<![CDATA[Project Vanguard]]>https://media.projectvanguard.comhttps://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Udt4!,w_256,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6425010a-7180-436d-8bf5-877ffce4f542_879x879.pngProject Vanguardhttps://media.projectvanguard.comSubstackSat, 10 Oct 2026 08:30:38 GMT<![CDATA[From Artillery Officer to Business Owner]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/from-artillery-officer-to-businesshttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/from-artillery-officer-to-businessWed, 30 Sep 2026 10:06:03 GMTI sat down with Dan Maxwell, one of four Army veterans who own Summit Point Leadership. Most of their work is training frontline leaders at rural electric co-ops, and Dan says you couldn’t ask for a better customer. I met Dan at Rice and pushed him into Al Danto’s acquisition class.

Dan doesn’t sugarcoat what buying a company takes. He signed a personal guarantee, and he’ll tell you you’re “essentially buying a job.” Be convinced of the company and its cash flow before you talk price, and expect even a business that already makes money to dip before it climbs. Pay off the debt and pay yourself a reasonable salary, and he counts that as a real success.

In the Army, every time an NCO moves up, there’s a leadership school waiting. At a co-op, the best lineman gets promoted to foreman and is left to figure it out, and Dan thinks that first-line leader is the biggest lever a utility has. Veterans bringing that training to the crews who keep the lights on is exactly what I want more of in this industry.

Dan also helps teach a veteran transition lab at Rice, built around a question I’d put to anyone weighing an MBA or a business of their own: how do you actually want to create value 10 years from now?

Chapters

  • 00:00 Introduction

  • 02:30 Why Buy a Business, and How the Deal Came Together

  • 07:22 Why Rural Electric Co-ops Make Great Customers

  • 10:56 Why Dan Joined the Army

  • 13:56 Getting Out: Med Device Sales and the Road to Rice

  • 17:57 The T1 Energy Award and the J Curve

  • 20:33 How Organizations Work with Summit Point

  • 23:15 Why the First-Line Leader Is the Biggest Lever

  • 27:04 Running the Veterans Business Battle at Rice

  • 30:20 The Veteran Transition Lab (was 30:01)

  • 33:21 Advice for Veterans Weighing an MBA or an Acquisition

  • 37:46 Everyone’s Your Boss, and Closing

Resources

People & Organizations

Veteran & Transition Resources

Company & Industry News

Books & Articles Discussed

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

]]><![CDATA[Where Veteran Policy Gets Written]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/where-veteran-policy-gets-writtenhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/where-veteran-policy-gets-writtenWed, 23 Sep 2026 10:05:39 GMTI sat down with Zach Federico, who runs the veterans task force at ALEC. He got there sideways. A commander walked into his rehearsal at Liberty University and offered to pay him to play music, which is how he wound up in the Virginia National Guard Band. He was a brand new executive assistant when a barely advertised roundtable packed out, and he turned that room into the first new ALEC task force in over 15 years.

ALEC is a nonprofit where state legislators trade what worked. The process is more mechanical than it sounds. A legislator brings a bill that passed at home, the room argues it out with nothing on the record and industry in the chairs, then two votes, legislators first and the private sector second. What survives becomes a model the other states can run. The Military Crosswalk Act came through that way, from a Utah senator, and it keeps a plumber with 10 years in uniform from starting over on a civilian license. Utah was the 37th state to pass one.

We also get into the Veterans Justice Act, why slim-majority states like Arizona out-function the supermajorities, and the referral mess a veteran hits the week they get out. Zach was blunt about where the policy comes from: “We don’t just hire PhDs to tell legislators what to think.”

What I keep chewing on is whether our industry shows up, because Zach has never had a veterans bill sent to the energy task force. His 50-state ranking on veteran policy drops Veterans Day, and he would not spoil where the states land.

Chapters

  • 00:00 - Introduction

  • 02:04 - How Zach Built ALEC's Veterans Task Force

  • 05:11 - What ALEC Is, and the Coming 50-State Ranking

  • 09:56 - Statehouses, Slim Majorities, and Why State Policy Moves

  • 15:45 - Cross-Referrals and Veteran Pathways into Energy

  • 17:47 - The Virginia Guard Band, and a Year Without a Break

  • 23:06 - The Military Crosswalk Act and How Model Policy Gets Made

  • 27:10 - Dual Referrals and Why Industry Should Be in the Room

  • 30:49 - Advice for Veterans Who Want into Policy

  • 32:52 - Rapid Fire

  • 33:28 - The Veterans Justice Act and Veteran Treatment Courts

  • 36:17 - What the Military Taught Him, and How to Join ALEC

  • 38:20 - The Referral Problem and the Peer Network

  • 42:56 - Closing Thoughts

Resources

People & Organizations

Veteran & Transition Resources

Policy & Programs

Company & Industry News

Books & Articles Discussed

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

]]><![CDATA[How veterans in energy get in front of elected officials]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/how-veterans-in-energy-get-in-fronthttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/how-veterans-in-energy-get-in-frontWed, 09 Sep 2026 10:03:40 GMTI sat down with Joe Jones, who joined the Coast Guard because of a TV commercial. He was a junior in a farming town in north central Kansas, saw Lou Gossett Jr. tell him to be part of the action, and got on the delayed enlistment program before he finished high school. He runs HR recruiting and corporate development at Canadian Solar now.

The part I didn’t expect is how much of his week goes into local politics. Joe calls himself an apathetic citizen for his first years out of the military, until a friend got heated and told him he didn’t get a voice on his community if he wasn’t involved in it. Now he block walks, and once a month he drives down the Gulf Freeway to a reserved room at a Mexican restaurant where people in politics hold small town hall meetings. Nobody at his company asked him to do any of it.

We also got into the Coast Guard cutter that stationed him in Omaha, the college the GI Bill paid for, and the plant his company runs in Mesquite that outgrew its first building. When I asked him where somebody starts, he didn’t complicate it. “Start by simply going to a meet and greet.”

I still don’t know whether one guy showing up in one county adds up to an industry that can talk to the people writing its rules. That’s what we’re trying to find out.

Chapter

  • 00:00 – Introduction and the 50 cal bottle openers

  • 03:00 – Meeting your state representative, and an idea for member roundtables

  • 06:10 – Why the Coast Guard, and where it sent him

  • 10:56 – Getting out, college, and finding recruiting in Houston

  • 13:36 – Chasing a client into a career at Canadian Solar

  • 15:16 – From apathetic voter to block walker

  • 17:59 – Where to start: meet and greets and local political clubs

  • 21:42 – Who shows up at these luncheons, and one veteran’s advice

  • 23:36 – Politics, Texas manufacturing, and the next grid crisis

  • 29:07 – Zig Ziglar and helping enough people get what they want

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

Policy & Programs

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

Related Project Vanguard Posts

]]><![CDATA[Why Vets Undersell Their Service]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/why-vets-undersell-their-servicehttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/why-vets-undersell-their-serviceWed, 26 Aug 2026 10:08:27 GMTI sat down with Megan Glancey. She spent about ten years in the Navy, most of it flying in Growlers, which are the electronic attack jets, and she develops utility-scale wind projects for Steelhead now. On her way out in 2022 she cut her own footage into one video and posted it with no plan attached, and it went everywhere, so she ended up with an audience she never went looking for.

What she does with that audience is why I wanted her on. She spends a good part of it telling other veterans to quit running down their own service. I hear it too, usually from somebody who served while apologizing that they never deployed. Megan gets her version from the women she flew with, and one of them told her at a wedding recently, well, we weren’t boots on the ground. Her answer does not change. You’ve done far more than most of your neighbors have.

We also got into how she ended up at the Naval Academy, the last tour doing signals work at NSA, and the graduate thesis on energy and national security she wrote years before she ever heard of us or joined our first fellowship cohort.

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Chapters

  • 00:00 – Introduction

  • 01:36 – Wind development and the landowner conversation

  • 06:02 – The video that went viral

  • 08:17 – Using your service to open doors

  • 10:23 – The Atlantic Council years

  • 12:19 – Her graduate research on energy and national security

  • 14:44 – From Annapolis to flying Growlers

  • 19:54 – Grounded, and the move to cryptologic warfare

  • 23:59 – Why veterans run down their own service

  • 30:08 – Advice for veterans trying to get into energy

  • 32:56 – How to plug into Project Vanguard

  • 34:49 – Closing thoughts

Resources

People & Organizations

Veteran & Transition Resources

  • Project Vanguard Fellowship and Community Leaders (Website)

  • Join Project Vanguard and the Slack Community (Website)

  • Project Vanguard Speakers Bureau (Website)

  • Project Vanguard Events (Website)

  • Veterans Advanced Energy Project (Website)

  • Veterans Advanced Energy Fellowship (Website)

Company & Industry News

  • Vestas Wins Order for 270 MW Project Developed by Steelhead Americas (North American Clean Energy)

  • Colorado Wind Turbine Company Vestas Hiring 400 New Employees in Expansion (Denver7)

  • From the Frontlines to the Grid: Veterans Powering America’s Clean Energy Future (Hire Heroes USA)

Policy & Programs

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

  • Landowners Have More Power Than They Use, with Jeff Risley (Episode)

  • Building Trust, Building Power, with Landon Redmon (Episode)

  • Reality Always Collects the Bill, with John Broschak (Episode)

]]><![CDATA[Landowners have more power than they use]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/landowners-have-more-power-than-theyhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/landowners-have-more-power-than-theyWed, 12 Aug 2026 09:53:28 GMTI sat down with Jeff Risley, who grew up on a wheat farm in western Kansas and spent his career in public affairs with energy developers as clients. One of them asked him why nobody was looking out for the farmers across the table. They had the idea, he built it. Farmers have a group for wheat and one for corn. Now they have one for electrons, and his own family has oil and gas wells on the same ground.

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When a developer comes knockin about leasing ground, the farmer is negotiating something he has never done before, against people who do it every day. So Jeff’s group can analyze land parcels using the same tools developers do to help landowners better understand the value of their land to a developer. What increases that value is things like how close the land is to a connection point on the grid and whether or not there are wetlands or protected species. What raises that number is not too complicated, like how close you sit to a place the grid can take the power and whether anything on it is protected. “Landowners have way more power than they think,” he told me.

He is just as blunt about how developers give that power back, deciding on a project, announcing it, then defending it when the county pushes back. I have done community engagement in these areas and that is how it goes. He is fair about it too. Some do this well, and some are two guys in a truck.

That and much more in today’s podcast episode.

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Chapters

  • 00:00 – Introduction

  • 01:43 – What REFA does for farmers and ranchers

  • 03:17 – The name, and how energy got politicized

  • 06:41 – What the ground is worth, and what landowners can ask for

  • 12:57 – How Jeff built REFA

  • 18:38 – Membership, pricing, and advocacy

  • 21:32 – Veterans getting into farming

  • 24:20 – What's squeezing farmers, and renewables as a lifeline

  • 28:08 – Regret, and why farmers trust other farmers

  • 29:55 – Getting in without owning land

  • 34:30 – Why developers lose rural communities

  • 38:53 – Social license after the project is built

  • 41:04 – Close, and why the messenger matters

Resources

People & Organizations

Policy & Programs

  • USDA and DOE Solar Energy and Farming Initiatives, including the Farmer Benefit Plan (Department of Energy)

Company & Industry News

  • Renewable Energy Group Champions Solar on Farms as USDA Presses to Cut Projects (DTN Progressive Farmer)

  • Why Farmers Built Their Own Renewable Energy Association (Farms.com)

  • Organization Formed to Help Landowners with Renewable Energy Projects (AgriNews)

  • As Federal Support for On-Farm Solar Declines, Is Community Agrivoltaics the Future? (Civil Eats)

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

  • Energy Reliability Isn’t a Talking Point with Ken Young (Listen)

  • From Command Posts to Clean Power (Listen)

  • Energy Needs a New Pitch, Veterans Are It (Read)

]]><![CDATA[The Sitreps Guys on Hiring Done Right]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/the-sitreps-guys-on-hiring-done-righthttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/the-sitreps-guys-on-hiring-done-rightThu, 30 Jul 2026 10:06:14 GMTI sat down with Max Cormier and Wyatt Frasier, the guys behind Sitreps. If you’re a veteran in business you already know the meme page. What you might not know is that they turned that community into a recruiting firm that places vets into leadership roles at defense tech startups and private equity portfolio companies.

We got into how that actually happened. It started as beer money from advertising lip balm, and it became something real once companies realized Sitreps could find trusted people fast, inside a community that already vouches for them. Max and Wyatt walk through where they fit that nobody else does, and why the volume play, a hundred bodies at a job site, was never their game.

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Both of them have hired and been hired, and they are blunt about what each side gets wrong. They will tell you about companies that drag out interviews for months and then lowball the good candidates, and about vets who assume their rank alone should open doors. The line that ties it together is one they say to clients all the time. Being cheap is expensive.

I had them on because I want that kind of high-grade military leadership moving into energy, not just the volume roles.

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Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Being cheap is expensive

  • 01:19 - Singapore and the semiconductor trip

  • 05:07 - From a meme page to a veteran community

  • 10:15 - Why the volume play was never the game

  • 14:30 - Where they fit: defense tech and PE portfolios

  • 20:05 - Speed to market

  • 22:00 - Why Max and Wyatt joined

  • 27:12 - Getting out: MBAs and the GI Bill

  • 31:00 - The pig-waste startup that didn't work

  • 35:47 - What companies get wrong about hiring

  • 38:53 - What candidates get wrong

  • 43:00 - Skin in the game

Resources

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

  • CHIPS Act overview, the semiconductor policy referenced in the Singapore discussion (Website)

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

]]><![CDATA[More projects than people to build them]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/more-projects-than-people-to-buildhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/more-projects-than-people-to-buildThu, 16 Jul 2026 10:02:50 GMTI 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.

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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.

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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

Company & Industry News

Related Project Vanguard Episodes

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 gigawatts of projects throughout the country and even in other countries, Canada, North America. And my role on the technical side. So when we’re looking at a project, we need to evaluate that project. It usually starts out with just a polygon on a map. And from our development team, we’ll say, hey, what can we do with this land? We have to look at it from a geospatial perspective. We have a GIS team, GIS personnel on my team. We’re going to look at it as far as wetlands, railroad track transmission lines, roads, houses. Once you get a polygon of an area. It turns into what’s called a buildable area, which is a much reduced amount of area inside that original polygon. And it looks like Swiss cheese, but really with a lot of holes in it, I tell you. So where there’s a lot of constraints to build, especially wind, ‘cause they’re big devices and you know, you need to you can’t put wind turbines right next to each other because of wake effects and you don’t want too close to structures people are living. They do produce Exactly, shadow flicker noise.

Kevin Doffing: Shadow flicker.

Jim Sardonia: Solar’s a little different animal, but it’s very similar. Instead of, you know, little isolated wind turbines, you have just a flat area. The constraints may be a little different. It’s a very different process of construction. That land basically underneath it, if you know, there may be some great flat prime farmland, but that may not be a great piece of land for solar because you’re taking away the ability to do all that good farming for twenty years.

Kevin Doffing: Yeah. But also at the same time, especially as you’re keeping it in your family, you’ve now rested the land. Yeah. You’re gonna see some of the most productive land when that comes back into production. Or, you know, you do multiple things and you start grazing underneath. Exactly. I love Silicon Valley or Silicon Ranch. You know, they’re now figuring out with IoT devices how to run cattle underneath. I mean, sheep you can do in certain places, but there’s certain places sheep just aren’t as versatile everywhere. And with every kind of grass. I mean, I’ve had people explain it to me. I’m not a sheep guy, but I’m pro sheep. But, you know, I’m from Texas. So like big cattle country. And I mean, now that they’re starting to figure that out, you don’t have to have it way above the cow. You know, you just have to be able to flip it up and flip it flat. And now the cows have somewhere shady to go. There’s just a lot of like knock on benefits.

Jim Sardonia: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a whole branch called agrivoltaics, you know, which is deals with that. What can you do? How can we take advantage of what we have underneath these underneath these tracking tables and modules? So it’s an emerging branch in photo in PV and solar, but it’s I think quickly gaining ground. So we’ll see that.

Kevin Doffing: Well, I mean, you know, just from a landowner perspective, like how can I get, you know, more value and revenue out of the same commodity and parcel, right? Like, what is my what is my what are my what is my revenue per acre? Right? Whether that’s, you know, because the industry did this, right? Like you’ve been in long enough. So you’ve seen probably where the contracts with landowners went from, hey, we’ll pay you based on how many towers are there. But then as the towers got bigger and there were fewer. It’s shifted over to well, how much power are you producing? And I want to cut the revenue. Yeah. Not just a square footage lease.

Jim Sardonia: Absolutely. Right. Yeah, absolutely. And it it’s, you know, shifting, like you said, as these turbines get larger in the generator size, a megawatt size and the rotor diameter of the blades, like you said, there’s much fewer turbines that may produce the same amount in a given area. Here in Pennsylvania, obviously, you know, we look at old abandoned strip mines. It’s a lot of land where you can’t really do anything on it. If you’re driven out on some of the hilltops and plateaus out here, once they go through and strip that out, there’s not a lot of growth potential and we’re looking at that actively. There’s still good portions of land that can be utilized for solar wind where there’s wind and battery storage especially. That’s another area we’re looking at. We’re looking at data centers at Exus as well. As long as you have transmission, maybe some w water sources in the area, it’s a

Kevin Doffing: Yeah, power, water, land. Like that’s all you need. But the power and the water the are the hard parts.

Jim Sardonia: Exactly. Yes, exactly. Especially, you know, transmission, making sure these data centers have huge loads, demanding huge amounts and just bringing the power in to run these is a challenge in itself. Water, like you said, for cooling. You know, there’s new technology coming that doesn’t necessarily use as much water, but you know, that’s years down the line. But we’re seeing, you know, utility scale batteries really picking up in capability as you know, in the last few years and then we expect it to continue next. Short term, five, ten years or so.

Kevin Doffing: So, you know, a long time ago when I was working with y’all, one of the things I found really interesting, because I just think that like the profitability of the projects is really the accelerant on the industry. If you’re not making money, then like it was a nice try. Right. But where they do make money, go make more money. And that’s the fastest way to scale anything, right? Yeah. The whole EV subsidy tax credit thing, okay. But as soon as gas prices spike. Sales spike, right? Because it’s an economic driver and that’s what people are going to make their decisions off of. And I love how y’all are thinking about as an asset manager, hey, how do we like run this efficiently? Where does preventive maintenance versus reactive maintenance make sense in the long-term value creation of this asset? But can you talk a little bit about like who are your clients? Like who actually owns the asset that you’re managing? Cause I always thought that was interesting because you’d hear about these blue chip companies. But I never thought about there are companies like DESRI, D.E. Shaw Renewables, that have gotten into actually owning and operating. But I think they’re the only financier that does that. Can you talk a little bit about like a BlackRock and the John Hancock’s

Jim Sardonia: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I forgot to mention that’s really how Exus formed about eight years ago. There was a legacy company called Everpower Wind Holdings, which is pretty close to a lot of us. A lot of us worked at Everpower. Our CEO at Everpower is now our is our CEO here at Exus, Jim Spencer. A lot of folks I work with day to day were former Everpower workers, but Everpower was sold off like a many renewable companies, IPPs, you know, they’re held in maybe closed-end funds that have a lifetime and they mature. And then, you know, the holder of that closed end fund, they’re required to sell that company off. And back in eight 2017, 18, Everpower was sold. Jim Spencer and Deval Beludia formed Exus Renewables North America and it was started out as a third party asset manager. And that activity that is really how Exus has operated ever since from the beginning till for about six years until a couple of years ago. But they were so successful in growing that client base. Some of the clients began asking, Hey, do you have experience in building a wind farm for us or repowering a wind farm for us or doing the maintenance? And they knew we had the technical

Kevin Doffing: Great when customers are like, can you do more scope?

Jim Sardonia: Exactly. Exactly. It’s like your dream client, of course. You know, there were the technical we had the technical experience and expertise that more people were brought into Exus. I was given a call a few years ago and I said, you know, when do you want me to start? Type of thing. It was really, you know, just an honor to come back. When you can come back to a company where you worked with great people, their focus is moving things forward, building projects, expanding the company, get hiring good people. That’s the type of company you want to be in. But we have big clients. I’ll say I can s kinda say what industries are they’re in. There’s a lot of companies that own renewable assets, but they don’t have the technical expertise to operate it and maintain it. And that’s where we come in. There’s infrastructure funds, pension funds, there’s, you know

Kevin Doffing: For de-risked long-term revenue generating assets, which that’s what I’ve always struggled in Houston when people are like, well, this doesn’t look as good as an offshore well return. I’m like, well, yeah, but what’s the downside on an offshore well return? And they’re like, zero. I’m like, well, you don’t have that with you. This is a utility capital play, not a oil and gas play. Like they’re different capital and risk appetites.

Jim Sardonia: Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. And like you said earlier, we’re not a nonprofit charity. Renewable companies are not nonprofits. They have to make revenue to survive. That’s just the bottom line. And dependent on your investor, dependent on your client, they have very high hurdle rates for returns. They have very high requirements for returns to even approve of investing money for these projects. These projects are

Kevin Doffing: Absolutely.

Jim Sardonia: Hundreds of millions of dollars requires hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and they want returns. It’s their money. Yep. They expect solid, almost guaranteed returns. You can’t guarantee the wind or the sun, but you can find the projects. We’ve been able to find the projects and find the right combination of components, EPC contractors, builders to make the projects pencil. The rates are only getting higher, the investors, the banks are only want higher returns and the money that they are let borrowing or investing. And, you know, there’s a lot of companies out there, like I said, in the last five years, you know this, there’s been a lot of cash out there in the last five, six years. Yeah. You know, they’re looking for areas to deploy that cash. You know, cash doesn’t make that a lot, even for these super huge investors, but they want to find good investments. Some of them want a percentage of renewable projects in their portfolio to diversify. But we’re working with clients that look that invest in all kinds of things. You know, hotels, other solar, small scale solar like rooftop and CNI commercial and industrial. Yep. And all various sources. I’d say it’s always good to diversify your investments and that’s what these big companies and investors are doing with renewable.

Kevin Doffing: Well, and that’s one the things I always talk to people is, you know, the entire like portfolio approach to our energy base so that we’re not overly exposed to a single commodity in case there’s something that pops off in the Middle East. Yeah. Which depending on what day you’re listening to this, we may or may not be at war ceasefire or throwing bombs at Iran or somewhere else, right? I was in Iraq. Yeah. But I mean, there’s intermittency and different project operating risk with everything, right? There’s the commodity risk of a global commodity. Yeah. But there’s also weather variability and intermittency. And you have a meteorological background. Can you talk a little bit about like how has the industry dealt with that, approached that, and how has that risk degraded or just improved over time?

Jim Sardonia: Well, that’s a great question. And it’s a really a big part of our process in determining, you know, basically when we get a piece of land, we have a financial modeling team. They want to know how much is it going produce? How big can it be? How many megawatts can we deploy here? Assuming all the constraints and everything else. And what the variability is going to be. What is the uncertainty? Uncertainty is a key part of the energy yield assessment evaluation. There’s uncertainty from for when, for example, you may

Kevin Doffing: Mm-hmm.

Jim Sardonia: Have deployed Met Towers. You have to deploy some kind of measuring device to see what the winds are on site. Meteorological tower. Meteorological tower with yeah. Anemometers, wind vanes, temperature sensors. You’re characterizing the site with data on site because there may be a airport, you know, 20 miles away, but that has weather data from two meters, three meters off the ground, but 25 miles away, got not going to be at all

Kevin Doffing: Met Tower being meteorolog mm. I’ll get there eventually.

Jim Sardonia: Representative of a site on the ridgeline in Pennsylvania thirty miles to its east or something like that. So we need data on wind, especially it’s much more variable with wind. If you have to have data collection at the site. However, there’s uncertainty, the quality of the sensors you have, the height of the sensors, you know, these turbines, like I mentioned before, we’re getting up to a hundred and twenty five meter hub heights, the center of the rotor, but the blades extend even further. You really don’t have met towers that tall. They’re you know, 60 to 100 meter range just to get the bottom part of the rotor. And then we have to use calculations to extrapolate what we think the wind profile is. But the wind data itself, you know, the sensors are not perfect. There’s uncertainty there. You’re only measuring a snapshot of time. These wind farms are going to be out for 20, 30 years. We’re measuring a two, three year snapshot and we’re projecting that forward based on what we do is there’s global weather models out there that actually can predict. They’re called gridded global models. Any point on the earth, you can go back 30, 40 years and you can get a time series of what that model predicted for conditions at say 100 meters. We use the data and we overlap our on-site data with the long-term previous data set from these models and we try to project backwards about twenty, thirty years, what the overall average would have been. You know, now year to year it’s gonna vary quite a bit and it can vary more at some sites versus others. In the eastern, like in Pennsylvania, it doesn’t vary as much year to year, maybe five to seven percent year to year. But you have a long term average. They call that the P fifty. That’s your fifty percent probability. Right. California out west in some of the mountainous regions, they can vary fifteen, twenty percent year to year. So you have to capture that variability. And you capture that in what’s called, we calculate not just the P50, the 50% chance, the average. We calculate things called a P90, P99. And the P99 is you have a 99% chance of exceeding a certain value. So it’s a value. Let’s say your production, you expect it to be 200 gigawatt hours per year. Yeah. Your 99% tile, your P99 is gonna be the value where ninety nine percent of the years you’re gonna exceed that, but that’s probably about eighty percent of the P fifty. So that’s, you know, what is that? A hundred and sixty megawatt hours per year.

Kevin Doffing: This is just so you can over prom underpromise and over deliver with the investors, like, hey, like we know we can hit this number.

Jim Sardonia: Exactly. And they want to stress test. The banks will stress test against the low number. They wanna know if I have one year out of twenty that it’s P ninety nine level, we’re gonna be okay or in some cases they’re not okay. We can’t even meet our debt coverage. You know, that we borrow money. No.

Kevin Doffing: No, as a business owner, like am I gonna make payroll? Like that’s what’s always in the back of my h head whenever I’ve, you know, had payroll is like it all things considered, I wanna make sure I’m taking care of my employees because it’s hard to run a business when you don’t pay your employees. Good luck.

Jim Sardonia: Yeah, exactly. And there’s some years. Right. Exactly. There were some years too where two thousand fifteen time frame out and out west there was a huge drought and it’s extended over several years. There was a big El Nino, big drought, big high pressure dome over the west coast, and the winds were almost nothing in in the big areas like Tehachapi, which is the famous wind farm region in California, Altamont Pass in Northern California.

Kevin Doffing: Service your debt.

Jim Sardonia: These wind farms out there, they were sixty, sixty-five percent of what they should have been. They were sixty to sixty-five percent of their average P fifty. It was devastating some of the, you know, financially for some of those wind farms. If you get two or three years strung in a row like that, it could cause some, you know, major headaches or, you know, it could cause some companies to go out of business, honestly. They came back, which is that’s the nature of averages. You’re gonna come back. Yeah. There’s gonna be some years that are Well above average, but you string a few bad years together and that’s what the banks are testing. They want to know what that variability is. What’s that range?

Kevin Doffing: It’s like being a farmer. You’re gonna have some bumper crop years, but I mean, yep, to your point, there will be some droughts and what are you gonna do?

Jim Sardonia: Yep, exactly. And they have to be prepared for that. Obviously they prefer a low uncertainty where your P ninety nines and P nineties are very close to the P fifty, so but everybody That’s right.

Kevin Doffing: Guarantee. Well, Jim, so take us back. How did you originally get into the military? What was your driving? Did you see a t shirt, you had your dad did it, like what was that motivation for you?

Jim Sardonia: Well, Sardonia family, there’s a lot of history in the military. Mm-hmm. I had two great uncles in World War Two, one of them the Pacific Theater, one in Europe. My great uncle in the Pacific Theater drove Higgins boats, that’s the thirty-five foot landing craft on a couple islands. My great uncle was on day two at on Normandy and he was there for one day. He took a bullet and that was it. He was one of those that was a quick in Europe for a very short time. I’d hear stories. My dad was in the Air Force for over 20 years. And you know, I was thinking about this actually. I and I thought you would ask it. And the first memories that I ever had as a human, I was three to four years old. I remember my dad coming back from Vietnam. And sorry.

Kevin Doffing: No, you’re fine.

Jim Sardonia: But, you know, when that’s the first memory you have of your this cool guy in uniform coming through the door, you know, I was like, wow, that made a huge impression. And this was in how old were you? I was like three to four. It was 1970 to 1972. And he was, you know, in Vietnam. He was in the Air Force, but he was a crew chief for the SR-71 Blackbird, the reconnaissance. Big you greatest plane ever designed, still way ahead of its time, in my opinion. But he’d get deployed they the Air Force back then in especially in those units, they’d have ninety day deployments, a hundred and twenty-day deployments. He’d go to Laos, Thailand, and Guam. The thing I remember was he’d come back, he’d bring us gifts. I still have gifts from like Japan, you know, little things. It was just cool. So the first memory I have really, I was fifth child of num of six, you know, was him coming through the door. It was great. You can imagine, you know, your dad coming back and everybody’s we’re a family of eight at that time. So it was a big event. And then, you know, this was during the Apollo era too. So I actually remember the last two moon missions, watching that on TV in nineteen seventy-two. So those two, I’d say those two things had the biggest impact on me as far as from then on, I was like, I’m gonna join the military. You know, I really wanted to be in the air force, but I was open to really anything, to be honest with you. And I interviewed with the Navy. At one point, they wanted me to be in a nuclear submarine, but I was like, nah, let me talk to the Air Force and see what they had. You know, went to school. I went to a small school originally, Valdosta State College, and joined the ROTC program there. And then got my commission four years later when I graduated and, you know, went from there. And they gave me two choices in assignments. First one was a missile launch officer in South Dakota or go back to school and go to Florida State for my meteorology degree. And I chose the meteorology degree. So it wasn’t a hard choice for me.

Kevin Doffing: Nice. I love that. But then you weren’t done doing some of that. So when you got out, what were you doing? I feel like there was a three letter acronym that you followed up with.

Jim Sardonia: Well, when I got out I was on active duty Yeah. I was on active duty for seven years and my last assignment was at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. And the Air Force provides all the meteorological support, all the weather support for the launches for NASA at Kennedy Space Center, which is just north of Cape Canaveral, and the Air Force for all the unmanned launches that the Air Force does out there.

Kevin Doffing: Fourth.

Jim Sardonia: I was a launch weather officer. We supported as a active duty Air Force launch weather officer, we were primarily supporting the Navy ballistic missile launches off the test launches off the East Coast. Mm-hmm. There was a weather team that supported every launch. We supported every shuttle launch, Titan at the time, Delta at Atlas at those vehicles too. We supported those as deputy launch weather officers, whether we’re man in the radar, that we had a weather reconnaissance aircraft that would fly through the clouds and very specific criteria to launch a rocket. There. And I would did that for a couple of years. And then I had the opportunity. They they wanted to expand the role. They had three civilian launch weather officers there. And they needed a fourth one. And just timing was key. And, you know, I was working hard there and timing. So that it’s two things that I tell everybody. Timing is always key to what you do or how opportunities may come your way. And if you work hard, That just aligns. If the timing aligns and you worked hard, those opportunities may pop up for you. So they offered me to work as a civilian. So I separated and worked for both the Air Force and NASA and supported, went on for six another six years supporting over 137 launches, 22 space shuttle launches. I was a meteorologist for the ferry flights when the space shuttle was on top of the 747 and flew across the country. That that was a very weather-sensitive flight. They could only fly Up to about twelve thousand feet. It was depressurized. The space shuttle is very it could fly into space and through a launch process, but it was very sensitive once it everything was turned off and once it was on the ground. And if you flew across the country, you could not fly through a cloud. It would actually pit the tiles and cause damage. So we had to fly keyhole our way through clouds and storms through the across the country. They had refueling stop halfway through. So very weather sensitive operation there. Wow. It was a fun ones to be a part of.

Kevin Doffing: So you’ve been doing this for a while. You know, I’m interested. What do you see that other people are not paying attention to, especially as you’ve seen like cycles where like nobody was paying attention to solar, wind was coming up? You know, then battery one megawatt was considered grid scale. And now, you know, we have gigawatt. I’m really interested in new financial vehicles that actually are made for, you know, monetizing battery storage, because battery storage is a Swiss Army knife and it kind of fills in on things. But I don’t feel like there’s a full turnkey monetization, you know, financial vehicle that’s bespoke for energy storage yet. What are you looking at that you don’t feel like people are paying attention to enough yet?

Jim Sardonia: Well, and I’d say the last three to four years, the thing that nobody was really anticipating or looking at was this massive demand growth in data centers. That I was in been in renewables eighteen years. Nobody was predicting what we’re seeing right now as far as the expansion of data centers, the massive growth in these. They’re popping up everywhere. I was in New Mexico a month ago. They’re building data centers like in parts of the desert where nothing should be, you know, it’s there’s barely any pl Yeah, exactly. There’s barely any plant life in these places. But it’s good land, it easy land and they’re building them there. The load growth or the growth of in Virginia and and even Pennsylvania now, nobody anticipated or looked was forecasting this kind of demand for power. We’re seeing it, I think we’re straining, we’re putting a strain on the system right now. We’re seeing localized

Kevin Doffing: Easy permitting.

Jim Sardonia: Pricing that’s being filtered down to homeowners and businesses. And you know, you’re seeing rates, you know, going through the roof in some areas. I think we’re playing catch up. We may be playing a lot of catch up to try to counter that. Mm-hmm. You know, one big project in New Mexico, the SunZia project, which I know a lot of folks at Pattern Energy, that is a massive undertaking, but that’s the kind of things we need to address. If we’re gonna continue to build these massive data centers with this incredible amount of load. And demand and we need to big big infrastructure projects like that. We need big grid, you know, grid interconnection challenges have always been the biggest challenge. Even, you know, since I started fifteen to eighteen years ago, it’s always been interconnection. And it that’s a long time of that being the same problem. But we’re continuously playing catch up, it feels like to me, with the growth that we’re seeing across the state the country.

Kevin Doffing: Yeah. And I mean, you know, going back to what you said earlier, you know, why are veterans at Exus? And I think it applies everywhere else. Like there’s such a need because this is not something where you can get by on vibes. Right. Like your project is successful or not. Like there’s no arguing, did it produce power? Did you make money? It’s brass tacks, right? And I think that it fits well with the military culture of operational excellence, risk mitigation, not risk aversion, and you know, just getting things done.

Jim Sardonia: Right.

Kevin Doffing: Where have you seen Exus, where have you all been able to bring that in so that you are attracting like the best of the best in the veteran community to come in to that? It applies across the industry, but how is your company trying to set itself apart on that?

Jim Sardonia: Think we have a good balance between very experienced and highly skilled, proven leaders in the industry into our fold here. And then using everybody to mentor new people, we have an active mentoring program. We have a great intern program every year. We’ve hired interns from every year class that we’ve had. We try to build the younger crew that we have, but Just the fact that I think we’re very focused and targeted on who we hire that have a lot of experience. And it on the operational side, that’s where veterans fit great. On the safety side, as you know, it everything in the military is built on safety and protecting our source our resources and our troops. And there’s great fits in certain areas. I’d say maintenance, operations, safety. So it’s a combination of that. We have our sites itself. Most of our site managers are veterans. They bring that focus, they bring that discipline, that work ethic, leadership, they’re ready to tackle and they own it. You know, they own those projects. That’s the great thing. It’s not just a job to them. They own these projects and, you know, it they take it personal when, you know, if these projects aren’t operating as they should, or, you know, even if they’re operating great, they want it to operate better to move things on. So I think that’s our strategy, you know, overall. We have great resources here locally in Pittsburgh. There’s a couple several great universities, Pitt, CMU, Carnegie Mellon, there’s Duquesne University. So there’s a great local source of technology and young talent. And also we collaborate with CMU, Pitt, other organizations throughout the industry to, you know, further the science. That’s one thing. Further take the science further, make build these projects. Let’s, you know, move things forward and build these projects that that work great.

Kevin Doffing: Yeah. No, I think, you know, as we bring in more folks from the military, what we end up finding, at least in my experience, maybe this more based on who I am, you know, there’s a little bit more of a libertarian streak of pragmatism versus, you know, a political alignment, really, but just getting things done. But I love to see diversity of thought inside the industry. Yeah. One of the things I was impressed with is that you’re involved with. Turning Point USA. Can you talk a little bit about how you got involved with the organization? What does that look like for you? And just talk a little bit about that.

Jim Sardonia: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve been involved with them for a little while now. I would say it’s my personal values, how I align my personal values with that organization. I enjoy mentoring. I have three teenagers as we discuss, you know, getting ready for college, the values and just kind of general ideals of what the country was founded on, less government. That’s one of the core values of turning point, or one of the core. Goals of educating our younger population and folks in college. I enjoy the aspect of talking to our younger generation. Like you said, it’s not political, but it’s just we’re interested in moving things forward in a positive way. You know, when I was in the military, I felt like it was served. I felt like, you know, I was serving my country. I feel like I’m doing the same now in renewable energy. And like you said, energy is security to serve the community as well. There’s a lot of things I enjoy on that. And just trying to get the message across, the values at turning point is trying to pass on. I’m aligned with that. And, you know, with kids going into college, I just want to see, you know, multiple areas of thought, like you said, and it’s not just one sided. There should be the opportunity for other student led organizations. I love that it’s a student led organization. One of the big things, there’s a story right here in Pittsburgh, two miles away from where I’m sitting, a local college. Here in downtown, voted unanimously to not allow a turning point chapter. It’s a student le you know, student government associate you could look it up, but

Kevin Doffing: That’s what Student Veterans of America is. I mean, like it’s a student led organization on campus.

Jim Sardonia: And to me, being voted down unanimously based on ideals, you know, these aren’t ideals of what the country was founded on, less of government involvement, just what the ideas of freedom to me, you know, being in a family with three generations in the military and and, you know, from every war from World War Two to Desert Storm, that’s important to me is to instill a sense of patriotism in my kids and others, you know, if I can. I think that’s important. You shouldn’t hate this country. I love this country. And that’s I’m gonna proudly say that. And I’m not ashamed of it. I’m not ashamed to say I’m a member of Turning Point. Completely proud of that, really. And in the events, obviously in the last year, even reinforced that. Especially in the until recently, you know, there the chapters are being turned down. But I’ll say that was the first step. That’s the first battle, maybe, but the war’s not over. And if you look at Where that’s happened at other colleges across the country, almost everyone eventually became eligible and created a chapter. And I’ll just say to the local university where that happened here, you know, the cavalry is coming and don’t get discouraged to the the students there. There’s people working in the shadows and behind the scenes. And, you know, we’ll do everything we can to help out. You know, it’s it’s just a first step. Disappointment and You know, failure at first sh motivate you more to try to achieve what you’re trying to achieve.

Kevin Doffing: Yeah, I love that. I mean, like, listen, we do a ton of energy advocacy. I’m not getting into a left or right thing. I’m just trying to advocate for vet jobs, all the above, energy security. But I mean, like, I gotta talk to people about how to show up and speak up. And I mean, I’m not telling them don’t do anything. I’m telling them, listen, you just need to connect your military service, whatever your service was, to your industry experience. Right. Like, we’re not the biggest advocacy group because we’re targeting you know, 10% of the energy workforce that have military experience, right? So it’s there are other groups that are bigger than us, but this is the group I belong to and the group I like being with. It’s interesting in how it’s hard to get some people, don’t want to put their head up. You know, I got a buddy who, one of our new chapters, is like, listen, I just don’t want to get mixed up in it. I will do anything to help you get veterans more jobs. I am all in on that aspect. I believe everything we’re talking about. But that’s the only thing I really want to get involved in because I just feel like it’s so hot out there that I don’t want to do it. And I’m like, man, but that’s how we bring the temperature down, is just I keep having to go back and forth with other energy advocates. They’re like, what’s your key talking point? I’m like, being a good dude or gal, like just being somebody and talking to somebody. You know, when we’ve had to defeat like misinformation on solar panels, one of my guys was at an American Legion having a beer, and someone’s like, I hear that, You know, the water runs off it when it rains, it causes cancer. And my guy didn’t launch into like a 12 point thing and pull up a PowerPoint or cite a research paper. He’s like, actually, nah, that’s not true. And that’s all it took because he was just somebody that he was having a beer with that he trusted that knew, worked in the industry, and all the drama was gone. They went back to just having a beer. We just need to talk about what we do for a living. Like I’m literally going to talk to a major wind company. Cause they’re like our veteran employees don’t feel comfortable talking about their jobs with their neighbors. Right. As they’re powering their neighborhood, as they are doing this amazing critical infrastructure, frontline worker, just turning gears. You know, they could be just as easily working on a drilling room floor. Yeah. And they’re not comfortable talking about their job. It’s like the craziest thing to me.

Jim Sardonia: Yeah, I agree. I agree. It’s like I’m proud of what I do. Like you said, it’s not a left or right thing. There’s a lot of viewpoints in the renewable industry from what I’ve seen and the people I’ve talked to and, you know, work with throughout the years. You know, you do get stereotyped if you say, I work in wind power renewables. It’s like, you well, you kill bats or birds or whatever. But you know, when you explain, you know, this is how we work with that. And there’s some legitimate concerns for both, you know, wind and solar. Like I wouldn’t want a turbine a hundred two hundred feet away from my house with shadow flicker. Right. Going. If you see videos of that online or what

Kevin Doffing: I don’t want to pump jack my backyard, but I’m fine having it my property. In like everything in moderation.

Jim Sardonia: Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, there’s Right. Exactly. And you mentioned standing up and being proud or just being assertive. You know, that’s one of the things that I’ve seen. You know, I’ve seen some veterans come in and they’re maybe a little better word, shy or afraid of standing up and speaking out or speaking up. And I said, just if you know there’s something where you can make an improvement, it’s the companies I’ve worked with, they are looking to move the company forward. If it’s an idea, if it’s a change in a process that makes things more efficient, brings in more revenue, you know, just gets a project done as you’re going through that development stage. I’ve seen 10 times more projects die in the development stage because they just don’t pencil. But yeah, you know, there’s a few that comes through. And if you can find a way to get those through, be willing to stand up. And that’s the kind of leadership I think a lot of companies are looking for. Just people that will own it, own their process or their function, their job function, their project they’re working on, and just trying to push things forward. You know, to me it’s not a job. We’re trying to make put something in the ground that’s gonna be there for thirty years. You know, my kids will see these layouts and these projects that I’ve worked on. And, you know, that’s something I want for them to see.

Kevin Doffing: Yeah. No marginal fuel cost, energy independence. Like whenever I go in and talk, if I know somebody’s hostile against renewables for whatever reason, I just talk about it without saying the trigger words. I talk about like being on an early stage of a technology curve, cost declines, you know, consumer preferences, capital returns, de risk long term. Yeah, like I can talk about renewables for seven minutes without saying the words. Yeah. And usually by the time we get around to it, they’re like, okay. Well, I d you know, I just haven’t thought about it that way. I’m like, well, then you’ve had some really bad salesmen come in here who are like pitching you the hearts and minds campaign without talking about the dollars and cents. What? Well, Jim, as we wrap up, you’ve been doing this for a while. You’ve been in the industry, you’ve built what, over seven gigawatts of projects. What’s your advice to veterans that are considering this industry? I think that almost a third.

Jim Sardonia: Yeah, exactly.

Kevin Doffing: Of the folks that listen to this, if not more, are active duty service members that are exploring this industry. Either they’re really want to get into it and they’re trying to figure out how, or they’re just kind of dipping their toe and then looking at it. What advice would you have for those that are evaluating this industry to know if it’s right for them?

Jim Sardonia: Well, I mean, the first thing I can say is that I’ve never been busier in my eighteen years in the renewables. And the next few years I think the outlook is outstanding and not just renewable energy, any energy industry. Just the growth, the demand for power is just skyrocketing. So in the next five, you know, six years we have so many projects that we there’s more projects than people and money that we can build. So I don’t see it getting to a point where there’s gonna be a slowdown at all. At all. It’s gonna continue. The thing to me to look for is look for companies that are very diverse. Even if it’s just renewables, look for a company that’s diverse. We’re doing wind power, we’re doing solar, we’re doing battery, we’re repowering sites, repowering wind and maybe even solar. We’re looking at data center power for data centers at certain areas. So if you know I’d be a little less confident if there’s companies just focused on one small area. Yeah. You know, we’ve seen a few companies go out in the last few years, but because of that, they were a little siloed into one area. And, you know, if one tariff hits, then it’s devastating. So there’s a lot of old wind farms out there that need to be repowered, that are being repowered. You know, that’s one great diversified area that we’re working on. So to me, those type of areas are those type of companies that have the diversification. Kind of figure out what you want to do. You want to be in the office, you want to be out in the field. There’s great operations. I see so many positions for operations managers and just people in the field, construction workers. There’s tons of activity, especially on the solar side. Solar requires a lot more people, a lot more numbers and people w during the construction phase. Wind requires fewer people, but more highly skilled, like these crane operators that, you know, only a few dozen can operate those. There’s certain areas in solar. You know, there’s a great I don’t know if I can promote a website, but it’s called get into energy dot jobs. Get into energy dot jobs. If you put your MOS in there, they will link your MOS to jobs that are available out there. So it’s a great that’s great.

Kevin Doffing: We’ve had them on the podcast. So that’s underneath that’s the Troops to Energy Jobs program underneath the Center for Energy Workforce Development. And John does coaching. It’s free coaching for any veteran that wants to get involved. You can go find that episode where we just talk about John and how he’s helping veterans through CEWD and the Troops to Energy Jobs do that. But getintoenergy.org, I think, website is a great. Platform where they have jobs, they have the MOS trainer and everything like that. Yeah. No. I mean, you know, one of the things we often get asked is like, hey, could you do this? Could you be a placement group? Could you be a recruiting? And I’m like, so many people are already doing that. Let’s not do what others are doing. Let’s do what needs to be done. And that’s where we do the community and the advocacy work because that’s the stuff that other people are not doing in our space that I’m excited to do.

Jim Sardonia: And just I I saw one of your other videos interviews before. Get on LinkedIn. There are so many sources. Get a LinkedIn profile if you don’t have one. Get a veteran that has transitioned to review a resume. You know, I’ll be happy to send it to me. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’ll be happy to help review. I’ve reviewed so many resumes from veterans and hopefully some of the things I’ve recommended help. Search out the leaders in renewable energy, which is funny. I typed in veterans. Are leaders in renewable energy that are veterans and your name popped up. You’re the first one that popped up. If you type that in Google, you’ll see your name and things like that. That’s important.

Kevin Doffing: For everybody that finds me. Well, and I mean, you know, that’s the point of why we have that Slack community. So, like if you’re listening to this and you do want to find some people, you can do that. But also, you just go to projectvanguard.org. You can join and you’ll get invited to our Slack community. We have a private Slack community with over 500 veterans that work in this industry. Introduce yourself. I guarantee you, we were just talking about with Andy Davis on a podcast episode that came out last week. Within a week, he had five meetings and three coffees. You know, with veterans in the industry. And it it happened like that. Like it’s a qualification or a vetting process that you’re on this platform. Okay, you’re a good person and you’ve already self-selected. You’re not going waste my time and I’m interested and can help you. So I mean it’s like just expedites on a peer-to-peer, decentralized, expedite way, because I love having these calls. I’m going to get murdered by our staff if I keep taking more calls with vets that want to get in and I talk about the same stuff. But all that to say, Jim, so great to have you on here. The time flies by. That’s always a good sign. Thanks so much for taking the time today with us.

Jim Sardonia: Absolutely. It was a pleasure talking to you and pleasure to be able to contribute.

Kevin Doffing: Awesome Jim. We’ll be in touch soon.

Jim Sardonia: Thank you.

]]><![CDATA[From Geopolitics to the Kitchen Table with Andy Davis]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/from-geopolitics-to-the-kitchen-tablehttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/from-geopolitics-to-the-kitchen-tableWed, 17 Jun 2026 10:11:05 GMTWhen Andy Davis first heard “energy security,” he thought what most people think. Oil. Nuclear. Geopolitics. A problem that lived somewhere far away, between governments.

He had more reason than most to think that way. As an Army Ranger, he parachuted into Iraq on the night of the invasion and later spent ten days in a firefight on top of the Haditha Dam, one of the largest power-generating facilities in the country. There was intel it would be blown to flood the Euphrates and trap American troops. His mortar crews were hitting the substations below. At the time, it was a mission. Years later, working for one of the largest dam owners in the world, he found himself giving public tours of hydroelectric dams and realized he’d been standing on top of one of these structures under fire long before he ever explained one to a crowd.

That full circle is the heart of this conversation, but it isn’t really the point. The point is what changed in how Andy sees the work.

His argument is simple: energy security stopped being a geopolitical abstraction for him and became a kitchen-table issue. People want the lights to stay on and the bill to stay predictable. Most of them have no idea where the power actually comes from or what the charges mean. He thinks the industry has a job to do there, and that most of these arguments are won or lost not in Washington but in a town hall or at someone’s kitchen table.

Kevin pushes on this from his own experience riding out hurricanes in Houston, where a small home microgrid is the difference between his kids streaming on their iPads and the neighbors huddled around a candle.

There’s also a straight answer here for veterans wondering how to break into energy, and it has less to do with credentials than you’d expect.

Andy didn’t plan any of this. He’ll tell you the best move he made was being willing to walk through a door he hadn’t planned on.

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Andy Davis

  • 01:39 - Welcome & Spotting Fellow Veterans

  • 05:05 - His Work in Community Engagement

  • 07:08 - Finding Project Vanguard

  • 11:05 - Joining the Army Rangers

  • 13:39 - The Combat Jump Into Iraq

  • 16:31 - The Haditha Dam Mission

  • 22:41 - From GI Bill Struggles to Politics

  • 27:49 - Advice for Veterans Entering Energy

  • 29:27 - Energy Security at the Kitchen Table

  • 33:36 - Becoming a Project Vanguard Leader

  • 37:19 - Closing Thoughts & Sign-Off

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

  • Section 247 Hydroelectricity Incentives: Brookfield Renewable Selections (Department of Energy)

  • Solutions to the Energy Talent Gap Are Hiding in Plain Sight (Utility Dive)

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[How a Marine Lands in Energy Policy]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/how-a-marine-lands-in-energy-policyhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/how-a-marine-lands-in-energy-policyWed, 20 May 2026 12:04:49 GMTMost service members start thinking seriously about life after the uniform six months out. Jim Purekal started two years out. He networked, he sat down with people who had nothing in common with his career, and he treated the whole thing like a mission with a deadline.

That discipline is how a retired Marine Corps major with twenty years in aviation ended up running Virginia legislative work for Advanced Energy United, a national trade association.

It is also why this episode is useful for anyone who is actually thinking about energy as a second career.

Jim spent his last active duty stretch on Capitol Hill as a congressional fellow in Senator Perdue’s office, then retired out of the Pentagon. He used SkillBridge to land at SunPower for twelve weeks during the pandemic, learning the industry from the inside on a DOD paycheck. His take on that program is direct: if a service member is six months from getting out and their command does not have a plan for them, that is a leadership gap.

The conversation gets into the work itself. Most days, Jim is in Richmond during the General Assembly session, working bills, educating lawmakers, meeting with member companies. Virginia sits inside PJM, the regional grid operator covering thirteen states and DC. Demand is climbing fast. Data centers, building electrification, transportation. The decisions that shape how the grid actually gets built happen in state capitals, not on cable news.

Jim and Kevin also dig into the harder question for transitioning veterans. What soft skills actually transfer. What the learning curve looks like. Why sales, policy, and project development are real landing spots, not just the technical trades. And what Jim wishes he had known when he was the one buttoning up his resume and asking strangers for a conversation.

The Solar Ready Vets program that helped Jim get placed has since been cut. That makes the question of where veterans find their next foothold in this industry less abstract, and more pressing.

Project Vanguard Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.

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Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Jim Purekal

  • 01:10 - Inside Advanced Energy United

  • 04:42 - The Virginia Legislative Beat

  • 05:51 - What’s Driving Virginia’s Demand

  • 07:27 - The Day-to-Day Policy Work

  • 11:27 - Why He Joined the Marines

  • 15:25 - SkillBridge and Landing at SunPower

  • 18:30 - Choosing Energy Over a Defense Contractor

  • 23:04 - The Congressional Fellowship

  • 25:43 - Preparing the Transition Early

  • 29:28 - Advice for Veterans Getting Out

  • 33:49 - What Energy Security Means to Him

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

]]><![CDATA[Don't Play Small with Marcus Barnes]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/dont-play-small-with-marcus-barneshttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/dont-play-small-with-marcus-barnesWed, 06 May 2026 10:09:52 GMTAbout seven percent of Americans have served in the military. The number who actually make it from a uniform into a career that fits is smaller than it should be, and the people who fall through the cracks most often are not the officers with MBAs. They’re the junior enlisted.

That’s the gap Marcus Barnes works in every day.

Marcus is a Marine Corps veteran and the Energy Program Manager at NextOp Vets, the Houston-based nonprofit Kevin has long called one of the best junior enlisted placement organizations in the sector. NextOp focuses on the E3 to E7 sweet spot, the rank range where transition is hardest and the industry’s recruiting machinery is weakest. Marcus’s specific job is to take that pipeline of talent and connect it to oil and gas, utilities, and renewables.

The conversation gets practical fast. Kevin and Marcus walk through how NextOp actually works, how employers plug in without paying to play, and where Project Vanguard’s swim lane ends and NextOp’s begins. PV builds the peer network. NextOp does the placement. The handoff matters, and most veterans don’t know either piece exists.

The other half of the episode is the human side. Marcus gets out of the Marines after six and a half years, walks into a staffing agency, and gets told his job is called HR. He didn’t know what HR was. He’s open about how often transitioning vets assume free resources are for somebody else, not them, and how much that single mindset costs people.

His parting advice is simple:

Don’t play small.

If you know a transitioning service member, especially a junior enlisted one staring at a graduation date with no plan, this is the episode to send them. And if you’re an employer in energy who keeps saying you want to hire more veterans but can’t find the pipeline, the pipeline is in here.

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Cold Open & Introducing Marcus Barnes

  • 01:56 - Where NextOp Stands Today

  • 05:03 - Why Veterans Fit Energy & Finding NextOp

  • 06:56 - Networking and Telling the Right Story

  • 11:40 - Reaching Bases & Transitioning Service Members

  • 14:26 - Project Vanguard and NextOp Swim Lanes

  • 17:31 - Sponsorship, Donations, and Funding

  • 19:10 - How Marcus Ended Up a Marine

  • 25:54 - What Transition Looks Like for Junior Enlisted Now

  • 28:30 - How to Support NextOp

  • 31:37 - Energy Security and Storm Response

  • 34:15 - Don’t Play Small & Wrap-Up

Resoures

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[Combined Arms of Energy]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/combined-arms-of-energyhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/combined-arms-of-energyFri, 01 May 2026 16:48:19 GMT

“I don’t think that it would go well for me to share my perspective. I love this industry, but nobody will like what I have to say.” I had one of my close veteran friends in the energy industry tell me this when I asked him to be on our podcast. He’s been working in solar and energy storage since leaving the Marines and has now started his own development company with some impressive financial backing. What perspective was he worried about sharing? It wasn’t his combat experience, it was his identity as a libertarian and his conservative views. He obviously hadn’t listened to the podcast, but I’ll give him a pass on that (I wouldn’t want to hear my voice either). But the fact that this successful industry executive didn’t want to be fully present is distressing.

What perspective was he worried about sharing? It wasn’t his combat experience, it was his identity as a libertarian and his conservative views.

Oil & gas is the essential backbone of our modern society and needs to be embraced and understood. Renewable energy is the fastest growing segment of the energy industry, and where I’m personally most excited to participate in the overall growth of energy in the coming decades as nearly everything gets electrified. We need both (and more) to fully execute a Combined Arms of Energy strategy and achieve true Energy Security.

I’ve noticed that when I ask folks what Energy Security means to them they can only talk about it in broad systems terms, but they often get tripped up on how to talk about it through their experiences. In the next dozen or so essays I’m going to try and lead by example in defining energy security through my personal experience so we can have other Project Vanguard members add their own stories to how our industry can talk about how energy security is national security. I think that this is a unique veteran perspective we can share with the industry, policymakers, and civilians. After all, I’m no expert in anything. But I have deployed and been successful in combat, owned an oilfield supply company for a decade, led one of the largest veteran service organizations in Texas building community among veterans, led sales for field services of utility scale operations and maintenance, and worked as the director of a think tank focused on the intersection of energy security and national security. I’m not that bright, but I have been busy. I’m not going to tell anyone what to think, but I am going to tell yall what I experienced. I hope that informs how anyone reading this thinks about energy security.

When I was in combat I loved being in the infantry, but that was only one aspect of what we called a Combined Arms philosophy. If I was going to go on a raid we also had air assets on standby, we’d prep an objective with artillery, cordon the area with tanks, assess targets using our intelligence assets, and we’d be supported by a mind boggling long logistics supply line. It took a diverse portfolio of operators and service members to execute a single raid. Our energy system is the same. It’s more secure with a diverse mix of energy generation assets. While this is something exciting and riveting to me, it also needs to be simple and unseen to everyone else.

It took a diverse portfolio of operators and service members to execute a single raid. Our energy system is the same.

Before I lay out all the aspects of energy security over the coming weeks, I want to start where I began my career in energy, my time as a light infantry platoon leader in Iraq. Two stories jump out at me when I think of energy security experiences when I was in Iraq. First, when I was living at OP Hotel in the center of the city with my platoon on overwatch of Route Michigan and a Tier 1 IED hotspot at its intersection with Easy Street and Apple. I was driving back into Camp Corregidor for a fuel run. On our way back after checking in Battalion, the guys and I were BS-ing when I heard something hitting the side of our up armored humvee. There was sporadic small arms fire from behind us. I decided we wouldn’t engage with our .50cal without being able to identify the source. But it struck me that we were burning gas, to go get gas, to run an oversized generator, to power a radio, coffee machine, and some lights. I don’t want an EV Humvee at an OP in the city. But man, a few solar panels would have been a way more secure solution. Especially looking back knowing that in Iraq 1 in 8 casualties were on fuel convoys. I can’t help thinking that we were so limited in the options we had for solving our own energy demands when I was in combat.

Energy Security is destroyed by energy scarcity.

I learned about what scarcity does to people when I was in Iraq. During the Surge and the Sunni Awakening we had calmed things down in Ramadi where I was deployed, so my platoon was moved out into a surrounding village called Juyaba. There we moved into a large house in the area that we had been using as a forward operating base. I was living with an Iraqi army company, training the officers in charge of the unit and leading contracting with the local city council. I saw firsthand how the insecurity of the war had removed the economic opportunities afforded to the local residents. As we’d go out into the neighborhoods on patrol I’d constantly hear about the lack of access to electricity. The local substation had been a launch point for a lot of raids, so of course we’d blown it up. Several times. So the only way that they could power their homes was from diesel generators, but accessing fuel was extremely difficult. We’d source fuel for some of the homes, as there were mothers with young children that were trying to keep formula cold for infants. I had to watch as these people had to make hard choices with their children’s lives on the line. When I think of Energy Security I think of those parents and how their energy scarcity created so much insecurity in their lives. I don’t want to see that happen in America.

When I think of Energy Security I think of those parents and how their energy scarcity created so much insecurity in their lives. I don’t want to see that happen in America.

We need energy abundance, not scarcity. If you think this only applied to combat situations or countries far from our shores then you’re wrong. I’ve seen fist fights after hurricanes in Houston when gas stations run out and there’s long lines to get gas. There’s an old saying that every civilization is three meals from barbarism, well it also applies to our need for energy.

We need a Combined Arms approach that derisks our energy system by not being constrained by any single energy source. The wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t always shine, and the market for global commodities in oil & gas isn’t always reliable. We need to invest in all of it or we risk our energy security, and thereby our national security and the safety of our families. Energy security is national security.

This is the first in the series of essays I’m planning to write. Here’s what you can expect to read in the coming weeks on this subject.

  • Essay 1: Combined Arms of Energy (launch)

  • Essay 2: Scarcity Creates Conflict (more Iraq stories)

  • Essay 3: The False Binary (my O&G vs renewables experience)

  • Essay 4: The Element They Won’t Defend (renewables needs O&G)

  • Essay 5: The Element They Won’t Attack (nuclear)

  • Essay 6: Resilience Starts at Home (my microgrid)

  • Essay 7: The Lost Coalition (hippies, preppers, and pot growers)

  • Essay 8: The Force We’re Not Training (veteran workforce challenges)

  • Essay 9: The Community That Didn’t Exist (why project vanguard resonates)

  • Essay 10: The Operations Order (the mission ahead)

As I continue this series feel free to reach out and share your own stories from the military and industry about energy security. I’d love to hear from you. Comment below or email me at kevin@projectvanguard.com

]]><![CDATA[Take a Risk on Yourself with Laura Gardner]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/take-a-risk-on-yourself-with-laurahttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/take-a-risk-on-yourself-with-lauraWed, 22 Apr 2026 20:20:43 GMTLaura Gardner enlisted in the Army Reserves at 17. She was one of 11 kids, seven of whom served. She didn’t have a grand plan. She needed one. Her parents kept sending recruiters to her job at a pool supply store until she finally said yes.

She started in postal operations, then switched her MOS to chemical warfare when she moved to Houston. After the military, she went into oil and gas, managing subsea drilling systems and complex field operations at TechnipFMC. Today she’s the CTO of Nova Source Power Services, leading technology for solar and battery storage.

That path matters here because Kevin and Laura both came up through oil and gas, and they get into why that background is an actual advantage in newer energy sectors. The operational discipline and the project management instincts carry forward. Laura also gets into what she’s seeing on the technology side: companies want the AI solution before they’ve fixed the process or the data underneath it. As she puts it, everyone skips the boring stuff, and that’s where things break.

But the thread running through this whole episode is Laura’s message to veterans considering the energy industry: you already know how to do this. You’ve moved from base to base, changed jobs on short notice, and figured it out every time. The structure is the same. The values are the same. It’s just a different boss.

Laura recently joined the Project Vanguard advisory board. In this episode she sits down with Kevin to talk about what she tells transitioning service members at career events, why leaving your comfort zone gets easier after the first time, and what the energy industry needs from people who’ve served.

Project Vanguard Podcast is produced by ClarityForge Studios.

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Laura Gardner

  • 01:38 - Meeting at CERAWeek & Oil and Gas Roots

  • 04:01 - Digital Twins and Technology Adoption

  • 08:22 - Moving from Oil and Gas to Solar

  • 12:38 - AI Adoption and Skipping the Boring Stuff

  • 15:15 - Joining the Military at 17

  • 17:07 - From Postal Operations to Chemical Warfare

  • 21:21 - Deciding to Get Out

  • 26:00 - Veterans Transitioning into Energy

  • 28:32 - Advisory Board & Community Leaders

  • 29:35 - Take a Risk on Yourself

  • 33:28 - Advice for Getting into the Energy Industry

  • 38:57 - Rapid Fire & Closing

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[Power Is Not Political with Frank Macchiarola]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/power-is-not-political-with-frankhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/power-is-not-political-with-frankWed, 15 Apr 2026 10:08:07 GMTEnergy has a messenger problem. Not a technology problem, not a cost problem, not even a policy problem at its core. The people doing the work and building the projects are winning. The people telling the story are struggling.

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Frank Macchiarola has spent 20 years on the advocacy side of energy, first at the American Petroleum Institute and now as Chief Advocacy Officer at American Clean Power. He has worked both sides of the fuel spectrum and both chambers of Congress. When he says the divisions in energy used to be geographic, not partisan, he is speaking from direct experience. And when he says that shift is now the single biggest obstacle to building what the country needs, it carries weight that cable news commentary never will.

Frank is also the first non-veteran to sit down on this podcast. That was intentional. The advocacy and external affairs lane in energy is one veterans should know about, and Frank’s perspective on what actually moves policymakers connects directly to the grassroots work Project Vanguard is building.

One of the sharpest moments in the conversation is Frank’s case that renewables and oil & gas are not actually in market competition right now. Demand growth from AI, data centers, and domestic manufacturing is so large that every resource is needed. The political war between fuels does not match the reality on the ground. Frank lived that reality at API. He is living it now at ACP.

A former boss of his used to share an anecdote from a senator:

“I always vote with my favorite lobbyist until I hear from my constituent.”

That line sits underneath the entire conversation. Who shows up matters more than who has access. Veterans, landowners, frontline workers, local business owners. Those are the voices that stop a legislator in their tracks. Frank explains why, and what ACP’s Power Votes program is doing to put that principle into practice at scale.

We also get into what the external affairs career pathway looks like for veterans and why Frank’s best piece of career advice cuts against most of the guidance people hear during transition.

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Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Frank Macchiarola

  • 01:41 - ACP’s Role in Clean Energy Advocacy

  • 03:31 - How Energy Became a Political Football

  • 06:59 - Energy Security as National Security

  • 10:30 - Renewables and Oil & Gas Are Not in Conflict

  • 13:35 - Why the Messaging Still Gets Mired

  • 17:56 - Power Votes and Grassroots Advocacy

  • 23:16 - Constituents as the Real Messengers

  • 29:19 - Authentic Voices on the Ground

  • 33:38 - Showing Up with Facts and Data

  • 36:04 - Clean Energy’s Competitive Position

  • 38:54 - External Affairs as a Career for Veterans

  • 43:33 - Closing

Resources

People & Organizations

Organizations Discussed

Company & Industry News

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[From Sea Daddy to Mrs. Virginia with Lourdes Spurlock]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/from-sea-daddy-to-mrs-virginia-withhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/from-sea-daddy-to-mrs-virginia-withWed, 08 Apr 2026 10:09:40 GMTLourdes Spurlock spent six years in the Navy running nuclear reactors. She was one of a handful of women on board, trained by male mentors who held her to the same standard as everyone else, and she came out the other side with thick skin, dark humor, and zero idea how to have a normal conversation with civilian women.

So she entered a pageant.

Not because she wanted a crown. Because she needed to relearn how to exist outside the military. How to dress for an interview. How to talk to people who didn’t get the joke. How to stop being the person nobody invites out a second time. Pageants became etiquette training, community access, and eventually a platform. She’s now Mrs. Virginia International 2026, and her platform is renewable energy, STEM, and veteran support.

That alone would be a good story. But this conversation goes further. Lourdes talks about what it actually feels like to leave a world where your coworkers check on you over the weekend and enter one where nobody asks how your three-day went. She talks about choosing a smaller pond on purpose, spending nine years at Newport News Shipyard building nuclear carriers before jumping into wind energy. And she makes the case that veterans don’t need more certifications to lead in this industry. They need to know what they bring and be willing to say it out loud in 30 seconds or less.

There’s a moment where Kevin asks what she wants to see happen with Project Vanguard’s fellowship over the next year. Her answer is direct: more women. Not as a talking point. Because she knows what it’s like to be the only one in the room and have nobody who gets it.

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Lourdes Spurlock

  • 01:30 - Legislative Days in Virginia & Oklahoma

  • 03:47 - Social Media & LinkedIn for Veterans

  • 05:25 - Getting a Screening Call, Not a Job

  • 07:48 - Building a Network Through Community

  • 09:13 - Mrs. Virginia International 2026

  • 10:28 - From Navy Nuke to Pageant Stage

  • 13:37 - Finding Mentors by Asking Why

  • 15:38 - Sea Daddies & Navy Mentorship Culture

  • 16:56 - Joining the Military & Newport News

  • 18:54 - Find the Small Pond First

  • 22:53 - More Women in the Fellowship

  • 27:28 - Your Story Is the Product

  • 29:28 - Advice for Veterans Entering Energy

  • 33:21 - Don’t Be Scared to Be the Only Woman

Resources

People & Organizations Mentioned

Company & Industry News

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[Training the Energy Workforce with Nick Martocci]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/training-the-energy-workforce-withhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/training-the-energy-workforce-withWed, 01 Apr 2026 10:03:46 GMTA lot of talk about energy stays stuck in the clouds. This conversation stays closer to the ground.

I sit down with Nick Martocci, a Marine turned Army National Guard pilot turned renewable energy trainer, to talk about the part of the industry people often miss: the actual workforce behind it. Not the slogans. Not the social media food fight. The work.

What comes through in this episode is how naturally veterans can fit into energy when the path is made visible. Nick lays out why the field feels familiar to so many former service members. Small teams. Safety. Mission execution. Logistics. Reliability. Taking care of the person to your left and right.

That matters because this is not just about helping veterans land jobs. It is about building a workforce that can keep critical infrastructure running, adapt to new technologies, and strengthen the systems the country depends on. Project Vanguard has been clear that veterans are trusted messengers and practical builders in this space, especially when the conversation stays focused on people, projects, and policies instead of political theater.

A few things make this episode worth your time:

  • Nick explains why energy work, especially in wind and storage, can be a real long-term fit for veterans

  • He gets specific about training, apprenticeships, and what companies actually need

  • He makes the case that energy security is not just about generation, but about workforce readiness and protection of the grid

One of the strongest threads here is that veterans do not need vague encouragement. They need clear pathways, real standards, and people willing to lower the ladder once they’ve climbed it. That sits right in the middle of Project Vanguard’s broader mission to connect veteran credibility with workforce opportunity and American energy strength.

This episode is useful for veterans looking for their next move, for employers thinking harder about talent pipelines, and for anyone who says they care about energy security but has not spent much time thinking about who actually does the work.

Resources

People & Organizations:

Company & Industry News

Books & Articles Discussed

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[The Cost of Energy Chaos with Joshua Bice]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/joshua-bicehttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/joshua-biceWed, 25 Mar 2026 10:03:29 GMTThe problem is not that America lacks energy resources.

The problem is that we keep treating a long-horizon infrastructure challenge like a short-term political argument.

In this conversation, Joshua Bice helps put a finer point on something Project Vanguard keeps coming back to: energy security is national security. Not as a bumper sticker. As a practical reality.

When Josh talks about the projects being built right now, he is not describing some clean-vs-conventional fantasy debate. He is describing large, real-world resiliency plays where natural gas, storage, renewables, interconnection, regulation, and industrial load growth are all colliding at once. That is especially true as AI drives bigger and more power-hungry facilities into the system.

The sharpest turn in the episode comes when the conversation moves from engineering to investment.

Josh’s point is simple: scared money does not invest. If policy swings every election cycle, capital gets cautious, timelines stretch, and the country loses ground on the very infrastructure it says it wants to build. That is not just a market problem. It is a national strength problem.

That is also where the veteran piece matters.

Kevin and Josh get at something bigger than workforce stats. Veterans tend to understand operational discipline, mission focus, risk mitigation, and long-term responsibility. In an industry that runs on reliability and trust, that matters. Project Vanguard’s broader case is that veterans are not just a hiring pool. They are credible messengers for a more grounded energy conversation.

A few threads run through this one:

  • energy abundance without purity politics

  • policy consistency as a condition for serious investment

  • veteran credibility as an asset in public persuasion

The unresolved question hanging over the episode is the right one: can the country build a stable framework before politics keeps chasing capital off the field?

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction

  • 01:37 - Project Vanguard Growth

  • 07:52 - Energy Underground in Houston

  • 12:50 - What Energy Security Means

  • 14:08 - Why Veterans Fit Energy

  • 17:27 - Partisanship and Policy Risk

  • 18:38 - Veterans as Trusted Voices

  • 19:39 - Josh’s Enlistment Story

  • 23:05 - Getting Out and Finding Direction

  • 23:52 - Breaking Into Energy in Latin America

  • 31:11 - Follow-Through, Trust, and Reputation

  • 32:39 - Advice for Veterans Entering Energy

  • 37:05 - Final Thoughts and Outro

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

Books & Articles Discussed

]]><![CDATA[The Network After Service with Ken Webre]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/the-network-after-service-with-kenhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/the-network-after-service-with-kenWed, 18 Mar 2026 10:08:51 GMTA lot of veterans do not struggle because they lack discipline, grit, or work ethic.

They struggle because the structure disappears, the signal gets noisy, and nobody gives them a clear map for what comes next.

That is the real center of this conversation with Ken Webre, the Director of Business Development for W-Industries.

Ken has spent decades in the electrical and power world, but what makes this episode worth your time is not just his industry background. It is the way he talks about transition without dressing it up. When he came out of the Navy, there was no giant network waiting for him. No clear translation from military experience to civilian work. No obvious playbook. He leaned on family, figured it out, and built a long career in electrical leadership from there.

What makes that story matter now is that the problem has changed shape, but not substance.

Today’s veterans have more information than ever. They can search anything, join anything, take any course, chase any credential. But that can become its own trap. More options do not automatically create more clarity. Sometimes they just make it easier to get lost.

That is where this conversation lands squarely in Project Vanguard territory:

  • trusted guidance matters more than generic advice

  • curiosity beats posturing

  • careers in energy become real when someone helps connect the dots

One of the strongest threads in the episode is Ken’s point that veterans should not lose themselves trying to fit somebody else’s mold. Show up. Be honest. Stay curious. Treat the work like it matters. That sounds simple, but it cuts against a lot of the bad advice people get when they are trying to build a second life after service.

This is also why Project Vanguard matters. Not as a slogan, and not as a feel-good veteran brand, but as a place where people can get real direction from others who have already made the jump. That fits the broader mission: veteran credibility, workforce opportunity, and practical leadership in an industry that actually builds things. That framing is consistent with Project Vanguard’s stated focus on veterans as trusted messengers and on connecting service members to energy careers.

The bigger question sitting underneath this episode is simple: how many veterans are still making major life decisions with too little signal and not enough trusted people in the room?

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Ken Webre

  • 02:19 - Ken’s Role at W-Industries

  • 03:41 - Energy Infrastructure, Not Ideology

  • 07:23 - Listening, Sales & Learning the Business

  • 10:22 - Louisiana Projects & Community Leadership

  • 13:06 - Batteries, Transmission & Grid Resilience

  • 17:36 - Joining the Navy & Early Service

  • 24:38 - Transitioning Out & Finding Electrical Work

  • 27:15 - Leadership, Motivation & Feeling Lost

  • 29:57 - Project Vanguard, Curiosity & Trusted Guidance

  • 32:37 - Honesty, Ownership & Why Veterans Succeed

  • 34:02 - Louisiana Event, Slack Community & Wrap-Up

Resources

People & Organizations:

Company & Industry News

Related Podcasts by Project Vanguard

Related Substack Posts by Kevin

]]><![CDATA[Building Energy From Experience with Jon Powers]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/building-energy-from-experience-withhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/building-energy-from-experience-withThu, 12 Mar 2026 10:03:35 GMTA lot of veterans leave the military knowing they can lead, solve problems, and operate under pressure, but not always knowing where those skills fit next.

That is the center of this conversation with Jon Powers, the Co-Founder of Clean Capital.

This episode is not just a walk through one man’s resume. It is a look at how military experience can turn into energy leadership, and why that matters far beyond one career path. Jon talks through the road from Iraq to Washington, from Operation Free to CleanCapital, and how the national security case for energy became real to him long before it became a talking point.

What makes this one worth your time is that it stays grounded. Jon is not speaking in abstractions. He is talking about fuel convoys, solar on base, propane shortages, and the kind of practical energy problems that stop feeling theoretical the moment people’s lives depend on them. That is where the conversation gets its weight.

It also lines up cleanly with a core Project Vanguard idea: veterans are credible messengers in energy not because they have the slickest talking points, but because they have lived close to the consequences of bad systems and fragile infrastructure. Project Vanguard’s broader case is that veterans can help move the conversation past purity politics and toward energy security, workforce opportunity, and all-of-the-above realism. This episode gives that argument a real human spine.

A few threads run through the whole discussion:

  • how service can translate into leadership in a new industry

  • why energy becomes a national security issue long before it becomes a political one

  • where veterans may be underestimating how valuable their skills really are

The part I would not give away too cheaply is Jon’s advice to veterans looking at the industry now. It is simple, but it cuts against the hesitation a lot of people carry when they leave the military and try to picture themselves in finance, development, or leadership roles.

If you care about veteran transition, American energy, or how serious people actually build second careers with purpose, this one earns the listen.

Timestamps

  • 00:00 - Introduction & Jon Powers

  • 01:31 - Kevin Johnson and the Early Network

  • 02:46 - Operation Free and John Warner

  • 10:16 - From Pentagon to CleanCapital

  • 15:37 - Why Jon Joined the Army

  • 17:05 - Coming Home and Path to Movies

  • 20:10 - Working With Iraqi Youth

  • 22:56 - How Middle East War Shaped Their Energy View

  • 25:14 - Advice for Veterans Entering Energy

  • 29:49 - Veteran Networks and Honest Translation

Resources

People & Organizations

Company & Industry News

  • CleanCapital Secures $300M HoldCo Facility with Infranity (Website)

  • CleanCapital Acquires 64 Solar and Energy Storage Projects From Greenbacker (Website)

  • US clean power groups turn to longer deals to finance growth (Reuters)

  • Solar and storage accounted for 84% of new US power added in 2024, report says (Reuters)

Books & Articles Discussed

  • Gunner Palace (Website)

  • Veterans push for climate bill with new Operation Free coalition (Grist)

]]><![CDATA[Landmen, Data Centers, and Hard Truths with Rickey Stuchell]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/landmen-data-centers-and-hard-truthshttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/landmen-data-centers-and-hard-truthsWed, 04 Mar 2026 11:04:14 GMTMost people argue energy like it’s a scoreboard.

But the work lives somewhere else, out in the counties, across kitchen tables, inside contracts that feel longer than a deployment.

In this episode, Rickey Stuchell breaks down the side of the industry that decides whether anything ever gets built. The land side.

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Energy parks are the new chess move

Rickey describes a model that feels like a next-phase strategy: developers bundling generation, storage, and data center load onto the same massive footprint.

Not a single project, more like an ecosystem with fences.

Why not go purchase or lease 2,000 acres where they can build a solar farm or a wind farm, put battery storage on it, and then add four or five million square feet of data center. - Rickey Stuchell

What a land team really is (and why veterans fit)

Rickey breaks the land team into three roles, and it maps cleanly onto how veterans already think:

  • Agents: boots on the ground with landowners

  • Project managers: orchestrating the negotiation and the chaos

  • Technicians: the document pros who keep everything correct (and keep everyone honest)

This is not a “paperwork job.” It’s relationship and pressure work, and you hear that in how he recruits. Sometimes he hires experience.

Rickey’s why is simple: helping vets find their next mission.

And the advice Rickey gives is the stuff that actually works:
Listen first. Learn the acronyms. Don’t be afraid to introduce yourself.

Final Thoughts

If you want to understand why projects stall, why timelines slip, and why the loudest online takes usually miss the point, this episode is for you.

The land side is where the work gets done. Rickey lives there, and he explains it in plain language, with the kind of calm confidence you only get from doing the job.

If you’re a veteran eyeing the industry, or a civilian who wants a clearer view of how this actually happens, go listen. And if you’ve ever had to earn trust across a table, you’ll recognize the skillset immediately.

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]]><![CDATA[Veterans, Policy, and the Hidden Energy Battlefield with Michael Dunn]]>https://media.projectvanguard.com/p/veterans-policy-and-the-hidden-energyhttps://media.projectvanguard.com/p/veterans-policy-and-the-hidden-energyWed, 25 Feb 2026 11:03:08 GMTMost people think clean energy is about technology.

It is not. Or at least not only that.

It is about who understands systems, who can navigate policy, and who can bring unlikely groups into the same room.

In this episode of Project Vanguard, I talk with Michael Dunn, a veteran who stumbled into clean energy through necessity, curiosity, and a relentless habit of saying yes.

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Michael did not set out to work in policy or markets.

He joined the military to pay for school.
He entered consulting to find direction.
He moved into clean energy because it was one of the few spaces where mission, economics, and national security intersect.

Along the way, he discovered something most energy conversations miss:

Power does not shift because of slogans.
It shifts because of coordination.

The conversation explores why veterans are uniquely positioned to influence the energy transition, how policy quietly shapes every market decision, and why coalition building may be more important than any single technology.

At its core, this episode is not about career advice or clean energy optimism.

It is about leverage.

Who has it.
How it is built.
And why the next decade of energy will be shaped less by engineers and more by people who understand how systems actually move.

If you want to understand how power really flows through the energy industry, this episode is worth your time.

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Timestamps

  • 00:05 – Why Veterans Matter in Energy

  • 02:20 – Michael’s Entry into Energy Policy

  • 03:20 – CELI and Fellowship Opportunities

  • 05:20 – Working at Qcells, Policy in Practice

  • 07:22 – Coalition Building in DC

  • 12:00 – Dropping Out and Enlisting

  • 14:26 – Military as Social Mobility

  • 16:06 – Education While Serving

  • 18:12 – Georgetown MBA to Energy Career

  • 22:33 – Atlantic Council and Strategic Focus

  • 27:50 – Advice for Veterans Breaking In

  • 30:00 – Using Project Vanguard Effectively

  • 34:57 – Closing Thoughts and Call to Action

Resources

Guest & Company

Topics Discussed

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