critical. Because we own the entire process in-house – from design to manufacturing – we have very fast development cycles of as little as nine months from prototype to certification. This enables us to take market share over time and scale our global offering. On this latter point, we only launched in the US a few months ago and are already seeing strong traction.
Turning to our product portfolio and its evolution, we have always designed our chargers with the user at the center of our development. We initially focused on charging solutions for single-family homes, because that’s where the lion’s share of charging occurs. With this in mind, we rolled out the first Commander and Pulsar models and an associated desktop and mobile app, myWallbox, in 2016. As a next logical step, we upgraded our energy management software, building out myWallbox 2.0 in 2017 to allow us to extend into semi-public charging for apartment buildings and fleets. Today, myWallbox is the platform that allows owners to control and manage their chargers--and for more advanced chargers and user management we provide a monthly subscription, cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service offering within that same platform. Energy management systems are important to our users because EV owners typically double their home’s energy consumption through charging and can thus achieve significant savings and protect their home’s electrical grid by optimizing their charging patterns.
Taking our technology one step further, we launched our DC bidirectional charger and energy management technology, called Quasar, in 2019. The battery of an electric vehicle can actually power a home for up to five days and with Quasar, we unlock the EV’s full potential. Customers can discharge the energy stored in their vehicle to power their home during blackouts, use that energy during peak hours to avoid high energy costs, or even sell it back to the grid where regulations allow. Moreover, Quasar allows EV owners producing solar or other renewable energy to store that clean energy in their vehicle, when not being fully utilized by the home. Quasar is a groundbreaking product because existing vehicle-to-grid and vehicle-to-home technologies are much larger, heavier, and more expensive, and so have been only viable for industrial usage. Quasar is a compact, affordable and easy-to-use product that is revolutionizing home charging and energy management. It is available today through partnerships in select countries in Europe and Australia, and will be available across the rest of Europe this summer and in the US next year.
Continuing along our evolution, in 2020 we entered into public charging through the acquisition of Electromaps, which allows users to locate and transact with public chargers on a network of more than 150,000 connected locations. For every charging session transacted through our public charging app, Wallbox collects a 10% fee. One particular feature to note is that the app offers real-time information from the network—alerting users, for example, when a charger is out-of-service.
Later in 2021, we will roll out Supernova, our DC Fast charger for public use. One of the biggest challenges today with traditional fast charging technology is reliability, given that these are typically very complex pieces of equipment. Supernova, on the other hand, contains multiple independent power modules, which means that in the event of a module failure, the system can still provide power and maintenance is isolated. Another typical issue with fast chargers is ease-of-use and ease-of-installation. With Supernova, we have an elegant and efficient architecture that is plug and play—it is lightweight, only needs to dissipate the same amount of energy as a hair dryer and does not require heavy machinery to install. As a result, Supernova offers a cost advantage versus the competition—we estimate a Total Cost of Ownership, or TCO, that is 40% below what others have to offer. We are currently in the prototype phase with this product, but we have 8,000 units under LOIs, of which Iberdrola recently placed an order for the first 1,000 units. In
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