Kevin Kucera with RPM Electric

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Distribute Tech, industrial innovations, safety, grid hardening, medium voltage, electromagnetic pulse, EMP protection, utility show, electrical industry, safety issues, hydrogen sulfide, vault safety, climbing linemen, Siemens, smart infrastructure.

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

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let's go all right once again, day three here at distribute tech, and it is in Dallas, Texas, and it is a collection of problem solvers. And thank you very much for joining industrial talk, the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you industry professionals all around the world. You're bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate. You are solving problems each and every day. We thank you very much for what you do. That's why you are the heroes in this story. We're also brought to you by Siemens. Smart infrastructure and grid software. Go out to siemens.com Great people, great company, great solutions. Go out to siemens.com find out more, you will be pleasantly pleased with all of the offerings. All right, in the hot seat. He's been on the hot seat before. Kevin, how do you say your last name? Coachera. Coach era. See, I would have butchered that, just FYI, just but now I now I know Coach era, and we're going to be talking a little bit about safety. We're going to be talking about what he's been experienced here at the at distribute tech, as well as his company. So let's get a chi rack. Let's get cracking. Let's get cracking. So they stole that from me, because I've been saying that for a long time. So they stole let's get

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out of crack. And yeah,

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they stole it from me. So I should be earning royalties. I got that. I don't. I'm sure I'm not going to see a penny. Not today. Hey, it's day three.

01:49

What's it been a great show so far? That isn't sure. Yeah, what activity? 600 booths, 18,000 people, Clarion, really,

01:56

you got the data? I didn't. It's, I've been stuck in the salt mine. I know that there's been a lot of people, but, man, that's pretty impressive.

02:02

It's just a zoo out there. It's crawling

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with people. It's, it's, it's big business.

02:09

It is big business. This is incredible. It's probably the number one show on earth, honestly, for utility. I'm guessing, if it's not, it's very close. It's very impressive.

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I don't, I don't know of any other one, I really and given the conversations that I've had here at distribute tech, it's, it's a frothy market out there with a lot of interest, a lot of opportunities, a lot of innovation and technology.

02:36

We've had a lot of activity at our booth with our grid hardening tech, technology, technology, the ultra fast surge arresters. It's been a huge pick up from last year. I think the industry awareness has really come alive in the importance of hardening the grid and creating that resilience of resiliency of their medium voltage systems. What's medium voltage? Anything from, I term it as anything from two KV to 72,000 volts, maybe 115,000 volts.

03:06

03:15

We gotta spin it up a little bit, here there, stretch it out a little bit.

03:20

Well, that that is been a very interesting conversation I've been having here at this event. And that is, how do we how do we stabilize the grid? Even more, how do we ensure the quality of that grid? Give us a little sort of 411 on, on what that technology, your technology provides,

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04:18

Give me a use case. What do you mean by all of that. That sounds great. It sounds like a tremendous product. So give me some real life sort of

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example. Well, one example could be a nuclear event, which would be catastrophic across the boards. However, that in today's day and age, there's actually directed energy weapons that could be used on the grid, those weapons could be creating a pulse known as an e1 which is a conducted energy pulse that travels in the conductor itself and creates a problem for transformers, generators, points of entries of buildings could be catastrophic, catastrophic failures, as a matter of fact, so we prevent. Yeah, it's

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by protecting the line, really. In a sense, we're shunting all of that to Earth

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now, beginning in six nano seconds. Yeah, it's just incredible. Point eight zeros and a six of a second.

05:20

Where do you where do you place it on the grid? Where do you place your device? I mean, where physically does it exist and reside?

05:29

This device could be reside at any transformer, rectifier. It could be acting as EMP scouts on the line out in the field, up on the lines. You can attach it to the lines. Yes, if you're mounting it physically to a pole and having a flying lead to the line and then grounding it, yes. So it's pretty much anywhere that's there's a market for 100,000 of these, if not a half million.

05:55

And and it seems, and correct me, if I'm wrong, installation is not that difficult.

06:02

No, I would say that every situation has its own flavor. But literally, you're only using about a meter of wire on one side and connecting to the ground on the other in a very generalized application.

06:15

Are you, are you having your own ground wire, or are you using the bonding of the pole?

06:21

We would prefer to use the bonding of the pole. However, we would want to make sure that it's effectively grounded.

06:29

Do you mean there's, there are bonds out there that are not grounded properly?

06:33

I would never say that.

06:36

No, all right, let's, let's go into this. First off, let's just get a little background on Kevin. We just we roll it right into what we were

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deep end of the pool. Yeah, right. It was

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great. I enjoyed it. I was like, Okay, I'm all in background. Give us a little background.

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I've been in the electrical industry for 35 years and slowly built up a business and railroad services and seven master licenses in the US, it's passionate. Electricity is a passion.

07:08

Yeah, you can tell we were talking offline when you buzzed on by, he buzzed the tower, and we talked about discussing safety, expand a little bit about that. Well, this

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is one of the largest utility shows in the world. And one thing that hasn't really been addressed here is just safety issues. I don't see a lot of safety products out on the floor. Actually, there is some, but I felt like there's been a few incidences in my career where I'd like to share what can happen, because anything can happen. And I, I walked away from one very, very close event by a millimeter. Yeah, take us through that. Well, it's, it's a, it's a lengthy story, but it's a, oh, it's got a punch line at the end.

07:58

I own this podcast. So, yeah, I can, I can lengthy it as much as I want to lengthy it nice. That's me sorry.

08:13

There. We're back. You're back. Easy, easy.

08:17

Well, that was an electrical safety, yeah, are you okay? That was a close call. We gotta file a form for that form. Go for it.

08:27

Tell us about that.

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08:50

But you said I stayed at a Holiday Inn, so I figure I can handle it, sure.

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11:30

It gets a little kludgy. Put a little put a little elbow grease. The next one's

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a little, a little jar, and the third one's a sharp jar. And if it doesn't go, I'll walk away. Exact thought process. Second one doesn't go third one, boom. We're talking 14 foot fireball, hey. And I thought I was looking at myself dead for half a second. I literally thought I was looking at myself dead for half sick. Yeah. And I'm like, Well, I'm not dead. I'm gonna go walk over to the office and meet the whole office halfway, because the whole shipyard, there's people in holes of ships in the dark, everybody, it's dark. Every the whole place is dark. It's dead. Yeah, sure enough. Stan and the whole entourage, even the president, the owner of the shipyard, meets me. What happened? I go out, blew up like, I don't know. Let's go check it out. I'm alive. You're okay? Yeah, I'm alive. Well, we go over there and rip that. You know, it's no problem. Let's open the door. Well, the last person that closed the door broke the stud off the back, and the rod had sat in there for 25 years on, stuck and I jarred it. It fell out. Hit a phase. Hit. It fell out. Hit the lug. The main ground lug is right one millimeter from the door down here a four rods coming into it. And it's, it's, it's not fully in. It's recessed down a half an inch. Yeah, the bottom of the rod lands smack in the main ground of the whole site and falls against a phase. Oh, yeah, direct short. The breaker tripped instantaneously. So if the rod had scraped the door on the way down, I would have been sprayed with 35,000 degree metal and been burnt or probably down. Yeah, so I walked away, unbelievable. Then later on, in the next day or so, of course, that was a big talking point that I'm still walking around. People were like, 600 feet down the pier. We saw it happen. It was 14 foot fireball. Your feet came off the ground. And I said, Well, now everybody knows, I levitate. You know, I literally, I think the magnetism brought me off the ground so I didn't jump, right?

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Yeah, let me ask you this, what was the the subsequent focus? I mean, come on. It's like, I've been in those locations. It's, it's like, Mad Max. It's, it's well on thunder

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dome. And it's, we buff the we buff the bus off, welded the stud on, closed the door after, you know, we turned it on pretty much right away and posted somebody there to keep everybody away while the rod got fixed with the door, but it was back. Everything was put back together in like three hours. I went home at the normal time that day. It's amazing. I'm still happy to be alive. So the whole point of this is anything can happen. Don't trust that you're just gonna go look in a cabinet, not break the plane. This happened to me, and for the first four or five years after this, I'd get emotional about it because it was that close, yeah, now I can share it. I used to teach. I've stepped away from teaching apprenticeship, but I tell this story to every class, yeah, and

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see what would what would interest me is, is these subsequent conversations that took place, okay, we repaired it, hopefully made it safe, took care of the problem. But you know, how many, how many boxes existed on that site? How many electrical challenges? I mean, was there any conversation about eight? Anything, or it's just like business as usual. Next day. No big deal. I I'll just

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say it was business as usual. There's a little bit more to that. You know, I'm not gonna get in the shipyards business, but shortly thereafter, my big job started. We parted ways, and I went on to run a very large data center in downtown Seattle. So the moral of story is, don't take it for granted that you're going to be safe, even if you're going to take a peek, because things can happen. You know,

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I work with a company called iris, and what's interesting about iris, and how they got their their start, was the ability to be able to look into boxes. They have those, they have these, these boxes that you could actually see in be able to test whether, but, but in your case, you would never know, right, because of that little, little metal hinge locking device.

15:56

So there's another situation that happens regularly where people get in trouble, and that's vaults, underground vaults, right? You've heard stories about guys dying in vaults. I know three guys that died in a vault in the same job, hydrogen sulfide gasses, yep, Paul's Paul. Paul consulter was one electrician using

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it. You're buying them out. No, no,

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you're not well. One guy went down. The next guy put his head in their hydrogen sulfide. One here, he fell in. Third guy fell in. The fourth guy got incapacitated. Didn't die, but it was a recovery effort right out of the gate in Superior Wisconsin. So you got to do your sniffer tests.

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See, this is interesting. There are companies here at distribute tech that specialize in that. When I was a lineman and I was doing splicing of underground cable, we'd have the vault, and all we had, it was one step above the parrot. Quite frankly, it was, it was just a device, stick in the hole, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, squeeze, test, test, test, test, test, everything's fine, but we did have a tremendous amount of training on on making sure that that vault is properly ventilated, and, you know, void of any dangerous vapors. But it, it's, it's amazing how, in your that scenario, I mean, you don't go in once, that's, that's the sad part about it, once somebody collapses in a vault. That's it. You call 911, yeah, you that's it. There's it's pretty straightforward. You can't go in and get them. Doesn't make sense.

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In this case, they had been, people have been going in and out of that vault, from what I heard, 10 or 15 years, all the time. And then it was somehow hydrogen sulfide creeped into that vault where the pumps were, and that was the end of it. It was

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a recovery effort right away. That happened, you know, was there any ru call?

18:05

It was a garbage dump next door. So they think that that seeped through groundwater or whatnot, into that hole. It was actually, I don't know all the details, but it was obviously tragic.

18:20

Yeah, you know that it, it highlights the need for one professionalism, the need for individuals to be properly trained, absolutely and this is, this is a this is a profession specifically in the in the world of power and utilities. It's a profession that is unforgiving. And the other thing that that always when I was doing it, it's you become sort of numb or Cavalier to a certain extent, which you shouldn't, because in the world of power, it just sort of sits there. It's, it's not spinning. It doesn't, it doesn't say, Hey, watch out, man. I'm a spinning, whirly gig. You can tell that it's dangerous. Don't stick your hand in here, because it's spinning and it's going to chop your hand off. That's that's not the case. You can't. It's just there. It's very static from from movement. And so that's the challenge that's always been sort of the lulls you into thinking, ass no big deal, but, but, you know,

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how about all the climbing linemen still do a lot of climbing. Climbing happens all the time. They've got Lyman rodeos to do rescue. I mean, they have that very well. Training that program is in a plus, yeah, and we

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would go through it over and over and over again, you know? And, and what's interesting, even when, when I was climbing poles for some reason or another, you just. So you just sort of knew that you're climbing a pole inside your head. You you're going to be safe. You just couldn't, you didn't do it cavalierly. Let's put it that way, you're climbing a pole, yeah, and it and and gravity is different up there. It's much more. It's pushing you into that pole in a big way. And it's just, it's the other elements that okay. Case in point, whenever we would de energize lines, right? And there was an accident, and in on towers, and once you de energize, it doesn't matter, you still have to ground the conduction. If you're working on a line, you ground between so you're right ground on one side, ground on the other side. You're working in between the grounds, and it's, and, you know, it's make sure that that's grounded properly one but there were some people that work on the static the very top line, and they forget that that's just like a capacitor. It's just like it runs miles and miles and miles, and it's just, it just builds up. And it's, it's looking for a way to discharge, and you could be the path to ground, whether you like it or not. And it's, it kills you. So it's, it's like you those, those are non negotiable. You just to this day, when I'm, I'm driving, it's just sort of a weird to this day, I'll look at lines. Just drive. Look at lines. Look at the construction. Well, look at that tree, that trees getting into that line, you know? And look at that Beaver Dam, yeah, it's just keep on going. Look at that pole. It's leaning and but one of the the areas is, is it's just when I see construction, I always look for the grounds. He's like, worried, well, you guys are on that. Where's the grounds? Man, Come on

21:48

Toby, cutting corners. Yeah, don't be cutting corners. Man, that's a great conversation. Yeah, it really is. I've enjoyed it a

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lot. Yeah. How do people get a hold of you? They want to know about your product? Let's put it that

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way. Well, I'm going to send them directly to the manufacturer. Manufacturer's website. On this one, ADV, f u i, f u, s, I O N, add fusion.com now we're

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going to have it out on industrial top.

22:13

Thanks guys. Yeah.

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Thank you very much. Appreciate you buzzing the tower and getting on.

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It's been fun. Yeah, sorry about

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about the technical difference. My foot caught on a cable. Speaking of danger, right? Dripping hazard. There it is. Yeah, it was life or death, guys. All right, once again, we're broadcasting from distribute tech, Dallas, Texas is the location, and it is great. You get people like Kevin, who knows their stuff. This is a fantastic event if you're in the world of utilities, transmission, distribution, hardware, whatever it might be, asset management, this is an event for you. You need to put this on your calendar for next year. If you are not here, we're also brought to you by those wonderful people at Siemens. Siemens smart infrastructure and grid software. Go out to siemens.com Great people, great company, great solutions, siemens.com we're going to wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network.

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Kevin Kucera, yes, RPM Electric Inc, that was distribute tech. We were chirping about safety. It's a big deal. I enjoy anytime I can talk about safety, specifically in the world of utilities. I'm all there. I, as you can tell I was like reliving my childhood of being able to climb towers and do line work, and, you know, living that dream can't do it now, too difficult, but boy, can I just respect the people that do it today. Outstanding conversation that's distributed again, as is right around the corner, and it is a fabulous event. Clarion events put it puts it on phenomenal. Phenomenal must attend a fan. A lot of things happening in that industry in a big way. Put it on your calendar. All right. Industrial talk is here for you. Contact me. Industrial talk.com. I'm there. Be bold. Be brave. There greatly. Hang out with Kevin. Change the world. We're gonna have another great conversation shortly. So stay tuned.