Wind turbine maintenance expert Garrett Calaway joins hosts Allen Hall and Joel Saxum to discuss his company, Calaway Solutions, which provides comprehensive turbine health audits and inspections. Calaway explains their process for assessing drivetrains, blades, generators and other components through visual inspections, drone imaging, and advanced techniques like borescoping. He highlights the need for impartial "data illumination" to determine the true condition of turbines, often unknown even to operators, and advocates for proactive maintenance over reactive fixes to maximize asset lifetime value. Calaway describes their diverse customer base and how regular audits can benefit owners, prevent issues, validate OEM work, ease transactions, and give insurers confidence by responsibly managing turbines.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. As we know, wind turbines are a maintenance nightmare at times. And with so many variety of wind turbines, particularly across the United States and the world, it's really hard to know what's wrong with any particular turbine at any particular time.

And with the markets consolidating and the number of turbines that are exchanging hands, knowing the health of a wind turbine becomes critical. And that's where Calaway

Solutions comes in. Garrett Calaway is the CEO of Calaway Solutions and has been involved in this industry a very long time. In this podcast, Joel and I will have in depth discussions with Garrett.

We're going to pick his brain as to where these problems are, how to find them and how to diagnose the health of your turbine. So this is a really great episode. Garrett, welcome to the program and give us a little bit of background on, on where you came from and how you got to this place.

Garrett Calaway: Been in the wind business for renewable energy for about 12 years. Started as a technician at Siemens back when it was Siemens, not Siemens Gamesa in its heyday. Done major components. That's actually where I learned bore scoping and, NDT process. I was part of the Siemens engineering engineering group.

Used to be called ST. Learned from everybody. Learned from the Danes. Learned from, the original guys that were building these wind turbines in the United States. Honestly, I got really lucky. From there, I ended up at Wanzek. I helped build their major component and renewable services group.

Yeah, I just decided that I was going to do this on my own. That I knew how to do it. We take that end of warranty style lockdown. We have that checklist. And what we want to propose to the world is that you do not wait till the end of warranty for this. You start at COD. You go through it, you do a 100 percent check of everything, not just a visual walk down.

External blades, internal blades, main bearing gearbox, generator, everything that you could think of, so that you have a real baseline. We want to say we come in and do a 100% And then throughout your warranty contract, but just for easy math, we'll say that your contract's five years.

We come back and we do 20 percent of your site randomly. And then by the time we get to the end of your warranty, you don't even need an end of warranty walk down. You already know the problems that you've got, the utility has going on in their sites.