 Hello and good afternoon, good morning, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to engineering for change or E4C for short. Today, we're very pleased to bring you this month's E4C webinar focusing on some startup lessons from our colleagues at Health Power Systems. Today's webinar is called Adapt to Thrive, an Industry Startup Reboots. My name is Yana Aranda and I'm the President of Engineering for Change, and I'll be serving as today's moderator. The webinar you're participating in today will be archived on our webinars page and our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs for those channels are listed here. Information on upcoming webinars is available on our webinars page. Any E4C members will receive invitations to those upcoming webinars directly. If you have any questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers, we encourage you to contact the E4C webinars team at webinars at engineeringforchange.org. And if you're following us on Twitter today, I'd like to invite you to join us in our conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinars. Now, before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you a bit about engineering for change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform, and global community of more than one million engineers, technologists, designers, global development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges may include access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, which we'll be talking about today, improved agriculture, and more. We want you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders, insights on hundreds of essential technologies in our solutions library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships, and more. E4C members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with our site, the better we'll be able to survey resources aligned to your needs. We invite you to visit our website to learn more and sign up. If you're just learning more about energy solutions, trying to bridge the electrical infrastructure gaps and low income settings, we invite you to explore the E4C solutions library after the webinar. An example of the type of technology you'll find is what you see on this slide. This solution is, in fact, what will be discussed at length by today's presenter as it is the original HUSC power systems biomass gasification power plant. In addition to what you hear today, you can explore the full report on the system in the solutions library. This report provides more information about technical performance, academic research, user provision models, and other details for the system. All the information is sourced by E4C's research fellows and reviewed by our community of experts. And most importantly, it is available to E4C members free of charge. Now, some very important housekeeping items before we get started. We'd like to take a moment to practice using the WebEx platform. Please, right now, type into the chat window what part of the world you're joining us from. The chat window is located at the bottom right of your screen. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon on the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides. I'll get us going as well here in New York. All right, so we have some folks from New York City, for sure, from Canada. I know we have some folks joining us from Portland, as well as Denver and Michigan. We also, I know, folks are dialing in from India and we have some folks from Rhode Island. So lots of great locations today. Keep your answers coming just so that you are aware. The chat window is meant for interaction with the other participants, as well as for any general questions. However, we would like for you to use the Q&A window, which is located just below the chat window, to type in additional questions for the presenters to be able to keep track of that. Again, if you do not see the Q&A window, please click the icon that is the bottom of the screen right in the middle of the slides for that, and you should be able to access it. So some more more replies here, folks from the Netherlands, India again. So thank you so much for joining us. After the webinar to access your professional development hour, particularly for engineers who require those, please follow the instructions on your member dashboard to access the PH form or click the link that you see on the slide right here to request that. And with this, I'd like to turn it over to our fantastic presenter, Manoj Singha, who is the co-founder and CEO of Husq Power Systems. Gets strong leadership skills with a proven track record of turning around a business, risk management, change management, and ability to bring a diverse team in multiple countries together to achieve a common vision. Mr. Singha has extensive experience developing strategy and execution across multiple industries, including renewable energy, energy policies for national electrification, and the financial services industry. His work history includes over a decade of experience in negotiating and deal making, raised equity and debt capital from a spectrum of investors. He's formed partnerships from startups to Fortune 500 companies to government institutions. Additionally, he has been invited as a speaker and panellist in multiple countries and now here online with E4C and has spoken on multiple topics, including access to energy for rural people, energy policy, risk management of financial assets, and credit risk. We're incredibly honored to have Manoj joining us today. I'm going to turn it over to him. All right. And Manoj, please take it away. Wonderful. Thank you very much, Yana. I hope you all can hear me okay. I had to shut down my video because my internet connectivity is very, very poor. I am actually a partner in India that happens to be my hometown and home state. That's a great thing. The bad thing is the internet is really slow. So I think from a presentation perspective, I will talk a little bit about my background and set up the context for, you know, what the power system says, and why did I really stop. So like I was saying earlier, I was born in Bihar, a state in India that has roughly 110 million people in population. And when I started this idea, 70 to 80 million people did not have electricity at all. And at the time I was in the US, I was enjoying my life, I should say. But I still had this nagging thing in my mind that my own people in my own home state are still suffering. And I'm talking about 2007 and eight time frame from lack of electricity as an electrical engineer. So I guess I was left with no option but to solve that problem. So that was the genesis of why I started in India to essentially solve the problem for people in the rural areas by providing them with 347 power and at an affordable price point that they can use to replace kerosene or diesel or what have you. So that's really the background of why we started this company in 2008. When we started this company in 2008, we looked at a variety of technology. And I used to work with Intel Corporation back then in the US. So semiconductor was quite easy for me to understand. Therefore, we started looking at solar PV as a technology of choice to do what we wanted to do, which is to provide electricity to people in rural areas in India. So we looked at that and then realized it was very expensive. If some of you track or look at the price of solar panels, you may not. But just so that you know in 2008 solar panels used to sell for $5 per watt as compared to 25 to 30 cents US cents that is per watt now. That's the kind of price that has changed over the last 10 years. Less than one tenth of what it used to be in 2008. So given that high price, we actually ended up picking biomass gasification as a technology choice for us. And before I go into too much detail about the technology piece, what we really do is we build these small power plants which are not more than 50 kilowatt in size typically. And we lay out wires and poles that span a distance of about a mile, mile and a half at the most. And in that radius, we serve roughly 200 to 300 customers that are residential small businesses and so on and so forth. So that was our model that we envisioned or you can say pioneered in 2008. So the whole idea or goal was to build these decentralized power plant distribution assets and people. And one of the reasons why we did all come up with that idea is because in India again back in 2008, all the cities will always be prioritized above the rural areas. So if there's a finite amount of power that India was generating, the rural people will always get prioritized the last. And therefore they will get electricity at odd hours like between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m. when nobody really needs it. So that's the problem that we encountered and we wanted to solve that by creating this decentralized asset or business or minigrid in our case. That has only one priority because people in that 1.5 mile radius. So that was why we came up with decentralized energy business model. Fast forward to now if you guys follow energy space at all or if you at least followed PG&E, FIASCO recently in California, they shut down 2 million people. They're talking about utilizing the assets because that can be much more resilient to things like fires and cyclones and what have you. So I'll pause there. So essentially that was those were the issues that we were looking at. And that's why we built this company has power systems that solves the problem of those people who live in the rural areas as a priority. Provide them with reliable and renewable power at an affordable price point so that they can do well. And in return we do well as well. Both from business perspective as in profitability. And of course we create a lot of impact. Today we have the auditing 70 hybrid minigrid systems in India and Tanzania. India correctly says in the India. So that's what we are doing today. And we are actually in terms of minigrid space. We are the world's lowest cost provider as compared to any other that is out there in the sector. And it is about to close the CBC round of financing which was 25 million dollars from a great set of investors that includes Shell. Shell has a new energy part so Shell new energies, NG, sweat fund and FMO. And yeah so these are the four investors that came in in 2018. Interestingly all of them are from Europe which might be an indication that they are a little bit more forward the thing when it comes to clean tech and uses of non-convention sources of energy. So this is just to re-establish what the problem statement we are dealing with. If you look at the numbers on your right side of the screen the most often quoted numbers are between 850 million to a billion people without access to power. We define the problem even larger because there are additional 1 to 1.3 billion people who do not have access to reliable power. Which is equally or even more painful. If you are getting power for 6 to 8 hours what are you really going to do? How can you plan anything when you get 10 hours of power and you have no idea when you get that power right? So our problem statement that we are trying to solve as a company is not just off grid but also weak grid or people connected to the weak grid system. I think I have done an underestimate. About 70 billion dollars gets spent on diesel and kerosene and candles in the rural parts of Africa and Asia. I think it is much larger than that. The recent numbers that are coming out about millions of diesel that run in these two continents is just enormous. And therefore the market size both from number of people were adversely impacted because of lack of access to power. And the money that they spend on really dirty sources of energy is very, very large. On our earth we have about 7 billion people and one third of that do not have access to reasonable and reliable power. So that is what really excited us other than solving the problem for my own home statement when we started the company. And as you can see on the chart on your left hand side the y-axis is GDP per capita and x-axis is energy consumption per capita. So if you are from United States or Canada the energy per capita is quite high and so is of course GDP per capita. So the correlation between energy uses and wealth is significantly high. I think nobody has proven the causation but correlation between these two variables are pretty much indication of where the wealth is or how the wealth can be created. And one of the levers is to create more energy uses, more for productive purposes. So that's the problem statement. I'm going to run quickly to this slide which talks about some of the economies that we are targeting including India. A few countries in East Africa, we are all different in Tanzania and we are looking at Nigeria as a market. So this is a little bit operated slide 2016 but that market size annual spend on energy uses is roughly $7 billion. So based on the problem statement that we talked about and how and why we really wanted to start the company in 2008, we defined our vision statement to be the world's largest total utility company providing 24-7 renewable and affordable power that enables socio-economic development and it has to happen at scale. So we did not start the company to do 20 or 200 villages. We started the company to hopefully do 200 or solve problem for 200,000 villages or at least 20,000 villages if not 200,000. And what I really want you to take away from this is we do not consider electricity as something that we provide. We really consider electricity as a tool that we provide to people that they can use in the most effective way they see fit in order to improve their life or increase their income or both. So residential customers or households of course they switch from kerosene to our mini grid lighting and therefore their life generally improves because they have light whenever they want it and they can use it for television and things of that nature to live that you and I are very comfortable with and we don't even think twice about it. And for, we really now focus on productive uses of power. So people who are running small shops or might want to run a small carpentry shop or a small factory that has a wheat grinding machine, that's the area that we really focus on because that's where the income increases significant once they connect to us. And that's why in our business statement captures social development at scale by providing electricity as a tool so that people can use it to prosper. This is kind of a bragging thing, but we won last year a low tech company, which was a great stamp of approval, I think for us in terms of what we are doing or what we have been doing for now 10 years. So what does our, like I was saying earlier, we build these small power plants that are 50 kilowatt in size. We have solar PV that provides power during daytime. We have biomass gasification system that provides power during evening time, which is between say 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. Then we have battery as a backup that provides power for the remainder period of night, like from 11 p.m. to 11 p.m. this morning. And battery acts as a backup if and when the rain or things of that nature so that people or our customers are not adversely impacted and they get 24-7 power per watt. So for some of you who may not be aware of what biomass gasification is, it's quite simple process. It was discovered, I think, during World War II or even before World War II. It takes biomass waste at the feedstock in the case of Spice Husk. At the feedstock of the gasification chamber, which is a pyrolysis process, so a plate is heated to 800 degrees Celsius under an oxygen condition that is not a whole lot of oxygen. So it doesn't burn and at that temperature it starts generating gas, which is called a producer gas. That we take out and feed it to an engine or modified CNG engine that is then connected to alternator that generates electricity. That's how that gasification process works. So we are using the system or this combination because our mandate is to generate 100% renewable power. We would have used diesel-gented at my time, but we chose not to. I talked about transmission and distribution. We run poles and wires that follow national standards up to a distance of 1.5 miles or 2 kilometers in each direction. And our customers are connected through smart prepaid meters. And that is key to reducing traffic to zero, which is a pretty big problem in India. So one of the biggest problems that companies face or distribution companies face in India is a lot of theft and transmission and distribution losses that makes big distribution companies actually not profitable. They lose money. So in India there are about 20 plus distribution companies and at an aggregate level they lose about 25 billion dollars annually. So that's the kind of problem that exists in this market because of both TN distribution losses but also because of theft. And we solved that by using this local network as well as smart prepaid metering system. So I think I stress upon this as well. What we really excel in is not providing or producing electrons, which we do, and take it to individual customers premises. What we really excel in is identify each customer segment that we can serve and serve them extremely well. And what do I mean by that? So for example, I talked about we have solar PV for daytime supply and solar PV is the cheapest energy source in that mix. So when our customers say households or shops or factories are using our energy during daytime, say between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m. or 4 p.m. We actually provide a discounted tariff rate to these customers so that they can take advantage of lower cost of energy that we are producing at that time. And we can do that because we have a smart prepaid metering system. So I also live in Fort Collins, Colorado in the U.S. And for City of Fort Collins, the utility introduced time of day pricing last year. The time of day pricing, so in some way, although we are catering only to customers that may not be expected. But what we have is smart prepaid metering system that is much better than most of the companies that I know of in the U.S., mostly from tariff management, etc. These are just customer data that we are really proud of. Like I was saying, we really take a lot of pride in serving our customers well. And this customer is one of our first customers that received 24-7 power. And when he received 24-7 power, his energy usage increased by 100%. And his sales were overall money that he was making increased by four times. So these are the things that we get really excited about. Of course, we provide a trunk, which is great, but the customer stories are the ones that really excite us. So that's our story in the village. What we have observed is that the energy consumption increases quite substantially. And we observe 50% of these energy user power. These are energy users from month 10 to month 12. And that is a winter drop. But overall, there is increase in energy consumption. And before I go further into this particular slide or deck, what I wanted to talk about is, which is, I guess, the topic of this conversation is how did we reach here? So I talked in the beginning about us founders starting the company with biomass gasification as a system. So in 2008, when we had biomass gasification system, because of the technical limitation, you were able to do six to eight hours of power with biomass gasification system only. And we were primarily serving residential customers because commercial customers needed to be served in the daytime as well. And we did that quite well. We actually raised our series A Round of Financing in 2010, sorry, C Round of Financing in 2010, and series A Round of Financing in 2012. With these financing, we scale quite rapidly from a couple of systems in 2008 to more than 70 systems by 2013. And these are, let me quickly stop. Do you guys want me to answer some of the questions that are coming or I should do at the end? No, let's wait till the end for questions. We'll tackle everything at the end. Otherwise, it might impact our time overall. Thank you. Okay. So our journey was, you know, we started with a business model with biomass gasification system. We did quite well. We expanded our footprint from, you know, two or three systems to 70 systems in less than two or three years after we received the money. When we were doing that, we were not watching a few things that we should have been watching. And our business model started sort of crumbling down or collapsing. What I mean by that is, you know, we had more than 12,000 customers across these 70 sites. And what we started observing was people who were happy with us in 2010 or 2011, they were not quite satisfied with what we were providing them in 2013 or early 2014. And the reason behind that was, you know, people were happy with six to eight hours of power in 2010. But with development and aspirational changes, our customers were aspiring to get on demand or 24-7 power. And we were way too busy with our own thought that was replicating it. We really sort of forgot to listen what customers were really demanding. Right? So that was one thing that we missed and we made that as a pretty big mistake. The second thing was, despite the fact that, you know, actually two of us, two founders of the company, we were both in solar or semiconductor industry. We had evaluated solar PV technology in 2008, but we did not keep track of that. And then realized in 2013 and 2014 that the solar prices had come down quite a bit. In 2013, the solar PV prices were down to a dollar per watt as compared to five dollars per watt in 2008. So those were the two major trends that we missed. And that's why we were looking at our business model that worked really well in 2008, 2010 and so on and so forth. Started really falling apart in 2013 and 2014. That was a pretty big setback for us. We were quite well known as one of the largest many great companies back then. Then we had our most highly paying customers deserting us and we had no idea what was happening. That meant we really dug into the business model and what really needed to happen to change the quality of the scale. It should always be ahead of what customers are going to aspire for. I don't have a slide in here, but we introduced, so first of all we changed our business model from the six to eight hours of supply to this hybrid many grid model that I just talked about in the last few slides, where we combined solar PV, a biomass gasification system and battery and synchronized all the systems together in order to service our customers and provide them with 24 seven power. And that is when we introduced smart prepaid metering system with all these quality fancy tariff management process so that we can always be ahead of what customers might need. For example, passing customer the cost advantage of solar PV or launching campaign that will promote data to the power. It was all possible through smart metering technology. So that was a major, major shift. You can call it a big pivot in the business model or turnaround of the company. Personally, I had, I went through this turnaround process. So we were at 70 plants, we had 300 people and we were losing a lot of money because our customers were deserting us. So we had to take a very tough call. We had to close a lot of sites. We had to let, you know, more than 50, 50% of the people go in order to fix the business and bring it to the right sort of in a right frame so that we can scale. So that was our 2014 timeframe when we really went through this tough process and made all the changes that are required. Of course, business model and technology wise we brought 24 seven power that is grid like and we can actually interact with the grid as well. And at the same time, if some of you are going to try and start companies or company, most founders including me, we make mistake of not hiring very competent management team. We typically think we can do everything ourselves. That is a misconception. I still, by the way, think I can do most of the things myself. So I have to teach or myself over and over again that you need to find highly competent people to join your journey. So that together you can do much bigger than what you or I can do standalone. No matter how talented you are or I am, we cannot be expert in every field. So one of the lessons for are you hire, if I had to build, you know, two more plans versus hire one more person with the same money. If I had to go back, I'll hire a person, not build those two extra plans. So those were some of the learnings along the way. And the third one was around policy. So when we started the company in 2008 and nine, you know, we built these systems. I was very happy. We were under the radar, but in the power or energy sector, you are actually doing infrastructure for a country. And you cannot shy away from policies and interaction and partnership with government. And that was another lesson. I, my background, like I was saying earlier is electrical engineer and I have an MBA as well. But I had no experience whatsoever with policies. So I had to learn that. And I have worked tremendously on policy side to bring mini grid as a part of national electrification plan of India and now Tanzania as well. And it took us eight years to get to that in India. India was the first country to announce mini grid policy and it happened in 2016. And interestingly, the same policy almost verbatim was picked by Nigeria in 2017 or 18 and they implemented that policy as well. So sure, I made some of those mistakes earlier, but I'm also very proud of the fact that we were able to create a sector that did not exist in the world. So those are some of the learnings and lessons that we have in terms of a business plan that we started with and the reality that hit us and how we use that reality and the data to evolve the business model to the next stage and bring competent management team members to help us through this sort of new work journey. So when we built these hybrid mini grid systems, we built about eight or 10 of them with the help of first so like as a very small equity investor in 2014. And after that we showed all the evidence that I'm actually sharing with you guys to these new investors that I talked about. So Shell and NG and others that got really involved in what is happening in more than 24 months of data to show that it works and it can work at scale. And that is what really helped us raise that $25 million after going through a really, really, really rough patch. So, you know, the lessons that I have already shared and what also pays off is if you're really tied to the purpose of what you're doing in our case electrification of everyone in the world to make positive impact in their lives is what is, is the purpose that really excites me every single day. It makes you more resilient. Of course, I could have said, you know, this is way too tough. I could have gone back to New York City. I was working in New York City. The purpose of what we were doing, the scale of the problem that we were trying to solve created a lot of resiliency in me as a person. That really helped me go through this very rough patch in the company between 2013 and 2020. So that's, those are the key lessons that, you know, is what I would share. And another point is, you know, when you're talking to investors if you're raising money, I was extremely transparent of what happened, why we close plans, why we let people go, what problems we faced. That also establishes a lot of trust when you're bringing new set of investors because it's better to tell what happened rather than hide. That's the basis of building trust with new set of partners. Some of the other, I'm going back to the slide now. Things that we have, literally the carousel uses to come to zero in every single village we have gone to. Just tremendous achievement if you can think about pollution that it creates in each household. I was talking about socioeconomic development. Again, these slides that I'm showing are all done by third party. We don't do this survey ourselves. Because we will be completely biased, of course. So it shows that 85% of our customers, roughly, they have all increased their businesses within the first 12 months of getting 24, 7. Very interestingly, actually the profit, so not just the sales. So that means cost can also go up. Their profits on third, which was a pretty interesting result for us because I did not expect that high profit increase for our commercial customers. So at this point of time, around the best, we made a major and if I can raise money from Shell and others. And right now we are scaling at a pretty fast pace. We had, and before scaling, we had anticipated challenges around scaling and one was of course technology. From solar PV to biomass to battery, we are always ahead, not ahead, but ahead of the curve when it comes to the technology that is right for our purposes. A pipe is also key. So right now in India we are expanding at the rate of one new minigrid per week. Our goal is to do one every other day. And that is by Q4 or by say November or December of 2020. In order to reach from one every seven days to one every other day is not, is not. And that's where we are looking for a lot of value chain, particularly average. Those are the relationships with the likes of Mahindra, which is a very large corporation in India. And we are finding partners in other countries as well. We are utility business. So we are going to have a large balance sheet. And in order to do that, we are always looking to get the most cost of debt financing that is possible in the world. And we have actually secured financing from OPEC, which is also a private investment corporation in the US and the Rockefeller Foundation. I talked about policy. Fortunately or unfortunately I had to learn this, but you cannot shy away from the policies. And I am constantly working on policy with multiple government stakeholders around the world. So we have raised equity like I was saying. We are looking to add another $20 million of debt on our balance sheet. And that would have a big size in India and a couple different countries in Africa. We are in Tanzania, like I said, might get into the Nigeria and other countries. So in summary, you know, we are the best in class model now after having made a big mistake. I think we have a good model. And like I was saying, but with multi stakeholders is key in this business. And we are looking at the same partners and stakeholders in the value chain. And lately we are working on a platform that includes IoT that can manage a fleet of assets. So then I have one power plant or even 10 or 20 power plant. It is one thing to manage them. But when we are looking at 300 to 500 power plants to manage. Manaj, we seem to have an audio pot here. Are you still there Manaj? Manaj, we may have lost you for a second. Do you want to dial us back in? Potentially Manaj got disconnected. So I'll give us a moment for him to reconnect. I think I'm connected again. There we go. Welcome back. Thank you. I was about to try to complete your presentation without you. Thank you for that. So these are actually we face in the field as well. We do have IoT based outages. So it's interesting to develop a technology platform that I can solve these kind of problems in real life. So that's, oh, I don't think I have the control on the slide moment or do I? In any case, so that was the last slide. So we are looking to expand quite rapidly again from one power plant that we install or one whole site that we install per week. One new site every other week, every other day, excuse me. And in order to do that, we need a lot of partners to accomplish that. And I think we are pushing for policy on immigrants that can become part of the national application program for a variety of reasons. One, it is going to be cheaper than an expanding main grid for hundreds of kilometers to reach rural parts of the world. And two, as we have seen in California and many other regions of the world, you know, the entire region was like assets or mini grid kind of program provides resiliency against those kind of. So with that, I'm going to pause. We are quite excited about scaling in India and many countries in Africa. And I'm sure we will make some more mistakes, but the key is to learn from them quickly and keep going. Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Yeah. Thank you for being so transparent. And yes, I think all of us. The one thing we can't guarantee beyond death and taxes is that we'll all make mistakes along the way. The important thing is certainly to learn from those. So we have a number of questions that have come in and I'm really excited to dig into these. One that immediately struck me is, you know, in terms of the, you're seeing this productive use from your customers. I was, I was really interested to see that one of the devices listed was printers. I did not, I expected freezers and refrigerators, but printers was actually a little surprise for me. Very interesting. So the question here from the audience from our listeners is, do you also supply the energy efficient and user devices to maximize the benefits of the electricity that you supply? Yes, good question. So we used to not do that until 2015, I think, but we started providing energy efficient appliances to our customers. So we do have partnerships with the likes of Havels in India or LG, Samsung and the likes to be able to provide our customers with a very high quality appliance that, you know, again, you and I can get in major cities of the world. What is really interesting is the people in the rural area, they get the bad deal all the time. So they will get more expensive item with a poor quality, which doesn't make sense. So we have tried to change that paradigm by bringing to the doorstep as simple as LG TV, which is LED. And at a price that is cheaper than what they could get in the closest market that they have access to. So it helps them and it helps us. Of course, we do make some money on that and they get to enjoy the better things at a cheaper price point. Of course, no, that's critically important. So a couple more questions related to the power plant itself. So one listener wants to know how do you identify the power plant sites and transport the sources of biomass to each site? In particular, this listener wants to know if the local community or customers are involved in that process in any way. Right. So the first part of the question is about identifying a site where we want to build them. That is actually almost a billion dollar question because it took us eight years to figure it out. It is not that trivial because of course we have to not just generate electricity and distribute it. Since we invest a large amount of capital in these assets, we also need to get repaid on those assets. So we have a variety of site selection process and criteria that make sure that our investment that we are making is going to get some returns. So that's more on the economic side but also I alluded to earlier. We have figured out what is the right mix for us that will generate economic return for us, make the business sustainable and it is helpful for the entire community. We have those sort of quantified and helps us to the selection as far as procurement. So we are always involved in the community. So each site that we build, we always hire local people. We never parachute people from cities to do these day-to-day operations and maintenance. So electrician and operator are always local to that village or maybe a neighboring village. So that builds a lot of, I don't know what the right phase is but it gives us a lot of attachment to the local community. And third question I think was about biomass procurement. So when we select site, that is also one of the criteria that go into it, we do select sites that are around say rice mills. And the rice mills should not be more than 8 to 10 kilometers or 5 to 6 miles of land and that way the transportation cost of biomass is not very high. So this question actually piggybacks off that one or dovetails into it. So the listener wanted to know that when the technology was created or when you develop these plans, how did you convince people to use the new technology? It seems that your presence in the community was obviously a critical factor to that. Do you want to expand on that a little bit more in terms of how did you assure your target customers that this was the way to go? All right, so customer is not the people who are using whatever they are using, whether it is diesel gen set or hydrogen lantern or even a candle. You know, we as a human being, we have a lot of inertia, we don't want to change. And so we have created a program which is a very step wise awareness program that creates this. So we have a simple messaging system that tells our potential customers of why we are more beneficial to them and the alternatives that they might be using at the time. And we bring, so now it is with all the digital and smart phones becoming less than $100 per piece, a lot of people do have smart phones. So we bring a tablet with a customer testimonial from the neighboring site and that helps us create a lot of awareness and buy in into what we are providing. So it's not a trivial process, but it's a very focused approach to demonstrate the benefit of what we do and how it helps them. So from both economic perspective, from the living standard perspective, and a lot of time, very interestingly, you know, which is neighbors and NB, somebody has LGTV, the neighbor also wants to have an LGTV. So that also works. Yeah, everybody wants to keep up with the Joneses. It's a universal concept. Yeah, this kind of customer education is, as you mentioned, not trivial. It's a large investment. And the second part of the listener's question regarding the implementation of these rural areas, whether you receive support for that or some funding to pilot test, or whether the users themselves, such as cooperatives or such, paid to kind of pilot the technology. I think how to answer that. So we did receive some support from government when we were doing biomass gasification system when we started the company in 2008. And it came in the form of subsidies. So that was one help. We also received some grant financing from foundations, the likes of Shell Foundation. So always approach grant providers to do the initial pilot or test the hypothesis or concept that you might have. And if you're playing in the energy sector, there's a lot of government programs that are always available. Yeah, it's really exciting to see or I think critical to acknowledge the amount of time you've invested in policy development and engaging with government agencies, both from the perspective of growing the sector at large, but also from the perspective of business development, which it seems to me that, you know, was really effective for you. So on the note of supporting organizations, another listener wanted to know whether engineering organizations like, for example, IEEE or nonprofits like EWB Engineers Without Borders supported you at all in your efforts, or if you did this without those kinds of engagements. Firstly, I used to write papers when I was a long time ago. That is my association with IEEE. After that, I haven't really read IEEE papers or taken any assistance on this front. Actually, I didn't know that there was something available. So that's on the IEEE front. We have not, I know engineering without borders, but in our case, we did not work or took help from them directly. We're not these two at least. But yeah, I mean, we have taken help from a lot of foundations to enter a new country or test a new hypothesis and such. Fantastic. So I know we're at time, but I have a question that I'm curious about. You mentioned how important and critical it is to hire a competent management team. And I very much violently agree with you that, you know, one person, no matter how talented cannot do it all. As a mom, I know this as well. So I would love to know what if you can speak to what does the management team look like now? What are some of those key hires that you made that you think really took you over the line? So when we were going through a really, really difficult time in 2013, I do believe in mentorship quite a bit. I did have a mentor since 2009 and he's a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He started two companies. I peered both of them. He has all the credentials, I guess, but he was a really good mentor to me. It didn't really matter to me whether he I peered a company or not. He was really able to connect to me and he was really able to guide me when I was, you know, seeking some kind of guidance or seeking some type of help. So I actually brought him on our board as an independent director in 2013. And he willingly accepted it when we were going through a really tough time. A lot of people actually would not why join a sinking ship, right? But that is a test of mentorship, I guess, and the relationship. So that was a very critical piece in terms of bringing a very highly competent ex-CEO and founder of multiple companies, successful companies on the board to keep me honest. Like he was not going to sugarcoat his words. So that was, you can say, a stupid or being brave of me to bring that kind of person who can be very, very direct and honest. Apart from that, he is the one who helped me hire other management team members that include Ed and Chief Operating Officer. He brings about 25 to 30 years of experience. We brought Head of Engineering. We brought Finance Controller. We brought Head of HR. So these were some of the highlight, sorry, another one is Head of Africa Business. So these are pretty competent people. A lot of them came from a combination of startup and corporate with more than 15, 20 years of experience. That has really solidified our management team. It's phenomenal. We do have, we are a time, so I know many of you will be dropping off, but there's one question that came in and I think it's a great one to kind of end on. A listener wants to know what has enabled you to be the LCOE provider when a large number of mini-grid and microgrid operators have struggled to be financially sustainable. That's a very important question. Everybody will have that. So LCOE is essentially levelized cost of energy. What is it that it cost us to deliver what our energy is what this question is about? And at a very high level, of course the technology or the hybrid technology that we are using enables us to lower the cost. Which is a right design to combine very uniquely in our case, solar PV, biomass gasification and the right sizing of the batteries. So that's one piece. Second piece is we have been running so many mini-grids for the last 10 years have codified all those learnings and mistakes into an algorithm. So we don't make those mistakes. So those are ruled out and we continue and repeat what really works. So when I say those are 45, these are not dependent on me or COO or anybody else. It is actually an algorithm that runs on the IoT. So that's one of the piece. Third is just the customer acquisition that we briefly discussed upon. That is extremely non-trivial. No matter how low your cost is, if you cannot acquire customers, you will never be sustainable. Making sure that your cash flow is very predictable. LCOE is also a function of utilization of asset during daytime and nighttime. And the customer acquisition and the right mix of customers allows us to have the capacity utilization of the plan fairly constant between day and nighttime. That most mini-grid players are not able to do. And even the likes of PG&E or Condition are not able to do. It's a very non-trivial problem to solve. Not saying we have cracked the code, but we have tried to do it better than others. So these are the top three reasons that I would say have enabled us to be the lowest cost LCOE company in the world in the mini-grid sector. And that is a tremendous accomplishment, Manajan. I would like to thank you so very much for your honest and transparent sharing with us today. The lessons you've learned, I hope, will be meaningful to our listeners on this webinar and on the recording, which will follow this webinar. With that, I'd like to thank you for your time today. I'd like to thank you, Manajan. I'd like to thank our listeners for joining us from all around the world. We are incredibly grateful for you setting aside some time during your incredibly busy schedule running this phenomenal company. So for those of you who are listening, interested in PDA certifications, the link is available on this slide. If you have more questions and we didn't address them, do feel free to reach out to us via the email address listed here. And of course, don't forget to become an E4C member to get more information on upcoming webinars. And with that, I wish you all a good evening, good night, good morning, depending where you are. And I hope to see you all on our next E4C webinar. Have a good day. Bye-bye now. Thank you, everyone. Bye.