The energy firm aiming to cut your carbon footprint
Bulb’s Hayden Wood speaks to Zlata Rodionova about his vision for a greener future and switching from the Big Six
The world has experienced a noticeable reduction in carbon emissions during the coronavirus lockdown by pushing us into greener living – and Bulb’s co-founder and chief executive Hayden Wood hopes these changes are here to stay.
Wood, who launched renewable energy provider Bulb with his friend Amit Gudka in 2015, believes lockdown has provided consumers with the opportunity to re-evaluate some of their old habits, including how they use their energy.
In fact, according to a report by Energy UK, more than 400,000 people switched from the Big Six to smaller suppliers in June and July this year – an increase of 25 per cent from this time last year.
Wood told The Independent: “Switching has remained quite high because people are at home and they are paying a bit more attention to where their energy is coming from. We’ve seen lots of people switching to renewable or smaller suppliers. You would think events like Covid-19 would replace people’s concerns about the climate crisis but actually people have become a bit more aware of things like their personal carbon emissions and we still see people worrying about it now.”
Bulb’s launched its “carbon calculator”, which helps customers understand how they use their energy, when lockdown started and Wood said uptake of the product has been “quite high”.
He added: “We realised a lot of people were anxious about the climate crisis but they didn’t know what to do about it, so we created this really simple tool. By putting in where they get their energy from, how they travel around, what they eat, our members can work out what their personal carbon emissions are and we then provide advice on how they can reduce those emissions.”
“The other thing that has been quite encouraging about the pandemic is seeing how, when governments really apply themselves to fixing an issue, what can be done and how quickly things can change.”
Wood launched Bulb with a simple mission – to solve a problem and make a difference in the energy sector.
He said: “We saw that people were getting a really bad deal on their energy. They were paying too much for it, it wasn’t renewable and they were getting a bad service – even though changing to a renewable energy supplier is the fastest and cheapest way for people to reduce your carbon emissions. We just couldn’t resist working on this, really. ”
Bulb supplies 100 per cent renewable electricity and 100 per cent carbon-neutral gas at competitive prices. Having launched five years ago, the energy firm is now used by 1.7 million households and supplies about six per cent of homes in the UK. Meanwhile, the company’s annual revenues have risen to £823m in the year to March 2019, up from £183m a year earlier.
This speedy growth has also come at a cost: Bulb’s net losses between April 2018 and March 2019 reached £129m – but Mr Wood said these were in proportion to rising revenue and are all “part of the plan”.
While lockdown has been “challenging” for the energy supplier in some aspects, it hasn’t stopped the company from growing with 180 new hires over the last six months. And Wood’s ambition for Bulb doesn’t end there. In a bid to reach 100 million customers by 2030, he has made a series of significant appointments in the last year.
These eight weeks were probably the proudest moments that I’ve had in the company
The company brought in former easyJet chief marketing officer Lis Blair to join its communication team. While Lionel Guicherd-Callin joined from Google Nest as chief product officer in January. It now has 800 employees and operates across four markets including the UK, France, Spain and Texas in the US.
“Bulb is a business that provides an essential service, people need electricity and gas to heat and light their homes. So, as soon as lockdown was announced, we needed to adapt our operations extremely quickly. These eight weeks were probably the proudest moments that I’ve had in the company – seeing the speed and agility with which people moved to solve a problem and the care and compassion from our teams.”
Like many other businesses, Bulb’s team had to switch to remote working overnight and invent completely
new ways of safely installing smart meters in a Covid compliant way.
With restrictions on international travel, Wood has also not been able to visit teams in Texas and Paris. “Before lockdown I was able to visit the other markets but we’ve adapted quickly and now communicate through hangouts and Zoom calls. It’s also been interesting to see how different countries responded to national lockdowns. We didn’t really expect this but we are beginning to see a cross combination of ideas from France and Texas to see how we can respond to Covid restrictions in the long term.”
At the start of lockdown, energy suppliers worked together with regulator Ofgem to ensure prepayment customers unable to top up during the coronavirus pandemic would be supported and Wood said he’s been inspired by this collaborative spirit.
“I’ve been quite impressed by how energy suppliers, the government and the regulator worked together to fixed those issues. I hope that we can learn from these collaborations in the future.”
In addition to international expansion, for the next six months Bulb will now be focused on scaling the Smart Pay-As-You-Go tariff, which will allow members to top up without going to the shops and provide more data about their usage
“Traditionally, that’s been a set a segment of the market that hasn’t switched as much. Those people are often the ones who are overpaying the most for their energy and are sometimes the least able to afford it. We’re going to be making a concerted effort to scale that product as quickly as possible to give those customers a chance to buy, save on their bills and reduce their carbon emissions.”