Case Study: Crossboundary Energy Access
Executing transactions and managing a growing portfolio of mini-grid investments
Crossboundary Energy Access (CBEA) is using Odyssey’s asset management platform to execute transactions and manage its growing portfolio of mini-grid investments.
A New Frontier in Distributed Energy
Crossboundary Energy Access is a pioneer in the field of off-grid distributed energy finance. As the first project financing facility for mini-grids, CBEA is developing solutions to unique sector challenges.
One of these challenges is tracking and analyzing the performance of a portfolio of distributed energy assets, which – unlike grid-connected or larger projects – have many diffuse sources of high-volume data.
Odyssey and CBEA partnered to solve this challenge; the Odyssey asset management platform gives CBEA the ability to evaluate transactions and track corresponding documentation, to monitor the performance of their assets, and to calculate contractually important KPIs from asset data.
Perhaps most importantly, Odyssey provides CBEA the data tools necessary to draw insights and learn from the performance of their assets in ways that will be critical for making energy access investments in the future.
Asset Management With Odyssey
CBEA and Odyssey have partnered to implement the sector’s first complete asset management platform for off-grid energy investments.
The platform provides CBEA a central hub to manage all portfolio activity, and interact with asset operators through each stage of its transactions.
Transaction Documents
As with any financial transaction, investing in mini-grid assets requires collection and organization of numerous documents, including customer contracts, technical drawings, technology sheets, and more.
Odyssey’s “smart” data rooms were designed for project operators to upload and tag files according to a common nomenclature.
This tagging feature enables CBEA to search through a complex data room and organize documentation according to the fund’s requirements.
Furthermore, CBEA can export a list of all data room files (tagged by file content and type), and run automated checks on the data room to ensure all required files have been provided. These features saved the CBEA team hundreds of hours of manual file review.
Live Monitoring and Asset Analytics
CBEA also uses Odyssey for critical fund management activities: measuring and reporting on the performance of its portfolio, and tracking key metrics related to the fund’s operational agreements.
To even begin to calculate these metrics, data needed to be collected from disparate sources: smart meters, site monitoring platforms, PV inverter systems, billing systems, company internal documents, and even spreadsheets updated by project operators.
Almost immediately, CBEA realized aggregating and analyzing that data was infeasible without a powerful software tool that was built for this sector.
Odyssey’s analytics platform ingests high-volume, real-time data feeds from all of the various on-site technologies being used.
The platform also enables large raw data file uploads so that asset operators can input data into the platform in order to centralize all key data from the asset portfolio.
Once ingested, the Odyssey data engine automatically cleans data, flags anomalies, and joins together all data sets so that CBEA can analyze data from multiple sources and measure its KPIs.
Key operations are performed on data fields as they come in, enabling immediate analysis on high-volume data feeds. Some examples of key metrics include:
- Daily consumption per user by customer segment
- Quarterly new, existing and churned customers
- Average revenue per user by customer segment
- Diesel run times and costs
- Production by generation source
- Households, businesses, community institutions powered
- CO2e emissions avoided
Odyssey enables the CBEA team to immediately access the data and analytics they need to manage their fund.
Analytics can be viewed at different levels of granularity – such as portfolio – level dashboards showing aggregated KPIs, interactive maps of regional sub-portfolios, or detailed visualizations of specific customers’ demand patterns.
Furthermore, the CBEA team can generate customized, automated investment reports to streamline the fund’s reporting process.
“If Odyssey’s asset management platform didn’t exist, it would have to be invented. It’s exactly what we need to manage our growing portfolio of mini-grid projects.”
Gabriel Davies, Head of Energy Access
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