 Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from today. Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today, we're pleased to bring you our third installment in the E4C seminar series. For those of you who are new to the series, the series is spearheaded by ASME's Engineering for Global Development Research Committee. And this purpose is to intellectually develop the fields of engineering for global development. Each month, we host a new research institution to learn about their work, advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and more. Today's seminar will be focusing on the work done by Dr. Nathan Johnson at the Arizona State University ASU. And I am Yana Aranda, and I am the president here at Engineering for Change, and I'll be one of the moderators for today's webinar. The seminar you're participating in today will be archived on E4C and on our YouTube channel. Both of the URLs where those will be archived are listed on the slide in front of you. Upcoming information, un-information upcoming seminars is available on the same page. If you are an E4C member, you will be receiving invitations to upcoming seminars directly. If you have any questions, comments, or recommendations for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact our team at researchatengineeringforchange.org. And if you're on Twitter today, we invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C Seminar Series. Now, before we move on to our presenter, I'd like to tell you about a bit about Engineering for Change. E4C is a knowledge organization, digital platform, and global community of over one million people around the globe, including engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to improve quality of life for underserved communities. These challenges may be access to clean water and sanitation, sustainable energy solutions, so much we'll be talking about today, improved agriculture, and more. We invite you all to become members of 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, fellowships, funding calls, and more. E4C members also receive exclusive invitations to online and regional events and access to resources aligned to their interests. You can learn more by visiting our website and signing out. Given our focus as a research community, we want to highlight some of E4C's research work, which cuts across geographies and sectors to deliver an ecosystem view of technology for good. Original research is conducted by E4C's research fellows annually on behalf of our partners, clients, and collaborators. It is delivered as digestible reports with implementable insights. We invite you to visit the research page, the URL is listed on this slide, and explore our field insights, research collaborations, and review of the state of engineering for global development, a compilation of the academic programs and institutions offering training in the sector. If you have research questions or want to work with us on a research project as a research fellow, please contact us at researchandengineeringforchange.org. And I'm really excited to share that we have an innovation challenge running on E4C right now focused on expediting solutions related to the United Nations to sustainable development goals for zero hunger and clean water. The Innovate for Impact Siemens Design Challenge aims to nurture breakthrough ideas and apply human sector design to engineer innovative hardware solutions that help achieve these SDGs by 2030. You can learn more and submit your ideas at engineeringforchange.org forward slash Siemens challenge. Please know that applications are open now to all E4C members, but they will close by April 3, 2020. So hurry and submit your innovations and please do share this opportunity widely. We're trying to get the brightest and brightest to contribute to their ideas. Now, with all of that out of the way, I wanted to invite you all to help us really understand how to use the WebEx platform. So we're going to take a moment to practice. Please right now in the chat window, tell us where in the world you are joining us from. For those of you who might not see the chat window, it is located to the bottom right of your screen. If the chat window is not open, then take a look in the middle of the slides at the very bottom and there's an icon there for the chat. So I see folks already replying. All right, a few from New York, including us. Buenos Aires, we have New Delhi, Minnesota, Vancouver, California, Chicago, Washington State, Boulder, and Arbor. Welcome, welcome everyone, from Ohio to Rome, from North Carolina and Ghana, fantastic. It's a pleasure to see you all here. I do see some of you replying in the Q&A window. Please note that the Q&A window will be for questions for our presenters. So if you do not see the chat window, again, go to the icon on the bottom of the slides in the middle and you will see that to open it. So welcome from Ecuador, England, and Hungary, all of you. Thank you so much for joining us. Now with that, I'm so thrilled to introduce today's presenter. Dr. Nathan Johnson is an Associate Professor at the Polytechnic School of the IRA Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. His work translates academic research to deployment for projects in the areas of energy access, grid modernization, microgrids, and critical infrastructure. Dr. Johnson is also an active educator with training and workforce development programs in and outside the university. At ASU, Dr. Johnson leads a laboratory for energy and power solutions, short form of LEAPs, that creates technical and business solutions that facilitate the global transition to resilient low-carbon economy. Before joining ASU, he worked in product development and business development for the energy sector with projects across 15 countries. And we've known Nate for a number of years and are very honored to have him back with us. He is going to be joined by our moderator and one of the architects of the series, Dr. Jesse Austin-Bernaman. I will not repeat your entire bio this time, Jesse, in order to make sure that we have plenty of time for Nate. And with that, I'm going to hand over the control of the slides to Nate and I'm excited to hear your insights, Nate. Perfect. Thanks, Yana, for the introduction. I'm really happy to talk to everyone joining us today. It's great to be back. As Yana was saying, I was here about eight years ago for some of the earlier parts of the EPC series. And as the community has developed over time, since the early 80s, 90s through today, to look at the transition of both the discipline, the focus areas of which we work, and then also the career paths that we take to grow a vibrant community by which we can provide impactful solutions and then accelerate the scope and scale of that change. Today, I'm going to talk to you about several different types of projects that relate under this broad concept of climate change, conflict, and then also engineering for peace. To start to mention for a moment kind of the breadth of work of where things have come to the last 10, 15 years in my team in our focus areas, it's mainly to indicate that we've worked on durable goods or consumer products with BP cooking sores for a few million people, fast moving consumer goods for Nestle, and then about 10 years ago that translated into awkward power infrastructure for communities in sub-Saharan Africa. And so looking at those different realms of engineering, designing products that go into homes, things from small satchets you'd buy at a store for food items and sanitation, but then also critical infrastructure, power and water systems, our perspective of how we approach those systems became actually quite similar, noting however that the instantiation of the engineering discipline and the problem solving skills might be fairly uniform after we able to structurally properly defend and characterize the problem. So that came to, as Jan was saying, our laboratory energy power solutions were a group of 30 people at Arizona State. I came back to the university for an attempt to provide a career trajectory and training for people wanting to provide and work on engineering solutions that provided substantive change in three, what leads to broad sectors of the world. First being humanitarian, second being civilian, and then third being military. And how do we create the basic science and applied engineering that can then be instantiated across these different user groups? And a lot of these application spaces have synergies and as we think about types of vulnerabilities that natural disasters and cyber attacks can instantiate on the world, the common lessons that we've grown will be shared with you in a couple different examples today. The other thing that I'd like to mention is being an academic now and then putting on my private sector ad and how we create products that go beyond publication to something that is in the handling of individual providing the quality of life for enhanced resilience is we're first understanding from an academic side what are the new areas of work or the cutting edge technologies that we can curate and then how does that map to the experience working in the private sector? Understanding specifically the user needs, the what the user wants going through a business model canvas to identify the potential cash flow models associated with those to create something of which we call innovation and being an engineer it doesn't always need to be in technology or product at the top. It actually might be the evolution of the creation of the new process or as we'll talk about the end of the day more focused on people and training and capacity. And then when we look at the solution it's a combination usually of one or more of these and so again it's not just technology saying that as an engineer but how do we get those services to people the cost and financing associated with it because at the end of the day it's not just improved access to power and water but at what cost and of what resilience and then the warranty and maintenance of those systems post implementation to make sure they're sustainable and then leading into the training. To mention briefly about climate change and as an engineer we utilize climate change models but the topic and focus of today's conversation isn't to go into the depths of how we model and project the impacts of climate change. The basic premise here is to indicate that climate change is happening it's always happening it's presently happening faster than it usually does and that is primarily attributed to anthropogenic or human process. Now when we look about the effects of climate change often we think about it in terms of the slow increase in the heat of the earth a couple degrees Fahrenheit in some areas and potentially 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit in other areas but then also the increasing incidence of extreme weather events storms multiple days in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit specifically in Arizona but then also mega droughts lasting greater than 30 years which if we think about the Syrian instance and the refugees flooding in Lebanon and Jordan is shown on the left the common thought or approach or understanding now is that given the the drought which was exacerbated by climate change that led to increasing incidence of conflict given traditional or historical ethnic or cultural divides and socioeconomic status divides and so the actor change of that climate and the drought that it caused exacerbated existing causes for people to potentially have disagreements and now we're seeing about 70 million people displaced or refugees in some capacity or another. Now when we think about the E4C community focused on developing countries providing access where my work is also gravitated to encompass is realizing that 55 percent of the earth population today reside in urban centers and in a couple decades it's going to be as close as two thirds of the population reside in urban centers what about a natural disaster hitting a town of 20 million people per city what about the settlements that have no formal mechanism for power and water services of sanitation what happens after a conflict and you need to reconstruct as in the upper right the systems that have been repaired how do defense communities around the world mobilize to respond to conflicts or disasters and even cities in the United States that's actually blackout in Manhattan which blacked out 70,000 people and more recently as you're aware in California with the forest fires causing power outages to over a million people and then issues and fatalities as a result of that losing power to critical services and so when I take a look at the breadth of the concern it is yes still focused on off-grid areas emerging markets and threatened communities but just because we're in an urban environment industrialized economy doesn't mean that we're not susceptible to disasters and threats and we really need to appreciate that as we think about our role in scope of engineering for change. To talk to you a little bit about our philosophy and how we approach this and understanding the scope of what's possible if I as a standards-making entity IEEE and S&P answer your other groups have done an amazing job creating qualities and standards based upon professional consensus and mathematical rigour to show what we should design today given the challenges that we're seeing in the world getting hotter drier in certain areas changing needs around the world those standards will need to be re-evaluated and they are re-evaluated every few years and uptake. Now what we found out in that is that also the design process that we follow and how do we reach those standards may not be as linear as we once thought it is and so that's why I have that illustration on the right showing that we need to create an university and in practice what we would classify as problem-finers where you may not know what the problem is because you're not aware of the dynamics because you haven't been exposed to the types of stresses or stressful events because we haven't seen them before or 500-year event is all of a sudden a 50-year and so some work financed by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy and also name of research provided us with the capacity to do this domestically which were now expanding to 10 countries and urban areas around the world. The reason that this is focused on the United States is honestly partly driven because we had access to the data and were able to model over the course of 10 years 20 or 40 years and higher that we're looking on the order of a 7 to 10 percent reduction the ability for electrical lines to carry power and so essentially what that means is there an extreme heat event or an outage or a power plant goes out there's going to be less opportunity to route that power around to get to where it needs to be simply because the world is just a little bit hotter and so if we took that and we expanded it out not just in the power systems but we were saying okay I'm a mechanical engineer, Yana's a mechanical engineer, Jesse ocean engineering and other disciplines and if we just focus on our individual technical specialities we would often miss these additional stressors that would be created by cyber attacks natural disasters and in some ways kinetic strengths and so then we're modeling coupled systems power water gas transportation and to think of an interesting example here is if you were to take Mexico City and you were to put it in this particular model and there was massive flooding that would occur that would be a first order effect of rains second order effect would be that the substations get flooded or the power system goes out that provides power to the pumps and the water out the third order effect is now the water is rising even faster and then you have people migrating health effects that are exacerbated furthermore and that's not something that you were trained or even able to produce the tools in any individual discipline which is why my speciality in Arizona State now is in that broader interval of systems. So after exposing and looking at these different types of stressors we're then able to understand how these unknown or are previously perceived circumstances affect a critical infrastructure and then when we've done this for a metro or urban area we also see on the right hand side for the US military installation that would need to respond in the event of a disaster and we take a look at what are the critical points of failure on the system now that you're considering how it's physically designed which typically you wouldn't do at the point of design and install and then come into that question about how do we modularize the infrastructure to be less susceptible to these types of failures which is going to be the main part of the rest of my conversation. As we were looking at microgroups and providing power to areas that don't have them and then also as urban infrastructure and how do we create an economy and stability of which is more susceptible to or less susceptible sorry to the types of threats and failures that we're seeing we're realizing at the exact same time is that there's a massive economic driver or renewable energy distributed power systems that are more secure for data centers for off-grid communities for hospitals for municipalities and so there's this big pull from consumers and then there's this big push from funders which just to give you one example for off-grid power systems Nigeria World Bank estimating about 350 million dollars in the next five years going into off-grid power systems just in that one country. The thing about that is that massive scale of demand and finances there's not enough industry or capability available and human resource bandwidth to execute on the size and scale of what's needed and so then what we try to do is say let's design faster ways to create technical specialties and designs that can be instantiated so this what you see here is showing how we take just information translate that into electrical design and analysis and then over to financial information on the right and what we've done is in a partnership for example with youth youth mappers at the USA sponsored group started by Patricia Solis and Vivian Arianga and then also power gen and association with Sam Slaughter and Frank Bird is taking a look at different ways to gain primary data create those into a geospatial domain without any power engineering involved rapidly translate that into a power system design using advanced machine learning techniques to optimize where the line should go where the assets should be for power generation and then also take a look at the financial evaluation for is that going to make sense for everyone involved in association with a public private partnership with Zindi and then another software package for the SS to complete that form of analysis to provide that impact ever here's a just a quick example so scaling the approach is you would see in the Niger for the community offered communities there on the left and so again with power generator new about a thousand people you've gone to a refugee settlement I'll speak a little bit about that again in a second and then with the Philippines in the right that tends to hundreds of thousands of people with another partnership a German Institute online out of Berlin and so again the size and scale of resilience reliable low-cost power systems is quite significant and how do we provide and leverage that same rapid acting approach to reduce the time by 90 which therefore reduce cost but then also improves efficacy of your project overall as we were taking a look as well about the settlements that are working in Uganda and elsewhere the settlements that get a thousand or five or ten thousand refugees each year naturally grow and change over time and so now we're starting to consider what is the natural evolution of a community over time as more inhabitants are added to it and how do we create power systems in such a way that when we add additional connections or assets to those systems is that we're not sacrificing power quality costs to the users or services as you see there on the lower left that indicates of the power system voltage on the grid voltage in Uganda and those red lines are actually the American National Standards Institute boundaries for the quality of power that should be maintained to provide stability and quality for the end user what you see is there's clear violations that go outside of that both above and below and so you want to be in the middle of that but that's typical if you're taking a Lego style walk approach when you're just adding infrastructure onto it but not if there's no understanding of how do you maintain the quality of power so how do we seamlessly add those connections and loads over time to expand that and think about how would we potentially modularize that this is one of those types of systems where we can add it and then also sacrifice the quality of the the power water and other systems actually deployed is we recently deployed a turnkey clinic this is in northern Uganda for about 12 000 people it serves 700 patients per week and this is critically important that those patients not only include refugees but then also the citizens of Uganda as we're working in Lebanon and Jordan in refugee relief operations the countries have been accepting in millions of refugees from Syria and doing so with open arms providing land and then access services while the influx of foreign aid was often from going to foreign contractors and so then a question is well after doing this with five years ten years or 20 years how does helping others when does that maybe become too much of a burden so then we change the format of the work not just to help refugees to help refugee affected communities providing economic development this system has been online for four months right now you see at the bottom the power system installed the first person coming in for a diagnosis is shown in the middle and then the right is the water system coming out of the right side going on just a bit i'm going to show you a quick video of this system coming together so let me share that with you you don't have water runs at your home how do you provide that in the middle of nowhere and that is what off-grid technology is all about the office of naval research funded the research and construction of this prototype turnkey that once it was designed and fabricated the decision about how to deploy the clinic has these cases like humanitarian applications disaster response scenarios and military operations building the first prototype here in Phoenix Arizona but we're going to be deploying this to the refugee camps in northern New York lawyer clinic at the humanitarian context and we came across an organization called Medical Beings International they were actually the organization staffing the running the medical club so we partnered with them to launch to use the system to use full potential and areas that could use a little bit of additional support structure so this is a really great low risk way to deploy this first prototype and evaluate how effective it is water yes yes we can perfect yep thanks so then the clinic actually thinking about rapidly developing and putting systems together the design process and late time to get into some of the components of a couple months but then the full system assembly actually was completed in under a week both the clinic the power and the water system and that brings us to essentially then the question after the technical design understanding the contractual mechanisms to create and provide products outside of university goes to the question of essentially logistics so now the question or challenge for us is how we create new systems regionally that can be deployed quite rapidly in the benefit test one thing I'll also note to you is that when we think about the fragility of power systems and how they're connected and how we might modularize those this is some work that was driven by the electric utility center here electric utilities in the united states defense departments and then also emerging market off-grid power system designers is how do we create smart intelligence systems that look out or forecast in the future so they can do a better job of scheduling critical loads communal loads and scheduling solar batteries and then also generators to provide lower cost and more reliable energy so this is just a brief example of what this looks like for for one on-grid example and I'll show you the off-grid of how these types of forecasting methods and adaptive control reduce the operating costs by a little over 30 percent and so that's extremely important because not only are we providing the technical sophistication that provides value to the academic society but then that monetary savings is what's going to provide sustainability and scaling in the future noting that between the left column there and the column just to the right of it is the cost saved with the micro-grid technology then the two columns to the right are the additional defense controls that allow additional cost savings and resilience to be maintained similarly as you take a look at there on the lower right with the amount of fuel savings achieved based upon optimizing to reduce your fuel use but then also providing capacity in the form of additional energy stored in the battery in the case of energy outages in the distribution network the generators or others and so you see that in the upper right as that optimized line in the orange an increase of about nine percent in what we call survivability is that the ability for an isolated system to maintain the quality of power and the power in the event of a grid we've worked then with a public-private partnership again as a university we're not what we would call an instrumented procurement and construction firm so then we would partner and then provide our our controls patents and our work to a third party that would then go install the systems one group that I would encourage you to take a look at is agito out of four columns Colorado these folks have installed off-grid power systems about 500 megawatts in different locations of the world and now they've taken this vendor agnostic approach that you design a system then you add our controls to it they're handling the machine-to-machine communication between the different entities and then we're providing the ability to schedule and control those assets for improved reliability and reduced cost and very flexible so we're doing that right now with individual uh microgroups with a single brain and I know someone out there is going to ask me so what happens when you look to the example of the power system design and community expanding over time uh that might have multiple brains or multiple different nodes and that's actually where we go to understand what might be benefit from nature and so this comes to a concept known as biomimicry and we actually look to dolphins and uh many people might look to how do you control distributed power systems with representation of how bees swarm or potentially how birds flock but what we realize is that the local power quality control is going to be completed at the individual devices to maintain the quality of the overall system but each one of these distributed assets needs to be dispatched locally to be locally and then provide grid support so it needs to be a little bit selfish in some ways and so instead of looking at how do we just look at aggregate dynamics of a group we need to provide individual benefit benefit to a local community and then to the team and so what we look at is dolphins and more specifically we actually look and borrow the computational mathematical derivatives from the dolphin mating region and as we apply this to power systems what we find out is that each one of these individual microgrid nodes or power systems needs to become aware of another entity and then build trust of that entity a reputation and then a sense of value of is it going to be essential to trade or negotiate power with them or reserve power when they need it and then these intelligent agents then communicate and then share that information in a way that provides it doesn't sacrifice the individual's ability to meet their loads and then shares any access back to the community so lastly what I'll talk about here is a bit on training and so if we took a look at the scale of need and how the energy economy is changing the the amount of folks burst in climate change and then also everyone on the phone called working in engineering for peace and related areas in electrical engineering power systems water systems civil engineering we realize that we simply need more of us and while we're a distributed group of capable people we actually need on the order of thousands tens of thousands more and so what my team started to do about three years ago is provide training on off-grid power systems and critical power systems and hybrid power systems to us service veterans who are transitioning out from experience as electricians made working with generators and then finding that the corresponding roles in the private sector in the utility industry had advanced so far further that their skill sets no longer matched up and so we developed what's called the microgrid bootcamp to provide those critical experiences and work in a one-week hands-on format very intensive we deliver this four times a year and now as we're scaling an understanding that we need to be training executives managers engineers operators and technicians across the entire industry that's changed we've now created a series of format and you see some of those examples in the bottom there where it's focused on professional credentialing and continuing education credits so that domestic utilities owners and operators and systems and then as we've trained folks doing operate power system development in southern africa east asia in the middle east as well how do we create regional centers of excellence and continuing capacity to to provide for the future one thing as i'll get to the close here is to indicate as well as that when i thought about my time in industry when i came back to the university to help set up a program that train and create a capacity for growing a needed workforce that doesn't just need to start in university education it needs to start beforehand and so we developed this microgrid on a desk you see some of the components are on the lower left and that's a physical system with different voltage levels that you can plug and play much like lego blocks that mimic a real world power system and then you have an interactive game and tablet in the middle that you can click on it you indicate grid outages you work on optical communities hundred communities and what is it going to take to provide reliable and low cost power and then you see there on the lower right that's an example of a pile we recently did with the fifth grade class and now we're doing that with high school classes as well and expanding that with a technology educational technology vendor horizon technologies to then create thousands of these things that we can provide not just the stem education that's more needed in here through 12 but then also the exposure of those individuals and those children going through school on what might be a future career path as I was told when I was in high school you know you like science and mass and become an engineer but there's hundreds of different types of engineers so now we're talking about the engineering specialities and then also the types of occupations at a young age so people couldn't think about where their future might be and a lot of that work that we've done wouldn't be possible without a fairly broad selection of partners and advisors and so I always want to stop for a moment and thank them both the federal and international sponsors private sector sponsors nonprofits a variety of partners for technology commercialization and delivery and then also advisors that help keep us up to date and review our work quarterly to give us insights on what the future might be and where we should end up going and so with that you see my contact information there you can feel free to reach out to me at any time and there's a website will support information and with that I'll pass it back to thank you so much Nate that was fantastic and I'm going to actually hand off to Jesse to take us through our discussion sure so again Nate thank you so much for sharing all those projects and then really more about your approach and the way you're making sort of academic contributions contributions to the partners and groups that you're working with as well as trying to have impact on the real world problem I think that was a really nice summary of you know addressing all of those areas and the role in which academia and research can have and trying to provide more efficient and and useful services I'm going to try and address some of the questions that came in the chat so if you have questions I just chat them and I'll try and summarize them but Nate one of the things I'd like to start with and we've had a couple questions on this is building it seems like you know you put up that partner site at the end where you had all of the different people that were involved how do you go about and then you also talked about curating the problem to try and find something where you could really have a value add how do you go about building that team throughout those projects and I just know from talking to you that these are multi-year relationships that you're developing right how do you go about building that team and and assessing is this a problem that you know I can curate in a positive way from the academic side but also this is the right you know partnership to get me to the to a solution that's that's really impactful so you talk a little bit about your process for forming that team over time are there different stages how do you go about thinking about who that is you're working with yeah very good question so thinking for locations for our work anywhere in the world oftentimes we get a phone call to work on a particular project or a problem and the end user will have an idea of how to potentially solve or resolve that problem that's been common for international work or domestic worker anywhere and I'm not saying that's that's wrong or bad but what's more important is not having an idea of how you might solve it is more a prioritization of the goals or objectives so then we move into a goal setting and problem scoping process where we also involve the potential stakeholders that might be connected to a particular problem space and as we take a look at awkward electrification on electrification there are differences often there could be differences of opinion on how those are handled or investigated or if it's a microgrid or a noble space system or a decent base system and utilizing the techniques with Cindy and the design practices allow us to rapidly illustrate in real time how those objectives and those priorities map to potential technical solution sets and that's extremely valuable because then suddenly we take a conversation that's engaging and move beyond a white bull session to real technical and financial details instead of saying we'll come back to you for two weeks and so that level of that gives a lot more confidence to everyone in the room and clarity about the accuracy of what we're talking about to resolve a lot of the confusion about what's possible and then after that it's relatively straightforward process to execution that's great so i think it's really important one of the takeaways that that i hadn't thought of that i just want to reiterate and i don't want to put words in your mouth while i'm trying to summarize is this idea of being able to rapidly show potential design so you put a lot of work into having that method also okay if these are your priorities and this is your context and your situation here are potential technical design spaces that might work for you having that ability to do it sort of in real time really gives you an advantage when having that discussion with stakeholders is that that's sort of one of the points that i'm coming away with quite true and i'd also say in that regard that our disciplinary training yes in many ways silos us but more specifically provides us with scripted problem solving processes and a vocabulary that limits our creative potential to imagine futures that could be better at resolving the goals that we have and by having these these real-time evaluation mechanisms it allows us to fully unlock our creativity and step aside from our embedded assumptions and practices and that's often hard to do because at the end of the day engineers are paid to make assumptions we make good assumptions but we make assumptions and the human mind naturally fills in details and so we need to be in a position where we can show how we creatively develop an opportunity space that innovates across not just basic science but across the realm for everyone to be involved with everyone's back sure oh so so that brings you know a lot of you're tying together you know we made this innovation in terms of how we're even having that conversation with the stakeholders but i really like you frame it in that way of saying look normally our stakeholder conversations go like this in the past but we've really spent some time putting our thought into how do we improve those conversations so we can quickly get to solutions and build that team and build confidence and buy-in from that team be able to have successful projects and it's really great we had a couple questions here about community involvement so just extending that stakeholder conversation a little bit could you talk a little bit about you know we focused on micro grids or off grid and you talked about as these communities develop how that sort of do they come back to the grid how does how do are you seeing trajectories for growth of the community and the capacity to need and the solution space so at the original conversation you might be in one solution space but as they grow maybe they're transitioning to somewhere else and that's all context dependent and stakeholder dependent how do you have those conversations because you saw a lot about the operating and sort of the dynamic nature of these systems how do you have that conversation early on with stakeholders so that they can understand the potential of where they want to go based on their own goals yeah good question when it comes maybe specifically to the refugee settlements they work with the host nation is going to be very prescriptive about what's permitted sometimes those communities can be just temporary semi-permanent or permanent and based upon where the host country will allow those communities to be or to develop will drastically change the format of the infrastructure the turnkey system that I showed with the clinic is an example of a certain semi-permanent insulation that can move over time as permitted usually the the UNI commission of refugees the host nation country and then the the refugee leaders will have developed a strategy for are they going to be around for months or years or potentially permanently and then that will advise the process that we follow in the problem curation and then also the design or what capacity and so as a result of that we'll then show okay for your community projections and growth it is most easily to think about these larger building blocks which might be one to four acres at a time of these number of people with these types of systems and then you can build out those in a relatively organic matter but it's and then you can add individual connections on the back when it comes from an operations perspective there is a certain times where we would train local orders and operators of the systems more so what we find though is with the technical sophistication of solar inverters battery management systems and then also the the the warranty requirements is we'll need a third-party vendor locally a a business that can provide maintenance services if an ad is needed because post install flying over to take a Uganda as an example that is a bit troublesome or challenging if it's just a minor issue and of course involved and so in that particular example solar now provides the warranty and maintenance contract for all of our refugee installations are working and they have a two-hour turnaround service and they have the technical capacity centralized to then distribute out and drive around to those locations in the event of an issue and that covers a bit about the conversation that we have in terms of how community might evolve but then when it comes to operations uh where and how that might that capacity be retained to then continue to develop or sorry provide high quality low cost power sure great thank you so i i want to push on that i want to extend that question a little bit um you talk a lot about thinking about okay what are these system contexts that affect the optimal operating strategy or design of these power grids and there's sort of two areas that i think your expertise maybe you could share some of your experience with us and one of those is like thinking about these different stakeholders that are perhaps bigger so you talked about sort of the maintenance stakeholder who's the business that's taking over this maintenance contract and doing that moving forward what about like regulatory bodies you talked about the high commission for refugees in the host country how are you bringing those stakeholders into your team and understanding okay what is the possible impact or constraints we have because of the energy policies of the host country or different government ministries or etc are you making sure that you're counting for all of those different stakeholders when you know you talked about gas electric you know all of these coupled systems and there's different stakeholders even within a single host country government that are affecting those and you need to understand all of us to make your design decisions how are you navigating that process what is your approach for trying to understand those types of effects the the simple and cheeky answer would say we handle it with great difficulty what what we tend to do originally after being invited in by what the social scientist would call a gatekeeper which is a person who is familiar with you and then also familiar with the local context and some of the stakeholders is create a some form of systems diagram or mapping that indicates the relationships between organizations energy matter and data and I know that seemed very disparate when we talk about the the the people component and the regulatory component the the physical quantities of systems moving around the data flow of information and then obviously the exchange of energy which is my speciality we need to understand the flow of those to then realize how they relate and who might have influence and then after that it helps influence who might or should be involved and then we go forward with the sometimes it's individual in-person meetings before a larger stakeholder meetings sometimes you go right to a stakeholder meeting with a larger group it depends on the circumstance context and then also the potential sensitivity of any of the stakeholders to feel left out so sometimes as a result of that we need to move straightforward to a bigger meeting other times it's not needed and sometimes to speak to one of the stakeholders we actually need to go through a higher level or a different state and that's why that importance of the gatekeeper is quite important cannot be understated I should say because they are going to be that conduit and provide the relationship for us to gain confidence both bidirectionally for the community and also forever can I build on that question a little bit Jesse and Nate given that context how do you ensure that your team is equipped with a right understanding to conduct that kind of analysis do you upskill you know the team through other training or by involving other departments I don't want to answer this but I'm just really curious to understand how you know you build that capacity internally for your for your own within ASU yeah that's a good question it's there's not many formalized processes that I would say that I've seen around the world what we've done is within the School of Sustainability Arizona State they've done a good job about preparing cohorts of 20 to 40 individuals per year to live and work in communities around the world and that provides the capacity for some cultural sensitivity training and awareness of different individuals and groups and then what my group would then layer on to that is is more directed on individual coaching on the practices involved in the project and then as we understand the influence of culture or the local environment we'll have we'll take some literate literary samples of the situations we're going to be involved in or the country and we'll have discussion groups about the first person perspectives for example of someone being a refugee for seven years and what that was like going through conflict getting separated from their family moving you know around for four to five years and then trying to figure out who they are and it's really hard to you know put yourself in there if someone else's shoes but those stories whether they be in print visual media I've been extremely informative to incentivize people to the types of experience they might have hopefully and we have the training and support for the social research methods and our anthropology prints once we get to on-ground interaction yeah thank you that's great thank you Nate and I think you know really important sharing sort of building that interdisciplinary team to get you know to make important engineering decisions to make the right ones we need to have that kind of system level understanding of the stakeholders on a human level but also like sort of thinking of the different stakeholders you've been talking about I had a question around you know following the stat you talked about data in the existence of data you know you presented that one that you're talking about machine learning and I noticed you said okay we can model the American and we have existing data and in fact you know my group is doing some transportation modeling and you know the U.S. has very very good data that's mandated by the government that needs to be collected but in many other cases we just have that data existing and so it's interesting to me that you've built up these mechanisms for trying to say how do we collect this data how do we create what we need in order to make our engineering decisions could you talk about some of your experiences and collecting data and thinking about that and in cases in many of these cases where we don't have good information right my earlier experiences was collecting primary data being in in different areas of the world either individually with small groups of five to ten people going to some of the larger studies where we hire out marketing firms like nielson 500 people out of time to collect you know survey data on you know like a hundred thousand people and that is time intensive resource intensive and really really expensive now what we're finding is that some of the major funding agencies and upgrade power systems would size or spec out would we do a grid extension or an upgrade power system or solar home system utilizing maybe some back at the end of the loop rules to do those system estimations and while it gets us a certain level of accuracy for for certain decisions at the scale that we're considering with hundreds of millions of dollars going in and even to provide the technical efficacy and bankability of these we need to get to a higher levels of data quality without spending you know a week to maybe a couple weeks in each individual community because there's is so many so then what we've done with with the GIS information and then an automated process through machine learning and pattern matching to identify structures and then to draw out where the electrical lines will be allows us to to reduce the human resource time by 95 percent or more and now we can do more villages and then the one thing that we don't have locally if we do from GIS information of course would be how many people might be in the community what might be their potential user demand profile and so that we actually get our scrape from national data sets or WHO data sets for example on the the amount of people in the community and their typical behaviors and then we merge those two systems together to then estimate what would the system be in a way that not only includes the local the locations of everything but now actually does the power engineering because if we just estimated what's needed base without doing actually any engineering at all it's a you know good question of did you actually size the system right and what we're finding out is that you might be 50 percent too small or 50 percent too large and when you're talking about you know am I going to be able to meet the loads in the community or am I going to decide system that's so overbuilt that no one's going to use it and then it's just going to financially fail those are some pretty big boundaries of it doesn't meet the needs because it's not big enough and it's going to physically fail because no one's using power and unfortunately that's how systems are being designed now so we're trying to narrow that boundary of error down to be a lot smaller to make better decisions I'm going to make a shameless plug here on that note for all of our listeners for the we have an off-grid energy webinar series that was delivered by Henry Louie Dr. Henry Louie out of Seattle who spoke quite at length and provided some context on sizing systems correctly and providing that background and so six-part series totally free I put the link up in the chat so I think that's a critical point that you've raised Nate and something that needs to be addressed perfect all right um I'm just gonna ask one last question Neanna because I think we're we're almost out of time and this has just been amazing Nate the what you've shared in your approach uh I want to be clear that the purpose of the seminar when we started it and and sort of that had you come and speak was to have this kind of learning across the different disciplines like what can people draw from your experiences and your approach and I think there's a lot there from the state that they're mapping from the using social science and interdisciplinary teams building the right team looking at those partnerships and then using some of the state-of-the-art algorithms and thinking about operation over time to really design the right systems and get better performance and and fiscal performance on that note I'd like to ask about the adaptive system so you talked a lot about sort of this operating strategy and forecasting and using machine learning both to build the structure and design it but then also in the operation of it so with your touch controls and all of those things you talk about like how you see implementing that making this even a feasible type of solution right so you talked about the fiscal sort of cost of these systems um looking at the graph that you showed sort of that bar chart it really only is once you apply the state-of-the-art algorithms that it seems like we're bringing it really into that range you're getting a lot of savings from that you talk about how you sort of came to that conclusion and where you see it might be applying in other areas either higher delivery or even in other types of systems right uh happy to speak to that the the illustrations provided our our demonstrated savings numbers and our our partner Gito is installed I think there's 20 systems within the last 18 months and so that provides the the examples domestically in Puerto Rico or other locations around the world with how these types of offerings or solutions that adaptability provides the benefit if I was to think maybe to the translated to another area of work um in the communication sector right now we're also considering the linkages between power water and cyber systems and how we can optimize that again getting back to maybe drop in the chemical for a second um are considering it another way but the flow of energy uh matter and communication and the needs for to meet the that community how do we optimize the real-time delivery of all of those systems and potentially reduce our capacity to provide water for a short period of time as we need more energy or for use additional energy for water that's needed in case of some certain event to meet those rapidly changing human needs in real time so that's something that I would see those those same methods could be applied by altering for the the folks out there that have an optimization background um the optimization function and the constraints associated with those with uh to double down on that reinforcing reinforcement learning mechanisms that are goal seeking that can change the interests in real time as the system learns about how the community behaves that's amazing I love it uh so it's matching with a lot of stuff that we're we're looking at similar um in reinforcement learning etc so thank you very much Nate I really appreciate uh your sharing of the insights it's been amazing this is really achieving all the goals that I had uh and trying to hear about people's where uh no I'm just saying you know like I think we want to build these these connections across the different subfields so you're an energy and power distribution but you're presenting it in a way that can inform my work in design but also other people's works whether they're in a wash or transportation and or some other areas I think it's really great Yana would you like to talk about our next speaker perhaps and then we'll say good bye thanks everyone for attending yeah actually I think there's a tremendous complementarity between what you shared today Nate and April's presenter who will be Evan Thomas who is currently the director of the Morton's Center in Global Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder many of their programs and their projects are similarly multidisciplinary really at that systems level so I really invite all of our seminar participants today to join us in April to hear from Dr. Thomas and about some of the approaches they have at Morton's Center and with that I know we are a time and I would like to be respectful of your time and thank you everyone for attending today we know there were a lot of questions and we're sorry if we didn't tackle all of them we truly apologize if we didn't tackle your question please feel free to email us or email Nate directly there we included his contact info in the chat window because we kind of moved through the slides fairly quickly and do join us as E4C members so you can hear about upcoming seminars with that I'd like to thank you Jesse and Nate for joining us today thank you everyone from all around the globe and we'll catch you on the next series in April have a great day thank you everyone