Delivering Clean Cooking Solutions across Millions of Households on AWS with Circle Gas

Based in the United Kingdom, Circle Gas provides clean cooking solutions through IoT-powered smart meters and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) distribution in sub-Saharan Africa. LPG is a preferred cooking method because it burns cleaner and more efficiently than charcoal or firewood. Unfortunately, the upfront costs associated with LPG equipment and refills, coupled with limited access to infrastructure, prevent many households from adopting this cleaner fuel.

This is where Circle Gas comes in: its smart meters track usage and facilitate microtransactions so that customers can buy LPG in small amounts. With this model, the fuel is more affordable and accessible when compared to traditional purchasing methods. However, to address this global challenge, Circle Gas needs to be able to deliver its solution on a massive scale. The company processes and analyzes data from thousands of transactions per day, and without robust technology, it could not effectively scale up to meet demand.

To gain this agility and enhance its IoT capabilities, Circle Gas chose to build its smart meter infrastructure on AWS. “We have a lot of transactions on a daily basis. A lot of people are cooking, and there’s a lot of data flowing,” says Morten Viktor, chief technology officer at Circle Gas. “We needed IoT technology that was scalable and future proof. That’s why we chose AWS.”

When a customer is interested in LPG, a Circle Gas employee administers a brief survey to assess their eligibility. Once they are approved, a trained technician visits the customer’s home with an LPG cylinder equipped with an IoT-powered smart meter. The technician sets up the cylinder and meter, connects them to the household’s cooking appliances, and verifies that everything operates safely and efficiently. Customers then pay for LPG using a mobile payment gateway; through the pay-as-you-go model, they can purchase gas in small, affordable quantities suited to their needs.

Behind the scenes, AWS services power the IoT functionality of the smart meters. Data from each meter—such as gas usage, remaining levels, and payment transactions—is transmitted to AWS IoT Core, a service that easily and securely connects devices to the cloud. This data activates various functions on AWS Lambda, a serverless, event-driven compute service, which perform processes such as updating account balances, alerting depots to dispatch and change a customer’s cylinder, or flagging potential issues for maintenance.

All transactional and usage data is stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service, which serves as the foundation for Circle Gas’s data lake. The company uses a lake house approach, which connects the data lake to data warehouses and other purpose-built services, to support analytics for business optimization and predictive modeling. AWS Glue, a serverless data integration service, is used to prepare and load the data for analytics. Circle Gas also uses the Iceberg open table format, which is compatible with AWS Glue, to maintain data consistency and facilitate seamless querying.

This robust system scales dynamically with the growing number of users, helping Circle Gas effectively process data, scale its service, and make a bigger impact. “At any given point, we see telemetry data for more than 400,000 devices,” says Alexis Josephides, head of engineering at Circle Gas. “On a daily basis, we process millions of cooking sessions.”

As of August 2024, more than 400,000 smart meters are in use by Circle Gas customers in Kenya and Tanzania. The company is adding more every day, facilitated by the scalable infrastructure that it has built on AWS.

By using cost-effective cloud solutions, Circle Gas can maintain an affordable service for its customers. It can also provide customers with greater visibility into their energy expenses for more effective forecasting and planning. This affordable access to clean cooking fuel not only enhances the quality of life for users but also contributes significantly to reducing carbon emissions. By the end of 2023, Circle Gas customers had avoided several million tons of carbon dioxide emissions. By switching from harvested wood to LPG, customers can also reduce their net carbon emissions significantly.

Circle Gas’s IoT-powered smart meters have improved access to clean cooking solutions, positively impacting thousands of households across Kenya and Tanzania. On AWS, the company can efficiently manage and analyze vast amounts of data from its IoT devices, which makes it simple to scale its operations and extend its reach.

As Circle Gas moves forward, it has set an ambitious goal: to help millions of households make the switch to LPG and embrace cleaner cooking methods. It plans to expand further into East Africa and add more countries within the next couple of years.

“Our company can only make an impact on deforestation, loss of life, and other issues if we can put our cooking solution in the hands of millions,” says Josephides. “On AWS, we can achieve that scale and optimize for cost so that it is more affordable for our customers.”