Welcome to our “Meet the Team” series, where we shine a spotlight on the people driving Wattstor’s success. In this edition, we introduce Jack Peck, Head of Sales for the UK and Ireland. With nearly a decade of experience in renewables and battery storage, Jack is passionate about helping businesses navigate today’s complex energy landscape. He plays a pivotal role in bringing Wattstor’s innovative solutions – including our unique Price Protect tariff – to commercial and industrial customers. In this interview, Jack shares his journey, the challenges businesses face, and why he believes now is the most exciting time for clean energy.
Tell us a bit about your professional background and just generally what led you to work in the clean energy sector.
My renewables journey started nearly 10 years ago now, initially developing solar farms here in the UK in the heyday of subsidised UK renewables. I then went on to found a site finding and early stage development company, helping established EPC companies to get a foothold in this market and then also internationally as well in West Africa, which was quite an adventure.
Then I transitioned into the battery storage space where we’ve never had a subsidy. It was all about innovation. How do you aggregate batteries together, link them into the electricity markets to create more money and create a business case around initially domestic storage and then into the commercial space with Wattstor and the present day where I head up the sales team in the UK on developing sites for commercial industrial customers. So, there’s quite some background.
What excites you most about Wattstor’s work?
Looking back, we’re now at the most exciting point in the renewables journey. It was previously, it was all about whether businesses could afford to go green, whether they had money to be able to do that. And now with the cost of renewables and solar and batteries having come down so much, we’re now at the point where the renewables is cheaper than the grid alternative.
We’ve got a huge opportunity to scale this in a way that we’ve never seen before and to offer businesses a better alternative than they have now whilst also reaching net zero and doing better for our planet, which I think is very exciting.
What are the typical challenges they face?
Many and varied from all types of business here in the UK, all facing different challenges along the way. I think probably the biggest being the complexity of the energy systems and the landscape that we’re seeing at the moment. We have businesses trying to reach net zero against a backdrop of some of the highest electricity costs in Europe, electrifying their fleets, heating. And alongside that, you’ve got issues of grid constraints as well, which is a massive hurdle.
There’s lots of challenges for businesses and key that they get the best advice and best services out there to enable them to reach net zero in a way that is beneficial to the company overall. And when we talk about these businesses, they’re essentially the industrial and commercial businesses across the UK and Ireland. It’s a broad spread.
How do you tailor your approach to each different business or customer?
I think it’s all about working with that company from the get-go, from the initial desktop analysis that we do, working with them to understand their business needs now and in the future as they begin to electrify with us.
It’s about understanding the different load profiles for each site, the available space that we’ve got for generating renewables or renewable electricity on site as well, and working with them to create a plan that is going to see them through the next 10, 20 or 25 years of electricity demand over that time and making sure that we can design something that fits them both now and in the future moving forward.
You’ve talked about designing the system, but now tell me about Price Protect.
Okay, so Price Protect is a new, unique renewable energy tariff for businesses. And it’s unique because it combines both a variable element with a fixed capped price. It’s variable in that it tracks the wholesale energy costs at a discount or the wholesale energy price discounted so that the customer is always better off than the market.
If energy prices go down over the contract term, then the customers can benefit from it, but they are also protected by a price cap, which means they can hedge their full electricity costs for the duration of the contract term and are always protected by the cap.
LEARN MORE ABOUT ENERGY PRICE VOLATILITY HERE »
How does Price Protect differ from a traditional Power Purchase Agreement, a traditional PPA?
It’s different for one because Price Protect covers the full electricity demand for a customer, so covers 100% of the electricity demand on that customer’s site, whereas a PPA or solar PPA might only do 20% or 30% of a customer’s demand and the remaining 60% or 70% of their consumption is coming from the grid, whereas Price Protect covers every kilowatt hour that customer consumes, whether it comes from the grid or from the on-site renewable system.
Give me a use case where Price Protect will make the biggest difference.
If you take, for example, a large warehouse that has cold storage within it, it’s got electricity demand 24-7, day and night. A traditional solar system would only cover that period of daytime demand when the sun is shining, but the remaining demand would have to come from the grid, whereas Price Protect will cover the full energy consumption from that site day and night through utilising the on-site solar and battery.
Another thing to say on the PPAs would be that with a PPA, traditionally, you’d fix out the cost that you pay, whereas Price Protect is variable. It also links to the wholesale electricity price. If that comes down over time, then customers get additional benefit from falling prices rather than being locked in from day one.
What has the reception been like from customers so far?
Incredibly positive following the launch. Again, I think that’s often the case with a new, unique product that comes to market, but what customers love about the product is that it is the simplicity of it. There’s so much advice out there, customers looking at building their own renewable systems, how do they go and procure energy from their energy supplier if they’re trying to build their own on-site system, where do they go to for their advice, whereas Price Protect combines all of those elements together.
We work directly with the customer to figure out the right solution for them, both now and in the future, and it allows them to cut through all of that complexity and also guarantee that they will always be better off than the market.
Tell me about a memorable success story that stands out in your sales journey.
Always the biggest hurdle for us developing renewables on-site in this country is grid constraints, and we see this massively, particularly up in Scotland where we have a very constrained network north of the border, and on the projects we’ve been working on with Scottish Water, nearly all of their sites are grid constrained to a 200 kilowatt AC generation and export limit, which massively reduces their scope for renewables.
Then we came in with our DC-coupled solution, connecting the solar directly to the battery and allowing them to overbuild the renewables even on grid-constrained sites. The first project that we’ve done with Scottish Water has allowed them to build five times the capacity of their grid connection offer that they’ve received by coupling the solar directly to the battery, and we’re now looking at rolling this out across their sites and getting over those grid-constrained hurdles, which is hugely satisfying for us to overcome.
What do you do outside of work for fun to de-stress?
I used to have loads of hobbies, used to play lots of sport, and then we now have a two-year-old, which is completely limited, all of that fun that we used to have. But I still am very enthusiastic, but bad surfer, I have to admit. I still like playing sport where I can, but now watching it more than playing it, but being outside, getting out in nature is generally my days off, my fun nowadays. Forest bathing. Indeed, something like that.
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