"Bee-Smart" - Powerhive's Smart-Grid Software

63a4f714-0ae8-4515-b750-3bd4e2d98bdd

Active

Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK
Innovate UK

£4,130,250

March 1, 2023

Aug. 31, 2024

In Sub-Saharan Africa, over 600million people lack access to electricity and millions are connected to an unreliable grid. Lack of energy security, especially in poorer parts of Africa, leads to reliance on biomass-fuels and expensive diesel-generators and diesel plants. Energy optimisation and redirection are a potential game-changer for widespread adoption of renewable energy.

Modern green mini-grid (GMG) technologies manage renewable power intermittency, demand-response services, and dispatch stable, clean, and sustainable power into the local/national grid system. However, cost, flexibility and reliability are significant barriers preventing widespread adoption.

The most cost-effective approach for powering mini-grids is to use renewable energy sources, which are widely available across Africa. Barriers to the growth of private sector mini-grids in Africa include gaps in the policy and regulatory framework and the lack of proven business models \[ADBG,2016\].

**Powerhive's Solution**

Using advancements in data-analytics and Big Data principles, Powerhive will develop an innovative machine-learning solution (Bee-Smart) that analyses energy production, usage, meterage, community needs, to address challenges through smart insight engine providing social and financial dividends at low-cost to rural communities, maximising data to ensure low-cost, accessible energy for end-users.

**Optimising Production/Storage/Usage through Data**

The project will aid GMG providers to optimise renewable energy grids to make excess power generation work for local communities using AI-based insights and decision-making from GMG meterage, site locations, communities, agricultural and business needs in the specific region of the GMG as well as other data such as weather impacts on GMG energy production. These AI-based insights will give GMG energy suppliers the ability to redirect energy at off-peak, low-cost rates to provide additional services to communities based on their own needs. This innovation will aid energy companies in providing lower-cost energy, optimising their own grids to reduce operational expenditures, and enable increased energy access for communities, while using the intermittent nature of green energy production to their advantage. Powerhive will provide a SaaS solution, which will be bundled with productive energy use hardware.

**Beneficiaries/Stakeholders**

The main beneficiaries of the project will be rural communities that rely on GMGs for energy, which aren't connected to the national grid. Bee-Smart will be aimed at GMG production and energy companies, using their own meterage data to better serve energy consumers and reduce operating costs. Powerhive supports the global advance on SDG7, enabling access to clean energy. Bee-Smart will subsequently be rolled out across Sub-Saharan Africa post-project.