Hypercube Podcast Transcript

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Host: Adam Sroka
Guest: Doug Cook

Intro: Welcome to the Hypercube podcast, where we explore how companies in the energy and utility sector leverage data analytics to make smarter decisions and accelerate business growth. I’m Adam Sroka, founder of Hypercube, a strategic consultancy that supports asset owner-operators, traders, route-to-market providers, and energy services companies to unlock the power of data.

If you’re interested in hearing real-world examples of how data and AI are advancing the energy sector, this is the show for you. 

Adam Sroka: Welcome back to the Hypercube podcast. Today, I’m delighted to be joined by Doug Cook, Director of Strategy and Flexibility at Ohme. Doug, would you like to introduce yourself?

Doug Cook: Yeah, absolutely. Adam, thanks so much for having me. And hey, everybody. Uh, yes, I am Doug. I am, as you say, the Strategy and Flexibility at Ohme. And I am a consummate energy and digitalization geek, so I’m really looking forward to this conversation. 

Adam Sroka: Could you explain, for those people that may be aren’t as familiar with, with the wider picture, could you explain how Ohme’s customers are helping balance the grid through, through the software that you’re developing?

Doug Cook: Yeah, of course. You know, absolutely. Happy to and, please call me out if I’m going too technical or, or, or too, too tragic. Basic idea. Historically, power stations, specifically coal and gas fired ones, were run a little bit like throttle on a car. If you push the accelerator, the spinning machine spins faster.

It generates more electricity or, you can put more power in the grid. We have moved towards more renewables as we have moved towards new technologies. We obviously introduced this concept of weather. So we introduced the concept of whether the sun is shining or whether the wind is blowing. That can be really, really positive.

We can have more electrons swimming around in the system than we need at any given point in time, or it can be. I’m not negative, but it can be unfortunate where we’re at a point of time in the day whenever one wants to watch Netflix or cook their dinner or whatever it is, and unfortunately there just isn’t enough electricity going around.

There are ways to mitigate that. So you can send price signals. You could say, oh, it suddenly got really expensive. The challenge that we have in the main in the UK, and for that matter, any developed country is that we are relatively insulated from price signals. So, even if it suddenly got really expensive in the power market, the vast majority of consumers in the UK wouldn’t suddenly stop cooking their dinners.

There’s an information gap, and we bridge that with this thing called retail, basically. Where retailers, suppliers, as they’re also sometimes called, buy electricity wholesale and they sell it retail. That premise is relatively simple, but the other thing they do, which is critical, is they hedge against some of those, some of that volatility.

So we’re not accidentally penalising our grandma’s for putting on the two bar heater on a cold evening, because there’s a, there’s a very real human experience in energy, right? One of the reasons I find it so fascinating. That said, if you take the average household, what is the most electrically intensive appliance in that home?

Ten years ago, maybe the television, the kettle, certainly when you boil it for a very brief period, the washing machine and dryer often comes up. It’s not going to be the case ten years from now. Ten years from now, where we’re sitting in 2034, we’re getting very close to next year in the power system, it’ll be things like your transport and your heating.

In other words, your electric vehicle and your heat pump. That said, all of this comes together, those things can be flexed. They can be flexed with relatively low inconvenience to us as Adam and Doug, as, as the homeowners, as the occupants, I don’t privately really care when my EV is charging. It could be charging now.

It could be charging at two in the morning. If it’s plugged in, it’s, you know, whatever. I would like to trust somebody to manage that service for me. Similarly, on a heat pump, how fast the heat pump is running right now, this second versus how fast it runs next hour or the last hour is actually as a consumer.

In material, what I want is the best service. I want a nice warm home and I want it as cheaply as possible. Or I want to drive. If I have a car as affordably as possible. And I basically want it to be taken care of what we can move to as a society. I’m a great optimist, right? By personality, what we can move to as a society is a society where that’s absolutely true and possible.

Because there’s this ebb and flow of the volume of renewable electricity in the grid, if we allow parties externally, who we trust, I keep coming back to this, to control those assets and to do that on our behalf. Then we can have that electricity next to free because, again, economist speaking, short run marginal cost, that the net cost of putting those extra electrons in the system is very, very, very low.

So why wouldn’t we use them? Worse, worse, we’d actually be wasting them. We’d effectively be earthing them or shunting them out of the system. There are other ways to do this. Like for example, massive batteries or pumped hydro solutions that people might be interested in or generating hydrogen. These are all possible.

But arguably they’re not going to heat my home and they’re not going to drive my, I mean, help me drive my vehicle as cheaply as possible. So when you’re comparing as economists do side by side between different technologies to help solve this renewables challenge slash opportunity, most people do this thing called LCOE levelized cost of electricity or levelized cost of storage.

But they’re not comparing apples to apples truly, because the difference between a residential EV charger or a heat pump and some massive battery in a field somewhere, is that the battery was put there just to help the energy system, but the heat pump and the EV charger have a benefit to me. Doug, I, I, I get a warm home.

I’m less of a burden on the NHS. I get a better quality of life. I get all the things that as a society, I would hope we want. I mean, as human beings, that’s basically how this works. And there’s a series of structures that lie in between this, like markets for different services, getting relatively more engineering and technical at this point, where Some assets can provide some services, not all assets can provide all services, etc.

So there’s a series of buyers for these things. The final analogy that I found useful in the past is capillaries in the, in the body. Again, we don’t need to be biology A level students to get this one, but we have heart, you know, veins and arteries around our heart. And then ultimately then some capillaries at the tips of our fingers.

There are going to be isolated pockets of complexity all over the country. Think of it like the power system in my street where I’m sitting right now could have a problem. It could have not enough capacity. It could have over voltage, could have a whole bunch of technical things. It doesn’t impact the next street over.

It certainly doesn’t impact the next county over and by no means impacts all countries. So the question is, could assets at a very local level. like a fleet of EV chargers, help to alleviate those problems, help to alleviate that pressure. So there’s both a national imperative. How can we use much more renewable energy?

How can we get security supply up? How can we reduce costs? How can we help people do it? And there’s a local element, which is really unique and really interesting, which is what can you do to help your street? What can you do to help your community? And I say to you as if there’s an active, uh, participant here.

What I’m really saying is that the energy system can communicate more effectively about local issues, concerns, objectives and then decentralised assets can help solve those, which is good. Because it means more people can have the technology in the first place. More people can have heat pumps, more people can have electric vehicles.

If that were not the case, then those capillaries would very rapidly become congested because they were never designed that every home has these incredibly electrically intensive devices and is using them whenever they feel like it. So by collaborating effectively, and this is a very almost philosophical, political type conversation by collaborating, you can defer when you need to invest in upgrading those systems.

And that’s good for everybody because we keep our bills relatively lower for longer or pay less tax, depending on how it pans out. That 

Adam Sroka: is optimistic, but I think you are right in the coming more of like an energy community, like that kind of, especially if we, if we do manage to get to like zonal pricing or anything like that stuff happens.

Then, we’re already seeing this with the winter cashback schemes being trialled and like the grid trying to offer services that enable people to ultimately at the simplest level save some money or make some money off the back of things like the way they contribute to the energy system and not just consume.

Doug Cook: Exactly, Adam. I think just building on that, I think we need to represent and reflect the true value. Like if you, for the sake of discussion, we’re living in Aberdeen, And you had a wind farm or a solar panel or whatever, you had something that was generating. And I live in Plymouth and I was consuming that electricity.

We have to observe that there is a significant geographic distance and a significant amount of network complexity that lies between those things. I know the zonal nodal debate is live and contentious and whatever, I certainly can give you my view if you want. But ultimately I see it like layers of an onion or dropping a pebble in a pond and watching the ripples flow out.

There’s a local causality and a local consequence. So the better we can get at reflecting that, the better we can make investment decisions and operational decisions. How we do it is a massive political complexity, but the physics is actually remarkably simple. Like the further you are transmitting electricity, the higher your loss is, the more complicated the system, the denser the system, the higher your losses.

Again, there’s ways you can calculate that bit. Then it’s about how we humans overlay prices or, or control signals. But again, to come back to one of your earlier points, does the average customer care? No. Should the average customer care? No. I think it would be borderline distraction to assume that everybody needs to care.

But I do think that the energy industry therefore needs to go on a maturity journey. We are our own worst enemy. We like to assume that either everybody’s like us, hint, they’re not, or that everybody should care. Oh yes. You know, it’s very, very important. I’m like, well, yeah, I happen to think it’s important subjectively.

I like people who also think it’s important. We tend to hang out and that’s great, but actually for the vast majority of society, it probably shouldn’t be important. It should be about the quality of life. It should be about the consequence and the impact. And if we draw them into the nuts and bolts and the how and the what’s and the why’s.

We either risk distracting them because as we might’ve seen, for example, in demand flexibility services of the previous winters, the relative value being paid to a consumer to fundamentally change their behaviour remains very small. So actually you get into the debate, which we’ve had in our household, where I tell my partner, we’re not going to cook dinner for our two under fives at 6 PM because it’s a DFS event.

Yeah, I see your face already. And of course she turns around and is like, yes, we are because we have two under fives and there’s going to be a third world war. Are you kidding? You know, please let’s, you know, put the cook around. And I say, Well, no, darling, we could save 20p. You know, you can imagine the conversation or 50p or whatever you can imagine the conversation, how that goes, right?

It’s a very, very short conversation. And I always lose. In a society, how do we think about things like this? Well, actually, we, we largely get a smaller group of humans to, to think about it. deal with them, to focus them, to talk about them. And then we roll it out to the rest of society and try to improve people’s lives.

But critically, that’s where it is, to improve people’s lives, make it cheaper for them to heat their homes, make their homes warmer, help them to drive more sustainably, whatever the thing may be. I think where we as an industry also have another related problem is we focus far too hard on the thing.

So in this case, zonal and without talking about the why or the KPIs of how would we know if we were succeeding? That’s kind of where you’re going, right? Would we know we were succeeding if, you know, um, Adam and Doug had a local pricing structure that worked, that neither Adam nor Doug was suffering as a consequence, that Adam’s solar output could help Doug’s car charge or, or whatever.

I think as a society, we need to reframe some of these things because then it will be more acceptable, which in turn means it’ll move faster. 

Adam Sroka: And so, yeah, that, that makes me think – Kind of a double barreled question. Because of that understanding, that measurability that’s going on a journey as well, right?

We’re seeing that across the energy sector. What’s your gut feel? Do you think the bulk of that change will come from the major players like the big suppliers retailers generators? Or do you think it’s gonna come from? Some of the really interesting smaller players and the new stars in the markets and in this space and following up from that Do you think those parties have technology and the data to actually make it happen? Because yeah, I’ve got a few but I’m interested in you as you’re the guest 

Doug Cook: No, I’m curious. I love conversations like this. I appreciate you inviting me on. We as a society felt these things called smart metres were going to be incredibly useful. And we created business models then and use cases that showed that they were going to be fantastic for size society and transformational, et cetera.

But if we were to be truly self-reflective for just a couple of minutes and take away the spin and the gloss, we would observe that we’ve got a reasonable penetration right now. But a certain percentage of those assets are coming to the end of their technical lives because of 2G connectivity and a bunch of other complexities that I don’t need to necessarily go into on a podcast, but, but there’s a number of them that are going to need replacing or upgrading.

So that’s a problem. And there’s also the fact that for a lot of those consumers, we haven’t necessarily delivered the value, at least not the sticker promise land. Nirvana type value. I’m not saying we haven’t delivered any, I’m just saying that we were perhaps not, we’re perhaps a bit bullish in our sales pitch.

And now we are in a world in which we’ve come to observe that the technology costs have fallen, the connectivity costs have fallen, the average appliance that you and I might buy in our personal capacities in 2024 is radically different to the average appliance we would have bought in 2012. And moreover, if you’re going to buy A capital intensive asset.

And let’s not kid ourselves, electric vehicles and heat pumps are expensive things, right? These are not sort of corner shop commodities. The chances are they come with a degree of inbuilt intelligence. They come with a degree and I don’t- I’m just not a brand preference point, this is more an observation.

Like if you want to buy any EV or any EV charger or any heat pump, they come with control systems and interfaces because as a society, we’ve come to expect apps and we’ve come to expect services and we’ve come to expect connectivity, it’s, it’s, it’s the norm. The paradigm has changed. So, to your first point, am I expecting radical innovation from the incumbents?

Short answer, no. Slightly longer answer, it’s not that they haven’t been trying for a decade. But with a couple of notable exceptions, you probably don’t need any additional PR and marketing, but hat tip to Octopus, but actually the vast majority of the incumbents haven’t been able or haven’t strategically or just haven’t changed society in the way that many people thought they could or would or should.

Now. This is not ignoring history. Like I saw the growth in the retail market firsthand, and then we saw its relative collapse after Putin invaded Russia, uh, Ukraine, and the gas crisis, et cetera. So it’s not to say that there can’t be innovation. It’s not to say there aren’t smaller players, but I think I would draw the clear distinction between innovation and services and the commercial models.

An innovation in the technology itself, is inherently a game that is geared towards smaller players. I don’t, again, this is not an energy thing. This is a global thing. This is a technology thing. You get some amazing innovation and R and D from major players, but you get the most exciting cutting edge stuff, usually by the smaller ones.

And then at some point that you get acquired or the business models don’t work or whatever, you know, super tankers versus speedboats. Who am I betting on? I’m betting on the speedboats. I think there’s a load of innovative companies that exist today, and I think there will be even more in the future, that can and will come up with amazing solutions to all of these things.

I think specifically on the metering and the accuracy and the data point, we are kidding ourselves. If we think the paradigm should be about taking data from more smart metres, or if we think we’ll ever get to a hundred percent smart metre penetration without some radical change in approach and policy and regulation, like mandation, basically, because otherwise, yeah, there’s going to be a diminishing curve.

And at some point people will observe that there isn’t the value at all, especially when, and I can say this on behalf of electric vehicle charge points for sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s the case in electric vehicles and heat pumps too, the data from those assets is better quality and perhaps more critically cheaper. And more effective than the data that is coming through the smart metre infrastructure. Why do I say that? Because the cost of us getting that data is effectively free. Because the customer actively wants us there, as opposed to there being a system cost rolling out a smart metre. And then secondly, the customer has an active interest in maintaining that data and helping us to maintain that data because they want the app, they want the service, they want to charge their car, they want to do all the things.

So unlike an asset that we might have thought had a longer lifetime, because it was an energy system asset like a smart metre. An EV charger or a heat pump has a sort of an active maintenance schedule that is designed and built by the owner, i. e. the consumer, the president, the member of the public. So there’s a whole bunch of differences.

The question, which is very interesting, is this comes to my point about disruption and incumbency. So what for the system? So what for the markets? The moment we have markets are saying, well, unless your asset has a smart metre, unless that smart metre is half hourly settled, then you may not play in this market.

And I’m sitting there scratching my head, working for a technology company going, why? What is a smart metre going to tell you about the rest of the home that we couldn’t tell you about the most electrically intensive appliance in the home? As in, do you think it is that important whether Adam is putting the kettle on at the same time as his EV charger is charging or not?

And the short answer is it’s actually background noise. No offence, it’s not personal. It’s the fact that we’re looking at hundreds of thousands of customers, right? And the second is just because you don’t, isn’t necessarily the way you ingested data in the past, create ontologies or create specifications, create standards and make sure people meet or exceed those.

Don’t take energy system paradigms and try and apply them to technology companies, by the way, most of which are global. So on what basis would they even want to engage with a UK specific standard? And that’s somewhat, somewhat moot. And then finally, 8010 or 8020, he says, checking his maths. Can you get 80 percent of the right answer through the thing you have?

Why then do you think you need, I mean, there’s certain instances, sure, where you need accuracy and you need high fidelity, et cetera, you know, the output of a gas fired power station. Yeah, of course you want accuracy. It’s a massive asset. It’s a commercially oriented thing, et cetera. What accuracy would we be prepared to accept around Doug’s personal home?

And then the half hourly settlement thing is just a complete joke. Joke. I mean, honestly, like that’s bananas because it links the assets in these fast moving speed boats inherently to the incumbents and the incumbents pace of deployment of the concept of half hourly settlement and the technologies that they would require to do so has been really slow.

The deadline has kept being pushed back. Again, I am making enemies now all over the sector, right? So why are we waiting for that? Why would you expect the flexibility that could come from a load of heat pumps and EV charging to wait until someone else gets their stuff in order? in order to be able to help the system.

That seems completely mad when we’re trying to reduce carbon and get to net zero. 

Adam Sroka: So that’s like almost the genesis of the question because you’ve, yeah, typically smaller companies, faster moving, able to take more risks, tech can start from scratch every year. And it’s all the new fancy technology and data platforms and so on and so forth.

But they don’t have the access, the network, the data, the customers, they don’t actually have some of the raw materials from which to build some of these insights that are really useful. Whereas you’ve got the incumbents that have all the resources, but then there’s so much mass that getting out of the inertia and moving in any direction is really quite difficult.

And I guess like you, you get into this like fractal complexity because you’ve got like, asset type and you’ve got location and there’s all these different things, but I guess weave it quite nicely back to, to EV charging as an example, right?

 So you, you talked about the importance of trust, so how do you as a small organisation and a new organisation go from nothing to building up that trust in a brand and improving on like the customer experience to the point where I’m happy for you to half charge my, my vehicle and, and do whatever you want to do with it overnight and understand that you’re not going to destroy the warranty on it, or you’re not going to do weird and wonderful things I don’t understand.

How did, how has Ohme gone through that sort of journey or what, what’s your strategy for achieving those things? Because I think that’s going to be pivotal, right? 

Doug Cook: Yes, correct. It’s absolutely pivotal. The short answer is slowly. So this is not a flippant answer. You don’t start a technology company promising to your customers, at least.

You might promise your investors. That’s a different story, but you don’t promise your customers that you’re going to do everything for them overnight. You have to win their trust. You have to earn their trust, right? You have to make it very clear why you’re doing the thing you were doing. You have to make it very clear what role they play in it.

So in Ohme’s world, at least, its customer comes first, full stop. In other words, if the customer, for whatever reason, wants to charge their car two in the afternoon, despite the fact there’s very little power in the system, and it’s probably not the thing they ought to be doing, and it might even be the most expensive thing they could do, it is not our place to say no.

Because that erodes trust. I think of trust as not a binary thing, although I can appreciate it’s a lot faster to lose than it is to gain, but rather a constant, you know, how full is the champagne glass or the beer glass or whatever, right? Because we are constantly trying to help customers. Understand the role they can play. Understand the role we can play. Help them get whatever level of depth of detail they want. This comes to our conversation earlier about early adopters versus mass market. I mean, from Ohme’s perspective, we see ourselves very much now in the mass market adoption in terms of numbers and scale and deployment, et cetera.

Um, We are seeing that behaviour change live. We see that because we have apps and we see, you know, using software concepts like Hotjar, et cetera, where people are using what and how. Um, just because we provide them reams and reams of complex analysis doesn’t mean they look at it. But thanks to things like Hotjar, we can see exactly where they look and why.

And so what we’re seeing is definite trends in particular directions. So we use that, we leverage that. And then critically, the last thing is communicating. Communication is not spamming. That’s a critical difference. It’s not pushing messages out because we want to be heard. That would erode trust. Again, it’s erosion versus accumulation, right?

Accumulation is helping, you know, if we were to see a situation in which a customer could have done something differently. Why wouldn’t we help them? What kind of company would stand by and say, Oh, you know, sorry, you, you know, you can’t cost more than you, than you should have or whatever. I think what’s interesting across the energy industry.

And this comes back to your actual previous question about incumbents versus new emergent is. Where is that trust? Where has that trust been historically? Where is that trust now? That trust is not with retailers. It isn’t. Again, with the possible exception of Octopus, but again, let’s leave the outliers and talk about the rest of society for a second.

Octopus is a very large retailer. There are other large retailers out there. If you were to do a customer census, a public census on trust, I don’t imagine electricity and gas retailers would be really top of the tree. That said, the companies that tend to be. Are your, potentially, well the companies at least that I’ve talked about in pubs and around barbecues, would be that you’ve got a new heat pump, or you’ve got a new EV.

Isn’t this a thing? Are you likely to talk about your EV charger? I mean, privately, the marketing team at Ohme would hope I’d say yes at this point. I mean, I would. The short answer is probably not. I would, but I’m, yeah. Oh right, you and I both. You and I both, but we’re, we’re perhaps the early market, right?

We’re clearly not mass market type people. Type people, um, with the most of the listeners, this blog probably, right? But would the average person that these people meet in the pub? No. Um, because it’s a means to an end. So how can you, um, help the customer? And then ultimately it’s about helping them save money, help them have a better experience.

The challenge the companies like us will have are these small boats, these emerging innovators, these people who are doing cool and wonderful things that are going to change the world. There is a monopoly chokehold on the value, very deliberate use of terms. So if I were to sell you, hi Adam, lovely to meet you, an EV charger, you would say, great, thanks, Doug.

Here’s some money. I’m going to take my EV charger or I’m going to get an installer. We’re going to arrange it for you. Whatever, point of store, you’ve got your charger. And therein the commercial relationship with us at the moment ends. Now, the energy industry has been experimenting for the best part of 20 years with recurring revenues, sort of ongoing commercial relationships, but the only one that’s stuck, unsurprisingly perhaps, is kilowatt hours of consumption. i. e. how much electricity or gas did you use to do the thing you were after doing and therefore we’re going to bill you for it. So, the companies known as suppliers or retailers have a natural advantage when it comes to any commercial proposition to a customer. Because they control the amount of electricity going in, or they don’t control, but they bill for the amount of electricity going into the system.

Companies like us who could do really fun stuff for those customers and, and are, you know, minded to, as in, we have the intent, we have the technology, we have the data, we have the colleagues, we have the whole shooting match. The only thing that makes it quite hard for us is, how can we remunerate the customer?

How can we help the customer? Or we can go into cahoots with a retailer. Which you see technology companies all over the world doing every day. So fine, pretty well worn path, but they tend not to collaborate very well. So if you go for one, you might not get the second, the third, the fourth, et cetera. In my experience.

And yes, I’ve been there and, or we get bought by a retailer. And again, there’s lots of precedent for that. But finally, critically, I think we need to move to a world where there are multiple points of access. Let’s say to the customer. I again, work well in analogies. I’ve tried to explain this to colleagues.

I’ve said, well, I have the internet. And because I’m an adult, I also choose to have Netflix. And because I have little people, I also have Disney plus. And somehow my tiny brain copes with that complexity. In other words, I can accept that I am paying for my internet and I am paying for my Netflix and I’m paying for my Disney plus and I get services from all three and they all use the internet as in there is a collective point of singularity that is literally a cable out of the wall into the, you know, fiber optic network, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

For whatever reason, the energy industry, we seem super reluctant to engage with those concepts, despite the fact we’re trying to do something called net zero, which happens to be really, really important and might even save the world. And therefore it’s quite galling to me. We’re not allowing the speed boats, the super tankers to really collaborate and compete.

Instead, it’s either you become a super part, a super tanker, or you jump onto one, or you partner with one, or otherwise you’re pretty much out in the wilderness. And that has some really egregious consequences. If flexibility providers make payments to companies who are doing something to help them, some way remunerate the customer for charging at the right time of day, do something, which again, at the moment is gray, right?

Let’s be clear. This is not happening for very good reasons. Then technically, technically that would be income. I’m not a tax specialist, but as far as I’m concerned, as far as I’m aware, that would be income. You know, we would be paying a party. That person would then either need to declare it or not. It’s on them.

But there’s all kinds of unintended consequences to this sort of thing. And I don’t think the system was really designed for it. 

Adam Sroka: Yeah. A really, really interesting point about the remuneration and tax implications of that. And, yeah, like settlement, uh, uh, like I know large organisations that struggle with settlement as it is like, God forbid it go two ways or whatever, but just to, Extend your analogy a step further.

It’s almost like the current setup in the energy sector is akin to the days of your AOL portal to the internet, right? And you had your, your AOL like services and yeah, we didn’t like it, right? And someone came along and busted it wide open and now the internet is the way it’s now. And yeah, maybe we’ve gone too far the other way.

We’ve applied subscriptions for everything and all these independent services, but you can’t deny the fact that. The pace of innovation improved. Overall, the customer experience is better. The freedom of choice and so on and so forth. I think that’s the thing I 

Doug Cook:  I think that’s the thing I focus on, Adam. I think that’s the specific words I pick up.

The experience is better. Like, I am an optimist. I believe that our experience of energy could be better. I have been dismayed by how many people in this country and around the world for that matter, have suffered over the last couple of years as prices have gone completely bananas, have therefore chosen not to heat their homes, have therefore chosen not to, to really watch how they live their lives.

There are all kinds of knock on consequences, right? How many people are going to NHS because they have, I don’t know, uh, breathing complexities because they live in a cold, damp house. I mean, you can imagine the knock on world. Energy is not a thing we desire for itself. We don’t talk about electricity and gas as being fun commodities.

They’re effectively rendering other services effective, right? They’re doing something that we value as a society. I guess it’s the same with the internet. I mean, that’s why I think this is such a good analogy. We don’t desire the internet for the internet’s sake. Well, I don’t think so. I don’t, at least.

I desire it because of the things it does. I desire it because it allows me to communicate. It allows me to catch up with people, with friends. It allows me to do my online banking, whatever. I, it’s a thing. I think of energy as the same. We as a society are not innovating fast enough because we are not focused enough on how to improve it for the customers.

We’re not clear enough about that. We haven’t got clear KPIs as to what that improvement would be. KPIs is a big word, but like we haven’t even got a discussion going as to what the right answer is. Let me give you a real practical analogy that I did on the back of an envelope the other day for fun.

People in the pub, friends, I should add, ask me why I work at Ohme when personally I’ve always been a mad keen cyclist. They’re like, shouldn’t you be working at an electric bike company, wouldn’t that make more sense? Ha ha ha ha ha. I said, okay, fair point. I said, yeah, we need all forms of transport. And Ohme does not do high voltage bus chargers, but let’s just say for a second that we did.

We could use the renewable energy that we have coming into our system, and this is before any of the most recent announcements about more wind, et cetera, et cetera. We could use the surplus of energy that we have at particular points in time now to effectively render all public transport in this country free.

And why do I say something so bold and audacious? Because it’s something that is bold and audacious that we could work towards. We could say, you know what, let’s say for the sake of discussion, that is a desirable outcome. We could say, right, well, what are we going to do to make all public transport in the country free?

We’d say it all has to be electrical. We’d say it all has to be linked into some flexibility type system, which people behind the scenes can write algorithms to make happen. And then the operational costs of buses, trains. bicycles, whatever, would be effectively free at point of access. What would that do?

Would it mean we live healthier lives on roads with fewer cars that have fewer, hopefully, accidents? You know there’s all kinds of knock on that. Again, in the energy system, we’ve become so focused on the specific things, zonal versus nodal pricing, or do we do half hourly settlement or not?

I mean, again, I’ve been in the meetings, I’ve been in the conferences, I’ve been in the discussions, and myself, we’ve just lost our way. Why? To what end? Then what? Focus on the what and then all the things you’re doing can tell you whether or not you’re pointing in the right direction. 

Adam Sroka: That’s an interesting point to kind of call it on, I think, because there’s a, I’m naturally a pessimist, so we could go at this for a while, but I know I think it’s great because yeah, but it’s almost basically saying where’s the big ambition, where’s the overall end goal for this?

It’s okay. Net zero point. That’s great, but net zero isn’t. It is, but it isn’t really a consumer benefit. It’s this thing. 

Doug Cook: It’s not sexy. It’s just like. It doesn’t sell. Yeah, exactly, Adam. It’s not a consumer benefit. It’s not a thing. I mean, how? So the other running joke that I have with the same group of friends is, how are we going to know when we get to net zero?

Are fireworks going to go off? Is everyone’s phone going to go white for 30 seconds in reflection of the fact? Like it’s such an intangible, immeasurable goal that has just become meaningless that we can’t work toward, well, we can continue to work towards it sort of, but then we’d have to actually capture carbon and recognize carbon and count carbon and even then, counting carbon.

I mean, come on, right? Explain that to people – in my case, six year old. Um, that’s, that’s impossible. Whereas if you were to explain that you’re working towards some kind of desirable end, and again, as a society, we’d have to set what the desirable end is. Then we can track whether or not we’re making progress.

Adam Sroka: We are running out of time. Unfortunately, I’ve not managed to ask any of the questions. I’d normally ask, which is a sign of a good show. I would, we always, just before we let anyone leave, we’d like to know if there’s anything you’d like to promote or plug, um, or if people want to find out more about you or the work of doing at Ohme, is there any where we could send them?

Doug Cook: Wow. A question I wasn’t expecting, honestly, Adam. Um, well, obviously please do visit our Ohme website, check us out on social media, et cetera, all that sort of standard vanilla stuff. Um, on a personal note, please do add me on LinkedIn or send me a message. Uh, or I’m always happy to have discussions like this, uh, in a pub or otherwise.

And, and generally please, you know, get involved, please challenge, please push, please push for change. I think there’s such an amazing opportunity to drive change in society. Again, optimist versus pessimist, how do I get it? But I, the reason I am here, the reason I do this is because I think that we should have a better world and I think the more people who get stuck in will, will get there.

The thing I want to hear from people is where there is and how would we know? 

Adam Sroka: Thank you very much, Doug. It’s been a pleasure. 

Doug Cook: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. 

Outro: And that’s it for this episode of the Hypercube podcast. Thanks for tuning in today.

If you have any questions about the topics we covered, you can reach out to us on LinkedIn or check out our website at  wearehypercube.com. You can also join Beyond Energy, our Slack community of data leaders from the sector. There’s a link to sign up in the episode description. We’re just getting this show off the ground, so if you like today’s episode, please leave us a rating, review, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

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