Weather Guard Lightning Tech's Chief Commercial Officer, Joel Saxum, gives his view of the state of the wind energy business from the perspective of a business development executive. The IRA bill is changing the way businesses are planning, working, and being acquired in the United States. Will that trend continue? And with the current lack of technicians, how do wind energy companies grow their businesses? This is an enlightening discussion sure to sparks conversations at the water cooler (or wind turbine).



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Joel Saxum Interview



Allen Hall: I'm Allen Hall, and I'm here with my good friend, JoelSaxum, and on this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast, we're here to talk with Joel, who has recently joined Weather Guard Lightning Tech as our Chief Commercial Officer. And Joel has tremendous knowledge in the wind industry and what has happened over the last couple of years.



And today we get to pick Joel's brain. And get a sense of where we have gone, where we are at, and where we are likely headed in the next year or two. So Joel, welcome to the program. 



Joel Saxum: Welcome, I suppose, for the, I don't know, the hundredth time or so, maybe? It's, it's close to that at this point. Yeah, so Allen and I were talking in the background off air, talking about, you know, what, what is actually happening out there right now.



It'd be nice to kind of drop a little bit of knowledge of. Of what, of course, I'm hearing in the, in the BD circles everybody seems to be connected somehow in this industry. And then also the general trends, all right? And we will touch on a couple of things here. 



Allen Hall: So if we go back two years ago to ACP in San Antonio, which is really kind of the first real kickoff.



I know we had O& M previous to that. I think, I think that's right, right? So we had O& M in San Diego. And, and at that point in the industry, everybody was just coming out of COVID. Those were really some of the first events, right? We had, if we all remember in San Antonio, we had COVID tests before we could walk into the building.



And what fun that was. And at that point in the, in the industry, it was like, everybody was just trying to come awake again. There was a little bit of discontinuity between organizations. You could feel that everybody's just trying to feel the way around. And technician wise, it seemed, it did seem like there was a huge competition for technicians, like, like we have seen now.



And then as we progressed over the last year or two, it's really, I think, changed dramatically in terms of the number of players in the marketplace. Even if you look at the number of drone companies that we saw a couple of years ago versus today, dramatically different. In, in terms of just sort of the knowledge base is still see the same key people around in terms of like the, the business development side, it has been a little bit of a rough road, right?



Even with the IRA bill has been a little bit of a rough road. 



Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, the IRA bill was designed to spur on projects, right? They say that we'll, we're going to get PTC back funds back the case, basically credits back basically back the same way they were. Before the IRA bill was passed, so, you know, every 10 years put X amount of dollars into your wind farms, get them up and running again, and you'll re qualify for these credits,