You can save money by replacing old electrical equipment, says Adhmora

If you’re concerned about your energy use, this startup from Bandung, Indonesia will interest you: Adhmora offers energy saving solutions. It was founded by a team of four graduates from the faculty of physics of the Institute of Technology Bandung. As a technology company in the green energy sector, Adhmora is breaking ground in an area rarely touched by local startups.

Adhmora COO Gibran Erlangga said that the startup was launched in October 2014 and has so far received seed investment of about US$7,600 from an investor who prefers to remain anonymous. “What we can say is that this person is one of the major players in seismology in Indonesia,” says Erlangga. He added that this funding was an early stage investment which came at the right time to help the Adhmora team develop their product and services until they are ready for the market.

Saving energy means saving costs

Adhmora targets owners of buildings, large corporations, and banks with the message that conserving energy is not only important for the sake of the environment but can lead to considerable cost savings. However, Adhmora doesn’t rule out the possibility that its service can also be used by private people who want to get serious about saving energy in their homes.

The startup’s services are packaged into two products: Energo and ESPC. If you decide to embark on an energy saving mission with Adhmora, the team begins by conducting a survey to determine which components of your building can be optimized for energy saving. This service is called Energo.

The Adhmora team then connects a device to your energy network. Its role is to monitor your energy use at all times. By collecting this data over time you can find out what components or behaviours are causing high energy consumption. This could be lighting, the air conditioning system, or other components.

The data can be accessed via a web application and can then be used as the reference for Adhmora’s second product – more about that later. But the base data from Energo can already help you achieve energy and cost savings, because your actions – for example turning off lights or AC units – can be seen to have immediate effect.

According to Erlangga, Adhmora is currently running a pilot program with its Energo product at the offices of Greeneration Indonesia in Bandung.

If manual energy saving is not enough for you, Adhmora offers you its second product, ESPC, which stands for “energy saving performance contracting”. This service is essentially a financing scheme in which Adhmora looks at all electronic equipment such as lighting and cooling in your building and replaces it with components that are more cost effective.

As building owner, there is little risk involved, because Adhmora, rather than being paid upfront, gets paid from a cut off the money that you will ultimately be able to save. For example, if you were spending US$800 a month on electricity before, and after the replacements you pay only US$400 each month, Adhmora will take a percentage from the US$400 saved. The exact percentage depends on several modalities as well as the length of the contract.

To test ESPC in a real-life environment, Adhmora is running a pilot project with Cihampelas Hotel 3. His startup has been able to give the hotel recommendations for energy saving with the potential for reducing its annual electricity cost by at least 2.5 percent, says Erlangga.

The challenge is education

Adhmora competes with a state-owned energy firm called PT Energy Management Indonesia (EMI). The service it offers is nearly the same. The difference is that PT EMI focuses on the buildings of state-owned enterprises in Indonesia.