As Bernard Ivezic/Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 21st of November, 2019, Ivan Mrvoš, the owner of Include and one of the most famous startup entrepreneurs in Croatia has a brand new product, the X24 Power Pack battery, which he presented at the Smart City Fair in Barcelona. The product excelled his already wildly successful business even more and opened up more opportunities for development, and this has been fully recognised by major global players and powerful names.
The Croatian startup Include has now created its biggest innovation to date since launching the amazing smart bench. As stated, Include’s brand new new product is codenamed X24 Power Pack.
The X24 Power Pack could be described with many diminutives. For example, Ivan Mrvoš, who introduced this new product at the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona, states that it is a standard battery within the capacities of what his company creates.
However, in spite of what this obviously still humble entrepreneur claims, very little is standard about this battery. In fact, Monna Country is the most advanced version of Include’s range of smart benches yet, which generate electricity themselves, store it and then charge e-bikes, mobile phones, support a range of sensors and are connected to the cloud via a 4G/LTE network.
Include’s Monna Country smart benches are completely independent of the power grid, thanks to the quality of their built-in battery packs, which are now being packaged as an entirely separate product. The X24 Power Pack, moreover, could also be described as the kind of product that the incredible Tesla, the startup belonging to genius Elon Musk, began developing back in 2012 and finally launched in 2015. In actuality, that comparison wouldn’t be right either, because four years ago both technology and the market were far too immature for such an offer.
Tesla has therefore focused on industrial applications by developing its Powerpack business, installing 100 kWh and 200 kWh storage batteries for communities and organisations that rely on renewable energy.
On the other hand, the version of household batteries, Powerwall, are finding it much harder to penetrate the market. The first version had a capacity of 6.5 kWh and needed to be stronger. Meanwhile, Tesla has introduced a new generation, the 13.5 kWh Powerwall 2 battery, which meets the energy backup needs of households.
The problem primarily lies in being able to meet demand, beginning in California where power outages and reductions have become commonplace, etc. 2020 is fast approaching, and the start of the massive sale of Powerwall in Japan is widely expected. Tesla boasts that it has delivered Powerwalls to 50,000 locations in seven countries so far, but Japan will actually be the start of mass commercialisation of this type of technology.
Bringing our attention back to Croatia’s Include, we could also describe the X24 Power Pack as a product with at least a dozen competitors in the world. Another massive name that would boost Include to unforeseen heights is Mercedes. The German auto giant is already offering its home and battery in the market.
Mercedes is not alone in that, either. Both BMW and Nissan have also entered this business, as has Panasonic, as well as a number of other companies, some better known and some less well known, who are looking for their space on the smart grid infrastructure market. This is a new market that will fundamentally transform companies like HEP in Croatia, because the liberalisation of the sale of electricity seen in Croatia is only a lukewarm guide to the changes that follow this industry closely.
On this particular new market, where there is currently a growing demand for industrial and home batteries, Ivan Mrvoš has initially left plenty of room for proper positioning. In Barcelona, Include introduced the 1.5 kWh X24 Power Pack model, which comes with the IP67 standard, which means it can last half an hour underwater. This could potentially be used for vessels.
For the first time, Include has an extremely scalable product whose use is wide and the demand for which is only going to grow. Given the fact that this more than promising Croatian startup raised the capital to expand its offer, the first fruits of this endeavour seem very promising indeed.
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