Yash Raj Khaitan is the founder and CEO of Village Power, an energy technology company founded in Berkeley, California. village power Develops and commercializes technology for smart power grids and energy analysis to help utilities and businesses reduce their energy losses. Yash Raj completed his graduation in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California. Founded in 2012, GramPower initially focused on manufacturing low cost solar products and microgrids for rural electrification, today the company is one of the largest companies in smart metering solutions for the national grid in India and 100,000 in India. Claims to handle power in excess of kilowatts. In more than 30 cities across the country. On this world environment Day 2022, Times of India Tech-Gadgets Now speaks to Yash Raj about village power, lessons from the pandemic and more…
> Describe the flagship offering of Village Power?
Village Power provides the industry’s most comprehensive smart metering and electricity distribution management platform. Electric utilities use our solutions to digitize and automate metering, billing and collection activities, and to identify and eliminate electricity theft. Our technology is designed and deployed to address the $16 billion/year energy loss problem in India.
Q. What are the major differences, if any, between Village Power’s solutions for businesses versus retail users?
There is no significant difference between Village Power’s solutions for businesses compared to retail users. We offer our smart meters in all our business verticals – State Electric Utilities; Co-living and PG Operator; and retail users. While the first two use our solution to manage electricity distribution operations, retail users deploy our advanced analytics to track their budgets and reduce their electricity bills.
Q. How has the Village Electricity offering changed/evolved in comparison to the market in the last 10 years?
Village Electricity was in rural electrification 10 years back. We will set up smart microgrids in off-grid areas where we will generate electricity using solar energy and distribute it using our smart prepaid metering platform. In 2016, we grew the business and began to focus on providing smart prepaid metering solutions to electric utilities – both public and private, as we recognized that as a major problem to solve – the annual Energy in India The loss is equivalent to about 40% of our national health budget. Since then, the technology and product stack has expanded significantly to take care of complex requirements
Today with our smart meter and software platform, we distribute over 100,000 kW of electricity per day, manage over 700 million annual electricity payments, and serve over 400,000 people with our technology. The country also recently mandated that 100% of India’s 250M electricity meters are to be converted into smart meters in the next three years. We are playing a leading role in this technology transformation.
Q. What is the biggest epidemic of village power learning?
The supply chain in our industry has been completely disrupted by the pandemic. The biggest way out of the pandemic is to diversify the supply chain. The second has been to focus even more on SaaS revenue as opposed to hardware sales.
> Any message you would like to give on the occasion of World Environment Day?
To survive as a species, we need the environment, and not vice versa. We at Village Power are dedicated to making our contribution to building fundamental energy efficiency on the grid and hope that many more businesses will align their strategies towards a truly clean planet.
Q. How has the Google Accelerator Program for Startups helped you in your entrepreneurial journey?
The Google Accelerator Program for Startups has helped us immensely in our growth journey. It helped our work gain a lot of visibility and connect with some amazing mentors on the product, technology and strategy sides.
Q: Why don’t you have an app for iPhone users?
We currently have an application working for Apple iOS. Since less than 15% of our users are working with iPhone, we have built our platform for Android first.
FacebookTwitterinstagramKu APPyoutube