Alex Øbell Nielsen, CEO of Danish Wind Power Academy, discusses their customized, on-site, hands-on training programs for wind turbine technicians. The academy's comprehensive approach improves wind farm efficiency and technician retention through targeted assessments and real-world problem-solving.
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Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy's brightest innovators. This is the Progress Powering tomorrow.
Allen Hall: Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Øbell Nielsen: Thank you. Good to be on the show.
Allen Hall: You've been in wind about 20 years, and, uh, when we had talked a couple of weeks ago now, uh, you were highlighting some of the challenges that exist in wind energy, especially on the training side. What are those challenges? What do you see as, uh, Danish Wind Power Academy as challenges out in the world
Alex Øbell Nielsen: from a training provider perspective?
Uh, of course, uh, the. The, the great demand for technicians, not only now, but also in the future, and not having a formal training, if you like, for wind turbine technicians. Um, we see that as a challenge. Uh, but of course it's also an opportunity for us as a training provider. [00:01:00] Um, but, um, I mean, as you mentioned, Danish Wind Power Academy has delivered training for more than 20 years.
Uh, we do so globally, um, headquartered in Denmark, but, um. Before I, you know, deep dive into all our, our trainings, uh, as an example, we deliver troubleshooting training. Uh, a lot of customers are asking for that, but we quickly learned that many of the participants didn't have the skillset to enter or join a troubleshooting training.
So what we begun doing two and a half years ago is to assess, uh, technicians before they actually go on one of our trainings to make sure that they have the right skillset. From that, then we've learned, uh, assessing more than I think 1500, maybe two, uh, yeah, more than 1500 technicians. Now that we see two or or more challenges.
One is hydraulics. They always score low on hydraulics and the others and controls where they also score low. So those are some of the challenges we see and we do [00:02:00] these assessments globally
Joel Saxum: and I think that's an important point there globally, right? Because Danish Wind Power Academy of course, like when you think wind, you think the Danes, right?
The Danes know what they're doing, right? Uh, we're, we're over here on uh, wind sites in the US all the time and they're like, yeah, some Danish guy was here last week fixing this. Like that happens all the time. But I, I, I wanna focus on that a little bit, saying like, we talk about, okay. The, the, the, the podcast here, of course, we're based in the states.
You can hear it by our voices, but we cover things globally, right? So we cover from the eu what's going on offshore, onshore, India, Australia, apac, down in Brazil, Mexico, you name it. We're, we're covering it. We're talking to people. The, the tech, the global technician problem in wind. Is not localized. It is everywhere.
It doesn't matter what locale you're in, where there's wind turbines, there is a shortage of qualified, trained, and good people. And I think, um, kudos to you guys for, you know, exporting your knowledge around the world. But that's something to focus on here, is that this [00:03:00] is a global issue and you guys are working to solve that.
Alex Øbell Nielsen: We try to at least, but, but as you said, it is global and we have done these assessments, uh, globally in 2024.