Lean Canvas Summary
Our Unique Patent Pending Invention Harvests power from thin air!
All other attemps have not been economical at the scale requisite for mass deployment. Whitewater Power uses Electric field energy harvesting for simple easy and safe lifetime powering of its sensors
Project requirements
- Pole tilt and incident monitoring
- Should periodically (at least every 20 min) report the current pole tilt degree and whether a significant impact (which could potentially not change the tilt) has occurred.
- Non-Invasive Power Line Monitoring
- Should measure and report the voltage on the power line.
- Energy Harvesting
- Should harvest energy from the Electric field produced by the power line.
- Energy Self-Sufficiency
- Should never require a battery recharge or replacement.
- Weather-Proof Housing
- Should work properly regardless of weather or climate.
- Non-Invasive Installation
- Should be easily and quickly installable by routine maintenance workers and should not negatively impact either the pole or the power line.
- Ambient Monitoring
- Should report the temperature of the conductor to monitor for power line sagging.
- Airspeed, direction and pressure can also be addressed.
- Flash Detection
- When a branch lands on a line a current spike occurs generating a local EMP event that can be detected at each pole. Even if there is no outage these events can be precursors and useful to preventative maintenance or a key incrimination during an outage.
- EMP Detection
- When a branch lands on a line a current spike occurs generating a local EMP event that can be detected at each pole. Even if there is no outage these events can be precursors and useful to preventative maintenance or a key incrimination during an outage.
- Camera option
- Incident recording possibilities, also provides deterrence from malicious tampering
- Long Distance Communication 10 Mile range
- Using LoRa or similar Poles can either use Point to aggregator or network. Nodes can be assigned point or buddy mode for addressing non-line of sight cases
- User Interface
- Should have an intuitive GUI to communicate with the utility company.
- Low network load
- Infrequent and small size data packets and randomized transmission period to mitigate network jamming (e.g. once in 20 min). Packets are compressed to only present trend and significant changes.
- Emergency “Blue Phone” option
- Makes every power pole a potential safe call box.
- Low cost, robust hardware installation by non-line-men
- Install at far enough distance to not require qualified linemen or power shut off.
- Lowest cost hardware