Navigating Interoperability and Security Risks in the Energy Landscape
On this episode of the Hypercube Podcast, Adam Sroka speaks with Rob Taylor, Group CIO at GivEnergy, the UK’s leading manufacturer of domestic battery storage systems. Rob shares his journey from receiving a shockingly high energy bill to leading the company’s software division, where he now drives cloud-based platforms, open APIs, and smart integrations that connect batteries, EV chargers, and home energy systems.
The conversation explores the core challenge of interoperability in a fragmented energy landscape. Rob explains how GivEnergy has championed openness from the beginning and why emerging standards like the Mercury initiative are critical to enabling a connected, scalable energy ecosystem. He also unpacks the strategic importance of early involvement in EV charger protocols, beyond GivEnergy’s core battery products.
Adam and Rob dive into the bigger picture: how domestic and grid-scale storage must work together to meet the UK’s Clean Power 2030 goals, and why cost barriers, installation complexity, and lack of targeted financial incentives are slowing broader adoption. Rob also raises concerns about security in both hardware and software supply chains, calling for greater scrutiny of development practices and long-term infrastructure risks.
Finally, they discuss the cautious but promising role of AI in home energy management, the importance of responsible data use, and how the sector can balance innovation with consumer trust. From standards and software to security and equity, this episode offers a wide-ranging look at the forces shaping the future of home energy.
Adam and Rob cover:
- How a sky-high energy bill led Rob from science into smart energy innovation
- Why GivEnergy bet early on open APIs and what it means for interoperability today
- The challenge of fragmented standards and how the Mercury initiative aims to fix it
- Security risks in global software supply chains and the hidden vulnerabilities in home energy devices
- Why home batteries alone aren’t enough: building toward whole-home optimisation
- The equity gap in energy adoption and the case for targeted financial incentives
The Hypercube podcast sits down with leaders in the energy and utilities sectors to explore how data analytics can help businesses make smarter decisions and accelerate business growth.
CHAPTER MARKERS
Chapter markers
[00:00] Batteries, fairness, and the risk of a two-tier energy system
[01:00] Meet Rob Taylor – GivEnergy’s CIO on scaling domestic storage
[05:19] Why interoperability is broken – and how Mercury might fix it
[10:13] Why Clean Power 2030 needs both grid-scale and home batteries
[17:51] Supply chain threats, software trust, and grid vulnerability
[24:43] AI hype vs real value – GivEnergy’s take on smart optimisation
TRANSCRIPT
Hypercube Podcast Transcript
Title: Navigating Interoperability and Security Risks in the Energy Landscape
Host: Adam Sroka
Guests: Rob Taylor
Rob Taylor (00:02)
Energy poverty is disproportionately impactful, obviously, for people who have less money. And if you’re middle class and you can afford to get a battery which reduces your costs, it seems like a little bit unfair that you have to have the money to save the money.
And we will end up with kind of a dual class energy society if we’re not careful with this.
Adam Sroka (00:41)
Hello and welcome back to the Hypercube Podcast. It’s a pleasure today to be joined by Rob Taylor. Rob is Group CIO at GivEnergy. For the folks in the audience that maybe aren’t familiar with GivEnergy or yourself, Rob, do want to just give us a run through of what you are up to and what you do?
Rob Taylor (01:00)
Sure, so GivEnergy, we’re primarily known as the biggest manufacturer of home domestic batteries in the UK, so battery storage. We also do commercial storage as well, mostly behind the meter type batteries. We do a number of other smart energy devices as well, but where we’re the market leader is the battery storage sector. So I run the software division for GivEnergy.
which is basically like all of our cloud software, our apps, and probably most importantly in the longer term, our integrations and market access and things like that.
Adam Sroka (01:37)
Small, easy job, simple stuff.
Rob Taylor (01:39)
I was
dead easy. I sleep well and feel rested.
Adam Sroka (01:43)
Yeah, no complexity, nothing changes, nice and fine. ⁓
Rob Taylor (01:46)
Simple,
just a few software bits.
Adam Sroka (01:50)
It’s a really funny space because like it’s just hard, it’s all hard, but the domestic case is so much like more vast with the number of manufacturers and things like that, the different systems you integrate with. I guess, what does your day to day look like?
Rob Taylor (02:05)
So I mean, a lot of it is staying in the detail at this stage. So I work really closely with the teams we’ve got. We have a number of different customers. So basically, we have our end users. But we also have our installers. We have our expert users, API users, and then obviously, our internal development and things like that. So I’m working across the teams and kind of synchronising. And then working with a bunch of external partners and explaining, you know,
how they can use our systems, some of the further looking forward things like market access and how we actually interact with the grid and with other peripheral components of the ecosystem. So it’s really varied, super interesting. I make churlish comments about how tired I am and things like that, but I really enjoy it. It’s really good fun.
Adam Sroka (03:00)
I find a lot of techies in the energy sector echo that like it is hard, it’s complicated, it changes all the time, and it’s messy but they absolutely love it and it’s funny I think you can like hire people that are much better than you could probably afford simply because they want to be working in a place that’s like fun and cool and doing energy stuff. Were you always an energy nerd or was it the tech that led you here?
Rob Taylor (03:24)
No, I mean, my journey to it is like kind of quite personal. So I basically bought an old house and had an enormous energy bill. I was already pretty interested in science, scientist as background. And I was already interested in like the climate crisis and stuff like that, just from a science point of view. But it really brings it home to you when you buy a house and your first energy bill is £800. You know, like, probably need to be a bit more on top of this, you know, and then it…
There’s a rabbit hole which I think a lot of people go down of like, why is it like that? Could this be optimised? Why is this set up in the way it’s set? And I think a lot of us energy geeks sort of start out with solving something personal and then thinking, actually, this should be better for a lot of people. How do we make this better? And that’s certainly what happened to me. I had no background in the energy sector before GivEnergy. If I went back five years, my
knowledge is pretty rudimentary about the whole sector. And it’s been a means to an end about how do I solve personal problems? And then, actually this is pretty interesting. I can see how this translates. And yeah, it kind of spirals from there, I think.
Adam Sroka (04:32)
For me, a scientist, physicist background, like it’s one of the few places I’ve worked and I’ve worked in defence, I’ve worked in finance and stuff. It’s one of the few places where you can get like the physical and kind of digital
like interaction is really important. And so you come up with a clever software solution, but actually there’s like a hard physical thing in a real world location that’s going to constrain the problem space. And it’s never the same. It’s always a bit wonky and a bit hard to do. Like for me that, that just keeps me sort of really engaged in some of the problem space. And I think I’m guessing that must be like even harder in the domestic case, like interoperability is something we bump into
a lot of time and it’s quite a big topic in the home tech space. How does GivEnergy look at that?
Rob Taylor (05:19)
Well, I mean, to be honest, if I rewind again, it was one of the reasons why I was so interested in coming to GivEnergy was I thought GivEnergy were pretty forward thinking in this space. So even before I joined, they had an open API. And that was back when openness was something which was generally viewed as a not a good thing, I think, in the sector. Everyone else had either completely undocumented or closed and monetised APIs and things like that,
and GivEnergy were open and they had this like brilliant expert user community around them in Home Assistant because they’d enabled that community to talk locally and things like that. And the foundations of good interoperability are built on openness. And that was one of the reasons why I came to Giv is because as a technologist looking at that, I can probably work with this. This is a company that’s basically doing the right things.
So yeah, I mean, I think you’re absolutely right. Interoperability is really key. And yeah, I think it builds off, you know, being open and wanting to work with other people.
Adam Sroka (06:20)
And like, it’s not just about APIs, right? Like, what are the kind of main challenges with all the platforms and energy systems, standards, regulation that you have to integrate with and consider?
Rob Taylor (06:30)
Yeah, I think the main thing is the fact that the standards are nascent or not really applied or not existent. We are early in the energy tech really sector and the standards are emerging and there are good ideas out there, but they’re not uniformly applied. I I can use ACPP as a good example. If you look at 30 car chargers in the market,
Every single OCPP implementation, even if it’s the same variant of OCPP, will be substantially different. It’s just it’s not a standardised sector at the moment. Interoperability builds off standards. If everyone’s doing their own thing, it’s very hard to be interoperable. And I think the standards development, the way we actually
Adam Sroka (07:01)
Thank
Rob Taylor (07:14)
take this forward is going to be the key thing. To be fair, I think there’s a lot of improvements that we can make, but there’s also a lot of progress on that front, certainly since I’ve been playing with it.
Adam Sroka (07:25)
It does baffle me that we’ve messed this up so badly at the start. It would have been so easy to just go, this is how we’re going to do this and let’s all start from a really good place. We’ve done this before with other technology, but yeah, EVs especially, I think it’s just a total mess. Is Mercury going to be the silver bullet to fix everything?
Rob Taylor (07:45)
I think Mercury is doing some really cool things. I sit on the steering group for Mercury. So I kind of would say that. But the ethos behind Mercury is really what sets it apart. And it’s the whole of the energy value chain that’s participating. And I think that’s the only way we get to solve these problems is like, everyone in the whole value chain needs to go, how is that actually going to work for a customer? How is this going to be reliable?
And if we’re going to have flexibility be such a big part of the grid, certainly the UK government are pinning a lot of hopes on flexibility. Clean Power 2030 basically rests on it. Without interoperability, it won’t happen. You can say, let’s open this up, but just practically, it’s not going to happen. So yeah, I think Mercury is doing some really cool stuff that I think they’re launching officially next week. So that’ll be pretty interesting.
But it’s the direction and it’s the fact that the value chain is involved, which really sets it apart. Yeah, I think it’s probably not the silver bullet, but it’s got a big part to play in the solution.
Adam Sroka (08:50)
We had a conversation previously, and it’s noble that you were saying, well, yeah, okay. Starting with the EV chargers, which isn’t actually GivEnergy’s main business, but by being involved early, you’re adding a lot of weight to it and you’re going to have an opportunity to shape it. Like, are there other people doing that? Like, it just feels like a really good thing for you to do, but probably quite a lot of work.
Rob Taylor (09:11)
Yeah, it is. It really is a lot of work. But at the end of the day, I’ve got pretty much one of my top guys just does Mercury at the moment, which is a difficult thing to do when you’re a scale up. It’s difficult to set aside that amount of resource, especially of your best people. But the long term play here is that a smart energy device is basically the same, whether it’s an inverter, whether it’s a battery, whether it’s hot water diverter. It’s energy in, energy out.
Adam Sroka (09:15)
you
Rob Taylor (09:40)
And yes, there is nuance. Clearly, there’s some differences around it. But essentially, the core protocol should be similar. The core interactions with the market should be similar. And the fundamentals we set with EV chargers, we will inherit into batteries naturally. So for us to just say, this is EV chargers. This is nothing to do with us is a very, very short term view, I think. So I wanted us to be front and centre so we understand the
challenges so we can influence the direction to make this universal which is then worth it’s worth us investing in.
Adam Sroka (10:13)
I completely agree and think it does make like thinking like a proper software engineer right is that like whatever they do now is going to dictate actually some of the decisions down the road for when it does bump into you so be involved now makes total sense. mentioned CP 2030 and the targets there. Do you have a gut feel on like how much actually is the domestic case going to contribute to that?
Like, are we going fast enough? Because it’s not far off. From where we see it, feels like there’s quite a delta actually for it to make a big enough difference compared to some of the more centralised stuff. Or is this a longer term play that actually is as demand grows in 15 years?
Rob Taylor (10:57)
Well, let me
Let me slightly flip it for you. If grid scale is the only answer, how do we do the transmission network upgrades that are going to support that? And I’ve not seen a good answer for that, and I don’t think we can afford that. So it’s not realistic, right? So if we’re going to do it all at grid scale, I don’t see how it’s going to work.
Adam Sroka (11:05)
Hmm.
Thanks a lot.
Rob Taylor (11:18)
I think the answer has to be a blended one. I don’t think distributed storage is the only answer to this. I don’t think flexibility from distributed assets is the only answer to this, but it needs to be both. And it needs to be both quite fast because we need to scale both of those markets to actually hit flexibility requirements which are going to support the renewables growth. So yeah, I mean, it’s not an answer that politicians like of like, we’ve just got to do both. But I think we do. ⁓
Adam Sroka (11:41)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, no, I agree.
Rob Taylor (11:45)
I think the other part of it is like funding, you know, central assets, you’re reliant on the market being there. You know, grid scale battery has to have ROI for the flexibility markets at the moment. You know, it’s not that great. The domestic asset, the market is just cream on the top of a domestic asset because you’re getting lots of other benefits. So the deployability of both the technologies are quite kind of complimentary and we can keep them both moving with different stimuli
Adam Sroka (11:59)
Yeah, the margins are getting really tight.
Rob Taylor (12:14)
potentially. So I really do think it’s both.
Adam Sroka (12:19)
Do you think the domestic side is going fast enough? And if not, what’s the kind of biggest barrier to pace?
Rob Taylor (12:24)
Hmm. So yeah, I mean, I think the market’s doing quite well, but probably not accelerating to the degree it needs to hit the targets that we’ve got. I think the cost is like the biggest barrier for domestic. You know, it’s a large outlay and costs are coming down from like materials point of view, but you’ve still got, you know, some fixed things in there. Like installation cost is significant still. It’s less than solar, for example, but
a battery is still going to cost you at least a few hundred quid to install even if it’s a simple job. Yeah, the battery costs can come down, but it’s still going to be significant. I think financial models need to be looked at. So, does it all need to be upfront payment? Could we attach some kind of incentive to battery installation? At the moment, you don’t get any. There’s no grants available at least in England.
The boiler upgrade scheme is showing how much you can apply a stimuli to heat pumps. Why wouldn’t we consider doing some similar sort of thing for batteries? And that’s one of the things we talk with government about. Everyone wants subsidies, everyone wants money in their system, but if we want to go faster that’s quite a simple button to press because we’ve already got the infrastructure for it.
Adam Sroka (13:35)
Yeah, so up in Scotland where I am, last summer one of our staff actually benefited from a huge subsidy grant for both heat pump and solar and battery installation, the whole kit, caboodle, and it was really good actually. It was like a big sum of money as a grant and any extra over and above was given as a loan as a really cheap like…
interest loan and they stopped it at the start of last summer I think but it just meant that you could get all of it done affordably as an individual and go forward with it. So I hope that comes back because I think it makes total sense and it unlocks this kind modern new technology for normal people.
Rob Taylor (14:14)
Yeah.
Well, I mean, kind of otherwise you end up targeting basically the middle class, like people who can afford to do it. Energy poverty is disproportionately impactful, obviously, for people who have less money. And if you’re middle class and you can afford to get a battery which reduces your costs, it seems like a little bit unfair that you have to have the money to save the money.
Adam Sroka (14:19)
Mm-mm.
Rob Taylor (14:36)
And we will end up with kind of a dual class energy society if we’re not careful with this.
You know, there are things we can do, like we work with a lot of social housing customers, for example, but it’s kind of that middle demographic where the gap is, you know, social housing is solving it for people. The middle class can solve it themselves, but people who are kind of in the, you know, you’re working, you may not have like five grand just sat around to invest in your future costs.
Adam Sroka (15:04)
never
Never going to be priority right?
Rob Taylor (15:04)
That’s where the gap. Yeah. And
you know, that would be where if I was government, that’s where I’d be targeting funding is some kind of means tested approach to stimulate adoption.
Adam Sroka (15:15)
Yeah, and that’s like, it makes sense. And it would back things up. It would also like, again, on the domestic scale, it would actually unlock a lot of economic stimulus for the companies that are going to be involved, right? And compared to like big grid scale infrastructure that will go to a handful of companies that are really giants, it’s going to go to local installers and local engineers. It’s not just going to be offshored to the Cayman Islands or whatever. And we’ve done away with.
Rob Taylor (15:39)
Yeah.
Adam Sroka (15:40)
What does, so like, because GivEnergy does touch on a lot of stuff, like batteries, solar, EVs, to GivEnergy, what does whole home optimisation look like?
Rob Taylor (15:50)
So when you start thinking about market interaction and the net drawdown from the grid or push up to the grid from a device, at the moment you start thinking about flexibility, if you think in silos, you’re inefficient. Now, we’re kind of lucky in the battery world, which is our home turf. We are probably the biggest asset in most homes who are interacting with the grid. It’s the most impactful asset. Yes, you could argue an EV, but it’s not really bidirectional. Whereas a battery can be bidirectional.
So we’re kind of in the luxury position where we can basically say, we’ll act as a silo, and it’s still effective. If you look around the other parts of smart energy, if you look at hot water storage, heat pumps, EVs, actually, sometimes us acting as a silo is not in the net benefit of the grid or the customer. It’s just from a single point of view, we’re optimising for ourselves. Now, if we had visibility of what everything was going on around the whole home,
You can perhaps act in a slightly better way to get a better outcome for the home owner, for the grid. But you need that whole home view to be able to do that. And at the moment, partly due to interoperability and partly due to topology, we just don’t have that. So whole home is definitely something that we’re heading in the direction of. And we think the whole market needs to be thinking about how do we enable whole home. It’s not an easy problem to solve, for sure.
But I think it is the direction we’ve got to go as a sector.
Adam Sroka (17:17)
And just to change gears a little bit, because like, I’m interested in supply chain and some of the, how these things are manufactured. You can’t build all of it, right? And we’re going to be importing stuff from overseas. There was some discussion in the news recently about, believe it or not, yeah, like rogue comms devices in Chinese inverters. Now I’m always sceptical of how much is real, how much is propaganda, but what about like, what kind of vulnerability security
concerns keep you up at night and kind of do you really lean into.
Rob Taylor (17:51)
I think the supply chain aspect is definitely one. So the supply chain in terms of the physical, the hardware, it’s the most obvious one. And it’s probably one of the easier ones to detect by device inspection and what does that chip do? Those kind of questions. From the intel I’ve had, that is a real story. It’s been reported in Reuters, Telegraph, a number of other outlets. And informally, we’ve been told, yes.
I won’t mention the name of the manufacturer, but it is real. But you only have to look at the Hezbollah pager attacks to see an even worse example of supply chain attacks in hardware. But for me, the one that really worries me is actually not the hardware supply chain attack. It’s the software one. So yes, you can put a chip in that does something rogue. But what if you’re
Firmware or your cloud software has the same backend. And where people are really not asking the right questions at the moment is where is my control software written? Now for me, the written bit, we see a lot of frankly nonsense and spin on this of like, we’re ISO 27001, we’re GDPR compliant. But actually what your compliance is detecting there is where your hosting is. So what?
Adam Sroka (19:13)
Yeah.
Rob Taylor (19:13)
If I
write software, it can be hosted in the EU, can be hosted in the UK. I can put a backdoor in it. Still hosted on something which is compliant, but compliance is not the thing. It’s trust. And where we’re not getting the questioning right yet, and there is movement in this direction, it’s like trust. And let me give a specific example. It’s not real world as far as I know, but it could very easily be. If I’m writing cloud control software for an inverter,
Adam Sroka (19:20)
Mm-hmm.
Rob Taylor (19:42)
as a Chinese developer, the Chinese government can compel me to write something in there which would allow control from the state. Now, whether they do or not is kind of moot, but the risk is there because in their laws, they can do that. It’s a little bit alien to us in the Western world that that could happen. But the fact that it’s there as a risk is just something which, to me, says when you’ve got all these devices interacting with the grid, I mean, look at Spain
a few weeks back. If you did want to destabilise a grid, that would be a very good way to destabilise a grid. I’m not saying China are planning to do it or anyone’s planning to do it, but if the attack vector is there, it feels like something we should be trying to mitigate. At the moment, the direction of security is heading down the compliance route, which is by nature retrospective.
Adam Sroka (20:16)
Yeah.
Rob Taylor (20:34)
I don’t think anyone’s going to be particularly impressed with OFGEM giving a fine if we’ve had a grid outage for like two days. It feels just not the right proportionate response. That’s what keeps me awake at night. yeah, the thing is, as a UK CIO responsible for UK written control software, if I did that, I would go to prison. What would happen if it’s not a UK, EU, US person?
Who is actually accountable and who’s going to be held for that. Yeah, that’s the sort of thing where we need to be asking much tougher questions about. I’m not saying cut China out of the supply chain. That’s ridiculous. We need to work with everyone. But are there ways that we could get trust, like guaranteed via our protocols? I think there’s some really interesting work going out there. TEIA is an interesting protocol
which is just coming up on the outside now.
So TEIA are the Trusted Energy Interoperability Alliance. You know, they’re doing some pretty cool stuff. But yeah, it’s not really adopted yet. I don’t think it’s fully understood the impact of this stuff. And I think the best thing we can do in the sector is just make sure the right questions are being asked about this.
Adam Sroka (21:46)
How much do like, because you have visibility to both tech and commercial, right? How much does that kind of security concern supply chain bleed into the customer side? Or do people just not care and want the end of their energy bills lower?
Rob Taylor (21:58)
I don’t think people realise at the moment what it could mean. Energy data, it’s interesting because the ICO know this. The ICO say your energy data is personal data. You need to treat it as personal data. It’s identifiable because you can link it to other things and you can say this is MPAN, this is your usage pattern. You can detect whether someone’s in the house or not. You can detect have they driven their car that day.
You can learn a lot about people’s behaviour from this kind of data. And at the moment, I think you get some people who have privacy concerns generally, and they might be taking notice of this. But certainly, installers, distributors are not really aware. They’re just selling boxes as far as they’re concerned. And most customers, I don’t think, have realised the implications of what could happen if suddenly your battery
you know, starts charging and your main fuse blows because everything’s interacting in the wrong way or being controlled badly. It is hopefully a matter of time, but I think it’s not high up the consumer consciousness at the moment, for most people at least.
Adam Sroka (23:09)
What kind of trends and conversations are, what is right in front of mind?
Rob Taylor (23:15)
Definitely cost. I mean, if we’re being honest, I think many of us who got into energy tech got into it for climate reasons. It’s because it is the right thing to do. We want to make a contribution to the planet. But actually what we’re seeing is like most of those people in the consumer world have now already done stuff or those who are able to have done stuff. Now most of the people buying are doing it for economic reasons, which is actually really good because it’s assigned the market’s work.
You know, it’s like the market stimulus has made people want to invest in this because it will save them money. Great. That’s something that works. But it does mean that you select products based on those economics as well. And ROI and that sort of stuff comes a lot higher up in consumers’ understanding. I think it’s quite a simplistic ROI understanding at the moment because basically a lot of the ancillary revenues which will be generated are not actually in the market yet.
So people are literally just going, what’s the cheapest box? Because I think that’s probably not long term what they need to be asking. It’s like, what’s the best return to me overall is a much better question. But we need to enable that a bit because it’s also a more complex question.
Adam Sroka (24:31)
And onto the, yeah, just thinking about that in light of the data question, like, what are people concerned about their data and how that’s used and what kind of clever things are we doing with it at GivEnergy.
Rob Taylor (24:43)
Well, some people are, definitely. And those people, I think, are the sensible ones. You should be concerned about your data. It is your data, and it could be used badly. But yeah, what we’re doing at the moment is we’re just starting to spin up our data science capability, if I’m honest. So we know what we want to do. We know we want to do whole-home optimisation. We know what data feeds we want. We’re building the infrastructure behind it, basically, to do what we want to do.
But we’re relatively early in our journey. We’re not trying to like, we don’t want to just release AI buzzword. If our app is AI enabled. Exactly. But I couldn’t sleep at night if I was doing that. I would feel too hypocritical of it. But yeah, you can bolt on GenAI or something like that. But the real value for me comes when you actually start to do some proper ML against usage and patterns.
Adam Sroka (25:19)
Sure, everyone upstairs.
Rob Taylor (25:39)
And that takes a lot of plumbing. I know your background. I know you will know that. But it takes time. I don’t want to just do a buzzword, really. So I want to do something which is impactful for customers.
Adam Sroka (25:51)
I that’s right and we do get approached by so many companies that we want an AI and it’s always just like okay why don’t we bake the cake before we make the icing, let’s do some stuff. I actually saw a thing online where someone was berating a video of a screen protector just from some random shop and it was like a screen protector for a phone with on the box it says optimised for AI.
Rob Taylor (26:16)
you
Adam Sroka (26:17)
I was just
Like, that is definitive proof that this is a hype wave and that we’re in the peak bubble.
Rob Taylor (26:21)
Yeah.
I mean, you go back three years and like everything, you know, if you’re in startup or scale up world, you just basically have to say AI to investors and you know, you just have to do it. And I think it’s become the same now to customers of like, you just have to say it and they’re, “ooh it’s better. It’s got AI,” but like, what does it do? I think like the benefit is like, what actually matters, not the technology. Technology enables stuff. Technology is not a means to an end in itself.
AI is just one thing that should be in our toolbox to do things better for customers.
Adam Sroka (26:55)
And I think actually like in this world, if you are going to use GenAI and large language models and stuff, they tend to have a massive return, not in like a chat interface to like, that’s quite cool when it enables people, gives them an interface they can use. But actually it’s like doing some of hidden stuff, some of the cruft like under the hood and that is very manual, very like human systems integrator type stuff.
We’ve seen some fun use cases there where like you use it to translate between things that are hard to understand or intractable for mere mortals like me. It’s an interesting space to watch, but I think yeah, 90% of the value is still to come from even just traditional statistical forecasting methods and like optimisation and stuff that’s been around for a very long time and not very hyped, but actually incredibly powerful and will get you the answers you need. If you can do all the plumbing.
Rob Taylor (27:46)
Yeah, mean,
Personally, I use GenAI quite a lot in my own workflows. But that’s because I can get specific value from it. And I know what it’s doing. And I know the limitations of it as well. And I think there is a school of thought out there that it’s just magic. And you can just not question it, especially in the LLM space.
Also, with things like optimisation, I think people, just looking at our customers, our customers, if we were to release an optimisation tool that just changed your settings constantly without any explanation, for a start, I don’t think it would be as good as people initially. In the future, I think it will be, probably better in the future. But we would not be able to explain why is your system charging now? Why is your system discharging? Why have you done this?
Adam Sroka (28:31)
you
Rob Taylor (28:40)
Customer support, how do you explain that? It just becomes very, very difficult. And I think it would be frustrating for the majority of users at the moment. But that said I absolutely agree that we are investing in it and we will continue to. Because I think if you do it right with the right level of explainability, then it can become very powerful. It’s just releasing something fast feels like totally the wrong approach for actual customer value to me.
Adam Sroka (28:49)
you
And on the security thread, I wholeheartedly agree. On the security thread, we are working with one of the biggest energy companies in the UK and it’s all around actually the whole new world of what if I roll out a shadow update to the foundational model that your AI is built on top of. And we’ve built prompt injection attack detectors and bias and drift detectors and stuff. And we’re building this whole like…
compliance framework for large language models because it’s this whole new thing that like your infosec leads of big businesses are starting to think about. But it’s only the big businesses that are starting to think about it. I think smaller businesses are a bit like, well, we’ll wait for someone to figure this out. But yeah, like we’re talking about control systems that could have malicious functions put within them, hardware stacks that have
chips and other things that maybe do comms or whatever but actually fundamentally you’re just making API calls to some random server and they don’t have to tell you. Was it Claude 3.7 that got dumbed down just a few weeks after it started and broke a load of use cases and stuff like that’s a new concern that yeah I don’t think enough people are talking about in this space
Rob Taylor (30:23)
I think there’s
the low speed skew stuff as well of like you don’t even need to make it wrong. You just need to make it slightly less accurate and apply a skew over time. And then suddenly your grid interactions are not what you’re expecting. And then things like grid outages will happen. And we won’t even be able to say why, if that’s the case. There’s very subtle ways that you could manipulate these devices which are interacting with the grid. And this is where the risk is real.
Adam Sroka (30:40)
Hmm.
Rob Taylor (30:50)
If we’re going to have flexibility, we need to understand what this implies. This is going back to the security conversation. This is where my concerns lie at the moment is like, there are things we can do now, which makes sense, which if we do and leave them and scale it to the level where we’re expecting things to hit, the implications become much more severe if we’ve got things wrong. And they’re very hard to undo. You can look at the Huawei and telco
Adam Sroka (31:11)
Thank
Rob Taylor (31:18)
example, where we had to pull Huawei out of many of our national telco providers because of trust concerns, basically. Whether they’re true or not, I have no idea. But there’s something where someone’s concerned enough to make costly changes. Now, you can do that with a telco because they’re centralised. If we have to do that with a few million distributed assets in people’s homes, just straight away work out the electrician bill
Adam Sroka (31:32)
A massive decision.
Rob Taylor (31:46)
for that.
Adam Sroka (31:47)
It’s asbestos all over again, right? It’s similar kind of like it’ll just linger for decades and
Rob Taylor (31:49)
Yeah, yeah, it’s great analogy.
Yeah, so that’s my concern is like, if we get ahead of this problem, we have a massive asset. If we just go, oh, you know, that’s a bit difficult. Let’s wait. Then we’ve got essentially a big risk that we’re carrying for a long time because the lifetime of these devices is 15 to 20 years, really.
Adam Sroka (32:09)
Mm-hmm.
Didn’t think this be a security chat, but it’s really interesting. So just before we move on, I want to, have you read Micro Prediction by Peter Cotton? It’s a really, really good book. It’s this, it’s a, it’s a great book. And it’s about a way of doing forecasting, but towards the end, he talks about orchestrated attacks that are similar to what you’re saying. And it’s like how actually, if you have enough agents within a market or something and they all bid
Rob Taylor (32:12)
No.
No, haven’t. No, I’ll write it down.
Adam Sroka (32:36)
consistently high a certain way, the system will resettle on that if that’s significant. And then if they orchestrate to flip to low, it causes a huge attack vector that’s really hard to defend against. And it’s really similar to the kind of thing you’re talking about.
Rob Taylor (32:48)
Yeah,
That’s exactly it. The skew is pretty much exactly what I meant. So I’ll need to read that book for some validation by the sound of it. Yeah, sounds good.
Adam Sroka (32:57)
Okay, doom and gloom over, it’s all going swimmingly. What are you most excited about? Biggest opportunities you think to shake up the sector and make big change?
Rob Taylor (33:07)
Yeah, I mean, definitely the revenues that we can return back from the interactions. So the grid services, I think the fact of considering your investment in a battery or other smart energy devices as well as a two-way street, it’s not just like you paying to get like this capability, but you will get paid is cool. And participation in the grid is something which is really exciting. And there are other ancillary streams that we’re looking at, which I think will also be
very interesting for customers. Let’s be honest, it’s not because it’s cool, like energy geek stuff. It’s because it’ll make a return on investment for people, which means they can be cheaper, which means more people can be involved. And we get snowball effect. So effectively, these things are a means to it’s cheaper, more accessible, and more participation.
Adam Sroka (33:58)
Yeah, I love it. I think it’s a kind of like cheese bag alignment to the reason Hypercube exists, right? It was like, I thought, I love the space. I love climate tech and I want to make a dent. If all we do is make renewable assets more efficient or more profitable, then actually in a small way, we act as an accelerator to kind of, if I’m going to take like, yeah, 50, 100, 200 people’s labour,
point it at something, try and make it a bit meaningful and do that. It’s a fun space to play, definitely.
Rob Taylor (34:34)
It really is.
There’s so many ways that you can improve because it’s a new sector and it’s forming. You know, you guys, I talked to you, I remember like pretty much 2 years ago and like you were in a very different space then and just to see the different people coming on and the right attitudes gaining traction is a satisfying place to be in right now. But we’ve got so much to do, as you know, so much to do.
Adam Sroka (35:00)
A long way to go. Yeah, definitely.
Yeah. Well, look, I think that’s a great place to wrap. Thanks so much, Rob. It’s been an amazing chat. And a security chat, which I didn’t expect. Before I let anyone leave, I always ask, if you’ve got anything you want to promote or plug where should we point the audience to come and find out more?
Rob Taylor (35:21)
Yeah, I mean we’re pretty active on socials. So, you know, if you look at us on LinkedIn. We have very active Facebook communities as well. Obviously our website givenergy.com Sorry, we’ve moved it recently. Yeah, I think you’ll get the latest, we’ve got some really interesting hardware products coming out in the next 2 to 3 months like some cool stuff, high-powered stuff. Hardware is not my bag, but like
It’s the stuff that all my things sit on top of. Stuff and things, I’m being very specific. We’ve got a very interesting new app, which we’ll link into some of this revenue stuff, which we’re going to be beta-ing in the next, probably the next month. It’s going to start. So keep your eyes out for that, especially if you’re an existing customer of GivEnergy, because there’ll be some cool things happening in there. And yeah, other than that,
We’ve got some really interesting stuff coming in the next 6 months, which I can’t talk about right now. But if you’ve caught us at a trade show, ask me face to face and I might tell you.
Adam Sroka (36:19)
Whisper. Very exciting.
Next trade show you’re at, do you know?
Rob Taylor (36:23)
I think it’ll probably be solar and storage in the autumn. So I think it’s October. For me personally, I think we’ve got the SEF one and things like that. But I’m not sure if I’m personally at that.
Adam Sroka (36:25)
Okay.
Well, thank you again, Rob. It’s been great and all the best at GivEnergy.
Rob Taylor (36:39)
Thanks, really enjoyed it. Cheers Adam.
Adam Sroka (36:43)
Great conversation with Rob Taylor from GivEnergy there. GivEnergy are one of the UK’s leading domestic battery manufacturers. Didn’t expect to go full on into a chat about cyber security, information security and safety around managing domestic energy assets, but it was really, really interesting to talk about some of the risks that you have to manage when you’re dealing with people’s homes and people’s PII.
There’s a lot going on in the space and it’s hard. And we got into interoperability standards. How do you make use of the various different technologies that people are buying into the home? When you’re talking about grid scale, utility scale, there’s fewer suppliers, it’s bigger investments, it’s easier, but that domestic scale interoperability becomes a real challenge. Really good episode, not our usual topics, but really insightful to see what goes on in the workings of an organisation like GivEnergy.
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