Ronin Ascenders Transform Wind Turbine Maintenance

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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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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,