Engineering news
The company won the money as part of the Shell Springboard competition, which will award a total of £440,000 in funding in 2017 to support innovative UK low-carbon businesses and support young ‘sustainability entrepreneurs’.
Upside Energy will use the £150,000 to support the scale-up and commercialisation of its technology. The company was chosen from six national finalists, out of a total of 131 applicants to the programme.
How does the technology work?
Upside Energy has developed a cloud-based energy aggregation service that creates a ‘Virtual Energy Store’ that can be sold to the grid to help balance supply and demand and which helps reduce the need to turn on the older, most polluting and expensive power stations during peak demand times.
The company has built a “very scaleable” cloud service that can talk to thousands of battery systems, for example back-up power supplies for computer equipment, traffic lights or mobile phone towers. It monitors the grid and talks to those batteries and tells them whether they should charge or discharge. They can also use thermal energy storage from hot water tanks.
The company uses these resources to "buffer" peaks and troughs in demand, Graham Oakes, founder of Upside Energy, told PE. When there is a lot of demand we can serve some of that locally from local batteries," he explained. When there is a lower energy demand the system can recharge the batteries. This "smooths out the flow of energy" and lets equipment and power plants run more efficiently Oakes added.
Oakes said that the funding and wider business support they they will receive from Shell will “accelerate” their plans with a large energy supplier they are working with to provide similar flexible energy services. They will also look to work with domestic properties with solar PV and batteries, sharing the money received from the National Grid for balancing services with the homeowner.
Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year
Carlton Cummins from Aceleron was awarded a total of £30,000 as the Shell LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year. The funding will help Aceleron to develop its technology which aims to tackle battery waste by transforming end-of-life lithium-ion batteries into affordable “energy storage solutions”.
In the UK there is no facilities to waste manage lithium-ion batteries in the UK – instead they export batteries at cost for recycling. To combat this problem Acceleron has developed a process to identify used batteries for re-use and then repackage them into energy storage modules for other applications. They have designed hardware for the process that they say is “sustainable, scaleable”. The modules are integrated with remote monitoring to ensure safety. To date, more than 1000 batteries have been processed using Aceleron's technology.
LiveWIRE Young Entrepreneur of the Year Carlton Cummins with Sinead Lynch, Shell UK county chair
Carlton Cummins, founder of Aceleron, said that the financial support and feedback the company received at the Shell Springboard awards will help take the battery waste technology to the “next level”.
Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for more than 90% of the UK’s low-carbon sector, yet less than half of UK SMEs survive beyond their first five years, according to the Office of National Statistics.
SMEs are an “important force within the low-carbon economy”, said Shell UK country chair Sinead Lynch. However, accessing finance is often a “key barrier to growth”, Lynch said. “Our programmes aim to provide a vital foothold in the funding ladder,” she added.
The survival rates for Shell Springboard and Shell LiveWIRE winners outperform the national average, with more than 70% of winners surviving beyond five years, according to Shell.
The Shell Springboard and Shell LiveWIRE programmes are designed to support UK entrepreneurs in starting-up and scaling-up innovative businesses that have the potential to accelerate the move to a sustainable, low-carbon economy.