 Good afternoon everyone. You're very welcome to the Institute. We're very lucky today to be to hear about your presentation from Peter Davies, CEO and founder of Verve and Velux Token. We're chatting down below over lunch, just where we are, where we're at, is that the equivalent to the launch of the Acron computer. It's about to take off in terms of an Apple Mac, because about to arrive, a word processor that will deal with this new technology, blockchain technology. So we very much look forward to hearing Peter's presentation and then having question and answer session afterwards. Before that, I'm just going to introduce Peter, I might ask Jerry Sullivan, Deputy Chief Executive of the ESB to say a few words on their interest in this whole area and issue. Good afternoon everybody and first of all you're very welcome here on behalf of ESB and to the fourth series of our fourth lecture in the series with OIA on energy. The topic for this year is energy lifestyles and I suppose that ties extremely well with ESB strategy to create an all-purpose which is to create a brighter future for the communities we serve and to lead the transition to a lower carbon future. So I know our last lecture here had Christian Ruby who was talking about the massive changes that are needed in the energy system across Europe to readily transform such that we can achieve Paris targets and decarbonize the whole electricity system by 2050. And in a world like that where 60% of end use will come from clean electricity rather than the 20% that currently is the situation. So I suppose for us in our business that means fully decarbonizing the electricity system and electrification of heat and transport are the big planks of the strategy and of course the piece in all of that is a huge change in everyone's attitudes and behaviors including our own and I suppose that's what ESB is recognized that we need to really walk with customers to together walk that future out and I suppose all utilities used to think they knew best and they would try and tell you what that was. We're not going to be like that we want to walk with customers to carve the future. So today's speaker then Peter I suppose embodies that for us and around two years ago we in ESB joined eight other international world global utilities and we created a program called Free Electrons and last year over 500 startup companies in the green space participated in that program and I was very pleased to be in Berlin recently where the top 15 companies were in action walking with those top eight utilities and verb was one of those companies and great to meet Peter there and we have signed a proof of concept with verb and we would intend to walking with our regulator to talk about peer-to-peer trading of energy in our new Dingle pilot which hopefully many of you know about which is whereby we are going to put in place the energy system of the future which will enable this new transition and I personally believe that peer-to-peer trading of energy is going to be part and parcel of the new world and what we want to do is to gain experience of that and hence we're really pleased to be working with Peter and his company and of course really delighted to welcome here to Dublin and maybe you get an opportunity to talk about Free Electrons and some of your questions here because it's an absolutely fantastic program for startup companies to work with big utilities to create the future and we certainly want to reach out and collaborate with lots of others we do not know all the answers just by collaboration we get better so that's really pleased to be here. If you want to give your presentation and then we'll throw it open to questions and answers afterwards. Yeah, thank you for coming along my name is Peter Davies I'm the founder of a company called Verth my background is electronic electrical engineering being the energy sector since probably about 2007 originally started in the commercial sector showing big companies how they could save 10% of their energy bill they moved into the grid level so I was working with substations in the UK where we were showing how appliances when they were turned on were causing things like voltage flicker on the line and power quality issues and then eventually realised that the whole technology that we've been working with was very much down the domestic consumer route and that's where the company's focus has been over the last three years so as a company our whole focus is on this kind of democatisation and future of the energy sector and basically what we've done is start building this energy marketplace of the future all based around data and one of the company's big missions is basically to reduce everyone's electricity bills down to zero and sounds like a big crazy scenario but the telecom industry is already headed there in terms of line rental and data and text messages and we're on a mission to do the same thing for the energy sector and our consumers I'm gonna spend the next kind of 20 minutes talking you through how we're going about that journey it all started with a verve hub so data is the key scenario and first we need to be able to get that data so you've had a smart need to roll out across the UK and rest of Europe but we summarised that it wasn't giving us the granular level of the data that we needed so we built a little hub which sits on top of your electricity meter or smart meter and basically samples your mains power line a million times a second so that's five million times faster than the average smart meter and you can see that it's very simple to clip on so clips literally around the cable going into your electricity meter communicates directly with a smart meter you've got it via a ZigBee chip and basically starts sampling your mains power line and from that data it can tell you what appliances are on at any time how much they're costing you and from the data you can even tell if those appliances are starting to break down over time so condition monitoring etc which I'll do a bit more detail we then send all that data so what appliances are on etc to an iPhone app or Android app or tablet so you then have a user interaction in real time which allows them to kind of be educated by the system and you can see from the kind of world map there the electricity system like the Brits put in place a lot of the infrastructure around the world and the Americans did the other half so our product automatically works across most of the world and the system that we've got turning up next year will work across the US and you can see the kind of top right it's just a little kind of smart home product which will sit on top of your electricity meter so about that big very non-intrusive and we'll start analyzing all this data for you and so what is that data we're looking for well every appliance has its own unique power signature so if you imagine your washing machine it's got a circuit board on it each of those components resistors combators creates a unique power signature and it would be the equivalent of being in a room of say 12 people having dinner and you put an Amazon Echo in the middle of the table and we know that the machine learning in that Amazon Echo is clever enough to work out who's talking at any point what they're saying in any language these days but also somebody started to shout or raise their voice or start to whisper it's the same thing your appliances are creating this unique power signature on your mains power line where if that signal starts to change over time you can see that change using you know signal processing machine learning algorithms and therefore you can start to tell things about the appliance so you can see this when you turn on the mixer mix has got a unique signature so machine learnings run over this in real time they pop up your mixer is being used on your app it can then know how much power your mix is using so it provides that information and it can tell you if that motor is starting to break on your mixer it then sends all this information like I said live app so it starts to kind of put home a useful feature in your home so part the kind of smart home ecosystem so it'll tell you if you've left on your iron or your oven or your hair straighteners it will send you notifications say hey your washing machines finish can even start doing things like allowing users to get involved in demand cyber response which is at the peak time between 6 7 p.m. if you turned off some of your appliances the grid will actually benefit from that so it can incentivize you to do that and then it can also send notifications to tell you if your washing machine has started to break down like 40% of all home care callouts so because of a filter blockage on the actual washing machine so it can start to analyze the signature and be okay well the drain cycles taking longer or there's a change in the harmonics in the power line therefore your filter start to block so can actually send a user a notification about six weeks before the washing machine is broken down that your washing machine needs the filter blocking so all of a sudden all those consumers which are paying for a monthly subscription so that an engineer will come out and fix it as soon as it breaks get a better service because actually they'll now know that the washing machine is about to break down and they're actually beat the problem happening in the first place so they'll never be without these appliances and so this data kind of opens up a lot of different propositions and a lot of them based around the consumer like the insights and the kind of better quality of service that they will get from the data but also from the utility providers themselves so a lot of these big retailers are realizing that actually their markets being pulled away you've got bulb in the UK that just pulled in 800,000 customers off the big utility companies and they're realizing that they need to move towards a service model and the only way they can move towards a service model in a kind of powerful manner is to get access to the data and that's the data the consumer level about their behavioral usages and kind of how they're how they're using their smart home but key thing I wanted to focus on this particular presentation is the kind of big three de-letter words that people talk about in the industry first is digitization which you've had by smart meters we've had by products like ours communicating the smart meters you've got decentralization which I'll talk about in a scale of like 10 minutes and decarbonization and the first one the decarbonization is obviously that the future homes everyone wants to have solar panels on their roof and a battery in the home and that allows you to kind of have this in-home energy management system and we want to encourage people to be going out and putting solar panels on their roof to therefore generate energy you just something pretty awesome in Ireland in fact you've now created this incentive model by offering a grant for people to go and get solar on their roof does now building the business models on top of that to really incentivize that and the way I want to talk about that is is through this peer-to-peer energy trading route and one of the key things that allows that is through using a technology called blockchain and I think from my discussions I had over lunch actually there's quite an advanced knowledge on it which is amazing but you just want to think of blockchain is basically an Excel spreadsheet and instead of one person owning that Excel spreadsheet is a bit like a Google doc that lots of people are kind of in control and can see who's made the changes and verify it and that's all it is it's basically just a spreadsheet but spreadsheet that's controlled by the masses instead of just one person and the reason we got involved in this kind of blockchain scenarios okay so our verb monitor is monitoring your mains power line your home and from that knows when you're turning on these appliances and how they're being used so when you turn on your washing machine it knows that in an hour's time the heating element of that washing machine is going to turn on so it knows that in an hour's time you're going to need a kilowatt hour in your home it's also monitoring your solar so you've got your solar panels on the roof and that's dependent on the weather so it's able to pull in things like satellite imagery data which can check their opacity of the cloud how thick it is to predict your weather usage in advance so now you know how much solar you're going to generate over the next kind of hour 24 hours etc and if you know when your washing machine has been turned on you know how much power you're going to use in advance and so the two of that is quite a powerful combo and if you add to that the third bit the jigsaw which is if you have local storage then all of a sudden you now have the solar being generated on your roof which can also store to a local battery so without even meaning to do this we basically realize we've built the world's best tool for being an in-home energy management system because we know how your usage is going on your home therefore we can predict your behavior during the course of the next two minutes ten minutes half an hour 24 hours we arm that with all your future solar information on your roof and if you add in a battery then you've got this amazing in-home energy management system and the best thing about it is it's completely automated so you as a user the dream of this is you don't do anything different keep going on about your usual routines and in the background you've got a smart bit of tech which is managing all this energy consumption for you and we basically got a quad core processor on it so we've got one core which is basically doing all the data acquisition you know we're sampling a million times a second that's a lot of data got two cores doing the machine learning side of it and then we've got this full core which is doing peer-to-peer energy trading and this basically stems from us realizing we have this energy management system and going well if people started buying their energy directly from their next door neighbor who's got solar panels rather than potentially from the grid how much money would they actually save so we did a project with a hundred homes in the UK hook them all up with these verb units they'll have batteries and solar and basically just analyze the data and we showed that each of those houses will save over 20% off their electricity bill if they were able to buy and sell that energy directly with a neighbor at peak times during the during the day and those that had solar panels on their roof would generate another 20% of revenue on top so all of a sudden you had this huge incentive that those with solar panels could make more money than what they were able to use before and actually the reason the verb hub is even more interesting was we would have access to that trading information far faster than any smart meter that was currently out there in the market which means if you think about it like the financial markets he who has access to the data the quickest gets the best price when currency trading etc so it's all about the speed of the data and the quality of the information you get which allows you to make these trading decisions again automatically and in the UK there's something very interesting we we have a standard bill for myself say it's about 15p per kilowatt hour but if you've got solar panels on your roof we have a feed in tariff and that feed in tariff used to be about 25p they went down to about 18p and it's gone down to about 7p and you probably heard like they've just scrapped it the problem of them just scrapping it means that one of the major kickers for them having a return on their investment on the solar it's just being completely pulled from under the rug so actually it's like well how can we incentivize people to still put solar on their roof we still want this decarbonized future and actually pit bit energy trading is a hugely powerful way of generating this new revenue because therefore the consumer can start selling this solar panel that they've got to their neighbor that basically isn't able to you know they couldn't afford to go get solar panels etc but they can buy the energy cheaper and it's using less of the grid because it's selling it to the next door neighbor and it can be monitored because you know the postcode of the energy that's bought it and the energy that's not and the brilliantly powerful thing about the blockchain and all this is that it's a ledger which is being completely maintained by the public so when I sell my one kilowatt hour to my next door neighbor there's a transaction history there which can be tracked it's completely public it's completely secure because we're all looking after it and it's a very powerful tool that's very democratized so you don't need one central body which is looking after the big spreadsheet and sending the bills to everyone you're all looking after the spreadsheet and therefore it allows this kind of transparency across the whole system but in a very secure manner the reason we started using blockchain was not because it was a super cool buzz thing in 2015 not a lot of people would even heard of it the reason we started using it was because I really didn't want to build up a big database survey team that we're gonna call me up at two in the morning to say hey the servers down you know your entire energy system is on the floor and luckily we had some guys you know we were into the whole Bitcoin stuff at the time so we're like well actually this blockchain technology is really awesome as a security to know that it's always gonna stay up and that for me is the biggest most powerful thing about blockchain and this is the security of supply like you know if AWS goes down your blockchain ledger won't go down it's on every single computer going through there's always gonna be a traceable ledger which is powerful so we were looking for a real opportunity a real world example where we can make a big difference we've proven through simulation through the data of these hundred homes that we're gonna make these guys a 20% saving so we wrote a government grant and picked up some funding from Innovate in the UK managed to get the regulator on board which is a key powerful thing and all this gonna have the regulator buy in but you know hopefully you've already picked up it's a very consumer focused but so it's in the regulators interest to make sure the consumer benefits so they're interested so they set up a sandbox for us in London and we basically found a housing estate in Hackney where they basically had some communal buildings and each of those communal buildings had already put solar panels onto its roofs but each of those homes you've got 40 flats in each block they're actually all on prepay meters because they're considered a credit risk so as I'm paying 15 people per kilowatt hour these guys are paying up to 18 people per kilowatt hour because they're potentially a you know a credit risk so if you think about what's happening they're getting five people per kilowatt hour from the solar panels which are on the roof and each of those tenants is paying 18 people per kilowatt hour so you've got this big arbitrage of you know this 13 pence worth of data when these guys are actually physically using the electrons which they're generating on their roof so something's not right there we feel okay so what we did was we put a verve in every single home and we've put some batteries into the actual building itself teamed up with some really awesome guys called repairing they basically did all the community management and we've basically been live energy trading on this housing estate in Hackney showing that we can save these tenants quite a large chunk of their energy bill and we've been working with the regulator to allow them to see the huge benefit and one of the really powerful things is we're working with British gas to even be able to potentially change the bill so this is where the regulator governs quite in because that electricity bill is so well-defined in all kind of state but what we're looking to do is have your electricity bill where it says British gas 62 pounds minus birth which is the energy trading 12 pounds therefore the bill to the consumer is 50 pounds and therefore you know to actually have this being real-time calculated and be able to be put offset against their bill is a hugely powerful scenario and getting completely automated without these guys getting involved or having to change their behavior or anything else so it's been very successful the first people in the UK to do a live energy trade on the blockchain we've been looking at legally making this kind of a regulatory modification and you've got interesting things on the bouncing a settlement grid that we're working with people like well that's really cool we're going to save these guys some money on their energy bill but we're trying to get everyone's electricity bills down to zero so it's like well how else can we monetize it so it's been a long time kind of work on these guys as part of this regulatory scenario educating them on the system showing them how to use the app that we built to show them how they can also make some savings in kind of their habits and we were like well it's a key thing here we've got two and a half million people in the UK alone who are on this kind of fuel poor scenario where if we can actually change the way they're potentially getting billed it's going to have a massive impact on their lives but the really interesting thing is this box was also doing all those other scenarios about your usage habits it was telling you if your washing machine was starting to break down it was telling you you've left your hair straighteners on and that data is actually hugely valuable I'm talking over lunch there's a there's a really interesting discussion we have if you think about your washing machine your washing machine your home like we know from this electricity box every time you turn that washing machine so we know that after every 20 washing machine cycles you're probably going to need washing powder so Amazon would love to know that you need washing powder because they can then sell you washing powder that's a valuable use of the data Unilever would love to know what type of washing powder you use and how you use that and therefore that's another very useful bit of data the insurance company wants to know that if your washing machine's got a fault whether it's likely to flood and if it's likely to flood then that's going to therefore increase your insurance contents bill so they're really interested in your washing use data you've got the likes of people that are selling you your washing machine they want to know if you're buying the latest eco washing machine if they can sell you the latest eco washing machine based on your energy savings you're going to make over a period of time you've got the people selling you the actual products itself you then got people involved in the demand-side response and people selling you batteries or solar if they're armed with your data of your usage they can offer you the best return on buying a battery or getting involved in demand-side response the grid wants to know about your usage of that washing machine because if it's causing extra power spikes or harmonics on the line they want to be able to solve it the energy companies want to be able to know about it because they want to understand what tariff you're on and actually if you're somebody that always uses your washing machine during the middle of the day they might be able to provide you with a better tariff to be able to put through but also if they know the filters start to block on that washing machine then the guy that's providing the warranty for that washing machine wants to know about your data as well and also the people that are providing the service for that washing machine so the engineer that was coming around to fix it also wants to know about your data so you've all of a sudden just got a list of about 10 different companies that are interested in your particular data and even though it's not a huge amount of value of that data they all add up and the brilliant thing is you can see from this it's it's not just one company they want to buy that bit of data Amazon want to be able to compete with Sainsbury's to say you washing machine who want to be able to compete with Tesco who want to be able to supply you the latest Samsung products as Samsung are interested Russell Hobbs want to know that all your other products are Russell Hobbs products so they can keep you into it so you all of a sudden these data is getting monetized over and over again and if I give you an example in the insurance companies alone us being able to reduce your contents bill from the analysis we've been doing them is looking to save you about 30 pounds a year off your insurance and if you think you've got over four million people in the UK that are paying you know between five and ten pounds per month so that an engineer will come around and fix their appliance then all of a sudden this is a lot of revenue that's able to be built on top of these and reduced again off your electricity bill so when we're talking about you know your British gas bill turns up and you have British gas 62 pounds minus the 12 pound verb pit to pit what we're also going to have is minus another 20 build pounds from the data they've sold during the course of that and so it's actually creating this future where all this data is actually a monetary value if you see the guy in the middle like GDPR is one of the best thing that's ever happened in this sector and blockchain allows you to follow where that data's gone it's going to be encrypted from the word go and you know at any particular point as to who's got your data so if you don't want to sell it to Amazon you don't have to and if you've sold it to Amazon and three months down the line you're like I really don't Amazon anymore you can stop it's a contract that you signed with Amazon on the blockchain you cancel it and you can go and sell it to somebody else and in fact you can sell it over and over again and it's all traceable it's all transparent and it's all encrypted in a format that you want it's all of a sudden put the user completely in control of their data and we talked about you know rollout this this doesn't need to be something that's mandated upon people if they receive this product they get the opportunity to say well do you want to save some more money off your energy bill do you want to actually make some money from peer-to-peer and you start to build the community stuff and the thing I think is really fascinating one of the things we've talked a lot about Dingell is actually how it encourages the community behavior because now you want your neighbor to go and get solar panels because the more people that have solar panels in your neighborhood the cheaper your electricity is going to be and therefore the more transactions which are happening really helps the grid as well so the more energy that's going through at the moment you've got a feed-in tariff of say 5p in the UK but no one's making any money on that it's just going out you know government incentive etc now actually you can take a cut of the transaction so if ESP or an insurance company is rolled out this product then now they can actually help transact the energy and every time there's a peer-to-peer transaction the grid is going to get a percentage of that cut so you need the infrastructure in place now the maintenance for the grid is paid for now it's in ESP or another company's incentive to roll out because they can actually make money on the transactions which are being put through plus they can provide the best beta data services and that's why you know we're very proud to talk about the fact that we partner with ESP to do this project in Dingell you've got a very innovative thinking energy company which is willing to kind of pioneer this we've signed a contract to actually you know proof this concept in Dingell just like we've done with the UK and it's gonna be really interesting to see how it's taken up how the community responds to it and where and how they want to be looked after on the data from the brilliant thing I like about working with ESP is it means we can slowly educate the people locally as to what it gets through like we're not gonna all of a sudden let their data to be sold to anyone that's gone through or be select partners with ESP as we go through this journey the whole blockchain community talked about a lot of lunch is gonna start rating those people that are buying your data so if Amazon start being really bad users of your data and and you know putting it to use that you're not happy with you're just gonna rate them lover just like you do with Uber just like you do with Airbnb so it'll actually only start selling your data to companies that you're happy about using your data they're gonna have to tell you why they're using their data and therefore it's going to be in your interest as a consumer to decide who you want you have to sell your data to anyone but you'll know that actually you'll get a monetary response for it where you'll be able to make a few pounds off your electricity bill and again I think I want to come back to it's a very international project we've already got a partnership happening with Tepco in Japan where they have a very similar scenario to Ireland where you know they're an island they don't do lots of natural gases and fossil fuels in the actual island itself having to import it in and therefore if you can encourage this kind of generation of renewables it's in the best interest for an island to actually you know look after its future security of its own supply its generation of energy and its maintenance of its whole grid infrastructure so I think the learnings we're going to get from Japan and be very useful to the learnings that we're going to be able to have here in Ireland and we've already teamed up you know Ocean Protocol who I mentioned before these amazing guys in the data plan AI they've got a base in Singapore so we're looking at Singapore stuff and in the UK so I'm very proud to have the regulators on board we're also testing this out in the US I've got a load of units out in Austin Texas and we've been talking with some guys in Portugal I think again I want to talk about the free electrons program like we wouldn't have met ESP we wouldn't have met Tepco if we didn't have this kind of awesome international program where these energy companies are actually incentivized to really drive forward innovation and work with these startups that have got these ideas they don't have the platform so I'm a big believer in that program and so you know huge congrats for you guys you know starting up the whole scenario you just had to see the buzz in the room for the amount of traction that's been generated like the companies got bought in this program it was crazy but yeah so yeah just to summarize it's kind of the mission that we're on how your data is going to have a huge value in the future energy market how the whole peer-to-peer side is going to be a transparent like democratized open platform which is going to encourage the future of renewables thank you