With the major tendency of energy efficiency and rising unit price of electricity, people are getting aware of the pattern they use water, electricity, and gas. Christian Ulrik Von Scholten, CEO & Co-Founder of NorthQ, is looking forward to the smart energy in future homes.
With the major tendency of energy efficiency and rising unit price of electricity, people are getting aware of the pattern they use water, electricity, and gas. Christian Ulrik Von Scholten, CEO & Co-Founder of NorthQ, is looking forward to the smart energy in future homes. He considers IoT solutions based on user data can provide an advanced energy service for end-users and optimize energy usage both in households and businesses.
Founded in 2007, Copenhagen-based enterprise NorthQ is specializing in Internet of Things with a main focus on manufacturing and developing home automation and energy optimization solutions. At its early stage, the first power readers of NorthQ were developed cooperatively with Dong Energy, the largest power utility in Denmark. The power readers were able to transfer electricity and gas consumption for users’ review.
Christian Ulrik Von Scholten, CEO &
Co-Founder of NorthQ
Based on this background experience, NorthQ also developed its cloud-based smart home platform along with its gateways, devices for energy monitoring and control, and security devices. The home solutions help property owners in increasing energy efficiency and reducing the costs for households. Apart from its own hardware products, NorthQ has been cooperating with various manufacturers such as Danfoss, Fibaro, Philio, and Qubino to provide customized IoT platform services.
“Our new energy reader is designed for measuring the energy consumption of business customers. They can also build their own user interface and app on top of our IoT platform,” explained von Scholten. “We want to integrate the NorthQ solutions with more service providers. Using NorthQ’s technology, they will be able to develop better services for their end-users or to improve the user interface of their software.”
Von Scholten explained that the widespread awareness of the environmental changes and the rising cost of energy push consumers to reconsider their way of energy usage. “People never thought about this matter in the past because they were unable to measure their energy consumption, but now, when they use our products they realize how much energy they’ve been wasting. People become more conscious and are willing to reduce the consumption as it is directly related to their bills.”
Von Scholten sees the key differences between European and Asian smart energy. “European market is complicated as the energy price, preferred brands, user habits and culture can vary greatly in different countries. In Asia, on the other hand, the energy prices are lower, so the motivation for end-users to reduce consumption is not high enough,” he analyzed. “However, when we take business clients such as malls and high-rise buildings into consideration, the energy consumption is comparatively high. The incentives for such client to reduce energy consumption are much higher and by implementing energy metering and management systems they can accomplish significant savings.”
“Many companies are only providing hardware products without service. For the current stage, software technology is the key for development. If companies don’t provide solutions for consumers, there is no market,” said von Scholten. “Our goal is to build the biggest metering platform in the world, and we will keep working on NorthQ’s complete solution for remote monitoring and energy optimization and create more convenience in the smart home.”