[0:00] Zhi Wei Li
So, ICONICS is now a group company of Mitsubishi Electric. And we're very proud of that. And what I'd like to also go through today is some of the efforts that Mitsubishi Electric has around sustainability. In Ted's talk this this morning, he showed this the same chart. There are 17 goals that Mitsubishi Electric has laid out, to get to a more sustainable type of company. So here I'm going to talk about a few of them that, to me, felt a bit more interesting.
[0:45]
So first off, this is one that we are involved in, and we had a very in-depth view of it. SUSTIE is a zero-energy building that Mitsubishi owns and operates in Japan. It's a building that is also sort of a test lab, if you will, for their zero energy technologies. The ability for them to achieve the zero-energy building is through not only the deployment of technology, as you can see on the left there, but also in the design of the building. So basically, the building was designed to consume very little energy to heat and cool to keep the occupants comfortable. And ICONICS’ contribution to this effort is to be a layer over all these complex systems to control, to monitor, and to provide analytics on the data that we collect from all these complex systems that are necessary to keep the building's energy consumption very low. We have visualizations around where energy is consumed and what time it's consumed. We have charts that show the energy consumption by time, by area, by occupancy. And we have charts that provide accountability as far as what type of equipment is consuming more or less of the energy, and you have that photovoltaic generation to give you a perspective if the photovoltaic generation is enough to cover all the energy usage that the building itself needs. And that would mean that it wouldn't need to get energy from the grid.
[2:35]
So that's one interesting use case. The other interesting use case here is in closed loop recycling of plastic. All the appliances that we use, the appliances that Mitsubishi Electric produces and sells contain a lot of plastic. So traditionally, those plastics, when the life of the equipment has ended, they end up in landfills, and this is definitely not a good thing for the environment. So, what Mitsubishi Electric did here was to create a recycling process that takes all these old appliances breaks down to plastic back into the purity plastic pellets that can then be used in the next cycle of appliance manufacturing, to create new appliances. Basically, creating a loop where the plastic is reused and never ends up in landfills or the ocean and whatnot. And also, this reduces the need for new plastic to be created and manufactured, which is also a good thing in terms of energy consumption and carbon emissions.
[3:45]
The other thing around sustainability is water. Water is a very important resource, a critical resource for us. And so having clean water and having the ability to recycle water as best we can, is very important. Alright, so Mitsubishi Electric's contribution to that is they have this machine that you see there which is called the Mitsubishi Ozonizer. What it does is it cleans water through an ozonization process. And that is an efficient way of recycling water so that it can be reused. And it's been deployed around the world. There are over 1700 Ozonizers deployed around the world. And it's so efficient and so good that it's been used in the Toba Aquarium in Japan for the manatee tank. These creatures are very sensitive to the quality of water and the fact that this can be used to recycle the water from tanks so they don't have to continuously get fresh water in means that there is a lot less wasting of the water and more efficient process and a whole.
[5:01]
And lastly, the last one we want to highlight is in the context of renewable energy sources. We understand that we want to shift from gas or coal-based power generation to solar and wind. But the thing about solar and wind generation is, you can only generate that when the sun's shining and the winds blowing, right, and that doesn't happen 24 hours a day. So, we need to generate as much power as possible when those conditions are ideal and store any excess power that is not immediately consumed in batteries. But interestingly, those two types of power generation require slightly different profiles for the battery. Wind power generation needs small capacity, high output lithium, whereas solar power requires large capacity, NAS batteries. So traditionally, you would have to pick one, or you have to deploy two kinds of battery systems. Mitsubishi Electric's innovation here is to combine these two characteristics into a single hybrid battery storage system. So that means that you can have a power generation farm that is both solar and wind with a single battery system. That reduces the footprint, if you will, for the farm and the battery system. And also, you wouldn't need to have two types of battery systems to maintain. So that increases the likelihood of adoption for renewable generation and reduces the cost of that as well. So that, hopefully, will catch on. And we'll have more cleaner sources of energy.