Tapping into Real-Time Sensor Data with InfluxDB Cloud to Provide Clean Energy to Rural Africa

Overview

Bringing real-time visibility to millions of off-grid energy systems

Bboxx had an interesting problem to solve — how to become a data-driven company by continuously monitoring their geographically dispersed 85,000 solar rooftop units providing insights into customer-usage patterns and anomaly detection. They turned to InfluxDB because “it was a “fire up and forget” database — it just worked!”

The result: Bboxx provides over 350,000 people across 35 countries with electricity — children are now able to study under good light without inhaling soot and fumes from burning kerosene. InfluxDB is a core part of their solution meeting their current needs of remote monitoring, billing, and alerting of their 85,000 units, growing to nearly 1 million by 2020.

Challenge

Scaling from thousands to millions of connected solar systems

The company grew on a fast trajectory; in just seven years it has 350 employees across five offices in China, UK, and East Africa, and has sold over 85,000 Bboxx units running in over 35 countries, providing 350,000 people with electricity. But their outsourced system of monitoring was unreliable and was not able to meet their business goals of being a data-driven business.

Technical Challenge

Building a telemetry platform for remote, distributed infrastructure

Becoming a data-driven business meant that their solution needed to have real-time data at its core which had another set of challenges:

• Securely monitor a distributed set of devices across low bandwidth 2G networks
• Provide real-time 24-7 monitoring to a distributed team who expects the data to always be right and available
• Provide the ability to monitor and react to high-speed time series data
• Ability to remotely monitor and manage the distributed devices
• Ability to track usage statistics and bill based on these statistics
• Proactively monitor units so they could be repaired before the customer lost power
• Provide insight into customer usage patterns to develop compelling pricing plans
• Gather, harmonize, and use 3 different sets of data from the various components
  • Raw telemetry data (voltage, current, temperature)
  • Logs from the box firmware
  • Derived data (power, daily energy usages, state of charge)
• Lack of staff to manage another solution
• Keep latency systems at a minimum — their systems were already hosted in AWS and the performance was meeting the need of the company

Solution

Enter InfluxDB Cloud

In addition to these technical challenges, they were looking for a system that could create real business value.

• Drive business value: Proactively monitor and analyze battery health, creating alerts based on historical trends that can predict battery failure before it happens. Their customers buy a service, not a battery!
• Increase customer satisfaction and retention: Gain insight into the day and the life of a customer and uncover interesting usage scenarios that drive product development. For example, knowing that customers leave their lights on all night for security purposes helps Bboxx deliver additional security offerings.
• Upsell opportunities: Correlate and aggregate usage data and upsell additional power capacity based on upcoming events; for example, the Kenya and Zambia football match increased demand for more energy to support extended viewing times.

The InfluxDB Platform was key to Bboxx’s final solution. Here are the main reasons they chose InfluxDB Cloud:

• Fully managed and hosted: Bboxx didn’t want to run the solution themselves on their own hardware so InfluxDB Cloud fit this requirement. Furthermore, having it in the same AWS data center with the other components of their solution also helped to maintain their low latency requirements.
• Scalability: InfluxDB was able to handle their current load and their projected load of 20 million units by 2020, all producing hundreds of events.
• Purpose-built: InfluxDB was built to reliably handle time series data. This was critical to Bboxx. They loved the fact that “InfluxDB was the ‘fire and forget’ database for us.”
• Query Language: The InfluxDB Query Language with its SQL-like structure was very easy to understand and work with.

Result

Driving growth with real-time operational data

Bboxx provides over 350,000 people across 35 countries with electricity — children are now able to study under good light without inhaling soot and fumes from burning kerosene. InfluxDB is a core part of their solution meeting their current needs of remote monitoring, billing, and alerting of their 85,000 units, growing to nearly 1 million by 2020.

The initial goal of becoming a data-driven business is a reality. They are now able to get insight into their data and are applying lessons learned from analyzing past data to develop new and exciting products that exceed customer expectations. Although gathering data was not a core part of their business plan, the insight it has created is a core asset to the business.

The whole company now uses data stored in InfluxDB in a whole new way:

• Developers analyze the data for ways to create new data streams.
• Analysts look for irregularities in usage and write algorithms to detect alerts.
• Business Managers look for customer usage patterns.
• Technicians analyze time series voltage and current patterns for remote diagnostics
• Centralized Call Center Operators reconcile more technical issues for customers by seeing the reason for the outage (hardware failure, over-usage, non-payment).

In addition, their investors are highly interested in their data collection and analysis as a marker for data-based competitive advantages, reduced delinquencies, growth potential, and decreased risk.