Alex Fournier, Director of Composite Operations at Enertek, discusses the importance and training of SPRAT certification for wind turbine technicians. He details the certification levels, recent changes in safety standards, and the significance of proper protective gear and equipment maintenance in rope access and blade repair.

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Allen Hall: With wind turbine scaling up and rope access becoming more critical. Technicians need proper training for safe and efficient blade repairs. This week we speak with Alex Fournier director of Composite Operations at Enertek, Alex brings insight on the spread certification process and how recent changes are enhancing safety.

Efficiency for technicians working at Height.

Speaker 2: Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Alex, welcome to the program.

Alex Fournier: Thank you guys for having me once again.

Allen Hall: Yeah, we're glad to have you back. There's been so much so many changes that has happened since the last time you were here, but today we want to talk about SPRAT training and. What this means for the industry and what the latest and greatest is in terms of sprt.

And for those who don't know what SPRT is, it's actually an acronym like most things in Wind, it's the Society of Professional Rope Access Technicians, and they create [00:01:00] the standards around. The knowledge you're supposed to have and the skills you're supposed to have if you want to climb with rope access.

Now. I, Alex, I wanna start off first, like how big of a problem do we have right now on the training on rope access technicians? I see a lot of variation across the United States in particular. Are you seeing the same thing, that they're just not so much a concrete standard everybody's using?

Alex Fournier: I think in Canada, like we don't have that many schools that offer the course, first of all. So I think we don't have much in the east Coast. We probably have what? Three, four. In the west coast they have a little bit more. And it's often like vendors that will offer it. So it's a mistress, for example, offered a course.

They do IDA and spread. I did my course at Novel in Montreal, which is one of the best training center I've seen in all my years of Rob Access. Celtic Falcon too in the East coast. Really good training center. But I [00:02:00] think since we don't have that many, everyone is kinda like on the same page, so everyone talked to each other and the course is pretty well structured, at least in Canada.

Before when I started the course was four days, and then you had one days for the exam. So it's a lot to learn in four days, but now they changed it to five days of course, and then one extra day for the exam. So that give you much time to train and, if you don't understand something you can.

You can really take the time to really understand it. So you're ready for the exam.

Joel Saxum: Alex, let me ask you a question about SPRAT and ia, right? 'cause Sprat is the North American version. IRATA is usually the EU version or rest of the world version. They are they're organizations that push this safety forward and there's, this is how we should do things.

And a lot of times a company will adopt it, say, X, Y, Z operator says, if you're gonna be on ropes on my site, you must be sprat level, this level, that level, that, however. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but this is my take on it. They're not actually like a [00:03:00] governmental association.