Profile: Energy to go

When you want power, in Stephen Voller’s world, you want it here – and now. Roger Cowe profiles an entrepreneur pushing to make fuels cell the portable solution.

Always trying to dash off one last memo, though the laptop battery warning is telling you to stop? Frustrated when your mobile beeps its impotence rather than making that next call? Know the feeling? It’s what set Stephen Voller on the road to developing portable fuel cells.

Talking over a pint in 2001, he and his partner Mike Clarke came up with the idea of a credit card-sized recharger. Like most pub discussions, it was a non-runner. But, unlike most pub discussions, it still led to the creation of a successful company – Voller Energy.

Although Clarke’s technical investigations concluded that the credit card device would deliver far too little power, the pair see a market for larger units which could eventually be used to recharge laptop and mobile phone batteries when you are in some remote jungle – or just sitting by the pool too far from a power point. At the moment the £3,000 price tag for a 100-watt unit is attractive only to the sort of people who could afford their own generator but don’t want to use one – the military, or the construction and leisure industries, for example.

A portable fuel cell can sit inside a mobile office without producing the noise or the noxious exhaust of a conventional generator. Fuel cells, of course, are the great green hope for future power generation. Voller, however, is an unlikely eco-entrepreneur.

He freely admits that “I’m no tree hugger”, and he hasn’t exactly followed the classic entrepreneurial path either. Instead, armed with a data processing degree from Leeds, he spent the first 15 years of his career working for the computing giant IBM – though he was in its fast-moving personal computer arm. “Like a lot of big companies,” he says, “IBM has a lot of bureaucracy and politics.

It can be like wading through mud sometimes. But I always worked in the bits that were growing rapidly, in sales and marketing, taking new products to market. I think I always had the entrepreneurial gene in me.” He needed it when he moved from IBM to become UK head of Netscape – not exactly a small company, but central to the internet entrepreneurialism of the 1990s, before it was swallowed up by AOL.

A couple of other technology ventures followed, before that fateful discussion in the pub. Clarke, who is now chief operating officer at Voller Energy, says his partner has lots of ideas, is ready to take risks and is very focused on what is good for the user. “But what impresses me more than anything is his single-mindedness and drive.

Often he’ll come up with an idea which is not very practical. But by forging ahead a practical solution will come out of it. If I tell him something won’t work he’ll say ‘never mind that, how do we do it?’ And I’ll go away and think about it and more often than not we’ll come up with a way of doing it.”

Thinking back to his IBM days, Voller sees “lots of parallels between the PC business then and portable fuel cells now”. As the PC became cheaper, lighter and more powerful, so it grew ever more attractive and available to a mass market. Not a bad analogy for what he sees happening with fuel cells.

Voller Energy currently has just 10 staff, but that will change over the next year. The company is heading towards stock market flotation, and with the resulting injection of capital and a fully developed product it plans to head north from Basingstoke and go into production in a new factory in Sheffield. Justine Williams of the regional development agency Yorkshire Forward, who came up with the Sheffield premises, says Voller’s determination to succeed was obvious right from the first meeting.

“Forward thinking, innovative and passionate about the development of ‘green energy’ products” – her description leaves little doubt of the impression he made. Voller, for his part, is convinced that the technological achievements of companies like his will eventually feed into fuel cells for cars. And that, he believes, would bring an even bigger environmental bonus.

He doesn’t doubt the urgency of progress here. “If you see the evidence on global warming, it’s undoubted now. We’ve got to do something to reverse the trend.” It may not be tree hugging, but Voller is concerned about the world in which his children will grow up – even if the passion to succeed means there is little time to draw breath. “You have to live and breathe the business. It doesn’t ever stop. Having an afternoon off during the weekend is a real pleasure.” That’s entrepreneurship for you.

Roger Cowe is a freelance writer specialising in responsible business and social enterprise.

7 July 2004

Roger Cowe