In “Innovations In Cleantech For A Sustainable Future,” guest Joe Warren, Cleantech Entrepreneur, takes a look back at his journey through the clean energy landscape, from starting out in the sector 18 years ago to setting up his own business in the energy storage market.
With host, Andrew White, he discusses how Cleantech has evolved since the start of the 21st century, when net zero was not even on the horizon yet and the challenges he faced entering an early-stage market, and how there is still great potential for future innovation to overhaul the way we power our world.
Delving into his own experience with innovating in the sector, we gain a first-hand insight into how much intellectual property matters. How much scrutiny do investors give to your patent portfolio? Is it a good idea to rely on trade secrets? What is the balance between protecting your invention and not disclosing too much in the public domain?
Find out by watching the full episode below.
You can listen to the episode on Spotify here.
Episode summary
Topics discussed🎙️
- How Joe founded his own company, after a shift from powering data centres to cleantech, and the early challenges of building a startup from product development to securing capital.
- His experience with gaining finance as an early-stage business, including bootstrapping, grants from government schemes, angel investors, as well as the role IP plays.
- The balance between patents and trade secrets, the evolution of a company’s IP portfolio, and how cloud-based services and AI affect IP strategy.
- How the energy storage market has evolved, how battery costs have fallen and what it takes to find the right product-market fit over time.
- The future of cleantech innovation, from emerging trends like grid flexibility, vehicle-to-grid technology, and sodium-ion and solid-state batteries to the need to decarbonise heat and capture carbon.
Key takeaways💡
- Early support can be decisive: Joe credits incubators, Innovate UK grants and early crowdfunding with helping the company he founded through the startup phase.
- Hardware startups must manage IP actively: Powervault’s IP strategy evolved from focusing on patents to valuing accumulated know-how, trade secrets and trade marks.
- The cost curve has flipped in cleantech: What was once an expensive niche is now mainstream – solar and storage is becoming a “no-brainer” for many UK homeowners.
- Cloud-based systems protect IP differently: The cloud allows technology or data to be stored in the cloud rather than in the product, meaning it can be kept secret and is harder to reverse.
- The next wave of cleantech is coming fast: With electricity nearly decarbonised, innovation is now moving toward heat, carbon capture and safer, cheaper batteries.
Notable quotes🔊
- “If you think back to where we were 18 years ago, we weren’t even thinking about net zero. I think there was less than a gigawatt of wind on the grid when I started and now we’ve got tens of gigawatts. The grid was quite carbon-intensive, so around 30% to 40% of our carbon emissions came from electricity and in the next five years the ambition is to reduce that down to zero or near enough zero. So we’re really in the middle of an amazing transformational journey.”
- “Everybody says in business: cash and customers are the two most important things, but I actually think there’s probably four things. You need to get that investment, getting access to grant funding is really key. You also need to have customers, which means that there needs to be a market. People need to understand that there’s a need for your product. And then, the team that are going to help take that idea and turn it into reality.”
- “The question is the trade-off between effectively disclosing everything when you issue a patent and keeping that information internal and secret. Now, a lot of services might be in the cloud, so we don’t necessarily put the technology into the product and, therefore, it’s much harder to reverse engineer it.”
- “We already have tens of gigawatts on the system and plans to put another 50, 60GW on over the next 10 to 20 years. And that’s going to mean that there’s suddenly far too much energy. Other times there’ll be too little. I think what we’re going to, therefore, see is the need for more flexibility in the system and that flexibility can come from a number of places. Obviously, batteries, like the ones we sell at Powervault, are very important. “
