 So, I see a lot of engaging discussions have started, and I mean, even though I mean, we are all in the open source spirit, so it should be, it's about collaboration, working together, talking to each other, learning from each other, and that's always good to your mind. Now I will start. Thank you that you came, and that you refreshed your mind now again to come in the conference mode again. I'm Vivien Barnier, I'm leading the Access Foundation, and I will talk today about open innovations for energy access, because we believe it's a significantly underrepresented topic around here. We want really to push it and to get the LF energy and open source crowd in general to learn more about the potentials on leveraging open source for energy access and leveraging the experience from energy access for energy transition and other open source projects in general. So, let me start with a slide that at least people that are kind of related to energy access might, no, no, I have to do it that way. That's a picture showing the globe by night, even though that's not really true, because we don't have this situation ever where the whole world is at night, but it's a compilation of different night times around the world and showing where you can see light emission in the night, which is a pretty good indicator to see where there's electricity. So, no wondering that in the Sahara there's not much electricity or in the Amazonas, it's maybe pretty good, and that there's not too much light in this area, particularly in the Amazonas, but still looking, for example, at the African continent, you have here on the west coast some light points, but also these areas are pretty densely populated, or not directly densely populated, but there are a lot of people living there, and a lot of these people actually don't have access to electricity. Yeah, that's the whole thing that we are talking about when we are talking about energy access, and we can also talk about energy in a broader sense, but mainly talking about electricity today, which you can see pretty nice on this map. I just focused on the African continent here, but there are also other spaces where this applies. Now, let's see what has happened for energy access over the last decade. We can see that there has been a very successful effort in reducing people that don't have access to electricity over the last decade. However, we also see that there was a stagnation over the last year, and even what happened in 2022, there are more people without electricity than the year before in the world. Now, anybody has a good idea why this is, or why that happened? Nobody? Population growth? Exactly. Population growth outperformed the efforts and investments in energy access. So we have connected new people here, and no one has lost, or little people have lost electricity connections, but the population growth is faster than the electrification efforts. And as we know, this is a problem that is not likely to end very soon. So there's a serious problem here. So we have a goal, which is the SDG7, which actually, very sadly, is missing an entrance in the SDG7 cubes, which are there in the corner. You might have seen, I was pretty obsessed now, all good that it's not there. And we actually made a picture, like symbolizing the 7 already, to make it fit there, and to show this in financial figures. We had, in 2019, unfortunately, I haven't found a more recent figure, but we had a bit more than 10 billion US dollar investment in energy access. However, to achieve this SDG7, like affordable and clean energy for all by 2030, we would need three times that yearly. We see that the most of this would go to the African continent, the good part to Asia, and the rest of the world, but the interesting figure is like we are at one-third, more or less, of what we would need annually to flow in the sector. Now there are reasons why this is like that, why there is no money flowing in the energy access sector. And this reason I want to point out to later make you understand where we see the particular value of open source in the sector. So as we can see, I mean this is now one village which is actually electrified, you can see the power poles here, but this is like the typical setting, even though the typical setting doesn't exist, but this is one typical setting of areas which are not electrified, so relatively sparsely populated, very remote very often, so difficult to reach, so setting up infrastructure is not easy, maintaining infrastructure is not easy, and it's expensive. We don't know how much energy people will use, and we don't know the total amount, we don't know when they will use it, like we don't know the patterns, we don't know the user's patterns. We have extreme weather conditions, like we have that in other parts of the world, but as I said that's also remote, so if something happens it takes a long time to go there, you have extreme heat, you have tropical animals and plants that go into any inverter or whatever technology you have there, you have winds, you have rains, you have issues with data connectivity if you want to go on remote monitoring, even though telecom is ahead of energy access, a lot of these areas have some data connectivity but don't have electricity yet, but not all, so it's not a 100% reliable connection you have with GSM or 2G or 4G, and then regulatory uncertainty, there's main grid connection extension, it might sound strange because main grid extension would sound great because it brings electricity, however if there is no certainty if it will happen or not, no private or private public partnership will engage in electrifying these areas with a decentralized system because they don't know will actually the main grid come and so my investment will be worthless soon or will it not? And often energy planning foresee there will be electrification in five years, so no investor is putting money on the table, but this is not going to happen and there's often no certainty that gives you the security, okay if you do it and in ten years the main grid comes there will be some compensation and so on to make it attractive. So it's basically they say we will electrify or we might electrify, so nobody else does it but in the end nothing happens, so that's what I mean by that as a risk, a good extension even though it would be great. Now with all that said, the last thing which I didn't mention to the first point of the slide, these areas pretty often have very very low income customers, meaning like all these challenges leads to be addressed which results in extremely expensive electricity or LCO, level cost of electricity or the price per kilowatt hour you need to pay, but you have on the other side customers that have very low income, so there's a mismatch between like the reality what it does costs to produce this energy and on the ability to pay for it. Now we would need low cost solutions which still are resilient to be able to achieve the SDG7 and we have actually a lot of actors that try to do it which is great on the one side, I mean we have non-profits, we have domestic SMEs from the countries and sometimes from the villages themselves, they try to do projects electrify themselves, we have community and cooperative driven energy electrification models, we have large international utilities going in the space of decentralized energy, selling solar home systems, so individual systems for insorcio, but also doing mini grids, we have the same from the domestic utility sometimes going in that direction and even agri-industries are looking into that because they want to kind of ensure their value chain and their logistics and need energy for that on-site, so the variety of players try to address these challenges which leads ultimately to the problem that a lot of this stakeholders end up reinventing the wheel constantly because the challenges are various, they need to be addressed, you need to develop a solution for them but often they do it everybody on the side and come up with very similar solutions which don't make the competitive advantage or difference to the other ones, they adjust the underlying necessary pain work that needs to be done and then a few tiny works might be the ones where they can say, oh this is really the outstanding part of my business model either in business model technology or so on, but there is so much repetition and in the sector there is still a lot of public donor money which is used, partly equity as well but mainly donor money which is constantly used to reinvent the wheel with individual solutions which should be shared to make a more efficient sector. I constantly click on this one and I have to click here. Now there is this one quote from Oskar from Okrasola which is one of the companies that we have worked with which says, think about the scale of the problems we are trying to solve. Electrifying hundreds of millions of people in incredibly remote areas is never going to happen if it relies on traditional utility methods. We need to be smarter and use what technology has to offer if we are going to solve the problem and I would even go beyond that. We need to jointly use and develop technology that we can offer to solve the problem because obviously technically we need to use but we need to develop and use it jointly that's what I would like to add to this quote even though Okra has developed an open source project with us but yeah I wanted to show this quote because it summarizes pretty greatly what we stand for. Now this means, it goes all in this direction of this word that has been said several times this morning already interoperability in the sector and there I want to show to make it a bit more pragmatic what is actually what we do what are the kind of project that we support and there's the open pay-go token. Who is familiar with pay as you go as a model? Okay some are. So let me quickly summarize pay as you go as we said in the remote areas low-income customers so when be able to purchase a relatively expensive asset for a solar system for example they can pay it on a pay as you go basis so basically they pay a monthly fee or weekly fee and get a token that allow unblocks air time so for months or a week or whatever they have paid for and then over a certain period of time they have paid off their system and it's transferred to them and it's completely unblocked but if they don't pay and don't get a token just stop working even though the solar panel is there and so just doesn't electricity doesn't come out so that is pay as you go in a nutshell and now you need this token which I mentioned you need somebody pay something gets a token and then enters via a keypad here to unblock it system and now there were a lot of there are still a lot of token systems and also an energy access and there were a lot of different tokens from different loan fraud from providers which ended up manufacturers obliging to pre-configure the same hardware for different token systems and that's where we engage together with Solaris off grid to say okay develop one open pay go token protocol to decode to encode and decode the information and this can be used on the different platforms and this ultimately drove to a sector right interability of this loan platform provider which are for example and Gaza Peggy and from there went to at least where we stopped counting 15 to 20 manufacturers which are now all using this open pay go token and open pay go metrics which are significantly disrupted the sector and led to significant efficiencies in the sector and that's exactly the kind of solutions where we believe the power of open source is very important for the sector and now a few more details I mean as I said it's in hardware and software agnostic technology that allows pay go compatibility and it's integrated with the most most pay go platforms and yeah allows you to secure you and remotely manage and disconnect customers assets if needed now this is one of our flagship projects that has had a very sector-wide impact in energy access now let me tell a bit why we see what we do and this interoperability issue or topic is very important for energy access but also for energy transition where we see the overlay we have here this picture which stands for for energy access in this for energy transition and we don't believe only that we need interoperability within energy access we also believe we need interoperability and transoperability between energy transition and energy access there's so much developments done in energy transition which are very could be very valuable for energy access in this versa but there's very little exchange in the open source space about these developments and how they're certainly not able to copy one-to-one but that's the great thing about open source we all know we can tweak it we can change it you can modify it and we really believe we need to create much more links and exchange here and leverage all this experience which create which is existent in the open source space to overcome this like barrier which we can see here and make it overlap much more and work together now I've said what we have done what are the challenges in energy access but I also want to say how an access works and how does our process work so we have this old-school image of a light bulb for an innovation it's not innovative anymore today but it was a great innovation and we still see a lot of light bulbs even though today there was LEDs but the concepts pretty much the same and and how do we find or develop these innovations so the one thing is an inbound do inbound and outbound identifications we have a call where people can propose ideas to us and the other one is we talk to the sector and identify the sector and try to understand what are the innovations that are needed either ways in the next step we involve in very deep stakeholder consultations so we talk to the different stakeholders in the sector we have a community platform where we invite the sector stakeholders to provide feedback and once we have a good co-designed project and say okay now we can develop it we mainly step a bit back and let the developers develop and just provide some quality insurance both on the development self and also on the software on the on the documentation and then during the process and afterwards we do like promotion and marketing where it is like something we are trying to make it spread all the world to the sector so the people know there are these innovations that you can use and lastly we also provide a library which is maintained with high quality open source innovations to be used by the sector and provide some initial adoption support so companies with not much clue of how to do it and where to do it can come to us and we we are there to provide the additional adoption support to see how to to use innovations that are actually available to use them and now let me go into a few more details a few more examples of the innovations and there's for example a hardware project then open battery management systems so the ones that are pretty aware what's energy access might say okay in other battery management systems there are so many around already proprietary not proprietary and so on however we still see in the energy sector companies developing their own battery management systems from scratch that's the problem no obviously your battery specifications or your application can be so specific that you need to tweak stuff but that's the great thing it's open source now we can tweak it and we really see a lot of companies in the sector constantly developing battery management systems like okay that's a great idea we funded Libre Solar a German based company developing this battery management system which is suitable for 12 to 48 world systems up to 16 cells which is actually quite a power so you can operate a like a little small machine with it already not just a few light bulbs and it comes with a variety of communications can serial Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and has also connectors where you could connect GSM lower one or other user interfaces and for GSM I will come to that later we have also an open source module for that here you can have a bit a closer look on the ones I into like tech and hardware development happy to bring that up later in the Q&A if you have specific questions and then as mentioned it's all about connectivity IoT or Internet of everything as you also call it not just of things and and energy access we also have the same problem and just that we have areas or we had areas were a lot of one on 2G but we were also also looking here will be 4G at some point 5G further in the future already today and and again there was no good solution on the market that responded in terms of price and functionality and sizing to what energy access companies needed so okra solar the company I mentioned earlier came up to say okay we want to develop a hardware and a related firmware for this communication module for communication modules which come as Wi-Fi 2G 3G and 4G modules depending on which can't because if you did operate in different countries and some 2G is already switched off in the other ones it's still operating quite nicely and yeah and they developed this Cicada communication modules which agnostic from the platform and also you can easily customize it to different microcontrollers and operating systems here again you can see the Cicada module and which you can easily plug on whatever device you're using and which brings us to the last project which is an oh no it's not our last project the last example I brought you today the open smart meter and smart meeting is all around an energy transition but only also an energy access and and again there are smart meters available even for energy access prepared for the energy access space however there are several companies that have and they are still developing their own smart meters because of costs because they don't shoot exactly their particular use case or whatsoever and and these are companies that actually focus on electrifying people on selling electricity but then they end up developing a smart meter and 10 of them at the same time not exchanging any information and it's not their business to sell a smart meter their business to sell electricity so and you are just there why why why again no and that's where we said okay we engage with first electric and Nigerian based company that developed a low-cost open smart meter and which you can see here which is actually which has all the basic functionality it has a customizable API can easily be integrated with like online platform for token generation has 232 and gsm communication which actually comes with again and that's what we think so great is the cicada Wi-Fi module or the cicada gsm module which you just saw the slide before so we really try also to use the different pieces in our ecosystem and they they work into each other this is a prototype stage is the ones that are bit into hardware developed might see that's a through-hole design and manually soldering which is obviously not suitable for mass manufacturing but that's also we really engage on early stage and also take risk in projects we are happy to like take okay high potential and high risk projects where not all grow as big as we would like to but the sector needs these initiatives and at least a lot of these learnings of what could be done and what you should not do can be accessed and accessed and used by the sector now I'm coming to the end soon we are here also today the first time at LF energy summit and pretty happy to be here to talk to you to LF energy crowd and to the open source crowd and any transition and open energy transition crowd to want to build together we want you guys to help with your building blocks and our buildings blocks working towards energy transition and energy access and leveraging your experience to actually tackle those challenges that I mentioned before the remote areas low income regulatory uncertainties extreme weather conditions unknown load patterns missing funds and the misuse of funds and we really want to stop this misuse of funds and just create an suitable open ecosystem of the basic tools that can be used and stimulate the sector so I pretty much invite all of you to look at what we are doing come to us there's also Clara my colleague and me we are here can talk to us and also if you have the other thousands or millions or billions too much and you want to fund energy access come to us we can help you a lot to make this very efficient and yeah make the best use of these funds to really have a great leverage in creating energy access and yeah let me close with this this is our great team we are remote teams with around the world is a bit exaggerated between the African continent in the European country a continent in different countries and that's more less how we look like and would love to soon not have enough space on our slides anymore to like put all the people that want to work with us and yeah you can contact us on infrared and access.org you can follow us on link it in you can also talk to the two of us as I mentioned and check out our github and where the projects that I mentioned and a lot of other projects that we have also much more software related projects are hosted and we do not only do technology software and hardware we also believe in business models and concepts and it's also what we have developed so let me close with that now there will be a Q&A session and feel free to ask whatever feel free to criticize we are pretty open to critics and we want to use and leverage this critics we think this is very important in what all of us do and when you have a question I would appreciate you quickly say your name and who you represent if you represent any if you just represent yourself also fine and the helps a lot to like later know who is asked so thank you for your attention it's a what it's one of the reasons why I'm here basically I would say I don't have the perfect roadmap now for that but then already said we should talk and I think we'll do that so yeah if you have great ideas or like want to brainstorm more than happy but I don't have a roadmap yet but I hope we are doing the first steps to work that and happy to get as many of you to join us on this journey and I am this we are currently funded by the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation and the Dune Foundation this I mean grant money for now so we are 100% grant funded so far we are also in the transition to see this is possibly not forever I mean we will always see grant funds because we also want to provide funds as I said part of our work is not doing the development our own but like seeking the sector coming to us to say we want to develop and we provide on the one side funds to do it but now we are also extending our in house support with our own team to the development also for some quality insurance issues and like guaranteeing material maintenance and so on but yeah we we have these two funders so far but obviously always on the outreach to to new funders and also growing a bit like this service provision around open so the open source products and open source and developments in general and but so far we are almost completely been in on grant funds so far and if you have some left over yeah this is means a very good point we have in our portfolio there two companies that we have funded the first electric the ones that developed a smart meter and a synergian based company and there's another one which I didn't present here which is air link which is a Bluetooth relay extension of the Internet let's say it's two for non-connected areas where you have relatively small either not a non-connected or you have very small devices and you don't want to spend 20 or 25 years on a GSM module so you would go for Bluetooth and it's like the phone acts as a data transition and Bluetooth based server also open source based service structure and the whole software around it it's called air link and it's developed by Tanzanian company Simo solar the others correctly said are you or even across Australia based companies that are active in this sector and on this continent the sector but yeah we are pretty open it's just from the proposition from poor from project that we have received and the feedback from the sector these are the ones that have crystallized as the most interesting project for the sector but we actively try to push more like African or Asian based companies to also come up with even though we are often observed there it's often a bit more resistance with the open source because I mean of stealing information and knowledge which is locally created which I can totally understand like historically thing so that there's a bit more reason but we are actually currently creating a bunch more balance with the open source community Africa yeah they are completely off of energy access but we are just also trying to bring energy access and this open source community together and we were not focusing on it and we I mean yeah we we try to focus on like bringing electricity to where there's not yet electricity instead of okay we decentralize and democratize the centralized systems which exists like for example developed countries often and however I agree that a lot of what we do could also be beneficial and this verse again and it's actually a good interesting point and for me that comes a bit with energy transition or this is I mean energy transition is not just we get rid of fossil fuels and put some solar panels it's much more also like transition in terms of using this decentralized renewable energies to also create energy communities and I mean historically to talk about energy committees and corporatives large parts of the world have been electrified by energy corporatives and the most prominent example they don't know if you know which country it is the US US has been electrified to a corporative model and maybe not the most logical if you look at today's policies and politics but and so we really believe that I mean we that's why I said we see energy transition like going back to corporatives or decentralize the energies and it's part of any transition and very happy to create and use more these linkages and parallelism yeah I mean this is something totally totally or feel like a larger like between a bit bigger as a e-bike but smaller than a car and that's where from the specs that could fit yeah I mean this is these kind of innovations are ones that you can really use pretty widely tweaking them a bit but it's always the idea yeah and yeah we yeah exactly give it to everybody and we in our particular case we want to stimulate people to use it and to even create and particularly create business models that can be a profit or non-profit or non-for-profit business model however that they scale it in the use and that it reach that leads to electrifying people more efficiently instead of having 40 organizations doing the same time the same thing on the same time all the time using public donor money which is the most like painful thing about all that again exactly yeah totally exactly we still 50 60 80% of this funds could go into actually creating a new connection instead of developing another smart need or not a battery management system yeah I think wait I don't have two minutes left but I think just oh there's one more question I mean it's difficult to say I mean the one thing which I've showcased is the open pay go token definitely in terms of how it disrupted and led to really a sector by interoperability across several stakeholders and by that saves significant amount of money and the other one which I didn't mention here and it's a direct initiative where we came in as a very early stage funder it's a decentralized renewable energy certificates this is possibly a prolemic topic to discuss about if we believe in rex or not however it's happening and it's only have what has happened a lot only for large systems while decentralized systems were completely not accessing they have a big need of getting more funds they were completely off of accessing this tool it's not large amounts of money you get for kilowatt hour which comes of solar energy but at least it's a few cents and the direct initiative provides the infrastructure to bundle like this very small amounts of energy distributed energy and converts them in an IRA work strongly with the IRA platform and then can be actually solved to somebody to offset the engine access to offset fossil energy production with renewable energy but with an additional impact because it's actually creating new energy for people now this I don't want to open the discussion if this general trait of offset is great or not and this is another political topic we can discuss this aside but I think this is also pretty successful in terms of it has grown it has been taken up it's now being a new own organization and they have been significant new flows of money creating new connections to people who didn't have energy excess before so I think these are the two but a lot of the others one as well and I heard there was a discussion about the metrics and impact we face the same challenge often we don't know we can see how many people have downloaded on our github and we can see and some protest not much contribution but we can see there were a lot of downloads but who knows are you using it have they used it have that saved money for them or time I don't know so maybe there's another bridge was more successful we just don't know so but if you have great ideas how to measure it we are here now I think it's really 40 minutes and I noticed that you are very precise on the time keeping here so I will do my contribution and my presentation here thank you so much for being here and for this engaging discussion