Graham Oakes Ltd (UK)
Partner Description
The energy system is changing. Renewable generation. Home batteries. Electric vehicles. Heat pumps. A host of new technologies distributed across homes, businesses and communities is changing the way energy is generated, distributed and consumed. This offers tremendous scope to reduce emissions, to create new value for people, to give people and communities enhanced control. But it also creates new complexity and uncertainty. Graham Oakes Ltd helps people navigate this complexity. It helps them identify opportunities and risks, develop frameworks to think about business and technology models, and then to set up and deliver projects that create value in this new world of distributed, local energy. Graham Oakes Ltd has been providing high value consulting to technology developers since 2003. Most notably, it founded the smart energy startup Upside Energy in 2013. Upside has built a cloud platform that uses advanced algorithms and AI to coordinate distributed energy resources in households and business sites to enhance the efficiency of the grid and enable greater deployment of renewable generation. Upside has now raised almost £3m of grant funding and £7m of equity finance and grown to employ almost 40 staff. We now are using the experience gained from creating Upside to support wider development of local, community and municipal energy.
Role in EMPOWER2.0
Graham Oakes Ltd brings extensive knowledge and experience of smart platforms to coordinate distributed resources such as household solar arrays and batteries. It supports the project partners to set up trials that can fully demonstrate the technical, economic and social potential of such distributed resources for balancing the grid and enhancing consumer control of their energy usage. It also uses experience gained from these trials to support wider policy and regulatory change to better support development of a cleaner, decentralised and democratised energy system.
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