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| JANUARY 2023 | UTILITY WEEK
Electricity
I
t's leaking from the roof and it's leaking from the
basement," says Hubbard, explaining her concerns
over electricity markets as they currently stand. In
her analogy of a house in a state of disrepair, the energy
system is leaking out value from top to bottom.
She worries that the government's Review of Elec-
tricity Market Arrangements (REMA), which closed to
responses in the autumn, is primarily focused on the
"top-down" optimisation of the energy system – fixing
the roof: "But how you build the foundations is really
fundamental to what kind of roof you can support. And
if you just fix the roof and you don't fix the foundations,
you're going to keep letting in water."
Hubbard founded Electron in 2015 to create the kind
of local peer-to-peer energy markets that can capture
some of this lost value, enabling parties on both the
generation and demand sides to make the best use of
their assets and the power grid they share.
Since then, the company has partnered with various
organisations, including suppliers, generators and net-
work operators, to trial local energy markets around the
country. For example, Project TraDER in Orkney, which
ran from late 2019 to spring 2021, allowed renewable
generators on the islands to trade with local sources of
demand to absorb their excess power, thereby avoiding
network constraints and the resulting curtailment.
However, Electron's work thus far has been limited
"We're moving away from a world where
you just get dumb access to push or pull
what you need from the grid."
Jo-Jo Hubbard,
CHIEF EXECUTIVE AND CO-FOUNDER, ELECTRON
Interview
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