Dan Pickel joins the Uptime Spotlight today to discuss the NFPA's Wind Turbine Technician I certification program. The program allows technicians to gain standardized recognition for their skills and understanding of safety protocols. With NFPA's extensive background in fire and electrical safety training, the course covers the topics wind turbine technicians need to know and can be taken online.

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Allen Hall: We have a distinguished guest who is at the forefront of developing professional standards in the rapidly growing wind energy sector. Dan Pickel is the Director of Certification and Accreditation at the National Fire Protection Association. Today, Dan will be discussing NFPA's groundbreaking Wind Turbine Technician I certification program.

Which addresses the critical need for qualified technicians in our rapidly expanding wind energy sector. With projections showing a demand for over 500, 000 technicians globally by 2027, this certification program couldn't come at a more crucial time.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to the program.

Dan Pickel: Thanks for having me. I'm really appreciative to be here today.

Allen Hall: It's great to have you because there's so many questions about this new certification and we decided to just go to the expert and find out. So, you know, obviously the wind energy sector is growing at a tremendous rate.

And with that comes issues about finding qualified technicians, and the new certification program is trying to address that, correct?

Dan Pickel: Yeah, so we, we developed the certification program, and I know we'll get into the, the meat of it later on, but it was meant to address that issue where there are, there's a lack of, uh, knowledge and skills for individuals that are entering the, uh, the industry as a wind turbine technician.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. You see, you hear that from a lot of service providers, right? Rather it's blade repair, torque and tensioning construction. We're at the point in the industry where we're, we're, we're starting to just, I know this is for lack of a better term, but like grabbing warm bodies and training them up as fast as we can and throwing them out there.

Well, what, what that ends up doing is it kind of shoots us in the footlong run because you end up with cost of port quality issues, you know, other, other safety issues and things on site, let alone the technical knowledge. Yeah. Uh, that's needed to advance the, the wind sector here, especially in the United States.

Dan Pickel: Yeah, definitely. I think there's, we've spoken to, uh, some of NFPA's customers in the past and their push is to get people to right trading. They want to make sure that their new employees have all the tools they need to be successful and to be safe out in the field. And they were struggling because there are some other training options out there.

Um, they reached out to us about getting 70E training for electrical safety, but they were finding that wasn't enough. There were still some issues on the field. They were telling us about some really unsafe conditions that were Caused by people just being unskilled and,