£5million raised for innovative gas network technology business, Utonomy

Utonomy has raised £5million through West Hill investors against a target of £4million. 

The Company has developed technologies that enable gas network utilities to reduce operating costs through increased automation. A combination of hardware and software (artificial intelligence and machine learning) provided by Utonomy minimises leakage in networks by optimising pressure, providing wide ranging benefits for utilities and consumers whilst simultaneously reducing the utilities’ maintenance costs. 

This breakthrough technology has the potential to facilitate very significant cost savings for the utilities and consumers, whilst reducing the leakage of natural gas, which consists largely of methane, a greenhouse gas which is 84x more potent than CO2 over the first 20-years that it is in the atmosphere. With leakage being proportional to pressure across the gas network, a 15% reduction in pressure would reduce leakage by the same amount.   Utonomy’s solution will also facilitate the use of green gases such as biomethane and hydrogen, another important component of the UK’s net zero energy strategy, in the gas network.

The gas grid operates under a constantly pressurised system. As demand fluctuates daily and seasonally, the grid must maintain adequate pressure to ensure that demand can be met at all times.  However,  operating at higher pressure leads to increased leakage, whilst lower pressure risks a supply shortage when demand rises. At present, gas network operators deploy engineers to manually adjust most of the26,000 governor stations in the UK gas grid four times  per year. This is a hugely inefficient, labour intensive and costly process, and results in  pressures that are higher than necessary for much of the time, causing excess leakage. 

By contrast, Utonomy provides gas distributors with a combination of physical actuators and software that remotely and automatically adjust the governors across the network to optimise pressure. The system can be retrofitted to existing network equipment quickly and easily and at an attractive price and payback period, helping to prepare networks for the low carbon transition. 

The Company has achieved traction with major network operators and the oversubscribed funding round provides capital to facilitate the rollout of this technology across the UK, with a view to international expansion in the medium term.