My Energy Xpert: a home and small business energy management solution by energyX Solutions
Pitch
My Energy Xpert is a SMART energy audit and monitoring app empowering people to save time, money and lower their energy footprint.
Description
Summary
Our mission is to simplify and automate energy management solutions for residential and small commercial buildings. Our motto is ‘energy management for all’ and we envision a world where every home and business has the ability to implement an energy savings program that is relevant to their building profile. This is important given that current conventional energy scan solutions in the market today require expensive engineers and cost more than the energy they save in a year. These conventional scans offer lower conversion rates to real energy savings achieved through the implementation of actual building improvements.
The result is that homes and small businesses are effectively excluded from identifying large scale conservation actions. This exclusion leaves a significant portion of energy savings on the table as residences and small business account for approximately 40% of all electricity consumption in North America (EIA, 2016).
Our current proprietary building energy scan technology, My Energy Xpert, is in line with our mission and allows anyone to complete a simple and accurate energy scan of their building in 15 minutes. It is a simple and customer centric web app that opens the door to a comprehensive range of energy efficiency by providing customized recommendations along with accurate predictions of the costs involved and the achievable savings. Our platform links with contractors, marketplaces, and subsidy programs to facilitate and implement our recommended building retrofits. Moreover, My Energy Xpert is available to home and businesses at 1/10th of the price of a convention scan and can lower the energy consumption of buildings by an average of 25%.
My Energy Xpert is a springboard to small building energy efficiency that leverages the Internet of Things and our proprietary algorithms, cloud computing, machine learning and gamification. My Energy Xpert has the potential to reduce total greenhouse gas emissions by more than 10% across North America.
Category of the action
Reducing emissions from electric power sector.
What actions do you propose?
Who will take these actions?
Energy and building management at scale is a complex task, so it makes sense to work through existing players and stakeholders. In this way, we are currently using channel partners such as utilities and energy retailers to deploy My Energy Xpert to their customer base through the following channels:
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Online customer portals, websites and email campaigns.
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Call center reps that engage consumers to complete the energy audit over the phone
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‘Walk through energy audits’ provided using door to door sales reps
We are also raising awareness through direct marketing campaigns such as flyers included with energy bill mailings and advertising through prominent industry publications.
Ultimately, home and business consumers will use My Energy Xpert to complete the scan of their own building. They will do the scan by themselves given My Energy Xpert’s customer centric design or via a trained person (from the utility or retailer) who arrives at the building and completes the application with the consumer as a walk-through building audit. Because the My Energy Xpert interface is so simple and intuitive, it does not require a highly trained individual, such as an engineer, to complete and so the cost of a walk-through scan is still considerably lower than that of a conventional engineering audit.
We are also in the process of partnering with a number of service organizations that include contractors, energy monitoring companies, property developers and even financing providers. The objective is to create a network of providers that are capable of taking consumers through the entire retrofit process in a way that is seamless, simple, and transparent.
Where will these actions be taken?
We’re starting in Toronto where there is an existing supply of aging small building stock, and a political, social and economic climate ripe for sustainable change. However, talks are already underway with potential clients across deregulated markets such as Ontario, Alberta, Texas, California, New York, Illinois, and even the United Kingdom.
In general, the timing for market entry of a simple, accurate, online building energy efficiency solution in the North American market is ideal. Our solution is so scalable that it is easily adapted for buildings in a wide range of markets including Europe and Asia.
Particularly in our home of Ontario, Canada, province-wide energy conservation and demand management requirements, such as those enforced by the IESO, have created a mandate for energy efficiency solutions. Available incentives for homes and businesses create an additional appetite for pragmatic and easily accessible solutions.
As in most other markets, utility and energy retail companies in Ontario are tasked with rolling out conservation programs and are held accountable by local, provincial, and federal agencies. Unfortunately, the average utility company is underprepared to take on such programs because their resources are largely consumed with delivering energy and maintaining the associated infrastructure. All the while, energy prices are strictly regulated keeping marginality razor thin. This combination of constraints places utility companies in a difficult position. In effect, they are caught by a mandate to act on conservation initiatives without the competencies or resources to effectively deliver such programs at scale.
Anywhere that utility companies struggle to serve their customers with energy management and conservation services and energy retailers struggle to keep their customers sticky and loyal, our solution can make an impact with homes and small business. We see truly global potential.
How much will emissions be reduced or sequestered vs. business as usual levels?
What are other key benefits?
Key benefits include:
- Consumers are offered accurate, affordable and trusted energy advice, and My Energy Expert acts as a valuable onboarding tool for conventional energy advisors.
-Our program streamlines retrofits in small buildings, and installation contractors can benefit from significantly reduced marketing and selling costs and increased customer volume.
-Building service providers can benefit from enhanced upselling of energy management services and building data services.
-We systematically reduce energy consumption, and offer consumer engagement, stickiness, and retention to energy retailers that reduces their customer churn. Moreover utilities are able to meet their conservation demand targets by enabling their customer base to implement the relevant retrofits that will lower building energy consumption.
-All of our channel partners are provided new revenue channels and collaboration opportunities through the upselling of high value products and services through our platform.
What are the proposal’s costs?
We have already secured investors and devoted resources to building our core platform, My Energy Xpert. This core platform was designed from the ground up using the Internet of Things, our proprietary algorithms and machine learning protocols. It is currently in the process of being licensed as a Software as a Service enterprise solution to channel partners across North America who want to deploy our solution in their service area. The platform is white labelled thereby allowing our channel partners to fully customize the user interface and make it relevant to their customer profile.
For our channel partners, we divide the implementation costs into three parts: one-time customization fees, software as a service licensing, and a variable per consumer fee for each completed energy scan using our platform. The end result is a turn-key energy audit and monitoring solution for our partners at a total cost of around $50 per consumer.
At this price point, My Energy Xpert costs a mere 10% compared to conventional energy audits. What’s more, My Energy Xpert delivers a more actionable building improvement plan and a network of additional service providers ready to assist the consumer in taking action and becoming more sustainable.
The retail cost of My Energy Xpert is typically earned back in two to four months through energy savings with minimal improvement implementations. Business consumers and large residences can see payback in as short as one month.
As we scale to serve more channel partners and consumers, we strive to lower the cost of My Energy Xpert even further. Initial development profits are reinvested into ongoing product development with the ambition of making our solution even simpler, even more accurate, and even more cost effective to deploy and customise. In true embodiment of our motto, the ultimate goal is a web application that is freely available to all buildings everywhere: energy management for all!
Time line
Setup and program lead times of My Energy Xpert with a channel partner typically take two to three months depending on the level of customization required. With no customization to the current platform, lead times can be as short one month. Once launched, the My Energy Xpert platform is operational and accessible online for consumers immediately. All ongoing maintenance and upgrades are handled by us and platform uptime is generally higher than 99%.
Consumers (homes and businesses) can generate meaningful results through My Energy Xpert in as little as 5 minutes; although most consumers spend approximately 15 minutes in the application. A holistic building improvement plan generated through My Energy Xpert typically takes around three months to fully implement; although, this timeline varies significantly depending on the project scope, budget, and other individual factors such as if the consumer is a tenant/renter or an owner/landlord. In general, consumers are free to take action as quickly as they like with timelines ranging from a matter of days to a year or more.
Program progress, aggregated data and analysis are available to our channel partners from day one; with formal updates and analysis typically occurring at least once per month. The total timeframe for a My Energy Xpert partner license can range anywhere from three to six months for a pilot project to up to three years for a full program license.
Related proposals
References
USDOE (US Dept. of Energy), "U.S. Primary Energy Consumption by Source and Sector, 2008" (2009) Retrieved from:http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pecss_diagram.pdf
EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration. A Look at the U.S. Commercial Building Stock: Results from EIA's 2012 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS). Release date: March 4, 2015. Retrieved from: https://www.eia.gov/consumption/commercial/reports/2012/buildstock/
EIA (U.S. Energy Information Administration). “Electric Power Annual”. Release date: February 16, 2016. Retrieved from:http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual
Suggested reading and general reference
Levine, M., D. Ürge-Vorsatz, K. Blok, L. Geng, D. Harvey, S. Lang, G. Levermore, A. Mongameli Mehlwana, S. Mirasgedis, A. Novikova, J. Rilling, H. Yoshino, 2007: Residential and commercial buildings. In Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [B. Metz, O.R. Davidson, P.R. Bosch, R. Dave, L.A. Meyer (eds)], Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom and New York, NY, USA.
By:
energyX Solutions
