How Min Strøm and Enode empower users to optimize household energy consumption and cut costs

138k+

DKK saved on consumer electricity bills

3,000

Smart Charging sessions activated within 1 month of launch

Min Strøm is on a mission to help consumers cut their energy costs.

It started as a hobby project when Founder Philip Engberg bought an EV. He wanted to track energy market prices and his own consumption patterns, but there were no good solutions on the market. Philip, a product engineer, joined forces with co-founder Anne Lundov, a UX designer, and together they built their own, launching the Min Strøm app in March 2022. By the end of the year, it was the third most downloaded app in Denmark, with several hundred thousand daily active users. “The energy crisis meant the need for tracking and adapting energy usage exploded, and we had the best product in the market for doing that” explains Philip.

The Min Strøm app helps users across Denmark, Norway and Sweden understand and optimize their energy consumption. It serves up insights about electricity prices, taxes and tariffs, providing seven day forecasts so users can see when electricity will be cheapest, and shift their consumption patterns to align. Min Strøm also gives users visibility over their past energy consumption, so they’re not surprised by unexpectedly high energy bills.

Challenge: building smart charging from scratch is resource-intensive and hard to scale

When the app started scaling, it was obvious to Philip and Anne that Min Strøm would need to offer EV Smart Charging. In residential properties, EVs are the asset with the single biggest impact on energy consumption: daily EV charging can almost double household energy usage, and drive up bills. With uptake of EVs across the Nordics accelerating, it was “a no-brainer. EVs are such a large market, and make such a big impact on household consumption that anything you can do to optimize them is very, very valuable,” explains Philip.

In fact, EV Smart Charging was one of the most-requested features by Min Strøm’s user base. It quickly became a high priority, not only to respond to consumer demand, but also to enable Min Strøm to advance its strategic vision. “Long term, our goal is to optimize all energy consumption within the private household” says Philip. “EVs are the most accessible and impactful of the new energy devices entering the home, so Smart Charging is an important first step,”

But Philip knew that he and Anne wouldn't be able to build and scale Smart Charging themselves. Developing and maintaining integrations with every make and model of EV on the market was an enormous task, especially for a small team. Min Strøm’s main value proposition – and its core competency – is UX. Philip and Anne have ambitious plans to develop the app, with lots of ideas for additional features and functionality to enrich the user experience. There would be no way for them to progress their roadmap if they were also trying to build Smart Charging from scratch. “If we had done that, we would have had to pivot the entire company to focus on Smart Charging,” explains Anne .

Solution: Enode’s API is easy to integrate and accelerates time to market

Instead, Min Strøm turned to Enode. With Enode, Min Strøm can instantly connect to over 600 energy devices, including a wide range of EVs, through a single integration. Enode also provides out-of-the box Smart Charging, seamlessly enabling the control and optimization of EVs through the Min Strøm app.

Philip considered other providers, but found that in many cases, Smart Charging was a “side-hustle” rather than a core product. Implementations offered the bare minimum UX, with little transparency for users trying to make informed choices about their energy consumption. These solutions “would have created more headaches and taken much longer to launch”, says Philip.

Other solutions also lacked the scope and scalability that Enode offered. Enode provides connectivity not only to EVs, but also to a variety of other assets – including solar inverters, home batteries and HVACs. This meant there was greater opportunity for Min Strøm to implement more products and scale in the future.

Results: Min Strøm and Enode deliver seamless UX and significant cost savings

Integration with Enode was easy. “From a developer’s point of view, Enode has the best documentation I have ever seen from a SaaS platform” says Philip. Clear and thorough support meant it was straightforward to implement and get started with Enode’s API. Min Strøm went live with beta testing within eight weeks, and successfully launched smart charging to its entire user base shortly afterwards. Using Enode’s smart charging algorithm meant Min Strøm was able to dramatically reduce time to market; Philip estimates that in the same timeframe, he would only have been able to complete integration with one EV brand had he been building functionality himself.

Within one month of launching Smart Charging, Min Strøm had saved users 138,391 DKK (over 20,000 USD) across 3,000 charge sessions. Philip believes that because Min Strøm surfaces all components of the energy price, including tariffs and taxes, “this solution is defacto and objectively the best and most accurate implementation of Smart charging we’ve seen so far.”

And there’s more still to come. Philip and Anne hope to scale Smart Charging to even more Min Strøm users, and to add Smart EV Solar Charging functionality to the app. Many of Min Strøm’s users own both EVs and solar inverters, so enabling them to charge their EVs with the excess energy produced by their solar inverters will drive even greater cost savings.

“We're passionate about creating the maximum possible value for our users, and enabling them to optimize energy consumption throughout their homes using the Min Strøm app,” says Anne. “Working with Enode unlocks the opportunity to integrate more home energy devices, and continue to build exceptional user experiences as we scale our product.”