Planning and O&M for ESCOs

posted in: Technology | 0

The SharedSolar platform is different to other electrification technology. We actually take a bottom-up approach and build over our experience in Sub-saharan Africa and research at Modi Labs for infrastructure planning and ‘big data’ visualisation. Below you can see a snap-shot of the software showing rich contextual information for our Sites in Senegal and Mali.

Potou

In the photo above shows the results of our scoping survey to analyse wheter or not a micro-grid makes sense depending of costing factors. Here we have mapped the villages connected to the grid. (Oui!, the results can  be easily shown in multiple languages also).

In the photo below, you can see the quality of monitoring and O&M a field staff can do. Here we are filtering the information collected for the number of exterior lights installed on each household. This reporting tool help us to track the physical changes in the sites over time and to verify that againts demand and consumption reports from chargers, inverters and individual meters.  It help us also to check that our staff is passing to provide service (in this case, Bakary, the manager of our sites in Mali, visited the household at 15hr on 18-09-2012).

Mali

In fact this tool has been so powerful that Bakary is supporting the needs of over 170 clients in only 2 days per week. Since april 2012 all the high level supervision has been remotely in our sites in Mali as the country suffered a Coup d’Etat and much of the support staff was evacauted to Senegal. Hower, we receive automated reports and  near real time  data from every meter connected (we can modulate the frequency of reporting as to save connectivity costs). So we make sure everyone connected to SharedSolar has the best service available.

 

 

Mobile phone: Weapon against global poverty

posted in: Articles, Media | 0

Summary

  • Affordable mobile phone access has caused a quantum leap for the world’s poor
  • From 2005 to 2010, cell phone use tripled in the developing world to 4 billion subscriptions
  • In Kenya, mobile phone banking services are used to make $1 billion transactions a month
  • Economist: “The cell phone is the single most transformative technology for development”

Full story

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10/09/tech/mobile/mobile-phone-poverty/index.html

 

The role of software and distributed intelligence in SharedSolar

posted in: Technology | 0

Sharedsolar is a great example of how software can transform otherwise static infrastructure into one that can deliver a flexible, dynamic and easy-to-manage service, for both the provider and the consumer. Deploying micro-grids combining generation, storage and metering technologies – as we do in SharedSolar – is one approach towards bringing immediate service to the populace. Because of the distributed nature of the sites and the subscriber base, it is important that:

  • from the operator standpoint, the assets deployed and service provided are managed efficiently with minimal downtime. An emphasis should be placed here on the design of modular systems to allow for later expansion and possible grid connection.
  • from the consumer standpoint, they are provided with a high-quality service and the flexibility to pay for it when they are able to.

At the Modi Research Group, we’ve been continually improving our software platforms to address these concerns. Our software solutions consist of two major components:

  • the Gateway – a web portal providing operator dashboards for the remote management of the sites. Aside from providing valuable insights into the operations, it also serves as the conduit between customers and the service over the mobile networks. Another key feature is the token management system crucial for tracking revenue collection, that could conceptually be tied-in with 3rd party services like mobile banking.
  • the local intelligence – a software application residing at each Sharedsolar site and responsible for near real-time metering of each circuit, consumer credit accounting, aggregated log transmissions to the Gateway, alert mechanisms (system health, consumer credit and consumption), load/energy management and so on. It also provides the messaging interfaces for the Gateway to access the sites, web UI’s for local technicians to troubleshoot over and web service API’s for our local vendor solution using Android devices.

Distributed generation warrants distributed intelligence. Especially when the sources are intermittent renewables like solar (or hydro, or wind), it is important to manage the demand based on how much was generated. This requires data to be passed regularly between the metering devices and the management software, and an interesting question arises about where the service responsibilities should lie. In settings with high-bandwidth, reliable (perhaps, IP-based) communication links, it might make more sense to have the intelligence situated at a central location, away from the sites. This is especially so from the software release/maintenance/control perspectives. In the absence of this communications infrastructure, it becomes imperative to shift a lot of the service responsibilities towards the sites themselves, as we’ve had to do in SharedSolar. Even the model of prepayment is affected by this decision; we’re able to provide pay-as-you-go simply because the accounting happens at the site and does not depend on data transmissions over an expensive and lossy channel (if we can call it that) such as SMS. A positive side-effect of having a high-level, software management system at the sites is the possibility it introduces of deploying standalone [smart] micro-grids.

It is also interesting to note how high-level software languages and frameworks (we use Twisted for local/distributed management and the Gateway is built using Pyramid) – same as those used to develop online services – can be leveraged to build these management systems. The ability to perform system integration with new hardware and add new service features like the Webmin and the web API’s for the local vendor devcies have been absolutely invaluable as we learn and adapt to situations on the ground. And I’m convinced that this would have been impossible within budget/time constraints if it were done at a level closer to the hardware (microcontrollers, low-level code etc.) More on this in a following blog post.

 

1 2 3