Energy
Against a backdrop of geopolitical challenges, energy and utilities companies must help drive a sustainable, carbon-neutral future. With innovation needed across the entire value chain, novel approaches to energy generation, transmission, storage and accounting are critical for success.
We work with clients in the sector, and their technology partners, to help manage the energy transition, propel the move to net zero, and create technology and service innovation breakthroughs. The goal may be to deliver efficiency and sustainability, to manage the green transition smoothly, or to enable an entirely new approach to energy generation or transmission.
What we do
Whatever your position in the energy value chain, CC’s technology consultants can help you assess, prepare for and benefit from disruptive energy trends and technologies. Our technical innovation and strategy capabilities are backed by proven experience in creating products and services to meet stringent performance requirements in demanding operating environments.
Smart metering and homes
Our expertise includes technology strategy and product/service design and development. Capturing and analysing data at the point of consumption can benefit both consumers and suppliers, facilitating intelligent energy applications, improving load balancing and empowering consumers.
We design smart meters and home energy management systems that are paving the way for new models of energy consumption and greater sustainability. CC delivers value to meter manufacturers, energy and water providers and value chain partners, through clear and independent assessments of requirements – then working in partnership with you to realise them.
EV charging and infrastructure
Electrification is creating a need for new and more sustainable networks to support vehicle charging. Significant challenges include predicting and managing the load on the grid, planning and design for charging network deployment, product design for user-friendly and cost-effective charging stations, and ensuring interoperability of both physical infrastructure (for a wide range of vehicles) and data platforms.
CC supports EV innovation ambitions with evaluation, design, simulation and prototyping, as well as future strategy development.
Intelligent grid management
The intelligent grid is vital as demands on energy networks grow and sources diversify away from fossil fuels. But many challenges remain. Incorporating micro-grids and renewables requires an enhanced ability to manage distributed systems and intermittent inputs. Control systems that leverage AI and enable automation, and push intelligence to the network edge, will be key to success.
Simulations and digital twins are critical to help with both design and ongoing operation of intelligent grids. Ensuring reliability and grid flexibility are supported is a non-trivial requirement, while cybersecurity and AI assurance must also be important considerations. CC’s expertise in these areas, combined with our wireless and sensing capabilities, can be important ingredients in successful development and deployment.
Renewables
Wind and solar power are becoming more widely used, but much remains to be done to help them realise their promise. Engineering for greater efficiency is a key requirement, along with creating new approaches to renewables infrastructure with novel materials, sensing technologies, mechanical and electrical design and applied physics.
CC’s technology consultants also help with innovation around transmission for renewables such as offshore wind, ensuring that AI-enabled control systems can collect and analyse data accurately and securely within complex or challenging environments.
Such innovation makes the renewables business case attractive and delivers maximum benefit for sustainability.
Hydrogen and novel energy sources
The future demands novel approaches to sourcing, transmitting and managing new sources such as hydrogen, biofuels, geothermal and space solar. From subterranean and sub-sea to outer space, successful exploration and development requires a fundamental understanding of technologies and the environment to identify what’s possible. A long-term view of benefits, challenges and investment requirements is also vital.
Our team is actively engaged with start-ups, industrial scale technology players, financial institutions and the public sector on the most innovative areas of novel energy. From using RF technologies to tap into geothermal energy sources, to developing new ways of synthesizing and utilising biofuels, CC can help. We support our clients in investigating, ideating, designing and developing solutions for the most complex, innovative and impactful new energy sources.
Carbon capture, utilisation and storage
This emerging area is of growing interest to industry and governments, as a powerful way to accelerate decarbonisation efforts. Significant technical innovation is needed to make efficient, effective and sustainable CCUS viable.
CC’s team combines a deep understanding of the underlying chemical and physical processes, with a clear view of the engineering, sensing and digital development required to deliver on the promise.
Strategy and business model innovation
Technology innovation must be matched by innovative approaches to business model evolution. Tasks include better matching of energy supply and demand, incentivising and supporting wider use of renewables, designing new approaches to measurement and certification of green energy, and creating new approaches to circularity and end-of-life. All require a combination of creative thinking and deep technical expertise.
CC can help, from initial concepting through to opportunity mapping and prioritisation, technology strategy, service design, and business case development.
Featured insights
Our expertise
- AI and analytics
- Connectivity and IoT
- Sensing
- Fluidics and thermodynamics
- Product realisation
- Strategic advice
CC has a deep understanding of AI and its applications. Our expertise spans Bayesian inference, real-time signal processing and data analysis and is combined with extensive technical skills in areas such as predictive analytics, deep learning, edge AI and empathetic AI.
Our consultants are pushing the boundaries of the human-machine interface to develop edge AI use cases, generative AI models, new supervised machine learning models and types of data analytics.
Our work is unlocking new frontiers in areas such as uncrewed aerial vehicles, synthetic biology, remote monitoring systems, telecoms and beyond.
We have the world’s largest independent wireless development team. It spans radio frequency, communications protocol, digital signal processing, power-optimised analogue and digital electronic design, embedded software, user experience and mechanical design.
Our consultancy expertise has led to the creation and development of several major wireless technologies and delivered a steady stream of disruptive breakthroughs. They include RF and satellite telecommunications to the world’s first wireless pacemaker and the ground-to-air radio system that controls more than 50% of the world’s air traffic.
CC covers everything from high-reliability sensing for ultra-harsh environments to low-cost, low-power consumer devices. With broad expertise and a technology agnostic approach, we deliver optimal solutions across the whole spectrum of sensing.
Our work includes physical modelling (computational flow dynamics and finite element), analysis for new sensing principles and the development of innovative machine vision and machine learning systems.
Inexpensive yet powerful microcontrollers and GPUs mean more value can be derived from commodities like CMOS cameras, accelerometers and magnetic sensors. Through value engineering of established designs, and by using novel DSP algorithms to extract more data, we deliver huge leaps forward in performance while reducing costs.
Understanding and optimising the flow of liquids, gases and heat can be critical design parameters. By understanding how heat will flow and how fluids and gases will interact with the proposed system, the time and cost of iteration and testing can be greatly reduced.
One of the earliest examples of our success in this field is inkjet printing, from which we created numerous spinouts, including billion-dollar companies Domino and Xaar.
Our consultancy teams are adept in nanofluidics, microfluidics and multiphase fluidics, with particular strengths in aerosol generation at a range of temperatures. We’ve also made significant progress in DNA liquid aerosols and nebulisers.
Our Product realisation capability ensures that products are not only innovative but also manufacturable, functional, and optimised for the end-user experience. This holistic approach integrates design, function, and manufacturing right from the start, ensuring a smooth path to production.
A core element of realisation is our Design for Manufacturing (DFM) expertise. Our DFM engineers and New Product Introduction (NPI) teams collaborate closely with our trusted Contract Manufacturing (CM) partners to ensure designs are optimised for both performance and manufacturability. This close partnership reduces costly iterations and speeds up the journey to market.
We go beyond traditional DFM by addressing cross-functional challenges, optimising mechanical architecture, UX, and ID, while maintaining design authority throughout.
This is especially valuable for breakthrough innovations, allowing us to deliver high-quality products faster, providing significant value to our clients and giving them a competitive edge.
Markets and technologies evolve rapidly and unpredictably. We help identify opportunities to ‘build, borrow or buy’ new technologies in anticipation of market requirements.
Business transformation is typically driven by a combination of internal, industry related, and external factors, often rooted in technology. Technology-driven disruption is nothing new, but the speed of change is unprecedented.
Because our technology consultants include engineers and scientists with deep technical insight, CC can identify golden opportunities and recommend an innovation portfolio or technology roadmap. As well as the technology, we ensure that the business model, market offerings and operations are all set up for success.
Our work
Our facilities
Digital labWith one petabyte local storage and specialised hardware for telecoms chassis design, machine learning development and more, this facility allows us to develop, test and operate new cloud-ready digital services rapidly in a secure environment. It enables rapid end-to-end prototyping and experimentation of sensitive concepts. We work across the full spectrum of cloud service providers, supporting both public and private infrastructures. |
Anechoic test chamberOur custom anechoic radio and antenna test chamber is a highly sophisticated 5m cube. Inside, we carry out automated 3D measurements and visualisation of wireless device behaviour and test body-worn technology using body phantoms or real live test subjects to optimise real-word RF performance of products such as smart implants (including implanted telemetry), connected drug delivery devices and wearables. Our anechoic test chamber is available as a standalone service for industry and academic research. Explore the facility and find out how you can access this state-of-the-art service. |
Prototyping workshopsOur electronic and mechanical prototyping workshops allow us to produce technically credible prototypes that bring ideas to life and offer a powerful demonstration of value – all while maintaining extremely high standards of quality that conform to ISO 9001, ISO 13485 and ISO 14001 regulations. Using the latest CNC and milling machines, lathes, welding gear and wire harness and cable assembly tools, we are able to produce parts very quickly and assemble full-scale working prototypes for testing and consumer trials. |
AI infrastructureCC’s comprehensive onsite compute infrastructure allows us to explore options and train and test models more rapidly to get better results. We run petaflop-scale, containerised compute on site, with multiple NVIDIA DGX-1 deep learning supercomputers and other GPU and FPGA-accelerated servers. This links to petabyte-scale local NetApp storage, project-specific cloud and our continuous integration systems. |