Helen Jeffrey, Forest Community Energy chair and AURORA Ambassador, tells us about Octopus Energy’s annual Energy Tech Summit she attended in London. This was a chance for her to learn about tech advancements in the energy sector to bring ideas to the energy community in Forest of Dean.
For the first time Octopus invited customers to their annual Energy Tech Summit in London, almost 3,000 of us. This decision, as Greg Jackson, Octopus Founder and CEO explained, turned a 450 person event for industry insiders and policy makers, into something quite spectacular. The free tickets were offered out and some 25,000 customer entered the ballot. I was one of the lucky ones.
The thought and attention to detail that the Octopus Team put together was exceptional. The setting, beside the Thames in Battersea Park, was glorious. The chimneys of the old coal fired power station were visible over the trees. Outside the venue you could get in to electric cars, step onto the BYD electric red London Bus, marvel at the purple wind-turbine, and touch the Cosy heat-pumps. This was experiencing new green tech for real, not just looking images on a screen.
The summit started in a wave of sound, light, colour, and energy. The huge audience were guided though space, the universe, ethics, AI, carbon graphs, paradigm shifts, and more. The speakers were all impressive.
For me the things that stood out were; the short video taking us along the Octopus Cosy heat-pump assembly line in Northern Ireland, the company (MOPO) providing a solar battery rental service in Africa, the Octopus visit to China to see BYD’s R&D and show their Kraken technology, and the vital work going on in Ukraine by DTEK, innovating a distributed green grid under hostile fire.
Octopus and DTEK announced a collaboration – RISE – “Energy resilience is key for Ukraine, and the deployment of thousands of solar panels and batteries to offices, factories, shops, hospitals and other buildings is vital to this.” The key is to use Kraken Flex alongside green power.
The big announcement happened – Greg Jackson launched a brand new EV package, the “Power Pack”, to include a BYD EV, a bi-directional charger and free electricity to power the car. This is all down to clever tech using the EV battery as a mini grid-balancer. Mike Butcher (speaker and former editor of Tech Crunch) explains it here.
After the main event I was lucky to be invited to spend some time connecting with people: Agile Phil Future Technologies Evangelist at Octopus, Ben who put balcony solar on his shed, Ann who wants cross pavement EV charging, and Emma interested in investing in a community owned wind turbine. Customers talking to each other and to Octopus staff. People had travelled a long way to be there, from Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, and Oxford. It was a fabulous experiment in customer engagement from a company founded on the principle of putting customer needs first and creating the tech to support that aim.
The standout for me was the underpinning theme of collaboration and creativity, often sparked by extreme need, a blank sheet, a niche opportunity, or the drag of an ‘incumbent’ to be worked around. In my view this is where Community Energy organisations also excel. It was great introducing Forest Community Energy to people I met, and I look forward to sharing all I learned with our team back in the Forest of Dean.
