 Everyone's different here at the Canopy Workspace, different organisations, projects and specialisms. But here inside the Entopia building there's also a common goal that brings us together. There's a collective desire to accelerate change and sustainability is at the heart of it. The Canopy is all about collaboration, a community sharing and learning from each other's experiences. And this is Canopy Connect, a podcast where you can get to know your fellow members at the Canopy. This time on the podcast. Hi, my name is Lily Cairns-Haylor. I'm the head of product and one of the co-founders at Advanced Infrastructure. So let's connect. So at Advanced Infrastructure we build geospatial planning solutions and data sets for accelerating energy transition planning. So that's looking at where to site rooftop PV, ground-mount wind turbines, heat pumps, the whole works. In terms of typical projects we work on, it's generally split across two types. Either near-term deployment planning, looking at where in the here and now can I put, say, EV charge points. Or we're looking at longer-term decarbonisation planning. So looking at what is a viable whole systems decarbonisation pathway across transport, heat, generation for a local area. So, say, Oxfordshire or Cambridge City. In terms of collaborators that we work with, our clients are typically local authorities, network operators, so electricity and gas network operators, consultants and private developers. We founded Advanced Infrastructure about three years ago. Myself and my co-founders, Christopher Jackson and Suhesh Dada Treya. It really came out about three years ago when we were working together on a number of smart local energy systems projects. And we grew really frustrated with the blockers that we saw repeatedly coming up again and again and again around financing, data access, cross-industry collaboration. And we were very much uniting the belief that there's a better way to do this. A more digital approach and a collaborative approach would work better. The challenge and the problem that we've been addressing is around the approach to whole systems energy planning. So traditionally it's been done in a very consultancy-driven approach. So that means you bring in a whole load of consultants to work really hard for about six months and output something like a report, a feasibility study or a local area energy plan, which is quite a well-defined method in the industry. And the problems with this are many, and we've done quite a lot of reports and published a lot of research into this, but to summarize it into three things. The first is that local energy planning as a consultancy-led initiative is simply too expensive. We've got over 300 local authorities in the UK and the average cost of a local energy plan is 150,000. If you do the maths, it's not affordable. The second is that when you focus on these sorts of paper-based feasibility reports, the data becomes a real problem. It becomes out of date really quickly, whereas obviously with a digital tool, you can have APIs that keep it up to date. And secondly, it's a very static snapshot in time, but the energy transition is something that moves incredibly quickly. New technologies come out, new solutions come out, policies change, funding schemes change, so you need a way of keeping those studies and those reports live rather than one-off exercises that get done and then forgotten about. In our team, we've got 28 people now going up to 30, I think, by the end of the month. And we're quite a remote team, so remote first has always been our approach. We've got nine UK-based employees, some in the north, some in the south, some in London, four in Cambridge, and then the rest of the team are spread out across India and Greece. In terms of the skill sets we have in the team, we have GIS software development, which has been really critical for us, so streaming very, very large geospatial datasets onto mapping applications in order to analyse them, and fundamentally that's what we build. We also have the data team that sits behind a lot of the data layers that go on to our geospatial platform, which is called Leap Plus, a local energy planner plus. And then we've got the product team that work hard with our clients to sort of identify new features and new data sets that we might be able to incorporate into the platform. We're the first company in the UK to have a digital solution to whole systems energy planning. Other companies have released technology-specific tools for, say, EV charge point sighting or heat pump feasibility programmes. But we're the first to have done a whole systems approach and we fundamentally believe that really is the way you need to do the energy transition. And in terms of the sort of successes that we're really proud of, we've rolled out this platform now across nine different local authorities, including Oxford Shire, Coventry City Council, Dundee, Perth, Kinross, the whole range, but I think really the project that we see sort of most of the work we've done coming to fruition is working with electricity network operators, who in turn engage with their local authorities and with their developers and use our platform as a means to do that, because that really brings in all of the different sort of use cases and uses that we work with. If I were to describe what I do as a founder, it's a bit of everything, as many people in Canopy can probably imagine. But specifically in terms of head of product, what I do is I run our user research initiatives, so that could be discovery, trying to identify new products, new markets. But I also work with our existing users, so I tend to be the main point of contact for all of our clients who we work with. So I tend to filter through the new feature requests, new data sets, new products that we build as a company. I've worked in a number of startups, so originally I studied history at university and I suppose got an interest in problem solving and working with people rather than books as part of that. And then after university I worked across a range of startups in HR tech and a few other different places. And then I wound up in energy, the passion for the company that I'm in now and the products that we build really came from and it's a sort of simple frustration that energy transition planning and deployment shouldn't be blocked by something as simple as data access and visibility. Its links with the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership was definitely one of the big draws for us, facilitating links with academia and with the corporates that we're trying to help decarbonise was very much a big draw as well as the ethos of the building itself. The retrofit standards here are fantastic and we spend a lot of our time working with companies to try and retrofit buildings, so it was a big selling point. We're always looking for new partnerships. We work with a lot of universities. We sponsor Knowledge Transfer Partnerships. PhD students were always keen to try and expand out the academia behind the work we do and ensure that it's rigorous, particularly big emphasis always for us on data and offering the broadest and the most robust collection of data that we can to our users. So we're always looking for new data partners, new data providers and new companies to work with there. Do jump on our website. Subscribe to our newsletter. We've got a fantastic new head of marketing who fires out really insightful stuff. I would say it's a genuinely useful piece rather than lots of little sound bites that maybe get chucked out to fill up your inbox, so I promise we won't bombard you. But you can find us on LinkedIn, Twitter, our website. I'll try to be here as often as possible. Mornings are terrible. I'm usually plugged in in meetings, but I try and sit in the forum as much as possible and love chatting to people. So usually in the afternoons, Friday or Thursday, come and find me. Thanks for checking out this episode of Canopy Connect. Log in to your office R&D profile to connect with your Canopy neighbors. Just head to the members page and find them. This is a Canopy podcast made by Newell-Ottman. The Canopy is part of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership supported by the European Regional Development Fund. Thank you for listening.