Cutting Energy Costs

A Virgin Startup backed renewable energy firm aims to provide energy self-sufficiency to homeowners and cut their electricity bills by up to 80 per cent.

Resilience Energy aims to become the “Uber of the electricity industry” by giving customers the hardware, software and contracts they need to produce, store and sell renewable energy, and an app to monitor the system’s performance.

Customers will be able to sell excess electricity on the spot market and excess battery capacity to the National Grid to help balance the grid’s energy supplies. This will allowResilience users to turn their homes into “personal power stations” and help the UK reach its challenging carbon reduction target.

The National Grid last year warned that a huge rollout of electric vehicles (EVs) could spark a 25 per cent increase in peak electricity demand by 2050, with EV ownership predicted to rise to 36 million by 2040.

Resilience plans to support the influx of electric vehicles and has “future-proofed” its system to allow for the integration of emerging technology, such as heat pumps, EV chargers and electric panel heaters.

Resilience founder and CEO Loic Hares spent years working for the UK’s ‘Big Six’ energy providers before moving his focus to energy startups in 2014. He now hopes to shake up the monopoly of the Big Six.

“Resilience aims to be the largest decentralised renewable energy generator – the Uber of the electricity industry – and cut the electricity bills of homeowners by up to 80 per cent”, said Hares.

“We’ll give homeowners everything they need to generate and store energy, use what they need on-demand, and sell the excess on the spot market, or to the National Grid to help it balance energy supplies.

“We’ll also be able to monitor each system in real-time to spot faults ahead of customers, and the system has been future-proofed to ensure compatibility with EV chargers and other technology.”

Hares says that the system’s algorithm has been designed to maximise homeowner savings and revenue, and customers can monitor this performance via a dedicated app.

Energy consumers will then be able “to turn their homes personal power stations and stop relying on the same old tariffs offered by the Big Six”, said Hares.

“Our ultimate aim, though, is to play a huge role in helping the world move towards a greener and more sustainable future”, he added.

Hares has already won the support of Virgin Startup – which has agreed to provide Resilience with a loan – and has formed partnerships with BRE, Plug In Solar, GB-Sol, Powervault & KiWi Power.

By using KiWi Power to manage their larger contracts Resilience will gain easy access to the balancing market.

The Resilience system will cost between £7,750 and £13,500, have an eight-year payback and will return in the region of £6,000 over the system’s lifetime, according to Hares.

Hares is seeking to sell his system through housing providers and constructors, energy suppliers, and EV and charge point manufacturers.

He plans to target the 23 million detached, semi-detached and terraced UK homes that used traditional energy suppliers in 2017, as well as self- and custom-build properties – which are forecasted to grow 41 per cent by 2020 – and the 800,000 homes with solar PV panels.

Hares, who has also advised many leading private equity and venture capital firms on purchases in the UK energy industry, will soon launch an equity crowdfunding campaign on Crowdcube to fund a specialist sales manager for Resilience.

He is inviting potential customers and investors to come and witness his system firsthand at a test facility in the world-renowned BRE Innovation Park in Motherwell, near Glasgow.