How this New Brunswick Startup Plans to Keep the Lights On
FREDERICTON–A new Fredericton startup wants to change the way utility companies locate and manage power outages.
Trispectra Innovation, an early stage startup company, plans to do this by offering a smart sensor to monitor the power lines in real time.
“The existing power outage management system is based on customers calling and letting them know when the power is out,” said Emmanuel Albert, CEO of Trispectra Innovation.
With this technology, Albert said, utilities can respond to outages more efficiently because of quicker ways to find what causes problems and not having to rely on customers to inform them.
“Since we are pulling information from the power lines, we are using that data to build a predictive analytics platform with the goal of being able to provide useful data that would be able to help utilities to be more proactive instead of being reactive as of right now,” he said.
After graduating with a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of New Brunswick, Albert continued his education at the J. Herbert Smith Centre’s Masters of Technology Management and Entrepreneurship Program, where he and his team came up with their first idea around building a wifi access point.
“Throughout the program, I realized that the product that we were working on at the time didn’t have any reliability. So we decided to pivot and that’s when we began looking at the energy sector… and the problems we could solve,” he says.
Nowadays, Trispectra Innovation is a part the Smart Grid Innovation Network. It is also part of the first cohort of an energy and cybersecurity accelerator called Energia Ventures, which is an extension of the Technology Management and Entrepreneurship Program at UNB.
Trispectra was founded in May 2015. In the coming months, Albert says, the company will start looking for early adopters to start testing the product.
So far, he said, Trispectra has received positive responses and validations from Canadian utility companies.
“We are still in discussions,” said Albert. “We are still in talks. That’s why I’m pretty confident that something will work over the next few months.
“The distribution automation market that Trispectra falls under is a growing market and it’s projected to [be worth] about $20 billion by 2020,” says Albert.
Despite having big companies like GD Energy and Siemens as competitors, Trispectra Innovation believes its competitive advantage is what makes it agile.
In the future, Albert said, he hopes to sell the product across North America, India and the Caribbean region.
Albert said he believes Fredericton is a great place to start a business because of its small, tight-knit atmosphere.
“For me in Fredericton, I could reach out to anybody and be able to talk to them in a coffee shop and have a conversation. I don’t think it is possible in other places,” he said.
“The cost of doing a business is also low [around here]. When you build a startup, it’s all about the support, the people, the network that you build that will help you succeed. It takes a village, and Fredericton has that community.”