Howard Johns – CEO, POP Energy

David Hunt (00:01.592)
Hello and welcome to the Leaders in Clean Tech podcast episode 167, I do believe, and another entrepreneur, this time a solar entrepreneur of good standing, who’s also a TEDx speaker, author, multiple entrepreneur and a solar OG, Howard Johns from Pop Energy. Welcome to the episode.

Howard Johns (00:24.166)
Well, an honour to be here. Thanks for having me David.

David Hunt (00:27.478)
Yeah, it’s good. Howard and I were just catching up a little bit beforehand. Our paths have crossed many times over the years, but let’s do that. Obviously, you’ve got a storied solar background now, so we won’t go through it chronologically. People can do that obviously on the bio, on the website and also obviously on LinkedIn. But let’s look at some of the highlights and in particular what sparked and what got you into that first entrepreneurial solar role.

Howard Johns (00:53.572)
Yeah, I so I studied energy engineering effectively. I studied climate change in the early 90s. I was like, what the? So I became a protester. So I lived in a tree on a coal mine and all this sort of stuff. But I guess what came out of that was that inevitably you lose as a protester. And then I realized that you can’t solve the problems by saying, no, you’ve got to solve, you’ve got to say, yeah, you’ve got to create pathways. So that’s what I spent the next sort of three decades doing.

David Hunt (01:22.146)
And that first business of, yeah, Southern Solar was the first step, right? So that was obviously when our paths first crossed. So again, from being a protest, to understanding the problem, to actually then think at that time in particular, which was what 2002-ish, three, something like that, yeah, when next to nobody was doing solar, you might see a few people knocking about with the, remember there’ll be P180.

Howard Johns (01:26.844)
Doesn’t, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Howard Johns (01:32.06)
Mmm.

Howard Johns (01:41.466)
Yeah 2002, so

David Hunt (01:51.564)
what panels and stuff. So what was it that thought, actually, this is my way to actually say be a yes rather than a no to do something positive without change, but why in particular solar, why in particular rooftops?

Howard Johns (01:52.41)
Yeah, yeah.

Howard Johns (02:02.511)
Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, so I actually bought my first solar panel the BP solar X panel an 80 watt panel in 99 and built a solar sound system of it like a Portable rig that we’ve showed films with and stuff like that and I tried to set up a community energy company then and people just thought I was completely mad but so the rooftop solar I started a lot with solar thermal but then also moved by about 2003 on to sort of PV I guess no one really was doing it in the UK at the time or very few people

David Hunt (02:26.702)
Mm-hmm.

Howard Johns (02:35.097)
And it just seemed like, actually, this could be the future. And it’s something that could be done anywhere. And it just seemed to me like a really, really great accessible thing. I’ve been influenced by the sort of back to the land movement in the US. So people like Real Goods and the Rainbow Power Company out of Nimbin in Australia. And I bought both their books and worked out how to do this stuff, because no one knew at the time how to do solar PV. So yeah, it just felt like something that anyone could do anywhere.

And that’s why it felt like really accessible and something I wanted to build on.

David Hunt (03:09.698)
Yeah, it’s always about one of the things that makes that democratised, you know, it’s a very democratic form of advantage to supply, isn’t When we move on to that, we’re obviously with community solar, but it’s something that should say that it’s easy for people to participate in and to take some elements of control.

Howard Johns (03:17.881)
Mm.

Howard Johns (03:23.237)
Completely. Completely. That’s exactly it. know, I think, sorry, go for it.

David Hunt (03:26.903)
How’d

David Hunt (03:31.47)
I was going to say when, I was a few years later, it’s 2007 when I founded EcoEnvironments. And at that time still, it was relatively tricky to get hold of product, let alone anything, know, anything else in which panels, inverters, et cetera. So how was the, how did you sort of start from nothing where you had no distribution networks at the time, particularly, I’m sure you had no sort of anyone to copy as such to a large degree. How did you start to build that business from, from nothing?

Howard Johns (03:58.149)
Yeah, yeah.

Howard Johns (04:02.563)
Yeah, it was an amazing journey actually, because obviously most people started around the feed-in tariff, but we actually doubled every year for 10 years before the feed-in tariff, and they continue to do that. I guess, you know, it’s the usual entrepreneurial story of, you know, you don’t know whether you’re coming or going half the time, or one week, you know, we’d have a great business ahead of us, and then something would change in the market, and we were like, my God, we haven’t got product, or there was a grant scheme that closed, or you know, all that sort of chaos that happens when you’re trying to build something.

David Hunt (04:28.91)
Mm-hmm.

Howard Johns (04:32.923)
I guess, you the market grew around us to some degree. And I mean, at one stage I was sharps, know, sharp was the only manufacturer in the UK and I was their largest client, you know, so we, we, we found pathways to make it grow. And I think, you know, it’s, funny now cause you, so there’s still really in an early adopter phase, but I guess we were in the hyper early adopter phase, you know, if people who, know, the, the first grid connected service system I did was two kilowatts. was like 20,000 pounds.

And it was probably on my father-in-law’s house and my father’s house. did the two of them to get accredited basically. And at that stage, people weren’t doing this cause of money. They were doing it cause of passion for the environment basically and to see a new thing happen. And of course, I guess that’s the most exciting thing about the moment now is that really money’s driving this or money can be the driver and the environment stuff is the nice to have on the side sort of thing.

David Hunt (05:31.855)
Yeah, The one thing that got me at the time and by no means claimed to be a Nostradamus and certainly didn’t see the price decreases that happened over the years in solar. even at that time in 2007, and again, we were two years before FITZ at least, so we were doing the hard slog when it was 20 grand for roof and however many years payback. But I just had a hunch that this was, it had to be the power source of the future. There didn’t seem any logical way that it wasn’t. I did think that it would be a lot more.

Howard Johns (05:57.391)
Yeah. Yeah.

David Hunt (06:01.546)
subsidy required for longer. But we could switch fossil fuel subsidies to soda subsidies. guess I was very naive then to think that might happen. yeah, it’s that, I say going from early adopter and the chaos at the time. And remember some of those grant things closing. But to be honest, what was trickier for us as a business when feeding the tariffs did happen was that triple digit growth that pretty much most of us that were around at that time went through.

Howard Johns (06:10.873)
Yay.

David Hunt (06:31.808)
really hard to manage when again there was those spikes of when the feed-in service then started to change and but you navigated all that with quite a big team so what what were the I guess coming from an almost you know from a better way of putting it a hippie sort of start to be a protester to start to build a business and then to have this really super growing business that was coming up against all of these challenges fairly thick and fast at the time.

Howard Johns (06:35.365)
Yeah. Yeah.

Howard Johns (06:47.557)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (06:56.127)
If it fully some like I I think some of my experiences of protesting directly translated into how I ran the business and how we structured ourselves in protest was that we created small cells that could operate independently with reference to the whole because when you’re in like a dynamic situation trying to prevent you know a group of police and bailiffs trying to knock you out of a site sort of thing like with the the coal mine.

you need people to be able to be autonomous because it’s a dynamic environment. So I think I’ve always built businesses with that. So it’s like when I built Southern Solo, I guess we got to eight different regional teams and each one was running its own show really with overarching systems that they could, that were held centrally that they were plugged into effectively. I think that creating autonomy for me was how we built that business so fast and so successfully.

And I think even more so, I feel like, you know, not only do I want to build businesses that, you know, change things like, you know, changing the energy system, I want to build them in a way that changes how we run businesses. And that’s always been a focus for me. So, you know, there’s this concept of self-organizing teams, which, you know, back, I don’t know, 15 years ago, I had no idea of even the concept. Now it’s a whole theorem with people, you know, and so…

With COP, for example, I’m actively building a self-organising company. So that’s one where you don’t necessarily have the traditional hierarchy because the more autonomy and independence people can have in their role, the more they show up and the more you get things done, basically. So it’s always been a principle for me and in many ways has been informed by that original experience, but it’s just carried on through and built.

When I was at Bluefield running their asset management business and then building the two new companies I built there, very much the same principles applied and people would just really respond. It’s like, old school micromanagement actually just shuts people down if you’re actually mentoring people and encouraging them to grow into their capacity.

Howard Johns (09:15.897)
you just get so much more out of them. It’s so much more enjoyable for everyone. And that’s one of the things I’ve loved the most. It’s one of the things I really enjoy about leading groups of people without businesses or elsewhere is just that, you know, seeing people arriving in the business, not necessarily having the skills they need, but having the right attitude and seeing them then step up and grow into something that really adds value. And that’s always been one of the biggest pleasures of the leadership positions I’ve had basically.

David Hunt (09:24.268)
Yeah.

David Hunt (09:45.153)
Yeah, yeah, it’s a strange thing is that, as you say, a lot of these concepts are now much more widely studied and understood to a degree theoretically. And many companies are that way, particularly in our scene. Obviously, over the last 12 years, I’ve worked with hundreds of startups, and many of whom, most of whom have some aspect of that in their culture. I guess it’s by definition of being in the kind of the clean tech sort of us against the world kind of environment to a degree. However, there are still a lot of companies started around otherwise who

Howard Johns (09:51.835)
you

Oof.

Howard Johns (10:07.941)
BLEUGH

David Hunt (10:14.798)
revert to this kind of command and control and micromanagement and stuff. it’s so bizarre to see sometimes. And then they’re surprised when people respond to a headhunter knocking on the door saying, hey, there’s something else you should be looking at. But culture is something that I should say that I guess comes from different experiences. From my part, I’d worked for some great companies and worked for a few crap ones as well. And I kind of formulated, well, this was good and this was bad.

Howard Johns (10:29.211)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (10:37.071)
Mmm.

David Hunt (10:43.67)
If I was to create a company to work for again, this would be it. And that’s kind of where my genesis and that respect came from. But obviously, it’s interesting to hear how that sort of early protesting kind of environment, least our leadership and the sort of coordination of things has inspired that. That’s interesting. So talk about then Bluefield, obviously Southern Soda was about 10, 15 years or so. And then let’s take a few steps towards pop and then we’ll see what you’re up to these days.

Howard Johns (10:51.739)
Mmm.

Howard Johns (11:03.131)
Mm.

Howard Johns (11:07.823)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Yeah, so Bluefield, I mean, so like many others, two years after the sort of massive ramping down of the feeding tower, I eventually had to close Southern Solar, which was super hard. You know, sort of, I actually shrunk it down, got it back to profitability, but you know, the market wasn’t there and so I had to move on. But I mean, I had the brilliant opportunity, I went to see

friends at Bluefield. Bluefield was the first listed fund to raise capital on the stock market to build solar plants in the UK and I popped in to see them thinking I’ll maybe I’ll do some consultancy and ended up taking on their asset management business which at the time was 450 megs of UK solar under management helping them double that up to over 900, launch it into new countries so Italy, Netherlands, various other places.

and then built them two new companies, which was an O &M business and a development business. I brought in the team to get that going and both super successful. mean, to be honest, it was a really brilliant five years for me there. I’d done some large scale before. So with Southern, we’d started doing development of large scale projects. That’s how I met all the investors. And then I did an O &M business for a global O &M business. And so Bluefield was sort of

a logical progression for me. And I had a really great time there. And I felt like we achieved an awful lot in that period. yeah, sort of taking the platform that they built, which was very much a fund management business, they’d got their asset management up and running, and they’re just broadening the platform out. So it really was turning into an IPP. And I think that obviously that’s where probably they’re going at this stage. Again, for me, was just, you

Howard Johns (13:02.829)
I know this stuff inside out. I’ve been on the tools back in the day. I know how it all fits together. So it was really fun to be able to build teams, really dealing with the technical, but also bridging the financial. all that fund, pulling together all the accounts for the funds. for me, it was great learning. I felt like sort of part of my development, I needed to get closer to the money to understand really how that.

side of things works and I was really grateful for the guys at Bluefield for, you know, sort of bringing me in and the learning I got from that, you know, and I hope that I’ll be able to apply some of that to what I’m doing now. But yeah, you know, again, it’s that thing of if we don’t pull large amounts of capital into this space, obviously we both know that’s happening globally on a phenomenal scale now, but if we don’t understand what the capital needs to be comfortable to come in, then we’re never going to scale it. So I really wanted to get close to the capital and understand

David Hunt (13:43.97)
Yeah, yeah.

Howard Johns (14:01.979)
Okay, what exactly does that look like and how do you manage that? And obviously provide some value in the process as well.

David Hunt (14:11.342)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and that’s one of the things that I can kind of got to at a relatively early point, obviously, when you got this kind of cottage industry and there was a bunch of us doing what we were trying to do. And then you kind of realized that actually, to really move the dial forward, we do need to engage with these corporates, with these financial institutions, with these, know, capitalist entities that…

Howard Johns (14:34.703)
Yeah, yeah.

David Hunt (14:37.55)
to move the dial forward. It has taken a little while, hasn’t it? I mean, it should say we’re still at now at a where there is trillions of dollars going into solar and battery development. But that’s been, I guess, 10, 15 years in the making, but it’s because we were doing things in those early days. I still think it’s quite funny sometimes when you talk about megawatts these days, people think, what are megawatts? But when the first five megawatts solar farms were going in, it was like an amazing step forward, wasn’t it?

Howard Johns (14:41.317)
Mm-hmm.

Howard Johns (15:03.483)
Yeah, it was huge. We were like, wow. Yeah, and I remember my first 10 kilowatt rooftop and people were like, why on did you put so many panels on that roof? You know, they were just shocked by this, you know, now you think 10 kilowatts, I mean, you put that on a house now, you know, it’s like, it’s laughable. But yeah, I mean, it’s amazing how it’s developed.

David Hunt (15:10.284)
Alright.

David Hunt (15:20.342)
yeah let’s let this

Yeah, yeah, let’s preempt pop a little bit because we’ll get to that. that’s because community solo is something I always found quite interesting. And in fact, it’s one of the things in the early days that appealed to me about what was going on in the end of the event in Germany, because again, there was a lot of, you know, slightly different political structure in Germany. But you were involved in community quite early. I just sort of been part of the formation of a community solo group when when unfortunately the market collapsed and we didn’t actually get to deliver any any meaningful projects. But

Howard Johns (15:38.597)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

David Hunt (15:56.323)
that the again, going back to that democratization kind of thing, at what point did you start to think actually, you there’s obviously a commercial element here, but actually there’s also a community element that we can tap into. What were your first sort of community solar projects?

Howard Johns (16:12.059)
Yeah, well, I mean, in many ways, that’s where I started in 99. I was in Brighton. I built my first solar rig and I was talking to people about setting up a community energy company in Brighton and people just thought I was completely mad. And then sort of nearly 10 years on 2007, 2008, there was something called the transition movement. And suddenly I was in a room full of people who were going, well, why don’t we just build a wind turbine on the hill? We’re in the South Downs, you know, it’s like, well, there’s a bunch of reasons why we’ll never do that, but we could do, you know, a solar plant that we all owned.

David Hunt (16:29.675)
Yep.

Howard Johns (16:42.011)
And that’s how it started really. was like, you know, sort of eight, nine years on from that original inspiration, which was very much drawn from Denmark and Germany and what they’d done with the energy vendor. And, you know, seeing the movement there and feeling like, well, why isn’t that happening here? So in 2008, I founded Avesco, which is still going strong today. It’s got permission for an 18 megs solar farm now, which I’m super happy about.

And I did 10 years as sort of Voluntary Director of that business to sort of prove the model. And we built the first solar PV rig funded by a local community basically in just as the feeding tower was about to close in 2011. So we, know, two or three years in development to get to that point and just got one through just before it went down. And I guess for me, you know, like putting communities at the center of this transition is super important.

I think it’s been amazing to watch that movement. There’s something like 450 community energy companies now across the UK, some of which undoubtedly inspired by what we did in Lewis with VESCO. I guess what’s been disappointing is that they’re all subscale. They’re all with a handful of rooftop systems. The odd ones got a larger plant, but none of them have achieved the scale of any of these bigger funds, for example.

David Hunt (17:47.022)
Yeah.

David Hunt (17:57.646)
Mm.

David Hunt (18:08.813)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (18:09.113)
And to me, feels like it’s a missed opportunity. And that’s partly why I’ve of spun back around to this space to see if there, you know, is there a way to reinvigorate this space? Because community energy companies are not commercial enough and they can’t therefore compete with the likes of the commercial developers and the commercial companies that are operating in this space. So invariably they’re sort of picking off the bits that are left, which, you know, just means it’s too small and it’s never going to have the meaningful impact that I hoped it would basically.

David Hunt (18:23.234)
Mm-hmm.

Howard Johns (18:38.575)
But yeah, I mean, it’s lovely to see how the space has come on. And obviously there’s huge political support now in the UK for it. Whether the sector can deliver on that ambition is another thing, but it’s great that there’s proper support and money behind it.

David Hunt (18:39.982)
you

David Hunt (18:54.732)
Yeah, good to get your thoughts, actually, because one of the things I’m sure was the same for you was when we were doing the solar rooftops back in the back in the day was that once you sort of installed on a house on a street, invariably that street would turn into a handful of others at least would want to join join the party. So there was that element of I’ve seen it. I can touch it in that community element. But people are like herding cats, aren’t they? So it must be tough to to sort of coordinate a community group where

Howard Johns (19:06.405)
Mm. Mm-hmm.

David Hunt (19:21.876)
everybody may have the same ultimate goal but everybody wants to get there in a slightly different way or at a different pace that that was I guess one of the challenges isn’t

Howard Johns (19:27.387)
Yeah, yes.

It is certainly one of the challenges and I think often, you know, people who are drawn to that space, you know, I always say you get the the retired engineers and you get people who are very well meaning and they want to be conclusive, which is lovely. But it means that it’s not very dynamic and not very commercial because of it, which can be a barrier, I think, you know, that’s why I resigned from Avesco about 10 years ago to focus on the large scale stuff. I’m sort of coming full circle at this point with with pop and

David Hunt (19:44.878)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (20:00.717)
again coming back into that space but with a new take on it which has been quite interesting.

David Hunt (20:07.462)
Okay, well let’s talk about that take then. So Pop was created when and what exactly are you looking to achieve?

Howard Johns (20:10.252)
Mmm.

Howard Johns (20:13.883)
Yeah, so I’ve basically been working on it for about three years, sort of thinking about it for about six. I actually founded the legal entity in about 2020, but it was just not the right time to get going. And then I got to a point where I felt like I had done what I could do at Bluefield. And I guess one of the key drivers behind the thinking for POP is that we were starting to get grid connection offers back with the development business that was saying, you you connect this 50-meg plant in 2038.

And, know, again, climate’s been my sort of motivator. So my brain started to go 2038. Well, there’s no way we can meet our climate targets and there’s no way we can decarbonize in the way we need to if we can’t connect stuff for 10 or 15 years. You know, it’s like there must be another way. So I started to think about, you know, with the drop of cost of solar and particularly batteries that there and the digitization of everything that’s going on.

David Hunt (20:59.715)
Yeah.

David Hunt (21:09.944)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (21:13.229)
And then the sort of rise of machine learning and those sorts of things, felt like actually, if you started from scratch today, what would you build? If you were thinking about energy today and there was nothing, you had a blank slate almost, where would you start? You’d start where the power was needed because we know it’s way more efficient to generate and store the energy at the edge where it’s needed. So in many ways, you know, it’s an expression of that. guess there’s three strands to it, really. One is like,

How do you herd the cats? How do you get that contagion happening in a street? How do you get multiple people on the street to think about this at once and maybe to act at once? Secondly then is like, how do you democratize the access to this? you for some people the 10 or 15,000 pounds they’re gonna need to spend upfront is a barrier. You know, how do you create a financial mechanism so they don’t have to spend it upfront? And then the third bit is then how do you orchestrate those systems and have them acting collectively?

you know, so that you can provide services in the grid and potentially flood power between homes. And those are sort of three strands of what we’re building basically. Because I think the future energy effectively is going to be on the edge. It’s going to be owned by millions of people. And the question is, how do you do that in a coordinated fashion so you end up with something that’s useful at the end of it? Because at the moment, let’s face it, it’s very much, you know, your average, let’s say, solar installer, you know, they’re

driving their marketing, they’re getting the cherry pick people from wherever, the early adopters. But actually, to get a useful thing at the end of it, if you could get a concentration of 200 or 300 houses all electrified, solar heat pump battery behind one substation, then suddenly you’ve got a block that’s useful that you can flood power out of, that you could do peer-to-peer trading from. There’s a whole bunch of things that I think open up. So that’s the sort of…

ideas behind pop is to try and create that.

David Hunt (23:15.35)
Okay, so how’s that going? My experience with that was working with Zonon way back in the day when, long before they were acquired, when we started to do the Zonon community where you could peer-to-peer trade from your domestic battery. And again, there were many barriers at that time, not least of which obviously regulatory and legislative. How is the market in the UK, and as far as you’re aware, outside of the UK, now creating these kinds of

Howard Johns (23:20.769)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah, totally. Super pioneering.

David Hunt (23:43.118)
So technologically, it’s all doable, isn’t it? But it’s a case of how do we actually facilitate it?

Howard Johns (23:46.747)
It’s there. Yeah. Yeah. So the regulation, I mean, across Europe, it’s opened up. So energy communities are a thing. Peer-to-peer trading is a thing. So it’s possible to build these, I think, already across many European countries. And there are companies out there doing it. In the UK, it’s still quite challenging. So there are various loopholes in the Energy Act which enable some of this stuff. So the wholesale trading of factories is possible already.

So you can take a collection of batteries and bid them into the wholesale markets and make money off them. So that’s possible today. There’s various companies that have pioneered that. I think where I’m going with this is, you know, how do you create that sort of peer to peer like meshed training across a tight geographic community? Again, it’s theoretically possible today. And there is a loophole that’s just sort of going through the Energy Act, which means that

that will be regularly possible as well, but no one’s really done it. I mean, there’s a couple of, there’s a group called Energy Local that have done a version of it, which is again, a community energy company, but it’s very, very small scale. You know, so like a hundred houses connected to a hydro plant or something like that. So theoretically it’s there, practically it’s not, but there’s a whole bunch of benefits as to why this would be a good thing. Not least of which is,

Most people don’t realize, five pence of your 28 pence per kilowatt hour electricity tariff is transmission costs. So the moment you are not transmission over the network, suddenly your electricity gets cheaper. that again, like a lot of the criticism we have against the renewable sector at the moment is that it doesn’t really benefit people. And when it hasn’t saved money on our bills, although we all know it has, it saved billions on our bills potentially.

but it doesn’t translate to money in people’s pockets. That’s the key thing, or they don’t see it as that. But if we could get these sort of local models up and running, then potentially you can give real tangible benefit to local people. Again, for me it’s like, okay, so if you use this sort of community financing vehicle, let’s say for your town, we have a community financing vehicle that owns a bunch of the infrastructure across the town that also happens to manage this stuff to maximize the…

Howard Johns (26:09.999)
the revenue streams you’re going to make off the batteries, you know, that creates a surplus that just lowers everyone’s bills, you know, so both the investors in it make some more money and the homeowners who have this stuff on their homes. To me, we need systems like that that are just completely win-win and that’s what I’m really trying to build apart, you know, does make it, it feels like we’re trying to do a very complex thing. But again, I didn’t just want to build something that

VC investor would want to invest in. wanted to build something that actually creates a new model and that does something really useful in this space. Again, I think if I’d been just going after VCs, I’d have just done a thin-sized software to enable one element of this. But really, I don’t want to see that. I want to see this new thing in the world, and that’s why I’m mad enough to keep going with these ideas.

David Hunt (26:44.866)
Mm.

David Hunt (27:03.726)
to kickstart. And one of the challenges, I guess, because things are so now positive in the sense of how things have evolved that you can now have solar on your roof, battery in the garage, heat pump potentially, EV charging, bi-directional very soon. that, it’s not complex to those of us who’ve been in and around the sector for long time, it all just makes sense. But to a consumer who perhaps has never seen anything bar some solar panels on the roof at some point.

Howard Johns (27:19.119)
Yeah.

David Hunt (27:30.646)
and probably no doubt seen lots of crap in the Daily Mail about heat pumps and stuff. how are you feeling going into communities and you you’re starting to see, how far you are on the journey so far, but are you starting to see people either resist or embrace this possibility?

Howard Johns (27:31.013)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (27:34.437)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (27:43.374)
Mm.

Howard Johns (27:51.247)
Yeah, I mean, it’s been interesting because in the three years, I think I’ve probably talked to, I don’t know, 60 different communities over these three years. know, every month I’ve done a couple of, you know, events in a town hall or a church hall and just really talk people through a little bit of my journey. But also like what’s happened to energy, the fact that we have been super successful. know, you’ve got solar and wind peaking up to like 70 % of the grid some days. You know, this

We have changed it, you know, and then to explain what that means for moving forward. And when people get their head around that, they’re like, and I say, oh, and by the way, your home could be an important cog in that whole new machine. Suddenly they’re enthusiastic. And I think, you know, in part, you know, we have a comms problem in that people don’t understand the future of energy. Many people in the industry don’t even understand the future of energy. think, you we’re creating it again.

And people are focused on, we’re just going to build all this large scale stuff and it’s going to flood power onto the grid. Actually, we all know that that’s going to create huge problems. It already is and will create huge problems around prices. You’re seeing negative prices in Australia, where they’re just giving away power for two hours a day on certain grids in Australia. This is what’s coming. That is going to destroy the investors business model to just building large scale plants.

Again, this is super dynamic disruption going on in this space. And I think when people understand that, you know, the quicker they get on with this, the more they’re to be insulated both from the geopolitical instability that’s affecting all of our lives, but also from this future energy which is unfolding and no more quite knows how it’s playing out.

David Hunt (29:35.214)
you.

Howard Johns (29:42.651)
I’ve been really heartened. I guess in the last, I don’t know, couple of months, we’ve started to really feel contagious around what we’re doing. people, so particularly that we collaborated with these crazy filmmakers, Dan and Hilary, who made this film called Power Station, which, you know, look it up if you haven’t seen it, it’s brilliant. It’s these two artists who decide to make a power station on their street and then realise how hard that is.

and they decide to raise money and give solar to people on the street for free and this sort of stuff. It’s a brilliant film, it’s really funny because it’s brilliant storytelling, the like of which we’ve never achieved really as an industry, but it’s super emotive and super engaging. And it makes it look really hard, but essentially it captures people’s imagination as to, look, this is so possible. We could just do it the next decade. We could unhook our cities and towns from…

imported energy like vastly. You know, maybe 20 % of their energy would be imported at the end of it. And, you know, that would have huge financial, environmental, social benefits in doing that. So we started to see contagion in the area therein, which is in North London, Walthamstow. And yeah, I mean, I think we’ve got like, well, about 120 on streets with people active. And I guess we’ve sort of taken this approach where

we’ll find what we call a street champion. Because again, we know that 70 % of UK adults, 70 % people globally care about climate. Most people like solar wind, all that sort of stuff. Most people would like to have it. But as you say, most people have no idea where to start. So we’ve been running these groups in streets where we get a street champion. We get all those curious folks who wouldn’t go and research this stuff.

David Hunt (31:10.764)
Mm-hmm.

Howard Johns (31:34.043)
in a room together and have a co or on a zoom call together and have a conversation about, okay, what does this all look like? How does it all fit together? What does it look like on your home? And we found that that sort of gives people the courage to act basically. that again, that 70%, you know, you’ve got the like 15 % early adopters who are doing it anyway, got 70 % who would do it if someone made it easy for them. So that’s really what we think is important at this point is, is how do you build trust?

and how do you make it easy for people to act? So that’s taking away the technical barriers, the fear and the financial barriers so they can just get on with it. And we think that is starting to work basically.

David Hunt (32:12.974)
Yeah.

Okay, so it’s essentially facilitating the or encouraging that contagion whereby on a street people with those who can afford it can go ahead and be comfortable installing their PV or battery or whatever or does POP have the plan to facilitate you touched on this before perhaps provide the financial model whereby you can aggregate both the power but also aggregate potentially the cost of installations.

Howard Johns (32:43.259)
Exactly that. So we intend to launch our first cooperative finance vehicle in hopefully three of them this year in three different areas. Because we think that that again, the biggest barrier to people doing this stuff is trust. You know, so if you can take away the trust barrier, again, if they feel like they’re having something done to them, we know this from, you know, planning of solar farms, when people feel like it’s a big investor coming in, and they’re just going to make loads of money and rip it out of the community.

then they feel really anti. If they feel like, this is our thing, this is an investment fund that’s locally owned, that benefits local people, and it’s local people doing the installations and all that sort of stuff, it totally changes it. Because I think that, know, obviously, that sort of pressure sales and marketing that’s been around this space over the years, you let’s face it, if you type

solar into Google, you’re going to have ads everywhere for the next six months, you’re to have phone calls coming at you and all this sort of stuff. And possibly from companies that, you know, not doing it in a way we’d want it done, let’s say, you know, and, so there’s a lot of

David Hunt (33:49.646)
We won’t call out names, we all know historically it’s been a thing and it still is a thing, which doesn’t help the trust.

Howard Johns (33:53.879)
It has, it still is, it still is. It really doesn’t. So anything we can do tonight, take away that fear and to make people feel like, okay, yeah, we’re all in this together, I think is absolutely crucial. And why not? Why not? Why not have systems that leave money locally? There’s absolutely no reason why not. It’s been done across Europe. It could be done here, basically.

David Hunt (34:20.142)
Okay, so let’s jump back to Howard the entrepreneur. So you’ve got this mission, you’ve got this concept, you’ve obviously started to make some progress. What’s next? How do you evolve this business? How do you start to create the business entity to support this mission?

Howard Johns (34:25.31)
Mmm.

Howard Johns (34:33.723)
Mmm.

Howard Johns (34:37.785)
Yeah, so I’ve sort got it up and running in many ways. You know, sort of, I have had a bit of deja vu of like, my God, I’ve just created another little mini Southern solar thing. What am I doing? You know, here I am crawling around in lofts. know, last week I was running a billion pounds of solar for Bluefield and now I’m, you know, selling solar to Mrs. Smith or whatever, you know, and I had a few moments of like, my God, what have I done? But essentially, you you sometimes just have to…

David Hunt (34:54.317)
you

Howard Johns (35:07.003)
surrender to that and go back to the start, you know, and, and, you know, I went from having a team of 150, suddenly it was like, oh, it’s just me. Oh, okay. Nothing’s going to happen unless I do it type thing. And that was super challenging, but I guess, you know, you just start, you know, and I feel like I’m really clear on what we’re building. I’m clear. It’s almost like we’re building a convening layer to make this thing happen. You know, so yes.

like how do you get streets talking to each other? How do you then deliver for those streets in an economic, cost-effective way, empowering local tradespeople? So we’ve done a whole piece around that, how you get existing electricians, roofers, plumbers, that sort of stuff, and upskill them enough so they can actually just get on and do this stuff. Because most of them would love to do it. They just know how to make it easy for them again. we’ve done a piece around that. Again, we’ve been working the last year-ish on building a financial model for both our own funding vehicle.

David Hunt (35:55.811)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (36:06.907)
you know, like a EnPow or like a Sunsave, HomeTree, those guys, you know, so borrowing that model, but then also looking at, okay, well, how do we also do that in a way that could enable these local vehicles? So the way you’ve got an active group who are already interested and want to do it, you can go, yeah, sure, here’s the business model. We’ve got the overarching structure to support you to be able to deploy capital and administer it afterwards. And then the last piece.

which we haven’t really started building. We’ve done initial enabling works on, but you know, it’s that whole flexibility management piece, you know, probably to begin with, we’re just partnering with folks that are already doing it. We’ve got a whole bunch of conversations on the go around that, but we feel like that is the future of the business. know, so like an installation business is just thinking about getting in and getting out and hoping there’s no problems afterwards.

David Hunt (36:47.604)
number of them.

David Hunt (36:58.925)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (37:00.163)
I’m really thinking about, how do we have a long-term relationship with these communities to actually really optimize those systems for them and maybe help them manage it financially as well? that’s, so sort of, again, I feel like I’m fusing the early activists, like how do you go and talk to streets? How do you get people doing that with then the Southern Solary bit of like the practical, how do you deliver? Then sort of.

financial, both merging the sort of cooperative side and also what I learned at Bluefield, know, how do you, how can we attract capital into this space and create structures that can contain that and make it flow? And then the last bit really, I guess, part the learning edges around the digital orchestration of the whole thing. And I did do a bunch of sort of digital work with the team at Bluefield around how we were running those assets, you know, so again, surfacing all the data from

David Hunt (37:52.035)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (37:53.167)
know, thousands of different data points and turning it into something useful. So again, taking some of that learning assignment, my co-founder at Pop, who was co-founder at Sun and Solar, came into another business, came into Bluefield to do digital stuff there is with me again, doing digital stuff for Pop. yeah, it feels like that’s where we’re going, is to be this long-term partner to communities to manage this future energy system as we build it, basically.

David Hunt (38:20.717)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (38:21.147)
But I have your moments, you it’s the classic thing of you start and people go, oh, so you’re building an installation business. I’m like, well, that’s part of it, but that’s not the whole picture. So it’s been fun, you know, sort of trying to evolve it to a point where people can see the bigger picture.

David Hunt (38:38.254)
Yeah, and it’s good, I’m sure, for yourself to knit all these various parts of experience into something which is an amalgamation of those things. Just touching on the funding, because you touched a couple of times on VC funding, we’ve all seen sort of 1,5 and Empower raise gazillions of pounds, or certainly many, many hundreds of millions of pounds. But you’re launching a crowd fund, I believe. Is that correct? Yeah, so maybe you can talk a bit more about that, because again, that’s again, a kind of a community-led funding.

Howard Johns (38:47.246)
Mmm

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Howard Johns (39:01.199)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

David Hunt (39:08.12)
versus just going to the VC who has a different long-term objective, despite being many really good climate tech VCs out there, but they still have a way of operating.

Howard Johns (39:08.389)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (39:13.708)
Yay.

Howard Johns (39:19.493)
Yeah, I felt, guess we have raised some institutional capital. So Sustainable Ventures is one of our backers, but it felt like actually there’s a real opportunity to broaden this again, you know, and to bring in the crowd and people who get the mission. Again, it’s been really interesting actually, though, because I have pitched to those of VCs and I think because what we’re doing is quite broad, it doesn’t really fit with their thesis and actually…

When I think about it, most VCs, dare I say it, they’re sort looking for businesses that can build super scale and are actually quite extractive. So they’re looking for businesses that can ship to a mobile phone that are gonna be extracting a small amount of cash from everyone for a long time, making those a profit. I guess what I’m proposing to do here is build a non-extractive business, which is again, quite radical. If we’re leaving the ownership with local people.

in a cooperative, for example, that doesn’t really sit with the VC. And I think that’s in part why it’s been challenging to raise from some of those climate tech funds. Because for a start, what we’re doing is quite broad. Secondly, it doesn’t necessarily follow their pattern. So yeah, we felt like it was the moment to open it up.

David Hunt (40:28.846)
Okay.

David Hunt (40:34.36)
Yeah.

It’s an interesting thought actually, because again, might not be careful what I say, because I work with a good number of climate tech VCs and support them. But that just generally seems to have been, now I’m getting a little bit hippy about it, there’s a big difference between a not-for-profit and a rapacious capitalist organization. And somewhere in the middle, there’s a place you can make good money and everybody benefits and lots of it stays locally. And I do see that, again, that doesn’t necessarily sit with a VC model that you don’t maximize benefit.

Howard Johns (40:42.843)
Hmm

Howard Johns (40:57.743)
Yay.

David Hunt (41:07.63)
in a slightly more rapacious kind of way. So when are you launching? We’ll obviously share the link.

Howard Johns (41:11.375)
Yeah.

I mean, think there’s some.

Yeah, so the sort pre-registration, I think they call it, is open at the moment. I think it will launch maybe in about a week, week and a half, for actual people to be able to sign up properly. So yeah, if you like the sound of the story, you like what we’re building, it’d be amazing if you could, because I think like 20 quid is the minimum sign up, so yeah, it’d be amazing if you want to get involved and come and join the journey.

David Hunt (41:39.438)
We’ll certainly share the link into the episode notes and good luck with that. But yeah, I guess that’s one of the things if you speak to some of those of us who are around at the back end of the 2000s in the sector.

Howard Johns (41:46.299)
Amazing, thank you.

David Hunt (41:57.707)
It does seem that there’s, I’m sure there are many still who are entrepreneurial, wanting to build stuff, wanting to do well for themselves, wanting to make money, wanting to sort of do those typical entrepreneurial capitalist things. But actually, going back to that democratisation, that energy locally for people to participate where…

everybody’s a winner seems to be, I guess, perhaps a little bit less prevalent these days and maybe we’re just getting old and cynical, but it’s good to see businesses that are still, yeah, is still opportunities to do really well for yourself, but actually do really well for other people as well.

Howard Johns (42:34.619)
I mean, think, again, I feel like we haven’t quite cracked it yet, but if I do crack it, I think this could be really huge because I think it will be different, it will be fresh, and it will be owned by people, and that just changes everything, you know? And again, the enthusiasm I have experienced when I’ve been out there talking to communities, people want this, you know? They’re really fed up of just having an extractive business constantly in their lives, just taking money off them every year.

They love the idea that they could be back in control of their energy and hence why people are doing it. But again, if we can wrap this in a way that just brings way more people with it, it was so more powerful. So yeah, that’s what I’m hoping to really manifest in the next five years.

David Hunt (43:21.066)
Well, like I said, we’ll put the links into the episode page. In conclusion, I always tend to ask guests around either individuals or specifically books that have inspired them. You’ve got a chance to plug your own book, by the way. But again, over either at the start of or during the course of your career, have there been any particular books or authors that have inspired you or kept you motivated?

Howard Johns (43:30.393)
Mmm.

Howard Johns (43:40.219)
It’s a really good question. I think, yeah, I obviously I did write a book on this stuff, which was very much for communities, energy revolution, how to do a community energy company yourself really. I think some, for me, some of the books that have really inspired me have been around like organizational structuring and that sort of stuff and like how you grow an organization. So there’s a book called Synchronicity, which I absolutely love, which, if you’re in leading a business, you constantly have these challenges.

One of the things in that book that’s still, you know, is with me today and that I reflect on regularly is that whole, it’s around the sort of creative destruction curve. You you’ve built businesses, you have regular times in the creation of a business way. It’s almost like you hit a wall, you feel like everything’s falling apart and you have to like do a rapid rethink and reconfigure where you’re at and, you know, resize it or whatever.

It’s just this concept that in that moment, that’s the most creative, the most fertile moment of your journey. And that’s where you really get things working. I think, know, books like that, that book, Synchronicity, again, in this last two or three years doing this, I’ve had multiple moments like that where I’ve been like, what am I doing? my God, this is terrible. It’s all falling apart or it’s not working.

David Hunt (45:03.256)
Okay.

Howard Johns (45:05.625)
whatever it is, and it’s in those moments that you really actually get to the point where you have the breakthroughs. And so I think for me, finding things that you can do with your team, with your supporters, with your mentors, to hold you, to give you the confidence to keep going through those hard moments and to understand that they’re part of a flow and that you do come through. If you do come through, then you actually come through with a lot more knowledge and a lot more strength.

Yeah, so that’s been one of my big inspirations, that book.

David Hunt (45:38.476)
Yeah, no, it’s really interesting. We’ll make sure we share that link. mean, just as a general concept, I’ve learned infinitely more from the mistakes, tragedies and failures that I have from the successes. But I guess that puts you in a moment where you have to be, by definition, creative. So we’ll share the links to that in the episode page as well. But listen, Howard, it’s been great to catch up. We’ve obviously crossed paths many times over the years, but it’s good to see you still out there fighting the good fight. And obviously we’ll look to see, hopefully, pop.

Howard Johns (45:48.111)
Yeah.

Howard Johns (45:55.587)
Awesome. Likewise, David.

David Hunt (46:06.722)
raising this capital required and to see pop streets across the UK. for now, thanks very much for sharing your thoughts and your journey so far.

Howard Johns (46:11.387)
Yay. Awesome. Thanks so much for having me David, great to see you.