Wind turbine maintenance expert Garrett Calaway joins hosts Allen Hall and Joel Saxum to discuss his company, Calaway Solutions, which provides comprehensive turbine health audits and inspections. Calaway explains their process for assessing drivetrains, blades, generators and other components through visual inspections, drone imaging, and advanced techniques like borescoping. He highlights the need for impartial “data illumination” to determine the true condition of turbines, often unknown even to operators, and advocates for proactive maintenance over reactive fixes to maximize asset lifetime value. Calaway describes their diverse customer base and how regular audits can benefit owners, prevent issues, validate OEM work, ease transactions, and give insurers confidence by responsibly managing turbines.

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Allen Hall: Welcome to this special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. As we know, wind turbines are a maintenance nightmare at times. And with so many variety of wind turbines, particularly across the United States and the world, it’s really hard to know what’s wrong with any particular turbine at any particular time.

And with the markets consolidating and the number of turbines that are exchanging hands, knowing the health of a wind turbine becomes critical. And that’s where Calaway

Solutions comes in. Garrett Calaway is the CEO of Calaway Solutions and has been involved in this industry a very long time. In this podcast, Joel and I will have in depth discussions with Garrett.

We’re going to pick his brain as to where these problems are, how to find them and how to diagnose the health of your turbine. So this is a really great episode. Garrett, welcome to the program and give us a little bit of background on, on where you came from and how you got to this place.

Garrett Calaway: Been in the wind business for renewable energy for about 12 years. Started as a technician at Siemens back when it was Siemens, not Siemens Gamesa in its heyday. Done major components. That’s actually where I learned bore scoping and, NDT process. I was part of the Siemens engineering engineering group.

Used to be called ST. Learned from everybody. Learned from the Danes. Learned from, the original guys that were building these wind turbines in the United States. Honestly, I got really lucky. From there, I ended up at Wanzek. I helped build their major component and renewable services group.

Yeah, I just decided that I was going to do this on my own. That I knew how to do it. We take that end of warranty style lockdown. We have that checklist. And what we want to propose to the world is that you do not wait till the end of warranty for this. You start at COD. You go through it, you do a 100 percent check of everything, not just a visual walk down.

External blades, internal blades, main bearing gearbox, generator, everything that you could think of, so that you have a real baseline. We want to say we come in and do a 100% And then throughout your warranty contract, but just for easy math, we’ll say that your contract’s five years.

We come back and we do 20 percent of your site randomly. And then by the time we get to the end of your warranty, you don’t even need an end of warranty walk down. You already know the problems that you’ve got, the utility has going on in their sites. They’ve preemptively ordered the parts that they know are starting to generate faster.

And so we actually get real life extension from these towers. We want to be in the renewable business, we need to make these things actually last and not just throw away pieces of machinery that still have life in them. And and so in part of that, we’ve, we do the visual walk down with our specialists.

We do external blade inspection. We have fully autonomous software. We’ve partnered with Thread to use their platform use their autonomous flight. And so we do the externals with that. And then we will go in with the Elios 2 and do internal inspections and we actually we partnered with Wind Power Lab on this.

You know We do what we are experts at.

Joel Saxum: Let me ask you a question here Garrett. Let me stop you for a second and ask you a question. So your customers right now, or when you started and you got into the, we’re going to do audits, we’re going to be your third party expertise, was mostly asset owners utility operators, whether it was regulated or unregulated, that’s who it was.

But I see, What I see is pretty, pretty extreme value for a financial customer, right? So someone that may be buying an asset, a bank that wants to come and look and see, is this something we should be taking a loan on, on, or say an insurance company that, hey, brand new wind farm to their portfolio, possibly, should we take this risk on?

And if this stuff was already done, if there was someone was already doing independent audits, does that make? Is it possible that it makes easier, premium reductions or the bank is like, Oh, okay, we’ve got this.

Garrett Calaway: These insurance companies, obviously they’re smart and they’re powerful, but they’re not renewable experts.

And if you’re going to go underwrite a massive project, you should know. And take that in that risk mitigation for yourself and know exactly what is going on with those assets. So part of this is getting, getting with the insurance companies and making the insurance companies go to the utilities of the OEMs and go, look, we’ll do this.

And we’ll even give you a better premium rate, but you have to have a third party organization come in that is no affiliation to you. Independent experts to give these audits. And if you maintain your towers in an appropriate way, you get a better, you get a better premium price, or there are discounts.

However but you’re Joel, you’re a hundred percent, you’re right on the money. Especially, wind turbines get bought and sold and traded. You might as well be, might as well be trading Pokemon cards at this point. And without these evaluations, how are these big financial companies, really, how do they really know?

And to my opinion, they don’t, they’re taking a risk. And it also, a lot of these companies, it just looks good to be in renewables these days.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And you start to see a lot of that in the capital money exchanges. It just boosts their ESG. ESG points, ESG scores or whatever to be a part of these things.

So no matter what money usually comes, we had a conversation that some of that about that the other day, right at the, they’ll take the risk on just to have the the green stamp. So let me ask you a couple more questions about then the, how you guys support the market then. So you have your team and of course you have a couple of clients that you usually work with.

But how big is the team and how much work can you guys actually take on to help people with this?

Garrett Calaway: We’re 15 people. So we we’re growing still a small group, but truth is we can handle whatever anybody wants to throw at us. We’re incredibly efficient. So sending a one, like literally a, two man team or one man team.

Is, it is incredibly easy. So it’s just, it’s time, right? It’s just time and persistence and showing the good work in what we’re able to deliver and, and really it’s all about return on investment. You invest this amount of money for us to come into these inspections.

The return is exponentially more. And it’s just about showing that and improving that. And we’ve been doing it slowly and methodically.

Allen Hall: So the issue right now in the industry is that there’s very little you will know about your turbine, unless you’re the OEM, because the OEMs have all the data and a lot of operators do not get that access to that data.

So they can’t even analyze their own equipment. So the only way to really understand what a piece of equipment is performing like today is you can do, you can connect with someone like our friend, Phil Totaro, who’s looking at the power produced in the wind coming in and to try to ballpark it that way.

The only other way to do it though, is to actually physically walk on site and start bore scoping listening for that grinding noise and get inside. Cause otherwise you’re guessing at it, leads to a sort of a more broad problem is there’s a lot of wind turbines. There’s not a lot of technicians that can do some of these higher level things.

There’s really no one in the middle, right? So we have technicians to go and fix the equipment and just to keep it up and running. We have the OEMs and the full service agreements that are top level. Don’t worry about it. Everything’s under the tent. Don’t look at it. We’ve got this sort of thing.

And what’s missing is the middle, right? The experts that can come in and kick the tires on a turbine to tell you what its actual life is and what it’s, what is happening with it right now. That’s the missing link, right? That’s where Calaway comes in.

Garrett Calaway: 100%. We, what we like to describe it as data illumination.

We come in and, like you can look at your CMS, you can look at your vibrations and you will understand that maybe you’ll see some stuff. You’ll start seeing spike elevations and you’ll know that maybe your IMS or your high speed or your planets are going bad and all that. But even with that, you still have to go bore scope them.

Nobody, very few people are just taking the advice of the CMS and going, just change out those main bearings. You don’t, like we’re certain we’re a hundred percent sure. And that’s just in one if your insurance is involved, there is no way that is happening because they need a visual evidence of what that vibration sensing is doing.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. And then they want an audit chain too, right? They want to look through records. They want to make sure so they can push point blame. That’s where it’s at. Once it hits that threshold of value, nobody wants to take that. Yeah, nobody wants to take that hit. So I was like, ah, this is actually oh, you are here.

Garrett Calaway: Yeah. Allen you’re right there. That middle ground is it was where I saw the missing link. I saw what needed to be done.

Allen Hall: That still exists with CMS though. Garrett? The CMS systems provide you a level of information. Something may have changed. I think that’s what CMS is really do here is that they say something has changed, but unless have an expert.

A very knowledgeable person go in and look to see what’s causing that alarm or that change. There’s really no point to a CMS system, the way I see it, because they can’t diagnose.

Garrett Calaway: And here’s the other, here’s the other side of that with the CMS. That’s, and we’ll say your, we’ll just, we’ll say your, it’s a, we’ll call it a Winergy 151 or 150 bearing.

It’s your downwind high speed bearing. And let’s say that they’ve got some heat going, you’ve got some PT 100 sensors are going off, your CMS is going off. And so you know you have a bad bearing. That doesn’t really change of why, or that doesn’t really change why, and then back in the day it used to be white etching cracks, which was all metallurgic material issues, right?

But what else you’re not looking at is that generator in alignment? Is that coupler up to spec? Are you meeting these standards? Because if you don’t, if that generator, if you get a bad generator foot, you will blow those bearings out very quickly. And again, and if you’re not a dread, if you’re just looking at the CMS and even if you’re just bore scoping, that’s not a re, you’ve got to go further down the line to really get that, get to that root cause analysis.

And without my specialists and without that, that deep internal knowledge, you’re never going to get there.

Joel Saxum: I think that another part of it to touch on is the stakeholder management of the situation, right? So when you’re sitting there, say you’re a financial asset owner or you’re an asset, you’re an asset owner, that is technician or expertise light, or engineering light. And that’s fine, that’s a lot of people these days. But then they’re relying on these OEMs for their warranty contracts, or not even warranty contracts, service contracts. Say you have this three, five year service contract, that OEM then says, Oh, we’ve got it, we’ve got it, don’t worry, at the end of the contract you may be inheriting a piece of garbage.

Garrett Calaway: In my opinion, most likely you are.

Joel Saxum: Yeah, if you’re an asset owner that sits there is mostly on the sidelines and don’t have your own engineering expertise, whether it’s a, an, an operating expense issue or however your company’s designed, that’s fine. You can still call someone like yourself, Garrett, or Calaway Solutions and say, Hey guys, you know what, we’ve had these things up for, whether it’s from baseline or not, we’ve had them for, I don’t know, two years and we would like to actually go and you’re auditing the machine. But you’re also auditing

the OEM that’s doing the service contract at the same time. Because you’re proving, have they done what they say they’re going to do. Can we trust them for the rest of the, the rest of the contract? X, Y, Z, because a lot of it also happens this way. At five years that, that business development or salesperson from that service contract holding company comes back to that, to wind energy holder and says, Hey, we’d like to sign another five year contract with you.

Not everybody takes over the assets at the end of those contracts. So at that time, if they’re doing a good job and they get the high grade from Calaway, then you’d be more apt to be able to sign that service contract for another five years.

Garrett Calaway: The crazy thing is, and I remember being at Siemens and hearing about 20 year service contracts.

If I was an, if I was a utility, I wouldn’t. I would never do that. I would never do that.

Joel Saxum: The only 30 year contract I’m signing is a wedding certificate.

Garrett Calaway: Yeah. I mean, and but you’re right, us coming in as an unbiased group and we, and cause when I talked to people, they’re like, Oh, you really got it out for the OEMs.

I’ve got it out for bad quality. I don’t care if it’s the OEM, I don’t care if it’s the utility.

Joel Saxum: It could be a different ISP.

Garrett Calaway: A hundred percent. And we’re just here to illuminate the data. Now, and whether that’s good or bad, it doesn’t matter. It just is what it is. Data is, are facts. And so if another ISP is doing the work and they’re doing a stellar job, we’re not gonna, we’re not gonna dog them out.

We’re just gonna, we’re gonna give the information. And if that means, if we can do that and, or, and honestly, if another ISP wanted to come in and go, Hey, we’d like you to audit our work on this site. And then they give that information to the utility, they might as well just sign a lifetime contract because I guarantee you there’s not a single ISP that’s ever thought to do that. Audit themselves independently to show the utility that they are as good as they’re doing or as good as they say. And so it’s, and we’re about doing that for the OEMs too.

If the OEMs are doing a great job, thumbs up, pat on the back, hand clap. Let’s go. Congratulations. But if you’re not, if you’re not holding your end of the bargain here, if you’re not, then we’re going to show.

Allen Hall: Yeah, I think there are a couple of things about OEMs and full service agreements.

The full service agreements seem to vary by location, right? So it is really dependent upon who you have locally that’s taking care of your equipment. How well that turns out, right? It’s a, it’s still a people business and it’s even in a sort of high tech world. That’s still a people business and good people do good work generally.

But the thing is unless you try to check up on them once in a while, you don’t always know what it looks like. And it’s really, unless you’re an expert in some of these highly detailed metallurgical, gearbox, lubrication, even some of the power distribution stuff, you’re just not gonna know where all the problems lie.

And I think this is where the, this Calaway solutions comes in here because when you get on site, when someone says, Hey. I really need to do an audit. We’re coming up to end a warranty or as it’s happening more frequently now. Hey, we got someone coming in to look at the asset. They want to buy the asset.

We need somebody to go through these turbines and tell us, give us a status of, red, yellow, green kind of situation. What does that look like? And you get on site, there’s a hundred turbines. What are you guys doing when you go through these turbines and evaluate the health of them?

Garrett Calaway: Obviously you’re going to start with the basic turbine information, make model date of COD. And, but so the first step is you’ll, you typically, we’re going to send a two man team out one guy. One guy’s going up and getting into the bore scope. Second guys coming up, doing the visual walk down from basement walking straight into the stairs up the ladder, getting off every deck.

Checking, torque marks, pinging bolts around every flange, looking just eyes peeled, looking for every single detail. And then, by the time they get to the top, the person upstairs up tower, bore scoping, is, maybe through the helical section, getting into the planetary, finish that up, then the two teams link up, they do the main bearing.

And it really depends on the man in the manufacturer. Cause if it’s GE main bearing, if you’re a one five, one X platform. You can just pry off that main bearing cover, clean out a bit of grease. Typically you’re looking down in that, that six o’clock position, but really it’s not three, six, and nine are typically where your damages are going to be on your main bearings.

That’s where the most load is. Pull that off, clean out a little grease in between, take a look, whether it’s bore scope or literally, sometimes you just take a picture because there’s a, giant crack missing. And then, we’re looking at the generators and then we’re hopping into the hub.

And we’re sending the Elios 2 drone, so we rabbit ear the hub with two, two blades sticking out, open hatches. Yep, and then we put the Elios drone in, and if you don’t know about it, it’s basically a caged drone. It’s in a sphere, and it’s about 40 About, I think it’s about 40 centimeters diameter ish, so it can fit into almost any pizza pan.

We do a very specific flight routine where all surfaces, every single part of the internal is done, but it’s done with video. So it’s a continuous 4K stream of video all the way down all the surfaces of the blades. And the reason that’s important is that if you go in there and just do a manual look and you’re just snapping pictures, you will miss something.

But if we have the video, then we compile it into, basically, and you can just, you have that. And you can just look at this full encompassing visual inspection. We hand that off to Wind Power Lab and they just go, I mean off the charts. From there, while we’re doing the internals and the team is on the internal side, we have a guy on the outside doing the external blade inspection so that we’re trying to condense this down to a most efficient package we can deliver.

Now doing all the bore scope, doing all the visual, doing all the blades. When you’re doing it, if it’s like you’re doing that kind of that super comprehensive audit, it’s one tower a day for a per team. It’s just so much to do. It takes so much to do. And from there we have these different reports.

We’ve got the external with Thread and their Unity server, which is absolutely amazing. We send off the data that we’ve collected to Wind Power Lab. And my real expertise is in, in the drivetrain stuff. And that’s just the truth of it. And so we’ll take on the internal, the drivetrain inspections and give our value mechanical stuff.

And honestly, more than, if we need to. particularly if it’s a Winergy box that we’re inspecting, I’ll send my reports to Winergy and be like, look, tell me what you think. And then we take all that information and we put it in a single source location. And and like I said, developing the grading is still a, it’s still in progress. It’s trying to figure out what that all we’re working it out. And that’s just because it’s new.

Allen Hall: Yeah. It’s hard to determine lifetime. You look inside a gearbox and say, it’s going to live a year or it’s going to live five. There’s a lot of variables there.

Garrett Calaway: Sure. But what you do know is, what you can absolutely know is if you’re low speed, if your bull gear and bearings are failing. That’s a new gearbox, for the most part. They have some companies that can change that out, and it’s a mess. But, and you do know, if you go in Borescope, the planetary system, if you find any spalling in there, you just, it’s a time bomb.

Now, it might last a year, it might last six months. It depends on how deep the crack is or how deep the spalling is, but you do know, you 100 percent know it will detonate to a point where it has to be changed out. So better to know now and have extra monitoring on there than, just hope, hope, hope is never a good plan.

Allen Hall: So what are the top three things that you see. So if you looked, it looked gearbox, drivetrain, all the major component mechanical, you’ve looked internal to blades, external to blades. What does that funnel down into typically, and I know there’s a lot of, each OEM has their own particular issue, of course, right?

Okay, but where do you usually end up here?

Garrett Calaway: Typically, your gearboxes are in a lot more trouble than you think they are. That’s that just from years and years of doing this and having worked with CMS and have gone out to do inspections where they said that there was 100 percent of crack there.

There was no crack there. And what we’ve found, and especially especially recently with another one of our, one of our large clients, they brought us in, we did 35 bore scope, comprehensive bore scope inspections, and they had a list of their of their Their warnings and errors that were going on, from their CMS. And we found, they were like yeah, there should be like a little bit of damage on the down, downwind high speed bearing. That bearing was wrecked and now that material spread to the, and now, and so it was like you thought you had one thing wrong, but you also have spalling on your IMS and your low speed and your planets.

 There was no CMS warning. I’m like, no, you waited too long. Sorry, you waited too long to replace your IMS. You knew that, some of these guys, they knew their IMS was, or their high speed was bad for six months. By that time, right, just run it. And I get it, you got to have production. You got to keep, got to keep up that, with your power purchase agreement and all that, but it’s just so short sighted, like bad news doesn’t get better with time. It just doesn’t take care of what, take care of the problem in front of you. And then you won’t have this giant problem in six months or a year. And so now we’ve found is that people think they know what’s going on with their gearboxes. They don’t know what they’re going, but they don’t really know. The CMS does a good enough job to give you some hints, but unless you’re really in there digging around it, you’re, fishing in the dark, man.

Joel Saxum: So would you say that Calaway Solutions major message to the industry is be proactive?

Garrett Calaway: 100%. That’s everything. And that’s, what we call this is RAM, Responsible Asset Management. Take care of what you’re supposed to take care of. And take care of it now.

Joel Saxum: Let me talk to you about this one, because this is an interesting take, that last week, Allen and I were up at CanREA in Calgary, and we talked with a lot of asset owners up in Canada.

And the big difference there is they may not have the PTC funds like we have. But their power purchase agreements are stable and they’re much more lucrative. So they have had a better job. And we talked with some companies that were there like intercompany, Hey, we do a much better job of managing our assets in Canada than they do in the States.

And they’re why, and he’s a point fingers and engineers and joking back and forth the company. But the general, what it basically boils down to is, their budgets are higher for O& M, so they have the capability of being more proactive, doing inspections, getting blades repaired properly, doing whatever it may be, but they’re actually ahead of the game, whereas down in the states, because of the way things are ran from a business standpoint it’s a lot more reactive.

And I think if you could get someone to switch gears, to be proactive, their assets will become that much more valuable. Their uptime will become that much more available and they’ll be able to produce more energy. And that’s what we want for everybody.

Garrett Calaway: As far as my customers go. And I’ll just, AES to me they are far and above. They’re one of the most proactive.

It’s, to me, it’s. AES and like Pattern energy. Like those are the shining stars to me. I can’t say enough good things about those two groups. They are proactive. They want to get after it. They want to know what’s going on with their assets and they do it.

And, but also AES and Pattern are still performing. They have a vested internal interest in making sure those things run. And I think that there’s a place with this that unless you’ve got skin in the game to maintain them yourselves in some capacity, you will pass the buck to the OEM and the OEM will do what the OEMs do.

Joel Saxum: They’ll follow the contract to a T. But above that, they’re not going above and beyond. They got no vested interest in it.

Garrett Calaway: My customers know that when we’re out there, we’re there to do it perfect. No substitutions, we get it done. And if it’s not done right, somebody’s going back and doing it again on our dime.

Allen Hall: So your typical client is who’s calling you? Is it a ISPs? Is it OEMs? Is it the operators?

Garrett Calaway: We have an interesting, we have a kind of a spectrum of across the board. We definitely have had some conversations with Rangel about doing some of their work for them. We’ll, that we’ll see where that goes.

It’s been kicked down the line. We’ve had conversations with Pearce. We’ve had conversations with Siemens. And, I still got a lot of connections there. We do some investigations on their thermal events for Siemens. Utilities, obviously Pattern AES Excel is a big customer of ours.

We cater to, if you call and you want your information, we cater to you.

Allen Hall: So how do people get ahold of you? Are they going to LinkedIn? Are they going to your website? How are they finding you?

Garrett Calaway: You can get ahold of me on LinkedIn. You can get ahold of us go to our website and it’s, we actually just updated our website again.

It’s a bit more comprehensive and easier to navigate. Gimme a call, give, send me an email. gcalaway@calawaysolutions.com

Allen Hall: Let’s go over Calaway solutions.com. So Calaway is with one L-C-A-L-A-W-A-Y.

Garrett Calaway: Correct, yeah. Everybody spells it wrong, but yeah. Calaway Solutions, C-A-L-A-W-A-Y solutions.com.

Allen Hall: Garrett, it’s been great to, to talk to you. I knew you guys were involved deeply in diagnosing turbines, which is a really interesting business. But I didn’t realize you were that deep. You’re really into the internals of these turbines, which is fantastic because we need people to do that.