For the grid to remain stable, supply and demand for electricity must be kept in balance. National Grid currently spends £850m p.a. on services to maintain this balance, many of them delivered by operating traditional fossil fuel generation at reduced capacity. This is inefficient, and both expensive and responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions. Providing such services from demand side, e.g. reducing demand at peak times, would result in a cheaper and less polluting solution.
Upside Energy has developed an innovative cloud service that coordinates energy stored in uninterruptible power supplies, solar PV systems, electric vehicles, domestic heating systems, etc. This creates a 'Virtual Energy Store' (VES) that enables us to sell a range of balancing services to grid and distribution network operators and energy suppliers, starting with frequency regulation services to National Grid. We then redistribute 75 per cent of our revenue back to the original equipment owners: households and small businesses.
We have also developed an open innovation model that will allow us to gain exclusive licences on a large portfolio of algorithms developed by our partner universities.
