Energy and environmental monitoring are at the forefront of global sustainability efforts. From tracking ocean conditions to preventing catastrophic bushfires, optimizing agricultural yields to managing power grids, a new generation of IoT solutions is transforming how we understand and respond to our changing environment.
The innovators leading this transformation share a common insight: delivering actionable environmental intelligence requires connectivity that works anywhere, from remote ocean waters to dense bushland. These companies have eliminated the complexity of building cellular infrastructure by partnering with Blues, allowing them to focus their engineering resources on solving critical environmental challenges rather than wrestling with connectivity protocols and carrier relationships.
In this blog, we’ll explore five examples of how IoT is enabling smarter energy management and more effective environmental monitoring today.
Enable IoT: Soil Monitoring for Continuous Agricultural Intelligence
Enable IoT has developed the Sense M30, a remote sensing device that brings precision agriculture into a new era. By providing continuous, real-time monitoring of soil composition and environmental conditions, Enable IoT is helping farmers optimize resources, improve yields, and support carbon-neutral farming practices.
Traditional soil testing involves periodic manual sampling, creating significant gaps in understanding soil conditions throughout the growing season. The Sense M30 changes this entirely. The compact device, planted directly in soil, harvests readings every 30 minutes on critical soil composition metrics including carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium levels. It also features an optical rain sensor and measures air temperature, pressure, and humidity. Modular ports allow farmers to connect research-grade accessories like electrical conductivity probes.
Their AI backend aggregates this data to predict carbon capture in soil, helping agricultural organizations qualify for carbon credits. Recent hardware iterations have added pH sensing capability, enabling AI to estimate phosphate levels for fertilizer management when prices remain volatile.
The technical challenge was creating smart agricultural technology that could operate autonomously in fields for years without maintenance, surviving buried in soil while transmitting data via cellular on a compact battery with a small solar panel.
Mike Bower, Managing Director of Enable IoT says, “We’re a soil science and AI company, not a telecommunications company. Blues gave us cellular connectivity that just works, so we could focus our energy on what we do best: turning environmental data into actionable intelligence for farmers.”
The result is a device that provides farmers with real-time soil data to guide smarter irrigation decisions. It operates autonomously with zero site infrastructure requirements and no power requirements as the device has its own long-life battery with solar panel recharging. The Sense M30 delivers AI insights that enable carbon tracking, certification, and provides continuous monitoring that drives sustainable yield improvement.
Silicon Vandals: Transforming Bushfire Intelligence with Aerial IoT
Silicon Vandals’ Samara is taking on one of the greatest challenges in bushfire mitigation: tracking fuel moisture content across vast, difficult-to-access bushland. Inspired by helicopter seeds that spin into a gentle descent, Samara uses biomimicry to enable aerial deployment of sophisticated environmental sensors, unlocking insights into areas previously too hard to monitor.
Monitoring forested terrain has yet to fully leverage modern environmental sensing technology. Simply put, there are limited engineers available to trek through dangerous landscapes to install and maintain sensor systems. Traditional methods involve costly, complex installations or manual measurements, resulting in sparse coverage and critical data gaps.
Once deployed, Samara tracks an array of critical bushfire indicators. The low-powered device provides both direct and modelled fuel moisture readings, a key measure for agencies to forecast risks and plan hazard reduction. Samara also captures CO₂, temperature, humidity, and vapour pressure deficit to build a clearer picture of local risk conditions.
“Our mission at Silicon Vandals is to pursue high-impact projects that solve overlooked problems,” says Tom McMenamin. “Samara represents exactly this philosophy: using rapid experimentation and field testing by users to address a critical environmental challenge that existing solutions couldn’t effectively tackle.”
Samara uses dual connectivity, cellular with satellite backup, to ensure reliable data transmission even from the most remote bushland. The system also automatically increases upload frequency during anomalous events, so critical changes in conditions are reported quickly.
Sofar Ocean: Building a Global Ocean Intelligence Network
Tim Janssen founded Sofar Ocean with a clear mission: address the critical gap in global ocean data. “In an age in which IoT and GPS provide so much data about the world around us, our oceans are being left behind. Today, most of our oceans remain unmapped and unmeasured, which severely impacts our ability to model and predict ocean and climate processes.” This inspired Spotter, a scalable platform designed to bring the same level of sensing and intelligence to the sea that GPS and IoT brought to land.
Traditional oceanographic instruments are expensive and difficult to deploy, resulting in sparse ocean monitoring coverage. This has resulted in sparse ocean monitoring coverage, leaving vast areas of the world’s oceans essentially invisible to scientists,
maritime operators, and coastal communities. Spotter transforms this through simple, affordable design. Each Spotter buoy is small, solar-powered, and easily deployed by hand from small boats or by air drop. The devices maintain science-grade measurement quality while remaining affordable, democratizing access to ocean intelligence.
Each buoy records wave spectra, sea surface temperature, and atmospheric pressure, while deriving wind speed and direction from wave data. With Smart Mooring, Spotter extends below the surface to measure temperature, currents, sound, and water level. Data transmits in real time through Iridium satellite and LTE links via the Sofar dashboard and API.
“Our mission is to connect the world’s oceans to contribute to a more sustainable future,” explains Tim Janssen. “We are hyper-focused on collecting as much data as we can, as quickly as we can, complementing other organizations, both government and commercial.”
The value Sofar delivers spans multiple user communities. Researchers use Spotter to monitor climate and ecosystems in real time. Shipping operators use the data through Sofar’s Wayfinder platform to optimize routes and cut emissions. Defense and government users rely on Spotter for environmental awareness and mission planning. The network approach means that every deployed Spotter contributes to a shared, planetary-scale dataset that benefits all users.
Voltaic Systems: Ensuring Reliable Power for Remote IoT Deployments
Voltaic Systems has established itself as a leader in solar power solutions for off-grid applications. Their battery health monitoring system, powered by Blues, addresses a fundamental challenge in remote IoT deployments: ensuring that high-value devices like cameras, sensors, and gateways maintain reliable power in locations where traditional infrastructure is unavailable.
Voltaic’s CORE Solar Systems provide easy-to-deploy, scalable power for industrial IoT devices. The goal of 100% uptime can be impaired by unexpectedly high-power consumption, shading from structures or vandalism. With traditional solar deployments, underperforming systems can go unnoticed until the device stops reporting, by which point, the damage is done.
Voltaic’s solution turns this reactive model into a proactive one. The cellular monitoring device is pre-installed on the battery. Once the battery is connected to a device, it sends detailed performance data to the cloud every 30 minutes, providing installation teams with deployment confirmation and giving users detailed insights into battery state of charge, power production, and power consumption.
“The ability to remotely monitor and diagnose issues with the solar panels has been invaluable” notes Jeff Crystal, COO at Voltaic Systems, “They pay for themselves just in support and engineering time. We regularly review fleets of devices and are able to coach customers to improve device placement or increase solar panel size in order to reduce the risk of running out of power. We would not be able to do this without the battery health monitor.”
See These Solutions Live at CES 2026
These five companies represent the breadth of energy and environmental monitoring applications: precision agriculture, solar power management, utility grid optimization, bushfire prevention, and ocean intelligence. Despite their diverse applications, they share a common insight, successful IoT deployment requires eliminating connectivity complexity to focus engineering resources on solving critical environmental challenges.
Want to see these energy and environmental monitoring solutions in action? All five companies will be showcased at the Blues booth during CES 2026 in Las Vegas. It’s a unique opportunity to meet the Blues team, see live demonstrations, and discover how reliable connectivity is enabling the next generation of environmental intelligence and sustainable energy management.
Book a meeting with our team on the ground to discuss your connected product, or keep up with exclusive content, booth updates, and behind-the-scenes insights as we gear up for the show. Follow Blues on social media to stay updated on:
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/buildwithblues
- YouTube: @BuildWithBlues
- Threads: @buildwithblues
- Instagram: @buildwithblues