Why Charging Your IoT Device at the Right Time Matters

Data can help us make more informed decisions. Information precedes action, so Tomorrow has built the world’s largest source of real-time data for electricity and carbon intensity. Because consuming electricity at optimal times matter.

Renewable energy sources are the talk of the world. From wind to waves, the impending energy transition from high to low carbon is changing societies. But there is one problem with renewable energy, says the start-up Tomorrow. And that is its intermittency.

Tomorrow is a tech start-up that wants to quantify and make the carbon impact of our daily choices widely available. As part of a project that explores the potential savings of a flexible approach to energy systems – CITIES, they found that by consuming electricity at optimal times we can reduce emissions. But to know what the right times are, we need data points.

That’s why Tomorrow has built the ElectricityMap. It visualises the carbon emissions of the electricity we consume in real-time. On top of that, Tomorrow has built the ElectricityMap API that offers streamlined access to the start-up’s proprietary machine learning engine which processes over 300 data points per second.

“The digital age has provided us with data about everything. We are collecting more data than ever, physical flows of materials, corporate activities, and personal actions. This presents us with an opportunity. By using all of this data, we can automate the quantification of resource usage that we so desperately need. By making it ubiquitous, we enable people to make better informed decisions. As information precedes action, our goal is to democratise information about the carbon footprint of their actions,”” says Olivier Corradi.

Democratizing data one point at a time

The focus of Tomorrow is to democratize data of consumer choices and build transparency.

Our hope is that by making the carbon cost of things more transparent, our decisions as citizens and policy-makers will by more rational, data-driven, and will bring us to a pragmatic and efficient energy transition that frees us from fossil fuels

says Olivier Corradi.

Olivier Corradi and co-founder Bruno Lajoie are both French, but Tomorrow was born in Denmark. Here, they became part of the EIT Climate-KIC family in 2017 when they joined the EIT Climate-KIC start-up accelerator. Early on, they got success with their ElectricityMap but wanted to align the impact objectives with revenue-generating activities.

Exploiting our visibility and building a business on the data we were collecting was by far the biggest challenge.

says Olivier Corradi.

Through EIT Climate-KIC, Tomorrow learned how to shape a proper business model and to transform the start-up to a structure that optimized for both impact and revenue. One thing that the Accelerator provides, besides the expertise and international perspectives, is the possibility for start-ups to get up to 95.000 Euro in equity-free funding.

But it is no easy task to make it into the accelerator. The programme accepts only 20 start-ups annually from Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland.

“I would advise others to think very hard about how business and impact dimensions align. Most ideas typically address only one of those and making sure both align is not a trivial task,” says Olivier Corradi.

Joining the EIT Climate-KIC accelerator

So far, more than 1000 start-ups have been supported by EIT Climate-KIC, and the accelerator has helped them raise more than 550 million Euro in funding.

Seek help from the start-ups who previously joined EIT Climate-KIC. They definitely can give good feedback on early pitches

Olivier Corradi advices.