Energy-as-a-Service: A Novel Idea Whose Time Has Come

June 16, 2019 – A Toronto-based company, Clear Blue Technologies International Inc., has been providing remote management of telecommunications and off-grid lighting for streets and parking lots for a number of years. And now it has launched Energy-as-a-Service (EaaS), a subscription service to provide clean, wireless power to remote localities of which many are off the grid.

Who can use EaaS?

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.

What lies ahead for Clear Blue and EaaS?

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.