The 2025 Uptime Thanksgiving Special

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! 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: 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 middle of the court not really knowing which direction to go in, but. Now we’re all thankful for, for what? It’s brought for the fact that everyone seems to be contributing a lot more, and at least we all know what direction we’re heading in or what the, what the rules are, the of the game are, so we can move accordingly. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I got some clarity. Right. I think that, but that happened as well, like when we had the IRA bill come in. Three, four years ago, it was the same thing. It was like, well, this bill’s here, and then you read through it. I mean, this was a little bit opposite, right? ’cause it was like, oh, these are all [00:03:00] great things. Right? Um, but there wasn’t clarity on it for like, what, six months until they finalized some of the. Longer on some of the, some of the tax bills and what it would actually mean for the industry and those kind of things. So yeah, sorting this stuff out and what you’ve seen, you’re a hundred percent correct, Yolanda, like all the people we talked to around the industry. Again, specifically in the US because this affects the us but I guess, let me ca caveat that it does affect the global supply chain, not, you know what I mean? Because it’s, it’s not just the, the US that it affects because of the consumption here. So, but what we have heard and seen from people is clarity, right? And we’re seeing a lot of people starting to shift strategy a little bit. Right now, especially we’re in budgeting season for next year, shifting strategy a little bit to actually get in front of, uh, I know like specifically blades, some people are boosting their blades, budgets, um, to get in front of the damages because now we have a, a new reality of how we need to operate our wind farms. The offshore Allen Hall: shift in the United States has really had a [00:04:00] dramatic impact. On the rest of the world. That was, uh, a little unexpected in the sense that the ramifications of it were broader, uh, just ...