IntelStor is a market research and business strategy consulting firm that focuses on the renewable energy industry. Founded in 2010 by renewable energy industry veteran Philip Totaro, IntelStor is regarded worldwide as the foremost experts on innovation strategy, competitive intelligence, and technology trend analysis in renewable energy. Joel Saxum and Allen Hall sit down with Phil to discuss the state of the wind industry, the need for analytics, and how the IntelStor platform can dramatically improve the wind business.

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IntelStor Guest

Allen Hall: I am Allen Hall, and I’m here with my co-host Joel Saxum for the special edition of the Uptime Podcast. In the rapidly evolving renewable energy market, market research is essential for stakeholders to make informed decisions. Market research provides insights into the revolving dynamics, consumer preferences, regulatory landscapes, and God knows there’s a lot of those, and all the emergency emer and all the emerging technologies.

Research can also help identify untapped opportunities to get risks and foster innovation. Well, today we’re shining a spotlight on IntelStor. Founded in 2010 by CEO and founder Phil Totaro, IntelStor has become a global beacon of expertise in innovation, strategy, competitive intelligence, and technology trend analysis within the renewable energy sector.

Phil, welcome back to the program. 

Phil Totaro: Thanks for having me, Allen. I appreciate it. 

Allen Hall: Well, there’s, there’s a lot happening in market analysis and I, I know I have seen behind the curtain a little bit and what all Interstore does, but you are a real powerful player in that space. The market research you have done in wind in particular is remarkable.

Phil Totaro: Well, thanks. It’s born out of going on, what, 13 years now of being in business, the company being in business. But it’s actually more than 20 years since I left university with an aerospace engineering degree and, and plenty of enthusiasm and found myself in originally starting in the aerospace sector and then transitioning into wind.

And I actually worked for Clipper Wind Power for some, it’s a fondly remembered name for others they have never heard of it before. But it was a wind turbine manufacturing company that was based in the United States. And we were actually dating back to 2007, 2008. We were the number two wind turbine manufacturer in the country behind GE.

At, at that time. So, you know, I, having started the company, I really just started doing kind of one-off consulting projects just as a, you know, a one-man show. And then over time what happened is we started getting repeated requests for things where we needed to build tools or we needed to build data sets.

And these would be around kind of commercial market analysis, technology, benchmarking, you name it. We even did a patent landscape where we, we literally went through something like 60,000 patents and cataloged, and classified all of them. So that, that was actually quite helpful, to be honest, in familiarizing us with a lot of the technology that is not only in use in the industry, but the technology that could be used in the future.

And so what happened is, you know, going back many, many years, I always wanted to build kind of an online data platform for all this. But it, we didn’t, the technology didn’t really quite exist to do what we wanted to be able to do, but the good news is it does now. So dating back about five, six years, we started building an online version of market research content.

You know, if, if anybody’s bought market research in the past, you know what the problem is. The day that we or anybody else writes you a market research report and gives it to you, whether it’s a PDF or whatever. It’s already stale. You know, all the charts, graphs, tables are it, it’s not gonna give you the most up-to-date version of the information, but an online data platform does.

Joel Saxum: And you know, Phil, having consumed a lot of those, it’s almost like in when you get that PDF report, you may pay 10, $20,000 for this thing. It’s in, for lack of a better terms, it comes to you analog, right? Like here, you’ve been emailed it, but you have this PDF report and you can read it and kind of make some insights and everything, but there’s nothing that makes it like a digital version of it, right?

Whereas makes it a little bit more easily actionable. That PDF report is great, but it’s just kind of a PDF report. 

Phil Totaro: Exactly, Joel. So with digitizing the consulting aspects of the business, digitizing all of the data because that’s the other challenge is, A lot of the conventional market research companies over the years, they never actually had a fully robust and accurate global asset Database. We, to be honest, nobody still has that today. We’re still in the process of building something where we’re going and geo tagging every single wind turbine. So for those of you who’ve seen countries like the United States or Brazil, that publishes a list of like all the wind turbines that are installed in the country, and they tell you, you know, every single location and every single make and model.

What they don’t do is they don’t combine that with other relevant commercial market data as well. So that’s what we’ve been doing, is we now have a catalog of more than half a million wind turbines, and we’re doing the same thing for more than I think, 34,000 solar farms in the world. And what we’re doing with all this data is we’re not only physically geolocating it on a map, but we’re identifying who built it, who currently owns it, if it’s not the same company.

How much did it cost? How much are they selling their power for? What can we expect in terms of payback timeframe on that? And you know, who’s operating and maintaining the thing because that also plays into how efficiently it, it operates. So we are, as far as I’m aware, the only company that has kind of comprehensive market level

intelligence across the entire asset base in the two biggest growth opportunities, I guess in wind and, and solar. 

Allen Hall: Well, it seems so important to know sort of the operational aspects of a wind farm or a solar farm to, to put a number on what it’s worth. It’s, it does seem like a lot of assets are bought and sold sort of sight unseen or maybe just taking a sampling.

But the way you have analyzed the wind farm asset, for example, You know how much power it’s putting out, what it should be putting out based on the, the weather and the winds, and also who is maintaining it, how well it’s doing. ‘Cause that does drive into the value of that asset. 

Phil Totaro: Right. And it’s interesting, Allen, because imagine you’re an investor for a minute and you maybe either have experience, or better yet, if you don’t have experience in investing in renewable energy assets, Where can you go to online comparison shop for projects to invest in?

Where can you go if you’re even a project developer? Where can you go to online comparison shop for power generation equipment? Like how do you know which piece of equipment actually performs better? Yes, you can get quotations from every single OEM, but they’re always gonna paint it in the best possible light.

What we’re doing is we’re stripping away all that sales and marketing stuff, and we’re saying, look, here’s the data that the independent power producers are obligated to report to the government, energy ministry, or regulatory authority. In the case of the US the data gets reported by the Independent Power Producers to the EIA that’s the Energy Information Administration.

They hoover up all that data from, you know, more than 1300 wind farms, and I think more than a thousand solar farms now in the United States. And they put that back out in the public domain for all to consume. What we’ve done is we’ve taken that information, we’ve done the same thing in Brazil, Denmark, Australia, Switzerland, the Dominican Republic, and basically any other country.

So I’m listing the ones that actually have publicly available asset data. Unfortunately, it’s not everywhere in the world. But for those countries that do have that data, we put together that picture of. We know your project CapEx. We know your power purchase contract price. We know your annual energy production from this government reported data.

And so we can actually calculate, you know, using a standard project, pro forma model, we can calculate your asset profitability, your payback window. You know, all sorts of things that are relevant for an investor to be able to use in pre-screening deal opportunities, for instance. And so that’s actually where we’ve gained some traction.

You know, since launching the online version of the platform is there are several companies, either investors or companies that want to acquire and repower assets. They’re using us to identify target sites where they can then, you know, not have to go and sign, you know, 30 different bilateral NDAs with 30 different companies.

They come to one platform, they get an answer about what direction should they be pointing in, and then they go and they can continue on doing their, their due diligence and, and we’re happy to help kind of facilitate that type of a, that type of use case. 

Joel Saxum: You know, one of the things I know Phil, you and your fantastic team do is not only do you have this digital platform for all these insights, these metrics, stuff that you’re collecting and putting together, but you guys derive your own insights from ’em as well, right?

You guys are putting out reports of, hey, We know this and this, and this is happening. So here we’re watching PPAs are trending this way and this, that. The other thing I think regularly, I mean, man, once a month I see you guys on LinkedIn putting out, Hey, we’ve got some new research. Hey, we’ve got some new research.

Can you focus on that a little bit? Tell us a little bit how you guys do that, that, that stuff. 

Phil Totaro: What’s interesting about building out a dataset like this is you don’t even know what it’s gonna tell you until you actually have everything in there. So the way in which we’ve been able to analyze some of this data, like we’ve actually found a trend in the US where some of the top independent power producers are actually operating their assets in a very specific way to try and maximize their production tax, credit revenue.

And that’s something that no other company has. I mean, whether they’re market research or whatever, they have no visibility to this type of a market level trend. Because they, they don’t, they aren’t necessarily taking the same data and analyzing it in the same way that, that we are. So we actually built something that allows us to look at like, how many years does it take before you see a drop off in performance of an asset?

I mean, let me put it this way. Imagine you wanted to buy a new car or a new cell phone or a laptop. You might go to a website, an online comparison shop for that type of thing, but imagine if they told you more about it. For instance, you’re in the market for a new cell phone. Imagine if somebody did a comparison of how many charge and discharge cycles your Apple phone got versus a Samsung phone or a Google Pixel phone.

Wouldn’t that influence your purchase decision? Similarly with a car, wouldn’t it influence your purchase decision if you knew that, you know, the mobile motor oil that was being put in it? It operated your car better and, you know, provided you more, you know, a long duration between oil changes as compared to some other, you know natural or synthetic brand.

I mean, the point is that it’s that level of fidelity of information that people are crying out for, I think the single most requested. Information that we get is how do these things actually operate and, and how do I know if I’m buying a lemon or not? And that’s actually something that even five years ago. We were never able to address nor was anyone able to address systematically throughout the entire industry.

But now we can. And that’s what’s really exciting about this. 

Joel Saxum: Yeah. That kind of high resolution data. I gotta, I gotta think that it’s got use for all kinds of different sectors, right? You, we’ve been talking here about the financial sector. People are investing or buying wind farms or acquiring them through mergers and acquisitions.

That’s one side of it. Right? But you also have like, Say I was a business development person that’s, that sold, I don’t know. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll grab a friend PowerCurve and they, and they sell products that can raise the actual energy production. They could look through the database, find places where their AEP may not be up to snuff, kind of, but they’re still operating. And, and

target those guys as intelligent business development for a product. Right. That’s just one other thing. The insurance industry could use this data to hedge some of their losses. We’ll say maybe they’re possible loss. So there’s a lot of, can, can you kind of tell us about some of the different sectors and how they’re engaging with you guys as well?

Phil Totaro: Yeah, absolutely. In fact, that’s a great point because we’ve had customers across like multiple different disciplines. So the supply chain companies and even the independent service companies have actually been the two biggest users of, of our data platform. The, the turbine OEMs and the other supply chain companies wanna be able to benchmark performance and leverage some of this information to say, Hey look, this is an independent company that’s got, you know, independently published data that says that we are better than someone else.

That’s valuable from a sales perspective. The independent service companies also utilize this for exactly what you just described, Joel. They wanna be able to see who’s got an underperforming chunk of their portfolio and can they get in there and potentially, you know, especially if there’s an expiring long-term service contract for an OEM or.

There might be some other reason why, you know, the OEM is underperforming, or maybe they’re utilize, you know, the asset owner is utilizing a different ISP and they can switch to somebody that has a track record that, that they can demonstrate that they’re better. So that’s, that’s definitely been one.

You also mentioned insurance. So one of the things that we’ve been working on with some insurance companies is actually trying to build even more fidelity to the data that we have by going through claims data and identifying components on turbines that have significant issues in terms of false and failures.

‘Cause again, like I mentioned before, if you’re looking at, you know, an online comparison shopping website for industrial equipment like IntelStor can be, that’s the type of information that people wanna be able to have access to. So, again, wouldn’t it necessarily inform your purchase decision, or if you’re an insurance company, wouldn’t it necessarily inform your decisions about how you go about underwriting, you know, different projects and, and specific makes and models of a product?

You know, you might adjust your premiums as a result of having access to this type of information. You know, even seeing who’s, you know, like how your own portfolio of insureds. Is performing versus somebody else that has exactly the same make and model of product in similar wind conditions or similar solar, you know, site conditions.

You might be able to ascertain like, Hey, why is this other company operating their thing more efficiently than the company that we ensure? You know, that that’s a discrepancy that can be explained now with the data that, that we have access to and the analytics that we’ve been able to develop around that type of data.

Allen Hall: So Phil, does that then drive a lot of operators and owners to, to deep dive into your data network themselves? It seems like every operator or maybe a, a, a potential buyer of a site has specific things they’re looking for, right? That not all the. Companies are looking for exactly the same thing. And, and, and I think Joel’s point is correct.

When you get a market report, you get this PDF and you’re like, okay, that that does me good for about 30 seconds. I’ve absorbed it, but I can’t manipulate the data myself and go look for the thing that I’m looking for. That little gold nugget of a site somewhere that everybody else has missed. I can go into your system and, and do that search myself, right?

Phil Totaro: Absolutely. And that’s exactly what some of the asset owners are, are using it for. Like I just described, they wanna be able to understand like if there’s someone out there that has the same make and model of Vestas or of GE or Siemens or Nordex or whomever, they wanna see like, well, how are they operating this thing better?

How are they getting more capacity factor out of it? How is it that they’re getting, it feels like they’re getting a better deal than we are. And they, they wanna know that because they, you know, for the asset owners. They also want to be able to attract investment. And if you can show that you’re towards the top of the league tables in terms of, you know, companies that are the most profitable companies that operate their assets the best, you definitely have a vested interest in being towards the top of those league tables.

Joel Saxum: Sounds like it could be a Wall Street play. 

Phil Totaro: Yeah, absolutely. Joel. 

Joel Saxum: I mean, if, if, if I’m investing in large you know, power producers, well maybe I’ll go take a look at this because this will tell me that who, who’s actually producing the right amounts of power. A hundred percent. I like the idea, to be honest with you, Phil, is the, the intelligent business development.

So say I’m looking at x, Y, z, wind farm owned by company A, B, C, what are the kind of the columns of data that you guys have for those? 

Phil Totaro: So, that’s a great question because what we’re tracking is, like I mentioned, we’ve got things like their power purchase contract and their CapEx data. And based on also having their annual energy production, what we calculate are.

The total revenue that they’ve generated to date the total revenue that they need to generate in order to break even. Now, that’s different than, you know, just being cashflow positive, which is something that usually happens in the first, like 18 months to two years of the project. The break even timeframe that, or the, the full net positive return on capital is something that we track and the timeframes for those.

It’s a very interesting trend because then you can see like companies that are performing very well and above the, the median or, or kind of the market average and, and companies that are below that too. So that’s something we, we are able to track lost production. So from the historical average in the annual energy production that somebody produces as I mentioned before, you’re going to naturally things degrade over time, you know, any kind kind of industrial equipment degrades over time.

But we can actually see from data how that falls off and how much delta in, you know, revenue. They should have been getting, that they’re losing now as a result of this underperformance and this continued underperformance. So we contract that. And then it’s, it’s basically determining also, you know, if they’ve broken even on their project already, how much additional net profit can they expect to generate as a result of continuing to operate through the planned end of an asset life.

And so from that we can determine like who’s got the most profitable asset portfolio. Who’s generating the most production tax credit, revenue from their portfolio, all sorts of things like this, that, that necessarily would influence an operational decision or a purchase decision or an investment decision.

So yeah, there’s, there’s all kinds of that. And then just to build on that, that thought, what we decided to do was we started building you know, kind of the, the industry’s first meaningful Rolodex. Of all these contacts at the companies because if you are looking to get in touch with somebody that is an asset manager or you know, somebody who represents the financial side of the ownership of an asset, we can help actually facilitate that.

We now have 91,000 contacts in the database where we’ve got their valid work email and. We’ve hooked that up to their LinkedIn profile, and if they change companies, we can go out and find their, their contact information so that we have something that allows people to continuously keep in touch with somebody that they’re, they’re gonna need to, to talk to for business development purposes for.

You know, ongoing asset operations, questions, anything. We also do a substantial amount of work on kind of market entry strategies, particularly with supply chain companies or project development companies that are looking to expand internationally. And frankly, a lot of the goings on in the industry, you know, companies that are looking at, you know, an Asian company looking to expand into Western Europe or the US.

We’ve been behind a lot of that. You know, unfortunately, we can’t always talk about what we’ve, what we’ve done. We’re like the CIA, but It’s like we’ve, we have our fingers in a lot of pies. And you may not know it.

Allen Hall: Are you giving them advice on like, who to reach out to? Like, here’s a, here’s a company in, if I’m in China, here’s a company in Spain that you need to connect with. 

Phil Totaro: Building this contact database, which has taken, you know, quite some time to actually you know, invest in, and we’ve had some great support from, from partners including yourself actually.

So we’ve, we’ve been able to build this. But what it’s unlocked is just like I mentioned before, like having a data set allows you to unlock other things. We now have a catalog of more than like, 7,000 companies that are active in the industry, and this runs the entire gamut from project developers to financiers, to service technician companies and and independent service providers.

Supply chain companies running, again, the entire gamut of, of different components that can and, and are supplied mechanical components, electrical, you name it. So we now have something that I don’t think anybody has ever done globally before. You know, we’ve, we’ve actually put all the companies in their headquarter locations as well as their manufacturing facilities down on a map.

We’ve actually started analyzing how much production capacity exists at each manufacturing site for the supply chain companies. So we’re really starting to dig into a lot of these things because it’s the more types of data and the more data that we can accumulate the, the better able we are at helping to facilitate those types of introductions, those types of relationships.

And so the, the business development capabilities have really. Come on leaps and bounds in the past few years as a result of combining the market intelligence with the business development capabilities. So that, as Joel mentioned before, if somebody wants to be able to go and do kind of intelligent outreach, you’re not just like email blasting somebody and saying, Hey, we’ve got a great thing that, that we wanna talk to you about.

You can go in and specifically target people that you actually wanna talk to based on their job function. And based on their company type and company function and, and really zero in on a message that’s gonna get across to, to those type of people. And we’re helping to, to make those connections all the time.

Allen Hall: Well, Phil, obviously it’s a very powerful tool that IntelStor has developed and it it has a whole bunch of users at the moment, and rightly so, because it, it does speed up development as, as Joel’s pointed out. The business development side, it makes life so much easier and you get to deal so much faster.

If you have the right information, you have the right context. It’s, it’s such a difficult problem if you’re searching on your own. Trying to find companies to, to make relationships with it is dang near impossible in this global marketplace. And IntelStor has those contacts readily available and you can find them, search ’em.

And get to that, that business development deal that you’ve been looking for for the last year or so. And it, it, it is a very powerful tool. How do people get ahold of you at IntelStor? How do they, how do they find you? 

Phil Totaro: Just visit www.IntelStor.com. And we have a contact page there. You can reach out to us.

You can also find me on LinkedIn under my name Philip Totaro. 

Allen Hall: Phil, this has been great. I’ve, I’ve learned a great deal. I knew I knew some things from just being behind the scenes a little bit, but I’ve learned so much more. So I, it’s great that you could come on the program and give us the highlights that I really appreciate it.

Phil Totaro: Thanks for having me again, Allen.