Almost any area on this planet, that’s who. When I spoke with Miriam Tuerk, CEO of the company this week, she talked about managing the power and operation of sites in 36 countries, and 30 U.S. states where off-grid infrastructure, much of it remotely placed, is already using Clear Blue to ensure high levels of reliability. Through the company’s operational centre in Toronto, it monitors tens of thousands of devices from street lighting to Internet-of-Things (IoT) smart sensors critical to telecommunications, oil and gas pipelines, and lighting operations.
The company has hauled its technology across the Andes Mountains into Peruvian Amazonia to sites where it installed telecommunications and lighting systems technology backed up by battery storage which they it then immediately began monitoring continuously from Toronto, thousands of kilometers away.
In Africa, the company is partnering with Facebook and local telecommunication providers and has doubled deployments in recent months.
Tuerk describes EaaS as one of the fastest-growing businesses in the emerging field of smart power. Customers, by paying an annual subscription fee for energy services says Navigant Research is a market expected to grow to $221 billion USD by 2026.
Tuerk states, “Just as cloud services like Amazon Web Services transformed the IT industry, EaaS can transform the power industry.”
How so?
By ridding customers of having to operate and manage powered assets, a significant saving.
Clear Blue, in announcing the launch of EaaS notes that more than 70% of new electrical power connections in the next decade will be off-grid or on mini-grids. And one of the biggest points of failure and costs will be battery storage ensuring equipment at these sites remains up and running 24×7.
With battery reliability a big issue, and limited warranties from the manufacturers, Clear Blue in the last five years has collected massive amounts of data on battery performance, testing more than 50 different providers. Comprehensive data analytics has given them the ability to choose the best battery options for working in a variety of remote environments with highly varied climate conditions. Tuerk told me that they have identified three batteries out of the more than 50 which are best in class and ensure installations they implement get reliable, continuous, clean power.
Today, 4.39 billion people on the planet have Internet access. The vast majority live in locations where power comes from the grid. But it is the next 3 billion that when connected will largely be off the grid or receiving local distributed power from mini and microgrids. These are the Clear Blue and EaaS customers of the future, and with the launch of this new service, the company is providing a positive disruptive technology that will change the lives of many of those 3 billion still disconnected from the 21st century as the next decade unfolds.
As the 20th century unfolded we witnessed the development of centralized power generation and voice distribution systems operated by utilities with growing networks of wires and transmission towers that first spanned cities, and then entire continents.
The latter half of the 20th century saw the emergence of the computer. Suddenly electrons flowing down wires weren’t limited to just power and voice. Data had joined the mix. And then as the last two decades of the century unfolded, the wires got cut with wireless transmission evolving from radio to telephony and data transmission. And data networks made the Internet possible.
Was all this connectivity evenly distributed across the planet? No. Vast areas of the Developing World, sub-Saharan Africa in particular, continue to remain in the dark. In fact, over one billion on the planet have no access to reliable electricity. Connectivity to the power grid comes at a very high cost.The problem is not limited to Developing World communities. In my country, Canada, more than 200 indigenous communities largely in remote and northern locales remain without access to power from the electrical grid. Instead, they are dependent on diesel generators.
For utilities operating from centrally-located generation facilities, meeting the needs of the disconnected last billion with 20th-century technology remains problematic and costly. And then there is anthropogenic climate change requiring power generators to consider distributed power generation and renewable energy alternatives.
We may be witnessing the beginning of the end for the ubiquitous power grid as the 21st century unfolds. What will replace it? Last week, I went to find out when I visited Clear Blue Technologies, a Toronto, Canada-based company, founded in 2011, whose CEO, Miriam Tuerk sat down with me to talk about the future of electrical power generation and distribution. She and her husband, John, are well versed in understanding the future of the power grid and the role off-grid will play in providing electricity to wireless, standalone applications.
Clear Blue Technologies represents a new generation of companies focused on providing a hardware-software service for off-grid power delivery and management. The company’s technology optimizes power to any off-grid installation requiring a reliable continuous electrical feed. This applies to everything from street lighting to telecommunications towers supporting mobile wireless.
Tuerk’s company has built the world’s first, smart management system for off-grid systems. She uses the word “nano-grid” defining the types of power requirements of these off-grid devices as being in the low kilowatt range, in comparison with microgrid megawatt range.
Tuerk also notes that Clear Blue Technologies is built as a service. So it is not just shipping a product to its customers, but rather, offering management of the energy powering the lights, or the wireless base stations, or other infrastructure requiring off-grid power.
One of its more recent installations in Hamilton, Ontario, received the Canadian Outdoor Lighting Project of the Year award. Clear Blue technology was deployed to manage 40 solar-powered lights. Solar-hybrid controllers mounted on the light poles, connected to remote management software at Clear Blue providing real-time dashboard views of the power to the lights, tracking performance, and flagging and correcting potential disruptions before they happen.
Lighting today poses a particular challenge for cities. It is their number one operating expense and is largely managed through periodic visual inspection neighbourhood by neighbourhood and block by block. United Nations calls for cities to be dark sky compliant will require them to rethink the lighting deployed. Clear Blue’s technology can certainly help through the remote management and monitoring of off-grid light sources turning them off when conditions are appropriate. That is the degree of granularity possible using Illumience, Clear Blue’s cloud-based software application.
Facebook, the social media giant of the Internet, has made Internet connectivity to areas of the world still disconnected, a major initiative of the company. Tuerk describes how Facebook approached her to help in this effort. The social media company identified Clear Blue as the only company today capable of making it possible to deploy and remotely manage thousands of small sites using off-grid energy sources to power up the technology being deployed to connect these remote communities to the Internet.
Clear Blue can do this because of Illumience, its cloud-based open-source compliant software that features continuous remote monitoring, proactive maintenance sending alerts as text or email, predictive weather analysis, and remote changing of off-grid power feeds to match changing local conditions.
Ultimately what Clear Blue is doing today is a reflection of the fundamental change occurring worldwide as more technology becomes powered by off-grid sources in a world increasingly no longer dependent on power over wires. In this new wireless world, energy will be sourced from solar, wind, battery, and other standalone technologies replacing utility-based delivery and leading to the democratization of power generation. It cannot come soon enough for those sites on our planet today that are held back by the lack of reliable, sustainable energy, and Internet connectivity.
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