NJORD - Create your own energy

The only energy provider that wants you to create your own and consume less power.

Creating and saving energy is a luxury item. If you find yourself living in an apartment, you probably don’t think about how you can create your own renewable energy. And why would you? Currently, renewable energy isn’t designed for apartments. - It requires your own outdoor space, something that ends most of the time ends within an arm's length from your apartment window. Something you don’t have in the 22 million apartments in the US alone. - It requires a commitment to full ownership and installations, which is hard when your typical lease is 12 months, and you don’t want to own and maintain the equipment or let alone make changes to the apartment. - It requires the finances you need to buy and install the equipment, especially if a system can cost $15.000 to $20.000 or a typical 5kW solar system (if you have the space). - It requires a long-term commitment. It takes a long time to either break even with the energy created or pay off the loan you took out for it. By reducing consumption, improving efficiency, and storing or generating their own energy, you can save money and decrease your dependency on energy prices. Sounds good, especially if you look at the rising prices in Europe (+32%) and in the US (+8% in 2022). But currently, you can only do that if you have the right recourses. Creating and saving energy is a luxury item. It widens the gap making some more exposed to price volatility than others. So what is a desirable future? Renters are able to produce energy in their apartments and have the ability to measure and analyze their consumption. Most importantly, all this doesn't require high upfront investments and isn’t connected to any long-term commitment. By generating their own power, tenants become less dependent on price fluctuations in the energy market. This could help the 400k low-income households in NYC that are at least two months behind on their bills right now. At a higher level, cities can reduce their consumption, reduce fossil power generation and thus increase the share of renewable energy through reduced consumption and not only through increased production. As part of our vision we want to monitor, compare, and analyze the energy consumption of apartments in combination with other data points, so consumers can reduce their consumption and consciously and deliberately replace appliances. As long as there is information about which appliances are used, it is possible to make recommendations for replacements. Old appliances can replace less effective ones in other households, thus creating a circular system. To bridge the gap between the present and the future, we would need a suitable means to create energy in apartments. We would need the means to analyze the consumption of individual devices in apartments between apartments. And we would need the means to circulate appliances between users. In addition, all these means would need to be scalable.

Our users want to create their own energy in their apartments. They sign on to our energy contract and get a wind turbine delivered to their apartment. They can either install the turbine itself or have it installed. We act as a middleman between the energy provider and the user and keep 50% of the created energy to refinance the turbine, and the rest gets deducted from their monthly bill. If clients choose to opt-out, we take the turbine back and refurbish it. The turbine has a diameter of 20 inches and is 50 inches high. A mounting bracket gets clamped through a sliding window and onto the wall below. The turbine is then pushed out of the window vertically on a rail. At the end of the rail, it is then tilted vertically and anchored. During installation, it is continuously secured by the rail and cannot fall. After the installation, the turbine leaves enough space for an AC to be mounted above. It simply needs to be plugged into the nearest outlet to connect it to the grid. In the future, we want to provide our consumers with plug-in power meters that communicate their usage via IoT and allow remote access. Knowing which device is connected to which meter, we can turn off devices if needed or suggest replacements based on location and comparison with other users around them. For every dollar that the user saves, we get 50¢. We want to analyze the appliances of our customers, suggest and wholesale replacements, and refurbish their old appliances to offer them as part of our circular approach to other customers.

Our target audience is those who currently live in the 22 million apartments in the US. And in the future, even those outside the US. The typical rental is a 2-bedroom apartment with 1.5 baths and an area between 1,000 and 1,999 square feet. Currently, they have a median annual income of $42,500 with a rent-to-income ratio of 57% or 2x the recommended 30% ratio. In the top 25% net worth percentile, 3.9% are renters. In New York City alone around 400.000 households are at least two bills behind on their payment right now. Thus we heavily want to focus on low-income households. In short, those living in apartments are heavily affected by price volatility and don’t have the funds to become more independent. We give them an opportunity to generate and save energy short term, with no investment and no ownership, even if their apartments are too small for existing systems.

Our team at Njord consists of Max and Shun, two strategic designers who are passionate about solving complex problems with technology and creativity. Both Max and Shun study at the Parsons School of Design and use a design-driven approach to problem-solving. Max is an industrial designer turned design strategist with a wide range of experience in designing products, services, and design methodologies. After working on a project with Fraunhofer Institute, where he created product concepts based on new patents, he focused on tight interdisciplinary collaboration. This led to several projects and his thesis "How to design with technology“, a technology-based design approach. Max was the first industrial designer at the mobility startup Sushi Bikes. For two years, he started and built a design team of now three employees, and led and developed several mobility projects. He followed his interest in entrepreneurship during a fellowship in the Academic Program for Entrepreneurship at his university and worked with several other startups as part of his freelance work. Shun brings 8 years of professional experience in product management, marketing, and business development to our team, having worked with global companies like FUJIFILM, Google, and Google X on consumer hardware and IoT products. He currently serves as a Senior Venture Strategist at Newlab, a startup incubator/accelerator focused on emerging technologies with the goal of transforming infrastructure and creating a more resilient and sustainable world. Shun's expertise in building and managing hardware businesses, combined with his connections to investors, advisors, and technologists in the hard-tech industry, make him a valuable asset to our team at Njord. Both Max and Shun live in an apartment in NYC and are actively engaged with the local community, which has been facing challenges due to increasing energy prices. As residents themselves, they have experienced firsthand the impact of rising energy costs. These experiences drove Max to gain an interest in the energy systems of the city. He conducted research at Parsons on the energy system of New York and its users, focusing on the potential for energy savings or generation from underutilized, wasted, or unknown sources. This research inspired the creation of Njord, a solution to the energy challenges faced by the city and its residents.

This project started as a research project at Parsons. During one full semester, we researched the energy system of New York and its users. One focus of the research was the potential for energy. Meaning saving or generating energy from an energy source that’s not utilized, wasted or unknown. If every part of the system aligns, the energy can be released. The focus of the research was so far focused on the problem statement. Some of the insights from this research inspired the idea for Njord.

Here is how Njord transforming how we consume and generate energy and has the potential to change the market itself. → enabling customers to generate their energy and consume less energy in apartments, without needing upfront investments, long-term commitments, ownership, and space → allows customers to become less dependent on price volatility → reduces the load on the city grid and allows a safer transformation to the grid of the future → helps building owners to comply with new building energy laws without high investments → potential to scale globally → in the future enables customers to change appliances for more efficient replacements based on quantitative data, creating a circular economy around appliances

In 2023 we want to start a pilot enabling tenants to generate their own energy at no investment. Our goal is 50 households.

The core technology of our solution is wind turbines. Harvesting energy from wind is a century-old concept that we aim to bring into an urban environment, allowing apartments to create their own energy. In the future, we want to combine that with IoT hardware and software to monitor consumption and recommend improvements.

We haven’t launched our solution yet. Our goal is to simulate and test the product with an MVP of 50 devices/households.

We have identified three primary obstacles that may impede our progress in the coming year. The first is a financial hurdle, particularly in terms of securing funding for our daily operations, which will encompass market research, hypothesis validation, prototype development, and deployment. While our initial focus will be on obtaining funding through research grants and competition prizes such as MIT Solve, there may come a point at which we need to consider raising capital through venture capital in order to expand the business. The second obstacle is technical in nature, as we will need to develop a functional prototype of our solution. As we do not possess in-house engineering capabilities, we may have to seek out a technical partner to assist us in creating hardware or software products. The third obstacle is a market-related barrier, in terms of gaining access to the target sites and early adopters who are willing to implement and test our solution in their apartments.

none

Our main product is the turbine in combination with a new energy contract. We provide our customers with the turbines and send them a monthly bill for their consumption with 50% of the produced energy deducted. This way we generate recurring revenue with 50% of the energy produced. Since we are also acting as a middleman between the customer and an actual energy provider we can collect payments from our customers on a monthly basis and pay the energy provider on another payment plan (6 months, 12 months…) We aim to break even with the costs of a turbine after 18 months. If customers cancel their contract the turbines get refurbished and reinstalled. Our value proposition to the user is that they can create their own energy without any upfront costs in their apartments. We measure our social impact by looking at the average share of power produced by their own turbines and the total power and money saved/generated so far. In the future, we want to supply our customers with plug-in energy monitors free of charge. We monitor the individual power usage of their devices and help them turn them off if not needed. For every dollar, they save in energy we keep 50ct. In addition, we analyze their appliances and apartment further, act as a marketing platform for quantitative proven more efficient devices, give them deals on new and pre-owned devices and take their old ones. With this addition, our value proposition to the user is that we are the first energy provider that actually wants them to consume less. We measure our social impact by looking at the average share of power saved and the total power and money saved so far. We aim to market our product to our users city by city. In each city, we are aiming to find one user per apartment building to trial our product and promote it to other tenants in the building. One key stakeholder for our success is the building owners. While they won't directly benefit from the energy created, they can use the resulting lowered consumption to comply with new energy laws such as Local Law 97 in NYC. This law requires buildings larger than 25,000 square feet to reduce their emissions below certain limits starting in 2024.

In the development phase, our main financial income is investment capital and grants. As soon as we start rolling out our service we start generating income from energy sales. In the future we add, consumption monitoring, targeted marketing, and refurbishment of appliances.