Q - Good morning, Benoît. Tell us about Énergie Futée, the startup you created with Maxime Delille.
Énergie Futée is a digital platform for people who currently heat their homes with domestic heating oil and propane. We help them
make the change to natural gas or electricity. The innovative thing about what we do is the personal attention we provide. Currently, people can hypothetically take care of all the necessary steps themselves and have the work done by a contractor, but they have to be able to deal with multiple stakeholders and things can get quite complicated.
Let’s take the case of a person who would like to
switch from domestic heating oil to natural gas. They need to contact and work with:
- the manager of the natural gas distribution network (GRDF in most municipalities) to install a meter;
- a heating engineer to install and connecting of the boiler;
- a bank to find financing;
- the energy supplier to purchase natural gas;
- a specialist company to remove their old oil tank.
That means at least 5 different organizations! It’s a pretty complex project for the customer. Our goals is to
reduce the level of complexity and help people by giving them advice and insight at every stage of the project.
Q: Do you take care of all of these steps instead of the end customer or do you simply to help them get organized?
We can take certain steps for them, like getting initial quotes or sending documents. Our plan is to eventually to take care of the entire process on behalf of an individual client, as our business grows.
Q- What are the main things that you offer?
We provide our clients with a complete understanding of their project. Our website gives the user access to two free simulators that let them:
- find out how much they could save by changing from heating energy
- estimate the cost of all the renovations involved.
- Énergie Futée also helps all of its clients get all the subsidies and rebates they are entitled to: tax credits, eco zero interest loans, energy premiums, local subsidies, etc.
The user has all of the relevant information at his or her fingertips to make an informed decision! If they’re interested, we can offer him additional support.We should highlight that
the whole service is free and without obligations. Énergie Futée gets paid by receiving commissions from our business partners.
If I had to define us in one sentence, I would say
we are the wedding planners of switching energy sources.
Q- How did you come up with the idea for this project? Maxime and I have been working at ENGIE for 7 years, and we already developed the startup
NegoFioul, which is an
online broker for heating oil for individual customers. We learned about the need for this new service from those customers, since they kept asking us questions about how to switch from heating oil to natural gas. Actually, many didn’t even know who to turn to and had no idea how much the renovation work would cost how much they would save. That's how we came up with the idea for Énergie Futée!So we put the idea on ENGIE's internal innovation platform, found sponsors and
joined the ENGIE intrapreneurship process. We’ve been
incubated in Le Village by CA since the beginning of September 2016. During the past five months we created the offer, set up partnerships and developed the website.
We are now entering the commercial deployment phase, which will allow us to test our proposal and tweak it in real time.
Q- What advantages does changing heating energy provide for your potential customers? For us, there are four main reasons to switch from domestic fuel and propane to natural gas or electricity:
- You can save money: Installing a condensing natural gas boiler or an air-to-water heat pump can significantly reduce your heating bills.
- Increasing the value of your home: An efficient and clean heating system increases the value of your home.
- More space and comfort: You can reuse the space that used to be occupied by oil or propane tank. No more oil smells in your home or truck deliveries.
- Preserving the environment: Switching heating fuels helps the environment because it improves your home’s carbon footprint, with reduced CO2 emissions and zero particulate emissions.
Q- What question would you have liked me to ask you? You could have asked me, "
Are there a lot of people in this market?"
The answer is yes. In France alone, there are still about seven million people who heat their homes with heating oil and propane!
More about Énergie Futée: Find more about us on
our website. You can also contact
Energie Futée by email: contact@energiefutee.fr
