Candace Wood, COO of Everpoint Services, along with Michael McCarty and Megan Culler from Idaho National Lab, discuss their collaboration at Little Pringle Wind Farm to conduct cybersecurity research and testing. The episode delves into the critical importance of addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities in wind energy infrastructure to ensure grid resiliency and energy security.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. This podcast has an interesting story behind it. Our first guest today is Candace Wood, Chief Operating Officer at Everpoint Services, which is based in Texas. Candace purchased the Little Pringle Wind Farm at an auction.

Little Pringle Wind Farm is outside of Texas. Amarillo, Texas, and buying a wind farm at auction doesn't happen very often. And this is where the story takes an interesting turn. Candace and Everpoint made a decision about how to use this wind farm. Everpoint connected with the Idaho National Laboratory, cybersecurity experts, to use a portion of the turbines for cybersecurity.

Research and testing. So from the Idaho National Lab is Michael McCarty, who is a cybersecurity research specialist and Megan Culler, who is a power engineer specializing in cybersecurity and resiliency, also from the Idaho National Laboratory. Megan, Michael, and Candice, welcome to the show.

Candace Wood: Thank you. Thanks for having us.

Michael McCarty: Thank you.

Allen Hall: Alright, so let's start off with a little prequel and figure out how Candace ended up buying a wind farm. So you were at an auction Candace? Can you describe what happened where you decided to put down some money on a wind farm?

Candace Wood: Everpoint Services, we are a end of life services company for renewables.

So we primarily focus on decommissioning and demolition of wind turbines as well as solar assets. And we'd heard about this wind farm that had been abandoned since about So I was at the auction in August of 2017. Small farm, 10 units originally 2 megawatts each and heard that it was going up for auction.

The county had seized the asset to try and recover some back taxes. I tuned into the option really with the intention of finding out who was going to purchase it and then pitching our services to them. Hey, we can come in and help you cut these things down. So I'm listening to the auction and the price point is going once going twice and I'm thinking gosh, that's Really not a lot of money.

I mean we're talking, five figures and I thought well, let me just throw out a bid there and see what happens so I threw out a bid that was just slightly above what was about to be the winning bid and on behold I One, I bought the wind farm, so it was somewhat impulsive decision, which was both terrifying and exciting.

In the immediate aftermath, what was interesting was once we looked into it a little bit more, we discovered that the interconnection agreement at the site was still in good standing. And once I actually finally got out there to look at it, because I did purchase the site unseen, I Never actually looked at it before.

Once we got out there and looked at it, I thought, these turbines, they're not in such terrible condition, all things considered. And so we started looking into, okay what could we do? Maybe did we want to repower it?