Adile Ajaja with EVLO Energy Storage

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Industrial Talk, Scott Mackenzie, Siemens, smart grid, energy storage, cybersecurity, Hydro Quebec, renewable energy, grid infrastructure, digitalization, power generation, demand response, data centers, AI processing, energy efficiency.

00:00

Scott. Welcome to the industrial talk podcast with Scott Mackenzie. Scott is a passionate industry professional dedicated to transferring cutting edge industry focused innovations and trends while highlighting the men and women who keep the world moving. So put on your hard hat, grab your work boots and let's go all right once again. Welcome

00:22

to industrial talk, the number one industrial related podcast in the universe that celebrates you industry professionals all around the world. You're bold, brave, you dare greatly, you innovate, you collaborate. You're solving problems again each and every day, and boy is it, time to solve problems and challenges, especially here at distribute tech, which we're on site right now. There are a lot of challenges that need to be addressed, and there are a lot of companies that are doing it with incredible skills and professionalism there. That's a that's a new intro. I was trying to change my intro. And we're brought to you by those wonderful people at Siemens and Siemens smart infrastructure and grid software. Go to siemens.com find out more. They are a great company with great people who are all focused on solving the challenges of today, specifically in the world of distribution, transmission, grid, infrastructure, you name it, it's all out on siemens.com in the hot seat, and I'm gonna do the best I can with this name, a deal. You did great. Thank you. The company is EVLO. EVLO, e, v, l, o, let's get cracking. There you go. You having a good conference, great

01:41

conference, great energy. First time, second time, second time, but last time was more than 10 years ago.

01:48

Oh, you've seen a lot of changes I did, and I

01:51

changed job, and so I have another perspective too. Yeah,

01:53

because this, this is amazing. Uh huh, I it is. It's definitely a topic of conversation, anything to deal with the grid, the cyber security, distribution, you name it, power generation, and it's all here. They got stuff. It is, of course, I'm here at the farthest end of the conference. There's there. You can't go any

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further. But to get here, you have to go through all the boots. So I wouldn't know,

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because I've been in the salt mine, the salt mine all the time. Now, as I complain to you, and you don't care, give us a little background on who you are.

02:35

Well, my name is Adile. I'm an electrical engineer by trade. I started my career working as a power system engineer for Hydro Quebec. It's the largest producer of renewables in North America. So I spent there a few years, and I was working on smart grids. And it was in that context, actually, that I came to this conference so many years ago, and I did a prison

02:53

talking Smart Grid back then, yeah, yeah, yeah. And talking about Smart Grid today,

02:58

exactly. They keep getting smarter. I guess, always room for improvement. You know that? Yeah. So fast forward, many. Couple of years later, I joined what was, what was before I worked for a but what was before a flow was a company called stallion. It started as a joint venture between Hydro Quebec and Sony. So my parent company had you Quebec had a lot of patents on a battery chemistry called LFP, very safe battery, so they had all the science behind it, and they partnered with Sony back then, who was the largest manufacturer of those cells. So they put their forces together and started a joint venture to create a grid scale energy storage systems. And that lasted for a few years before hydrocobac decided to go on its own and took everything and created envelope, and here we are today with a fully capable commercial operation,

03:47

but you're still connected with Hydro Quebec. We are so it's still,

03:55

you know, currently, they offer financing, they offer a strategy, they offer these type of things, but we operate as a autonomous entity. So Hydro Quebec mission is really centered around delivering electricity to its customers, but it has a couple of subsidiaries to try and promote different technologies. It also has a research center. So and so we're so we're one of those external entities. Our link is mostly through financials.

04:22

Where's your office? So

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we have a headquarter, corporate headquarter on the Island of Montreal, but our engineering headquarter, and most of the activities taking place on the south shore of Montreal in a city called varenn. This is in the province of Quebec, in the country of Canada.

04:37

Yeah. Let's see. This is cool. That is a bucket list visit. I want to go to Montreal because the, apparently, the foodie scene is very good.

04:48

It is very diverse. Yeah,

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there are a couple of things in my life that I like, I like traveling and I like

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eating. So we're gonna do an episode two. Yeah, when you. Do it, yeah, there it is after you go to a couple of restaurants and we can start, oh, kick off the discussion with your preferred meals.

05:11

Okay, okay, I'm done. I'm there. You had me. You had me. All right. Give us a little sort of overview of evlo,

05:21

right? So evlo is a company that commercializes grid scale energy storage systems. So our mission is to the proposed solutions to our utility customers. RPP customers is to propose to them energy solutions that are innovative and cost efficient. At evlo, we have our full in house, engineering, electrical, mechanical and software. So our model is we are an integrator, so we procure different parts from different suppliers, and we build a full turnkey solution, including with the software that runs on top of it. That's our value proposition.

05:58

A lot of conversation have evolved around this, the connected, the necessity to have this digitalization of of your grid, to be able to pull that data, to be able to do that, but it's all connected. Take us through sort of that cybersecurity component, that protection element, that there's there's no compromise. It has to be protected. Vital infrastructure take us through

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that absolutely so cyber security is at core of what we try to deliver. Like you said, those systems, they have to be connected by nature. They are connected to the grid. They are connected electrically. They're connected digitally as well, and this has to be done in a safe way. In our space, we deliver solutions that are mission critical. So it is a necessity that we're protecting against attacks and against and against failures. So I would say cyber security is a is the way to look at it, the way to look at it. And let me know, if you want to shorten this answer, but I don't want it. I like to look at it through the product life cycle. Yeah, so, you know, you know, when you dEVLOp a product, as you know, it starts from a design, and then there will be a, you know, supply part, and then we're going to assemble and manufacture, then deploy and then operate. And at each of those stages, there's an opportunity to include cyber security and another at three levels, first at the point at the let's say, at the planning level, and then at the detection level, and then at the remediation level. So when we talk about cyber security of an energy asset, most people will think will have the image in their head that somebody will try to attack from remote and connect and try to take down, take offline, for example, a storage system. But so we try to protect against this, for example, with firewalls with rules, and that's one aspect of the technology. But really, when we talk about cybersecurity, we really think about it in the whole product life cycle. So this will start like early on when I mentioned that we begin with design and supply. We're going to make sure that we have security by design embedded, and we're going to make sure that we supply only from trusted sources. We're going to make sure that the logistics and the transportation is is covered. So cyber security is very broad, but I think looking at it from the product life cycle perspective helps, you know, piece it into more easy to understand chunks.

08:30

There's legacy systems out there. True. How do you how do you protect the existing legacy systems? If you got the product life cycle, it's easier to have that conversation about about design and build and so on, and be able to build in that, that protection layer within that, that conversation and that activity, what about the exist? There's a lot of legacy equipment that exists out there. What do we do about protecting those assets?

09:03

This is a great point. There is an agency called NERC, and it's an overarching agency that covers Canada and the US that ensures that the grids are operating in a stable way. So if you want to operate a grid in Canada or in the US, you have to be registered to NERC, and they will impose on your set of requirements to make sure that you that all the grids, they operate stably and avoid having blackouts and different adverse Yeah. Not good. Exactly on the grid, a nurk says that the energy assets on average have an age of 40 years old. Yeah. So, so what you're saying is real, and more than that, 25% of all the assets are older than 50 years old. So this is a true thing. It's a reality that we have many assets that are really old. So now, what can we do about it? NERC again has a set of. The requirements. They called NERC CIP that covers 14 chapters. We don't need to go into the details, but they bring certain requirements that you know help you, that help you increase the cybersecurity level of your assets. And they will cover things from supply management to training to different things of that nature. So what do we do with the existing asset? We have to create a fence around it for things that are in operation. That's the best we can do today, because it's not really realistic to try and think that we're going to replace everything at once. When things work, we can't. There is just too much, and

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it doesn't make sense if the assets are operating according to design. I mean

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exactly, if it's working, why touch it? But so the strategy, for the most part, is to wait for things to reach their end of life, and then when it gets replaced, it gets replaced with the new the newer thing. And the newer thing is supposed to perform better in terms of cybersecurity in that time. In that time, the main strategy is to try to bring a perimeter to limit access. So first of all, from external person that would like to have access, so to fire one everything, so it would be to create a bubble. So everything, the bubble May a little bit less safe, but if the bubble can can be burst, then at least you have one level of safety. And then, even for that legacy hardware, there is always some configurations and strategies that you can do, for example, replacing passwords. It can be a manual process versus being an automated process. So things can be done in this way. Audits are conducted, pen tests are being carried to try and assess the risk level and the vulnerability level. So things think things are put in place, and just to conclude this solution that's perfectly cyber safe, like at the prevention level is really hard to achieve. So so a lot of a lot of is going to be done to try and prevent an attack from happening, but then also things that are being done to ensure that if something happens, we're able to detect it fast. So we deploy systems to have quick detection, and then we deploy other systems to have a response to it. So try to and trying to mitigate the effect. If something were to

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happen, very good. I'm going to sort of shift. If this is outside of your realm or comfort, just you just let me know, much of the conversation here at this event is talking about the increase in demand for power, and it's just happening, data centers, whatever AI, processing what it's all around that, Right? And, and it's significant in the world of Hydro Quebec. How is that organization addressing that demand? I mean, when you get right down to it, I mean, you have a significant hydro asset base, how do you how do you scale?

13:00

Absolutely, this is a great challenge. It's a great challenge for Hydro Quebec. It's a great challenge for all the utilities, for Hydro Quebec in particular, because you're asking, there's also a shift in trying to go fully green, yeah, so this is an added requirement on the production capabilities. But like you said, there is also work to be done on the demand side. So at Hydro Quebec, there are some programs that are rolling out to try to improve the performance of demand response. So for example, tariffs that will that will be adjusted depending on certain situations, to incentivize people to consume it a little bit differently. There's also electronic devices that can be installed at people's houses to control, to better control, temperature and other and other equipment in the house. So there are some programs that are put in place to try to address the demand aspect of it. And then there's, you know, infrastructure and going on to try to address the generation aspect of it.

13:56

Yeah, I I can understand the demand side, and, but there's only going to be so much efficiency that you can sort of gain from that, and, and, but

14:06

if you look at the context of Hydro Quebec, we have a system where it peaks really high during winter. It gets cold during winter, so Oh yeah, the system is dimension to be able to supply electricity for that peak. So there is opportunity outside of the peak period to for more efficiency. And it's a mix. It's a mix. It's a mix of different things. So for example, should do we really need to have a install generation base to be able to sustain the peak? Or should we have some of our own and some that will be imported? So there's different strategies that you know that are that are being looked after to try and address this solution from an economical angle as well.

14:49

Put your future hat on. See what? Yeah, there it is. Take us through what you see, what, what, what you think is is happening. I would be in. Press and know what your your insights are.

15:03

So if I put my future hat on, so for if I answer this from I can, I could try to answer it from an energy in that from a cyber security perspective, if that makes sense. So from an energy perspective, you know, demand seems to continue to grow. You know, population is growing and the needs of the population is growing. So I think mathematically,

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data centers and just

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exactly. And then the technology also is just more and more demanding in terms of energy data centers, and we can talk about, I mean, data centers for crypto mining, for AI, for also these sort of usages. So it's it's only growing. It's only growing and, and, and I think we should embrace this to some extent, because the ability, I mean, the availability of energy, will translate into more comfort, more technology, more value for people. So this is on, this is on the one side. So definitely it's growing. And from also a climate perspective, if we're trying to shift towards more renewables, there's also, again, with my future hat, I believe that. I believe that wind energy production, solar energy production and storage are going to continue to play a major role, and all of this has to be in a cyber safe?

16:21

Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot right on your calendar right there that's well well done. Hey, how do people get a hold of you?

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What's your best way? Well, LinkedIn is the easiest way. All right, there it is, man.

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All right. You are wonderful. Thank you. I enjoyed that conversation immensely, and, in fact, I enjoy all the conversation, but you were the best.

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You said that to everyone pretty much you

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read me. All right. Thank you very much. All right, listeners, we're gonna have all the contact information for a deal out on industrial talk. His LinkedIn stack card will be there, so reach out to him. Great insights, and it's a must. If you're connected, you need cybersecurity. If you're connected, you need to have conversations with individuals that understand that, so reach out to him. Find out more. We're brought to you by those wonderful people at Siemens. Siemens smart infrastructure and grid software. Go to siemens.com find out more. You will not be disappointed. Great company, great people, great solutions. All there. Siemens.com All right, we're gonna wrap it up on the other side. Stay tuned. We will be right back.

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You're listening to the industrial talk Podcast Network,

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a deal that's his name, contact information out on industrial talk. Here's LinkedIn stack guard right there. I'm looking at it right now, chock full of great information. The company is evlo energy stores. That's e, v, l, o, energy storage. So and we're talking cyber security, and we're talking about what is happening in the energy and utility space, there's so much you need to be involved. That's what you need to be involved. You need to you need to say, yes, I want to be ball involved. That's it. It's all cool. All right, industrial talk again, is here for you. We're starting a new platform, industrial news network. We are featuring incredible personalities that are passionate about you and what you do. You gotta check it out. We're starting to build it. It's starting to gain a little traction. It's all excited. All right, be bold, be brave. There greatly. Hang out with Adile, and you will be changing the world. We're gonna have another great conversation coming from distribute tech and others. So stay tuned. You.