Molly Webb

Molly Webb is Founder of Energy Unlocked, an energy market accelerator focused on new market entrants achieving a low cost, renewable, resilient energy system, and Co-Founder of  PeerCo, a platform which boosts carbon impact for businesses through digital Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (Molly on LinkedIn).

We cover (amongst many things!):
-How the Energy Unlocked cam out of Molly's work at the Climate Group, and her diagnosis of the challenges for innovating in energy.
-How Energy Unlocked is a market accelerator, not a business accelerator. Molly is focussing on the conditions that would make it possible for multiple start-ups to succeed.
-One of the methods Energy Unlimited uses is Open Innovation.
-Molly also uses a strategy approach called 'Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation' (PDIA).
-Relate the Energy Unlimited approach to the module's innovation typology.
-If the incentives in the energy market were there, then we'd be fast on our way to a sustainable future already.
-There has been a shift to government-led industrial strategy.
-The Carbon Flex project, which asked asked the question 'Are we investing in the right things at local level to decarbonise the grid faster?'.
-Part of accelerating a market is breaking new ground which is too risky for funding which wants a secure and certain return. Which makes it difficult!
-How understandings of the way energy markets work are very entrenched by how they happen to work now, rather than how they might work if you change the incentives.
-Addressing that inertia and entrenched situation requires exploring. Hence the need for Energy Unlocked.
-The importance of making sure the problem definition is not constrained by the understanding of what is currently possible.
-How important he demand side of the energy markets are, and how this is under-explored in policy, philanthropic funding and investment.

This is part of a series of interviews about innovation for sustainability conducted for the UCL Institute for Sustainable Resources, as a contribution to a module in this Masters. You can find out more about these interviews, and the module, here.

Transcript

Molly Webb: 0:00

Ah

David Bent-Hazelwood: 0:07

this is one of several interviews on innovation, business and sustainability for the students studying the MSc in sustainable resources at UCL. My name is David bent, and I'm an honorary lecturer at the UCL Institute for Sustainable resources, and CO lead a module on innovation, business and sustainability. Most of the course gives people the latest economic theory, research findings and insight these 30 minute interviews are with practitioners to give some of the grit under the fingernails of innovating for sustainability today, I'm delighted to say we're joined by Molly Webb, who is the founder of energy unlocked, and the co founder of pure carbon Hello, money. Hello, hello. So the first question is, what is your role and organisation?

Molly Webb: 0:52

Well, I am a founder of two organisations. One is a not for profit I founded in 2015. At cop 21, in Paris, we launched it there. So right at the end of 2015. And the other is a startup that just was incorporated in 2023, though, came out of work that I've been doing since about 2017.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 1:23

And so for energy unlocked, which is that that's the 2015. One, just give us a sense of what is what is what is Energy Unlocked, what was the get up to you.

Molly Webb: 1:33

So I set it up as a not for profit after working at the Climate Group, which is an international NGO, also founded here in London in 2004. That still is working with companies and regional governments to advance action on climate change. And so I'd worked at the Climate Group since 2007. And there I was running the SMART Technologies area. So I learned everything I know, about advocacy, I learned this started to learn there. And I was focused on digital and telecommunications industries, how to apply those products and services to climate change challenges. So not just looking at the direct footprint or the negative impacts of telecoms networks and data centres, but looking at how you would apply all of those digital capabilities to climate challenges. And what I was finding was that working with smaller companies, so I was working with Google, Cisco, Intel, working with smaller companies was not what the sort of what our organisation was set up to do. So after doing a short secondment, with the founder of Skypes, philanthropic organisation, I identified a number of areas of innovation that I thought climate philanthropists should be looking at and one was startups and supporting them to advance at the pace that they wanted to advance but in a way that was solving societal challenges at the same time, and I wanted to focus on energy because energy is such a critical, you know, area of decarbonisation. So when I set up, energy unlocked in 2015, it was really to find a model to be able to support startups to punch above their weight. Yeah, so I guess that's, that's

David Bent-Hazelwood: 3:46

the engine? And is it? Is it right to think of it as of energy and not as an energy market accelerator? So you're working with startups? I mean, do you have a particular often an accelerator will have, like a range of start, like in terms of the maturity of the lifecycle of a startup? So do you take precede? Or do they need to be have funding to the pre revenue to have revenue? When do you start working with them?

Molly Webb: 4:14

So it's interesting, I called energy unlocked market accelerator when I started it, meaning that I didn't want to focus on just Business Acceleration. I wanted to focus on the sort of conditions that would make it possible for multiple startups to succeed in this space. And energy is a very particular space, as we know, it's very regulated, highly scrutinised lots of public tension on it if the political winds change. Governments react with crazy policies, or statements. So it's not an easy sector to be innovative in So, what I was focused on with energy unlocked was trying to link those, what we typically call the push of r&d investment into companies and tech, as well as the pull policies, those, you know, Contracts for Difference famously in this country to support wind power. So some of the policies that pull through businesses, not just push them into the market and and so energy unlocked set up a number of started by setting up a Innovation Challenge. And we were lucky that the climate funder at the time funded energy unlock to do the startup kind of hyping up the startups finding 100 100 of those hyping up the or investing in a different organisation to support government focused advocacy around energy productivity. So we were looking for startups that could do energy productivity. Another organisation was looking at government targeted advocacy, and another the Climate Group, in fact, where I'd left was focused on the corporate networks, so the bit bigger businesses and how they would also be involved in doubling energy productivity. So you could see the funder had a very enlightened view of how to put together this mix of advocacy. But we've also since then run innovation challenges. Aside from innovation challenges, we've run the kind of corporate open innovation side where we had all the startups in our database, so let's get companies to identify problems, and then we find startups to meet those. And then we've also done design of programmes for cities on behalf of cities. How do they understand their city level role in facilitating markets. And so I'd say that the common thread is behind are the energy unlocked methods, because there isn't one quick cookie cutter innovation method we're using. The common thread is problem driven. So solutions, or there's actually a Harvard developed sort of theory called problem driven, I want to say iterative assessment PDCA, which I might be getting wrong. But I really love this PDA framework, because it's about building capacity in governments, but I've applied it kind of more broadly, to be able to identify your own challenges, and therefore solve them yourself through any number of means required sort of a facilitation process. Right. So that's what I think is the common thing is, you know, we don't all have the same problem. So identify yours well enough that an innovative solution is possible. Yeah. Identify it in such a way that an innovation is possible. Yes, so I'd say we're not a typical accelerator as in, we run cohorts of companies that we then look for investment for, we're much more about the policy side. So in in, you know, in the case of a programme we've run in London, which I can talk more about called Flex London, we put problem, problem owners together with solutions, we watched them struggle to meet in an innovative solution in the middle. And then we fed that learning back to city and national level.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 8:59

So whilst you've been talking, I've had a chance to look up what the the I Can DBIA problem driven, iterative adaptation is not assessing very close, and I'll put the link in the show notes to that. And I think the other thing to just take out of your answer there is I was wrong about a new about typically, when we think about an accelerator, we think about a body which is accelerating individual entrepreneurs and startups but but your focus and focus is different. It's the energy market as a whole. And, and of course, each energy market and each part of the world is different, hence the need for that very context driven well, what's the problem here specifically? And in the in the module, we we have a sort of typography of innovation based on different levels starting at selling a product, what your meeting process how you're making it, but an extending that up into your industry. Setting and your political economy. So most innovation taxonomies don't think out at that level. But I think that Mises means that they miss a trick. And that's the trick that you're pursuing your focus there is on the industry or settings, changing the energy markets, so that the pros sustainability, the climate change, acting and improving businesses are the most successful. And

Molly Webb: 10:23

yeah, and we can't, you know, I think it's, it's, it's hard to change the market takes too long, right. So most startups end up changing themselves to fit the market. And Jeff Hardy from Imperial has done a great visual of a whole like zoo of different kinds of animals. And as soon as they hit the energy market, they go into this funnel, and they all come out of dog. It's so perfect, because my experience of the Climate Group in the early 2000s was, oh, all these exciting startups. And then I watched them have to pivot about three times a year to match the whims of, you know, a new government announcement. And then I'd watched them say, oh, like, oh, power is, was starting out then. And they said, we'll save 20% of everyone's energy off everyone's energy bills. And then it was something more like 2% By the time they actually got their service to market. And then they were bought by Oracle. And I remember talking to them, and they were still trying to do Time Of Use tariffs. You know, a couple of years ago, when you think how long and it took and how ambitious they were, I was just watching that happen over and over again. And so I thought, we've got to be able to do something now have we succeeded as Energen locked in changing that, I think it takes so much longer than we think to, to even when we're explicitly saying the whole point is we have to move faster. So I don't know if we've necessarily succeeded in changing market conditions faster, but at least, we're aiming to call that out, as opposed to saying, Hey, you start up, you'd better figure out how to fit into the existing market in 18 months, you're you're you're not 10x, you're your VCs investment, you're out of here. We're coming at it from kind of a different perspective. Absolutely.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 12:23

And so that speaks to a couple of different themes in previous interviews, and also in the module itself, one of which is those existing marking market incentives. If those were enough to get us to a sustainable future, then we'd be headed in that direction. So those are a very significant block to do with the way their market functions at the moment and relying on process penalty innovations to succeed in the existing market conditions is not going to get us where we need to get to you. It another kind of theme is that it's better to do the right thing badly to them to do the wrong thing well, so because if you're doing the right thing badly, at least, then you get a chance to improve, you're doing the right thing. If you're doing the wrong thing. Well, how good you get at it, it's still the wrong thing. And so I think they feel like you're not achieving very much. But at least you're trying to do something which is worth doing. And of course, the big change, small comfort. And then the other change in the last sort of 15 years is that when you are the Climate Group and I was a forum for the future, the idea of industrial strategy in the UK or the US was more or less forbidden. But now it's very much a law mod. And and so there is much more willingness to act dynamically to do more than just fix market failures, but also to shape market directions to use Mariana MasterCards, who's kind of term and she uses mission a huge fan. Yeah. And so there is there's a receptiveness. And there have been legislation like in the US the inflation Reduction Act, and other things, too, which show were what as MSR calls the catalytic government approach, which is much more friendly to let shape market so we get the innovations we need. I want to go into your stories in a second. But before we get there, one last question and sort of framing which is about how do you define sustainability? Or how do you define what makes up by in the case of an energy market? How do we know if we have an energy market which is serving the future we want from your point of view?

Molly Webb: 14:37

Yeah, you've touched on what I think sustainability is in a way that were maybe my my hesitation in using the word sustainable, to describe what I think is needed to get to really tackle climate change. So I see that We don't have a sustainable energy system now. We, we have to, you know, electrify everything get more efficient. We have to be doing all of the deploying new technologies as well as existing ones, all at the same time. And we sort of assume that taking a risk averse approach is okay, but the risk averse approach is worse than taking a more proactive approach. So I think with sustainability, it's often in our minds that we're, we need to stay in balance, stay where we are, whereas right where we are now, so bad, that we kind of don't want to be sustaining much of it. But always sustainability, for me has been about environmental sustainability. I mean, I think that in the late 90s, the sort of Natural Capitalism, the link to being able to be environmental, and make money was very much how the Climate Group framed things and how we thought we were going to achieve more than if we framed it as environment is against economic sustainability. But I think we're now I'm now at the point and it's probably where we'll end up is sort of where to go next. I very much think the governance part of it is needs focus. So I'm, I'm evolving, not because we've solved the environmental or economic sustainability, but just because if we haven't got the rules of the game, right, we may not get the environmental and social, which is sort of what you've touched on by saying, we can't just continue to do really good innovation in the current conditions. So I'm, I'm very aligned with that thinking. Excellent.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 17:05

So the next question is about stories that are a good example of your work. And you've already highlighted some potential stories. So mentioned flex London, there is innovation challenges, open innovation approaches, and maybe the city design programme is the same as excellent, I'd say, your choice, what story would you like to tell us first?

Molly Webb: 17:25

So, I mean, I can link the stories, the there was a key question that I've been orienting a lot of the work around is, are we investing in the right things in cities, to decarbonize the grid to drive energy transitions. Because a lot of the focus on energy systems changes on the supply side of energy. And because I was a digital person in the beginning, way back since 1999, I was always thinking about the lots of the small things that could aggregate up into bigger things. The Long Tail, remember,

David Bent-Hazelwood: 18:15

feels like a long time ago, that was, you

Molly Webb: 18:19

know, a part of the, what I experienced in my beginning of my work life was watching those dynamics begin to to be reality, where, you know, you'd suddenly we had the ability to produce content on the internet, you know, and so I, you know, working in for an internet company in 2000, I had to try and harness this potential, it was not really there yet, but you were starting to think this way. So my approach was always, we should be harnessing lots of small actions to add up to more than the sum of their parts. And there was in 2015, in the UK, Goron and Imperial, among others, wrote a quantified the value of what we call demand side flexibility, which is being able to turn up your building or turn down your building, not just turn it down, being able to add storage, battery storage or other storage to do that, being able to value kind of what's going on behind the metre as part of a system, you know, just like efficiency, makes the whole system smaller, and we all pay less. So does flexibility in a world when we have a lot of renewable supply, which means that we have this intermittency. So we have 1000s and 1000s of hours potentially coming where it's too windy, and we don't have enough demand or it's, we have too much demand and not enough wind and sun. And so that demand side flexibility is worth billions to the system, but it was slow to happen. So we set up a programme called Flex London and had Greater London Authority funding to facilitate the whole value chain of companies, from aggregators, to IoT companies to energy management, software companies and buildings, the whole value chain of companies that would have to come together, be interoperable, in order to flex the demand of London, to meet the needs of the grid, or some, you know, not curtailing wind, when it was plentiful. So that idea of demand side flexibility kind of makes sense it is at a system level, but at an individual level, my priorities are different. So if I'm a commercial building, and I have to pay rent, and I have to pay other, you know, costs of my energy bill is a tiny bit of it. And if UK Power Networks is going to pay me a little bit more to be flexible, and that's going to interrupt, make me turn off my lights at 6pm. When my staff is still in the in the building, why would I do that? So we ran this programme found a lot of those barriers, contradictory business priorities to what the energy system needs, contradicting, you know, net zero goals, compared to what the business needed. And we had lots of lack of data sharing. And so that programme found some interest in overcoming those barriers in the market itself without having to change anything, but mostly it found barriers. So then we decided, okay, out of that, people are saying their other business priorities are net zero. If you're a public sector, or borough or company, you need to go net zero or demonstrate you're going Net Zero soon. So why don't we see if the carbon value flexibility is the same as the energy value flexibility? And that was a different question to ask. And we started looking at how to quantify that. And that led us into a whole different perspective on the same problem that people have been wrestling with, which is how do we get more demand side flexibility for the energy system. And so that's second project was philanthropically funded it built on the city funded project. And we were able to kind of string them together and get new insights and challenge the view on our cost and carbon correlated in the energy system. And we didn't find that they were right, not only at wholesale price level, where they're only correlated half the time, if that, but at retail price level, or even, you know, in the way we procure energy, as a borough. Someone in Central, you know, the central team is procuring energy for the social housing provider for the lighting for the commercial buildings, it is not cognizant of need or the use of time of place. So we found that this lack of correlation means that our assumption is we're saving carbon when we save costs. But it's not the case. Right? So then we moved on to a programme, which was actually funded by Google, through C 40. Cities, the big cities network, looking at the role of cities in 24/7, carbon free energy, which is just a word to say, let's value the match of demand and supply every hour in our markets. And because we've done all this hourly carbon accounting of flexibility in order to understand the value of carbon, from flexing, we suddenly thought, Oh, well, we have a really good insight into this. And so London was able to be the first city to do this pilot design around being a 24/7 carbon free city. That is what has led to spinning out pure carbon, the technology company to build the software to be able to support cities to do this, to be able to understand, not the whole city, but owners of solar panels, building owners in cities to be able to say, am I actually saving carbon? When I operate my building? How to measure it, how to trigger carbon savings. So for example, Transport for London has a commercial building. They have combined heat and power in that building. Sometimes it's operating consuming gas when it could be operating on much lower carbon grid electricity so These are the choices that we're going to start to be able to make as we transition. And so the story of innovation is that we were able to kind of follow the problems, stay very focused on those problems, try and find appropriate solutions and challenge our own thinking, challenge our own assumptions. And then my process as a person is to say, is this not for profit, the right vehicle to do this work? Or should I set up something else? Or should I find some other organisation to do it, so some things are appropriate for cities to do? Some are appropriate for, for network operators to do some are appropriate for startups. So that's always how I'm thinking is I'm not really wedded to the organisational unit I'm in. I'm much more thinking like, what tool needs to be applied this time. And

David Bent-Hazelwood: 25:51

I think that speaks all the way back to how you describe the purpose of energy unlocked about accelerating the energy market. So it's about which what kind of intervention will make the difference on the problem we've addressed? Is all we've identified. Is it a policy thing, which probably can only be done by the city? Or maybe the national government, given how centralised the UK? Is? Is it is it the kind of thing which which you can put into standards and put into norms which everybody uses? Which may or may well be voluntary, but sort of half enforced by the power grid or by some other kind of actor? Or can it be created by having a startup that provides that as a service, and therefore sort of sidesteps the current problem, but and addresses it in new kind of way? And depending on the nature of the challenge, and the nature of the solution, that you're saying, we don't pre you're not pre cooking, what the form will be, you're saying, well, let's choose the form, which matches with the nature of the intervention. And it should go Yeah,

Molly Webb: 26:53

I think that's I love that idea. But in practice, it's hard. Yeah. You know, it's not, it's not like, I've chosen a stress free.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 27:06

Well, yes, particularly with, I suppose one of the things which is implied in a lot of what you said already. And you mentioned a couple of times is governments changing their mind? So an uncertain and rather volatile policy context, even is undermines the desire to invest and make these efforts? Because why would you invest when the government can just change them and remove the feed in tariff to use one example for about 1015 years ago, seemingly overnight with almost no, no lead time. And so that can remove the incentives for these very nascent and emerging markets. I

Molly Webb: 27:47

also like personally, and if you know, when people are looking at careers, I just have never had a career where I thought, I'm going to be a journalist, or I'm going to be an engineer. I've always been, what I would say is, I used to say, an advocacy person, but I'm actually an entrepreneur in the sense that I have to constantly think about what is the problem I'm solving? How am I gonna solve it? And find the money to do it? Yeah. So there's never comfortable, you're never comfortable? Because you're always challenging yourself. Yeah. So I don't recommend it's not for the faint hearted. But it's very interesting. Yeah. And as energy unlocked, I at 1.1 of my kind of amazed, more enlightened funders said, if you you know, maybe your goal with energy unlocked is to get people to steal your ideas, because you don't want to do everything twice, or three times, or four times. If you want to do it once, then you have to make sure someone steals it, and then they run with it, and they scale it. So so far, energy unlocked has been more in that space of saying, we'll try it, we'll be the fit that will try to do the thing that's hard. So people don't feel as scared of it, and then it can be replicated. And that's a theory of change in a way. But it also isn't, it means you're harder to fund weather because you're not only climate philanthropy material, you're not only government funding material, you know, you you're a mix and that just

David Bent-Hazelwood: 29:28

why no so you you're you're deliberately saying you'll do the breaking of new ground which is too risky for funding that is looking for our secure return and therefore your funding and investment like that. And then if you're willing for someone else to then having you broken the fast follower to then go okay, I know I can make money here. Then somebody else gets Is the upside of you breaking that new ground. So it's not like in a typical sort of venture builder kind of world, you'd say, well, we'll fund all this new stuff, and then one in 10 of that will come off and that one in 10, that comes off will be huge. You're deliberately saying, We exist to create an energy market, which is heading in the right direction, somebody else can make money out of that, but somebody has to take the risk of making that first change. And the for profit parts of the marketplace are not going to take that risk. And therefore, you have to assume the potential profits that might come for it, which makes it even harder to fund. Yeah, I think, I

Molly Webb: 30:38

think I think there is a model for doing some of that if, you know, in climate philanthropy, in theory, they don't take a lot of risks, but they should fund good governance work and policy work. So that's sort of where, you know, we we think energy unlocked needs to go now is to, you know, this, to me is, in a way, I've learned from doing this over the last seven, eight years, that it's easier to be something recognisable, so that it happens faster than it is to try and constantly explain why you're different and what it is you are. So yeah, it's a personal journey as well.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 31:23

I think the other thing, I just wanted to emphasise and caught a spirit earlier in your explanation. But this as we move into a world where renewables allows us to electrify very nearly everything, not quite everything pretty compared to currently very nearly everything. And I do remember, my old boss, Jonathan port, when I was a foreign teacher, coming back, this must be 15 years ago, coming back from a meeting with the minister. And the minister just not understanding that lots of lots of little bits of energy efficiency could add up to, to avoiding the need to build lots of new power stations. Exactly. Yeah. And and the, the dominant way of thinking about electricity provision, and energy provision in government and in business for the last six years has been, you only need to build a small number of very big power stations, and they all supply everybody with electricity they need. And we're heading to a world in which you build a very large number of solar, wind, and so on. And they each of those provide a small amount of power, but added up, they're making a great deal of power. And also we have because of the digital revolution, that disaggregation allows us to control every little thing a little bit. And that means you can flex your demand, you can flex your supply and match it so much better. But this, and that becomes instead of a small number of generators to a large number of users, it becomes a large number of generators to a large number of users who also are generators who also are flexible. And all of the industry and all of the policymakers and regulators are absolutely not used to that and barely know how to think about oh, historically, it's changing a little bit now. So that's one of the reasons why the marketplace is stuck is because all of the incentives, all the norms, all of the policies are set up for the previous technologies. Absolutely.

Molly Webb: 33:22

And we're still dealing with those sunk costs and legacy infrastructure that we need to pay back still. So I think I mean, that is the one focus of energy unlocked is recognised the demand side as a resource, it's infrastructure. It might have some generation, it might have some storage, but it's buildings, it's our roads with electric vehicle charging, this is infrastructure just as much as the big offshore wind farms or the big transmission lines. And we need to recognise it and fund it in that way. And it can't, we can't only fund that off the backs of consumers who happen to be able to do it, when you know, it suits them. We need to make sure they're getting access to being able to fund this infrastructure if if we want them to do it in their homes, or in often SMEs or in offices and cities in local areas. So that, you know, we call it the demand side. And this is the what we're going to work on is what is this narrative? How do we lift up this agenda so that we're, you just said it very concisely. How do we continue to make that not sound like a really complex, risky thing, but actually a way simpler thing to do, then, you know, how long do we think it's going to take to get permitting We have new transmission lines across pristine English countryside a long time. You know, how long do we think it's gonna take to get these massive projects funded and built a long time in the meantime, we could give, and how much value will you and I see if that we may see our costs increase and not feel the benefit. So the risk we take every time we consume fossil fuels, because we are living in a warming planet, we can't mitigate unless we're given the option to and that's also part of why this distributed demand side infrastructure needs to be accelerated, because then we are part of owning that transition. Yeah. So that's really what energy unlocked is there to do. And pure carbon is there to do the kind of instrument and technology to let everyone be part of getting some payback from that demand side infrastructure.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 36:00

And by giving everyone a role in the transition and benefits from the transition, then you'll truly have a more just transition, which is more likely to be politically stable, and therefore more likely to continue and happen over a long period of time. But yeah,

Molly Webb: 36:12

and resilient. I mean, we're quite, we're in unchartered territory in terms of what we're going to be facing. So we don't we don't know what the costs are going to be of, of some of the centralised infrastructure staying resilient in the face of these changes. So we need it for, you know, for very practical reasons, not just philosophical, ethical reasons, but I think we should have both, obviously, but maybe it's easier to weigh in on the practicality sometimes. Absolutely.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 36:51

I want to I want to keep going into innovation management, and what are the key methods and practices you use? And you've mentioned one already, the problem driven iterative appraisal, no, I've already got it wrong. Oh, no, no. Adaptation attention. Yeah. So but anyway, you can talk about that one or any other any methods use, which you could just give you all the highlights on what they are and why you would use them.

Molly Webb: 37:21

So that's a good one to use when the problem isn't well defined. And there's not a good consensus. And then we, so I like it, because contrasting that with, say corporate innovation, where you might or open innovation from, say a company I've, or a city, I've run, been part of programmes where if you just say to the city, tell us your problem, they might say anything from I need to remove chewing gum on the sidewalk to I need to completely revamp my transportation system. And so if you have a process for helping define problems, then you might get a better solution or a more appropriate solution. Whereas if you kind of leave it to, let's say, a company's own business units, and they they're thinking in the context of what they have to deliver already, and we need to do it a bit better, to your point before, then you might get an optimization or something slightly better, but not a real breakthrough. And so I would I like PDA as a way as a sort of way of thinking, because then you can apply, you know, some of the more familiar corporate open innovation, or does user centred design techniques, or any of these you can apply within that initial framing. So that's a tactic. I mean, we, we tend to use hackathons strategically, to say, Oh, it's a deadline, let's have a deadline to share data, because we find that sharing data is a major barrier to a lot of the red. And so having that sort of, let's figure out a way to just share for this limited period of time, under these limited conditions can really help. I love a good task force. I think, if I could recommend one thing too, you know, as a process, it's like set up a task force, invite different departments who haven't worked together before. And use the PDI process maybe but it's so simple, but it really allows you to say Oh, for a limited period of time on this limited topic, we're giving ourselves permission to change and collaborate and, and so I would say you know, the most boring way of talking about up, the things that I think have worked best, is like really good change management, just being on IT project managing, using agile as much as you can. Because you aren't going to know the answer, you know, having goals having what you'd love to get done. And what you what you have to get done being pretty clear. Yeah, so I could go on, but I think that's probably Yeah.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 40:28

What you were saying there might I think is it Henry Ford said that if it asked customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse and carriage. So making sure the problem definition is not constrained by the current understanding and current way of thinking is very important if you're wanting to have innovation, which is more than just incrementally improving the status quo. And on to our last few questions, what's the biggest challenges you face? And how do you overcome them?

Molly Webb: 40:59

I think I already said that. The biggest challenge is not being something clearly definable. So I've said is, are we a lab? Are we market accelerator? And that's been the biggest challenge, as well as I think is strength. But it's also been not easy in terms of sustained organisational funding. It means we're nimble, or we can bring together diverse interdisciplinary teams. It's really fun. But it comes with its level of uncertainty. Yeah.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 41:42

Great. Sounds like your solution at the moment is to fit into the categories that your funders understand and to become understandable. Is that the right way of thinking of it? Yeah, and

Molly Webb: 41:54

to. So maybe allow, you know, if if a startup is an understandable entity, and it has a certain way of getting funding, allow that to run a bit longer, and let that thing succeed, if it can, or fail. And then, you know, just clearly delineate each thing so that it has a little bit longer to grow and be sustained. So if there's a philanthropically funded piece around, building a narrative on demand side being as critical a piece of infrastructure as supply in the new energy world, let that run a bit longer as opposed to changing tack midstream because I get impatient because it's taken two years. Why? Yeah.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 42:51

Cool. If there was one thing policymakers could do, which would make your work significantly easier, what would that be?

Molly Webb: 43:00

Again, recognising the demand side? Yeah. So I think it's, it sounds too high level, but I think it's pretty profound. We've been playing with some of these governance principles that I think we need to start working on. So I think we're typically used to seeing if government, you know, I'm not asking government to say, I'm picking a technology of you know, I believe in solar and wind over something else. But But allowing us because you've have that picture in your head that you described of a centralised, lots of big power plants, versus a decentralised lots of small things. The governance that goes with that needs to be clear, because I think once that's clear, policymakers will be able to act. And that's what I want from them is to listen to what it means is you're not, you're not assuming everyone's a price, optimise cost optimising rational actor. Like let's get over that, because there's enough research to show that that's not the case. And let's design for that. So there are some components of that recognising the demand side, but that's what I mean. They don't have to pick only the technology framework that goes along with it. But but recognising some of those roles and assumptions that need to change

David Bent-Hazelwood: 44:28

and to sort of borrow some language of Mariana Mazzucato. There's no need to pick technology winners or company winners. We need democratically elected governments to pick directions and set of incentives. And then in that context, and appropriately incentivize marketplace, we'll find the appropriate technologies and business winners, but you, you've got to pick the direction and I think all of the stuff I see says the direction is towards decentralised decarbonized electricity grid which is provided During the vast majority of our energy needs, need to pick that direction and follow through with it. Yes. Last question. What are your priorities going forward?

Molly Webb: 45:14

So with clear carbon or pirkko, my priority is to turn every IoT company that has integration to buildings into carbon performance machines, basically. And

David Bent-Hazelwood: 45:29

just in case folks don't know, IoT is internet of things. So that's where so any device is online, and is providing data about energy performance of itself and maybe other devices. And it's in principles that you couldn't be maybe be able to control it a little bit from somewhere else, often automatically. Exactly.

Molly Webb: 45:51

So I want to automate the carbon performance of everything. That's, that's what's next for pirkko. And with Energen, locked, I mentioned this governance framework, I sometimes call this the net zero operating model that we need a governance framework for I just started playing with that. I think we just need to realise that that's coming. It's this decentralised model. So we want to work on the governance strategies around delivering that sort of operating model. And very much I've been in it and telecoms and digital since 1999, basically. So we're now at a real turning point with AI and I'm not overhyping AI. But it is interesting. So the governance of AI full stop is fascinating right now. I'm not I'm really my, my original sort of digital focus and climate was all about solutions, digital solutions to climate, and now I'm much more interested in digital governance, that aligns with climate governance. So I think that's what's next is getting deeper into that. And this is these are huge questions on that will not answer alone. But I'm looking for others who are thinking about those big questions and and challenging our, our institutional preparedness for the governance challenges coming. Right.

David Bent-Hazelwood: 47:23

Thank you Well, and if folks want to help on joining with Molly on that they can connect. And that brings us to the end of our questions. So thanks very much, Molly, for talking us through the work of energy on lotta energy market accelerator and all of the different component parts of that all of the different kinds of innovations and the struggles as well. It's been a very rich conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you