CASE STUDY:
NEAS
ABOUT NEAS
NEAS is Norway’s friendly neighbourhood energy provider. The business is over a century old, having started producing renewable energy from hydropower in 1920, and rebranded as NEAS – a merger of eight energy companies – in 1990.
As an energy business, sustainability is vitally important to NEAS. Both the company’s private and business customers are invested in this topic and are asking their providers about it with increasing frequency, making it an increasingly pressing topic.
“As the kind of business we are – producing electric power, distributing internet and television – we have to be able to make a difference,” says Jørgen Larshus Klokseth, product and business development manager energy at NEAS .
“Regarding sustainability, electric power is one of the biggest solutions. But there’s a big problem – we don’t have enough electric power, or at least, not a good enough grid. That means we have to share power in a better way and be smarter about our consumption.”
2003
Founded
160
Chargers
+100%
New Customers in '21
An education in smarter power
NEAS is working on multiple projects to better share power within the local grid. Thanks to a variety of tools, the company is able to offer flexible energy use. “We are giving our customers a clearer view of how they use their electricity,” says Klokseth. “We’re educating them on how they can reduce their use and generally be smarter about it.”
This is partly because people’s concept of power has changed a great deal in a short space of time. Klokseth has worked with NEAS for two years now, and when he began in November 2020, electricity was merely a monthly bill that didn’t require a lot of thought. “Now, in late 2022, it’s so much more,” he explains. “It’s a high-interest product, whereas it was more of a commodity two years ago.
“Not only that, but customers are asking for more information on what comes next, and better education because they don’t understand the minutiae of kilowatt hours, for example. It’s no longer good enough to give customers information through their app about how much power they used yesterday – they want to know what they used in the last 10 seconds, and how they can reduce it when their house is empty for most of the day.”
The benefits of CURRENT’s platform
In multi-dwelling buildings, EV drivers are charging their cars at home, which means the cost is shared across multiple people’s bills. Ergo, if one person charges more, their neighbours suffer. To avoid unfair or high costs, NEAS and CURRENT use load balancing, which Klokseth refers to as “the smart solution” for customers using EV charging in these types of dwellings. Thanks to load balancing, NEAS is not only able to offer lower prices, but also flexibility and simplicity when it comes to billing. One bill, one settlement from NEAS, zero hassle.
It was a colleague of Klokseth’s who first proposed the partnership between NEAS and CURRENT. The energy provider was looking for a system that could help with EV charging and load balancing, as well as handling cash flow, and CURRENT had exactly what NEAS was looking for.
“We got our first customer on the CURRENT platform in 2019,” says Klokseth. “We were and still are working with CURRENT very closely, and that level of partnership is very much appreciated from our side. They’re very quick to respond and offer great customer service, which really helps when it comes to educating our customers. Plus, CURRENT is an EV charge management platform that allows us to grow, and we’ve had a lot of competitors join the scene recently.”
Best of all, NEAS is able to draw on CURRENT’s expertise to look at how it can improve what it does, what it can adjust, and what it can build on. “For me, it’s not a fixed platform with limitations,” Klokseth explains. “CURRENT allows us even more flexibility in day-to-day business as well as with specific projects. The possibilities when it comes to EV charging models are endless.”
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The partnership moving forward
NEAS has big plans for future projects that include charging more than just cars, and these projects will rely heavily on CURRENT’s expertise in load balancing, user access, and payment. “We know we can always sit down with the team and say, ‘Let’s find a solution’,” says Klokseth. “I know other platforms exist, but I haven’t looked at them because I’ve been so satisfied with CURRENT.”
This highlights the power of energy expertise in the modern world. Over 90% of new cars in Norway are EVs, but Klokseth believes that with this push in innovation, the government has forgotten that the country doesn’t yet have the infrastructure in place to charge them all. Having said that, NEAS is still seeing some growth in existing and upcoming charging infrastructure, and has enjoyed 100% growth in customer numbers in each of the last two years. The business will push for that kind of growth again next year.
“CURRENT is such an important part of our solution in providing energy in a flexible, reliable way.”
By offering reliable chargers through CURRENT, NEAS is doing its bit to make sure customers are more confident in EV ownership. It has a contract for 160 chargers throughout the local community, and CURRENT will be there, hand-in-hand with the energy provider, to support this move.
“We also have a lot of business customers who want to know how many company cars we’ve charged this week, what their environmental impact is, and the CO2 emissions of a diesel car would be in comparison,” says Klokseth. “I can either waste time figuring it out with a calculator, or I can use the CURRENT platform to get that information straight away.
If you’d like to find out how CURRENT’s EV charging management platform could help your business, book a demo here.
