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Vision · Shift

Turn commercial refrigeration into the UK’s distributed cold battery.

A fridge is thermal storage. Cooled a little early, it can hold off its compressor for a while without the food noticing. Multiply that across every pharmacy, kitchen, shop and surgery and you have a large, flexible load that the electricity system would pay to use — if it can be done safely, cheaply and at small sites.

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The thesis

Land with compliance. Differentiate with resilience. Scale into flexibility.

1 · Sense

Mandatory compliance

Pharmacies, GP practices and food businesses already have to keep temperature records. Tempa does it better and cheaper than paper or stand-alone loggers, and pays for itself in electricity. That earns the sensor on the fridge.

2 · Shield

Resilience for estates

NHS and public estates need to know which critical loads are protected and for how long. The thermal model behind the outage board is the same model that makes flexibility safe.

3 · Shift

A fleet of controllable cold

With per-asset thermal models, half-hourly prices and a cheap retrofit controller, refrigeration load is shifted to cheap or grid-friendly half-hours and the flexibility is sold — always inside food-safety limits.

How it connects

Sites, platform, markets.

Three market routes exist in the UK today for flexible demand: NESO’s demand flexibility programmes, local flexibility bought by distribution network operators, and time-of-use tariffs. Tempa’s Shift layer is being built to speak to all three, with a pluggable interface for dispatch signals.

Pharmacies & GP practicesvaccine fridgesFood businessesfridges, freezers, cold roomsNHS & council estatesbackup power, cold roomstempaSenseaudit-grade recordShieldthermal model · outage boardShiftsafe flexibility · from 2027NESOdemand flexibilityDNOslocal flexibilityTariffstime-of-use pricesDashed: the Shift path. No flexibility revenue exists today; the data model and safety limits are built first.
Why it has not been done at small sites

The long tail needs cheaper everything.

Supermarket-scale refrigeration flexibility has been trialled in the UK before — for example Open Energi’s work with large retailers — using the building management systems and engineering teams that large stores have. A café, a pharmacy or a care home has none of that. Tempa’s innovation is making it work for the long tail: LoRaWAN sensors that install in minutes, a per-asset thermal model learned from the sensor’s own data, and a cheap retrofit controller that works with the fridge’s existing thermostat.

Every market figure in this section is approximate until sourced. We do not claim any flexibility revenue today.

A worked example of the Shift idea

modelled example

Take the same 12-cabinet site from the energy page (14,400 kWh/yrapproximate). Suppose each cabinet can safely hold off its compressor for 30 minutes during a peak price half-hour, twice a day, on 200 days a year, with a fitted thermal model confirming it never approaches its upper limit.

  • · Load held off: roughly 329 kWh/yr shifted out of expensive half-hoursmodelled
  • · Value: the difference between peak and off-peak prices on that energy, plus any flexibility payment — tens of pounds per cabinet per year in today’s marketapproximate
  • · The point: small per site, large across tens of thousands of sites, and the sensors are already there for compliance.

Illustrative arithmetic only. Real headroom depends on each cabinet’s measured thermal behaviour, its target band, door use and ambient; Tempa will only ever shift load inside measured, per-asset safety limits.

Safety first

Rules that come before any control.

  • The platform may only delay cooling. It never raises an asset’s upper limit, and the thermal model’s confidence bounds every hold-off.
  • Any loss of communication reverts to pass-through: the fridge runs on its own thermostat within one reporting interval.
  • A manual override on site always wins and is logged.
  • Every control action, its justification and its outcome are written to an append-only audit record.
  • Only assets with a fitted thermal model above a confidence threshold are eligible.
  • Backup batteries can earn flexibility revenue in normal conditions, but never below the reserve the protected loads need.
Timeline

What exists now, what comes next.

  1. Now: Sense and Shield run end to end on simulated estates; pilot sites are being fitted. The data model for Shift — prices, flexibility windows, controllers, control actions — is already in place so nothing is retrofitted later.
  2. 2026: pilots in pharmacies, GP practices, food businesses and public estates; thermal models learned from real cabinets.
  3. 2027: Shift — price and signal ingestion, a dispatch simulator that values the flexibility available per site and across the fleet, the controller interface and its fail-safe rules, and revenue share per site.