Diesel and diesel generators still represent the most reliable and secure way for many business to access on-demand, onsite power, despite the growing adoption of renewable energy solutions. From construction sites, to festivals, and even back up power for wind farms, this is a growing $30B market that is threatening our climate targets.
This is because, to switch from the diesel genset to a generator that uses a renewable fuel, businesses need certainty they will be able to access the fuel they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. At a time when supply and costs of renewable fuels are still uncertain, and the “fuel of the future” unclear, businesses are forced to decide between failing to meet their 2030 climate targets or putting their operations at risk by sacrificing energy security.
The challenge to find a solution for this was the driving force for IPG Energy's founding team. Eight years later on this highly-challenging deep-tech mission, the result is a generator that delivers pollutant-free power from any fuel, and enables net-zero- and zero-carbon fuels to become a true alternative to fossil fuels for many distributed power applications by ensuring they are economically viable for businesses.
Tell us about the business, what it is, what it aims to achieve, who you work with, how you reach customers, and so on?
IPG Energy is a renewable energy startup working with the construction industry to demonstrate that our product, the IPG Flameless Generator, offers the route to accelerating the transition to renewable fuels at scale.
Using our patented Flameless Combustion technology, our award-winning product overcomes the cost and availability challenges to using 100% renewable fuels by unlocking pollutant-free power from any fuel, at a competitive cost. Offering huge baseline carbon savings even using diesel, and precision cost control thanks to the flexibility to hot swap, or blend fuels, our customers can tailor carbon savings to their clients’ budgets, and enjoy a cost-effective, low-risk route to reducing carbon at scale.
The benefits of our product, however, are not limited to the construction industry, but can unlock decarbonisation wherever clean, on-demand power is needed, such as manufacturing, EV charging, or maritime.
Our mission is to become the go-to replacement to the diesel generator by the end of the decade. In doing so, we will unlock the definitive demand for renewable fuels to accelerate cost-effective production of all the green fuels we know today. But also those interesting lower-quality waste-derived fuels that could not be produced in enough quantities to displace a company’s diesel use on their own, but as part of the fuel mix. The IPG Flameless Generator can help us get to zero-diesel as quickly, securely and cost-effectively as possible.
How has the business evolved since its launch?
IPG Energy was founded in 2016 and, as with many rapidly growing startups, has transitioned through multiple evolutions on its journey so far.
Many of the early years were focused on the R&D to develop our patented Flameless Combustion technology and the other innovations that make up our product, the IPG Flameless Generator, today. Fast forward a few years to 2020 when our CTO Brett and I joined the company, we shifted gear from developing a technology to building, marketing and selling a product, and an alternative decarbonisation strategy for our customers.
The result is a product highly anticipated by the construction industry, with a strong financial backing, including an oversubscribed crowdfunding campaign on Republic Europe (formerly Seedrs). And collecting a swathe of recognition and awards in the climate-tech, construction tech and startup space, including VINCI Group’s CATALYST accelerator and CEMEX Ventures’ Top 50 Contech Startups.
Now, we’re about to embark on the next phase of change for the business. Building on our £1M prototype project with National Highways, we are working towards customer demonstration pilots in both the construction industry, and other markets in the coming year. This, alongside an increasing focus on productionisation and scaling the team, will see us evolve again into setting us up to be manufacturing our product in the 1,000’s, and supporting many companies to ditch their diesel generators, by the end of the decade.
Tell us about the working culture at IPG Energy?
We don’t believe there is a right or wrong company culture, nor is it something fixed or static, especially in a fast-growing startup. For us, good culture is about creating the environment for our people to thrive. Our ethos is: “Be brave enough to fail, value output over input, and solve problems together.” This is how we will achieve things no-one else can.
Given that we don’t think there is a right answer, why have we chosen this? Well, with a Leadership team coming from academic, entrepreneurial or non-corporate backgrounds, we’ve had the opportunity to realise that the prescribed hours of 9-5 may not always be the most productive hours of the day.
Championing the concept of output over the concept of input between the hours of 9-5 not only enables all kinds of flexible working – an environment that works for all, including our neurodivergent colleagues – but it prevents the number one morale destroyer: hypocrisy. Why should the rest of the team not also be able to define their most productive working style? Furthermore, as a group of over-achievers, we are prone to perfectionism, but perfectionism slows down the rate of rapid, iterative development that we need in order to succeed. So, we constantly tell ourselves to be brave enough to fail, to learn what needs to be learnt as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.
As we prepare for significant growth, our culture will continue to evolve. The trick here will be in maintaining the magic that has brought us this far while creating space for new colleagues to contribute to our ongoing success.
How are you funded?
To-date IPG Energy has been funded through angel investors, including a successful crowdfunding campaign hosted on equity funding platform Republic Europe (formerly Seedrs).
What has been your biggest challenge so far and how have you overcome this?
The biggest challenges we have faced so far stem from the very nature of being a hardware company. Developing a hardware product is, as the name suggests, hard!
Our CEO experienced this first-hand from running the Agri-tech startup he launched prior to joining IPG Energy, and was able to come to IPG Energy with what he very candidly refers to as learnings around “how not to bring a hardware product to market”. The Agri-tech company failed to engage early enough with its customers, instead thinking, “We will build it, and they will come”.
A positive result of this is that, today, IPG Energy’s leadership team are equipped with the depth of experience to understand the intrinsic challenges IPG Energy face as a hardware company, from both a technical and commercial perspective, and how to mitigate them. By nature, hardware development is a more lengthy and capital-intensive process compared to its software cousins, so we have applied these learnings to our work at IPG Energy and focussed our efforts on reducing the cost of failure, and constantly “failing forward”.
As with any product development, the strategy to creating a minimal viable product is simple on paper, but the devil is the detail. For IPG Energy, this meant focusing on the key pains felt by businesses in our beachhead markets. Today, our customers are asking how they can confidently transition their businesses away from diesel, without compromising energy security. Prioritising our fuel-agnostic, pollutant-free capabilities, and initially sacrificing peak efficiency for low-capex solutions, has been key to on-boarding customers for MVP trials. With their buy-in today, we now have the foundation upon which to move forward, optimising efficiency and further reducing costs to secure our competitive advantages in the long tail of future applications where our technology will hold value.
How does IPG Energy meet an unmet need?
The impact on the environment of diesel generators is significant. Take just the construction industry for example: A diesel generator on a construction site can consume upwards of 91,000 ltrs of diesel a year, which equates to 245 metric tons of CO2 annually. In London 14.5% of the most harmful emissions such as PM2.5 are estimated to be from stationary diesel generators on construction sites. With approximately 82 million units in operation globally in 2020, the carbon emissions and air pollution generated is substantial.
Pollutant-free and fuel-agnostic, our product promises businesses a cost-effective, low-risk transition to renewable fuels for onsite power, at scale. Customers can offer clients the best carbon savings available for their budget, with a solution that can be scaled across all projects, and aggregate demand while leveraging any renewable fuel supply chain to secure more favourable fuel contracts. Over time, this will continue to increase availability, drive down costs and accelerating decarbonisation across sectors from construction to EV charging.
What’s in store for the future?
Our product is completely fuel-agnostic, a characteristic that is made possible by our innovative Flameless Combustion technology. With this, we are able to offer an accelerated roadmap to net zero. Our customers can replace their diesel generators at scale across their sites, and use any renewable, conventional, or lower-quality fuel (or blend of fuels) to start their decarbonisation journey today without taking on the cost and risk of switching to 100% renewable fuels before they are abundantly available.
This makes us uniquely capable of deploying our product at scale, helping us towards our mission of becoming the go-to replacement to the diesel generator before the end of the decade.
What advice would you give other founders or future founders?
While I am not part of the original founding team of IPG Energy, coming into the business into a leadership role at such an early stage has afforded me insights into the challenges founding teams face when moving from a company with a concept, to one with a market-validated product or service.
Often in startups, founding and early teams are having to wear many hats, stretching beyond their skillsets and experience to do whatever is needed to get the company to the next stage of development, next funding round, or next customer contract. Everyone in IPG Energy’s small team have demonstrated that, even if initially they’re not sure how to do something, they are confident in their ability to figure it out.
With this, the focus is less on the specific experience and skillsets your early hires bring to the table, and more on their ability to approach each problem with determination, positivity and adaptability. This mindset can be a force-multiplier in those early, bootstrapped days. That’s why my advice to future founders would be to look for this growth mindset quality in your new hires, and nurture it.
And finally, a more personal question. What’s your daily routine and the rules you’re living by at the moment?
As a Chief of Staff, I live by the saying “No two days at the same”. My role within the early-stage startup that is IPG Energy is varied and interesting, and you’ll often hear me describe my role as covering “everything we haven’t hired for yet”.
In practice, this means the scope of my responsibilities include contributing to the day-to-day running of the business, working closely with every member of our small team to keep the delivery of our CEO’s vision on track, fostering a positive working environment for our team, and ensuring that we are making the best day-to-day decisions we can.
At the same time, this means working with the CEO to evolve the company strategy, and devising and testing new tactics for accelerating our growth. I have to understand both sides of this coin, which is a truly invigorating challenge, and I genuinely enjoy the opportunities and insights it brings in my direction.
Lauren Franklin is Chief of Staff at IPG Energy.
