Bill Cappel and Kyle Slagle with Cross Discipline Engineering

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

kyle, standards, power, utility, client, bill, innovation, years, solutions, systems, problem, industrial, coming, engineering, updating, solve, cde, talk, world, move

00:00

Scott, welcome to the Industrial Talk Podcast with Scott. MacKenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting-edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots, and let's get all right once again.

00:22

Welcome to Industrial Talk. Thank you very much for joining the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates industry professionals all around the world. You are bold, you are brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you solve problems, and that's why you are changing the world each and every day. If you can tell by the buzz in the background, we are at distribute tech. This is Orlando, Florida, and it is a collection of problem solvers within the utility, space, power, you name it. It's here. I'm just stuck in the salt mine. I won't be able to walk around, which is just a very depressing thought. However, I can handle it in the hot seat. We have two we have two from cross discipline, engineering, one, Bill Cappel, don't, you know, see, you corrected me. Very good. Yeah. And Kyle Slagle,

01:15

Slagle.

01:16

Slagle got it all. We threw

01:18

in the curveball with the names, right?

01:21

Which is, which is a common challenge? How you guys doing today, having a good conference?

01:27

Great, yes.

01:28

So you've been to this conference a couple of times, correct? What makes it a good conference?

01:36

I'll tell you what. Sorry, just for

01:38

a point of I should say, Kyle, what makes it a good conference? That would be the professional thing I should do. You

01:46

bet we can volley back and forth. It's good. But coming, you know, the last few years I've been here, the networking is what's good. Lots of new solutions out here, lots of people to talk to innovations happening all around us. And if you want to know where you're lacking or where you're leading. This is a place you can find it here.

02:03

Sure, I just had a conversation with a gentleman by the name of Jim, and it was, we were just talking about the industry in general, about all of the technology, the innovation that is happening and and of the solutions that can exist here. It's, it's nuts, it's and it's happening at a rapid pace. I, again, way above my pay grade. So let's start with a little background. Kyle, we start with you. Give us a little background on who you are,

02:31

all right? Well, I tell you, I'm a Solutions expert looking to partner with folks to find solutions to your problems. And I know that's a broad range, right? But in the power industry, what we find is there's so many things available, but if you don't know, then you don't know. And so talking with folks trying to figure out what their problem is, that becomes my niche, right? What is your problem? And then I go to work with the team behind me to figure out what's the solution we can bring to you. You know, full line of engineering service behind us, across discipline engineering, right in the power space. And so we're seeing a lot of stuff. We're out here finding the new stuff. And so that's what I do, that's my background, is to try and find the problem and then go to solving it.

03:13

But did you? Did you have a utility background? I

03:16

did as

03:17

a boy.

03:19

Well, not as a boy, maybe, but as a younger, as a younger me, I did spend 14 years with an IOU. When I left that company a few years back, system operator, that's right, I left there as Director of Engineering, and so a lot of experience in trying to solve problems from that, from the IOU side, and now helping

03:39

See, here's the deal with the IOU, with all of the changes that are taking place within the just grid management. Yes, I don't my background is utilities. I was a transmission lineman back then. It was pretty straightforward. Power transmission distribution. Don't make the lights go out there. It is pretty simple business model. But nowadays, how do you match supply and demand? I can't tell you. Bill backgrounds. Yeah,

04:10

I am our Director of Field Services for cross discipline, engineering and on the field services side, it's out in the field. We got retired linemen. We've got young guys getting out, doing construction, observation, field work, data collection, so on and so forth. Before your unretired military, as in 21 years in the CBS, mow, Tilty support equipment, mobile power plant, mobile substations. We move them anywhere in the world, operate them, test them, maintain them. Give power to where facilities cold iron sports, so on and so forth. So I did that for quite a long time. It's retired back in 17 and been in CDE basically ever since you

04:50

stay Kyle. That's cool. That's cool story.

04:53

I know, I know. I love it.

04:55

Well. Thank you for your service. Thank you so let's talk a little bit about. Engineering, many of the conversations that I've had so far revolve around that innovation trying to be carbon neutral. What are the strategies associated with that and and how do you keep the lights from flickering, keep them on, you know, safe, reliable power, right? Kyle, what? What do? Where do we begin? Okay, Bill,

05:24

it's hard. You're

05:27

right. He's like, Oh, man, that's a little question.

05:31

We really got to start with the goal, right? Like you said, we're trying to solve problems for so many goals all at once. We have to pick a priority, right? And there can be priority two goals. But there has to be one goal you're trying to hit when you can solve that you can move on to others. But when you're trying to solve everything you just mentioned all at once, it becomes a big, massive problem that is almost too complex. But you start with the top and you move down slowly, progressively through the goals you want to hit. So where we're starting really, is what is the ultimate goal. Some people are really trying to be carbon neutral, but some people are saying, I want to be carbon neutral, but I don't want to spend any money. Those two are hard. Yeah, I

06:09

was just going to say, good luck. That's

06:10

right. That's right. So, so we really got to say, Okay, what's the priority here? What are we trying to solve? We can find solutions. It's about implementation. In the end,

06:20

what about you? Bill, what do you see you in you in agreement with our friend,

06:26

I am, at the end of the day, the potential client, or the client, the utility, whatever you want to call them, they have to identify what their needs are, and we cannot sacrifice reliability, right? No. And so that's, that's one of the biggest issues, is, how do we move towards carbon neutral without sacrificing reliability? And we don't want to necessarily pay for it, or we don't want to have exorbitant costs coming associated with that. So we have to identify, like Kyle was saying, we have to identify the problem, their main problem that they want to solve, assist that client and solving that problem and then moving them from there.

07:03

But don't you have to understand where the market is going, relatively speaking, and the demands that are being placed on the market to be able to guide your client in a way that makes sense. The problem that I might see is relevant to me and not to diminish it might not be a real long term type of solution that is necessary to achieve or to deal with the pressures of the market. You agree? Cop,

07:30

yeah, I agree. And I think that one thing I didn't say, and I really want to add in here, is where we start is to realize that we're trying to make a massive shift, and it's not going to happen in one year, right? So many times we're trying to combine all these things, we need to make steps in the right direction, and that's going to lead us down the right path, and that actually gets us back to where the problem is manageable, right? And you can, you can now address what you're trying to do for your customers, right as a utility while you're making steps in the right direction.

08:02

There are so many. For example, whenever I look at what's taking place in the market, and looking at all of the real innovation and the changes that are being pushed into the market itself, if I was an executive, if I was king for the day, I would be overwhelmed. And I would be overwhelmed in such a way, bill that I wouldn't know where to focus. Do you guys take your clients through it's like, okay, I got it. I hear you. You've got this, this, this, this, this, and this, and, oh, by the way, you saw this on the internet. Now you have that problem. Do you? Do you in a way, help me travel that road?

08:46

Absolutely. And thank you for the question. You know, part of our our paradigm with CDE is we have four, four steps in the process, right? The first step is to understand and we have to be able to work with our client. We have to understand what are their concerns, and to be able to address those and so the first step is to understand. The second part is going to be to anticipate, so trying to anticipate what, what we need to do to help them achieve whatever outcome that they're trying to achieve, from a design side, from a reliability side, it doesn't matter. And then we have to communicate those expectations, or what we think is their needs back to that client, and then we help them execute. And that's the loop that we try to bring the client in and work them through that process, understand, communicate, anticipate and execute. And that works really, really well for

09:34

us. See it should work very well with whatever industry, because that makes sense, because there's, there's constant, how do you Kyle deal with and work with the regulatory side of these decisions? Because again, I don't want to I don't want to spend money. I want to come home. I want to flip my switch. I want to turn on my computer. I want to watch a. Movie, whatever it might be. But then to achieve some of these requirements require, well, money, great case stuff. You guys, how do you? How do you sort of navigate those wild

10:16

Yeah, so I say there's a couple ways. Right. The regulatory body body is what it is, and those rules are what they are. Now, some people that want to go home and flip the switch watch their Netflix, they can vote, right? They have a way to go out and vote and change those policies if they want, and if they don't, we end up following the rules, right, helping our clients make sure they're within the rules, but also anticipating what rule changes might come in the future, right? So that we're not doing a project, and then five years later you have to undo or redo what's going on. So that's part of the anticipation phase. And it's really about asking your clients to get out there and be proactive with a regulatory body, right? Understand where they're going, and understand where the barriers or the rules are today, because they are shifting. They're constantly shifting in the environment today, and a lot of it has to do with the speed, right? We talked about how fast people want to move to the new solutions. Regulatory bodies are, you know, not only behind, not

11:10

known for being nimble. No, that's right. Nimble. Regulator, new Jumbo. She's

11:15

not right. This

11:16

isn't right.

11:19

But, yeah, there's, there's a lot of five year and 10 year goals out there that will see a lot of regulatory change, you know, compared to the last 50 years. So it is very important that we build that into our solutions, and at least understand what's coming down the pike from that perspective. With

11:35

that said, and you sort of run the blanket across your your client base, what are some of the challenges bubble up? What are they saying? Gosh, I need whatever bill.

11:56

No standards. Standard verification is a huge one, right? Standard, standardization, right? Making sure that your standards are up to date. We were just, yeah, actually, Kyle and I were just talking about that a little bit ago. You know, a lot of utilities, their standards may be 3040, 50 years old, done back in the 60s, and trying to help them bring their standards up to date, bring them into from a given

12:18

example, like a standard.

12:22

Our us, right? Our US standards. If you're talking what 14 four to 20 was it 2400 or 24,000 volts, having a standard for a distribution structure, right? They can have a very basic, very basic level of a standard in in the RUS document I'm just using as an example, and you can see on the cooperative side of the house, it's pretty much the same. Whether it's dash or.is immaterial, but roughly stays the same. Then you can have an IOU or maybe a different client that have really old centers just really have not updated it into newer technologies. And that's one of the areas that CDE we can help those clients out with, is updating their individual standards on the electrical side, was it rural unification standards, and so being able to update their individual standards to meet today's requirements, to be able to apply them to designs or drawings or engineering practices. So that's one of those areas where we're seeing clients or utilities need that assistance. It's just updating. That's a basic thing, updating their systems. Or standards,

13:34

go ahead,

13:35

yeah? Something as simple, I just go to this is the concrete mixes and steel you put in your substations. Yeah? All right, some of the standards we're looking at are 1975 right? That's early. That's right, it is. But you know, the transformer manufacturers, they've changed how they're doing steel when you get a transformer, and so they're fitting different you need to adjust those to what the new technology is producing. We're producing different products today, and yet we're using these old standards. And so what it does is it causes a problem during construction, right? Or it causes, it causes you have to go into every single project and update, build a material list, because it's not the same provider that it was in 1975 the utility space, you know, is just as in the other industry, is short, right? On people, right? There's a lot of people out there, but we don't have enough people in the utility space to keep utility space to keep up with that. So sometimes that gets left to the very back burner. It's getting to a point now where we have to address it.

14:31

That was a fascinating observation. I didn't I work with an organization on standards, but not those type of standards, and people don't realize how important standards are like that, that consistent, yes, idea of how to do certain things, and does it mesh together? And everybody's sort of rowing in the same direction. Here's an ISO question. So my my knowledge of the utilities back when I was a transmission. Lineman is pretty straightforward, power transmission, distribution, boom, home or wherever it is. And then in the the world of the system operator, they would say, okay, supply, demand, I'm matching it. It's all good. Everything's fine, because that's that's important. How do they do it today? How? How do they manage supply, demand and all of the stuff that's so dynamic on the system? Yeah,

15:30

so today, they're raising it to a higher level. A lot of automated machinery, like technology coming in that's adjusting that on the fly at the power pool level is really what's being managed today, not necessarily at the individual utility level, which is good, right? And that's all good, but putting in the infrastructure so that when the power pool calls for it, rather than making phone calls and double checking and triple checking, you still have to do those things. But there are some protocols in place where you can just make the automatic adjustment so the power pool can adjust the power plant directly, if it's already online, to what it needs and what it's seeing for, for forecasting,

16:02

yeah, because I, I, again, there's a lot of this stuff is way above my pay grade, and I was, I was just very, just rudimentary in my way of looking at the grid and how it works, and it made sense and when, when it was back, then it's like, Nope, no power. But it gets to that innovation. It gets to that the technology to be able to do, to deal with that in a dynamic way,

16:31

right? And it's no different, you know, we see the AI wave coming in, right? Yeah, it was. It's no different than that. You're just accumulating data at a higher level and letting you know today we have operators make those decisions or overseeing the decisions being made by the systems, right? And the more that technology comes in, the more automated it gets. And so what it's doing is it's making, it's making us have more specific, detailed knowledge, you know, for an employee to run that system, but you need fewer of them, right, right? But bringing in very specified knowledge, which is going to make it hard to get those operators as well in the future, right? There's fewer jobs. There's few people going down a path, because you can use fewer people, but that becomes another bottleneck down the road. Oh, yeah,

17:15

if not just risk, just,

17:17

I agree. Risk, yeah. Now it used to be possible to start some of these power systems, especially some of the water systems, you know, without the electricity and all manual dials, all manual levers, right? And we're changing now. There's very few that are left that way, you need some type of electric and so we're putting it back up electric systems, right? But it's not something that you just go in there, pull a few dials, pull a few levers and put this thing online manually anymore.

17:42

Wow. Bill, how do people get a hold of you?

17:46

So our main, main area is going to be through our website, crossesplin.com that's going to be the easy way to get ahold of us. So feel free get on our website. Take a look, reach out to us. There is a connect button there, and we'll be getting back in touch with, are

18:00

you on LinkedIn?

18:01

We are. We've been posting for distribute tech 24 as well. So feel free to find us there.

18:07

Kyle, you are on LinkedIn?

18:08

I'm on LinkedIn, yes,

18:09

you guys are active on LinkedIn. Yes, sir. Across

18:15

the split on LinkedIn is monitored Absolutely.

18:19

You guys are great, man. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. All right, we're going to have all the contact information for these two gents out on Industrial Talk, So fear not reach out to them, as long as as well as their well with cross discipline. So glad you got that URL cross discipline. That's pretty good. All right, we're broadcasting from distribute tech here in Orlando, Ford. It is a collection of problem solvers, as you can tell by Bill and Kyle, problem solving is the name of the game. All right, we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back. You're

18:54

listening to the Industrial Talk Podcast Network. You

19:02

bill. That's Kyle. That's Bill cross discipline. Engineering is the organization we were on site distribute tech. And of course, there's power gen two. They're both sort of one in the same sort of but if you're in the world of power, if you're in the world of utilities and energy and all of that good stuff, those two events, distribute tech, power Gen must attend Mad, Mad innovations taking place in those markets. Big time. All right. Contact information for those two gents out on Industrial Talk. Let's say you have a podcast. You want greater attention you want, greater attraction to what you are saying. Put it out on Industrial Talk. That's what it's there for. That platform is there for you. You have a technology, you have solutions. Put it out on Industrial Talk. We're here specifically to get that message out. That's our purpose. We want you to see. Exceed please join the ecosystem. All right. Be bold, be brave, dear greatly. Hang out with Bill and Kyle. Change the world. We're going to have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned. You.