An electric utility's biggest bane, John Lauletta says, is the power outage. It makes sense that if utilities could predict outages -- or at least when parts of the system were about to fail -- they'd jump at the chance.
Enter Exacter, which over the past four years has grown rapidly by helping to predict how and where overhead power distribution systems might fail.
Lauletta, Exacter's CEO, says the company began to gel in 2004, when he and fellow utilities veteran Larry Anderson (Exacter's vice president of international business) "started talking about this idea of predictive technologies. We started our work with the Ohio State University High Voltage Laboratory, and we opened our company on July 1, 2006."
Today, Exacter has 100 utility customers in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Australia and the U.K.
In a nutshell, here's Exacter's approach: As a vehicle drives along the distribution route at regular speeds, a patented sensor in the car detects radio emissions from damaged components. Exacter sends a person into the field to confirm which component is damaged or failing. A digital photograph is taken, latitude and longitude confirmed, and reported to the utility so the problem can be fixed.
While there are other methods for finding bad components, none is as accurate, fast or as comprehensive as the method Exacter uses, Lauletta says.
Lauletta says another growing service for Exacter is helping utilities understand the feasibility of laying "smartgrid" networks over their distribution lines.
Exacter has received support from the Ohio TechAngel Funds and the Ohio Third Frontier Innovation Ohio Loan Fund. Last year, the company received Outstanding Startup and Outstanding Service awards from TechColumbus, and, more recently, a statewide professional engineering award for innovation for small companies.
Source: John Lauletta, Exacter
Writer: Gene Monteith