 as by nature it's got to be a huge consumer of energy, but they are doing a lot of where they can to promote energy efficiency and nowhere maybe is that more evident than in rapid deployment. That's where the military gets a sudden call to go to usually a remote spot and set up really quickly and that involves getting helicopters there and that involves getting planes there. That would seem to be a major major massive energy consumer except that my guest today Jeff Verenkem of Gold Wings Supply and others have devised a method or a technology for lighting this rapid deployment space in an incredible energy efficient and resource efficient manner. So welcome to the show Jeff. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. I mean very innovative. Wow. So why don't you just start at step one and tell us what the challenges that you faced and the solutions that you found. Sure. So Gold Wings Supply we're actually more I would view as more as like a value added reseller. So we have partners that have these various technologies that we typically focus on green energies, quick deployment, solar being a primary platform and then we integrate these and come in with creative innovative solutions to bring all these technologies together to bring a total solution to our partner. In many cases it is the Department of Defense but we do have several other government agencies and municipality agencies that we support as well. And in this particular case you're doing you're dealing with lighting and we have LED lighting is way way way more efficient than the lighting we grew up with and you have the massive use of LED lighting. What do you need to light when you set up a rapid deployment site? A place to set it up. They're all self-contained and they are very quickly deployed and they are movable by hand so it doesn't take heavy equipment, doesn't take a lot of skilled labor. So it's something that the Department of Defense has migrated to very rapidly and this is being hidden and deployed around multiple bases around the country in preparation for the inevitable or what may be an emergency. So there's a lot of elements that come into this solution. And one thing I'm thinking about is weight. You have to carry a heck of a lot of stuff to this site and in the old days you used that used to include a heck of a lot of fuel, barrels and barrels of fuel. Now I believe that your lighting is taken care of by photovoltaic panels plus maybe battery storage. Is that the case? That is correct. So the legacy systems were hardwired so if you can imagine trying to put in a 6,000 or 10,000 foot runway you would have these legacy systems that had massive generators that required a significant fuel supply. You'd have a tremendous amount of labor running out spools of wire, skilled labor that's having to interconnect all of these and when you get done with the entire system you've deployed 30,000 feet of cable, connectorized it, interfaced it with generators, put control circuits on that and put everything connected to the various lighting devices for the airfield whether it's runway, threshold, taxiway, touchdown, whatever it is and it would take four, six, seven weeks to deploy that. So with the new systems that we've brought to their attention they're able to honestly for a helipad you could technically deploy a helipad in 30 minutes and that would be fully controllable by the pilot where the pilot has the ability to control the intensity of the lighting as well as if it's a very covert or secret mission they can switch everything to infrared and they can put on their night vision goggles and have everything operating just with the click of their mic so now it's much quicker. For a 10,000 foot runway to put it in perspective you know a constant current system that we spoke about earlier would take four to six weeks they can deploy an entire runway in less than two weeks which would enable them to bring them C5As, C17, C130s to bring in massive deployment of heavy equipment, troops, supplies so it's a much much more rapid deployment system that's capable and I think the other key element of this is that it is expeditionary so they can set it up very quickly they can also tear it down, re-containerize it in the mobile trailer and move it to a new location so if the mission has been accomplished or they need to move it to a new location they're able to tear this down relocate it and reuse the same system have it back in operation very quickly. Wow do you know if other nations are are emulating this system though? This is deployed worldwide I mean the U.S. is really in the forefront of this and you know probably the biggest element that changed this was you know in the legacy days of the military they had mill specs so everything was mill spec so they own the design they kind of drove the technology the downside of that is that it also forced them to own the design flaws they weren't keeping up with the latest technology it was much more costly so they've kind of converted over and said okay this is this is not working for us they went to what they call COTS which is commercial off the shelf so now we're going commercial off the shelf which has leading edge technology that's available in the market today much lower production costs much higher quality supply chain is much more stable so it enables them to get these products quicker because they're not mill spec so they're able to get these with normal supply chain lead times and get these products a lot quicker. Yeah this is a classic example of following the latest latest trends in technological improvements and taking advantage of them very very rapidly now if you look at the total weight involved you you specify the time involved down from seven weeks to two weeks and yeah just the weight of carrying all that old stuff everything's got to be much much lighter so it does one solar panel control one light or does one solar panel go out to a gang of lights or how does that work? So each light is self-contained and it has four panels on on all four sides so it's omnidirectional from both a solar absorption as well as a light dispersion so if you can imagine something being maybe a little bit larger than say a milk carton you set that out that thing starts absorbing sun it has batteries in it it has wireless networks and engaged in it it has technology that manages the solar charging of it so it takes it you put it out and it will run dusted on there's a graphic of it so these things they will run dusted on they have 14 days of battery storage capability in what we call autonomy it also has a manual control on it so you can check the charge status you can put it in a intensity of output you can change it over to infrared and you can put it into a wireless mode which would be picked up by the handheld controller then either ground control crew or the pilot are able to control these remotely and they'll illuminate change the intensity or go to infrared or turn it off in you know any location whether you're in the air or on the ground wow you can control it from from the air also yep it's a vhf radio that comes from the pilot they go to a frequency they use mic clicks to determine the intensity levels and a different mic click pattern and it will change the light so the pilot has full control of it and they can kind of set it up the way they want that works best for them wow well Jeff you've got some slides to show us also I do I do so I'll help articulate what what this narrative has been about and give you a little bit of a visual perspective so we've kind of talked about you know the different types of what the the basically expeditionary airfield lighting is all about but it's it's basically the ability to quickly deploy a runway or vertical takeoff and landing site to deploy equipment and resources whether it's men or food or whatever it is they also have it's also critical for if they have to do extraction missions if they have warfighters that are out in the field they need to extract them they can bring them in it should bring in helicopters and just pull them out real quickly medically extractions but the key element is that it gives you the ability to set it up very rapidly and adversely if you get into we're moving the mission or mission's been accomplished at your current location we can pack it back up and and move it to a new location next slide please so we kind of talked about this a little bit that the legacy systems had a lot of cabling a lot of electronics required specialty labor you kind of look at the one graphic in the middle there I mean it's a spaghetti factory is what it is and trying to untangle this and keep in mind that the warfighter traditionally you know a lot of these warfighters that are handling this equipment are between 18 and 25 years old most of them have no college experience or college degree so they're just straight out of high school gone into the military and they're having to handle this stuff so it gets very clumsy and cumbersome and not very quick to deploy Jeff when you refer to legacy basically what you mean is old-fashioned in in this case it is old-fashioned it's kind of what they the old school and so the beauty of technology that advances very quickly and this and honestly just kind of a setback is that this whole technology started with a self-contained lantern that was developed for the Canadian Coast Guard I actually worked for the company to develop this first technology so they put this on top of a buoy to give mariners a visual perspective of you know the the marker before it had solar panels mounted on it had batteries had lights so they took this technology and said why don't we use this for the airfield as well we can use this similar technology that technology advancement brought it into the airfield lighting arena with the very similar technology so being that it was maritime to start with it's fully waterproof so these are fully waterproof we've I've seen airfields completely underwater and then when they dry out everything works just fine so it's all good yeah I knew your boss the owner Leah Hunt back when she first brought this online and I think this was the first company in America to bring this technology online the marine technology you're referring to correct correct so yeah thanks for highlighting that so if you can step back to the slides let me walk through this don't give you a little bit more next slide please so as I mentioned earlier you know kind of the the legacy was you know mill spec sourcing strategy so the mill military on the design they own the supply chain they own the little intellectual property so it just made for it to be very cumbersome so they've moved to you know and this has taken some time this is probably 10 years ago it's like look you really need to look at commercial off the shelf this is commercially available this technology is right exactly what you're looking for and we can take care of this for you with a commercial build structure that we can manage for you much quicker lead times lower costs everything so they've moved to the commercial off the shelf and that's what enabled us to bring these new products to their introduction and ultimately they have adopted it next slide please so you know as I kind of highlighted there's all kinds of advantages with going commercial off the shelf there's commercially available commoditized components that make it much lower costs we've got multi source components so it's not just a single source you have multiple sources that are making similar leds circuits batteries solar panels etc so it's much more available volume production because this is used in multiple either municipalities or do d it's used by the forestry department where they need to use it to bring in aircraft or helicopters for refueling and reloading so it's used across a various array of government agencies so it's readily available it's all ISO 9000 you know produced so it's and the product reliability testing because there's so much field deployment is very strong and supports the the low failure rate so it's a it's a solid direction for them to to adopt those are just kind of a quick snapshot of the various solar technologies that we're utilizing up in the upper left you'll see those are actually the solar self-contained lanterns as we call them below that is the wind sock that's all solar operated as well so that illuminates at nighttime so they can see the wind direction for more permanent deployments when they're going to be in a location for you know a year plus they'll put in runway signs and directional signs to give them because it's much more like an international airport just running product in and resources in and out of the airport on the right is the what we call the R cal which is the air to ground radio system solar operated as well so in the upper right corner you'll see a what we call a happy system it's a precision approach path indicator tells the pilot if they're on the glideslope blower above and then all of this equipment except for the signs is loaded into the trailer so that trailer carries all of the airfield lights and all the installation hardware and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a minute so the lights they are omnidirectional they run dusted dawn they have 14 days of battery storage capability so if you basically have a blackout heavy storms it will still work dusted dawn for 14 days and no problem but that really doesn't happen so we've had virtually operations where the these lights weren't run for five six seven years until they have to replace the battery so they work very well and again their wireless connected with a 900 megahertz radio so next slide this is the solar wind con they're called the l806 l807 l807 is the primary l806 is the secondary it has a light that's illuminating inside of the wind con and this as well can be interfaced with the wireless controller runs dusted dawn so it's all self-contained these you can set these up in probably 30 minutes we're in a regular airfield it would take you couple weeks because you have to run wire and undo it and trenching and these are the signs again these are more for when there's a long deployment airfield that they're going to utilize but it still gives them the ability to have removal and reinstallation very quickly so it works well works with the the wireless controller as well so this has kind of two configurations depicted here the upper two slides reflect this is the rcal this is more for a permanent location that they're going to utilize for a long period of time it's got a cabinet with batteries with the receiver and transceiver in it which is that red box and then it has a solar panel that charges that so that enables the pilot to communicate with the airfield from its vhf radio the photo below is actually the rcal unit that's installed inside of the trailer so once that trailer rolls out to a location it's already mounted there and it just it deactivated and it's running so it's very quick deployable to have that thing set up in the trailer this is the precision approach path indicator and a happy which is a helicopter approach a path indicator we do both of them so it it enables the pilot to know if they're on glide slope high or low so the left graphic kind of depicts what the pappy looks like if it's all white you're way too high if it's all red you're way too low if you have a red white you're right on the glide slope relative to the happy on the right it's a little bit different configuration it's more of a red green so if it's flashing green you're way too high flashing red it's way too low and if you're solid green you're right on the glide slope in a helicopter can just come right in pitch black no lights infrared um configuration they can see everything just fine and just come right in with no obstruction or uh or hazard that probably saves a whole lot of lives because in rapid deployment you're in a very uncertain sometimes chaotic situation that is correct and additionally these aircraft are not cheap right i mean they're very expensive so protecting those assets is very important as well so this is the trailer so it's as i've indicated it everything fits in there you'll see the rcal on the left side that's the air to ground radio the next graphic next to it is the all of the installation tools and parts to install those on a runway and then you can also you want the trailer designed you can plug it into a 30 amp shore power and it will charge all of the lights while it's just sitting there so it keeps them all brimmed up so that when you deploy they're at 100 percent um small graphic above that is every light is connected with a cable so they're all connected to either the shore power or on top of the trailer there's solar panels as well so it charges if it's sitting outside or you're rolling this down the road on the back of a hum v it's getting charged at the same time so it's always ready for deployment at 100 capacity with the battery strength one of the most recent tests that we had accomplished is what they call sling load testing so for even quicker deployment they can just lift these trailers up with a sling load on a helicopter move this to a location set it down hook it up to a hum v pull it short distances and you're setting up the airfield so I mean they can deploy this very quickly so having done that although this is utilized for the Department of Defense this is also a dual use technology and what that means is that it's good for Department of Defense but it's also good for civilian usage as well so for example these uh the trailer with the airfield lighting this can also be utilized for firefighting this could be used in national disaster where we have earthquakes decimates a region you can bring it you set up airfields or vertical takeoff and landing sites for helicopters to bring in medical food supplies emergency services so it's very possible to utilize this in the um private sector as well a couple other products that we um do represent are solar outdoor lighting so we have solar bollards in the middle that light up pathways and then we also have solar street or pathway lighting in that right graphic we also utilize this at the Department of Defense so they don't have to run generators not they just mount these in the ground hook them up takes about 30 minutes to set up a solar light they run dusted on or you can turn them off with a actually an iPhone interface app and they can light up the barracks area perimeter fences around the airfield or in the commercial sector if we go to the next slide we've been very integral in the rebuilding of the Lahaina community so they have the ohana hope project and they've set up these small communities with small houses with uh community kitchens community bathrooms they get these communities back intact and as a community unit and then we've actually had several of these solar lights put around there for pathway for safety pedestrian walking for street lights for the parking lot and for area lighting so the dual use technology military civilian um state municipality it's all usable in all of those arenas so that's the innovation that we bring uh with this solar technology do you know approximately how many people are being housed in these communities in Lahaina well we're on phase three right now but i know that um there's probably it depends on the size of them but the first one was kind of the test unit but i think they had like a hundred families that they put in there and then they were branching out we're actually in the stage three and stage four they're starting to deploy more and more of these communities out there to bring them out of the hotels and back into their community so they can carry on with their with their lives yeah that's that's so impressive and we've got to wrap up but i'm thinking of the horrible earthquake recently in japan they certainly could have used this technology to bring in helicopters and provide people with food shelter and whatnot it's absolutely absolutely yeah well on that very cheery note we have to wrap up thank you so much jeff barron camp of bullwing supply this is technological advance on steroids and everybody especially americans are benefiting so thank you so much jeff you're very welcome thank you for having me think check hawaii bye