Our new series of blog posts introduces this year’s participants of Japan Energy Challenge. Up next is Patrick Caiger-Smith, CEO of Green Energy Options (GEO), he’ll be discussing the role his company can play in the future of Japan’s energy markets.
GEO focuses on the energy element of the smart home. Their aim is to use their smart energy devices to help customers save money on their energy bills. Through the smart-meter rollout, more than 5 million smart meters have been installed in UK homes, Green Energy Options intends to enable these customers to engage more actively with their smart systems. In this article we’ll be going over what makes GEO stand out from the competition.
Can you tell us a bit about the company and its founders?
In 2006 when I started geo, virtually nobody understood what happened to energy in their homes – consumers just paid the bill, which was generally just an estimate of consumption. Our objective was to help educate householders about how to save energy and thus reduce carbon emissions from their homes. We wished to do this on scale so have always seen the energy Suppliers as our natural channel partners. Over the last 13 years we have built a strong and rapidly expanding business which covers all areas of home energy management, from visualisation displays and apps to heating and water control systems and in the near future, our platform and consumer base will be using AI to integrate advanced optimisation of home battery storage and solar with the need to charge EVs in the home. All the products and services we offer today can be connected to our cloud platform and collect where our data scientists build insights for consumers and B2B customers alike. We now employ around 120 staff and have sales of circa £30m.
How does your solution fit within the wider trends of Digitalisation and Decarbonisation in the energy sector?
geo is a thought leader in the field of residential energy management and has been very actively involved as an integrator of in home equipment with new services providing demand flexibility. geo is currently trialling battery storage and EV charge station integration together with heating control and solar in a solution that integrates with demand flexibility aggregators. This is pioneering work in the field of full home automation.
Are there milestones you are particularly proud to have achieved as a company?
Reaching profitability 5 years ago was a major milestone. Since then we have been in the UK TechTrack 100 fastest growing technology companies for three years and have received the Queen’s Award for Innovation in 2017. Almost all our products have achieved innovation awards at the time they were launched.
Let’s look at Japan Energy Challenge’s scope: what specifically attracted you about the prospect of expanding to the Japanese market?
We are particularly interested in the Japanese market because of the interest in Japan in technical solutions and because it could help us to develop more advanced solutions with wider appeal.
And finally, how will your solution promote the expansion and modernisation of the Japanese energy sector?
The UK market has some interesting and advanced approaches to both electricity and gas metering and control. It may be that the learnings from big scale deployments in the UK are useful in their application in the Japanese market. We hope so!
Green Energy Options will be taking part in Japan Energy Challenge in London this year, you can read about the other companies taking part in this year’s edition here. You can also find out more about the program, ventures and sponsors by clicking the links.
