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.