Solar-Powered Three Wheeled Trikes for The Philippines - A Conversation with Allan Gray of SunETrike

Allan Gray joins the Smart City Podcast to discuss low cost low impact transportation solutions, as well as a variety of other topics, including supercapacitors.
 
 Listeners will learn about:
 · What’s happening in the Philippines right now.
 · How mobile battery backup can help keep critical operations running during grid outages.
 · How do solar and electric vehicle technologies fit into the Filipino energy and public transport sectors and what kinds of obstacles do they face?
 · The current state of the solar industry?
 · What’s been the perspective of the different stakeholders of these communities about electric vehicles?
 · What do you do if you're a city manager or a citizen activist?
 
 About sunETrike:
 
 The sunEtrike solar electric transport solution handles the vehicles, batteries and solar as distinct units for planning & scaling. The pilot shuttle service mentioned in this episode achieved its targetted ROI of 30% before being shut down by the Coved pandemic and end of contract.
 
 These low-speed electric tricycles are best suited to last mile transportation of people and cargo. They have capacity to carry up to seven passengers or 500 kg of freight, with top operating speeds of 50 km/h. The trikes can travel approximately 40 km per battery charge, depending on weight and hills.  At its peak, our pilot was running 220 to 250 km per day.
 
 The Supercapacitor/HESS project was spun into a new company (Hessner) upon admission into the Hong Kong Science and Technology Park's Incubation Program in 2020
 

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Transcript

ARC Advisory Introduction  

Broadcasting from Boston, Massachusetts the Smart Cities podcast is the only podcast dedicated to all thing’s smart cities. The podcast is the creation of ARC advisory group Smart City practice. ARC advises leading companies, municipalities and governments on technology trends and market dynamics that affect their business and quality of life in their cities. To engage further please like and share our podcast or reach out directly on Twitter at @SmartCityvwpts or on our website at WWW.ARCweb.com/industries/smart-cities

Jim Frazer  

welcome again to another episode of the smart city Podcast. Today, I'm thrilled to be joined by our Allan Gray of Sun e trike in the Philippines. Welcome, Alan. Hey, good evening. Hey, good morning to you. So you've got a very broad experience in across the world. Can you tell us a little bit about how you came to the sustainability world in general, and each trike and energy efficiency and conservation in particular? 

Allan Gray  

, so I grew up in a small logging and mining town called Prince George, about Rick, kind of right in the center of British Columbia, Canada. And it was, so when I was going through high school, I watched the mountain pine beetle go through the forest. So I don't know if how many of our listeners would be familiar with the mountain pine beetle. But it was one of the very early kind of like, pretty obviously, impacted by the climate, like the fact that the climate was not getting as cold cause this beetle infestation that would normally kind of run its natural course, basically spread through the whole forest and wipe out even very, like not the old like, generally it was a pest that would get the old and the sick trees of the forest. But because it has this natural anti-freeze in its shell that did not get killed off by the wet winters which weren't getting as cold anymore. It was able to spread and spread and spread and just really do a very substantial economic damage. And I watched as like in high school, I watched entire forest Go Red in one year, and then dead like completely bone-dry dead the next year. The really serious forest fires that have happened over the last five years, I know California has had them, but VCs really had them as well. And that's just because all of this dead standing timber has been just sitting there and drying out over the years. And so we're seeing we're seeing the consequences of that through to 2019 was in 2018 2019, we're especially bad years for forest fires. So that was very formational for me, and my father put his foot he used to run an ISP and the internet service provider in that area. And we would go to very remote towns and fishing resorts and native reserves and bring internet to those communities for the first time. And I put my first solar panel up on the side of a radio shack on top of a mountain in high school. So that that was that was my experience that was that was back when solar was like 350 $4 a watt in like 2003. So totally off grid with our SCADA system, we would see the sun pop up and pop back down again for a few hours, like maybe four or five hours. And that would be what would keep the radio station running through the winter.

Jim Frazer  

That's fascinating. So how did you make your way to the Philippines?

Allan Gray  

Well, I was like with this having seen this, I went through university and he kind of developed the desire to apply my career towards energy conservation. And I started out in engineering and was thinking about how might I apply this towards like an a very resource focused I was in mining engineering, but then I switched over to geology. So starting in engineering and moving more into pure science It's very natural resource focused. And geothermal seemed like the most obvious fit for that path in order to be like a clean energy specialist technician at us, I guess a scientific or an engineering level. And yeah, so geothermal, but Canada doesn't have a geothermal industry to speak of when you're talking about like high grade power. You've got heat pumps and stuff like that. But all of the volcanoes in Canada are hundreds and hundreds of kilometers away. So as kind of a student of the world, a geologist and a knower of the earth. I was paying attention to countries like the Philippines and Turkey for many years, kind of during my degree and post degree. And my father moved to Hong Kong, in, I guess, maybe around 2012 ish. And so he, I mean, as an entrepreneur, he's always kind of coming up with new ideas. For the most part, I didn't really have much to say about it. But when he proposed Solar Electric tricycles, in the Philippines to me as soon as I heard it, I just said, Yes. And I mean, it caught him by surprise, even. But we kind of started putting the model together. And in 20 2015, we arrived the end of 2015. And got to work building. We got our first pilot project shuttle service, running in 2016, serving private subdivision that was under construction at the time. And so we were operating 16 to 18 hours a day, 365 days a year, we had four tricycles, just driving people in and out of the subdivision for 10 pesos, which is about 20 cents US per ride per person. We had, I think, around three and uptime, so 99.999% uptime versus the service contract. But that that proceeded until December 2020. We were doing the whole fundraising and trying to get in and figure out how we were going to get our, our business model funded. And then of course, the pandemic, it well, not just a pandemic, the Tao volcano, which hadn't erupted since the 70s erupted in January 2020, which was as a geologist and like a volcano oriented electrical geophysicist was just one of the most amazing things to witness. And, and yeah, and then and then right into pandemic, and it's, it was considered one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world. So knock on wood, it was actually there was there were there were not serious casualties or anything like I think there's there was maybe one person passed away, but our entire family swam in the lake that erupted about 10 days before the eruption was quite, quite something to watch in retrospect.

Jim Frazer  

Wow. So what's the current status of your projects? What needs are you trying to address? I'll just outline your business case around what's happening there.

Allan Gray  

Right. So I mean, the Philippines is an island archipelago, they've got several 1000 Islands. And so they are kind of distributed energy is sort of forced on them by their geology. We're not in a super remote area at this time. The city that I live in is about 500,000 people. And there are many cities, like kind of small cities of similar size scattered around, and we're kind of on the periphery of Manila, which is, of course, a mega city. So but if you get even on this island, not very far from me, you can get energy prices that are not that different from flying in remote communities in the Arctic, like in Canada. So like you're talking about, you're talking about, like more than $1 per kilowatt hour, which I mean, kind of blew my mind to know that and that's not even getting into small islands. So, so an electric vehicle transition towards, like the transition towards electric vehicles. This is a place where solar is going to compete very well, as long as the infrastructure is built well and robustly and of course, this supply chain issues are very challenging. But I mean, that's the long term value proposition for me as a geologist for why Would you try to push or like I guess become a champion of solar based transportation and in a country like the Philippines, compared to other countries like maybe Thailand or India, which are, of course on the continent, so you've just got the much more like, make megalithic or monolithic like energy utility. In the Philippines, you've got hundreds of small energy cooperatives. And there's a lot of studies in the United States that talk about how the electric cooperatives have a much higher rate of uptake of solar technologies compared to the more commercially built grid. Utility companies.

Jim Frazer  

No, indeed, the investor owned utilities have different cost accounting than those that are simply buying power from an IOU. Or from the US government on grid, you've undertaken a bit of a heavy lift as it's not only an electric vehicle, but it's also a charging mechanism. And it's a charging mechanism driven by PV. Do you want to touch on perhaps each one of those?

Allan Gray  

Okay, so I mean, the electric vehicle is a, it's a took, if you're familiar with the term it took, there are these small, three wheeled vehicles, right. And as you pointed out, if you're going to do that with electric, you got to charge it. And so you're relying on the grid primarily. And where we were, we had our shuttles our pilot project, we had we had a very stable grid, and not excessive energy prices. So I think we in the entire time of 2015 until 2020 2016 to 2020, we only had one power outage and it was because somebody hid the power lines with a kite. So like that, that that was very good reliability. In during our time there. We actually not knowing how long the power outage would go, would go on for we were actually suggesting to the residents that we could take our Tuk Tuks around and power freezers, if there was anybody who had the concern that their power their food might go bad, like people who are running small restaurants and stuff. We weren't we were in a position to be able to offer them battery backup. And then the solar, we had the solar that we were able to put up in our pilot project for that time. It when it when we initially started it was covering it was fallback, like so it was a grid tied solar system. So we weren't, we weren't relying on the solar for our pilot project, in this case, because the grid was reliable. But it at when we initially put it up, it was probably covering about 70% of the daily usage. But because it was a growing subdivision, the requirements of the vehicles increased faster than we were able to get new roof space. So by the end of it, it was probably about 30%. And of course, if we were to if we were to extend that into less reliable places, we would have to move more towards an off grid style topology for that. But that that just hasn't happened yet. We like as I mentioned, we kind of needed, like, obviously solar and electric vehicles are some very capital intensive operation. And we just we just weren't able to get that rolling on the financial side before the pandemic. Yeah,

Jim Frazer  

I have two points. One is that even in the developed world, we're starting to see here in the United States where commercial or government bus operations are, are, there are a number that are now PV powered, ie electric bus depots. Because the cost of building a new substation, and running the power to that new substation for charging is a significant number that actually a micro grid with PV panels makes a better financial business case. I've also read quite a bit about the impacts of electric vehicles as mobile battery backup. And in particular, in some less developed countries India comes to mind the that mobile battery backup can drive the factory or the machines in the assembly plant so that a tremendous amount of economic activity is not lost. for the day, so it's not just the creature comforts of having lighting for to prepare dinner or a life for kids homework, but it's actually well, if you don't have the power in many places in the world, people just go home and come back when the power is on, and they go back to work all over again. So it's, ,  that that is fascinating to me, and I think can make a dramatic impact. So, what are the where are you now in your in your development plans for the son, e trike? How many vehicles do you have out there? How many? What is the footprint look like?

Allan Gray  

We actually don't have vehicles running right now. We went with our small team when the pandemic happened, we kind of concentrated our efforts on we actually, my father lives in Hong Kong. So I'm the only one in the Philippines anymore. My brother was with me here from 2015 until 2020. But it's just me now. But my father has always been in Hong Kong. And we were able to get into the Hong Kong science and technologies parks incubation program for a super capacitor module that we're building with the intention of putting that super capacitor into the electric vehicles, sort of as a filtering function like a hybrid, it's called a hybrid energy storage system. So you got the battery, and the and the super capacitor in parallel, they sort of for the for like, I mean, you talk about peak shaving on the at the grid scale, well, this is peak shaving, at the electric motor surge, current scale, sort of filtering function. And, and so the it's expected and we don't have good data on this, especially with lithium batteries, I still kind of been elusive to get good data on to quantify how much it's expected to make a difference. But reducing the surge current, just from a basic electrical strain perspective, is expected to increase the battery lifespan, as well as the range per charge you like using logic similar to Pukar effect? If you're familiar with that in lead acid batteries, lead acid batteries will have a different capacity, depending on the average discharge current,

Jim Frazer  

correct? Correct. I know you're involved in a variety of technologies, that happens to be to what other things do you do you touch in the world of energy.

Allan Gray  

So another project that the that the Hong Kong side has gotten involved with is a is in collaboration with a quant information and energy harvesting research group, operating more at the theoretical physics level. And so we're, we're kind of filling the role of commercial partner for this project, which is basically taking a taking a the suspension system, and creating a transducer that you could basically produce electricity from, which has been, which, of course, has been tried in all sorts of ways in the past. So what our what our little angle is on that is to, to have basically variable damping, using machine learning, with the possibility of moving into like a quant situation in the future. I mean, we're not there right now. But that but the but the idea of being able to do variable damping, in order to increase comfort and of course, yield more energy out of out of the vibrational the vibrations that are coming out of the road. So you're trying you're trying to keep the road the passenger comfort, like the experience for the passenger stable, and of course, your road is going to have all sorts of impulses that you that are available. I mean, of course a leaf springs not going to do anything. But if you're able to put that damper in there and produce electricity, then

Jim Frazer  

that's a fascinating application. It is a an evolution of regenerative braking. Right in my mind, it's less linear braking rather than rotary braking.

Allan Gray  

I don't know how much the electric like in I don't know what the status of like the top tier automotive makers is right now, but a lot of with even with lithium batteries, it's more so with lead acid but even with lithium ion batteries, they keep their regenerative braking settings turned down because they don't want to be feeding too much current into the batteries. So Oh, that's loss. That's yeah, that's loss on the system. Just let these dogs finish off and continue that that's fine. The point is that capacitors should be able to handle that, like, well, the super capacitors are inherently able to handle that high current better than batteries. So

Jim Frazer  

once and, and certainly we know that electric, particularly the more popular commercial electric passenger vehicles today have limitations on their discharge cycles. The where you really can't do you cannot deploy some of our visions of a vehicle to grid,  applications,  that that holy grail of, say, charging my vehicle at night, and doing some arbitrage and selling my power at 3pm to power my air conditioner on doesn't can't really happen on a daily basis today because of because of battery life issues. And the impacts of hitting that battery too hard every day. That's fascinating. So which of these variety of technologies that you're working with are our closest to commercialization? And what obstacles do you see in actually getting them into the market?

Allan Gray  

Well, I, the we, we hope that we're going to have the super capacitors in the vehicles in the coming months. We I mean, there'll be in vehicles that that we've got a pretty close eye on, where we wouldn't be trying to put them out into vehicles that don't that, like we like, I mean, kind of like open market situation requires a higher engineering. But if I mean, in our case, in our shuttle service, previously, the vehicles were running on the same roads every day, and we were on site all the time. So that's, that's kind of like the expected initial test deployments. And that was sort of expected to be the benefit, I hope that we'll have an opportunity to deploy our vehicles again, in the coming months. But the other issue was that we never managed to get through the whole government registration process. So we, I mean, we're, it's, it's hard to say it's hard to say how will mitigate that whole, that whole process, there's a lot of there are a lot of electric vehicles in this country that are makers in this country that don't really worry about the whole registration thing. You can probably imagine, but I mean, coming from North America, that's the sort of thing that that I've kind of got a certain amount of conviction about. So yeah, I did it. It's complicated. There's, there's a lot to say about that topic. Yeah.

Jim Frazer  

I mean, it's only recently here in in terms of autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles, Florida is one of the faster moving states. And it only was two or three years ago, that legislation was signed in into law where a three wheeled vehicle now does not require a motorcycle driver driver's license. Okay. Because we do have some very engaged in Energy and Environmental activists who are lobbyists, who simply looked at the, the delivery service of I mean, not so much Amazon but Instacart for food or, or the pizza delivery person and walk through why are they driving a 4000 pound car today, or a 6000 pound electric vehicle, when those deliveries are only a few miles, and they could much even more easily be served by a three wheeled 1300 pound vehicle.

Allan Gray  

Yeah, totally. Yeah.

Jim Frazer  

roadway air and there's an awful lot of just related benefits. And there,  we here in North America, as  are we we don't see very many three wheeled vehicles, but that industry is on the rise here. Okay. particularly in Florida because now it's when you don't need a license. Which is you just registered like a regular regular car. Can I ask a question regarding Florida also was taking has taken a lead that you don't need any extra insurance for autonomous vehicle. Oh, wow. Yeah, so there aren't a lot don't have those yet. But there's no the impetus there was to make sure there wasn't any extra overhead to that industry regulatory overhead that caused it to be held back. Which is pretty fascinating. So sorry about that, guys. I just wanted to ask you about

Allan Gray  

installing solar panels in the Philippines. And regarding the monsoons, in the weather, because of the summer months in the heavy rains, was there any special processes or like special requirements for the roofs that you actually placed the solar panels on? Well, I mean, we, we worked with the building engineers to view our own design, and then we put up we did the fabrication, we put it up in coordination with the people who are because there was act of construction going on those houses anyway, we're able to coordinate with both the building engineers and the people that were doing the actual building, and then come up with a solution that that did that did withstand a few typhoons before we before we vacated the premises.

Jim Frazer  

Well, got Devon thanks for that question. Because it reminds me that Gaven and I both live here in South Florida. And in 1992, Hurricane Andrew impacted south of Miami and caused a variety of huge impacts to the building codes here. And I think what Dan might be referencing is that the Miami Dade rules require a 150 mile an hour rating for any new construction. So that's windows, that's doors. There are some great videos on the internet about how they test that with a baseball pitching machine and putting a two by four in it and shooting it out the window. But one of the one of the impediments to the solar industry here and here it is in Palm Beach County. Devon's in Broward and Southwest is Miami Dade. Is it all of that infrastructure for that solar panel must be rated to 150 in Miami Dade and I believe 140. Broward and that's it's an impediment. But  it is what it is where we live in hurricane territory and I know that the Philippines gets impacted as well.

Allan Gray  

Yeah, they certainly do. I mean, I take my like, I mean when I'm going and doing wind studies, I'm largely pulling my information out of Western sources. And then and then I work with industry practitioners here but if we were to go and try and look for somebody who is going to do an inspector that would render a judgment about whether something was rated for like 100 kilometers or 200 Kilometer winds, we wouldn't we wouldn't be able to find them and you just get blank flow from the industry like it we just like the industry is not doesn't have that level of sophistication around here. But I mean people grew up with these kinds of wins and so the engineers are attentive to it and in a lot of cases like if you were to try and put on factories a lot of a lot of factories have not built the build built their facilities with the idea that you would be putting a ton of solar panels on the roof in the first place. So there are a lot of there are a lot of buildings that are disqualified from putting loading on even before you think about putting even before you start thinking about when and like so there's a lot of considerations and then there's there are a lot of building owners who would not want the building the roof penetrated and then the whole insurance industry and how what's their level of comfort with that? I'm not active in the solar industry directly at this like I haven't been going around and trying to propose to different places to do it. It's like we because like really my mission here is more on public transportation. So like trying to go in and get really into like building requirements and stuff I work with engineers when it when there's engineering design considerations that that are outside of what I can sign off on.

Jim Frazer  

So your active day to day efforts are about public trade. exportation using electric vehicles.

Allan Gray  

Right? Yeah. Yeah. That's that's kind of the niche side that I've been in I don't I'm not really looking to to sell this into personal like a personal vehicle market and so and the like the public transportation is here is quite different like and tricycles and took like they're actually motorcycles with side cars here is the more common way that tricycles are run. And that that is a very common public transportation vehicle here and it's done through the city. So I mean, this might be a nice segue into the whole IEEE P 274. Bit because this is where the Smart Cities side of things comes in and why and why I've taken special explain

Jim Frazer  

that to our listeners on some governmental entity actually owns motorcycles with side cars, and you pay a fee to be transported around the city, or how does that work?

Allan Gray  

No, you have these members, or you have these member associations. And I mean, who like who specifically owns the tricycles, it might be that the mayor owns a number of tricycles that are in these associations, but tricycles that become part of these associations must register with the city and the skin, and each of the cities have their own tricycle, kind of regulatory body and licensing body that allowed that gives them the permit to be a personal carrier, like a member of public convenience is a label they use it.

Jim Frazer  

Okay, so it's what comes to mind is sort of the yellow cab model from yesteryear.

Allan Gray  

Yeah, you could say that

Jim Frazer  

privately owned or publicly licensed? Who drives that? Do you? Is it rented like an E bike? Or how does that work?

Allan Gray  

Well, I'll just qualify that there's, I mean, you do have taxis in the mega city like, but you don't really like even a city of this size, this close to the city. There, I very rarely see a taxi. And if I see when it's they came from Manila. So you could say that it is the same, but tricycles have less range, they don't move around as much as a yellow cab would, they generally get that they get, they have their main corner off of the main road, and they'll service an area off of that kind of main artery, they'll service the area that, that that is around that. So that's, that's kind of, they've got their little zone. So you might have 20, or 30 tricycle associations that have their own little lineups or territories within a single city of this size. And, and it's common, I mean, every tote is going to be different title Toyota is tricycle operator and drivers Association, but it's not uncommon for it to be about 5050 Where you have 50% are independent owner operators and 50% will pay a daily fee to whoever owns a tricycle to drive.

Jim Frazer  

Okay, so, so I'm intuiting that your one of your goals is to electrify those vehicles.

Allan Gray  

Yeah, and, and, and get solar up on their terminals.

Jim Frazer  

Beautiful, beautiful. What's been the perspective of, of,  all the different stakeholders in those communities about this,

Allan Gray  

I mean, I think they admire electric vehicles, but when you put a price tag in front of them, they get pretty nervous. Like a lot of these people are living daily day to day like food hand to mouth income. And of course you've got medical emergencies and stuff like that, that can be devastating for a person in that economic condition so the idea of going to buy a new vehicle, let alone Electric is pretty scary for them. And so and so what I've we I actually we've found an inventor of a device here in the Philippines. He's an American guy, but he's been in the Philippines for about 10 years. And he's developed a device that you can put between the carburetor and the machine, the motor into the that intake manifold there, that via fluid dynamics and sort of it's got it's basically a ring with fins that causes the air fuel mixture to be more like thoroughly mixed, which gives them about 20% improvement in fuel efficiency by the numbers that we have right now. By the way, that well constrained but it's but they're getting about 20% efficiency gain and add a return on investment that's like in the hundreds of percent.

Jim Frazer  

So, and less and less carbon emissions.

Allan Gray  

Correct? Yep. Yep. Yeah, it's I mean, according to like, I was skeptical about this claim at first, but the US EPA actually verified it for me that they that they that you can basically take the carbon content of a liter of gas, and gasoline and extract the fuel, the carbon dioxide emissions out of it, irrespective of the type of motors that you're using. I was surprised by that. But but the US EPA confirmed that's a valid way to dioxide emissions.

Jim Frazer  

Well, Alan, this has been a fascinating conversation. My real my last question really is what, across all these different technologies that you touch?  what do you see for the future? For the Philippines and maybe Hong Kong and elsewhere?

Allan Gray  

Well, I mean, electrification is, is, is definitely coming. And I mean, as a geologist, the battery supply chain is something that I definitely try to follow in so much as I can, I mean, a small company like us doesn't really have the ability to influence how that plays out. But by definitely, the battery supply chain is going to have a huge impact on that. And the fact that those resources are concentrated in such few countries, is kind of a little bit scary from the perspective of that whole resource curse that happened with oil and gas, and like how the Middle East became a real powder keg. And so how that how would that impact places like Latin America with the lithium and Morocco with the phosphates, of course, cobalt, Cobalt is notorious for that anyway, already. So I mean, I kind of hope and pray that that that will be able to handle that whole dynamic better than then then it played out last century with oil. Yeah, because I do think that the technology is in a position to deliver what people are hoping it will deliver. When it comes to better carbon footprints, and for everybody. And of course, the more efficient you can be the more super capacitors and the more onboard harvesting you can do with solar panels and vibration, that that will help to improve and leave a smaller footprint per kilometer that you go, I think all of those can play their role. But at the end of the day, you are still pulling a lot of metal out of the ground to build a battery. So

Jim Frazer  

certainly, while I'm looking at our clock, we're just about out of time. Are there any last words you have for our audience today?

Allan Gray  

, well, I mean, Jim, and I know each other from IEEE P. 2784. So that's, that's the that's where Smart City, I guess, enthusiast and planners. That's where we're hoping to be able to provide some high level guidance on how to go about planning and sorting through the maze of different technologies and approaches and solutions that historic city can offer. So if you want to check out P 2784. That's, that's a place where I'm gonna be sharing 2023 At least, online. And yeah, I think that's,

Jim Frazer  

that's great, Alan. Yeah, for our listening audience. The I triple V. P 2784. Initiative was started a few years ago. And it really is intended to be a smart city cookbook. Or a flowchart of what you can do to have to make major impacts with a with a strong financial business case. What  what do you do if you're a city manager or a citizen activist or, or a mom or dad at the Parent Teacher Association. So the, that ever has been underway for a while. It was dormant for a few months, but I know has been restarted under Kishor Narang. I would urge everyone to participate at for a period there I was the chair, so I have some investment in it. I know. Alan was an active member as well. So that's a plug for the IEEE owl and before we go, would you be kind enough to share some contact information if anyone would like to reach out to you

Allan Gray  

Oh, yeah, sure. So our website is Sunetrike.com And then my name is Allan gray. So a l l a n gra y at sunetrike.com

Jim Frazer  

Well, once again, our guest today has been Allan Gray of sunetrike. Alan, thank you very much for spending your time with us today. Thank you, Gaven, for being on here as well and we look forward to seeing you on another episode of the smart city podcast. Thank you very much everybody.

ARC Advisory Wrapup 

Broadcasting from Boston, Massachusetts the Smart Cities podcast is the only podcast dedicated to all thing’s smart cities. The podcast is the creation of ARC advisory group Smart City practice. ARC advises leading companies, municipalities and governments on technology trends and market dynamics that affect their business and quality of life in their cities. To engage further please like and share our podcast or reach out directly on Twitter at @SmartCityvwpts or on our website at WWW.ARCweb.com/industries/smart-cities