Who is FLEX Co-Founder Energy Unlocked?
Energy Unlocked is a company that brings together future energy solutions with the mission of solving climate change. They are one of the co-founders behind The FLEX Network, the first market offer that pays customers for shifting consumption to clean power — avoiding dirty, polluting electricity with a digital token.
Molly Webb, the founder of Energy Unlocked, driven by a mission to solve climate change, has spent over 15 years working in market acceleration and advocacy for global innovation in tech, climate change, smart cities and energy, working in partnership with companies and cities.
For Molly the idea for Energy Unlocked began 10 years ago, when writing the SMART 2020 report at The Climate Group, an international NGO. The report sets out a digital energy vision to achieve €600 billion in energy savings by 2020, including smart grids, buildings and transport.
Her work with large companies like Cisco, Google, BT, Intel or Johnson Controls as well as new start-ups (see EPIC 100), looked at the opportunities for smart analytics, monitoring and control, combined with innovative digital energy business models, to accelerate energy savings and carbon reductions across different business sectors and cities. But even these innovators struggle with the scale of acceleration required to match ambitious climate change targets.
The idea for Energy Unlocked came from the urgency of that challenge of acceleration. Globally, by uniting innovators around the world with an aligned mission for energy productivity, climate and energy transition, we could have an outsized impact on achieving a low carbon future.
How Energy Unlocked is speeding up the change
Change in energy markets from an innovator’s perspective is painfully, crushingly, slow. How can a company justify spending half of its time in conversations that may not yield results for many years, while their commercial operations suffer?
When setting up Energy Unlocked in 2015, seed-funded by Tempus Energy, they were faced with the frustrating situation that decarbonisation just wasn’t happening fast enough and there were too many obstacles in the way.
Having technology isn’t enough. We already have exponential growth in solar power, rapidly reducing costs of battery storage allowing electrification of transport, and digital capability through smart meter deployments. But still we are not reaching our full capacity to decarbonize as quickly as possible.
The technologies available today should be pushing the energy system to a tipping point of peaking carbon emissions. But unfortunately, renewables alone do not deliver decarbonisation.
The economic problem…
Intermittent renewables are not always ‘on’. And because of this, we build ‘backup’ fossil fuel generation for the times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
We build our grids for peak capacity (for instance, New York state operates at just 54% utilisation) and this increases costs for consumers who pay for the whole system all year long, in case we need it for those few hottest or coldest days.
A key technology Energy Unlocked has championed from the start has been demand flexibility — it is the technology that allows us to control energy demand on the grid in times of stress so we don’t need to rely on back up fossil fuel generation.
The potential savings of using this technology are enormous and well documented (conservatively worth hundreds of billions in 2040 according to the International Energy Agency), but the current problem we have with demand flexibility is that we need buy in from the consumer to be able to utilize it fully — without a reward mechanism for unlocking flexible devices we are blocked from fully unleashing its potential.
The urgent solution….
Working alongside Tempus Energy, Energy Unlocked has co-founded the FLEX Network to support decarbonisation through flexibility and will grow a network of the companies that can reward customers for being flexible.
With FLEX Network, we solve the problem of slow market change by providing a token outside of the current energy system that pays devices to be flexible. The savings made using demand flexibility fund the token.
Watch Molly talk to Bitcoin magazine about FLEX here.
Other projects by Energy Unlocked
Energy Unlocked also convenes and runs programs to accelerate adoption of these new solutions by companies and public sector organisations. Their team and partners have been scanning the globe for innovative solutions and matching them to market needs, creating opportunities for innovator’s voices to change policy and market design (check out http://www.flexlondon.org). Their work shows that innovation is possible — solutions can be relied upon to deliver commercial value — even in a system as critical to our economies as the power sector.
If you want to find out more about what we are doing with FLEX Token, you can keep up to date through signing up on our website , or through our social media channels: Facebook and Twitter.
