The year 2023 is drawing to a close – a year in which a lot has changed both in our company and in our market environment.
With the revision of §14a EnWG, an important political course has been set for the grid-oriented control of heat pumps, storage systems and EV chargers. From 2024, prosumers will have more freedom to operate their controllable consumers efficiently; they will no longer face as many restrictions. We are pleased that we were able to successfully contribute to the debate and that our recommendations on incentive-based and smart usage models have been taken into account. In the future, our Energy IoT solutions will help more than ever to actively reduce the load on the grids.
The German government also presented a PV strategy this year and adopted the first elements of the solar package in August to accelerate the expansion of PV energy in Germany. We have also taken a public stance on this in order to create an understanding that, in addition to the expansion of PV energy, energy management is also key to realizing the full potential of PV systems.
→ Our position on the new regulation of §14a in Tagesspiegel Background
→ Our commentary on the German PV strategy in Energie & Management
Before we say goodbye for the Christmas break, we would like to take a look back at everything that has happened at our company this year and the highlights we have shared with our partners:
With Zolar and EKD, we have acquired two new major PaaS customers
This year, two growth champions in the solar industry, Zolar and EKD, have integrated our IoT solution for energy management and optimization. Both companies use our PaaS offering (Platform-as-a-Service) and provide home energy management systems (HEMS) for their end customers based on it.
In August, we launched our new top-hat rail gateway to accelerate the energy transition: the Energy Manager RailX. Thanks to its enhanced performance and a new design with reduced dimensions, the Energy Manager RailX enables even simpler and faster installation on the top-hat rail, creating space for urgently needed installation capacity. The gateway is equipped for all current and future Energy IoT applications and can be used in a variety of ways by installers
By the middle of this year, we had already produced as many Energy Managers as in the whole of last year. There are now 27,000 Energy Managers in the field and growth is only just picking up speed! In order to be well prepared for the increasing volume of orders, we have decided not to purchase third-party hardware, but to develop our Energy Managers ourselves and control production in a scalable manner. To this end, we have developed a cloud-based fabrication service with our partners that automates and monitors the creation and management of production orders.
With over eleven years of expertise in the field of energy IoT, we have developed an energy IoT platform that can cope with the rapid developments on the energy market: KiwiOS. It is the centerpiece for manufacturer-independent sector coupling across device types. Further improving the quality of our platform in terms of scalability, stability and security is our top priority.
This year, we have recorded how we ensure this for KiwiOS in a blog series.
Many Kiwigrid employees also use our energy management solutions at home to optimize their own energy flows and at the same time identify potential improvements for the products. For example, our Head of Platform Operations Christian Geie and our Teamlead Human Resources Dana Kästner-Geie have built a solar carport on their own initiative and are using Kiwigrid's HEMS for this. Our CFO Janek Schuffenhauer and our Vice President Products & Customer Success Lars Schwarzelt are also passionate about optimizing self-consumption and use the company's own products for this.
All of the aforementioned successes depend very much on each and every individual who has worked on behalf of Kiwigrid this year. We would like to take this opportunity to thank them all. We are incredibly proud of our great team and the commitment of our Kiwis to the success of the energy transition and climate protection. We are delighted that our clean energy community is constantly growing and that the next generation is also committed to sustainability and a clean environment.
Our mission is to continue driving the energy transition forward. To this end, we want to further expand our functionalities in the direction of sector coupling in the coming year. In the future, energy optimization will also support energy storage systems (ESS) and flexible tariffs. We are also planning to further improve the user experience of our products and make our solutions accessible beyond the DACH region.
Instead of sending Christmas cards and gifts, we decided last year to invest the money sustainably and in the spirit of the energy transition. Our donations were used to build a solar system in Banhine (Mozambique) as part of a project run by the organization CUCOMO e.V., which has since provided a village school there with light, electricity and internet. We will be supporting the same project again this year with a donation of 3,000 euros. This will be used to support a program teaching about sexual and reproductive health, menstruation and menstrual hygiene.
At Kiwigrid, we think the idea of a sustainable energy supply combined with an educational program that enables more equality and participation is great. With our renewed financial support, we want to contribute to the sustainable development of this project and achieve the greatest possible impact.
→ More information: www.cucomo.org/menstrual-equity
Kiwigrid wishes a Merry Christmas and all the best for the New Year!