Christopher Jackson, CEO of Advanced Infrastructure Technology Limited talks to the Catapult for a new series about the success of innovators we’ve supported.

Advanced Infrastructure’s mission is to accelerate an informed, fair and affordable shift to Net Zero. To this end, it’s developing software and datasets to help improve the planning of local energy transitions.

“We did some research and we found about 30% of projects, whether they are retrofits or building a solar farm or an electric vehicle charging hub, get abandoned because of a lack of network availability,” Christopher says.

“We wanted to avoid that wasted time that people go through – no longer accepting that 30% of all projects will die after spending months progressing them.”

Insightful data and the right tools

Driving Advanced Infrastructure’s innovation is the belief that decarbonisation shouldn’t be blocked by something as simple as not having access to insightful data.

This aligns with the Catapult’s goal that businesses and the public sector have tools to quickly and easily decarbonise. It seemed inevitable that the pair would work together.

Christopher previously worked as head of flexibility at a large European utility which he says was exciting but he felt a big company wasn’t the right fit for him – he wanted to work for a company that could be nimbler.

In April 2020, he co-founded Advanced Infrastructure with Lily Cairns Haylor and Suhas Dattatreya.

How did the Catapult help?

A year later, Advanced Infrastructure won funding from Innovate UK under a competition to improve the energy sector’s use of data. The Catapult was providing support to the competition’s startups.

“That led to us doing lots of user interviews with the team at the Catapult – the people who had developed the UK’s first Local Area Energy Plans – known as LAEPs.”

Christopher says the Catapult’s experts helped Advanced Infrastructure understand the limitations they’d originally faced and the opportunities available if local planners had improved access to more robust data.

“Shortly after that, we were selected as a delivery partner by Oxfordshire County Council to be part of Project LEO. The goal of one of the work packages was to deliver and build a digital tool to support the local authorities to essentially digitise Local Area Energy Planning.

“We worked in collaboration with Energy Systems Catapult in specifying the requirements of that tool, the input data it would need and creating an early minimum viable product.”

Advanced Infrastructure’s spatial energy-planning platform, which is called LAEP+, has been made available through the Catapult’s e-commerce site Net Zero Market alongside the Catapult’s Net Zero Data range and open datasets from across the industry.

The company has a great track record with DNOs who make LAEP+ available to local authorities in their regions. Of the UK’s six DNOs four have already adopted Advanced Infrastructure’s LAEP+ platform, enabling over 200 local authorities to access the tool.

“It’s a great partnership,” Christopher says.

Enabling non-technical people to do technical work

Christopher says he wants Advanced Infrastructure’s software to help overcome the non-technical barriers to achieving Net Zero. Key among them is having people in local authorities with the right skills.

“Digital tools are really useful if they can allow a user to do something for which they would otherwise have to seek professional support.

“We’re helping non-technical users in local authorities achieve technical tasks.”

He says 99% of the process of implementing a clean energy plan including searching for a site, doing a feasibility study, procuring suppliers and getting it built, is work that a non-technical person can do.

“It’s chasing people. And it’s stakeholder engagement. It’s soft skills stuff. And the remaining 1% is a technical analysis. What our tool does is it allows the non-technical person to do that technical analysis too, unlocking them to achieve entire delivery of the project from beginning to end.

“They can avoid procuring a consultant and handing the entire process off to them at a costly day rate. Now they can build institutional knowledge.”

Dream fix

Asked if he could click his fingers to improve any one aspect of the energy system, Christopher says he’d like the energy regulator to order the entire UK electricity network, from the generators all the way through to those delivering power to our homes, to work together to create a virtual model – known as a digital twin – of the grid.

“Advanced Infrastructure has a digital twin of the building stock. If you map that onto a digital twin of the electricity network and the gas network, suddenly you’d be able to do sophisticated modelling to evidence different scenarios.”

It would give planners and developers more certainty on connection capability right from day one.

“It would avoid a lot of wasted effort in the energy sector,” he says.

Where next?

Finally, on the topic of Advanced Infrastructure’s future ambitions, Christopher has his sights firmly fixed on international expansion.

“We’ve done a trial in Ireland, and we’re just starting another in North America. That’s going to provide two test cases or testimonials which we can use to expand our offering overseas.”

With support from the Catapult and its own pressing ambition to accelerate an informed and affordable shift to Net Zero, Advanced Infrastructure is set to go from strength to strength.