‘Why I’m heading up UrbanChain’s US expansion’: In conversation with Graeme Cooper

Graeme Cooper

With energy industry heavyweight Cooper heading up UrbanChain’s expansion into the US, he reveals his excitement and the opportunities that lie ahead

For those who don’t know you Graeme, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Of course. My career has broadly been in infrastructure and energy. I've always worked in markets going through huge disruption. In my first career, I built cell phone networks across Europe before we had iPhones and phones with cameras on. You know, they were just a device you could talk to.

So I rolled out 2G and 3G networks across Europe. It was really disruptive but all of a sudden, that market matured. It stopped being about coverage. It became about bundling, billing and branding,

I went on to work in developing wind farms. I worked with Fred.Olsen developing, owning and operating eight large scale commercial wind farms, so just over half a billion pounds worth of onshore wind farms in the UK. And we developed a 3.2 billion pound offshore wind farm.

Later, I became Head of Future Markets at National Grid and led all the work of the National Grid on decarbonising heat, because 86% of the UK is heated with a gas boiler and decarbonising transport as the other dirtiest market. It’s been a varied career so far, with top down big policy working for governments, the Prime Minister's Business Council, sitting on the advisory board of the Committee on Climate Change. I helped write transport policy, I've spoken on behalf of the energy secretary for the US and spoken at COP 26 too.

What took you to the US?

Well, I’d done an MBA in Energy as I wanted to learn more and more given more wars are caused by energy than by religion in this day and age. So, I went to school in Norway and California and France, learnt a lot about nuclear, oil, gas, wind, solar, trading and innovation. And I ended up getting the urge to work in the States and joined Jacobs 18 months ago and continue to live in Boston, Massachusetts with my family.. Recently Mo and Somayeh at UrbanChain reached out and here we are.

When it comes to the energy transition, where is the US compared with the UK?

The US is arguably a little behind a lot of Europe, including the UK, on the energy transition. But it is catching up real fast. Through the combination of IIJA (Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act) and inflation Reduction Act (IRA), there is a huge amount of investment going into the US around clean consumption and clean generation.

It would be naive to think of the US as one market, it's 50 countries acting under an umbrella. It's like the United States of Europe. One state is like Germany, another state is like France. Strong local control, arguably slightly weaker Federal control. Whereas the UK is traditionally the other way around, strong Westminster control, weaker local authority control.

Also, because the country's so big, they don't have one electricity market, they have multiple electricity markets.

The US is massive, energy hungry and they like disruption. What you've also got in the US is markets that have gone fast with this like California. They've learnt a lot, and they're now having to kind of reconstitute.

You've got Texas, which arguably has been a gas powered state for a long time. That now has more renewables than California. Interestingly, over the last two years, Texas has deployed so many renewables, and therefore market disruption, that it’s creating so many opportunities and is another area of attraction for investors.

The next most progressive area is the north east, New England and New York State, some of the most aggressive climate change targets. And what they've done is they've looked at California to try and learn how to not make some of those early mistakes California's made.

So is this where opportunity lies for UrbanChain?

The role that I'm playing is trying to work out and help navigate, where is the best place for UrbanChain to explore and pioneer. How, when and with whom?

From our early work (we are less than a month in), yes, California, Texas and New England. The complexity of the size, the diversity of thought, the dynamics of having multiple energy markets in one geography means that this is not either a sure thing or an easy thing however. Saying that, this US expansion is undoubtedly the greatest opportunity for UrbanChain to grow and scale at pace.

The US is one of the most energy hungry countries on the planet, one of the largest and has a very diverse market. Ultimately it’s a pleasure for me to pioneering a place in the US market for one of the most pioneering and disruptive energy players in the UK.

You quite rightly mention that ‘we are in the middle of our generation's industrial revolution’. Could you expand on this?

We are undoubtedly in the midst of our generation's industrial revolution. Over the next 15 or 20 years most G7 economies will double the amount of electricity they consume.

To be able to do that, you're going to need anywhere between four and six times the amount of clean generation that we have today. And to be able to do that, you'll need twice the grid capacity. So we are going through a fundamental shift in our relationship with energy, driven by climate change, driven by air quality, and driven by efficiency. The more you electrify, the more efficient our systems are.

If we're going to get to clean energy systems, clean air and have some chance of minimising the damage to the environment, we need to change our relationship with energy - and that change is happening and comes broadly under the term energy transition.

So there are problems and opportunities?

Anything that's going through change creates a whole ton of problems and a whole ton of opportunities. There is no instruction book that we're following to decarbonise our power systems. We're having to make it up as we go. So we're having to take what we see and work out new clever and better ways of answering that challenge.

Where for you does UrbanChain sit when it comes to solutions through innovation?

Traditionally, utilities were state owned. The generation was state owned. They made what the electorate needed. They turned the power up and down to meet whatever people needed.

We are now way outside that and are now in a world where we have democratised energy. If you own a house, you can put solar on the roof. You're your own power station. You can sell your electricity to someone else. You buy what you can't generate yourself, and you become a participant.

Any business can now take part in generating energy. You've got businesses that are consuming more and thinking about where their energy comes from. And arguably the most delightful thing about UrbanChain is it solves all this.

What UrbanChain is ultimately doing is very accurately matching generation from multiple renewable sources to many energy consumers demanding their energy, effectively ensuring that they know what they are buying and from who.

I’ve seen the success UrbanChain has had in the UK, you know, this 10x growth, the disruption they've caused. They've proved themselves in arguably the most progressive energy market in the northern hemisphere. UrbanChain’s tech creates local energy markets where generators produce clean energy and local consumers use it. And their AI and blockchain driven technology keeps things running smoothly.

Ultimately, how excited are you to be playing a crucial role in UrbanChain’s ongoing journey?

Very. The energy transition is taking us into uncharted territory where there is an opportunity to improve the status quo. UrbanChain demonstrates innovation that actively enhances the energy transition.

Our aim is to show an alternative way to have a relationship with energy that has been pioneered in the UK and could work well in the US. We don’t want to tell them what to do. Some of what I'm doing is not only looking at the market opportunity, the go to market, but it's also realising the sensitivity that Americans buy from Americans. Americans like American ideas. So if you come in and you say, this is a British idea, you'll do this because it works, you'll not get very far. We have to recognise that America looks after America first. So how we navigate the market entry is going to be a really interesting learning journey for us.

Finally, there must be something quirky about you that you haven’t yet mentioned?

Well I suppose I do take my work home. I bought a 600-year old derelict farmhouse in Berkshire, and I made it, over a period of eight or nine years, effectively carbon neutral. So this is a protected listed building. The garden heats all of the hot water and does all the heating through ground source heat pumps. I'm a complete petrol head, but I've been an EV driver since 2017 and I've got some of the smartest tech, meaning that it's only the cleanest and cheapest energy that goes into the car. In the same way with the heat pumps, it's the cleanest and cheapest energy that goes into them - they only run when the grid is clean and cheap. They don't run when the grid is dirty and expensive. I store 600 litres of hot water so I don’t need to run the heat pumps when the grid is dirty and expensive. Everything that goes down the drain, we process in the garden. That means the only emission from my house in the UK is clean water. I also appeared on Top Gear between covid lockdowns, and definitely a claim to fame,, talking to presenter Chris Harris about EVs.