Weather Guard Lightning Tech

3S Lift Elevates Wind Technician Safety and Efficiency

Gio Scialdone, President of 3S Lift Americas, discusses the significant strides the company has made in deploying Climb Auto Systems across North America’s wind turbines. 3S Lift has installed over 18,000 Climb Auto Systems and expects to reach nearly 30,000 by the end of 2025, showing market need for making turbine climbs safer and less strenuous.

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Allen Hall: When technicians across North America are experiencing a dramatic and enjoyable shift in their daily work routine. This week we speak with Gio Scialdone president of three s, lift America. Under Geo’s Leadership 3S Lift has deployed over 18,000 Climb model systems with another 7,000 on order making the daily commute safer and more efficient for technicians at nearly one third of all wind turbines in North America.

Stay tuned.

Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow.

Allen Hall: Gio, welcome to the podcast.

Gio Scialdone: Thanks, Allen. Joel, thanks for having me.

Allen Hall: So our last touch point with you was about in 2023 and a lot has changed since then. When we first talked, I think there were about five, 6,000 climb auto systems being used in the United States, and was there like 70 odd thousand turbines in the us?

Those numbers have really dramatically changed. You wanna give everybody an update on how many cl model systems you have deployed in the us?

Gio Scialdone: Yeah. It’s a fun story and really one that’s close to me. As I’ve been here seven years and after my first year 2018, we had 50 units installed.

So we’re talking the climb auto system, we’re talking the ladder lift, retrofittable single technician ladder from the base of the tower to the A deck. Last year we completed 7,000 plus alone in 2024, and we’ve now got a total installed base of over 18,000, a backlog of about 7,000. So if we don’t sell any more lifts this year which I hope we will, we by the end of 2025, we.

We ought to be pretty close to 30,000 installed in the US and Canada. So that’s North America alone. We’re really proud of the team and the efforts that, the, our technicians are out there working every day. I think, Justin Patterson’s, our operations director, he’s got 38 teams of two techs 75, 80 technicians.

Every day installing lifts on the order of 130 to 150 per week as a company. So we’re a little diff we’re a little bigger than we were Yeah. The last time we talked. But it’s exciting.

Allen Hall: The climb model system is a great system, and as Joel and I move around the United States and we stop at wind farms, we talk to technicians about it and the site supervisors, and they love it.

They absolutely love that system. They love when it has been installed. They like using it. It just changes the whole attitude about being a technician and getting up tower, which is a remarkable thing. You have dramatically changed the way we think about climbing wind turbines today in the United States, and that’s that adoption rate.

A couple years ago it wasn’t very good. I want, I, when we talked to site supervisors, they would push back like, yeah, my guys can climb. They’re still okay to climb. What changed?

Gio Scialdone: Yeah. First I don’t wanna say I changed it, right? The product is speaking for itself. The product value is supreme.

I think, you mentioned attitude. The technician’s attitudes are changing. We had a customer who placed some orders in the fourth quarter after visiting some sites with and without our lifts. So a few of their sites they may have picked and choose okay, we’re going to retrofit this site for whatever reason.

Maybe it’s a poor performer and they want to improve, or maybe it’s a good performer, but they’re struggling to get technicians to work there. There’s a few different reasons I think ultimately. A product like this is starting to hit a tipping point. So I think we’re, we’re starting to feel some momentum.

What changed? I think, some word of mouth and the value stories started to become real. Like it’s really hard to measure availability in a three month fade, a three month period. We’re trying to show that. And we’re seeing data, so data helps, right? Some longer runway, we’ve got seven years of installations.

We have, a really good quality record. So that, that’s really helpful. And we’ve been adopted by the biggest customers out there. I think that’s of note, right? You can’t, I think of the top 20 owners, we have installations in 19 of the top 20. Owner operator. So that includes utilities, ipp, and if you wanna buy a wind turbine today in the North America, you’re gonna buy from four or five OEMs.

All of those OEMs can supply our lip. Were approved with all of them. So that’s a change too, right? I think four or five years ago we were outselling this and trying to get it in directly. And now the OEMs have it as a shelf option. So that’s a big change too.

Joel Saxum: I think what, to put it in perspective here, like we talked about adoption rate.

If you add Canada and the us so we’re saying North American turbines out there, Canada’s got 7,000 to 8,000 turbines. We’ve got 74 and change or whatever that number is. So figure 80, 85,000. You guys are gonna be, hopefully by the end of this year in 25,000 of ’em, and now 80 of 85. Some of those are, legacy turbines that are small kilowatt ones with lattice towers and these kind of things.

So that number shrinks to the availability of the market this way. But we’re talking one out of three turbines that you guys are in right now in the United States, and hopefully in the next. Year, 18 months, one out of two. That’s amazing for the technicians. And I wanted to touch on another point here is Allen and I follow the news globally about wind.

Of course. That’s one of the things we do regularly, right? So we’re w always watching about safety. And we see safety. There’s safety that what’s happening here, an incident there. Not only are you. Having your technicians that can get to work quicker, they can get to work without being worn out.

But all of that plays into a safety role as well. Can you tell us how that system helps on the safety record of these farms? There’s

Gio Scialdone: a huge

Joel Saxum: benefit

Gio Scialdone: to not climate. Allen, you’re in Western Massachusetts. There’s a few wind farms out there. The HUAC Wind Farm was one of the first projects I worked on, and they don’t have lifts yet.

But they’re looking at them and it’s only a 65 meter tower, but it’s freezing cold in the winter. And it creates a dangerous situation when you’re climbing with a bunch of gear and you get sweaty when you get to the A deck. And then you have potential hypothermic situations. The longevity of the repetitive motion.

We’ve talked and studied with a few different ergonomic experts. They’ve, given us some really good data on the challenges with repetitive movements or repetitive motion. If we sit in a computer all day long and type and type, you get carpal tunnel or whatever, so I think it’s really similar for wind turbine technicians.

These, these folks are climbing literally every day. This is their job at least once a day. So eliminating that is ultimately gonna. Improve their physical wellbeing. Some may say it’s a good workout. It can be, you can work out in other ways. It’s a very strenuous activity.

Strenuous workouts are risky. If you’re a bodybuilder, you’re working out strenuously. It’s challenging. And then think about from a safety perspective, a lot of people don’t connect this sometimes, but if I don’t have to climb. I am not ex, spending that energy physically climbing, then my brain is probably gonna be more focused on the electrical troubleshooting inside the hub that I have to figure out why this pitch bearing is not doing what it’s supposed to be doing.

That’s your real job. That’s, this is a hard job. That’s what you’ve been training for years, right? Is not to, climb for 15 minutes. I think a lot of our customers are seeing that that benefit full, come full circle. You mentioned the scale. We, we think that there’s probably 60,000 ish turbines in Norther and us, maybe another, yeah, probably five or so in Canada that are over 80 meters of one and a half megawatts or so.

We still have a long way to go. I don’t know. I try to make analogies at times for our product. ’cause I think it’s fun to think about when did airbags become just standard? All of a sudden they you can’t buy a car without ’em. And I’m starting to think maybe, I hope, I think a lot of owner operators are thinking, geez, we’re running a wind farm.

This is our job, this is our business. This is what we do. We have. Eight gigawatts in our fleet, or even the guys who have two. But that’s your job. That’s primarily your job is to operate these power plants as effectively and safely as you can. We think our product can, should be considered as a need, not a nice add.

And

Joel Saxum: We’re not there yet. We’ve got a lot more work to do. Gianna touch on that troubleshooting idea because we’ve talked to again, we’re out in the field all the time speaking with technicians. Sometimes you have this concept and the, and technicians listening will. We’ll know this, that end of the day climb, right?

So the conversation we have regularly is about, our daily jobs about lightning protection stuff. It’s about uptime of the turbines. We want these things producing, whether that’s for the PPA or contractually or whatever. That’s how energy producers make money, keep these things spinning. And there’s this concept sometimes that, hey, it’s three 30.

Or four o’clock, almost the end of the day if we climb, we’re up there until, and we’re not getting back down till seven. Let’s leave this one for the morning. That happens regularly in the wind world, right? It’s that end of the day climb thing. Now, if you don’t have to do an end of the day climb and you get to just hop onto a, basically an elevator, take it to the top, do your work, come back down, that changes the ROI of your kit.

Because now you’re not just saving the technicians operating more safely, but you’re putting more revenue in the pocket of the actual operator at that wind farm. That just makes sense to me.

Gio Scialdone: That’s, a lot of the driving factors are that exact notion. It’s more frequent climbs, right?

It’s increasing the number of acents. There’s a lot of companies out there that look at availability in different ways. Loss production factor. Time-based availability, energy based availability. A lot of them track number of ascents and they see a direct correlation from the number of ascents to the production of the windfall.

So the more you’re in a, in a way you’re like the more I’m fixing it, the better it’s running. Yeah. Yeah. We had a customer we got a quote from a customer who sent us an email on the fourth quarter who said, we, he just visited he is a CEO, or COOI should say. He said he just visited a few wind farms and the technicians love it.

And he said one thing, he goes about your 3:00 PM he said, nobody fights anymore about the 3:00 PM climb. Like they don’t in, in a way, they might even be raising their hand because that could be overtime where they used to say, and I’ve been on those sites. I worked in the field for two years. Ah, geez, I just want to, I just wanna go home.

I don’t want to climb up. And especially if you’re climbing up with an unknown factor up tower, right? If you’re going, ah, there’s a, I got this fault reading. I can’t do a stop, reset down tower ’cause that’s what you’re gonna try to do, right? It’s the smart thing to do, to try to see if you can fix it without climbing or without even using the climb auto without ascending.

Then they get up tower and imagine how frustrated it could be if you had to climb and then you forgot something at three 30. Oh, I forgot this tool ’cause I didn’t know what I was gonna go up here and do. That’s all the time, right? That is all the time. You’re, that is the nature of troubleshooting.

You can’t, you’re not gonna bring up every tool in your bag each time you ascend. But if you’re with the climb auto system and you forgot something, you can send it down remotely. And then your partner can put the tools on the climb auto system in the box and send it back up. And that takes 10 minutes round trip.

Instead of you climbing up, climbing down or sending the the internal chain hoist up and down, which is slower, or for other models you have, if you need a bigger tool, you gotta, send a winch out the backside of the cell, so I think there’s a lot of what we’ve learned too, is how our customers are changing the way they operate.

In a, in some ways, I’m not sure if they’re changing, like the big things, like how they do annual inspections, annual maintenances, but I think they’re changing some of the troubleshooting piece and that’s helping them, certainly helping their data, as you

Allen Hall: said. And now the climb model system, because it’s so widely deployed, there are accessories to it.

One being a box you can attach to the side of it to move gear up and down tools, equipment, whatnot. That makes a lot of sense. And I don’t always see that. And every time I walk into a turbine and I don’t see the, all the accessories, I think you guys haven’t really learned a lesson here. This tool has more capability than, want to walk people through.

What add-ons there are to the climb model system right

Gio Scialdone: now? We’ve improved the product over the years too. We’ve improved its functionality, its safety. The system itself has a fall Arrester, I. Inside of the car. Certainly it operates in manual mode and you can get up and down yourself.

We talked about that remote functionality is really important. Sending it down to the next technician, sending it down or up with tools that the remote mode can handle about 140 pounds of tools and equipment. That’s a setting, that’s a safety setting. There’s weight sensors in the foot pedals that measure that.

But that’s in general you’re not gonna send up a ya drive but you can send up a good amount of tools. You can send up a torque wretch, you can send up lunch, right? And so it’s just it’s important. Like these things are like enabling. And I hate to.

I keep going back to the soft side of it, but they’re really enabling technicians to just feel better and feel happier. Like we had a, I was at a site like in the fourth quarter and one of the guys was like, he was really excited that we were gonna install them soon. And I think he his exact quote was, this is gonna be a life changer for us.

He, it, it really is. And I was trying to think like how that could be, okay. Every day you commute by climbing. A 300 foot ladder, that’s your commute. And now you can take a ride. And I wonder if that’s like going from, riding your bike five miles in the rain uphill to now, being able to afford a car and you’re you’re becoming more efficient with your.

Joel Saxum: Job with your life and that just feels better. Gio, I’m going back to lunch. This is what I’m thinking. My entire career as a wind technician climbing that tower 15 minutes up, I’ve never had a hot lunch in the Neel and now the boys are swinging over from the o and m meeting, putting hot pizza hot pizza in the carrier, sending it back up to me, and I got warm pizza in then to sell.

And it’s the first time ever. That’s enough for me to put one of them in. That’s an awesome idea. Yeah.

Allen Hall: One of the key pieces over the last couple of years Geo that we’ve seen, ’cause we’ve been up close to it, is the training aspect of three s and you’re integrated into the training programs of a number of training sites.

TSL outside Dallas is one that I remember specifically. The banner’s there, the equipment’s there. So your training technician, as you get. Into the industry. They’re used to that because they’ve seen it as part of their onboarding and their training. You wanna walk through the sort of the thought processes of that and how you’ve integrated yourself into those training programs.

Gio Scialdone: I’m glad you brought that up because right now, this is the most important responsibility that I feel I have. And we have is now. Now it’s no longer, oh, let’s hope we get, a few hundred of these in the field. This is the way that a lot of technicians get to work, and we need to now ensure that they stay safe using our product, which means training, education, the right products, the right accessories, the right inspections, pre-use, annual inspections are important.

We have our system at a few different training centers. T-S-L-S-T-L, nsa Airstreams up Tower. Some of the contractors, pierce, all the OEMs, they we’ve wanted to put the product there so that there’s just more exposure to how just, it’s a very simple system, but we wanna ensure that techs are using it frequently.

We ourselves three s in Richardson, Texas, outside of Dallas, we’ve got our 40,000 square foot warehouse office with a portion of that, which is a GWO certified training facility. We’re not necessarily training our customers there, but we’re training our technicians and our, and we’re doing a lot of our own testing and research on the product to ensure it gets better and better.

Just last year, which is really important we, it’s, how many technicians are there? 12,000, some probably. So not only do the 10 technicians at the site use the lift. But the 40 technicians every year who come in from the ISPs also use it. How are we ensuring that they’re trained? The owner operator is, should do that, and a lot of them are, but we’ve all been there.

It can be how can we assure that training is as it should be? So we’ve rolled out this online portal. Um, it’s nearly free. Really for users to get trained online. It’s a two hour course. It’s comprehensive. Sounds like a long course for a system that you stand on, put your fall arrester in hold, two handles and go up.

But there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot of technicians that are smart. They, we’ve been there. We find ways to make things faster. And we want to ensure that everyone using the system does it right. And so this portal is really important. We rolled it out to our customers, to the operators to go get training.

And not only can you go train at, TSL and all the other spots, but we really believe that the online portal is a requirement. We want to ensure that nobody ever gets hurt on our product, and now one in three tech, if they’re, if we’re in one in three turbines, then one in three technicians are using it or more.

For the traveling tech. So maybe one and two. So let’s get the education going. I appreciate you bringing that up ’cause it’s, for us, it’s really important.

Allen Hall: And recently you made an agreement with dispatch, the online app, which shows where all the wind turbines are. I. Now with your agreement, you can see which turbines have the 3S Lift system integrated into them.

So now you know which turbines to climb. But it also has a certification piece in it too, right? So that you can, you make sure that you have taken that training before you, you get on site and realize, oh, there’s a 3S Lift here. I need to take that two hour training piece.

Gio Scialdone: The dispatch app is amazing.

It’s I’m. So happy to partner with those guys. They’ve done a great job. Imagine being a technician, being able to use that. We use it all the time we travel. You guys do too. I know when when you’re driving around, you’re going, is that a Siemens turbine? Oh no, that’s G okay, whose site is that?

And it really does help. And then think, from the safety perspective and emergency perspective, they’ve got a great product. So we’re happy to be integrated in some way. Yeah, I think yeah, you mentioned the certification connection point. That’s a phenomenal thing.

We, we’d love to take that a step further and have, our customers use it and a lot of ’em are I think it’s great for our sales team too, and they travel. They pull that up and see which sites are which and where our systems are installed and where they might not be.

Yeah, it’s a really cool product that it also shows if I was a technician, probably and I was, or I was a, a technician that’s, applying for a job and there’s a cluster of wind farms in the, Minnesota area, which there are a lot of wind farms there, and which one might you wanna apply to.

There’s still a lot of openings. This six, this is a job that’s in, still in, in very high demand. I haven’t checked the latest Indeed or LinkedIn Open, but there’s hundreds and hundreds of openings for wind turbine technicians. Still a growing job. And I think one of our customers for sure has said directly their fill rate is and their acceleration to when they place it, when they post a job and then close it, it’s much faster.

Since they’ve installed the Climb Auto system, people know, and I think they’re using the dis dispatch app. First, and I think they’re also asking the question, do you have a lift or not? When they get, when they interview. So what a

Allen Hall: benefit to a tech. Yeah. You think about all the money that HR departments spend to try to recruit technicians, tens of thousands of dollars per year.

I, and some of the things I’ve seen is, are insane. It could be just as simple as making their lives a little bit easier with the 3S Lift. That seems like a smart move. So what does 2025 hold for 3S Lift here geo? What should we

Gio Scialdone: expect? I think we’re gonna, we’re doing quarterly safety bulletins, so I think we’re trying to get more active with the market to push information.

We are really excited to, to have the opportunity to talk to you guys and. And share our stories, and I appreciate, your insights and expertise. Um, 2025, we’ve got 80 technicians working for three s and then we’ve got a few partnered subcontractors. So in some ways, we’re expecting to install eight to 10,000 more lifts this year.

The majority of those will be in retrofit scenarios. We do have a really good market share on the new construction side as well. So we’re still very active on, on, on the new construction sites. We’ve, we’re proud to say that we’ve got our lift at the Sun Zia site, which is the biggest wind farm in America.

So that’s an awesome thing. This is, have you been to Sunzi? Have you been out there?

Joel Saxum: Not yet.

Gio Scialdone: It’s amazing. What pattern has done to, to, build this PA pattern? Blattner, ge, vestus all of the above. They are, it is so remote. It is a huge infrastructure project that is very remote and the advent of lifts there.

We’re really proud to partner with those companies to, to have our lifts there. So we’re busy there. And that’s a project that’s a year and a half, two years to build. Wow. Yeah, we’re excited. We, this year is focused on safe execution safe execution and information to our customers. And continue, we’re gonna be building out in Canada a lot more.

Last year was a, an entry into the market. We’re in five provinces now in Canada. We’re, we’re really seeing the adoption rate improve there. They’re focused on safety, just like the companies in the us, a lot of them are the same companies. So yeah we’ve got a great team up there and a great sales manager up there who’s, um, kinda help us build out that, that space as well.

Allen Hall: So Geo, the Climb auto system is becoming deployed almost universally across the United States and now into Canada. If you don’t have it installed, where do you go? Where do you start?

Gio Scialdone: From a site manager perspective, if you’re a site leader or a site tech or a, a regional manager and you don’t have our contact we’re, you can go on three s lyft.com and click the info button, and that email goes to me, by the way, so that info@threesamericas.com is my second inbox.

For those texts that wanna have a, have a question or want to get a quote. We’re happy to e even if you have two turbines, Allen, we’re installing sometimes one we’re not opposed to that. We, we see value. If you see value, we see value. It doesn’t have to be a whole site even.

So some sites we’re installing a third at a time, right? Because the, that’s what the customer has for budget. That’s okay. It’s not an all or nothing. Thing we’ve got this in some universities and some of the wind schools and some of the wind towers out there that, that have really taken shape over the last decade.

So yeah, three s lyft.com, three s Americas you can reach us.

Allen Hall: Yes. If you don’t have a 3S Lift installed in your site you need to go to 3S Lift.com. Get ahold of Geo and start that process now, because they have so many deployments in the United States, you need to get in line.

There’s a lot of activity in 2025. You need to get your orders in now to get that done and stop climbing towers, right? The, we’re beyond that now. Geo, thank you so much for being on the podcast. We love having you on. Thank you guys. It was awesome. Appreciate it.

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