Episode Details

Allen, Joel, and Yolanda share their annual Thanksgiving reflections on a year of major changes in wind energy. They discuss industry collaboration, the offshore wind reset, and upcoming changes in 2026. Thanks to all of our listeners from the Uptime team!

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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering Tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I’m your host, Alan Hall in the Queen city of Charlotte, North Carolina. Joel Saxon’s up in Wisconsin, and Yolanda Padron is down in Texas, and this is our yearly Thanksgiving edition. Thanks for joining us and, and on this episode we always like to look back at the year and, uh, say all we’re thankful for.

We’ve had a number of podcast guests on more than 50, I think total by the time we get to conferences and, uh, all the different places we’ve been over the past year. Joel, it does seem like it’s been a really interesting year. We’ve been able to watch. The changes in the wind industry this year via the eyes of [00:01:00]others.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. One of the things that’s really interesting to me when we have guests on is that we have them from a variety of parts of the wind industry sector. So we have ISPs, you know, people running things out in the field, making stuff happen. We’ve got high level, you know, like we have this, some CEOs on from different, uh, people that are really innovative and trying to get floating winged out there.

They have like on, we had choreo generation on, so we, so we have all different spectrums of left, right center, Europe, well us, you name it. Uh, new innovative technology. PhD smart people, uh, doing things. Um, also, it’s just a, it’s just a gamut, right? So we get to learn from everybody who has a different kind of view on what’s 

Allen Hall: happening.

Yolanda, you’ve been in the midst of all this and have gone through a big transition joining us at Weather Guard, lightning Tech, and we’re very thankful for that, for sure. But over the last year, you’ve seen a lot of changes too, ’cause you’ve been in the seat of a blade engineer and a [00:02:00] large operator.

What do you think? 

Yolanda Padron: Uh, something I am really thankful for this year is, and I think a lot of owner operators are, is just knowing what’s coming up. So there was a lot of chaos in the beginning before the big beautiful bill where everyone theorized on a lot of items. Um, and, and you were just kind of stuck in the mid