About Blackdown
Blackdown Energy is a specialist AI engineering consultancy for enterprise energy businesses. We design and deliver production systems for trading, optimisation, origination and operational decision-making.
The firm is led by Tom Cusack-Huang, a former front-office banking technologist who has spent the past decade building trading, risk, data and AI systems across global financial institutions, commodities businesses and European energy markets.
Tom Cusack-Huang
Founder and Technical Lead
Front-office markets · Energy trading · Production AI
Founder
Tom began his career at JPMorgan, working with the Wholesale Credit and Exotics business on systems supporting front-office risk, exotic derivatives and counterparty credit processes.
He subsequently worked at Nomura, delivering technology across cross-asset trading desks, before joining HSBC Global Banking and Markets as a Technical Lead. At HSBC, he led a team of nine engineers delivering automation, forecasting and data-processing systems in a highly regulated environment.
His work then moved into commodities and energy. Since then, he has designed and delivered systems spanning real-time PnL, derivatives pricing, algorithmic trading, reserve-market optimisation, renewable asset control, contract intelligence and AI-assisted operational workflows.
Blackdown was founded around a simple observation: the most valuable energy AI systems cannot be built by treating the market, the operating process and the software as separate disciplines. They require all three to be understood together.
“The difficult part is rarely producing an AI answer. It is making that answer reliable, explainable and usable inside a live commercial process.”
Selected experience
Tom’s experience includes leading and delivering production systems for some of the world’s largest financial, commodities and energy organisations. Client identities relating to Blackdown engagements remain confidential, but the nature and scale of the work can be described.
Reserve-market optimisation
Developed optimisation models for reserve-capacity auctions, combining market data, feature engineering and trading logic to support dynamic bidding decisions. The resulting approach increased bid acceptance rates by more than 50%.
Measured outcome
50%+ increase in bid acceptance
Banking automation
Led the engineering of an automated risk-weighted-assets process within a global banking environment, replacing a recurring spreadsheet-driven workflow with a controlled production system.
Measured outcome
Approximately 80 hours per month reduced to minutes
Trading and risk systems
Built and enhanced production services for real-time PnL, derivatives pricing, Greeks, market-risk analysis and trading-desk reporting across banking, commodities and energy environments.
Delivery scope
Pricing · PnL · risk · market data
Energy contract intelligence
Designed multilingual retrieval and extraction workflows for power-purchase and energy-attribute contracts, converting inconsistent legal and commercial documents into validated, auditable data models.
Delivery scope
Extraction · validation · auditability
AI projects in energy often fail at the point where a convincing demonstration has to become a dependable operating system.
A model may produce a plausible answer, yet still lack authoritative data, market context, operating constraints, evaluation, approvals or a defensible record of how the decision was reached.
Blackdown works on that difficult layer. We combine AI engineering with the calculations, controls, integrations and decision evidence required for systems that influence real commercial outcomes.
Domain experience
Blackdown engagements are led directly by the founder. We work closely with trading, origination, operations, risk, data and engineering teams to define one commercially important problem and take it through to working software.
Each engagement has explicit success criteria, frequent review with the people who will use the system and a clear route into the client's existing technology and control environment.
The objective is not to leave behind a demonstration that depends indefinitely on Blackdown. Architecture, documentation, testing and knowledge transfer are part of the delivery.
Every system begins with a real decision, workflow or measurable constraint.
Security, testing, auditability and integration are considered from the outset.
Clients retain the architecture, documentation and internal capability required to operate what has been built.
Work with Blackdown
We work with enterprise energy teams on commercially consequential AI, optimisation and data systems.