Page Text: Commercial SaaS products
Meet the leadership
Our team of experts are ready to help you better understand and tackle your weather and climate-related challenges
Colin McKinnon
CEO
Colin has overall responsibility for the IEA. He has a background in general management with BP and has spent the last 25 years turning scientific R&D into commercial opportunities through the development of new products, services and start-up ventures. His experience covers data and software, environmental science and engineering. He has worked for early stage companies through to major corporations across a wide range of sectors including energy, infrastructure, oil/gas and the space sector.
Dr Jon Blower
CTO
Jon is responsible for the technical team. He has led numerous international projects concerning environmental data and visualization and has developed open-source data visualisation software that is widely used in web-based applications. Prior to the IEA, Jon was Technical Director of Reading e-Science Centre and before that a software engineer with Tessella, carrying out consultancy projects in numerous industries.
Andrew Groom
Business Development Director
Andrew leads on developing our commercial strategy and related opportunities. Andrew has science qualifications and a background in technical, analytical and leadership roles. His early career includes over 10 years working in the finance sector for multi-national retail and investment banks. Prior to joining the IEA Andrew spent over 12 years in the UK’s space sector, working as an analyst, consultant, and business development manager at Airbus before 4 years of Director-level roles at CGI.
Dr Maria Noguer
Programme Manager
Maria is an experienced programme manager and is responsible for implementing and directing major projects at the IEA. A Meteorologist by training, she has over 25 years’ experience in climate science research and management, having worked for the UK Met Office as a climate scientist, for the UK Government as a climate adviser and for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as deputy head of the technical support unit.
Alan Yates
Principal Consultant
Alan is the principal energy consultant at the IEA with over 35 years commercial experience in applied decision support. He oversees the technical development of EnergyMetric, our renewable generation software and is an expert in renewable energy resource assessment. He recently led a project to quantify potential emission reductions for a large-scale industrial electricity consumer. Alan is a Fellow of the Operational Research Society, has an engineering degree and an MSc in Environmental Informatics.
Our core skills
Renewable Energy
We have a growing portfolio of work applying forecasting and optimisation techniques to energy sector challenges. Recent projects include (1) the evaluation of forecast accuracy and weather regimes on the economic dispatch and spinning reserve requirements of fossil fuel generators (2) an examination of factors driving unscheduled downtime for a wind farm and (3) the scheduling of production to minimise energy costs and CO2 emissions.
Weather and Climate
Our applied meteorologists work operationally with data from global forecast providers and run our own in-house WRF regional weather model. We are experts in sourcing and manipulating observational data, forecast verification and performance benchmarking. We have practical experience working with climate reanalysis data and climate model outputs and have developed several applications for ECMWF’s Climate Change Service and Data Store.
Data visualisation
We have many years of experience in data visualisation, with a particular focus on integrating geospatial data with other information sources, including scientific and socio-economic data. We combine a deep knowledge of the scientific principles behind the data with an appreciation of the need to present data in an engaging and meaningful manner that communicates a clear message or enables better decision-making.
Modelling and analysis
We have a wealth of expertise in the development and deployment of data-driven models of virtually every conceivable type. Specific methodological expertise includes deep neural networks, support vector machines, generalised linear models and Bayesian belief networks. We also frequently employ optimisation techniques such as mixed integer programming to identify optimum decision thresholds.
Full stack software engineering
We have many years of experience across all areas of software development, ranging from small stand-alone apps to full-scale commercial SaaS products. Our front-end team writes modern, single page applications which enable intuitive data exploration leveraging our in-house UX design skills. Our back-end team develops GIS-enabled services exploiting the latest containerisation technology and cloud services to deliver secure and resilient performance.
Earth observation
We have significant experience in processing many kinds of satellite imagery (optical, radar, thermal and others) using image analysis and machine learning algorithms. Our projects have included studies of land cover classification, urban change detection, atmospheric composition (e.g. air quality and pollutant analysis) and surface temperature using Earth observation data from both free and commercial sources.
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