Equity Guru Endorses Clear Blue Technologies.. CLEAR BLUE TECHNOLOGIES (CBLU.V): POWER TO THE PEOPLE
I was on a boardroom tour of Toronto late last year with some high rollers and big brokers, when we were walked into a room and confronted with a woman around my age looking to pitch us a green energy play.
I could sense the boys club that had walked in was apprehensive. We’d just heard a synthetic breast milk pitch, so the boys in their suits were a bit mommy-businessed out.
Boy did they get a lesson in how it’s done.
This is Miriam Tuerk. If you’re having a dinner party, you want her there, and not because she makes a mean salmon mousse, but because she may be the most interesting exec I’ve heard. Hell, if you’re putting on a TED Talk, you want her there. She destroys boardrooms.
After I heard her pitch on the opportunity that is Clear Blue Technologies last year, I thought to myself, I’m going to buy some of this. Unfortunately for me, my broker was sitting right next to me and, quick as a whip, said, ‘how much do you want?’ so much for a coll-off period.
So I’ve been a stakeholder in Clear Blue since before it went public. My initial investment is down, at the time of writing, but not by much. The reason I’m still in is Miriam.
It’s not that she tosses on an earpiece mic and booms her words to the back of the room, though she does, it’s that, as an electrical engineer, she’s got supreme knowledge of her product on the hardware side and coding side, and of the real world situations that require her product – and how she intends to get that product to the masses.
Rather, how she’s already got her product to the masses. She’s literally already sold thousands of systems to 34 countries, as of the time of writing. 55% of those systems have gone to Africa. The vast majority of the remainder have been US/Canada installations.
SO WHAT DOES CLEAR BLUE DO?
Imagine you’re in an African nation, let’s say Lesotho, and you’re farming and breeding goats, but the weather this time of year is notoriously unpredictable and you don’t exactly have a phone or a laptop to check the weather forecast.
Or an internet connection for a laptop or phone to connect to.
Or electricity, for much of the day.
In today’s world, that means you may or may not starve, but you definitely will not succeed, not against the billions of people across the world who DO have electricity and DO have wifi and DO have laptops.
So, many African nations, and Western nations, and telecommunications companies, and electricity utilities, and even individual villages and towns, are looking at options as to how to get connected – or at least powered up.
You could hang a wind turbine out by the side of the road, which would work whenever there’s wind but require a big battery, occasional maintenance, and there’s the issue that there might not actually be a grid around to connect it to. You could slap solar panels out there, but you’d have the same issues in batteries, maintenance, no grid..
Clear Blue’s Smart Off-Grid system is built for this situation.
A large part of the world is off-grid, meaning billions are not connected to a reliable power source, and connecting disparate places and building power plants is absurdly costly, so it just doesn’t happen until the cost is warranted.
Clear Blue’s system allows customers to install a solar/wind-powered, wifi-enabled street light with remote controlled management, to be dropped in any location for a low installation and management cost.
If you have a railway switch hundreds of miles from nowhere, a Clear Blue system can not only allow you to remove the diesel generator you’re probably using to keep it going (and the guy refilling that generator every dew days), but can also turn that location into a virtual small power grid, bringing services to the location that wouldn’t make economic sense normally.
Security monitoring. Cellphone tower. Power generation. The internet.
All from a streetlight.
Currently, if you’re doing anything in remote locations, you lug a generator with you, and a big old container of diesel to keep it going. Want to have internet access at your mine site? Need to run an oxygen tank in a makeshift hospital tent? Want to put security cameras along your oil pipeline to stop people from illegally tapping into it? Want to stick a camera in your corn field so you can tell when it needs water?
Right now, you need a generator. With Clear Blue, your security camera – or streetlight, or railway switch, or cell tower, IS the generator. It makes the grid less relevant, and creates mini grids all over.
Now, this would be a good deal for the world, and for Clear Blue, if all they were doing was dropping hardware all over the world, but the remote monitoring is really the goose laying a seriously golden egg.
Rather than send a maintenance person all over hell’s half acre to check that everything is working every few months, the Clear Blue systems self report when maintenance is needed, with 70% of all issues able to be fixed remotely. The systems also allow for tweaking of the power generation schedule, monitoring of batteries, maximizing performance… heck, they even monitor weather patterns, so you can know if poor conditions for power generation mean you should minimize your usage for a day or two.
Imagine hundreds of these outposts, all linked via the cloud, sending back ongoing reports to HQ, helping ramp systems up at times of peak need, or ramp them down if the batteries are full already.
Clear Blue’s systems are inexpensive, and that’s actually an issue I have with them. We all want to save the world, and there’s no question there’s a social responsibility imperative to help those in need by pricing systems in a way they remain within reach. That 55% of Clear Blue’s business is with Africa is impressive, but also a sign that it may be too cheap.
An example of this is in Morocco, where a pilot project using Clear Blue tech is expecting to install (or be a part of the installing of) 5,000 smart Off-Grid lights, for a minimum contract value of $5.4 million by 2021. Assuming the ‘maximum’ contract value won’t add a digit to that total, that’s cheap. From what I could find online, an average streetlight in the UK can cost $8,000 to purchase and install, and that’s without solar or wind powered anything attached.
Clear Blue may only be installing a part of the finished product, but the fact remains such contracts are heavy on the sales timeline side, and a bit light on the revenue end – for now.
The defence on being inexpensive is, likely, there needs to be a critical mass of systems to really enable cost savings and maximize profit potential. If you’re covering the world on the cheap because there’s some ulterior motive in having access to the ensuing data, or being able to upsell later when you’re depended on in a bigger way, or in having a system build out that a bigger player might want to come in and acquire, then going in inexpensively to the world can make sense.
For Clear Blue, that last option may be a very real one.