 Hello, everyone. Good afternoon, good evening, or good morning, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineer for Change, Leap-Progging Energy Solutions through IOT in Cambodia. My name is Mariela Machado and I'm program manager here at InfoSoup, a avid moderator for today's webinar. The webinar you're participating in today will be archived on our webinar space and YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on this slide. Information on upcoming webinars is available on our webinar page. E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming webinars directly. If you have any questions, comments and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar team at webinars at engineerforchange.org as you see on the screen. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our hashtag at E4C webinars. Before we move on to our presenters, I would like to tell you a bit about Engineer for Change. E4C for short of Engineer for Change is a knowledge organization and digital platform and a global community of more than one million engineers, designers, development practitioners, and social scientists who are leveraging technology to solve quality of life challenges faced by underserved communities. Some of those challenges include access to clean water, sanitation, sustainable energy, improved agriculture, ICTs and more. We invite you to become a member. E4C membership is free and provides access to news and thought leaders, insights on hundreds of essential solutions on our Solutions Library, professional development resources, and current opportunities such as jobs, funding calls, fellowships, and more. If you're seeing members also enjoy a unique user experience based on their site behavior and engagement. Essentially, the more you interact with the E4C site, the better we'll be able to serve you resources aligned to your interests. We really invite you to visit our website if you haven't already, engineerforchange.org to learn more and sign up. If you're interested in learning more about energy solutions, trying to bridge the electrical infrastructure gaps in low-income settings, we invite you to explore the E4C Solutions Library after the webinar. An example of the type of tech that you'll find is what you see on our slide now. This solution is called the Solar Suitcase, and it's a package solar power system designed by weak air solar to power off-grid medical clinics and provide surgical lightning, power mobile devices, and medical devices. The full report is in our Solutions Library, and we'll provide more information about the technical performance, the academic research, and user provision models of the system. All the information is sourced by our engineerforchange fellows and reviewed by our community experts. And most importantly, it's available to E4C members for your off-charge. So be sure to check it out. So very important housing items before we get started. Let's take a moment and practice using the WebEx platform. Please type right now in the chat below what part of the world are you joining us from. Please use the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, and just type your location. If the chat is not open on your screen, try clicking the chat icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slide. Let's see where everyone is joining us from. Italy, New York City, Colorado, Philippines, Malaysia. Wow, we're in San Francisco. We're going to Asia. So welcome. Cambodia. Welcome, everyone. We're thrilled to have you. So a couple of additional instructions before we move on. You can use this window, the one that you just used to type in your location to share remarks during the webinar. And if you have any technical questions, you just send a private chat to engineerforchangeadmin. 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But before we do that, take just a quick moment now to tell you about our awesome speakers. First, I will start with Abnan Hanan, a co-founder and CEO of Okra. Welcome, Abnan. Or Afi, for short. Abnan has an academic background in renewable energy engineering and economics from the Australian National University. His mission is to empower the underprivileged by enabling access to energy and technology. Having worked for various technology companies, such as Bueno, Australia's fastest growing IoT startup and IBM, Abnan has an appreciation for persevering with challenging problems that require human-centered design and implementation of innovative technologies. Welcome, Abnan. We're thrilled to have you. Yeah, thanks. My pleasure. Our other presenter is called Nitya Menon. Nitya is product owner and firmware engineer at Okra Solar. Nitya has a diverse technology background in software, firmware and design engineering from Harvey Mott College. She's passionate about applying her knowledge to address global issues of energy and water access and unlock opportunities for the bottom of the pyramid. For the most of her career, she has worked across sustainable development sectors in Southeast Asia and West Africa, developing tools and services to empower rural communities. So without further to say, I want to welcome Nitya and Abnan. Thank you so much for joining us. And over to you guys. Cool. Thanks so much. Do you reckon you can pass me the ball? Awesome. Sweet. Well, yeah, firstly, thank you so much, Mariela. And if you see, it's a pleasure for us to finally be on the platform and share some of the lessons that we've learned from our experience. So let me start by telling you guys why it is that we do what we do, right? So my name is Afi. I was born in Bangladesh. I grew up in Australia. Now I live in Cambodia, but currently I'm in the Philippines. Right. And what we believe everyone in the company is that it doesn't actually matter which piece of dirt that you were born on, right? As long as you got one of these, which is a mobile phone, access to the internet, and a bit of motivation, right? You've got all the information and all the opportunities at your fingertips. And that's the future that we want to enable. And we want to do it as fast as possible. So yes, we're supported by like Unido and SMB and Schneider Electric as well, but we're not an NGO. What we are is we're a company that builds technology to get electricity access out to communities that don't have access to go. So let me start by introducing the problem. The problem is that there's still a billion people on the planet that don't even have access to electricity, simply because the existing ways of getting the grid out there isn't working. So that means all these people who could have those opportunities that I was talking about are locked out of it, right? Because they can't open up income generating activities. On the other side of the coin, these guys are still paying $120 to $250 a year in order to access just lighting for a couple of hours and mobile phone charging, which shows you really how important it is for these people to get access to these devices, even for a short period of time. So the way that we saw this was yes, it's a challenge, but actually, there's a lot of money going into it. And it's an opportunity that we might be able to actually solve in a commercially viable way. I'll let Nithya take the next slide. Yeah, so that was some higher level, maybe data or analysis, the situation. But for us, it's always really important to actually go to the communities and speak with and learn from the people who don't have energy. And what are their needs? What are they doing right now to solve this problem? These people are resourceful. And what we had hundreds of incredible stories. And this is just one of them. But this little guy, his name is Bore. He rides a bicycle eight kilometers, probably about every week to charge his families, or maybe more often, to charge his family's old car battery that you can see strapped to the back of his bicycle. And that battery gives him and his family a few hours of lighting and mobile phone charging, which is insane. Like that, you know, that means he's, that's time he's not learning. That's time he's in his family are not growing their economic kind of opportunities. And they're barely getting any access to power and paying through the roof like that batter is probably being charged or is being charged via diesel generator. They're paying so much more than we are for just running a few less. And that these are the people that we are addressing when we're trying to solve this problem. Sweet. So when we have the chapter, if I see team, we agreed that we'll try and show you guys as many data points as we can. So both the data that we use to get into this game to find this opportunity to do something that we've always impact pool, but also commercially viable. And also the data points that we've picked up along the journey of actually getting energy up to these communities. And what we hope is that you can use this data for two, two things, right? Number one is that you can actually challenge our assumptions if you like and help us improve on the way that we're delivering what we're doing. And number two, you can also hopefully find some inspiration or some opportunities on your own to use these data points to your advantage to help solve the problems that we're really passionate about. It's a pretty simple chart, right? GDP on the x-axis on the y-axis is energy consumption per capita. As you can see at the macro level, when houses use more energy, they make more income. So that's what we're about at Okra. We want to enable as much energy consumption as these households can access from clean, reliable power, so that they can generate more income and have a more productive lifestyle. Let's jump on the next slide. So when we were looking at these solutions, remember, or not these solutions, and we're looking at the solutions for energy access. Remember, I said like there's a billion people that don't have power. And the existing solution, which is grid extension, is just not getting done. And that's because the cost of getting electricity through grid extension is too much for the utilities to do. So they simply don't invest in those last mile villages. A grid extension, when we first came to Cambodia three years ago, seemed to be at the door for many, many buildings. But then we looked at what are the alternatives? Well, you have to start by actually looking at how the household uses energy, right? So when we got to Cambodia three years ago, we installed smart meters on five households. And that enabled us to track the energy consumption that these households would use over time. And in order to track that consumption, we needed to let them use as much energy as they wanted to use. So we put on really big oversized solar and systems, which was very inefficient, but would enable that household to use however much power they wanted. I'll draw your attention to two of the lines. One is the purple one. The x-axis is how much energy that household consumes. And the y-axis is the probability of them consuming that amount on any given day. So you can see this purple house, they don't consume much power for most of the days, like 70% of the days they're using just lighting. But maybe once a week or less than 10% of the time, they're using about 300 watt hours. They're using like 30 times the energy that they use on a daily basis. And that might be because they've come home and they're running fans or maybe they're drying things that they've just got out from the farm. But whatever reason it is, there's a really big variation on that house. If you look at the yellow one, this is another household. In general, they're consuming a decent amount of energy a day. Let's say about 400 watt hours is the peak. So they're probably running like fans, not fan freezers, they're running fans, televisions, light bulbs. And 10% of the time they're using next to nothing like a very limited amount just lighting. And then another 10% of the time on the other end of the spectrum, they're using a lot of power. They might be having a party and running the television or the light bulb. The point is, there's a lot of variation between these households. And even each household has variation on a day to day basis. And so for that reason, we just looked at our ethos of enabling these households to use as much power as they want. And we saw solar home systems as not actually fitting that gap that we wanted to plug. Because you need to have to make that solar home system really, really big, which costs a lot of money and oversized it, or the solar home system would actually cap out and not allow the household to use the power that it needs. So the next solution that we looked at was micro grids. I put V equals IR there that should be power loss equals I squared R. But anyway, so the point I was trying to demonstrate here is this is actually a site that's energised with our current we'll tell you a bit more about it later. But imagine this, this is how a typical micro grid works. You've got your all your solar and all your batteries and your diesel if you've got like a hybrid system. It's at one point in the community. That's where all the power is getting generated. And then what you have to do as a utility is you need to deliver that power to every single household that wants to consume that power, and it's going to pay you for that power. In order to deliver that power from here all the way to not sure if you can see, but all the way to where the arrow points, or even all the way to the last houses on the first island. That's a fair amount of distance, right? It's about a kilometer all the way up actually a bit more than that. And so for that power to travel that distance with your I squared R power loss, you need to keep that current as low as possible, which means boosting the voltage can enable you to minimise power loss. And that's traditionally why the power that's generated at DC is converted to 40 volt AC and then send all the way from the generator to those last houses on that second island. So that's how the microgrid works that you know, very big picture. And we decided to break it down and look at the economics. So we're like, All right, guys, energy companies, utilities, why aren't you getting electricity out to all these villages with microgrid? Wait, let me just mention one more thing, go back. The benefit of the microgrid is that all of these load profiles, they'll kind of balance out when you're providing power to so many houses at once, right? So that kind of needing to really oversize the network, as you have to with solar home systems, it didn't apply as much because you could balance it out between the household. I hope that makes it. So we asked these energy companies like, Hey, solar panels are coming down in price. Everyone's talking about it. Batteries are getting cheap. Everyone's talking about it. Why aren't you getting energy access out to all these areas? They're like, guys, do you understand what the economics are of a microgrid? They're like solar panels and batteries actually make up less than half of the cost of setting up the microgrid, right? A large part of the cost is in setting up that inverter. So paying for the equipment for the inverter and the charge control, so that you can actually boost the voltage and send it from one end of the village to the other. And when you set up that inverter, you need to have engineers who know how to size the inverter and also size the solar PV to go into the inverter to operate at high efficiency. Then the rest of the money comes in operations and maintenance. That's expensive for households that are in really remote rural areas, cost a lot to serve them. And even collecting payments from these households costs so much money that it just doesn't end up being a viable solution. So at this point, we thought about it and we've all like a whole lot of you guys have probably studied like renewables at university. And everyone's talking about like how DC power is what's generated from solar panels. DC power is what's being stored in batteries. We asked ourselves like why is AC like? Oh, sorry. Can you turn it off? I can hear you. Okay. Sorry about that. So we asked ourselves, we're like, you know, is there another way to do it rather than put all that money out just to get power from here to here? Is there a smarter way to do it? So we did some calculations and the hypothesis was actually instead of sending the power from one side of the village all the way to the other side, what do we enable solar panels and batteries to be installed on all of these households in a distributed fashion, right? And then actually share the power between the households in a mesh network, right? So that the majority of the power would get consumed or it's generated. And then whatever's left would get pushed from one house to the next. But because the line wouldn't necessarily be so long in that scenario, hypothetically, you wouldn't have much power loss and so you wouldn't need all those expensive components. So if you take a look at this slide, this is the hypothetical calculation, not hypothetical, like we put the numbers in and we're like, wow, like the more houses there are in a mesh network that actually the less relative power loss and voltage drop you've got compared to an AC network. So this is pretty encouraging for us. A mesh network could actually be more efficient than this AC network. Not only that, but we hypothesize that actually if we're going to put a device on every single house to make sure that it can share power with its neighbors, so taking out the role of the inverter, which is the top one over there. If we're going to do that, then why don't we take the Tesla model, right? So the Tesla model is like, well, if a house needs a roof tile, you may as well put solar PV in that roof tile as well, right? If you're going to get a greenfield roof on it and then you get to save on the cost. So we're like, what if we roll in on that device, remote monitoring, and we manage the payments as well. And we put all of that into one device and while doing that, we get rid of the need for the inverter. That was our hypothesis when we came up with this idea for a GT distributed mesh grid. I'll jump into a bit of the technical details around how we designed it. So we're like, yeah, you can put panels and batteries at every single house. You don't need panels at every single house, but you should probably have batteries at every single house. So no matter what happens in the network, if the smarts fail or something like that, that house still has backup power for lighting or basic usages. In addition to that, whenever a battery is about to get full, our smart device, which is signified by this icon here, will figure out that, hey, this battery is about to get full. I'm going to boost the voltage of any extra power and share it with my networks if they want it. And likewise, this guy, the one that's on the bottom, not sure if you can see what I'm putting out, but the one that's on the bottom, when they don't have enough power, they can actually pull power from their neighbors. And the point was, because guy was not traveling that far, because he's just from house to house in a mesh network, you don't have much power loss and you don't need all those expensive components. So that was the first bit of the technical design. Second bit is on the right hand side of the screen. And we're like, well, what if the house is really, really far away? This device should still be able to act as a standalone charge controller for them. And then eventually when the community, or when it becomes economical enough to connect that house to the network, you can just draw a cable, connect it to another awkward controller, and then the house software will start managing and distributing power in a smart grid. That was the hypothesis that we wanted to create. And this is the first prototype of what we actually created. I actually got pulled up at a train station in Sydney when I was holding this prototype. They must have thought it looked like something malicious. And my co-founder when he did a demo of this prototype when we were running our crowdfunding campaign, it actually went on fire. So we've had some bad experiences with this prototype, but it proved that you could share power from one house to another. And it enabled us to raise about $60,000 on a crowdfunding campaign, which helped us get these guys, this girl, Nithya, who is a firmware engineer, and more than a firmware engineer, actually, also like our product owner, and they created a real product that could do this in the field. So I'll let Nithya take it away from here. Oh, I'm going to pass the small thing to me. Sorry about that, yeah. All right, yeah. So as after you're saying, it was pretty exciting time to come on, got this really good idea, like all the modeling seems to work out, can be really promising. And personally as an engineer, this is really cool to dive into, because you've learned a lot about, you know, PID controllers, various types of control algorithms, systems at uni, and now it's like, all right, this is real, you need to build something that's actually going to control the way power moves across an entire grid that was setting up with your technology, which was, you know, amazing because it really pulled together everything that I had learned and made it tangible, and I was really driven to learn and implement it the first time. And, you know, it's always been throughout the entire journey, very exciting to take every little bit of progress that we make and actually take it out to the community. You can see in this photo, this is back in the day before we could actually send a lot of commands to the device remotely. So we're in the field with a laptop connected to some of the really early prototypes. But still, every day, you know, in the office that you build something, you get to take it out to the field and actually see people getting power out of it, it was super validating. But what we did discover was that sharing power, the whole model that Appie is talking about, boosting power, making it a smart network, was really challenging, because think about it. So we've gone from a system where at one central point everything is controlled and spread out from there. And so everything is always in sync with each other. To now, every single house is both making decisions around when to put power out onto the system, when to take power off of the system. And, but you can't have a grid that just like changes all the time. So if one person turns on something, the whole grid changes, or one person turns off something, the whole grid changes. That doesn't work. So essentially like, you know, really complex game of tug of war and theoretically the algorithms should have been able to handle it, but it was super challenging to get it to work properly. And this moment that Appie actually captures this photo, was probably one of the coolest moments of my engineering career, was just that moment where the grid was completely stable as we had, you know, three or four ochre units connected together. And we could really finally validate that this piece of tech that we built was going to work is going, this grid concept was going to happen and could share power the way we wanted to. And at this point, we haven't slept in a really long time, but we couldn't wait to get these out into the field. So our very next step was deploy systems, get them sharing together, and let's see what the data says, because as Appie said, we're a data driven company. If the data doesn't support all these hypotheses we've said, then that's it. Like then, you know, this something's not working and we need to make a change. Uh, cool. Right here. Wait, so before we show the data of what was happening with the sharing, let's just compare it to you know, our control. So we had some systems that were just standalone solar home systems, and we wanted to see, okay, is there really a problem here? Like we people say their loads are quite volatile. We showed some of that data. So is there an economic loss by having solar home system on a single house? And what we see is that, let's say in this in this image here, someone has turned on some loads in the morning, then the sun comes up, it starts charging, which is tracking against the red curve, and then the loads aren't really there, and so there's nowhere for power to go, and the solar panel basically stops generating. So that entire gap between the yellow lines and the red curve is powerless lost, which means you put money into assets that could be generating but aren't, and that's all the, all those inefficiencies leads the grid to these solutions being more expensive, and therefore inviolable for these communities. So like, all right, cool. There's power being wasted. Let's see if our solutions can actually address this. And we were really psyched to get our first, our grids out there and actually see, actually see this problem being addressed. So what we did was we had four homes that had solar panels on them, and one home that didn't, and they're all connected to each other. Now the top, you can see that the one line that goes down below is the one that doesn't have a panel and is therefore receiving excess power from all the other homes, and then the other ones are kind of depending on when their loads are on, are sharing power. And, and then when you look at the panels of all of those homes, we see that instead of completely dropping off when those homes didn't need it, there's all this power that's still generated throughout the day. So that was really validating and just showed us that this whole, this whole algorithm we built, the whole technology, was going to help us reduce the capex or the capital expenses required to set up a grid. We can already show that we need fewer solar panels, and then the grid is running at higher efficiency, so maybe even the size of everything could be reduced. So that's one way in which this idea becomes more affordable. The next thing we needed to validate was, as Api was saying, we needed these, we designed these controllers to not only do the power electronics, but also to give us a lot of data back from the field. And what we started being able to do with that is make the operations costs reduced, or actually predict when growth is happening and grow the system over time, which is really easy when it's this DC modular system, because yeah, there's no inverters and there's no like cap on the sides of the network. It can just grow as demand, as demand grows. So here in this graph, you can see the first couple days a battery is really not getting enough charge. And actually we get alert to our system that says the state of charge has been dissipating. This house could be running towards a blackout. And so then that gray line shows when we had the field partners go out there and increase the panel size, add more panels to that house. And then shortly after we see that that system recover and the that household is now starting to use more power. So that tells us that all this data is really helping the operations run smoothly, because without that, that home would have just eventually gone to a blackout. They would have locked power. We all know that it sucks to have a power outage. And then they would have had to call and then they would have to wait and then, you know, their system would come back online in some number of days. But it's like the most important to us that these people get access to power just like we do, which means it's reliable. And it's not something they just have to expect will be gone for days at a time. And so this all this data helps us actually make sure that that is happening. Cool. So in summary, the way that all of our tech is coming together is a bunch of components of it. The first that mesh network, so that's the hardware and the firmware designed to share power and make sure that, you know, the capital costs come down. The grid is smart and it's running at a higher efficiency. And then because we've got a controller on every house, we can do so much more. So the remote monitoring, as I've already talked about, so the ability to both predict when there are problems, but also help grow the grid over time. And then the last thing that this controller also really enables is mobile payments. So these communities are so far away or so remote that it can take, it can cost as much as these people are using an energy to actually get out and visit them. So if we have to collect cash, that makes it unfeasible. But with our controllers, now people can pay via SMS or pay via various mobile banking applications. And that unlocks communities as target markets for this technology. So as engineers, we're really excited. We've done all this, get it out into the field. We're really proud of it. It's looking much better than the very first version. We're excited. It's been manufactured. It's in a clear box. We can admire the text inside and we put it in five homes. And pretty much within a day or so we get a call from one of them saying they don't want it. They want it out of their house. We're like, oh, what? Like, you know, this should be so exciting. They're getting around the clock power for the first time. What have gone wrong? And we dig into it. We speak with them and turns out on the microcontroller within that hardware is a little red light that just turns on just beeps, not beeps, just flashes very slowly to indicate that the system's running. And for a household that's never had electricity running throughout the night, this little red light was a huge like it looked evil or it was scary or they just wanted it gone. And as a big eye-opener for us where it's like we can sit there and we can develop tech, but it's always about getting out into the field, learning from these lessons and constantly making modifications to what we're doing. And with that, what really gets us the most excited is taking a step back and thinking about what's the impact that we're having. It's cool that we can build all this tech and we can see the data coming in, but what does it mean for the end user? And at this point, this is really exciting for us because we've now got families like that of Boray's who used to be paying so much for so little amounts of power. So now, paying even less are getting around the clock power. But then the cool, even more exciting thing is they're not just getting around the clock power with the same amount of power that they used to get because that's still limiting. If all you can do is have a few lights and maybe charge your phone, you're still pretty much capped on what your opportunities are in front of you. But with the open systems, the way that they can enable quite a large range of loads, people have started climbing energy ladders. So maybe from lights, the first thing, especially in these hot communities out here in Cambodia with fans. So that allowed people, you know, allowed like family members to be a lot happier, allowed people to work into the evening, then from fans to TVs and then rising up from TVs to now freezers, fridges, but basically expanding the complete range of opportunities that these people have in front of them. And digging into that a little bit more, when we start trying to think, okay, what can people do with electricity beyond just turning on lights? One of the big trends that we noticed across all of the communities we were working in, the Philippines or Indonesia or Cambodia is that the ability to preserve food, so freezers, fridges, is a huge, a huge demand because it's currently a huge loss for these, you know, most of these people are farmers or fishers or things like that, fishermen. So just by adding a freezer into their communities, you can see almost a doubling of their income. And then beyond just that, you see like this, this man here, Mr. Sopal in Cambodia, he experimented with refrigerating cold drinks and getting to sell those, or I think he said that cold chilies were much more desirable. So that's the photo there. And basically these people now have a whole new range of ways to generate income and yeah, share new goods across the community. wheat, back to you, Abby. Cool, thanks. Jenna, pass me the ball. Oh, sorry. Yeah. That's so good. So bringing it back to a high level, like here, this is some useful data that we've calculated. The blue lines, we looked at the cost of the blue columns. Sorry. We looked at the cost of getting energy access about 500 watt hours per day to households over a 10 year period. Right. And then we found that setting up these DC microgrids comes out at about one third of the cost of doing it with an AC mini grid. So that was pretty validating for us. And a big reason for that is because we realized at the end of the day to make the impact that we want. We can't be going out to all of these villages and install solar panels and batteries ourselves. Right. The reason why is because we aren't the locals, we don't speak the local language. We don't have, you know, all the local knowledge that local energy companies and utilities have. So if you didn't or come across to the right so far, basically what we are is we build this technology that we're telling you about. Can we build it for the energy companies so that they can deliver energy out to remote communities reliably, clean, and as affordably as possible so that those households can use that power for productivity. So at this point, we're like sweet. We've got a solution one-third of the cost of existing alternatives. And at this point, which is probably about 12 months ago, we started rolling out our pilots at a larger scale. And at present, we've got agreements to deploy about... At present, we've got 200 households and that's 1,000 people that are energized with our technology. And we recently got an agreement to do 8,000 households. So that's 40,000 people with our technology. And we're currently operating in Philippines, Indonesia, and Cambodia. So this is some pretty cool stuff that I want to show you right now. And it's not, you know, just through this box that we are going to actually achieve what we want, which is getting this reliable energy to these communities. I'm going to show you a machine right now. Can you guys see it? Yep. All right. So the first thing that we do is, and this is really cool, right? So this is machine learning data that's been provided to us by some of our partners. We get this data to identify where the upgrade households actually are. So you can see all these households are actually mapped. This is by algorithms, picking up where they are. Then we overlay this data with information from the regulators or the utilities to see where the existing national grid is, right? By doing this, we can actually identify, hey, for this community over here, it might make sense to extend the electricity grid out. We want the least cost solution. But for these communities over here, it would definitely make sense to set up a standalone microgrid. For this one, it might make sense for AC microgrid because it's really, really big. But definitely for all of these ones, it would make sense to do a distributed DC modular microgrid, such as ours. So that's pretty cool stuff that we arm these energy companies and utilities with because at the end of the day, it helps make them successful. So we share this information with them so that they can identify the sites and know where they can do this in a sustainable way. Once the houses get connected, it looks something like this. So sorry about the deep in the background. But say here's a microgrid here, all connected with Okra in Cambodia. Here's the standalone house. And then here's another microgrid. And here's another microgrid. This is some more data from some microgrids in the Philippines. And what's really cool is for every single house that gets connected, we basically, you know, are making sure that we can provide energy in a way that these communities best at the most. So we can go down to level of looking at what amount of energy these households are using and at what time they're using it. And so right now they're paying on a basic like per day amount. But in the future, we plan on unlocking new business models that the community might be more interested in. For example, appliance hours. So with these analytics, we can figure out, well, they've been using a fan for roughly eight hours. They've been using a refrigerator all day long. So these communities will then be able to pay for refrigeration days or fan hours. And how they make those payments are all made in real time using mobile payments on a daily basis, right? So if you were going to more details, but basically these households, traditionally, they don't have bank accounts and they've been unlocked from the financial services sector. But right now we've got this awesome thing, which is basically mobile money, right? Which is proliferated the market really, really rapidly. So these households effectively just scan a QR code and a cash which they digitize and then it gets sent into the account of the utility. And as long as they've paid for their energy, they get access to power. And if they haven't paid for energy, we don't actually want to completely cut them off because our job is to make sure that the household is productive and has a good lifestyle. So we can use our IoT device to actually remotely cut off everything in the household except for lighting and mobile phone charging to encourage them to pay to still enable them to have all the basic services. And yeah, I think that workflow for me personally, using machine learning data to identify operating households with our partners illustrates and Village Infrastructure Angels and then setting them up into these smart micro-greeds is when households can make payments on a daily basis, they didn't have bank accounts before and then we can monitor and actually control the energy access using IoT to encourage them to make payments. When I talk to like our old professors at university, they're like, man, you guys are doing the things that we couldn't even, we can't do on the national grid of Australia. So yeah, we're pretty proud but it's also something that's necessary in order to enable this last mile to get access in a sustainable way. You need to really push the boundaries of technology to make it happen. Let me up. Cool. All things well. Yeah. All right. So yeah, I think it's kind of already led in a bit. We, it's really exciting for us to see the way these communities can go from having almost no infrastructure. I mean, where like Api and myself and probably many of you grew up, like you went from, you have water infrastructure, electricity infrastructure, all these things and you got cell infrastructure later and internet infrastructure and all these things. But for these communities, they've gone from absolutely nothing to now getting cell phones. And then just with that, we suddenly see them completely leapfrogging and their energy infrastructure is completely different to what you and I pay back home. And as Api said, the ability for a remote community to just scan a QR code and pay for their energy is something that we don't experience. And it allows the whole system to be so flexible and reach so many more communities without it being constrained by kind of traditional infrastructure that we see back home. Beyond that, another kind of really interesting way that our tech has gone so far ahead from what maybe the existing grids in our countries are doing right now is the ability to just send an upgrade and completely change the way that the system is working for the better. So a little bit of an example there. There was an occasion about a year ago where we saw, we were looking at the data and we saw that the grid was kind of losing power combination of like increased consumption across the network, but the distributors couldn't get out and increase the solar panels within that week. And so as engineers, we put our heads together. All right. So I don't think we're really pushing the limits of the system yet. We can make a few changes and actually increase what power is being shared. And so we did those changes, did a few tests, and then remotely, sitting at my desk here in Snompen was able to unlock 50% extra power across all of our communities just by sending this update remotely. And that's amazing. I mean, that's very empowering. For us as engineers, to be able to do that and see our work getting out to the communities like that, but for just thinking about the energy infrastructure, that's really cool because that means that any new improvements can happen so fast and all the time. And then lastly, all of this, all this alerting, all the touch points that we can have with the community in so much trust and accountability in the whole system in ways that for me, when I think about energy back home, it's such a black box. You don't really get a lot of information on what you're using, what the bill is till the end. There's not a lot of data. We always talk about data. And here, we've got the distributors saying, it's so good to get these alerts. I feel like I can really see, you know, we can take a look at if someone is actually using power out of the battery and kind of getting it without paying. So just fueling the power. We can trigger that as an alert or the end users are saying, it's so, I have so much trust in a system that as soon as I pay, I know exactly how much I have, how many days of power that is, and I get all these alerts telling me in case maybe the weather is bad, predicted outages, and all those things just create a system of users feeling like they can rely on this system, which is exactly what we want. So all of that coming together, we're clearly really excited about what we're pulling together and it changes every day, but not for us. There's so, so, so much more, and we're really excited about all of the data that we've been able to generate and all the insights that can be drawn out of it. But we also want to turn this over to you who are listening and anyone, your friends, anyone else who is at all interested, and if there's any way that we can share this data that Api was showing you, we are more than happy to because the more people that can get their hands on this data and do exciting things, this is better and we are always benefiting from other people sharing data with us. So that's one huge thing that we would like to be able to offer. And the other, the next thing is that energy is just the beginning as we discovered. There's so much to come beyond that from even more appliances, financial services, education services, even health related, and we hope that maybe some of what we've talked about has inspired or maybe you're already interested in these sectors and you want to go off and work and on all these issues which all build off of what we're trying to target right now but there's a lot more to come. And finally, we are looking for more people always. We have a culture of wanting the best and most diverse and most passionate people to come on board with us and we are currently trying to get even more people, especially all types of engineers. So if you know anyone or yourself, please put us in touch and yeah, thank you for listening to us and I guess we'll pass it off to Mariela to take some questions. All right. Excellent. Thank you so much, Nithya and Apnon. This was very insightful and I'm really very excited to see how we're evolving in this sector to really be more complex solutions that are data driven and actually increasing in efficiencies of what exists. And personally, and this is my personal opinion, I really believe this could be the next step in the energy sector mixing the technology, especially using data. So let's start. We have a very excited Q&A here. So let me get started. In regions, let's look at the first one. In regions where there is a commercial establishment such as a water purifier that consumes a lot of power, is there a limit to the amount of power a particular connection can draw from the mesh network? Yeah. Did you want me to take that, Nithya? Yeah, either. I mean, I can take it. So for earlier, that's the first kind of versions of the product. Yet the limit was a little bit lower. It's about 250 watts of power output continuous. And then the next versions of the product go up to about 1.2 kilowatts or yeah, 1.2 kilowatts of output power. And so that's still a limit, but we've done a ton of market research to kind of identify that a lot of the appliances that people could want to be integrating into their lives would fit within this range. And we do know that there are a range of appliances even beyond that. That won't fit within that power range right now. And that might be the next version or kind of the next step for us. But we're definitely scaling the power capacity. At the same time, we also see that the vast majority of people are kind of using this mid-range amount of power. And we do want to provide a solution that's not so robust, that is therefore so expensive. So for someone who is trying to use maybe just fans, TVs, even a fridge, then now can't afford something that is meant to handle factory level equipment. So it's a bit of a balance, but we're trying to expand the range that we can support. And I just add two additional things to our net user. One is we ran into this problem in the Philippines. So we had freezers that were bigger than the capacity that we could support from one device. So the devices are made so that they can actually be stacked in parallel. So you could boost that from 1.2 to 2.4 to 3.6 kW etc. And I think the question also asked about how much power gets pushed through the line. So because it is extra low voltage, 50 volts, if you've got a lot of power that's a kilowatt, then you'll start having more power loss. So we try to mitigate that in the network planning using our software tools which identifies where the big loads are and that's where you want to put a majority of the solar PV and the storage. But again, you do that all in an automated way to minimize the engineering requirement. Perfect. Thank you so much. If you guys could mute when I ask the questions, great. Yeah, I'm having so much terrific. So let's go to the next question. What's the business model for Okra? So I'm going to read it directly as it was written. How does Okra make its money? Do you provide the service through existing utilities? Oh, yeah. So basically there's two parts to our revenue stream. So first is we sell that box that we showed you a picture of that does all of the control. So that's a piece of hardware that Nithya and the engineering team put a lot of R&D into building. We give this to the utility so they can set up the plug and play microgrid. But once it's set up, it needs software to manage the distribution algorithms, to do the remote monitoring, and also to manage the payments. So we charge an additional software as a service subscription fee once a month to the utility to support these systems while they're in the field. That's the business model. Got it. So if I'm underpinning the next week, you lean on the data, right? So you're gathering and the remote monitoring. We don't actually like sell the data. We want to protect the data so that it doesn't get used for purposes that it shouldn't. So the data is actually kept on our side and not given to all those guys. But what we do is we provide reliability that the network's going to operate with our algorithms and then we provide insights from that data. So does the house have a panel that's damaged or a battery that needs replacement or does the system need scaling up? We push that through our software tools to the distributors and the utility so they can operate more effectively and affordably as well. Got it. Excellent. Let's go to the next question. So a participant had a question around the site selection for the installation of the centralized solar systems interacted with one another. Considering the fact that the capex of community integration for such a system will be considerable, you conduct any site service prior to check for viability? This again, so... Oh, sorry. I was muted. But there's two parts to this. So there's a macro part which I showed you. So we look at it from like a bird's eye view and we're like, here are all these sites that seem really appropriate to get energized by this tech because there's a density of households and it's far away from the national grid but they're probably not going to get energized any other way. But then we actually really rely on our partners which are the local utilities and distribution companies and they've got really good local knowledge and they go out there and they use survey tools to find out how much income the household has, what their aspirations are and then that data pipes back into our network modeling tool and then it spits out this is how much capacity should be implemented or installed at each part of this network. Got it. Got it. Let's go to our next question. With regards to cutting off power supply of a household using the IoT based services, does Okra provide consumers with a provision for a load limited connection where where in consumers can decide on a consumption limit per day? And that participant also says that Okra's infrastructure is terrific and she's very exciting or he is very excited to see the proliferation of this tech. And if you can take that one. Cool. So yeah, so part of as we were talking about kind of all of the work that is done into setting up new projects into new markets. So part of that is figuring out what maybe tiers or what levels of energy are going to be most desirable. So we haven't while the tech completely allows it, depending on the regulation or depending on what sort of environment we're setting up our systems in, we haven't so far done a system where the end user decides kind of exactly how much they they want each day and then they're to like a specific number and then they want to be cut off. But we have, we often sort of allow like a full suite of options of tier one, tier two, tier three, tier four, tier five or something like that. And then you can be on one and then you can decide that you want to use more power and you can move up or you want to use less power and you can move down. So we still try to give as much flexibility as possible to the consumers while working within whatever regulatory environment we're fitting into. Is that the full question? Great. Yes. Yes. Let's go to the next one. We have a couple. I really hope to like at least get some of this done. We have a lot of interesting questions. So let's go to the next one. Is your system compatible with other generation sources? So just wind turbines. Topic. Yeah. It comes up actually a lot and it's really cool that whoever this is shout out to them for bringing this up because that's insightful. So absolutely, the kind of constant problem with renewables is that there's highs and there's lows. And so with solar it's obviously every day and with wind it's maybe, you know, yeah, it's variable in a different way. And there's a number of studies that show that if you can overlay some of these renewables you can actually get quite reliable power pretty much throughout the year. And so we've been talking about that a lot, especially a bunch of typhoons have been hitting our systems in the Philippines and what can we do to mitigate this. And as of today we don't have wind turbines integrated into our system but that's something that from an R&D perspective we're looking to play around with and yeah, maybe in the future we could be pretty flexible in what types of energy we allow into our controllers. Excellent. And that was Gary Jones by the way. What's that question? The next one? The next one will be what this does the startup need to scale and become viral? Maybe partnership with local governments and, you know, you might have that already. Yeah, am I on my phone? Cool. Yeah, so I think it's really interesting right like when you think about it electricity is something that's really important to government policy. They want to see everyone in their country get electrified and it's also something that they mold very close to them. They don't necessarily like to see like a startup company coming out and controlling electricity access to all of the households in their country. So we think basically what you've mentioned is really, really important. We need to work within the local ecosystem. So what that is can get delivered. And then there's local utilities who already in many cases have a license to deliver energy in a specific area. And that's really what we're focusing on being time say in the Philippines, in Cambodia, and those are the two main markets that also we're going to be focusing on Indonesia to make as many partnerships with these utilities as possible and show the regulators that more reliable renewable energy can get delivered at a significant lower cost to these households with this technology. And so that's the answer to that question. I think you were spot on. We need the local governments to be our partners. And in response to Durov's question about packages in one of the markets that were deployed, one of the microgrids, there's four tiers that people can access. So 200 watt hours per day, they pay a certain amount for that. And then if they hit 200 watt hours, then the firmware team has programmed an SMS that lets them know they're about to get cut off from power. So they could reduce consumption. They hit their cap, they get cut off. The other package is a 350 watt hours per day, 750 and 1.2 kilowatt hours per day. And the same deal happens. They can also SMS to increase to the next package. Got it. I will ask one last question because this is coming from an E4C fellow, Amartya, that has joined the webinar. So let's go to the last question from social engineering management perspective. Could you provide some insight on your process or approach to increase the acceptance and scalability of such products amongst traditional and rural households across various regions? And what is the distribution strategy employed by you remotely or by, is it by you remotely through the IoT or by local distributors to ensure best deployment of this technology? Yeah, cool. So start backwards first. What is the distribution strategy? So yeah, I've alluded to a couple of times like we don't want to be those outsiders who are going out there and playing like we're God or whatever in these communities, right? We want to build technology that enables the people whose job it is to get electricity out there to do it way better and way more affordably. So we partner with these local distributors who speak the local language. We give them the tech and the support and then they go out there and they're really good at communicating to the community again why it's beneficial for them to switch from diesel and kerosene to 24-7 clean energy that's actually cheaper for them. So it's not too hard of itself for these local guys who can communicate with us. And then I'll just jump onto that quickly as well. So that's from a distributor level but then also I think part of the question was about convincing yeah kind of how does it spread within communities and that's where we've seen I think a lot of people working in development will echo this but the seeing is believing mentality. So we always start with a smaller scale maybe even just a couple homes and as soon as people see it as soon as you see your neighbor gets completely reliable power around the clock the demand really just grows from there. So that's been a deployment strategy as well. Great. And I'm three minutes over but I will ask you one last question that I think might be a good closing question in regards to what are your plans to expand to Africa? Well, we've got a lot of... Are there any? So we've had plans and we've got agreements with a bunch of distributors in Africa but to be honest like just Cambodia Philippines Indonesia is like over 30 million people that don't have access to electricity in these markets. So we need to focus first and make sure that we can prove out the technology start getting some scales some momentum and then we want to make sure that every person on the planet has electricity by 2025. So I'm pretty sure we'll be in Africa within the next couple of years and absolutely latest. And we wish you a lot of love for this. Thank you so much, and Afi for connecting especially because you're in Philippines and Cambodia so making an effort to connect so late we really appreciate it. This was very insightful and I'm sure our attendees also enjoy given the amount of questions that they ask and we have a couple that I didn't but I will send it over to you for the attendees. Thanks so much for participating in this webinar as you can see on the slide if you want to update your PDH there's a link there if you had any more questions please email us and this webinar will be uploaded to our website in the next couple of days so stay tuned also for our next webinar in the next couple of months. Okay. Thank you so much and have a great day. Thank you Afi and Nithya again. Yeah. Thanks guys for tuning in to Zone. Yeah, feel free to reach out to us. Talk to you soon. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye. Bye.