Powerstar celebrates twenty years of business resilience and power resilience: the Yorkshire company going from strength to strength
Since starting as a consultancy in 2001, Sheffield-based Powerstar has grown to become one of the UK’s leading energy storage and power resilience specialists. With products and technologies engineered in the UK and exported to more than 20 countries worldwide, the company is still firmly rooted in Yorkshire, and continues to employ more than 80 people at its Sheffield headquarters and manufacturing facility, and its transformer winding facility in Bromsgrove, with plans for significant growth and expansion.
Powerstar’s original offering was founded on energy management, engineering and consultancy services to help businesses become more energy efficient. In its first eight years, the company’s focus on environmental issues won it some major accolades, including the Business Award of the Care4Air Awards, in recognition of manufacturing solutions that help reduce carbon emission, as well as a Smart DTi Award, presented to the company’s founder and CEO, Dr. Alex Mardapittas, for innovation in the field of technology.
Locating to its current site in Sheffield in 2010, Powerstar has cemented its commitment to the Yorkshire region, gaining accreditation with the ‘Made in Sheffield’ mark, awarded to select companies who uphold the city’s standards of excellence in manufacturing and winning the ‘Yorkshire Forward Innovation Award’ for the development of an innovative, patented solution that has been fully designed, manufactured and engineered in Yorkshire.
Recognition of Powerstar’s innovation brought the company further regional awards, including the ‘Yorkshire’s Finest’ Award from The Yorkshire Post for the launch of the Powerstar MAX voltage optimisation system in 2011, as well as the PWC Yorkshire Private Business Award for ‘Technology Innovation of the Year’. But, it has not all been plain sailing, as Alex reflects,
“Has it been tough? At the beginning, it was extremely tough. I think that, when we started growing, when we saw the results of our blood, sweat and tears, that was very good and very rewarding. When we moved our focus into energy storage technology it became extremely tough again, because of the focus on research and development. Research and development take a lot of cash and a lot of courage. As a private company, we managed to do everything from our own resources – and that was very important for us. Maybe it meant we grew more slowly than we could have. In hindsight, the opportunities that we needed and that the country really needs to embrace, are now here. We can capitalise on these and grow the company and our team’s place in the Yorkshire manufacturing and business community from a very solid footing.”
Global expansion, from a Sheffield base, was demonstrated further when Powerstar won the UKTI (UK Trade & Investment) Exported of the Year Award. And, in recognition of the company’s environmental focus, the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce awarded Powerstar the ‘E.OM Environmental Award’ for taking significant steps to promote and adapt and make environmental improvements.
Looking to the future, there are definite changes to the energy landscape and to the global and national focus on net zero. As a signal of this, Powerstar have just completed their second financial year within the Covid-19 pandemic and, even in these difficult and extraordinary times, the company has the most work in progress and orders in hand in their twenty-year history. Alex considers the reasons for this success,
“As we move away from fossil fuel generation – we are doing this now, and last year nearly forty percent of our generation as UK PLC was from renewables – people are realising the importance of a solution like ours. As we shift from ‘reliable’ generation into unpredictable power generation, the National Grid needs to rebalance and there will be issues for the power resilience of the country. And a lot of organisations rely on power resilience, so are now coming to us asking for Powerstar solutions.”
With the UK Government’s target of an 80% reduction in CO2 by 2035, businesses are increasingly realising the need for smart microgrid solutions, from the expansion of the Electric Vehicle (EV) sector to the risks of power disruption in a world of intermittent energy generation and as local energy generation grows. The capacity for flexible generation and a flexible way of utilising power will enable businesses to move into a net zero environment more quickly and with confidence. Looking to this future, Alex comments,
“Our main emphasis, and the focus of our research and development, is to provide the resilience that is so vital to business and especially to those organisations for whom a blip in power supply has major impacts. However, the benefit of energy storage technology is that you can achieve this while simultaneously providing other benefits, such as renewable firming, supporting EV charging, and even earning revenue from grid contracts, making it an ideal power resilience solution for a net zero future.”
Major credit for Powerstar’s success belongs to the people working within the company, and many of these have been with Powerstar since 2001 and have helped with the development and manufacture of energy storage solutions designed, manufactured and engineered in Sheffield. Alex explains,
“The trust we have in our team, knowing that everybody in the company is working towards a common purpose, has brought us the right results. In the Wild West, they used to say that the pioneers got all the arrows and then they found the gold. This is where we are at now: we know that our solutions are right for the current environment and for the next twenty years, and so we look forward to continued growth and expansion.”
Powerstar continues to invest in the burgeoning Yorkshire economy and looks forward to helping position the region at the forefront of the net zero challenge, and to celebrating with local companies at the Made in Sheffield Awards, this July.
For more information about Powerstar’s power resilience solutions please contact:
E: info@powerstar.com T: 0333 230 1327
W: www.powerstar.com
