Exeri is a Luleå-based company that provides smart grid surveillance that helps electricity companies save time and money in fixing power disruptions. Magnus Karlsson, founder and CEO, is now aiming to launch their system to markets internationally.
In Sweden’s major cities, the power grid is mostly buried underground. But for a vast majority of households in the countryside, electricity is still delivered through connected cables on utility poles, basically operating in the same way as the telephone network did 100 years ago. When there is a power disruption, troubleshooting consists of simple trial-and-error and physical inspections, taking lots of time and manpower just to locate the exact cause of the cut. But with Exeri’s smart grid surveillance system the downtime is heavily reduced as the fault’s location can be immediately pinpointed on the grid.
– We save time and money for our clients by offering intelligent grid surveillance of any power system. By placing smart devices on the utility poles that communicate to a central AI unit, we can provide instant updates on the status of the grid. Our clients can then immediately identify the location and reason for any power cut, says Magnus Karlsson, founder and CEO of Exeri.
Without a surveillance system, a power cut takes about six and a half hours to fix on average, and about 60% of that time is purely to physically search and find the source of the problem. Since there are about 40,000 power cuts in Sweden each year, and most of the electrical grid is located in less populated areas, the workload saved by Exeri’s surveillance system is huge. And Magnus identifies great potential in countries where almost the entire power grid is installed above ground, such as in the US.
– Our goal is to establish our smart Grid system worldwide within a few years and to be the leading supplier for grid monitoring and decision support systems.
The idea for Exeri came one morning in 2011 when Magnus was standing in the shower. Over previous months, he had been experiencing power cuts to his home, and when talking to the power company they said the reason it took so long to fix each one was the time it took to locate each source. So together with some telecom colleagues that he had previously worked with at Ericsson, they started to develop a solution to this problem. However the company was not formally founded until 2015 when battery technology had advanced sufficiently so that they were able to bring their complete solution to market.
– It took some time to get everything right, but we realized the enormous potential of our system very early on. I remember an incident with Piteå Energi, one of our first clients. They had a power cut the night before Christmas Eve, and because of our system, they were able to quickly isolate it so that only two households were affected. Our smart grid surveillance probably saved Christmas for thousands of households that year, says Magnus.
Exeri offers two different products at the moment. One is called Total Control, which means that tracking devices are installed on each pole in the grid, allowing updates on a very detailed level. Quick Coverage on the other hand is a product where devices are placed only at strategic locations. It gives a less detailed view but is more cost-efficient. The batteries on each tracking device last up until ten years before they need to be changed.
– We are fortunate that Northern Sweden has one of the most reliable electrical grids in the world, but Exeri’s smart monitoring system enhances it even further, says Mox Murugan at Invest in Norrbotten. In many other parts of the world, grid outages and faults create major economic costs, and it is clear that Exeri can dramatically reduce their impact.
– We are now aiming to reach out to clients internationally with Exeri’s smart grid surveillance. Our experiences from Sweden shows that our system delivers very large savings in time and money for power companies, while also helping them to provide a much better service to their clients, says Magnus Karlsson, founder and CEO of Exeri.
Learn more about other fields
