Show notes
Allen and Joel speak to Bryant Bertrand, CEO and co-founder of Ronin, to discuss their innovative power ascenders used in the wind industry. Ronin's technology makes turbine climbs faster, safer, and less physically demanding for technicians, potentially transforming maintenance operations. Their products are designed with the technician in mind, from operation simplicity to weight.
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Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, joined by my co host, Joel Saxum. Today, joining us is Bryant Bertrand, CEO and co founder of Ronin. And for those of you who haven't encountered their equipment yet, Ronin is a company at the forefront of vertical access technology.
They develop power ascenders aiming to make turbine climbs faster, safer, and less physically demanding for technicians. In today's episode, we'll explore how Ronin's ascenders are impacting maintenance operations from. Routine inspections to major component exchanges. And we'll discuss the technology behind the devices, their safety features, and how they comply with industry standards.
. Will also share his insights on real world performance data and user experiences from wind farms across the country. So whether you're a technician looking to optimize your climb times or an engineer interested in the latest maintenance tech or a site engineer considering ways to enhance your team's efficiency, this conversation promises valuable insight.
Allen Hall: Welcome to the program.
Joel Saxum: Thanks for having me on guys. Bryant, give us a, give us the rundown. Give us the general thing here. What are you guys doing? What is the product?
Bryant Bertrand: Yeah. So let me give you just a little background on myself. My team, we came out of the rescue industry. Predominantly we were designing hoists and winches for helicopters.
So this is the mountainside Coast Guard rescue that you typically see on helicopters and believe it or not, there's not rescues happening every day and a lot of times these birds get multipurpose into commercial activities and those activities may be dropping a technician off on a transmission tower, an offshore wind turbine, oil and gas platform, but we would just see a ton of access issues for men and women that are climbing in these at height industries.
And so we took a look saying how can we get some better access tools out there for these workers that are working on ropes. And we took a look at a lot of technology and specifically we looked at the military technology that was being deployed for power descenders. And you guys might have seen maybe videos of these devices coming out of the water SEAL teams or tactical teams doing on, off, offshore shipboarding with it.
And we said how do we take this technology which is. Very nichey, very military, very high, highly tech and make a more commercialized product that's more looked like a tool. And that's really. Where Ronan was founded on, and we've seen great success there and bringing these tools in these industries.
And they serve a number of great purposes in addressing access challenges and fatigue reduction and efficiency. And that's really the core founding message of this business is to bring this technology to the forefront. And allow it to essentially elevate the workforce.
Allen Hall: So the key I've noticed from the Ronin technology is it's pretty compact and I've seen old style ascenders and technicians out there with these things that look like they're from the 1980s and they're just these big, massive machines and they don't move that well.
And I wonder about how safe they are. Ronan's changed all that, right? Your stuff is clean.
Bryant Bertrand: So when you look at what we're trying to do, with the Ronan product line, is we're trying to have it very closely aligned with traditional fall protection equipment. And so when you talk about rope access, and you talk about people up and climbing, and the tools that they're currently using, It's an industry where maybe size you don't want larger size.
You want smaller size, right? So you're talking about workspaces. You're talking about equipment in front of you and around you, stuff that you're going to be positioning off. So size is really important. Really, when we took a look at the technology, we said, Hey, great technology. It's out there. It's a great access tool.
Nobody has access to it. And so it's really about fundamentally looking at why don't people have access to it? And one of the things is size. And ability to priced accordingly and training and ease of use and all those things that allow this to have better access within industry.
And so that's really our core focus. And if you look at Ronan technology and where we're always going to try to take it as our goal is to continue to get smaller, more affordable, better access, easier to use, easier to train, easier to roll out because, the biggest disservice we see right now with power to senders is.
Companies are looking at this technology to really extract the full benefits you can get out of it. You need to really look at rolling it out across your workforce. And to do that, you need to have technology that obviously is trainable, priced appropriately, small, compact and available. And so it's really about breaking down those barriers of interest, entrance, getting more technicians able to have access to equipment because it is transformed for their lives and it's transformed for the businesses that are using it.
Joel Saxum: I think something important here to touch on as well is you see this sometimes when innovative products come to the market, whether, it doesn't matter what market or what industry it's in, specifically here we're in the wind industry, right? So when a product comes to market and you have to fight many fires to get it accepted within the product you're not doing that as much, right?
You're, rope access is definitely a thing. Working at heights is definitely a thing. Lifting kit is already a thing. These are things that people are doing in the industry day after day, but they're doing it manually. Or they're doing it in a less efficient manner. Like the one we had talked off air a little bit, one of the things we talked about was, say someone's out doing a big blade repair, and this blade repair may be, most, as we as these blades get bigger, and the repairs get bigger, and the damages get bigger you're not working on a, a one square foot area right in front of your face.
You're working on a repair that might be a couple meters long. When you come down, and like I'm sailed down on the blade, and you start grinding, or you start prepping, or you start doing whatever, work task you need to do, a lot of times you need to go back up. So what happens then is you have to manually upsale yourself back up your rope.
And I'm not a rope access guy, so I can't tell you exactly how to do that. But I do know that it's a manual process, right? So you're going to wear yourself out. You're getting fatigued at the end of the day. Sometimes, and I don't want to, you don't want to see this, but at the end of the day, if it was like, you may see people cutting corners cause they're man, I got to climb back up there.
But now it's just the flip of a switch. You're back up to the top of the repair.
Bryant Bertrand: Yeah. So really, when you talk about, in, in speaking to the wind industry, they're going to use this device and a number of core functions, one will be personal ascension. When talking about blade repair, and the efficiency to be able to go back up and down that blade on inspection and repair, super important. So when you look at climbing from a rope standpoint on a synthetic rope, as you're jogging or footlocking or manually trying to get yourself back up a lot of wear and tear on the body, a lot of soft tissue muscle damage, you're actually inducing a lot of shock load on the body just in that core function.
That's some of the stuff that wears our climbers out. And not only are they're jogging up their weight, they're jogging up their tools, their personal protective equipment. So you're talking about your own body weight and typically 45 pounds on your body to move that. The power to center starts to.
eliminate those challenges. So not only are you going to get better body ergonomics, you're going to get better efficiency when you're doing that type of work out there on the blades. Subsequently, this device is also being used in rescue. So if you had a rescue situation where you needed to do a two man pickoff, this is a device where when minutes matter, you're going to be able to get down and do that assist and get to that climber.
Many times, when you look at It, it injuries out there where there is a fall or there is suspension trauma times. What really matters, in that harness and that suspension state, it's about 15 minutes to that body can go into cardiac arrest. So getting down there, relieving that pressure, taking that load off that individual and getting them down is extremely critical in that process.
So you'll see it being used in a rescue capacity also for an injured person. And then the third area is. is material hauling. So when you talk about inside that turbine, getting material up and down that center,