Harnessing Nature’s Energy

Eddie McGoldrick, Co Founder and Director of The Electric Storage Company.

An Interview with Eddie McGoldrick Co-Founder and Director of The Electric Storage Company, who initiated the first and only field trial, supplying and installing battery storage in Northern Ireland.

Why did you create The Electric Storage Company?

We started the company with an ambition to disrupt an industry, to bring the advances of renewable energy to all customers not just those of an industrial size. That ambition has been the drive behind the success of The Electric Storage company to date. We set this company up to bring cheaper, cleaner, smarter electricity to homes and businesses across the island of Ireland and beyond. My background is in utilities, including 30 years in the electricity industry. My co-founder, Anne Marie’s, background was Financial Services with Prudential and Capita L&P, a strong combination of experience for bringing electricity, data and services together.

How do you revolutionise a highly regulated industry?

It’s all about getting your timing right and persistence. We started working on this in 2016, knowing it would be a long haul. Invest NI supported our notion of a data and services platform, which we now call PARIS. Data is the key to the disruption we wanted to bring to an industry that is actually surprisingly thin on data, but heavy on engineering.

Again timing was in our favour as the UK Government Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) launched its innovation programme, Prospering from the Energy Revolution, is investing up to £102.5M into industry and research to accelerate innovation in smart local energy systems. This came out in 2019, just as we were finalising our first development of smart batteries in customer homes, linking to our earlyversion of PARIS.

The aim of BEIS Prospering from the Energy Revolution programme is to create businesses that could translate the challenge of the transition to Net Zero into new companies, services and business models. We applied for and got £2.4m support for Project Girona, a detailed design for a radical new approach to enabling homeowners to get access to cheaper, cleaner, smarter electricity.

We pitched for this award in Westminster and had NIE Networks and Ulster University colleagues along with us. We were also encouraged by Robin Walker, Deputy Secretary of State, who met with us on the day of the pitch and provided insight from his days as a BEIS Minister.

Project Girona is now underway, installing PV solar panels and smart batteries into 100 homes in Coleraine at no cost to the home owners and tenants. They are all connected to the PARIS platform that lies at the heart of EFaaS.

What is PARIS?

Our business model is all about data and services, PARIS looks after the data side of things. The smart batteries we put in each home gather data every second. We measure what electricity you are using in your home, what is being generated in your home from solar panels, what you are drawing from the power grid and what capacity is in the battery attached to your home. All of this is brought into our PARIS platform and it asks itself 4 questions every minute of every day, for each unit of electricity; Should I use it now? Should I store it? Should I trade it on the Single Electricity Market or should I sell it as Network Services to NIE Networks or SONI? Our Virtual Power Plant controlled by PARIS coordinates this process for hundreds of batteries, as a series of clusters. We have clusters operating in Ulster, Leinster and Connaught. We need some customers in Munster and then we can have an Inter Provincial Energy Saving Championship. This is how we harness nature’s energy.

What is EFaaS?

We call the service side of the business model EFaaS, Energy Flexibility as a Service. Domestic and commercial customers know that as we move towards the Net Zero targets set at international, national and regional levels your energy costs will rise steeply and permanently unless you can access renewable energy. The challenge is how do we make this affordable for people and businesses?

Often when considering the challenges ahead it is useful to reflect on how challenges were met in the past. Over 70 years ago people in this country prospered from an energy revolution when mains electricity was introduced right across the country, sometimes referred to as rural electrification. Back then people wanted, but couldn’t directly afford the cookers, kettles and even smoothing irons that made their lives easier, using the cleaner, more efficient wonder of electricity. Seamus Heaney captured the moment beautifully in his poem Electric Light, “If I stood on the bow-backed chair, I could reach the light switch. They let me and they watched me, a touch of the little pip would work the magic”

It’s time to see if we can work the magic again and get cheaper, cleaner, smarter electricity into homes and businesses.

What have been your challenges?

Well, given that we kicked off this project on the morning of the Brexit result and we named it after a famous shipwreck, what could possibly go wrong? COVID lockdown hit us but thankfully none of our team contracted the disease. Our business was “born in the cloud” and is “Digital from the ground up”, so we have been able to work remotely since March last year. We have doubled the size of the team during lockdown. Our great team are working in Belfast, Lyons, Berlin, Loughborough and Cushendall and we never missed a milestone. However, all the working in Teams, on Miro boards in virtual workshops and being “On Mute” can take its toll. As we all know, innovation breeds best when people are together, so let’s hope we can start to get back to working together soon.

Are there opportunities for other companies in this space?

A great advantage we have here in Northern Ireland, is that we are close, small and contain all the elements of decision making in electricity; regulator, network operators, Consumer Council. We know from talking to similar projects across GB, that they are frustrated by not having access to their network operator or regulator as easily as we can here.

We also have a great eco-system of colleges and universities. We have worked with Ulster University, Queens and Northern Regional College. We have recruited staff from this ecosystem and offered placements and project opportunities. This gives us a chance to recruit good people with a solid education behind them who we can then mould into the new roles and skills this revolution is calling for.

The skills we depend on are electrical design, sales and marketing right through to high-end data analytics. Thankfully, we can work with great local companies, but there is definitely room for more and other players. Net Zero Carbon is such a big challenge, with massive opportunities, for us all.

Our supply chain stretches from a warehouse near Crumlin to Germany and China. We are working with local manufacturers and suppliers to see if we can get more value added at local stages in that chain. We would love more people to get involved.

Finally, we talk about this project being where Fintech meets Greentech. Central to our PARIS platform is the software development and cyber security skills with AquaQ Analytics and ANSEC, both based right here in Northern Ireland. Our PARIS platform and EFaaS have been recognised as leading edge by Innovate UK and potential customers across the British Isles. So there is a lot of work still to do and much more scope for other, different approaches in meeting this challenge.

Eddie and Anne Marie McGoldrick.

“Our business was “born in the cloud” and is “Digital from the ground up”, so we have been able to work remotely since March last year. We have doubled the size of the team during lockdown. Our great team are working in Belfast, Lyons, Berlin, Loughborough and Cushendall and we never missed a milestone.”