India’s per capita energy consumption currently stands close to one-third of the world average. India is running renewable energy initiatives in a big way and has emerged as the second most attractive market for renewable energy equipment in the world. With the headquarters of International Solar Alliance, India is all set to become a global leader in solar energy. India being a growing economy, power consumption is only going to rise and the country has realized that building and operating the solar farm is cheaper than existing coal fields. Remarkable environmental benefits of Renewable energy making it the biggest driver to help us meet our carbon emission reduction targets. Indian government has set a new goal of achieving 100GW capacity by 2022.
Akshya Power is one of India’s most exciting startup in the Solar Industry. Akshya in sanskrit means, something which never depletes, hence it’s a synonym of the English word renewable. “We strongly believe that renewable energy is the future of energy and solar is at forefront of it. We started developing our software for Solar Industry in the year 2015 and launched it in 2016. Initial response for the software was encouraging and that motivated us to build further for the industry,” says Ritu Choudhary, Co-Founder, Akshya Power.
Serving the Best
The solar Energy firm has three major products namely AkshyaPower, a cloud based monitoring solution for keeping real time track of data from every asset of the plant, O&M Portal -a web based dashboard to monitor Operations & Maintenance activities in solar plant and Reportly – It automates the reporting and analysis for large solar portfolio companies. “For portfolio companies, we provide an integrated solution, which can combine all three of our solutions together and there is nothing beyond this that you would need for managing and operating a large or small solar portfolio. With Akshya Power, we also have our in-house built easyLog datalogger, so it can just plug-in with any of the existing device from any manufacturer or any communication protocol. Akshya Power can be scaled from 1MWp to GWp level plants, without any hitch. We also provide realtime information of plant performance with a dashboard that contains text and graph based widgets. Critical alerts from plants are sent via email and SMS for quick actions. Other activities like Preventive Maintenance Scheduling, Issue tracking and Stock management are handled by our product O&M Portal, while portfolio reports and data analysis feature are available in Reportly,” added Shree Kant Bohra, CEO, Akshya Power.
Professional in the field
Shree Kant Bohra, is a passionate technologist with soaring vision and ideas. He’s an engineer with a knack for entrepreneurship believing in technology as an enabler, from his college days, where he played a crucial role in various technical events. He was a Google Summer of Code fellow in 2009, was semi-finalist in Google Online Marketing Challenge 2009 and runner-up in International Online Hacking Challenge organized by IIT Kanpur. After college, he worked with various teams and build technology products from grounds-up. With solar industry, he realized that he can have the maximum impact of his software knowledge in making the world a better place.
The Innovative abode
“Creativity and Innovation are two important pillars on which the whole organization is based. I would rather say they are two sides of the same coin. From day-one, our focus is on realizing everyone in the team that they are free to think of creative ideas and shouldn’t be afraid of it. Everyone is praised for their creative, original ideas and also encouraged to try radical approaches. We don’t have a culture of managers and subordinates, everyone is given a leadership role for the feature they develop and all other team mates, review it. With open-feedback loop, we have seen that people take most sensible decisions, and the rate of innovation also increases,” pinpoints Ritu.
The firm has served various clients over the years such as Sun Edison, OWM Solar, Indian Oil, Terra Form, Refex Energy are to name a few. “Customers love to be heard, they want to know that their problem is taken seriously, so the right amount of communication is the key to a successful and long term relationship. Akshya Power encourages everyone in the team to talk to the customers, not just the customer relationship team. That helps our engineers to understand the user problems and since they are the ones who have worked on the features, they can have the quickest answer to any customer query,” elaborates Shree Kant.
Akshya Power has also been awarded as ‘Solar IT Company of the year 2019’ at India Solar Week 2019 for the innovative solutions for solar industry. The firm was also runner-up in RIICO startup challenge organized by the Rajasthan Government. “Focusing on the customer’s pain point and doing all the grunt work for them in monitoring is one of the key-factors behind our success. When other companies are busy building on buzz-words and sharing shiny presentations, we directly tell our customers how much we can save them by doing things which matters most for them and that clicks with our most satisfying customers till date. Also, our competitive and flexible pricing as well as the on-field service is something we are proud of and it has contributed most to our success so far.”
The Future Ahead
Solar Industry’s future is bright in India and everywhere, the dynamics may change with time, but the core-strength will always be there. Monitoring and Reporting is integral to the success of the solar industry. “In the future, we may see new technology, new protocol and even new medium to monitor. With a strong base in technology, we are confident that we can adapt to and even lead the way to the future of monitoring in India and the world. We would like to be the de-facto name and standard in the monitoring and reporting, which everyone in the industry will follow,” concludes Shree Kant.
