How Artificial Intelligence Based Startup Brought Revolution In Electricity Supply

Dr. Sayonsom Chanda was not unfamiliar with the strong winds and continuous rain that used to knock down the electricity for hours, days, and even sometimes weeks also. He belongs to the East Midnapur district in West Bengal. He also encountered the horror of the 1999 Odisha cyclone and Sidr cyclone in 2007.

This was the main cause that pushed him to start Sync Energy in 2017. This startup constructs Artificial Intelligence-based tools that simplify emergency and disaster response planning for the companies which are in the electrical power distribution field.

“We saw an opportunity and a real advantage to automate much of these calculations and put the grunt-work behind the scenes so that engineers are less stressed and can focus on every utility engineer, linemen, crew, and first responders the power to do simulation,” explains Sayonsom.

This platform provides better information about the impact of disaster before it actually strikes. This helps electric power companies in decreasing the cost of emergency power outages.

When Sayonsom was pursuing his Ph.D. from Washington State University, he met Robert Kabera who was a graduate from Stanford University and was working for Prof. Anurag Srivastava, the same professor for whom  Sayonsom was working.

In previous years, they together tried to find out the cause why such strong and prolonged power outages were not able to be avoided. When they discussed with Michael Bernard, who was the mentor of Robert, they came to know that all the operators, practitioners, and planners were not connected with artificial intelligence.

It was the time when he felt that he had to build a tool that should be able to predict the damage to the power grid.

How It Works

It works on a no-code interface for electrical engineers to perform advanced analytics. The team claims to have constructed the first and the largest power system with an incident database which is called event intelligence (E.I.).

Especially in the rural parts of East India, Sync Energy has opened his access to its damage predictive capabilities for emergency response NGOs and state disaster planning department, block development officers. Sync Energy predicts how much damage will be caused to the electrical grid because of cyclones, earthquakes, etc.

Recently because of the Amphan cyclone in West Bengal, Sync Energy has decided to offer its asset damage prediction technologies for free to research organizations as well as rural block development officers.

Future Plans

According to a study, by the end of 2020, there will be 28 billion-plus objects with the data exchange capabilities. The backend technology of Sync Energy costs more than 30000 US dollars over the previous four years, which also includes the time that is put in by the co-founders to build the predictive analysis analytics brain of the Sync Energy.

Nowadays, the company is working on expanding to the communities without smart grid technologies. It is helping local authorities as well as the disaster response team also.