
Tony Taylor started his career as an technical staff trainee with the then South Wales Electricity Board in 1978. Roles in South Wales Electricity (later to become SWALEC) included industrial metering, heating design, industrial energy efficiency and applications advice and energy efficiency for commercial organisations.
In 1994 Tony moved to Celtic Contracting (later Hyder Infrastructure) to head up the business development team. Together with a new management team the business broadened from power systems contracting to facilities maintenance and became a national and international business with over 1000 staff. Experience gained here included contract vetting and negotiation as well as energy and utility requirements for large, multi-site clients such as (then) Defence Estates.
Facilities maintenance experience was put to good use at Norland Managed Services in 2003, securing a number of multi-site contracts with blue-chip clients such as National Grid.
In 2004 Tony joined a number of ex-SWALEC colleagues at Utility Partnership Limited (UPL) initially to head up business development in this rapidly growing utility consultancy. Over the 10 years at UPL, Tony undertook board-level roles ranging from metering and data to bill validation, energy contracts, energy efficiency services, business development, contract commercial diligence and even product development of data logging equipment.
It was during this period that Tony was involved with Ofgem and later DECC on the UK smart metering programme (representing ESTA) including working in the following specialist groups:
• Meter installation and maintenance
• Meter variants
• HAN working group
• Tariff group
• Microgen group
• Data access
• DCC planning groups (WG1-WG3)
In 2014 Tony played a key role in supporting the due-diligence leading to the successful acquisition of UPL by the SMS-plc group.