This 2-year (2023-2025) project brings together a consortium of companies that seek to solve the problem of providing affordable and clean cooling solutions to off-grid households and businesses. Supported by Innovate UK’s Energy Catalyst program, Inclusive Energy will work with partners Focus Energy and Koolboks to develop a higher quality and easier to manage cooling service for customers in West Africa. To do this, the project builds on Inclusive Energy's remote monitoring system, Cloud Solar, and will seek to develop data modelling and machine learning techniques with both the live data and meta-data to deliver insights to cooling service providers and their customers. As well as reacting to faults and issues that have already occurred, the project will investigate and develop a solution to provide predictive maintenance for a range of issues including predicting the end of life of the batteries and predicting probable system issues such as lack of energy availability. These issues can then be mitigated with sophisticated load shedding and controls via the Cloud Solar charge controller, along with alerts for the solar system owners and providers to advise on energy saving techniques. Therefore, the project proposes development of 3 parallel and integrated capabilities: (1) analyse, (2) forecast, (3) mitigate.

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