P[05]Electric Cloud

UAL provided us an opportunity to work on an innovation brief for EDF Energy. Over the course of the project, we used scenario planning to inform a potential strategic repositioning of the company and developed a clear vision of where and why it should move, and an access point to approach the transition. Among other competing groups, we pitched the proposal at an EDF hosted event in June 2016. After negotiations, EDF made a final decision to acquire the intellectual property of our work. Although we are unable to showcase the final proposal we can outline the strategic reasoning upon which it was built. 

C[01]Context

Strategic reports at the time (2015) were making special emphasis on how the combined disruption of data technologies and decentralised sustainable energy production and storage systems would favour a progressive switch to “prosumerism” in the energy market.01

On top of this, the ‘Big Four’ electric companies in the UK were losing their market share in favour of new actors that were perceived as more sustainable and trustworthy.02

C[02]The Brief

EDF provided a brief with a set of apparently unconnected problems concerning their public image and their perception among customers. Among them: Lack of an emotional attachment of customers with their brand. Lack of interaction with clients apart from billing, payment, and technical failure. Lack of visibility as electricity is not tangible, not visible, and taken for granted.

C[03]Our Lecture

In return, we provided EDF with a cohesive explanation linking symptoms and causes and future opportunities.

[01]Electricity services are a representation of the physical infrastructure that enables its production and delivery. EDF services, billing, and communications are a representation of the electric grid, not its users.

[02]Electricity is a network of buildings and at this moment the household is its basic unit. People just happen to be linked to their household through ownership or other contractual agreement.

[03]A household is not representative of the nuclear family anymore, and maybe it never was. Alternative family structures emerge as flat sharing becomes the fastest growing occupational model in England.

C[04]Prospective Model

[04]Sensing infrastructures and data modelling techniques hold the potential to create an alternative visualisation model of the energy network, one where individuals – and not buildings – are the basic unit; one where users have a personal energy consumption/production record instead of a household energy consumption bill.

[05]The implications of this switch would be similar to what was witnessed in the telecommunications industry two decades ago, when telephone services moved from our household walls to our pockets with the adoption of the cell phone.

[06]To develop the full potential of this transition, a semiotic switch from energy as a commodity to energy as value must occur. This implies the perception of energy not as a perishable good but as a strategic personal asset, and the conceptualisation of a world where prosumers can buy, sell, share, save, store, invest in, and generate social and capital value from energy.

C[05]Projective Model

[07]Under this new semiotic regime, energy companies would develop a parallel role, not necessarily as producer/provider, but as managers and traders in energy exchange networks.

[08] In order to secure a future proof ambivalent position strategic movements should aim to open new a space of action not above people but but in between them.

Electric Cloud provided an entry point and a strategy for EDF to start this transition towards an ambivalent strategic position that would help them thrive in either a centralised or decentralised scenario.