Towards the end of last year we were asked to speak at the BE-ST Fest 2024 event, in one of the breakout sessions giving attendees the opportunity to ‘meet the enterprise agencies’. Scottish Enterprise, Scotland’s national enterprise agency, has been so integral to the growth and success of TownRock Energy that we couldn’t say no.
Being asked to speak and share our experience of working with Scottish Enterprise has been a great opportunity for us to reflect on our journey as a company, and how Scottish Enterprise has been there at key points on that journey to offer support, guidance and crucially at times, funding.
TownRock was established in 2013, and this timeline shows our growth over the last 11 years. The three boxes at the bottom right in green show where Scottish Enterprise grant funding made a significant impact on the company, and our ability to deliver low-carbon heating and cooling solutions for our clients.
Green Jobs
Green Jobs research and development (R&D) funding has been transformative for the company. Working with our long-term client, Lanchester Wines, for whom we operate and maintain the UK’s first two multi-MW Mine-Water Geothermal Projects, we have been able to significantly increase our service offer to them. We constructed and deployed a hydrogeological / geo chemical “Pump Test Rig” which allows us to better understand the hydrogeology of the boreholes on their site; we have developed a detailed technical Operations & Maintenance Service Offering for mine water heating, which we are now in a position to replicate for other clients; and we have been able to dedicate time to the creation of a regulatory roadmap which captures the current state of play of the complex and evolving UK mine energy sector.
At the Glasgow venue SWG3, where we designed, developed and commissioned the world’s first BODYHEAT geothermal heating and cooling system, Green Jobs R&D funding has supported us to collect and analyse 24 months’ worth of borehole data. We can now use this to prove the efficiency of the system, and to make the case for installing a BODYHEAT system to other venues around the world. You can read our recent news post about BODYHEAT here.
Galleries to Calories
In 2022 we were delighted to be awarded funding for the R&D project Galleries to Calories (G2C). This is a £2.6million research and development project, co-funded by Scottish Enterprise, the Geological Survey Ireland, the Department of Energy in the USA and the European Union. We are working with academic and industry partners in Scotland, Ireland and the USA to explore how we can use abandoned flooded coal mines to store and transport waste heat, in this case from a large data centre.
This project allows us to dedicate time to best understand the mine water resources, share findings with some of the best academics in the world in this area, and turn this research into real commercial benefit. With the demand for data centres growing exponentially in a world where AI is becoming commonplace, we hope to enable data centre developers to make best use of their waste heat. You can read more about this fascinating collaborative project on the project blog here.
Other support
And that’s not all. The Scottish Enterprise-run AIRDev programme supported us to develop our Innovation Roadmap, and crucially to re-focus our North Star and Key Performance Indicators away from the traditional measures of turnover and headcount (though we’re doing well on those too!), to what really matters to us – helping our clients to reduce their carbon emissions.
As an example of how active our relationship is with Scottish Enterprise, our presentation for the BE-ST event had been finalised and sent over to the organisers on the Thursday, and in it we said that we had just applied for some funding to support additional training and development for our team. By the time the event came round, only three working days later, we had been awarded that funding and received the paperwork. And as this is being written, colleagues are undertaking training part-funded through this grant.
Scottish Enterprise has been so supportive of us over the last few years, referencing us at events, on social media and raising the profile not only of TownRock, but of the geothermal industry as a whole. They have given us opportunities and space to experiment and take risks, and through their support we can realise the commercial value of research, for the benefit of the wider industry, the public and ultimately the climate.
If you’ve not done so already, get in touch with your enterprise agency – we highly recommend it!