Mikal Løvik began his career in Norway’s offshore oil and gas industry, where he noticed a big but largely hidden source of energy waste: electric heating cables. Service vessels and drilling rigs used the cables to prevent equipment from freezing, but they always ran on full blast, even when it wasn’t necessary to keep surfaces so toasty.
Every major industrial sector around the world uses systems like these, as do cities and buildings to melt snow from sidewalks. The cables are either off or on, hot or cold. That means much of the heat they create is often lost to the air.
This inefficiency led Løvik and his partners to launch Eqon, a startup based in Stavanger, Norway, that makes what he likened to dimmer switches for lightbulbs. The software-enabled devices can dial down the use and temperatures of existing heating cables to reduce electricity demand — in turn curbing emissions, particularly if a system draws power from diesel generators or a fossil-fuel-heavy grid.
On Wednesday, Eqon said it had closed a $6 million seed round led by Azolla Ventures, a U.S. investment firm that focuses on early-stage climate startups. The funding will allow Eqon to build more of its novel devices and market itself to American companies, which represent the world’s second-largest market for electric heating cables, after Europe, Løvik said.
“Industrial heating is one of the most stubborn decarbonization challenges on the planet — it accounts for a massive share of global emissions and has seen almost no innovation at the control and efficiency layer,” Af Hernandez, a principal at Azolla Ventures, said in a statement. “This is precisely the kind of overlooked, high-impact technology … that Azolla is delighted to back.”
Overall, Eqon estimates its product can reduce the energy consumption, and thus CO2 emissions, of electric heating cables by up to 80%, though the results can vary by project.
Løvik, who is the startup’s CEO, said he sees a large market opportunity for the niche solution — particularly as industrial firms grapple with rising electricity costs and limited power supplies. These problems could become even more pronounced as factories in Europe, the U.S., and elsewhere move to electrify their gas-fired boilers and heaters, further straining power systems.
“When you dim things down, you remove the energy peaks, which is a big constraint on the grid,” Løvik said of the heating cables. Lowering those spikes in demand can free up capacity for manufacturers to add new factory lines or upgrade facilities, he said.
