Utopus Insights, a new energy analytics software company, was officially launched today, with a mission of accelerating an era of clean, reliable, distributed and cost-effective energy. The company, with offices in Valhalla, NY and Bengaluru, India and its initial market focus in North America, Europe, India and other select regions, announced its executive management team and the first two offerings in its HyperCast and GridPulse product families, both of which are built on the MaestrOS platform. These solutions will offer a system of insight to optimally plan and orchestrate the grid of today and tomorrow.
Utopus Insights is a spin-out from IBM, with Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) as an investor and strategic partner. VELCO has recognized the strength of the team, the quality of the solutions and the importance of the vision: “This is powerful, timely innovation – this is where the grid is going. We now have a level of vision, a level of information, and a new toolset that demonstrates true savings,” said Kerrick Johnson, VP of Strategy at VELCO.
Utopus Insights has assembled an established team of experts in data science, optimization, software engineering, and utility industry knowledge, and is starting with field-proven technology based on more than 15 years of utility customer projects at IBM Research and a portfolio of dozens of patents, led by an exceptional executive team:
- Chandu Visweswariah (President and CEO) was an IBM Fellow and Director of the Smarter Energy Research Institute
- Balki Iyer (Chief Growth Officer) was COO of Enel Green Power India and Business Development leader for GE’s Global Research Center
- Ron Ambrosio (Chief Scientist) was an IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO for Smarter Energy Research, and is a founding member of the U.S. Dept. of Energy’s GridWise® Architecture Council
- Tarun Kumar (Chief Technology Officer) was an IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and Senior Manager of the worldwide Smarter Energy Research team
- Kevin Warren (Chief Operating Officer) was an IBM Distinguished Research Staff Member and led IBM Research’s clean energy strategy
HyperCast provides the world’s most accurate wind and solar day-ahead forecasting, as well as short-term forecasting or nowcasting. It can cut errors in half compared to current industry methods by combining specialized hyper-local weather forecasting with deep machine learning. Its benefits include increased firm renewable bidding, congestion and power quality improvement, and reduced spinning reserves.
GridPulse ingests all relevant data sources and combines them with physics models to accurately predict the failure probability of individual grid assets. GridPulse then combines this failure probability with network risk analytics to quantify the impact of failures. Augmenting time- and condition-based maintenance with GridPulse will optimize spending while improving reliability.
The MaestrOS platform is the conductor behind the scenes that makes it all work. MaestrOS is an extensible, full-featured platform for deep energy analytics, architected for cloud (SaaS), on-premises and distributed Internet of Things (IoT) operation, with Open APIs to allow integration with third party tools. MaestrOS has a rich set of data curation, machine learning and stochastic algorithms, as well as hyper-local weather modeling, and will quickly unlock value from new use cases.
“Explosive growth of renewables, battery storage and electric vehicles will transform the grid. We will be the leading provider of the new intelligence required,” said Chandu Visweswariah, President and CEO of Utopus Insights.
About Utopus Insights
Utopus Insights is an innovation leader with a rich pedigree in energy analytics and software, and a world-class ecosystem of applications. The company’s mission is to accelerate an era of distributed, reliable, clean and cost-effective energy. Its solutions offer a system of insight to optimally plan and orchestrate the grid of today and tomorrow by combining industry expertise with deep analytics to convert data into actionable insights. For more information, please visit: www.utopusinsights.com.
Utopus Insights executive team photo available by clicking here and a brief corporate overview video is here. 