Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This week we spoke to Alex Fournier, a field operations manager who works on wind turbines in frigid temperatures, about the safety precautions and practices technicians need when doing turbine maintenance and repairs in extreme cold. Recommendations such as heated gear, taking breaks to warm up, and using procedures to mitigate risks like icefalls are only a few ways that techs could keep safe in winter temperatures. Visit https://www.fabricair.com/ice-protection-systems/
Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!
Pardalote Consulting – https://www.pardaloteconsulting.com
Weather Guard Lightning Tech – www.weatherguardwind.com
Intelstor – https://www.intelstor.com
Allen Hall: Welcome to the special edition of the Uptime Wind Energy podcast. I’m your host, Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. In this episode, we explore the unique hazards faced by wind turbine technicians working to keep the turbine spinning during extreme cold weather events. As renewable energy expands, more wind farms are located in remote areas with harsh winter conditions, placing technicians at risk of frostbite, hypothermia, and injury.
Joining us to discuss cold weather safety is Alex Fournier, field operations manager at Borealis Wind, which is a division of FabricAir now. Alex is based in Quebec, Canada, and has been working in the wind industry for seven years. Alex will share his insights on the precautions technicians should take when performing maintenance and repairs in cold climates.
Alex, welcome to the program.
Alex Fournier: Thank you guys for having me today.
Allen Hall: So it’s been really cold in Canada and the United States. There’s been we’re expecting a snowstorm tonight. So we’re battening down the hatches. But as the wind turbines must keep running. And I was recently down in Texas when a cold front was coming on.
Coming through there and the technicians were really concerned about it because it’s something that doesn’t happen very often They’re not really prepared for the cold weather to stay any length of time And I thought Alex does this all the time. He lives in this kind of environment That’s my day today and with Borealis, Borealis obviously creates the de icing systems for wind turbine blades And so Alex is up and down on wind turbines all the time putting systems in and keeping blades Turning, I thought this is a good opportunity to talk about wind turbine safety and cold weather conditions and some of the things that you do and your technicians you work with to keep yourself safe in this cold weather conditions.
Because I’ll have to tell you one of the coldest times I was ever in was in Montreal, very near to you, actually.
Alex Fournier: Yeah the thing with Montreal is, oh, it’s an island, so it’s a circle of water. And so it’s really humid. So when you’re in the city, you can feel the humidity go through your clothes.
It’s so yeah, you don’t go in Montreal when it’s minus 30.
Allen Hall: No, and you better bring a hat and gloves because I thought I could make about a hundred yard run to the building I was working at from my car and I got about halfway there and I thought, I’m going to have hypothermia. I am not going to make it.
Alex Fournier: Oh yeah, no, it’s not not temperature you want to play around with.
Allen Hall: Yeah. Some of the gear that’s used up in Canada, and I’ve seen some pictures of technicians up in Canada, getting ready to go work on wind turbines. I think it’s really important that we all highlight what are those things are and the safety gear you guys take.
Cause I think the other thing about Canada is the location of the wind farms can be very remote. You’re out there by yourself.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, exactly. So most of the wind farm in Quebec they’re really isolated from the road or the cities. Some other some other province and Canada, the wind farm are closer to towns, but in Quebec, it’s really isolated.
So normally when you go to the turbine, you need to be prepared, and what I’ve seen recently, so props to Milwaukee, they started doing some heated clothes. So they do heated pants, heated coat, yeah, heated toque, heated glove, heated socks, heated boots even. So I think that’s really one of the key and we see it more and more technicians starting to equip themselves with it.
And we also see company that start buying that stuff to their technician, cause they don’t want to stop the work, even though the temperatures are really cold, right?
Joel Saxum: I’ll go give it one for the the rest of our listeners that may not know it. Okay. Cause I have my better half is Canadian. I’ve spent some time in Canada as well, but a toque.
It’s actually a warm winter hat. That’s what we would call like a be a beanie. Just so when you say two, I wanna make sure everybody knows what it is, but but the Milwaukee clothes, the one thing they’ve done it’s fantastic. So they can use the little drill batteries, actually like the little 12, 12 amp or 12 volt ones, and you plug it in, has a little pocket in the side.
The other cool thing they have is, and I don’t know about all of them, but some of them, like the jackets actually have a 12 volt plugin, so you can plug it into the truck while you’re in the truck and it will heat the jacket up. And then you unplug it, run out, do your work. You can get back in, plug it back in.
It’s like wearing a warm blanket. They’re pretty awesome.
Alex Fournier: Exactly. So I will say like an essential for a technician that work in the winter will be heated clothes or at least a good coverall. Me, I always wear coverall nice winter coverall. And also if they can eat something warm, so even a soup or even crock pot, they sell like a little pot that you can eat and warm up your food that will help you go through the day.
Joel Saxum: Not, this isn’t wind turbine specific, but I spent a lot of time up on the north slope of Alaska in the wintertime, and which is, it’s Arctic, right? The big thing up there, and of course, where wind turbines are, whether they’re in Quebec or Saskatchewan or North Dakota or Frickin Sweden or wherever else it is in the Arctic temperatures, we’re in wind.
It’s going to be windy. So all of those things, you want to protect yourself, right? So one of the, one of the concepts we always drilled home to people was, okay, there’s ambient temperature and then there’s the wind chill. Yeah, the wind chill. Yeah. And so ambient temperature, which is like the regular, Hey, it’s 20 below.
That affects everything material. So whether it’s a metal, or a car door, or ice, or whatever, that affects that. However, windchill only affects things that are living, that are organic. The wind has an effect on your hand, but does not have necessarily an effect on your hammer. So you want to make sure that everything that you have exposed to the wind is covered up in these windy areas.
If you’re out in the farm fields in Alberta, and you’re working wind turbines in the wintertime, Man, that wind is going to be blowing. So sometimes you want to wear face covering, make sure no, no skin, nothing down here under your eyes or anything like that is exposed because that’s when you can get frostbite real quick.
Alex Fournier: Oh yeah. And you have no choice. You’re going to work for, let’s say 10 to 12 hours of that turbine. You want to be warm. If you’re cold, what’s going to affect the cold really going to affect you because it’s going to affect you mentally too. And it’s going to exhaust you. Your body will become exhausted because it’s trying to warm up itself.
And also it can affect you mentally, because while you’re doing the work, you just want to be done because you’re cold, so that can be an effect of, working in cold weather is that it will affect also your job performance.
Joel Saxum: Do they regularly put out okay, here’s the windchill chart.
And when the temperatures are this much, this is when you must take warm up periods to warm up. And do they have policies for all that?
Alex Fournier: Yeah, so normally, especially in Quebec, I was on a site maybe two years ago, and I got to the site and it was minus 37 Celsius. So we got to the site, we assess the situation.
We’re like, Oh, it’s really cold outside. We’re really exposed to frostbite. And even it’s not going to make your day go easy. So do you actually have a charge, a chart and it’s maybe like you do 30 minutes of work and then you do 30 minutes of warm up. But normally when temperature are that cold, you’re going to wait until it drops under the 30 to start working again.
Joel Saxum: Another thing I was thinking, I’m thinking about here. So this was something that happened to us up in Alaska a lot. Certain tools that you use when you can use them inside or when it’s warm you can use just fine But when it’s cold you can’t like the one that always stuck up my mind was like zip ties, okay in a turbine You know There’s zip ties zipping wires together making you making sure everything looks neat and fancy if it’s 30 below a standard plastic zip Type just breaks like the tab just breaks off.
You don’t get to use it They make polar ones that have the little metal tab on them. And sometimes even those So it changes the way you do things.
Alex Fournier: I have a funny story. I was doing rope access in Montreal in my old days, and we had to install a banner on the crane just to promote like a project they were working on and it was during the winter.
So I was like, yeah, we’re just going to use zip tie, we’re going to zip tie it to the crane. And it will be perfect. So then we spend two hours with zip tying the big sign. And then we get to the ground and we look up and the sign is all off. We remove, cause it was so cold as zip tie snap in the wind.
So we looked at it and we’re like, okay, we went to Home Depot and we buy elastic and we put it back with elastic. But yeah we learned from that. Yeah.
Allen Hall: So what are some of the things you guys take on your truck? And I know a lot of times when you’re up that far north, you tend to plug your vehicles in to keep them warm, keep the oil warm so you can start them.
Alex Fournier: So some sites in Quebec, mostly they don’t plow the road. So the, they need to access with machinery. So some sites they will use snow cats some sites they will use side by side. So normally we use all that kind of stuff, but the essential really, I would say will be like coffee, warm clothes.
Charger for all your stuff. Cause even your phone up there, will die really quick. So you need the method of communication, either for your radio or your phone. We need, sometimes we need chain for the wheel. Because you can get stuck in the snow, right? So not only you deal, so people think that we’re usually dealing with ice, which is true, like we’re dealing with a lot of ice when we’re outside, but we’re also dealing with the cold weather, the snow and the wind, so you need to be prepared for all that kind of stuff.
Joel Saxum: Do they try to give you some kind of backup communications, right? If you’re normally on site, you have like a VHF radio in the vehicle and a cell phone and this just in case something happens.
Alex Fournier: Normally the radios, they’re charged every day. At the day, we charge our radio.
And we normally have three or four, depending on how many members we have in our team. So for all four radio to die at the same time, I think you need to stop the day there and go home. But yeah, normally we have enough communication, method to be able to talk to site especially with the phone or the radio.
Allen Hall: And for boots, what are you guys doing for boots? And to, are you doing like the yak tracks to add to boots so you get a little more grip when it does turn icy?
Alex Fournier: I know some sites they require ice not ice, but ice like a spike. So I was working on some site in the States and it was required to have some spike on your boots to be on site.
Just cause even at the OM yard, you can just slip and fall, so even the people in the office were wearing spike boots that I like, it’s the Geos or Neos boots. So it’s like a overboots so that will keep your feet warm because you’re not actually touching the surface of the you’re not touching the ground, you’re in your Neos, so the Neos touch the ground and keep your feet warm.
Or just a good winter boots. We’ll do the work.
Joel Saxum: Big old boot that, there’s a difference to that. People don’t think about because if you have an experience that you just don’t know, but when you’re standing on the cold metal stairs, grates or anything of the, of a turbine.
Your feet will get colder way faster than they will just standing on snow.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, exactly. And like I was saying, two years ago, I was in Minnesota working in the States and I was working with a lot of people from Texas in January. So they got sent to site and they didn’t really know, what to expect.
So me, I checked the weather before I came down there. So I was like, Oh, wow. It’s pretty close to Canada, so I bought, good boots, fiberglass toe. Because if you wear metal toe, it’s going to freeze up right away. So I bought good fiberglass toes, toe boots. I bought a big coat and I got there and I was ready, but I seen all these Texas people coming in with their stilto boots.
And the first minute they were outside, they were like, my feet are frozen. And I was like, yeah, it’s because you got still cap.
Joel Saxum: Here. I’ll give you, I’ll give you a South to North one. So while I was working on a project in Nenana, Alaska, one time outside of Fairbanks. And it was really remote.
This is an oil and gas thing. So every morning you woke up, you got in a helicopter, you flew over the mountain an hour, and you got dropped out in there, and we surveyed all day. And then they were drilling shot holes behind us for seismic exploration. And the drilling company, drillers for that kind of stuff are really hard to come by.
That is a very specific skill. And so they brought this drilling company out of Louisiana. To the middle of Alaska in February, and they showed up on site and they had, because they’re used to drilling in water, so they always wear like waiters and stuff. So these guys showed up, they were wearing waiters and like hooded sweatshirts and it was 40 below Fahrenheit.
The first day we couldn’t fly because it was 40 below is the cutoff for the collectives of the helicopter. To be able to be too cold to fly. So the first day we couldn’t fly. And all these guys, their eyes were this big. They just showed up from Louisiana what are we doing here? And they had to put them all in a bus and go to Fairbanks and buy them all.
Art, the Arctic Carhartt gear, right? Bibs and jackets and goggles, full face masks, all this stuff, because they were not prepared whatsoever.
Alex Fournier: So that’s what we ended up doing with the Texas people. We did the stop work, reassess, and we went to the store and we bought all the bibs and the big coat for them to be able to work.
It’s not some, it’s not something that someone will know if they don’t experience it, so it’s let’s say the wind farm in Texas that get, ice storm and then they’re stuck, their operation are all stuck because they don’t know what to do. It’s just they just don’t know, it’s not their fault, they just don’t experience it.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, there’s another thing that’s really important in the wintertime that I was taught from a young age, but grew up in northern Wisconsin, right? Same thing. Is layering. So layering it, cause if you go I’m gonna throw on as much clothes as I can to stay warm and you don’t walk around and you start sweating and all this stuff, then you get cold like that.
Then you’re done. If you start sweating, you’re screwed. So you wanna make sure that you got a good thin base layer and just kinda build that stuff up. It’s to, to mount, to be able to manage the heat within your body. Cause then you can take things off, take stuff on, whatever like that.
So if you don’t manage that heat and you get sweaty you’re in a world of hurt.
Alex Fournier: Exactly. And that’s an issue that we face in the wind industry. Cause that ladder, you still need to climb it. It’s not because it’s winter that you don’t climb the ladder. So when you get to climb the ladder, you need to remove some layers.
So when you climb, you’re not. Too warm. So when you get on top, you’re a little bit cold, but then you start layering back up. Exactly. So you don’t want to sweat while you climb because then you’re screwed.
Joel Saxum: Yep. Let me ask you this. Did you ever be up in a nacelle and it’s actually nice that the turbine is running because it creates a little bit of heat up there?
Alex Fournier: Yep. But normally when I go there, turbines are down. So I’m cold.
Joel Saxum: You’re not climbing during a snowstorm unless the turbine’s off.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, exactly. Because it’s actually like a rule in Quebec Don’t mark me on my word on that, but I think it’s actually a ruling in Quebec that tower, you cannot stop a tower in the winter if it doesn’t need to be stopped.
Cause that’s in the winter that we have the most wind production, like the wind is stronger in the winter, so they don’t want to stop tower if they’re not stopped. So normally when we go in towers, they’re pretty cold.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, cause they want to maintain the grid. That’s when you guys need the most power too is in the middle of winter.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, exactly. There’s some turbine model that they have heaters inside. We’re lucky enough that some of our clients have. Heaters and their turbines. So when we get up there, even if the turbine is stopped, we can start the heater and it’s Cancun in the cell. But we also have clients that don’t have any heating system.
And when we get up there, it’s just freezing cold.
Allen Hall: Are you allowed to take some heaters up there with you if they don’t have a heating system?
Alex Fournier: Yes, we do. But it’s going to be like a conventional house heater. So even if you put it like in the blade, it will make a little difference. We do it because when we eat, we like to be warm.
But even like putting that in the blade, it won’t change anything. I’m lucky enough because we work with the icing system, hot air de icing system, so we can start the system.
Joel Saxum: You just turn the Borealis system on, turn the heater on. Pull, yeah, pull the FabricAir thing off and let the heater just blow on you for a little bit.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, that’s how I eat my lunch, but no For real, when we, normally when we go in there we can start the system before, so when we go in the blade, it’s a little bit warmer. It doesn’t stay warm for hours, but it still give us a little push.
Joel Saxum: Let me ask you this one, this was a trick that we used to use.
So you take your Sammy Maker, Your nice sandwich at home or whatever the night before for your lunch or your soup or whatnot, but that sandwich you’d wrap in tinfoil. So when you got uptower.
Alex Fournier: Put it on the gearbox.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, put it on the gearbox, warm your sandwich up. Does that happen in the wind world?
Alex Fournier: Yeah, we still do that, yeah. We we actually bought the grill cheese maker last year. Heh. It seems stupid, but we bought a grill cheese maker and we just grill her sandwich and and the dinner lunchtime. So that make it more fun.
Joel Saxum: I learned that trick actually, when I was like 19 years old, I was working on a road crew in Chicago, Illinois and what they would do.
Is they would take, was it they’re pouring asphalt, right? So they take your sandwich and say, Hey, wrap that thing in five layers of tinfoil tomorrow. And they take a five gallon bucket and they put us a shovel full of asphalt in there and then put everybody’s sandwich and put another shovel on top.
Wait like 15 minutes, then take the asphalt out, unwrap your sandwiches and they’re all cooked.
Alex Fournier: That’s a good idea.
Joel Saxum: So let me ask a question about something turbine specific. Is there anything that you’ve seen in a turbine, whether it’s a. I don’t know, a cabinet latch or a climb assist or something that are like, man, it’s cold out.
Now we got to worry about this thing, right? Because it was, yeah, I’m thinking about mechanics wise, it was always like, when it got that cold where I’ve been, you don’t want to be cranking on, metal parts and stuff because they get brittle when it
gets that cold.
Alex Fournier: The 1 thing I can think about, it’s the 3s lift.
I know on the nuts, it’s right. If you work. Between these temperature that are low temperature, you need to work the lift before you use it. So make a couple of run and then you can use it just to warm it up. But obviously everything that is battery powered, your drill will, will give up after a couple of minutes.
Your climb assist can even give up after a couple of minutes. So everything really that have a battery, no good in the winter. If you use a lamp, bring extra battery with you because it won’t live forever. But yeah, everything that is mechanical, it’s more work in the winter, just because also you need to think about yourself, you all layer it up, so you’re just your movement are way harder than if it was summer.
Joel Saxum: So the whole crew though, all the technicians that got the spare batteries in their, in And inside their jacket and stuff, trying to keep them good.
We work with we work with Sikaflex and our method to warm it up is we put it in our bibs and we just carry it all day until we need to use it.
Allen Hall: Oh, wow. I wondered about adhesives because yeah, it’s so cold. I just don’t want to, don’t want to move.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, it’s crazy. I will say all. Everything that is fiberglass work, I would say take a break in the winter. Unless you really need to do it. I know some company they’re innovating right now. I seen Acura and they did a post on LinkedIn maybe two weeks ago.
And they’re using the SkyFlix platform with the heaters and the lamp and it’s all cover up, so they’re able to still do composite work in the winter. So a couple of company like this, they’re really innovating and trying to bring services all year round, which is exceptional.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, that when we were, when we would run with any kind of adhesives or anything like that, it was like when you’re driving to site, it’s always, they’re up on the dash rate where the defroster is getting heat right on them. You get out, grab, stick them inside, and away you go.
Allen Hall: And wintertime, the days are short, right?
So when your time, especially when you’re up north where you are, and some of those wind farms, the days are really short. Do you have to be cautious about, hey, it’s getting dark outside, we got to get out of here? Are there rules about that? About being where it’s really cold, plus it’s being dark, and the temperature does drop some when the sun goes down, even on those northern latitudes.
Is there more things you have to worry about once the sun goes down?
Alex Fournier: Yeah, my personal advice is if you work in the winter, don’t try to push it just because, it’s cold, you’re tired, it get dark fast, yeah, normally you still try to go down when the sun go down, if that makes sense.
But I don’t think there’s actually a ruling, but yeah, when the sun goes down, you need to go down too, because it will get even colder too.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, and for people who don’t realize that or have been in the South, basically working on turbines, or even the South, really, to be honest with you, all the way up to the Dakotas and whatnot.
If you’re up in Quebec or northern Quebec, especially your day, your sunlight, good sunlight of the day can only be 9 to 3. Like you’re down to a 6 hours of sunlight.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you really need to be cautious too. And if I can tell a story too, we were in Quebec I think a year ago and it was in the morning.
And so we opened the snow cat and it starts snowing and we’re like, oh, it’s going to snow today, but we didn’t expect much snow. And then it was the end of the day around 8, 9, so it’s already dark. Then we get out and all our tracks are completely cover up. So we didn’t even we didn’t even know the road anymore, and it’s all like big ditch.
Joel Saxum: How to get back to the O&M building.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, so we had a guy outside just walking, trying to find like the deep spot. And yeah, we were with the snowcat. It was crazy, be cautious of the snow too, because when it starts snowing, you never know what’s going to happen. And it can be a couple of centimeters, but it can be two feet too.
Allen Hall: Yeah, how do you deal with that though? It does seem like the snowstorms come randomly at times. Do you carry GPS with you in some way? I guess your phone has GPS, but does it even work that far? Away from cell towers.
Alex Fournier: The good idea will have been to look at the weather channel before the start of the day, when you need to get some stuff done, that’s not the first thing you’re going to think about, you mostly think about work first in my case, so no, but yeah, having, let’s say like a good, a good part of the day, a plan of the day, assess all the risk in the morning.
And then you can do your work and, work in consequences. That will really be the key.
Allen Hall: Just to summarize, make sure you have extra gear, make sure of extra food. Don’t get wet and prepare for when it gets really cold. Yeah. And mind your batteries.
Alex Fournier: But there’s some of our client, the innovative solution to, like I said, we work with snow cat.
So that, that can pretty much get you anywhere you need to go. And they also have ice trailer. What is an ice trailer? It’s something you attach either on a truck or at a snowcat, and when you bring it to the tower, there’s actually like a platform that’s deploying so that will protect you from the ice falling too.
Oh, I didn’t, never heard of that. Yeah, so that, that helps the technicians to to work safe and even mitigate the ice risk. And even now, they created some trucks with platform on it that will protect you from the ice as well.
Joel Saxum: Okay, this is a, we’re going to talk about a risk that is specific to wind turbines, right?
You guys, Borealis, you’re in the icing space, like your friends, Ice Tech, that are up there as well, in that icing space, knowing when that’s going on. And getting, the blades getting covered with ice. We, I’ve been on insurance cases where they say, hey the turbine was spinning, a chunk of ice came off that was the size of the hood of a truck.
The next blade came, hit it, did a bunch of damage. Now we’re talking about the blades. But you guys are people standing under the turbines. How do you handle that risk?
Alex Fournier: Yeah, so first of all, I should say, get a de icing system, a Borealis Wind IPS system. But all joke aside, there’s mitigation. First of all, it’s to have a good procedure in place.
I think just with having a good procedure, all to work with ice risk is the key of it because often people, they’re a little bit hesitant, to work with ice because everyone know it’s a risk, right? Everyone across the industry know that ice is a risk. So when you tell it a technician to go work on a tower, that’s I stopped it.
They might be hesitant, but if you have a good procedure in place that explain all the risk and all to mitigate them. That would be the first step, having a good procedure, that would be the first step, just to eliminate all the hesitation from technician and really have a clear idea of what it is.
And the second step will be to get some medication tool. Like I said, a snow cat with an ice trailer that’s really helpful, because now, that you have the procedure and then you’re on top of that. You have, risk mitigation, you have material to mitigate it. That will really be the key to be able to work with the eyes is to get prepared, have the tooling and the procedure to prepare yourself to, to work with the eyes.
And on top of that, if you can have the icing system, obviously that will work too.
Allen Hall: That’s a really serious problem to deal with though. It does seem the icefalls could instantaneously kill you, leave you stranded, or leave you stranded out there, seriously hurt.
Alex Fournier: Yeah, it’s, you don’t want to play around with that, and, there’s certain situation, if you see that it’s super sunny outside, and you see the ice shed, obviously don’t go there.
It’s the first step, and no one will be, no one will be mad because you do a stuff work that’s, you don’t play around with safety. There’s still some way to be able to work even though there’s ice, even if you don’t have a snowcat or ice trailer, if you follow a good procedure, there’s some case that it’s going to be minus four with a big sun shining, obviously some pieces of ice will shed, because it will melt.
But if it’s minus 20 outside, not sunny, and you’re able to yaw the tower away from the door. At temperature around minus 20, minus 15, the ice doesn’t shed. It’s pretty, stuck on the blade. You can do you can do break tests. People do that though. They will spin the rotor, do a brake test, see if the ice shed normally if the ice doesn’t shed, the temperature is super low, and you can yaw away from the tower and the wind is in the, another direction, then I will say it’s safe to access the turbine but yeah, in some cases, it’s just Not workable if you don’t have the good tool.
Allen Hall: I’ve learned a tremendous amount here, Alex. I had no idea of all the techniques and pieces of equipment you take to, to keep yourself safe while working on wind turbines when it’s cold outside, this is fascinating to hear.
Alex Fournier: But like I said, us, we’re used to it cause we’re from, we’re from Nordic province and it’s, we need to deal with it day to day.
So it will be a shame if every day we will not be able to work because of the ice. So people with good idea came in and, that’s how we’re able to work and innovate the industry.
Allen Hall: So if I’m down in Texas and I’m in the middle of an ice storm and I want to get ahold of you, Alex, how do I get some advice from you about how to work in cold climates?
Where do I go?
Alex Fournier: Really I suggest that every, service company or, energy provider to really dig into it and just make clear procedure for all their worker. That will be the best bet I can give them. Cause like I said, with a clear procedure, you educate your worker too, and you ensure that they’re safe to work.
Allen Hall: If you’re on the web, you might as well check out Borealis Wind. Because they have a really cool deicing system.
Alex Fournier: borealiswind.com. We can, so scrap all the podcasts, just go on the website and use our solution and you will be set.
Allen Hall: Alex, thanks for appearing on the program. We love hearing all this good stuff and we’ll see you at some of the trade shows this month.
Alex Fournier: So myself, Alexander, will be in Quebec at the IQPR conferences to talk about deicing. My buddy, Wade Coulis, our sales manager will be at Blades USA and me and him will be at, in San Diego next week at the OMS safety summit. And Daniel Roper will be at Winter Wind and we will be in Minneapolis for the ACP trade show also.
Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s great. Alex, so much for being on the program.
Alex Fournier: Thank you guys for having me and I wish you all a good day.
