 Good morning everyone. How are you all? Welcome to the second webinar of this innovation series for energies. We're organizing between Australian Embassy and the desk and Colombian telecom to this time. We want to welcome everyone. Thank you for your time today. This morning, we're going to just get a few minutes until all the people are going to get connected. And we are going to begin, I think, in two or three minutes. We're going to begin. So thank you very much for your pomp and quality. To respect everyone's time, we're going to start the second session of the innovation series of energy today. And the approach in the micro great topic, having in mind that every time more countries are incorporated it's not conventional and renewable energetics inside their energetic sizing. Each time it's gaining more important, more importance in the energetic market so Australia currently offering these mean to offering challenges, the increasing electricity cost maintenance of infrastructure, and they need to offer service to a bigger coverage, geographically talking. So having in mind most of the population, it's based close the shoreline. So that the micro grids are systems that are just to connect all the remote people around the country. So of course they are integrated between having a rise in different countries worldwide. So for us, it's so important for us for today's like talking you a little bit this sample about Australia is making through our speakers, and we want to welcome to our partners in this event, the Australian ambassador. Eric has trusted Camilo, I'm sorry, and that's cool. And one of it from Columbia intelligently. So, Joe, me, I'm Alejandro Calderon, head of business development from Australia, which is the agency of commerce and from the Australian government based in Bogota. So Camilo Sanchez, I give you the floor. Thank you very much. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for the presentation. I want to agree, our ambassador, Erica has performed a very important thing for not only for our country, but for Columbia. And of course this is our second event. Last time we were talking about hydrogen and we were talking about the, we are the incentives for this country and what the important are to have this ally country to help processes. So this other topic, which is so important for us. This moment, as you said, a lot of municipality in the periphery of Columbia are needing from these processes and we are looking for here for this very interesting speakers that are going to help us to close those gaps, and the way we have had and we're having and after all the association of the utilities in Columbia, and it's been working the last years the very strong way. The SOD is one of the more important six is to have 100% of energy in all the Colombian territory. And of course the networks are so important for this process in the last sense we have since 2018, we have coverage of almost 97%, but that last mile, the last part is the hardest. And of course, that it's fundamental to have the conscious to bring the specialists for this process. And that's why we're been working by hand with the government and the countries that have the carriage technology. And we're very happy we have pretty sure we're going to shift pretty good investments required in this process. We're at 3.5 billion of these Colombian pieces that we are going to invest in 257 solution and affecting 170,000 Colombians. And that's why it's very important to bring here for all the organization, and for our milling Colombian, it's performing his task to of course to keep closing those gaps. We are still working for a cleaner and more and more cleanest metrics from around the world, and we're very committed to those challenges we have established, not only in the US and but around international level. And that's why today I'm very proud to be here in microgrades or crystal are seeing today that even not being here, we are presented that company that is of course it's so important for the development so just as to welcome you, you know, to desk with the association of utilities and with you to help do the re economic or reactivation to boost the economic in a column in territory so hot for every one of you I thank you very much for the invitation so thank you very much for your introduction so I think that open in the floor. I'm going to present removed from general micro grids is the president seal of general micro grids for APAC Africa. The main interest approach to modernization of the electric networks and the application of new resources to manage as sustainable energy and very reliable and the micro red step is federal assessor for commerce department in ISP and of course in the emerging technology for the energy generation of California, so he has welcomed the working group for micro reds in the micro grid alliance is foundation of that in nation has funded and preceded the international micro red association and the Australian micro grid center of excellence. So very, the worries for you. Well thank you very much for that kind introduction. I'm looking very much forward to this discussion. I have the honor of having these types of discussions frequently with different governments. And this is the first time that I've actually worked with the Colombian government on this particular topic so thank you for inviting me. I would like to state that I actually have a footprint in both the United States and in Australia. I live in Australia now in Perth, and I will be actually talking on behalf of the work that we've done here in Australia. This presentation today is going to be quite a wild ride on the evolution of the electric grid. I'm not going to talk on micro grids but I wanted to do a real quick study of how the micro grid evolution progressed. And if we have time we'll talk a little bit about where the center of excellence are the Australian center of excellence is focused and how we're trying to drive the industry forward. So this is the talk that I'm going to give today, I'm going to begin with the evolution of the big grid. I'm going to talk a little bit about decentralization and the different ways in which we can decentralize electrification. Then I'll talk a little bit about the composition of micro grids and the role that it plays, particularly in the areas that we've talked about. I want to spend a little time talking about some of the innovations that have emerged and that really make micro grids reliable, sustainable, economic, and you know a very valid investment for both private investors and the public sector. Then I'll show you some examples of projects that we've been involved in across the world. We've worked in four different continents. And I'll just show you some examples of types of projects just to give you a feel of the range of complexity. And then preceding this event, somebody sent me a number of questions they would like to have answered, which I have answered, and I'll go through those rather quickly. So, first I wanted to talk about the evolution of the grid. The evolution of the grid was originally an electromechanical system that over time in the late 90s and early 2000s, we started to overlay ICT information communications technology. And that really was an enabler for us to provide more reliability and higher fidelity of control of all the assets. What we didn't realize was that the number of assets was going to change dramatically on the grid, because many of the production assets now we're in customers homes. So it was very advantageous for the evolution of the smart grid, which became kind of foundational for us to look at how do we advance the state of the art in micro grids and I'll be talking about that a little bit. So in terms of my background, I worked on very large grids in the United States for about 10 years and then I transitioned for the last 15 years or so focused strictly on micro grids. So my background is a reflection of the big grid, and I'll be talking about how we can have grid connected micro grids and disconnected micro grids. But it's with that kind of background that hopefully sheds a little light on where I think that the industry is going. But for a few moments I'll talk about kind of the different types of micro grids that we see occurring. We see micro grids that are part of the large community. And we see these popping up quite honestly in North America and some of them in Australia. But what we see is that many of these micro grids are within an existing network. And the best place to monitor and manage them is at the utilities substation level, because that's the demarcation point between transmission and distribution. And we're actually going to be talking about that particular subject a little bit later. Then we see many, many micro grids that are not connected to the grid at all. They may one day become connected to the grid, but we anticipate them being self sufficient. And we talk about micro grids that operate a single town in Australia, particularly here in Western Australia. We have many mining camps and mining operations that are micro grids. Also we see seaports and airports being great candidates for remote micro grids. One of the things that we see happening on islands is that the best reliability for micro grid is a series of micro grids spread across the island that are interconnected by a low voltage transmission line. And we call those ring topology because if there's ever an outage at the at any one point to the transmission line, it doesn't take down any of the other systems. We'll talk a little bit about that later. And then lastly, one of the most important things to think about for micro grids is that it's a collection of different resources and those resources. Some of them are owned by private entities and some of them by the institutional investor utility investors. I'm going to go into a little bit of detail on how that works and where we see those being most efficient. And then the last topic here is village micro grids. I was fortunate enough to work in India for five years and also in East Africa for a number of years. And many of the micro grids that we started up were very small projects very small village projects. But in one case, many of those village micro grids were connected then to the larger grid at the future point in time. The last subject around micro grids that I want to just touch on is this topic of standalone power systems. These are systems that are in vogue here in Australia. Essentially, they're different than a micro grid because the supply of power always matches the demand. When we look at micro grids, particularly as we move from, you know, the smart grid industry into micro grid industry we're talking about advanced micro grids that are using a high degree of it. And so we have a much better fidelity of control over the devices so standalone systems are kind of in a compartment of their own, and I will be referring to those, because that's not really where the direction of the industry is heading. So just so we all have the same level of context for what a micro grid is. We have a collection of uses of energy. And we have a collection of energy producing units. And we call all of these collectively as distributed energy resources. What we do is when we confine them within a region, imagine putting a fence around all of these assets together, and they can be controlled as a single representative unit. Many of these units can be, they can start their life connected to the grid, but then many of them may not start their life connected to the grid, as I mentioned the different types of micro grids. But again, they will be operating as a single unit, and that unit is controlled by a very high speed control system called a micro grid controller. So within the communities that we see in vision, utilizing micro grid technology, this picture just describes the fact that there are many, many types of assets that play a role in the organization of how the micro grid works. All of those devices that are electrical, in a sense, will have some level of either control or sensor that is attached to it that a single micro grid controller then will communicate with and send instructions to Because a micro grid is different than the larger grid, we don't always have the large rotating mass generators in a large, as a large utility would have. We have very small discrete units. And we have to have a different way of managing issues like voltage fluctuation, frequency fluctuation and demand for power, which we call reactive power. We can be able to commission the devices to work in real time to supply the necessary characteristics that we're looking for and that's why a micro grid controller plays such a big role. So this is a kind of a depiction of kind of the original thinking of how micro grids would be evolved in large grid systems. You would also have your, you know, your typical utility involved where you have a grid operator with their transmission system. And of course they have their distribution system which has many, many substations, which within a substation you may have an embedded network micro grid or the entire substation, and all of that distribution circuit could be its own micro grid. And we've actually seen templates of that I was involved in putting a plan together to convert a very large utility ends into 85 micro grids for all 85 substations. But we see many players coming and playing a role in a micro grid business. As I mentioned before, the, you have the incumbent utility that has an interest, but many times when these micro grids emerge on their own you have private investors. And you have to respect the needs of both entities. And what we see happening, particularly in many of developing countries is that the best way to provide electrification to more of the population is with public private partnerships. And one of the pieces of work that I did in India was to help rewrite energy policy that ensured that private investors can build grid maintenance and grid support through their own micro grids with their own investments, which ultimately became connected to the larger grid. So using other people's money, and it was able to increase their economic productivity, because we designed the micro grids in such a way that they became resources to the larger grid. So the concept is kind of like this. Imagine each one of these circles representing a single micro grid. In this case where we have multiple micro grids that are interconnected to each other. You can see the kind of former ring pattern as I mentioned earlier, that many Island are ring based topology. We see this as a federated micro grid. And it may exist on its own because you have private investors in each micro grid, or you may have actually a systematic plan to develop this type of design for a larger grid. We actually have the technology to manage all of this. Anyone individual micro grid can stand alone and become disconnected from the rest of the ring and still be self sufficient. So the entire system with all the micro grids collectively are under a single control point. And there is the technology already that supports that I've actually deployed that in two utilities, one here in Australia and one in North America. So kind of getting back to the grid connected micro grids. We are very much interested in how they can emerge and what are some of the reasons why micro grids occur in very high populated areas. We're finding that these micro grids are very successful, as long as they're designed appropriately for what we're trying to achieve. So we have a lot of micro grids just to emerge on their own. You actually need a systematic approach to it. We call that a system of system design, but in many cases, the micro grids, not only provide a resource to the distribution operator, but also can provide resources into the whole cell system. And we see this happening in different parts of the world now. We have privately owned micro grids. We treat the micro grid as an investment by a third party investor who's still selling kilowatt hours directly to the customer. We call that micro grid as a service. So the investor owns all the assets, or he may develop a partnership with incumbent utility utility may operate the lines and polls. The third party investor produces the investment in all the generation assets and the control mechanisms for all the rooftop solar that may exist. And then ultimately, there's the utility or customer owned utility, customer owned micro grids. And those are emerging just as well and quite rapidly. So just a few moments talking about some of the challenges and deploying a micro grid. It's particularly those micro grids that are connected to a larger grid. There are many engineering duties that need to be undertaken. And this is sort of just a real quick list of some of the activities that we have to do. We're the investments going in energy generation and energy storage. We have demand management. We have to meter the consumers of energy so that we can monetize the investment. We may find ways in which to interconnect to the distribution to the wholesale market. And then we also implement quite a bit of, as I said, it information technology. So we, in addition to deploying the electrical fabric, we're also deploying the information fabric. And those are done in tandem. Now there's an acronym here on that second to the last bullet called DER MS, that probably many of you in the utility sector have heard before. The acronym stands for distributed energy resource management system. And this is a product and a solution that has emerged in the last five years that has now become very mature. And we see utilities actually owning and operating a DER MS system to control micro grids and discrete assets owned by third parties. So for third party owns electric storage or a solar panel or electric vehicle, the DER MS actually controls it discreetly on behalf of and the improvement and operations of the rest of the grid. And the micro grid controller is a scaled down version of that system. Before we undertake the construction of a micro grid, we go through a very exhausting process, which is called the feasibility study. Now, just by the words feasibility study, you probably come to the idea that, oh, we're going to decide whether or not this is investable or not. Yes, there's that. But also, the study goes through a complete system design to understand what are the all of the elements that need to be invested in, what are the existing elements if they exist. How do we improve them and provide more energy efficiency. And then how do we determine where we're going to fund this project. And lastly, doesn't meet the financial viability requirements for the investor. This is a study that can take a week to two weeks, depending on the size of the project to many, many months. But anyway, this is a process that every micro grid undergoes before we actually make an investment in the assets. And it's in the fact that there's going to be quite a bit of innovation. This is a very complex slide and I'm only going to talk about it at a very high level. There are many participants in different segments of the micro grid market. As for the micro grid control and energy management at the top left of these series of boxes. There's quite a number of different industrial companies who have solutions specifically devoted to that one activity. To the right, we have modeling and feasibility analysis companies and that's all they do and they do it very well. Below that we have data collection control systems, we have building management, heating and ventilation management. Below that we have the management of the switch here, which is very common in all utilities but we still have to ensure that all the circuits have fuses on them to the transformers are working that we can move power with a switch all of those elements. We still exist and we have a big big community of suppliers in that area. And then at the lowest level there we have all the discrete energy devices they could be consumers of energy could be motors could be electric pumps. They could be electric storage in some cases, or even different types of generators and the range of generators is quite diverse. On the hand side of the series of graphs is a number of organizations that specialize in the engineering construction of micro grids. And then lastly at the bottom right. Just a collection of different investors who are interested in this space. So what I've done is I've captured kind of the whole range of different stakeholders that have an interest in the development of micro grids. So that was a complex diagram. This, I'm not going to go into any detail describing. But when you control a micro grid. There are many many assets that have different requirements to be controlled. This is an architectural diagram of a micro grid controller. An author of one of these systems. And each of those lines has a specific function. And there is quite a bit of work that goes behind supplying that, and it has specific duties that it handles at the top level you have your analytics, the mid levels supervisory control. Then you have your it network management and then at the lowest level, you have the physical systems, which are typically commodities. And although it looks like this is complex. The typical investors shielded from this, but the people who want to implement a micro grid have to understand what the requirements are. So I was going to go through just a few examples of some of the projects that we've undertaken and then I'll get to the question and answer period. We have developed projects in like four different continents. We have many different partners. Some of you will recognize some of the names here. Two of the names three of the names on this slide are Australian based companies. So we work with a rich range of different suppliers. There's a bottom note there that we've worked in the US in the Caribbean, Australia, India, Kenya and Uganda. So I'm going to start here in North America. This is a micro grid project that I built in 2007 is a utility owned micro grid. It's out the very outskirts of San Diego, and it's very distant from the city and from the operation of the business from the electrical business. The community frequently had outages due to fire and storms. And there were times when the community of 2000 people would have no electricity for weeks on end. So we redesigned the distribution utility to actually deploy a micro grid and this has now been in operations for almost 10 years. Very successful system moving across to the southern hemisphere. This is where I'm at now. I'm in Western Australia. The red flag there is located in a town called on slow. I talked about a technology called D RMS terms. I implemented terms here in this town. The town had eight diesel generators supplying power to it at the at the conclusion of deploying the Durham system. We were able to turn off all of the generators at a certain point in time and only run the grid on customer owned rooftop solar and utility owned electric storage. This was a profound change in direction for how micro grid can be deployed. We completely removed the carbon emitting component of many of these regional towns by deploying this technology. I worked in Indonesia for a little bit to helping develop feasibility studies for some industrial seaports. We did quite a bit of work in India. When I started working in India we saw somewhere between 300 and 500 micro grids across the entire nation. At the conclusion of our work we had over 10,000 micro grids. Primarily they were owned by private investors, but they became resources to the rest of the grid. I worked in Kenya with lighting systems and micro grid system to some work in Uganda, similar types of projects. These were all started out as village projects that became much bigger because of incumbent utility or then wanted to use the pirate public private sector concepts that we had developed another project in California and this is a school. This school has been taken off the grid and has become self reliant with some technologies and different strategies that were deployed for that. And then a project in the Caribbean, working with the local incumbent utility to provide high reliability for some of their resort communities. So that concludes the formal presentation. This next slide here is one where I was submitted some questions and what I've done is I've tried to provide some very simple answers. So the first question that was submitted, which standards do you recommend for ensuring interoperability of micro grids? I remember those very complex slides that I showed you with the graphs between each layer. There's a set of standards. Those standards are very well known. They're published. And I can provide more details around those to the people who need to know specifically what the standards are. This presentation is not geared for going into the details of all of that but I'm happy to supply that information at a later time. The last point under that question is inverter standards are the most critical. This is absolutely true, particularly when you have a public-private partnership. If many of the resources are coming from customer-owned assets, those assets have to behave properly on the microgrid or on the grid. And the way they behave is by sending signals to the inverter on what that behavior must be. They exist, they're well-established, and the control systems that command inverters as well-established as well. Question was sent to me, how do the AMI infrastructure ensure the operation of microgrids? AMI is the extension of SMART grid on the distribution grid. AMI advanced metering infrastructure is absolutely essential for data collection and heuristics, neural network kind of machine learning on the behavior of how things operate with tens of thousands, if not millions of nodes. So AMI has become very useful for not only the operation of the big grid, but also for the operation of microgrids. So what we want to do is we have metering systems that communicate back to a head end. I've mentioned the Derm system already. This is the next bullet here. It says from the utility's perspective, you need to use Derms, particularly when you have tens of thousands or even millions of connection points. This is something that cannot be done manually at this point anymore. It's absolutely autonomous. Question sent to me, which protocols do you recommend monitoring controlling a microgrid? If you go back to the, remember the slide I talked to you about the architecture of a microgrid controller, those standards are very well understood. I'm not going to go into the detail of what they are, but we know what they needed to be. So many of the layers of the microgrid controller are supplied by different parties. You may not have the same implementer of the microgrid controller for all the, all the different layers and so you need to have standards for interoperability. The next question, which are the challenges to coordinate embedded microgrids in existing networks? Well, it's the experience that we've had and with the adoption of the advanced microgrid where you have a tremendous amount of information technology. We've not found this to be difficult at all. We actually know how to do it. The science is very robust. The engineering is very sound and getting back to kind of the Derm system. If the utility deploys something like a Derms, it's incredibly simple. We had an onslaught, even including the procurement process took us about 18 months to be fully deployed. And this is a town of 2000 residences. Most of them have solar rooftop and electric storage, which we were able to commission. So we understand how to implement that. The question was about embedded microgrids. It's the exact same problem. We just have to isolate the portion of the grid that needs to be controlled. And the last question, what is the recommended control hierarchy for operations for microgrids with a centralized operator and its observability scheme? Again, I like to say that we understand this very well. I'm going to show you yet another complex slide about the architecture of how we make this all happen. I'm definitely not going to go into this. As an industry, we have developed the means in which we can manage all assets across a grid from wholesale generation to transmission to distribution, all the way down to customer owned assets, which we call DER. We know how to do this. The engineering is there. That concludes my presentation. Thank you for your patience and me getting through some very complex issues, but happy to take questions as the time permits. Thank you very much, Terry, for your presentation. Thank you very much, Terry, for your presentation. It's very interesting. It gives us a great getting introduction for the topic for microgrids. And of course, for our next speaker, John David Molina from Colombe Intelligente, he's going to give us a little bit introduction. To present, of course, an opera scholar that it's after John David. So at the end, at the bottom of your screen, you have all into Q&A. You're we're going to give space at the end to ask any questions you may have today. And John David, I give you the floor. David, no se escuchas. John David, can you hear us? I can hear you, but I think you're waiting for the next speaker. Is that right? Oh, sorry. Is it me? I'm so sorry. I thought someone else was going to say something first and we're doing Q&A. We're making that in that way, but it's somebody having problems. So to not take anybody's time, we're going to enter this interview. I'm an engineer, microtronic engineer working at Opera Saga, a business development model for East Africa. It's coming with a wider experience working with technology companies and innovation. And currently working, giving the new technologies and energy to new communities and for our communities around the world. So, you know, you have the floor right now. Thank you for your participation today. Thank you so much. So just a quick one. I think someone submitted a Q&A. Are we going to go through, do you want to go through the question and answer now or for Terry's presentation or after? Yeah. Awesome. Can everyone see my screen? Maybe I'll hit present. Perfecto. Buenas dias a todos. Buenas dias. Buenas tatame! I'm really excited to have this conversation with everyone and thanks, Terry, for setting the precedence for everything that we're actually chatting about. Now, I guess a quick run through of what I'll be speaking about is basically the problem that we are trying to solve at OKA Solar, who we are, why we do what we do, what is a mesh grid and how are technologies being implemented in these rural communities to create opportunities for those who need it the most. So I'm Indranil Roy, I manage our business development and operations and activities here in West Africa based here in Nigeria at the moment. So, I mean, I guess I'll start by a little bit of the introduction to the problem that we're trying to solve. So if you look around you, we tend to take the things around this for granted, you know, like running water coming out of a tap pipe sewage and electricity powering, you know, everything really around us. Now, there's like the main problem we're trying to solve is there's about 800 million people in the world without access to energy. And about 20 million of those. I got the number from the World Bank, so it might not be correct but about 20 million of those is just in Latin America, who still rely who don't have access to energy and they still rely on kerosene diesel generators charcoal for you know daily activities like cooking heating and so on. Now we've seen this across other markets in Southeast Asia, which is where we started our company. And, you know, back in 2016 and that's kind of why we started Oprah solar to address that major issue. So, Oprah solar is where technology company developing the hardware and software for energy developers government bodies desk goes to bring clean energy to offer communities by clean energy, I mean specifically solar. So we've been in relationships with government bodies and energy developers. We've been given some awards by clean tech group is one of the most innovative companies and by Forbes is one of the top 100 companies to watch. Now, as you all know like developing actually I'll chat about this first basically what our technology is is twofold we have our hardware and our software. So we have our hardware which is basically the ochre pod which is what we've developed. This is how it looks goes into households, and this hardware works with our software which is our harvest platform. So, why do we build what we did now our target market is the off grid community so really it's the poorest of the poor usually in rural parts of the world which make up a large population in the countries we're in. There's a little bit about Nigeria, for example, or Africa as a whole which has a massive energy deficit. Now, compared to Latin America, it's significantly higher and with the population growth here obviously, there's a lot more work to be done, but even looking at the population that doesn't have access to energy in Latin America, we need to come up with innovative solutions to make energy more affordable to bring to these communities. So, as most of you know, as Terry's also kind of mentioned. There's a lot of aspects that need to be considered when developing energy when bringing energy to these to any part of the world so you have to do. I mean the complex image that Terry shared. That's kind of the work that needs to go into bringing energy there is lots of moving parts and pieces that need to align. Now, developing a mini grid has several setbacks as well which make them very expensive and difficult to commission. Now we compare ourselves so our mesh grid technology to AC mini grids typically because our goal is to reduce a lot of those costs and make it easier to bring energy to the hybrid communities. Now with the longer timeline for project development and large infrastructure costs to do distribution and ongoing maintenance, the payback period of mini grids is very high. So you couple couple this with the unique topology of a village and not every household might get connected. Now in this slide what we're really comparing ourselves to is how in setting up AC mini grids a solar AC mini grids. A bulk of the setup costs are in transmission and distribution and a lot of it actually, and a lot of time is taken to get the land rights and project development it can take anywhere between 6 to 12 months from getting funding to actually setting up a community with energy. Whereas we've developed our solution to be a lot quicker and cheaper as well. Now there's limitations on both sides, but the way we see it is you do need multiple types of multiple types of technologies to solve the world's electrification problem. Let's get more about what our okra mesh grid actually is. So we've developed our okra pod with three things in mind to lower costs of to lower the capex. Yeah, that's required so that it makes more financial financial viability for energy developers to bring power to these communities to provide remote monitoring and maintenance and making it as seamless as possible. The third side is to allow the sharing of power, and that's what I'll chat about here. So in the middle image here what we've basically done is, I guess taking it back to the first, the basics, when you are bringing developing an AC mini grid for a community to get the land rights, identify a location, install your solar panels, batteries and all the other assets and then pull cables, thick cables to every last household in the community. So what we did is when we first launched, when we were first prototyping our device, and we're trying to address some of the issues. This was back in Cambodia in around 2016 2017. We noticed that the time it would take and all these costs really added up to energy developers not being able to convince their investors or that it's a good investment for them to make the revenues that they need. And also mind you, these off takers, so the households that will be getting this energy have very little money to actually pay for the energy. And so we took a lot of those issues into account and we developed this mesh grid. What this basically is, is we call it a decentralized mini grid, or an interconnected solar home system if you want to call it but it's with a focus on productive loads. So the way it works is on the household level you install the okra pod you have panels and batteries on the household level, and then say between six of us maybe three of us sign up to get energy. So we have assets installed. Now later on down the road, if our three other neighbors want to get access to energy as well they can simply install our okra pods, and you have cables connecting each of us and we can share power between our assets. Now what that means is it's a lower investment for an energy developer to bring energy to everyone in a community and it leaves no one out. It doesn't leave anyone out. And I guess getting into a little bit of the technical side is our system can function as a solar home system, an individual solar home system, or when you have them in close proximity you can interconnect them so they can share power. We use a DC system to share power but then on the household level it's an AC system. The reason we use DC there's a number of factors but the key thing is to keep those distribution and transmission costs low. And I can get into that later if anyone has any questions we can chat more about it. Cool so the next step really was to make our device able to do all the metering and remote monitoring as well. Now we built our software. Now every device is connected by the IOT and we built a harvest platform to really address a lot of the issues that energy developers have in the field. Before I get into that a little bit of a comparison here between what the costs are like for a centralized minigrid compared to our distributed mesh grid. So you can see like a lot of the main cost comes from the distribution from the distribution and when it comes down to the, I guess, in the financial models and most energy developers are working on becomes of the cost per connection for a household. Now the biggest difference between our distributed mesh grid is we're able to more accurately size the loads for a household, whereas for a minigrid you have to oversize because you're forecasting the amount of energy that a household will be using. And that's how we've addressed our systems as well. And because we've developed a modular system in these awkward communities. You can actually start off with really small systems and as their load increases, because as the load increases you can add in more solar panels and batteries as well. So our target market is our goal is to reach 100% electrification and typically in the awkward communities that we work in, they've never had access to energy and most of the time they've lived without the need for it. So when we bring them energy, we've got to start at the bottom line at the bottom level, and then we build up their capacity and their needs and also we need to improve their livelihoods through income generation activities. So I'll get into our software now. Yeah, perfect. So basically, what we've done is we've enabled our harvest platform to be the one stop software solution for any energy developer trying to bring power to awkward communities. Now the way we do that is I can actually go into the software later if you have, if we have some time, but the key things here is you're able to monitor all your households to a really granular level and how they're performing. So you can monitor all the equipment, the solar panels, the batteries, the inverters, how their loads are being distributed across the network and obviously you can also monitor the mesh grid so the sharing of power across the households as well. Now what that means for energy developers is on the financial level you can actually manage your whole portfolio and see how you can optimize your growth and maybe upgrade the communities to have more energy or push more productive appliances. And we also have a lot of automation built into our operations and maintenance because what we've noticed is, especially in rural communities that we work in, an energy developer spends a lot of their capital on ongoing capital in sending engineers or their team out to the field. And as you might know in a lot of these rural areas it costs a lot of money and poses a lot of risk to the company to send people out periodically. So our system is actually built in a way that enables really localized maintenance. So for example, imagine you have a community in rural Colombia, maybe in the mountains somewhere, and the developer sets up the assets in the households, you have 100 households. Typically we would encourage the developer to identify a local maintenance agent. Now this person is someone who actually lives in the community, might be the village leader or the village chief or could be anyone really. And then they're trained, they're given a little bit of training to be able to do, for example, the cash collections, simple fixes on the network, and also maybe incentivize to sell appliances or upgrade the households to the next energy package depending on how much energy they're using. So what happens is, for example, if as an energy developer sitting in your office in Bogota, you're seeing that maybe one of the, you're noticing some power theft in one of the households, which is a common problem that occurs where they bypass the system. Now, you might, with our system you're able to see that and then you get a trigger and you can call the local maintenance agent who lives in the community, and they can go and actually check what's going on in the system. And rather than having downtime, you're able to action it as fast as possible to make sure the system is running smoothly. So I guess one of the key factors that most of the business models are working towards is increasing that average revenue per user. And that's done through a number of factors and that increasing that ARPU really drives your payback for a whole system and with our okra systems what we're seeing at the moment is optimizing that financial model to get your positive IRRs around seven to nine years. And that's how we're seeing that a lot of the developers are able to scale up their electrification plans. So the other side as well is our harvest platform works with our harvest app. Now one of the big things that we've noticed is a lot of developers have to use multiple tools to do their signups their surveys and their billing and things like that so we've really tried to build it all into one platform. And one of the other things is because our platform has an API built at the back end, we actually can integrate depending on which market we're in with mobile money payment. We can use any AC meters or any other equipment you're using to feed data into harvest as well. And as you can see here the app can actually be used to track all the payments and do all the collections and also for maintenance. Now I guess the other side as well is we built a bit of AI into our platform so we can do credit profiling of the households. And then I mentioned that a lot of the communities we work with are, you know, the poorest of the poor communities really, and bringing energy to these households typically doesn't make sense for energy develop do is to our credit profiling. We encourage energy developers to bring in productive appliances to these households so think mailing machines grinding machines equipment that allows them to start businesses like a blender television perhaps, or a rice cooker or something. So through this productive appliance financing you're able to monitor as well how much revenue you're making from these installments that these households are paying. Yep, and then we have lots of operations and maintenance data now this image here on the bottom right. You're seeing is actually real granular data of the performance of all the equipment. And we take a lot of this and we provide very simple instructions on our on our front end. That's really easy to understand for anyone. So, I guess, looking at how our whole solution works once you've installed our systems in these communities, you sign them up, and this is kind of the workflow that it goes through for the energy developer. I guess one of the other things we do add in is doing simulations for these communities so typically how the flow would work so say if you know the desk go in Colombia would like to energize a community and you're trying to identify how much there are how much it would cost you simply share the GPS coordinates with us and we'd run it through our, our algorithms to run this kind of a simulation. I can show you one of these later on if we have time, but what we typically do is we perform we create our program runs the simulation and it creates clusters based on some parameters that we've put in. So in this image you can see there's a number of these clusters and the green dots represent the households, and the yellow lines show them being interconnected in the mesh grid. So the modularity and the scalability of the system really enables it to run as an individual solar home system or as part of a larger mesh grid system. So yeah I guess that's kind of the last slide and the next few slides are really going to the roadmap of what we have moving forward, as we're really looking at growing our, our technology offering to integrate with AC meters that are in the field I guess Terry some of the solutions that you're working in for urban areas and some rural areas as well we really see that integrating into our software platform as well and vice versa. And that kind of brings me to the end of my presentation, happy to answer any questions and I guess if you'd like to take a look at our software platform or some of the simulations just, yep, should be a message that we can definitely run through it as well. Thank you. Thank you very much for your presentation pretty interesting technology, I think, as mentioned, can help to rise a very remote communities. And, of course, to have this project to have for all the communities and population in these regions. You have access to electricity and logically to carry to more sustainable development and economically for just communities. And of course, thank you very much for your presentation. And as I mentioned, if you have any questions, then please let us in a key and a bottom of the screen so I'm just going to start with the already sent questions. So, from directly for Terry, Terry. In Australia has been the great connections and determined establish it to ensure greater stability. Do you think the current regulatory framework can affect the effective implementation of micro grids across Australia. That's a really good question. That's a very diplomatically positioned question without alerting too many people to the negative aspects of policy right now. Policy is very critical to encouraging private investment in micro grids. And I think that the way the policies are set up today for Australia are actually aligned with the adoption of not only micro grids but also customer owned assets. We see that. And honestly, what's occurring here in Australia. I also experienced when I was in India. I think it would be changed if the rule makers understand the benefits of those changes. So, you know, bottom line is the, the current regulatory environment needs to be worked on. Nevertheless, we're finding that micro grids are being built without that change. Do those micro grid support the rest of the grid. No, absolutely not. The rules are very protective of the incumbents. Do you want me to answer the second part of the question. Yes, please. Exactly. Thank you. The second part. The current policies strive to increase the use of electric cars and hydrogen production. We understand that as an industry. There's a desire for net carbon net zero carbon. And how to reduce carbon emissions and we think electric vehicles and hydrogen production are very salient investments. Micro grids can actually enhance that because of the way in which micro grids manage all types of energy resources. We actually have designed specifically for electric vehicles and for hydrogen. That said, we actually have a hydrogen project in development right now in southern part of also some part of Western Australia, a little town called Albany, where we're taking wave energy, which is producing more power than the off takers are consuming. And the surplus is going into hydrogen production. So it's actually blue hydrogen coming in off the ocean. So for electric vehicles. We see that specifically the architecture for that for for their support is to ensure that you have good generation resources and you have electric storage resources on site where the electric vehicles are being charged. The next stage beyond supporting just the vehicle needing to charge is having the electric vehicle participate in grid related activities. So if you have a solution supply at the charging station we would want to tell the car not to charge those solutions do exist and goes back to my previous discussion on complex systems for utility operations. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you so much for your email. Terry already answered one of the questions that we've received earlier, but also we would like to hear about which standards would you recommend to ensure interoperability of the micro grids or what is your experience on that sense. Sure. I mean, of course, if like a micro grid is grid connected it does need to have and meet all the appropriate national and IC standards for installation and the communication protocols but I guess with all cross use case. It's really for those areas which are not viable for grid connection, typically in the areas where in the grid. So I think between 10 to 20 years or really an internet amount of time to get there because it's not in the country's plan to bring it there. So our philosophy is that solution that meets is to develop a solution that meets the needs of that community is more important than ensuring interoperability with systems that are not present. We're kind of in a different space I guess in that in that sense. And in your experience experience which protocols would you recommend for monitoring and control the micro grid, like the. Yep. I mean our software which is equivalent to the, you know, the monitoring control software I mean. There are many layers of the communication where the decision on the protocol must be made. With our platform we've kept it as simple as possible. So we favored a lightweight low bandwidth protocol like and QTT because it allows us to build a system that can be cheaply and easily deployed in these remote communities. These are places where internet connectivity is really poor you have 2G, you know edge connectivity so we really need to keep our costs down and, you know, make sure that even in that low quality, we can use, we can send the data over over the air. So it doesn't really make sense for us to use our industrial protocols. Again, like our case is not the general case so that's not to say that all that this is appropriate for all micro grids. So I think it does need to be done on a project on a case by case basis and an assessment needs to be made. Okay. And you were mentioning that in the systems or in the protocol do you use, is your system compatible with any type of solar storage system available or is there any? Yeah, so our Ocropod works with, can work with any solar panel or batteries, but I guess it comes down to the sizing that you're hoping for that on the household level. So our equipment is all certified and regulated under like the IAC standards and all the certifications we need and the markets we're in. One second and the last question that I received was how would the AMI infrastructure ensures the operation of the microgrid? Yeah, I guess that's where our harvest platform kind of comes in. So it helps to decentralize the O&M, the operations and maintenance by providing quite simple to-do lists to a local maintenance agent, like I mentioned, and they can follow this on their mobile phone. So our system being remotely monitored and controlled allows the O&M to be carried out by, carried out hyper locally by people who live in the community itself. This not only makes it a lot cheaper, but it engenders a sense of ownership. So as we're working with the community, you get that ownership from the community itself, so it reduces a lot of things like power theft and damage to equipment. And it uses those who are the most incentivized to maintain the grid, the residents themselves. And since our system is extra low voltage, one day of training is enough for them to safely operate and maintain the system. But we do need to remember that the technology is only a tool. The incentives must be aligned to ensure effective operation regardless of what the technology is there. I guess to give an analogy, when COVID hit early last year, we have a lot of products in the Philippines and we've done the logistics and shipped, I think it was around, we were energizing on 60 households on one of the smaller islands in the Philippines. And once the equipment was there, it was stored on the island, but then COVID hit and Philippines locked down completely. And it was there for a couple of months. We're thinking, oh, maybe Philippines will open up and we can go to the training and help them do the installations. But then what ended up happening is it was like three or four months and Philippines had no signs of opening up. And what the community leaders told us was, hey, we just will install it ourselves. Can you teach us virtually how? And we actually just made some YouTube videos publicly available that they used to watch and they installed and we provide support remotely, but they're able to install it all themselves. And we've kind of designed our system in a way that enables people in the community to do that as well. And we've adhered to the IEEE standards that makes it safe for non-certified engineers to install our equipment as well. So that's kind of a bit of a commentary on how our technology is just a tool and we're incentivizing the community to maintain and operate their own mesh grid network. Okay. Great. Thank you very much. I think Terri and Daniel were very clear on their presentations. We will be sending out the recording of this session to everyone that registered. And we are hoping to, if you have any additional questions, please let us know. We will be sending it to them and send you the answers. And now that we have Juan David on the line, I will just pass the mic to him to close the event. Thank you very much, Alejandra. Just to thank you for general micrometres. Good. They are having the micrometres solution. We're having for a lot of interest here in Colombia. And we want to thank everybody that were here in the second seminar of this series for industries to be supported by the Australian Embassy. And Andesco, we were working to transmit for you this kind of transference about the background in Australia, not only your country, but under your whole level. So we're going to keep working with the embassy to achieve that integration, the new technologies in our systems in our sector to make profit or start those experiences that of course you're very, very sure with us. Ambassador Erika, thank you very much. We're going to go keep working with you together. Thank you very much. Everybody have a very nice day and we hope for the opportunity to see you all.