Electrifying Future

I have always been enthralled by electricity in our homes. It's?immediacy, efficiency, and cleanliness. No smell, no mess. Obviously, the actual impact it has a lot to do with how it is generated, but for a?consumer it is genuinely magical. Couple that with the amazing advancements the UK have made in clean generation, and you can now really see the move to an electric future is possible.

It feels so archaic to heat a home with oil or gas and certainly when I moved to a heat pump I have not looked back. Well at least until we had the energy crisis and electricity prices quadrupled. Unfortunately, in the UK we tie the wholesale electricity cost to gas, but with such a shift to wind and other renewables I can’t see that as a long-term solution.

However as a family we have embraced electricity and after running my own electric car for a number of years I have finally managed to persuade my wife to go full electric. Her new BMW iX, while divisive on looks (well I like it!) steps the game up again and genuinely feels like driving the future. This ties in nicely with our building project which we started a few years ago and will be featured on Grand Designs hopefully next year. I have had a long held aspiration to demonstrate what is possible and at the same time end up with a highly efficient house that produces all I need, independently from anyone else.

Currently we pump our own water, treat our own sewage and deliver our own internet so the idea of generating our own power is compelling. We are installing wind, solar and batteries to deliver what we hope will be an impressive setup meeting all our living and transport needs. Unfortunately, because it is so new and evolving, nobody really understand how it will all work, and what I should expect from it. I have batteries coming from the UK, wind turbine from Italy and solar tiles from Ireland. We don't even know what the EPC will be as a lot of the equipment we are using hasn't yet been rated – that is another can of worms that needs urgent review. Government legislation is still very much in the dark ages of when electricity was considered dirty and wasteful, but that is changing – slowly.

My interest with electricity doesn't stop there. Because I have spent the last two years, developing a team of incredibly talented engineers in building a new platform for the home which not only automates everything in the home from lighting, heating, security and media, to intelligently managing demand and reducing all energy consumption. We estimate that 30% of energy savings are achievable when the system is installed in any home. That is change the world kind of claims.

We haven't spent two years and countless hours of development with patents making the technical solution just for my house, but for every house in the world. We are delivering a product that can be easily installed and understood enabling mass adoption. We are there now and currently focused on further funding to conduct full scale deployments and on towards production. It is an exciting time for Tewke and over the coming months I hope to share more as we move from 'stealth mode' into live operations.

www.piersdaniell.com