Allen and Joel speak with SkySpec’s Chief Revenue Officer, Josh Goryl, at the SkySpecs Customer Forum. With record attendance, the forum emphasized industry collaboration, data amalgamation, and the application of AI for optimizing wind and solar renewable energy assets. SkySpecs announced their expansion into the solar industry, leveraging their established wind solutions to streamline data management and operational strategies across renewable energy sectors.

Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary Barnes’ YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us!

Allen Hall: [00:00:00] I’m Alan Hall, host of the Uptime Winner Energy podcast, and I’m here with Joel Saxon and Josh Gar, chief Revenue Officer with Sky Spec, and Josh brought us out this week to participate in the Skys Pick Customer Forum 2025, which as it turns out, has been the largest attendance this year.

Joel Saxum: Yeah,

Allen Hall: it’s grown every single year. Yeah. It’s a room full of people, all experts in blades all here to learn about the next generation of skys specs, blades and

Joel Saxum: CMS predict CMS predict analysis and that’s why it’s growing so much. Right. How, what kind of percentage of the capacity in the states do you think is represented here?

Allen Hall: We, we should have ran the number, I should have came prepared for this, but, um, I mean, I would say. 75%. Yeah. 80%. Okay. Yeah, that’s, you’re talking all the, all the big operators are, are here. Yep. I think, uh, 21 total organizations represented over 40 experts, blades, drivetrain, few senior management as well, and asset management [00:01:00] engineering.

So it’s an awesome, awesome group. We keep, uh, ev It’s tough though. Every year we have to step it up a bit, so we’re kind of, I think we’re outgrowing the space that we’re at here and excited for. Yeah, we’re bursting at the seams. Uh, last year Joel and I were invited to come and it’s the first time that we had been here and I thought, wow, this is a pretty full room.

And this year, like, okay, she’s back. We’re we’re, we are sitting next to the door right now because everybody is trying to learn what Sky Specs offers, what. Power do I have on my desktop right now, but also what is coming and there’s a lot of new product releases happening that were announced just this morning.

Yeah, and I think the cool thing too, that’s it’s not often you’re able to get this many experts from operators together in one room, and even more so ones that cut across drive, train, CMS, all main components and. It can be tough to kind of keep everyone engaged ’cause everyone’s a domain expert in different, different areas.

But the conversations have been been incredible and I think even within [00:02:00] organizations as, as, as well. And so we’re trying to learn how do we help our customers come together more and, and collaborate across. And even just having these discussions that want to discuss pulled out of is fantastic. Just some of that collaboration between even people that are, that are at the same company, they don’t see each other as much.

Joel Saxum: There, there’s some cultural things playing out here that are funny to me because if you’re in wind and you’ve bounced around, if you’re an ISP or you’re at an operator, you know, some of the players and kind of how they act, how they keep their, their, their poker hands close to their chest and stuff. So you see some people sitting at a table and you see, and I noticed this yesterday, like the psychological look of things sails, right?

Mm-hmm. So I’m kind of looking at people listening and stuff and, and the, the one of the persons from an operator that usually does play things close to their hands mm-hmm. Was just kind of sitting there listening. Everyone’s like, what’s your opinion? What’s your opinion? He was like, uh, what’s yours? But, but that being said, the, the collaboration here has been fantastic.

Uh, uh, we were talking with Matt Stead earlier and he was saying mm-hmm. He, uh, was a part of a conversation where someone from Canada, someone from the us they shared some [00:03:00] information and they were like, that’s a amazing, thank you. Let’s swap cards. Different operators, you know, sharing things. Uh, we sat in a couple of the breakout sessions and the breakout sessions.

Yes, we had a presentation. Yes, we were walking through solutions and problems, but they, they devolved into amazing conversations where everybody in the room just kinda like turned to each other and were like, what do you think? How could we use this? Could you use that? Does this make sense? Um, and it’s, and it’s, it’s engineers.

It’s all engineers. Oh yeah. They’re geared to solve the problems and that’s what’s happening.

Allen Hall: Yeah. And, and I think at a macro level, right? Like it’s, it’s a lot of the same themes that, that everyone’s seeing. We’re, we’re talking about the, the same things. And a lot of it is how do we continue to do. More with less as these fleets grow mm-hmm.

There’s different issues that pop up every, every year and just having a tier. To your point, even even last year, last night I was talking to somebody and after the conference they stayed in touch with each other for four months and were talking weekly mm-hmm. On just different, uh, tools and tricks that they [00:04:00] were using to be more, more efficient.

Nothing. Confidential to their, their own organization, but more so how are they more efficient with the tools that they’re, that they’re using. So that’s where a lot of the value is if there’s only so many blade engineers and CMS engineers in the industry. And so it’s important that there’s opportunities for them to learn from each other and they’re, they’re not really competing with one another.

Once a turbines or the solar panels are deployed now, it’s about operational efficiency. And delivering that power. So every operator is maximizing the revenue and you really can’t do that today without Sky specs. You need to have blade data, you need to have CMS data, you need to have, uh, power curve information.

Mm-hmm. Like how your turbines are performing before you can even make sense. So the engineers. To me are finally accessing tools on a almost universally, that they didn’t have five years ago. Yeah. That are empowering them way beyond what they ever thought would be possible.

Joel Saxum: You can’t optimize, uh, an industrial fleet on a spreadsheet.

No. You can [00:05:00] maybe maintain some things and look at some part numbers and figures, a couple things out model wise. Right. But, and I know some good people that are really good with spreadsheets. Yep. But you need, you need tools. You need to, uh, be able to amalgamate your data. You need to be able to look at, I mean, this is one of the big things we’re talking about here.

Um, predict, prevent, perform. Yep. Or did I do it backwards? I’ve gotten it wrong all week. Prevent, predict. Perform. Perform. There you go. There you go. So, so, but looking at this saying, okay, so we have a foundation, we need inspections, we need these things, right? That is the foundation of the data. We have to have collections, whether it’s, uh, inspections, scada data, CMS data, whatever that may be.

Yes. Okay. Now it’s amalgamated into a platform. Now we can see this stuff. Mm-hmm. Now we can start running predictive analytics. We can start visualizing things. Yesterday you and I said, and, and. On the performance monitoring breakout session, and the data that was in that thing was just like, what about this?

You could use this data for that. You could use it for that. This is a great idea here. Now, this morning we talked, or we listened to, uh, Alan Larson from your team say, we’re gonna marry that [00:06:00] performance data with CMS data. Yep. And we’re gonna be able to look at, here’s your performance drop. Here’s what your CMS data is saying, and get real insights out of it.

And it sounds. To me, like I don’t know any other solution that’s never been done in the industry before.

Allen Hall: No, and and I think to your earlier point, it starts with that baseline and that health record and to be able to see, we’ve all been in the industry for some time now, and the level of maturity, even just year over year, we finally start to see it.

Right. And so another thing they brought up this morning was even just. Uh, preventative inspection programs. Years ago, it was, you know, maybe we’ll do 25, 30% of the fleet each year. And then after four or five years, we inspected everything. Well, it’s, it’s not that simple, right? There’s different makes and models, different risk tolerances.

Mm-hmm. And the arrangements with third parties is, is different. So, um, it’s, it’s kind of that intake valve and having all that data in, in one place. And, uh, fortunately we’re seeing most of the operators have taken big, big leaps over the course of the [00:07:00] last couple years to have all that data in, in one place.

And then from there it’s like, okay, how do I start to see trends. Across main components and optimize the repair windows. And now it’s about the fine tuning. And I think we’re getting there as, as an industry. And that’s why we, that’s one of the things we talked about. We’re excited about jumping into the solar and battery battery storage space.

’cause our customers said, Hey, a lot of these problems that we saw in wind and what you guys solved in blades and drivetrain, solar’s been in hypergrowth mode. We’ve done a lot of inspections, but data’s everywhere. Help us solve that problem.

Joel Saxum: Let’s pause there for a second. That’s a huge announcement.

Let’s do that announcement here.

Allen Hall: Yeah. So here, that’s what we announced now this morning, so we’ll, we’ll definitely have, have, uh, have, have more information very, very soon, soon on. Um, things have been moving, moving fast over the course of the last, last few months, but the reason why we’re, we’re diving into it is because, um, really we’ve al always been about following our customers and [00:08:00] helping them solve their, their biggest problems.

And we’re starting to hear, uh, that they want to bring the playbook. From wind, from wind o and m into, into solar. Um, again, earlier we were talking about how SCADA teams are not just looking at wind data. Mm-hmm. It’s across all their generating assets. And having one place for all that data is, is very, very important.

And I think where we can help our customers is getting all that data into one place and going from. Data capture to work order in whatever system that you have. It could be an ERP system, it could be, it could be in horizon, but there absolutely is a, is a need in that, in that space and we think we can really help out.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. Listening to the, uh, new, new Sky spec, C-C-E-C-T-O this morning, Ben Toan, he was talking about some of the architecture moves that you guys are making in the background to be able to make that, I don’t want, I don’t wanna simplify it, this, this far, but the copy paste of the wind playbook. Two Solar makes, it makes it easier for the future of if expanding [00:09:00]into other silos, doing more things, uh, making that platform.

One login. We can manage all of our assets and um, and do it the same way. Right. So as you guys have expanded in the last few years with. Inspections, tech enabled insights from the, the, the SMEs that are here, um, into the, using the digitalization tools and the qa qc process. We talked a bunch about that and, and your repair vendor management yesterday.

Yep. But being able to take all of those things that you guys have perfected and built over the years and wind. And boom, immediately be able to deploy that into solar. That’s gonna be a game changer for some people.

Allen Hall: Yeah, we’re, we’re super excited about it. And, and that’s what, so Ben Tor, who’s our, our new Chief Technology Officer is, talks a lot about a, a common data model and being able to, as we, as we start to scale.

It’s not just about a, a blade or a drivetrain gearbox, it’s, it’s about more, more than that. And being able to put in the solar data, whether it’s the panels, inverters, combiner boxes, and that ex expands further, right? And the battery storage and [00:10:00] other power generating assets. And I think that’s where we can, we can really help out.

So it’s kind of taking a step back a bit and thinking about, okay, how do we think about that model holistically, mm-hmm. Across renewable, uh, renewable assets. So excited for it. But again, don’t wanna get too far out over our skis here. So the first, first step is, is solar and, and working in partnership with our, with our customers on that.

And I think it’s big because a lot of the engineers we’ve been working with for the last several years that have been primarily wind focused, blade focused. Yeah. When you talk to them today. They’ll say, oh yeah, and I have a solar site that I’m now responsible for. Mm-hmm. And so they’re trying to learn the solar aspects pretty quickly, but staying in the same platform is huge because it reduces the cycle, learning cycle Yeah.

By quite a bit.

Joel Saxum: Yeah. I, we, and this is a, a, we’re gonna make a, well, let’s make a side announcement. Yeah. We just added another team member to the weather guard team. I hear you. You’ll hear more about that here in the next, in the coming weeks. But, uh, she came from a team that managed wind solar. And [00:11:00] battery storage with the same engineering group.

Right. And I think that that, like you said, is becoming onshore and offshore. Mm-hmm. It is becoming more and more common. Right. So you’re seeing that be engineering resource. We always talk about the shortage of technicians. Mm-hmm. But there’s a shortage of engineers and it’s shrinking in a lot of pools.

Yep. Right. There’s a lot of people who, one big beautiful deal thing, trying to cut budgets, changing operating models. So engineers are being asked to do more. The more with less thing, right? Yep. They’re being asked to do more with less. Well, how do you do that? You don’t do that by using spreadsheets. You do it by using a, a common tool set with the architecture that works together in something, you know, and one place that you can manage all these things.

Allen Hall: Oh, yeah. It’s the only way to do it. And as we go forward over the next year, what I’m really interested in is what new concepts, ideas, platform updates. They get implemented by the operators because you, you always come out every year. Mm-hmm. We talk to Sky Specs and we, we see all the new things that happen and then we wait for the, the feedback and then we get to the customer [00:12:00] forum.

You see what they just used over the last year, they’re gonna be more hungry for more data than ever before. Mm-hmm. Even though they may be a little bit on a reduced staff. So that puts a big onus and burden onto Skys specs to not just provide data. Well, here’s all the drone images. No, we need to be able to give you insights as to what is happening and what I should be doing about it.

That’s the benefit of being with Skys specs. Yeah. I, I think, I think that’s huge. Right. And definitely there’s always a, a call to move faster and faster. Yeah. Because there’s, there’s a lot of challenges. A year ago, we were sitting in this room and we talked a lot about internal inspections, and we were on a journey.

Ingesting that third party ingest, uh, data, but customers are like, Hey, it’d be really great if you had a robot for that too. Yeah. So, and now it’s sitting right out here’s sitting out there and our robots are very busy. So, yeah. Um, it’s, it’s, it’s stuff like that where it’s, it’s continuing to get that feedback.

We get it at forums like, like this. Right. And, um, for us too, especially as we get into those other spaces like doing. An [00:13:00] external drone inspection of a blade is just one piece of the puzzle, right? There’s a lot of other data streams that are critically important, and even it’s especially important in solar when there’s different data capture methods.

And again, our big focus is gonna be on that JE ingestion. Mm-hmm. And getting all that data into, into one place. Um, maybe in some cases we’ll do the data capture, but customers are sitting on a ton of data already. Right. And so it’s helping them digitize it, get it into that common data model, and then connect it to their work order system.

That is key. And there’s a lot of automation and rules that kind of go in to trigger the optimization. And that’s where I think we’re, we’re good at. And some of our customers have seen that success and wind and that value case. And that’s what it’s about for, for, for solar. So it’s an exciting, exciting time.

I’m gonna put you on,

on

Joel Saxum: the hook here. Okay.

Allen Hall: All right. So

Joel Saxum: our producer Claire, make a short outta this. We’re gonna put it on LinkedIn. Okay. This morning we heard and we saw a slide and some promises that said, expect transparency from skys specs. [00:14:00] So we’re here talking about all kinds of awesome developments.

Yep. A lot of things happening. Probably the most active product roadmap I think that I’ve seen at Skys specs. Mm-hmm. In since I’ve been around wind. Right. So. Expect more information. Q4, Q1, 26. Things rolling out. Um, you know, the, the, the jump into solar, some more CMS things, some the financial asset modeling.

Expect to hear more about that.

Josh Goryl: Mm-hmm.

Joel Saxum: Um, a repair vendor management, possibly moving into other components than just blades. Like there’s going to be a lot of announcements and the transparency promise, we got it this morning. Yep. We’re recording it now.

Allen Hall: Yeah, yeah. Well, you, you got it here, but I will say I have to leave some, uh, some stuff for the audience so they come, set out calls and do all that.

But yeah, to your, to your point, we’re super thrilled for what’s, what’s, what’s ahead. Um, so Alan, Alan Larson, who leads, leads product here, he had a, he a great presentation on some of the things that we’re gonna, we’re gonna be doing and you, we hit [00:15:00] on a lot of them. So solar. We have a, we have a POC now, uh, working with, with customers all already.

So we’ll see more of that in in 2026. Uh, thrilled to continue to work closer and closer with you guys at, at Weather Guard and a logic ping. And on the lightning stuff we’re going deeper and deeper into a lot of these lightning work workflows. It’s a big problem, right? Big, big problem, right? You, you guys know more than more than anyone.

And so bringing all that data into the horizon platform is, is, is, is key. So we’re, we’re, we’re thrilled about that. And then I think what’s also important is that we continue to do and improve what we’re good at. So even on the, the inspection side, I think there’s a lot that we can do in collaboration with customers to optimize those workflows.

So there’s a lot less kind of human in the loop, uh, because we have to continue to, to scale. And, um, we have amazing SMEs in this, in this industry, and it’s helping empower them to do, to do more. There is a [00:16:00] lot more inspection data than anyone could have ever imagined at this, at this point. And as an industry and as a company, we’ve gotten very good at, uh, moving faster, but it’s continuing to, to optimize and use AI and different tools.

Tools like that. Yeah. And I wanna talk about the AI. This, uh, improvements that have been made over the last year. There was a presentation yesterday talking about how to use AI to suss out images to make sure you’re getting what you’re paying for mm-hmm. On repairs. That was a monumental task, just listening to the engineering discussion of what it took to do that analysis.

How much AI comes in in 20, late 20, 25 into 26. Is that where the industry is headed? Because. Of the mass, massive amounts of data from every turbine. The images are so much better than they were three years ago, and they’re just, we’re taking more pictures. We’re doing it quarterly. Mm-hmm. So a yearly, or we’re not doing a third of the farm, we’re doing the whole farm year and the repair reports.

That was the big thing. Yeah. And the repair reports u the PDFs for ai. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So the, the, the data stream comes in and it’s, it’s huge. Are [00:17:00] you then thinking more AI over the next couple years, just so we can get that condensed data set down? No question. And in all areas we have to, and I think every organization is thinking about their Ai, AI strategy.

And, and for us it’s, it’s kind of going back to first principles and thinking on a workflow level. Right, and so there was a use case yesterday where we were talking about okay, reviewing images a lot more efficiently from the field. There’s thousands of PDF reports from rep from repair reports that our customers are trying to digitize.

How do we use AI to to do that? So we see those improvement. It feels like every couple weeks there’s something new that helps our team. And we’re trying to put more of those tools in the hands of our, our customer, but customers. But that is, um, one of the key pillars of our, of our strategy because we know we need it.

We know our customers need it, and how do we do that to together? So. What I will say, it’s not just AI that spits out the, an the right answer every single time. Right. Right. We, we always have, have, have work to [00:18:00] do, but we kind of think about it on a, on a workflow level and, and, um, how does it help us and everything we do every, every day.

Joel Saxum: Hmm. And the addition of Ben Torquing to the team is, is gonna spur that along. We, we heard from him this morning, man. That guy’s got it going on.

Allen Hall: Oh yeah, Ben, Ben, Ben has been fantastic. So Ben, uh, has been with us for about two months now. He’s our new Chief tech technology officer, and he is an AI background, uh, enterprise architecture background.

So that’s one of the other areas too, even outside of e uh, AI is being able to integrate to other third party platforms. We deal with utilities and IPPs. There’s a lot of big systems and being able to do that in a flexible way. That’s, that’s quick. Um, and, and works best for, for both sides. We know it’s not realistic that every single person every day is working in horizon.

Um, but it’s getting all that engineering and asset management data into the, into the right hands and doing that through some of these third party connections. So another area [00:19:00] where we’re gonna continue to, to level up and, and grow as an organization. So if you’re an asset manager and you are not using Skys specs, I don’t even know who that would be today.

But if you’re an engineer, you’re not actively on the Horizon platform and or if you’re on the Horizon platform and you wanna learn all the things that you missed this week. Yeah. How do they get ahold of you, Josh, to get the update? Yeah, I would say, um, I’m definitely gonna, I’ll leave my kind of contact information behind.

You can contact me directly. Always our sales teams. We have a sales@skysspecsdot.com, that goes to all of our account account executives and our technical sales manager. So depending on the, the area of need, we’d be happy to kinda set up, even if it’s just a discovery call and, um, with no agenda to kind of help and assess.

What you have, have going on, and I’m sure there’s areas where we can, we can help and yeah, if you have solar assets, you better be calling Skys picks now and getting that turned on. That’s right. Yeah. We’re, we’re super, super excited. And I think too, like we’re, we’re in it to, to learn and we know everyone has a different [00:20:00] operating strategy and may think about, uh, the world a little bit differently.

And so it’s important that we, we kind of take a step back and, and learn from you all. So we’ve kind of always taken that, taken that approach. And we can move fast too. Josh, you love having you on the podcast and love being at the customer forums. They’re very, yeah. Thanks for the invite. Uh, yeah, they’re eye-opening every single time and, uh, we get to talk to so many people.

So, Josh, thank you so much for inviting us and, and thanks so much for being on the podcast. No, the thing I’ll say too is, I, I can’t thank the two of you and, and Claire enough and just kind of the, the level of support and engagement and you guys have really helped level up our forum the last couple years.

So it means a, means a ton.

Joel Saxum: Thanks. Appreciate it.

How to be a Supportive Partner - 134