Wind Impacts Railroad Safety? And Other False Flags

Weather Guard Lightning Tech



Wind Impacts Railroad Safety? And Other False Flags

The crew discusses the Federal Department of Transportation’s concerns over wind turbines interfering with railroads, the USDA’s stance on renewable energy projects on farmland, new treasury rules for wind and solar projects, and highlight the Sunflower Wind Farm in Kansas for its community impact and operational success.

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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.

Hold on tight. I told my producer before we started, this is gonna be a. Bumpy rise. So for all our listeners, hold on. Uh, it’s a lot of news in the wind and solar world at the minute. Phil Tarro is in California. Joel Saxon is back from Australia in Austin, Texas, and first up is the Federal Department of Transportation.

Complaining about how close wind turbines could be to railroads and create an interference, and it’d be a safety crisis. Uh, federal transportation officials and a new scientific research report, [00:01:00] Joel, are sounding an urgent alarm about wind turbines being. Too close to railroad tracks and a comprehensive study from California’s Tehachapi Pass Wind Farm confirms, quote unquote confirms that wind farms can severely interfere with critical radio communications used by trains.

Now, uh, what they don’t want you to do is to read the report. That’s what they don’t want you to do. And, uh, as a group of engineers, we’re going to read the report and see what it says. And what it says is that they have a safety system on trains because they used to run into each other quite often. And what they’ve done is they have a overriding system that’s run by radio communication that if a train goes too fast and some of these more frequented train tracks or in.

High density population bases like Chicago or Baltimore, one of these places that they can actually slow the train down or stop the train in some cases, what it sounds like if they’re [00:02:00] on a collision course, and that becomes important on commuter rails. And, um, if they have toxic chemicals on trains, that they don’t want them to have accidents.

So they put the system in. And the system is based on Joel. The world’s oldest communication form. 

Joel Saxum: It’s VHF radio, right? So to those of you that don’t know what VHF radio is, it’s basically like, uh, close to the frequencies you’d use as a walkie-talkie as a kid. Um hmm. Right. Uh, or a CB radio. Right. We’re, we’re quite a ways past that now.

Uh, so wifi, cell modems, satellite communications are all regular things within basically any other industry. Uh, of course, but this one, yeah, we’re still using VHF technology that we used. I, that’s been around for a long time for radio communication back from World War ii. Or before that? Oh yeah. 

Allen Hall: Right around World War ii.

How far do those, uh, walkie-talkie radios typically 

Joel Saxum: work? Well, it depends if you, I guess if it depends if you buy ’em from Walmart or if you buy ’em a, [00:03:00] a, a professional one. But, uh, depending on what watt radio is in ’em, I mean mile two miles maybe. 

Allen Hall: Exactly. And that’s how this train system works. So every.

Couple of miles, they have a repeater to transmit the signal up and down the train tracks. Well, it became really important because, you know, these wind turbines are interfering with this train signal and may have a collision. So what they did is they commenced the study to go look at if there’s interference, uh, bouncing off the wind turbines, and if you read the report, they talk about wind turbine blades, possibly spinning and creating this interference pattern.

And particularly if the wind turbine blades are made outta metal, it could be this big problem. Well. No wind turbine blade is made outta metal today. And you know, the chances that the wind turbine blades line up in a particular orientation to cross interference is practically 

Joel Saxum: dang near zero. You know, there’s something else we didn’t think about here.

We were kind of talking about this before we talking about metal blades and turbines. Of course, that’s not a thing. Uh, but they did this study in Tehachapi. If you’ve, of course a ton of our listeners have been to Tehachapi. It’s [00:04:00]like the wind mecca in the United States, right? Those are all lattice towers.

Lattice towers have. A different effect on radio signals than the Monopile towers that we’re used to that are most everywhere else in the, in the wind industry. But La Latt, lattice Towers can definitely do, do something to radio signal. 

Allen Hall: So my first thought was to reach out to Joel when I read the report and say, Joel, there must be railroad tracks near wind turbines existing already.

Joel Saxum: How many Joel? Yeah. So we, we went and found some data online of uh, basically we know where the turbines are. We, US wind turbine database. Um, and then found the some shape files of where the railroad tracks are in the United States and duplicated their study to put like a buffer on the tracks that one, 1.2 miles took a look at it.

And there is about 6,500 turbines in the United States that are within a mile or 1.2 miles of a railroad track. That makes sense, right? These wind farms are, you know, along highways, [00:05:00] uh, a lot of ’em. Um. And railroad tracks follow highways. They’re kind of co-located, right? So of the 75,000 and change there’s about 6,500.

So eight and a half, 9% of turbines in the United States are within a mile or two or a mile, 1.1 or 1.2 miles of, of a railroad track. 

Allen Hall: Well, evidently it’s a concern now, so we have to do something about it now. My first question was, well, this system must work in cities. That’s what it’s there for. There must be buildings and roads and bridges and draw bridges and other things in the way of this signal.

And sure enough, I was right. They, they do have buildings in the way, and you know what they do? They put a repeater in. You put a repeater in, just like a cell phone repeater to make the signal, uh, strength much higher to avoid the interference problem. And it works. So the DOT’s running around right now, and the head of the DOT Sean Duffy is, is exclaiming that, uh, wind turbines are the downfall of the [00:06:00] railroad community and they’re gonna push back wind turbines, uh, from railroad tracks.

So Joel, you better prepare for how many turbines to be moved back. 6,000 6,500. Yeah. 

Phil Totaro: So have we gone into crazy land? A couple of things. First of all, Tehachapi never had metal blades. The, even the oldest turbines there, if they had, uh, any kind of blades other than fiberglass, they were wood. Um, and I don’t think Tehachapi had wooden blades, uh, out there for like 40 years.

The funny thing about all this is that it’s, uh, you know, stuff like this, it’s probably not gonna be that much of an issue because, as Joel just mentioned, if you’re only talking about 8% of the, you know, installed base in the United States, well guess what? There’s 92% of the installed base that doesn’t have this problem to deal with.

So that’s, you know. I’d take 92% over 8% any day. And, and, and look, the, the government actually, even though they [00:07:00] may kind of sound stupid at, at times or even try to deliberately portray themselves as stupid at times, um, they, they actually do get it. Uh, I know a lot of people are going to, you know, find it funny that I would say something like that.

But if you look, and, and the reason I can say this is if you actually look at what they did with like these IRS tax rules, um, you know. What they’re actually doing is facilitating manufacturing in the United States. So my point of all this is while they’re out there saying, you know, wind turbines are evil, in reality, the industry is actually going to thrive for the next, you know, 18 months or so, we’re, we’re still gonna have problems.

And, and they’re absolutely pouring gas on a fire. Needs to actually be put out rather than have gas poured on it. But the, you know, their rhetoric is one thing and their actual actions are another. 

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Choose Pitch for peace of mind. Contact Onyx Insight today. To schedule your demo of Eco Pitch and experience the future of blade monitoring. Well, along Phil’s line of thought, the agriculture department will no longer support solar and wind projects on productive farmland. According to the agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, the move targets what officials call the destruction of prime agricultural soil.

For green new deals, subsidized solar panels. Now the emphasis here at first is on solar panels. But wait, there’s more. [00:09:00] USDA previously provided over $2 billion for renewable projects through its Rural Energy for America program. Now a 2024 study found that wind and solar projects affected. Only 424,000 acres, which is less than 0.05% of the total farmland in America.

And Joel, you’ve been driving through Iowa more recently. There’s a lot of agricultural land there and a lot of corn fields. Well, there’s wind turbines taking up, up a lot of space in 

Joel Saxum: those farms. No, uh uh the, the first thing I think that we need to touch here though is like this green New Deal thing.

That was never passed. That’s not real. The green New Deal never happened. So there’s your first misnomer. Second one, eh? Yeah. Well you, I mean, you’ve seen anybody that’s seen a wind farm. It’s the, you have a road that’s, uh, 16 feet wide or so for a good road base and a 25 foot wide pad, [00:10:00] maybe 40, 50 foot wide pad, depending on the base of the turbine.

You know, it just doesn’t take up that much space. But I think that, uh, for me. In this, the capital markets will prevail. If the federal program doesn’t wanna support people, uh, you know, by giving, like, by subsidizing them to build solar panels on their land, fine. If it makes more sense for that landowner to grow, to grow corn or to harvest electrons, they’re gonna do what’s best for them to make money.

So that’s, and you’re gonna continue to see it. Um, so sorry, but that’s going to happen. Um, I mean, we’re fans of Wind, right? The Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, but it is a perfect dual use, uh, process, right? You’re, you’re, how many farmers are benefiting from this is amazing, the stories that they have. You can talk to any of these guys and gals that own these farms and hear how much this is like creating revenue and creating, uh, money and uh, changing their whole family.

Right? But the same thing now you’re starting to [00:11:00] see more and more agri Voltaics, if you haven’t looked into that, where it’s a dual use, uh, uh, utility scale, uh, solar, and that’s freaking awesome. I’ve seen a couple of these farms where they’re planting soybeans or like sod farming and stuff underneath the solar panels.

Uh, so that’s gonna become, uh, use as well. So, I mean, I understand the attack. We know what’s going on. Again, like Phil said, at the federal level, this, this administration, kind of from all angles, it’s filtering down, trying to attack, uh, renewable energy in general. I think that the capital markets will prevail.

Allen Hall: Don’t you wonder how much agricultural land has been taken over by super Walmarts over the years, or Yeah. Or 

Joel Saxum: subdivisions. Uh, yeah. Like, so if you, if you’re, if you’re. I, I don’t wanna say this wrong. If you’re an octogenarian, if you’re an, if you’re a little bit of a, an older listener of the podcast and maybe you’ve been through Houston in the past, drive through when you drove through Houston, and even in the, in the nineties, the [00:12:00] places now where there’s 10, 15, 20 miles of just homes, those were rice patties.

That was all, that was all agriculture, right? And, and it was productive agriculture, really good agriculture. Um, and now it’s just houses. So you can’t like to pinpoint who’s doing what and all these different things. Like, it’s just kind of ridiculous to me. 

Phil Totaro: Here’s the other impact of what they’re doing.

There were about $1.6 billion worth of applications pending for, from farmers that wanted to install wind and solar on their property. And these are typically smaller, you know, turbines. This isn’t necessarily for utility scale ’cause this program is separate from anything that we do. Uh, at the utility scale level, this is basically a farmer wants to, as Joel said, put an Agri Voltaic system in there.

Their farm or have a small wind turbine installed in their farm. That’s like a 30 or 50 kilowatt size [00:13:00] thing. That’s what this program is intended for. Now, there are projects that actually already occurred that the farmers paid for out of pocket that they were hoping to get reimbursed for by the government and with the government cutting off the funding to this program.

These people, farmers, hardworking American farmers, are now out of pocket for these wind and solar systems, uh, where they thought they were gonna have the support of the government to, uh, you know, to come in and, and reimburse them, at least partially for having this system on their farm. So now if we’re talking about subsidies 

Joel Saxum: taught in and agriculture for energy production.

There is 89 million acres, give or take of corn planted in the United States. 27, 20 7 million of them, so almost a third were subsidized and used directly for ethanol production.[00:14:00]

So, so, so now you’re, now you have. You’re, you’re playing. So it’s a weird, uh, like dichotomy there, right? Because of course the, the administration here wants to further the hydrocarbon industry, you know, American energy drill, baby drill, all this stuff. So pushback and renewables. Let’s get gas going. How do they handle this one?

How do they handle the, the, the third of the co, the ethanol problem and the fact that it’s junk fuel? Anyways, I won’t even put it in my truck. So the way they handle it is 

Allen Hall: Iowa is the first round of caucuses for the presidential election, and they don’t touch it. For years and years and years between elections, they’ll poo poo ethanol and other states.

But as soon as they arrive in Iowa, it’s the greatest thing ever. So they’re not gonna stop it. And, and, but these kind of projects where they’re sticking it to the farmer is just not cool. Come on, what are we doing? And back to Phil’s point, you’re just hurting a little f. Small family [00:15:00] farm or maybe even the large family farm, that’s who you’re hurting.

You’re not hurting the wind and solar industry, but you feel like they have to say something. Each of the departments has to say something to get. Uh, in the good light of the Trump administration, which is just starting to get ridiculous, don’t let blade damage catch you off guard. OGs, ping sensors detect issues before they become expensive, time consuming problems from ice buildup and lightning strikes to pitch misalignment and internal blade cracks.

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Phil’s, uh, thought was a couple of weeks ago that they were kind of gonna merge the two concepts [00:16:00] of the 5% rule and beginning construction and kind of merge ’em together. But the, something came out that was completely different, and it basically is that in order to qualify for tax credits under this new piece of legislation, uh, the develops need to show physical work of a significant nature has begun.

So, in a sense. It’s sort of a lower threshold to start. Phil, can you give us some of the details of what’s about to happen with this new treasury requirement? 

Phil Totaro: Yes, so the good news for anybody that’s already signed a Safe Harbor deal is that other than this requirement that you have to demonstrate some physical construction and, and I’ll get to exactly what they mean by that, uh, in a minute, but under the existing Safe Harbor rules, you’re still okay.

Um, the only caveat to it is you can’t start construction. Then stop it and then start it up again. [00:17:00] Anybody that hasn’t already signed a deal with Safe Harbor. Do it now. If you can try to at least get it done before the 2nd of September if you can. If you can’t, then you have to be able to start construction by July 4th of next year.

And again, as long as you start construction by July 4th of next year and you continue to construct, you’ll be fine. Uh, as long as you and then commission by the end of 2027. If you can’t, if you can’t have your, your safe harbor in place. Now, what is this start of construction? The physical construction requirement mean?

There’s basically one of two ways you can qualify, and this is where it kind of gets interesting. The work can actually be on site or offsite, but at the end of the day, I mean this actually opens up the door to a lot of a US manufacturing. Which is a good thing, and b, it’s actually a lot more tame than what everybody [00:18:00] feared.

So I, I’m just 

Joel Saxum: thinking about this out loud as a strategy thing. So we were just, uh, we, by we, I mean the weather guard team, I wasn’t there, uh, but the weather guard team was just on site on a, on a new construction site where they were like, we’ve got piles of cranes, piles of people we’re gonna build this thing in a couple months.

And it was like. Whoa. Like, I can’t believe you’re gonna build that that fast. That’s crazy. But in my mind, I go to this, as long as you have continuous activity going on, maybe you start to spread those crews a little bit thin and those assets, those construction assets a little bit thin and spread ’em around to different sites.

If of course, all the other things in place, the permits are in place, you’re in the queue, you got the interconnection, all this stuff. But if you’re a large company and you’re trying to develop a lot of sites, but you still wanna qualify right now, you might be like. Put your Gantt charts out to December 30th, 26.

That might be the, the time, or is it end of 27 or 

Phil Totaro: end of 26, 

Joel Saxum: Phil. 

Phil Totaro: So they have to commission, if they [00:19:00] don’t already have safe harbor, then they have to start construction by July 4th next year and finish by December 31st, 2027. For anybody that’s safe harbored already, they can, they still have to start construction, um, within the four year window.

And there’s no, uh, they, they have to finish within that four year window. But once they start construction, they have to continuously construct. As long as you start 

Joel Saxum: construction by the fourth of next year, you have 18 months from that date to finish your wind farm. So it doesn’t actually make it smart if you’re not safe Harbor yes.

If you’re not safe harbor. Okay. So if you’re not safe harbor, if you’re getting all new kit now, so then it doesn’t make, it almost would make sense to kind of like. Drag your feet on the project. Yeah, but, but get more, but get multiple ones built. 

Allen Hall: Remember that existing build outs are going like crazy because the [00:20:00] demand for electricity is so high.

So wind turbine farms are being put up at tremendous speed. The the little four year window we just created, which I think came from Chuck Grassley from Iowa, Phil, I think there was a lot of pressure put on the treasury by that Senator. 

Phil Totaro: Oh yeah, that was, that was in the previous IRS rules. Yeah. Because of him.

Allen Hall: Yeah, absolutely. So there was a lot of negotiation behind the scenes, and he had withdrawn some treasury nominations or held up treasury nominations and told the Trump administration they were not gonna get a hearing until these IR Rs and treasury rules had come out in basically giving more time. And, and, and they did.

They did. They totally did. But Joel, back to your point, I think there’s enough buildout going on existing that this may make it a little less chaotic than it was because everybody is putting in wind, everybody’s putting in solar. All this AI data center drive is driving demand [00:21:00] for wind and solar, and you can only build so fast.

But as I learned from being on site a couple of weeks ago. Boy, the the speed at which these large EPC contractors are out there, putting turbines in the ground is amazing. Amazing. They have such talented crews out there. That’s all they do. Move from place to place to place. Putting turbines in, getting the, all the infrastructure done.

I mean, when we walked up on site, my producer and I walked up on site to this wind farm. They had transformers in the parking lot, right? So they were just getting started. But the a number of people on site to try to get these projects done ’cause they’re gonna move to the next one. This project was gonna end around Thanksgiving, middle of November in the States, and then we’re going to the next project.

That’s amazing. That is really amazing. On the build out. Three months. Yeah, three months. Three months. Boom. And they had just been on a project, which was another huge project they had just come off of massive project. [00:22:00]So now you have, back to sort of Phil’s point, you have these super talented, focused teams that are putting in terms who know what they’re doing.

They can go fast. And, 

Phil Totaro: and keep in mind that it, this is kind of the challenge we, we face as an industry in a lot of other countries. We’ve got a lot of talent here that knows how to build fast. The same size project in Australia would take easily a. Three to four times the the time, like it would take nine to 12 months to build, you know, a 400 megawatt project versus how fast we can, we can execute here in the us.

And the funny thing about that is they have such high demand. In a place like Australia for talent, that they’re gonna have to soften up their, their immigration rules to allow people that have requisite experience from the US or Europe to come down there and help them. Joel, that 

Allen Hall: one site we went to, uh, where they’re building turbines out, one turbine up and running a day.[00:23:00]

I asked, well, that seems like a pretty good clip. And some of the workers there said, oh no, that’s not as fast as we could do it. I’ve, we’ve done more than that before. 

Phil Totaro: That’s actually offshore pace. They can do one offshore turbine a day, and that’s slow. 

Joel Saxum: To me, it was like this, this, this farm was like, you know, between 90 and a hundred towers and they’re gonna build it in three months.

And, and, and that’s like, and you and, and in this area, like you can get weather. Like you’re, you’re, they’re going to get snow on this site. Like it’s gonna happen. Um, and it’s possible that it comes and it, and it blows. I mean, we’re wind country, right? So when you get, you have the possibility of a storm coming in and blowing six foot snow drifts across all the roads and stuff, like, and you still think that you’re gonna be able to do that and they’re confident.

That’s, that’s crazy to me. Joel, talk about the pay. That these workers were getting on this win site. Yeah. So this, that’s an interesting, uh, kind of thing that’s hap that’s rolled down from the IRA bill here right now too, because of course Alan and I, Phil Rosemary, [00:24:00] we’re connected all over the industry.

We hear, hear from a lot of different people. But I’ve had this conversation with a couple of, uh, big ISPs. Um. Yeah, some of them being in like the Blade World and the maintenance world and these kind of things, and they’re like, yeah, they’re, well, I got some guys, or TFAs, the technical field advisors, uh, for these construction sites.

Yeah, we’ve got some guys up there, but man, it’s crazy what we have to, like, what we’re billing out. So the ISPs billing the operators or the, the EPC contractors, billing the operators, some of them are billing 180 to $200 an hour for each person on site. Because of these other IRA, the white sheet wages.

And some of those places are like, I, I understand that. Like I, my early, early, my first big boy job was in Chicago and we had to do things with the unions and all this different stuff. And I remember seeing the wage rates for some of these guys that were just standing there leaning on shovels all day.

And it just drove me crazy. Um, so I understand how that works there, but my thought was usually always like when you get out in the middle of nowhere, like that stuff kind of goes away, but not, so it’s [00:25:00] not the case anymore. Some of these guys are making, I mean, out there just like, Hey, I’m a, I’m a laborer.

I’m a technician. I’m just kind of helping out here, and they’re making 60, 70, 80 bucks an hour. I mean, the paychecks that these guys are taking home is 

Phil Totaro: nuts. Yeah. The the good news about that is that even though a lot of that rate is actually insurance. They’re, the people are still actually getting paid at a pretty good clip.

’cause in the, in years gone by, you send somebody out into the field, they were getting paid like 30, 35 bucks an hour while they were billing out at 180 bucks an hour. And the overwhelming majority of that was going to, you know, insurance policy and, and underwriting. Now more of that, even though you’re still paying that kind of a rate, more of it’s actually going to the workers.

So it’s gotten a little bit better. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. What I’ve heard from these guys is these, the, uh, the, there’s a fight for who gets to go to the white sheet jobs anymore. Like the, the technicians are like, no, no, no. I’m [00:26:00] staying here. I’m not going on vacation. Like, oh, we gotta cycle you out on the rotation. They’re like, no, no, no, no, no.

I don’t wanna go home. I’m staying here. But it’s a problem. So like the, one of the issues that the oil field has had, and a, and Alan, you and I took a trip out to Abilene, um, last year. Talked to some training facilities and some other people out there and they said, you know, we have an issue here because we can’t recruit very well out in this side of Texas because the oil field grabs all these people.

’cause the oil field is willing to pay them more than the wind world will will. But now you’re starting to see that tide flip a little bit. And Phil, the 

Allen Hall: IRA bill, that part of it. Didn’t change. I, at least the reading I had was that payout feature for the workers on site. The prevailing wage feature remained, that didn’t get eliminated recently.

So with all the build out going on and that prevailing wage requirement, technicians could be making some pretty nice money. 

Phil Totaro: That’s correct. It will go away though at the end [00:27:00] of 2027 when the PTC is actually phased out. So keep that in mind, 

Joel Saxum: right? You, you got some time? No. I wanna flag this though. This is me saying this to all of our technician friends, listening from an ex oil field guy.

Do not go buy in Corvette. Do not go buy a new one ton Denali pickup. Do not do that. Don’t, don’t do that. Take this extra money. Put put your seven, $7,000 in your IRA that you, that you may or may not have. Make sure you do that first. But invest some of this money. Stick it away. Don’t go buy fast cars and big trucks because the oil field guys have done that and gals have done that forever and it doesn’t end well.

You could pitch your kids through college 

Allen Hall: with some of the money they’re gonna make and good for them. Do it, do it, do it. Go get that you got, you have a little over a year, year and a half or so to make some money. Go do it. 

Phil Totaro: There’s one last word of caution I have about all this. If you’re not safe [00:28:00] harbor.

You better start construction fast because one of the things that’s been happening in the US. Is, we’ve got moratoriums that have been put in place in a lot of different places around the us. There are 44 states that have more than 450 moratoriums now, and if somebody puts a moratorium in place and prevents you from doing.

Your physical construction, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing onsite, offsite, whatever, they can put a moratorium in place that basically prevents you from collecting your tax credits. So start constructing as fast as you can and if you’re an EPC contractor, staff up the Wind 

Joel Saxum: Farm of the week This week, uh, comes from one of our friends in the industry.

So, uh, we had, uh, jewel Williams, uh, we recorded with her the other day. She’s a fantastic engineering manager. From Ted onshore us and she said, can, can I, can I do a shout out to some of my team? Uh, of course that’s, that’s what the [00:29:00] Wind Farm of the Week is about. It’s about, uh, shining the spotlight on people in the field.

So the Wind Farm of the week this week is the Sunflower Wind Farm. Uh, that is Ted’s on one of Ted’s onshore, uh, wind farms in Kansas. So it’s in Marion County, Kansas. Uh, it was their first onshore wind project, uh, in the state, of course, onshore Kansas. Yes, it must be. Uh, but it is made of 89 ge 2.8, 1 27 meter rotor turbines.

That’s 200 megawatts for the whole wind farm. It’s commissioned in, it was commissioned in 2023. Uh, produces enough clean energy to power over 96,000 homes annually, and is expected to contribute over 28 million in property, property tax revenue to Marion County over its lifetime. Um, so a lot of lease payments to the locals, uh, supporting community initiatives including education, environmental conservation programs, which is, I mean, that’s a hallmark of, or they do that everywhere they go with their wind farms.

Um, but this week, the, the special recognition and we’re, we’re getting kind of a shout out from Jewel here. Sunflower Winds receiving special [00:30:00]recognition from Sted for its deep community engagement, positive local impact, and the exceptional performance and dedication of the onsite GE team. So Tommy Gage, Jace Sherwood, and the team out there making sure that the turbines are spinning at, uh, sunflower wind in Kansas.

Kudos to you guys. So all of these aspects have contributed to being a operating, a well-oiled machine, achieving high availability and smooth operation. So the Sunflower Wind Farm from Osted, as brought to us by Jewel Williams is the Wind Farm of the week. That wraps 

Allen Hall: up another episode of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast.

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