As Poslovni Dnevnik/Josipa Ban writes, reducing energy costs due to the ongoing energy crisis is a priority for both households and companies. However, it is almost impossible to achieve savings, or energy efficiency, without undertaking any proper analysis of your consumption.
Ivan Pavic, one of the members of the Croatian startup Green Energy Pal, explains that although energy efficiency is talked about a lot, most people don’t know how they can increase theirs properly and concretely.
“The reason lies in the fact that they don’t have the basic prerequisite solved, that is, they don’t know when they spend the most, how much that is and which devices cause that consumption. If we don’t know that, how can we plan the actions that will have the most effect, and with the least investment, and then result in the reduction of consumption, and thus the electricity bill?” asks Pavic.
Guided by this problem, four colleagues from FER, Ivan Pavic, Domagoj Badanjak, Alen Hrga and Ivan Sudic – developed Enpulse. It is, as Pavic explained, a private energy consultant which explains to users in a simple way how to achieve greater energy efficiency and how to reduce their electricity bills.
The reality that their idea and product on which they worked for 18 months to develop has great potential has also been shown by the fact that they were declared the best in the competition of startups from four countries of the region at the BASF Adriatic competition. With this, they entered the grand final of the BASF Innovation Hub 2022 as one of the six best solutions in the field of sustainable development in all of Central and Eastern Europe. This recognition, as expected, means a lot to them, and for several reasons.
“First of all, the expert jury, with excellent comments and questions, drew our attention to the segments of the product and its presentation on which we need to work further. Second, we gained recognition, which contributes to better marketing and the better acquisition of new customers, and in the end, the monetary award we received is very useful for us,” stated Pavic, a member of the team at the Croatian startup Green Energy Pal.
However, there is still a lot of work ahead of the team who are developing their private energy consultant which is composed of three parts (an electricity metre on location, a backend system that stores data, and the user interface) in their spare time. Pavic explained that they have set themselves three goals – increasing the number of users, expanding the features of Enpulse and attracting investments.
“The increase in the number of users brings us financial support and enables us to develop new product features. Namely, a good part of our background tools are based on big data analysis and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms, which also require a large amount of data. In other words, without new users and data, we can’t even develop any new features,” noted Pavic.
In addition to all of the above, for further growth and development, they will need a financial injection, so their plan is to find an investor. “We need an investment so that we can fully devote ourselves to product development and employ experts from various fields of IT, AI development, energy, sales and marketing,” they announced from the Croatian startup Green Energy Pal.
The reactions to the product so far, which has only been on the market for a few months, are very positive. “The current users from the household category are very satisfied with the product,” said Pavic, adding that, although their target group of users is both companies and households, they still give preference to companies.
“SMEs have significant energy costs, often accounting for 10 to 30 percent of their total costs. However, these costs aren’t so high as to require extensive analyses by energy experts and consultants. This is precisely why we’re developing a ”digital energy consultant” which can give people advice on increasing energy efficiency at a very low cost. Our idea is that the investment in hardware companies pays off within one or several months, and that the monthly software subscription is only a small part of the savings achieved with our product,” noted Pavic, adding that the use of their product in households is still less profitable than it is in companies.
It’s worth mentioning that this is one of the very few startups that is actually benefiting from the energy crisis, although they didn’t count on such a development when they started developing their product.
“Now we have more open potential collaborations with different companies. We assume that the demand for our product will grow significantly,” concluded Pavic.
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