What remote towers taught me about silence

In March 2013 a battery bank at a mobile-tower site in eastern Indonesia stopped reporting. For nine hours our monitoring screen in Jakarta showed the site as healthy, because its last reading had been a good one. When a technician reached it by motorcycle the next morning, the generator had run dry and the tower was dark. No component had failed dramatically. Our system had simply assumed that silence meant normal. Every remote system I have designed since then starts from the opposite assumption.

I grew up in Singapore in a household where my mother's family spoke Malay and my father's spoke Teochew. I studied electrical and electronic engineering at Kerandai Institute of Technology and graduated in 2001. My first employer, Ondavale Electrical Engineering, installed switchgear and transformers in factories and commercial buildings. As a graduate engineer I prepared cable schedules, witnessed testing and learnt that a drawing approved in an office and an installation energised on site are two different documents.

In 2004 I joined Strathvoren Grid Automation, which integrated protection and control systems for substations in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. I configured relays, wrote test procedures and spent long weeks commissioning. The work showed me how control systems usually fail: seldom through one broken part, more often through a setting somebody changed for a sound reason and nobody recorded. It also gave me my first close reading of utility interconnection requirements, which I learnt to treat as descriptions of how equipment must behave rather than forms to complete.

Batteries came next. From 2008 I worked at Tenggarelle Power Systems, which designed and maintained battery and UPS installations for telecom exchanges, hospitals and data rooms in Singapore and Malaysia, and I completed a part-time master's in power engineering through Pennacott University. Our lead-acid rooms had familiar hazards: hydrogen, ventilation and heat. When we installed our first lithium-ion systems in 2011, the conversation changed quickly. A cell that overheats can affect its neighbours, and cooling stops being a comfort feature and becomes part of the safety case. I became engineering manager in 2010 and led fourteen people.

In 2012 I moved to Merapika Tower Energy, which supplied power as a service to mobile-tower owners at sites with no grid or an unreliable one. We ran generators, batteries and later solar at about 2,300 sites across Indonesia and the Philippines. As head of remote site engineering I owned the equipment standards and the alarm logic that told our operations centres what each site was doing. That is where the silent battery bank appeared, and where I rebuilt the alarms so that a site which stopped reporting became an event in its own right. Every visit was expensive, so every design question became a question about what we could see, what we could change remotely and what still needed a person on the hill.

I joined Lautaneri Energy in February 2017 as vice-president of engineering. The company then ran nineteen island plants and had just begun its first factory battery projects. Its founders wanted to bring solar and storage to small grids that burned diesel almost around the clock, selling the energy under supply agreements with the cooperatives and the state utility that operate those grids. I grew the engineering team from twenty-two people to fifty-one, standardised our container and inverter designs, and set up the Cebu control room that watches the fleet day and night.

I became chief technology officer in March 2021. My remit covers plant design standards, battery engineering and safety, site control systems, operational-technology security, and the platform we use to monitor and schedule the fleet. I manage about US$9 million a year of technology operating cost plus platform capital. I report to the chief executive and present to the board's risk and safety committee each quarter; I have not served as a director. Each case on this site involved a trade-off that a senior colleague opposed for reasonable reasons, and I have tried to record what each decision cost as plainly as what it achieved.

The people who judge our work most closely are not in Singapore. They are the general managers and dispatchers of the cooperatives that buy our energy, and the technicians who travel to each island. A dispatcher needs to know at four in the afternoon how much the battery will carry through the evening peak. A technician needs a controller that behaves the same way at every site. I would bring that habit to a board: technology described by what the people relying on it need to know, and when they need to know it.

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Languages / English · Malay · Mandarin · Indonesian (working knowledge)