If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Improve It: Dr. Amarjeet Singh, CTO & Co-Founder, Zenatix

The power sector in India is fraught with many problems such as transmission losses, theft and general lack of visibility within the distribution system. There is a need to properly monitor the electric grid, prevent transmission losses, reduce operational wastage of energy, and essentially make the grid smarter. In an exclusive interview with BW Businessworld, Dr. Amarjeet Singh, CTO and Co-Founder, Zenatix, discusses the need for smart metering, utilization of IoT in the power grid, Zenatix’s efforts in reducing operational wastage of electricity, and the sustainability angle to their work. Edited excerpts: 

Why is smart metering essential to prevent transmission losses with respect to electricity distribution?

A big part of transmission and distribution losses in India are attributed to theft. Smart metering will provide a necessary accounting of consumption at different geographical locations which can then help narrow down on locations where theft is prevalent. Accordingly, appropriate action can be taken.

How does Zenatix aim to give real-time visibility in the distribution network of electricity to prevent theft and losses? 

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it”. Real-time energy consumption can provide the measurement required to understand “When” and “Where” of electricity theft and losses. Zenatix can provide a rugged end-to-end IoT infrastructure that can enable such data collection at large scale (collecting 100s of millions of data points every day) and analytics that make sense of this data.

How is IoT utilized by Zenatix to reduce overall aggregated transmission losses? What is the national and regional average of aggregated transmission losses in electricity?

Currently, Zenatix does not work on this side. However, with the proliferation of smart metering and other sensory and control deployments across the grid, Zenatix will like to contribute to intelligent sensing and control and help in reducing the aggregated transmission losses.

How is Zenatix aiming to amplify the work done in the Smart City mission, with respect to the formation of a Smart Grid? 

Smartness in the smart city will be powered by the grid first becoming smarter and ensuring that there is enough electricity in place. While the whole potential for integrated data-driven decision making is not obvious, it’s clear that Smart Cities will involve smart infrastructure, smart mobility, and smart grid, among others, each one throwing lots of data in near real time. Making sense of this data to make intelligent decision making is what is going to drive efficiencies as well as open up new business opportunities. As an example, an air conditioning system of a building connected to a smart mobility system can delay the start time of AC in the morning if the people are expected to arrive in late because of a massive traffic jam nearby.

How is wastage of electricity reduced on the consumption side by Zenatix? For example with residential areas, commercial areas and industrial areas? 

Industrial, Residential and Commercial consumers constitute the majority of the electricity consumption in the country.

Industrial consumers such as pharma companies consume a lot of power for non-manufacturing (utility) activities. Monitoring such consumption and controlling the big loads automatically provide a significant opportunity for reducing electricity wastage.

Commercial consumers include hotels, hospitals, office buildings, retail chains and educational institutions, among others. Air conditioning, UPS and Diesel Generator (DG) constitute major consumption for these consumers. Intelligent control of these sub-systems can result in significantly cutting down on electricity wastage in this environment. Some examples are – switching on the Air Conditioning in the morning based on outside weather conditions and cooling rate of the building; monitoring the UPS load and ensuring that computers are put into sleep/off mode during non-operational hours; and ensuring that the whole facility is shifted back to grid (and not running unnecessarily on the DG) when the grid recovers back from failure.

Residential consumers are already an aware lot. A few ways in which electricity wastage can still be minimised are – ensuring that the AC (or other big loads) are not running unnecessarily; running the appliances in the right mode (e.g. AC at the right set temperature); and ensuring that the appliances are serviced at the right time to ensure that their continuing operations are not sub-optimal.

How is operational wastage of electricity in consumers reduced, without retrofitting, or without altering behaviour?

If a system can monitor the environmental context (e.g. occupancy or temperature) and automatically control the appliances to operate them at the right time and at the right settings, then operational wastage can be reduced. The key to all this is “automated control”. Pure monitoring and analytics are not going to help and will rely on alterations in human behaviour (which is hard to achieve) to get any meaningful savings.

How does Zenatix utilize time-based and sensor-based control to propagate its mission of sustainability and energy efficiency? 

Zenatix has a product called WattMan that is largely focusing on retail chains (such as supermarkets) and banks – anyone who has 100s of outlets spread across the country. WattMan involves retrofitting each outlet with sensors that understand the context – temperature, humidity, state of assets (e.g. if the ATM machine has gone into a hang state or if the Pizza oven has been switched on) and automatically controls other electrical appliances in the outlet based on the context. As an example, Air Conditioning in a pizza outlet is switched on at the right time (based on automated time-based control) and is run at an optimal temperature, accounting for variations in occupancy and weather conditions (driven by sensor-based control).

What has been Zenatix’s work in utilizing artificial technology to save energy? 

From across more than 1000 outlets spread across more than 70 cities, Zenatix collects roughly 100 million data points every day. We are constantly working on developing suitable AI algorithms that can make sense out of the collected data and drive useful benefits to the business:

Energy savings – high electrical consuming appliances such as Air Conditioners are automatically switched on and off based on fixed time of the day and ambient temperature or state of another appliance (e.g. Kitchen Exhaust is switched on only when oven is turned on); outdoor signages are controlled automatically based on sunset and sunrise times;

Improved Compliance – Temperature monitoring in refrigeration units, customer areas and production areas provide deeper insights which can help prevent spoilage of perishable items and providing better comfort experience to both employees and customers

Predictive Maintenance – High-resolution data (collected every 30 seconds) is used to train sophisticated AI algorithms which can then predict failure (such as compressor gas leakage for refrigeration units) well in advance resulting in reduced energy consumption, better product quality and avoidance of complete downtime resulting in business loss 

How is Zenatix aiming to address the triple bottom line of People, Planet, Profit? 

Energy efficiency is the foot in the door for Zenatix. It helps build a clear business case. We guarantee that WattMan system will reduce energy consumption worth 1.5 times (typically the benefits are 2-3 times) of the annual charges that customer has to pay. Once this clear business case is accepted, contributing to their Profit margins, we then work with customers to address their other challenges. On experiencing the advantages of real-time monitoring and automated control thereof, customers typically come up with other challenges which either help us in contributing to the profit margins or attacking the other two benefits – People and Planet.

For ATMs, besides energy savings, we provide them with improved uptime and reduced First Line Maintenance (FLM) cost thus contributing significantly to the profit margins.

Temperature monitoring and corresponding alerts help in ensuring that People (both employees and customers) get comfortable experience.

Early detection of leakages of compressor gas (which contributes to significant global warming) helps mitigate some of the environmental concerns. Besides, cutting down on electricity consumption has an indirect benefit on the Planet, especially for a country like India where much of the power is produced from thermal power plants that create a lot of pollution.

Why does Zenatix aim to address the energy saving issues of distributed infrastructure, with respect to retail chains and banks? 

Energy efficiency is a critical element for sustainability and a lot of work is being done in this area already. Energy efficiency delivers the least expensive power compared to any other source of electricity. However, much of the focus in energy efficiency has been on retrofits (build and deploy more energy efficient light bulbs, air conditioners, etc.). Often overlooked is the power of data-driven energy efficiency – no matter whether you have an efficient or inefficient infrastructure, if you are not operating it well, you will bleed on energy.

• In this respect, Zenatix has developed an innovative product called WattMan. It’s an IoT based Building Management System (BMS) tailor-made for retail chains and banking set-ups (essentially, anyone who has large number of geographically distributed infrastructure) and help them in reducing their electricity consumption by up to 30%.
• Given the distributed nature of retail/ banking set-ups (multiple outlets/ branches spread across the country), having control over the electricity spends and providing the right customer experience at the same time is a big challenge. WattMan addresses these challenges in an automated manner through its IoT based BMS that delivers intelligent controls together with predictive and preventive maintenance. All this is powered by advanced machine learning algorithms.
• Zenatix has innovated significantly and aims to fill this huge gap globally. Hardware products designed by Zenatix, together with innovations on the communication side and cloud-based hosting solution allows us to innovate on a BMS which is low on hardware and exploits advanced machine learning algorithms on the collected data to offer significantly higher value than a traditional BMS.

What is WattMan?

WattMan is an innovative IoT based Building Management System (BMS) tailor-made for retail chains and banking set-ups (essentially, anyone who has a large number of geographically distributed infrastructure) and help them in reducing their electricity consumption by up to 30%. Given the distributed nature of retail/ banking set-ups (multiple outlets/ branches spread across the country), having control over the electricity spends and providing the right customer experience at the same time is a big challenge. WattMan addresses these challenges in an automated manner through its IoT based BMS that delivers intelligent controls together with predictive and preventive maintenance. All this is powered by advanced machine learning algorithms.

Its hardware is engineered to reliably operate in the Indian context that has voltage fluctuations, irregular network connectivity and sudden power failure. The server side software is built to handle large volume of sensor data that gets collected (more than 30 million data points are collected on daily basis from all the sensors deployed by Zenatix). Collected data is used to develop machine learning driven models deciding optimal operational settings based on external factors like weather and footfall, thus allowing sophisticated control.

How is Zenatix complimenting the work done by government bodies like EESL? (give full forms in the answer)

Energy Efficiency Services Limited is a government enterprise that is behind the massive adoption of LEDs in India. Beyond LEDs, they are now moving towards energy-efficient buildings as well as energy efficient Air Conditioners. Zenatix is in discussions with them to provide the technology solutions for:

Monitoring and baselining for energy efficiency buildings – Our WattMan system can be used to do real-time monitoring of energy-efficient buildings. Analytics on the collected data can be used to create baseline consumption and effectively calculate the savings from different measures adopted for energy efficiency.

Automated control and predictive maintenance for energy efficient ACs – Zenatix has developed a smart thermostat which can work with any AC and perform web-enabled control using Infrared (the same way a remote communicates with the AC). This thermostat can be used with energy efficient ACs, being promoted by EESL, to provide multiple benefits:

Ensure that ACs do not run during non-working hours or weekends and hence reduce operational wastage

Use real time data to estimate when the AC needs servicing. This can then be used to generate an alert to the manufacturer (who is providing 5 year AMC as part of the AC cost) and raise escalations if the service is not delivered in a timely manner (since our system, using the real-time data, can then estimate when the AC is back to normal condition)

How is Zenatix working with the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE) and the UNDP to make a prototype for ECBC compliance? 

BEE came up with Energy Conservation Building Code (ECBC 2017) this year. This code aims to deliver energy efficient design, construction and operation of commercial buildings in India. Zenatix, together with their partner Environmental Design Solutions (EDS) are tasked with creating a prototype system for ECBC 2017. Development of this system is supported by United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

With this initiative, Zenatix aims to help the government with reducing the energy wastage in commercial buildings (it is estimated that buildings consume approximately 30% of the total energy consumption in the country and waste up to 40% of the energy they consume). We want to do our bit to ensure energy sustainability in the country by attacking the consumption side and making it more efficient using the latest IoT technologies and AI on the large-scale data collected thereof.