David Pearson:

Good morning, or afternoon everybody. Thank you so much for coming out today. My name is David Pearson. We're going to be getting started with this webinar in just about a minute. We'll let some people trickle in as we see it. So again, we'll get started in just about one minute.

Okay, we will go ahead and get started. Like I said before, thank you so much for coming out today to our webinar, Securing the Energy Sector. We're really excited for our guest today. We have Phil Brophy from Enel North America, and they have been a LiveView Technology client for quite a while, and just have some tremendous stories, and tremendous ideas on how to better secure the energy sector.

Before we get started, I'm going to have our co-host, Michael Hanks, introduce himself. I guess I'll introduce him. He is the customer marketing manager for LiveView Technology. And then, I will turn some time over to Phil, so that he can introduce himself and Enel North America and tell us what they do.

Michael Hanks:

Perfect. Thanks, David. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. This is Michael. I run the customer marketing for the company, and I get to work with great customers like Phil, and hear their awesome stories, and where they've come from. We're excited to chat with Phil today, and just hear about his past, and all his stories, and all of his best practices, and a bunch of great stuff. So, Phil, I'll turn it over to you to introduce yourself, and a little bit more about where you come from, and all that fun stuff.

Phil Brophy:

Well, thanks very much, Dave and Mike. I really appreciate the opportunity to participate today in this webinar. My name is Phil Brophy, I'm the head of security for Enel North America. We're a renewable energy company, and currently have about 115 locations located in the US and Canada. These locations are solar, wind, geothermal locations, and as you can imagine, with a renewable energy company, we're not in Downtown Boston. We do have some rechargeable electric car chargers, actually, at Gillette Stadium, where the Patriots play. We have 50 chargers there.

However, major deployment of use, the LiveView Technology is some of our remote locations, which I jokingly tell, my wife says, "When you go on a business trip, where are you going?" I said, "Well, it's an hour and a half away from nowhere and then we drive an hour from there." So we're extremely rural. When I show her pictures and said, "Yeah, I haven't turned in the last 83 miles, this is where we are." So you can imagine infrastructure and those type of things are always difficult, especially in the early stages. And our deployment initially was with construction deployments and then we've actually used those for... I'm using one unit right now for an emergency situation for monitoring.

So that's kind where we operate. We are growing tremendously. As a renewable energy company, you can imagine we have seven projects currently under various stages of deployment and we are utilizing the LiveView Technologies at a number of those sites and providing great assets to our security as well as our operations and construction folks.

By way of background, I've been in the security field for approximately more than 25 years. I'll leave it at that. But the renewable energy was something new for me about four years, I came primarily from the defense side. So renewable energy was an interesting dynamic to become used to, and that's one of the reasons why when I first met Dave and Steve at Security Exchange and we talked, it made a lot of sense based on the needs that I was now starting to address with the LiveView Technologies. So I'll leave it at that and then we can get deeper into it as we go.

David Pearson:

Thank you so much, Phil. And again, we are so happy for you to be here. It is very exciting for us. So tell us a little bit about some of the issues that you've seen in securing these remote locations. How is it different than securing something that is like an inner city power plant or something that's a little bit closer to home?

Phil Brophy:

And I think that the biggest word right there would be infrastructure. Again, we are literally going to farmlands, some of them occupied by a herd of cows as the only living items in the area. And we're coming in and we're starting the construction process, which means we have no internet, we have no power, we're in extremely remote locations, and we're bringing in tens of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of assets that are going to be stored in laydown areas during construction, and to try to run a long extension cord just isn't a viable option. The beauty of the LiveView Technology is the fact that it's solar-powered. Now with the battery enhancement as well, it's cellular upload, and the deployment takes approximately 30 minutes, and then I can actually see a construction site within 30 minutes and have remote capability and I can zoom in on things, I can pan out if I'd like, I can rotate the PTZ, I have the thermal imaging capabilities, I have a spotlight, I have an interactability with messaging that can go on there.

And then the other thing is, and we can talk about this in a minute, is the monitoring. The monitoring gives me a 24/7 coverage. I don't have to have a security officer there. And we can talk about numbers in a minute, but that is the beauty of being able to deploy these in remote locations. We've also used them at a construction site in California in a strip mall that we were retrofitting in office space. There was some high crime in that area. We deployed two sites. We had a convex it was broken into, and by deploying these two units had real-time visibility on what was going on. We had interaction capability with some of the kids that decided Friday night was a great day to hang around construction sites, and by turning on a 5,500 aluminum spotlight, it's amazing how quickly people will scatter.

And that was the beauty is because I would get an email on my phone saying there's an activity going on. I could literally bring it up on my iPhone, see what was going on, control the unit remotely, and I will give a shout-out to the monitoring company. They were phenomenal. They would do an initial evaluation, say, "I think it's just kids around [inaudible 00:08:19], they're getting a little closer to your building," and they'd call me. So you have that built-in monitoring capability that sort of does an early vet, but then when it became something that was actionable, I could monitor what was going on and they could actually contact local law enforcement for response if necessary. So that was the beauty of both the urban and the suburban deployments of the units, and it really helped us out for a deterrent for the thefts in the area. Those went down. The real-time, situational awareness of what was happening.

We had used them also at construction sites that, as I said, were in a very remote location and were involved with some tornadoes and tremendous rainstorms in the Texas area. I think it was last year, they got four inches of rain in one day. And so you can imagine if you've got a construction site that's under development, the runoff sometimes can be a little tricky. So by giving the access to the LiveView units to my construction folks and my operations folks, they did not have to drive 60-plus miles from the hotel to evaluate the situation to realize, "We're not going to be on site, it's just not a safe environment and we're going to shut down the site remotely." They had real-time visibility of what was going on and in the area there with wind speeds of over a hundred miles an hour.

The LiveView trailer survived everything, the mast was still up, and nothing blew off, but we could get real-time visibility of what was happening. And the last thing I'll bring up is if you are expecting a delivery and it's an half-hour's delivery and you may not have security offices there, you can actually see did that trailer arrive and now I can go out and meet this guy instead of driving all the way out and then finding out he's going to be there seven hours after and you sitting in the middle of literally nowhere baking in your truck, waiting for this truck to arrive. So situational awareness, security enhancements, because I can do this stuff remotely. Local deployment of resources if necessary, and then the 24/7 monitoring.

It's just a win-win when you're looking at being a security person that if I wanted to run infrastructure to put in camera systems, the first thing the construction people would tell me is, "I don't have any infrastructure to tie into, and it would just be cost prohibitive." So that was why I've really gone with these as a tremendous asset to us.

‍David Pearson:

So tell us about how life was before when you were working with more traditional security. Were you employing guards at each of these sites? Were they just unsecure fences? What are some of those practices that you implemented then?

Phil Brophy:

Yeah, that's really a great question. We recently had a program, a project rather, kick off and it's in a remote section of the Southwest. And we were going to actually made a business case that instead of having two security offices on site, I was able to make a business case to show that we had savings on the bottom line and we actually had enhanced our security. And how do we do that? We had a unit at the entrance point for regular business operations that was staffed by a security officer during business hours. So 12 hours, 7:00 to 7:00, Monday through Friday. But when the site was closed down, we also had hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, worth of equipment about a mile up the road that we were bringing in, and they wanted to have a security officer there on off hours.

So from 7:00 P to 7:00 A, Monday through Friday, and then 24 hours a day on Saturday and Sunday, and that was going to cost X. And I said, "Okay. So if something happens, what are you going to have?" The security officer hopefully will find them and they will engage with them. They're now a mile and a half into the middle of nowhere. The response time in Southern... It was in Texas, the response time from local authorities is probably 45 minutes if a good day, unless he happens to be in the area, and what is the security officer going to do at that point? And I said, "Why don't we just put a second unit in?" He said, "What are you talking about?"

I said, "We put a second unit in, it can be monitored. If the person comes in off hours, then the thermal will pick it up. We'll have motion. The PTZ will provide us real-time analysis of what's happening. The monitoring company will then make an evaluation, can activate a spotlight, and I guarantee you nine times out of 10 the people will flee the area, especially with the blinking strobe light on the top. That's a clear indicator and deterrent that there's actual devices in operations. And if worse comes to worse and they do start to break in, we have real-time video and the notification of the law enforcement people can be made in concurrence with us watching what's going on and they'll be able to provide... Make and model a vehicle, potentially license plate because of the new technology that now is being able to be deployed with the LiveView Technologies as well as description of the individuals.

Those are real-time information gatherers as opposed to, and I know some of the folks on the call would never find a security officer at three o'clock on a Saturday morning potentially sleeping there and not even aware that a whole trailer full of copper wire had been stolen. That's just a hypothetical. That would never happen of course. But in reality that's a concern that I have to worry about. And so that was my rationale. And when I did the numbers and gave them what the actual costs were for putting this in, and we waited against the cost per hour for security officer, we went with the requested setup of during regular business hours, a LiveView Technology trailer at the beginning to supplement our security officer because now we had a record of who was coming and going for deliveries. That also helps for service people.

"Yeah, I was there for eight hours." "No, actually you came at 10:46 in the morning and you left at 2:14 in the afternoon. Don't bill me for [inaudible 00:14:51]."

Michael Hanks:

That's a great point. Yeah.

‍Phil Brophy:

So there's your ROI that all your bean counters love to hear those things is you can stop pushing back because if you just said, "No, you weren't on site, well show me. Well, I got the video if you want to do that. And so it gives you that point we can talk about.

Michael Hanks:

Yeah, totally. Yeah, that is an excellent point.

Phil Brophy:

So I guess there is something, one story I wanted to bring up of how we actually deployed this. As I said, I met Dave and Steve at the Security Exchange out in Utah, which is by the way, a beautiful location. And they told me about this and they said, "Well, you want to try a unit." And they happened to have one in the Massachusetts area, so I said, "Sure." And we deployed it at a hydro site in downtown Lowell Massachusetts, which typically the only reason we have a hydro site, there's a river that runs down the Merrimack River, and it's adjacent to the University of Lowell. And any good bar owner will put his bars right next to the University of Lowell because there seems to be a high consumption. So one Friday night about 11:30, my cell phone goes off with an alert for the hydro site during this test period.

So of course I immediately look on and go, "Hey, let's check this out." And I see four thermal streams at my fence area. And so I jokingly said to my wife, "Hey, watch this." And I activated the spotlight with an announcement, "This area is protected, you are trespassing, leave immediately." And you could see the thermal streams that were going at one area went 90 degrees to the left and they fled the area. So I did not have any problems with people going around. There wasn't any vandalism, but again, we didn't have to deal with an unsanitary condition, I guess is probably the best way of putting it. I mean, it's a little bit of a joking way of putting it, the security work.

Now, if I didn't have a device there, potentially I didn't deal with that unsanitary condition, but could that have also turned into a vandalism situation. The deterrent of that unit being there, the interruptibility that I had with the unit allowed me to address the situation and then send a message. I guarantee you, when those four people that had the thermal streams got back to the dorm, they were speaking about the unit that told them to leave and the way the light came on. And I didn't have any problems with that facility from that point on. So that's sort of a light-hearted discussion of a business case, but the reality was it worked and that was what I'm looking for. That was the total objective right there.

David Pearson:

I love that. And that just goes to show that active deterrence not only from that blue light and the strobe light, but the fact that you can literally call in or talk directly down to people. And in a case where you are next to a college campus or there might be some people who are there who aren't necessarily looking to cause damage or who maybe are just there for some vandalism, but it's a really easy way to scare people off.

Phil Brophy:

It's a quick deployment tool, it worked out really well. And when you look at the average cost, I think rolled up, it's around $2,500 for the month. That gets me the unit, it gets me my interoperability, and it gets me my monitoring. And I did some quick math and hopefully my calculator was working on my iPhone because God forbid we do everything by hand these days, but it breaks down to $83 a day and $3.46 an hour for, if you want to call it, air quotes, "An active security visibility at your site." That's a pretty good ROI. And so when you look at that, if I just put up a camera, it would've probably cost me five grand by the time I get done putting my infrastructure to do the same thing.

‍David Pearson:

And how does that compare to hiring a full-time guard?

Phil Brophy:

Security offices, and it varies by region, are probably going to run you a bill rate of somewhere between $25 to $60 depending on what region you're in and what your expectations are of them. So you're looking at probably a five, 6x increase minimum, probably even more for the individuals to be on site. And then you have the quality of deliverable services and your monitoring capability because again, a security officer on site and there are applications that are great and you need that interoperability, but with remote monitoring is what you're trying to accomplish, this solution has proved to be very efficient, cost-effective, and easily deployed.

David Pearson:

And I love that. We love traditional security. If it wasn't for having guards there, our business would be very different. But I love the idea of many of our customers coupling on-site security or security patrols in tandem with the LiveView units just shows to really work because it's that active deterrent, but then you also have that body on site. It's great for everybody.

Phil Brophy:

Absolutely. Again, one of the things I would bring up also is the customizable messages that you can put in multiple languages on the different units that can actually enunciate them in the parking lot. And the reason I know this is I went to the local Lowe's, and I live in New Hampshire, so I pulled into Lowe's on Saturday morning to do my weekend warrior, pick up a few two by fours, and I look over and there's a LiveView unit, I started laughing and all of a sudden it said, "Remember COVID precautions are in place, don't forget to bring your mask." And of course, half asleep on Saturday morning, where's my mask? Hanging over the directional in my truck. So I said, "Hey, thanks a lot, Dave." And I actually sent him a picture of it and said, "Thanks for reminding me to bring my mask so I didn't have to walk back through the parking lot."

So it made be an event that's going on as well where you may want to say, "Make sure you exit through the left part of the parking lot." It's just all customizable things that you can do as well. And that's one of the things I like is the messaging that is able to be, it's just not, "You must leave now." You can have those standard or you can customize them, and the monitoring folks have the ability to download those. I'll refer to the folks from LiveView, I believe in pretty much real time to the unit if there's a customizable message you want to have on there. So those are the kind of things that I like from an interaction. Because the average person who's trying to do something at your site, is that being monitored by somebody who's down the street, or in my case, 3,500 miles away?

Michael Hanks:

Phil, you bring up a great point. That's something that I really love as I've been talking with a lot of customers is, yeah, we have great deterrents, great security monitoring, and all that, but being able to find some fun, very engaging, useful use cases like this, helping people just providing that just outside of the typical use case for one of our units. I love hearing that. So thanks for sharing that story.

Phil Brophy:

No problem. It's proved to be a very good asset to have in my toolbox.

Michael Hanks:

That being said, we maybe forgot to say this at first, but any of our attendees, if you do have any questions that you want to ask us or Phil, there is a place down on your sidebar. You're able to ask any questions. So feel free to shoot those our way and we'll be able to ask those to Phil and get those answered here in the next little bit for sure.

David Pearson:

Questions or comments? If there's anything that wasn't quite clear that we said, feel free to just send that on over and then we'll answer those as they come in.

Phil Brophy:

I think one of the things that I also made a note here I wanted to bring up is the health monitoring of the unit. I've had the two units in California that I deployed, I didn't realize that I actually had a power issue. It wasn't properly charging because we had stuck it in the corner and it was the monitoring service that called me and said, "Hey, we're going to have to relocate this because we're not getting a full charge on that."

And there was also a problem with a hard drive at one of our construction sites that we were unaware because it looked like everything was working, but the monitoring of the health of the unit is also something that if I had put infrastructure in, that's an additional responsibility that I have to make sure I put into consideration to go, "Oh, that's right. Are we up and running? Do we have any disconnect? When that tornado went through, did we lose internet connectivity? Is the data actually being retrieved and retained as I hoped that it had been?"

So it takes a little bit off of my plate that I just know I have another person or another organization looking at the maintenance and the functionality. So I can assume based on their activities that 24/7 I have an up and running unit. And if not, with that hard drive within a short period of time, they deployed a technician out to replace the hard drive and we were back up and running in no time at all. So that's just one thing I want to bring up as far as the service during your lease period or your deployment purpose.

David Pearson:

Yeah, absolutely. So we do have some questions coming in.

‍Phil Brophy:

Okay.

David Pearson:

I guess this is a question more for Mike and I, but Randall asked a question of if we have units in Houston or are they able to come out to the East Coast on request? Yes. Yeah, we can get specific, we have units, but they can go all over the country. We even have a whole fleet of a amount in Hawaii that we can get out to people. So just give us a call and we can work that out, getting that to you.

Michael Hanks:

Yeah, Houston's actually a really big area for us. We have quite a few out there, but if our deployment is typically depending on the whole getting things figured out, we could get them there pretty quickly once everything's signed and ready to go within a couple of days. So that shouldn't ever be an issue, so totally.

David Pearson:

Phil, we also have another question from Andrew. He asks about the cell phone band or satellite for communication. We do run off of cell connectivity, but how has that been for you in those remote locations? Has that been fairly reliable or have you ever had times where you haven't been able to get in touch with a unit?

Phil Brophy:

Surprisingly, we've had a very high uptime. Only issues we've had is if we had severe weather in the area, and that's one of the best parts about having the technician when they come out and they set the unit, we have a perception of where we want it, but at the end of the day, the connectivity is confirmed and that cell connectivity has continued during the deployment of the units. We haven't had any problems with suddenly unit three is offline for some reason. We've had some very, very good results with uptime.

Michael Hanks:

Yeah. And we don't want to get too into the weeds. We're happy to on an individual basis. But yeah, we do run on a two-SIM card cellular base. And so like Phil just said, we typically have a really good uptime. It's rare that we ever have units go down, but our uptime is really great. And so we could get more into the weeds on on an individual basis, but thanks for that question, Andrew.

David Pearson:

Phil, Joseph also asks about some of these remote locations. How much vandalism do you see out there specifically in your remote locations or what's kind of the-

Phil Brophy:

I mean, it's usually mostly the kids with the ATVs that decide to go for a ride and they come across a large bounty of copper. So copper wire is typically the issues. And copper wire, yes, it's expensive, but my issue is the criticality of the supply of that hardware being impacted. So if they steal 1,000 feet of copper wire, well, it's obviously a financial impact, but if that's going to be laid tomorrow to connect our substation for example, and it now kicks back our schedule by three to four weeks because... Three to four days to potentially weeks, that could have a project impact as well. But for the most part it's random vandalism, but I think the turn factor, especially in these open areas, if you see a blinking strobe light, and as you get closer you have the ability to illuminate it, that's usually enough to turn for most miscreants to say, "I'm going to go somewhere else."

Michael Hanks:

To follow up with that, have you ever seen any vandalism to the unit itself, Phil.

Phil Brophy:

I have not because you really have to get very close to the unit. And as soon as you look up and you see those, we've had no vandalism whatsoever to any of our units.

Michael Hanks:

Yeah. And in a general sense, vandalism, we're not going to say that it never happens, but they're rare cases. It is monitoring it pretty quick. We do have the talk down and we typically are able to avoid most sense of vandalism, but for the most part it rarely, rarely happens.

Phil Brophy:

Right.

David Pearson:

Then we do have one final question and it's about the remote monitoring that you all had during that initial deployment and still to this day, and they want to know how that was handled for you. Did those alerts come to LiveView Technology first or did they come to you?

Phil Brophy:

I got something going on. There's actually an app that we use and it works out very well. Guys, I apologize, I've got a situation. I have to jump off of.

David Pearson:

Okay, well that's fine. Thank you so much, Phil. We're just wrapping up here anyway.

‍Phil Brophy:

Okay. Appreciate it. If you need more [inaudible 00:30:52], please reach out. I'm more than happy to.

Michael Hanks:

Okay, thank you. Thank you, Phil. That's the life of someone running ahead of the security office for sure. [inaudible 00:31:03].

‍Phil Brophy:

Hello, sorry about that. Just finish up a long-winded call?

Michael Hanks:

Hey Phil. Let's go ahead and mute Phil.

David Pearson:

That's fine. There we go. Okay. So yes, to answer the question, Randall, we personally don't do the monitoring. We contract out with a variety of different security partners and they work directly with you on that. So if there's any alerts that need to happen, those go straight to you. And even if you're not working with an outside partner and have our D3 unit that has the motion detection and a few of those things, then those alerts go directly to you. So you're able, like Phil said, to access them via an app on your phone and handle those at any time for that.

Well, thank you everybody for coming out. It's been a real pleasure for us. And just again, to Phil, thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to work with us. If you do have any additional questions, we will get to those and we will be reaching out to you just to make sure that those are answered for you. And again, if you are interested in learning more about LiveView Technologies, visit our website, lvt.com, or give us a call and talk with one of our reps. Okay, thank you so much.

Michael Hanks:

Thanks, everyone. Have a great day.