Powerstar Marks 20th Anniversary with New Focus
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This summer, Powerstar celebrate 20 years manufacturing and implementing leading energy management and power resilience solutions.
As the UK faces almost unprecedented changes and new pressures impacting how we source and use energy, the priorities of our customers are also changing.
As a result, our 20th year also marks a change in focus, to ensure we deliver the improved resilience and sustainability that organisations increasingly need. While those sectors that have always required power resilience now face new energy management challenges, others are finding that potential energy disruption is becoming a risk they need to address. The growing need for secure, reliable power, balanced with other priorities including reducing costs and carbon emissions, is changing how both we and our customers approach power management.
A brief history of Powerstar
Founded as an energy consultancy focused on addressing customer’s energy efficiency issues, the development of Powerstar’s voltage optimisation and regulation technology saw the business rapidly transition to a solutions-focused technology manufacturer.
Driven in part by the growing importance of net-zero, the energy landscape changes rapidly, and it was crucial for a growing energy solutions provider to adapt quickly to maintain our early success. In 2012, Powerstar observed a growing demand for energy storage solutions. With the aid of a £1.6 million EU grant, Powerstar bolstered its voltage optimsiation technology with a newly developed energy storage offering.
In 2015, Powerstar installed its first energy storage application with UPS for Asda, a system that continues to operate today supporting business-critical automated logistics. The same year, Powerstar’s newly christened VIRTUE battery energy storage system was named the ‘European Product Innovation of the Year’ at European Utility Week, as well as taking home the prize for ‘Renewable Energy & Grid Innovation.’
Looking ahead to continued growth
While early predictions regarding the battery storage market have proven overly optimistic, the changing energy sector has continued to present Powerstar with opportunities for growth. This is evidenced by our two financial years within the Covid-19 pandemic, which has seen our order book grow to its largest in our 20-year history. Increasingly, customers are turning to Powerstar to deliver comprehensive power resilience solutions. This includes established UPS markets that are faced with the pressing need to address rising energy costs and improve sustainability performance. It also encompasses a growing range of new markets that are seeking out improved sustainability, particularly a number of manufacturing sectors that face significant impact on productivity and profitability when experiencing power disruption.
As our CEO and founder Dr Alex Mardapittas explains: “As we move away from fossil fuel generation – we are doing this now, and last year nearly forty percent of our generation as UK PLC was from renewables – people are realising the importance of a solution like ours. As we shift from ‘reliable’ generation into unpredictable power generation, the Grid needs to rebalance and, during that rebalancing process, there will be issues for the power resilience of the country. And a lot of organisations rely on power resilience, so are now coming to us asking for Powerstar solutions.”
As a result, Powerstar is turning its attention towards not just power resilience, but on how our technologies can deliver both critical power and a range of additional benefits simultaneously. While traditional UPS is well established and vital to a wide range of sectors, it doesn’t contribute to your wider energy management strategy and net-zero goals.
In comparison, Powerstar’s battery energy storage systems offer a comprehensive range of additional functionality depending on the customer’s requirements. This could be helping to reduce net carbon emissions, reducing energy bills, managing multiple complex power flows, enabling EV charging or supporting constrained grid connections. By providing seamless, site-wide UPS protection while incorporating each of these difference capabilities, Powerstar technology can deliver a true smart microgrid.