Show notes
Allen Hall and co-host Joel Saxum discuss Pearce Renewables' new state-of-the-art training facility in Dallas, Texas with John Hornbeck and Travis Dees. Pearce is addressing the growing demand for skilled wind turbine technicians through innovative hands-on training methods, including the use of real equipment and cross-training opportunities across renewable energy sectors. Learn more at https://www.pearce-renewables.com/training/.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. The wind energy sector is booming, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts wind turbine service technicians will be the fastest growing job this decade. But with great growth comes a need for skilled workers, and training enough qualified technicians is vital to keep wind farm projects up and running.
Pearce Renewables has been a leader in technician training, and they recently opened a new training facility in Dallas, Texas. And if you're not familiar with Pearce Renewables, and boy, you're missing out. They are the largest ISP in the U. S., and they have a great need for well trained technicians. Our guests are John Hornbeck, Manager of Learning Organizational Development, and Travis Dees, Senior Vice President of Operational Support.
John and Travis, welcome to the show.
Travis Dees: Thank you, Al. Happy to be here.
Allen Hall: Joel and I visited your brand new, fancy training facility in Dallas, Texas. Man, is that thing impressive.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, we were there while you guys were still building things, right? You had people climbing around, you were installing TVs and stuff.
And at that time it was impressive. We walked in, we're like, wow, look at this place. Look at the size of it. The, I think that to be honest with you, the layout of the training rooms and everything. There's a lot of things going on there. You've got capabilities to run people through a lot of different training mechanisms as well.
Travis Dees: Yeah, when we started the design in the facility, it was trying to build for the future, not for what our needs were today, right? As you said before, we're growing very quickly and the need for technicians is definitely upon all of us, but us specifically. Making sure they're trained and equipped properly before they go out in the field is our goal.
We're trying to build a facility, not just in Texas, but other places as well. Starting in Texas and growing our California facility where the technicians actually want to come. They come there to get their training, but we want them to want to come back. I want them to go to the field, get some hours under their belt, and be like, hey, when do I get to go back to Dallas and hang out at that place?
That place was cool, the trainers are great, they're really informative. We're trying to set out, for an awesome vibe. We want it to be. something that our people are proud of. Therefore they take that with them in the field and they, it rubs off on our other technicians and it's building our culture.
You know what I mean? Like it's the, we have one opportunity to shine for our employees and this was our opportunity. So we took it and working with, incense and other companies to get all of the equipment inside of the facility was amazing. They designed an awesome jungle gym when I call it, man, that thing is awesome.
And John and the work that he did getting our wind turbine and everything put together and the time frame and the layout works, the flow is really cool. I think it really helps the technicians, keep and retain all the information that we're feeding them versus them losing it, and what you guys didn't see is We have a section in there now where all the technicians that come through can autograph a wall which has been fun because some people like to draw some pictures and box letter their names And there's some really cool signatures and at the same time We wanted our trainers to have a place.
They wanted a training, you know Don't get me wrong. It's dallas. It's hot. Like it was hot there yesterday and those guys were all over that tower. But And we put some big fans in there. It'll cool it down. And, I keep saying, Hey, it can't be air conditioned because then they're going to get they won't be working in their elements.
The wind turbines, they're out in all of the elements. So when it's cold, it should be a little chilly and when it's hot, it should be warm. So you don't want to spoil them. No, absolutely not. They, I think they're already spoiled as it is, but but no, I think the team and John specifically and his team have done a great job with making sure that we had the right equipment, to give our technicians and, even some of our clients they're people, the best training we could possibly offer up and we'll continue to grow and improve.
I think there's always opportunity for improvement, but we're really excited about the Dallas facility. Everyone that comes in there, we bring a bunch of clients in and yeah. Wow. That jungle gym is, it is a wow factor.
Joel Saxum: So Allen and I came to the facility back in April and you and John welcomed us in and John was giving us a tour of basically the, you have a bunch of classrooms.
Of course, there's some, of course you have a, then it's a little bit of a Pearce facility, right? So you're going to have some meetings or something. You've got really nice conference rooms and stuff in there, but training rooms that were air conditioned and nice for certain things. But then when we walked out into the The big facility, right?
The big warehouse type facility. The first thing I saw on the corner was a legitimate nacelle. Sitting there ready to and John was like, we'll get to that in a little bit. We'll take a peek at that thing. Let me show you some other stuff. And also, there's a freaking nacelle in here. That's amazing, right?
We've been to a lot of places. Training facilities and such. And you don't see that very often for one, right? They're tough to get ahold of. Nobody wants to that's expensive. It's a piece of kit, right? That could be used in something else. So people don't really want to get it, get you get rid of it.
But the guys are really going to have the capabilities of doing some hands on training. John, you want to walk us through some of the other things that are out in that warehouse?
John Hornbeck: We're training our employees to be the best they can so that our ISP can keep growing. But the way when we first landed the building, even when it came to the jungle gym, we contracted, worked with ENSA to sell some materials.
But they were open as a company and they said, Hey here's what some other designs look like. I visited a couple of facilities. I looked at some of other training centers designs. So the team and the trainers and I, we sat down and we drew up, Hey what makes ours different? And we came up with a big U shape.
And that was a little bit too big for what we needed at the time, which was fine, so we cut it down, but just the way that we put thought into it of, hey, here's all the ladders going up underneath. The deck that, that simulate coming up into a wind turbine main shaft and how we shaped the advanced rescue training section and put things on the second level made it different than everybody else's and it made it cooler and it looks amazing, and then with you pointing out the wind turbine, that was the other thing, not everybody has a fully, can be powered up or in the middle of powering it up right now, getting it wired to, to put power to it.
at a low voltage so that we can do training and and teach everybody how to work on it without actual high voltage in front of the cabinets. But there's only a couple of facilities out there that will have that ability to train on a live wind turbine inside their shop. Not just the wind turbine that's in there that sets us apart as we're gonna be able to do live power loop training on that.
So we have the same thing. For the solar and the battery storage in the divisions we have partnered with some folks and given us battery storage cabinets and inverters that and helping us power those up so that we can do live training. Not only for customers, but to highlight that to potential clients and things that other partners that we work with.
Allen Hall: So at Pearce Renewables, when you train somebody up, they're training on real live active equipment. It's not a simulation. It's just not a box on a bench. You're actually using real equipment, especially like battery storage, which is really interesting too because there's not a lot of training facilities doing that at the moment.
That is a unique piece, I think, because the worst time for a technician is those first week or two or six months where they're, everything is just new. You're trying to, to de-risk that in a sense, by giving them access to real working equipment.
John Hornbeck: E Exactly. And that's what I said that earlier, we wanted to.
Do the things that set us apart from just your, I'll call it the cookie cutter trainings. There's plenty of great training facilities out there and there's, they all do a great job, but there's a cookie cutter method there. You come in, do the standard training and go out to the field. We wanted to change that.