Going off-grid: a life dedicated to decarbonising energy systems

Andy Rankin, founder and Managing Director at Midsummer, was in conversation with Renewable Energy Installer to discuss his journey from creating a sustainable lifestyle to building a business, the challenges of early off-grid installations, the business potential of renewables, the role of software, and what lies ahead. As seen on Renewable Energy Installer. 

We are in conversation with Andy Rankin, the founder and Managing Director of Midsummer Energy, the award winning UK renewables wholesaler that exists to “deliver the most innovative products at great prices, alongside fantastic customer service”

A former climate scientist who started a solar company from his off-grid home 18 years ago, Andy likes to build things from scratch, whether that’s companies, houses, solar farms, software or freight bikes. 

To the best of our knowledge, Andy is the only MD in the industry with ultra-running titles under his belt and the only one to have begun his journey from a solar-powered canal boat. With our intrigue truly sparked, we caught up with Andy to learn about his journey from establishing his own sustainable lifestyle to setting up a business that would help others to do the same and hear about the challenges of early off-grid installations, his realisation that renewable energy was a viable business proposition, where software services fit into the picture and what the future may hold.

Q: Graduating in oceanography and working with the British Antarctic Survey suggest climate and nature have long been among your interests. Did your studies and experience influence your future trajectory?

Absolutely! I was exceptionally fortunate to work for a few years within the ice core group at BAS, studying how climate has changed in the past. Spending some time at Halley, the research station where the ozone hole was discovered, I realised that this planet we live on is fragile and precious, and easily damaged by man but that damage isn’t a given. The world came together and took action to address ozone depletion, and although it’s a much greater challenge, we can do the same for carbon emissions.

Although, ultimately, I decided the academic life was not for me, my experience as a scientist made me determined to spend my life doing what I could about greenhouse gases and climate change.

Q: That explains your drive for sustainability, and your off-grid life, but how did you end up afloat? 

From a very young age I’ve enjoyed messing around on boats. When I moved to Cambridge to work for BAS I was cycling to work alongside the river one day, rueing Cambridge property prices – a long way out of reach of a young academic – and thought ‘hey, why don’t I get a boat instead?’ Having just started a career in climate science I wanted to be as low carbon as possible, so rather than a boat with a diesel engine I decided to go electric.

Q: Canal boats with solar panels atop and even electric-powered ones are an increasingly common sight, but I’m guessing it was a very different picture 25 years ago. Was it easy to find the solutions you needed? 

There have always been a few eccentrics who lead the way, and I wasn’t the first to convert a narrowboat to electric propulsion. So there were a few examples to follow, and there were one or two small companies making suitable motors and controllers. But it was very much a DIY assembly project – there weren’t any companies who could offer to come and fit all the bits together. It was great fun though – a friend who was studying engineering snuck us into the university workshops so that we could mill the prop shaft to fit the motor. You couldn’t just buy the right coupling off the shelf.

Q: How did your own journey into sustainable living translate to the creation of Midsummer?

After deciding the academic life wasn’t for me I spent a couple of years travelling, without any real future plan. Twiddling my thumbs in Cambridge after returning, I got chatting to a friend who had bought solar panels for his own boat but found good information and advice hard to come by. Thinking ‘hey, I could set up a website doing that’, I bought an old laptop, headed to the library to get an internet connection – this was in the days before even 3G data, let alone 4G or 5G, so internet on a boat was a challenge – taught myself some html, and started selling solar panels. Close on 20 years later, I’m still doing it.

It would be hard to find a smaller business than Midsummer was in the early days! Operating as a sole trader, the ‘warehouse’ was the front room of my narrowboat – 7 foot long by 6 foot wide. The first year I turned over £20K, focussing entirely on off-grid systems. Most customers were buying components for narrowboats, yachts or motorhomes but, over the next few years, we supplied a fair number of systems to run scientific experiments or monitoring equipment in remote places as well. Midsummer off-grid systems ended up all over the place, from the ice caps of Antarctica and Greenland to a beach hut in Gabon.

It was the introduction of the Feed-in Tariff, in 2010, that really kick-started Midsummer’s growth. We established a wholesale division headed up by Jamie – now our commercial director – and also did a number of installations ourselves around Cambridge.

The growth hasn’t stopped since!

Q: That growth has seen Midsummer evolve from those early individual sales to a significantly expanded range offering a one-stop shop for installers. How do you ensure you don’t lose sight of your original vision?

Whether it’s a couple of small flexible solar panels for a yacht, a 200kW array for a commercial building, or a heat pump for a domestic property, the aim is exactly the same as it always was – to decarbonise our energy systems. I’m only a small cog in the machine now, but we’ve always looked for people who share our enthusiasm and passion for low carbon energy, and it’s that shared sense of purpose that continues to drive Midsummer forward.

Q: You still offer a dedicated service to those seeking to decarbonise off-grid settings – what unique challenges do they face and how is that business?

Off grid business remains good – there are as many people as ever who live off the grid on boats or remote properties up and down the country. Of course the market is much smaller than the grid-connect solar or heat pump markets so off-grid sales are now a relatively small part of our turnover. But we keep a team that specialises in off-grid systems and it’s still an important part of what we do.

Off-grid systems need to be designed very carefully. If your grid-connect PV system fails you will be paying more for your electricity, but your fridge will still be running and you can still boil a kettle. With off-grid systems you need to be extremely careful with your design to make sure you have sufficient power and storage to run your appliances. There isn’t any backup when you are unplugged from the grid.

Q: Quality and support seem to be high on your list of priorities?

When I was looking to fit solar panels and go electric on my narrowboat, I found there wasn’t a lack of sellers even back in those early days – but there was a lack of sellers giving good technical and sales support. That was one of my earliest motivations for starting my own business. But I think it just makes good business sense too. Customers might shop around and buy for a while from the company that gives them the lowest price, but that company will make no margin and will build no loyalty from their customers. We don’t want to just be box shifters. We want to be a positive force in the industry. 

Q: You also provide two key industry software services in Easy PV and Heatpünk. How did they come about and how have they evolved?

We did our own solar installations for a number of years immediately after the introduction of the Feed-in Tariff. I used to draw a roof to scale to work out how many panels we could install; use mounting system manufacturer’s systems to work out the mounting components; use inverter manufacturer’s tools to find a compatible inverter; do some performance calculations in a spreadsheet, and create a nice quote in a word processor. The process was painfully inefficient. So I threw together some very basic tools to simplify our own surveying and quoting procedures. Fast forward a couple of years, and we decided to move away from installing to focus on the growing distribution business. The tools had saved us huge amounts of time, and so we decided to create an online service – Easy PV – to give installers access. 

When we branched out into heat pumps it was natural we would aim to do the same thing for heat pump installers. We took Easy PV, stripped out the solar design tools and added tools for heat loss surveying instead, and Heatpünk was born. In the early days I did a lot of the software development work myself – and looking back the tools were laughably basic. We’re extremely fortunate to now have the resources to employ a fantastic software development team who are building far more sophisticated tools than I ever could.

Q: Why is design support such an important part of the Midsummer offering?

Installers don’t want to be doing paperwork and design. They’d rather be talking to customers or up on the scaffolding. We can save companies a huge amount of time and make sure that designs are accurate and compliant with all the regulations, and that quotes look great. Ultimately, that reduces the cost and improves the quality of solar and heat pump installations.

Over the years we’ve invested an enormous amount in making the journey for installers as easy and simple as possible when designing a solar array or heat pump system through Easy PV or Heatpünk. We’re soon to release our AI-powered upgrade to Easy PV that can literally design an entire solar PV system – with the address being the only input! We create a 3D model of a house, work out which are the best roofs for solar, work out the optimum array layout and calculate the mounting system down to the last nut and bolt, find a compatible inverter and build a full bill of materials. All without human input. So for the installer we can cut out a huge amount of time, and money, on the design side.

But it goes further than that. With automated PV design we, first of all, reduce the price that a customer pays because the installer has lower overheads and can be more competitive. And, secondly, we speed the process up. An end customer can now get an indicative price for a solar installation using Easy PV’s ‘instant estimate’ tool in a few seconds, right from our installation partners’ websites. The end customer can go to two or three such installers in an evening and get prices they can be pretty confident in.

Q: Alongside your own software development, you are also supporting new technology through investment in the Bristol-based startup Nusku and developing industry partnerships with companies such as InstaGroup and Solarport. Are partnership becoming increasingly important? 

Getting this country to net zero is not something that any one company can do on its own. We need to work together. As a distributor and software provider, Midsummer sits in the middle between manufacturers and installers, and we can add value on both sides – and they can add value to us.

Nusku is a good example. They’re designing a great product that is breaking the mould – but they need a route to market, and we can provide that through Heatpünk and Midsummer. We also have installers – from small local firms to energy companies – who we can work with to bring new features to Easy PV and Heatpünk to improve their workflow.

It’s the part of the job that I find most satisfying these days – working with so many other fantastic companies that are equally committed to driving the uptake of renewables. Together we are stronger.

Q: What barriers remain and what more needs to happen to overcome them?

Heat pump deployment is way behind where we need it to be. We need to drive both demand and supply and demand is the bigger problem.

Currently, it costs as much, or more, to run a heat pump as it does to run a gas boiler in many houses. We need to change the economics so that the heat pump is cheaper to run. That can be achieved, to some extent, by using time-of-use tariffs and smart controllers (or just by adding a big solar array and a battery), but that adds complexity to the system which may not be appropriate for many end customers. Fundamentally, to deliver lower running costs for heat pumps, the big change that is needed is cheaper electricity and more expensive gas.

Demand is also depressed by a perception in some people that heat pumps are ineffective or ‘not suitable for my house’, which, in most cases, is nonsense. That will be countered slowly as heat pumps are installed more widely – it’s harder to argue that a heat pump isn’t suitable for your house when your neighbour has one installed and tells you in the street how well it is working.

In the early days of grid-connect solar there was just as much scepticism about PV arrays, but people now know that they are reliable and effective.

Q: What are you hoping for from the new government?

I’m hoping for a real commitment to driving down carbon emissions. That commitment, from the last government, was lukewarm at times, and policy flip flops like postponing the Clean Heat Market Mechanism at short notice did a great deal of harm. Installers need confidence to invest in training and in building up their businesses. They need to know that there will be a stable market for their services.

The levers that the Government need to move to drive up demand for heat pumps and solar aren’t huge. Higher building standards; a small change in the relative price of gas and electricity; allowing more heat pump installs under permitted development – these are not big changes that need to be made. I’m quietly optimistic that we do now have an administration that takes the need to address climate change seriously, so I hope that we’re going to see some very positive action on renewables over the next few years. 

Q: What does the future hold for Midsummer?

I can’t claim any skill as a soothsayer – I would never have predicted 18 years ago that we would be where we are now! In the immediate future though we’re expecting that demand will continue to grow, especially for heat pumps. We’ve got another 30,000 sq ft of warehousing coming into operation shortly that we are raring to fill with more renewables.

On the software side we’ve got some fantastic new features that we are working on – Easy PV is about to become even easier! So watch this space. After that, we’ll just keep riding the solarcoaster, as we have for the last 18 years, and we’ll see where it takes us!