By Aditya Raj
Gurgaon: For most people, an electricity bill is simply a number that arrives at the end of the month. But for 17-year-old Aditya Krishan Goel, a Class 12 student at The Shri Ram School, Aravali, it became a question he could not ignore: where exactly is all that energy going?
His curiosity began while working at Prakriti Creations, a small manufacturing unit where he was involved in developing an automatic thread-pulling machine used to separate shirt collars.
Spending time on the factory floor, Aditya noticed that machines sometimes performed differently even when nothing about them appeared to have changed. At the same time, electricity bills continued to rise, but there was no way to identify which machine was consuming more power or why.
“What struck me was that the inefficiency wasn’t just about the machines. It was about the lack of visibility,” Aditya says. “There was no data or system to answer basic questions — where was energy being used the most, where was it being wasted, and how could you fix something you couldn’t even see?”
The experience made him curious about how energy could be monitored in real time. His next internship would give him a way to explore that question.
At TerraTech, Aditya worked on industrial dashboards for companies monitoring solar and wind energy generation. He worked with Grafana to visualise renewable-energy data and understand how physical energy infrastructure could be translated into information that people could actually use. The internship gave him hands-on experience in building real-time energy-monitoring systems and directly catalysed the development of AeiX.
The idea was simple: if solar and wind generation could be monitored through live dashboards, why couldn’t the same technology be used to understand electricity consumption in factories and other organisations?
That question led to AeiX, an IoT-based energy intelligence platform that consolidates fragmented energy-consumption data and turns it into actionable insights.
The problem, Aditya found, was significant. Globally, 10–15% of energy is estimated to be lost to avoidable inefficiencies. To understand the Indian context, he conducted primary research with 21 SMEs across India. He found that 64% relied only on monthly electricity bills, while another 18% used manual or Excel-based tracking.
Aditya began building a solution himself. Using ESP32, Raspberry Pi, ZMPT101B and SCT-013 sensors, Modbus RTU/TCP, MQTT, Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana, he created an end-to-end system capable of collecting, transmitting, analysing and visualising energy data in real time. The technology was then put to the test.
At Sakkatech LLP, AeiX showed that the facility was still consuming approximately 1.5 kWh at night, even when the premises were empty. Instead of simply reporting the anomaly, Aditya traced the data to its source and discovered that a water compressor had been left running overnight. Once it was switched off, night time consumption fell by approximately 7.5%.
In another instance, AeiX flagged an abnormal power-factor reading. Aditya investigated the issue and found that the facility’s capacitor panel was malfunctioning. After it was corrected, the power factor improved from approximately 0.2 to 0.95. These experiences showed Aditya that energy monitoring could do more than explain an electricity bill. It could help identify equipment problems and enable organisations to act before small inefficiencies became larger costs.
AeiX is now also being piloted at Kamal Packaging Pvt. Ltd., as Aditya continues to test and refine the system in real manufacturing environments. But his most important deployment was closer to home.
After developing the technology and testing it through industrial pilots, Aditya approached The Shri Ram School, Aravali, with the idea of using AeiX to monitor the school’s energy consumption. He installed monitoring hardware and wiring within the school’s 1.5 MW electrical panel, led the software development and established the real-time monitoring infrastructure. He also mentored 2 junior students, involving them in data collection, dashboard setup and real-time monitoring.
For Aditya, the school deployment was about more than adding another project to his portfolio. It was about using a technology he had built to create change within the community he was already part of.
“I didn’t want AeiX to remain something I had built for a competition,” he says. “I wanted to see whether something I had engineered could actually help my own school understand and reduce its energy wastage.”
The project has since earned Aditya the Sigma Xi Engineering Interdisciplinary Award and recognition at the IRIS National Fair Regional Round, part of the Regeneron ISEF feeder pathway. His work has also reached an international research audience through a published video associated with the IEOM 11th North American International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Operations Management, held at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in June 2026.
From observing unexplained electricity consumption on a factory floor, to monitoring renewable energy at TerraTech, to building his own IoT platform, testing it in industry and finally deploying it at his school, Aditya’s journey has been one of turning curiosity into action.
Today, AeiX is more than a technology project. It is Aditya’s attempt to make an invisible problem visible — and to show how a young engineer can use data, technology and persistence to create tangible change in the ecosystem around him.
At 17, Aditya is not waiting to build the energy systems of the future. He is already working to make the ones around him smarter, more efficient and more sustainable.
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