Headquartered in Ireland, and with offices in England and Scotland, EnergyCloud‘s mission is to ‘divert otherwise wasted renewable energy to homes in fuel poverty’ – in other words, creating a new use case for surplus energy from renewable facilities that are simply ‘turned off’ when not in use.
Former Luzern eCommerce and Oracle executive Alan Wyley, who was appointed CEO of the not-for-profit enterprise in September 2024, tells SustainabilityOnline that as much as €450 million worth of surplus wind energy was wasted last year alone.
“When you’re producing a lot of wind energy, it’s not completely predictable, and it tends to be produced mainly at night, when demand is lowest,” he says.
“EirGrid’s [Ireland’s grid management authority] job is to balance the grid. So, they have to effectively ‘dispatch down’ or turn off some of the wind farms to balance the grid, and that’s where the waste is being created. It’s no fault of EirGrid – they have to balance the grid, and that is the simplest way to do so.”
An important role
Additionally, as Wyley explains, the grid infrastructure is not always capable of transferring wind-generated energy from rural areas, where wind farms are typically located, to urban centres where demand exists. These combined factors result in underutilised wind energy, and in keeping with the goals of Ireland’s Climate Action Plan to maximise energy efficiency, he sees EnergyCloud as a workable solution to put this energy to use.
As the project scales, the goal is to absorb this surplus wind energy by distributing it to homes equipped with smart Energy Cloud devices. This would allow EirGrid to leave certain wind farms operational rather than curtailing them, as there would be predictable demand.
“We’re effectively turning those homes into individual batteries, which are able to store X amount of power during the night, so that when the homeowner wakes up, they’ve a hot tank of water and can use it however they want,” says Wyley.
EnergyCloud aims to expand this approach beyond heating water, exploring options such as controlling heat pumps, integrating with solar panels, and managing smart storage heaters.
“We are hopeful that we would be able to stretch that energy use out across a day or two for each home – which would make a real impact on their energy bills,” he adds.
Device rollout
Ireland’s location on the edge of Europe ensures that EnergyCloud is not constrained by the amount of surplus wind energy. Rather, the primary limitation is the cost of installing the required devices in homes, with Wyley noting that funding will be essential for broader deployment.
We’ve been included in the Programme for Government, and if we can get the government to put real targets in place to tackle energy poverty, that would be transformative,” he says.
“Of course, it doesn’t have to be all through EnergyCloud. We’re not trying to fix it on our own – we’re working with everybody that we can to make this happen. If we get our ducks in a row, we can actually make a massive impact.”
Otherwise, as much as €3 billion worth of energy could be wasted over the current term of this government, on top of around €2.1 billion that was wasted over the past seven years.
“The government can’t do anything about the past, but they can do something about the next five years,” says Wyley.
A positive step forward was seen at the end of June, when Darragh O’Brien TD, Minister for Climate, Environment and Energy and Minister for Transport, announced the launch of a new EnergyCloud project in Fingal, north County Dublin, alongside Amazon Web Services and Co-operative Housing Ireland, which will see 500 households equipped with smart devices [see below].
“This is an ambitious and creative project,” as the Minister noted.
Housing policy
To date, EnergyCloud has partnered with both public and private bodies to assist with the rollout of devices – “we’re enormously grateful to them,” says Wyley – but in terms of gaining real traction, he believes that alignment with housing policy could raise the bar for this social enterprise.
“For every home that is built, or every home that is upgraded or retrofitted, regardless of whether there’s somebody in energy poverty or not, we believe at Energy Cloud that every home should have a smart device,” says Wyley. “If you’re putting in a heat pump, that heat pump should have a smart device that can be remotely controlled, so that if and when that homeowner is in energy poverty, we can provide free heating.”
By embedding smart technology into housing policy, EnergyCloud would be in a position to flexibly respond to households whose financial situations may change, enabling it to deliver energy assistance when needed.
“We should ripple that all the way through – every device, whether it’s a solar panel, a heat pump, an immersion controller, and so on,” he adds. “All of the manufacturers can do this today, and the reason they’re not is because nobody’s asked them to.”
Learn more about EnergyCloud at www.energycloud.org.
