New Delhi, Nov 4 (IANS): As power distribution companies are making efforts to reduce losses and make a turnaround, consultancies and technology companies are playing a major role in helping them cut costs and make savings on non-critical expenditure.

Mercados Energy Markets, has been able to help Uttar Pradesh Power Corporation Ltd. (UPPCL) achieve substantial savings with the help of weather forecast data by IBM's The Weather Company, said Mohit Goyal, Partner at Mercados Energy Markets India.

The company is a project management consultant under the Centre's UDAY scheme.

Goyal said that the aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses of UPPCL have reduced from 49 per cent in 2016-17 to 30 per cent in 2019-20.

"The power purchase cost increased significantly in FY18-19 by around 25 per cent because they were buying high cost power and they were incurring lot of expenses because of deviation in power demand from the forecasting of demand," he said.

"We had to deploy some Artificial Intelligence which could help in project the power demand accurately," Goyal added.

He said that Mercados won the tender in the state and provided a comprehensive cloud based machine learning portfolio management, which allowed the discom in the state to forecast demand and schedule power in order to cater to the demand at least cost.

The tool uses historical demand data and IBM's satellite-based global high resolution forecast.

Goyal said that the company is also working is Bihar and Madhya Pradesh.

"We have been approaching other states also. In Odisha we had a meeting two weeks back and we are also approaching other states," he said.

Himanshu Goyal, India Business Leader of The Weather Company said that the company does a lot of work in power and energy sectors among others.

"Our focus has been to ensure that we at least stay highly focused on the accuracy," he said.

The Weather Company, an IBM business, is also present in other segments in India including agritech, providing hyperlocal forecast data at the farm level. It is also present in retail and industries including logistics and shipping.