The co-founder of collapsed energy firm Bulb has apologised for the supplier’s failure and said his new electricity storage company is taking a “completely different” approach.
Amit Gudka left Bulb months before it went bust in 2021 and went on to found a battery storage start-up called Field.
The company, now in its fourth year with about 90 employees, builds and runs large-scale batteries designed to provide electricity to the grid when wind turbines and solar panels are not generating power.
Field recently bought its biggest site in England, a battery project in the North East which it says is capable of powering 500,000 homes for four hours.
The company hopes to capitalise on a fast renewable energy transition in the UK, after Labour set a target of decarbonising the power system by 2030.
The Government’s plan mainly involves ramping up the UK’s wind and solar power to replace fossil fuels, but officials have said battery storage will be important when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine.
Mr Gudka told the PA news agency: “Batteries can respond very quickly to either charge up or discharge (on to the grid). The battery owner will get paid a fee.”
He said Field has picked areas where there will likely be constraints on the grid and is developing batteries to release excess energy when it is needed.
Some of its other projects are in northern Scotland, East Anglia and south Wales.
“We’ve moved quite quickly on developing those, which we think will be very useful for the grid,” he said.
Mr Gudka is better known for his role alongside entrepreneur Hayden Wood in co-founding Bulb, the green energy supplier that went bust in 2021, forcing the government to take on its 1.7 million customers.
The company was heavily criticised afterwards for its model of attracting customers by offering lucrative referral payments in the pursuit of fast growth.
He said he has “a lot of regret about what happened at Bulb”.
He added: “To see a company that you founded ultimately collapse and cause disruption for customers, staff and the energy industry, I feel very sad and sorry about that.”
Mr Gudka said Bulb went bust because of the “extraordinary circumstances” in the market at that point, when energy prices were rocketing.
He denied the company grew too fast, pointing out Bulb was one of around 30 energy suppliers which failed during the crisis.
However, it was the biggest – its customers made up about 6% of the UK’s household energy market – and it never turned a profit.
Mr Gudka admitted the company should have been “better capitalised” at the time, and had been in the process of raising money when he left.
“With hindsight, there were things that could have been done differently… If that fundraising started a few months earlier it could have been a very different outcome.”
Field is a “very different” business to Bulb because it is an infrastructure company, he added, rather than a supplier to consumers.
“The most important thing is building safe, reliable projects, because they’re going to be there for 30 years,” he said.
Pushed on whether the co-founder of a collapsed supplier is the right person to be in charge of energy infrastructure, Mr Gudka said: “It’s completely different, the approach we are taking.”
Field has raised cash “a long way ahead” of when it needs it, he said, with its most recent fundraise coming in July 2023, a £200 million investment led by DIF Capital partners, a Dutch infrastructure investor.
He said: “Our main spend is on high voltage electricity equipment. You need significant investment to do that.”
One similarity Field has with Bulb is that the start-up benefits from being more nimble than its larger competitors.
They include the likes of FTSE 100-listed energy giant SSE or the Danish multinational Orsted, both of which he admits have “much bigger balance sheets”.
He added: “But we can move a bit quicker, and I think that helps us.”
Last year, Field set up its Spanish office with a target of developing “hundreds of megawatts of large-scale battery projects” across the country by 2030, Mr Gudka said, and it has similar ambitions in Germany and Italy.
He said: “There’s a huge need for flexibility in all markets, so we moved quite quickly after setting up in the UK to be set up in European countries as well.”
Nonetheless, Mr Gudka insisted he has learned the lessons from Bulb.
He said: “This is definitely not a move-fast-and-break-things type of sector. It’s not the internet. That’s a big consideration and so it should be.”