I sat down with Jim Sardonia, who just won the first PowerVets Veterans Leadership Award from ACP, a program they run with us. When I asked him about it he barely talked about himself. He called it a team award and started telling me about his guys in the field, the ones out at two and three in the morning restarting turbines in feet of snow and twenty below. Jim spent seven years in the Air Force as a launch weather officer at Cape Canaveral. Now he’s VP of technical support at Exus Renewables North America, where his team decides whether a piece of land can hold a project at all. That means telling a bank what twenty years of weather will produce when you’ve only got two or three years of data from the site. The bank stress tests your number against the worst year it can imagine. Jim remembers 2015, when the drought out west put California wind farms at 65 percent of their long-term average. Get that math wrong and people don’t make payroll. This is what I mean when I say you can’t get by on vibes in this industry. The project produces or it doesn’t. That’s why veterans fit here, and Jim’s been hiring and mentoring them for years. He says there are more projects right now than there are people and money to build them. Timestamps * 00:06 - Cold open and welcome * 01:25 - The PowerVets award and the guys in the field * 03:06 - Turbine height, wind shear, and site suitability * 05:18 - What Exus does, and how a polygon becomes buildable land * 07:46 - Solar land use, agrivoltaics, and revenue per acre * 11:26 - Who owns these assets: Everpower, pension funds, and hurdle rates * 16:45 - Pricing the weather: met towers, P50/P90/P99, and bank stress tests * 22:46 - A military family and the SR-71 crew chief * 26:01 - Launch weather officer: 137 launches and shuttle ferry flights * 28:21 - Data center demand and the interconnection bottleneck * 30:53 - Why veterans fit: ownership, safety, and no getting by on vibes * 33:33 - Turning Point USA and student-led organizations * 37:15 - Advocacy without the trigger words * 42:23 - Advice for veterans considering the industry Resources People & Organizations * Kevin Doffing (LinkedIn) * Project Vanguard (Website - Podcast - Apple Podcasts - Spotify) * Jim Sardonia (LinkedIn) * Exus Renewables North America (Website - LinkedIn) * American Clean Power Association (Website) * ACP PowerVets Veterans Leadership Award (Website) * PowerVets Veteran Program at CLEANPOWER (Website) * Center for Energy Workforce Development (Website) * Troops to Energy Jobs (Website - LinkedIn) * Get Into Energy (Website) * Student Veterans of America (Website) * Pattern Energy (Website) Company & Industry News * Exus Renewables North America Closes $400 Million Facility to Meet Surging Power Demand * Exus Renewables North America Secures Over $300 Million in Financing for Zia Solar Portfolio and Keystone Wind Projects * Energy Industry Needs More Veterans as Demand for Skilled Workers Grows Related Project Vanguard Episodes * From Geopolitics to the Kitchen Table with Andy Davis Transcript Kevin Doffing: Welcome to Project Vanguard Podcast, home of the community of Veterans in Energy, where we explore the journeys of veterans leading in energy. We’re building American energy dominance through an all-the-above approach where energy security is national security. And our mission is to double the number of veterans working in the energy industry. I’m your host, Kevin Doffing. Today I’m talking with Jim Sardonia. Jim’s an Air Force veteran and meteorologist who spent years as a launch Weather Officer at Cape Canaveral, supporting space shuttle launches for NASA. Now, he’s the VP of Technical Support at Exus Renewables North America. And drumroll, he just won the first ever Power Vet Leadership Award from the American Clean Power Association. I don’t know how it took winning this award for Jim and I to finally connect, but I’m really glad we did. We talk about what it takes to make a project pencil, how banks stress test the weather itself. And why demand is outrunning everyone’s forecasts. Who actually owns these assets and how to turn wind data into a number a bank will lend against? If you’re a veteran wondering whether there’s room for you in this industry, Jim’s answer is this whole episode. Let’s get into it. Jim, thank you so much for joining us today. Jim Sardonia: Absolutely. I appreciate the invitation and it’s great to speak with you. Kevin Doffing: Yeah. You know, the first time we spoke, I was actually in Iowa as we were kicking off that chapter last month or so. And I was real excited to talk to you because you recently won an award through the American Clean Power Association. Can you talk a little bit about what that was? What did you do with the big cash prize? Jim Sardonia: Yeah, I’m still waiting for that, but no. The award is the first inaugural ACP, it’s American Clean Power Association’s Power Vet Leadership Award. And based on the write up, they wanted to identify and recognize veterans and their contributions to the renewable energy industry. I was nominated by my company, Exus Renewables North America, which was a huge honor. We have you know, almost a dozen veterans in our company. Kevin Doffing: Yeah. Jim Sardonia: Itself and just be nominated by my company was a huge honor. And then we got notification it was a top five finalist at Clean Power in Houston was in the s crowd there when they announced and very honored and privileged to be standing and sitting next to my fellow veterans and accepted on everybody’s behalf. To me I like I told my folks here, this is a team award from my perspective for all the veterans here. We have veterans in the field operating our sites. They’re out there two in the three in the morning. Getting these turbines restarted in the middle of the winter with feet of snow on the ground and twenty below. So they’re the ones that motivate me, you know, to work harder in the back office here and make their job easier and better and work the best I can for Exus here. Kevin Doffing: Yeah. And I’ve been out to the Exus offices. I love how there’s that ground mount wind turbine that’s in there. Yeah, the vertical. Yeah. I’ve had some friends that have talked to me about that, but it’s you gotta get a lot more height on top of buildings or whatever. G get out of the friction at the base. Jim Sardonia: Yeah. And out of the shadow of the big building. Kevin Doffing: And you’ve designed a lot of projects. So you know exactly probably the numbers behind the increase in efficiency as you get higher. Yeah. Well. Jim Sardonia: Absolutely. That’s a huge part of our core business. And being on the technical side, we look at those conditions, the climatic conditions at each site, at each wind farm. You know, these turbines are getting massive. They’re going up to a hundred and twenty-five meter hub heights, you know, three to four hundred, three hundred and fifty to four hundred feet just at the hub height. That’s at the nacelle level. And then the blades are another eighty meters above that. So we’re really stretching into the lower levels of the atmosphere. We’re really extending high. Into that and wind shear is a big part of that element where you as you you go higher winds you typically increase in some cases they actually decrease and at unique like mountain passes in California or out west you get some very unique wind flow dynamics which we have to study that’s our job on the technical side is to study all these sites, make sure the conditions are suitable for good production, but also not to beat up these turbines. They’re designed to last 20 years, but if you have conditions that are really rough, turbulent high wind shear, they could beat these turbines to death in two or three years. So we’re looking at a balance between good production, positive revenue, projects that make money and produce well and can last for a lifetime. That’s what the Kevin Doffing: That’s what I always liked when I talk to companies, you know, asset management companies like Exus is it’s not a hearts and minds things. It’s a dollars and cents. Right. People will be like, hey, you you say all the above. What about a coal plant? I’m like, do it. If it pencils, like do it. But good luck without some massive subsidies to make it pencil. And that has nothing to do with greenwashing or whatever. That’s just market economics, commodity pricing, just the market, yeah, like free markets. So take a step back. Jim Sardonia: Yes. Yes. Kevin Doffing: What would you say you do at Exus and tell everybody about Exus as a company? As y’all are hiring more vets and things like that. I love what y’all do. Jim Sardonia: Yeah, absolutely. Exus Renewables North America is a owner, operator, developer, and builder of utility scale renewables, wind, solar, and battery storage. We’re basically A to Z. We Greenfield Prospect, we’re prospecting actively right now for new projects across the country. We’re looking at potential acquisitions of projects maybe further along in development or even operating assets. So we look at everything that is, you know, could bring value to the company to increase our pipeline, our portfolio. As I mentioned, we, you know, we’re a developer and a builder too. We have an EPC group and that’s the group I’m assigned to. I’m the VP of technical support in our EPC group. And EPC stands for engineering, procurement, and construction. My role is more in the E and the P part of that, the engineering and procurement. And then we have our another silo with an another vice president who’s head of construction. Once the project is developed and designed, and we have signed contracts to procure wind turbines or solar modules, then it shifts over to our active construction group. We have very experienced folks in our construction team that have built gigawatts, multiple giga
