Manchester-based Evergreen Smart Power are an innovative Virtual Power Plant business, aggregating and controlling domestic energy loads resulting from electric vehicles (EVs) and heating to suit specific customer, market, generation and grid conditions.

Evergreen’s EV solution can respond to grid conditions, moving charging to off-peak hours to reduce strain on the network at peak times, while ensuring that EVs are sufficiently charged when needed. The solution also optimises other loads, such as heat pumps and electric heaters.

Energy Launchpad helped Evergreen develop their future roadmap through competitive landscaping, consumer insights/trial and detailed analysis with our Business Model Innovation team. This examined alternative target markets and revenue streams. Outputs were developed to be used for pitches to future investors.

Following this incubation support, Energy Systems Catapult then helped Evergreen develop and deliver a follow-on test & demonstration project called Flexibly-Responsive Energy Delivery with 250 consumers driving and smart-charging EVs at home – supported by our Consumer Insight team.

Evergreen Smart Power Co-Founder Andy McKay said: “Prior to this piece of work we had one main product. In effect this has identified two new product variants that address innovative opportunities and other areas that will move quicker than our long term market. This will translate into 3 separate platforms requiring separate teams.

“Energy Launchpad has allowed us to tap into a wide range of energy sector industry expertise with a support package tailored to our specific needs. It’s an opportunity every energy start-up would benefit from.”

Watch the case study:

Mixergy has designed an innovative, smart hot water storage tank that allows consumers to heat only the water they need, in contrast to conventional hot water tanks which heat all or nothing. This saves on energy, cost and carbon emissions.

Energy Systems Catapult utilised our Home Energy Dynamics modelling toolkit to help Mixergy simulate how their hot water tank interacts with varied building and occupancy profiles without needing to deploy the innovation in the real world.

HED has been tested on a number of homes to date, to demonstrate a very strong correlation between predicted and measured energy performance, which supports validation work undertaken with Salford University’s Energy House.

David White, Head of Commercial Operations, Mixergy, said: “Home Energy Dynamics allowed us to test Mixergy’s product when deployed in a varied ecosystem of products and applications, which is often challenging to model. These insights are extremely valuable when articulating to prospective clients and stakeholders the full impact of deploying smart home technologies.

“We were really impressed with the accuracy of the model and also how it is able to quickly identify effectiveness of a solution without need for a full laboratory set-up.”

Edinburgh- based Amp X has developed a digital energy assistant, ALICE, ithat makes autonomous demand-side-response decisions based on real-world market signals.

With advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and user-centred autonomous control, ALICE is able to schedule energy usage by household devices’ when the energy is greenest and cheapest. This will unlock flexibility, improve grid resilience and maximise renewable energy usage.

Energy Systems Catapult is helping Amp X test and demonstrate ALICE by:

• Managing the recruitment of up to 60 households into the Living Lab.
• Consumer Insight specialists will work with trial participants to analyse their experience of ALICE, test the benefits and to understand what the customer values.
• Using room-by room digital control and sensors to monitor performance, the Living Lab can gather and analyse real-world data such as energy consumption, air temperatures, relative humidity and local weather.

The six month trial from the Autumn 2021, will analyse and validate:

• ALICE’s potential to facilitate demand-side response, provide carbon savings, and reduce energy costs.
• The consumer experience – providing real-world consumer insight and feedback on ease of installation/set up/removal, usability and the quality of the consumer-interface.
• The interface between ALICE and various in-home devices, including Electric Vehicles, smart meters, appliances, and Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning controls.