“Money makes the world go round”: whoever said that first was correct. If we want to solve climate change and change our energy infrastructure, we need to be innovative and entrepreneurial. We need to have green ideas that make more money than their dirty predecessors. We all know that the UK’s fossil-fuel-heavy energy mix is a big problem for our future. The solution must include increased revenue and increased profits, but for a cleaner alternative.
At the start of this year I decided to commit to making a difference. I took what I called a “productive gap year” to have a go at setting up a business to tackle this problem. It meant moving back in with my parents, scratching around in the penny jar for a pint at the weekend and eating far too many tins of baked beans. But my efforts paid off: a few weeks ago my business Crowd Power Plant won the mayor of London’s low carbon entrepreneur award.
The award, which looks for the most innovative ideas to help reduce London’s CO2 emissions, is a competition open to students and recent graduates in London. The process really tested out the business plan and my ability as an entrepreneur.
The idea for Crowd Power Plant came to me by deconstructing contemporary ideas such as crowdfunding and crowd-sourcing, and seeing what other industries the notion of the crowd could be applied to. I combined this idea with my academic background in environmental technology and came up with a business proposition that signs up members and rewards them financially through a profit share for becoming part of a crowd. After a few weeks of thinking through the idea I asked my friend Dominic Jacobson, who specialises in solar cell fabrication, to come on board as a co-founder.
Our strategy is to offer our members cash in return for the excess electricity that their renewable energy installations generate. We aggregate surplus electricity from lots of small renewable energy installations across the UK, to form a “crowd”. Using the bargaining power of this crowd we then sell electricity to suppliers or the wholesale market for a better price. Finally, we share the profits with our members.
Our hope is that Crowd Power Plant will revolutionise the UK energy market by further encouraging the uptake of small scale renewable technologies.
Winning the award is opening up lots of doors for us and we are talking to generators and suppliers. Our £15,000 prize is mainly being spent on ensuring that our business is legally water tight. We cannot wait to get this innovative project off the ground and ready for a formal launch in November.
James Winfield is co-founder of Crowd Power Plant and winner of the mayor of London’s low carbon entrepreneur award, co-sponsored by Siemens. This blog is editorially independent.
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