Power Update #16 — August 2019
While some think that business deals and opportunities pretty much are there for the picking, it’s far from the truth. Business development is more akin to farming, with long periods of toil and preparation, than hunting, where luck would seem to be the major contributor to success. For every agreement, we would have pitched to as many as four potential partners. For every approval, we would have iterated a proposal many times. At the same time, the tech team would have been carrying out numerous tweaks to the platforms to accommodate the concerns of our potential partners demonstrate ability. But this last month was something of a small harvest for us; many of the conversations and leads we’d been nurturing for the last year finally bore fruit.
Singapore — Synergy Beta is good to go!
We’d been working on this since we finished our Alpha in January with TEPCO. We had been sharing the results with industry players here and lobbying gencos to partner with us to deploy this landmark platform in Singapore. And we finally found partners in a tripartite relationship with one of the largest gencos, supported by their European principal. We’ve been very fortunate to get this support in Singapore for the commercial pilot. Apart from just lending us support on the regulation front, they’re also allowing us to test our technology stack from signup and acquisition to settlement and billing. Furthermore, the support from the European principal also means a possible opportunity for support into markets in Europe and Australia. There’s an embargo on much of the details for now and an official announcement will be made in October during Singapore International Energy Week (SIEW) 2019.
Malaysia— Synergy pilot by Q1 2020
We’ve been in long discussions with the teams at TNB for almost a year, discussing innovation and how P2P can benefit the grid and the consumers in Malaysia’s fast-evolving electricity sector. And I can finally let the cat out the bag: just last week, at Asian Utility Week 2019 in Kuala Lumpur, I made the announcement that TNB has finally given the go-ahead to develop a P2P pilot in Malaysia with Electrify on our Synergy platform. The last couple of months were spent wading through a great many technical details such as the tiered billing tariff and integrating with the existing Net Energy Metering (NEM) programme. I’ll update the Tribe accordingly as we progress and are given a thumbs-up to release more details.
Spain — Possible Synergy pilot in the pipes
We’ve been in long discussions with the leading smart-meter manufacturer in the region for the last six months. These included technical document exchanges, meetings, interviews with their board members and advisors and, in the coming fall, we will begin joint engagement in Spain with utilities and retailers. We’re in the late stages of MOU clearance and expect that to complete in the coming weeks. After that, they will represent our interest in collaborative pilots and commercial projects in Spain.
So — what else can’t we talk about?
The nature of business is such that we will have many discussions and plans being laid and prepared that we can’t disclose in case we lose a technological or business advantage. For instance, I can’t disclose which of the big tech companies I’m in discussions with to deploy a wide-scale low-cost energy metering network with. Nor can I talk about our plans to work a Singaporean agency to tap into their energy data lake to develop a new layer of consumer services around granular energy data. Similarly, I can’t talk about my negotiations with a European EV manufacturer on how to use Synergy to deliver clean renewable energy to their customers. Neither can I talk about the new business models and platforms around solar energy that we’re discussing with utility operators to Singapore’s north. And no, I haven’t forgotten Australia and how we’ve already completed the parsing script for National Electricity Market (NEM) data, in collaboration with an Australian retailer.
I can’t disclose the details behind these regardless of how much social media pressure is applied. I’m confident our Electrify Tribe understands that we are taking the right path to make Electrify a trusted and comprehensive energy platform for the next millennia. This isn’t a consumer application business but an electricity grid application platform; and infrastructure isn’t built in just a day. Or a year.
Summary
This is a very exciting time for us. After a lot of hard work, sweeping changes and many false starts with partnerships, we’re finally getting into a good stride and finding large corporate and national-level players who have demo’d Synergy and are impressed enough to want to test it for their respective markets. It’s taken over a year to get to this point, but we’re finally getting the recognition to deploy. The next few months will set up 2020 to be one of accelerated growth.
Always present,
Martin Lim
CEO
