Joseph Chacon, CEO of Padge LLC, discusses the impact of electrical harmonics on wind turbines and solar systems, providing insights into causes, consequences, and effective solutions for improving power quality.

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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Joe, welcome to the show. 

Joseph Chacon: Thank you. I appreciate it. 

Allen Hall: Well, I'm glad we connected, uh, through Jon Zalar, I believe, and we don't talk electrical power creation or what that. Kind of power we're creating and what the effect of that power is on systems downstream very often, uh, the Uptime podcast, because there's so many wind turbine issues, is mostly focused on mechanical problems.

But we're finding that more and more problems may have an electrical origin. We wanted to get an expert in here that would be you to come help us on harmonics because there are requirements about harmonics. 

Joseph Chacon: There are, uh, IEEE five 19 governs [00:01:00] the requirements for harmonics. At the point of common coupling.

Allen Hall: That's correct. And your prior experiences with ge, which is now GE Renova down in South Carolina, that's correct. But you were involved, maybe give a brief description of the things you're working on because when electrical people talk, um, kind of gets lost in translation. You were knee deep, maybe waist deep, maybe eyeballs deep and electrical 

Joseph Chacon: power at GE Renova?

No, not, not knee deep, not weight deep, waist deep. I was baptized, completely immersed all the way in. I came shortly after the Enron acquisition. Um, I was one of the electrical engineering managers at the time. We had, uh, I think two or three at the time. Um, this was pretty early on. Uh, I got out of that because, uh, I'm, I like management, but I, I like electrical engineering, so I wanted to go back to being an individual contributor.

Um, so I've touched just about [00:02:00] every electrical thing you can think of in a wind turbine. And also in solar 

Joel Saxum: as well. You know, a little bit of a sidebar here 'cause I want, we want to definitely get into this deep technical conversation, but Joe, you touched on something that happens to people, right? You're a really good engineer, you've run a team, you've solved some problems.

So now you get promoted to management, but you don't get to engineer as much anymore. So you get, like, you get, you start being leadership and like doing all these things, how to manage people, how to run a team, this, that, and that's great. We need that. The industry, every industry globally, we need to be able to do those things.

But for engineers that have engineer at heart, and I'm, I'm also looking at you, Alan Hall. Uh, they, they wanna be able to engineer, right? They wanna be able to do stuff to make a difference to, to, to get hands on with a problem. So, so you, so you've done that though, right? That that's you, you are now, uh, Josh Shahan is, uh, pad LLC and 

Joseph Chacon: pod is short for Padre, which is what my kids and grandchildren call me.

They just shortened it from Padre to podge. 'cause saying two [00:03:00]syllables was too much and I liked it. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah, I like that. Okay, so, so, so like we said, uh, you, you, you guys, you're getting deep into harmonics and other issues. You get called in by Solar Farms to solve problems and, and this is the thing Alan and I were kind of talking about off air a little bit is.