BusinessTN

For the average person, a power outage is no big deal. At worst, consequences might include the resetting of a few clocks or the stubbing of a toe while searching for a flashlight or candle. On the other hand, consequences of a power outage can be dire for a large manufacturing plant: a quarter-second delay could spell millions of dollars in lost productivity, as it often takes up to a day to restore normal operations.

Few people are as aware of this as the 60 experts at Knoxville-based EPRI Solutions, arguably the world’s preeminent authority on electrical power and the for-profit subsidiary of Electrical Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif.

As a series of power outages struck dozens of cities in the eastern United States and Canada in August 2003, culminating in the much publicized darkening of New York City, EPRI Solutions was called upon to figure out what caused the cascading failure. It took roughly a year, but First Energy of Akron, Ohio, which got blamed for the blackouts, received its report and began to regroup. Earlier this year, EPRI Solutions dispatched its wizzes to Arizona to figure out what caused an unfortunate sequence of outages and fires at the state’s Palo Verde nuclear plant west of Phoenix and at its several substations. Among the factors at fault, they determined, was a usually reliable relay, which is known to fail only once in 2,000 years. Who knew?

“We work with many utility companies across the world making their facilities run more efficiently, helping them deliver higher quality electricity to their clients,” says Mike Howard, the company’s president. EPRI Solutions started in Knoxville in 1986 when the Tennessee Center for Research and Development received a contract to research power quality from the not-for-profit institute in Palo Alto. As experience would prove, EPRI Solutions became a perfect example of a marriage between pure science and for-profit consulting in an area where very few experts are groomed on an annual basis. Howard, who gained business acumen by building and selling his own company prior to joining EPRI in 1992, is the first to prove that EPRI’s model works. As the Palo Alto institute does its research, funded by the electric utility industry that pulls money together to focus on the problems at hand, experts at EPRI Solutions are crossing the globe on consulting gigs for private industry, which is more than ever dependent on outsourcing and therefore in need of reliable energy supplies in emerging markets, such as Asia.

In a given year, EPRI Solutions handles roughly 450 ongoing projects, which typically cost between $50,000 and $100,000. As of late March, the company was involved in projects in China, Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan, to name a few. It’s not hard to land new business in this niche. “To identify where utility companies are, you just look up in the air and follow the poles,” Howard says. Meanwhile, EPRI Solutions seems perfectly comfortable with raking in roughly $40 million a year. Howard says he doesn’t foresee a need to sell, relocate or go public.

As for the average person, whose involvement with electricity rarely extends further than the flipping of a circuit breaker or plugging in of an extension cord, doesn’t it feel good to know that some of the world’s foremost experts on electrical power live next door?