We tend to neglect little things, such as turning off the light in a room or switching off an unused computer, because we think that the savings of one person do not count in the big picture. Grinfinity is a company that strongly believes in crowd energy savings – the idea that each person, by saving just a bit of energy, can contribute to measurable and significant results. Their product, Grinfy, is a software that automates energy saving by desktops and laptops.
This tool is targeted mostly at multi-computer customers, such as companies, universities or institutions. Far too often large-scale companies have problems with saving energy, as there are too many factors to monitor. Grinfy eliminates this problem, automating many processes. Except for basic functions such as turning off the monitor when it is not used, Grinfy allows to turn off hard disks, control CPU speed and configure power saving modes of all computer components. All of these solutions can be directly translated to CSR metrics available in the accompanying web panels with all statistics.
The Grinfy system was born in 2012 in the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center as a research project. Kamil Nawrocki, the CEO of Grinfinity, stresses: “knowledge and science are the basis of our company”. Grinfy originated from the Gicomp project, which was developed in Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Center in 2012 as a research project. In 2016, four co-founders and scientists – Kamil Nawrocki, Marcin Adamski, Mateusz Jarus and Ariel Oleksiak – founded Grinfinity. The goal of this company is to commercialize the Grinfy system.
“The project is extremely scalable,” said Nawrocki. “Individual users own 8-10 million computers. Large and medium companies own 2-4 million, and institutions such as universities, administration offices and hospital – yet another 2 million. Even a few pennies saved per computer will result in enormous savings measured in kWh or CO2.”
Except for optimizing the energy use of computers, Grinfy system allows to save energy on any kind of appliances such as air conditioners or electric heaters. They also work on further projects that include crowd energy savings. Ultimately, Grinfy is to become a savings aggregator that will be able to display and measure all savings made in a community.
Grinfinity has already proven to be quite successful. Their biggest implementation took place in June 2016 in three IKEA furniture factories. They were also one of forty winners of the Start-up Challenge during European Start-up Days, were declared the winners of ABSL Start-Up Challenge in the Big Data & Analytics category and won a contest resulting in implementation of their solution by PGNiG (Polish Oil and Gas Company).
“We take great care of saving in microscale,” said Nawrocki. “It teaches us to change our perspective, which in turn allows for saving on a large scale. I come from a region of Poland called Wielkopolska, and I think that its prosperity stems from this kind of thrifty thinking. We want to show this approach to the whole world.”
