Meet Tom Cox, founder and MD of Decent Energy, and host of People Planet Pint in Cambridge.

Tom’s idea is simple: if you want people to live more sustainably, make it easy and make it affordable.

Decent’s platform cuts carbon and saves users money. And Decent only gets paid when customers do.

Tom explains their first product, Shifter - software that helps households optimise when they use and store electricity, based on half-hourly shifts in UK energy prices and grid carbon intensity.

We explore Decent’s risk-reward model: no savings, no fee. Trust sits at the heart of it, backed by full transparency about what the software does and why.

You’ll also hear about:

• Why “green tariffs” don’t remove the importance of when you use energy
• How Decent measures impact - money saved and CO₂ avoided, tracked against changing baselines
• The unexpectedly hard part: producing a bill that clearly proves the savings
• Early traction with councils, and why inverter integrations matter
• The roadmap ahead: Shifter; Flexer (flexibility markets with cash payouts); Switcher (tariff recommendations based on real usage); and, longer term, peer-to-peer energy trading

Tom’s one piece of advice for sustainability-focused start-ups:

Make sure the sustainability business case is watertight. Whatever your mission, it still has to be commercially viable - because saving money is a message everyone understands.

Tom’s 10-year vision:
A shift towards hyper-local energy systems, where communities intelligently balance their own demand using rooftop solar, batteries and smart software. Less strain on the grid. Lower carbon. Lower bills. And a model that avoids the grid congestion already seen in parts of Europe.

Find out more at decentenergy.io, and try Power Hour - a simple tool showing the cheapest and lowest-carbon time to use electricity tomorrow, even if you’re not yet a customer.