“We have to use the right power, in the right location, at the right time”: Jo-Jo Hubbard, Electron

“For our first four years, we won all the prizes and no commercial contracts. That changed after grid congestion and electricity load growth hit the headlines last year. We've finally started winning the contracts,” says Jo-Jo Hubbard, co-founder and CEO of Electron.

Electron is a technology scale-up whose focus is on accelerating the transition to affordable, clean power with its software platform, ElectronConnect. The company is working to transform how energy is traded, embedding greater flexibility in how, when and where power is consumed.

Explaining the need for greater flexibility, Hubbard says: “Our core belief is that the energy transition is going to be too expensive, meaning economic collapse, or too slow, meaning social collapse if we don't actually optimise how we consume or store it.”

With an increasing proportion of our power supply coming from variable and intermittent generation, such as solar and wind, flexibility offers a way to better marry supply and demand.

“Our flexibility market solution is about using existing generation and network capacity better,” says Hubbard. “We have to use the right power, in the right location, at the right time. In turn, that means grids can connect new, clean megawatts faster and see real GDP expansion.”

However, change doesn’t just happen. It needs to be made to happen.

“We believe flexibility can be encouraged through sharper time and location-based price-signals,” says Hubbard. The Electron platform makes that possible by enabling people to dial up and incentivise renewable energy consumption when clean energy is in abundance and dial it down when supply or grid capacity is scarcer.

Incentivising greater flexibility

“The system cost of your energy consumption is no longer about how much you use. It’s more about avoiding daily or regional peaks and how you can use energy flexibly — if there was a price signal to do so,” she says.

The change will require business models and incentives in the energy sector to evolve and catch up with the technology, Hubbard believes.

However, Electron does already work with half of the UK’s distribution network operators. This signifies that finding ways to increase the use of cheap, clean power, through greater flexibility and storage is becoming more critical by the day, as future energy consumption forecasts soar, and grids become more congested.

“Flexibility is by far the cheapest, fastest form of additional capacity,” she says, while acknowledging fossil fuels — particularly gas — will still have a vital role to play in the next stage of the energy transition and charting a credible path to net zero.

Driving international competitiveness

“The utility industry has been this very boring, stable thing for 20 years, but now we've moved from talking about efficiency to talking about massive load growth from industry reshoring, data centres and AI,” says Hubbard.

Hubbard says the ability to service that demand effectively and cost-efficiently will increasingly be a factor in establishing how competitive economies are on the world stage. This is especially true with energy-hungry data centres being so integral to how businesses — and whole industries — create value.

“Energy accounts for about 2% of GDP and yet it creates more than 90% of it. So, energy security doesn't just mean shoring us up against a reliance on Russian gas. It means protecting the right to compete in international business, as a country. And being competitive means doing what you can to reduce the input costs. The UK, US, and Central Europe will never have the cheapest workforce, so we need to bring down the cost of energy.”

However, developing energy security while not derailing net zero commitments will require the narrative around energy to mature beyond “the classic energy trilemma”, says Hubbard. This states “you can have really secure energy, or really clean energy, or really low-cost energy”.

“But those things don’t have to be mutually exclusive in a more cost-reflective market,” she says.

Securing the right talent

As Electron moves further along its path from award-winning to contract-winning, Hubbard says she has been reassured by the quality of talent the business has been able to hire — often cited as a sticking point for other tech-powered businesses.

“We’ve actually found that the market for talent has been very strong in the last few years,” she says, attributing this, in part, to offering careers “that are relevant to something people are passionate about” in enabling greener energy use.

Hubbard says she has also seen a disproportionate number of CVs from female technologists to the point they outnumbered male candidates at times. “Perhaps because I’m a female CEO, women can see very clearly this is a business where they can progress, as can anybody with the skills and the passion to help us deliver on our vision.”

Where Hubbard does see challenges for start-up and scale-up businesses in the UK, which could have a longer-term impact on the UK competitiveness and innovation, is in securing investment. She says recent years have seen a move away from “investing in what’s on a PowerPoint deck”. That could mean progressive, yet unproven ideas and innovations potentially struggle to get out of the starting blocks.

“It really is a very, very different investor appetite,” she says. “It's harder to sell the vision for something that will be really valuable in the future. You must have a vision that includes how you can monetise it now.”

Those first four years of winning awards, but no contracts, simply wouldn’t be enough now to court investment, she says. It’s continuing to win real commercial contracts that matters, both for the Electron business and its vision for an energy abundant future.