David Pearson:

Hey everyone. Just wanted to welcome everyone out to this presentation today. We will be getting started here in just about another minute or so. Let a few more people roll in and we're really excited to have SFC energy with us Liveview Technologies today to talk about EFOY and the wonderful way that it's going to expand our products and some of the great things that their products can do to help expand and increase real reliability for our security and surveillance projects. Just a couple of matters of business. You will be able to ask questions during this webinar and we encourage you to do so. We're going to have a Q&A session towards the end, but feel free to let those questions pour in at the beginning and then we'll get those all queued up for our presenters. So like I said, we'll get started in about another minute and we look forward to being with you all today. Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

Like I said earlier today, this webinar we are going to be discussing SFC Energy and Liveview Technologies recent partnership and how SFC Energy is helping increase reliability and sustainability for our Liveview units. Our presenters today we have Bryan Wright. He is the hardware engineering manager for Liveview technologies. He's the master of all things internal to your live units. Then we also have Chelsea O'Connor, who's a business and development manager, or business development manager with SFC Energy Canada, and I'm going to pass it off to them to get started and have us talk about EFOR and about how it's going to change the way that we think about live units and surveillance.

Chelsea O'Connor:

Great. Good morning everybody. Thank you so much for the introduction. So let's get started and get right into what the EFOY is. So the EFOY is an off-grid energy solution. David, do you mind switching to the next slide for us? Perfect, thank you. So what we're doing here is off-grid power generation. So what the fuel cell is doing, typically you might be familiar with using solar to generate power or a gen set, which is a combustion producing device. What we're using here is fuel cell technology, specifically direct methanol. And what we're doing is we're creating power through a chemical reaction. We are a methanol-based fuel cell. That means we operate at a very low temperature and that means that we have the ability to create power on demand. So what our fuel cells solutions are designed to do is to start and stop based on battery voltage.

So they are highly reliable, there's no internal moving parts. What the fuel cell is going to do, like I had suggested, was it's going to turn off and on until the end of life. There's no preventative maintenance on the system. Again, it's just you're going to install it in your system, you're going to connect it to a battery bank and you're going to let it automatically turn off and on based on battery voltage. What's really unique about the technology that we produce here is that it is eco-friendly and clean tech. So if you're familiar with a gen set, what it's doing is it's producing power through a combustion process where one of the byproducts is emissions. So with the fuel cell, really what we're doing is there's a platinum catalyst inside the unit where your energy input is going to be Ultra-Pure methanol mixed with oxygen and your energy output is DC power, a small amount of water.

And in addition to that, a very insignificant amount of CO₂. So it's similar to a human breathing, which is why a lot of our clients around the world have moved over to this technology just as we are more conscious of our emission footprint. With regards to off-grid power, that is one of the nice things about the fuel cell is it really is clean power on demand. And what is unique about the technology as well is its footprint. So think about the size of a shoebox. That's really what we're doing here with the fuel cell technology. There's various models that we offer, but they all are very small, very lightweight, nice and compact, which is why it fits so nicely in the trailers that Liveview has designed.

Do you just want to switch to the next slide, David? Thank you. So getting into some of the technical specs around the fuel cell. So we've got various models. Really what we're doing is we specialize in providing a low-power energy solution. So our units can range as small as 45 watts. Our largest single unit is a 500 watt unit, and you can parallel multiple fuel cells together to meet rated power. So typically when we're sizing these systems, we're looking at what your continuous load is and we will suggest the most appropriate model of fuel cell based on your average power demand. For the Liveview trailers, our Pro 2400 Duo is going to be the most suitable based on the power demand. So all of our fuel cell systems have been designed to work in very extreme environmental conditions around the world. We are a global organization with over 50,000 units installed everywhere from the Arctic Circle down in south Texas, Singapore, you name it, everywhere globally. And the way that we've designed these systems is to work in conjunction with solar.

So on the Liveview trailers, there's a couple solar panels and a battery bank. And what the fuel cell is doing is it's got voltage sensing lines that connect directly to the batteries and it's going to start and stop based on battery voltage. So Bryan, maybe you want to take over from here and talk about maybe the way that the EFOY supports your trailer design with regards to the refueling?

Bryan Wright:

Yeah. Yeah, so as you had mentioned, you guys have many different configurations and sizes. We worked with SFC to kind of spec out the ideal system for the LVT platform as it sits today, right? That's why we opted for the 110 watt system. We're running, our systems typically we're in that 65 watt range at least that's more of the peak. A lot of our systems are a little bit lower, but we expect it for what our max load typically has been seen. And as you see there, we've done a lot of testing on this and seen that we can get a fueling pattern in Salt Lake City, that's where we're at, where we're only going to be filling this thing once a year with two 60 liter tanks in our system. Obviously that's contingent on power in, power out.

If you don't have good solar good conditions, you're at risk to be fueling more than that. But as you can see, we actually did a case study up in Star Valley, Wyoming. We chose that location for its harsh environment for cold weather and snow and this same 65 watt system we lasted, we burned through 52 of those 60 liters in 3.6 months. And so that was with the panels being covered. It truly was kind of the harshest environments, which kind of is a segue into why we are truly partnering with SFC and trying to integrate this system with our technology.

For us, the customer is the most important thing and what's most important for the customer is truly uptime, right? We're using these units, a lot of people are deploying them for security purposes and they rely on these camera systems to be a hundred percent reliable. And so we've got a lot of demand. We've chased this over the years with various different forms of generators trying to get a reliable condition and some of the things that were exciting and enticing to us that we knew the customer would enjoy was the benefits of the EFOY. Obviously it is a backup power system and is something to note. Our systems are primarily solar power. Our methodology is based on, hey, let's get the free energy as we can, but when all this fails we can't control the weather. If we did, we wouldn't have this problem.

The EFOY kicks in as a backup and it allows us to, as you saw before, with the only fueling once a year as compared to some of the other experiences we've had with various generators, we can promise the customer better up times with less maintenance in supporting our trailers. Some of the other benefits, as you can see in here from these two pictures, it's actually a very small system. We were able to create a little more space by removing... We had a real estate for our generator, we moved that generator and the EFOY you can see there is up on the left and it's all constrained into one side. For us, those who are familiar, it all fits within one battery box, which just adds to our sleekness, adds to the experience. Most people don't even know that these systems have backup power with them. David, if you don't mind, we can speak to some of the next things on the next slide. Which I kind of alluded to some of these, but that's the form factor is very exciting for us.

Like I said, the excitement of being able to, these are for us, put in our battery box, no one knows they're there, they're silent, quiet, they're green. It really has been something that we are excited and proud to release. Many of our customers running a generator unit, whether it was a propane unit or a gasoline unit, they're pretty noisy as Chelsea brought up. The green aspect, also the mechanical aspects, right? We're talking moving parts with the generators.

A lot of times you have belts and pulleys and various different mechanical needs. We don't have that with the EFOY. And then I think the biggest, most exciting thing for us on our platforms with our generator in average conditions, we were seeing about every three to four weeks in before a refuel occurs, we're able to push that further and further out, allowing less contact with the trailer again, which is our mantra as a company. We want it to be a deployed unit that goes out with no touches. And so if we can bump that down to that one year where you go out once a year and minimal maintenance, minimal touches and you get up time on your cameras, that's what we're chasing and that's what we're excited to offer with SFC.

Chelsea O'Connor:

And Bryan, just one thing to expand on what you were saying is, the energy input is ultrapure methanol. And the reason why we use ultrapure methanol is because of the superior energy density. So if you have a 50 watt continuous load, you've got about 14 days of autonomy in the fuel in one cartridge. Typically, our setups are designed to work with two cartridges. We can expand for more the Liveview trailer. As you've seen in the photos previously, they use two of our fuel cartridges, so that's about 50 days of power not factoring in anything that solar and battery is able to do. So there's not another fuel source in the world that has that ability to be so energy dense. And that's why we use the small cartridges and their screw cap. And Bryan can probably agree that replacing the fuel cartridges is very simple. It's safe to do. They're spill proof, tamper proof, and you don't need a commercial truck to come in and refuel. Anyone can take a cartridge out and unscrew the cap and replace it on the fuel cell unit.

Bryan Wright:

Perfect. Which has been, that's definitely a value add experience to our customers. As I've gotten some feedback, understanding the frustration as she just mentioned, of trying to get the commercial truck out to fill your tanks or even having one of your guys, or even yourselves going out to manage a tank every few weeks. There's costs associated to that, there's time associated to that. And again, if we don't chase that, we're at risk for that downtime, which is a word that we don't like to hear. So it's all in all an exciting venture. Something that I did miss as I was talking about this, it does provide opportunity to go into those harsher environments. We talked about temperature, but solar performance. We've had some customers have needs where they might need to put it in an area that is less than ideal and we can look at that, evaluate whether it's going to be enough solar performance with the backup energy with the EFOY unit. We're going into places that we likely couldn't have gone before.

Chelsea O'Connor:

Yeah, exactly. And the nice thing about the fuel cell technology is that it's enabling you to use a renewable energy source as your primary source of power without sacrificing operational efficiency as you suggested. The EFOY is only ever going to run when it needs to. So if the EFOY is running, then that would have been downtime and I mean, what Liveview and the fuel cell offer is a hundred percent uptime because all of these installations are highly critical applications where we can't afford any downtime and that's what the fuel cell brings to the table with this setup.

Bryan Wright:

I do want to emphasize personally, I always shocked at the quietness, literally when we're playing with these in our shop as we've kind of been developing and working with it, we had to resort to actually touching the unit to feel the vibration to see that it was on because there was enough audible noise from our environment that we couldn't hear that it was on. So it's pretty cool.

David Pearson:

Okay. Well I think right now is a great time to transition to kind of a Q&A, so if you do have questions there, like I mentioned at the beginning, there should be a question box for you to ask that in. But we'll just get to a few of the questions that have come in as we've been presenting while the rest of those questions come in. As we're talking about the methanol cartridges, what do those typically run and how does that compare to the cost of a traditional generator, a gasoline-powered generator?

Chelsea O'Connor:

Yeah, so the methanol that we deliver is provided in cartridges. There's various sizes and then there's smaller 10-liter cartridges. We design our setups to incorporate at a minimum two different fuel cartridges. And when we're sizing and designing these solutions, first thing we're going to ask you is what's your desired autonomy? So as Bryan suggested, they want to get the maximum amount of time between refueling intervals, which is going to vary depending where you are in the world and what solar is able to produce for power. But the cartridges are low cost, typically on a fuel cell solution, it's really on the operational side of the budget where you see the value of the technology because the only thing that you're going to do with this unit is a couple times a year you go out and replace the fuel cartridges.

There's a couple of different distribution warehouses in North America. We have a larger global distribution network as well. So when the EFOY is consuming fuel, what it's doing is it's communicating that through Modbus as well, so you're going to get low fuel alarms and you'll never run into a situation where you might've lost power during cold snap because you ran out of fuel, unless you might be ignoring low fuel alarms. So cartridges are easy to handle, readily available, and are low cost.

David Pearson:

And Bryan, those low fuel alerts, those are all within our command center as well. Which is where they would see typically they're fuel levels and things, they'd be able to receive those alerts.

Bryan Wright:

Correct. Yeah. That's one of the exciting things that we are able to offer as compared to other systems we've offered in the past is we'll have that fuel level reading and alerts that would come up through our system, but also allows us to be able to communicate with the EFOY and pull data from it to optimize this experience moving forward. To be able to have that capability is great. We love that SFC put that capability within their platform. It's as simple with us just plugging in through an ethernet port and we have communication with the device.

David Pearson:

That's fantastic. Now we do have a question coming in. Bryan, you were talking about how EFOY has reduced vibrations and they were wondering how the of a standard unit, how that can affect the quality of security or surveillance that we see and then how EFOY having no vibrations, therefore will help that to those issues to be resolved.

Bryan Wright:

Yeah, I assume that's a kind of context of our version to our gas generator, a Kohler system. It does have aggressive vibration, but the nice thing for us is we are running our system up through our mast and we actually tension it out through guy-wires and there's enough dampening through that experience that it doesn't actually affect our analytics when the generator is running or not. So it's really more, in this case, it's more a user experience. We've got a lot of customers that are in retail or more open, public spaces and having that loud vibration generator running as opposed to this EFOY, as I mentioned too, I'm excited for our customers to experience literally be running and no one will know except us.

David Pearson:

Great. And we have a question on when will this be available? Is this something that we're putting onto new trailers now by request and when or are we planning on adding this to older trailers?

Bryan Wright:

The availability, we have started deployment. We're in that ramp up phase, which means you got to get in quick to make sure that we can account for the numbers. But we do have units going out and again, we're just getting production. We've seen 25 go out so far and as many know, trying to work out those kinks, make sure there's always a ramp up phase before we can be full capacity production. But we are in that phase. As far as a retrofit option... Go ahead David. Sorry.

David Pearson:

Oh, I was just going to say as far as a retrofit option, what are we looking at?

Bryan Wright:

Yeah, so that's been a complex statement for us as far as the experience with the customer. It's really looking at that demand and seeing something that's unique about the EFOY system that has been different than other systems is it is a potential item that could be retrofitted as far as it's not too heavy. Our gas generator was heavy enough that you would need either a two-man lift or even a forklift to bring it in. This thing you could throw under your arm and feel, you almost feel like you're not being respectful for how much value it adds and how much you can throw it around. But long story short, as far as whether we're going to be retrofitting this, it's a matter of looking at the demand and looking at those logistics. There is some complexity in having either a certified technician or LVT units. We'll start studying that. If we see a demand, we could start looking at potentially doing that.

David Pearson:

And what I've heard around as well is the best way to get on that list is just to reach out to your AE or your CSM and just let them know that you've got a unit that's having trouble with uptime due to weather and to get on that list, to get the first retrofits that we send out.

Bryan Wright:

Yep. Yep. You reach out to them, I'm well plugged in with them. Once we see a big enough demand to say, "Hey, there's a market here and we need to address it," we'll start to look at that.

‍David Pearson:

Okay, we've got some time for one or two more questions and it looks like we have one coming in that is really just about how much will this increase the reliability of the units? Is it going to make... Are we confident in saying that it's going to dramatically increase the reliability of these units, especially in increment weather areas?

Bryan Wright:

I would say my direct experience has been very confident. Again, we took this unit up to Star Valley, threw it up there. For those who are, those who aren't really, the equation comes down to power in, power out. Power in is for us as a solar, if you don't have solar performance, you are at risk of having downtime if you don't have a backup unit. With the Star Valley unit, if you have any shadows or coverage, for example, in our case it was snow, we essentially were getting no solar input and we still had that unit last three and a half months, not going down. It didn't go down. We still had some fuel left, we went up to reservice it.

And again, without that EFOY unit, that unit would've been down indefinitely until the snow was cleared. But what that means for a customer is we do have constraints that when it comes to placing these units, sometimes we don't get optimal solar performance. You might have a building, you might have a tree, you might have things that are hurting your performance with the backup EFOY unit. Those systems can prevent that downtime. Now my clause on that is it's all contingent on the equation. If you go a hundred percent no solar, well that's not how we've designed the system. The EFOY can handle that, but you're going to be consuming obviously significantly more fuel.

David Pearson:

Okay. Well thank you so much Bryan and Chelsea for jumping on with us today. It has been fantastic. Chelsea, how should our guests get in contact with you if they want to learn more about EFOY and some of the capabilities?

Chelsea O'Connor:

Yeah, I mean feel free to visit our website. So we are SFC Energy Canada. And we are the North American division of our global organization. Connect with us on LinkedIn, go to the website. You've got the contact info on the screen right now as well, and I can be reached directly as well. And it's again, Chelsea O'Connor with SFC Energy Canada.

David Pearson:

Great. And if you are interested in learning more about LiveView and getting a unit with EFOY installed at your location, then you can reach out to us and our contact information is there on the screen as well. Thank you so much again, and we look forward to hearing from you all again soon.