Themo, the Estonian-Finnish smart floor heating start-up has raised 650k€ to develop further its demand-side management solutions both for business and private customers across Finland, and to hire new talents helping the company to grow.
Until today, Themo has been primarily focusing on providing Energy Saving Service to rental apartment businesses in Finland by using its intelligent digital thermostat. According to its CEO, Madis Uuemaa, the Themo thermostat generates monetary savings up to 50%. Being used in more than 4500 heaters, altogether these devices save their clients at least 400 000 euros every year by using in total 3500 MWh less energy than the previous manual thermostats did.
The recent high electricity prices have activated the need to move the energy consumption to those hours when the prices are lower and vice versa. It’s called demand response and when used by thousands of aggregated customers this can serve as a valuable grid balancing tool for the grid operator. This is exactly what Themo can offer.
“The energy crisis can be resolved by building new electricity power plants or by reducing and flexibly shifting electricity consumption,” says Uuemaa. “At Themo, we cannot build power plants but we do know how to make electricity consumption smart, so that we could have cheap and clean electricity for everyone,“ he states.
With the raised funds Themo is planning to turn its customers into the flexibility providers, bringing them to the electricity balancing market. This would not only remove the pressure from the grid and reduce the reinforcement costs but would also result in a creation of additional revenue streams for the flexibility providers. Regulation to allow energy consumers to participate in grid balancing exists already in Finland and is available with limitations in the Baltic States.