Nordic Propeye: Energy efficiency. Improved.

GETTING THE DATA

“You need to provide input to control systems,” says Carl Aspenberg, CEO of Nordic Propeye, a company that specialises in offering solutions for improving the energy efficiency of buildings. And by input, Carl is referring primarily to sensors. That’s where Propeye’s work starts, installing sensors and collecting data on a building’s performance across a range of factors like temperature, humidity, CO2 and of course electricity consumption. The company then analyses the data and offers solutions in the form of improvements to the buildings. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence is constantly working the data to optimise performance, factoring in things like energy prices and the building’s temperature shifts. “There’s a lot of potential for improving energy efficiency,” Carl adds. “We look primarily at cooling, heating and ventilation. You can have improved air quality and you can bring your energy consumption and expenditure down as well. It helps buildings classify as green, and that in turn increases their value.”

FROM SENSORS TO SERVICE PACKAGE

The company’s main product is the CO2 sensor, but they have been branching out and developing other sensors as well, and more recently, installing smart grids and packaging products together in the form of services. “In order to grow, we needed external financing,” Carl says, referring to an EU-guaranteed loan backed by the EIF under the InvestEU programme. “We’re now able to finance our hardware solutions as well.” The company’s interventions can generate significant savings in a very short timeframe, with savings ranging from 15-25% and a typical payback time of around 2 years. With the urgency of the climate crisis, it’s not difficult to see how this offering could be very interesting.

LEAN, CLEAN AND GREEN

At the time of writing, the company had connected more than 70,000 flats in Sweden, installed more than 60,000 sensors and was monitoring and managing more than 1.5 million m2 of office space, making its own dent in the climate challenge, one sensor at a time. “The main challenge we have relates to ageing infrastructure, particularly when you can’t really communicate with it,” Carl explains. But the company is pressing ahead regardless. “We’ve made it our mission to help our customer to make their real estate and condominiums lean, clean & green,” he adds, as the company is also looking to include charging stations in their offering.

Company: Nordic Propeye (Sweden)

Type of business: energy

Financial intermediary: SEB

Financing purpose: product development

EIF financing: InvestEU

For further information about EIF intermediaries in Sweden, please refer to: http://www.eif.org/what_we_do/where/se/index.htm