Energeo tell us about their aspirations for Data Pitch and beyond.

 The EU energy market is faced with the challenge to meet the ever growing demand for energy, which is set to increase by a third by 2040, while addressing the need for rapid decarbonisation to avoid climate change.

UK-based startup Energeo aims to transform energy strategies from community to national levels to encourage more efficient energy use, and a shift towards lower carbon energy sources. We spoke to Energeo CEO Ian Dee about their plans for Data Pitch.

What do you hope to achieve on the Data Pitch accelerator?

We hope to develop a SaaS platform to enable stakeholders to more rapidly and cost-effectively identify opportunities to implement low carbon and renewable energy technology, while simultaneously being able to measure and assess impact on the low voltage power network.

What shared data will you work with and how will you use it?

We will be working with near real-time low voltage substation data on the Energy challenge (increasing efficient energy creation and use). This data has been shared through the Western Power Distributions OpenLV programme.

This data will help us to model the impact of low carbon technology on low voltage grids, which we use to assess and identify the best technology mix to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions, and ensure that grid constraints are managed.

Why do you think it is important for startups to work with large scale data providers?

Large data providers often lack the agility and innovation culture of SMEs and startups, while smaller organisations lack the resources and capacity to collate and curate large datasets. By combining these two elements, new insights from existing data can be extracted to deliver real-world impact.

What’s the best thing about working with data?

Problem solving! With geospatial data we can facilitate visualisation and contextualisation by presenting data and analysis results in aesthetically pleasing map formats that are easy for users to understand, and give a clear view of the ‘bigger picture’.

If you could change one thing about the data ecosystem what would it be?

There needs to be more openness. Open data has played an enormous role in reducing the risk to startups and SMEs when developing new products and services. An increased openness around data (privacy and ethics notwithstanding) could ensure that more end users – and therefore citizens – could benefit from the innovations often stunted by prohibitively-priced commercial data or complicated commercial data agreements.