DSPTCH: Revolutionizing Wind Farm Management

Allen Hall and Joel Saxum interview Alex Jones, co-founder of
DSPTCH, about the app's evolution from a wind farm locator to a
comprehensive operations management and IRA compliance tool for
renewable energy. They discuss new features, prevailing wage and
apprenticeship tracking, industry adoption, and how DSPTCH improves
efficiency and safety in wind farm operations. Visit
https://dsptch.app/ or download at https://dsptch.app.link/. Sign
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wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Welcome to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. I'm your host,
Allen Hall, along with my co host, Joel Saxum. When we first
discovered the software app DSPTCH, Joel and I used it to find wind
farms but DSPTCH is so much more than a wind map today. DSPTCH is
now widely used by operators for managing projects, handling forms,
timesheets, apprenticeship tracking, and so much more. Our guest is
Alex Jones, co founder and president of DSPTCH. Alex, welcome to
the show. Alex Jones: Yeah, thanks for having me. Allen Hall: So I.
Went back into my DSPTCH app and got access to the online computer
version of the DSPTCH app and was just astounded at all the
advanced features you've added roughly over the last year. I think
I, I picked up the app when we were in New Orleans at ACP and. it
to full fine wind farms, particularly with technicians on site that
didn't know where their own wind turbines were. So it was really
helpful there, but you want to talk about some of the things you
guys are doing now? Alex Jones: Yeah, for sure. This year at OMS,
we launched a new product the safety side, we call it oversight and
it really just gives asset owners and EPCs, really anyone who wants
to come in Yeah. The ability to manage that site, add points put in
emergency documents, emergency contacts. And we've really gone long
on that front. So we had one of our clients and utility partners
reach out and they were making flyers for DSPTCH for fire
departments, EMS, so on and so forth. And we were like, okay
explain what you're doing. And we've turned that into a product
now, and we've seen a huge surge in local first responders,
emergency teams getting on there's been a few Incidents recently in
the industry and then you add in tornadoes and wildfires and all
these other things. So people are looking to map. Hey, I want to
know where my tornado shelters are. I want to know local emergency
response teams phone numbers for emergency contacts and then even
things like helicopter landing points. So we now support adding all
of those things to the map and then updating any information like
about the site itself, adding documents, those sorts of things. And
so we've really seen that take off and become a part of site
orientation for a number of asset owners and so on. And it's
evolved into a pretty neat safety tool. Joel Saxum: Yeah. I was
thinking about this I'm speaking from the mind of a traveling wind
turbine technician, right? Cause this comes from my oil and gas
past every site you go on every O& M building you visit. They
hand you your sheet of paper. This is your ERP, your emergency
response plan. This is where the, the tornado shelter is. This is
where the O& M building is. Here's the closest hospital, all
these different things. Now you have a living one that's in your
phone. Every technician has their phone on them all the time.
That's just a given, right? So then, and if there is a massive
update, Oh, we're using a different thing. Are we moved the truck?
Cause we've seen the, Alan, you and I have seen those moving
tornado shelters, right? Basically you just pick them up on a truck
and put them somewhere else. They're crazy. But that's a living
document now, right? You're not scrambling or you get in your truck
and you're like, Oh man, someone got bit by a snake. Who do I call?
And you're going through the ERPs or in the advisor or in, tucked
away in the back of the seat or something like, Oh, what's that
phone number? Now you know, you have it. Cause you're on, you're on
wherever you're at XYZ wind farm. Boom. You're boom. There it is.
That's fantastic. So the oversight part of the product gives people
the ability to claim, Hey, this is my wind farm. And then, Hey,
we're going to add all these different things in. They can keep it
private or is it all public or how does that work? Alex Jones:
Yeah. So a few different ways we have the ability. So we're rolling
out pretty soon the site checking capability. So anybody who's
physically on site, we'll get access to a little bit extra. You
can't have company documents, company forms. One of the things that
we're working towards is right now our form tool allows you to have
a sort of a single pane of glass. So the idea is any vendor, any
technician that comes to your site, you're getting full tracking of
every work order, every, QA, QC document against a turbine and all
of that just being a nice standard way that you don't have to have
PDFs and CSVs and all those things flying around for every internal
and external vendor. And then to some degree, it allows a number of
these companies as they move to self perform to just improve their
ability to do that. They're not locked into some tool or have their
data behind a paywall. If they pick one partner or the other. And
then we've seen a large adoption with EPCs lately, just. They want
to map lay down yards, roads before they're there. One of those
stories we had was, getting a gearbox during a cell delivered to
the wrong tower. Now you've got, crane sitting idle, you've got
folks sitting idle and it's okay, I've got to go find a flatbed,
get them to come back out here, pick it back up and move it a
quarter of a mile. And by the time you're done with that, it's
okay, we had two days of everybody kind of twiddling their thumbs,
waiting around for one thing to move. And Yeah, that's been a nice
use case. I think the safety side is really where we've seen the
most uptick, but now with all this new build growth, it's a frantic
phone call or text message of hey, why isn't this site in DSPTCH?
And it's like you are, You're literally building a lay down yard
right now. I don't know how you thought we would know that. Joel
Saxum: But if you're killing those inefficiencies, right? Those are
the things that just plague large projects. Rosemary on the podcast
always talks about the book of how big things get done. But there's
some practical use to that, right? Logistics inefficiencies on site
because in this world too, it's You may have an, like you say, you
have an EPC contractor out there. Okay there may be 20 people on
the site when it starts, and by the time that thing is over with,
there may have been 500 different people roll through that site in
6 months, if you're building a wind farm, from 5, 10, 15 different
subcontractors, and all these different people, so knowing that
they're all on site, they have a live map, basically a customized
version of Google Maps to get around the site, know where to put
things, know what to do killing inefficiencies, that's huge. We, I
say in this, cause we had a conversation with Heli Service USA
yesterday, and it was all about how can we tackle inefficiencies in
offshore wind. Now that's what their goal was that you guys are
doing the same thing, but for onshore wind, tackling those
inefficiencies. Alex Jones: Yep. And we've seen some interesting
things come out of it. We've had a few sheriffs let us know that
And I had never put my self in the position of a local sheriff, but
if a angry landowner calls and says there's a loud turbine or one
leaking oil, it becomes, their responsibility to track down who
owns this turbine, where's the O& M building, this, that, the
other, and they're, They may have received some onboarding
documentation, but yeah, they, they have to track all that down. So
we've got a handful of sheriff's departments that really like the
fact that they can, open up a, open up the app, figure out who owns
that, where the on end building is. And then some feedback from our
folks have been the construction on building and the operational on
building may be different. And so somebody's, vendors are calling
and they're like. Hey, I think I'm here. And really they're at the,
O and M building from the construction phase, and then it's 30
minutes, all these sorts of silly things that happen just day over
day. Allen Hall: Let's talk about the IRA bill and what it means
for keeping track of your employees and the apprenticeship piece of
that. It does seem the paperwork requirements have grown quite a
bit. And keep, and knowing. Who's doing what and where they're at
on top of it. I understand that I don't have employees in that
situation. However, I was noticing on the app, you can actually
track that now. Alex Jones: That's right. Yeah. We got thinking of,
Hey, we've got these really interesting site maps. We know where
every tower is, where assets are or so on and so forth. How do we
tie that into making IRA compliances here? And so as you traverse
counties, you The wage determinations for what you're supposed to
pay people for failing wage change. And if you have a time card,
one, we've got geocoding on the time cards. And then two, if
someone logs time to a particular tower, we know what county that's
in. And there's,