In this day and age you should always go out and buy a system to get a task done – there’s an app for that.
Right?
I’m not so sure.
More than ten years ago, we were trying to get into the demand response business.
Demand response, in case you don’t know, helps balance a grid that has a high proportion of renewables.
Because the sun doesn’t always shine, and the wind stops blowing, renewable supplies can be intermittent, and be unavailable at certain periods.
Instead of spinning up a gas generator to keep supply going demand response programmes pay large users to switch off and drop demand – hence demand response.
We went to the market to see if there were solutions out there that would do the things we needed – monitor notifications from the grid, meter client sites in near-real time, and pull everything together so that we could ask a site to turn down or up as needed.
We looked at the market, talked to providers – but nothing quite fit what we needed.
So we started building our own. In doing that we learned more about how meters operated, which ones we could connect to and which ones were tricky. The difference between modbus and TCP-IP.
Eventually, we did get our own system running, held together with a combination of servers and code that did the job – that ran and helped us operate the business.
Would we have been better off buying a tool? I don’t know, because we didn’t.
We built a lean and low-cost system that let us do what the market needed and test if it could be a business.
Which it wasn’t. The DR business at the time didn’t have a working economic model – it’s a monopsonist system which basically means suppliers can’t make a margin.
It wasn’t for us.
For the last several years we’ve been developing systems for energy and carbon data management instead.
It’s not an easy space for corporates to scan – there are thousands of systems out there and it’s even more complicated with the hopes and promises from AI.
And the next couple of years look to be challenging – with a greater focus on costs and a need for effective solutions that deliver clear outcomes.
Keeping it lean and simple still has value here.
Handcrafted insight 