Get Sust! Issue 31

Placement student bags award and £4.3 million

Iain Whiteside, a 21-year-old computer science and mathematics student at Edinburgh University, has scooped the Shell STEP award for the UK’s Most Enterprising Student. His work, conducted while on a placement with Martin Energy Limited (MEL), will generate some £4.3 million in revenue for MEL and its customer Tesco over the next two years.

Working on MEL’s core service, Flexitricity, which provides balancing and reserve services to the National Grid, Iain Whiteside created the ‘Demand Buyback System’ and successfully installed it at its first site.

His system will allow National Grid to ‘actively manage’ the air-conditioning in Tesco stores, briefly reducing energy use in the shops to offset sudden jumps in demand from other customers. National Grid will pay Tesco for its co-operation and Tesco will split the revenue with MEL.

MEL’s Flexitricity is a tool to aid ‘system balancing’, a process whereby the National Grid instructs electricity generators to increase or reduce output to keep the system stable at all times. Instead of working with the supply side for system balancing, it works through a central control system to enable its ‘energy partners’ to automatically manage their demand, known as the ‘balancing mechanism’.

MEL says its Flexitricity system is a more carbon-efficient way of providing reserve and balancing services to cover demand peaks and system emergencies than existing technologies.

Learn more:

	•	Shell STEP creates tailored placements for undergraduates in small firms, helping convert their knowledge into practical applications. See www.shellstep.org.uk.
	•	See also www.flexitricity.com/news.