Mylight Systems gives you energy independence

Mylight Systems manufactures a range of energy management products for energy-positive houses and buildings: those that produce their own energy through solar photovoltaics most often. We provide additional functions on top of this basic task of providing on-site energy.

As we all know, the challenge of photovoltaic energy is its intermittency. The other challenge is that you do not always consume when you produce. Mylight Systems has developed products that allow you to predict production levels and adapt your consumption to it. For this reason we target the biggest energy consuming systems in the house, usually heating and producing hot water. On average, heating accounts for 50% of energy bills and water 25%, so they are very significant sources of energy use.

The idea is to make consumption more "movable" without impacting user comfort. Take water heaters: historically they run at night, during off-peak hours. But a water heater can also serve as a battery: you can launch it during the day without impacting the temperature of the water, ensuring hot water gets produced with renewable energy.

 For heating we work on two aspects:

• Reducing consumption by reducing the temperature by 3 degrees when residents aren’t there thanks to better managing thermostats
• During the seasonal transitions when electricity production is good during the day but where the nights are cool, we preheat the house and improve the building’s energy inertia to mitigate the famous 7 p.m. peak.

Mylight Systems has also developed a series of products that are compatible with storage batteries, but logic requires us to start by managing consumption: when we’re using batteries, we don’t want to launch the water heater which itself serves as a thermal battery! The principle is to start by using the cheapest kwh: the ones that are produced and consumed on-site, green and local, and then potentially storing the surplus, although today the financial aspects of storage are still complicated.

Do you work with individual users as clients?

Currently our products are mostly sold with solar kits, so mainly for new electricity generation facilities and through distributors/installers.

Most of our on-site consumption facilities are residential. In France, there are 30,000 households with solar panels and just a few hundred on-site plants in the small tertiary sector. But there are 18 million individual houses, so the market is huge!

In the commercial market, the challenge is first of all about sizing (how much power to install so that the company profits from it) and then finding out what sources of energy consumption can be shifted around in time. But on their own heating and the air-conditioning are already big areas that can be improved.

What will you show on the booth at Viva Technology to explain what you do?

Our product is quite tangible. Since most homes are not connected today, to remotely control consumptions and appliances we install a connected electrical box with all the elements that will allow us to manage consumption.

We’re going to show this box as well as the demonstration interface with data from a real client. This lets user who don’t know Mylight System project themselves a little more onto the product and what users see in everyday life. The demonstration is quite telling. Since it’s a real house, you are fully aware of the impact on-site production-consumption has on your bills as well as the impact of optimizing your consumption.

We measure power consumption of the homes  we monitor every 30 seconds, whereas Linky meters give info about a day’s consumption in increments of 30 minutes! It was very important for us to monitor this information in real time, because half-hour increments don’t really let you manage on-site energy consumption. A microwave consumes a lot of energy in 3 minutes. You won’t realize that if you only have information ever half an hour.

What do you expect to get from participating in VivaTechnology?

Why come to Vivatech? Mylight Systems sells in the B2B2B2C market, to distributors who sell to installers, and it our installers are in contact with the end customers. It is much more difficult for us to understand consumer aspirations since we have little contact with them.

And the enegy business is changing and many very innovative companies bring new proposals to the market. I find it very interesting to compare our points of view on how this is happening.

A slogan for Mylight Systems?

Our slogan has been "Towards your energy independence" since we were founded.

Independence doesn’t mean leaving the network. Instead, it’s about "empowerment", the appropriation of energy as a subject we can control and master, and an area in which the consumer didn’t have room to make change.

Finally, for you the future will be …?

Speaking of the future of energy, it will certainly be digital, decentralized and renewable.

This has been our vision from the beginning. It is essential to play our part in the global fight against climate change. Mylight Systems is at the crossroads of these paths.