What do we really mean by a 'Giant Leap Together'? It conveys what we must do to realise the Strategic Innovation Fund's far-reaching ambition to decarbonise energy networks. The net zero push is nothing short of a moonshot, requiring urgent input from networks, suppliers, investors, regulators, funders, policy-makers, and everyone involved in energy.

In this episode, Innovate UK’s Matt Hastings and Kate Jones hear from Randolph Brazier, the director of innovation and electricity systems at the Energy Networks Association. We also meet Ali Safari, founder and chief executive of Oxford-based artificial intelligence innovators Farad.ai.

 Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) is a £450 million programme to fund and support projects to drive down UK energy’s carbon footprint at lowest cost to consumers. It is delivered through a partnership with Innovate UK. Find details of the SIF online at www.ofgem.gov.uk/sif, and see our Giant Leap Together animation on YouTube here: youtube.com/watch?v=iKqU0p8A84g

Episode 3 – A Giant Leap Together to Transform Our Energy System

The Strategic Innovation Fund is investing £450 million in energy network innovation because the challenge of rapidly decarbonising our energy networks is enormous but we can do this. With collaboration, we can make the leap; a giant leap together.

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Welcome back to the Bright Spark podcast from Innovate UK in partnership with Ofgem. I’m Matt Hastings and this is episode three. We started this time with a short clip from our animated film on the theme of a giant leap together. Go find it online to see it in full. We put the YouTube link in the episodes’ show notes. Today, we’re setting about unpacking that phrase, a giant leap together; a phrase that is so important to our mission here at the Strategic Innovation Fund. What is a giant leap together? What does it mean? Who does it apply to and what do we need it to achieve in the increasingly urgent race to net zero? And yes, it is deliberately chosen to echo Neil Armstrong’s giant leap on the moon. This net-zero push is, without doubt, the most urgent moonshot for all of us, not just in the energy networks but for the whole energy sector too. It needs to involve networks, suppliers, consumers, investors, regulators, policymakers, innovators and funders, like us here at Innovate UK. We need to work together to urgently reform how we work to solve this problem and that’s what we’re about to explore.

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We’ve not got a very long time at all. Seven football World Cups, seven more Olympics and, if we’re sticking with the moon theme, 18’ish total eclipses.

We are leading the world in energy transition but the question is how much more can we achieve if we take the giant leap together?

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I’m really pleased that we’re hearing shortly from Randolph Brazier, Director of Innovation and Electricity Systems at the Energy Networks Association, one of our key partners in the delivery of the Strategic Innovation Fund. We’re also looking under the bonnet of an exciting tool being developed by an innovative Oxford-based company involved in one of the SIF consortia.

Finally, we’re developing the central nervous system for the future net-zero energy system. We’ve built a highway communication platform for a lot of data sets to be exchanged and actually be communicating with one another.

Farad.ai uses artificial intelligence to service millions of key data points across the networks. I hope you’ll find it another really insightful, interesting episode.

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And as always, I’m joined by a fantastic member of the Strategic Innovation Fund team and this time, it’s my friend and colleague, Kate Jones. How are you doing, Kate?

I’m great, thanks. I’m back! [Laughter]

Woohoo! So, Kate, now we’re talking about Giant Leap Together, our sector-wide operating model, that’s really trying to carve the year up into four distinct chunks of activity to really help the networks and help innovators to really think and do things in different ways. How would you describe Giant Leap Together?

So, I’m going to stick with the moon theme here, Matt.

Nice.

You know there’s the story of John F. Kennedy going to NASA Space Centre, speaking to the man with the broom and saying, ‘What are you doing?’ and he says, ‘I’m helping to put men on the moon.’ That man wasn’t just a janitor. He was a member of the NASA Space Team and he contributed to the overall mission of putting a man on the moon. He understood the importance of teamwork and he understood his contribution to the overall mission. Giant Leap Together is about bringing everybody in and cultivating this culture of collaboration so that we can get there quicker.

I absolutely love that and, yeah, I think the space mission is a really good example of something that had to happen incredibly quickly. It required a completely new way of working and the worst thing about net zero is every week and every month that goes by, the target gets steeper, and steeper, and steeper.

We’ve not got a very long time at all – 28 years. That’s seven football World Cups, six if you like rugby more, seven more Olympics and, if we’re sticking with the moon theme, that’s 18’ish total eclipses and maybe nine total solar eclipses. So we’ve not got long and we’ve got to work out how we work best together to achieve some of that.

We need about a 75% emissions reduction within the electricity system in the next eight years and that is an enormous and profound fundamental change. I think what Giant Leap Together does is really start to mobilise the sector in a new way and kind of lights a fire underneath the innovator community and the networks to really help them to work collaboratively together as we move forward.

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I think the other interesting angle to this is on the international side of things. We have got some of the best capabilities in the world in this country in terms of the research base and in terms of the technical aspects of the networks. We’ve got a forward-thinking regulator but we’re also conscious that there are a lot of global players in the US, Europe and across the world who really want to use the Strategic Innovation Fund to demonstrate their capability in this country for the benefit of UK consumers. I think what Giant Leap Together enables us to do is... it’s almost like a magnet for talent and bringing in that talent from across the world.

Next up in this episode, I’ve been speaking about all of this with the Director of Innovation and Electricity Systems at the Energy Networks Association, Randolph Brazier.

As energy networks, it’s our role to enable this transition. We’ve had quite a good history, under the regulations that are currently set, in innovating, bringing on new technologies, making the grid smarter and enabling the connection of these new devices. However, there’s still quite a long way to go and there’s still a lot that we need to learn.

There’s a real role here for us working together and bringing this Giant Leap Together principle into practice. What role do you see partner organisations, such as entrepreneurs and other innovators, having in this and supporting the networks and the wider energy system?

The advantage of working with start-ups, SMEs, innovators, etcetera, is that they bring new perspectives to how we can enable that transition but they also bring a lot of skills, technologies and techniques from other sectors or other areas that can be hugely beneficial and that we may not have originally thought of as networks. A good example is in the data and digital space. Obviously, when you’re connecting millions of devices, you need to have a much smarter grid and you need to have a lot better understanding of what’s happening on that grid. So dealing with millions of different data points and millions of different transactions is something that happens quite a lot in other industries, particularly in tech-type industries. So we can learn a lot from people bringing tools and techniques from those industries and innovating to enable them on the gas and electricity networks. I think they’re absolutely critical in enabling this transition because while we’ve done a pretty good job to date, there’s still a long way to go.

We use the Giant Leap Together phrase as something across the energy systems but, like you say, there’s definitely something around bringing in other sectors. Just as examples, the water sector and the rail sector are all large asset management companies which are similar to networks or might have similar challenges around asset management but there are even just new ways of working around things like vulnerability. This is going to be a huge – well, it is a huge topic at the minute in the news, particularly with the energy crisis. How do you think we could work better with, say, the water industry or even any of the other utilities to support vulnerability?

Yeah, it’s a really good question, Kate. People in vulnerable circumstances are not just vulnerable in one energy vector. They’re probably, or almost certainly, interacting with water, gas and electricity. They’re probably taking different forms of transport. They have mobile phones and telecommunication connections, etcetera. They probably use the internet and things like that. So if we brought those different sectors together and those different areas, whether they be utilities or other people and other services, we can probably, first of all, get a better understanding of who is vulnerable and what the different types of vulnerability are because there’s not just one type, of course. Once we understand or better understand who they are and what different types of vulnerability they have, then we can work together with those other services and other utilities to provide better services and better support for them. That is very much in line with the whole systems approach which you hear a lot bandied about in the industry and often, it sounds quite nebulous and no one really knows what it means but I think that’s a classic use case – vulnerable customers – of how you can bring different sectors and different areas together to help better identify people and get better data but then also provide them with a better service and, ultimately, a better outcome for their lives.

But, I suppose, ultimately, if we’re all working together as well, it’s about delivering that value for money and about the networks being an enabler for a lot of these technologies. Everybody needs water still. Everybody needs transport still. What else do you think needs to happen to bring in these other sectors but also what else needs to happen to draw in other people from across the energy systems?

That is a perennial challenge; trying to break down the silos, trying to foster collaboration, foster innovation and foster better working together. Part of it is bringing in cross-sector parties and entities. UKRI (UK Research & Innovation) and you guys are good examples. You don’t just focus on energy networks, for example. You look across the piece with other sectors, other utilities and other entities. I think working with partners like yourself, partners like the Energy Systems Catapult and government, etcetera, is really critical. I think also regulators need to work closer together. Obviously, you’ve got entities like Ofcom, Ofwat and Ofgem. I think these guys need to work closer together. Now I know they’ve started doing that. I think more generally as well, as energy networks, we need to start exploring beyond our comfort zone and beyond our usual partners and usual collaborators to explore some of these other areas and try and understand how we can learn from other sectors and better collaborate with them. At the end of the day, there’s pretty much no sector or no area of society that doesn’t need energy. Energy is effectively essential to human life and to businesses, etcetera, and so we do interact with all different types of sectors and people but we’ve just got to go and work better with them and understand their needs and uses better. It’s also about understanding how they can help us because when you think about things like flexibility, a lot of these other sectors and areas can actually really support us in our transition to net zero.

Randolph, thank you for your time today. That’s been really, really interesting and I’m super excited to be working with you and the rest of the team at ENA on the Giant Leap Together.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Kate. Really great to be here and really looking forward to working together as well.

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Thanks for being with us for Bright Spark, a podcast from Innovate UK. We run the Strategic Innovation Fund or SIF for the UK energy regulator Ofgem. To find out more, check out the link in the description box below on your podcast player or just google Ofgem SIF. This episode is all about the journey we’re on which we are calling Giant Leap Together. We’re unpacking all that that means and the intent behind it to innovate and to bring about massive positive change for energy consumers and for net zero and to push the UK ever so closer to that key goal of becoming the Silicon Valley of energy.

So far in this episode, we’ve been banging the drum for innovators, talking about the massive value to be had in collaboration between the energy networks, the entrepreneurs, the people with ideas and the people that can really spark change. It’s time now to speak to one of those innovators to find out more about how they see the challenge and the opportunity of being involved in the Strategic Innovation Fund.

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My name is Ali Safari and I’m the founder and chief executive of Farad.ai. I founded Farad.ai around three years ago to find the highest possible way that I could have an impact on fighting climate change.

Thanks so much, Ali, for joining us. Can you tell me a wee bit more about what Farad.ai does?

Sure.

What’s your elevator pitch? [Laughter]

At Farad.ai, we’re developing the central nervous system for the future net-zero energy system. I guess that’s very high level, so let me elaborate a little bit more. For this purpose, we’re looking at Bristol. It’s a map and on the map, you have lots of different data layers. You have the existing infrastructure, i.e. the electrical substations, assets and cables. You have an area that you have selected and in this area, you want to install this particular technology. The platform does all of the analysis for you in terms of what the power requirements are and whether the local network can support that development. On top of that, you have the entire planning data sets. What are the potential planning risks that you have? What are the flood zones? Which are the protected buildings and listed buildings? For example, this area here is a residential area with retail, leisure and offices. Why that is important, in particular, for the EV industry is because if you go to a cinema and you want to electrify the car park in that cinema, you don’t want a rapid EV charger there. You’re going to be watching a movie for two hours. In this location here, this type of charger would be sufficient. Without that data set, you wouldn’t be able to make those decisions. The other phenomenal thing that you can see... and this is an innovation that we have done and no one else in the market has done it and what you can see here is a heat map of electricity demand down to postcode level. The strong red that you see means that those areas have a lot of demand on the local network. Imagine that in those areas you want to electrify heating, i.e. you want to change the gas boilers to electric boilers, just looking at the holistic picture, you immediately know that in those areas you will have trouble because the local electricity network can’t cope with it. You can see, for example, in these areas here, they are light yellow which means the electricity demand is not that intense in those areas. So, actually, you can electrify transport and heat in those areas. A lot of the net-zero decision-making that we need to make is locationally dependent and this is exactly what we offer. Actually, these data layers are giving those planners or decision-makers what they need in order to make optimal decisions.

Thanks for that. Often, when we speak about these power flows and data working together, we speak about digital twins. Can you tell me and some of the listeners who might not know what that means?

Of course. I think at the heart of this amazing energy revolution that we are experiencing, Farad.ai is addressing the digitalisation challenge. So far, we’ve got 400 million data points across 60 different data sets and ten independent coal fields, which you can search through in less than two seconds. We call this system that we have built an ai-powered digital twin for the energy system.

Wow! That is a lot of touchpoints and that system will probably need a lot of data from a lot of different players, right?

That’s exactly what it is. The way to think about it is that we’ve built a highway communication platform for a lot of data sets to be exchanged and actually be communicating with one another so we can enable decision-making in the future energy system.

So we met each other through you being involved in one of the Strategic Innovation Fund projects, Navigation. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and what Farad.ai are trying to do?

Basically, we crossed paths with SIF quite accidentally. I was speaking with our existing investors, Dunelm Energy with Ian Marchant and Nigel Ellis, and we agreed that in order for our nation to deliver the net-zero ambition that we have, we need to have cross-field collaboration; collaboration between power, gas, hydrogen and water. We then asked, ‘Can we put together a consortium of different members who uniquely bring expertise in these different things?’ We formed a consortium which is now led by Southern Gas Networks (SGN). Initially, the project will focus on addressing the electrification and mobility challenges and we have two other amazing innovators with us, Intelligent Power Generation or IPG which provides fuel-agnostic, gluten-free power generators. The other is Smart Power Networks which provide intelligent control and integration to the grid. That’s the initial phase of the project but in subsequent phases, we’re bringing in a water utility and also a hydrogen production company which can generate green hydrogen. Farad.ai will act as a glue which will provide strategic insights and different members in the consortium will also benefit from it because we’re also innovating on the commercial models and everybody can actually benefit from the pain points that are going to be in the electricity network.

I love that analogy of you being like the glue. It just shows how important collaborative working is. What is your experience to date of working with the energy networks?

When you’re pioneering a new concept, the natural response is often not to be receptive which is completely understandable, especially if you’re working with the networks or the network companies. This is because of the nature of the businesses they run. However, I think one of the things that I was genuinely surprised about when I had interactions at the board level with SGN, the project partner that we’re working with, these leaders understand the magnitude of the challenges which are coming. The other thing that they do is if they realise that an innovator is genuinely creating value and they want to implement positive change, they do allocate resources internally. That leadership mindset is actually that of frontline staff as well. Our experience of working with SGN engineers so far has been absolutely fantastic and phenomenal.

That’s really good to hear and it’s good that you’ve had that interaction across the different levels within the network as well. Thinking wider now, so thinking about working collaboratively across the energy sector, what barriers do you think we need to overcome to help innovators and small companies work together with the networks?

I think our government has done an absolutely phenomenal job so far in the electricity network to incentivise and actually encourage the network operators to open data. In the whole world, our government are leading on data openness policies which are enabling innovators like us to come and take the data sets which are available and actually innovate on that. Now the gas network operators and the water network operators are historically behind electricity network operators. It’s not that they don’t want to share data sets and it’s not that they don’t see the value of doing it but if there was some government incentive or some government indication that it’s okay to do that, then we could have innovated much faster.

That’s really interesting and I suppose opening up these collaborations and opening that data to everybody has huge opportunities.

This exactly goes back to why we do what we do at Farad.ai. Fundamentally, we are in a race against time to fight climate change, our economies need to grow sustainably and we need to create sustainable jobs to ensure that society is progressing in the right direction. In order to do that, innovation is not only about us bringing the technology. It’s also about the regulation and actually the policy landscape and, as a nation, we have an extremely great track record of doing that. The Energy Networks Association, Ofgem and BEIS have been phenomenal at coming up with bold policy designs to push the industry in the right direction. The other thing is actually investment. One of the things that we’ve experienced here in the UK in our ecosystem is that we have visionary investors who genuinely want to make the net-zero transition work. The third thing is around the commercial models. There is a lot of value to be created on the back of digitalisation. We are innovating on a daily basis on different commercial models for different stakeholders and the message for them is clear. Let’s come up with a win/win proposal. It doesn’t mean that if you’re going to give us your data sets and if we’re going to be working together that we want that free of charge. We spend a lot of our time thinking about how we can innovate also on the commercial models which I think is necessary because otherwise, these solutions won’t scale which is the point of getting to net zero as soon as possible.

Why do you think it’s important for companies like Farad.ai to be involved in innovation programmes like the Strategic Innovation Fund?

The pace of the change which is happening in the energy industry is sometimes even overwhelming for a leading AI start-up like us. The tech itself moves extremely fast. At Farad.ai, we are innovating on a day-to-day basis. Our innovation cycle is two to four weeks. The multi-disciplinary skill set that we bring to the table and the agility that we have in order to respond to changes and solve problems in a much quicker and more agile way is something that we can offer to the energy network companies. I think the message to them is very clear. We can help you to transform your business models. Farad.ai is not the only innovator out there in the energy space. There are lots of other amazing innovators like us as well and quite frankly, each one of them brings unique skill sets, expertise and services to the market and without that collaboration, we won’t be able to have the impact that we can.

I just want to touch on one point that you said about your two to four-week innovation period. I find that really interesting. Part of the Strategic Innovation Fund is about failing fast, finding those ideas that are not right, discovering quickly that they’re not right and moving on to the next one. I think without collaboration and having that innovation culture of being able to do that, that’s not possible.

At Farad.ai, everybody is encouraged to make mistakes. As long as they’re learning from it and they’re actually moving fast and iterating, it’s absolutely fine.

Yeah, it’s really interesting and I think just to tie it into the episode theme here, Giant Leap Together is all about taking these steps together, filling the gaps that other partners might have and working collaboratively to reach that common goal of meeting net zero.

Absolutely. The amount of innovation that is required is so vast. We are moving to a complete unknown; a territory that even I, with an amazing team of engineers, strategies and commercial people, sometimes struggle to get my head around. For a very long time, I didn’t take the giant leap but I decided to change that mindset and that perspective and trust the process. That was the only way to grow. My team then also started to trust me and took the giant leap together with me and we brought the best out of each other and out of the company. I’m incredibly humbled to be leading that team but just look at what we have achieved over the last year. I really think that our energy industry in the UK is also facing a similar dilemma. We are leading the world in energy transition but the question is how much more can we achieve if we take the giant leap together? It will certainly be challenging and a tough journey ahead but is the reward not worth it in the end? Do we really want to leave a disturbed planet for our children and grandchildren with a potentially uninhabitable climate or do we think that if we took the giant leap together, we can fight climate change on time and decarbonise our energy system? Can we set an example for the world to follow?

That’s a really nice note to finalise the interview on. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.

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So some of the key takeaways from today’s episode are that everybody wants to play a part in meeting net zero but everyone realises they’ve got to do that together. I think that we realise that it’s okay if we get things wrong but we just need to resolve that quickly and move on to the next idea. The other thing I think is that we’ve got real opportunities to not only learn from each other within the industry sector but to look outside of our own sector and the silos that are there and learn from other sectors such as space, water and finance. There are loads of opportunities there for us to work together and doing that is really going to create some value for money for consumers.

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We’ve talked a lot in this episode about the scale of the challenge and the scope of the ambition that we have. There is just time before we finish up to look at timescales and the next steps. Let’s bring back Innovate UK’s Matt Hastings for the final few minutes.

It’s really in acceleration where we can start to put rocket boosters, to use your analogy, Kate, on a lot of these innovations and really send them up to the next level. That’s when the Strategic Innovation Fund challenges will open in September time but it’s also when we’re hoping to bring the entire energy sector together for a brand new Energy Innovation Summit. This summit is almost like COP26. We’re going to bring together the real change-makers to focus in on the key challenges of our time and work together as a sector, something that we haven’t been great at historically, to really zone in on how we’re going to solve some of these problems. I just can’t wait for that dynamic where you’re going to have the best innovators from government-funded programmes, the best innovators from Ofgem-funded programmes, the best innovators from across UK research and innovation and the academic base working together, sharing insights, learning from each other and ultimately, helping us to get to where we need to get to.

Yeah, everyone has got a common interest here and it would be great at these sessions at this event you’re speaking about, the Summit, if we didn’t just talk about the things we’re doing and we actually get around a table and start problem-solving. I would love for us to do some sort of hackathon-style roundtable where we get all different players into a room and actually work on a problem end-to-end during the event space.

Okay, as we’re discussing that exciting caucus planned for Glasgow in September, let’s finish this episode by hearing a bit more of your conversation with Randolph Brazier at the Energy Networks Association. With long experience in bringing the industry together, they’re working in a great partnership with us here at Innovate UK, the Department for Business, Ofgem and others to make the most of this year’s opportunity.

Yeah, really exciting – the Summit, for short. Previously, the Energy Networks Innovation Conference was held virtually for the last two years, of course, due to Covid but now, fortunately, and hopefully, it will be back in person in Glasgow, although there will be a hybrid element as well. I think there’s a huge opportunity here to use this platform to really showcase what we’re doing and hopefully, get more investment in UK PLC, get those exports flowing and get those services flowing to other countries as well because the UK, at the end of the day, when it comes to the energy transition and the innovation space, we are very much leading globally. So this should be a really good opportunity for us to do that and I think with you guys on board and also government and the Department for International Trade, etcetera, we’ve got the right players around the table to be able to help us do that.

Yeah, so, Randolph, you’ve probably heard me say... I keep using the phrase #squadgoals [laughter]. I think the Giant Leap Together and bringing everyone together is really going to be the envy of the whole energy sector and other sectors. Let’s show them how it’s done.

Yeah, definitely. I like #squadgoals. That’s good.

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#Squadgoals. Now, look, I’m not cool enough to know what that actually means but luckily, Kate is. I still prefer Giant Leap Together to be honest but there’s room for both I guess.

Thanks to Randolph Brazier from the Energy Networks Association and a big thanks to Farad.ai’s Ali Safari who we heard from earlier. Thanks to Kate Jones for being my co-presenter this time out on the podcast. My name is Matt Hastings. Bright Spark is an Innovate UK podcast about the brilliant work being supported under the umbrella of Ofgem’s Strategic Innovation Fund. To find out more about the Strategic Innovation Fund, just head online to Ofgem.gov.uk/SIF. That link is also in the written description that accompanies this episode in your podcast player. Bright Spark is a Bespoken Media Production for Innovate UK in partnership with Ofgem. Thanks again for giving us your time and your attention this episode. Bye for now.

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