Sustainable Business:
attractive trait at a time when everyone
bends over backwards to try to accommodate
everyone else’s views. ‘A lot of my career
has been about recognising the failure of the
environmental or sustainability movement
to appeal to a wide spectrum of society.
This is something I care about, I want others
to care too, and I can see real room for
improvement,’ he says.
Tom’s main motivation is to make it easier
for people to make sustainable energy choices.
‘It seemed obvious that organisations were
pushing for environmental change but were
failing to connect,’ he says. ‘Products were
often more expensive than the equivalent,
often poorer quality or more inconvenient to
buy, and often politically associated with the
left. One of these three things was enough for
consumers to not choose these products — all
three were definitely enough. What we have
to do is to move away from responsibility as
a burden and towards a reward for doing it.
It has to be very easy to transition to a zero-
carbon future personally.’
I met up with Tom in a buzzy café in
West London. Over coffee he walked me
through a confusing array of economic drivers,
regulatory pressures, new technologies, and
consumer preferences when it comes to what’s
happening in the renewable energy market.
He knows his stuff, and thankfully has a
knack of simplifying the complex.
He sets out a compelling proposition.
The business he is now a part of — OVO
Energy — is a fast-growing entrepreneurial
business sitting across home energy systems
and smart charging for electric vehicles. Founded
by an entrepreneur called Stephen Fitzpatrick,
it is now a substantial business valued at over
£1.1bn operating through several sub-brands
all powered by its ‘brain’ at the centre, a
technology business called Kaluza.
Kaluza’s technology enables the coordination
and control of millions of connected devices —
principally home heating systems and electric
vehicle chargers — creating a fully distributed
energy system which also gives customers the
opportunity to choose to be supplied from
100% renewable sources. What makes Kaluza
so powerful, though, is that it not only helps
to m p a k e n h a m
Tom Pakenham at OVO Energy’s London office
individuals with their energy choices, but also
helps grid operators to manage better supply
and demand at peak times through intelligent
real-time analysis and control of household
electricity consumption.
Tom was initially put in charge of
running OVO’s Electric Vehicles business.
‘An electric vehicle is just a battery on wheels.
Cars sit parked for 95% of the time, so this
is an asset you should be sweating. The
business provides intelligent charging systems,
allowing customers both to save money and
to use more renewable sources by optimising
overnight charging. You know with your
electric car that you need to put 10kWh of
energy into it between 6pm when you get
home and 6am when you want to use it again,
so you have 12 hours to do this,’ says Tom.
‘At the moment you plug it in and it starts
charging straight away. But what we do is
recognise that you have 12 hours to do this,
and so we optimise the charger to charge
The Wykeham Journal 2019 33