Tantalus Systems Holding Inc. (TGMPF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good afternoon. Thanks for joining us today. We have a very special presentation with Tantalus Systems. With me, I have Peter Londa, CEO; and Andrew Mitchell, who's Director of Utility Solutions, he's actually done a demo with us before, but today is going to be a bit of a special demo we're going to walk through The Day in the Life of the Utility. So it should be very interesting for a lot of the viewers that would like to see this offer in action. I don't think we're going to work off an actual presentation, but this will contain some forward-looking statements. So if you want to know more about those, you can find them on the company's website on the presentation, and we will have a Q&A session about halfway through the hour. So feel free to put any questions that you have in the Q&A box. And with that out of the way, I'd like to introduce Peter Londa and Andrew Mitchell. Thank you both for joining us today.

Deb, thanks for having us.

Thank for having us.

Yes. No, it's great. I want to thank you also for supporting our charity drive for food banks. I think you've donated to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank. So we really appreciate that and your support. Pete, I don't know if you want to say a few words before we get going on the demo.

Well, first, Deb, thank you to you and Adelaide Capital for facilitating the webinars and giving companies like us an opportunity to contribute to the fundraising effort that -- and the charity effort that you've been organizing through Adelaide. So pleasure to be here and pleasure to support the cause. And I would just say, we're looking forward to, I think, providing an illustration of what our software capabilities are. especially for those that follow us in the market, sometimes hard to extrapolate how devices and software that we talk about really come together to solve specific problems for the utilities and the way in which they interact with our technology, which Andrew is going to walk us through. We think of ourselves as a hardware-enabled software company, and a lot of what Andrew is going to show you is based on all of the data that we capture from devices deployed throughout the distribution grid whether that's some of the core competencies around our TC modules that get integrated into meters or some of the data that we're now collecting through our TRUSense gateway. And so as these devices and the data crystallized for us, enables us to take a data-driven approach to really helping utilities modernize the grid. And so with that, Andrew, thanks for joining us and carving out time to give a demo of our capabilities.

My pleasure. Thanks for the introduction, Pete. Again, my name is Andrew Mitchell. As was mentioned earlier, Director of Utility Solutions at Tantalus. I actually ran a utility for 17 years as an engineering supervisor as an early Tantalus customer. I'm going to share my screen with you folks right now so that we can take a look at a live system, let me bring this up. And I'd like to make it somewhat -- I don't say entertaining, but give you a feel, based on your role if you were a CFO at a utility or you happen to be on a Board of Directors or if you happen to be an employee at a utility how Tantalus impacts that utility on a minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day basis. And what I like to call this when I'm traveling with our sales team are giving demos is a Day in the Life. So what you're looking at is a dashboard of a system, all of our customers have the same dashboard, and we call these KPIs. We tried to simplify this so that those that have all education levels, if you will, someone hired in from a meter shop or someone hired in as an engineer. This all means the same thing. And we try to color code that in a mantra of green, yellow and red. Green is good, yellow is marginal and red requires some attention. And so as you come in and look at a dashboard like this, what does it mean at the utility level. And as Pete talked about, we have all these hardware devices that enable us to do software, collect all the software, the data and then make decisions from it. And so what we do is we come in, in the morning time and some of these data pieces, if you will, or hardware pieces are the backbone of our network. We call them Gateway. So you've seen some of our announcements with the TRUSense Gateway. That is now one piece of our infrastructure that we're pushing towards utilities to go to at the 5-foot meter level that we put out in the field, whether it be fiber, cellular or Ethernet, that talks to our other devices in the field. And so a utility person comes in, in the morning and can check the health of all the devices very, very quickly, looking at a KPI screen, a widget or a Gateway, whatever you want to call it, and know how their day looks from the backbone of the utility and the network. What we do next is we move over to this little KPI here called land device status. That's going to tell the utility of the health of every single meter on the network and every single device that's out there throughout the system. Now is the number going to be perfect. Well, we strive for perfection, but at a utility, there's always car accidents, poles get hit, storms come through, things happen. So I like to say that this is a living, breathing infrastructure that's going to change day by day. We can never stop a squirrel from causing an outage or a bird flying through a bird guard, things of that nature. When you're at home and you see your lights blink, invariably, that's 90% of the time is caused by an animal that's getting into a line or a tree branch that brushes into an overhead line where your lights blink and cause you that frustration at home, and we can monitor all that, which I'll show you here shortly, but that affects our network. And so now the utility can see that very, very quickly in the morning coming in, taking a quick peek and knowing how their day is going to go. Tantalus is one of the few vendors where we call it TRUScan, but we talk to multiple commodities, whether it be water, electric or gas. And so we break that out for the utility to monitor their water gas or other vendors that we can read so they can quickly determine do I need to go out in the field today and address a water meter that's leaking? Do I have a gas meter that has a problem? Again, the green, yellow, red mantra allows the utility to come in here very quickly and know what's going on, click on the details and then go out and solve the problem that might be at hand. So first thing in the morning, we've looked at 3 of these KPIs. The utility personnel says, well, my network is in good shape. Everything is communicating, Life is in good shape. Now I switch hats. When I ran my utility, I needed to know where outages were at. So I would move up to the upper left corner and find out if I had any outages. And if I did, I'd want to know, do I have any meter personnel? Any line crew out there? Do I have any accidents out there? Do I know where my people are and it's the public safe? Tantalus meters provide us that information immediately in what we call a TRUPush method. So when a meter loses power, it instantly tells us that there's an outage, and it comes on to our screen and we know within a matter of a second what is taking place. So in this situation, there's no outages. If there were, I would want to know, I would get on the truck radio at the utility and find out where everyone is at and make sure that it's been addressed. What I tell all of our utilities next when I'm out there as we move over to remote disconnects. Remote disconnects allow the utilities to offer multiple things: one, safety for their personnel, right? You don't have to go out and collect money from someone who happens to be in arrears. You can do it remotely from the office. You can automate it, unfortunately, at my former utility, we had a situation where weapons were pulled on meter employees. We switched to all remote disconnect meters to take that safety situation in hand and alleviate that problem. But what a remote disconnect allows us to do is, it allows us to have power to every customer. So you can put someone on a prepaid program. So even if a customer can't afford electricity, you can set them up to be successful using our meters in a prepay scenario to be able to look at a remote disconnect meter, and do what we call a 90-10, 80-20, 70-30 program for bad debt. And that way, a customer always maintains power, we get rid of trip charges and the utility becomes the hero even if the utility has to shut a customer off, that customer can get their power turned back on automatically throughout the day as soon as there are so many pennies above the margin that is set at the utility. And then normally, utilities do not disconnect on Saturdays and Sundays. So as long as the customer is positive on a Friday night, they can have power all weekend and be shut off on a Monday morning and then work all week to do that scenario throughout the week. Again, from there, what we move to is what we call interval success rate. Tantalus is different than our competition. We measure ourselves against every single interval that is supposed to come into the office. What I mean by that is if residential meters are supposed to be every hour, and I'm expecting let's say, 1,000 meters to come in every day, every hour, then I measure myself to that benchmark. If it's 5 minutes or 15 minutes, I want every single reading at that interval now. Is that always 100%? No. work takes place out on the lines. As I mentioned earlier, with storms, animals, outages, bad weather, things of that nature. This number is going to fluctuate, but it's a heartbeat. And it tells our customers as long as you stay at a certain level, your system is performing optimally. Again, when you see all this green on the screen, life is pretty doggone good at a utility and their day is going to go pretty well from all the data that we're collecting. Now, this also allows the utility to have pinpoint accuracy when it comes to looking at customer data. So if I were to look at what we call the TRUConnect, which is our meter we come into details, and we separate that out by what we call polyphase which are commercial and industrial customers think hospitals, factories, schools, banks, things of that nature fall under those categories. single phase is usually residential doesn't have to be, but that's kind of how we separate it for the utility. If I have a customer that calls in to the utility with a high bill complaint, I now have the option of being able to search that customer up. And for talking purposes, we simply named the customer high bill to get to it easily. But if I come in and look at a customer, now a customer service rep can open a screen, which we call our single pane of glass and know everything about that customer. We instantly know the customer's location, their address, the service location, the transformer, the phase that, that customer is on and even the substation and feeder. That all becomes important as we're working blinks or outages here in a few minutes, but we now know everything about that customer location so that we can kind of dive in and make sure everything is okay at the residence. If we look here under consumption data, Tantalus does a -- we can always get a reading within 60 seconds. So all of our customers, all of our 330-plus, 340-plus utilities have the ability to query a meter instantaneously. And so what that provides is the utility personnel can query a meter in an outage situation, in a high bill situation, and it gives us an instantaneous reading that comes in and lets us know what the usage is on the meter and what the voltage is by having this, we now know whether or not we have to roll certain personnel from the utility out to look at the meter, look at the location, or whether we can talk to the customer and talk to them and see if some things happen behind their breaker panel in the house without having to roll a vehicle from the office. But from the high bill complaint, the customer calls in and says, well, I'm not real happy something changed in my bill and let's just pretend we go back to February. The customer calls in and says, my bill in February dramatically increased. Well, if I log in and I now have the opportunity to look at all this metering data, I can look at it in realtime, and we stored in the system for a year and change. But now I can go back and look and say, well, something happened at this customer location on February 16 to 17 that caused the usage to dramatically increase. I can click into that and find out, was it a situation with weather? Was it voltage? What actually happened and I can start to see the usage patterns every so many minutes to determine what's taking place on the 16, and I go to the next day on the 17, and at the utility, we can determine different things from all this data that tells us that people come home from school, maybe they had an extra child come home from college, maybe they had someone else move in. Maybe they have a water heater that's starting to go back all these different things that causes the usage to increase at a home that most people wouldn't think about when they call into a utility to complain about a high bill. This data is so powerful, it allows the utility to have that conversation and pinpoint accuracy and they can even send it to the utility up here, and we can come up here and we can export this. But we could send it via e-mail to a customer and have the exact same conversation or look at the same thing and have the conversation and say, do you see this? Do you see that, and it makes the animosity and the anger factor disappear when talking to consumers when they're complaining about the money they've spent when they don't understand it. And now a utility can take Tantalus data and Tantalus information and very, very precisely point out to the customer what's taking place. Again, from a utilities perspective, it allows a utility to have conversations that we never had before, could have. We can ask a customer how old their water heater is. Is it electric? Are they running baseboard heating, are they running strip heating? Are they running this? Are they running that? And usually, we can get to the point where it's an aha moment where the customer says, I did this or this happened or we found that to where even customers have left the door open in their house and didn't know it, or their garage that's heated and caused the bill to go up. So just having this type of data allows the utility to better serve the membership quite well. Again, these panes of glass all look the same. We can do all kinds of things. We can do remote disconnects from a customer's house -- from the office I mean, we don't have to roll trucks. It's a great savings at a utility level. We can make meters bidirectional. Well, what does that mean? That means if a customer calls the utility and says, I'm going to put solar on my home or I'm going to buy an electric vehicle may go through the proper permitting and get things installed, I now can change the meter from a delivered only standpoint to a bidirectional meter to where I can see the energy going both ways from what the utility delivers to the consumer and what the consumer is pushing back on the grid. Now for all -- everybody on here that's paying attention in the industry. Every state is different. Every country is different. The pricing is different. And that's where utilities need this type of data to be able to go to their legislators, go to their members and go to the customer base because it is so different across North America on what we do with energy being pushed back on to the grid that utilities -- this is just been an invaluable piece for utilities to have to be able to understand what's taking place on the grid. We move over a little bit here to alarms. We take all this data, as Pete mentioned, hardware enables -- a few hardware devices that make us a software-enabled company, we now can set parameters to what we call the substation level. And so when you're driving out there and you see a substation with all those wires and going everywhere, and you think to yourself, well, how does Tantalus play in this area? What does Tantalus do? Well, we're monitoring the performance of that substation all the way down to the house and beyond. Every component in the house that's coming back in, and we're seeing what happens to the voltage at the residential level, we now can aggregate all that back up and me as a former utility employee, I now know if that substation is behaving correctly or if the transmission company that's even higher is it providing enough voltage to my distribution substation so that you can turn your hair dryer on, dry your hair, heat your house, cool your house in the winter. And that's what this Tantalus information provides the utility in real time. We know right down to the second, what's taking place at the utility at the home level to be able to provide better service for all those customers at the utility. What Tantalus does is we try to teach all of our customers how the system works, right? We put this all out here, we map it out and we show how everything communicates. There's nothing hidden. There's no secrets. We try to make it as straightforward as possible. With technology that exists today, I know how far meter one talks to meter two, whether it's across the street, whether it's across the yard, whether it's from the house to the house here, whether it's this house to this house. Why is that important? Well, in an RF industry, things that are talking over radio, if I have a line crew out or, let's say, a dump truck takes out this pole here with this meter is at or somebody knocks this meter off the side of the home and this meter communicates through it, Tantalus is a self-healing network, and it will automatically heal and this meter will go somewhere else to talk back to the office. We try to teach our utilities this because throughout the day, if you're doing certain things, a meter might go offline based on work being done, based on an accident different things like that, but let the system heal itself, correct itself, while the utility as sending someone out to fix this broken pole where this meter is setting and bring it back online. We just like to be able to teach our customers how the entire system works so that they understand it so they can be better prepared to make sure all the data is making it back to the office. I won't bore you with all of the details down here, but everything is available to the customer to understand what is taking place. What I want to show you next is I'm going to jump back to the, what we call our main screen. And our CEO has been very kind in letting us put a device on his house, a TRUSense Gateway because we're trying to capture some issues in the state that he lives in. And so I'm going to use Pete's meter, but this is one of our new TRUSense Gateways. The beauty of this device is you do not have to be a full-blown Tantalus customer to utilize that device. We now can take this TRUSense Gateway to any utility across North America and the Caribbean Basin that have the same meter socket sizes that we do and set one of these devices and be able to see the powerful amount of data that comes back with this device. And when I say powerful, Pete referenced what we call a TC module for our normal AMI industry. That device still has a Linux computer in it, still is phenomenal. But just think of this device, for a lack of a better term, on steroids. It is able to see 15,000 samples of data every second. So if you can think about that, what we're trying to find at a house level compared to a substation to help the customer out allows us to be able to window in and watch this information in realtime. So this meter or the TRUSense Gateway is currently on Pete's house . Now we've hit in the exact location. He's in Connecticut, but we show it on the map in Florida. We know it's a 240-volt rated circuit, 100 amp current rating. And as we roll down, what's very important to know about the TRUSense Gateway is we have all the alarms and events at a utility level. When was the last time this device was an outage? Well, we programmed it in Canada, put it in a box, shipped it to the boss. So it was out September 25 to October 6, shipping across and then it was plugged in at the location. It's not how it normally works, but we tracked it, we know it. We know why that was an outage. Right now, there hasn't been what we consider a voltage sag per se at Pete's location. But now I'm going to show you we've caught sag alarms in there, which is a little bit different, and I'll show you what that is. But we're able to see the temperature at the device at Pete's location. We're able to see when it was measured. We're able to monitor harmonics at his location. We're able to monitor right down to the cycle at his location to see what is taking place and why we're seeing certain things. Our previous meters that I showed you go down to 5-minute intervals. This one goes down to the cycle. Well, what does that mean? That means the previous meter I was looking at, I could have one reading every 5 minutes in our Tantalus system. And the TRUSense Gateway, I can have 15,000 readings every second to show you the type of power that this device has. So what we're looking to capture, if I come in here and I want to see what's taking place at our CEO's location, we can see that on December 5, something happens with the total current in the home to go from 61.4 amps all the way up to 215 amps, and it rides there for a little bit and then it falls back down. Now why is that important at a utility? Well, we know that Pete has a F-150 Lightning, an electric vehicle plugged into a transformer out on the pole and the rest of his house also has to have power at said location. So now we're able to dive in here and start to take a look and see what happens every so many seconds of the day, every hour we can look, and we now see that his truck was plugged in here around 10:00 at night. And if we want a window in just a little further -- I'm sorry, I hit the wrong button. Let me go back, I can click in a little further and we can start to get even more granular data. From a utilities perspective, to have this kind of information, and; to look at what's happening with the amp ridge at the house to look what's happening with the voltage at a house level at this level is unheard of. Normally, you have to spend $5,000, $6,000 on a special device, have a utility crew roll a bucket truck, go set it on the side of a home, leave it for 2 weeks, collect the data, bring it back to the office, download it from an engineer. Hopefully, you captured the situation that occurred then be able to assess what happened and then call the customer and offer a solution as to what you should do next or what the utility should do next. Having this at the location, we've already started to be able to capture different things happening at the location and talk to the local utility and say, hey, this is what we're seeing. We know we're not a customer of yours from a Tantalus perspective. But here's this data that we're capturing at the resident level behind the transformer. Can you please tell us, is this happening to the neighbors. And if they can't tell us then they have to go further back to the substation to figure out if only Mr. Londa is seeing this or if all of his neighbors are seeing the same situation. While in this situation, his truck comes up to 200 amps, he charges his truck, life is good, and we just walk through it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, second by second, and it's an unbelievable amount of data that the utility now has at their fingertips that we can start to make decisions that affect the overall grid, grid health and grid capacity. What I want to show you, I'm going to step out of here as we were looking back at Pete's device on his home, if I go to active alarms, we don't currently have any active at Pet's location. But if I come in here and I say, well, I want to select this device and I want to look at the historical analysis, and I want to look at old events that took place, since the device was set at the location we are now capturing sags and we kind of probably need to rename this, but it's faster than a sag. We're monitoring and seeing on November 16, for a 13 second period, we noticed the voltage dropped. Again, we caught the voltage dropping for 9 seconds at 2 in the morning, 2:36 at 2:59 for another 5 seconds the voltage drop. Well, it's 25 degrees, it's below freezing in Connecticut. What happens when that sag hits and it knocks your furnace offline or it knocks your your truck offline or your vehicle off-line and you wake up to go to work the next morning and you don't have power in your vehicle, it becomes a very, very tenuous situation when things like that start happening with no answer. So at Tantalus, we're able to collect this information at the utility level and tell the utility, look, it's supposed to be above 230 volts, you were 40 volts below what's acceptable, you can burn up equipment in the home, you can cause things to fail dramatically within the home. Different things take place at 190 volts that are not supposed to run at 190 volts at the house level. You always hear when you're buying something, that's 120-volt, your computer, you plug it in the wall, your TV, you plug it in the wall, well we measure, not only line to what we call neutral at 120, we measure it across the whole service, which is supposed to be roughly 240 volts. As you can see, the value is well below that for a 5-second period, which can cause damage within the home. You can see we have other situations that have occurred as well since the device was set. We've had a blink at the location. We've had a loose neutral wire, things are occurring that we're trying to capture and provide data to the utility. It's a bit of a rare scenario here, but we just wanted to show you the power of our device as we roll it out to the, I believe, 60-plus utilities that have already purchased this device and the power that it gives them to be able to analyze and work with things at the utility level and talk to their members, C&I customers, different things like that, to see this data in realtime, brings it to life to let you know what you can do with it. So now you've seen the main screen where we come into a day in the life, and we say, well, here's what a day looks like. Here's some outages. You've seen the data. What next now? What's next in the industry? And I'm sure you all have heard the buzzwords of analytics, AI, whether it be the big buzzwords NVIDIA, OpenAI, you name it, you're hearing that out there. And what's happening is at Tantalus, we have so much data now coming in from our utilities than we can actually take this data and we can turn dumb equipment smart. And what I mean by that is if you think about when you're driving out and you look up and you see an overhead pole or you see a big green transformer on a pad, feeding an apartment complex or feeding a hospital, it's just wire, metal and oil. It is dumb as dumb can be. But what we do is we take all the Tantalus data with a little bit of AI and machine learning, and we tie it all back together, and we're offering analytics to our customers. What I can now tell a customer about every transformer is whether it's critically overloaded. Well, what does that mean? That means it's going to burn down. That means it's going to melt, cause a pole fire and go out in the middle of the night causing overtime outage and a bad situation. What does overload mean? Well, overload means it's exceeding its nameplate rating. Is that bad? Not all the time. You can do it for a little while, but we track that. And so that overloaded shortens the life span of these transformers, which since post-COVID, have become very, very expensive and long lead times for utilities. It's one of the things that changed most dramatically post-COVID is the cost of transformers. And then we can see when you're having reverse power flow. Reverse power flow is great if the utility knows about it, and it's a solar setup. It's a battery set up. It's an EV vehicle to grid. It's not so great when a customer hooks up a generator to a circuit panel during a major outage, and now the public is threatened with safety and the line crew is threatened with safety. And so Tantalus goes beyond and shows the utility which transformers are seeing that reverse power flow. If you think about it, if you've ever added anything at your home and not called the utility, many places this happens. You're supposed to call the utility and let them know you've added on to your home or you've done X, Y, Z to your house. It doesn't happen very often. So utility scramble and we use Tantalus data at my former utility every day, every hour, every minute to see when new load was coming on through alarming and things of that nature to be able to see what was happening in what we would call a blind spot. And then we tie that all together with event alarms, a sag, a swell, an outage or a blank on a 2,000 kVA pad mount that feeds the hospital becomes important today. If you have enough of those, it breaks the oil down in the transformer. I don't want the hospital generator to kick on and run for 8 hours because that becomes an expensive endeavor for a hospital. I want to monitor what's happening on my grid so that I can manage that at all times to be a good steward of what's taking place at that transformer, right? I want to make sure that transformer lasts as long as it's supposed to, that it's running optimally and that I'm not degrading its life, and I'm not causing a C&I factory, a school, a hospital to be doing something or using more power than they should based on that transformer and its capacity. So with a little bit of AI, we're able to see that. And so if I come down here, what we do is we highlight this on the maths for all of our customers for every single transformer. What you're looking at is a utility that covers 600 square miles in Northern Indiana. It's about 30 degrees today. I can look at every single transformer and their nameplate load and see if -- how the system is performing. And what you see is, today, only 33 transformers out of 15,000 are over their nameplate rating. Again, the engineers can look at this very, very quickly and decide is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Is it okay? And so whether you're an engineer or not, we've tried to take out the mathematics of all of it and show you with the Tantalus data that a transformer like the one you're seeing now is a normal transformer on a pole like hanging outside of Pete's house that has to power, an F-150, even though it's under sized, we can run transformers harder in our industry for a certain period of time until they become less efficient and degrade and it becomes this cost benefit analysis. So now each and every utility can see what's happening and determine maybe I should upgrade that one. Maybe I should do something different. Maybe I need to protect that location. And so that's what our information provides. What we can do as well as we take all this information for the utility, one other piece that a lot of people don't think about are what we call idle transformers. And again, pre-COVID, utilities were notorious for leaving, abandon connections, retired services, people move out, we would leave wires, poles and transformers sit for up to 10 years, hoping someone would move in because it wasn't worth our time or it wasn't worth it financially to go out and remove the pole, pull the wire back in, bring the transformer back into the shop. Well, that's changed dramatically post-COVID. It is now something that most utilities are planning as someone leaves a service, if no one is there to move in, if no one is there to take over the service they'll only leave it out there for a certain period of time in certain scenarios, and they'll go pull that pole back, they'll pull the wire back. They'll bring the transformer back. And now we can see these idle transformers. An idle transformer that's sitting out there cost money to keep running. And so it plays a factor every day across North America and the Caribbean on being energized. A utility has to energize it if it's out there. We can now see those transformers and determine whether or not they're supposed to be idle. Sometimes things happen in the industry that are not supposed to happen and a transformer goes from full production mode to idle mode and utilities bill in correctly, and there can be hundreds of thousands of dollars lost every month based on that occurrence, which we've already captured and helped some of our customers overcome. Again, from an underloaded transformer perspective, if you think about when you're out driving through a neighborhood, if you don't see any overhead lines, look around for what we call petascales, green petascales and try to think to yourself, well, how many houses do I think are connected to the same petascale. Do I share a transformer with a lot of other people? Or do I have my own transformer. And if you ever go and talk to your neighbor and find out you're on the same transformer, if that transformer becomes overloaded because one of you put in a hot tub or somebody did something, you can dim the lights of your neighbor and that's what the utility has to monitor and stay on top of so that we can come out and put a larger transformer in if you didn't call and tell us that, hey, I put something new in and I've increased the load so much that I'm now dimming my neighbor's lights. Well, Tantalus takes that approach and says, look, we'll provide all this information for you, a little bit of AI, a little bit of machine learning and now every single transformer, whether it's overloaded, underloaded or sitting idle, can now be monitored using Tantalus software, a little bit of hardware and our head-end system. So with that, I'd like to stop. That's a Day in the Life at a Utility. That's what we go through when I was 17 years at my former utility every day, every hour, every morning. These are the decisions that are made in affect the pricing, affect your rates and affect what happens in the utility industry moving forward.

Thanks Andrew. Go ahead Pete.

No, no, after you, Deb. You got it.

No, no, no. You go.

I was just going to thank Andrew for walking everybody through it and starting to track all the events that are unfolding in my house, can't wait to educate my utility proactively, of course.

I've got one audience question. So from the demo, what specific data does Tantalus provide that is not available from other AMI solutions?

Typically, the one big thing we provide is what we call our TRUPush data. We don't have to ask for anything. We have it set to automatically push. And what that allows the utility to do is it's kind of like a text message. You're not asking for your text to come in. We've set all the parameters and the system automatically negotiates all those responses. So everything is in real time, which allows the utility to be as proactive as possible and as fast as possible when it comes to mitigating situations and scenarios that are out there. Most of our competition, to date, still uses what we call batch, and they batch things up in 1-hour, 4-hour, 6-hour, 8-hour batches and send it to the utility to decipher and unpack and it takes the utility quite a while to sort through that and lay it out the way they want to make it meaningful, whereas at Tantalus, if you have a blink at your house, you're notified. If you have an outage, I'm notified. If you have something that goes over on what we call a high bill, I can set what we call consumption alarm, I'm instantly notified. So that allows a relationship to be built with the utility and the consumer in a much faster, closer relationship than waiting until the end of the day, end of the week, end of the month.

Yes. I'd say as it relates to the core of our business -- thanks, Andrew. Incrementally, as it relates to the core capabilities, we refer to just granular data. Meters -- keep in mind, we don't manufacture meters. We're embedding our edge intelligence into third-party meters, whether that's Itron, Aclara or Landis+Gyr who we partner with and compete with. The way in which we extract data from those meters is just different. The TRUpush capabilities that Andrew just articulated is a fundamental difference. And I'd say the precision of data that we capture from those third-party meter is different. As we incorporate the TRUSense Gateway into the market, the sampling rate per second is not comparable to a traditional meter. Whether that has our intelligence or not. It's just -- it's a piece of fruit, but it's an apple to a pineapple type comparison. And within the TRUSense Gateway, it's not only power quality and consumption and data around outages. But as we've shared, it's also data with respect to what's happening behind the meter, whether that's down to a circuit breaker or an appliance.

Thanks, Pete. I've got another question here. So how many utilities are using the system in production now? And what are the top 1 or 2 things they want added to it?

I'll answer the first portion and then Andrew, maybe you can cover the prioritized problems that we're solving. We have -- I think as of our Q3 results, over 330 utilities that are deploying our capabilities today. Some of those utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric are solely deploying our TRUSync software. So if the question ties to the AMI capabilities that Andrew has outlined, order of magnitude over 300 utilities that have this system up and running in their operations center today. They're about, call it, 30-ish utilities that are tied to TRUSync, which would not have the broader metering capabilities that Andrew walked through. We are just starting to deploy analytics to utilities that have competing AMI systems, and as we activate those, we'll look forward to providing updates accordingly. Andrew, do you want to maybe highlight -- I think it's tough because every utility is a little bit different. But from your perspective, the 2 or 3 primary use cases.

Well, what I would really like to touch on is something that might apply to a lot of utilities. But across North America, we went from an energy-rich supply to constrained when it comes to power with data centers, with the push to EV with more and more electrification. And so what's happening at the level -- at the electric utility level that we serve in the distribution level, they need to be able to control this power and do more with this power that's available to them. And so what we've been able to do at Tantalus and some of the things that some of our own customers have helped us create, for example, we have a product called TRUFlex Protect, well you say, well, what is that? Well, every module that Tantalus makes, every device that we sell has a Linux computer, an ASIC chip with a Linux computer embedded on it. And how do we enhance more value out of that Linux computer, and what we've done is we've been able to design an emergency type setup where we can go out and bring all of these remote disconnect meters under one software and be able to redefine how the grid operates. Quick history lesson. If there is rolling blackouts today in almost every part of the world, a circuit breaker is opened at the substation. If you live on the hospital circuit, you're always going to have power, okay? You're never going to be shut off if they can avoid it. If you happen to live on anything other than the hospital circuit, you're going to have outages. What we've done is we've taken our remote disconnect meter, and that Linux computer on it. And we've been able to take it with software and push that down to the Linux computer and build out feeders and groups and areas and leave all those feeders from a substation and scale that closed in and let residential customers absorb in an emergency situation that load that needs to be shed, whether it's for power constrained, whether it's for storms, whether it's for heat, you name the reason we've been 45 seconds from blackouts in the Midwest, 45 seconds from blackouts in California this year, 1.5 minutes down in Tennessee we have been within 2 minutes of seeing blackouts across North America. I can't tell you the Canadian side, I'm not as in tune to that, but it has been close because we're power constrained. So utilities want us to do more and more and more with our operating system and our devices to be able to get creative to control that load, will limit the load and protect that transformer. We have new partnerships to where we now can avoid up to about $15,000 at a location say in Pete's scenario with an F-150 Lightning. If the utility has too small of a transformer, we can put a TRUSense Gateway out with one of our meters and be able to see the load on that transformer in realtime and only use the amount of power that's necessary to charge that electric vehicle, while not changing the transformer and not upgrading the panel. So that's what our utilities are looking for us to do to be able to better serve their membership. And those are 2 of the things we've done this past year, that's pretty fantastic, in my opinion, coming from the utility industry on saving the member money and protecting assets at the utility to again, sweat the assets longer and be able to do more with less.

So I don't know, Andrew or Pete, which you want to take this, but TRUSense Gateway seems like a very insightful and powerful tool for utilities. Actually, it is for you, Andrew. Andrew, based on your experience, what are the reasons a utility wouldn't adopt the Gateway?

Well, if I had my way, I would have 6 on every feeder across the United States, if I had my way. It allows you to have what we call substation quality data, and I think we're going to see the adoption rate continue to trip in a trajectory -- upward trajectory, with cellular service. They don't have to be a full-blown [ tamper less ] AMI system. We didn't touch on this in the demo, but this device is also what we call an RTU that can talk to a utility SCADA system. So I can put 6 of these out, 3 right outside of a substation and 3 at the very end of a circuit. And I now know right down to the cycle did every customer see this, was it the first customer out, who didn't see it. And if I sprinkle a few more, 5 or 6 of these on a feeder across every substation, I now have the granular visibility to know without a shadow of the doubt what's taking place across the grid. So it's just a matter of time, in my opinion, as we continue to put the message out there, continue to go to the shows, continue to show the power of this device. It makes a lot of sense. We have several pilots going with non-AMI customers, as Pete mentioned earlier, that are doing just what I described to you with other vendors that cannot provide the granularity and the data and the speed as to which we're helping them overcome a different selection.

To aggregate that in terms of the opportunity in the U.S. relative to what Andrew has conveyed sort of 6 devices, or feeder order of magnitude, we're talking a couple of million devices, TRUSense Gateways in the U.S. Fair extrapolation there, Andrew?

Pretty fair.

I have one final audience question, and I think it's going back to just the overall software. When utilities have tested and decided not to deploy what were the technical or operating concerns that they have -- no, it is about the Gateway.

So I'd say we're still -- continue to be early maybe even preseason at this point in the context of what inning we're in. The -- we haven't yet seen one of the utilities that is placed an order and put a device in the field, not continue to plan to move forward. So it's a little hard to answer that question just based on where we are. A number of the utilities that placed orders still don't have the device deployed yet, still in production mode and shipping mode. So I think we'll learn more certainly as we get all 50-plus of those utilities activated. Where we have seen some utilities not yet activate. We built the TRUSense Gateway with an advisory committee. Not all members of the advisory committee have placed initial orders yet. I think, it's consistent with messaging that we've shared. In those circumstances, it's predominantly funding, how they're going to fund not only -- it's not just a matter of a handful of devices that's pretty straightforward. It's how they would fund an entire deployment. And we see utilities until they really -- some utilities until they have very good clarity as to where the funding is going to come from. They're not even interested in engaging the pilot just yet. So that's utility-specific that we see. Andrew, I don't think beyond Advisory Committee or certainly the initial set of utilities that have the devices in the field beyond funding anything else that you've extrapolated or learned?

Not to date, no. It's been a great learning on how municipal utilities work, how cooperative utilities work, how Canadian utilities were and IOUs in the state's work. And everybody just has a little bit different flavor. And I think that plays into Pete's statement. We're in the preseason yet. Some of them operate much faster than others. Amazingly, co-ops are quicker across the United States to adopt and move. They have less obstacles less hurdles, less politics based on being member-owned. Some of the munis, as Pete mentioned, are still struggling to get their financing in order. And as we continue to work through the Canadian market, again, it's just a matter of working through the different steps that need to take place.

Well, thanks, Andrew. I really appreciate your time and the demo. Pete, did you want to have any closing remarks?

No, Deb, thanks for facilitating. And for those of you who have joined, thanks for allocating additional time to learn about the business. We're not -- it's not a cookie-cutter concept. And so I think the illustration of the software capabilities and analytics that Andrew walked us through, hopefully, is pretty insightful in terms of the capabilities that we're delivering and the differentiated approach certainly in terms of how we access and analyze and then present data to solve real problems for utilities. So Andrew, thanks, similarly. Thanks for allocating the time and walking everybody through a Day in the Life of a Utility.

My pleasure. Thanks for having us, Deb.

Thanks, Andrew. Thanks, Pete. Really appreciate your time and your support for the charity. Thanks, everyone, for participating and for your questions. If you have any further questions or like a call or anything like that, feel free to reach out. We will have this edited and on the YouTube channel probably tomorrow afternoon. So yes, thanks, everyone. Happy holidays.

Same to you, Deb. Thanks.

Bye-bye.