that’s something we’re working on too in-house as a, uh, working on a new training. Syllabus to where we can give some of the basic NDT tools to, uh, end users so that if a repair company would come in, they would be able to have their technicians do a quick, you know, quick test. Uh, it’s what we used to call like an operator level inspection. And then if they saw some of the stuff we trained ’em to that we could come back and, and bring in a level three or a level two and look at their information and then maybe do a reinspection if they thought they saw something that was bad. Allen Hall 2025: Joel, you and I had discussed a couple of months ago with an operator in the United States and the Midwest that was gonna be building a repowering, a wind farm with turbines, uh, that were a couple of years old. Remember that discussion about what version of [00:06:00] the blade are those? And it was an early version. I was surprised how long those blades had been sitting in the yard, and we said, well, it’s gonna have a B and C problem. You need to get somebody out there to inspect those blades before you hang them. That’s the perfect case for NDT to get out there and look because it wasn’t like every blade had a serial defect. It was just kind of a random thing that was happening. Do you remember that situation? Joel Saxum: Yeah, and it was really interesting too because you know, we’re on like that specific blade. We’re on like version nine of it out in the field right now. But since I think those were like in 20 19, 20 20, they had been safe harbored from they, those blades have the advantage of now having 3, 4, 5, 6 years of. History within the market of all of the issues that pop up. So we were able to tell that operator, Hey, since these things haven’t flown yet, we know it’s this, this, this, and this. You should have NDT come out here and do this. You should do this. This basically preemptive repair, this proactive measure before you fly these [00:07:00] things. Um, and I think what we see right now, Alan, like you said, just to open the episode with IRA bill changes and. And these new legislation coming up, there’s a lot of stuff coming out of Safe Harbor that’s gonna get flown. Allen Hall 2025: Oh, it’s gonna have a huge, uh, amount of blades that have been sitting there for a couple of years. And, but if you, the operator haven’t used those blades or don’t know the service history of those blades, it’s kind of a mystery and you better be calling other operators that are using them. But ultimately, when it gets down to it, before you hang those blades, and I know everybody’s in a rush to hang blades. You better take a look at ’em with NDT, especially if there are known issues with those blades. And the the problem is you can’t just do a walk down, which is what I think a lot of operators are doing right now. Send a technician down to make a look. Make sure the blade’s all in one piece, like I guess that’s where they’re at. Or we’ll walk inside and kick the tires and make sure all the bond lines are there. It’s a lot more complicated than that, and particularly if you know there’s a source of problem on a particular [00:08:00] blade, you can’t see it. It can be buried deep inside. How are you gonna know without having somebody with NDT experience? Joel Saxum: This is the interesting thing too, here with that specific case that that developer will call ’em. They said, I talked with the OEM. They said there’s nothing wrong with these blades. And they like, that was like, they’re like, they’re like, yeah, we checked with them. They said, there’s no issues. I said, you must have been talking to a sales guy because anybody from that engineering team is gonna tell you that. Or maybe they don’t want to, right? They, of course they don’t want to come clean with this, but that’s why we, that’s why we have the, like the uptime network and people that you can talk to and things of these sort out there and experts like Jeremy, right? The C-I-C-N-D-T guys, because they’ve seen the worst of the worst, Jeremy Heinks: right? We typically only get called in when it’s the worst of the worst, but to, uh, toss ’em with more wrinkle. Toss one more wrinkle into the whole storage thing. Uh, we got a project a few years back where the storage site, like, ’cause the blades had been stored for like 15 years, like seven years prior. The storage [00:09:00]site was underwater for like three weeks, like 20 feet. Like it was a massive flood, 20 feet of water or 10 feet of water, whatever it was. So the, it was a lot of water anyway. The bottom two thirds of these blades were. Rotted because of water logs being sitting in the water. And of course over the last seven years they got cleaned up. They looked good ’cause of the rain and everything and it looked bad. So we get out there, we’re scanning laminates and you get like halfway down the blade and it just with the, you know, terrible signal. And so we look back on the history and sure enough there was floods in the area. So those are things you gotta look at too. These blades are coming out of these long-term storage. I mean, how were they stored? How what has gone, what weather has been through that storage area in the last whatever years? Uh, because all that affects these blades when they’re on the ground. I mean, they’re, they’re, they’re fairly secure when they’re up tur up turbine and they’re meant to be in that environment. They’re not really meant to be getting just hit hard with weather when they’re on the ground. ’cause they’re [00:10:00] not sealed up. They’re not, you know, you know, a lot of different things there. Joel Saxum: Another ground issue, and I, I’ve, I’ve heard of this one through my insurance connections and stuff like that, is, um, when blades are on the ground, there’s, this is not an abnormal thing. It happens quite regularly that it shouldn’t, but it does. That heavy, strong winds will come through and can blow the blades over when they’re sitting in their chairs, right at the, or they’ll start, yeah, they’ll start fluttering in ways that they’re not designed to flutter. Right? They’re designed to take the gravity loads and take the force loads the way they are up tower when they’re sitting on the ground, it’s a completely different game. So if they’ve been there, if they’ve experienced an extreme weather event or something of that sort, NDT is the only way you’re gonna figure out if something is really wrong with ’em. Jeremy Heinks: Right. And that rolls into handling as well. So shipping, handling at the plant, handling from, you know, in between. Different movements. Uh, like you said, they, they’re designed to be in an environment that’s hung from a turbine and, uh, get those types of, you know, elements and the winds and everything on. That’s not everything we do to when on [00:11:00] the ground. So Allen Hall 2025: turbines, a lot of times, even at the blades are in storage. They get moved around a good bit. And what we’re finding, talking to operators is that a lot of the damage we’re seeing later on in some of these blades. Was most likely due to transportation. So maybe it was on the ship on the way over, or maybe when they got trucked to the, uh, storage site or they got bumped into. It does seem to be a lot more of that. And the lift points seem to be another area where, you know, you know, I think there’s some, uh, need to be taken a deeper look at. Obviously the root bushings are a problem area for almost everybody at the moment, but also further out on the blade. There seems to be. Uh, repeatable damage areas that you see that you wouldn’t be able to detect until you got the blade spin. And, and then you see these cracks develop. But a lot of that can be sussed out on the ground, especially with knowledgeable people. Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. So that’s just another reason for, you know, pre-installation inspection. Um, you know, a lot [00:12:00] of places you’ve got experts moving these things, you know, experts lifting ’em, whatnot. But when they’re in a, they’re on a ship or they’re in a yard. A lot of times the guys that are professionals at moving them aren’t there. So it’s gonna get moved by somebody and they’re not gonna know exactly what they’re doing, even if they’re trying their best to be, make sure they’re following procedure or whatnot. But, um, you never know who’s moving on, who’s, you know, what, what, what kind of skills or the experience they have. Joel Saxum: So, so that brings me into another question here, Jeremy. Right? We’re talking about skills and tools and these kind of things in the industry. When we say NDT, I would like everybody listening to know that when we say NDT, we’re talking about a wide gamut of technologies, of solutions, of products, of, uh, you know, methodologies for inspection here. NDT is just a broad scheme for non-destructive testing. We wanna see inside of something without cutting it, breaking it, whatever we have to do. [00:13:00]So, can you, can you walk us through the approach that kind of CIC will use? So, hey, customer comes to me, we have this issue. Okay. You guys have, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40, 50 different ways of doing things. Um, but how does that conversation usually start? What does that process look like for an operation? Jeremy Heinks: So it, I mean, it all depends on it’s case by case with what kind of issue they’re looking for. But, uh, we recently had our. Our, our lab opened up in, in Ogden, Utah, where we’ve got, um, a lot of in-house technologies now, like robotic ct, uh, laser ultrasound, um, and then urography, all the normal stuff. We typically throw out these things, but deposit focus, but we’re able to do just about anything. A lot of advanced materials, and of course a lot of that came from us servicing the DOD, the defense and the, the aviation, it’s space side of the house. But now that we have them all in one place. If a wind customer has an, let’s say they have, um, a root issue or they have a bottom line issue, or they’ve got, um, you know, or these, uh, carbon fiber [00:14:00] main spars, you know, you’ve got some new types of defects to out of these. Typically what would happen was you cut into these things to see what’s wrong. And of course, we’ve all seen what cutting composites does it, you know, it can be kind of messy and it can damage a defect that’s existing so you don’t have a good look at it. With these technologies we have in house now, especially with the CT part of it, we can do a inspection. We can see everything of a area that is unmolested, right? So we can, let’s say you find something and you’re scanning, let’s say you are an OEM and you’re doing ultrasonic inspection or thermography, and you find something in house, well, you can cut around that, send it to us, we can scan it and get a 3D image, you know, of the full material thickness. Really break that down without having the damage, the defect. Uh, and this is stuff that hasn’t been really gone into on the wind side yet. We do it on aviation and space all the time, um, for defect characterization. And then, you know, we have a really good picture of what’s going on there. [00:15:00] Uh, we characterize defects that way and we can also come up with better inspection solutions that way. Allen Hall 2025: Well, that’s interesting because I’ve seen it in aviation all the time. I assume they were doing it in wind. You have to have a way to understand what the defects are and when you see one, or especially if you don’t understand what is causing it, you just can’t cross section that you want to take a large section out and then scan it. Understand what is likely the source of that problem that’s not being done. And when, too much at the moment, I think it is, but it’s, Jeremy Heinks: it’s finally getting cheap enough that, uh, it’s. It’s an option, right? So it’s, it’s always been kind of expensive, but the equipment has come, is coming down in cost and we have a very unique system in-house. It’s not typical to your normal CT system. So we use, uh, a robotic system, a cobots, so we can, we do very large, very large parts, uh, and, uh, composites of course are typically lower energy. So [00:16:00] it’s, um, pretty much tailored for that type of part. Where other CT systems may, might be tailored to other, other types of parts. Allen Hall 2025: So then you can actually take some significantly large size pieces. Then what’s the, what’s the biggest size part you can take and, and get some data out of? Jeremy Heinks: I mean, again, comes outta the time and money. Uh, right now our largest piece is probably, um. Probably like a 10 foot by six foot section. Allen Hall 2025: Whoa. Jeremy Heinks: I mean, in theory we could do a, we could do a whole wing in theory, you know, um, which could be a, you know, a decent sized blade even. But, uh, that would require specialized bay, um, and some extra tooling. But, uh, right now in-house, yeah, we could do, uh, fairly large sample. Joel Saxum: The first time I ran into you, uh, Jeremy in the wind industry was probably three, four years ago. I think, and you may not even have known this, but it was on an, it was on an RCA case for an insurance company, and they’re like, we, [00:17:00] we did the, our, our initial, where the team I was with at the time, our initial RFI, Hey, we need this data, this data, this data. And they sent, they sent us this just library of stuff and they were like. Can you use this? What is this? And it was all NDT data from, from the issue that we were inspecting. It was like, this is the most amazing batch of data we have ever received on an RCA. Who are these people? Where did this come from? Um, and I think that, that, that was my first, ’cause, you know, from the oil and gas side, NDT, that’s just regular. You’re doing it all offshore platforms, like you’re always doing NDT. It’s just, it’s just an accepted thing. Uh, you know, and the, the, of course the offshore technicians for NDT, the, the rates are a lot different. Um, and so I was like, okay, yeah, we we’re using nd this is when I first was really getting going and win. I was like, oh, great, we’re using NDT and Win. But since then, it’s still, it’s been. Very specialized use, you know, RCAs or like a special repair or something like that. You just don’t see it very widespread. And, and it’s, it’s frustrating because, you know, from, I guess from my past, like you can see the value of this [00:18:00] tool and you see some tertiary kind of things out there where people are doing little NDT with robotics and this and that, but like, it’s like the industry hasn’t grasped onto it. Like, I don’t know if the engineers just don’t, just don’t know that it’s available or know the value of it or why they’re missing it. Because you go back to the idea of, um. You go to your general practitioner or the doctor and say like, okay, yeah, you got your knee hurts. Okay. Yeah. Shake it around a little bit. Like, okay, we’re gonna, we need to prob maybe do surgery here and before we do that, let’s go get an X-ray or a MRI. So we know exactly what we’re supposed to do. When we get in there, we make it efficient. We make bang, bang, bang, clean cut and all, and we’re done. That’s the same thing as like, uh, to me, a really deep lightning repair. You know what I mean? We hear these war stories all the time of people saying like, oh yeah, they quoted us 20,000. And this team quoted us 50,000, and then the $20,000 team, we gave the project to them, they got in there and it ended up being a hundred thousand. Well, if you would’ve spent 15 grand or 10 grand, or five grand or whatever it may be to get some NDT work done on this thing before [00:19:00] you opened it all up, you might know what you were getting into and be more efficient. Come with the right kit, less standby time, the right technicians on the job, all this stuff, just like your surgery on your knee. I mean, have you seen anybody picking up that idea in the wind industry? Jeremy Heinks: Not as, not as much as I’d like. Um, there’s been a coup, there’s some of the OEMs have tried to automate, tried to bring it in. Um, most of ’em do some inspection. Um, and it really is the plant by plant, depending on what kind of support they have. We all know whenever things are times are tight or, uh, or you need to have the cycle time as the most important thing. You know, quality is the first one to get cut. So, you know, that’s, that makes it a tough. A tough sell in a lot of people’s books ’cause we add cycle time and we add costs, uh, at the manufacturer. Um, but, um, you know, the other thing I’ve seen is, you know, when they do try and implement something where, let’s say some automation where they could do this stuff quickly and, [00:20:00] you know, over the mass produced parts that they have, um, you know, they, they go to an automation company that doesn’t know much about NDT. If they do know about NDT, it’s, it’s not wind. NDT. So. Um, you know, the, they would be better off if they would contact, you know, a company like ours or there’s a few of us out there where all we, like a majority of our work is in the wind industry. Um, there’s a, there’s a couple in Europe, there’s a couple over here. Get those guys in first. It doesn’t have to be us. Um, but get somebody with practical Yeah. You know, experience and that practical part is the most important part, and have them help you with a practical approach. To the inspection with automation. I mean, that’s, there’s simple and easy ways to do this that just haven’t been done yet. Allen Hall 2025: Um, Jeremy Heinks: not gonna say it’s gonna be cheap, but it should be, um, usable. It’s not gonna end up on a shelf. Like I always keep telling everybody, all these systems, just they, I’ve seen millions of dollars spent and it just sits on a shelf [00:21:00] collecting dust. Happens all the time. Um, and that’s in the field as well. Uh, we see a lot of really cool robotics sink coming out. A lot of, uh, drone. Interior drone stuff, exterior, drone stuff, uh, and just looking for a practical approach. You know, these guys, a lot of ’em come at it with, um, really good intentions, but, uh, they don’t have the experience needed to, uh, know what they’re gonna run into when they do these, these types of applications and therefore, kind of missed the mark. Allen Hall 2025: Jeremy, I’ve been to a site recently and noticed up on the whiteboard. Blade bolts were their particular issue. And I saw a couple of the blade bolts sitting in the shop there and they had cracks, big cracks and broken blade bolts. And I thought, man, that’s a huge problem. And the number of turbines that were listed was incredible. It’s not technicians and mechanics are out there all day fixing these blade bolts ’cause there’s so many bolts per blade. You just multiply the numbers like wow, they have a huge [00:22:00] problem. The issue is you can’t really tell which Blade Bolt has a crack in it while it’s installed, unless it falls out, and they were having that problem too. How can you attack that problem from an NDT standpoint? Can you suss out what bolts are likely to fail or, or in the process of failing? Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, so in bolt inspection is isn’t new. Um, it’s gonna, sounds kind of new to the wind industry, but uh, oil and gas aviation. We’ve all done, we’ve been doing bolt inspection on those for quite a long time. So even in, uh, on marine with the, you know, sail sailing vessels with the mask bolts. Uh, so, uh, these are things that we can do ultrasonically, um, you know, whether it’s stalled and look for cracks at different, uh, lengths. Um, of course we need a little bit of information about the bolt itself, the material, um, design length, all that stuff. But, uh, no, we can definitely do a, a, uh, inspection. Whether it installed or not installed on the bolts? Uh, you mean it wouldn’t even be a [00:23:00] bad idea to get the bolts inspected before they get used for installation? You know, that could be done with, uh, a few different methods that are pretty quick. Uh, but, uh, the other thing we’re working on, uh, actively is a monitoring system also where, uh, we’ll be able to attach the sensors to the end of the bolt and, uh, it’ll be able to, uh. Monitor the, the health of the individual bolts over time. Allen Hall 2025: Can you see inclusions, or what is the defect that’s causing these bolts to start to crack? Is it something in the casting of the bolts themselves or the machining? Are they overheating them when they’re getting machined or not tempering them correctly? All the Jeremy Heinks: above. So we can definitely see that, um, you know, on new bolts you’ll, you’ll be able to see if there’s manufacturing defects or if there’s material defects, um, that maybe didn’t get caught during manufacturing. Or, um, you know, receiving inspection. Allen Hall 2025: I have one of these bolts that’s like two and a half feet long you can actually see inside and tell me where that defect lies. ’cause you cannot see it on the outside when they’re all [00:24:00] finished. Jeremy Heinks: Right. Typically we use ultrasound, uh, for, uh, quick inspection on that. Um, I mean, if it’s out of the, the turbine, you know, first year x-ray and make particle, that kind of trend, you know, everything gets your to outta, but the ut seems to be pretty, pretty straightforward on those. We’d even signed the cracks that are in the threads if we had the right, um, bit jangle to the, uh, the beam. Allen Hall 2025: Okay. So if you just received a whole truckload of these bolts, which is sort of the quality that you’re coming in right now, you could ut inspect each one of those before you took ’em up tower and, and spent all the money to install ’em and make sure that the manufacturer actually is delivering a proper product. Are Joel Saxum: they doing that at the factory? Why are they not doing that at the factory? Jeremy Heinks: Because Allen Hall 2025: they’re told they’re Jeremy Heinks: good when they get ’em from a supplier. Allen Hall 2025: That seems like a huge, if I’m the attorney at Blade Bulk Company, China Limited, I would want to make sure that I won’t gonna kill somebody because, ’cause those things are falling out and they’re just gonna [00:25:00] lawn daughter it underneath the turbine. Joel Saxum: And a hard hat’s not gonna save you from a bolt coming down. Allen Hall 2025: Well, you could tell by the number of problems that they were having that they had replaced some of these bolts. The new bolts had also had problems. So as a, a sequence of replacements, at some point you have to stop that process. You have to validate the part. You’re putting in the turbine is correct, right? I mean, when you have to do that Jeremy Heinks: on my side, you, you get what you pay for. And if you’re gonna go for cheap, you should probably spend a little bit to make sure what you’re getting is Allen Hall 2025: somewhat decent. So how, what would that entail to check them in the o and m building and say, you got a hundred bolts show up on site. What are we talking about in terms of time to make sure that at least the, the sanity check is being done before you spend the money to install these bolts? I mean, if we put together something, it could be done a few minutes per bolt. Throw me a, throw me a time and a dollar amount. Are we talking about millions of dollars or thousands of dollars for this? Thousands of dollars [00:26:00] Strong. Jeremy Heinks: We could probably get a system together that would be extremely cheap and effective. So I mean, if there’s, if that’s something that needs to exist in the industry, then we can definitely put together something that we can sell. Allen Hall 2025: I think people don’t realize that that is a thing. They don’t know that that’s possible. You can’t go to Amazon and buy a blade, bolt checker that’s not there. You can buy a lot of things on Joel Saxum: Amazon though. Allen Hall 2025: Let me ask you about the thing. I’ve seen the sort of the unscientific blade bolt check. Where they, have you seen this Jeremy, where they hang the bolt on one end and they tap it in the other and it, and it rings right? It makes this kind of a bell noise and they think they can hear if there’s a defect inside of there. Can you hear if there’s an inclusion or some sort of crystalline defect inside this blade bolt by tapping it? That’s, it’s a resonance test and Jeremy Heinks: I, I think you could definitely tell, you can definitely tell if there’s something going on. I think you would have to have a good control though. So if you, you have to have, you’d have to have one bid [00:27:00] vote. To balance against, I would imagine, and someone with good hearing. Yeah, I, it’s tap testing with anything is always subject to so many things. So it’s, uh, it’s better than, Allen Hall 2025: better than nothing probably. But, uh, how much better than nothing? Is it just slightly better or is it like, well you get, at least you’re getting the worst ones out of the lot. Uh, would it even do that? Unless I had it announced to, to try it, um, I would wanna. Say either way, but you see the little tap hammers, I’ve been on site and seen the little tap hammers sitting on guys’ desks that are the, you know, the, uh, calibrated tap test tool to see for DAS, that is not an easy tool to use. And it’s not even right for all the applications because it only, it’ll see something on the surface, but where, what can’t it see? Jeremy Heinks: So there is a regulated. Way to do tap tests. There’s, [00:28:00]it’s, as you have a certified tap test that you have to have, uh, noise levels and the environment have to be at below a certain amount, your, your guy doing, the person doing the test has to have a hearing check annually, and it has to be at a certain level. Um, the tap hammer has to be, is proportional to the thickness of material you’re looking at. ’cause if you’re looking at some, I mean, it’s only good for so, so thick. Like if you’re looking at. 10 millimeters, 15 millimeters fine. But once you get past 20, you’re gonna use a heavy hammer. And I’ve seen hammers in some plants that were probably causing damage, you know, ’cause they were so heavy, like, and they’re just, it was a piece of rebar with a ball bearing welded on the end of it, and they’re just hammering away. And it was so loud in the bay that even when they got lucky, when it crossed the dry glass area, they didn’t hear it. They just kept on rolling. Joel Saxum: Man, I thought, I thought a tap test was literally like a technician with a, with a, like a one euro coin in their hand or something. Just like ding ding [00:29:00] d ding, ding, ding. Like, that’s my tap test. Like you got a quarter. Jeremy Heinks: I have done a lot of tap tests, but it was like on radars where you had like two layers of carbon fiber and it was super thin and you could really hear, it works sometimes, but you just have, it’s got limitations just like any other method of inspection. So, and if people just. Allen Hall 2025: Don’t abide Jeremy Heinks: by Allen Hall 2025: this. If you have a technician roll into the o and m building, listen to Def Leppard on 11, then you’re probably not picking the right guy to do the tap test because it does take a lot of sensitivity to hear these minor changes. It’s not easy. Or the Lake Green, Ozzy Osborne. Yeah, right. If you see a, an Ozzy sticker on the guy’s pickup truck, probably not the right choice for the uh, tap test expert. The funniest thing ever. Jeremy Heinks: On the aviation side, we’ve gone to so many aviation or space group areas that use tap test and it’s always the oldest guy that has the hardest hearing, that’s doing the test every time, every Allen Hall 2025: time [00:30:00] they pass the most stuff. That’s why production doesn’t slow down. You said it, not me. I wanna expand the scope just for a minute. Uh, there’s gonna be a lot of, a lot of sites right now because of the changes in the IRA bill that are not going to be able to. Uh, get their next round of production tax credits and reapply because they’re gonna miss this window, right? So you have blades that are seven and eight years old, or turbines eight, seven, or eight years old. You’re not gonna be in that window of opportunity pretty much depending on what happens with the treasury rules. That thing is like it’s going to force operators into taking a deeper look at the health status of their turbines, maybe more than they have in the past to know, am I good for another 10 years, or if I do a little bit of preemptive maintenance on my existing fleet, can I get ’em 10 years, maybe 15 years? That’s the look I think that everybody’s trying to evaluate right now, and I think the [00:31:00] key to all of that is to actually have some NDT data. To actually look inside and to see, do I have a blade root issue that’s still early, that it’s gonna pop up at year 12? Do I have a cracking issue that I need to go take a look at? How does that factor into the planning over the next year, 18 months? For me, it was a little eyeopening when we went Jeremy Heinks: down that and visited our friends in Australia, and that’s kind of how they live, right? With their, their wind farms. They, they have to make ’em last. And it was, it was eye-opening and I, I just had a conversation with one last week. One of the people we met down there and they were looking into, uh, main bearings, a pitch bearing, and they’re cracking, right? So these are things that can be inspected with ultrasound or other things, and we can find these cracks internally. Like this is stuff that we don’t get to see much in the US or, or, you know, markets like ours because they get replaced, right? Everything gets just, we have a throwaway attitude when it comes to blades because of, you know, repowering and other things. Um, [00:32:00] where. Places like Australia or like in the islands where we’ve got a customer, that’s not how they look at it. These things have to last 30 years, you know, or longer, you know. So, uh, inspection and preventive maintenance is, is is, uh, the way to look, way to go. It. I mean, again, oil and gas, the stuff they have has to last a long damn time. A lot. You know, they do preventative maintenance. They have repair schedules or replacement schedules, all this stuff. And maybe we gotta start looking at that stuff a little more smartly on our side. Um, and, uh, budget for more inspection on these things that we know will go bad over time. And it’s not necessarily just the blade, but other parts of the turbine as well. You know, we’ve got a a yup. Bearing we’re looking at too. And that’s, that’s a pretty large. Part you have a crack in it, but Joel Saxum: ha bearing. Jeremy Heinks: Yeah. So these are things that didn’t crack. So we’re looking at, uh, with different inspection methods as well. [00:33:00] So, Allen Hall 2025: so do you think the roles of reversing that the Australian European methodology to keep turbines up and running is going to be applied to the states, and how is that going to transfer that knowledge transfer gonna work because it. The staffs in. A lot of us operators are set up for that 10 year period. Like they, they don’t really think about year 11 anymore. They haven’t for a number of years. How do they get spooled up on that and what resources are they going to need to get to year 15 and 20? If I was them, I would be reaching out to Jeremy Heinks: our partners in Australia or Europe and ask those questions. And a lot of these comp, a lot of these large energy companies are not just us. They’re. Multiple, you know, areas of the world that they, they brought in. So they have, they should have the knowledge and the leverage in house. They’re just gonna have to connect those people or, you know, people, people, people like you guys are gonna be able to, you know, bring that knowledge and connect those people. ’cause I mean, you guys are great at connecting people for [00:34:00] sure. Joel Saxum: That’s what we, we try to say that to everybody though, too. Every time we go to, like, Hamburg is next year, right? The, the Hamburg is to me is the best wind show in the world. Hamburgers next year. Wind Europe is coming up. Like if you’re a US operator, if you, if you’re, you name it, one of the big conglomerates that has people on both sides of the pond. Yeah. Connect up internally. Come on. Get your act together. But the other side of it is, is there’s a lot of people here that aren’t, they just don’t know. You know, there’s a lot of operators that are very large here. They don’t have anything else anywhere else. Go to Hamburg, go to Wind Europe, go, go over there, just go to the conference, see the technology, see the innovations, talk to the people, have some conversations because it will be eye-opening and you know, and, and there is another one too that I think is a very important, um, there’s some ISPs that go across the pond, back and forth, and some of these good ISPs have a lot of really good knowledge about what goes on back and forth because there’s a different operating model over there as well. There’s a lot of the. Financial asset owners that [00:35:00] just have the plants and they entrust someone later on in life to manage it for ’em. Where these ISPs have 20 vestas engineers and 20 Siemens engineers and 20 SGRE engineer or you know, all these people there. So there’s, there is a way to get this information back and forth, but you’re a hundred percent correct here in this conversation. I guess the, all the three of us here. We’re staring at, uh, a cliff that we need to figure out how to get wings on before we, we don’t want it to be like the red, the red Bull thing, where every, just into the water. We don’t wanna do that. We wanna fly up the cliff. Jeremy Heinks: But we’ve seen, we’ve seen this too, at some of the, the o and m focused, you know, show or conferences or gatherings. The ISPs aren’t, aren’t brought in ’cause they’re scared. It turns into a sales pitch. Um, but again, I like the one we had in Australia last year. That was great. It was, hey. This isn’t a sales pitch, just tell ’em. I mean, most of us know, I mean, I, I’m gonna be up there speaking. I’m not, I don’t have to do a sales pitch. If I, if what I’m saying is valuable to somebody, they’re gonna come find me, [00:36:00] which is what happened after that. You know, people reach out, you know that they’re gonna be like, oh, that I have that issue. I’m gonna go talk to this guy. You don’t have to do a sales pitch, just say, Hey, this is what we, what we found. These are the things we ran into as we do these things. And just keep it about the, uh, about the, about the problems. That we’re facing? Allen Hall 2025: Well, yeah, that’s gonna be the key for the next couple of years, just because a lot of the engineers and staff on the United States, uh, have not been to a lot of conferences and talk to technical people because they haven’t needed to. It’s more of, Hey, I need to keep the blade running a couple more months and then we’re gonna move on to the next project. We got a Repowering project going on. It’s been in that sort of build mode for a number of years, and that whole. Logistics, uh, internal workflow is going to change where they need to be bringing outside resources in to help them understand what they’re missing or what key components do they have over in Denmark or Germany or France that we don’t have on staff at the minute, and why do [00:37:00] they have it? One of those is going to be NDT and a lot of it, I think just because of the age of the turbines and the. I would say the era in which they were built, it’s gonna lead themselves into more inspection. That’s, I think, an avenue for C-I-C-N-D-T to explore, obviously. But I think the key is to get the engineers and the sort of the maintenance staff out into the world again, and to come to some of these conferences. Like j when Jeremy speaks, you should be there listening because he’s gonna give you all the answers in about 30 minutes of what you need to go do. That’s the key. Right? Jeremy Heinks: Right, right. And I mean, not just myself, but anybody in a position where you’ve got knowledge and experience that would benefit the whole industry, um, you know, certain volunteering, get, get out there and uh, and pass the, you know, pass the word out. You know, it’s like, you know, we had this thing in the NDT industry where. A certain generation of the, the older guys that had all this experience, all our senior level threes, you know, back then it was, you [00:38:00] wanted to hold everything in because that was your key, that was your ticket to getting a payday. Right. But ended up is when those feasible people all retired or, or worse. Um, then though that knowledge got passed down and uh, it was all kept up. And you look at, look at the aviation industry, the fumbles they’ve had lately with quality. And that’s because of that. ’cause they don’t talk to each other, none of that. They, they this year, all these problems they’re having right now in aviation stuff that they took care of in the fifties, right. And they just forgot. So now we get, have a chance to try and not do that in the wind industry. Um, you know, if you’re an expert in something, get out there. And, I mean, it’s tough. Like I don’t like talking in front of big crowds or anything, but. It’s, uh, once you get rolling and people get engaged and with guys like you to help out, you know, it’s, it’s not a bad type. Just set the ball in the tee and let you take a whack at it. But you could be in the difference between somebody having a whole farm, uh, a wind farm, go, go down, or they have a, like we’ve come across people that have had [00:39:00] blades or turbines offline for weeks, if not months, because they have an issue they don’t know they can do anything about. And then they bring us in and like, Hey, we did the inspection. This is repairable. Or we did the inspection. You should just get rid of this blade or, or whatever. It’s just they’ve been paralyzed and that, I don’t think that’s, you know, something that needs to happen Allen Hall 2025: either. Well, they shouldn’t be paralyzed. They should be calling C-I-C-N-D-T or going to the website, cic ndt.com. Get ahold of Jeremy, get ahold of the staff because they have a, a tremendous amount of knowledge about blades, about how to inspect them and how to keep the turbines running. Quickly, yes, it costs a little bit of money, but it’s well worth it when you have these turbines down for months on end, and I’ve seen that this year. It’s insane. They should have called. C-I-C-N-D-T and gotten their turbines back up and running. Jeremy, how can people reach you directly? Can they get ahold of you on LinkedIn? Jeremy Heinks: Yeah, get on uh LinkedIn and just search Jeremy Hikes or you can go to our website, uh, ct.com and [00:40:00] we’ve Allen Hall 2025: got links to uh, get ahold of us there and go to some of the wind conferences because Jeremy’s gonna be there laying down the knowledge on NDT and you won’t want to miss it. So, Jeremy, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We love having you. Thanks for having me.

From surprise unveilings to one-of-a-kind experiences, excitement is building for the 2026 Detroit Auto Show. But it's about more than just horsepower. This year, SAE International is co-sponsoring Media and Industry Days, where OEMs, suppliers, tech leaders, and students come together for vehicle debuts, industry insights, and future-focused conversations.   Listen in as Sam Klemet, Executive Director of the Detroit Auto Dealers Association, to discuss what visitors can expect this year, including new STEM-driven, career-focused activities designed to inspire future engineers. He also highlights the show's multi-million-dollar philanthropic and economic impact, and how its growing emphasis on education, talent development, and innovation continues to reflect the true spirit of the Motor City.   We'd love to hear from you. Share your comments, questions and ideas for future topics and guests to podcast@sae.org. Don't forget to take a moment to follow SAE Tomorrow Today — a podcast where we discuss emerging technology and trends in mobility with the leaders, innovators and strategists making it all happen—and give us a review on your preferred podcasting platform.   Follow SAE on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Follow host Grayson Brulte on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.

Allen, Joel, and Rosemary break down the Trump administration’s sudden halt of five major offshore wind projects, including Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind and parts of Vineyard Wind, over national security claims the hosts find questionable. They also cover the FCC’s ban on new DJI drone imports and what operators should do now, plus Fraunhofer’s latest wind research featured in PES Wind Magazine. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by Strike Tape, protecting thousands of wind turbines from lightning damage worldwide. Visit strike tape.com. And now your hosts, Alan Hall, Rosemary Barnes, Joel Saxon, and Yolanda Padron. Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Allen Hall: Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall, and I’m here with. Rosemary Barnes in Australia and Joel Saxon is down in Austin, Texas. Yolanda Padron is on holiday, and well, there’s been a lot happening in the past 24 hours as we’re recording this today. If you thought the battle over offshore wind was over based on some recent court cases, well think again. The Trump administration just dropped the hammer on five major offshore wind projects. Exciting. National security concerns. The Secretary of the Interior, Doug Bergham announced. The immediate pause affecting projects from Ted Eor, CIP and Dominion Energy. So Coastal [00:01:00] Virginia, offshore wind down in Virginia, right? Which is the one we thought was never gonna be touched. Uh, the Department of War claims classified reports show these giant turbines create radar interference that could blind America’s defenses. Half of vineyard winds, turbines are already up and running, producing power, by the way. Uh, and. I guess they, it sounds like from what I can see in more recent news articles that they turn the power off. They just shut the turbines off even though those turbines are fully functioning and delivering power to shore. Uh, so now the question is what happens? Where does this go? And I know Osted is royally upset about it, and Eor obviously along with them, why not? But the whole Denmark us, uh, relationship is going nuclear right now. Joel Saxum: I think here’s a, here’s a technical thing that a lot of people might not know. If you’re in the wind industry in the United States, you may know this. There’s a a few sites in the northern corner of Colorado that are right next to Nebraska, [00:02:00] and that is where there is a strategic military installations of subsurface, basically rocket launches and. And in that entire area, there is heavy radar presence to be able to make sure that we’re watching over these things and there are turbines hundreds of meters away from these launch sites at like, I’ve driven past them. Right? So that is a te to me, the, the radar argument is a technical mute point. Um, Alan, you and I have been kind of back and forth in Slack. Uh, you and I and the team here, Rosemary’s been in it too, like just kind of talking through. Of course none of us were happy. Right. But talking through some of the points of, of some of these things and it’s just like basically you can debunk almost every one of them and you get down to the level where it is a, what is the real reasoning here? It’s a tit for tat. Like someone doesn’t like offshore wind turbines. Is it a political, uh, move towards being able to strengthen other interests and energy or what? I don’t know. ’cause I can’t, I’m not sitting in the Oval Office, but. [00:03:00] At the end of the day, we need these electrons. And what you’re doing is, is, is you’re hindering national security or because national security is energy security is national security, my opinion, and a lot of people’s opinions, you’re hindering that going forward. Allen Hall: Well, let’s look at the defense argument at the minute, which is it’s, it’s somehow deterring, reducing the effectiveness of ground radars, protecting the shoreline. That is a bogus argument. There’s all kinds of objects out on the water right now. There’s a ton of ships out there. They’re constantly moving around. To know where a fixed object is out in the water is easy, easy, and it has been talked about for more than 15 years. If you go back and pull the information that exists on the internet today from the Department of Defense at the time, plus Department of Interior and everybody else, they’ve been looking at this forever. The only way these turbines get placed where they are is with approval from the Department of Defense. So it isn’t like it didn’t go through a review. It totally did. They’ve known about this for a long, long time. So now to bring up this [00:04:00] specious argument, like, well, all of a sudden the radar is a problem. No, no. It’s not anybody’s telling you it’s a classified. Piece of information that is also gonna be a bogus argument because what is going along with that are these arguments as well, the Defense Department or Department of War says it’s gonna cause interference or, or some degradation of some sort of national defense. Then the words used after it have nothing to do with that. It is, the turbines are ugly, the turbines are too tall. It may interfere, interfere with the whales, it may interfere with fishing, and I don’t like it. Or a, a gas pipeline could produce more power than the turbines can. That that has nothing to do with the core argument. If the core argument is, is some sort of defense related. Security issue, then say it because it, it can’t be that complicated. Now, if you, if you knew anything about the defense department and how it operates, and also the defenses around the United States, of which I know a little bit about, [00:05:00] having been in aerospace for 30 freaking years, I can tell you that there are all kinds of ways to detect all kinds of threats that are approaching our shoreline. Putting a wind turbine out there is not Joel Saxum: gonna stop it. So the, at the end of the day, there is a bunch, there’s like, there’s single, I call them metric and intrinsic, right? Metric being like, I can put data to this. There’s a point here, there’s numbers, whatever it may be. And intrinsic being, I don’t like them, they don’t look that good. A pipeline can supply more energy. Those things are not necessarily set in stone. They’re not black and white. They’re, they’re getting this gray emotional area instead of practical. Right. So, okay. What, what’s the outcome here? You do this, you say that we have radar issues. Do we do, does, does the offshore substation have a radar station on it for the military or, or what does that, what does that look like? Allen Hall: Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, but if the threat is what I think it is, none of this matters. None of this matters. It’s already been discussed a hundred times with the defense [00:06:00] department and everybody else is knowledgeable in this, in this space. There is no way that they started planted turbines and approve them two, three years ago. If it was a national security risk, there is no chance that that happened. So it really is frustrating when you, when you know some of the things that go on behind the scenes and you know what, the technical rationales could be about a problem. And that’s not what’s being talked about right now that I don’t like being lied to. Like, if you want to have a, a political argument, have a political argument, and the, if the political argument is America wants Greenland from Denmark, then just freaking say it. Just say it. Don’t tie Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, new J, all, all these states up until this nonsense, Virginia, what are we doing? What are we doing? Because all those states approved all those projects knowing full well what the costs were, knowing how tall the turbines were, knowing how long it was gonna take to get it done, and they all approved them. This [00:07:00] is not done in a vacuum. These states approve these projects and these states are going to buy that power. Let them, you wanna put in a a, a big gas pipeline. Great. How many years is that gonna take, Doug? How many years is that gonna take? Doug Bergham? Does anybody know? He, he doesn’t know anything about that. Joel Saxum: You’re not getting a gas pipeline into the east coast anytime soon whatsoever. Because the, the east, the east coast is a home of Nimbyism. Allen Hall: Sure, sir. Like Massachusetts. It’s pretty much prohibited new gas pipelines for a long time. Okay. That’s their choice. That is their choice. They made that choice. Let them live with it. Why are you then trying to, to double dip? I don’t get it. I don’t get it. And, but I do think, Joel, I think the reason. This is getting to the level it is. It has to do something to do with Greenland. It has something to do with the Danish, um, uh, ambassador or whoever it was running to talk to, to California and Newsom about offshore tournaments. Like that was not a smart move, my opinion, but [00:08:00] I don’t run international relations with for Denmark. But stop poking one another and somebody’s gotta cut this off. The, the thing I think that the Trump administration is at risk at is that. Or instead, Ecuador has plenty of cash. They’re gonna go to court, and they are most likely going to win, and they’re going to really handcuff the Trump administration to do anything because when you throw bull crap in front of a judge and they smell it, the the pushback gets really strong. Well, they’re gonna force all the discussion about anything to do with offshore to go through a judge, and they’re gonna decide, and I don’t think that’s what the Trump administration wants, but that’s where they’re headed. I’m not sure why Joel Saxum: you’d wanna do that. Like at the end of the day, that may be the solution that has to come, but I don’t think that that’s not the right path either. Right? Because a judge is not an SME. A judge doesn’t know all of the, does the, you know, like a, a judge is a judge based on laws. They don’t, they’re, they’re not an offshore wind energy expert, so they sh that’s hard for them to [00:09:00] decide on. However, that’s where it will go. But I think you’re correct. Like this, this is more, this is a larger play and, and this mor so this morning when this rolled out, my WhatsApp, uh, and text messages just blew up from all of my. Danish friends, what is going on over there? I’m like, I don’t know what you want me to say. I’m not in the hopeful office. I can’t tell you what’s going on. I’m not having coffee in DC right now. I said, you know, but going back to it, like you can see the frustration, like, what, why, why is this the thing? And I think you’re right though, Alan, it is a large, there’s a larger political play in, in movement here of this Greenland, Denmark, these kind of things. And it’s a, it’s. It’s sad to see it ’cause it just gets caught. We’re getting caught in the crossfire as a wind industry. Yeah. It’s Allen Hall: not helping anybody. And when you set precedents like this, the other side takes note, right? So Democrats, when they eventually get back into the White House again, which will happen at some point, are gonna swing the pendulum just as hard and harder. So what are you [00:10:00] doing? None of, none of this matters in, in my opinion, especially if you, if you read Twitter today, you’re like, what the hell? All the things that are happening right now. RFK Jr had a post a few hours ago talking about, oh, this is great. We’re gonna shut off this off shore wind thing because it kills the whales. Sorry, it doesn’t. Sorry. It doesn’t, if you want, if you wanna make an argument about it, you have to do better than that. A Twitter post doesn’t make it fact, and everybody who’s listened to this and paying attention, I don’t want you to do your own research, but just know that you got a couple of engineers here, that that’s what we do for a living. We source through information, making sure that it makes sense. Does it align? Is it right? Is it wrong? Is, is there something to back it up with? And the information that we have here says. It is. It’s not hurting anything out there. You may not like them, but you know what? You don’t want a coal factor in your backyard either. Delamination and bottomline failures and blades are difficult problems to detect [00:11:00] early. These hidden issues can cost you millions in repairs and lost energy production. C-I-C-N-D-T are specialists to detect these critical flaws before they become expensive burdens. Their non-destructive test technology penetrates deep to blade materials to find voids and cracks. Traditional inspections completely. Miss C-I-C-N-D-T Maps. Every critical defect delivers actionable reports and provides support to get your blades back in service. So visit cic ndt.com because catching blade problems early will save you millions. Joel Saxum: When it comes down to sorting through data, I think that’s a big problem. Right? And that’s what’s happening with a lot of the, I mean, generalizing, a lot of the things that are happening in the United States in the last 10 years give it. Um, but people just go, oh, this person said this. They must be an authority. Like, no, it’s not true. We’ve been following [00:12:00] a lot of these things with offshore wind. I mean, probably closer than most. Uh, besides the companies that are developing those wind farms, simply because it’s a part of our day job, it’s what we do. We’re, we’re, we’re looking at these things, right? So. Understanding the risks, uh, rewards, the political side of things. The commercial side. The technical side. That’s what we’re here to kind of feed, feed the information back to the masses. And a lot of this, or the majority of all of this is bs. It doesn’t really, it doesn’t, it doesn’t play. Um, and then you go a little bit deeper into things and. Like the, was it the new Bedford Light, Alan, that said like, now they’re seeing that the turbines have actually been turned off, not just to stop work for construction. They’ve turned the turbines off up in Massachusetts or up off of in the northeast area? No, that they have. Allen Hall: And why? I mean, the error on the side of caution, I think if you’re an attorney for any of the wind operations, they’re gonna tell you to shut it off for a couple of days and see what we can figure out. But the, the timing of the [00:13:00] shutdown I think is a little unique in that the US is pretty much closed at this point. You’re not gonna see anything start back up for another couple of weeks, although they were doing work on the water. So you can impose a couple hundred million. Do, well, not a hundred million dollars, but maybe a couple million dollars of, of overhead costs in some of these projects because you can’t respond quick enough. You gotta find a judge willing to put a stay in to hold things the same and, and hold off this, uh, this, uh, b order, but. To me, you know, it’s one of those things when you deal with the federal government, you think the federal government is erratic in just this one area? No, it’s erratic in a lot of areas. And the frustration comes with do you want America to be stronger or do you want nonsense to go on? You know? And if I thought, if that thought wind turbines were killing whales, I’d be the first one up to screaming. If I thought offshore wind was not gonna work out in term, in some long-term model, I would be the first one screaming about it. That’s not Joel Saxum: reality. [00:14:00] Caveat that though you said, you’re saying if I thought, I think the, the real word should be if I did the research, the math and understood that this is the way it was gonna be. Right? Because that’s, that’s what you need to do. And that’s what we’ve been doing, is looking at it and the, the, all the data points to we’re good here. If someone wanted to do harm Allen Hall: to the United States, and God forbid if that was ever the case. That wouldn’t be the way to do it. Okay. And we, and we’ve seen that through history, right. So it, it’s, it doesn’t even make any sense. The problem is, is that they can shield a judge from looking at it somewhat. If they classify well, the judge isn’t able to see what this classified information is. In today’s world, AI and everything on the internet, you don’t think somebody knows something about this? I do. And to think that you couldn’t make any sort of software patch to. Fix whatever 1965 radar system they have sitting on the shorelines of Massachusetts. They could, in today’s world, you can do that. So this whole thing, it [00:15:00] just sounds like a smoke screen and when you start poking around it, no one has an answer. That is the frustrating bit. If you’re gonna be seeing stuff, you better have backup data. But the Joel Saxum: crazy thing here, like look at the, the, the non wind side of this argument, like you’re hurting job growth. Everybody that goes into a, uh. Into office. One of the biggest things they run on all the time, it doesn’t matter, matter where you are in the world, is I’m gonna bring jobs and prosperity to the people. Okay. How many jobs have just been stopped? How many people have just been sent home? How much money’s being lost here? And who’s one of the biggest companies installing these turbines in the states? Fricking ge like so. You’re, you’re hurting your own local people. And not only is this, you stand there and say, we’re doing all this stuff. We’re getting all this wind energy. We’re gonna do all these things and we’re gonna win the AI race. To the point where you’ve passed legislation or you’ve written, uh, uh, executive order that says, Hey, individual states, if you pass legislation [00:16:00] that slows or halts AI development in your state, the federal government can sue you. But you’re doing the same thing. You’re halting and slowing down the ability for AI and data centers to power themselves at unprecedented growth. We’re at here, 2, 3, 4, 5% depending on what, what iso you ask of, of electron need, and we’re the fastest way you could put electrons to the grid. Right now in the United States, it’s. Either one of those offshore wind farms is being built today, or one of the other offs, onshore wind farms or onshore solar facilities that are being built right now today. Those are the fastest ways to help the United States win the AI race, which is something that Trump has loud, left and right and center, but you’re actively like just hitting people in the shins with a baseball bat to to slow down. Energy growth. I, I just, it, it doesn’t make any logical sense. Allen Hall: And Rosemary just chime in here. We’ve had enough from the Americans complaining about it. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah. I mean, it’s hard for me to comment in too much detail about all of the [00:17:00] American security stuff. I mean, defense isn’t, isn’t one of my special interests and especially not American defense, but. When I talk about this issue with other Australians, it’s just sovereign risk is the, the issue. I mean, it was, it’s similar with the tariffs. It’s just like how, and it’s not just for like foreign companies that might want to invest in America. American companies are affected just, uh, as equally, but like you might be anti wind and fine. Um, but I don’t know how any. Company of any technology can have confidence to embark on a multi-year, um, project. Now, because you don’t know, like this government hates wind energy, but the next one could hate ai or the next one could hate solar panels, electric cars, or you know, just, just anything. And so like you just can’t. You just can’t trust, um, that your plans are gonna be able to be fulfilled even if you’ve got contracts, even if you’ve got [00:18:00] approvals, even if you are most of the way through building something, it’s not enough to feel safe anymore. And it’s just absolutely wild. That’s, and yeah, I was actually discussing with someone yesterday. How, and bearing in mind I don’t really understand American politics that deeply, but I’m gonna assume that Republicans are generally associated with being business friendly. So there must be so many long-term Republican donors who have businesses that have been harmed by all of these kinds of changes. And I just don’t understand how everyone is still behind this type of behavior. That’s what, that’s what I struggle to understand. Joel Saxum: This is the problem at the higher levels in. In DC their businesses are, are oil and gas based though. That’s the thing, the high, the high power conservative party side of things in the United States politics. The, the lobby money and the real money and the like, like think like the Dick Cheney era. Right. That was all Weatherford, right? It’s all oil and gas. Rosemary Barnes: So it’s not like anybody [00:19:00] cares about the, you know, I don’t know, like there’d be steel fabricators who have been massively affected by this. Right? Like that’s a good, a good traditional American business. Right. But are you saying it’s not big enough business that anyone would care that, that they’ve been screwed over? Joel Saxum: Not anymore Allen Hall: because all that’s being outsourced. The, the other argument, which Rosemary you touched upon is, is the one I’m seeing more recently on all kinds of social medias. It’s a bunch of foreign companies putting in these wind turbines. Well, who the hell Joel Saxum: is drilling your oil baby? This is something that I’ve always said. When you go go to Houston, Texas, the energy capital of the world, every one of those big companies, none of ’em are run by a Texan. They are all run by someone from overseas. Every one of ’em. Allen Hall: You, you think that, uh, you know, the Saudis are all, you know, great moral people. What the hell are you talking about? Are you starting to compare countries now? Because you really don’t wanna do that. If you wanna do that into the traditional energy marketplace, you’re, you’re gonna have [00:20:00] a lot of problems sleeping at night. You will, I would much rather trust a dane to put in a wind turbine or a German to put in a wind turbine than some of the people that are in, involved in oil and gas. Straight up. Straight up. Right. And we’ve known that for years. And we, we, we just play along, look. The fact of the matter is if you want to have electrons delivered quickly to the United States, you’re gonna have to do something, and that will be wind and solar because it is the fastest, cheapest way to get this stuff done. If you wanna try to plant some sort of gas pipeline from Louisiana up to Massachusetts or whatever the hell you wanna do, good luck. You know how many years you’re talking about here. In the meantime, all those people you, you think you care about are gonna be sitting there. With really high electricity rates and gas, gas, uh, rates, it’s just not gonna end well. Speaker 5: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and [00:21:00] 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by wind professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions. Not speeches if Allen Hall: you don’t have enough on your plate already. Uh, the FCC has panned the import and sale of all new drone models from Chinese manufacturers, including the most popular of all in America, DJI, uh, and they clo. They currently hold about 70% of the global marketplace, the ban as DGI and Autel Robotics to the quote unquote covered list of entities deemed [00:22:00] a national security risk. Now here’s the catch. Existing models that are already approved for sale can still be purchased. So you can walk down to your local, uh, drone store and buy A DJI drone. And the ones you already own are totally fine, but the next generation. Not happening. They’re not gonna let ’em into the United States. So the wind industry heavily relies on drones. And, and Joel, you and I have seen a number of DJI, sort of handheld drones that are used on sites as sort of a quick check of the health of a, or status of a blade. Uh, you, you, I guess you will still be able to do that if you have an older dj. I. But if you try to buy a new one, good luck. Not gonna happen. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think the most popular drone right now in the field, of course two of ’em, I would, I would say this, it’s like the Mavic type, you know, the little tiny one that like a site supervisor or a technician may have, they have their part 1 0 7 license. They can fly up and look at stuff. Uh, and then the [00:23:00] other one is gonna be the more industrial side. That’s gonna be the DJ IM 300. And that’s the one where a lot of these platforms, the perceptual robotics and some of the others have. That’s their base because the M 300 has, if you’re not in the, the development world, it has what’s called a pretty accessible SDK, which software development kit. So they’re designed to be able to add your sensors, put your software, and they’re fly ’em the way you want to. So they’re kind of like purpose built to be industrial drones. So if you have an M 300 or you’re using them now, what this I understand is you’re gonna still be able to do that, but when it comes time for next gen stuff, you’re not gonna be able to go buy the M 400. And import that. Like once it’s you’re here, you’re done. So I guess the way I would look at it is if I was an operator and that was part of our mo, or I was using a drone inspection provider, that that’s what comes on site. I would give people a plan. I would say basic to hedge your risk. I would say [00:24:00]basically like, Hey, if you’re my drone operator and I’m giving you a year to find a new solution. Um, that integrates into your workflows to get this thing outta here simply because I can’t be at risk that one day you show up, this thing crashes and I can’t get another one. A lot of companies are already like, they’re set and ready to go. Like all the new Skys specs, the Skys specs, foresight, drone, it’s all compliant, right? It’s USA made USA approved. Good to go. I think the new Arons drone is USA compliant. Good to go. Like, no, no issues there. So. Um, I think that some of the major players in the inspection world have already made their moves, um, to be able to be good USA compliant. Um, so just make sure you ask. I guess that’s, that. Our advice to operators here. Make sure you ask, make sure you’re on top of this one so you just don’t get caught with your pants down. Allen Hall: Yeah, I know there’s a lot of little drones in the back of pickup trucks around wind farms and you probably ought to check, talk to the guys about what’s going on to make sure that they’re all compliant. [00:25:00] In this quarter’s, PES Win magazine, which you can download for free@pswin.com. There is an article by Fran Hoffer, and they’re in Germany. If you don’t know who Fran Hoffer is, they’re sort of a research institution that is heavily involved in wind and fixing some of the problems, tackling some of the more complex, uh, issues that exist in blade repair. Turbine Repair Turbine Lifetime. And the article has a number of the highlights that they’ve been working on for the last several years, and you should really check this out, but looking at the accomplishments, Joel, it’s like, wow, fraud offer has been doing a lot behind the scenes and some of these technologies are, are really gonna be helpful in the near future. Joel Saxum: Yeah. Think of Frown Hoffer of your our US com compadres listening. Think of frown Hoffer as and NRE L, but. Not as connected to the federal government. Right. So, but, but more connected to [00:26:00] industry, I would say. So they’re solving industry problems directly. Right. Some of the people that they get funding research from is the OEMs, it’s other trade organizations within the group. They’re also going, they’re getting some support from the German federal government and the state governments. But also competitive research grants, so some EU DPR type stuff, um, and then some funding from private foundations and donors. But when you look at Frow, offerer, it’s a different project every time you talk to ’em. But, and what I like to see is the fact that these projects that they’re doing. Are actually solving real world problems. I, I, I, Alan and I talk about this regularly on the podcast is we have an issue with government funding or supportive funding or even grant funding or competitive funding going to in universities, institutions, well, whoever it may be, to develop stuff that’s either like already developed, doesn’t really have a commercial use, like, doesn’t forward the industry. But Frow Hoffer’s projects are right. So like one of the, they, they have [00:27:00] like the large bearing laboratory, so they’re test, they’ve tested over 500 pitch bearings over in Hamburg. They’re developing a handheld cure monitoring device that can basically tell you when resin has cured it, send you an email like you said, Alan, in case you’re like taking a nap on the ropes or something. Um, but you know, and they’re working on problems that are plaguing the industry, like, uh, up working on up towel repairs for carbon fiber, spar caps. Huge issue in the industry. Wildly expensive issue. Normally RA blade’s being taken down to the ground to fix these now. So they’re working on some UPT tile repairs for that. So they’re doing stuff that really is forwarding the industry and I love to see that. Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s one of the resources that. We in the United States don’t really take advantage of all the time. And yeah, and there’s a lot of the issues that we see around the world that if you were able to call f Hoffer, you should think about calling them, uh, and get their opinion on it. They probably have a solution or have heard of the problem before and can direct you to, uh, uh, a reasonable outcome. [00:28:00] That’s what these organizations are for. There’s a couple of ’em around the world. DTU being another one, frow Hoffer, obviously, uh, being another powerhouse there. That’s how the industry moves forward. It, it doesn’t move forward when all of us are struggling to get through these things. We need to have a couple of focal points in the industry that can spend some research time on problems that matter. And, and Joel, I, I think that’s really the key here. Like you mentioned it, just focusing on problems that we are having today and get through them so we can make the industry. Just a little bit better. So you should check out PES WIN Magazine. You can read this article and a number of other great articles. Go to ps win.com and download your articles today. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate all the feedback and support we receive from the wind industry. If today’s discussion sparked any question or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and please don’t forget to subscribe so you [00:29:00] never miss an episode For Joel, Rosemary and Yolanda, I’m a hall. We’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

At the heart of The Prophets' vision are “The 24 Essential Supply Chain Processes.” What are they? Find out, and see the future yourself. Click here As 2025 wraps up, the Auto Supply Chain Prophets podcast looks back on its journey and shares thoughts about what's next. Hosts Jan Griffiths, Jim Liegghio, and Terry Onica take a moment to celebrate the podcast's impact, highlighting 15,000 downloads in over 20 countries, and look forward to their 100th episode in 2026, a milestone only a few podcasts achieve.Jim encourages listeners to revisit past episodes to hear how industry leaders think, solve problems, and approach supply chain challenges. Terry shares her retirement from QAD after 23 years, celebrating a career spent promoting supply chain excellence and promising to continue contributing to projects she loves.Jan confirms the podcast isn't going anywhere. In 2026, it will return with a refreshed format and new energy. For now, listeners can check out past episodes, dive deeper into the content on the website, and follow along as the hosts continue sharing conversations that shape the automotive supply chain.Featured on this episode: Name: Jan GriffithsTitle: President and Founder, Gravitas Detroit About: Jan is the architect of cultural change in the automotive industry. As the President & Founder of Gravitas Detroit, Jan brings a wealth of expertise and a passion for transforming company cultures. Additionally, she is the host of the Automotive Leaders Podcast, where she shares insightful conversations with industry visionaries. Jan is also the author of AutoCulture 2.0, a groundbreaking book that challenges the traditional leadership model prevalent in the automotive world. With her extensive experience and commitment to fostering positive change, Jan is at the forefront of revolutionizing the automotive landscape.Connect: LinkedInName: James “Jim” LiegghioTitle: Manager, Customer Experience & Engagement, Automotive Industry Action Group (AIAG)About: Jim is a seasoned supply chain leader with over 25 years of experience, particularly in the automotive sector. His expertise spans a wide range of areas, from hands-on plant-level material and production control to high-level corporate logistics roles at major OEMs like FCA. He has navigated the complexities of international logistics, trade compliance, and cross-functional collaboration, gaining a global perspective that enhances his approach to supply chain management. He excels at working across departments to achieve strategic goals, with a strong focus on optimizing operations and fostering relationships. His work isn't just about logistics; it's about cultivating a culture of continuous improvement, community, and diversity. Throughout his career, Jim has remained committed to lifelong learning, driven by a genuine curiosity and a passion for leadership.Connect: LinkedInName: Terry OnicaTitle: Director, Automotive at

Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity InsiderEpisode: The Hidden Reason Most Manufacturing Cybersecurity Programs FailPub date: 2025-12-23Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationDino sits down with cybersecurity expert Wil Klusovsky to discuss the massive gap between IT security practices and OT reality. With 26 years of experience, Wil shares his unconventional journey into operational technology and reveals why most security tools end up as shelfware on plant floors.They dive deep into the communication breakdown between CISOs and plant operations, the critical role of system integrators and OEMs that IT leaders often ignore, and why the "air gap" myth continues to put manufacturing facilities at risk.Wil breaks down his framework for speaking to boards in language they understand, emphasizing business impact over technical jargon. The conversation covers everything from the challenges of MFA implementation in OT environments to why patching isn't always the answer. They discuss how organizations can build effective OT security programs by making cybersecurity everyone's responsibility - not just IT's problem.Chapters:(00:00:00) - Opening: The $50K Security Investment That Nobody Uses(00:01:00) - Will's Unconventional Journey Into OT Cybersecurity(00:03:45) - The Communication Gap Between IT and OT Teams(00:07:15) - Why Asset Visibility Tools Miss 135% of Your Equipment(00:10:30) - Speaking Board Language: Revenue Loss vs. Technical Jargon(00:13:25) - The Missing Third Leg: System Integrators and OEMs(00:17:30) - Making Cybersecurity Everyone's Job, Not Just IT's Problem(00:21:15) - Why Patching Isn't Always the Answer in OT Environments(00:25:45) - The Reality Check: Physical Security in Manufacturing Plants(00:28:30) - Building a Cybersecurity Program as a Journey, Not a DestinationLinks And Resources:Wil Online LinktreeWil Klusovsky on LinkedInWant to Sponsor an episode or be a Guest? Reach out here.Industrial Cybersecurity Insider on LinkedInCybersecurity & Digital Safety on LinkedInBW Design Group CybersecurityDino Busalachi on LinkedInCraig Duckworth on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Industrial Cybersecurity Insider? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to leave us a review!The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Industrial Cybersecurity Insider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Shoot us a Text.Episode #1228: The day after Christmas, Kyle flies solo with Brian Benstock to talk 2026 strategy. Benstock's take: the year will bring “difficulty mixed with opportunities,” and dealers who prepare now—especially around affordability messaging and trade-cycle tech—will be ready when the tide comes in.Benstock is bullish on 2026: lower inflation and easing interest-rate pressure should help affordability, which benefits dealers, OEMs, and the broader economy.He applauds policy moves that reduce EV mandates and questions consumer-subsidized EV incentives, arguing adoption should be driven by product superiority, not taxpayers.“Set up your fishing nets during low tide.” Benstock urges leaders to prepare teams now—process, messaging, and mindset—so they can capitalize quickly when demand rises.Trade-cycle management is the big unlock: real-time equity awareness + timely, personalized offers could move customers like telecom upgrades do—same payment, newest model.The blocker is vendor fragmentation: hundreds of tools that don't integrate, plus “toll booths” that limit data flow. Benstock calls integration the next frontier.0:00 Intro with Kyle Mountsier 1:46 Brian Benstock joins the show 3:26 Why Benstock is bullish on the 2026 economy 7:12 How dealers should prepare during “low tide” 8:36 Why trade-cycle management is the next frontier 12:45 How affordability messaging can grow SARThank you to today's sponsor, Mia. Capture more revenue, protect CSI, and never miss a call or connection again with 24/7 phone coverage and texting (SMS) follow-up for sales, service, and reception. Learn more at https://www.mia.inc/Join Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier every morning for the Automotive State of the Union podcast as they connect the dots across car dealerships, retail trends, emerging tech like AI, and cultural shifts—bringing clarity, speed, and people-first insight to automotive leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.Get the Daily Push Back email at https://www.asotu.com/ JOIN the conversation on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asotu/

We.come to Episode 382 - Th Last Episode? We have: Word of the week Highs & Lows Weird news Bike updates Then we get down to continuing where we left of last week. What are the major OEMs trying to get you to focus on as we wrap up 2025? We analyze some websites and discover what is a common trend and what stands out the most? Show contact info Creative Riding is available on Apple Podcasts, Sound Cloud, Google Play, Tune In, Spotify, etc. Leave the show a rating and review on your favorite podcast app. https://motorcycle-podcasts.com/ Check out our blog: creative-riding.com Contact the show: Discord: https://discord.gg/3kzhhChcUj Email: creativeridingpodcast@gmail.com FB/IG: @creativeridingpodcast Reddit: @Creative_Riding Support the show: patreon.com/creativeriding zazzle.com/store/creative_riding

How Did H2O Innovation Build a Water Empire Through 18+ Acquisitions (M&A) and What Happens Now Under Private Equity?More #water insights? Get my free mapping of 267 water investors here: https://investors.dww.show

Read our Macrovey deal analysis (closed) on KingscrowdRobotics hype is everywhere—but who actually makes robots work on real warehouse floors? In this episode, Chris sits down with Macrovey Director of Business Development Matt Labinski to unpack how Macrovey designs fully autonomous, material-handling systems that act like a warehouse “Robotics OS.” We start with what Macrovey is and isn't (00:03)—the company doesn't manufacture robots, it integrates best-in-class OEMs through proprietary orchestration software. Matt explains the model (00:32): up-front design + install and recurring software/maintenance—plus a Robots-as-a-Service option that lowers CapEx. We dive into who buys (06:28): e-commerce, 3PLs, pharma, defense (U.S. Air Force) and even smaller 10k–100k sq ft facilities. Category context (07:31): warehouse robotics penetration is still surprisingly low; Macrovey targets the SMB/mid-market others ignore. We cover why OEMs and warehouses need an integrator (09:09), the sales cycle and deal sizes (12:22)—from $50k pilots to $3M+ programs—and how modular, mobile systems (25:03) move with demand. Finally, we hit the AI layer (27:31): machine learning that optimizes slotting, picking, and vision-based QA. If you want exposure to warehouse autonomy without betting on a single robot, Macrovey's middle-layer, recurring-revenue approach may be the de-risked way to play it.

Allen, Joel, Rosemary, and Yolanda break down the TPI Composites bankruptcy fallout. Vestas is acquiring TPI’s Mexico and India operations while a UAE company picks up the Turkish factories. That leaves GE in a tough spot with no clear path to blade manufacturing. Plus the crew discusses blade scarcity, FSA availability floors, and whether a new blade manufacturer could emerge. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Allen Hall: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall. I’ve got Yolanda Padron and Joel Saxum in Texas. And Rosemary Barnes is back from her long Vacation in Australia and TPI. Composites is big in the news this week, everybody, because they’re in bankruptcy hearings and they are selling off parts of the business. Vestas is, at least according to News Reports positioned to acquire. A couple of the LLCs down in Mexico. So there’s uh, two of them, TPI in Mexico, five LLC, and TPI in Mexico, six LLC. There are other LLCs, of course involved with this down in Mexico. So they’re buying, not sure exactly what the assets are, but probably a couple of the factories in which their blades were being manufactured in. Uh, this. Is occurring because Vestas stepped in. They were trying to have an auction and Vestas stepped forward and just ended up buying these two LLCs. [00:01:00] Other things that are happening here, Joel, is that, uh, TPI evidently sold their Turkish division. Do you recall to who they sold? That, uh, part of the Joel Saxum: business too, two companies involved in that, that were TPI Turkey, uh, and that was bought by a company called XCS composites. Uh, and they are out of the United Arab Emirates, so I believe they’re either going to be Abu Dhabi or Dubai based. Uh, but they took over the tube wind blade manufacturing plants in Isme, uh, also a field service and inspection repair business. And around 2,700 employees, uh, from the Turkish operation. So that happened just, just after, I mean, it was a couple weeks after the bankruptcy claim, uh, went through here in August, uh, in the States. So it went August bankruptcy for TPI, September, all the Turkish operations were bought and now we’ve got Vestas swooping in and uh, taking a bunch of the Mexican operations. Allen Hall: Right. And [00:02:00] Vestas is also taking TPI composites India. Which is a part of the business that is not in bankruptcy, uh, that’s a, a separate business, a separate, basically LLC incorporation Over in India, the Vestus is going to acquire, so they’re gonna acquire three separate things in this transaction. The question everybody’s asking today after seeing this Vestus move is, what is GE doing? Because, uh, GE Renova has a lot of blades manufactured by TPI down in Mexico. No word on that. And you would think if, if TPI is auctioning off assets that GE renova would be at the front of the line, but that’s not what we’re hearing on the ground. Joel Saxum: Yeah, I mean it’s, the interesting part of this thing is for Vestas, TPI was about 35% of their blade capacity for manufacturing in 2024. If their 30, if, if Vestas was 35%, then GE had to be 50%. There [00:03:00] demand 60. So Vesta is making a really smart move here by basically saying, uh, we’ve gotta lock down our supply chain for blades. We gotta do something. So we need to do this. GE is gonna be the odd man out because, I mean, I think it would be a, a cold day in Denmark if Vestas was gonna manufacture blades for ge. Allen Hall: Will the sale price that Vest has paid for this asset show up in the bankruptcy? Hearings or disclosures? I think that it would, I haven’t seen it yet, but eventually it’ll, it must show up, right? All, all the bankruptcy hearings and transactions are, they have an overseer essentially, what happens to, so TPI can’t purchase or sell anything without an, um, getting approved by the courts, so that’ll eventually be disclosed. Uh, the Turkish sale will be, I would assume, would be disclosed. Also really curious to see what the asset value. Was for those factories. Joel Saxum: So the Turkish sale is actually public knowledge right now, and [00:04:00] that is, lemme get the number here to make sure I get it right. 92.9 million Euros. Uh, but of, of course TPI laden with a bunch of non-convertible and convertible debt. So a ton of that money went right down to debt. Uh, but to be able to purchase that. They had to assu, uh, XCS composites in Turkey, had to assume debt as is, uh, under the bankruptcy kind of proceedings. So I would assume that Vestas is gonna have to do the same thing, is assume the debt as is to take these assets over and, uh, and assets. We don’t know what it is yet. We don’t know if it’s employees, if it’s operations, if it’s ip, if it’s just factories. We don’t know what’s all involved in it. Um, but like you said, because. TPI being a publicly traded company in the United States, they have to file all this stuff with SEC. Allen Hall: Well, they’ll, they’re be delisted off of. Was it, they were Joel Saxum: in Nasdaq? Is that where they were listed? The India stuff that could be private. You may ne we may not ever hear about what happened. Valuation there. Allen Hall: Okay, so what is the, the [00:05:00] future then for wind blade production? ’cause TPI was doing a substantial part of it for the world. I mean, outside of China, it’s TPI. And LM a little bit, right? LM didn’t have the capacity, I don’t think TPI that TPI does or did. It puts Joel Saxum: specifically GE in a tight spot, right? Because GEs, most of their blades were if it was built to spec or built to print. Built to spec was designed, uh, by LM and built by lm. But now LM as we have seen in the past months year, has basically relinquished themselves of all of their good engineering, uh, and ability to iterate going forward. So that’s kind of like dwindling to an end. TPI also a big side of who makes blades for ge if Vestas is gonna own the majority of their capacity, Vestas isn’t gonna make blades for ge. So GEs going to be looking at what can we, what can we still build with lm? And then you have the kind of the, the odd ducks there. You have the Aris, [00:06:00] you have the MFG, um, I mean Sonoma is out there. This XCS factory is there still in Turkey. Um, you may see some new players pop up. Uh, I don’t know. Um, we’ll see. I mean, uh, Rosemary, what’s, what’s your take? Uh, you guys are starting to really ramp up down in Australia right now and are gonna be in the need of blades in general with this kind of shakeup. Rosemary Barnes: What do we say? My main concern is. Around the service of the blades that we’ve already got. Um, and when I talk to people that I know at LM or XLM, my understanding is that those parts of the organization are still mostly intact. So I actually don’t expect any big changes there. Not to say that the status quo. Good enough. It’s not like, like every single OEM whose, um, FSAs that I work with, uh, support is never good enough. But, um, [00:07:00] it shouldn’t get any worse anyway. And then for upcoming projects, yeah, I, I don’t know. I mean, I guess it’s gonna be on a case by case basis. Uh, I mean, it always was when you got a new, a new project, you need a whole bunch of blades. It was always a matter of figuring out which factory they were going to come from and if they had capacity. It’ll be the same. It’s just that then instead of, you know, half a dozen factories to choose from, there’s like, what, like one or two. So, um, yeah, I, that’s, that’s my expectation of what’s gonna happen. I presumably ge aren’t selling turbines that they have no capability to make blades for. Um, so I, I guess they’re just gonna have a lot less sales. That’s the only real way I can make it work. Allen Hall: GE has never run a Blade factory by themselves. They’ve always had LM or somebody do it, uh, down in Brazil or TPI in Mexico or wherever. Uh, are we thinking that GE Renova is not gonna run a Blade Factory? Is that the thought, or, or is [00:08:00] that’s not in the cards either. Rosemary Barnes: I don’t think it’s that easy to just, just start running a Blade Factory. I mean, I know that GE had blade design capabilities. I used to design the blades that TPI would make. So, um, that part of it. Sure. Um, they can, they can still do that, but it’s not, yeah, it’s, it’s not like you just buy a Blade factory and like press start on the factory and then the, you know, production line just starts off and blades come out the other end. Like there is a lot of a, a lot of knowhow needed if that was something that they wanted to do. That should have been what they started doing from day one after they bought lm. You know, that was the opportunity that they had to become, you know, a Blade factory owner. They could have started to, you know, make, um, have GE. Take up full ownership of the, the blade factories and how that all worked. But instead, they kept on operating like pretty autonomously without that many [00:09:00] changes at the factory level. Like if they were to now say, oh, you know, hey, it’s, uh, we really want to. Have our own blade factories and make blades. It’s just like, what the hell were you doing for the last, was it like seven years or something? Like you, you could easily have done what? And now you haven’t made it as hard for yourselves as possible. So like I’m not ruling out that that’s what they’re gonna try and do, because like I said, I don’t think it’s been like executed well, but. My God, it’s like even stupid of the whole situation. If that’s where we end up with them now scrambling to build from scratch blade, um, manufacturing capability because there’s Yolanda Padron: already a blade scarcity, right? Like at least in the us I don’t know if you guys are seeing it in, in Australia as well, but there’s a blade scarcity for these GE blades, right? So you’re, they kind of put themselves in an even more tough spot by just now. You, you don’t have access to a lot of these TPI factories written in theory. From what we’re seeing. You mean to get like replacement blades? Yeah. So like for, for issues? Yeah. New [00:10:00] construction issues under FSA, that, Rosemary Barnes: yeah. I mean, we’ve always waited a, a long time for new blades. Like it’s never great. If you need a new blade, you’re always gonna be waiting six months, maybe 12 months. So that’s always been the case, but now we are seeing delays of that. Maybe, maybe sometimes longer, but also it’s like, oh well. We can’t replace, like, for like, you’re gonna be getting a, a different kind of blade. Um, that will work. Um, but you know, so that is fine, except for that, that means you can’t do a single blade replacement anymore. Now, what should have been a single blade replacement might be a full set replacement. And so it does start to really, um, yeah. Mess things up and like, yeah, it’s covered by the FSA, like that’s on them to buy the three blades instead of one, but. It does matter because, you know, if they’re losing money on, um, managing your wind farm, then it, it is gonna lead to worse outcomes for you because, you know, they’re gonna have to skimp and scrape where they [00:11:00] can to, you know, like, um, minimize their losses. So I, I don’t think it’s, it’s, it’s Yolanda Padron: not great. Yeah. And if you’re running a wind farm, you have other stakeholders too, right? It’s not like you’re running it just for yourself. So having all that downtime from towers down for a year. Because you can’t get blades on your site. Like it’s just really not great. Rosemary Barnes: Yeah, and I mean, there’s flaws on there. Like they’ve got an availability guarantee. Then, you know, below that they do have to, um, pay for that, those losses. But there’s a flaw on that. So once you know, you, you blast through the floor of your availability, then you know, that is on the owner. Now it’s not on the, um, service provider. So it’s definitely. Something that, yeah, there’s lots of things where you might think, oh, I don’t have to worry about my blades ’cause I’ve got an F, SA, but you know, that’s just one example where, okay, you will, you will start worrying if they, they yeah. Fall through the floor of their availability guarantee. Joel Saxum: Two questions that pop up in my mind from this one, the first one, the first one is [00:12:00] directly from Alan. You and I did a webinar, we do so many of ’em yesterday, and it was about, it was in the nor in North America, ferc, so. They have new icing readiness, uh, reporting you, so, so basically like if you’re on the, if you’re connected to the grid, you’re a wind farm or solar farm and you have an icing event, you need to explain to them why you had an outage, um, and why, what you’re doing about it. Or if you’re not doing something about it, you have to justify it. You have to do all these things to say. Hey, some electrons weren’t flowing into the grid. There’s certain levels. It’s much more complicated than this, but electrons weren’t flowing into the grid because of an issue. We now have to report to FERC about this. So is there a stage when a FERC or uh, some other regulatory agency starts stepping into the wind industry saying like, someone’s gotta secure a supply chain here. ’cause they’re already looking at things when electrons are on the grid. Someone’s got a secure supply chain here so we can ensure that [00:13:00]these electrons are gonna get on the grid. Could, can something like that happen or was, I mean, I mean, of course that’s, to me, in my opinion, that’s a lot of governmental overreach, but could we see that start to come down the line like, Hey, we see from an agency’s perspective, we see some problems here. What are you doing to shore this up? Allen Hall: Oh, totally. Right. I, I think the industry in general has an issue. This is not an OEM specific problem. At the minute, if this is a industry-wide problem, there seems to be more dispersed. Manufacturers are gonna be popping up. And when we were in Scotland, uh, we learned a lot more about that. Right, Joel? So the industry has more diversification. I, I, here’s, here’s my concern at the minute, so. For all these blade manufacturers that we would otherwise know off the top of our heads. Right. Uh, lm, TPI, uh, Aris down in Brazil. The Vestus manufacturing facilities, the Siemens manufacturing [00:14:00] facilities. Right. You, you’re, you’re in this place where. You know, everybody’s kind of connected up the chain, uh, to a large OEM and all this made sense. You know, who was rebuilding your blades next year and the year down, two years down the road. Today you don’t, so you don’t know who owns that company. You don’t know how the manager’s gonna respond. Are you negotiating with a company that you can trust’s? Gonna be there in two or three years because you may have to wait that long to get blades delivered. I don’t know. I think that it, it put a lot of investment, uh, companies in a real quandary of whether they wanna proceed or not based upon the, what they is, what they would perceive to be the stability of these blade companies. That’s what I would think. I, I, Vestas is probably the best suited at the minute, besides Siemens. You know, Vestas is probably best suited to have the most perceived reliability capability. Control, Joel Saxum: but they have their own [00:15:00] blade factories already, right? So if they buy the TPI ones, they’re just kind of like they can do some copy pasting to get the the things in place. And to be honest with you, Vesta right now makes the best blades out there, in my opinion, least amount of serial defects. Remove one, remove one big issue from the last couple Allen Hall: years. But I think all the OEMs have problems. It’s a question of how widely known those problems are. I, I don’t think it’s that. I think the, the, the. When you talk to operators and, and they do a lot of shopping on wind turbines, what they’ll tell you generally is vestus is about somewhere around 20% higher in terms of cost to purchase a turbine from them. And Vestus is gonna put on a, a full service agreement of some sort that’s gonna run roughly 30 years. So there’s a lot of overhead that comes with buying a, a Vestas turbine. Yes. You, you get the quality. Yes. You get the name. Yes, you get the full service agreement, which you may or [00:16:00] may not really want over time. Uh, that’s a huge decision. But as pieces are being removed from the board of what you can possibly do, there’s it, it’s getting narrow or narrow by the minute. So it, it’s either a vestus in, in today’s world, like right today, I think we should talk about this, but it’s either Vestus or Nordic. Those are the two that are being decided upon. Mostly by a lot of the operators today. Joel Saxum: That’s true. We’re, and we just saw Nordex, just inked a one gigawatt deal with Alliant Energy, uh, just last week. And that’s new because Alliant has traditionally been a GE buyer. Right. They have five or six ge, two X wind farms in the, in the middle of the United States, and now they’ve secured a deal with Nordex for a gigawatt. Same thing we saw up at Hydro Quebec. Right. Vestas and Nordex are the only ones that qualify for that big, and that’s supposed to be like a 10 gigawatt tender over time. Right. But the, so it brings me to my, I guess my other question, I was thinking about this be [00:17:00] after the FERC thing was, does do, will we see a new blade manufacturer Allen Hall: pop Joel Saxum: up? Allen Hall: No, I don’t think you see a new one. I think you see an acquisition, uh, a transfer of assets to somebody else to run it, but that is really insecure. I, I always think when you’re buying distressed assets and you think you’re gonna run it better than the next guy that. Is rare in industry to do that. Think about the times you’ve seen that happen and it doesn’t work out probably more than 75% of the time. It doesn’t work out. It lasts a year or two or three, and they had the same problems they had when the original company was there. You got the same people inside the same building, building the same product, what do you think is magically gonna change? Right? You have this culture problem or a a already established culture, you’re not likely to change that unless you’re willing to fire, you know, a third of the staff to, to make changes. I don’t see anybody here doing that at the minute because. Finding wind blade technicians, manufacturing people is [00:18:00] extremely hard to do, to find people that are qualified. So you don’t wanna lose them. Joel Saxum: So this is why I say, this is why I pose the question, because in my mind, in in recent wind history, the perfect storm for a new blade manufacturer is happening right now. And the, and the why I say this is there is good engineers on the streets available. Now washing them of their old bad habits and the cultures and those things, that’s a monumental task. That’s not possible. Allen Hall: Rosemary worked at a large blade manufacturer and it has a culture to it. That culture really didn’t change even after they were acquired by a large OEM. The culture basically Rosemary Barnes: remained, they bizarrely didn’t try and change that culture, like they didn’t try to make it a GE company so that it wasn’t dur, it was wasn’t durable. You know, they, they could have. Used that as a shortcut to gaining, um, blade manufacturing capabilities and they didn’t. And that was a, I think it was a choice. I don’t think it’s an inevitability. It’s never easy to go in and change a, a culture, [00:19:00] but it is possible to at least, you know, get parts of it. Um, the, the knowledge should, you should be able to transfer and then get rid of the old culture once you’ve done that, you know, like, uh. Yeah, like you, you bring it in and suck out all the good stuff and spit out the rest. They didn’t do that. Joel Saxum: The opportunity here is, is that you’ve got a, you’ve got people, there’s gonna be a shortage of blade capacity, right? So if you are, if you are going to start up a blade manufacturing facility, you, if you’re clever enough, you may be able to get the backlog of a bunch of orders to get running without having to try to figure it out as you go. Yolanda Padron: I feel like I’d almost make the case that like the blade repair versus replace gap or the business cases is getting larger and larger now, right? So I feel like there’s more of a market for like some sort of holistic maintenance team to come in and say, Hey, I know this OEM hasn’t been taking care of your blades really well, but here are these retrofits that have proven to be [00:20:00]to work on your blades and solve these issues and we’ll get you up and running. Rosemary Barnes: We are seeing more and more of of that. The thing that makes it hard for that to be a really great solution is that they don’t have the information that they need. They have to reverse engineer everything, and that is. Very challenging because like you can reverse engineer what a blade is, but it doesn’t mean that, you know, um, exactly like, because a, the blade that you end up with is not an optimized blade in every location, right? There’s some parts that are overbuilt and um, sometimes some parts that are underbuilt, which gives you, um, you know, serial issues. But, so reverse engineering isn’t necessarily gonna make it safe, and so that does mean that yeah, like anyone coming in with a really big, significant repair that doesn’t go through the OEM, it’s a, it’s a risk. It, it’s always a risk that they have, you know, like there’s certain repairs where you can reverse engineer enough to know that you’re safe. But any really big [00:21:00] one, um, or anything that involves multiple components, um, is. Is a bit of a gamble if it doesn’t go through the OEM. Joel Saxum: No, but so between, I guess between the comments there, Yolanda and Rosemary, are we then entering the the golden age of opportunity for in independent engineering experts? Rosemary Barnes: I believe so. I’m staking, staking my whole business on it. Allen Hall: I think you have to be careful here, everybody, because the problem is gonna be Chinese blade manufacturers. If you wanna try to establish yourself as a blade manufacturer and you’re taking an existing factory, say, say you bought a TPI factory in Turkey or somewhere, and you thought, okay, I, I know how to do this better than everybody else. That could be totally true. However, the OEMs are not committed to buying blades from you and your competition isn’t the Blade Factory in Denmark or in Colorado or North Dakota, or in Mexico or Canada, Spain, wherever your competition is when, [00:22:00] uh, the OEM says, I can buy these blades for 20 to 30% less money in China, and that’s what you’re gonna be held as, as a standard. That is what’s gonna kill most of these things with a 25% tariff on top. Right? Exactly. But still they’re still bringing Joel Saxum: blades in. That’s why I’m saying a local blade manufacturer, Rosemary Barnes: I think it’s less the case. That everyone thinks about China, although maybe a little bit unconventional opinion a about China, they certainly can manufacture blades with, uh, as good a quality as anyone. I mean, obviously all of the, um, Danish, uh, American manufacturers have factories in China that are putting out excellent quality blades. So I’m not trying to say that they dunno how to make a good blade, but with their. New designs, you know, and the really cheap ones. There’s a couple of, um, there’s a couple of reasons for that that mean that I don’t think that it just slots really well into just replacing all of the rest of the world’s, um, wind turbines. The first is that there are a lot of [00:23:00] subsidies in China. Surely there can only continue so long as their economy is strong. You know, like if their economy slows down, like to what extent are they gonna be able to continue to, um, continue with these subsidies? I would be a little bit nervous about buying an asset that I needed support for the next 30 years from a company like. That ecosystem. Then the other thing is that, um, that development, they move really fast because they take some shortcuts. There’s no judgment there. In fact, from a develop product development point of view, that is absolutely the best way to move really fast and get to a really good product fast. It will be pervasive all the way through every aspect of it. Um, non-Chinese companies are just working to a different standard, which slows them down. But also means that along the way, like I would be much happier with a half developed, um, product from a non-Chinese manufacturer than a half developed product from a Chinese manufacturer. The end point, like if China can keep on going long enough with this, [00:24:00] you know, like just really move fast, make bold decisions, learn everything you can. If they can continue with that long enough to get to a mature product, then absolutely they will just smash the rest of the world to pieces. So for me, it’s a matter of, um, does their economy stay strong enough to support that level of, uh, competition? Allen Hall: Well, no, that’s a really good take. It’s an engineering take, and I think the decision is made in the procurement offices of the OEMs and when they start looking at the numbers and trying to determine profitability. That extra 20% savings they can get on blades made in China comes into play quite often. This is why they’re having such a large discussion about Chinese manufacturers coming into the eu. More broadly is the the Vestas and the Siemens CAAs and even the GE Re Novas. No, it’s big time trouble because the cost structure is lower. It just is, and I. [00:25:00] As much as I would love to see Vestas and Siemens and GE Renova compete on a global stage, they can’t at the moment. That’s evident. I don’t think it’s a great time to be opening any new Blade Factory. If you’re not an already established company, it’s gonna be extremely difficult. Wind Energy O and M Australia is back February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Pullman on the park. Which is a great hotel. We built this year’s agenda directly from the conversations we’ve had in 2025 and tackling serial defects, insurance pressures, blade repairs, and the operational challenges that keeps everybody up at night around the world. So we have two days of technical sessions, interactive roundtables and networking that actually moves the industry for. Forward. And if you’re interested in attending this, you need to go to WMA 2020 six.com. It’s WOMA 2020 six.com. Rosemary, a lot of, uh, great events gonna happen at. W 2026. Why don’t [00:26:00] you give us a little highlight. Parlet iss gonna be there. Rosemary Barnes: Parlow is gonna be there. I mean, a highlight for me is always getting together with the, the group. And also, I mean, I just really love the size of the event that uh, every single person who’s there is interested in the same types of things that you are interested in. So the highlight for me is, uh, the conversations that I don’t know that I’m gonna have yet. So looking forward to that. But we are also. Making sure that we’ve got a really great program. We’ve got a good mix of Australian speakers and a few people bringing international experience as well. There’s also a few side events that are being organized, like there’s an operators only forum, which unfortunately none of us will be able to enter because we’re not operators, but that is gonna be really great for. For all of them to be able to get together and talk about issues that they have with no, nobody else in the room. So if, if you are an operator and you’re not aware of that, then get in touch and we’ll pass on your details to make sure you can join. Um, yeah, and people just, you know, [00:27:00] taking the opportunities to catch up with clients, you know, for paddle load. Most or all of our clients are, are gonna be there. So it is nice to get off Zoom and um, yeah, actually sit face to face and discuss things in person. So definitely encourage everyone to try and arrange those sorts of things while they’re there. Joel Saxum: You know, one of the things I think is really important about this event is that, uh, we’re, we’re continuing the conversation from last year, but a piece of feedback last year was. Fantastic job with the conversation and helping people with o and m issues and giving us things we can take back and actually integrate into our operations right away. But then a week or two or three weeks after the event, we had those things, but the conversation stopped. So this year we’re putting some things in place. One of ’em being like Rosemary was talking about the private operator forum. Where there’s a couple of operators that have actually taken the reins with this thing and they wanna put this, they wanna make this group a thing where they’re want to have quarterly meetings and they want to continue this conversation and knowledge share and boost that whole Australian market in the wind [00:28:00]side up right? Rising waters floats all boats, and we’re gonna really take that to the next level this year at Allen Hall: WMA down in Melbourne. That’s why I need a register now at Wilma 2020 six.com because the industry needs solutions. Speeches. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate all the feedback and support we received from the wind industry. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Just reach out to us on LinkedIn and please don’t forget to subscribe so you’d never miss an episode. For Joel Rosemary and Yolanda, I’m Allen Hall. We’ll catch you next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Podcast: Exploited: The Cyber Truth Episode: When Vehicles Aren't Just Machines: Cybersecurity, Autonomy & What's NextPub date: 2025-12-18Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationAs vehicles evolve into always-connected, software-defined systems, cybersecurity decisions increasingly shape privacy, safety, and trust on the road. In this episode of Exploited: The Cyber Truth, host Paul Ducklin is joined by RunSafe Security CEO Joseph M. Saunders and special guest Sean McKeever, Global Product Cybersecurity Lead at Marelli, for a candid discussion on what it really means to secure modern vehicles. Sean brings deep industry experience to unpack how OEMs and suppliers are navigating data stewardship, autonomous testing, vehicle theft, and diverging global regulations. Together, Paul, Joe, and Sean explore: What constant connectivity means for driver privacy and data stewardshipThe risks of beta-testing autonomous systems on public roadsHow car theft has shifted from physical break-ins to software exploitationWhy U.S. and EU cybersecurity regulations take fundamentally different approachesThe importance of collaboration across OEMs, suppliers, and regulators From RF relay attacks to software-defined vehicles with decade-long lifecycles, this episode highlights why cybersecurity is no longer an add-on but a core design decision shaping the future of mobility.The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from RunSafe Security, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Some episodes are planned. Others are produced. And then there are episodes like this one—where the setting, the people, and the moment all collide into something memorable. For the 500th episode of MakingChips, the team gathered once again At the Boring Bar for an unfiltered, bourbon-fueled roundtable with leaders from across the manufacturing ecosystem. Recorded live at Roush Yates Manufacturing Solutions during the Top Shops Conference in Charlotte, this special annual episode brings together shop owners, executives, advisors, and industry partners for the kinds of conversations that usually happen after the microphones are turned off. The drinks are poured, the guardrails come down, and the real stories start to flow. What emerges is an honest discussion about what truly separates top-performing shops from the rest. Not hype. Not buzzwords. But culture, systems, communication, and the discipline to do the hard things consistently—especially when cash flow is tight, customers are demanding, and complexity is rising. From benchmarking through the Top Shops survey to navigating OEM power dynamics, cash flow strain, customer communication, and the maturity of manufacturing as an industry, this conversation reflects how far the industry has come—and how far it still needs to go. Along the way, there are laughs, sharp takes, personal stories, and more than a few lessons earned the hard way. This is At the Boring Bar. And for Episode 500, it's exactly where the MakingChips conversation belongs. Segments (0:00) Setting the scene at Roush Yates Manufacturing Solutions during Top Shops (1:47) Introductions from shop leaders, OEMs, advisors, and industry partners (6:14) What actually separates Top Shops from the middle of the pack (10:15) Core values, culture, and leadership maturity (15:57) IMTS, trade shows, and the pressure to bring something new (22:06) Marketing, differentiation, and industry buzzwords (26:00) AI, automation, and separating real value from hype (31:51) Cash flow realities and long payment terms (37:15) OEM power dynamics and positioning as a second source (45:57) Communication as a competitive advantage (55:40) Systems, standards, and operational discipline (1:02:10) Data visibility, professionalism, and rising expectations (1:12:45) Scaling culture, teams, and leadership (1:26:45) Developing people and building trust (1:37:15) Industry maturity and cross-industry learning (1:47:45) Final reflections from At the Boring Bar Resources mentioned on this episode CliftonLarsonAllen (CLA) Top Shops IMTS 2026 Methods Machine Tools Connect With the Guests/Hosts Isaac Burton Jason Davis Nick Goellner Mike Payne Paul Van Metre Jamie Marzilli Leslie Boyd Jon Star Connect With MakingChips www.MakingChips.com On Facebook On LinkedIn On Instagram On Twitter On YouTube

Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity InsiderEpisode: Why OT Must Lead the Manufacturing Cybersecurity ConversationPub date: 2025-12-17Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationKatie O'Brien shares her unconventional journey from music teacher to industrial cybersecurity expert, bringing over 25 years of IT experience into the OT world. In this conversation with Dino, Katie discusses the critical gaps in OT cybersecurity—from the lack of university programs teaching industrial security to the disconnect between IT and OT teams. They explore why system integrators and OEMs fail to design cybersecurity into new manufacturing projects from the start, compare it to building cars without safety features, and discuss the emergence of managed services in the OT space. Katie explains how Garland Technology helps organizations get visibility into aging infrastructure with unmanaged switches, and both hosts emphasize the urgent need for the OT ecosystem to drive cybersecurity conversations proactively rather than waiting for IT teams who may never have walked the plant floor.Chapters:(00:00:00) - The Hard Truths About OT Security Nobody Wants to Hear(00:01:06) - Katie's Unconventional Journey: From Music Teacher to OT Cybersecurity Expert(00:04:00) - The Current State of OT Cybersecurity and Future Directions(00:06:00) - The Education Gap: Why Universities Aren't Teaching Industrial Cybersecurity(00:08:00) - The Disconnect Between IT/Security Teams and OT Operations(00:10:00) - Designing Cybersecurity Into New Manufacturing Projects From the Start(00:13:00) - IT Teams Who've Never Walked the Plant Floor(00:16:00) - The Emergence of Managed Services in the OT Space(00:18:00) - Garland Technology: Getting Visibility Into Aging Infrastructure(00:19:00) - Software Defined Automation and the Future of Industrial Control(00:22:00) - Why the OT Ecosystem Must Drive the Cybersecurity Conversation(00:24:00) - The Real Cost of Downtime and Cyber Incidents in ManufacturingLinks And Resources:Katie O'Brien on LinkedInWant to Sponsor an episode or be a Guest? Reach out here.Industrial Cybersecurity Insider on LinkedInCybersecurity & Digital Safety on LinkedInBW Design Group CybersecurityDino Busalachi on LinkedInCraig Duckworth on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Industrial Cybersecurity Insider? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to leave us a review!The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Industrial Cybersecurity Insider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Private aviation has a reputation problem, and it's not because demand is slow, but because the system behind it is still operating like it's 1998.  Too many operators are stuck in old behaviors: seven brokers on a single trip, opaque pricing, and a customer experience that feels more like chasing down a missing receipt than stepping into a premium service.  We talk about “frictionless” tech in every other industry, but in aviation, friction is still the business model. And yet, the real opportunity in private aviation isn't more luxury, it's more transparency, standardization, and efficiency. The industry doesn't struggle because people don't want to fly. It struggles because the little guys can't scale, the big guys can't personalize, and customers end up paying $100 for a turkey sandwich wrapped like a gas-station snack.  If 90% of operators have fewer than 10 airplanes, how do they compete, maintain safety standards, reduce costs, or deliver anything resembling a modern experience? That's where FlyHouse is flipping the script. Their thesis is simple but radical for aviation: create a unified tech ecosystem, give small operators scale, tie owners and flyers directly to availability, and make safety a cultural standard, not a checkbox.  How is FlyHouse building a marketplace where transparency replaces guesswork, lift becomes predictable, and users can split a $40,000 flight as seamlessly as splitting a dinner bill?  My guest today, Jack Lambert, the CEO of FlyHouse, has spent the last three years building something the industry has resisted for decades: a tech-driven aviation model where operators, owners, and flyers all win.  In this conversation, we break down what it actually takes to modernize a legacy industry, where the real inefficiencies sit, and why culture (not just airplanes) is the asset that determines who survives the next wave of consolidation.   You'll also learn; Why private aviation feels chaotic today, and the hidden friction points customers never see How a tech marketplace with 2,000+ airplanes solves the real bottleneck: lift, not luxury The cultural and behavioral shifts operators must make for safety to actually mean something Why the “Henry” flyer (high earner, not rich yet) is reshaping private travel demand The economics behind brokers, GRPs, and why seven middlemen on one trip destroys value How small operators can access fuel savings, maintenance leverage, and real safety oversight through scale How Flyhouse's split-flight functionality turns private travel into a predictable, shareable, lifestyle product The little details that separate forgettable operators from world-class ones   About the Guest Jack Lambert is the CEO of FlyHouse. He is an industry veteran, widely respected for his leadership and innovation in private aviation. His aviation career is backed by decades of experience, and his personal achievements extend beyond business. A graduate of the University of Massachusetts Boston, Jack was a standout student-athlete, holding records in three sports and earning All-American honors. His exceptional achievements led to his induction into the university's Hall of Fame, further fueling the drive and determination that would later define his leadership in aviation. Building on this foundation of excellence, Jack went on to found and serve as CEO of Jet Access Aviation. Known for his creative vision and hands-on approach, Jack has earned a reputation for reshaping how businesses and clients experience private aviation. At FlyHouse, Jack continues his forward-thinking leadership style. His vision is rooted in the belief that transparency, trust, and putting people first are key to sustainable success. He leverages his deep industry knowledge to drive FlyHouse forward, fostering a culture of innovation while delivering exceptional client experiences. Jack's passion for aviation and unwavering commitment to service have enabled FlyHouse to redefine private flight, offering luxury, convenience, and affordability through a groundbreaking business model that benefits both jet owners and customers. To learn more, visit https://www.goflyhouse.com/ and connect with Jack on LinkedIn.   About Your Host Craig Picken is an Executive Recruiter, writer, speaker, and ICF Trained Executive Coach. He is focused on recruiting senior-level leadership, sales, and operations executives in the aviation and aerospace industry. His clients include premier OEMs, aircraft operators, leasing/financial organizations, and Maintenance/Repair/Overhaul (MRO) providers, and since 2008, he has personally concluded more than 400 executive-level searches in a variety of disciplines. Craig is the ONLY industry executive recruiter who has professionally flown airplanes, sold airplanes, and successfully run a P&L in the aviation industry. His professional career started with a passion for airplanes. After eight years' experience as a decorated Naval Flight Officer – with more than 100 combat missions, 2,000 hours of flight time, and 325 aircraft carrier landings – Craig sought challenges in business aviation, where he spent more than 7 years in sales with both Gulfstream Aircraft and Bombardier Business Aircraft. Craig is also a sought-after industry speaker who has presented at Corporate Jet Investor, International Aviation Women's Association, and SOCAL Aviation Association.    Subscribe, Rate & Review Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm, so our show reaches more people. Thank you! 

Allen and Joel are joined by Gregory Kocsis, lifting technology expert, to discuss the gap between European and US crane operations. They cover multi-brand blade handling tools, up-tower cranes, and why the aftermarket service sector is driving innovation in major component replacements. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining light on wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Greg, welcome to the program. Joel Saxum: Thank you guys. Nice to meet you. Allen Hall: we have a lot to talk about today. there’s so many heavy lifts. Complex lifts on ships, lifts on, and mountaintops lifts in really odd places. it’s getting more complicated as we go along, and obviously Joel and I talked to a lot of operators and one of the things they complain about more recently is, Hey, we’re having trouble with lifts and we’re having damage that we didn’t have in the past. And it’s complicated, and the access to cranes is more complicated. Everything’s become more complicated. What are some of the issues that you see on the other end of the spectrum, being in that [00:01:00] business? Gregory Kocsis: Yeah. Basically what I see that, so I, I work both, in the last decade in both US and Europe. and I can see that there’s no lack of technologies. there’s a lot of tech that’s, solving a lot of issues. but mostly what you can see that there’s a slight gap. I would say that, There’s two, two prong. the US it seems, some of the farm are really big, and that’s good for scale. but the, technologies are a little bit behind, I would say 10, 15 years sometimes. so that also means that the. The solutions that they use to, to change a blade or change a gearbox or how to lower a full, rotor, it’s always, lower tech and based on practicalities. Joel Saxum: Greg, why do you think that is? Do you think it’s just simply because, yeah, like the eu, so you’ve done a lot of work in the eu, of course, onshore, offshore, and globally. But in the EU it [00:02:00] seems like tighter quarters maybe, harder to get around some of the wind farms. Is, does that drive some of the difference in innovation? Because like you said, you there’s the innovation is there, the tooling is there. The EU has been doing it for a while. It’s just that in the states it seems like we’re more, for lack of a better term, like agricultural about things. It’s kinda Hey, this has worked for 40 years, so this is what’s how we’re gonna do it. Gregory Kocsis: Yeah, it’s always some, nature driven forces are there. So in the, in, for example, if you look at Germany, there’s, a lot of owners and the size of sites are three turbines, four turbines. And if you look at the platform that’s available around turbine is very limited. I was also on a site last year in, North Germany where basically, the truck could park right next to the turbine, but they had to clear some trees, in order to, make sure that they can put the full rotor down. Because since, since they installed it, forest grew, [00:03:00] much, much more. That was another case in, Rotterdam when we were right next to the channel and they had to, close the road. that was, docking. To the ships, back and forth every, half an hour when they had to lift the blade and it was going across the road. So when you’re in situations like this and there’s not a lot of space around the turbines, you have to start thinking that, how can we do this quicker? How can we do this safer? Because you can see that there’s a lot of planning that goes, with this as well. And then you need to make sure that, it’s more predictable, what you’re doing. So I think that. That’s one of the main driver for these technologies. if I put it simple terms that the more single crane operation for MCRs, and technologies that allow a single crane exchange, is, more pushed because of this rather than in the US where you can get maybe two smaller, cranes and then you just sling it, [00:04:00] and then take it down with two cranes. Joel Saxum: Yeah, you’ve got all kinds of space, right? Half of our wind farms are in pasture or farm fields. I wouldn’t say half. We say the majority of our wind farms are in pa pasture, and you’ve got space. The only thing limiting you is, how big the pad is really Right. And bring some cribbing in. You can basically get done with the same technology you’ve been using for cranes for years and years and with that as well, I think that, one of the things we talked about in our kind of, chat off air was. the workforce over here is a little bit different as well. So the workforce over here is sometimes a, a slinger or someone who’s holding a tagline. They got a green hard hat on, and they’re a warm body because they need people, they need help. because we’re doing things at such scale. Whereas in the eu, that’s just not the case. you’re not gonna be allowed to be around operations like that unless you’ve been thoroughly trained for a couple years. And, so, that situation with the workforce is a little bit different. So it’s almost easier to not be [00:05:00]consistently and continuously innovating and training people on new things. But with that, we’re, leaving ourselves behind in the game, right? There’s cost savings to be had, there’s time savings to be had that we’re just not harvesting. Gregory Kocsis: Yeah, absolutely. And as you mentioned that the, benefits in, Europe at these, lower scale, that also allows that, some of these smaller ISPs, they can excel what they’re doing. So they can have a crew of 10, 15 people and they focus on, some turbines, but they. When they do a campaign, that doesn’t mean that they have to go through a hundred turbines. They, do one disassembly or two disassembly or three, and it just stays at that scale. So they can actually manage to get by with the smaller crew and then really, get really experienced, on this. While I think in the US there’s quite a lot of push on. We cannot just do one. Because if you look at the size of sites, there’s [00:06:00] also one site consists between 80 and 120 turbines. And if you draw an an area that, let’s say a two hour driving range that can summarize 2000 turbines. And that also means that when something happens there, you also wanna do it at scale. So you cannot get away with 10, 15 people you need. 30, or you need five, five different crews. And then where can you get these people? How quickly can you train them? And I think that’s actually the good thing is that if we could manage to, to, pull the experience that we have in Europe, that would be good to scale it up because that’s the drawback of Europe, that when you, once you have something great. You cannot scale it up and then put a specialized tool cost above or across, 2000 turbine exchanges. Allen Hall: Is there a movement to bring more technology over from the eu, particularly because, the tools are a little more specialized, [00:07:00] but you’re reducing risk. Is it just that, the larger wind farms, be it in the United States, be it in Australia or there’s a lot of places on the planet where the wind farms are big Brazil. Another case in point, are there cases where it needs to have more technology transfer? They’re doing it a certain way. In Germany, it’s cleaner, more efficient. It takes those people to do it. It’s safer, it’s repeatable. Have we just not broached that yet? Because it doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of technology transfer in terms of lifts from the EU to many other places. Gregory Kocsis: I think the main, if you look at it that what is the driver on this is who’s responsible for an MCR operation. And if you look at the turbine’s lifetime, it’s all about. Who’s, responsible for the service. And in us, typically the turbine, especially next era, likes to buy new turbines with zero, zero involvement from the OEMs they want to [00:08:00] take over from the get go. and then typically in, in Europe we have, 10, 15 or whole, lifetime service contracts. if you look at a pie that who, takes care of the turbine? I would say that. 40% is, in the hands of, the asset owners or ISPs. and that’s also growing. So I think it was, would make that estimated that 40% will, will shift towards, 60. So that, that is the drive that I can see that more of this chunk is getting, getting bigger. And you can see players that are already globally existing, like Deutsche intech, that. That’s quite big in the US and Europe that they started to do that transition, and then take that technology that they could experience in different sites and then put this to the service side. But that’s, the difficult part, that even though that slice is [00:09:00] fairly big, it’s spread across small companies. And as a small company, if you pick one in Denmark or you pick one in the Netherlands, for them to collaborate on a project or assist on a project in US or Australia or Brazil, it’s quite costly. So then the question comes at who’s. Who’s footing the bill? is it the service company? Is it the asset owner? Is the crane company chipping in? Or how is the collaboration working? And there’s no rule of thumb that applies everywhere for these. So it’s case by case that how, big is it? How many turbines are we talking about? What kind of turbines, how far are we out in the service contract? Joel Saxum: It brings in a couple of questions, right? Why are we having this block of, lifting and crane operation innovations? Is it when the OEMs are responsible? They have, they know their say blade types, they know their hub types. They know their MCE, they know their drivetrain components, so they know and they have the designs [00:10:00] and the drawings of what their existing tooling needs would be or how to connect to them. So they’re able to build out these tools that work for them Now. Going from that to being a, say a crane company or an EPC building turbines. You are building multi-brand turbines, multi-brand sites. Not only multi-brand, but multi-unit, different technologies, different blade types. So all of your fixtures need to be different and there’s not very many universal tools out there. how do we get to the point where we can build more universal tools or more tooling that can work for everybody? Gregory Kocsis: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s. The OEMs are holding all the cards, on this one. So that, that also means that when you’re under a service contract, then that means that the OEM as you said, they have the tooling, they have the work procedure, and, in this case, if you try to imagine the MCR, it starts with. What parts do you have to shut down in the turbine? What do you have to disconnect? What do you have to plan on the ground? So [00:11:00] we could isolate it and talk just about the tools. and that was actually part of my work in the previous company that I worked at. We, tried to figure out that what kind of universal tools, can we make for these, purposes, but we also face the fact that many of the ISPs that are coming, they have the demand for, can you give me a Swiss knife that solves everything? And I have nothing from the OEM. So where should we get that? How heavy is that hub? where are the lifting points on the blade? Where is the COG? and then these lack of informations that are difficult together on the market. and the OEM is not really keen to share it either, Allen Hall: but why wouldn’t they want to share that information? Greg? I’m trying to understand where they’re coming from. It would make everybody’s life easier. And lower the cost of operation. If they had standardized lifting points, particularly like generators and gear boxes, that would make a lot of [00:12:00] sense to me. It’s like any other industry where there’s hoists and lifts that are standardized, but in wind, endeavor seems to come across that way. Everybody’s got their own specialized design, don’t they? See the revenue. They could generate from that, that, or the lower the cost that their, customers would have to, put out for lifts and repairs by making it standardized. And, where’s the IEC committees in all this and dvs of the world? Gregory Kocsis: they can definitely see the money, and I think that’s, the big issue, because they, like to earn money as well. So if you look at. What is an OEM earning on selling turbines? Its OTs. What is the OEM Earning on service contracts. That’s where the dough is. So they like these as well, and this is monetizing the market that. They like that they control these kind of information because that drives the, let’s say, the desperate customers to fall back on the [00:13:00] safety net of an OEM service contract. so it would be actually the disadvantage, in the short term, with the current business model. for the OEM if they would open up a little bit more. On the other hand, I think right now we have a lot of, asset owners that grew quite big, like EDP, next era that have, a lot of, turbines. it’s for, many years now. So some of the fleet, if you look at the old vest, V 40 sevens, I think. But NextEra has couple thousands of them. that also means that they have a lot of knowledge on these legacy turbines as well. The knowledge is there, the OEMs, but there’s no clear drive on why should they open up. and there’s a knowledge, bulk of knowledge at the service providers like Deutsche Technique. There’s a bulk of knowledge, with big, asset owners. But this is not shared across and there’s no consensus of, [00:14:00]let’s look at it, how we can, make tools that are better. Because I think the, business model is missing that. How can we make sure that everyone will benefit from this? Joel Saxum: Yeah. It was like we, we talked about off air as well. the, when we talk lifting, what also goes hand in hand with lifting is transportation fixtures. and I’ve heard stories of heavy lift vessels having to completely cut off and reel on new fixtures to ship new blades. And that just seems like what a waste of money, time and effort. of course people are making money doing that, but at the end of the day, that hurts LCOE for wind in energy, right? Because there’s just more cost put into the supply chain that doesn’t. Really need to be there or shouldn’t need to be there. so I, I would like to see us get to the stage where we’re doing, where we have some multi-brand tools or some universal tools in the lifting world. and so that’s a question I wanna ask you then, Greg. we’ve been [00:15:00] talking in generalities around some things. Can you share with us some of these tools that we may not know in the states that exist in the EU that you guys are using? Gregory Kocsis: Yeah, for sure. Yeah. The way I look at it. And then you said it’s also, connected with cranes, is that if you look at some numbers, there’s 35,000 crane call outs globally. Every year where the crane has to go on site and then some of these big things have to be lifted. Now, this is not including the offshore vessels. and that, if you look at these and break down the numbers, you have to lift something that’s big. out of these 35,000, 15,000 would be. Blades or blade bearings. So that means that you have to do something with the blade. You have to take off the blade for the blade’s sake, or you have to take off the blade for the, bearing’s sake. And then the other, tent and, thousand is for the, transformer. so the [00:16:00] generator, and the gearbox, that these are the big things. I think, as you said, blade damage is the most. Particular thing that you shouldn’t break and it’s easy to break is the blades. So that was the primary focus also, with, some of the company that has worked before. So the one of these universal blade handling tools, that we have, different, solutions from, Germany, a couple of them from Denmark, that the premise is that you can have a single crane and then, the blade tool itself. can either adapt, to the blade itself or there’s some slight modifications that you have to do and then it can handle multi-brand. So that would mean that you have one tool and it can handle a range of blades. Allen Hall: That, that seems like an obvious win for an operator or groups of operators in a certain location like Texas where there’s are variety of turbines.[00:17:00] If I had a multi-brand blade lifting tool, why? Why hasn’t that seen wider adoption by a number of operators? Just basically saying, Hey, everybody, throw in 20% of the cost and we’ll just park this tool in the middle of Texas when we need it, we’ll just pull it out. Seems, that seems obvious, but it hasn’t happened. Gregory Kocsis: If, you look at the tech level of such a tool comparing to the tech level that they used to on a daily basis, it’s, that’s where the gap is because if, they have a tool that’s, you start including it, there’s self-balancing system in it, there’s hydraulics in it, and they. Then they know that then someone needs to know about this. Who’s gonna be that? Is it their own guy? Or is someone coming with the tool every time that they use this? On the good side, we can see that, for example, Vestas made their tools for Vestas blades. and then they, instead of, a universal seating, they use [00:18:00] proprietary seating for each blade. you know what you’re. You wanna lift, you prep the tool accordingly, and then it’ll fit so that works for Vestas. And I think more and more crews are, are using these, Vestas technologies, but I think that. The cool thing would be that to have these tools and start using the tools that are not just, for one OEM, but try to utilize these, multi, multi-brand sites and, make sure that, couple of these tools available. So you also have, resilience that if something breaks down that the whole project is not dying. Yeah, I would say the gap based on the tech availability and the learning curve itself, how to do it is, that’s the most thing that holds it back. Joel Saxum: Let me get, your opinion on a couple other technologies here as we’re talking lifting technologies. up tower cranes have been, I wouldn’t say it, it’s not a resurgence, it’s a, it just [00:19:00] splashed under the scene here in the last few years. You got a couple companies doing it and some doing it offshore, some doing onshore. we’ve spoken to a few of ’em on the podcast. What’s your opinion on the usage of these things and where they’re good, where what, what pros, cons they have? What are your thoughts? Gregory Kocsis: I think it’s great. I, back in the day when I was at the Danish Trade Council in 2019, I think it was, back then when RA started to have this project with Aon back then, now RWE, where they bought one, and they said that, We’ll start testing this. We are gonna be the pioneers in this because on paper, it works really nice that you have less containers moving around, less, setup, less footprint of the crane itself. I think with these, if we’re talking about theile cranes, it has its place where it makes. Most sense. So for example, one, one case that I’ve heard that, the [00:20:00] northern, part of the country and also in Canada, there, there could be some times of the year when the roads are shut down and then you cannot carry these heavy loads. and then moving around one of these up tower cranes, it’s easier. so it’s not gonna be delayed by weather. So definitely for these that you would have a case that. For the next six to seven months, your crane is not available because we cannot transport it. Then you can swoop in with this and definitely solve it. it does need some setup time, so when, the site is fairly close, and the pads are close to each other, moving a conventional crane from site to site is actually easier, than p this down and move it to the next. So it also depends on how many, how many turbines do you want to take care of in the region? Joel Saxum: Yeah. I think large campaigns, it’s tougher to justify them for, they don’t work as well. but one-offs, access [00:21:00] issues. smaller, quicker things. they’re definitely a use case for ’em. Gregory Kocsis: Another thing I’ve seen it, I think a year ago it was not in, in Spain, that they also looked at a technology that how you can, for example, lower the blade, utilizing a fixture in the hub, that you just bring this small thing up and use the turbine itself as its own fixture to lower this. And that would mean that you have. a hoist, on the top. And then you just need a smaller mobile crane, on the bottom to tip the blade when it comes down. I think these are also very cool things because that means that you don’t need the whole, big multi, multi container big cranes to, to set up for, the smaller thing. And if you need to take care of one blade, when there’s no unbalanced road or no crazy thing, you just need to do a blade bang exchange. Then this could also save, a lot. But, that [00:22:00] also comes to the same book that this is fairly new and this is even newer than the up tower cranes. So we’re talking about, this is, let’s say in still in the prototype phase when they testing the first editions, in the past two years. Allen Hall: So will we see more, new technology coming outta Europe, or is the demand going to. Drive the technology where there’s turbines going in. I’m thinking of Australia. We’ve talked to some operators there, they’re gonna use some innovative techniques to assemble towers that have been around several years, and no one in Europe really has taken advantage of it in the states, not even thinking about it, but the rapid expansion in large farms in Australia, is that where the hot center’s gonna be for lifting in new technology over the next couple of years? Gregory Kocsis: I would say so, Allen Hall: yeah. Gregory Kocsis: Australia is also an upcoming market for these. but as we talked about what drives this, [00:23:00] it, it will be driven by where is the most independent service provider or where is the most contracts that are run out of the OEM and the asset owner took the liberty that we are gonna take the decision and we are gonna, we are gonna test this. Allen Hall: So that’s just very interesting, look into the industry because I do think. Where Australia is a little bit different is that they have been in mining and big, heavy iron projects forever and they’re not afraid to get involved in heavy lifts. That’s just something that they do all the time versus the middle of Kansas where that doesn’t tend to happen so much. So is the technology moving towards Australia and towards Asia? In general because offshore’s gonna be there, onshore, ISS gonna be there. And what should we expect over the next, couple of years then, in terms of crane and lifting technology, will we [00:24:00] see, just bigger, more massive cranes doing heavier lifts or is it gonna be more innovation? there’s, I Gregory Kocsis: think it’s two sides of this. So there’s always one side where you look at what’s happening with the new installations. And the new installations are driven by bigger. Things, larger things that are more fragile, especially with the blades. so that, that’s the technology that goes there, that how can we, we are really at the transport limit, on, both macel and blades when we’re talking about these new things. So I think the, the. Innovation in that sense will go on that direction. And the new installation that, how can we make these even bigger things to be possible to transport and put together in terms of the, the aftermarket and the old turbines. It’s a very different perspective. and the, you can also see a lot of [00:25:00] innovations there, but the, but the stakeholders are very different, so I, don’t think still that the OEM will be heavily involved in this. and do platform close cross collaborative options. but we are entering a stage where some of these bigger players are also, global. So E-D-P-E-D-F, they, in energy, I think they’re one of the innovative ones. They, they exist across the pond as well. So they’re starting to do this knowledge transfer within, their organizations and that, that. That, that are kick starting some small things. And then you can see the, it’s the neighbor effect when you can see that, oh, it works there, why can’t we get there? so it will slowly, organically grow that way. Allen Hall: I think it’s gonna be an interesting next couple of years because as turbines have gradually gotten larger, the two megawatt turbine, which exists primarily in the United States, [00:26:00] is a dying breed. 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 megawatt turbines are gonna become the standard, and lifts are gonna get more complicated, obviously, and the challenges will be there, but it, seems like we’re. at the time where the lifting technology and the financial aspects are gonna come together, we’re gonna close some of these loops and it will be a better situation for a lot of people. It’s time. And I, think if you’re out, if you’re listening to this podcast and you haven’t looked at some of the lifting technologies, you need to call Greg or get ahold of Greg. And how do they do that? Do they, can they find you on LinkedIn? Gregory Kocsis: Yeah, absolutely. I think the easiest way is to find me on LinkedIn. My contacts are also there, so you can find my emails there or just ping me with a message and then we, and we take it from there. Allen Hall: And it’s Greg Coxs, K-O-C-S-I-S. Make sure you put that in LinkedIn correctly. K-O-C-S-I-S or you’re never gonna find Greg. Greg, thank you so much for being on the podcast because there’s so much happening in [00:27:00] the lifting world. It’s hard to keep track, and it is a global industry, so it’s nice to talk to somebody who’s in touch with all of it. Absolutely. Gregory Kocsis: My pleasure.

We look at the Air India Boeing 787 crash and the friction between investigators, Boom Supersonic's plan for stationary power generation, Spirit Airlines' new labor agreements, the canceled TSA labor contract, DHS purchase of Boeing 737s, ethics and the FAA Administrator, the V-22 Osprey accident rate, A-10 retirement postponement, return of PanAm, and fumes in the cabin. Aviation News Air India Boeing 787 Crash Probe Leads to Tussle Between Investigators India's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) and U.S. agencies, such as the NTSB and FAA, investigating the Air India crash have clashed over where and how to read out the flight recorders, access to evidence, and the overall pace and transparency of the investigation. U.S. officials reportedly feared a lack of openness, while Indian officials pushed back strongly against what they saw as outside interference and challenges to their competence. Boeing 787, courtesy Air India. Preliminary technical findings point toward the 787's fuel control switches being moved from “RUN” to “CUTOFF,” starving both engines of fuel shortly after takeoff. Some U.S. sources suspect deliberate pilot action, while Indian authorities have downplayed pilot culpability in public. Source article in the Wall Street Journal: Officials Clash in Investigation of Deadly Air India Crash Air India Admits Compliance Culture Needs Overhaul After Flying Airbus Without Permit, Document Shows An Air India investigation found that one of its Airbus planes conducted eight commercial flights without an airworthiness permit. “Systemic failures” were cited, and the airline admitted it needed to make compliance improvements. Boom Supersonic Secures Breakthrough AI Engine Deal Boom Supersonic is developing the Symphony propulsion system to power its Overture supersonic airliner. At the same time, AI data centers require enormous compute power, and they need energy to do that. Boom says that it will develop the land-based Superpower 42-megawatt natural gas turbine, based on the Symphony engine. If successful, the Superpower would generate a revenue stream and provide operating data. Crusoe Energy has 29 Superpower units on order, with delivery expected in 2027. Major aero‑derivative OEMs offering ground power generation​ include: General Electric, Siemens Energy, Mitsubishi Power, Rolls‑Royce, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries. AvWeek reports that Boom has closed a $300 million funding round, which the company says, together with the AI gas turbine deal, will be sufficient to complete development of the Symphony and initial Overture aircraft. Video: Introducing Superpower: The Supersonic Tech Powering AI Data Centers https://youtu.be/krweC0gvbhM?si=5F4EO-yBlbsjE196 JetBlue A320 narrowly avoids mid-air collision with USAF tanker over Caribbean On December 12, 2025, a JetBlue Airways A320-232 (Flight B61112) left Curaçao bound for JFK airport. Shortly after takeoff, the plane narrowly avoided a collision with a US Air Force refueling tanker. Spirit Airlines Reaches Another Milestone in its Restructuring as Pilots and Flight Attendants Ratify Agreements Spirit Airlines announced the ratification of labor agreements with pilots (represented by the Air Line Pilots Association) and flight attendants (represented by the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA). The two agreements are subject to court approval. 82% of the pilots voted in favor of the contract, which allows temporary reductions in pay rates and retirement contributions effective January 1, 2026. Pay rates are restored through guaranteed increases on August 1, 2028, and January 1, 2029. Company-funded retirement contributions will be fully restored by July 1, 2029. See ALPA Press Release: Spirit Airlines Pilots Ratify Restructuring Agreement. US invalidates union contract covering 47,000 TSA officers, AFGE vows to challenge The American Federation of Government Employees represents airport screening officers and plans to file a lawsuit after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated the collective bargaining agreement. DHS plans to implement a new labor framework on January 11, 2026, when the collection of union dues from TSA officers’ paychecks will cease. TSA said the new labor framework “will return the agency back into a security-focused framework that prioritizes workforce readiness, resource allocation and mission focus with an effective stewardship of taxpayer dollars.” US signs nearly $140m deal to purchase six Boeing 737s for use in deportations The Department of Homeland Security signed a contract with Arlington, Virginia-based Daedalus Aviation Corporation to purchase six Boeing 737 planes for deportation operations. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said: “This new initiative will save $279m in taxpayer dollars by allowing ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” Daedalus Aviation Corporation focuses on turnkey flight operations and specialized charter services for government and high‑stakes commercial clients. They emphasize contingency, evacuation, and other critical missions. Senator says FAA administrator failed to sell multimillion-dollar airline stake as promised Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) says FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford promised to sell his multimillion-dollar stake in Republic Airways under his ethics agreement, but he has failed to do so. Bedford agreed to sell all his shares within 90 days of his confirmation, but 150 days have now passed. In a letter to Bedford, Sen. Cantwell writes, “It appears you continue to retain significant equity in this conflicting asset months past the deadline set to fully divest from Republic, which constitutes a clear violation of your ethics agreement. This is unacceptable and demands a full accounting.” New V-22 Mishap Reviews Find Material Issues with Osprey, Poor Communication Between Services Two new reports point to faulty parts, poorly understood maintenance procedures, and a lack of communication across the services. The result was a lack of safety and reliability across the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. One report was from the Naval Air Systems Command, and the other was from the Government Accountability Office. Both had been in the works for two years. Twenty people were killed in V-22 Osprey accidents from 2022 to 2024. Congress Postpones A-10 Retirement The A-10 Thunderbolt II (the Warthog) close support aircraft has been on the verge of retirement for years. The National Defense Appropriations Act (NDAA) directs the Air Force to keep at least 103 A-10 aircraft in its inventory until a phaseout in 2029. The NDAA limits retirement plans for other aircraft: KC-10 tankers, the F-15E Strike Eagle, and the E-3 Sentry surveillance plane. Delays in supplying replacements are cited as the reason. Pan Am plans future Airbus A320neo operations as part of Miami launch The “new Pan Am” is a startup effort to revive the Pan American World Airways brand as a U.S. Part 121 scheduled airline. Pan American Global Holdings acquired the rights to the Pan Am brand in 2023. Pan Am intends to deploy Airbus A320neo aircraft as part of its future operations in Miami. There are few details about the executive team, but Ed Wegel is described as a Pan Am co-founder. He is also the founder of AVi8 Air Capital, a niche aviation-focused investment and advisory firm with headquarters in the Miami, Florida area. The company is active in the relaunch of Pan Am, and this year (2025), they completed a comprehensive Pan Am business plan. Boeing Sued By Law Professor After Allegedly Inhaling Toxic Fumes On Cross-Country Flight A law professor who flew on a Boeing 737 aircraft operated by Delta Air Lines last year is suing Boeing, alleging that he suffered serious health issues after being exposed to toxic fumes in the cabin. Mentioned The 10 Best Airports for AvGeeks: Rare Aircraft, Unique Routes, and Niche Airlines Hosts this Episode Max Flight, Rob Mark, and our Main(e) Man Micah, with Erin Applebaum.

Industrial Talk is talking to Ryan Hiss, VP of Sales and Marketing at Better Engineering about "Industrial Parts Washers". Ryan Hiss, VP of Sales and Marketing at Better Engineering, discussed their industrial wash systems on the Industrial Talk Podcast. Better Engineering, founded in 1960, specializes in aqueous parts washers for various industries, including automotive, aerospace, and food and pharmaceutical. Hiss highlighted the importance of cleanliness in manufacturing, noting that their systems can process parts at high throughputs, ensuring quality control. The company also employs sensors to monitor equipment and proactively alert customers to maintenance needs. Better Engineering is expanding into automation and traceability in food and pharmaceutical industries to improve efficiency and sustainability. Outline Introduction and Welcome to Industrial Talk Podcast Scott introduces Ryan Hiss from Better Engineering, highlighting their expertise in industrial washers.Scott suggests an on-site conversation with Ryan to discuss industrial washers further. Discussion on AI and Human Interaction in Business Scott discusses the role of AI in business and emphasizes the importance of human interaction in maintaining trust and engagement.Scott argues that companies need to tell their stories with a human face to build trust and authenticity.Scott shares his experience of creating content that reflects the human side of business.Scott encourages listeners to reach out to Industrial Talk for help in telling their stories effectively. Introduction of Ryan Hiss and Better Engineering Scott introduces Ryan Hiss, VP of Sales and Marketing at Better Engineering, and discusses his background.Ryan shares his journey from Baltimore to California, his education, and his career in software sales before joining Better Engineering.Ryan talks about his father's retirement and his role in taking over the family business.Ryan provides a brief history of Better Engineering, founded in 1960 by his grandfather, and its evolution over the years. Better Engineering's Products and Services Ryan explains Better Engineering's focus on industrial wash systems, also known as aqueous parts washers.Better Engineering offers a variety of wash systems, including small parts washers, conveyor washers, rotary basket washers, and custom units.Ryan highlights the company's work with major space, aerospace, automotive, and food and pharmaceutical OEMs.Ryan discusses the importance of cleanliness in manufacturing and the role of industrial washers in maintaining quality control. Challenges and Solutions in Industrial Washing Ryan explains the need for high-throughput wash systems in automotive and aerospace manufacturing.Better Engineering's systems are designed to meet specific cleanliness standards and are tested using standard equipment.Ryan discusses the flexibility of Better Engineering's wash systems, which are modular by design to accommodate different customer requirements.Ryan shares examples of how Better Engineering modifies existing systems to meet new application needs. Data Collection and AI in Manufacturing Ryan talks about the use of sensors in Better Engineering's wash systems to monitor and maintain equipment.Better Engineering collects data on various parameters, such as vibration, temperature, and chemistry concentration, to ensure optimal performance.Ryan explains the importance of traceability in food and pharmaceutical industries, where data is used to track and verify cleanliness.Better Engineering provides interfaces to send data to

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda recap the UK Offshore Wind Supply Chain Spotlight in Edinburgh and Great British Energy’s £1 billion manufacturing push. Plus Ørsted’s European onshore wind sale, Xocean’s unmanned survey tech at Moray West, and why small suppliers must scale or risk being left behind. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! You are listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by build turbines.com. Learn, train, and be a part of the Clean Energy Revolution. Visit build turbines.com today. Now, here’s your host. Allen Hall, Joel Saxon, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host Allen Hall in Charlotte, North Carolina, the Queen City. I have Yolanda Pone and Joel Saxon back in Austin, Texas. Rosemary Barnes is taking the week off. We just got back from Scotland, Joel and I did, and we had a really great experience at the UK offshore wind supply chain spotlight 2025 in Edinburgh, where we met with a number of wind energy suppliers and technology advocates. A Joel Saxum: lot going on there, Joel. Yeah. One of the really cool things I enjoyed about that, um, get together the innovation spotlight. [00:01:00] One, the way they had it set up kind of an exhibition space, but not really an exhibition. It was like just a place to gather and everybody kind of had their own stand, but it was more how can we facilitate this conversation And then in the same spot, kind of like we’ve seen in other conferences, the speaking slots. So you could be kind of one in ear, oh one in year here, listening to all the great things that they’re doing. But having those technical conversations. And I guess the second thing I wanted to share was. Thank you to all of the, the UK companies, right? So the, all the Scottish people that we met over there, all the people from, from England and, and around, uh, the whole island there, everybody was very, very open and wanting to have conversations and wanting to share their technology, their solutions. Um, how they’re helping the industry or, or what other people can do to collaborate with them to help the industry. That’s what a lot of this, uh, spotlight was about. So from our, our seat, um, that’s something that we, you know, of course with the podcast, we’re always trying to share collaboration, kind of breed success for everybody. So kudos to the ORE [00:02:00] Catapult for putting that event on. Allen Hall: Yeah, a big thing. So, or Catapult, it was a great event. I’ve met a lot of people that I’ve only known through LinkedIn, so it’s good to see them face to face and. Something that we’ve had on the podcast. So we did a number of podcast recordings while we’re there. They’ll be coming out over the next several weeks, so stay tuned for it. You know, one of the main topics at that event in Edinburg was the great British Energy announcement. This is huge, Joel. Uh, so, you know, you know, the United Kingdoms has been really pushing offshore wind ambitions for years, but they don’t have a lot of manufacturing in country. Well, that’s all about the change. Uh, great British energy. Which is a government backed energy company just unveiled a 1 billion pound program called Energy Engineered in the uk, and their mission is pretty straightforward. Build it in the uk, employ people in the uk, and keep the economic benefits of the clean energy transition on British soil. 300 million pounds of that is really [00:03:00] going to be focused on supply chain immediately. That can happen in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and England. It’s a big promotion for the UK on the wind energy side. I see good things coming out of this. What were your thoughts when you heard that Joel Saxum: announcement, Joel? The offshore wind play. Right. It’s like something like this doesn’t happen to economies very often. Right. It’s not very often that we have like this just new industry that pops outta nowhere. Right. We’re, we’re not making, you know, it’s like when, when. Automotive industry popped up in the, you know, the early 19 hundreds. Like that was this crazy new thing. It’s an industrial revolution. It’s all this new opportunity. So offshore wind in, in my idea, same kind of play, right? It’s this new thing or newer thing. Um, and as a government, um, coming together to say, Hey, this is happening. We have the resources here. We’re gonna be deploying these things here. Why would we not take advantage of building this here? I mean. Any politician that says I’m bringing jobs or I’m bringing in, you [00:04:00] know, um, bringing in funds to be able to prop up an industry or to, uh, you know, start a manufacturing facility here or support an engineering department here, um, to be able to take advantage of something like this. Absolutely right. Why offshore this stuff when you can do it Here, you’ve got the people, you have the engineering expertise. It’s your coastline. You’ve operated offshore. You know how to build them, operate ’em, all of these different things. Keep as much of that in-house as you can. I, I mean, we’ve, we’ve watched it in the US over the last few years. Kind of try to prop up a supply chain here as well. But, you know, with regulations and everything changing, it’s too risky to invest. What the, it looks like what the UK has seen over there is, well, we might as well invest here. We’ll throw the money at it. Let’s, let’s make it happen on our shores. The Allen Hall: comparison’s obvious to the IRA Bill Yolanda and the IRA bill came out, what, A little over two years ago, three years ago, roughly. We didn’t see a lot of activity [00:05:00] on the manufacturing side of building new factories to do wind. In fact, there was a lot of talk about it initially and then it. It really died down within probably a year or so. Uh, you know, obviously it’s not a universal statement. There were some industries model piles and some steelworks and that kind of thing that would would happen. But sometimes these exercises are a little treacherous and hard to walk down. What’s your thoughts on the UK government stepping in and really. Putting their money where the mouth is. Yolanda Padron: I think it’s, I mean, it’s, it’s great, right? It’s great for the industry. It’ll, it’ll be a great case, I think, for us to look at just moving forward and to, like you said, government’s putting their money where their mouth is and what exactly that means. You know, not something where it’s a short term promise and then things get stalled, or corporations start looking [00:06:00] elsewhere. If every player works the way that they’re, it’s looking like they’re going to play right now, then it, it could be a really good thing for the industry. Allen Hall: Well, the, the United States always did it in a complicated way through tax policy, which means it runs through the IRS. So any bill that passes Congress and gets signed by the president, they like to run through the IRS, and then they make the tax regulations, which takes six months to 12 months, and then when they come out, need a tax attorney to tell you what is actually written and what it means. Joel, when we went through the IRA bill, we went through it a couple of times actually, and we were looking for those great investments in new technology companies. I just remember seeing it. That isn’t part of the issue, the complexity, and maybe that’s where GB Energy is trying to do something different where there’s trying to simplify the process. Joel Saxum: Yeah. The complexity of the problem over here is like that. With any. Business type stuff, right? Even when you get to the stage of, um, oh, this is a write off, this is this [00:07:00] for small businesses and those things, so it’s like a delayed benefit. You gotta plan for this thing. Or there’s a tax credit here, there. Even when we had the, um, the electric vehicle tax credits for, uh, individuals, right? That wasn’t not something you got right away. It was something you had to apply for and that was like later on and like could be. 15 months from now before you see anything of it. And so it’s all kind of like a difficult muddy water thing in the i a bill. You’re a hundred percent correct. Right. Then we passed that thing. We didn’t have the, the rules locked down for like two years. Right. And I remember we had, we had a couple experts on the podcast talking about that, and it was like, oh, the 45 x and the 45 y and the, the C this and the be that, and it was like. You needed to have a degree in this thing to figure it out, whereas the, what it sounds like to me, right, and I’m not on the inside of this policy, I dunno exactly how it’s getting executed. What it sounds like to me is this is more grant based or, and or loan program based. So it’s kinda like, hey, apply and we’ll give you the money, or we’ll fund a loan that supports some money of with low interest, zero [00:08:00] interest, whatever that may be. Um, that seems like a more direct way, one to measure ROI. Right, and or to get things done. Just just to get things done. Right. If someone said, Hey, hey, weather guard, lightning Tech. We have a grant here. We’d like to give you a hundred grand to do this. Or it was like, yeah, if you put this much effort in and then next year tax season you might see this and this and this. It’s like, I don’t have time to deal with that. Yolanda Padron: Yeah. We might also just change the rules on you a little bit, and then maybe down the line we’ll see where we go. Yeah. It does seem like they’re, they’re setting up the dominoes to fall in place a bit better. This way. Yeah, absolutely. Joel Saxum: That’s a, that’s a great way to put it, Yolanda. Let’s setting up the dominoes to fall in place. So it’s kinda like, Hey. These are the things we want to get done. This is what we wanna do as an industry. Here’s a pool of money for it, and here’s how you get access to it. Allen Hall: A lot’s gonna change. I remember, was it a couple of months ago, maybe, maybe a year ago, time flies guys. Uh, we were just talking about. That on the way home from [00:09:00]Scotland, like how many people have had in the podcast? It’s a lot over 60 have been on the podcast as guests. Uh, one of the people we want to have on is, uh, Dan McGrail, who’s the CEO of Great British Energy because, uh, we had talked about with Rosemary the possibility of building turbines all in. The uk, they have blade factories. All this stuff is doable, right? They have technology. This is not complicated work. It just needs to be set up and run. And maybe this is the goal is to just run, it may maybe not be OEM focused. I I, that’s what I’m trying to sort through right now as, is it vestas focused? Is it GE focused? Is it Siemens Keesa focused? Is there a focus or will these turbines have GB energy? Stamped on the side of them. I would Joel Saxum: see love to see support for sub-component suppliers. Yeah, I would too. Yeah. The reason being is, is like that’s, that’s more near and dear to my heart. That’s what [00:10:00] I’ve done in my career, is been a part of a lot of different, smaller businesses that are really making a difference by putting in, you know, great engineering comes from small businesses. That’s one of my, my things that I’ve always seen. It seems to be easier to get things done. In a different way with a small business than it does to engineering by committee with 50 people on a team faster, sometimes better. Uh, that’s just my experience, right? So I would like to see these smaller businesses propped up, because again, we need the OEMs. Yes, absolutely. But also spread it around, right? Spread the wealth a little bit. Uh, you know, a, a factory here, a factory there, a engineering facility here. The, uh, you know, an execution plant here. Some things like that. I would love to see more of these kind of, uh, spread around like the, like GB energy’s money spreads around, like fairy dust. Just kind of plant a little here, plant a little in this city, make a little here, instead of just lumping it to one or lumping it into one big, um, OEM. And that doesn’t necessarily [00:11:00] have to be an OEM, right? It could be a blade manufacturer that I’m talking about, or. Or a big, big gearbox thing or something like that. We need those things, and I, I’m all for support for them, but I just don’t think that all of its support should go to them. Speaker 7: Australia’s wind farms are growing fast, but are your operations keeping up? Join us February 17th and 18th at Melbourne’s Poolman on the park for Wind Energy o and M Australia 2026, where you’ll connect with the experts solving real problems in maintenance asset management. And OEM relations. Walk away with practical strategies to cut costs and boost uptime that you can use the moment you’re back on site. Register now at W OM a 2020 six.com. Wind Energy o and m Australia is created by Wind Professionals for wind professionals because this industry needs solutions, not speeches. Allen Hall: If you haven’t booked your tickets to Wind Energy o and m Australia 2026, you need to be doing [00:12:00] that. Today, uh, the event is on February 17th and 18th in Melbourne, Australia. Uh, we’ll have experts from around the world talking everything o and m, and there’s so many good people are gonna be on the agenda, Joel, and a lot of big companies sponsoring this Joel Saxum: year. Allen Hall: You want to give us a highlight? Joel Saxum: Yeah, so like you said, Alan, we have a ton of sponsors going to be there and, and I’d like to say the sponsors. Thank you ahead of time. Of course. Right. We’re, we’re, we’re super excited for them to get involved because as we’ve put this event together. We’re trying to do this no sales pitches, right? So we wanna do this, not pay to play. We want people here that are going to actually share and learn from each other. And the sponsors have been kind enough to get on board with that message and follow through with it. So, like our lead industry sponsor Tilt, uh, Brandon, the team over there, fantastic. Um, they have, they’re, they’re the, their key sponsor here and they’re supporting a lot of this. So the money’s going to applying in experts from all over the [00:13:00] world, putting this thing together. Uh, so we have an, uh. A forum to be able to talk at, uh, C-I-C-N-D-T. From here in the States, uh, we’ve got Palisades, who’s another operator in the, uh, Australian market, uh, rig com. ISP over there doing blade work and it just keeps rolling down. We’ve got squadron on board, squadron’s gonna do one of the coffee carts. Um, so I know that we’ve got a limited bit of tickets left. I think we are 250 in the venue and that’s what the plan is. I think we’re sitting at about half of that leftover. Allen Hall: Yeah, it’s getting close to running out. And I know in Australia everybody likes to purchase their tickets at the last minute. That’s great. And but you don’t wanna miss out because there is limited seating to this event. And you wanna go to WMA w om a 2020 six.com. Look at all the activities. Book some tickets. Plan to book your travel if you’re traveling from the United States or elsewhere. You need a couple of weeks [00:14:00]hopefully to do that ’cause that’s when the airline prices are lower. If you can book a a couple of weeks ahead of time. So now’s the time to go on Woma 2020 six.com. Check out the conference, get your tickets purchased, start buying your airline tickets, and get in your hotel arranged. Now’s the time to do that. Well, as you know, war has been selling off pieces of itself after setbacks in the America market. Uh, sounds like two heavyweight bidders are looking for one of those pieces. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners and ENG G are allegedly competing for Seds European. Onshore Wind business, a portfolio valued at roughly 1 billion euros. Supposedly the bids are gonna be due this week, although nothing is certain in a billion dollar deals. This is a little bit odd. I understand why Stead is doing it, because they’re, they’re trying to fundraise, but if they do this. They will be essentially European offshore wind only [00:15:00] with some American onshore and a little bit American offshore. Not much. Uh, that will be their future. Are they gonna stay with America one onshore or, and American offshore? Is that a thing? Or they just could, could be all European offshore wind. Is that where Osted is headed? It’s a complicated mix because, you know, they’re, they’re, they’ve negotiated a couple of other deals. Most recently to raise cash. They’re supposedly selling, uh, another set of wind farms. I dunno how official that is, but it’s, it seems like there’s some news stories percolating up out there trying to raise more cash by selling large percentages of offshore wind farms. Where does Joel Saxum: this all end? I don’t know. The interesting thing is like if you looked at Ted, uh, man, two years ago, like if you Googled anything or used a jet, GPT or whatever it was like, gimme the. Three largest wind operators in the world. They were the top three all the time. Right. And, and most valuable. At one point in time, they were worth like, [00:16:00] uh, I don’t wanna say the wrong number, but I, I thought, I thought 25 billion or something like that. They were worth. ATS at one point in time. Market share. Allen Hall: Yeah, Joel Saxum: I think that seems right. So like they, they were huge and it just seems like, yeah, they’re trying to survive, but in survival mode, they’ve just kind, they’re just dwindling themselves down to being just o just a small offshore company. And, or not small, but a small, just a, just a siloed offshore company. A large offshore company. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, like, even just, there was, there’s another article, um. Today we’re, we’re talking here, CIP and Engie looking to buy their European onshore business. They’ve also are putting up like, uh, was it greater Ang of four in Taiwan for, for sale as well. So, I mean, like you said, where does it stop? I don’t know. Um, CIP is an interesting play. Uh, an Eng, CIP and Engie kind of battling this one out ’cause the CIP management team is a bunch of ex or said people, so they know that play very well. Um, ENGIE of course, being a big French [00:17:00] utility. So that one will sell, right? They’re, their European offshore or onshore assets will be gone shortly. Uh, they’ll be sitting with a bunch of offshore assets that they own and partially own around the world. Uh, and of course their, their, I think their US onshore fleet is about a gigawatt, maybe a and a half. Um, that could be the next domino to fall. You don’t, I, sorry, Yolanda, I used your, your, your, uh, euphemism from before, but, um. That they’re actively parting ways with some stuff. I don’t know when it stops. Allen Hall: It is odd, right? EOR has basically stopped a lot of renewables. Stat Craft has pulled back quite a bit. Another Norwegian company. A lot of the nor Northern European companies are slowing down in wind altogether, trying to stick to onshore for the most part. Offshore will still be developed, but just not at the pace that it needed to be developed. There is a lot of money moving around. Billions [00:18:00] and billions of, of euros and dollars moving. And I guess my, my thought is, I’m not sure from a market standpoint where Orid is headed, or even Ecuador for that matter, besides maybe moving back into oil and gas. They never really left it. The direction of the company is a little unknown because these, uh, news articles about sales. Are not really prefaced, right? It’s just like, all right, Taiwan, we’re selling more than 50% of the projects in Taiwan. We’re out, we’re selling European onshore pow, which there’d been some rumors about that, that I had heard, but nothing was really locked in, obviously, until you really start seeing some reliable news sources. Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners is an interesting play just because it kind of keeps it. Up in Denmark and not in France with Engie. That’s what I’m, in my [00:19:00] head. I’m thinking Sted is not likely to sell it to Engie just because they’re French. This is a national, uh, security issue for Denmark Sted. Is it, I I how Engie is involved in this maybe to help set a, a baseline of what the valuation is so that CIP can then purchase it. Do you see CIP losing this, Joel? Joel Saxum: No, I don’t think so. I think, yeah, I think CCIP has to land with this one and, and CI P’s been building a portfolio quietly, building a, not, I guess not quietly, they’ve been building a portfolio for the last few years. It’s pretty stout, uh, pretty fairly sizable. Right? And it, it’s an interesting play watching this for me because you, you see all these people kind of rotating out. And it, and it has to do with the, the, in my opinion, it has to do with the macroeconomics of things, right? Once, when you develop something and you get through, like in, into the teething pain cycle and all that kind of stuff. [00:20:00] The asset is not designed to have a 50, 70%, you know, margin, right? That’s not how wind works. Wind, wind operates of small margins and a lot of times in the early, a early stages of a project, you end up running into issues that eat those margins away. So when you’re talking about small margins, they’re six to 10% is what you kind of see. Um, and it’s pretty easy to eat away a 6% or a 10% margin. If you have some kind of serial defect you have to deal with, uh, or that, that the OEM’s fighting you on and, and you know, whether or not they take responsibility for it or you have to pay for it. A lot of times those processes can drag out for 12, 24, 36 months until you get made whole. So the early state, the first, you know, five years of a lot of these projects, five to eight years, are very expensive. And then once you get through kind of those things and the thing starts just chugging. Then you actually are starting to make money, and that’s where CIP P’S buying these assets is in that years after it’s gone through its teething pains and the company that developed it is like, man, [00:21:00] we need to get outta this thing. We’ve just been burning through cash. Then CI P’s kinda swooping in and grabbing ’em. And I think that this is another one of those plays. Allen Hall: So they’re gonna live with a smaller margin or they’re gonna operate the assets differently. Joel Saxum: The assets may be being operated better now than they were when they started, just in that, in, they exist, the starting company simply because the, some of the issues have been solved. They’ve been sorted through the things where you have early, early failures of bearings or some stuff like the early fairings of gearboxes. Those things have been sorted out, so then CIP swoops in and grabs them after the, the teething issues that have been gone. Allen Hall: Does evaluation change greatly because of the way horse did, manages their assets? Up or down? Joel Saxum: I would say generally it would go up. Yeah. I don’t necessarily think it’s dependent on o and m right now. I think it’s just a, it’s a time to buy cheap assets, right? Like you see, you see over here in the States, you see a lot of acquisitions going on. People divesting, they’re not divesting because they’re like, oh, we’re gonna make a ton of money off this. They may need the cash. They’re [00:22:00] divesting in, in, um, what’s the term, like under duress? A lot of them, it may not look like it from the outside in a big way, but that’s kind of what’s happening. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, I think it’ll be really interesting to see, uh, you know, there were a lot of layoffs in Ted and Europe as well, so seeing if maybe some of the people who can make those assets perform better. Come back just with a different t-shirt on. Allen Hall: As wind energy professionals staying informed is crucial, and let’s face it difficult. That’s why the Uptime podcast recommends PES Wind Magazine. PES Wind offers a diverse range of in-depth articles and expert insights that dive into the most pressing issues facing our energy future. Whether you’re an industry veteran or new to wind, PES wind has the high quality content you need. Don’t miss out. Visit PES wind.com today in this quarter’s, PES Wind Magazine, which you can download a copy at PES [00:23:00] wind.com. There’s an article by Xan and they were, uh, contracted by Ocean Winds to evaluate the sea floor from. The sea floor at Moray West, which is way, way, way up north on the northern end of Scotland. A pretty rough area, Joel. And, but what ex Ocean did was they used unmanned survey equipment to monitor the ocean floor where the mono piles were gonna replace for the Moey West Wind Farm. That is a really difficult area to operate any sort of boat, but. Uh, the reason we’re doing this remotely unmanned was that it, it gave them sort of a, a less costly way to get high resolution images of the sea bottom. This is interesting because ocean wind was developing more a West apparently hadn’t used anything like this before, but the results, at [00:24:00] least from what I can see in PS win, look Joel Saxum: great. Yeah. This is a technology that’s been, um. Man, it’s been under development by a lot of companies in the last six, eight years. And now it’s starting to get to the point where it is, I mean, we’re, we’re TRL nine plus, right? There’s a lot of these solutions out there that are commercially ready. Xans been a top of this list since, man, since I was playing in that oil and gas world, to be honest with you. Like 20 18, 20 17, uh, really cool looking boats. That’s besides the point. Uh, but when they show up at trade shows and stuff with ’em, you’re like, ah, oh, that thing’s neat looking. Um, but it, it, it, it solves all kinds of problems, right? So when you go offshore and you’re just gonna do, say you’re just gonna go out there and do multibeam, so you’re just gonna do echo sound where you’re just looking to see depths and what’s on the sea floor. The minimum kind of vessel you need for that is 10 to 15 meters long. You need probably two to six people on that vessel. And that’s just, if you’re going out doing shift work, if you’re staying out there [00:25:00] and working 24 7, that vessel grows to. 30 meters instantly, right? So now you’re burning thousands and thousands of dollars in fuel. You’ve got food on board. You got all, it’s just a pain to put this vessel out there. You take all of those people out of harm’s way. You take all the costs away and they, and you put two of them, or one or two of them on shore in a facility, and then you put this three meter vessel out there that’s fully autonomous. No people, but collects the same style of data. I mean, it’s a no brainer, right? So you’re getting the same style of data and if, and the thing’s working 24 7, there is no need to have someone sleep. There’s a not a technician issue. There’s not, none of this is, is a problem anymore. Nobody’s getting seasick, right? So you’re sitting, you’re, you’re sitting back on shore, uh, going to work, uh, with no PPE on, um, having a, having a coffee from Starbucks down the street. And you’re running this thing 24 7, you’re collecting all [00:26:00] that fantastic data. Uh, it is just, like I said, it’s a no brainer. Now, now they’re getting to the stage where they’re putting ’em out as swarms, so you can cover whole fields. You’re doing live cable inspections. It’s, it’s pretty fantastic. So Exo ocean’s really making the next generation of robotics o offshore. Allen Hall: Yeah. And that’s gonna drive down the cost of energy. These kind of developments make huge strides in lowering costs, and this is why you need to read PES Win Magazine. So there’s a. Great articles all throughout the magazine. This quarter’s issue is, is Heavy with articles. Get your free copy@pswin.com today. As you know, in the wind industry, survival has always belonged to those who can keep up, uh, and Sorn freeze. Nuon knows better than most with his decades of experience at LM Wind Power and Uzon. He now chairs two Danish subcontractors, Polytech and Jupiter. Bach. Uh, his message to smaller suppliers in, in a recent article is. Pretty blunt. It [00:27:00]says the manufacturers, big OEMs want fewer partners and larger partners who can take on more responsibility. And if you cannot invest and grow with those manufacturers, you’ll be left behind the winners. It says it will be those who stay close to the turbine makers and adapt as the industry evolves. Joel, this is a really interesting discussion that, uh, Soren put out there. Obviously he’s invested in Polytech and Jupiter, Bach, uh, to great suppliers obviously, but small businesses are where a lot of the key technologies have been driven over the last five, six years. In wind, or more broadly the last 20 years in wind, a lot of great technology has come out of places that you wouldn’t have thought of. The OEMs have not been the bastion of innovation. I would say it [00:28:00] is necessary. You have both, wouldn’t you think? You have to have the small business innovation to prove out ideas and to show that they work, but you also have to have the large manufacturers to implement those ideas more broadly without either one of them, nobody wins. Joel Saxum: I fully agree and I think that one of the things that’s a little bit, uh, more of a granular comment there is. I think sometimes you need the OEMs and the other suppliers within the supply chain to open their doors a little bit, right? So this is, this is me wearing my, my small business, small innovative business, uh, in the wind industry cap. And that is, man, sometimes it is hard to get a conversation with a large subsupplier or with an OEM when you have something that can help them. And they just don’t want to communicate, don’t want to help. It’s just our way or the highway kind of thing. And if you watch, like we, so the podcast gives us an kind of, or not [00:29:00] gives us, it forces us to have kind of an op, an opportunity to look at, you know, what are the, what are the financial statements of some of these OEMs? What are the financial statements of some of their large sub-suppliers? You know? ’cause if they’re located in countries where that stuff is public knowledge, you can see how and what they’re doing. And if you, if you look at business in a general way where you rely on one customer or two customers to, for your whole business, you’re gonna be hurting. Um, especially in the way we look at things or what we’re seeing in the wind industry right now is if you’re, if you are a large company to say you do a hundred million in revenue and your customers are ge Vestas. Depending on what happens regulatory wise, in some random country somewhere your a hundred million dollars could shrink to 50 real quick. Um, so I don’t think that that’s a great way to do business. I think, you know, having a bit of diversification probably helps you a little bit. The OEMs Allen Hall: have a particular job to do. They need to deliver turbines onsite on time and create power for their customer. That’s our main [00:30:00] focus. They are a generator. Driven company, they make generators on steel towers with a propeller system basically. Right. Just simplify it way, way down. There’s not a lot of technology in that itself. Obviously there’s control systems, obviously there’s electronics involved, but the concept from this basic fundamentals is not difficult to to grasp. The difficulty is in execution. Showing that that product can last for 20 years, and that product can last in different environments. Australia, United States, up in Scandinavia, Canada, way down south and Brazil. There’s some really rough environments there and the OEMs are relying upon in industry, uh, guidance from like the IECs and then the dvs, uh, uls Tube. Nord. Uh. Bvs where they’re trying to make these turbines comply to a [00:31:00] set of essentially regulations, which just simplify it. You can do that. But as we have seen historically in the wind industry, if you make a turbine that just meets those requirements, you do not necessarily have a successful product. You have a product that is marginal, and as Yolanda has pointed out to me numerous times, there’s a lot of real issues in wind turbines. That probably could have been solved five years ago by small mobile companies with outside of the box ideas that could have given the OEMs a huge advantage, especially in blades. Yolanda Padron: Yeah, and I think a lot of these companies are, they’re looking at things from a different point of view, right? They’re smaller companies. You have people who could know the product, they know the real issue that’s going on on the ground. They know. Kind of what they need to do, what the next step is to move forward in their solution.[00:32:00] Right? But it’s not like it’s a, a company where you need 30 people to sign off before you can go onto the next stage, and then you need 30 more people to sign off before you can get funding to do something else. And so yes, the OEMs are doing a good job in their scope. If they’re meeting their scope, they are doing a good job. You know, if I, if I take like bread and cheese, then yes, I have a sandwich, right? Like, it might not be the best sandwich in the world, but I have a sandwich. So like, they’re making the sandwich and that’s great. But if you want something to, to actually work and to last and to, to give everybody else the, the idea that. You know, wind is profitable and we can all benefit from it. You have to get all those different layers in there, right? You have to make [00:33:00] sure that you know, if you have a big lightning issue, then you get the right people in the room to get that retrofit in there to solve your lightning issue. If you have a big leading edge erosion issue, then you get those right people in the room to solve everything, and it’s not always going to be a one size fits all. Right, but you do need those smaller companies to, to be in the room with you. Joel Saxum: I’m a hundred percent agreeing with you, Yolanda, and I think that this is the issue here is that at some level then an OEM, an OEM engineering head would have to admit that they’re not the end all be all, and that they may have got a couple of things wrong. And what, what I would love to see and who, and maybe maybe ask you this question, who of the major four Western OEMs. Do you think would be open to like an industry advisory board? Nordex, you think it’s Nordex? I think Yolanda Padron: that’s the closest one so far that we’ve seen. Right? Joel Saxum: Yeah. I, I, I agree with you, and I’m saying that because I don’t think any of the other ones would ever admit that they have an [00:34:00] issue, right? They have attorneys and they have problems, Allen Hall: so they really can’t, but I, I think internally they know that they haven’t optimized their production, they haven’t optimized their performance out in the field. They’re trying to improve availability, that’s for sure. Estes has spent a great deal of time over the last year or two improving availability so that the money is being spent. The question is, do they have all the right answers or the overspending to get to the availability that they want to deliver to their customers? That’s a great question because I do think that we we’re just in Scotland and there’s a number of technology companies in the UK that I think, wow, they should be implementing some of these. Ideas and these products that have been proven, especially the ones that have been out for a couple of years, they should be implemented tomorrow, but they’re not yet because they can’t get through the door of an OEM because the OEM doesn’t want to hear it. Joel Saxum: Yeah, agreed. Agreed. Right. Well, well, like I, the, the, the example that keeps popping into my mind is Pete Andrews and the team over [00:35:00] at Echo Bolt, simply because they have a solution that works. It’s simple. They’ve done the legwork to make sure that this thing can be optimized and utilized by technicians in the field around the world. But they, it just like, they haven’t gotten the buy-in from, from whoever, uh, that it seems to be, you know, there’s a hurdle here. Uh, and that hurdle may be the Atlantic Ocean. I don’t know. Uh, but I would love to see, I would love to see their, uh, solution for bolted connections, uh, and monitoring bolted connections kicked around the world because I think you could save. Uh, the wind industry a ton, a ton, a ton of money. And that is an example of a small business full of subject matter experts that made a solution that can solve a problem, whether you’re an OEM or you’re an operator or whatever. There’s there that’s there, utilize them, right? Those are the kind of things that we need in this industry. Yolanda Padron: And it’s also those smaller companies too that will look at your feedback and then they’ll say, oh. Okay, do I need to adjust here? [00:36:00] Did I not focus on this one parameter that your specific site has? Right. And you don’t see that from the OEMs ’cause they have so, uh, they have so many problems that they’re trying to tackle at once that it gets really difficult to, not just to hone in on one, but to, to tell everybody, oh, I, I have this perfect solution for everything. Here you go. Allen Hall: Right. I think there’s an internal conflict in the engineering departments and manufacturing departments of any OEM, regardless if it’s in wind or in any other industry, is that they have a system to make this product and they’re pretty confident in it, otherwise they wouldn’t be doing it. They don’t want to hear outside noise is I, I would describe it as noise. Like, uh, if you have a great solution that would help out their manufacturing process. But I work here, I know how, I know the ins and outs that that new idea by a small company won’t work here. Those [00:37:00] barriers have to be knocked down internally in the OEMs. The OEM management should be going through and saying, Hey, look, if I find me the manager of this operation, if I find a company that could help us and save us money, and you’re being a roadblock, guess what? See ya. Hit the road because there is no way you can let those opportunities pass you by. In today’s marketplace, you need to be grabbing hold of every opportunity to lower your cost, to improve your product availability, to improve your relationship with your customers. How do you do that? Quickly, you look at the companies that are providing solutions and you grab them, grab them, and hold on for your life and listen to what they have to say because they have probably done more research into your product than your people have. That wraps up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. If today’s discussion sparked any questions or ideas, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us on LinkedIn and don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. If you [00:38:00] found value in today’s discussion, please leave us a review. It really helps other wind energy professionals discover the show and we’ll catch you here next week on the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast.

Ever wondered how an engineer's mindset can transform complex challenges into innovative solutions? In this conversation with Josh Tarbutton, PhD, PE, founder of Bravo Team, Cam and Otis explore the intersection of engineering excellence and entrepreneurial spirit."Engineering is about solving problems," Josh explains, drawing from his extensive experience as a military veteran, professor, and now leader of a premier engineering firm. From discussing the importance of custom machine design and automation to sharing insights about the Hero's Journey in professional development, this episode offers a deep dive into the world of advanced R&D.What makes this conversation particularly valuable is Josh's unique perspective on leadership and innovation. "The best solutions often come from understanding the narrative," he shares, emphasizing the role of storytelling in engineering and business. Whether you're an aspiring engineer, a business leader facing technical challenges, or simply curious about the future of automation, Josh's insights provide a roadmap for navigating complex problems with creativity and precision.More About Josh:Joshua Tarbutton, PhD, PE is an engineer, entrepreneur, and U.S. Army veteran, leading Bravo Team, a premier engineering firm specializing in custom machine design, automation, and advanced R&D. With a BSME from Georgia Tech and an MS andPhD in Mechanical Engineering from Clemson University, he spent nearly a decade as a professor, earning tenure at UNC Charlotte, publishing 53 research papers and securing millions in research funding. His eight years of military service instilled a disciplined, problem-solving mindset that drives his leadership. He is an Entrepreneur Organization member, where he has served as an Accelerator Coach and board member. Founded in 2018, Bravo Team partners with Fortune 500 companies, OEMs, and industrial manufacturers to solve complex engineering challenges. The firm excels in machine design, automation, PCB development, and software engineering, providing custom-built solutions where off-the-shelf options fall short. Joshua is dedicated to advancing engineering excellence, transformative automation, scalable innovation for industry leaders, and helping people find their narrative in the Hero's Journey.#10xyourteam #LeadershipDevelopment #EngineeringMindset #ProblemSolving #InnovationCulture #EntrepreneurialLeadership #VeteranLeaders #AutomationSolutions #AdvancedEngineering #RAndDInnovation #BusinessGrowthStrategiesChapter Times and Titles:From Military Service to Engineering Leadership [00:00 - 10:00]Introduction to Josh Tarbutton and Bravo TeamThe journey from Army veteran to engineering entrepreneurHow military discipline shapes problem-solvingCustom Solutions for Complex Challenges [10:01 - 20:00]The importance of custom machine design and automationWhy off-the-shelf solutions often fall shortPartnering with Fortune 500 companies for innovationThe Hero's Journey in Engineering [20:01 - 30:00]Understanding the narrative in problem-solvingHow storytelling enhances engineering solutionsThe role of the Hero's Journey in professional growthAdvancing Engineering Excellence [30:01 - 40:00]Josh's experience as a professor and researcherThe impact of publishing and securing research fundingBuilding a culture of innovation at Bravo TeamLeadership and Innovation in Practice [40:01 - 50:00]Balancing technical expertise with entrepreneurial visionLessons from serving as an Accelerator CoachEncouraging scalable innovation in industry leadersConnecting with Bravo Team [50:01 - End]How to learn more about Bravo Team's servicesFinal thoughts on engineering and entrepreneurshipContact information and resources for further explorationJosh Tarbuttonhttps://www.link

Podcast: Industrial Cybersecurity InsiderEpisode: How OT Managed Services Are Revolutionizing Industrial CybersecurityPub date: 2025-12-09Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationDino sits down with industrial automation and industrial cybersecurity expert Kevin Kumpf, fresh off the floor of Rockwell Automation Fair 2025. They discuss why OT managed services are finally becoming viable for manufacturing, the critical 80/20 split between people and technology challenges, and how the industry's "silver tsunami" of retiring talent is forcing a reckoning. Kevin shares insights on building unified platforms that can manage everything from 30-year-old paper tape systems to AI-powered smart factories, why IT's "patch now" mentality fails in OT environments, and how the DG 360 platform is delivering true cyber-physical convergence today - not tomorrow. They discuss the reality that most OT cybersecurity tools only discover 30% of plant assets, the importance of human-in-the-loop decision making, and why the OT ecosystem - not IT - must drive the managed services revolution. This is a must-listen for anyone struggling with the complexity of protecting and managing modern manufacturing facilities.Chapters:(00:00:00) - Introduction and Rockwell Automation Fair Recap(00:01:43) - The OT Managed Services Evolution and Rebranding(00:04:15) - The Three-Legged Stool: IT, OT, and OEMs(00:07:32) - Point Solutions vs. Unified Platforms in Manufacturing(00:10:45) - The DG 360 Vision: 360-Degree Plant Visibility(00:14:28) - The Silver Tsunami and Training Challenges(00:18:22) - Alert Fatigue and Actionable Intelligence(00:22:45) - Software Defined Automation and Legacy Systems(00:26:18) - Why OT Must Drive the Cybersecurity Conversation(00:30:35) - Real-Time Demo and Implementation ReadinessLinks And Resources:Kevin Kumpf on LinkedInWant to Sponsor an episode or be a Guest? Reach out here.Industrial Cybersecurity Insider on LinkedInCybersecurity & Digital Safety on LinkedInBW Design Group CybersecurityDino Busalachi on LinkedInCraig Duckworth on LinkedInThanks so much for joining us this week. Want to subscribe to Industrial Cybersecurity Insider? Have some feedback you'd like to share? Connect with us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube to leave us a review!The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Industrial Cybersecurity Insider, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

TOPIC: Electric Vehicles PANEL: Patrick Anderson, CEO, Anderson Economic Group; Jacqueline Charniga, The Detroit Free Press; Gary Vasilash, shinymetalboxes.net; John McElroy, Autoline.tv

Most people talk about space power like it's a solved problem. Big arrays, rigid panels, high-efficiency silicon; the same architecture we've been flying for decades.  But the more you look at where national security and commercial space are headed, the clearer it becomes: our power systems weren't designed for the missions we're trying to execute today. Space is no longer a passive environment. It's dynamic, congested, competitive, and increasingly contested. If you're operating a satellite that needs to reposition, evade, maneuver, or maintain persistent awareness over the oceans, every kilogram of mass and every square inch of surface area starts to matter. Traditional solar arrays generate plenty of power, but they come with a hidden cost: fragility, deployment complexity, and a form factor that locks spacecraft into decisions they can't easily undo. Thin-film solar panels change that. When you can generate meaningful power without rigid wings. When your power source can be wrapped around a body, integrated into a surface, or rolled out without fear of shattering, Maneuverability becomes an asset instead of a liability.  High-radiation orbits are more viable, high-voltage architectures make sense, and persistent maritime sensing becomes more realistic. And the same characteristics that matter in orbit start unlocking terrestrial defense applications as well. What are some of the new opportunities arising for thin-film solar? How are they able to ability to fulfill smaller, specialized, high-value orders quickly? In this episode, I sit down with the CEO of Ascent Solar, Paul Warley. We talk about how thin-film is reshaping what's possible in orbit, why defense customers are paying attention, and how a microcap manufacturer found itself aligned with some of the biggest trends in national security and space power.   You'll also learn; Why maneuverability is becoming the real strategic advantage in orbit How thin-film's flexibility and high-voltage capability unlock new spacecraft architectures Why reaching 12–13% efficiency is a tipping point that suddenly makes thin-film viable for LEO, MEO, and even high-radiation GEO missions. How defense customers are rethinking power as mission profiles shift Why thin-film's resilience in high-radiation and atomic oxygen environments gives it advantages that silicon can't match. What the increasing launch cadence means for power requirements, mass budgets, and the economics of spacecraft design. How decades of sunk R&D and process knowledge create a moat that would be difficult and expensive for new entrants to replicate. Where Paul sees thin-film fitting into the future of both defense and space operations, from niche platforms to major programs. About the Guest Paul Warley is the President and CEO of Ascent Solar, a small microcap company in Colorado. Ascent's thin-film is the solar power solution for scenarios where traditional rigid panels won't work. Ascent brings together 20+ years of R&D, 17 years of manufacturing experience, numerous awards, and a comprehensive IP and patent portfolio to cement its leadership in the photovoltaics market. To learn more, visit https://ascentsolar.com/.  About Your Host Craig Picken is an Executive Recruiter, writer, speaker, and ICF Trained Executive Coach. He is focused on recruiting senior-level leadership, sales, and operations executives in the aviation and aerospace industry. His clients include premier OEMs, aircraft operators, leasing/financial organizations, and Maintenance/Repair/Overhaul (MRO) providers, and since 2008, he has personally concluded more than 400 executive-level searches in a variety of disciplines. Craig is the ONLY industry executive recruiter who has professionally flown airplanes, sold airplanes, and successfully run a P&L in the aviation industry. His professional career started with a passion for airplanes. After eight years' experience as a decorated Naval Flight Officer – with more than 100 combat missions, 2,000 hours of flight time, and 325 aircraft carrier landings – Craig sought challenges in business aviation, where he spent more than 7 years in sales with both Gulfstream Aircraft and Bombardier Business Aircraft. Craig is also a sought-after industry speaker who has presented at Corporate Jet Investor, International Aviation Women's Association, and SOCAL Aviation Association.  Subscribe, Rate & Review Check out this episode on our website, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify, and don't forget to leave a review if you like what you heard. Your review feeds the algorithm, so our show reaches more people. Thank you!   

Morten Handberg, Principal Consultant at Wind Power LAB, returns to discuss blade damage categorization. From transverse cracks and leading edge erosion to carbon spar cap repairs, he explains what severity levels really mean for operators and why the industry still lacks a universal standard. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow. Morten, welcome back to the program. Thanks, Allen. It’s fantastic to be back again. Boy, we have a lot to discuss and today we’re gonna focus on categorization of damage, which is a super hot topic across the industry. What does a cat five mean? What does a category three mean? What does a category 5.9 I’ve I’ve seen that more recently. Why do these defect categories matter? Morten Handberg: Well, it matters a lot because it really tells you as, uh, either an OEM or as an operator, how should you respond to your current blade issue. So you need to have some kind of categorization about what the defect type is and what the severity is. The severity will tell you something about the repairability and [00:01:00] also something about the part of the blade that is affected. The type of the defect tells you something about what is the origin From an operational point of view, it doesn’t make as much sense in a way because you really just wanna know, can this be repaired or not? You know? And you know, what does it need to repair? That’s what you need, what you really need to focus on as an operator, whether it’s then del elimination, erosion, peeling. Uh, transverse cracks, it’ll all come down to repairs. It does matter for you because it will tell you an underlying, you know, are there reason why I’m keep seeing all these damages? So that’s why you need to know the category as well. But purely operational. You just need to know what is the severity side know, what does it take to repair it? Allen Hall: So as the operator, a lot of times they’re getting information from different service providers or even the OEM. They’re getting multiple inputs on what a damage is in terms of a category. Are we getting a lot of conflicting information about this? Because the complaint from [00:02:00] I hear from operators is the OE EMM says this is a category four. The ISP says is a category five. Who am I to believe right Morten Handberg: now? Well, there is a lot of, a bit different opinions of that. It almost becomes a religious issue question at some point, but it, it really dives down to that, you know, there is no real standardization in the wind industry. And we’ve been discussing this, uh, I wanna say decades, probably not that much, but at least for the past 11 years I’ve been, been hearing this discussion come up. Uh, so it’s, it’s something this was just been struggling with, but it also comes down to that. Each OEM have their own origin. Uh, so that also means that they have trended something from aeronautics, from ship building industry, from, you know, uh, from, from some other composite related industry, or maybe not even composite related. And that means that they are building their own, uh, their own truth about what the different defects are. There is a lot of correlation between them, but there is still a lot of, lot of tweaks [00:03:00] and definitions in between and different nomenclature. That does add a a lot of confusion. Allen Hall: Okay, Morten Handberg: so Allen Hall: that explains, I mean, because there isn’t an industry standard at the moment. There is talk of an industry standard, but it does seem like from watching from the outside, that Europe generally has one, or operators specifically have one. Uh, EPRI’s been working on one for a little while. Maybe the IEC is working on one, but there isn’t like a universal standard today. Morten Handberg: There is not a universal standard. I mean, a lot of, a lot of OEMs or service providers will, will, will claim that they have the standard, they have the definition in wind power lab. We have our own. That we have derived from the industry and in, in general. But there is not an, uh, an industry agreed standard that everyone adheres to. That much is true. You could say in Europe, a lot of owners have come together, uh, in the Blade Forum, and they have derived, there’s a standard within that. Um, uh, and with a lot of success, they’d written, the [00:04:00] Blade Hamburg I think was very helpful because it was operator driven, um, approach. Allen Hall: So there is a difference then between defects that are significant and maybe even classified as critical and other defects that may be in the same location on the blade. How are those determined? Morten Handberg: The way that I’ve always approached is that I will look at firstly what kind of blades type it is. So how is it structured? Where are the load carrying elements of the blade? That’s very important because you can’t really say on a business V 90 and a Siemens, uh, 3.6 that the defect in the same position will mean the same thing. That’s just not true because they are structured in very different ways. So you really need to look at the plate type just to start with. Then you need to look at, is it in a. In a loaded part of the blade, meaning is it over the, the load carrying part, um, uh, laminates? Is it in a, in a shell area? And you know, what is the approximate distance from the roof? Is that, that also tells you something [00:05:00] about the general loads in the area. So you know, you need to take that into consideration. Then you also need to look at how much of the blade is actually affected. Is it just surface layers? Is it just coating or is it something that goes, uh, through the entire laminate stack? And if that is on the, on the beam laminate, you’re in serious trouble. Then it will be a category five. If the beam laminate is vectored. And if you’re lucky enough that your blade is still sitting on the turbine, you should stop it, uh, to avoid a complete BA bait collapse. Uh, so, so you need, so, so that, you know, you can, that, that is very important when you’re doing defect categorizations. So that means that you need Allen Hall: internal inspections on top of external Morten Handberg: inspections. If you see something, uh, that is potentially critical, then yeah, you should do an internal inspection as well to verify whether it’s going through, um, the entire lemonade stack or not. That that’s a, that’s a good, good, good approach. Um, I would say often, you know, if you see something that is potentially critical, uh, but there is still a possibility that could be repaired. Then I might even also just send up a repair [00:06:00] team, uh, to see, you know, look from the outside how much of the area is actually affected, because that can also pretty quickly give you an indication, do we need to take this blade down or not? Sometimes you’ll just see it flat out that, okay, this crack is X meters long, it’s over sensitive area of the blade. You know, we need to remove this blade. Uh, maybe when, once it’s down we can determine whether it’s repairable or not, but. We, but it’s not something that’s going to be fixed up tower, so there’s not a lot of need for doing a lot of added, um, add added inspections to verify this, this point. Allen Hall: Let’s talk about cracks for a moment, because I’ve seen a lot of cracks over the last year on blades and some of them to me look scary because they, they are going transverse and then they take a 90 degree and start moving a different direction. Is there a, a rule of thumb about cracks that are visual on the outside of the blade? Like if it’s how, if they’re [00:07:00] closer to the root they’re more critical than they’re, if they’re happening further outers or is there not a rule of thumb? You have to understand what the design of the blade is. Morten Handberg: Well, I mean the general rule of thumb is transfers cracks is a major issue that’s really bad. That’s, uh, you know, it’s a clear sign, something. Severely structural is going on because the transverse crack does not develop or develop on its own. And more likely not once it starts, you know, then the, uh, the, the strain boundaries on the sides of the cr of the crack means that it requires very little for it to progress. So even if in a relatively low loaded area with low strain, once you have a, a transverse crack, uh, present there, then it will continue. Uh, and you mentioned that it’s good during a 90 degree. That’s just because it’s doing, it’s, it’s taking the least path of the path of least resistance, because it’ll have got caught through the entire shell. Then when it reaches the beam, the beam is healthy. It’s very stiff, very rigid laminate. So it’s easier for it to go longitudinal towards the [00:08:00] root because that’s, that, that, that’s how it can progress. That’s where it has the, uh, you know, the, the, the strain, uh, um, the, the strain high, high enough strain that it can actually, uh, develop. That that’s what it would do. So transverse cracks in general is really bad. Of course, closer to root means it’s more critical. Um, if there is a crack transverse crack, uh, very far out in the tip, I would usually say, you know, in the tip area, five, 10 meter from the tip, I would say, okay, there’s something else going on. Something non load related. Probably causes, could be a lightning strike, could be an impact damage. That changed the calculation a little bit because then, you know, it’s not a load driven issue. So that might give you some time to, you know, that you can operate with something at least. But again, I, I don’t want to make any general rules that people then didn’t go out and say, well, I did that, so, and, but my blade still broke. That’s not really how it works. You need to really, you need to, to, uh, look at cracks like that individually. You can’t make a a common rule. Allen Hall: Another [00:09:00] area, which is under discussion across the industry are surface defects and there are a variety of surface defects. We’re seeing a lot of hail damage this year. Uh, that’s getting categorized as lightning damage. And so there’s obviously a different kind of repair going on. Hail versus lightning. Are there some standards regarding surface defects? Uh, the visuals on them? Is there a guideline about Morten Handberg: it? Well, I mean, uh, some of the, uh, some of the, how do you say, omic couture, some of the, uh, some of the standards, they do provide some guideline to determine which surface kind of surface defect it is, you could say, on the operational points, as long as it’s surface related. Then the repair methodology is the same, whether it’s peeling, erosion, voids, chipping scratches, the repair is the same. So that in principle does not change anything. But in the reason why it matters is because we need to understand the [00:10:00] underlying issue. So if you have lot of peeling, for instance, it means you have a very low quoting quality, and that is something that is either post post repair related or it’s manufacturing related, depending on the blade, on the age of your blade. So that’s very important for you to know because if you have peeling somewhere, then more likely than not, you’ll also have have issues with it elsewhere because, you know, tend to, they tend to follow each other, you know, coding quality issues. So that’s a good thing to know for you as an operator that you, this is just one of many, erosion is important, but often gets miscategorized because erosion is a leading edge issue. Um, so we only see it on the, on the very edge of the leading edge. So approximately 40 millimeter band. That’s typically what we see, and it’s straight on the leading edge. So if someone’s claiming that they see lead, leading edge erosion on the, on the pressure side, shell or ide, shell, it’s miscategorizing because that’s what you, that’s not why they have to have the ring. Uh, impacts ring can still, still [00:11:00] hit the shells, but when it hits the, the, the shell areas, it will ricochet because it hits it at an angle. Leading edge gets straight on. So it gets the entire impact force and that’s why you get the erosion issue because of, of fatigue essentially. Uh, coding fatigue. So that’s very important. There is something that you know you can really utilize if you just know that simple fact that it’s always a leading edge, it’s always uniform. It, you can track that. And if you have leading edge erosion in one area, you will have it in the entire wind farm. So you don’t need to do that much inspection to determine your erosion levels, voids, pinholes. They are manufacturing driven because they are driven by either imperfections in the coating, meaning you have a sand, grain dust, or you had, uh, air inclusions underneath your coating. And they will weaken the structure. And that means that, um, rain effect or other effects causing strain on your coating will accelerate a lot faster. So they will develop and create these small, um, yeah, uh, how do you [00:12:00] say, small defined holes in your coating. So that’s why it’s important to know. But if you’re running a wind farm 15 years, 10 years down the line. Then it’s more important for you to know that it’s a surface defect and you need to fix it by doing coating repair. You don’t need to think so much about the, the underlying issue, I would say. Allen Hall: Okay. I think that’s been miscategorized a number of times. I’ve seen what I would consider to be some sort of paint adhesion issue because it’s sort of mid cord and not near the leading edge, but sometimes it just looks like there’s massive peeling going on and maybe, uh, it’s easy to assume that maybe is erosion. It’s just a weak adhesion of paint. That that’s what you’re saying? Morten Handberg: Yeah. If it’s, if it’s midspan, if it’s shell related, then it’s, it’s a, it’s a coating quality related issue. It doesn’t really have anything to do with erosion. Um, you could say erosion. We can, we can, we can, uh, we can look at in, in, in two areas. So you have the out or third of the leading edge. [00:13:00] That’s where you would have the theoretical leading edge erosion breakdown, because that’s where you have rain impact high enough that it will cause some kind of degradation, but that all of your leading edge will suffer in the same way because the tip speed of the outer four meters of your blade. Versus the re the other, you know, uh, 10, 12 meters depending on length of your blade. Sometimes it’s a lot longer, but they are getting degraded in a much different way. So the out of pew meters, they can get what’s called structural erosion. So that means that the erosion goes fast enough and it’s progressive enough that you can start to damage the laminate underneath. You won’t see that further in because the, the impact is just not that great and you will likely not see structural erosion over the lifetime, but the out a few meters, that’s important. And that’s where you need, need to focus your, that that’s where you need to pay attention on what kind of materials you add because that can save you a lot of repair, re, re repair. And, uh, down the line, how do you categorize Allen Hall: leading edge erosion? A lot of [00:14:00] times I see it, uh, from operators. Let’s say it’s, uh, category four because it’s into the fiber. But is it always a structural issue? Is there a lot of loading on the leading edges of these blades where you would have to come back with structural applies to repair it? Or is it just a aerodynamic shape and does it really depend upon who the OE Em is? Morten Handberg: Well, I mean, I’ve seen erosion category five as well, and I think it’s a mis misinterpretation. I think it’s, you know, people are trying it to raise awareness that, hey, there was a serious issue with erosion, but it’s a wrong way to use the severities. Because if we look at severity five, severity five, if you have a critical issue, your blade is about to come down if you don’t do anything. So category five means you need to stop your turbine. Maybe you can repair it, but that really depends on the, uh, on what is damaged by, on, on, on the blade. And you can determine that once you removed it and looked at it on, on, on the ground. But you need to stop. Category four is a severe structural damage. It’s not something that [00:15:00] is causing an immediate threat, but it’s something that will progress rapidly if you don’t do anything. So here you need to look at the damage itself. So how does it affect the structure and can you operate it curtailed, uh, or can you operate it, uh, or can you operate normally and repair it within a short time window? That’s what you can use because it’s something that is. Uh, that can, that can develop into an, into an imminent issue if you don’t react to it. Severity three is more for your, is more your annual maintenance schedule. So that is your, your minor structural damages and it’s your erosion issues. So that’s something that there is a severity Three, you need to look at it for next year’s budget. Severity two means that. Something that’s gradually degradating your coating on the blade, but it’s not something that means anything at this point in time. So one is your coating, is your surface damage or minor surface damage. Pinholes uh, contamination. It’s really light issue, so it’s not something you really need to consider. So. [00:16:00] Severity ones, you, you really mean that, that it’s, you don’t need to think about this anymore. You know, it’s, it’s not an issue. So erosion will fall typically within severity two to severity four. Severity four being you have a hole in your blade from erosion, basically. Uh, because you can still have structural degradation of deleting it and still being a severity three, because it does not really change your maintenance cycle in any, in any way. You don’t need to do anything immediate to fix it. Um, so that’s why I would put most of erosion defects in severity three and just say, okay, it’s something we need to plan a leading edge, a leading edge ERO repair campaign next year or the year after, depending on the severity of it. That’s why, how I, I would approach, Allen Hall: that’s good insight, because I do think a lot of operators, when they do see a hole in the leading edge, think I have to stop this turbine. But at the same token, I have seen other operators with holes. I could put my fist through. That are continuing to use those blades and they will say, it’s not structural, it’s not [00:17:00] great aerodynamically, but the, we’re still making power here. We’re still making rated power. Even with the hole and the leading edge, it’s not going to progress anymore. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a progression that we understand. That’s how they describe it. It will get worse, but it’s not gonna get catastrophic worse. Morten Handberg: I mean, if you run it long enough, at some point, something secondary will happen. Sure. But again, that’s also why we use the severity four category for erosion, where you have severe structural degradation because it does starting to mean something for the integrity of the blade. It will not mean that it’s coming down right away when you see a hole in the blade from erosion. That’s, that’s the entire purpose of it. But it does it, you use it to raise awareness that there is something you need to look at imminently or at least react to, uh, and make a plan for. You can’t just pull, you can’t just delay it until next year’s, uh, maintenance campaign. We have an active issue here, so that’s why I think severity four applies to erosion. That has penetrated all structural layers. Allen Hall: Are there some [00:18:00] blade damages that are just can’t be repaired or, or just have too much difficulty to repair them, that it’s not worth it? And how do you know? How do you understand? That blade is not repairable versus the one next to it which looks similar, which can be repaired. What goes into that assessment? Morten Handberg: So one is, is the, is the beam laminate damaged? If it is, then uh, either it comes down to a commercial decision. It’s simply not fixable and, and restoring it in, you know, restoring it back, uh, to original form ship. And there’s also the, the, uh, the, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, uh, returning element of carbon fiber, because carbon fiber adds another level of complexity repairs, because you’re so dependent on the pristine quality of the carbon for it to, to, for, to utilize the, the, uh, mechanical strength of carbon. And if you, if you don’t apply it in the right way, then you can create some high stress zones. Where, you know, the [00:19:00] cure is as bad as the disease really. So that’s why you have to be extra careful with carbon repairs. But they can be done. But it, you know, it really comes down to a commercial decision then. So in principle, unless the blade is deformed, uh, or, or, or damaged in such a way that you have to remove a large part of the s shell lemonade in a loaded area, then most things they can, in principle, be repaired. It’s just a matter of is the, is the cost of the repair. Cheaper than the cost of a new blade. And that calculation might, you know, depend on are there any, any spare blades available? Is this blade, uh, still in production? And if I don’t repair this, then I don’t have any blade for my turbine and then I can’t operate anymore. That also changed the calculus right along quite a lot, so I think. For a lot of damages. It, it’s more of a, it’s often more of a commercial decision rather than a technical, because ca glass fiber is very forgiving. You can repair a lot, even if it’s really severe. I mean, I’ve seen blade repairs that took [00:20:00] 3000 hours, but it was deemed worthwhile because you couldn’t get a, a bare blade. And in most other cases, that would’ve been been scrapped, you know, without, you know, without blinking. Um, so, so, you know, if you really want to, you could repair it. In a lot of cases, Allen Hall: how difficult is it to repair carbon protrusions, because it does seem like when they manufacture those protrusions, there’s a lot of quality control going into it. The fibers have to be in the right direction all the time, and they’re really compacted in there. They’re tight, tight block of carbon that you’re purchasing and sliding into into this blade. Are they really repairable in sections or is it you have to take out the whole length of a pultrusion and replace it? I’m, I’m trying to understand the difficulty here because there’s a lot of operators in the United States now that have some portion of their fleet is carbon spar cap, not a lot of it, but some of it. How [00:21:00] difficult is that to repair? Morten Handberg: Well, it’s difficult enough that a lot of OEMs, they will say if you have a damage to the carbon, it’s a non-repairable defect. That is to a large extent the general rule. Um, there are, there are, uh, there are ways and some of it is replacement of the protrusion. Um, other, another method is, is to do a vacuum infusion lamination. I’ve also seen some repairs with success where, uh, glass fiber is utilized instead of carbon fiber. So you reply, so you, you, um, you calculate the mechanical strength of the carbon. And then replace that with an equal amount, you know, strength wise of glass fiber. The problem is you are to a degree playing with little bit with fire because you are then changing the structure of the blade. You are increasing the thickness and thereby you are changing the stiffness. So it’s, you have to be really [00:22:00] careful, uh, it’s possible. And uh, again. All if all other options are out and you want this blade really to get up and running again because it’s your only option. Maybe it’s worthwhile to, to investigate, but it requires a lot of insight in and also a little bit of, uh, how do you say, uh, you don’t, you shouldn’t be too risk adverse if you go down that that route, but, but again, it is possible. It is technically possible. But it’s something you do for the outer, uh, outer areas of the blade where you have less loads and you’re less sensitive. Allen Hall: Can those carbon repairs be done up tower or are they always done with the rotor set or the blade drop down to ground? Morten Handberg: I know some carbon repairs have been done up tower, but in general it’s down tower also, just because if you have damage to your carbon, it means you have a severe structural issue. So you wouldn’t generally try to do it that well, I would, not in general, but, but the, the, the cases I’ve seen that, that has been downturn repairs. Yeah. Allen Hall: Do you think about the categories differently? If it includes carbon [00:23:00] as a structural element? Morten Handberg: No, because carbon is part of the load carrying laminate. If you’re to the load carrying laminate, then it becomes a four or five immediately. Um, so, uh, so I would say the same rule applies because ag again, it’s a very rough scale, but it applied, but it gives you a sense of where, you know, what is the urgency, which is what I think we in generally need. And I like the more simple model because it’s more applicable to the general industry and it’s easier for, uh, you know, it’s easier to, to implement. Um. And it is easier to understand than if you have a too too gradual, uh, scale because it’s difficult for the people who are sitting and assessing to determine if, uh, you know, what, what category it is. And it’s difficult for the people who have to read the report afterwards. And it’s also about, you know, what is the purpose? And in general, I would say, well, this, the defect categorization, the severe categorization is to determine can this be repaired or not? That’s what we use it [00:24:00] for. So that, that, that’s how we, it should be applied. Allen Hall: Is the industry going to have a universal standard? Soon. Is that possible? Or is this really gonna be country by country, region by region? How we think about blade defects and blade repairs? Morten Handberg: I think that. Given the, uh, the, how do you say, the individual interests in having their own model from the different OEMs or service providers? I think the, when they’re choosing a pope, they have an easy task ahead of them, you know, deciding that. Then we have the agreeing on an on inte standard and on plate. Allen Hall: Pope is currently an American, so that tells you something. The world has shifted. There is still hope. Maybe there is still hope because it, it is a very difficult problem and I hear a lot of conflicting opinions about it and they’re not wrong. The opinions I hear when they’re explained to me, they have a rationale as to why. They’re calling something a cat four versus a cat three. [00:25:00] It all makes sense, but when you get two engineers in the room, they’re rarely are going to agree. So I’m just thinking maybe, maybe there isn’t a, a yeah, maybe there isn’t a time where we’re all gonna come together. Morten Handberg: I think that, you know, it’s, it’s also about what are you willing to accept and what are you willing to s. You know, as an OEM, as a blade engineer, as a service provider, in order to make common agreement. Because I think if we were willing to, you know, set aside differences, um, and then agree on, okay, what is the, what, what is that, what is the, the ma the industry needs and what, what fulfills the purpose? We could agree tomorrow, but that’s not where we are, uh, at the moment. So, so I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But yes, there, there was a way to do an in to make an international standard. Um, for blades and I, I would say maybe it’s, if the IC made, made, made one, then maybe that that could, uh, that could fix it. Uh, maybe if, uh, they’re starting to become more [00:26:00]focused from governments, uh, and you know, that it wind industry becomes recognized as critical infrastructure. That then there is a requirement for international standards on what are defects, to make it easier to determine what is critical or not, so that proper reaction can be made. That will also help it. But again, as long as it’s only about late experts having to agree with each other and that’s the only then, then we’re, then we will not get to a point where we’re going to agree on, on everything. No. Allen Hall: Wow. This is a continual discussion about blade defects and categorization and Morton. I really appreciate. You’re giving us your thoughts about it because I trust you one and two, you’re on the leading edge of what the industry is thinking. So it’s very good to get you in here and explain where categorization is and, and two operators that are listening to this podcast understand you’re probably getting a lot of different opinions about categorization. You need to sit down and figure it out for yourself, or reach out to Morton who can explain what you should be thinking and how you should be [00:27:00]thinking about this problem. Morton, how do people get ahold of you to learn more? Morten Handberg: Easiest way is to reach out to me on LinkedIn. Um, I have a very active profile there. You can always write me and I’ll always write, write, write it back. You can also write to me on my company email, m me h@windpowerapp.com. Um, those are the two easiest way to get, uh, get in, in, uh, get in touch me. And I would say, as an owner, what you need to know. Is it a structural issue or is a surface issue you have? And then plan your repairs from there. That is, that is the. Basic, yeah, that, that you need to have, and then forget about the others, the other side of it, you know, if it’s one defect type or another, that’s not necessarily what’s going to help you. It’s all about getting the blades repaired. And, uh, and the turbine up and running again. That should be the focus. Allen Hall: Absolutely. Morton, we love having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s good to be here. See [00:28:00] you.

Today's show features: JR Toothman, Owner of Toothman Ford

 Amol Waishampayan, Co-Founder of Fullthrottle.ai Glenn Lundy, President of 800% Elite Auto This episode is brought to you by: Cars.com – the #1 most recognized automotive marketplace and the place shoppers turn for trusted expertise and a better way to compare vehicles. Unlike marketplaces that reduce everything to price, Cars.com automatically merchandises your inventory's most compelling features and accolades to highlight true value and help shoppers make confident buying decisions. Cars.com is the flagship offering from Cars Commerce, an audience-driven technology company simplifying everything about buying and selling cars. Learn more at https://www.carscommerce.inc/marketplace. Fullthrottle.ai – fullthrottle.ai® helps dealers, OEMs, and automotive agencies deliver laser-sharp, household-level omnichannel targeting with the first generative-AI powered automotive DSP — enabling identity-based reach and real-time bidding efficiency. We're also a proud partner of the Automotive Media Marketplace, bringing smarter, tierless activation to the industry. Meet our team at NADA 2026 at the Auto Media Marketplace Booth #1915W or at the V20 Booth #2001W. To learn more or book your demo, visit https://www.fullthrottle.ai/the-automotive-dsp/ CDG Circles – A modern peer group for auto dealers. Private dealer chats. Real insights — confidential, compliant, no travel required. Visit https://cdgcircles.com/ to learn more. Car Dealership Guy is back with our second annual NADA Party—happening in Las Vegas on Thursday, February 5th. It's the hottest ticket at NADA 2026. Spots are limited and unfortunately we can't invite everyone —so RSVP today at https://carguymedia.com/cdglive and we hope to see you in Vegas! -- Check out Car Dealership Guy's stuff: CDG News ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://news.dealershipguy.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ CDG Jobs ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://jobs.dealershipguy.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ CDG Recruiting ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.cdgrecruiting.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ My Socials: X ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.twitter.com/GuyDealership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Instagram ➤⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/cardealershipguy/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TikTok ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@guydealership⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ LinkedIn ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/company/cardealershipguy/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Threads ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.threads.net/@cardealershipguy⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Facebook ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100077402857683⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Everything else ➤ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠dealershipguy.com

Airbus A320 fuselage panel problems, Thunderbird F-16C crash, ATC prime integrator, hand flying, Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, Southwest Airlines meltdown fine, solar flares and A320 groundings, airline pay-for-delay compensation, and charging air travelers without REAL ID. Aviation News Airbus prepares A320 inspections as fuselage flaw hits deliveries Airbus engineers are inspecting 628 A320 family exterior fuselage panels for thickness defects. The skin panels have thickness deviations beyond Airbus's design tolerances. The panels were manufactured by a Spanish supplier Sofitec Aero and do not represent a flight‑safety risk at this time. Panels on the upper forward fuselage are the main concern, with deviations having also been found in some rear‑fuselage sections. The affected panels are not serialized, so Airbus must inspect the entire batch of potentially impacted airframes rather than trace specific parts. A320 Family final assembly line in Toulouse. Courtesy Airbus. Sofitec Aero is an aerostructures company that designs, manufactures, and assembles metallic and composite aircraft structures for major OEMs, including Airbus, Boeing, Embraer, Bombardier, and several Tier‑1 suppliers such as Spirit AeroSystems and Stelia. It is a privately held firm, founded in 1999. Thunderbirds F-16C Fighting Falcon Crashes in California The 57th Wing Public Affairs Office issued a statement saying, “On December 3, 2025, at approximately 10:45 a.m., a Thunderbird pilot safely ejected from a F-16C Fighting Falcon aircraft during a training mission over controlled airspace in California. The pilot is in stable condition and receiving follow-on care.” The F‑16C went down during a routine training mission in controlled airspace over the Mojave Desert. The crash site is located in a remote desert area near the town of Trona, approximately two miles south of Trona Airport and about 27 miles from Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. Hydrazine: A Significant Hazard Each Time An F-16 Crashes (Or Fires Up The Emergency Power Unit) F‑16s use hydrazine in their emergency power units, so environmental and hazmat teams from Edwards Air Force Base were deployed to the site to evaluate and mitigate any hazardous materials concerns. The F-16's Emergency Power Unit (EPU) is a backup power system that utilizes H-70 (approximately 70% hydrazine and 30% water) to drive a small turbine, supplying emergency hydraulic and electrical power in the event of main engine or generator failure. Hydrazine is used because it is a monopropellant that can rapidly generate mechanical power without external oxygen, but it is also highly toxic, corrosive, and flammable, so its use is tightly controlled and largely limited to legacy or niche applications. US government selects contractor Peraton to lead air traffic control modernisation In Episode 865, we reported that two bids had been received to become the prime integrator for the FAA's project to overhaul the air traffic control system, called the Brand New Air Traffic Control System (BNATCS). They were Peraton and Parsons Corporation. Congress had approved $12.5 billion for the project, and the Agency has indicated that an additional $19 billion might be requested. The US Department of Transportation (DOT) selected Peraton as the prime integrator. The national security company is owned by Veritas Capital and headquartered in Reston, Virginia. Flight Global says Peraton is a “provider of technologies for large, complex organisations, offering services including cyber security, systems engineering and modernisation, cloud computing and data management.” According to Veritas, the company specializes in buying and growing companies that sell technology and services to U.S. government agencies in defense, intelligence, civil, and health markets. Examples include acquisitions or control of federal IT and mission‑support businesses such as Northrop Grumman's federal IT arm (combined into Peraton) and health IT and analytics providers serving Medicaid and Defense Health Agency programs. See also, What to know about the air traffic control overhaul and the company FAA hired to manage it. Union Urges ‘Back-to-Basics' Approach to Pilot Skills Captain Wendy Morse is a Boeing 787 captain and serves as first vice president and national safety coordinator at the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA). In a recent interview at the Skift Aviation Forum in Fort Worth, she said the union is advocating for pilots to “go back to our roots” and maintain strong manual-flying proficiency throughout their careers. Morse said, “So the biggest thing is [getting] back to basics…We have to maintain a basic level of flying, a basic level of flying skills, and we have to continue to maintain those basics. This business about positive rate, gear up, [and] put on the autopilot is not a good idea. We have to keep flying the airplane so that we're good at it.” Boeing closes Spirit AeroSystems purchase in major supply chain realignment Boeing has completed its takeover of Spirit AeroSystems. Under the $4.7 billion deal, Boeing re-acquires most of Spirit AeroSystems. Airbus picks up parts of Spirit in its supply chain. Operations in Subang, Malaysia, went to Composites Technology Research Malaysia, and the subsidiary Fiber Materials was sold earlier this year to Tex-Tech Industries. Portions of the Belfast, Northern Ireland, operations will continue as an independent subsidiary branded as Short Brothers. Trump administration lets Southwest Airlines off the hook with a multimillion dollar waiver for 2022 holiday travel meltdown In 2023, the Biden administration fined Southwest Airlines $140 million for the 2022 holiday travel meltdown. The US Department of Transportation has now waived the final $11 million installment of that fine. The DOT says Southwest has made worthwhile investments in its operations control center and “the Department is of the view that it is more beneficial for the flying public to give Southwest credit for significantly improving its on-time performance and completion factor.” The 10-day schedule meltdown resulted in 17,000 canceled flights, roughly half of Southwest's holiday season flight schedule. Southwest paid out $600 million in refunds and reimbursements to passengers who were affected. Add in additional labor costs and lost revenue, and the airline reported a $914 million after-tax loss. Aviation News Follow-Up A320 Groundings – There Was No Solar Flare In Visual Approach, Airplane Geeks co-founder Courtney Miller argues that the data does not support the case that the October 30, 2025, uncommanded altitude decrease of a JetBlue A320 was caused by solar radiation. Looking at proton flux data, Courtney says, “We are talking about high-energy protons traveling from the sun to Earth, penetrating the Earth's protective magnetic field, and also penetrating the aircraft's hardware shielding to deliver what's called a Single-Event Upset (SEU). Another term you may have heard for it is a “bit flip”. The proton flux usually arrives associated with a solar flare, but not always. NOAA tracks and reports these events. In the days leading up to the “intense solar radiation” that Airbus referenced as the potential issue in the JetBlue upset, there was no intense solar radiation. The Visual Approach Advisory brings novel, data-driven, and contrarian answers to aviation clients around the world. Our bespoke consulting team is built with a focus on deep industry expertise, contrarian thought leadership, trusted independence, and opinionated results. We compete with the largest consulting firms by focusing on quality results and contrarian ideas. Pay-On-Delay Would Send Airfares Soaring, Says Transport Minister The Australian Federal Transport Minister, Catherine King, told ABC Radio in Sydney that an EU-style “pay-on-delay” compensation scheme would drive up airfares in Australia. The federal government has proposed airline customer protections, and the Minister's comments come after a consultation period ended. EU 261 requires that airlines pay passengers compensation for delays and cancellations within their control. King feels the Australian market is too small to sustain such a measure. “It is costly to administer compensation schemes. Those costs are generally passed on to passengers,” she said. Fliers without a compliant ID will have to pay TSA $45 next year The TSA says that starting in February 1, 2026, air travelers in the U.S. without a REAL ID will be charged a $45 fee. The initially planned $18 fee was raised after officials realized this identification program would cost more than anticipated. The fee applies to travelers 18 and older who are flying domestically without a REAL ID or other accepted form of ID. The non-refundable fee will be required to verify identity through the TSA Confirm.ID system. Confirm.ID replaces TSA's older manual “forgot my ID” procedures. It's a more automated, technology‑assisted process that uses a traveler's biographic and possibly biometric information to verify identity and screen against watchlists. Confirm.ID is meant as a last‑resort option for people who arrive at the checkpoint without a compliant ID, not as a routine substitute for REAL ID or a passport. The fee can be paid online before arriving at the airport. Travelers can also pay online at the airport before entering the security line, but officials said the process may take up to 30 minutes. Mentioned From the FAA: PackSafe – Portable Electronic Devices Containing Batteries Lithium Batteries in Baggage Hosts this Episode Max Flight, Rob Mark, and our Main(e) Man Micah.

What goes into the process of designing a new dealership and where do you even begin? Today on Connected, Greg is joined in the studio by Bill Chidley, co-founder of ChangeUp and author of The Brand Vortex. ChangeUp is a branding and retail design firm that partners with several OEMs and their dealer programs to help establish dealership design and branding standards. They also put out an industry report titled, "Why the Dealership Experience Still Matters," about the importance of the physical dealership in a changing automotive retail landscape. Greg and Bill talk through some of the findings of the report and discuss some of the things dealerships have to balance when establishing their branding, like: - The needs of the brand and the function of the dealership. - OEM expectations and unique dealership identity. - How to align branding when showcasing different vehicle models. Bill had some really great insight to share on some aspects of the dealership that may not always be top of mind, but are so important for the customer experience. Get Connected with Bill and enjoy this week's episode!

Episode Info As the president of Personal Lines at Nationwide, Casey Kempton is responsible for all aspects of the business including product, underwriting, sales and distribution, claims and services. Her organization focuses on delivering effortless, personal and reassuring experiences for distribution  professionals and customers who value protection and service. Casey previously served as the executive vice president, digital business officer at Chubb where she was responsible for small business revenue generation, agency experience and the build of digital acquisition channels via direct-to-consumer affinity partnerships, eBrokers and agent-carrier connectivity. Prior to Chubb, she led the personal lines agency channel at The Hartford including oversight of field sales performance, distribution strategy, marketing and product portfolio management. She also spent time with the ACE Group accountable for global personal and commercial lines as well as leading the operations and information technology for the Latin America region. Casey's early career included working on P&C strategic initiatives across the insurance value chain at The Hartford. A graduate of the University of Connecticut, Casey holds Bachelor of Arts degrees in Cognitive Anthropology and English. She also has two patents in her name relating to homeowners insurance rating. Episode Overview: Casey shares her expertise and vision for the future of personal insurance lines, discussing the evolving landscape of the industry and the innovative strategies Nationwide is implementing to stay ahead. Key Topics Discussed: Introduction to Casey Kempton: Casey introduces herself and her role at Nationwide, where she oversees Auto, Home, Umbrella, and other personal lines. She shares her journey and experiences since taking on the role in February 2024. Customer-Centric Approach: Nationwide's strong focus on customer satisfaction and building robust relationships with distribution partners. The importance of understanding customer needs and providing tailored insurance solutions. Predict and Prevent Strategy: Discussion on the "Predict and Prevent" initiative, which aims to mitigate risks before they occur. How this strategy is reshaping the insurance landscape by focusing on prevention rather than just compensation. Technological Advancements: The role of AI and data in enhancing pricing sophistication and service delivery. The impact of telematics and connected technologies in personal lines insurance. Industry Challenges and Opportunities: Navigating the complexities of personal lines insurance, including risk management and loss prevention. The evolving consumer mindset towards insurance as a necessary investment rather than a mere obligation. Future Outlook: Casey's vision for the future of insurance, emphasizing the need for continuous innovation and adaptation. The potential for growth in embedded insurance and partnerships with OEMs. Conclusion: Casey Kempton provides a comprehensive overview of the current state and future direction of personal lines insurance. Her insights into Nationwide's strategies and the industry's evolution offer valuable perspectives for anyone interested in the future of insurance. This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance book series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk. Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes. Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.

Send us a textWhat happens when a family-owned GSE manufacturer pairs engineering pride with a clear purpose? We head to Noonan, Georgia to talk with Malahan about a journey that started with A0 drawings and a dream, grew into two factories serving 40+ countries a year, and now fuels a 200-plus golfer charity tournament—the Shamrock Classic—raising funds for mental health and suicide prevention.We swap stories about the founder's late-night sketches and the long-tenured team who still carry his spirit onto the shop floor. Then we pull back the curtain on how the company scaled without losing its people-first culture: an internal app that shows where machines ship, highlights visitors, and invites families to events; a North American facility that keeps service close and relationships closer; and a product portfolio that spans de-icers, belt loaders, PRM lifts, high lifts, catering trucks, and more.From there, we step onto the tee box. The Shamrock Classic brings airlines, ground handlers, OEMs, leasing partners, and even competitors to White Oak for a shotgun start across two courses. It's open, welcoming, and transparent about impact. The American Foundation for Suicide Prevention joins three local Noonan partners, all collaborating to direct funds where they're needed most. Between the welcome night's axe throwing and simulator swings, the drone footage, and, yes, the famous chicken biscuits, the day stays light while the cause stays front and center.Curious how to play, sponsor, or volunteer next year? Reach out via the Shamrock Classic email and follow Malahan on LinkedIn for save-the-dates. If today's conversation moves you, subscribe, share the show with a colleague, and leave a quick review—your support helps more industry pros find stories that connect craft, community, and real-world change.Looking for dependable and on demand ground support equipment leasing? Fortbrand is your go to partner. We specialize in tailored operating leases for airlines, cargo carriers, and ground handlers, delivering top tier equipment without the wait. From the latest electric GSE to traditional units, Fortbrand offers flexible terms, competitive rates, and a customer experience that is second to none. Keep your ramp moving with confidence. Visit fortbrand.com and experience GSE leasing redefined.

TOPIC: Off Road Vehicles PANEL: Adam Bernard, AutoPerspectives; Warren Browne, RFQ Insights; Gary Vasilash, shinymetalboxes.net; John McElroy, Autoline.tv

50-60% of the parts on an average collision claim are plastic. Yet, most of the industry is still operating in the "wild west" when it comes to repairing them.In this eye-opening episode of Body Bangin', I sat down with Mario Dimovski, a 35-year veteran of the industry and the Head of the Plastic Repair Alliance Council, to discuss the massive knowledge gap in plastic repair… and the global initiative that is about to change everything.Mario has spent his entire career in plastics. He explains why the "chicken wire and hot glue" approach is failing shops, why OEMs are finally paying attention, and how a new set of global standards is being built to help shops repair safer, cheaper, and better.This episode is a wake-up call for every shop owner who wants to stay ahead of the curve on the most common material in the bay.What You'll Learn in This Episode:

Shoot us a Text.Episode #1208: Today we're joined by guest host Todd Caputo and break down why car buyers are finally pushing back on pricing and how BMW and Audi are muscling into the booming off-road segment.Show Notes with links:American car buyers are finally tapping the brakes. After years of paying whatever it took to get into a new car, stretched consumers are hitting affordability ceilings and forcing both dealers and OEMs to rethink what demand really looks like heading into 2025.Shoppers are shifting downmarket—buying used, taking longer loans, delaying purchases, and gravitating toward lower-priced models like the Chevy Trax.Industry projections for 2025–26 have softened as tariffs, inflation, and tighter labor markets cool big-ticket spending.Rising days' supply is prompting deeper discounting while lower-income borrowers fall behind on payments and overall vehicle spending drops YoY.Retailers report weaker new-vehicle margins, though service traffic is climbing as more owners try to stretch aging vehicles.“People are asking, ‘How can I afford this?'” said dealer Robert Peltier. “There are people who are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck.”The all-terrain SUV segment is heating up fast as BMW and Audi prepare to challenge icons like Wrangler, Bronco, G-Wagen, and Defender—tapping into a growing niche that's suddenly not niche at all.The off-road segment is booming: nine core models totaled 371,495 sales through Q3 2025, on pace for a post-pandemic record. Wrangler and Bronco remain the kings.Audi will build its first true off-roader on the upcoming Scout Terra/Traveler platform in South Carolina, offering both full EV and range-extender options.BMW's G74 aims straight at the G-Wagen and Defender, built on the X5 platform in Greer, SC, with U.S. production helping dodge tariff pressure.Analysts say styling—not specs—will make or break these newcomers; anything too close to G-Wagen territory risks immediate backlash.“Adding a true off-road-capable SUV will attract buyers… but whether that investment pays off is the challenge,” said S&P Global Mobility's Sam Fiorani Bernard.Join Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier every morning for the Automotive State of the Union podcast as they connect the dots across car dealerships, retail trends, emerging tech like AI, and cultural shifts—bringing clarity, speed, and people-first insight to automotive leaders navigating a rapidly changing industry.Get the Daily Push Back email at https://www.asotu.com/ JOIN the conversation on LinkedIn at: https://www.linkedin.com/company/asotu/

It's Paul Schmucker and Todd Deeken of Everyday Driver! They tell us about life with their long-term C8 Corvette; Lotus ownership; owning 2 Caymans (and how that IS and is NOT redundant); truck changes; tire recommendations; shorter gears vs bigger engines; and answer Patreon questions including: Does leading a driving adventure ruin the trip?Accidental horns in Lotus carsCleaning tips to limit corrosion981 Boxster S vs E92 M3 as a driver's carHow cheap will Polestar 1's get?When will OEMs stop chasing power numbers?What do I set my tire pressures to?What do you keep in your daily driver?Is the $100k price for an air-cooled car worth it?How do I drive on a track that's COLD?Miata or Solstice GXP?Recorded November 20, 2025https://www.everydaydriver.com SHOW NOTESAura FramesFor a limited time, visit AuraFrames.com and get $45 off Aura's best-selling Carver Mat frames - named #1 by Wirecutter -  by using promo code TIRE at checkout.  RulaThousands of guys have already used Rula to finally get the care they needed. Don't keep putting it off -  go to Rula.com/tire and get started today. Take the first step, get connected, and take control of your mental health.#sponsored CashAppDownload Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/mfsirfru   #CashAppPod and use our exclusive referral code SECURE10 in your profile, send $5 to a friend within 14 days, and you'll get $10 dropped right into your account. Terms apply. #CashAppPartner  New merch! Grab a shirt or hoodie and support us! https://thesmokingtireshop.com/ Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! For a 10% discount on your first case go to https://www.offtherecord.com/TST Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman Want your question answered? Want to watch the live stream, get ad-free podcasts, or exclusive podcasts? Join our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thesmokingtirepodcast Use Off The Record! and ALWAYS fight your tickets! Enter code TST10 for a 10% discount on your first case on the Off The Record app, or go to http://www.offtherecord.com/TST. Watch our car reviews: https://www.youtube.com/thesmokingtire Tweet at us!https://www.Twitter.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Twitter.com/zackklapman Instagram:https://www.Instagram.com/thesmokingtirehttps://www.Instagram.com/therealzackklapman