Leonhard Birnbaum, COO of E.ON, visits IoT startup Lemonbeat

The energy sector is undergoing a massive transformation. Along with solar, wind, storage and other technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT) plays an essential role in making this transformation happen. It's revolutionising nearly every part of the industry from energy generation to distribution and changing how energy companies and customers interact.

To explore possibilities of the IoT, E.ON´s Chief Operating Officer Leonhard Birnbaum visited Lemonbeat – a startup that simplifies the complex world of IoT while building an end-to-end enabling solution for IoT projects.

During an exciting half-day journey, the Lemonbeat team introduced Leonhard Birnbaum to their technology and processes. “It was impressive to see at what level of detail Leonard Birnbaum was interested in our hardware and software developments," says Oliver van der Mond, CEO of Lemonbeat. “It is always fun to have such high-profile managers in our labs who are interested in discussing high-tech and its business potentials in such a depth.”

The major driver for the use of IoT technologies in the energy industry is the growing demand for process automation and operational efficiency. But that is not all. Integration of IoT solutions also mean greater flexibility to accommodate new energy sources, better management of assets and operations, greater reliability, enhanced security, better customer service, and enablement of new business models.  

To explore the benefits of IoT, E.ON has implemented multiple projects within the last years. Recently, Lemonbeat has been recognised as a new and promising collaboration partner for future IoT projects. “Lemonbeat is a small gem that we have found in innogy’s portfolio after E.ON and innogy merged,” says Leonhard Birnbaum. “Further exploring IoT technology with Lemonbeat might be just the right opportunity for E.ON to have a real value-adding IoT service in house.”

In only five years Lemonbeat has boosted their workforce from 5 to 31 IoT energy experts and connected over one million devices. Alongside over 30 long-standing B2B customers in the energy sector, Lemonbeat has already started projects with several units within E.ON. Together with City Energy Solutions team, the startup has implemented a remote building energy management solution that is already been provided to E.ON´s B2B customers. In parallel, Lemonbeat has started pilots with Westnetz and Avacon where they jointly seek to smarten up old transformer stations and bring them to the cloud.

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