 And I think we're just waiting on Bill. I see Bill will say guard. Does that mean? Yeah. Hi. I'm here. Wonderful. Welcome. Thanks. All right. And Bill Vernava, he confirmed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe something a struggle. Do you have any opinion? Yeah, I just emailed him and I, um, CC view. All right. We'll wait for one more minute and then we'll go ahead and get started. Welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Um, Erin, can I trouble you to share? There we go. I think we will go ahead and get started. I believe the recording is already started. All right. Lovely. Well, colleagues. Good morning. Good afternoon or good evening, depending where you're joining us from today. My name is Yana Randa and I'm the director of the engineering global development team at ASME. And I also serve as the president of engineering for change. Today's webinar is part of the waves to water prize programming presented by the US department of energy's wave power technologies office or WPTO for those of you who are new. And for any of you that are new, the prize was launched three years ago with a goal of enabling the development of small modular cost competitive validation systems. After five stages and numerous competitors, the price concluded last month with one grand prize winner and four other finalists. And I want to congratulate everyone who participated. And of course, special congratulations to the winners and finalists. And an additional congratulations to our collaborators at the national renewable energy laboratory and WPTO on the incredible program that support these cutting edge solutions. Well done. Next slide. So today's webinar, we want to talk a little bit about that as implementing partners for the waves to water prize. Engineering for Change had the pleasure of working with the participating teams and helping them scale their innovations. Today's webinar will serve to provide insights on how to ensure that you're delivering value to your key stakeholders by applying human centered design. We will hear provocations from leaders in the innovation sector and a panel of experts representing potential customers and key stakeholders of wave powered salination solutions. I will serve as one of your moderators today along with my colleague, Aaron Piper. The webinar will be archived on E4C site and on our YouTube channel and both of those URLs are listed on this slide. And if you're following us on Twitter today, please do join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, hashtag E4C webinar series. So as we get going for those of you who might be new to teams or haven't used the platform before and just generally who are joining us, we would love to see where you're from. So I want to invite you to type in your location that you're joining us from today in the chat window. So if you are not seeing the chat, you should be able to click the little chat icon in the bottom of the slides in the middle of the slides and be able to get that to pop up and be able to know where you are joining us from. There we go. I see folks coming in. We have Minnesota, Quebec, Illinois, UK, Ethiopia, Fort Collins, very good. Colorado, welcome everyone. It's such a pleasure to have you here. Do let us know where you're from. You can use this window to type in your remarks. Typically we actually look for Q&A, but in teams that's not there, apologies for the misrepresentation, but do welcome you to use the chat to type in your remarks or any questions. And you can always raise your hand if you have a question. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today. We're so thrilled to have you from throughout the world and across the United States and Canada. So, before we move on to our presenters, I'd like to tell you a little bit about engineering for change and who we are. E4C is a leading knowledge organization, digital platform and global community of more than 1 million engineers, designers, development practitioners and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by vulnerable communities, as embodied in the United Nations sustainable development goals. E4C's perspective cuts across geographies and sectors, including ICT, energy, water, sanitation, transport, health, habitat and agriculture, providing pathways to connect, learn, explore and freely access critical knowledge and networks to advance the social sector. E4C members access news and thought leaders, just as you are today, insights on research and hundreds of essential technologies, an E4C solution library, professional development resources and unique opportunities to contribute to the social sector. In addition to this, E4C provides impact services to a variety of mission-aligned organizations. Our impact service leverage a proven methodology for supporting social entrepreneurs as they move technology innovations from concept to testing to scale up. Programs focus on de-risking ventures by assessing their strengths and weaknesses and providing strategic and technical guidance to get them to their next stage of development. Through this work, E4C taps into our network of innovators, inventors, engineers, manufacturers, designers and product developers and blend virtual assessment with rigorous and person boot camps. Impact services deliver timely access to customized guidance that effectively propels ventures and accelerates mission-aligned organizations forward. And we've been proud to be delivering these services to NREL as part of our engagement with the Waves to Water Prize, as well as other organizations that you see listed here. Now, I mentioned that today we're going to be focusing on human sector design and really refining value propositions. So with that, I'd like to transition to our leading expert on the topic, Ms. Ittika Gupta. Next slide, please. So Ittika is a founding partner at Studio Carbon and an ideal alum. She currently leads Studio Carbon in the Netherlands and India, working at the intersection of design systems thinking and storytelling to build solutions for an abundant and thriving future. Ittika's experience in circular design, human-centered design for business development, ethos design and strategy for business and lifecycle analysis. She is also the founder of DungSea, which brings in-house biobased material innovation to the market. She's a bachelor's of technology and electrical and electronic engineering and a master's of design, industrial and product design. We are incredibly excited to have Ittika join us today from the Netherlands. And before I turn it over to Ittika, I would like to invite our participants, particularly those of you who represent teams, to please take 30 seconds to type in what you consider to be your value proposition for your venture into the chat. And so, as you do that, I think, are we turning around? You're going to be advancing the slides for Ittika. Okay, there we go. Ittika, the floor is yours. Welcome. Thank you, Iyana. Hi, everyone. Lovely to be here. I'll wait for a few more seconds to see if people can check that in their value proposition so we get to know a little bit about their innovations. I'll put on wine. So, DungSea, which Iyana was mentioning, well, a couple of minutes back, our value proposition is we build the future with it. I'd love to hear some more from the rest of you. I see John, Gilbert, Matthew, Rooz, Brett. Okay, while we wait for everyone to type this in, let's just jump in and ask the first principle question of what is a value proposition and what is the purpose of value proposition? It's a question we all ask every time we develop a new business, a new idea, a new innovation, or simply decide about how to scale our existing idea or business to another country or another region. In most cases, the way, theoretically, we'll define a value proposition is a promise. It's a promise that we're making to our customers, to the rest of our stakeholders of what kind of value or what kind of benefit or what kind of solution or what kind of problem-solving does our solution do for their needs? These needs could be conscious needs. They could be subconscious needs of our customers. The value proposition also encompasses the USB of the work that we are doing. So how are we different from our competitors? How are we faster, better, or more in some way from an existing solution in the market? A value proposition, ideally, should also be talking about a holistically writer solution for a problem. No problem has an ultimate right or an absolute right solution. We're all always striving for a slightly more writer solution than the one that preceded us. And that way, our value proposition should encompass that holistically. So it takes into account how our solution is better economically, technologically, culturally, socially, and in multiple other facets. A value proposition should also ensure that it's talking about a long-term promise. It's talking about an impact that it's making to a customer's life in the long term. And finally, it should also be written or drafted or pulled out and emerged in a way where it is talking about and guiding us for the strategy of growth. Say, today, I'm making a product with an X technology. How do I decide of the next new innovation that I need to make? What should that next new innovation be? A value proposition as a brand, as a company should be addressed with every new scale-up strategy that we decide for. So taking all of that into account, let's start with a couple of examples of value propositions for very, very different businesses. And from there, we'll move into a quick tool that I think could also help all of you in defining more clearly your value propositions. I see some of those in the chat already. So Water Bros provides lightweight, portable, wave-powered desalination units that can easily be deployed. William, thanks a ton for sharing that. Let's use that as a quick example. I love to... I mean, it's wonderful for me to understand that you're selling a desalination unit. They're better because they're portable, because they're lightweight and they're wave-powered. But if I, as a customer, am deploying it or using it, I'd love to know more of what does portability do for me? Does it make moving it from one room to another easier? Does it make it easier for me to move it from one location in a city to another? I mean, portability as a word could mean many things. So maybe rephrasing our value proposition to how it's solving my problem, where portability is a feature. It's not the solution. So maybe talking about a solution could be great. Because it's lightweight, it's also portable. Again, how does lightweight add any value to my day-to-day use of a desalination unit if I'm going to keep it in one place all the time? It would be a great way to talk about value proposition. Now, this company you see on the screen is a company based in South Africa. They're called Dehoven and their innovation is called Bioka. They make fully automated panels for floors, walls, and ceilings out of hemp crete. Now, this company is in the sector of biobased building and construction. In that sector, there's already a market that's really bustling and building up with multiple alternatives materials, whether we're talking about shredded wood, we're talking about cardboard, we're talking about recycle concrete, or we're talking about hemp crete. They have a fully automated system, so they make really precise buildings. They can make these buildings in a matter of six days. It really cuts down the cost of production. In a house that you've assembled together in six days, it has a lifetime of at least 100 years because it's going to last. They can make tiny houses. They can make multi-plurid houses, and all of these things account as features for this company. But as they went down into distilling their value proposition, which encompasses all that I just said about the USP or the real problem or a holistic solution, their value proposition and promise as a company came down to designing and creating buildings that breathe. As succinct and articulate and short as it sounds, when they were talking to their customers and they were talking to a lot of contractors that are now selling buildings to their customers, they realized that as a trend, especially after COVID with people living indoors, it became very important for people to start figuring out what kind of materials were they living in and around. In a house, you're surrounded in a capsule and everything within that capsule is what you breathe in. Determines your physical and mental health. And for that kind of a value proposition and this subconscious need that people have when they're making decisions of their next furniture or wall paint or even construction material, promising buildings that can breathe became a very, very clear way of communicating and innovation that is already out there in the market and yet showing them in a USP and different life than the rest of their competitors. Right now, this company with the promise of building that breathe with hemp creed is using the same principle as their grounding idea to figure out what's the next big material that they're going to use in their innovation factories. When they're thinking of the panel designs and the way they're going to frame windows and doors in it or the way they're planning assembly, the same idea that breathing buildings as a promise cannot be compromised is driving their innovation, engineering and decision-making. So that becomes one very quick and succinct idea of a value proposition of buildings that breathe. Let's go to the next slide. Thanks, Erin. This one is a company called Nextem. They're very different from the previous one I showed you. This company makes headsets, which are EEG devices. They are like those little cords if you have ever seen in a hospital when you're trying to map out your brain signals and you generally do it for research for a lot of other health conditions like cerebral palsy. These are very usual tools that doctors use in very clinical and scientific environments. But Nextem created a headset, and it's a headset that looks almost like a cycling headgear. And that headset is something that's completely mobile. It's a consumer product that you put on your head. And once you put on your head, through a very simple to use dashboard, you can actually map out and track your signals. And they have softwares that are built on those signals that can help you make sense of it. So every time you're sitting and reading, what does your brain look like in focus? What does your brain really look like when you're feeling extremely happy? What happens to your brain when you are in a moment of grieving? Once you start understanding your brain better as a consumer, you start looking at your brain the way you look at your body. There may be a lot more that you can do to tap into the potential of your thinking and mind. Again, this super complex, super technical value proposition to be made to an end consumer that doesn't even know that this kind of a product is something they can use. How do you again pull out a value proposition that talks about a real, not necessarily in this case a problem, but a real potential that is untapped that I as an end user could tap. And it again comes down to a simple phrase which states thinking beyond thought. Again, talking about what that statement does to an end user or to an investor who's putting money into this business or to a researcher who's been doing a lot of brain signal interfacing. You're clearly talking about yourself as a company that is fully committed through its product development, its interfaces, dashboard, storytelling and promoting humans to think beyond the conscious thoughts that we understand and to really going beyond psychology into neurobiology and making that neurobiology accessible into my day-to-day lives. Pulling out a three-phase succinct, very clear, very relatable, very simple in its terminology offer value proposition for an extremely complex and sophisticated technology. Let's look at one more example. This one comes from another part of the world and this is an example of a company called Kakae which is building sewage treatment plants for households. When this company started developing sewage treatment plants for homes and individual houses and apartments, they realized that people are not very used to the idea of having an STP in their homes. You know of an STP in an office, in a mall, in a commercial environment but never in a household like in appliance. Thinking of sewage, thinking about everything that we flush down the toilet every single day is not the most common idea that hits our head when I'm thinking of making a house. It's not the most obvious appliance that I think of when I'm looking for purchase. In that case, how do I draft out a value proposition where for a day-to-day user, somebody building their next home, somebody purchasing a house in an apartment building who's a very circular and a very conscious consumer, how do I explain to them that this is a product that they need or this is a product that will add value to them? Now I can tell them that it's a very modular, very quiet, self-sufficient, zero energy consuming, no smell STP that recycles about 95% of the water that's collected in your sewage every single day and with some additional plugins into this product that water can be translated into drinkable water by EU standards. So it's a very, very high quality and very, very simple product and it works on the principles of biomimicry. But instead of talking about all the technical qualities that make it an amazing and awesome product to build out a value proposition which is a promise that we are making constantly to the rest of the world through our innovation, they decided to play with nomenclature and completely get away from the actual terminology that we use for this product which is a sewage treatment plan because sewage gives a feeling of disgust. Treatment sounds very, very technical and it sounds very, very industrial. Plant again sounds like a big factory, not something that I will put in my beautiful little backyard to take care of my sewage every day. So they just reverted it into a value proposition of saying they're building the world's first water recovery pod. Talking about water and not sewage talking about recovery and not treatment and talking about a pod and not a plant is another very different way of just playing around with nomenclature and terminologies to put out a value proposition where it helps you to really call out and explain to the world that you're trying to disrupt an industry or you're trying to disrupt a sector by an innovation that the world has not seen before. An innovation that's so obvious that's so elegant and simple in its outcomes that it just feels stupid when you put it out of why hadn't somebody else sort of hit the fall and some of those kind of solutions and value propositions are the easiest to click with for people. Let's look at one final example. This one comes from India and it's by a company called Daily Dump. They make home composting units for people living in urban and semi urban spaces and Daily Dump started about 16 years ago at a time where home composting was not really an idea that people, especially in urban India, would adopt. It was something that we would very naturally and intuitively do in rural parts of the country. But Daily Dump realized that in the entire waste that's being collected in a city more than about 60% of it is actually food waste because in India we cook all our meals, a lot of vegetables, a lot of curry, a lot of water. So it's a lot of food waste. So they came up with a beautiful solution of these different pots that you see in the image right now. They're made out of clay. Some of them are made out of bamboo. They're all handcrafted. They're taking up local craft and artisans to build these products. And that whole value proposition at a time when the country didn't even know that it needed it, was to not say that I'm going to dump my waste or I'm putting my waste away or I'm treating my waste or I'm getting rid of my waste. But they said that we're going to work towards making waste visible and beautiful. Very, very counterintuitive and contradictory to what any other waste management company of that time and even today is doing in India. But because they entered the market saying waste is not something that we believe in is an idea. Nature doesn't have a terminology or an ideology for waste and why should we humans. So how do we reinvent our users and our customers thinking itself around waste? So they were not just putting out a product but also trying to shift behaviors and getting people to start rethinking about something that they produced every single day. In which case they made it their endeavor for over a decade and a half to create products and solutions that performed really well at a very high quality. They produced waste in about six weeks without any electricity power or any additional additives or smell. But that's not what they sold. What they sold was that it's something that you can put out in your balcony, in your courtyard, in your terraces, anywhere with pride. It doesn't look like an ugly bin that you hide below your sink and it makes you with a lot of pride and beauty put that waste out. It took a couple of years but right now Daily Dump is seen across the country as a pioneer into the idea of home composting and with the world struggling with management of waste and trying to decentralize solutions of waste management. This idea of getting people to start make their waste visible and beautiful and really with pride take ownership of it has gone a long way into making them sustain successfully and profitably as a business at a time where in India every month and in every city there's a new business for waste management cropping up. So that's another way in which Braili propositions can be about putting out an ideology that the world doesn't know it needs or doesn't know that it's prepared for but really using storytelling to put out that ideology and slowly and steadily through each product and narrative you really make that ideology and association that people make for your company and your brand making you a disruptor or a pioneer in that sector. Now all of these four ideas as I explained sound again very intuitive to have to have been thought of they sound like the right value propositions to have been made and I don't fancy about it but arriving at these takes a lot of just deliberation iteration talking to customers talking to all stakeholders finding different patterns and opportunities that are there in the sector into gaps that are there in the sector and in the end really defining one first principle need or tackling one first principle belief of your end user through the product that you're putting out for them. I'll give you a quick tool at this point on how that can be done and before I give you the tool for the context I'll give you a little story. So the story is about this guy called Rahul who was a radio jockey of workaholic he loved working 14 hours a day he loved his job he loved his hectic life he felt very motivated and very driven he felt career was a really important part of a person's identity but in this day to day life one day he woke up with a really bad cold and he had to go for a very urgent meeting so he couldn't afford to take an off that day. So he took a pill popped it out for a cold rested for a couple of hours and voila he was feeling quite okay and he went back to his hectic life. Now this solution worked in the short term it was very promising it delivered what it had said it would and it got him to go back to his workspace which is what he was seeking but eventually next slide we learn that after a couple of weeks Rahul realized that every few weeks he was getting a cold every few weeks he was falling ill. So he went back to the doctor to ask for a more long-term medication to a medication that could make sure he doesn't fall ill and stays efficient. Now the doctor looked a little bit more deeply and explained to him that he needed to start working on his diet he needed to rest a little bit more and he needed to change his lifestyle. There are some fundamental ideological changes that the doctor was asking him to do they were not wrong but when Rahul heard them he simply just felt amused and he constantly kept telling himself let's see I understand what you're trying to say but that's not something that's a solution that will work for me because I enjoy the stress I don't get bothered by stress I love this fast-paced lifestyle so I need something that can keep me on this fast-paced lifestyle and not really take me away from it do you have a solution? Now the more deeply we think about it this lifestyle hazard that he's causing himself is going to have a long-term impact on his health and by the time he realizes it it's already going to be probably too late because of an illness that he'll catch which will slow him down a lot more than he would like right now. So in that case if you were proposing or building out a solution for Rahul how would you go about understanding him more deeply bridge and craft out a value proposition that's appealing and convincing and easy to internalize for Rahul for that I'll give you a quick tool right here we'll go to the next slide please and that is our mental model is Iceberg we look at this Iceberg from top down we'll start with any time we go as a company to solve a problem generally we start identifying and noticing the problem by an event that happens in Rahul's case the event that happened was catching a cold if we are talking about creating a lake cleaning solution to gather the waste or an ocean cleaning solution the event that's happening is that you can see waste floating around in the ocean or you can see wildlife under the ocean eating that waste now from that event if you just take a pause and dig a little bit deeper and start asking yourself what are the patterns or trends that have happened over the time for that event to happen in Rahul's case you'll realize that the patterns of him catching a cold happen he started identifying this event more seriously that he realized that he was catching more cold and he was falling more ill each time he was sleeping less so the event in itself may be catching a cold which needs to be solved but it can't be solved until unless we solve the pattern of the fact that he doesn't sleep enough or the fact that he sleeps less if we go one level deeper into the iceberg and start talking about the underlying structures that influence these patterns we'll start realizing that he's sleeping less why is he sleeping less because there is more stress at his work because he is not eating very well and because he lives alone he has difficulty accessing healthy food near either his home or work so the location that he's staying in the kind of stores that he has around all of these factors of underlying structures are leading to him sleeping less which is leading to him catching a cold if we dig one level deeper of why is there more stress at work why is he not eating well why is he not working towards accessing healthy food around them you'll start identifying and unraveling some assumptions and beliefs and values that he holds close to himself that basically dictates the way he makes decisions in his life for people to adopt your solution no matter how good it is you need to cater to or disrupt people's belief systems and for that you need to understand them in Rahul's case you'll have to understand that for him career is the most important piece of his identity you have to understand that he already believes that healthy food is too expensive you have to understand that he already believes that rest is something that's for the unmotivated so instead of building a solution directly to help him reduce catching the cold if you start building out solutions which are around making very quick healthy but very tasty foods in about 10 minutes of time every morning for the next three meals for him or you start giving him ideas of how to catch a glimpse or a moment of a power nap or rest or a little pause in his day to day life without really sort of disrupting his routines the chances that he'll adopt and eventually be loyal to your solution or technology or innovation or brand is much higher than if you're simply giving him a solution to catch a cold and that as a tool it's something that's very easily available online you can use it and break it down for all your stakeholders there could be a mental model stakeholder and really break it down and try and understand that the event that you're trying to tackle of whether it's access to water whether it is cleaning up that water whether it is providing water at a lower cost or whether it is changing behaviors about water usage any of those solutions can be iterated refined or pitched to a customer by mental models and value propositions woven into the mental models of those customers I'll take a pause here let me see so John has a question which is what is the name of the company producing the pods the company John is called Kakai and they're working on a technology which is a Danish technology of a company called BioQ where they use biomimicry as a first principle to naturally recycle sewage water into eventually drinkable clean water any other questions if any of us has I'd be happy to answer otherwise I'll give it back to Ianna thank you so much Ithika I don't think I see any other questions but that was incredibly insightful and you can probably take a peek at some of the value props that were added in the chat by our participants I think a lot to work with there with that human-centered design perspective and mind and we are now going to transition into another thought leader provocation another insight in this instance from the humanitarian relief sector and kindly if you are not speaking if I can trouble you to please mute we're getting a little bit of background noise thank you so much so I am going to go ahead and introduce our incredible speaker who is Ruth Salmon who is the Innovation Manager at ELRA's Humanitarian Innovation Fund Ruth designs and manages funding calls for innovative solutions to gaps in water and sanitation humanitarian responses before working at ELRA she worked for a nonprofit consultancy designing and scaling innovative financing programs in the WASH health and education sectors across East and West Africa she also worked in monitoring and evaluation research roles and provided technical assistance to the government of Sierra Leone for two years she is passionate about using research and innovation to improve development outcomes and help collaboration between actors from different perspectives and schools of thought can achieve this she has a Bachelor of Science in International Development Studies and a Master's in Research for International Development from the University of London welcome Ruth to our virtual stage we will be here to get some very unique perspectives on the humanitarian innovation space great thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me so yes at ELRA we have been working to understand how best to scale innovation in the humanitarian sector for a number of years we funded over 150 innovation teams to develop, test and scale impactful innovations and yet we found that despite the impact the increased investment humanitarian innovation over the last couple of years scaling it is still a huge challenge and this is for a number of reasons some of which are displayed on the slide at the moment so over the next few minutes I'll highlight some of those challenges as well as how we can flip some of them into opportunities this presentation is based on the research that ELRA has done over the last couple of years and I've linked to the different reports that we produced throughout the presentation in the chat after as well so in terms of the challenges to scaling innovation within the humanitarian sector our research and experience so far has kind of narrowed it down to these five so challenge number one is that too few innovations are geared to scale meaning that scalability is often insufficiently considered during the early stages of innovation development so questions such as is there a market for this idea is it financially viable does it bring value to the end user all questions that seem very obvious but can be lost in the excitement of developing a new product or trying out something different in the space the second challenge is around the insufficient embedded knowledge and skills for supporting scale within the humanitarian sector itself I think this is an area that's slowly improving but there's still a need to consider the full range of scaling strategies available during on sources from outside of the humanitarian sector and adapting them to the dynamics of the sector itself the third challenge is around funding there is generally a lack of funding for scaling innovation as a lot of the funding goes towards the development of new ideas and solutions and piloting those there's a bit of a funding gap for kind of scaling those ideas once they've proven and have evidence to a certain level the funding also tends to be short-term so kind of one or two years to lower the risk to donors but we found that in reality it takes much much longer to scale innovations in the sector more like five to seven years to even begin to kind of see impact at a larger scale then thirdly the funding is also often inflexible innovators are normally paid to do certain activities to achieve a certain outcome that's not really how innovation works in the best instance especially in unpredictable humanitarian settings where the situation might change and then the ideal scenario is that then you can adapt to that changing situation it's also really hard to find core funding for organizations that have an idea that they want to scale to kind of move from an organization being one where they're piloting an idea to one where they're moving to a long-term venture it's really hard to get funding for them to strengthen their organizational structures and kind of make that transition so that's another barrier too the fourth challenge is around the insufficient evidence that exists for the impact of innovations so there's a couple of reasons for this within the humanitarian sector the first is that there's a lack of baseline data for effectiveness on current practice so there's nothing to compare new innovations against because there isn't evidence for what's being done currently anyway there's also patchy evaluation of different innovations rather than it being more systematic this is due to a couple of factors the nature of the settings themselves are very unstable it also takes a large amount of funding and time to evaluate an innovation or an intervention rigorously the sector is also really fragmented in terms of what it sees as enough evidence or sufficient evidence to change a practice there are a very few sector-wide agreed upon evidence standards for what constitutes enough evidence to make a change and to switch to a new way of doing things and then challenge five is around how the structure of the humanitarian ecosystem itself does not lend itself well to scaling innovation and I'll expand on that one in the next slide if I can have that please great so before we move on to the opportunities I just wanted to outline this last challenge in a bit more detail there are three barriers that make scaling in the humanitarian ecosystem hard specifically we've also invested in researching these challenges and that's in our humanitarian and wash procurement reports so I've linked to that report as well so these three barriers I picked out a drawing on that research so we've seen generally that the underlying incentive structure of the humanitarian ecosystem can stifle innovation by which we mean that humanitarians are focused on doing no harm and delivering interventions at speed to respond to a dire need that exists for those affected by the crisis this can make trialling something new really tricky field responders are more likely to fall back to the methods that they've used before in other situations regardless of the factors to whether there's evidence for them working well or not they just go to the thing that is closest to hand another barrier is that procurement processes in the sector are really opaque it's often not clear what the process is for getting a new intervention into a humanitarian agency's catalogue for example or even who the right person is to approach what the process is supply challenges can also abound in that it's difficult to find suppliers that are willing to invest in setting up production for a market that is often unpredictable or you get the flip side of that problem where agencies are locked into long-term agreements to overcome the unpredictability but that means that getting a new product into the market is often quite difficult because humanitarian agencies and their suppliers are already in a long-term contract to produce the same products then there's a third barrier that is a lack of markets that would exist in other contexts so this is around the fact that the procurement of resources for responses is dominated by several large humanitarian agencies and yet across these agencies there are often different specifications for very similar products making it very hard for supplies to produce at scale and I have an example of this on the next slide if we can go there so this slide should if we click through give you three examples of different humanitarian agencies catalogs so we've got UNHCR Save the Children and then Oxfam they're all showing you the product specification of the product page for a trucking a water transport ladder and yet you can see across the different catalogs there are different specifications there are different prices so it's very difficult for suppliers to be able to produce something that is accepted by all of the main humanitarian agencies even though there's only a couple of them that are procuring at scale great so it's very clear that there are a lot of barriers I'm sure some of you were more than aware of some of these anyway so let's start to talk about how we can overcome them so I'll now outline two opportunities that exist for innovators in the humanitarian system and this is from our experience of working with those teams that we funded to scale humanitarian innovations so the first of these is generating and using evidence to navigate the sector so innovation teams can do this by understanding their stakeholders, enablers and constraints and aligning with them and this is a bit similar to the examples that it was just giving in terms of putting yourself in your stakeholders shoes understanding how they perceive evidence, what evidence they might be more accepted to about your innovation, when they might want to receive it and how and who would be best to present it to them who do they see as a credible source so the second opportunity around this is involving your stakeholders as early as possible in evidence generation so giving them a role in reviewing or deciding on what evidence is collected, giving demonstrations to them and providing visuals of the innovations so diagrams, videos and using those resources to really tell a story and a narrative about your innovation and what role it can play and what value it brings there's also potentially a role for peer-to-peer mechanisms so tapping into groups or organizations that already exist in the area where your innovation sits and creating buy-in within these so approaching those organizations presenting to them and getting their buy-in as well and then finally the third opportunity is thinking about what evidence stakeholders need to take decisions so producing evidence that facilitates the scaling protest the process sorry not just thinking about evidence that your solution works or evidence of its impact so if we can move to the next slide please so this slide demonstrates the different types of scaling evidence which is how we've come to think about it the two dark blue columns are kind of how we tend to think about evidence generally so we normally think about evidence that there's a problem and then evidence that our solution solves that problem and the other groups of evidence that we found can be really helpful in facilitating the uptake of innovations are the three light blue boxes on the right so evidence that your solution is the right solution or for a particular context or that it has a relative advantage over other solutions so that might be comparing it to other innovations doing a value for money analysis demonstrating the demand that exists for your solution within the sector the second area is having a feasible and sustainable scaling strategy and having evidence that demonstrates that that's the case so one way of doing this is having a detailed implementation or quality control guidelines so that when you hand the solution over to another actor they know how to operate it and that kind of is clearly laid out for them the other area of this is kind of replicability so understanding what factors affect the effectiveness of your innovation in different contexts and being able to predict how it will perform across different contexts and then finally the evidence of team capability so showing those that you might be approaching for funding or to adopt your innovation kind of the strengths of your team demonstrating that you've got the right connections that you're well managed that you have a feasible scaling strategy etc so those are the different areas of evidence that we've started to think about as well as having the evidence that your solution works and using evidence for a variety of different goals such as bringing credibility to the organisation, rallying support for it helping those adopting it to make key decisions and fulfilling decision makers requirements if we can move forward to the next one great so that was the first opportunities around kind of evidence use and generation the second opportunity is ensuring that the innovation is geared to scale from the outset so we mentioned at the beginning that sometimes this doesn't happen so of course the flip side of that is to ensure that you definitely have thought about this so one way to do this is to consider scaling pathways from the inception of the innovation I've put on the slide three different pathways that we've identified but this comes with the caveat that there is no one single pathway and that no two pathways for scaling an innovation will look the same and that one pathway could be a combination of the different pathways itself so these are three examples of pathways that do exist so the first is ensuring that the innovation is scaled through getting it incorporated into policy guidance or practice standards so this requires close collaboration with key decision makers at an early stage to ensure that you can influence them to adopt the changes into policy and practice guidelines within the sector another scaling pathway is adoption by others so this could be government actors could be other humanitarian agencies it might be through humanitarian mechanisms either the cluster system or it could be encouraging donors to adopt it as well and this could be either demand driven so creating enough demand that people take up the innovation for themselves or it could be adoption through encouragement or advocacy that this is something that works within the sector so that others elect to adopt it and then finally the third pathway is direct implementation by the originating organisation so this pathway supports innovators who are themselves directly implementing or using the new innovation to scale their operations and this can happen either directly or through a franchise or partnership model where they maintain a degree of control so that's one area is considering the pathway to scale another opportunity is to think about what your innovation fits with the existing humanitarian system and thinking about the degree of change that you're requiring from those that are adopting your innovation so are you asking them to modify and slightly tweak their existing practice or are you asking them to create a whole new system around the innovation that you're proposing and whether the answer to that question is less drastic or more drastic will then the approach that you need to take in scaling the innovation the types of relationships that you need to develop with your stakeholders and also the kind of timeframe that you're thinking about in terms of what change can be expected and how quickly the innovation might take root and then the third opportunity is around using the growing tools that's available to innovators in the sector. I've linked a couple on the slide and I will put some of those in the chat as well after I've finished and that's all I have so yeah happy to take any questions Thank you so much Ruth I have very useful guidance that can be I think integrated to everybody's strategies immediately so if you do have questions feel free to drop them into the chat otherwise we are going to transition So with that I'd like to now turn the floor over to my co-moderator and colleague Miss Erin Piper who is a research manager here with Engineering for Change working with our fellows as well as a variety of impact projects and partners at the intersection of engineering sustainability and global development across the sector so Erin floor is yours to lead our panel Thanks so much Yana So I'd like to go to the next slide Our panel will begin with our panelists sharing a little bit about their backgrounds and the work that their organizations are doing related to WASH energy and the target market for wave power desalination So I'd like to start now by introducing our first panelists who are a key guard founder and operations director of footprint projects Well if you'd like to take a minute to introduce yourself and a little bit about footprint projects Sure Hi, it's great to be here Do you want us to share screens or anything or should we just talk? I feel free to just talk and we can I love it, keep it simple Yeah, so my name is Will I lead footprint project I'm a nonprofit based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota that deploys cleaner energy to disasters to help communities build back greener So that really looks like assembling and then dispatching mobile solar generator systems with batteries and solar panels to displace fossil fuel generators in the emergency relief and response context Between disasters we develop regional networks of mobile solar generators to get prepared for the next large power outage in that region We've been working on this since 2018 We've deployed to over 15 disasters in the domestic United States and we do have a small operation ongoing in Ukraine now Our goal is to work to include more sustainable technologies holistically so we're really excited to learn and kind of be a participant in this panel and yeah, we're happy to share kind of our experience deploying renewable energy technologies in these response contexts, what we see what gets plugged in and hopefully be helpful here Thanks so much Will. Our next panelist today is Bill Varnava who is a mechanical engineer with the Water and Water Technology Product Lead with the U.S. Naval Facilities Engineering Expeditionary Warfare Center Welcome, Bill. I know you're calling in. Are you able to unmute and introduce yourself in the work that you do? Yes, hi, Erin. This is Bill Varnava. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Yes, hi. Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this panel today. I was for the Navy here with the NAFAC and our Sea Water Desalination Test Facility. So what I basically do is we test and evaluate basically water systems and components related to desal water purification for expeditionary shipboard facility installation water systems for the DOD and other federal agencies and in addition test and evaluate systems for private groups and other interested parties. So our facility is kind of a unique one. We're able to see water and test in a real-world environment on a continuous basis. So interested in the idea of the wave-to-water concept and that it could provide either disaster relief and or installation resilience. Well, thank you. Thanks so much, Bella. Our next panelist is Paul Touls. Paul Touls, CEO of WaterCycle LLC. Welcome, Paul. Thank you, Erin. Nice to meet everybody virtually. So as you can see from my resume it talks a lot about desalination. You know, a lot of my focus particularly in this discussion is for the Caribbean. I was very lucky as a child to live in Jamaica for three years, so I got to really understand a little bit of what happens in the Caribbean and watching storms and hurricanes come in. You know, Jamaica also has earthquakes, nothing like Haiti, but a lot of natural disasters. The other thing I will say is more recently my career in the last three or four years, and unfortunately I didn't think to put it in here, I've done a lot of work on technology, so microgrid systems with hybrid solutions with wind, solar and batteries. And I think, you know, adding wave technology to that system is definitely something to consider. So, thank you. Thanks so much, Paul. And our last panelist is John Pikele, global market developer with Suez Water Technologies and Solutions. Welcome, John. Thank you very much. Yes, so I work with a Suez Water Technologies and Solutions, a global supplier of water and wastewater treatment technologies. So we manufacture membranes, we design and manufacture thermal systems, not used in the desalination of seawater, but actually used on the tail end on treatment of brine in the application of zero liquid discharge. But my expertise is really in both osmosis membranes, and so we often, you know, we don't often get involved in the power generation aspect that feeds say the electric motor that powers the high pressure pump to desalinate seawater using membranes. But we do supply permanent installations and mobile equipment that has to go into where the seawater is coming from and what is the final quality of filtered water being used for for, and we can provide insight into new technologies that, you know, experience. If you go to the next slide, Erin, thank you. I just put this one pager together just for people's benefit. This illustrates a couple of things around seawater desalination systems that are key, you know, relative to the concentration of seawater and osmotic pressure, the use of membranes to remove that salt, high pressure requirement for running membranes, integrating energy recovery, of which I've shown a picture in the lower right hand corner. And if you go to lower left hand corner, that's a picture of a small turbo installed on a membrane skid. And energy recovery is extremely important in seawater desalination to lower the electrical consumption or cost required to desalinate seawater. Without it, you would see a lot less commercial seawater plants in the world. And then the one in the upper right hand corner is our smallest desalination membrane system does not have energy recovery, but it is cost-effective and often used for people that have a small inland seawater desalination well and provide a small volume of desalinated water for portable use. So just giving you some pictures to go with the explanation. Thanks. Thanks so much, Sean. And thank you so much to all of our panelists for joining us today. We will now move on to the moderated panel section of the discussion, where we'll be covering a number of topics, including existing solutions for energy generation and water desalination, as well as technical cost and deployment considerations. So I wanted to start off first with a question to Will. So PhilPrint Project deploys mobile solar solutions for emergency and clean access to power. Which geographic regions? I think you've covered this, the current regions that you're working in. If you could reiterate those. And then also in your experience, do you find energy is often difficult to source and generate in those areas, especially in the disaster relief context? Yeah. We deploy mostly in the domestic U.S. Simply because the equipment that we bring in is large and shipping is a significant constraint for any humanitarian emergency, but it really doesn't make sense to put a large solar trailer in a container and ship it over to West Africa. It's better to build it there. So energy is always a challenge in emergencies, particularly I think international emergencies, longer term remote refugee camp style challenges are where a lot of the cleaner microgrid technologies have been deployed. A lot of what we're doing is importing lessons learned from the international disaster response context and applying them to firefighters in Houma, Louisiana after Hurricane Ida or something else where there's a domestic large long term power outage and we're deploying solutions that would would reduce the use of fossil fuels in those contexts. So I think it's a yes to be I mean it's a yes, but international long term displacement refugee or humanitarian crisis of those scale are where you see, you know, UNHCR investing, you know, a million dollars to build a microgrid for because the payoff is for 10 to 17 years while in Louisiana after Hurricane Ida the grids back in two months, you know what I mean? So there's a there's a significant I think that's a really important piece of the the puzzle to think about when you're when you're deciding, all right, it might make more sense to deploy this equipment in international humanitarian context because the the payoff over the initial investment is going to be be extended. Thanks so much, well, and just as a quick follow up question, more specifically, what gaps do you see in the current solutions that are being deployed for energy generation? Yeah, I mean, it's it's just a to be honest, like on the domestic side, we're just so used to, you know, the National Guard providing the fossil fuel supply chain if the grids out for an extended period that there's not really create a lot of creativity going on with how to deploy newer technologies. I think the first so for the domestic, you know, US response infrastructure or systems, I think the the gap is is tech, you know, creativity because the technology is really there and it's really just a logistics and finance challenge. Micro grids are more expensive up front. The grid is still being rebuilt relatively quickly, and so making that cost to benefit ratio over a period of a grid outage of two months to six months is a lot harder to do than in, let's say, Bangladesh, where you have a refugee camp that's going to be operational for 10 years or longer. I think in the international response space, the the gap is finance, right? You just need more capital to the tech still there, the use cases there. You just need a lot more, you know, people putting their money where their mouth is. Yeah, so I think they're different based on whether you're looking at the US or or, you know, the UN, so to speak. Thanks so much. Well, and I see that there's some questions coming in in the chat. We will leave some time at the end to have the panelists answer some of those questions with an audience Q&A. So please do add questions to the chat as you think of them and also direct them towards specific panelists as necessary. So the next question is for John, kind of a parallel question. So your work at Suez focuses on water technologies and solutions for more industrial or commercial applications. What gaps do you see in the current solutions for water desalination? OK, you know, energy consumption has always been one of the primary challenges as you do large desalination plants. The whole reason membranes became popular is because it was more energy efficient than thermal evaporation and condensing of seawater to make portable water. But that energy consumption is not just in the membrane being used to remove the salt, but it is also in the pretreatment and the conveyance of the of the volume of water from the ocean. And we deal with membrane fouling on seawater is one of our, you know, primary challenges in operational efficiency of a membrane system. Membrane follows that needs more pressure. It needs more cleaning. You consume more chemicals. If you have downtime cleaning a membrane, it's not making water. So you have to have more membranes to make up the difference when part of your system is being cleaned. So balancing all those energy needs from pretreatment to the actual desalination seawater continues to be a challenge. You know, I'm thinking of the contrast of a, you know, small humanitarian relief system where you've got a, you know, portable power supply that can be deployed efficiently in sight to the design elements that have gone into large desalination facilities. And I think of the co-located power plant example where we use the cooling water for a power plant to heat the incoming water for the desalination plant, which makes the membranes more energy efficient and it also means you have one less intake into that plant. But the challenge is still there. The challenge of managing energy and managing those operational factors that consume energy and desalination, I think continues to be the biggest gap. We'll talk maybe in a little bit about environmental, you know, challenges of discharging the concentrate of Brian, but I think in just the desalination part of its energy, no question. Thanks, John. And as a follow-up question to that and the work that you currently do, would there be interest in pursuing additional options such as wave powered technology to meet those energy needs? Absolutely. I mean, there's already, I don't know, half a dozen, you know, photovoltaic, coupled or driven desalination plants in, you know, areas close to the equator around the world. I think there's actually a, in Perth, Australia, I believe, a wave powered, you know, generation demonstration plant. So the concept is certainly a viable one because, you know, the waves are there. They're a source of energy and building a plant or generating and transmitting electricity to desalination plants where they're most economically located is a significant investment. So, again, the challenge is most of the time when we get involved, the capacity of those desalination plants are so large, so that the amount of power required for a large plant is huge and the more power you need to generate continuously, the more, you know, the long-term, you know, fossil fuel-based technologies tend to be more economical. But as time goes on, we hope that that's not true, right? We get more and more economical to generate greener. Thanks, John. And Paul, I had a similar question for you in the work that you do and kind of with your end users, do you see interests in additional options to meet energy or water needs through wave-powered desalination? Yeah, so there's been a lot of talk about, obviously, multiple types of alternate energy throughout, say, the Caribbean, as an example. People have looked at solar, wind and wave. The challenge with the Caribbean is the sheer size of the Caribbean from an area and overall area perspective, and each island is quite unique and different. So having one system that fits all is quite a challenge for people. So each island tends to look at these issues separately independently. They're installing some wind in various islands. They've got some solar and wave activity in each island is quite different. Obviously, the closer you get to the equator, the less of the tidal movement there is. So you've got to really just focus only on wave activity. So it just varies throughout the islands, but people are definitely looking at trying to find ways. I know that some people talk about generating energy that's fair to a desalination part, and then there are some people that are trying to integrate desalination into the actual device. So some people have got a piston type device that operates the pump. I would encourage people to focus on generating electricity. But that's my personal view. Thanks so much, Paul. So next question is for you, Bill. Part of your work with the Navy includes the testing and evaluation of desalination and water purification systems. How do you and your role with the Navy or as an organization decide if a new technology is worth pursuing, and how are these technologies vetted and tested? Okay, well, generally what the Navy or government does is we generally have a needs, a mission gap, a technology gap. We basically want to do something. So water purification or desal, it's generally centered around less energy, reduced maintenance, increased reliability. Also in terms of scaling it down to smaller scales, it's generally kind of a more unique challenge on the military DOD side in terms of transport. A lot of times we also look at what's called the technical readiness level of a technology. So we would put out, government would put out requests for proposals or solicitations saying, hey, we're interested in technology like a broad agency announcement and vendors and groups and then submit concepts that can then be reviewed and generally they look at things like technical merit, innovation, what is the team's capabilities and what do we think is that applicability to the government mission, but generally it's on size and weight transportability because a lot of our equipment has to be moved around and redeployed. So as far as testing and those types of things, generally our group gets involved with pilot scale, demonstration, proof of concept. So generally if a developer or group has something then at a certain point in the development they would send us their product or system and set it up at our facility and then test it. And generally we like to test things you know, it's kind of like what is it you're trying to achieve with the test, right? It's just proof of concept that it works, validate some, you know, capabilities. What I've seen is most people have a general idea of what their system does, but they don't know how it, they don't know what the actual conditions are to operate it. They would say, well, I need to run some tests to kind of like a test matrix to see well, I don't know where this is best optimized. So I'm going to run a series of conditions and then once I determine that I'll say, okay, that's my best condition. Now I'm going to, you know, run it at that point for let's say three months. And I think this is just a test generally gives you a pretty good sense of the overall reliability of the system. Thanks so much, Bill. And following up on that, you discussed kind of the importance of the size of the system. I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and kind of what size of the system, but also in terms of water or energy output, be looking for in terms of the applications and the work that you do? Yeah, I think it depends. So like for art, for example, for what we do with the Navy here, you know, we look at kind of a what I call kind of like a family of water systems. So we go down to a individual marine soldier size, a squad level, platoon level, larger scale systems. So that would be like, you know, in terms of output, you know, something like maybe, you know, 200 gallons a day at a platoon level, you know, maybe 1800 gallons a day at a company level, that's like 150 people, and then maybe 1200 to 1500 gallons a day or gallons an hour at like the large, you know, base camp, you know, and again, that's more of our, you know, military forces. If we're looking at like, you know, installations or kind of what, you know, would be on a base, a fixed installation, then it would vary depending on the size of the number of teeth. That could range anywhere from, you know, 25-50,000 gallons a day to maybe half a million a day or a million gallons a day and large, you know, bases and installations. Like, you know, the Navy has Guantanamo Bay down in Cuba and, you know, they have a desal series of desal plants down there and they do like two, you know, one and a half million gallons a day, two million gallons a day of production. I think that's our largest one in the government. And then there's various other bases that have different size systems. So. Thanks. Thanks so much, Belle. That's really insightful. I'm really helpful. So next question is centered around cost and I wanted to direct this to Paul and John. Are costs a significant factor in your consideration when adopting a new technology and kind of what considerations are given to capital versus O&M costs? Go ahead, Paul. Thank you. So cost obviously is very important, particularly into, again, if I focus on the Caribbean, cost is a little bit of less of an issue when it comes to a disaster, because obviously it's availability and capability that's more important. But ultimately cost obviously is extremely important. You know, the capital cost, they can often get a loan for the capital cost, the actual operating costs. So again, if you look at the Caribbean from an overall desalination perspective, there's a blend of government owned plants to BOO type plants where somebody builds owns and operates them for a fixed cost. So, you know, different people will try to address how to bring the lowest cost of water to their end users. I agree with Paul and I would add to it, you know, projects often have a certain scope and the larger you draw the scope, the more you start to bring in aspects that are offset by, say, higher investment in capital, because you have a longer lower operating cost or more robust because you put in more treatment. It costs you more, but over the life of the system, it will run cheaper because you have less membrane replacement, less cleaning, etc. So the bigger one draws the envelope of what it costs to put in and run an operated desalination plant, the more you can bring in new technologies and say, you know, this technology helps reduce costs in these other ways, so it can cost more initially. And when we look at incorporating a new technology into our portfolio and our systems, we try to understand, even if it's higher operating or higher in capital initially, what is driving the higher cost and will economy of scale and further development bring those costs down? And if you have a pathway towards lower costs, even if it's five years in the future, there can be a motivation to tackling that challenge because you see the long-term benefit of that making your offering stronger because ultimately it will provide an overall lower cost solution, even if you define its box too narrowly and it looks really expensive at the beginning. Just to add one additional thing, the Caribbean is a great example or great place for people to bring in new innovative technologies. So as an example, historically, most of the desalination plants were owned and operated by governments. BOOs became very prevalent early on before it really became common around the world and even mobile temporary systems are being, you know, containerized sea water reverse osmosis unit gets mobilized to an island, initially maybe short term, but often ends up being in operation for much longer. And there's a real mix of desalination capability and contracting mechanisms in the Caribbean. The Trinidad has got I think a 66 million gallon a day sea water reverse osmosis predominantly used for industrial purposes in a specific area in Trinidad, but then you can go to a hotel in an island where they have their own desalination plant. So it's just a real mix of that and different technologies and so it's a great place to really try to pursue and bring in invasive technologies. And Paul, would you agree that the cost per cubic meter of desalinated water for those different extremes can be widely different because of economy of scale technology selected and how much pretreatment they put in or types of membranes, or energy recovery? Absolutely. And a lot of that is, you know, a lot of the Caribbean, the sea water is very good quality compared to say Trinidad where you've got water coming out of the Orinoco River, which impacts the whole island. So it really is very island specific, but yes, that's true. Thanks Paul. Thanks John. So the next question is around deployment and this is for Bill and Will. So the systems created for the Waste Water Prize are meant to be shipped in a container fully assembled to reduce the installation time and technical skill required. Are there any hurdles to importing such a technology for disaster relief scenarios? You follow me on this one? Go ahead please. Go ahead Will. Go ahead. I can think of a bajillion hurdles, particularly if it's an, I mean most of it comes down to people, but and then gas, money, I guess. But yeah, cost to transport and then getting it through customs internationally is always a trick. It's a huge challenge. I would say that, you know, as far as if we're the wave to water concept, if it was to be in a container or some type of modular system, you know, something that kind of a standard size, like a standard size container, like a QuadCon or ISO container or something like that. But I would also say too, it would be like, having them pre-deployed in key locations, I think what I've seen, what we've seen on the Navy's side or government side is when there's these events, it's like they wanted it yesterday. Why don't you have it there? You know, even if you have the capability, the logistics of transporting it from point A to B takes a lot of time and effort. And by the time you can do that, sometimes the event that's like, it's either they figured out another solution or you don't have that kind of time. So if you had something like co-located or what I would call a backup system at a base or at a location, that's almost what you need to be able to switch over to that. If your mainline infrastructure goes down due to a disaster or a system failure, you want to have a backup or a redundant system available to be able to switch over kind of right there and already built in. I think maybe for like the wave power thing, that would maybe identify locations where that's conducive to that in terms of geographic locations or something like that and trying to figure out, could you say deploy them or put in infrastructure to deploy that and then take that water and transport it to shore or something like that? Thanks, Val. And then Paul, I was wondering from your perspective, are there any additional hurdles to importing such a technology for longer term use in a coastal community, for example? Interfacing with existing infrastructure I think is often a challenge. If you're generating power from a wave device, what are you connected to? Do you connect it to an existing microgrid or an existing grid which may be down and the length of the cable that you need to get good access to the site? So there's a lot of logistics issues and obviously that's going to vary from location to location. Thanks, Paul. And so in terms of logistics, I have a follow-up question for Paul and John. What sort of regulations or permitting have to be considered when deploying a desalination system? It varies tremendously. So if you take the United States as an example, you have extreme cases. If you look at California on one end of the spectrum versus Texas or even Louisiana, Louisiana is probably one of the easier to permit, but Texas initially was thought to be very, very easy to do, but it's becoming a little more challenging with the EPA stepping in over TCEQ. But in the Caribbean, there's very little, often what will happen is the supplier of the equipment will have a more stringent requirement for brine discharge or those sorts of things. So many islands don't have many limitations. Yeah. The biggest challenge we face is the content of the brine discharge. A lot of times we want to run as high a recovery as we can on the membranes. It reduces the size of the intake. You get more pure water from it, but that has two consequences. One, it pushes your desalinity up even higher. So it has a bigger need to be careful about where you discharge it back into the ocean. So it doesn't affect marine life that's close to the shore. And also the chemicals that we use to inhibit scale formation on membranes have to be environmentally safe. And those things exist, but they're not as always effective as some of the older chemicals, which we don't like to use when we're discharging back into the environment. So there's a rigorous review of chemicals used and discharged with your brine as well as the TDS and where that brine is going. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, John. So I did promise that we would leave some time at the ends for any questions from the audience. So I just wanted to open it up now if you had any questions for any of the panelists or speakers today. I'm feel free to send questions in the chat. So I have a question for Will. Uh-oh. No, no, it's what battery technology do you use for storing energy in your systems? Because I think you said you deploy both the generation of power and the storage of power in your solutions. Yeah, it's a great question. We try to get, we try to outfit systems as much as possible with lithium ferrous phosphate batteries, or cells which are the safest accessible, you know, market ready kind of plug and play storage that has the biggest depth of discharge, you know, safest, all that stuff. I also say we deploy whatever is free. So we like free batteries better than, you know, that's the best chemistry of battery. So we do a lot of upcycling, reusing, repurposing of batteries, and so we'll deploy anything that's not a single source fossil fuel generator. But yeah, when we can get, when we can fund or find LFP battery storage, that's what we prefer. Thanks. I see a question from Gilbert. What is the minimal water production for disaster relief, in your opinion? That is totally site dependent. And I would say that like, I mean, I'll just jump in and please, if anybody else jumps in, please. But it's, I think a lot of times we get the disaster response community gets hung up on trying to do all of it at once and go really big and not and forgets that like a little bit of water or a little bit of power is can be game changing if deployed appropriately. So I mean, the answer is as much as physically possible, right? That's the particularly in large scale disaster outages where or disasters in general where, you know, power, water, shelter, food, connectivity are all essential and they become essential very, very quickly for a vast overwhelming number of people. But particularly with our work, we've noticed that a lot of times it will get a fire department that says like, yeah, we need to run our entire building. Do you have a solar trailer that can plug into our building? We often say no, but we can power your Wi-Fi and your fridge. And if that changes, if that reduces or eliminates their need to send a human to get gas driving two hours to Mississippi or whatever to refill their generator and instead they can use that person for something else, that is effectively game changing. So I'd say like as long as you know, particularly for the folks that have worked through this challenge, as long as you know what your customer needs, like what they want and what they need might be vastly different. And we see that all the time with, hey, we run a 20 KVA generator and what they're doing is charging their Wi-Fi, you know, like that is so oversized for what they need. And they think what they want is a 20 KVA power system. And what they need is two, right? So I'd say the minimal is whatever that site or whatever that client is using, right? And that's the real, the gap in information for both water and power I think is significant. So I'd do that. We spent a lot of time doing site assessments before we deploy any equipment simply because what people say over the phone and what they need in real life are usually vastly different. So I don't know much about, you know, some of the ins and outs of electricity generation and storage, but the question I often get involved in is, what's the largest single phase pump that you can support? And then what pressure can we generate? And the more sailing the water is, the more that pressure goes to desalination, less volume you create, the more portable it is than the less pressure you need, and the more water you can filter. But starting that question with what, you know, is the available supply of power? And if in some cases it's single phase or it's direct current, if it's coming from a battery bank or portable take panel, we start with the motor and then we try to put what pumping energy we can do on that and then filter as much water as we can with the available pressure generated. So kind of an engineering backwards way of looking at it, but that just shows you the importance of the power generation in a lot of these filtration solutions. We have the technology, but powering it is an essential piece of the design. Thanks. Thanks, well, thanks, John. I do want to be cognizant of the time. I know we're at the ends of the time we had a lot of it, so I just wanted to thank everyone for joining today. Thank you to all the speakers and panelists. Just an abundance of knowledge and perspective that we had on the call today. As a reminder, this recording will be available on the Engineering for Change website following today's meeting and wanted to wish all of you a great rest of your day. And thank you once again for joining us. Thank you. Our pleasure. Thanks, everyone. Bye-bye.