Ready, Set, Go: The EC Go App Is Now Available to All

Green Building Alliance’s annual campaign, Catch the Energy Thief, is just around the corner. To make the hunt easier, more effective and more fun, Energy Control has now created a free version of its EC Go app, available to everyone during the Catch the Energy Thief campaign.

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– EC Go is an app developed to make it as easy as possible to gain control of what is happening in small and large buildings. The app quickly reveals both small and large energy thieves. We have now created a freemium version of the app that everyone can download and use during the Green Building Alliance’s Catch the Energy Thief campaign, says Tommy Hagenes at Energy Control.

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The Catch the Energy Thief campaign is aimed at everyone who manages buildings. The goal is to help them find sources within the building that are causing unnecessary energy use. Green Building Alliance therefore encourages all public and private building owners to participate by, for example, carrying out an evening check of their buildings and catching the energy thieves! Relevant buildings can be office buildings, shopping centres, housing cooperatives, schools, nurseries and operational buildings. Energy Control wishes to contribute to the industry-wide effort and is therefore now offering a completely no-obligation free version of the app it has developed for its own customers.
 
– This is a collective industry effort, and we want to make the hunt for energy thieves as effective as possible. That is why last year we simplified our own reporting form. We are pleased that Energy Control has now used our form and created an integrated version in the EC Go app that makes it easy for operators to register energy thieves and report them to us. We encourage building owners to request solutions for registering energy thieves in the tools they use on a daily basis. Everyone who creates such tools and wants to contribute to the campaign is welcome to do so, but it is important to ensure that energy thieves registered outside our own form are also reported to Green Building Alliance, says Communications Manager Morten Nordskag at Green Building Alliance.

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Several major property operators have already adopted EC Go, including Statens vegvesen which has properties spread across the country.

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– The app gives us real-time data from our buildings right in our pocket. It also makes it even easier for us to participate in Catch the Energy Thief, so this year we will be joining in too, says Head of FDVU & Proptech at Statens vegvesen, Martin Hellерød Sæther. In the 2023 Catch the Energy Thief campaign, a total of 873,253 square metres of building floor space was registered and reviewed. Findings from the campaign revealed an average savings potential of 4.45 kWh per square metre, which for Green Building Alliance’s members combined corresponded to 223 GWh/year. If this holds true for all commercial buildings in Norway, this corresponds to 575 GWh/year.

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– Norway must reduce electricity consumption in buildings by 10 TWh by 2030, and eliminating energy thieves is a simple and affordable way to cut energy use. With the electricity prices we had in the winter of 2022/23 and partly last winter, there are also significant economic benefits for building owners. By allowing the EC Go app and similar offerings on the market to be used to register energy thieves and link them to follow-up and building management, we hope that unnecessary energy use will decrease and that more building owners will join the effort, says Nordskag.

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– EC Go was developed to make the hunt for energy thieves fun. While in Pokémon Go you hunt Pokémons, in EC Go we hunt energy thieves. So "let’s Go" — catch the energy thieves together with Green Building Alliance, says Hagenes.

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