DUE to substantial economic growth over the last decade, India’s energy use has been rapidly increasing. Consequently, around a third of the population frequently suffer from power cuts that can last several hours.
To help balance this growing demand with supply shortages, an innovative Indian start-up called Ecolibrium Energy has developed an energy analytics platform called SmartSense that uses demand-side-response to reduce the energy consumption of industry and provide much-needed relief to the grid.
Through the platform Coca Cola and Tata, as well as 750 other commercial and industrial consumers and utilities in South Asia, have saved up to 15 percent of their energy and asset maintenance costs.
The company’s SmartSense energy analytics platform has been honoured by the UK-based Ashden sustainable energy awards, where, on the 14th of June, it won International Ashden Award for Powering Business.
Powering India
Coming from a small town in India where access to electricity was a big issue, Founder and Director Harit Soni and his brother Chintan Soni decided they wanted to use technology to fix inefficiencies in the network.
The brothers soon realised the best place to start was with large companies that account for around 50 percent of India’s energy consumption.
“The reason blackouts happen is because peak demand is not met and most times that demand comes from industry and not houses,” said Harit, speaking to Tech Wire Asia at the Ashden International Conference.
“We knew that if we could reduce these inefficiencies, we could provide better power to the rest of the country,” he added.
Ecolibrium’s SmartSense platform provides a detailed view of energy consumption across a company’s facility. It will identify trends, find energy hotspots, spot leaks, measure consumption and perform predictive machine learning intelligence so that companies can improve energy efficiency.
“Monitoring is becoming a commodity these days; the data and what you can do with it to bring actionable intelligence Is key and where we have found our edge,” said Harit.
Heidi Vella 