Mini-Grid Automation: Translating Local Knowledge Into Scalable Business Practices


Mini-grid developers have succeeded in markets beyond the reach of traditional utilities, and they have done so through the following high touch means:
  • Close relationships with on-the-ground staff and customers
  • Careful, modular deployment of capital
  • Detailed knowledge of the value chain from electricity supply to distribution to customer billing
In this session, we demonstrate how utility automation technology can be used to achieve professional, scalable operations while maintaining these agile, high touch fundamentals. We will work through a few specific examples from our own operations, as well as those of our customers:
  • Tariff discovery through experimentation
  • An SMS interface for first-line consumer support
  • Automated theft detection
Speaker

Wesley Verne, SteamaCo, Microgrids expert
Wesley Verne
Chief Technology Officer
SteamaCo

Wesley is the CTO at SteamaCo, where he builds smart meters and automation software for the world's toughest markets - off-grid Africa, Asia, and Latin America. SteamaCo's technology provides power to tens of thousands of consumers in remote environments, at a fraction of the cost of comparable smart meters. Wesley's work ranges from building a world-class Mancunian software engineering team, to developing technology on-site in rural Tanzania, to designing smart meter networks using cutting-edge LoRa technology.