Revolutionising the concept of energy monitoring and efficiency

There are two aspects of energy management: global and personal. ‘How can I reduce my costs?’ is a question that everybody, from an individual to an organisation, asks themselves.

Energy cost is a cost that is completely unavoidable. The larger a company or industry, the higher its energy costs. Gokul Shrinivas, Founder & CEO, MinionLabs India, elaborates on how reducing energy costs is the most impactful way for any industry to increase its profit numbers.

Apart from just savings, other aspects global corporates look for include sustainability, ESG and international compliance standards. It becomes a matter of corporate responsibility for them to reduce their carbon footprint along with energy saved.

The genesis of MinionLabs lies in Shrinivas’s college days when, for a project, he set out to discover how his college could save on power costs. “To save cost, you need to know the cost,” he points out. “When you know how much energy an appliance consumes, you can define the problem.” Problems can be overuse of power, leakages and more.

“Currently, no solution is available to quantify power consumption at the appliance level. To do that, you need a meter for every appliance,” he elaborates. At Rs10,000 per metreand a licence fee for every connection to the dashboard, this is a high cost. “Plus, knowing will not lower costs. An energy auditorand technician need to be hired, adding further to the surcharges.” To identify and save a small percentage of energy, one ends up paying a higher price with the returns generated only years later.

However, Shrinivas deduced that having this visibility on the exact appliance-wise consumption was critical. For this, his team built an AI-based solution that can be installed on the main electricity board, which intelligently detects energy used by each outlet and appliance. “Through this technology, we leverage just one device to meter multiple appliances. Additionally, this device detects pain points and generates solutions in the form of actionable notifications.”