SkySpecs Customer Forum Recap with Josh Goryl

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
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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.