Case study

Helping Swarm’s home energy vision become reality

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Renewable energy start-up Swarm was founded in 2023 with a vision to make homeowners’ lives easier, greener and cheaper through technology. Opencast has helped turn Swarm’s vision into a technical reality, embedding a specialist team to help speed market entry of a fully tested home energy product.

  • Swarm
  • Sustainable energy
  • Innovation and emerging technology
  • Automated decisions on home energy

  • Scalable product and service

  • Cheaper, faster route to market

Challenge

Develop and take new energy system to market

Newcastle-headquartered Swarm was founded by two entrepreneurs with a background in electric vehicle (EV) charging innovation. Elmtronics, led by Swarm’s co-founders Dan Martin and Anthony Piggott, was acquired by Mer in 2022.

Dan and Anthony had a vision for the green home energy market – to align and automate different home energy devices to work efficiently as one, using a device that would seamlessly and securely integrate with the setup in people’s homes to make best use of them all.

Swarm’s concept would create a system that automated home energy decisions for users. Automation would transform how users manage, store and redistribute their energy. And a single device would make intelligent decisions on their behalf and save them money.

Taking an innovative technology product to market can be a challenging and time-consuming process, particularly for startups with a limited funding ‘runway’. Typically, it takes up to a year for a new product to hit the market. Swarm wanted to accelerate that process.

Green home technology is also relatively new, with little by way of an industry standard. Integrating sustainable devices would mean working with multiple individual circumstances. With Swarm developing a first-to-market product, it was also critically important that the new product and service would meet user needs.

Swarm’s technology would direct power based on people’s energy tariffs and usage, as well as the requirements of the national grid. It would introduce a tech-agnostic solution to an industry where there had previously been no open standard between solar manufacturers.

Swarm wanted to test hypotheses for its proposed new product. Could it create something that could communicate across multiple inverter types? Could it automate power consumption with users’ consent? And could it orchestrate multiple clients in different geolocations to do the same thing within a second of each other, confirming the feasibility of its ‘virtual power plant’ idea?

In late 2023, Swarm’s founders asked Opencast for help in turning their vision into a reality – and Opencast proposed an innovative and flexible partnership that would see it embedding a full-service team into the Swarm operation to develop its product in a live state, at scale. Opencast would share in Swarm’s future success through equity participation.

Response – collaboration

Collaboration to accelerate development with user focus

Opencast’s embedded team added expertise in software development, solutions architecture, business analysis (BA), agile delivery management (ADM), product design and delivery, user-centred design (UCD), service design, accessibility, cybersecurity and more. Opencast Chief Executive Tom Lawson also joined the Swarm board as a non-executive director to offer strategic direction.

Collaboration would be easier with both firms headquartered at Hoults Yard in Newcastle. Demonstration and testing of Swarm’s technology could also take place at Hoults, in a purpose-built energy hub.

Opencast would help Swarm not just to create software, but also build a device and a service. This meant building a physical device with software, screens and designing an app, with cloud-based infrastructure to support the deployment, orchestration and monitoring of over 100,000 devices.

Opencast also helped Swarm to shape its company structure to enable rapid scaling up – as well as build the in-house tech team to ensure the business would be more self-sufficient.

With Opencast’s team exploring the technical and regulatory possibilities, as well as value and innovation, Swarm could turn its founders’ theory into a product that landed well in the market.

To identify customer needs, motivations and pain points, Opencast UCD consultants talked to home energy users. Insights from pilot home users helped to shape and inform Swarm’s minimum viable product (MVP).

Service designers would help deliver the entire service solution, including both front and back end. Interaction designers, meanwhile, would focus on the product’s front end.

The team’s product owner (PO) documented Swarm’s requirements, creating a product roadmap. They used a ‘wall of work’ to identify and document various work strands centrally. This would ensure that every team member understood how their work contributed to the product development overall.

Response – algorithm and security

Smart algorithm – and scaling for market roll-out

Opencast’s developer team researched, defined and created a smart algorithm that effectively became Swarm’s AEM. The algorithm would decide every action the new product should perform. With imminent energy prices a known quantity, the algorithm would understand users’ needs, solar forecasts and energy tariffs, assessing when users should buy energy, when they would need it for consumption – and when to take advantage of high export prices by selling energy back to the grid.

The developer team, supported by a data scientist, used machine learning and deployed linear algorithms to address home energy import and export efficiency, handling and integrating complex datasets from a variety of sources, while a solution architect worked with the Swarm team on a design for the AEM solution.

Opencast’s business analysts worked with the PO and ADM to engage and advise Swarm on service delivery timelines and milestones to align expectations and ensure clarity on delivery. Deliverables from a BA perspective included a customer onboarding journey, front-end visualisation and battery management. The team also conducted accessibility reporting on the web app.

Security considerations were paramount. Opencast’s Head of Security Services helped Swarm to enhance its cybersecurity controls and receive certification for compliance, including new government legislation brought in April 2024, enabling Swarm to achieve IoT Baseline Level 1 assurance provided by certifying body IASME.

Work included adopting secure coding practices, conducting regular security audits and third-party penetration tests and implementing robust data protection protocols. By focusing on risk assessment and management, Swarm was able to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities early in its development cycle.

Cross-cutting work including in product, service design and delivery is enabling Swarm to scale the new service, helping it to deliver its first few hundred orders. And a scalability plan was put in place to meet future projections.

In spring 2024, the new product was rolled out for user and technical testing to 15 homes. It assessed users’ individual tariffs, historical energy demand and solar generation, and automated their buying and selling of energy from the grid. The AEM would automatically make decisions on behalf of customers to buy and sell energy and show them the financial savings they made each day.

In July 2024, Swarm’s Hub:One product went live, offering a UK first – an automated home energy management system that worked across renewable devices from different providers. Later that month, Swarm secured its first 500 units to a key wholesaler in the marketplace. It aimed for at least 3,000 devices to be installed by the end of 2024.

Impact

Robust and secure product with automated energy savings

The Opencast partnership has given Swarm an automated product that makes intelligent decisions on behalf of the consumer, who no longer needs to think about when to buy and sell or decide if they have enough energy for their own needs.

The partnership also refined and accelerated Swarm’s go-to-market strategy, including identifying market opportunities that would reinforce the unique selling point of Swarm’s device.

Early impact from a 15-home roll-out showed a big drop in the time for people to see a return on their investment in renewable energy.

With a solar setup, one bill was reduced to £12, and with the AEM device installed the total monthly bill was zero through a combination of savings and selling excess energy back to the grid at peak times. Customer homes using solar were also becoming net positive.

The deployment of the Hub:One technology, with its orchestration of multiple systems in under one second, paves the way for future functionality including in the virtual power plant. This technology has the potential for other applications in future.

Swarm’s Hub:One product passed the government-set IoT product security and telecommunications infrastructure (PSTI) requirements.

Swarm’s next-gen technology, developed with the support of Opencast, has a significant impact on home energy consumption, transforming how consumers manage, store and redistribute energy, with a single device making intelligent decisions on their behalf. And it accelerates their payback on renewables investment. The algorithm at its centre understands users’ needs, solar forecasts and energy tariffs.

Consumers no longer need to make home energy decisions: Swarm does it all for them.

up to

£300

savings on energy bills

500

units shipped early to key wholesaler

up to

20

new North East jobs

Technical details

Cloud first: using IoT technologies and serverless AWS monitoring of live services

Kotlin APIs: to surface data and informationacross the platform

Python, SQL, OR Tools and Databricks: for data science and automation algorithms

Typescript: used to create software for the Hub:One device to talk to the inverters

Custom hardware and Modbus: to design and prototype hardware

React: for front-end development

Third-party APIs: to integrate withelectric vehicles and chargers

Mobile apps: designing for iOS and Android

Jira, Confluence, Figma, Miro and Excalidraw: for collaboration.

There’s a lot of clever technology out there that helps people manage the energy in their homes but, incredibly, there has been nothing in the UK that works with different brands and devices. We knew we could create something to change this and chose Opencast as our lead partner. With their tech expertise and our knowledge of the energy sector, we have the ability to make something really exciting: one app to control every aspect of energy in the home.

Anthony Piggott, Co-Founder & Chief Executive

Swarm

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