COMMUNITY IMPACT AWARD FINALIST
After years serving in the Royal Australian Air Force and working in the aerospace industry, Garry Harding CEO and Co-Founder of EnergyFlex,is helping Australians save money on their power bills and cut down on carbon emissions. And he is doing it all through an app he helped create with a fellow RAAF veteran.
Meet Garry
RAAF veteran Garry Harding is making it easier for everyday Australians to cut down on energy costs and carbon emissions.
He, along with fellow Air Force veteran, Craig Phasey, have founded EnergyFlex, a company that aims to make understanding energy consumption easy.
The company, which launched three years ago, was the culmination of Garry’s 30 years of experience in aerospace engineering and business development and Craig’s decades of work in air intelligence and systems engineering consultancy.
Garry, the CEO of EnergyFlex, said the company began as a consultancy service before evolving into a data analytics company with a purpose-built app.
“We provide consumers, mums and dads, a free app that enables them to better understand how they use energy at their home and how it directly relates to carbon emissions,” said Garry.
The app uses data from smart metres and gives a rating from zero to five, simplifying the jumble of numbers, tariffs and data found on the average powerbill.
The idea for the EnergyFlex platform came to Garry and Craig when they were working with heavy industry.
They realised the average person had the same concerns around energy usage but felt powerless to do anything about it.
“Rather than just helping the big emitters get better and so forth and do 10 businesses a year, we thought, well…this universally applicable tool means we could potentially reach 10 million consumers and make an appreciable difference in the country around climate change,” Garry said.
The app gives users a baseline when it comes to their energy consumption and tangible goals to work towards.
“I think everybody wants to drive down their costs, but they also want to participate in climate change,” Garry said.
“'The EnergyFlex app can save you $1,000 a year if you just change your behaviours and you can reduce your carbon emissions by two tons just by giving us your data so we can show it back to you.”
Today, EnergyFlex has 20 employees across Brisbane and Adelaide and 1600 people using the app in the three months since it launched.
“We’re getting 60 per cent month-on-month growth of people coming on board our platform, which is hugely exciting,” Garry said.
EnergyFlex was also picked for an incubator program by Oz Minerals (now BHP), formed a partnership with Commonwealth Bank and won the 2024 Residential PropTech of the Year Award.
But behind the success was a lot of “boot leather”, as Garry put it.
“When you're building something that's never been built before, you can't read a book on it, and that's been the biggest challenge,” he said.
“You're making it up as you go along (and there is) a lot of trial and error in some respects.”
As of last month, Garry was able to add finalist in the Community Impact category of The King’s Trust Beyond Service Awards to his list of accomplishments.
“On a personal level, it's career capping,” he said.
“It's a bell ringer for me, and a hugely proud moment.
“It brings home that we built something from nothing.
“Going for The King's Trust Beyond Service Award is the pinnacle of saying to our team, hey, look, well done, but don't listen to me anymore, this is what the community is actually saying about the good that we are doing.”
