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“The good thing about being a Gujarati is your parents and society at large like the idea of entrepreneurialism and encourage you to start up,” says Harit Soni.
Soni did exactly that, when he teamed up with his brother Chintan to start Ecolibrium Energy in 2009. “I always wanted to do something in the energy sector. People in Gujarat are much more receptive to an idea, especially in the bureaucracy and political class. We started off with carbon credit consulting because we wanted to do something which needed less investment and got the revenues in. My consulting background was an added bonus for us,” says Soni.
Born in 1983 in Bhuj, Soni passed out of Bangalore Engineering College and joined Infosys for six months in 2004. Active with a student body called Aisect, Soni went to Canada to work with it for six months. On returning to India he joined KPMG in 2006 as an analyst and by 2009 had managed to secure admission in Ivy League colleges for his MBA.
But he opted to start up on his own. A few months later, the brother duo figured out there was opportunity in the smart grid sector. Smart grid is a type of electrical grid which attempts to predict and intelligently respond to the behavior and actions of all electric power users connected to it, suppliers, consumers, and those that act as both, in order to efficiently deliver reliable, economic, and sustainable electricity services.

The offer
“We realized there are existing MNCs in the smart grid sector but the challenges in India are very different from elsewhere. High level automation is not the key need while theft detection and peak level management are focal areas. Today we offer products under Smartsense, Gridsense and Greensense (see box).

While Gridsense is mainly working with the government, Smartsense is a good source of revenue for us and fast moving. In this area we work with private enterprises to set up energy management systems. Greensense is something new and we do not know how much potential it holds but have started it since we had the capability,” says Soni.
Load shedding or power blackouts, a considerable problem in India, occurs mainly due to the peak demand at the consumer side during the peak hours. The demand in India already exceeds the supply by close to 7-11 percent.
Economically it is not feasible for a utility to erect new power plants and expand the transmission capacity to meet the critical demand during the peak hours.
The only way to achieve this without much spending on expanding the power infrastructure is to bring the supply and demand at equilibrium during those peak hours.
Ecolibrium’s Demand Response (DR) program aims to help the utilities and the consumer come close in the generation and consumption pattern and the company is betting big on this.

Tags:
Ecolibrium Energy, Gujarat, Harit Soni, power sector, Smartsense