The evolution of Hello Energy: from visualisation to data quality

Hello Energy turns ten this year. In that time, the company has changed, and so has the market it operates in. Co-founders Kees van Alphen and Benno Schwarz look back on the decisions that shaped both.

The idea: make energy visible, in plain language

"Our plan was to give energy visibility to the users of buildings," says Benno Schwarz, Head of Growth at Hello Energy. "The name Hello Energy says it all: we wanted to create a dashboard that explained what was happening in a building, in accessible language, to people who did not speak energy."

"If you look at our first projects, CitizenM and KPMG, both wanted to visualise their energy consumption," says Hello Energy Managing Director, Kees van Alphen. "CitizenM wanted it for their internal organisation, to understand what was happening across their hotels. KPMG went further: they put live energy figures on screens in the lobby. If accountants see numbers that do not add up, that is not a great look."

Those early screens showed more than just energy. Departure times for public transport, news feeds, short films about how solar panels work. "It had to be engaging," says Schwarz. "But our focus was always on energy and sustainability."

The first discovery: data must be good enough to show

Visualisation turned out to require something that most clients did not have: reliable data. The assumption had been that companies would already possess it.

"We thought more companies would simply have their data available," says Schwarz. "They did not. So we started taking responsibility for getting it ourselves."

The stakes became clear immediately. For KPMG, energy figures were going on screens visible to everyone in the building. For CitizenM, the data was being used to understand performance across an entire hotel portfolio. In both cases, wrong numbers were not an option.

"Tenant grade data has to becorrect," says Schwarz. "You are showing a tenant: this is what you are doing, this is how much CO2 you are emitting, this is how much you could save. If that is wrong, the building owner looks incompetent.”

The extra mile: taking responsibility no one asked for

"We took responsibility for getting good data, very early on," says Van Alphen. "That is not a given. We could have said: deliver us the data and we will visualise it. But we went further, and that is ultimately what made us experts in this field. We could also have said: if the data is not there, then it is not there. But we saw that the product only worked if the data was there. So we took on that role naturally."

The willingness to go further became a defining characteristic. Where other parties would declare a connection made and move on, Hello Energy stayed. If data stopped coming in, they investigated. If a meter was inaccessible, they found another way. "We are really willing to take that extra step," says Schwarz. "If the data is not available digitally, we will try to get it via a datalogger or a new smart meter. That hands-on approach is what distinguishes us."

From double focus to data first

For several years, Hello Energy carried two propositions simultaneously: the visualisation product and the underlying data capability. The market was asking a harder question in the meantime. "There was a period where clients thought: if you are getting data anyway, why would it cost extra?" says Schwartz. Van Alphen describes how that perception evolved: "Initially the idea was: this should not cost much, it is just data. Then clients began to understand the complexity. Now there is budget for it."

"We kept getting more and more requests for data only," says Schwartz. "People were already using their own dashboards. What they needed was reliable data they could use themselves."

"We noticed that the double focus, both on visualisation and on data, was not helping us," says Schwartz. "Data had to be the core. Data collection is what we are." The visualisation product did not disappear. "We have completely renewed itover the past six months," says Schwartz. "Existing clients use it and appreciate it. But we needed to make data accessible to everyone, whether they use our screens or not."

Teaching a market what data quality means

As Hello Energy sharpened its focus on data, a new challenge emerged: clients did not have a shared understanding of what data quality meant.

"Every party has their own perception of quality data," says Schwarz. "A competitor can say they deliver quality data because they ensure you know your annual consumption once a year. You could call that a quality, but it raises questions."

For a long time, Hello Energy's own message was built around the claim of high-quality data. That message was harder to land than expected. "When we started actively tracking missing data and flagging it to clients, the initial reaction was not always positive," says Schwarz. "There is always something wrong with your data. But that is exactly the point: we were the only ones looking."

The market's understanding only began to shift when compliance obligations made data quality impossible to ignore. Accountancy firms started requiring that submitted data be assured. Certification bodies tightened their standards. "Clients started to realise: if we want to actually do something with this data, it had better be right," says Schwarz. "Because the consequences of wrong data became real."

Four types of quality, not one

The most recent evolution in how Hello Energy thinks about data quality is also the most significant. The concept of high-quality data as a universal standard has given way to something more precise.

"We are moving away from saying that we deliver high-quality data as a general claim," says Schwarz. "We deliver access to data for four specific use cases: certification grade, analytics grade, billing grade and tenant grade. The question is not whether data is good or bad. The question is whether it meets the requirements for what you need to do with it."

Van Alphen frames it as a shift in the conversation itself. "Instead of talking about quality data, we talk about: what quality do you want? For CSRD purposes, monthly data is the minimum, and the trend is towards more granularity. Certification and compliance frameworks are demanding more, so even within certification grade, we want data that is as granular as possible. For analytics, you want it as granular as possible, ideally in real time. For billing, it has to be exact,with certified and calibrated meters. Each need requires a different standard."

"That makes the conversation considerably easier," says Schwarz. "We can deliver data to the standard you need, defined by what you need to achieve."

This is the first in a series of articles in which Kees van Alphen and Benno Schwarz share what ten years of European energy data collection has taught them.

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