Leveraging Military Experience for a Successful Wind Energy Career

Allen and Joel sat down with Will Friedl, CEO of Prometheus Wind, and Kevin Doffing with the Veterans Advanced Energy Project, both veterans working in wind, to discuss how military skills transfer to the renewables industry and tips for veterans and companies to connect. Check out Prometheus Wind: https://www.linkedin.com/company/prometheus-wind/ Reach out to Kevin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevindoffing/ 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.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech - www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with my co host, Joel Saxun. We're in San Diego at ACP OMS, and it's a really big show, and we've run across a number of people that we recognize this week. And I thought we ought to sit down and talk to Everyone to get them on the podcast. So we have two guests today. We have Will Friedl who is CEO of Prometheus Wind is based in Colorado. And we also have Kevin Doffing. He's with the veterans advanced energy project, which is also part of the Atlantic council, global energy center. Got it. Got it. Got it. That was one take. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks. So we're here because we're talking veterans, and getting veterans into the wind industry, which is an initiative of American Clean Power, obviously. But we feel like we need to get more veterans involved. And Will, obviously, being an Air Force veteran out of the Air Force Academy, and now running his own successful wind business He's the case study. He is exactly the case study. We wanted to highlight this because we want to make sure that everybody that is a veteran knows that there's resources out there to get into WIND. And Kevin, do you want to talk about what's out there right now and the resources that are there and what your organization does? Kevin Doffing: Sure. So our organization, the Veterans Advanced Energy Project, falls under the Atlanta Council. Which is a nonpartisan think tank based out of DC. So if you're inside the loop of DC you know what that is. It's a, one of the most respected think tanks inside of DC producing a lot of really great thought leadership that influences policy and decision making. If you're not inside the beltway, which I am not, I'm from Texas. I had no idea what that meant. So I was like, this sounds cool. You have veterans. It sounds like renewables. I think I'm in your wheelhouse. So the program was really started to build up the leadership within the industry. It was started through a gentleman named Dan Mish, who was at the time at Argonne National Labs and moved over to Invenergy. So Invenergy has been a long time core sponsor of the program, has hosted multiple summits and we host an annual fellowship bringing these leaders together like Will, who's in our current cohort. And we have an annual summit. So it's all about building up the thought leadership around veterans in this space. Joel Saxum: And I think one of the things to touch on here, if you're not familiar, you don't have any family members, friends, or anything in the military is a big fraternity, right? So if you have people that Will, I'm sure you have tons of friends from the military and contacts. Will Friedl: Yeah, absolutely. It was one of the first things that I started out in this company, I came directly from the military into the CEO position for my company. And so I had zero contacts, zero knowledge, zero anything. And it's really hard to break in.