http://africanenergy.com/which-battery-is-better-in-hot-environments-2/

It’s worth noting how the Mobile/IT revolution has been instrumental for us in providing a grid-like electric service with intermittent renewables. Our on-site servers run on processors designed for mobile phones – low cost, low power, less heat. The IT hardware costs are negligible with the addition of these platforms, but the flexibility we can bring with our hosted software is huge. We provide customer service by leveraging the existing mobile network infrastructure, with mobile handsets as the interface between customers and the operators. Wireless LAN’s support our mobile app that local agents use for payment collection, management and local overrides. Our enterprise management system also uses the mobile network infrastructure for communicating with the sites.

Without these mobile computing and communications platforms, it would not have been possible for us to deploy and operate sustainable electric services in the regions and communities that we are in. And we’re extremely happy and excited to have been given this chance to participate and showcase our solutions.

More on the announcement and the challenge here – http://www.vodafone-us.com/wireless-innovation-project/current-competition/2013-finalists/

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).

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.

• 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.