Episode Details

Allen and Yolanda discuss operational shifts driven by the IRA bill, focusing on the importance of long-term operational strategies, collaboration, and advanced monitoring solutions.

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Intro: [00:00:00] 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 hosts, 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 the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina, and I have.

Yolanda Padron in Austin, Texas, and Yolanda has been out at a site in West Texas last several days working out some strike tape installations because the, the blade season of Texas is so long and the repair season is so long. Everybody’s really making work and, and maybe even spending a little more money than they thought they were gonna spend this year.

Just to get their turbines righted because it is for us at Weather Guard, it’s still lightning season. There are a lot of storms and the amount [00:01:00] of rain in West Texas is crazy. Flooded roads, uh, on highways still days after rainstorms. That tells you that the amount of rain. It has been a little bit of an unusual year on the, on the wind production side because of the weather.

Right? 

Yolanda Padron: Yeah. It’s, it’s been high production for, for a lot of the, that area. It’s definitely, it’s, you start getting all of those drone inspections in and everything. Sometimes I think it’s, it’s worked out pretty great for some of the operators that maybe didn’t have a lot of, uh, planning capabilities in the past.

So then they’re able to come in and actually. Books, some teams to do work even, even though the traditional blade season has passed. 

Allen Hall: Oh yeah. Is there gonna be a traditional blade season from here on out? And I think this is where a lot of operators are rethinking, uh, the changes to the IRA bill and the one big beautiful bill aspects is, you know, with the, with the production tax credits sort of waning and, and [00:02:00] wrapping up.

They are going to be putting more emphasis on o and m. And in fact, when we were at Skys specs forums, and I keep bringing this up ’cause it’s such a monumental thing that we were at in Ann Arbor a couple weeks ago. The emphasis has moved from definitely from development to more of operations. But the, the level of complexity there has changed.