Hygge Power’s 2020 Year in Review: Resilience in Action

The year started with our team singularly focused on bringing cleaner, more reliable and comfortable energy storage to the world. We had created a subsidiary in Taiwan to help us launch the OPO family, a suite of plug-and-play, multifunctional energy storage devices designed to bring affordable energy storage to everyone. And, we had some wind in our sails through our selections to the prestigious Shell GameChanger Accelerator™ Powered by NREL (GCxN) and the 4D Bold Idea Challenge with Powerhouse and Schneider Electric.

To state the obvious, from the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide civil unrest to massive wildfires, devastating hurricanes, vicious droughts and other extreme weather events, 2020 has been quite the year. “Unprecedented” might have been the word of the year for the Oxford English Dictionary, but for us, we think there’s another word that speaks more directly to our 2020: resilience. 

Willpower

Our goal has always been to bring power to the people through our intelligent backup power ecosystem, and the early part of the year saw us make numerous hardware advancements on the path to achieving that goal. The OPO Hub can now recharge batteries 25% faster and its battery capacity increased by 15%, plus we improved our efficiencies and communication security.

When everything shut down in March, we were locked out of our labs and our supply chain was completely bottlenecked. Without the opportunity to physically work on our hardware solution, we pivoted to focus on the areas within our control. And believe it or not, we’re grateful that the opportunity became what it did because we connected with consumers and investors, made serious strides in furthering our intellectual property and expanded the intelligence that sits behind everything we do: our back-end software. 

Through a catalytic investment from Ideaship, a venture capital firm that provides technology startups patent development capital, we will begin 2021 in a greater position to protect the IP behind our intelligent energy storage hardware and related software than ever before. 

Introducing the CO-Z App for True Hygge

Our in-depth market research earlier this year helped us gain a better understanding of how the pandemic has affected the reliability of energy. These consumer insights played a critical role in helping us deliver a new mobile app, and we are so proud to announce that CO-Z will launch in Q1 2021!  

Hygge is a Scandinavian term meaning coziness and deep comfort. For this reason, it made sense to call our new smartphone app CO-Z. Designed to function both independent of as well as with our hardware, CO-Z empowers customers to maintain a comfortable lifestyle by knowing about the risk of an outage before it happens, save money on their energy bills and reduce their carbon footprint. Even better, CO-Z offers tips and insights to better manage energy usage and allows people to report power issues, creating a beautiful, interconnected community of empowered energy users. 

Power Ahead

Much like OPO’s resilience during a power outage, we’ve found that we talk about resilience a lot these days. These conversations have positioned us for sustained growth and important partnerships in 2021 and beyond. We believe that form follows function, and so we restructured our team earlier this year to reflect new priorities and opportunities. This includes a greater focus on sales and business development capabilities as well. 

Our collaborative work with partners like NREL, Shell, Schneider Electric, Powerhouse, Ideaship and Panasonic will continue into next year. And, we are pleased to share that we have been selected to participate in Florida Power & Light's 35 Mules program! Through each partnership, we have seen an incredible breadth and depth of innovation taking place within the clean energy market, and we have lots of reasons to be optimistic in 2021.

In spite of the significant challenges 2020 threw our way, we powered ahead to create unmistakable momentum so that we are that much closer to bringing power to the people!

 With gratitude,

The Hygge Power team