The Spärck scholarship launched a few weeks ago at the Manchester science & industry museum. DSIT are sponsoring 80 MSc students studying AI over the next year and part of the two-day launch was a Hackathon for the students to work with businesses supporting the scholarship on a tailored
If you've seen me at events this summer I've quite often referred to grid frequency, grid balancing and system inertia. Keeping the grid at around 50Hz is essential so there's a lot of forecasting and planning months, weeks, days in advance and finally in-
During the first two weeks of July I had the pleasure of running a couple of mini hackathons with GCSE students in our Slough research centre and Manchester office. I started with a 30 minute primer of the world of smart energy tech - everything from how the grid is evolving
At the Energy Tech Summit yesterday I published a quick video about our new export tariff, Prime Outgoing. Octopus Prime - almost out now. If you’ve got a decent size battery it probably makes more sense to use our peak time export tariff. And it’s great for the grid
Electricity is produced by generators, or Power Plants; coal, gas, solar, wind, nuclear etc. A Virtual Power Plant (VPP) doesn't produce any electricity. Instead it's a collection of electrical assets that can react to requests for more or less generation (or demand) on the grid and
Talking Clock 00:00:00 ▶ Speak the Time
At last, we're getting some sunny days and a decent amount of solar but I've always wondered why we only get 10% production in the depths of winter compared to the summer when daylight hours are a bit less than half. In January the Earth is
After what feels like years of hype, AI is here and it's magic. In fact any new technology that feels like magic proves there's been a jump in innovation. If you're not sure even just going to https://gemini.google.com/app and asking
{Yes, it's an AI generated image of solar being stored in a bank vault ;) } Most home solar systems will export on sunny days; our system regularly exports 20+ kWh on a summers day. But solar systems in the UK generate 15% to 20% of their summer output in
On a Sunday evening you get one of these to exercise your brain. The issue here is that if you want to charge an electric car using any energy supplier's smart tariff low rate period often the wiring means the car will first draw energy from the home
But only with a solar system. Our home battery has stored and supplied almost exactly a quarter of our annual electricity use to the 1st October 2025. We've also exported surplus solar, and run some grid-trade during March to September too. Our system is a 5kWp solar
We love trees and we love wind turbines. So we’ve created some tech that combines the two in order to bring invisible renewable energy to a tree near you. I’m not talking about sticking a wind turbine poking out of the top of a tree - that would be