Allen and Joel are joined by Gregory Kocsis, lifting technology expert, to discuss the gap between European and US crane operations. They cover multi-brand blade handling tools, up-tower cranes, and why the aftermarket service sector is driving innovation in major component replacements.
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Allen Hall: Greg, welcome to the program. 
Joel Saxum: Thank you guys. Nice to meet you. 
Allen Hall: we have a lot to talk about today. there’s so many heavy lifts. Complex lifts on ships, lifts on, and mountaintops lifts in really odd places. it’s getting more complicated as we go along, and obviously Joel and I talked to a lot of operators and one of the things they complain about more recently is, Hey, we’re having trouble with lifts and we’re having damage that we didn’t have in the past.
And it’s complicated, and the access to cranes is more complicated. Everything’s become more complicated. What are some of the issues that you see on the other end of the spectrum, being in that [00:01:00] business? 
Gregory Kocsis: Yeah. Basically what I see that, so I, I work both, in the last decade in both US and Europe.
and I can see that there’s no lack of technologies. there’s a lot of tech that’s, solving a lot of issues. but mostly what you can see that there’s a slight gap. I would say that, There’s two, two prong. the US it seems, some of the farm are really big, and that’s good for scale.
but the, technologies are a little bit behind, I would say 10, 15 years sometimes. so that also means that the. The solutions that they use to, to change a blade or change a gearbox or how to lower a full, rotor, it’s always, lower tech and based on practicalities. 
Joel Saxum: Greg, why do you think that is?
Do you think it’s just simply because, yeah, like the eu, so you’ve done a lot of work in the eu, of course, onshore, offshore, and globally. But in the EU it [00:02:00] seems like tighter quarters maybe, harder to get around some of the wind farms. Is, does that drive some of the difference in innovation?
Because like you said, you there’s the innovation is there, the tooling is there. The EU has been doing it for a while. It’s just that in the states it seems like we’re more, for lack of a better term, like agricultural about things. It’s kinda Hey, this has worked for 40 years, so this is what’s how we’re gonna do it.
Gregory Kocsis: Yeah, it’s always some, nature driven forces are there. So in the, in, for example, if you look at Germany, there’s, a lot of owners and the size of sites are three turbines, four turbines. And if you look at the platform that’s available around turbine is very limited. I was also on a site last year in, North Germany where basically, the truck could park right next to the turbine, but they had to clear some trees, in order to, make sure that they can put the full rotor down. Because since, since they installed it, forest grew, [00:03:00] much, much more. That was another case in, Rotterdam when we were right next to the channel and they had to, close the road.
that was, docking. To the ships, back and forth every, half an hour when they had to lift the blade and it was going across the road. So when you’re in situations like this and there’s not a lot of space around the turbines, you have to start thinking that, how can we do this quicker?
How can we do this safer? Because you can see that there’s a lot of planning that goes, with this as well. And then you need to make sure that, it’s