– There is no such thing as bad timing. It´s a lot of hard work building a company no matter how good or bad times are, says CEO of new cluster member Powerzeek, Dag Lilletvedt.
In April last year, Powerzeek launched their Powerzeek Energy Platform, which offers ship owners an online marketplace for fuels.
CEO Dag Lilletvedt founded Powerseek in 2016. When the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Lilletvedt and his team of six decided to suit up and go online with their marketplace for clean maritime fuel.
– In hindsight, we are glad we launched our platform during the Great Lockdown. It has been a lot of work, but the challenging situation has also given us a lot of valuable market feedback, which we would have needed also in an all-time high market. Things have progressed well, and we are now ready to implement the required changes and start to grow, Lilletvedt says.
Expands to more fuels
Even though the demand for Powerzeek´s services dropped substantially due to the virus, Lilletvedt has also experienced positive effects after starting up during the pandemic.
– First of all, people have been more available in 2020. Travel restrictions have made it easier to get hold of people online, Lilletvedt says.
The maritime industry consists of 100,000 commercial ships, all of them requiring fuel every day. Due to IMO´s increasingly more stringent international regulations on ships, the interest in cleaner, alternative fuels has increased. Until now, Powerzeek has been dealing with liquid natural gas (LNG). When joining NCE Maritime CleanTech, the company seeks to expand to even more green fuels.
– Our vision is to enable any type of ship to use cleaner energy, no matter where in the world it may be located. Our hairy goal is to become the world´s largest provider of clean energy to the maritime industry. Of the 100,000 commercial ships in the world today, only 400 of them use LNG. Even though this number is expected to increase, we wish to a part of the development of new value chains for other fuels, such as ammonia, hydrogen, methanol and electricity, Lilletvedt says.
The easier way
The Bergen-based tech-company aims to make it easier to buy clean fuel.
– We want to bring transparency and trust to the maritime fuel community, by making it easier for ship owners to buy cleaner marine fuels with the required quality, and at the lowest price. Today buying clean marine fuel is a challenge. This challenge comprises lack of suppliers, price and quality transparency, and lack of direct dialogue and credit mechanisms, Lilletvetdt says and adds:
– Powerzeek comes from the industry and understand the needs of both buyers and sellers. We also see that new value chains for fuels such as ammonia and hydrogen are being developed and that the NCE Maritime CleanTech network is at the forefront of this work. That is why we applied for membership in the cluster. In addition to our existing solutions, we work with new and innovative sustainable projects where we see that NCE Maritime Cleantech’s other members can participate and contribute, Lilletvedt says.