Why this 26-year-old Singapore founder thinks the building industry is spending too much to save energy

Eugene Chia, chief operating officer of Ecovolt, a Singapore technology company developing hardware and software to help buildings monitor and manage their energy consumption, owes his entrepreneurial career partly to an argument with his mother.

She repeatedly told him to switch off the electrical appliances in his room. He repeatedly assumed their consumption was too insignificant to warrant the fuss.

“I wanted to prove to her that we really did not need to worry about it,” he recalls. “Well, she was right. It is not an astronomical amount of waste, but it adds up.”

His co-founders had their own encounters with wasted electricity. Glenn Quah, Ecovolt’s chief technology officer, noticed persistent electricity bills in Norway even when his housemates were away. Raphael Chew, the company’s CEO, investigated the phenomenon of plug loads and vampire energy.

Their eventual discovery was that the household problem became considerably more complicated inside commercial buildings.

“In an office, a school, a government building, the appliances are bigger and there are far more of them. Nobody owns the bill,” Chia explains.

The occupant does not necessarily pay for consumption, the facilities manager might not have selected the equipment, and the finance department sees only the consolidated expense.

What began as an argument over a fan became a question of institutional accountability.

The cost of doing nothing

Buildings are notoriously complicated ecosystems. Owners, tenants, facilities managers, equipment suppliers, and sustainability departments operate according to different priorities, while the infrastructure itself can involve systems installed by numerous vendors over many years.

26-year-old Chia describes energy management as a “wicked problem”, aggravated by an industry that has become accustomed to its own difficulties. “The assumption I reject most” is not in his vocabulary here; his actual objection is more pointed: “That ‘it cannot be helped’.”

He bristles particularly at the solutions proposed when building owners finally confront excessive consumption.

“When an owner is finally forced to cut consumption, the answer they get is a whole-system overhaul,” he observes, describing projects that can cost tens of millions of dollars and cause years of disruption.

He argues that comparatively modest investments in measurement and controls can often deliver substantial improvements without replacing entire systems.

This is the premise behind Ecovolt, a technology solution that monitors and co-ordinates energy use across plug loads, lighting, indoor air quality, and air-conditioning systems. Its deployments have extended across schools, offices, residential environments, warehouses, and even a golf course.

Yet, Chia has found that convincing an established industry to change takes far more than developing a technically credible alternative.

Young enough to surprise

“It is hard,” he says of establishing credibility. “This is an old, mature industry where track record, age of institution, and reputation decide almost everything.”

The company is young, its people are young, and prospective clients are understandably concerned about entrusting complicated building systems to suppliers without decades of experience. “The age of our people is consistently the first thing people notice and the last thing they mention,” he remarks.

Ecovolt’s response has involved accumulating technical competence, certifications, project references, and the ability to speak the language of seasoned industry practitioners.

Chia readily acknowledges the expertise of people who have spent twenty years operating chiller plants. But he has encountered something unexpected among those older professionals: allies.

“There is a whole layer of people who have been quietly holding out hope, watching and waiting for something like us to come along,” he says, recalling facilities managers who know their buildings could perform better and consultants frustrated by the limitations of conventional solutions.

“Our energy is infectious to those people,” he reflects. “They are the ones who get us into rooms our age would otherwise keep us out of.”

Rather than begin with a prestigious flagship client, Ecovolt deliberately pursued smaller, varied projects while its technology was still developing. “Every one of them was sold with a product that was, honestly, maybe 80 per cent there,” Chia admits.

Schools, offices, and the golf course became testing grounds where technical problems could be resolved without jeopardising an enormous contract. The company gradually developed the experience required to undertake more complicated work.

According to Chia, Ecovolt now has more than 30 paying customers and is cash-flow positive. “The irrational decision was to grow with our customers instead of ahead of them.”

The venture capital question

There is another convention that Chia approaches with considerable scepticism: the belief that successful entrepreneurship should culminate in an impressive fundraising announcement.

“We are so enamoured with raising VC capital in this ecosystem that many young founders hold it up as the pinnacle,” he observes. “Raising money is treated as success. Not as a signal of success, but as the success itself.”

Ecovolt has instead pursued a leaner approach, balancing the immediate demands of incoming projects against the longer-term advantages of building its own technical capabilities.

That strategy comes with inconveniences. The company develops its own hardware and software rather than relying entirely on external devices, exposing its team to the decidedly unglamorous realities of manufacturing, installation, and maintenance. “Hardware means capital, design, manufacturing, shipping, electricians, ladders, dusty ceiling plenums,” Chia enumerates.

It would be easier to integrate someone else’s equipment, although doing so would leave Ecovolt dependent on the very vendor arrangements it wants to challenge.

Nor does Chia categorically reject external investment. He recognises that excessive attachment to bootstrapping could eventually become a competitive disadvantage.

For now, his philosophy remains that “constraints build ingenuity”, with the business developing its capabilities before committing to a more aggressive expansion strategy.

Who owns the building?

Chia’s ambitions extend beyond reducing electricity bills. He wants to challenge the way building owners access and control information about their own properties.

Under existing arrangements, he explains, energy readings, operational schedules, and control systems can remain locked inside proprietary vendor platforms. Building owners may even have to pay to retrieve information generated by their own equipment.

“I want that to be unacceptable,” he declares.

His preferred alternative involves open protocols, accessible data, and systems that can communicate regardless of which company installed them.

The consequences could extend across an entire building, allowing lighting, air-conditioning, and other equipment to operate in concert rather than as isolated installations.

Chia is attempting this in an industry that measures credibility in years, established relationships, and accumulated technical experience. The incumbents possess all three. What he and his colleagues bring is a willingness to question why buildings should remain beholden to expensive solutions and proprietary systems.

His mother’s original complaint concerned a few appliances left running unnecessarily. Ecovolt’s ambitions have grown considerably since then, but the irritation remains recognisable. Somewhere, someone is paying for electricity nobody needs, while everyone assumes somebody else is responsible.

This time, Chia intends to prove that something can be done about it.

Art direction: Fazlie Hashim
Photographer: Athirah Annissa
Stylist: Dolphin Yeo
Grooming: Angel Gwee, using Chanel Beauty and Goldwell

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