A Long Time Coming: Why Powerverse Feels Like a Calling

9 Jan

Early roots in sustainability

My interest in sustainability goes back to university, when I studied geography in the early 1990s. It was the time of the Rio Earth Summit, and a growing awareness of the environmental crises we were walking into. I read widely and followed the science closely. One book that stayed with me was James Lovelock’s A Final Warning. Lovelock, who developed the Gaia theory of the earth as a single interconnected system, opened my eyes to the scale of the challenge and the need to act differently.

That awareness never left me. Wherever my career took me, I kept reading, watching, and thinking about how technology, business, and human systems could respond.

Seeds of an idea

When I worked at a Sky subsidiary in the late 1990s, I began to think more seriously about how I could put my time to use in tackling big challenges like climate change. Around that time, I was also reading about entrepreneurship — Richard Branson, Virgin, and the idea of creating challenger businesses in sleepy industries.

I had an idea: that local solar on rooftops could one day be a challenger model for distributed community energy. Instead of relying entirely on the big energy retailers, people could generate and share their own power, supported by smarter technology.

I even sent a letter through a friend to Branson’s office, suggesting Virgin Energy might explore this. It wasn’t for them at the time. And perhaps the timing wasn’t right more broadly — it took another 15 years before Octopus and others began to make serious moves to modernise the UK energy sector.

Learning the craft of enterprise software

Meanwhile, I was building a career in software. I co-founded CloudSense, an enterprise software company serving telecoms and media. Over more than a decade, I learned what it takes to scale: product development, enterprise sales, customer trust, global expansion, and eventually, a successful exit.

Those years were formative. I didn’t forget about energy, but I was equipping myself with the tools I would one day need to play a role in it.

The opportunity resurfaces

After selling and leaving CloudSense, I had the headspace to consider what might come next. It was then that I received a call on behalf of Nick Boyle, the entrepreneur behind Lightsource — the world’s largest commercial solar company at the time.

Nick and his team had built solar farms across the world. Alongside that, they’d created a lab to develop software for managing power flows between energy devices. The more they experimented, the clearer it became: the greatest potential wasn’t in utility-scale solar farms, but in homes.

Nick wanted a partner to carve out this lab and turn it into a new business. For me, it felt like a moment of alignment. Here was the very space I had imagined twenty years earlier — local solar, local storage, intelligent software, and AI to connect it all together. The opportunity had circled back, but now I had the experience to meet it.

Powerverse today

That’s how Powerverse was born. Our mission is to transform energy to make it cleaner, cheaper, and fairer. By empowering consumers — giving them visibility, control, and better deals — we can modernise a sector that has been too slow to change.

This is not a theoretical mission. It’s practical. We are building a platform that brings together rooftop solar, batteries, EV chargers, and home energy devices, and makes them work in harmony. We are proving that smarter software can turn complexity into simplicity, and that energy can work better for people.

It feels like a calling, not just a business. The idea I once wrote in a letter has finally found its time.

Doing it differently this time

But there is another layer. I don’t run Powerverse in the same way I ran my first company. Experience changes you. Success teaches you, but so do the struggles, and so does the search for meaning beyond financial outcomes.

This time, I try to lead with authenticity. I try to build deeper connections with the people I work with. I try to create a culture where creativity and initiative can thrive, where people feel part of something meaningful. We don’t always get it right, but the intention matters — and it makes the work richer.

For me, leadership now is not about control, but about presence. It’s about staying open to opportunity, listening closely to what’s in front of us, and allowing the right path to reveal itself. That may sound like surrender, but it isn’t passive. It’s active attention — being alert, being ready, and being willing to step forward when the time is right.