Electron’s flexibility platform gets £4 million boost

UK blockchain pioneer Electron has secured £4 million ($5 million) in investment funding to grow the use of its ElectronConnect flexibility market platform.

The investment round, which was led by East Innovate, the venture capital arm of quantitative commodity, technology and research company East Alpha, is intended to support the growth of Electron’s team and further product development as well as enable expansion in the UK, Europe and North America.

ElectronConnect is designed for network operators and municipal suppliers to launch and operate local flexibility markets at scale, with optimisation of both variable renewable power and network capacity based on time and location – key for reducing network congestion and connecting more clean technologies to the grid and thus achieving net zero.

“We believe that time and location-based markets for energy and flexibility are foundational to the fastest, cleanest path to net zero energy. But, when Electron started developing these markets six years ago, the policies, business models and technologies required to support such markets were still unclear,” says Jo-Jo Hubbard, CEO of Electron.

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Fast forward to today, many of the world’s major economies have already reached 50%+ variable renewable generation; storage technologies have reached inflection point; over 1 million electric vehicles are already on the road; and increasingly congested networks have risen to the top of political agendas, she continues.

“There has never been a clearer need or mandate to deploy flexibility markets at scale. This is the inflection point for which we developed ElectronConnect. This funding brings us the resources to scale, as well as the right partners, insight and support on that journey.”

ElectronConnect was developed in partnership with utility partners in several countries, with some recent initiatives including project TraDER, which developed a live local energy trading market in the Orkney Islands, and project Artemis, which demonstrated the potential of flexibility trading in South Korea.

Electron states that its second-generation, software-based tool enables more dynamic market pricing and deeper integration with network control systems, using a technology-first approach to unlock the scale needed, whilst delivering an improved experience for market operators, providers and end consumers.

Other partners in the investment round were Riverstone, Nesta and One Planet Capital.