Utopus Insights, a new energy analytics software company, was officially launched today, with offices in Valhalla, NY, and Bengaluru, India, and its initial market focus in North America, Europe, India and other select regions.
A spin-out from IBM, with Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO) as an investor and strategic partner, Utopus Insights focuses on accelerating an era of clean, reliable, distributed and cost-effective energy.
The company 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.
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
“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.
HyperCast provides 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.