Let there be light: this startup tames your energy vampires, cuts your power bill by 10%

Around 1.2 billion people – more than a sixth of the world’s population – still have no access to electricity; a billion more have only an intermittent supply. I grew up in a relatively prosperous small town in north Kerala, India, but belonged to the second “energy poor” billion. Every evening, there were a few scheduled hours of power cut and several unexpected outages. Homework from school was always done in candle-light. That snuffed the romance out of candle-lit dinners for me forever.

Now, electricity supply is far more regular back home but according to the International Energy Agency (PDF), 16 percent of the world’s population will still have no electricity even by 2030. Despite such shocking statistics, more than half of the energy produced is being wasted. The US leads the world in that respect, wasting 58 percent of its energy. Sounds criminal, doesn’t it?

We are all culprits because at home and at work we nurse many energy vampires. From traditional incandescent light bulbs, air conditioners, and heating systems to set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and other networked devices, they all leak energy. Around US$80 billion is wasted on power for online devices alone.

Fortunately, there is some good news. Small changes like using more energy efficient lights (CFL bulbs, for example), shutting off lights and computers when nobody is using them, cleaning air filters regularly, adjusting heating and cooling systems, and so on can make a big difference. To do this efficiently, you have to first monitor your energy use and then plug the leaks. Indian startup Zenatix is in the business of helping you do that. Currently, it makes commercial buildings – offices, university campuses, and industries – energy efficient. It’s moving towards energy smart homes as well.

How to make buildings smart

A lot of companies today are working on ways to conserve energy. Many of them manufacture and install energy monitoring equipment like smart meters and controllers. Zenatix does that as well, but goes a few steps further. It has a cloud-based software product called ZenSoft which monitors the energy consumption data from the smart meters in real time. “We use advanced analytics to make sense of this data and recommend measures to save energy,” Dr. Amarjeet Singh, Zenatix co-founder and head of technology, tells Tech in Asia.

“The analytics engine slices and dices the data to come up with the energy consumption pattern of the building, down to each and every appliance in it. Then steps are taken to optimize that. We have been able to give 10-12 percent of energy savings to all our customers,” Singh says. This Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi grad founded the company in December 2013 with two of his friends from college, Rahul Bhalla and Vishal Bansal.

Singh has a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was working as an assistant professor at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi, when he began a government-funded project to make the university building energy efficient. He led a team of faculty members to install 200 smart meters, analyzed the data collected, and took action to reduce energy consumption in the campus by about 10 percent. “That is a saving of INR 2-2.5 million (US$ 32,000 – 40,000),” Singh says. The project eventually led to Zenatix.

Singh and his two friends were on the lookout for a strong idea within the big data and analytics space for a long time. They narrowed it down to a few application domains where data analytics could have a big impact, and finally decided on energy. “We felt energy as a domain is ready for disruption as the power grids are getting smarter and hardware like smart meters are widely available. All we needed was a controller that can pull data efficiently from these meters and the rest of it can be on the cloud. Besides, I had already done a lot of research in energy sustainability,” Singh explains.

The startup is based in Investopad, an incubator in Gurgaon near Delhi.