The Guest – Brenda Park, COO of StorTera
In our latest episode, we spoke with Brenda Park, COO of the ground-breaking Scottish energy storage business, StorTera, who shared her insights on renewables, sustainability, community energy projects, and more.
Brenda is a seasoned operations leader with a PhD in Physics and over a decade of experience in the renewable energy sector. As COO and Director at StorTera—an Edinburgh-based energy storage innovator—she has been instrumental in building and leading the company’s core team of scientists and engineers, propelling the development of groundbreaking Single Liquid Flow Battery (SLiQ) technology and the StorAI platform
Brenda’s expertise spans agile project management, renewable systems, and the commercialization of innovative energy storage solutions, making her a key force in advancing StorTera’s mission toward sustainable and resilient energy infrastructure.
Some highlights of this episode include:
- The Problem of Wind and Solar Curtailment
- Limitations of Lithium-Ion Batteries
- Sustainability and Circular Economy Practices
- Community Energy Projects and AI-Enhanced Smart Grids
Q: One of the biggest challenges that I’ve encountered with scaling is the influx of feature requests from customers. How have you dealt with that and identified where the value is and built the right features?
“User feedback is tricky. Often, customers know what they like, but when they want something changed, they don’t always know exactly how or what the right solution is.
For example, our core business is investment accounts for individuals. But we asked ourselves, what if we also offered investment accounts for companies? At first, we tried this in a sandbox environment — limited, controlled, just to see how it worked and learn from it. Over time, it proved to be a genuinely interesting business opportunity, so we expanded it.
The challenge is defining that sandbox so it’s integrated enough to be meaningful, but not so entangled that it disrupts the core business. In the end, it’s about balance: letting experiments evolve on their own while ensuring they don’t slow down everything else. That’s the real finesse.”
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