INVENT 2023 Finalist Profile: WM Energy

Founder names: Daniel Parke and Egle Parke

Smart Energy, Simple Solutions.

What is your background?

Daniel is currently completing his PhD focusing on renewable energy generation and storage in the outdoor events sector. Egle is currently completing her MSc in Energy Storage.

What inspired you to start your business?

We want to make the long, complex and often tedious process of building large energy models & simulations simple, and available for all. Even on a small domestic level, changes to an existing energy or utility system can be relatively expensive, and as such any deviation from expectations can have significant changes in outcome for the end consumer.

This is often due to the highly variable performance of renewable energy systems, but also is due to the inaccuracy that current modelling methods provide. Inaccuracies that in our day to day work we are used to overcoming, and as such believe should not be a problem still faced by consumers today.

We aim to make this a problem of the past, by combining and utilising advances in modelling techniques, as well as machine learning capabilities.

What problem are you solving?

Energy systems can be incredibly complex with many different cogs in the wheel, and as such making informed decisions can be difficult without extensive experience. We aim to simplify this process as much as possible, whilst offering additional tools and insights relative to available platforms on the market today.

This will not only make the energy procurement process much more streamlined and straightforward, but could also provide additional sources of revenue generation/savings.

Who and where are your potential customers?

Our market is in effect anyone with an existing energy system, but will primarily be focused on the facilities management sector, which will range from third party contractors delivering FM contracts, to in house operations in the public & private sector.

Buildings with an existing energy system could benefit from our monitoring and insight tools, which aim to provide insight into energy trends and highlight areas of concern.

Any designs with aims to change an existing energy system would also benefit from our modelling and simulation tools, as we would be able to provide more tailored insights for their specific requirements.

What do you think is the potential for your business?

We think the potential for our business model is larger than just the energy sector. What we are perfecting is the entirety of the data collection, preparation, modelling and simulation & analysis process. Although we are indeed focusing on energy initially as this is our natural background, the techniques and methods that have been developed to achieve this can be applied to any dataset. This could lead to a large opportunity in future if our technology platform can get momentum in the market.

Where do you hope to be 5 years from now?

We hope to have delivered our complete platform focused on monitoring, modelling and analysis. At this stage in our journey we also have ambitions to leverage the user platform as a method to enable P2P trading in the energy market. This would enable direct market participation for consumers on our platform, including the import/export sale of electricity from a range of sources including electric vehicle to application (V2X) trading.

You can find Daniel and Egle on Twitter!

Tickets for the INVENT Awards Night 2023 are on sale at invent23.co/awards – Thursday 21st September at the ICC Belfast.